Chapter VI: Part 6

The intrigues of Egypt persisted, however, and, in 589 or 588, after the accession of Pharaoh Hophra,(479) at last prevailed upon Judah. Ṣedekiah yielded to the party of revolt and Nebuchadrezzar swiftly invested Jerusalem. Roused to realities _the king and all the people of Jerusalem_ offered their repentance by a solemn covenant before God to enfranchise, in obedience to the Law, those slaves who had reached a seventh year of service. But when on the news of an Egyptian advance the Chaldeans raised their siege, the Jewish slave-owners broke faith and pressed back their liberated slaves into bondage.(480) This proved the last link in the long chain of lies and frauds by which the hopelessly dishonest people fastened upon them their doom. Egypt again failed her dupes. The Chaldeans, either by the terror they inspired or by an actual victory on the field, compelled her army to retire, and resumed the siege of Jerusalem. Though Jeremiah counselled surrender and though the city was sapped by famine and pestilence, the fanatics—to whom, however reluctantly, some admiration is due—held out against the forces of Babylon for a year and a half. Then came the end. The walls on the north were breached. Ṣedekiah fled by a southern gate, upon an effort to reach the East of Jordan. He was overtaken on the plains of Jericho, his escort scattered and himself carried to Nebuchadrezzar’s head-quarters at Riblah on the Orontes. Thence, after his sons were slain before his eyes, and his eyes put out, he was taken in fetters to Babylon. Nebuṣaradan, a high Babylonian officer, was dispatched to Jerusalem to burn the Temple, the Palace and the greater houses, and to transport to Babylon a second multitude of Jews, leaving only _the poorest of the land to be vine-dressers and husbandmen_.(481) This was in 586.

1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)

From these rapidly descending years a number of prophecies by Jeremiah have come to us, as well as narratives of the trials which he endured because of his faithfulness to the Word of the Lord, and his sane views of the facts of the time. As we read these prophecies and narratives several changes become clear in the position and circumstances of the Prophet, and in his temper and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words have been, we are not surprised that to his contemporaries he has grown to be a personage of greater impressiveness and authority than before. He has still his enemies but these are not found in exactly the same quarters as under Jehoiakim. Instead of an implacable king, and princes more or less respectful and friendly, in the king he has now a friend, though a timid and ineffective one, while the new and inferior princes appear almost wholly against him. Formerly both priests and prophets had been his foes, but now only the prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one priest is loyal to him.(482) Inwardly again, he has no more of those debates with God and his own soul, which had rent him during the previous years; only once does doubt escape from his lips in prayer.(483) Clearest of all, his hope has been released, and in contrast with his prophesying up to the surrender of Jerusalem in 597, but in full agreement with his enduring faith in God’s Freedom and Patience,(484) he utters not a few predictions of a future upon their own land for both Israel and Judah. This greatest of the changes which appear is due partly to the fact that while the man’s reluctant duty has been to pronounce the doom of exile upon his people, that doom has been fulfilled, and his spirit, which never desired it,(485) is free to range beyond its shadows. To the clearness into which he rises he is helped, under belief in the Divine Grace, by the truth obvious to all but fanatics that peace and order were possible for that shaken world only through submission to Nebuchadrezzar’s firm government, including as this did a policy comparatively lenient to the Jewish exiles. But there was another and stronger reason why Jeremiah should at last turn himself to a ministry of hope, however sternly he must continue to denounce the Jews left in Jerusalem and Judah. The catastrophe of 597 largely separated the better elements of the nation, which were swept into exile, from the worse which remained in the land.

It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the most momentous events in the history of Israel, with which Jeremiah’s earliest Oracle under Ṣedekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more the Word of the Lord starts to him from a vision, this time of two baskets, one of good the other of bad figs, which the Lord, he says, _caused me to see_: a vision which I take to be as physical and actual as those of the almond-rod and the caldron upon his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though others interpret it as imaginative like the visions of Amos.(486) Note how easily again the Prophet passes from verse to prose. The verse is slightly irregular. The stresses of the four couplets are these—3 + 3; 4 + 3; 4 + 3; 3 + 3—to which the following version only approximates.

XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah?
And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad,
which for their(487) badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of
the Lord came unto me, [5] saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel—

Like unto these good figs
I look on the exiles of Judah,
Whom away from this place I have sent
To the Chaldeans’ land for (their) good.
For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6
And bring them back to this land,
And build them and not pull them down,
And plant them and not pluck up.

