for I am but a youth._ The words express that reluctance to begin
which a sense of unpreparedness, and misgivings about the unknown
future, naturally inspire. To take the first step demands decision and
confidence; but confidence and decision do not come of contemplating
oneself and one's own unfitness or unpreparedness, but of steadfastly
fixing our regards upon God, who will qualify us for all that He
requires us to do. Jeremiah does not refuse to obey His call; the
very words "My Lord Iahvah"--'Adonai, Master, or my Master--imply a
recognition of the Divine right to his service; he merely alleges
a natural objection. The cry, "Who is sufficient for these things?"
rises to his lips, when the light and the glory are obscured for a
moment, and the reaction and despondency natural to human weakness
ensue. _And Iahvah said unto me, Say not, I am but a youth; for unto
all that I send thee unto, thou shalt go, and all that I command thee
thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of them; for with thee am I to rescue
thee, is the utterance of Iahvah._ "Unto all that I send thee unto";
for he was to be no local prophet; his messages were to be addressed
to the surrounding peoples as well as to Judah; his outlook as a seer
was to comprise the entire political horizon (ver. 10, xxv. 9, 15,
xlvi. _sqq._). Like Moses (Ex. iv. 10), Jeremiah objects that he is no
practised speaker; and this on account of youthful inexperience. The
answer is that his speaking will depend not so much upon himself as
upon God: "All that I command thee, thou shalt speak." The allegation
of his youth also covers a feeling of timidity, which would naturally
be excited at the thought of encountering kings and princes and
priests, as well as the common people, in the discharge of such a
commission. This implication is met by the Divine assurance: "Unto
all"--of whatever rank--"that I send thee unto, thou shalt go"; and
by the encouraging promise of Divine protection against all opposing
powers: "Be not afraid of them; for with thee am I to rescue thee."[18]
_And Iahvah put forth His hand and touched my mouth: and Iahvah said
unto me, Behold I have put My words in thy mouth!_ This word of the
Lord, says Hitzig, is represented as a corporeal substance; in
accordance with the Oriental mode of thought and speech, which invests
everything with bodily form. He refers to a passage in Samuel (2 Sam.
xvii. 5) where Absalom says, "Call now Hushai the Archite, and let us
hear _that which is in his mouth_ also;" as if what the old counsellor
had to say were something _solid_ in more senses than one. But we
need not press the literal force of the language. A prophet who could
write (v. 14): "Behold I am about to make my words in thy mouth fire
and this people logs of wood; and it shall devour them;" or again (xv.
16), "Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and Thy word became
unto me a joy and my heart's delight," may also have written, "Behold
I have put My words in thy mouth!" without thereby becoming amenable
to a charge of confusing fact with figure, metaphor with reality. Nor
can I think the prophet means to say that, although, as a matter of
fact, the Divine word already dwelt in him, it was now "put in his
mouth," in the sense that he was henceforth to utter it. Stripped of
the symbolism of vision, the verse simply asserts that the spiritual
change which came over Jeremiah at the turning point in his career was
due to the immediate operation of God; and that the chief external
consequence of this inward change was that powerful preaching of
Divine truth, by which he was henceforth known. The great Prophet of
the Exile twice uses the phrase, "I have set My words in thy mouth"
(Isa. li. 16, lix. 21) with much the same meaning as that intended by
Jeremiah, but without the preceding metaphor about the Divine hand.
_See I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,
to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to overturn; to
rebuild and to replant._ Such, following the Hebrew punctuation,
are the terms of the prophet's commission; and they are well worth
consideration, as they set forth with all the force of prophetic idiom
his own conception of the nature of that commission. First, there is
the implied assertion of his own official dignity: the prophet is made
a _paqîd_ (Gen. xli. 34, "officers" set by Pharaoh over Egypt; 2 Kings
xxv. 19 a military prefect) a prefect or superintendent of the nations
of the world. It is the Hebrew term corresponding to the ἐπίσκοπος of
the New Testament and the Christian Church (Judg. ix. 28; Neh. xi. 9).
And secondly, his powers are of the widest scope; he is invested with
authority over the destinies of all peoples. If it be asked in what
sense it could be truly said that the ruin and renascence of nations
was subject to the supervision of the prophets, the answer is obvious.
