neighbouring heathen, Israel is alone legislated for—a free nation owning
no foreign king as it bows to no foreign deity, but governing itself in
obedience to the revealed Will of its own God. This Will is applied to
every detail of its life in as comprehensive a system of national religion
as the world has known. And thus next to devotion to the Deity comes pride
in the nation. Because of their possession of the Divine Law Israel are
_the_ righteous people and wise above all others. The patriotism of the
Book must have been one cause of its immediate acceptance by the people,
when Josiah brought it before them and upon it they made Covenant with
their God. Throughout the Book treats the nation as a moral unit. It
enforces indeed justice as between man and man. It gives woman a higher
position than is assumed for her by other Hebrew codes. It cares for the
individual poor, stranger, debtor and dependent priest with a humanity all
its own, and it exhorts to the education of children. Above all it forbids
base thoughts as well as base deeds. Yet, while thus enforcing the
elements of a searching personal morality, Deuteronomy deals with the
individual only through his relations to the nation and the national
worship. The Book has no promise for the individual beyond the grave. Nor
is there pity nor charity for other peoples nor any sense of a place for
them in the Divine Providence. There is no missionary spirit nor hope for
mankind outside of Israel.
Further it is due to the almost exclusively national outlook and interest
of the Book that it has no guidance or comfort to offer for another
element of personal experience—question and doubt. While it illustrates
from the nation’s history the purifying discipline of suffering because of
sin it says nothing of the sufferings of righteous individuals, but by the
absoluteness of its doctrines of morality and Providence suggests, if
indeed it does not inculcate, the dogma that right-doing will always meet
with prosperity and wrong-doing with pain and disaster—a dogma which
provoked the thoughtful to scepticism, as we shall see with Jeremiah
himself.
Again, the fact that the Book, while superbly insistent upon justice,
holiness and humanity, lays equal emphasis on a definite ritual, with One
Altar and an exclusive system of sacrifices, tempted the popular mind to a
superstitious confidence in these institutions. And while it was of
practical advantage to have the principles of the prophets reduced to a
written system, which could be enforced as public law and taught to the
young—two ends on which the authors of Deuteronomy are earnestly
bent—there was danger of the people coming thereby to trust rather in the
letter than in the spirit of the new revelation. Both these dangers were
soon realised. As Dr. A. B. Davidson has said, “Pharisæism and Deuteronomy
came into the world on the same day.”
* * * * *
Such was the Book discovered in the Temple in 621-20 and accepted as
Divine by King and Nation. Modern efforts to connect Jeremiah with its
discovery and introduction to the Monarch, and even with its composition,
may be ignored. Had there been a particle of evidence for this, it would
have been seized and magnified by the legalists in Israel, not to speak of
those apocryphal writers who foist so much else on Jeremiah and
Baruch.(268) That they have not even attempted this is proof—if proof were
needed—that Jeremiah, the youthful son of a rural family, and probably
still unknown to the authorities in the Capital, had nothing whatever to
do either with the origins, or with the discovery, of the Book of the Law
or with its presentation to the King by the priests of the Temple.
Yet so great a discovery, so full a volume of truth poured forth in a
style so original and compelling, cannot have left unmoved a young prophet
of the conscience and heart of Jeremiah.(269) That he was in sympathy with
the temper and the general truths of Deuteronomy we need not doubt. As for
its ethics, its authors were of the same school as himself and among their
teachers they had the same favourite, Hosea. In his earliest Oracles
Jeremiah had expressed the same view as theirs of God’s constant and clear
guidance of Israel and of the nation’s obstinacy in relapsing from this.
His heart, too, must have hailed the Book’s august enforcement of that
abolition of the high places and their pagan ritual, which he had ventured
to urge from his obscure position in Anathoth. Nor did he ever throughout
his ministry protest against the substitute which the Book prescribed for
those—the concentration of the national worship upon a single sanctuary.
