Chapter VII: Part 7

Was such advice right or wrong? The question is much debated. The two German scholars just quoted find it so wrong that they cannot think of it as Jeremiah’s. But in that situation and under the convictions which held him, the Prophet could not have spoken differently. He knew, and soundly knew, not only that the city was doomed and that her rulers who persisted in defending her were senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Ṣedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so forsworn and self-disentitled, besides being so insane, as that of the feeble king and his frantic masters, the princes. For Jeremiah the only Divine right was Nebuchadrezzar’s. But to the conviction that Ṣedekiah and the princes were not the lawful lords of Judah, we must add the pity of the Prophet as he foresaw the men, women and children of his people done to useless death by the cruel illusions of their illegitimate governors. Calvin is right, when, after a careful reservation of the duties of private citizens to their government at war, he pronounces that “Jeremiah could not have brought better counsel” to the civilians and soldiers of Jerusalem.(592) And it is no paradox to say that the Prophet’s sincerity in giving such advice is sealed by his heroic refusal to accept it for himself and resolution to share to the end what sufferings the obstinacy of her lords was to bring on the city. Nor, be it observed, did he bribe his fellow citizens to desert to the enemy by any rich promise. He plainly told them that this would leave a man nothing but bare life—_his life for a prey_.

It would, however, be most irrelevant to deduce from so peculiar a situation, and from the Divine counsels applicable to this alone, any sanction for “pacificism” in general, or to set up Jeremiah as an example of the duty of deserting one’s government when at war, in all circumstances and whatever were the issues at stake. We might as well affirm that the example of the man, who rouses his family to flee when he finds their home hopelessly on fire, is valid for him whose house is threatened by burglars. Isaiah inspired resistance to the Assyrian besiegers of Jerusalem in his day with as Divine authority as Jeremiah denounced resistance to the Chaldean besiegers in his. Nor can we doubt that our Prophet would have appreciated the just, the inevitable revolt of the Maccabees against their pagan tyrants, which is divinely praised in the Epistle to the Hebrews as a high example of faith. It is one thing to deny allegiance, as Jeremiah did, to a government that had broken the oath on which alone its rights were founded, and the keeping of which was the sole security for “the stability of the times.” It is another and very different thing to refuse, on alleged grounds of conscience, to follow one’s government when it lifts the sword against a people who have broken _their_ oath, and mobilises its subjects in defence of justice and of the freedom of weaker nations, imperilled by that perjury.

But the princes seem to have honestly believed that Jeremiah was guilty of treason, and said to the king—

XXXVIII. 4. Let this man, we pray, be put to death forasmuch as he
weakens the hands of the men of war left to the city and the hands
of all the people by speaking such words to them, for this man is
seeking not the welfare of this people but the hurt. 5. And the
king said, Behold he is in your hand; for the king was not able to
do anything against them.(593) 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast
him into the cistern of Malchiah the king’s son, in the Court of
the Guard; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. In the cistern
there was no water, only mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire.

The story which follows is one of the fairest in the Old Testament, XXXVIII. 7-13.(594) When no others seem to have stirred to rescue the Prophet—unless Baruch had a hand in what he tells and is characteristically silent about it—Ebed-melech, a negro eunuch of the palace, sought the king where he then was(595) and charged the princes with starving Jeremiah to death.(596) The king at once ordered him to take three(597) men and rescue the Prophet. The thoughtful negro, perhaps prompted by the women of the palace, procured some rags and old clouts from a lumber room, told Jeremiah to put them under his arm-pits to soften the roughness of the ropes, and so drew him gently from the mire and he was restored to the Guard-Court. Ebed-melech had his reward in the Lord’s promise to save him from the men whom he had made his foes by his brave rescue of their prey.(598)

Once more, as we might expect, the restless king sent for Jeremiah.(599) Shaken by his terrible experiences the Prophet, before he would answer, asked if the king would put him to death for his answer or act on his advice. The king swore not to hand him over to the princes; so Jeremiah promised that if Ṣedekiah would give himself up to the Chaldeans he and his house would be spared and the city saved. The king—it is another credible trait in this weak character—feared that the Chaldeans would deliver him to the mockery of those Jews who had already deserted to them. Jeremiah sought to reassure him, again urged him to surrender, and then burst out with the vision—an extraordinarily interesting phase of prophetic ecstasy—of another mockery which the king would suffer from his own women if he did not yield but waited to be taken captive.

XXXVIII. 21. But if thou refuse to go forth this is the thing the
Lord has given me to see: 22. Behold all the women, that are left
in the king of Judah’s house,(600) brought forth to the princes of
the king of Babylon and saying,

They set thee on and compelled thee,
The men of thy peace;
Now they have plunged thy feet in the swam
They turn back from thee!(601)

The verse is in Jeremiah’s favourite measure, and its figures spring immediately from his experience. The mire can hardly have dried on him, into which he had been dropped, but at least his friends had pulled him out of it; the king had been forced into far deeper mire by his own counsellors, and they were leaving him in it!

