Chapter II: Part 2

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 them(53)—in fact the only literary forms with which they were familiar; and that in all probability more of the man himself comes out in the poetry than in the prose which he has left to us. By his native gifts and his earliest associations he was a poet to begin with; and therefore the form and character of his poetry, especially as revealing himself, demand our attention.

* * * * *

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.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the house-mill, the wine skins, the ornaments of women, the yoke, the plough, and so forth. And there are abrupt changes of metaphor as in our early ballads, due to the rush of a quick imagination and the crowd of concrete figures it catches.

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(55) to [those] evils
Didst train(56) thy ways.
Yea on thy skirts is found blood
Of innocent(57) souls.
Not only on felons(?) I find it,(58)
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.(59)
Every town of its folk is forsaken,
With none to inhabit.
All is up! Thou destined to ruin,(?)(60)
What doest thou now
That thou deck’st thee in deckings of gold
And clothest in scarlet,(61)
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:
“Woe unto me, but it faints,
My life to the butchers!”

On the other hand here is a metre,(62) for the irregularities of which no remedy is offered by alternative readings in the Versions, but Duhm and others reduce these only by padding the text with particles and other terms. Yet these very irregularities have reason; they suit the meaning to be expressed. Thus while some of the couplets are in the Qînah metre, it is instructive that the first three lines are _all_ short, because they are mere ejaculations—that is they belong to the same class of happy irregularities as we recalled in Shakespeare’s blank verse.

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!(63)

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,
No more to meet Thee.”

There is another poem in which the Qînah measure prevails but with occasional lines longer than is normal—Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end of 5(64)).

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(65)
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.(66) In Chs. IX and X also we shall find irregular metres.

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(67) 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,(68)
That would not accept correction;
Lost(69) 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.(70)

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(71)
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(72) 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 Israel’s unfaithfulness to her Husband is in verse. See below, pages 98, 99.

* * * * *

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(73) 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 ease as figures of the truths he is enforcing. They are never bald or uncouth, though in translation they may sometimes sound so.

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.(74) The Deity is addressing the prophet:—

And thou shalt say unto this people,
“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”

and it shall be if they say unto thee, “Don’t we know of
course(75) that

“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”

then 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.](76)

The tillers(77) of the ground are dismayed,
For no rain hath been(78);
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(79) 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.(80)

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.(81)

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.(82)

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!”(83)
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.(84)

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!(85)

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.(86)

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 19_b_ 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(87) hath doomed us to perish,
And given us poison to drink,
For to Him(88) have we sinned.
Hope for peace there was once—
But no good—
For a season of healing—
Lo, panic.(89)
From Dan the sound has been heard,(90)
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,(91)
Sickens my heart upon me.
Hark to the cry of my people
Wide o’er the land—
“Is the Lord not in Ṣion,
Is there no King there?”(92)

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.(93)
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 them—was this rural poet, who was called to carry the burdens of prophecy through forty of the most critical and disastrous years of Israel’s history. In next lecture we shall follow the earlier stages which his great heart pursued beneath those burdens.

Lecture III.

THE PROPHET—HIS YOUTH AND HIS CALL.

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_.(94) The boy’s name and his father’s, Hilḳiah, _Yahweh my portion_,(95) are tokens of the family’s loyalty to the God of Israel, at a time when the outburst in Jewry of a very different class of personal names betrays on the part of many a lapse from the true faith, and when the loyal remnant of the people were being persecuted by King Manasseh. Probably the family were descended from Eli. For Abiathar, the last of that descent to hold office as Priest of the Ark, had an ancestral estate at Anathoth, to which he retired upon his dismissal by Solomon.(96) The child of such a home would be brought up under godly influence and in high family traditions, with which much of the national history was interwoven. It may have been from his father that Jeremiah gained that knowledge of Israel’s past, of her ideal days in the desert, of her subsequent declensions, and of the rallying prophecies of the eighth century, which is manifest in his earlier Oracles. Some have claimed a literary habit for the stock of Abiathar.(97) Yet the first words of God to Jeremiah—_before I formed thee in the body I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the womb I hallowed thee_(98)—as well as the singular originality he developed, rather turn us away from his family traditions and influence.

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 on no cross-road to the East. One of its influences on the spirit of its greatest son was its exposure to the East and the Desert. The fields of Anathoth face the sunrise and quickly merge into the falling wilderness of Benjamin. It is the same open, arid landscape as that on which several prophets were bred: Amos a few miles farther south at Tekoa, John Baptist, and during His Temptation our Lord Himself. The tops of the broken desert hills to the east are lower than the village. The floor of the Jordan valley is not visible, but across its felt gulf the mountains of Gilead form a lofty horizon.

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?(99)

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._(100) Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei, Jeremiah’s persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and _poor_ Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new disasters:—

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,
For they are not.(103)

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 was born and brought up on the edge between them.

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.(104)

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.(105) Moreover, Shiloh lay there, Shiloh where Eli and other priestly ancestors had served the Ark in a sanctuary now ruined.(106)

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.(107)

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., and for an interval the land was quiet. But towards 625 word came that the Medes were threatening Nineveh, and, though they were repelled, in that year Asshurbanipal died and Nabopolassar of Babylon threw off the Assyrian yoke. Palestine felt the grasp of Nineveh relax. There was a stir in the air and men began to dream. But quick upon hope fell fear. Hordes of a new race whom—after the Greeks—we call Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian monuments, had half a century before swarmed over or round the Caucasus, and since then had been in touch, and even in some kind of alliance, with the Assyrians. Soon after 624 they forced the Medes to relinquish the siege of Nineveh. They were horsemen and archers, living in the saddle, and carrying their supplies behind them in wagons. After (as it seems) their effective appearance at Nineveh, they swept over the lands to the south, as Herodotus tells us;(108) and riding by the Syrian coast were only brought up by bribes on the border of Egypt.(109) This must have been soon after the young prophet’s call in 627-6. In short, the world, and especially the North, was (to use Jeremiah’s word) _boiling_ with events and possibilities of which God alone knew the end. Prophets had been produced in Israel from like conditions in the previous century, and now after a silence of nigh seventy years, prophets were again to appear: Zephaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah.

