forefathers,--_I will again plead_ (reason, argue forensically)
_with you_ (the present generation in whom their guilt repeats
itself) _saith Iahvah, and with your sons' sons_ (who will inherit
your sins) _will I plead_. The nation is conceived as a moral unity,
the characteristics of which are exemplified in each successive
generation. To all Israel, past, present, and future, Iahvah will
vindicate his own righteousness. _For cross_ (the sea) _to the coasts
of the Citieans_ (the people of Citium in Cyprus) _and see; and to
Kedar_ (the rude tribes of the Syrian desert) _send ye, and mark well,
and see whether there hath arisen a case like this. Hath a nation
changed gods--albeit they are no-gods? Yet My people hath changed
his_ (true) _glory for that which helpeth not_ (or is worthless).
_Upheave, ye heavens_ (שמו שמים, a fine paronomasia), _at this, and
shudder_ (_and_) _be petrified_ (מְאֹד חַֽרְבוּ Ges., "be sore amazed"
= שמם; but Hitzig "be dry" = stiff and motionless, like syn. יבש in
1 Kings xiii. 4), _saith Iahvah; for two evil things hath My people
done: Me they have forsaken--a Fountain of living water--to hew them
out cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot_ (imperf. = potential)
_hold water_ (Heb. _the_ waters: generic article) (vv. 9-13). In these
five verses, the apostasy of Israel from his own God is held up as
a fact unique in history--unexampled and inexplicable by comparison
with the doings of other nations. Whether you look westward or
eastward, across the sea to Cyprus, or beyond Gilead to the barbarous
tribes of the Cedrei (Ps. cxx. 5), nowhere will you find a heathen
people that has changed its native worship for another; and if you
did find such, it would be no precedent or palliation of Israel's
behaviour. The heathen in adopting a new worship simply exchanges one
superstition for another; the objects of his devotion are "non-gods"
(ver. 11). The heinousness and the eccentricity of Israel's conduct
lies in the fact that he has bartered truth for falsehood; he has
exchanged "his Glory"--whom Amos (viii. 7) calls the Pride (A.V.
Excellency) of Jacob--for a useless idol; an object which the prophet
elsewhere calls "The Shame" (iii. 24, xi. 13), because it can only
bring shame and confusion upon those whose hopes depend upon it.
The wonder of the thing might well be supposed to strike the pure
heavens, the silent witnesses of it, with blank astonishment (cf. a
similar appeal in Deut. iv. 26, xxxi. 28, xxxii. 1, where the earth
is added). For the evil is not single but twofold. With the rejection
of truth goes the adoption of error; and both are evils. Not only
has Israel turned his back upon "a fountain of living waters;" he
has also "hewn him out cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold
water." The "broken cisterns" are, of course, the idols which Israel
made to himself. As a cistern full of cracks and fissures disappoints
the wayfarer, who has reckoned on finding water in it; so the idols,
having only the semblance and not the reality of life, avail their
worshippers nothing (vv. 8, 11). In Hebrew the waters of a spring
are called "living" (Gen. xxi. 19), because they are more refreshing
and, as it were, life-giving, than the stagnant waters of pools and
tanks fed by the rains. Hence by a natural metaphor, the mouth of
a righteous man, or the teaching of the wise, and the fear of the
Lord, are called a fountain of life (Prov. x. 11, xiii. 14, xiv. 27).
"The fountain of life" is with Iahvah (Ps. xxxvi. 10); nay, He is
Himself the Fountain of living waters (Jer. xvii. 13); because all
life, and all that sustains or quickens life, especially spiritual
life, proceeds from Him. Now in Ps. xix. 8 it is said that "The law
of the Lord--or, the teaching of Iahvah--is perfect, reviving (or
restoring) the soul" (cf. Lam. i. 11; Ruth iv. 15); and a comparison
of Micah and Isaiah's statement that "Out of Zion will go forth the
law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Isa. ii. 3; Mic. iv.
2), with the more figurative language of Joel (iii. 18) and Zechariah
(xiv. 8), who speak of "a fountain going forth from the house of the
Lord," and "living waters going forth from Jerusalem," suggests the
inference that "the living waters," of which Iahvah is the perennial
fountain, are identical with His law as revealed through priests and
prophets. It is easy to confirm this suggestion by reference to the
river "whose streams make glad the city of God" (Ps. xlvi. 4); to
Isaiah's poetic description of the Divine teaching, of which he was
himself the exponent, as "the waters of Shiloah that flow softly"
(viii. 6), Shiloah being a spring that issues from the temple rock;
and to our Lord's conversation with the woman of Samaria, in which He
characterises His own teaching as "living waters" (St. John iv. 10),
and as "a well of waters, springing up unto eternal Life" (_ibid._ 14).
