Jeremiah
Being The Baird Lecture for 1922
By
George Adam Smith
New York
George H. Doran Company
1924
CONTENTS
Dedication.
Preface.
Preliminary.
Lecture I. The Man And The Book.
Lecture II. The Poet.
Lecture III. The Prophet—His Youth And His Call.
Lecture IV. The Prophet In The Reign Of Josiah.
1. His Earliest Oracles. (II. 2-IV. 4.)
2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)
3. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. (Chs. VII, VIII. 8, XI.)
Lecture V. Under Jehoiakim.
1. From Megiddo to Carchemish, 608-605.
2. Parables. (XIII, XVIII-XX, XXXV.)
3. Oracles on the Edge of Doom. (VII. 16-XVIII _passim_, XXII, XLV.)
Lecture VI. To The End And After.
1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)
2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)
3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)
4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)
Lecture VII. The Story Of His Soul.
1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV.
10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)
2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)
3. Sacrifice.
Lecture VIII. God, Man And The New Covenant.
1. God.
2. Man and the New Covenant.
Appendix I. Medes And Scythians.
Appendix II. Necoh’s Campaign.
Index Of Texts.
Index Of Names And Subjects.
Footnotes
DEDICATION.
TO
THE UNION
OF
THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES
PREFACE.
The purpose and the scope of this volume are set forth in the beginning of
Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I
understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and
which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English.
Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the
irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the
Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of
some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind
that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not
be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as is the case with the
folk-songs of Palestine to-day. I am well aware that metres so primitive
and by our canons so irregular have been more rhythmically rendered by the
stately prose of our English Versions; yet it is our duty reverently to
seek for the original forms and melodies of what we believe to be the
Oracles of God. The only other point connected with the metrical
translations offered, which need be mentioned here, is that I have
rendered the name of the God of Israel as it is by the Greek and our own
Versions—The Lord—which is more suitable to English verse than is either
Yahweh or Jehovah.
The text of the Lectures and the footnotes show how much I owe to those
who have already written on Jeremiah, as also in what details I differ
from one or another of them.
I have retained the form of Lectures for this volume, but I have very much
expanded and added to what were only six Lectures of an hour each when
delivered under the auspices of the Baird Trust in Glasgow in 1922.
George Adam Smith.
CHANONRY LODGE,
OLD ABERDEEN,
_18th October, 1923._
PRELIMINARY.
First of all, I thank the Baird Trustees for their graceful appointment to
this Lecture of a member of what is still, though please God not for long,
another Church than their own. I am very grateful for the privilege which
they grant me of returning to Glasgow with the accomplishment of a work
the materials for which were largely gathered during the years of my
professorship in the city. The value of the opportunity is enhanced by all
that has since befallen our nation and the world. The Great War invested
the experience of the Prophet, who is the subject of this Lecture, with a
fresh and poignant relevance to our own problems and duties. Like
ourselves, Jeremiah lived through the clash not only of empires but of
opposite ethical ideals, through the struggles and panics of small
peoples, through long and terrible fighting, famine, and slaughter of the
youth of the nations, with all the anxieties to faith and the problems of
Providence, which such things naturally raise. Passionate for peace, he
was called to proclaim the inevitableness of war, in opposition to the
popular prophets of a false peace; but later he had to counsel his people
to submit to their foes and to accept their captivity, thus facing the
hardest conflict a man can who loves his own—between patriotism and common
sense, between his people’s gallant efforts for freedom and the stern
facts of the world, between national traditions and pieties on the one
side and on the other what he believed to be the Will of God. These are
issues which the successive generations of our race are called almost
ceaselessly to face; and the teaching and example of the great Prophet,
who dealt with them through such strenuous debates both with his
fellow-men and with his God, and who brought out of these debates
spiritual results of such significance for the individual and for the
nation, cannot be without value for ourselves.
Lecture I.
THE MAN AND THE BOOK.
In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of
the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which
contains them—but especially of the man himself, his personality and his
tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its
achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as
his influence on the subsequent religion of his people.
It has often been asserted that in Jeremiah’s ministry more than in any
other of the Old Covenant the personality of the Prophet was under God the
dominant factor, and one has even said that “his predecessors were the
originators of great truths, which he transmuted into spiritual life.”(1)
To avoid exaggeration here, we must keep in mind how large a part
personality played in their teaching also, and from how deep in their
lives their messages sprang. Even Amos was no mere _voice crying in the
wilderness_. The discipline of the desert, the clear eye for ordinary
facts and the sharp ear for sudden alarms which it breeds, along with the
desert shepherd’s horror of the extravagance and cruelties of
civilisation—all these reveal to us the Man behind the Book, who had lived
his truth before he uttered it. Hosea again, tells the story of his
outraged love as _the beginning of the Word of the Lord by him_. And it
was the strength of Isaiah’s character, which, unaided by other human
factors, carried Judah, with the faith she enshrined, through the first
great crisis of her history. Yet recognise, as we justly may, the
personalities of these prophets in the nerve, the colour, the accent, and
even the substance of their messages, we must feel the still greater
significance of Jeremiah’s temperament and other personal qualities both
for his own teaching and for the teaching of those who came after him.
