Lecture Vi.

TO THE END AND AFTER. 597-? B.C.

The few remaining years of the Jewish kingdom ran rapidly down and their story is soon told.

When Nebuchadrezzar deported King Jehoiachin in 597, he set up in his place his uncle Mattaniah, a son of Josiah by that Hamutal, who was also the mother of the miserable Jehoahaz.(469) The name of the new king Nebuchadrezzar changed to Ṣedekiah, Righteousness or Truth of Jehovah,(470) intending thus to bind the Jew by the name of his own God to the oath of allegiance which he had exacted from him. When Ezekiel afterwards denounced Ṣedekiah on his revolt it was for despising the Lord’s oath and breaking the Lord’s covenant(471)—a signal instance of the sanctity attached in the ancient world to an oath sworn by one nation to another, even though it was to the humiliation of the swearer.(472) So far as we see, Ṣedekiah was of a temper(473) to have been content with the peace, which the observance of his oath would have secured to him. But he was a weak man, master no more of himself than of his throne,(474) distracted between a half-superstitious respect for the one high influence left to him in Jeremiah and the opposite pressure, first from a set of upstarts who had succeeded to the estates and the posts about court of their banished betters, and second, from those prophets whose personal insignificance can have been the only reason of their escape from deportation. It is one of the notable ironies of history that, while Nebuchadrezzar had planned to render Judah powerless to rebel again, by withdrawing from her all the wisest and most skilful and soldierly of her population, he should have left to her her fanatics!

There remained in Jerusalem the elements—sincerely patriotic but rash and in politics inexperienced—of a “war-party,” restless to revolt from Babylon and blindly confident of the strength of their walls and of their men to resist the arms of the great Empire. Of their nation they and their fellows alone had been spared the judgment of the Lord and prided themselves on being the Remnant to which Isaiah had promised survival and security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, Get ye far from the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession.(475) Through the early uneventful years of Ṣedekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party found time to gather strength, and in his fourth year must have been stirred towards action by the arrival in Jerusalem of messengers from the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Ṣidon, all of them states within the scope of Egyptian intrigues against Babylon.(476) For the time the movement came to nothing largely because of Jeremiah’s influence, and Ṣedekiah is said to have journeyed to Babylon to protest in person his continued fidelity.(477) Either then or previously Nebuchadrezzar imposed on Jerusalem the Babylonian idolatry which Ezekiel describes as invading even the Temple.(478)

The intrigues of Egypt persisted, however, and, in 589 or 588, after the accession of Pharaoh Hophra,(479) at last prevailed upon Judah. Ṣedekiah yielded to the party of revolt and Nebuchadrezzar swiftly invested Jerusalem. Roused to realities the king and all the people of Jerusalem offered their repentance by a solemn covenant before God to enfranchise, in obedience to the Law, those slaves who had reached a seventh year of service. But when on the news of an Egyptian advance the Chaldeans raised their siege, the Jewish slave-owners broke faith and pressed back their liberated slaves into bondage.(480) This proved the last link in the long chain of lies and frauds by which the hopelessly dishonest people fastened upon them their doom. Egypt again failed her dupes. The Chaldeans, either by the terror they inspired or by an actual victory on the field, compelled her army to retire, and resumed the siege of Jerusalem. Though Jeremiah counselled surrender and though the city was sapped by famine and pestilence, the fanatics—to whom, however reluctantly, some admiration is due—held out against the forces of Babylon for a year and a half. Then came the end. The walls on the north were breached. Ṣedekiah fled by a southern gate, upon an effort to reach the East of Jordan. He was overtaken on the plains of Jericho, his escort scattered and himself carried to Nebuchadrezzar’s head-quarters at Riblah on the Orontes. Thence, after his sons were slain before his eyes, and his eyes put out, he was taken in fetters to Babylon. Nebuṣaradan, a high Babylonian officer, was dispatched to Jerusalem to burn the Temple, the Palace and the greater houses, and to transport to Babylon a second multitude of Jews, leaving only the poorest of the land to be vine-dressers and husbandmen.(481) This was in 586.

1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)

From these rapidly descending years a number of prophecies by Jeremiah have come to us, as well as narratives of the trials which he endured because of his faithfulness to the Word of the Lord, and his sane views of the facts of the time. As we read these prophecies and narratives several changes become clear in the position and circumstances of the Prophet, and in his temper and outlook. Signally vindicated as his words have been, we are not surprised that to his contemporaries he has grown to be a personage of greater impressiveness and authority than before. He has still his enemies but these are not found in exactly the same quarters as under Jehoiakim. Instead of an implacable king, and princes more or less respectful and friendly, in the king he has now a friend, though a timid and ineffective one, while the new and inferior princes appear almost wholly against him. Formerly both priests and prophets had been his foes, but now only the prophets are mentioned as such, and at least one priest is loyal to him.(482) Inwardly again, he has no more of those debates with God and his own soul, which had rent him during the previous years; only once does doubt escape from his lips in prayer.(483) Clearest of all, his hope has been released, and in contrast with his prophesying up to the surrender of Jerusalem in 597, but in full agreement with his enduring faith in God’s Freedom and Patience,(484) he utters not a few predictions of a future upon their own land for both Israel and Judah. This greatest of the changes which appear is due partly to the fact that while the man’s reluctant duty has been to pronounce the doom of exile upon his people, that doom has been fulfilled, and his spirit, which never desired it,(485) is free to range beyond its shadows. To the clearness into which he rises he is helped, under belief in the Divine Grace, by the truth obvious to all but fanatics that peace and order were possible for that shaken world only through submission to Nebuchadrezzar’s firm government, including as this did a policy comparatively lenient to the Jewish exiles. But there was another and stronger reason why Jeremiah should at last turn himself to a ministry of hope, however sternly he must continue to denounce the Jews left in Jerusalem and Judah. The catastrophe of 597 largely separated the better elements of the nation, which were swept into exile, from the worse which remained in the land.

It is this drastic sifting, ethically one of the most momentous events in the history of Israel, with which Jeremiah’s earliest Oracle under Ṣedekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more the Word of the Lord starts to him from a vision, this time of two baskets, one of good the other of bad figs, which the Lord, he says, caused me to see: a vision which I take to be as physical and actual as those of the almond-rod and the caldron upon his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though others interpret it as imaginative like the visions of Amos.(486) Note how easily again the Prophet passes from verse to prose. The verse is slightly irregular. The stresses of the four couplets are these—3 + 3; 4 + 3; 4 + 3; 3 + 3—to which the following version only approximates.

XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah? And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad, which for their(487) badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel—

Like unto these good figs I look on the exiles of Judah, Whom away from this place I have sent To the Chaldeans’ land for (their) good. For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6 And bring them back to this land, And build them and not pull them down, And plant them and not pluck up.

7. And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord, and they shall be for a people unto Me, and I will be to them for God, when they turn to me with all their heart. 8. But like the bad figs which cannot be eaten for their(488) badness—thus saith the Lord—so I give up Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes and the remnant of Jerusalem, the left in this land,(489) with them that dwell in the land of Egypt.(490) 9. And I will set them for consternation(491) to all kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I drive them. And I will send among them the sword, the famine and the pestilence, till they be consumed from off the ground which I gave to them.(492)

We cannot overestimate the effect upon Jeremiah himself, and through him and Ezekiel upon the subsequent history of Israel’s religion, of this drastic separation in 597 of the exiles of Judah from the remnant left in the land. After suffering for years the hopelessness of converting his people, the Prophet at last saw an Israel of whom hope might be dared. It was not their distance which lent enchantment to his view for he gives proof that he can descry the dross still among them, despite the furnace through which they have passed.(493) But the banished were without doubt the best of the nation, and now they had “dreed their weird,” gone through the fire, been lifted out of the habits and passions of the past, and chastened by banishment—pensive and wistful as exile alone can bring men to be.

