unto them this word: Thus said Iahvah, the God of Israel: Every jar
is wont to be filled_ (or _shall be filled_) _with wine. And if they
say unto thee, Are we really not aware that every jar is wont to be
filled with wine? say thou unto them, Thus said Iahvah, Lo, I am about
to fill all the inhabitants of this land, and the kings that sit for
David upon his throne, and the priests and the prophets, and all the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness; and I will dash them in
pieces against one another, and the fathers and the sons together,
saith Iahvah: I will not forbear nor spare nor pity, so as not to mar
them_ (cf. vv. 7, 9).
The individual members of the nation, of all ranks and classes, are
compared to earthenware jars, not "skins," as the LXX. gives it, for
they are to be _dashed in pieces_, "like a potter's vessel" (Ps. ii. 9;
cf. ver. 14).[54] Regarding them all as ripe for destruction, Jeremiah
exclaims, "Every jar is filled with wine," in the ordinary course
of things; that is its destiny. His hearers answer with the mocking
question, "Do you suppose that we don't know that?" They would, of
course, be aware that a prophet's figure, however homely, covered an
inner meaning of serious import; but derision was their favourite retort
against unpopular truths (xvii. 15, xx. 7, 8). They would take it for
granted that the thing suggested was unfavourable, from their past
experience of Jeremiah. Their ill-timed banter is met by the instant
application of the figure. They, and _the kings_ then sitting on David's
throne, _i.e._, the young Jehoiachin and the queen-mother Nehushta (who
probably had all the authority if not the title of a regent), and the
priests and prophets who fatally misled them by false teachings and
false counsels, are the wine-jars intended, and the wine that is to fill
them is the wine of the wrath of God (Ps. lxxv. 8; Jer. xxv. 15; cf.
li. 7; Rev. xvi. 19; Isa. xix. 14, 15). The effect is intoxication--a
fatal bewilderment, a helpless lack of decision, an utter confusion
and stupefaction of the faculties of wisdom and foresight, in the very
moment of supreme peril (cf. Isa. xxviii. 7; Ps. lx. 5). Like drunkards,
they will reel against and overthrow each other. The strong term _I will
dash them in pieces_ is used, to indicate the deadly nature of their
fall, and because the prophet has still in his mind the figure of the
wine-jars, which were probably amphoræ, pointed at the end, like those
depicted in Egyptian mural paintings, so that they could not stand
upright without support. By their fall they are to be utterly "marred"
(the term used of the girdle, ver. 9).
But even yet one way of escape lies open. It is to sacrifice their
pride, and yield to the will of Iahvah. _Hear ye, and give ear, be
not haughty! for Iahvah hath spoken: give ye to Iahvah your God the
glory, before it grow dark_ (or _He cause darkness_), _and before your
feet stumble upon mountains of twilight; and_ _ye wait for the dawn,
and He make it gloom, turning it to cloudiness!_ (Isa. v. 30, viii.
20, 22; Amos viii. 9). It is very remarkable, that even now, when
the Chaldeans are actually in the country, and blockading the strong
places of southern Judah (ver. 19), which was the usual preliminary
to an advance upon Jerusalem itself (2 Chron. xii. 4, xxxii. 9;
Isa. xxxvi. 1, 2), Jeremiah should still speak thus; assuring his
fellow-citizens that confession and self-humiliation before their
offended God might yet deliver them from the bitterest consequences
of past misdoing. Iahvah had indeed spoken audibly enough, as it
seemed to the prophet, in the calamities that had already befallen the
country; these were an indication of more and worse to follow, unless
they should prove efficacious in leading the people to repentance. If
they failed, nothing would be left for the prophet but to mourn in
solitude over his country's ruin (ver. 17). But Jeremiah was fully
persuaded that the Hand that had stricken could heal; the Power that
had brought the invaders into Judah, could cause them to "return
by the way that they had come" (Isa. xxxvii. 34). Of course such a
view is unintelligible from the standpoint of unbelief; but then the
standpoint of the prophets is faith.
