Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 1

Jeremiah.

by George Adam Smith.

PREFACE.

The purpose and the scope of this volume are set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English.

Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional pa.s.sage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as is the case with the folk-songs of Palestine to-day. I am well aware that metres so primitive and by our canons so irregular have been more rhythmically rendered by the stately prose of our English Versions; yet it is our duty reverently to seek for the original forms and melodies of what we believe to be the Oracles of G.o.d. The only other point connected with the metrical translations offered, which need be mentioned here, is that I have rendered the name of the G.o.d of Israel as it is by the Greek and our own Versions-The Lord-which is more suitable to English verse than is either Yahweh or Jehovah.

The text of the Lectures and the footnotes show how much I owe to those who have already written on Jeremiah, as also in what details I differ from one or another of them.

I have retained the form of Lectures for this volume, but I have very much expanded and added to what were only six Lectures of an hour each when delivered under the auspices of the Baird Trust in Glasgow in 1922.

George Adam Smith.

CHANONRY LODGE, OLD ABERDEEN, _18th October, 1923._

PRELIMINARY.

First of all, I thank the Baird Trustees for their graceful appointment to this Lecture of a member of what is still, though please G.o.d not for long, another Church than their own. I am very grateful for the privilege which they grant me of returning to Glasgow with the accomplishment of a work the materials for which were largely gathered during the years of my professorship in the city. The value of the opportunity is enhanced by all that has since befallen our nation and the world. The Great War invested the experience of the Prophet, who is the subject of this Lecture, with a fresh and poignant relevance to our own problems and duties. Like ourselves, Jeremiah lived through the clash not only of empires but of opposite ethical ideals, through the struggles and panics of small peoples, through long and terrible fighting, famine, and slaughter of the youth of the nations, with all the anxieties to faith and the problems of Providence, which such things naturally raise. Pa.s.sionate for peace, he was called to proclaim the inevitableness of war, in opposition to the popular prophets of a false peace; but later he had to counsel his people to submit to their foes and to accept their captivity, thus facing the hardest conflict a man can who loves his own-between patriotism and common sense, between his people's gallant efforts for freedom and the stern facts of the world, between national traditions and pieties on the one side and on the other what he believed to be the Will of G.o.d. These are issues which the successive generations of our race are called almost ceaselessly to face; and the teaching and example of the great Prophet, who dealt with them through such strenuous debates both with his fellow-men and with his G.o.d, and who brought out of these debates spiritual results of such significance for the individual and for the nation, cannot be without value for ourselves.

Lecture I.

THE MAN AND THE BOOK.

In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which contains them-but especially of the man himself, his personality and his tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as his influence on the subsequent religion of his people.

It has often been a.s.serted that in Jeremiah's ministry more than in any other of the Old Covenant the personality of the Prophet was under G.o.d the dominant factor, and one has even said that "his predecessors were the originators of great truths, which he trans.m.u.ted into spiritual life."(1) To avoid exaggeration here, we must keep in mind how large a part personality played in their teaching also, and from how deep in their lives their messages sprang. Even Amos was no mere _voice crying in the wilderness_. The discipline of the desert, the clear eye for ordinary facts and the sharp ear for sudden alarms which it breeds, along with the desert shepherd's horror of the extravagance and cruelties of civilisation-all these reveal to us the Man behind the Book, who had lived his truth before he uttered it. Hosea again, tells the story of his outraged love as _the beginning of the Word of the Lord by him_. And it was the strength of Isaiah's character, which, unaided by other human factors, carried Judah, with the faith she enshrined, through the first great crisis of her history. Yet recognise, as we justly may, the personalities of these prophets in the nerve, the colour, the accent, and even the substance of their messages, we must feel the still greater significance of Jeremiah's temperament and other personal qualities both for his own teaching and for the teaching of those who came after him.

Thanks to his loyal scribe, Baruch, we know more of the circ.u.mstances of his career, and thanks to his own frankness, we know more of his psychology than we do in the case of any of his predecessors. He has, too, poured out his soul to us by the most personal of all channels; the charm, pa.s.sion and poignancy of his verse lifting him high among the poets of Israel.

So far as our materials enable us to judge no other prophet was more introspective or concerned about himself; and though it might be said that he carried this concern to a fault, yet fault or none, the fact is that no prophet started so deeply from himself as Jeremiah did. His circ.u.mstances flung him in upon his feelings and convictions; he was constantly searching, doubting, confessing, and pleading for, himself. He a.s.serted more strenuously than any except Job his individuality as against G.o.d, and he stood in more lonely opposition to his people.

