as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God
upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people’s sin costs God more
pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As
we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called
to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the
Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel,
was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant
surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them.
What wrong found your fathers in Me,
That so far they broke from Me?
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say my folk, “We are off,
No more to meet Thee!”
Can a maiden forget her adorning
Or her girdle the bride?
Yet Me have My people forgotten
Days without number.(785)
So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His
heritage, His love still wonders how that can be—
Is My heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird
With the wild-birds round and against her?
Is Israel a slave,
Or house-born serf?
Why he for a prey?(786)
All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: _no man lays it to heart,
upon Me is the waste_.(787) And what we have seen to be the most human
touch of all, the surprise of an outraged father at feeling, beneath His
wrath against a prodigal son, the instincts of the ancient love which no
wrath can quench,
Is Ephraim My dearest son,
The child of delights?
That as oft as against him I speak
I must think of him still!(788)
That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative
effect.
Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God Jeremiah speaks home
to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which
loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction
nor a thing to be lightly taken.(789) Time for repentance is short; doom
comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have
their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words
nor worship nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It
is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden
themselves softly. And—very firmly this—forgiveness is not easily granted
by God nor cheaply gained by men; God has not only set our sins before His
face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the
Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can
avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in
atonement for their sins, but arduous, rigorous and deeply sincere in its
anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ
came, very far _into the fellowship of His sufferings_.
I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah’s other original
contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the
Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the
prophet had bravely tried to be—no transient guest but a dweller in their
midst.(790) The titles for God which we may assume to have first come from
himself are few, perhaps only three: _The Fountain of Living Waters, the
Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble_, and _Hasidh,
or Loyal-in-Love_,(791) a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes,
but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him
do, he uses the title _Yahweh of Hosts_, doubtless in the other prophets’
sense of _the forces of history and of the Universe_ (the original meaning
having been _the armies of Israel_), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic
_Yahweh thy God_, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek
faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name _Yahweh_ (Jehovah) by
which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long
struggle between them as individuals.
Passing now from the world of nations to the world of nature we observe
how little the genuine Oracles of Jeremiah have to tell us of the Divine
Power over this; yet the little is proclaimed with as firm assurance as of
God’s control of the history of mankind. Both worlds are His: the
happenings in the one are the sacraments, the signs and seals, of His
purposes and tempers towards the other: the winter blossom of the almond,
of His wakefulness in a world where all seems asleep; the sun by day and
the moon and stars by night, of His everlasting faithfulness to His
own.(792) All things in nature obey His rule though His own people do not;
it is He who rules the stormy sea and can alone bring rain.
Even the stork in the heavens
Knoweth her seasons,
And dove, swift and swallow
Keep time of their coming.
But My people—they know not
The Rule of the Lord.
I have set the sand as a bound for the sea,
An eternal decree that cannot be crossed.
Are there makers of rain ’mong the bubbles of the heathen?
Art Thou not He? ... all these Thou hast made.(793)
After all neither Nature nor the courses of the Nations but the single
human heart is the field which Jeremiah most originally explores for
visions of the Divine Working and from which he has brought his most
distinctive contributions to our knowledge of God. But that leads us up to
the second part of this lecture, his teaching about man. Before beginning
that, however, we must include under his teaching about God, two elements
of this to which his insight into the human heart directly led him.
First this great utterance of the Divine Omnipresence:
I am a God who is near,
Not a God who is far.
Can any man hide him in secret,
And I not see him?
Do I not fill heaven and earth?—
Rede of the Lord.(794)
These verses have been claimed as the earliest expression in Israel of the
Divine Omnipresence.(795) Amos, however, had given utterance to the same
truth though on a different plane of life.(796)
Second, and partly in logical sequence from the preceding, but also
stimulated by thoughts of the best of Judah(797) banished to a long exile,
Jeremiah was the first in Israel to assure his people that the sense of
God’s presence, faith in His Providence, His Grace, and Prayer to Him were
now free both of Temple and Land—as possible on distant and alien soil,
without Ark or Altar, as they had been with these in Jerusalem. See his
Letter to the Exiles, and recall all that lay behind it in his predictions
of the ruin of the Temple, and abolition of the Ark, and in his rejection
of sacrifices.(798) To Deuteronomy exile was the people’s punishment; to
Jeremiah it is a fresh opportunity of grace.
2. Man and the New Covenant.
In the earliest Oracles of Jeremiah nations are the human units in
religion, Israel as a whole the object of the Divine affection and
providence. To his age worship was the business of the nation: public
reverence for symbols and institutions, and rites in which the
individual’s share was largely performed for him by official
representatives. The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt with
the people as a moral unity from the earliest times to their own. The Lord
had loved and sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation. As a nation
they fell away from Him and now they were wholly false to Him. When
Jeremiah first urges them to return, it is of a public and general
repentance that he speaks, as Deuteronomy had done; and when his urgency
fails it is their political disappearance which he pronounces for doom.
