The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day
of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us
feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his
career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his
commission he shall be broken—as indeed he was.
Lord, Thou beguiled’st me, and beguiled I let myself be,
Thou wast too strong for me, Thou hast prevailed.(683)
Power was pain to him; he carried God’s Word as _a burning fire in his
heart_.(684) If the strength and the joy in which others rise on their
gifts ever came to him they quickly fled. Isaiah, the only other prophet
comparable, accepts his mission and springs to it with freedom. But
Jeremiah, always coerced, shrinks, protests, craves leave to retire. So
that while Isaiah’s answer to the call of God is _Here am I, send me_,
Jeremiah’s might have been “I would be anywhere else than here, let me
go.” He spent much of himself in complaint and in debate both with God and
with his fellow-men:
Mother! Ah me!
As whom hast thou borne me?
A man of quarrel and of strife
To the whole of the land—
All of them curse me.(685)
Nor did he live to see any solid results from his work. His call was
To root up, pull down and destroy,
To build and to plant.(686)
If this represents the Prophet’s earliest impression of his charge, the
proportion between the destructive and constructive parts of it is
ominous; if it sums up his experience it is less than the truth. Though he
sowed the most fruitful seeds in the fields of Israel’s religion, none
sprang in his lifetime. For his own generation he built nothing.
Sympathetic with the aims and the start of the greatest reform in Israel’s
history, he grew sceptical of its progress and had to denounce the dogmas
into which the spirit of it hardened. A king sought his counsel and
refused to follow it; the professional prophets challenged him to speak in
the Name of the Lord and then denied His Word; the priests were ever
against him, and the overseer of the Temple put him in the stocks. Though
the people came to his side at one crisis, they rejected him at others and
fell back on their formalist teachers, and the prophets of a careless
optimism. Though he loved his people with passion, and pled with them all
his life, he failed to convince or move them to repentance—and more than
once was forbidden even to pray for them. He was charged not to marry nor
found a family nor share in either the griefs or the joys of society. His
brethren and his father’s house betrayed him, and he was stoned out of
Anathoth by his fellow-villagers. Though he could count on a friend or two
at court, he had to flee into hiding. King Ṣedekiah, who felt a slavish
reverence for his word, was unable to save him from imprisonment in a miry
pit, and he owed his deliverance, neither to friend nor countryman, but to
a negro eunuch of the palace. Even after the fall of Jerusalem, when his
prophecies were vindicated almost to the letter, he failed to keep a
remnant of the nation in Judah; and his word had no influence with the
little band which clung to him as a fetish and hurried him to Egypt.
There, with his back to the brief ministry of hope that had been allowed
him, he must take up again the task of denunciation which he abhorred; and
this is the last we hear of him.
It was the same with individuals as with the people as a whole. We may say
that with few exceptions, whomever he touched he singed, whomever he
struck he broke—_a man of quarrel and strife to the whole land, all of
them curse me_. And he cursed them back. When Pashhur put him in the
stocks Jeremiah called him _Magor Missabib_, Terror-all-round, _for lo, I
will make thee a terror to thyself and to all thy friends, they shall fall
by the sword and thou behold it_.(687) Nothing satisfied his contempt for
Jehoiakim, but that dying the king should be buried with the burial of an
ass.(688) Even for Ṣedekiah, to whom he showed some tenderness, his last
utterance was of a vision of the weak monarch being mocked by his own
women.(689) His irony, keen to the end, proves his detachment from all
around him. His scorn for the bulk of the other prophets is scorching, and
his words for some of them fatal. Of Shemaiah, who wrote of the captives
in Babylon letters of a tenor opposite to his own, he said _he shall not
have a man to dwell among this people_.(690) When the prophet Hananiah
contradicted him, he foretold, after carefully deliberating between his
rival’s words and his own, that Hananiah would die, and Hananiah was dead
within a few months.(691) He had no promise for those whom he counselled
to desert to the enemy save of bare life; nor anything better even for the
best of his friends: _Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them
not! Only thy life will I give thee for a prey in all places whither thou
goest._(692)
The following are the full texts from which the foregoing summary has been
drawn and most of which I have reserved for this Lecture.
IV. 10. Then said I, Ah Lord Yahweh, Verily Thou hast deceived
this people and Jerusalem, saying There shall be peace!—whereas
the sword striketh to the life!