The word they were authorised to declare was the word of God. But
God's word is not something whose efficacy is exhausted in the human
utterance of it. God's word is an irreversible command, fulfilling
itself with all the necessity of a law of nature. The thought is well
expressed by a later prophet: "For as the rain cometh down, and the
snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth,
and maketh it bring forth and spring; and yieldeth seed to the sower
and bread to the eater: so shall My word become, that goeth forth out
of My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty (ריקם), but shall surely
do that which I have willed, and shall carry through that for which I
sent it" (or "shall prosper him whom I have sent," Isa. lv. 10, 11).
All that happens is merely the selfaccomplishment of this Divine word,
which is only the human aspect of the Divine will. If, therefore, the
absolute dependence of the prophets upon God for their knowledge of
this word be left out of account, they appear as causes, when they are
in truth but instruments, as agents when they are only mouthpieces.
And so Ezekiel writes, "when I came to destroy the city" (Ezek. xliii.
3), meaning when I announced the Divine decree of its destruction.
The truth upon which this peculiar mode of statement rests--the truth
that the will of God must be and always is done in the world that
God has made and is making--is a rock upon which the faith of His
messengers may always repose. What strength, what staying power may
the Christian preacher find in dwelling upon this almost visible fact
of the self-fulfilling will and word of God, though all around him
he hear that will questioned, and that word disowned and denied! He
knows--it is his supreme comfort to know--that, while his own efforts
may be thwarted, that will is invincible; that though _he_ may fail in
the conflict, that word will go on conquering and to conquer, until it
shall have subdued all things unto itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Even in the history of the transmission of ancient writings.
[17] Isa. xliv. 24, מבָּטן יוצֶרך, xlix. 5, לו לֶעבד מבּטְןֶ יצְרִי.
[18] For the words of this promise, cf. ver. 19 _infr._, xv. 20, xlii.
11.
II.
_THE TRUST IN THE SHADOW OF EGYPT._
JEREMIAH ii. 1-iii. 5.
The first of the prophet's public addresses is, in fact, a sermon
which proceeds from an exposure of national sin to the menace of
coming judgment. It falls naturally into three sections, of which
the first (ii. 1-13) sets forth Iahvah's tender love to His young
bride Israel in the old times of nomadic life, when faithfulness
to Him was rewarded by protection from all external foes; and then
passes on to denounce the unprecedented apostasy of a people from
their God. The second (14-28) declares that if Israel has fallen a
prey to her enemies, it is the result of her own infidelity to her
Divine Spouse; of her early notorious and inveterate falling away to
the false gods, who are now her only resource, and that a worthless
one. The third section (ii. 29-iii. 5) points to the failure of
Iahvah's chastisements to reclaim a people hardened in guilt, and
in a self-righteousness which refused warning and despised reproof;
affirms the futility of all human aid amid the national reverses; and
cries woe on a too late repentance. It is not difficult to fix the
time of this noble and pathetic address. That which follows it, and is
intimately connected with it in substance, was composed "in the days
of Josiah the king" (iii. 6), so that the present one must be placed
a little earlier in the same reign; and, considering its position in
the book, may very probably be assigned to the thirteenth year of
Josiah, _i.e._ B.C. 629, in which the prophet received his Divine
call. This is the ordinary opinion; but one critic (Knobel) refers
the discourse to the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim, on account
of the connexion with Egypt which is mentioned in vv. 18, 36, and the
humiliation suffered at the hands of the Egyptians which is mentioned
in ver. 16; while another (Graf) maintains that chaps. ii.-vi. were
composed in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, as if the prophet had
committed nothing to writing before that date--an assumption which
seems to run counter to the implication conveyed by his own statement,
chap. xxxvi. 2. This latter critic has failed to notice the allusions
in chaps. iv. 14, vi. 8, to an approaching calamity which may be
averted by national reformation, to which the people are invited;--an
invitation wholly incompatible with the prophet's attitude at that
hopeless period. The series of prophecies beginning at chap. iv. 3 is
certainly later in time than the discourse we are now considering; but
as certainly belongs to the immediate subsequent years.
It does not appear that the first two of Jeremiah's addresses were
called forth by any striking event of public importance, such as the
Scythian invasion. His new-born consciousness of the Divine call would
urge the young prophet to action; and in the present discourse we have
the firstfruits of the heavenly impulse. It is a retrospect of Israel's
entire past and an examination of the state of things growing out of it.
