Temple, when his prediction that the sacred vessels would not be restored
was flatly contradicted and with as much assurance that the contradiction
was from the God of Israel, as Jeremiah’s assurance about his own words.
The speaker was like himself from the country of Benjamin, from Gibeon
near Anathoth, Hananiah son of Azzur, who said—
XXVIII. 2. Thus saith the Lord, I have broken(519) the yoke of the
king of Babylon! 3. Within two years I will bring back to this
place the vessels of the House of the Lord, [4] and Jeconiah and
all the exiles of Judah that went to Babylon; for I will break the
yoke of the king of Babylon. 5. Then said Jeremiah to Hananiah,
before the priests and all the people(520) standing in the House
of the Lord—yes, [6] Jeremiah said,(521) Amen! The Lord do so! The
Lord establish the words thou hast prophesied, by bringing back
the vessels of the Lord’s House and all the exiles from Babylon to
this place! 7. Only hear, I pray thee, the Word of the Lord which
I am about to speak in thine ears and in the ears of all the
people. 8. The prophets who have been before me and thee from of
old, they prophesied against many lands and against great kingdoms
of war [and of famine (?) and pestilence].(522) 9. The prophet who
prophesies of peace (it is only) when the word(523) comes to pass
that the prophet is known(524) whom in truth the Lord hath sent.
10. Then Hananiah(525) took the bars off the neck of Jeremiah and
brake them. 11. And Hananiah spake before all the people saying:
Thus saith the Lord, Even so will I break the yoke of the king of
Babylon [within two years](526) from off the necks of all the
nations. And Jeremiah went his way. 12. Then came the Word of the
Lord to Jeremiah, after Hananiah had broken the bars from off his
neck, saying, [13] Go tell Hananiah, Thus saith the Lord: Thou
hast broken the bars of wood but I will(527) make in their stead
bars of iron. 14. For thus saith the Lord, An iron yoke have I put
upon the necks of all [these] nations, that they may serve the
king of Babylon. 15. And Jeremiah said to Hananiah,(528) The Lord
hath not sent thee, but thou leadest this people to trust in a
lie. 16. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I am about to
dispatch thee from off the face of the ground—this year thou shalt
die. 17. And he was dead(529) by the seventh month.
All praise to Baruch for his concise and vivid report, and to the Greek
translator who has reproduced it! The editors of the Hebrew text have
diluted its strength.
With this narrative we are bound to take the section of the Book entitled
_Of the Prophets_, XXIII. 9-32. The text is in parts uncertain, and
includes obvious expansions. These removed, we can fairly distinguish a
continuous metrical form up to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27.
The metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise the suggestion(530) that
the whole is rhetorical prose, between which and metre proper it is often
hard, as we have seen, to draw the line. But we have also learned how
often and how naturally irregular, when the subject requires it,
Jeremiah’s metres tend to become. So I have ventured, with the help of the
Greek, to render the whole as metre, in which form are parts beyond doubt.
Verses 18 and 30-32 are in prose, and both, but more probably the former,
may be later additions, as are 19, 20, and clauses in 9, 10.
There is no reason against taking the remainder as Oracles by Jeremiah
himself. No dates are given them; they probably come from various stages
of his ministry, for he early found out the false prophets, and his
experience of them and their errors lasted to the end. But probably this
collection of the Oracles was made under Ṣedekiah; that Baruch gathered it
still later is not so likely.
Of the prophets:— XXIII. 9
Broken my heart within me,
All pithless my bones.
I’m become like a drunken man
Like a wight overcome with wine.(531)
Of adulterers the land is full 10
Their course it is evil,(532)
Their might not right.
For prophet and priest alike 11
Are utterly godless.(533)
E’en in My House their evil I find—
Rede of the Lord.
Therefore their way shall they have 12
In slippery places,
Thrust shall they be into darkness(534)
And fall therein,
When I bring calamity on them,
The year of their visitation.
In Samaria’s prophets I saw the unseemly, 13
By Baal they prophesied.(535)
In Jerusalem’s prophets I see the horrible— 14
Adultery, walking in lies.
They strengthen the hands of ill-doers,
That none from his wickedness turns.
To Me they are all like Sodom,
Like Gomorra her(536) dwellers!
Therefore thus saith the Lord:(537) 15
Behold, I will feed them with wormwood,
And drug them with poison.(538)
For forth from Jerusalem’s prophets
Godlessness starts o’er the land.
Thus saith the Lord of Hosts 16
Hearken not to the words of the prophets
They make them bubbles,(539)
A vision from their hearts they speak,
Not from the mouth of the Lord.
Saying to the scorners of His(540) Word 17
“Peace shall be yours;”
To all who follow their stubborn hearts
“No evil shall reach you!”