On the contrary in a later Oracle he looks for the day when that shall be
observed by all Israel and the watchmen on Mount Ephraim shall cry,
Rise, let us up to Ṣion,
To the Lord our God!(270)
On the other hand, the emphasis which Deuteronomy equally lays upon ethics
and upon ritual, and its absolute doctrines of morality and Providence
were bound to provoke questions in a mind so restlessly questioning as
his. Then there was the movement of reform which followed upon the appeal
of the Book to the whole nation. Jeremiah himself had called for a
national repentance and here, in the people’s acceptance of the Covenant
and consent to the reforms it demanded, were the signs of such a
repentance. No opposition appears to have been offered to those reforms.
The King who led them was sincere; a better monarch Judah never knew, and
his reign was signalised by Jeremiah at its close as a reign of justice
when _all was well_. Yet can we doubt that the Prophet, who had already
preached so rigorous a repentance and had heard himself appointed by God
as the tester of His people, would use that detached position jealously to
watch the progress of the reforms which the nation had so hurriedly
acclaimed and to test their moral value?
In modern opinion of Jeremiah’s attitude to the discovered Law-Book there
are two extremes. One is of those who regard him as a legalist and
throughout his career the strenuous advocate of the Book and the system it
enforced. The other is of those who maintain that he had no sympathy with
legal systems or official reforms, and that the passages in the Book of
Jeremiah which allege his assent to, and his proclamation of, the
Deuteronomic Covenant, or represent him as using the language of
Deuteronomy, are not worthy of credit.(271) Of these extremes we may say
at once that if with both we neglect the twofold character of
Deuteronomy—its emphasis now on ethics and now on ritual—and again, if
with both we assume that Jeremiah’s attitude to the Law-Book and to the
reforms it inspired never changed, then the evidences for that attitude
offered by the Book of Jeremiah are inconsistent and we may despair of a
conclusion. But a more reasonable course is open to us. If we keep in mind
the two faces of Deuteronomy as well as the doubtful progress for many
years of the reforms started by it, and if we also remember that a prophet
like all the works of God was subject to growth; if we allow to Jeremiah
the same freedom to change his purpose in face of fresh developments of
his people’s character as in the Parable of the Potter he imputes to his
God; if we recall how in 604 the new events in the history of Western Asia
led him to adapt his earlier Oracles on the Scythians to the Chaldeans who
had succeeded the Scythians as the expected Doom from the North—then our
way through the evidence becomes tolerably clear, except for the
difficulty of dating a number of his undated Oracles. What we must not
forget is the double, divergent intention and influence of Deuteronomy,
and the fact that Josiah’s reformation, though divinely inspired, was in
its progress an experiment upon the people, whose mind and conduct beneath
it Jeremiah was appointed by God to watch and to test.
These considerations prepare us _first_ for the story in Ch. XI. 1-8 of
Jeremiah’s fervent assent to the ethical principles of Deuteronomy and of
the charge to him to proclaim these throughout Judah; and _then_ for his
later attitude to the written Law, to the Temple and to sacrifices.
XI. 1. The Word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2.
Hear thou(272) the words of this Covenant, and speak them to the
men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 3. And thou
shalt say to them, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: 4.
Cursed be the man who hears not the words of this Covenant, which
I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought them out of the
land of Egypt, out of the iron-furnace, saying, Hearken to My
Voice and do(273) according to all that I command you, and ye
shall be to Me a people, and I will be God to you; [5] in order to
establish the oath which I sware unto your fathers, to give them a
land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day. 6. And I
answered and said, Amen, O Lord! 7. And the Lord said unto me,
Proclaim(274) these words in the cities of Judah and in the
streets of Jerusalem, saying, [8] Hear ye the words of this
Covenant and do them, but they did them not.(275)
The story has its difficulties. It is undated; it is followed by verses
9-17, apparently from the reign of Jehoiakim; what the Prophet is called
to hear and gives his solemn assent to is generally described as _this
Covenant_; and in verses 7 and 8 there is what may be a mere editorial
addition since the Greek Version omits it, which has led some to assert
the editorial character of the whole. But for the reasons given above,
there is no cause to doubt the substantial truthfulness of the story,
unless with Duhm we were capable of believing that Jeremiah never spoke in
prose, nor can be conceived as, at any time in his life the advocate of
what was a legal as well as a prophetic book. Of the first of these
assertions we have already disposed;(276) the second is met by the fact
that what Jeremiah was called to assent to was not a legal programme but a
spiritual covenant, of which ethical obedience alone was stated as the
condition. In Josiah’s reign what else could _this Covenant_ mean than the
Covenant set forth in the recently discovered Book of the Law and solemnly
avouched by the whole people?(277) That its essence was spiritual and
ethical is expressed in the Deuteronomic phrases which follow, and the
quotation of these is most relevant to the occasion. Nor do the
recollections, the command and the promise which they convey go beyond
what Jeremiah had already enforced in his earlier Oracles.(278)
Therefore we may believe that, as recorded, Jeremiah heard in the heart of
Deuteronomy the call of God, that he uttered his Amen to it; and that,
from his experience of the evils of the high-places, he felt obliged, as
he also records, to proclaim _this Covenant_ throughout Judah.(279)
In the same chapter as the charge to the Prophet concerning _this
Covenant_ there is mention of a conspiracy against his life by the men of
Anathoth, XI. 21. Some suppose that these were enraged by his support of
reforms which abolished rural sanctuaries like their own. But his earlier
denunciations of such shrines, delivered independently of Deuteronomy, had
been enough to rouse his fellow-villagers against him as a traitor to
their local interests and pieties.