We also have come out of the Great War with the best of us gone, and feel the contrast between their distant purity, out of great tribulation, and the unworthiness of those who are left. But neither to Jeremiah nor to any of his time was such inspiration possible as we draw from our brave, self-sacrificing dead. No confidence then existed in a life beyond the grave. Jeremiah himself can only weep for the slain of his people. His last vision of them is of corpses strewn on the field like sheaves left after the reaper which nobody gathers, barren of future harvests; and the last word he has for them is, they went forth and are not.(494) But that separated and distant Israel has for the Prophet something at least of what the cloud of witnesses by which we are encompassed means for us. There was quality in them, quality purified by suffering and sacrifice, more than enough to rally the conscience of the nation from which they had been torn. For the Prophet himself they released hope, they awoke the sense of a future, they revived the faith that God had still a will for His people, and that by His patient Grace a pure Israel might be re-born.

If the vision of the Figs reveals the ethical grounds of Jeremiah’s new hope for Israel, his Letter to the Exiles, XXIX. 1-23, discloses still another ground on which that hope was based—his clear and sane appreciation of the politics of his time. And it adds a pronouncement of profound significance for the future of Israel’s religion, that the sense of the presence of God, faith in His Providence and Grace, and prayer to Him were independent of Land and Temple.

From the subsequent fortunes of the exiles we know what liberal treatment they must have received from Nebuchadrezzar. They were settled by themselves; they were not, as in Egypt of old, hindered from multiplying; they were granted freedom to cultivate and to trade, by which many of them gradually rose to considerable influence among their captors. All this was given to Jeremiah to foresee and to impress upon the first exiles. But it meant that their exile would be long.

It is proof of the change in the Prophet’s position among his people(495) that his Letter was carried to Babylon by two ambassadors from the King of Judah to Nebuchadrezzar, and evidently with the consent of Ṣedekiah himself. The text of the Letter and of its title, originally no doubt from Baruch’s memoirs, has been considerably expanded, as is clear not only from the brevity of the Greek version, but from the superfluous formulas and premature insertions which the Hebrew and the Greek have in common. Following others I have taken verses 5-7 as metre; and if this is right we have a fresh instance of Jeremiah’s passing from metre to prose in the same discourse. The metrical character of 5-7 is not certain. Its couplets run on the following irregular scheme of stresses: 3 + 4, 2 + 3, 3 + 3, 3 + 2 (?), 3 + 4, 3 + 4—the last line as so often in a strophe being a long one.(496)

XXIX. 1. These are the words of the Letter which Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem unto [the remnant of] the elders of the exiles, by the hand of Eleasah, son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, son of Hilḳiah, whom Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon unto the king of Babylon saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, unto the exiles whom I have exiled from Jerusalem:(497)

Build houses and settle ye down, 5 Plant gardens and eat of their fruit, Take ye wives, 6 And beget sons and daughters. Take wives to your sons, Give your daughters to husbands, To beget sons and daughters,(498) And increase(499) and do not diminish. And seek ye the peace of the land,(500) 7 To the which I have banished you, And pray for it unto the Lord, For in her peace your peace shall be.

8. [For thus saith the Lord, Let not the prophets in your midst deceive you, nor your diviners, nor hearken to the dreams they (?) dream. 9. For falsehood are they prophesying unto you in My Name; I have not sent them.](501) 10. For thus saith the Lord, So soon as seventy years be fulfilled for Babylon, I will visit you and establish My Word toward you by bringing you(502) back to this place.

For I am thinking about you— 11 Rede of the Lord— Thoughts not of evil but peace To give you a Future and Hope. Ye shall pray Me, and I will hear you, 12 Seek Me and find; 13 If ye ask Me with all your heart I shall be found of you. 14

By omitting all of verses 12-14 that is not given by the Greek we get these eight lines in approximately Jeremiah’s favourite Qinah-measure. The Greek also lacks verses 16-20, which irrelevantly digress from the exiles to the guilt and doom of the Jews in Jerusalem, and which it is difficult to think that Jeremiah would have put into a letter to be carried by two of these same Jews.(503) Verse 15 goes with 21-23,(504) a separate message to the exiles which we shall treat in the following section.

2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)

Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles had its consequences. First, there was their claim to have prophets of the Lord among themselves, which in our text immediately follows the Letter as if part of it, XXIX. 15, 21-23, but which is probably of a somewhat later date.

XXIX. 15. Because ye have said, The Lord hath raised us up prophets in Babylon, thus saith the Lord concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and concerning Ṣedekiah son of Maaseiah,(505) Behold I am to give them into the hand of the king of Babylon and to your eyes shall he slay them. 22. And of them shall a curse be taken up by all the exiles of Judah who are in Babylon saying, “The Lord set thee like Ṣedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted(506) in the fire!” 23. Because they have wrought folly in Israel and committed adultery with their neighbours’ wives, and in My Name have spoken words which I commanded them not. I am He who knoweth and am witness—Rede of the Lord.

And, second, another of the “prophets” among the exiles sent to Jerusalem a protest against Jeremiah’s Letter, XXIX. 24-29.

This passage, especially in its concise Greek form, which as usual is devoid of the repetitions of titles and other redundant phrases in the Hebrew text, bears the stamp of genuineness.

XXIX. 24. And unto Shemaiah the Nehemalite thou shalt say:(507) 25b. Because thou hast sent in thine own name a letter to Ṣephaniah, son of Maaseiah, the priest,(508) saying, The Lord hath appointed thee priest, instead of Jehoiada the priest, to be overseer in the House of the Lord for every man that is raving and takes on himself to be a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in the stocks and in the collar. 27. Now therefore why hast thou not curbed Jeremiah of Anathoth, who takes on himself to prophesy unto you? 28. Hath he not sent to us in Babylon saying, “It(509) is long! Build ye houses and settle down, and plant gardens and eat their fruit.” 29. And Ṣephaniah read this letter in the ears of Jeremiah; and the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying, Send to the exiles saying: Thus saith the Lord concerning Shemaiah the Nehemalite, Because Shemaiah hath prophesied unto you, although I did not send him, and hath led you to trust in a lie; therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold I am about to visit upon Shemaiah and upon his seed; there shall not be a man to them in your midst to see the good which I am going to do you.(510)

In one respect Jeremiah has not changed. His denunciation of individuals who oppose the Word of the Lord by himself is as strong as ever, and still more dramatically than in the case of Shemaiah it appears in his treatment of the prophets within Jerusalem, who flouted his counsels of subjection to Nebuchadrezzar, Chs. XXVII-XXVIII. In this narrative or narratives (for the whole seems compounded of several, perhaps not all referring to the same occasion) the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts are even more than usually great. The Greek again attracts our preference by its freedom from superfluous titles, repetitions and redundances, and is probably nearer than the Hebrew to the original of Baruch’s Memoirs of the Prophet. But it is obviously not complete, missing out clauses, the presence of which is implied by subsequent ones.(511) The following is the substance of what Baruch reports.

It was the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, 593, when messengers from the neighbouring nations came to Jerusalem to intrigue under Egyptian influence for revolt against Babylon. Jeremiah was commanded to make a yoke of bars and thongs, and having put it on his neck to charge the messengers to tell their masters—

XXVII. 4. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: I have made the Earth by My great power and Mine outstretched arm, and I give it unto whom it seems right to Me. 6. So now I have given all these lands(512) into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, to serve him,(513) and even the beasts of the field to serve him. 8. And it shall be that the nation and kingdom, which will not put their neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon, with the sword and with the famine(514) shall I visit them—Rede of the Lord—till they be consumed at his hand (?). 9. But ye, hearken ye not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your dreamers,(515) nor to your soothsayers, nor to your sorcerers, who say, “Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon”; for they prophesy a lie unto you, to the result of removing you far from your own soil. 11. But the nation which brings its neck into the yoke of the king of Babylon and serves him, I will let it rest on its own soil and it shall till this and abide within it.

This is followed by a similar Oracle to Ṣedekiah himself, 12-15, and by another, 16-22, to the priests concerning a matter of peculiar anxiety to them.

