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

feet they restrain not,

      The Lord hath no pleasure in them,

      He remembers their guilt.80

      The following dirge is on either a war or a pestilence, or on both, for they often came together. The text of the first lines is uncertain, the Hebrew and Greek differing considerably:—

      Call ye the keening women to come,

      And send for the wise ones,

      That they hasten and sing us a dirge,

      Till with tears our eyes run down,

      Our eyelids with water.

      For death has come up by our windows,

      And into our palaces,

      Cutting off from the streets the children,

      The youths from the places.

      And fallen are the corpses of men

      Like dung on the field,

      Or sheaves left after the reaper,

      And nobody gathers.81

      [pg 059]

      The minatory discourses are sombre and lurid. Sometimes the terror foretold is nameless and mystic, yet even then the Prophet's simplicity does not fail but rather contributes to the vague, undefined horror. In the following it is premature night which creeps over the hills—night without shelter for the weary or refuge for the hunted.

      Hear and give ear, be not proud,

      For the Lord hath spoken!

      Give glory to the Lord your God

      Before it grows dark,

      And before your feet stumble—

      On the mountains of dusk.

      While ye look for light, He turns it to gloom

      And sets it thick darkness.82

      There this poem leaves the Doom, but in others Jeremiah leaps in a moment from the vague and far-looming to the near and exact. He follows a line which songs of vengeance or deliverance often take among unsophisticated peoples in touch with nature. They will paint you a coming judgment first in the figure of a lowering cloud or bursting storm and then in the twinkling of an eye they turn the clouds or the lightnings into the ranks and flashing arms of invaders arrived. I remember an instance of this within one verse of a negro song from the time of the American Civil War:—

      [pg 060]

      Don't you see de lightning flashing in de cane-brakes?

      Don't you think we'se gwine to have a storm?

      No you is mistaken—dem's de darkies' bayonets,

      And de buttons on de uniform!

      Examples of this sudden turn from the vague to the real are found throughout Jeremiah's Oracles of Doom. Here are some of them:—

      Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights,

      Right on the Daughter of My people,

      It is neither to winnow nor to cleanse,

      In full blast it meets me … :

      Lo, like the clouds he is mounting,

      Like the whirlwind his chariots!

      Swifter than vultures his horses;

      Woe! We are undone!

      For hark a signal from Dan,

      Mount Ephraim echoes disaster,

      Warn the folk! “They are come!”83

      Make heard o'er Jerusalem.

      Lo, the beleaguerers (?) come

      From a land far-off,

      They let forth their voice on the townships of Judah,

      [Close] as the guards on her suburbs

      [pg 061]

      They are on and around her,

      For Me she defied.84

      There is a similar leap from the vagueness of IV. 23–26, which here follows, to the vivid detail of verses 29–31 already rendered on page 45.

      I looked to the earth, and lo, chaos,

      To the heavens, their light was gone,

      I looked to the mountains, they quivered,

      The hills were all shuddering.

      I looked and behold not a man,

      All the birds of the heavens had fled.

      I looked for the gardens, lo desert,

      All the townships were burning.

      Or take a similar effect from the Oracle on the Philistines, Ch. XLVII. 2, 3.

      Lo, the waters are up in the North,

      The torrents are plunging,

      O'erwhelming the land and her fulness,

      The city and her dwellers.

      Mankind is crying and howling,

      Every man in the land,

      At the noise of the stamp of the hoofs of his steeds

      At the rush of his cars,

      The rumble of his wheels.

      [pg 062]

      Fathers look not back for their children,

      So helpless their hands!85

      Or take the Prophet's second vision on his call, Ch. I. 13 ff., the boiling cauldron with its face from the North, which is to boil out over the land; then the concrete explanation, I am calling to all the kingdoms of the North, and they shall come and every one set his throne in the gates of Jerusalem. There you have it—that vague trouble brewing in the far North and then in a moment the northern invaders settled in the gates of the City.

      But the poetry of Jeremiah had other strains. I conclude this lecture with selections which deal with the same impending judgment, yet are wistful and tender, the poet taking as his own the sin and sufferings of the people with whose doom he was charged.

      The first of these passages is as devoid of hope as any we have already seen, but like Christ's mourning over the City breathes the regret of a great love—a profound and tender Alas!

      Jerusalem, who shall pity,

      Who shall bemoan thee?

      Or who will but turn him to ask

      After thy welfare?

      Then follow lines of doom without reprieve and the close comes:—

      [pg 063]

      She that bore seven hath fainted,

      She breathes out her life.

      Set is her sun in the daytime,

      Baffled and shaméd;

      And their remnant I give to the sword

      In face of their foes.86

      In the following also the poet's heart is with his people even while he despairs of them. The lines, VIII. 14-IX. 1, of which 17 and 19b are possibly later insertions, are addressed to the country-folk of Judah and Benjamin:—

      For what sit we still?

      Sweep together,

      And into the fortified cities,

      That there we may perish!

      For our God87 hath doomed us to perish,

      And