toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of
Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.
Yet more awful than the physical calamities which the prophet unveils
throughout these terrible years are his bitter portraits of the character
of his people, whom no word of their God nor any of His heavy judgments
could move to repentance. He paints a hopeless picture of society in
Jerusalem and Judah under Jehoiakim, rotten with dishonesty and vice.
Members of the same family are unable to trust each other; all are bent on
their own gain by methods unjust and cruel—from top to bottom so
hopelessly false as even to be blind to the meaning of the disasters which
rapidly befal them and to the final doom that steadily draws near. Yet,
for all the wrath he pours upon his generation and the Divine vengeance of
which he is sure, how the man still loves and clings to them, and takes
their doom as his own! And, greatest of all, how he reads in the heart
that was in him the Heart of God Himself—the same astonishment that the
people are so callous, the same horror of their ruin, nay the same sense
of failure and of suffering under the burden of such a waste—_on Me is the
waste!_(467) _What I built I have to destroy!_
Except that he does not share these secrets of the Heart of God, it is of
Victor Hugo among moderns that I have been most reminded when working
through Jeremiah’s charges against the king, the priests, the prophets and
the whole people of Judah—Victor Hugo in his _Châtiments_ of the monarch,
the church, the journalists, the courtiers and other creatures of the
Third French Empire. There is the same mordant frankness and satiric rage
combined with the same desire to share the miseries of the critic’s people
in spite of their faults. I have already quoted Hugo’s lines on Napoleon
III as parallel to Jeremiah’s on Jehoiakim.(468)
Here are two other parallels.
To Jeremiah’s description of his people being persuaded that all was well,
when well it was not, and refusing to own their dishonour, VIII. 11, 12,
take Hugo’s “on est infâme et content” and
Et tu chantais, en proie aux éclatants mensonges
Du succès.
And to Jeremiah’s acceptance of the miseries of his people as his own and
refusal to the end to part from them take these lines to France:—
Je te demanderai ma part de tes misères,
Moi ton fils.
France, tu verras bien qu’humble tête éclipsée
J’avais foi,
Et que je n’eus jamais dans l’âme une pensée
Que pour toi.
France, être sur ta claie à l’heure où l’on te traine
Aux cheveux,
O ma mère, et porter mon anneau de ta chaine
Je le veux!
Lecture VI.
TO THE END AND AFTER. 597-? B.C.
The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their
story is soon told.
When Nebuchadrezzar deported King Jehoiachin in 597, he set up in his
place his uncle Mattaniah, a son of Josiah by that Hamutal, who was also
the mother of the miserable Jehoahaz.(469) The name of the new king
Nebuchadrezzar changed to Ṣedekiah, _Righteousness_ or _Truth of
Jehovah_,(470) intending thus to bind the Jew by the name of his own God
to the oath of allegiance which he had exacted from him. When Ezekiel
afterwards denounced Ṣedekiah on his revolt it was for _despising the
Lord’s oath and breaking the Lord’s covenant_(471)—a signal instance of
the sanctity attached in the ancient world to an oath sworn by one nation
to another, even though it was to the humiliation of the swearer.(472) So
far as we see, Ṣedekiah was of a temper(473) to have been content with the
peace, which the observance of his oath would have secured to him. But he
was a weak man, master no more of himself than of his throne,(474)
distracted between a half-superstitious respect for the one high influence
left to him in Jeremiah and the opposite pressure, first from a set of
upstarts who had succeeded to the estates and the posts about court of
their banished betters, and second, from those prophets whose personal
insignificance can have been the only reason of their escape from
deportation. It is one of the notable ironies of history that, while
Nebuchadrezzar had planned to render Judah powerless to rebel again, by
withdrawing from her all the wisest and most skilful and soldierly of her
population, he should have left to her her fanatics!