Thanks to his loyal scribe, Baruch, we know more of the circumstances of
his career, and thanks to his own frankness, we know more of his
psychology than we do in the case of any of his predecessors. He has, too,
poured out his soul to us by the most personal of all channels; the charm,
passion and poignancy of his verse lifting him high among the poets of
Israel.
So far as our materials enable us to judge no other prophet was more
introspective or concerned about himself; and though it might be said that
he carried this concern to a fault, yet fault or none, the fact is that no
prophet started so deeply from himself as Jeremiah did. His circumstances
flung him in upon his feelings and convictions; he was constantly
searching, doubting, confessing, and pleading for, himself. He asserted
more strenuously than any except Job his individuality as against God, and
he stood in more lonely opposition to his people.
Jeremiah was called to prophesy about the time that the religion of Israel
was re-codified in Deuteronomy—the finest system of national religion
which the world has seen, but only and exclusively national—and he was
still comparatively young when that system collapsed for the time and the
religion itself seemed about to perish with it. He lived to see the Law
fail, the Nation dispersed, and the National Altar shattered; but he
gathered their fire into his bosom and carried it not only unquenched but
with a purer flame towards its everlasting future. We may say without
exaggeration that what was henceforth finest in the religion of Israel
had, however ancient its sources, been recast in the furnace of his
spirit. With him the human unit in religion which had hitherto been mainly
the nation was on the way to become the individual. Personal piety in
later Israel largely grew out of his spiritual struggles.(2)
His forerunners, it is true, had insisted that religion was an affair not
of national institutions nor of outward observance, but of the people’s
heart—by which heart they and their hearers must have understood the
individual hearts composing it. But, in urging upon his generation
repentance, faith and conversion to God, Jeremiah’s language is more
thorough and personal than that used by any previous prophet. The
individual, as he leaves Jeremiah’s hands, is more clearly the direct
object of the Divine Interest and Grace, and the instrument of the Divine
Will. The single soul is searched, defined and charged as never before in
Israel.
But this sculpture of the individual out of the mass of the nation, this
articulation of his immediate relation to God apart from Law, Temple and
Race, achieved as it was by Jeremiah only through intense mental and
physical agonies, opened to him the problem of the sufferings of the
righteous. In his experience the individual realised his Self only to find
that Self—its rights, the truths given it and its best service for
God—baffled by the stupidity and injustice of those for whom it laboured
and agonised. The mists of pain and failure bewildered the Prophet and to
the last his work seemed in vain. Whether or not he himself was conscious
of the solution of the problem, others reached it through him. There are
grounds for believing that the Figure of the Suffering Servant of the
Lord, raised by the Great Prophet of the Exile, and the idea of the
atoning and redemptive value of His sufferings were, in part at least, the
results of meditation upon the spiritual loneliness on the one side, and
upon the passionate identification of himself with the sorrows of his
sinful people on the other, of this the likest to Christ of all the
prophets.(3)
* * * * *
For our knowledge of this great life—there was none greater under the Old
Covenant—we are dependent on that Book of our Scriptures, the Hebrew text
of which bears the simple title “Jeremiah.”
The influence of the life and therefore the full stature of the man who
lived it, stretches, as I have hinted, to the latest bounds of Hebrew
history, and many writings and deeds were worshipfully assigned to him.
Thus the Greek Version of the Old Testament ascribes Lamentations to
Jeremiah, but the poems themselves do not claim to be, and obviously are
not, from himself. He is twice quoted in II. Chronicles and once in Ezra,
but these quotations may be reasonably interpreted as referring to
prophecies contained in our book, which were therefore extant before the
date of the Chronicler.(4) Ecclesiasticus XLIX. 6-7 reflects passages of
our Book, and of Lamentations, as though equally Jeremiah’s, and Daniel
IX. 2 refers to Jeremiah XXV. 12. A paragraph in the Second Book of
Maccabees, Ch. II. 1-8, contains, besides echoes of our Book of Jeremiah,
references to other activities of the Prophet of which the sources and the
value are unknown to us. But all these references, as well as the series
of apocryphal and apocalyptic works to which the name either of Jeremiah
himself or of Baruch, his scribe, has been attached,(5) only reveal the
length of the shadow which the Prophet’s figure cast down the ages, and
contribute no verifiable facts to our knowledge of his career or of his
spiritual experience.
For the actual life of Jeremiah, for the man as he was to himself and his
contemporaries, for his origin, character, temper, struggles, growth and
modes of expression, we have practically no materials beyond the Canonical
Book to which his name is prefixed.(6)
Roughly classified the contents of the Book (after the extended title in
Ch. I. 1-3) are as follows:—
1. A Prologue, Ch. I. 4-19, in which the Prophet tells the story of his
call and describes the range of his mission as including both his own
people and foreign nations. The year of his call was 627-6 B.C.
