The short prophecy which has furnished a text for this chapter shows
that Jeremiah was not unaware of Baruch's tendency to self-assertion,
and even felt that sometimes it required a check. Apparently chapter
xlv. once formed the immediate continuation of chapter xxxvi., the
narrative of the incident of the roll. It was "the word spoken by
Jeremiah the prophet to Baruch ben Neriah, when he wrote these words
in a book at the dictation of Jeremiah in the fourth year of
Jehoiakim." The reference evidently is to xxxvi. 32, where we are told
that Baruch wrote, at Jeremiah's dictation, all the words of the book
that had been burnt, and many like words.

Clearly Baruch had not received Jeremiah's message as to the sin and
ruin of Judah without strong protest. It was as distasteful to him as
to all patriotic Jews and even to Jeremiah himself. Baruch had not yet
been able to accept this heavy burden or to look beyond to the
brighter promise of the future. He broke out into bitter complaint:
"Woe is me now! for Jehovah hath added sorrow to my pain; I am weary
with my groaning, and find no rest."[66] Strong as these words are,
they are surpassed by many of Jeremiah's complaints to Jehovah, and
doubtless even now they found an echo in the prophet's heart. Human
impatience of suffering revolts desperately against the conviction
that calamity is inevitable; hope whispers that some unforeseen
Providence will yet disperse the storm-clouds, and the portents of
ruin will dissolve like some evil dream. Jeremiah had, now as always,
the harsh, unwelcome task of compelling himself and his fellows to
face the sad and appalling reality. "Thus saith Jehovah, Behold, I am
breaking down that which I built, I am plucking up that which I
planted."[67] This was his familiar message concerning Judah, but he
had also a special word for Baruch: "And as for thee, dost thou seek
great things for thyself?" What "great things" could a devout and
patriotic Jew, a disciple of Jeremiah, seek for himself in those
disastrous times? The answer is at once suggested by the renewed
prediction of doom. Baruch, in spite of his master's teaching, had
still ventured to look for better things, and had perhaps fancied that
he might succeed where Jeremiah had failed and might become the
mediator who should reconcile Israel to Jehovah. He may have thought
that Jeremiah's threats and entreaties had prepared the way for some
message of reconciliation. Gemariah ben Shaphan and other princes had
been greatly moved when Baruch read the roll. Might not their emotion
be an earnest of the repentance of the people? If he could carry on
his master's work to a more blessed issue than the master himself had
dared to hope, would not this be a "great thing" indeed? We gather
from the tone of the chapter that Baruch's aspirations were unduly
tinged with personal ambition. While kings, priests, and prophets were
sinking into a common ruin from which even the most devoted servants
of Jehovah would not escape, Baruch was indulging himself in visions
of the honour to be obtained from a glorious mission, successfully
accomplished. Jeremiah reminds him that he will have to take his
share in the common misery. Instead of setting his heart upon "great
things" which are not according to the Divine purpose, he must be
prepared to endure with resignation the evil which Jehovah "is
bringing upon all flesh." Yet there is a word of comfort and promise:
"I will give thee thy life for a prey in all places whither thou
goest." Baruch was to be protected from violent or premature death.

According to Renan,[68] this boon was flung to Baruch
half-contemptuously, in order to silence his unworthy and unseasonable
importunity:--

"Dans une catastrophe qui va englober l'humanitÃ© tout entiÃ¨re, il est
beau de venir rÃ©clamer de petites faveurs d'exception! Baruch aura la
vie sauve partout oÃ¹ il ira; qu'il s'en contente!"

We prefer a more generous interpretation. To a selfish man, unless
indeed he clung to bare life in craven terror or mere animal tenacity,
such an existence as Baruch was promised would have seemed no boon at
all. Imprisonment in a besieged and starving city, captivity and exile,
his fellow-countrymen's ill-will and resentment from first to
last--these experiences would be hard to recognise as privileges
bestowed by Jehovah. Had Baruch been wholly self-centred, he might well
have craved death instead, like Job, nay, like Jeremiah himself. But
life meant for him continued ministry to his master, the high privilege
of supporting him in his witness to Jehovah. If, as seems almost
certain, we owe to Baruch the preservation of Jeremiah's prophecies,
then indeed the life that was given him for a prey must have been
precious to him as the devoted servant of God. Humanly speaking, the
future of revealed religion and of Christianity depended on the survival
of Jeremiah's teaching, and this hung upon the frail thread of Baruch's
life. After all, Baruch was destined to achieve "great things," even
though not those which he sought after; and as no editor's name is
prefixed to our book, he cannot be accused of self-seeking. So too for
every faithful disciple, his life, even if given for a prey, even if
spent in sorrow, poverty, and pain, is still a Divine gift, because
nothing can spoil its opportunity of ministering to men and glorifying
God, even if only by patient endurance of suffering.

We may venture on a wider application of the promise, "Thy life shall
be given thee for a prey." Life is not merely continued existence in
the body: life has come to mean spirit and character, so that Christ
could say, "He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." In
this sense the loyal servant of God wins as his prey, out of all
painful experiences, a fuller and nobler life. Other rewards may come
in due season, but this is the most certain and the most sufficient.
For Baruch, constant devotion to a hated and persecuted master,
uncompromising utterance of unpopular truth, had their chief issue in
the redemption of his own inward life.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] _Antt._, x. 9, 1.

[59] xxxvi. 26, 32.

[60] In order of time, ch. xxxvi.

[61] xxxii.

[62] xliii.

[63] _Antt._, x. 9, 1.

[64] Bissell's Introduction to Baruch in Lange's Commentary.

[65] So LXX., which here probably gives the true order.

[66] The clause "I am weary with my groaning" also occurs in Psalm vi.
6.

[67] The concluding clause of the verse is omitted by LXX., and is
probably a gloss added to indicate that the ruin would not be confined
to Judah, but would extend "over the whole earth." Cf. Kautzsch.

[68] _Hist. of Israel_, iii., 293.

                               CHAPTER VI

                      _THE JUDGMENT ON JEHOIAKIM_

                      xxii. 13-19, xxxvi. 30, 31.

    "Jehoiakim ... slew him (Uriah) with the sword, and cast his dead
    body into the graves of the common people."--JER. xxvi. 23.

    "Therefore thus saith Jehovah concerning Jehoiakim, ... He shall be
    buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the
    gates of Jerusalem."--JER. xxii. 18, 19.

    "Jehoiakim ... did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah,
    according to all that his fathers had done."--2 KINGS xxiii. 36, 37.

Our last four chapters have been occupied with the history of Jeremiah
during the reign of Jehoiakim, and therefore necessarily with the
relations of the prophet to the king and his government. Before we
pass on to the reigns of Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, we must consider
certain utterances which deal with the personal character and career
of Jehoiakim. We are helped to appreciate these passages by what we
here read, and by the brief paragraph concerning this reign in the
Second Book of Kings. In Jeremiah the king's policy and conduct are
specially illustrated by two incidents, the murder of the prophet
Uriah and the destruction of the roll. The historian states his
judgment of the reign, but his brief record[69] adds little to our
knowledge of the sovereign.

Jehoiakim was placed upon the throne as the nominee and tributary of
Pharaoh Necho; but he had the address or good fortune to retain his
authority under Nebuchadnezzar, by transferring his allegiance to the
new suzerain of Western Asia. When a suitable opportunity offered, the
unwilling and discontented vassal naturally "turned and rebelled
against" his lord. Even then his good fortune did not forsake him;
although in his latter days Judah was harried by predatory bands of
Chaldeans, Syrians, Moabites, and Ammonites, yet Jehoiakim "slept with
his fathers" before Nebuchadnezzar had set to work in earnest to
chastise his refractory subject. He was not reserved, like Zedekiah,
to endure agonies of mental and physical torture, and to rot in a
Babylonian dungeon.

Jeremiah's judgment upon Jehoiakim and his doings is contained in the
two passages which form the subject of this chapter. The utterance in
xxxvi. 30, 31, was evoked by the destruction of the roll, and we may
fairly assume that xxii. 13-19 was also delivered after that incident.
The immediate context of the latter paragraph throws no light on the
date of its origin. Chapter xxii. is a series of judgments on the
successors of Josiah, and was certainly composed after the deposition
of Jehoiachin, probably during the reign of Zedekiah; but the section
on Jehoiakim must have been uttered at an earlier period. Renan indeed
imagines[70] that Jeremiah delivered this discourse at the gate of the
royal palace at the very beginning of the new reign. The nominee of
Egypt was scarcely seated on the throne, his "new name" Jehoiakim--"He
whom Jehovah establisheth"--still sounded strange in his ears, when
the prophet of Jehovah publicly menaced the king with condign
punishment. Renan is naturally surprised that Jehoiakim tolerated
Jeremiah, even for a moment. But, here as often elsewhere, the French
critic's dramatic instinct has warped his estimate of evidence. We
need not accept the somewhat unkind saying that picturesque anecdotes
are never true, but, at the same time, we have always to guard against
the temptation to accept the most dramatic interpretation of history
as the most accurate. The contents of this passage, the references to
robbery, oppression, and violence, clearly imply that Jehoiakim had
reigned long enough for his government to reveal itself as hopelessly
corrupt. The final breach between the king and the prophet was marked
by the destruction of the roll, and xxii. 13-19, like xxxvi. 30, 31,
may be considered a consequence of this breach.

Let us now consider these utterances. In xxxvi. 30_a_ we read,
"Therefore thus saith Jehovah concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah, He
shall have none to sit upon the throne of David." Later on,[71] a like
judgment was pronounced upon Jehoiakim's son and successor Jehoiachin.
The absence of this threat from xxii. 13-19 is doubtless due to the
fact that the chapter was compiled when the letter of the prediction
seemed to have been proved to be false by the accession of Jehoiachin.
Its spirit and substance were amply satisfied by the latter's
deposition and captivity after a brief reign of a hundred days.

The next clause in the sentence on Jehoiakim runs: "His dead body
shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the
frost." The same doom is repeated in the later prophecy:--

          "They shall not lament for him,
            Alas my brother! Alas my brother!
          They shall not lament for him,
            Alas lord! Alas lord![72]
          He shall be buried with the burial of an ass,
            Dragged forth and cast away without the gates of Jerusalem."

Jeremiah did not need to draw upon his imagination for this vision of
judgment. When the words were uttered, his memory called up the murder
of Uriah ben Shemaiah and the dishonour done to his corpse. Uriah's
only guilt had been his zeal for the truth that Jeremiah had
proclaimed. Though Jehoiakim and his party had not dared to touch
Jeremiah or had not been able to reach him, they had struck his
influence by killing Uriah. But for their hatred of the master, the
disciple might have been spared. And Jeremiah had neither been able to
protect him, nor allowed to share his fate. Any generous spirit will
understand how Jeremiah's whole nature was possessed and agitated by a
tempest of righteous indignation, how utterly humiliated he felt to be
compelled to stand by in helpless impotence. And now, when the tyrant
had filled up the measure of his iniquity, when the imperious impulse
of the Divine Spirit bade the prophet speak the doom of his king,
there breaks forth at last the long pent-up cry for vengeance:
"Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saint"--let the persecutor suffer the
agony and shame which he inflicted on God's martyr, fling out the
murderer's corpse unburied, let it lie and rot upon the dishonoured
grave of his victim.

Can we say, Amen? Not perhaps without some hesitation. Yet surely, if
our veins run blood and not water, our feelings, had we been in
Jeremiah's place, would have been as bitter and our words as fierce.
Jehoiakim was more guilty than our Queen Mary, but the memory of the
grimmest of the Tudors still stinks in English nostrils. In our own
days, we have not had time to forget how men received the news of
Hannington's murder at Uganda, and we can imagine what European
Christians would say and feel if their missionaries were massacred in
China.

And yet, when we read such a treatise as Lactantius wrote _Concerning
the Deaths of Persecutors_, we cannot but recoil. We are shocked at the
stern satisfaction he evinces in the miserable ends of Maximin and
Galerius, and other enemies of the true faith. Discreet historians have
made large use of this work, without thinking it desirable to give an
explicit account of its character and spirit. Biographers of Lactantius
feel constrained to offer a half-hearted apology for the _De Morte
Persecutorum_. Similarly we find ourselves of one mind with Gibbon,[73]
in refusing to derive edification from a sermon in which Constantine the
Great, or the bishop who composed it for him, affected to relate the
miserable end of all the persecutors of the Church. Nor can we share the
exultation of the Covenanters in the Divine judgment which they saw in
the death of Claverhouse; and we are not moved to any hearty sympathy
with more recent writers, who have tried to illustrate from history the
danger of touching the rights and privileges of the Church. Doubtless
God will avenge His own elect; nevertheless _Nemo me impune lacessit_ is
no seemly motto for the Kingdom of God. Even Greek mythologists taught
that it was perilous for men to wield the thunderbolts of Zeus. Still
less is the Divine wrath a weapon for men to grasp in their differences
and dissensions, even about the things of God. Michael the Archangel,
even when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses,
durst not bring against him a railing judgment, but said, The Lord
rebuke thee.[74]

How far Jeremiah would have shared such modern sentiment, it is hard
to say. At any rate his personal feeling is kept in the background; it
is postponed to the more patient and deliberate judgment of the Divine
Spirit, and subordinated to broad considerations of public morality.
We have no right to contrast Jeremiah with our Lord and His
proto-martyr Stephen, because we have no prayer of the ancient prophet
to rank with, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,"
or again with, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." Christ and
His disciple forgave wrongs done to themselves: they did not condone
the murder of their brethren. In the Apocalypse, which concludes the
English Bible, and was long regarded as God's final revelation, His
last word to man, the souls of the martyrs cry out from beneath the
altar: "How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost Thou not judge and
avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?"[75]

Doubtless God will avenge His own elect, and the appeal for justice
may be neither ignoble nor vindictive. But such prayers, beyond all
others, must be offered in humble submission to the Judge of all. When
our righteous indignation claims to pass its own sentence, we do well
to remember that our halting intellect and our purblind conscience
are ill qualified to sit as assessors of the Eternal Justice.