O my bowels! My bowels, I writhe! 19
O the walls of my heart!
My heart is in storm upon me,
I cannot keep silence!
I am filled with the rage of the Lord, VI. 11
Worn with holding it in!
Pour it out on the child in the street,
Where the youths draw together.
The following refers to the conspiracy of his fellow-villagers against
him.
The Lord let me know and I knew it, XI. 18
Then I saw through(693) their doings;
But I like a tame lamb had been, 19
Unwittingly(694) led to the slaughter.
On me they had framed their devices
“Let’s destroy the tree in its sap.(695)
Cut him off from the land of the living,
That his name be remembered no more.”
O Lord, Thou Who righteously judgest, 20
Who triest the reins and the heart,
Let me see Thy vengeance upon them,
For to Thee I have opened(696) my cause.
21. Therefore thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who are
seeking my(697) life, saying, Thou shalt not prophesy in the Name
of the Lord, that thou die not by our hands:(698)
Lo, I am to visit upon them! 22
Their(699) youths shall die by the sword,
Their sons and their daughters by famine,
Till no remnant be left them. 23
For evil I bring on the men of Anathoth,
The year of their visitation.
Mother! Ah me! XV. 10
As whom(700) hast thou borne me?
A man of strife and of quarrel
To the whole of the land.
I have not lent upon usury, nor any to me,
Yet all of them curse me.
Amen,(701) O Lord! If I be to blame(?), 11
If I never besought Thee,
In the time of their trouble and straits,
For the good of my foes.
Is the arm on my shoulder iron 12
Or brass my brow?(702)
Thou hast known it,(703) O Lord. 15
Think on and visit me!
Avenge me on them that pursue me,
Halt not Thy wrath.
Know that for Thee I have borne reproach
From them who despise(704) Thy words. 16
[End them!(705) Thy word’s my delight
And the joy of my heart
For Thy Name has been calléd upon me,
Lord of Hosts!]
I have not sat in their company 17
Jesting and merry.(706)
Because of Thy hand alone I sit,
For with rage Thou hast filled me.
Why is my pain perpetual, 18
My wound past healing?
Art Thou to be a false stream to me,
As waters that fail?
This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!
Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19
If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee,
That before Me thou stand;
And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile,
As My Mouth thou shalt be.
[Then may those turn to thee,
But not thou to them.]
For to this people I set thee 20
An impassable wall.(707)
When they fight thee they shall not prevail,
With thee am I to deliver,(708)
And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21
From the hand of the cruel redeem thee.
Thou(709) shalt not take a wife— XVI. 2
Rede of the Lord—
Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine
Within this place.
For thus hath the Lord said: 3
As for the sons and the daughters
Born in this place,
[As for their mothers who bore them
And their fathers who gat them
Throughout this land.]
Painfullest deaths shall they die 4
Unmourned, unburied,
[Be for dung on the face of the ground,
Consumed by famine and sword.]
And their corpses shall be for food
To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth.(710)
Thus saith the Lord: 5
Come not to the house of mourning,
Nor go about to lament,(711)
Because My Peace I have swept
Away from this people.(712)
For them shall none lament, 6_b_
Nor gash nor make themselves bald;
Neither break bread(713) to the mourner,(714) 7
For the dead to console him,
Nor pour him(715) the cup of condolement
For his father or mother.
Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8
To sit with them eating and drinking.
For thus saith the Lord of Hosts,(716) 9
The God of Israel:
Lo, I shall stay from this place,
In your days, to your eyes,
The voices of joy and of gladness,
The voices of bridegroom and bride.
Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this—the people’s leaving of
their God—and the doom of exile.
Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14
Save me and saved shall I be.(717)
Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15
“Where is the Word of the Lord?
Pray let it come!”
But I have not pressed ... (?) 16
Nor for evil(718) kept at Thee,
Nor longed for the woeful day,
Thyself dost know.
Whatever came forth from my lips
To Thy face it was.
Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17
My Refuge in evil days.
Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18
Dismayed, but dismayed not I.
Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster
And break them twice over!
XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah
devices, for the Law(719) shall not perish from the priest, nor
Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us
smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.
