Jeremiah’s; but it uses Jacob, the later literature’s favourite name for
Israel, which Jeremiah does not use, and (in the last two verses) some
phrases with an outlook reminiscent of the Second Isaiah. The verses
describe a day when the world shall again be shaken, but out of the
shaking Israel’s deliverance shall come.
[The sound of trembling we hear, XXX. 5
Dread without peace.
Enquire now and look ye, 6
If men be bearing?
Why then do I see every man(616)
With his hands on his loins?
All faces are changed, and
Livid become.(617)
For great is that day, 7
None is there like it,
With a time of trouble for Jacob.
Yet out of it saved shall he be.
It shall come to pass on that day— 8
Rede of the Lord—
I will break their(618) yoke from their(619) neck,
Their(620) thongs I will burst;
And strangers no more shall they serve,(621)
But serve the Lord their God, 9
And David their king,
Whom I will raise up for them.]
The next piece is more probably Jeremiah’s, as even Duhm admits; verses 10
and 11 which precede it are not given in the Greek.
Healless to me is thy ruin, 12
Sick is thy wound,
Not for thy sore is remede, 13
No closing (of wounds) for thee!
Forgot thee have all thy lovers, 14
Thee they seek not.
With the stroke of a foe I have struck thee,
A cruel correction.
Why criest thou over thy ruin, 15
Thy healless pain?
For the mass of thy guilt, thy sins profuse
Have I done to thee these.
If these Qînah quatrains are not Jeremiah’s, some one else could match him
to the letter and the very breath. They would fall fitly from his lips
immediately upon the fulfilment of his people’s doom. Less probably his
are the verses which follow and abruptly add to his stern rehearsal of
judgment on Judah the promise of her deliverance, even introducing this
with a _therefore_ as if deliverance were the certain corollary of
judgment—a conclusion not to be grudged by us to the faith of a later
believer; for it is not untrue that the sinner’s extremest need is the
occasion for God’s salvation.(622) Yet the sudden transition feels
artificial, and lacks, be it observed, what we should expect from Jeremiah
himself, a call to the doomed people to repent. Note, too, the breakdown
of the metre under a certain redundancy, which is not characteristic of
Jeremiah.
[Therefore thy devourers shall all be devoured, 16
And all thine oppressors.
All shall go off to captivity;
Thy spoilers for spoil shall be
And all that upon thee do prey, I give for prey.
For new flesh I shall bring up upon thee, 17
From thy wounds I shall heal thee;(623)
Outcast they called thee, O Ṣion,
Whom none seeketh after.]
The rest of the chapter is even less capable of being assigned to
Jeremiah.
More of Jeremiah’s own Oracles are readily recognised in Ch. XXXI. I leave
to a later lecture the question of the authenticity of that on The New
Covenant and of the immediately preceding verses;(624) while the verses
which close the chapter are certainly not the Prophet’s. But I take now
the rest of the chapter, verses 1-28. The first of these may be editorial,
the link by which the compiler has connected Chs. XXX and XXXI; yet there
is nothing to prevent us from hearing in it Jeremiah himself.
XXXI. 1. At that time—Rede of the Lord—I shall be God to all the
families(625) of Israel, and they shall be a people to Me.
A poem follows which metrically and in substance bears every mark of being
Jeremiah’s. The measure is his favourite Qînah, and the memory of the
Lord’s ancient love for Israel, which had stirred the youth of the
Prophet,(626) revives in his old age and is the motive of his assurance
that Israel will be restored. It is of Ephraim as well as of Judah that he
thinks, indeed of Ephraim especially. We have seen how the heart of this
son of Anathoth-in-Benjamin was early drawn to the exiles from that
province on which the northward windows of his village looked out.(627)
Now once more he was in Benjamin’s territory, at Ramah and at Miṣpah, with
the same northward prospect. Naturally his heart went out again to Ephraim
and its banished folk. Of the priestly tribe as Jeremiah’s family were,
their long residence in the land of Benjamin must have infected them with
Benjamin’s sense of a closer kinship to Ephraim, the son of Joseph, the
son of Rachel, than to Judah, the son of Leah. And there was, in addition,
the influence of neighbourhood. If blood be thicker than water it is
equally true that watered blood is warmed to affection by nearness of
locality and closeness of association.(628)
It is questionable whether the opening couplet quotes the deliverance of
Israel from Egypt as a precedent for the future return of the northern
tribes from captivity, described in the lines that follow; or whether this
return is at once predicted by the couplet, with the usual prophetic
assurance as though it had already happened. If we take _the desert_ as
this is taken in Hosea II. 14, we may decide for the latter alternative.