Jeremiah was called to prophesy about the time that the religion of Israel was re-codified in Deuteronomy-the finest system of national religion which the world has seen, but only and exclusively national-and he was still comparatively young when that system collapsed for the time and the religion itself seemed about to perish with it. He lived to see the Law fail, the Nation dispersed, and the National Altar shattered; but he gathered their fire into his bosom and carried it not only unquenched but with a purer flame towards its everlasting future. We may say without exaggeration that what was henceforth finest in the religion of Israel had, however ancient its sources, been recast in the furnace of his spirit. With him the human unit in religion which had hitherto been mainly the nation was on the way to become the individual. Personal piety in later Israel largely grew out of his spiritual struggles.(2)

His forerunners, it is true, had insisted that religion was an affair not of national inst.i.tutions nor of outward observance, but of the people's heart-by which heart they and their hearers must have understood the individual hearts composing it. But, in urging upon his generation repentance, faith and conversion to G.o.d, Jeremiah's language is more thorough and personal than that used by any previous prophet. The individual, as he leaves Jeremiah's hands, is more clearly the direct object of the Divine Interest and Grace, and the instrument of the Divine Will. The single soul is searched, defined and charged as never before in Israel.

But this sculpture of the individual out of the ma.s.s of the nation, this articulation of his immediate relation to G.o.d apart from Law, Temple and Race, achieved as it was by Jeremiah only through intense mental and physical agonies, opened to him the problem of the sufferings of the righteous. In his experience the individual realised his Self only to find that Self-its rights, the truths given it and its best service for G.o.d-baffled by the stupidity and injustice of those for whom it laboured and agonised. The mists of pain and failure bewildered the Prophet and to the last his work seemed in vain. Whether or not he himself was conscious of the solution of the problem, others reached it through him. There are grounds for believing that the Figure of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, raised by the Great Prophet of the Exile, and the idea of the atoning and redemptive value of His sufferings were, in part at least, the results of meditation upon the spiritual loneliness on the one side, and upon the pa.s.sionate identification of himself with the sorrows of his sinful people on the other, of this the likest to Christ of all the prophets.(3)

For our knowledge of this great life-there was none greater under the Old Covenant-we are dependent on that Book of our Scriptures, the Hebrew text of which bears the simple t.i.tle "Jeremiah."

The influence of the life and therefore the full stature of the man who lived it, stretches, as I have hinted, to the latest bounds of Hebrew history, and many writings and deeds were worshipfully a.s.signed to him.

Thus the Greek Version of the Old Testament ascribes Lamentations to Jeremiah, but the poems themselves do not claim to be, and obviously are not, from himself. He is twice quoted in II. Chronicles and once in Ezra, but these quotations may be reasonably interpreted as referring to prophecies contained in our book, which were therefore extant before the date of the Chronicler.(4) Ecclesiasticus XLIX. 6-7 reflects pa.s.sages of our Book, and of Lamentations, as though equally Jeremiah's, and Daniel IX. 2 refers to Jeremiah XXV. 12. A paragraph in the Second Book of Maccabees, Ch. II. 1-8, contains, besides echoes of our Book of Jeremiah, references to other activities of the Prophet of which the sources and the value are unknown to us. But all these references, as well as the series of apocryphal and apocalyptic works to which the name either of Jeremiah himself or of Baruch, his scribe, has been attached,(5) only reveal the length of the shadow which the Prophet's figure cast down the ages, and contribute no verifiable facts to our knowledge of his career or of his spiritual experience.

For the actual life of Jeremiah, for the man as he was to himself and his contemporaries, for his origin, character, temper, struggles, growth and modes of expression, we have practically no materials beyond the Canonical Book to which his name is prefixed.(6)

Roughly cla.s.sified the contents of the Book (after the extended t.i.tle in Ch. I. 1-3) are as follows:-

1. A Prologue, Ch. I. 4-19, in which the Prophet tells the story of his call and describes the range of his mission as including both his own people and foreign nations. The year of his call was 627-6 B.C.

2. A large number of Oracles, dialogues between the Prophet and the Deity and symbolic actions by the Prophet issuing in Oracles, mostly introduced as by Jeremiah himself, but sometimes reported of him by another. Most of the Oracles are in verse; the style of the rest is not distinguishable by us from prose. They deal almost exclusively with the Prophet's own people though there are some references to neighbouring tribes. The bulk of this cla.s.s of the contents is found within Chs. II-XXV, which contain all the earlier oracles, i.e. those uttered by Jeremiah before the death of King Josiah in 608, but also several of his prophecies under Jehoiakim and even ?edekiah. More of the latter are found within Chs. XXVII-x.x.xV: all these, except XXVIII and part of x.x.xII, which are introduced by the Prophet himself, are reported by another.