16. Thus saith the Lord, Hearken ye not to the words of the(516) prophets, who prophesy to you saying, Behold, the vessels of the Lord’s House shall be brought back from Babylon; for a lie are they prophesying to you. I have not sent them.(517) 18. But if prophets they be, and if the Word of the Lord is with them, let them now plead with Me [that the vessels left in the House of the Lord come not to Babylon]. 19. Yet thus saith the Lord concerning the residue of the vessels, which the king of Babylon did not take when he carried Jeconiah into exile from Jerusalem, unto Babylon shall they be brought—Rede of the Lord.

The Hebrew text concludes with a prophecy of the restoration of the vessels, which had it been in the original the Greek translators could hardly have omitted, and which is therefore probably a post factum insertion. Not only, then, were the sacred vessels taken away in 597 to remain in Babylon, but such as were still left in Jerusalem would also be carried thither. It is possible that this address is now out of place and should follow the next chapter, XXVIII, which deals only with the vessels carried off in 597. Like the Hebrew the Greek text gives XXVIII a separate introduction which dates it in the fifth month of the fourth year of Ṣedekiah, but omits the Hebrew statement that the year was the same as that of the events and words recorded in XXVII. The extent of the differences between the Hebrew and Greek continues to be at least as great as before,(518) as a comparison will show between the Authorised Version and the following rendering which adheres to the Greek.

Jeremiah was still wearing his symbolic yoke of wood and thongs in the Temple, when his prediction that the sacred vessels would not be restored was flatly contradicted and with as much assurance that the contradiction was from the God of Israel, as Jeremiah’s assurance about his own words. The speaker was like himself from the country of Benjamin, from Gibeon near Anathoth, Hananiah son of Azzur, who said—

XXVIII. 2. Thus saith the Lord, I have broken(519) the yoke of the king of Babylon! 3. Within two years I will bring back to this place the vessels of the House of the Lord, and Jeconiah and all the exiles of Judah that went to Babylon; for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon. 5. Then said Jeremiah to Hananiah, before the priests and all the people(520) standing in the House of the Lord—yes, Jeremiah said,(521) Amen! The Lord do so! The Lord establish the words thou hast prophesied, by bringing back the vessels of the Lord’s House and all the exiles from Babylon to this place! 7. Only hear, I pray thee, the Word of the Lord which I am about to speak in thine ears and in the ears of all the people. 8. The prophets who have been before me and thee from of old, they prophesied against many lands and against great kingdoms of war [and of famine (?) and pestilence].(522) 9. The prophet who prophesies of peace (it is only) when the word(523) comes to pass that the prophet is known(524) whom in truth the Lord hath sent. 10. Then Hananiah(525) took the bars off the neck of Jeremiah and brake them. 11. And Hananiah spake before all the people saying: Thus saith the Lord, Even so will I break the yoke of the king of Babylon [within two years](526) from off the necks of all the nations. And Jeremiah went his way. 12. Then came the Word of the Lord to Jeremiah, after Hananiah had broken the bars from off his neck, saying, Go tell Hananiah, Thus saith the Lord: Thou hast broken the bars of wood but I will(527) make in their stead bars of iron. 14. For thus saith the Lord, An iron yoke have I put upon the necks of all [these] nations, that they may serve the king of Babylon. 15. And Jeremiah said to Hananiah,(528) The Lord hath not sent thee, but thou leadest this people to trust in a lie. 16. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I am about to dispatch thee from off the face of the ground—this year thou shalt die. 17. And he was dead(529) by the seventh month.

All praise to Baruch for his concise and vivid report, and to the Greek translator who has reproduced it! The editors of the Hebrew text have diluted its strength.

With this narrative we are bound to take the section of the Book entitled Of the Prophets, XXIII. 9-32. The text is in parts uncertain, and includes obvious expansions. These removed, we can fairly distinguish a continuous metrical form up to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27. The metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise the suggestion(530) that the whole is rhetorical prose, between which and metre proper it is often hard, as we have seen, to draw the line. But we have also learned how often and how naturally irregular, when the subject requires it, Jeremiah’s metres tend to become. So I have ventured, with the help of the Greek, to render the whole as metre, in which form are parts beyond doubt. Verses 18 and 30-32 are in prose, and both, but more probably the former, may be later additions, as are 19, 20, and clauses in 9, 10.

There is no reason against taking the remainder as Oracles by Jeremiah himself. No dates are given them; they probably come from various stages of his ministry, for he early found out the false prophets, and his experience of them and their errors lasted to the end. But probably this collection of the Oracles was made under Ṣedekiah; that Baruch gathered it still later is not so likely.

Of the prophets:— XXIII. 9 Broken my heart within me, All pithless my bones. I’m become like a drunken man Like a wight overcome with wine.(531) Of adulterers the land is full 10 Their course it is evil,(532) Their might not right. For prophet and priest alike 11 Are utterly godless.(533) E’en in My House their evil I find— Rede of the Lord. Therefore their way shall they have 12 In slippery places, Thrust shall they be into darkness(534) And fall therein, When I bring calamity on them, The year of their visitation. In Samaria’s prophets I saw the unseemly, 13 By Baal they prophesied.(535) In Jerusalem’s prophets I see the horrible— 14 Adultery, walking in lies. They strengthen the hands of ill-doers, That none from his wickedness turns. To Me they are all like Sodom, Like Gomorra her(536) dwellers! Therefore thus saith the Lord:(537) 15 Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, And drug them with poison.(538) For forth from Jerusalem’s prophets Godlessness starts o’er the land. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts 16 Hearken not to the words of the prophets They make them bubbles,(539) A vision from their hearts they speak, Not from the mouth of the Lord. Saying to the scorners of His(540) Word 17 “Peace shall be yours;” To all who follow their stubborn hearts “No evil shall reach you!”

18. [For who hath stood in the council of the Lord and hath seen His Word? Who hath attended and heard?](541)

I have not sent the prophets, 21 Of themselves they run. I have not spoken to them, They do the prophesying. If they had stood in My Council, 22 And heard My Words, My people they would have been turning(542) From(543) the wrong of their doings. I am a God who is near 23 Not a God who is far.(544) Can any man hide him in secret 24 And I not see him? Is it not heaven and earth that I fill?— Rede of the Lord. I have heard what the prophets say 25 Who preach in My Name, Falsely saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed, I have dreamed.”(545) Will the heart of the prophets turn,(546) 26 Who prophesy lies? And in their prophesying ... (?)(547) The deceit of their heart, Who plan that My people forget My Name(548) 27 Through the dreams they tell, Just as their fathers forgot My Name through Baal. The prophet with whom is a dream 28 Let him tell his(549) dream; But he with whom is My Word, My Word let him speak in truth. What has the straw with the wheat?(550) —Rede of the Lord— My Word, is it not(551) like fire 29 And the hammer that shatters the rock?

30. Therefore, Behold, I am against the prophets—Rede of the Lord—who steal My Words each from his mate. 31. Behold, I am against the prophets who fling out their tongues and rede a Rede.(552) 32. Behold, I am against the prophets of false dreams who tell them and lead My people astray by their falsehood and extravagance(553)—not I have sent them or charged them, nor of any profit whatsoever are they to this people.(554)

We have now all the material available for judgment upon Jeremiah’s life-long controversy with the other prophets. His message and theirs were diametrically opposite. But both he and they spoke in the name of the same God, the God of their nation. Both were convinced that they had His Mind. Both were sure that their respective predictions would be fulfilled. Each repudiated the other’s claim to speak in the name of their nation’s God. With each it was an affair of strong, personal convictions, which we may grant, in the case of some at least of Jeremiah’s opponents, to have been as honest as his. At first sight it may seem hopeless to analyse such equal assurances, based apparently on identical grounds, with the view of discovering psychological differences between them; and as if we must leave the issue to the course of events to which both parties confidently appealed. Even here the decision is not wholly in favour of the one as against the others. For Jeremiah’s predictions in the Name of the Lord were not always fulfilled as he had shaped them. The northern executioners of the Divine Judgment upon Judah were not the Scythians as he at first expected; and—a smaller matter—Jehoiakim was not buried with the burial of an ass, dragged and flung out from the gates of Jerusalem, but slept with his fathers.(555) Yet these are only exceptions. Jeremiah’s prophesying was in substance vindicated by history, while the predictions of the other prophets were utterly belied. This is part of Jeremiah’s meaning when he says, Of no profit whatsoever are they to this people.(556)

What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the similar surfaces of Jeremiah’s and the prophets’ assurances we find two deep distinctions between them—one moral and one intellectual.

