the press; where a novel is certain of widespread popularity, if its
aim be to undermine the foundations of the Christian faith; where
atheism is mistaken for intelligence, and an inconsistent Agnosticism
for the loftiest outcome of logic and reason; where flagrant lust
walks the streets unrebuked, unabashed; where every other person you
meet is a gambler in one form or another, and shopmen and labourers
and loafers and errand boys are all eager about the result of races,
and all agog to know the forecasts of some wily tipster, some wiseacre
of the halfpenny press!
A Christian country: where the rich and noble have no better use
for profuse wealth than horse-training, and no more elevating mode
of recreation than hunting and shooting down innumerable birds and
beasts; where some must rot in fever-dens, clothed in rags, pining for
food, stifling for lack of air and room; while others spend thousands
of pounds upon a whim, a banquet, a party, a toy for a fair woman. I
am not a Socialist; I do not deny a man's right to do what he will
with his own, and I believe that state interference would be in the
last degree disastrous to the country. But I affirm the responsibility
before God of the rich and great; and I deny that they who live and
spend for themselves alone are worthy of the name of Christian.
A Christian country: where human beings die, year after year, in the
unspeakable, unimaginable agonies of canine madness, and dogs are
kept by the thousand in crowded cities, that the sacrifice to the
fiend of selfishness and the mocking devil of vanity may never lack
its victims! There is a more than Egyptian worship of Anubis, in the
silly infatuation which lavishes tenderness upon an unclean brute, and
credulously invests instinct with the highest attributes of reason; and
there is a worse than heathenish besottedness in the heart that can
pamper a dog, and be utterly indifferent to the helplessness and the
sufferings of the children of the poor. And people will go to church,
and hear what the preacher has to say, and "think he said what he ought
to have said," or not, as the case may be, and return to their own
settled habits of worldly living, as a matter of course. Oh yes! it is a
Christian country--the name of Christ has been named in it for fifteen
centuries past; and for that reason Christ will judge it.
* * * * *
_Therefore, thus said Iahvah Sabaoth: Lo, I am about to melt them and
put them to proof_ (Job xii. 11; Judg. xvii. 4; ch. vi. 25.); _for how
am I to deal in face of_ [_the wickedness of_, LXX: the term has fallen
out of the Heb. text: cf. iv. 4, vii. 12] _the daughter of My people?_
This is the meaning of the disasters that have fallen and are even
now falling upon the country. Iahvah will melt and assay this rough,
intractable human ore, in the fiery furnace of affliction; the strain
of insincerity that runs through it, the base earthy nature, can only
thus be separated and purged away (Isa. xlviii. 10). _A deadly arrow_
[LXX. a _wounding_ one, _i.e._, one which does not miss, but hits and
kills] _is their tongue; deceit it spake: with his mouth peace with his
companion he speaketh, and inwardly he layeth his ambush_ (Ps. lv. 22).
The verse again specifies the wickedness complained of, and justifies
our restoration of that word in the previous verse.
Perhaps, with the Peshito Syriac and the Targum, we ought rather to
render: _a sharp arrow is their tongue_. There is an Arabic saying
quoted by Lane, "Thou didst sharpen thy tongue against us," which
seems to present a kindred root[37] (cf. Ps. lii. 3, lvii. 4; Prov.
xxv. 18). The Septuagint may be right, with its probable reading:
_deceit are the words of his mouth_. This certainly improves the
symmetry of the verse.
_For such things_ (emphatic) _shall I not_--or _should I not_, with an
implied _ought_--_shall I not punish them, saith Iahvah, or on such a
nation shall not My soul avenge herself?_ (v. 9, 29, after which the
LXX. omits _them_ here.) These questions, like the previous one, _How
am I to deal_--or, _how could I act--in face of the wickedness of the
daughter of My people?_ imply the moral necessity of the threatened
evils. If Iahweh be what He has taught man's conscience that He is,
national sin must involve national suffering, and national persistence
in sin must involve national ruin. Therefore He will _melt and try_
this people, both for their punishment and their reformation, if it
may be so. For punishment is properly retributive, whatever may be
alleged to the contrary. Conscience tells us that we _deserve_ to
suffer for ill-doing, and conscience is a better guide than ethical
or sociological speculators who have lost faith in God. But God's
chastisements as known to our experience, that is to say, in the
present life, are reformatory as well as retributive; they compel us
to recollect, they bring us, like the Prodigal, back to ourselves,
out of the distractions of a sinful career, they humble us with the
discovery that we have a Master, that there is a Power above ourselves
and our apparently unlimited capacity to choose evil and to do it: and
so by Divine grace we may become contrite and be healed and restored.
