The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

472 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
the nations in question are very well defined! To be sure, the focus is here a
broad one, including both Judah and Jerusalem first, and then all those
surrounding nations, because they would all come under the heel of Babylon.
And RF’s strange contention, that the designation ‘its inhabitants ... as
mentioned in verse 8’ (should be 9) ought to be understood as the antecedent,
not of the pronoun ‘they’, which does not occur in the Hebrew, but of the
embedded (or implied) subject from the verb ‘abhedu, down in verse 11, is so
farfetched from both a syntactical and a semantic viewpoint, that it is utterly
impossible to take it seriously. Indeed, this can be said about his entire tortuous
effort about this subject.
What does ‘et mean in front of melekh?
On page 83 RF once more turns to a tiny Hebrew particle for help in his
quandary; this time it is the particle ‘et, which is seen prefixed to the word
melekh in the latter clause of Jer. 25:11. As the analysis showed, the phrase ‘etmelekh
babhel (‘king [of] Babylon’) constituted the direct object of that clause,
signifying the one ‘these nations’ would have to serve for seventy years, and the
particle ‘et functioned as the objective marker, as it generally does in Hebrew.
However, RF does not want that to be so, and so he says, ‘While the particle ‘et
is often used as object marker, it can be used as a preposition with the meaning
“with” as well.’ Now, this needs a little modification, for in reality there are two
etymologically different Hebrew particles spelled ‘et, not just one, as anyone
can see for himself in the Hebrew dictionaries. Unfortunately they are always
spelt in the same way when they do not take suffixes, and they are also both
connected to the next word by the Hebrew hyphen, the so-called maqqeph, as
the ‘et found in Jer. 25:11 is. This ‘et fits the description very well of the socalled
accusative particle, which is ‘prefixed as a rule only to nouns that are
definite’, that is, they need no article - proper nouns, titles, names of cities and
nations, etc., are definite wihout it.
At any rate, since there is no formal difference in this case, the context must
decide which ‘et we are dealing with, and here the syntax is clear: as shown in
the above analysis: ‘abhedu (‘they will serve’) is the verbal, haggoyim ha’elleh (’the
nations the these’) is the overt subject, and so, quite naturally, ‘et-melekh babhel is
the direct object. This is not only the ‘natural analysis’, it is simply the only
analysis that makes sense! The renowned Hebraist Dr. Driver, who wrote the
articles on all the various types of particles in the Hebrew and English Lexicon by
Brown, Driver and Briggs, gave both particles excellent treatment in that
dictionary, which see (pp. 84-87). Of course, he could not include all the
occurrences, for ‘et occurs more than 10,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, and of
them more than 830 are found in the book of Jeremiah. (A.M. Wilson,‘The
particle ‘et in Hebrew’, Hebraica ,Vol. 6, 1890, No. 2, pp. 139-150; No. 3, pp.
212-224) Happily, Dr. Driver also made a most excellent translation of The Book
of The Prophet Jeremiah (London, 1906), and his rendering of Jeremiah 25:11 is
quite clear and unambiguous as may be seen in the section prefaced by this
subheading: