nature that most requires this heavenly discipline, if the best is
to be made of it that can be made. The strongest element, that which
is most characteristic of the person, that which constitutes his
individuality, is the chosen field of Divine influence and operation;
for here lies the greatest need. In Jeremiah this master element was
an almost feminine tenderness; a warmly affectionate disposition,
craving the love and sympathy of his fellows, and recoiling almost
in agony from the spectacle of pain and suffering. And therefore it
was that the Divine discipline was specially applied to this element
in the prophet's personality. In him, as in all other men, the good
was mingled with evil, which, if not purged away, might spread until
it spoiled his whole nature. It is not virtue to indulge our own
bent, merely because it pleases us to do so; nor is the exercise of
affection any great matter to an affectionate nature. The involved
strain of selfishness must be separated, if any naturally good gift
is to be elevated to moral worth, to become acceptable in the sight
of God. And so it was precisely here, in his most susceptible point,
that the sword of trial pierced the prophet through. He was saved from
all hazard of becoming satisfied with the love of wife and children,
and forgetting in that earthly satisfaction the love of his God. He
was saved from absorption in the pleasures of friendly intercourse
with neighbours, from passing his days in an agreeable round of
social amenities; at a time when ruin was impending over his country,
and well nigh ready to fall. And the means which God chose for the
accomplishment of this result were precisely those of which the
prophet had complained (xv. 17); his social isolation, which though in
part a matter of choice, was partly forced upon him by the irritation
and ill-will of his acquaintance. It is now declared that this trial
is to continue. The Lord does not necessarily remove a trouble, when
entreated to do it. He manifests His love by giving strength to bear
it, until the work of chastening be perfected.
An interruption is now supposed, such as may often have occurred in
the course of Jeremiah's public utterances. The audience demands to
know why all this evil is ordained to fall upon them. _What is our
guilt and what our trespass, that we have trespassed against Iahvah
our God?_ The answer is a twofold accusation. Their fathers were
faithless to Iahvah, and they have outdone their fathers' sin; and the
penalty will be expulsion and a foreign servitude.
"Because your fathers forsook Me (It is Iahvah's word!)
And went after other gods, and served them, and bowed down to them,
And Me they forsook, and My teaching they observed not:
And ye yourselves (or, as for you) have done worse than your
fathers;
And lo, ye walk each after the stubbornness of his evil heart,
So as not to hearken unto Me.
Therefore will I hurl you from off this land,
On to the land that ye and your fathers knew not;
And ye may serve there other gods, day and night,
Since I will not grant you grace."
The damning sin laid to Israel's charge is idolatry, with all the
moral consequences involved in that prime transgression. That is to
say, the offence consisted not barely in recognising and honouring the
gods of the nations along with their own God, though that were fault
enough, as an act of treason against the sole majesty of Heaven; but
it was aggravated enormously by the moral declension and depravity,
which accompanied this apostasy. They and their fathers forsook Iahvah
"_and kept not His teaching_;" a reference to the Book of the Law,
considered not only as a collection of ritual and ceremonial precepts
for the regulation of external religion, but as a guide of life and
conduct. And there had been a progress in evil; the nation had gone
from bad to worse with fearful rapidity: so that now it could be
said of the existing generation that it paid no heed at all to the
monitions which Iahvah uttered by the mouth of His prophet, but walked
simply in stubborn self-will and the indulgence of every corrupt
inclination. And here too, as in so many other cases, the sin is to be
its own punishment. The Book of the Law had declared that revolt from
Iahvah should be punished by enforced service of strange gods in a
strange land (Deut. iv. 28, xxviii. 36, 64); and Jeremiah repeats this
threat, with the addition of a tone of ironical concession: there, in
your bitter banishment, you may have your wish to the full; you may
serve the foreign gods, and that without intermission (implying that
the service would be a slavery).
The whole theory of Divine punishment is implicit in these few words
of the prophet. They who sin persistently against light and knowledge
are at last given over to their own hearts' lust, to do as they
please, without the gracious check of God's inward voice. And then
there comes a strong delusion, so that they believe a lie, and take
evil for good and good for evil, and hold themselves innocent before
God, when their guilt has reached its climax; so that, like Jeremiah's
hearers, if their evil be denounced, they can ask in astonishment:
"What is our iniquity? or what is our trespass?"