The prophet's attention is not yet confined to Judah; he deplores the
rupture of the ideal relations between Iahvah and His people as a whole
(ii. 4; cf. iii. 6). As Hitzig has remarked, this opening address, in
its finished elaboration, leaves the impression of a first outpouring of
the heart, which sets forth at once without reserve the long score of
the Divine grievances against Israel. At the same time, in its closing
judgment (iii. 5), in its irony (ii. 28), in its appeals (ii. 21, 31),
and its exclamations (ii. 12), it breathes an indignation stern and
deep to a degree hardly characteristic of the prophet in his other
discourses, but which was natural enough, as Hitzig observes, in a first
essay at moral criticism, a first outburst of inspired zeal.
In the Hebrew text the chapter begins with the same formula as chap.
i. (ver. 4): "And there fell a word of Iahvah unto me, saying." But
the LXX. reads: "And he said, Thus saith the Lord," (καὶ εἶπε, τάδε
λέγει κύριος); a difference which is not immaterial, as it may be a
trace of an older Hebrew recension of the prophet's work, in which
this second chapter immediately followed the original superscription
of the book, as given in chap. i. 1, 2, from which it was afterwards
separated by the insertion of the narrative of Jeremiah's call and
visions (ויאמֽר: cf. Amos i. 2). Perhaps we may see another trace of
the same thing in the fact that whereas chap. i. sends the prophet to
the rulers and people of Judah, this chapter is in part addressed to
collective Israel (ver. 4); which constitutes a formal disagreement.
If the reference to Israel is not merely retrospective and
rhetorical,--if it implies, as seems to be assumed, that the prophet
really meant his words to affect the remnant of the northern kingdom
as well as Judah,--we have here a valuable contemporary corroboration
of the much disputed assertion of the author of Chronicles, that
king Josiah abolished idolatry "in the cities of Manasseh and Ephraim
and Simeon even unto Naphtali, to wit, in their ruins round about" (2
Chron. xxxiv. 6), as well as in Judah and Jerusalem; and that Manasseh
and Ephraim and "the remnant of Israel" (2 Chron. xxxiv. 9, cf. 21)
contributed to his restoration of the temple. These statements of
the Chronicler imply that Josiah exercised authority in the ruined
northern kingdom, as well as in the more fortunate south; and so
far as this first discourse of Jeremiah was actually addressed to
Israel as well as to Judah, those disputed statements find in it an
undesigned confirmation. However this may be, as a part of the first
collection of the author's prophecies, there is little doubt that the
chapter was read by Baruch to the people of Jerusalem in the fourth
year of Jehoiakim (chap. xxxvi. 6).
_Go thou and cry in the ears of Jerusalem: Thus hath Iahvah said_
(or _thought_: This is the Divine thought concerning thee!) _I have
remembered for thee the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine
espousals; thy following Me_ (as a bride follows her husband to his
tent) _in the wilderness, in a land unsown_. _A dedicated thing_
(קֹרֶשׁ: like the high priest, on whose mitre was graven לַיְהוָֹה
קֹרֶשׁ) _was Israel to Iahvah, His firstfruits of increase; all who
did eat him were held guilty, ill would come to them, saith Iahvah_
(vers. 2, 3).--"I have remembered for thee," _i.e._ in thy favour,
to thy benefit--as when Nehemiah prays, "Remember in my favour, O
my God, for good, all that I have done upon this people," (Neh. v.
19)--"the kindness"--חֶסֶד--the warm affection of thy youth, "the love
of thine espousals," or the charm of thy bridal state (Hos. ii. 15,
xi. 1); the tender attachment of thine early days, of thy new born
national consciousness, when Iahvah had chosen thee as His bride,
and called thee to follow Him out of Egypt. It is the figure which
we find so elaborately developed in the pages of Hosea. The "bridal
state" is the time from the Exodus to the taking of the covenant at
Sinai (Ezek. xvi. 8), which was, as it were, the formal instrument
of the marriage; and Israel's young love is explained as consisting
in turning her back upon "the flesh-pots of Egypt" (Ex. xvi. 3), at
the call of Iahvah, and following her Divine Lord into the barren
steppes. This forsaking of all worldly comfort for the hard life of
the desert was proof of the sincerity of Israel's early love. [The
evidently original words "in the wilderness, a land unsown," are
omitted by the LXX., which renders: "I remembered the mercy of thy
youth, and the love of thy nuptials (τελείωσις, consummation), so
that thou followedst the Holy One of Israel, saith Iahvah."] Iahvah's
"remembrance" of this devotion, that is to say, the return He made for
it, is described in the next verse. Israel became not "holiness" but
a holy or hallowed thing; a dedicated object, belonging wholly and
solely to Iahvah, a thing which it was sacrilege to touch; Iahvah's
"firstfruits of increase" (Heb. תבואתה ראשית). This last phrase is to
be explained by reference to the well-known law of the firstfruits
(Ex. xxiii. 19; Deut. xviii. 4, xxvi. 10), according to which the
first specimens of all agricultural produce were given to God. Israel,
like the firstlings of cattle and the firstfruits of corn and wine and
oil, was ליהוה קדש consecrated to Iahweh; and therefore none might eat
of him without offending. "To eat" or devour is a term naturally used
of vexing and destroying a nation (x. 25, l. 7; Deut. vii. 16, "And
thou shalt eat up all the peoples, which Jehovah thy God is about to
give thee;" Isa. i. 7; Ps. xiv. 4, "Who eat up My people as they eat
bread"). The literal translation is, "All his eaters become guilty
(or are treated as guilty, punished); evil cometh to them;" and the
verbs, being in the imperfect, denote what happened again and again in
Israel's history; Iahvah suffered no man to do His people wrong with
impunity. This, then, is the first count in the indictment against
Israel, that Iahvah had not been unmindful of her early devotion,
but had recognised it by throwing the shield of sanctity around her,
and making her inviolable against all external enemies (vv. 1-3).
