Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 16

A Gilead art thou to Me, Or head of Lebanon, Yet shall I make thee a desert Of tenantless cities.

I will hallow against thee destroyers, 7 Each with his weapons, They shall cut down the choice of thy cedars And fell them for fuel.

8. [And(452) nations shall pa.s.s by this city and shall say each to his mate, For what hath the Lord done thus to this great city? 9.

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Covenant of the Lord their G.o.d, and bowed themselves to other G.o.ds and served them.]

Whether this piece of prose be from Jeremiah himself or from another is uncertain and of no importance. It is a true statement of his own interpretation of the cause of his people's doom. The next Oracle addressed to the nation is upon King Jeconiah, or Koniyahu. I follow mainly the Greek.

Up to Lebanon and cry, XXII. 20 Give forth thy voice in Bashan, And cry from Abarim(453) that broken Be all thy lovers.

I spake to thee in thy prosperity, 21 Thou saidst, I hear not!

This was thy way from thy youth, Not to hark to My Voice.

All thy shepherds the wind shall shepherd, 22 Thy lovers go captive.

Then shamed shalt thou be and confounded For all thine ill-doing.

Thou in Lebanon that dwellest, 23 Nested on cedars, How shalt thou groan(454) when come on thee pangs, Anguish as hers that beareth.

As I live-'t is the Rede of the Lord- 24 Though Konyahu were Upon My right hand the signet, Thence would I tear him.(455)

25. And I shall give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life and into the hand of them thou dreadest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans; [26] and I will hurl thee out, and thy mother who bare thee, upon another land, where ye were not born, and there shall ye die. 27. And to the land, towards which they shall be lifting their soul,(456) they shall not return.

Is Konyahu then despised, 28 Like a nauseous vessel?

Why is he flung and cast out On a land he knows not?

Land, Land, Land, 29 Hear the Word of the Lord!

Write this man down as childless, 30 A fellow ...(?) For none of his seed shall flourish Seated on David's throne, Or ruling still in Judah.(457)

We can reasonably deny to Jeremiah nothing of all this pa.s.sage, not even the prose by which the metre is interrupted. We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pa.s.s from verse to prose and again from prose to verse. Nor are the repet.i.tions superfluous, not even that four-fold _into the hand of_ in the prose section, for at each recurrence of the phrase we feel the grip of their captor closing more fast upon the doomed king and people. Nor are we required to take the pathetic words, _the land to which they shall be lifting up their soul_, as true only of those who have been long banished. For the exiles to Babylon felt this home-sickness from the very first, as Jeremiah well knew.

If we are to trust the date given by its t.i.tle-and no sufficient reason exists against our doing so-there is still an Oracle of Jeremiah, which, though now standing far down in our Book, Ch. XLV, belongs to the reign of Jehoiakim, and is properly a supplement to the story of the writing of the Rolls by Baruch in 605.(458) The text has suffered, probably more than we can now detect.

XLV. 1. The Word, which Jeremiah the prophet spake to Baruch, the son of Neriah, while he was writing these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah,(459) in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah.(460) 2. Thus saith the Lord(461) concerning thee, O Baruch, [3] for thou didst say:-

Woe is me! Woe is me!(462) How hath the Lord on my pain heaped sorrow!

I am worn with my groaning, Rest I find none!

[Thus shalt thou say to him(463)] thus sayeth the Lord: 4 Lo, what I built I have to destroy, And what I planted I have to root up.(464) Thou, dost thou seek thee great things? 5 Seek thou them not, For behold, on all flesh I bring evil- Rede of the Lord- But I give thee thy life as a prey, Wheresoever thou goest.

The younger man, with youth's high hopes for his people and ambitions for himself in their service-ambitions which he could honestly cherish by right both of his station in life(465) and the firmness of his character-felt his spirit spent beneath the long-drawn weight of all the Oracles of Doom, which it was his fate to inscribe as final. Now to Baruch in such a mood the older man, the Prophet, might have appealed from his own example, for none in that day was more stripped than Jeremiah himself, of family, friends, affections, or hopes of positive results from his ministry; nor was there any whose life had been more often s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of death. But instead of quoting his own case Jeremiah brought to his despairing servant and friend a still higher example. The Lord Himself had been forced to relinquish His designs and to destroy what He had built and to uproot what He had planted. In face of such Divine surrender, both of purpose and achievement, what was the resignation by a mere man, or even by a whole nation, of their hopes or ambitions? Let Baruch be content to expect nothing beyond bare life: _thy life shall I give thee for a prey_. This stern phrase is found four times in the Oracles of Jeremiah,(466) and nowhere else. It is not more due to the Prophet than to the conditions of his generation. Jeremiah only put into words what must have been felt by all the men of his time-those terrible years in which, through the Oracles quoted in this lecture, he has shown us War, Drought, Famine and Pestilence fatally pa.s.sing over his land; when _Death came up by the windows_, children were cut off from their playgrounds and youths from the squares where they gathered, and the corpses of men were scattered like dung on the fields. It was indeed a time when each survivor must have felt that his life had been _given_ him _for a prey_.