18. [For who hath stood in the council of the Lord and hath seen
His Word? Who hath attended and heard?](541)
I have not sent the prophets, 21
Of themselves they run.
I have not spoken to them,
They do the prophesying.
If they had stood in My Council, 22
And heard My Words,
My people they would have been turning(542)
From(543) the wrong of their doings.
I am a God who is near 23
Not a God who is far.(544)
Can any man hide him in secret 24
And I not see him?
Is it not heaven and earth that I fill?—
Rede of the Lord.
I have heard what the prophets say 25
Who preach in My Name,
Falsely saying, “I have dreamed,
I have dreamed, I have dreamed.”(545)
Will the heart of the prophets turn,(546) 26
Who prophesy lies?
And in their prophesying ... (?)(547)
The deceit of their heart,
Who plan that My people forget My Name(548) 27
Through the dreams they tell,
Just as their fathers forgot
My Name through Baal.
The prophet with whom is a dream 28
Let him tell his(549) dream;
But he with whom is My Word,
My Word let him speak in truth.
What has the straw with the wheat?(550)
—Rede of the Lord—
My Word, is it not(551) like fire 29
And the hammer that shatters the rock?
30. Therefore, Behold, I am against the prophets—Rede of the
Lord—who steal My Words each from his mate. 31. Behold, I am
against the prophets who fling out their tongues and rede a
Rede.(552) 32. Behold, I am against the prophets of false dreams
who tell them and lead My people astray by their falsehood and
extravagance(553)—not I have sent them or charged them, nor of any
profit whatsoever are they to this people.(554)
We have now all the material available for judgment upon Jeremiah’s
life-long controversy with the other prophets. His message and theirs were
diametrically opposite. But both he and they spoke in the name of the same
God, the God of their nation. Both were convinced that they had His Mind.
Both were sure that their respective predictions would be fulfilled. Each
repudiated the other’s claim to speak in the name of their nation’s God.
With each it was an affair of strong, personal convictions, which we may
grant, in the case of some at least of Jeremiah’s opponents, to have been
as honest as his. At first sight it may seem hopeless to analyse such
equal assurances, based apparently on identical grounds, with the view of
discovering psychological differences between them; and as if we must
leave the issue to the course of events to which both parties confidently
appealed. Even here the decision is not wholly in favour of the one as
against the others. For Jeremiah’s predictions in the Name of the Lord
were not always fulfilled as he had shaped them. The northern executioners
of the Divine Judgment upon Judah were not the Scythians as he at first
expected; and—a smaller matter—Jehoiakim was not _buried with the burial
of an ass, dragged and flung out from the gates of Jerusalem_, but _slept
with his fathers_.(555) Yet these are only exceptions. Jeremiah’s
prophesying was in substance vindicated by history, while the predictions
of the other prophets were utterly belied. This is part of Jeremiah’s
meaning when he says, _Of no profit whatsoever are they to this
people_.(556)
What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the
similar surfaces of Jeremiah’s and the prophets’ assurances we find two
deep distinctions between them—one moral and one intellectual.
We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the
prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their
God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel
from the level of that tribal system of religion which prevailed
throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of
Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from
them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith
in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however
close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high
His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a
generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unworthy of
His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the
hands of their enemies.(557) _What else can I do?_ Jeremiah hears God say.
The opposing prophets reply, _Not He!_ This is the ground of his charge
against them, that they plan to make the _people forget the Name_, the
revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as _their fathers forgat Him
through Baal_,(558) confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local
god.(559) This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is
clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of
course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of
their time—on the one side his acute conscience of the vices that
corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those
vices. They would _heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly_,
saying _it is well, it is well when well it is not_, and in their
prophesying there was no call to repentance.(560) Moreover, though this
may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among
the exiles were _partakers of other men’s sins_; for Jeremiah charges them
with the prevailing immoralities of the day—adultery and untruth. Instead
of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness
that spread through the land.(561) Though we have only Jeremiah’s—or
Baruch’s—word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the
adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the
fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah’s charges are
therefore not incredible.
But the grounds of the difference between Jeremiah and the other prophets
were also intellectual. Jeremiah had the right eye for events and
throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells us how the will of God was
sometimes suggested to him by the sight of certain physical objects—the
almond-blossom that broke the winter of Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or
the potter at his wheel—so the sight of that in which the physical and
spiritual mingled, the disposition and progress of the political forces of
his world, made clear to him the particular lines upon which the ethically
certain doom of Judah would arrive. He had the open eye for events and
allowed neither that horror of his people’s ruin, of which he tells us his
heart was full, nor any other motive of patriotism, nor temptations to the
easier life that had surely been his by flattery and the promise of peace
to his contemporaries, to blind him to the clear and just reading of his
times, to which God’s Word and his faith in the Divine character had
opened his vision. On the contrary the other prophets, to take them at
their best, were blinded by their patriotism, blinded by it even after
Carchemish and when the grasp of Babylon was sensibly closing upon
Judah—even after the first captivity and when the siege of Jerusalem could
only end in her downfall and destruction. Nothing proved sufficient to
open such eyes to the signs of the times.
