day was coming when the very fall of the Temple, the very loss of the Ark itself, might be considered a boon. They 'shall no more say, 'the ark of the covenant of the Lord; 'neither shall it come to mind; neither shall they remember 'it; neither shall they visit it; neither shall that be done 'any more.' The reformation of Josiah he notices only to speak of the uselessness of the much vaunted discovery of the sacred books. How do ye say, We are wise, and the 6 law of the Lord is with us. Lo, certainly in vain hath He 'made it; the fear of the scribes is in 2 vain.' Yet, if we may trust the arguments by which the Book of Deuteronomy has been connected with that revolution, a peculiar interest accrues to the Prophet who stands to Deuteronomy almost in the same relation as that book stands to the rest of the Pentateuch. Jeremiah is, above everything else, the Prophet of the Deuteronomy-of the 'Second Law;' not merely from the close connexion of outward style, but because he brings out more clearly than any other Prophet the spiritual lessons of that the most spiritual of all the Mosaic books, and looks forward to the time when his people shall be guided by a higher than any merely external law. It is to Jeremiah, even more than to Isaiah, that the writers of the Apostolic age look back, when they wish to describe the Dispensation of the Spirit. His predictions of the Anointed King are fewer and less distinct than those of the preceding Prophets. But he is the Prophet beyond all others of the "New Testament'the New Covenant,'-which first appears in his writings. As in the one glance which he casts forward to the Coming Ruler, it is as the Just King, the personification of Divine Justice, in contrast to the weak and wayward rule of the unhappy Princes that closed the line Jer. iii. 16, vii. 4. 2 Ibid. viii. 8. Heb. viii. 8-13, x. 16, 17. Jer. xxiii. 5, 6, xxxiii. 15, 16. The other allusions are very slight, Jer. xxx. 9, xxxiii. 17. 6 of Judah, so amidst the degradation of the Prophetic and Priestly offices, he consoles himself with the thought that, whilst even the Divine covenant of the ancient Law is to be abolished, there is to be a new covenant, a new understanding between God and man; a new Law, more sacred even than Deuteronomy, written not in any outward book, or by any inspiration of words and letters, but in the hearts and spirits of those who will be thus brought into union with God. And the knowledge of this new truth shall no longer be confined to any single order or caste, but 'all shall know the Lord from the least unto the greatest.'1 With this conviction, there was no bound to the extent of his hopes. In the letter they have been but scantily and imperfectly realised, but in the spirit they have been fulfilled more widely than even he ventured to predict; for they were founded on the eternal law of moral progress and spiritual regeneration, more fixed than that which giveth the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and stars for a • light by night, which divideth the sea when its waves roar.'2 The eulogy of the Law in the 119th Psalm, in the peculiar rhythm which marks the poetry of this age of the Jewish Church, is but a prolonged expression of Jeremiah's hope, the transfiguration of the ancient Mosaic system in the sunset of the declining monarchy, before the night which will be succeeded by a more glorious dawn. I see that all things come to an end; but thy commandment is exceeding broad.' This is the reward of the truthfulness of his character. To read in the possibilities of the future a balance for the difficulties of the present, was his compensation for the rare gift of seeing things as they really were, through no false or coloured medium. He stood' firmly on the old ways;' felt their weakness and their strength, saw where 6 1 Jer. xxxi. 33, 34. 2 Ibid. 35. Comp. Isa. xl. 12. 3 Ps. exix. 96. ✦ Jer. vi. 16. (Bacon's Essays, xxiv.) Jehoahaz. B. C. 609. they failed and where they were solid, and therefore he was able to look out, and discern the good way' in which henceforth his church and country could walk. Such is the outline of the Prophet's mission which we have now to follow through the fall of the Holy City, and onward through the effects of his teaching and his life as long as the last echoes of that fall linger in our ears. 1 2 The struggles of the expiring kingdom of Judah are like those of a hunted animal-now flying, now standing at bay, between two huge beasts of prey, which, whilst their main object is to devour each other, turn aside from time to time to snatch at the smaller victim that has crossed their midway path. It was not now a question of independence, but of choice between two foreign sovereigns. When the country recovered from the shock of Josiah's death, it found itself in the grasp of the Egyptian Necho. Jerusalem, if not actually taken by him, was virtually