told the garrison and citizens of St. Andrews, when besieged by the
French, that “their corrupt life could not escape punishment of God and
that was his continued advertisement from the time he was called to
preach” among them. “When they triumphed of their victory (the first
twenty days they had many prosperous chances) he lamented and ever said
‘They saw not what he saw!’ When they bragged of the force and thickness
of their walls, he said, ‘They should be but egg-shells!’ When they
vaunted ‘England will rescue us!’ he said, ‘Ye shall not see them, but ye
shall be delivered into your enemies’ hands and shall be carried to a
strange country!’ ” that is France. All of which came to pass, as with
Jeremiah’s main predictions.(580)
The second of Jeremiah’s pronouncements given above is followed by the
story of the besieged’s despicable treatment of their slaves, XXXIV. 8-22;
based on a memoir by Baruch, but expanded. Both the Hebrew and the shorter
Greek offer in parts an uncertain text, and add this problem that their
story begins with a covenant to _proclaim a Liberty_(581) for the Hebrew
slaves in general, while the words which they attribute to Jeremiah limit
it to the emancipation, in terms of a particular law, of those slaves who
had completed six years of service (verse 14).(582) But neither this nor
the other and smaller uncertainties touch the substance of the story.(583)
As the siege began the king and other masters of slaves in Jerusalem
entered into solemn covenant to free their Hebrew slaves, obviously in
order to propitiate their God, and also some would assert (though
unsupported by the text) in order to increase their fighting ranks; but
when the siege was raised they forced their freedmen back to bondage: “a
deathbed repentance with the usual sequel on recovery.”(584) This is the
barest exposure among many we have of the character of the people with
whom Jeremiah had to deal, and justifies the hardest he has said of their
shamelessness.
XXXIV. 17. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not obeyed Me by
proclaiming a Liberty each for his countryman. Behold I am about
to proclaim for you a Liberty—to the sword, to the famine and to
the pestilence, and I will set you a consternation to all kingdoms
of the earth.... 21. And Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes
will I give into the hands of their foes, the king of Babylon’s
host that are gone up from you. 22. Behold, I am about to
command—Rede of the Lord—and bring them back to this city and they
shall storm and take it and burn it with fire, and the townships
of Judah will I make desolate and tenantless.
Are we not in danger of the guilt of a similar perjury to the men who
fought for us in the Great War, and for whom we have not yet fulfilled all
the promises made to them by our governors?
About this time the ill-treatment of Jeremiah, which had ceased on
Ṣedekiah’s accession, was resumed. The narrative, or succession of
narratives, of this begins at XXXVII. 11, and continues to XXXIX. 14, with
interruptions in XXXIX. 1, 2, 4-13. Save for a few expansions, the whole
must have been taken from Baruch’s memoirs. Except for the omission of
XXXIX. 4-13, the differences of the Greek from the Hebrew are unimportant,
consisting in the usual absence of repetitions of titles, epithets and
names.
The siege being raised, Jeremiah was going out by the North gate of the
city to Anathoth to claim or to manage(585) some property there, when he
was arrested by the captain of the watch, and charged with deserting. He
denied this, but was taken to the princes, who flogged him and flung him
into a vault in the house of Jonathan, the Secretary. After many days he
was sent for by the king who asked, _Is there Word from the Lord?_ _There
is_, he replied, and, as if drumming a lesson into a stupid child’s head,
repeated his message, _Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King
of Babylon_. He asked what he had done to be treated as he had been, and,
by contrast, where were the prophets who had said that the Babylonians
would not come to Judah—his irony was not yet starved out of him!—and
begged not to be sent back to the vault. The king committed him to the
Court of the Guard, where at least he was above ground, could receive
visitors, and was granted daily a loaf from the Bakers’ Bazaar while bread
lasted in the city.(586)
Yet through his bars he still defied his foes and they were at him again,
quoting to the king two Oracles which he had uttered before and apparently
was repeating to those who resorted to him in the Guard-Court.
XXXVIII. 1. And Shephatiah, Mattan’s son, Gedaliah Pashḥur’s son,
Jucal Shelamiah’s son, and Pashḥur Malchiah’s son,(587) heard the
words Jeremiah was speaking about the people:(588) [2] “Thus saith
the Lord, He that abides in this city shall die by the sword, the
famine or the pestilence, but he that goes forth to the Chaldeans
shall live—his life shall be to him for a prey but he shall
live.”(589) 3. “Thus(590) saith the Lord: This city shall surely
be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s host and they
shall take it.”
