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

poison to drink,

      For to Him88 have we sinned.

      Hope for peace there was once—

      But no good—

      For a season of healing—

      Lo, panic.89

      From Dan the sound has been heard,90

      The hinnying of his horses;

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      With the noise of the neighing of his stallions

      All the land is aquake.

      For that this grief hath no comfort,91

      Sickens my heart upon me.

      Hark to the cry of my people

      Wide o'er the land—

      “Is the Lord not in Ṣion,

      Is there no King there?”92

      Harvest is over, summer is ended

      And we are not saved!

      For the breach of the Daughter of my people

      I break, I darken,

      Horror hath seized upon me,

      Pangs as of her that beareth.93

      Is there no balm in Gilead,

      Is there no healer?

      Why will the wounds never stanch

      Of the daughter of my people?

      O that my head were waters,

      Mine eyes a fountain of tears,

      That day and night I might weep

      For the slain of my people!

      Such in the simple melodies of his music and in the variety of his moods—now sombre, stern and relentless, now tender and pleading, now in despair of his people yet identifying himself with [pg 065] them—was this rural poet, who was called to carry the burdens of prophecy through forty of the most critical and disastrous years of Israel's history. In next lecture we shall follow the earlier stages which his great heart pursued beneath those burdens.

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Lecture III.

       Table of Contents

The Prophet—His Youth And His Call.

       Table of Contents

      Jeremiah was born soon after 650 B.C. of a priestly house at Anathoth, a village in the country of Benjamin near Jerusalem. Just before his birth Egypt and the small states of Palestine broke from allegiance to Assyria. War was imminent, and it may have been because of some hope in Israel of Divine intervention that several children born about the time received the name Yirmyahu—Yahweh hurls or shoots.94 The boy's name and his father's, Hilḳiah, Yahweh my portion,95 are tokens of the family's loyalty to the God of Israel, at a time when the outburst in Jewry of a very different class of personal names betrays on the part of many a lapse from the true faith, and when the loyal remnant of the people were being persecuted by King Manasseh. Probably the family were descended from Eli. For [pg 067] Abiathar, the last of that descent to hold office as Priest of the Ark, had an ancestral estate at Anathoth, to which he retired upon his dismissal by Solomon.96 The child of such a home would be brought up under godly influence and in high family traditions, with which much of the national history was interwoven. It may have been from his father that Jeremiah gained that knowledge of Israel's past, of her ideal days in the desert, of her subsequent declensions, and of the rallying prophecies of the eighth century, which is manifest in his earlier Oracles. Some have claimed a literary habit for the stock of Abiathar.97 Yet the first words of God to Jeremiah—before I formed thee in the body I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the womb I hallowed thee98—as well as the singular originality he developed, rather turn us away from his family traditions and influence.

      What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared.

      Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name Anata, is a little village not four miles north-north-east of Jerusalem, upon the first of the rocky shelves by which the central range of Palestine declines through desert to the valley of the Jordan. The village is hidden from the main road between Jerusalem and the North, and lies [pg 068] on no cross-road to the East. One of its influences on the spirit of its greatest son was its exposure to the East and the Desert. The fields of Anathoth face the sunrise and quickly merge into the falling wilderness of Benjamin. It is the same open, arid landscape as that on which several prophets were bred: Amos a few miles farther south at Tekoa, John Baptist, and during His Temptation our Lord Himself. The tops of the broken desert hills to the east are lower than the village. The floor of the Jordan valley is not visible, but across its felt gulf the mountains of Gilead form a lofty horizon.

      The descending foreground with no shelter against the hot desert winds, the village herds straying into the wilderness, the waste and crumbling hills shimmering in the heat, the open heavens and far line of the Gilead highlands, the hungry wolves from the waste and lions from the jungles of Jordan are all reflected in Jeremiah's poems:—

      Light o' heel young camel,

      Zig-zagging her tracks,

      Heifer gone to school to the desert—

      In the heat of her passion,

      Snapping the breeze in her lust,

      Who is to turn her?

      Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights,

      Direct on my people,

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      Neither to winnow nor to sift,

      In full blast it meets me.

      A lion from the jungle shall smite,

      A wolf from the wastes undo them,

      The leopard shall prowl round their towns,

      All faring forth shall be torn.

      Even the stork in the heavens

      Knoweth her seasons,

      And dove, swift and swallow

      Keep time of their coming.

      Is there no balm in Gilead,

      No healer there?99

      We need not search the botany of that province for the suggestion of this last verse. Gilead was the highland margin of the young prophet's view, his threshold of hope. The sun rose across it.

      The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin's. Even where not actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given to the tribe and its few historical personages. Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf.100 Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei, Jeremiah's persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the [pg 070] tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.101 It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,102 by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and poor Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new disasters:—

      A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation

      And bitterest weeping,

      Rachel beweeping her