2. Man and the New Covenant.

In the earliest Oracles of Jeremiah nations are the human units in religion, Israel as a whole the object of the Divine affection and providence. To his age worship was the business of the nation: public reverence for symbols and institutions, and rites in which the individual’s share was largely performed for him by official representatives. The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt with the people as a moral unity from the earliest times to their own. The Lord had loved and sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation. As a nation they fell away from Him and now they were wholly false to Him. When Jeremiah first urges them to return, it is of a public and general repentance that he speaks, as Deuteronomy had done; and when his urgency fails it is their political disappearance which he pronounces for doom.

But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that of the immediate relation of the individual to God. Jeremiah never lost hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah the gradual breaking up of the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.

One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark masses appear and how difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn comes up one begins to see all this. The mass breaks; first the larger, more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is apparent in its separate strength and beauty.

It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is a breaking of dawn—but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation which has begun with the singular Thou changes gradually to You, and not Israel but ye men of Israel are called to turn to their God.(799) As the Prophet’s indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national harlotry. He arraigns separate classes or groups,(800) and then, in increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous Ṣedekiah, the bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)—with the fit word and in sharp irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who fling about their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord.(802) Jeremiah has answered the call to him to search for the man, the men beneath the nation.(803)

Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of drought. Such passages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards God of its individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the multitude and talks to him of himself.

O Lord, Who triest the righteous, Who seest the reins and the heart.(804)

False above all is the heart, Sick to despair, Who is to know it? I, the Lord, searching the heart And trying the reins, To give to each man as his ways, As the fruit of his doings.(805)

Can any man hide him in secret And I not see him?(806)

In those days they shall say no more: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity, every man that eateth sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.(807)

Speak to all Judah all the words I have charged thee.... Peradventure they will hearken and turn every man from his evil way.(808)

He that would boast in this let him boast, Insight and knowledge of Me.(809)

Lord, I know—not to man is his way, Not man’s to walk or settle his steps.(810)

Blessed the man that trusts in the Lord And the Lord is his trust! He like a tree shall be planted by water, That stretches its roots to the stream; Unafraid at the coming of heat, His leaf shall be green; Sans care in the season of drought He fails not in yielding his fruit.(811)

The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth—could not be more beautifully drawn.

Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human unit in religion—Deuteronomy’s ideal and at first his own—to the individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy conduct of the people, their abandonment by God, the ruin of the State and of the national worship—which cut off individuals from all political and religious associations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah’s repeated phrase) only his life, or his soul, for a prey.(812) But all these could have furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter experience his own soul searched and re-searched by God—

But Thou, Lord, hast known me, Thou seest and triest my heart towards Thee—(813)

unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence of an immediate and intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had learned how a man could be God’s before he was his mother’s or his nation’s—God’s own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one’s own generation—how God can hold a single man alone to His Will against his nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them. And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law like a garden of lilies within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah’s heart, and was watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.

We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing—the prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place, following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour grapes—individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah’s own; the critical questions which have been with us from the beginning embarrass us still.

The collection of Oracles to which that of the New Covenant belongs, Chs. XXX, XXXI, was not made till long after Jeremiah’s time; it includes, as we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic origin.(814) But so do other chapters of the Book, in which nevertheless genuine prophecies of Jeremiah are recognised by virtually all modern critics. The context therefore offers no prejudice against the authenticity of the prophecy of the New Covenant, XXXI. 31-34. But the form and the substance of this have raised doubts, so honest and reluctant as to deserve our consideration. Duhm starts his usual objection that the passage is in prose and a style characteristic of the late expanders of the Book. We may let that go, as we have done before, as by itself inconclusive;(815) the prophecy may not have come directly from Jeremiah’s mouth but through the memory of a reporter of the Prophet, Baruch or another. More deserving of consideration is the criticism which Duhm, with great unwillingness, makes of the terms and substance of the prophecy. He objects to the term covenant: a covenant is a legal contract and could hardly have been chosen for the frame of his ideal by so pronounced an anti-legalist as Jeremiah. The passage “promises a new Covenant—not a new Torah but only a more inward assimilation of the Torah by the people, and emphasises the good results which this will have for them but betrays no demand for a higher kind of religion. If one does not let himself be dazzled by the phrases new covenant and write it on the heart then the passage tells us of the relation of the individual no more than Deuteronomy has already regarded as possible, XXX. 11 ff., and desirable, VI. 6-8: namely, that every man should be at home in the Law and honestly follow it.” He continues: “it is impossible for me to hold any longer to the Jeremian origin of the passage. I find in it only the effusion of one learned in the Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that every one of the Jewish people should know the Law by heart.”

But in his resolve “not to let himself be dazzled” has not Duhm gone to the opposite extreme and seriously under-read the whole spirit of the passage—besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness of the presence in the text of a legalist at work?(816) The choice of the term covenant for the frame of his ideal was not unnatural to Jeremiah nor irrelevant to his experience and teaching. Formally the term may mean a legal contract; but it is open to a prophet or a poet to use any metaphor for his ideals and transform its mere letter by the spirit he puts into it; and after all covenant is only a metaphor for a relation which was beyond the compass of any figure to express. Yet it was a term classical in Israel and most intelligible to the generation whom Jeremiah was addressing. Its associations, especially as he had recalled them,(817) had been those not of the Law but of Love. It was not a contract or bargain but an approach by God to His people, an offer of His Grace, a statement of His Will and accompanied by manifestations of His Power to redeem them. One might as well charge Jesus with legalism in adopting a term sanctioned by God Himself, and so historical, sacred and endeared to the national memory. Nor need Torah, or Law, be taken as Duhm takes it in its sense of the legal codes of Israel, but in its wider meaning of the Divine instruction or revelation. Further the epithet New applied to Covenant was most relevant to the Prophet’s and his people’s recent sense of the failure of the ancient covenant, as restated and enforced in Deuteronomy. In spite of the excitement caused by the discovery of the Book in which it was written, and the recital of its words throughout the land, the Old Covenant had failed to capture the heart of the people or to secure from them more than the formal and superstitious observance of the letter of its Torah. Was it not a natural antithesis to predict that His Torah would be set by God in their inward parts and written on their hearts? How else (will Duhm tell us?) than by such phrases could the Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law of God “by heart” (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the Prophet’s teaching. He had spoken of God’s will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught religion as the individual’s direct knowledge of God;(819) he had won this himself from God directly without help from his parentage, his fellow-prophets or priests or any others; he had most bitterly known also how weak the word of one man is to teach his countrymen this knowledge and that it can only come by the inward operation of God Himself upon their spirits; and he had made as clear as ever prophet did that God’s pardon for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation’s survival and restoration.

Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of Jeremiah’s experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar and dear to the people. The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest, but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah’s failing fingers or to the awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own.

Lo, days are coming—Rede of the Lord—when I will make with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them(820)—Rede of the Lord. But this is My(821) Covenant which I will make with the sons(822) of Israel after those days—Rede of the Lord—I will set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write it, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother saying, Know thou(823) the Lord! For they shall all know Me from the least even to the greatest;(824) for I will forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.

This is, as has been said, a prophecy of Christianity which has hardly its equal in the Old Testament.(825) It is the Covenant which Jesus Christ the Son of God accepted for Himself and all men and sealed with His own blood.

And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual soul is made to feel that God created it not for its family nor its state nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for it after death. The Prophet’s eyes are still sealed to that future. The soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with God.

Appendix I.

MEDES AND SCYTHIANS (PP. 73, 110).

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to give a correct account of the national and racial movements which, along with the moral conditions in Judah, called forth Jeremiah’s Oracles of judgment in the years immediately following his call in 627-626 B.C. But the following facts are well founded. In or about 625 the Medes were defeated in an attack upon Assyria and their king Phraortes was killed, but at the same time Asshurbanipal died, and his weaker successor was compelled to recognize the virtual independence of Nabopolassar, the Chaldean in Babylon. Cyaxares (624-585), the son of Phraortes, soon after his succession to his father—say between 624 and 620—led a second Median assault upon Assyria and besieged Nineveh, but had to retire because of the onset from the north of the Scythians, the Ashguzai of the Assyrian monuments, probably the Ashkenaz or Ashkunza (?) of the Old Testament. And then it was not for some years that Cyaxares felt himself strong enough by his alliance with Nabopolassar for a third Median invasion of Assyria which culminated in the capture and destruction of Nineveh.

The Assyrians appear to have been in touch with the Ashguzai for over a century and for a shorter time probably in alliance with them; which alliance was the cause of the Scythian advance to the relief of Nineveh from its siege by the Medes circa 724-720 (see Winckler Die Keilinschriften v. das alte Testament, 3rd ed., pp. 100 ff.). About the same time must be dated the Scythian advance through Western Asia to the borders of Egypt, which Herodotus (I. 103-104, IV. 1) reports. Professor N. Schmidt (Enc. Bibl., art. “Scythians”) supposes that this advance was due to the same Scythian-Assyrian alliance, in order to preserve the Assyrian territories from the arms of Psamtik of Egypt, who had since 639 been besieging Ashdod; and he holds that this hypothesis explains the absence of any record of violence by the Scythians on their southern campaign, except at Ashkelon. This precarious hypothesis apart, we have the facts that no Biblical chronicler records any invasion of Judah and Benjamin by the Scythians, and yet that the early Oracles of Jeremiah, generally attributed to the alarms which the advance of such barbarian hordes would excite in Judah, do closely fit the Scythians (with a few exceptions that may be due to the prophet’s adaptation in 604 of his earlier Oracles to the new enemy out of the north, the Chaldeans).

There, are, however, modern writers who claim that the Oracles in question were originally composed not in view of the Scythian, but of the Chaldean invasion of Palestine. So George Douglas (The Book of Jeremiah, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), who, while assigning Jeremiah’s call to 627, relegates the two visions and all the Oracles in the first part of the book to the years following Jehoiakim’s accession to the Jewish throne in 608; cp. Winckler, Geschichte Israels, I. pp. 112 f. and F. Wilke (Alttestamentliche studien R. Kittel zum 60 Geburtstag dargebracht, 1913), quoted by John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion, pp. 42 f. n. 2. This would be an easy solution but for the insuperable objections to it that the Oracles in question far more closely fit the Scythian, than the Chaldean, invasion; and that Jer. I. 2, as distinctly covers prophecies of Jeremiah in the days of Josiah as v. 3 does his prophesying under Jehoiakim.

POSTSCRIPT.

The date of Nineveh’s fall has hitherto been accepted as 607-606 B.C. But in July of this year (1923) Mr. C. J. Gadd described to the British Academy a Babylonian tablet, which dates the fall in the fourteenth year of Nabopolassar’s reign in Babylon. This year was 612 B.C., if it be right to reckon the reign from 626-25 B.C.; but as remarked above, p. 175, Nabopolassar became in that year officially not king but only viceroy. Dependent as I was on a newspaper summary of Mr. Gadd’s lecture I could therefore do no more than offer for the fall of Nineveh the alternative dates, 612 and 606; see above p. 175 and compare p. 162.

Appendix II.

NECOH’S CAMPAIGN (PP. 162, 163).

In addition to the accounts in the Books of Kings and Chronicles of Pharaoh Nĕcoh’s advance into Asia in pursuance of his claim for a share of the crumbling Assyrian Empire there are two independent records: (1) Jeremiah XLVII. 1—and Pharaoh smote Gaza—a headline (with other particulars) wrongly prefixed by the Hebrew text, but not by the Greek, to an Oracle upon an invasion of Philistia not from the south but from the north (see above, pp. 13, 61); (2) by Herodotus, II. 159, who says that “Nĕcoh (Nekôs) making war by land on the Syrians defeated them at Magdolos and after the battle took Kadŭtis, a great city of Syria.” Magdolos is probably Megiddo, unless it stands for Megdel, which, as well as Rumman (= Hadad-rimmon, the scene of the mourning for Josiah, Zech. XII. 11) lies near Megiddo. If, as is usually held, Kadŭtis be Gaza, Herodotus has reversed the proper order of Nĕcoh’s two actions; but Kadŭtis also suggests hak-Kôdēsh, the holy, an epithet of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, I. 270) which would suit Herodotus’ order, for it was after Megiddo that Nĕcoh became master of Jerusalem and Judah. The suggestion, though worth mentioning, is doubtful; the epithet is late, exilic and post-exilic; and Herodotus’ phrase took Kadŭtis is hardly equivalent to became paramount there as Nĕcoh became paramount in Jerusalem.

INDEX OF TEXTS.

