Jeremiah
Being The Baird Lecture for 1922
By
George Adam Smith
New York
George H. Doran Company
1924
The purpose and the scope of this volume are
set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture
II. explains the various metrical forms in which I
understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most
of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured,
however imperfectly, to reproduce in English.
Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety
of these forms, the irregularities which are found
in them, and the occasional passage of the
Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to
verse, after the manner of some other bards or
rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in
mind that what appear as metrical irregularities
on the printed page would not be felt to be so
when sung or chanted; just as is the case with
the folk-songs of Palestine to-day. I am well
aware that metres so primitive and by our canons
so irregular have been more rhythmically rendered
by the stately prose of our English Versions;
yet it is our duty reverently to seek for the
The text of the Lectures and the footnotes show how much I owe to those who have already written on Jeremiah, as also in what details I differ from one or another of them.
I have retained the form of Lectures for this volume, but I have very much expanded and added to what were only six Lectures of an hour each when delivered under the auspices of the Baird Trust in Glasgow in 1922.
George Adam Smith.
Chanonry Lodge,
Old Aberdeen,
18th October, 1923.
First of all, I thank the Baird Trustees for their
graceful appointment to this Lecture of a member
of what is still, though please God not for long,
another Church than their own. I am very grateful
for the privilege which they grant me of returning
to Glasgow with the accomplishment of
a work the materials for which were largely
gathered during the years of my professorship in
the city. The value of the opportunity is enhanced
by all that has since befallen our nation
and the world. The Great War invested the
experience of the Prophet, who is the subject of
this Lecture, with a fresh and poignant relevance
to our own problems and duties. Like ourselves,
Jeremiah lived through the clash not only of
empires but of opposite ethical ideals, through
the struggles and panics of small peoples, through
long and terrible fighting, famine, and slaughter
of the youth of the nations, with all the anxieties
to faith and the problems of Providence, which
such things naturally raise. Passionate for peace,
he was called to proclaim the inevitableness of
war, in opposition to the popular prophets of a
In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which contains them—but especially of the man himself, his personality and his tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as his influence on the subsequent religion of his people.
It has often been asserted that in Jeremiah's
ministry more than in any other of the Old
Covenant the personality of the Prophet was
under God the dominant factor, and one has even
said that his predecessors were the originators
of great truths, which he transmuted into spiritual
life.
So far as our materials enable us to judge no
other prophet was more introspective or concerned
about himself; and though it might be
said that he carried this concern to a fault, yet
Jeremiah was called to prophesy about the
time that the religion of Israel was re-codified in
Deuteronomy—the finest system of national religion
which the world has seen, but only and
exclusively national—and he was still comparatively
young when that system collapsed for
the time and the religion itself seemed about to
perish with it. He lived to see the Law fail, the
Nation dispersed, and the National Altar shattered;
but he gathered their fire into his bosom and
carried it not only unquenched but with a purer
flame towards its everlasting future. We may
say without exaggeration that what was henceforth
finest in the religion of Israel had, however
ancient its sources, been recast in the furnace of
his spirit. With him the human unit in religion
which had hitherto been mainly the nation was on
the way to become the individual. Personal piety
in later Israel largely grew out of his spiritual
struggles.Without
Jeremiah,
says Wellhausen, the Psalms could not
have been composed.
His forerunners, it is true, had insisted that religion was an affair not of national institutions nor of outward observance, but of the people's heart—by which heart they and their hearers must have understood the individual hearts composing it. But, in urging upon his generation repentance, faith and conversion to God, Jeremiah's language is more thorough and personal than that used by any previous prophet. The individual, as he leaves Jeremiah's hands, is more clearly the direct object of the Divine Interest and Grace, and the instrument of the Divine Will. The single soul is searched, defined and charged as never before in Israel.
But this sculpture of the individual out of the
mass of the nation, this articulation of his immediate
relation to God apart from Law, Temple
and Race, achieved as it was by Jeremiah only
through intense mental and physical agonies,
opened to him the problem of the sufferings of
the righteous. In his experience the individual
realised his Self only to find that Self—its rights,
the truths given it and its best service for God—baffled
by the stupidity and injustice of those
for whom it laboured and agonised. The mists
of pain and failure bewildered the Prophet and to
the last his work seemed in vain. Whether or
not he himself was conscious of the solution of
the problem, others reached it through him.
There are grounds for believing that the Figure
Annotata
ad Vetus Testamentum,
on Is. lii-liii; Cornill, Das
Buch Jeremia erklärt,
pp. 11-12; John Skinner, Prophecy and
Religion,
p. 351.
For our knowledge of this great life—there was
none greater under the Old Covenant—we are
dependent on that Book of our Scriptures, the
Hebrew text of which bears the simple title
Jeremiah.
The influence of the life and therefore the full
stature of the man who lived it, stretches, as I
have hinted, to the latest bounds of Hebrew
history, and many writings and deeds were
worshipfully assigned to him. Thus the Greek
Version of the Old Testament ascribes Lamentations
to Jeremiah, but the poems themselves do
not claim to be, and obviously are not, from
himself. He is twice quoted in II. Chronicles
and once in Ezra, but these quotations may be
reasonably interpreted as referring to prophecies
contained in our book, which were therefore
Baruch
to which is attached
(2) The Epistle of Jeremy
warning the Jews of Babylon in
general and conventional terms against idolatry. Apocalyptic
writings, (3) Apocalypse of Baruch,
(4) (5) and (6) three other
Apocalypses of Baruch,
(7) The Rest of the Words of
Baruch,
or Paralipomena Jeremiæ,
(8) Prophecy of Jeremiah.
For particulars of these see Encyclopædia Biblica,
arts. Apocalyptic Literature
(R. H. Charles), and Apocrypha
(M. R. James).
For the actual life of Jeremiah, for the man as
he was to himself and his contemporaries, for his
origin, character, temper, struggles, growth and
modes of expression, we have practically no
materials beyond the Canonical Book to which
his name is prefixed.The Prophecies of Jeremiah
in The Expositor's Bible,
1890, pp. 10 ff.) refers Pss. xxiii,
xxvi-xxviii to Jeremiah, and it is possible that in particular the
personal experiences in Ps. xxvii are reflections of those of
the prophet. But such experiences were so common in the
history of the prophets and saints of Israel as to render the
reference precarious.
Roughly classified the contents of the Book (after the extended title in Ch. I. 1-3) are as follows:—
1. A Prologue, Ch. I. 4-19, in which the Prophet tells the story of his call and describes the range of his mission as including both his own people and foreign nations. The year of his call was 627-6 B.C.
2. A large number of Oracles, dialogues between
the Prophet and the Deity and symbolic
actions by the Prophet issuing in Oracles, mostly
introduced as by Jeremiah himself, but sometimes
reported of him by another. Most of the Oracles
are in verse; the style of the rest is not distinguishable
by us from prose. They deal almost
3. A separate group of Oracles on Foreign Nations, Chs. XLVI-LI, reported to us as Jeremiah's.
4. A number of narratives of episodes in the Prophet's life from 608 onwards under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah to the end in Egypt, soon after 586; apparently by a contemporary and eyewitness who on good grounds is generally taken to be Baruch the Scribe: Chs. XXVI, XXXVI-XLV; but to the same source may be due much of Chs. XXVII-XXXV (see under 2).
5. Obvious expansions and additions throughout all the foregoing; and a historical appendix in Ch. LII, mainly an excerpt from II. Kings XXIV-XXV.
On the face of it, then, the Book is a compilation
from several sources; and perhaps we ought
to translate the opening clause of its title not as
in our versions The Words of Jeremiah,
but
The History of Jeremiah,
as has been legitimately
done by some scholars since Kimchi.
What were the nuclei of this compilation? How did they originate? What proofs do they give of their value as historical documents? How did they come together? And what changes, if any, did they suffer before the compilation closed and the Book received its present form?
These questions must be answered, so far as possible, before we can give an account of the Prophet's life or an estimate of himself and his teaching. The rest of this lecture is an attempt to answer them—but in the opposite order to that in which I have just stated them. We shall work backward from the two ultimate forms in which the Book has come down to us. For these forms are two.
Besides the Hebrew text, from which the Authorised and Revised English Versions have been made, we possess a form of the Book in Greek, which is part of the Greek Version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. This is virtually another edition of the same work. The Hebrew text belongs to the Second or Prophetical Canon of the Jewish Scriptures, which was not closed till about 200 B.C., or more than 350 years after Jeremiah's death. The Greek Version was completed about the same time, and possibly earlier.
These two editions of the Book hold by far the
In size the Greek Book of Jeremiah is but
seven-eighths of the Hebrew,
More instructive is the greater number of
phrases and passages found in the Hebrew Book,
and consequently in our English Versions, but absent
from the Greek. Some, it is true, are merely
Finally, there is one great difference of arrangement.
The group of Oracles on Foreign
Nations which appear in the Hebrew as Chs.
XLVI-LI are in the Greek placed between verses
13 and 15 In his Schweich
Lectures on
From all this two conclusions are drawn: (1) when the titles
were inserted the chapters were arranged as in the Greek,
which, therefore, was the original arrangement; (2) they afford
Hebrew evidence for a break or interruption in the middle of
the Oracles—the longer titles cease about the end of Part I of
the Greek Version, which therefore follows a division of the
Book into two parts that already existed in the Hebrew original
from which it was made. The Hebrew editor who amplified
the titles had apparently only Part I before him.
The Septuagint and Jewish
Worship
(for the British Academy, 1921) Mr. St. John
Thackeray presents clear evidence from the different vocabularies
in the Greek Version that this Version was the work of
two translators, the division between whom is at Ch. xxix.
verse 7. The dividing line cuts across the Greek arrangement
of the chapters, which sets the Oracles on Foreign Nations in
the centre of the Book. This shows that it was not the translators
who placed them there, but that the translators found the
arrangement in the Hebrew MS. from which they translated.
Further, he thinks that the division of the Book into two parts
was not made by the translators, but already existed in their
Hebrew exemplar. For this the Hebrew text gives two evidences:
(1) the titles of the Oracles, (2) the colophons appended
to two of them. The titles are some long, some short.
In the Hebrew order the Oracles with long titles are mixed up
with those with short, but in the Greek order the six with long
titles come together first and are followed by the five with short.
There are two colophons—one to the Moab Oracle, the other to
the Babylon Oracle; but the Moab Oracle stands last in the
Greek order and the Babylon Oracle last in the Hebrew order.
Modern critics differ as to the comparative
value of these two editions of the Book of Jeremiah,
and there are strong advocates on either
side.Der Prophet J.
erklärt,
1862), George Douglas
(The Book of Jeremiah,
1903) for the Hebrew; and Workman
(The Text of Jeremiah,
1888) for the Greek. For a
judicial comparison of the two editions, resulting much in favour
of the Greek, see W. R. Smith, The O.T. in the Jewish
Church,
Lectures IV and V.The Hebrew is
qualitatively superior to the Greek, but
quantitatively the Greek is nearer the original. This judgment
is general, admitting many exceptions, and each passage has to
be considered by itself.
—A. B. Davidson. Cp. Duhm, Das
Buch Jer.,
p. xxii.
Moreover, this common material bears evidence
of having already undergone similar treatment,
before it passed out on those two lines
of further development which resulted in the
canonical Hebrew text and the Greek Version
respectively. The signs of gradual compilation
are everywhere upon the material which they
share in common. Now and then a chronological
order appears, and indeed there are traces of a
purpose to pursue that order throughout. But
this has been disturbed by cross-arrangements
according to subject,
These data clearly prove that not only from the time when the Hebrew and Greek editions of the Book started upon their separate lines of development, but from the very beginnings of the Book's history, the work of accumulation, arrangement and re-arrangement, with other editorial processes, had been busy upon it.
The next question is, have we any criteria by
which to discriminate between the elements in the
Book that belong either to Jeremiah himself or
to his contemporaries and others that are due to
editors or compilers between his death soon after
586 and the close of the Prophetic Canon in
200 B.C.? The answer is that we have such
criteria. All Oracles or Narratives in the Book,
which (apart from obvious intrusions) imply that
the Exile is well advanced or that the Return
from Exile has already happened, or which reflect
the circumstances of the later Exile and
subsequent periods or the spirit of Israel and the
teaching of her prophets and scribes in those
periods, we may rule out of the material on
which we can rely for our knowledge of Jeremiah's
life and his teaching. Of such Exilic and
post-Exilic contents there is a considerable, but
not a preponderant, amount. These various
items break into their context, their style and
substance are not conformable to the style and
substance of the Oracles, which (as we shall see)
are reasonably attributed to Jeremiah, but they
All these, then, we lay aside, so far as our search
for Jeremiah himself and his doctrine is concerned,
But once more—in what remains of the Book, what belongs to Jeremiah himself or to his time, we have again proofs of compilation from more sources than one. Some of this is in verse—among the finest in the Old Testament—some in prose orations; some in simple narrative. Some Oracles are introduced by the Prophet himself, and he utters them in the first person, some are reported of him by others. And any chronological or topical order lasts only through groups of prophecies or narratives. Fortunately, however, included among these are more than one account of how the writing of them and the collection of them came about.
In 604-603 B.C., twenty-one, or it may have been twenty-three, years after Jeremiah had begun to prophesy, the history of Western Asia rose to a crisis. Pharaoh Nĕcoh who had marched north to the Euphrates was defeated in a battle for empire by Nebuchadrezzar, son of the King of Babylon. From the turmoil of nations which filled the period Babylon emerged as that executioner of the Divine judgments on the world, whom Jeremiah since 627 or 625 had been describing generally as out of the North. His predictions were justified, and he was able to put a sharper edge on them. Henceforth in place of the enemy from the North Jeremiah could speak definitely of the King of Babylon and of his people the Chaldeans.
In Ch. XXV we read accordingly that in that year, 604-3, he delivered to the people of Jerusalem a summary of his previous oracles. He told them that the cup of the Lord's wrath was given into his hand; Judah and other nations, especially Egypt, must drink it and so stagger to their doom.
But a spoken and a summary discourse was not
enough. Like Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah was
moved to commit his previous Oracles to writing.
In Ch. XXXVI is a narrative presumably by
an eyewitness of the transactions it recounts, and
this most probably the scribe who was associated
with the Prophet in these transactions. Jeremiah
was commanded to take a roll of a book and write on
The story has been questioned, but by very
few, and on no grounds that are perceptible
to common sense. One critic imagines that it
ascribes miraculous power to the Prophet in its
natural impression that the Prophet reproduces
from memory and dictates all the words which the
Lord has spoken to him.
Encyclopædia Biblica.
There is, of course, more room for difference of opinion as to the contents of each of the successive Rolls, and as to how much of these contents is included in our Book of Jeremiah. But to such questions the most probable answer is as follows.
There cannot have been many of the Prophet's
previous Oracles on the first Roll. This was read
three times over in the same day and was probably
limited to such Oracles as were sufficient for its
retouched under fresh provocation
the contents of the first
Roll. This interpretation would imply that words
means nouns, verbs, adjectives and so forth, whereas words
can only carry the same sense as it carries in the rest of the Book, viz.
whole Oracles or Discourses. Note the phrase
words like them, viz. like the words
or Oracles on the first Roll.
If such a Roll as the second existed in the care
of Baruch then the use of it in the compilation of
our Book of Jeremiah is extremely probable, and
the probability is confirmed by some features of the
Book. Among the Oracles which can be assigned
Jeremiah,
in Hastings, B.D.,
ii. 522.
Further let us note that if some of the Oracles in the earlier part of the Book—after the account of the Prophet's call—are undated, while the dates of others are stated vaguely; and again, if some, including the story of the call, appear to be tinged with reflections from experiences of the Prophet later than the early years of his career, then these two features support the belief that the Oracles were first reduced to writing at a distance from their composition and first delivery—a belief in harmony with the theory of their inclusion and preservation in the Prophet's second Roll.
Let us now turn to the biographical portions
of the Book. We have proved the trustworthiness
of Ch. XXXVI as the narrative of an eyewitness,
in all probability Baruch the Scribe, who for the
first time is introduced to us. But if Baruch wrote
Ch. XXXVI it is certain that a great deal more
of the biographical matter in the Book is from
the Book does not
contain a single line that claims to be written by
Baruch.
Such, then, are the data which the Book of
Jeremiah offers for the task of determining the
origins and authenticity of its very diverse contents.
After our survey of them, those of you
who are ignorant of the course of recent criticism
will not be surprised to learn that virtual agreement
now exists on certain main lines, while great
differences of opinion continue as to details—differences
perhaps irreconcilable. It is agreed
that the book is the result of a long and a slow
growth, stretching far beyond Jeremiah's time,
A. Collections of genuine Oracles and Discourses of Jeremiah—partly made by himself.
B. Narratives of his life and times by a contemporary writer or writers, the principal, if not the only, contributor to which is (in the opinion of most) the Scribe Baruch.
C. Exilic and Post-Exilic additions in various forms: long prophecies and narratives; shorter pieces included among the Prophet's own Oracles; and scattered titles, dates, notes and glosses.
Moreover, there is also general agreement as to which of these classes a very considerable number of the sections of the Book belong to. There is not, and cannot be, any doubt about the bulk of those which are apparently exilic or post-exilic. It is equally certain that a large number of the Oracles are Jeremiah's own, and that the most of the Narratives are from his time and trustworthy. But questions have been raised and are still receiving opposite answers as to whether or not some of the Oracles and Narratives have had their original matter coloured or expanded by later hands; or have even in whole been foisted upon the Prophet or his contemporary biographer from legendary sources.
Of these questions some, however they be
answered, so little affect our estimates of the
Prophet and his teaching that we may leave them
These four questions are
(1) The authenticity of the account of his call in Ch. I.
(2) The authenticity of the account of his support of the promulgation of Deuteronomy, the Old Covenant, in Ch. XI.
(3) The authenticity of his Oracle on the New Covenant in Ch. XXXI.
(4) And an even larger question—Whether indeed any of the prose Oracles attributed to him in the Book are his, or whether we must confine ourselves to the passages in verse as alone his genuine deliverances?
The first three of these questions we may leave
for discussion to their proper places in our survey
of his ministry. The fourth is even more fundamental
to our judgment both of the Book and of
the Man; and I shall deal with it in the introduction
to the next lecture on The Poet Jeremiah.
From last lecture I left over to this the discussion of a literary question, the answer to which is fundamental to our understanding both of the Book and of the Man, but especially of the Man.
The Book of Jeremiah has come to us with all
its contents laid down as prose, with no metrical
nor musical punctuation; not divided into stichoi
or poetical lines nor marked off into stanzas or
strophes. Yet many passages read as metrically,
and are as musical in sound, and in spirit as poetic
as the Psalms, the Canticles, or the Lamentations.
Their language bears the marks that usually distinguish
verse from prose in Hebrew as in other
literatures. It beats out with a more or less
regular proportion of stresses or heavy accents.
It diverts into an order of words different from the
order normal in prose. Sometimes it is elliptic,
sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the
meaning—both signs of an attempt at metre.
Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries
alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what
is usual in prose, and prefers forms of words more
These questions and claims—all-important as
they are for the definition of the range and character
of the prophet's activity—we can decide only
after a preliminary consideration of the few clear
In Hebrew poetry there are some principles about
which no doubt exists. First, its dominant feature
is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which,
though found in all human song, is carried through
this poetry with a constancy unmatched in any
other save the Babylonian. The lines of a couplet
or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous,
that is identical in meaning, or Supplementary
and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least their
meanings respond or correspond to each other in
a way, for which no better name has been found
than that given it by Bishop Lowth more than a
century and a half ago, Parallelismus Membrorum.
De
Sacra Pœsi Hebræorum,
1753.The German Lyric
(London, Dent & Sons, 1914):
In regard to the length of the lines, their number, and the
arrangement of the rhymes, the poet has absolute freedom in all
three classes;
and again of the Volkslied there is no mechanical
counting of syllables; the variation in the number of accented
and unaccented syllables is the secret of the verse.
And he quotes from Herder on the Volkslieder: songs of the
people ... songs which often do not scan and are badly
rhymed.
If the Hebrew poet be so
constantly bent on a rhythm of sense this must
inevitably modify his rhythms of sound. If his
first aim be to produce lines each more or less
complete in meaning, but so as to run parallel to
its fellow, it follows that these lines cannot be
always exactly regular in length or measure of
time. If the governing principle of the poetry
requires each line to be a clause or sentence in
itself, the lines will frequently tend, of course
But there are other explanations of the metrical
irregularities in the traditional text of Hebrew
poems, which make it probable that these irregularities
are often original and not always (as they
sometimes are) the blunders of copyists. In all
forms of Eastern art we trace the influence of what
we may call Symmetriphobia, an aversion to
absolute symmetry which expresses itself in more
or less arbitrary disturbances of the style or
pattern of the work. The visitor to the East
knows how this influence operates in weaving and
architecture. But its opportunities are more frequent,
and may be used more gracefully, in the
art of poetry. For instance, in many an Old
Testament poem in which a single form of metre
prevails there is introduced at intervals, and especially
at the end of a strophe, a longer and
heavier line, similar to what the Germans call the
Schwellvers
in their primitive ballads. And
this metrical irregularity is generally to the profit
both of the music and of the meaning.
Further, the fact that poems, such as we now
deal with, were not composed in writing, but
were sung or chanted is another proof of the
possibility that the irregularities in their metre
are original. In the songs of the peasants of
Palestine at the present day the lines vary as
much as from two to five accents, and within the
Palästinischer Diwan.
Nor are such irregularities confined to Eastern
or primitive poetry. In the later blank verse of
Shakespeare, broken lines and redundant syllables
are numerous, but under his hand they become
things of beauty, and the irregularity is the
foundation of the larger and nobler rule.
To
quote the historian of English prosody—These
are quite deliberate indulgences in excess or defect,
over or under a regular norm, which is so pervading
and so thoroughly marked that it carries
them off on its wings.
History of English Prosody,
vol. ii. 53,
54.Nordseebilder,
has many irregular lines—irregularities
suitable to the variety of the subjects
of his verse.
Again, in relevance to the mixture of poetry
with prose in the prophetic parts of the Book of
Jeremiah, it is just to note that the early pre-Islamic
rhapsodists of Arabia used prose narratives
to illustrate the subjects of their chants;
that many later works in Arabic literature are
medleys of prose and verse; that in particular the
prose of the Arabian Nights
frequently breaks
into metre; while the singing women of Mecca
often put metre aside and employ the easier form
of rhymed prose
Mekka,
vol. ii. 62.Saj
as it is called.
If I may offer a somewhat rough illustration, the works of some Eastern poets are like canoe voyages in Canada, in which the canoe now glides down a stream and is again carried overland by what are called portages to other streams or other branches of the same stream. Similarly these works have their clear streams of poetry, but every now and again their portages of prose. I may say at once that we shall find this true also of the Book of Jeremiah.
All these phenomena, both of Eastern and of Western poetry, justify us in regarding with scepticism recent attempts whether to eliminate—by purely arbitrary omissions and additions, not founded on the evidence of the Manuscripts and Versions—the irregularities in the metrical portions of the Book of Jeremiah, or to confine the Prophet's genuine Oracles to these metrical portions, and to deny that he ever passed from metre into rhythmical prose. And our scepticism becomes stronger when we observe to what different results these attempts have led, especially in the particular form or forms of metre employed.
Professor Duhm, for instance, confines our
prophet to one invariable form, that of the Qînah
or Hebrew Elegy, each stanza of which consists
Kurzer Hand-Commentar,
1901; and Das Buch
Jeremia,
a translation, 1903.the metrical pieces in the book are
written throughout in Oktastichs,
or eight lines
a piece, but admits (and rightly) that in the
metrical structure of the individual lines there
prevails a certain freedom, due to the fact that for
the prophet verse-making (Dichten) was not an end
in itself.
While he allows, as all must, that
Jeremiah frequently used the Qînah metre, he
emphasises the presence of the irregular line,
almost as though it were the real basis of the prophetic
metre.Das Buch Jeremia,
1905, p.
xlvi.Metrische Studien,
in the Transactions of
Saxon Society of the Sciences,
vol. xxi (which relies too much
on the Massoretic or Canonical text); Erbt, Jeremia u. seine
Zeit,
p. 298; Giesebrecht, Jeremia's Metrik,
iii. ff.; Karl
Budde's relevant pages in his Geschichte der althebräischen
Litteratur,
1906 reached me after I had expressed the views I
have given above. They agree in the main with these
views.
To sum up: in view of the argument adduced
from the obvious principles of Hebrew verse and
of the primitive poetic practice of other nations—not
to speak of Shakespeare and some modern
poets—I am persuaded after close study of the
text that, though Jeremiah takes most readily
to the specific Qînah metre, it is a gross and
pedantic error to suppose that he confined himself
to this, or that when it appears in our Book it is
always to be read in the same exact form without
irregularities. The conclusion is reasonable
that this rural prophet, brought up in a country
village and addressing a people of peasants, used
the same license with his metres that we have
observed in other poetries of his own race. Nor
is it credible that whatever the purpose of his
message was—reminiscence, or dirge, or threat
of doom or call to repent, or a didactic purpose—Jeremiah,
throughout the very various conditions
of his long ministry of forty years, employed
but one metre and that only in its strictest form
allowing of no irregularities. This, I say, is not
credible.Song
of the Bell
—a variety in beautiful harmony with that of the
different aspects of life on which he touches; and see above,
p. 36, on the irregularity of metre in
Heine's Nordseebilder.
The other question, whether in addition Jeremiah
ever used prose in addressing his people,
may be still more confidently answered. Duhm
maintains that with the exception of the letter to
the Jewish exiles in Babylonia,no ruler of spirits, a delicate
observer, a sincere exhorter and counsellor, a
hero only in suffering and not in
attack.
It is true that, while the lyrics which are
undoubtedly the prophet's own are terse, concrete,
poignant and graceful, the style of many—not
of all—of the prose discourses attributed
to him is copious, diffuse, and sometimes
cold. But then it is verse which is most
accurately gripped by the memory and firmly
preserved in tradition; it is verse, too, which
best guards the original fire. Prose discourses,
whether in their first reporting or in their subsequent
tradition more readily tend to dilate and
to relax their style. Nor is any style of prose
so open as the Deuteronomic to additions,
Therefore in the selection of materials available
for estimating the range and character of
Jeremiah's activities as a prophet, we must not
reject any prose Oracles offered by the Book as
his, simply because they are in prose. This
reasonable caution will be of use when we come
to consider the question of the authenticity of
such important passages as those which recount
his call, or represent him as assisting in the
promulgation of Deuteronomy, and uttering the
Oracle on the New Covenant.
But, while it has been necessary to reject as
groundless the theory that Jeremiah was exclusively
a poet of a limited temper and a single
form of verse and was not the author of any
of the prose attributed to him, we must keep in
mind that he did pour himself forth in verse;
that it was natural for a rural priest such as
he, aiming at the heart of what was mainly a
nation of peasants, to use the form or forms
of folk-song most familiar to themIt
is an understatement of the case to say that the folk-song
has been a source of inspiration. In the very greatest
lyricists we simply find the folk-song in a new shape: it has
become more polished and artistic, and it has been made the
instrument of personal lyrical utterance.
—John Lees, M.A.,
D.Litt., The German Lyric
(London, etc., Dent & Sons,
1914).
From what has been said it is clear that we
must not seek too high for Jeremiah's rank as a
poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome
some recent writers—is due partly to a
recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his
prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the
truths which that mixed style frequently conveys.
But those truths apart, his verse was just that of
the folksongs of the peasants among whom he
was reared—sometimes of an exquisite exactness
of tone and delicacy of feeling, but sometimes
full both of what are metrical irregularities according
to modern standards, and of coarse images
and similes. To reduce the metrical irregularities,
by such arbitrary methods as Duhm's, may
occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the
edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody
and weakens the emphasis.
Some of Jeremiah's verse indeed shows no irregularity. The following, for instance, which recalls as Hosea loved to do the innocence and loyalty of Israel's desert days, is in the normal Qînah rhythm of lines with alternately three and two accents each. The two first lines are rhymed, the rest not.
II. 2f.:—
The troth of thy youth I remember, Thy love as a bride, Thy follow of Me through the desert, The land unsown. Holy to the Lord was Israel, Of His income the firstling, All that would eat it stood guilty, Evil came on them.
Or II. 32:—
Can a maiden forget her adorning, Or her girdle the bride? Yet Me have My people forgotten, Days without number. How fine hast thou fashioned thy ways, To seek after love! Thus 't was thyself Pointing את with Patah-Sheva for Tsere. to [those] evilsDidst train Pointing לםדתי with Chireq-Patah-Sheva-Sheva. thy ways.Yea on thy skirts is found blood Of innocent Hebrew adds poor. souls.Not only on felons(?) I find it, So Duhm after the Greek; see p. 97, n. 3. But over all these.
Here again is a passage which, with slight emendations and these not arbitrary, yields a fair constancy of metre (IV. 29-31):—
From the noise of the horse and the bowmen All the land is in flight, They are into the caves, huddle in thickets, And are up on the crags. After the Greek. Every town of its folk is forsaken, With none to inhabit. All is up! Thou destined to ruin,(?) By differently arranging the Hebrew consonants, see p. 117. Other arrangements are possible. Greek omits destined to ruin. What doest thou now That thou deck'st thee in deckings of gold And clothest in scarlet, Hebrew and Greek have this couplet in the reverse order. And with stibium widenest thine eyes? In vain dost thou prink! Though satyrs, they utterly loathe thee, Thy life are they after. For voice as of travail I hear, Anguish as hers that beareth, The voice of the Daughter of Ṣion agasp, She spreadeth her hands:
On the other hand here is a metre,
Israel a slave! Or house-born serf! Why he for a prey? Against him the young lions roar, Give forth their voice, And his land they lay waste Burning and tenantless. Is not this being done thee For thy leaving of Me?
Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel's mourning, the sob upon which the wail dies out:—
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children And will not be comforted— For they are not! xxxi. 15.
Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a passionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another—I love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be repeated to the people in 604-3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,
O generation look at the Word of the Lord!
breaking in before the following regular verse,
Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness? Why say my folk, We are off,
There is another poem in which the Qînah
measure prevails but with occasional lines longer
than is normal—Ch. V. 1-6a (alternatively to end
of 5
Run through Jerusalem's streets, Look now and know, And search her broad places If a man ye can find, If there be that doth justice Aiming at honesty. [That I may forgive her.] Though they say, As God liveth,Falsely they swear. Lord, are thine eyes upon lies After Duhm who reads לכן = לאכן (cp. viii. 6) and transfers it to the following line. And not on the truth? Thou hast smitten, they ail not, Consumed them, they take not correction; Their faces set harder than rock, They refuse to return.
Or take Ch. II. 5-8. A stanza of four lines in
irregular Qînah measure (verse 5) is followed by
a couplet of four-two stresses and several lines of
three each (verses 6 and 7), and then (verse 8) by
a couplet of three-two, another of four-three, and
another of three-three.
Let us now take a passage, IX. 22, 23, which, except for its last couplet, is of another measure than the Qînah. The lines have three accents each, like those of the Book of Job:—
Boast not the wise in his wisdom, Boast not the strong in his strength, Boast not the rich in his riches, But in this let him boast who would boast— Instinct and knowledge of Me, Me, the Lord, Who work troth And So Greek. justice and right upon earth,For in these I delight.
Or this couplet, X. 23, in lines of four stresses each:—
Lord, I know—not to man is his way, Not a man's to walk or settle his steps!
Not being in the Qînah measure, both these passages are denied to Jeremiah by Duhm. Is not this arbitrary?
The sections of the Book which pass from verse to prose and from prose to verse are frequent.
One of the most striking is the narrative of the Prophet's call, Ch. I. 4-19, which I leave to be rendered in the next lecture. In Chap. VII. 28 ff. we have, to begin with, two verses:—
This is the folk that obeyed not The voice of the Lord, So Greek; Hebrew adds their God. That would not accept correction; Lost Hebrew adds and is cut off. is truth from their mouth.Shear and scatter thy locks, Raise a dirge on the heights, The Lord hath refused and forsaken The sons of His wrath.
Then these verses are followed by a prose tale of the people's sins. Is this necessarily from a later hand, as Duhm maintains, and not naturally from Jeremiah himself?
Again Chs. VIII and IX are a medley of lyrics and prose passages. While some of the prose is certainly not Jeremiah's, being irrelevant to the lyrics and showing the colour of a later age, the rest may well be from himself.
Ch. XIV is also a medley of verse and prose. After the Dirge on the Drought (which we take later), comes a passage in rhythmical prose (verses 11-16), broken only by the metrical utterance of the false prophets in verse 13:—
Sword or famine ye shall not see, They shall not be yours; But peace and staith shall I give you Within this Place. The Hebrew makôm must here as elsewhere be given as equivalent to the Arabic makâm (literally like the Hebrew standing-place but) generally sacred site.
And verse comes in again in verses 17-18, an Oracle of Jeremiah's own:—
Let mine eyes with tears run down, By night and by day, Let them not cease from weeping After Duhm. For great is the breach— Broken the Virgin, Daughter of my people, Most sore the wound! Fare I forth to the field, Lo, the slain of the sword; If I enter the city, Lo, anguish of famine. Priest and prophet alike are gone begging In a land they know not. Hast Thou utterly cast away Judah, Loathes Ṣion Thy soul? Why then hast Thou smitten us, Past our healing? Hoped we for peace—no good, For time to heal—and lo panic! Lord we acknowledge our evil, The guilt of our fathers— To Thee have we sinned.
And now the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes, precariously, as from a later hand:—
For Thy Name's sake do not despise, Demean not the Throne of Thy Glory, Remember and break not Thy Covenant with us! Can any of the gentile Bubbles bring rain, Or the Heavens give the showers? Art not Thou He Hebrew adds the Lord our God; not in the Greek. on whom we must wait?For all these Thou hast made.
Again in Ch. XV. 1-2, prose is followed by a couplet, this by more prose (verses 3, 4) and this by verse again (verses 5-9). But these parts are relevant to each other, and some of Duhm's objections to the prose seem inadequate and even trifling. For while the heavy judgment is suitably detailed by the prose, the following dirge is as naturally in verse:—
Jerusalem, who shall pity, Who shall bemoan thee? Who shall but turn him to ask After thy welfare?
And once more, in the Oracle Ch. III. 1-6 the first
verse, a quotation from the law on a divorced wife,
is in prose, and no one doubts that Jeremiah himself
is the quoter, while the rest, recounting
So much for the varied and often irregular
streams of the Prophet's verse and their interruptions
and connections by portages
of prose.
Let us turn now from the measures to the substance
and tempers of the poetry.
As in all folk-song the language is simple, but its general inevitableness—just the fit and ringing word—stamps the verse as a true poet's. Hence the difficulty of translating. So much depends on the music of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions, metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the original. Before taking some of the Prophet's renderings of the more concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of his moral reflections in verse—Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:—
Curséd the wight that trusteth in man Making flesh his stay! [And his heart from the Lord is turned] Like some desert-scrub shall he be, Nor see any coming of good, But dwell in the aridest desert, A salt, uninhabited land. Blesséd the wight that trusts in the Lord, And the Lord is his trust! He like a tree shall be planted by waters, That stretches its roots to the stream, Unafraid So Greek and Vulg.; Hebrew has he shall not see. at the coming of heat,His leaf shall be green. Sans care in a year of drought, He fails not in yielding his fruit.
As here, so generally, the simplicity of the poet's
diction is matched by that of his metaphors, similes,
and parables. A girl and her ornaments, a man
and his waist-cloth—thus he figures what ought to
be the clinging relations between Israel and their
God. The stunted desert-shrub in contrast to
the river-side oaks, the incomparable olive, the
dropped sheaf and even the dung upon the fields;
the vulture, stork, crane and swift; the lion, wolf
and spotted leopard coming up from the desert or
the jungles of Jordan; the hinnying stallions and
the heifer in her heat; the black Ethiopian, already
familiar in the streets of Jerusalem, the potter and
his wheel, the shepherd, plowman and vinedresser,
the driver with his ox's yoke upon his shoulders;
the harlot by the wayside; the light in the home
and sound of the hand-mill—all everyday objects
of his people's sight and hearing as they herded,
ploughed, sowed, reaped or went to market in the
city—he brings them in simply and with natural
In the very bareness of his use of them there
lurks an occasional irony as in the following—a
passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.
And thou shalt say unto this people, and it shall be if they say unto thee,
Don't we know of courseA Hebrew idiom, literally don't, knowing, we know? thatthen thou shalt say unto them: Thus saith the Lord, Lo, I am about to fill the inhabitants of this land, the kings and princes, the priests and prophets, even Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness [the drunkenness, that is, of horror at impending judgments] and I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together. I will not pity, saith the Lord, nor spare nor have compassion that I should not destroy them.
How one catches the irritation of the crowd on being told what seems to them such a commonplace—till it is interpreted!
Like his fellow-prophets, whose moral atmosphere was as burning as their physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright sun drew breath (as Isaiah puts it) in the fear of the Lord and saw the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human as well as animal, which their skirts leave behind are rendered with vividness, poignancy and horror of detail.
Take, to begin with, the following, XIV. 1 ff.:—
The Word of the Lord to Jeremiah Concerning the Drought. Jerusalem's cry is gone up, Judah is mourning, The gates thereof faint in Black grief to the ground. Her nobles sent their menials for water, They came to the pits; Water found none and returned, Empty their vessels. [Abashed and confounded They cover their heads.] This couplet is wanting in the Greek. The tillers So rightly Duhm after the Greek. of the ground are dismayed,For no rain hath been Hebrew uselessly adds in the land. ;And abashed are the ploughmen, They cover their heads. The hind on the moor calves and abandons, For the grass has not come. On the bare heights stand the wild asses, Gasping for air With glazen eyes— Herb there is none! Though our sins do witness against us, Lord act for the sake of Thy Name! [For many have been our backslidings, 'Fore Thee have we sinned.] Hope of Israel, His Saviour In time of trouble, Why be like a traveller So Duhm, reading gār for gēr. through the land,Or wayfaring guest of a night? Why art Thou as one that is stunned,— Strong yet unable to save? Yet Lord, Thou art in our midst, [O'er us Thy Name hath been called] Do not forsake us! Thus saith the Lord of this people:— So fond to wander are they, Their feet they restrain not, The Lord hath no pleasure in them, He remembers their guilt. Hebrew adds, and will make visitation on their sins, which the Greek omits.
The following dirge is on either a war or a pestilence, or on both, for they often came together. The text of the first lines is uncertain, the Hebrew and Greek differing considerably:—
Call ye the keening women to come, And send for the wise ones, That they hasten and sing us a dirge, Till with tears our eyes run down, Our eyelids with water. For death has come up by our windows, And into our palaces, Cutting off from the streets the children, The youths from the places. And fallen are the corpses of men Like dung on the field, Or sheaves left after the reaper, And nobody gathers. ix. 17 f., 21 f.; see also pp. 205, 206.
The minatory discourses are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet's simplicity does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills—night without shelter for the weary or refuge for the hunted.
Hear and give ear, be not proud, For the Lord hath spoken! Give glory to the Lord your God Before it grows dark, And before your feet stumble— On the mountains of dusk. While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom And sets it thick darkness. xiii. 15-16.
There this poem leaves the Doom, but in others Jeremiah leaps in a moment from the vague and far-looming to the near and exact. He follows a line which songs of vengeance or deliverance often take among unsophisticated peoples in touch with nature. They will paint you a coming judgment first in the figure of a lowering cloud or bursting storm and then in the twinkling of an eye they turn the clouds or the lightnings into the ranks and flashing arms of invaders arrived. I remember an instance of this within one verse of a negro song from the time of the American Civil War:—
Don't you see de lightning flashing in de cane-brakes? Don't you think we'se gwine to have a storm? No you is mistaken—dem's de darkies' bayonets, And de buttons on de uniform!
Examples of this sudden turn from the vague to the real are found throughout Jeremiah's Oracles of Doom. Here are some of them:—
Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights, Right on the Daughter of My people, It is neither to winnow nor to cleanse, In full blast it meets me...: Lo, like the clouds he is mounting, Like the whirlwind his chariots! Swifter than vultures his horses; Woe! We are undone! For hark a signal from Dan, Mount Ephraim echoes disaster, Warn the folk! They are come!So the Greek. Make heard o'er Jerusalem. Lo, the beleaguerers (?) come From a land far-off, They let forth their voice on the townships of Judah, [Close] as the guards on her suburbs They are on and around her, For Me she defied. iv. 11-13, 15-17. The text and so the metre of 16, 17 are uncertain. For besiegers Duhm proposes by the change of one letter to read panthers, to which in v. 6 Jeremiah likens the same foes. Skinner, leopards. See below, p. 114.
There is a similar leap from the vagueness of IV. 23-26, which here follows, to the vivid detail of verses 29-31 already rendered on page 45.
I looked to the earth, and lo, chaos, To the heavens, their light was gone, I looked to the mountains, they quivered, The hills were all shuddering. I looked and behold not a man, All the birds of the heavens had fled. I looked for the gardens, lo desert, All the townships were burning.
Or take a similar effect from the Oracle on the Philistines, Ch. XLVII. 2, 3.
Lo, the waters are up in the North, The torrents are plunging, O'erwhelming the land and her fulness, The city and her dwellers. Mankind is crying and howling, Every man in the land, At the noise of the stamp of the hoofs of his steeds At the rush of his cars, The rumble of his wheels. Fathers look not back for their children, So helpless their hands! Lit. Because of the feebleness of their hands.
Or take the Prophet's second vision on his call, Ch. I. 13 ff., the boiling cauldron with its face from the North, which is to boil out over the land; then the concrete explanation, I am calling to all the kingdoms of the North, and they shall come and every one set his throne in the gates of Jerusalem. There you have it—that vague trouble brewing in the far North and then in a moment the northern invaders settled in the gates of the City.
But the poetry of Jeremiah had other strains. I conclude this lecture with selections which deal with the same impending judgment, yet are wistful and tender, the poet taking as his own the sin and sufferings of the people with whose doom he was charged.
The first of these passages is as devoid of hope as any we have already seen, but like Christ's mourning over the City breathes the regret of a great love—a profound and tender Alas!
Jerusalem, who shall pity, Who shall bemoan thee? Or who will but turn him to ask After thy welfare?
Then follow lines of doom without reprieve and the close comes:—
She that bore seven hath fainted, She breathes out her life. Set is her sun in the daytime, Baffled and shaméd; And their remnant I give to the sword In face of their foes. xv. 5-9.
In the following also the poet's heart is with his people even while he despairs of them. The lines, VIII. 14-IX. 1, of which 17 and 19b are possibly later insertions, are addressed to the country-folk of Judah and Benjamin:—
For what sit we still? Sweep together, And into the fortified cities, That there we may perish! For our God Greek; in both cases Hebrew adds the Lord. hath doomed us to perish,And given us poison to drink, For to Him See previous note. have we sinned.Hope for peace there was once— But no good— For a season of healing— Lo, panic. This verse is uncertain; for Hebrew בעתה read with the Greek בהלה. For another arrangement see above, p. 51. From Dan the sound has been heard, So Greek; Hebrew omits sound. The hinnying of his horses; With the noise of the neighing of his stallions All the land is aquake. For that this grief hath no comfort, This line is uncertain. Sickens my heart upon me. Hark to the cry of my people Wide o'er the land— Greek. Harvest is over, summer is ended And we are not saved! For the breach of the Daughter of my people I break, I darken, Horror hath seized upon me, Pangs as of her that beareth. So Greek; Hebrew omits this line. Is there no balm in Gilead, Is there no healer? Why will the wounds never stanch Of the daughter of my people? O that my head were waters, Mine eyes a fountain of tears, That day and night I might weep For the slain of my people!
Such in the simple melodies of his music and
in the variety of his moods—now sombre, stern
and relentless, now tender and pleading, now in
despair of his people yet identifying himself with
Jeremiah was born soon after 650 B.C. of a
priestly house at Anathoth, a village in the
country of Benjamin near Jerusalem. Just before
his birth Egypt and the small states of Palestine
broke from allegiance to Assyria. War was
imminent, and it may have been because of some
hope in Israel of Divine intervention that several
children born about the time received the name
Yirmyahu—Yahweh hurls or
shoots.
What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared.
Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name
Anata, is a little village not four miles north-north-east
of Jerusalem, upon the first of the
rocky shelves by which the central range of
Palestine declines through desert to the valley of
the Jordan. The village is hidden from the main
road between Jerusalem and the North, and lies
The descending foreground with no shelter against the hot desert winds, the village herds straying into the wilderness, the waste and crumbling hills shimmering in the heat, the open heavens and far line of the Gilead highlands, the hungry wolves from the waste and lions from the jungles of Jordan are all reflected in Jeremiah's poems:—
Light o' heel young camel, Zig-zagging her tracks, Heifer gone to school to the desert— In the heat of her passion, Snapping the breeze in her lust, Who is to turn her? Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights, Direct on my people, Neither to winnow nor to sift, In full blast it meets me. A lion from the jungle shall smite, A wolf from the wastes undo them, The leopard shall prowl round their towns, All faring forth shall be torn. Even the stork in the heavens Knoweth her seasons, And dove, swift and swallow Keep time of their coming. Is there no balm in Gilead, No healer there? ii. 23, 24; iv. 11; v. 6; viii. 7, 22.
We need not search the botany of that province for the suggestion of this last verse. Gilead was the highland margin of the young prophet's view, his threshold of hope. The sun rose across it.
The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay
was Benjamin's. Even where not actually desert
the bleak and stony soil accords with the character
given to the tribe and its few historical personages.
Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf.
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children, And will not be comforted, For they are not. xxxi. 15.
The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation's history alike swept these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him—not Rachel's only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul's sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of Benjamin.
The empty, shimmering desert and the stony
land thronged with such tragedies—Jeremiah
It was a nursery not unfit for one, who might have been (as many think), the greatest poet of his people, had not something deeper and wider been opened to him, with which Anathoth was also in touch. The village is not more than an hour's walk from Jerusalem. Social conditions change little in the East; then, as now, the traffic between village and city was daily and close—country produce taken to the capital; pottery, salted fish, spices, and the better cloths brought back in exchange. We see how the history of Jerusalem may have influenced the boy. Solomon's Temple was nearly four hundred years' old. There were the city walls, some of them still older, the Palace and the Tombs of the Kings—perhaps also access to the written rolls of chroniclers and prophets. Above all, Anathoth lay within the swirl of rumour of which the capital was the centre. Jerusalem has always been a tryst of the winds. It gathers echoes from the desert far into Arabia, and news blown up and down the great roads between Egypt and Damascus and beyond to the Euphrates; or when these roads are deserted and men fear to leave their villages, news vibrating as it vibrates only in the tremulous East, from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp across incredible spaces. As one has finely said of a rumour of invasion:—
I saw the tents of Cushán in affliction, The curtains of Midian's land were trembling. Hab. iii. 7 .
To the north lay the more fruitful Ephraim—more
fruitful and more famous in the past than
her sister of Benjamin, but now in foreign hands,
her own people long gone into exile. It was
natural that her fate should lie heavy on the still
free but threatened homes of Benjamin, whose
northern windows looked towards her; and that
a heart like Jeremiah's should exercise itself upon
God's meaning by such a fate and the warning it
carried for the two surviving tribes.
It was, too, across Ephraim with its mixed population in touch with the court and markets of Nineveh, that rumours of war usually reached Benjamin and Judah:—
Hark! They signal from Dan, Mount Ephraim echoes disaster. iv. 15.
After a period of peace, and as Jeremiah was
growing to manhood, such rumours began to
blow south again from the Euphrates. Some
thirteen years or so earlier, Asshurbanipal, the
Sardanapalus of the Greeks, had accomplished
the last Assyrian conquest in Palestine, 641 B.C.,
For these northern omens conspired with
others, ethical and therefore more articulate,
within Judah herself. It was two generations
since Isaiah and Hezekiah had died, and with
them the human possibilities of reform. For
nearly fifty years Manasseh had opposed the
pure religion of the prophets of the eighth
century, by persecution, by the introduction of
foreign and sensual cults, and especially by reviving
in the name of Israel's GodJerusalem,
ii. 263, 264.
A few voices crying through the night had
indeed reminded Judah of what He was and
what He required. He hath showed thee, O man,
The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his training, and the boy in the priest's home at Anathoth were of an age: a fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah's reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch; yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:—
Did he not eat and drink, And do judgment and justice? The cause of the poor and the needy he judged— Then was it well. xxii. 15, 16.
Attempts at reform were made soon after
Josiah's accession,Jerusalem,
ii.
As many as thy cities in number So many O Judah thy gods! ii. 28; xi. 13.
Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but immoral, with impure rites and orgies.
Lift to the bare heights thine eyes, Where not wast thou tumbled? The land thou hast fouled with thy whoredoms, iii. 2.
—spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.
This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in the nation's politics. With no faith in One Supreme God the statesmen of Judah, just as in Isaiah's earlier days, fluttered between the great powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under Psamtik's vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the restless vassals of Assyria. But Assyria, though weakened, had not become negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly drifted. To use Jeremiah's figure, suitable alike to her politics and her religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour after another.
All this was chaos worse than the desert that
crumbled before Anathoth, a tragedy more bitter
than the past which moaned through the land
behind. What had God to say? It was a singular
mark of Israel, that the hope of a great prophet
never died from her heart. Where earnest
souls were left they prayed for his coming and
looked for the Word of the Lord by him more
than they who wait for the morning. The same
The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning, so far as he himself was concerned:—
Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee, And a prophet to the nations had set thee. i. 5.
A thought of God, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; God's alone, and sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness—this that then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than even that similar assurance which centuries later filled another priest's home in the same hill country:—
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord, To prepare His ways. Luke i. 76 .
The questions of foreknowledge and predestination,
with which Jeremiah engaged himself
not a little, I leave for a future lecture.
This was very wide—not for Judah only, but
a prophet to the nations had I set thee. The objection
has been taken, that it is too wide to be original,
and the alternative inferences drawn: either that
it is the impression of his earliest consciousness as
a prophet but formed by Jeremiah only after years
of experience revealed all that had been involved
in his call; or that it is not Jeremiah's own but
the notion formed of him by a later exaggerating
generation. It is true that Jeremiah did not
dictate the first words of the Lord to him till some
twenty-three years after he heard them, when it
was possible and natural for him to expand them
in terms of his intervening experience. And we
must remember the summary bent of the Hebrew
mind—how natural it was to that mind to describe
processes as if they were acts of a day, done by a
fiat as in the story of the Creation; or to state a
system of law and custom, which took centuries
to develop, as though it were the edict of a single
Yet the forebodings at least of a task so vast as
that of prophet to the nations were anything but
impossible to the moment of Jeremiah's call;
for the time surged, as we have seen, with the
movements of the nations and their omens for his
own people. Indeed it would have been strange
if the soul of any prophet, conscious of a charge
from the Almighty, had not the instinct, that as
the meaning of this charge was gradually unfolded
to him, it would reveal, and require from him
the utterance of, Divine purposes throughout a
world so full even to the uninspired eye of the
possibilities both of the ruin of old states and of
the rise of new ones—a world so close about his
own people, and so fraught with fate for them,
that in speaking of them he could not fail to speak
of the whole of it also. If at that time a Jew had
at all the conviction that he was called to be a
prophet, it must have been with a sense of the
same responsibilities, to which the older prophets
had felt themselves bound: men who knew themselves
to be ministers of the Lord of Hosts, Lord
of the Powers of the Universe, who had dealt not
with Israel only but with Moab and Ammon
and Aram, with Tyre and the Philistines and
Egypt, and who had spoken of Assyria herself as
And in fact Jeremiah's acknowledged Oracles—some
of them among his earliest—travel far beyond
Judah and show not merely a knowledge of, and
vivid interest in, the qualities and fortunes of other
peoples, but a wise judgment of their policies and
therefore of what should be Judah's prudent
attitude and duty towards them. For long
before his call she had been intriguing with Egypt
and Assyria.
No wonder that Jeremiah shrank from such a
task: Ah, Lord God, I know not to speak, I am too
young.
Ah, Lord, Thou didst beguile me, And beguiled I let myself be; Thou wast too strong for me And hast prevailed. xx. 7.
The following shows how this came about:—
And the Lord said unto me, Say not I am too young, for to all to which I send thee thou shalt go, and all I command thee thou shalt speak,
Be not afraid before them For with thee am I to deliver, Rede of the Lord. And the Lord put forth His hand and caused it to touch my mouth, and the Lord said to me, Lo, I have set My Word in thy mouth,
See I appoint thee this day Over the nations and kingdoms, To pull up and tear down and destroy, Hebrew adds the redundant to pull down; Greek omits. To build and to plant.
To this also objection has been taken as still more
incredible in the spiritual experience of so youthful
a rustic. It has been deemed the exaggeration
of a later age, and described as the gigantic
figure
of a plenipotentiary to the nations,
utterly inconsistent with the modest singer of
the genuine oracles of Jeremiah, a hero only in
suffering, not in assault.
Two visions follow. To appreciate the first we must remember the natural anxiety of the prophets when charged with pronouncements so weighty and definite. The Word, the ethical purpose of God for Israel was clear, but how was it to be fulfilled? No strength appeared in the nation itself. The party, or parties, loyal to the Lord had been in power a dozen years and effected little in Jerusalem and nothing beyond. The people were not stirred and seemed hopeless. Living in a village where little changed through the years, but men followed the habits of their fathers, Jeremiah felt everything dead. Winter was on and the world asleep.
Then the Word of the Lord came to me saying, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah; and I said, I am seeing the branch of an almond tree. And the Lord said to me, Well hast thou seen, for I am awake over My Word to perform it.
The Hebrew for almond tree is shākēdh, which
also means awakeness or
watchfulness,
The Second Vision needs no comment after our survey of the political conditions of the time. The North held the forces for the fulfilling of the Word. The Vision is followed by a charge to the Prophet himself.
And the word of the Lord came to me the second time, What art thou seeing? And I said, A caldron boiling and its face is from (?) the North.
The text reads, its face is from the face of northwards, which some would emend to its face is turned northwards, i.e. the side on which it is blown upon and made to boil. Boiling or bubbling, lit. blown upon, fanned. And the Lord said unto me:—Out of the North shall evil boil forth After the Greek; Hebrew has be opened. On all that dwell in the land; For behold, I am calling All the realms Hebrew has races and kingdoms and adds Rede of the Lord. of the North.They shall come and each set his throne In the openings of the gates of Jerusalem, On all of her walls round about, And every township of Judah. And My judgments by them Read אתם with points Chireq and Qamets. shall I utterOn the evil of those who have left Me, Who have burned to other gods And bowed to the works of their hands. But thou shalt gird up thy loins, Stand up and speak Hebrew adds to them; Greek omits. all I charge thee.Be not dismayed before them, Lest to their face I dismay thee. See I have thee set this day A fenced city and walls of bronze To the kings and princes of Judah, Her priests and the folk of the land; They shall fight but master thee never, For with thee am I to deliver— Rede of the Lord. The last three couplets are uncertain. In v. 18 Hebrew adds a basalt pillar and, after bronze, against all the land.
Jeremiah was silenced and went forth to his ministry—the Word upon his lips and the Lord by his side.
Two further observations are natural.
First, note the contrast between the two Visions—the blossoming twig and the boiling caldron brewing tempests from the North. Unrelated as these seem, they symbolise together Jeremiah's prophesying throughout. For in fact this was all blossom and storm, beauty and terror, tender yearning and thunders of doom—up to the very end. Or to state the same more deeply: while the caldron of the North never ceased boiling out over his world—consuming the peoples, his own among them, and finally sweeping him into exile and night—he never, for himself or for Israel, lost the clear note of his first Vision, that all was watched and controlled. There is his value to ourselves. Jeremiah was no prophet of hope, but he was the prophet of that without which hope is impossible—faith in Control—that be the times dark and confused as they may, and the world's movements ruthless, ruinous and inevitable, God yet watches and rules all to the fulfilment of His Will—though how we see not, nor can any prophet tell us.
Second, note how the story leaves the issue, not
with one will only, but with two—God's and the
Man's, whom God has called. His family has
been discounted, his people and their authorities,
This period of the Prophet's career may be taken in three divisions:—
First, His Earliest Oracles, which reflect the lavish distribution of the high-places in Judah and Benjamin, and may therefore be dated before the suppression of these by King Josiah, in obedience to the Law-Book discovered in the Temple in 621-20 B.C.
Second, His Oracles on the Scythians, whose invasions also preceded that year; with additions.
Third, Oracles which imply that the enforcement of the Law-Book had already begun, and reveal Jeremiah's attitude to it and to the course of the reforms which it inspired.
We must keep in mind that the Prophet did not
dictate his early Oracles till the year 604-03, and
that he added to them on the Second Roll many
like words.
These bear few marks of the later date at which they were dictated by Jeremiah—in fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6-18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though vaguely described as yet, is inevitable. The nation is addressed as a whole at first in the second person singular feminine, but soon also in the plural, and the plural prevails towards the end. The nation answers as a whole, sometimes as I but sometimes also as We.
Before expounding the truths conveyed by
these early Oracles it is well to translate them in
full, for though not originally uttered at the same
time, they run now in a continuous stream of
portages
of prose
which I have described.
