for a moment at the dividing of the great Babylonian roads,' whether the army should proceed against Rabbath of Ammon, or Jerusalem of Judah. The Chaldæan King stood at the parting of the ways. He made his arrows of divination bright, he consulted with images, he looked on the sacrifice. All the omens pointed to Jerusalem, and to Jerusalem he came. Palestine was overrun, and Jerusalem, with the two strong southern fortresses of Lachish and Azekah, alone remained unshaken. At this emergency the Egyptian army appeared, and the Chaldæans raised the siege. It was like that critical moment in the last war of the Jews, when the temporary withdrawal of the Roman forces from Jerusalem left a pause before the final overthrow. Some fled into the camp of the enemy; some to the hills beyond the Jordan; some, like frightened doves, to the mountains of Judæa.2 Within the city, the nobles once more regained their ascendancy over the King, and the forced emancipation of their slaves was revoked. Against this injustice Jeremiah raised his voice, in accents worthy of Amos or Micah.3 It was his last public address. He saw too clearly the coming catastrophe, and was on the point of escaping from Jerusalem to end his days in his own loved village of Anathoth.* At the northern gate of the Temple, the gates of Benjamin,' he was arrested by the officer of the guard, on the not unnatural supposition that he was deserting to the Chaldæans. Imprison- The nobles, delighted to have their enemy in their power, Jeremiah. beat him, and then imprisoned him in a dungeon, formed ment of out of the wall in the house of Jonathan the royal scribe. The King, hardly venturing to act for himself, secretly caused him to be removed, heard once more his fearless warning and piteous entreaty, and placed him in a more easy confine 1 Ezek. xxi. 19-22. 2 Ibid. vii. 16, xxxiv. 7, xxxvii. 5-12. Jer. xxxiv. 17-22. 4 Ibid. xxxvii. 13-15. Ibid. 13; xx. 2; Zech. xiv. 10. 6 ment in the court of a prison attached to the palace.' The King and the nobles still sent to ask his counsel, and still his answer was the same. Those who received his message gave the alarm, and the princes insisted on his removal to a place of greater security, as they could not expose the loyalty and courage of the people to warnings of so disastrous and dispiriting a tenor. The weak King was unable to resist them, and the Prophet was taken to the house of one of his most determined enemies, and let down into a deep well, from which the water had been dried, but of which the bottom was deep in slime, into which he sank, and would probably have perished, either from hunger or suffocation.2 It is difficult not to imagine a connection between this incident and the 69th Psalm:3 I sink in the mire, where there is no bottom. Deliver me out of the mire that I sink not let not the well shut its mouth upon me.' Reproach ' hath broken my heart: I am sick, and I looked for some 'to take pity; but there was none, and for comforters, and 'I found none.' Such a comforter, however, was at handone of the Ethiopian guards of the royal harem, known by the name of the King's Slave.' Ebed-Melech found the King sitting in the great northern entrance of the Temple, and obtained a revocation of the order; and then, under the protection of a strong guard, proceeded, with a detailed care, which the Prophet seems gratefully to record, to throw down a mass of soft rags from the royal wardrobe to ease the rough ropes with which he drew him out of the well.1 One more secret interview the Prophet had with the King, carefully concealed from the imperious nobles, and was then remanded to his former state prison, where he remained secluded during the rest of the siege, though with a certain amount of freedom, and with the companionship of his faithful Baruch. Two Jer. xxxvii. 16-21. 2 Ibid. xxxviii. 1-6, xxi. 1-10. Jer. xxxviii. 7-13. 3 Ps. lxix. 2, 14, 15, 20. striking scenes enlivened this solitude. One was his grateful remembrance of his Ethiopian benefactor,' whose safety in the coming troubles he positively predicted. The other was his interview with his cousin Hanameel. He was sitting in the open court which enclosed the prison, with many of the citizens of Jerusalem round him. Suddenly his cousin entered with the offer, startling at that moment of universal confusion, to sell the ancestral plot of ground at their native Anathoth, of which, in the fall of their family, Jeremiah was the last and nearest heir. Had the Prophet been less assured of the ultimate return of his people, he might well have hesitated at a proposal which seemed only like the mockery that he had before encountered from his townsmen. But he felt assured that the present cloud would pass away, and, with a noble confidence which has often been compared to that of the Roman senator who bought the ground occupied by the camp of Hannibal, formally purchased the field in the presence