Chapter III: Part 3

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 verse—save for one of those “portages” of prose which I have described.(137) There is no reason for denying the whole of this passage to Jeremiah, whether because it is in prose or because it treats of Northern Israel as well as Judah.(138) But on parts of it the colours are distinctly of a period later than that of the Prophet. All the rest of the Oracles may be taken to be from himself. Duhm after much hesitation has come to doubt the genuineness of Ch. II. 5-13, but his suspicions of deuteronomic influence seem groundless, and even if they were sound they would be insufficient for denying the verses to Jeremiah.(139)

II. 1, 2, And he said, Thus sayeth the Lord:(140)

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(141)
Bubbles became.
Nor said they: 6
Where is the Lord who carried us up
From the land of Miṣraim?(142)
Who led us through the desert,
Land of waste and chasms,
Land of drought and barren,(143)
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(144) rebelled against Me;
By Baal the prophets did prophesy,
And followed the worthless.
So still with you must I strive,(145) 9
And strive with your sons.(146)
For cross to the isles of Kittîm and look 10
Send to Kedár, and think for yourselves,(147)
And see, was ever like this?
Have any nations(148) changed their gods, 11
And these no gods at all?
Yet My people exchanged their(149) Glory
For that which is worthless.
Be heavy,(150) O heavens, for this, 12
Shudder 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.(151)
Is not all this being done thee 17
For thy leaving of Me?(152)
And now what to thee is the road to Miṣraim,(153)
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.(154)

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,(155)
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.(156)
How sayest thou, “I’m not defiled, 23
Nor gone after the Baals.”
Look at thy ways in the Valley,
And own thy deeds!
A young camel, light o’ heel,(157)
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!(158)
For with strangers I’m fallen in love,
Them must I after!”
Like the shame of the thief when he’s caught, 26
Shall Israel’s sons(159) be shamed.
[They and their kings and their princes,
Their priests and their prophets](160)
Who say to a stock “Thou my Father!” 27
To a stone “Thou hast borne me!”
Their(161) backs they have turned to Me
Never their(162) faces.
Yet in time of their trouble they say
“Rise up and save us!”
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,(163)
So be, O Judah, thy gods!
What quarrel have you against Me? 29
All you are the sinners;(164)
Against Me you all have rebelled—
Rede of the Lord.
In vain have I smitten your sons 30
Ye(165) took not correction
Your(166) sword has devoured your prophets,
Like a ravaging lion.
O generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord!(167) 31
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say My folk “We are off,
No more to meet Thee!”
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:(168)
Yea, on thy skirts is found blood 34
Of innocent souls,
Not only on felons(?) I find it
But over all these.(169)
Yet thou said’st, “I am assoiled, 35
Sure His wrath turns from me!”
Behold 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(170)
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?(171) Is that
woman(172) 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.(173)
The brow of a harlot was thine,
Shame thou hadst done with.
But now—thou callest me “Father, 4
Friend of my youth!”
“Bears _He_ a grudge for ever, 5
Stands on His guard for aye?”(174)
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,(175)
Hast thou seen what recreant Israel did to Me(176) 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,(177) that, all because recreant
Israel committed adultery, I had dismissed her and given her the
bill of her divorce; yet her sister treacherous Judah was 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(178) has not returned to Me
with all her heart, but only in feigning.(179) 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,(180) recreant Israel,
I frown(181) 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(182) not obeyed My voice—
Rede of the Lord.

14. [Return ye backsliding children, Rede of the Lord, for I am
your Baal,(183) and I will take you, one from a city and two from
a clan, and will 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,(184) 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,(185) 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 their(186) fathers for
a heritage.]

But I(187) had declared the How(?) 19
I should set thee(188) 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,(189) 20
So 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!
“Here are we! to Thee we are come,
Thou Lord art our God.
“Surely the heights are a fraud 23
The hills and their hubbub!(190)
“Alone in the Lord our God
Is Israel’s safety.
“The Baal hath devoured our toil 24
And our sires’ from their youth,
“Their flocks and their herds,
Their sons and daughters—
“Lie we low in our shame, 25
Our dishonour enshroud us!
“For to our God(191) have we sinned,
“[We and our sires from our youth]
Up to this day!
“Nor have heeded the voice
Of the Lord our God.”

