Part 3 (1/2)

This is the folk that obeyed not The voice of the Lord,(68) That would not accept correction; Lost(69) is truth from their mouth.

Shear and scatter thy locks, Raise a dirge on the heights, The Lord hath refused and forsaken The sons of His wrath.

Then these verses are followed by a prose tale of the people's sins. Is this necessarily from a later hand, as Duhm maintains, and not naturally from Jeremiah himself?

Again Chs. VIII and IX are a medley of lyrics and prose pa.s.sages. While some of the prose is certainly not Jeremiah's, being irrelevant to the lyrics and showing the colour of a later age, the rest may well be from himself.

Ch. XIV is also a medley of verse and prose. After the Dirge on the Drought (which we take later), comes a pa.s.sage in rhythmical prose (verses 11-16), broken only by the metrical utterance of the false prophets in verse 13:-

Sword or famine ye shall not see, They shall not be yours; But peace and staith shall I give you Within this Place.(70)

And verse comes in again in verses 17-18, an Oracle of Jeremiah's own:-

Let mine eyes with tears run down, By night and by day, Let them not cease from weeping(71) For great is the breach- Broken the Virgin, Daughter of my people, Most sore the wound!

Fare I forth to the field, Lo, the slain of the sword; If I enter the city, Lo, anguish of famine.

Priest and prophet alike are gone begging In a land they know not.

Hast Thou utterly cast away Judah, Loathes ?ion Thy soul?

Why then hast Thou smitten us, Past our healing?

Hoped we for peace-no good, For time to heal-and lo panic!

Lord we acknowledge our evil, The guilt of our fathers- To Thee have we sinned.

And now the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes, precariously, as from a later hand:-

For Thy Name's sake do not despise, Demean not the Throne of Thy Glory, Remember and break not Thy Covenant with us!

Can any of the gentile Bubbles bring rain, Or the Heavens give the showers?

Art not Thou He(72) on whom we must wait?

For all these Thou hast made.

Again in Ch. XV. 1-2, prose is followed by a couplet, this by more prose (verses 3, 4) and this by verse again (verses 5-9). But these parts are relevant to each other, and some of Duhm's objections to the prose seem inadequate and even trifling. For while the heavy judgment is suitably detailed by the prose, the following dirge is as naturally in verse:-

Jerusalem, who shall pity, Who shall bemoan thee?

Who shall but turn him to ask After thy welfare?

And once more, in the Oracle Ch. III. 1-6 the first verse, a quotation from the law on a divorced wife, is in prose, and no one doubts that Jeremiah himself is the quoter, while the rest, recounting Israel's unfaithfulness to her Husband is in verse. See below, pages 98, 99.

So much for the varied and often irregular streams of the Prophet's verse and their interruptions and connections by ”portages” of prose. Let us turn now from the measures to the substance and tempers of the poetry.

As in all folk-song the language is simple, but its general inevitableness-just the fit and ringing word-stamps the verse as a true poet's. Hence the difficulty of translating. So much depends on the music of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions, metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the original. Before taking some of the Prophet's renderings of the more concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of his moral reflections in verse-Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:-

Cursed the wight that trusteth in man Making flesh his stay!