II. 1, 2, And he said, Thus sayeth the Lord:
So simply the Greek; the Hebrew, And the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go and proclaim in the ears of Jerusalem saying, not only betrays an editorial redundancy, but what follows is addressed not to Jerusalem but to all Israel. Here if anywhere the Greek has the original. Jeremiah begins thus to dictate to Baruch. I remember the troth of thy youth, Thy love as a bride, Thy following Me through the desert, The land unsown. Holy to the Lord was Israel, 3 First-fruit of His income; All that would eat it stood guilty, Evil came on them. Rede of the Lord— Hear the Lord's Word, House of Jacob, 4 All clans of Israel's race! [Thus sayeth the Lord] 5 What wrong found your fathers in Me, That so far they broke from Me, And following after the Bubble Hebrew kebel = breath. Bubbles became. Nor said they: 6 Where is the Lord who carried us up From the land of Miṣraim? Egypt. Who led us through the desert, Land of waste and chasms, Land of drought and barren, So Greek. A land which nobody crosses, Nor mankind settles upon it. And I brought you into a garden, 7 To feed on its fruit and its wealth. But coming ye fouled My land, My heritage turned to loathing. The priests never said, 8 Where is the Lord? They who handle the Law knew Me not, The rulers Lit. shepherds. rebelled against Me;By Baal the prophets did prophesy, And followed the worthless. So still with you must I strive, Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. 9And strive with your sons. Some Hebrew MSS. and Vulgate. For cross to the isles of Kittîm and look 10 Send to Kedár, and think for yourselves, Cyprus = Kittim and Kedár, an Arab tribe, are the extremes of the world then known to the Jews. And see, was ever like this? Have any nations So Greek. changed their gods, 11And these no gods at all? Yet My people exchanged their Hebrew marg. my. GloryFor that which is worthless. Be heavy, Or heave (Ball), lit. be aghast but the Hebrew is alliterative, shommû shamaîm. O heavens, for this, 12Shudder and shudder again! Twain the wrongs My people have wrought— 13 Me have they left, The Fount of live water, To hew themselves cisterns, Cisterns broken, That cannot hold water! Israel a slave! 14 Or house-born serf! Why he for a prey? Against him the young lions roar, 15 Give forth their voice, And his land they lay waste, Burned are his towns and tenantless. The sons, too, of Noph and Taḥpanḥes have forced, 16 Have abused thee. This couplet is after the Greek, Hebrew has browsed on thy skull for forced. Noph = Memphis, Egypt's capital; Taḥpanḥes = Daphne on the Egyptian road to Palestine. Either 14-19 or more probably 16 alone is one of Jeremiah's additions to his earlier Oracles after Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608. Is not all this being done thee 17 For thy leaving of Me? So Greek; Hebrew adds, when he led thee by the way. And now what to thee is the road to Miṣraim, Miṣraim = Egypt. Nile's waters to drink? Or what is to thee the road to Asshúr, 18 To drink of the River? Be thy scourge thine own sin, 19 Thy doublings convict thee! Know and see how sore for thyself, How bitter to leave Me! But never was awe of Me thine— Rede of the Lord thy God. These last four lines follow the Greek. From of old thou hast broken thy yoke, 20 Hast burst thy bonds, Saying, I will not serve!While upon every high hill, And under each rustling tree, Harlot thou sprawlest! Yet a noble vine did I plant thee, 21 Wholly true seed; How could'st thou change to a corrupt, So Duhm by a better division of words. A wildling grape? Yea, though thou scour thee with nitre, 22 And heap to thee lye, Ingrained is thy guilt before Me, Rede of the Lord, thy God. So the Greek. How sayest thou, I'm not defiled,23Look at thy ways in the Valley, And own thy deeds! A young camel, light o' heel, The Hebrew ḳal seems to combine here its two meanings of swift and trifling. Zig-zagging her tracks, A heifer, schooled to the desert— 24 In the heat of her lust, Snapping the wind in her passion, Who is to turn her? None that would seek her need strain them, In her month they shall find her. Save thou thy feet from the peeling, 25 Thy throat from thirst! But thou sayest, No use!Hebrew no' ash; with Greek delete the second no. For with strangers I'm fallen in love, Like the shame of the thief when he's caught, 26 Shall Israel's sons So Greek. be shamed.[They and their kings and their princes, Their priests and their prophets] The insertion (by a copyist?) of this formula rather weakens the connection. Who say to a stock Thou my Father!27To a stone Thou hast borne me!Their So some Versions. backs they have turned to MeNever their Greek adds and as the number of streets in Jerusalem they burn to Baal; cp. xi. 13. faces.Yet in time of their trouble they say Where be thy gods thou hast made thee? 28 Let them rise, if so they may save thee In time of thy trouble; For as thy townships in number, So Greek. So be, O Judah, thy gods! What quarrel have you against Me? 29 All you are the sinners; Greek. Against Me you all have rebelled— Rede of the Lord. In vain have I smitten your sons 30 Ye Greek. took not correctionYour Greek the. sword has devoured your prophets,Like a ravaging lion. O generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord! Prose, probably a later insertion when the prophet dictated his Oracles. See pp. 47 f. 31Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness? Why say My folk We are off,Can a maiden forget her adorning, 32 Or her girdle a bride? Yet Me have My people forgotten, Days without number! Why trimmest thou still thy ways 33 To seek after love? Therefore thou also to evil Thy ways hast trained: The text of this quatrain is corrupt, the rendering above makes use of the versions. Yea, on thy skirts is found blood 34 Of innocent souls, Not only on felons(?) I find it But over all these. The text of this verse too is uncertain. For skirts Greek has hands; to innocent Hebrew adds needy. Some read the second couplet [though] thou did'st not catch them breaking in, but because of all these, i.e. thy sins against Me, thou did'st murder them. Yet thou said'st, I am assoiled,35Behold I am going to judge thee For saying, I'm sinless!How very light dost thou take it, 36 To change thy ways! E'en of Miṣraim shalt thou be ashamed Or balked. As ashamed of Ashshúr. Out of this too shalt thou come 37 With thy hands on thy head, For spurned hath the Lord the things of thy trust, Not by them shalt thou prosper! III. 1. [Saying]:—If a man dismiss his wife and she go from him and become another man's, shall she return to him?
Greek. Is that womanGreek; Hebrew land. not too polluted? But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers and—wouldest return unto Me? Rede of the Lord.Lift to the clearings thine eyes, 2 Where not wast thou tumbled? For them by the roads thou hast sate, Like an Arab in desert, Thou hast fouled the land with thy whoredoms And with thy vices; With thy lovers so many 3 It has meant but thy snare. So Duhm after the Greek. Hebrew is impossible. The brow of a harlot was thine, Shame thou hadst done with. But now—thou callest me Father,4The two Hebrew verbs in this couplet, naṭar and shamar mean to keep (or maintain) and to watch; they are usually transitive and (in the sense here intended) are followed by a noun, anger or wrath, which English versions supply here. But its absence from both the Hebrew and Greek texts leads us to take the verbs as intransitive, as is the case with naṭar in New-Hebrew. Lo, so thou hast spoken, yet done Ills to thine utmost. 6. And the Lord said unto me in the days of Josiah, the king,
Verses 6-18, in prose break the connection both of style and meaning between 5 and 19 and cannot in whole be Jeremiah's or from his period. This is especially true of 16-18 which assume the destruction of the Ark and the Exile of Judah as well as of Israel as already actual. But the passage probably contains genuine fragments from Jeremiah. Hast thou seen what recreant Israel did to MeSo Greek. going up every high hill and under each rustling tree, and there playing the harlot. 7. And I said, After she has done all these things can she return to Me?—and she did not return. 8. And her treacherous sister Judah saw, yes she saw,So one Hebrew MS. and Syriac. that, all because recreant Israel committed adultery, I had dismissed her and given her the bill of her divorce; yet her sister treacherous Judahwas not afraid, but also went and played the harlot. 9. And it came to pass that, through the wantonness of her harlotry, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stones and with stocks. 10. And yet, for all this, treacherous Judah Hebrew adds her sister. has not returned to Me with all her heart, but only in feigning.Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. 11. And the Lord said to me, Recreant Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah. 12. Go and call out these words toward the North and say,Turn thee to Me, So Greek. recreant Israel,I frown Lit. make not My face to fall. not upon thee;For gracious am I (Rede of the Lord), Nor for ever bear grudge. Only acknowledge thy guilt, 13 That defying the Lord thy God, Thou hast scattered to strangers thy ways Under each rustling tree, And hast Greek; Hebrew ye have. not obeyed My voice—Rede of the Lord. 14. [Return ye backsliding children, Rede of the Lord, for I am your Baal,
That is Lord and Husband. and I will take you, one from a city and two from a clan, andwill bring you to Ṣion. 15. And I will give you Shepherds after My heart, and they shall shepherd you with knowledge and with skill. 16. And it shall be, when ye multiply and increase in the land in those days (Rede of the Lord), they shall not again say, The Ark of the Covenant of the Lord!It shall not come to mind, it shall be neither remembered nor missed,So Greek. nor shall it be made again. 17. At that time they shall call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord and all nations shall gather to her,Hebrew adds to the Name of the Lord to Jerusalem. nor walk any more after the stubbornness of their evil hearts. 18. In those days the House of Judah shall walk with the House of Israel, that together they may come from the land of the North to the land which I gave theirSo Greek; Hebrew your; after North Greek has and from all lands. fathers for a heritage.]But I In antithesis to verse 5 of which it is the immediate sequel both in sense and metre. had declared the How(?) 19I should set thee Feminine, i.e. Judah was a daughter, and a son's portion was designed for her. among the sons,And should give thee a land of delight, Fairest domain of the nations. And said, Thou would'st call Me Father, Nor from after Me turn. As a woman plays false to her fere, So finely Ball. 20So to Me ye played false! [O House of Israel, Rede of the Lord.] Hark! 21 From the clearings weeping is heard, Wailing of Israel's sons, That they have perverted their way, Forgotten the Lord their God. Return ye oft-turning children, 22 Let me heal your back-turnings! Thou Lord art our God. The hills and their hubbub! The riotous festivals on the high-places. Is Israel's safety. And our sires' from their youth, Their sons and daughters— Our dishonour enshroud us! Hebrew adds the Lord. have we sinned,Up to this day! [Israel, if thou wilt return, IV. 1 Return to Me, And thy loathly things put from thy mouth Nor stray from My face. This couplet after the Greek. If in truth thou swear by the life of the Lord, 2 Honest and straight, Then the nations shall bless them by Him And in Him shall they glory.] I agree with Cornill and Skinner that these two verses are a later addition. The answer to the people's confession comes in verses 3 and 4. 3. Thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of
So some Hebrew MSS. and versions. Jerusalem:Fallow up your fallow-ground, Hebrew nirû lakeḿ nîr; also in English the noun and verb are the same—to fallow or fallow up = to break or plough up. And sow not on thorns! To your God So Greek and other versions. circumcise ye, 4Off from your heart with the foreskin! [O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem] Lest My fury break out like fire, And burn with none to quench! [Because of the ill of your doings.]
From his call the Prophet went forth, as we saw, with a heavy sense of the responsibility and the power of the single soul, so far as he himself was concerned; and while we study his ministry we shall find him coming to feel the same for each of his fellow-men. But in these his earliest utterances he follows his predecessors, and especially Hosea, in addressing his people as a whole, and treating Israel as a moral unit from the beginning of her history to the moment of his charge to her. He continues the figures which Hosea had used. Long ago in Egypt God chose Israel for His child, for His bride, and led her through the desert to a fair and fruitful land of her own. Then her love was true. The term used for it, ḥeṣedh, is more than an affection; it is loyalty to a relation. To translate it but kindness or mercy, as is usually done, is wrong—troth is our nearest word.
I remember the troth of thy youth, Thy love as a bride, Thy following Me through the desert, The land unsown.
Upon the unsown land there were no rival
gods. But in fertile Canaan the nation encountered
innumerable local deities, the Baalîm,
husbands of the land, begetters of its fruits and
lords of its waters. We conceive how tempting
these Baalîm were both to the superstitious
The cardinal sin of the people, the source of all their woes is religious,
Is not this being done thee For thy leaving of Me?
This was so, not only because He was their ancestral God—though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations—but because He was such a God and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the gods they went after had neither character nor efficiency—mere breaths, mere bubbles!
The nerve of the faith of the prophets was this
memory—that their God was love and in love
had wrought for His people. The frequent
expression of this by the prophets and by
Deuteronomy, the prophetic edition of the Law,
is the answer to those abstractions to which some
academic moderns have sought to reduce the
Object of Israel's religion—such as, a tendency
not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
The God of Israel was Righteous and demanded
righteousness from men; but to begin with He
was Love which sought their love in return.
First the Exodus then Sinai; first Redemption
then Law; first Love then Discipline. Through
His Deeds and His Word by the prophets He
had made all this clear and very plain.
What wrong found your fathers in Me, That so far they broke from Me? Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness? Why say My folk, We are off,
Jeremiah has prefaced this Divine challenge with
a passionate exclamation in prose—O
Generation—you!—look
at the Word of the Lord!—which (as I
have said) I like to think was added to his earlier
verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot
you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the
stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with
A noble vine did I plant thee, Wholly true seed, How could'st thou change to a corrupt, A wildling grape?
The sense of their terrible guilt governs him, and of their indifference to it, saying we are clean, to which he answers:—
Yea though thou scour thee with nitre And heap to thee lye, Ingrained is thy guilt before Me— Rede of the Lord.
Yet the fervency with which he pleads the
Divine Love reveals a heart of hunger, if hardly
of hope, for his nation's repentance. Indeed apart
from his own love for them he could not have
followed Hosea so closely as he does at this stage
of his career, without feeling some possibility of
their recovery from even this, their awful worst;
and his ear strains for a sign of it. Like Hosea
he hears what sounds like the surge of a national
repentance
Fallow up the fallow-ground, Sow not on thorns! To your God So Greek. circumcise ye,Off from your heart with the foreskin! Lest My wrath break out like the fire, And burn with none to quench. iv. 3, 4.
Jeremiah has been called the blackest of pessimists, and among his best-known sayings some seem to justify the charge:—
Can the Ethiop change his skin, Or the leopard his spots? Then also may ye do good, Who are wont to do evil. xiii. 23.
And again,
False above all is the heart, And sick to despair, Who is to know it?
But to his question came the answer:—
I, the Lord, searching the heart, And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings. xvii. 9, 10.
In this answer there is awfulness but not final
doom. The affirmation of a man's dread responsibility
for his fate implies, too, the liberty
to change his ways. In the dim mystery of the
heart freedom is clear. Similarly, and even
more plainly, is this expressed in the earlier
call to break up the fallow-ground. This implies
that beneath those surfaces of the national life,
whether of callous indifference on the one hand
or of shallow feeling on the other, there is soil
which, if thoroughly ploughed, will be hospitable
to the good seed and fit to bring forth fruits
meet for repentance. Human nature even at
its worst has tracts other than those on which
there has been careless sowing among thorns,
moral possibilities below those of its abused
or neglected surfaces. Let us mark this depth,
which the Prophet's insight has already reached.
Much will come out of it; this is the matrix
of all developments by himself and others of
the doctrine of man and his possibilities under
God. And for all time the truth is valid that
many spoiled or wasted lives are spoiled or wasted
In what form the deep ploughing required was at first imagined by the Prophet we see from the immediately following Oracles.
The invasion of Western Asia by the Scythians
happened some time between 627 and 620
B.C.The
Medes and Scythians.
The following may be consulted:
N. Schmidt in Enc. Bibl.
on Jeremiah
and Scythians;
Driver, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah,
p. 21; J. R.
Gillies, Jeremiah, the Man and His Message,
pp. 63 ff., who
thinks that the Scythians did invade Judah, and W. R.
Thomson, The Burden of the Lord,
pp. 46 ff., who thinks
they did not. A thorough study of the question will be found
in Skinner's Prophecy and Religion, Studies in the Life of
Jeremiah,
ch. iii. The case against the Scythians being the
enemy from the North that Jeremiah describes is best presented
by J. F. McCurdy in History, Prophecy, and the Monuments,
vol. ii. pp. 395 ff.
1. As it has reached us, the First Scythian Song, Ch. IV. 5-8, opens with the general formula—
Proclaim in Judah and Jerusalem, Make heard and say!
which may be the addition of a later hand, but
is as probably Jeremiah's own; for the capital,
though not likely to be besieged by the Scythians,
was just as concerned with their threatened invasion
as the country folk, to whom, in the first
Strike up the trump through the land, IV. 5b Call with full voice, And say, Sweep together and into The fortified towns. Hoist the signal towards Ṣion, 6 Pack off and stay not! For evil I bring from the North And ruin immense. The Lion is up from his thicket, 7 Mauler of nations; He is off and forth from his place, Thy land Greek the earth. to lay waste;That thy townships be burned With none to inhabit! Gird ye with sackcloth for this, 8 Howl and lament, For the glow of the wrath of the Lord Turns not from us.
These lines are followed by a verse with an introduction to itself, and therefore too separate from the context, and indeed too general to have belonged to so vivid a song:—
9. And it shall be in that day—Rede of the Lord—
The heart of the king shall perish, And the heart of the princes, And the priests shall be aghast And the prophets dismayed!
And this is followed by one of the sudden protests to God, which are characteristic of Jeremiah:—
10. And I said, Ah Lord God, surely Thou hast wholly deceived this people and Jerusalem saying,
Peace shall be yours,while the sword strikes through to the life!
2. The Second Scythian Song is like the first, prefaced by a double address, which there is no reason to deny to Jeremiah. Jerusalem is named twice in the song, and naturally, since the whole land is threatened with waste and the raiders come up to the suburbs of the capital. The Prophet speaks, but as so often the Voice of the Lord breaks through his own and calls directly to the city and people (though the last line of verse 12 may be a later addition). On the other hand, the Prophet melts into his people; their panic and pangs become his. This is one of the earliest instances of Jeremiah's bearing of the sins of his people and of their punishment.
IV. 11. At that time it was said to this people and to Jerusalem,
A wind off the blaze of the bare desert heights, Straight on the Daughter of my people, Neither to winnow nor to sift, In full blast it meets me. 12 [Now will I speak My judgments upon them] Lo, like the clouds he is mounting, 13 Like the whirlwind his cars! Swifter than vultures his horses, Woe, we are undone! Jerusalem, cleanse thou thy heart, The text adds from evil, one wonders if Jerusalem was added in 604; without it the line is regular. 14That thou be saved! How long shalt thou harbour within thee Thy guilty devices. For hark! They signal from Dan, 15 Mount Ephraim echoes disaster. Warn the folk, They are come!After the Greek. 16Make heard o'er Jerusalem. Behold, So Syr., transferred from previous couplet. beleaguerers (?) comingFrom a land far away; They give out their voice on the townships of Judah; Like the guards on her fields 17 They are round and upon her, For Me she defied! Metre and meaning of 16 and 17 uncertain. For beleaguerers (?) Duhm reads panthers or leopards; cp. v. 6. Thy ways and thy deeds have done 18 These things to thee. This evil of thine how bitter! It strikes to the heart. O my bowels! My bowels, I writhe! 19 O walls of my heart! My heart is in storm upon me, I cannot keep silence. Duhm after Greek renders, My soul is in storm, my heart throbs. For the sound of the trump thou hast heard, O my soul, The uproar of battle. Ruin upon ruin is summoned, 20 The land is undone! Suddenly undone my tents, In a moment my curtains! How long must I look for the signal 21 And hark for the sound of the trump! [Yea, fools are My people 22 Nor Me do they fear. Greek; Hebrew know. Children besotted are they, Void of discretion. Clever they are to do evil, To do good they know not.
3. The Third of the Scythian Songs is without introduction. Whether the waste, darkness, earthquake and emptiness described are imminent or have happened is still left uncertain, as in the previous songs. The Prophet speaks, but as before the Voice of God peals out at the end.
I looked to the earth, and lo chaos, 23 To the heavens, their light was gone. I looked to the hills and Greek; Hebrew adds lo! they quivered, 24All the heights were a-shuddering. I looked—and behold not a man! 25 All the birds of heaven were fled. I looked to the gardens, lo desert, 26 All the townships destroyed, Before the face of the Lord, The glow of His wrath. [For thus hath the Lord said, 27 All the land shall be waste Yet full end I make not] Probably a later addition. For this let the Earth lament, 28 And black be Heaven above! I have spoken and will not relent, Purposed and turn not from it. The order of verbs in this couplet is that of the Greek.
4. The Fourth Scythian Song follows immediately,
also without introduction. The first four
couplets vividly describe the flight of the peasantry,
From the noise of the horse and the bowmen, IV. 29 All the land So Greek; Hebrew city, a change possibly made after the fall of Jerusalem. is in flight,They are into the caves, huddle in thickets, So Greek. Are up on the crags. Every town of its folk is forsaken No habitant in it. All is up! Thou destined to ruin(?) Text uncertain; this reading is derived by differently dividing the consonants—bah no' ash for bahen 'îsh. 30What doest thou now? That thou dressest in scarlet, And deck'st thee in deckings of gold, With stibium widenest thine eyes. In vain dost thou prink! Though satyrs they utterly loathe thee, Thy life are they after! For voice as of travail I hear, 31 Anguish as hers that beareth, The voice of the daughter of Ṣion agasp, he spreadeth her hands:
The next poem, Ch. V. 1-13, says little of the
Scythians, possibly only in verse 6, but details the
moral reasons for the doom with which they
threatened the people. It describes the Prophet's
search through Jerusalem for an honest, God-fearing
man and his failure to find one. Hence
the fresh utterance of judgment. Perjury and
whoredom are rife, with a callousness to chastisement
already inflicted. Some have relegated
Jeremiah's visit to the capital to a year after 621-20
when the deuteronomic reforms had begun
and Josiah had removed the rural priests to the
Temple.
Range ye the streets of Jerusalem, V. 1 Look now and know, And search her broad places, If a man ye can find— If there be that does justice, Aiming at honesty. [That I may forgive them Greek; Hebrew her. The clause seems an addition. ]Though they say, As God liveth,2Falsely Hebrew adds therefore. they swearLord, are Thine eyes upon lies(?) 3 And not on the truth So Duhm after the Greek; p. 48, n. 2. ?Thou hast smitten, they ail not, Consumed them, they take not correction. Their faces set harder than rock, They refuse to return. But I said, Ah, they are the poor,4And therefore So Greek. the foolish!The Rule of their God. With them let me speak. Ah, together they have broken the yoke, They have burst the bonds! So a lion from the jungle shall smite them, 6 A wolf of the waste destroy, The leopard shall prowl round their towns, All faring forth shall be torn. For many have been their rebellions, Profuse their backslidings. How shall I pardon thee this— 7 Thy children have left Me, And swear by no-gods. I gave them their fill and they whored, And trooped to the house of the harlot. Rampant The text is uncertain, the Hebrew margin and versions pointing to an untranslatable original. stallions they be, 8Neighing each for the wife of his friend. Shall I not visit on such, 9 Rede of the Lord, Nor on a people like this Myself take vengeance? Up to her vine-rows, destroy, 10 And make The text has make not, but this is inconsistent with the context, and not seems a later addition. a full end,Away with her branches, They are not the Lord's. For betraying they have betrayed Me 11 Judah and Israel both [Rede of the Lord] The Lord they have belied, 12 Saying Not He!Evil shall never come on us, Nor famine nor sword shall we see. Hebrew adds, thus be it done them; Greek omits. 14. Therefore thus hath the Lord of Hosts said, because of their speaking this word—
Hebrew has God after Lord and your for their. Behold I am setting My Word In thy mouth for fire, And this people for wood, And it shall devour them.
5. The Fifth Song upon the Scythians, Ch. V. 15-17, besides still leaving them nameless, emphasises their strangeness to Israel's world. There was a common language in Western Asia, Aramean, the lingua franca of traders from Nineveh to Memphis; and Jew, Assyrian and Egyptian conversed in it. But the tongue of these raiders from over the Caucasus was unintelligible. Yet how they would set their teeth into the land! Mixed with the verses which thus describe them are others which suit not them but the Chaldeans and must have been added by the Prophet in 604. A people so new to the Jews might hardly have been called by Jeremiah an ancient nation, from of old a nation, and in fact these phrases are wanting in the Greek version.
Behold, I am bringing upon you V. 15 A nation from far, [O house of Israel, Rede of the Lord An ancient nation it is, From of old a nation.] This couplet the Greek lacks. A nation thou knowest not its tongue, 16 Nor canst hear what it says, Its quiver an open grave, Eloquent of death: Ps. v. 9 .All of it stalwarts. For these four lines the Greek has only A nation thou hearest not its tongue, all of them mighty. It shall eat up thy harvest and bread, 17 Eat thy sons and thy daughters, It shall eat up thy flocks and thy cattle, Eat thy vines and thy figs. It shall beat down thy fortified towns, Wherein thou dost trust, with the sword.
The last couplet is unsuitable to the Scythians, incapable as they were of sieges and avoiding fortified towns—though once they rushed Askalon. It is probably, therefore, another of the additions of 604 referring to the Chaldeans. The prose which follows is certainly from the Chaldean period, for it was not Scythians but Chaldeans who threatened with exile the peoples whom they overran.
V. 18. Yet even in those days—Rede of the Lord—I will not make a full end of you.
19. And it shall be when they say, For what hath the Lord our God done to us all these things?—that thou shalt say to them, Just as ye have left Me and have served foreign gods in your own land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land not yours.
There follows a poem, verses 20-31, that has nothing to do with the Scythian series; and that with the preceding prose, with which also it has no connection, shows us what a conglomeration of Oracles the Book of Jeremiah is. It seems as though the compiler, searching for a place for it, had seen the catch-word harvest in the previous Scythian song and, this one having the same word, he had copied it in here. The Book shows signs elsewhere of the same mechanical method. But like all the Oracles this has for its theme the foolish dulness of Israel to their God and His Word, and the truth that it is their crimes which are the cause of all their afflictions yet now not in history but in Nature. There is no reason to doubt that the verses are Jeremiah's, and nothing against our dating them in the early years of his ministry.
Declare ye this in the House of Jacob, V. 20 Through Judah let it be heard: Hebrew adds saying. Hear ye now this, people most foolish, 21 And void of sense. Lit. with no heart, the seat not only of feeling, but of the practical intelligence. [They have eyes but they do not see, Ears but they hear not.] Fear ye not Me, Rede of the Lord, 22 Nor tremble before Me?— Who have set the sand a bound for the sea, An eternal decree it cannot transgress; Though (its waters) Something like this has obviously slipped from the text. toss, they shall not prevail,And its rollers boom, they cannot break over. Yet this people heart-hard and rebellious, 23 Have swerved and gone off; For not with their hearts do they say, 24 The early and latter; These have your crimes deranged, 25 Your sins withholden your luck. For scoundrels are found in My folk, 26 Who prowl with the crouch of a fowler(?) Text uncertain. And set their traps to destroy, 'Tis men they would catch! Like a cage that is full of birds, 27 Their houses are filled with deceit, Either with the spoils or with the victims thereof. And so they wax wealthy and great— 28 They are fat, they are sleek!— Overflowing with things of evil(?), They defend not the right, The right of the orphan to prosper, Nor justice judge for the needy. The text of the whole verse is uncertain. Greek omits things of evil and to prosper. Shall I not visit on these, 29 Rede of the Lord, Nor on a people like this Myself be avenged? Or take vengeance Myself. Appalling and ghastly it is 30 That has come to pass in the land: The prophets prophesy lies, 31 The priests bear rule at their hand, And My people—they love so to have it; But what will ye do in the end?
6. In the Sixth Song on the Scythians, VI. 1-5,
which also is given without introduction, Jerusalem
is threatened—even Jerusalem to which in
the previous songs the country-folk had been
bidden to fly for shelter—and the foes are described
in the attempt to rush her, as they rushed Askalon
according to Herodotus. That they are represented
as faltering and no success is predicted for
them, and also that they are called shepherds, are
signs that it is the Scythians, though still nameless,
who are meant in verses 3-5. The next
three verses, separately introduced, point rather to
Pack off, O Benjamin's sons, VI. 1 Out of Jerusalem! Strike up the trump in Tekoa, Hebrew bitĕkô'a tiḳĕ'û; a play upon words. O'er Beth-hakkérem lift up the signal! For evil glowers out of the North, And ruin immense. O the charming (?) the pampered height After the Greek; the Hebrew text is corrupt. 2Of the daughter of Ṣion! Unto her shepherds are coming, 3 With their flocks around, Transferred from the next line to suit the metre. They pitch against her their tents, Each crops at his hand. The Hebrew idiom for starting a campaign or a siege, which was formally sanctioned by a religious rite. the battle against her,For thus said the Lord of Hosts: 6 Hew down her So some MSS. trees and heapAgainst Jerusalem a mound; Woe to the City of Falsehood, So Greek: Hebrew, She is a city to be visited. Nought but oppression within her! As a well keeps its waters fresh 7 She keeps fresh her evil; Violence and spoil are heard throughout her, Ever before Me sickness and wounds. Jerusalem, be thou corrected, 8 Lest from thee My soul doth break, Lest I lay thee a desolate waste, Uninhabited land.
Here follows another and separately introduced Oracle:—
Thus hath the Lord Hebrew adds of Hosts. said: 9Glean, let them glean as a vine Israel's remnant; Like the grape-gleaner turn thy hand Again to its So Greek. tendrils.And witness that they may hear? They cannot give heed. No pleasure have they therein. Pour It is difficult to discriminate in these lines between the Lord and the Prophet as speakers. If the Greek I will pour is correct, the Prophet still speaks, otherwise the Lord who began in verse 9 and was followed by the Prophet in 10 and 11a, resumes in 11b. it out on the child in the street,On the youths where they gather; Both husband and wife shall be taken, The old with the full of days. Their homes shall be turned to others, 12 Their fields and wives together, When I stretch forth My Hand On those that dwell in this So Greek. land.[Rede of the Lord.] Because from the least to the greatest 13 All are greedy of gain, Right on from prophet to priest Every one worketh lies. They would heal the breach of My people, 14 As though it were trifling, Saying, It is well, it is well—When—where Ibid. is it well?Were they shamed of their loathsome deeds? 15 Nay, not at all ashamed! They know not even to blush! So they with the fallen shall fall, And shall reel in the time that I visit, Rede of the Lord.
Still another Oracle which gives no glimpse of
the Scythians, but threatens a vague disaster and
once more states the moral reasons for Judah's
doom. Its allusion to incense and sacrifices is
no reason for dating it after the discovery of
Deuteronomy.In the Wake of the Reform,
says it is almost certainly post-deuteronomic. I am not convinced.
See below, p. 133.
Thus hath the Lord said— 16 Halt on the ways and look, And ask for the ancient paths: Where is Greek mark ye. the way that is good?Go ye in that, And rest shall ye find to your soul, But they— We go not!I raised up sentinels for you— 17 Heed the sound of the trump! See above, p. 112. But they— We heed not!Therefore, O nations, hearken, 18 And own My record against them (?) Text both of Greek and Hebrew uncertain; the above is adapted from the Greek. Hear thou, O Earth, 19 Lo, evil I bring to this people, The fruit of their own devices, Greek has backslidings. Since they have not heeded My Word, And My Law have despised. To Me what is incense that cometh from Sheba, 20 Sweet-cane from a far-off land? Your holocausts are not acceptable, Nor your sacrifice pleasing. Therefore thus hath the Lord said: 21 Behold I set for this people Blocks upon which to stumble; Fathers and children together, Neighbour and friend shall perish.
