The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Sham Scholarship 475
For no restoration will take place till the seventy years of Babylonian domination are ended,
when those now in exile with Jehoiachin will turn to Yahweh, and he will bring them back
(cf. xxiv, 5-7).
Since we are investigating the semantic contents of the preposition le, we may
as well note that Professor Buhl used the very same word in Danish, ‘for’, and
that the noted German grammarian and translator Emil Kautzsch (who edited
Gesenius’ Hebrew grammar later translated into English by A. Cowley) used
the German form of the same preposition, namely ‘für’, in front of the word
‘Babel’. Actually, already Luther had used the preposition ‘für’ here, as early as
in 1534. The same usage (‘for Babel’) is found in the translation by Dr. Chr. H.
Kalkar (Copenhagen 1847), who as a converted Jew was an expert in Biblical
Hebrew. As it is, all the most serious and reasonably literal translations have
‘for’ here, or words to that effect; NEB has a slightly different wording: ‘When
a full seventy years have passed over Babylon,...’ and AAT has: ‘As soon as
Babylon has finished seventy years,...’, while Moffatt has: ‘As soon as Babylon’s
seventy years are over,...’. The Jewish translation Tanakh agrees with Moffatt,
while the older ones by Leeser and JPS use ‘for’. As is well known, the KJV has
‘at Babylon’, which is not so strange when one bethinks that it most likely was
influenced by the Vulgate’s ‘in Babylone’; after all, most of the early English
translations until and including the KJV were influenced by that old Latin
version – also, the knowledge of Biblical Hebrew was rather imperfect then, but
fortunately it has improved enormously since 1611. Curiously, the so-called
‘New King James Version’ (1982) has kept the ‘at’ here; however, the reason
may well be that the editors did not want a total revision (cf. the Preface), but
rather a mere modernization, such as the replacing of obsolete words like ‘thou,
thee, thy’ and ‘thine’ with the modern pronouns ‘you, your’ and ‘yours’.
However, when the Revised Version came out in 1885 the knowledge of
Hebrew was much greater – there were no less than ten professors of Hebrew
in the so-called ‘Old Testament Company’ who revised the Hebrew part of the
Bible (including Jeremiah), and so things were changed. One of the real experts
among them was Dr. Driver, who has been mentioned already, and it would
have been unthinkable for him to render such a preposition wrongly. At that
time he was already engaged in the work of compiling the great Hebrew
lexicon, in which he gave an expert account of the preposition le on pages 510-
518, covering a total of 16 columns. Here he classified the meanings of le under
seven main headings and a lot of subheadings and even lesser groups, totaling
69 semantic variants, some even overlapping. The very smallest main heading,
with no subgroups at all, is No. 2 (page 511), ‘Expressing locality, at, near’,
which does not, however, contain anything supporting RF’s views.
Dr. Driver gives as the general sense of this preposition ‘to, for, in regard to, ...
denoting direction (not properly motion, as (‘el) towards, or reference to; and hence
used in many varied applications, in some of which the idea of direction
predominates, in others that of reference to ... very often, with various classes of
verbs, to, towards, for.’ Similar explanations are given in Gesenius-Buhl and
Köhler-Baumgartner. Interestingly, it was not only in the Revised Version but
also in its transatlantic counterpart, the American Standard Version of 1901,
KJV’s ‘at Babylon’ had been corrected to ‘for Babylon’, and that wording has