We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel from the level of that tribal system of religion which prevailed throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unworthy of His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the hands of their enemies.(557) What else can I do? Jeremiah hears God say. The opposing prophets reply, Not He! This is the ground of his charge against them, that they plan to make the people forget the Name, the revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as their fathers forgat Him through Baal,(558) confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local god.(559) This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of their time—on the one side his acute conscience of the vices that corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those vices. They would heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying it is well, it is well when well it is not, and in their prophesying there was no call to repentance.(560) Moreover, though this may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among the exiles were partakers of other men’s sins; for Jeremiah charges them with the prevailing immoralities of the day—adultery and untruth. Instead of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness that spread through the land.(561) Though we have only Jeremiah’s—or Baruch’s—word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah’s charges are therefore not incredible.

But the grounds of the difference between Jeremiah and the other prophets were also intellectual. Jeremiah had the right eye for events and throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells us how the will of God was sometimes suggested to him by the sight of certain physical objects—the almond-blossom that broke the winter of Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or the potter at his wheel—so the sight of that in which the physical and spiritual mingled, the disposition and progress of the political forces of his world, made clear to him the particular lines upon which the ethically certain doom of Judah would arrive. He had the open eye for events and allowed neither that horror of his people’s ruin, of which he tells us his heart was full, nor any other motive of patriotism, nor temptations to the easier life that had surely been his by flattery and the promise of peace to his contemporaries, to blind him to the clear and just reading of his times, to which God’s Word and his faith in the Divine character had opened his vision. On the contrary the other prophets, to take them at their best, were blinded by their patriotism, blinded by it even after Carchemish and when the grasp of Babylon was sensibly closing upon Judah—even after the first captivity and when the siege of Jerusalem could only end in her downfall and destruction. Nothing proved sufficient to open such eyes to the signs of the times.

Making allowance, then, for the fact that we depend for our knowledge of the controversy upon the record of only one of the parties to it, and imputing to the other prophets the best possible, we are left with these results: that as proved by events the truth was with Jeremiah’s word and not with that of his opponents, and that the causes of this were his profoundly deeper ethical conceptions of God working in concert with his unwarped understanding of the political and military movements of his time.

To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets who were against him.

Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he opposed the Word of the Living God, Who spoke to the times and freely acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.

Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In contrast, not merely were Jeremiah’s prophecies conditional but the conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.

Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage Jeremiah showed patience with his opponents, the patience which is proof of the soundness of a man’s own convictions. He believed in “the liberty of prophesying,”

The prophet with whom is a dream Let him tell his dream, And he with whom is My Word, My Word let him speak in truth!

Jeremiah had no fear of the issue being threshed out between them. The wheat would be surely cleared from the straw.(562) That is a confidence which attracts our trust. In the strength of it Jeremiah was enabled to pause and reflect on the apparently equal confidence which he encountered in his opponents, and to give this every opportunity to prove itself to him before he repeated his own convictions. I cannot think, as many do, that his words to Hananiah were sarcastic; and when Hananiah broke the yoke on Jeremiah’s shoulders, and it is said, But Jeremiah went his way, this was not in contempt but to think out the issue between them.(563) Nor do I feel sarcasm in his wish that his opponents’ predictions of the return of the sacred vessels from Babylon might be fulfilled.(564) His brave calm words to the prophets and priests who sought his life in the Temple in 604(565) bear similar testimony. All these are the marks of an honest, patient and reflective mind which weighs opinions opposite to its own.

Further still, Jeremiah had to his credit that of which his opponents appear to have been devoid. As we have seen no prophet was less sure of himself, or more reluctant to discharge the duties of a prophet. Everywhere he gives evidence of being impelled by a force not his own and against his will.(566) But the other prophets show no sign of this accrediting reluctance. They eagerly launch forth on their mission; fling about their tongues, and rede a Rede of the Lord.(567) They give no impression of a force behind them. Jeremiah says that they run of themselves and prophesy of themselves, they have not been sent.(568) We still keep in mind that we owe the accounts of them to Jeremiah and Baruch, their opponents. But our own experience of life enables us to recognise the portraits presented to us, as of characters found in every age: pushful men, who have no doubts of their omniscience, but, however patriotic or religious or learned, leave upon their contemporaries no impression of their being driven by another force than themselves, and whose opinions either are belied by events, or melt into the air.

One point remains. In answering Hananiah Jeremiah adduced the example of the acknowledged prophets of the past as being always prophets of doom, so that the presumption was in favour of those who still preached doom; yet he allowed that if any prophet promised peace, and peace came to pass, he also might be known as genuine. That was sound history, and in the circumstances of the day it was also sound sense.

3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)

History has no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet’s feet as low as the feet of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties of defence, the last crusts. His hunger, and, what is still keener, his pity for those who suffer it with him, may break his faith into cowardice and superstition. But if faith stands, and common-sense with it, his opportunities are high. His powers of spiritual vision may prove to be also those of political and even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics, to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a hero.

The Old Testament gives us three instances—Elisha’s brave visions during the Syrian blockade of Dothan and siege of Samaria; Isaiah, upon the solitary strength of his faith, carrying Jerusalem inviolate through her siege by the Assyrians; and now a century later Jeremiah, with a more costly courage, counselling her surrender to the Babylonians.

The records of the Prophet’s activity and sufferings during the siege are so curiously scattered through the Book and furnished with such headlines as to leave it clear that they were added at different times and possibly from different sources. Some of them raise the question whether or not they are doublets.

Three, XXI. 1-10, XXXIV. 1-7, XXXVII. 3-10, bear pronouncements by Jeremiah that the city must surrender or be stormed and burned. Of these the first and third each gives as the occasion of the pronouncement it quotes, Ṣedekiah’s mission of two men to the Prophet. Several critics regard these missions as identical. But can we doubt that during that crisis of two years the distracted king would send more than once for a Divine word? And for this what moments were so natural as when the Chaldeans were beginning the siege, XXI. 4, and when they raised it, XXXVII. 5? That one of the two messengers is on each occasion the same affords an inadequate reason—and no other exists—for arguing that both passages are but differently telling the same story.(569) Nor have any grounds been offered for identifying the occasion of either passage with that of XXXIV. 1-7. Thus we have three separate deliverances from Jeremiah to the king, each with its own vivid phrases and distinctive edge.

The first, XXI 1-10, was given as the Chaldeans closed upon Jerusalem but the Jews were not yet driven within the walls.(570) Ṣedekiah sent Pashḥur and Ṣephaniah to inquire if by a miracle the Lord would raise the siege. The grim answer came that the Lord Himself would fight the besieged, till they died of pestilence and the survivors were slaughtered by Nebuchadrezzar—I(571) shall not spare nor pity them—which is proof that this Oracle was uttered before the end of the siege, when the survivors were not slain but deported. The people are advised to desert to the enemy—counsel which we shall consider later.

The second, XXXIV. 1-7, records a pronouncement unsought by the king but evoked from Jeremiah by the progress of the Chaldean arms, which had overrun all Judah save the fortresses of Jerusalem, Lachish and Azekah. Its vivid genuineness is further certified by its unfulfilled promise of a peaceful death for Ṣedekiah. The following is mainly after the Greek.

