Bible Commentaries
Jeremiah 8

Verses 1-22

; Jeremiah 8:1-22; Jeremiah 9:1-26; Jeremiah 10:1-25; Jeremiah 26:1-24

In the four chapters which we are now to consider we have what is plainly a finished whole. The only possible exception {Jeremiah 10:1-16} shall be considered in its place. The historical occasion of the introductory prophecy, {Jeremiah 7:1-15} and the immediate effect of its delivery, are recorded at length in the twenty-sixth chapter of the book, so that in this instance we are happily not left to the uncertainties of conjecture. We are there told that it was in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah, king of Judah," that Jeremiah received the command to stand in the forecourt of Iahvah’s house, and to declare "to all the cities of Judah that were come to worship" there, that unless they repented and gave ear to Iahvah’s servants the prophets, He would make the temple like Shiloh, and Jerusalem itself a curse to all the nations of the earth. The substance of the oracle is there given in briefer form than here, as was natural, where the writer’s object was principally to relate the issue of it as it affected himself. In neither case is it probable that we have a verbatim report of what was actually said, though the leading thoughts of his address are, no doubt, faithfully recorded by the prophet in the more elaborate composition. {Jeremiah 7:1-34} Trifling variations between the two accounts must not, therefore, be pressed.

Internal evidence suggests that this oracle was delivered at a time of grave public anxiety, such as marked the troubled period after the death of Josiah, and the early years of Jehoiakim. "All Judah," or "all the cities of Judah," {Jeremiah 26:2} that is to say, the people of the country towns as well as the citizens of Jerusalem, were crowding into the temple to supplicate their God. {Jeremiah 7:2} This indicates an extraordinary occasion, a national emergency affecting all alike. Probably a public fast and humiliation had been ordered by the authorities, on the reception of some threatening news of invasion. "The opening paragraphs of the address are marked by a tone of controlled earnestness, by an unadorned plainness of statement, without passion, without exclamation, apostrophe, or rhetorical device of any kind; which betokens the presence of a danger which spoke too audibly to the general ear to require artificial heightening in the statement of it. The position of affairs spoke for itself" (Hitzig). The very words with which the prophet opens his message, "Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth, the God of Israel, Make good your ways and your doings, that I may cause you to dwell (permanently) in this place!" (Jeremiah 7:3, cf. Jeremiah 7:7) prove that the anxiety which agitated the popular heart and drove it to seek consolation in religious observances, was an anxiety about their political stability, about the permanence of their possession of the fair land of promise. The use of the expression "Iahvah Sabaoth" Iahvah (the God) of Hosts is also significant, as indicating that war was what the nation feared; while the prophet reminds them thus that all earthly powers, even the armies of heathen invaders, are controlled and directed by the God of Israel for His own sovereign purposes. A particular crisis is further suggested by the warning: "Trust ye not to the lying words, ‘The Temple of Iahvah, the Temple of Iahvah, the Temple of Iahvah, is this!"’ The fanatical confidence in the inviolability of the temple, which Jeremiah thus deprecates, implies a time of public danger. A hundred years before this time the temple and the city had really come through a period of the gravest peril, justifying in the most palpable and unexpected manner the assurances of the prophet Isaiah. This was remembered now, when another crisis seemed imminent, another trial of strength between the God of Israel and the gods of the heathen. Only part of the prophetic teachings of Isaiah had rooted itself in the popular mind-the part most agreeable to it. The sacrosanct inviolability of the temple, and of Jerusalem for its sake, was an idea readily appropriated and eagerly cherished. It was forgotten that all depended on the will and purposes of Iahvah himself; that the heathen might be the instruments with which He executed His designs, and that an invasion of Judah might mean, not an approaching trial of strength between His omnipotence and the impotency of the false gods, but the judicial outpouring of His righteous wrath upon His own rebellious people.

Jeremiah, therefore, affirms that the popular confidence is ill-founded; that his countrymen are lulled in a false security; and he enforces his point, by a plain exposure of the flagrant offences which render their worship a mockery of God.

Again, it may be supposed that the startling word, "Add your burnt offerings to your" (ordinary) "offerings, and eat the flesh (of them,)"{ Jeremiah 7:21} implies a time of unusual activity in the matter of honouring the God of Israel with the more costly offerings of which the worshippers did not partake, but which were wholly consumed on the altar; which fact also might point to a season of special danger.

And, lastly, the references to taking refuge behind the walls of "defenced cities," {Jeremiah 8:14; Jeremiah 10:17} as we know that the Rechabites and doubtless most of the rural populace took refuge in Jerusalem on the approach of the third and last Chaldean expedition, seem to prove that the occasion of the prophecy was the first Chaldean invasion, which ended in the submission of Jehoiakim to the yoke of Babylon. {2 Kings 24:1} Already the northern frontier had experienced the destructive onslaught of the invaders, and rumour announced that they might soon be expected to arrive before the walls of Jerusalem. {Jeremiah 8:16-17}

The only other historical occasion which can be suggested with any plausibility is the Scythian invasion of Syria-Palestine, to which the previous discourse was assigned. This would fix the date of the prophecy at some point between the thirteenth and the eighteenth years of Josiah (B.C. 629-624). But the arguments for this view do not seem to be very strong in themselves, and they certainly do not explain the essential identity of the oracle summarised in Jeremiah 26:1-6, with that of Jeremiah 7:1-15. The "undisguised references to the prevalence of idolatry in Jerusalem itself (Jeremiah 7:17; Jeremiah 7:30-31), and the unwillingness of the people to listen to the prophet’s teaching," {Jeremiah 7:27} are quite as well accounted for by supposing a religious or rather an irreligious reaction under Jehoiakim-which is every way probable considering the bad character of that king, {2 Kings 23:37; Jeremiah 22:13 sqq.} and the serious blow inflicted upon the reforming party by the death of Josiah; as by assuming that the prophecy belongs to the years before the extirpation of idolatry in the eighteenth year of the latter sovereign.

And now let us take a rapid glance at the salient points of this remarkable utterance. The people are standing in the outer court, with their faces turned toward the court of the priests, in which stood the holy house itself. {Psalms 5:7} The prophetic speaker stands facing them, "in the gate of the Lord’s house," the entry of the upper or inner court, the place whence Baruch was afterwards to read another of his oracles to the people. {Jeremiah 36:10} Standing here, as it were between his audience and the throne of Iahvah, Jeremiah acts as visible mediator between them and their God. His message to the worshippers who throng the courts of Iahvah’s sanctuary is not one of approval. He does not congratulate them upon their manifest devotion, upon the munificence of their offerings, upon their ungrudging and unstinted readiness to meet an unceasing drain upon their means. His message is a surprise, a shock to their self-satisfaction, an alarm to their slumbering consciences, a menace of wrath and destruction upon them and their holy place. His very first word is calculated to startle their self-righteousness, their misplaced faith in the merit of their worship and service. "Amend your ways and your doings!" Where was the need of amendment? they might ask. Were they not at that moment engaged in a function most grateful to Iahvah? Were they not keeping the law of the sacrifices, and were not the Levitical priesthood ministering in their order, and receiving their due share of the offerings which poured into the temple day by day? Was not all this honour enough to satisfy the most exacting of deities? Perhaps it was, had the deity in question been merely as one of the gods of Canaan. So much lip service, so many sacrifices and festivals, so much joyous revelling in the sanctuary, might be supposed to have sufficiently appeased one of the common Baals, those half-womanish phantoms of deity whose delight was imagined to be in feasting and debauchery. Nay, so much zeal might have propitiated the savage heart of a Molech. But the God of Israel was not as these, nor one of these; though His ancient people were too apt to conceive thus of Him, and certain modern critics have unconsciously followed in their wake.

Let us see what it was that called so loudly for amendment, and then we may become more fully aware of the gulf that divided the God of Israel from the idols of Canaan, and His service from all other service. It is important to keep this radical difference steadily before our minds, and to deepen the impression of it, in days when the effort is made by every means to confuse Iahvah with the gods of heathendom, and to rank the religion of Israel with the lower surrounding systems.

Jeremiah accuses his countrymen of flagrant transgression of the universal laws of morality. Theft, murder, adultery, perjury, fraud, and covetousness, slander and lying and treachery, {Jeremiah 7:9; Jeremiah 9:3-8} are charged upon these zealous worshippers by a man who lived amongst them, and knew them well, and could be contradicted at once if his charges were false.

He tells them plainly that, in virtue of their frequenting it, the temple is become a den of robbers.

And this trampling upon the common rights of man has its counterpart and its climax in treason against God, in "burning incense to the Baal, and walking after other gods whom they know not"; {Jeremiah 7:9} in an open and shameless attempt to combine the worship of the God who had from the outset revealed Himself to their prophets as a "jealous," i.e., an exclusive God, with the worship of shadows who had not revealed themselves at all, and could not be "known," because devoid of all character and real existence. They thus ignored the ancient covenant which had constituted them a nation. {Jeremiah 7:23}

In the cities of Judah, in the streets of the very capital, the cultus of Ashtoreth, the Queen of Heaven, the voluptuous Canaanite goddess of love and dalliance, was busily practised by whole families together, in deadly provocation of the God of Israel. The first and great commandment said, Thou shalt love Iahvah thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve. And they loved and served and followed and sought after and worshipped the sun and the moon and the host of heaven, the objects adored by the nation that was so soon to enslave them. {Jeremiah 8:2} Not only did a worldly, covetous, and sensual priesthood connive in the restoration of the old superstitions which associated other gods with Iahvah, and set up idol symbols and altars within the precincts of His temple, as Manasseh had 2 Kings 21:4-5; they went further than this in their "syncretism," or rather in their perversity, their spiritual blindness, their wilful misconception of the God revealed to their fathers. They actually confounded Him-the Lord "who exercised lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness, and delighted in" the exhibition of these qualities by His worshippers {Jeremiah 9:24} -with the dark and cruel sun god of the Ammonites. They "rebuilt the high places of the Tophet, in the valley of ben Hinnom," on the north side of Jerusalem, "to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire"; if by means so revolting to natural affection they might win back the favour of heaven-means which Iahvah "commanded not, neither came they into His mind." {Jeremiah 7:31} Such fearful and desperate expedients were doubtless first suggested by the false prophets and priests in the times of national adversity under king Manasseh. They harmonised only too well with the despair of a people who saw in a long succession of political disasters the token of Iahvah’s unforgiving wrath. That these dreadful rites were not a "survival" in Israel, seems to follow from the horror which they excited in the allied armies of the two kingdoms, when the king of Moab, in the extremity of the siege, offered his eldest son as a burnt offering on the wall of his capital before the eyes of the besiegers. So appalled were the Israelite forces by this spectacle of a father’s despair, that they at once raised the blockade, and retreated homeward. {2 Kings 3:27} It is probable, then, that the darker and bloodier aspects of heathen worship were of only recent appearance among the Hebrews, and that the rites of Molech had not been at all frequent or familiar, until the long and harassing conflict with Assyria broke the national spirit and inclined the people, in their trouble, to welcome the suggestion that costlier sacrifices were demanded, if Iahvah was to be propitiated and His wrath appeased. Such things were not done, apparently, in Jeremiah’s time; he mentions them as the crown of the nation’s past offences; as sins that still cried to heaven for vengeance, and would surely entail it, because the same spirit of idolatry which had culminated in these excesses, still lived and was active in the popular heart. It is the persistence in sins of the same character which involves our drinking to the dregs the cup of punishment for the guilty past. The dark catalogue of forgotten offences witnesses against us before the Unseen Judge, and is only obliterated by the tears of a true repentance, and by the new evidence of a change of heart and life. Then, as in some palimpsest, the new record covers and conceals the old; and it is only if we fatally relapse, that the erased writing of our misdeeds becomes visible again before the eye of Heaven. Perhaps also the prophet mentions these abominations because at the time he saw around him unequivocal tendencies to the renewal of them. Under the patronage or with the connivance of the wicked king Jehoiakim, the reactionary party may have begun to set up again the altars thrown down by Josiah, while their religious leaders advocated both by speech and writing a return to the abolished cultus. At all events, this supposition gives special point to the emphatic assertion of Jeremiah, that Iahvah had not commanded nor even thought of such hideous rites. The reference to the false labours of the scribes {Jeremiah 8:8} lends colour to this view. It may be that some of the interpreters of the sacred law actually anticipated certain writers of our own day, in putting this terrible gloss upon the precept, "The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto Me." {Exodus 22:29}

