How mcn like Ussher, Dathe, Michaelis, De Wette, could even for one moment have defended so obvious a mistake, we are utterly unable to comprehend. The wish to find all documents mentioned in Scripture in our canon ought not to have been father to such a monstrosity. True, it is given up now by the foremost of its former de fenders ; and only a few minor writers still hold that although our book does not exactly seem to befit the occasion of Josiah's death, yet it was written at that time as a prophecy on the future fate of Jerusalem—' quoa' azinime firobabile est,' we can only add with Calvin (Prol. aa' Lanz.) We may be brief on the question of authorship, which, in fact, has been touched upon already in some degree in the foregoing. It is by common consent assig,ned to Jeremiah the prophet. The Talmud, embodying the earliest traditions, has : Jeremiah wrote his Book, the Book of Kings, and the Lamentations' (Baba .b'athra is, a). t Follow ing these same traditions, the LXX. write, And it came to pass, after Israel was led captive and Jerusalem was destroyed, Jeremiah z-at weeping and lamented the lamentation over Jerusalem, and said.' The Vulg. has, And it came to pass that after Israel was led into exile and Jeru salem was deserted, the Prophet Jeremiah sat weeping, and lamented his lamentation on Jeru salem, and sighing with a bitter heart and sorely crying said:. Echa Rabathi uses in its intro duction, as a kind of refrain, triz words, 'And when they sinned they were driven into exile, and when they were driven into exile Jeremiah began to lament over them The Targum to Lamentations begins, Said Jeremiah the prophet and high-priest.' The Midrash, by a fanciful inter pretation of Isaiah x. 3o, even finds a reference to Jeremiah in that passage, which it explains in this wise : " Lift up thy voice '—that is, in the word of the Torah, in the houses of solemn assembly—` thou daughter of waves '—of those thrown about in the world like waves in the sea ;` listen '—to the Law, to the words of the Torah, to the words of pro phecy, to piety and virtuous deeds ; or Laisha,' the lion Nebuchadnezzar will come over thee ; thou poor '—in good works, poor ' in prophecy, poor ' in righteousness ; and if thou wilt not hear—` Anatotlz :' he from Anatoth—Jeremiah— will come over thee, and will prophecy against thee ; and when the punishment did come, he la mented over them 7174t-2' (Introd. to Echa Rabb.) Besides this outer evidence, the inner evidence for Jeremiah's authorship is so striking that, for aught we know, it may bave given rise to those very traditions. The elegies are written in his time by one who has lived through all the misery which they describe. The personal references to Jere miah's own fate, such as we know it from his book of prophecies and kings, are not wanting.t What is more, his poetical and prophetical individuality pervades the whole so unmistakeably, that it seems hardly necessary to refer to the numerous parallel passages, adduced by Eichhorn, Berth°1dt, Keil, De \Vette, Jahn, Bleck, and others. If contents, spirit, manner, individuality, are any g-uarantee at all, then Jeremiah is the author, and sole author of the book before us. He even seems to refer to his other book (cf. ii. ; Jer. xiv. 13). But were any further proof needed, we would certainly find it in the very diction and phraseology common to both works, and peculiar to them alone.* Indeed, not one investigator in ancient or modern times has doubted the fact upon which tradition speaks with such rare unanimity. Except Hardt, who, for reasons of his own, ascribed the five different elegies to Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and king Jehonja respectively, and, in our own time, Conz and Thenius. The latter holds that only Lam. ii. and iv. belong to Jeremiah (the former written in Palestine, the latter in Eg-ypt), the three others, howeyer, to have been written by Jere miah's contemporaries and disciples. His reasons for this assumption are, that Jeremiah could not have treated the same subject five times ; that 2 and 4 are different from 1, 3, 5, which are less worthy of Jeremiah's pen ; that the three latter do not quite fit Jeremiah's own circumstances; and, finally, because there is a difference in the alpha betical structure (see below) of 1, and of 2-4. These objections to Jeremiah's exclusive authorship scem about as tenable as Hardt's Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and consorts. The first two points are not worth consideration ; the third is answered by the simple proposition that they are poems, and not a historical narrative which we have before us, and that therefore a certain license must be given to the poet in the use of broad similes in his gene ralisings, and in his putting himself sometimes in the place of the whole people as its spokesman and chief mourner. And if, finally, the structure differs in from 2 and 4, then it may as well be asked why 3, which is not supposed to be written by Jeremiah, is like and 4, which are allowed to be written by him ? If somebody has imitated the structure in 3, why has it not been also imi tated in r and 5 ? A further refutation of this attempt to take away two-fifths of Jerem iah's author ship—supported by no investigator as we said— has been given by Ewald, and We have indeed only mentioned it for the sake of completeness.— It has likewise been urged that the book is found placed among the Kethubim and not among the prophets, and that it bears no name ; that con sequently there seems to have been a doubt in the minds of the redactors of the Canon as to the authorship, But the fact is that this Book of Lamentations, which nowhere pretends to be a book of prophecy, which nowhere predicts events which will happen, but describes those which have happened—in words, it is true, well worthy of the inspired ' writer,*— and nowhere speaks in the name, or reports a message of, God, belongs by rights to the Hagiographa. That, further, the redactors of the Canon did not think fit to inscribe the book with Jeremiah's name, proves less than nothing. There is not the remotest doubt about
the unanimous belief before, during, and after their time, in Jeremiah's authorship (cf., e.g., quite apart from the express statements, the ingenious IIaggadistic parallels between Isaiah's verses of comfort and Jeremiah's verses of woe, alphabeti cally arrayed in Echa Rabbathi and elsewhere); and it might as well be called in question whether they believed in Moses' authorship of the Penta teuch, since they did not state this as their opinion expressly at the beginning of the book.
Whether Jeremiah himself or Baruch (as Bun sen, after Rashi, assumes) wrote out the different chapters, and whether Jeremiah, or his disciples (Ewald), finished it in Palestine or Egypt, are questions on which we cannot enlarge here, nor will it be of very much consequence for Biblical criticism, if, as probably will be the case, they remain unsettled for ever.
Respecting the outward form of these elegies, as far as style is concerned, we can only endorse the enthusiastic encomiums of the Lowths, Eich horns, Herders. There seems in the whole realm of human mourning put into words, from the most tragic lament of classical Hellas to Ossian's wail and the Nibelungen-Klage, hardly anything to be compared in depth of heartrending pathos, and in grandeur and nobleness of language to these sacred elegies—though certainly our transfations, however faithful, do not quite convey this idea. Neither the symphonic character of the whole, nor the varying metres of the single parts, nor even that wonderful tenderness imparted to the whole by the constant recurrence of the feminine suffixes and ,termina tions of verbs and adjectives, the rl , , 4.", etc., which, with a melancholy charm of their own, constantly remind us that it is a woman, the daughter of Zion herself, whose plaintive song resounds through the stilly night, can be imagined by the reader of any European version whatsoever. The more genuine and sublime, however, the poetry, the more surprising it would seem at first sight that the four first elegies should be arranged alphabetically' — that is, that i., ii., iv. should consist of twenty-two verses, each beginning with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in alphabetical order, while has sixty-six verses, commencing with each letter of the alphabet re peated three times.t It is a grave error, how ever, for this reason alone, to call the time in which they were composed barbarous, or, at all events, a time of poetical decline and vitiated taste. What more barbarous, it would appear, than rhyme, the swaddling-clothes of unborn thought' (Bettina von Arnim), to find which does certainly give the poet at times more trouble than the beginning of a new sentence—not exactly logi cally linked to its predecessor—with a certain letter. Coldness, languor of feeling, low and mechani cal phraseology,' —all these charges have becn brought against the like Biblical alphabetical com position, but have not been substantiated. It was simply a fashion of the time, into which even the most genuine outburst of grief, when clad in poeti cal garb, fell naturally. Ai tificial forms, like the Sonnet, the Terze Rime, Madrigals, GI-lazels, Ma kamat, do not imply want of real poetry in Dante, Shakspere, Hariri, Riickert, GOthe ; not to mention rEschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and their sometimes unfathomable metres. And are the 24th and 35th Psalms less grand because they are in acrostics ? The Samaritan, Syriac, and Hebrew Liturgies of the Middle Ages contain some of the rarest poetical gems in this same form, and we cannot but emphatically protest against an a priori reason which is so flagrantly contrary to facts.—The peculiarity noticeable in the second, third, and fourth chapters, that the 0 precedes the 3,7, we can no more explain than any of the former investigators. I3ut we shall not trouble tbe reader with a new hypothesis. Suffice it to add that nothing in the least degree satisfac tory has been brought fonvard in explanation of this apparent irregularity.—In i.-iii. (except ii. 19) every verse seems to form a sort of Tricolon, indicated by distinctive accents (Imperatores or Reges) Soph Pasuk, Ethnaclita, Sakepb Katon ; the subdivisions of which, however, are of very unequal number and length ; while iv. and v. appear to fall more naturally into Disticha. Another division has been suggested somewhat according to the follow ing scheme :— How does the city sit solitary, once full of people ! — is she become as a widow - is the great among nations become tribu tary— How does the Princess among provinces sit soli tary I But on these points we must not further enlarge ; any more than we can do full justice to the mani fold extraordinary theories of strophe and anti strophe, of Sapphic metre and trimeter, brought forward by investigators from Jerome to Saalschtitz. That they were expressly composed by Jeremiah for Choruses, we do not know, and do not be lieve. ` En de telles calamites,' says a French writer, cceur humain se resserre ou se fond ; devient insensible ou s'abandonne au deses poir. L'intention du prophete est de premunir ses compatriotes contre l'un et Pautre de ces ex ces. vent qu'ils pleurent avec lui, mais conzine lzri.' And there is no reason why they should not have been sung by, without being expressly writ ten for,' those who sat by the rivers of Babylon, as they are still chanted in the Synagogues, both on the eve and the morning of the 9th of Ab.* The prophet probably sent them to his exiled brethren, as he may have sent them part of his prophetical book ; and from Babylon they were brought back when the House of God was reared acmin on the sacred ground. The position of the eamentations in the Canon appears to have been uncertain at first, since it was sometimes put to gether with Jeremiah's prophecies (see above), some times treated as a special worlc. In a talmudical enumeration of the Hagiographa (Bab. Bathra r4. b), we find it between the Song of Songs and Daniel.