Part 16

The time of relief and fair promise, out of which we have supposed that the Prophet conceived and uttered the preceding Oracles, came to a sudden and tragic close with the assassination of the good governor Gedaliah by the fanatic Ishmael. Had this not happened we can see from those Oracles on what favourable lines the restoration of Judah might have proceeded under the co-operation of Gedaliah and Jeremiah, and how after so long and heart-breaking a mission of doom to his people the Prophet might at last have achieved before his eyes some positive part in their social and political reconstruction; for certainly he had already proved his practical ability as well his power of far vision. But even such sunset success was denied him, and once more his people crumbled under his hand. God provided some better thing for him in the spiritual future of Israel, to which he must now pass through still deeper sacrifice and humiliation.(661)

Ishmael, against whom the noble Gedaliah would take no warning, was one of those fanatics with whom the Jewish nation have been cursed at all crises in their history.(662) The motive for his crime was the same as had inspired the fatal defence of Jerusalem, a blind passion against the Chaldean rule. Having slain Gedaliah he attempted to remove the little remnant at Miṣpah to the other side of Jordan but was overtaken by a force under Gedaliah’s lieutenant, Johanan-ben-Kareah, and his captives were recovered. Fearing the wrath of the Chaldeans for the murder of their deputy, the little flock did not return to Miṣpah but moved south to Gidroth(663)-Chimham near Bethlehem, broken, trembling, and uncertain whether to remain in their land or to flee from it.(664)

The Prophet was the one hope left to them, and like Ṣedekiah they turned to him in their perplexity for a word of guidance from the Lord. With his usual deliberation he took ten days to answer, laying the matter before the Lord in prayer; studying, we may be sure, the actual facts of the situation (including what he already knew to be the people’s hope of finding security in Egypt) and carefully sifting out his own thoughts and impulses from the convictions which his prayers brought him from God. The result was clear: the people must abide in their land and not fear the Chaldeans, who under God’s hand would let them be; but if they set their faces for Egypt, the sword which they feared would overtake them. This was God’s Word; if they broke their promise to obey it, they would surely die.(665)

With shame we read the rest of the story. Jeremiah had well discerned(666) that those of his countrymen, who had been deported in 597, were the good figs of his vision and those who remained the bad. The latter were of the breed that had turned Temple and Sacrifice into fetishes, for as such they now treated the Prophet, the greatest whom God ever sent to Israel. Covetous of having him with them they eagerly asked him for a Word of the Lord, promising to obey it, in the expectation of their kind that it would be according to their own ignorant wishes; but when it declared against these, they scolded Jeremiah as disappointed barbarians do their idols, and presuming on his age as a weakness, complained that he had been set against them by Baruch, a philo-Chaldean who would have them all carried off to Babylon! So Baruch also—all praise to him—held the same sane views of the situation as his Prophet and as that wise governor Gedaliah. In spite of their promise they refused to obey the Word of the Lord, fled for Egypt carrying with them Jeremiah and Baruch, and reached the frontier town of Tahpanhes. How it must have broken the Prophet’s heart!(667)

But not his honesty or his courage! At Tahpanhes he set before the fugitives one of those symbols which had been characteristic of his prophesying. He laid great stones in the entry of the house of the Pharaoh and declared that Nebuchadrezzar would plant his throne and spread his tapestries upon them, when he came to smite Egypt, assuming that land as easily as a shepherd dons his garment; and after breaking the obelisks of its gods and burning their temples he would safely depart from it.(668)

So far the narrative runs clearly, but in Ch. XLIV, the last that is written of Jeremiah, the expander has been specially busy.(669) The chapter opens, verses 1-14, with what purports to be an Oracle by Jeremiah concerning, not the little band which had brought him down with them, but _all the Jews which were dwelling in the land of Egypt, at Migdol and Tahpanhes_,(670) on the northern frontier, _and in the land of Pathros_, or Upper Egypt. It is not said that these came to Tahpanhes to receive the Oracle. Yet the arrival of a company fresh from Judah and her recent awful experiences must have stirred the Jewish communities already in Egypt and drawn at least representatives of them to Tahpanhes to see and to hear the newcomers. If so, it would be natural for Jeremiah to expound the happenings in Judah, and the Divine reasons for them. No date is given for the Prophet’s Oracle. This need not have been uttered for some time after he reached Egypt, when he was able to acquaint himself with the conditions and character of his countrymen in their pagan environment, and learn in particular how they had fallen away like their fathers to the worship of other gods. Such indeed is the double theme of the words attributed to him. He is made to say that Jerusalem and Judah are now desolate because of their people’s wickedness, and especially their idolatry, in stubborn disobedience to the repeated Word of their God by His prophets; surely a similar punishment must befall the Jews in Egypt, for they also have given themselves to idols. But so awkwardly and diffusely is the Oracle reported to us that we cannot doubt that, whatever its original form was, this has been considerably expanded. At least we may be sure that Jeremiah uttered some Oracle against the idolatry of the Jews in Egypt, for in what follows they give their answer.