_Is Israel a bondman, or a homeborn serf? Why hath he become a prey?
Over him did young lions roar; they uttered their voice; and they
made his land a waste; his cities, they are burnt up_ (or _thrown
down_), _so that they are uninhabited. Yea, the sons of Noph and
Tahpan_(_h_)_es, they did bruise thee on the crown. Is not this what_
(the thing that) _thy forsaking Iahvah thy God brought about for thee,
at the time He was guiding thee in the way?_ (vv. 14-17). As Iahvah's
bride, as a people chosen to be His own, Israel had every reason
to expect a bright and glorious career. Why was this expectation
falsified by events? But one answer was possible, in view of the
immutable righteousness, the eternal faithfulness of God. _The ruin
of Israel was Israel's own doing._ It is a truth which applies to
all nations, and to all individuals capable of moral agency, in all
periods and places of their existence. Let no man lay his failure in
this world or in the world to come at the door of the Almighty. Let
none venture to repeat the thoughtless blasphemy which charges the
All-Merciful with sending frail human beings to expiate their offences
in an everlasting hell! Let none dare to say or think, God might have
made it otherwise, but He would not! Oh, no; it is all a monstrous
misconception of the true relations of things. You and I are free to
make our choice now, whatever may be the case hereafter. We may choose
to obey God, or to disobey; we may seek His will, or our own. The
one is the way of life; the other, of death, and nothing can alter
the facts; they are part of the laws of the universe. Our destiny
is in our own hands, to make or to mar. If we qualify ourselves for
nothing better than a hell--if our daily progress leads us farther and
farther from God and nearer and nearer to the devil--then hell will
be our eternal home. For God is love, and purity, and truth, and glad
obedience to righteous laws; and these things, realized and rejoiced
in, are heaven. And the man that lives without these as the sovereign
aims of his existence--the man whose heart's worship is centred upon
something else than God--stands already on the verge of hell, which
is "the place of him that knows not (and cares not for) God." And
unless we are prepared to find fault with that natural arrangement
whereby like things are aggregated to like, and all physical elements
gravitate towards their own kind; I do not see how we can disparage
the same law in the spiritual sphere, in virtue of which all spiritual
beings are drawn to their own place, the heavenly-minded rising to the
heights above, and the contrary sort sinking to the depths beneath.
The precise bearing of the question (ver. 14), "Is Israel a bondman,
or a homeborn slave?" is hardly self-evident. One commentator supposes
that the implied answer is an affirmative. Israel _is_ a "servant,"
the servant, that is, the worshipper of the true God. Nay, he is
more than a mere bondservant; he occupies the favoured position of
a slave born in his lord's house (cf. Abram's three hundred and
eighteen young men, Gen. xiv. 14), and therefore, according to the
custom of antiquity, standing on a different footing from a slave
acquired by purchase. The "home" or house is taken to mean the land
of Canaan, which the prophet Hosea had designated as Iahvah's "house"
(Hosea ix. 15, cf. 3); and the "Israel" intended is supposed to be
the existing generation born in the holy land. The double question
of the prophet then amounts to this: If Israel be, as is generally
admitted, the favourite bondservant of Iahvah, how comes it that his
lord has not protected him against the spoiler? But, although this
interpretation is not without force, it is rendered doubtful by the
order of the words in the Hebrew, where the stress lies on the terms
for "bondman" and "homeborn slave"; and by its bold divergence from
the sense conveyed by the same form of question in other passages of
the prophet, _e.g._ ver. 31 _infr._, where the answer expected is a
negative one (cf. also chap. viii. 4, 5, xiv. 19, xlix. 1. The formula
is evidently characteristic). The point of the question seems to
lie in the fact of the helplessness of persons of servile condition
against occasional acts of fraud and oppression, from which neither
the purchased nor the homebred slave could at all times be secure.
The rights of such persons, however humane the laws affecting their
ordinary status, might at times be cynically disregarded both by their
masters and by others (see a notable instance, Jer. xxxiv. 8 _sqq._).