When Saul set out for Damascus, "breathing out threatening and
slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," the survivors of his
victims cried out for a swift punishment of the persecutor, and
believed that their prayers were echoed by martyred souls in the
heavenly Temple. If that ninth chapter of the Acts had recorded how
Saul of Tarsus was struck dead by the lightnings of the wrath of God,
preachers down all the Christian centuries would have moralised on the
righteous Divine judgment. Saul would have found his place in the
homiletic Chamber of Horrors with Ananias and Sapphira, Herod and
Pilate, Nero and Diocletian. Yet the Captain of our salvation,
choosing His lieutenants, passes over many a man with blameless
record, and allots the highest post to this blood-stained persecutor.
No wonder that Paul, if only in utter self-contempt, emphasised the
doctrine of Divine election. Verily God's ways are not our ways and
His thoughts are not our thoughts.

Still, however, we easily see that Paul and Jehoiakim belong to two
different classes. The persecutor who attempts in honest but misguided
zeal to make others endorse his own prejudices, and turn a deaf ear
with him to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, must not be ranked with
politicians who sacrifice to their own private interests the
Revelation and the Prophets of God.

This prediction which we have been discussing of Jehoiakim's shameful
end is followed in the passage in chapter xxxvi. by a general
announcement of universal judgment, couched in Jeremiah's usual
comprehensive style:--

"I will visit their sin upon him and upon his children and upon his
servants, and I will bring upon them and the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and the men of Judah all the evil which I spake unto them and they did
not hearken."

In chapter xxii. the sentence upon Jehoiakim is prefaced by a
statement of the crimes for which he was punished. His eyes and his
heart were wholly possessed by avarice and cruelty; as an
administrator he was active in oppression and violence.[76] But
Jeremiah does not confine himself to these general charges; he
specifies and emphasises one particular form of Jehoiakim's
wrong-doing, the tyrannous exaction of forced labour for his
buildings. To the sovereigns of petty Syrian states, old Memphis and
Babylon were then what London and Paris are to modern Ameers,
Khedives, and Sultans. Circumstances, indeed, did not permit a Syrian
prince to visit the Egyptian or Chaldean capital with perfect comfort
and unrestrained enjoyment. Ancient Eastern potentates, like mediÃ¦val
suzerains, did not always distinguish between a guest and a hostage.
But the Jewish kings would not be debarred from importing the luxuries
and imitating the vices of their conquerors.

Renan says[77] of this period: "L'Egypte Ã©tait, Ã  cette Ã©poque, le
pays oÃ¹ les industries de luxe Ã©taient le plus dÃ©veloppÃ©es. Tout le
monde raffolaient, en particulier, de sa carrosserie et de ses meubles
ouvragÃ©s. Joiaquin et la noblesse de JÃ©rusalem ne songeaient qu'Ã  se
procurer ces beaux objets, qui rÃ©alisaient ce qu'on avait vu de plus
exquis en fait de goÃ»t jusque-lÃ ."

The supreme luxury of vulgar minds is the use of wealth as a means of
display, and monarchs have always delighted in the erection of vast
and ostentatious buildings. At this time Egypt and Babylon vied with
one another in pretentious architecture. In addition to much useful
engineering work, Psammetichus I. made large additions to the temples
and public edifices at Memphis, Thebes, Sais, and elsewhere, so that
"the entire valley of the Nile became little more than one huge
workshop, where stone-cutters and masons, bricklayers and carpenters,
laboured incessantly."[78] This activity in building continued even
after the disaster to the Egyptian arms at Carchemish.

Nebuchadnezzar had an absolute mania for architecture. His numerous
inscriptions are mere catalogues of his achievements in building. His
home administration and even his extensive conquests are scarcely
noticed; he held them of little account compared with his temples and
palaces--"this great Babylon, which I have built for the royal
dwelling-place, by the might of my power and for the glory of my
majesty."[79] Nebuchadnezzar created most of the magnificence that
excited the wonder and admiration of Herodotus a century later.

Jehoiakim had been moved to follow the notable example of Chaldea and
Egypt. By a strange irony of fortune, Egypt, once the cynosure of
nations, has become in our own time the humble imitator of Western
civilisation, and now boulevards have rendered the suburbs of Cairo "a
shabby reproduction of modern Paris." Possibly in the eyes of Egyptians
and Chaldeans Jehoiakim's efforts only resulted in a "shabby
reproduction" of Memphis or Babylon. Nevertheless these foreign luxuries
are always expensive; and minor states had not then learnt the art of
trading on the resources of their powerful neighbours by means of
foreign loans. Moreover Judah had to pay tribute first to Pharaoh Necho,
and then to Nebuchadnezzar. The times were bad, and additional taxes for
building purposes must have been felt as an intolerable oppression.
Naturally the king did not pay for his labour; like Solomon and all
other great Eastern despots, he had recourse to the _corvee_, and for
this in particular Jeremiah denounced him.

          "Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness
              And his chambers by injustice;
           That maketh his neighbour toil without wages,
             And giveth him no hire;
           That saith, 'I will build me a wide house
             And spacious chambers,'
           And openeth out broad windows, with woodwork of cedar
             And vermilion painting."

Then the denunciation passes into biting sarcasm:--

          "Art thou indeed a king,
           Because thou strivest to excel in cedar?"[80]

Poor imitations of Nebuchadnezzar's magnificent structures could not
conceal the impotence and dependence of the Jewish king. The
pretentiousness of Jehoiakim's buildings challenged a comparison which
only reminded men that he was a mere puppet, with its strings pulled now
by Egypt and now by Babylon. At best he was only reigning on sufferance.

Jeremiah contrasts Jehoiakim's government both as to justice and
dignity with that of Josiah:--

          "Did not thy father eat and drink?"[81]

(He was no ascetic, but, like the Son of Man, lived a full, natural,
human life.)

          "And do judgment and justice?
           Then did he prosper.
           He judged the cause of the poor and needy,
           Then was there prosperity.
           Is not this to know Me?
           Jehovah hath spoken it."

Probably Jehoiakim claimed by some external observance, or through
some subservient priest or prophet, to "know Jehovah"; and Jeremiah
repudiates the claim.

Josiah had reigned in the period when the decay of Assyria left Judah
dominant in Palestine, until Egypt or Chaldea could find time to
gather up the outlying fragments of the shattered empire. The wisdom
and justice of the Jewish king had used this breathing space for the
advantage and happiness of his people; and during part of his reign
Josiah's power seems to have been as extensive as that of any of his
predecessors on the throne of Judah. And yet, according to current
theology, Jeremiah's appeal to the prosperity of Josiah as a proof of
God's approbation was a startling anomaly. Josiah had been defeated
and slain at Megiddo in the prime of his manhood, at the age of
thirty-nine. None but the most independent and enlightened spirits
could believe that the Reformer's premature death, at the moment when
his policy had resulted in national disaster, was not an emphatic
declaration of Divine displeasure. Jeremiah's contrary belief might be
explained and justified. Some such justification is suggested by the
prophet's utterance concerning Jehoahaz: "Weep not for the dead,
neither bemoan him: but weep sore for him that goeth away." Josiah had
reigned with real authority, he died when independence was no longer
possible; and therein he was happier and more honourable than his
successors, who held a vassal throne by the uncertain tenure of
time-serving duplicity, and were for the most part carried into
captivity. "The righteous was taken away from the evil to come."[82]

The warlike spirit of classical antiquity and of Teutonic chivalry
welcomed a glorious death upon the field of battle:--

          "And how can man die better
             Than facing fearful odds,
           For the ashes of his fathers,
             And the temples of his Gods?"

No one spoke of Leonidas as a victim of Divine wrath. Later Judaism
caught something of the same temper. Judas MaccabÃ¦us, when in extreme
danger, said, "It is better for us to die in battle, than to look upon
the evils of our people and our sanctuary"; and later on, when he
refused to flee from inevitable death, he claimed that he would leave
behind him no stain upon his honour.[83] Islam also is prodigal in its
promises of future bliss to those soldiers who fall fighting for its
sake.

But the dim and dreary SheÃ´l of the ancient Hebrews was no glorious
Valhalla or houri-peopled Paradise. The renown of the battle-field was
poor compensation for the warm, full-blooded life of the upper air.
When David sang his dirge for Saul and Jonathan, he found no comfort
in the thought that they had died fighting for Israel. Moreover the
warrior's self-sacrifice for his country seems futile and inglorious,
when it neither secures victory nor postpones defeat. And at Megiddo
Josiah and his army perished in a vain attempt to come

          "Between the pass and fell incensed points
           Of mighty opposites."

We can hardly justify to ourselves Jeremiah's use of Josiah's reign as
an example of prosperity as the reward of righteousness; his
contemporaries must have been still more difficult to convince. We
cannot understand how the words of this prophecy were left without any
attempt at justification, or why Jeremiah did not meet by anticipation
the obvious and apparently crushing rejoinder that the reign
terminated in disgrace and disaster.

Nevertheless these difficulties do not affect the terms of the
sentence upon Jehoiakim, or the ground upon which he was condemned. We
shall be better able to appreciate Jeremiah's attitude and to discover
its lessons if we venture to reconsider his decisions. We cannot
forget that there was, as Cheyne puts it, a duel between Jeremiah and
Jehoiakim; and we should hesitate to accept the verdict of Hildebrand
upon Henry IV. of Germany, or of Thomas Ã  Becket on Henry II. of
England. Moreover the data upon which we have to base our judgment,
including the unfavourable estimate in the Book of Kings, come to us
from Jeremiah or his disciples. Our ideas about Queen Elizabeth would
be more striking than accurate if our only authorities for her reign
were Jesuit historians of England. But Jeremiah is absorbed in lofty
moral and spiritual issues; his testimony is not tainted with that
sectarian and sacerdotal casuistry which is always so ready to
subordinate truth to the interests of "the Church." He speaks of facts
with a simple directness which leaves us in no doubt as to their
reality; his picture of Jehoiakim may be one-sided, but it owes
nothing to an inventive imagination.

Even Renan, who, in Ophite fashion, holds a brief for the bad
characters of the Old Testament, does not seriously challenge
Jeremiah's statements of fact. But the judgment of the modern critic
seems at first sight more lenient than that of the Hebrew prophet: the
former sees in Jehoiakim "un prince libÃ©ral et modÃ©rÃ©,"[84] but when
this favourable estimate is coupled with an apparent comparison with
Louis Philippe, we must leave students of modern history to decide
whether Renan is really less severe than Jeremiah. Cheyne, on the
other hand, holds[85] that "we have no reason to question Jeremiah's
verdict upon Jehoiakim, who, alike from a religious and a political
point of view, appears to have been unequal to the crisis in the
fortunes of Israel." No doubt this is true; and yet perhaps Renan is
so far right that Jehoiakim's failure was rather his misfortune than
his fault. We may doubt whether any king of Israel or Judah would have
been equal to the supreme crisis which Jehoiakim had to face. Our
scanty information seems to indicate a man of strong will, determined
character, and able statesmanship. Though the nominee of Pharaoh
Necho, he retained his sceptre under Nebuchadnezzar, and held his own
against Jeremiah and the powerful party by which the prophet was
supported. Under more favourable conditions he might have rivalled
Uzziah or Jeroboam II. In the time of Jehoiakim, a supreme political
and military genius would have been as helpless on the throne of Judah
as were the PalÃ¦ologi in the last days of the Empire at
Constantinople. Something may be said to extenuate his religious
attitude. In opposing Jeremiah he was not defying clear and
acknowledged truth. Like the Pharisees in their conflict with Christ,
the persecuting king had popular religious sentiment on his side.
According to that current theology which had been endorsed in some
measure even by Isaiah and Jeremiah, the defeat at Megiddo proved that
Jehovah repudiated the religious policy of Josiah and his advisers.
The inspiration of the Holy Spirit enabled Jeremiah to resist this
shallow conclusion, and to maintain through every crisis his unshaken
faith in the profounder truth. Jehoiakim was too conservative to
surrender at the prophet's bidding the long-accepted and fundamental
doctrine of retribution, and to follow the forward leading of
Revelation. He "stood by the old truth" as did Charles V. at the
Reformation. "Let him that is without sin" in this matter "first cast
a stone at" him.

Though we extenuate Jehoiakim's conduct, we are still bound to condemn
it; not however because he was exceptionally wicked, but because he
failed to rise above a low spiritual average: yet in this judgment we
also condemn ourselves for our own intolerance, and for the prejudice
and self-will which have often blinded our eyes to the teachings of
our Lord and Master.

But Jeremiah emphasises one special charge against the king--his
exaction of forced and unpaid labour. This form of taxation was in
itself so universal that the censure can scarcely be directed against
its ordinary and moderate exercise. If Jeremiah had intended to
inaugurate a new departure, he would have approached the subject in a
more formal and less casual fashion. It was a time of national danger
and distress, when all moral and material resources were needed to
avert the ruin of the state, or at any rate to mitigate the sufferings
of the people; and at such a time Jehoiakim exhausted and embittered
his subjects--that he might dwell in spacious halls with woodwork of
cedar. The Temple and palaces of Solomon had been built at the expense
of a popular resentment, which survived for centuries, and with which,
as their silence seems to show, the prophets fully sympathised. If
even Solomon's exactions were culpable, Jehoiakim was altogether
without excuse.

