_JEREMIAH AND HIS PROPHECIES_
JER. i. 1-v. 31
"Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes--they were souls that
stood alone,
While the men they agonised for hurled the contumelious
stone;
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith
divine,
By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme
design."
LOWELL.
Truly Jeremiah was a prophet of evil. The king might have addressed
him in the words with which Agamemnon reproaches Kalchas.[852]
"Augur accursed! denouncing mischief still:
Prophet of plagues, for ever boding ill!
Still must that tongue some wounding message bring,
And still thy priestly pride provoke thy king."
Never was there a sadder man.[853] Like Phocion, he believed in the
enemies of his country more than he believed in his own people. He saw
"Too late" written upon everything. He saw himself all but universally
execrated as a coward, as a traitor, as one who weakened the nerves
and damped the courage of those who were fighting against fearful odds
for their wives and children, the ashes of their fathers, their
altars, and their hearths. It had become his fixed conviction that any
prophets--and there were a multitude of them--who prophesied peace
were false prophets, and _ipso facto_ proved themselves conspirators
against the true well-being of the land.[854] In point of fact,
Jeremiah lived to witness the death-struggle of the idea of religion
in its predominantly national character (vii. 8-16, vi. 8). "The
continuity of the national faith refused to be bound up with the
continuance of the nation. When the nation is dissolved into
individual elements, the continuity and ultimate victory of the true
faith depends on the relations of Jehovah to individual souls out of
which the nation shall be bound up."[855]
And now a sad misfortune happened to Jeremiah. His home was not at
Jerusalem, but at Anathoth, though he had long been driven from his
native village by the murderous plots of his own kindred, and of those
who had been infuriated by his incessant prophecies of doom. When the
Chaldæans retired from Jerusalem to encounter Pharaoh, he left the
distressed city for the land of Benjamin, "to receive his portion from
thence in the midst of the people"--apparently, for the sense is
doubtful, to claim his dues of maintenance as a priest. But at the
city gate he was arrested by Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the captain
of the watch, who charged him with the intention of deserting to the
Chaldæans. Jeremiah pronounced the charge to be a lie; but Irijah took
him before the princes, who hated him, and consigned him to dreary and
dangerous imprisonment in the house of Jonathan the scribe. In the
vaults of this "house of the pit" he continued many days.[856] The
king sympathised with him: he would gladly have delivered him, if he
could, from the rage of the princes; but he did not dare.[857]
Meanwhile, the siege went on, and the people never forgot the anguish
of despair with which they waited the reinvestiture of the city. Ever
since that day it has been kept as a fast--the fast of Tebeth.
Zedekiah, yearning for some advice, or comfort--if comfort were to be
had--from the only man whom he really trusted, sent for Jeremiah to
the palace, and asked him in despicable secrecy, "Is there any word
from the Lord?" The answer was the old one: "Yes! Thou shalt be
delivered into the hands of the King of Babylon." Jeremiah gave it
without quailing, but seized the opportunity to ask on what plea he
was imprisoned. Was he not a prophet? Had he not prophesied the return
of the Chaldæan host? Where now were all the prophets who had
prophesied peace? Would not the king at least save him from the
detestable prison in which he was dying by inches?
The king heard his petition, and he was removed to a better prison in
the court of the watch, where he received his daily piece of bread out
of the bakers' street until all the bread in the city was spent.