The people of Judah were misled, but they were willingly misled. When Jeremiah declares to them, "Lo, ye are trusting, for your part, upon the words of delusion, so that ye gain no good!" {Jeremiah 7:8} it is perhaps not so much the smooth prophecies of the false prophets as the fatal attitude of the popular mind, out of which those misleading oracles grew, and which in turn they aggravated, that the speaker deprecates. He warns them that an absolute trust in the "praesentia Numinis" is delusive; a trust, cherished like theirs independently of the condition of its justification, viz., a walk pleasing to God. "What! will ye break all My laws, and then come and stand with polluted hands before Me in this house, {Isaiah 1:15} which is named after Me ‘Iahvah’s House’, {Isaiah 4:1} and reassure yourselves with the thought, We are absolved from the consequences of all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10). Lit. "We are saved, rescued, secured, with regard to having done all these abominations": cf. Jeremiah 2:35. But perhaps, with Ewald, we should point the Hebrew term differently, and read, "Save us!" "to do all these abominations," as if that were the express object of their petition, which would really ensue, if their prayer were granted: a fine irony. For the form of the verb. {cf. Ezekiel 14:14} They thought their formal devotions were more than enough to counterbalance any breaches of the decalogue; they laid that flattering unction to their souls. They could make it up with God for setting His moral law at naught. It was merely a question of compensation. They did not see that the moral law is as immutable as laws physical; and that the consequences of violating or keeping it are as inseparable from it as pain from a blow, or death from poison. They did not see that the moral law is simply the law of man’s health and wealth, and that the transgression of it is sorrow and suffering and death.

"If men like you," argues the prophet, "dare to tread these courts, it must be because you believe it a proper thing to do. But that belief implies that you hold the temple to be something other than what it really is; that you see no incongruity in making the House of Iahvah a meeting place of murderers. {"spelunca latronum" Matthew 21:13} That you have yourselves made it, in the full view of Iahvah, whose seeing does not rest there, but involves results such as the present crisis of public affairs; the national danger is proof that He has seen your heinous misdoings." For Iahvah’s seeing brings a vindication of right, and vengeance upon evil. {2 Chronicles 24:22; Exodus 3:7} He is the watchman that never slumbers nor sleeps; the eternal Judge, Who ever upholds the law of righteousness in the affairs of man, nor suffers the slightest infringement of that law to go unpunished. And this unceasing watchfulness, this perpetual dispensation of justice, is really a manifestation of Divine mercy; for the purpose of it is to save the human race from self-destruction, and to raise it ever higher in the scale of true well-being, which essentially consists in the knowledge of God and obedience to His laws.

Jeremiah gives his audience further ground for conviction. He points to a striking instance in which conduct like theirs had involved results such as his warning holds before them. He establishes the probability of chastisement by a historical parallel. He offers them, so to speak, ocular demonstration of his doctrine. "I also, lo, I have seen, saith Iahvah!" Your eyes are fixed on the temple; so are Mine, but in a different way. You see a national palladium; I see a desecrated sanctuary, a shrine polluted and profaned. This distinction between God’s view and yours is certain: "for, go ye now to My place which was at Shiloh, where I caused My Name to abide at the outset" (of your settlement in Canaan); "and see the thing that I have done to it, because of the wickedness of My people Israel" (the northern kingdom). There is the proof that Iahvah seeth not as man seeth; there, in that dismantled ruin, in that historic sanctuary of the more powerful kingdom of Ephraim, once visited by thousands of worshippers like Jerusalem today, now deserted and desolate, a monument of Divine wrath.

The reference is not to the tabernacle, the sacred Tent of the Wanderings, which was first set up at Nob {1 Samuel 22:11} and then removed to Gibeon, {2 Chronicles 1:3} but obviously to a building more or less like the temple, though less magnificent. The place and its sanctuary had doubtless been ruined in the great catastrophe, when the kingdom of Samaria fell before the power of Assyria (721 B.C.).

In the following words (Jeremiah 7:13-15) the example is applied. "And now"-stating the conclusion-"because of your having done all these deeds" ("saith Iahvah," LXX omits), "and because I spoke unto you" ("early and late," LXX omits), "and ye hearkened not, and I called you and ye answered not": {Proverbs 1:24} "I will do unto the house upon which My Name is called, wherein ye are trusting, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers-as I did unto Shiloh."

Some might think that if the city fell, the holy house would escape, as was thought by many like-minded fanatics when Jerusalem was beleaguered by the Roman armies seven centuries later: but Jeremiah declares that the blow will fall upon both alike; and to give greater force to his words, he makes the judgment begin at the house of God. (The Hebrew reader will note the dramatic effect of the disposition of the accents. The principal pause is placed upon the word "fathers," and the reader is to halt in momentary suspense upon that word, before he utters the awful three which close the verse: "as I-did to-Shiloh." The Massorets were masters of this kind of emphasis.)

"And I will cast you away from My Presence, as I cast" ("all": LXX omits) "your kinsfolk, all the posterity of Ephraim." {2 Kings 17:20} Away from My Presence: far beyond the bounds of that holy land where I have revealed Myself to priests and prophets, and where My sanctuary stands; into a land where heathenism reigns, and the knowledge of God is not; into the dark places of the earth, that lie under the blighting shadow of superstition, and are enveloped in the moral midnight of idolatry. "Projiciam vos a facie mea." The knowledge and love of God-heart and mind ruled by the sense of purity and tenderness and truth and right united in an Ineffable Person, and enthroned upon the summit of the universe-these are light and life for man; where these are, there is His Presence. They who are so endowed behold the face of God, in Whom is no darkness at all. Where these spiritual endowments are nonexistent; where mere power, or superhuman force, is the highest thought of God to which man has attained; where there is no clear sense of the essential holiness and love of the Divine Nature; there the world of man lies in darkness that may be felt; there bloody rites prevail; there harsh oppression and shameless vices reign: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.

"And thou, pray thou not for this people," {Jeremiah 18:20} "and lift not up for them outcry nor prayer, and urge not Me, for I hear thee not. Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather sticks, and the fathers light the fire, and the women knead dough, to make sacred buns" {Jeremiah 44:19} "for the Queen of Heaven, and to pour libations to other gods, in order to grieve." {Deuteronomy 32:16; Deuteronomy 32:21} "Is it Me that they grieve? saith Iahvah; is it not themselves" (rather), "in regard to the shame of their own faces" (Jeremiah 7:16-19).

From one point of view, all human conduct may be said to be "indifferent" to God; He is self-sufficing, and needs not our praises, our love, our obedience, any more than He needed the temple ritual and the sacrifices of bulls and goats. Man can neither benefit nor injure God; he can only affect his own fortunes in this world and the next, by rebellion against the laws upon which his welfare depends, or by a careful observance of them. In this sense, it is true that wilful idolatry, that treason against God, does not "provoke" or "grieve" the Immutable One. Men do such things to their own sole hurt, to the shame of their own faces: that is, the punishment will be the painful realisation of the utter groundlessness of their confidence, of the folly of their false trust; the mortification of disillusion, when it is too late. That Jeremiah should have expressed himself thus is sufficient answer to those who pretend that the habitual anthropomorphism of the prophetic discourses is anything more than a mere accident of language and an accommodation to ordinary style.

In another sense, of course, it is profoundly true to say that human sin provokes and grieves the Lord. God is Love; and love may be pained to its depths by the fault of the beloved, and stirred to holy indignation at the disclosure of utter unworthiness and ingratitude. Something corresponding to these emotions of man may be ascribed, with all reverence, to the Inscrutable Being who creates man "in His own image," that is, endowed with faculties capable of aspiring towards Him, and receiving the knowledge of His being and character.

"Pray not thou for this people for I hear thee not!" Jeremiah was wont to intercede for his people. {Jeremiah 11:14; Jeremiah 18:20; Jeremiah 15:1; cf. 1 Samuel 12:23} The deep pathos which marks his style, the minor key in which almost all his public utterances are pitched, proves that the fate which he saw impending over his country grieved him to the heart. "Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought"; and this is eminently true of Jeremiah. A profound melancholy had fallen like a cloud upon his soul; he had seen the future, fraught as it was with suffering and sorrow, despair and overthrow, slaughter and bitter servitude; a picture in which images of terror crowded one upon another, under a darkened sky, from which no ray of blessed hope shot forth, but only the lightnings of wrath and extermination. Doubtless his prayers were frequent, alive with feeling, urgent, imploring, full of the convulsive energy of expiring hope. But in the midst of his strong crying and tears, there arose from the depths of his consciousness the conviction that all was in vain. "Pray not thou for this people, for I will not hear thee." The thought stood before him, sharp and clear as a command; the unuttered sound of it rang in his ears, like the voice of a destroying angel, a messenger of doom, calm as despair, sure as fate. He knew it was the voice of God.

In the history of nations as in the lives of individuals there are times when repentance, even if possible, would be too late to avert the evils which long periods of misdoing have called from the abyss to do their penal and retributive work. Once the dike is undermined, no power on earth can hold back the flood of waters from the defenceless lands beneath. And when a nation’s sins have penetrated and poisoned all social and political relations, and corrupted the very fountains of life, you cannot avert the flood of ruin that must come, to sweep away the tainted mass of spoiled humanity; you cannot avert the storm that must break to purify the air, and make it fit for men to breathe again.

"Therefore"-because of the national unfaithfulness-"thus said the Lord Iahvah, Lo, Mine anger and My fury are being poured out toward this place-upon the men, and upon the cattle, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it will burn, and not be quenched!" {Jeremiah 7:20} The havoc wrought by war, the harrying and slaying of man and beast, the felling of fruit trees and firing of the vineyards, are intended; but not so as to exclude the ravages of pestilence and droughts {Jeremiah 14:1-22} and famine. All these evils are manifestations of the wrath of Iahvah., cattle and trees and "the fruit of the ground," i.e., of the cornlands and vineyards, are to share in the general destruction, {cf. Hosea 4:3} not, of course, as partakers of man’s guilt, but only by way of aggravating his punishment. The final phrase is worthy of consideration, because of its bearing upon other passages. "It will burn and not be quenched," or "it will burn unquenchably." The meaning is not that the Divine wrath once kindled will go on burning forever; but that once kindled, no human or other power will be able to extinguish it, until it has accomplished its appointed work of destruction.

"Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth, the God of Israel: Your holocausts add ye to your common sacrifices, and eat ye flesh!" that is, Eat flesh in abundance, eat your fill of it! Stint not yourselves by devoting any portion of your offerings wholly to Me. I am as indifferent to your "burnt offerings," your more costly and splendid gifts, as to the ordinary sacrifices, over which you feast and make merry with your friends. {1 Samuel 1:4; 1 Samuel 1:13} The holocausts which you are now burning on the altar before Me will not avail to alter My settled purpose. "For I spake not with your fathers, nor commanded them, in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, concerning matters of holocaust and sacrifice, but this matter commanded I them, ‘Hearken ye unto My voice, so become I God to you, and you-ye shall become to Me a people; and walk ye in all the way that I shall command you, that it may go well with you!"’ (Jeremiah 7:22-23) cf. Deuteronomy 6:3. Those who believe that the entire priestly legislation as we now have it in the Pentateuch is the work of Moses, may be content to find in this passage of Jeremiah no more than an extreme antithetical expression of the truth that to obey is better than sacrifice. There can be no question that from the outset of its history. Israel, in common with all the Semitic nations, gave outward expression to its religious ideas in the form of animal sacrifice. Moses cannot have originated the institution, he found it already in vogue, though he may have regulated the details of it. Even in the Pentateuch, the term "sacrifice" is nowhere explained; the general understanding of the meaning of it is taken for granted. {see Exodus 12:27; Exodus 23:18} Religious customs are of immemorial use, and it is impossible in most cases to specify the period of their origin. But while it is certain that the institution of sacrifice was of extreme antiquity in Israel as in other ancient peoples, it is equally certain, from the plain evidence of their extant writings, that the prophets before the Exile attached no independent value either to it or to any other part of the ritual of the temple. We have already seen how Jeremiah could speak of the most venerable of all the symbols of the popular faith. {Jeremiah 3:16} Now he affirms that the traditional rules for the burnt offerings and other sacrifices were not matters of special Divine institution, as was popularly supposed at the time. The reference to the Exodus may imply that already in his day there were written narratives which asserted the contrary; that the first care of the Divine Saviour after He had led His people through the sea was to provide them with an elaborate system of ritual and sacrifice, identical with that which prevailed in Jeremiah’s day. The important verse already quoted {Jeremiah 8:8} seems to glance at such pious fictions of the popular religious teachers: "How say ye, We are wise, and the instruction" (A.V. "law") "of Iahvah is with us? But behold for lies hath it wrought-the lying pen of the scribes!"

