Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922. George Adam Smith

      Two visions follow. To appreciate the first we must remember the natural anxiety of the prophets when charged with pronouncements so weighty and definite. The Word, the ethical purpose of God for Israel was clear, but how was it to be fulfilled? No strength appeared in the nation itself. The party, or parties, loyal to the Lord had been in power a dozen years and effected little in Jerusalem and nothing beyond. The people were not stirred and seemed hopeless. Living in a village where little changed through the years, but men followed the habits of their fathers, Jeremiah felt everything dead. Winter was on and the world asleep.

       Then the Word of the Lord came to me saying, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah; and I said, I am seeing the branch of an almond tree. And the Lord said to me, Well hast thou seen, for I am awake over My Word to perform it.

      The Hebrew for almond tree is shākēdh, which also means awakeness or watchfulness,129 and the [pg 085] Lord was awake or was watchful—shōkēdh—the difference only of a vowel. In that first token of spring which a Palestine winter affords, the Prophet received the sacrament of his call and of the assurance that God was awake! That the sacrament took this form was natural. That of Isaiah of Jerusalem was the vision of a Throne and an Altar. That of Ezekiel, the exile, shone in the stormy skies of his captivity. This to the prophet of Anathoth burst with the first blossom on his wintry fields. The sense of unity in which he and his people conceived the natural and spiritual worlds came to his help; neither in the one world nor in the other did God slumber. God was watching.

      The Second Vision needs no comment after our survey of the political conditions of the time. The North held the forces for the fulfilling of the Word. The Vision is followed by a charge to the Prophet himself.

       And the word of the Lord came to me the second time, What art thou seeing? And I said, A caldron boiling and its face is from (?) the North.130 And the Lord said unto me:—

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      Out of the North shall evil boil forth131

      On all that dwell in the land;

      For behold, I am calling

      All the realms132 of the North.

      They shall come and each set his throne

      In the openings of the gates of Jerusalem,

      On all of her walls round about,

      And every township of Judah.

      And My judgments by them133 shall I utter

      On the evil of those who have left Me,

      Who have burned to other gods

      And bowed to the works of their hands.

      But thou shalt gird up thy loins,

      Stand up and speak134 all I charge thee.

      Be not dismayed before them,

      Lest to their face I dismay thee.

      See I have thee set this day

      A fenced city and walls of bronze

      To the kings and princes of Judah,

      Her priests and the folk of the land;

      They shall fight but master thee never,

      For with thee am I to deliver—

      Rede of the Lord.135

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      Jeremiah was silenced and went forth to his ministry—the Word upon his lips and the Lord by his side.

      Two further observations are natural.

      First, note the contrast between the two Visions—the blossoming twig and the boiling caldron brewing tempests from the North. Unrelated as these seem, they symbolise together Jeremiah's prophesying throughout. For in fact this was all blossom and storm, beauty and terror, tender yearning and thunders of doom—up to the very end. Or to state the same more deeply: while the caldron of the North never ceased boiling out over his world—consuming the peoples, his own among them, and finally sweeping him into exile and night—he never, for himself or for Israel, lost the clear note of his first Vision, that all was watched and controlled. There is his value to ourselves. Jeremiah was no prophet of hope, but he was the prophet of that without which hope is impossible—faith in Control—that be the times dark and confused as they may, and the world's movements ruthless, ruinous and inevitable, God yet watches and rules all to the fulfilment of His Will—though how we see not, nor can any prophet tell us.

      Second, note how the story leaves the issue, not with one will only, but with two—God's and the Man's, whom God has called. His family has been discounted, his people and their authorities, [pg 088] political and religious, are to be against him. He is to stand up and speak, He is not to let himself be dismayed before them, lest God make him dismayed. Under God, then, the Individual becomes everything. Here, at the start of his ministry, Jeremiah has pressed upon him, the separateness, the awful responsibility, the power, of the Single Soul. We shall see how the significance of this developed not for himself only, but for the whole religion of Israel.

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Lecture IV.

       Table of Contents

The Prophet In The Reign Of Josiah. 627–26-608 B.C.

       Table of Contents

      This period of the Prophet's career may be taken in three divisions:—

      First, His Earliest Oracles, which reflect the lavish distribution of the high-places in Judah and Benjamin, and may therefore be dated before the suppression of these by King Josiah, in obedience to the Law-Book discovered in the Temple in 621–20 B.C.

      Second, His Oracles on the Scythians, whose invasions also preceded that year; with additions.

      Third, Oracles which imply that the enforcement of the Law-Book had already begun, and reveal Jeremiah's attitude to it and to the course of the reforms which it inspired.

      We must keep in mind that the Prophet did not dictate his early Oracles till the year 604–03, and that he added to them on the Second Roll many like words.136 We shall thus be prepared for the appearance among them of references to the [pg 090] changed conditions of this later date, when the Scythians had long come and gone, the Assyrian Empire had collapsed, its rival Egypt had been defeated at the Battle of Carchemish, and Nebuchadrezzar and his Chaldeans were masters of Western Asia.

1. His Earliest Oracles. (II. 2-IV. 4.)

       Table of Contents

      These bear few marks of the later date at which they were dictated by Jeremiah—in fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6–18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though vaguely described as yet, is inevitable. The nation is addressed as a whole at first in the second person singular feminine, but soon also in the plural, and the plural prevails towards the end. The nation answers as a whole, sometimes as I but sometimes also as We.

      Before expounding the truths conveyed by these early Oracles it is well to translate them in full, for though not originally uttered at the same time, they run now in a continuous stream of [pg 091] verse—save for one of those “portages” of prose which I have described.137 There