They are so ripe in sin that they retain no knowledge of it as sin,
but hold it virtue.
"And they, so perfect is their misery,
Not once perceive their foul disfigurement,
But boast themselves more comely than before."
And not only do we find in this passage a striking instance of
judicial blindness as the penalty of sin. We may see also in the
penalty predicted for the Jews a plain analogy to the doctrine that
the permanence of the sinful state in a life to come is the penalty of
sin in the present life. "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still;
and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still!" and know himself to
be what he is.
The prophet's dark horizon is here apparently lit up for a moment by
a gleam of hope. The fourteenth and fifteenth verses, however, with
their beautiful promise of restoration, really belong to another
oracle, whose prevailing tones are quite different from the present
gloomy forecast of retribution (xxiii. 7 _sqq._). Here they interrupt
the sense, and make a cleavage in the connexion of thought, which can
only be bridged over artificially, by the suggestion that the import
of the two verses is primarily not consolatory but minatory; that is
to say, that they threaten Exile rather than promise Return; a mode
of understanding the two verses which does manifest violence to the
whole form of expression, and, above all, to their obvious force in
the original passage from which they have been transferred hither.
Probably some transcriber of the text wrote them in the margin of his
copy, by way of palliating the otherwise unbroken gloom of this oracle
of coming woe. Then, at some later time, another copyist, supposing
the marginal note indicated an omission, incorporated the two verses
in his transcription of the text, where they have remained ever since.
(See on xxiii. 7, 8.)
After plainly announcing in the language of Deuteronomy the expulsion
of Judah from the land which they had desecrated by idolatry, the
prophet develops the idea in his own poetic fashion; representing the
punishment as universal, and insisting that it _is_ a punishment, and
not an unmerited misfortune.
"Lo, I am about to send many fishers (It is Iahvah's word!)
And they shall fish them;
And afterwards will I send many hunters,
And they shall hunt them,
From off every mountain,
And from off every hill,
And out of the clefts of the rocks."
Like silly fish, crowding helplessly one over another into the
net,[68] when the fated moment arrives, Judah will fall an easy prey
to the destroyer. And "afterwards," to ensure completeness, those who
have survived this first disaster will be hunted like wild beasts, out
of all the dens and caves in the mountains, the Adullams and Engedis,
where they have found a refuge from the invader.
There is clearly reference to two distinct visitations of wrath, the
latter more deadly than the former; else why the use of the emphatic
note of time "afterwards"? If we understand by the "fishing" of the
country the so-called first captivity, the carrying away of the boy-king
Jehoiachin and his mother and his nobles and ten thousand principal
citizens, by Nebuchadrezzar to Babylon (2 Kings xxiv. 10 _sqq._); and
by the "hunting" the final catastrophe in the time of Zedekiah; we get,
as we shall see, a probable explanation of a difficult expression in the
eighteenth verse, which cannot otherwise be satisfactorily accounted
for. The next words (ver. 17) refute an assumption, implied in the
popular demand to know wherein the guilt of the nation consists, that
Iahvah is not really cognisant of their acts of apostasy.
"For Mine eyes are upon all their ways,
They are not hidden away from before My face;
Nor is their guilt kept secret from before Mine eyes."
The verse is thus an indirect reply to the questions of verse 10;
questions which in some mouths might indicate that unconsciousness of
guilt, which is the token of sin finished and perfected; in others,
the presence of that unbelief which doubts whether God can, or at
least whether He does regard human conduct. But "He that planted the
ear, can He not hear? He that formed the eye, can He not see?" (Ps.
xciv. 9). It is really an utterly irrational thought, that sight, and
hearing, and the higher faculties of reflexion and consciousness, had
their origin in a blind and deaf, a senseless and unconscious source
such as inorganic matter, whether we consider it in the atom or in the
enormous mass of an embryo system of stars.
The measure of the penalty is now assigned.