[Israel, if thou wilt return, IV. 1
Return to Me,
And thy loathly things put from thy mouth
Nor stray from My face.(192)
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.](193)

3. Thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants
of(194) Jerusalem:

Fallow up your fallow-ground,(195)
And sow not on thorns!
To your God(196) circumcise ye, 4
Off 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 prudence of tribes strange to agriculture and anxious to conciliate the traditional powers thereof; and to the people’s passions through the sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation’s trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts in the rural life which he is addressing in order to describe it.

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,
To meet Thee no more.”

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 which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the present corruption of Israel.

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(197)—was it when Judah listened to the pleadings and warnings of the discovered Book of the Law and _all the people stood to the Covenant_? But he does not say whether he found this sincere or whether it was merely a shallow stir of the feelings. Probably he suspected the latter, for in answer to it he gives not God’s gracious acceptance, but a stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching of their hearts.

Fallow up the fallow-ground,
Sow not on thorns!
To your God(198) circumcise ye,
Off from your heart with the foreskin!
Lest My wrath break out like the fire,
And burn with none to quench.(199)

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.(200)

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.(201)

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 only on the surface; and that it is worth while ploughing deeper for their possibilities.(202)

In what form the deep ploughing required was _at first_ imagined by the Prophet we see from the immediately following Oracles.

2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)

The invasion of Western Asia by the Scythians happened some time between 627 and 620 B.C.(203) The following series of brief poems unfold the panic actually caused, or to the Prophet’s imagination likely to be caused, in Judah by the advance of these marauding hordes, and clearly reflect their appearance and manner of raiding. It is indeed doubtful that Judah was visited by the Scythians, who appear to have swept only the maritime plain of Palestine. And once more we must remember that when the Prophet dictated his early Oracles to Baruch for the second time in 604, and _added to them many more like words_,(204) the impending enemy from the North was no longer the Scythians but Nebuchadrezzar and his Chaldeans; for this will explain features of the poems that are not suited to the Scythians and their peculiar warfare, which avoided the siege of fortified towns but kept to the open country and the ruin of its villages and fields. Jeremiah does not give the feared invaders a name. The Scythians were utterly new to his world; yet their name may have occurred in the poems as originally delivered and have been removed in 604, when the Scythians were no longer a force to be reckoned with.(205)

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 place, the lines are addressed. The _trump_ or _horn_ of the first line was the signal of alarm, kept ready by the watchman of every village, as Amos and Joel indicate.(206)

Strike up the trump through the land, IV. 5_b_
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(207) 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,(208) 14
That 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!”(209) 16
Make heard o’er Jerusalem.
Behold,(210) beleaguerers (?) coming
From 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!(211)
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.(212)
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.(213)
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(214) they quivered, 24
All 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](215)
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.(216)

4. The Fourth Scythian Song follows immediately, also without introduction. The first four couplets vividly describe the flight of the peasantry, actual or imagined, before the invaders. The rest seems addressed to the City as though being threatened she sought to reduce her foes with a woman’s wiles, only to find that it was not her love but her life they were after, and so expired at their hands in despair. All this is more suitable to the Chaldean than to the Scythian invasion, and may be one of the Prophet’s additions in 604 to his earlier Oracles. However we take it, the figure is of Jeremiah’s boldest and most vivid. The irony is keen.

From the noise of the horse and the bowmen, IV. 29
All the land(217) is in flight,
They are into the caves, huddle in thickets,(218)
Are up on the crags.
Every town of its folk is forsaken
No habitant in it.
All is up! Thou destined to ruin(?)(219) 30
What 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:
“Woe unto me, but it faints,
My life to the butchers!”