None of the foregoing brief and separate Oracles diverts from the moral theme of all these earlier utterances of the Prophet, that Judah's afflictions, whether from Nature or from invaders, are due to her own wickedness. And this record even the foreign peoples are called to witness—another proof that from the first Jeremiah had a sense of a mission to the nations as well as to his own countrymen.
7. There follows the Seventh, the last of the
Songs which may be referred to the Scythian
invasion, Ch. VI. 22-26. It repeats the distance
from which, in the fateful North, those hordes
have been stirred to their work of judgment, their
22. Thus hath the Lord said:
Lo, a people comes out of the North, A nation Hebrew adds great, which Greek omits. astir from the ends of the earth,The bow and the javelin they grasp, 23 Cruel and ruthless, The noise of them booms like the sea, On horses they ride— Arrayed as one man for the battle On thee, O Daughter of Ṣion! We have heard their fame, 24 Limp are our hands; Anguish hath gripped us, Pangs as of travail. Fare not forth to the field, 25 Nor walk on the way, For the sword of a foe, Terror all round! Daughter of My people, gird on thee sackcloth 26 And wallow in ashes! Mourn as for an only-begotten, Wail of the bitterest! For of a sudden there cometh The spoiler upon us. Greek you.
This is the last of Jeremiah's Oracles on the
Scythians. There is little or no doubt of their
date—before 621-20. What knowledge of this
new people and their warfare the Prophet displays!
What conscience of the ethical purpose
of the Lord of Hosts in threatening Judah with
them! Yet some still refuse to credit the story
of his Call, that from the first he heard himself
appointed as a prophet to the nations.
This section of Jeremiah's earlier Oracles concludes with one addressed to himself, Ch. VI. 27-30. It describes the task assigned him during the most of his time under Josiah, whether before the discovery and promulgation of the Book of the Law in 621-20, or subsequently to this while he watched the nation's new endeavour to repent and reform. During the years from 621-20 till 608 when Josiah was defeated and slain at Megiddo, there can have been but little for him to do except to follow, as his searching eyes and detached mind alone in Israel could follow, the great venture of Judah in obedience to the Book of the Law. For this interval the outside world had ceased to threaten Israel. The Assyrian control of her was relaxed: the people of God were free, and had their first opportunity for over a century to work out their own salvation.
Assayer among My people I set thee, Hebrew adds, a fortress, obviously borrowed by some scribe from other appointments by God of Jeremiah, e.g. i. 18. For ways in next line Duhm by change of a letter reads value. 27To know and assay their ways, All of them utterly recreant, 28 Gadding about to slander. Brass and iron are all of them(?), Wasters they be! Fiercely blow the bellows, 29 The lead is consumed of the fire(?) In vain does the smelter smelt, Their dross Greek and Targ. read their evil for the evil ones of the Hebrew. is not drawn.For the Lord hath refused them. The general meaning is clear, the details obscure for the text is uncertain. Driver's note is the most instructive. In refining, the silver was mixed with lead and the mass, fused in the furnace, had a current of air turned upon it; the lead oxidising acted as a flux, carrying off the alloy or dross. But in Israel's case the dross is too closely mixed with the silver, so that though the bellows blow and the lead is oxidised, the dross is not drawn and the silver remains impure.
To take these lines as subsequent to the
institution of Deuteronomy and expressive of
the judgment of the Prophet upon the failure of
the reformation under Josiah to reach the depth
of a real repentance,Jeremia u. seine Zeit
) and
Skinner (p. 160) do.
We are not told when or why Jeremiah left
Anathoth for Jerusalem. His early poem denouncing
the citizens
There is general agreement that the Book of the
Law discovered by the Temple-priests in 621-20
was our Book of Deuteronomy in whole or in
part—more probably in part, for Deuteronomy
has been compiled from at least two editions of
the same original, and the compilation may not
have been made till some time later. Many of its
laws, including some peculiar to itself, have been
woven out of more than one form, and there are
two Introductions to the Book, each hortatory
and historical and each covering to some extent
the same ground as the other. We cannot tell
how much of this compilation was contained in
the discovered Book of the Law. But this Book
included certainly first the laws of worship peculiar
to Deuteronomy, because the reforms which it
inspired carried out these laws, and probably
second some of the denunciations which precede or
follow the laws, for such would explain the consternation
of the King when the Book was read
to him.Deuteronomy
in the Cambridge Bible for Schools.
Deuteronomy is fairly described as a fresh codification of the ancient laws of Israel in the spirit of the Prophets of the Eighth Century. The Book is not only Law but Prophecy, in the proper sense of this word, and a prophetic interpretation of Israel's history. It not only restates old and adds new laws but enforces the basal truths of the prophets, and in this enforcement breathes the ethical fervour of Amos and Isaiah as well as Hosea's tenderness and his zeal for education.
Deuteronomy has three cardinal doctrines: The One God, The One Altar, and The One People.
First, The One God. Though slightly tinged
with popular conceptions of the existence of other
gods,
Second—and this is original to Deuteronomy—The
One Altar, at that time an inevitable corollary
Third, The One People. Save for possible
proselytes from the neighbouring heathen, Israel
is alone legislated for—a free nation owning no
foreign king as it bows to no foreign deity, but
governing itself in obedience to the revealed Will
of its own God. This Will is applied to every
detail of its life in as comprehensive a system of
national religion as the world has known. And
thus next to devotion to the Deity comes pride
in the nation. Because of their possession of the
Divine Law Israel are the righteous people and
wise above all others. The patriotism of the
Book must have been one cause of its immediate
acceptance by the people, when Josiah brought
it before them and upon it they made Covenant
with their God. Throughout the Book treats the
nation as a moral unit. It enforces indeed justice
as between man and man. It gives woman a
Further it is due to the almost exclusively national outlook and interest of the Book that it has no guidance or comfort to offer for another element of personal experience—question and doubt. While it illustrates from the nation's history the purifying discipline of suffering because of sin it says nothing of the sufferings of righteous individuals, but by the absoluteness of its doctrines of morality and Providence suggests, if indeed it does not inculcate, the dogma that right-doing will always meet with prosperity and wrong-doing with pain and disaster—a dogma which provoked the thoughtful to scepticism, as we shall see with Jeremiah himself.
Again, the fact that the Book, while superbly
Pharisæism and Deuteronomy
came into the world on the same day.
Such was the Book discovered in the Temple
in 621-20 and accepted as Divine by King and
Nation. Modern efforts to connect Jeremiah with
its discovery and introduction to the Monarch,
and even with its composition, may be ignored.
Had there been a particle of evidence for this, it
would have been seized and magnified by the
legalists in Israel, not to speak of those apocryphal
writers who foist so much else on Jeremiah and
Baruch.
Yet so great a discovery, so full a volume of
truth poured forth in a style so original and
compelling, cannot have left unmoved a young
prophet of the conscience and heart of Jeremiah.
Rise, let us up to Ṣion, To the Lord our God! xxxi. 6.
On the other hand, the emphasis which Deuteronomy equally lays upon ethics and upon ritual, and its absolute doctrines of morality and Providence were bound to provoke questions in a mind so restlessly questioning as his. Then there was the movement of reform which followed upon the appeal of the Book to the whole nation. Jeremiah himself had called for a national repentance and here, in the people's acceptance of the Covenant and consent to the reforms it demanded, were the signs of such a repentance. No opposition appears to have been offered to those reforms. The King who led them was sincere; a better monarch Judah never knew, and his reign was signalised by Jeremiah at its close as a reign of justice when all was well. Yet can we doubt that the Prophet, who had already preached so rigorous a repentance and had heard himself appointed by God as the tester of His people, would use that detached position jealously to watch the progress of the reforms which the nation had so hurriedly acclaimed and to test their moral value?
In modern opinion of Jeremiah's attitude to the
discovered Law-Book there are two extremes.
One is of those who regard him as a legalist and
These considerations prepare us first for the story in Ch. XI. 1-8 of Jeremiah's fervent assent to the ethical principles of Deuteronomy and of the charge to him to proclaim these throughout Judah; and then for his later attitude to the written Law, to the Temple and to sacrifices.
XI. 1. The Word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2. Hear thou
Sing. as partly in Greek and wholly in Syriac. the words of this Covenant, and speak them to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 3. And thou shalt say to them, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: 4. Cursed be the man who hears not the words of this Covenant, which I commanded your fathers in the day that I broughtthem out of the land of Egypt, out of the iron-furnace, saying, Hearken to My Voice and do With Greek omit them of the Hebrew text. according to all that I command you, and ye shall be to Me a people, and I will be God to you; [5] in order to establish the oath which I sware unto your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day. 6. And I answered and said, Amen, O Lord! 7. And the Lord said unto me, ProclaimHebrew adds all. these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, saying, [8] Hear ye the words of this Covenant and do them, but they did them not.As above, Greek omits all of the Hebrew verses 7, 8 except the last clause which follows naturally on verse 6.
The story has its difficulties. It is undated;
it is followed by verses 9-17, apparently from the
reign of Jehoiakim; what the Prophet is called
to hear and gives his solemn assent to is generally
described as this Covenant; and in verses 7 and 8
there is what may be a mere editorial addition
since the Greek Version omits it, which has led
some to assert the editorial character of the
whole. But for the reasons given above, there is
no cause to doubt the substantial truthfulness of
the story, unless with Duhm we were capable of
believing that Jeremiah never spoke in prose, nor
Book of Jeremiah,
p. 156.the accumulation
of distinctively Deuteronomic phrases and ideas in verses 4, 5
implies a dependence on that book which savours strongly of
editorial workmanship.
But if this Covenant
be the Deuteronomic, as he admits, what more natural than to state it in
Deuteronomic terms, expressive as these are only of its spiritual
essence? I would also refer to what I have said on p. 41 as
to the effect on the Prophet of the new and haunting style of
Deuteronomy.
Therefore we may believe that, as recorded,
Jeremiah heard in the heart of Deuteronomy the
call of God, that he uttered his Amen to it; and
that, from his experience of the evils of the high-places,
he felt obliged, as he also records, to
proclaim this Covenant throughout Judah.The deliberate invention of an incident, which had
no point of contact in the authentic record of his life, is a
procedure of which no assured parallel is found in the book.
We must at least believe that a trustworthy tradition lies behind
the passage in ch. xi; and the conclusion to which it naturally
points is that Jeremiah was at first strongly in favour of the law
of Deuteronomy, and lent his moral support to the reformation
of Josiah
(pp. 102-3). Wellhausen, Isr. u. Jüdische Gesch.
(1894, p. 97): An der Einführung des Deuteronomiums hatte er
mitgewirkt, zeitlebens eiferte er gegen die illegitimen Altäre in
den Städten Judas.... Aber mit den Wirkungen der Reformation
war er keineswegs zufrieden.
So too J. R. Gillies, Jeremiah,
p. 113, and W. R. Thomson, The Burden of the Lord,
p. 66;
and virtually so, Peake, i. 11-14.
In the same chapter as the charge to the Prophet
concerning this Covenant there is mention of a conspiracy
against his life by the men of Anathoth,
XI. 21. Some suppose that these were enraged
by his support of reforms which abolished rural
sanctuaries like their own. But his earlier denunciations
of such shrines, delivered independently
Another address, VII. 1-15, said to have been
delivered to all Judah, rebukes the people for
their false confidence in the Temple and their
abuse of it, and threatens its destruction. Editorial
additions may exist in both the Hebrew and
Greek texts of this address, but it contains phrases
non-deuteronomic and peculiar to Jeremiah, while
its echoes of Deuteronomy were natural to the
occasion. Except for a formula or two, I take the
address to be his own. Nor am I persuaded by
the majority of modern critics that it is a mere
variant of the Temple address reported in Ch.
XXVI as given in the beginning of the reign of
Jehoiakim. Why may Jeremiah not have spoken
more than once on the same theme to the same, or
a similar effect? Moreover, the phrase We are
delivered! VII. 10, which does not recur in XXVI,
suits the conditions before, rather than those after,
the Battle of Megiddo. For parallel with the
increased faith in the Temple, due mainly to the
people's consciousness of their obedience to the
Law-Book, was their experience of deliverance
from the Assyrian yoke. I am inclined, therefore,
to refer VII. 1-15 to the reign of Josiah, rather
than with XXVI to that of Jehoiakim.O.T. History,
p. 278, n. 2; while
Duhm, Giesebrecht, Davidson, Driver, Gillies, Peake and Skinner
all take vii. 1-15 and xxvi. to refer to the same occasion early in
Jehoiakim's reign. Duhm and Skinner remark on an apparently
incoherent association of Place ( = Holy Place) and Land in vii.
3-7. The clause about the Land may be a later addition. Yet
in verses 13-15 (the substance of which Skinner admits to be
genuine) the destruction of the Holy Place and ejection of the
people from the Land are both threatened.
VII. 2, 3. Hear ye the Word of the Lord, all Judah!
So simply the Greek; the longer Hebrew title, verses 1, 2 may be an expansion by an editor, who took vii. 1-15 as reporting the same speech as xxvi. 1 ff. In verse 3 Hebrew reads Lord of Hosts. Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel—Better your ways and your doings that I may leave you to dwell in this Place. 4. Put not your trust on lying words,Greek adds for they will be absolutely of no avail to you. saying to yourselves,So Syriac. The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord—[5] are those!Or there they are!—plural because of the complex of buildings. But if ye thoroughly better your ways and your doings, if ye indeed do justice between a man and his fellow, [6] and oppress not the sojourner, the orphan, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood [in this Place], nor go after other gods to your hurt, [7] then I shall leave you to abide in this Place [inthe land which I gave to your fathers from of old for ever]. 8. Behold, you put your trust on lying words that cannot profit. 9. What? Steal, murder, fornicate, swear falsely, and burn It is doubtful whether this verb, meaning in earlier Hebrew to make any burnt offering was already confined to its later meaning, to burn incense. to Baal, and go after other gods whom ye knew not, [10] yet come and stand before Me in this House upon which My Name has been called and sayWe are delivered—in order to work all these abominations! 11. Is it a robbers' den that MySo Greek. House [upon which My Name has been called] has become in your eyes? I also, behold I have seen it—Rede of the Lord. 12. For go now to My Place which was in Shiloh, where at first I caused My Name to dwell, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel. 13. And now because of your doing of all these deeds [Rede of the Lord, though I spake unto you rising early and speaking, but ye hearkened not, and I called you, but ye did not answer],Much within these brackets is lacking in the Greek. [14] I shall do to the House [on which My Name has been called] in which you are trusting, and to the Place which I gave to you and to yourfathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15. And I shall cast you out from before My Face as I cast out Hebrew all. your brethren, all the seed of Ephraim.
In this address there is nothing that contradicts
Deuteronomy. The sacredness with which the
Book had invested the One Sanctuary is acknowledged.
But the people have no moral sense
of that sacredness. Their confidence in the
Temple is material and superstitious, fostered, we
may believe, by the peace they were enjoying and
their relief from a foreign sovereignty, as well as
by their formal observance of the institutions
which the Book prescribed. What had been
founded to rally and to guide a spiritual faith they
turned into a fetish and even to an indulgence
for their wickedness. The House, in which Isaiah
had bent beneath the seraphs' adoration of the
Divine Holiness, and, confessing his own and his
people's sin, had received from its altar the
sacrament of pardon and of cleansing, was by this
generation not only debased to a mere pledge of
their political security but debauched into a shelter
for sins as gross as ever polluted their worship
upon the high places. So ready, as in all other
ages, were formality and vice to conspire with
each other! Jeremiah scorns the people's trust in
the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their
trust (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt
Whether, then, this address was delivered in
Josiah's reign or early in Jehoiakim's it affords no
reason for our denying it to Jeremiah. As God's
tester of the people he has been watching their response
to the Revelation they had accepted, and has
proved that their obedience was to the letter of this
and not to its spirit, that while they superstitiously
revered its institutions they shamelessly ignored
its ethics. For just such vices as they still
practised God Himself must take vengeance. As
those had deranged the very seasons and were
leading to the overthrow of the state,
Another Oracle, XI. 15, 16, also undated, seems,
like the last passage, best explained as delivered
by Jeremiah while he watched during the close
of Josiah's reign the hardening of the people's
trust in their religious institutions and felt its
What has My Beloved to do in My house, XI. 15 Working out mischief? Vows, holy flesh! Can such things turn Calamity from thee; Or by these thou escape? Vows, so Greek, but Lucian fat pieces ( Lev. vi. 5 ); by these thou escape, so Greek, Hebrew then mightest thou rejoice.Flourishing olive, fair with fruit, 16 God called thy name. To the noise of a mighty roaring He sets her on fire— Blasted her branches!
The first of these verses repeats the charge of
VII. 2-11: the people use the Temple for their
sins. The word rendered mischief is literally
devices, and the meaning may be intrigues hatched
from their false ideas of the Temple's security.
But the word is mostly used of evil devices and
here the Greek has abomination. As with their
This leads to another and more difficult question. Jeremiah has spoken doom on the Temple and the Nation; has he come to doubt the Law-Book itself or any part of it? As to that there are two passages one of which speaks of a falsification of the Law by its guardians, while the other denies the Divine origin not only of the deuteronomic but of all sacrifices and burnt offerings.
Even before the discovery of the Law-Book the
young prophet had said of those who handle the Law
that they did not know the Lord.
How say you, We are the Wise,VIII. 8But lo, the falsing pen of the scribes Hath wrought it to falsehood.
Torah, literally direction or instruction, is either a single law or a body of law, revealed by God through priests or prophets, for the religious and moral practice of men. Here it is some traditional or official form of such law, for which the people have rejected the Word of the Lord—His living Word by the prophets of the time (verse 9).
Put to shame are the wise, 9 Dismayed and taken. Lo, they have spurned the Word of the Lord— What wisdom is theirs?
Was this Torah oral or written? And if written was it the discovered Book of the Torah, which in part at least was our Deuteronomy?
So far as the text goes the original Torah may
have been either oral or written, and the scribes
have falsified it, by amplification or
distortion,
VII. 21. Thus saith the Lord,
Hebrew adds of Hosts, the God of Israel. Your burnt offerings add to your sacrifices and eat fleshThe former were not, the latter were in part, eaten by the worshipper; but it does not matter if now he eats them all alike! ! 22. For I spake not with your fathers nor charged them, in the day that I brought them forth from the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offering and sacrifice. 23. But with this Word I charged them, saying, Hearken to My Voice, and I shall be to you God, andye shall be to Me a people, and ye shall walk in every way that I charge you, that it may be well with you.
Whether from Jeremiah or not, this is one of the
most critical texts of the Old Testament because
while repeating what the Prophet has already
fervently accepted,
For the accuracy of these assertions or implications by a succession of prophets and psalmists there is a remarkable body of historical evidence. The sacrificial system of Israel is in its origins of far earlier date than the days of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. It has so much, both of form and meaning, in common with the systems of kindred nations as to prove it to be part of the heritage naturally derived by all of them from their Semitic forefathers. And the new element brought into the traditional religion of Israel at Sinai was just that on which Jeremiah lays stress—the ethical, which in time purified the ritual of sacrifice and burnt-offering but had nothing to do with the origins of this.
Therefore it is certain first that Amos and
Jeremiah meant literally what they stated or
implicitly led their hearers to infer—God gave no
commands at the Exodus concerning burnt-offerings
and sacrifices—and second that historically
they were correct. But, of course, their interest
in so saying was not historical but spiritual.
The O.T. in the Jewish Church,
2nd ed., 203, 295 (1892), and Edghill, The Evidential Value
of Prophecy
(1904), 274, one of the best works on the O.T. in
our time.
But with all this do not let us forget something more. While thus anticipating by more than six centuries the abolition of animal sacrifices, Jeremiah, by his example of service and suffering, was illustrating the substitute for them—the human sacrifice, the surrender by man himself of will and temper, and if need be of life, for the cause of righteousness and the salvation of his fellow-men. The recognition of this in Jeremiah by a later generation in Israel led to the conception of the suffering Servant of the Lord, and of the power of His innocent sufferings to atone for sinners and to redeem them.
This starts a kindred point—and the last—upon
which Jeremiah offers, if not a contradiction, at
least a contrast and a supplement to the teaching
of Deuteronomy. We have noted the absoluteness—or
idealism—of that Book's doctrines of
Too righteous art Thou O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue, Yet cases there are I must speak to Thee of: The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease? Thou hast planted them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their hearts.
We shall have to deal with these questions and God's answer to them, when in a later lecture we analyse Jeremiah's religious experience and struggles. Here we only note the contrast which they present to Deuteronomy—a contrast between the Man and the System, between Experience and Dogma, between the Actual and the Ideal. And, as we now see, it was the System and the Dogma that were defective and the Man and his Experience of life that started, if not for himself yet for a later generation, pondering his experience, the solution of those problems, which against the deuteronomic teaching he raised in brave agony to God's own face.
Such serious differences between Jeremiah and Deuteronomy—upon the Law, the Temple, the Sacrifices, and Doctrines of Providence and Morality—suggest an important question with regard to the methods of Divine Revelation under the Old Covenant. Do they not prove that among those methods there were others than vision or intuition springing from the direct action of the Spirit of God upon the spirits of individual men? Are they not instances of the processes by which to this day in the Providence of God truth is sifted and ultimately beaten out—namely debate and controversy between different minds or different schools of thought, between earnest supporters of various and often hostile opinions in neither of which lies the whole of the truth? The evidence for Revelation by Argument which the Book of Jeremiah affords is not the least of its contributions to the history and philosophy of religion.
Josiah's faithful reign, and with it all thorough
efforts to fulfil the National Covenant,
The year was 608 B.C. Medes and Chaldeans
together had either taken, or were still besieging,
Nineveh; and Pharaoh Nĕcoh,H. G. H. L.,
p. 151.
At first sight, the courage of Josiah and his
small people in facing the full force of Egypt
seems to deserve our admiration, as much as did
the courage of King Albert and his nation in opposing
the faithless invasion of Belgium by the
Germans aiming at France. There was, however,
a difference. Nĕcoh was not invading
Judah, but crossing Philistine territory and a
Galilee which had long ceased to be Israel's.
Some suppose that since the Assyrian hold upon
Palestine relaxed, Josiah had gradually occupied
all Samaria. If this be so, was he now stirred by
a gallant sense of duty to assert Israel's ancient
claim to Galilee as well? We cannot tell.
His servants carried his body from the field in
a chariot to Jerusalem, bringing him back, as we
may realise, to a people stricken with consternation.
Their trust in the Temple was shaken—they
were not delivered!
Weep not for the dead, XXII. 10 Nor bemoan him, But for him that goeth away weep sore, For he cometh no more, Nor seeth the land of his birth.
Jehoahaz died in Egypt.
The next King, Jehoiakim, another of Josiah's
sons, was set on the throne by Nĕcoh, who also
exacted a heavy tribute. What national disillusion!
The hopes falsely kindled upon the letter
of Deuteronomy lay quenched on Megiddo; and
the faithful servant of the Covenant had, in spite
of its promises as men would argue, been defeated
and slain in the flower of his life. Judah
had been released from the Assyrian yoke, only
to fall into the hands of another tyrant, her new
king his creature, and her people sorely burdened
to pay him. The result was religious confusion.
In at least a formal obedience to the deuteronomic
laws of worship, the people of the land continued
to resort to the Temple fasts and festivals.
Woe to who builds his house by injustice, XXII. 13 His storeys by wrong, Who forces his fellows to serve for nothing, And pays not their wage. Who saith, Greek omits and renders the following I and my by thou and his. 14I will build me an ampler house And airier storeys, Widen my windows, panel with cedar, And paint with vermilion, Wilt thou thus play the king, 15 Fussing with cedar? Thy sire, did not he eat and drink, And do justice and right, And judge for the poor and the needy? 16 Then was it well! Using the Greek, Duhm, Cornill and Skinner render this quatrain thus:—
Did not thy father eat and drink,
And do himself well?
Yet he practised justice and right,
Judged the cause of the needy and poor.Was not this how to know Me?— Rede of the Lord. But thine eyes and thy heart are on nought 17 Save thine own spoil, And on shedding of innocent blood, Doing outrage and murder.
Josiah had enjoyed what was enough for him
in sober, seemly parallel to his faithful discharge
of duty; his son was luxurious, unscrupulous,
bloody, and withal petty—fussing with cedar, and
cutting up the Prophet's roll piece by piece with
a pen-knife! Jeremiah and Baruch's sarcastic
notes on Jehoiakim find parallels in Victor Hugo's
Châtiments
of Napoleon III.: l'infiniment petit,
monstreux et feroce;
Voici de l'or, viens pille
et vole ... voici du sang, accours, viens boire,
petit, petit!
XXII. 18. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, King of Judah.
Mourn him they shall not, Woe brother!Nor beweep him, Woe Lord!Or Woe Highness!With the burial of an ass shall they bury him, 19 Dragged and flung out— Out from the gates of Jerusalem.
Such a prophet to such a king must have been
intolerable, and through the following years
Jeremiah was pursued by the royal hatred.
This he bravely gave by making, in obedience
to God's call, public prediction of the ruin of the
Temple. It is uncertain whether Jeremiah did
so only once, as many think who read in Chs.
VII and XXVI reports of the same address, or
whether, as I am inclined to believe, the former
chapter reports an address delivered under Josiah,
and the latter the repetition of its substance in
the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim.
XXVI. 1. In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, came this word from the Lord. 2. Thus saith the Lord, Stand in the court of the Lord's House and speak unto all Judah, all who come in to worship in the Lord's House, all the words that I have charged thee to speak to them; keep back not a word. 3. Peradventure they will hearken and turn every man from his evil way, and I shall relent of the evil which I am purposing to do to them because of the evil of their doings. 4. And thou shalt say, Thus saith the Lord: If ye will not obey Me to walk in My Law, which I have set before you, [5] to hearken to the words of My servants, the prophets whom I am sending to you, rising early and sending—but ye have not hearkened—[6] then
shall I render this House like Shiloh and this City a thing to be cursed of all nations of the earth. 7. And the priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the House of the Lord. 8. And it was, when Jeremiah finished speaking all that the Lord had charged him to speak to all the people, that the priests and the prophets Both text and versions add here and all the people; but this may be the careless insertion of a copyist, for in what follows the people are with Jeremiah. laid hold on him saying, Thou shalt surely die! 9. Because thou hast prophesied in the Name of the Lord saying, As Shiloh this House shall be, and this City shall be laid waste without a dweller. And all the people were gathered to Jeremiah in the House of the Lord. 10. When the princes of Judah heard of these things they came up from the king's house to the House of the Lord and took their seats in the opening of the New Gate of the Lord's House.11. Then said the priests and the prophets to the princes and to all the people—Sentence of death for this man! For he hath prophesied against this City as ye have heard with your ears. So 34 MSS., and Syr. Vulg. and Targ.12. And Jeremiah said to the princes and to all the people, The Lord hath sent me to prophesy against this House and against this City all the words which ye have heard. 13. So now better your ways and your doings, and hearken to the Voice of the Lord, that the Lord may relent of the evil which He hath spoken against you. 14. But as for me, here am I in your hand! Do to me as is good and right in your eyes. 15. Only know for sure that if ye put me to death ye will be bringing innocent blood upon yourselves, and upon this City and upon her inhabitants; for in truth the Lord did send me unto you to speak in your ears all these words. 16. And the princes and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, Not for this man be sentence of death, because in the Name of the Lord our God hath he spoken to us. 17. Then arose some of the elders of the land and said to all the assembly of the people. 18. There was Micaiah the Morasthite in the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and he said to all the people of Judah, Thus saith the Lord: Ṣion like a field shall be ploughed, And Jerusalem be heaps, And the mount of the House a mound of the jungle. 19. Did Hezekiah and all Judah put him to death? Did they not fear the Lord and soothe the Lord's face, and the Lord relented of the evil He had uttered against them. Yet we are about to do a great wrong upon our own lives.
Several of its features lift this story to a place among the most impressive in the Old Testament. The priests and prophets on the one side and the princes on the other both use the phrase, that Jeremiah spoke in the Name of the Lord. But the former quote it ironically, or in indignation at the Prophet's claim, while the princes are obviously impressed by his sincerity and apparently their impression is shared by the people. There could be no firmer measure of the pitch of personal power to which Jeremiah has at last braced himself.
The promise of his Call is fulfilled. Sceptical, fluid and shrinking as he is by nature, he stands for this hour at least, a strong wall and a fortress, by his clear conscience, his simple courage, and his full surrender to whatever be in store for him. How bravely he refuses to conciliate them!—I am in your hand, do to me as is right in your eyes.
Again, there is proof of a popular tradition and
conscience in Israel more sound than those of the
religious authorities of the nation. The people
remembered what their priests and prophets
forgot or ignored, and through their elders gave
the common
sense
and to the public instinct for justice. And
on that day in Jerusalem these were called forth
by the ability of the people, commoners and
nobles alike, to recognise a real Prophet, an
authentic Speaker-for-God at once when they
heard him.
The danger that Jeremiah faced and the source from which it sprang are revealed by the fate which befell another denouncer of the land in the Name of the Lord. Of him, the narrator uses a form of the verb to prophesy different from that which he uses of Jeremiah, thus guarding himself from expressing an opinion as to whether the man was a genuine prophet. This is a further tribute to the moral effect of Jeremiah's person and word.
XXVI. 20. There was also a man who took upon him to prophesy in the Name of the Lord, Urijahu, son of Shemajahu, from Kiriath-jearim, and he prophesied
Hebrew adds against this city and. against this land, according to all the words ofJeremiah. 21 . And king JehoiakimHebrew adds and all his mighty men. and all the princes heard of his words and they soughtSo Greek; Hebrew the king sought. to put him todeath; and Urijahu heard and fearing fled and went into Egypt. 22. And the king sent men to Egypt. Hebrew adds a name (El-nathan, son of Ackbor) and repeats. 23. And they took forth Urijah thence and brought him to the king, and slew him with the sword, and cast his corpse into the graves of the sons of the people. 24. But the hand of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, was with Jeremiah so as not to give him into the hand of the people to put him to death.
