addressing his people, may be still more confidently answered. Duhm
maintains that with the exception of the letter to the Jewish exiles in
Babylonia,(50) the Prophet never spoke or wrote to his people in prose,
and that the Book contains no Oracles from him, beyond some sixty short
poems in a uniform measure. These Duhm alleges—and this is all that he
finds in them—reveal Jeremiah as a man of modest, tender, shrinking
temper, “no ruler of spirits, a delicate observer, a sincere exhorter and
counsellor, a hero only in suffering and not in attack.”(51) Every passage
of the Book, which presents him in any character beyond this—as an
advocate for the Law or as a didactic prophet—is the dream of a later age,
definitely separable from his own Oracles not more by its inconsistence
with the temper displayed in these than by its prose form; for in prose,
according to Duhm, Jeremiah never prophesied. On the evidence we have
reviewed this also is not credible. That Jeremiah never passed from verse
to prose when addressing his people is a theory at variance with the
practice of other poets of his race; and the more unlikely in his case,
who was not only a poet but a prophet, charged with truths heavier than
could always be carried to the heart of his nation upon a single form of
folk-song. Not one of the older prophets, upon whom at first he leant, but
used both prose and verse; and besides there had burst upon his young ear
a new style of prophetic prose, rhythmical and catching beyond any
hitherto publicly heard in Israel. At least some portions of our Book of
Deuteronomy were discovered in the Temple a few years after his call, and
by order of King Josiah were being recited throughout Judah. Is it
probable that he, whose teaching proves him to have been in sympathy with
the temper and the practical purpose of that Book, should never have
yielded to the use of its distinctive and haunting style?
It is true that, while the lyrics which are undoubtedly the prophet’s own
are terse, concrete, poignant and graceful, the style of many—not of
all—of the prose discourses attributed to him is copious, diffuse, and
sometimes cold. But then it is verse which is most accurately gripped by
the memory and firmly preserved in tradition; it is verse, too, which best
guards the original fire. Prose discourses, whether in their first
reporting or in their subsequent tradition more readily tend to dilate and
to relax their style. Nor is any style of prose so open as the
Deuteronomic to additions, parentheses, qualifications, needless
recurrence of formulas and favourite phrases, and the like.
Therefore in the selection of materials available for estimating the range
and character of Jeremiah’s activities as a prophet, we must not reject
any prose Oracles offered by the Book as his, simply because they are in
prose. This reasonable caution will be of use when we come to consider the
question of the authenticity of such important passages as those which
recount his call, or represent him as assisting in the promulgation of
Deuteronomy, and uttering the Oracle on the New Covenant.(52)
But, while it has been necessary to reject as groundless the theory that
Jeremiah was exclusively a poet of a limited temper and a single form of
verse and was not the author of any of the prose attributed to him, we
must keep in mind that he did pour himself forth in verse; that it was
natural for a rural priest such as he, aiming at the heart of what was
mainly a nation of peasants, to use the form or forms of folk-song most
familiar to them(53)—in fact the only literary forms with which they were
familiar; and that in all probability more of the man himself comes out in
the poetry than in the prose which he has left to us. By his native gifts
and his earliest associations he was a poet to begin with; and therefore
the form and character of his poetry, especially as revealing himself,
demand our attention.
* * * * *
From what has been said it is clear that we must not seek too high for
Jeremiah’s rank as a poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome some
recent writers—is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations
of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which
that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was
just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was
reared—sometimes of an exquisite exactness of tone and delicacy of
feeling, but sometimes full both of what are metrical irregularities
according to modern standards, and of coarse images and similes. To reduce
the metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm’s, may
occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet
oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again
are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not
infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the
pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are
the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the
house-mill, the wine skins, the ornaments of women, the yoke, the plough,
and so forth. And there are abrupt changes of metaphor as in our early
ballads, due to the rush of a quick imagination and the crowd of concrete
figures it catches.
Some of Jeremiah’s verse indeed shows no irregularity. The following, for
instance, which recalls as Hosea loved to do the innocence and loyalty of
Israel’s desert days, is in the normal Qînah rhythm of lines with
alternately _three_ and _two_ accents each. The two first lines are
rhymed, the rest not.
II. 2f.:—
The troth of thy youth I remember,
Thy love as a bride,
Thy follow of Me through the desert,
The land unsown.
Holy to the Lord was Israel,
Of His income the firstling,
All that would eat it stood guilty,
Evil came on them.
Or II. 32:—
Can a maiden forget her adorning,
Or her girdle the bride?
Yet Me have My people forgotten,
Days without number.
How fine hast thou fashioned thy ways,
To seek after love!
Thus ’t was thyself(55) to [those] evils
Didst train(56) thy ways.
Yea on thy skirts is found blood
Of innocent(57) souls.
Not only on felons(?) I find it,(58)
But over all these.
Here again is a passage which, with slight emendations and these not
arbitrary, yields a fair constancy of metre (IV. 29-31):—
From the noise of the horse and the bowmen
All the land is in flight,
They are into the caves, huddle in thickets,
And are up on the crags.(59)
Every town of its folk is forsaken,
With none to inhabit.
All is up! Thou destined to ruin,(?)(60)
What doest thou now
That thou deck’st thee in deckings of gold
And clothest in scarlet,(61)
And with stibium widenest thine eyes?
In vain dost thou prink!
Though satyrs, they utterly loathe thee,
Thy life are they after.
For voice as of travail I hear,
Anguish as hers that beareth,
The voice of the Daughter of Ṣion agasp,
She spreadeth her hands:
“Woe unto me, but it faints,
My life to the butchers!”
On the other hand here is a metre,(62) for the irregularities of which no
remedy is offered by alternative readings in the Versions, but Duhm and
others reduce these only by padding the text with particles and other
terms. Yet these very irregularities have reason; they suit the meaning to
be expressed. Thus while some of the couplets are in the Qînah metre, it
is instructive that the first three lines are _all_ short, because they
are mere ejaculations—that is they belong to the same class of happy
irregularities as we recalled in Shakespeare’s blank verse.
Israel a slave!
Or house-born serf!
Why he for a prey?
Against him the young lions roar,
Give forth their voice,
And his land they lay waste
Burning and tenantless.
Is not this being done thee
For thy leaving of Me?
Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel’s mourning,
the sob upon which the wail dies out:—
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children
And will not be comforted—
For they are not!(63)
Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a
passionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another—I
love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be
repeated to the people in 604-3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,
O generation look at the Word of the Lord!
breaking in before the following regular verse,
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say my folk, “We are off,
No more to meet Thee.”
There is another poem in which the Qînah measure prevails but with
occasional lines longer than is normal—Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end
of 5(64)).
Run through Jerusalem’s streets,
Look now and know,
And search her broad places
If a man ye can find,
If there be that doth justice
Aiming at honesty.
[That I may forgive her.]
Though they say, “As God liveth,”
Falsely they swear.
Lord, are thine eyes upon lies(65)
And not on the truth?
Thou hast smitten, they ail not,
Consumed them, they take not correction;
Their faces set harder than rock,
They refuse to return.
Or take Ch. II. 5-8. A stanza of four lines in irregular Qînah measure
(verse 5) is followed by a couplet of four-two stresses and several lines
of three each (verses 6 and 7), and then (verse 8) by a couplet of
three-two, another of four-three, and another of three-three.(66) In Chs.
IX and X also we shall find irregular metres.
Let us now take a passage, IX. 22, 23, which, except for its last couplet,
is of another measure than the Qînah. The lines have three accents each,
like those of the Book of Job:—
Boast not the wise in his wisdom,
Boast not the strong in his strength,
Boast not the rich in his riches,
But in this let him boast who would boast—
Instinct and knowledge of Me,
Me, the Lord, Who work troth
And(67) justice and right upon earth,
For in these I delight.
Or this couplet, X. 23, in lines of four stresses each:—
Lord, I know—not to man is his way,
Not a man’s to walk or settle his steps!
Not being in the Qînah measure, both these passages are denied to Jeremiah
by Duhm. Is not this arbitrary?
The sections of the Book which pass from verse to prose and from prose to
verse are frequent.
One of the most striking is the narrative of the Prophet’s call, Ch. I.
4-19, which I leave to be rendered in the next lecture. In Chap. VII. 28
ff. we have, to begin with, two verses:—
This is the folk that obeyed not
The voice of the Lord,(68)
That would not accept correction;
Lost(69) is truth from their mouth.
Shear and scatter thy locks,
Raise a dirge on the heights,
The Lord hath refused and forsaken
The sons of His wrath.
Then these verses are followed by a prose tale of the people’s sins. Is
this necessarily from a later hand, as Duhm maintains, and not naturally
from Jeremiah himself?
Again Chs. VIII and IX are a medley of lyrics and prose passages. While
some of the prose is certainly not Jeremiah’s, being irrelevant to the
lyrics and showing the colour of a later age, the rest may well be from
himself.
Ch. XIV is also a medley of verse and prose. After the Dirge on the
Drought (which we take later), comes a passage in rhythmical prose (verses
11-16), broken only by the metrical utterance of the false prophets in
verse 13:—
Sword or famine ye shall not see,
They shall not be yours;
But peace and staith shall I give you
Within this Place.(70)
And verse comes in again in verses 17-18, an Oracle of Jeremiah’s own:—
Let mine eyes with tears run down,
By night and by day,
Let them not cease from weeping(71)
For great is the breach—
Broken the Virgin, Daughter of my people,
Most sore the wound!
Fare I forth to the field,
Lo, the slain of the sword;
If I enter the city,
Lo, anguish of famine.
Priest and prophet alike are gone begging
In a land they know not.
Hast Thou utterly cast away Judah,
Loathes Ṣion Thy soul?
Why then hast Thou smitten us,
Past our healing?
Hoped we for peace—no good,
For time to heal—and lo panic!
Lord we acknowledge our evil,
The guilt of our fathers—
To Thee have we sinned.
And now the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly
distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes,
precariously, as from a later hand:—
For Thy Name’s sake do not despise,
Demean not the Throne of Thy Glory,
Remember and break not Thy Covenant with us!
Can any of the gentile Bubbles bring rain,
Or the Heavens give the showers?
Art not Thou He(72) on whom we must wait?
For all these Thou hast made.
Again in Ch. XV. 1-2, prose is followed by a couplet, this by more prose
(verses 3, 4) and this by verse again (verses 5-9). But these parts are
relevant to each other, and some of Duhm’s objections to the prose seem
inadequate and even trifling. For while the heavy judgment is suitably
detailed by the prose, the following dirge is as naturally in verse:—
Jerusalem, who shall pity,
Who shall bemoan thee?
Who shall but turn him to ask
After thy welfare?
And once more, in the Oracle Ch. III. 1-6 the first verse, a quotation
from the law on a divorced wife, is in prose, and no one doubts that
Jeremiah himself is the quoter, while the rest, recounting Israel’s
unfaithfulness to her Husband is in verse. See below, pages 98, 99.
* * * * *
So much for the varied and often irregular streams of the Prophet’s verse
and their interruptions and connections by “portages” of prose. Let us
turn now from the measures to the substance and tempers of the poetry.
As in all folk-song the language is simple, but its general
inevitableness—just the fit and ringing word—stamps the verse as a true
poet’s. Hence the difficulty of translating. So much depends on the music
of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at
the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom
possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions,
metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the
original. Before taking some of the Prophet’s renderings of the more
concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of
his moral reflections in verse—Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of
abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:—
Curséd the wight that trusteth in man
Making flesh his stay!
[And his heart from the Lord is turned]
Like some desert-scrub shall he be,
Nor see any coming of good,
But dwell in the aridest desert,
A salt, uninhabited land.
Blesséd the wight that trusts in the Lord,
And the Lord is his trust!
He like a tree shall be planted by waters,
That stretches its roots to the stream,
Unafraid(73) at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green.
Sans care in a year of drought,
He fails not in yielding his fruit.