O Lord, unto me give Thou heed, 19
And hark to the voice of my plea!(720)
Shall evil be rendered for good, 20
That they dig a pit for my life?(721)
O remember my standing before Thee,
To bespeak their good—
To turn Thy fury from off them.
Give therefore their sons to famine, 21
And spill them out to the sword.
Let their wives be widows and childless
And their men be slain of death—
And smitten their youths by the sword in battle.
May crying be heard from their homes, 22
As a troop comes sudden upon them!
For a pit have they dug to catch me,
And hidden snares for my feet.
But Thou, O Lord, hast known 23
Their counsels for death against me.
Pardon Thou not their iniquities,(722)
Nor blot from Thy Presence their sins;(723)
But let them be tumbled before Thee
Deal with them in time of Thy wrath.
Verses 21-23 are rejected by Duhm and Cornill, along with XI. 22_b_, 23,
XII. 3_b_, XVII. 18 for no textual or metrical reasons, but only because
these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah such outbursts of
passion: just as we have seen them for similarly sheer reasons of
sentiment refuse to consider as his the advice to desert to the
enemy.(724) Yet they admit inconsistently the genuineness of VI. 11, XI.
20, XV. 15.(725)
Lord, Thou beguiledst me, and beguiled I let myself be, XX. 7
Too strong for me, Thou hast conquered,
A jest I have been all the day,
Every one mocks me.
As oft as I speak I must shriek, 8
Crying “Violence and spoil.”
Yea, the Word of the Lord is become my reproach
All day a derision.
If I said, I’ll not mind Him(726) 9
Nor speak in His name,(727)
Then in my heart ’tis a burning fire,
Shut up in my bones.
I am worn away with refraining,
I cannot hold on.(728)
For I hear the whispering of many, 10
Terror all round!
“Denounce, and let us denounce him,”
—And these my familiars!—
Keep ye watch for him tripping,
Perchance he’ll be fooled,
“And we be more than enough for him,
And get our revenge.”
Yet the Lord He is with me, 11
Mighty and Terrible!
So they that hunt me shall stumble
And shall not prevail.
Put to dire shame shall they be
When they fail to succeed.
Be their confusion eternal,
Nor ever forgotten!
O Lord,(729) Who triest the righteous, 12
Who lookest to the reins and the heart,
Let me see Thy vengeance upon them,
For to Thee I have opened my cause.(730)
Cursed be the day, XX. 14
Whereon I was born!
The day that my mother did bare me,
Be it unblessed!
Cursed be the man who carried the news, 15
Telling my father,
“A man child is born to thee!”
Making him glad.
Be that man as the cities the Lord overthrew, 16
And did not relent,
Let him hear a shriek in the morning,
And at noon-tide alarms;
That he slew me not in(731) the womb, 17
So my mother had been my grave,
And great for ever her womb!
For what came I forth from the womb? 18
Labour and sorrow to see,
That my days in shame should consume.
Considering the passion of these lines, it is not surprising that they are
so irregular.(732)
Some have attributed the aggravations, at least, of this rage to some
fault in the man himself. They are probably right. The prophets were
neither vegetables nor machines but men of like passions with ourselves.
Jeremiah may have been by temper raw and hasty, with a natural capacity
for provoking his fellows. That he felt this himself we may suspect from
his cry to his mother, that he had been born to quarrel. His impatience,
honest though it be, needs stern rebuke from the Lord.(733) Even with God
Himself he is hasty.(734) There are signs throughout, naïvely betrayed by
his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate.
For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his
predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all
its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a
soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have
been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view,
an unlikely instrument for the work he had to do and the force with which
he must drive—painfully swerving at times from his task, and at others
rushing in passion before the power he hated but could not withstand.
So probable an opinion becomes a certainty when we turn to God’s words to
him. _Be not dismayed lest I make thee dismayed_ and _I set thee this day
a fenced city and wall of bronze_.(735) For these last imply that in
himself Jeremiah was something different. God does not speak thus to a man
unless He sees that he needs it. It was to his most impetuous and unstable
disciple that Christ said, _Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I
build_.
Yet while his own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must
also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the
princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any
of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks
against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from
without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but
broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the
formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and
care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer
to his call to repent: _No’ash, No use! All is up!_ Probably this reflects
his own feelings about them. He was a man perpetually baffled by what he
had to work with.