It is, indeed, difficult to see how Jeremiah or any of his predecessors could have done otherwise than take for granted the established modes of public worship, and the traditional holy places. The prophets do not seek to alter or abolish the externals of religion as such; they are not so unreasonable as to demand that stated rites and traditional sanctuaries should be disregarded, and that men should worship in the spirit only, without the aid of outward symbolism of any sort, however innocent and appropriate to its object it might seem. They knew very well that rites and ceremonies were necessary to public worship; what they protested against was the fatal tendency of their time to make these the whole of religion, to suppose that Iahvah’s claims could be satisfied by a due performance of these, without regard to those higher moral requirements of His law which the ritual worship might fitly have symbolised but could not rightly supersede. It was not a question with Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, whether or not Iahvah could be better honoured with or without temples and priests and sacrifices. The question was whether these traditional institutions actually served as an outward expression of that devotion to Him and His holy law, of that righteousness and holiness of life, which is the only true worship, or whether they were looked upon as in themselves comprising the whole of necessary religion. Since the people took this latter view, Jeremiah declares that their system of public worship is futile.

"Hearken unto My voice": not as giving regulations about the ritual, but as inculcating moral duty by the prophets, as is explained immediately, {Jeremiah 7:25} and as is clear also from the statement that "they walked in the schemes of their own evil heart" (omit: "in the stubbornness," with LXX, and read "mo’acoth" stat. constr.), "and fell to the rear and not the front."

As they did not advance in the knowledge and love of the spiritual God, who was seeking to lead them by His prophets, from Moses downwards, {Deuteronomy 18:15} they steadily retrogaded and declined in moral worth, until they had become hopelessly corrupt and past correction. (Lit. "and they became back and not face," which may mean, they turned their backs upon Iahvah and His instruction.) This steady progress in evil is indicated by the words, "and they hardened their neck, they did worse than their fathers." {Jeremiah 7:26} It is implied that this was the case with each successive generation, and the view of Israel’s history thus expressed is in perfect harmony with common experience. Progress, one way or the other, is the law of character; if we do not advance in goodness, we go back, or, what is the same thing, we advance in evil.

Finally, the prophet is warned that his mission also must fail, like that of his predecessors, unless indeed the second clause of Jeremiah 7:27, which is omitted by the Septuagint, be really an interpolation. At all events, the failure is implied if not expressed, for he is to pronounce a sentence of reprobation upon his people. "And thou shalt speak all these words unto them" ("and they will not hearken unto thee, and thou shalt call unto them, and they will not answer thee": LXX omits). "And thou shalt say unto them, This is the nation that hearkened not unto the voice of Iahvah its God, and received not correction: Good faith is perished and cut off from their mouth." {cf. Jeremiah 9:3 sq.} The charge is remarkable. It is one which Jeremiah reiterates: see Jeremiah 7:9; Jeremiah 6:13; Jeremiah 7:5; Jeremiah 9:3 sqq.; Jeremiah 12:1. His fellow countrymen are at once deceivers and deceived. They have no regard for truth and honour in their mutual dealings; grasping greed and lies and trickery stamp their everyday intercourse with each other; and covetousness and fraud equally characterise the behaviour of their religious leaders. Where truth is not prized for its own sake, there debased ideas of God and lax conceptions of morality creep in and spread. Only he who loves truth comes to the light; and only he who does God’s will sees that truth is divine. False belief and false living in turn beget each other; and as a matter of experience it is often impossible to say which was antecedent to the other.

In the closing section of this first part of his long address (Jeremiah 7:29 - Jeremiah 8:3), Jeremiah apostrophises the country, bidding her bewail her imminent ruin. "Shear thy tresses" (coronal of long hair) "and cast them away, and lift upon the bare hills a lamentation!"-sing a dirge over thy departed glory and thy slain children, upon those unhallowed mountain tops which were the scene of thine apostasies: {Jeremiah 3:21} "for Iahvah hath rejected and forsaken the generation of His wrath." The hopeless tone of this exclamation (cf. also Jeremiah 7:15, Jeremiah 7:16, Jeremiah 7:20) seems to agree better with the times of Jehoiakim, when it had become evident to the prophet that amendment was beyond hope, than with the years prior to Josiah’s reformation. His own contemporaries are "the generation of Iahvah’s wrath," i.e., upon which His wrath is destined to be poured out, for the day of grace is past and gone; and this, because of the desecration of the temple itself by such kings as Ahaz and Manasseh, but especially because of the horrors of the child sacrifices in the valley of ben Hinnom, {2 Kings 16:3; 2 Kings 21:3-6} which those kings had been the first to introduce in Judah. "Therefore behold days are coming, saith Iahvah, and it shall no more be called the Tophet" (an obscure term, probably meaning something like "Pyre" or "Burning place": cf. the Persian tabidan "to burn," and "to bury," strictly "to burn" a corpse; also "to smoke," Sanskrit dhup: to suppose a reproachful name like "Spitting" = "Object of loathing," is clearly against the context: the honourable name is to be exchanged for one of dishonour), "and the Valley of ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter, and people shall bury in (the) Tophet for want of room (elsewhere)!" A great battle is contemplated, as is evident also from Deuteronomy 28:25-26, the latter verse being immediately quoted by the prophet. {Jeremiah 7:33} The Tophet will be defiled forever by being made a burial place; but many of the fallen will be left unburied, a prey to the vulture and the jackal. In that fearful time, all sounds of joyous life will cease in the cities of Judah and in the capital itself, "for the land will become a desolation." And the scornful enemy will not be satisfied with wreaking his vengeance upon the living; he will insult the dead, by breaking into the sepulchres of the kings and grandees, the priests and prophets and people, and haling their corpses forth to lie rotting in face of the sun, moon, and stars, which they had so sedulously worshipped in their lifetime, but which will be powerless to protect their dead bodies from this shameful indignity. And as for the survivors, "death will be preferred to life in the case of all the remnant that remain of this evil tribe, in all the places whither I shall have driven them, saith Iahvah Sabaoth" (omit the second "that remain," with LXX as an accidental repetition from the preceding line, and as breaking the construction). The prophet has reached the conviction that Judah will be driven into banishment; but the details of the destruction which he contemplates are obviously of an imaginative and rhetorical character. It is, therefore, superfluous to ask whether a great battle was actually fought afterwards in the valley of ben Hinnom, and whether the slain apostates of Judah were buried there in heaps, and whether the conquerors violated the tombs. Had the Chaldeans or any of their allies done this last, in search of treasure for instance, we should expect to find some notice of it in the historical chapters of Jeremiah. But it was probably known well enough to the surrounding peoples that the Jews were not in the habit of burying treasure in their tombs. The prophet’s threat, however, curiously corresponds to what Josiah is related to have done at Bethel and elsewhere, by way of irreparably polluting the high places; {2 Kings 23:16 sqq.} and it is probable that his recollection of that event, which he may himself have witnessed, determined the form of Jeremiah’s language here.

In the second part of this great discourse {Jeremiah 8:4-22} we have a fine development of thoughts which have already been advanced in the opening piece, after the usual manner of Jeremiah. The first half (or strophe) is mainly concerned with the sins of the tuition (Jeremiah 8:4-13), the second with a despairing lament over the punishment (Jeremiah 8:14-22; Jeremiah 9:1). "And thou shalt say unto them: Thus said Iahvah, Do men fall and not rise again? Doth a man turn back, and not return? Why doth Jerusalem make this people to turn back with an eternal" (or perfect, utter, absolute) "turning back? Why clutch they deceit, refuse to return?" The LXX omits "Jerusalem," which is perhaps only a marginal gloss. We should then have to read "shobebah," as "this people" is masc.

The "He" has been written twice by inadvertence. The verb, however, is transitive in Jeremiah 50:19; Isaiah 47:10, etc.; and I find no certain instance of the intrans, form besides Ezekiel 38:8, participle. "I listened and heard; they speak not aright"; {Exodus 10:29; Isaiah 16:6} "not a man repenteth over his evil, saying (or thinking), ‘What have I done?’ They all" (lit. "all of him," i.e., the people) "turn back into their courses" (plur. Heb. text; sing. Heb. marg.), "like the rushing horse into the battle."

There is something unnatural in this obstinate persistence in evil. If a man happens to fall he does not remain on the ground, but quickly rises to his feet again; and if he turn back on his way for some reason or other, he will usually return to that way again. There is a play on the word "turn back" or "return," like that in Jeremiah 3:12; Jeremiah 3:14. The term is first used in the sense of turning back or away from Iahvah, and then in that of returning to Him, according to its metaphorical meaning "to repent." Thus the import of the question is: Is it natural to apostatise and never to repent of it? Perhaps we should rather read, after the analogy of Jeremiah 3:1 "Doth a man ‘go away’ on a journey, and not return?"

Others interpret: "Doth a man return, and not return?" That is, if he return, he does it, and does not stop midway; whereas Judah only pretends to repent, and does not really do so. This, however, does not agree with the parallel member, nor with the following similar questions.

It is very noticeable how thoroughly the prophets, who, after all, were the greatest of practical moralists, identify religion with right aims and right conduct. The beginning of evil courses is turning away from Iahvah; the beginning of reform is turning back to Iahvah. For Iahvah’s character as revealed to the prophets is the ideal and standard of ethical perfection; He does and delights in love, justice, and equity. {Jeremiah 9:23} If a man look away from that ideal, if he be content with a lower standard than the Will and Law of the All-Perfect, then and thereby he inevitably sinks in the scale of morality. The prophets are not troubled by the idle question of medieval schoolmen and sceptical moderns. It never occurred to them to ask the question whether God is good because God wills it, or whether God wills good because it is good. The dilemma is, in truth, no better than a verbal puzzle, if we allow the existence of a personal Deity. For the idea of God is the idea of a Being who is absolutely good, the only Being who is such; perfect goodness is understood to be realised nowhere else but in God. It is part of His essence and conception; it is the aspect under which the human mind apprehends Him. To suppose goodness existing apart from Him, as an independent object which He may choose or refuse, is to deal in empty abstractions. We might as well ask whether convex can exist apart from concave in nature, or motion apart from a certain rate of speed. The human spirit can apprehend God in His moral perfections, because it is, at however vast a distance, akin to Him-a "divinae particula aurae"; and it can strive towards those perfections by help of the same grace which reveals them. The prophets know of no other origin or measure of moral endeavour than that which Iahvah makes known to them. In the present instance, the charge which Jeremiah makes against his contemporaries is a radical falsehood, insincerity, faithlessness: "they clutch" or "cling to deceit, they speak what is not right" or "honest, straightforward." {Genesis 42:11; Genesis 42:19} Their treason to God and their treachery to their fellows are opposite sides of the same fact. Had they been true to Iahvah, that is, to His teachings through the higher prophets and their own consciences, they would have been true to one another. The forbearing love of God, His tender solicitude to hear and save, are illustrated by the words: "I listened and heard not a man repented over his evil, saying, What have I done?" (The feeling of the stricken conscience could hardly be more aptly expressed than by this brief question.) But in vain does the Heavenly Father wait for the accents of penitence and contrition: "they all return"-go back again and again {Psalms 23:6} -"into their own race" or "courses, like a horse rushing" lit. "pouring forth": of rushing waters, {Psalms 78:20} "into the battle." The eagerness with which they follow their own wicked desires, the recklessness with which they "give their sensual race the rein," in set defiance of God, and wilful oblivion of consequences, is finely expressed by the simile of the warhorse rushing in headlong eagerness into the fray. {Job 39:25} "Also" (or "even") "the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times, and turtledove, swift and crane observe the season of their coming; but My people know not the ordinance of Iahvah"-what He has willed and declared to be right for man (His Law; "jus divinum, relligio divina"). The dullest of wits can hardly fail to appreciate the force of this beautiful contrast between the regularity of instinct and the aberrations of reason. All living creatures are subject to laws upon obedience to which their well-being depends. The life of man is no exception; it too is subject to a law-a law which is as much higher than that which regulates mere animal existence as reason and conscience and spiritual aspiration are higher than instinct and sexual impulse. But whereas the lower forms of life are obedient to the laws of their being, man rebels against them, and dares to disobey what he knows to be for his good; nay, he suffers himself to be so blinded by lust and passion and pride and self-will that at last he does not even recognise the Law-the ordinance of the Eternal-for what it really is, the organic law of his true being, the condition at once of his excellence and his happiness.