As here, so generally, the simplicity of the poet’s diction is matched by
that of his metaphors, similes, and parables. A girl and her ornaments, a
man and his waist-cloth—thus he figures what ought to be the clinging
relations between Israel and their God. The stunted desert-shrub in
contrast to the river-side oaks, the incomparable olive, the dropped sheaf
and even the dung upon the fields; the vulture, stork, crane and swift;
the lion, wolf and spotted leopard coming up from the desert or the
jungles of Jordan; the hinnying stallions and the heifer in her heat; the
black Ethiopian, already familiar in the streets of Jerusalem, the potter
and his wheel, the shepherd, plowman and vinedresser, the driver with his
ox’s yoke upon his shoulders; the harlot by the wayside; the light in the
home and sound of the hand-mill—all everyday objects of his people’s sight
and hearing as they herded, ploughed, sowed, reaped or went to market in
the city—he brings them in simply and with natural ease as figures of the
truths he is enforcing. They are never bald or uncouth, though in
translation they may sometimes sound so.
In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as
in the following—a passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.(74)
The Deity is addressing the prophet:—
And thou shalt say unto this people,
“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”
and it shall be if they say unto thee, “Don’t we know of
course(75) that
“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”
then thou shalt say unto them: Thus saith the Lord, Lo, I am about
to fill the inhabitants of this land, the kings and princes, the
priests and prophets, even Judah and all the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, with drunkenness [the drunkenness, that is, of horror
at impending judgments] and I will dash them one against another,
fathers and sons together. I will not pity, saith the Lord, nor
spare nor have compassion that I should not destroy them.
How one catches the irritation of the crowd on being told what seems to
them such a commonplace—till it is interpreted!
Like his fellow-prophets, whose moral atmosphere was as burning as their
physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright
sun _drew breath_ (as Isaiah puts it) _in the fear of the Lord_ and saw
the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts
of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the
hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the
barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief,
every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert
hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and
especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human
as well as animal, which their skirts leave behind are rendered with
vividness, poignancy and horror of detail.
Take, to begin with, the following, XIV. 1 ff.:—
_The Word of the Lord to Jeremiah Concerning the Drought._
Jerusalem’s cry is gone up,
Judah is mourning,
The gates thereof faint in
Black grief to the ground.
Her nobles sent their menials for water,
They came to the pits;
Water found none and returned,
Empty their vessels.
[Abashed and confounded
They cover their heads.](76)
The tillers(77) of the ground are dismayed,
For no rain hath been(78);
And abashed are the ploughmen,
They cover their heads.
The hind on the moor calves and abandons,
For the grass has not come.
On the bare heights stand the wild asses,
Gasping for air
With glazen eyes—
Herb there is none!
Though our sins do witness against us,
Lord act for the sake of Thy Name!
[For many have been our backslidings,
’Fore Thee have we sinned.]
Hope of Israel, His Saviour
In time of trouble,
Why be like a traveller(79) through the land,
Or wayfaring guest of a night?
Why art Thou as one that is stunned,—
Strong yet unable to save?
Yet Lord, Thou art in our midst,
[O’er us Thy Name hath been called]
Do not forsake us!
Thus saith the Lord of this people:—
So fond to wander are they,
Their feet they restrain not,
The Lord hath no pleasure in them,
He remembers their guilt.(80)
The following dirge is on either a war or a pestilence, or on both, for
they often came together. The text of the first lines is uncertain, the
Hebrew and Greek differing considerably:—
Call ye the keening women to come,
And send for the wise ones,
That they hasten and sing us a dirge,
Till with tears our eyes run down,
Our eyelids with water.
For death has come up by our windows,
And into our palaces,
Cutting off from the streets the children,
The youths from the places.
And fallen are the corpses of men
Like dung on the field,
Or sheaves left after the reaper,
And nobody gathers.(81)
The minatory discourses are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror
foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet’s simplicity
does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In
the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills—night
without shelter for the weary or refuge for the hunted.
Hear and give ear, be not proud,
For the Lord hath spoken!
Give glory to the Lord your God
Before it grows dark,
And before your feet stumble—
On the mountains of dusk.