Another address, VII. 1-15, said to have been delivered to all Judah,
rebukes the people for their false confidence in the Temple and their
abuse of it, and threatens its destruction. Editorial additions may exist
in both the Hebrew and Greek texts of this address, but it contains
phrases non-deuteronomic and peculiar to Jeremiah, while its echoes of
Deuteronomy were natural to the occasion. Except for a formula or two, I
take the address to be his own. Nor am I persuaded by the majority of
modern critics that it is a mere variant of the Temple address reported in
Ch. XXVI as given _in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim_. Why may
Jeremiah not have spoken more than once on the same theme to the same, or
a similar effect? Moreover, the phrase _We are delivered!_ VII. 10, which
does not recur in XXVI, suits the conditions before, rather than those
after, the Battle of Megiddo. For parallel with the increased faith in the
Temple, due mainly to the people’s consciousness of their obedience to the
Law-Book, was their experience of deliverance from the Assyrian yoke. I am
inclined, therefore, to refer VII. 1-15 to the reign of Josiah, rather
than with XXVI to that of Jehoiakim.(280) But, whatever be its date, VII.
1-15 is relevant to our present discussion.
VII. 2, 3. Hear ye the Word of the Lord, all Judah!(281) Thus
saith the Lord, the God of Israel—Better your ways and your doings
that I may leave you to dwell in this Place. 4. Put not your trust
on lying words,(282) saying to yourselves,(283) “The Temple of the
Lord, The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord—[5] are
those!”(284) But if ye thoroughly better your ways and your
doings, if ye indeed do justice between a man and his fellow, [6]
and oppress not the sojourner, the orphan, and the widow, and shed
not innocent blood [in this Place], nor go after other gods to
your hurt, [7] then I shall leave you to abide in this Place [in
the land which I gave to your fathers from of old for ever]. 8.
Behold, you put your trust on lying words that cannot profit. 9.
What? Steal, murder, fornicate, swear falsely, and burn(285) to
Baal, and go after other gods whom ye knew not, [10] yet come and
stand before Me in this House upon which My Name has been called
and say “We are delivered”—in order to work all these
abominations! 11. Is it a robbers’ den that My(286) House [upon
which My Name has been called] has become in your eyes? I also,
behold I have seen it—Rede of the Lord. 12. For go now to My Place
which was in Shiloh, where at first I caused My Name to dwell, and
see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people
Israel. 13. And now because of your doing of all these deeds [Rede
of the Lord, though I spake unto you rising early and speaking,
but ye hearkened not, and I called you, but ye did not
answer],(287) [14] I shall do to the House [on which My Name has
been called] in which you are trusting, and to the Place which I
gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15. And I
shall cast you out from before My Face as I cast out(288) your
brethren, all the seed of Ephraim.