2. A large number of Oracles, dialogues between the Prophet and the Deity
and symbolic actions by the Prophet issuing in Oracles, mostly introduced
as by Jeremiah himself, but sometimes reported of him by another. Most of
the Oracles are in verse; the style of the rest is not distinguishable by
us from prose. They deal almost exclusively with the Prophet’s own people
though there are some references to neighbouring tribes. The bulk of this
class of the contents is found within Chs. II-XXV, which contain all the
earlier oracles, i.e. those uttered by Jeremiah before the death of King
Josiah in 608, but also several of his prophecies under Jehoiakim and even
Ṣedekiah. More of the latter are found within Chs. XXVII-XXXV: all these,
except XXVIII and part of XXXII, which are introduced by the Prophet
himself, are reported by another.
3. A separate group of Oracles on Foreign Nations, Chs. XLVI-LI, reported
to us as Jeremiah’s.
4. A number of narratives of episodes in the Prophet’s life from 608
onwards under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah to the end in Egypt, soon after 586;
apparently by a contemporary and eyewitness who on good grounds is
generally taken to be Baruch the Scribe: Chs. XXVI, XXXVI-XLV; but to the
same source may be due much of Chs. XXVII-XXXV (see under 2).
5. Obvious expansions and additions throughout all the foregoing; and a
historical appendix in Ch. LII, mainly an excerpt from II. Kings XXIV-XXV.
On the face of it, then, the Book is a compilation from several sources;
and perhaps we ought to translate the opening clause of its title not as
in our versions “The Words of Jeremiah,” but “The History of Jeremiah,” as
has been legitimately done by some scholars since Kimchi.
What were the nuclei of this compilation? How did they originate? What
proofs do they give of their value as historical documents? How did they
come together? And what changes, if any, did they suffer before the
compilation closed and the Book received its present form?
These questions must be answered, so far as possible, before we can give
an account of the Prophet’s life or an estimate of himself and his
teaching. The rest of this lecture is an attempt to answer them—but in the
opposite order to that in which I have just stated them. We shall work
backward from the two ultimate forms in which the Book has come down to
us. For these forms are two.
Besides the Hebrew text, from which the Authorised and Revised English
Versions have been made, we possess a form of the Book in Greek, which is
part of the Greek Version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint.
This is virtually another edition of the same work. The Hebrew text
belongs to the Second or Prophetical Canon of the Jewish Scriptures, which
was not closed till about 200 B.C., or more than 350 years after
Jeremiah’s death. The Greek Version was completed about the same time, and
possibly earlier.
These two editions of the Book hold by far the greatest part of their
contents in common, yet they differ considerably in the amount and in the
arrangement of their contents, and somewhat less in the dates and personal
references which they apply to various passages. We have thus before us
two largely independent witnesses who agree in the bulk of their
testimony, and otherwise correct and supplement each other.
In size the Greek Book of Jeremiah is but seven-eighths of the Hebrew,(7)
but conversely it contains some hundred words that the Hebrew lacks. Part
of this small Greek surplus is due to the translators’ expansion or
paraphrase of briefer Hebrew originals, or consists of glosses that they
found in the Hebrew MSS. from which they translated, or added of
themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but
omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these
differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity
in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails to do so.(8)
More instructive is the greater number of phrases and passages found in
the Hebrew Book, and consequently in our English Versions, but absent from
the Greek. Some, it is true, are merely formal—additions to a personal
name of the title _king_ or _prophet_ or of the names of a father and
grandfather, or the more frequent use of the divine title _of Hosts_ with
the personal Name of the Deity or of the phrase _Rede of the Lord_.(9)
Also the Greek omits words which in the Hebrew are obviously mistakes of a
copyist.(10) Again, a number of what are transparent glosses or marginal
notes on the Hebrew text are lacking in the Greek, because the translator
of the latter did not find them on the Hebrew manuscript from which he
translated.(11) Some titles to sections of the Book, or portions of
titles, absent from the Greek but found in our Hebrew text, are also later
editorial additions.(12) Greater importance, however, attaches to those
phrases that cannot be mere glosses and to the longer passages, wanting in
the Greek but found in the Hebrew, many of which upon internal evidence
must be regarded as late intrusions into the latter.(13) And occasionally
a word or phrase in the Hebrew, which spoils the rhythm or is irrelevant
to the sense, is not found in the Greek.(14)
Finally, there is one great difference of arrangement. The group of
Oracles on Foreign Nations which appear in the Hebrew as Chs. XLVI-LI are
in the Greek placed between verses 13 and 15(15) of Ch. XXV, and are
ranged in a different order—an obvious proof that at one time different
editors felt free to deal with the arrangement of the compilation as well
as to add to its contents.(16)
Modern critics differ as to the comparative value of these two editions of
the Book of Jeremiah, and there are strong advocates on either side.(17)
But the prevailing opinion, and, to my view, the right one, is that no
general judgment is possible, and that each case of difference between the
two witnesses must be decided by itself.(18) With this, however, we have
nothing at present to do. What concerns us now is the fact that the Greek
is not the translation of the canonical Hebrew text, but that the two
Books, while sharing a common basis of wide extent, represent two
different lines of compilation and editorial development which continued
till at least 200 B.C. Between them they are the proof that, while our
Bible was still being compiled, some measure of historical criticism and
of editorial activity was at work on the material—and this not only along
one line. We need not stop to discuss how far the fact justifies the
exercise of criticism by the modern Church. For our present purpose it is
enough to keep in mind that our Book of Jeremiah is the result of a long
development through some centuries and on more than one line, though the
two divergent movements started with, and carried down, a large body of
material in common.
