1 within the Temple courts. Then, and not till then, the Priestly officer, who had special charge of the Temple, seized him, and immured him in a prison, where he was fixed in a rack or pillory, apparently used as the common punishment of unpopular Prophets. For a moment his spirit rose to one of his wildest and sternest denunciations, and then, as if overstrained by the effort, he sank back into the deepest 2 gloomthe gloom of many a lofty soul which feels itself misunderstood by men, which can hardly believe that it is not deserted by God. In this deep distress, one faithful friend is by his side, his Elisha, his Timotheus-Baruch, the son of Neriah. In their prison, or their hiding-place, he heard the rumours of the great events which filled the minds and thoughts of Recitation the whole people. It was then that the resolution was taken Baruch. of committing to writing all the scattered prophecies of the of last troubled years. Baruch was skilled in the art, and from Jeremiah's dictation, on a roll of parchment, divided into columns, with the ink and reed which, as a scribe, he always carried with him, he wrote down the impassioned warnings which Jeremiah had already spoken, which were intended, like the newly-discovered Law in Josiah's reign, to warn the King and nobles to a sense of their danger. It was determined to seize the occasion of a public fast to make the hazardous experiment. On that day, a wintry day in December, Baruch appeared in the chamber of a friendly noble, Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, which was apparently over the new gateway already mentioned. There from the window or balcony of the chamber, or from the platform or pillar on which the Kings had stood on solemn occasions, he recited the long alternation of lament and invective to the vast congregation, assembled for the national fast. Micaiah, the son of his host, 4 1 Jer. xx. 2, xxix. 26; comp. 2 Chr. xvi. 10; Acts xvi. 24. 2 Ibid. xx. 3-18. Jer. xxxvi. 2, xxv. 13. 1 alarmed by what he heard, descended the Temple hill, and communicated it to the Princes who, as usual through these disturbed reigns, were seated in council in the palace, in the apartments of the chief secretary. One of them, Jehudi, the descendant of a noble house, acted apparently as an agent or spokesman of the rest, and was sent to summon Baruch to their presence. He sat down in the attitude of an Eastern teacher, and as he went on his recital struck terror into the hearts of his hearers. They saw his danger; they charged him and his master to conceal themselves, and deposited the sacred scroll in the chamber where they had heard it, whilst they announced to the fierce and lawless King its fearful contents. A third time it was recited-this time not by Baruch, but by the courtier Jehudi-to the King as he sat warming himself over the charcoal brazier, with his princes standing round him. Three or four columns exhausted the royal patience. He seized a knife, such as Eastern scribes wear for the sake of erasures, cut the parchment into strips, and threw it into the brazier till it was burnt to ashes. Those who had heard from their fathers of the effect produced on Josiah by the recital of the warnings of Deuteronomy, might well be startled at the contrast. None of those well-known signs of astonishment and grief were seen; neither King nor attendants rent their clothes. It was an outrage long remembered. Baruch, in his hiding-place, was overwhelmed with despair at this failure of his mission. But Jeremiah had now ceased to waver. He bade his timid disciple take up the pen, and record once more the terrible messages. The country was doomed. It was only individuals who could be saved. But the Divine oracle could not be destroyed in the destruction of its outward framework. It was the new form of the vision of the Bush burning, but not consumed:' a sacred book, the form in which Divine truths were now first 1 Jer. xxxvi. 15; comp. Luke iv. 20. 2 Jer. xlv. 3. Death of beginning to be known, burnt as sacred books have been burnt again and again, in the persecutions of the fourth or of the sixteenth century, yet multiplied by that very cause; springing from the flames to do their work, living in the voice and life of men, even when their outward letter seemed to be lost. Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to 'Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book 'which Jehoiakim, the King of Judah, had burned in the 'fire, and there were added besides unto them many like words.' In this record of the Prophet's feeling, thus emphasized by his own repetition, is contained the germ of the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing,' the inexhaustible vitality of the written word. This is the first recorded instance of the formation of a Canonical Book, and of the special purpose of its formation. The Book' now, as often afterwards, was to be the death-blow of the old regal, aristocratic, sacerdotal, exclusiveness, as represented in Jehoiakim. The Scribe,' now first rising into importance in the person of Baruch, to supply the defects of the living Prophet, was as the printing-press, in far later ages, supplying the defects both of Prophet and Scribe, and handing on the words of truth which else might have irretrievably perished. We return to the thin thread of the gradually breaking B. C. 598. monarchy. The King, possibly in consequence of the repeated entreaties of the Prophet, submitted to the Chaldæan power; but, with the fickleness which belonged to his character, immediately revolted again; and, in the inroad of the neighbouring hostile tribes, let loose, according to the policy of Nebuchadnezzar, against their ancient enemy, the calamities of the country seemed to reach their culmination. In this confusion and alarm the reign of Jehoiakim closed 22 Kings xxiv. 2. 1 Jer. xxxvi. 32. amidst a shade of deep melancholy and almost mystery, which well expresses the national feeling respecting it. According to one version, the city was besieged, the Temple was plundered of many of its sacred vessels, and the King himself taken captive. According to a second, the Chaldæan troops entered Jerusalem on friendly terms, and then seized and killed the King and the chiefs of the State. According to a third, he died peacefully at 3 home, and was buried in the garden of Uzza by the side of his grandfather Manasseh, and his father Josiah. According to a fourth, which well expresses the detestation in which his memory was held, there were no funeral dirges over him as there had been over his father and brother; but his corpse was thrown out, like that of a dead ass, outside the walls of Jerusalem,' exposed to the burning sun by day, and the wasting 5 frost by night. And this prophetic curse was darkened with a yet deeper hue by the legend which described how, on the skin of the dead corpse, as it thus lay exposed, there appeared in distinct Hebrew characters the name of the demon Codonazer, to whom he had sold himself. In the disorder which followed on Jehoiakim's death or Jehoiachin. B. C. 598. exile, his son Jeconiah or Coniah, who assumed either his father's 7 name, Jehoiakim, or that of Jehoiachin, the Lord's 'Appointed,' was raised to the throne. His mother, Nehushta, the daughter of one of the chief nobles, occupied the 12 Chr. xxxvi. 7. The siege of Jerusalem, which in Dan. i. 1 is placed in the third year of Jehoiakim, is in 2 Chr. xxxvi. 5, 6, 8 placed in the eleventh year. Much of this obscurity may arise from the confusion of Jehoiakim with Jehoiachin, see 2 Kings xxiv. 8 (LXX.). Josephus, Ant. x. 6, §3. 32 Kings xxiv. 6; 2 Chr. xxxvi. 8 (LXX.). It is possible that in any case his corpse may have been ultimately interred there. Compare the curse of position, great even in this last extremity of the house, of Queen-mother. His short reign of three months is wrapped in obscurity and contradiction. But whether, as by one report, he was a little child, or by another a full-grown 2 youth, whether a prince, headstrong and 3 violent, or kind and gentle, he attracted a peculiar sympathy in his fall, as the last of the lion cubs of the tribe of Judah, the last direct heir of the house of David. At the first onslaught of the Babylonian army on Jerusalem, he and his mother' Nehushta, unwilling to expose the city to a siege, sate down as suppliants before the conqueror. The golden ornaments of the Temple were rudely hacked off and carried to Babylon; and thither also the King himself, the Queen-mother, the royal harem, the nobles and priests, and a certain number, variously stated, of soldiers, artificers, and smiths. 8 9 The nation reeled under the blow. It seemed to them as if the signet ring of His promises were torn off from the hand of God Himself. It could hardly be believed that the young Prince, the last of his race, should be cast away like a broken idol and despised vessel,10 and that the voice of the young lion should be no more heard on the mountains of Israel "; that the topmost and tenderest shoot of the royal cedar-tree should have been plucked off by the Eagle of the East, and planted far away in the merchant-city of the Euphrates.12 From the top of Lebanon, from the heights of Bashan, from the ridges of Abarim, the widowed country shrieked aloud, as she saw the train of her captive King and nobles disappearing in the distant 13 East. From the heights 12 Chr. xxxvi. 9. Ibid. 9; Ezek. xix. 6. Jer. xxii. 30. Ibid. xiii. 18 (Heb.), xxii. 26, xxiv. 12. 8 2 Kings xxiv. 13 (Heb. and Thenius). More than 10,000 in 2 Kings xxiv. 14, 15; 3,023 in all in Jer. lii. 28. 10 Jer. xxii. 24, 28. 11 Ezek. xix. 8. 18 Ibid. xvii. 4. 13 Jer. xxii. 20 (Heb.) 23. |