But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the
Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not
only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the
public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of
new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that
of the immediate relation of the individual to God. Jeremiah never lost
hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual
aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is
impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of
dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under
Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by
Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah the gradual breaking up of
the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity
grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the
individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.
One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into
the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark masses appear and how
difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with
its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn
comes up one begins to see all this. The mass breaks; first the larger,
more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is
apparent in its separate strength and beauty.
It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is
a breaking of dawn—but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of
this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation
which has begun with the singular _Thou_ changes gradually to _You_, and
not _Israel_ but _ye men of Israel_ are called to turn to their God.(799)
As the Prophet’s indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national
harlotry. He arraigns separate classes or groups,(800) and then, in
increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend
friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official
bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire
the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous Ṣedekiah, the
bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)—with the fit word and in sharp
irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the
typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber
in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds
failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who _fling about
their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord_.(802) Jeremiah has answered the
call to him to search for the _man_, the men beneath the nation.(803)
Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply
thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of
God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his
stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of
man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for
himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal
life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of
drought. Such passages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to
be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more
with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards God of its
individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the multitude and
talks to him of himself.
O Lord, Who triest the righteous,
Who seest the reins and the heart.(804)
False above all is the heart,
Sick to despair,
Who is to know it?
I, the Lord, searching the heart
And trying the reins,
To give to each man as his ways,
As the fruit of his doings.(805)
Can any man hide him in secret
And I not see him?(806)
In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour
grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every
one shall die for his own iniquity, every man that eateth sour
grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.(807)
Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee....
Peradventure they will hearken and turn _every man from his evil
way_.(808)
He that would boast in this let him boast,
Insight and knowledge of Me.(809)
Lord, I know—not to man is his way,
Not man’s to walk or settle his steps.(810)
Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord
And the Lord is his trust!
He like a tree shall be planted by water,
That stretches its roots to the stream;
Unafraid at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green;
_Sans_ care in the season of drought
He fails not in yielding his fruit.(811)
The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of
Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on
earth—could not be more beautifully drawn.
Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human
unit in religion—Deuteronomy’s ideal and at first his own—to the
individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was
promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy
conduct of the people, their abandonment by God, the ruin of the State and
of the national worship—which cut off individuals from all political and
religious associations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah’s repeated phrase)
only _his life_, or _his soul, for a prey_.(812) But all these could have
furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter
experience his own soul searched and re-searched by God—
But Thou, Lord, hast known me,
Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee—(813)
unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence
of an immediate and intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had learned
how a man could be God’s before he was his mother’s or his nation’s—God’s
own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary
conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can
overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one’s own
generation—how God can hold a single man alone to His Will against his
nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In
all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his
own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them.
And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in
Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils
about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms
show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law like a garden of lilies
within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah’s heart, and was
watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.
* * * * *
We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing—the
prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place,
following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour
grapes—individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we
cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah’s own; the critical questions which
have been with us from the beginning embarrass us still.
The collection of Oracles to which that of the New Covenant belongs, Chs.
XXX, XXXI, was not made till long after Jeremiah’s time; it includes, as
we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic origin.(814) But so do
other chapters of the Book, in which nevertheless genuine prophecies of
Jeremiah are recognised by virtually all modern critics. The context
therefore offers no prejudice against the authenticity of the prophecy of
the New Covenant, XXXI. 31-34. But the form and the substance of this have
raised doubts, so honest and reluctant as to deserve our consideration.
Duhm starts his usual objection that the passage is in prose and a style
characteristic of the late expanders of the Book. We may let that go, as
we have done before, as by itself inconclusive;(815) the prophecy may not
have come directly from Jeremiah’s mouth but through the memory of a
reporter of the Prophet, Baruch or another. More deserving of
consideration is the criticism which Duhm, with great unwillingness, makes
of the terms and substance of the prophecy. He objects to the term
_covenant_: a _covenant_ is a legal contract and could hardly have been
chosen for the frame of his ideal by so pronounced an anti-legalist as
Jeremiah. The passage “promises a new Covenant—not a new Torah but only a
more inward assimilation of the Torah by the people, and emphasises the
good results which this will have for them but betrays no demand for a
higher kind of religion. If one does not let himself be dazzled by the
phrases _new covenant_ and _write it on the heart_ then the passage tells
us of the relation of the individual no more than Deuteronomy has already
regarded as possible, XXX. 11 ff., and desirable, VI. 6-8: namely, that
every man should be at home in the Law and honestly follow it.” He
continues: “it is impossible for me to hold any longer to the Jeremian
origin of the passage. I find in it only the effusion of one learned in
the Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that every one of the
Jewish people should know the Law by heart.”