His sin was that common to all governments, the use of the authority of
the state for private ends. This sin is possible not only to sovereigns
and secretaries of state, but to every town councillor and every one who
has a friend on a town council, nay, to every clerk in a public office
and to every workman in a government dockyard. A king squandering public
revenues on private pleasures, and an artisan pilfering nails and iron
with an easy conscience because they only belong to the state, are
guilty of crimes essentially the same. On the one hand, Jehoiakim as the
head of the state was oppressing individuals; and although modern states
have grown comparatively tender as to the rights of the individual, yet
even now their action is often cruelly oppressive to insignificant
minorities. But, on the other hand, the right of exacting labour was
only vested in the king as a public trust; its abuse was as much an
injury to the community as to individuals. If Jeremiah had to deal with
modern civilisation, we might, perchance, be startled by his passing
lightly over our religious and political controversies to denounce the
squandering of public resources in the interests of individuals and
classes, sects and parties.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] 2 Kings xxiii. 34-xxiv. 7.

[70] iii. 274.

[71] xxii. 30.

[72] R.V., "Ah my brother! or Ah sister!... Ah lord! or Ah his glory!"
The text is based on an emendation of Graetz, following the Syriac.
(Giesebrecht.)

[73] Chap. xiii.

[74] Jude 9.

[75] Apc. vi. 10.

[76] xxii. 17. The exact meaning of the word translated "violence" (so
A.V., R.V.) is very doubtful.

[77] _Hist._, etc., iii. 266.

[78] Rawlinson, _Ancient Egypt_ (Story of the Nations).

[79] Dan. iv. 30.

[80] I have followed R.V., but the text is probably corrupt. Cheyne
follows LXX. (A) in reading "because thou viest with Ahab": LXX. (B) has
"Ahaz" (so Ewald). Giesebrecht proposes to neglect the accents and
translate, "viest in cedar buildings with thy father" (_i.e._ Solomon).

[81] According to Giesebrecht (cf. however the last note) this clause
is an objection which the prophet puts into the mouth of the king. "My
father enjoyed the good things of life--why should not I?" The prophet
rejoins, "Nay, but he did judgment," etc.

[82] Isa. lvii. (English Versions).

[83] Macc. ii. 59, ix. 10.

[84] iii. 269.

[85] P. 142.

                              CHAPTER VII

                            _JEHOIACHIN_[86]

                              xxii. 20-30.

    "A despised broken vessel,"--JER. xxii. 28.

    "A young lion. And he went up and down among the lions, he became
    a young lion and he learned to catch the prey, he devoured
    men."--EZEK. xix. 5, 6.

    "Jehoiachin ... did evil in the sight of Jehovah, according to all
    that his father had done."--2 KINGS xxiv. 8, 9.

We have seen that our book does not furnish a consecutive biography of
Jeremiah; we are not even certain as to the chronological order of the
incidents narrated. Yet these chapters are clear and full enough to
give us an accurate idea of what Jeremiah did and suffered during the
eleven years of Jehoiakim's reign. He was forced to stand by while the
king lent the weight of his authority to the ancient corruptions of
the national religion, and conducted his home and foreign policy
without any regard to the will of Jehovah, as expressed by His
prophet. His position was analogous to that of a Romanist priest under
Elizabeth or a Protestant divine in the reign of James II. According
to some critics, Nebuchadnezzar was to Jeremiah what Philip of Spain
was to the priest and William of Orange to the Puritan.

During all these long and weary years, the prophet watched the ever
multiplying tokens of approaching ruin. He was no passive spectator,
but a faithful watchman to the house of Israel; again and again he
risked his life in a vain attempt to make his fellow-countrymen aware
of their danger.[87] The vision of the coming sword was ever before
his eyes, and he blew the trumpet and warned the people; but they
would not be warned, and the prophet knew that the sword would come
and take them away in their iniquity. He paid the penalty of his
faithfulness; at one time or another he was beaten, imprisoned,
proscribed, and driven to hide himself; still he persevered in his
mission, as time and occasion served. Yet he survived Jehoiakim,
partly because he was more anxious to serve Jehovah than to gain the
glorious deliverance of martyrdom; partly because his royal enemy
feared to proceed to extremities against a prophet of Jehovah, who was
befriended by powerful nobles, and might possibly have relations with
Nebuchadnezzar himself. Jehoiakim's religion--for like the Athenians
he was probably "very religious"--was saturated with superstition, and
it was only when deeply moved that he lost the sense of an external
sanctity attaching to Jeremiah's person. In Israel prophets were
hedged by a more potent divinity than kings.

Meanwhile Jeremiah was growing old in years and older in experience.
When Jehoiakim died, it was nearly forty years since the young priest
had first been called "to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy
and to overthrow; to build and to plant"; it was more than eleven
since his brighter hopes were buried in Josiah's grave. Jehovah had
promised that He would make His servant into "an iron pillar and
brasen walls."[88] The iron was tempered and hammered into shape
during these days of conflict and endurance, like--

          " ... iron dug from central gloom,
              And heated hot with burning fears
              And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
          And battered with the shocks of doom,
          To shape and use."

He had long lost all trace of that sanguine youthful enthusiasm which
promises to carry all before it. His opening manhood had felt its happy
illusions, but they did not dominate his soul and they soon passed away.
At the Divine bidding, he had surrendered his most ingrained prejudices,
his dearest desires. He had consented to be alienated from his brethren
at Anathoth, and to live without home or family; although a patriot, he
accepted the inevitable ruin of his nation as the just judgment of
Jehovah; he was a priest, imbued by heredity and education with the
religious traditions of Israel, yet he had yielded himself to Jehovah,
to announce, as His herald, the destruction of the Temple, and the
devastation of the Holy Land. He had submitted his shrinking flesh and
reluctant spirit to God's most unsparing demands, and had dared the
worst that man could inflict. Such surrender and such experiences
wrought in him a certain stern and terrible strength, and made his life
still more remote from the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows of
common men. In his isolation and his inspired self-sufficiency he had
become an "iron pillar." Doubtless he seemed to many as hard and cold as
iron; but this pillar of the faith could still glow with white heat of
indignant passion, and within the shelter of the "brasen walls" there
still beat a human heart, touched with tender sympathy for those less
disciplined to endure.

We have thus tried to estimate the development of Jeremiah's character
during the second period of his ministry, which began with the death
of Josiah and terminated with the brief reign of Jehoiachin. Before
considering Jeremiah's judgment upon this prince we will review the
scanty data at our disposal to enable us to appreciate the prophet's
verdict.

Jehoiakim died while Nebuchadnezzar was on the march to punish his
rebellion. His son Jehoiachin, a youth of eighteen,[89] succeeded his
father and continued his policy. Thus the accession of the new king
was no new departure, but merely a continuance of the old order; the
government was still in the hands of the party attached to Egypt, and
opposed to Babylon and hostile to Jeremiah. Under these circumstances
we are bound to accept the statement of Kings that Jehoiakim "slept
with his fathers," _i.e._ was buried in the royal sepulchre.[90] There
was no literal fulfilment of the prediction that he should "be buried
with the burial of an ass." Jeremiah had also declared concerning
Jehoiakim: "He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David."[91]
According to popular superstition, the honourable burial of Jehoiakim
and the succession of his son to the throne further discredited
Jeremiah and his teaching. Men read happy omens in the mere observance
of ordinary constitutional routine. The curse upon Jehoiakim seemed so
much spent breath: why should not Jeremiah's other predictions of ruin
and exile also prove a mere _vox et prÃ¦terea nihil_? In spite of a
thousand disappointments, men's hopes still turned to Egypt; and if
earthly resources failed they trusted to Jehovah Himself to intervene,
and deliver Jerusalem from the advancing hosts of Nebuchadnezzar, as
from the army of Sennacherib.

Ezekiel's elegy over Jehoiachin suggests that the young king displayed
energy and courage worthy of a better fortune:--

          "He walked up and down among the lions,
             He became a young lion;
           He learned to catch the prey,
             He devoured men.
           He broke down[92] their palaces,
             He wasted their cities;
           The land, was desolate, and the fulness thereof,
             At the noise of his roaring."[93]

However figurative these lines may be, the hyperbole must have had some
basis in fact. Probably before the regular Babylonian army entered
Judah, Jehoiachin distinguished himself by brilliant but useless
successes against the marauding bands of Chaldeans, Syrians, Moabites,
and Ammonites, who had been sent to prepare the way for the main body.
He may even have carried his victorious arms into the territory of Moab
or Ammon. But his career was speedily cut short: "The servants of
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem and besieged the
city." Pharaoh Necho made no sign, and Jehoiachin was forced to retire
before the regular forces of Babylon, and soon found himself shut up in
Jerusalem. Still for a time he held out, but when it was known in the
beleaguered city that Nebuchadnezzar was present in person in the camp
of the besiegers, the Jewish captains lost heart. Perhaps too they hoped
for better treatment, if they appealed to the conqueror's vanity by
offering him an immediate submission which they had refused to his
lieutenants. The gates were thrown open; Jehoiachin and the Queen
Mother, Nehushta, with his ministers and princes and the officers of his
household, passed out in suppliant procession, and placed themselves and
their city at the disposal of the conqueror. In pursuance of the policy
which Nebuchadnezzar had inherited from the Assyrians, the king and his
court and eight thousand picked men were carried away captive to
Babylon.[94] For thirty-seven years Jehoiachin languished in a Chaldean
prison, till at last his sufferings were mitigated by an act of grace,
which signalised the accession of a new king of Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar's successor Evil Merodach, "in the year when he began to
reign, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah out of prison, and
spake kindly to him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings
that were with him in Babylon. And Jehoiachin changed his prison
garments, and ate at the royal table continually all the days of his
life, and had a regular allowance given him by the king, a daily
portion, all the days of his life."[95] At the age of fifty-five, the
last survivor of the reigning princes of the house of David emerges from
his dungeon, broken in mind and body by his long captivity, to be a
grateful dependent upon the charity of Evil Merodach, just as the
survivor of the house of Saul had sat at David's table. The young lion
that devoured the prey and caught men and wasted cities was thankful to
be allowed to creep out of his cage and die in comfort--"a despised
broken vessel."

We feel a shock of surprise and repulsion as we turn from this
pathetic story to Jeremiah's fierce invectives against the unhappy
king. But we wrong the prophet and misunderstand his utterance if we
forget that it was delivered during that brief frenzy in which the
young king and his advisers threw away the last chance of safety for
Judah. Jehoiachin might have repudiated his father's rebellion against
Babylon; Jehoiakim s death had removed the chief offender, no personal
blame attached to his successor, and a prompt submission might have
appeased Nebuchadnezzar's wrath against Judah and obtained his favour
for the new king. If a hot-headed young rajah of some protected Indian
state revolted against the English suzerainty and exposed his country
to the misery of a hopeless war, we should sympathise with any of his
counsellors who condemned such wilful folly; we have no right to find
fault with Jeremiah for his severe censure of the reckless vanity
which precipitated his country's fate.

Jeremiah's deep and absorbing interest in Judah and Jerusalem is
indicated by the form of this utterance; it is addressed to the
"Daughter of Zion"[96]:--

          "Go up to Lebanon, and lament,
           And lift up thy voice in Bashan,
           And lament from Abarim,[97]
           For thy lovers are all destroyed!"

Her "lovers," her heathen allies, whether gods or men, are impotent,
and Judah is as forlorn and helpless as a lonely and unfriended woman;
let her bewail her fate upon the mountains of Israel, like Jephthah's
daughter in ancient days.

          "I spake unto thee in thy prosperity;
           Thou saidst, I will not hearken.
           This hath been thy way from thy youth,
           That thou hast not obeyed My voice.
           The tempest shall be the shepherd to all thy shepherds."

Kings and nobles, priests and prophets, shall be carried off by the
Chaldean invaders, as trees and houses are swept away by a hurricane.
These shepherds who had spoiled and betrayed their flock would
themselves be as silly sheep in the hands of robbers.

          "Thy lovers shall go into captivity.
           Then, verily, shalt thou be ashamed and confounded
           Because of all thy wickedness.
           O thou that dwellest in Lebanon!
           O thou that hast made thy nest in the cedar!"

The former mention of Lebanon reminded Jeremiah of Jehoiakim's halls
of cedar. With grim irony he links together the royal magnificence of
the palace and the wild abandonment of the people's lamentation.

          "How wilt thou groan[98] when pangs come upon thee,
           Anguish as of a woman in travail!"

The nation is involved in the punishment inflicted upon her rulers. In
such passages the prophets largely identify the nation with the
governing classes--not without justification. No government, whatever
the constitution may be, can ignore a strong popular demand for
righteous policy, at home and abroad. A special responsibility of
course rests on those who actually wield the authority of the state,
but the policy of rulers seldom succeeds in effecting much either for
good or evil without some sanction of public feeling. Our revolution
which replaced the Puritan Protectorate by the restored Monarchy was
rendered possible by the change of popular sentiment. Yet even under
the purest democracy men imagine that they divest themselves of civic
responsibility by neglecting their civic duties; they stand aloof, and
blame officials and professional politicians for the injustice and
crime wrought by the state. National guilt seems happily disposed of
when laid on the shoulders of that convenient abstraction "the
government"; but neither the prophets nor the Providence which they
interpret recognise this convenient theory of vicarious atonement: the
king sins, but the prophet's condemnation is uttered against and
executed upon the nation.

