Why are verses Jeremiah 29:8-9 omitted in the NAB?

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Good observation:thumbsup: .I looked up the verses in my DR then found v8 and v9 and v15 in my NAB After verse 20:) I was starting to get upset and kept reading.Thanks for making me "dig"a little.Rocky:)
 
I looked up the verses in my DR then found v8 and v9 and v15 in my NAB After verse 20.
Why you may ask?

I quote from the *Preface to the New American Bible, The Old Testament:*In some instances in the Book of Job, in Proverbs, Sirach, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zechariah there is good reason to believe that the original order of lines was accidentally disturbed in the transmission of the text. The verse numbers given in such cases are always those of the current Hebrew text, though the arrangement differs. In these instances the textual notes advise the reader of the difficulty. Cases of exceptional dislocation are called to the reader’s attention by footnotes.
As the OP noted, there is no footnote here. I guess this was not a case of “exceptional dislocation.” What about those “textual notes”? Back to the *Preface:*Where the translation supposes the received text—Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, as the case may be—ordinarily contained in the best-known editions, as the original or the oldest extant form, no additional remarks are necessary. But for those who are happily able to study the original text of the scriptures at firsthand, a supplementary series of textual notes pertaining to the Old Testament was added originally in an appendix to the typical edition. (It is now obtainable in a separate booklet from The Catholic Biblical Association of America, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064.) These notes furnish a guide in those cases in which the editorial board judges that the manuscripts in the original languages, or the evidence of the ancient versions, or some similar source, furnish the correct reading of a passage, or at least a reading more true to the original than that customarily printed in the available editions.
If you really want some exercise, try comparing Esther in the NAB to the Douay-Rheims. By the way, you may notice 1 & 2 Maccabees follows Esther in the NAB. Yeah, they moved whole books, too.
 
What’s the deal?

vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__PQ7.HTM

It’s the same in both of my printed NAB’s and I can’t even find a comment anywhere saying why the verses were omitted.

Because they were judged to interrupt the sequence of the text where they would otherwise stand.

**As the last poster indicates, there is a good deal of re-ordering of text in the NAB; but this is not unusual in modern versions; far from it. It is not, in principle, any different from the editorial work which produces Greek New Testaments with their variant readings: the translations we read often show some of the work that has gone on, but not all, simply because there a lot of it. **

**An even closer comparison is with the LXX: it re-orders large amounts of Jeremiah, & is appreciably shorter into the bargain. Yet nobody denounces it - maybe because it is sanctified by long use; who knows 🤷 ? **

**A problem is that the Bible is two things: **
  • A body of Ancient Near Eastern writings
  • a body of sacred writings within the Jewish & Christian Churches
    **As an ANE text, Jeremiah (for example) is as much an object of academic interest as any other - the editorial operations that book undergoes are not in principle different from any other of that age or background. **
As a sacred text, OTOH, it has associations that a text not regarded as sacred in Judaism or Christianity won’t have.

The result is a tension between Jeremiah as an ANE text, & Jeremiah as part of the Bible. And as a result, work on it as an ANE text is apt to feel like a profanation when it is considered under that other aspect, as a sacred & divine & canonical work. This twofold character is one of the things that makes translations of these texts so difficult.


Hope that helps to set your mind at rest 😦
 
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