3. After this general appeal for penitence, the discourse turns
to the two exalted persons whose position and interest in the
country were the highest of all, the youthful king, and the empress
or queen-mother. They are addressed in a tone which, though not
disrespectful, is certainly despairing. They are called upon, not so
much to set the example of penitence (cf. Jonah iii. 6), as to take
up the attitude of mourners (Job ii. 13; Isa. iii. 26; Lam. ii. 10;
Ezek. xxvi. 16) in presence of the public disasters. _Say thou to
the_ _king and to the empress, Sit ye low on the ground_! (lit. _make
low your seat_! cf. Isa. vii. for the construction) _for it is fallen
from your heads[55]--your beautiful crown_! (Lam. v. 16). _The cities
of the south are shut fast, and there is none that openeth_ (Josh. vi.
1): _Judah is carried away captive all of her, she is wholly carried
away_. There is no hope; it is vain to expect help; nothing is left
but to bemoan the irreparable. The siege of the great fortresses of
the south country and the sweeping away of the rural population were
sure signs of what was coming upon Jerusalem. The embattled cities
themselves may be suggested by the fallen crown of beauty; Isaiah
calls Samaria "the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim" (Isa.
xxviii. 1), and cities are commonly represented in ancient art by
female figures wearing mural crowns. In that case, both verses are
addressed to the sovereigns, and the second is exegetical of the first.
As already observed, there is here no censure, but only sorrowful
despair over the dark outlook. In the same way, Jeremiah's utterance
(xxii. 20 _sqq._) about the fate of Jehoiachin is less a malediction
than a lament. And when we further consider his favourable judgment of
the first body of exiles, who were carried away with this monarch soon
after the time of the present oracle (chap. xxiv.), we may perhaps see
reason to conclude that the surrender of Jerusalem to the Chaldeans on
this occasion was partly due to his advice. The narrative of Kings,
however, is too brief to enable us to come to any certain decision about
the circumstances of Jehoiachin's submission (2 Kings xxiv. 10-12).
4. From the sovereigns, the prophet turns to Jerusalem. _Lift up thine
eyes_ (_O Jerusalem_[56]), _and behold them that came from the north!
Where is the flock that was given to thee, thy beautiful sheep? What
wilt thou say when He shall appoint over thee--nay, thou thyself hast
spurred them against thyself!--lovers_ (iii. 4, xi. 19) _for head?
Will not pangs take thee, as a woman in travail?_ Jerusalem sits upon
her hills, as a beautiful shepherdess. The country towns and unwalled
villages lay about her, like a fair flock of sheep and goats entrusted
to her care and keeping. But now these have been destroyed and their
pastures are made a silent solitude, and the destroyer is advancing
against herself. What pangs of shame and terror will be hers, when
she recognises in the enemy triumphing over her grievous downfall the
heathen "friends" whose love she had courted so long! Her sin is to be
her scourge. She shall be made the thrall of her foreign lovers. Iahvah
will "appoint them over her" (xv. 3, li. 27); they will become the
"head," and she the "tail" (Lam. i. 5; Deut. xxviii. 44). Yet this will,
in truth, be her own doing, not Iahvah's; she has herself "accustomed
them to herself" (x. 2), or "instructed" or "spurred them on" against
herself (ii. 33, iv. 18). The revolt of Jehoiakim, his wicked breach
of faith with Nebuchadrezzar, had turned friends to enemies (iv. 30).
But the chief reference seems to be more general--the continual craving
of Judah for foreign alliances and foreign worships. _And if thou say
in thine heart, "Wherefore did these things befall me?" through the
greatness of thy guilt were thy skirts uncovered, thine heels violated_
(Nah. iii. 5) or _exposed. Will a Cushite change his skin, or a leopard
his spots? ye, too, are ye able to do good, O ye that are wont to do
evil?_ If amid the sharp throes of suffering Jerusalem should still
fail to recognise the moral cause of them (v. 19), she may be assured
beforehand that her unspeakable dishonour is the reward of her sins;
_that_ is why "the virgin daughter of Sion" is surprised and ravished by
the foe (a common figure: Isa. xlvii. 1-3). Sin has become so ingrained
in her, that it can no more be eradicated than the blackness of an
African skin, or the spots of a leopard's hide. The habit of sinning has
become "a second nature," and, like nature, is not to be expelled (cf.
viii. 4-7).
The effect of use and wont in the moral sphere could hardly be expressed
more forcibly, and Jeremiah's comparison has become a proverb. Custom
binds us all in every department of life; it is only by enlisting this
strange influence upon the side of virtue, that we become virtuous.