Verse 2 is rejected by Duhm and Cornill partly on the insufficient ground
that verses 2 and 3 have separate introductions and therefore could have
had originally no connection. But in quoting two utterances of the Prophet
for their cumulative effect it was natural to prefix to each his usual
formula. Duhm’s and Cornill’s real motive, however, is their repugnance to
admitting that Jeremiah could have advised desertion from the city. So
Duhm equally rejects XXI. 9, of which XXXVIII. 2 is but an abbreviation;
while Cornill seeks to save XXI. 9 by reading it as a summons to the
_whole_ people to surrender and so distinguishes it from XXXVIII. 2,
advice _to individuals_ to desert. I fail to follow this distinction. The
terms used are as individual in the one verse as in the other; if the one
goes the other must also. But need either go? Duhm’s view is that both are
from a later period, when there was no longer a native government in
Judah, reverence for the monarchy was dead, and the common conscience of
Jewry was not civic but ecclesiastical! This is ingenious, but far from
convincing. There are no grounds either for denying these verses to
Jeremiah, or for reading his advice _to go forth to the Chaldeans_ as
meant otherwise than for the individual citizens.
Was such advice right or wrong? The question is much debated. The two
German scholars just quoted find it so wrong that they cannot think of it
as Jeremiah’s. But in that situation and under the convictions which held
him, the Prophet could not have spoken differently. He knew, and soundly
knew, not only that the city was doomed and that her rulers who persisted
in defending her were senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they
had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or
military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called
constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to
support it. Ṣedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his
suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy
crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so
forsworn and self-disentitled, besides being so insane, as that of the
feeble king and his frantic masters, the princes. For Jeremiah the only
Divine right was Nebuchadrezzar’s. But to the conviction that Ṣedekiah and
the princes were not the lawful lords of Judah, we must add the pity of
the Prophet as he foresaw the men, women and children of his people done
to useless death by the cruel illusions of their illegitimate governors.
Calvin is right, when, after a careful reservation of the duties of
private citizens to their government at war, he pronounces that “Jeremiah
could not have brought better counsel” to the civilians and soldiers of
Jerusalem.(592) And it is no paradox to say that the Prophet’s sincerity
in giving such advice is sealed by his heroic refusal to accept it for
himself and resolution to share to the end what sufferings the obstinacy
of her lords was to bring on the city. Nor, be it observed, did he bribe
his fellow citizens to desert to the enemy by any rich promise. He plainly
told them that this would leave a man nothing but bare life—_his life for
a prey_.
It would, however, be most irrelevant to deduce from so peculiar a
situation, and from the Divine counsels applicable to this alone, any
sanction for “pacificism” in general, or to set up Jeremiah as an example
of the duty of deserting one’s government when at war, in all
circumstances and whatever were the issues at stake. We might as well
affirm that the example of the man, who rouses his family to flee when he
finds their home hopelessly on fire, is valid for him whose house is
threatened by burglars. Isaiah inspired resistance to the Assyrian
besiegers of Jerusalem in his day with as Divine authority as Jeremiah
denounced resistance to the Chaldean besiegers in his. Nor can we doubt
that our Prophet would have appreciated the just, the inevitable revolt of
the Maccabees against their pagan tyrants, which is divinely praised in
the Epistle to the Hebrews as a high example of faith. It is one thing to
deny allegiance, as Jeremiah did, to a government that had broken the oath
on which alone its rights were founded, and the keeping of which was the
sole security for “the stability of the times.” It is another and very
different thing to refuse, on alleged grounds of conscience, to follow
one’s government when it lifts the sword against a people who have broken
_their_ oath, and mobilises its subjects in defence of justice and of the
freedom of weaker nations, imperilled by that perjury.
