remarkable utterance. The people are standing in the outer court,
with their faces turned toward the court of the priests, in which
stood the holy house itself (Ps. v. 7). The prophetic speaker stands
facing them, "in the gate of the Lord's house," the entry of the
upper or inner court, the place whence Baruch was afterwards to read
another of his oracles to the people (xxxvi. 10). Standing here, as
it were between his audience and the throne of Iahvah, Jeremiah acts
as visible mediator between them and their God. His message to the
worshippers who throng the courts of Iahvah's sanctuary is not one of
approval. He does not congratulate them upon their manifest devotion,
upon the munificence of their offerings, upon their ungrudging and
unstinted readiness to meet an unceasing drain upon their means. His
message is a surprise, a shock to their self-satisfaction, an alarm
to their slumbering consciences, a menace of wrath and destruction
upon them and their holy place. His very first word is calculated to
startle their self-righteousness, their misplaced faith in the merit
of their worship and service. _Amend your ways and your doings!_
Where was the need of amendment? they might ask. Were they not at
that moment engaged in a function most grateful to Iahvah? Were they
not keeping the law of the sacrifices, and were not the Levitical
priesthood ministering in their order, and receiving their due share
of the offerings which poured into the temple day by day? Was not all
this honour enough to satisfy the most exacting of deities? Perhaps
it was, had the deity in question been merely as one of the gods of
Canaan. So much lip-service, so many sacrifices and festivals, so
much joyous revelling in the sanctuary, might be supposed to have
sufficiently appeased one of the common Baals, those half-womanish
phantoms of deity whose delight was imagined to be in feasting and
debauchery. Nay, so much zeal might have propitiated the savage heart
of a Molech. But the God of Israel was not as these, nor one of these;
though His ancient people were too apt to conceive thus of Him, and
certain modern critics have unconsciously followed in their wake.
Let us see what it was that called so loudly for amendment, and then we
may become more fully aware of the gulf that divided the God of Israel
from the idols of Canaan, and His service from all other service. It is
important to keep this radical difference steadily before our minds, and
to deepen the impression of it, in days when the effort is made by every
means to confuse Iahvah with the gods of heathendom, and to rank the
religion of Israel with the lower surrounding systems.
Jeremiah accuses his countrymen of flagrant transgression of the
universal laws of morality. Theft, murder, adultery, perjury, fraud
and covetousness, slander and lying and treachery (vii. 9, ix. 3-8),
are charged upon these zealous worshippers by a man who lived amongst
them, and knew them well, and could be contradicted at once if his
charges were false.
He tells them plainly that, in virtue of their frequenting it, the
temple is become a den of robbers.
And this trampling upon the common rights of man has its counterpart
and its climax in treason against God, in _burning incense to the
Baal, and walking after other gods whom they know not_ (vii. 9); in
an open and shameless attempt to combine the worship of the God who
had from the outset revealed Himself to their prophets as a "jealous,"
_i.e._, an exclusive God, with the worship of shadows who had not
revealed themselves at all, and could not be "known," because devoid
of all character and real existence. They thus ignored the ancient
covenant which had constituted them a nation (vii. 23).
In the cities of Judah, in the streets of the very capital, the
cultus of Ashtōreth, the Queen of Heaven, the voluptuous Canaanite
goddess of love and dalliance, was busily practised by whole families
together, in deadly provocation of the God of Israel. The first and
great commandment said, Thou shalt love Iahvah thy God, and Him only
shalt thou serve. And they loved and served and followed and sought
after and worshipped the sun and the moon and the host of heaven,
the objects adored by the nation that was so soon to enslave them
(viii. 2). Not only did a worldly, covetous and sensual priesthood
connive in the restoration of the old superstitions which associated
other gods with Iahvah, and set up idol symbols and altars within the
precincts of His temple, as Manasseh had done (2 Kings xxi. 4-5);
they went further than this in their "syncretism," or rather in their
perversity, their spiritual blindness, their wilful misconception of
the God revealed to their fathers. They actually confounded HIM--the
Lord _who exercised loving kindness, justice, and righteousness, and
delighted in_ the exhibition of these qualities by His worshippers
(ix. 24)--with the dark and cruel sun-god of the Ammonites. They
_rebuilt the high-places of the Tophet, in the valley of ben
Hinnom_, on the north side of Jerusalem, _to burn their sons and
their daughters in the fire_; if by means so revolting to natural
affection they might win back the favour of heaven--means which
Iahvah _commanded not, neither came they into His mind_ (vii. 31).