Making allowance, then, for the fact that we depend for our knowledge of
the controversy upon the record of only one of the parties to it, and
imputing to the other prophets the best possible, we are left with these
results: that as proved by events the truth was with Jeremiah’s word and
not with that of his opponents, and that the causes of this were his
profoundly deeper ethical conceptions of God working in concert with his
unwarped understanding of the political and military movements of his
time.
To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets
who were against him.
Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that
had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for
this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he
opposed _the Word of the Living God_, Who spoke to the times and freely
acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.
Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to
their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In
contrast, not merely were Jeremiah’s prophecies conditional but the
conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His
doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the
Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last
he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom
He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.
Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage Jeremiah showed patience
with his opponents, the patience which is proof of the soundness of a
man’s own convictions. He believed in “the liberty of prophesying,”
The prophet with whom is a dream
Let him tell his dream,
And he with whom is My Word,
My Word let him speak in truth!
Jeremiah had no fear of the issue being threshed out between them. The
wheat would be surely cleared from the straw.(562) That is a confidence
which attracts our trust. In the strength of it Jeremiah was enabled to
pause and reflect on the apparently equal confidence which he encountered
in his opponents, and to give this every opportunity to prove itself to
him before he repeated his own convictions. I cannot think, as many do,
that his words to Hananiah were sarcastic; and when Hananiah broke the
yoke on Jeremiah’s shoulders, and it is said, _But Jeremiah went his way_,
this was not in contempt but to think out the issue between them.(563) Nor
do I feel sarcasm in his wish that his opponents’ predictions of the
return of the sacred vessels from Babylon might be fulfilled.(564) His
brave calm words to the prophets and priests who sought his life in the
Temple in 604(565) bear similar testimony. All these are the marks of an
honest, patient and reflective mind which weighs opinions opposite to its
own.
Further still, Jeremiah had to his credit that of which his opponents
appear to have been devoid. As we have seen no prophet was less sure of
himself, or more reluctant to discharge the duties of a prophet.
Everywhere he gives evidence of being impelled by a force not his own and
against his will.(566) But the other prophets show no sign of this
accrediting reluctance. They eagerly launch forth on their mission; _fling
about their tongues, and rede a Rede_ of the Lord.(567) They give no
impression of a force behind them. Jeremiah says that _they run of
themselves_ and _prophesy of themselves_, they have not been sent.(568) We
still keep in mind that we owe the accounts of them to Jeremiah and
Baruch, their opponents. But our own experience of life enables us to
recognise the portraits presented to us, as of characters found in every
age: pushful men, who have no doubts of their omniscience, but, however
patriotic or religious or learned, leave upon their contemporaries no
impression of their being driven by another force than themselves, and
whose opinions either are belied by events, or melt into the air.
One point remains. In answering Hananiah Jeremiah adduced the example of
the acknowledged prophets of the past as being always prophets of doom, so
that the presumption was in favour of those who still preached doom; yet
he allowed that if any prophet promised peace, and peace came to pass, he
also might be known as genuine. That was sound history, and in the
circumstances of the day it was also sound sense.
3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)
History has no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great
teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those
of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First
in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews
by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet’s feet as low as the feet
of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties of defence, the last
crusts. His hunger, and, what is still keener, his pity for those who
suffer it with him, may break his faith into cowardice and superstition.
But if faith stands, and common-sense with it, his opportunities are high.
His powers of spiritual vision may prove to be also those of political and
even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a
victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics,
to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a
hero.
The Old Testament gives us three instances—Elisha’s brave visions during
the Syrian blockade of Dothan and siege of Samaria; Isaiah, upon the
solitary strength of his faith, carrying Jerusalem inviolate through her
siege by the Assyrians; and now a century later Jeremiah, with a more
costly courage, counselling her surrender to the Babylonians.
The records of the Prophet’s activity and sufferings during the siege are
so curiously scattered through the Book and furnished with such headlines
as to leave it clear that they were added at different times and possibly
from different sources. Some of them raise the question whether or not
they are doublets.