The prophet next meets an objection. He has just alleged a profound moral ignorance-a culpable ignorance-against the people. He supposes them to deny the accusation, as doubtless they often did in answer to his remonstrances {cf. Jeremiah 17:15; Jeremiah 20:7 sq.} "How can ye say, ‘We are wise"’-morally wise-"‘and the teaching of Iahvah is with us!"’ ("but behold": LXX omits: either term would be sufficient by itself) "for the Lie hath the lying pen of the scribes made it!" The reference clearly is to what Jeremiah’s opponents call "the teaching (or ‘law: torah’) of Iahvah"; and it is also clear that the prophet charges the "scribes" of the opposite party with falsifying or tampering with the teaching of Iahvah in some way or other. Is it meant that they misrepresent the terms of a written document, such as the Book of the Covenant, or Deuteronomy? But they could hardly do this without detection, in the case of a work which was not in their exclusive possession. Or does Jeremiah accuse them of misinterpreting the sacred law, by putting false glosses upon its precepts, as might be done in a legal document wherever there seemed room for a difference of opinion, or wherever conflicting traditional interpretations existed side by side? (Cf. my remarks on Jeremiah 7:31). The Hebrew may indicate this, for we may translate: "But lo, into the lie the lying pen of the scribes hath made it!" which recalls St. Paul’s description of the heathen as changing the truth of God into a lie. {Romans 1:26} The construction is the same as in Genesis 12:2; Isaiah 44:17. Or, finally, does he boldly charge these abettors of the false prophets with forging supposititious law books, in the interest of their own faction, and in support of the claims and doctrines of the worldly priests and prophets? This last view is quite admissible, so far as the Hebrew goes, which, however, is not free from ambiguity. It might be rendered, "But behold, in vain," or "bootlessly" {Jeremiah 3:23} "hath the lying pen of the scribes laboured"; taking the verb in an absolute sense, which is not a common use. {Ruth 2:19} Or we might transpose the terms for "pen" and "lying," and render, "But behold, in vain hath the pen of the scribes fabricated falsehood." In any case, the general sense is the same: Jeremiah charges not only the speakers, but the writers, of the popular party with uttering their own inventions in the name of Iahvah. These scribes were the spiritual ancestors of those of our Saviour’s time, who "made the word of God of none effect for the sake of their traditions." {Matthew 15:6} "For the Lie" means, to maintain the popular misbelief. It might also be rendered, "for falsehood, falsely," as in the phrase "to swear falsely," i.e., for deceit. It thus appears that conflicting and competing versions of the law were current in that age. Has the Pentateuch preserved elements of both kinds, or is it homogeneous throughout? Of the scribes of the period we, alas! know little beyond what this passage tells us. But Ezra must have had predecessors, and we may remember that Baruch, the friend and amanuensis of Jeremiah, was also a scribe. {Jeremiah 36:26}

"The ‘wise’ will blush, they will be dismayed and caught! Lo, the word of Iahvah they rejected, and wisdom of what sort have they?" {Jeremiah 6:10} The whole body of Jeremiah’s opponents, the populace as well as the priests and prophets, are intended by "the wise," that is, the wise in their own conceits; {Jeremiah 7:8} there is an ironical reference to their own assumption of the title. These self-styled wise ones, who preferred their own wisdom to the guidance of the prophet, will be punished by the mortification of discovering their folly when it is too late. Their folly will be the instrument of their ruin, for "He taketh the wise in their own craftiness" as in a snare. {Proverbs 5:22}

They who reject Iahvah’s word, in whatever form it comes to them, have no other light to walk by; they must needs walk in darkness, and stumble at noonday. For Iahvah’s word is the only true wisdom, the only true guide of man’s footsteps. And this is the kind of wisdom which the Holy Scriptures offer us; not a merely speculative wisdom, not what is commonly understood by the terms science and art, but the priceless knowledge of God and of His will concerning us; a kind of knowledge which is beyond all comparison the most important for our well-being here and hereafter. If this Divine wisdom, which relates to the proper conduct of life and the right education of the highest faculties of our being, seem a small matter to any man, the fact argues spiritual blindness on his part; it cannot diminish the glory of heavenly wisdom.

Some well meaning but mistaken people are fond of maintaining what they call "the scientific accuracy of the Bible," meaning thereby an essential harmony with the latest discoveries, or even the newest hypotheses, of physical science. But even to raise such a preposterous question, whether as advocate or as assailant, is to be guilty of a crude anachronism, and to betray an incredible ignorance, of the real value of the Scriptures. That value I believe to be inestimable. But to discuss "the scientific accuracy of the Bible" appears to me to be as irrelevant to any profitable issue, as it would be to discuss the meteorological precision of the Mahabharata, or the marvellous chemistry of the Zendavesta, or the physiological revelations of the Koran, or the enlightened anthropology of the Nibelungenlied.

A man may reject the word of Iahvah, he may reject Christ’s word, because he supposes that it is not sufficiently attested. He may urge that the proof that it is of God breaks down, and he may flatter himself that he is a person of superior discernment, because he perceives a fact to which the multitude of believers are apparently blind. But what kind of proof would he have? Does he demand more than the case admits of? Some portent in earth or sky or sea, which in reality would be quite foreign to the matter in hand, and could have none but an accidental connection with it, and would, in fact, be no proof at all, but itself a mystery requiring to be explained by the ordinary laws of physical causation? To demand a kind of proof which is irrelevant to the subject is a mark not of superior caution and judgment, but of ignorance and confusion of thought. The plain truth is, and the fact is abundantly illustrated by the teachings of the prophets and, above all, of our Divine Lord, that moral and spiritual truths are self-attesting to minds able to realise them: and they no more need supplementary corroboration than does the ultimate testimony of the senses of a sane person.

Now the Bible as a whole is a unique repertory of such truths; this is the secret of its age-long influence in the world. If a man does not care for the Bible, if he has not learned to appreciate this aspect of it, if he does not love it precisely on this account, I, in turn, care very little for his opinion about the Bible. There may be much in the Bible which is otherwise valuable, which is precious as history, as tradition, as bearing upon questions of interest to the ethnologist, the antiquarian, the man of letters. But these things are the shell, that is the kernel; these are the accidents, that is the substance; these are the bodily vesture, that is the immortal spirit. A man who has not felt this has yet to learn what the Bible is in his text as we now have it, Jeremiah proceeds to denounce punishment on the priests and prophets, whose fraudulent oracles and false interpretations of the Law ministered to their own greedy covetousness, and who smoothed over the alarming state of things by false assurances that all was well (Jeremiah 8:10-12). The Septuagint, however, omits the whole passage after the words, "Therefore I will give their wives to others, their fields to conquerors!" and as these words are obviously an abridgment of the threat, Jeremiah 6:12, {cf. Deuteronomy 28:30} while the rest of the passage agrees verbatim with Jeremiah 6:13-15, it may be supposed that a later editor inserted it in the margin here, as generally apposite (cf. Jeremiah 6:10 to with Jeremiah 8:9), whence it has crept into the text. It is true that Jeremiah himself is fond of repetition, but not so as to interrupt the context, as the "therefore" of Jeremiah 8:10 seems to do. Besides, the "wise" of Jeremiah 8:8 are the self-confident people; but if this passage be in place here, "the wise" of Jeremiah 8:9 will have to be understood of their false guides, the prophets and priests. Whereas, if the passage be omitted, there is manifest continuity between the ninth verse and the thirteenth: "‘I will sweep, sweep them away,’ saith Iahvah; no grapes on the vine, and no figs on the fig tree, and the foliage is withered, and I have given them destruction" (or "blasting").

The opening threat is apparently quoted from the contemporary prophet Zephaniah. {Zephaniah 1:2-3} The point of the rest of the verse is not quite clear, owing to the fact that the last clause of the Hebrew text is undoubtedly corrupt. We might suppose that the term "laws" had fallen out, and render, "and I gave them laws which they transgress." {cf. Jeremiah 5:22; Jeremiah 31:35} The Vulgate has an almost literal translation, which gives the same sense: "et dedi eis quae praetergressa sunt." The Septuagint omits the clause, probably on the ground of its difficulty. It may be that bad crops and scarcity are threatened. {cf. Jeremiah 14:1-22, Jeremiah 5:24-25} In that case, we may correct the text in the manner suggested above; Jeremiah 17:18, for Amos 4:9). Others understand the verse in a metaphorical sense. The language seems to be coloured by a reminiscence of Micah 7:12; and the "grapes" and "figs" and "foliage" may be the fruits of righteousness, and the nation is like Isaiah’s unfruitful vineyard {Isaiah 5:1-30} or our Lord’s barren fig tree, {Matthew 21:19} fit only for destruction (cf. also Jeremiah 6:9 and Jeremiah 7:20). Another passage which resembles the present is Habakkuk 3:17 "For the fig tree will not blossom, and there will be no yield on the vines; the produce of the olive will disappoint, and the fields will produce no food." It was natural that tillage should be neglected upon the rumour of invasion. The country folk would crowd into the strong places, and leave their vineyards, orchards, and cornfields to their fate. {Jeremiah 7:14} This would, of course, lead to scarcity and want, and aggravate the horrors of war with those of dearth and famine. I think the passage of Habakkuk is a precise parallel to the one before us. Both contemplate a Chaldean invasion, and both anticipate its disastrous effects upon husbandry. It is possible that the original text ran: "And I have given (will give) unto them their own work" (i.e., the fruit of it: used of fieldwork, Exodus 1:14; of the earnings of labour. {Isaiah 32:17} This, which is a frequent thought in Jeremiah, forms a very suitable close to the verse. The objection is that the prophet does not use this particular term for "work" elsewhere. But the fact of its only once occurring might have caused its corruption. (Another term, which would closely resemble the actual reading, and give much the same sense as this last) "their produce." This, too, as a very rare expression, only known from Joshua 5:11-12, might have been misunderstood and altered by an editor or copyist. It is akin to the Aramaic and there are other Aramaisms in our prophet. One thing is certain; Jeremiah cannot have written what now appears in the Masoretic text.

It is now made clear what the threatened evil is, in a fine closing strophe, several expressions of which recall the prophet’s magnificent alarm upon the coming of the Scythians (cf. Jeremiah 4:5 with Jeremiah 8:14; Jeremiah 4:15 with Jeremiah 8:16; Jeremiah 4:19 with Jeremiah 8:18). Here, however, the colouring is darker, and the prevailing gloom of the picture unrelieved by any ray of hope. The former piece belongs to the reign of Josiah, this to that of the worthless Jehoiakim. In the interval between the two, moral decline and social and political disintegration had advanced with fearfully accelerated speed, and Jeremiah knew that the end could not be far off.