There remained in Jerusalem the elements—sincerely patriotic but rash and
in politics inexperienced—of a “war-party,” restless to revolt from
Babylon and blindly confident of the strength of their walls and of their
men to resist the arms of the great Empire. Of their nation they and their
fellows alone had been spared the judgment of the Lord and prided
themselves on being the Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival and
security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, _Get ye far from
the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession._(475) Through the
early uneventful years of Ṣedekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party
found time to gather strength, and in his fourth year must have been
stirred towards action by the arrival in Jerusalem of messengers from the
kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Ṣidon, all of them states within the
scope of Egyptian intrigues against Babylon.(476) For the time the
movement came to nothing largely because of Jeremiah’s influence, and
Ṣedekiah is said to have journeyed to Babylon to protest in person his
continued fidelity.(477) Either then or previously Nebuchadrezzar imposed
on Jerusalem the Babylonian idolatry which Ezekiel describes as invading
even the Temple.(478)
The intrigues of Egypt persisted, however, and, in 589 or 588, after the
accession of Pharaoh Hophra,(479) at last prevailed upon Judah. Ṣedekiah
yielded to the party of revolt and Nebuchadrezzar swiftly invested
Jerusalem. Roused to realities _the king and all the people of Jerusalem_
offered their repentance by a solemn covenant before God to enfranchise,
in obedience to the Law, those slaves who had reached a seventh year of
service. But when on the news of an Egyptian advance the Chaldeans raised
their siege, the Jewish slave-owners broke faith and pressed back their
liberated slaves into bondage.(480) This proved the last link in the long
chain of lies and frauds by which the hopelessly dishonest people fastened
upon them their doom. Egypt again failed her dupes. The Chaldeans, either
by the terror they inspired or by an actual victory on the field,
compelled her army to retire, and resumed the siege of Jerusalem. Though
Jeremiah counselled surrender and though the city was sapped by famine and
pestilence, the fanatics—to whom, however reluctantly, some admiration is
due—held out against the forces of Babylon for a year and a half. Then
came the end. The walls on the north were breached. Ṣedekiah fled by a
southern gate, upon an effort to reach the East of Jordan. He was
overtaken on the plains of Jericho, his escort scattered and himself
carried to Nebuchadrezzar’s head-quarters at Riblah on the Orontes.
Thence, after his sons were slain before his eyes, and his eyes put out,
he was taken in fetters to Babylon. Nebuṣaradan, a high Babylonian
officer, was dispatched to Jerusalem to burn the Temple, the Palace and
the greater houses, and to transport to Babylon a second multitude of
Jews, leaving only _the poorest of the land to be vine-dressers and
husbandmen_.(481) This was in 586.
1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)
From these rapidly descending years a number of prophecies by Jeremiah
have come to us, as well as narratives of the trials which he endured
because of his faithfulness to the Word of the Lord, and his sane views of
the facts of the time. As we read these prophecies and narratives several
changes become clear in the position and circumstances of the Prophet, and
in his temper and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words have been, we
are not surprised that to his contemporaries he has grown to be a
personage of greater impressiveness and authority than before. He has
still his enemies but these are not found in exactly the same quarters as
under Jehoiakim. Instead of an implacable king, and princes more or less
respectful and friendly, in the king he has now a friend, though a timid
and ineffective one, while the new and inferior princes appear almost
wholly against him. Formerly both priests and prophets had been his foes,
but now only the prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one priest
is loyal to him.(482) Inwardly again, he has no more of those debates with
God and his own soul, which had rent him during the previous years; only
once does doubt escape from his lips in prayer.(483) Clearest of all, his
hope has been released, and in contrast with his prophesying up to the
surrender of Jerusalem in 597, but in full agreement with his enduring
faith in God’s Freedom and Patience,(484) he utters not a few predictions
of a future upon their own land for both Israel and Judah. This greatest
of the changes which appear is due partly to the fact that while the man’s
reluctant duty has been to pronounce the doom of exile upon his people,
that doom has been fulfilled, and his spirit, which never desired it,(485)
is free to range beyond its shadows. To the clearness into which he rises
he is helped, under belief in the Divine Grace, by the truth obvious to
all but fanatics that peace and order were possible for that shaken world
only through submission to Nebuchadrezzar’s firm government, including as
this did a policy comparatively lenient to the Jewish exiles. But there
was another and stronger reason why Jeremiah should at last turn himself
to a ministry of hope, however sternly he must continue to denounce the
Jews left in Jerusalem and Judah. The catastrophe of 597 largely separated
the better elements of the nation, which were swept into exile, from the
worse which remained in the land.