7. And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord,
and they shall be for a people unto Me, and I will be to them for
God, when they turn to me with all their heart. 8. But like the
bad figs which cannot be eaten for their(488) badness—thus saith
the Lord—so I give up Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes and
the remnant of Jerusalem, the left in this land,(489) with them
that dwell in the land of Egypt.(490) 9. And I will set them for
consternation(491) to all kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a
proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I drive them.
And I will send among them the sword, the famine and the
pestilence, till they be consumed from off the ground which I gave
to them.(492)

We cannot overestimate the effect upon Jeremiah himself, and through him and Ezekiel upon the subsequent history of Israel’s religion, of this drastic separation in 597 of the exiles of Judah from the remnant left in the land. After suffering for years the hopelessness of converting his people, the Prophet at last saw an Israel of whom hope might be dared. It was not their distance which lent enchantment to his view for he gives proof that he can descry the dross still among them, despite the furnace through which they have passed.(493) But the banished were without doubt the best of the nation, and now they had “dreed their weird,” gone through the fire, been lifted out of the habits and passions of the past, and chastened by banishment—pensive and wistful as exile alone can bring men to be.

We also have come out of the Great War with the best of us gone, and feel the contrast between their distant purity, _out of great tribulation_, and the unworthiness of those who are left. But neither to Jeremiah nor to any of his time was such inspiration possible as we draw from our brave, self-sacrificing dead. No confidence then existed in a life beyond the grave. Jeremiah himself can only _weep for the slain of his people_. His last vision of them is of _corpses strewn on the field like sheaves left after the reaper which nobody gathers_, barren of future harvests; and the last word he has for them is, _they went forth and are not_.(494) But that separated and distant Israel has for the Prophet something at least of what the cloud of witnesses by which we are encompassed means for us. There was quality in them, quality purified by suffering and sacrifice, more than enough to rally the conscience of the nation from which they had been torn. For the Prophet himself they released hope, they awoke the sense of a future, they revived the faith that God had still a will for His people, and that by His patient Grace a pure Israel might be re-born.

If the vision of the Figs reveals the ethical grounds of Jeremiah’s new hope for Israel, his Letter to the Exiles, XXIX. 1-23, discloses still another ground on which that hope was based—his clear and sane appreciation of the politics of his time. And it adds a pronouncement of profound significance for the future of Israel’s religion, that the sense of the presence of God, faith in His Providence and Grace, and prayer to Him were independent of Land and Temple.

From the subsequent fortunes of the exiles we know what liberal treatment they must have received from Nebuchadrezzar. They were settled by themselves; they were not, as in Egypt of old, hindered from multiplying; they were granted freedom to cultivate and to trade, by which many of them gradually rose to considerable influence among their captors. All this was given to Jeremiah to foresee and to impress upon the first exiles. But it meant that their exile would be long.

It is proof of the change in the Prophet’s position among his people(495) that his Letter was carried to Babylon by two ambassadors from the King of Judah to Nebuchadrezzar, and evidently with the consent of Ṣedekiah himself. The text of the Letter and of its title, originally no doubt from Baruch’s memoirs, has been considerably expanded, as is clear not only from the brevity of the Greek version, but from the superfluous formulas and premature insertions which the Hebrew and the Greek have in common. Following others I have taken verses 5-7 as metre; and if this is right we have a fresh instance of Jeremiah’s passing from metre to prose in the same discourse. The metrical character of 5-7 is not certain. Its couplets run on the following irregular scheme of stresses: 3 + 4, 2 + 3, 3 + 3, 3 + 2 (?), 3 + 4, 3 + 4—the last line as so often in a strophe being a long one.(496)

XXIX. 1. These are the words of the Letter which Jeremiah sent
from Jerusalem unto [the remnant of] the elders of the exiles, [3]
by the hand of Eleasah, son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, son of
Hilḳiah, whom Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon unto the
king of Babylon saying, [4] Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel, unto the exiles whom I have exiled from Jerusalem:(497)

Build houses and settle ye down, 5
Plant gardens and eat of their fruit,
Take ye wives, 6
And beget sons and daughters.
Take wives to your sons,
Give your daughters to husbands,
To beget sons and daughters,(498)
And increase(499) and do not diminish.
And seek ye the peace of the land,(500) 7
To the which I have banished you,
And pray for it unto the Lord,
For in her peace your peace shall be.

8. [For thus saith the Lord, Let not the prophets in your midst
deceive you, nor your diviners, nor hearken to the dreams they (?)
dream. 9. For falsehood are they prophesying unto you in My Name;
I have not sent them.](501) 10. For thus saith the Lord, So soon
as seventy years be fulfilled for Babylon, I will visit you and
establish My Word toward you by bringing you(502) back to this
place.

For I am thinking about you— 11
Rede of the Lord—
Thoughts not of evil but peace
To give you a Future and Hope.
Ye shall pray Me, and I will hear you, 12
Seek Me and find; 13
If ye ask Me with all your heart
I shall be found of you. 14

By omitting all of verses 12-14 that is not given by the Greek we get these eight lines in approximately Jeremiah’s favourite Qinah-measure. The Greek also lacks verses 16-20, which irrelevantly digress from the exiles to the guilt and doom of the Jews in Jerusalem, and which it is difficult to think that Jeremiah would have put into a letter to be carried by two of these same Jews.(503) Verse 15 goes with 21-23,(504) a separate message to the exiles which we shall treat in the following section.

