Chapter IV: Part 4

On the other hand, the emphasis which Deuteronomy equally lays upon ethics and upon ritual, and its absolute doctrines of morality and Providence were bound to provoke questions in a mind so restlessly questioning as his. Then there was the movement of reform which followed upon the appeal of the Book to the whole nation. Jeremiah himself had called for a national repentance and here, in the people’s acceptance of the Covenant and consent to the reforms it demanded, were the signs of such a repentance. No opposition appears to have been offered to those reforms. The King who led them was sincere; a better monarch Judah never knew, and his reign was signalised by Jeremiah at its close as a reign of justice when _all was well_. Yet can we doubt that the Prophet, who had already preached so rigorous a repentance and had heard himself appointed by God as the tester of His people, would use that detached position jealously to watch the progress of the reforms which the nation had so hurriedly acclaimed and to test their moral value?

In modern opinion of Jeremiah’s attitude to the discovered Law-Book there are two extremes. One is of those who regard him as a legalist and throughout his career the strenuous advocate of the Book and the system it enforced. The other is of those who maintain that he had no sympathy with legal systems or official reforms, and that the passages in the Book of Jeremiah which allege his assent to, and his proclamation of, the Deuteronomic Covenant, or represent him as using the language of Deuteronomy, are not worthy of credit.(271) Of these extremes we may say at once that if with both we neglect the twofold character of Deuteronomy—its emphasis now on ethics and now on ritual—and again, if with both we assume that Jeremiah’s attitude to the Law-Book and to the reforms it inspired never changed, then the evidences for that attitude offered by the Book of Jeremiah are inconsistent and we may despair of a conclusion. But a more reasonable course is open to us. If we keep in mind the two faces of Deuteronomy as well as the doubtful progress for many years of the reforms started by it, and if we also remember that a prophet like all the works of God was subject to growth; if we allow to Jeremiah the same freedom to change his purpose in face of fresh developments of his people’s character as in the Parable of the Potter he imputes to his God; if we recall how in 604 the new events in the history of Western Asia led him to adapt his earlier Oracles on the Scythians to the Chaldeans who had succeeded the Scythians as the expected Doom from the North—then our way through the evidence becomes tolerably clear, except for the difficulty of dating a number of his undated Oracles. What we must not forget is the double, divergent intention and influence of Deuteronomy, and the fact that Josiah’s reformation, though divinely inspired, was in its progress an experiment upon the people, whose mind and conduct beneath it Jeremiah was appointed by God to watch and to test.

These considerations prepare us _first_ for the story in Ch. XI. 1-8 of Jeremiah’s fervent assent to the ethical principles of Deuteronomy and of the charge to him to proclaim these throughout Judah; and _then_ for his later attitude to the written Law, to the Temple and to sacrifices.

XI. 1. The Word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2.
Hear thou(272) the words of this Covenant, and speak them to the
men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 3. And thou
shalt say to them, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: 4.
Cursed be the man who hears not the words of this Covenant, which
I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought them out of the
land of Egypt, out of the iron-furnace, saying, Hearken to My
Voice and do(273) according to all that I command you, and ye
shall be to Me a people, and I will be God to you; [5] in order to
establish the oath which I sware unto your fathers, to give them a
land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day. 6. And I
answered and said, Amen, O Lord! 7. And the Lord said unto me,
Proclaim(274) these words in the cities of Judah and in the
streets of Jerusalem, saying, [8] Hear ye the words of this
Covenant and do them, but they did them not.(275)

The story has its difficulties. It is undated; it is followed by verses 9-17, apparently from the reign of Jehoiakim; what the Prophet is called to hear and gives his solemn assent to is generally described as _this Covenant_; and in verses 7 and 8 there is what may be a mere editorial addition since the Greek Version omits it, which has led some to assert the editorial character of the whole. But for the reasons given above, there is no cause to doubt the substantial truthfulness of the story, unless with Duhm we were capable of believing that Jeremiah never spoke in prose, nor can be conceived as, at any time in his life the advocate of what was a legal as well as a prophetic book. Of the first of these assertions we have already disposed;(276) the second is met by the fact that what Jeremiah was called to assent to was not a legal programme but a spiritual covenant, of which ethical obedience alone was stated as the condition. In Josiah’s reign what else could _this Covenant_ mean than the Covenant set forth in the recently discovered Book of the Law and solemnly avouched by the whole people?(277) That its essence was spiritual and ethical is expressed in the Deuteronomic phrases which follow, and the quotation of these is most relevant to the occasion. Nor do the recollections, the command and the promise which they convey go beyond what Jeremiah had already enforced in his earlier Oracles.(278)

Therefore we may believe that, as recorded, Jeremiah heard in the heart of Deuteronomy the call of God, that he uttered his Amen to it; and that, from his experience of the evils of the high-places, he felt obliged, as he also records, to proclaim _this Covenant_ throughout Judah.(279)

In the same chapter as the charge to the Prophet concerning _this Covenant_ there is mention of a conspiracy against his life by the men of Anathoth, XI. 21. Some suppose that these were enraged by his support of reforms which abolished rural sanctuaries like their own. But his earlier denunciations of such shrines, delivered independently of Deuteronomy, had been enough to rouse his fellow-villagers against him as a traitor to their local interests and pieties.