Genesis— xlix. 27; 69

Exodus— xxi. 1-6; 235

Leviticus— vi. 5; 152 xix. 27; 206 xxvi. 34 f.; 8

Numbers— xxx. 2, 12; 313

Deuteronomy— iv. 19; 136, 195 xvii. 3; 195 xviii. 6; 135 xxxii. 13; 222

Judges— i. 16; 193 iv. 17; 194 v. 4; 222 24; 194 xi. 36; 313

I. Samuel— x. 2; 302 xv. 6; 193 22; 156

I. Kings— ii. 26 f.; 67

II. Kings— x. 15, 23; 193 xxii. 12 ff.; 174 20; 259 xxiii. 5, 13; 195 8 ff.; 135 10; 196 28-30; 163 31; 66, 232 xxiv. 1-16; 176 6; 259 8, 15; 213 17; 232 18; 66 xxv. 7; 270 18; 246 21; 236

I. Chronicles— ii. 55; 193

II. Chronicles— xxxv. 20; 162 xxxvi. 21-23; 8

Ezra— i. 1 f.; 8

Nehemiah— xiii; 20 15-22; 221

Psalms— v. 9; 122 xv; 232 xxiii; 9 xxvi-xxviii; 9 l. 13, 14; 158 li. 16, 17; 158

Isaiah— vi; 351 x. 28-32; 70 xv. f.; 20 xl. ff.; 8, 20 xliv. 28; 8 lii, liii; 7 lvi. 2-7; 221 lviii; 20 13 f.; 221 lx. 5; 302

Jeremiah— i.; 9, 28, 30, 42, 50, 78-88 1-3; 9 5; 67 6; 82, 318 9 f.; 355 10; 14, 83, 319 11 f.; 351, 365 12 f.; 355 13-15; 62 17 f.; 14, 333 ii, iii; 355, 357 ii-xxv; 10 ii. 1-37; 91-98 1-3; 44 2; 104 5; 106, 356, 362 5-8; 49 8; 355 9; 356 f. 11-13; 346, 356 13; 364 14 f.; 39, 40, 362 14-17; 47 17; 14, 105 18; 81 19; 12, 14, 360 21 f.; 107, 346 23 f.; 68 25; 346, 360 26; 18 28; 76 29; 12 30; 360 31; 47, 106, 346, 355, 362 32 ff.; 45 35; 346, 357, 363 37; 358 iii; 18 1-25; 98-103 1-6; 52, 358 2; 77, 370 3; 358, 365 5; 40 6-18; 18 6 ff.; 358 20; 358 21-25; 361 22; 107 25; 107 iv. 1-4; 103 3 f.; 43, 70, 108 , 346, 361 5-8; 112 6; 355 8; 358 9 f.; 113 , 332 11-22; 114 , 115 11-14; 60, 68, 69 15-18; 60, 72 18; 360 23-28; 61, 116 28; 358 29-31; 45 f., 117 , 118 v. 1-9; 119 , 120 , 134 1-6; 48, 357, 369 1; 370 3; 360 4; 12 6; 69 7-9; 357, 358, 369 10-14; 120 , 121 13; 18 14; 84 15-17; 122 , 355 18 f.; 122 , 123 20-31; 123-125 , 357 22; 365 24; 365 26; 370 29; 358 31; 343, 346, 360 vi. 1-8; 125-127 9-15; 127-129 11; 319, 330, 358 13-15; 200 15; 359 16-21; 129 , 130 22-26; 130 , 131 26; 359 27-29; 132-134 , 352 27-30; 360 vii-x; 17 vii. 1-15; 147-151 , 346 1-28; 18 3 ff.; 346, 357 12-15; 72 14; 367 15; 359 16-20; 195 16; 358 19; 360 21-23; 155-159 , 346, 367 28 ff.; 50 30 ff.; 165, 195 viii.; 50 1-3; 196 4-12; 196, 198-200 5; 13 7; 69 8 f.; 153 , 154 , 155, 369 10-12; 13, 261, 359, 360 13; 200 14-ix. 1; 63 f., 200-202 16; 12 19; 356 21; 12 22; 69 ix.; 50 1; 202 2-9; 202-204 2 f.; 341 , 342 3, 7; 230 4 f.; 369 9; 358 10-12; 204 11; 359 13-16; 204, 208 15; 359 17 ff.; 58, 205 20-22; 58, 205 , 206 , 241 22 f.; 49 23-26; 18, 206 , 207 24; 357, 371 x. 1-16; 18, 20, 207, 352 6-8; 13 11; 18 17 f.; 207 19-22; 207-209 , 241, 370 23 f.; 49, 209 , 372 25; 209 , 210 xi.; 30, 42 1-5; 18 1-8; 28, 143-145 , 155, 377 6-8; 13, 17, 18 13; 76 14; 358, 360 15, 16; 151-153 , 210, 346 18 ff.; 28 18-23; 323 f. 20; 330, 371 21; 146 22 f.; 329 xii. 1-6, 28; 339 , 340 , 351 1-2; 160 , 161 , 356 3; 14, 329, 373 5; 332 7-9; 362 7-13; 210-212 8; 385 9; 230 11; 230, 362 xiii. 1-17; 28 1-11; 183-185 1; 356 12-14; 55, 185, 358 15, 16; 59 17; 212 18, 19; 213 20-27; 213-215 22; 360 23; 108, 346 24; 359 25; 361 xiv; 50 1 ff.; 56 f. 8 f.; 57, 348 , 364 11-16; 50 f. , 360 12; 346 17-18; 51, 215 19-22; 216 , 217 21; 348 22; 356, 365 xv. 1-9; 52, 358 1-4; 217 5-9; 217 , 218 7 f.; 359 10; 319 10-21; 324-326 13, 14; 13 15; 330 18 f.; 332, 347 xvi. 2-9; 326 , 327 5-9; 219 10-13; 219, 327 12; 346 14, 15; 18, 219 16-18; 219 19, 20; 220, 356 xvii. 1-4; 13, 220 , 346 5 ff.; 53 f. , 353 7 f.; 372 9, 10; 108 , 109 , 371 13; 364 14-18; 328 16; 237 18; 329 19-27; 20 xviii; 82 xviii. 1-12; 28, 185-190 , 355, 360 1; 356 7-10; 84 13-17; 221 , 222 11 f.; 361 15; 356 17; 359 18-23; 328 f. 20 f.; 332 xix; 191 xix-xx. 6; 223 1; 356 xx. 1-6; 191 , 192 2; 321 3 f.; 369 7; 82, 318, 353 7-18; 223 7-12; 330 , 331 8; 318 9; 319 11; 353 12; 371 14-18; 331 , 332 xxi. 1-10; 223, 267, 268 7; 358 9; 229, 277-280 11, 12; 223 13, 14; 223 xxii-xxiii. 8; 16 xxii. 1-5; 223 6 f.; 223 , 224 8 f.; 224 10; 164 11 f.; 223 13-17; 166 , 167 , 223, 369 15 f.; 75, 357 18 f.; 167 , 168 , 259, 321 20-30; 224-226 25 f.; 355 26; 213 xxiii. 1-8; 20 7, 8; 18, 219 9-32; 253-258 9-40; 16 14, 17, 22; 261 14-17; 361 15; 359 19, 20; 18, 358 21; 265 23 f.; 366, 371 27; 260 28; 264 31; 265, 370 32; 259 xxiv; 28 1; 356 1-9; 238-241 , 309 7; 378 8 ff.; 355 9 f.; 359 xxv; 22 1-11, 13; 179-181 9; 355 12-14; 20, 181 13-15; 14, 181 , 358 15-38; 182 26; 20 xxvi; 10, 147, 168-174 1-9; 18 2; 165, 371 6; 72 13; 357 14, 15; 264 xxvii-xxxv; 10 xxvii, xxviii; 247 xxvii; 234, 248-250 1; 13 2; 356 5, 6; 355 7; 13 9; 361 12-14; 13 17-22; 13 18; 264 xxviii; 10, 28 2-17; 251-253 6; 264 xxviii. 11; 264 15; 361, 369 17; 322 xxix; 40 1-23; 241-245 4-13; 367 14; 13 15; 245 16-20; 13 21-23; 245 , 261 24-32; 246-247 , 322 29; 237 xxx-xxxiii; 286 xxx, xxxi; 293, 374 f. xxx. 2; 293 5-9; 294 , 295 10, 11; 13, 295 12-15; 295 15; 13 16-17; 296 22; 13 23, 24; 18, 358 xxxi; 30, 42, 286 1-6; 297-300 6; 141 7-14; 20 7-9; 300 , 301 10-14; 301 , 302 15; 47, 70 15-17; 303 , 304 18-22; 304 , 305 20; 363 23-28; 305 , 306 29, 30; 307, 371 31-34; 307, 375-380 35 f.; 365 xxxii; 10, 28, 286 1-5; 286 , 355 6-15; 285, 356 6-25; 287-289 12; 12 16-25; 237 26-44; 289 30; 356 xxxiii; 289-291 1; 290 4-13; 290 14-26; 13, 289 xxxiv. 1-7; 267, 268-270 2; 355 8-22; 235, 273-275 22; 355 xxxv; 193 , 194 2; 356 xxxvi-xlv; 10 xxxvi; 17, 22 ff. , 26, 178 , 179 2; 82, 356 9; 165 28; 356 32; 89, 110 xxxvii. 3-10; 267, 270 , 271 5, 7; 234 11; 234 11-21; 275 , 276 17-21; 284 xxxviii. 1-3; 276-280 2; 229, 277 4-6; 280 , 281 7-13; 281 14-28; 282-285 19 ff.; 321 22; 369 28; 285, 291 xxxix. 3, 14; 291 , 292 4-13; 13, 291 7; 270 14; 174 15-18; 281 , 282 18; 229 xl-xliv; 17, 18 xl. 1-6; 291 , 292 5, 6; 174 xli, xlii; 307-309 xliii. 1-7; 310 8-13; 310 xliv. 1-14; 311 , 312 15-28; 312-316 30; 234 xlv; 17, 226-229 5; 27, 322 xlvi-li; 10, 14, 20, 181 xlvi. 26; 13 27 f.; 13 xlvii. 1; 13, 384 2, 3; 61 xlviii. 40-47; 13, 20 xlix. 7-22; 20 34-39; 20 l. 1-58; 20 li. 59; 234 60; 20 lii; 10, 20 28-30; 13

Lamentations; 31, 318

Ezekiel— i; 351 viii; 234 xi. 15; 234 xvi. 59; 232 xvii. 11-21; 232 xix. 14; 233 xxiii. 22; 213 xxix. 3; 234

Daniel; 292

Hosea— vi. 1-4; 217

Joel— ii. 1; 112

Amos— iii. 2; 260 6; 112 v. 25; 158 ix. 2 ff.; 366

Obadiah; 20

Micah— vi. 6-8; 75, 158

Zephaniah— iii. 4; 258

Habakkuk— iii. 7; 72

Matthew— xviii. 23 f.; 189 xxvii. 7; 185

Luke— i. 76; 79 vii. 39 ff.; 189 xiii. 6 ff.; 189 xix; 189

1 Corinthians— i. 17; 157

INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS.

Ahikam, 157, 174, 291.

Amos, 3, 22, 112, 158, 260.

Anathoth, 66, 67, 287, etc.

Apocrypha, the, 8.

“Arabian Nights,” 36.

Ark, the, 101.

Assyria, 66, 77, 175.

Atonement, 7.

Baalîm, 76, etc.

Babylonian idolatry, 234.

Ball, C. J., his “The Prophecies of Jeremiah,” 9, 93, 184, 203, 210.

Baruch, 4, 8, 23, 26, 82, 178, 227.

Budde, Professor, 38.

Calvin, 278, 283, 315.

Carchemish, battle of, 175.

Chaldeans, the, 110, 121, 122, etc.

Cornill, 7, 38, 82, 166, 184, 190, 222, 268, 269, 276, 287, 298, 299, 301, 312, 329, 375, etc.

Corvée, the, 166.

Covenant, the new, 374 ff.

Dalman: “Palästinischer Diwan,” 36.

Davidson, Dr. A. B., 3, 5, 15, 26, 139, 186, 268, 354.

Deuteronomy, Book of, 135; its cardinal doctrines, 136; alleged connection of Jeremiah with its composition, 139.

Dirge on the drought, 56.

Douglas, G., 15, 145, 382.

Driver: “The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah,” 111, 133, 147, 181, 239, 296, 312.

Duhm, Professor, 8, 15, 37, 38, 40, 82, 83, 91, 98, 115, 166, 194, 222, 227, 243, 244, 257, 268, 269, 276, 287, 295, 300, 312, 329, 375, etc.

Ebed-Melech, 281.

Edghill, 159.

Egypt, 77, 105, 234, 310.

Ephraim, 72, 297, 299, 304.

Erbt, 38, 48, 133, 190, 227, 256, 268, 314.

Euphrates, 184.

Ewald, 184, 222, 268.

Farah, Wady, 184.

Freedom, the Divine, 186, 237.

Future Life, no hope of, 138, 240, 334, 340, 380.

Gedaliah, 276, 291, 292; assassination, 307.

Gidroth-Chimham, 308.

Giesebrecht, 38, 48, 147, 155, 181, 227, 257, 268, 287, 312, 380.

Gilead, 68, 69, 201, 224.

Gillies, Rev. J. R., 111, 146, 147, 181, 190, 222, 268, 287, 294, 312, 324, 375.

God, man, and the new covenant, 350.

Grotius, 7.

Hananiah, 251.

Hebrew poetry, 33.

Heine, 36, 40.

Herder, 34.

Herodotus, 73, 206, 382.

Hilḳiah, 66.

Hinnom, 185, 191, 195 (Topheth).

Hosea, 4, 44, etc.

Hugo, Victor, 167, 230.

Isaiah, 4, 85, 266, 279, 319, 351.

Ishmael (the fanatic), 307.

Jeconiah (Konyahu), 224.

Jehoahaz, 164.

Jehoiachin, 176 (see Jeconiah).

Jehoiakim, 144, 165, 195.

