Bible Review

Although in the Masoretic text (the standard Hebrew text of the Bible) Ebedmelech says, “these men have done wrong,” in the Septuagint (a Greek translation from the Hebrew) he tells Zedekiah, “you have done wrong.” In the Book of Jeremiah, the Septuagint is arguably the superior text.

Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1994), p. 41.

William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 289.

Note also that Zephaniah, a contemporary of Jeremiah, mentions Cush or Cushite three times in his three short chapters. Ronald E. Clements, Jeremiah, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), pp. 86–87.

Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, pp. 122–23, 130.

Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), plates 17–22.

Herodotus, History 3.379, p. 379. See also Gray, “Persian Empire,” pp. 21–22.

Herodotus, History 3.152–153. In an inscription the Cushite king Nastesenen speaks of defeating k-m-b-s-u-d-n. Hall (“Restoration of Egypt,” pp. 312–313), argues that this is a reference to Cambyses. George Reisner, however (Harvard African Studies 2, 1923), rejects this connection, maintaining that Nastesenen was much later than Cambyses. See G. Buchanan Gray, “The Foundation and Extension of the Persian Empire,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 4, pp. 20–21.

Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, “Literature, Accounts, Lists” in Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1993), p. 280.

Ronald J. Williams, “The Egyptians,” in Peoples of Old Testament Times, ed. D.J. Wiseman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 95–96. See also the Letter of Aristeas 13; and Herodotus, History 2.161.