Another address, VII. 1-15, said to have been delivered to all Judah, rebukes the people for their false confidence in the Temple and their abuse of it, and threatens its destruction. Editorial additions may exist in both the Hebrew and Greek texts of this address, but it contains phrases non-deuteronomic and peculiar to Jeremiah, while its echoes of Deuteronomy were natural to the occasion. Except for a formula or two, I take the address to be his own. Nor am I persuaded by the majority of modern critics that it is a mere variant of the Temple address reported in Ch. XXVI as given _in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim_. Why may Jeremiah not have spoken more than once on the same theme to the same, or a similar effect? Moreover, the phrase _We are delivered!_ VII. 10, which does not recur in XXVI, suits the conditions before, rather than those after, the Battle of Megiddo. For parallel with the increased faith in the Temple, due mainly to the people’s consciousness of their obedience to the Law-Book, was their experience of deliverance from the Assyrian yoke. I am inclined, therefore, to refer VII. 1-15 to the reign of Josiah, rather than with XXVI to that of Jehoiakim.(280) But, whatever be its date, VII. 1-15 is relevant to our present discussion.

VII. 2, 3. Hear ye the Word of the Lord, all Judah!(281) Thus
saith the Lord, the God of Israel—Better your ways and your doings
that I may leave you to dwell in this Place. 4. Put not your trust
on lying words,(282) saying to yourselves,(283) “The Temple of the
Lord, The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord—[5] are
those!”(284) But if ye thoroughly better your ways and your
doings, if ye indeed do justice between a man and his fellow, [6]
and oppress not the sojourner, the orphan, and the widow, and shed
not innocent blood [in this Place], nor go after other gods to
your hurt, [7] then I shall leave you to abide in this Place [in
the land which I gave to your fathers from of old for ever]. 8.
Behold, you put your trust on lying words that cannot profit. 9.
What? Steal, murder, fornicate, swear falsely, and burn(285) to
Baal, and go after other gods whom ye knew not, [10] yet come and
stand before Me in this House upon which My Name has been called
and say “We are delivered”—in order to work all these
abominations! 11. Is it a robbers’ den that My(286) House [upon
which My Name has been called] has become in your eyes? I also,
behold I have seen it—Rede of the Lord. 12. For go now to My Place
which was in Shiloh, where at first I caused My Name to dwell, and
see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people
Israel. 13. And now because of your doing of all these deeds [Rede
of the Lord, though I spake unto you rising early and speaking,
but ye hearkened not, and I called you, but ye did not
answer],(287) [14] I shall do to the House [on which My Name has
been called] in which you are trusting, and to the Place which I
gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15. And I
shall cast you out from before My Face as I cast out(288) your
brethren, all the seed of Ephraim.

In this address there is nothing that contradicts Deuteronomy. The sacredness with which the Book had invested the One Sanctuary is acknowledged. But the people have no moral sense of that sacredness. Their confidence in the Temple is material and superstitious, fostered, we may believe, by the peace they were enjoying and their relief from a foreign sovereignty, as well as by their formal observance of the institutions which the Book prescribed. What had been founded to rally and to guide a spiritual faith they turned into a fetish and even to an “indulgence” for their wickedness. The House, in which Isaiah had bent beneath the seraphs’ adoration of the Divine Holiness, and, confessing his own and his people’s sin, had received from its altar the sacrament of pardon and of cleansing, was by this generation not only debased to a mere pledge of their political security but debauched into a shelter for sins as gross as ever polluted their worship upon the high places. So ready, as in all other ages, were formality and vice to conspire with each other! Jeremiah scorns the people’s _trust_ in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their _trust_ (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at least had Deuteronomy effected—shifting their trust from foreign gods and states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and unable to restrain them from bringing along with it their old obdurate vices.

Whether, then, this address was delivered in Josiah’s reign or early in Jehoiakim’s it affords no reason for our denying it to Jeremiah. As God’s tester of the people he has been watching their response to the Revelation they had accepted, and has proved that their obedience was to the letter of this and not to its spirit, that while they superstitiously revered its institutions they shamelessly ignored its ethics. For just such vices as they still practised God Himself must take vengeance. As those had deranged the very seasons and were leading to the overthrow of the state,(289) no one could hope that the Temple would escape their consequences. And there was that precedent of the destruction of Israel’s first sanctuary in Shiloh, the ruins of which, as we have seen, lay not far from Jeremiah’s home at Anathoth.(290)

Another Oracle, XI. 15, 16, also undated, seems, like the last passage, best explained as delivered by Jeremiah while he watched during the close of Josiah’s reign the hardening of the people’s trust in their religious institutions and felt its futility; or alternatively when that futility was exposed by the defeat at Megiddo. It has, however, been woven by some hand or other into a passage reflecting the revival of the Baal-worship under Jehoiakim (verse 17; its connection with the prose sentence preceding is also doubtful). Copyists have wrought havoc with the Hebrew text, but as the marginal note of our Revisers indicates, the sense may be restored from the Greek. _My Beloved_ is, of course, Israel.

What has My Beloved to do in My house, XI. 15
Working out mischief?
Vows, holy flesh! Can such things turn
Calamity from thee;
Or by these thou escape?(291)
Flourishing olive, fair with fruit, 16
God called thy name.
To the noise of a mighty roaring
He sets her on fire—
Blasted her branches!