The nervous king jibbed from the vision without remark and begged Jeremiah not to tell what had passed between them, but, if asked, to say that he had been supplicating Ṣedekiah not to send him back to the house of Jonathan; which answer the Prophet obediently gave to the inquisitive princes and so quieted them: _the matter was not perceived_. He has been blamed for prevaricating. On this point Calvin is as usual candid and sane. “It was indeed not a falsehood, but this evasion cannot wholly be excused. The Prophet had an honest fear; he was perplexed and anxious—it would be better to die at once than be thus buried alive in the earth.... Yet it was a kind of falsehood. He confesses that he did as the king charged him and there is no doubt that he had before him the king’s timidity.... He cannot be wholly exempted from blame. In short, we see how even the servants of God have spoken evasively when under extreme fear.” The prophets were _men of like passions with ourselves_. By now Jeremiah had aged, and was strained by the flogging, the darkness, the filth and the hunger he had suffered. Can we wonder at or blame him? But with what authenticity does its frankness stamp the whole story!

With most commentators I have treated Ch. XXXVIII as the account of a fresh arrest of Jeremiah and a fresh interview between him and Ṣedekiah. I see, however, that Dr. Skinner takes the whole chapter to be “a duplication.”(602) He considers it a general improbability that two such interviews, as XXXVII. 17-21 and XXXVIII. 14-27 relate, “should have taken place in similar circumstances within so short a time.” Yet the king was just the man to appeal to the Prophet time after time during the siege. The similarities in the two stories are natural because circumstances were more or less similar at the various stages of such a siege; but the differences are more significant. The vivid details of XXXVIII attest it as the account of an event and of sayings subsequent to those related in XXXVII. The Prophet’s precaution, before he would answer, in getting a pledge that he would not be put to death nor handed over to the princes, as he had already been, and his consent for Ṣedekiah’s sake, as well as for his own, to prevaricate to the princes are features not found in the other reports of such interviews, but intelligible and natural after the terrible treatment he had suffered. Dr. Skinner, too, admits that the two accounts may be read as of different experiences of the Prophet, “if we can suppose that the offence with which he is charged in XXXVIII. 1 ff. could have been committed while he was a prisoner in the court of the guard;” but this appears to Dr. Skinner as “hardly credible.” Yet the incidents related in XXXII. 6-15 show not only that it is credible but that it actually happened. In the East such imprisonment does not prevent a prisoner, though shackled, from communicating with his friends and even with the gaping crowd outside his bars, as I have seen more than once.

In the Court of the Guard Jeremiah remained till the city was taken.(603) He regained communication with his friends; and it is not surprising to have as from this time several sayings by him, or to discover from them that his heart, no longer confined to reiterating the certain doom of the city, was once more released to the hope of a future for his people, hope across which the shadow of doubt appears to have fallen but once. His guard-court prophecies form part of that separate collection, Chs. XXX-XXXIII, to which the name The Book of Hope has been fitly given. Of these chapters XXX and XXXI, without date, imply that the city has already fallen and the exile of her people is complete. But XXXII and XXXIII are assigned to the last year of the siege and to the Prophet’s confinement to the guard-court. There is now general agreement that XXXII. 1-5 (or at least 3-5) are from a later hand, which correctly dates the story it introduces but attributes Jeremiah’s imprisonment to Ṣedekiah instead of to the princes, and even seems to confound Ṣedekiah with Jehoiachin; and _second_ that the story itself, of a transaction between Jeremiah and his cousin regarding some family property, is genuine, dictated by the Prophet to Baruch before or after the end of the siege. Some reject as later all the rest of the chapter: a long prayer by Jeremiah and the Lord’s answer to it, both of which are full of deuteronomic phrases. Yet that an editor should have made so large an addition to the book without genuine material to work from is hardly credible; while it is characteristic of Jeremiah to have fallen into the doubt his prayer reveals, and this doubt would naturally be followed by a Divine answer. But such original elements it is not possible to discriminate exactly from the expansions by which they have been overlaid.(604)

XXXII. 6. And Jeremiah said, The Word of the Lord came to me
saying, [7] Behold, Hanamel son of Shallum thine uncle is coming
to thee to say, Buy thee my field in Anathoth, for thine is the
right of redemption to buy it. 8. And Hanamel son of my uncle came
to me in the guard-court and said, Buy my field that is Anathoth,
for the right of inheritance is thine and thine the redemption;
buy it for thyself. Then I knew that it was the Lord’s Word. 9. So
I bought the field from Hanamel mine uncle’s son and weighed to
him seventeen silver shekels. 10. And I subscribed the deed and
sealed it and took witnesses, weighing the money in the balances.
11. And I took the deed of sale, both that which was sealed and
that which was open,(605) [12] and I gave it to Baruch son of
Neriah, son of Maḥseiah, in the sight of Hanamel mine uncle’s son,
and in sight of the Jews sitting in the guard-court. 13. And in
their sight I charged Baruch, saying, [14] Thus saith the Lord of
Hosts: Take this deed of sale which is sealed, and this deed which
is open, and put them in an earthen vessel that they may last many
days. 15. For thus saith the Lord, Houses and fields and vineyards
shall yet again be bought in this land. 16. Now after I had given
the deed of sale to Baruch, Neriah’s son, I prayed to the Lord
saying, Ah Lord ... (?) [24] behold the mounts; they are come to
the city to take it, and the city shall be given into the hands of
the Chaldeans who are fighting against it, because of the sword
and the famine and the pestilence; and what Thou hast spoken is
come to pass, and, lo, Thou art seeing it. 25. Yet Thou saidst to
me, Buy thee the field for money, so I wrote the deed and sealed
it and took witnesses—whereas the city is to be given into the
hands of the Chaldeans!

