Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 13

The rest of the chapter, verses 15-38, is so full of expansions and repet.i.tions, which we may partly see from a comparison of it with the Greek, as well as of inconsistencies with some earlier Oracles by Jeremiah,(338) of traces of the later prophetic style and of echoes of other prophets, that many deny any part of the miscellany to be Jeremiah's own. Yet we must remember that his commission was not to Judah alone(339) but to _the nations_ as well, against many of which XXV. 15-38 is directed; and the figure of the Lord handing to the Prophet the cup of the wine of His wrath is not one which we have any reason to doubt to be Jeremiah's. Sifting, by help of the Greek, the Hebrew list of nations who are to drink of the cup, we get Judah and Egypt; Askalon, Gaza, Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod; Dedan, Tema, Buz, and their _clipt_ neighbours in Arabia; all of whom were shaken in Jeremiah's day by the Chaldean terror.

Indeed the reference to Ashdod suits the condition of that Philistine city in the Prophet's time better than its restored prosperity in the post-exilic age. The substance of verses 15-23 may therefore be reasonably left to Jeremiah. Verses 24-38 are more doubtful.(340)

2. Parables. (XIII, XVIII-XX, x.x.xV.)

To the reign of Jehoiakim are usually referred a number of symbolic actions by Jeremiah, the narratives of which carry no dates. So far as they imply that the Prophet was still able to move openly about Jerusalem and the country they might be regarded as earlier than 604, when he was under restraint and had to hide himself.(341) But this is not certain. We are left to take them in the order in which they occur in the Book.

The first is that of the waist-cloth, XIII. 1-11. Jeremiah was charged to buy a linen waist-cloth(342) and after wearing it, but keeping it from damp, to bury it in the cleft of a rock, and after many days to dig it up, when he found it rotting. So had the Lord taken Israel to cleave to Him as such a cloth _cleaves to the loins of a man_; but separated from Him they had likewise rotted and were good for nothing. Separated by what-G.o.d's action or their own? As it stands the interpretation is complicated. G.o.d spoils Israel because of their pride (verse 9) and Israel spoil themselves by disobedience and idolatry (verse 10). The complication may be due to a later addition to the text. But this question is not serious. Neither is that of the place where Jeremiah is said to have buried the cloth.

_Perath_, the spelling in the text, is the Hebrew name for the Euphrates and so the Greek and our own versions render it. But the name has not its usual addition of The River. If the Euphrates be intended the story is hardly one of fact, but rather a vivid parable of the saturation of the national life by heathen, corruptive influences from Mesopotamia.(343) Yet within an hour from Anathoth lies the Wady Farah, a name which corresponds to the Hebrew _Perath_ or (by a slight change) _Parah_; and the Wady, familiar as it must have been to Jeremiah, suits the picture, having a lavish fountain, a broad pool and a stream, all of which soak into the sand and fissured rock of the surrounding desert.(344) That the Wady Farah was the scene of the parable is therefore possible, though not certain.(345) But the ambiguity of these details does not interfere with the moral of the whole.

This parable is immediately followed by the ironic metaphor of the Jars Full of Wine, XIII. 12-14, which I have already quoted.(346)

Next comes the Parable of the Potter, Ch. XVIII, that might be from any part of the Prophet's ministry, during which he was free to move in public. This parable is instructive first by disclosing one of the ways along which Revelation reached, and spelt itself out in, the mind of the Prophet. He felt a Divine impulse to go down to the house of the Potter,(347) _and there I will cause thee to hear My Words_, obviously not words spoken to the outward ear. For, as Jeremiah watched the potter at work on _his two stones_,(348) and saw that when the vessel he first attempted was marred he would remould the clay into another vessel as seemed good to him, a fresh conception of the Divine Method with men broke upon Jeremiah and became articulate. A word from the Lord flashed through his eyes upon his mind, just as in his first visions of the almond-blossom and the caldron.(349)

XVIII. 5. Then the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying, [6] O House of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?(350) Behold, as the clay in the hand of the potter, so are ye in My hand.(351)

Thus by figure and by word the Divine Sovereignty was proclaimed as absolutely as possible. But the Sovereignty is a real Sovereignty and therefore includes Freedom. It is not fettered by its own previous decrees, as some rigorous doctrines of predestination insist, but is free to recall and alter these, should the human characters and wills with which it works in history themselves change. There is a Divine as well as a human Free-will. "G.o.d's dealing with men is moral; He treats them as their moral conduct permits Him to do."(352)