The first of these verses repeats the charge of VII. 2-11: the people use the Temple for their sins. The word rendered _mischief_ is literally _devices_, and the meaning may be intrigues hatched from their false ideas of the Temple’s security. But the word is mostly used of _evil devices_ and here the Greek has _abomination_. As with their Temple so with their vows and sacrifices. All are useless because of their wickedness. The nation must be punished. The second verse may well have been uttered after the defeat at Megiddo, or may be a prediction on the eve of that disaster to _the branches_ of the nation, which the nation as a whole survived.

This leads to another and more difficult question. Jeremiah has spoken doom on the Temple and the Nation; has he come to doubt the Law-Book itself or any part of it? As to that there are two passages one of which speaks of a falsification of the Law by its guardians, while the other denies the Divine origin not only of the deuteronomic but of all sacrifices and burnt offerings.

Even before the discovery of the Law-Book the young prophet had said of _those who handle the Law_ that _they did not know the Lord_.(292) And now in an Oracle, apparently of date after the discovery, he charges the scribes with manipulating _the Law_, the _Torah_, so as to turn it to falsehood. The Oracle is addressed to the people of whom he has just said that they do not know _the Rule, the Mishpaṭ, of the Lord_.

How say you, “We are the Wise, VIII. 8
The Law of the Lord is with us.”
But lo, the falsing pen of the scribes
Hath wrought it to falsehood.

_Torah_, literally _direction_ or _instruction_, is either a single law or a body of law, revealed by God through priests or prophets, for the religious and moral practice of men. Here it is some traditional or official form of such law, for which the people have rejected the Word of the Lord—His living Word by the prophets of the time (verse 9).

Put to shame are the wise, 9
Dismayed and taken.
Lo, they have spurned the Word of the Lord—
What wisdom is theirs?

Was this _Torah_ oral or written? And if written was it the discovered Book of the _Torah_, which in part at least was our Deuteronomy?

So far as the text goes the original _Torah_ may have been either oral or written, and the scribes have _falsified_ it, by amplification or distortion,(293) either when reducing it for the first time to writing or when copying and editing it from an already written form. This leaves open these further questions. If written was the _Torah_ the very _Book of the Torah_ discovered in the Temple in 621-20? And if so did the falsification affect the whole or only part of the Book? To these questions some answer No, on the ground of Jeremiah’s assent to _this Covenant_, and the command to him to proclaim it.(294) Others answer Yes; in their view Jeremiah was opposed to the deuteronomic system as a whole, or at least to the detailed laws of ritual added to the prophetic and spiritual principles of the Book.(295) Another possibility is that Jeremiah had in view those first essays in writing of a purely priestly law-book, which resulted during the Exile in the so-called Priests’ Code now incorporated in the Pentateuch. In our ignorance both of the original form of Deuteronomy and of the extent and character of the activity of the scribes during the reign of Josiah we might hesitate to decide among these possibilities were it not for the following address which there is no good reason for denying to Jeremiah.

VII. 21. Thus saith the Lord,(296) Your burnt offerings add to
your sacrifices and eat flesh(297)! 22. For I spake not with your
fathers nor charged them, in the day that I brought them forth
from the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offering and sacrifice.
23. But with this Word I charged them, saying, Hearken to My
Voice, and I shall be to you God, and ye shall be to Me a people,
and ye shall walk in every way that I charge you, that it may be
well with you.

Whether from Jeremiah or not, this is one of the most critical texts of the Old Testament because while repeating what the Prophet has already fervently accepted,(298) that the terms of the deuteronomic Covenant were simply obedience to the ethical demands of God, it contradicts Deuteronomy and even more strongly Leviticus, in their repeated statements that in the wilderness God also commanded sacrifices. The issue is so grave that there have been attempts to evade it. None, however, can be regarded as successful. That which would weaken the Hebrew phrase, rightly rendered _concerning_ by our versions, into _for the sake of_ or _in the interest of_ (as if all the speaker intended was that animal sacrifice was not the chief end or main interest of the Divine legislation) is doubtful philologically, nor meets the fact that all the Hebrew codes assign an indispensable value to sacrifice. Inadmissible also is the suggestion that the phrase means _concerning the details of_, for Deuteronomy and especially Leviticus emphasise the details of burnt-offering and sacrifice. Nor is the plausible argument convincing that the Prophet spoke relatively, and meant only what Samuel meant by _Obedience is better than sacrifice_, or Hosea by _The Knowledge of God is more than burnt-offerings_.(299) Nor are there grounds for thinking that the Prophet had in view only the Ten Commandments; while finally to claim that he spoke in hyperbole is a forlorn hope of an argument. In answer to all these evasions it is enough to point out that the question is not merely that of the value of sacrifice, but whether during the Exodus the God of Israel gave any charge concerning sacrifice; as well as the fact that others than Jeremiah had either explicitly questioned this or implicitly denied it. When Amos, in God’s Name repelled the burnt-offerings of his generation he asked, _Did ye bring unto Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O House of Israel?_ and obviously expected a negative answer. And the following passages only render more general the truth that Israel’s God has no pleasure at any time in the sacrifices offered to Him, with the institution of which—the natural inference is—He can have had nothing to do. _Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath declared to thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God._ And these two utterances in the Psalms: _Shall I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving and pay thy vows to the Most High_; and _Thou desirest not sacrifice else would I give it, Thou delightest not in burnt-offering, The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit_.(300)

For the accuracy of these assertions or implications by a succession of prophets and psalmists there is a remarkable body of historical evidence. The sacrificial system of Israel is in its origins of far earlier date than the days of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. It has so much, both of form and meaning, in common with the systems of kindred nations as to prove it to be part of the heritage naturally derived by all of them from their Semitic forefathers. And the new element brought into the traditional religion of Israel at Sinai was just that on which Jeremiah lays stress—the ethical, which in time purified the ritual of sacrifice and burnt-offering but had nothing to do with the origins of this.