The tone of the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country’s freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of property in land. Let those observe, who deny to such individual rights any communal interest or advantage. Jeremiah at least proves how a small property of his own may help a prophet in his hope for his country and people.

All this is followed in Ch. XXXIII by a series of oracles under the heading _The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time while he was still shut up in the guard-court_. Because verses 14-26 are lacking in the Greek and could not have been omitted by the translator had they been in the original text, and because they are composed partly of mere echoes of Jeremiah and partly of promises for the Monarchy and Priesthood not consonant with his views of the institutions of Israel, they are very generally rejected. So are 2 and 3 because of their doubtful relevance and their style, that of the great prophet of the end of the Exile. The originality of 1 and 4-13 has also been denied. The question is difficult. But there is no reason to doubt that the editor had good material for the data in 1, or that under the Hebrew text, which as it stands in 4, 5 is impossible(606) and throughout 6-13 has been much expanded, there is something of Jeremiah’s own. Verses 4 and 5 reflect the siege in progress, though if the date in verse 1 be correct we must take _torn down_ as future. In 6-13 are promises of the restoration of the ruined city, of peace and stability, of the return of the exiles both of Judah and Israel and of their forgiveness; Jerusalem shall again be a joy, and the voices of joy, of the bridegroom and bride, and of worship in the Temple, shall again be heard; shepherds and their flocks shall be restored throughout Judah and the Negeb. It would be daring to deny to the Prophet the whole of this prospect. The city was about to be ruined, its houses filled with dead; the land had already been ravaged. His office of doom was discharged; it is not unnatural to believe that his great soul broke out with a vision of the hope beyond for which he had taken so practical a pledge. That is all we can say; some of the details of the prospect can hardly be his.(607)

Jerusalem fell at last in 586 and Jeremiah’s imprisonment in the guard-court was over.(608)

4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)

There are two separated accounts of what befel Jeremiah when the city was taken. Ch. XXXIX. 3, 14 tells us that he was fetched from the guard-court by Babylonian officers,(609) and given to Gedaliah, the son of his old befriender Ahikam, _to be taken home_.(610) At last!—but for only a brief interval in the life of this homeless and harried man. When a few months later Nebuṣaradan arrived on his mission to burn the city and deport the inhabitants Jeremiah is said by Ch. XL to have been carried off in chains with the rest of the captivity as far as Ramah, where, probably on Gedaliah’s motion, Nebuṣaradan released him and he joined Gedaliah at Miṣpah.(611)

It is unfortunate that we take our impressions of Nebuchadrezzar from the late Book of Daniel instead of from the contemporary accounts of his policy by Jeremiah, Baruch and Ezekiel. A proof of his wisdom and clemency is here. While deporting a second multitude to Babylonia in the interests of peace and order, he placed Judah under a native governor and chose for the post a Jew of high family traditions and personal character. All honour to Gedaliah for accepting so difficult and dangerous a task! He attracted those Jewish captains and their bands who during the siege had maintained themselves in the country,(612) and advised them to acknowledge the Chaldean power and to cultivate their lands, which that year fortunately produced excellent crops. At last there was peace, and the like-minded Governor and Prophet must together have looked forward to organising in Judah the nucleus at least of a restored Israel.

To this quiet interval, brief as it tragically proved, we may reasonably assign those Oracles of Hope which it is possible to recognise as Jeremiah’s among the series attributed to him in Chs. XXX, XXXI. No chapters of the book have been more keenly discussed or variously estimated.(613) Yet at least there is agreement that their compilation is due to a late editor who has arranged his materials progressively so that the whole is a unity;(614) that many of these materials are obviously from the end of the exile in the style then prevailing; but that among them are genuine Oracles of Jeremiah recognisable by their style. These are admitted as his by the most drastic of critics. It is indeed incredible that after such a crisis as the destruction of the Holy City and the exile of her people, and with the new situation and prospect of Israel before him, the Prophet should have had nothing to say. And the most probable date for such utterances of hope as we have now to consider is not that of his imprisonment but the breathing-space given him after 586, when the Jewish community left in Judah made such a promising start.(615)

From its measure and vivid vision the first piece might well be Jeremiah’s; but it uses Jacob, the later literature’s favourite name for Israel, which Jeremiah does not use, and (in the last two verses) some phrases with an outlook reminiscent of the Second Isaiah. The verses describe a day when the world shall again be shaken, but out of the shaking Israel’s deliverance shall come.

