JEREMIAH
Jeremiah dates his call to the arduous mission of prophet in the
thirteenth year of King Josiah (626 B.C.), and he lived till after the
fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., so that, like his predecessor Isaiah a
century earlier, his career spans a period of about forty years in a
time of great events. Only five years after he began to prophesy,
Josiah reformed religion in Judah on the new model of the law-book
discovered by Hilkiah (Deuteronomy; see above, pp. 62 f.). Jeremiah,
scion of a priestly family native in Anathoth, a few miles north of
Jerusalem, which very likely traced its descent from Abiathar, David's
priest, whom Solomon deposed in favour of Zadok, was therefore one of
those priests of the high places who were hit hardest by the
suppression of the local sanctuaries. That his townsmen of Anathoth
sought his life (Jer. xi. 18 ff.) has been attributed to their
indignation that Jeremiah should dare to preach Josiah's "covenant" to
them (see Jer. xi. 1-17). Whatever hopes he may have entertained at
first, Jeremiah was not long in seeing that the reform had cleaned
only the outside of the cup and the platter, while men fortified their
consciences behind the "covenant" against an investigation of the
inside. In 608 B.C. Josiah fell in battle at Megiddo against the
Egyptian king Necho. After a brief vassalage to Egypt, Judah came
under the Babylonian yoke. Jeremiah saw all this; saw, too, Jerusalem
twice taken by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar (597, 586 B.C.), the
temple burned and the walls razed; and was at last forced to accompany
the refugees to Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah.
Early in the reign of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah delivered himself of a
fulminant oracle in the gate of the temple (Jer. vii. 1-15, cf. c.
26), in which he declared that the Jews' faith in the temple as the
palladium of the city was a delusion; unless they altogether amended
their ways, God would make the temple a ruin like the ancient
sanctuary at Shiloh. Priests, prophets, and people clamoured with one
voice for the blasphemer's death, but he hurled back at them a
reiteration of his warning. The intervention of some of the magnates
saved his life; but another prophet who lacked such influential
protection was extradited from Egypt and put to death.
Under these circumstances Jeremiah took another way of reaching the
public (see Jer. 36). He dictated to Baruch the prophecies which he
had uttered from the beginning of his mission to that time, and sent
Baruch to read the roll in the temple at the fast in the ninth month
in the fifth year of Jehoiakim (603 B.C.). Some of the nobles had
Baruch give them a private reading, and then carried the book to the
king, first giving Baruch the friendly advice to put himself and
Jeremiah out of harm's way. The king, as he read the roll, cut off the
pages, and burned them on the brazier in his chamber. Jeremiah
thereupon dictated to the faithful Baruch another roll containing all
the prophecies that were in the first, "and there were added besides
unto them many like words." We may be sure that the second edition
would have been even less agreeable reading to Jehoiakim than the
first. One of the additional words is indeed preserved in Jer. xxxvi.
29-31. The chapter is of peculiar interest, because it is an
account--the only one in the Old Testament--of the origin of a
prophetic book. We see the prophet reproducing, doubtless from memory,
the content of oracles uttered in the course of the preceding twenty
years or more, and enlarging the collection for a second edition. It
is a fair conjecture that this second roll furnished to our Book of
Jeremiah most, if not all, the prophecies prior to the fifth year of
Jehoiakim; but it is certain that the roll itself is not incorporated
as such in the present book. There are also several prophecies from
later years of Jehoiakim, and many from the reign of the last king,
Zedekiah, especially from the time of his revolt and the siege of
Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
A distinctive feature of the Book of Jeremiah is the presence of
passages of considerable extent derived from a biographical source.
From this comes the account of the making and reading of the collected
volume of prophecies in the fourth and fifth years of Jehoiakim of
which we have already spoken (Jer. 36), and particularly the narrative
of Jeremiah's fortunes during the last siege of Jerusalem and
afterward, including the flight to Egypt and his experiences with the
refugees there, covering thus three or four years beginning with 588
(Jer. 37-44). To the same source it is natural to ascribe c. 26,
relating to the circumstances and consequences of the prophecy
delivered in the temple at the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign (c. 7);
c. 28 (collision with the "false prophet" Hananiah, in the beginning
of the reign of Zedekiah); c. 29 (letter to the Jews in Babylonia,
about the same time); and parts of cc. 32, 34, and 35.