It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the most momentous events in
the history of Israel, with which Jeremiah’s earliest Oracle under
Ṣedekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more the Word of the Lord starts to
him from a vision, this time of two baskets, one of good the other of bad
figs, which the Lord, he says, _caused me to see_: a vision which I take
to be as physical and actual as those of the almond-rod and the caldron
upon his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though others interpret it
as imaginative like the visions of Amos.(486) Note how easily again the
Prophet passes from verse to prose. The verse is slightly irregular. The
stresses of the four couplets are these—3 + 3; 4 + 3; 4 + 3; 3 + 3—to
which the following version only approximates.
XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah?
And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad,
which for their(487) badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of
the Lord came unto me, [5] saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel—
Like unto these good figs
I look on the exiles of Judah,
Whom away from this place I have sent
To the Chaldeans’ land for (their) good.
For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6
And bring them back to this land,
And build them and not pull them down,
And plant them and not pluck up.
7. And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord,
and they shall be for a people unto Me, and I will be to them for
God, when they turn to me with all their heart. 8. But like the
bad figs which cannot be eaten for their(488) badness—thus saith
the Lord—so I give up Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes and
the remnant of Jerusalem, the left in this land,(489) with them
that dwell in the land of Egypt.(490) 9. And I will set them for
consternation(491) to all kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a
proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I drive them.
And I will send among them the sword, the famine and the
pestilence, till they be consumed from off the ground which I gave
to them.(492)
We cannot overestimate the effect upon Jeremiah himself, and through him
and Ezekiel upon the subsequent history of Israel’s religion, of this
drastic separation in 597 of the exiles of Judah from the remnant left in
the land. After suffering for years the hopelessness of converting his
people, the Prophet at last saw an Israel of whom hope might be dared. It
was not their distance which lent enchantment to his view for he gives
proof that he can descry the dross still among them, despite the furnace
through which they have passed.(493) But the banished were without doubt
the best of the nation, and now they had “dreed their weird,” gone through
the fire, been lifted out of the habits and passions of the past, and
chastened by banishment—pensive and wistful as exile alone can bring men
to be.
We also have come out of the Great War with the best of us gone, and feel
the contrast between their distant purity, _out of great tribulation_, and
the unworthiness of those who are left. But neither to Jeremiah nor to any
of his time was such inspiration possible as we draw from our brave,
self-sacrificing dead. No confidence then existed in a life beyond the
grave. Jeremiah himself can only _weep for the slain of his people_. His
last vision of them is of _corpses strewn on the field like sheaves left
after the reaper which nobody gathers_, barren of future harvests; and the
last word he has for them is, _they went forth and are not_.(494) But that
separated and distant Israel has for the Prophet something at least of
what the cloud of witnesses by which we are encompassed means for us.
There was quality in them, quality purified by suffering and sacrifice,
more than enough to rally the conscience of the nation from which they had
been torn. For the Prophet himself they released hope, they awoke the
sense of a future, they revived the faith that God had still a will for
His people, and that by His patient Grace a pure Israel might be re-born.
If the vision of the Figs reveals the ethical grounds of Jeremiah’s new
hope for Israel, his Letter to the Exiles, XXIX. 1-23, discloses still
another ground on which that hope was based—his clear and sane
appreciation of the politics of his time. And it adds a pronouncement of
profound significance for the future of Israel’s religion, that the sense
of the presence of God, faith in His Providence and Grace, and prayer to
Him were independent of Land and Temple.
From the subsequent fortunes of the exiles we know what liberal treatment
they must have received from Nebuchadrezzar. They were settled by
themselves; they were not, as in Egypt of old, hindered from multiplying;
they were granted freedom to cultivate and to trade, by which many of them
gradually rose to considerable influence among their captors. All this was
given to Jeremiah to foresee and to impress upon the first exiles. But it
meant that their exile would be long.