While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom
And sets it thick darkness.(82)
There this poem leaves the Doom, but in others Jeremiah leaps in a moment
from the vague and far-looming to the near and exact. He follows a line
which songs of vengeance or deliverance often take among unsophisticated
peoples in touch with nature. They will paint you a coming judgment first
in the figure of a lowering cloud or bursting storm and then in the
twinkling of an eye they turn the clouds or the lightnings into the ranks
and flashing arms of invaders arrived. I remember an instance of this
within one verse of a negro song from the time of the American Civil War:—
Don’t you see de lightning flashing in de cane-brakes?
Don’t you think we’se gwine to have a storm?
No you is mistaken—dem’s de darkies’ bayonets,
And de buttons on de uniform!
Examples of this sudden turn from the vague to the real are found
throughout Jeremiah’s Oracles of Doom. Here are some of them:—
Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights,
Right on the Daughter of My people,
It is neither to winnow nor to cleanse,
In full blast it meets me...:
Lo, like the clouds he is mounting,
Like the whirlwind his chariots!
Swifter than vultures his horses;
Woe! We are undone!
For hark a signal from Dan,
Mount Ephraim echoes disaster,
Warn the folk! “They are come!”(83)
Make heard o’er Jerusalem.
Lo, the beleaguerers (?) come
From a land far-off,
They let forth their voice on the townships of Judah,
[Close] as the guards on her suburbs
They are on and around her,
For Me she defied.(84)
There is a similar leap from the vagueness of IV. 23-26, which here
follows, to the vivid detail of verses 29-31 already rendered on page 45.
I looked to the earth, and lo, chaos,
To the heavens, their light was gone,
I looked to the mountains, they quivered,
The hills were all shuddering.
I looked and behold not a man,
All the birds of the heavens had fled.
I looked for the gardens, lo desert,
All the townships were burning.
Or take a similar effect from the Oracle on the Philistines, Ch. XLVII. 2,
3.
Lo, the waters are up in the North,
The torrents are plunging,
O’erwhelming the land and her fulness,
The city and her dwellers.
Mankind is crying and howling,
Every man in the land,
At the noise of the stamp of the hoofs of his steeds
At the rush of his cars,
The rumble of his wheels.
Fathers look not back for their children,
So helpless their hands!(85)
Or take the Prophet’s second vision on his call, Ch. I. 13 ff., the
boiling cauldron with its face from the North, which is to boil out over
the land; then the concrete explanation, _I am calling to all the kingdoms
of the North, and they shall come and every one set his throne in the
gates of Jerusalem_. There you have it—that vague trouble brewing in the
far North and then in a moment the northern invaders settled in the gates
of the City.
But the poetry of Jeremiah had other strains. I conclude this lecture with
selections which deal with the same impending judgment, yet are wistful
and tender, the poet taking as his own the sin and sufferings of the
people with whose doom he was charged.
The first of these passages is as devoid of hope as any we have already
seen, but like Christ’s mourning over the City breathes the regret of a
great love—a profound and tender Alas!
Jerusalem, who shall pity,
Who shall bemoan thee?
Or who will but turn him to ask
After thy welfare?
Then follow lines of doom without reprieve and the close comes:—
She that bore seven hath fainted,
She breathes out her life.
Set is her sun in the daytime,
Baffled and shaméd;
And their remnant I give to the sword
In face of their foes.(86)
In the following also the poet’s heart is with his people even while he
despairs of them. The lines, VIII. 14-IX. 1, of which 17 and 19_b_ are
possibly later insertions, are addressed to the country-folk of Judah and
Benjamin:—
For what sit we still?
Sweep together,
And into the fortified cities,
That there we may perish!
For our God(87) hath doomed us to perish,
And given us poison to drink,
For to Him(88) have we sinned.
Hope for peace there was once—
But no good—
For a season of healing—
Lo, panic.(89)
From Dan the sound has been heard,(90)
The hinnying of his horses;
With the noise of the neighing of his stallions
All the land is aquake.
For that this grief hath no comfort,(91)
Sickens my heart upon me.
Hark to the cry of my people
Wide o’er the land—
“Is the Lord not in Ṣion,
Is there no King there?”(92)