Moreover, this common material bears evidence of having already undergone
similar treatment, _before_ it passed out on those two lines of further
development which resulted in the canonical Hebrew text and the Greek
Version respectively. The signs of gradual compilation are everywhere upon
the material which they share in common. Now and then a chronological
order appears, and indeed there are traces of a purpose to pursue that
order throughout. But this has been disturbed by cross-arrangements
according to subject,(19) and by the intrusion of later oracles and
episodes among earlier ones(20) or _vice versa_(21) as if their materials
had come into the hands of the compilers or editors of the Book only
gradually. Another proof of the gradual growth of those contents, which
are common to the Hebrew and the Greek, is the fashion in which they tend
to run away from the titles prefixed to them. Take the title to the whole
Book,(22) Ch. I. 2, _Which was the Word of the Lord to Jeremiah in the
days of Josiah, son of Amon, King of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his
reign_. This covers only the narrative of the Prophet’s call in Ch. I, or
at most a few of the Oracles in the following chapters. The supplementary
title in verse 3—_It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of
Josiah, King of Judah, up to [the end of]_(_23_)_ the eleventh year of
Ṣedekiah, the son of Josiah King of Judah, up to the exile of Jerusalem,
in the fifth month_—is probably a later addition, added when the later
Oracles of Jeremiah were attached to some collection of those which he had
delivered under Josiah; but even then the title fails to cover those words
in the Book which Jeremiah spake after Jerusalem had gone into exile, and
even after he had been hurried down into Egypt by a base remnant of his
people.(24) Moreover, the historical appendix to the Book carries the
history it contains on to 561 B.C. at least.(25) Again there are passages,
the subjects of which are irrelevant to their context, and which break the
clear connection of the parts of the context between which they have
intruded.(26) The shorter sentences, that also disturb the connection as
they stand, appear to have been written originally as marginal notes which
a later editor or copyist has incorporated in the text.(27) To this class,
too, may belong those brief passages which appear twice, once in their
natural connection in some later chapter and once out of their natural
connection in some earlier chapter.(28) And again in VII. 1-28 and XXVI.
1-9 we have two accounts, apparently from different hands, of what may or
may not be the same episode in Jeremiah’s ministry.
These data clearly prove that not only from the time when the Hebrew and
Greek editions of the Book started upon their separate lines of
development, but from the very beginnings of the Book’s history, the work
of accumulation, arrangement and re-arrangement, with other editorial
processes, had been busy upon it.
The next question is, have we any criteria by which to discriminate
between the elements in the Book that belong either to Jeremiah himself or
to his contemporaries and others that are due to editors or compilers
between his death soon after 586 and the close of the Prophetic Canon in
200 B.C.? The answer is that we have such criteria. All Oracles or
Narratives in the Book, which (apart from obvious intrusions) imply that
the Exile is well advanced or that the Return from Exile has already
happened, or which reflect the circumstances of the later Exile and
subsequent periods or the spirit of Israel and the teaching of her
prophets and scribes in those periods, we may rule out of the material on
which we can rely for our knowledge of Jeremiah’s life and his teaching.
Of such Exilic and post-Exilic contents there is a considerable, but not a
preponderant, amount. These various items break into their context, their
style and substance are not conformable to the style and substance of the
Oracles, which (as we shall see) are reasonably attributed to Jeremiah,
but they so closely resemble those of other writings from the eve of the
Return from Exile or from after the Return that they seem to be based on
the latter. In any case they reflect the situation and feelings of Israel
in Babylonia about 540 B.C. Some find place in our Book among the earlier
Oracles of Jeremiah,(29) others in his later,(30) but the most in the
group of Oracles on Foreign Nations.(31) And, finally, there are the long
extracts from the Second Book of Kings, bringing, as I have said, the
history down to at least 561.(32)
All these, then, we lay aside, so far as our search for Jeremiah himself
and his doctrine is concerned, and we do so the more easily that they are
largely devoid of the style and the spiritual value of his undoubted
Oracles and Discourses. They are more or less diffuse and vagrant, while
his are concise and to the point. They do not reveal, as his do, a man
fresh from agonising debates with God upon the poverty of his
qualifications for the mission to which God calls him, or upon the
contents of that mission, or upon his own sufferings and rights; nor do
they recount his adventures with his contemporaries. They are not the
outpourings of a single soul but rather the expression of the feelings of
a generation or of the doctrines of a school. We have in our Bible other
and better utterances of the truths, questions, threats and hopes which
they contain.