[The sound of trembling we hear, XXX. 5
Dread without peace.
Enquire now and look ye, 6
If men be bearing?
Why then do I see every man(616)
With his hands on his loins?
All faces are changed, and
Livid become.(617)
For great is that day, 7
None is there like it,
With a time of trouble for Jacob.
Yet out of it saved shall he be.
It shall come to pass on that day— 8
Rede of the Lord—
I will break their(618) yoke from their(619) neck,
Their(620) thongs I will burst;
And strangers no more shall they serve,(621)
But serve the Lord their God, 9
And David their king,
Whom I will raise up for them.]

The next piece is more probably Jeremiah’s, as even Duhm admits; verses 10 and 11 which precede it are not given in the Greek.

Healless to me is thy ruin, 12
Sick is thy wound,
Not for thy sore is remede, 13
No closing (of wounds) for thee!
Forgot thee have all thy lovers, 14
Thee they seek not.
With the stroke of a foe I have struck thee,
A cruel correction.
Why criest thou over thy ruin, 15
Thy healless pain?
For the mass of thy guilt, thy sins profuse
Have I done to thee these.

If these Qînah quatrains are not Jeremiah’s, some one else could match him to the letter and the very breath. They would fall fitly from his lips immediately upon the fulfilment of his people’s doom. Less probably his are the verses which follow and abruptly add to his stern rehearsal of judgment on Judah the promise of her deliverance, even introducing this with a _therefore_ as if deliverance were the certain corollary of judgment—a conclusion not to be grudged by us to the faith of a later believer; for it is not untrue that the sinner’s extremest need is the occasion for God’s salvation.(622) Yet the sudden transition feels artificial, and lacks, be it observed, what we should expect from Jeremiah himself, a call to the doomed people to repent. Note, too, the breakdown of the metre under a certain redundancy, which is not characteristic of Jeremiah.

[Therefore thy devourers shall all be devoured, 16
And all thine oppressors.
All shall go off to captivity;
Thy spoilers for spoil shall be
And all that upon thee do prey, I give for prey.
For new flesh I shall bring up upon thee, 17
From thy wounds I shall heal thee;(623)
Outcast they called thee, O Ṣion,
Whom none seeketh after.]

The rest of the chapter is even less capable of being assigned to Jeremiah.

More of Jeremiah’s own Oracles are readily recognised in Ch. XXXI. I leave to a later lecture the question of the authenticity of that on The New Covenant and of the immediately preceding verses;(624) while the verses which close the chapter are certainly not the Prophet’s. But I take now the rest of the chapter, verses 1-28. The first of these may be editorial, the link by which the compiler has connected Chs. XXX and XXXI; yet there is nothing to prevent us from hearing in it Jeremiah himself.

XXXI. 1. At that time—Rede of the Lord—I shall be God to all the
families(625) of Israel, and they shall be a people to Me.

A poem follows which metrically and in substance bears every mark of being Jeremiah’s. The measure is his favourite Qînah, and the memory of the Lord’s ancient love for Israel, which had stirred the youth of the Prophet,(626) revives in his old age and is the motive of his assurance that Israel will be restored. It is of Ephraim as well as of Judah that he thinks, indeed of Ephraim especially. We have seen how the heart of this son of Anathoth-in-Benjamin was early drawn to the exiles from that province on which the northward windows of his village looked out.(627) Now once more he was in Benjamin’s territory, at Ramah and at Miṣpah, with the same northward prospect. Naturally his heart went out again to Ephraim and its banished folk. Of the priestly tribe as Jeremiah’s family were, their long residence in the land of Benjamin must have infected them with Benjamin’s sense of a closer kinship to Ephraim, the son of Joseph, the son of Rachel, than to Judah, the son of Leah. And there was, in addition, the influence of neighbourhood. If blood be thicker than water it is equally true that watered blood is warmed to affection by nearness of locality and closeness of association.(628)

It is questionable whether the opening couplet quotes the deliverance of Israel from Egypt as a precedent for the future return of the northern tribes from captivity, described in the lines that follow; or whether this return is at once predicted by the couplet, with the usual prophetic assurance as though it had already happened. If we take _the desert_ as this is taken in Hosea II. 14, we may decide for the latter alternative.

Grace have they found in the desert, XXXI. 2
The people escaped from the sword;
While Israel makes for his rest from afar
The Lord appears to him(629): 3
“With a love from of old I have loved thee,
So in troth I (now) draw thee.(630)
“I will rebuild thee, and built shalt thou be, 4
Maiden of Israel!
“Again thou shalt take(631) thee thy timbrels
And forth to the merrymen’s dances.
“Again shall vineyards be planted(632) 5
On the hills of Samaria,
“Planters shall surely plant them(?)
And forthwith enjoy(633) (their fruit).
“For comes the day when watchmen are calling 6
On Ephraim’s mountains:
“Rise, let us go up to Ṣion,
To the Lord our God.”

