cut
oft, the restoration is described more in general terms. In the second
part, the Lord meets a two-fold special grief of the believers. The
time was approaching when the house of David was to be most deeply
humbled, when every trace of its former glory was to be done away with.
With it, the hopes of the people seem to be buried. God himself had
declared this house to be the medium, through which all the mercies
were to come, which He, as the King, had promised to bestow upon His
people. But what was to become of the mercies, if the channel was
destroyed, through which they were to be bestowed upon the people? The
temple which, through the guilt of the people, had been changed into a
den of robbers, was to be destroyed. But, with the existence of the
temple, the existence of the Levitical priesthood was bound up, and if
the latter was done away with, how was to be obtained forgiveness of
sins, which, in the Law, had been connected with the mediation of the
Levitical priesthood? These fears and cares the Lord now meets by
declaring that, in both respects, the perishing would be an arising,
that life should arise from death.

The genuineness of this section has been assailed by _Jahn_ (_Vaticinia
Mess._ iii. p. 112, ff.[1]), after the example of _J. D. Michaelis_,
who, in the German translation of the Bible, inclosed it within
brackets. For the present, we mention only the internal
reason--deferring the refutation till we come to the exposition of
particulars--because we require it in order to set aside the external
reason. Jahn, p. 121, sums it up in these words: "The matter stands in
opposition to all the prophecies of Jeremiah and all the other
Prophets. For all of them limit themselves to the one David who was to
come [Pg 461] after the captivity, and do not mention any successor to
him, far less such a multitude of descendants of David and of Levites,
which is promised to the people under the name of a blessing, but which
would, in reality, have been a very heavy burden to the people, at
whose expense they were to be splendidly maintained." The external
reason is the omission of the section in the Alexandrian version.
Proceeding upon the altogether gratuitous assumption of a double
recension of the prophecies of Jeremiah, people imagine that, by the
omission in the Alexandrian version, they are entitled to suppose that,
in that recension which the LXX. followed, this section was not
contained. But the arguments a