Such fearful and desperate expedients were doubtless first suggested
by the false prophets and priests in the times of national adversity
under king Manasseh. They harmonized only too well with the despair
of a people, who saw in a long succession of political disasters the
token of Iahvah's unforgiving wrath. That these dreadful rites were
not a "survival" in Israel, seems to follow from the horror which
they excited in the allied armies of the two kingdoms, when the king
of Moab, in the extremity of the siege, offered his eldest son as
a burnt-offering on the wall of his capital before the eyes of the
besiegers. So appalled were the Israelite forces by this spectacle
of a father's despair, that they at once raised the blockade, and
retreated homeward (2 Kings iii. 27). It is probable, then, that the
darker and bloodier aspects of heathen worship were of only recent
appearance among the Hebrews, and that the rites of Molech had not
been at all frequent or familiar, until the long and harassing
conflict with Assyria broke the national spirit and inclined the
people, in their trouble, to welcome the suggestion that costlier
sacrifices were demanded, if Iahvah was to be propitiated and His
wrath appeased. Such things were not done, apparently, in Jeremiah's
time; he mentions them as the crown of the nation's past offences; as
sins that still cried to heaven for vengeance, and would surely entail
it, because the same spirit of idolatry which had culminated in these
excesses, still lived and was active in the popular heart. It is the
persistence in sins of the same character which involves our drinking
to the dregs the cup of punishment for the guilty past. The dark
catalogue of forgotten offences witnesses against us before the Unseen
Judge, and is only obliterated by the tears of a true repentance, and
by the new evidence of a change of heart and life. Then, as in some
palimpsest, the new record covers and conceals the old; and it is
only if we fatally relapse, that the erased writing of our misdeeds
becomes visible again before the eye of Heaven. Perhaps also the
prophet mentions these abominations because at the time he saw around
him unequivocal tendencies to the renewal of them. Under the patronage
or with the connivance of the wicked king Jehoiakim, the reactionary
party may have begun to set up again the altars thrown down by Josiah,
while their religious leaders advocated both by speech and writing a
return to the abolished cultus. At all events, this supposition gives
special point to the emphatic assertion of Jeremiah, that Iahvah had
_not_ commanded nor even thought of such hideous rites. The reference
to the false labours of the scribes (chap. viii. 8) lends colour to
this view. It may be that some of the interpreters of the sacred law
actually anticipated certain writers of our own day, in putting this
terrible gloss upon the precept, _The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou
give unto Me_ (Ex. xxii. 29).
The people of Judah were misled, but they were willingly misled. When
Jeremiah declares to them, _Lo, ye are trusting, for your part, upon
the words of delusion, so that ye gain no good!_ (vii. 8) it is perhaps
not so much the smooth prophecies of the false prophets as the fatal
attitude of the popular mind, out of which those misleading oracles
grew, and which in turn they aggravated, that the speaker deprecates.
He warns them that an absolute trust in the _præsentia Numinis_ is
delusive; a trust, cherished like theirs independently of the condition
of its justification, viz., a walk pleasing to God. _What! will ye
break all My laws, and then come and stand with polluted hands before
Me in this house_ (Isa. i. 15), _which is named after Me 'Iahvah's
House'_, (Isa. iv. 1), _and reassure yourselves with the thought, We
are absolved from the consequences of all these abominations?_ (vv.
9-10. Lit. _We are saved, rescued, secured, with regard to having done
all these abominations_: cf. ii. 35. But perhaps, with Ewald, we should
point the Hebrew term differently, and read, "Save us!" _to do all these
abominations_, as if that were the express object of their petition,
which would really ensue, if their prayer were granted: a fine irony.