3. A separate group of Oracles on Foreign Nations, Chs. XLVI-LI, reported to us as Jeremiah's.

4. A number of narratives of episodes in the Prophet's life from 608 onwards under Jehoiakim and ?edekiah to the end in Egypt, soon after 586; apparently by a contemporary and eyewitness who on good grounds is generally taken to be Baruch the Scribe: Chs. XXVI, x.x.xVI-XLV; but to the same source may be due much of Chs. XXVII-x.x.xV (see under 2).

5. Obvious expansions and additions throughout all the foregoing; and a historical appendix in Ch. LII, mainly an excerpt from II. Kings XXIV-XXV.

On the face of it, then, the Book is a compilation from several sources; and perhaps we ought to translate the opening clause of its t.i.tle not as in our versions "The Words of Jeremiah," but "The History of Jeremiah," as has been legitimately done by some scholars since Kimchi.

What were the nuclei of this compilation? How did they originate? What proofs do they give of their value as historical doc.u.ments? How did they come together? And what changes, if any, did they suffer before the compilation closed and the Book received its present form?

These questions must be answered, so far as possible, before we can give an account of the Prophet's life or an estimate of himself and his teaching. The rest of this lecture is an attempt to answer them-but in the opposite order to that in which I have just stated them. We shall work backward from the two ultimate forms in which the Book has come down to us. For these forms are two.

Besides the Hebrew text, from which the Authorised and Revised English Versions have been made, we possess a form of the Book in Greek, which is part of the Greek Version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint.

This is virtually another edition of the same work. The Hebrew text belongs to the Second or Prophetical Canon of the Jewish Scriptures, which was not closed till about 200 B.C., or more than 350 years after Jeremiah's death. The Greek Version was completed about the same time, and possibly earlier.

These two editions of the Book hold by far the greatest part of their contents in common, yet they differ considerably in the amount and in the arrangement of their contents, and somewhat less in the dates and personal references which they apply to various pa.s.sages. We have thus before us two largely independent witnesses who agree in the bulk of their testimony, and otherwise correct and supplement each other.

In size the Greek Book of Jeremiah is but seven-eighths of the Hebrew,(7) but conversely it contains some hundred words that the Hebrew lacks. Part of this small Greek surplus is due to the translators' expansion or paraphrase of briefer Hebrew originals, or consists of glosses that they found in the Hebrew MSS. from which they translated, or added of themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails to do so.(8)

More instructive is the greater number of phrases and pa.s.sages found in the Hebrew Book, and consequently in our English Versions, but absent from the Greek. Some, it is true, are merely formal-additions to a personal name of the t.i.tle _king_ or _prophet_ or of the names of a father and grandfather, or the more frequent use of the divine t.i.tle _of Hosts_ with the personal Name of the Deity or of the phrase _Rede of the Lord_.(9) Also the Greek omits words which in the Hebrew are obviously mistakes of a copyist.(10) Again, a number of what are transparent glosses or marginal notes on the Hebrew text are lacking in the Greek, because the translator of the latter did not find them on the Hebrew ma.n.u.script from which he translated.(11) Some t.i.tles to sections of the Book, or portions of t.i.tles, absent from the Greek but found in our Hebrew text, are also later editorial additions.(12) Greater importance, however, attaches to those phrases that cannot be mere glosses and to the longer pa.s.sages, wanting in the Greek but found in the Hebrew, many of which upon internal evidence must be regarded as late intrusions into the latter.(13) And occasionally a word or phrase in the Hebrew, which spoils the rhythm or is irrelevant to the sense, is not found in the Greek.(14)

Finally, there is one great difference of arrangement. The group of Oracles on Foreign Nations which appear in the Hebrew as Chs. XLVI-LI are in the Greek placed between verses 13 and 15(15) of Ch. XXV, and are ranged in a different order-an obvious proof that at one time different editors felt free to deal with the arrangement of the compilation as well as to add to its contents.(16)

Modern critics differ as to the comparative value of these two editions of the Book of Jeremiah, and there are strong advocates on either side.(17) But the prevailing opinion, and, to my view, the right one, is that no general judgment is possible, and that each case of difference between the two witnesses must be decided by itself.(18) With this, however, we have nothing at present to do. What concerns us now is the fact that the Greek is not the translation of the canonical Hebrew text, but that the two Books, while sharing a common basis of wide extent, represent two different lines of compilation and editorial development which continued till at least 200 B.C. Between them they are the proof that, while our Bible was still being compiled, some measure of historical criticism and of editorial activity was at work on the material-and this not only along one line. We need not stop to discuss how far the fact justifies the exercise of criticism by the modern Church. For our present purpose it is enough to keep in mind that our Book of Jeremiah is the result of a long development through some centuries and on more than one line, though the two divergent movements started with, and carried down, a large body of material in common.