Nevertheless a special responsibility rests upon the ruler, and now
Jeremiah turns from the nation to its king.

          "As I live--Jehovah hath spoken it--
           Though Coniah ben Jehoiakim king of Judah were a signet ring
                    upon My right hand----"

By a forcible Hebrew idiom Jehovah, as it were, turns and confronts
the king and specially addresses him:--

          "Yet would I pluck thee thence."

A signet ring was valuable in itself, and, as far as an inanimate object
could be, was an "_alter ego_" of the sovereign; it scarcely ever left
his finger, and when it did, it carried with it the authority of its
owner. A signet ring could not be lost or even cast away without some
reflection upon the majesty of the king. Jehoiachin's character was by
no means worthless; he had courage, energy, and patriotism. The heir of
David and Solomon, the patron and champion of the Temple, dwelt, as it
were, under the very shadow of the Almighty. Men generally believed that
Jehovah's honour was engaged to defend Jerusalem and the house of David.
He Himself would be discredited by the fall of the elect dynasty and the
captivity of the chosen people. Yet everything must be sacrificed--the
career of a gallant young prince, the ancient association of the sacred
Name with David and Zion, even the superstitious awe with which the
heathen regarded the God of the Exodus and of the deliverance from
Sennacherib. Nothing will be allowed to stand in the way of the Divine
judgment. And yet we still sometimes dream that the working out of the
Divine righteousness will be postponed in the interests of
ecclesiastical traditions and in deference to the criticisms of ungodly
men!

          "And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy
                    life,
           Into the hand of them of whom thou art afraid,
           Into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and the
                    Chaldeans.
           And I will hurl thee and the mother that bare thee into
                    another land, where ye were not born:
           There shall ye die.
           And unto the land whereunto their soul longeth to return,
           Thither they shall not return."

Again the sudden change in the person addressed emphasises the scope
of the Divine proclamation; the doom of the royal house is not only
announced to them, but also to the world at large. The mention of the
Queen Mother, Nehushta, reveals what we should in any case have
conjectured, that the policy of the young prince was largely
determined by his mother. Her importance is also indicated by xiii.
18, usually supposed to be addressed to Jehoiachin and Nehushta:---

          "Say unto the king and the queen mother,
           Leave your thrones and sit in the dust,
           For your glorious diadems are fallen."

The Queen Mother is a characteristic figure of polygamous Eastern
dynasties, but we may be helped to understand what Nehushta was to
Jehoiachin if we remember the influence of Eleanor of Poitou over
Richard I. and John, and the determined struggle which Margaret of
Anjou made on behalf of her ill-starred son.

The next verse of our prophecy seems to be a protest against the
severe sentence pronounced in the preceding clauses:--

          "Is then this man Coniah a despised vessel, only fit to be
                    broken?
           Is he a tool, that no one wants?"

Thus Jeremiah imagines the citizens and warriors of Jerusalem crying
out against him, for his sentence of doom against their darling prince
and captain. The prophetic utterance seemed to them monstrous and
incredible, only worthy to be met with impatient scorn. We may find a
mediÃ¦val analogy to the situation at Jerusalem in the relations of
Clement IV. to Conradin, the last heir of the house of Hohenstaufen.
When this youth of sixteen was in the full career of victory, the Pope
predicted that his army would be scattered like smoke, and pointed out
the prince and his allies as victims for the sacrifice. When Conradin
was executed after his defeat at Tagliacozzo, Christendom was filled
with abhorrence at the suspicion that Clement had countenanced the
doing to death of the hereditary enemy of the Papal See. Jehoiachin's
friends felt towards Jeremiah somewhat as these thirteenth-century
Ghibellines towards Clement.

Moreover the charge against Clement was probably unfounded; Milman[99]
says of him, "He was doubtless moved with inner remorse at the
cruelties of 'his champion' Charles of Anjou." Jeremiah too would
lament the doom he was constrained to utter. Nevertheless he could not
permit Judah to be deluded to its ruin by empty dreams of glory:--

          "O land, land, land,
           Hear the word of Jehovah."

Isaiah had called all Nature, heaven and earth to bear witness against
Israel, but now Jeremiah is appealing with urgent importunity to Judah.
"O Chosen Land of Jehovah, so richly blessed by His favour, so sternly
chastised by His discipline, Land of prophetic Revelation, now at last,
after so many warnings, believe the word of thy God and submit to His
judgment. Hasten not thy unhappy fate by shallow confidence in the
genius and daring of Jehoiachin: he is no true Messiah."

          "For saith Jehovah,
           Write this man childless,
           A man whose life shall not know prosperity:
           For none of his seed shall prosper;
           None shall sit upon the throne of David,
           Nor rule any more over Judah."

Thus, by Divine decree, the descendants of Jehoiakim were
disinherited; Jehoiachin was to be recorded in the genealogies of
Israel as having no heir. He might have offspring,[100] but the
Messiah, the Son of David, would not come of his line.

Two points suggest themselves in connection with this utterance of
Jeremiah; first as to the circumstances under which it was uttered,
then as to its application to Jehoiachin.

A moment's reflection will show that this prophecy implied great courage
and presence of mind on the part of Jeremiah--his enemies might even
have spoken of his barefaced audacity. He had predicted that Jehoiakim's
corpse should be cast forth without any rites of honourable sepulture;
and that no son of his should sit upon the throne. Jehoiakim had been
buried like other kings, he slept with his fathers, and Jehoiachin his
son reigned in his stead. The prophet should have felt himself utterly
discredited; and yet here was Jeremiah coming forward unabashed with new
prophecies against the king, whose very existence was a glaring disproof
of his prophetic inspiration. Thus the friends of Jehoiachin. They would
affect towards Jeremiah's message the same indifference which the
present generation feels for the expositors of Daniel and the
Apocalypse, who confidently announce the end of the world for 1866, and
in 1867 fix a new date with cheerful and undiminished assurance. But
these students of sacred records can always save the authority of
Scripture by acknowledging the fallibility of their calculations. When
their predictions fail, they confess that they have done their sum wrong
and start it afresh. But Jeremiah's utterances were not published as
human deductions from inspired data; he himself claimed to be inspired.
He did not ask his hearers to verify and acknowledge the accuracy of his
arithmetic or his logic, but to submit to the Divine message from his
lips. And yet it is clear that he did not stake the authority of Jehovah
or even his own prophetic status upon the accurate and detailed
fulfilment of his predictions. Nor does he suggest that, in announcing a
doom which was not literally accomplished, he had misunderstood or
misinterpreted his message. The details which both Jeremiah and those
who edited and transmitted his words knew to be unfulfilled were allowed
to remain in the record of Divine Revelation--not, surely, to illustrate
the fallibility of prophets, but to show that an accurate forecast of
details is not of the essence of prophecy; such details belong to its
form and not to its substance. Ancient Hebrew prophecy clothed its ideas
in concrete images; its messages of doom were made definite and
intelligible in a glowing series of definite pictures. The prophets were
realists and not impressionists. But they were also spiritual men,
concerned with the great issues of history and religion. Their message
had to do with _these_: they were little interested in minor matters;
and they used detailed imagery as a mere instrument of exposition.
Popular scepticism exulted when subsequent facts did not exactly
correspond to Jeremiah's images, but the prophet himself was
unconscious of either failure or mistake. Jehoiakim might be
magnificently buried, but his name was branded with eternal dishonour;
Jehoiachin might reign for a hundred days, but the doom of Judah was not
averted, and the house of David ceased for ever to rule in Jerusalem.

Our second point is the application of this prophecy to Jehoiachin.
How far did the king deserve his sentence? Jeremiah indeed does not
explicitly blame Jehoiachin, does not specify his sins as he did those
of his royal sire. The estimate recorded in the Book of Kings
doubtless expresses the judgment of Jeremiah, but it may be directed
not so much against the young king as against his ministers. Yet the
king cannot have been entirely innocent of the guilt of his policy and
government. In chapter xxiv., however, Jeremiah speaks of the captives
at Babylon, those carried away with Jehoiachin, as "good figs"; but we
scarcely suppose he meant to include the king himself in this
favourable estimate, otherwise we should discern some note of sympathy
in the personal sentence upon him. We are left, therefore, to conclude
that Jeremiah's judgment was unfavourable; although, in view of the
prince's youth and limited opportunities, his guilt must have been
slight compared to that of his father.

And, on the other hand, we have the manifest sympathy and even
admiration of Ezekiel. The two estimates stand side by side in the
sacred record to remind us that God neither tolerates man's sins
because there is a better side to his nature, nor yet ignores his
virtues on account of his vices. For ourselves we may be content to
leave the last word on this matter with Jeremiah. When he declares
God's sentence on Jehoiachin, he does not suggest that it was
undeserved, but he refrains from any explicit reproach. Probably if he
had known how entirely his prediction would be fulfilled, if he had
foreseen the seven-and-thirty weary years which the young lion was to
spend in his Babylonian cage, Jeremiah would have spoken more tenderly
and pitifully even of the son of Jehoiakim.

FOOTNOTES:

[86] Also called Coniah and Jeconiah.

[87] Considerable portions of chaps. i.-xx. are referred to the reigns
of Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin: see previous volume on Jeremiah.

[88] i. 18.

[89] The Chronicler's account of Jehoiakim's end (2 Chron. xxviii.
6-8) is due to a misunderstanding of the older records. According to
Chronicles Jehoiachin was only eight, but all our data indicate that
Kings is right.

[90] In LXX. of 2 Chron. xxxvi. 8, Jehoiakim, like Manasseh and Amon,
was "buried in the garden of Uzza": B, GanozÃ¦; A, Ganozan. Cheyne is
inclined to accept this statement, which he regards as derived from
tradition.

[91] xxxvi. 30.

[92] So A. B. Davidson in Cambridge Bible, etc., by a slight
conjectural emendation; there have been many other suggested
corrections of the text. The Hebrew text as it stands would mean
literally "he knew their widows" (R.V. margin); A.V., R.V., by a
slight change, "he knew their (A.V. desolate) palaces."

[93] Ezek. xix. 5-7.

[94] 2 Kings xxiv. 8-17.

[95] 2 Kings xxv. 27-30; Jer. lii. 31-34.

[96] The Hebrew verbs are in 2 s. fem.; the person addressed is not
named, but from analogy she can only be the "Daughter of Zion," _i.e._
Jerusalem personified.

[97] Identified with the mountains of Moab.

[98] R.V. margin, with LXX., Vulg., and Syr.

[99] Milman's _Latin Christianity_, vi. 392.

[100] 1 Chron. iii. 17 mentions the "sons" of Jeconiah, and in Matt.
i. 12 Shealtiel is called his "son," but in Luke iii. 27 Shealtiel is
called the son of Neri.

                              CHAPTER VIII

                   _BAD SHEPHERDS AND FALSE PROPHETS_

                             xxiii., xxiv.

    "Woe unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of My
    pasture!"--JER. xxiii. 1.

    "Of what avail is straw instead of grain?... Is not My word like
    fire, ... like a hammer that shattereth the rocks?"--JER. xxiii.
    28, 29.

The captivity of Jehoiachin and the deportation of the flower of the
people marked the opening of the last scene in the tragedy of Judah and
of a new period in the ministry of Jeremiah. These events, together with
the accession of Zedekiah as Nebuchadnezzar's nominee, very largely
altered the state of affairs in Jerusalem. And yet the two main features
of the situation were unchanged--the people and the government
persistently disregarded Jeremiah's exhortations. "Neither Zedekiah, nor
his servants, nor the people of the land, did hearken unto the words of
Jehovah which He spake by the prophet Jeremiah."[101] They would not
obey the will of Jehovah as to their life and worship, and they would
not submit to Nebuchadnezzar. "Zedekiah ... did evil in the sight of
Jehovah, according to all that Jehoiakim had done; ... and Zedekiah
rebelled against the king of Babylon."[102]

It is remarkable that though Jeremiah consistently urged submission to
Babylon, the various arrangements made by Nebuchadnezzar did very little
to improve the prophet's position or increase his influence. The
Chaldean king may have seemed ungrateful only because he was ignorant of
the services rendered to him--Jeremiah would not enter into direct and
personal co-operation with the enemy of his country, even with him whom
Jehovah had appointed to be the scourge of His disobedient people--but
the Chaldean policy served Nebuchadnezzar as little as it profited
Jeremiah. Jehoiakim, in spite of his forced submission, remained the
able and determined foe of his suzerain, and Zedekiah, to the best of
his very limited ability, followed his predecessor's example.

Zedekiah was uncle of Jehoiachin, half-brother of Jehoiakim, and own
brother to Jehoahaz.[103] Possibly the two brothers owed their bias
against Jeremiah and his teaching to their mother, Josiah's wife
Hamutal, the daughter of another Jeremiah, the Libnite. Ezekiel thus
describes the appointment of the new king: "The king of Babylon ...
took one of the seed royal, and made a covenant with him; he also put
him under an oath, and took away the mighty of the land: that the
kingdom might be base, that it might not lift itself up, but that by
keeping of his covenant it might stand."[104] Apparently
Nebuchadnezzar was careful to choose a feeble prince for his "base
kingdom"; all that we read of Zedekiah suggests that he was weak and
incapable. Henceforth the sovereign counted for little in the
internal struggles of the tottering state. Josiah had firmly
maintained the religious policy of Jeremiah, and Jehoiakim, as firmly,
the opposite policy; but Zedekiah had neither the strength nor the
firmness to enforce a consistent policy and to make one party
permanently dominant. Jeremiah and his enemies were left to fight it
out amongst themselves, so that now their antagonism grew more bitter
and pronounced than during any other reign.