The prophet thus, perhaps, discerns a faint glimmer of hope, but his
sky darkens again immediately. The land is already to a great extent
desolate, through the ravages of the invaders, or through severe
droughts (cf. iv. 25, viii. 20(?), xii. 4). _Upon the mountains will
I lift up weeping and wailing, and upon the pastures of the prairie
a lamentation, for they have been burnt up_ (ii. 15; 2 Kings xxii.
13), _so that no man passeth over them, and they have not heard the
cry of the cattle: from the birds of the air to the beasts, they are
fled, are gone_ (iv. 25). The perfects may be prophetic and announce
what is certain to happen hereafter. The next verse, at all events, is
unambiguous in this respect: _And I will make Jerusalem into heaps,
a haunt of jackals; and the cities of Judah will I make a desolation
without inhabitant_. Not only the country districts, but the fortified
towns, and Jerusalem itself, the heart and centre of the nation, will
be desolated. Sennacherib boasts that he took forty-six strong cities,
and "little towns without number," and carried off 200,150 male and
female captives, and an immense booty in cattle, before proceeding
to invest Jerusalem itself; a state which shews how severe the
sufferings of Judah might be, before the enemy struck at its vitals.
In the words _I will make Jerusalem heaps_, there is not necessarily a
change of subject. Jeremiah was authorized to "root up and pull down
and destroy" in the name of Iahvah.
He now challenges the popular wise men (viii. 8, 9) to account for
what, on their principles, must appear an inexplicable phenomenon.
_Who is the_ (_true_) _wise man, so that he understands this_ (Hos.
xiv. 9), _and who is he to whom the mouth of Iahvah hath spoken, so
that he can explain it_ [_unto you?_ LXX.]. _Why is the land undone,
burnt up like the prairie, without a passer by?_ Both to Jeremiah and
to his adversaries the land was Iahvah's land; what befel it must
have happened by His will, or at least with His consent. Why had He
suffered the repeated ravages of foreign invaders to desolate His own
portion, where, if anywhere on earth, He must display His power and
the proof of His deity? Not for lack of sacrifices, for these were
not neglected. Only one answer was possible, to those who recognised
the validity of the Book of the Law, and the binding character of
the covenant which it embodied. The people and their wise men cannot
account for the national calamities; Jeremiah himself can only do
so, because he is inwardly taught by Iahvah himself (ver. 12): _And
Iahvah said_. It may be supposed that ver. 11 states the popular
dilemma, the anxious question which they put to the official prophets,
whose guidance they accepted. The prophets could give no reasonable
or satisfying answer, because their teaching hitherto had been that
Iahvah could be appeased "with thousands of rams, and ten thousand
torrents of oil" (Mic. vi. 7). On such conditions they had promised
peace, and their teaching had been falsified by events. Therefore
Jeremiah gives the true answer for Iahvah. But why did not the people
cease to believe those whose word was thus falsified? Perhaps the
false prophets would reply to objectors, as the refugees in Egypt
answered Jeremiah's reproof of their renewed worship of the Queen
of Heaven: "It was in the years that followed the abolition of this
worship that our national disasters began" (xliv. 18). It is never
difficult to delude those whose evil and corrupt hearts make them
desire nothing so much as to be deluded.
_And Iahvah said: Because they forsook_ (lit. _upon_ = on account
of _their forsaking_) "_My Law which I set before them_" (Deut. iv.
