And we are not saved!
For the breach of the Daughter of my people
I break, I darken,
Horror hath seized upon me,
Pangs as of her that beareth.(93)
Is there no balm in Gilead,
Is there no healer?
Why will the wounds never stanch
Of the daughter of my people?
O that my head were waters,
Mine eyes a fountain of tears,
That day and night I might weep
For the slain of my people!
Such in the simple melodies of his music and in the variety of his
moods—now sombre, stern and relentless, now tender and pleading, now in
despair of his people yet identifying himself with them—was this rural
poet, who was called to carry the burdens of prophecy through forty of the
most critical and disastrous years of Israel’s history. In next lecture we
shall follow the earlier stages which his great heart pursued beneath
those burdens.
Lecture III.
THE PROPHET—HIS YOUTH AND HIS CALL.
Jeremiah was born soon after 650 B.C. of a priestly house at Anathoth, a
village in the country of Benjamin near Jerusalem. Just before his birth
Egypt and the small states of Palestine broke from allegiance to Assyria.
War was imminent, and it may have been because of some hope in Israel of
Divine intervention that several children born about the time received the
name Yirmyahu—_Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots_.(94) The boy’s name and his
father’s, Hilḳiah, _Yahweh my portion_,(95) are tokens of the family’s
loyalty to the God of Israel, at a time when the outburst in Jewry of a
very different class of personal names betrays on the part of many a lapse
from the true faith, and when the loyal remnant of the people were being
persecuted by King Manasseh. Probably the family were descended from Eli.
For Abiathar, the last of that descent to hold office as Priest of the
Ark, had an ancestral estate at Anathoth, to which he retired upon his
dismissal by Solomon.(96) The child of such a home would be brought up
under godly influence and in high family traditions, with which much of
the national history was interwoven. It may have been from his father that
Jeremiah gained that knowledge of Israel’s past, of her ideal days in the
desert, of her subsequent declensions, and of the rallying prophecies of
the eighth century, which is manifest in his earlier Oracles. Some have
claimed a literary habit for the stock of Abiathar.(97) Yet the first
words of God to Jeremiah—_before I formed thee in the body I knew thee,
and before thou camest forth from the womb I hallowed thee_(98)—as well as
the singular originality he developed, rather turn us away from his family
traditions and influence.
What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier
prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared.
Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name Anata, is a little village
not four miles north-north-east of Jerusalem, upon the first of the rocky
shelves by which the central range of Palestine declines through desert to
the valley of the Jordan. The village is hidden from the main road between
Jerusalem and the North, and lies on no cross-road to the East. One of its
influences on the spirit of its greatest son was its exposure to the East
and the Desert. The fields of Anathoth face the sunrise and quickly merge
into the falling wilderness of Benjamin. It is the same open, arid
landscape as that on which several prophets were bred: Amos a few miles
farther south at Tekoa, John Baptist, and during His Temptation our Lord
Himself. The tops of the broken desert hills to the east are lower than
the village. The floor of the Jordan valley is not visible, but across its
felt gulf the mountains of Gilead form a lofty horizon.
The descending foreground with no shelter against the hot desert winds,
the village herds straying into the wilderness, the waste and crumbling
hills shimmering in the heat, the open heavens and far line of the Gilead
highlands, the hungry wolves from the waste and lions from the jungles of
Jordan are all reflected in Jeremiah’s poems:—
Light o’ heel young camel,
Zig-zagging her tracks,
Heifer gone to school to the desert—
In the heat of her passion,
Snapping the breeze in her lust,
Who is to turn her?
Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights,
Direct on my people,
Neither to winnow nor to sift,
In full blast it meets me.
A lion from the jungle shall smite,
A wolf from the wastes undo them,
The leopard shall prowl round their towns,
All faring forth shall be torn.
Even the stork in the heavens
Knoweth her seasons,
And dove, swift and swallow
Keep time of their coming.
Is there no balm in Gilead,
No healer there?(99)
We need not search the botany of that province for the suggestion of this
last verse. Gilead was the highland margin of the young prophet’s view,
his threshold of hope. The sun rose across it.
The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin’s. Even where not
actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given
to the tribe and its few historical personages. _Benjamin shall ravin as a
wolf._(100) Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei,
Jeremiah’s persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed
threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in
his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among
whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard,
thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had
predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron,
Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and _poor_
Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all
of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new
disasters:—
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,
For they are not.(103)
The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation’s history alike swept
these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him—not
Rachel’s only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops
at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul’s sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in
the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through
more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of
Benjamin.