Jeremiah, personality, 4; biography, 26; as poet, 31; as prose writer, 40; his youth and his call, 66; range of his mission, 79; prophet to the nations, 79; carrier of the Word of the Lord, 83; charge in visions, 84; in the reign of Josiah, 89; his Oracles, 89; alleged pessimism, 108; Oracles on the Scythians, 110; settlement in Jerusalem, 134; alleged connection with the composition of Deuteronomy, 139; attitude to its ethics and to the written law, and to sacrifices, 143; difficulties as to “the Covenant,” 144; conspiracy against, 146; address rebuking the people, 147; contrasts to the teaching of Deuteronomy, 153; enmity of the priests, 168; prediction of the ruin of the Temple, 168; the Rolls, 178; address prophesying judgment upon Judah, 179; parables, 183; arrest, 191; Oracles on the Edge of Doom, 195; hopeful prophecies, 236; vision of the good and bad figs, 238; Letter to the Exiles, 241; treatment of the ’prophets’ in Jerusalem, 245; removal and restoration of the sacred vessels, 250; controversy with other prophets, 258; his prophesying vindicated by history, 259; arrested and flogged, 275; controversy as to suggested surrender, 276; charged with treason and cast into cistern, 280; rescue by Ebed-melech, 281; appeal by the King, 282; “The Book of Hope,” 286; what befel Jeremiah when the city was taken, 291; carried off in chains to Ramah and there released, 292; prophecies of the physical restoration of Israel and Judah, 302; carried off to Egypt, 310; Oracle concerning the Jews in Egypt, 311; the story of his soul, 317; “the Weeping Prophet,” 318; voice of pain and protest, 318; his irony and scorn, 321; fluid and quick temper, 332; poet’s heart for the beauties of nature and domestic life, 334; no hope of another life, 334; faith in his predestination, 335; sacrifice of self, 341; foreshadowing the sufferings of Christ for men, 349; revelations of God subjective, 352; a God of deeds, 354; Jeremiah’s monotheism, 356; brooding on the wrath of the Lord, 358; the love of God, 361; the Divine power in nature, 365; man and the new covenant, 367; readings of the heart of man, 370; the individual as the direct object of the Divine grace and discipline, 372; the prophecy of the new covenant, 374.

Jeremiah (Book of), 9; questions of authorship, 19; the Rolls, 23; Exilic and Post-Exilic additions, 29; poetical passages, 31; critical text, 156; evidence for revelation by argument, 161.

Jerusalem, 113, 125; invested by Nebuchadrezzar, 234; Temple and Palace burned, 235; Jeremiah’s activity and sufferings during the siege, 267; his pronouncements of surrender, 267.

Job, Book of, 49.

Johanan-ben-Kareah, 308.

Josiah, 75, 162, etc.

Knox, John, 266, 272.

König, 145.

“Kurzer Hand-Commentar,” 38.

Lees, Dr. John: “The German Lyric,” 33, 42.

Love, the Divine, 106, 348, 356, etc.

Lowth, Bishop: “De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum,” 33.

Magor-Missabib, 192.

Man and the new covenant, 367.

Marti, 155, 184.

McCurdy, 111.

McFadyen, J. E., 184, 222.

Megiddo, battle of, 163.

Metrical Questions, vii, 32-53 and passim.

Mispah, 292, 308.

Misraim (Egypt), 94, etc.

Nabopolassar, 175.

Nebuchadrezzar, 110, 126, 175, 292, etc.

Nebusaradan, 235, 291, 292.

Nĕcoh, 163, 175, 384.

Nineveh, Fall of, 162, 163, 175, 383.

Nineveh, 175.

Noph (Memphis), 94, 311.

Omnipresence, the Divine, 256, 366.

Oracles on the Edge of Doom, 60, 195.

Parable of the Potter, 82, 185.

Parables, 183.

Pashhur, 191.

Pathros, 311.

Patience, the Divine, 187-189, 217, 237.

Peake, Prof., 146, 147, 184, 222, 268, 273, 274, 279, 287, 293, 312, 375.

Predestination, 78, 186, 335.

Prophets. Personality of the, 3; see also 245-266.

Qînah (metre), 37, 39, 44, 244, 283, 295, 297, etc.

Queen, or Host, of Heaven, 195, 234, 313, 314.

Ramah, 70, 292, 297, 303.

Rechabites, the, 193.

Renan, 308.

Rothstein, 222, 294, 312.

Sacrifice, 130, 152, 155-159, 299, 341.

Saintsbury, George: “History of English Prosody,” 36.

Schmidt, Professor, 24, 25, 111, 382.

Schweich Lectures, 34.

Scythians, the, 73, 82, 110, 381.

Ṣedekiah, 232, and passim to 282.

Shakespeare, 36, 47.

Shiloh, 72, 149, 170.

Skinner, Rev. John, D.D.: his “Prophecy and Religion, Studies in the Life of Jeremiah,” 7, 103, 111, 129, 133, 145, 146, 166, 169, 181, 190, 222, 227, 237, 268, 279, 284, 292, 307, 375, 383.

Slavery, 235; proposed emancipation, 273.

Smith, H. P., 147.

Smith, W. Robertson, 15, 159.

Snouck Hurgronje: “Mekka,” 37.

Stade, B., 267.

Tahpanhes (Daphne), 94, 310, 311.

Tchekov, 198.

Thackeray, St. John: his “The Septuagint and Jewish Worship,” 14.

Thomson, Rev. W. R., 111, 140, 146, 268.

Torah, the, 153, etc.

Urijahu, 173.

Wady Farah, 184.

Wellhausen, 5, 146.

Winckler: “A.T. Untersuchungen,” 142, 176, 382, 383.

FOOTNOTES

1 A. B. Davidson.

2 A. B. Davidson. “Without Jeremiah,” says Wellhausen, “the Psalms could not have been composed.”

3 Cp. e.g. Jer. xi. 19, with Is. liii. 7; and see Grotius, “Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum,” on Is. lii-liii; Cornill, “Das Buch Jeremia erklärt,” pp. 11-12; John Skinner, “Prophecy and Religion,” p. 351.

4 II. Chron. xxxvi. 21 (with a reference to Lev. xxvi. 34, 35) and 22, 23, the latter repeated in Ezra i. 1-2. Duhm, indeed, but on insufficient grounds, thinks the former citation, because of its reference to Leviticus, cannot be from our Book of Jeremiah but is from a Midrash unknown to us; yet the chronicler’s was the very spirit to associate a Levitical provision with Jer. xxix. 10; cp. xxv. 9-12. The other quotation Duhm refers to some part of Is. xl. ff. (xliv. 28?) as though this had at one time been attributed to Jeremiah.

5 In the Apocrypha proper, (1) “Baruch” to which is attached (2) “The Epistle of Jeremy” warning the Jews of Babylon in general and conventional terms against idolatry. Apocalyptic writings, (3) “Apocalypse of Baruch,” (4) (5) and (6) three other “Apocalypses of Baruch,” (7) “The Rest of the Words of Baruch,” or “Paralipomena Jeremiæ,” (8) “Prophecy of Jeremiah.” For particulars of these see “Encyclopædia Biblica,” arts. “Apocalyptic Literature” (R. H. Charles), and “Apocrypha” (M. R. James).

6 Following Hitzig, C. J. Ball (“The Prophecies of Jeremiah” in “The Expositor’s Bible,” 1890, pp. 10 ff.) refers Pss. xxiii, xxvi-xxviii to Jeremiah, and it is possible that in particular the personal experiences in Ps. xxvii are reflections of those of the prophet. But such experiences were so common in the history of the prophets and saints of Israel as to render the reference precarious.

7 It has been calculated that the Greek has 2700 words fewer than the Hebrew, i.e. about 120 verses or from four to five average chapters.

8 E.g. ii. 19, 29; iii. 1; v. 4a; viii. 16, 21; xxxii. 12, etc.

9 nĕ’um Yahweh: utterance or oracle of Jehovah.

10 E.g. the words at his mouth, xxxvi. 17; xxxviii. 16.

11 E.g. Jerusalem in viii. 5, and in xxxvi. 22 the ninth month.

12 E.g. ii. 1-2; xxv. 1b; xxvii. 1; xlvii. 1; l. 1.

13 E.g. viii. 10ab-12; x. 6-8; xi. 7, 8; xvii. 1-4 (perhaps omitted by the Greek, because partly given already in xv. 13, 14); xxv. 18 and a curse as at this day; xxvii. 1, 7, 12b, 13, 14a, 17, 18b, clauses in 19, 20, the whole of 21, and 22b; xxix. 14, 16-20; xxx. 10, 11 (= xlvi. 27 f.), 15a, 22; xxxiii. 14-26; xxxix. 4-13; xvi. 26; xlvii. 1 (except to the Philistines); xlviii. 45-47; lii. 28-30.

14 E.g. i. 10, 17, 18; ii. 17, 19; vii. 28b; xii. 3; xiv. 4, etc.

15 Verse 14 is not found in the Greek.

16 In his Schweich Lectures on “The Septuagint and Jewish Worship” (for the British Academy, 1921) Mr. St. John Thackeray presents clear evidence from the different vocabularies in the Greek Version that this Version was the work of two translators, the division between whom is at Ch. xxix. verse 7. The dividing line cuts across the Greek arrangement of the chapters, which sets the Oracles on Foreign Nations in the centre of the Book. This shows that it was not the translators who placed them there, but that the translators found the arrangement in the Hebrew MS. from which they translated. Further, he thinks that the division of the Book into two parts was not made by the translators, but already existed in their Hebrew exemplar. For this the Hebrew text gives two evidences: (1) the titles of the Oracles, (2) the colophons appended to two of them. The titles are some long, some short. In the Hebrew order the Oracles with long titles are mixed up with those with short, but in the Greek order the six with long titles come together first and are followed by the five with short. There are two colophons—one to the Moab Oracle, the other to the Babylon Oracle; but the Moab Oracle stands last in the Greek order and the Babylon Oracle last in the Hebrew order.

From all this two conclusions are drawn: (1) when the titles were inserted the chapters were arranged as in the Greek, which, therefore, was the original arrangement; (2) they afford Hebrew evidence for a break or interruption in the middle of the Oracles—the longer titles cease about the end of Part I of the Greek Version, which therefore follows a division of the Book into two parts that already existed in the Hebrew original from which it was made. The Hebrew editor who amplified the titles had apparently only Part I before him.

17 E.g. Graf (“Der Prophet J. erklärt,” 1862), George Douglas (“The Book of Jeremiah,” 1903) for the Hebrew; and Workman (“The Text of Jeremiah,” 1888) for the Greek. For a judicial comparison of the two editions, resulting much in favour of the Greek, see W. R. Smith, “The O.T. in the Jewish Church,” Lectures IV and V.

18 “The Hebrew is qualitatively superior to the Greek, but quantitatively the Greek is nearer the original. This judgment is general, admitting many exceptions, and each passage has to be considered by itself.”—A. B. Davidson. Cp. Duhm, “Das Buch Jer.,” p. xxii.

19 Oracles on the King, xxii. 1-xxiii. 8 and on the Prophets, xxiii. 9-40.

20 The Oracles under Jehoiakim, chs. vii-x, before those on the enforcement of Deuteronomy under Josiah xi. 6-8.

21 The Oracle for Baruch, dated in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, 604 B.C., is not given till ch. xlv, a long way off from ch. xxxvi to which it belongs by date and subject, and only after chs. xl-xliv, the story of Jeremiah’s life after the fall of Jerusalem.

22 So far as it is common to the Hebrew and the Greek.

23 The end of is wanting in the Greek.

24 Chs. xl-xliv. And between them the title and its supplement ignore the Oracles which Jeremiah uttered under Josiah after the thirteenth year of the King, perhaps iii. 6-18, and certainly xi. 1-5, 6-8.

25 Ch. lii.

26 E.g. iii. 6-18; ix. 23-26 with x. 1-16; xxi. 11-12 with (probably) 13-14.

27 E.g. ii. 26; v. 13; x. 11, the last written in Aramaic.

28 Cp. xxiii. 7, 8 with xvi. 14, 15, and xxx. 23, 24 with xxiii. 19, 20.

29 x. 1-16; xvii. 19-27 (on the Sabbath—unlike Jeremiah, who did not lay stress on single laws but very like post-exilic teaching, e.g. Neh. xiii and Is. lviii), possibly xxiii. 1-8; xxv. 12-14 (the obviously late as at this day in verse 18 and verse 26b are omitted by the Greek).

30 Parts of xxx and xxxi, especially xxxi. 7-14, the spirit of which is so much that of the Eve of the Return from Exile and the style so akin to that of the Great Prophet of that Eve that some take it as dependent on his prophecies.

31 xlvi-li, especially on Moab, xlviii. 40-47, which is based on the earlier prophecy, Is. xv-xvi; on Edom, xlix. 7-22, based on Obadiah; Elam, xlix. 34-39; and the long prophecy on Babylon, l. 1-58, which reflects like Is. xl. ff. the historical situation just before the Medes overthrew Babylon, and expresses an attitude towards the latter very different from Jeremiah’s own fifty years earlier. The compiler, or an editor of the Book, has (li. 60) erred in attributing this long prophecy to Jeremiah. In all these there may be genuine nuclei.

32 Ch. lii.

33 So Greek, Hebrew has Israel.

34 N. Schmidt in the “Encyclopædia Biblica.”

35 Professor Schmidt, in the article already quoted, takes this to mean only that Jeremiah “retouched under fresh provocation” the contents of the first Roll. This interpretation would imply that words means nouns, verbs, adjectives and so forth, whereas words can only carry the same sense as it carries in the rest of the Book, viz. whole Oracles or Discourses. Note the phrase words like them, viz. like the words or Oracles on the first Roll.

36 Cp. A. B. Davidson, “Jeremiah,” in Hastings, “B.D.,” ii. 522.

37 Schmidt, op. cit.

38 xlv. 5.

39 Chs. i., xi., 1-8, 18-xii. 6; xiii. 1-17; xviii. 1-12.

40 Chs. xxiv, xxviii, xxxii (except for the introductory verses 1-5).

41 “De Sacra Pœsi Hebræorum,” 1753.