18), _and they hearkened not unto My voice_ (Deut. xxviii. 15), _and
walked not therein_ (in My Law; LXX. omits the clause); _and walked
after the obstinacy of their own_ (_evil_: LXX.) _heart, and after the
Baals_ (Deut. iv. 3) _which their fathers taught them_--instead of
teaching them the laws of Iahvah (Deut. xi. 19). Such were, and had
always been, the terms of the answer of Iahvah's true prophets. Do you
ask _upon what ground_ (_`al mah_) misfortune has overtaken you? Upon
the ground of your having forsaken Iahvah's "law" or instruction, His
doctrine concerning Himself and your consequent obligations towards
Him. They had this teaching in the Book of the Law, and had solemnly
undertaken to observe it, in that great national assembly of the
eighteenth year of Josiah. And they had had it from the first in the
living utterances of the prophets.
This, then, is the reason why the land is waste and deserted. And
_therefore_--because past and present experience is an index of the
future, for Iahvah's character and purpose are constant--therefore the
desolation of the cities of Judah and of Jerusalem itself, will ere
long be accomplished. _Therefore thus said Iahvah Sabaoth_, the God
of Armies and _the God of Israel; Lo, I am about to feed them_--or,
_I continue to feed them_--to wit, _this people_ (an epexegetical
gloss omitted by the LXX.) _with wormwood, and I will give them to
drink waters of gall_ (Deut. xxix. 17. An Israelite inclining to
foreign gods is "a root bearing wormwood and gall"--bearing a bitter
harvest of defeat, a cup of deadly disaster for his people; cf. Am.
vi. 12), _and I will "scatter them among the nations," "whom they and
their fathers knew not"_ (Deut. xxviii. 36, 64). The last phrase is
remarkable as evidence of the isolation of Israel, whose country lay
off the beaten track between the Trans-Euphratean empires and Egypt,
which ran along the sea-coast. They knew not Assyria, until Tiglath
Pileser's intervention (circ. 734), nor Babylon till the times of
the New Empire. In Hezekiah's day, Babylon is still "a far country"
(2 Kings xx. 14). Israel was in fact an agricultural people, trading
directly with Phenicia and Egypt, but not with the lands beyond
the Great River. The prophets heighten the horror of exile by the
strangeness of the land whither Israel is to be banished.
_And I will send after them the sword, until I have consumed them._
The survivors are to be cut off (cf. viii. 3); there is no reserve,
as in iv. 27, v. 10, 18; a "full end" is announced; which, again,
corresponds to the aggravation of social and private evils in the time
of Jehoiakim, and the prophet's despair of reform.
The judgment of Judah is the ruin of her cities, the dispersion of
her people in foreign lands, and extermination by the sword. Nothing
is left for this doomed nation but to sing its funeral song; to send
for the professional wailing women, that they may come and chant
their dirges, not over the dead but over the living who are condemned
to die: _Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth_ (here as in ver. 6, LXX. omits
the expressive _Sabaoth_), _Mark ye well_ the present crisis, and
what it implies (cf. ii. 10; LXX. wrongly omits this emphatic term),
_and summon the women that sing dirges, that they come, and unto the
skilful women send ye, that they come_ [LXX. omits], _and hasten_
[LXX. _and speak and_] _to lift up the death-wail over us, that our
eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour down waters_.
The "singing women" of 2 Chron. xxxv. 25, or the "minstrels" of St.
Matt. ix. 23, are intended. The reason assigned for thus inviting
them assumes that the prophet's forecast is already fulfilled.
Already, as in viii. 19, Jeremiah hears the loud wailing of the
captives as they are driven away from their ruined homes: _For the
sound of the death-wail is heard from Sion, "How are we undone! We
are sore ashamed"_--of our false confidence and foolish security and
deceitful hopes--"_for_, after all, _we have left the land, for our
dwellings have cast_ (_us_) _out_!" The last two lines appear to be
parallels, which is against the rendering, _For men have cast down
our dwellings_. Cf. Lev. xviii. 25; chap. xxii. 28. From the wailing
women, the address now seems to turn to the Judean women generally;
but perhaps the former are still intended, as their peculiar calling
was probably hereditary and passed on from mother to daughter: _For
hear, ye women, the word of Iahvah, and let your ear take in the word
of His mouth! and teach ye your daughters the death-wail, and each her
companion the lamentation; for_
"_Death scales our lattices,
Enters our palaces,
To cut off boy without,
The young men from the streets._"
_And the corpses of men will fall_--the tense certifies the future
reference of the others--_like dung_ (viii. 2) _on the face of the
field_ (2 Kings ix. 37, of Jezebel's corpse)--left without burial rites
to rot and fatten the soil--_and like the corn-swath behind the reaper,
and none shall gather_ (_them_). The quatrain (ver. 20) is possibly
quoted from some familiar elegy; and the allusion seems to be to a
mysterious visitation like the plague, which used to be known in Europe
as "the Black Death" (cf. xv. 2, xviii. 21, xliii. 11). In this time
of closed gates and barred doors, death is represented as entering the
house, not by the door, but "climbing up some other way" like a thief
(Joel ii. 9; St. John x. 1). Bars and bolts will be futile against
such an invader. The figure is not continued in the second half of the
stanza.[38] The point of the closing comparison seems to be that whereas
the corn-swaths are gathered up in sheaves and taken home, the bodies
will lie where the reaper Death cuts them down.