XXXIV. 2b. Thus saith the Lord: This city shall certainly be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it and burn it with fire. 3. And thou shalt not escape but surely be taken and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall look into his eyes, and his mouth speak with thy mouth,(572) and to Babylon shalt thou come. 4. Yet hear the Lord’s Word, O Ṣedekiah, king of Judah! 5. Thus saith the Lord,(573) In peace shalt thou die, and as the burnings(574) for thy fathers who reigned before thee so shall they burn for thee, and with “Ah lord!” lament thee. I have spoken the Word—Rede of the Lord.

The miserable king, how much worse was in store for him than even Jeremiah was given to foresee! Duhm (to our surprise, as Cornill remarks) agrees that the passage is from Baruch; but only in order to support the precarious thesis that Baruch knew nothing of Ṣedekiah’s being afterwards blinded and that the reports of this(575) sprang from unfounded rumour.

The third pronouncement to Ṣedekiah, XXXVII. 3-10,(576) was made when the king sent Jehucal and Ṣephaniah to seek the Prophet’s prayers, after the Chaldeans had raised the siege in order to meet the reported Egyptian advance to the relief of Jerusalem.

XXXVII. 7. Thus saith the Lord: Thus say ye to the king of Judah who sent you to inquire of Me,(577) Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which is coming forth to help you, shall return to the land of Egypt. 8. And the Chaldeans shall come back and fight against this city and take it and burn it with fire. 9. For(578) thus saith the Lord: Deceive not yourselves saying, The Chaldeans shall surely go off from us; they shall not go. 10. Even though ye smote the whole host of the Chaldeans that are fighting with you, and but wounded men were left, yet should these rise, each in his tent,(579) and burn this city with fire.

It is very remarkable how the spiritual powers of the Prophet endowed him with these sound views of the facts of his time, and of their eventualities whether in the political or in the military sphere. For nearly forty years he had foretold judgment on his people out of the North: for eighteen at least he had been sure that its instrument would be Nebuchadrezzar and he had foreseen the first deportation of the Jews to Babylonia. Now step by step through the siege he is clear as to what must happen—clear that the Chaldeans will invest the city, clear when they raise the investment that they will beat off the Egyptian army of relief and return, clear that resistance to them is hopeless, and will but add thousands of deaths by famine and pestilence before the city is taken and burned and its survivors carried into exile—all of which comes to pass. But this political sagacity and military foresight have their source in moral and spiritual convictions—the Prophet’s assurance of the character and will of God, his faith in the Divine Government not of a single nation but of all the powers of the world, and his belief that a people is saved and will endure for the service of mankind, neither because of past privileges nor by the traditions in which it trusts, nor by adherence to dogmas however vital these have been to its fathers, nor even by its passionate patriotism and its stubborn gallantry in defence of land and homes, but only by its justice, its purity, and its obedience to God’s will. These are the spiritual convictions which alone keep the Prophet’s eyes open and his heart steadfast through the fluctuations of policy and of military fortune that shake his world, and under the agony of appearing to be a traitor to his country and of preaching the doom of a people whom he loves with all his soul.

The case of John Knox affords a parallel to that of the Hebrew prophet. He told the garrison and citizens of St. Andrews, when besieged by the French, that “their corrupt life could not escape punishment of God and that was his continued advertisement from the time he was called to preach” among them. “When they triumphed of their victory (the first twenty days they had many prosperous chances) he lamented and ever said ‘They saw not what he saw!’ When they bragged of the force and thickness of their walls, he said, ‘They should be but egg-shells!’ When they vaunted ‘England will rescue us!’ he said, ‘Ye shall not see them, but ye shall be delivered into your enemies’ hands and shall be carried to a strange country!’ ” that is France. All of which came to pass, as with Jeremiah’s main predictions.(580)

The second of Jeremiah’s pronouncements given above is followed by the story of the besieged’s despicable treatment of their slaves, XXXIV. 8-22; based on a memoir by Baruch, but expanded. Both the Hebrew and the shorter Greek offer in parts an uncertain text, and add this problem that their story begins with a covenant to proclaim a Liberty(581) for the Hebrew slaves in general, while the words which they attribute to Jeremiah limit it to the emancipation, in terms of a particular law, of those slaves who had completed six years of service (verse 14).(582) But neither this nor the other and smaller uncertainties touch the substance of the story.(583) As the siege began the king and other masters of slaves in Jerusalem entered into solemn covenant to free their Hebrew slaves, obviously in order to propitiate their God, and also some would assert (though unsupported by the text) in order to increase their fighting ranks; but when the siege was raised they forced their freedmen back to bondage: “a deathbed repentance with the usual sequel on recovery.”(584) This is the barest exposure among many we have of the character of the people with whom Jeremiah had to deal, and justifies the hardest he has said of their shamelessness.

XXXIV. 17. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not obeyed Me by proclaiming a Liberty each for his countryman. Behold I am about to proclaim for you a Liberty—to the sword, to the famine and to the pestilence, and I will set you a consternation to all kingdoms of the earth.... 21. And Ṣedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes will I give into the hands of their foes, the king of Babylon’s host that are gone up from you. 22. Behold, I am about to command—Rede of the Lord—and bring them back to this city and they shall storm and take it and burn it with fire, and the townships of Judah will I make desolate and tenantless.

Are we not in danger of the guilt of a similar perjury to the men who fought for us in the Great War, and for whom we have not yet fulfilled all the promises made to them by our governors?

About this time the ill-treatment of Jeremiah, which had ceased on Ṣedekiah’s accession, was resumed. The narrative, or succession of narratives, of this begins at XXXVII. 11, and continues to XXXIX. 14, with interruptions in XXXIX. 1, 2, 4-13. Save for a few expansions, the whole must have been taken from Baruch’s memoirs. Except for the omission of XXXIX. 4-13, the differences of the Greek from the Hebrew are unimportant, consisting in the usual absence of repetitions of titles, epithets and names.

The siege being raised, Jeremiah was going out by the North gate of the city to Anathoth to claim or to manage(585) some property there, when he was arrested by the captain of the watch, and charged with deserting. He denied this, but was taken to the princes, who flogged him and flung him into a vault in the house of Jonathan, the Secretary. After many days he was sent for by the king who asked, Is there Word from the Lord? There is, he replied, and, as if drumming a lesson into a stupid child’s head, repeated his message, Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon. He asked what he had done to be treated as he had been, and, by contrast, where were the prophets who had said that the Babylonians would not come to Judah—his irony was not yet starved out of him!—and begged not to be sent back to the vault. The king committed him to the Court of the Guard, where at least he was above ground, could receive visitors, and was granted daily a loaf from the Bakers’ Bazaar while bread lasted in the city.(586)

Yet through his bars he still defied his foes and they were at him again, quoting to the king two Oracles which he had uttered before and apparently was repeating to those who resorted to him in the Guard-Court.

XXXVIII. 1. And Shephatiah, Mattan’s son, Gedaliah Pashḥur’s son, Jucal Shelamiah’s son, and Pashḥur Malchiah’s son,(587) heard the words Jeremiah was speaking about the people:(588) “Thus saith the Lord, He that abides in this city shall die by the sword, the famine or the pestilence, but he that goes forth to the Chaldeans shall live—his life shall be to him for a prey but he shall live.”(589) 3. “Thus(590) saith the Lord: This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s host and they shall take it.”

Verse 2 is rejected by Duhm and Cornill partly on the insufficient ground that verses 2 and 3 have separate introductions and therefore could have had originally no connection. But in quoting two utterances of the Prophet for their cumulative effect it was natural to prefix to each his usual formula. Duhm’s and Cornill’s real motive, however, is their repugnance to admitting that Jeremiah could have advised desertion from the city. So Duhm equally rejects XXI. 9, of which XXXVIII. 2 is but an abbreviation; while Cornill seeks to save XXI. 9 by reading it as a summons to the whole people to surrender and so distinguishes it from XXXVIII. 2, advice to individuals to desert. I fail to follow this distinction. The terms used are as individual in the one verse as in the other; if the one goes the other must also. But need either go? Duhm’s view is that both are from a later period, when there was no longer a native government in Judah, reverence for the monarchy was dead, and the common conscience of Jewry was not civic but ecclesiastical! This is ingenious, but far from convincing. There are no grounds either for denying these verses to Jeremiah, or for reading his advice to go forth to the Chaldeans as meant otherwise than for the individual citizens.

