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, Sedekiah'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) Sedekiah sent Pashhur and Sephaniah 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 Sedekiah. The following is mainly after the Greek.

XXXIV. 2b. 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 Sedekiah, 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 Sedekiah's being afterwards blinded and that the reports of this(575) sprang from unfounded rumour.

The third pronouncement to Sedekiah, XXXVII. 3-10,(576) was made when the king sent Jehucal and Sephaniah 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 Sedekiah, 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 Sedekiah'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 Pashhur's son, Jucal Shelamiah's son, and Pashhur 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.

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. Sedekiah 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 Sedekiah 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 Sedekiah 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 Sedekiah 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 Sedekiah. 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 Sedekiah'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 Sedekiah instead of to the princes, and even seems to confound Sedekiah 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 Mahseiah, 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 Nebusaradan 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, Nebusaradan released him and he joined Gedaliah at Mispah.(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 Qinah 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 Sion, 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 Qinah, 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 Mispah, 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 Sion, 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 7-9a.

[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 Sion, 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 20a 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 shamed, 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 Mispah 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 Mispah 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 Sedekiah 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, 22a.

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, 28b 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 Sedekiah, 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 Sedekiah, 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.

Mother! Ah me! XV. 10 As whom(700) hast thou borne me? A man of strife and of quarrel To the whole of the land. I have not lent upon usury, nor any to me, Yet all of them curse me. Amen,(701) O Lord! If I be to blame(?), 11 If I never besought Thee, In the time of their trouble and straits, For the good of my foes. Is the arm on my shoulder iron 12 Or brass my brow?(702) Thou hast known it,(703) O Lord. 15 Think on and visit me! Avenge me on them that pursue me, Halt not Thy wrath. Know that for Thee I have borne reproach From them who despise(704) Thy words. 16 [End them!(705) Thy word's my delight And the joy of my heart For Thy Name has been called upon me, Lord of Hosts!] I have not sat in their company 17 Jesting and merry.(706) Because of Thy hand alone I sit, For with rage Thou hast filled me. Why is my pain perpetual, 18 My wound past healing? Art Thou to be a false stream to me, As waters that fail?

This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!

Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19 If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee, That before Me thou stand; And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile, As My Mouth thou shalt be. [Then may those turn to thee, But not thou to them.] For to this people I set thee 20 An impassable wall.(707) When they fight thee they shall not prevail, With thee am I to deliver,(708) And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21 From the hand of the cruel redeem thee.

Thou(709) shalt not take a wife— XVI. 2 Rede of the Lord— Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine Within this place. For thus hath the Lord said: 3 As for the sons and the daughters Born in this place, [As for their mothers who bore them And their fathers who gat them Throughout this land.] Painfullest deaths shall they die 4 Unmourned, unburied, [Be for dung on the face of the ground, Consumed by famine and sword.] And their corpses shall be for food To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth.(710) Thus saith the Lord: 5 Come not to the house of mourning, Nor go about to lament,(711) Because My Peace I have swept Away from this people.(712) For them shall none lament, 6b Nor gash nor make themselves bald; Neither break bread(713) to the mourner,(714) 7 For the dead to console him, Nor pour him(715) the cup of condolement For his father or mother. Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8 To sit with them eating and drinking. For thus saith the Lord of Hosts,(716) 9 The God of Israel: Lo, I shall stay from this place, In your days, to your eyes, The voices of joy and of gladness, The voices of bridegroom and bride.

Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this—the people's leaving of their God—and the doom of exile.

Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14 Save me and saved shall I be.(717) Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15 "Where is the Word of the Lord? Pray let it come!" But I have not pressed ... (?) 16 Nor for evil(718) kept at Thee, Nor longed for the woeful day, Thyself dost know. Whatever came forth from my lips To Thy face it was. Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17 My Refuge in evil days. Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18 Dismayed, but dismayed not I. Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster And break them twice over!

XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah devices, for the Law(719) shall not perish from the priest, nor Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.

O Lord, unto me give Thou heed, 19 And hark to the voice of my plea!(720) Shall evil be rendered for good, 20 That they dig a pit for my life?(721) O remember my standing before Thee, To bespeak their good— To turn Thy fury from off them. Give therefore their sons to famine, 21 And spill them out to the sword. Let their wives be widows and childless And their men be slain of death— And smitten their youths by the sword in battle. May crying be heard from their homes, 22 As a troop comes sudden upon them! For a pit have they dug to catch me, And hidden snares for my feet. But Thou, O Lord, hast known 23 Their counsels for death against me. Pardon Thou not their iniquities,(722) Nor blot from Thy Presence their sins;(723) But let them be tumbled before Thee Deal with them in time of Thy wrath.