But once more—in what remains of the Book, what belongs to Jeremiah
himself or to his time, we have again proofs of compilation from more
sources than one. Some of this is in verse—among the finest in the Old
Testament—some in prose orations; some in simple narrative. Some Oracles
are introduced by the Prophet himself, and he utters them in the first
person, some are reported of him by others. And any chronological or
topical order lasts only through groups of prophecies or narratives.
Fortunately, however, included among these are more than one account of
how the writing of them and the collection of them came about.
In 604-603 B.C., twenty-one, or it may have been twenty-three, years after
Jeremiah had begun to prophesy, the history of Western Asia rose to a
crisis. Pharaoh Nĕcoh who had marched north to the Euphrates was defeated
in a battle for empire by Nebuchadrezzar, son of the King of Babylon. From
the turmoil of nations which filled the period Babylon emerged as that
executioner of the Divine judgments on the world, whom Jeremiah since 627
or 625 had been describing generally as _out of the North_. His
predictions were justified, and he was able to put a sharper edge on them.
Henceforth in place of the _enemy from the North_ Jeremiah could speak
definitely of the _King of Babylon_ and of his people _the Chaldeans_.
In Ch. XXV we read accordingly that in that year, 604-3, he delivered to
the people of Jerusalem a summary of his previous oracles. He told them
that the cup of the Lord’s wrath was given into his hand; Judah and other
nations, especially Egypt, must drink it and so stagger to their doom.
But a spoken and a summary discourse was not enough. Like Amos and Isaiah,
Jeremiah was moved to commit his previous Oracles to writing. In Ch. XXXVI
is a narrative presumably by an eyewitness of the transactions it
recounts, and this most probably the scribe who was associated with the
Prophet in these transactions. Jeremiah was commanded to _take a roll of a
book and write on __ it all the words which_ the Lord _had spoken to him
concerning Jerusalem_(_33_)_ and Judah and all the nations from the day_
the Lord first _spake to him, in the days of Josiah, even unto this day_.
For this purpose he employed Baruch, the son of Neriah, afterwards
designated the Scribe, and Baruch wrote on the Roll to his dictation.
Being unable himself to enter the Temple he charged Baruch to go there and
to read the Roll on a fast-day _in the ears of all the people of Judah who
have come in from their cities_. Baruch found his opportunity in the
following December, and read the Roll from the New Gate of the Temple to
the multitude. This was reported to some of the princes in the Palace
below, who sent for Baruch and had him read the Roll over to them. Divided
between alarm at its contents and their duty to the king, they sent
Jeremiah and Baruch into hiding while they made report to Jehoiakim. The
king had the Roll read out once more to himself as he sat in his room in
front of a lighted brasier, for it was winter. The reading incensed him,
and as the reader finished each three or four columns he cut them up and
threw them on the fire till the whole was consumed. But Jeremiah, in safe
hiding with Baruch, took another Roll and dictated again the contents of
the first; _and there were added besides unto them many like words_.
The story has been questioned, but by very few, and on no grounds that are
perceptible to common sense. One critic imagines that it ascribes
miraculous power to the Prophet in “its natural impression that the
Prophet reproduces from memory and dictates all the words which the Lord
has spoken to him.”(34) There is no trace of miracle in the story. It is a
straight tale of credible transactions, very natural (as we have seen) at
the crisis which the Prophet had reached. No improbability infects it, no
reflection of a later time, no idealising as by a writer at a distance
from the events he recounts. On the contrary it gives a number of details
which only a contemporary could have supplied. Nor can we forget the power
and accuracy of an Oriental’s memory, especially at periods when writing
was not a common practice.
There is, of course, more room for difference of opinion as to the
contents of each of the successive Rolls, and as to how much of these
contents is included in our Book of Jeremiah. But to such questions the
most probable answer is as follows.