Was such advice right or wrong? The question is much debated. The two German scholars just quoted find it so wrong that they cannot think of it as Jeremiah’s. But in that situation and under the convictions which held him, the Prophet could not have spoken differently. He knew, and soundly knew, not only that the city was doomed and that her rulers who persisted in defending her were senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Ṣedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so forsworn and self-disentitled, besides being so insane, as that of the feeble king and his frantic masters, the princes. For Jeremiah the only Divine right was Nebuchadrezzar’s. But to the conviction that Ṣedekiah and the princes were not the lawful lords of Judah, we must add the pity of the Prophet as he foresaw the men, women and children of his people done to useless death by the cruel illusions of their illegitimate governors. Calvin is right, when, after a careful reservation of the duties of private citizens to their government at war, he pronounces that “Jeremiah could not have brought better counsel” to the civilians and soldiers of Jerusalem.(592) And it is no paradox to say that the Prophet’s sincerity in giving such advice is sealed by his heroic refusal to accept it for himself and resolution to share to the end what sufferings the obstinacy of her lords was to bring on the city. Nor, be it observed, did he bribe his fellow citizens to desert to the enemy by any rich promise. He plainly told them that this would leave a man nothing but bare life—his life for a prey.

It would, however, be most irrelevant to deduce from so peculiar a situation, and from the Divine counsels applicable to this alone, any sanction for “pacificism” in general, or to set up Jeremiah as an example of the duty of deserting one’s government when at war, in all circumstances and whatever were the issues at stake. We might as well affirm that the example of the man, who rouses his family to flee when he finds their home hopelessly on fire, is valid for him whose house is threatened by burglars. Isaiah inspired resistance to the Assyrian besiegers of Jerusalem in his day with as Divine authority as Jeremiah denounced resistance to the Chaldean besiegers in his. Nor can we doubt that our Prophet would have appreciated the just, the inevitable revolt of the Maccabees against their pagan tyrants, which is divinely praised in the Epistle to the Hebrews as a high example of faith. It is one thing to deny allegiance, as Jeremiah did, to a government that had broken the oath on which alone its rights were founded, and the keeping of which was the sole security for “the stability of the times.” It is another and very different thing to refuse, on alleged grounds of conscience, to follow one’s government when it lifts the sword against a people who have broken their oath, and mobilises its subjects in defence of justice and of the freedom of weaker nations, imperilled by that perjury.

But the princes seem to have honestly believed that Jeremiah was guilty of treason, and said to the king—

XXXVIII. 4. Let this man, we pray, be put to death forasmuch as he weakens the hands of the men of war left to the city and the hands of all the people by speaking such words to them, for this man is seeking not the welfare of this people but the hurt. 5. And the king said, Behold he is in your hand; for the king was not able to do anything against them.(593) 6. So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah the king’s son, in the Court of the Guard; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. In the cistern there was no water, only mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire.

The story which follows is one of the fairest in the Old Testament, XXXVIII. 7-13.(594) When no others seem to have stirred to rescue the Prophet—unless Baruch had a hand in what he tells and is characteristically silent about it—Ebed-melech, a negro eunuch of the palace, sought the king where he then was(595) and charged the princes with starving Jeremiah to death.(596) The king at once ordered him to take three(597) men and rescue the Prophet. The thoughtful negro, perhaps prompted by the women of the palace, procured some rags and old clouts from a lumber room, told Jeremiah to put them under his arm-pits to soften the roughness of the ropes, and so drew him gently from the mire and he was restored to the Guard-Court. Ebed-melech had his reward in the Lord’s promise to save him from the men whom he had made his foes by his brave rescue of their prey.(598)

Once more, as we might expect, the restless king sent for Jeremiah.(599) Shaken by his terrible experiences the Prophet, before he would answer, asked if the king would put him to death for his answer or act on his advice. The king swore not to hand him over to the princes; so Jeremiah promised that if Ṣedekiah would give himself up to the Chaldeans he and his house would be spared and the city saved. The king—it is another credible trait in this weak character—feared that the Chaldeans would deliver him to the mockery of those Jews who had already deserted to them. Jeremiah sought to reassure him, again urged him to surrender, and then burst out with the vision—an extraordinarily interesting phase of prophetic ecstasy—of another mockery which the king would suffer from his own women if he did not yield but waited to be taken captive.

XXXVIII. 21. But if thou refuse to go forth this is the thing the Lord has given me to see: 22. Behold all the women, that are left in the king of Judah’s house,(600) brought forth to the princes of the king of Babylon and saying,

They set thee on and compelled thee, The men of thy peace; Now they have plunged thy feet in the swam They turn back from thee!(601)

The verse is in Jeremiah’s favourite measure, and its figures spring immediately from his experience. The mire can hardly have dried on him, into which he had been dropped, but at least his friends had pulled him out of it; the king had been forced into far deeper mire by his own counsellors, and they were leaving him in it!

The nervous king jibbed from the vision without remark and begged Jeremiah not to tell what had passed between them, but, if asked, to say that he had been supplicating Ṣedekiah not to send him back to the house of Jonathan; which answer the Prophet obediently gave to the inquisitive princes and so quieted them: the matter was not perceived. He has been blamed for prevaricating. On this point Calvin is as usual candid and sane. “It was indeed not a falsehood, but this evasion cannot wholly be excused. The Prophet had an honest fear; he was perplexed and anxious—it would be better to die at once than be thus buried alive in the earth.... Yet it was a kind of falsehood. He confesses that he did as the king charged him and there is no doubt that he had before him the king’s timidity.... He cannot be wholly exempted from blame. In short, we see how even the servants of God have spoken evasively when under extreme fear.” The prophets were men of like passions with ourselves. By now Jeremiah had aged, and was strained by the flogging, the darkness, the filth and the hunger he had suffered. Can we wonder at or blame him? But with what authenticity does its frankness stamp the whole story!

With most commentators I have treated Ch. XXXVIII as the account of a fresh arrest of Jeremiah and a fresh interview between him and Ṣedekiah. I see, however, that Dr. Skinner takes the whole chapter to be “a duplication.”(602) He considers it a general improbability that two such interviews, as XXXVII. 17-21 and XXXVIII. 14-27 relate, “should have taken place in similar circumstances within so short a time.” Yet the king was just the man to appeal to the Prophet time after time during the siege. The similarities in the two stories are natural because circumstances were more or less similar at the various stages of such a siege; but the differences are more significant. The vivid details of XXXVIII attest it as the account of an event and of sayings subsequent to those related in XXXVII. The Prophet’s precaution, before he would answer, in getting a pledge that he would not be put to death nor handed over to the princes, as he had already been, and his consent for Ṣedekiah’s sake, as well as for his own, to prevaricate to the princes are features not found in the other reports of such interviews, but intelligible and natural after the terrible treatment he had suffered. Dr. Skinner, too, admits that the two accounts may be read as of different experiences of the Prophet, “if we can suppose that the offence with which he is charged in XXXVIII. 1 ff. could have been committed while he was a prisoner in the court of the guard;” but this appears to Dr. Skinner as “hardly credible.” Yet the incidents related in XXXII. 6-15 show not only that it is credible but that it actually happened. In the East such imprisonment does not prevent a prisoner, though shackled, from communicating with his friends and even with the gaping crowd outside his bars, as I have seen more than once.