2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)

Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles had its consequences. _First_, there was their claim to have prophets of the Lord among themselves, which in our text immediately follows the Letter as if part of it, XXIX. 15, 21-23, but which is probably of a somewhat later date.

XXIX. 15. Because ye have said, The Lord hath raised us up
prophets in Babylon, [21] thus saith the Lord concerning Ahab son
of Kolaiah and concerning Ṣedekiah son of Maaseiah,(505) Behold I
am to give them into the hand of the king of Babylon and to your
eyes shall he slay them. 22. And of them shall a curse be taken up
by all the exiles of Judah who are in Babylon saying, “The Lord
set thee like Ṣedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon
roasted(506) in the fire!” 23. Because they have wrought folly in
Israel and committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and in
My Name have spoken words which I commanded them not. I am He who
knoweth and am witness—Rede of the Lord.

And, _second_, another of the “prophets” among the exiles sent to Jerusalem a protest against Jeremiah’s Letter, XXIX. 24-29.

This passage, especially in its concise Greek form, which as usual is devoid of the repetitions of titles and other redundant phrases in the Hebrew text, bears the stamp of genuineness.

XXIX. 24. And unto Shemaiah the Nehemalite thou shalt say:(507)
25_b_. Because thou hast sent in thine own name a letter to
Ṣephaniah, son of Maaseiah, the priest,(508) saying, [26] The Lord
hath appointed thee priest, instead of Jehoiada the priest, to be
overseer in the House of the Lord for every man that is raving and
takes on himself to be a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in
the stocks and in the collar. 27. Now therefore why hast thou not
curbed Jeremiah of Anathoth, who takes on himself to prophesy unto
you? 28. Hath he not sent to us in Babylon saying, “It(509) is
long! Build ye houses and settle down, and plant gardens and eat
their fruit.” 29. And Ṣephaniah read this letter in the ears of
Jeremiah; [30] and the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying,
[31] Send to the exiles saying: Thus saith the Lord concerning
Shemaiah the Nehemalite, Because Shemaiah hath prophesied unto
you, although I did not send him, and hath led you to trust in a
lie; [32] therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold I am about to
visit upon Shemaiah and upon his seed; there shall not be a man to
them in your midst to see the good which I am going to do
you.(510)

In one respect Jeremiah has not changed. His denunciation of individuals who oppose the Word of the Lord by himself is as strong as ever, and still more dramatically than in the case of Shemaiah it appears in his treatment of the prophets within Jerusalem, who flouted his counsels of subjection to Nebuchadrezzar, Chs. XXVII-XXVIII. In this narrative or narratives (for the whole seems compounded of several, perhaps not all referring to the same occasion) the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts are even more than usually great. The Greek again attracts our preference by its freedom from superfluous titles, repetitions and redundances, and is probably nearer than the Hebrew to the original of Baruch’s Memoirs of the Prophet. But it is obviously not complete, missing out clauses, the presence of which is implied by subsequent ones.(511) The following is the substance of what Baruch reports.

It was the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, 593, when messengers from the neighbouring nations came to Jerusalem to intrigue under Egyptian influence for revolt against Babylon. Jeremiah was commanded to make a yoke of bars and thongs, and having put it on his neck to charge the messengers to tell their masters—

XXVII. 4. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: [5] I
have made the Earth by My great power and Mine outstretched arm,
and I give it unto whom it seems right to Me. 6. So now I have
given all these lands(512) into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king
of Babylon, to serve him,(513) and even the beasts of the field to
serve him. 8. And it shall be that the nation and kingdom, which
will not put their neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon, with
the sword and with the famine(514) shall I visit them—Rede of the
Lord—till they be consumed at his hand (?). 9. But ye, hearken ye
not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your
dreamers,(515) nor to your soothsayers, nor to your sorcerers, who
say, “Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon”; [10] for they
prophesy a lie unto you, to the result of removing you far from
your own soil. 11. But the nation which brings its neck into the
yoke of the king of Babylon and serves him, I will let it rest on
its own soil and it shall till this and abide within it.

This is followed by a similar Oracle to Ṣedekiah himself, 12-15, and by another, 16-22, to the priests concerning a matter of peculiar anxiety to them.

16. Thus saith the Lord, Hearken ye not to the words of the(516)
prophets, who prophesy to you saying, Behold, the vessels of the
Lord’s House shall be brought back from Babylon; for a lie are
they prophesying to you. I have not sent them.(517) 18. But if
prophets they be, and if the Word of the Lord is with them, let
them now plead with Me [that the vessels left in the House of the
Lord come not to Babylon]. 19. Yet thus saith the Lord concerning
the residue of the vessels, [20] which the king of Babylon did not
take when he carried Jeconiah into exile from Jerusalem, [22] unto
Babylon shall they be brought—Rede of the Lord.

The Hebrew text concludes with a prophecy of the restoration of the vessels, which had it been in the original the Greek translators could hardly have omitted, and which is therefore probably a _post factum_ insertion. Not only, then, were the sacred vessels taken away in 597 to remain in Babylon, but such as were still left in Jerusalem would also be carried thither. It is possible that this address is now out of place and should follow the next chapter, XXVIII, which deals only with the vessels carried off in 597. Like the Hebrew the Greek text gives XXVIII a separate introduction which dates it in the fifth month of the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, but omits the Hebrew statement that the year was the same as that of the events and words recorded in XXVII. The extent of the differences between the Hebrew and Greek continues to be at least as great as before,(518) as a comparison will show between the Authorised Version and the following rendering which adheres to the Greek.

Jeremiah was still wearing his symbolic yoke of wood and thongs in the Temple, when his prediction that the sacred vessels would not be restored was flatly contradicted and with as much assurance that the contradiction was from the God of Israel, as Jeremiah’s assurance about his own words. The speaker was like himself from the country of Benjamin, from Gibeon near Anathoth, Hananiah son of Azzur, who said—

XXVIII. 2. Thus saith the Lord, I have broken(519) the yoke of the
king of Babylon! 3. Within two years I will bring back to this
place the vessels of the House of the Lord, [4] and Jeconiah and
all the exiles of Judah that went to Babylon; for I will break the
yoke of the king of Babylon. 5. Then said Jeremiah to Hananiah,
before the priests and all the people(520) standing in the House
of the Lord—yes, [6] Jeremiah said,(521) Amen! The Lord do so! The
Lord establish the words thou hast prophesied, by bringing back
the vessels of the Lord’s House and all the exiles from Babylon to
this place! 7. Only hear, I pray thee, the Word of the Lord which
I am about to speak in thine ears and in the ears of all the
people. 8. The prophets who have been before me and thee from of
old, they prophesied against many lands and against great kingdoms
of war [and of famine (?) and pestilence].(522) 9. The prophet who
prophesies of peace (it is only) when the word(523) comes to pass
that the prophet is known(524) whom in truth the Lord hath sent.
10. Then Hananiah(525) took the bars off the neck of Jeremiah and
brake them. 11. And Hananiah spake before all the people saying:
Thus saith the Lord, Even so will I break the yoke of the king of
Babylon [within two years](526) from off the necks of all the
nations. And Jeremiah went his way. 12. Then came the Word of the
Lord to Jeremiah, after Hananiah had broken the bars from off his
neck, saying, [13] Go tell Hananiah, Thus saith the Lord: Thou
hast broken the bars of wood but I will(527) make in their stead
bars of iron. 14. For thus saith the Lord, An iron yoke have I put
upon the necks of all [these] nations, that they may serve the
king of Babylon. 15. And Jeremiah said to Hananiah,(528) The Lord
hath not sent thee, but thou leadest this people to trust in a
lie. 16. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I am about to
dispatch thee from off the face of the ground—this year thou shalt
die. 17. And he was dead(529) by the seventh month.

All praise to Baruch for his concise and vivid report, and to the Greek translator who has reproduced it! The editors of the Hebrew text have diluted its strength.

With this narrative we are bound to take the section of the Book entitled _Of the Prophets_, XXIII. 9-32. The text is in parts uncertain, and includes obvious expansions. These removed, we can fairly distinguish a continuous metrical form up to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27. The metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise the suggestion(530) that the whole is rhetorical prose, between which and metre proper it is often hard, as we have seen, to draw the line. But we have also learned how often and how naturally irregular, when the subject requires it, Jeremiah’s metres tend to become. So I have ventured, with the help of the Greek, to render the whole as metre, in which form are parts beyond doubt. Verses 18 and 30-32 are in prose, and both, but more probably the former, may be later additions, as are 19, 20, and clauses in 9, 10.

There is no reason against taking the remainder as Oracles by Jeremiah himself. No dates are given them; they probably come from various stages of his ministry, for he early found out the false prophets, and his experience of them and their errors lasted to the end. But probably this collection of the Oracles was made under Ṣedekiah; that Baruch gathered it still later is not so likely.

Of the prophets:— XXIII. 9
Broken my heart within me,
All pithless my bones.
I’m become like a drunken man
Like a wight overcome with wine.(531)
Of adulterers the land is full 10
Their course it is evil,(532)
Their might not right.
For prophet and priest alike 11
Are utterly godless.(533)
E’en in My House their evil I find—
Rede of the Lord.
Therefore their way shall they have 12
In slippery places,
Thrust shall they be into darkness(534)
And fall therein,
When I bring calamity on them,
The year of their visitation.
In Samaria’s prophets I saw the unseemly, 13
By Baal they prophesied.(535)
In Jerusalem’s prophets I see the horrible— 14
Adultery, walking in lies.
They strengthen the hands of ill-doers,
That none from his wickedness turns.
To Me they are all like Sodom,
Like Gomorra her(536) dwellers!
Therefore thus saith the Lord:(537) 15
Behold, I will feed them with wormwood,
And drug them with poison.(538)
For forth from Jerusalem’s prophets
Godlessness starts o’er the land.
Thus saith the Lord of Hosts 16
Hearken not to the words of the prophets
They make them bubbles,(539)
A vision from their hearts they speak,
Not from the mouth of the Lord.
Saying to the scorners of His(540) Word 17
“Peace shall be yours;”
To all who follow their stubborn hearts
“No evil shall reach you!”