The one shall be taken and the other left!
We are not told why, after the verdict of the
princes and the people, Ahikam's intervention
was needed. Yet the people were always fickle,
and the king who is not mentioned in connection
with Jeremiah's case, but as we see from Urijah's
watched cruelly from the background, was not
the man to be turned by a popular verdict from
taking vengeance on the Prophet who had attacked
him. Ahikam, however, had influence at court,
and proved friendly to Jeremiah on other occasions.
All this was in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim.
Before we follow Jeremiah himself through
the rest of that malignant and disastrous reign,
during which the steadfastness that his personality
had achieved was again to be shaken, we must
In 625 B.C. the successor of Asshurbanipal upon
the tottering throne of Assyria had found himself
compelled to acknowledge Nabopolassar the
Chaldean as nominally viceroy, but virtually king,
of Babylon.Twelve Prophets,
vol. ii.;
on the date see Appendix I.
By 602, if not before, Nebuchadrezzar, having
succeeded his father as King of Babylon, carried
his power to the coasts of the Levant and the
Egyptian border. Judah was his vassal, and for
three years Jehoiakim paid him tribute, but then
defaulted, probably because of promises from
Egypt after the fashion of that restless power.
As if not yet ready to invade Judah in force,
Nebuchadrezzar let loose upon her, along with
some of his own Chaldeans, troops of Moabites,
Ammonites and Arameans. Soon afterwards
Jehoiakim died and was succeeded by his son
Jehoiachin, a youth of eighteen, who appears to
have maintained his father's policy; for in 598, if
not 597, Nebuchadrezzar came up against Jerusalem,
which forthwith surrendered, and the king,
his mother and wives, his courtiers and statesmen
were carried into exile, with the craftsmen and
smiths and all who were apt for war; none remained
save the poorest of the people of the land.A.T.
Untersuchungen,
81 ff.) gives good reasons for preferring
605-3.
Throughout these convulsions of her world, this crisis in the history of Judah herself, Jeremiah remains the one constant, rational, and far-seeing power in the national life. But at what terrible cost to himself! His experience is a throng of tragic paradoxes. Faithful to his mission, every effort he makes to rouse his people to its meaning is baffled. His word is signally vindicated by the great events of the time, yet each of these but tears his heart the more as he feels it bringing nearer the ruin of his people. His word is confirmed, but he is shaken by doubts of himself, his utterance of which is in poignant contrast to his steadfast delivery of his messages of judgment. No prophet was at once more sure of his word and less sure of himself; none save Christ more sternly denounced his people or upon the edge of their doom more closely knit himself to them.
It is a staggering world, and the one man who has its secret is shaken to despair about himself. Yet the Word with which he is charged not only fulfils itself in event after event but holds its distracted prophet fast to the end of his abhorred task of proclaiming it.
The cardinal event was Nebuchadrezzar's
victory over Nĕcoh at Carchemish in 605 or 604
with its assurance of Babylonian, not Egyptian,
supremacy throughout Western Asia. Such confirmation
of the substance of Jeremiah's prophecies
First there is the Divine Peradventure at the
beginning of the story.
To the same decisive year, 605-4, the fourth of
Jehoiakim, is referred an address by Jeremiah reported
in XXV. 1-11 (with perhaps 13a). This
repeats the Prophet's charge that his people have
refused—now for three-and-twenty years—to
listen to his call for repentance and reaffirms
the certainty, at last made clear by the Battle of
Carchemish, that their deserved doom lies in the
hands of a Northern Power, which shall waste
their land and carry them into foreign servitude
for seventy years. The suggestion that this
address formed the conclusion of the Second
Roll dictated by Jeremiah to Baruch is suitable
to the contents of the address and becomes more
Z.A.T.W.,
viii. 177 ff.) and Duhm, but their arguments are
answered by Giesebrecht and Cornill in loco; see, too, Gillies,
195-8, 202, and Skinner, 240 f.
Verses 12-14, indicating the destruction of
Babylon in her turn after seventy years, are, in
whole or in part, generally taken as a post-exilic
addition.D.B.,
ii. 574,
Driver and Gillies in loco.
The rest of the chapter, verses 15-38, is so full
of expansions and repetitions, which we may
partly see from a comparison of it with the
Greek, as well as of inconsistencies with some
earlier Oracles by Jeremiah,
To the reign of Jehoiakim are usually referred
a number of symbolic actions by Jeremiah, the
narratives of which carry no dates. So far as
they imply that the Prophet was still able to
move openly about Jerusalem and the country
they might be regarded as earlier than 604, when
he was under restraint and had to hide himself.
The first is that of the waist-cloth, XIII. 1-11.
Jeremiah was charged to buy a linen waist-clothEnc. Bibl.,
article Girdle.
Prophets of the O. T.,
Eng. trans, iii. 152), quoting
Schick (Ausland,
1867, 572-4), by Birch (P.E.F.Q.,
1880,
235), and by Marti (Z.D.P.V.,
1880, 11), and has been accepted
by many—Cheyne, Ball, McFadyen, Peake, etc.
This parable is immediately followed by the
ironic metaphor of the Jars Full of Wine, XIII.
12-14, which I have already quoted.
Next comes the Parable of the Potter, Ch.
XVIII, that might be from any part of the
Prophet's ministry, during which he was free
to move in public. This parable is instructive
first by disclosing one of the ways along which
Revelation reached, and spelt itself out in, the mind
of the Prophet. He felt a Divine impulse to go
down to the house of the Potter,Enc. Bibl.,
article Pottery.
XVIII. 5. Then the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying, [6] O House of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?
Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. Behold, as the clay in the hand of the potter, so are ye in My hand.Hebrew adds House of Israel.
Thus by figure and by word the Divine
Sovereignty was proclaimed as absolutely as
possible. But the Sovereignty is a real Sovereignty
and therefore includes Freedom. It is
not fettered by its own previous decrees, as some
rigorous doctrines of predestination insist, but is
free to recall and alter these, should the human
characters and wills with which it works in
history themselves change. There is a Divine
as well as a human Free-will. God's dealing
with men is moral; He treats them as their
moral conduct permits Him to do.
The Predestination of men or nations, which
the Prophet sees figured in the work of the potter,
is to Service. This is clear from the comparison
between Israel and a vessel designed for a definite
use. It recalls Jeremiah's similar conception of
To the truths of the Divine Sovereignty and
the Divine Freedom the parable adds that of
the Divine Patience. The potter of Hinnom
does not impatiently cast upon the rubbish which
abounds there the lump of clay that has proved
refractory to his design for it. He gives the
lump another trial upon another design. If, as
many think, the verses which follow the parable,
7-10, are not by Jeremiah himself (though this is
far from proved, as we shall see) then he does not
explicitly draw from the potter's patience with
the clay the inference of the Divine patience with
men. But the inference is implicit in the parable.
Did Jeremiah intend it? If he did, this is proof
that in spite of his people's obstinacy under the
hand of God, he cherished, though he dared not
yet utter, the hope that God would have some
fresh purpose for their service beyond the wreck
In either case the parable is rich in Gospel for
ourselves. If we have failed our God upon His
first designs for us and for our service do not let
us despair. He is patient and ready to give us
another trial under His hand. And this not only
is the lesson of more than one of our Lord's
parables, for instance that of the fig-tree found
But as Christ Himself taught, there are, and
ethically must be, limits to the Divine Patience
with men. Of these the men of Judah and
Jerusalem are warned in the verses which follow
the parable. While it is true (verse 7 ff.) that if
a nation, which God has said He will destroy, turn
from its evil, He will relent, the converse is
equally true of a nation which He has promised
to plant and build, that if it do wrong and obey
not He will surely repent of the good He had
planned for it. For this refractory people of
Judah He is already framing or moulding
evil—the verb used is that of which the Hebrew name for
potter is the participle. Though chosen of God
and shaped by His hands for high service Israel's
destiny is not irrevocable; nay, their doom is
already being shaped. Yet He makes still another
appeal to them to repent and amend their ways.
To this they answer: No use! we will walk after
our own devices and carry out every one the stubbornness
Some moderns have denied these verses to
Jeremiah and taken them as the addition of a later
hand and without relevance to the parable. With
all respect to the authority of those critics,
The Prophet's threat of evil is still so vague,
that, with due acknowledgment of the uncertainty
of such points, we may suppose it, along with the
Parable of the Potter, to have been uttered before
the Battle of Carchemish, when the Babylonian
sovereignty over Western Asia became assured.
The next in order of Jeremiah's symbols, Ch. XIX, the breaking of a potter's jar past restoration, with his repetition of doom upon Judah, led to his arrest, Ch. XX, and this at last to his definite statement that the doom would be captivity to the King of Babylon. Some therefore date the episode after Carchemish, but this is uncertain; Jeremiah is still not under restraint nor in hiding.
He is charged to buy an earthen jar and take
with him some of the elders of the people and of
the priests to the Potsherd Gate in the Valley of
Hinnom.
XX. 3. The Lord hath called thy name not Pashḥur but Magor-Missabib, Terror-all-round. 4. For thus saith the Lord, Lo, I will make thee a terror to thyself and all thy friends, and they shall fall by the sword of their foes, and thine own eyes shall be seeing it; and all Judah shall I give into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them to exile and smite them with the sword ... 6. And thou Pashḥur and all that dwell in thy house shall go into captivity and in Babylon thou shalt die.
The above is mainly from the Greek. The following is a significant instance of how the knowledge of the Bible still holds among some at least of the Scottish peasantry. A woman in a rural parish calling on her minister to complain about the harshness of the factor of the landlord said that he was a very Magor-Missabib. And it is no less significant that the minister had to consult his concordance to the Bible to know what she meant!
At last Jeremiah definitely states what Judah's doom from the North is to be. We wish that we knew the date of this utterance.
Assigned by its title to the days of Jehoiakim is
The Rechabites, a tent-dwelling tribe sojourning
within the borders, and worshipping the God,
of Israel, had taken refuge from the Chaldean
invasion within the walls of Jerusalem. Knowing
their fidelity to their ancestral habits Jeremiah
invited some of them to one of the Temple
chambers and offered them wine. They refused,
for they said that their ancestor Jehonadab ben-Rechab
From the seventh to the tenth chapters of the
Book of Jeremiah there are a number of undated
passages in prose and in verse, which are generally
held to have been included in the collection of
the Prophet's Oracles written out by Baruch in
604-3, and of which some may have been delivered
during the reign of Josiah, but the most of
them more probably either upon its tragic close
at Megiddo in 608, or under Jehoiakim. We have
already considered the addresses reported in
VII. 1-15, 21-27,Jerusalem,
ii., pp. 186 ff.,
260, 263.Jerusalem,
ii., pp. 263 f.
But there follow, from VIII. 4 onwards, after
the usual introduction, a series of metrical Oracles
of which the following translation is offered in
observance of the irregularity of the measures of
the original. Note how throughout the Prophet
is, as before, testing his false people—heeding
and listening are his words—finding no proof of a
genuine repentance and bewailing the doom that
therefore must fall upon them. Some of his
earlier verses are repeated, and there is the
reference to the Law, VIII. 8 f., which we have
discussed.
In Ch. VIII, verses 4-12 (including the repetitions
they contain) seem a unity; verse 13
stands by itself (unless it goes with the preceding);
14, 15 echo one of the Scythian songs, but
the fear they reflect may be that either of an
Egyptian invasion after Megiddo or of a Chaldean;
16 and 17 are certainly of a northern invasion,
but whether the same as the preceding is doubtful;
The two Chs. VIII and IX are thus a collection
both of prose passages and poems out of
different circumstances and different moods, with
The first verses are in curious parallel to
Tchekov's remarkable plaint about his own people
and the Russian disease
as he calls their failing:
Why do we tire so soon? And when we fall
how is it that we never try to rise again?
And thou shalt say to them, Greek omits this clause. Thus saith the Lord: VIII. 4Apparently a common proverb. Why then are this people turning 5 Persistently turning Hebrew adds Jerusalem with no sense and a disturbance to the metre. ?They take fast hold of deceit, Refuse to return. I have been heeding, been listening— 6 They speak but untruth! Not a man repents of his evil, Saying, What have I done?All of them swerve in their courses Like a plunging horse in the battle. Even the stork in the heavens 7 Knoweth her seasons, And dove and swift and swallow Keep time of their coming— Only my people, they know not The Rule Mishpaṭ = rule, order, ordinance. of the Lord.How say ye, We are the wise,8Torah = law, see p. 154. of the Lord.But, lo, into falsehood hath wrought it Reading צשה with Dagesh in last letter. False pen of the scribes. Put to shame are the wise, 9 Dismayed and taken, The Word of the Lord have they spurned— What wisdom is theirs? So to others I give their wives, 10 Their fields to who may take them, For all from the least to the greatest On plunder are bent; From the prophet on to the priest Everyone worketh lies. They would heal the breach of my people 11 As though it were trifling, Saying It is well, it is well!—And well it is not! Were they shamed of the foulness they wrought? 12 Nay, shamed not at all, Nor knew their dishonour! So shall they fall with the falling, Reel in the time of their reckoning, Sayeth the Lord. With 10-12, cp. vi. 13-15; 11, 12 are wanting in Greek. Would I harvest them?—Rede of the Lord— 13 No grapes on the vine, And never a fig on the fig-tree, Withered the leaves. Hebrew adds a line of corrupt text. For what sit we still? 14 Sweep together And into the fortified cities, To perish. For the Lord our own God Hath doomed us to perish, Hath drugged us with waters of bale— To Him Hebrew, the Lord. have we sinned.Hoping for peace? 15 'Twas no good, For a season of healing? Lo, panic. So Greek. The verse is another instance of the two-stresses-to-a-line metre; see p. 46. From Dan the bruit So Greek. has been heard, 16Hinnying of his horses, With the noise of the neighing of his steeds The land is aquake. He So Greek. comes,So Greek. he devours the land and her fulnessThe city and her dwellers. For behold, I am sending upon you 17 Basilisk-serpents, Against whom availeth no charm, But they shall bite you. Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. Ah! That my grief is past comfort After the Greek, Hebrew is hopeless. 18Faints on me my heart, Lo, hark to the cry of my people Wide o'er the land. Lit., from a land of distances, usually taken as meaning exile. But exile is not yet. Duhm as above. Is there no king? So Greek. [Why have they vexed Me with idols, Foreigners' fancies?] Bubbles, ii. 5. The couplet seems an intrusion breaking between the two parts of the people's cry. For the breaking of the daughter of my people 21 I break, I blacken! Horror hath fastened upon me Pangs as of her that beareth. So Greek. Is there no balm in Gilead, 22 Is there no healer? Why do the wounds never close Lit., why cometh not up the fresh skin on. Of the daughter of my people? Oh that my head were waters, IX. 1 Mine eyes a fountain of tears, That day and night I might weep For the slain of my people!
There follows an Oracle in a very different mood. In the previous one the Prophet has taken his people to his heart, in spite of their sin and its havoc; in this he repels and would be quit of them.
O that I had in the desert 2 A wayfarers' Greek, an uttermost. lodge!Then would I leave my people, And get away from them, For adulterers all they be, A bundle The Hebrew word seems to me to be taken here rather in its primitive sense of bundle than in the later, official meaning of assembly. of traitors!Their tongue they stretch 3 Like a treacherous bow,(?) And never for truth Use their power in the land, But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not. Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord for till now the Prophet has spoken. Verse 3 is difficult. Duhm omits most, Cornill all, as breaking the metrical schemes which they think Jeremiah invariably used. But the form of the Hebrew text—short lines of two beats each, with one longer line—is one into which Jeremiah sometimes falls (see pp. 46 f.). Like a bow so Greek; Hebrew, their bow. Cp. our draw a long bow (Ball). Be on guard with your friends, 4 Trust not your So Syriac. brothers,For brothers are all very Jacobs, And friends gad about to defame. Every one cheateth his neighbour, 5 They cannot speak truth. Their tongues they have trained to falsehood, They strain to be naughty— Wrong upon wrong, deceit on deceit(?) 6 Refusing to know Me. Again Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. The text is uncertain. Hebrew, thy dwelling is in the midst of deceit, they refuse to know Me. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Hebrew adds of Hosts. 7Lo, I will smelt them, will test them. How else should I do In face of the evil ... So Greek, Hebrew omits; more seems to have dropped out. (?)Of the Daughter of My people? A deadly So Hebrew text; Hebrew margin and Greek polished. shaft is their tongue 8The words of their mouth So Greek. deceit;If peace any speak to his friend In his heart he lays ambush. Shall I not visit for such— 9 Rede of the Lord— Nor on a nation like this Myself take vengeance? Raise for the mountains a wail, So Greek. Hebrew, I will raise and adds lamentation. 10For the meads of the pasture a dirge! They are waste, with never a man Hebrew adds passing over, probably a mistaken transference from verse 12. Greek and Latin omit. Nor hear the lowing of cattle. From the birds of heaven to the beasts They have fled, they are gone. I will make Jerusalem heaps, 11 Of jackals the lair, And the townships of Judah lay waste, With never a dweller. Who is the man that is wise 12 To lay this to mind, As the mouth of the Lord hath told him, So to declare— The wherefore the country is perished, And waste as the desert, With none to pass over! 13. And the Lord said unto me,
So Greek. Because they forsook My Law which I set before them, and hearkened not to My Voice,Hebrew uselessly adds nor walked therein. [14] but havewalked after the stubbornness of their heart, and after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. 15. Therefore thus saith the Lord Hebrew adds of hosts; and this people for them. the God of Israel, Behold I will give them wormwood to eat and the waters of poison to drink. 16. And I will scatter them among the nations, whom neither they nor their fathers knew, and send after them the sword till I have consumed them.Thus saith the Lord: 17 Call the keening women to come, And send for the wise ones, That they come and make haste Hebrew adds of Hosts and consider ye which Greek omits as well as hasten in 18; the text of the four lines is uncertain. For us and our Greek has you and your. 18To lift us a dirge, Till with tears our eyes run down, Our eyelids with water. For hark! from Ṣion the voice of wailing, 19 So Vulgate. Hear, O women, the saying of the Lord, 20 Your ears take in the word of His mouth, Teach the lament to your daughters Each to her comrade the dirge: And into our palaces, Cutting off from the streets the children The youths from the places; Hebrew has the obvious intrusion, Speak thus, Rede of the Lord, which Greek lacks. And the corpses of men are fallen 22 As dung on the field, As sheaves left after the reaper Thus saith the Lord: 23 Boast not the wise in his wisdom, Boast not the strong in his strength, Boast not the rich in his riches, But he that would boast in this let him boast, 24 Insight and knowledge of Me, That I am the Lord, who work troth, Judgment and justice on earth, For in these I delight. 25. Behold, the days are coming—Rede of the Lord—that I shall visit on everyone circumcised as to the foreskin. 26. Egypt and Judah and Edom, the sons of Ammon and Moab, and all with the corner
I.e. of their hair; see xxv. 23, xlix. 32. Herodotus says (iii. 8) that some Arabs shaved the hair above their temples; forbidden to Jews, clipt, who dwell in the desert; for all the nations are uncircumcised in their heart and all the house of Israel.Lev. xix. 27 .
Which just means that Israel, circumcised in the flesh but not in the spirit, are as bad as the heathen who share with them bodily circumcision.
Ch. X. 1-16 is a spirited, ironic poem on the follies of idolatry which bears both in style and substance marks of the later exile.
On the other hand X. 17-23 is a small collection of short Oracles in metre, which there is no reason to deny to Jeremiah. The text of the first, verses 17-18, is uncertain. If with the help of the Greek we render it as follows it implies not an actual, but an inevitable and possibly imminent, siege of Jerusalem. The couplet in 17 may alone be original and 18, the text of which is reducible neither to metre nor wholly to sense, a prose note upon it.
Sweep in thy wares from beyond, So Greek; Hebrew, the land. The Hebrew part. sitting may like that in v. 18 be future. X. 17In siege that shalt sit! 18. For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will sling out them that dwell in this land,
So Greek; Hebrew, in the land at this time. and will distress them in order that they may find ...(?)
Such is the most to be made of the fragment of
which there are many interpretations. The next
piece, 19-22, is generally acknowledged to be
Jeremiah's. It has the ring of his earlier Oracles.
Woe is me for thy So Greek, Hebrew my. ruin, 19Sore is thy So Greek, Hebrew my. stroke!But I said, Well, this sickness is mine So some Greek and Latin versions, Syriac and Targ. And I must bear it! Undone is my tent and perished, Greek; Hebrew omits. 20Snapped all my cords! My sons—they went out from me And they are not! None now to stretch me my tent Or hang up my curtains. For that the shepherds I.e. Rulers. are brutish 21Nor seek of the Lord, Therefore prosper they shall not, All scattered their flock. Hebrew, pastures. Hark the bruit, X. 22 Behold it comes, And uproar great From land of the North, To lay the cities of Judah waste, A lair of jackals.
As we have seen, Jeremiah in the excitement of
alarm falls on short lines, ejaculations of two
stresses each, sometimes as here with one longer
line.
A quatrain follows of longer, equal lines as is usual with Jeremiah when expressing spiritual truths:—
Lord I know! Not to man is his way, 23 Not man's to walk or settle his steps. Chasten me, Lord, but with judgment, 24 Not in wrath, lest Thou bring me to little!
The last verse of the chapter is of a temper unlike that of Jeremiah elsewhere towards other nations, and so like the temper against them felt by later generations in Israel, that most probably it is not his.
[Pour out Thy rage on the nations, 25 Who do not own Thee, And out on the kingdoms Who call not Thy Name! For Jacob they devoured and consumed, And wasted his homestead] So, following some Greek MSS., Targ., and the parallel Ps. lxxix. 6 ,7 .
Another series of Oracles, as reasonably referred to the reign of Jehoiakim as to any other stage of Jeremiah's career, is scattered over Chs. XI-XX. I reserve to a later lecture upon his spiritual conflict and growth those which disclose his debates with his God, his people and himself—XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18, and I take now only such as deal with the character and the doom of the nation.
Of these the first in the order in which they
appear in the Book is XI. 15, 16, with which we
have already dealt,
I have forsaken My House, XII. 7 I have left My Heritage, I have given the Beloved of My Soul To the hand of her foes. My Heritage to Me is become 8 Like a lion in the jungle, She hath given against Me her voice, Therefore I hate her. Is My Heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird 9 With wild-birds round and against her? Go, gather all beasts of the field, Bring them on to devour. Shepherds so many My Vineyard have spoiled 10 Have trampled My Lot— My pleasant Lot they have turned To a desolate desert They make it a waste, it mourns, 11 On Me is the waste! All the land is made desolate, None lays it to heart! Over the bare desert heights 12 Come in the destroyers! [For the sword of the Lord is devouring From the end of the land, And on to the end of the land, No peace to all flesh. The text of these four lines is hardly metrical. Wheat have they sown and reaped thorns, 13 Have travailed for nought, Ashamed of their crop shall they be In the heat of God's wrath.]
The last eight lines are doubtfully original: the speaker is no longer God Himself. There follows, in verses 14-17, a paragraph in prose, which is hardly relevant—a later addition, whether from the Prophet or an editor.
The next metrical Oracles are appended to the
Parables of the Waist-cloth and of the Jars in
Ch. XIII.
But if ye will not hear it: XIII. 17 In secret my soul shall weep Because of your pride, And mine eyes run down with tears For the flock of the Lord led captive. In this quatrain Greek reads your soul, and Hebrew my eye and precedes this line by shall weep indeed which Greek omits. The last line is one of those longer ones with which verses or strophes often conclude (see p. 35).
The next Oracle in metre is an elegy, probably
prospective, on the fate of Jehoiachin and his
mother Nehushta.
Say to the King and Her Highness, 18 Low be ye seated! For from your heads is come down The crown of your splendour. The towns of the Southland are blocked 19 With none to open. All Judah is gone into exile, Exile entire. So Greek.
The flock of the Lord, verse 17, comes again into
the next poem, addressed to Jerusalem as appears
from the singular form of the verbs and pronouns
preserved throughout by the Greek (but only in
20b by the Hebrew) which to the disturbance of
the metre adds the name of the city—probably a
marginal note that by the hand of some copyist
has been drawn into the text. In verse 21 the
people, whom Judah has wooed to be her ally but
who are about to become her tyrant, are, of course,
the Babylonians.
Lift up thine eyes and look, XIII. 20 They come from the North! Where is the flock that was given thee, Thy beautiful flock? What wilt thou say when they set 21 O'er thee as heads, As heads obviously belongs to this second line of the quatrain, from which some copyist has removed it to the fourth. Those whom thyself wast training To be to thee friends? Shall pangs not fasten upon thee, Like a woman's in travail? And if thou say in thine heart, 22 Why fall on me these? For the mass of thy guilt stripped are thy skirts, Ravished thy limbs! Can the Ethiop change his skin, 23 Or the leopard his spots? Then also may ye do good Who are wont to do evil. As the passing chaff I strew them 24 To the wind of the desert. This is thy lot, the share I mete thee— 25 Rede of the Lord— Because Me thou hast wholly forgotten And trusted in fraud. So thy skirts I draw over thy face, 26 Thy shame is exposed. Thine adulteries, thy neighings, 27 Thy whorish intrigues; On the heights, in the field have I seen Thy detestable deeds. Jerusalem! Woe unto thee! Thou wilt not be clean— After how long yet? So Hebrew literally.
Ch. XIV. 1-10 is the fine poem on the Drought
which was rendered in a previous lecture.sea of troubles,
not drought only but
war, famine and pestilence. Forbidden to pray for
the people Jeremiah pleads that they have been
misled by the prophets who promised that there
would be neither famine nor war; and the Lord
condemns the prophets for uttering lies in His
Name. Through war and famine prophets and
people alike shall perish.
And thou shalt say this word to them: XIV. 17 Let your eyes run down with tears Day and night without ceasing, For broken, broken is the Daughter of my people, With the direst of strokes! Fare I forth to the field, 18 Lo the slain of the sword! Or come into the city Lo anguish of famine! Yea, prophet and priest go a-begging In a land they know not. The text of the first four lines is uncertain. I have mainly followed the Greek. Begging, if we borrow the sense of the verb in Syriac, otherwise huckstering, peddling.
Some see reflected in these lines the situation after Megiddo, when Egyptian troops may have worked such evils on Judah; but more probably it is the still worse situation after the surrender of Jerusalem to Nebuchadrezzar. There follows, 19-22, another prayer of the people (akin to that following the drought, 7-9) which some take to be later than Jeremiah. The metre is unusual, if indeed it be metre and not rhythmical prose.
[Hast Thou utterly cast off Judah, 19 Loathes Ṣion Thy soul? Why hast Thou smitten us so That for us is no healing? Hoped we for peace—no good! For a season of healing—lo panic! We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness, 20 The guilt of our fathers; to Thee have we sinned. For the sake of Thy Name, do not spurn us, 21 Debase not the Throne of Thy Glory, Remember, break not Thy Covenant with us! 'Mongst the bubbles of the nations are makers of rain, 22 Or do the heavens give the showers? Art Thou not He for whom we must wait? Yea, Thou hast created all these.]
As the Book now runs this prayer receives from
God a repulse, XV. 1-4, similar to that which was
received by the people's prayer after the drought
XIV. 10-12, and to that which Hosea heard to the
prayer of his generation.
Jerusalem, who shall pity, XV. 5 Who shall bemoan thee, Who will but turn him to ask After thy welfare? 'Tis thou that hast left Me—Rede of the Lord— 6 Still going backward. So I stretched my hand Hebrew and some Greek MSS. add against thee. and destroyed theeTired of relenting. With a winnowing fork I winnowed them 7 In the gates of the land. I bereaved and destroyed my people Because of their evil. Hebrew, they turned not from their ways. I saw their widows outnumber 8 The sand of the seas. I brought on the mother of youths(?) Destruction at noonday, And let fall sudden upon them Anguish and terrors. The text of verse 8 is uncertain. I have mainly followed the Greek. She that bare seven hath fainted, 9 Breathes out her life, Set is her sun in the daytime Shamed and abashed! And their remnant I give to the sword In face of their foes! Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.
Through the rest of Ch. XV and through
XVI and XVII are a number of those personal
passages, which I have postponed to a subsequent
lecture upon Jeremiah's spiritual
struggles,
Thus saith the Lord— XVI. 5 Come not to the home of mourning, Nor go about to lament, Hebrew adds nor bemoan them, an expansion. For my Peace I have swept away— Away from this people. Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord, even kindness and compassion; verses 6 and 7 are expansion. Nor enter the house of feasting, 8 To sit with them eating and drinking For thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel; 9 Lo, I make to cease from this place, To your eyes, in your days, The voices of joy and rejoicing, The voices of bridegroom and bride.
There follows a passage in prose, 10-13, which in
terms familiar to us, recites the nation's doom,
their exile. Verses 14, 15 break the connection
with 16 ff., and find their proper place in XXIII.
7-8, where they recur. Verses 16-18 predict,
under the figures of fishers and hunters, the
arrival of bands of invaders, who shall sweep the
country of its inhabitants, because of the idolatries
with which these have polluted it. There is no
The sin of Judah is writ XVII. 1 With pen of iron, With the point of a diamond graven On the plate of their heart— And eke on the horns of their altars, Hebrew adds when their children remember their altars and Asherim rightly taken by Duhm and Cornill as a gloss. And each spreading tree, Upon all the lofty heights 2 And hills of the wild Thy substance and all thy treasures 3 For spoil I give, Because of sin thy high places Throughout thy borders. Thine heritage thou shalt surrender Hebrew adds in thee for which some read thy hand. 4Which I have given thee, And thy foes I shall make thee to serve In a land thou knowest not. Ye have kindled a fire in my wrath That for ever shall burn. These four verses along with the phrase Thus saith the Lord which follows them are lacking in Greek. This is clearly due to the oversight of a copyist, his eye passing inadvertently from the Lord of xvi. 21 to the Lord of xvii. 5.