There is good reason to believe that the author of this biography was
Baruch, who not only stood in intimate relations with Jeremiah before
the fall of Jerusalem, but accompanied him to Egypt (Jer. xliii. 6).
It is consequently a historical source of the best possible kind. For
the first half of Jeremiah's career this source fails us; and, as we
have seen, it is continuous only from the last years of Zedekiah. It
is possible that Baruch's association with Jeremiah began in the time
of Jehoiakim, and his narrative may have commenced there.
Unfortunately this life of Jeremiah has not been preserved complete or
intact. The prophecies contained in it led later compilers to
introduce other oracles which seemed appropriate to the context, and
to supplement the words of Jeremiah by edifying compositions of their
own. Their aim, it must constantly be borne in mind, was not to
produce a critical edition of the prophecies of Jeremiah, but to make
a book effective to impress the truths and motives of religion on
their own contemporaries, and with changing times and situations to
keep the book, so to speak, up to date. If the words of an old
prophet suggested to them a good moral, they wrote it out for him,
without dreaming that they were doing either him or morality a wrong,
or thinking how much trouble they were making for future historical
students. It is exactly the same procedure and the same motive which
meets us in innumerable places in the Pentateuch and Historical Books.
To stigmatize such interpolations as literary fraud is absurd. These
additions are often recognizable by their prosaic preachiness or by
their composite imitativeness.
Of one kind of prediction the Jews of later centuries could not have
enough, the prophecies of deliverance from the foreign yoke and the
better time to follow. They not only cherished the hopeful words of
former prophets and wrote variations on their themes, but gave
expression to their faith and their ideals in their own way. That they
often took their inspiration from Isa. 40 ff. is natural. In Jeremiah
such promises of a happier future are accumulated in cc. 30-33, which
contain, with some oracles of Jeremiah, pieces of various authorship
and age, some of them such pendants to gloomy pictures as we have
found numerous in Isaiah (e.g. Jer. xxx. 1 ff. to vss. 12-15), others
more independent compositions.
These stand interspersed among the extracts from Baruch's life of
Jeremiah. In the first half of the book (Jer. 1-25) there is no such
history for a framework. It will be observed here that the prophet
commonly introduces his message in personal form, "The word of Jehovah
came to me, saying," or "Then Jehovah said to me," or the like.
Sometimes an oracle begins, as in c. 18, "The words which came to
Jeremiah," as a kind of title, while in the sequel the prophet speaks
in the first person. Dates are infrequent in this part of the book,
and if a chronological order was observed in Baruch's roll, it has
been broken up in the present arrangement. Internal evidence does not
always suffice to fix the age of the utterances, the less because some
of the early oracles have obviously been adapted to a later situation.
This is peculiarly evident in cc. 1-6. In these chapters are several
prophecies from the years when the wild horsemen from the Scythian
steppes were overrunning western Asia and striking terror into the
stoutest hearts by their barbarous appearance and fierce manners.
Jeremiah saw in them the scourge of God (see e.g. Jer. iv. 5-8,
27-31), the day of doom was come! It was, indeed, such a vision of
doom that first met his gaze, when God made him a prophet (Jer. i. 13
ff.). But in the present shape of these chapters the enemy out of the
north which menaces ruin is not the wild Scythian hordes, but the
serried armies of Babylon. It is not at all improbable that this
change of horizon was made by Jeremiah himself, when at the beginning
of Jehoiakim's reign the Scythian flood had run off, and, by the
overthrow of Nineveh and Nebuchadnezzar's defeat of Pharaoh Necho on
the Euphrates, the new Babylonian empire had become the impending fate
of Syria and Palestine.
Among the prophecies of Jeremiah in this part of the book also are
introduced pieces, larger or smaller, which are the product of later
generations; two conspicuous examples are Jer. ix. 23-34; x. 1-16 (x.