For now utter famine came upon the wretched Jews, to add to the
horrors and accidents of the siege. If we would know what that famine
was in its appalling intensity, we must turn to the Book of
Lamentations. Those elegies, so unutterably plaintive, may not be by
the prophet himself, but only by his school; but they show us what was
the frightful condition of the people of Jerusalem before and during
the last six months of the siege. "The sword of the wilderness"--the
roving and plundering Bedouin--made it impossible to get out of the
city in any direction. Things were as dreadfully hopeless as they had
been in Samaria when it was besieged by Benhadad.[858] Hunger and
thirst reduce human nature to its most animal conditions. They
obliterate the merest elements of morality. They make men like beasts,
and reveal the ferocity which is never quite dead in any but the
purest and loftiest souls. They arouse the least human instincts of
the aboriginal animal. The day came when there was no more bread left
in Jerusalem.[859] The fair and ruddy Nazarites, who had been purer
than snow, whiter than milk, more ruddy than corals, lovely as
sapphires, became like withered boughs,[860] and even their friends
did not recognise them in those ghastly and emaciated figures which
crept about the streets. The daughters of Zion, more cruel in their
hunger than the very jackals, lost the instincts of pity and
motherhood. Mothers and fathers devoured their own little unweaned
children.[861] There was parricide as well as infanticide in the
horrible houses. They seemed to plead that none could blame them,
since the lives of many had become an intolerable anguish, and no man
had bread for his little ones, and their tongues cleaved to the roof
of their mouth. All that happened six centuries later, during the
siege of Jerusalem by Titus, happened now. Then Martha the daughter of
Nicodemus ben-Gorion, once a lady of enormous wealth, was seen picking
the grains of corn from the offal of the streets; now the women who
had fed delicately and been brought up in scarlet were seen sitting
desolate on heaps of dung.[862] And Jehovah did not raise His hand to
save His guilty and dying people. It was too late!
And as is always the case in such extremities, there were men who stood
defiant and selfish amid the universal misery. Murder, oppression, and
luxury continued to prevail. The godless nobles did not intermit the
building of their luxurious houses, asserting to themselves and others
that, after all, the final catastrophe was not near at hand. The sudden
death of one of them--Pelatiah, the son of Benaiah--while Ezekiel was
prophesying, terrified the prophet so much that he flung himself on his
face and cried with a loud voice, "Ah, Lord God! wilt Thou make a full
end of the remnant of Israel?" But on the others this death by the
visitation of God seems to have produced no effect; and the glory of God
left the city, borne away upon its cherubim-chariot.[863]
Even under the stress of these dreadful circumstances the Jews held
out with that desperate tenacity which has often been shown by nations
fighting behind strong walls for their very existence, but by no
nation more decidedly than by the Jews. And if the rebel-party, and
the lying prophets who had brought the city to this pass, still
entertained any hopes either of a diversion caused by Pharaoh Hophrah,
or of some miraculous deliverance such as that which had saved the
city from Sennacherib years earlier, it is not unnatural that they
should have regarded Jeremiah with positive fury. For he still
continued to prophesy the captivity. What specially angered them was
his message to the people that all who remained in Jerusalem should
die by the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, but that those who
deserted to the Chaldæans should live. It was on the ground of his
having said this that they had imprisoned him as a deserter; and when
Pashur and his son Gedaliah heard that he was still saying this, they
and the other princes entreated Zedekiah to put him to death as a
pernicious traitor, who weakened the hands of the patriot soldiers.
Jeremiah was not guilty of the lack of patriotism with which they
charged him. The day of independence had passed for ever, and Babylon,
not Egypt, was the appointed suzerain. The counselling of
submission--as many a victorious chieftain has been forced at last to
counsel it, from the days of Hannibal to those of Thiers--is often the
true and the only possible patriotism in doomed and decadent nations.
Zedekiah timidly abandoned the prophet to the rage of his enemies; but
being afraid to murder him openly as Urijah had been murdered, they
flung him into a well in the dungeon of Malchiah, the king's son. Into
the mire of this pit he sank up to the arms, and there they purposely
left him to starve and rot.[864] But if no Israelite pitied him, his
condition moved the compassion of Ebed-Melech, an Ethiopian, one of
the king's eunuch-chamberlains. He hurried to the king in a storm of
pity and indignation. He found him sitting, as a king should do, at
the post of danger in the gate of Benjamin; for Zedekiah was not a
physical, though he was a moral, coward. Ebed-Melech told the king
that Jeremiah was dying of starvation, and Zedekiah bade him take
three[865] men with him and rescue the dying man. The faithful
Ethiopian hurried to a cellar under the treasury, took with him some
old, worn fragments of robes, and, letting them down by cords, called
to Jeremiah to put them under his arm-pits. He did so, and they drew
him up into the light of day, though he still remained in prison.