18. [For who hath stood in the council of the Lord and hath seen
His Word? Who hath attended and heard?](541)

I have not sent the prophets, 21
Of themselves they run.
I have not spoken to them,
They do the prophesying.
If they had stood in My Council, 22
And heard My Words,
My people they would have been turning(542)
From(543) the wrong of their doings.
I am a God who is near 23
Not a God who is far.(544)
Can any man hide him in secret 24
And I not see him?
Is it not heaven and earth that I fill?—
Rede of the Lord.
I have heard what the prophets say 25
Who preach in My Name,
Falsely saying, “I have dreamed,
I have dreamed, I have dreamed.”(545)
Will the heart of the prophets turn,(546) 26
Who prophesy lies?
And in their prophesying ... (?)(547)
The deceit of their heart,
Who plan that My people forget My Name(548) 27
Through the dreams they tell,
Just as their fathers forgot
My Name through Baal.
The prophet with whom is a dream 28
Let him tell his(549) dream;
But he with whom is My Word,
My Word let him speak in truth.
What has the straw with the wheat?(550)
—Rede of the Lord—
My Word, is it not(551) like fire 29
And the hammer that shatters the rock?

30. Therefore, Behold, I am against the prophets—Rede of the
Lord—who steal My Words each from his mate. 31. Behold, I am
against the prophets who fling out their tongues and rede a
Rede.(552) 32. Behold, I am against the prophets of false dreams
who tell them and lead My people astray by their falsehood and
extravagance(553)—not I have sent them or charged them, nor of any
profit whatsoever are they to this people.(554)

We have now all the material available for judgment upon Jeremiah’s life-long controversy with the other prophets. His message and theirs were diametrically opposite. But both he and they spoke in the name of the same God, the God of their nation. Both were convinced that they had His Mind. Both were sure that their respective predictions would be fulfilled. Each repudiated the other’s claim to speak in the name of their nation’s God. With each it was an affair of strong, personal convictions, which we may grant, in the case of some at least of Jeremiah’s opponents, to have been as honest as his. At first sight it may seem hopeless to analyse such equal assurances, based apparently on identical grounds, with the view of discovering psychological differences between them; and as if we must leave the issue to the course of events to which both parties confidently appealed. Even here the decision is not wholly in favour of the one as against the others. For Jeremiah’s predictions in the Name of the Lord were not always fulfilled as he had shaped them. The northern executioners of the Divine Judgment upon Judah were not the Scythians as he at first expected; and—a smaller matter—Jehoiakim was not _buried with the burial of an ass, dragged and flung out from the gates of Jerusalem_, but _slept with his fathers_.(555) Yet these are only exceptions. Jeremiah’s prophesying was in substance vindicated by history, while the predictions of the other prophets were utterly belied. This is part of Jeremiah’s meaning when he says, _Of no profit whatsoever are they to this people_.(556)

What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the similar surfaces of Jeremiah’s and the prophets’ assurances we find two deep distinctions between them—one moral and one intellectual.

We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel from the level of that tribal system of religion which prevailed throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unworthy of His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the hands of their enemies.(557) _What else can I do?_ Jeremiah hears God say. The opposing prophets reply, _Not He!_ This is the ground of his charge against them, that they plan to make the _people forget the Name_, the revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as _their fathers forgat Him through Baal_,(558) confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local god.(559) This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of their time—on the one side his acute conscience of the vices that corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those vices. They would _heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly_, saying _it is well, it is well when well it is not_, and in their prophesying there was no call to repentance.(560) Moreover, though this may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among the exiles were _partakers of other men’s sins_; for Jeremiah charges them with the prevailing immoralities of the day—adultery and untruth. Instead of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness that spread through the land.(561) Though we have only Jeremiah’s—or Baruch’s—word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah’s charges are therefore not incredible.