The everyday happiness promised is striking. Here speaks again the man, who, while ruin ran over the land, redeemed his ancestral acres in pledge of the resettlement of all his people upon their own farms and fields. He is back in the country, upon the landscapes of his youth, and in this fresh prospect of the restoration of Israel he puts first the common joys and fruitful labours of rural life, and only after these the national worship centred in Jerusalem. Cornill denies this last verse to Jeremiah, feeling it inconsistent with the Prophet’s condemnation of the Temple and the Sacrifices.(634) But that condemnation had been uttered by Jeremiah because of his contemporaries’ sinful use of the House of God, whereas now he is looking into a new dispensation. How could he more signally clinch the promise of that reunion of Israel and Judah, for which all his life he had longed, than by this call to them to worship together?

The next verses are not so recognisable as Jeremiah’s, unless it be in their last couplet. The rest rather reflect the Return from Exile as on the point of coming to pass, which happened long after Jeremiah’s time; and they call the nation _Jacob_, the name favoured by prophets of the end of the Exile.

[Ring out with joy for Jacob, 7
Shout for (?) the head of the nations,(635)
Publish ye, praise ye and say,
The Lord hath saved His(636) people,
The Remnant of Israel!
Behold from the North I bring them, 8
And gather from ends of the earth;
Their blind and their lame together,
The mother-to-be and her who hath borne.
In concourse great back they come hither.
With weeping forth did they go,(637) 9
With consolations(638) I bring them,
I lead them by(639) streams of water,
On an even way,
They stumble not on it](640)

For a father I am become to Israel,
And my first-born is Ephraim!

This couplet may well be Jeremiah’s; but whether it should immediately follow verse 6 is doubtful. The next lines are hardly his, bearing the same marks of the late exile as we have seen in verses 7-9_a_.

[Hear, O nations, the Word of the Lord, 10
And declare on the far-away isles(641):
Who hath scattered Israel will gather,
And guard as a shepherd his flock.
For the Lord hath ransomed Jacob 11
And redeemed from the hand of the stronger than he.
They are come and ring out on Mount Ṣion, 12
Radiant(642) all with the wealth of the Lord,
With the corn, the new wine, the fresh oil,
The young of the flock and the herd;
Till their soul becomes as a garden well-watered,
Nor again any more shall they pine.
Then rejoice in the dance shall the maidens, 13
The youths and the old make merry.(643)
When their mourning I turn to mirth(644)
And give them joy from their sorrow.
When I richly water the soul of the priests,(645) 14
And My folk with My bounty are filled—
Rede of the Lord.]

The next poems no one denies to Jeremiah; they are among the finest we have from him. And how natural that he should conceive and utter them in those quiet days when he was at, or near, Ramah, the grave of the mother of the people.(646) He hears her century-long travail of mourning for the loss of the tribes that were sprung from her Joseph, aggravated now by the banishment of her Benjamin; but hears too the promise that her travail shall be rewarded by their return. The childless old man has the soul of mother and father both—now weeping with the comfortless Rachel and now, in human touches unmatched outside the Parable of the Prodigal, reading into the heart of God the same instinctive affections, to which, in spite of himself, every earthly father is stirred by the mere mention of the name of a rebellious and wandered son. The most vivid details are these: _after I had been brought to know_, which might also be translated _after I had been made to know myself_ and so anticipate _when he came to himself_ of our Lord’s Parable; _I smote on my thigh_, the gesture of despair; and in 20_a_ the very human attribution to the Deity of surprise that the mere name of Ephraim should move Him to affection, which recalls both in form and substance the similar question attributed to the Lord in XII. 9.

There is no reason to try, as some do, to correct in the poems their broken measures, for these both suit and add to the poignancy and tenderness which throb through the whole.(647)

Hark, in Ramah is heard lamentation 15
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,(648)
For they are not.
Thus saith the Lord: 16
Refrain thy voice from weeping,
And from tears thine eyes,
For reward there is for thy travail—
They are back from the land of the foe!
[And hope there is for thy future, 17
Thy sons come back to their border.](649)

I have heard, I have heard 18
Ephraim bemoaning,
“Thou hast chastened me, chastened I am,
Like a calf untrained.
“Turn me Thyself, and return I will,
For Thou art my God.
“For after I had turned away (?)(650) 19
I repented ... (?)
“And after I was brought to know,(651)
I smote on my thigh.
“I am shaméd, yea and confounded,
As I bear the reproach of my youth.”(652)

Is Ephraim My dearest son,(653) 20
A child of delights?
That as oft as against him I speak
I must think of him still.
My bowels for him are yearning,
Pity him I must!—Rede of the Lord.

Set thee up way-marks, 21
Plant thyself guide-posts!
Put to the highway thy heart,
The way that thou wentest.
Come back, O maiden of Israel, 22
Back to thy towns here.
How long to drift hither and thither,
Thou turn-about daughter!
[For the Lord hath created a new thing on earth,
A female shall compass a man.](654)

The next small poem, when we take from it certain marks of a later date is possibly Jeremiah’s, though this is not certain; to the previous Oracles on Ephraim it naturally adds one upon Judah.