The prophet's complaint, as developed in the following section (vv.
4-8), is that, in spite of the goodness of Iahvah, Israel has forsaken
_Him_ for idols. "_Hear ye the word of Iahvah, O house of Jacob, and
all the clans of the house of Israel!_" All Israel is addressed, and
not merely the surviving kingdom of Judah, because the apostasy had
been universal. A special reference apparently made in ver. 8 to the
prophets of Baal, who flourished only in the northern kingdom. We may
compare the word of Amos "against _the whole clan_," which Iahvah
"brought up from the land of Egypt" (Amos iii. 1), spoken at a time
when Ephraim was yet in the heyday of his power.
_Thus hath Iahvah said, What found your fathers in Me, that was
unjust_, (עָוֶל a single act of injustice, Ps. vii. 4; not to be found
in Iahvah, Deut. xxxii. 4) _that they went far from Me and followed
the Folly and were befooled_ (or _the Delusion and were deluded_)
(ver. 5). The phrase is used 2 Kings xvii. 15 in the same sense;
הַהֶבֶל "the (mere) breath," "the nothingness" or "vanity," being
a designation of the idols which Israel went after (cf. also chap.
xxiii. 16; Ps. lxii. 11; Job xxvii. 12); much as St. Paul has written
that "an idol is nothing in the world" (1 Cor. viii. 4), and that,
with all this boasted culture, the nations of classical antiquity
"became vain," or were befooled "in their imaginations" (ἐματαιώθησαν
= ויהבלו), "and their foolish heart was darkened" (Rom. i. 21). Both
the prophet and the apostle refer to that judicial blindness which
is a consequence of persistently closing the eyes to truth, and
deliberately putting darkness for light and light for darkness, bitter
for sweet, and sweet for bitter, in compliance with the urgency of the
flesh. For ancient Israel, the result of yielding to the seductions
of foreign worship was, that "They were stultified in their best
endeavours. They became false in thinking and believing, in doing and
forbearing, because the fundamental error pervaded the whole life of
the nation and of the individual. They supposed that they knew and
honoured God, but they were entirely mistaken; they supposed they were
doing His will, and securing their own welfare, while they were doing
and securing the exact contrary" (Hitzig). And similar consequences
will always flow from attempts to serve two masters; to gratify the
lower nature, while not breaking wholly with the higher. Once the soul
has accepted a lower standard than the perfect law of truth, it does
not stop there. The subtle corruption goes on extending its ravages
farther and farther; while the consciousness that anything is wrong
becomes fainter and fainter as the deadly mischief increases, until at
last the ruined spirit believes itself in perfect health, when it is,
in truth, in the last stage of mortal disease. Perversion of the will
and the affections leads to the perversion of the intellect. There
is a profound meaning in the old saying that, Men make their gods in
their own likeness. As a man is, so will God appear to him to be.
"With the loving, Thou wilt shew Thyself loving; With the perfect,
Thou wilt shew Thyself perfect; With the pure, Thou wilt shew Thyself
pure; And with the perverse, Thou wilt shew Thyself froward" (Ps.
xviii. 25 _sq._). Only hearts pure of all worldly taint see God in His
purity. The rest worship some more or less imperfect semblance of Him,
according to the varying degrees of their selfishness and sin.