"And I will repay first the double of their guilt and their
trespass
For that they profaned My land with the carcases of their loathly
offerings,
And their abominations filled Mine heritage."[69]
"I will repay _first_." The term "first," which has occasioned much
perplexity to expositors, means "the first time" (Gen. xxxviii. 28;
Dan. xi. 29), and refers, if I am not mistaken, to the first great
blow, the captivity of Jehoiachin, of which I spoke just now; an
occasion which is designated again (ver. 21), by the expression "this
once" or rather "at this time." And when it is said "I will repay the
double of their guilt and of their trespass," we are to understand
that the Divine justice is not satisfied with half measures; the
punishment of sin is proportioned to the offence, and the cup of
self-entailed misery has to be drained to the dregs. Even penitence
does not abolish the physical and temporal consequences of sin; in
ourselves and in others whom we have influenced they continue--a
terrible and ineffaceable record of the past. The ancient law required
that the man who had wronged his neighbour by theft or fraud should
restore double (Ex. xxii. 4, 7, 9); and thus this expression would
appear to denote that the impending chastisement would be in strict
accordance with the recognised rule of law and justice, and that Judah
must repay to the Lord in suffering the legal equivalent for her
offence. In a like strain, towards the end of the Exile, the great
prophet of the captivity comforts Jerusalem with the announcement that
"her hard service is accomplished, her punishment is held sufficient;
for she hath received of Iahvah's hand twofold for all her trespasses"
(Isa. xl. 2). The Divine severity is, in fact, truest mercy. Only thus
does mankind learn to realize "the exceeding sinfulness of sin," only
as Judah learned the heinousness of desecrating the Holy Land with
"loathly offerings" to the vile Nature-gods, and with the symbols
in wood and stone of the cruel and obscene deities of Canaan; viz.
by the fearful issue of transgression, the lesson of a calamitous
experience, confirming the forecasts of its inspired prophets.
"Iahvah my strength and my stronghold and my refuge in the day of
distress!
Unto Thee the very heathen will come from the ends of the earth,
and will say:
'Mere fraud did our fathers receive as their own,
Mere breath, and beings among whom is no helper.
Should man make him gods,
When such things are not gods?'
"Therefore, behold I am about to let them know--
At this time will I let them know My hand and My might,
And they shall know that My name is Iahvah!"
In the opening words Jeremiah passionately recoils from the very
mention of the hateful idols, the loathly creations, the lifeless
"carcases," which his people have put in the place of the Living God.
An overmastering access of faith lifts him off the low ground where
these dead things lie in their helplessness, and bears him in spirit
to Iahvah, the really and eternally existing, Who is his "strength and
stronghold and refuge in the day of distress." From this height he
takes an eagle glance into the dim future, and discerns--O marvel of
victorious faith!--that the very heathen, who have never so much as
known the Name of Iahvah, must one day be brought to acknowledge the
impotence of their hereditary gods, and the sole deity of the Mighty One
of Jacob. He enjoys a glimpse of Isaiah's and Micah's glorious vision of
the latter days, when "the mountain of the Lord's House shall be exalted
as chief of mountains, and all nations shall flow unto it."
In the light of this revelation, the sin and folly of Israel in
dishonouring the One only God, by associating Him with idols and
their symbols, becomes glaringly visible. The very heathen (the
term is emphatic by position), will at last grope their way out of
the night of traditional ignorance, and will own the absurdity of
manufactured gods. Israel, on the other hand, has for centuries sinned
against knowledge and reason. They had "Moses and the prophets"; yet
they hated warning and despised reproof. They resisted the Divine
teachings, because they loved to walk in their own ways, after the
imaginings of their own evil hearts. And so they soon fell into
that strange blindness, which suffered them to see no sin in giving
companions to Iahvah, and neglecting His severer worship for the
sensuous rites of Canaan.
A rude awakening awaits them. Once more will Iahvah interpose to save
them from their infatuation. "This time" they shall be taught to know
the nothingness of idols, not by the voice of prophetic pleadings, not
by the fervid teachings of the Book of the Law, but by the sword of
the enemy, by the rapine and ruin, in which the resistless might of
Iahvah will be manifested against His rebellious people. Then, when the
warnings which they have ridiculed find fearful accomplishment, then
will they know that the name of the One God is IAHVAH--He Who alone was
and is and shall be for evermore. In the shock of overthrow, in the
sorrows of captivity, they will realize the enormity of assimilating the
Supreme Source of events, the Fountain of all being and power, to the
miserable phantoms of a darkened and perverted imagination.
xvii. 1-18. Jeremiah, speaking for God, returns to the affirmation of
Judah's guiltiness. He has answered the popular question (xvi. 10), so
far as it implied that it was no mortal sin to associate the worship
of alien gods with the worship of Iahvah. He now proceeds to answer it
with an indignant contradiction, so far as it suggested that Judah was
no longer guilty of the grossest forms of idolatry.