There cannot have been many of the Prophet’s previous Oracles on the first
Roll. This was read three times over in the same day and was probably
limited to such Oracles as were sufficient for its practical purpose of
moving the people of Judah to repentance at a Fast, when their hearts
would be most inclined that way. But when the first Roll was destroyed,
the immediate occasion for which it was written was past, and the second
Roll would naturally have a wider aim. It repeated the first, but in view
of the additions to it seems to have been dictated with the purpose of
giving a permanent form to _all_ the fruits of Jeremiah’s previous
ministry. The battle of Carchemish had confirmed his predictions and put
edge upon them. The destruction of the Jewish people was imminent and the
Prophet’s own life in danger. His enforced retirement along with Baruch
lent him freedom to make a larger selection, if not the full tale, of his
previous prophecies. Hence the phrase _there were added many words like_
those on the first Roll.(35)
If such a Roll as the second existed in the care of Baruch then the use of
it in the compilation of our Book of Jeremiah is extremely probable, and
the probability is confirmed by some features of the Book. Among the
Oracles which can be assigned to Jeremiah’s activity before the fourth
year of Jehoiakim there is on the whole more fidelity to chronological
order than in those which were delivered later, and while the former are
nearly all given without narrative attached to them, and are reported as
from Jeremiah himself in the first person, the latter for the most part
are embedded in narratives, in which he appears in the third person.(36)
Further let us note that if some of the Oracles in the earlier part of the
Book—after the account of the Prophet’s call—are undated, while the dates
of others are stated vaguely; and again, if some, including the story of
the call, appear to be tinged with reflections from experiences of the
Prophet later than the early years of his career, then these two features
support the belief that the Oracles were first reduced to writing at a
distance from their composition and first delivery—a belief in harmony
with the theory of their inclusion and preservation in the Prophet’s
_second_ Roll.
Let us now turn to the biographical portions of the Book. We have proved
the trustworthiness of Ch. XXXVI as the narrative of an eyewitness, in all
probability Baruch the Scribe, who for the first time is introduced to us.
But if Baruch wrote Ch. XXXVI it is certain that a great deal more of the
biographical matter in the Book is from his hand. This is couched in the
same style; it contains likewise details which a later writer could hardly
have invented, and it is equally free from those efforts to idealise
events and personalities, by which later writers betray their distance
from the subjects of which they treat. It is true that, as an objector
remarks, “the Book does not contain a single line that claims to be
written by Baruch.”(37) But this is evidence rather for, than against,
Baruch’s authorship. Most of the biographical portions of the Old
Testament are anonymous. It was later ages that fixed names to Books as
they have fixed Baruch’s own to certain apocryphal works. Moreover, the
suppression of his name by this scribe is in harmony with the modest
manner in which he appears throughout, as though he had taken to heart
Jeremiah’s words to him: _Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them
not. Only thy life will I give thee for a prey in all places whither thou
goest._(38) But there is still more conclusive evidence. That Baruch had
not been associated with Jeremiah before 603-4 is a fair inference from
the fact that the Prophet had to dictate to him all his previous Oracles.
Now it is striking that up to that year and the introduction of Baruch as
Jeremiah’s scribe, we have few narratives of the Prophet’s experience and
activity—being left in ignorance as to the greater part of his life under
Josiah—and that these few narratives—of his call, of his share in the
propagation of Deuteronomy, of the plot of the men of Anathoth against
him, of his symbolic action with his waist-cloth, and of his visit to the
house of the Potter—are (except in the formal titles to some of them) told
in the first person by Jeremiah himself,(39) while from 604-3 onwards the
biographical narratives are much more numerous and, except in three of
them,(40) the Prophet appears only in the third person. This coincidence
of the first appearance of Baruch as the Prophet’s associate with the
start of a numerous series of narratives of the Prophet’s life in which he
appears in the third person can hardly be accidental.
* * * * *
Such, then, are the data which the Book of Jeremiah offers for the task of
determining the origins and authenticity of its very diverse contents.
After our survey of them, those of you who are ignorant of the course of
recent criticism will not be surprised to learn that virtual agreement now
exists on certain main lines, while great differences of opinion continue
as to details—differences perhaps irreconcilable. It is agreed that the
book is the result of a long and a slow growth, stretching far beyond
Jeremiah’s time, out of various sources; and that these sources are in the
main three:—
A. Collections of genuine Oracles and Discourses of Jeremiah—partly made
by himself.
B. Narratives of his life and times by a contemporary writer or writers,
the principal, if not the only, contributor to which is (in the opinion of
most) the Scribe Baruch.
C. Exilic and Post-Exilic additions in various forms: long prophecies and
narratives; shorter pieces included among the Prophet’s own Oracles; and
scattered titles, dates, notes and glosses.
Moreover, there is also general agreement as to which of these classes a
very considerable number of the sections of the Book belong to. There is
not, and cannot be, any doubt about the bulk of those which are apparently
exilic or post-exilic. It is equally certain that a large number of the
Oracles are Jeremiah’s own, and that the most of the Narratives are from
his time and trustworthy. But questions have been raised and are still
receiving opposite answers as to whether or not some of the Oracles and
Narratives have had their original matter coloured or expanded by later
hands; or have even in whole been foisted upon the Prophet or his
contemporary biographer from legendary sources.
Of these questions some, however they be answered, so little affect our
estimates of the Prophet and his teaching that we may leave them alone.