42 Writing of the early German lyric, Dr. John Lees says in his volume on “The German Lyric” (London, Dent & Sons, 1914): “In regard to the length of the lines, their number, and the arrangement of the rhymes, the poet has absolute freedom in all three classes;” and again of the Volkslied “there is no mechanical counting of syllables; the variation in the number of accented and unaccented syllables is the secret of the verse.” And he quotes from Herder on the Volkslieder: “songs of the people ... songs which often do not scan and are badly rhymed.”

43 Dalman, “Palästinischer Diwan.”

44 Saintsbury, “History of English Prosody,” vol. ii. 53, 54.

45 Snouck Hurgronje, “Mekka,” vol. ii. 62.

46 “Kurzer Hand-Commentar,” 1901; and “Das Buch Jeremia,” a translation, 1903.

47 “Das Buch Jeremia,” 1905, p. xlvi.

48 E.g. Sievers, “Metrische Studien,” in the “Transactions of Saxon Society of the Sciences,” vol. xxi (which relies too much on the Massoretic or Canonical text); Erbt, “Jeremia u. seine Zeit,” p. 298; Giesebrecht, “Jeremia’s Metrik,” iii. ff.; Karl Budde’s relevant pages in his “Geschichte der althebräischen Litteratur,” 1906 reached me after I had expressed the views I have given above. They agree in the main with these views.

49 Certainly the evidence of both the Hebrew text and the Versions are against it, and the sense supports the text. More than once when sharp questions or challenges are thrown out, we have very appropriately two parallel lines of two accents each instead of the usual Qînah couplet of three and two: e.g. ii. 14 and iii. 5. See below, pp. 46 ff. Compare the variety of metres, which Schiller employs to such good effect in his “Song of the Bell”—a variety in beautiful harmony with that of the different aspects of life on which he touches; and see above, p. 36, on the irregularity of metre in Heine’s Nordseebilder.

50 Ch. xxix.

51 Op. cit., p. xii.

52 Chs. i, xi and xxxi.

53 “It is an understatement of the case to say that the folk-song has been a source of inspiration. In the very greatest lyricists we simply find the folk-song in a new shape: it has become more polished and artistic, and it has been made the instrument of personal lyrical utterance.”—John Lees, M.A., D.Litt., “The German Lyric” (London, etc., Dent & Sons, 1914).

54 And in particular sins against the fundamental principle of parallelism, e.g. in iv. 3, where even with the help of part of an obvious title to the Oracle he gets only three lines and supposes the fourth to be lost; and though the sense-parallelism is generally within a couplet he divides it between the last line of his first couplet and the first of his second. Again, if we keep in mind what is said above (p. 35) of the recurrence in Hebrew poems of longer, heavier lines at intervals—especially at the end of a strophe or a poem, we must feel a number of Duhm’s emendations to be not only unnecessary but harmful to the effectiveness of the verse.

55 Pointing את with Patah-Sheva for Tsere.

56 Pointing לםדתי with Chireq-Patah-Sheva-Sheva.

57 Hebrew adds poor.

58 So Duhm after the Greek; see p. 97, n. 3.

59 After the Greek.

60 By differently arranging the Hebrew consonants, see p. 117. Other arrangements are possible. Greek omits destined to ruin.

61 Hebrew and Greek have this couplet in the reverse order.

62 ii. 14-17.

63 xxxi. 15.

64 While Duhm and Giesebrecht reduce the text to the exact Qînah form, Erbt correctly reads it as varied by lines of four accents.

65 After Duhm who reads לכן = לאכן (cp. viii. 6) and transfers it to the following line.

66 See below, p. 92.

67 So Greek.

68 So Greek; Hebrew adds their God.

69 Hebrew adds and is cut off.

70 The Hebrew makôm must here as elsewhere be given as equivalent to the Arabic makâm (literally like the Hebrew standing-place but) generally sacred site.

71 After Duhm.

72 Hebrew adds the Lord our God; not in the Greek.

73 So Greek and Vulg.; Hebrew has he shall not see.

74 xiii. 12-14. The above rendering follows the Greek version.

75 A Hebrew idiom, literally don’t, knowing, we know?

76 This couplet is wanting in the Greek.

77 So rightly Duhm after the Greek.

78 Hebrew uselessly adds in the land.

79 So Duhm, reading gār for gēr.

80 Hebrew adds, and will make visitation on their sins, which the Greek omits.

81 ix. 17 f., 21 f.; see also pp. 205, 206.

82 xiii. 15-16.

83 So the Greek.

84 iv. 11-13, 15-17. The text and so the metre of 16, 17 are uncertain. For besiegers Duhm proposes by the change of one letter to read panthers, to which in v. 6 Jeremiah likens the same foes. Skinner, leopards. See below, p. 114.

85 Lit. Because of the feebleness of their hands.

86 xv. 5-9.

87 Greek; in both cases Hebrew adds the Lord.

88 See previous note.

89 This verse is uncertain; for Hebrew בעתה read with the Greek בהלה. For another arrangement see above, p. 51.

90 So Greek; Hebrew omits sound.

91 This line is uncertain.

92 Greek.

93 So Greek; Hebrew omits this line.

94 (1) Jeremiah of Libnah, father of Hamutal, II. Kings xxiii. 31; xxiv. 18; (2) Jeremiah, father of Jaazaniah, the Rechabite, Jer. xxxv. 3; (3) Jeremiah the prophet, son of Hilḳiah.

95 Not to be confounded with the temple-priest, Hilḳiah, who was concerned with the finding of the Law.

96 I. Kings ii. 26 f.

97 Duhm, p. 3.

98 Jer. i. 5.

99 ii. 23, 24; iv. 11; v. 6; viii. 7, 22.

100 Gen. xlix. 27.

101 iv. 3.

102 Is. x. 28-32.

103 xxxi. 15.

104 Hab. iii. 7.

105 See below on ch. iii.

106 vii. 12-15; xxvi. 6.

107 iv. 15.

108 i. 103-107 (after Hecatæus).

109 See Appendix I—Medes and Scythians.

110 “Jerusalem,” ii. 263, 264.

111 Micah vi. 8.

112 xxii. 15, 16.

113 “Jerusalem,” ii.

114 Though not in every case, for Anathoth itself is but the plural of the Syrian goddess Anath, as Ashtaroth is the plural of Astart or Astarte.

115 ii. 28; xi. 13.

116 iii. 2.

117 i. 5.

118 Luke i. 76.

119 See Lecture vii.

120 ii. 18.

121 See his seven Scythian songs below, pp. 110 ff.

122 xviii.

123 xxxvi. 2, a clause which Duhm merely on the grounds of his theory is obliged to regard as a later intrusion, though it bears no marks of being such.

124 So Cornill after the Greek.

125 xx. 7.

126 Hebrew adds the redundant to pull down; Greek omits.

127 Duhm; see above, p. 40.

128 This is clear from other passages, v. 14; xviii. 7-10, etc.

129 Ball happily translates wake-tree.

130 The text reads, its face is from the face of northwards, which some would emend to its face is turned northwards, i.e. the side on which it is blown upon and made to boil. Boiling or bubbling, lit. blown upon, fanned.

131 After the Greek; Hebrew has be opened.

132 Hebrew has races and kingdoms and adds Rede of the Lord.

133 Read אתם with points Chireq and Qamets.

134 Hebrew adds to them; Greek omits.

135 The last three couplets are uncertain. In v. 18 Hebrew adds a basalt pillar and, after bronze, against all the land.

136 xxxvi. 32; see pp. 22 ff.

137 P. 37.

138 See pp. 40 f., 72.

139 See p. 41.

140 So simply the Greek; the Hebrew, And the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Go and proclaim in the ears of Jerusalem saying, not only betrays an editorial redundancy, but what follows is addressed not to Jerusalem but to all Israel. Here if anywhere the Greek has the original. Jeremiah begins thus to dictate to Baruch.

141 Hebrew kebel = breath.

142 Egypt.

143 So Greek.

144 Lit. shepherds.

145 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

146 Some Hebrew MSS. and Vulgate.

147 Cyprus = Kittim and Kedár, an Arab tribe, are the extremes of the world then known to the Jews.

148 So Greek.

149 Hebrew marg. my.

150 Or heave (Ball), lit. be aghast but the Hebrew is alliterative, shommû shamaîm.

151 This couplet is after the Greek, Hebrew has browsed on thy skull for forced. Noph = Memphis, Egypt’s capital; Taḥpanḥes = Daphne on the Egyptian road to Palestine. Either 14-19 or more probably 16 alone is one of Jeremiah’s additions to his earlier Oracles after Egypt’s invasion of Palestine in 608.

152 So Greek; Hebrew adds, when he led thee by the way.

153 Miṣraim = Egypt.

154 These last four lines follow the Greek.

155 So Duhm by a better division of words.

156 So the Greek.

157 The Hebrew ḳal seems to combine here its two meanings of swift and trifling.

158 Hebrew no’ ash; with Greek delete the second no.

159 So Greek.

160 The insertion (by a copyist?) of this formula rather weakens the connection.

161 So some Versions.

162 Greek adds and as the number of streets in Jerusalem they burn to Baal; cp. xi. 13.

163 So Greek.

164 Greek.

165 Greek.

166 Greek the.

167 Prose, probably a later insertion when the prophet dictated his Oracles. See pp. 47 f.

168 The text of this quatrain is corrupt, the rendering above makes use of the versions.

169 The text of this verse too is uncertain. For skirts Greek has hands; to innocent Hebrew adds needy. Some read the second couplet [though] thou did’st not catch them breaking in, but because of all these, i.e. thy sins against Me, thou did’st murder them.

170 Or balked.

171 Greek.

172 Greek; Hebrew land.

173 So Duhm after the Greek. Hebrew is impossible.

174 The two Hebrew verbs in this couplet, naṭar and shamar mean to keep (or maintain) and to watch; they are usually transitive and (in the sense here intended) are followed by a noun, anger or wrath, which English versions supply here. But its absence from both the Hebrew and Greek texts leads us to take the verbs as intransitive, as is the case with naṭar in New-Hebrew.

175 Verses 6-18, in prose break the connection both of style and meaning between 5 and 19 and cannot in whole be Jeremiah’s or from his period. This is especially true of 16-18 which assume the destruction of the Ark and the Exile of Judah as well as of Israel as already actual. But the passage probably contains genuine fragments from Jeremiah.

176 So Greek.

177 So one Hebrew MS. and Syriac.

178 Hebrew adds her sister.

179 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

180 So Greek.

181 Lit. make not My face to fall.

182 Greek; Hebrew ye have.

183 That is Lord and Husband.

184 So Greek.

185 Hebrew adds to the Name of the Lord to Jerusalem.

186 So Greek; Hebrew your; after North Greek has and from all lands.

187 In antithesis to verse 5 of which it is the immediate sequel both in sense and metre.

188 Feminine, i.e. Judah was a daughter, and a son’s portion was designed for her.

189 So finely Ball.

190 The riotous festivals on the high-places.

191 Hebrew adds the Lord.

192 This couplet after the Greek.

193 I agree with Cornill and Skinner that these two verses are a later addition. The answer to the people’s confession comes in verses 3 and 4.

194 So some Hebrew MSS. and versions.

195 Hebrew nirû lakeḿ nîr; also in English the noun and verb are the same—to fallow or fallow up = to break or plough up.

196 So Greek and other versions.

197 iii. 22b, 25; Hos. v. 15-vi. 3.

198 So Greek.

199 iv. 3, 4.

200 xiii. 23.

201 xvii. 9, 10.

202 See further, Lecture viii.

203 See above, p. 73.

204 xxxvi. 32.

205 On the subject of this paragraph see the appendix on “The Medes and Scythians.” The following may be consulted: N. Schmidt in “Enc. Bibl.” on “Jeremiah” and “Scythians;” Driver, “The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah,” p. 21; J. R. Gillies, “Jeremiah, the Man and His Message,” pp. 63 ff., who thinks that the Scythians did invade Judah, and W. R. Thomson, “The Burden of the Lord,” pp. 46 ff., who thinks they did not. A thorough study of the question will be found in Skinner’s “Prophecy and Religion, Studies in the Life of Jeremiah,” ch. iii. The case against the Scythians being the enemy from the North that Jeremiah describes is best presented by J. F. McCurdy in “History, Prophecy, and the Monuments,” vol. ii. pp. 395 ff.

206 Amos iii. 6; Joel ii. 1.

207 Greek the earth.

208 The text adds from evil, one wonders if Jerusalem was added in 604; without it the line is regular.

209 After the Greek.

210 So Syr., transferred from previous couplet.

211 Metre and meaning of 16 and 17 uncertain. For beleaguerers (?) Duhm reads panthers or leopards; cp. v. 6.

212 Duhm after Greek renders, My soul is in storm, my heart throbs.

213 Greek; Hebrew know.

214 Greek; Hebrew adds lo!

215 Probably a later addition.

216 The order of verbs in this couplet is that of the Greek.

217 So Greek; Hebrew city, a change possibly made after the fall of Jerusalem.

218 So Greek.

219 Text uncertain; this reading is derived by differently dividing the consonants—bah no’ ash for bahen ’îsh.

220 P. 134.

221 Greek; Hebrew her. The clause seems an addition.

222 Hebrew adds therefore.

223 So Duhm after the Greek; p. 48, n. 2.

224 So Greek.

225 The text is uncertain, the Hebrew margin and versions pointing to an untranslatable original.

226 The text has make not, but this is inconsistent with the context, and not seems a later addition.

227 Hebrew adds, thus be it done them; Greek omits.

228 Hebrew has God after Lord and your for their.

229 This couplet the Greek lacks.

230 Eloquent of death: Ps. v. 9.

231 For these four lines the Greek has only A nation thou hearest not its tongue, all of them mighty.

232 Hebrew adds saying.

233 Lit. with no heart, the seat not only of feeling, but of the practical intelligence.

234 Something like this has obviously slipped from the text.

235 Text uncertain.

236 Either with the spoils or with the victims thereof.

237 The text of the whole verse is uncertain. Greek omits things of evil and to prosper.

238 Or take vengeance Myself.

239 Hebrew bitĕkô’a tiḳĕ’û; a play upon words.

240 After the Greek; the Hebrew text is corrupt.

241 Transferred from the next line to suit the metre.

242 The Hebrew idiom for starting a campaign or a siege, which was formally sanctioned by a religious rite.

243 So some MSS.

244 So Greek: Hebrew, She is a city to be visited.

245 Hebrew adds of Hosts.

246 So Greek.

247 It is difficult to discriminate in these lines between the Lord and the Prophet as speakers. If the Greek I will pour is correct, the Prophet still speaks, otherwise the Lord who began in verse 9 and was followed by the Prophet in 10 and 11a, resumes in 11b.

248 So Greek.

249 Ibid.

250 Hans Schmidt, quoted by Dr. Skinner, does so, and takes it as the earliest evidence of Jeremiah’s opposition to Deuteronomy, and Dr. Skinner in his Chapter “In the Wake of the Reform,” says it is almost certainly post-deuteronomic. I am not convinced. See below, p. 133.

251 Greek mark ye.

252 See above, p. 112.

253 Text both of Greek and Hebrew uncertain; the above is adapted from the Greek.

254 Greek has backslidings.

255 Hebrew adds great, which Greek omits.

256 Greek you.

257 See above, pp. 79 ff.

258 Hebrew adds, a fortress, obviously borrowed by some scribe from other appointments by God of Jeremiah, e.g. i. 18. For ways in next line Duhm by change of a letter reads value.

259 Greek and Targ. read their evil for the evil ones of the Hebrew.

260 The general meaning is clear, the details obscure for the text is uncertain. Driver’s note is the most instructive. In refining, the silver was mixed with lead and the mass, fused in the furnace, had a current of air turned upon it; the lead oxidising acted as a flux, carrying off the alloy or dross. But in Israel’s case the dross is too closely mixed with the silver, so that though the bellows blow and the lead is oxidised, the dross is not drawn and the silver remains impure.

261 As Erbt (“Jeremia u. seine Zeit”) and Skinner (p. 160) do.

262 v. 1-8, see p. 119.

263 So Duhm.

264 Deut. xviii. 6, II Kings xxiii. 8, 9.

265 On this and the following paragraphs see the writer’s “Deuteronomy” in the Cambridge Bible for Schools.

266 Deut. iv. 19.

267 See above, pp. 76, 104 ff.

268 See p. 8.

269 Cp. Thomson, op. cit., p. 61.

270 xxxi. 6.

271 These two extremes are represented by Winckler and Duhm respectively.

272 Sing. as partly in Greek and wholly in Syriac.

273 With Greek omit them of the Hebrew text.

274 Hebrew adds all.

275 As above, Greek omits all of the Hebrew verses 7, 8 except the last clause which follows naturally on verse 6.

276 See above, pp. 40 ff.

277 This consideration seems to dispose of König’s claim that Jeremiah here maintains the Sinai-Covenant (with the Decalogue) in opposition to the Moab-Covenant set forth in Deuteronomy. How could the former be defined in the time of Josiah as this Covenant or described in Deuteronomic phrases? See also G. Douglas, “Book of Jeremiah,” p. 156.

278 Dr. Skinner (op. cit., p. 100) thinks that “the accumulation of distinctively Deuteronomic phrases and ideas in verses 4, 5 implies a dependence on that book which savours strongly of editorial workmanship.” But if this Covenant be the Deuteronomic, as he admits, what more natural than to state it in Deuteronomic terms, expressive as these are only of its spiritual essence? I would also refer to what I have said on p. 41 as to the effect on the Prophet of the new and haunting style of Deuteronomy.

279 Dr. Skinner’s authoritative support to the substance of the thesis maintained above is very welcome, strengthened as it is by the point which he makes in the first of the following sentences: “The deliberate invention of an incident, which had no point of contact in the authentic record of his life, is a procedure of which no assured parallel is found in the book. We must at least believe that a trustworthy tradition lies behind the passage in ch. xi; and the conclusion to which it naturally points is that Jeremiah was at first strongly in favour of the law of Deuteronomy, and lent his moral support to the reformation of Josiah” (pp. 102-3). Wellhausen, “Isr. u. Jüdische Gesch.” (1894, p. 97): “An der Einführung des Deuteronomiums hatte er mitgewirkt, zeitlebens eiferte er gegen die illegitimen Altäre in den Städten Judas.... Aber mit den Wirkungen der Reformation war er keineswegs zufrieden.” So too J. R. Gillies, “Jeremiah,” p. 113, and W. R. Thomson, “The Burden of the Lord,” p. 66; and virtually so, Peake, i. 11-14.

280 So, too, H. P. Smith, “O.T. History,” p. 278, n. 2; while Duhm, Giesebrecht, Davidson, Driver, Gillies, Peake and Skinner all take vii. 1-15 and xxvi. to refer to the same occasion early in Jehoiakim’s reign. Duhm and Skinner remark on an apparently incoherent association of Place ( = Holy Place) and Land in vii. 3-7. The clause about the Land may be a later addition. Yet in verses 13-15 (the substance of which Skinner admits to be genuine) the destruction of the Holy Place and ejection of the people from the Land are both threatened.

281 So simply the Greek; the longer Hebrew title, verses 1, 2 may be an expansion by an editor, who took vii. 1-15 as reporting the same speech as xxvi. 1 ff. In verse 3 Hebrew reads Lord of Hosts.

282 Greek adds for they will be absolutely of no avail to you.

283 So Syriac.

284 Or there they are!—plural because of the complex of buildings.

285 It is doubtful whether this verb, meaning in earlier Hebrew to make any burnt offering was already confined to its later meaning, to burn incense.

286 So Greek.

287 Much within these brackets is lacking in the Greek.

288 Hebrew all.

289 Verses 9, 25, 29, etc.

290 See above, p. 72.

291 Vows, so Greek, but Lucian fat pieces (Lev. vi. 5); by these thou escape, so Greek, Hebrew then mightest thou rejoice.

292 ii. 8, see above, p. 92.

293 Cp. the similar charge of Christ against the scribes.

294 xi. 1 ff.; so Giesebrecht on viii. 8.

295 Marti, Gesch. der Isr. Religion, 154, 166; Duhm, and especially Cornill, in loco.

296 Hebrew adds of Hosts, the God of Israel.

297 The former were not, the latter were in part, eaten by the worshipper; but it does not matter if now he eats them all alike!

298 xi. 1 ff.: above, pp. 143 ff.

299 Sam. xv. 22, Hos. vi. 6. Those who take the passage relatively also quote Paul’s words that Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the gospel, 1 Cor. i. 17.

300 Amos v. 25; Micah vi. 6-8; Ps. l. 13, 14; li. 16, 17.

301 See Robertson Smith, “The O.T. in the Jewish Church,” 2nd ed., 203, 295 (1892), and Edghill, “The Evidential Value of Prophecy” (1904), 274, one of the best works on the O.T. in our time.

302 II. Chron. xxxv. 20, when he had set the Temple again in order.

303 Or Nechoh or Neco as in our own versions: Heb. נכוה or נכו.

304 “H. G. H. L.,” p. 151.

305 II. Chron. xxxv. 21. This may be only the reflection of later Jewish piety on so perplexing a disaster; but it rings like fact.

306 II. King xxiii. 29, as soon as he saw him. For other records of Nĕcoh’s northward march see Appendix II.

307 The idea that Josiah fought Nĕcoh, as an Assyrian vassal (Benzinger on II. Kings xxiii. 28-30) is, of course, quite improbable, even if Nineveh did not fall till 606. But if the latest datum is correct that Nineveh fell in 612 (see Appendix I) it is utterly groundless.

308 See above, p. 149.

309 xxvi. 2, xxxvi. 9.

310 Whether the sacrifices of children in Hinnom had been resumed, vii. 31 ff., is uncertain; yet this passage may well belong to Jehoiakim’s reign.

311 Greek omits and renders the following I and my by thou and his.

312 Using the Greek, Duhm, Cornill and Skinner render this quatrain thus:—

Did not thy father eat and drink, And do himself well? Yet he practised justice and right, Judged the cause of the needy and poor.

313 ii. 8, 31, v. 30, 31, vi. 13, 14, 19, etc.; see pp. 106, 154, etc.

314 xx. 10.

315 See above, pp. 147 ff.

316 Many take the conditional clauses in vii and xxvi to be later insertions (e.g. Skinner, 169 f.). But it was natural to the malice of his foes to distort Jeremiah’s conditional, into an absolute, threat, and in xxvi. 13 he corrects them. My translation follows the Greek version, and omits the Hebrew additions which are found in our English versions.

317 Both text and versions add here and all the people; but this may be the careless insertion of a copyist, for in what follows the people are with Jeremiah.

318 So 34 MSS., and Syr. Vulg. and Targ.

319 Hebrew adds against this city and.

320 Hebrew adds and all his mighty men.

321 So Greek; Hebrew the king sought.

322 Hebrew adds a name (El-nathan, son of Ackbor) and repeats.

323 II. Kings xxii. 12 ff.; Jer. xxxix. 14, xl. 5, 6.

324 The designations of the title differ; what is stated above was probably the fact.

325 See Appendix I.

326 As vividly described, or predicted, by Nahum; see the writer’s “Twelve Prophets,” vol. ii.; on the date see Appendix I.

327 II. Kings xxiv. 1-16. The chronology of the end of Jehoiakim’s reign is uncertain. Most have held that the three years of his tribute were his last years, 600-598. But Winckler (“A.T. Untersuchungen,” 81 ff.) gives good reasons for preferring 605-3.

328 See above, pp. 22 ff. Our versions render the Hebrew correctly, but the following emendations may be made from the Greek: Verse 1, for this word ... from the Lord read the word of the Lord came unto me; 2, for Israel read Jerusalem; 22, omit in the ninth month, unnecessary after 9; 31, omit their iniquity, for upon them read upon him, and for men read land, of Judah; 32, for Jeremiah took read Baruch took and omit and gave it to Baruch the scribe the son of Neriah, and also the words king of Judah and in the fire.

329 xxxvi. 3.

330 xxxvi. 29; cp. xxv. 9 f.

331 xxxvi. 19, 24.

332 Such is the force of the Hebrew idiom in the last clause of xxxvi. 16; for the different attitude of the princes in 608 see pp. 170 ff.

333 The Hebrew text is accurately rendered by our English Versions; the following are the principal points on which the Greek differs from it: Verse 1, both Greek and Latin lack that was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon; in verse 2 Greek lacks Jeremiah the prophet and all, and in verse 3 the word of the Lord hath come to me and but ye have not hearkened. In verse 6 for I will do you no hurt Greek reads to your hurt. Again, Greek lacks in 7 saith the Lord, in 8 of Hosts, in 9 saith the Lord and to Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon My servant, and for all the families it reads a family; and in 11 lacks this, a desolation, these and the king of Babylon, substituting for the last two shall serve among the nations.

334 E.g. the preposition to before Nebuchadrezzar in verse 9 which does not construe.

335 xxv. 1-14 has been denied to Jeremiah by Schwally (“Z.A.T.W.,” viii. 177 ff.) and Duhm, but their arguments are answered by Giesebrecht and Cornill in loco; see, too, Gillies, 195-8, 202, and Skinner, 240 f.

336 See Davidson in Hastings’ “D.B.,” ii. 574, Driver and Gillies in loco.

337 See above, p. 14.

338 E.g. cp. 26 with 9 and both with i. 15.

339 As Duhm asserts; see above, pp. 79 ff.

340 The above paragraph on xxv. 15-38 is based on Giesebrecht’s careful analysis of the passage.

341 xxxvi. 5, 19, 26.

342 Worn next the skin; not girdle which came over the other garments. See “Enc. Bibl.,” article “Girdle.”

343 So virtually Cornill, who, indifferent as to whether the story is one of fact or of imagination, emphasises the choice of the Euphrates as its essential point, compares ii. 18, to drink of the waters of the River, and dates the story in the earliest years of Jeremiah’s ministry. On the other hand Erbt, who also reads Euphrates, interprets the story as one of actual journeys thither by Jeremiah.

344 I visited it in 1901 and 1904, a most surprising oasis!

345 Pĕrath or Parah = Farah was first suggested by Ewald (“Prophets of the O. T.,” Eng. trans, iii. 152), quoting Schick (“Ausland,” 1867, 572-4), by Birch (“P.E.F.Q.,” 1880, 235), and by Marti (“Z.D.P.V.,” 1880, 11), and has been accepted by many—Cheyne, Ball, McFadyen, Peake, etc.

346 See above, p. 55.

347 In the valley of Hinnom, where were potteries and above them a city-gate Harsith = (probably) Potsherds; in the upper valley broken pottery is still crushed for cement; lower down traces of ancient potteries appear, and there is the traditional site of the Potter’s Field, Matt. xxvii. 7.

348 So literally the term rendered wheel, A.V. It was of two discs, originally of stone, but later of wood, of which in earlier times the upper alone revolved and the lower and larger was stationary, but later both revolved by the potter’s foot. See “Enc. Bibl.,” article “Pottery.”