These verses, characteristic of Jeremiah, are more
so of his earliest period than of his work in the
reign of Jehoiakim, and may have been among
those which he added to his Second Roll. They
are succeeded by the beautiful reflections on the
man who does not trust the Lord and on the man
who does, verses 5-8, quoted in a previous lecture.Isaiah,
lvi. 2-7, lviii. 13, 14;
In Ch. XVIII the Parable of the Potter is followed by a metrical Oracle which has all the marks of Jeremiah's style and repeats the finality of the doom, to which the nation's forgetfulness of God and idolatry have brought it. Once more the poet contrasts the constancy of nature with his people's inconstancy. Neither the metre nor the sense of the text is so mutilated as some have supposed.
Therefore thus saith the Lord: XVIII. 13 Ask ye now of the nations, Who heard of the like? The horror she hath grossly wrought, Virgin of Israel. Fails from the mountain rock 14 The snow of Lebánon? Or the streams from the hills dry up, The cold flowing streams? A much manipulated verse! Mountain, taking sadai in its archaic sense as in Assyrian and some Hebrew poems, Jud. v. 4 ,Deut. xxxii. 13 (see the writer'sDeut.in theCamb. Bible for Schools) where it is parallel to highlands, rock and flinty rock. The following emendations of the text are therefore unnecessary, and are more or less forced. Sirion (Duhm, Cornill, Peake, McFadyen, Skinner); missurîm = from the rocks (Rothstein). The Greek takes sadai as breasts and nominative to the verb: Do the breasts of the rock give out?—not a bad figure. Hill-streams reading mêmê harîm (Rothstein) for the Hebrew maîm zarîm = strange (? far off) streams. Ewald takes zarîm from zarar = to rush, press. Duhm reads mĕzarîm = Northstar. Cornill turns the couplet to Or do dry up from the western sea the flowing waters? Gillies, the wet winds from the sea, etc., for which there is a suggestion in the Greek α μῳ.Yet Me have My people forgotten, 15 And burned See p. 149, n. 1 to vanity,Stumbling from off their ways, The tracks of yore, To straggle along the by-paths, An unwrought road; Turning their land to a waste, 16 A perpetual hissing. All who pass by are appalled, And shake their heads. With So some MSS.; the text has like. an east wind strew them I shall, 17In face of the foe. My back not my face shall I show them In their day of disaster.
Personal passages follow in verses 18-23, and
in XIX-XX. 6, the Symbol of the Earthen Jar
and the episode of the Prophet's arrest with its
consequences, which we have already considered,
From Chs. XXII-XXIII. 8, a series of Oracles
on the kings of Judah, we have had before us
the elegy on Jehoahaz, XXII. 10 (with a prose
note on 11, 12) and the denunciation of Jehoiakim,
13-19.
XXII. 6. For thus saith the Lord concerning the house of the king of Judah
Duhm's objection to this title as a mistake by an editor is groundless; for though the following lines are addressed to the land or people as a whole, their climax is upon the fate of the royal house, the choice of thy cedars. —A Gilead art thou to Me, Or head of Lebánon, Yet shall I make thee a desert Of tenantless cities. I will hallow against thee destroyers, 7 Each with his weapons, They shall cut down the choice of thy cedars And fell them for fuel. 8. [And
Hebrew adds many. nations shall pass by this city and shall say each to his mate, For what hath the Lord done thus to this great city? 9. And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Covenant of the Lord their God, and bowed themselves to other gods and served them.]
Whether this piece of prose be from Jeremiah himself or from another is uncertain and of no importance. It is a true statement of his own interpretation of the cause of his people's doom. The next Oracle addressed to the nation is upon King Jeconiah, or Koniyahu. I follow mainly the Greek.
Up to Lebánon and cry, XXII. 20 Give forth thy voice in Bashán, And cry from Abarîm Greek from over the sea. that brokenBe all thy lovers. I spake to thee in thy prosperity, 21 Thou saidst, I hear not! This was thy way from thy youth, Not to hark to My Voice. All thy shepherds the wind shall shepherd, 22 Thy lovers go captive. Then shamed shalt thou be and confounded For all thine ill-doing. Thou in Lebánon that dwellest, 23 Nested on cedars, How shalt thou groan Greek, Syriac, Vulgate. when come on thee pangs,Anguish as hers that beareth. As I live—'t is the Rede of the Lord— 24 Though Konyahu were Upon My right hand the signet, Thence would I tear him. Hebrew thee. 25. And I shall give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life and into the hand of them thou dreadest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans; [26] and I will hurl thee out, and thy mother who bare thee, upon another land, where ye were not born, and there shall ye die. 27. And to the land, towards which they shall be lifting their soul,
Hebrew adds to return thither; Greek lacks. they shall not return.Is Konyahu then despised, 28 Like a nauseous vessel? Why is he flung and cast out On a land he knows not? Land, Land, Land, 29 Hear the Word of the Lord! Write this man down as childless, 30 A fellow ...(?) For none of his seed shall flourish Seated on David's throne, Or ruling still in Judah. In 28-30 the Greek, mainly followed above in accordance with the metre, is far shorter than the Hebrew text.
We can reasonably deny to Jeremiah nothing of all this passage, not even the prose by which the metre is interrupted. We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pass from verse to prose and again from prose to verse. Nor are the repetitions superfluous, not even that four-fold into the hand of in the prose section, for at each recurrence of the phrase we feel the grip of their captor closing more fast upon the doomed king and people. Nor are we required to take the pathetic words, the land to which they shall be lifting up their soul, as true only of those who have been long banished. For the exiles to Babylon felt this home-sickness from the very first, as Jeremiah well knew.
If we are to trust the date given by its title—and
no sufficient reason exists against our doing
so—there is still an Oracle of Jeremiah, which,
though now standing far down in our Book,
Ch. XLV, belongs to the reign of Jehoiakim, and
XLV. 1. The Word, which Jeremiah the prophet spake to Baruch, the son of Neriah, while he was writing these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah,
Cornill: the words of Jeremiah in a book. in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah.Hebrew adds saying. 2. Thus saith the LordHebrew adds the God of Israel. concerning thee, O Baruch, [3] for thou didst say:—Woe is me! Woe is me! So Greek. How hath the Lord on my pain heaped sorrow! I am worn with my groaning, Rest I find none! [Thus shalt thou say to him Superfluous after, not to say inconsistent with, verse 2; probably editorial. ] thus sayeth the Lord: 4Lo, what I built I have to destroy, And what I planted I have to root up. I have to or am about to. The Hebrew addition to this couplet, and that is the whole earth, is probably a gloss; it is not found in all Greek versions. Thou, dost thou seek thee great things? 5 Seek thou them not, For behold, on all flesh I bring evil— Rede of the Lord— But I give thee thy life as a prey, Wheresoever thou goest.
The younger man, with youth's high hopes for
his people and ambitions for himself in their
service—ambitions which he could honestly
cherish by right both of his station in lifeAntt.,
ix. 1.
To the hearts of us who have lived through the Great War, with its heavy toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.
Yet more awful than the physical calamities
which the prophet unveils throughout these
Except that he does not share these secrets of
the Heart of God, it is of Victor Hugo among
moderns that I have been most reminded when
working through Jeremiah's charges against the
king, the priests, the prophets and the whole
people of Judah—Victor Hugo in his Châtiments of
Here are two other parallels.
To Jeremiah's description of his people being
persuaded that all was well, when well it was not,
and refusing to own their dishonour, VIII. 11, 12,
take Hugo's on est infâme et content
and
Et tu chantais, en proie aux éclatants mensonges Du succès.
And to Jeremiah's acceptance of the miseries of his people as his own and refusal to the end to part from them take these lines to France:—
Je te demanderai ma part de tes misères, Moi ton fils. France, tu verras bien qu'humble tête éclipsée J'avais foi, Et que je n'eus jamais dans l'âme une pensée Que pour toi. France, être sur ta claie à l'heure où l'on te traine Aux cheveux, O ma mère, et porter mon anneau de ta chaine Je le veux!
The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their story is soon told.
When Nebuchadrezzar deported King Jehoiachin
in 597, he set up in his place his uncle
Mattaniah, a son of Josiah by that Hamutal, who
was also the mother of the miserable Jehoahaz.Antt.
vii. 5.
There remained in Jerusalem the elements—sincerely
patriotic but rash and in politics inexperienced—of
a war-party,
restless to revolt
from Babylon and blindly confident of the strength
of their walls and of their men to resist the arms
of the great Empire. Of their nation they and
their fellows alone had been spared the judgment
of the Lord and prided themselves on being the
Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival
and security on their own land: for they said to
The intrigues of Egypt persisted, however,
and, in 589 or 588, after the accession of Pharaoh
Hophra,
From these rapidly descending years a number
of prophecies by Jeremiah have come to us, as
well as narratives of the trials which he endured
because of his faithfulness to the Word of the
Lord, and his sane views of the facts of the time.
As we read these prophecies and narratives
several changes become clear in the position and
circumstances of the Prophet, and in his temper
and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words
have been, we are not surprised that to his contemporaries
he has grown to be a personage of
greater impressiveness and authority than before.
He has still his enemies but these are not found
in exactly the same quarters as under Jehoiakim.
Instead of an implacable king, and princes more
or less respectful and friendly, in the king he has
now a friend, though a timid and ineffective one,
while the new and inferior princes appear almost
wholly against him. Formerly both priests and
prophets had been his foes, but now only the
prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one
It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the
most momentous events in the history of Israel,
with which Jeremiah's earliest Oracle under
Ṣedekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more
the Word of the Lord starts to him from a vision,
this time of two baskets, one of good the other of
bad figs, which the Lord, he says, caused me to see:
a vision which I take to be as physical and actual
as those of the almond-rod and the caldron upon
his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though
others interpret it as imaginative like the visions
of Amos.
XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah? And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad, which for their
So Greek. badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of the Lord came unto me, [5] saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel—Like unto these good figs I look on the exiles of Judah, Whom away from this place I have sent To the Chaldeans' land for (their) good. For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6 And bring them back to this land, And build them and not pull them down, And plant them and not pluck up. 7. And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord, and they shall be for a people unto Me, and I will be to them for God, when they turn to me with all their heart. 8. But like the bad figs which cannot be eaten for their
So Greek and other versions. badness—thus saith the Lord—so I give up Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes and the remnant of Jerusalem, the left in this land,Greek city. with them that dwell in the land of Egypt.Jews who may have stirred up Egypt against Babylon. 9. And I will set them for consternationSo Greek; Hebrew adds for an evil, to all kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I drive them. And I will send among them the sword, the famine and the pestilence, tilla corrupt repetition of the preceding word(Driver).they be consumed from off the ground which I gave to them. Hebrew adds and to their fathers.
We cannot overestimate the effect upon Jeremiah
himself, and through him and Ezekiel upon the
subsequent history of Israel's religion, of this
drastic separation in 597 of the exiles of Judah
from the remnant left in the land. After suffering
for years the hopelessness of converting his
people, the Prophet at last saw an Israel of whom
hope might be dared. It was not their distance
which lent enchantment to his view for he gives
proof that he can descry the dross still among
them, despite the furnace through which they have
passed.dreed
their weird,
gone through the fire, been lifted out
of the habits and passions of the past, and
chastened by banishment—pensive and wistful as
exile alone can bring men to be.
We also have come out of the Great War with
the best of us gone, and feel the contrast between
their distant purity, out of great tribulation, and the
unworthiness of those who are left. But neither
to Jeremiah nor to any of his time was such inspiration
possible as we draw from our brave,
self-sacrificing dead. No confidence then existed
in a life beyond the grave. Jeremiah himself can
only weep for the slain of his people. His last vision
If the vision of the Figs reveals the ethical grounds of Jeremiah's new hope for Israel, his Letter to the Exiles, XXIX. 1-23, discloses still another ground on which that hope was based—his clear and sane appreciation of the politics of his time. And it adds a pronouncement of profound significance for the future of Israel's religion, that the sense of the presence of God, faith in His Providence and Grace, and prayer to Him were independent of Land and Temple.
From the subsequent fortunes of the exiles we
know what liberal treatment they must have received
from Nebuchadrezzar. They were settled
by themselves; they were not, as in Egypt of old,
It is proof of the change in the Prophet's position
among his people
XXIX. 1. These are the words of the Letter which Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem unto [the
remnant of] the elders of the exiles, [3] by the hand of Eleasah, son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, son of Hilḳiah, whom Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon unto the king of Babylon saying, [4] Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, unto the exiles whom I have exiled from Jerusalem: This title has been much expanded, as the briefer Greek shows, and indeed much more than it shows. In 1 the addition of priests and prophets is in view of 8 and 15 evidently wrong. The Hebrew remnant of (before the elders) which Greek lacks is difficult. It seems a later addition to the text when many of the elders had died. Duhm's suggestion of a revolt of the early exiles and the execution of many of the elders by Nebuchadrezzar is imaginary. In verse 2 we have such a needless gloss or expansion as later scribes were fond of making. Build houses and settle ye down, 5 Plant gardens and eat of their fruit, Take ye wives, 6 And beget sons and daughters. Take wives to your sons, Give your daughters to husbands, To beget sons and daughters, Greek omits this line. And increase Hebrew adds there. and do not diminish.And seek ye the peace of the land, Greek; Hebrew city. 7To the which I have banished you, And pray for it unto the Lord, For in her peace your peace shall be. 8. [For thus saith the Lord, Let not the prophets in your midst deceive you, nor your diviners, nor hearken to the dreams they (?) dream. 9. For falsehood are they prophesying unto you in My Name; I have not sent them.]
8 and 9 strike one as a premature reference to the prophets. 10. For thus saith the Lord, So soon as seventy years be fulfilled for Babylon, I will visit you and establish My Word toward you by bringing youGreek perhaps better your people, for in seventy years the elders addressed must have died out. back to this place.For I am thinking about you— 11 Rede of the Lord— Thoughts not of evil but peace To give you a Future and Hope. Ye shall pray Me, and I will hear you, 12 Seek Me and find; 13 If ye ask Me with all your heart I shall be found of you. 14
By omitting all of verses 12-14 that is not given
by the Greek we get these eight lines in approximately
Jeremiah's favourite Qinah-measure. The
Greek also lacks verses 16-20, which irrelevantly
digress from the exiles to the guilt and doom of
the Jews in Jerusalem, and which it is difficult to
think that Jeremiah would have put into a letter
to be carried by two of these same Jews.
Jeremiah's Letter to the Exiles had its consequences. First, there was their claim to have prophets of the Lord among themselves, which in our text immediately follows the Letter as if part of it, XXIX. 15, 21-23, but which is probably of a somewhat later date.
XXIX. 15. Because ye have said, The Lord hath raised us up prophets in Babylon, [21] thus saith the Lord concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and concerning Ṣedekiah son of Maaseiah,
Greek lacks the names of both the fathers, and also the last clause of Hebrew, 21, which prophesy a lie to you in My Name. Behold I am to give them into the hand of the king of Babylon and to your eyes shall he slay them. 22. And of them shall a curse be taken up by all the exiles of Judah who are in Babylon saying,The Lord set thee like Ṣedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted23. Because they have wrought folly in Israel and committed adultery with their neighbours' wives, and in My Name have spoken words which IThis verb is a play on the name of Ahab's father. in the fire!commanded them not. I am He who knoweth and am witness—Rede of the Lord.
And, second, another of the prophets
among
the exiles sent to Jerusalem a protest against
Jeremiah's Letter, XXIX. 24-29.
This passage, especially in its concise Greek form, which as usual is devoid of the repetitions of titles and other redundant phrases in the Hebrew text, bears the stamp of genuineness.
XXIX. 24. And unto Shemaiah the Nehemalite thou shalt say:
In Hebrew follows in 25a a useless editorial addition. 25b. Because thou hast sent in thine own name a letter to Ṣephaniah, son of Maaseiah, the priest,Hebrew precedes this with to all the people which are in Jerusalem and, and follows it with and to all the priests, additions very doubtful in view of verse 29. In II. Kings xxv. 18 Ṣephaniah is second priest. saying, [26] The Lord hath appointed thee priest, instead of Jehoiada the priest, to be overseer in the House of the Lord for every man that is raving and takes on himself to be a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in the stocks and in the collar. 27. Now therefore why hast thou not curbed Jeremiah of Anathoth, who takes on himself to prophesy unto you? 28. Hath he not sent to us in Babylon saying,ItThe time of the captivity. is long! Build ye houses and settle down, and plant gardens and eat their fruit.29. And Ṣephaniah read this letter in the ears of Jeremiah; [30] and the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying, [31] Send to the exiles saying: Thus saith the Lord concerning Shemaiah the Nehemalite, Because Shemaiah hath prophesied unto you, although I did not send him, and hath led you to trust in a lie; [32] therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold I am about to visit upon Shemaiah and upon his seed; there shall not be a man to them in your midst to see the good which I am going to do you. Greek lacks the unnecessary remainder.
In one respect Jeremiah has not changed. His
denunciation of individuals who oppose the Word
of the Lord by himself is as strong as ever, and
still more dramatically than in the case of Shemaiah
it appears in his treatment of the prophets
within Jerusalem, who flouted his counsels of
subjection to Nebuchadrezzar, Chs. XXVII-XXVIII.
In this narrative or narratives (for the
whole seems compounded of several, perhaps
not all referring to the same occasion) the differences
between the Greek and Hebrew texts are
even more than usually great. The Greek again
attracts our preference by its freedom from superfluous
titles, repetitions and redundances, and is
probably nearer than the Hebrew to the original
of Baruch's Memoirs of the Prophet. But it is
It was the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, 593, when messengers from the neighbouring nations came to Jerusalem to intrigue under Egyptian influence for revolt against Babylon. Jeremiah was commanded to make a yoke of bars and thongs, and having put it on his neck to charge the messengers to tell their masters—
XXVII. 4. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: [5] I have made the Earth by My great power and Mine outstretched arm, and I give it unto whom it seems right to Me. 6. So now I have given all these lands
Greek the earth. into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, to serve him,Hebrew my servant. and even the beasts of the field to serve him. 8. And it shall be that the nation and kingdom, which will not put their neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon, with the sword and with the famineHebrew adds pestilence. shall I visit them—Rede of the Lord—till they be consumed at his hand (?). 9. But ye, hearken ye not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your dreamers, Greek; Hebrew dreams. nor to your soothsayers, nor to your sorcerers, who say,Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon; [10] for they prophesy a lie unto you, to the result of removing you far from your own soil. 11. But the nation which brings its neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon and serves him, I will let it rest on its own soil and it shall till this and abide within it.
This is followed by a similar Oracle to Ṣedekiah himself, 12-15, and by another, 16-22, to the priests concerning a matter of peculiar anxiety to them.
16. Thus saith the Lord, Hearken ye not to the words of the
Greek; Hebrew your. prophets, who prophesy to you saying, Behold, the vessels of the Lord's House shall be brought back from Babylon; for a lie are they prophesying to you. I have not sent them.So adds Greek. 18. But if prophets they be, and if the Word of the Lord is with them, let them now plead with Me [that the vessels left in the House of the Lord come not to Babylon]. 19. Yet thus saith the Lord concerning the residue of the vessels, [20] which the king of Babylon did not take when he carriedJeconiah into exile from Jerusalem, [22] unto Babylon shall they be brought—Rede of the Lord.
The Hebrew text concludes with a prophecy of
the restoration of the vessels, which had it been
in the original the Greek translators could hardly
have omitted, and which is therefore probably a
post factum insertion. Not only, then, were the
sacred vessels taken away in 597 to remain in
Babylon, but such as were still left in Jerusalem
would also be carried thither. It is possible that
this address is now out of place and should follow
the next chapter, XXVIII, which deals only with
the vessels carried off in 597. Like the Hebrew
the Greek text gives XXVIII a separate introduction
which dates it in the fifth month of the fourth
year of Ṣedekiah, but omits the Hebrew statement
that the year was the same as that of the events
and words recorded in XXVII. The extent of
the differences between the Hebrew and Greek
continues to be at least as great as before,
Jeremiah was still wearing his symbolic yoke of wood and thongs in the Temple, when his prediction that the sacred vessels would not be restored was flatly contradicted and with as much assurance that the contradiction was from the God of Israel, as Jeremiah's assurance about his own words. The speaker was like himself from the country of Benjamin, from Gibeon near Anathoth, Hananiah son of Azzur, who said—
XXVIII. 2. Thus saith the Lord, I have broken
The prophetic perfect = I will break, verse 4. the yoke of the king of Babylon! 3. Within two years I will bring back to this place the vessels of the House of the Lord, [4] and Jeconiah and all the exiles of Judah that went to Babylon; for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon. 5. Then said Jeremiah to Hananiah, before the priests and all the peopleAs in xxvii. 16 Greek puts the priests after the people. standing in the House of the Lord—yes, [6] Jeremiah said,Baruch is not well accustomed to long sentences, therefore repeats this clause (Duhm). Amen! The Lord do so! The Lord establish the words thou hast prophesied, by bringing back the vessels of the Lord's House and all the exiles from Babylon to this place! 7. Only hear, I pray thee, the Word of the Lord which I am about to speak in thine ears and in the ears of all the people. 8. The prophets who have been before me and thee from of old,they prophesied against many lands and against great kingdoms of war [and of famine (?) and pestilence]. Greek lacks the bracketed words; famine by changing one letter of the Hebrew for evil. 9. The prophet who prophesies of peace (it is only) when the wordHebrew adds of the prophet. comes to pass that the prophet is knownRecognised or acknowledged. whom in truth the Lord hath sent. 10. Then HananiahGreek adds In the sight of all the people; also gives the plural bars. took the bars off the neck of Jeremiah and brake them. 11. And Hananiah spake before all the people saying: Thus saith the Lord, Even so will I break the yoke of the king of Babylon [within two years]Greek lacks these words. from off the necks of all the nations. And Jeremiah went his way. 12. Then came the Word of the Lord to Jeremiah, after Hananiah had broken the bars from off his neck, saying, [13] Go tell Hananiah, Thus saith the Lord: Thou hast broken the bars of wood but I willSo Greek; Hebrew thou shalt. make in their stead bars of iron. 14. For thus saith the Lord, An iron yoke have I put upon the necks of all [these] nations, that they may serve the king of Babylon. 15. And Jeremiah said toHananiah, Hebrew adds Hear now Hananiah. The Lord hath not sent thee, but thou leadest this people to trust in a lie. 16. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I am about to dispatch thee from off the face of the ground—this year thou shalt die. 17. And he was deadHebrew adds that year. by the seventh month.
All praise to Baruch for his concise and vivid report, and to the Greek translator who has reproduced it! The editors of the Hebrew text have diluted its strength.
With this narrative we are bound to take the
section of the Book entitled Of the Prophets, XXIII.
9-32. The text is in parts uncertain, and includes
obvious expansions. These removed, we can
fairly distinguish a continuous metrical form up
to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27. The
metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise
the suggestion
There is no reason against taking the remainder as Oracles by Jeremiah himself. No dates are given them; they probably come from various stages of his ministry, for he early found out the false prophets, and his experience of them and their errors lasted to the end. But probably this collection of the Oracles was made under Ṣedekiah; that Baruch gathered it still later is not so likely.
Of the prophets:— XXIII. 9 Broken my heart within me, All pithless my bones. I'm become like a drunken man Like a wight overcome with wine. Hebrew adds Before the Lord, yea before His holy words (Greek before His glorious majesty). Both break the connection and are unmetrical. Of adulterers the land is full 10 Their course it is evil, The couplet here given by Hebrew and Greek is too long for the verse, breaks the connection, and is apparently a copyist's dittography expanded by quotation from ix. 2 (Duhm). But a single line is needed. Helped by Greek, we might read and because of these mourns. Their might not right. For prophet and priest alike 11 Are utterly godless. After Duhm. E'en in My House their evil I find— Rede of the Lord. Therefore their way shall they have 12 In slippery places, Thrust shall they be into darkness So Syriac, alone yielding a sound division of the lines. And fall therein, When I bring calamity on them, The year of their visitation. In Samaria's prophets I saw the unseemly, 13 By Baal they prophesied. Hebrew and Greek add a line breaking metre and parallel. In Jerusalem's prophets I see the horrible— 14 Adultery, walking in lies. They strengthen the hands of ill-doers, That none from his wickedness turns. To Me they are all like Sodom, Like Gomorra her Jerusalem's (?). dwellers!Therefore thus saith the Lord: Greek adds of Hosts concerning the prophets. 15Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, And drug them with poison. Cornill rejects this couplet, I think needlessly. For forth from Jerusalem's prophets Godlessness starts o'er the land. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts 16 Hearken not to the words of the prophets They make them bubbles, So Greek, cp. ii. 5, p. 92. A vision from their hearts they speak, Not from the mouth of the Lord. Saying to the scorners of His Or My, Erbt and Cornill. Word 17To all who follow their stubborn hearts 18. [For who hath stood in the council of the Lord and hath seen His Word? Who hath attended and heard?]
So Greek. Hebrew feared and heard His word. These clauses are not metrical and may be a later intrusion; which 19, 20 certainly are, for they find their proper place in xxx. 23, 24. I have not sent the prophets, 21 Of themselves they run. I have not spoken to them, They do the prophesying. If they had stood in My Council, 22 And heard My Words, My people they would have been turning So Greek. From Hebrew expands, from their evil way and. the wrong of their doings.I am a God who is near 23 Not a God who is far. So Greek affirmatively. Hebrew, by putting the couplet as a question, confuses the meaning. To near it adds Rede of the Lord. Can any man hide him in secret 24 And I not see him? Is it not heaven and earth that I fill?— Rede of the Lord. I have heard what the prophets say 25 Who preach in My Name, Falsely saying, I have dreamed,So Duhm happily takes a third repetition (for other cases of this kind, see vii. 4; xxii. 29) instead of the senseless how long at the beginning of the next verse. Will the heart of the prophets turn, Giesebrecht's happy emendation. 26Who prophesy lies? And in their prophesying ... (?) So Greek. The deceit of their heart, Who plan that My people forget My Name Greek Law. 27Through the dreams they tell, Just as their fathers forgot My Name through Baal. The prophet with whom is a dream 28 Let him tell his So Greek. dream;But he with whom is My Word, My Word let him speak in truth. What has the straw with the wheat? Greek adds so My words. —Rede of the Lord— My Word, is it not Hebrew adds thus. like fire 29And the hammer that shatters the rock? 30. Therefore, Behold, I am against the prophets—Rede of the Lord—who steal My Words
each from his mate. 31. Behold, I am against the prophets who fling out their tongues and rede a Rede. So lit. or call it a Rede; fling out so two Greek versions, Hebrew take. 32. Behold, I am against the prophets of false dreams who tell them and lead My people astray by their falsehood and extravagance—not I have sent them or charged them, nor of any profit whatsoever are they to this people. Zeph. iii. 4 .In 31 and 32 Hebrew repeats Rede of the Lord. The section which follows can hardly be Jeremiah's.
We have now all the material available for
judgment upon Jeremiah's life-long controversy
with the other prophets. His message and theirs
were diametrically opposite. But both he and
they spoke in the name of the same God, the God
of their nation. Both were convinced that they
had His Mind. Both were sure that their respective
predictions would be fulfilled. Each repudiated
the other's claim to speak in the name of
their nation's God. With each it was an affair of
strong, personal convictions, which we may grant,
in the case of some at least of Jeremiah's opponents,
to have been as honest as his. At first sight it
may seem hopeless to analyse such equal assurances,
based apparently on identical grounds, with
the view of discovering psychological differences
between them; and as if we must leave the issue
What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the similar surfaces of Jeremiah's and the prophets' assurances we find two deep distinctions between them—one moral and one intellectual.
We take the moral first for it is the deeper.
Both Jeremiah and the prophets based their predictions
on convictions of the character of their
God. But while the prophets thought of Him
and of His relations to Israel from the level of that
But the grounds of the difference between
Jeremiah and the other prophets were also intellectual.
Jeremiah had the right eye for events
and throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells
us how the will of God was sometimes suggested
to him by the sight of certain physical objects—the
almond-blossom that broke the winter of
Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or the potter at his
wheel—so the sight of that in which the physical
Making allowance, then, for the fact that we
depend for our knowledge of the controversy upon
the record of only one of the parties to it, and
imputing to the other prophets the best possible,
we are left with these results: that as proved by
events the truth was with Jeremiah's word and
not with that of his opponents, and that the causes
of this were his profoundly deeper ethical conceptions
of God working in concert with his unwarped
To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets who were against him.
Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he opposed the Word of the Living God, Who spoke to the times and freely acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.
Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In contrast, not merely were Jeremiah's prophecies conditional but the conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.
Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage
Jeremiah showed patience with his opponents,
the patience which is proof of the soundness of
a man's own convictions. He believed in the
liberty of prophesying,
The prophet with whom is a dream Let him tell his dream, And he with whom is My Word, My Word let him speak in truth!
Jeremiah had no fear of the issue being threshed
out between them. The wheat would be surely
cleared from the straw.
Further still, Jeremiah had to his credit that
of which his opponents appear to have been
One point remains. In answering Hananiah
Jeremiah adduced the example of the acknowledged
prophets of the past as being always
prophets of doom, so that the presumption was in
favour of those who still preached doom; yet he
allowed that if any prophet promised peace, and
peace came to pass, he also might be known as
History has no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet's feet as low as the feet of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties of defence, the last crusts. His hunger, and, what is still keener, his pity for those who suffer it with him, may break his faith into cowardice and superstition. But if faith stands, and common-sense with it, his opportunities are high. His powers of spiritual vision may prove to be also those of political and even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics, to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a hero.