It is proof of the change in the Prophet’s position among his people(495)
that his Letter was carried to Babylon by two ambassadors from the King of
Judah to Nebuchadrezzar, and evidently with the consent of Ṣedekiah
himself. The text of the Letter and of its title, originally no doubt from
Baruch’s memoirs, has been considerably expanded, as is clear not only
from the brevity of the Greek version, but from the superfluous formulas
and premature insertions which the Hebrew and the Greek have in common.
Following others I have taken verses 5-7 as metre; and if this is right we
have a fresh instance of Jeremiah’s passing from metre to prose in the
same discourse. The metrical character of 5-7 is not certain. Its couplets
run on the following irregular scheme of stresses: 3 + 4, 2 + 3, 3 + 3, 3
+ 2 (?), 3 + 4, 3 + 4—the last line as so often in a strophe being a long
one.(496)
XXIX. 1. These are the words of the Letter which Jeremiah sent
from Jerusalem unto [the remnant of] the elders of the exiles, [3]
by the hand of Eleasah, son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, son of
Hilḳiah, whom Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon unto the
king of Babylon saying, [4] Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel, unto the exiles whom I have exiled from Jerusalem:(497)
Build houses and settle ye down, 5
Plant gardens and eat of their fruit,
Take ye wives, 6
And beget sons and daughters.
Take wives to your sons,
Give your daughters to husbands,
To beget sons and daughters,(498)
And increase(499) and do not diminish.
And seek ye the peace of the land,(500) 7
To the which I have banished you,
And pray for it unto the Lord,
For in her peace your peace shall be.
8. [For thus saith the Lord, Let not the prophets in your midst
deceive you, nor your diviners, nor hearken to the dreams they (?)
dream. 9. For falsehood are they prophesying unto you in My Name;
I have not sent them.](501) 10. For thus saith the Lord, So soon
as seventy years be fulfilled for Babylon, I will visit you and
establish My Word toward you by bringing you(502) back to this
place.
For I am thinking about you— 11
Rede of the Lord—
Thoughts not of evil but peace
To give you a Future and Hope.
Ye shall pray Me, and I will hear you, 12
Seek Me and find; 13
If ye ask Me with all your heart
I shall be found of you. 14
By omitting all of verses 12-14 that is not given by the Greek we get
these eight lines in approximately Jeremiah’s favourite Qinah-measure. The
Greek also lacks verses 16-20, which irrelevantly digress from the exiles
to the guilt and doom of the Jews in Jerusalem, and which it is difficult
to think that Jeremiah would have put into a letter to be carried by two
of these same Jews.(503) Verse 15 goes with 21-23,(504) a separate message
to the exiles which we shall treat in the following section.
2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)
Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles had its consequences. _First_, there was
their claim to have prophets of the Lord among themselves, which in our
text immediately follows the Letter as if part of it, XXIX. 15, 21-23, but
which is probably of a somewhat later date.
XXIX. 15. Because ye have said, The Lord hath raised us up
prophets in Babylon, [21] thus saith the Lord concerning Ahab son
of Kolaiah and concerning Ṣedekiah son of Maaseiah,(505) Behold I
am to give them into the hand of the king of Babylon and to your
eyes shall he slay them. 22. And of them shall a curse be taken up
by all the exiles of Judah who are in Babylon saying, “The Lord
set thee like Ṣedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon
roasted(506) in the fire!” 23. Because they have wrought folly in
Israel and committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and in
My Name have spoken words which I commanded them not. I am He who
knoweth and am witness—Rede of the Lord.
And, _second_, another of the “prophets” among the exiles sent to
Jerusalem a protest against Jeremiah’s Letter, XXIX. 24-29.
This passage, especially in its concise Greek form, which as usual is
devoid of the repetitions of titles and other redundant phrases in the
Hebrew text, bears the stamp of genuineness.