Therefore it is certain _first_ that Amos and Jeremiah meant literally what they stated or implicitly led their hearers to infer—God gave no commands at the Exodus concerning burnt-offerings and sacrifices—and _second_ that historically they were correct. But, of course, their interest in so saying was not historical but spiritual. Their aim was practical—to destroy their generation’s materialist belief that animal sacrifice was the indispensable part of religion and worship. Still his way of putting it involves on the part of Jeremiah a repudiation of the statements of Deuteronomy on the subject. So far, then, Jeremiah opposed the new Book of the Law.(301)

But with all this do not let us forget something more. While thus anticipating by more than six centuries the abolition of animal sacrifices, Jeremiah, by his example of service and suffering, was illustrating the substitute for them—the _human_ sacrifice, the surrender by man himself of will and temper, and if need be of life, for the cause of righteousness and the salvation of his fellow-men. The recognition of this in Jeremiah by a later generation in Israel led to the conception of the suffering Servant of the Lord, and of the power of His innocent sufferings to atone for sinners and to redeem them.

* * * * *

This starts a kindred point—and the last—upon which Jeremiah offers, if not a contradiction, at least a contrast and a supplement to the teaching of Deuteronomy. We have noted the absoluteness—or idealism—of that Book’s doctrines of Morality and Providence; they leave no room for certain problems, raised by the facts of life. But Jeremiah had bitter experience of those facts, and it moved him to state the problems to God Himself. He owns the perfect justice of God; but this only makes his questioning more urgent.

Too righteous art Thou O Lord, XII. 1
That with Thee I should argue,
Yet cases there are I must speak to Thee of:
The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper,
And the treacherous all be at ease?
Thou hast planted them, yea they take root, 2
They get on, yea they make fruit;
Near in their mouths art Thou,
But far from their hearts.

We shall have to deal with these questions and God’s answer to them, when in a later lecture we analyse Jeremiah’s religious experience and struggles. Here we only note the contrast which they present to Deuteronomy—a contrast between the Man and the System, between Experience and Dogma, between the Actual and the Ideal. And, as we now see, it was the System and the Dogma that were defective and the Man and his Experience of life that started, if not for himself yet for a later generation, pondering his experience, the solution of those problems, which against the deuteronomic teaching he raised in brave agony to God’s own face.

Such serious differences between Jeremiah and Deuteronomy—upon the Law, the Temple, the Sacrifices, and Doctrines of Providence and Morality—suggest an important question with regard to the methods of Divine Revelation under the Old Covenant. Do they not prove that among those methods there were others than vision or intuition springing from the direct action of the Spirit of God upon the spirits of individual men? Are they not instances of the processes by which to this day in the Providence of God truth is sifted and ultimately beaten out—namely debate and controversy between different minds or different schools of thought, between earnest supporters of various and often hostile opinions in neither of which lies the whole of the truth? The evidence for Revelation by Argument which the Book of Jeremiah affords is not the least of its contributions to the history and philosophy of religion.

Lecture V.

UNDER JEHOIAKIM. 608-597-8 B.C.

1. From Megiddo to Carchemish, 608-605.

Josiah’s faithful reign, and with it all thorough efforts to fulfil the National Covenant,(302) came to a tragic close on the field of Megiddo—the Flodden of Judah.

The year was 608 B.C. Medes and Chaldeans together had either taken, or were still besieging, Nineveh; and Pharaoh Nĕcoh,(303) eager to win for Egypt a share of the crumbling Assyrian Empire, had started north with a great army. Marching by the coast he first took Gaza, and crossing by one of the usual passes from Sharon to Esdraelon,(304) found himself opposed near Megiddo by a Jewish force led by its king in person. The Chronicler tells us that Nĕcoh sought to turn Josiah from his desperate venture: _What have I to do with thee? I am come not against thee but against the House with which I am at war. God hath spoken to speed me; forbear from God who is with me, lest He destroy thee._(305) But Josiah persisted. The issue of so unequal a contest could not be doubtful. The Jewish army was routed and Josiah himself immediately slain.(306)

At first sight, the courage of Josiah and his small people in facing the full force of Egypt seems to deserve our admiration, as much as did the courage of King Albert and his nation in opposing the faithless invasion of Belgium by the Germans aiming at France. There was, however, a difference. Nĕcoh was not invading Judah, but crossing Philistine territory and a Galilee which had long ceased to be Israel’s. Some suppose that since the Assyrian hold upon Palestine relaxed, Josiah had gradually occupied all Samaria. If this be so, was he now stirred by a gallant sense of duty to assert Israel’s ancient claim to Galilee as well? We cannot tell.(307) But what we may confidently assume is that, having fulfilled by thirteen years of honest reforms his own part of the terms of the Covenant, Josiah believed that he could surely count on the Divine fulfilment of the rest, and that some miracle would bring to a righteous king and people victory over the heathen, however more powerful the heathen might be. He was only thirty-nine years of age.

