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22 chapters
Dedication.
Dedication.
TO THE UNION OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES The purpose and the scope of this volume are set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose an
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Preface.
Preface.
First of all, I thank the Baird Trustees for their graceful appointment to this Lecture of a member of what is still, though please God not for long, another Church than their own. I am very grateful for the privilege which they grant me of returning to Glasgow with the accomplishment of a work the materials for which were largely gathered during the years of my professorship in the city. The value of the opportunity is enhanced by all that has since befallen our nation and the world. The Great
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Preliminary.
Preliminary.
In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which contains them—but especially of the man himself, his personality and his tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as his influence on the subsequent religion of his people. It has often been asserted that in Jeremiah's ministry more than in any other of the
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Lecture I. The Man And The Book.
Lecture I. The Man And The Book.
So far as our materials enable us to judge no other prophet was more introspective or concerned about himself; and though it might be said that he carried this concern to a fault, yet fault or none, the fact is that no prophet started so deeply from himself as Jeremiah did. His circumstances flung him in upon his feelings and convictions; he was constantly searching, doubting, confessing, and pleading for, himself. He asserted more strenuously than any except Job his individuality as against God
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Lecture II. The Poet.
Lecture II. The Poet.
These questions and claims—all-important as they are for the definition of the range and character of the prophet's activity—we can decide only after a preliminary consideration of the few clear and admitted principles of Hebrew poetry, of their consequences, and of analogies to them in other literatures. In Hebrew poetry there are some principles about which no doubt exists. First , its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which, though found in all human song, is carried th
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Lecture III. The Prophet—His Youth And His Call.
Lecture III. The Prophet—His Youth And His Call.
What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared. Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name Anata, is a little village not four miles north-north-east of Jerusalem, upon the first of the rocky shelves by which the central range of Palestine declines through desert to the valley of the Jordan. The village is hidden from the main road between Jerusalem and the North, and lies on no cross-road to the East.
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1. His Earliest Oracles. (II. 2-IV. 4.)
1. His Earliest Oracles. (II. 2-IV. 4.)
II. 1, 2, And he said, Thus sayeth the Lord: 140 III. 1. [Saying]:—If a man dismiss his wife and she go from him and become another man's, shall she return to him? 171 Is that woman 172 not too polluted? But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers and—wouldest return unto Me? Rede of the Lord. 6. And the Lord said unto me in the days of Josiah, the king, 175 Hast thou seen what recreant Israel did to Me 176 going up every high hill and under each rustling tree, and there playing the harlot.
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2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)
2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)
1. As it has reached us, the First Scythian Song, Ch. IV. 5-8, opens with the general formula— which may be the addition of a later hand, but is as probably Jeremiah's own; for the capital, though not likely to be besieged by the Scythians, was just as concerned with their threatened invasion as the country folk, to whom, in the first place, the lines are addressed. The trump or horn of the first line was the signal of alarm, kept ready by the watchman of every village, as Amos and Joel indicate
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3. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. (Chs. VII, VIII. 8, XI.)
3. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. (Chs. VII, VIII. 8, XI.)
There is general agreement that the Book of the Law discovered by the Temple-priests in 621-20 was our Book of Deuteronomy in whole or in part—more probably in part, for Deuteronomy has been compiled from at least two editions of the same original, and the compilation may not have been made till some time later. Many of its laws, including some peculiar to itself, have been woven out of more than one form, and there are two Introductions to the Book, each hortatory and historical and each coveri
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1. From Megiddo to Carchemish, 608-605.
1. From Megiddo to Carchemish, 608-605.
At first sight, the courage of Josiah and his small people in facing the full force of Egypt seems to deserve our admiration, as much as did the courage of King Albert and his nation in opposing the faithless invasion of Belgium by the Germans aiming at France. There was, however, a difference. Nĕcoh was not invading Judah, but crossing Philistine territory and a Galilee which had long ceased to be Israel's. Some suppose that since the Assyrian hold upon Palestine relaxed, Josiah had gradually o
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2. Parables. (XIII, XVIII-XX, XXXV.)
2. Parables. (XIII, XVIII-XX, XXXV.)
This parable is immediately followed by the ironic metaphor of the Jars Full of Wine, XIII. 12-14, which I have already quoted. 346 Next comes the Parable of the Potter, Ch. XVIII, that might be from any part of the Prophet's ministry, during which he was free to move in public. This parable is instructive first by disclosing one of the ways along which Revelation reached, and spelt itself out in, the mind of the Prophet. He felt a Divine impulse to go down to the house of the Potter, 347 and th
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3. Oracles on the Edge of Doom. (VII. 16-XVIII passim, XXII, XLV.)
3. Oracles on the Edge of Doom. (VII. 16-XVIII passim, XXII, XLV.)
But there follow, from VIII. 4 onwards, after the usual introduction, a series of metrical Oracles of which the following translation is offered in observance of the irregularity of the measures of the original. Note how throughout the Prophet is, as before, testing his false people— heeding and listening are his words—finding no proof of a genuine repentance and bewailing the doom that therefore must fall upon them. Some of his earlier verses are repeated, and there is the reference to the Law,
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1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)
1. The Release of Hope. (XXIV, XXIX.)
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 interpr
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2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)
2. Prophets and Prophets. (XXIII. 9-32, XXVII-XXIX, etc.)
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. 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 She
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3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)
3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)
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
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4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)
4. And After. (XXX, XXXI, XXXIX-XLIV.)
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 tas
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1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)
1. Protest and Agony. (I, IV. 10, 19, VI. 11, XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18.)
His first word is one of shrinking, I cannot speak, I am too young . 682 The voice of pain and protest is in most of his Oracles. He curses the day of his birth and cries woe to his mother that she bare him. He makes us feel that he has been charged against his will and he hurtles on his career like one slung at a target who knows that in fulfilling his commission he shall be broken—as indeed he was. Power was pain to him; he carried God's Word as a burning fire in his heart . 684 If the strengt
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2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)
2. Predestination. (I, XVIII, etc.)
From the first and all through it was God's choice of him, the knowledge of himself as a thought of the Deity and a consecrated instrument of the Divine Will, which grasped this unbraced and sensitive creature, this alternately discouraged and impulsive man, and turned him, as we have seen, into the opposite of himself. The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish and Christian theology has understo
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3. Sacrifice.
3. Sacrifice.
Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people—worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord . His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a rive
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1. God.
1. God.
For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers. Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible office of a prophet in such times,
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2. Man and the New Covenant.
2. Man and the New Covenant.
Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even
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Appendix I. Medes And Scythians (pp. 73, 110).
Appendix I. Medes And Scythians (pp. 73, 110).
The Assyrians appear to have been in touch with the Ashguzai for over a century and for a shorter time probably in alliance with them; which alliance was the cause of the Scythian advance to the relief of Nineveh from its siege by the Medes circa 724-720 (see Winckler Die Keilinschriften v. das alte Testament , 3rd ed., pp. 100 ff.). About the same time must be dated the Scythian advance through Western Asia to the borders of Egypt, which Herodotus (I. 103-104, IV. 1) reports. Professor N. Schmi
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