Then the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders of the people assembled at the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, and plotted to take Jesus by trickery and kill Him. But they said, "Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people." And when Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to Him having an alabaster flask of very costly fragrant oil, and she poured it on His head as He sat at the table. But when His disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, "To what purpose is this waste? For this fragrant oil might have been sold for much and given to the poor." But when Jesus was aware of it, He said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for Me. For you have the poor with you always, but Me you do not have always. For in pouring this fragrant oil on My body, she did it for My burial. Assuredly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her." Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, "What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?" And they counted out to him thirty pieces of silver. So from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him. Now on the first day of the Feast of the Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying to Him, "Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?" And He said, "Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, `The Teacher says, "My time is at hand; I will keep Passover at your house with My disciples."'" So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them; and they prepared the Passover. Now when evening had come, He sat down with the twelve. Now as they were eating, He said, "Assuredly, I say to you, one of you will betray Me." And they were exceedingly sorrowful, and each of them began to say to Him, "Lord, is it I?" Then He answered and said, "He who dipped his hand with Me in the dish will betray Me. The Son of Man goes as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born." Then Judas, who was betraying Him, answered and said, "Rabbi, is it I?" He said to him, "You have said it (Matthew 26:3-25)."
According to John's Gospel, Judas "had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it (John 12:6)." It is important to keep in mind the consistency of symbols- the corruption of money in this case. But why are we including the record of the betrayal of Christ in our narrative of events of Jeremiah's time? We'll include some more of that record to answer the question, following Jesus' standing before the high priest and Peter's three denials:
And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pontius Pilate the governor. Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." And they said, "What is that to us? You see to it!" Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood." And they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, and gave them for the potter's field, as the LORD directed me (Matthew 27:2-10)."
This brings up two difficulties. The first is quite simple: the quotation listed there was not spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, but by Zechariah. The second is that Jeremiah does buy a field for silver, and does visit a potter, but the two are not connected in the narrative. So, clearly, Matthew must be wrong.
You would think that the early church would have caught this mix-up and corrected it early on. Well, no, it could be argued, they would have been afraid to correct sacred text. Of course, but that flies in the face of the argument that the early church made up as much of these stories as they deemed fit- that the four gospels are the product of ecclesiastical fiat, edited and reedited over the years. Then how could they have missed this mistake? It's obvious they noticed it: in the King James Version, the name Jeremiah is translated as Jeremy, one of the only Latin words in the mostly Greek and sometimes Aramaic New Testament. The mistake made someone nervous.
Or is it a mistake? Did the early church have the King James Version of the Bible, in English? Of course not, they had the Greek. The New Testament was recorded in Greek, the language of sophistication in the Hellenistic period. And the word translated as `spoken,' in the phrase `spoken by Jeremiah the prophet,' is not `spoken' at all.
It is the Greek `rheo' or prolongated form `ereo,' which means `to flow' as water, as it is used in John 7:38: "`He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'" It is translated as `spoken' exclusively when used with the phrase `by the prophet.' Now, what about the quotation by Zechariah? Can something be interpreted as spoken by one prophet and done by another? Jeremiah 44:25:
"`Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, saying: "You and your wives have spoken with your mouths and fulfilled with your hands, saying, `We will surely perform our vows that we have made, to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her.' You will surely fulfill your vows and perform your vows!"'"
They speak the vow, and then they perform the vow. The Interpreter's Bible (1956, Abingdon Press, Nashville TN, vol. 5 p 794) states, in translation of Jeremiah 1:1, "The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin:"
[commenting on the translation of] The words: The Hebrew (dibhre') can also mean "acts" or "history": e.g. in 5:28 it is translated "deeds," and it appears frequently in the sense of "chronicle" or "history" in Kings and Chronicles.
But isn't this a lot of equivocating? Well, is it equivocating to examine details? The real question is, is there some REASON for things to be as they are?
It is in Jeremiah (chapter 18) where we find the famous analogy of God as the potter, declaring that He can do as He will with the house of Israel as if she were a clay pot, including destroy her. So, when He does prepare the destruction brought on by Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah purchases a field. It is, symbolically, the field of God, the potter of the house of Israel, and through its purchase, Jeremiah demonstrates the faith God has given him that the people will return from Babylon, even on the eve of destruction. It is a field representing redemption. Jeremiah performs the act. Zechariah prophesied to Jerusalem prior to the return from Babylon, even before Ezra and Nehemiah. What he says about the 30 pieces of silver and the potter's field is a prophecy of Jesus as the Redeemer of humanity, just like the field bought by Jeremiah is about redemption of the land. It ties the land, and the Christ, and redemption all together. Seen from this perspective, the statement "flowed from Jeremiah" can be seen not as some "contradiction in the Bible," of an English rendering of a Greek word translating a Hebrew prophecy, but as a tying together of all these elements, almost a challenge to do so. Again, if the church was busy rewriting the Gospels over hundreds of years to suit themselves, they would surely have picked this up and "fixed" it.