His servants carried his body from the field in a chariot to Jerusalem, bringing him back, as we may realise, to a people stricken with consternation. Their trust in the Temple was shaken—they were not _delivered_!(308) In the circumstances they did their feeble best by raising to the vacant throne Josiah’s son, Shallum, as Jehoahaz, _the Lord hath taken hold_. But the new name proved no omen of good. In three months Nĕcoh had the youth in bonds at Riblah, in the land of Hamath, _that he might not reign in Jerusalem_, and afterwards took him to Egypt. Of this fresh sorrow Jeremiah sang as if it had drowned out the sorrow of Megiddo—

Weep not for the dead, XXII. 10
Nor bemoan him,
But for him that goeth away weep sore,
For he cometh no more,
Nor seeth the land of his birth.

Jehoahaz died in Egypt.

The next King, Jehoiakim, another of Josiah’s sons, was set on the throne by Nĕcoh, who also exacted a heavy tribute. What national disillusion! The hopes falsely kindled upon the letter of Deuteronomy lay quenched on Megiddo; and the faithful servant of the Covenant had, in spite of its promises as men would argue, been defeated and slain in the flower of his life. Judah had been released from the Assyrian yoke, only to fall into the hands of another tyrant, her new king his creature, and her people sorely burdened to pay him. The result was religious confusion. In at least a formal obedience to the deuteronomic laws of worship, the people of the land continued to resort to the Temple fasts and festivals.(309) But resenting the failure of their God to grant victory numbers relapsed into an idolatry as rank as that under Ahaz or Manasseh;(310) while others, more thoughtful but not less bewildered, conceived doubts of the worth of righteousness. And these tempers were embittered by the cruel selfishness of the new monarch and his reckless injustice. To the taxes required for the tribute to Egypt he added other exactions in order to meet his extravagance in enlarging and adorning his palace. The crime, with which Jeremiah charges him in the following lines, is one to which small kings in the East have often been tempted by their contact with civilisations richer than their own. On Judah Jehoiakim imposed the cruel corvée, which in our day Ismail Pasha imposed upon Egypt.

Woe to who builds his house by injustice, XXII. 13
His storeys by wrong,
Who forces his fellows to serve for nothing,
And pays not their wage.
Who saith,(311) 14
I will build me an ampler house
And airier storeys,
Widen my windows, panel with cedar,
And paint with vermilion,
Wilt thou thus play the king, 15
Fussing with cedar?
Thy sire, did not he eat and drink,
And do justice and right,
And judge for the poor and the needy? 16
Then was it well!(312)
Was not this how to know Me?—
Rede of the Lord.
But thine eyes and thy heart are on nought 17
Save thine own spoil,
And on shedding of innocent blood,
Doing outrage and murder.

Josiah had enjoyed what was enough for him in sober, seemly parallel to his faithful discharge of duty; his son was luxurious, unscrupulous, bloody, and withal petty—_fussing with cedar_, and cutting up the Prophet’s roll piece by piece with a pen-knife! Jeremiah and Baruch’s sarcastic notes on Jehoiakim find parallels in Victor Hugo’s “Châtiments” of Napoleon III.: “l’infiniment petit, monstreux et feroce;” “Voici de l’or, viens pille et vole ... voici du sang, accours, viens boire, petit, petit!”

XXII. 18. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim, son of
Josiah, King of Judah.

Mourn him they shall not, “Woe brother!”
“Woe sister!”
Nor beweep him, “Woe Lord!”
Or “Woe Highness!”
With the burial of an ass shall they bury him, 19
Dragged and flung out—
Out from the gates of Jerusalem.

Such a prophet to such a king must have been intolerable, and through the following years Jeremiah was pursued by the royal hatred. There were other and more poisonous enemies. We have found him, from the first, steadily seeing through, and stoutly denouncing the great religious orders—the priests, natural believers in the Temple, with a belief, since Deuteronomy came into their hands, more dogmatic and arrogant than ever; and the professional prophets with their shallow optimism that all was well for Judah, and that her God could never bring upon her the doom which Jeremiah threatened in His Name. _Not He!_ was their answer to him. These two classes were in conspiracy, deluding themselves and the people; in their trust upon the letter of the Law, they had no sense, as he told them, of _The Living God_.(313) Roused by his scorn they watched for an occasion to convict and destroy him.(314)

This he bravely gave by making, in obedience to God’s call, public prediction of the ruin of the Temple. It is uncertain whether Jeremiah did so only once, as many think who read in Chs. VII and XXVI reports of the same address, or whether, as I am inclined to believe, the former chapter reports an address delivered under Josiah, and the latter the repetition of its substance in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim.(315) However this be, Ch. XXVI alone relates the consequences of his outspoken courage. It represents the priests and the prophets as quoting his sentence upon the Temple in absolute terms; though both reports, in the form in which they have reached us, render his own delivery of it as conditional upon the nation’s refusal to repent and to better their ways.(316) This, of course, was ever their way; they were ready distorters.

