Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 5

THE PROPHET-HIS YOUTH AND HIS CALL.

Jeremiah was born soon after 650 B.C. of a priestly house at Anathoth, a village in the country of Benjamin near Jerusalem. Just before his birth Egypt and the small states of Palestine broke from allegiance to a.s.syria.

War was imminent, and it may have been because of some hope in Israel of Divine intervention that several children born about the time received the name Yirmyahu-_Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots_.(94) The boy's name and his father's, Hil?iah, _Yahweh my portion_,(95) are tokens of the family's loyalty to the G.o.d of Israel, at a time when the outburst in Jewry of a very different cla.s.s of personal names betrays on the part of many a lapse from the true faith, and when the loyal remnant of the people were being persecuted by King Mana.s.seh. Probably the family were descended from Eli.

For Abiathar, the last of that descent to hold office as Priest of the Ark, had an ancestral estate at Anathoth, to which he retired upon his dismissal by Solomon.(96) The child of such a home would be brought up under G.o.dly influence and in high family traditions, with which much of the national history was interwoven. It may have been from his father that Jeremiah gained that knowledge of Israel's past, of her ideal days in the desert, of her subsequent declensions, and of the rallying prophecies of the eighth century, which is manifest in his earlier Oracles. Some have claimed a literary habit for the stock of Abiathar.(97) Yet the first words of G.o.d to Jeremiah-_before I formed thee in the body I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the womb I hallowed thee_(98)-as well as the singular originality he developed, rather turn us away from his family traditions and influence.

What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared.

Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name Anata, is a little village not four miles north-north-east of Jerusalem, upon the first of the rocky shelves by which the central range of Palestine declines through desert to the valley of the Jordan. The village is hidden from the main road between Jerusalem and the North, and lies on no cross-road to the East. One of its influences on the spirit of its greatest son was its exposure to the East and the Desert. The fields of Anathoth face the sunrise and quickly merge into the falling wilderness of Benjamin. It is the same open, arid landscape as that on which several prophets were bred: Amos a few miles farther south at Tekoa, John Baptist, and during His Temptation our Lord Himself. The tops of the broken desert hills to the east are lower than the village. The floor of the Jordan valley is not visible, but across its felt gulf the mountains of Gilead form a lofty horizon.

The descending foreground with no shelter against the hot desert winds, the village herds straying into the wilderness, the waste and crumbling hills s.h.i.+mmering in the heat, the open heavens and far line of the Gilead highlands, the hungry wolves from the waste and lions from the jungles of Jordan are all reflected in Jeremiah's poems:-

Light o' heel young camel, Zig-zagging her tracks, Heifer gone to school to the desert- In the heat of her pa.s.sion, Snapping the breeze in her l.u.s.t, Who is to turn her?

Wind off the glow of the bare desert heights, Direct on my people, Neither to winnow nor to sift, In full blast it meets me.

A lion from the jungle shall smite, A wolf from the wastes undo them, The leopard shall prowl round their towns, All faring forth shall be torn.

Even the stork in the heavens Knoweth her seasons, And dove, swift and swallow Keep time of their coming.

Is there no balm in Gilead, No healer there?(99)

We need not search the botany of that province for the suggestion of this last verse. Gilead was the highland margin of the young prophet's view, his threshold of hope. The sun rose across it.

The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin's. Even where not actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given to the tribe and its few historical personages. _Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf._(100) Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing s.h.i.+mei, Jeremiah's persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church-while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, th.o.r.n.y soil that needed deep ploughing.(101) It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,(102) by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pa.s.s, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and _poor_ Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many ma.s.sacres, and above all of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new disasters:-

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation And bitterest weeping, Rachel beweeping her children, And will not be comforted, For they are not.(103)

The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation's history alike swept these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him-not Rachel's only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul's sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of Benjamin.

The empty, s.h.i.+mmering desert and the stony land thronged with such tragedies-Jeremiah was born and brought up on the edge between them.