17 is the immediate continuation of ix. 22), and xvii. 19-27.
Jeremiah's experience in the pursuit of his calling was a hard one.
His Cassandra forebodings gained him the enmity of all, and hostility
grew to bitter hatred as the dire fulfilment stared them in the face.
His countrymen in Anathoth plotted his death; the prophecy in the
temple all but cost him his life, and was an end, for the time at
least, of public appearances; the coming of his collected oracles into
Jehoiakim's hands drove him and the scribe into hiding. During the
last siege, he first was kept in arrest in a private house, then cast
into an empty cistern, where he would have perished but for the
friendliness of a negro eunuch; then confined in the court of the
guard till the taking of the city; released by the Babylonians, his
counsel to the refugees not to flee to Egypt was badly received, and
he was constrained to accompany them. In Egypt, again denouncing and
predicting ill, he disappears; Jewish legend says, killed by his
exasperated countrymen.
But these outward perils and pains were not all he had to bear for
being a prophet. In anguish of soul he suffered twice the tragedy of
his people, in foresight and in fact--suffered as only a man of
sensitive spirit and unflinching will can suffer. That needs no
commentary; but there is another element we do not so easily conceive:
Jeremiah believed that the word of God he had to utter was not merely
a prediction, but the effectual cause, of the ruin of Judah (see Jer.
i. 9 f.). It is not strange that the task God had laid on him seemed
too heavy to be borne. He feels himself a man of contention to the
whole earth. He remonstrates, he reproaches God for having misled him,
he resolves never again to speak in the name of the Lord; but there is
within him as it were a burning fire shut up in his bones, he cannot
hold in (Jer. xx. 7-18; see also xv. 10 f., 15-18; xii. 1-6). These
"confessions," as they have been called, are of the greatest interest;
they are a revelation of the prophet's soul such as has no counterpart
in the Old Testament, and, with Baruch's simple story, bring him as a
man nearer to us than any of the other prophets.
In the Hebrew (and therefore in the English) Bible, the last chapters
of the book (Jer. 46-51) contain a collection of prophecies against
foreign nations, to which is appended (c. 52) an extract from the Book
of Kings (2 Kings xxiv. 18-xxv. 21), describing the taking of
Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586 B.C. In the Greek Bible the
oracles against the foreign nations come in between Jer. xxv. 13 and
vs. 15, but in an altogether different order. They evidently formed a
little book by themselves, which in one recension of the Book of
Jeremiah were appended to the volume of his prophecies, in another
were inserted in the middle of it as the corresponding collections of
foreign oracles are placed in Ezek. 25-32 and Isa. 13-23. The question
of the original place and disposition of these prophecies is of
importance only for the relation of the two forms of the book to each
other, and need not be pursued here.
It is very doubtful whether Jeremiah had any hand whatever in these
chapters. The prolix prophecy against Babylon (Jer. 50-51) is a purely
literary exercise, for which contributions have been levied right and
left, and was written at a time when Babylon had long ceased to be of
historical importance. Others of the prophecies borrow from earlier
prophets generously. An examination, by the aid of the marginal
references in the Revised Version (Oxford and Cambridge edition,
1898), of the appropriations and reminiscences will give a profitable
notion of this literary imitation of prophecy.
The different order of the prophecies is not the only, nor the most
important, difference between the Hebrew and the Greek Jeremiah.
Besides a great number of variant readings of the ordinary kind, the
oldest Greek version is much shorter than the Hebrew; it has been
reckoned that in the neighbourhood of 2700 words in the latter have
nothing corresponding to them in the translation. Some part of this
may be due to abridgment by the translators, to which the repetitions
in parts of Jeremiah--chiefly secondary parts--invited; but when all
allowance is made for this, it remains that the Hebrew copies from
which the translation was made had a much briefer text than the
Palestinian Hebrew in our hands, and it is probable that the greater
part of this difference, which is chiefly in comparative verbosity, is
due to padding with stock phrases and turns of thought in the
Palestinian text. In some instances oracles or tags to oracles which
on other grounds are recognized as late additions to our text had not
got into that of the Greek translators.