Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 25

One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark ma.s.ses appear and how difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn comes up one begins to see all this. The ma.s.s breaks; first the larger, more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is apparent in its separate strength and beauty.

It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is a breaking of dawn-but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation which has begun with the singular _Thou_ changes gradually to _You_, and not _Israel_ but _ye men of Israel_ are called to turn to their G.o.d.(799) As the Prophet's indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national harlotry. He arraigns separate cla.s.ses or groups,(800) and then, in increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous ?edekiah, the bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)-with the fit word and in sharp irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who _fling about their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord_.(802) Jeremiah has answered the call to him to search for the _man_, the men beneath the nation.(803)

Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of G.o.d in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of G.o.d and the duty of every man to know G.o.d for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of drought. Such pa.s.sages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards G.o.d of its individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the mult.i.tude and talks to him of himself.

O Lord, Who triest the righteous, Who seest the reins and the heart.(804)

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

I, the Lord, searching the heart And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings.(805)

Can any man hide him in secret And I not see him?(806)

In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity, every man that eateth sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.(807)

Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee....

Peradventure they will hearken and turn _every man from his evil way_.(808)

He that would boast in this let him boast, Insight and knowledge of Me.(809)

Lord, I know-not to man is his way, Not man's to walk or settle his steps.(810)

Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord And the Lord is his trust!

He like a tree shall be planted by water, That stretches its roots to the stream; Unafraid at the coming of heat, His leaf shall be green; _Sans_ care in the season of drought He fails not in yielding his fruit.(811)

The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth-could not be more beautifully drawn.

Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human unit in religion-Deuteronomy's ideal and at first his own-to the individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy conduct of the people, their abandonment by G.o.d, the ruin of the State and of the national wors.h.i.+p-which cut off individuals from all political and religious a.s.sociations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah's repeated phrase) only _his life_, or _his soul, for a prey_.(812) But all these could have furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter experience his own soul searched and re-searched by G.o.d-

But Thou, Lord, hast known me, Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee-(813)

unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence of an immediate and intimate knowledge of G.o.d. At his call he had learned how a man could be G.o.d's before he was his mother's or his nation's-G.o.d's own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one's own generation-how G.o.d can hold a single man alone to His Will against his nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them.

And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law like a garden of lilies within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah's heart, and was watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.

We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing-the prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place, following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour grapes-individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah's own; the critical questions which have been with us from the beginning embarra.s.s us still.

The collection of Oracles to which that of the New Covenant belongs, Chs.

x.x.x, x.x.xI, was not made till long after Jeremiah's time; it includes, as we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic origin.(814) But so do other chapters of the Book, in which nevertheless genuine prophecies of Jeremiah are recognised by virtually all modern critics. The context therefore offers no prejudice against the authenticity of the prophecy of the New Covenant, x.x.xI. 31-34. But the form and the substance of this have raised doubts, so honest and reluctant as to deserve our consideration.

Duhm starts his usual objection that the pa.s.sage is in prose and a style characteristic of the late expanders of the Book. We may let that go, as we have done before, as by itself inconclusive;(815) the prophecy may not have come directly from Jeremiah's mouth but through the memory of a reporter of the Prophet, Baruch or another. More deserving of consideration is the criticism which Duhm, with great unwillingness, makes of the terms and substance of the prophecy. He objects to the term _covenant_: a _covenant_ is a legal contract and could hardly have been chosen for the frame of his ideal by so p.r.o.nounced an anti-legalist as Jeremiah. The pa.s.sage "promises a new Covenant-not a new Torah but only a more inward a.s.similation of the Torah by the people, and emphasises the good results which this will have for them but betrays no demand for a higher kind of religion. If one does not let himself be dazzled by the phrases _new covenant_ and _write it on the heart_ then the pa.s.sage tells us of the relation of the individual no more than Deuteronomy has already regarded as possible, x.x.x. 11 ff., and desirable, VI. 6-8: namely, that every man should be at home in the Law and honestly follow it." He continues: "it is impossible for me to hold any longer to the Jeremian origin of the pa.s.sage. I find in it only the effusion of one learned in the Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that every one of the Jewish people should know the Law by heart."