in his hands, though not without a struggle. Shallum, the second son of the dead King, was hastily raised over his elder brother's head to the vacant throne. Like all the Princes of this period of dissolution, he took, perhaps as a kind of charm, a new sacred name on his accession, Jeho-Ahaz, the Lord's possession;' and, like all the Kings whose right was disputed, was 3 anointed with the sacred oil as if the founder of a new dynasty. In three months he was carried off to the conqueror's camp in the north at Riblah. Riblah was the regular outpost of those great hosts, whether from Egypt or Babylon, during the whole of this period. On the banks of a mountain stream, in the midst of a vast and fertile plain, at a central point, where across the desert the roads diverge to the Euphrates, 1 Dean Milman (3rd ed.), i. 394. 4 then its capture coincides with Jer. xlvii. 1. 2 Kings xxiii. 30. Ibid. xxiii. 33, xxv. 20; and see Robinson, Bib. Res. iii. 545. 6 3 6 or along the coast, or through the vale of Cœle-Syria to Palestine and the South, no more advantageous place of encampment could be imagined. Thither first, and then to Egypt, the young usurper was carried off. Something there had been in his character, or in the popular mode of his election, which endeared him to the country. A lamentation, as for his father, went up from the Princes and Prophets of the land for the lion's 2 cub, that was learning to catch his prey, caught in the pitfall, and led off in chains-by a destiny even sadder than death in battle. Weep not for the dead, nor bemoan him, but weep sore for him that goeth away.' He was the first King of Judah that died in exile. He shall return no more, he shall return no more to see 'his native country-his native land no more.' His elder Jehoiakim. brother, Eliakim, taking the more sacred name of JehoJakim,' was placed on the throne as a vassal by the Egyptian King, and Palestine became a mere province of Egypt. For a few years a temporary splendour remained, combined with the restoration of old heathen rites. The King himself, by enforced labour, enlarged his palace, roofed it with cedar, painted it with vermilion, as if the evil day was still far off, and he could rest securely under the protection of the Egyptian power, whose heavy tribute he exacted from his unwilling subjects. He remained fixed in the recollections of his countrymen, as the last example of those cruel, selfish, luxurious Princes, the natural product of Oriental monarchies, the disgrace of the monarchy of David. 5 In this last decline of the state there were Prophets to bear witness to higher truths. It may be that the warning voice from Habakkuk's watchtower was raised against the 12 Kings xxiii. 34; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 4. Ezek. xix. 3, 4. Jer. xxii. 10, 11, 12. 2 Kings xxiii. 34. Apparently, by a kind of incantation, to secure Jer. xxii. 13, 14. B. C. 609-598. Urijah. Jeremiah in the Temple. grinding oppression with which Jehoiakim's buildings were carried on, which would make the very stones and rafters cry out against him. Another Prophet, Urijah, from the ancient Kirjath-jearim, at the very beginning of the reign, by his energetic remonstrances, probably against the Egyptian alliance, provoked such a fierce reaction of king, and nobles, and army, that he had to fly for safety even into Egypt itself. He was pursued by no less a person than the King's father-in-law, and brought back to Jerusalem, where he was beheaded, and his corpse excluded from the cemetery, which, as it seems, by long usage, had been devoted to the Prophetic order.3 But the chief monitor was Jeremiah himself. Except at the funeral of Josiah, this is the first record of his public appearance. In the court of the Temple, in the midst of a vast assemblage, headed by the Priestly and Prophetic orders, the Prophet rose up and delivered an appeal which contained almost every element of his teaching. It struck the successive chords of invective, irony, bitter grief, and passionate lamentation. It touched on all the topics on which his countrymen would be most sensitive-not only the idolatrous charms by which they hoped to win the favour of the Phoenician deities, in whom they perhaps but only half believed, but on the uselessness and impending fall of the ancient institutions, which had seemed to contain a promise of eternal duration -the Temple of Solomon, the Mosaic ritual, the Royal Sepulchres, the Holy City, the Chosen People, the sacred rite of Circumcision. But the main point of his address was when he reminded them of the last signal overthrow of the national sanctuary, and bade them see with their own eyes, not thirty miles from Jerusalem, the desolate 2 Hab. ii. 9-11. By a very ingenious argument Bunsen (Gott in der Geschichte, p. 452) endeavours to identify Urijah with the unknown author of Zech. xii. 3 Jer. xxvi. 20-23. |