XXVI. 1. In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim, son of
Josiah, came this word from the Lord. 2. Thus saith the Lord,
Stand in the court of the Lord’s House and speak unto all Judah,
all who come in to worship in the Lord’s House, all the words that
I have charged thee to speak to them; keep back not a word. 3.
Peradventure they will hearken and turn every man from his evil
way, and I shall relent of the evil which I am purposing to do to
them because of the evil of their doings. 4. And thou shalt say,
Thus saith the Lord: If ye will not obey Me to walk in My Law,
which I have set before you, [5] to hearken to the words of My
servants, the prophets whom I am sending to you, rising early and
sending—but ye have not hearkened—[6] then shall I render this
House like Shiloh and this City a thing to be cursed of all
nations of the earth. 7. And the priests and the prophets and all
the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the House of the
Lord. 8. And it was, when Jeremiah finished speaking all that the
Lord had charged him to speak to all the people, that the priests
and the prophets(317) laid hold on him saying, Thou shalt surely
die! 9. Because thou hast prophesied in the Name of the Lord
saying, As Shiloh this House shall be, and this City shall be laid
waste without a dweller. And all the people were gathered to
Jeremiah in the House of the Lord. 10. When the princes of Judah
heard of these things they came up from the king’s house to the
House of the Lord and took their seats in the opening of the New
Gate of the Lord’s House.(318) 11. Then said the priests and the
prophets to the princes and to all the people—Sentence of death
for this man! For he hath prophesied against this City as ye have
heard with your ears. 12. And Jeremiah said to the princes and to
all the people, The Lord hath sent me to prophesy against this
House and against this City all the words which ye have heard. 13.
So now better your ways and your doings, and hearken to the Voice
of the Lord, that the Lord may relent of the evil which He hath
spoken against you. 14. But as for me, here am I in your hand! Do
to me as is good and right in your eyes. 15. Only know for sure
that if ye put me to death ye will be bringing innocent blood upon
yourselves, and upon this City and upon her inhabitants; for in
truth the Lord did send me unto you to speak in your ears all
these words. 16. And the princes and all the people said to the
priests and the prophets, Not for this man be sentence of death,
because in the Name of the Lord our God hath he spoken to us. 17.
Then arose some of the elders of the land and said to all the
assembly of the people. 18. There was Micaiah the Morasthite in
the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and he said to all the people
of Judah, Thus saith the Lord: Ṣion like a field shall be
ploughed, And Jerusalem be heaps, And the mount of the House a
mound of the jungle. 19. Did Hezekiah and all Judah put him to
death? Did they not fear the Lord and soothe the Lord’s face, and
the Lord relented of the evil He had uttered against them. Yet we
are about to do a great wrong upon our own lives.

Several of its features lift this story to a place among the most impressive in the Old Testament. The priests and prophets on the one side and the princes on the other both use the phrase, that Jeremiah _spoke in the Name of the Lord_. But the former quote it ironically, or in indignation at the Prophet’s claim, while the princes are obviously impressed by his sincerity and apparently their impression is shared by the people. There could be no firmer measure of the pitch of personal power to which Jeremiah has at last braced himself.

The promise of his Call is fulfilled. Sceptical, fluid and shrinking as he is by nature, he stands for this hour at least, _a strong wall and a fortress_, by his clear conscience, his simple courage, and his full surrender to whatever be in store for him. How bravely he refuses to conciliate them!—_I am in your hand, do to me as is right in your eyes._

Again, there is proof of a popular tradition and conscience in Israel more sound than those of the religious authorities of the nation. The people remembered what their priests and prophets forgot or ignored, and through their elders gave utterance to it on the side of justice. In agreement with them were the princes, the lay leaders of the nation. To ecclesiastics of every age and race this is a lesson, to give heed to “the common sense” and to the public instinct for justice. And on that day in Jerusalem these were called forth by the ability of the people, commoners and nobles alike, to recognise a real Prophet, an authentic Speaker-for-God at once when they heard him.

The danger that Jeremiah faced and the source from which it sprang are revealed by the fate which befell another denouncer of the land in the Name of the Lord. Of him, the narrator uses a form of the verb _to prophesy_ different from that which he uses of Jeremiah, thus guarding himself from expressing an opinion as to whether the man was a genuine prophet. This is a further tribute to the moral effect of Jeremiah’s person and word.

XXVI. 20. There was also a man who took upon him to prophesy in
the Name of the Lord, Urijahu, son of Shemajahu, from
Kiriath-jearim, and he prophesied(319) against this land,
according to all the words of Jeremiah. 21. And king
Jehoiakim(320) and all the princes heard of his words and they
sought(321) to put him to death; and Urijahu heard and fearing
fled and went into Egypt. 22. And the king sent men to Egypt.(322)
23. And they took forth Urijah thence and brought him to the king,
and slew him with the sword, and cast his corpse into the graves
of the sons of the people. 24. But the hand of Ahikam, the son of
Shaphan, was with Jeremiah so as not to give him into the hand of
the people to put him to death.

The one shall be taken and the other left! We are not told why, after the verdict of the princes and the people, Ahikam’s intervention was needed. Yet the people were always fickle, and the king who is not mentioned in connection with Jeremiah’s case, but as we see from Urijah’s watched cruelly from the background, was not the man to be turned by a popular verdict from taking vengeance on the Prophet who had attacked him. Ahikam, however, had influence at court, and proved friendly to Jeremiah on other occasions.(323)

All this was _in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim_. Before we follow Jeremiah himself through the rest of that malignant and disastrous reign, during which the steadfastness that his personality had achieved was again to be shaken, we must understand the progress of the great events which directed his own conduct and gradually determined the fate of his people.