Grace have they found in the desert, XXXI. 2
The people escaped from the sword;
While Israel makes for his rest from afar
The Lord appears to him(629): 3
“With a love from of old I have loved thee,
So in troth I (now) draw thee.(630)
“I will rebuild thee, and built shalt thou be, 4
Maiden of Israel!
“Again thou shalt take(631) thee thy timbrels
And forth to the merrymen’s dances.
“Again shall vineyards be planted(632) 5
On the hills of Samaria,
“Planters shall surely plant them(?)
And forthwith enjoy(633) (their fruit).
“For comes the day when watchmen are calling 6
On Ephraim’s mountains:
“Rise, let us go up to Ṣion,
To the Lord our God.”
The everyday happiness promised is striking. Here speaks again the man,
who, while ruin ran over the land, redeemed his ancestral acres in pledge
of the resettlement of all his people upon their own farms and fields. He
is back in the country, upon the landscapes of his youth, and in this
fresh prospect of the restoration of Israel he puts first the common joys
and fruitful labours of rural life, and only after these the national
worship centred in Jerusalem. Cornill denies this last verse to Jeremiah,
feeling it inconsistent with the Prophet’s condemnation of the Temple and
the Sacrifices.(634) But that condemnation had been uttered by Jeremiah
because of his contemporaries’ sinful use of the House of God, whereas now
he is looking into a new dispensation. How could he more signally clinch
the promise of that reunion of Israel and Judah, for which all his life he
had longed, than by this call to them to worship together?
The next verses are not so recognisable as Jeremiah’s, unless it be in
their last couplet. The rest rather reflect the Return from Exile as on
the point of coming to pass, which happened long after Jeremiah’s time;
and they call the nation _Jacob_, the name favoured by prophets of the end
of the Exile.
[Ring out with joy for Jacob, 7
Shout for (?) the head of the nations,(635)
Publish ye, praise ye and say,
The Lord hath saved His(636) people,
The Remnant of Israel!
Behold from the North I bring them, 8
And gather from ends of the earth;
Their blind and their lame together,
The mother-to-be and her who hath borne.
In concourse great back they come hither.
With weeping forth did they go,(637) 9
With consolations(638) I bring them,
I lead them by(639) streams of water,
On an even way,
They stumble not on it](640)
For a father I am become to Israel,
And my first-born is Ephraim!
This couplet may well be Jeremiah’s; but whether it should immediately
follow verse 6 is doubtful. The next lines are hardly his, bearing the
same marks of the late exile as we have seen in verses 7-9_a_.
[Hear, O nations, the Word of the Lord, 10
And declare on the far-away isles(641):
Who hath scattered Israel will gather,
And guard as a shepherd his flock.
For the Lord hath ransomed Jacob 11
And redeemed from the hand of the stronger than he.
They are come and ring out on Mount Ṣion, 12
Radiant(642) all with the wealth of the Lord,
With the corn, the new wine, the fresh oil,
The young of the flock and the herd;
Till their soul becomes as a garden well-watered,
Nor again any more shall they pine.
Then rejoice in the dance shall the maidens, 13
The youths and the old make merry.(643)
When their mourning I turn to mirth(644)
And give them joy from their sorrow.
When I richly water the soul of the priests,(645) 14
And My folk with My bounty are filled—
Rede of the Lord.]