Neither virtue nor vice can be pronounced perfect, until the habit of
either has become fixed and invariable. It is the tendency of habitual
action of any kind to become automatic; and it is certain that sin
may attain such a mastery over the active powers of a man that its
indulgence may become almost an unconscious exercise of his will, and
quite a matter of course. But this fearful result of evil habits does
not excuse them at the bar of common sense, much less at the tribunal
of God. The inveterate sinner, the man totally devoid of scruple,
whose conscience is, as it were, "seared with a hot iron," is not on
that account excused by the common judgment of his kind; the feeling
he excites is not forbearance, but abhorrence; he is regarded not as
a poor victim of circumstances over which he has no control, but as
a monster of iniquity. And justly so; for if he has lost control of
his passions, if he is no longer master of himself, but the slave of
vice, he is responsible for the long course of self-indulgence which
has made him what he is. The prophet's comparison cannot be applied in
support of a doctrine of immoral fatalism. The very fact that he makes
use of it, implies that he did not intend it to be understood in such
a sense. "_Will a Cushite change his skin, or a leopard his spots? Ye
also_--supposing such a change as that--_will be able to do good, O
ye that are taught_--trained, accustomed--_to do evil_!" (perhaps the
preferable rendering).
Not only must we abstain from treating a rhetorical figure as a
colourless and rigorous proposition of mathematical science; not only
must we allow for the irony and the exaggeration of the preacher: we
must also remember his object, which is, if possible, to shock his
hearers into a sense of their condition, and to awaken remorse and
repentance even at the eleventh hour. His last words (ver. 27) prove
that he did not believe this result, improbable as it was, to be
altogether impossible. Unless some sense of sin had survived in their
hearts, unless the terms, "good" and "evil," had still retained a
meaning for his countrymen, Jeremiah would hardly have laboured still
so strenuously to convince them of their sin.
For the present, when retribution is already at the doors, when already
the Divine wrath has visibly broken forth, his prevailing purpose is
not so much to suggest a way of escape, as to bring home to the heart
and conscience of the nation the true meaning of the public calamities.
They are the consequence of habitual rebellion against God. _And I will
scatter them like stubble passing away to_ (= before: cf. xix. 10) _the
wind of the wilderness. This is thy lot_ (_fem._ thine, O Jerusalem),
_the portion of thy measures_ (others: _lap_) _from Me, saith Iahvah;
because thou forgattest Me, and didst trust in the Lie. And I also--I
will surely strip thy skirts to thy face, and thy shame shall be seen!_
(Nah. iii. 5). _Thine adulteries and thy neighings, the foulness of thy
fornications upon the hills in the field_ (iii. 2-6)--_I have seen thine
abominations!_ (For the construction, compare Isa. i. 13.) _Woe unto
thee, O Jerusalem! After how long yet wilt thou not become clean?_ (2
Kings v. 12, 13). That which lies before the citizens in the near future
is not deliverance, but dispersion in foreign lands. The onset of the
foe will sweep them away, as the blast from the desert drives before it
the dry stubble of the corn-fields (cf. iv. 11, 12). This is no chance
calamity, but a recompense allotted and meted out by Iahvah to the
city that forgot Him and "trusted in the Lie" of Baal-worship and the
associated superstitions. The city that dealt shamefully in departing
from her God, and dallying with foul idols, shall be put to shame by Him
before all the world (ver. 26 recurring to the thought of ver. 22, but
ascribing the exposure directly to Iahvah). Woe--certain woe--awaits
Jerusalem; and it is but a faint and far-off glimmer of hope that is
reflected in the final question, which is like a weary sigh: _After how
long yet wilt thou not become clean?_ How long must the fiery process
of cleansing go on, ere thou be purged of thine inveterate sins? It is
a recognition that the punishment will not be exterminative; that God's
chastisements of His people can no more fail at last than His promises;
that the triumph of a heathen power and the disappearance of Iahvah's
Israel from under His heaven cannot be the final phase of that long
eventful history which began with the call of Abraham.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] Also xlviii. 12; Lam. iv. 2; Isa. xxx. 14.
[55] LXX. ἀπὸ κεφαλῆς ὑμῶν.. Read מֵרָאשֹׁתֵיכֶם = מֵרָאשׁיכֶם; and
cf. Assyrian _rešu_, plur. _rešêtu_ (= ראשות).
