Part 4 (1/2)

Yet Lord, Thou art in our midst, [O'er us Thy Name hath been called]

Do not forsake us!

Thus saith the Lord of this people:-

So fond to wander are they, Their feet they restrain not, The Lord hath no pleasure in them, He remembers their guilt.(80)

The following dirge is on either a war or a pestilence, or on both, for they often came together. The text of the first lines is uncertain, the Hebrew and Greek differing considerably:-

Call ye the keening women to come, And send for the wise ones, That they hasten and sing us a dirge, Till with tears our eyes run down, Our eyelids with water.

For death has come up by our windows, And into our palaces, Cutting off from the streets the children, The youths from the places.

And fallen are the corpses of men Like dung on the field, Or sheaves left after the reaper, And n.o.body gathers.(81)

The minatory discourses are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet's simplicity does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills-night without shelter for the weary or refuge for the hunted.

Hear and give ear, be not proud, For the Lord hath spoken!

Give glory to the Lord your G.o.d Before it grows dark, And before your feet stumble- On the mountains of dusk.

While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom And sets it thick darkness.(82)

There this poem leaves the Doom, but in others Jeremiah leaps in a moment from the vague and far-looming to the near and exact. He follows a line which songs of vengeance or deliverance often take among unsophisticated peoples in touch with nature. They will paint you a coming judgment first in the figure of a lowering cloud or bursting storm and then in the twinkling of an eye they turn the clouds or the lightnings into the ranks and flas.h.i.+ng arms of invaders arrived. I remember an instance of this within one verse of a negro song from the time of the American Civil War:-

Don't you see de lightning flas.h.i.+ng in de cane-brakes?

Don't you think we'se gwine to have a storm?

No you is mistaken-dem's de darkies' bayonets, And de b.u.t.tons on de uniform!

Examples of this sudden turn from the vague to the real are found throughout Jeremiah's Oracles of Doom. Here are some of them:-

Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights, Right on the Daughter of My people, It is neither to winnow nor to cleanse, In full blast it meets me...: Lo, like the clouds he is mounting, Like the whirlwind his chariots!

Swifter than vultures his horses; Woe! We are undone!

For hark a signal from Dan, Mount Ephraim echoes disaster, Warn the folk! ”They are come!”(83) Make heard o'er Jerusalem.

Lo, the beleaguerers (?) come From a land far-off, They let forth their voice on the towns.h.i.+ps of Judah, [Close] as the guards on her suburbs They are on and around her, For Me she defied.(84)

There is a similar leap from the vagueness of IV. 23-26, which here follows, to the vivid detail of verses 29-31 already rendered on page 45.

I looked to the earth, and lo, chaos, To the heavens, their light was gone, I looked to the mountains, they quivered, The hills were all shuddering.

I looked and behold not a man, All the birds of the heavens had fled.

I looked for the gardens, lo desert, All the towns.h.i.+ps were burning.

Or take a similar effect from the Oracle on the Philistines, Ch. XLVII. 2, 3.