But whatever advantage the prophet might derive from the weakness of
the sovereign was more than counterbalanced by the recent deportation.
In selecting the captives Nebuchadnezzar had sought merely to weaken
Judah by carrying away every one who would have been an element of
strength to the "base kingdom." Perhaps he rightly believed that
neither the prudence of the wise nor the honour of the virtuous would
overcome their patriotic hatred of subjection; weakness alone would
guarantee the obedience of Judah. He forgot that even weakness is apt
to be foolhardy--when there is no immediate prospect of penalty.

One result of his policy was that the enemies and friends of Jeremiah
were carried away indiscriminately; there was no attempt to leave
behind those who might have counselled submission to Babylon as the
acceptance of a Divine judgment, and thus have helped to keep Judah
loyal to its foreign master. On the contrary Jeremiah's disciples were
chiefly thoughtful and honourable men, and Nebuchadnezzar's policy in
taking away "the mighty of the land" bereft the prophet of many
friends and supporters, amongst them his disciple Ezekiel and
doubtless a large class of whom Daniel and his three friends might be
taken as types. When Jeremiah characterises the captives as "good
figs" and those left behind as "bad figs,"[105] and the judgment is
confirmed and amplified by Ezekiel,[106] we may be sure that most of
the prophet's adherents were in exile.

We have already had occasion to compare the changes in the religious
policy of the Jewish government to the alternations of Protestant and
Romanist sovereigns among the Tudors; but no Tudor was as feeble as
Zedekiah. He may rather be compared to Charles IX. of France, helpless
between the Huguenots and the League. Only the Jewish factions were
less numerous, less evenly balanced; and by the speedy advance of
Nebuchadnezzar civil dissensions were merged in national ruin.

The opening years of the new reign passed in nominal allegiance to
Babylon. Jeremiah's influence would be used to induce the vassal king to
observe the covenant he had entered into and to be faithful to his oath
to Nebuchadnezzar. On the other hand a crowd of "patriotic" prophets
urged Zedekiah to set up once more the standard of national
independence, to "come to the help of the Lord against the mighty." Let
us then briefly consider Jeremiah's polemic against the princes,
prophets, and priests of his people. While Ezekiel in a celebrated
chapter[107] denounces the idolatry of the princes, priests, and women
of Judah, their worship of creeping things and abominable beasts, their
weeping for Tammuz, their adoration of the sun, Jeremiah is chiefly
concerned with the perverse policy of the government and the support it
receives from priests and prophets, who profess to speak in the name of
Jehovah. Jeremiah does not utter against Zedekiah any formal judgment
like those on his three predecessors. Perhaps the prophet did not regard
this impotent sovereign as the responsible representative of the state,
and when the long-expected catastrophe at last befell the doomed people,
neither Zedekiah nor his doings distracted men's attention from their
own personal sufferings and patriotic regrets. At the point where a
paragraph on Zedekiah would naturally have followed that on Jehoiachin,
we have by way of summary and conclusion to the previous sections a
brief denunciation of the shepherds of Israel.

"Woe unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of My
pasture!... Ye have scattered My flock, and driven them away, and have
not cared for them; behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your
doings."

These "shepherds" are primarily the kings, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, and
Jehoiachin, who have been condemned by name in the previous chapter,
together with the unhappy Zedekiah, who is too insignificant to be
mentioned. But the term shepherds will also include the ruling and
influential classes of which the king was the leading representative.

The image is a familiar one in the Old Testament and is found in the
oldest literature of Israel,[108] but the denunciation of the rulers of
Judah as unfaithful shepherds is characteristic of Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
and one of the prophecies appended to the Book of Zechariah.[109]
Ezekiel xxxiv. expands this figure and enforces its lessons:--

          "Woe unto the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves!
           Should not the shepherds feed the sheep? Ye eat the fat, and
                    ye clothe you with the wool.
           Ye kill the fatlings; but ye feed not the sheep.
           The diseased have ye not strengthened,
           Neither have ye healed the sick,
           Neither have ye bound up the bruised,
           Neither have ye brought back again that which was driven
                    away,
           Neither have ye sought for that which was lost,
           But your rule over them has been harsh and violent.
           And for want of a shepherd, they were scattered,
           And became food for every beast of the field."[110]

So in Zechariah ix., etc., Jehovah's anger is kindled against the
shepherds, because they do not pity His flock.[111] Elsewhere[112]
Jeremiah speaks of the kings of all nations as shepherds, and pronounces
against them also a like doom. All these passages illustrate the concern
of the prophets for good government. They were neither Pharisees nor
formalists; their religious ideals were broad and wholesome. Doubtless
the elect remnant will endure through all conditions of society; but the
Kingdom of God was not meant to be a pure Church in a rotten state. This
present evil world is no manure heap to fatten the growth of holiness:
it is rather a mass for the saints to leaven.

Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel turn from the unfaithful shepherds whose
"hungry sheep look up and are not fed" to the true King of Israel, the
"Shepherd of Israel that led Joseph like a flock, and dwelt between
the Cherubim." In the days of the Restoration He will raise up
faithful shepherds, and over them a righteous Branch, the real Jehovah
Zidqenu, instead of the sapless twig who disgraced the name
"Zedekiah." Similarly Ezekiel promises that God will set up one
shepherd over His people, "even My servant David." The pastoral care
of Jehovah for His people is most tenderly and beautifully set forth
in the twenty-third Psalm. Our Lord, the root and the offspring of
David, claims to be the fulfilment of ancient prophecy when He calls
Himself "the Good Shepherd." The words of Christ and of the Psalmist
receive new force and fuller meaning when we contrast their pictures
of the true Shepherd with the portraits of the Jewish kings drawn by
the prophets. Moreover the history of this metaphor warns us against
ignoring the organic life of the Christian society, the Church, in our
concern for the spiritual life of the individual. As Sir Thomas More
said, in applying this figure to Henry VIII., "Of the multitude of
sheep cometh the name of a shepherd."[113] A shepherd implies not
merely a sheep, but a flock; His relation to each member is tender and
personal, but He bestows blessings and requires service in fellowship
with the Family of God.

By a natural sequence the denunciation of the unfaithful shepherds is
followed by a similar utterance "concerning the prophets." It is true
that the prophets are not spoken of as shepherds; and Milton's use of
the figure in _Lycidas_ suggests the New Testament rather than the
Old. Yet the prophets had a large share in guiding the destinies of
Israel in politics as well as in religion, and having passed sentence
on the shepherds--the kings and princes--Jeremiah turns to the
ecclesiastics, chiefly, as the heading implies, to the prophets. The
priests indeed do not escape, but Jeremiah seems to feel that they are
adequately dealt with in two or three casual references. We use the
term "ecclesiastics" advisedly; the prophets were now a large
professional class, more important and even more clerical than the
priests. The prophets and priests together were the clergy of Israel.
They claimed to be devoted servants of Jehovah, and for the most part
the claim was made in all sincerity; but they misunderstood His
character, and mistook for Divine inspiration the suggestions of their
own prejudice and self-will.

Jeremiah's indictment against them has various counts. He accuses them
of speaking without authority, and also of time-serving, plagiarism,
and cant.

First, then, as to their unauthorised utterances: Jeremiah finds them
guilty of an unholy licence in prophesying, a distorted caricature of
that "liberty of prophesying" which is the prerogative of God's
accredited ambassadors.

          "Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto
                    you.
           They make fools of you:
           The visions which they declare are from their own hearts,
           And not from the mouth of Jehovah.

           Who hath stood in the council of Jehovah,
           To perceive and hear His word?
           Who hath marked His word and heard it?
           I sent not the prophets--yet they ran;
           I spake not unto them--yet they prophesied."

The evils which Jeremiah describes are such as will always be found in
any large professional class. To use modern terms--in the Church, as
in every profession, there will be men who are not qualified for the
vocation which they follow. They are indeed not called to their
vocation; they "follow," but do not overtake it. They are not sent of
God, yet they run; they have no Divine message, yet they preach. They
have never stood in the council of Jehovah; they might perhaps have
gathered up scraps of the King's purposes from His true councillors;
but when they had opportunity they neither "marked nor heard"; and yet
they discourse concerning heavenly things with much importance and
assurance. But their inspiration, at its best, has no deeper or richer
source than their own shallow selves; their visions are the mere
product of their own imaginations. Strangers to the true fellowship,
their spirit is not "a well of water springing up unto eternal life,"
but a stagnant pool. And, unless the judgment and mercy of God
intervene, that pool will in the end be fed from a fountain whose
bitter waters are earthly, sensual, devilish.

We are always reluctant to speak of ancient prophecy or modern
preaching as a "profession." We may gladly dispense with the word, if
we do not thereby ignore the truth which it inaccurately expresses.
Men lived by prophecy, as, with Apostolic sanction, men live by "the
gospel." They were expected, as ministers are now, though in a less
degree, to justify their claims to an income and an official status,
by discharging religious functions so as to secure the approval of the
people or the authorities. Then, as now, the prophet's reputation,
influence, and social standing, probably even his income, depended
upon the amount of visible success that he could achieve.

In view of such facts, it is futile to ask men of the world not to
speak of the clerical life as a profession. They discern no ethical
difference between a curate's dreams of a bishopric and the
aspirations of a junior barrister to the woolsack. Probably a refusal
to recognise the element common to the ministry with law, medicine,
and other professions, injures both the Church and its servants. One
peculiar difficulty and most insidious temptation of the Christian
ministry consists in its mingled resemblances to and differences from
the other professions. The minister has to work under similar worldly
conditions, and yet to control those conditions by the indwelling
power of the Spirit. He has to "run," it may be twice or even three
times a week, whether he be sent or no: how can he always preach only
that which God has taught him? He is consciously dependent upon the
exercise of his memory, his intellect, his fancy: how can he avoid
speaking "the visions of his own heart"? The Church can never allow
its ministers to regard themselves as mere professional teachers and
lecturers, and yet if they claim to be more, must they not often fall
under Jeremiah's condemnation?

It is one of those practical dilemmas which delight casuists and
distress honest and earnest servants of God. In the early Christian
centuries similar difficulties peopled the Egyptian and Syrian deserts
with ascetics, who had given up the world as a hopeless riddle. A full
discussion of the problem would lead us too far away from the exposition
of Jeremiah, and we will only venture to make two suggestions.

The necessity, which most ministers are under, of "living by the
gospel," may promote their own spiritual life and add to their
usefulness. It corrects and reduces spiritual pride, and helps them to
understand and sympathise with their lay brethren, most of whom are
subject to a similar trial.

Secondly, as a minister feels the ceaseless pressure of strong
temptation to speak from and live for himself--his lower, egotistic
self--he will be correspondingly driven to a more entire and persistent
surrender to God. The infinite fulness and variety of Revelation is
expressed by the manifold gifts and experience of the prophets. If only
the prophet be surrendered to the Spirit, then what is most
characteristic of himself may become the most forcible expression of his
message. His constant prayer will be that he may have the child's heart
and may never resist the Holy Ghost, that no personal interest or
prejudice, no bias of training or tradition or current opinion, may dull
his hearing when he stands in the council of the Lord, or betray him
into uttering for Christ's gospel the suggestions of his own self-will
or the mere watchwords of his ecclesiastical faction.

But to return to the ecclesiastics who had stirred Jeremiah's wrath.
The professional prophets naturally adapted their words to the itching
ears of their clients. They were not only officious, but also
time-serving. Had they been true prophets, they would have dealt
faithfully with Judah; they would have sought to convince the people
of sin, and to lead them to repentance; they would thus have given
them yet another opportunity of salvation.

          "If they had stood in My council,
           They would have caused My people to hear My words;
           They would have turned them from their evil way,
           And from the evil of their doings."

But now:--

          "They walk in lies and strengthen the hands of evildoers,
           That no one may turn away from his sin.

           They say continually unto them that despise the word of
                    Jehovah,[114]
           Ye shall have peace;
           And unto every one that walketh in the stubbornness of his
                    heart they say,
           No evil shall come upon you."

Unfortunately, when prophecy becomes professional in the lowest sense
of the word, it is governed by commercial principles. A sufficiently
imperious demand calls forth an abundant supply. A sovereign can "tune
the pulpits"; and a ruling race can obtain from its clergy formal
ecclesiastical sanction for such "domestic institutions" as slavery.
When evildoers grow numerous and powerful, there will always be
prophets to strengthen their hands and encourage them not to turn away
from their sin. But to give the lie to these false prophets God sends
Jeremiahs, who are often branded as heretics and schismatics,
turbulent fellows who turn the world upside-down.

The self-important, self-seeking spirit leads further to the sin of
plagiarism:--

          "Therefore I am against the prophets, is the utterance of
                    Jehovah,
           Who steal My word from one another."

