Haplography in the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX Jeremiah

Opinions of nineteenth century scholars assessing the text of Jeremiah, where the LXX is one-eighth shorter than MT, were divided. Movers (1837) favored the shorter LXX text, while Graf (1862) favored the longer MT, believing that LXX Jeremiah had been abridged and corrupted by its translator. Since Duhm (1901) the shorter text of Jeremiah has been given consistent preference, and the MT seen as an expansionist text. The discovery of a fragment of the short Hebrew text of Jeremiah at Qumran (4QJer^b) led Janzen (1963) and others to conclude that the LXX translator did not abridge his Vorlage, but translated a Hebrew text of comparable length, localized in Egypt where the translation was made. While Janzen did not believe that shorter is always better, he nevertheless supported the consensus view that MT is by and large an expansionist text. The present article challenges this view, arguing that the LXX translated from a seriously flawed Hebrew text of Jeremiah, one containing more than 300 arguable cases of haplography, accounting for 64% of its word loss. The article also presents evidence to show that Biblia Hebraica failed to cite many LXX omissions, and was unjustly biased in favor of the shorter LXX readings. The longer MT of Jeremiah is far and away the better text, comparable to LXX Samuel, which is also longer and better. What we have then in Jeremiah is not so much proto-MT expansion by busy scribes in Babylon, but proto LXX loss by careless and inattentive scribes in Egypt.