Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 3

This is the folk that obeyed not The voice of the Lord,(68) That would not accept correction; Lost(69) is truth from their mouth.

Shear and scatter thy locks, Raise a dirge on the heights, The Lord hath refused and forsaken The sons of His wrath.

Then these verses are followed by a prose tale of the people's sins. Is this necessarily from a later hand, as Duhm maintains, and not naturally from Jeremiah himself?

Again Chs. VIII and IX are a medley of lyrics and prose pa.s.sages. While some of the prose is certainly not Jeremiah's, being irrelevant to the lyrics and showing the colour of a later age, the rest may well be from himself.

Ch. XIV is also a medley of verse and prose. After the Dirge on the Drought (which we take later), comes a pa.s.sage in rhythmical prose (verses 11-16), broken only by the metrical utterance of the false prophets in verse 13:-

Sword or famine ye shall not see, They shall not be yours; But peace and staith shall I give you Within this Place.(70)

And verse comes in again in verses 17-18, an Oracle of Jeremiah's own:-

Let mine eyes with tears run down, By night and by day, Let them not cease from weeping(71) For great is the breach- Broken the Virgin, Daughter of my people, Most sore the wound!

Fare I forth to the field, Lo, the slain of the sword; If I enter the city, Lo, anguish of famine.

Priest and prophet alike are gone begging In a land they know not.

Hast Thou utterly cast away Judah, Loathes ?ion Thy soul?

Why then hast Thou smitten us, Past our healing?

Hoped we for peace-no good, For time to heal-and lo panic!

Lord we acknowledge our evil, The guilt of our fathers- To Thee have we sinned.

And now the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes, precariously, as from a later hand:-

For Thy Name's sake do not despise, Demean not the Throne of Thy Glory, Remember and break not Thy Covenant with us!

Can any of the gentile Bubbles bring rain, Or the Heavens give the showers?

Art not Thou He(72) on whom we must wait?

For all these Thou hast made.

Again in Ch. XV. 1-2, prose is followed by a couplet, this by more prose (verses 3, 4) and this by verse again (verses 5-9). But these parts are relevant to each other, and some of Duhm's objections to the prose seem inadequate and even trifling. For while the heavy judgment is suitably detailed by the prose, the following dirge is as naturally in verse:-

Jerusalem, who shall pity, Who shall bemoan thee?

Who shall but turn him to ask After thy welfare?

And once more, in the Oracle Ch. III. 1-6 the first verse, a quotation from the law on a divorced wife, is in prose, and no one doubts that Jeremiah himself is the quoter, while the rest, recounting Israel's unfaithfulness to her Husband is in verse. See below, pages 98, 99.

So much for the varied and often irregular streams of the Prophet's verse and their interruptions and connections by "portages" of prose. Let us turn now from the measures to the substance and tempers of the poetry.

As in all folk-song the language is simple, but its general inevitableness-just the fit and ringing word-stamps the verse as a true poet's. Hence the difficulty of translating. So much depends on the music of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions, metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the original. Before taking some of the Prophet's renderings of the more concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of his moral reflections in verse-Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:-

Cursed the wight that trusteth in man Making flesh his stay!

[And his heart from the Lord is turned]

Like some desert-scrub shall he be, Nor see any coming of good, But dwell in the aridest desert, A salt, uninhabited land.

Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord, And the Lord is his trust!

He like a tree shall be planted by waters, That stretches its roots to the stream, Unafraid(73) at the coming of heat, His leaf shall be green.

Sans care in a year of drought, He fails not in yielding his fruit.

As here, so generally, the simplicity of the poet's diction is matched by that of his metaphors, similes, and parables. A girl and her ornaments, a man and his waist-cloth-thus he figures what ought to be the clinging relations between Israel and their G.o.d. The stunted desert-shrub in contrast to the river-side oaks, the incomparable olive, the dropped sheaf and even the dung upon the fields; the vulture, stork, crane and swift; the lion, wolf and spotted leopard coming up from the desert or the jungles of Jordan; the hinnying stallions and the heifer in her heat; the black Ethiopian, already familiar in the streets of Jerusalem, the potter and his wheel, the shepherd, plowman and vinedresser, the driver with his ox's yoke upon his shoulders; the harlot by the wayside; the light in the home and sound of the hand-mill-all everyday objects of his people's sight and hearing as they herded, ploughed, sowed, reaped or went to market in the city-he brings them in simply and with natural ease as figures of the truths he is enforcing. They are never bald or uncouth, though in translation they may sometimes sound so.

In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as in the following-a pa.s.sage of prose broken by a single line of verse.(74) The Deity is addressing the prophet:-

And thou shalt say unto this people, "Every jar shall be filled with wine,"

and it shall be if they say unto thee, "Don't we know of course(75) that

"Every jar shall be filled with wine,"

then thou shalt say unto them: Thus saith the Lord, Lo, I am about to fill the inhabitants of this land, the kings and princes, the priests and prophets, even Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness [the drunkenness, that is, of horror at impending judgments] and I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together. I will not pity, saith the Lord, nor spare nor have compa.s.sion that I should not destroy them.

How one catches the irritation of the crowd on being told what seems to them such a commonplace-till it is interpreted!

Like his fellow-prophets, whose moral atmosphere was as burning as their physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright sun _drew breath_ (as Isaiah puts it) _in the fear of the Lord_ and saw the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human as well as animal, which their skirts leave behind are rendered with vividness, poignancy and horror of detail.

Take, to begin with, the following, XIV. 1 ff.:-

_The Word of the Lord to Jeremiah Concerning the Drought._

Jerusalem's cry is gone up, Judah is mourning, The gates thereof faint in Black grief to the ground.

Her n.o.bles sent their menials for water, They came to the pits; Water found none and returned, Empty their vessels.

[Abashed and confounded They cover their heads.](76)

The tillers(77) of the ground are dismayed, For no rain hath been(78); And abashed are the ploughmen, They cover their heads.

The hind on the moor calves and abandons, For the gra.s.s has not come.

On the bare heights stand the wild a.s.ses, Gasping for air With glazen eyes- Herb there is none!

Though our sins do witness against us, Lord act for the sake of Thy Name!

[For many have been our backslidings, 'Fore Thee have we sinned.]

Hope of Israel, His Saviour In time of trouble, Why be like a traveller(79) through the land, Or wayfaring guest of a night?

Why art Thou as one that is stunned,- Strong yet unable to save?