Moreover, there may be a reference to the fact that slaves were
always reckoned in those times as a valuable portion of the booty
of conquest; and the meaning may be that Israel's lot as a captive
is as bad as if he had never known the blessings of freedom, and had
simply exchanged one servitude for another by the fortune of war. The
allusion is chiefly to the fallen kingdom of Ephraim. We must remember
that Jeremiah is reviewing the whole past, from the outset of Iahvah's
special dealings with Israel. The national sins of the northern and
more powerful branch had issued in utter ruin. The "young lions," the
foreign invaders, had "roared against" Israel properly so called, and
made havoc of the whole country (cf. iv. 7). The land was dispeopled,
and became an actual haunt of lions (2 Kings xvii. 25), until
Esarhaddon colonised it with a motley gathering of foreigners (Ezra
iv. 2). Judah too had suffered greatly from the Assyrian invasion in
Hezekiah's time, although the last calamity had then been mercifully
averted (Sanherib boasts that he stormed and destroyed forty-six
strong cities, and carried off 200,000 captives, and an innumerable
booty). The implication is that the evil fate of Ephraim threatens to
overtake Judah; for the same moral causes are operative, and the same
Divine will, which worked in the past, is working in the present, and
will continue to work in the future. The lesson of the past was plain
for those who had eyes to read and hearts to understand it. Apart from
this prophetic doctrine of a Providence which shapes the destinies of
nations, in accordance with their moral deserts, history has no value
except for the gratification of mere intellectual curiosity.
_Aye, and the children of Noph and Tahpanhes they bruise_ (_? used to
bruise; are bruising_: the Heb. ירעו may mean either) _thee on the
crown_ (ver. 16). This obviously refers to injuries inflicted by Egypt,
the two royal cities of Noph or Memphis, and Tahpanhes or Daphnæ, being
mentioned in place of the country itself. Judah must be the sufferer,
as no Egyptian attack on Ephraim is anywhere recorded; while we do
read of Shishak's invasion of the southern kingdom in the reign of
Rehoboam, both in the Bible (1 Kings xiv. 25), and in Shishak's own
inscriptions on the walls of the temple of Amen at Karnak. But the form
of the Hebrew verb seems to indicate rather some contemporary trouble;
perhaps plundering raids by an Egyptian army, which about this time
was besieging the Philistine stronghold of Ashdod (_Herod._, ii. 157).
"The Egyptians are bruising (or crushing) thee" seems to be the sense;
and so it is given by the Jewish commentator Rashi (ירצצו diffringunt).
Our English marginal rendering ("fed on") follows the traditional
pronunciation of the Hebrew term (יִרְעוּ), which is also the case with
the Targum and the Syriac versions; but this can hardly be right, unless
we suppose that the Egyptians infesting the frontier are scornfully
compared to vermin (read יְרֹעוּ with J. D. Mich.) of a sort which, as
Herodotus tells us, the Egyptians particularly disliked (but cf. Mic. v.
5; Ges., depascunt, "eating down.")
The A.V. of ver. 17 presents a curious mistake, which the Revisers
have omitted to correct. The words should run, as I have rendered
them, "Is not _this_"--thy present ill fortune--"the thing that thy
forsaking of Iahvah thy God did for thee--at the time when He was
guiding thee in the way?" The Hebrew verb does not admit of the
rendering in the perf. tense, for it is an impf., nor is it a 2nd
pers. fem. (תעשה _not_ תעשי) but a 3rd. The LXX. has it rightly
(οὐχὶ ταῦτα ἐποίησέ σοι τὸ καταλιπεῖν σε ἐμέ;), but leaves out
the next clause which specifies the time. The words, however, are
probably original; for they insist, as vv. 5 and 31 insist, on the
groundlessness of Israel's apostasy. Iahvah had given no cause for it;
He was fulfilling His part of the covenant by "guiding them in the
way." Guidance or leading is ascribed to Iahvah as the true "Shepherd
of Israel" (chap. xxxi. 9; Ps. lxxx. 1). It denotes not only the
spiritual guidance which was given through the priests and prophets;
but also that external prosperity, those epochs of established power
and peace and plenty, which were precisely the times chosen by
infatuated Israel for defection from the Divine Giver of her good
things. As the prophet Hosea expresses it, ii. 8 _sq._, "She knew not
that it was I who gave her the corn and the new wine and the oil; and
silver I multiplied unto her, and gold, which they made into the Baal.