1 "The trespass of Judah," he affirms, "is written with pen of iron,
with point of adamant;
Graven upon the tablet of their heart,
And upon the horns of their altars:
Even as their sons remember their altars,
And their sacred poles by the evergreen trees,
Upon the high hills.
2 "O My mountain in the field!
Thy wealth and all thy treasures will I give for a spoil,
For the trespass of thine high-places in all thy borders.
And thou shalt drop thine hand[70] from thy demesne which I gave
thee;
And I will enslave thee to thine enemies,
In the land that thou knowest not;
"For a fire have ye kindled in Mine anger;
It shall burn for evermore."
It is clear from the first strophe that the outward forms of idolatry
were no longer openly practised in the country. Where otherwise would be
the point of affirming that the national sin was "written with pen of
iron, and point of adamant"--that it was "graven upon the tablet of the
people's heart?" Where would be the point of alluding to the children's
_memory_ of the altars and sacred poles, which were the visible adjuncts
of idolatry? Plainly it is implied that the hideous rites, which
sometimes involved the sacrifice of children, are a thing of the past;
yet not of the distant past, for the young of the present generation
remember them; those terrible scenes are burnt in upon their memories,
as a haunting recollection which can no more be effaced, than the guilt
contracted by their parents as agents in those abhorrent rites can be
done away. The indelible characters of sin are graven deeply upon their
hearts; no need for a prophet to remind them of facts to which their
own consciences, their own inward sense of outraged affections, and of
nature sacrificed to a dark and bloody superstition, bears irrefragable
witness. Rivers of water cannot cleanse the stain of innocent blood from
their polluted altars. The crimes of the past are unatoned for, and
beyond reach of atonement; they cry to heaven for vengeance, and the
vengeance will surely fall (xv. 4).
Hitzig rather prosaically remarks that Josiah had destroyed the
altars. But the stains of which the poet-seer speaks are not palpable
to sense; he contemplates unseen realities.
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
The second strophe declares the nature of the punishment. The tender,
yearning, hopeless love of the cry with which Iahvah resigns His
earthly seat to profanation and plunder and red-handed ruin, enhances
the awful impression wrought by the slow, deliberate enunciation
of the details of the sentence--the utter spoliation of temple and
palaces; the accumulated hoards of generations--all that represented
the wealth and culture and glory of the time--carried away for ever;
the enforced surrender of home and country; the harsh servitude to
strangers in a far-off land.
It is difficult to fix the date of this short lyrical outpouring,
if it be assumed, with Hitzig, that it is an independent whole. He
refers it to the year B.C. 602, after Jehoiakim had revolted from
Babylon--"a proceeding which made a future captivity well-nigh
certain, and made it plain that the sin of Judah remained still to be
punished." Moreover, the preceding year (B.C. 603) was what was known
to the Law as a Year of Release or Remission (_shenath shemittah_);
and the phrase "thou shalt drop thine hand," _i.e._ "loose thine hold
of" the land (xvii. 4), appears to allude to the peculiar usages of
that year, in which the debtor was released from his obligations, and
the corn-lands and vineyards were allowed to lie fallow. The Year of
Release was also called the Year of Rest (_shenath shabbathon_, Lev.
xxv. 5); and both in the present passage of Jeremiah, and in the book
of Leviticus, the time to be spent by the Jews in exile is regarded as
a period of rest for the desolate land, which would then "make good
her sabbaths" (Lev. xxvi. 34, 35, 43). The Chronicler indeed seems to
refer to this very phrase of Jeremiah; at all events, nothing else is
to be found in the extant works of the prophet with which his language
corresponds (2 Chron. xxxvi. 21).