The Old Testament gives us three instances—Elisha's
brave visions during the Syrian blockade
of Dothan and siege of Samaria; Isaiah, upon the
solitary strength of his faith, carrying Jerusalem
The records of the Prophet's activity and sufferings during the siege are so curiously scattered through the Book and furnished with such headlines as to leave it clear that they were added at different times and possibly from different sources. Some of them raise the question whether or not they are doublets.
Three, XXI. 1-10, XXXIV. 1-7, XXXVII. 3-10,
bear pronouncements by Jeremiah that the city
must surrender or be stormed and burned. Of
these the first and third each gives as the occasion
of the pronouncement it quotes, Ṣedekiah's mission
of two men to the Prophet. Several critics regard
these missions as identical. But can we doubt
that during that crisis of two years the distracted
king would send more than once for a Divine word?
And for this what moments were so natural as
when the Chaldeans were beginning the siege,
XXI. 4, and when they raised it, XXXVII. 5?
That one of the two messengers is on each occasion
the same affords an inadequate reason—and no
other exists—for arguing that both passages are but
differently telling the same story.a free composition
upon it by another hand!
The first, XXI 1-10, was given as the Chaldeans
closed upon Jerusalem but the Jews were not yet
driven within the walls.
The second, XXXIV. 1-7, records a pronouncement
unsought by the king but evoked from
XXXIV. 2b. Thus saith the Lord: This city shall certainly be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it and burn it with fire. 3. And thou shalt not escape but surely be taken and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall look into his eyes, and his mouth speak with thy mouth,
Greek omits this clause inadvertently. The proposed reversal to thy mouth speak with his mouth (Giesebrecht, etc.) misses the point; surely the captor would speak first. and to Babylon shalt thou come. 4. Yet hear the Lord's Word, O Ṣedekiah, king of Judah! 5. Thus saith the Lord,Hebrew adds concerning thee, thou shalt not die by the sword. In peace shalt thou die, and as the burningsOf spices. Some Greek versions read mournings, and so shall they mourn for thee. for thy fathers who reigned before thee so shall they burn for thee, and withAh lord!lament thee. I have spoken the Word—Rede of the Lord.
The miserable king, how much worse was in store
for him than even Jeremiah was given to foresee!
Duhm (to our surprise, as Cornill remarks) agrees
The third pronouncement to Ṣedekiah, XXXVII.
3-10,
XXXVII. 7. Thus saith the Lord: Thus say ye to the king of Judah who sent you to inquire of Me,
Greek reads say thou and thee for me, and omits you. Behold, Pharaoh's army, which is coming forth to help you, shall return to the land of Egypt. 8. And the Chaldeans shall come back and fight against this city and take it and burn it with fire. 9. ForSo Greek. thus saith the Lord: Deceive not yourselves saying, The Chaldeans shall surely go off from us; they shall not go. 10. Even though ye smote the whole host of the Chaldeans that are fighting with you, and but wounded men were left, yet should theserise, each in his tent, Greek place. and burn this city with fire.
It is very remarkable how the spiritual powers of
the Prophet endowed him with these sound views
of the facts of his time, and of their eventualities
whether in the political or in the military sphere.
For nearly forty years he had foretold judgment
on his people out of the North: for eighteen at
least he had been sure that its instrument would
be Nebuchadrezzar and he had foreseen the first
deportation of the Jews to Babylonia. Now step
by step through the siege he is clear as to what
must happen—clear that the Chaldeans will invest
the city, clear when they raise the investment that
they will beat off the Egyptian army of relief and
return, clear that resistance to them is hopeless,
and will but add thousands of deaths by famine
and pestilence before the city is taken and burned
and its survivors carried into exile—all of which
comes to pass. But this political sagacity and
military foresight have their source in moral and
spiritual convictions—the Prophet's assurance of
the character and will of God, his faith in the
Divine Government not of a single nation but of
all the powers of the world, and his belief that a
people is saved and will endure for the service of
mankind, neither because of past privileges nor by
the traditions in which it trusts, nor by adherence
The case of John Knox affords a parallel to
that of the Hebrew prophet. He told the garrison
and citizens of St. Andrews, when besieged by the
French, that their corrupt life could not escape
punishment of God and that was his continued
advertisement from the time he was called to
preach
among them. When they triumphed of
their victory (the first twenty days they had
many prosperous chances) he lamented and ever
said
that is France. All of which
came to pass, as with Jeremiah's main predictions.They saw not what he saw!
When they
bragged of the force and thickness of their walls,
he said, They should be but egg-shells!
When
they vaunted England will rescue us!
he said,
Ye shall not see them, but ye shall be delivered
into your enemies' hands and shall be carried to
a strange country!
History of the Reformation in Scotland,
Bk. i.
The second of Jeremiah's pronouncements
given above is followed by the story of the
besieged's despicable treatment of their slaves,
XXXIV. 8-22; based on a memoir by Baruch,
but expanded. Both the Hebrew and the shorter
Greek offer in parts an uncertain text, and add
this problem that their story begins with a
covenant to proclaim a Libertydeclare a Liberty of Tender Consciences,
Declaration
of Breda by Charles II.that the emancipation was undertaken
in obedience to the neglected law, and that to make their action
even more effective ... they decided to emancipate all their
slaves without waiting till the legal term had expired
(Peake).
Yet it is also possible that the reference in verses 13, 14 to the
law, a deathbed repentance with the
usual sequel on recovery.
XXXIV. 17. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not obeyed Me by proclaiming a Liberty each for his countryman. Behold I am about to proclaim for you a Liberty—to the sword, to the famine and to the pestilence, and I will set you a consternation to all kingdoms of the earth.... 21. And Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes will I give into the hands of their foes, the king of Babylon's host that are gone up from you. 22. Behold, I am about to command—Rede of the Lord—and bring them back to this city and they shall storm and take it and burn it with fire, and the townships of Judah will I make desolate and tenantless.
Are we not in danger of the guilt of a similar
perjury to the men who fought for us in the Great
About this time the ill-treatment of Jeremiah, which had ceased on Ṣedekiah's accession, was resumed. The narrative, or succession of narratives, of this begins at XXXVII. 11, and continues to XXXIX. 14, with interruptions in XXXIX. 1, 2, 4-13. Save for a few expansions, the whole must have been taken from Baruch's memoirs. Except for the omission of XXXIX. 4-13, the differences of the Greek from the Hebrew are unimportant, consisting in the usual absence of repetitions of titles, epithets and names.
The siege being raised, Jeremiah was going
out by the North gate of the city to Anathoth to
claim or to manage
Yet through his bars he still defied his foes and they were at him again, quoting to the king two Oracles which he had uttered before and apparently was repeating to those who resorted to him in the Guard-Court.
XXXVIII. 1. And Shephatiah, Mattan's son, Gedaliah Pashḥur's son, Jucal Shelamiah's son, and Pashḥur Malchiah's son,
Greek omits this last named. heard the words Jeremiah was speaking about the people:So Greek: Hebrew unto all the people. [2]Thus saith the Lord, He that abides in this city shall die by the sword, the famine or the pestilence, but he that goes forth to the Chaldeans shall live—his life shall be to him for a prey but he shall live.Greek lacks to him and Syriac the last clause. 3.ThusGreek For thus. saith the Lord: This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon's host and they shall take it.
Verse 2 is rejected by Duhm and Cornill partly
Was such advice right or wrong? The question
is much debated. The two German scholars just
quoted find it so wrong that they cannot think of
Jeremiah could not have brought better
to the civilians and soldiers of Jerusalem.
It would, however, be most irrelevant to deduce
from so peculiar a situation, and from the Divine
counsels applicable to this alone, any sanction for
pacificism
in general, or to set up Jeremiah as
an example of the duty of deserting one's government
when at war, in all circumstances and whatever
were the issues at stake. We might as well
affirm that the example of the man, who rouses
his family to flee when he finds their home
hopelessly on fire, is valid for him whose house
is threatened by burglars. Isaiah inspired resistance
to the Assyrian besiegers of Jerusalem
in his day with as Divine authority as Jeremiah
denounced resistance to the Chaldean besiegers
in his. Nor can we doubt that our Prophet
would have appreciated the just, the inevitable
revolt of the Maccabees against their pagan
the stability of
the times.
It is another and very different thing
to refuse, on alleged grounds of conscience, to
follow one's government when it lifts the sword
against a people who have broken their oath,
and mobilises its subjects in defence of justice
and of the freedom of weaker nations, imperilled
by that perjury.
But the princes seem to have honestly believed that Jeremiah was guilty of treason, and said to the king—
XXXVIII. 4. Let this man, we pray, be put to death forasmuch as he weakens the hands of the men of war left to the city and the hands of all the people by speaking such words to them, for this man is seeking not the welfare of this people but the hurt. 5. And the king said, Behold he is in your hand; for the king was not able to do anything against them.
So Greek. Hebrew takes this clause as part of Ṣedekiah's reply: the king is not able to do anything against you. 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah the king's son, in the Court of the Guard; and they let down Jeremiahwith cords. In the cistern there was no water, only mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire.
The story which follows is one of the fairest in
the Old Testament, XXXVIII. 7-13.
Once more, as we might expect, the restless
king sent for Jeremiah.
XXXVIII. 21. But if thou refuse to go forth this is the thing the Lord has given me to see: 22. Behold all the women, that are left in the
king of Judah's house, After the deportation of 597. brought forth to the princes of the king of Babylon and saying,They set thee on and compelled thee, The men of thy peace; Now they have plunged thy feet in the swam They turn back from thee! So Greek; Hebrew reads thy feet are plunged, and omits from thee; 23 is a late expansion.
The verse is in Jeremiah's favourite measure, and its figures spring immediately from his experience. The mire can hardly have dried on him, into which he had been dropped, but at least his friends had pulled him out of it; the king had been forced into far deeper mire by his own counsellors, and they were leaving him in it!
The nervous king jibbed from the vision without
remark and begged Jeremiah not to tell what had
passed between them, but, if asked, to say that
he had been supplicating Ṣedekiah not to send
him back to the house of Jonathan; which answer
the Prophet obediently gave to the inquisitive
princes and so quieted them: the matter was not
perceived. He has been blamed for prevaricating.
On this point Calvin is as usual candid and sane.
It was indeed not a falsehood, but this evasion
cannot wholly be excused. The Prophet had an
honest fear; he was perplexed and anxious—it
The prophets
were men of like passions with ourselves. By now
Jeremiah had aged, and was strained by the
flogging, the darkness, the filth and the hunger
he had suffered. Can we wonder at or blame
him? But with what authenticity does its frankness
stamp the whole story!
With most commentators I have treated Ch.
XXXVIII as the account of a fresh arrest of
Jeremiah and a fresh interview between him and
Ṣedekiah. I see, however, that Dr. Skinner takes
the whole chapter to be a duplication.
should have taken place in similar
circumstances within so short a time.
Yet the
king was just the man to appeal to the Prophet
time after time during the siege. The similarities
in the two stories are natural because circumstances
were more or less similar at the various
stages of such a siege; but the differences are
if we can suppose that the
offence with which he is charged in XXXVIII.
1 ff. could have been committed while he was a
prisoner in the court of the guard;
but this
appears to Dr. Skinner as hardly credible.
Yet
the incidents related in XXXII. 6-15 show not
only that it is credible but that it actually
happened. In the East such imprisonment does
not prevent a prisoner, though shackled, from
communicating with his friends and even with
the gaping crowd outside his bars, as I have seen
more than once.
In the Court of the Guard Jeremiah remained
till the city was taken.
XXXII. 6. And Jeremiah said, The Word of the Lord came to me saying, [7] Behold, Hanamel son of Shallum thine uncle is coming to thee to say, Buy thee my field in Anathoth, for thine is the right of redemption to buy it. 8. And Hanamel son of my uncle came to me in the guard-court and said, Buy my field that is
Anathoth, for the right of inheritance is thine and thine the redemption; buy it for thyself. Then I knew that it was the Lord's Word. 9. So I bought the field from Hanamel mine uncle's son and weighed to him seventeen silver shekels. 10. And I subscribed the deed and sealed it and took witnesses, weighing the money in the balances. 11. And I took the deed of sale, both that which was sealed and that which was open, The custom was to have one copy open for reference, and one sealed for confirmation if the open one should be disputed. To sealed Hebrew adds the injunction and conditions. [12] and I gave it to Baruch son of Neriah, son of Maḥseiah, in the sight of Hanamel mine uncle's son, and in sight of the Jews sitting in the guard-court. 13. And in their sight I charged Baruch, saying, [14] Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: Take this deed of sale which is sealed, and this deed which is open, and put them in an earthen vessel that they may last many days. 15. For thus saith the Lord, Houses and fields and vineyards shall yet again be bought in this land. 16. Now after I had given the deed of sale to Baruch, Neriah's son, I prayed to the Lord saying, Ah Lord ... (?) [24] behold the mounts; they are come to the city to take it, and the city shall be given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it, because of the sword and the famine and the pestilence;and what Thou hast spoken is come to pass, and, lo, Thou art seeing it. 25. Yet Thou saidst to me, Buy thee the field for money, so I wrote the deed and sealed it and took witnesses—whereas the city is to be given into the hands of the Chaldeans!
The tone of the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country's freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of property in land. Let those observe, who deny to such individual rights any communal interest or advantage. Jeremiah at least proves how a small property of his own may help a prophet in his hope for his country and people.
All this is followed in Ch. XXXIII by a series
of oracles under the heading The Word of the Lord
came to Jeremiah a second time while he was still shut
up in the guard-court. Because verses 14-26 are
lacking in the Greek and could not have been
omitted by the translator had they been in the
original text, and because they are composed
partly of mere echoes of Jeremiah and partly of
promises for the Monarchy and Priesthood not
Jerusalem fell at last in 586 and Jeremiah's imprisonment
in the guard-court was over.
There are two separated accounts of what befel
Jeremiah when the city was taken. Ch. XXXIX.
3, 14 tells us that he was fetched from the guard-court
by Babylonian officers,
It is unfortunate that we take our impressions
of Nebuchadrezzar from the late Book of Daniel
instead of from the contemporary accounts of his
policy by Jeremiah, Baruch and Ezekiel. A proof
of his wisdom and clemency is here. While deporting
a second multitude to Babylonia in the
interests of peace and order, he placed Judah
under a native governor and chose for the post a
Jew of high family traditions and personal character.
All honour to Gedaliah for accepting so
difficult and dangerous a task! He attracted those
Jewish captains and their bands who during the
siege had maintained themselves in the country,
To this quiet interval, brief as it tragically
Heilige Schrift des A. T.,
754), whose upper date for them after
597 is too early, and to Gillies (p. 238) who refers them to the Prophet's
imprisonment.
From its measure and vivid vision the first piece might well be Jeremiah's; but it uses Jacob, the later literature's favourite name for Israel, which Jeremiah does not use, and (in the last two verses) some phrases with an outlook reminiscent of the Second Isaiah. The verses describe a day when the world shall again be shaken, but out of the shaking Israel's deliverance shall come.
[The sound of trembling we hear, XXX. 5 Dread without peace. Enquire now and look ye, 6 If men be bearing? Why then do I see every man Hebrew adds the gloss like a bearing woman. With his hands on his loins? All faces are changed, and Livid become. So Greek, reading היו for הוי. For great is that day, 7 None is there like it, With a time of trouble for Jacob. Yet out of it saved shall he be. It shall come to pass on that day— 8 Rede of the Lord— I will break their So Greek, Hebrew thy. yoke from theirSo Greek, Hebrew thy. neck,Their So Greek, Hebrew thy. thongs I will burst;And strangers no more shall they serve, After the Greek. But serve the Lord their God, 9 And David their king, Whom I will raise up for them.]
The next piece is more probably Jeremiah's, as even Duhm admits; verses 10 and 11 which precede it are not given in the Greek.
Healless to me is thy ruin, 12 Sick is thy wound, Not for thy sore is remede, 13 No closing (of wounds) for thee! Forgot thee have all thy lovers, 14 Thee they seek not. With the stroke of a foe I have struck thee, A cruel correction. Why criest thou over thy ruin, 15 Thy healless pain? For the mass of thy guilt, thy sins profuse Have I done to thee these.
If these Qînah quatrains are not Jeremiah's,
some one else could match him to the letter and
the very breath. They would fall fitly from his
lips immediately upon the fulfilment of his people's
doom. Less probably his are the verses which
follow and abruptly add to his stern rehearsal of
[Therefore thy devourers shall all be devoured, 16 And all thine oppressors. All shall go off to captivity; Thy spoilers for spoil shall be And all that upon thee do prey, I give for prey. For new flesh I shall bring up upon thee, 17 From thy wounds I shall heal thee; Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. Outcast they called thee, O Ṣion, Whom none seeketh after.]
The rest of the chapter is even less capable of being assigned to Jeremiah.
More of Jeremiah's own Oracles are readily
recognised in Ch. XXXI. I leave to a later
lecture the question of the authenticity of that on
The New Covenant and of the immediately preceding
XXXI. 1. At that time—Rede of the Lord—I shall be God to all the families
Greek, family. of Israel, and they shall be a people to Me.
A poem follows which metrically and in substance
bears every mark of being Jeremiah's.
The measure is his favourite Qînah, and the
memory of the Lord's ancient love for Israel,
which had stirred the youth of the Prophet,surely,
from the earliest stage of Jeremiah's prophetic career; but
both its late place in the Book
and the reasons given above argue strongly for a date at Miṣpah
under Gedaliah.
It is questionable whether the opening couplet quotes the deliverance of Israel from Egypt as a precedent for the future return of the northern tribes from captivity, described in the lines that follow; or whether this return is at once predicted by the couplet, with the usual prophetic assurance as though it had already happened. If we take the desert as this is taken in Hosea II. 14, we may decide for the latter alternative.
Grace have they found in the desert, XXXI. 2 The people escaped from the sword; While Israel makes for his rest from afar The Lord appears to him So Greek. : 3So in troth I (now) draw thee. Or continue troth to thee. Maiden of Israel! So Greek; Hebrew deck thee with. thee thy timbrelsAnd forth to the merrymen's dances. So Greek. On the hills of Samaria, And forthwith enjoy Lit make common, i.e. not be obliged to wait over the first four crops as required by the law, (their fruit).Lev. xix. 23-25 , before having the fruit released for their own use. Greek reads the similar Hebrew verb praise.On Ephraim's mountains:
The everyday happiness promised is striking.
Here speaks again the man, who, while
ruin ran over the land, redeemed his ancestral
acres in pledge of the resettlement of all his
people upon their own farms and fields. He is
back in the country, upon the landscapes of his
youth, and in this fresh prospect of the restoration
of Israel he puts first the common joys and
fruitful labours of rural life, and only after these
the national worship centred in Jerusalem. Cornill
denies this last verse to Jeremiah, feeling it
inconsistent with the Prophet's condemnation of
the Temple and the Sacrifices.
The next verses are not so recognisable as Jeremiah's, unless it be in their last couplet. The rest rather reflect the Return from Exile as on the point of coming to pass, which happened long after Jeremiah's time; and they call the nation Jacob, the name favoured by prophets of the end of the Exile.
[Ring out with joy for Jacob, 7 Shout for (?) the head of the nations, Duhm emends to on the top of the hills. Publish ye, praise ye and say, The Lord hath saved His So Greek and Targ. people,The Remnant of Israel! Behold from the North I bring them, 8 And gather from ends of the earth; Their blind and their lame together, The mother-to-be and her who hath borne. In concourse great back they come hither. With weeping forth did they go, So Greek. 9With consolations Ibid. I bring them,I lead them by So Greek. streams of water,On an even way, They stumble not on it] It is singular how each of these three verses contains not four but five lines. Cornill, by using the introduction Thus saith the Lord, omitting the remnant of Israel, combining two pairs of lines and including the following couplet, effects the arrangement of octastichs to which he has throughout the book arbitrarily committed himself. Duhm has another metrical arrangement. For a father I am become to Israel, And my first-born is Ephraim!
This couplet may well be Jeremiah's; but whether it should immediately follow verse 6 is doubtful. The next lines are hardly his, bearing the same marks of the late exile as we have seen in verses 7-9a.
[Hear, O nations, the Word of the Lord, 10 And declare on the far-away isles Or coasts. :Who hath scattered Israel will gather, And guard as a shepherd his flock. For the Lord hath ransomed Jacob 11 And redeemed from the hand of the stronger than he. They are come and ring out on Mount Ṣion, 12 Radiant Lit. they stream upon, A.V. flow together; but the verb is to be taken in the same sense as in all with the wealth of the Lord,Ps. xxxiv. 5 were lightened and inIs. lx. 5 , R.V. It is the liquid rippling light, thrown up on the face from water.With the corn, the new wine, the fresh oil, The young of the flock and the herd; Till their soul becomes as a garden well-watered, Nor again any more shall they pine. Then rejoice in the dance shall the maidens, 13 The youths and the old make merry. So Greek. When their mourning I turn to mirth Hebrew adds and will comfort them. And give them joy from their sorrow. When I richly water the soul of the priests, Richly lit. with fat, which Greek omits but to priests adds the sons of Levi, an instance of how ready later hands have been to add prose glosses to the poetry. 14And My folk with My bounty are filled— Rede of the Lord.]
The next poems no one denies to Jeremiah;
they are among the finest we have from him.
And how natural that he should conceive and
utter them in those quiet days when he was
at, or near, Ramah, the grave of the mother
of the people.
There is no reason to try, as some do, to correct
in the poems their broken measures, for these
both suit and add to the poignancy and tenderness
which throb through the whole.
Hark, in Ramah is heard lamentation 15 And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children, And will not be comforted, Hebrew and some versions add for her children. For they are not. Thus saith the Lord: 16 Refrain thy voice from weeping, And from tears thine eyes, For reward there is for thy travail— They are back from the land of the foe! [And hope there is for thy future, 17 Thy sons come back to their border.] Greek has not the first line of this couplet, and reads differently the second. The whole seems a needless variant or paraphrase of 16. I have heard, I have heard 18 Ephraim bemoaning, Like a calf untrained. For Thou art my God. Or turned to (?). Greek reads after my captivity. I repented ... (?) Some would read was chastised. I smote on my thigh. Still have that on my conscience; there is no need to doubt this line in whole or part as some do. Is Ephraim My dearest son, After all that has passed! 20A child of delights? That as oft as against him I speak I must think of him still. My bowels for him are yearning, Pity him I must!—Rede of the Lord. Set thee up way-marks, 21 Plant thyself guide-posts! Put to the highway thy heart, The way that thou wentest. Come back, O maiden of Israel, 22 Back to thy towns here. How long to drift hither and thither, Thou turn-about daughter! [For the Lord hath created a new thing on earth, A female shall compass a man.] Compass or change to (?) This couplet has been the despair of commentators. Its exilic terms, created and female, relieve us of it.
The next small poem, when we take from it certain marks of a later date is possibly Jeremiah's, though this is not certain; to the previous Oracles on Ephraim it naturally adds one upon Judah.
Thus saith the Lord: Hebrew adds of hosts, God of Israel. 23Once more shall they speak this word. In Judah's land and her towns, When I turn again their captivity: Hebrew and Greek add holy mount, a late term and here irrelevant, for it is all Judah that is described. In Judah and all her towns shall be dwelling 24 Tillers and they that roam with flocks, For I have refreshed the Greek each. weary soul, 25And cheered every soul that was pining. [On this I awoke and beheld, 26 And sweet unto me was my sleep.] Doubtful. Jeremiah had nothing to do with dreams as means of prophecy. Behold, are coming the days— 27 Rede of the Lord— When Israel and Judah Hebrew adds to each the house of. I sowWith the seed of man and of beast; And it shall be, as I was wakeful upon them 28 To tear down and do evil, Hebrew adds from i. 10 (q.v.), pluck up, break down and destroy. So wakeful on them will I be, To build and to plant— Rede of the Lord.
These prophecies of the physical restoration of
Israel and Judah are fitly followed by two, in what
is rather rhythmical prose than verse, which define
the moral and spiritual aspects of the new
dispensation; both laying stress on individual
The time of relief and fair promise, out of which
we have supposed that the Prophet conceived and
uttered the preceding Oracles, came to a sudden
and tragic close with the assassination of the good
governor Gedaliah by the fanatic Ishmael. Had
this not happened we can see from those Oracles
on what favourable lines the restoration of Judah
might have proceeded under the co-operation of
Gedaliah and Jeremiah, and how after so long and
heart-breaking a mission of doom to his people
the Prophet might at last have achieved before
his eyes some positive part in their social and
political reconstruction; for certainly he had
already proved his practical ability as well his
power of far vision. But even such sunset success
was denied him, and once more his people
crumbled under his hand. God provided some
better thing for him in the spiritual future of
Israel, to which he must now pass through still
deeper sacrifice and humiliation.it was only by way of the eternal world
that Jeremiah could enter on the fruition of his hopes.
Ishmael, against whom the noble Gedaliah would
take no warning, was one of those fanatics with
whom the Jewish nation have been cursed at all
That
atrocious brigand
(Renan).
The Prophet was the one hope left to them, and
like Ṣedekiah they turned to him in their perplexity
for a word of guidance from the Lord.
With his usual deliberation he took ten days to
answer, laying the matter before the Lord in
prayer; studying, we may be sure, the actual facts
of the situation (including what he already knew
to be the people's hope of finding security in Egypt)
and carefully sifting out his own thoughts and
impulses from the convictions which his prayers
brought him from God. The result was clear:
the people must abide in their land and not fear
With shame we read the rest of the story.
Jeremiah had well discerned
But not his honesty or his courage! At
Tahpanhes he set before the fugitives one of those
symbols which had been characteristic of his
prophesying. He laid great stones in the entry
of the house of the Pharaoh and declared that
Nebuchadrezzar would plant his throne and spread
his tapestries upon them, when he came to smite
Egypt, assuming that land as easily as a shepherd
dons his garment; and after breaking the obelisks
of its gods and burning their temples he would
safely depart from it.
So far the narrative runs clearly, but in Ch.
XLIV, the last that is written of Jeremiah, the
expander has been specially busy.
From verse 15 the story and the words it
reports become—with the help of the briefer
Greek version and the elision of manifest additions
in both the Hebrew and the Greek texts
XLIV. 16. The word which thou hast spoken to us in the Name of the Lord!—we will not hearken to thee! 17. But we shall surely perform every word, which has gone forth from our mouth:
That is solemnly sworn; to burn to the Queen of Heaven and pour her libations, as we and our fathers did, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and streets of Jerusalem, and had fulness of bread, and were well and saw no evil. 18. But since we left off to burn to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour her libations, we have lacked everything and been by the sword and the famine consumed. 19. AndJudg. xi. 36 ;Numb. xxx. 2 ,12 .Some Greek MSS. and Syriac have and all the women answered, an addition felt to be necessary after the mention of both men and women in 15. while we were burning to the Queen of Heaven and poured her libations, did we make her cakesHebrew adds to portray her, that is on the cakes. and pour her libations without our husbands?
This was a straight challenge to the prophet,
The real, the characteristic answers of Jeremiah
are the others: to the women reported in
verses 24, 25, and to all the Jews in Egypt 26-28;
in which respectively he treats the claim of the
women ironically, and leaves the issue between
his word and that of his opponents to be decided
by the event. These answers also have been expanded,
but we may reasonably take the following
to be original.
XLIV. 24. And Jeremiah said [to the people
and] to the women, [25] Hear the Word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord, Israel's God: Ye women So Greek. have said with your mouthsAnd fulfilled with your hands, Which we have vowed, Indeed then establish your words Generally accepted instead of Hebrew vows. And perform your vows!
Jeremiah adds this by way of irony.
26. Therefore hear the Word of the Lord all Judah, who are settled in the land of Egypt:
By My great Name I swear, Sayeth the Lord, That My Name shall no more be called By the mouth of a man of Judah— Saying, As liveth the Lord!—In all the land of Egypt. Lo, I am wakeful upon you 27 For evil and not for good. The rest of 27 and 28a, the destruction of all the Jews in Egypt, is a prose expansion. And the remnant of Judah shall know, 28b Whose is the word that shall stand. Hebrew adds, but Greek lacks, from me or from them.
These are the last words we have from him, and up to these last he is still himself—broken-hearted indeed and disappointed in the ultimate remnant of his people—but still himself in his honesty, his steadfastness to the truth and his courage; still himself in his irony, his deliberateness and his confident appeal to the future for the vindication of his word.
So he disappears from our sight. How pathetic that even after his death he is not spared from spoiling but that the last clear streams of his prophesying must run out, as we have seen, in the sands of those expanders!
In this Lecture I propose to gather up the story of the soul of the man, whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal powers or ambition—the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.
If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means Yahweh hurls
or shoots forth, it fitly describes the
Prophet's temper, struggles and fate. For he was
a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a
force not his own, and on a mission from which,
from the first, his gifts and affections recoiled and
against which he continued to protest. On his
Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,
For as oft as I speak I must shriek, And cry Violence and Spoil!xx. 8.
His first word is one of shrinking, I cannot speak,
I am too young.
Lord, Thou beguiled'st me, and beguiled I let myself be, Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed. xx. 7.
Power was pain to him; he carried God's
Word as a burning fire in his heart.I would be anywhere else than
here, let me go.
He spent much of himself in
complaint and in debate both with God and with
his fellow-men:
Mother! Ah me! As whom hast thou borne me? A man of quarrel and of strife To the whole of the land— All of them curse me. xv. 10; cp. xii. 1.
Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was
To root up, pull down and destroy, To build and to plant. i. 10, p. 83.
