Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 2

Therefore in the selection of materials available for estimating the range and character of Jeremiah's activities as a prophet, we must not reject any prose Oracles offered by the Book as his, simply because they are in prose. This reasonable caution will be of use when we come to consider the question of the authenticity of such important pa.s.sages as those which recount his call, or represent him as a.s.sisting in the promulgation of Deuteronomy, and uttering the Oracle on the New Covenant.(52)

But, while it has been necessary to reject as groundless the theory that Jeremiah was exclusively a poet of a limited temper and a single form of verse and was not the author of any of the prose attributed to him, we must keep in mind that he did pour himself forth in verse; that it was natural for a rural priest such as he, aiming at the heart of what was mainly a nation of peasants, to use the form or forms of folk-song most familiar to them(53)-in fact the only literary forms with which they were familiar; and that in all probability more of the man himself comes out in the poetry than in the prose which he has left to us. By his native gifts and his earliest a.s.sociations he was a poet to begin with; and therefore the form and character of his poetry, especially as revealing himself, demand our attention.

From what has been said it is clear that we must not seek too high for Jeremiah's rank as a poet. The temptation to this-which has overcome some recent writers-is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was reared-sometimes of an exquisite exactness of tone and delicacy of feeling, but sometimes full both of what are metrical irregularities according to modern standards, and of coa.r.s.e images and similes. To reduce the metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm's, may occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming-the house-candle, the house-mill, the wine skins, the ornaments of women, the yoke, the plough, and so forth. And there are abrupt changes of metaphor as in our early ballads, due to the rush of a quick imagination and the crowd of concrete figures it catches.

Some of Jeremiah's verse indeed shows no irregularity. The following, for instance, which recalls as Hosea loved to do the innocence and loyalty of Israel's desert days, is in the normal Qinah rhythm of lines with alternately _three_ and _two_ accents each. The two first lines are rhymed, the rest not.

II. 2f.:-

The troth of thy youth I remember, Thy love as a bride, Thy follow of Me through the desert, The land unsown.

Holy to the Lord was Israel, Of His income the firstling, All that would eat it stood guilty, Evil came on them.

Or II. 32:-

Can a maiden forget her adorning, Or her girdle the bride?

Yet Me have My people forgotten, Days without number.

How fine hast thou fashioned thy ways, To seek after love!

Thus 't was thyself(55) to [those] evils Didst train(56) thy ways.

Yea on thy skirts is found blood Of innocent(57) souls.

Not only on felons(?) I find it,(58) But over all these.

Here again is a pa.s.sage which, with slight emendations and these not arbitrary, yields a fair constancy of metre (IV. 29-31):-

From the noise of the horse and the bowmen All the land is in flight, They are into the caves, huddle in thickets, And are up on the crags.(59) Every town of its folk is forsaken, With none to inhabit.

All is up! Thou destined to ruin,(?)(60) What doest thou now That thou deck'st thee in deckings of gold And clothest in scarlet,(61) And with stibium widenest thine eyes?

In vain dost thou prink!

Though satyrs, they utterly loathe thee, Thy life are they after.

For voice as of travail I hear, Anguish as hers that beareth, The voice of the Daughter of ?ion agasp, She spreadeth her hands: "Woe unto me, but it faints, My life to the butchers!"

On the other hand here is a metre,(62) for the irregularities of which no remedy is offered by alternative readings in the Versions, but Duhm and others reduce these only by padding the text with particles and other terms. Yet these very irregularities have reason; they suit the meaning to be expressed. Thus while some of the couplets are in the Qinah metre, it is instructive that the first three lines are _all_ short, because they are mere e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns-that is they belong to the same cla.s.s of happy irregularities as we recalled in Shakespeare's blank verse.

Israel a slave!

Or house-born serf!

Why he for a prey?

Against him the young lions roar, Give forth their voice, And his land they lay waste Burning and tenantless.

Is not this being done thee For thy leaving of Me?

Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel's mourning, the sob upon which the wail dies out:-

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children And will not be comforted- For they are not!(63)

Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a pa.s.sionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another-I love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be repeated to the people in 604-3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,

O generation look at the Word of the Lord!

breaking in before the following regular verse,

Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness?

Why say my folk, "We are off, No more to meet Thee."

There is another poem in which the Qinah measure prevails but with occasional lines longer than is normal-Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end of 5(64)).

Run through Jerusalem's streets, Look now and know, And search her broad places If a man ye can find, If there be that doth justice Aiming at honesty.

[That I may forgive her.]

Though they say, "As G.o.d liveth,"

Falsely they swear.

Lord, are thine eyes upon lies(65) And not on the truth?

Thou hast smitten, they ail not, Consumed them, they take not correction; Their faces set harder than rock, They refuse to return.

Or take Ch. II. 5-8. A stanza of four lines in irregular Qinah measure (verse 5) is followed by a couplet of four-two stresses and several lines of three each (verses 6 and 7), and then (verse 8) by a couplet of three-two, another of four-three, and another of three-three.(66) In Chs.

IX and X also we shall find irregular metres.

Let us now take a pa.s.sage, IX. 22, 23, which, except for its last couplet, is of another measure than the Qinah. The lines have three accents each, like those of the Book of Job:-

Boast not the wise in his wisdom, Boast not the strong in his strength, Boast not the rich in his riches, But in this let him boast who would boast- Instinct and knowledge of Me, Me, the Lord, Who work troth And(67) justice and right upon earth, For in these I delight.

Or this couplet, X. 23, in lines of four stresses each:-

Lord, I know-not to man is his way, Not a man's to walk or settle his steps!

Not being in the Qinah measure, both these pa.s.sages are denied to Jeremiah by Duhm. Is not this arbitrary?

The sections of the Book which pa.s.s from verse to prose and from prose to verse are frequent.

One of the most striking is the narrative of the Prophet's call, Ch. I.

4-19, which I leave to be rendered in the next lecture. In Chap. VII. 28 ff. we have, to begin with, two verses:-