So Jeremiah buys a field (performs it), Zechariah places it in its perspective by speaking it, and its fulfillment is in the buying of the potter's field with the value put on Jesus' life, a field for burying strangers (non-Jews, or Gentiles), which has its own fulfillment because the Messiah is meant to be `a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6).' Is it the same field? That's a good question.
Let's briefly review. So far, we have lands owned by Levites which are always redeemable. We have land redeemed by Jeremiah's kinsman. We have a tract of land bought by Temple priests with the money Judas received for betraying Christ. We know that the potter's field spoken of in Jeremiah was in the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom Jeremiah 19:1-12
Thus says the LORD: "Go and get a potter's earthen flask, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests. And go out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the Potsherd Gate; and proclaim there the words that I will tell you, and say, `Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will bring such a catastrophe on this place, that whoever hears of it, his ears will tingle. Because they have forsaken Me and made this an alien place, because they have burned incense in it to other gods whom neither they, their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known, and have filled this place with the blood of the innocents (they have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into My mind), therefore behold, the days are coming," says the LORD, "that this place shall no more be called Tophet or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter. And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hands of those who seek their lives; their corpses I will give as meat for the birds of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth. I will make this city desolate and a hissing; everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its plagues. And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the desperation with which their enemies and those who seek their lives shall drive them to despair."' Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, and say to them, `Thus says the LORD of hosts: "Even so I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter's vessel, which cannot be made whole again; and they shall bury them in Tophet till there is no place to bury. Thus I will do to this place," says the LORD, "and to its inhabitants, and make this city like Tophet."'"
, on the western side of Jerusalem.
Then there is the passage from the book of ZechariahZechariah 11:4-17
Thus says the LORD my God, "Feed the flock for slaughter, whose owners slaughter them and feel no guilt; those who sell them say, `Blessed be the LORD, for I am rich'; and their shepherds do not pity them. For I will no longer pity the inhabitants of the land," says the LORD. "But indeed I will give everyone into his neighbor's hand and into the hand of his king. They shall attack the land, and I will not deliver them from their hand." So I fed the flock for slaughter, in particular the poor of the flock. I took for myself two staffs: the one I called Beauty, and the other I called Bonds; and I fed the flock. I dismissed the three shepherds in one month. My soul loathed them, and their soul also abhorred me. Then I said, "I will not feed you. Let what is dying die, and what is perishing perish. Let them that are left eat each other's flesh." And I took my staff, Beauty, and cut it in two, that I might break the covenant which I had made with all the peoples. So it was broken on that day. Thus the poor of the flock, who were watching me, knew that it was the word of the LORD. Then I said to them, "If it is agreeable to you, give me my wages; and, if not, refrain." So they weighed out for my wages thirty pieces of silver. And the LORD said to me, "Throw it to the potter"- that princely price they set on me. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD for the potter. Then I cut in two my other staff, Bonds, that I might break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel. And the LORD said to me, "Next, take for yourself the implements of a foolish shepherd. For indeed I will raise up a shepherd in the land who will not care for those who are cut off, nor seek the young, nor heal those that are broken, nor feed those that still stand. But he will eat the flesh of the fat and tear their hooves in pieces.
Woe to the worthless shepherd,
Who leaves the flock!
A sword shall be against his arm
And against his right eye;
His arm shall completely wither,
And his right eye shall be totally blinded."
, from which Matthew quotes, while ascribing it to Jeremiah.
Following the preceding passage from Zechariah, there is also a prophecy against the armies that come up against Jerusalem and Judah. The Hinnom Valley is better known today as Gehenna, or hell, because there they burned the refuse in a fire that was never quenched. Symbolically, the meaning is profound yet clear: the price set on Jesus was used to buy a field in hell, as Jesus descended into Hell in order to raise up sinners. But an action has more than one meaning in the Bible. The Valley of Hinnom was the East to West boundary between the lands of Judah and Benjamin. The Hebrew for "tribe" also means "staff" or "rod," as is, incidentally, the Messiah also known as the "Branch" and the "Rod of Jesse" (father of David, and the Messiah was to come from the Davidian family tree). The second staff is Bands, the cutting of which breaks the unity between the nations Judah and Israel. The one tribe which, as we have seen, had lands set aside within every other tribe was Levi, and "Levi" means "attached," from the root word "lavah" which means "to unite," and certainly by permeating the other 12 tribes it united them, it had its own privileges, it was a tribe of spiritual ministers, of priests, and was outside any territorial disputes between tribes, able to serve also as mediators. The field bought for money may very well relate to the tribe of Issachar, which means "he shall bring hire," from the root word "sachar" which means "hire for wages," because Jacob's wife Leah "bought" Jacob for a night from Rachel for the price of some mandrakes in the great baby-competition that went on between those two (see Genesis 30). "So they weighed out for my wages 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12)." Judas Iscariot's name has been debated, which is because the New Testament is written in Greek and the Hebrew and Aramaic traditions are lost or were never written down. (This is a big part of the reason for the great interest in the Scrolls as possibly being Hebrew versions of New Testament ideas. Though they don't mention Jesus, some writers have