Therefore will I take back My corn in the time of it, and My new wine
in its season, and will snatch away My wool and My flax, which were to
cover her nakedness." And (chap. xiii. 6) the same prophet gives this
plain account of his people's thankless revolt from their God: "When
I fed them, they were sated; sated were they, and their heart was
lifted up: therefore they forgot Me." It is the thought so forcibly
expressed by the minstrel of the Book of the Law (Deut. xxxii. 15),
first published in the early days of Jeremiah: "And Jeshurun waxed fat
and kicked; Thou waxedst fat, and gross and fleshy! And he forsook
the God that made him, And made light of his protecting Rock." And,
lastly, the Chronicler has pointed the same moral of human fickleness
and frailty in the case of an individual, Uzziah or Azariah, the
powerful king of Judah, whose prosperity seduced him into presumption
and profanity (2 Chron. xxvi. 16): "When he grew strong, his heart
rose high, until he dealt corruptly, and was unfaithful to Iahvah his
God." I need not enlarge on the perils of prosperity; they are known
by bitter experience to every Christian man. Not without good reason
do we pray to be delivered from evil "In all time of our wealth;" nor
was that poet least conversant with human nature who wrote that "Sweet
are the uses of adversity."
_And now_--a common formula in drawing an inference and concluding an
argument--_what hast thou to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the
waters of Shihor_ (the Black River, the Nile); _and what hast thou to
do with the way to Assyria, to drink the waters of the River?_ (_par
excellence_, _i.e._, the Euphrates). _Thy wickedness correcteth thee,
and thy revolts it is that chastise thee. Know then, and see that
evil and bitter is thy forsaking Iahvah thy God, and thine having no
dread of Me, saith the Lord Iahvah Sabaoth_ (vv. 18, 19). And now--as
the cause of all thy misfortunes lies in thyself--what is the use of
seeking a cure for them abroad? Egypt will prove as powerless to help
thee now, as Assyria proved in the days of Ahaz (ver. 36 _sq._). The
Jewish people, anticipating the views of certain modern historians,
made a wrong diagnosis of their own evil case. They traced all that
they had suffered, and were yet to suffer, to the ill will of the two
great Powers of their time; and supposed that their only salvation lay
in conciliating the one or the other. And as Isaiah found it necessary
to cry woe on the rebellious children, "that walk to go down into
Egypt, and have not asked at My mouth; to strengthen themselves in
the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt!" (Isa.
xxx. 1 _sq._), so now, after so much experience of the futility and
positive harmfulness of these unequal alliances, Jeremiah has to lift
his voice against the same national folly.
The "young lions" of ver. 15 must denote the Assyrians, as Egypt is
expressly named in ver. 16. The figure is very appropriate, for not
only was the lion a favourite subject of Assyrian sculpture; not only
do the Assyrian kings boast of their prowess as lion-hunters, while
they even tamed these fierce creatures, and trained them to the chase;
but the great strength and predatory habits of the king of beasts made
him a fitting symbol of that great empire whose irresistible power was
founded upon and sustained by wrong and robbery. This reference makes
it clear that the prophet is contemplating the past; for Assyria was
at this time already tottering to its fall, and the Israel of his day,
_i.e._ the surviving kingdom of Judah, had no longer any temptation to
court the countenance of that decaying if not already ruined empire.
The sin of Israel is an old one; both it and its consequences belong
to the past (ver. 20 compared with ver. 14); and the national attempts
to find a remedy must be referred to the same period. Ver. 36 makes it
evident that the prophet's contemporaries concerned themselves only
about an Egyptian alliance.
It is an interesting detail that for "the waters of Shihor," the LXX.
gives "waters of Gihon" (Γηῶν), which it will be remembered is the
name of one of the four rivers of Paradise, and which appears to have
been the old Hebrew name of the Nile (Ecclus. xxiv. 27; Jos., _Ant._,
i. 1, 3). Shihor may be an explanatory substitute. For the rest, it is
plain that the two rivers symbolize the two empires (cf. Isa. viii.