The sin of plagiarism is impossible to the true prophet, partly
because there are no rights of private property in the word of
Jehovah. The Old Testament writers make free use of the works of their
predecessors. For instance, Isaiah ii. 2-4 is almost identical with
Micah iv. 1-3; yet neither author acknowledges his indebtedness to the
other or to any third prophet.[115] Uriah ben Shemaiah prophesied
according to all the words of Jeremiah,[116] who himself owes much to
Hosea, whom he never mentions. Yet he was not conscious of stealing
from his predecessor, and he would have brought no such charge against
Isaiah or Micah or Uriah. In the New Testament 2 Peter and Jude have
so much in common that one must have used the other without
acknowledgment. Yet the Church has not, on that ground, excluded
either Epistle from the Canon. In the goodly fellowship of the
prophets and the glorious company of the apostles no man says that the
things which he utters are his own. But the mere hireling has no part
in the spiritual communism wherein each may possess all things because
he claims nothing. When a prophet ceases to be the messenger of God,
and sinks into the mercenary purveyor of his own clever sayings and
brilliant fancies, then he is tempted to become a clerical Autolycus,
"a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." Modern ideas furnish a curious
parallel to Jeremiah's indifference to the borrowings of the true
prophet, and his scorn of the literary pilferings of the false. We
hear only too often of stolen sermons, but no one complains of
plagiarism in prayers. Doubtless among these false prophets charges of
plagiarism were bandied to and fro with much personal acrimony. But it
is interesting to notice that Jeremiah is not denouncing an injury
done to himself; he does not accuse them of thieving from him, but
from one another. Probably assurance and lust of praise and power
would have overcome any awe they felt for Jeremiah. He was only free
from their depredations, because--from their point of view--his words
were not worth stealing. There was nothing to be gained by repeating
his stern denunciations, and even his promises were not exactly suited
to the popular taste.

These prophets were prepared to cater for the average religious
appetite in the most approved fashion--in other words, they were
masters of cant. Their office had been consecrated by the work of true
men of God like Elijah and Isaiah. They themselves claimed to stand in
the genuine prophetic succession, and to inherit the reverence felt
for their great predecessors, quoting their inspired utterances and
adopting their weighty phrases. As Jeremiah's contemporaries listened
to one of their favourite orators, they were soothed by his assurances
of Divine favour and protection, and their confidence in the speaker
was confirmed by the frequent sound of familiar formulÃ¦ in his
unctuous sentences. These had the true ring; they were redolent of
sound doctrine, of what popular tradition regarded as orthodox.

The solemn attestation NE'UM YAHWE, "It is the utterance of Jehovah,"
is continually appended to prophecies, almost as if it were the
sign-manual of the Almighty. Isaiah and other prophets frequently use
the term MASSA (A.V., R.V., "burden") as a title, especially for
prophecies concerning neighbouring nations. The ancient records loved
to tell how Jehovah revealed Himself to the patriarchs in dreams.
Jeremiah's rivals included dreams in their clerical apparatus:--

          "Behold, I am against them that prophesy lying dreams--
               _Ne'um Yahwe_--
           And tell them, and lead astray My people
           By their lies and their rodomontade;
           It was not I who sent or commanded them,
           Neither shall they profit this people at all,
               _Ne'um Yahwe_"

These prophets "thought to cause the Lord's people to forget His name,
as their fathers forgot His name for Baal, by their dreams which they
told one another."

Moreover they could glibly repeat the sacred phrases as part of their
professional jargon:--

          "Behold, I am against the prophets,
           It is the utterance of Jehovah (_Ne'um Yahwe_),
           That use their tongues
           To utter utterances (_Wayyin'amu Ne'um_)."

"To utter utterances"--the prophets uttered them, not Jehovah. These
sham oracles were due to no Diviner source than the imagination of
foolish hearts. But for Jeremiah's grim earnestness, the last clause
would be almost blasphemous. It is virtually a caricature of the most
solemn formula of ancient Hebrew religion. But this was really
degraded when it was used to obtain credence for the lies which men
prophesied out of the deceit of their own heart. Jeremiah's seeming
irreverence was the most forcible way of bringing this home to his
hearers. There are profanations of the most sacred things which can
scarcely be spoken of without an apparent breach of the Third
Commandment. The most awful taking in vain of the name of the Lord God
is not heard among the publicans and sinners, but in pulpits and on
the platforms of religious meetings.

But these prophets and their clients had a special fondness for the
phrase "The burden of Jehovah," and their unctuous use of it most
especially provoked Jeremiah's indignation:--

          "When this people, priest, or prophet shall ask thee,
           What is the burden of Jehovah?
           Then say unto them, Ye are the burden.[117]
           But I will cast you off, _Ne'um Yahwe_.
           If priest or prophet or people shall say, The burden of
                    Jehovah,
           I will punish that man and his house.
           And ye shall say to one another,
           What hath Jehovah answered? and, What hath Jehovah spoken?
           And ye shall no more make mention of the burden of Jehovah:
           For (if ye do) men's words shall become a burden to
                    themselves.

           Thus shall ye inquire of a prophet,
           What hath Jehovah answered thee?
           What hath Jehovah spoken unto thee?
           But if ye say, The burden of Jehovah,
           Thus saith Jehovah: Because ye say this word, The burden of
                    Jehovah,
           When I have sent unto you the command,
           Ye shall not say, The burden of Jehovah,
           Therefore I will assuredly take you up,
           And will cast away from before Me both you and the city which
                    I gave to you and to your fathers.
           I will bring upon you everlasting reproach
           And everlasting shame, that shall not be forgotten."

Jeremiah's insistence and vehemence speak for themselves. Their moral
is obvious, though for the most part unheeded. The most solemn
formulÃ¦, hallowed by ancient and sacred associations, used by inspired
teachers as the vehicle of revealed truths, may be debased till they
become the very legend of Antichrist, blazoned on the _Vexilla Regis
Inferni_. They are like a motto of one of Charles's Paladins flaunted
by his unworthy descendants to give distinction to cruelty and vice.
The Church's line of march is strewn with such dishonoured relics of
her noblest champions. Even our Lord's own words have not escaped.
There is a fashion of discoursing upon "the gospel" which almost
tempts reverent Christians to wish they might never hear that word
again. Neither is this debasing of the moral currency confined to
religious phrases; almost every political and social watchword has
been similarly abused. One of the vilest tyrannies the world has ever
seen--the Reign of Terror--claimed to be an incarnation of "Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity."

Yet the Bible, with that marvellous catholicity which lifts it so high
above the level of all other religious literature, not only records
Jeremiah's prohibition to use the term "Burden," but also tells us that
centuries later Malachi could still speak of "the burden of the word of
Jehovah." A great phrase that has been discredited by misuse may yet
recover itself; the tarnished and dishonoured sword of faith may be
baptised and burnished anew, and flame in the forefront of the holy war.

Jeremiah does not stand alone in his unfavourable estimate of the
professional prophets of Judah; a similar depreciation seems to be
implied by the words of Amos: "I am neither a prophet nor of the sons
of the prophets."[118] One of the unknown authors whose writings have
been included in the Book of Zechariah takes up the teaching of Amos
and Jeremiah and carries it a stage further:--

          "In that day (it is the utterance of Jehovah Sabaoth) I will
                    cut off the names of the idols from the land,
           They shall not be remembered any more;
           Also the prophets and the spirit of uncleanness
           Will I expel from the land.
           When any shall yet prophesy,
           His father and mother that begat him shall say unto him,
           Thou shalt not live, for thou speakest lies in the name of
                    Jehovah:
           And his father and mother that begat him shall thrust him
                    through when he prophesieth.
           In that day every prophet when he prophesieth shall be
                    ashamed of his vision;
           Neither shall any wear a hairy mantle to deceive:
           He shall say, I am no prophet;
           I am a tiller of the ground,
           I was sold for a slave in my youth."[119]

No man with any self-respect would allow his fellows to dub him
prophet; slave was a less humiliating name. No family would endure the
disgrace of having a member who belonged to this despised caste;
parents would rather put their son to death than see him a prophet. To
such extremities may the spirit of time-serving and cant reduce a
national clergy. We are reminded of Latimer's words in his famous
sermon to Convocation in 1536: "All good men in all places accuse your
avarice, your exactions, your tyranny. I commanded you that ye should
feed my sheep, and ye earnestly feed yourselves from day to day,
wallowing in delights and idleness. I commanded you to teach my law;
you teach your own traditions, and seek your own glory."[120]

Over against their fluent and unctuous cant Jeremiah sets the terrible
reality of his Divine message. Compared to this, their sayings are like
chaff to the wheat; nay, this is too tame a figure--Jehovah's word is
like fire, like a hammer that shatters rocks. He says of himself:--

          "My heart within me is broken; all my bones shake:
           I am like a drunken man, like a man whom wine hath overcome,
           Because of Jehovah and His holy words."

Thus we have in chapter xxiii. a full and formal statement of the
controversy between Jeremiah and his brother-prophets. On the one
hand, self-seeking and self-assurance winning popularity by orthodox
phrases, traditional doctrine, and the prophesying of smooth things;
on the other hand, a man to whom the word of the Lord was like a fire
in his bones, who had surrendered prejudice and predilection that he
might himself become a hammer to shatter the Lord's enemies, a man
through whom God wrought so mightily that he himself reeled and
staggered with the blows of which he was the instrument.

The relation of the two parties was not unlike that of St. Paul and
his Corinthian adversaries: the prophet, like the Apostle, spoke "in
demonstration of the Spirit and of power"; he considered "not the word
of them which are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of God is
not in word, but in power." In our next chapter we shall see the
practical working of this antagonism which we have here set forth.

FOOTNOTES:

[101] xxxvii. 2.

[102] 2 Kings xxiv. 18-20.

[103] 2 Chron. xxxvi. 10 makes Zedekiah the brother of Jehoiachin,
possibly using the word in the general sense of "relation." Zedekiah's
age shows that he cannot have been the son of Jehoiakim.

[104] Ezek. xvii. 13, 14.

[105] xxiv.

[106] vii.-xi.

[107] viii.

[108] Gen. xlix. 24, J. from older source. Micah v. 5.

[109] ix.-xi., xiii. 7-9.

[110] Ezek. xxxiv. 2-5.

[111] Zech. x. 3, xi. 5.

[112] xxv. 34-38.

[113] Froude, i. 205.

[114] LXX. See R.V. margin.

[115] Possibly, however, the insertion of this passage in one of the
books may have been the work of an editor, and we cannot be sure that,
in Jeremiah's time, collections entitled Isaiah and Micah both
included this section.

[116] xxvi. 20.

[117] So LXX. and modern editors: see Giesebrecht, _in loco_. R.V.
"What burden!"

[118] vii. 14; but cf. R.V.; "I was," etc.

[119] Zech. xiii. 2-5. Post-exilic, according to most critics
(Driver's _Introduction, in loco_).

[120] Froude, ii. 474.

                               CHAPTER IX

                               _HANANIAH_

                            xxvii., xxviii.

    "Hear now, Hananiah; Jehovah hath not sent thee, but thou makest
    this people to trust in a lie."--JER. xxviii. 15.

The most conspicuous point at issue between Jeremiah and his opponents
was political rather than ecclesiastical. Jeremiah was anxious that
Zedekiah should keep faith with Nebuchadnezzar, and not involve Judah
in useless misery by another hopeless revolt. The prophets preached
the popular doctrine of an imminent Divine intervention to deliver
Judah from her oppressors. They devoted themselves to the easy task of
fanning patriotic enthusiasm, till the Jews were ready for any
enterprise, however reckless.

During the opening years of the new reign, Nebuchadnezzar's recent
capture of Jerusalem and the consequent wholesale deportation were
fresh in men's minds; fear of the Chaldeans together with the
influence of Jeremiah kept the government from any overt act of
rebellion. According to li. 59, the king even paid a visit to Babylon,
to do homage to his suzerain.

It was probably in the fourth year of his reign[121] that the
tributary Syrian states began to prepare for a united revolt against
Babylon. The Assyrian and Chaldean annals constantly mention such
combinations, which were formed and broken up and reformed with as
much ease and variety as patterns in a kaleidoscope. On the present
occasion the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Zidon sent their
ambassadors to Jerusalem to arrange with Zedekiah for concerted
action. But there were more important persons to deal with in that
city than Zedekiah. Doubtless the princes of Judah welcomed the
opportunity for a new revolt. But before the negotiations were very
far advanced, Jeremiah heard what was going on. By Divine command, he
made "bands and bars," _i.e._ yokes, for himself and for the
ambassadors of the allies, or possibly for them to carry home to their
masters. They received their answer, not from Zedekiah, but from the
true King of Israel, Jehovah Himself. They had come to solicit armed
assistance to deliver them from Babylon; they were sent back with
yokes to wear as a symbol of their entire and helpless subjection to
Nebuchadnezzar. This was the word of Jehovah:--

          "The nation and the kingdom that will not put its neck beneath
                    the yoke of the king of Babylon,
           That nation will I visit with sword and famine and pestilence
                    until I consume them by his hand."

The allied kings had been encouraged to revolt by oracles similar to
those uttered by the Jewish prophets in the name of Jehovah; but:--

          "As for you, hearken not to your prophets, diviners, dreams,
                    soothsayers and sorcerers,
           When they speak unto you, saying, Ye shall not serve the king
                    of Babylon.
           They prophesy a lie unto you, to remove you far from your
                    land;
           That I should drive you out, and that you should perish.
           But the nation that shall bring their neck under the yoke of
                    the king of Babylon, and serve him,
           That nation will I maintain in their own land (it is the
                    utterance of Jehovah), and they shall till it and
                    dwell in it."

When he had sent his message to the foreign envoys, Jeremiah addressed
an almost identical admonition to his own king. He bids him submit to
the Chaldean yoke, under the same penalties for disobedience--sword,
pestilence, and famine for himself and his people. He warns him also
against delusive promises of the prophets, especially in the matter of
the sacred vessels.