But the grounds of the difference between Jeremiah and the other prophets were also intellectual. Jeremiah had the right eye for events and throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells us how the will of God was sometimes suggested to him by the sight of certain physical objects—the almond-blossom that broke the winter of Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or the potter at his wheel—so the sight of that in which the physical and spiritual mingled, the disposition and progress of the political forces of his world, made clear to him the particular lines upon which the ethically certain doom of Judah would arrive. He had the open eye for events and allowed neither that horror of his people’s ruin, of which he tells us his heart was full, nor any other motive of patriotism, nor temptations to the easier life that had surely been his by flattery and the promise of peace to his contemporaries, to blind him to the clear and just reading of his times, to which God’s Word and his faith in the Divine character had opened his vision. On the contrary the other prophets, to take them at their best, were blinded by their patriotism, blinded by it even after Carchemish and when the grasp of Babylon was sensibly closing upon Judah—even after the first captivity and when the siege of Jerusalem could only end in her downfall and destruction. Nothing proved sufficient to open such eyes to the signs of the times.

Making allowance, then, for the fact that we depend for our knowledge of the controversy upon the record of only one of the parties to it, and imputing to the other prophets the best possible, we are left with these results: that as proved by events the truth was with Jeremiah’s word and not with that of his opponents, and that the causes of this were his profoundly deeper ethical conceptions of God working in concert with his unwarped understanding of the political and military movements of his time.

To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets who were against him.

Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he opposed _the Word of the Living God_, Who spoke to the times and freely acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.

Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In contrast, not merely were Jeremiah’s prophecies conditional but the conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.

Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage Jeremiah showed patience with his opponents, the patience which is proof of the soundness of a man’s own convictions. He believed in “the liberty of prophesying,”

The prophet with whom is a dream
Let him tell his dream,
And he with whom is My Word,
My Word let him speak in truth!

Jeremiah had no fear of the issue being threshed out between them. The wheat would be surely cleared from the straw.(562) That is a confidence which attracts our trust. In the strength of it Jeremiah was enabled to pause and reflect on the apparently equal confidence which he encountered in his opponents, and to give this every opportunity to prove itself to him before he repeated his own convictions. I cannot think, as many do, that his words to Hananiah were sarcastic; and when Hananiah broke the yoke on Jeremiah’s shoulders, and it is said, _But Jeremiah went his way_, this was not in contempt but to think out the issue between them.(563) Nor do I feel sarcasm in his wish that his opponents’ predictions of the return of the sacred vessels from Babylon might be fulfilled.(564) His brave calm words to the prophets and priests who sought his life in the Temple in 604(565) bear similar testimony. All these are the marks of an honest, patient and reflective mind which weighs opinions opposite to its own.

Further still, Jeremiah had to his credit that of which his opponents appear to have been devoid. As we have seen no prophet was less sure of himself, or more reluctant to discharge the duties of a prophet. Everywhere he gives evidence of being impelled by a force not his own and against his will.(566) But the other prophets show no sign of this accrediting reluctance. They eagerly launch forth on their mission; _fling about their tongues, and rede a Rede_ of the Lord.(567) They give no impression of a force behind them. Jeremiah says that _they run of themselves_ and _prophesy of themselves_, they have not been sent.(568) We still keep in mind that we owe the accounts of them to Jeremiah and Baruch, their opponents. But our own experience of life enables us to recognise the portraits presented to us, as of characters found in every age: pushful men, who have no doubts of their omniscience, but, however patriotic or religious or learned, leave upon their contemporaries no impression of their being driven by another force than themselves, and whose opinions either are belied by events, or melt into the air.

One point remains. In answering Hananiah Jeremiah adduced the example of the acknowledged prophets of the past as being always prophets of doom, so that the presumption was in favour of those who still preached doom; yet he allowed that if any prophet promised peace, and peace came to pass, he also might be known as genuine. That was sound history, and in the circumstances of the day it was also sound sense.

3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)

History has no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet’s feet as low as the feet of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties of defence, the last crusts. His hunger, and, what is still keener, his pity for those who suffer it with him, may break his faith into cowardice and superstition. But if faith stands, and common-sense with it, his opportunities are high. His powers of spiritual vision may prove to be also those of political and even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics, to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a hero.

The Old Testament gives us three instances—Elisha’s brave visions during the Syrian blockade of Dothan and siege of Samaria; Isaiah, upon the solitary strength of his faith, carrying Jerusalem inviolate through her siege by the Assyrians; and now a century later Jeremiah, with a more costly courage, counselling her surrender to the Babylonians.

The records of the Prophet’s activity and sufferings during the siege are so curiously scattered through the Book and furnished with such headlines as to leave it clear that they were added at different times and possibly from different sources. Some of them raise the question whether or not they are doublets.

Three, XXI. 1-10, XXXIV. 1-7, XXXVII. 3-10, bear pronouncements by Jeremiah that the city must surrender or be stormed and burned. Of these the first and third each gives as the occasion of the pronouncement it quotes, Ṣedekiah’s mission of two men to the Prophet. Several critics regard these missions as identical. But can we doubt that during that crisis of two years the distracted king would send more than once for a Divine word? And for this what moments were so natural as when the Chaldeans were beginning the siege, XXI. 4, and when they raised it, XXXVII. 5? That one of the two messengers is on each occasion the same affords an inadequate reason—and no other exists—for arguing that both passages are but differently telling the same story.(569) Nor have any grounds been offered for identifying the occasion of either passage with that of XXXIV. 1-7. Thus we have three separate deliverances from Jeremiah to the king, each with its own vivid phrases and distinctive edge.