The empty, shimmering desert and the stony land thronged with such
tragedies—Jeremiah was born and brought up on the edge between them.
It was a nursery not unfit for one, who might have been (as many think),
the greatest poet of his people, had not something deeper and wider been
opened to him, with which Anathoth was also in touch. The village is not
more than an hour’s walk from Jerusalem. Social conditions change little
in the East; then, as now, the traffic between village and city was daily
and close—country produce taken to the capital; pottery, salted fish,
spices, and the better cloths brought back in exchange. We see how the
history of Jerusalem may have influenced the boy. Solomon’s Temple was
nearly four hundred years’ old. There were the city walls, some of them
still older, the Palace and the Tombs of the Kings—perhaps also access to
the written rolls of chroniclers and prophets. Above all, Anathoth lay
within the swirl of rumour of which the capital was the centre. Jerusalem
has always been a tryst of the winds. It gathers echoes from the desert
far into Arabia, and news blown up and down the great roads between Egypt
and Damascus and beyond to the Euphrates; or when these roads are deserted
and men fear to leave their villages, news vibrating as it vibrates only
in the tremulous East, from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp across
incredible spaces. As one has finely said of a rumour of invasion:—
I saw the tents of Cushán in affliction,
The curtains of Midian’s land were trembling.(104)
To the north lay the more fruitful Ephraim—more fruitful and more famous
in the past than her sister of Benjamin, but now in foreign hands, her own
people long gone into exile. It was natural that her fate should lie heavy
on the still free but threatened homes of Benjamin, whose northern windows
looked towards her; and that a heart like Jeremiah’s should exercise
itself upon God’s meaning by such a fate and the warning it carried for
the two surviving tribes.(105) Moreover, Shiloh lay there, Shiloh where
Eli and other priestly ancestors had served the Ark in a sanctuary now
ruined.(106)
It was, too, across Ephraim with its mixed population in touch with the
court and markets of Nineveh, that rumours of war usually reached Benjamin
and Judah:—
Hark! They signal from Dan,
Mount Ephraim echoes disaster.(107)
After a period of peace, and as Jeremiah was growing to manhood, such
rumours began to blow south again from the Euphrates. Some thirteen years
or so earlier, Asshurbanipal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, had
accomplished the last Assyrian conquest in Palestine, 641 B.C., and for an
interval the land was quiet. But towards 625 word came that the Medes were
threatening Nineveh, and, though they were repelled, in that year
Asshurbanipal died and Nabopolassar of Babylon threw off the Assyrian
yoke. Palestine felt the grasp of Nineveh relax. There was a stir in the
air and men began to dream. But quick upon hope fell fear. Hordes of a new
race whom—after the Greeks—we call Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian
monuments, had half a century before swarmed over or round the Caucasus,
and since then had been in touch, and even in some kind of alliance, with
the Assyrians. Soon after 624 they forced the Medes to relinquish the
siege of Nineveh. They were horsemen and archers, living in the saddle,
and carrying their supplies behind them in wagons. After (as it seems)
their effective appearance at Nineveh, they swept over the lands to the
south, as Herodotus tells us;(108) and riding by the Syrian coast were
only brought up by bribes on the border of Egypt.(109) This must have been
soon after the young prophet’s call in 627-6. In short, the world, and
especially the North, was (to use Jeremiah’s word) _boiling_ with events
and possibilities of which God alone knew the end. Prophets had been
produced in Israel from like conditions in the previous century, and now
after a silence of nigh seventy years, prophets were again to appear:
Zephaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah.
For these northern omens conspired with others, ethical and therefore more
articulate, within Judah herself. It was two generations since Isaiah and
Hezekiah had died, and with them the human possibilities of reform. For
nearly fifty years Manasseh had opposed the pure religion of the prophets
of the eighth century, by persecution, by the introduction of foreign and
sensual cults, and especially by reviving in the name of Israel’s God(110)
the ancient sacrifice of children, in order to propitiate His anger. Thus
it appears that the happier interests of religion—family feasts, pieties
of seed-time and harvest, gratitude for light, fountains and rain, and for
good fortune—were scattered among a host both of local and of foreign
deities; while for the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Moses and
Isaiah, the most horrible of superstitious rites were reserved, as if all
that His people could expect of Him was the abatement of a jealous and
hungry wrath.
A few voices crying through the night had indeed reminded Judah of what He
was and what He required. _He hath showed thee, O man, __ what is good;
and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk
humbly with thy God._(111) At last with the overthrow of Manasseh’s
successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who
was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother’s
influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the
higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance
of Manasseh, were content to have it so.