In this address there is nothing that contradicts Deuteronomy. The
sacredness with which the Book had invested the One Sanctuary is
acknowledged. But the people have no moral sense of that sacredness. Their
confidence in the Temple is material and superstitious, fostered, we may
believe, by the peace they were enjoying and their relief from a foreign
sovereignty, as well as by their formal observance of the institutions
which the Book prescribed. What had been founded to rally and to guide a
spiritual faith they turned into a fetish and even to an “indulgence” for
their wickedness. The House, in which Isaiah had bent beneath the seraphs’
adoration of the Divine Holiness, and, confessing his own and his people’s
sin, had received from its altar the sacrament of pardon and of cleansing,
was by this generation not only debased to a mere pledge of their
political security but debauched into a shelter for sins as gross as ever
polluted their worship upon the high places. So ready, as in all other
ages, were formality and vice to conspire with each other! Jeremiah scorns
the people’s _trust_ in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their
_trust_ (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The
change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at
least had Deuteronomy effected—shifting their trust from foreign gods and
states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and
unable to restrain them from bringing along with it their old obdurate
vices.
Whether, then, this address was delivered in Josiah’s reign or early in
Jehoiakim’s it affords no reason for our denying it to Jeremiah. As God’s
tester of the people he has been watching their response to the Revelation
they had accepted, and has proved that their obedience was to the letter
of this and not to its spirit, that while they superstitiously revered its
institutions they shamelessly ignored its ethics. For just such vices as
they still practised God Himself must take vengeance. As those had
deranged the very seasons and were leading to the overthrow of the
state,(289) no one could hope that the Temple would escape their
consequences. And there was that precedent of the destruction of Israel’s
first sanctuary in Shiloh, the ruins of which, as we have seen, lay not
far from Jeremiah’s home at Anathoth.(290)
Another Oracle, XI. 15, 16, also undated, seems, like the last passage,
best explained as delivered by Jeremiah while he watched during the close
of Josiah’s reign the hardening of the people’s trust in their religious
institutions and felt its futility; or alternatively when that futility
was exposed by the defeat at Megiddo. It has, however, been woven by some
hand or other into a passage reflecting the revival of the Baal-worship
under Jehoiakim (verse 17; its connection with the prose sentence
preceding is also doubtful). Copyists have wrought havoc with the Hebrew
text, but as the marginal note of our Revisers indicates, the sense may be
restored from the Greek. _My Beloved_ is, of course, Israel.
What has My Beloved to do in My house, XI. 15
Working out mischief?
Vows, holy flesh! Can such things turn
Calamity from thee;
Or by these thou escape?(291)
Flourishing olive, fair with fruit, 16
God called thy name.
To the noise of a mighty roaring
He sets her on fire—
Blasted her branches!
The first of these verses repeats the charge of VII. 2-11: the people use
the Temple for their sins. The word rendered _mischief_ is literally
_devices_, and the meaning may be intrigues hatched from their false ideas
of the Temple’s security. But the word is mostly used of _evil devices_
and here the Greek has _abomination_. As with their Temple so with their
vows and sacrifices. All are useless because of their wickedness. The
nation must be punished. The second verse may well have been uttered after
the defeat at Megiddo, or may be a prediction on the eve of that disaster
to _the branches_ of the nation, which the nation as a whole survived.
This leads to another and more difficult question. Jeremiah has spoken
doom on the Temple and the Nation; has he come to doubt the Law-Book
itself or any part of it? As to that there are two passages one of which
speaks of a falsification of the Law by its guardians, while the other
denies the Divine origin not only of the deuteronomic but of all
sacrifices and burnt offerings.
Even before the discovery of the Law-Book the young prophet had said of
_those who handle the Law_ that _they did not know the Lord_.(292) And now
in an Oracle, apparently of date after the discovery, he charges the
scribes with manipulating _the Law_, the _Torah_, so as to turn it to
falsehood. The Oracle is addressed to the people of whom he has just said
that they do not know _the Rule, the Mishpaṭ, of the Lord_.
How say you, “We are the Wise, VIII. 8
The Law of the Lord is with us.”
But lo, the falsing pen of the scribes
Hath wrought it to falsehood.
_Torah_, literally _direction_ or _instruction_, is either a single law or
a body of law, revealed by God through priests or prophets, for the
religious and moral practice of men. Here it is some traditional or
official form of such law, for which the people have rejected the Word of
the Lord—His living Word by the prophets of the time (verse 9).