The next poems no one denies to Jeremiah; they are among the finest we
have from him. And how natural that he should conceive and utter them in
those quiet days when he was at, or near, Ramah, the grave of the mother
of the people.(646) He hears her century-long travail of mourning for the
loss of the tribes that were sprung from her Joseph, aggravated now by the
banishment of her Benjamin; but hears too the promise that her travail
shall be rewarded by their return. The childless old man has the soul of
mother and father both—now weeping with the comfortless Rachel and now, in
human touches unmatched outside the Parable of the Prodigal, reading into
the heart of God the same instinctive affections, to which, in spite of
himself, every earthly father is stirred by the mere mention of the name
of a rebellious and wandered son. The most vivid details are these: _after
I had been brought to know_, which might also be translated _after I had
been made to know myself_ and so anticipate _when he came to himself_ of
our Lord’s Parable; _I smote on my thigh_, the gesture of despair; and in
20_a_ the very human attribution to the Deity of surprise that the mere
name of Ephraim should move Him to affection, which recalls both in form
and substance the similar question attributed to the Lord in XII. 9.
There is no reason to try, as some do, to correct in the poems their
broken measures, for these both suit and add to the poignancy and
tenderness which throb through the whole.(647)
Hark, in Ramah is heard lamentation 15
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,(648)
For they are not.
Thus saith the Lord: 16
Refrain thy voice from weeping,
And from tears thine eyes,
For reward there is for thy travail—
They are back from the land of the foe!
[And hope there is for thy future, 17
Thy sons come back to their border.](649)
I have heard, I have heard 18
Ephraim bemoaning,
“Thou hast chastened me, chastened I am,
Like a calf untrained.
“Turn me Thyself, and return I will,
For Thou art my God.
“For after I had turned away (?)(650) 19
I repented ... (?)
“And after I was brought to know,(651)
I smote on my thigh.
“I am shaméd, yea and confounded,
As I bear the reproach of my youth.”(652)
Is Ephraim My dearest son,(653) 20
A child of delights?
That as oft as against him I speak
I must think of him still.
My bowels for him are yearning,
Pity him I must!—Rede of the Lord.
Set thee up way-marks, 21
Plant thyself guide-posts!
Put to the highway thy heart,
The way that thou wentest.
Come back, O maiden of Israel, 22
Back to thy towns here.
How long to drift hither and thither,
Thou turn-about daughter!
[For the Lord hath created a new thing on earth,
A female shall compass a man.](654)
The next small poem, when we take from it certain marks of a later date is
possibly Jeremiah’s, though this is not certain; to the previous Oracles
on Ephraim it naturally adds one upon Judah.
Thus saith the Lord:(655) 23
Once more shall they speak this word.
In Judah’s land and her towns,
When I turn again their captivity:
“The Lord thee bless, homestead of justice!”(656)
In Judah and all her towns shall be dwelling 24
Tillers and they that roam with flocks,
For I have refreshed the(657) weary soul, 25
And cheered every soul that was pining.
[On this I awoke and beheld, 26
And sweet unto me was my sleep.](658)
Behold, are coming the days— 27
Rede of the Lord—
When Israel and Judah(659) I sow
With the seed of man and of beast;
And it shall be, as I was wakeful upon them 28
To tear down and do evil,(660)
So wakeful on them will I be,
To build and to plant—
Rede of the Lord.
These prophecies of the physical restoration of Israel and Judah are fitly
followed by two, in what is rather rhythmical prose than verse, which
define the moral and spiritual aspects of the new dispensation; both
laying stress on individual responsibility, the one in ethics, 29, 30, the
other in religion, 31 ff., the proclamation of The New Covenant. They are
no doubt Jeremiah’s: we shall take them up in the last lecture.
The time of relief and fair promise, out of which we have supposed that
the Prophet conceived and uttered the preceding Oracles, came to a sudden
and tragic close with the assassination of the good governor Gedaliah by
the fanatic Ishmael. Had this not happened we can see from those Oracles
on what favourable lines the restoration of Judah might have proceeded
under the co-operation of Gedaliah and Jeremiah, and how after so long and
heart-breaking a mission of doom to his people the Prophet might at last
have achieved before his eyes some positive part in their social and
political reconstruction; for certainly he had already proved his
practical ability as well his power of far vision. But even such sunset
success was denied him, and once more his people crumbled under his hand.