of Baruch and the assembled Jews; and then broke out, once and again, first in prose and then in poetry, into the expressions of his perfect conviction that, after the misery of siege and captivity, the land of Palestine should be again peaceably bought and sold, and that for all future ages the royal family of David and the Levitical tribe should exercise their functions in a spirit of justice never before known within the walls of Jerusalem. It is not the only time in the history of States and Churches that he who has been denounced as a deserter and traitor, becomes in the last extremity the best comforter and coun sellor. Demosthenes, who had warned his fellow-countrymen in his earlier days against their excessive confidence, in his later days was the only man who could reassure their excessive despondency. Herder, who in his earlier days had been attacked by contemporary theologians as a heretic, Tbid. xxxii. 16-44. Jer, xxxix. 15-18 Ibid. xxxii. 6-15. 3 was, as years rolled on, invoked as their only help against the rising tide of unbelief. Let all such, in every age, accept the omen of the mingled darkness and light which marks the vicissitudes of the career of Jeremiah. 3 4 B. C. 587. The siege had now set in once more, and for the last time. The siege. The nation never forgot the month and the day on which the armies of Chaldæa finally invested the city. It was in January, on the tenth day of the tenth month. It was felt as the day of the deepest gloom by the Israelite exiles.1 It has been commemorated as a fast, the fast of Tebeth, ever since in the Jewish Church. Round the walls were reared the gigantic mounds by which Eastern armies conducted their 2 approaches to besieged cities, and which were surmounted by forts overtopping the walls. To make room for these, the houses which the Kings of Judah had built outside for pleasant retreats were swept away. The vassal kings of Babylon had their thrones planted in view of each of the gates. Famine and its accompanying visitation of pestilence ravaged the crowded population within the walls. The store of bread was gradually exhausted. It was only by a special favour of the King that a daily supply was sent to Jeremiah in his prison from the baker's quarter, and at last even this failed. The nobles, who had prided themselves on their beautiful complexions, purer than snow, whiter than milk, ' ruddy as rubies, polished as sapphires,' had become ghastly and black with starvation. Their wasted skeleton forms could hardly be recognised in the streets. The ladies of Jerusalem, in their magnificent crimson robes, might be seen sitting in despair on the dunghills. From these foul heaps 6 Ezek. xxiv. 1-27. 6 2 Jer. xxxii. 24, lii. 4; Ezek. iv. 2. 3 Jer. xxxiii. 4. • Ibid. i. 15. 5 Josephus, Ant. x. 7, §4; 8, §1; Baruch ii. 25; Ezek. v. 12. 5 • Jer. lii. 6. Ibid. xxxvii. 21, xxxviii. 9; Ezek. iv. 16, v. 16, xii. 19. Lam. iv. 7, 8, v. 10 (Heb. and Ewald). Lam. iv. 5; Ezek. iv. 12, 15. B. C. 587. were gathered morsels to eke out the failing supply of food. There was something specially piteous in the sight of the little children, with their parched tongues, fainting in the streets, asking for bread, crying to their mothers for corn and wine.' There was something still more terrible in the hardened feeling with which the parents turned away from them. The Hebrew mothers seemed to have lost the instincts even of the brute creation, to have sunk to the level of the unnatural ostriches that leave their nests in the wilderness.2 Fathers devoured the flesh of their own sons 3 and their own daughters. The hands even of compassionate mothers have sodden their own children, the mere infants just born. Yet even in this extremity the inhabitants held out. There was still one corner of the city open, that which commanded the road to Jericho, and, along this, occasional sallies were made to obtain provisions, but were almost always repulsed by the wild Arab tribes who hung on the outskirts of the Chaldæan 5 camp. Against the huge engines of Asiatic warfare, the besieged citizens constructed counter-engines, and (such was the Jewish tradition) the struggle was worthy of the occasion; a combat or duel, not only of courage but of skill and intelligence, between Babylon and Jerusalem. So wore away the eighteen months of the siege. Some, doubtless of the Priestly and Prophetic orders, shaved their heads, and clothed themselves in sackcloth, and cast their gold and silver into the streets, as the extreme offerings of despair. Others, of the more heathen faction, like the Roman Pontiff reviving the Etruscan rites during the siege of Alaric, renewed with intenser fanaticism the charms and amulets of necromancy, and even in the courts of the Temple might be heard the loud wail of Hebrew women for their lost 1 Lam. ii. 11, 12, 19, iv. 4. Ibid. iv. 3. Ezek. v. 10; Baruch ii. 3. 5 Lam. v. 9. Joseph. Ant. x. 8, §1. |