349 See above, pp. 84 f.

350 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

351 Hebrew adds House of Israel.

352 A. B. Davidson.

353 To this we return in dealing with Jeremiah’s religious experience. See below, Lecture vii.

354 See above, p. 109 on iv. 3.

355 Luke xiii. 6 ff. Other parables or actual incidents illustrating either the possibilities of characters commonly deemed hopeless or the fresh chances given them by God’s grace, are found in Matt. xviii. 23 f., Luke vii. 39 f. (the woman who was a sinner) and xix. (Zacchæus).

356 Cornill in loco, Skinner, pp. 162 f., both of them in fine passages on the teaching of the parable, the former exposing the superficiality of Duhm’s impulsive judgment upon it. Cornill finds that the genuine words of Jeremiah close with verse 4; Skinner, Erbt and Gillies (p. 158) continue them to 6.

357 But see next page.

358 xix. 1 ff. The Greek connects this incident with the preceding by reading then for the Hebrew thus, and with many Hebrew MSS. adds to saith the Lord the phrase to me, making Jeremiah himself the narrator. In xix. 4 read with Greek whom neither they nor their fathers knew, and the kings of Judah have filled, etc. Throughout Greek lacks phrases which are probably later additions to Hebrew; but these are not important.

359 See p. 185, n. 2.

360 The above is mainly from the Greek. The following is a significant instance of how the knowledge of the Bible still holds among some at least of the Scottish peasantry. A woman in a rural parish calling on her minister to complain about the harshness of the factor of the landlord said that he was a very Magor-Missabib. And it is no less significant that the minister had to consult his concordance to the Bible to know what she meant!

361 In xxxv the differences between Greek and Hebrew continue to be those generally found in the Book, i.e. Greek omits the expansive formulas, including the Divine titles, redundant words (like all) and phrases, and corrects the wrong preposition to by the right upon (17). Further, it spells differently some of the proper names, reads house for chamber (4 bis), a bowl for bowls (5), to me for to Jeremiah (12), and in 18 does not address the promise to the Rechabites, but utters it of them in the third person, also omitting the name of Jeremiah, and in 19 for for ever, lit. all the days, reads all the days of the land.

362 The ally of Jehu, II. Kings x. 15, 23. The tribe was Kenite, I. Chron. ii. 55. The Kenites, according to Jud. i. 16, I. Sam. xv. 6, settled in the South of Judah, but Jonadab is found in North Israel and apparently his descendants, as fugitives before an invasion from the North, came from the same quarter. Heber the Kenite also dwelt on Esdraelon, Jud. iv. 17, v. 24.

363 Duhm’s criticisms of it, and rejection of some of its parts are, even for him, unusually arbitrary, especially his objection to the words in verse 13, Go and say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for obviously these people were not gathered in, nor could be addressed from, the Temple chamber. It was the people as a whole, whose fickleness from age to age he was about to condemn; on this verse Duhm’s remarks are, besides being arbitrary, inconsistent.

364 Above, pp. 147 ff.

365 Above, pp. 50, 153 f.

366 Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3; II. Kings xxiii. 5, 13. See the present writer’s “Jerusalem,” ii., pp. 186 ff., 260, 263.

367 Deut. xii. 31, II. Kings xxiii. 10. See “Jerusalem,” ii., pp. 263 f.

368 Pp. 153 f.

369 The only apparent reason for the compiler putting the two songs together is that the last verse of the one and the first verse of the other open in the same way, O that I had (Hebrew O who would give me).

370 xxxvi. 32.

371 Greek omits this clause.

372 Apparently a common proverb.

373 Hebrew adds Jerusalem with no sense and a disturbance to the metre.

374 Mishpaṭ = rule, order, ordinance.

375 Torah = law, see p. 154.

376 Reading צשה with Dagesh in last letter.

377 With 10-12, cp. vi. 13-15; 11, 12 are wanting in Greek.

378 Hebrew adds a line of corrupt text.

379 Hebrew, the Lord.

380 So Greek. The verse is another instance of the two-stresses-to-a-line metre; see p. 46.

381 So Greek.

382 So Greek.

383 So Greek.

384 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

385 After the Greek, Hebrew is hopeless.

386 Lit., from a land of distances, usually taken as meaning exile. But exile is not yet. Duhm as above.

387 So Greek.

388 Bubbles, ii. 5. The couplet seems an intrusion breaking between the two parts of the people’s cry.

389 So Greek.

390 Lit., why cometh not up the fresh skin on.

391 Greek, an uttermost.

392 The Hebrew word seems to me to be taken here rather in its primitive sense of bundle than in the later, official meaning of assembly.

393 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord for till now the Prophet has spoken. Verse 3 is difficult. Duhm omits most, Cornill all, as breaking the metrical schemes which they think Jeremiah invariably used. But the form of the Hebrew text—short lines of two beats each, with one longer line—is one into which Jeremiah sometimes falls (see pp. 46 f.). Like a bow so Greek; Hebrew, their bow. Cp. our draw a long bow (Ball).

394 So Syriac.

395 Again Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord. The text is uncertain. Hebrew, thy dwelling is in the midst of deceit, they refuse to know Me.

396 Hebrew adds of Hosts.

397 So Greek, Hebrew omits; more seems to have dropped out.

398 So Hebrew text; Hebrew margin and Greek polished.

399 So Greek.

400 So Greek. Hebrew, I will raise and adds lamentation.

401 Hebrew adds passing over, probably a mistaken transference from verse 12. Greek and Latin omit.

402 So Greek.

403 Hebrew uselessly adds nor walked therein.

404 Hebrew adds of hosts; and this people for them.

405 Hebrew adds of Hosts and consider ye which Greek omits as well as hasten in 18; the text of the four lines is uncertain. For us and our Greek has you and your.

406 So Vulgate.

407 Hebrew has the obvious intrusion, Speak thus, Rede of the Lord, which Greek lacks.

408 I.e. of their hair; see xxv. 23, xlix. 32. Herodotus says (iii. 8) that some Arabs shaved the hair above their temples; forbidden to Jews, Lev. xix. 27.

409 So Greek; Hebrew, the land. The Hebrew part. sitting may like that in v. 18 be future.

410 So Greek; Hebrew, in the land at this time.

411 So Greek, Hebrew my.

412 So Greek, Hebrew my.

413 So some Greek and Latin versions, Syriac and Targ.

414 Greek; Hebrew omits.

415 I.e. Rulers.

416 Hebrew, pastures.

417 See above, pp. 46 f., 93.

418 So, following some Greek MSS., Targ., and the parallel Ps. lxxix. 6, 7.

419 Above, pp. 152 ff.

420 P. 176. Practically all agree to this. Admitting its possibility, Duhm prefers to assign the lines to the Scythian invasion, against which see the reasons offered by Cornill in loco, who further suggests a connection between xi. 15, 16 and xii. 7-13. Ball, after Naegelsbach, argues for a date before Carchemish.

421 The text of these four lines is hardly metrical.

422 Above, pp. 183-185.

423 p. 59.

424 In this quatrain Greek reads your soul, and Hebrew my eye and precedes this line by shall weep indeed which Greek omits. The last line is one of those longer ones with which verses or strophes often conclude (see p. 35).

425 II. Kings xxiv. 8, 15; Jer. xxii. 26.

426 So Greek.

427 See ii. 36, iv. 30; Ezek. xxiii. 22.

428 As heads obviously belongs to this second line of the quatrain, from which some copyist has removed it to the fourth.

429 So Hebrew literally.

430 Pp. 56 f. The date is quite uncertain.

431 The text of the first four lines is uncertain. I have mainly followed the Greek. Begging, if we borrow the sense of the verb in Syriac, otherwise huckstering, peddling.

432 Hos. vi. 1-4.

433 P. 189.

434 Hebrew and some Greek MSS. add against thee.

435 Hebrew, they turned not from their ways.

436 The text of verse 8 is uncertain. I have mainly followed the Greek.

437 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

438 Lecture vii.

439 Hebrew adds nor bemoan them, an expansion.

440 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord, even kindness and compassion; verses 6 and 7 are expansion.

441 Hebrew adds when their children remember their altars and Asherim rightly taken by Duhm and Cornill as a gloss.

442 Hebrew adds in thee for which some read thy hand.

443 These four verses along with the phrase Thus saith the Lord which follows them are lacking in Greek. This is clearly due to the oversight of a copyist, his eye passing inadvertently from the Lord of xvi. 21 to the Lord of xvii. 5.

444 See pp. 53, 54.

445 Cp. “Isaiah,” lvi. 2-7, lviii. 13, 14; Neh. xiii. 15-22.

446 A much manipulated verse! Mountain, taking sadai in its archaic sense as in Assyrian and some Hebrew poems, Jud. v. 4, Deut. xxxii. 13 (see the writer’s “Deut.” in the “Camb. Bible for Schools”) where it is parallel to highlands, rock and flinty rock. The following emendations of the text are therefore unnecessary, and are more or less forced. Sirion (Duhm, Cornill, Peake, McFadyen, Skinner); missurîm = from the rocks (Rothstein). The Greek takes sadai as breasts and nominative to the verb: Do the breasts of the rock give out?—not a bad figure. Hill-streams reading mêmê harîm (Rothstein) for the Hebrew maîm zarîm = strange (? far off) streams. Ewald takes zarîm from zarar = to rush, press. Duhm reads mĕzarîm = Northstar. Cornill turns the couplet to Or do dry up from the western sea the flowing waters? Gillies, the wet winds from the sea, etc., for which there is a suggestion in the Greek α μῳ.

447 See p. 149, n. 1

448 So some MSS.; the text has like.

449 Pp. 191 ff.

450 Pp. 164-167.

451 Duhm’s objection to this title as a mistake by an editor is groundless; for though the following lines are addressed to the land or people as a whole, their climax is upon the fate of the royal house, the choice of thy cedars.

452 Hebrew adds many.

453 Greek from over the sea.

454 Greek, Syriac, Vulgate.

455 Hebrew thee.

456 Hebrew adds to return thither; Greek lacks.

457 In 28-30 the Greek, mainly followed above in accordance with the metre, is far shorter than the Hebrew text.

458 The reasons given by Giesebrecht and Duhm in loco, by Skinner, p. 346, and (more fancifully) by Erbt, p. 86, for impugning the date given in xlv. 1, and relegating the Oracle to the close of Jeremiah’s life in exile as his last words to Baruch, have been answered in great detail, and to my mind conclusively, by Cornill, who points out how much more suited the Oracle is to conditions in 605 than to those of Baruch and Jeremiah after 586.

459 Cornill: the words of Jeremiah in a book.

460 Hebrew adds saying.

461 Hebrew adds the God of Israel.

462 So Greek.

463 Superfluous after, not to say inconsistent with, verse 2; probably editorial.

464 I have to or am about to. The Hebrew addition to this couplet, and that is the whole earth, is probably a gloss; it is not found in all Greek versions.

465 His brother Seraiah was a high officer of the king, ch. li. 59; see also Josephus X. “Antt.,” ix. 1.

466 Here and xxi. 9, xxxviii. 2, xxxix. 18.

467 ix. 3, 7 (How else can I do?), xii. 9, 11, see p. 211.

468 See p. 167.

469 2 Kings xxiii. 31, xxiv. 17; see above, p. 164.

470 The exact transliteration of the Hebrew is Ṣidḳiyahu.

471 Ezek. xvi. 59, xvii. 11-21; especially 15-19.

472 Ps. xv., who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.

473 Josephus imputes to him χρεστότης καὶ δικαιοσύνη, X. “Antt.” vii. 5.

474 No strong rod, no sceptre to rule, Ezek. xix. 14.

475 Or ye are far, etc., Ezek. xi. 15.

476 Jer. xxvii.; in verse 1 for Jehoiakim read Ṣedekiah.

477 Jer. li. 59; though some doubt this.

478 Ezek. viii; Jer. xliv. 17-19 and his other references to the worship of the Queen or Host of Heaven may also refer to this.

479 Jer. xliv. 30, Pharaoh of xxxvii. 5, 7, 11, Ezek. xxix. 3; Apries, Herodotus ii. 161.

480 Jer. xxxiv. 8-22; cp. Exod. xxi. 1-6, Deut. xv. 12-18.

481 2 Kings xxv. 21.

482 xxix. 29; Skinner, p. 253, doubts this.

483 xxxii. 16-25.

484 See above, pp. 186-188.

485 xvii. 16.

486 So Driver; Amos vii. 1, 4, 7, viii. 1.

487 So Greek.

488 So Greek and other versions.

489 Greek city.

490 Jews who may have stirred up Egypt against Babylon.

491 So Greek; Hebrew adds for an evil, “a corrupt repetition of the preceding word” (Driver).

492 Hebrew adds and to their fathers.

493 xxix. 20, 15, 21-32, see pp. 245-247.

494 ix. 22; x. 20.

495 See above, p. 236.

496 See above, p. 35.

497 This title has been much expanded, as the briefer Greek shows, and indeed much more than it shows. In 1 the addition of priests and prophets is in view of 8 and 15 evidently wrong. The Hebrew remnant of (before the elders) which Greek lacks is difficult. It seems a later addition to the text when many of the elders had died. Duhm’s suggestion of a revolt of the early exiles and the execution of many of the elders by Nebuchadrezzar is imaginary. In verse 2 we have such a needless gloss or expansion as later scribes were fond of making.

498 Greek omits this line.

499 Hebrew adds there.

500 Greek; Hebrew city.

501 8 and 9 strike one as a premature reference to the prophets.

502 Greek perhaps better your people, for in seventy years the elders addressed must have died out.

503 Duhm.

504 As even Lucian’s version shows in spite of its retaining 16-20.

505 Greek lacks the names of both the fathers, and also the last clause of Hebrew, 21, which prophesy a lie to you in My Name.