But in his resolve "not to let himself be dazzled" has not Duhm gone to the opposite extreme and seriously under-read the whole spirit of the pa.s.sage-besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness of the presence in the text of a legalist at work?(816) The choice of the term _covenant_ for the frame of his ideal was not unnatural to Jeremiah nor irrelevant to his experience and teaching. Formally the term may mean a legal contract; but it is open to a prophet or a poet to use any metaphor for his ideals and transform its mere letter by the spirit he puts into it; and after all _covenant_ is only a metaphor for a relation which was beyond the compa.s.s of any figure to express. Yet it was a term cla.s.sical in Israel and most intelligible to the generation whom Jeremiah was addressing. Its a.s.sociations, especially as he had recalled them,(817) had been those not of the Law but of Love. It was not a contract or bargain but an approach by G.o.d to His people, an offer of His Grace, a statement of His Will and accompanied by manifestations of His Power to redeem them. One might as well charge Jesus with legalism in adopting a term sanctioned by G.o.d Himself, and so historical, sacred and endeared to the national memory.

Nor need Torah, or Law, be taken as Duhm takes it in its sense of the legal codes of Israel, but in its wider meaning of the Divine _instruction_ or _revelation_. Further the epithet _New_ applied to Covenant was most relevant to the Prophet's and his people's recent sense of the failure of the ancient covenant, as restated and enforced in Deuteronomy. In spite of the excitement caused by the discovery of the Book in which it was written, and the recital of its words throughout the land, the Old Covenant had failed to capture the heart of the people or to secure from them more than the formal and superst.i.tious observance of the letter of its Torah. Was it not a natural ant.i.thesis to predict that His Torah would be set by G.o.d _in their inward parts and written on their hearts_? How else (will Duhm tell us?) than by such phrases could the Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law of G.o.d "by heart" (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of G.o.d's will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught religion as the individual's direct knowledge of G.o.d;(819) he had won this himself from G.o.d directly without help from his parentage, his fellow-prophets or priests or any others; he had most bitterly known also how weak the word of one man is to teach his countrymen this knowledge and that it can only come by the inward operation of G.o.d Himself upon their spirits; and he had made as clear as ever prophet did that G.o.d's pardon for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation's survival and restoration.

Thus the pa.s.sage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of Jeremiah's experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar and dear to the people. The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest, but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah's failing fingers or to the awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own.

Lo, days are coming-Rede of the Lord-when I will make with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them(820)-Rede of the Lord. But this is My(821) Covenant which I will make with the sons(822) of Israel after those days-Rede of the Lord-I will set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write it, and I will be to them a G.o.d, and they shall be to Me a people.

And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother saying, Know thou(823) the Lord! For they shall all know Me from the least even to the greatest;(824) for I will forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.

This is, as has been said, a prophecy of Christianity which has hardly its equal in the Old Testament.(825) It is the Covenant which Jesus Christ the Son of G.o.d accepted for Himself and all men and sealed with His own blood.

And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual soul is made to feel that G.o.d created it not for its family nor its state nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for it after death. The Prophet's eyes are still sealed to that future. The soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with G.o.d.

Appendix I.

MEDES AND SCYTHIANS (PP. 73, 110).

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to give a correct account of the national and racial movements which, along with the moral conditions in Judah, called forth Jeremiah's Oracles of judgment in the years immediately following his call in 627-626 B.C. But the following facts are well founded. In or about 625 the Medes were defeated in an attack upon a.s.syria and their king Phraortes was killed, but at the same time a.s.shurbanipal died, and his weaker successor was compelled to recognize the virtual independence of Nabopola.s.sar, the Chaldean in Babylon.

Cyaxares (624-585), the son of Phraortes, soon after his succession to his father-say between 624 and 620-led a second Median a.s.sault upon a.s.syria and besieged Nineveh, but had to retire because of the onset from the north of the Scythians, the Ashguzai of the a.s.syrian monuments, probably the Ashkenaz or Ashkunza (?) of the Old Testament. And then it was not for some years that Cyaxares felt himself strong enough by his alliance with Nabopola.s.sar for a third Median invasion of a.s.syria which culminated in the capture and destruction of Nineveh.

