34 DAVID A. BOSWORTH The Ugaritic passage explicitly identifies the brains (mḫ) as the source of tears, and Jer 9,9 seems to reflect the same idea 31. The He- brew word for “brain matter” is not attested, although the Hebrew cognate hxm is used with reference to fatty food in Isa 25,6 32. The writer may have preferred the term var here because the expression ~ym yvar represents a play on the phrase var ym (“poisoned waters”), which occurs three times in Jeremiah and twice within the weeping poems (8,14; 9,14; 23,15). A similar wordplay of var (“head”) and var (“poison”) is evident in Job 20,16 and Deut 32,32-33. Several translations read “spring of water” (REB; NABRE), although the term !y[ (“spring”) is absent. Its absence seems a striking omission of a potential wordplay with !y[ (“eye”) in the following line. In this passage, YHWH and Jeremiah both weep over the impend- ing doom of the people as Jeremiah embodies the tears of YHWH in his own weeping. The copious tears desired in 8,23 would manifest the great emotional pain expressed in 8,18 and 21. The pain of the suffering people hurts the deity and the prophet, and they weep as a result of their attachment to the community. Jeremiah and YHWH have each other, but the networks of relationships in which they are embedded have been disrupted. Their tears serve as a plea for the people to change their ways and avoid catastrophe. 3. Jeremiah 9,17 In Jer 9,16-21, YHWH calls keening women to come and perform a dirge. Keening women appear in many societies to lead commu- nity lament in times of grief. Keening is a professional art that is typically practiced by older women who teach the skill to younger S. GERVITZ, “The Ugaritic Parallel to Jeremiah 8.23”, JNES 20 (1961) 31 41-46, proposed modifying the Ugaritic text to read my (“water”) instead of mḫ (“brain”) on the basis of Jer 9,9. This unusual attempt to modify a Ugaritic text based on a Hebrew text received surprisingly wide acceptance given that the Ugaritic text is not problematic. See the objections of Y. AVISHUR, “Should a Ugaritic Text be Corrected on the Basis of a Biblical Text?”, VT 31 (1981) 218-220, and GERVITZ, “Response”, VT 33 (1983) 330-334. COLLINS, “Physi- ology of Weeping”, mistakenly argues that Israelites thought that tears origi- nated in the kidneys. HALOT I, 568. See G. DEL OLMO LETE – J. SANMARTÍN (eds.), Dictionary 32 of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition (Leiden 2003) II, 538-539. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati