The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Sham Scholarship 477
in which le had been rendered with a local meaning, as ‘at’, ‘in’ or ‘to’, and of
course Jenni has these verses in his classification, e.g. defining le in Jeremiah
51:2 as a ‘personal dative of Babel, personified as world power’, and Jeremiah
3:17 as a ‘local directional’. Both of these are used correctly in their contexts,
agreeing with the general sense of le, ‘to, towards, for’, and the full details about
them and their various uses (e.g. the ‘local’ or ‘directional’) can be found in Dr.
Jenni’s very precise classification.
As for the last scripture mentioned by RF in this connection, Jeremiah 40:11, a
check on some translations of this verse shows that not everything is as simple
as RF appears to think; if, for instance, he had checked the LXX, he would
have found a genitive construction in Jer. 47:11 (corresponding to MT’s 40:11),
which Sir Launcelot Lee Brenton rendered ‘the king of Babylon had granted a
remnant to Judah’ in the Bagster Septuagint. (Reprint of 1976). The very same
construction is found in Rotherham’s The Emphasized Bible, while the NASB
uses ‘left a remnant for Judah’; several versions have ‘a remnant of Judah’ (e.g.
NKJV; RV; ASV) and Leeser’s Jewish translation has ‘left a remnant unto
Judah’. Let us also take a look at a very scholarly Norwegian rendering by
Mowinckel and Messell in DET GAMLE TESTAMENTE De senere Profeter
(Oslo 1944), page 417: ‘Babelkongen hadde unt Judafolket en rest’, (‘the king of
Babylon had granted the people of Judah a remnant’) and then, for the sake of
good order, we’ll close this little check-up by quoting NW: ‘the king of
Babylon had given a remnant to Judah.’ (Emphasis added where pertinent)
Even though quite a few versions have ‘in’ as suggested by RF, it appears to be
impossible to get a complete consensus on the way to render le in this verse!
In his discussion of the possibility of using le in a local sense as ‘at’ (page 86, §
2) RF points out that ‘The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew lists about 30 examples of
this meaning’. Now, this is not so strange and it is actually a very small
percentage when we recall that this preposition occurs more than 20,000 times
in the Hebrew Bible. To be honest, that learned dictionary does not seem to
offer the most comprehensive or the most detailed treatment of le, for it has
only a total of 373 examples in its entry on that preposition (pages 479-485),
while Brown-Driver-Briggs has more than 1500! What is more, whenever BDB
has treated a category of le as found in one of the books of the Bible, it usually
adds that the listed examples are followed by many more in that book or
chapter. Moreover, it brims with grammatical and general linguistic
information, adding many useful references to Aramaic, Syriac and other
Semitic tongues for the sake of comparison.
Regarding the examples of le being used in the sense of ‘at’, RF is somewhat
less than accurate, for in section 4. in the dictionary he uses, which treats ‘of
place, at, by, on, along, over’, there are only 11 examples of ‘at’, not 30! The
section lists 31 verses with a total of 35 examples of ‘local’ le, some of which are
even rendered ‘for’, ‘to’, or by other words, and there is no added grammatical
explanation of any kind whatsoever. Of course, Gesenius-Buhl and Köhler-
Baumgartner also have plenty of information on this preposition and its usage,
so as not to speak of Professor Jenni’s magnificent volume quoted above.
One more point about lebabhel in Jeremiah 29:10: On page 85, the last six lines,
RF relates that of 70 translations in his library only six had the ‘local’ meaning,