It was a nursery not unfit for one, who might have been (as many think), the greatest poet of his people, had not something deeper and wider been opened to him, with which Anathoth was also in touch. The village is not more than an hour's walk from Jerusalem. Social conditions change little in the East; then, as now, the traffic between village and city was daily and close-country produce taken to the capital; pottery, salted fish, spices, and the better cloths brought back in exchange. We see how the history of Jerusalem may have influenced the boy. Solomon's Temple was nearly four hundred years' old. There were the city walls, some of them still older, the Palace and the Tombs of the Kings-perhaps also access to the written rolls of chroniclers and prophets. Above all, Anathoth lay within the swirl of rumour of which the capital was the centre. Jerusalem has always been a tryst of the winds. It gathers echoes from the desert far into Arabia, and news blown up and down the great roads between Egypt and Damascus and beyond to the Euphrates; or when these roads are deserted and men fear to leave their villages, news vibrating as it vibrates only in the tremulous East, from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp across incredible s.p.a.ces. As one has finely said of a rumour of invasion:-

I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction, The curtains of Midian's land were trembling.(104)

To the north lay the more fruitful Ephraim-more fruitful and more famous in the past than her sister of Benjamin, but now in foreign hands, her own people long gone into exile. It was natural that her fate should lie heavy on the still free but threatened homes of Benjamin, whose northern windows looked towards her; and that a heart like Jeremiah's should exercise itself upon G.o.d's meaning by such a fate and the warning it carried for the two surviving tribes.(105) Moreover, s.h.i.+loh lay there, s.h.i.+loh where Eli and other priestly ancestors had served the Ark in a sanctuary now ruined.(106)

It was, too, across Ephraim with its mixed population in touch with the court and markets of Nineveh, that rumours of war usually reached Benjamin and Judah:-

Hark! They signal from Dan, Mount Ephraim echoes disaster.(107)

After a period of peace, and as Jeremiah was growing to manhood, such rumours began to blow south again from the Euphrates. Some thirteen years or so earlier, a.s.shurbanipal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, had accomplished the last a.s.syrian conquest in Palestine, 641 B.C., and for an interval the land was quiet. But towards 625 word came that the Medes were threatening Nineveh, and, though they were repelled, in that year a.s.shurbanipal died and Nabopola.s.sar of Babylon threw off the a.s.syrian yoke. Palestine felt the grasp of Nineveh relax. There was a stir in the air and men began to dream. But quick upon hope fell fear. Hordes of a new race whom-after the Greeks-we call Scythians, the Ashguzai of the a.s.syrian monuments, had half a century before swarmed over or round the Caucasus, and since then had been in touch, and even in some kind of alliance, with the a.s.syrians. Soon after 624 they forced the Medes to relinquish the siege of Nineveh. They were hors.e.m.e.n and archers, living in the saddle, and carrying their supplies behind them in wagons. After (as it seems) their effective appearance at Nineveh, they swept over the lands to the south, as Herodotus tells us;(108) and riding by the Syrian coast were only brought up by bribes on the border of Egypt.(109) This must have been soon after the young prophet's call in 627-6. In short, the world, and especially the North, was (to use Jeremiah's word) _boiling_ with events and possibilities of which G.o.d alone knew the end. Prophets had been produced in Israel from like conditions in the previous century, and now after a silence of nigh seventy years, prophets were again to appear: Zephaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah.

For these northern omens conspired with others, ethical and therefore more articulate, within Judah herself. It was two generations since Isaiah and Hezekiah had died, and with them the human possibilities of reform. For nearly fifty years Mana.s.seh had opposed the pure religion of the prophets of the eighth century, by persecution, by the introduction of foreign and sensual cults, and especially by reviving in the name of Israel's G.o.d(110) the ancient sacrifice of children, in order to propitiate His anger. Thus it appears that the happier interests of religion-family feasts, pieties of seed-time and harvest, grat.i.tude for light, fountains and rain, and for good fortune-were scattered among a host both of local and of foreign deities; while for the G.o.d of Israel, the G.o.d of Abraham, Moses and Isaiah, the most horrible of superst.i.tious rites were reserved, as if all that His people could expect of Him was the abatement of a jealous and hungry wrath.