[56] For עיניכם we might read, with LXX., Vat., ם(ירושל) עיניך. The
Arabic has Israel. But Vulg. and Targ. agree with the Q'rê, and take the
verbs as plur.: "Lift ye up your eyes and see who are coming from the
north." The sing. fem. is to be preferred as the more difficult reading,
and on account of ver. 21, where it recurs. Jerusalem is addressed
(ver. 27), and "_your_ eyes," plur. masc. pron., may be justified as
indicating the _collective_ sense of the fem. sing. The population of
the capital is meant. Cf. Mic. i. 11; Jer. xxi. 13, 14. In ver. 23, the
masc. plur. appears again, the figure for a moment being dropped.
IX.
_THE DROUGHT AND ITS MORAL IMPLICATIONS._
JEREMIAH xiv., xv. (xvii.?).
Various opinions have been expressed about the division of these
chapters. They have been cut up into short sections, supposed to
be more or less independent of each other;[57] and they have been
regarded as constituting a well-organized whole, at least so far as
the eighteenth verse of chap. xvii. The truth may lie between these
extremes. Chapters xiv., xv. certainly hang together; for in them
the prophet represents himself as twice interceding with Iahvah on
behalf of the people, and twice receiving a refusal of his petition
(xiv. 1-xv. 4), the latter reply being sterner and more decisive than
the first. The occasion was a long period of drought, involving much
privation for man and beast. The connexion between the parts of this
first portion of the discourse is clear enough. The prophet prays
for his people, and God answers that He has rejected them, and that
intercession is futile. Thereupon, Jeremiah throws the blame of the
national sins upon the false prophets; and the answer is that both
the people and their false guides will perish. The prophet then
soliloquises upon his own hard fate as a herald of evil tidings, and
receives directions for his own personal guidance in this crisis of
affairs (xv. 10-xvi. 9). There is a pause but no real break at the
end of chap. xv. The next chapter resumes the subject of directions
personally affecting the prophet himself; and the discourse is then
continuous so far as xvii. 18, although, naturally enough, it is
broken here and there by pauses of considerable duration, marking
transitions of thought, and progress in the argument.
The heading of the entire piece is marked in the original by a
peculiar inversion of terms, which meets us again, chap. xlvi. 1,
xlvii. 1, xlix. 34, but which, in spite of this recurrence, wears a
rather suspicious look. We might render it thus: "What fell as a word
of Iahvah to Jeremiah, on account of the droughts" (the plural is
intensive, or it signifies the long continuance of the trouble--as
if one rainless period followed upon another). Whether or not the
singular order of the words be authentic, the recurrence at chap.
xvii. 8 of the remarkable term for "drought" (Heb. _bacc̰óreth_ of
which _bac̰c̰aróth_ here is plur.) favours the view that that chapter
is an integral portion of the present discourse. The exordium (xiv.
1-9) is a poetical sketch of the miseries of man and beast, closing
with a beautiful prayer. It has been said that this is not "a word
of Iahvah to Jeremiah," but rather the reverse. If we stick to the
letter, this no doubt is the case; but, as we have seen in former
discourses, the phrase "Iahvah's word" meant in prophetic use very
much more than a direct message from God, or a prediction uttered at
the Divine instigation. Here, as elsewhere, the prophet evidently
regards the course of his own religious reflexion as guided by Him
who "fashioneth the hearts of men," and "knoweth their thoughts long
before;" and if the question had suggested itself, he would certainly
have referred his own poetic powers--the tenderness of his pity, the
vividness of his apprehension, the force of his passion,--to the
inspiration of the Lord who had called and consecrated him from the
birth, to speak in His Name.