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.(220) But, as we have seen, Anathoth lay so near to Jerusalem, and intercourse between them was naturally so constant, that Jeremiah may well have gained the following experience before he left his village for residence in the city. The position of the poem among the Scythian Songs, along with the possible allusion to the Scythians in verse 6, suggests a date before 620. There is no introduction.

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(221)]
Though they say, “As God liveth,” 2
Falsely(222) they swear
LORD, are Thine eyes upon lies(?) 3
And not on the truth(223)?
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, 4
And therefore(224) the foolish!
“They know not the Way of the Lord,
The Rule of their God.
“To the great I will get me, 5
With them let me speak.
“For they know the Way of the Lord,
And the Rule of their God.”
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(225) stallions they be, 8
Neighing 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(226) 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.
“The prophets! they are nothing but wind 13
The Word is not with them!”(227)

14. Therefore thus hath the Lord of Hosts said, because of their
speaking this word—(228)

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.](229)
A nation thou knowest not its tongue, 16
Nor canst hear what it says,
Its quiver an open grave,(230)
All of it stalwarts.(231)
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:(232)
Hear ye now this, people most foolish, 21
And void of sense.(233)
[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)(234) 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
“Now fear we the Lord our God,
“Who giveth the rain in its season,
The early and latter;
“And the weeks appointed for harvest
Secureth for us.”
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(?)(235)
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,(236)
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.(237)
Shall I not visit on these, 29
Rede of the Lord,
Nor on a people like this
Myself be avenged?(238)
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 a Chaldean invasion by their picture of besiegers throwing up a mound against the walls, and may therefore be one of the additions to his earlier Oracles made by the Prophet, when in 604 the enemy from the North was clearly seen to be Nebuchadrezzar, with the siege-trains familiar to us from the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments; upon which are represented just such a hewing of timber and heaping of mounds against a city’s walls.

Pack off, O Benjamin’s sons, VI. 1
Out of Jerusalem!
Strike up the trump in Tekoa,(239)
O’er Beth-hakkérem lift up the signal!
For evil glowers out of the North,
And ruin immense.
O the charming (?) the pampered height(240) 2
Of the daughter of Ṣion!
Unto her shepherds are coming, 3
With their flocks around,(241)
They pitch against her their tents,
Each crops at his hand.
“Hallow(242) the battle against her,
Up, let us on by noon.”
“Woe unto us! The day is turning, 4
The shadows of evening stretch.”
“Up then and on by night, 5
That we ruin her palaces!”
For thus said the Lord of Hosts: 6
Hew down her(243) trees and heap
Against Jerusalem a mound;
Woe to the City of Falsehood,(244)
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(245) said: 9
Glean, let them glean as a vine
Israel’s remnant;
Like the grape-gleaner turn thy hand
Again to its(246) tendrils.
“To whom shall I utter myself, 10
And witness that they may hear?
“Lo, uncircumcised is their ear,
They cannot give heed.
“The Word of the Lord is their scorn,
No pleasure have they therein.
“I am full of the rage of the Lord, 11
“Weary with holding it back!
Pour(247) 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(248) 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(249) 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.(250)

Thus hath the Lord said— 16
Halt on the ways and look,
And ask for the ancient paths:
Where is(251) 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!(252)
But they—“We heed not!”
Therefore, O nations, hearken, 18
And own My record against them (?)(253)
Hear thou, O Earth, 19
Lo, evil I bring to this people,
The fruit of their own devices,(254)
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 ruthlessness and terrific tumult, the panic they produce, and bitter mourning. The usual formula introduces the verses.

22. Thus hath the Lord said:

Lo, a people comes out of the North,
A nation(255) 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.(256)

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_.(257)

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,(258) 27
To 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(259) is not drawn.
“Refuse silver” men call them,
For the Lord hath refused them.(260)

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,(261) is unnecessary. The young Jeremiah had already tested his people and in his earliest Oracles reached conclusions as hopeless as that here. At least he had already been called to test the people; and in next section we shall see how he continued to fulfil his duty after the discovery of Deuteronomy, and onwards through the attempts at reformation which it inspired.

3. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. (Chs. VII, VIII. 8, XI.)