But there are at least four of them on the answers to which does depend
the accurate measure of the stature of Jeremiah as a man and a prophet, of
the extent and variety of his gifts and interests, of the simplicity or
complexity of his temperament, and of his growth, and of his teaching
through his long ministry of over forty years.
These four questions are
(1) The authenticity of the account of his call in Ch. I.
(2) The authenticity of the account of his support of the
promulgation of Deuteronomy, the Old Covenant, in Ch. XI.
(3) The authenticity of his Oracle on the New Covenant in Ch.
XXXI.
(4) And an even larger question—Whether indeed any of the prose
Oracles attributed to him in the Book are his, or whether we must
confine ourselves to the passages in verse as alone his genuine
deliverances?
The first three of these questions we may leave for discussion to their
proper places in our survey of his ministry. The fourth is even more
fundamental to our judgment both of the Book and of the Man; and I shall
deal with it in the introduction to the next lecture on “The Poet
Jeremiah.”
Lecture II.
THE POET.
From last lecture I left over to this the discussion of a literary
question, the answer to which is fundamental to our understanding both of
the Book and of the Man, but especially of the Man.
The Book of Jeremiah has come to us with all its contents laid down as
prose, with no metrical nor musical punctuation; not divided into
_stichoi_ or poetical lines nor marked off into stanzas or strophes. Yet
many passages read as metrically, and are as musical in sound, and in
spirit as poetic as the Psalms, the Canticles, or the Lamentations. Their
language bears the marks that usually distinguish verse from prose in
Hebrew as in other literatures. It beats out with a more or less regular
proportion of stresses or heavy accents. It diverts into an order of words
different from the order normal in prose. Sometimes it is elliptic,
sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the meaning—both signs of
an attempt at metre. Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries
alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what is usual in prose, and
prefers forms of words more sonorous than the ordinary. But these many and
distinct passages of poetry issue from and run into contexts of prose
unmistakable. For two reasons we are not always able to trace the exact
border between the prose and the verse—_first_ because of the frequent
uncertainties of the text, and _second_ because the prose, like most of
that of the prophets, has often a rhythm approximating to metre. And thus
it happens that, while on the one hand much agreement has been reached as
to what Oracles in the Book are in verse, and what, however rhythmical,
are in prose, some passages remain, on the original literary form of which
a variety of opinion is possible. This is not all in dispute. Even the
admitted poems are variously scanned—that is either read in different
metres or, if in the same metre, either with or without irregularities.
Such differences of literary judgment are due partly to our still
imperfect knowledge of the laws of Hebrew metre and partly to the variety
of possible readings of the text. Nor is even that all. The claim has been
made not only to confine Jeremiah’s genuine Oracles to the metrical
portions of the Book, but, by drastic emendations of the text, to reduce
them to one single, exact, unvarying metre.
These questions and claims—all-important as they are for the definition of
the range and character of the prophet’s activity—we can decide only after
a preliminary consideration of the few clear and admitted principles of
Hebrew poetry, of their consequences, and of analogies to them in other
literatures.
In Hebrew poetry there are some principles about which no doubt exists.
_First_, its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning,
which, though found in all human song, is carried through this poetry with
a constancy unmatched in any other save the Babylonian. The lines of a
couplet or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous, that is identical
in meaning, or Supplementary and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least
their meanings respond or correspond to each other in a way, for which no
better name has been found than that given it by Bishop Lowth more than a
century and a half ago, “Parallelismus Membrorum.”(41) _Second_, this
rhythm of meaning is wedded to a rhythm of sound which is achieved by the
observance of a varying proportion between stressed or heavily accented
syllables and unstressed. That is clear even though we are unable to
discriminate the proportion in every case or even to tell whether there
were fixed rules for it; the vowel-system of our Hebrew text being
possibly different from what prevailed in ancient Hebrew. But on the whole
it is probable that as in other primitive poetries(42) there were no exact
or rigorous rules as to the proportion of beats or stresses in the single
lines. For the rhythm of sense is the main thing—the ruling factor—and
though the effort to express this in equal or regularly proportioned lines
is always perceptible, yet in the more primitive forms of the poetry just
as in some English folk-songs and ballads the effort did not constantly
succeed. The art of the poet was not always equal to the strength of his
passion or the length of his vision, or the urgency of his meaning. The
meaning was the main thing and had to be beat out, even though to effect
this was to make the lines irregular. As I have said in my Schweich
Lectures: “If the Hebrew poet be so constantly bent on a rhythm of sense
this must inevitably modify his rhythms of sound. If his first aim be to
produce lines each more or less complete in meaning, but so as to run
parallel to its fellow, it follows that these lines cannot be always
exactly regular in length or measure of time. If the governing principle
of the poetry requires each line to be a clause or sentence in itself, the
lines will frequently tend, of course within limits, to have more or fewer
stresses than are normal throughout the poem.”