God provided some better thing for him in the spiritual future of Israel,
to which he must now pass through still deeper sacrifice and
humiliation.(661)
Ishmael, against whom the noble Gedaliah would take no warning, was one of
those fanatics with whom the Jewish nation have been cursed at all crises
in their history.(662) The motive for his crime was the same as had
inspired the fatal defence of Jerusalem, a blind passion against the
Chaldean rule. Having slain Gedaliah he attempted to remove the little
remnant at Miṣpah to the other side of Jordan but was overtaken by a force
under Gedaliah’s lieutenant, Johanan-ben-Kareah, and his captives were
recovered. Fearing the wrath of the Chaldeans for the murder of their
deputy, the little flock did not return to Miṣpah but moved south to
Gidroth(663)-Chimham near Bethlehem, broken, trembling, and uncertain
whether to remain in their land or to flee from it.(664)
The Prophet was the one hope left to them, and like Ṣedekiah they turned
to him in their perplexity for a word of guidance from the Lord. With his
usual deliberation he took ten days to answer, laying the matter before
the Lord in prayer; studying, we may be sure, the actual facts of the
situation (including what he already knew to be the people’s hope of
finding security in Egypt) and carefully sifting out his own thoughts and
impulses from the convictions which his prayers brought him from God. The
result was clear: the people must abide in their land and not fear the
Chaldeans, who under God’s hand would let them be; but if they set their
faces for Egypt, the sword which they feared would overtake them. This was
God’s Word; if they broke their promise to obey it, they would surely
die.(665)
With shame we read the rest of the story. Jeremiah had well discerned(666)
that those of his countrymen, who had been deported in 597, were the good
figs of his vision and those who remained the bad. The latter were of the
breed that had turned Temple and Sacrifice into fetishes, for as such they
now treated the Prophet, the greatest whom God ever sent to Israel.
Covetous of having him with them they eagerly asked him for a Word of the
Lord, promising to obey it, in the expectation of their kind that it would
be according to their own ignorant wishes; but when it declared against
these, they scolded Jeremiah as disappointed barbarians do their idols,
and presuming on his age as a weakness, complained that he had been set
against them by Baruch, a philo-Chaldean who would have them all carried
off to Babylon! So Baruch also—all praise to him—held the same sane views
of the situation as his Prophet and as that wise governor Gedaliah. In
spite of their promise they refused to obey the Word of the Lord, fled for
Egypt carrying with them Jeremiah and Baruch, and reached the frontier
town of Tahpanhes. How it must have broken the Prophet’s heart!(667)
But not his honesty or his courage! At Tahpanhes he set before the
fugitives one of those symbols which had been characteristic of his
prophesying. He laid great stones in the entry of the house of the Pharaoh
and declared that Nebuchadrezzar would plant his throne and spread his
tapestries upon them, when he came to smite Egypt, assuming that land as
easily as a shepherd dons his garment; and after breaking the obelisks of
its gods and burning their temples he would safely depart from it.(668)
So far the narrative runs clearly, but in Ch. XLIV, the last that is
written of Jeremiah, the expander has been specially busy.(669) The
chapter opens, verses 1-14, with what purports to be an Oracle by Jeremiah
concerning, not the little band which had brought him down with them, but
_all the Jews which were dwelling in the land of Egypt, at Migdol and
Tahpanhes_,(670) on the northern frontier, _and in the land of Pathros_,
or Upper Egypt. It is not said that these came to Tahpanhes to receive the
Oracle. Yet the arrival of a company fresh from Judah and her recent awful
experiences must have stirred the Jewish communities already in Egypt and
drawn at least representatives of them to Tahpanhes to see and to hear the
newcomers. If so, it would be natural for Jeremiah to expound the
happenings in Judah, and the Divine reasons for them. No date is given for
the Prophet’s Oracle. This need not have been uttered for some time after
he reached Egypt, when he was able to acquaint himself with the conditions
and character of his countrymen in their pagan environment, and learn in
particular how they had fallen away like their fathers to the worship of
other gods. Such indeed is the double theme of the words attributed to
him. He is made to say that Jerusalem and Judah are now desolate because
of their people’s wickedness, and especially their idolatry, in stubborn
disobedience to the repeated Word of their God by His prophets; surely a
similar punishment must befall the Jews in Egypt, for they also have given
themselves to idols. But so awkwardly and diffusely is the Oracle reported
to us that we cannot doubt that, whatever its original form was, this has
been considerably expanded. At least we may be sure that Jeremiah uttered
some Oracle against the idolatry of the Jews in Egypt, for in what follows
they give their answer.