Put to shame are the wise, 9
Dismayed and taken.
Lo, they have spurned the Word of the Lord—
What wisdom is theirs?
Was this _Torah_ oral or written? And if written was it the discovered
Book of the _Torah_, which in part at least was our Deuteronomy?
So far as the text goes the original _Torah_ may have been either oral or
written, and the scribes have _falsified_ it, by amplification or
distortion,(293) either when reducing it for the first time to writing or
when copying and editing it from an already written form. This leaves open
these further questions. If written was the _Torah_ the very _Book of the
Torah_ discovered in the Temple in 621-20? And if so did the falsification
affect the whole or only part of the Book? To these questions some answer
No, on the ground of Jeremiah’s assent to _this Covenant_, and the command
to him to proclaim it.(294) Others answer Yes; in their view Jeremiah was
opposed to the deuteronomic system as a whole, or at least to the detailed
laws of ritual added to the prophetic and spiritual principles of the
Book.(295) Another possibility is that Jeremiah had in view those first
essays in writing of a purely priestly law-book, which resulted during the
Exile in the so-called Priests’ Code now incorporated in the Pentateuch.
In our ignorance both of the original form of Deuteronomy and of the
extent and character of the activity of the scribes during the reign of
Josiah we might hesitate to decide among these possibilities were it not
for the following address which there is no good reason for denying to
Jeremiah.
VII. 21. Thus saith the Lord,(296) Your burnt offerings add to
your sacrifices and eat flesh(297)! 22. For I spake not with your
fathers nor charged them, in the day that I brought them forth
from the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offering and sacrifice.
23. But with this Word I charged them, saying, Hearken to My
Voice, and I shall be to you God, and ye shall be to Me a people,
and ye shall walk in every way that I charge you, that it may be
well with you.
Whether from Jeremiah or not, this is one of the most critical texts of
the Old Testament because while repeating what the Prophet has already
fervently accepted,(298) that the terms of the deuteronomic Covenant were
simply obedience to the ethical demands of God, it contradicts Deuteronomy
and even more strongly Leviticus, in their repeated statements that in the
wilderness God also commanded sacrifices. The issue is so grave that there
have been attempts to evade it. None, however, can be regarded as
successful. That which would weaken the Hebrew phrase, rightly rendered
_concerning_ by our versions, into _for the sake of_ or _in the interest
of_ (as if all the speaker intended was that animal sacrifice was not the
chief end or main interest of the Divine legislation) is doubtful
philologically, nor meets the fact that all the Hebrew codes assign an
indispensable value to sacrifice. Inadmissible also is the suggestion that
the phrase means _concerning the details of_, for Deuteronomy and
especially Leviticus emphasise the details of burnt-offering and
sacrifice. Nor is the plausible argument convincing that the Prophet spoke
relatively, and meant only what Samuel meant by _Obedience is better than
sacrifice_, or Hosea by _The Knowledge of God is more than
burnt-offerings_.(299) Nor are there grounds for thinking that the Prophet
had in view only the Ten Commandments; while finally to claim that he
spoke in hyperbole is a forlorn hope of an argument. In answer to all
these evasions it is enough to point out that the question is not merely
that of the value of sacrifice, but whether during the Exodus the God of
Israel gave any charge concerning sacrifice; as well as the fact that
others than Jeremiah had either explicitly questioned this or implicitly
denied it. When Amos, in God’s Name repelled the burnt-offerings of his
generation he asked, _Did ye bring unto Me sacrifices and offerings in the
wilderness forty years, O House of Israel?_ and obviously expected a
negative answer. And the following passages only render more general the
truth that Israel’s God has no pleasure at any time in the sacrifices
offered to Him, with the institution of which—the natural inference is—He
can have had nothing to do. _Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of
rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my first-born
for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath
declared to thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of
thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God._ And these two utterances in the Psalms: _Shall I eat the flesh of
bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving and pay thy
vows to the Most High_; and _Thou desirest not sacrifice else would I give
it, Thou delightest not in burnt-offering, The sacrifices of God are a
broken spirit_.(300)