If this represents the Prophet's earliest impression
of his charge, the proportion between
the destructive and constructive parts of it is
ominous; if it sums up his experience it is less
than the truth. Though he sowed the most
It was the same with individuals as with the
people as a whole. We may say that with few
exceptions, whomever he touched he singed,
whomever he struck he broke—a man of quarrel
and strife to the whole land, all of them curse me. And
he cursed them back. When Pashhur put him in
the stocks Jeremiah called him Magor Missabib,
Terror-all-round, for lo, I will make thee a terror to
thyself and to all thy friends, they shall fall by the sword
and thou behold it.
The following are the full texts from which the foregoing summary has been drawn and most of which I have reserved for this Lecture.
IV. 10. Then said I, Ah Lord Yahweh, Verily Thou hast deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying There shall be peace!—whereas the sword striketh to the life!
O my bowels! My bowels, I writhe! 19 O the walls of my heart! My heart is in storm upon me, I cannot keep silence! I am filled with the rage of the Lord, VI. 11 Worn with holding it in! Pour it out on the child in the street, Where the youths draw together.
The following refers to the conspiracy of his fellow-villagers against him.
The Lord let me know and I knew it, XI. 18 Then I saw through So Greek; Hebrew thou lettest me see. their doings;But I like a tame lamb had been, 19 Unwittingly Greek; Hebrew takes this with the next line. led to the slaughter.On me they had framed their devices So generally read since Hitzig; Hebrew has bread, i.e. fruit. Cut him off from the land of the living, O Lord, Thou Who righteously judgest, 20 Who triest the reins and the heart, Let me see Thy vengeance upon them, For to Thee I have opened Others: on Thee I have rolled; cp. xx. 12. my cause.21. Therefore thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who are seeking my
Greek; Hebrew thy. life, saying, Thou shalt not prophesy in the Name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hands:Hebrew copyists senselessly repeat, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; Greek omits. Lo, I am to visit upon them! 22 Their So Greek. youths shall die by the sword,Their sons and their daughters by famine, Till no remnant be left them. 23 For evil I bring on the men of Anathoth, The year of their visitation. Mother! Ah me! XV. 10 As whom Greek. hast thou borne me?A man of strife and of quarrel To the whole of the land. I have not lent upon usury, nor any to me, Yet all of them curse me. Amen, Greek, meaning, Thy sanction to their curses. O Lord! If I be to blame(?), 11If I never besought Thee, In the time of their trouble and straits, For the good of my foes. Is the arm on my shoulder iron 12 Or brass my brow? The text of the last six lines is corrupt; the above is Duhm's reading after the Greek. See too J. R. Gillies. Verses 13, 14 are out of place here, see xvii. 3, 4. Thou hast known it, Greek omits. O Lord. 15Think on and visit me! Avenge me on them that pursue me, Halt not Thy wrath. Know that for Thee I have borne reproach From them who despise So Greek; Hebrew (with same consonants, but the first two transposed) Found were Thy words. Thy words. 16[End them! So Greek; Hebrew I did eat them. But all this bracketed quatrain breaks the connection between what precedes and verse 17. Thy word's my delightAnd the joy of my heart For Thy Name has been calléd upon me, Lord of Hosts!] I have not sat in their company 17 Jesting and merry. Cornill after Greek. Because of Thy hand alone I sit, For with rage Thou hast filled me. Why is my pain perpetual, 18 My wound past healing? Art Thou to be a false stream to me, As waters that fail?
This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!
Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19 If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee, That before Me thou stand; And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile, As My Mouth thou shalt be. [Then may those turn to thee, But not thou to them.] For to this people I set thee 20 An impassable wall. Omit of bronze for the metre's sake; it is a copyist's echo of i. 18. Cornill omits impassable instead. When they fight thee they shall not prevail, With thee am I to deliver, Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21 From the hand of the cruel redeem thee. Thou Hebrew precedes this with And the Word of the Lord came unto me, which Greek is without, thus closely connecting xvi. 2 ff. with xv. 21. shalt not take a wife— XVI. 2Rede of the Lord— Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine Within this place. For thus hath the Lord said: 3 As for the sons and the daughters Born in this place, [As for their mothers who bore them And their fathers who gat them Throughout this land.] Painfullest deaths shall they die 4 Unmourned, unburied, [Be for dung on the face of the ground, Consumed by famine and sword.] And their corpses shall be for food To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth. In 3, 4 the bracketed lines are probably expansions of the original. Thus saith the Lord: 5 Come not to the house of mourning, Nor go about to lament, Hebrew, etc., add nor bemoan them—expansion. Because My Peace I have swept Away from this people. 5b, 6a are not in Greek. For them shall none lament, 6b Nor gash nor make themselves bald; Neither break bread So Greek. to the mourner,By a change of vowels. 7For the dead to console him, Nor pour him So Greek. the cup of condolementFor his father or mother. Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8 To sit with them eating and drinking. For thus saith the Lord of Hosts, Greek lacks of Hosts. 9The God of Israel: Lo, I shall stay from this place, In your days, to your eyes, The voices of joy and of gladness, The voices of bridegroom and bride.
Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this—the people's leaving of their God—and the doom of exile.
Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14 Save me and saved shall I be. Perhaps 14 connects with 9, 10. The line For Thou art my praise is a late addition. Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15 But I have not pressed ... (?) 16 Nor for evil So Aq. Symm. Syr., reading ra'ah, evil for ro'eh, shepherd. kept at Thee,Nor longed for the woeful day, Thyself dost know. Whatever came forth from my lips To Thy face it was. Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17 My Refuge in evil days. Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18 Dismayed, but dismayed not I. Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster And break them twice over! XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah devices, for the Law
Torah, see p. 154. shall not perish from the priest, nor Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.O Lord, unto me give Thou heed, 19 And hark to the voice of my plea! So Greek; Hebrew of mine accusers. Shall evil be rendered for good, 20 That they dig a pit for my life? To this line Greek adds have privily laid a stumbling block. Most regard both lines as an expansion from 22. O remember my standing before Thee, To bespeak their good— To turn Thy fury from off them. Give therefore their sons to famine, 21 And spill them out to the sword. Let their wives be widows and childless And their men be slain of death— And smitten their youths by the sword in battle. May crying be heard from their homes, 22 As a troop comes sudden upon them! For a pit have they dug to catch me, And hidden snares for my feet. But Thou, O Lord, hast known 23 Their counsels for death against me. Pardon Thou not their iniquities, Pl.; So Greek. Nor blot from Thy Presence their sins; Pl.; So Greek. But let them be tumbled before Thee Deal with them in time of Thy wrath.
Verses 21-23 are rejected by Duhm and Cornill,
along with XI. 22b, 23, XII.
3b, XVII. 18 for no
textual or metrical reasons, but only because
these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah
such outbursts of passion: just as we have
Lord, Thou beguiledst me, and beguiled I let myself be, XX. 7 Too strong for me, Thou hast conquered, A jest I have been all the day, Every one mocks me. As oft as I speak I must shriek, 8 Crying Violence and spoil.Yea, the Word of the Lord is become my reproach All day a derision. If I said, I'll not mind Him Greek the name of the Lord. 9Nor speak in His name, Greek; Hebrew adds any more. Then in my heart 'tis a burning fire, Shut up in my bones. I am worn away with refraining, I cannot hold on. So Greek. For I hear the whispering of many, 10 Terror all round! —And these my familiars!— Keep ye watch for him tripping, Perchance he'll be fooled, Yet the Lord He is with me, 11 Mighty and Terrible! So they that hunt me shall stumble And shall not prevail. Put to dire shame shall they be When they fail to succeed. Be their confusion eternal, Nor ever forgotten! O Lord, Hebrew adds of Hosts. Who triest the righteous, 12Who lookest to the reins and the heart, Let me see Thy vengeance upon them, For to Thee I have opened my cause. Verse 13, a doxology, is probably a later addition. Cursed be the day, XX. 14 Whereon I was born! The day that my mother did bare me, Be it unblessed! Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15 Telling my father, Making him glad. Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16 And did not relent, Let him hear a shriek in the morning, And at noon-tide alarms; That he slew me not in So Greek. the womb, 17So my mother had been my grave, And great for ever her womb! For what came I forth from the womb? 18 Labour and sorrow to see, That my days in shame should consume.
Considering the passion of these lines, it is not
surprising that they are so irregular.
Some have attributed the aggravations, at least,
of this rage to some fault in the man himself.
They are probably right. The prophets were
neither vegetables nor machines but men of
like passions with ourselves. Jeremiah may have
been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural
capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt
this himself we may suspect from his cry to his
mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His
impatience, honest though it be, needs stern
rebuke from the Lord.
So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when
we turn to God's words to him. Be not dismayed
lest I make thee dismayed and I set thee this day a fenced
city and wall of bronze.
Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his
solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind
that neither among the priests, the prophets and
the princes of his time, nor in the kings after
Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material
which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks
against Assyria. The nation crumbling
from within was suffering from without harder
blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not
weld but broke a people already decadent and
with nothing to resist them save the formalities of
religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost
heart and care. He makes them use more than
Poet as he was he had the poet's heart for the beauties of nature and of domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride, and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have children of his own or to take part in any social merriment—in this last respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?
There is another thing which we must not
forget in judging Jeremiah's excessive rage. We
cannot find that he had any hope of another life.
Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from
his own Oracles or from those attributed to him.
Here and now was his only chance of service,
here and now must the visions given him by God
be fulfilled or not at all. In the whole book of
Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no
glory to come, no gleam even of the martyr's
crown. I have often thought that what seem to
us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue
with Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation
of prophets and psalmists under the Old
Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his influence to the end of his nation's history.
What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times? Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that God Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circumstance.
Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart, I have set thee a prophet to the nations.
From the first and all through it was God's choice of him, the knowledge of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have seen, into the opposite of himself.
The writers of the Old Testament give full
expression to the idea of predestination, but what
they understand by it is not what much of Jewish
and Christian theology has understood. In the
Old Testament predestination is not to character
or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life
or eternal punishment, but to service, or some
particular form of service, for God and man. The
Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for
Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of
God for the enlightenment and blessing of mankind.
And this faith is enforced on the nation, not
for their pride nor to foster the confidence that
God will never break from them, but to rouse their
conscience, and give them courage when they are
feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service.
So with Jeremiah in regard both to his own predestination
and that of his people. In his Parable
of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as
vessels that the clay is moulded; God is revealed
not as predestining character or quality, but as
shaping characters for ends for which under His
hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable
From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator, such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.
Having this experience of God's ways with man
it was not possible for Jeremiah to succumb to
those influences of a strong unqualified faith in
predestination which have often overwhelmed the
personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked
of the wine of predestination,
and history both
in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men
so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will,
reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning
slaves of fate, or violent and equally
unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less
instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers
Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled, Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.
The man would not be mastered, but if mastered
is not crushed. He questions each moment of his
own sufferings, each moment of his people's oncoming
doom. He debates with God on matters
of justice. He wrestles things out with God and
emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping
like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in
his mind and more sure of himself—as we see him
at last when the full will of God breaks upon his
soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly
surrenders to his own and his people's fate. That
is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so
shrinking stands out henceforth a fenced city and a
wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land:
the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of
We may here take in full the remarkable passage,
part of which we have already studied.
Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue. Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:— The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease? Thou did'st plant them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their reins. But me, O Lord, Thou hast known, Hebrew adds, Thou seest me. 3And tested my heart with Thee; Drag them out like sheep for the shambles, To the day of slaughter devote them. Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee— 5 How wilt thou vie with the horse? If in peaceful country thou can'st not trust, How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan? For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6 Even they have betrayed thee. Even they have called after thee loudly, Trust them not, though they speak thee fair. See also p. 160. Verse 4 is clearly out of place here, referring to a hardly relevant subject. Verse 6 is less improbable an illustration of the harder troubles in store for the prophet. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of the rest: Thou can'st not trust, so Greek; Hebrew thou art trusting. Hitzig, etc., by changing one consonant read thou art fleeing. Rankness lit. pride or extravagance. If verse 6 is original, the date of the whole is early.
The rankness or luxuriance of Jordan is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord's answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life.
But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.
There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.
O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2 A wayfarers' lodge! Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors. They stretch their tongues 3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land. But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not! See above, p. 202.
Well might the Prophet wish to escape from
such a people—worn out with their falsehood,
their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet
it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn
or caravanserai where he would have been less
lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem,
sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord. His
desire is to be set where a man may see all the
interest of passing life without any responsibility
for it, where men are wayfarers only and come
and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and
help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never
touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is
the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a
tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look
below the surface of life, to know people long
enough to judge them with a keener conscience
than their own and to love them with a hopeless
and breaking heart that never got an answer to its
love or to its calls for repentance—wearied with
watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old
truths become lies or at the best mere formalities,
But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah's too carried with it its denial. My people—that I might leave my people—this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them deeper and more yearning.
From the year of Carchemish onward he appears
not again to have tried or prayed to escape.
Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they
persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets
and priests called for his execution. He was
stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The
king scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies;
and the people following their formalist leaders
rejected his word. With the first captivity under
Jehoiakim all the better classes left Jerusalem, but
he elected to remain with the refuse. When in
the reign of Ṣedekiah the Chaldeans came down
on the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender
he was again beaten and was flung into a pit to
starve to death. When he was freed and the
If Jeremiah thus of his own will suffered with
his people, and to the bitter end with the worst of
them, was he also conscious of suffering for them?
After his death, when the full tragedy of his life
came home to his people's heart, the sense of the
few suffering for the many, the righteous for the
Isaiah
XL-LXVI, which
presents the Suffering Servant of the Lord and
declares the atoning virtues of His Agonies and
Death.
But it is not clear that Jeremiah ever felt anything
of this about himself; if he did so he has refrained
from uttering it. Yet he must have been
very near so high a consciousness. His love and
his pity for his sinful people were full. He can
hardly have failed to descry that his own spiritual
agonies which brought him into so close a
personal communion with God would show to
every other man the way for his approach also to
the Most High and Holy and his reconciliation
with his God. Again he was weighed down with
his people's sins; he bore on his heart the full
burden of them. He confessed them. The shame
which the people did not feel for them, he felt;
and he painted the curse upon them in words
Why is my pain perpetual, My wound past healing? xv. 18.
The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for God was with him to deliver—but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there—in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if they were his, in his agony for his people's estrangement from God and in his own constantly wounded love—lay his real substitution, his vicarious offering for his people.
Did Jeremiah ever conceive the far-off fulness
of the travail thus laid upon his soul, the truth
that this vicarious agony of a righteous man for
the sins of others is borne by God Himself? To
that question we have only fragments of an
answer. In his discourses, both earlier and later,
when he talks directly in the Name of the Deity—when
O Hope of Israel, His Saviour In time of trouble. Why be like a passenger through the land, Or the wayfaring guest of a night? Yet Lord Thou art in our midst, Do not forsake us. xiv. 8, 9; see p. 57.
I may be going too far in interpreting the
longing and faith that lie behind these words.
But whether Jeremiah had instinct of it, as I have ventured to think from his prayer, or had not, he foreshadowed, as far as mere man can, the sufferings of Jesus Christ for men—and this is his greatest glory as a prophet.
We have followed the career of Jeremiah from his call onwards to the end, and we have traced his religious experience with its doubts, struggles, crises, and settlement at last upon the things that are sure: his debates with God and strifes with men, which while they roused him to outbursts of passion also braced his will, and stilled the wilder storms of his heart. There remains the duty of gathering the results of this broken and gusty, yet growing and fruitful experience: the truths which came forth of its travail, about God and Man and their relations. And in particular we have still to study the ideal form which Jeremiah, or (as some questionably argue) one of his disciples, gave to these relations: the New Covenant, new in contrast to God's ancient Covenant with Israel as recorded and enforced in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Among the surprises which Jeremiah's own
Oracles have for the student is the discovery of
how little they dwell upon the transcendent and
Isaiah's vision was of the Lord upon a Throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by Seraphim crying to one another, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts! the whole earth is full of His Glory! And their voices rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crushing his heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel—the storm-wind out of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes; and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the Lord. And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face.
In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is
none of this Awfulness—only What art thou seeing
Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron
boiling. That was characteristic of his encounters
For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers.
Again there were the startled recoil of his
nature from the terrible office of a prophet in
such times, and those born gifts of questioning
and searching which fitted him for his allotted
duty as Tester of his people,
Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered, The Lord is with me as a Mighty and Terrible. xx. 7, 11.
From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and fruitfulness of faith, beginning
Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord, And the Lord is his trust. xvii. 7 f.; p. 54.
But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the effects of faith in man.
Again by the desperate character of the times
he was starved of hope, the hope by which the
Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah's most
immediate convictions of God are that He has
done, and is always doing or about to do, things.These prophets were terribly one-idea'd men
—their one
idea being that the Lord was about to do something.
It was all this activity and effectiveness, with
their sure results in history, which distinguished
Him from other gods, the gods of the nations,
who were ineffective, or as Jeremiah puts it
unprofitable—no-gods,
nothings and do-nothings, the work
of men's hands, lies or frauds,
and mere bubbles.
Yet Jeremiah's monotheism, like that of all the
Hebrew prophets, is even more due to convictions
of the character of the God of Israel. We have
seen how he dwells on the Divine Love, faithful
and yearning for love in return, pleading and
patient even with its delinquent sons and
daughters;
As a woman is false to her fere, Have ye been false to me. iii. 1 ff., 20.
Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the
Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah broods and
explodes more frequently and fiercely than any
other prophet: I am full of the rage of the Lord; the
glow of His wrath; take the cup of the wine of this fury
at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee
to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn
until He have executed it.
The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate
linking of physical and political disasters with
the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to
ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced
of the ethical necessity of that Wrath and
of its judgments on Judah—he was convinced before
they came to pass and he predicted them accurately,
from close observation of the political
conditions of his world and the character of his
people. Granted these and God's essential and
operative justice, the connection was natural:
What else can I do? It was clear that Judah both
deserved and needed punishment and equally clear
that the boiling North held the potentialities of
this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly
approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and
as the history both of nations and individuals has
frequently illustrated, there is a natural sequence
of disaster upon wrong-doing. Be thy scourge thine
own sin! Thy ways and thy deeds have done to thee
But perhaps the chief glory of our Prophet is that while thus delivering, as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people's sin costs God more pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel, was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them.
What wrong found your fathers in Me, That so far they broke from Me? Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness? Why say my folk, We are off,Can a maiden forget her adorning Or her girdle the bride? Yet Me have My people forgotten Days without number. ii. 5, 31, 32.
So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His heritage, His love still wonders how that can be—
Is My heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird With the wild-birds round and against her? Is Israel a slave, Or house-born serf? Why he for a prey? xii. 7-9; ii. 14.
All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: no
man lays it to heart, upon Me is the waste.
Is Ephraim My dearest son, The child of delights? That as oft as against him I speak I must think of him still! xxxi. 20.
That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative effect.
Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the
Love of God Jeremiah speaks home to the heart
of his own, and of our own and of every generation
which loves lies and lets itself be lulled by
them. Sin, he says, is no fiction nor a thing to
be lightly taken.I am guiltless
: ii.
35.
I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah's
other original contributions to theology, on the
Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of
God, and his hope that God would be to Israel
what the prophet had bravely tried to be—no
transient guest but a dweller in their midst.
Passing now from the world of nations to the
Even the stork in the heavens Knoweth her seasons, And dove, swift and swallow Keep time of their coming. But My people—they know not The Rule of the Lord. I have set the sand as a bound for the sea, An eternal decree that cannot be crossed. Are there makers of rain 'mong the bubbles of the heathen? Art Thou not He? ... all these Thou hast made. viii. 7; v. 22 (xxxi. 35); xiv. 22 (after the Greek); cp. iii. 3; v. 24.
After all neither Nature nor the courses of the Nations but the single human heart is the field which Jeremiah most originally explores for visions of the Divine Working and from which he has brought his most distinctive contributions to our knowledge of God. But that leads us up to the second part of this lecture, his teaching about man. Before beginning that, however, we must include under his teaching about God, two elements of this to which his insight into the human heart directly led him.
First this great utterance of the Divine Omnipresence:
I am a God who is near, Not a God who is far. Can any man hide him in secret, And I not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth?— Rede of the Lord. xxiii. 23 f.; above, p. 256.
These verses have been claimed as the earliest
expression in Israel of the Divine Omnipresence.
Second, and partly in logical sequence from
the preceding, but also stimulated by thoughts
of the best of Judah
In the earliest Oracles of Jeremiah nations are
the human units in religion, Israel as a whole the
object of the Divine affection and providence.
To his age worship was the business of the nation:
public reverence for symbols and institutions, and
rites in which the individual's share was largely
performed for him by official representatives.
The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt
with the people as a moral unity from the earliest
times to their own. The Lord had loved and
sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation.
As a nation they fell away from Him and now they
were wholly false to Him. When Jeremiah first
urges them to return, it is of a public and general
But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that of the immediate relation of the individual to God. Jeremiah never lost hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah the gradual breaking up of the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.
One has travelled by night through a wooded
country, by night and on into the dawn. How
solid and indivisible the dark masses appear and
It seems to me as I travel through the Book of
Jeremiah that here also is a breaking of dawn—but
they are men whom it reveals. There is a
stir of this even in the earliest Oracles; for the
form of address to the nation which has begun
with the singular Thou changes gradually to
You, and not Israel but
ye men of Israel are called to
turn to their God.
Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of drought. Such passages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards God of its individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the multitude and talks to him of himself.
O Lord, Who triest the righteous, Who seest the reins and the heart. xi. 20; xx. 12. False above all is the heart, Sick to despair, Who is to know it? I, the Lord, searching the heart And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings. xvii. 9 f. Can any man hide him in secret And I not see him? xxiii. 24. In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity, every man that eateth sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.
xxxi. 29 f. Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee.... Peradventure they will hearken and turn every man from his evil way.
xxvi. 2 f. He that would boast in this let him boast, Insight and knowledge of Me. ix. 24. Lord, I know—not to man is his way, Not man's to walk or settle his steps. x. 23. Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord And the Lord is his trust! He like a tree shall be planted by water, That stretches its roots to the stream; Unafraid at the coming of heat, His leaf shall be green; Sans care in the season of drought He fails not in yielding his fruit. xvii. 7 f.; above, p. 54.
The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth—could not be more beautifully drawn.
Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea
of the nation as the human unit in religion—Deuteronomy's
ideal and at first his own—to the
individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace
and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by
the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy
conduct of the people, their abandonment by
God, the ruin of the State and of the national
worship—which cut off individuals from all political
and religious associations, leaving to each
(in Jeremiah's repeated phrase) only his life, or
But Thou, Lord, hast known me, Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee— xii. 3.
unless through doubt and struggle he himself
had won into the confidence of an immediate and
intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had
learned how a man could be God's before he was
his mother's or his nation's—God's own and to
the end answerable only to Him. He had proved
his solitary conscience under persecution. He
had known how personal convictions can overbear
the traditions of the past and the habits of
one's own generation—how God can hold a
single man alone to His Will against his nation
and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to
their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious
service which Jeremiah achieved for his own
generation; what he had won for himself was
possible for each of them. And sure it is that
the personal piety which henceforth flourished
in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving
its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the
state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms
show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law
We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing—the prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place, following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour grapes—individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah's own; the critical questions which have been with us from the beginning embarrass us still.
The collection of Oracles to which that of the
New Covenant belongs, Chs. XXX, XXXI, was
not made till long after Jeremiah's time; it includes,
as we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic
origin.promises a
new Covenant—not a new Torah but only a more
inward assimilation of the Torah by the people,
and emphasises the good results which this will
have for them but betrays no demand for a higher
He
continues: it is impossible for me to hold any
longer to the Jeremian origin of the passage. I
find in it only the effusion of one learned in the
Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that
every one of the Jewish people should know the
Law by heart.
But in his resolve not to let himself be dazzled
has not Duhm gone to the opposite extreme and
seriously under-read the whole spirit of the
passage—besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness
of the presence in the text of a
legalist at work?by heart
(auswendig), is, whoever
their author may have been, to travesty his
meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New
Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the
Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of God's will
to give His people a new heart to know Him;
Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings
together all the strands of Jeremiah's experience
and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the
political debris of the times, into one fair web
under a pattern familiar and dear to the people.
Lo, days are coming—Rede of the Lord—when I will make with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them
So Greek, Latin and Syriac; Hebrew though I was an husband to them. —Rede of the Lord. But this is MySo one Greek version. Covenant which I will make with the sonsSo some MSS. of Israel after those days—Rede of the Lord—I will set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write it, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother saying, Know thouSo Greek and Latin. the Lord! For they shall all know Me from the least even to the greatest;Hebrew adds, Rede of the Lord. for I will forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.
This is, as has been said, a prophecy of
Christianity which has hardly its equal in the
Old Testament.
And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual soul is made to feel that God created it not for its family nor its state nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for it after death. The Prophet's eyes are still sealed to that future. The soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with God.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to give a correct account of the national and racial movements which, along with the moral conditions in Judah, called forth Jeremiah's Oracles of judgment in the years immediately following his call in 627-626 B.C. But the following facts are well founded. In or about 625 the Medes were defeated in an attack upon Assyria and their king Phraortes was killed, but at the same time Asshurbanipal died, and his weaker successor was compelled to recognize the virtual independence of Nabopolassar, the Chaldean in Babylon. Cyaxares (624-585), the son of Phraortes, soon after his succession to his father—say between 624 and 620—led a second Median assault upon Assyria and besieged Nineveh, but had to retire because of the onset from the north of the Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian monuments, probably the Ashkenaz or Ashkunza (?) of the Old Testament. And then it was not for some years that Cyaxares felt himself strong enough by his alliance with Nabopolassar for a third Median invasion of Assyria which culminated in the capture and destruction of Nineveh.
The Assyrians appear to have been in touch with
Scythians
) supposes that this advance was due
to the same Scythian-Assyrian alliance, in order
to preserve the Assyrian territories from the arms
of Psamtik of Egypt, who had since 639 been
besieging Ashdod; and he holds that this hypothesis
explains the absence of any record of
violence by the Scythians on their southern campaign,
except at Ashkelon. This precarious
hypothesis apart, we have the facts that no Biblical
chronicler records any invasion of Judah and
Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the
early Oracles of Jeremiah, generally attributed to
the alarms which the advance of such barbarian
hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the
Scythians (with a few exceptions that may be due
to the prophet's adaptation in 604 of his earlier
Oracles to the new enemy out of the north, the
Chaldeans).
There, are, however, modern writers who claim
that the Oracles in question were originally composed
not in view of the Scythian, but of the
Chaldean invasion of Palestine. So George
Douglas (The Book of Jeremiah, London, Hodder
& Stoughton, 1903), who, while assigning Jeremiah's
call to 627, relegates the two visions and
POSTSCRIPT.
The date of Nineveh's fall has hitherto been accepted as 607-606 B.C. But in July of this year (1923) Mr. C. J. Gadd described to the British Academy a Babylonian tablet, which dates the fall in the fourteenth year of Nabopolassar's reign in Babylon. This year was 612 B.C., if it be right to reckon the reign from 626-25 B.C.; but as remarked above, p. 175, Nabopolassar became in that year officially not king but only viceroy. Dependent as I was on a newspaper summary of Mr. Gadd's lecture I could therefore do no more than offer for the fall of Nineveh the alternative dates, 612 and 606; see above p. 175 and compare p. 162.
In addition to the accounts in the Books of Kings
and Chronicles of Pharaoh Nĕcoh's advance into
Asia in pursuance of his claim for a share of the
crumbling Assyrian Empire there are two independent
records: (1) Jeremiah XLVII. 1—and
Pharaoh smote Gaza—a headline (with other particulars)
wrongly prefixed by the Hebrew text, but
not by the Greek, to an Oracle upon an invasion
of Philistia not from the south but from the north
(see above, pp. 13,
61); (2) by Herodotus, II. 159,
who says that Nĕcoh (Nekôs) making war by
land on the Syrians defeated them at Magdolos
and after the battle took Kadŭtis, a great city of
Syria.
Magdolos is probably Megiddo, unless it
stands for Megdel, which, as well as Rumman
(= Hadad-rimmon, the scene of the mourning for
Josiah, Zech. XII. 11) lies near Megiddo. If, as
is usually held, Kadŭtis be Gaza, Herodotus has
reversed the proper order of Nĕcoh's two actions;
but Kadŭtis also suggests hak-Kôdēsh,
the holy, an
epithet of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, I. 270) which
would suit Herodotus' order, for it was after
Megiddo that Nĕcoh became master of Jerusalem
and Judah. The suggestion, though worth
mentioning, is doubtful; the epithet is late, exilic
and post-exilic; and Herodotus' phrase took
Kadŭtis is hardly equivalent to became paramount
there as Nĕcoh became paramount in Jerusalem.
Arabian Nights,36.
The Prophecies of Jeremiah,9, 93, 184, 203, 210.
Palästinischer Diwan,36.
The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah,111, 133, 147, 181, 239, 296, 312.
the Covenant,144;
The Book of Hope,286;
the Weeping Prophet,318;
Kurzer Hand-Commentar,38.
The German Lyric,33, 42.
De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum,33.
History of English Prosody,36.
Prophecy and Religion, Studies in the Life of Jeremiah,7, 103, 111, 129, 133, 145, 146, 166, 169, 181, 190, 222, 227, 237, 268, 279, 284, 292, 307, 375, 383.
Mekka,37.
The Septuagint and Jewish Worship,14.
A.T. Untersuchungen,142, 176, 382, 383.
v vii viii 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 069 070 071 072 073 074 075 076 077 078 079 080 081 082 083 084 085 086 087 088 089 090 091 092 093 094 095 096 097 098 099 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394