_Thus said Iahvah: Let not a wise man glory in his wisdom, and let
not the mighty man glory in his might! Let not a rich man glory
in his riches, but in this let him glory that glorieth, in being
prudent and knowing Me_ (LXX. omits pronoun, cf. Gen. i. 4), _that I,
Iahvah, do lovingkindness_ (_and_: LXX. and Orientals), _justice and
righteousness upon the earth; for in these I delight, saith Iahvah._
It is not easy, at first sight, to see the connexion of this, one of
the finest and deepest of Jeremiah's oracles, with the sentence of
destruction which precedes it. It is not satisfactory to regard it
as stating "the only means of escape and the reason why it is not
used" (the latter being set forth in vv. 24, 25); for the leading
idea of the whole composition, from vii. 13 to ix. 22, is that
retribution is coming, and no escape, not even that of a remnant,
is contemplated. The passage looks like an appendix to the previous
pieces, such as the prophet might have added at a later period when
the crisis was over, and the country had begun to breathe again,
after the shock of invasion had rolled away. And this impression
is confirmed by its contents. We have no details about the first
interference of the new Chaldean power in Judah; we only read that
in Jehoiakim's days _Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon came up,
and Jehoiakim became his servant three years: then he turned and
rebelled against him_ (2 Kings xxiv. 1). But before this, for some
two or three years, Jehoiakim was the vassal of the king of Egypt
to whom he owed his crown, and Nebuchadrezzar had to reduce Necho
before he could attend to Jehoiakim. It may be, therefore, that the
worst apprehensions of the time not having been realized, in the
year or two of lull which followed, the politicians of Judah began
to boast of their foresight and the caution and sagacity of their
measures for the public safety, instead of ascribing the respite to
God; the warrior class might vaunt the bravery which it had exhibited
or intended to exhibit in the service of the country; and the rich
nobles might exult in the apparent security of their treasures and
the new lease of enjoyment accorded to themselves. To these various
classes, who would not be slow to ridicule his dark forebodings as
those of a moody and unpatriotic pessimist (xx. 7, xxvi. 11, xxix. 26,
xxxvii. 13), Jeremiah now speaks, to remind them that if the danger
is over for the present, it is the lovingkindness and the righteous
government of Iahvah which has removed it, and to declare that it
is only suspended and postponed, not abolished for ever: _Behold,
days are coming, saith Iahvah, when I will visit_ (his guilt) _upon
every one that is circumcised in foreskin_ (only, and not _in heart_
also): _upon Egypt and upon Judah, and upon Edom and upon the benê
Ammon and upon Moab, and upon all the tonsured folk that dwell in the
wilderness: For all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house
of Israel are uncircumcised in heart._ Egypt is mentioned first, as
the leading nation, to which at the time the petty states of the west
looked for help in their struggle against Babylon (cf. xxvii. 3). The
prophet numbers Judah with the rest, not only as a member of the same
political group, but as standing upon the same level of unspiritual
life. Like Israel, Egypt also practised circumcision, and both the
context here requires and their kinship with the Hebrews makes it
probable that the other peoples mentioned observed the same custom
(Herod., ii. 36, 104), which is actually portrayed in a wall-painting
at Karnak. The "tonsured folk" or "cropt-heads" of the wilderness
are north Arabian nomads like the Kedarenes (xlix. 28, 32), and the
tribes of Dedan, Tema and Buz (xxv. 23), whose ancestor was the
circumcised Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 13 _sqq._, xvii. 23). Herodotus records
their custom of shaving the temples all round, and leaving a tuft of
hair on the top of the head (Herod., iii. 8), which practice, like
circumcision, had a religious significance, and was forbidden to the
Israelites (Lev. xix. 27, xxi. 5).