But there are other explanations of the metrical irregularities in the
traditional text of Hebrew poems, which make it probable that these
irregularities are often original and not always (as they sometimes are)
the blunders of copyists. In all forms of Eastern art we trace the
influence of what we may call Symmetriphobia, an aversion to absolute
symmetry which expresses itself in more or less arbitrary disturbances of
the style or pattern of the work. The visitor to the East knows how this
influence operates in weaving and architecture. But its opportunities are
more frequent, and may be used more gracefully, in the art of poetry. For
instance, in many an Old Testament poem in which a single form of metre
prevails there is introduced at intervals, and especially at the end of a
strophe, a longer and heavier line, similar to what the Germans call the
“Schwellvers” in their primitive ballads. And this metrical irregularity
is generally to the profit both of the music and of the meaning.
Further, the fact that poems, such as we now deal with, were not composed
in writing, but were sung or chanted is another proof of the possibility
that the irregularities in their metre are original. In the songs of the
peasants of Palestine at the present day the lines vary as much as from
two to five accents, and within the same metrical form from three to four;
lines with three accents as written will, when sung to music, be stressed
with four, or with four as written will be stressed with five in order to
suit the melody.(43)
Nor are such irregularities confined to Eastern or primitive poetry. In
the later blank verse of Shakespeare, broken lines and redundant syllables
are numerous, but under his hand they become things of beauty, and “the
irregularity is the foundation of the larger and nobler rule.” To quote
the historian of English prosody—“These are quite deliberate indulgences
in excess or defect, over or under a regular norm, which is so pervading
and so thoroughly marked that it carries them off on its wings.”(44) Heine
in his unrhymed “Nordseebilder,” has many irregular lines—irregularities
suitable to the variety of the subjects of his verse.
Again, in relevance to the mixture of poetry with prose in the prophetic
parts of the Book of Jeremiah, it is just to note that the early
pre-Islamic rhapsodists of Arabia used prose narratives to illustrate the
subjects of their chants; that many later works in Arabic literature are
medleys of prose and verse; that in particular the prose of the “Arabian
Nights” frequently breaks into metre; while the singing women of Mecca
“often put metre aside and employ the easier form of rhymed prose”(45) the
“Saj” as it is called.
If I may offer a somewhat rough illustration, the works of some Eastern
poets are like canoe voyages in Canada, in which the canoe now glides down
a stream and is again carried overland by what are called portages to
other streams or other branches of the same stream. Similarly these works
have their clear streams of poetry, but every now and again their portages
of prose. I may say at once that we shall find this true also of the Book
of Jeremiah.
All these phenomena, both of Eastern and of Western poetry, justify us in
regarding with scepticism recent attempts whether to eliminate—by purely
arbitrary omissions and additions, not founded on the evidence of the
Manuscripts and Versions—the irregularities in the metrical portions of
the Book of Jeremiah, or to confine the Prophet’s genuine Oracles to these
metrical portions, and to deny that he ever passed from metre into
rhythmical prose. And our scepticism becomes stronger when we observe to
what different results these attempts have led, especially in the
particular form or forms of metre employed.
Professor Duhm, for instance, confines our prophet to one invariable form,
that of the Qînah or Hebrew Elegy, each stanza of which consists of four
lines of alternately _three_ and _two_ accents or beats; and by drastic
and often quite arbitrary emendation of the text he removes from this
every irregularity whether of defect or redundance in the separate
lines.(46) On the other hand Cornill concludes that “the metrical pieces
in the book are written throughout in _Oktastichs_,” or eight lines a
piece, but admits (and rightly) that “in the metrical structure of the
individual lines there prevails a certain freedom, due to the fact that
for the prophet verse-making (_Dichten_) was not an end in itself.” While
he allows, as all must, that Jeremiah frequently used the Qînah metre, he
emphasises the presence of the irregular line, almost as though it were
the real basis of the prophetic metre.(47) Other modern scholars by
starting from other presuppositions or by employing various degrees of the
textual evidence of the Versions, have reached results different from
those of Duhm and Cornill.(48) But at the same time it is remarkable how
much agreement prevails as to the frequent presence of the Qînah measure
or its near equivalent.
To sum up: in view of the argument adduced from the obvious principles of
Hebrew verse and of the primitive poetic practice of other nations—not to
speak of Shakespeare and some modern poets—I am persuaded after close
study of the text that, though Jeremiah takes most readily to the specific
Qînah metre, it is a gross and pedantic error to suppose that he confined
himself to this, or that when it appears in our Book it is always to be
read in the same exact form without irregularities. The conclusion is
reasonable that this rural prophet, brought up in a country village and
addressing a people of peasants, used the same license with his metres
that we have observed in other poetries of his own race. Nor is it
credible that whatever the purpose of his message was—reminiscence, or
dirge, or threat of doom or call to repent, or a didactic
purpose—Jeremiah, throughout the very various conditions of his long
ministry of forty years, employed but one metre and that only in its
strictest form allowing of no irregularities. This, I say, is not
credible.(49)