506 This verb is a play on the name of Ahab’s father.

507 In Hebrew follows in 25a a useless editorial addition.

508 Hebrew precedes this with to all the people which are in Jerusalem and, and follows it with and to all the priests, additions very doubtful in view of verse 29. In II. Kings xxv. 18 Ṣephaniah is second priest.

509 The time of the captivity.

510 Greek lacks the unnecessary remainder.

511 The following are some details as to xxvii. The Hebrew verse 1 is not given by Greek; Jehoiakim is of course a copyist’s error for Ṣedekiah, as 3, 12, 20 and xxviii. 1 show. Greek lacks the second clause of verse 5, all 7, several clauses of 8, one of 10, from under onwards in 12, all 13, the first of 14, now shortly in 16 (but adds I have not sent them), all 17, the last half of 18, most of 19, much of 20, all 21, and two clauses of 22.

512 Greek the earth.

513 Hebrew my servant.

514 Hebrew adds pestilence.

515 Greek; Hebrew dreams.

516 Greek; Hebrew your.

517 So adds Greek.

518 The general differences in xxviii are: after the Lord Hebrew adds of Hosts the God of Israel verses 2, 14; in 11 and 14 the name Nebuchadnezzar as in xxvii; in 3, 4, 14, 16, 17 unnecessary explanatory clauses or expansions; and throughout the title the prophet to the names Jeremiah and Hananiah respectively. Of all these the Greek is devoid; other differences are marked in the notes to the translation.

519 The prophetic perfect = I will break, verse 4.

520 As in xxvii. 16 Greek puts the priests after the people.

521 Baruch is not well accustomed to long sentences, therefore repeats this clause (Duhm).

522 Greek lacks the bracketed words; famine by changing one letter of the Hebrew for evil.

523 Hebrew adds of the prophet.

524 Recognised or acknowledged.

525 Greek adds In the sight of all the people; also gives the plural bars.

526 Greek lacks these words.

527 So Greek; Hebrew thou shalt.

528 Hebrew adds Hear now Hananiah.

529 Hebrew adds that year.

530 By Giesebrecht.

531 Hebrew adds Before the Lord, yea before His holy words (Greek before His glorious majesty). Both break the connection and are unmetrical.

532 The couplet here given by Hebrew and Greek is too long for the verse, breaks the connection, and is apparently a copyist’s dittography expanded by quotation from ix. 2 (Duhm). But a single line is needed. Helped by Greek, we might read and because of these mourns.

533 After Duhm.

534 So Syriac, alone yielding a sound division of the lines.

535 Hebrew and Greek add a line breaking metre and parallel.

536 Jerusalem’s (?).

537 Greek adds of Hosts concerning the prophets.

538 Cornill rejects this couplet, I think needlessly.

539 So Greek, cp. ii. 5, p. 92.

540 Or My, Erbt and Cornill.

541 So Greek. Hebrew feared and heard His word. These clauses are not metrical and may be a later intrusion; which 19, 20 certainly are, for they find their proper place in xxx. 23, 24.

542 So Greek.

543 Hebrew expands, from their evil way and.

544 So Greek affirmatively. Hebrew, by putting the couplet as a question, confuses the meaning. To near it adds Rede of the Lord.

545 So Duhm happily takes a third repetition (for other cases of this kind, see vii. 4; xxii. 29) instead of the senseless how long at the beginning of the next verse.

546 Giesebrecht’s happy emendation.

547 So Greek.

548 Greek Law.

549 So Greek.

550 Greek adds so My words.

551 Hebrew adds thus.

552 So lit. or call it a Rede; fling out so two Greek versions, Hebrew take.

553 Zeph. iii. 4.

554 In 31 and 32 Hebrew repeats Rede of the Lord. The section which follows can hardly be Jeremiah’s.

555 xxii. 19; II. Kings xxiv. 6; just as conversely Huldah’s prophecy that Josiah would be gathered to his fathers in peace, II. Kings xxii. 20, was belied at Megiddo.

556 xxiii. 32, repeating what he has frequently said already.

557 As Amos had more strongly put it, You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities, iii. 2.

558 xxiii. 27.

559 As we have seen; above, pp. 76, 104 f., 137.

560 viii. 11; xxiii. 14, 17, 22, etc., etc.

561 xxix. 23, xxiii. 14.

562 xxiii. 28, above, p. 257; cp. xxvii. 18.

563 xxviii. 11, cp. xlii. 1-7.

564 xxviii. 6; above, p. 251.

565 xxvi. 14, 15.

566 See further, Lecture vii.

567 xxiii. 31, p. 258.

568 xxiii. 21.

569 Stade’s combination (ZATW 1892, 277 ff.) of xxi. 1, 2; xxxvii. 4-10; xxi. 3-10; xxxvii. 11 ff. yields a contradiction—a prayer for the raising of the siege (xxi. 1, 2) already raised (xxxvii. 5). Erbt avoids this by combining only xxi. 1, 2a; xxxvii. 6-10; similarly Gillies (p. 309). But, as Cornill says, one cannot explain how from this form the two accounts have risen. Older critics (except Ewald) and Davidson, Giesebrecht, Peake, Thomson, (196, 198) and Cornill refer the passages to different occasions. Skinner leaves the question in suspense (259 n.). Duhm disposes of xxxvii. 3-10 as a Midrash legend and xxi. 1-10 as “a free composition” upon it by another hand!

570 Probably the original tenor of verse 4, but the text is confused by additions.

571 Greek; Hebrew he.

572 Greek omits this clause inadvertently. The proposed reversal to thy mouth speak with his mouth (Giesebrecht, etc.) misses the point; surely the captor would speak first.

573 Hebrew adds concerning thee, thou shalt not die by the sword.

574 Of spices. Some Greek versions read mournings, and so shall they mourn for thee.

575 xxxix. 7; II. Kings xxv. 7.

576 Verses 1, 2 either belonged originally to this section, and mark it as from another source than, or different edition of, Baruch’s memoirs, or more probably were added by an editor as necessary after the preceding sections (xxxv, xxxvi) from Jehoiakim’s reign.

577 Greek reads say thou and thee for me, and omits you.

578 So Greek.

579 Greek place.

580 Knox’s “History of the Reformation in Scotland,” Bk. i.

581 Cp. “declare a Liberty of Tender Consciences,” Declaration of Breda by Charles II.

582 A possible solution is “that the emancipation was undertaken in obedience to the neglected law, and that to make their action even more effective ... they decided to emancipate all their slaves without waiting till the legal term had expired” (Peake). Yet it is also possible that the reference in verses 13, 14 to the law, Deut. xv. 12, is due to an editor.

583 The chief differences between Hebrew and Greek are: 8, Greek lacks all and the senseless unto them; 9, Greek reads so that no Jew should be a slave; 10, 11, for Hebrew heard (R.V. obeyed), Greek reads turned, omits the last two clauses of 10, all of 11 save the last and in 12, 13 from the Lord and God of Israel; 14 reads six for Hebrew seven and 15 they for ye (twice); 16 omits and brought them into subjection, 17, to his brother and every man, 18 all reference to the calf and its parts, 20, 21 and into the hand of them that seek their life (twice).

584 Peake.

585 xxxvii. 12; the phrase is obscure.

586 xxxvii. 11-21.

587 Greek omits this last named.

588 So Greek: Hebrew unto all the people.

589 Greek lacks to him and Syriac the last clause.

590 Greek For thus.

591 See above, p. 232.

592 Calvin’s discriminating remarks on xxxviii. 2, in No. cxlvii of his prelections on the Book of Jeremiah, are well worth reading. See, too, Peake (p. 24) and Skinner (261 ff.).

593 So Greek. Hebrew takes this clause as part of Ṣedekiah’s reply: the king is not able to do anything against you.

594 Greek again is devoid of the repetitions, etc., that overload the Hebrew.

595 Hebrew adds sitting, an obvious intrusion (not in Greek), for in the siege the king would hardly hold council in the Benjamin-Gate.

596 Greek reads that he charged not the princes but the king. The text of 9 is uncertain. Duhm thinks the original meant that the princes wished Jeremiah’s death so as to save bread.

597 Hebrew and versions thirty, differing little from the Hebrew for three, which is now generally read.

598 xxxix. 15-18.

599 xxxviii. 14-28; Greek agrees with Hebrew save for its usual omissions as well as secretly, 16. Both read the third entry of the Lord’s House, which some, by adding a letter, would change to entry of the Shalishim or guards; unnecessarily, as Haupt shows.

600 After the deportation of 597.

601 So Greek; Hebrew reads thy feet are plunged, and omits from thee; 23 is a late expansion.

602 Pp. 258-9 n., thus exceeding Steuernagel’s and Buttenwieser’s readings of parts of it as a variant of xxxvii.

603 xxxviii. 28.

604 Duhm and Cornill take as original only 6-15; Giesebrecht reasonably adds 16, Ah Lord Yahweh in 17, 24, 25, and in the main 26-44, from which probably more deductions should be made than he makes. Gillies (270 ff.) takes 16-25 as later reflections on a prayer by Jeremiah, 24-41 as editorial, 42-44 as bringing us back to the actual situation. This is safer than Peake’s distinction of 16, 24-26, 36-44 as genuine (slightly qualified by his notes). Hebrew and Greek throughout are the same, save for the usual Greek omissions, and these are more in the narrative 1-15 (especially 5b, 11b, 14 these deeds with it for them and they, while in 8 for Hebrew the redemption is thine it has thou art the elder) than in the prayer and the divine answer (30b, 36 captivity for pestilence, 41 visit for rejoice over). In 6 for Hebrew me Greek has Jeremiah, but confirms the 1st person in 8, 9-13, 16, 25, and in 26 has me for Hebrew Jeremiah. Greek, too, has some of its unusual surplus: 8 Shallum, 12 son of, 19 ὁ θεος ὁ μέγας ὁ παντοκράτωρ καὶ μεγαλώνυμος Κύριος, 25 and I wrote the deed and sealed it, 33b still, 43 again.

605 The custom was to have one copy open for reference, and one sealed for confirmation if the open one should be disputed. To sealed Hebrew adds the injunction and conditions.

606 The numerous emendations are purely conjectural; the least unsatisfactory being Cornill’s: The houses ... shall be torn down against which the Chaldeans are coming to fight with mounds and sword and to fill with the corpses of men whom I have smitten in my wrath, etc.

607 One may eliminate the few words not found in Greek, and naturally suspect the liturgical clause in 11. Some take 13 as a late expansion of 12.

608 xxxviii. 28.

609 Verse 14 follows directly on verse 3. The statement that Nebuṣaradan was one of them is in verse 13 which belongs to the very late section, 4-13, lacking in the Greek.

610 Hebrew: lit. to the house; Greek omits.

611 Either Neby Samwîl or Tell-en-Naṣb, both a few miles north of Jerusalem. The above exposition takes xxxix. 3, 14 and xl. 1-6 as supplementary. But some read them as variants of the same episode, debating which is the more reliable. For a full discussion see Skinner, pp. 272 ff.

612 Hebrew, the forces (Greek, the force) in the field.

613 The oscillations of this controversy have been recently so fully recounted (by Cornill and Peake) that it is unnecessary to repeat them here.

614 Whether the datum xxx. 2, that Jeremiah was commanded by the Lord to write the words spoken to him in a book, is historical, is uncertain. It is not impossible that as he had been moved to write down his Oracles of doom (xxxvi) he should now be similarly advised about these later Oracles of hope. The rejection of xxx. 2, by most critics, seems to me rash.

615 This in answer to Rothstein (Kautzsch’s “Heilige Schrift des A. T.,” 754), whose upper date for them after 597 is too early, and to Gillies (p. 238) who refers them to the Prophet’s imprisonment.

616 Hebrew adds the gloss like a bearing woman.

617 So Greek, reading היו for הוי.

618 So Greek, Hebrew thy.

619 So Greek, Hebrew thy.

620 So Greek, Hebrew thy.

621 After the Greek.

622 Driver.

623 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

624 Lecture viii.

625 Greek, family.

626 iii. 6 f.

627 See p. 72.

628 Cornill dates the poem, “surely,” from the earliest stage of Jeremiah’s prophetic career; but both its late place in the Book and the reasons given above argue strongly for a date at Miṣpah under Gedaliah.

629 So Greek.

630 Or continue troth to thee.

631 So Greek; Hebrew deck thee with.

632 So Greek.

633 Lit make common, i.e. not be obliged to wait over the first four crops as required by the law, Lev. xix. 23-25, before having the fruit released for their own use. Greek reads the similar Hebrew verb praise.

634 Above, pp. 149 f., 152, 155 ff.

635 Duhm emends to on the top of the hills.

636 So Greek and Targ.

637 So Greek.

638 Ibid.

639 So Greek.

640 It is singular how each of these three verses contains not four but five lines. Cornill, by using the introduction Thus saith the Lord, omitting the remnant of Israel, combining two pairs of lines and including the following couplet, effects the arrangement of octastichs to which he has throughout the book arbitrarily committed himself. Duhm has another metrical arrangement.

641 Or coasts.

642 Lit. they stream upon, A.V. flow together; but the verb is to be taken in the same sense as in Ps. xxxiv. 5 were lightened and in Is. lx. 5, R.V. It is the liquid rippling light, thrown up on the face from water.

643 So Greek.

644 Hebrew adds and will comfort them.

645 Richly lit. with fat, which Greek omits but to priests adds the sons of Levi, an instance of how ready later hands have been to add prose glosses to the poetry.

646 1 Sam. x. 2.

647 See above pp. 46 f.

648 Hebrew and some versions add for her children.

649 Greek has not the first line of this couplet, and reads differently the second. The whole seems a needless variant or paraphrase of 16.