For the form of the verb, cf. Ezek. xiv. 14.) They thought their formal
devotions were more than enough to counterbalance any breaches of the
decalogue; they laid that flattering unction to their souls. They could
make it up with God for setting His moral law at nought. It was merely
a question of compensation. They did not see that the moral law is as
immutable as laws physical; and that the consequences of violating or
keeping it are as inseparable from it as pain from a blow, or death
from poison. They did not see that the moral law is simply the law of
man's health and wealth, and that the transgression of it is sorrow and
suffering and death.
"If men like you," argues the prophet, "dare to tread these courts, it
must be because you believe it a proper thing to do. But that belief
implies that you hold the temple to be something other than what it
really is; that you see no incongruity in making the House of Iahvah
a meeting-place of murderers (_spelunca latronum_: Matt. xxi. 13).
That you have yourselves made it, in the full view of Iahvah, whose
seeing does not rest there, but involves results, such as the present
crisis of public affairs; the national danger is proof that He has
seen your heinous misdoings." For Iahvah's seeing brings a vindication
of right, and vengeance upon evil (2 Chron. xxiv. 22; Ex. iii. 7). He
is the watchman that never slumbers nor sleeps; the eternal Judge,
Who ever upholds the law of righteousness in the affairs of man, nor
suffers the slightest infringement of that law to go unpunished. And
this unceasing watchfulness, this perpetual dispensation of justice,
is really a manifestation of Divine mercy; for the purpose of it is to
save the human race from self-destruction, and to raise it ever higher
in the scale of true well-being, which essentially consists in the
knowledge of God and obedience to His laws.
Jeremiah gives his audience further ground for conviction. He points
to a striking instance in which conduct like theirs had involved
results such as his warning holds before them. He establishes the
probability of chastisement by an historical parallel. He offers
them, so to speak, ocular demonstration of his doctrine. _I also,
lo, I have seen, saith Iahvah!_ Your eyes are fixed on the temple;
so are Mine, but in a different way. You see a national palladium;
_I_ see a desecrated sanctuary, a shrine polluted and profaned. This
distinction between God's view and yours is certain: _for, go ye now
to My place which was at Shiloh, where I caused My Name to abide at
the outset_ (of your settlement in Canaan); _and see the thing that I
have done to it, because of the wickedness of My people Israel_ (the
northern kingdom). _There_ is the proof that Iahvah seeth not as man
seeth; there, in that dismantled ruin, in that historic sanctuary
of the more powerful kingdom of Ephraim, once visited by thousands
of worshippers like Jerusalem to-day, now deserted and desolate, a
monument of Divine wrath.
The reference is not to the tabernacle, the sacred Tent of the
Wanderings, which was first set up at Nob (1 Sam. xxi. 22) and then
removed to Gibeon (2 Chron. i. 3), but obviously to a building more
or less like the temple, though less magnificent. The place and its
sanctuary had doubtless been ruined in the great catastrophe, when the
kingdom of Samaria fell before the power of Assyria (721 B.C.).
In the following words (vv. 13-15) the example is applied. _And
now_--stating the conclusion--_because of your having done all these
deeds_ (_saith Iahvah_, LXX. omits), _and because I spoke unto you_
(_early and late_, LXX. omits), _and ye hearkened not, and I called
you and ye answered not_ (Prov. i. 24): _I will do unto the house upon
which My Name is called, wherein ye are trusting, and unto the place
which I gave to you and to your fathers--as I did unto Shiloh._
Some might think that if the city fell, the holy house would escape,
as was thought by many like-minded fanatics when Jerusalem was
beleaguered by the Roman armies seven centuries later: but Jeremiah
declares that the blow will fall upon both alike; and to give greater
force to his words, he makes the judgment begin at the house of God.
(The Hebrew reader will note the dramatic effect of the disposition of
the accents. The principal pause is placed upon the word "fathers,"
and the reader is to halt in momentary suspense upon that word,
before he utters the awful three which close the verse: _as I--did
to--Shiloh_. The Massorets were masters of this kind of emphasis.)