From verse 15 the story and the words it reports become—with the help of the briefer Greek version and the elision of manifest additions in both the Hebrew and the Greek texts(671)—more definite. Either _both_ the men whom Jeremiah addressed _and_ their women, or, as is textually more probable, the women alone answered him in the following remarkable terms. These run in rhythmical prose, that almost throughout falls into metrical lines, which the English reader may easily discriminate for himself.

XLIV. 16. The word which thou hast spoken to us in the Name of the Lord!—we will not hearken to thee! 17. But we shall surely perform every word, which has gone forth from our mouth:(672) to burn to the Queen of Heaven and pour her libations, as we and our fathers did, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and streets of Jerusalem, and had fulness of bread, and were well and saw no evil. 18. But since we left off to burn to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour her libations, we have lacked everything and been by the sword and the famine consumed. 19. And(673) while we were burning to the Queen of Heaven and poured her libations, did we make her cakes(674) and pour her libations without our husbands?

This was a straight challenge to the prophet, returning to him the form of his own argument. As he had traced the calamities of Judah to her disobedience of Yahweh, they traced those which hit themselves hardest as women to their having ceased to worship Ashtoreth. What could Jeremiah answer to logic formally so identical with his own? The first of the answers attributed to him, verses 20-23, asserts that among their other sins it was their worship of the Queen of Heaven, and not, as they said, their desisting from it, which had worked their doom. But this answer is too full of deuteronomic phrasing for the whole of it to be the Prophet’s; if any of it is genuine this can only be part of the obviously expanded opening, 21, 22_a_.

The real, the characteristic answers of Jeremiah are the others: to the women reported in verses 24, 25, and to all the Jews in Egypt 26-28; in which respectively he treats the claim of the women ironically, and leaves the issue between his word and that of his opponents to be decided by the event. These answers also have been expanded, but we may reasonably take the following to be original.(675) Note how they connect in verse 24 with verse 19. I again follow the Greek.

XLIV. 24. And Jeremiah said [to the people and] to the women, [25] Hear the Word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord, Israel’s God:

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 passage through the turbulence of his time he reminds us of one of those fatal shells 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 God’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 God 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 God 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 passion, 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 Ṣedekiah, 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 ass.(688) Even for Ṣedekiah, 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 brass 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. Know that for Thee I have borne reproach From them who despise(704) Thy words. 16 [End them!(705) Thy word’s my delight And the joy of my heart For Thy Name has been calléd upon me, Lord of Hosts!] I have not sat in their company 17 Jesting and merry.(706) Because of Thy hand alone I sit, For with rage Thou hast filled me. Why is my pain perpetual, 18 My wound past healing? Art Thou to be a false stream to me, As waters that fail?

This to Him on Whom he had called as The Fountain of Living Water!

Therefore thus saith the Lord: 19 If thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee, That before Me thou stand; And if thou bring forth the dear from the vile, As My Mouth thou shalt be. [Then may those turn to thee, But not thou to them.] For to this people I set thee 20 An impassable wall.(707) When they fight thee they shall not prevail, With thee am I to deliver,(708) And deliver thee I shall from the power of the wicked, 21 From the hand of the cruel redeem thee.

Thou(709) shalt not take a wife— XVI. 2 Rede of the Lord— Nor shall sons nor daughters be thine Within this place. For thus hath the Lord said: 3 As for the sons and the daughters Born in this place, [As for their mothers who bore them And their fathers who gat them Throughout this land.] Painfullest deaths shall they die 4 Unmourned, unburied, [Be for dung on the face of the ground, Consumed by famine and sword.] And their corpses shall be for food To the birds of the heaven and beasts of the earth.(710) Thus saith the Lord: 5 Come not to the house of mourning, Nor go about to lament,(711) Because My Peace I have swept Away from this people.(712) For them shall none lament, 6_b_ Nor gash nor make themselves bald; Neither break bread(713) to the mourner,(714) 7 For the dead to console him, Nor pour him(715) the cup of condolement For his father or mother. Come thou not to the house of feasting, 8 To sit with them eating and drinking. For thus saith the Lord of Hosts,(716) 9 The God of Israel: Lo, I shall stay from this place, In your days, to your eyes, The voices of joy and of gladness, The voices of bridegroom and bride.

Follows, in 10-13, the moral reason of all this—the people’s leaving of their God—and the doom of exile.

Heal me O Lord, and I shall be healed, XVII. 14 Save me and saved shall I be.(717) Lo, there be those, who keep saying to me. 15 “Where is the Word of the Lord? Pray let it come!” But I have not pressed ... (?) 16 Nor for evil(718) kept at Thee, Nor longed for the woeful day, Thyself dost know. Whatever came forth from my lips To Thy face it was. Be not a (cause of) dismay to me, 17 My Refuge in evil days. Shamed be my hunters, but shamed not I, 18 Dismayed, but dismayed not I. Bring Thou upon them the day of disaster And break them twice over!

XVIII. 18. And they said, Come and let us devise against Jeremiah devices, for the Law(719) shall not perish from the priest, nor Counsel from the wise, nor the Word from the prophet. Come let us smite him with the tongue and pay no heed to any of his words.