7; chap. xlvi. 7); and the expression "to drink the waters" of them
must imply the receiving and, as it were, absorption of whatever
advantage might be supposed to accrue from friendly relations with
their respective countries. At the same time, a contrast seems to be
intended between these earthly waters, which could only disappoint
those who sought refreshment in them, and that "fountain of living
waters" (ver. 13) which Israel had forsaken. The nation sought in
Egypt its deliverance from self-caused evil, much as Saul had sought
guidance from witches when he knew himself deserted by the God whom
by disobedience he had driven away. In seeking thus to escape the
consequences of sin by cementing alliances with heathen powers,
Israel added sin to sin. Hence (in ver. 19) the prophet reiterates
with increased emphasis what he has already suggested by a question
(ver. 17): "Thy wickedness correcteth thee, and thy revolts it is
that chastise thee. Know then, and see that evil and bitter is thy
forsaking of Iahweh thy God, and thine having no dread of Me!" Learn
from these its bitter fruits that the thing itself is bad (Read אֵלַי
פָחַדְתְּי as a 2nd pers. instead of פַחְדָּתִי. Job xxi. 33, quoted
by Hitzig, is not a real parallel; nor can the sentence, as it stands,
be rendered, "Und dass die Scheu vor mir nicht an dich kam"); and
renounce that which its consequences declare to be an evil course,
instead of aggravating the evil of it by a new act of unfaithfulness.
_For long ago didst thou break thy yoke, didst thou burst thy bonds,
and saidst, I will not serve: for upon every high hill, and under each
evergreen tree thou wert crouching in fornication_ (vv. 20-24). Such
seems to be the best way of taking a verse which is far from clear as
it stands in the Masoretic text. The prophet labours to bring home to
his hearers a sense of the reality of the national sin; and he affirms
once more (vv. 5, 7) that Israel's apostasy originated long ago, in the
early period of its history, and implies that the taint thus contracted
is a fact which can neither be denied nor obliterated. (The punctuators
of the Hebrew text, having pointed the first two verbs as in the 1st
pers. instead of the 2nd feminine, were obliged, further, to suggest
the reading אֶעֶבֹור לֹא, "I will not transgress," for the original
phrase אעבור לא "I will not serve;" a variant which is found in the
Targum, and many MSS. and editions. "Serving" and "bearing the yoke"
are equivalent expressions (xxvii. 11, 12); so that, if the first two
verbs were really in the 1st pers., the sentence ought to be continued
with, "And _I_ said, _Thou_ shalt not serve." But the purport of this
verse is to justify the assertion of the last, as is evident from the
introductory particle "for," כִּי. The Syriac supports אעבור; and the
LXX. and Vulg. have the two leading verbs in the 2nd pers., iv. 19.) The
meaning is that Israel, like a stubborn ox, has broken the yoke imposed
on him by Iahvah; a statement which is repeated in v. 5: "But these have
altogether broken the yoke, they have burst the bonds" (cf. ver. 31,
_infr._; Hos. iv. 16; Acts xxvi. 14).
_Yet I--I planted thee with_ (or, _as_) _noble vines, all of them
genuine shoots; and how hast thou turned Me thyself into the wild
offshoots of a foreign vine?_ (ver. 21). The thought seems to be
borrowed from Isaiah's Song of the Beloved's Vineyard (Isa. v.
1 _sqq._). The nation is addressed as a person, endowed with a
continuity of moral existence from the earliest period. "The days
of the life of a man may be numbered; but the days of Israel are
innumerable" (Ecclus. xxxvii. 25). It was with the true seed of
Abraham, the real Israel, that Iahvah had entered into covenant (Ex.
xviii. 19; Rom. ix. 7); and this genuine offspring of the patriarch
had its representatives in every succeeding generation, even in the
worst of times (1 Kings xix. 18). But the prophet's argument seems
to imply that the good plants had reverted to a wild state, and that
the entire nation had become hopelessly degenerate; which was not far
from the actual condition of things at the close of his career. The
culmination of Israel's degeneracy, however, was seen in the rejection
of Him to whom "gave all the prophets witness." The Passion of Christ
sounded a deeper depth of sacred sorrow than the passion of any of His
forerunners. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thou that killest the prophets,
and stonest them that are sent unto thee!"
"Then on My head a crown of thorns I wear;
For these are all the grapes Sion doth bear,
Though I My vine planted and watered there:
Was ever grief like Mine?"
_For if thou wash with natron, and take thee much soap, spotted_
(_crimsoned_; Targ. Isa. i. 18: or _written_, _recorded_) _is thy
guilt before Me, saith My Lord Iahvah._ Comparison with Isa. i. 18,
"Though thy sins be as scarlet ... though they be red like crimson,"
suggests that the former rendering of the doubtful word (נִכְתָּם) is
correct; and this idea is plainly better suited to the context than
a reference to the Books of Heaven, and the Recording Angel; for the
object of washing is to get rid of spots and stains.