Part 6
Hark! 21 From the clearings weeping is heard, Wailing of Israel’s sons, That they have perverted their way, Forgotten the Lord their God. Return ye oft-turning children, 22 Let me heal your back-turnings! “Here are we! to Thee we are come, Thou Lord art our God. “Surely the heights are a fraud 23 The hills and their hubbub!(190) “Alone in the Lord our God Is Israel’s safety. “The Baal hath devoured our toil 24 And our sires’ from their youth, “Their flocks and their herds, Their sons and daughters— “Lie we low in our shame, 25 Our dishonour enshroud us! “For to our God(191) have we sinned, “[We and our sires from our youth] Up to this day! “Nor have heeded the voice Of the Lord our God.”
[Israel, if thou wilt return, IV. 1 Return to Me, And thy loathly things put from thy mouth Nor stray from My face.(192) If in truth thou swear by the life of the Lord, 2 Honest and straight, Then the nations shall bless them by Him And in Him shall they glory.](193)
3. Thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of(194) Jerusalem:
Fallow up your fallow-ground,(195) And sow not on thorns! To your God(196) circumcise ye, 4 Off from your heart with the foreskin! [O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem] Lest My fury break out like fire, And burn with none to quench! [Because of the ill of your doings.]
From his call the Prophet went forth, as we saw, with a heavy sense of the responsibility and the power of the single soul, so far as he himself was concerned; and while we study his ministry we shall find him coming to feel the same for each of his fellow-men. But in these his earliest utterances he follows his predecessors, and especially Hosea, in addressing his people as a whole, and treating Israel as a moral unit from the beginning of her history to the moment of his charge to her. He continues the figures which Hosea had used. Long ago in Egypt God chose Israel for His child, for His bride, and led her through the desert to a fair and fruitful land of her own. Then her love was true. The term used for it, _ḥeṣedh_, is more than an affection; it is loyalty to a relation. To translate it but _kindness_ or _mercy_, as is usually done, is wrong—_troth_ is our nearest word.
I remember the troth of thy youth, Thy love as a bride, Thy following Me through the desert, The land unsown.
Upon the unsown land there were no rival gods. But in fertile Canaan the nation encountered innumerable local deities, the Baalîm, husbands of the land, begetters of its fruits and lords of its waters. We conceive how tempting these Baalîm were both to the superstitious prudence of tribes strange to agriculture and anxious to conciliate the traditional powers thereof; and to the people’s passions through the sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation’s trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts in the rural life which he is addressing in order to describe it.
The cardinal sin of the people, the source of all their woes is religious,
Is not this being done thee For thy leaving of Me?
This was so, not only because He was their ancestral God—though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations—but because He was such a God and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the gods 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 God 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 God 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 passionate 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 noble 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 God’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 God(198) circumcise 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 God. 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 Ṣion, 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 God, which are characteristic of Jeremiah:—
10. And I said, Ah Lord God, 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] Lo, like the clouds he is mounting, 13 Like the whirlwind his cars! Swifter than vultures his horses, Woe, we are undone! Jerusalem, cleanse thou thy heart,(208) 14 That thou be saved! How long shalt thou harbour within thee Thy guilty devices. For hark! They signal from Dan, 15 Mount Ephraim echoes disaster. Warn the folk, “They are come!”(209) 16 Make heard o’er Jerusalem. Behold,(210) beleaguerers (?) coming From a land far away; They give out their voice on the townships of Judah; Like the guards on her fields 17 They are round and upon her, For Me she defied!(211) Thy ways and thy deeds have done 18 These things to thee. This evil of thine how bitter! It strikes to the heart. O my bowels! My bowels, I writhe! 19 O walls of my heart! My heart is in storm upon me, I cannot keep silence.(212) For the sound of the trump thou hast heard, O my soul, The uproar of battle. Ruin upon ruin is summoned, 20 The land is undone! Suddenly undone my tents, In a moment my curtains! How long must I look for the signal 21 And hark for the sound of the trump! [Yea, fools are My people 22 Nor Me do they fear.(213) Children besotted are they, Void of discretion. Clever they are to do evil, To do good they know not.
3. The Third of the Scythian Songs is without introduction. Whether the waste, darkness, earthquake and emptiness described are imminent or have happened is still left uncertain, as in the previous songs. The Prophet speaks, but as before the Voice of God peals out at the end.
I looked to the earth, and lo chaos, 23 To the heavens, their light was gone. I looked to the hills and(214) they quivered, 24 All the heights were a-shuddering. I looked—and behold not a man! 25 All the birds of heaven were fled. I looked to the gardens, lo desert, 26 All the townships destroyed, Before the face of the Lord, The glow of His wrath. [For thus hath the Lord said, 27 All the land shall be waste Yet full end I make not](215) For this let the Earth lament, 28 And black be Heaven above! I have spoken and will not relent, Purposed and turn not from it.(216)
4. The Fourth Scythian Song follows immediately, also without introduction. The first four couplets vividly describe the flight of the peasantry, actual or imagined, before the invaders. The rest seems addressed to the City as though being threatened she sought to reduce her foes with a woman’s wiles, only to find that it was not her love but her life they were after, and so expired at their hands in despair. All this is more suitable to the Chaldean than to the Scythian invasion, and may be one of the Prophet’s additions in 604 to his earlier Oracles. However we take it, the figure is of Jeremiah’s boldest and most vivid. The irony is keen.
