Party

of the Heathen Princes.

By one of those lightning flashes, which at times, in the moments of its thickest darkness, reveal the interior of Jewish society, we are admitted, during these closing scenes, to a closer view of its several elements in this its latest crisis, than we have enjoyed since the time of David. The violence which had, in the earlier period of the divided kingdom, characterised the northern dynasty, in the reigns of Manasseh and Josiah penetrated the fortunes of Jerusalem also. It had become a mortal battle between two fierce parties. The persecution of the Prophets by Manasseh had provoked the persecution of the idolatrous Priests by Josiah. The mutual mistrust which had already, in the time of Hezekiah, broken up families and divided the nearest friends, and made a man's worst enemies those of his own household,' had now reached the highest degree of intensity: Every man had to take heed of his neighbour, and 'suspect his brother.' 2

There was the party which may be called the party of 'the Princes,'-that body of nobles who, from the time of Joash, perhaps of Rehoboam, had leaned to the idolatrous and licentious practices of the early Kings of Judah, and who held the later Kings almost as puppets in their hands. With them were associated many of the Elders or chiefs of the tribes, under whose auspices the polytheism, which Josiah had for the moment extirpated, still continued to linger, even in the courts of the Temple itself. At the north gate of the sacred precincts was a statue of Astarte, and a wailing-place, where, as at the Phoenician Byblos, there were women howling over the loss of the Syrian god Thammuz.3 In the subterranean chambers underneath the Temple area were fitted up chapels decorated after the Egyptian fashion, with likenesses of sacred animals,

2 Jer. ix. 4, xii. 6.

1 Micah vii. 5, 6. See Ewald, iii. 711.

Ezek. viii. 3–5, 14.

to which incense was offered.1 Even in the space of the court between the porch and the altar, there was a band of high dignitaries who turned their backs on the Temple, and paid their devotions eastward to the Sun as he rose over the Mount of Olives.2 The names of some of the more determined of these reactionary Princes are preserved: Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, Jaazaniah the son of Azur, and Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan; probably, also, Elishama, the chief secretary of the royal family, and his grandson Ishmael -who had a connexion with the court of Ammon, and himself belonged to the royal family.

3

4

Party of

the Priests

and Pro

By the side of these, perhaps opposed to them, perhaps allied with them, in that strange combination which often brings together, for purposes of political or religious ani- phets. mosity, parties themselves most alien to each other, was the great body of the Sacerdotal, and even of the Prophetic order. There were those who directly lent themselves to magical rites, both amongst the male and female members of the Prophetic schools. There were also those who clung with a desperate tenacity to the hope that the local sanctity of Jerusalem was a sufficient safeguard against all calamities; who repeated, with that energy of iteration which only belongs to Eastern fanatics, the very name of the Temple of Jehovah as an all-sufficing talisman; who prided themselves on the newly-discovered treasure of the Law; who recited the old prophetic phrases, often careless of what they meant; who saw in the city only a vast cauldron & constructed for their special content and enjoyment. Amongst these were Pashur, of a high Priestly family, holding the office of governor of the Temple, with his son Gedaliah; another Pashur, with his uncle Jerahmeel, high in the favour of the

1 Ezek. viii. 8-12.

2 Ibid. 16.

Ibid. 11, xi. 1.

4 Ibid. xiii. 2, 6, 18.

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5

8

5 Jer. vii. 4. See Lecture XXX.

Ibid. viii. 8.

Ibid. xxiii. 31, 33.

⚫ Ezek. xi. 3.

The Friends of Jeremiah.

court; the whole family of Shelemiah, including his son Jehucal and his grandson Jehudi; Seraiah the son of Azariah; and Irijah the son of Shelemaiah, the son of HananiahHananiah himself being one of the leading Prophets of this extreme party.

