Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 8

This was so, not only because He was their ancestral G.o.d-though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations-but because He was such a G.o.d and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the G.o.ds they went after had neither character nor efficiency-mere breaths, mere bubbles!

The nerve of the faith of the prophets was this memory-that their G.o.d was love and in love had wrought for His people. The frequent expression of this by the prophets and by Deuteronomy, the prophetic edition of the Law, is the answer to those abstractions to which some academic moderns have sought to reduce the Object of Israel's religion-such as, "a tendency not ourselves that makes for righteousness." The G.o.d of Israel was Righteous and demanded righteousness from men; but to begin with He was Love which sought their love in return. First the Exodus then Sinai; first Redemption then Law; first Love then Discipline. Through His Deeds and His Word by the prophets He had made all this clear and very plain.

What wrong found your fathers in Me, That so far they broke from Me?

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

Why say My folk, "We are off, To meet Thee no more."

Jeremiah has prefaced this Divine challenge with a pa.s.sionate exclamation in prose-_O Generation-you!-look at the Word of the Lord!_-which (as I have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the present corruption of Israel.

A n.o.ble vine did I plant thee, Wholly true seed, How could'st thou change to a corrupt, A wildling grape?

The sense of their terrible guilt governs him, and of their indifference to it, saying we are clean, to which he answers:-

Yea though thou scour thee with nitre And heap to thee lye, Ingrained is thy guilt before Me- Rede of the Lord.

Yet the fervency with which he pleads the Divine Love reveals a heart of hunger, if hardly of hope, for his nation's repentance. Indeed apart from his own love for them he could not have followed Hosea so closely as he does at this stage of his career, without feeling some possibility of their recovery from even this, their awful worst; and his ear strains for a sign of it. Like Hosea he hears what sounds like the surge of a national repentance(197)-was it when Judah listened to the pleadings and warnings of the discovered Book of the Law and _all the people stood to the Covenant_? But he does not say whether he found this sincere or whether it was merely a shallow stir of the feelings. Probably he suspected the latter, for in answer to it he gives not G.o.d's gracious acceptance, but a stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching of their hearts.

Fallow up the fallow-ground, Sow not on thorns!

To your G.o.d(198) circ.u.mcise ye, Off from your heart with the foreskin!

Lest My wrath break out like the fire, And burn with none to quench.(199)

Jeremiah has been called the blackest of pessimists, and among his best-known sayings some seem to justify the charge:-

Can the Ethiop change his skin, Or the leopard his spots?

Then also may ye do good, Who are wont to do evil.(200)

And again,

False above all is the heart, And sick to despair, Who is to know it?

But to his question came the answer:-

I, the Lord, searching the heart, And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings.(201)

In this answer there is awfulness but not final doom. The affirmation of a man's dread responsibility for his fate implies, too, the liberty to change his ways. In the dim mystery of the heart freedom is clear.

Similarly, and even more plainly, is this expressed in the earlier call to _break up the fallow-ground_. This implies that beneath those surfaces of the national life, whether of callous indifference on the one hand or of shallow feeling on the other, there is soil which, if thoroughly ploughed, will be hospitable to the good seed and fit to bring forth fruits meet for repentance. Human nature even at its worst has tracts other than those on which there has been careless sowing among thorns, moral possibilities below those of its abused or neglected surfaces. Let us mark this depth, which the Prophet's insight has already reached. Much will come out of it; this is the matrix of all developments by himself and others of the doctrine of man and his possibilities under G.o.d. And for all time the truth is valid that many spoiled or wasted lives are spoiled or wasted only on the surface; and that it is worth while ploughing deeper for their possibilities.(202)

In what form the deep ploughing required was _at first_ imagined by the Prophet we see from the immediately following Oracles.

2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)

The invasion of Western Asia by the Scythians happened some time between 627 and 620 B.C.(203) The following series of brief poems unfold the panic actually caused, or to the Prophet's imagination likely to be caused, in Judah by the advance of these marauding hordes, and clearly reflect their appearance and manner of raiding. It is indeed doubtful that Judah was visited by the Scythians, who appear to have swept only the maritime plain of Palestine. And once more we must remember that when the Prophet dictated his early Oracles to Baruch for the second time in 604, and _added to them many more like words_,(204) the impending enemy from the North was no longer the Scythians but Nebuchadrezzar and his Chaldeans; for this will explain features of the poems that are not suited to the Scythians and their peculiar warfare, which avoided the siege of fortified towns but kept to the open country and the ruin of its villages and fields. Jeremiah does not give the feared invaders a name. The Scythians were utterly new to his world; yet their name may have occurred in the poems as originally delivered and have been removed in 604, when the Scythians were no longer a force to be reckoned with.(205)

1. As it has reached us, the First Scythian Song, Ch. IV. 5-8, opens with the general formula-

Proclaim in Judah and Jerusalem, Make heard and say!

which may be the addition of a later hand, but is as probably Jeremiah's own; for the capital, though not likely to be besieged by the Scythians, was just as concerned with their threatened invasion as the country folk, to whom, in the first place, the lines are addressed. The _trump_ or _horn_ of the first line was the signal of alarm, kept ready by the watchman of every village, as Amos and Joel indicate.(206)

Strike up the trump through the land, IV. 5_b_ Call with full voice, And say, Sweep together and into The fortified towns.

Hoist the signal towards ?ion, 6 Pack off and stay not!

For evil I bring from the North And ruin immense.

The Lion is up from his thicket, 7 Mauler of nations; He is off and forth from his place, Thy land(207) to lay waste; That thy townships be burned With none to inhabit!

Gird ye with sackcloth for this, 8 Howl and lament, For the glow of the wrath of the Lord Turns not from us.

These lines are followed by a verse with an introduction to itself, and therefore too separate from the context, and indeed too general to have belonged to so vivid a song:-

9. And it shall be in that day-Rede of the Lord-

The heart of the king shall perish, And the heart of the princes, And the priests shall be aghast And the prophets dismayed!

And this is followed by one of the sudden protests to G.o.d, which are characteristic of Jeremiah:-

10. And I said, Ah Lord G.o.d, surely Thou hast wholly deceived this people and Jerusalem saying, "Peace shall be yours," while the sword strikes through to the life!

2. The Second Scythian Song is like the first, prefaced by a double address, which there is no reason to deny to Jeremiah. Jerusalem is named twice in the song, and naturally, since the whole land is threatened with waste and the raiders come up to the suburbs of the capital. The Prophet speaks, but as so often the Voice of the Lord breaks through his own and calls directly to the city and people (though the last line of verse 12 may be a later addition). On the other hand, the Prophet melts into his people; their panic and pangs become his. This is one of the earliest instances of Jeremiah's bearing of the sins of his people and of their punishment.

IV. 11. At that time it was said to this people and to Jerusalem,

A wind off the blaze of the bare desert heights, Straight on the Daughter of my people, Neither to winnow nor to sift, In full blast it meets me. 12 [Now will I speak My judgments upon them]