The Predestination of men or nations, which the Prophet sees figured in the work of the potter, is to Service. This is clear from the comparison between Israel and a vessel designed for a definite use. It recalls Jeremiah's similar conception of his own predestination, which was not to a certain state, of life or death, but to the office of speaker for G.o.d to the nations. Yet because the acceptance or rejection by a nation or an individual of the particular service, for which G.o.d has destined them, naturally determines their ultimate fate, therefore this wider sense, which predestination came to have in Christian doctrine, is so far also involved in the parable.(353)

To the truths of the Divine Sovereignty and the Divine Freedom the parable adds that of the Divine Patience. The potter of Hinnom does not impatiently cast upon the rubbish which abounds there the lump of clay that has proved refractory to his design for it. He gives the lump another trial upon another design. If, as many think, the verses which follow the parable, 7-10, are not by Jeremiah himself (though this is far from proved, as we shall see) then he does not explicitly draw from the potter's patience with the clay the inference of the Divine patience with men. But the inference is implicit in the parable. Did Jeremiah intend it?

If he did, this is proof that in spite of his people's obstinacy under the hand of G.o.d, he cherished, though he dared not yet utter, the hope that G.o.d would have some fresh purpose for their service beyond the wreck they were making of His former designs for them and the ruin they were thereby bringing on themselves-that He would grant them still another chance of rising to His will. But if Jeremiah did not intend this inference from his parable then we may claim the parable as one more example of that of which we have already had several, the power of this wonderful man's experience and doctrine to start in other minds ideas and beliefs of which he himself was not conscious, or which at least he did not articulate-that power which after all is his highest distinction as a prophet. I do not think, however, that we can deny to Jeremiah all consciousness of what his parable implies in regard to the Patience of the Divine Potter with the perverse human clay in His hands. For we have already seen from another of the Prophet's metaphors that under the abused and rank surface of a nation's or an individual's life he was sure of soil which by deeper ploughing would yet yield fruits meet for repentance.(354)

In either case the parable is rich in Gospel for ourselves. If we have failed our G.o.d upon His first designs for us and for our service do not let us despair. He is patient and ready to give us another trial under His hand. And this not only is the lesson of more than one of our Lord's parables, for instance that of the fig-tree found fruitless, but nevertheless given the chance of another year,(355) and the motive of His hopes for the publicans and harlots, but is implied by all the Gospel of His life and death for sinners. In these He saw still possibilities worth His dying for.

But as Christ Himself taught, there are, and ethically must be, limits to the Divine Patience with men. Of these the men of Judah and Jerusalem are warned in the verses which follow the parable. While it is true (verse 7 ff.) that if a nation, which G.o.d has said He will destroy, turn from its evil, He will relent, the converse is equally true of a nation which He has promised to plant and build, that if it do wrong and obey not He will surely repent of the good He had planned for it. For this refractory people of Judah He is already _framing_ or _moulding evil_-the verb used is that of which the Hebrew name for _potter_ is the participle. Though chosen of G.o.d and shaped by His hands for high service Israel's destiny is not irrevocable; nay, their doom is already being shaped. Yet He makes still another appeal to them to repent and amend their ways. To this they answer: _No use! we will walk after our own devices and carry out every one the stubbornness __ of his evil heart._ At least that is how Jeremiah interprets their temper; his people had hardened since Megiddo and the accession of Jehoiakim.

Some moderns have denied these verses to Jeremiah and taken them as the addition of a later hand and without relevance to the parable. With all respect to the authority of those critics,(356) I find myself unable to agree with them. They differ as to where the authentic words of the Prophet cease, some concluding these with verse 4 others with verse 6. In either case the parable is left in the air, without such practical application of his truths as Jeremiah usually makes to Judah or other nations. Nor can the relevance of the verses be denied, as Cornill, one of their rejectors, admits. Nor does the language bear traces of a later date. They seem to me to stand as Jeremiah's own.

The Prophet's threat of evil is still so vague, that, with due acknowledgment of the uncertainty of such points, we may suppose it, along with the Parable of the Potter, to have been uttered before the Battle of Carchemish, when the Babylonian sovereignty over Western Asia became a.s.sured.(357)

The next in order of Jeremiah's symbols, Ch. XIX, the breaking of a potter's jar past restoration, with his repet.i.tion of doom upon Judah, led to his arrest, Ch. XX, and this at last to his definite statement that the doom would be captivity to the King of Babylon. Some therefore date the episode after Carchemish, but this is uncertain; Jeremiah is still not under restraint nor in hiding.

