Secret_History

Chapter 10: Who Wrote the Bible and Why? 457
provisions for the Philistine king of Ashkelon, as well as for other kings. A second
document, also broken, mentions the kings of Gaza and Ashdod performing duties
for Nebuchadnezzar
So, who the heck is Shallum?
Well, first of all we remember that earlier in this chapter, we recounted the story
of the finding of the book of Deuteronomy in the temple. It was found by the priest
Hilkiah, apparently the father of Jeremiah, and it was turned over the royal scribe,
Shaphan. The king then ordered Shaphan to do something: he sent Hilkiah to a
prophetess!
“And Hilkiah, and they that the king had appointed, went to Huldah the prophetess,
the wife of Shallum the son of Tikvath, the son of Hasrah, keeper of the wardrobe;
(now she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college).”
So we find a possible strange connection here, even if the genealogy of the
individual is given as being different from the Shallum with whom we are
concerned.
In Jeremiah chapter 32, King Zedekiah, the last of Josiah’s sons to reign, a
purported brother of a son of Josiah named Shallum, has locked Jeremiah up in
prison because Jeremiah keeps telling him that the Babylonians are going to get
him. Jeremiah is ranting about this dreadful situation and tells us about a business
transaction that he, Jeremiah, was instructed to undertake.
And Jeremiah said, The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Behold, Hanameel
the son of Shallum thine uncle shall come unto thee saying, Buy thee my field that
is in Anathoth: for the right of redemption is thine to buy it. So Hanameel mine
uncle’s son came to me in the court of the guard in accordance with the word of the
Lord, and he said to me, I pray you buy my field that is in Anathoth, which is in the
land of Benjamin; for the right of inheritance is yours and the redemption is yours;
buy it for yourself. Then I knew that this was the word of the Lord. And I bought
the field that was in Anathoth of Hanameel my uncle’s son…
This suggests that the Shallum in question is dead, the son has inherited, and that
Jeremiah is the next of kin, giving him the first right of refusal to buy this field
that the son of Shallum wants to sell. Of course, if Zedekiah were really a son of
Josiah and a brother of the Shallum in question, he would have the right of
redemption. So obviously we have either two Shallums, or just one Shallum.
Again, who is Shallum, listed as a “son” of Josiah? Is it the same Shallum who
is listed as the uncle of Jeremiah? And who is the Jeremiah who is the father of the
wife of Josiah, and therefore the grandfather of Zedekiah? Well, we can’t be sure,
but my personal opinion is that the genealogy has been doubled more than once
and that a few people have been inserted here who may never actually have
existed at that particular point in time and that there was only one Shallum whose
name was added as a son of Josiah in order to establish a claim or a connection.
So, even if there is no way possible to determine the relationships or even the
precise times, or to determine how these names all came to be maneuvered into a
timeline that obviously either did not exist, or was so confused as to make any
attempts to sort it out futile, we still have a very powerful impression that
Jeremiah, author of at least seven books of the Bible, had a definite agenda in his
prestidigitation of the putative “history of Israel”. He was also of the Davidic line
himself, whatever that was supposed to mean, and that he was also connected