In 625 B.C. the successor of Asshurbanipal upon the tottering throne of Assyria had found himself compelled to acknowledge Nabopolassar the Chaldean as nominally viceroy, but virtually king, of Babylon.(324) The able chief of a vigorous race, Nabopolassar bided his time for a vaster sovereignty, and steadily this came to him. The Medes, twice baffled in their attempts on Nineveh,(325) made terms with him for a united assault on the Assyrian capital and for the division of its empire. To that assault Nineveh fell in 612 or 606,(326) and with her fall Assyria disappeared from among the Northern Powers. Whatever part of the derelict empire the Medes may have secured, Mesopotamia remained with the Chaldeans who doubtless claimed as well all its provinces south of the Euphrates. But, as we have seen, Nĕcoh of Egypt had already overrun these and battle between him and the Chaldeans became imminent. Their armies met in 605-4 at Carchemish on The River. Nĕcoh was defeated by Nebuchadrezzar, son of Nabopolassar, and driven south to his own land. Egypt had failed; and the northern caldrons, as Jeremiah from the first predicted, again boiled with the fate of Judah and her neighbours. _The Foe_, though no longer the Scythian of his early expectations, was still _out of the North_.

By 602, if not before, Nebuchadrezzar, having succeeded his father as King of Babylon, carried his power to the coasts of the Levant and the Egyptian border. Judah was his vassal, and for three years Jehoiakim paid him tribute, but then defaulted, probably because of promises from Egypt after the fashion of that restless power. As if not yet ready to invade Judah in force, Nebuchadrezzar let loose upon her, along with some of his own Chaldeans, troops of Moabites, Ammonites and Arameans. Soon afterwards Jehoiakim died and was succeeded by his son Jehoiachin, a youth of eighteen, who appears to have maintained his father’s policy; for in 598, if not 597, Nebuchadrezzar came up against Jerusalem, which forthwith surrendered, and the king, his mother and wives, his courtiers and statesmen were carried into exile, with the craftsmen and smiths and all who were _apt for war; none remained save the poorest of the people of the land_.(327)

Throughout these convulsions of her world, this crisis in the history of Judah herself, Jeremiah remains the one constant, rational, and far-seeing power in the national life. But at what terrible cost to himself! His experience is a throng of tragic paradoxes. Faithful to his mission, every effort he makes to rouse his people to its meaning is baffled. His word is signally vindicated by the great events of the time, yet each of these but tears his heart the more as he feels it bringing nearer the ruin of his people. His word is confirmed, but he is shaken by doubts of himself, his utterance of which is in poignant contrast to his steadfast delivery of his messages of judgment. No prophet was at once more sure of his word and less sure of himself; none save Christ more sternly denounced his people or upon the edge of their doom more closely knit himself to them.

It is a staggering world, and the one man who has its secret is shaken to despair about himself. Yet the Word with which he is charged not only fulfils itself in event after event but holds its distracted prophet fast to the end of his abhorred task of proclaiming it.

The cardinal event was Nebuchadrezzar’s victory over Nĕcoh at Carchemish in 605 or 604 with its assurance of Babylonian, not Egyptian, supremacy throughout Western Asia. Such confirmation of the substance of Jeremiah’s prophecies of the past twenty-three years was that Divine signal which flashed on him to reduce those prophecies to writing and have them recited to the people by Baruch. We have already followed the story in Ch. XXXVI of how this was done(328) and of the consequences—the communication of the Roll to the princes and by them to the king, the king’s burning of the Roll piece by piece as he heard it read, his order for the arrest of Jeremiah and Baruch, their escape into hiding, and their preparation of a Second Roll containing all the words of the First with many others like them. We may now, in addition, note the following.

First there is the Divine Peradventure at the beginning of the story.(329) _It may be_, God says, that the people will hear and turn from their evil ways that I may forgive their iniquity—a very significant _perhaps_ when taken with the Parable of the Potter to which we are coming. Again, the king at least understands the evil predicted by Jeremiah to be the destruction of his land and people by the King of Babylon.(330) And again, though some of the princes encourage the Prophet’s escape, and urge the king not to burn the Roll, none are shocked by the burning.(331) Evidently in 605-4 they were not so impressed with the divinity of Jeremiah’s word as they had been in 608. Then they did not speak of telling the king; now they say that they _must tell_(332) him. Jehoiakim’s malignant influence has grown, and Jeremiah discovers the inconstancy of the princes, even of some friendly to himself.