But the princes seem to have honestly believed that Jeremiah was guilty of
treason, and said to the king—
XXXVIII. 4. Let this man, we pray, be put to death forasmuch as he
weakens the hands of the men of war left to the city and the hands
of all the people by speaking such words to them, for this man is
seeking not the welfare of this people but the hurt. 5. And the
king said, Behold he is in your hand; for the king was not able to
do anything against them.(593) 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast
him into the cistern of Malchiah the king’s son, in the Court of
the Guard; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. In the cistern
there was no water, only mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire.
The story which follows is one of the fairest in the Old Testament,
XXXVIII. 7-13.(594) When no others seem to have stirred to rescue the
Prophet—unless Baruch had a hand in what he tells and is
characteristically silent about it—Ebed-melech, a negro eunuch of the
palace, sought the king where he then was(595) and charged the princes
with starving Jeremiah to death.(596) The king at once ordered him to take
three(597) men and rescue the Prophet. The thoughtful negro, perhaps
prompted by the women of the palace, procured some rags and old clouts
from a lumber room, told Jeremiah to put them under his arm-pits to soften
the roughness of the ropes, and so drew him gently from the mire and he
was restored to the Guard-Court. Ebed-melech had his reward in the Lord’s
promise to save him from the men whom he had made his foes by his brave
rescue of their prey.(598)
Once more, as we might expect, the restless king sent for Jeremiah.(599)
Shaken by his terrible experiences the Prophet, before he would answer,
asked if the king would put him to death for his answer or act on his
advice. The king swore not to hand him over to the princes; so Jeremiah
promised that if Ṣedekiah would give himself up to the Chaldeans he and
his house would be spared and the city saved. The king—it is another
credible trait in this weak character—feared that the Chaldeans would
deliver him to the mockery of those Jews who had already deserted to them.
Jeremiah sought to reassure him, again urged him to surrender, and then
burst out with the vision—an extraordinarily interesting phase of
prophetic ecstasy—of another mockery which the king would suffer from his
own women if he did not yield but waited to be taken captive.
XXXVIII. 21. But if thou refuse to go forth this is the thing the
Lord has given me to see: 22. Behold all the women, that are left
in the king of Judah’s house,(600) brought forth to the princes of
the king of Babylon and saying,
They set thee on and compelled thee,
The men of thy peace;
Now they have plunged thy feet in the swam
They turn back from thee!(601)
The verse is in Jeremiah’s favourite measure, and its figures spring
immediately from his experience. The mire can hardly have dried on him,
into which he had been dropped, but at least his friends had pulled him
out of it; the king had been forced into far deeper mire by his own
counsellors, and they were leaving him in it!
The nervous king jibbed from the vision without remark and begged Jeremiah
not to tell what had passed between them, but, if asked, to say that he
had been supplicating Ṣedekiah not to send him back to the house of
Jonathan; which answer the Prophet obediently gave to the inquisitive
princes and so quieted them: _the matter was not perceived_. He has been
blamed for prevaricating. On this point Calvin is as usual candid and
sane. “It was indeed not a falsehood, but this evasion cannot wholly be
excused. The Prophet had an honest fear; he was perplexed and anxious—it
would be better to die at once than be thus buried alive in the earth....
Yet it was a kind of falsehood. He confesses that he did as the king
charged him and there is no doubt that he had before him the king’s
timidity.... He cannot be wholly exempted from blame. In short, we see how
even the servants of God have spoken evasively when under extreme fear.”
The prophets were _men of like passions with ourselves_. By now Jeremiah
had aged, and was strained by the flogging, the darkness, the filth and
the hunger he had suffered. Can we wonder at or blame him? But with what
authenticity does its frankness stamp the whole story!
With most commentators I have treated Ch. XXXVIII as the account of a
fresh arrest of Jeremiah and a fresh interview between him and Ṣedekiah. I
see, however, that Dr. Skinner takes the whole chapter to be “a
duplication.”(602) He considers it a general improbability that two such
interviews, as XXXVII. 17-21 and XXXVIII. 14-27 relate, “should have taken
place in similar circumstances within so short a time.” Yet the king was
just the man to appeal to the Prophet time after time during the siege.