_And I will cast you away from My Presence, as I cast_ (_all_: LXX.
omits[30]) _your kinsfolk, all the posterity of Ephraim_ (2 Kings
xvii. 20). Away from My Presence: far beyond the bounds of that holy
land where I have revealed Myself to priests and prophets, and where
My sanctuary stands; into a land where heathenism reigns, and the
knowledge of God is not; into the dark places of the earth, that
lie under the blighting shadow of superstition, and are enveloped
in the moral midnight of idolatry. _Projiciam vos a facie mea._ The
knowledge and love of God--heart and mind ruled by the sense of purity
and tenderness and truth and right united in an Ineffable Person,
and enthroned upon the summit of the universe--these are light and
life for man; where these are, there is His Presence. They who are
so endowed behold the face of God, in Whom is no darkness at all.
Where these spiritual endowments are non-existent; where mere power,
or superhuman force, is the highest thought of God to which man has
attained; where there is no clear sense of the essential holiness and
love of the Divine Nature; there the world of man lies in darkness
that may be felt; there bloody rites prevail; there harsh oppression
and shameless vices reign: for the dark places of the earth are full
of the habitations of cruelty.
_And thou, pray thou not for this people_ (xviii. 20), _and lift not
up for them outcry nor prayer, and urge not Me, for I hear thee not.
Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets
of Jerusalem? The children gather sticks, and the fathers light the
fire, and the women knead dough, to make sacred buns_ (xliv. 19) _for
the Queen of Heaven, and to pour libations to other gods, in order to
grieve Me_ (Deut. xxxii. 16, 21). _Is it Me that they grieve? saith
Iahvah; is it not themselves_ (rather), _in regard to the shame of
their own faces_ (16-19).
From one point of view, all human conduct may be said to be
_indifferent_ to God; He is αὐτάρκης, self-sufficing, and needs not
our praises, our love, our obedience, any more than He needed the
temple ritual and the sacrifices of bulls and goats. Man can neither
benefit nor injure God; he can only affect his own fortunes in this
world and the next, by rebellion against the laws upon which his
welfare depends, or by a careful observance of them. In this sense,
it is true that wilful idolatry, that treason against God, does not
"provoke" or "grieve" the Immutable One. Men do such things to their
own sole hurt, to the shame of their own faces: that is, the punishment
will be the painful realization of the utter groundlessness of their
confidence, of the folly of their false trust; the mortification of
disillusion, when it is too late. That Jeremiah should have expressed
himself thus is sufficient answer to those who pretend that the habitual
anthropomorphism of the prophetic discourses is anything more than a
mere accident of language and an accommodation to ordinary style.
In another sense, of course, it is profoundly true to say that human
sin provokes and grieves the Lord. God is Love; and love may be pained
to its depths by the fault of the beloved, and stirred to holy
indignation at the disclosure of utter unworthiness and ingratitude.
Something corresponding to these emotions of man may be ascribed, with
all reverence, to the Inscrutable Being who creates man "in His own
image," that is, endowed with faculties capable of aspiring towards
_Him_, and receiving the knowledge of His being and character.
_Pray not thou for this people ... for I hear thee not!_ Jeremiah was
wont to intercede for his people (xi. 14, xviii. 20, xv. 1; cf. 1
Sam. xii. 23). The deep pathos which marks his style, the minor key
in which almost all his public utterances are pitched, proves that
the fate which he saw impending over his country, grieved him to the
heart. "Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought;"
and this is eminently true of Jeremiah. A profound melancholy had
fallen like a cloud upon his soul; he had seen the future, fraught as
it was with suffering and sorrow, despair and overthrow, slaughter and
bitter servitude; a picture in which images of terror crowded one upon
another, under a darkened sky, from which no ray of blessed hope shot
forth, but only the lightnings of wrath and extermination. Doubtless
his prayers were frequent, alive with feeling, urgent, imploring,
full of the convulsive energy of expiring hope. But in the midst
of his strong crying and tears, there arose from the depths of his
consciousness the conviction that all was in vain. _Pray not thou for
this people, for I will not hear thee._ The thought stood before him,
sharp and clear as a command; the unuttered sound of it rang in his
ears, like the voice of a destroying angel, a messenger of doom, calm
as despair, sure as fate. He knew it was the voice of God.