The a.s.syrians appear to have been in touch with the Ashguzai for over a century and for a shorter time probably in alliance with them; which alliance was the cause of the Scythian advance to the relief of Nineveh from its siege by the Medes _circa_ 724-720 (see Winckler _Die Keilinschriften v. das alte Testament_, 3rd ed., pp. 100 ff.). About the same time must be dated the Scythian advance through Western Asia to the borders of Egypt, which Herodotus (I. 103-104, IV. 1) reports. Professor N. Schmidt (_Enc. Bibl._, art. "Scythians") supposes that this advance was due to the same Scythian-a.s.syrian alliance, in order to preserve the a.s.syrian territories from the arms of Psamtik of Egypt, who had since 639 been besieging Ashdod; and he holds that this hypothesis explains the absence of any record of violence by the Scythians on their southern campaign, except at Ashkelon. This precarious hypothesis apart, we have the facts that no Biblical chronicler records any invasion of Judah and Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the early Oracles of Jeremiah, generally attributed to the alarms which the advance of such barbarian hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the Scythians (with a few exceptions that may be due to the prophet's adaptation in 604 of his earlier Oracles to the new _enemy_ out of the north, the Chaldeans).

There, are, however, modern writers who claim that the Oracles in question were originally composed not in view of the Scythian, but of the Chaldean invasion of Palestine. So George Douglas (_The Book of Jeremiah_, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), who, while a.s.signing Jeremiah's call to 627, relegates the two visions and all the Oracles in the first part of the book to the years following Jehoiakim's accession to the Jewish throne in 608; cp. Winckler, _Geschichte Israels_, I. pp. 112 f. and F. Wilke (_Alttestamentliche studien R. Kittel zum 60 Geburtstag dargebracht_, 1913), quoted by John Skinner, _Prophecy and Religion_, pp. 42 f. n. 2.

This would be an easy solution but for the insuperable objections to it that the Oracles in question far more closely fit the Scythian, than the Chaldean, invasion; and that Jer. I. 2, as distinctly covers prophecies of Jeremiah in the days of Josiah as v. 3 does his prophesying under Jehoiakim.

POSTSCRIPT.

The date of Nineveh's fall has. .h.i.therto been accepted as 607-606 B.C. But in July of this year (1923) Mr. C. J. Gadd described to the British Academy a Babylonian tablet, which dates the fall in the fourteenth year of Nabopola.s.sar's reign in Babylon. This year was 612 B.C., if it be right to reckon the reign from 626-25 B.C.; but as remarked above, p. 175, Nabopola.s.sar became in that year officially not king but only viceroy.

Dependent as I was on a newspaper summary of Mr. Gadd's lecture I could therefore do no more than offer for the fall of Nineveh the alternative dates, 612 and 606; see above p. 175 and compare p. 162.

Appendix II.

NECOH'S CAMPAIGN (PP. 162, 163).

In addition to the accounts in the Books of Kings and Chronicles of Pharaoh Necoh's advance into Asia in pursuance of his claim for a share of the crumbling a.s.syrian Empire there are two independent records: (1) Jeremiah XLVII. 1-_and Pharaoh smote Gaza_-a headline (with other particulars) wrongly prefixed by the Hebrew text, but not by the Greek, to an Oracle upon an invasion of Philistia not from the south but from the north (see above, pp. 13, 61); (2) by Herodotus, II. 159, who says that "Necoh (Nekos) making war by land on the Syrians defeated them at Magdolos and after the battle took Kadutis, a great city of Syria." Magdolos is probably Megiddo, unless it stands for Megdel, which, as well as Rumman (= Hadad-rimmon, the scene of the mourning for Josiah, Zech. XII. 11) lies near Megiddo. If, as is usually held, Kadutis be Gaza, Herodotus has reversed the proper order of Necoh's two actions; but Kadutis also suggests _hak-Kodesh_, _the holy_, an epithet of Jerusalem (_Jerusalem_, I. 270) which would suit Herodotus' order, for it was after Megiddo that Necoh became master of Jerusalem and Judah. The suggestion, though worth mentioning, is doubtful; the epithet is late, exilic and post-exilic; and Herodotus' phrase _took Kadutis_ is hardly equivalent to _became paramount_ there as Necoh became paramount in Jerusalem.