Part 16 (1/2)

A Gilead art thou to Me, Or head of Lebanon, Yet shall I make thee a desert Of tenantless cities.

I will hallow against thee destroyers, 7 Each with his weapons, They shall cut down the choice of thy cedars And fell them for fuel.

8. [And(452) nations shall pa.s.s by this city and shall say each to his mate, For what hath the Lord done thus to this great city? 9.

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Covenant of the Lord their G.o.d, and bowed themselves to other G.o.ds and served them.]

Whether this piece of prose be from Jeremiah himself or from another is uncertain and of no importance. It is a true statement of his own interpretation of the cause of his people's doom. The next Oracle addressed to the nation is upon King Jeconiah, or Koniyahu. I follow mainly the Greek.

Up to Lebanon and cry, XXII. 20 Give forth thy voice in Bashan, And cry from Abarim(453) that broken Be all thy lovers.

I spake to thee in thy prosperity, 21 Thou saidst, I hear not!

This was thy way from thy youth, Not to hark to My Voice.

All thy shepherds the wind shall shepherd, 22 Thy lovers go captive.

Then shamed shalt thou be and confounded For all thine ill-doing.

Thou in Lebanon that dwellest, 23 Nested on cedars, How shalt thou groan(454) when come on thee pangs, Anguish as hers that beareth.

As I live-'t is the Rede of the Lord- 24 Though Konyahu were Upon My right hand the signet, Thence would I tear him.(455)

25. And I shall give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life and into the hand of them thou dreadest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans; [26] and I will hurl thee out, and thy mother who bare thee, upon another land, where ye were not born, and there shall ye die. 27. And to the land, towards which they shall be lifting their soul,(456) they shall not return.

Is Konyahu then despised, 28 Like a nauseous vessel?

Why is he flung and cast out On a land he knows not?

Land, Land, Land, 29 Hear the Word of the Lord!

Write this man down as childless, 30 A fellow ...(?) For none of his seed shall flourish Seated on David's throne, Or ruling still in Judah.(457)

We can reasonably deny to Jeremiah nothing of all this pa.s.sage, not even the prose by which the metre is interrupted. We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pa.s.s from verse to prose and again from prose to verse. Nor are the repet.i.tions superfluous, not even that four-fold _into the hand of_ in the prose section, for at each recurrence of the phrase we feel the grip of their captor closing more fast upon the doomed king and people. Nor are we required to take the pathetic words, _the land to which they shall be lifting up their soul_, as true only of those who have been long banished. For the exiles to Babylon felt this home-sickness from the very first, as Jeremiah well knew.

If we are to trust the date given by its t.i.tle-and no sufficient reason exists against our doing so-there is still an Oracle of Jeremiah, which, though now standing far down in our Book, Ch. XLV, belongs to the reign of Jehoiakim, and is properly a supplement to the story of the writing of the Rolls by Baruch in 605.(458) The text has suffered, probably more than we can now detect.

XLV. 1. The Word, which Jeremiah the prophet spake to Baruch, the son of Neriah, while he was writing these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah,(459) in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah.(460) 2. Thus saith the Lord(461) concerning thee, O Baruch, [3] for thou didst say:-

Woe is me! Woe is me!(462) How hath the Lord on my pain heaped sorrow!

I am worn with my groaning, Rest I find none!

[Thus shalt thou say to him(463)] thus sayeth the Lord: 4 Lo, what I built I have to destroy, And what I planted I have to root up.(464) Thou, dost thou seek thee great things? 5 Seek thou them not, For behold, on all flesh I bring evil- Rede of the Lord- But I give thee thy life as a prey, Wheresoever thou goest.

The younger man, with youth's high hopes for his people and ambitions for himself in their service-ambitions which he could honestly cherish by right both of his station in life(465) and the firmness of his character-felt his spirit spent beneath the long-drawn weight of all the Oracles of Doom, which it was his fate to inscribe as final. Now to Baruch in such a mood the older man, the Prophet, might have appealed from his own example, for none in that day was more stripped than Jeremiah himself, of family, friends, affections, or hopes of positive results from his ministry; nor was there any whose life had been more often s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of death. But instead of quoting his own case Jeremiah brought to his despairing servant and friend a still higher example. The Lord Himself had been forced to relinquish His designs and to destroy what He had built and to uproot what He had planted. In face of such Divine surrender, both of purpose and achievement, what was the resignation by a mere man, or even by a whole nation, of their hopes or ambitions? Let Baruch be content to expect nothing beyond bare life: _thy life shall I give thee for a prey_. This stern phrase is found four times in the Oracles of Jeremiah,(466) and nowhere else. It is not more due to the Prophet than to the conditions of his generation. Jeremiah only put into words what must have been felt by all the men of his time-those terrible years in which, through the Oracles quoted in this lecture, he has shown us War, Drought, Famine and Pestilence fatally pa.s.sing over his land; when _Death came up by the windows_, children were cut off from their playgrounds and youths from the squares where they gathered, and the corpses of men were scattered like dung on the fields. It was indeed a time when each survivor must have felt that his life had been _given_ him _for a prey_.

To the hearts of us who have lived through the Great War, with its heavy toll on the lives both of the young and of the old, this phrase of Jeremiah brings the Prophet and his contemporaries very near.