In the history of nations as in the lives of individuals there are
times when repentance, even if possible, would be too late to avert
the evils which long periods of misdoing have called from the abyss to
do their penal and retributive work. Once the dike is undermined, no
power on earth can hold back the flood of waters from the defenceless
lands beneath. And when a nation's sins have penetrated and poisoned
all social and political relations, and corrupted the very fountains of
life, you cannot avert the flood of ruin that must come, to sweep away
the tainted mass of spoiled humanity; you cannot avert the storm that
must break to purify the air, and make it fit for men to breathe again.
_Therefore_--because of the national unfaithfulness--_thus said the
Lord Iahvah, Lo, Mine anger and My fury are being poured out toward
this place--upon the men, and upon the cattle, and upon the trees of
the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it will burn, and not
be quenched!_ (vii. 20). The havoc wrought by war, the harrying and
slaying of man and beast, the felling of fruit trees and firing of
the vineyards, are intended; but not so as to exclude the ravages of
pestilence and droughts (chap. xiv.) and famine. All these evils are
manifestations of the wrath of Iahvah. Cattle and trees and "the fruit
of the ground," _i.e._ of the cornlands and vineyards, are to share in
the general destruction (cf. Hos. iv. 3), not, of course, as partakers
of man's guilt, but only by way of aggravating his punishment. The
final phrase is worthy of consideration, because of its bearing upon
other passages. _It will burn and not be quenched_, or _it will burn
unquenchably_. The meaning is not that the Divine wrath once kindled
will go on burning for ever; but that once kindled, no human or other
power will be able to extinguish it, until it has accomplished its
appointed work of destruction.
_Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth, the God of Israel: Your holocausts add
ye to your common sacrifices, and eat ye flesh!_ that is, Eat flesh
in abundance, eat your fill of it! Stint not yourselves by devoting
any portion of your offerings wholly to Me. I am as indifferent to
your "burnt-offerings," your more costly and splendid gifts, as to
the ordinary sacrifices, over which you feast and make merry with
your friends (1 Sam. i. 4, 13). The holocausts which you are now
burning on the altar before Me will not avail to alter My settled
purpose. _For I spake not with your fathers, nor commanded them, in
the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, concerning
matters of holocaust and sacrifice, but this matter commanded I
them, "Hearken ye unto My voice, so become I God to you, and you--ye
shall become to Me a people; and walk ye in all the way that I shall
command you, that it may go well with you!"_ (22-23) cf. Deut. vi.
3. Those who believe that the entire priestly legislation as we now
have it in the Pentateuch is the work of Moses, may be content to
find in this passage of Jeremiah no more than an extreme antithetical
expression of the truth that to obey is better than sacrifice. There
can be no question that from the outset of its history, Israel, in
common with all the Semitic nations, gave outward expression to its
religious ideas in the form of animal sacrifice. Moses cannot have
originated the institution, he found it already in vogue, though he
may have regulated the details of it. Even in the Pentateuch, the
term "sacrifice" is nowhere explained; the general understanding of
the meaning of it is taken for granted (see Ex. xii. 27, xxiii. 18).
Religious customs are of immemorial use, and it is impossible in most
cases to specify the period of their origin. But while it is certain
that the institution of sacrifice was of extreme antiquity in Israel
as in other ancient peoples, it is equally certain, from the plain
evidence of their extant writings, that the prophets before the Exile
attached no independent value either to it or to any other part of the
ritual of the temple. We have already seen how Jeremiah could speak
of the most venerable of all the symbols of the popular faith (iii.
16). Now he affirms that the traditional rules for the burnt-offerings
and other sacrifices were not matters of special Divine institution,
as was popularly supposed at the time. The reference to the Exodus
may imply that already in his day there were written narratives which
asserted the contrary; that the first care of the Divine Saviour after
He had led His people through the sea was to provide them with an
elaborate system of ritual and sacrifice, identical with that which
prevailed in Jeremiah's day. The important verse already quoted (viii.
8) seems to glance at such pious fictions of the popular religious
teachers: _How say ye, We are wise, and the instruction_ (A. V. "law")
_of Iahvah is with us? But behold for lies hath it wrought--the lying
pen of the scribes!_