The fatal news of invasion has come, and he sounds the alarm to his countrymen. "Why are we sitting still" (in silent stupefaction)? "assemble yourselves, that we may go into the defenced cities, and be silent" (or "amazed, stupefied," with terror) "there! for Iahvah our God hath silenced us" (with speechless terror) "and given us water of gall to drink; for we trespassed toward Iahvah. We looked for peace" or, weal, prosperity, "and there is no good; for a time of healing, and behold panic fear!" So the prophet represents the effect of the evil tidings upon the rural population. At first they are taken by surprise; then they rouse themselves from their stupor to take refuge in the walled cities. They recognise in the trouble a sign of Iahvah’s anger. Their fond hopes of returning prosperity are nipped in the bud; the wounds of the past are not to be healed; the country has hardly recovered from one shock, before another and more deadly blow falls upon it. The next verse describes more particularly the nature of the bad news; the enemy, it would seem, had actually entered the land, and given no uncertain indication of what the Judeans might expect, by his ravages on the northern frontier.

"From Dan was heard the snorting of his horses; at the sound of the neighings of his chargers all the land did quake: and they came in" (into the country) "and eat up the land and the fulness thereof, a city and them that dwelt therein." This was what the invaders did to city after city, once they had crossed the border; ravaging its domain, and sacking the place itself. Perhaps, however, it is better to take the perfects as prophetic, and to render: "From Dan shall be heard . . . shall quake: and they shall come and eat up the land," etc. This makes the connection easier with the next verse, which certainly has a future reference: "For behold I am about to send" (or simply, "I send") "against you serpents." {Isaiah 11:8}, a small but very poisonous snake; (Aquila basili Vulg. regulus), "for whom there is no charm, and they will bite you! saith Iahvah." If the tenses be supposed to describe what has already happened, then the connection of thought may be expressed thus: all this evil that you have heard of has happened, not by mere ill fortune, but by the Divine will: Iahvah Himself has done it, and the evil will not stop there, for He purposes to send these destroying serpents into your very midst. {cf. Numbers 21:6}

The eighteenth verse begins in the Hebrew with a highly anomalous word, which is generally supposed to mean "my source of comfort." But both the strangeness of the form itself, which can hardly be paralleled in the language, and the indifferent sense which it yields, and the uncertainty of the Hebrew MSS., and the variations of the old versions, indicate that we have here another corruption of the text. Some Hebrew copies divide the word, and this is supported by the Septuagint and the Syro-Hexaplar version, which treat the verse as the conclusion of Jeremiah 8:17, and render "and they shall bite you ‘incurably, with pain of your perplexed heart"’ (Syro-Hex. "without cure"). But if the first part of the word is "without" ("for lack of"), what is the second? No such root as the existing letters imply is found in Hebrew or the cognate languages. The Targum does not help us: "Because they were scoffing" "against the prophets who prophesied unto them, sorrow and sighing will I bring" "upon them on account of their sins: upon them, saith the prophet, my heart is faint," It is evident that this is no better than a kind of punning upon the words of the Masoretic text. I incline to read "How shall I cheer myself? Upon me is sorrow; upon me my heart is sick." The prophet would write for "against," without a suffix. {Job 9:27; Job 10:20} The passage is much like Jeremiah 4:19.

Another possible emendation is: "Iahvah causeth sorrow to flash forth upon me": after the archetype of Amos 5:9; but I prefer the former.

Jeremiah closes the section with an outpouring of his own overwhelming sorrow at the heart rending spectacle of the national calamities. No reader endued with any degree of feeling can doubt the sincerity of the prophet’s patriotism, or the willingness with which he would have given his own life for the salvation of his country. This one passage alone says enough to exonerate its author from the charge of indifference, much more of treachery to his fatherland. He imagines himself to hear the cry of the captive people, who have been carried away by the victorious invader into a distant land: "Hark! the sound of the imploring cry of the daughter of my people from a land far away! ‘Is Iahvah not in Sion? or is not her King in her?"’. {cf. Micah 4:9} Such will be the despairing utterance of the exiles of Judah and Jerusalem; and the prophet hastens to answer it with another question, which accounts for their ruin by their disloyalty to that heavenly King; "O why did they vex Me with their graven images, with alien vanities?" Compare a similar question and answer in an earlier discourse. {Jeremiah 5:19} It may be doubted whether the pathetic words which follow-"The harvest is past, the fruit gathering is finished, but as for us, we are not delivered!"-are to be taken as a further complaint of the captives, or as a reference by the prophet himself to hopes of deliverance which had been cherished in vain, month after month, until the season of campaigns was over. In Palestine, the grain crops are harvested in April and May, the ingathering of the fruit falls in August. During all the summer months, Jehoiakim, as a vassal of Egypt, may have been eagerly hoping for some decisive interference from that quarter. That he was on friendly terms with that power at the time appears from the fact that he was allowed to fetch back refugees from its territory. {Jeremiah 26:22 sq.} A provision for the extradition of offenders is found in the far more ancient treaty between Ramses II and the king of the Syrian Chetta (fourteenth century B.C.). But perhaps the prophet is alluding to one of those frequent failures of the crops, which inflicted so much misery upon his people, {cf. Jeremiah 7:13; Jeremiah 3:3; Jeremiah 5:24-25} and which were a natural incident of times of political unsettlement and danger. In that case, he says, the harvest has come and gone, and left us unhelped and disappointed. I prefer the political reference, though our knowledge of the history of the period is so scanty that the particulars cannot be determined.

It is clear enough from the lyrical utterance which follows (Jeremiah 8:21-22), that heavy disasters had already befallen Judah: "For the shattering of the daughter of my people am I shattered; I am a mourner: astonishment hath seized me!" This can hardly be pure anticipation. The next two verses may be a fragment of one of the prophet’s elegies (qinoth). At all events, they recall the metre of Lamentations 4:1-22; Lamentations 5:1-22:

Doth balm in Gilead fail?

Fails the healer there?

Why is not bound up

My people’s deadly wound?

"Oh that my head were springs,

Mine eye a fount of tears!

To weep both day and night

Over my people’s slain."

It is not impossible that these two quatrains are cited from the prophet’s elegy upon the last battle of Megiddo and the death of Josiah. Similar fragments seem to occur below {Jeremiah 9:17-18; Jeremiah 9:20} in the instructions to the mourning women, the professional singers of dirges over the dead.

The beauty of the entire strophe, as an outpouring of inexpressible grief, is too obvious to require much comment. The striking question "Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physician there?" has passed into the common dialect of religious aphorism: and the same may be said of the despairing cry, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!"

The wounds of the state are past healing; but how, it is asked, can this be? Does nature yield a balm which is sovereign for bodily hurts, and is there nowhere a remedy for those of the social organism? Surely that were something anomalous, strange, and unnatural. {cf. Jeremiah 8:7} "Is there no balm in Gilead?" Yes, it is found now here else (cf. Plin., "Hist. Nat.," 12:25 ad init. "Sed omnibus odoribus praefertur balsamum, uni terrarum Judaeae, concessum"). Then has Iahvah mocked us, by providing a remedy for the lesser evil, and leaving us a hopeless prey to the greater? The question goes deep down to the roots of faith. Not only is there an analogy between the two realms of nature and spirit; in a sense, the whole physical world is an adumbration of things unseen, a manifestation of the spiritual. Is it conceivable that order should reign everywhere in the lower sphere, and chaos be the normal state of the higher? If our baser wants are met by provisions adapted in the most wonderful way to their satisfaction, can we suppose that the nobler-those cravings by which we are distinguished from irrational creatures-have not also their satisfactions included in the scheme of the world? To suppose it is evidence either of capricious unreason, or of a criminal want of confidence in the Author of our being.

"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no healer there?" There is a panacea for Israel’s woes-the "law" or teaching of Iahvah; there is a Healer in Israel, Iahvah Himself, {Jeremiah 3:22; Jeremiah 17:14} who has declared of Himself, "I wound and I heal." {Deuteronomy 32:39; Deuteronomy 30:17; Deuteronomy 33:6} "Why then is no bandage applied to the daughter of my people?" This is like the cry of the captives, "Is Iahvah not in Sion, is not her King in her?" {Jeremiah 8:19} The answer there is, Yes! it is not that Iahvah is wanting; it is that the national guilt is working out its own retribution. tie leaves this to be understood here; having framed his question so as to compel people, if it might be, to the right inference and answer.

The precious balsam is the distinctive glory of the mountain land of Gilead, and the knowledge of Iahvah is the distinctive glory of His people Israel.

Will no one, then, apply the true remedy to the hurt of the state? No, for priests and prophets and people "know not-they have refused to know" Iahvah. {Jeremiah 8:5} The nation will not look to the Healer and live. It is their misfortunes that they hate not their sins. There is nothing left for Jeremiah but to sing the funeral song of his fatherland.

While weeping over their inevitable doom, the prophet abhors with his whole soul his people’s wickedness, and longs to fly from the dreary scene of treachery and deceit. "O that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men"-some lonely khan on a caravan track, whose bare, unfurnished walls, and blank almost oppressive stillness, would be a grateful exchange for the luxury and the noisy riot of Judah’s capital-"that I might leave my people and go away from among them!" The same feeling finds expression in the sigh of the psalmist, who is perhaps Jeremiah himself: "O for the wings of a dove!" {Psalms 55:6 sqq.} The same feeling has often issued in actual withdrawal from the world. And under certain circumstances, in certain states of religion and society, the solitary life has its peculiar advantages. The life of towns is doubtless busy, practical, intensely real; but its business is not always of the ennobling sort, its practice in the strain and struggle of selfish competition is often distinctly hostile to the growth and play of the best instincts of human nature; its intensity is often the mere result of confining the manifold energies of the mind to one narrow channel, of concentrating the whole complex of human powers and forces upon the single aim of self-advancement and self-glorification; and its reality is consequently an illusion, phenomenal and transitory as the unsubstantial prizes which absorb all its interest, engross its entire devotion, and exhaust its whole activity. It is not upon the broad sea, nor in the lone wilderness, that men learn to question the goodness, the justice, the very being of their Maker. Atheism is born in the populous wastes of cities, where human beings crowd together, not to bless, but to prey upon each other; where rich and poor dwell side by side, but are separated by the gulf of cynical indifference and social disdain; where selfishness in its ugliest forms is rampant, and is the rule of life with multitudes:-the selfishness which grasps at personal advantage and is deaf to the cries of human pain; the selfishness which calls all manner of fraud and trickery lawful means for the achievement of its sordid ends; and the selfishness of flagrant vice, whose activity is not only earthly and sensual, but also devilish, as directly involving the degradation and ruin of human souls. No wonder that they whose eyes have been blinded by the god of this world, fail to see evidence of any other God; no wonder that they in whose hearts a coarse or a subtle self-worship has dried the springs of pity and love can scoff at the very idea of a compassionate God; no wonder that a soul, shaken to its depths by the contemplation of this bewildering medley of heartlessness and misery, should be tempted to doubt whether there is indeed a Judge of all the earth, who doeth right.

There is no truth, no honour in their dealings with one another; falsehood is the dominant note of their social existence: "They are all adulterers, a throng of traitors!" The charge of adultery is no metaphor. {Jeremiah 5:7-8} Where the sense of religious sanctions is weakened or wanting, the marriage tie is no longer respected; and that which perhaps lust began, is ended by lust, and man and woman, are faithless to each other, because they are faithless to God.

"And they bend their tongue, their bow, falsely." The tongue is as a bow of which words are the arrows. Evildoers "stretch their arrow, the bitter word. to shoot in ambush at the blameless man." {Psalms 64:4; cf. Psalms 11:2} The metaphor is common in the language of poetry; we have an instance in Longfellow’s "I shot an arrow into the air," and Homer’s familiar, "winged words," is a kindred expression. Others render, "and they bend their tongue as their bow of falsehood," as though the term "sheqer, mendacium" were an epithet qualifying the term for "bow." I have taken it adverbially, a use justified by Psalms 38:20; Psalms 69:5; Psalms 119:78; Psalms 119:86. In colloquial English a man who exaggerates a story is said to "draw the long bow."