There lies at the heart of many of us a feeling, which has lurked
there, more or less without our cognisance, ever since the childish
days when the Old Testament was read at the mother's knee, and
explained and understood in a manner proportioned to the faculties of
childhood. When we hear the phrase "The Lord spake," we instinctively
think, if we think at all, of an actual voice knocking sensibly at the
door of the outward ear. It was not so; nor did the sacred writer mean
it so. A knowledge of Hebrew idiom--the modes of expression usual and
possible in that ancient speech--assures us that this statement, so
startlingly direct in its unadorned simplicity, was the accepted mode
of conveying a meaning which we, in our more complex and artificial
idioms, would convey by the use of a multitude of words, in terms
far more abstract, in language destitute of all that colour of life
and reality which stamps the idiom of the Bible. It is as though the
Divine lay farther off from us moderns; as though the marvellous
progress of all that new knowledge of the measureless magnitude of the
world, of the power and complexity of its machinery, of the surpassing
subtlety and the matchless perfection of its laws and processes,
had become an impassable barrier, at least an impenetrable veil,
between our minds and God. We have lost the sense of His nearness,
of His immediacy, so to speak; because we have gained, and are ever
intensifying, a sense of the nearness of the world with which He
environs us. Hence, when we speak of Him, we naturally cast about
either for poetical phrases and figures, which must always be more
or less vague and undefined, or for highly abstract expressions,
which may suggest scientific exactness, but are, in truth, scholastic
formulæ, dry as the dust of the desert, untouched by the breath of
life; and even if they affirm a Person, destitute of all those living
characters by which we instinctively and without effort recognise
Personality. We make only a conventional use of the language of the
sacred writers, of the prophets and prophetic historians, of the
psalmists, and the legalists of the Old Testament; the language which
is the native expression of a peculiar intensity of religious faith,
realizing the Unseen as the Actual and, in truth, the only Real.
"Judah mourneth and the gates thereof languish,
They are clad in black down to the ground;
And the cry of Jerusalem hath gone up.
And their nobles have sent their lesser folk for water;
They have been to the pits, and found no water:
Their vessels have come back empty;
Ashamed and confounded, they have covered their heads.
"Because the ground is chapt, for there hath not been rain in the
land,
The plowmen are ashamed, they have covered their heads.
"For even the hind in the field hath yeaned and forsaken her fawn,
For there is no grass.
And the wild asses stand on the bare fells;
They snuff the wind like jackals;
Their eyes fail, for there is no pasturage.
"If our sins have answered against us,
Iahweh, act for Thine own Name sake;
For our relapses are many;
Against Thee have we trespassed.
"Hope of Israel, that savest him in time of trouble,
Wherefore wilt Thou be as a stranger in the land,
And as a traveller that leaveth the road but for the night?
Wherefore wilt Thou be as a man o'erpowered with sleep,
As a warrior that cannot rescue?
"Sith Thou art in our midst, O Iahvah,
And Thy Name upon us hath been called;
Cast us not down!"
How beautiful both plaint and prayer! The simple description of the
effects of the drought is as lifelike and impressive as a good picture.
The whole country is stricken; the city-gates, the place of common
resort, where the citizens meet for business and for conversation, are
gloomy with knots of mourners robed in black from head to foot, or,
as the Hebrew may also imply, sitting on the ground, in the garb and
posture of desolation (Lam. ii. 10, iii. 28). The magnates of Jerusalem
send out their retainers to find water; and we see them returning with
empty vessels, their heads muffled in their cloaks, in sign of grief
at the failure of their errand (cf. 1 Kings xviii. 5, 6). The parched
ground everywhere gapes with fissures;[58] the yeomen go about with
covered heads in deepest dejection. The distress is universal, and
affects not man only, but the brute creation. Even the gentle hind, that
proverb of maternal tenderness, is driven by sorest need to forsake the
fruit of her hard travail; her starved dugs are dry, and she flies from
her helpless offspring. The wild asses of the desert, fleet, beautiful
and keen-eyed creatures, scan the withered landscape from the naked
cliffs, and snuff the wind, like jackals scenting prey; but neither
sight nor smell suggests relief. There is no moisture in the air, no
glimpse of pasture in the wide sultry land.
The prayer is a humble confession of sin, an unreserved admission that
the woes of man evince the righteousness of God. Unlike certain modern
poets, who bewail the sorrows of the world as the mere infliction of
a harsh and arbitrary and inevitable Destiny, Jeremiah makes no doubt
that human sufferings are due to the working of Divine justice.
"Our sins have answered against our pleas at Thy judgment seat; our
relapses are many; against Thee have we trespassed," against Thee,
the sovereign Disposer of events, the Source of all that happens and
all that is. If this be so, what plea is left? None, but that appeal
to the NAME of Iahvah, with which the prayer begins and ends. "Act
for Thine own Name sake."... "Thy Name upon us hath been called." Act
for Thine own honour, that is, for the honour of Mercy, Compassion,
Truth, Goodness; which Thou hast revealed Thyself to be, and which
are parts of Thy glorious Name (Ex. xxxiv. 6). Pity the wretched, and
pardon the guilty; for so will Thy glory increase amongst men; so will
man learn that the relentings of love are diviner affections than the
ruthlessness of wrath and the cravings of vengeance.