Now why does Jeremiah mention circumcision at all? The case is, I
think, parallel to his mention of another external distinction of
the popular religion, the Ark of the Covenant (iii. 15). Just as
in that place God promises _shepherds according to Mine heart which
shall shepherd_ the restored Israel _with knowledge and prudence_,
and then directly adds that, in the light and truth of those days,
the ark will be forgotten (iii. 15, 16); so here, he bids the ruling
classes, the actual shepherds of the nation, not to trust in their
own wisdom or valour or wealth (cf. xvii. 5 _sqq._), but in _being
prudent and knowing Iahvah_, and then adds that the outward sign of
circumcision, upon which the people prided themselves as the mark of
their dedication to Iahvah, was in itself of no value, apart from a
"circumcised heart," _i.e._, a heart purified of selfish aims and
devoted to the will and glory of God (iv. 4). So far as Iahvah is
concerned, all Judah's heathen neighbours are uncircumcised, in spite
of their observance of the outward rite. The Jews themselves would
hardly admit the validity of heathen circumcision, because the manner
of it was different, just as at this day the Muhammadan method differs
from the Jewish. But Jeremiah puts "all the house of Israel," who were
circumcised in the orthodox manner, on a level with the imperfectly
circumcised heathen peoples around them. All alike are uncircumcised
before God; those who have the orthodox rite, and those who have but
an inferior semblance of it; and all alike will in the day of judgment
be visited for their sins (cf. Amos i.).
With the increasing carelessness of moral obligations, an increasing
importance would be attached to the observance of such a rite as
circumcision, which was popularly supposed to devote a man to Iahvah
in such sense that the tie was indissoluble. Jeremiah says plainly
that this is a mistaken view. The outward sign must have an inward
and spiritual grace corresponding thereto; else the Judeans are no
better than those whose circumcision they despise as defective. His
meaning is that of the Apostle, "Circumcision verily profiteth, _if
thou keep the law_; but if thou be a breaker of law, thy circumcision
hath become uncircumcision" (Rom. ii. 25). "Circumcision is nothing,
and uncircumcision is nothing, _but the keeping of the commandments
of God," scil._ is everything (1 Cor. vii. 19). It is "faith working
by love," it is the "new creature" that is essential in spiritual
religion (Gal. v. 6, vi. 15).
_Hæc dicit Dominus: Non glorietur sapiens in sapientia sua._ Glancing
back over the whole passage, we discern an inward relation between
these verses and the preceding discourse. It is not the outward props
of state-craft, and strong battalions, and inexhaustible wealth, that
really and permanently uphold a nation; not these, but the knowledge of
Iahvah, a just insight into the true nature of God, and a national life
regulated in all its departments by that insight. At the outset of this
third section of his discourse (ix. 3-6), Jeremiah declared that corrupt
Israel _knew not_ and _refused to know_ its God. At the beginning of the
entire piece (vii. 3 _sq._), he urged his countrymen to _amend their
ways and their doings_, and not go on trusting in _lying words_ and
doing the opposite of _lovingkindness and justice and righteousness_,
which alone are pleasing to Iahvah (Mic. vi. 8), Who _delighteth in
lovingkindness and not sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God more than
in burnt-offerings_ (Hos. vi. 6). And just as in the opening section the
sacrificial worship was disparaged, taken as an "opus operatum," so here
at the close circumcision is declared to have no independent value as
a means of securing Divine favour (ix. 25). Thus the entire discourse
is rounded off by the return of the end to the beginning; and the main
thought of the whole, which Jeremiah has developed and enforced with so
much variety of feeling and oratorical and poetical ornament, is the
eternally true thought that a service of God which is purely external
is no service at all, and that rites without a loving obedience are an
insult to the Majesty of Heaven.