Their tongue is a bow with which they shoot lies at their neighbours, "and it is not by truth"-faithfulness, honour, integrity-"that they wax mighty in the land"; their riches and power are the fruit of craft and fraud and overreaching. As was said in a former discourse, "their houses are full of deceit, therefore they become great, and amass wealth." {Jeremiah 5:27} "By truth," or more literally "unto truth, according to the rule or standard of truth according {cf. Isaiah 32:1} to right"; Genesis 1:11 "according to its kind." With the idea of the verb, we may compare Psalms 112:2 "Mighty in the land shall his seed become." {cf. also Genesis 7:18-19} The passage Jeremiah 5:2-3, is essentially similar to the present, and is the only one besides where we find the term "by truth." The idiom seems certain, and the parallel passages, especially Jeremiah 5:27, appear to establish the translation above given; otherwise one might be tempted to render: "they stretch their tongue, their bow, for lying," {Jeremiah 5:2} "and it is not for truth that they are strong in the land." "Noblesse oblige" is no maxim of theirs; they use their rank and riches for unworthy ends.

"For out of evil unto evil they go forth"-they go from one wickedness to another, adding sin to sin. Apparently, a military metaphor. What they have and are is evil, and they go forth to secure fresh conquests of the same kind. Neither good nor evil is stationary; progress is the law of each-"and Me they know not, saith Iahvah"-they know not that I am truth itself, and therefore irreconcilably opposed to all this fraud and falsehood.

"Beware ye, every one of his companion, and in no brother confide ye; for every brother will surely play the Jacob, -and every companion will go about slandering. And they deceive each his neighbour, and truth they speak not: they have trained their tongue to speak falsehood, to pervert" {their way, Jeremiah 3:21} "they toil." {Jeremiah 20:9; cf. Genesis 19:11} "Thine inhabiting is in the midst of deceit; through deceit they refuse to know Me, saith Iahvah" (Jeremiah 8:3-5). As Micah had complained before him, {Micah 7:5} and as bitter experience had taught our prophet, {Jeremiah 11:18 sqq., Jeremiah 12:6} neither friend nor brother was to be trusted; and that this was not merely the melancholy characteristic of a degenerate age, is suggested by the reference to the unbrotherly intrigues of the far-off ancestor of the Jewish people, in the traditional portrait of whom the best and the worst features of the national character are reflected with wonderful truth and liveliness, Every brother will not fail to play the Jacob (Genesis 25:29 sqq., Genesis 27:36; Hosea 12:4), to outwit, defraud, supplant: cunning and trickery will subserve acquisitiveness. But though an inordinate love of acquisition may still seem to be specially characteristic of the Jewish race, as in ancient times it distinguished the Canaanite and Semitic nations in general, the tendency to cozen and overreach one’s neighbour is so far from being confined to it that some modern ethical speculators have not hesitated to assume this tendency to be an original and natural instinct of humanity. The fact, however, for which those who would account for human nature upon purely "natural" grounds are bound to supply some rational explanation, is not so much that aspect of it which has been well known to resemble the instincts of the lower animals ever since observation began, but the aspect of revolt and protest against those lower impulses which we find reflected so powerfully in the documents of the higher religion, and which makes thousands of lives a perpetual warfare.

Jeremiah presents his picture of the universal deceit and dissimulation of his own time as something peculiarly shocking and startling to the common sense of right, and unspeakably revolting in the sight of God, the Judge of all. And yet the difficulty to the modern reader is to detect any essential difference between human nature then and human nature now-between those times and these. It is still true that avarice and lust destroy natural affection; that the ties of blood and friendship are no protection against a godless love of self. The work of slander and misrepresentation is not left to avowed enemies; your own acquaintance will ratify their envy, spite, or mere ill will in this unworthy way. A simple child may tell the truth; but tongues have to be trained to expertness in lying, whether in commerce or in diplomacy, in politics or in the newspaper press, in the art of the salesman or in that of the agitator and the demagogue. Men still make a toil of perverting their way, and spend as much pains in becoming accomplished villains as honest folk take to excel in virtue. Deceit is still the social atmosphere and environment, and "through deceit" men "refuse to know Iahvah." The knowledge, the recognition, the steady recollection of what Iahvah is, and what His law requires, does not suit the man of lies; his objects oblige him to shut his eyes to the truth. Men "do not will" and "will not," to know the moral impediments that lie in the way of self-seeking and self-pleasing. Sinning is always a matter of choice, not of nature, nor of circumstances alone. To desire to be delivered from moral evil is, so far, a desire to know God.

"Thine inhabiting is in the midst of deceit": who that ever lifts an eye above the things of time has not at times felt thus? "This is a Christian country." Why? Because the majority are as bent on self-pleasing, as careless of God, as heartlessly and systematically forgetful of the rights and claims of others, as they would have been had Christ never been heard of? A Christian country? Why? Is it because we can boast of some two hundred forms or fashions of supposed Christian belief, differentiated from each other by heaven knows what obscure shibboleths, which in the lapse of time have become meaningless and obsolete; while the old ill will survives, and the old dividing lines remain, and Christians stand apart from Christians in a state of dissension and disunion that does despite and dishonour to Christ, and must be very dear to the devil? Some people are bold enough to defend this horrible condition of things by raising a cry of Free Trade in Religion. But religion is not a trade, not a thing to make a profit of, except with Simon Magus and his numerous followers both inside and outside of the Church.

A Christian country! But the rage of avarice, the worship of Mammon, is not less rampant in London than in old Jerusalem. If the more violent forms of oppression and extortion are restrained among us by the more complete organisation of public justice, the fact has only developed new and more insidious modes of attack upon the weak and the unwary. Deceit and fraud have been put upon their mettle by the challenge of the law, and thousands of people are robbed and plundered by devices which the law can hardly reach or restrain. Look where the human spider sits, weaving his web of guile, that he may catch and devour men! Look at the wonderful baits which the company monger throws out day by day to human weakness and cupidity! Do you call him shrewd and clever and enterprising? It is a sorry part to play in life, that of Satan’s decoy, tempting one’s fellow creatures to their ruin. Look at the lying advertisements, which meet your eyes wherever you turn, and make the streets of this great city almost as hideous from the point of view of taste as from that of morality! What a degrading resource! To get on by the industrious dissemination of lies, by false pretences, which one knows to be false! And to trade upon human misery-to raise hopes that can never be fulfilled-to add to the pangs of disease the smart of disappointment and the woe of a deeper despair, as countless quacks in this Christian country do!

A Christian country: where God is denied on the platform and through the press; where a novel is certain of widespread popularity if its aim be to undermine the foundations of the Christian faith; where atheism is mistaken for intelligence, and an inconsistent agnosticism for the loftiest outcome of logic and reason; where flagrant lust walks the streets unrebuked, unabashed; where every other person you meet is a gambler in one form or another, and shopmen and labourers and loafers and errand boys are all eager about, the result of races, and, all agog to know the forecasts of some wily tipster, some wiseacre of the halfpenny press!

A Christian country: where the rich and noble have no better use for profuse wealth than horse training, and no more elevating mode of recreation than hunting and shooting down innumerable birds and beasts; where some must rot in fever dens, clothed in rags, pining for food, stifling for lack of air and room; while others spend thousands of pounds upon a whim, a banquet, a party, a toy for a fair woman. I am not a Socialist, I do not deny a man’s right to do what he will with his own, and I believe that state interference would be in the last degree disastrous to the country. But I affirm the responsibility before God of the rich and great; and I deny that they who live and spend for themselves alone are worthy of the name of Christian.

A Christian country: where human beings die, year after year, in the unspeakable, unimaginable agonies of canine madness, and dogs are kept by the thousand in crowded cities, that the sacrifice to the fiend of selfishness and the mocking devil of vanity may never lack its victims! There is a more than Egyptian worship of Anubis, in the silly infatuation which lavishes tenderness upon an unclean brute, and credulously invests instinct with the highest attributes of reason; and there is a worse than heathenish besottedness in the heart that can pamper a dog, and be utterly indifferent to the helplessness and the sufferings of the children of the poor. And people will go to church, and hear what the preacher has to say, and "think he said what he ought to have said," or not, as the case may be, and return to their own settled habits of worldly living, as a matter of course. Oh yes! it is a Christian country the name of Christ has been named in it for fifteen centuries past; and for that reason Christ will judge it.

"Therefore, thus said Iahvah Sabaoth: Lo, I am about to melt them and put them to proof"; {Job 12:11; Judges 17:4; Jeremiah 6:25} "for how am I to deal in face of" ("the wickedness of," LXX: the term has fallen out of the Hebrews text: cf. Jeremiah 4:4, Jeremiah 7:12) "the daughter of My people?" This is the meaning of the disasters that have fallen and are even now falling upon the country. Iahvah will melt and assay this rough, intractable human ore in the fiery furnace of affliction; the strain of insincerity that runs through it, the base earthy nature, can only thus be separated and purged away. {Isaiah 48:10} "A deadly arrow" (LXX a "wounding" one, i.e., one which does not miss, but hits and kills) "is their tongue; deceit it spake: with his mouth peace with his companion he speaketh, and inwardly he layeth his ambush." {Psalms 55:22} The verse again specifies the wickedness complained of, and justifies our restoration of that word in the previous verse.

Perhaps, with the Peshito Syriac and the Targum, we ought rather to render: "a sharp arrow is their tongue." There is an Arabic saying quoted by Lane, "Thou didst sharpen thy tongue against us," which seems to present a kindred root {cf. Psalms 52:3; Psalms 57:4 Proverbs 25:18} The Septuagint may be right, with its probable reading: "deceit are the words of his mouth." This certainly improves the symmetry of the verse.

"For such things" (emphatic) "shall I not"-or "should I not," with an implied "ought-shall I not punish them, saith Iahvah, or on such a nation shall not My soul avenge herself?" {Jeremiah 5:9; Jeremiah 5:29, after which the LXX omits "them" here} These questions, like the previous one, "How am I to deal"-or, "how could I act-in face of the wickedness of the daughter of My people?" imply the moral necessity of the threatened evils. If Iahweh be what He has taught man’s conscience that He is, national sin must involve national suffering, and national persistence in sin must involve national ruin. Therefore He will "melt and try" this people, both for their punishment and their reformation, if it may be so. For punishment is properly retributive, whatever may be alleged to the contrary. Conscience tells us that we deserve to suffer for ill-doing, and conscience is a better guide than ethical or sociological speculators who have lost faith in God. But God’s chastisements as known to our experience, that is to say, in the present life, are reformatory as well as retributive; they compel us to recollect, they bring us, like the Prodigal, back to ourselves, out of the distractions of a sinful career, they humble us with the discovery that we have a Master, that there is a Power above ourselves and our apparently unlimited capacity to choose evil and to do it: and so by Divine grace we may become contrite and be healed and restored.

The prophet thus, perhaps, discerns a faint glimmer of hope, but his sky darkens again immediately. The land is already to a great extent desolate, through the ravages of the invaders, or through severe droughts, {cf. Jeremiah 4:25; Jeremiah 8:20(?}; Jeremiah 12:4). "Upon the mountains will I lift up weeping and wailing, and upon the pastures of the prairie a lamentation, for they have been burnt up," {Jeremiah 2:15; 2 Kings 22:13} "so that no man passeth over them, and they have not heard the cry of the cattle: from the birds of the air to the beasts, they are fled, are gone." {Jeremiah 4:25} The perfects may be prophetic and announce what is certain to happen hereafter. The next verse, at all events, is unambiguous in this respect: "And I will make Jerusalem into heaps, a haunt of jackals; and the cities of Judah will I make a desolation without inhabitant." Not only the country districts, but the fortified towns, and Jerusalem itself, the heart and centre of the nation, will be desolated. Sennacherib boasts that he took forty-six strong cities, and "little towns without number," and carried off 200,150 male and female captives, and an immense booty in cattle, before proceeding to invest Jerusalem itself; a statement which shows how severe the sufferings of Judah might be, before the enemy struck at its vitals.