Three, XXI. 1-10, XXXIV. 1-7, XXXVII. 3-10, bear pronouncements by
Jeremiah that the city must surrender or be stormed and burned. Of these
the first and third each gives as the occasion of the pronouncement it
quotes, Ṣedekiah’s mission of two men to the Prophet. Several critics
regard these missions as identical. But can we doubt that during that
crisis of two years the distracted king would send more than once for a
Divine word? And for this what moments were so natural as when the
Chaldeans were beginning the siege, XXI. 4, and when they raised it,
XXXVII. 5? That one of the two messengers is on each occasion the same
affords an inadequate reason—and no other exists—for arguing that both
passages are but differently telling the same story.(569) Nor have any
grounds been offered for identifying the occasion of either passage with
that of XXXIV. 1-7. Thus we have three separate deliverances from Jeremiah
to the king, each with its own vivid phrases and distinctive edge.
The first, XXI 1-10, was given as the Chaldeans closed upon Jerusalem but
the Jews were not yet driven within the walls.(570) Ṣedekiah sent Pashḥur
and Ṣephaniah to inquire if by a miracle the Lord would raise the siege.
The grim answer came that the Lord Himself would fight the besieged, till
they died of pestilence and the survivors were slaughtered by
Nebuchadrezzar—_I_(_571_)_ shall not spare nor pity them_—which is proof
that this Oracle was uttered before the end of the siege, when the
survivors were not slain but deported. The people are advised to desert to
the enemy—counsel which we shall consider later.
The second, XXXIV. 1-7, records a pronouncement unsought by the king but
evoked from Jeremiah by the progress of the Chaldean arms, which had
overrun all Judah save the fortresses of Jerusalem, Lachish and Azekah.
Its vivid genuineness is further certified by its unfulfilled promise of a
peaceful death for Ṣedekiah. The following is mainly after the Greek.
XXXIV. 2_b_. Thus saith the Lord: This city shall certainly be
given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it
and burn it with fire. 3. And thou shalt not escape but surely be
taken and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall look into
his eyes, and his mouth speak with thy mouth,(572) and to Babylon
shalt thou come. 4. Yet hear the Lord’s Word, O Ṣedekiah, king of
Judah! 5. Thus saith the Lord,(573) In peace shalt thou die, and
as the burnings(574) for thy fathers who reigned before thee so
shall they burn for thee, and with “Ah lord!” lament thee. I have
spoken the Word—Rede of the Lord.
The miserable king, how much worse was in store for him than even Jeremiah
was given to foresee! Duhm (to our surprise, as Cornill remarks) agrees
that the passage is from Baruch; but only in order to support the
precarious thesis that Baruch knew nothing of Ṣedekiah’s being afterwards
blinded and that the reports of this(575) sprang from unfounded rumour.
The third pronouncement to Ṣedekiah, XXXVII. 3-10,(576) was made when the
king sent Jehucal and Ṣephaniah to seek the Prophet’s prayers, after the
Chaldeans had raised the siege in order to meet the reported Egyptian
advance to the relief of Jerusalem.
XXXVII. 7. Thus saith the Lord: Thus say ye to the king of Judah
who sent you to inquire of Me,(577) Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which
is coming forth to help you, shall return to the land of Egypt. 8.
And the Chaldeans shall come back and fight against this city and
take it and burn it with fire. 9. For(578) thus saith the Lord:
Deceive not yourselves saying, The Chaldeans shall surely go off
from us; they shall not go. 10. Even though ye smote the whole
host of the Chaldeans that are fighting with you, and but wounded
men were left, yet should these rise, each in his tent,(579) and
burn this city with fire.
It is very remarkable how the spiritual powers of the Prophet endowed him
with these sound views of the facts of his time, and of their
eventualities whether in the political or in the military sphere. For
nearly forty years he had foretold judgment on his people out of the
North: for eighteen at least he had been sure that its instrument would be
Nebuchadrezzar and he had foreseen the first deportation of the Jews to
Babylonia. Now step by step through the siege he is clear as to what must
happen—clear that the Chaldeans will invest the city, clear when they
raise the investment that they will beat off the Egyptian army of relief
and return, clear that resistance to them is hopeless, and will but add
thousands of deaths by famine and pestilence before the city is taken and
burned and its survivors carried into exile—all of which comes to pass.
But this political sagacity and military foresight have their source in
moral and spiritual convictions—the Prophet’s assurance of the character
and will of God, his faith in the Divine Government not of a single nation
but of all the powers of the world, and his belief that a people is saved
and will endure for the service of mankind, neither because of past
privileges nor by the traditions in which it trusts, nor by adherence to
dogmas however vital these have been to its fathers, nor even by its
passionate patriotism and its stubborn gallantry in defence of land and
homes, but only by its justice, its purity, and its obedience to God’s
will. These are the spiritual convictions which alone keep the Prophet’s
eyes open and his heart steadfast through the fluctuations of policy and
of military fortune that shake his world, and under the agony of appearing
to be a traitor to his country and of preaching the doom of a people whom
he loves with all his soul.