The first, XXI 1-10, was given as the Chaldeans closed upon Jerusalem but the Jews were not yet driven within the walls.(570) Ṣedekiah sent Pashḥur and Ṣephaniah to inquire if by a miracle the Lord would raise the siege. The grim answer came that the Lord Himself would fight the besieged, till they died of pestilence and the survivors were slaughtered by Nebuchadrezzar—_I_(_571_)_ shall not spare nor pity them_—which is proof that this Oracle was uttered before the end of the siege, when the survivors were not slain but deported. The people are advised to desert to the enemy—counsel which we shall consider later.

The second, XXXIV. 1-7, records a pronouncement unsought by the king but evoked from Jeremiah by the progress of the Chaldean arms, which had overrun all Judah save the fortresses of Jerusalem, Lachish and Azekah. Its vivid genuineness is further certified by its unfulfilled promise of a peaceful death for Ṣedekiah. The following is mainly after the Greek.

XXXIV. 2_b_. Thus saith the Lord: This city shall certainly be
given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it
and burn it with fire. 3. And thou shalt not escape but surely be
taken and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall look into
his eyes, and his mouth speak with thy mouth,(572) and to Babylon
shalt thou come. 4. Yet hear the Lord’s Word, O Ṣedekiah, king of
Judah! 5. Thus saith the Lord,(573) In peace shalt thou die, and
as the burnings(574) for thy fathers who reigned before thee so
shall they burn for thee, and with “Ah lord!” lament thee. I have
spoken the Word—Rede of the Lord.

The miserable king, how much worse was in store for him than even Jeremiah was given to foresee! Duhm (to our surprise, as Cornill remarks) agrees that the passage is from Baruch; but only in order to support the precarious thesis that Baruch knew nothing of Ṣedekiah’s being afterwards blinded and that the reports of this(575) sprang from unfounded rumour.

The third pronouncement to Ṣedekiah, XXXVII. 3-10,(576) was made when the king sent Jehucal and Ṣephaniah to seek the Prophet’s prayers, after the Chaldeans had raised the siege in order to meet the reported Egyptian advance to the relief of Jerusalem.

XXXVII. 7. Thus saith the Lord: Thus say ye to the king of Judah
who sent you to inquire of Me,(577) Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which
is coming forth to help you, shall return to the land of Egypt. 8.
And the Chaldeans shall come back and fight against this city and
take it and burn it with fire. 9. For(578) thus saith the Lord:
Deceive not yourselves saying, The Chaldeans shall surely go off
from us; they shall not go. 10. Even though ye smote the whole
host of the Chaldeans that are fighting with you, and but wounded
men were left, yet should these rise, each in his tent,(579) and
burn this city with fire.

It is very remarkable how the spiritual powers of the Prophet endowed him with these sound views of the facts of his time, and of their eventualities whether in the political or in the military sphere. For nearly forty years he had foretold judgment on his people out of the North: for eighteen at least he had been sure that its instrument would be Nebuchadrezzar and he had foreseen the first deportation of the Jews to Babylonia. Now step by step through the siege he is clear as to what must happen—clear that the Chaldeans will invest the city, clear when they raise the investment that they will beat off the Egyptian army of relief and return, clear that resistance to them is hopeless, and will but add thousands of deaths by famine and pestilence before the city is taken and burned and its survivors carried into exile—all of which comes to pass. But this political sagacity and military foresight have their source in moral and spiritual convictions—the Prophet’s assurance of the character and will of God, his faith in the Divine Government not of a single nation but of all the powers of the world, and his belief that a people is saved and will endure for the service of mankind, neither because of past privileges nor by the traditions in which it trusts, nor by adherence to dogmas however vital these have been to its fathers, nor even by its passionate patriotism and its stubborn gallantry in defence of land and homes, but only by its justice, its purity, and its obedience to God’s will. These are the spiritual convictions which alone keep the Prophet’s eyes open and his heart steadfast through the fluctuations of policy and of military fortune that shake his world, and under the agony of appearing to be a traitor to his country and of preaching the doom of a people whom he loves with all his soul.