XXIX. 24. And unto Shemaiah the Nehemalite thou shalt say:(507)
25_b_. Because thou hast sent in thine own name a letter to
Ṣephaniah, son of Maaseiah, the priest,(508) saying, [26] The Lord
hath appointed thee priest, instead of Jehoiada the priest, to be
overseer in the House of the Lord for every man that is raving and
takes on himself to be a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in
the stocks and in the collar. 27. Now therefore why hast thou not
curbed Jeremiah of Anathoth, who takes on himself to prophesy unto
you? 28. Hath he not sent to us in Babylon saying, “It(509) is
long! Build ye houses and settle down, and plant gardens and eat
their fruit.” 29. And Ṣephaniah read this letter in the ears of
Jeremiah; [30] and the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying,
[31] Send to the exiles saying: Thus saith the Lord concerning
Shemaiah the Nehemalite, Because Shemaiah hath prophesied unto
you, although I did not send him, and hath led you to trust in a
lie; [32] therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold I am about to
visit upon Shemaiah and upon his seed; there shall not be a man to
them in your midst to see the good which I am going to do
you.(510)
In one respect Jeremiah has not changed. His denunciation of individuals
who oppose the Word of the Lord by himself is as strong as ever, and still
more dramatically than in the case of Shemaiah it appears in his treatment
of the prophets within Jerusalem, who flouted his counsels of subjection
to Nebuchadrezzar, Chs. XXVII-XXVIII. In this narrative or narratives (for
the whole seems compounded of several, perhaps not all referring to the
same occasion) the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts are even
more than usually great. The Greek again attracts our preference by its
freedom from superfluous titles, repetitions and redundances, and is
probably nearer than the Hebrew to the original of Baruch’s Memoirs of the
Prophet. But it is obviously not complete, missing out clauses, the
presence of which is implied by subsequent ones.(511) The following is the
substance of what Baruch reports.
It was the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, 593, when messengers from the
neighbouring nations came to Jerusalem to intrigue under Egyptian
influence for revolt against Babylon. Jeremiah was commanded to make a
yoke of bars and thongs, and having put it on his neck to charge the
messengers to tell their masters—
XXVII. 4. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: [5] I
have made the Earth by My great power and Mine outstretched arm,
and I give it unto whom it seems right to Me. 6. So now I have
given all these lands(512) into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king
of Babylon, to serve him,(513) and even the beasts of the field to
serve him. 8. And it shall be that the nation and kingdom, which
will not put their neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon, with
the sword and with the famine(514) shall I visit them—Rede of the
Lord—till they be consumed at his hand (?). 9. But ye, hearken ye
not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your
dreamers,(515) nor to your soothsayers, nor to your sorcerers, who
say, “Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon”; [10] for they
prophesy a lie unto you, to the result of removing you far from
your own soil. 11. But the nation which brings its neck into the
yoke of the king of Babylon and serves him, I will let it rest on
its own soil and it shall till this and abide within it.
This is followed by a similar Oracle to Ṣedekiah himself, 12-15, and by
another, 16-22, to the priests concerning a matter of peculiar anxiety to
them.
16. Thus saith the Lord, Hearken ye not to the words of the(516)
prophets, who prophesy to you saying, Behold, the vessels of the
Lord’s House shall be brought back from Babylon; for a lie are
they prophesying to you. I have not sent them.(517) 18. But if
prophets they be, and if the Word of the Lord is with them, let
them now plead with Me [that the vessels left in the House of the
Lord come not to Babylon]. 19. Yet thus saith the Lord concerning
the residue of the vessels, [20] which the king of Babylon did not
take when he carried Jeconiah into exile from Jerusalem, [22] unto
Babylon shall they be brought—Rede of the Lord.
The Hebrew text concludes with a prophecy of the restoration of the
vessels, which had it been in the original the Greek translators could
hardly have omitted, and which is therefore probably a _post factum_
insertion. Not only, then, were the sacred vessels taken away in 597 to
remain in Babylon, but such as were still left in Jerusalem would also be
carried thither. It is possible that this address is now out of place and
should follow the next chapter, XXVIII, which deals only with the vessels
carried off in 597. Like the Hebrew the Greek text gives XXVIII a separate
introduction which dates it in the fifth month of the fourth year of
Ṣedekiah, but omits the Hebrew statement that the year was the same as
that of the events and words recorded in XXVII. The extent of the
differences between the Hebrew and Greek continues to be at least as great
as before,(518) as a comparison will show between the Authorised Version
and the following rendering which adheres to the Greek.