In the Court of the Guard Jeremiah remained till the city was taken.(603) He regained communication with his friends; and it is not surprising to have as from this time several sayings by him, or to discover from them that his heart, no longer confined to reiterating the certain doom of the city, was once more released to the hope of a future for his people, hope across which the shadow of doubt appears to have fallen but once. His guard-court prophecies form part of that separate collection, Chs. XXX-XXXIII, to which the name The Book of Hope has been fitly given. Of these chapters XXX and XXXI, without date, imply that the city has already fallen and the exile of her people is complete. But XXXII and XXXIII are assigned to the last year of the siege and to the Prophet’s confinement to the guard-court. There is now general agreement that XXXII. 1-5 (or at least 3-5) are from a later hand, which correctly dates the story it introduces but attributes Jeremiah’s imprisonment to Ṣedekiah instead of to the princes, and even seems to confound Ṣedekiah with Jehoiachin; and second that the story itself, of a transaction between Jeremiah and his cousin regarding some family property, is genuine, dictated by the Prophet to Baruch before or after the end of the siege. Some reject as later all the rest of the chapter: a long prayer by Jeremiah and the Lord’s answer to it, both of which are full of deuteronomic phrases. Yet that an editor should have made so large an addition to the book without genuine material to work from is hardly credible; while it is characteristic of Jeremiah to have fallen into the doubt his prayer reveals, and this doubt would naturally be followed by a Divine answer. But such original elements it is not possible to discriminate exactly from the expansions by which they have been overlaid.(604)

XXXII. 6. And Jeremiah said, The Word of the Lord came to me saying, Behold, Hanamel son of Shallum thine uncle is coming to thee to say, Buy thee my field in Anathoth, for thine is the right of redemption to buy it. 8. And Hanamel son of my uncle came to me in the guard-court and said, Buy my field that is Anathoth, for the right of inheritance is thine and thine the redemption; buy it for thyself. Then I knew that it was the Lord’s Word. 9. So I bought the field from Hanamel mine uncle’s son and weighed to him seventeen silver shekels. 10. And I subscribed the deed and sealed it and took witnesses, weighing the money in the balances. 11. And I took the deed of sale, both that which was sealed and that which was open,(605) and I gave it to Baruch son of Neriah, son of Maḥseiah, in the sight of Hanamel mine uncle’s son, and in sight of the Jews sitting in the guard-court. 13. And in their sight I charged Baruch, saying, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: Take this deed of sale which is sealed, and this deed which is open, and put them in an earthen vessel that they may last many days. 15. For thus saith the Lord, Houses and fields and vineyards shall yet again be bought in this land. 16. Now after I had given the deed of sale to Baruch, Neriah’s son, I prayed to the Lord saying, Ah Lord ... (?) behold the mounts; they are come to the city to take it, and the city shall be given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it, because of the sword and the famine and the pestilence; and what Thou hast spoken is come to pass, and, lo, Thou art seeing it. 25. Yet Thou saidst to me, Buy thee the field for money, so I wrote the deed and sealed it and took witnesses—whereas the city is to be given into the hands of the Chaldeans!

The tone of the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country’s freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of property in land. Let those observe, who deny to such individual rights any communal interest or advantage. Jeremiah at least proves how a small property of his own may help a prophet in his hope for his country and people.

All this is followed in Ch. XXXIII by a series of oracles under the heading The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time while he was still shut up in the guard-court. Because verses 14-26 are lacking in the Greek and could not have been omitted by the translator had they been in the original text, and because they are composed partly of mere echoes of Jeremiah and partly of promises for the Monarchy and Priesthood not consonant with his views of the institutions of Israel, they are very generally rejected. So are 2 and 3 because of their doubtful relevance and their style, that of the great prophet of the end of the Exile. The originality of 1 and 4-13 has also been denied. The question is difficult. But there is no reason to doubt that the editor had good material for the data in 1, or that under the Hebrew text, which as it stands in 4, 5 is impossible(606) and throughout 6-13 has been much expanded, there is something of Jeremiah’s own. Verses 4 and 5 reflect the siege in progress, though if the date in verse 1 be correct we must take torn down as future. In 6-13 are promises of the restoration of the ruined city, of peace and stability, of the return of the exiles both of Judah and Israel and of their forgiveness; Jerusalem shall again be a joy, and the voices of joy, of the bridegroom and bride, and of worship in the Temple, shall again be heard; shepherds and their flocks shall be restored throughout Judah and the Negeb. It would be daring to deny to the Prophet the whole of this prospect. The city was about to be ruined, its houses filled with dead; the land had already been ravaged. His office of doom was discharged; it is not unnatural to believe that his great soul broke out with a vision of the hope beyond for which he had taken so practical a pledge. That is all we can say; some of the details of the prospect can hardly be his.(607)

Jerusalem fell at last in 586 and Jeremiah’s imprisonment in the guard-court was over.(608)

4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)

There are two separated accounts of what befel Jeremiah when the city was taken. Ch. XXXIX. 3, 14 tells us that he was fetched from the guard-court by Babylonian officers,(609) and given to Gedaliah, the son of his old befriender Ahikam, to be taken home.(610) At last!—but for only a brief interval in the life of this homeless and harried man. When a few months later Nebuṣaradan arrived on his mission to burn the city and deport the inhabitants Jeremiah is said by Ch. XL to have been carried off in chains with the rest of the captivity as far as Ramah, where, probably on Gedaliah’s motion, Nebuṣaradan released him and he joined Gedaliah at Miṣpah.(611)

It is unfortunate that we take our impressions of Nebuchadrezzar from the late Book of Daniel instead of from the contemporary accounts of his policy by Jeremiah, Baruch and Ezekiel. A proof of his wisdom and clemency is here. While deporting a second multitude to Babylonia in the interests of peace and order, he placed Judah under a native governor and chose for the post a Jew of high family traditions and personal character. All honour to Gedaliah for accepting so difficult and dangerous a task! He attracted those Jewish captains and their bands who during the siege had maintained themselves in the country,(612) and advised them to acknowledge the Chaldean power and to cultivate their lands, which that year fortunately produced excellent crops. At last there was peace, and the like-minded Governor and Prophet must together have looked forward to organising in Judah the nucleus at least of a restored Israel.

To this quiet interval, brief as it tragically proved, we may reasonably assign those Oracles of Hope which it is possible to recognise as Jeremiah’s among the series attributed to him in Chs. XXX, XXXI. No chapters of the book have been more keenly discussed or variously estimated.(613) Yet at least there is agreement that their compilation is due to a late editor who has arranged his materials progressively so that the whole is a unity;(614) that many of these materials are obviously from the end of the exile in the style then prevailing; but that among them are genuine Oracles of Jeremiah recognisable by their style. These are admitted as his by the most drastic of critics. It is indeed incredible that after such a crisis as the destruction of the Holy City and the exile of her people, and with the new situation and prospect of Israel before him, the Prophet should have had nothing to say. And the most probable date for such utterances of hope as we have now to consider is not that of his imprisonment but the breathing-space given him after 586, when the Jewish community left in Judah made such a promising start.(615)

From its measure and vivid vision the first piece might well be Jeremiah’s; but it uses Jacob, the later literature’s favourite name for Israel, which Jeremiah does not use, and (in the last two verses) some phrases with an outlook reminiscent of the Second Isaiah. The verses describe a day when the world shall again be shaken, but out of the shaking Israel’s deliverance shall come.

The next piece is more probably Jeremiah’s, as even Duhm admits; verses 10 and 11 which precede it are not given in the Greek.

Healless to me is thy ruin, 12 Sick is thy wound, Not for thy sore is remede, 13 No closing (of wounds) for thee! Forgot thee have all thy lovers, 14 Thee they seek not. With the stroke of a foe I have struck thee, A cruel correction. Why criest thou over thy ruin, 15 Thy healless pain? For the mass of thy guilt, thy sins profuse Have I done to thee these.