tried to associate Him with the Qumranic Teacher of Righteousness because then they would have the Hebrew derivations of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables and therefore be able to play all the word games which Hebrew encourages.) Baigent and Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, and with Lincoln in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, try to make the point that the translation of Iscariot should derive from the sect of violent Jewish zealots known as Sicarii. The traditional view is that it derives from the Hebrew phrase Ish Kerioth, or "man of Kerioth" (which means `city,' hence also the possible `man of the city'). These are certainly possibilities, but the former is a real stretch and the latter would be more likely if ANYONE ELSE in the New Testament had a name of similar derivation (Is- or Ish-Cityname), which they don't. What seems much more likely is that Iscariot means nothing more sinister or OBVIOUS than "Issacharite," as someone from Cyprus is known as a "Cypriot." Forest for the trees. So, the first staff, Beauty, would seem to relate to the Messiah; the wages in the potter's field to the Iscariot; and the staff called Bands to the tribe of Levi, the priests. But why cut two staffs in half in a prophecy in the first place? Well, what is a staff? It's a symbol, true, but in practical terms it's a support, something on which to lean on long journeys. Break two staffs and the support is gone, and one falls. And where does one fall without the support of God? To a field in the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna the place of burning refuse, or Hell. The blessing of Jacob upon his son Issachar on his (Jacob's) deathbed was this: "Issachar is a strong donkey, lying down between two burdens; he saw that rest was good; and that the land was pleasant; he bowed his shoulder to bear a burden, and became a band of slaves (Genesis 49:14-15)." When Jesus rides into Jerusalem, He rides in upon a donkey, but not just any donkey- a young one, a colt, the foal of a donkey. A grown man riding on a young animal is a sign of the Messiah, from Zechariah 9:9. We don't think we are stretching a point here to indicate that Jesus, too, bore the burden of our sins, and was broken under their weight. He then descended into hell and from there was raised on the third day in the flesh. Following this, in the history of Israel, the 2nd temple was destroyed- the place ministered to by the Levites under what St. Paul describes as the bondage to the old Mosaic covenant. What we have here is a steady giving way to and overcoming of burdens, weights, gravity, the flesh, sin, all of which exist at the opposite end of Creation from God. Only when the heaviness required by material things and their gravity is overcome, when men no longer need to yield to this bondage to the flesh, can the New Heaven and the New Earth become.
There's more on the subject, this time broken sticks, in Ezekiel 37:15-28Ezekiel 37:15-28
Again the word of the LORD came to me, saying, "As for you, son of man, take a stick for yourself and write on it: `For Judah and for the children of Israel, his companions.' Then take another stick and write on it, `For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel, his companions.' Then join them one to another for yourself into one stick, and they will become one in your hand. And when the children of your people speak to you, saying, `Will you not show us what you mean by these?'- say to them, `Thus says the Lord GOD: "Surely I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, his companions; and I will join them with it, with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they will be one in My hand."' And the sticks on which you write will be in your hand before their eyes. Then say to them, `Thus says the Lord GOD: "Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, wherever they have gone, and will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all; and they shall no longer be two nations, nor shall they ever be divided into two kingdoms again. They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions; but I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. Then they shall be My people, and I will be their God. David My servant shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd; they shall also walk in My judgments and observe My statutes, and do them. Then they shall dwell in the land that I have given to Jacob My servant, where your fathers dwelt; and they shall dwell there, they, their children, and their children's children, forever; and My servant David shall be their prince forever. Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them, and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; I will establish them and multiply them, and I will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My tabernacle also shall be with them; indeed I will be their God, and they shall be My people. The nations also will know that I, the LORD, sanctify Israel, when My sanctuary is in their midst forevermore."'"
, following the account of the renewal of Israel after the dispersion and the prophecy of the dry bones. There would come a time, Ezekiel said, when the Jews come together again, and then they will have a ruler to rule over them. In 1948 the staff came together. The next step in this prophecy is for the ruler to come- David, or, understood symbolically, One of his descendants.
Perhaps the two broken staffs refer to the first two temples, both of which were destroyed. The union of the two sticks in Ezekiel may then represent the third temple, which he describes. If this is true, then the third temple will be built. This particular historical dream of the Jews may ALSO take place, alongside their "next year in Jerusalem" dream, their "create a garden in the desert" dream, all of which are prophetic, all of which are impossible in strictly human terms. If the Jews could regain and hold onto their promised land in the face of Hitler and Stalin and Nasser and Arafat, when the combined powers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and all the Middle Eastern Moslem nations (namely Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Libya) were not sufficient to destroy this tiny little country despite four attempts to do so, one of which was undertaken on the highest Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur when they were attacked by complete surprise, then we have to either credit God or some amazing superhuman powers. In other words, unless we are prepared to accept that the Jews come from Krypton, then we have to acknowledge the hand of the Lord in their favor, and that the land belongs to them not because of their righteousness but because He said so, and He is as good as His Word.