The similarities in the two stories are natural because circumstances were
more or less similar at the various stages of such a siege; but the
differences are more significant. The vivid details of XXXVIII attest it
as the account of an event and of sayings subsequent to those related in
XXXVII. The Prophet’s precaution, before he would answer, in getting a
pledge that he would not be put to death nor handed over to the princes,
as he had already been, and his consent for Ṣedekiah’s sake, as well as
for his own, to prevaricate to the princes are features not found in the
other reports of such interviews, but intelligible and natural after the
terrible treatment he had suffered. Dr. Skinner, too, admits that the two
accounts may be read as of different experiences of the Prophet, “if we
can suppose that the offence with which he is charged in XXXVIII. 1 ff.
could have been committed while he was a prisoner in the court of the
guard;” but this appears to Dr. Skinner as “hardly credible.” Yet the
incidents related in XXXII. 6-15 show not only that it is credible but
that it actually happened. In the East such imprisonment does not prevent
a prisoner, though shackled, from communicating with his friends and even
with the gaping crowd outside his bars, as I have seen more than once.
In the Court of the Guard Jeremiah remained till the city was taken.(603)
He regained communication with his friends; and it is not surprising to
have as from this time several sayings by him, or to discover from them
that his heart, no longer confined to reiterating the certain doom of the
city, was once more released to the hope of a future for his people, hope
across which the shadow of doubt appears to have fallen but once. His
guard-court prophecies form part of that separate collection, Chs.
XXX-XXXIII, to which the name The Book of Hope has been fitly given. Of
these chapters XXX and XXXI, without date, imply that the city has already
fallen and the exile of her people is complete. But XXXII and XXXIII are
assigned to the last year of the siege and to the Prophet’s confinement to
the guard-court. There is now general agreement that XXXII. 1-5 (or at
least 3-5) are from a later hand, which correctly dates the story it
introduces but attributes Jeremiah’s imprisonment to Ṣedekiah instead of
to the princes, and even seems to confound Ṣedekiah with Jehoiachin; and
_second_ that the story itself, of a transaction between Jeremiah and his
cousin regarding some family property, is genuine, dictated by the Prophet
to Baruch before or after the end of the siege. Some reject as later all
the rest of the chapter: a long prayer by Jeremiah and the Lord’s answer
to it, both of which are full of deuteronomic phrases. Yet that an editor
should have made so large an addition to the book without genuine material
to work from is hardly credible; while it is characteristic of Jeremiah to
have fallen into the doubt his prayer reveals, and this doubt would
naturally be followed by a Divine answer. But such original elements it is
not possible to discriminate exactly from the expansions by which they
have been overlaid.(604)
XXXII. 6. And Jeremiah said, The Word of the Lord came to me
saying, [7] Behold, Hanamel son of Shallum thine uncle is coming
to thee to say, Buy thee my field in Anathoth, for thine is the
right of redemption to buy it. 8. And Hanamel son of my uncle came
to me in the guard-court and said, Buy my field that is Anathoth,
for the right of inheritance is thine and thine the redemption;
buy it for thyself. Then I knew that it was the Lord’s Word. 9. So
I bought the field from Hanamel mine uncle’s son and weighed to
him seventeen silver shekels. 10. And I subscribed the deed and
sealed it and took witnesses, weighing the money in the balances.
11. And I took the deed of sale, both that which was sealed and
that which was open,(605) [12] and I gave it to Baruch son of
Neriah, son of Maḥseiah, in the sight of Hanamel mine uncle’s son,
and in sight of the Jews sitting in the guard-court. 13. And in
their sight I charged Baruch, saying, [14] Thus saith the Lord of
Hosts: Take this deed of sale which is sealed, and this deed which
is open, and put them in an earthen vessel that they may last many
days. 15. For thus saith the Lord, Houses and fields and vineyards
shall yet again be bought in this land. 16. Now after I had given
the deed of sale to Baruch, Neriah’s son, I prayed to the Lord
saying, Ah Lord ... (?) [24] behold the mounts; they are come to
the city to take it, and the city shall be given into the hands of
the Chaldeans who are fighting against it, because of the sword
and the famine and the pestilence; and what Thou hast spoken is
come to pass, and, lo, Thou art seeing it. 25. Yet Thou saidst to
me, Buy thee the field for money, so I wrote the deed and sealed
it and took witnesses—whereas the city is to be given into the
hands of the Chaldeans!