The case of John Knox affords a parallel to that of the Hebrew prophet. He told the garrison and citizens of St. Andrews, when besieged by the French, that “their corrupt life could not escape punishment of God and that was his continued advertisement from the time he was called to preach” among them. “When they triumphed of their victory (the first twenty days they had many prosperous chances) he lamented and ever said ‘They saw not what he saw!’ When they bragged of the force and thickness of their walls, he said, ‘They should be but egg-shells!’ When they vaunted ‘England will rescue us!’ he said, ‘Ye shall not see them, but ye shall be delivered into your enemies’ hands and shall be carried to a strange country!’ ” that is France. All of which came to pass, as with Jeremiah’s main predictions.(580)

The second of Jeremiah’s pronouncements given above is followed by the story of the besieged’s despicable treatment of their slaves, XXXIV. 8-22; based on a memoir by Baruch, but expanded. Both the Hebrew and the shorter Greek offer in parts an uncertain text, and add this problem that their story begins with a covenant to _proclaim a Liberty_(581) for the Hebrew slaves in general, while the words which they attribute to Jeremiah limit it to the emancipation, in terms of a particular law, of those slaves who had completed six years of service (verse 14).(582) But neither this nor the other and smaller uncertainties touch the substance of the story.(583) As the siege began the king and other masters of slaves in Jerusalem entered into solemn covenant to free their Hebrew slaves, obviously in order to propitiate their God, and also some would assert (though unsupported by the text) in order to increase their fighting ranks; but when the siege was raised they forced their freedmen back to bondage: “a deathbed repentance with the usual sequel on recovery.”(584) This is the barest exposure among many we have of the character of the people with whom Jeremiah had to deal, and justifies the hardest he has said of their shamelessness.

XXXIV. 17. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not obeyed Me by
proclaiming a Liberty each for his countryman. Behold I am about
to proclaim for you a Liberty—to the sword, to the famine and to
the pestilence, and I will set you a consternation to all kingdoms
of the earth.... 21. And Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes
will I give into the hands of their foes, the king of Babylon’s
host that are gone up from you. 22. Behold, I am about to
command—Rede of the Lord—and bring them back to this city and they
shall storm and take it and burn it with fire, and the townships
of Judah will I make desolate and tenantless.

Are we not in danger of the guilt of a similar perjury to the men who fought for us in the Great War, and for whom we have not yet fulfilled all the promises made to them by our governors?

About this time the ill-treatment of Jeremiah, which had ceased on Ṣedekiah’s accession, was resumed. The narrative, or succession of narratives, of this begins at XXXVII. 11, and continues to XXXIX. 14, with interruptions in XXXIX. 1, 2, 4-13. Save for a few expansions, the whole must have been taken from Baruch’s memoirs. Except for the omission of XXXIX. 4-13, the differences of the Greek from the Hebrew are unimportant, consisting in the usual absence of repetitions of titles, epithets and names.

The siege being raised, Jeremiah was going out by the North gate of the city to Anathoth to claim or to manage(585) some property there, when he was arrested by the captain of the watch, and charged with deserting. He denied this, but was taken to the princes, who flogged him and flung him into a vault in the house of Jonathan, the Secretary. After many days he was sent for by the king who asked, _Is there Word from the Lord?_ _There is_, he replied, and, as if drumming a lesson into a stupid child’s head, repeated his message, _Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon_. He asked what he had done to be treated as he had been, and, by contrast, where were the prophets who had said that the Babylonians would not come to Judah—his irony was not yet starved out of him!—and begged not to be sent back to the vault. The king committed him to the Court of the Guard, where at least he was above ground, could receive visitors, and was granted daily a loaf from the Bakers’ Bazaar while bread lasted in the city.(586)

Yet through his bars he still defied his foes and they were at him again, quoting to the king two Oracles which he had uttered before and apparently was repeating to those who resorted to him in the Guard-Court.

XXXVIII. 1. And Shephatiah, Mattan’s son, Gedaliah Pashḥur’s son,
Jucal Shelamiah’s son, and Pashḥur Malchiah’s son,(587) heard the
words Jeremiah was speaking about the people:(588) [2] “Thus saith
the Lord, He that abides in this city shall die by the sword, the
famine or the pestilence, but he that goes forth to the Chaldeans
shall live—his life shall be to him for a prey but he shall
live.”(589) 3. “Thus(590) saith the Lord: This city shall surely
be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s host and they
shall take it.”

Verse 2 is rejected by Duhm and Cornill partly on the insufficient ground that verses 2 and 3 have separate introductions and therefore could have had originally no connection. But in quoting two utterances of the Prophet for their cumulative effect it was natural to prefix to each his usual formula. Duhm’s and Cornill’s real motive, however, is their repugnance to admitting that Jeremiah could have advised desertion from the city. So Duhm equally rejects XXI. 9, of which XXXVIII. 2 is but an abbreviation; while Cornill seeks to save XXI. 9 by reading it as a summons to the _whole_ people to surrender and so distinguishes it from XXXVIII. 2, advice _to individuals_ to desert. I fail to follow this distinction. The terms used are as individual in the one verse as in the other; if the one goes the other must also. But need either go? Duhm’s view is that both are from a later period, when there was no longer a native government in Judah, reverence for the monarchy was dead, and the common conscience of Jewry was not civic but ecclesiastical! This is ingenious, but far from convincing. There are no grounds either for denying these verses to Jeremiah, or for reading his advice _to go forth to the Chaldeans_ as meant otherwise than for the individual citizens.