Jeremiah

JEREMIAH, the son of Hilkiah, belonging to the priestly family of Anathoth, a few miles to the north-west of Jerusalem, was the last of the great pre-exilic prophets of Israel.

His Life and Times.

The life of Jeremiah falls in one of the most striking and critical periods in the history of the ancient world. His ministry began in 626, the year of the death of Asshur bani-pal, the last of the great kings of Assyria, at a time when all western Asia was being laid desolate by the inroads of hordes of northern barbarians known to the Greeks as Scythians or Cim merians and to the Babylonians as Umman-manda. He witnessed the complete overthrow of Assyria culminating in the destruction of Nineveh in 612, followed by the decisive defeat of Egypt's last attempt at world empire in the battle of Carchemish (605). Star tling events took place in his own land also. In his youth (639) a king was assassinated; in 621 occurred the great reform of Josiah, who met a tragic end at Megiddo in 6o8. Judah became a vassal in turn of Egypt and of Babylon, and, rebelling against the latter in 597, suffered invasion, siege, and the deportation of her young king, Jehoiachin, and the best of her people. Jehoiachin's uncle and successor, Zedekiah, after years of vacillation and weakness, yielded to the machinations of his corrupt nobility and to the intrigues of Egypt, and the Jewish kingdom perished in 585 with the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple of Solomon.

Jeremiah's call came in 626, when Judah was suffering from Scythian raids and even Jerusalem was threatened. His attitude towards the reforms of Josiah is a matter of dispute, some scholars holding that he regarded the law-book on which it was based as a forgery (cf. Jer. viii. 8), and that his uncompromising hos tility to sacrifice of any kind (cf. Jer. vii. 21) made it impossible for him to approve of a movement which permitted its continu ance. On the other hand these views may have been later develop ments, and Jer. xi. 1-14 suggests naturally that he approved Josiah's action, while it is easy to understand the hostility of his own family (Jer. xi. 18-2o, xii. 6) if he was concerned in a move ment which would deprive the priests of Anathoth of their an cestral rights. We hear little more of Jeremiah during the rest of the reign of Josiah, for whom the prophet had a deep respect, but the reaction under Jehoiakim called for his condemnation, and his boldness endangered his life (Jer. vii. 1 sqq., xxvi.). He fully realized the significance of the battle of Carchemish, and took a step which, as far as we know, was unprecedented in Israelite prophecy. He secured the services of a professional writer, Baruch by name, to whom he dictated earlier prophecies which were read in public on a festal occasion. Jehoiakim's attempt to suppress this document led only to its being rewritten (Jer. xxxvi.). In Zedekiah's reign he continued his protests against the moral and religious degradation of Israel, and during the final siege of Jerusalem took the unpopular course of recommending surrender to the Chaldeans. Called to Anathoth on family busi ness during an interval of the siege, he was arrested and thrown into prison, where he continued to deliver the same message. An attempt was made to starve him to death in an old well, but he was rescued by an Ethiopian, Ebedmelech by name, and survived the fall of the city. He was allowed by the Chaldeans to make his home at Mizpah with Gedaliah, but, on the assassination of that honourable and chivalrous governor, Jeremiah was taken down to Egypt by the panic-stricken survivors. The last we hear of him is a final denunciation of his fellow-countrymen for adopt ing the worship of the Queen of Heaven.

The Man and His Message.—Few characters in history have stronger claims on our affection and sympathy than Jeremiah. Nervous, tender, shy, with a deep-rooted love of nature and of man, his temperament demanded a life of quiet domestic obscu rity. His calling and his devotion to his God demanded that he should live a life of lonely publicity, always on the unpopular side, always confronted with the disaster which in the end over whelmed his country, always conscious of sharing in responsibility for evils which he was powerless to avert or postpone. His was a

double passion, a love of his people and a love of his God : the longing of his heart was to see them validly wedded to one an other ; and the tragedy of his life lay in the steady drift of Israel away from Yahweh, till the last blow fell in Egypt, and he had to pronounce their association at an end—they were finally divorced (Jer. xliv. 26-29). At the outset of his career he had received a promise of support in the face of man, and, as far as we know, he never blenched before priest or king or people. But in facing his God he stood alone, often rebelling, sometimes even doubting the good faith of a divine Master, who, as popular theology held, might entrap His very servants to their utter ruin (cf. Jer. xii. 1-6, xv. 15-21, xx. 7-11).

Yet though these experiences brought Jeremiah an agony par alleled in Hebrew literature only by that of Job, it was thence that the great significance of his life and work sprang. Accepting the doctrines and attitude of his great predecessors, especially Hosea, he saw that the union between God and man must be spiritual, not material, and he expressed this eternal truth in his of the New Covenant (Jer. xxxi. 31-34). And his rela tions with Yahweh were a new phenomenon in the history of re ligion. Living in the midst of a community which nominally wor shipped the God who had inspired him, he yet stood apart from it in his spiritual life. To him his religion was essentially per sonal, not communal, and, as far as we know, he was the first to stand alone with God; he was the Father of all the Saints.

The Book of Jeremiah.—This book exhibits with exceptional clearness the three types of material which were at the disposal of the compilers of our Biblical prophetic literature, for it con tains (i.) poetry (mainly actual oracles delivered by the prophet), (ii.) prose written in the first person, giving an account of various utterances of the prophet, sometimes with reference to the occa sions on which they were delivered, and (iii.) prose written in the third person, giving an account mainly of events in the life of the prophet. It is usual to attribute passages of the last type to Baruch, the scribe, who acted as secretary to Jeremiah. It is clear that material of type (i.) was already arranged in small collections when it came into the hands of the compiler, who selected suitable sections from material of type (ii.) (or, when necessary, type [iii.]) to form introductions to the poetic col lections. Thus i. 1-14 (ii.) forms an introduction, not only to the whole book, but also to the collection ii. i5–iii. 5; iii. 6-18 (ii.) forms an introduction to the collection of oracular poetry con tained in iii. 19–vi. 3o. It is noticeable that the oracular collec tions grow shorter as the book proceeds, and that the compiler was forced to use passages of type (iii.) for his "introductions" from ch. 19 onwards. Some modern scholars, notably Daihm and Mowinckel, believe that many of the (ii.) passages are the work of imaginative later scribes, who wished to claim the authority of the prophet for their own theological views, but the originality or otherwise of the sections does not affect their position in the history and structure of the book.

The Greek version (LXX.), representing the text current among Egyptian Jews, frequently differs very widely from the traditional Hebrew text, which is of Palestinian (or Babylonian?) origin. The best illustration of the divergence is to be found in the position of a large collection of oracles against foreign nations. In the common Hebrew text, followed by modern vernacular transla tions, this collection is placed near the end of the book, occupy ing chapters xliv.–li. ; in the LXX. it appears between vv. 13 and 15 of ch. xxv. in our familiar arrangement. (T. H. R.)