Thus saith the Lord:(655) 23
Once more shall they speak this word.
In Judah’s land and her towns,
When I turn again their captivity:
“The Lord thee bless, homestead of justice!”(656)
In Judah and all her towns shall be dwelling 24
Tillers and they that roam with flocks,
For I have refreshed the(657) weary soul, 25
And cheered every soul that was pining.
[On this I awoke and beheld, 26
And sweet unto me was my sleep.](658)

Behold, are coming the days— 27
Rede of the Lord—
When Israel and Judah(659) I sow
With the seed of man and of beast;
And it shall be, as I was wakeful upon them 28
To tear down and do evil,(660)
So wakeful on them will I be,
To build and to plant—
Rede of the Lord.

These prophecies of the physical restoration of Israel and Judah are fitly followed by two, in what is rather rhythmical prose than verse, which define the moral and spiritual aspects of the new dispensation; both laying stress on individual responsibility, the one in ethics, 29, 30, the other in religion, 31 ff., the proclamation of The New Covenant. They are no doubt Jeremiah’s: we shall take them up in the last lecture.

The time of relief and fair promise, out of which we have supposed that the Prophet conceived and uttered the preceding Oracles, came to a sudden and tragic close with the assassination of the good governor Gedaliah by the fanatic Ishmael. Had this not happened we can see from those Oracles on what favourable lines the restoration of Judah might have proceeded under the co-operation of Gedaliah and Jeremiah, and how after so long and heart-breaking a mission of doom to his people the Prophet might at last have achieved before his eyes some positive part in their social and political reconstruction; for certainly he had already proved his practical ability as well his power of far vision. But even such sunset success was denied him, and once more his people crumbled under his hand. God provided some better thing for him in the spiritual future of Israel, to which he must now pass through still deeper sacrifice and humiliation.(661)

Ishmael, against whom the noble Gedaliah would take no warning, was one of those fanatics with whom the Jewish nation have been cursed at all crises in their history.(662) The motive for his crime was the same as had inspired the fatal defence of Jerusalem, a blind passion against the Chaldean rule. Having slain Gedaliah he attempted to remove the little remnant at Miṣpah to the other side of Jordan but was overtaken by a force under Gedaliah’s lieutenant, Johanan-ben-Kareah, and his captives were recovered. Fearing the wrath of the Chaldeans for the murder of their deputy, the little flock did not return to Miṣpah but moved south to Gidroth(663)-Chimham near Bethlehem, broken, trembling, and uncertain whether to remain in their land or to flee from it.(664)

The Prophet was the one hope left to them, and like Ṣedekiah they turned to him in their perplexity for a word of guidance from the Lord. With his usual deliberation he took ten days to answer, laying the matter before the Lord in prayer; studying, we may be sure, the actual facts of the situation (including what he already knew to be the people’s hope of finding security in Egypt) and carefully sifting out his own thoughts and impulses from the convictions which his prayers brought him from God. The result was clear: the people must abide in their land and not fear the Chaldeans, who under God’s hand would let them be; but if they set their faces for Egypt, the sword which they feared would overtake them. This was God’s Word; if they broke their promise to obey it, they would surely die.(665)

With shame we read the rest of the story. Jeremiah had well discerned(666) that those of his countrymen, who had been deported in 597, were the good figs of his vision and those who remained the bad. The latter were of the breed that had turned Temple and Sacrifice into fetishes, for as such they now treated the Prophet, the greatest whom God ever sent to Israel. Covetous of having him with them they eagerly asked him for a Word of the Lord, promising to obey it, in the expectation of their kind that it would be according to their own ignorant wishes; but when it declared against these, they scolded Jeremiah as disappointed barbarians do their idols, and presuming on his age as a weakness, complained that he had been set against them by Baruch, a philo-Chaldean who would have them all carried off to Babylon! So Baruch also—all praise to him—held the same sane views of the situation as his Prophet and as that wise governor Gedaliah. In spite of their promise they refused to obey the Word of the Lord, fled for Egypt carrying with them Jeremiah and Baruch, and reached the frontier town of Tahpanhes. How it must have broken the Prophet’s heart!(667)

But not his honesty or his courage! At Tahpanhes he set before the fugitives one of those symbols which had been characteristic of his prophesying. He laid great stones in the entry of the house of the Pharaoh and declared that Nebuchadrezzar would plant his throne and spread his tapestries upon them, when he came to smite Egypt, assuming that land as easily as a shepherd dons his garment; and after breaking the obelisks of its gods and burning their temples he would safely depart from it.(668)

