The interest of the book of Jeremiah is unique. On the one hand, it
is our most reliable and elaborate source for the long period of
history which it covers; on the other, it presents us with prophecy
in its most intensely human phase, manifesting itself through a
strangely attractive personality that was subject to like doubts and
passions with ourselves. At his call, in 626 B.C., he was young and
inexperienced, i. 6, so that he cannot have been born earlier than
650. The political and religious atmosphere of his ministry was
alike depressing. When it began, the Scythians were overrunning
Western Asia, and Judah was the vassal of Assyria, as she continued
to be till the fall of Nineveh in 606 B.C. Josiah, in whose reign
Jeremiah began his ministry, was a good king; but the idolatries of
his grandfather Manasseh had only too surely left their mark, and
the reformation which was inaugurated on the basis of Deuteronomy
(621) had produced little permanent result. Idolatry and immorality
of all kinds continued to be the order of the day, vii. 9 (about
608). The inner corruption found its counterpart in political
disaster. The death of Josiah in 609 at Megiddo, when he took the
field, probably as the vassal of Assyria, against the king of Egypt,
was a staggering blow to the hopes of the reformers, and formed a
powerful argument in the hands of the sceptics. The vassalage of
Assyria was exchanged for the vassalage of Egypt, and that, in four
years, for the vassalage of Babylonia, whose supremacy over Western
Asia was assured by her victory on the epoch-making field of
Carchemish (605).
There was no strong ruler upon the throne of Judah during the years
preceding the exile. Jehoahaz, the successor of Josiah, deposed by
the Egyptians and exiled after a three months' reign, xxii. 10-12,
was succeeded by the rapacious Jehoiakim (608-597), who cared
nothing for the warning words of Jeremiah (xxxvi.), and his
successor Jehoiachin, who was exiled to Babylon after a three
months' reign, was followed by the weak and vacillating Zedekiah,
who reigned from 597 to 586, when Jerusalem was taken and the
monarchy perished. The priests and prophets were no more faithful to
their high office than the kings. The prophets were superficial men
who did not realize how deep and grievous was the hurt of the
people, xxiii. 9-40, and who imagined that the catastrophe, if it
came, would speedily be reversed, xxviii.; and the priests reposed a
stubborn confidence in the inviolability of the temple (xxvi.) and
the punctiliousness of their offerings, vii. 21, 22.
Jeremiah, though he came of a priestly family, knew very well that
there was no salvation in ritual. He saw that the root of the evil
was in the heart, which was "deceitful above all things and
desperately sick," xvii. 9, and that no reformation was possible
till the heart itself was changed. It was for this reason that he
called upon the people to circumcise their heart, iv. 4, and to
search for Jehovah with all their heart, xxix. 13.
It would be interesting to know what was Jeremiah's attitude to the
law-book discovered and published in 621, but unfortunately the
problems that gather round the authenticity of the text of Jeremiah
are so vexatious that we cannot say with certainty. On the one hand,
we know that, though at that time a prophet of five years' standing,
he was not consulted on the discovery of the book (2 Kings xxii.
14); on the other hand, xi. 1-14 explicitly connects him with an
itinerant mission throughout the province of Judah for the purpose
of inculcating the teaching of "the words of this covenant," which
can only be the book of Deuteronomy. But there is fairly good reason
for supposing that this passage, which is diffuse, and very unlike
the poems that follow it, _vv_. 15, 16, 18-20, is one of the
many later scribal additions to the book. Even if Jeremiah did
support the Deuteronomic movement, he must have felt, in the words
of Darmesteter, that "it is easier to reform the cult than the
soul," and that the real solution would never be found in the
statutes of a law-book, but only in the law written upon the heart,
xxxi. 31-33. Here again, this great prophecy of the law written upon
the heart, has been denied to Jeremiah--by Duhm, for example: but at
any rate, it is conceived in the spirit of the prophet.
It is unfortunate that some of the noblest utterances on religion in
the book of Jeremiah have been, for reasons more or less convincing,
denied to him: e.g. the great passage which looks out upon a time
when the dearest material symbols of the ancient religion would no
longer be necessary; days would come when men would never think of
the ark of the covenant, and never miss it, iii. 16. But even if it
could be proved that these words were not Jeremiah's, it was a sound
instinct that placed them in his book. He certainly did not regard
sacrifice as essential to the true religion, or as possessing any
specially divine sanction, vii. 22, and the thinker who could utter
such a word as vii. 22 is surely on the verge of a purely spiritual
conception of religion, if indeed he does not stand already within
it. If the temple is not indispensable, vii. 4, neither could the
ark be.
This severely spiritual conception of religion is but the outcome of
the intensely personal religious experience of the prophet. There is
no other prophet whose intercourse with the divine spirit is so
dramatically portrayed, or into the depths of whose heart we can so
clearly see. He speaks to God with a directness and familiarity that
are startling, "Why hast Thou become to me as a treacherous brook,
as waters that are not sure?" xv. 18. He has little of the serene
majesty of Isaiah whose eyes had seen the king. His tender heart,
ix. 1, is vexed and torn till he curses not only his enemies, xi.
20ff., but the day on which he was born, xx. 14-18. He did not
choose his profession, he recoiled from it; but he was thrust into
the arena of public life by an impulse which he could not resist.
The word, which he would fain have hidden in his heart, was like a
burning fire shut up in his bones, and it leaped into speech of
flame, xx. 9.
As a poet, Jeremiah is one of the greatest. He knows the human heart
to its depths, and he possesses a power of remarkably terse and
vivid expression. Nothing could be more weird than this picture of
the utter desolation of war;--
I beheld the earth,
And lo! it was waste and void.
I looked to the sky,
And lo! its light was gone.
I beheld the mountains,
And lo! they trembled.
And all the hills
Swayed to and fro.
I beheld (the earth)
And lo! there was no man,
And all the birds of the heaven
Had fled.
iv. 23-25.
A world without the birds would be no world to Jeremiah. Of singular
power and beauty is the lament which Jeremiah puts into the mouths
of the women:--
Death is come up at our windows,
He has entered our palaces,
Cutting off the children from the streets
And the youths from the squares.