A LEVITE SCRIBE
PRETENDS TO BE JEREMIAH

      There are numerous false prophecies concerning 'David's throne' found in the prophecies. I will not list them all. Consider the following doubly false prophecy.

"The Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn cereal offerings, and to make sacrifices for ever. The word of YAHWEH came to Jeremiah: Thus says YAHWEH: If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night will not come at their appointed time, then also my covenant with David my servant may be broken, so that he shall not have a son to reign on his throne, and my covenant with the Levitical priests my ministers." (Jeremiah 33:18)

      The ideological outlook of this prophecy in Jeremiah contradicts Jeremiah's condemnation of such things as sacrifice, the ark of Moses, and the temple cult earlier in his book, but it echoes the constant refrain in the Torah, especially in Leviticus, that sacrifices would be offered forever. Jeremiah (radical Jeremiah) stated:

"Thus says YAHWEH of hosts, the God of Israel: "Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh yourselves. For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices." (Jeremiah 7:21)

      This was the ideological position of 'radical Jeremiah'. 'Reactionary Jeremiah' stated that sacrifices would be offered forever. At the same time he stated that David would always have a son on the throne. Zedekiah was the last of David's line to sit on the throne, and the sacrificial system was brought to an abrupt end by the destruction of Israel and the temple by the Romans around 70 C.E. While the ideology of 'reactionary Jeremiah' contradicted 'radical Jeremiah' it was in complete agreement with the priestly documents, where it was also stated that sacrifice was ordained by God, when the people came out of Egypt, and would last forever. Priests were the final editors of the Bible, and the final editors of the prophets as well, so it is not hard to imagine the actual identity of 'reactionary Jeremiah' (he was some priestly editor of the manuscript).

"This is the portion of Aaron and of his sons from the offerings made by fire to YAHWEH, consecrated to them on the day they were presented to serve as priests of the LORD; YAHWEH commanded this to be given them by the people of Israel, on the day that they were anointed; It is their due forever throughout their generations. This is the law of the burnt offering, of the cereal offering, of the sin offering, of the guilt offering, of the consecration, and of the peace offerings, which YAHWEH commanded Moses on Mount Sinai, on the day that he commanded the people of Israel to bring their offerings to YAHWEH, in the wilderness of Sinai." (Leviticus 7:35)

      It was obviously a Levite (or a false prophet working for the Levites) who made the false prophecy just quoted, and in this case the author is easy to indentify based on their ideology. (Jeremiah was not the false prophet in this case.) This leads me to propose another interpretation for this mess of false prophecy and inconsistent doctrine in the books of the prophets. Previously I suggested that my suspicions were aroused by the presence of reactionary Levitical dogma in the books of radical prophets, and this led me to suspect that the priest purposely included false prophecies to discredit the prophets. A second possibility is that some Levite scribes simply developed swollen heads, and decided to become prophets themselves. They threw their hats into the ring and now, thousands of years later we are in the perfect position to judge how it all worked out for them. Two thousand years gone by - not a Levite in sight. Let us compare prophecies and tally up the score. In this case it was radical Jeremiah - score one point. Some Levite scribe with a pen (pretending to be Jeremiah) - score zero. (And that should tell you something right there.) I have suggested that my choice of the radical stream of Jewish prophecy was not based on a simple matter of personal taste, but that rather this tradition best encapsulated the truth about the Bible, and this is a fine example of what I mean. So following this line of interpretation the priests made counter prophecies extolling what the radical prophets condemned. The radical prophets remain standing to this day, while those Levite Scribes should have put their pens away and got on with whatever they were doing. But the Scribes were the final handlers of scripture, not the prophets, and it turns out that the scribes were the final prophets as well, unfortunately, giving Christian Apologists a lot to apologize for over the course of thousands of years. That they also brought their false prophets with them is no surprise, and once again, this is what radical Jeremiah said of them, so we can give him another point to add to his score. (And if you read Jeremiah chapter 8 you will find that he also said that the Levite scribes were forgers who wielded a lying pen. When you consult the various pages on the books of the Bible found on this site, you will find ample evidence presented of both their forgeries and their truly deceptive form of editing these manuscripts, so, once again, we can credit radical Jeremiah with one more true prophecy, and add one more point to his score. All this calls for another page entitled 'true prophecy in the prophets, don't you think, but first let me deal with this issue of disposing with false Levitical prophecy.) So we could conclude that the priests did not falsify the prophets 'on purpose' but rather thought themselves prophets and thought their war mongering false prophets were prophets, set themselves up and took a dive. And at the risk of sounding redundant, that really should tell you something about the scribes and Levites as compared to radical prophets, don't you think?