To the same decisive year, 605-4, _the fourth of Jehoiakim_, is referred an address by Jeremiah reported in XXV. 1-11 (with perhaps 13_a_). This repeats the Prophet’s charge that his people have refused—now for three-and-twenty years—to listen to his call for repentance and reaffirms the certainty, at last made clear by the Battle of Carchemish, that their deserved doom lies in the hands of a Northern Power, which shall waste their land and carry them into foreign servitude for seventy years. The suggestion that this address formed the conclusion of the Second Roll dictated by Jeremiah to Baruch is suitable to the contents of the address and becomes more probable if we take as genuine the words in 13_a_, _Thus will I bring upon that land all My words which I have spoken against her, all that is written in this Book_. But a curious question rises from the fact that we have two differing reports of the address.(333) Very significantly the shorter Greek Version contains neither the addition to the date, _that was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon_, nor the two statements that his was the Northern Power which would waste Judah and which she should serve for seventy years (verses 1, 9, 11, as also the similar reference in verse 12), all of which are inserted in the Hebrew text but not without a sign of their being later intrusions upon it.(334) And indeed it is inconceivable that the Greek translator could have omitted the four references to Nebuchadrezzar (including that in verse 12) had he found them in the Hebrew text from which he worked. Probably, therefore, Jeremiah did not include them in the first version of his address; and for this he had reason. His purpose in the address was to declare the fulfilment of the substance of all his previous prophesying, and this had been not that the Chaldeans, but that _a northern power_, would prove to be the executioner of God’s judgment upon Judah. The references to Nebuchadrezzar were added, possibly by Jeremiah himself or by Baruch, as the Chaldean doom steadily drew nearer. The interesting thing is that the earlier version of the address survived and was used by the Greek translator.(335)

Verses 12-14, indicating the destruction of Babylon in her turn after seventy years, are, in whole or in part, generally taken as a post-exilic addition.(336) Omitting verse 14, the Greek inserts between 13 and 15 the Oracles on Foreign Nations, which the Hebrew postpones to Chs. XLVI. ff.(337) In the uncertain state of the text of 12-14 it is impossible to decide whether this was or was not the original position of those Oracles.

The rest of the chapter, verses 15-38, is so full of expansions and repetitions, which we may partly see from a comparison of it with the Greek, as well as of inconsistencies with some earlier Oracles by Jeremiah,(338) of traces of the later prophetic style and of echoes of other prophets, that many deny any part of the miscellany to be Jeremiah’s own. Yet we must remember that his commission was not to Judah alone(339) but to _the nations_ as well, against many of which XXV. 15-38 is directed; and the figure of the Lord handing to the Prophet the cup of the wine of His wrath is not one which we have any reason to doubt to be Jeremiah’s. Sifting, by help of the Greek, the Hebrew list of nations who are to drink of the cup, we get Judah and Egypt; Askalon, Gaza, Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod; Dedan, Tema, Buz, and their _clipt_ neighbours in Arabia; all of whom were shaken in Jeremiah’s day by the Chaldean terror. Indeed the reference to Ashdod suits the condition of that Philistine city in the Prophet’s time better than its restored prosperity in the post-exilic age. The substance of verses 15-23 may therefore be reasonably left to Jeremiah. Verses 24-38 are more doubtful.(340)

2. Parables. (XIII, XVIII-XX, XXXV.)

To the reign of Jehoiakim are usually referred a number of symbolic actions by Jeremiah, the narratives of which carry no dates. So far as they imply that the Prophet was still able to move openly about Jerusalem and the country they might be regarded as earlier than 604, when he was under restraint and had to hide himself.(341) But this is not certain. We are left to take them in the order in which they occur in the Book.

The first is that of the waist-cloth, XIII. 1-11. Jeremiah was charged to buy a linen waist-cloth(342) and after wearing it, but keeping it from damp, to bury it in the cleft of a rock, and after many days to dig it up, when he found it rotting. So had the Lord taken Israel to cleave to Him as such a cloth _cleaves to the loins of a man_; but separated from Him they had likewise rotted and were good for nothing. Separated by what—God’s action or their own? As it stands the interpretation is complicated. God spoils Israel because of their pride (verse 9) and Israel spoil themselves by disobedience and idolatry (verse 10). The complication may be due to a later addition to the text. But this question is not serious. Neither is that of the place where Jeremiah is said to have buried the cloth. _Pĕrath_, the spelling in the text, is the Hebrew name for the Euphrates and so the Greek and our own versions render it. But the name has not its usual addition of The River. If the Euphrates be intended the story is hardly one of fact, but rather a vivid parable of the saturation of the national life by heathen, corruptive influences from Mesopotamia.(343) Yet within an hour from Anathoth lies the Wady Farah, a name which corresponds to the Hebrew _Pĕrath_ or (by a slight change) _Parah_; and the Wady, familiar as it must have been to Jeremiah, suits the picture, having a lavish fountain, a broad pool and a stream, all of which soak into the sand and fissured rock of the surrounding desert.(344) That the Wady Farah was the scene of the parable is therefore possible, though not certain.(345) But the ambiguity of these details does not interfere with the moral of the whole.

This parable is immediately followed by the ironic metaphor of the Jars Full of Wine, XIII. 12-14, which I have already quoted.(346)

Next comes the Parable of the Potter, Ch. XVIII, that might be from any part of the Prophet’s ministry, during which he was free to move in public. This parable is instructive first by disclosing one of the ways along which Revelation reached, and spelt itself out in, the mind of the Prophet. He felt a Divine impulse to go down to the house of the Potter,(347) _and there I will cause thee to hear My Words_, obviously not words spoken to the outward ear. For, as Jeremiah watched the potter at work on _his two stones_,(348) and saw that when the vessel he first attempted was marred he would remould the clay into another vessel as seemed good to him, a fresh conception of the Divine Method with men broke upon Jeremiah and became articulate. A word from the Lord flashed through his eyes upon his mind, just as in his first visions of the almond-blossom and the caldron.(349)