_And they said not, Where is Iahvah, who brought us up out of the
land of Egypt, that guided us in the wilderness, in a land of wastes
and hollows_ (_or desert and defile_), _in a land of drought and
darkness_ (dreariness צלמות), _in a land that no man passed through,
and where no mortal dwelt_ (ver. 6). "They said not, Where is Iahvah,
who brought us up out of the land of Egypt." It is the old complaint
of the prophets against Israel's black ingratitude. So, for instance,
Amos (ii. 10) had written: "Whereas I--I brought you up from the
land of Egypt, and guided you in the wilderness forty years;" and
Micah (vi. 3 _sq._): "My people, what have I done unto thee, and how
have I wearied thee? Answer against Me. For I brought thee up from
the land of Egypt, and from a house of bondmen redeemed I thee." In
common gratitude, they were bound to be true to this mighty Saviour;
to enquire after Iahvah, to call upon Him only, to do His will, and
to seek His grace (cf. xxix. 12 _sq._). Yet, with characteristic
fickleness, they soon forgot the fatherly guidance, which had never
deserted them in the period of their nomadic wanderings in the wilds
of Arabia Petræa; a land which the prophet poetically describes
as "a land of wastes and hollows"--alluding probably to the rocky
defiles through which they had to pass--and "a land of drought and
darkness;"[19] the latter an epithet of the Grave or Hades (Job x.
21), fittingly applied to that great lone wilderness of the south,
which Isaiah had called "a fearsome land" (xxi. 1), and "a land of
trouble and anguish" (xxx. 6), whither, according to the poet of Job,
"The caravans go up and are lost" (vi. 18).
_And I brought you into the garden land, to eat its fruits and its
choicest things_ (טוּבָהּ Isa. i. 19; Gen. xlv. 18, 20, 23); _and ye
entered and defiled My land, and My domain ye made a loathsome thing!_
(ver. 7). With the wilderness of the wanderings is contrasted the
"land of the _carmel_," the land of fruitful orchards and gardens,
as in chap. iv. 26.; Isa. x. 18, xvi. 10, xxix. 17. This was Canaan,
Iahvah's own land, which He had chosen out of all countries to be His
special dwelling-place and earthly sanctuary; but which Israel no sooner
possessed, than they began to pollute this holy land by their sins,
like the guilty peoples whom they had displaced, making it thereby an
abomination to Iahvah (Lev. xviii. 24 _sq._, cf. chap. iii. 2).
_The priests they said not, Where is Iahvah? and they that handle the
law, they knew_ (_i.e._ regarded, heeded) _Me not; and as for the
shepherds_ (_i.e._ the king and princes, ver. 26), _they rebelled
against Me, and the prophets, they prophesied by_ (through) _the Baal,
and them that help not_ (_i.e._ the false gods) _they followed_ (ver.
8). In the form of a climax, this verse justifies the accusation
contained in the last, by giving particulars. The three ruling classes
are successively indicted (cf. ver. 26, ch. xviii. 18). The priests,
part of whose duty was to "handle the law," _i.e._ explain the
Torah, to instruct the people in the requirements of Iahvah, by oral
tradition and out of the sacred law-books, gave no sign of spiritual
aspiration (cf. ver. 6); like the reprobate sons of Eli, "they knew
not" (1 Sam. ii. 12) "Iahvah," that is to say, paid no heed to Him and
His will as revealed in the book of the law; the secular authorities,
the king and his counsellors ("wise men," xviii. 18), not only sinned
thus negatively, but positively revolted against the King of kings,
and resisted His will; while the prophets went further yet in the
path of guilt, apostatizing altogether from the God of Israel, and
seeking inspiration from the Phenician Baal, and following worthless
idols that could give no help. There seems to be a play on the words
Baal and Belial, as if Baal meant the same as Belial, "profitless,"
"worthless" (cf. 1 Sam. ii. 12: "Now Eli's sons were sons of Belial;
they knew not Iahvah." The phrase לֹא־יוֹעִלוּ "they that help not,"
or "cannot help," suggests the term בְּלִיַעַל Belial; which, however,
may be derived from בְּלִי "not," and על "supreme," "God," and so mean
"not-God," "idol," rather than "worthlessness," "unprofitableness," as
it is usually explained). The reference may be to the Baal-worship of
Samaria, the northern capital, which was organised by Ahab, and his
Tyrian queen (chap, xxiii. 13).