It seems to have been at this time that, in spite of his grim
vaticination of immediate retribution, Jeremiah showed his serene
confidence in the ultimate future by accepting the proposal of his
cousin Hanameel to buy some of the paternal fields at Anathoth, though
at that very moment they were in the hands of the Chaldæans. Such an
act publicly performed must have caused some consolation to the
besieged, just as did the courage of the Roman senator who gave a good
price for the estate outside the walls of Rome on which Hannibal was
actually encamped.
Then Zedekiah once more secretly sent for him, and implored him to tell
the unvarnished truth. "If I do," said the prophet, "will you not kill
me? and will you in any case hearken to me?" Zedekiah swore not to
betray him to his enemies; and Jeremiah told him that, even at that
eleventh hour, if he would go out and make submission to the
Babylonians, the city should not be burnt, and he should save the lives
of himself and of his family. Zedekiah believed him, but pleaded that he
was afraid of the mockery of the deserters to whom he might be
delivered. Jeremiah assured him that he should not be so delivered, and
that, if he refused to obey, nothing remained for the city, and for him
and his wives and children, but final ruin. The king was too weak to
follow what he must now have felt to be the last chance which God had
opened out for him. He could only "attain to half-believe." He entrusted
the result to chance, with miserable vacillation of purpose; and the
door of hope was closed upon him. His one desire was to conceal the
interview; and if it came to the ears of the princes--of whom he was
shamefully afraid--he begged Jeremiah to say that he had only entreated
the king not to send him back to die in Jonathan's prison.
As he had suspected, it became known that Jeremiah had been summoned
to an interview with the king. They questioned the prophet in prison.
He told them the story which the king had suggested to him, and the
truth remained undiscovered. For this deflection from exact truth it
is tolerably certain that, in the state of men's consciences upon the
subject of veracity in those days, the prophet's moral sense did not
for a moment reproach him. He remained in his prison, guarded probably
by the faithful Ebed-Melech, until Jerusalem was taken.
Let us pity the dreadful plight of Zedekiah, aggravated as it was by
his weak temperament. "He stands at the head of a people determined to
defend itself, but is himself without either hope or courage."[866]
FOOTNOTES:
[852] Homer, _Iliad_, i. 106-109.
[853] But it must not be forgotten that Jer. xxxi. 1-34 is so hopeful
that it has been called "the Gospel before Christ."
[854] Jer. vi. 14, viii. 11; Ezek. xiii. 10.
[855] W. R. Smith, "Prophets" (_Enc. Brit._).
[856] Jer. xxxvii, 11-15.
[857] Jer xxxviii. 5. The Jewish aristocracy consisted, says Grätz, of
three classes: the _benî hammelech_, or "king's sons"--_i.e._, princes
of the blood-royal; the _roshî aboth_, "heads of the fathers," or
_zekenîm_, "elders"; and the _abhodî hammelech_, "king's servants," or
"courtiers" (ii. 446).
[858] Lam. v. 4.
[859] Jer. xxxvii. 21, xxxviii. 9, lii. 6.
[860] Lam. iv. 7, 8.
[861] Lam. iv. 10, ii. 20; Ezek. v. 10; Baruch ii. 3.
[862] Lam. iv. 5. See Stanley, _Lectures_, ii. 470.
[863] Ezek. xi. 22.
[864] This may possibly be alluded to in Psalm lxix. 2.
[865] Jer. xxxviii. 10, A.V., "thirty."
[866] Van Oort, iv. 52.