He is charged to buy an earthen jar and take with him some of the elders of the people and of the priests to the Potsherd Gate in the Valley of Hinnom.(358) There, after predicting the evils which the Lord shall bring on the city because of her idolatry and her sacrifice of children in that Valley down which they were looking from this gate, he broke the jar and flung it upon the heaps of shattered earthenware from which the gate derived its name;(359) and returning to the Temple repeated the Lord's doom upon Judah and Jerusalem. He was heard by Pash?ur of the priestly guild of Immer, who appears to have been chief of the Temple police, and after being _smitten_ was put in the stocks, but the next day released, probably rather because his friends among the princes had prevailed in his favour than because the mind of Pash?ur had meantime changed. For Jeremiah on his release immediately faced his captor with these words:-

XX. 3. The Lord hath called thy name not Pash?ur but Magor-Missabib, Terror-all-round. 4. For thus saith the Lord, Lo, I will make thee a terror to thyself and all thy friends, and they shall fall by the sword of their foes, and thine own eyes shall be seeing it; and all Judah shall I give into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them to exile and smite them with the sword ... 6. And thou Pash?ur and all that dwell in thy house shall go into captivity and in Babylon thou shalt die.(360)

At last Jeremiah definitely states what Judah's doom from the North is to be. We wish that we knew the date of this utterance.

a.s.signed by its t.i.tle to _the days of Jehoiakim_ is another action of the Prophet, which is the exhibition rather of an example than of a symbol, Ch. x.x.xV. The story was probably dictated by Jeremiah to Baruch, for while the Hebrew text opens it in the first person (2-5), the Greek version carries the first person throughout and the later change by the Hebrew to the third person (12 and 18) may easily have been due to a copyist mistaking the first personal suffix for the initial letter of the name Jeremiah.(361)

The Rechabites, a tent-dwelling tribe sojourning within the borders, and wors.h.i.+pping the G.o.d, of Israel, had taken refuge from the Chaldean invasion within the walls of Jerusalem. Knowing their fidelity to their ancestral habits Jeremiah invited some of them to one of the Temple chambers and offered them wine. They refused, for they said that their ancestor Jehonadab ben-Rechab(362) had charged them to drink no wine, neither to build houses, nor sow seed nor plant vineyards. Whereupon Jeremiah went forth and held them up as an example to the men of Judah, not because of any of the particular forms of their abstinence, but because of their constancy. Here were people who remembered, and through centuries had remained loyal to, the precepts of an ancestor; while Israel had fallen from their ancient faithfulness to their G.o.d and ignored His commandments. The steadfast loyalty of these simple nomads to the inst.i.tutions of a far-away human father, how it put to shame Judah's delinquency from the commands of her Divine Father! This contrast is in line with the others, which we have seen Jeremiah emphasising, between his people's fickleness towards G.o.d and the obdurate adherence of the Gentiles to their national G.o.ds, or the constancy of the processes of nature: the birds that know the seasons of their coming, the unfailing snows of Lebanon and the streams of the hills. The whole story is characteristic of Jeremiah's teaching.(363)

3. Oracles on the Edge of Doom. (VII. 16-XVIII _pa.s.sim_, XXII, XLV.)

From the seventh to the tenth chapters of the Book of Jeremiah there are a number of undated pa.s.sages in prose and in verse, which are generally held to have been included in the collection of the Prophet's Oracles written out by Baruch in 604-3, and of which some may have been delivered during the reign of Josiah, but the most of them more probably either upon its tragic close at Megiddo in 608, or under Jehoiakim. We have already considered the addresses reported in VII. 1-15, 21-27,(364) as well as the metrical fragments VII. 28, 29, and VIII. 8, 9.(365) There are other prose pa.s.sages describing (1) VII. 16-20, the wors.h.i.+p of the Queen, or the Host, of Heaven, which had been imposed upon Jerusalem by the a.s.syrians, and either survived the decay of their power from 625 onwards, or if suppressed by Josiah in obedience to Deuteronomy,(366) had been revived under Jehoiakim; (2) VII. 30-34, the high-places in Topheth, upon which children were sacrificed, also condemned by Deuteronomy and recorded as destroyed by Josiah;(367) (3) VIII. 1-3, the desecration of the graves of Jerusalem. It is not necessary to reproduce these prose pa.s.sages, whether they be Jeremiah's or not; our versions of them, Authorised and Revised, are sufficiently clear.

But there follow, from VIII. 4 onwards, after the usual introduction, a series of metrical Oracles of which the following translation is offered in observance of the irregularity of the measures of the original. Note how throughout the Prophet is, as before, testing his false people-_heeding_ and _listening_ are his words-finding no proof of a genuine repentance and bewailing the doom that therefore must fall upon them. Some of his earlier verses are repeated, and there is the reference to the Law, VIII. 8 f., which we have discussed.(368) There is also a hint of exile-which, however, is still future.