From the noise of the horse and the bowmen, IV. 29 All the land(217) is in flight, They are into the caves, huddle in thickets,(218) Are up on the crags. Every town of its folk is forsaken No habitant in it. All is up! Thou destined to ruin(?)(219) 30 What doest thou now? That thou dressest in scarlet, And deck’st thee in deckings of gold, 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, 31 Anguish as hers that beareth, The voice of the daughter of Ṣion agasp, he spreadeth her hands: “Woe unto me, but it faints, My life to the butchers!”
The next poem, Ch. V. 1-13, says little of the Scythians, possibly only in verse 6, but details the moral reasons for the doom with which they threatened the people. It describes the Prophet’s search through Jerusalem for an honest, God-fearing man and his failure to find one. Hence the fresh utterance of judgment. Perjury and whoredom are rife, with a callousness to chastisement already inflicted. Some have relegated Jeremiah’s visit to the capital to a year after 621-20 when the deuteronomic reforms had begun and Josiah had removed the rural priests to the Temple.(220) But, as we have seen, Anathoth lay so near to Jerusalem, and intercourse between them was naturally so constant, that Jeremiah may well have gained the following experience before he left his village for residence in the city. The position of the poem among the Scythian Songs, along with the possible allusion to the Scythians in verse 6, suggests a date before 620. There is no introduction.
Range ye the streets of Jerusalem, V. 1 Look now and know, And search her broad places, If a man ye can find— If there be that does justice, Aiming at honesty. [That I may forgive them(221)] Though they say, “As God liveth,” 2 Falsely(222) they swear LORD, are Thine eyes upon lies(?) 3 And not on the truth(223)? Thou hast smitten, they ail not, Consumed them, they take not correction. Their faces set harder than rock, They refuse to return. But I said, “Ah, they are the poor, 4 And therefore(224) the foolish! “They know not the Way of the Lord, The Rule of their God. “To the great I will get me, 5 With them let me speak. “For they know the Way of the Lord, And the Rule of their God.” Ah, together they have broken the yoke, They have burst the bonds! So a lion from the jungle shall smite them, 6 A wolf of the waste destroy, The leopard shall prowl round their towns, All faring forth shall be torn. For many have been their rebellions, Profuse their backslidings. How shall I pardon thee this— 7 Thy children have left Me, And swear by no-gods. I gave them their fill and they whored, And trooped to the house of the harlot. Rampant(225) stallions they be, 8 Neighing each for the wife of his friend. Shall I not visit on such, 9 Rede of the Lord, Nor on a people like this Myself take vengeance?
Up to her vine-rows, destroy, 10 And make(226) a full end, Away with her branches, They are not the Lord’s. For betraying they have betrayed Me 11 Judah and Israel both [Rede of the Lord] The Lord they have belied, 12 Saying “Not He! Evil shall never come on us, Nor famine nor sword shall we see. “The prophets! they are nothing but wind 13 The Word is not with them!”(227)
14. Therefore thus hath the Lord of Hosts said, because of their speaking this word—(228)
Behold I am setting My Word In thy mouth for fire, And this people for wood, And it shall devour them.
5. The Fifth Song upon the Scythians, Ch. V. 15-17, besides still leaving them nameless, emphasises their strangeness to Israel’s world. There was a common language in Western Asia, Aramean, the _lingua franca_ of traders from Nineveh to Memphis; and Jew, Assyrian and Egyptian conversed in it. But the tongue of these raiders from over the Caucasus was unintelligible. Yet how they would set their teeth into the land! Mixed with the verses which thus describe them are others which suit not them but the Chaldeans and must have been added by the Prophet in 604. A people so new to the Jews might hardly have been called by Jeremiah _an ancient nation, from of old a nation_, and in fact these phrases are wanting in the Greek version.
Behold, I am bringing upon you V. 15 A nation from far, [O house of Israel, Rede of the Lord An ancient nation it is, From of old a nation.](229) A nation thou knowest not its tongue, 16 Nor canst hear what it says, Its quiver an open grave,(230) All of it stalwarts.(231) It shall eat up thy harvest and bread, 17 Eat thy sons and thy daughters, It shall eat up thy flocks and thy cattle, Eat thy vines and thy figs. It shall beat down thy fortified towns, Wherein thou dost trust, with the sword.
The last couplet is unsuitable to the Scythians, incapable as they were of sieges and avoiding fortified towns—though once they rushed Askalon. It is probably, therefore, another of the additions of 604 referring to the Chaldeans. The prose which follows is certainly from the Chaldean period, for it was not Scythians but Chaldeans who threatened with exile the peoples whom they overran.
V. 18. Yet even in those days—Rede of the Lord—I will not make a full end of you. 19. And it shall be when they say, For what hath the Lord our God done to us all these things?—that thou shalt say to them, Just as ye have left Me and have served foreign gods in your own land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land not yours.
There follows a poem, verses 20-31, that has nothing to do with the Scythian series; and that with the preceding prose, with which also it has no connection, shows us what a conglomeration of Oracles the Book of Jeremiah is. It seems as though the compiler, searching for a place for it, had seen the catch-word _harvest_ in the previous Scythian song and, this one having the same word, he had copied it in here. The Book shows signs elsewhere of the same mechanical method. But like all the Oracles this has for its theme the foolish dulness of Israel to their God and His Word, and the truth that it is their crimes which are the cause of all their afflictions yet now not in history but in Nature. There is no reason to doubt that the verses are Jeremiah’s, and nothing against our dating them in the early years of his ministry.