In the words "I will make Jerusalem heaps," there is not necessarily a change of subject. Jeremiah was authorised to "root up and pull down and destroy" in the name of Iahvah.

He now challenges the popular wise men {Jeremiah 8:8-9} to account for what, on their principles, must appear an inexplicable phenomenon. "Who is the (true) wise man, so that he understands this," {Hosea 14:9} "and who is he to whom the mouth of Iahvah hath spoken, so that he can explain it" ("unto you?" LXX). "Why is the land undone, burnt up like the prairie, without a passer by?" Both to Jeremiah and to his adversaries the land was Iahvah’s land; what befell it must have happened by His will, or at least with His consent. Why had He suffered the repeated ravages of foreign invaders to desolate His own portion, where, if anywhere on earth, He must display His power and the proof of His deity? Not for lack of sacrifices, for these were not neglected. Only one answer was possible, to those who recognised the validity of the Book of the Law, and the binding character of the covenant which it embodied. The people and their wise men cannot account for the national calamities; Jeremiah himself can only do so, because he is inwardly taught by Iahvah himself: {Jeremiah 7:12} "And Iahvah said." It may be supposed that Jeremiah 7:11 states the popular dilemma, the anxious question which they put to the official prophets, whose guidance they accepted. The prophets could give no reasonable or satisfying answer, because their teaching hitherto had been that Iahvah could be appeased "with thousands of rams, and ten thousand torrents of oil." Micah 6:7 On such conditions they had promised peace, and their teaching had been falsified by events. Therefore Jeremiah gives the true answer for Iahvah. But why did not the people cease to believe those whose word was thus falsified? Perhaps the false prophets would reply to objectors, as the refugees in Egypt answered Jeremiah’s reproof of their renewed worship of the Queen of Heaven: "It was in the years that followed the abolition of this worship that our national disasters began" (Jeremiah 44:18). It is never difficult to delude those whose evil and corrupt hearts make them desire nothing so much as to be deluded.

"And Iahvah said: Because they forsook" (lit. "upon" = on account of "their forsaking") "‘My Law which I set before them"’, {Deuteronomy 4:18} "and they hearkened not unto My voice," {Deuteronomy 28:15} "and walked not therein" (in My Law; LXX omits the clause); "and walked after the obstinacy of their own" ("evil": LXX) "heart, and after the Baals" {Deuteronomy 4:3} "which their fathers taught them"-instead of teaching them the laws of Iahvah. {Deuteronomy 11:19} Such were, and had always been, the terms of the answer of Iahvah’s true prophets. Do you ask "upon what ground" ("‘al mah") misfortune has overtaken you? Upon the ground of your having forsaken Iahvah’s "law" or instruction, His doctrine concerning Himself and your consequent obligations towards Him. They had this teaching in the Book of the Law, and had solemnly undertaken to observe it, in that great national assembly of the eighteenth year of Josiah. And they had had it from the first in the living utterances of the prophets.

This, then, is the reason why the land is waste and deserted. And therefore-because past and present experience is an index of the future, for Iahvah’s character and purpose are constant-therefore the desolation of the cities of Judah and of Jerusalem itself will ere long be accomplished. "Therefore thus said Iahvah Sabaoth," the God of Armies and "the God of Israel; Lo, I am about to feed them" or, "I continue to feed them"-to wit, "this people" (an epexegetical gloss omitted by the LXX) "with wormwood, and I will give them to drink waters of gall" Deuteronomy 29:17. An Israelite inclining to foreign gods is "a root bearing wormwood and gall"-bearing a bitter harvest of defeat, a cup of deadly disaster for his people; {cf. Amos 6:12} "and I will ‘scatter them among the nations,’ ‘whom they and their fathers knew not."’ {Deuteronomy 28:36; Deuteronomy 28:64} The last phrase is remarkable as evidence of the isolation of Israel, whose country lay off the beaten track between the Trans-Euphratean empires and Egypt, which ran along the seacoast. They knew not Assyria, until Tiglath Pileser’s intervention (circ. 734), nor Babylon till the times of the New Empire. In Hezekiah’s day, Babylon is still "a far country." {2 Kings 20:14} Israel was in fact an agricultural people, trading directly with Phoenicia and Egypt, but not with the lands beyond the Great River. The prophets heighten the horror of exile by the strangeness of the land whither Israel is to be banished.

"And I will send after them the sword, until I have consumed them." The survivors are to be cut off; {cf. Jeremiah 8:3} there is no reserve, as in Jeremiah 4:27, Jeremiah 5:10, Jeremiah 5:18; a "full end" is announced; which, again, corresponds to the aggravation of social and private evils in the time of Jehoiakim, and the prophet’s despair of reform.

The judgment of Judah is the ruin of her cities, the dispersion of her people in foreign lands, and extermination by the sword. Nothing is left for this doomed nation but to sing its funeral song; to send for the professional wailing women, that they may come and chant their dirges, not over the dead, but over the living who are condemned to die: "Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth" (here as in Jeremiah 7:6, LXX omits the expressive "Sabaoth"), "Mark ye well" the present crisis, and what it implies (cf. Jeremiah 2:10; LXX wrongly omits this emphatic term), "and summon the women that sing dirges, that they come, and unto the skilful women send ye, that they come" (LXX omits), "and hasten" (LXX "and speak and") "to life up the death wail over us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour down waters." The "singing women" of 2 Chronicles 35:25, or the "minstrels" of St. Matthew 9:23, are intended. The reason assigned for thus inviting them assumes that the prophet’s forecast is already fulfilled. Already, as in Jeremiah 8:19, Jeremiah hears the loud wailing of the captives as they are driven away from their ruined homes: "For the sound of the death wail is heard from Sion, ‘How are we undone! We are sore ashamed"’-of our false confidence and foolish security and deceitful hopes-"‘for,"’ after all, "‘we have left the land, for our dwellings have cast (us) out!"’ The last two lines appear to be parallels, which is against the rendering, "For men have cast down our dwellings." {Cf. Leviticus 18:25; Leviticus 22:28} From the wailing women, the address now seems to turn to the Judean women generally; but perhaps the former are still intended, as their peculiar calling was probably hereditary and passed on from mother to daughter: "For hear, ye women, the word of Iahvah, and let your ear take in the word of His mouth! and teach ye your daughters the death wail, and each her companion the lamentation"; for

"Death scales our lattices,

Enters our palaces,

To cut off boy without,

The young men from the streets."

"And the corpses of men will fall"-the tense certifies the future reference of the others-"like dung" {Jeremiah 8:2} "on the face of the field" 2 Kings 9:37, of Jezebel’s corpse-left without burial rites to rot and fatten the soil-"and like the corn swath behind the reaper, and none shall gather (them)." The quatrain {Jeremiah 8:20} is possibly quoted from some familiar elegy; and the allusion seems to be to a mysterious visitation like the plague, which used to be known in Europe as "the Black Death." {cf. Jeremiah 15:2; Jeremiah 18:21; Jeremiah 43:11} In this time of closed gates and barred doors, death is represented as entering the house, not by the door, but "climbing up some other way" like a thief. {Joel 2:9; St. John 10:1} Bars and bolts will be futile against such an invader. The figure is not continued in the second half of the stanza. The point of the closing comparison seems to be that whereas the corn swaths are gathered up in sheaves and taken home, the bodies will lie where the reaper Death cuts them down.

"Thus said Iahvah: Let not a wise man glory in his wisdom, and let not the mighty man glory in his might! Let not a rich man glory in his riches, but in this let him glory that glorieth, in being prudent and knowing Me," {LXX omits pronoun, cf. Genesis 1:4} "that I, Iahvah, do lovingkindness" ("and" LXX and Orientals), "justice and righteousness upon the earth: for in these I delight, saith Iahvah."

It is not easy, at first sight, to see the connection of this, one of the finest and deepest of Jeremiah’s oracles, with the sentence of destruction which precedes it. It is not satisfactory to regard it as stating "the only means of escape and the reason why it is not used" (the latter being set forth in Jeremiah 7:24-25); for the leading idea of the whole composition, from Jeremiah 7:13 to Jeremiah 9:22, is that retribution is coming, and no escape, not even that of aremnant, is contemplated. The passage looks like an appendix to the previous pieces, such as the prophet might have added at a later period when the crisis was over, and the country had begun to breathe again, after the shock of invasion had rolled away. And this impression is confirmed by its contents. We have no details about the first interference of the new Chaldean power in Judah; we only read that in Jehoiakim’s days "Nebucladrezzar the king of Babylon came up, and Jehoiakim became his servant three years: then he turned and rebelled against him" {2 Kings 24:1} But before this, for some two or three years, Jehoiakim was the vassal of the king of Egypt to whom he owed his crown, and Nebuchadrezzar had lo reduce Necho before he could attend to Jehoiakim. It may be, therefore, that the worst apprehensions of the time not having been realised, in the year or two of lull which followed, the politicians of Judah began to boast of their foresight and the caution and sagacity of their measures for the public safety, instead of ascribing the respite to God; the warrior class might vaunt the bravery which it had exhibited or intended to exhibit in the service of the country; and the rich nobles might exult in the apparent security of their treasures and the new lease of enjoyment accorded to themselves. To these various classes, who would not be slow to ridicule his dark forebodings as those of a moody and unpatriotic pessimist, {Jeremiah 20:7; Jeremiah 26:11; Jeremiah 29:26; Jeremiah 37:13} Jeremiah now speaks, to remind them that if the danger is over for the present, it is the lovingkindness and the righteous government of Iahvah which has removed it, and to declare that it is only suspended and postponed, not abolished forever: "Behold, days are coming, saith Iahvah, when I will visit" (his guilt) "upon every one that is circumcised in foreskin" (only, and not "in heart" also): "upon Egypt and upon Judah, and upon Edom and upon the ben Ammon and upon Moab, and upon all the tonsured folk that dwell in the wilderness: For all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart." Egypt is mentioned first, as the leading nation, to which at the time the petty states of the west looked for help in their struggle against Babylon. {cf. Jeremiah 27:3} The prophet numbers Judah with the rest, not only as a member of the same political group, but as standing upon the same level of unspiritual life. Like Israel, Egypt also practised circumcision, and both the context here requires and their kinship with the Hebrews makes it probable that the other peoples mentioned observed the same custom (Herod., 2:36, 104), which is actually portrayed in a wall painting at Karnak. The "tonsured folk" or "cropt heads" of the wilderness are north Arabian nomads like the Kedarenes, {Jeremiah 49:28; Jeremiah 49:32} and the tribes of Dedan, Tema, and Buz Jeremiah 25:23, whose ancestor was the circumcised Ishmael. {Genesis 25:13 sqq., Genesis 17:23} Herodotus records their custom of shaving the temples all round, and leaving a tuft of hair, on the top of the head (Herod., 3:8), which practice, like circumcision, had a religious significance, and was forbidden to the Israelites. {Leviticus 19:27; Leviticus 21:5}

Now why does Jeremiah mention circumcision at all? The case is, I think, parallel to his mention of another external distinction of the popular religion, the Ark of the Covenant. {Jeremiah 3:15} Just as in that place God promises "shepherds according to Mine heart which shall shepherd" the restored Israel "with knowledge and prudence," and then directly adds that, in the light and truth of those days, the ark will be forgotten; {Jeremiah 3:15-16} so here, he bids the ruling classes, the actual shepherds of the nation, not to trust in their own wisdom or valour or wealth, {cf. Jeremiah 17:5 sqq.} but in "being prudent and knowing Iahvah," and then adds that the outward sign of circumcision, upon which the people prided themselves as the mark of their dedication to Iahvah, was in itself of no value, apart from a "circumcised heart," i.e., a heart purified of selfish aims and devoted to the will and glory of God. {Jeremiah 4:4} So far as Iahvah is concerned, all Judah’s heathen neighbours are uncircumcised, in spite of their observance of the outward rite.

