Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 21

Ye women(676) have said with your mouths And fulfilled with your hands, "We must indeed perform our vows, Which we have vowed, "To burn to the Queen of Heaven, And to pour her libations!"

Indeed then establish your words(677) And perform your vows!

Jeremiah "adds this by way of irony."(678) Having thus finished with the women, he adds an Oracle to the Jews in general.

26. Therefore hear the Word of the Lord all Judah, who are settled in the land of Egypt:

By My great Name I swear, Sayeth the Lord, That My Name shall no more be called By the mouth of a man of Judah- Saying, "As liveth the Lord!"- In all the land of Egypt.

Lo, I am wakeful upon you 27 For evil and not for good.(679) And the remnant of Judah shall know, 28_b_ Whose is the word that shall stand.(680)

These are the last words we have from him, and up to these last he is still himself-broken-hearted indeed and disappointed in the ultimate remnant of his people-but still himself in his honesty, his steadfastness to the truth and his courage; still himself in his irony, his deliberateness and his confident appeal to the future for the vindication of his word.

So he disappears from our sight. How pathetic that even after his death he is not spared from spoiling but that the last clear streams of his prophesying must run out, as we have seen, in the sands of those expanders!

Lecture VII.

THE STORY OF HIS SOUL.

In this Lecture I propose to gather up the story of the soul of the man, whose service, and the fortunes it met with, we have followed over the more than forty years of their range. The interest of many great lives lies in their natural and fair development: the growth of gift towards occasion, the beckoning of occasion when gift is ripe, the sympathy between a man and his times, the coincidence of public need with personal powers or ambition-the zest of the race and the thrill of the goal. With Jeremiah it was altogether otherwise.

1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI.

9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)

If, as is possible, the name Jeremiah means _Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots forth_, it fitly describes the Prophet's temper, struggles and fate. For he was a projectile, fired upon a hostile world with a force not his own, and on a mission from which, from the first, his gifts and affections recoiled and against which he continued to protest. On his pa.s.sage through the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal sh.e.l.ls which rend the air as they shoot, distinct even through the roar of battle by their swift, shrill anguish and effecting their end by their explosion.

Jeremiah has been called The Weeping Prophet, but that is mainly because of the attribution to him of The Book of Lamentations, which does not profess to be his and is certainly later than his day. Not weeping, though he had to weep, so much as groaning or even screaming is the particular pitch of the tone of this Prophet. As he says himself,

For as oft as I speak I must shriek, And cry "Violence and Spoil!"(681)

His first word is one of shrinking, _I cannot speak, I am too young_.(682) 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion, 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 ?edekiah, 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 a.s.s.(688) Even for ?edekiah, 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 bra.s.s 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.