But in his resolve “not to let himself be dazzled” has not Duhm gone to
the opposite extreme and seriously under-read the whole spirit of the
passage—besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness of the presence in
the text of a legalist at work?(816) The choice of the term _covenant_ for
the frame of his ideal was not unnatural to Jeremiah nor irrelevant to his
experience and teaching. Formally the term may mean a legal contract; but
it is open to a prophet or a poet to use any metaphor for his ideals and
transform its mere letter by the spirit he puts into it; and after all
_covenant_ is only a metaphor for a relation which was beyond the compass
of any figure to express. Yet it was a term classical in Israel and most
intelligible to the generation whom Jeremiah was addressing. Its
associations, especially as he had recalled them,(817) had been those not
of the Law but of Love. It was not a contract or bargain but an approach
by God to His people, an offer of His Grace, a statement of His Will and
accompanied by manifestations of His Power to redeem them. One might as
well charge Jesus with legalism in adopting a term sanctioned by God
Himself, and so historical, sacred and endeared to the national memory.
Nor need Torah, or Law, be taken as Duhm takes it in its sense of the
legal codes of Israel, but in its wider meaning of the Divine
_instruction_ or _revelation_. Further the epithet _New_ applied to
Covenant was most relevant to the Prophet’s and his people’s recent sense
of the failure of the ancient covenant, as restated and enforced in
Deuteronomy. In spite of the excitement caused by the discovery of the
Book in which it was written, and the recital of its words throughout the
land, the Old Covenant had failed to capture the heart of the people or to
secure from them more than the formal and superstitious observance of the
letter of its Torah. Was it not a natural antithesis to predict that His
Torah would be set by God _in their inward parts and written on their
hearts_? How else (will Duhm tell us?) than by such phrases could the
Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as
Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law
of God “by heart” (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to
travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in
harmony with the rest of the Prophet’s teaching. He had spoken of God’s
will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught
religion as the individual’s direct knowledge of God;(819) he had won this
himself from God directly without help from his parentage, his
fellow-prophets or priests or any others; he had most bitterly known also
how weak the word of one man is to teach his countrymen this knowledge and
that it can only come by the inward operation of God Himself upon their
spirits; and he had made as clear as ever prophet did that God’s pardon
for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor
is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his
teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation’s survival and
restoration.
Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of
Jeremiah’s experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the
political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar
and dear to the people. The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest,
but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah’s failing fingers or to the
awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own.
Lo, days are coming—Rede of the Lord—when I will make with the
House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not
like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that
I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of
Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them(820)—Rede
of the Lord. But this is My(821) Covenant which I will make with
the sons(822) of Israel after those days—Rede of the Lord—I will
set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write
it, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man
his brother saying, Know thou(823) the Lord! For they shall all
know Me from the least even to the greatest;(824) for I will
forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.
This is, as has been said, a prophecy of Christianity which has hardly its
equal in the Old Testament.(825) It is the Covenant which Jesus Christ the
Son of God accepted for Himself and all men and sealed with His own blood.
And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual
soul is made to feel that God created it not for its family nor its state
nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for
it after death. The Prophet’s eyes are still sealed to that future. The
soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with God.
Appendix I.
MEDES AND SCYTHIANS (PP. 73, 110).
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to give a correct account of the
national and racial movements which, along with the moral conditions in
Judah, called forth Jeremiah’s Oracles of judgment in the years
immediately following his call in 627-626 B.C. But the following facts are
well founded. In or about 625 the Medes were defeated in an attack upon
Assyria and their king Phraortes was killed, but at the same time
Asshurbanipal died, and his weaker successor was compelled to recognize
the virtual independence of Nabopolassar, the Chaldean in Babylon.
Cyaxares (624-585), the son of Phraortes, soon after his succession to his
father—say between 624 and 620—led a second Median assault upon Assyria
and besieged Nineveh, but had to retire because of the onset from the
north of the Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian monuments, probably
the Ashkenaz or Ashkunza (?) of the Old Testament. And then it was not for
some years that Cyaxares felt himself strong enough by his alliance with
Nabopolassar for a third Median invasion of Assyria which culminated in
the capture and destruction of Nineveh.
The Assyrians appear to have been in touch with the Ashguzai for over a
century and for a shorter time probably in alliance with them; which
alliance was the cause of the Scythian advance to the relief of Nineveh
from its siege by the Medes _circa_ 724-720 (see Winckler _Die
Keilinschriften v. das alte Testament_, 3rd ed., pp. 100 ff.). About the
same time must be dated the Scythian advance through Western Asia to the
borders of Egypt, which Herodotus (I. 103-104, IV. 1) reports. Professor
N. Schmidt (_Enc. Bibl._, art. “Scythians”) supposes that this advance was
due to the same Scythian-Assyrian alliance, in order to preserve the
Assyrian territories from the arms of Psamtik of Egypt, who had since 639
been besieging Ashdod; and he holds that this hypothesis explains the
absence of any record of violence by the Scythians on their southern
campaign, except at Ashkelon. This precarious hypothesis apart, we have
the facts that no Biblical chronicler records any invasion of Judah and
Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the early Oracles of Jeremiah,
generally attributed to the alarms which the advance of such barbarian
hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the Scythians (with a few
exceptions that may be due to the prophet’s adaptation in 604 of his
earlier Oracles to the new _enemy_ out of the north, the Chaldeans).