In the midst of these adverse influences was a powerful group, the direct inheritors of the traditions of the reign of Josiah. Hilkiah, Shaphan, Maaseiah, and Huldah, indeed, were passed away; but their friends or children still remained; and the families especially of Shaphan and Maaseiah formed a powerful society, united by the closest sympathy. The life of the whole circle was the Prophet Jeremiah, bound up by various ties of kinship or friendship with almost all of them. Even if his father Hilkiah was not the High Priest of that name, yet his own Priestly descent must have brought them. JEREMIAH. into close connexion. His uncle Shallum was the husband

of the Prophetess Huldah, and his friend Hanameel was his cousin, their son. His constant companion was Baruch the grandson of Maaseiah, and his most powerful protectors, Ahikam and Gedaliah, were the son and grandson of Shaphan. Born in the priestly city of Anathoth, with the influence of these families round him, it might well be said that he was consecrated to his office even from his earliest days. His father had received his birth with a joy of which the remembrance was long preserved, and which strangely contrasted with the dark career of his after life. The faithful adherence of these companions through good report and evil, his constant appeals to them for help, the unexpected aid which, through their intervention, was brought to his rescue, bring out the fascination which he exercised over them, and the tender sympathy which they received from him, so as, more than any other of the ancient Prophets, to recall the great Apostle, who had a thousand friends, and loved

Jer. i. 5.

2 If we may take literally Jer. xx, 15.

each as if he had a thousand souls, and died a thousand / ' deaths when he parted from them.'

tude.

But it might be said of Jeremiah, even more than of S. His soliPaul, that in spite of these numerous friends, for the greater part of his mission he had no man likeminded with him.' From the first moment of his call he was alone, amidst a hostile world. The nation was against him. In the day when he uttered his lament over Josiah, he lost his last hope in the house of Judah. From that hour the charm of the royal line of David was broken; the institution which had of itself sustained the monarchy had lost its own vital power. The nobles were exasperated against him by his fearless rebukes of their oppression and luxury. Most of all, he was hated and cursed-the bitterest trial, in every time-by the two sacred orders to which he himself belonged. He was one of those rare instances in the Jewish history, in which Priest and Prophet were combined, and by a singularly tragical fate he lived precisely at that age in which both of those great institutions seemed to have reached the utmost point of degradation and corruption; both, after the trials and vicissitudes of centuries, in the last extremity of the nation of which they were the chief supports, broke down and failed. Between the Priesthood and the Prophets there had hitherto been more or less of a conflict; but now that conflict was exchanged for a fatal union- a wonderful and horrible thing was committed in the land; the Prophets prophesied 'falsely and the Priests bore rule by their means; and the 'people loved to have it so,'1 and he who by each of his callings was naturally led to sympathise with both, was the doomed antagonist of both,-victim of one of the strongest of human passions, the hatred of Priests against a Priest who attacks his own order, the hatred of Prophets against a Prophet who ventures to have a voice and a will of his own.

1 Jer. v. 31, ii. 8, vi. 13, xxiii. 11, 34, xxvi. 11.

His doc

trines.

His own village of Anathoth, occupied by members of the sacred tribe, was for him a nest of conspirators' against his life. Of him, first in the sacred history, was the saying literally fulfilled, a Prophet hath no honour in his own. 'birthplace.'"

And, as often has happened in like case, the misfortune of his position was aggravated by the necessity of opposing the general current of popular prejudice, and professional narrowness, not merely in its grosser forms of selfishness and superstition, but in those points where it merely carried to excess feelings which were in themselves good, and which had in an earlier age been sanctioned by the noblest examples and most fruitful results. In the altered circumstances of his age, he could no longer be what Isaiah had been: nay, that unshaken belief in the inherent invincible strength of Jerusalem which Isaiah had preached, and which the Prophets of his time repeated after Isaiah with a constant and not unnatural confidence, it was the duty of

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Jeremiah to oppose. Even the yet diviner truth of the possibility of restoration for the most hardened character, which Isaiah had set forth in words whose fire lives to this day, was to Jeremiah overclouded by the sense of the ingrained depravity which seemed to have closed up every entrance to the national conscience. The message, Though 'your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though 'they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool,' was exchanged for the desponding cry, Can the Ethiopian change 'his skin or the leopard his 'spots?' The free will of Isaiah and the fatality of Jeremiah were each true for the moment, each liable to exaggeration by those who will not make

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1 Jer. xi. 19, 21.

* Ἐν τῇ αὐτοῦ πατρίδι, Luke iv. 24. Isa. i. 18. Calvin, with that good sense which marks his commentary, rejects the support which the exaggerated use of this verse might give

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