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 God(110) the ancient sacrifice of children, in order to propitiate His anger. Thus it appears that the happier interests of religion—family feasts, pieties of seed-time and harvest, gratitude for light, fountains and rain, and for good fortune—were scattered among a host both of local and of foreign deities; while for the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Moses and Isaiah, the most horrible of superstitious rites were reserved, as if all that His people could expect of Him was the abatement of a jealous and hungry wrath.

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, __ what is good; and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God._(111) At last with the overthrow of Manasseh’s successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother’s influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance of Manasseh, were content to have it so.

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.(112)

Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah’s accession,(113) but little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple. In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been worshipped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and possibly, as Assyria’s sovereignty relaxed, the worship of the Host of Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village had the shrine of a deity before the God of Israel came to the land. The names of these local Baalîm, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been transferred to Him by the ignorant worshippers, till instead of one Yahweh—one Lord—unique in character and in power, there were as many as there had been Baalîm, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the Godhead into countless local forms:—

As many as thy cities in number
So many O Judah thy gods!(115)

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,(116)

—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 conditions prevailed out of which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah. Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities. Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of God the thunder which to all ears was rumbling there?

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.(117)

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.(118)

The questions of foreknowledge and predestination, with which Jeremiah engaged himself not a little, I leave for a future lecture.(119) Here we may consider the range of his mission.

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 lawgiver and all spoken at once, when the development entered on a new and higher stage, as we see in the case of Deuteronomy and its attribution to Moses.

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 His staff and the rod of His judgment. Jeremiah’s three contemporaries, Ṣephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, all deal with the foreign powers of their day—why should he in such an age not have been conscious from the first that his call from the Lord of Hosts involved a mission as wide as theirs? I am sure that if we had lived with this prophet through his pregnant times, as we have lived through these last ten years and have been compelled to think constantly not of our own nation alone—concentrated as we had to be on our duties to her—but of _all_ the nations of the world as equally involved in the vast spiritual interests at stake, we should have no difficulty in understanding how possible and natural it was for Jeremiah to hear his mission _to the nations_ clearly indicated in the very moment of his call.

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.(120) Just then or immediately later the Scythians, after threatening the Medes, were sweeping over Western Asia as far as the frontier of Egypt, and in his Scythian songs Jeremiah(121) shows an intimate knowledge of their habits. In his Parable of the Potter (for which unfortunately there is no date) he declares God’s power to mould or re-mould _any_ nation.(122) And Baruch, writing of Jeremiah’s earlier ministry, says that he spoke _concerning all nations_.(123)

No wonder that Jeremiah shrank from such a task: _Ah, Lord God, I know not to speak, I am too young._(124) His excuse is interesting. Had he not developed his gift for verse? Or, conscious of its rustic simplicity, did he fear to take the prophet’s thunder on lips, that had hitherto moved only to the music of his country-side? In the light of his later experience the second alternative is not impossible. When much practice must have made him confident of his art as a singer, he tells us how burning he felt the Word of the Lord to be. But whatever was the motive of his reluctance it was overcome. As he afterwards said:—

Ah, Lord, Thou didst beguile me,
And beguiled I let myself be;
Thou wast too strong for me
And hast prevailed.(125)

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,(126)
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.”(127) Such an objection rather strains the meaning of the passage. According to this Jeremiah is to be the carrier of the Word of the Lord. That Word, rather than the man himself, is the power _to pull up and tear down and destroy, to build and to plant_(128)—that Word which no Hebrew prophet received without an instinct of its world-wide range and its powers of both destruction and creation.

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_,(129) and the Lord was _awake_ or was _watchful_—_shōkēdh_—the difference only of a vowel. In that first token of spring which a Palestine winter affords, the Prophet received the sacrament of his call and of the assurance that God was awake! That the sacrament took this form was natural. That of Isaiah of Jerusalem was the vision of a Throne and an Altar. That of Ezekiel, the exile, shone in the stormy skies of his captivity. This to the prophet of Anathoth burst with the first blossom on his wintry fields. The sense of unity in which he and his people conceived the natural and spiritual worlds came to his help; neither in the one world nor in the other did God slumber. God was watching.

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.(130) And the Lord said unto me:—

Out of the North shall evil boil forth(131)
On all that dwell in the land;
For behold, I am calling
All the realms(132) 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(133) shall I utter
On 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(134) 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.(135)

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, political and religious, are to be against him. _He_ is to stand up and speak, _He_ is not to let himself be dismayed before them, lest God make him dismayed. Under God, then, the Individual becomes everything. Here, at the start of his ministry, Jeremiah has pressed upon him, the separateness, the awful responsibility, the power, of the Single Soul. We shall see how the significance of this developed not for himself only, but for the whole religion of Israel.

Lecture IV.

THE PROPHET IN THE REIGN OF JOSIAH. 627-26-608 B.C.

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_.(136) We shall thus be prepared for the appearance among them of references to the changed conditions of this later date, when the Scythians had long come and gone, the Assyrian Empire had collapsed, its rival Egypt had been defeated at the Battle of Carchemish, and Nebuchadrezzar and his Chaldeans were masters of Western Asia.

1. His Earliest Oracles. (II. 2-IV. 4.)