Verses 21-23 are rejected by Duhm and Cornill, along with XI. 22b, 23, XII. 3b, XVII. 18 for no textual or metrical reasons, but only because these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah such outbursts of passion: just as we have seen them for similarly sheer reasons of sentiment refuse to consider as his the advice to desert to the enemy.(724) Yet they admit inconsistently the genuineness of VI. 11, XI. 20, XV. 15.(725)

Lord, Thou beguiledst me, and beguiled I let myself be, XX. 7 Too strong for me, Thou hast conquered, A jest I have been all the day, Every one mocks me. As oft as I speak I must shriek, 8 Crying "Violence and spoil." Yea, the Word of the Lord is become my reproach All day a derision. If I said, I'll not mind Him(726) 9 Nor speak in His name,(727) Then in my heart 'tis a burning fire, Shut up in my bones. I am worn away with refraining, I cannot hold on.(728) For I hear the whispering of many, 10 Terror all round! "Denounce, and let us denounce him," —And these my familiars!— Keep ye watch for him tripping, Perchance he'll be fooled, "And we be more than enough for him, And get our revenge." Yet the Lord He is with me, 11 Mighty and Terrible! So they that hunt me shall stumble And shall not prevail. Put to dire shame shall they be When they fail to succeed. Be their confusion eternal, Nor ever forgotten! O Lord,(729) Who triest the righteous, 12 Who lookest to the reins and the heart, Let me see Thy vengeance upon them, For to Thee I have opened my cause.(730)

Cursed be the day, XX. 14 Whereon I was born! The day that my mother did bare me, Be it unblessed! Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15 Telling my father, "A man child is born to thee!" Making him glad. Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16 And did not relent, Let him hear a shriek in the morning, And at noon-tide alarms; That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17 So my mother had been my grave, And great for ever her womb! For what came I forth from the womb? 18 Labour and sorrow to see, That my days in shame should consume.

Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are so irregular.(732)

Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves. Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience, honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with God Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, naively betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which he must drive—painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand.

So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God's words to him. Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed and I set thee this day a fenced city and wall of bronze.(735) For these last imply that in himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable disciple that Christ said, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build.

Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer to his call to repent: No'ash, No use! All is up! Probably this reflects his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he had to work with.

Poet as he was he had the poet's heart for the beauties of nature and of domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride, and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have children of his own or to take part in any social merriment—in this last respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?

There is another thing which we must not forget in judging Jeremiah's excessive rage. We cannot find that he had any hope of another life. Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from his own Oracles or from those attributed to him. Here and now was his only chance of service, here and now must the visions given him by God be fulfilled or not at all. In the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to come, no gleam even of the martyr's crown. I have often thought that what seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah's passion and cursing, let us try to realise how we would have felt had we, like him, found our one service baffled, and the single possible fulfilment of our ideals rendered vain. All of which shows the difference that Christ has made.



2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)

Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his influence to the end of his nation's history.

What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times? Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that God Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circumstance.

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart, I have set thee a prophet to the nations.

From the first and all through it was God's choice of him, the knowledge of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have seen, into the opposite of himself.

The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service, for God and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of God for the enlightenment and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for their pride nor to foster the confidence that God will never break from them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that the clay is moulded; God is revealed not as predestining character or quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable illustrates not arbitrariness of election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom—freedom in God to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man's part to thwart God's designs for him. In further illustration of this remember again the wonderful words, Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee. To work upon man God needs man's own will.

From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator, such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.

Having this experience of God's ways with man it was not possible for Jeremiah to succumb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of "the wine of predestination," and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against God Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will as over against that of God:

Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled, Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.

The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people's oncoming doom. He debates with God on matters of justice. He wrestles things out with God and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure of himself—as we see him at last when the full will of God breaks upon his soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and his people's fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so shrinking stands out henceforth a fenced city and a wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land: the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in God's discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant's weakness and grants him the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself.

We may here take in full the remarkable passage, part of which we have already studied.(736)

Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue. Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:— The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease? Thou did'st plant them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their reins. But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3 And tested my heart with Thee; Drag them out like sheep for the shambles, To the day of slaughter devote them.

Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee— 5 How wilt thou vie with the horse? If in peaceful country thou can'st not trust, How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan? For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6 Even they have betrayed thee. Even they have called after thee loudly, Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738)

The rankness or luxuriance of Jordan is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord's answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life.



3. Sacrifice.

But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.

There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.

O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2 A wayfarers' lodge! Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors. They stretch their tongues 3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land. But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not!(739)

Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people—worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance—wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.(740) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony!