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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Jeremiah: Being The Baird Lecture for 1922," George Adam Smith presents a profound examination of one of the Bible's most complex prophetic figures, Jeremiah. Through a blend of theological insight and literary analysis, Smith delves into the socio-political backdrop of ancient Israel, articulating the prophet's struggles against a disobedient nation and a perplexed divine call. His scholarly approach weaves together an eloquent narrative infused with poetic elements reflecting Jeremiah's own lamentations, making the text both accessible and rich in academic rigor. Smith's lecture stands as a pivotal contribution to biblical scholarship, situated in the early 20th century discourse that sought to illuminate the intersection of faith, prophecy, and societal turmoil. George Adam Smith, a prominent Scottish theologian and scholar, was deeply engaged in biblical studies and the complexities of religious thought. His experiences in a rapidly modernizing world likely influenced his exploration of Jeremiah's plight, as the prophet's themes of isolation and moral clarity resonate with Smith's own considerations of faith in a changing society. Smith's other works, notably in biblical criticism, frame his comprehensive understanding of the historical and spiritual significance of Jeremiah's message. This lecture is highly recommended for scholars, theologians, and readers seeking to deepen their understanding of the prophetic tradition within the Hebrew Bible. Smith's insightful analysis not only unpacks Jeremiah's character but also encourages a broader contemplation of the role of prophets within the societal fabric of their times. A must-read for anyone invested in theology, biblical history, or literary interpretations of scripture. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922
Table of Contents
Introduction
A lone prophetic voice confronts a turbulent nation with the demands of truth and faith. George Adam Smith’s Jeremiah: Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 presents a sustained study of the biblical prophet within the framework of a public lecture series delivered in 1922 and subsequently published in the 1920s. Situated within early twentieth-century biblical scholarship, the book stands at the crossroads of academic inquiry and ecclesial instruction. Its genre is scholarly yet accessible, combining historical orientation with theological reflection. Readers encounter a carefully shaped introduction to Jeremiah’s world and witness, framed not as a narrow exegetical manual, but as an interpretive guide intended for thoughtful engagement.
The volume’s origin in the Baird Lecture, a distinguished Scottish platform for theological discourse, shapes its aims and tone. Smith, a noted Old Testament scholar, writes for listeners and readers who seek clarity about the prophetic tradition and its relevance to faith and public life. The lecture format encourages directness and synthesis: arguments are presented with pedagogical pacing, and interpretive claims are tested against the text and its historical setting. Without presuming specialist training, the work invites an informed audience into the interpretive task, modeling how to read an ancient book with careful attention to context, genre, and the lived realities that informed its message.
At its core, the book explores Jeremiah’s ministry against the backdrop of political strain, religious controversy, and social upheaval in ancient Judah. Smith traces the prophet’s vocation, the shape of his oracles, and the pressures that accompany speaking for God in a contested public arena. The approach is historical and literary: events are located in their time, and the rhetoric of prophecy is examined for what it reveals about conviction, warning, and hope. Rather than cataloging minutiae, the author curates the most salient questions a reader must ask, offering a map for navigating a complex text that spans personal lament, public proclamation, and communal instruction.
Key themes emerge with consistency: the cost of conscience, the interplay of worship and ethics, the testing of national identity, and the tension between judgment and renewal. Smith illuminates how Jeremiah’s voice calls a community to align its practices with its professed faith, insisting that covenant loyalty is measured in justice as much as in ritual. The human face of prophecy remains visible—courage, vulnerability, and persistence are part of the portrait. The result is neither a romanticized hero nor a merely historical figure, but a prophet whose words demand moral attention. Readers receive a portrait that is both critically grounded and spiritually searching.
Stylistically, the work balances analysis with cadence, reflecting its life as spoken lectures refined for print. Smith’s prose is measured and lucid, moving from context to interpretation to implication without haste. He foregrounds textual signals and historical contours, then draws carefully framed conclusions, allowing the evidence to lead. While scholarly, the voice is pastoral in its concern for the moral and communal stakes of reading Jeremiah. The mood is sober yet hopeful, marked by intellectual patience rather than polemic. This combination yields a guide suited to clergy, students, and general readers who wish to think rigorously and read devotionally without sacrificing one for the other.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance is evident in its treatment of public truth, leadership under pressure, and the responsibilities of communities amid uncertainty. Jeremiah’s dilemmas—how to speak honestly, how to weigh tradition against urgent reform, how to endure when institutions falter—echo beyond antiquity. Smith’s framing encourages readers to ask not only what the text meant then, but how its questions probe present commitments. The lectures model a way of holding historical distance and moral proximity together, neither collapsing the gap nor leaving the text inert. In doing so, they offer resources for discernment in cultural moments that test integrity and hope.
Approached as an introduction and companion, this book equips readers to meet Jeremiah with historical awareness and interpretive care. It clarifies the prophet’s setting, sketches the major contours of his message, and proposes categories—covenant, conscience, judgment, promise—that organize a demanding corpus into a coherent whole. The reading experience is cumulative and reflective, inviting revisiting rather than quick consumption. Without exhausting the questions the text raises, Smith provides a steady hand, orienting newcomers and enriching seasoned readers. The result is a guide that honors both the complexity of the biblical witness and the seriousness of its claims, offering illumination without presumption.
Synopsis
In these Baird Lectures for 1922, George Adam Smith presents a systematic study of the prophet Jeremiah, combining historical context, literary analysis, and theological synthesis. He aims to recover the man and his message from the complex book that bears his name and to relate them to the crises of late seventh- and early sixth-century Judah. The opening sets out his method: close reading of the biblical text, comparison of Masoretic and Septuagint traditions, consultation of Assyrian-Babylonian records, and attention to style and form. Smith then outlines his plan—times, the book, the life, oracles of judgment and hope, confessions, and lasting significance.
The first major section reconstructs the historical setting. Smith traces the decline of Assyria, the brief influence of Egypt under Necho II, and the rise of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. Within Judah, he reviews Josiah’s reform, the discovery of the law, and the political and religious tensions that followed Josiah’s death at Megiddo. This context frames the pressures upon Jerusalem’s court, priesthood, and populace. The narration situates Jeremiah within these events, emphasizing the oscillation between pro-Egyptian and pro-Babylonian policies, the vulnerability of a small kingdom, and the moral issues attached to state cult and social justice.
Smith next introduces Jeremiah’s call and early ministry. He summarizes the prophet’s origins in Anathoth, the youthful sense of vocation, and the inaugural visions interpreted as pledges of vigilance and impending northern threat. The lectures recount Jeremiah’s preaching under Josiah and then Jehoiakim, especially the Temple Sermon, which challenges reliance on the sanctuary apart from ethical obedience. Smith presents the core themes of covenant loyalty, idolatry’s futility, and the critique of superficial reform. He notes Jeremiah’s use of poetic oracles and symbolic actions, while marking the shift from reform-era hopes to sharper warnings as political danger intensifies.
The narrative moves to Jeremiah’s conflicts with authorities during Jehoiakim’s reign. Smith summarizes the commissioning of Baruch to write the scroll, its public reading, the king’s burning of the columns, and the prophet’s rewriting with additions. He reviews episodes of arrest, threats to life, and efforts to silence the message. The lectures also introduce the so‑called Confessions of Jeremiah—personal prayers and protests that disclose the strain of vocation. These passages are treated as essential evidence for Jeremiah’s inner life and resolve, complementing the public oracles of judgment. Smith keeps the focus on sources, sequence, and historical plausibility.
Turning to the international crisis, Smith outlines Jeremiah’s counsel to accept Babylonian overlordship. He describes symbolic acts such as the yoke, the confrontation with the prophet Hananiah, and the debate over the fate of temple vessels. The lectures then summarize the letter to the exiles, urging constructive settlement and patient hope, grounded in conviction of a divinely appointed term. Smith contrasts Jeremiah’s outlook with nationalist agitation, presenting the prophet’s stance as coherent with his theology of judgment and preservation. The section highlights how policy, prophecy, and public opinion intersected in the late years before Jerusalem’s catastrophe.
Smith proceeds to the final years of Judah and their aftermath. He recounts the siege under Zedekiah, Jeremiah’s imprisonments, and sign-acts such as the purchase of a field at Anathoth as a token of future recovery. The lectures survey the so‑called Book of Consolation, with promises of restoration, and then the events at Mizpah after the city’s fall, including the assassination of Gedaliah and the flight to Egypt. Smith reviews oracles related to these episodes and those addressed to foreign nations, noting the prophet’s persistence amid displacement and the continued argument against idolatry and political illusions.
Having traced the career, Smith synthesizes Jeremiah’s theological teaching. Central topics include the knowledge of God as ethical and relational, the primacy of justice and truth in social life, and the meaning of judgment as purgative rather than merely punitive. He delineates themes of individual responsibility, circumcision of the heart, and the promise of a renewed covenant written within. The vision of a faithful remnant and a future re‑gathering balances the stern warnings. Smith emphasizes how these elements form a coherent message shaped by concrete crises, rather than abstractions detached from history or communal practice.
A substantial portion addresses the composition and transmission of the book. Smith distinguishes poetic from prose sections, discusses Baruch’s memoir and editorial activity, and evaluates the role of Deuteronomistic shaping. He compares the Masoretic Text with the shorter Septuagint, noting differences in order and wording, and considers the placement of the oracles against the nations. Criteria for assessing authenticity and chronology are explained without claiming finality. The lectures also attend to style—repetition, imagery, and symbolic actions—as aids to discerning layers of tradition and the prophet’s characteristic diction across varied settings.
In conclusion, Smith gathers the historical, literary, and theological findings into an estimate of Jeremiah’s place in Israel’s faith. He argues that the prophet’s witness sustained a community through defeat by relocating hope from institutions to fidelity and truth. The lectures underscore Jeremiah’s influence on later Judaism and Christianity, particularly the language of new covenant and inward law. Without venturing speculative reconstruction, Smith stresses the enduring clarity of Jeremiah’s essential claims and their capacity to inform public policy, worship, and personal conscience. The volume closes by linking careful criticism with practical apprehension of the prophet’s message.
Historical Context
Jeremiah is set in late seventh and early sixth century BCE Judah, centered on Jerusalem and its hinterland, with the prophet originating from Anathoth in Benjamin. The polity was a small theocratic monarchy squeezed between empires: fading Assyria, resurgent Egypt under Psamtek I and Necho II, and the rising Neo Babylonian power of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. The Temple on Mount Zion anchored religion and royal legitimacy; the countryside held ancient shrines targeted by reform. Trade routes like the Via Maris and the King’s Highway gave Judah strategic value. In this milieu, George Adam Smith situates Jeremiah’s ministry, emphasizing concrete dates, rulers, and places to frame the prophet’s oracles.
The reign of Josiah (640 609 BCE) and his reforms form the initial backdrop. In 622 BCE a book of the law was reportedly found in the Temple, spurring centralization of worship in Jerusalem, suppression of high places, and ethical renewal inspired by Deuteronomic ideals. Assyrian retreat after 630 allowed Judah brief autonomy and even outreach into former northern territories. Josiah died at Megiddo in 609 BCE confronting Pharaoh Necho II. Jeremiah’s call in Josiah’s thirteenth year, 627 BCE, placed him as both supporter and critic: he applauded moral reform yet warned against ritualism without justice. Smith interprets these reforms as crucial for understanding Jeremiah’s early preaching and its national scope.
The Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE decisively shifted Near Eastern power. Nebuchadnezzar II defeated Necho II on the Euphrates, ending Egyptian ambitions in Syria Palestine. Jehoiakim, whom Necho had installed in 609, transferred vassalage to Babylon after 605, then rebelled following Nebuchadnezzar’s costly 601 Egyptian campaign. Babylonian and allied raiders harried Judah, as 2 Kings 24 attests. The Babylonian Chronicle (BM 21946) corroborates Carchemish and Nebuchadnezzar’s campaigns, data Smith deploys to synchronize Jeremiah’s sermons advocating submission to Babylon as divine chastisement. The book mirrors this geopolitical pivot by reorienting Judah’s hopes away from Egypt and toward a sober acceptance of Babylonian overlordship as a historical instrument.
The twin crises of 597 and 586 BCE dominate both the history and Jeremiah’s message. After Jehoiakim’s death in late 598, Jerusalem capitulated in March 597 under Jehoiachin. Nebuchadnezzar exiled the young king, the court, soldiers, and artisans. Figures vary: 2 Kings 24 speaks of 10,000 deportees, while Jeremiah 52 lists 3,023 exiles in the seventh year, with further groups later. Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s uncle, was installed as vassal. Despite Jeremiah’s counsel, court factions leaned again toward Egypt. When Hophra (Apries) took Egypt’s throne in 589, Zedekiah rebelled. The Babylonian siege began in 589 588; famine gripped the city; the wall was breached in 586; the Temple and palace were burned; and Nebuzaradan oversaw systematic demolition. The Lachish ostraca, roughly dated to 588, echo the panic among Judah’s garrisons and corroborate the book’s wartime atmosphere. After the fall, Gedaliah son of Ahikam was appointed governor at Mizpah, promising stability. His assassination by Ishmael son of Nethaniah shattered the remnant and drove refugees, forcibly taking Jeremiah, to Egypt at Tahpanhes. Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles (chapter 29) instructed deportees to build houses and seek Babylon’s peace, promising a measured seventy year horizon to restoration. Smith treats these events as the crucible of Jeremiah’s theology of history: the catastrophe is neither accident nor finality, but judgment with future mercy, presented with dates, names, and places to substantiate the prophet’s historical realism.
Judah’s internal politics sharpened the crisis. Pro Egyptian elites opposed Jeremiah’s pro Babylon posture. In 604 BCE, Jeremiah dictated a scroll to Baruch; Jehoiakim cut and burned it column by column, dramatizing royal resistance to prophetic admonition. In 594 BCE, Hananiah proclaimed a swift end to Babylon’s yoke; Jeremiah countered with a wooden, then iron yoke symbol, predicting Hananiah’s death that year. Earlier, the Temple Sermon denounced trust in sacred space without justice. Smith reads these episodes as hard data for the period’s partisan struggle, illustrating how policy debates, censorship, and rival prophecy shaped national decisions that culminated in siege, exile, and religious rethinking.
Religious syncretism and social injustice are historically concrete in Jeremiah’s time. Worship at Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom involved child sacrifice to Molech, condemned alongside Baal and Asherah cults at high places. Josiah’s centralization tried to abolish these, yet practices lingered under Jehoiakim and Zedekiah. Jeremiah attacked the temple ideology, citing Shiloh as precedent for sanctuary ruin, and demanded protection of the alien, orphan, and widow, condemnation of bloodshed, fair wages, and honest courts. Smith links these critiques to known seventh century practices and to the socio economic strain of tribute and war, showing how religious deviation and class injustice intertwined in the kingdom’s downfall.
The wider international field included the fall of Assyria and shifting fortunes of neighboring states. Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to the Medes and Babylonians; Assyrian remnants fought on at Harran in 609 with Egyptian support. Jeremiah’s oracles against nations address Egypt, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Kedar, Elam, and Babylon itself (chapters 46 51), situating Judah within a divine sovereignty over empires. Although Jeremiah’s life preceded 539 BCE, the book anticipates Babylon’s humbling, later realized when Cyrus of Persia took Babylon. Smith uses cuneiform and classical notices to align these oracles with verifiable tides of power, demonstrating that the book reflects, and interprets, a real diplomatic map.
The book functions as a rigorous social and political critique of late monarchic Judah. It exposes elite exploitation, judicial corruption, and religious complacency that cloaked injustice under temple ritual. It condemns cynical foreign policy oscillating between Egypt and Babylon, arguing that treaty making divorced from ethical reform invites catastrophe. The prophet attacks censorship and propaganda by kings and court prophets, modeling accountability through public reading, open debate, and symbolic protest. He reframes national hope as moral restoration under a renewed covenant written on hearts, not a quick diplomatic rescue. In Smith’s analysis, the historical specificity sharpens the book’s indictment of systemic failures in governance and society.
Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922
Dedication.
TO THE UNION OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES
[pg vii]
Preface.
The purpose and the scope of this volume are set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as is the case with the folk-songs of Palestine to-day. I am well aware that metres so primitive and by our canons so irregular have been more rhythmically rendered by the stately prose of our English Versions; yet it is our duty reverently to seek for the [pg viii] original forms and melodies of what we believe to be the Oracles of God. The only other point connected with the metrical translations offered, which need be mentioned here, is that I have rendered the name of the God of Israel as it is by the Greek and our own Versions—The Lord—which is more suitable to English verse than is either Yahweh[3] or Jehovah.
The text of the Lectures and the footnotes show how much I owe to those who have already written on Jeremiah, as also in what details I differ from one or another of them.
I have retained the form of Lectures for this volume, but I have very much expanded and added to what were only six Lectures of an hour each when delivered under the auspices of the Baird Trust[1] in Glasgow in 1922.
George Adam Smith.Chanonry Lodge,Old Aberdeen,18th October, 1923.
[pg 001]
Preliminary.
First of all, I thank the Baird Trustees for their graceful appointment to this Lecture of a member of what is still, though please God not for long, another Church than their own. I am very grateful for the privilege which they grant me of returning to Glasgow with the accomplishment of a work the materials for which were largely gathered during the years of my professorship in the city. The value of the opportunity is enhanced by all that has since befallen our nation and the world. The Great War invested the experience of the Prophet, who is the subject of this Lecture, with a fresh and poignant relevance to our own problems and duties. Like ourselves, Jeremiah lived through the clash not only of empires but of opposite ethical ideals, through the struggles and panics of small peoples, through long and terrible fighting, famine, and slaughter of the youth of the nations, with all the anxieties to faith and the problems of Providence, which such things naturally raise. Passionate for peace, he was called to proclaim the inevitableness of war, in opposition to the popular prophets of a [pg 002] false peace; but later he had to counsel his people to submit to their foes and to accept their captivity, thus facing the hardest conflict a man can who loves his own—between patriotism and common sense, between his people's gallant efforts for freedom and the stern facts of the world, between national traditions and pieties on the one side and on the other what he believed to be the Will of God. These are issues which the successive generations of our race are called almost ceaselessly to face; and the teaching and example of the great Prophet, who dealt with them through such strenuous debates both with his fellow-men and with his God, and who brought out of these debates spiritual results of such significance for the individual and for the nation, cannot be without value for ourselves.
[pg 003]
Lecture I.
The Man And The Book.
In this and the following lectures I attempt an account and estimate of the Prophet Jeremiah, of his life and teaching, and of the Book which contains them—but especially of the man himself, his personality and his tempers (there were more than one), his religious experience and its achievements, with the various high styles of their expression; as well as his influence on the subsequent religion of his people.
It has often been asserted that in Jeremiah's ministry more than in any other of the Old Covenant the personality of the Prophet was under God the dominant factor, and one has even said that “his predecessors were the originators of great truths, which he transmuted into spiritual life.”1 To avoid exaggeration here, we must keep in mind how large a part personality played in their teaching also, and from how deep in their lives their messages sprang. Even Amos was no mere voice crying in the wilderness. The discipline of the desert, the clear eye for ordinary facts and [pg 004] the sharp ear for sudden alarms which it breeds, along with the desert shepherd's horror of the extravagance and cruelties of civilisation—all these reveal to us the Man behind the Book, who had lived his truth before he uttered it. Hosea again, tells the story of his outraged love as the beginning of the Word of the Lord by him. And it was the strength of Isaiah's character, which, unaided by other human factors, carried Judah, with the faith she enshrined, through the first great crisis of her history. Yet recognise, as we justly may, the personalities of these prophets in the nerve, the colour, the accent, and even the substance of their messages, we must feel the still greater significance of Jeremiah's temperament and other personal qualities both for his own teaching and for the teaching of those who came after him. Thanks to his loyal scribe, Baruch, we know more of the circumstances of his career, and thanks to his own frankness, we know more of his psychology than we do in the case of any of his predecessors. He has, too, poured out his soul to us by the most personal of all channels; the charm, passion and poignancy of his verse lifting him high among the poets of Israel.
So far as our materials enable us to judge no other prophet was more introspective or concerned about himself; and though it might be said that he carried this concern to a fault, yet [pg 005] fault or none, the fact is that no prophet started so deeply from himself as Jeremiah did. His circumstances flung him in upon his feelings and convictions; he was constantly searching, doubting, confessing, and pleading for, himself. He asserted more strenuously than any except Job his individuality as against God, and he stood in more lonely opposition to his people.
Jeremiah was called to prophesy about the time that the religion of Israel was re-codified in Deuteronomy[2]—the finest system of national religion which the world has seen, but only and exclusively national—and he was still comparatively young when that system collapsed for the time and the religion itself seemed about to perish with it. He lived to see the Law fail, the Nation dispersed, and the National Altar shattered; but he gathered their fire into his bosom and carried it not only unquenched but with a purer flame towards its everlasting future. We may say without exaggeration that what was henceforth finest in the religion of Israel had, however ancient its sources, been recast in the furnace of his spirit. With him the human unit in religion which had hitherto been mainly the nation was on the way to become the individual. Personal piety in later Israel largely grew out of his spiritual struggles.2
[pg 006]His forerunners, it is true, had insisted that religion was an affair not of national institutions nor of outward observance, but of the people's heart—by which heart they and their hearers must have understood the individual hearts composing it. But, in urging upon his generation repentance, faith and conversion to God, Jeremiah's language is more thorough and personal than that used by any previous prophet. The individual, as he leaves Jeremiah's hands, is more clearly the direct object of the Divine Interest and Grace, and the instrument of the Divine Will. The single soul is searched, defined and charged as never before in Israel.
But this sculpture of the individual out of the mass of the nation, this articulation of his immediate relation to God apart from Law, Temple and Race, achieved as it was by Jeremiah only through intense mental and physical agonies, opened to him the problem of the sufferings of the righteous. In his experience the individual realised his Self only to find that Self—its rights, the truths given it and its best service for God—baffled by the stupidity and injustice of those for whom it laboured and agonised. The mists of pain and failure bewildered the Prophet and to the last his work seemed in vain. Whether or not he himself was conscious of the solution of the problem, others reached it through him. There are grounds for believing that the Figure [pg 007] of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, raised by the Great Prophet of the Exile, and the idea of the atoning and redemptive value of His sufferings were, in part at least, the results of meditation upon the spiritual loneliness on the one side, and upon the passionate identification of himself with the sorrows of his sinful people on the other, of this the likest to Christ of all the prophets.3
For our knowledge of this great life—there was none greater under the Old Covenant—we are dependent on that Book of our Scriptures, the Hebrew text of which bears the simple title “Jeremiah.”
The influence of the life and therefore the full stature of the man who lived it, stretches, as I have hinted, to the latest bounds of Hebrew history, and many writings and deeds were worshipfully assigned to him. Thus the Greek Version of the Old Testament ascribes Lamentations to Jeremiah, but the poems themselves do not claim to be, and obviously are not, from himself. He is twice quoted in II. Chronicles and once in Ezra, but these quotations may be reasonably interpreted as referring to prophecies contained in our book, which were therefore [pg 008] extant before the date of the Chronicler.4 Ecclesiasticus XLIX. 6-7 reflects passages of our Book, and of Lamentations, as though equally Jeremiah's, and Daniel IX. 2 refers to Jeremiah XXV. 12. A paragraph in the Second Book of Maccabees, Ch. II. 1-8, contains, besides echoes of our Book of Jeremiah, references to other activities of the Prophet of which the sources and the value are unknown to us. But all these references, as well as the series of apocryphal and apocalyptic works to which the name either of Jeremiah himself or of Baruch, his scribe, has been attached,5 only reveal the length of the shadow which the Prophet's figure cast down the ages, and contribute [pg 009] no verifiable facts to our knowledge of his career or of his spiritual experience.
For the actual life of Jeremiah, for the man as he was to himself and his contemporaries, for his origin, character, temper, struggles, growth and modes of expression, we have practically no materials beyond the Canonical Book to which his name is prefixed.6
Roughly classified the contents of the Book (after the extended title in Ch. I. 1-3) are as follows:—
1. A Prologue, Ch. I. 4-19, in which the Prophet tells the story of his call and describes the range of his mission as including both his own people and foreign nations. The year of his call was 627-6 B.C.
2. A large number of Oracles, dialogues between the Prophet and the Deity and symbolic actions by the Prophet issuing in Oracles, mostly introduced as by Jeremiah himself, but sometimes reported of him by another. Most of the Oracles are in verse; the style of the rest is not distinguishable by us from prose. They deal almost [pg 010] exclusively with the Prophet's own people though there are some references to neighbouring tribes. The bulk of this class of the contents is found within Chs. II-XXV, which contain all the earlier oracles, i.e. those uttered by Jeremiah before the death of King Josiah in 608, but also several of his prophecies under Jehoiakim and even Ṣedekiah. More of the latter are found within Chs. XXVII-XXXV: all these, except XXVIII and part of XXXII, which are introduced by the Prophet himself, are reported by another.
3. A separate group of Oracles on Foreign Nations, Chs. XLVI-LI, reported to us as Jeremiah's.
4. A number of narratives of episodes in the Prophet's life from 608 onwards under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah to the end in Egypt, soon after 586; apparently by a contemporary and eyewitness who on good grounds is generally taken to be Baruch the Scribe: Chs. XXVI, XXXVI-XLV; but to the same source may be due much of Chs. XXVII-XXXV (see under 2).
5. Obvious expansions and additions throughout all the foregoing; and a historical appendix in Ch. LII, mainly an excerpt from II. Kings XXIV-XXV.
On the face of it, then, the Book is a compilation from several sources; and perhaps we ought to translate the opening clause of its title not as in our versions “The Words of Jeremiah,” but [pg 011]“The History of Jeremiah,” as has been legitimately done by some scholars since Kimchi.
What were the nuclei of this compilation? How did they originate? What proofs do they give of their value as historical documents? How did they come together? And what changes, if any, did they suffer before the compilation closed and the Book received its present form?
These questions must be answered, so far as possible, before we can give an account of the Prophet's life or an estimate of himself and his teaching. The rest of this lecture is an attempt to answer them—but in the opposite order to that in which I have just stated them. We shall work backward from the two ultimate forms in which the Book has come down to us. For these forms are two.
Besides the Hebrew text, from which the Authorised and Revised English Versions have been made, we possess a form of the Book in Greek, which is part of the Greek Version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. This is virtually another edition of the same work. The Hebrew text belongs to the Second or Prophetical Canon of the Jewish Scriptures, which was not closed till about 200 B.C., or more than 350 years after Jeremiah's death. The Greek Version was completed about the same time, and possibly earlier.
These two editions of the Book hold by far the [pg 012] greatest part of their contents in common, yet they differ considerably in the amount and in the arrangement of their contents, and somewhat less in the dates and personal references which they apply to various passages. We have thus before us two largely independent witnesses who agree in the bulk of their testimony, and otherwise correct and supplement each other.
In size the Greek Book of Jeremiah is but seven-eighths of the Hebrew,7 but conversely it contains some hundred words that the Hebrew lacks. Part of this small Greek surplus is due to the translators' expansion or paraphrase of briefer Hebrew originals, or consists of glosses that they found in the Hebrew MSS. from which they translated, or added of themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails to do so.8
More instructive is the greater number of phrases and passages found in the Hebrew Book, and consequently in our English Versions, but absent from the Greek. Some, it is true, are merely [pg 013] formal—additions to a personal name of the title king or prophet or of the names of a father and grandfather, or the more frequent use of the divine title of Hosts with the personal Name of the Deity or of the phrase Rede of the Lord.9 Also the Greek omits words which in the Hebrew are obviously mistakes of a copyist.10 Again, a number of what are transparent glosses or marginal notes on the Hebrew text are lacking in the Greek, because the translator of the latter did not find them on the Hebrew manuscript from which he translated.11 Some titles to sections of the Book, or portions of titles, absent from the Greek but found in our Hebrew text, are also later editorial additions.12 Greater importance, however, attaches to those phrases that cannot be mere glosses and to the longer passages, wanting in the Greek but found in the Hebrew, many of which upon internal evidence must be regarded as late intrusions into the latter.13 And occasionally a word or phrase [pg 014] in the Hebrew, which spoils the rhythm or is irrelevant to the sense, is not found in the Greek.14
Finally, there is one great difference of arrangement. The group of Oracles on Foreign Nations which appear in the Hebrew as Chs. XLVI-LI are in the Greek placed between verses 13 and 1515 of Ch. XXV, and are ranged in a different order—an obvious proof that at one time different editors felt free to deal with the arrangement of the compilation as well as to add to its contents.16
[pg 015]Modern critics differ as to the comparative value of these two editions of the Book of Jeremiah, and there are strong advocates on either side.17 But the prevailing opinion, and, to my view, the right one, is that no general judgment is possible, and that each case of difference between the two witnesses must be decided by itself.18 With this, however, we have nothing at present to do. What concerns us now is the fact that the Greek is not the translation of the canonical Hebrew text, but that the two Books, [pg 016] while sharing a common basis of wide extent, represent two different lines of compilation and editorial development which continued till at least 200 B.C. Between them they are the proof that, while our Bible was still being compiled, some measure of historical criticism and of editorial activity was at work on the material—and this not only along one line. We need not stop to discuss how far the fact justifies the exercise of criticism by the modern Church. For our present purpose it is enough to keep in mind that our Book of Jeremiah is the result of a long development through some centuries and on more than one line, though the two divergent movements started with, and carried down, a large body of material in common.
Moreover, this common material bears evidence of having already undergone similar treatment, before it passed out on those two lines of further development which resulted in the canonical Hebrew text and the Greek Version respectively. The signs of gradual compilation are everywhere upon the material which they share in common. Now and then a chronological order appears, and indeed there are traces of a purpose to pursue that order throughout. But this has been disturbed by cross-arrangements according to subject,19 and by the intrusion of [pg 017] later oracles and episodes among earlier ones20 or vice versa21 as if their materials had come into the hands of the compilers or editors of the Book only gradually. Another proof of the gradual growth of those contents, which are common to the Hebrew and the Greek, is the fashion in which they tend to run away from the titles prefixed to them. Take the title to the whole Book,22 Ch. I. 2, Which was the Word of the Lord to Jeremiah in the days of Josiah, son of Amon, King of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. This covers only the narrative of the Prophet's call in Ch. I, or at most a few of the Oracles in the following chapters. The supplementary title in verse 3—It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, King of Judah, up to [the end of]23 the eleventh year of Ṣedekiah, the son of Josiah King of Judah, up to the exile of Jerusalem, in the fifth month—is probably a later addition, added when the later Oracles of Jeremiah were attached to some collection of those which he had delivered under Josiah; but even then the title fails to cover those words in the Book which [pg 018] Jeremiah spake after Jerusalem had gone into exile, and even after he had been hurried down into Egypt by a base remnant of his people.24 Moreover, the historical appendix to the Book carries the history it contains on to 561 B.C. at least.25 Again there are passages, the subjects of which are irrelevant to their context, and which break the clear connection of the parts of the context between which they have intruded.26 The shorter sentences, that also disturb the connection as they stand, appear to have been written originally as marginal notes which a later editor or copyist has incorporated in the text.27 To this class, too, may belong those brief passages which appear twice, once in their natural connection in some later chapter and once out of their natural connection in some earlier chapter.28 And again in VII. 1-28 and XXVI. 1-9 we have two accounts, apparently from different hands, of what may or may not be the same episode in Jeremiah's ministry.
[pg 019]These data clearly prove that not only from the time when the Hebrew and Greek editions of the Book started upon their separate lines of development, but from the very beginnings of the Book's history, the work of accumulation, arrangement and re-arrangement, with other editorial processes, had been busy upon it.
The next question is, have we any criteria by which to discriminate between the elements in the Book that belong either to Jeremiah himself or to his contemporaries and others that are due to editors or compilers between his death soon after 586 and the close of the Prophetic Canon in 200 B.C.? The answer is that we have such criteria. All Oracles or Narratives in the Book, which (apart from obvious intrusions) imply that the Exile is well advanced or that the Return from Exile has already happened, or which reflect the circumstances of the later Exile and subsequent periods or the spirit of Israel and the teaching of her prophets and scribes in those periods, we may rule out of the material on which we can rely for our knowledge of Jeremiah's life and his teaching. Of such Exilic and post-Exilic contents there is a considerable, but not a preponderant, amount. These various items break into their context, their style and substance are not conformable to the style and substance of the Oracles, which (as we shall see) are reasonably attributed to Jeremiah, but they [pg 020] so closely resemble those of other writings from the eve of the Return from Exile or from after the Return that they seem to be based on the latter. In any case they reflect the situation and feelings of Israel in Babylonia about 540 B.C. Some find place in our Book among the earlier Oracles of Jeremiah,29 others in his later,30 but the most in the group of Oracles on Foreign Nations.31 And, finally, there are the long extracts from the Second Book of Kings, bringing, as I have said, the history down to at least 561.32
All these, then, we lay aside, so far as our search for Jeremiah himself and his doctrine is concerned, [pg 021] and we do so the more easily that they are largely devoid of the style and the spiritual value of his undoubted Oracles and Discourses. They are more or less diffuse and vagrant, while his are concise and to the point. They do not reveal, as his do, a man fresh from agonising debates with God upon the poverty of his qualifications for the mission to which God calls him, or upon the contents of that mission, or upon his own sufferings and rights; nor do they recount his adventures with his contemporaries. They are not the outpourings of a single soul but rather the expression of the feelings of a generation or of the doctrines of a school. We have in our Bible other and better utterances of the truths, questions, threats and hopes which they contain.
But once more—in what remains of the Book, what belongs to Jeremiah himself or to his time, we have again proofs of compilation from more sources than one. Some of this is in verse—among the finest in the Old Testament—some in prose orations; some in simple narrative. Some Oracles are introduced by the Prophet himself, and he utters them in the first person, some are reported of him by others. And any chronological or topical order lasts only through groups of prophecies or narratives. Fortunately, however, included among these are more than one account of how the writing of them and the collection of them came about.
[pg 022]In 604-603 B.C., twenty-one, or it may have been twenty-three, years after Jeremiah had begun to prophesy, the history of Western Asia rose to a crisis. Pharaoh Nĕcoh who had marched north to the Euphrates was defeated in a battle for empire by Nebuchadrezzar, son of the King of Babylon. From the turmoil of nations which filled the period Babylon emerged as that executioner of the Divine judgments on the world, whom Jeremiah since 627 or 625 had been describing generally as out of the North. His predictions were justified, and he was able to put a sharper edge on them. Henceforth in place of the enemy from the North Jeremiah could speak definitely of the King of Babylon and of his people the Chaldeans.
In Ch. XXV we read accordingly that in that year, 604-3, he delivered to the people of Jerusalem a summary of his previous oracles. He told them that the cup of the Lord's wrath was given into his hand; Judah and other nations, especially Egypt, must drink it and so stagger to their doom.
But a spoken and a summary discourse was not enough. Like Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah was moved to commit his previous Oracles to writing. In Ch. XXXVI is a narrative presumably by an eyewitness of the transactions it recounts, and this most probably the scribe who was associated with the Prophet in these transactions. Jeremiah was commanded to take a roll of a book and write on [pg 023] it all the words which the Lord had spoken to him concerning Jerusalem33 and Judah and all the nations from the day the Lord first spake to him, in the days of Josiah, even unto this day. For this purpose he employed Baruch, the son of Neriah, afterwards designated the Scribe, and Baruch wrote on the Roll to his dictation. Being unable himself to enter the Temple he charged Baruch to go there and to read the Roll on a fast-day in the ears of all the people of Judah who have come in from their cities. Baruch found his opportunity in the following December, and read the Roll from the New Gate of the Temple to the multitude. This was reported to some of the princes in the Palace below, who sent for Baruch and had him read the Roll over to them. Divided between alarm at its contents and their duty to the king, they sent Jeremiah and Baruch into hiding while they made report to Jehoiakim. The king had the Roll read out once more to himself as he sat in his room in front of a lighted brasier, for it was winter. The reading incensed him, and as the reader finished each three or four columns he cut them up and threw them on the fire till the whole was consumed. But Jeremiah, in safe hiding with Baruch, took another Roll and dictated again the contents of the first; and there were added besides unto them many like words.
[pg 024]The story has been questioned, but by very few, and on no grounds that are perceptible to common sense. One critic imagines that it ascribes miraculous power to the Prophet in “its natural impression that the Prophet reproduces from memory and dictates all the words which the Lord has spoken to him.”34 There is no trace of miracle in the story. It is a straight tale of credible transactions, very natural (as we have seen) at the crisis which the Prophet had reached. No improbability infects it, no reflection of a later time, no idealising as by a writer at a distance from the events he recounts. On the contrary it gives a number of details which only a contemporary could have supplied. Nor can we forget the power and accuracy of an Oriental's memory, especially at periods when writing was not a common practice.
There is, of course, more room for difference of opinion as to the contents of each of the successive Rolls, and as to how much of these contents is included in our Book of Jeremiah. But to such questions the most probable answer is as follows.
There cannot have been many of the Prophet's previous Oracles on the first Roll. This was read three times over in the same day and was probably limited to such Oracles as were sufficient for its [pg 025] practical purpose of moving the people of Judah to repentance at a Fast, when their hearts would be most inclined that way. But when the first Roll was destroyed, the immediate occasion for which it was written was past, and the second Roll would naturally have a wider aim. It repeated the first, but in view of the additions to it seems to have been dictated with the purpose of giving a permanent form to all the fruits of Jeremiah's previous ministry. The battle of Carchemish had confirmed his predictions and put edge upon them. The destruction of the Jewish people was imminent and the Prophet's own life in danger. His enforced retirement along with Baruch lent him freedom to make a larger selection, if not the full tale, of his previous prophecies. Hence the phrase there were added many words like those on the first Roll.35
If such a Roll as the second existed in the care of Baruch then the use of it in the compilation of our Book of Jeremiah is extremely probable, and the probability is confirmed by some features of the Book. Among the Oracles which can be assigned [pg 026] to Jeremiah's activity before the fourth year of Jehoiakim there is on the whole more fidelity to chronological order than in those which were delivered later, and while the former are nearly all given without narrative attached to them, and are reported as from Jeremiah himself in the first person, the latter for the most part are embedded in narratives, in which he appears in the third person.36
Further let us note that if some of the Oracles in the earlier part of the Book—after the account of the Prophet's call—are undated, while the dates of others are stated vaguely; and again, if some, including the story of the call, appear to be tinged with reflections from experiences of the Prophet later than the early years of his career, then these two features support the belief that the Oracles were first reduced to writing at a distance from their composition and first delivery—a belief in harmony with the theory of their inclusion and preservation in the Prophet's second Roll.
Let us now turn to the biographical portions of the Book. We have proved the trustworthiness of Ch. XXXVI as the narrative of an eyewitness, in all probability Baruch the Scribe, who for the first time is introduced to us. But if Baruch wrote Ch. XXXVI it is certain that a great deal more of the biographical matter in the Book is from [pg 027] his hand. This is couched in the same style; it contains likewise details which a later writer could hardly have invented, and it is equally free from those efforts to idealise events and personalities, by which later writers betray their distance from the subjects of which they treat. It is true that, as an objector remarks, “the Book does not contain a single line that claims to be written by Baruch.”37 But this is evidence rather for, than against, Baruch's authorship. Most of the biographical portions of the Old Testament are anonymous. It was later ages that fixed names to Books as they have fixed Baruch's own to certain apocryphal works. Moreover, the suppression of his name by this scribe is in harmony with the modest manner in which he appears throughout, as though he had taken to heart Jeremiah's words to him: Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. Only thy life will I give thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest.38 But there is still more conclusive evidence. That Baruch had not been associated with Jeremiah before 603-4 is a fair inference from the fact that the Prophet had to dictate to him all his previous Oracles. Now it is striking that up to that year and the introduction of Baruch as Jeremiah's scribe, we have few narratives of the Prophet's experience and activity—being left in ignorance as to the greater part of his life under Josiah—and that these few narratives—of [pg 028] his call, of his share in the propagation of Deuteronomy, of the plot of the men of Anathoth against him, of his symbolic action with his waist-cloth, and of his visit to the house of the Potter—are (except in the formal titles to some of them) told in the first person by Jeremiah himself,39 while from 604-3 onwards the biographical narratives are much more numerous and, except in three of them,40 the Prophet appears only in the third person. This coincidence of the first appearance of Baruch as the Prophet's associate with the start of a numerous series of narratives of the Prophet's life in which he appears in the third person can hardly be accidental.
Such, then, are the data which the Book of Jeremiah offers for the task of determining the origins and authenticity of its very diverse contents. After our survey of them, those of you who are ignorant of the course of recent criticism will not be surprised to learn that virtual agreement now exists on certain main lines, while great differences of opinion continue as to details—differences perhaps irreconcilable. It is agreed that the book is the result of a long and a slow growth, stretching far beyond Jeremiah's time, [pg 029] out of various sources; and that these sources are in the main three:—
A. Collections of genuine Oracles and Discourses of Jeremiah—partly made by himself.
B. Narratives of his life and times by a contemporary writer or writers, the principal, if not the only, contributor to which is (in the opinion of most) the Scribe Baruch.
C. Exilic and Post-Exilic additions in various forms: long prophecies and narratives; shorter pieces included among the Prophet's own Oracles; and scattered titles, dates, notes and glosses.
Moreover, there is also general agreement as to which of these classes a very considerable number of the sections of the Book belong to. There is not, and cannot be, any doubt about the bulk of those which are apparently exilic or post-exilic. It is equally certain that a large number of the Oracles are Jeremiah's own, and that the most of the Narratives are from his time and trustworthy. But questions have been raised and are still receiving opposite answers as to whether or not some of the Oracles and Narratives have had their original matter coloured or expanded by later hands; or have even in whole been foisted upon the Prophet or his contemporary biographer from legendary sources.
Of these questions some, however they be answered, so little affect our estimates of the Prophet and his teaching that we may leave them [pg 030] alone. But there are at least four of them on the answers to which does depend the accurate measure of the stature of Jeremiah as a man and a prophet, of the extent and variety of his gifts and interests, of the simplicity or complexity of his temperament, and of his growth, and of his teaching through his long ministry of over forty years.
These four questions are
The first three of these questions we may leave for discussion to their proper places in our survey of his ministry. The fourth is even more fundamental to our judgment both of the Book and of the Man; and I shall deal with it in the introduction to the next lecture on “The Poet Jeremiah.”
[pg 031]
Lecture II.
The Poet.
From last lecture I left over to this the discussion of a literary question, the answer to which is fundamental to our understanding both of the Book and of the Man, but especially of the Man.
The Book of Jeremiah has come to us with all its contents laid down as prose, with no metrical nor musical punctuation; not divided into stichoi or poetical lines nor marked off into stanzas or strophes. Yet many passages read as metrically, and are as musical in sound, and in spirit as poetic as the Psalms, the Canticles, or the Lamentations. Their language bears the marks that usually distinguish verse from prose in Hebrew as in other literatures. It beats out with a more or less regular proportion of stresses or heavy accents. It diverts into an order of words different from the order normal in prose. Sometimes it is elliptic, sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the meaning—both signs of an attempt at metre. Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what is usual in prose, and prefers forms of words more [pg 032] sonorous than the ordinary. But these many and distinct passages of poetry issue from and run into contexts of prose unmistakable. For two reasons we are not always able to trace the exact border between the prose and the verse—first because of the frequent uncertainties of the text, and second because the prose, like most of that of the prophets, has often a rhythm approximating to metre. And thus it happens that, while on the one hand much agreement has been reached as to what Oracles in the Book are in verse, and what, however rhythmical, are in prose, some passages remain, on the original literary form of which a variety of opinion is possible. This is not all in dispute. Even the admitted poems are variously scanned—that is either read in different metres or, if in the same metre, either with or without irregularities. Such differences of literary judgment are due partly to our still imperfect knowledge of the laws of Hebrew metre and partly to the variety of possible readings of the text. Nor is even that all. The claim has been made not only to confine Jeremiah's genuine Oracles to the metrical portions of the Book, but, by drastic emendations of the text, to reduce them to one single, exact, unvarying metre.
These questions and claims—all-important as they are for the definition of the range and character of the prophet's activity—we can decide only after a preliminary consideration of the few clear [pg 033] and admitted principles of Hebrew poetry, of their consequences, and of analogies to them in other literatures.
In Hebrew poetry there are some principles about which no doubt exists. First, its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which, though found in all human song, is carried through this poetry with a constancy unmatched in any other save the Babylonian. The lines of a couplet or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous, that is identical in meaning, or Supplementary and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least their meanings respond or correspond to each other in a way, for which no better name has been found than that given it by Bishop Lowth more than a century and a half ago, “Parallelismus Membrorum[4].”41Second, this rhythm of meaning is wedded to a rhythm of sound which is achieved by the observance of a varying proportion between stressed or heavily accented syllables and unstressed. That is clear even though we are unable to discriminate the proportion in every case or even to tell whether there were fixed rules for it; the vowel-system of our Hebrew text being possibly different from what prevailed in ancient Hebrew. But on the whole it is probable that as in other primitive poetries42 there were no exact or rigorous [pg 034] rules as to the proportion of beats or stresses in the single lines. For the rhythm of sense is the main thing—the ruling factor—and though the effort to express this in equal or regularly proportioned lines is always perceptible, yet in the more primitive forms of the poetry just as in some English folk-songs and ballads the effort did not constantly succeed. The art of the poet was not always equal to the strength of his passion or the length of his vision, or the urgency of his meaning. The meaning was the main thing and had to be beat out, even though to effect this was to make the lines irregular. As I have said in my Schweich Lectures: “If the Hebrew poet be so constantly bent on a rhythm of sense this must inevitably modify his rhythms of sound. If his first aim be to produce lines each more or less complete in meaning, but so as to run parallel to its fellow, it follows that these lines cannot be always exactly regular in length or measure of time. If the governing principle of the poetry requires each line to be a clause or sentence in itself, the lines will frequently tend, of course [pg 035] within limits, to have more or fewer stresses than are normal throughout the poem.”
But there are other explanations of the metrical irregularities in the traditional text of Hebrew poems, which make it probable that these irregularities are often original and not always (as they sometimes are) the blunders of copyists. In all forms of Eastern art we trace the influence of what we may call Symmetriphobia[6], an aversion to absolute symmetry which expresses itself in more or less arbitrary disturbances of the style or pattern of the work. The visitor to the East knows how this influence operates in weaving and architecture. But its opportunities are more frequent, and may be used more gracefully, in the art of poetry. For instance, in many an Old Testament poem in which a single form of metre prevails there is introduced at intervals, and especially at the end of a strophe, a longer and heavier line, similar to what the Germans call the “Schwellvers” in their primitive ballads. And this metrical irregularity is generally to the profit both of the music and of the meaning.