We are not told when or why Jeremiah left Anathoth for Jerusalem. His early poem denouncing the citizens(262) reveals a close observation of their morals but no trace of the reforms begun by Josiah soon after 621 B.C. Some therefore hold that he had settled in the City before that year.(263) Anathoth, however, lay so near Jerusalem that even from his boyhood Jeremiah must have been familiar with the life and trade of the capital; and as his name is not mentioned in connection with the discovery of the Law-Book on which the reforms were based, and neither he nor his biographer speaks of that discovery, it is probable that as yet he had not entered upon residence in the Temple-precincts. A natural occasion for the migration of his family and himself would be upon Josiah’s disestablishment of the rural sanctuaries and provision for their priests beside the priests of the Temple.(264) In any case we find Jeremiah henceforth in Jerusalem, delivering his Words in the gateways or courts of the Temple to all classes of the citizens as well as to the country-folk, who under the new laws of worship thronged more than ever the City and her great Shrine.

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.(265)

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,(266) the monotheism of the Book is strenuously moral and warmly spiritual. The God of Israel is to be served and loved because He is Love—the One and Only God not more by His Righteousness and His Power than by His Grace, manifest as all three have been throughout His dealings with Israel. The worship of other gods is forbidden and so is every attempt to represent Himself in a material form. His ritual is purged of foolish, unclean and cruel elements. Witchcraft and necromancy are utterly condemned.

_Second_—and this is original to Deuteronomy—The One Altar, at that time an inevitable corollary both to the need for purity in the worship of God and to the truth of His Unity. The long license of sacrifices at a multitude of shrines had resulted not only in the debasement of His worship, but in the popular confusion of Himself with a number of local deities.(267) The removal of the high-places, the concentration of sacrifice upon One Altar had, by the bitter experience of centuries, become a religious and an ethical necessity.

_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 higher position than is assumed for her by other Hebrew codes. It cares for the individual poor, stranger, debtor and dependent priest with a humanity all its own, and it exhorts to the education of children. Above all it forbids base thoughts as well as base deeds. Yet, while thus enforcing the elements of a searching personal morality, Deuteronomy deals with the individual only through his relations to the nation and the national worship. The Book has no promise for the individual beyond the grave. Nor is there pity nor charity for other peoples nor any sense of a place for them in the Divine Providence. There is no missionary spirit nor hope for mankind outside of Israel.

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 insistent upon justice, holiness and humanity, lays equal emphasis on a definite ritual, with One Altar and an exclusive system of sacrifices, tempted the popular mind to a superstitious confidence in these institutions. And while it was of practical advantage to have the principles of the prophets reduced to a written system, which could be enforced as public law and taught to the young—two ends on which the authors of Deuteronomy are earnestly bent—there was danger of the people coming thereby to trust rather in the letter than in the spirit of the new revelation. Both these dangers were soon realised. As Dr. A. B. Davidson has said, “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.(268) That they have not even attempted this is proof—if proof were needed—that Jeremiah, the youthful son of a rural family, and probably still unknown to the authorities in the Capital, had nothing whatever to do either with the origins, or with the discovery, of the Book of the Law or with its presentation to the King by the priests of the Temple.

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.(269) That he was in sympathy with the temper and the general truths of Deuteronomy we need not doubt. As for its ethics, its authors were of the same school as himself and among their teachers they had the same favourite, Hosea. In his earliest Oracles Jeremiah had expressed the same view as theirs of God’s constant and clear guidance of Israel and of the nation’s obstinacy in relapsing from this. His heart, too, must have hailed the Book’s august enforcement of that abolition of the high places and their pagan ritual, which he had ventured to urge from his obscure position in Anathoth. Nor did he ever throughout his ministry protest against the substitute which the Book prescribed for those—the concentration of the national worship upon a single sanctuary. On the contrary in a later Oracle he looks for the day when that shall be observed by all Israel and the watchmen on Mount Ephraim shall cry,

Rise, let us up to Ṣion,
To the Lord our God!(270)