Poet as he was he had the poet’s heart for the beauties of nature and of
domestic life: for birds and trees and streams, for the home-candle and
the sound of the house-mill, for children and the happiness of the bride,
and the love of husband and wife; and he was forbidden to marry or have
children of his own or to take part in any social merriment—in this last
respect so different from our Lord. Was it unnatural that his heart broke
out now and then in wild gusts of passion against it all?
There is another thing which we must not forget in judging Jeremiah’s
excessive rage. We cannot find that he had any hope of another life.
Absolutely no breath of this breaks either from his own Oracles or from
those attributed to him. Here and now was his only chance of service, here
and now must the visions given him by God be fulfilled or not at all. In
the whole book of Jeremiah we see no hope of the resurrection, no glory to
come, no gleam even of the martyr’s crown. I have often thought that what
seem to us the excess of impatience, the rashness to argue with
Providence, the unholy wrath and indignation of prophets and psalmists
under the Old Covenant, are largely to be explained by this, that as yet
there had come to them no sense of another life or of judgment beyond this
earth. When we are tempted to wonder at Jeremiah’s passion and cursing,
let us try to realise how we would have felt had we, like him, found our
_one_ service baffled, and the _single_ possible fulfilment of our ideals
rendered vain. All of which shows the difference that Christ has made.
2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)
Yet though such a man in such an age Jeremiah is sped through it with a
force, which in spite of him never fails and which indeed carries his
influence to the end of his nation’s history.
What was the powder which launched this grim projectile through his times?
Part at least was his faith in his predestination, the bare sense that God
Almighty meant him from before his beginning for the work, and was
gripping him to it till the close. This alone prevailed over his reluctant
nature, his protesting affections, and his adverse circumstance.
Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee,
Before thou wast forth from the womb, I had put thee apart,
I have set thee a prophet to the nations.
From the first and all through it was God’s choice of him, the knowledge
of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the
Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this
alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have
seen, into the opposite of himself.
The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of
predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish
and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination
is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life
or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service,
for God and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for
Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of God for the enlightenment
and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for
their pride nor to foster the confidence that God will never break from
them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are
feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in
regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his
Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that
the clay is moulded; God is revealed not as predestining character or
quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they
yield suitable qualities. The parable illustrates not arbitrariness of
election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom—freedom in God
to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man’s part to thwart
God’s designs for him. In further illustration of this remember again the
wonderful words, _Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee
dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee_. To work upon man God
needs man’s own will.
From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience
of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted
him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in
Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the
regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator,
such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.
Having this experience of God’s ways with man it was not possible for
Jeremiah to succumb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in
predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its
devotees. Someone has talked of “the wine of predestination,” and history
both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it
as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either
apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally
unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a
pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It
was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his
individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against
God Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to
have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He
argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he
expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will
as over against that of God:
Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled,
Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.
The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He
questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people’s
oncoming doom. He debates with God on matters of justice. He wrestles
things out with God and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping
like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure
of himself—as we see him at last when the full will of God breaks upon his
soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and
his people’s fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so
shrinking stands out henceforth _a fenced city and a wall of bronze over
against the whole people of the land_: the one unbreakable figure in the
breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in God’s
discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant’s weakness and grants him
the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself.
We may here take in full the remarkable passage, part of which we have
already studied.(736)
Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1
That with Thee I should argue.
Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:—
The way of the wicked—why doth it prosper,
And the treacherous all be at ease?
Thou did’st plant them, yea they take root, 2
They get on, yea they make fruit;
Near in their mouths art Thou,
But far from their reins.
But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3
And tested my heart with Thee;
Drag them out like sheep for the shambles,
To the day of slaughter devote them.
Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee— 5
How wilt thou vie with the horse?
If in peaceful country thou can’st not trust,
How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan?
For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6
Even they have betrayed thee.
Even they have called after thee loudly,
Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738)
_The rankness_ or _luxuriance of Jordan_ is the jungle on both sides of
the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the
wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he
complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the
checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that
ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively
strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered
soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is
the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken
and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord’s answer, but Jeremiah
does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus,
to break through to another life.
3. Sacrifice.
But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and
his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and
mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was
the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in
religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of
the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type
of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the
prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious
preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah’s experience is
of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of
his utterances which bear witness to it.