In Ch. VIII, verses 4-12 (including the repet.i.tions they contain) seem a unity; verse 13 stands by itself (unless it goes with the preceding); 14, 15 echo one of the Scythian songs, but the fear they reflect may be that either of an Egyptian invasion after Megiddo or of a Chaldean; 16 and 17 are certainly of a northern invasion, but whether the same as the preceding is doubtful; and doubtful too is the connection of both with the incomparable elegy which follows-VIII. 18-IX. 1. For IX. 1 undoubtedly belongs to this, as the different division of the chapters in the Hebrew text properly shows. In Ch. IX. 2-9 the Prophet is in another mood than that of the preceding songs. There the miseries of his people had oppressed him; here it is their sins. There his heart had been with them and he had made their sufferings his own; here he would flee from them to a lodge in the desert.(369) IX. 10-12, is another separate dirge on the land, burned up but whether by invaders or by drought is not clear. Then 13-16 is a pa.s.sage of prose. In 17-22 we have still another elegy with some of the most haunting lines Jeremiah has given us, on war or pestilence, or both. And there follow eight lines, verses 23-24, on a very different, a spiritual, theme, and then 25-26 another prose pa.s.sage, on the futility of physical circ.u.mcision if the heart be not circ.u.mcised. If these be Jeremiah's, and there is no sign in them to the contrary, they form further evidence of his originality as a prophet.

The two Chs. VIII and IX are thus a collection both of prose pa.s.sages and poems out of different circ.u.mstances and different moods, with little order or visible connection. Are we to see in them a number of those _many like words_ which Jeremiah, when he dictated his Second Roll to Baruch, added to his Oracles on the First Roll?(370)

The first verses are in curious parallel to Tchekov's remarkable plaint about his own people and "the Russian disease" as he calls their failing: "Why do we tire so soon? And when we fall how is it that we never try to rise again?"

And thou shalt say to them,(371) Thus saith the Lord: VIII. 4 "Does any one fall and not get up, Or turn and not return?"(372) Why then are this people turning 5 Persistently turning(373)?

They take fast hold of deceit, Refuse to return.

I have been heeding, been listening- 6 They speak but untruth!

Not a man repents of his evil, Saying, "What have I done?"

All of them swerve in their courses Like a plunging horse in the battle.

Even the stork in the heavens 7 Knoweth her seasons, And dove and swift and swallow Keep time of their coming- Only my people, they know not The Rule(374) of the Lord.

How say ye, "We are the wise, 8 With us is the Law(375) of the Lord."

But, lo, into falsehood hath wrought it(376) False pen of the scribes.

Put to shame are the wise, 9 Dismayed and taken, The Word of the Lord have they spurned- What wisdom is theirs?

So to others I give their wives, 10 Their fields to who may take them, For all from the least to the greatest On plunder are bent; From the prophet on to the priest Everyone worketh lies.

They would heal the breach of my people 11 As though it were trifling, Saying "It is well, it is well!"- And well it is not!

Were they shamed of the foulness they wrought? 12 Nay, shamed not at all, Nor knew their dishonour!

So shall they fall with the falling, Reel in the time of their reckoning, Sayeth the Lord.(377)

Would I harvest them?-Rede of the Lord- 13 No grapes on the vine, And never a fig on the fig-tree, Withered the leaves.(378)

For what sit we still? 14 Sweep together And into the fortified cities, To perish.

For the Lord our own G.o.d Hath doomed us to perish, Hath drugged us with waters of bale- To Him(379) have we sinned.

Hoping for peace? 15 'Twas no good, For a season of healing?

Lo, panic.(380)

From Dan the bruit(381) has been heard, 16 Hinnying of his horses, With the noise of the neighing of his steeds The land is aquake.

He(382) comes,(383) he devours the land and her fulness The city and her dwellers.

For behold, I am sending upon you 17 Basilisk-serpents, Against whom availeth no charm, But they shall bite you.(384)

Ah! That my grief is past comfort(385) 18 Faints on me my heart, Lo, hark to the cry of my people Wide o'er the land.(386) "Is the Lord not in ?ion, 19 Is there no king?(387) [Why have they vexed Me with idols, Foreigners' fancies?](388) "Harvest is past, summer is ended, 20 And we are not saved!"

For the breaking of the daughter of my people 21 I break, I blacken!

Horror hath fastened upon me Pangs as of her that beareth.(389) Is there no balm in Gilead, 22 Is there no healer?