The Jews themselves would hardly admit the validity of heathen circumcision, because the manner of it was different, just as at this day the Muhammadan method differs from the Jewish. But Jeremiah puts "all the house of Israel," who were circumcised in the orthodox manner, on a level with the imperfectly circumcised heathen peoples around them. All alike are uncircumcised before God; those who have the orthodox rite, and those who have but an inferior semblance of it; and all alike will in the day of judgment be visited for their sins. {cf. Amos 1:1-15}

With the increasing carelessness of moral obligations, an increasing importance would be attached to the observance of such a rite as circumcision, which was popularly supposed to devote a man to Iahvah in such sense that the tie was indissoluble. Jeremiah says plainly that this is a mistaken view. The outward sign must have an inward and spiritual grace corresponding thereto; else the Judeans are no better than those whose circumcision they despise as defective. His meaning is that of the Apostle, "Circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law; but if thou be a breaker of law, thy circumcision hath become uncircumcision." {Romans 2:25} "Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God, " scil., is everything. {1 Corinthians 7:19} It is "faith working by love," it is the "new creature" that is essential in spiritual religion. {Galatians 5:6; Galatians 6:15}

Haec dicit Dominus: Non glorietur sapiens in sapientia sua. Glancing back over the whole passage, we discern an inward relation between these verses and the preceding discourse. It is not the outward props of statecraft, and strong battalions, and inexhaustible wealth, that really and permanently uphold a nation; not these, but the knowledge of Iahvah, a just insight into the true nature of God, and a national life regulated in all its departments by that insight. At the outset of this third section of his discourse, {Jeremiah 9:3-6} Jeremiah declared that corrupt Israel "knew not" and "refused to know" its God. At the beginning of the entire piece Jeremiah 7:3 sq.), he urged his countrymen to "amend their ways and their doings," and not go on trusting in "lying words" and doing the opposite of "lovingkindness and justice and righteousness," which alone are pleasing to Iahvah, {Micah 6:8} Who "delighteth in lovingkindness and not sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God more than in burnt offerings." {Hosea 6:6} And just as in the opening section the sacrificial worship was disparaged, taken as an "opus operatum," so here at the close circumcision is declared to have no independent value as a means of securing Divine favour. {Jeremiah 9:25} Thus the entire discourse is rounded off by the return of the end to the beginning; and the main thought of the whole, which Jeremiah has developed and enforced with so much variety of feeling and oratorical and poetical ornament, is the eternally true thought that a service of God which is purely external is no service at all, and that rites without a loving obedience are an insult to the Majesty of Heaven.

Jeremiah 10:17-25. The latter part of Jeremiah 10:1-25 resumes the subject suspended at Jeremiah 9:22. It evidently contemplates the speedy departure of the people into banishment. "Away out of the land with thy pack" (or "thy goods"; "property," Targ. "merchandise," the Heb. term, which is related to "Canaan," occurs here only), "O thou that sittest in distress!" (or "abidest in the siege." {Jeremiah 52:5; 2 Kings 24:10} Sion is addressed, and bidden to prepare her scanty bundle of bare necessaries for the march into exile. So Egypt is bidden to "make for herself vessels of exile," Jeremiah 46:19. Some think that Sion is warned to withdraw her goods from the open country to the protection of her strong walls, before the siege begins, as in Jeremiah 8:14; but we have passed that stage in the development of the piece, and the next verse seems to show the meaning: "For thus hath Iahvah said, Lo, I am about to sling forth the inhabitants of the land this time"-as opposed to former occasions, when the enemy retired unsuccessful, {2 Kings 16:5; 2 Kings 19:36} or went off satisfied with plunder or an indemnity, like the Scythians {see 2 Kings 14:14} -"and I will distress them that they may find out" the truth, which now they refuse to see. The aposiopesis "that they may find out!" is very striking. The Vulgate renders the verb in the passive: Tribulabo eos ita ut inveniantur. This, however, does not give so good a sense as the Masoretic pointing, and Ewald’s reference of the term to the goods of the panic-stricken fugitives seems flat and tasteless ("the inhabitants of the land will this time not be able to hide their goods from the enemy!"). The best comment on the phrase is supplied by a later oracle: "Lo, I am about to make them know this time-I will make them know My hand and My might; that they may know that My name is Iahvah." {Jeremiah 16:21} Cf. also Jeremiah 17:9; Ecclesiastes 8:17.

The last verse (Jeremiah 10:17) resembles a poetical quotation; and this one looks like the explication of it. There the population is personified as a woman; here we have instead the plain prose expression, "inhabitants of the land." The figurative, "I will sling them forth" or "cast them out," explains the bidding of Sion to "pack up her bundle" or "belongings"-there seems to be a touch of contempt in this isolated word, as much as to signify that the people must go forth into exile with no more of their possessions than they can carry like a beggar in a bundle. The expression, "I will distress them," seems to show that "thou that sittest in the distress" is proleptic, or to be rendered "thou that art to sit in distress," which comes to the same thing.

And now the prophet imagines the distress and the remorse of this forlorn mother, as it will manifest itself when her house is ruined and her children are gone and she realises the folly of the past:-{cf. Jeremiah 4:31}

"Woe’s me for my wound!

Fatal is my stroke!"

(perhaps quoted from a familiar elegy). "And yet I-I thought," {Jeremiah 22:21; Psalms 30:7} "Only this"-no more than this-"is my sickness: I can bear it!" The people had never fully realised the threatenings of the prophets, until they began to be accomplished. When they heard them, they had said half-incredulously, half-mockingly, Is that all? Their false guides, too, had treated apparent danger as a thing of little moment, assuring them that their half reforms, and zealous outward worship, were sufficient to turn away the Divine displeasure. {Jeremiah 6:14} And so they said to themselves, as sinners are still in the habit of saying, "If the worst come to the worst, I can bear it. Besides, God is merciful, and things may turn out better for frail humanity than your preachers of wrath and woe predict. Meanwhile-I shall do as I please, and take my chance of the issue."

The lament of the mourning mother continues: "My tent is laid waste and all my cords are broken; My sons went forth of me" (to battle) "and are not; There is none to spread my tent any more, And to set up my curtains." {Amos 9:11} Overhearing, as it were, this sorrowful lamentation ("qinah"), the prophet interposes with the reason of the calamity: "For the shepherds became brutish" or "behaved foolishly," stulte egerunt (Vulg.)-the leaders of the nation showed themselves as insensate and silly as cattle-"and Iahvah they sought not"; {Jeremiah 2:8} "Therefore"-as they had no regard for Divine counsel-"they dealt not wisely," {Jeremiah 3:15; Jeremiah 9:23; Jeremiah 20:11} "and all their flock was scattered abroad."

Once more, and for the last time, the prophet sounds the alarm: "Hark! a rumour! lo, it cometh! and a great uproar from the land of the north; to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a haunt of jackals!" It is not likely that the verse is to be regarded as spoken by the mourning country; she contemplates the evil as already done, whereas here it is only imminent. {cf. Jeremiah 4:6; Jeremiah 6:22; Jeremiah 1:15} The piece concludes with a prayer (Jeremiah 10:23-25), which may be considered either as. an intercession by the prophet on behalf of the nation, {cf. Jeremiah 18:20} or as a form of supplication which he suggests as suitable to the existing crisis. "I know, Iahvah, that man’s way is not his own; That it pertaineth not to a man to walk and direct his own steps: Correct me, Iahvah, but with justice; Not in Thine anger, lest Thou make me small!" Partly quoted, {Psalms 6:1; Psalms 38:1} "Pour out Thy fury upon the nations that know Thee not, And upon tribes that have not called upon Thy name; For they have devoured Jacob" ("and will devour him") ("and consumed him"), "and his pasture they have desolated!" {Psalms 79:6-7, quoted from this place. In Jeremiah the LXX omits "and will devour him"; while the psalm omits both of the bracketed expressions.}

The Vulgate renders Jeremiah 7:23 "Scio, Domine, quia non est hominis via ejus; nec viri est ut ambulet, et dirigat gressus suos." I think this indicates the correct reading of the Hebrew text; cf. Jeremiah 9:23, where two infinitives absolute are used in a similar way. The Septuagint also must have had the same text, for it translates, "nor will (can) a man walk and direct his own walking." The Masoretic punctuation is certainly incorrect; and the best that can be made of it is Hitzig’s version, which, however, disregards the accents, although their authority is the same as that of the vowel points: "I know Iahvah that not to man belongeth his way, not to a perishing" (lit. "going," "departing") "man-and to direct his steps." Any reader of Hebrew may see at once that this is a very unusual form of expression. {For the thought, cf. Proverbs 16:9; Proverbs 19:21; Psalms 37:23}

The words express humble submission to the impending chastisement. The penitent people does not deprecate the penalty of its sins, but only prays that the measure of it may be determined by right rather than by wrath. {cf. Jeremiah 46:27-28} The very idea of right and justice implies a limit, whereas wrath, like all passions, is without limit, blind and insatiable. "In the Old Testament, justice is opposed, not to mercy, but to high-handed violence and oppression, which recognise no law but subjective appetite and desire. The just man owns the claims of an objective law of right."

Non est hominis via ejus. Neither individuals nor nations are masters of their own fortunes in this world. Man has not his fate in his own hands; it is controlled and directed by a higher Power. By sincere submission, by a glad, unswerving loyalty, which honours himself as well as its Object, man may cooperate with that Power, to the furtherance of ends which are of all possible ends the wisest, the loftiest, the most beneficial to his kind. Self-will may oppose those ends, it cannot thwart them; at the most it can but momentarily retard their accomplishment, and exclude itself from a share in the universal blessing.

Israel now confesses, by the mouth of his best and truest representative, that he has hitherto loved to choose his own path, and to walk in his own strength, without reference to the will and way of God. Now, the overwhelming shock of irresistible calamity has brought him to his senses, has revealed to him his powerlessness in the hands of the Unseen Arbiter of events, has made him see, as he never saw, that mortal man can determine neither the vicissitudes nor the goal of his journey. Now he sees the folly of the mighty man glorying in his might, and the rich man glorying in his riches; now he sees that the how and the whither of his earthly course are not matters within his own control; that all human resources are nothing against God, and are only helpful when used for and with God. Now he sees that the path of life is not one which we enter upon and traverse of our own motion, but a path along which we are led; and so, resigning his former pride of independent choice, he humbly prays, "Lead Thou me on!" Lead me whither Thou wilt, in the way of trouble and disaster and chastisement for my sins; but remember my human frailty and weakness, and let not Thy wrath destroy me! Finally, the suppliant ventures to remind God that others are guilty as well as he, and that the ruthless destroyers of Israel are themselves fitted to be objects as well as instruments of Divine justice. They are such

(1) because they have not "known" nor "called upon" Iahvah; and

(2) because they have "devoured Jacob" who was a thing consecrated to Iahvah, {Jeremiah 2:3} and therefore are guilty of sacrilege. {cf. Jeremiah 50:28-29}

It has never been our lot to see our own land overrun by a barbarous invader, our villages burnt, our peasantry slaughtered, our towns taken and sacked with all the horrors permitted or enjoined by a non-Christian religion. We read of but hardly realise the atrocities of ancient warfare. If we did realise them, we might even think a saint justified in praying for vengeance upon the merciless destroyers of his country. But apart from this, I see a deeper meaning in this prayer. The justice of this terrible visitation upon Judah is admitted by the prophet. Yet in Judah many righteous were involved in the general calamity. On the other hand, Jeremiah knew something of the vices of the Babylonians, against which his contemporary Habakkuk inveighs so bitterly. They "knew not" nor "called upon" Iahvah; but a base polytheism reflected and sanctioned the corruption of their lives. A kind of moral dilemma, therefore, is proposed here. If the propose of this outpouring of Divine wrath be to bring Israel to "find out" {Jeremiah 7:18} and to acknowledge the truth of God and his own guiltiness, can wrath persist, when that result is attained? Does not justice demand that the torrent of destruction be diverted upon the proud oppressor? So prayer, the forlorn hope of poor humanity, strives to overcome and compel and prevail with God, and to wrest a blessing even from the hand of Eternal Justice.