The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his
training, and the boy in the priest’s home at Anathoth were of an age: a
fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded
Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left
us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah’s
reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch;
yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:—
Did he not eat and drink,
And do judgment and justice?
The cause of the poor and the needy he judged—
Then was it well.(112)
Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah’s accession,(113) but
little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple.
In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been
worshipped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to
remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and
possibly, as Assyria’s sovereignty relaxed, the worship of the Host of
Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village
had the shrine of a deity before the God of Israel came to the land. The
names of these local Baalîm, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and
Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with
the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been
transferred to Him by the ignorant worshippers, till instead of one
Yahweh—one Lord—unique in character and in power, there were as many as
there had been Baalîm, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes
repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the Godhead
into countless local forms:—
As many as thy cities in number
So many O Judah thy gods!(115)
Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad
influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but
immoral, with impure rites and orgies.
Lift to the bare heights thine eyes,
Where not wast thou tumbled?
The land thou hast fouled with thy whoredoms,(116)
—spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.
This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in
the nation’s politics. With no faith in One Supreme God the statesmen of
Judah, just as in Isaiah’s earlier days, fluttered between the great
powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under
Psamtik’s vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the
restless vassals of Assyria. But Assyria, though weakened, had not become
negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly
drifted. To use Jeremiah’s figure, suitable alike to her politics and her
religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour
after another.
All this was chaos worse than the desert that crumbled before Anathoth, a
tragedy more bitter than the past which moaned through the land behind.
What had God to say? It was a singular mark of Israel, that the hope of a
great prophet never died from her heart. Where earnest souls were left
they prayed for his coming and looked for the Word of the Lord by him more
than they who wait for the morning. The same conditions prevailed out of
which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah.
Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities.
Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of God the thunder which to all
ears was rumbling there?
The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and
abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning,
so far as he himself was concerned:—
Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee,
Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee,
And a prophet to the nations had set thee.(117)
A thought of God, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of
time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; God’s alone, and
sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these
days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that
were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness—this that
then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son
of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than
even that similar assurance which centuries later filled another priest’s
home in the same hill country:—
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest,
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord,
To prepare His ways.(118)
The questions of foreknowledge and predestination, with which Jeremiah
engaged himself not a little, I leave for a future lecture.(119) Here we
may consider the range of his mission.
This was very wide—not for Judah only, but _a prophet to the nations had I
set thee_. The objection has been taken, that it is too wide to be
original, and the alternative inferences drawn: either that it is the
impression of his earliest consciousness as a prophet but formed by
Jeremiah only after years of experience revealed all that had been
involved in his call; or that it is not Jeremiah’s own but the notion
formed of him by a later exaggerating generation. It is true that Jeremiah
did not dictate the first words of the Lord to him till some twenty-three
years after he heard them, when it was possible and natural for him to
expand them in terms of his intervening experience. And we must remember
the summary bent of the Hebrew mind—how natural it was to that mind to
describe processes as if they were acts of a day, done by a fiat as in the
story of the Creation; or to state a system of law and custom, which took
centuries to develop, as though it were the edict of a single lawgiver and
all spoken at once, when the development entered on a new and higher
stage, as we see in the case of Deuteronomy and its attribution to Moses.
Yet the forebodings at least of a task so vast as that of _prophet to the
nations_ were anything but impossible to the moment of Jeremiah’s call;
for the time surged, as we have seen, with the movements of the nations
and their omens for his own people. Indeed it would have been strange if
the soul of any prophet, conscious of a charge from the Almighty, had not
the instinct, that as the meaning of this charge was gradually unfolded to
him, it would reveal, and require from him the utterance of, Divine
purposes throughout a world so full even to the uninspired eye of the
possibilities both of the ruin of old states and of the rise of new ones—a
world so close about his own people, and so fraught with fate for them,
that in speaking of _them_ he could not fail to speak of the _whole of it_
also. If at that time a Jew had at all the conviction that he was called
to be a prophet, it must have been with a sense of the same
responsibilities, to which the older prophets had felt themselves bound:
men who knew themselves to be ministers of the Lord of Hosts, Lord of the
Powers of the Universe, who had dealt not with Israel only but with Moab
and Ammon and Aram, with Tyre and the Philistines and Egypt, and who had
spoken of Assyria herself as His staff and the rod of His judgment.