To the hearts of us who have lived through the Great War, with its heavy toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.

Yet more awful than the physical calamities which the prophet unveils throughout these terrible years are his bitter portraits of the character of his people, whom no word of their G.o.d nor any of His heavy judgments could move to repentance. He paints a hopeless picture of society in Jerusalem and Judah under Jehoiakim, rotten with dishonesty and vice.

Members of the same family are unable to trust each other; all are bent on their own gain by methods unjust and cruel-from top to bottom so hopelessly false as even to be blind to the meaning of the disasters which rapidly befal them and to the final doom that steadily draws near. Yet, for all the wrath he pours upon his generation and the Divine vengeance of which he is sure, how the man still loves and clings to them, and takes their doom as his own! And, greatest of all, how he reads in the heart that was in him the Heart of G.o.d Himself-the same astonishment that the people are so callous, the same horror of their ruin, nay the same sense of failure and of suffering under the burden of such a waste-_on Me is the waste!_(467) _What I built I have to destroy!_

Except that he does not share these secrets of the Heart of G.o.d, it is of Victor Hugo among moderns that I have been most reminded when working through Jeremiah's charges against the king, the priests, the prophets and the whole people of Judah-Victor Hugo in his _Chatiments_ of the monarch, the church, the journalists, the courtiers and other creatures of the Third French Empire. There is the same mordant frankness and satiric rage combined with the same desire to share the miseries of the critic's people in spite of their faults. I have already quoted Hugo's lines on Napoleon III as parallel to Jeremiah's on Jehoiakim.(468)

Here are two other parallels.

To Jeremiah's description of his people being persuaded that all was well, when well it was not, and refusing to own their dishonour, VIII. 11, 12, take Hugo's "on est infame et content" and

Et tu chantais, en proie aux eclatants mensonges Du succes.

And to Jeremiah's acceptance of the miseries of his people as his own and refusal to the end to part from them take these lines to France:-

Je te demanderai ma part de tes miseres, Moi ton fils.

France, tu verras bien qu'humble tete eclipsee J'avais foi, Et que je n'eus jamais dans l'ame une pensee Que pour toi.

France, etre sur ta claie a l'heure ou l'on te traine Aux cheveux, O ma mere, et porter mon anneau de ta chaine Je le veux!

Lecture VI.

TO THE END AND AFTER. 597-? B.C.

The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their story is soon told.

When Nebuchadrezzar deported King Jehoiachin in 597, he set up in his place his uncle Mattaniah, a son of Josiah by that Hamutal, who was also the mother of the miserable Jehoahaz.(469) The name of the new king Nebuchadrezzar changed to ?edekiah, _Righteousness_ or _Truth of Jehovah_,(470) intending thus to bind the Jew by the name of his own G.o.d to the oath of allegiance which he had exacted from him. When Ezekiel afterwards denounced ?edekiah on his revolt it was for _despising the Lord's oath and breaking the Lord's covenant_(471)-a signal instance of the sanct.i.ty attached in the ancient world to an oath sworn by one nation to another, even though it was to the humiliation of the swearer.(472) So far as we see, ?edekiah was of a temper(473) to have been content with the peace, which the observance of his oath would have secured to him. But he was a weak man, master no more of himself than of his throne,(474) distracted between a half-superst.i.tious respect for the one high influence left to him in Jeremiah and the opposite pressure, first from a set of upstarts who had succeeded to the estates and the posts about court of their banished betters, and second, from those prophets whose personal insignificance can have been the only reason of their escape from deportation. It is one of the notable ironies of history that, while Nebuchadrezzar had planned to render Judah powerless to rebel again, by withdrawing from her all the wisest and most skilful and soldierly of her population, he should have left to her her fanatics!