If the rendering of the second verse, which we find in both our
English versions, and which I have adopted above, be correct, there
arises an obvious objection to the date assigned by Hitzig; and the
same objection lies against the view of Naegelsbach, who translates:
"As their children remember their altars,
And their images of Baal _by_ (_i.e._ at the sight of) the green
trees, by the high hills."
For in what sense could this have been written "not long before
the fourth year of Jehoiakim," which is the date suggested by this
commentator for the whole group of chapters, xiv.-xvii. 18? The entire
reign of Josiah had intervened between the atrocities of Manasseh
and this period; and it is not easy to suppose that any sacrifice
of children had occurred in the three months' reign of Jehoahaz,
or in the early years of Jehoiakim. Had it been so, Jeremiah, who
denounces the latter king severely enough, would certainly have placed
the horrible fact in the forefront of his invective; and instead
of specifying Manasseh as the king whose offences Iahvah would not
pardon, would have thus branded Jehoiakim, his own contemporary. This
difficulty appears to be avoided by Hitzig, who explains the passage
thus: "When they (the Jews) think of their children, they remember,
and cannot but remember, the altars to whose horns the blood of their
immolated children cleaves. In the same way, by a green tree on the
hills, _i.e._, when they come upon any such, their Asherim are brought
to mind, which were trees of that sort." And since it is perhaps
possible to translate the Hebrew as this suggests, "When they remember
their sons, their altars, and their sacred poles, by (_i.e._ by means
of) the evergreen trees (collective term) upon the high hills," and
this translation agrees well with the statement that the sin of Judah
is "graven upon the tablet of their heart," his view deserves further
consideration. The same objection, however, presses again, though with
somewhat diminished force. For if the date of the section be 602, the
eighth year of Jehoiakim, more than forty years must have elapsed
between the time of Manasseh's bloody rites and the utterance of this
oracle. Would many who were parents then, and surrendered their
children for sacrifice, be still living at the supposed date? And if
not, where is the appropriateness of the words "When they remember
their sons, their altars, and their Asherim?"
There seems no way out of the difficulty, but either to date the
piece much earlier, assigning it, _e.g._, to the time of the
prophet's earnest preaching in connexion with the reforming movement
of Josiah, when the living generation would certainly remember the
human sacrifices under Manasseh; or else to construe the passage in a
very different sense, as follows. The first verse declares that the
sin of _Judah_ is graven upon the tablet of _their heart_, and upon
the horns of _their_ altars. The pronouns evidently shew that it is
the guilt of _the nation_, not of a particular generation, that is
asserted. The subsequent words agree with this view. The expression,
"_Their_ sons" is to be understood in the same way as the expressions
"_their_ heart," "_their_ altars." It is equivalent to the "sons of
Judah" (_benê Jehudah_), and means simply the people of Judah, as
now existing, the present generation. Now it does not appear that
image-worship and the cultus of the high-places revived after their
abolition by Josiah. Accordingly, the symbols of impure worship
mentioned in this passage are not high-places and images but altars
and Asherim, _i.e._, the wooden poles which were the emblems of the
reproductive principle of Nature. What the passage therefore intends
to say would seem to be this: "The guilt of the nation remains, so
long as its children are mindful of their altars and Asherim erected
beside[71] the evergreen trees on the high hills"; _i.e._, so long as
they remain attached to the modified idolatry of the day.
The general force of the words remains the same, whether they accuse
the existing generation of serving sun-pillars (_maççeboth_) and
sacred poles (_asherim_), or merely of hankering after the old
forbidden rites. For so long as the popular heart was wedded to the
former superstitions, it could not be said that any external abolition
of idolatry was a sufficient proof of national repentance. The longing
to indulge in sin is sin; and sinful it is not to hate sin. The guilt
of the nation remained, therefore, and would remain, until blotted out
by the tears of a genuine repentance towards Iahvah.
But understood thus, the passage suits the time of Jehoiachin, as well
as any other period.
"Why," asks Naegelsbach, "should not Moloch have been the terror of
the Israelitish children, when there was such real and sad ground for
it, as in wanting in other bugbears which terrify the children of the
present day?" To this we may reply, (1) Moloch is not mentioned at
all, but simply altars and _asherim_; (2) would the word "remember" be
appropriate in this case?