650 Or turned to (?). Greek reads after my captivity.

651 Some would read was chastised.

652 Still have that on my conscience; there is no need to doubt this line in whole or part as some do.

653 After all that has passed!

654 Compass or change to (?) This couplet has been the despair of commentators. Its exilic terms, created and female, relieve us of it.

655 Hebrew adds of hosts, God of Israel.

656 Hebrew and Greek add holy mount, a late term and here irrelevant, for it is all Judah that is described.

657 Greek each.

658 Doubtful. Jeremiah had nothing to do with dreams as means of prophecy.

659 Hebrew adds to each the house of.

660 Hebrew adds from i. 10 (q.v.), pluck up, break down and destroy.

661 As Dr. Skinner says, “it was only by way of the eternal world that Jeremiah could enter on the fruition of his hopes.”

662 “That atrocious brigand” (Renan).

663 The folds of, as Aquila shows that we should read Hebrew Geruth.

664 For the above see ch. xli, continuing from xl what is no doubt Baruch’s account.

665 So ch. xlii. This and xli are substantially the same in Hebrew and Greek, the Greek as usual omitting the repetitions of the Divine Titles and of the names of the fathers of the actors, and a few other expansions; and suggesting, as Syriac and Vulg. also do, some minor corrections.

666 xxiv. 1 ff.

667 xliii. 1-7. Hebrew and Greek still agree in essentials, Greek as usual omitting Divine Titles (which the Hebrew copyists delight in repeating), the needless father-names and also the term proud (or presumptuous) in 2, where it reads the others for the senseless Hebrew participle saying. In 6 it reads remainder for children, and household for daughters—of the king.

668 xliii. 8-13. In 9 for the obscure Hebrew phrase, R.V. in mortar in the brickwork, Greek reads ὲν προθύροις; in 10 lacks My servant, for I and I have reads he and thou hast; and in 12 he shall for I will. Also in 12 for he shall array himself with the land of Egypt as a shepherd putteth on his garment, Greek has he shall clear out the land as a shepherd clears his garment from lice. Suitable and vivid as this figure is and adopted by many moderns, one hesitates to use it for lack of confirmation from other sources. The other one is sufficient.

669 Besides its usual minus Greek omits in 1 and at Noph, in 3 and to serve and neither ... fathers, in 9 and your own wickedness, in 10 neither have they feared, in my law nor, before you and, in 11 against you ... all Judah, at least half of 12, in 15 unto other gods and that stood by, in 18 and to pour out ... unto her, in 19 to portray her, in 22, without inhabitant, in 23 as it is this day, in 28 mine or theirs. Also Greek begins 19, And all the women answered and said, and in 25 for ye and your wives reads properly ye women.

670 Hebrew adds and at Noph (Memphis).

671 Duhm, Rothstein, Cornill, Gillies, etc., eliminate from 15 as a later addition all the men who knew that their wives burned to other gods on the ground that 19 shows the women alone to be the speakers; Duhm, precariously changing besides a great assembly (by the alteration of one letter) to with a great (loud) voice. And these critics and Driver, Giesebrecht and Peake rightly take even all the people ... in Pathros as a late gloss founded on verse 1.

672 That is solemnly sworn; Judg. xi. 36; Numb. xxx. 2, 12.

673 Some Greek MSS. and Syriac have and all the women answered, an addition felt to be necessary after the mention of both men and women in 15.

674 Hebrew adds to portray her, that is on the cakes.

675 Erbt first made clear the metrical form of these verses, though I think too grudgingly, and has ignored the fact that they are not one but two Oracles.

676 So Greek.

677 Generally accepted instead of Hebrew vows.

678 Calvin.

679 The rest of 27 and 28a, the destruction of all the Jews in Egypt, is a prose expansion.

680 Hebrew adds, but Greek lacks, from me or from them.

681 xx. 8.

682 i. 6.

683 xx. 7.

684 vi. 11, xx. 9.

685 xv. 10; cp. xii. 1.

686 i. 10, p. 83.

687 xx. 2 ff.; see p. 192.

688 xxii. 18 f.; see p. 167.

689 xxxviii. 19 ff.; pp. 282 f.

690 xxix. 24-32.

691 xxviii. 17.

692 xlv. 5; p. 228.

693 So Greek; Hebrew thou lettest me see.

694 Greek; Hebrew takes this with the next line.

695 So generally read since Hitzig; Hebrew has bread, i.e. fruit.

696 Others: on Thee I have rolled; cp. xx. 12.

697 Greek; Hebrew thy.

698 Hebrew copyists senselessly repeat, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; Greek omits.

699 So Greek.

700 Greek.

701 Greek, meaning, Thy sanction to their curses.

702 The text of the last six lines is corrupt; the above is Duhm’s reading after the Greek. See too J. R. Gillies. Verses 13, 14 are out of place here, see xvii. 3, 4.

703 Greek omits.

704 So Greek; Hebrew (with same consonants, but the first two transposed) Found were Thy words.

705 So Greek; Hebrew I did eat them. But all this bracketed quatrain breaks the connection between what precedes and verse 17.

706 Cornill after Greek.

707 Omit of bronze for the metre’s sake; it is a copyist’s echo of i. 18. Cornill omits impassable instead.

708 Hebrew adds Rede of the Lord.

709 Hebrew precedes this with And the Word of the Lord came unto me, which Greek is without, thus closely connecting xvi. 2 ff. with xv. 21.

710 In 3, 4 the bracketed lines are probably expansions of the original.

711 Hebrew, etc., add nor bemoan them—expansion.

712 5b, 6a are not in Greek.

713 So Greek.

714 By a change of vowels.

715 So Greek.

716 Greek lacks of Hosts.

717 Perhaps 14 connects with 9, 10. The line For Thou art my praise is a late addition.

718 So Aq. Symm. Syr., reading ra’ah, evil for ro’eh, shepherd.

719 Torah, see p. 154.

720 So Greek; Hebrew of mine accusers.

721 To this line Greek adds have privily laid a stumbling block. Most regard both lines as an expansion from 22.

722 Pl.; So Greek.

723 Pl.; So Greek.

724 Above, pp. 276 ff.

725 In contrast with its boldness in textual criticism a curious timidity of sentiment has set through recent O.T. scholarship in Germany from which the older German scholars were free.

726 Greek the name of the Lord.

727 Greek; Hebrew adds any more.

728 So Greek.

729 Hebrew adds of Hosts.

730 Verse 13, a doxology, is probably a later addition.

731 So Greek.

732 Cp. xviii. 20 f. p. 329.

733 xii. 5; cp. xv. 19.

734 iv. 10; p. 322; xv. 18.

735 i. 17 f.; cp. xv. 19.

736 See above, p. 160.

737 Hebrew adds, Thou seest me.

738 See also p. 160. Verse 4 is clearly out of place here, referring to a hardly relevant subject. Verse 6 is less improbable an illustration of the harder troubles in store for the prophet. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of the rest: Thou can’st not trust, so Greek; Hebrew thou art trusting. Hitzig, etc., by changing one consonant read thou art fleeing. Rankness lit. pride or extravagance. If verse 6 is original, the date of the whole is early.

739 See above, p. 202.

740 v. 31; p. 125.

741 ii. 22 f.; xiii. 23; xvi. 12; xvii. 1; etc.

742 ii. 11-13, 22, 25, 31 f.

743 ii. 35; v. 31; vii. 4-11, 21 ff.; xi. 15; xiv. 12.

744 iv. 3, 4; vii. 3 ff. etc.

745 xv. 18.

746 Debase not the throne of Thy Glory, xiv. 21.

747 xiv. 8, 9; see p. 57.

748 x. 1-16 is a later writer’s; see p. 207.

749 vi. 27; see pp. 132, 133.

750 xii. 1 ff., etc.

751 xx. 7, 11.

752 xvii. 7 f.; p. 54.

753 See above, p. 299.

754 Shortly before his death, Professor A. B. Davidson said to me, “These prophets were terribly one-idea’d men”—their one idea being that the Lord was about to do something.

755 ii., iii. passim.

756 ii. 31.

757 ii. 8; Where is the Lord?

758 i. 12 ff.

759 xxvii. 5.

760 xxii. 7; i. 15; iv. 6; v. 15, etc.

761 xxii. 25 f.; xxiv. 8 ff.; xxv. 9; xxvii. 6; xxxii. 3; xxxiv. 2, 22.

762 xviii. 1-11.

763 i. 9 f.; etc.

764 ii. 9; xii. 1 ff.; xiii. 1; xviii. 1; xix. 1, xxiv. 1 f.; xxvii. 2; xxxii. 6; xxxv. 2; xxxvi. 2, 28.

765 ii. 5, 11; viii. 19 (?); xiv. 22; xvi. 19, 20; xviii. 15; xxxii. 30 (?), etc. Bubble, Hebrew hebel, lit. breath, usually rendered vanity by our versions.

766 Deut. iv. 19 reconciles the two by saying that Yahweh had assigned the gods to their respective nations.

767 Above, pp. 187 ff.; ii. 9, 31 f.; iii. 12, 19; etc.

768 ix. 24; cp. v. 1 ff., etc.

769 vii. 3 ff.; xxvi. 13. See above, pp. 155 ff.

770 xxii. 15 f.

771 ix. 7; cp. ii. 9, 35; v. 7-9, 25.

772 Not from the very earliest; ii. and iii. utter pleadings rather than condemnations.

773 iii. 1 ff., 20.

774 vi. 11; iv. 8, 26; xxv. 15; xxx. 24 (also, but out of place in xxiii. 20); cp. xiii. 12-14.

775 ii. 20; iii. 3, 6 ff., 20; xii. 8.

776 iv. 28; v. 7; vii. 16; xi. 14; xv. 1 ff.

777 v. 9, 29; ix. 9; xxi. 7.

778 vi. 15; viii. 12; ix. 15 (xxiii. 15); xv. 7, 8; xiii. 24; xviii. 17; vi. 26; ix. 11; vii. 15; xxiv. 9, 10.

779 ii. 19; iv. 18; vii. 19; xiii. 22.

780 vi. 27-30; pp. 132 ff.

781 ii. 30, v. 3.

782 ii. 25; xviii. 12; vi. 15; viii. 12; xi. 14; xiv. 11.

783 v. 31; xiii. 25; xviii. 11 ff.; xxiii. 14-17; xxvii. 9; xxviii. 15.

784 iii. 21-25, a vain confession of sin by the people which meets only with a sterner call from God (iv. 3-4; see pp. 102 f., 107 f.) and was, as the subsequent years proved, ineffective; cp. xviii. 15.

785 ii. 5, 31, 32.

786 xii. 7-9; ii. 14.

787 xii. 11; cp. Gen. xlviii. 7.

788 xxxi. 20.

789 I shall judge thee for saying “I am guiltless”: ii. 35.

790 Above, pp. 186 ff., 348.

791 ii. 13; xiv. 8; xvii. 13; iii. 12.

792 i. 11 f.; xxxi. 35 f.

793 viii. 7; v. 22 (xxxi. 35); xiv. 22 (after the Greek); cp. iii. 3; v. 24.

794 xxiii. 23 f.; above, p. 256.

795 By Smend.

796 Amos ix. 2 ff.

797 See above, pp. 238-241.

798 xxix. 4-13; cp. vii. 14, 21 ff.; iii. 16; and see above, pp. 143-159.

799 See above, pp. 90 ff.

800 v. 1-5; viii. 8, scribes and wise; and prophets and priests continually.

801 ix. 4 f.; v. 7 f.; xx. 3 f.; xxii. 13-18; xxxviii. 22; xxviii. 15 f.

802 iii. 2; v. 26; x. 21; xxiii. 31.

803 v. 1.

804 xi. 20; xx. 12.

805 xvii. 9 f.

806 xxiii. 24.

807 xxxi. 29 f.

808 xxvi. 2 f.

809 ix. 24.

810 x. 23.

811 xvii. 7 f.; above, p. 54.

812 See above, pp. 227-229.

813 xii. 3.

814 Above, pp. 293 ff. This was rightly perceived by earlier critics of last century, Movers, De Wette, Hitzig, etc., who mostly assigned as a date the end of the exile and read the influence of the Second Isaiah upon any Jeremian material that the chapters may contain. In spite of objections by Graf their thesis was reaffirmed and expanded by Stade (Gesch. Isr. i. 643) and by Smend (Lehrbuch der A.T. Religionsgeschichte, 1893), who denied that any part of xxx, xxxi was from Jeremiah, on grounds both of alleged inconsistencies with Jeremiah’s teaching, and of the representations of Judah with her people restored and her cultivation resumed. But since Smend criticism has been more discriminating; admitting post-exilic elements and consequently a late age for the whole collection but reserving for our Prophet various passages: Giesebrecht, xxxi. 2-6, 15-20, 27-34; Duhm, xxx. 12-15, xxxi. 2-6, 15-22a; Erbt, xxxi. 2-6, 15-17, 18-20; Cornill, xxxi. 2-5, 9b, 15-22b, 31-34; J. R. Gillies, xxxi. 2-6, 15-20, 29 f., 31b, 33b, 34; Peake, xxxi. 2-6, 15-22, 31-34; Skinner, xxxi. 2-6, 15 f., 18-20, 21 f., 29 f., 31-34.

815 Above, pp. 36 f., 40-42, 49-52, 91.

816 Above, pp. 40, 91, 142, 145.

817 xi. 1 ff., etc.

818 xxiv. 7.

819 ix. 24; cp. viii. 7b, etc.

820 So Greek, Latin and Syriac; Hebrew though I was an husband to them.

821 So one Greek version.

822 So some MSS.

823 So Greek and Latin.

824 Hebrew adds, Rede of the Lord.

825 Giesebrecht.