Moreover, this common material bears evidence of having already undergone similar treatment, _before_ it pa.s.sed out on those two lines of further development which resulted in the canonical Hebrew text and the Greek Version respectively. The signs of gradual compilation are everywhere upon the material which they share in common. Now and then a chronological order appears, and indeed there are traces of a purpose to pursue that order throughout. But this has been disturbed by cross-arrangements according to subject,(19) and by the intrusion of later oracles and episodes among earlier ones(20) or _vice versa_(21) as if their materials had come into the hands of the compilers or editors of the Book only gradually. Another proof of the gradual growth of those contents, which are common to the Hebrew and the Greek, is the fashion in which they tend to run away from the t.i.tles prefixed to them. Take the t.i.tle to the whole Book,(22) Ch. I. 2, _Which was the Word of the Lord to Jeremiah in the days of Josiah, son of Amon, King of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign_. This covers only the narrative of the Prophet's call in Ch. I, or at most a few of the Oracles in the following chapters. The supplementary t.i.tle in verse 3-_It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, King of Judah, up to [the end of]_(_23_)_ the eleventh year of ?edekiah, the son of Josiah King of Judah, up to the exile of Jerusalem, in the fifth month_-is probably a later addition, added when the later Oracles of Jeremiah were attached to some collection of those which he had delivered under Josiah; but even then the t.i.tle fails to cover those words in the Book which Jeremiah spake after Jerusalem had gone into exile, and even after he had been hurried down into Egypt by a base remnant of his people.(24) Moreover, the historical appendix to the Book carries the history it contains on to 561 B.C. at least.(25) Again there are pa.s.sages, the subjects of which are irrelevant to their context, and which break the clear connection of the parts of the context between which they have intruded.(26) The shorter sentences, that also disturb the connection as they stand, appear to have been written originally as marginal notes which a later editor or copyist has incorporated in the text.(27) To this cla.s.s, too, may belong those brief pa.s.sages which appear twice, once in their natural connection in some later chapter and once out of their natural connection in some earlier chapter.(28) And again in VII. 1-28 and XXVI.

1-9 we have two accounts, apparently from different hands, of what may or may not be the same episode in Jeremiah's ministry.

These data clearly prove that not only from the time when the Hebrew and Greek editions of the Book started upon their separate lines of development, but from the very beginnings of the Book's history, the work of acc.u.mulation, arrangement and re-arrangement, with other editorial processes, had been busy upon it.

The next question is, have we any criteria by which to discriminate between the elements in the Book that belong either to Jeremiah himself or to his contemporaries and others that are due to editors or compilers between his death soon after 586 and the close of the Prophetic Canon in 200 B.C.? The answer is that we have such criteria. All Oracles or Narratives in the Book, which (apart from obvious intrusions) imply that the Exile is well advanced or that the Return from Exile has already happened, or which reflect the circ.u.mstances of the later Exile and subsequent periods or the spirit of Israel and the teaching of her prophets and scribes in those periods, we may rule out of the material on which we can rely for our knowledge of Jeremiah's life and his teaching.

Of such Exilic and post-Exilic contents there is a considerable, but not a preponderant, amount. These various items break into their context, their style and substance are not conformable to the style and substance of the Oracles, which (as we shall see) are reasonably attributed to Jeremiah, but they so closely resemble those of other writings from the eve of the Return from Exile or from after the Return that they seem to be based on the latter. In any case they reflect the situation and feelings of Israel in Babylonia about 540 B.C. Some find place in our Book among the earlier Oracles of Jeremiah,(29) others in his later,(30) but the most in the group of Oracles on Foreign Nations.(31) And, finally, there are the long extracts from the Second Book of Kings, bringing, as I have said, the history down to at least 561.(32)

All these, then, we lay aside, so far as our search for Jeremiah himself and his doctrine is concerned, and we do so the more easily that they are largely devoid of the style and the spiritual value of his undoubted Oracles and Discourses. They are more or less diffuse and vagrant, while his are concise and to the point. They do not reveal, as his do, a man fresh from agonising debates with G.o.d upon the poverty of his qualifications for the mission to which G.o.d calls him, or upon the contents of that mission, or upon his own sufferings and rights; nor do they recount his adventures with his contemporaries. They are not the outpourings of a single soul but rather the expression of the feelings of a generation or of the doctrines of a school. We have in our Bible other and better utterances of the truths, questions, threats and hopes which they contain.