A few voices crying through the night had indeed reminded Judah of what He was and what He required. _He hath showed thee, O man, __ what is good; and what doth the Lord require but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy G.o.d._(111) At last with the overthrow of Mana.s.seh's successor, Amon, signs of a dawn appeared. The child of eight years who was heir to the throne was secured, perhaps through his mother's influence, by a party in Court and Temple that had kept loyal to the higher faith; and the people, probably weary of the fanatic extravagance of Mana.s.seh, were content to have it so.

The young King Josiah, who to the end was to prove himself worthy of his training, and the boy in the priest's home at Anathoth were of an age: a fact not to be omitted from any estimate of the influences which moulded Jeremiah in his youth. But no trace of this appears in what he has left us; as a boy he may never have seen the King, and to the close of Josiah's reign he seems to have remained too obscure to be noticed by his monarch; yet at the last he has only good to say of Josiah:-

Did he not eat and drink, And do judgment and justice?

The cause of the poor and the needy he judged- Then was it well.(112)

Attempts at reform were made soon after Josiah's accession,(113) but little was achieved, and that little only in the capital and its Temple.

In the latter for four hundred years no deity of the land had been wors.h.i.+pped save Yahweh, and He in no material form. It would be easy to remove from the streets of Jerusalem any recently introduced Baals and possibly, as a.s.syria's sovereignty relaxed, the wors.h.i.+p of the Host of Heaven. But beyond Jerusalem the task was more difficult. Every village had the shrine of a deity before the G.o.d of Israel came to the land. The names of these local Baalim, or Lords, had mostly vanished,(114) and Israel claimed the rural sanctuaries for Yahweh. But the old rites, with the old conceptions of deity attached to them, seem to have been transferred to Him by the ignorant wors.h.i.+ppers, till instead of one Yahweh-one Lord-unique in character and in power, there were as many as there had been Baalim, and they bore the same inferior and sometimes repulsive characters. We cannot exaggerate this division of the G.o.dhead into countless local forms:-

As many as thy cities in number So many O Judah thy G.o.ds!(115)

Their high places lay all round the Prophet and each had its bad influence, not religious only but ethical, not only idolatrous but immoral, with impure rites and orgies.

Lift to the bare heights thine eyes, Where not wast thou tumbled?

The land thou hast fouled with thy wh.o.r.edoms,(116)

-spiritual and physical both; the one led to the other.

This dissipation of the national mind upon many deities was reflected in the nation's politics. With no faith in One Supreme G.o.d the statesmen of Judah, just as in Isaiah's earlier days, fluttered between the great powers which were bidding for the empire of the world. Egypt under Psamtik's vigorous direction pressed north, flying high promises for the restless va.s.sals of a.s.syria. But a.s.syria, though weakened, had not become negligible. Between the two the anchorless policy of Judah helplessly drifted. To use Jeremiah's figure, suitable alike to her politics and her religion, she was a faithless wife, off from her husband to one paramour after another.

All this was chaos worse than the desert that crumbled before Anathoth, a tragedy more bitter than the past which moaned through the land behind.

What had G.o.d to say? It was a singular mark of Israel, that the hope of a great prophet never died from her heart. Where earnest souls were left they prayed for his coming and looked for the Word of the Lord by him more than they who wait for the morning. The same conditions prevailed out of which a century before had come an Amos, a Hosea, a Micah and an Isaiah.

Israel needed judgment and the North again stirred with its possibilities.

Who would rise and spell into a clear Word of G.o.d the thunder which to all ears was rumbling there?

The call came to Jeremiah and, as he tells the story, came sudden and abrupt yet charged with the full range and weight of its ultimate meaning, so far as he himself was concerned:-

Before in the body I built thee, I knew thee, Before thou wast forth of the womb, I had hallowed thee, And a prophet to the nations had set thee.(117)

A thought of G.o.d, ere time had anything to do with him, or the things of time, even father or mother, could make or could mar him; G.o.d's alone, and sent to the world; out of the eternities with the Divine will for these days of confusion and panic and for the peoples, small and great, that were struggling through them. It was a stupendous consciousness-this that then broke in the village of Anathoth and in the breast of the young son of one its priests; the spring of it deeper and the range of it wider than even that similar a.s.surance which centuries later filled another priest's home in the same hill country:-

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord, To prepare His ways.(118)