The tone of the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I
have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him,
though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has
undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical
carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis
of his hope for his country’s freedom and prosperity was his own right to
a bit of property in land. Let those observe, who deny to such individual
rights any communal interest or advantage. Jeremiah at least proves how a
small property of his own may help a prophet in his hope for his country
and people.
All this is followed in Ch. XXXIII by a series of oracles under the
heading _The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time while he was
still shut up in the guard-court_. Because verses 14-26 are lacking in the
Greek and could not have been omitted by the translator had they been in
the original text, and because they are composed partly of mere echoes of
Jeremiah and partly of promises for the Monarchy and Priesthood not
consonant with his views of the institutions of Israel, they are very
generally rejected. So are 2 and 3 because of their doubtful relevance and
their style, that of the great prophet of the end of the Exile. The
originality of 1 and 4-13 has also been denied. The question is difficult.
But there is no reason to doubt that the editor had good material for the
data in 1, or that under the Hebrew text, which as it stands in 4, 5 is
impossible(606) and throughout 6-13 has been much expanded, there is
something of Jeremiah’s own. Verses 4 and 5 reflect the siege in progress,
though if the date in verse 1 be correct we must take _torn down_ as
future. In 6-13 are promises of the restoration of the ruined city, of
peace and stability, of the return of the exiles both of Judah and Israel
and of their forgiveness; Jerusalem shall again be a joy, and the voices
of joy, of the bridegroom and bride, and of worship in the Temple, shall
again be heard; shepherds and their flocks shall be restored throughout
Judah and the Negeb. It would be daring to deny to the Prophet the whole
of this prospect. The city was about to be ruined, its houses filled with
dead; the land had already been ravaged. His office of doom was
discharged; it is not unnatural to believe that his great soul broke out
with a vision of the hope beyond for which he had taken so practical a
pledge. That is all we can say; some of the details of the prospect can
hardly be his.(607)
Jerusalem fell at last in 586 and Jeremiah’s imprisonment in the
guard-court was over.(608)
4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)
There are two separated accounts of what befel Jeremiah when the city was
taken. Ch. XXXIX. 3, 14 tells us that he was fetched from the guard-court
by Babylonian officers,(609) and given to Gedaliah, the son of his old
befriender Ahikam, _to be taken home_.(610) At last!—but for only a brief
interval in the life of this homeless and harried man. When a few months
later Nebuṣaradan arrived on his mission to burn the city and deport the
inhabitants Jeremiah is said by Ch. XL to have been carried off in chains
with the rest of the captivity as far as Ramah, where, probably on
Gedaliah’s motion, Nebuṣaradan released him and he joined Gedaliah at
Miṣpah.(611)
It is unfortunate that we take our impressions of Nebuchadrezzar from the
late Book of Daniel instead of from the contemporary accounts of his
policy by Jeremiah, Baruch and Ezekiel. A proof of his wisdom and clemency
is here. While deporting a second multitude to Babylonia in the interests
of peace and order, he placed Judah under a native governor and chose for
the post a Jew of high family traditions and personal character. All
honour to Gedaliah for accepting so difficult and dangerous a task! He
attracted those Jewish captains and their bands who during the siege had
maintained themselves in the country,(612) and advised them to acknowledge
the Chaldean power and to cultivate their lands, which that year
fortunately produced excellent crops. At last there was peace, and the
like-minded Governor and Prophet must together have looked forward to
organising in Judah the nucleus at least of a restored Israel.
To this quiet interval, brief as it tragically proved, we may reasonably
assign those Oracles of Hope which it is possible to recognise as
Jeremiah’s among the series attributed to him in Chs. XXX, XXXI. No
chapters of the book have been more keenly discussed or variously
estimated.(613) Yet at least there is agreement that their compilation is
due to a late editor who has arranged his materials progressively so that
the whole is a unity;(614) that many of these materials are obviously from
the end of the exile in the style then prevailing; but that among them are
genuine Oracles of Jeremiah recognisable by their style. These are
admitted as his by the most drastic of critics. It is indeed incredible
that after such a crisis as the destruction of the Holy City and the exile
of her people, and with the new situation and prospect of Israel before
him, the Prophet should have had nothing to say. And the most probable
date for such utterances of hope as we have now to consider is not that of
his imprisonment but the breathing-space given him after 586, when the
Jewish community left in Judah made such a promising start.(615)