Part 17 (1/2)

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 G.o.d, 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 ?edekiah, 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 pa.s.sed.(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 pa.s.sions 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 n.o.body 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 encompa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nouncement of profound significance for the future of Israel's religion, that the sense of the presence of G.o.d, 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 amba.s.sadors from the King of Judah to Nebuchadrezzar, and evidently with the consent of ?edekiah himself. The text of the Letter and of its t.i.tle, 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 pa.s.sing 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, [3]

by the hand of Eleasah, son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, son of Hil?iah, whom ?edekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon unto the king of Babylon saying, [4] Thus saith the Lord, the G.o.d 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, [21] thus saith the Lord concerning Ahab son of Kolaiah and concerning ?edekiah 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 ?edekiah 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 pa.s.sage, especially in its concise Greek form, which as usual is devoid of the repet.i.tions of t.i.tles and other redundant phrases in the Hebrew text, bears the stamp of genuineness.

XXIX. 24. And unto Shemaiah the Nehemalite thou shalt say:(507) 25_b_. Because thou hast sent in thine own name a letter to ?ephaniah, son of Maaseiah, the priest,(508) saying, [26] 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 ?ephaniah read this letter in the ears of Jeremiah; [30] and the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying, [31] 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; [32] 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 t.i.tles, repet.i.tions 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 ?edekiah, 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-