There remained in Jerusalem the elements-sincerely patriotic but rash and in politics inexperienced-of a "war-party," restless to revolt from Babylon and blindly confident of the strength of their walls and of their men to resist the arms of the great Empire. Of their nation they and their fellows alone had been spared the judgment of the Lord and prided themselves on being the Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival and security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, _Get ye far from the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession._(475) Through the early uneventful years of ?edekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party found time to gather strength, and in his fourth year must have been stirred towards action by the arrival in Jerusalem of messengers from the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and ?idon, all of them states within the scope of Egyptian intrigues against Babylon.(476) For the time the movement came to nothing largely because of Jeremiah's influence, and ?edekiah is said to have journeyed to Babylon to protest in person his continued fidelity.(477) Either then or previously Nebuchadrezzar imposed on Jerusalem the Babylonian idolatry which Ezekiel describes as invading even the Temple.(478)

The intrigues of Egypt persisted, however, and, in 589 or 588, after the accession of Pharaoh Hophra,(479) at last prevailed upon Judah. ?edekiah yielded to the party of revolt and Nebuchadrezzar swiftly invested Jerusalem. Roused to realities _the king and all the people of Jerusalem_ offered their repentance by a solemn covenant before G.o.d to enfranchise, in obedience to the Law, those slaves who had reached a seventh year of service. But when on the news of an Egyptian advance the Chaldeans raised their siege, the Jewish slave-owners broke faith and pressed back their liberated slaves into bondage.(480) This proved the last link in the long chain of lies and frauds by which the hopelessly dishonest people fastened upon them their doom. Egypt again failed her dupes. The Chaldeans, either by the terror they inspired or by an actual victory on the field, compelled her army to retire, and resumed the siege of Jerusalem. Though Jeremiah counselled surrender and though the city was sapped by famine and pestilence, the fanatics-to whom, however reluctantly, some admiration is due-held out against the forces of Babylon for a year and a half. Then came the end. The walls on the north were breached. ?edekiah fled by a southern gate, upon an effort to reach the East of Jordan. He was overtaken on the plains of Jericho, his escort scattered and himself carried to Nebuchadrezzar's head-quarters at Riblah on the Orontes.

Thence, after his sons were slain before his eyes, and his eyes put out, he was taken in fetters to Babylon. Nebu?aradan, a high Babylonian officer, was dispatched to Jerusalem to burn the Temple, the Palace and the greater houses, and to transport to Babylon a second mult.i.tude of Jews, leaving only _the poorest of the land to be vine-dressers and husbandmen_.(481) This was in 586.

1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)

From these rapidly descending years a number of prophecies by Jeremiah have come to us, as well as narratives of the trials which he endured because of his faithfulness to the Word of the Lord, and his sane views of the facts of the time. As we read these prophecies and narratives several changes become clear in the position and circ.u.mstances of the Prophet, and in his temper and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words have been, we are not surprised that to his contemporaries he has grown to be a personage of greater impressiveness and authority than before. He has still his enemies but these are not found in exactly the same quarters as under Jehoiakim. Instead of an implacable king, and princes more or less respectful and friendly, in the king he has now a friend, though a timid and ineffective one, while the new and inferior princes appear almost wholly against him. Formerly both priests and prophets had been his foes, but now only the prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one priest is loyal to him.(482) Inwardly again, he has no more of those debates with G.o.d and his own soul, which had rent him during the previous years; only once does doubt escape from his lips in prayer.(483) Clearest of all, his hope has been released, and in contrast with his prophesying up to the surrender of Jerusalem in 597, but in full agreement with his enduring faith in G.o.d's Freedom and Patience,(484) he utters not a few predictions of a future upon their own land for both Israel and Judah. This greatest of the changes which appear is due partly to the fact that while the man's reluctant duty has been to p.r.o.nounce the doom of exile upon his people, that doom has been fulfilled, and his spirit, which never desired it,(485) is free to range beyond its shadows. To the clearness into which he rises he is helped, under belief in the Divine Grace, by the truth obvious to all but fanatics that peace and order were possible for that shaken world only through submission to Nebuchadrezzar's firm government, including as this did a policy comparatively lenient to the Jewish exiles. But there was another and stronger reason why Jeremiah should at last turn himself to a ministry of hope, however sternly he must continue to denounce the Jews left in Jerusalem and Judah. The catastrophe of 597 largely separated the better elements of the nation, which were swept into exile, from the worse which remained in the land.

It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the most momentous events in the history of Israel, with which Jeremiah's earliest Oracle under ?edekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more the Word of the Lord starts to him from a vision, this time of two baskets, one of good the other of bad figs, which the Lord, he says, _caused me to see_: a vision which I take to be as physical and actual as those of the almond-rod and the caldron upon his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though others interpret it as imaginative like the visions of Amos.(486) Note how easily again the Prophet pa.s.ses from verse to prose. The verse is slightly irregular. The stresses of the four couplets are these-3 + 3; 4 + 3; 4 + 3; 3 + 3-to which the following version only approximates.

XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah?

And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad, which for their(487) badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of the Lord came unto me, [5] saying, Thus saith the Lord, the G.o.d of Israel-

Like unto these good figs I look on the exiles of Judah, Whom away from this place I have sent To the Chaldeans' land for (their) good.

For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6 And bring them back to this land, And build them and not pull them down, And plant them and not pluck up.