Jeremiah’s three contemporaries, Ṣephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, all deal
with the foreign powers of their day—why should he in such an age not have
been conscious from the first that his call from the Lord of Hosts
involved a mission as wide as theirs? I am sure that if we had lived with
this prophet through his pregnant times, as we have lived through these
last ten years and have been compelled to think constantly not of our own
nation alone—concentrated as we had to be on our duties to her—but of
_all_ the nations of the world as equally involved in the vast spiritual
interests at stake, we should have no difficulty in understanding how
possible and natural it was for Jeremiah to hear his mission _to the
nations_ clearly indicated in the very moment of his call.
And in fact Jeremiah’s acknowledged Oracles—some of them among his
earliest—travel far beyond Judah and show not merely a knowledge of, and
vivid interest in, the qualities and fortunes of other peoples, but a wise
judgment of their policies and therefore of what should be Judah’s prudent
attitude and duty towards them. For long before his call she had been
intriguing with Egypt and Assyria.(120) Just then or immediately later the
Scythians, after threatening the Medes, were sweeping over Western Asia as
far as the frontier of Egypt, and in his Scythian songs Jeremiah(121)
shows an intimate knowledge of their habits. In his Parable of the Potter
(for which unfortunately there is no date) he declares God’s power to
mould or re-mould _any_ nation.(122) And Baruch, writing of Jeremiah’s
earlier ministry, says that he spoke _concerning all nations_.(123)
No wonder that Jeremiah shrank from such a task: _Ah, Lord God, I know not
to speak, I am too young._(124) His excuse is interesting. Had he not
developed his gift for verse? Or, conscious of its rustic simplicity, did
he fear to take the prophet’s thunder on lips, that had hitherto moved
only to the music of his country-side? In the light of his later
experience the second alternative is not impossible. When much practice
must have made him confident of his art as a singer, he tells us how
burning he felt the Word of the Lord to be. But whatever was the motive of
his reluctance it was overcome. As he afterwards said:—
Ah, Lord, Thou didst beguile me,
And beguiled I let myself be;
Thou wast too strong for me
And hast prevailed.(125)
The following shows how this came about:—
And the Lord said unto me, Say not I am too young, for to all to
which I send thee thou shalt go, and all I command thee thou shalt
speak,
Be not afraid before them
For with thee am I to deliver,
Rede of the Lord. And the Lord put forth His hand and caused it to
touch my mouth, and the Lord said to me, Lo, I have set My Word in
thy mouth,
See I appoint thee this day
Over the nations and kingdoms,
To pull up and tear down and destroy,(126)
To build and to plant.
To this also objection has been taken as still more incredible in the
spiritual experience of so youthful a rustic. It has been deemed the
exaggeration of a later age, and described as the “gigantic figure” of a
“plenipotentiary to the nations,” utterly inconsistent with the modest
singer of the genuine oracles of Jeremiah, “a hero only in suffering, not
in assault.”(127) Such an objection rather strains the meaning of the
passage. According to this Jeremiah is to be the carrier of the Word of
the Lord. That Word, rather than the man himself, is the power _to pull up
and tear down and destroy, to build and to plant_(128)—that Word which no
Hebrew prophet received without an instinct of its world-wide range and
its powers of both destruction and creation.
Two visions follow. To appreciate the first we must remember the natural
anxiety of the prophets when charged with pronouncements so weighty and
definite. The Word, the ethical purpose of God for Israel was clear, but
how was it to be fulfilled? No strength appeared in the nation itself. The
party, or parties, loyal to the Lord had been in power a dozen years and
effected little in Jerusalem and nothing beyond. The people were not
stirred and seemed hopeless. Living in a village where little changed
through the years, but men followed the habits of their fathers, Jeremiah
felt everything dead. Winter was on and the world asleep.
Then the Word of the Lord came to me saying, What art thou seeing,
Jeremiah; and I said, I am seeing the branch of an almond tree.
And the Lord said to me, Well hast thou seen, for I am awake over
My Word to perform it.
The Hebrew for almond tree is _shākēdh_, which also means _awakeness_ or
_watchfulness_,(129) and the Lord was _awake_ or was
_watchful_—_shōkēdh_—the difference only of a vowel. In that first token
of spring which a Palestine winter affords, the Prophet received the
sacrament of his call and of the assurance that God was awake! That the
sacrament took this form was natural. That of Isaiah of Jerusalem was the
vision of a Throne and an Altar. That of Ezekiel, the exile, shone in the
stormy skies of his captivity. This to the prophet of Anathoth burst with
the first blossom on his wintry fields. The sense of unity in which he and
his people conceived the natural and spiritual worlds came to his help;
neither in the one world nor in the other did God slumber. God was
watching.