From verse 15 the story and the words it reports become—with the help of
the briefer Greek version and the elision of manifest additions in both
the Hebrew and the Greek texts(671)—more definite. Either _both_ the men
whom Jeremiah addressed _and_ their women, or, as is textually more
probable, the women alone answered him in the following remarkable terms.
These run in rhythmical prose, that almost throughout falls into metrical
lines, which the English reader may easily discriminate for himself.
XLIV. 16. The word which thou hast spoken to us in the Name of the
Lord!—we will not hearken to thee! 17. But we shall surely perform
every word, which has gone forth from our mouth:(672) to burn to
the Queen of Heaven and pour her libations, as we and our fathers
did, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and streets
of Jerusalem, and had fulness of bread, and were well and saw no
evil. 18. But since we left off to burn to the Queen of Heaven,
and to pour her libations, we have lacked everything and been by
the sword and the famine consumed. 19. And(673) while we were
burning to the Queen of Heaven and poured her libations, did we
make her cakes(674) and pour her libations without our husbands?
This was a straight challenge to the prophet, returning to him the form of
his own argument. As he had traced the calamities of Judah to her
disobedience of Yahweh, they traced those which hit themselves hardest as
women to their having ceased to worship Ashtoreth. What could Jeremiah
answer to logic formally so identical with his own? The first of the
answers attributed to him, verses 20-23, asserts that among their other
sins it was their worship of the Queen of Heaven, and not, as they said,
their desisting from it, which had worked their doom. But this answer is
too full of deuteronomic phrasing for the whole of it to be the Prophet’s;
if any of it is genuine this can only be part of the obviously expanded
opening, 21, 22_a_.
The real, the characteristic answers of Jeremiah are the others: to the
women reported in verses 24, 25, and to all the Jews in Egypt 26-28; in
which respectively he treats the claim of the women ironically, and leaves
the issue between his word and that of his opponents to be decided by the
event. These answers also have been expanded, but we may reasonably take
the following to be original.(675) Note how they connect in verse 24 with
verse 19. I again follow the Greek.
XLIV. 24. And Jeremiah said [to the people and] to the women, [25]
Hear the Word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord, Israel’s God:
Ye women(676) have said with your mouths
And fulfilled with your hands,
“We must indeed perform our vows,
Which we have vowed,
“To burn to the Queen of Heaven,
And to pour her libations!”
Indeed then establish your words(677)
And perform your vows!
Jeremiah “adds this by way of irony.”(678) Having thus finished with the
women, he adds an Oracle to the Jews in general.
26. Therefore hear the Word of the Lord all Judah, who are settled
in the land of Egypt:
By My great Name I swear,
Sayeth the Lord,
That My Name shall no more be called
By the mouth of a man of Judah—
Saying, “As liveth the Lord!”—
In all the land of Egypt.
Lo, I am wakeful upon you 27
For evil and not for good.(679)
And the remnant of Judah shall know, 28_b_
Whose is the word that shall stand.(680)
These are the last words we have from him, and up to these last he is
still himself—broken-hearted indeed and disappointed in the ultimate
remnant of his people—but still himself in his honesty, his steadfastness
to the truth and his courage; still himself in his irony, his
deliberateness and his confident appeal to the future for the vindication
of his word.
So he disappears from our sight. How pathetic that even after his death he
is not spared from spoiling but that the last clear streams of his
prophesying must run out, as we have seen, in the sands of those
expanders!
Lecture VII.
THE STORY OF HIS SOUL.
In this Lecture I propose to gather up the story of the soul of the man,
whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the
more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives
lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards
occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy
between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal
powers or ambition—the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With
Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.
1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI.
9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)
If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means _Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots
forth_, it fitly describes the Prophet’s temper, struggles and fate. For
he was a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a force not his own,
and on a mission from which, from the first, his gifts and affections
recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his passage through
the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal shells
which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle
by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting their end by their explosion.
Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because
of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not
profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though
he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular
pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,
For as oft as I speak I must shriek,
And cry “Violence and Spoil!”(681)