The popular doctrine of the inviolable sanctity of the Temple had
sustained a severe shock when Nebuchadnezzar carried off the sacred
vessels to Babylon. It was inconceivable that Jehovah would patiently
submit to so gross an indignity. In ancient days the Ark had plagued
its Philistine captors till they were only too thankful to be rid of
it. Later on a graphic narrative in the Book of Daniel told with what
swift vengeance God punished Belshazzar for his profane use of these
very vessels. So now patriotic prophets were convinced that the golden
candlestick, the bowls and chargers of gold and silver, would soon
return in triumph, like the Ark of old; and their return would be the
symbol of the final deliverance of Judah from Babylon. Naturally the
priests above all others would welcome such a prophecy, and would
industriously disseminate it. But Jeremiah "spake to the priests and
all this people, saying, Thus saith Jehovah:--

          "Hearken not unto the words of your prophets, which prophesy
                    unto you,
           Behold, the vessels of the house of Jehovah shall be brought
                    back from Babylon now speedily:
           For they prophesy a lie unto you."

How could Jehovah grant triumphant deliverance to a carnally minded
people who would not understand His Revelation, and did not discern
any essential difference between Him and Moloch and Baal?

          "Hearken not unto them; serve the king of Babylon and live.
           Why should this city become a desolation?"

Possibly, however, even now, the Divine compassion might have spared
Jerusalem the agony and shame of her final siege and captivity. God
would not at once restore what was lost, but He might spare what was
still left. Jeremiah could not endorse the glowing promises of the
prophets, but he would unite with them to intercede for mercy upon the
remnant of Israel.

          "If they are prophets and the word of Jehovah is with them,
           Let them intercede with Jehovah Sabaoth, that the rest of the
                    vessels of the Temple, the Palace, and the City may
                    not go to Babylon."

The God of Israel was yet ready to welcome any beginning of true
repentance. Like the father of the Prodigal Son, He would meet His
people when they were on the way back to Him. Any stirring of filial
penitence would win an instant and gracious response.

We can scarcely suppose that this appeal by Jeremiah to his
brother-prophets was merely sarcastic and denunciatory. Passing
circumstances may have brought Jeremiah into friendly intercourse with
some of his opponents; personal contact may have begotten something
of mutual kindliness; and hence there arose a transient gleam of hope
that reconciliation and co-operation might still be possible. But it
was soon evident that the "patriotic" party would not renounce their
vain dreams; Judah must drink the cup of wrath to the dregs: the
pillars, the sea, the bases, the rest of the vessels left in Jerusalem
must also be carried to Babylon, and remain there till Jehovah should
visit the Jews and bring them back and restore them to their own land.

Thus did Jeremiah meet the attempt of the government to organise a
Syrian revolt against Babylon, and thus did he give the lie to the
promises of Divine blessing made by the prophets. In the face of his
utterances, it was difficult to maintain the popular enthusiasm
necessary to a successful revolt. In order to neutralise, if possible,
the impression made by Jeremiah, the government put forward one of
their prophetic supporters to deliver a counter-blast. The place and
the occasion were similar to those chosen by Jeremiah for his own
address to the people and for Baruch's reading of the roll--the court
of the Temple where the priests and "all the people" were assembled.
Jeremiah himself was there. Possibly it was a feast-day. The incident
came to be regarded as of special importance, and a distinct heading
is attached to it, specifying its exact date, "in the same year"--as
the incidents of the previous chapter--"in the beginning of the reign
of Zedekiah, in the fourth year, in the fifth month."

On such an occasion, Jeremiah's opponents would select as their
representative some striking personality, a man of high reputation for
ability and personal character. Such a man, apparently, they found in
Hananiah ben Azzur of Gibeon. Let us consider for a moment this
mouthpiece and champion of a great political and ecclesiastical party,
we might almost say of a National Government and a National Church. He
is never mentioned except in chapter xxviii., but what we read here is
sufficiently characteristic, and receives much light from the other
literature of the period. As Gibeon is assigned to the priests in
Joshua xxi. 17, it has been conjectured that, like Jeremiah himself,
Hananiah was a priest. The special stress laid on the sacred vessels
would be in accordance with this theory.

In our last chapter we expounded Jeremiah's description of his
prophetic contemporaries, as self-important and time-serving, guilty
of plagiarism and cant. Now from this dim, inarticulate crowd of
professional prophets, an individual steps for a moment into the light
of history and speaks with clearness and emphasis. Let us gaze at him,
and hear what he has to say.

If we could have been present at this scene immediately after a
careful study of chapter xxvii. even the appearance of Hananiah would
have caused us a shock of surprise--such as is sometimes experienced
by a devout student of Protestant literature on being introduced to a
live Jesuit, or by some budding secularist when he first makes the
personal acquaintance of a curate. We might possibly have discerned
something commonplace, some lack of depth and force in the man whose
faith was merely conventional; but we should have expected to read
"liar and hypocrite" in every line of his countenance, and we should
have seen nothing of the sort. Conscious of the enthusiastic support
of his fellow-countrymen and especially of his own order, charged--as
he believed--with a message of promise for Jerusalem, Hananiah's face
and bearing, as he came forward to address his sympathetic audience,
betrayed nothing unworthy of the high calling of a prophet. His words
had the true prophetic ring, he spoke with assured authority:--

          "Thus saith Jehovah Sabaoth, the God of Israel,
           I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon."

His special object was to remove the unfavourable impression caused by
Jeremiah's contradiction of the promise concerning the sacred vessels.
Like Jeremiah, he meets this denial in the strongest and most
convincing fashion. He does not argue--he reiterates the promise in a
more definite form and with more emphatic asseveration. Like Jonah at
Nineveh, he ventures to fix an exact date in the immediate future for
the fulfilment of the prophecy. "Yet forty days," said Jonah, but the
next day he had to swallow his own words; and Hananiah's prophetic
chronology met with no better fate:--

"Within two full years will I bring again to this place all the
vessels of the Temple, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away."

The full significance of this promise is shown by the further
addition:--

"And I will bring again to this place the king of Judah, Jeconiah ben
Jehoiakim, and all the captives of Judah that went to Babylon (it is
the utterance of Jehovah); for I will break the yoke of the king of
Babylon."

This bold challenge was promptly met:--

"The prophet Jeremiah said unto the prophet Hananiah before the
priests and all the people that stood in the Temple." Not "the true
prophet" and "the false prophet," not "the man of God" and "the
impostor," but simply "the prophet Jeremiah" and "the prophet
Hananiah." The audience discerned no obvious difference of status or
authority between the two--if anything the advantage lay with
Hananiah; they watched the scene as a modern churchman might regard a
discussion between ritualistic and evangelical bishops at a Church
Congress, only Hananiah was their ideal of a "good churchman." The
true parallel is not debates between atheists and the Christian
Evidence Society, or between missionaries and Brahmins, but
controversies like those between Arius and Athanasius, Jerome and
Rufinus, Cyril and Chrysostom.

These prophets, however, display a courtesy and self-restraint that
have, for the most part, been absent from Christian polemics.

"Jeremiah the prophet said, Amen: may Jehovah bring it to pass; may He
establish the words of thy prophecy, by bringing back again from Babylon
unto this place both the vessels of the Temple and all the captives."

With that entire sincerity which is the most consummate tact, Jeremiah
avows his sympathy with his opponents' patriotic aspirations, and
recognises that they were worthy of Hebrew prophets. But patriotic
aspirations were not a sufficient reason for claiming Divine authority
for a cheap optimism. Jeremiah's reflection upon the past had led him to
an entirely opposite philosophy of history. Behind Hananiah's words lay
the claim that the religious traditions of Israel and the teaching of
former prophets guaranteed the inviolability of the Temple and the Holy
City. Jeremiah appealed to their authority for his message of doom:--

"The ancient prophets who were our predecessors prophesied war and
calamity and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms."

It was almost a mark of the true prophet that he should be the herald
of disaster. The prophetical books of the Old Testament Canon fully
confirm this startling and unwelcome statement. Their main burden is
the ruin and misery that await Israel and its neighbours. The
presumption therefore was in favour of the prophet of evil, and
against the prophet of good. Jeremiah does not, of course, deny that
there had been, and might yet be, prophets of good. Indeed every
prophet, he himself included, announced some Divine promise, but:--

"The prophet which prophesieth of peace shall be known as truly sent
of Jehovah when his prophecy is fulfilled."

It seemed a fair reply to Hananiah's challenge. His prophecy of the
return of the sacred vessels and the exiles within two years was
intended to encourage Judah and its allies to persist in their revolt.
They would be at once victorious, and recover all and more than all
which they had lost. Under such circumstances Jeremiah's criterion of
"prophecies of peace" was eminently practical. "You are promised these
blessings within two years: very well, do not run the terrible risks
of a rebellion; keep quiet and see if the two years bring the
fulfilment of this prophecy--it is not long to wait." Hananiah might
fairly have replied that this fulfilment depended on Judah's faith and
loyalty to the Divine promise; and their faith and loyalty would be
best shown by rebelling against their oppressors. Jehovah promised
Canaan to the Hebrews of the Exodus, but their carcasses mouldered in
the desert because they had not courage enough to attack formidable
enemies. "Let us not," Hananiah might have said, "imitate their
cowardice, and thus share alike their unbelief and its penalty."

Neither Jeremiah's premises nor his conclusions would commend his
words to the audience, and he probably weakened his position by
leaving the high ground of authority and descending to argument.
Hananiah at any rate did not follow his example: he adheres to his
former method, and reiterates with renewed emphasis the promise which
his adversary had contradicted. Following Jeremiah in his use of the
parable in action, so common with Hebrew prophets, he turned the
symbol of the yoke against its author. As Zedekiah ben Chenaanah made
him horns of iron and prophesied to Ahab and Jehoshaphat, "Thus saith
Jehovah, With these shalt thou push the Syrians until thou have
consumed them,"[122] so now Hananiah took the yoke off Jeremiah's neck
and broke it before the assembled people and said:--

"Thus saith Jehovah, Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar
king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within two full years."

Naturally the promise is "for all nations"--not for Judah only, but
for the other allies.

"And the prophet Jeremiah went his way." For the moment Hananiah had
triumphed; he had had the last word, and Jeremiah was silenced. A public
debate before a partisan audience was not likely to issue in victory for
the truth. The situation may have even shaken his faith in himself and
his message; he may have been staggered for a moment by Hananiah's
apparent earnestness and conviction. He could not but remember that the
gloomy predictions of Isaiah's earlier ministry had been followed by the
glorious deliverance from Sennacherib. Possibly some similar sequel was
to follow his own denunciations. He betook himself anew to fellowship
with God, and awaited a fresh mandate from Jehovah.

"Then the word of Jehovah came unto Jeremiah, ... Go and tell
Hananiah: Thou hast broken wooden yokes; thou shalt make iron yokes in
their stead. For thus saith Jehovah Sabaoth, the God of Israel: I have
put a yoke of iron upon the necks of all these nations, that they may
serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon."[123]

We are not told how long Jeremiah had to wait for this new message, or
under what circumstances it was delivered to Hananiah. Its symbolism
is obvious. When Jeremiah sent the yokes to the ambassadors of the
allies and exhorted Zedekiah to bring his neck under the yoke of
Nebuchadnezzar, they were required to accept the comparatively
tolerable servitude of tributaries. Their impatience of this minor
evil would expose them to the iron yoke of ruin and captivity.

Thus the prophet of evil received new Divine assurance of the abiding
truth of his message and of the reality of his own inspiration. The
same revelation convinced him that his opponent was either an impostor
or woefully deluded:--

"Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto the prophet Hananiah, Hear now,
Hananiah; Jehovah hath not sent thee, but thou makest this people to
trust in a lie. Therefore thus saith Jehovah: I will cast thee away
from on the face of the earth; this year thou shalt die, because thou
hast preached rebellion against Jehovah."

By a judgment not unmixed with mercy, Hananiah was not left to be
convicted of error or imposture, when the "two full years" should have
elapsed, and his glowing promises be seen to utterly fail. He also was
"taken away from the evil to come."

"So Hananiah the prophet died in the same year in the seventh
month"--_i.e._ about two months after this incident. Such personal
judgments were most frequent in the case of kings, but were not
confined to them. Isaiah[124] left on record prophecies concerning the
appointment to the treasurership of Shebna and Eliakim; and elsewhere
Jeremiah himself pronounces the doom of Pashhur ben Immer, the
governor of the Temple; but the conclusion of this incident reminds us
most forcibly of the speedy execution of the apostolic sentence upon
Ananias and Sapphira.

The subjects of this and the preceding chapter raise some of the most
important questions as to authority in religion. On the one hand, on
the subjective side, how may a man be assured of the truth of his own
religious convictions; on the other hand, on the objective side, how
is the hearer to decide between conflicting claims on his faith and
obedience?

The former question is raised as to the personal convictions of the
two prophets. We have ventured to assume that, however erring and
culpable Hananiah may have been, he yet had an honest faith in his
own inspiration and in the truth of his own prophecies. The conscious
impostor, unhappily, is not unknown either in ancient or modern
Churches; but we should not look for edification from the study of
this branch of morbid spiritual pathology. There were doubtless Jewish
counterparts to "Mr. Sludge the Medium" and to the more subtle and
plausible "Bishop Blougram"; but Hananiah was of a different type. The
evident respect felt for him by the people, Jeremiah's almost
deferential courtesy and temporary hesitation as to his rival's Divine
mission, do not suggest deliberate hypocrisy. Hananiah's "lie" was a
falsehood in fact but not in intention. The Divine message "Jehovah
hath not sent thee" was felt by Jeremiah to be no mere exposure of
what Hananiah had known all along, but to be a revelation to his
adversary as well as to himself.

The sweeping condemnation of the prophets in chapter xxiii. does not
exclude the possibility of Hananiah's honesty, any more than our
Lord's denunciation of the Pharisees as "devourers of widows' houses"
necessarily includes Gamaliel. In critical times, upright, earnest men
do not always espouse what subsequent ages hold to have been the cause
of truth. Sir Thomas More and Erasmus remained in the communion which
Luther renounced: Hampden and Falkland found themselves in opposite
camps. If such men erred in their choice between right and wrong, we
may often feel anxious as to our own decisions. When we find ourselves
in opposition to earnest and devoted men, we may well pause to
consider which is Jeremiah and which Hananiah.

The point at issue between these two prophets was exceedingly simple
and practical--whether Jehovah approved of the proposed revolt and
would reward it with success. Theological questions were only
indirectly and remotely involved. Yet, in face of his opponent's
persistent asseverations, Jeremiah--perhaps the greatest of the
prophets--went his way in silence to obtain fresh Divine confirmation
of his message. And the man who hesitated was right.

Two lessons immediately follow, one as to practice, the other as to
principle. It often happens that earnest servants of God find
themselves at variance, not on simple practical questions, but on the
history and criticism of the remote past, or on abstruse points of
transcendental theology. Before any one ventures to denounce his
adversary as a teacher of deadly error, let him, like Jeremiah, seek,
in humble and prayerful submission to the Holy Spirit, a Divine
mandate for such denunciation.

But again Jeremiah was willing to reconsider his position, not merely
because he himself might have been mistaken, but because altered
circumstances might have opened the way for a change in God's
dealings. It was a bare possibility, but we have seen elsewhere that
Jeremiah represents God as willing to make a gracious response to the
first movement of compunction. Prophecy was the declaration of His
will, and that will was not arbitrary, but at every moment and at
every point exactly adapted to conditions with which it had to deal.
Its principles were unchangeable and eternal; but prophecy was chiefly
an application of these principles to existing circumstances. The true
prophet always realised that his words were for men as they were when
he addressed them. Any moment might bring a change which would
abrogate or modify the old teaching, and require and receive a new
message. Like Jonah, he might have to proclaim ruin one day and
deliverance the next. A physician, even after the most careful
diagnosis, may have to recognise unsuspected symptoms which lead him
to cancel his prescription and write a new one. The sickening and
healing of the soul involve changes equally unexpected. The Bible does
not teach that inspiration, any more than science, has only one
treatment for each and every spiritual condition and contingency. The
true prophet's message is always a word in season.

We turn next to the objective question: How is the hearer to decide
between conflicting claims on his faith and obedience? We say the right
was with Jeremiah; but how were the Jews to know that? They were
addressed by two prophets, or, as we might say, two accredited
ecclesiastics of the national Church; each with apparent earnestness and
sincerity claimed to speak in the name of Jehovah and of the ancient
faith of Israel, and each flatly contradicted the other on an immediate
practical question, on which hung their individual fortunes and the
destinies of their country. What were the Jews to do? Which were they to
believe? It is the standing difficulty of all appeals to external
authority. You inquire of this supposed divine oracle and there issues
from it a babel of discordant voices, and each demands that you shall
unhesitatingly submit to its dictates on peril of eternal damnation; and
some have the audacity to claim obedience, because their teaching is
"_quod semper_, _quod ubique_, _quod ab omnibus_."

One simple and practical test is indeed suggested--the prophet of evil
is more likely to be truly inspired than the prophet of good; but
Jeremiah naturally does not claim that this is an invariable test.
Nor can he have meant that you can always believe prophecies of evil
without any hesitation, but that you are to put no faith in promises
until they are fulfilled. Yet it is not difficult to discern the truth
underlying Jeremiah's words. The prophet whose words are unpalatable
to his hearers is more likely to have a true inspiration than the man
who kindles their fancy with glowing pictures of an imminent
millennium. The divine message to a congregation of country squires is
more likely to be an exhortation to be just to their tenants than a
sermon on the duty of the labourer to his betters. A true prophet
addressing an audience of working men would perhaps deal with the
abuses of trades unions rather than with the sins of capitalists.

But this principle, which is necessarily of limited application, does
not go far to solve the great question of authority in religion, on
which Jeremiah gives us no further help.

There is, however, one obvious moral. No system of external authority,
whatever pains may be taken to secure authentic legitimacy, can
altogether release the individual from the responsibility of private
judgment. Unreserved faith in the idea of a Catholic Church is quite
consistent with much hesitation between the Anglican, Roman, and Greek
communions; and the most devoted Catholic may be called upon to choose
between rival anti-popes.

Ultimately the inspired teacher is only discerned by the inspired
hearer; it is the answer of the conscience that authenticates the
divine message.

FOOTNOTES:

[121] The close connection between xxvii. and xxviii. shows that the
date in xxviii. 1, "the fourth year of Zedekiah," covers both
chapters. "Jehoiakim" in xxvii. 1 is a misreading for "Zedekiah": see
R.V. margin.

[122] 1 Kings xxii. 11.

[123] The rest of this verse has apparently been inserted from xxvii.
6 by a scribe. It is omitted by the LXX.

[124] xxii. 15-25.

                               CHAPTER X

                    _CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE EXILES_

                                 xxix.

    "Jehovah make thee like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of
    Babylon roasted in the fire."--JER. xxix. 22.

Nothing further is said about the proposed revolt, so that Jeremiah's
vigorous protest seems to have been successful. In any case, unless
irrevocable steps had been taken, the enterprise could hardly have
survived the death of its advocate, Hananiah. Accordingly Zedekiah
sent an embassy to Babylon, charged doubtless with plausible
explanations and profuse professions of loyalty and devotion. The
envoys were Elasah ben Shaphan and Gemariah ben Hilkiah. Shaphan and
Hilkiah were almost certainly the scribe and high priest who
discovered Deuteronomy in the eighteenth year of Josiah, and Elasah
was the brother of Ahikam ben Shaphan, who protected Jeremiah in the
fourth year of Jehoiakim, and of Gemariah ben Shaphan, in whose
chamber Baruch read the roll, and who protested against its
destruction. Probably Elasah and Gemariah were adherents of Jeremiah,
and the fact of the embassy, as well as the choice of ambassadors,
suggests that, for the moment, Zedekiah was acting under the influence
of the prophet. Jeremiah took the opportunity of sending a letter to
the exiles at Babylon. Hananiah had his allies in Chaldea: Ahab ben
Kolaiah, Zedekiah ben Maaseiah, and Shemaiah the Nehelamite, with
other prophets, diviners, and dreamers, had imitated their brethren in
Judah; they had prophesied without being sent and had caused the
people to believe a lie. We are not expressly told what they
prophesied, but the narrative takes for granted that they, like
Hananiah, promised the exiles a speedy return to their native land.
Such teaching naturally met with much acceptance, the people
congratulating themselves because, as they supposed, "Jehovah hath
raised us up prophets in Babylon." The presence of prophets among them
was received as a welcome proof that Jehovah had not deserted His
people in their house of bondage.

Thus when Jeremiah had confounded his opponents in Jerusalem he had
still to deal with their friends in Babylon. Here again the issue was
one of immediate practical importance. In Chaldea as at Jerusalem the
prediction that the exiles would immediately return was intended to
kindle the proposed revolt. The Jews at Babylon were virtually warned to
hold themselves in readiness to take advantage of any success of the
Syrian rebels, and, if opportunity offered, to render them assistance.
In those days information travelled slowly, and there was some danger
lest the captives should be betrayed into acts of disloyalty, even after
the Jewish government had given up any present intention of revolting
against Nebuchadnezzar. Such disloyalty might have involved their entire
destruction. Both Zedekiah and Jeremiah would be anxious to inform them
at once that they must refrain from any plots against their Chaldean
masters. Moreover the prospect of an immediate return had very much the
same effect upon these Jews as the expectation of Christ's Second Coming
had upon the primitive Church at Thessalonica. It made them restless and
disorderly. They could not settle to any regular work, but became
busybodies--wasting their time over the glowing promises of their
popular preachers, and whispering to one another wild rumours of
successful revolts in Syria; or were even more dangerously occupied in
planning conspiracies against their conquerors.

Jeremiah's letter sought to bring about a better state of mind. It is
addressed to the elders, priests, prophets, and people of the
Captivity. The enumeration reminds us how thoroughly the exiled
community reproduced the society of the ancient Jewish state--there
was already a miniature Judah in Chaldea, the first of those Israels
of the Dispersion which have since covered the face of the earth.

This is Jehovah's message by His prophet:--

          "Build houses and dwell in them;
           Plant gardens and eat the fruit thereof;
           Marry and beget sons and daughters;
           Marry your sons and daughters,
           That they may bear sons and daughters,
           That ye may multiply there and not grow few.
           Seek the peace of the city whither I have sent you into
                    captivity:
           Pray for it unto Jehovah;
           For in its peace, ye shall have peace."

There was to be no immediate return; their captivity would last long
enough to make it worth their while to build houses and plant gardens.
For the present they were to regard Babylon as their home. The
prospect of restoration to Judah was too distant to make any practical
difference to their conduct of ordinary business. The concluding
command to "seek the peace of Babylon" is a distinct warning against
engaging in plots, which could only ruin the conspirators. There is an
interesting difference between these exhortations and those addressed
by Paul to his converts in the first century. He never counsels them
to marry, but rather recommends celibacy as more expedient for the
present necessity. Apparently life was more anxious and harassed for
the early Christians than for the Jews in Babylon. The return to
Canaan was to these exiles what the millennium and the Second Advent
were to the primitive Church. Jeremiah having bidden his
fellow-countrymen not to be agitated by supposing that this
much-longed event might come at any moment, fortifies their faith and
patience by a promise that it should not be delayed indefinitely.

          "When ye have fulfilled seventy years in Babylon I will visit
                    you,
           And will perform for you My gracious promise to bring you
                    back to this place."[125]

Seventy is obviously a round number. Moreover the constant use of
seven and its multiples in sacred symbolism forbids us to understand
the prophecy as an exact chronological statement.

We should adequately express the prophet's meaning by translating "in
about two generations." We need not waste time and trouble in
discovering or inventing two dates exactly separated by seventy years,
one of which will serve for the beginning and the other for the end of
the Captivity. The interval between the destruction of Jerusalem and the
Return was fifty years (B.C. 586-536), but as our passage refers more
immediately to the prospects of those already in exile, we should obtain
an interval of sixty-five years from the deportation of Jehoiachin and
his companions in B.C. 601. But there can be no question of
approximation, however close. Either the "seventy years" merely stands
for a comparatively long period, or it is exact. We do not save the
inspiration of a date by showing that it is only five years wrong, and
not twenty. For an inspired date must be absolutely accurate; a mistake
of a second in such a case would be as fatal as a mistake of a century.

Israel's hope is guaranteed by God's self-knowledge of His gracious
counsel:--

          "I know the purposes which I purpose concerning you, is the
                    utterance of Jehovah,
           Purposes of peace and not of evil, to give you hope for the
                    days to come."

In the former clause "I" is emphatic in both places, and the phrase is
parallel to the familiar formula "by Myself have I sworn, saith
Jehovah." The future of Israel was guaranteed by the divine
consistency. Jehovah, to use a colloquial phrase, knew His own mind.
His everlasting purpose for the Chosen People could not be set aside.
"Did God cast off His people? God forbid."

Yet this persistent purpose is not fulfilled without reference to
character and conduct:--

          "Ye shall call upon Me, and come and pray unto Me,
             And I will hearken unto you.
           Ye shall seek Me, and find Me,
             Because ye seek Me with all your heart.
           I will be found of you--it is the utterance of Jehovah.

           I will bring back your captivity, and will gather you from
                    all nations and places whither I have scattered
                    you--it is the utterance of Jehovah.
           I will bring you back to this place whence I sent you away to
                    captivity."[126]

As in the previous chapter, Jeremiah concludes with a personal
judgment upon those prophets who had been so acceptable to the exiles.
If verse 23 is to be understood literally, Ahab and Zedekiah had not
only spoken without authority in the name of Jehovah, but had also
been guilty of gross immorality. Their punishment was to be more
terrible than that of Hananiah. They had incited the exiles to revolt
by predicting the imminent ruin of Nebuchadnezzar. Possibly the Jewish
king proposed to make his own peace by betraying his agents, after the
manner of our own Elizabeth and other sovereigns.

They were to be given over to the terrible vengeance which a Chaldean
king would naturally take on such offenders, and would be publicly
roasted alive, so that the malice of him who desired to curse his
enemy might find vent in such words as:--

"Jehovah make thee like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon
roasted alive."

We are not told whether this prophecy was fulfilled, but it is by no
means unlikely. The Assyrian king Assurbanipal says, in one of his
inscriptions concerning a viceroy of Babylon who had revolted, that
Assur and the other gods "in the fierce burning fire they threw him
and destroyed his life"--possibly through the agency of Assurbanipal's
servants.[127] One of the seven brethren who were tortured to death in
the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes is said to have been "fried in
the pan."[128] Christian hagiology commemorates St. Lawrence and many
other martyrs, who suffered similar torments. Such punishments
remained part of criminal procedure until a comparatively recent date;
they are still sometimes inflicted by lynch law in the United States,