If these Qînah quatrains are not Jeremiah’s, some one else could match him to the letter and the very breath. They would fall fitly from his lips immediately upon the fulfilment of his people’s doom. Less probably his are the verses which follow and abruptly add to his stern rehearsal of judgment on Judah the promise of her deliverance, even introducing this with a therefore as if deliverance were the certain corollary of judgment—a conclusion not to be grudged by us to the faith of a later believer; for it is not untrue that the sinner’s extremest need is the occasion for God’s salvation.(622) Yet the sudden transition feels artificial, and lacks, be it observed, what we should expect from Jeremiah himself, a call to the doomed people to repent. Note, too, the breakdown of the metre under a certain redundancy, which is not characteristic of Jeremiah.

The rest of the chapter is even less capable of being assigned to Jeremiah.

More of Jeremiah’s own Oracles are readily recognised in Ch. XXXI. I leave to a later lecture the question of the authenticity of that on The New Covenant and of the immediately preceding verses;(624) while the verses which close the chapter are certainly not the Prophet’s. But I take now the rest of the chapter, verses 1-28. The first of these may be editorial, the link by which the compiler has connected Chs. XXX and XXXI; yet there is nothing to prevent us from hearing in it Jeremiah himself.

XXXI. 1. At that time—Rede of the Lord—I shall be God to all the families(625) of Israel, and they shall be a people to Me.

A poem follows which metrically and in substance bears every mark of being Jeremiah’s. The measure is his favourite Qînah, and the memory of the Lord’s ancient love for Israel, which had stirred the youth of the Prophet,(626) revives in his old age and is the motive of his assurance that Israel will be restored. It is of Ephraim as well as of Judah that he thinks, indeed of Ephraim especially. We have seen how the heart of this son of Anathoth-in-Benjamin was early drawn to the exiles from that province on which the northward windows of his village looked out.(627) Now once more he was in Benjamin’s territory, at Ramah and at Miṣpah, with the same northward prospect. Naturally his heart went out again to Ephraim and its banished folk. Of the priestly tribe as Jeremiah’s family were, their long residence in the land of Benjamin must have infected them with Benjamin’s sense of a closer kinship to Ephraim, the son of Joseph, the son of Rachel, than to Judah, the son of Leah. And there was, in addition, the influence of neighbourhood. If blood be thicker than water it is equally true that watered blood is warmed to affection by nearness of locality and closeness of association.(628)

It is questionable whether the opening couplet quotes the deliverance of Israel from Egypt as a precedent for the future return of the northern tribes from captivity, described in the lines that follow; or whether this return is at once predicted by the couplet, with the usual prophetic assurance as though it had already happened. If we take the desert as this is taken in Hosea II. 14, we may decide for the latter alternative.

Grace have they found in the desert, XXXI. 2 The people escaped from the sword; While Israel makes for his rest from afar The Lord appears to him(629): 3 “With a love from of old I have loved thee, So in troth I (now) draw thee.(630) “I will rebuild thee, and built shalt thou be, 4 Maiden of Israel! “Again thou shalt take(631) thee thy timbrels And forth to the merrymen’s dances. “Again shall vineyards be planted(632) 5 On the hills of Samaria, “Planters shall surely plant them(?) And forthwith enjoy(633) (their fruit). “For comes the day when watchmen are calling 6 On Ephraim’s mountains: “Rise, let us go up to Ṣion, To the Lord our God.”

The everyday happiness promised is striking. Here speaks again the man, who, while ruin ran over the land, redeemed his ancestral acres in pledge of the resettlement of all his people upon their own farms and fields. He is back in the country, upon the landscapes of his youth, and in this fresh prospect of the restoration of Israel he puts first the common joys and fruitful labours of rural life, and only after these the national worship centred in Jerusalem. Cornill denies this last verse to Jeremiah, feeling it inconsistent with the Prophet’s condemnation of the Temple and the Sacrifices.(634) But that condemnation had been uttered by Jeremiah because of his contemporaries’ sinful use of the House of God, whereas now he is looking into a new dispensation. How could he more signally clinch the promise of that reunion of Israel and Judah, for which all his life he had longed, than by this call to them to worship together?

The next verses are not so recognisable as Jeremiah’s, unless it be in their last couplet. The rest rather reflect the Return from Exile as on the point of coming to pass, which happened long after Jeremiah’s time; and they call the nation Jacob, the name favoured by prophets of the end of the Exile.

For a father I am become to Israel, And my first-born is Ephraim!

This couplet may well be Jeremiah’s; but whether it should immediately follow verse 6 is doubtful. The next lines are hardly his, bearing the same marks of the late exile as we have seen in verses 7-9a.

The next poems no one denies to Jeremiah; they are among the finest we have from him. And how natural that he should conceive and utter them in those quiet days when he was at, or near, Ramah, the grave of the mother of the people.(646) He hears her century-long travail of mourning for the loss of the tribes that were sprung from her Joseph, aggravated now by the banishment of her Benjamin; but hears too the promise that her travail shall be rewarded by their return. The childless old man has the soul of mother and father both—now weeping with the comfortless Rachel and now, in human touches unmatched outside the Parable of the Prodigal, reading into the heart of God the same instinctive affections, to which, in spite of himself, every earthly father is stirred by the mere mention of the name of a rebellious and wandered son. The most vivid details are these: after I had been brought to know, which might also be translated after I had been made to know myself and so anticipate when he came to himself of our Lord’s Parable; I smote on my thigh, the gesture of despair; and in 20a the very human attribution to the Deity of surprise that the mere name of Ephraim should move Him to affection, which recalls both in form and substance the similar question attributed to the Lord in XII. 9.

There is no reason to try, as some do, to correct in the poems their broken measures, for these both suit and add to the poignancy and tenderness which throb through the whole.(647)

Hark, in Ramah is heard lamentation 15 And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children, And will not be comforted,(648) For they are not. Thus saith the Lord: 16 Refrain thy voice from weeping, And from tears thine eyes, For reward there is for thy travail— They are back from the land of the foe! [And hope there is for thy future, 17 Thy sons come back to their border.](649)

I have heard, I have heard 18 Ephraim bemoaning, “Thou hast chastened me, chastened I am, Like a calf untrained. “Turn me Thyself, and return I will, For Thou art my God. “For after I had turned away (?)(650) 19 I repented ... (?) “And after I was brought to know,(651) I smote on my thigh. “I am shaméd, yea and confounded, As I bear the reproach of my youth.”(652)

Is Ephraim My dearest son,(653) 20 A child of delights? That as oft as against him I speak I must think of him still. My bowels for him are yearning, Pity him I must!—Rede of the Lord.

Set thee up way-marks, 21 Plant thyself guide-posts! Put to the highway thy heart, The way that thou wentest. Come back, O maiden of Israel, 22 Back to thy towns here. How long to drift hither and thither, Thou turn-about daughter! [For the Lord hath created a new thing on earth, A female shall compass a man.](654)

The next small poem, when we take from it certain marks of a later date is possibly Jeremiah’s, though this is not certain; to the previous Oracles on Ephraim it naturally adds one upon Judah.

Thus saith the Lord:(655) 23 Once more shall they speak this word. In Judah’s land and her towns, When I turn again their captivity: “The Lord thee bless, homestead of justice!”(656) In Judah and all her towns shall be dwelling 24 Tillers and they that roam with flocks, For I have refreshed the(657) weary soul, 25 And cheered every soul that was pining. [On this I awoke and beheld, 26 And sweet unto me was my sleep.](658)

Behold, are coming the days— 27 Rede of the Lord— When Israel and Judah(659) I sow With the seed of man and of beast; And it shall be, as I was wakeful upon them 28 To tear down and do evil,(660) So wakeful on them will I be, To build and to plant— Rede of the Lord.

These prophecies of the physical restoration of Israel and Judah are fitly followed by two, in what is rather rhythmical prose than verse, which define the moral and spiritual aspects of the new dispensation; both laying stress on individual responsibility, the one in ethics, 29, 30, the other in religion, 31 ff., the proclamation of The New Covenant. They are no doubt Jeremiah’s: we shall take them up in the last lecture.

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, 22a.

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, 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, 28b 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!