So far the narrative runs clearly, but in Ch. XLIV, the last that is written of Jeremiah, the expander has been specially busy.(669) The chapter opens, verses 1-14, with what purports to be an Oracle by Jeremiah concerning, not the little band which had brought him down with them, but _all the Jews which were dwelling in the land of Egypt, at Migdol and Tahpanhes_,(670) on the northern frontier, _and in the land of Pathros_, or Upper Egypt. It is not said that these came to Tahpanhes to receive the Oracle. Yet the arrival of a company fresh from Judah and her recent awful experiences must have stirred the Jewish communities already in Egypt and drawn at least representatives of them to Tahpanhes to see and to hear the newcomers. If so, it would be natural for Jeremiah to expound the happenings in Judah, and the Divine reasons for them. No date is given for the Prophet’s Oracle. This need not have been uttered for some time after he reached Egypt, when he was able to acquaint himself with the conditions and character of his countrymen in their pagan environment, and learn in particular how they had fallen away like their fathers to the worship of other gods. Such indeed is the double theme of the words attributed to him. He is made to say that Jerusalem and Judah are now desolate because of their people’s wickedness, and especially their idolatry, in stubborn disobedience to the repeated Word of their God by His prophets; surely a similar punishment must befall the Jews in Egypt, for they also have given themselves to idols. But so awkwardly and diffusely is the Oracle reported to us that we cannot doubt that, whatever its original form was, this has been considerably expanded. At least we may be sure that Jeremiah uttered some Oracle against the idolatry of the Jews in Egypt, for in what follows they give their answer.

From verse 15 the story and the words it reports become—with the help of the briefer Greek version and the elision of manifest additions in both the Hebrew and the Greek texts(671)—more definite. Either _both_ the men whom Jeremiah addressed _and_ their women, or, as is textually more probable, the women alone answered him in the following remarkable terms. These run in rhythmical prose, that almost throughout falls into metrical lines, which the English reader may easily discriminate for himself.

XLIV. 16. The word which thou hast spoken to us in the Name of the
Lord!—we will not hearken to thee! 17. But we shall surely perform
every word, which has gone forth from our mouth:(672) to burn to
the Queen of Heaven and pour her libations, as we and our fathers
did, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and streets
of Jerusalem, and had fulness of bread, and were well and saw no
evil. 18. But since we left off to burn to the Queen of Heaven,
and to pour her libations, we have lacked everything and been by
the sword and the famine consumed. 19. And(673) while we were
burning to the Queen of Heaven and poured her libations, did we
make her cakes(674) and pour her libations without our husbands?

This was a straight challenge to the prophet, returning to him the form of his own argument. As he had traced the calamities of Judah to her disobedience of Yahweh, they traced those which hit themselves hardest as women to their having ceased to worship Ashtoreth. What could Jeremiah answer to logic formally so identical with his own? The first of the answers attributed to him, verses 20-23, asserts that among their other sins it was their worship of the Queen of Heaven, and not, as they said, their desisting from it, which had worked their doom. But this answer is too full of deuteronomic phrasing for the whole of it to be the Prophet’s; if any of it is genuine this can only be part of the obviously expanded opening, 21, 22_a_.

The real, the characteristic answers of Jeremiah are the others: to the women reported in verses 24, 25, and to all the Jews in Egypt 26-28; in which respectively he treats the claim of the women ironically, and leaves the issue between his word and that of his opponents to be decided by the event. These answers also have been expanded, but we may reasonably take the following to be original.(675) Note how they connect in verse 24 with verse 19. I again follow the Greek.

XLIV. 24. And Jeremiah said [to the people and] to the women, [25]
Hear the Word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord, Israel’s God:

Ye women(676) have said with your mouths
And fulfilled with your hands,
“We must indeed perform our vows,
Which we have vowed,
“To burn to the Queen of Heaven,
And to pour her libations!”
Indeed then establish your words(677)
And perform your vows!

Jeremiah “adds this by way of irony.”(678) Having thus finished with the women, he adds an Oracle to the Jews in general.

26. Therefore hear the Word of the Lord all Judah, who are settled
in the land of Egypt:

By My great Name I swear,
Sayeth the Lord,
That My Name shall no more be called
By the mouth of a man of Judah—
Saying, “As liveth the Lord!”—
In all the land of Egypt.
Lo, I am wakeful upon you 27
For evil and not for good.(679)
And the remnant of Judah shall know, 28_b_
Whose is the word that shall stand.(680)

These are the last words we have from him, and up to these last he is still himself—broken-hearted indeed and disappointed in the ultimate remnant of his people—but still himself in his honesty, his steadfastness to the truth and his courage; still himself in his irony, his deliberateness and his confident appeal to the future for the vindication of his word.

So he disappears from our sight. How pathetic that even after his death he is not spared from spoiling but that the last clear streams of his prophesying must run out, as we have seen, in the sands of those expanders!

Lecture VII.

THE STORY OF HIS SOUL.

In this Lecture I propose to gather up the story of the soul of the man, whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal powers or ambition—the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.

1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)

If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means _Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots forth_, it fitly describes the Prophet’s temper, struggles and fate. For he was a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a force not his own, and on a mission from which, from the first, his gifts and affections recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his passage through the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal shells which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting their end by their explosion.

Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,

For as oft as I speak I must shriek,
And cry “Violence and Spoil!”(681)

His first word is one of shrinking, _I cannot speak, I am too young_.(682) The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his commission he shall be broken—as indeed he was.

Lord, Thou beguiled’st me, and beguiled I let myself be,
Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.(683)

Power was pain to him; he carried God’s Word as _a burning fire in his heart_.(684) If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But Jeremiah, always coerced, shrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So that while Isaiah’s answer to the call of God is _Here am I, send me_, Jeremiah’s might have been “I would be anywhere else than here, let me go.” He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with God and with his fellow-men:

Mother! Ah me!
As whom hast thou borne me?
A man of quarrel and of strife
To the whole of the land—
All of them curse me.(685)

Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was

To root up, pull down and destroy,
To build and to plant.(686)

If this represents the Prophet’s earliest impression of his charge, the proportion between the destructive and constructive parts of it is ominous; if it sums up his experience it is less than the truth. Though he sowed the most fruitful seeds in the fields of Israel’s religion, none sprang in his lifetime. For his own generation he built nothing. Sympathetic with the aims and the start of the greatest reform in Israel’s history, he grew sceptical of its progress and had to denounce the dogmas into which the spirit of it hardened. A king sought his counsel and refused to follow it; the professional prophets challenged him to speak in the Name of the Lord and then denied His Word; the priests were ever against him, and the overseer of the Temple put him in the stocks. Though the people came to his side at one crisis, they rejected him at others and fell back on their formalist teachers, and the prophets of a careless optimism. Though he loved his people with passion, and pled with them all his life, he failed to convince or move them to repentance—and more than once was forbidden even to pray for them. He was charged not to marry nor found a family nor share in either the griefs or the joys of society. His brethren and his father’s house betrayed him, and he was stoned out of Anathoth by his fellow-villagers. Though he could count on a friend or two at court, he had to flee into hiding. King Ṣedekiah, who felt a slavish reverence for his word, was unable to save him from imprisonment in a miry pit, and he owed his deliverance, neither to friend nor countryman, but to a negro eunuch of the palace. Even after the fall of Jerusalem, when his prophecies were vindicated almost to the letter, he failed to keep a remnant of the nation in Judah; and his word had no influence with the little band which clung to him as a fetish and hurried him to Egypt. There, with his back to the brief ministry of hope that had been allowed him, he must take up again the task of denunciation which he abhorred; and this is the last we hear of him.

It was the same with individuals as with the people as a whole. We may say that with few exceptions, whomever he touched he singed, whomever he struck he broke—_a man of quarrel and strife to the whole land, all of them curse me_. And he cursed them back. When Pashhur put him in the stocks Jeremiah called him _Magor Missabib_, Terror-all-round, _for lo, I will make thee a terror to thyself and to all thy friends, they shall fall by the sword and thou behold it_.(687) Nothing satisfied his contempt for Jehoiakim, but that dying the king should be buried with the burial of an ass.(688) Even for Ṣedekiah, to whom he showed some tenderness, his last utterance was of a vision of the weak monarch being mocked by his own women.(689) His irony, keen to the end, proves his detachment from all around him. His scorn for the bulk of the other prophets is scorching, and his words for some of them fatal. Of Shemaiah, who wrote of the captives in Babylon letters of a tenor opposite to his own, he said _he shall not have a man to dwell among this people_.(690) When the prophet Hananiah contradicted him, he foretold, after carefully deliberating between his rival’s words and his own, that Hananiah would die, and Hananiah was dead within a few months.(691) He had no promise for those whom he counselled to desert to the enemy save of bare life; nor anything better even for the best of his friends: _Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not! Only thy life will I give thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest._(692)

The following are the full texts from which the foregoing summary has been drawn and most of which I have reserved for this Lecture.

IV. 10. Then said I, Ah Lord Yahweh, Verily Thou hast deceived
this people and Jerusalem, saying There shall be peace!—whereas
the sword striketh to the life!

O my bowels! My bowels, I writhe! 19
O the walls of my heart!
My heart is in storm upon me,
I cannot keep silence!

I am filled with the rage of the Lord, VI. 11
Worn with holding it in!
Pour it out on the child in the street,
Where the youths draw together.

The following refers to the conspiracy of his fellow-villagers against him.

The Lord let me know and I knew it, XI. 18
Then I saw through(693) their doings;
But I like a tame lamb had been, 19
Unwittingly(694) led to the slaughter.
On me they had framed their devices
“Let’s destroy the tree in its sap.(695)
Cut him off from the land of the living,
That his name be remembered no more.”
O Lord, Thou Who righteously judgest, 20
Who triest the reins and the heart,
Let me see Thy vengeance upon them,
For to Thee I have opened(696) my cause.

21. Therefore thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who are
seeking my(697) life, saying, Thou shalt not prophesy in the Name
of the Lord, that thou die not by our hands:(698)

Lo, I am to visit upon them! 22
Their(699) youths shall die by the sword,
Their sons and their daughters by famine,
Till no remnant be left them. 23
For evil I bring on the men of Anathoth,
The year of their visitation.