Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922. George Adam Smith
serf!
Why he for a prey?
Against him the young lions roar,
Give forth their voice,
And his land they lay waste
Burning and tenantless.
Is not this being done thee
For thy leaving of Me?
Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel's mourning, the sob upon which the wail dies out:—
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children
And will not be comforted—
For they are not!63
Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a passionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another—I love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be repeated to the people in 604–3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,
O generation look at the Word of the Lord!
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breaking in before the following regular verse,
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say my folk, “We are off,
No more to meet Thee.”
There is another poem in which the Qînah measure prevails but with occasional lines longer than is normal—Ch. V. 1–6a (alternatively to end of 564).
Run through Jerusalem's streets,
Look now and know,
And search her broad places
If a man ye can find,
If there be that doth justice
Aiming at honesty.
[That I may forgive her.]
Though they say, “As God liveth,”
Falsely they swear.
Lord, are thine eyes upon lies65
And not on the truth?
Thou hast smitten, they ail not,
Consumed them, they take not correction;
Their faces set harder than rock,
They refuse to return.
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Or take Ch. II. 5–8. A stanza of four lines in irregular Qînah measure (verse 5) is followed by a couplet of four-two stresses and several lines of three each (verses 6 and 7), and then (verse 8) by a couplet of three-two, another of four-three, and another of three-three.66 In Chs. IX and X also we shall find irregular metres.
Let us now take a passage, IX. 22, 23, which, except for its last couplet, is of another measure than the Qînah. The lines have three accents each, like those of the Book of Job:—
Boast not the wise in his wisdom,
Boast not the strong in his strength,
Boast not the rich in his riches,
But in this let him boast who would boast—
Instinct and knowledge of Me,
Me, the Lord, Who work troth
And67 justice and right upon earth,
For in these I delight.
Or this couplet, X. 23, in lines of four stresses each:—
Lord, I know—not to man is his way,
Not a man's to walk or settle his steps!
Not being in the Qînah measure, both these passages are denied to Jeremiah by Duhm. Is not this arbitrary?
The sections of the Book which pass from verse to prose and from prose to verse are frequent.
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One of the most striking is the narrative of the Prophet's call, Ch. I. 4–19, which I leave to be rendered in the next lecture. In Chap. VII. 28 ff. we have, to begin with, two verses:—
This is the folk that obeyed not
The voice of the Lord,68
That would not accept correction;
Lost69 is truth from their mouth.
Shear and scatter thy locks,
Raise a dirge on the heights,
The Lord hath refused and forsaken
The sons of His wrath.
Then these verses are followed by a prose tale of the people's sins. Is this necessarily from a later hand, as Duhm maintains, and not naturally from Jeremiah himself?
Again Chs. VIII and IX are a medley of lyrics and prose passages. While some of the prose is certainly not Jeremiah's, being irrelevant to the lyrics and showing the colour of a later age, the rest may well be from himself.
Ch. XIV is also a medley of verse and prose. After the Dirge on the Drought (which we take later), comes a passage in rhythmical prose (verses 11–16), broken only by the metrical utterance of the false prophets in verse 13:—
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Sword or famine ye shall not see,
They shall not be yours;
But peace and staith shall I give you
Within this Place.70
And verse comes in again in verses 17–18, an Oracle of Jeremiah's own:—
Let mine eyes with tears run down,
By night and by day,
Let them not cease from weeping71
For great is the breach—
Broken the Virgin, Daughter of my people,
Most sore the wound!
Fare I forth to the field,
Lo, the slain of the sword;
If I enter the city,
Lo, anguish of famine.
Priest and prophet alike are gone begging
In a land they know not.
Hast Thou utterly cast away Judah,
Loathes Ṣion Thy soul?
Why then hast Thou smitten us,
Past our healing?
Hoped we for peace—no good,
For time to heal—and lo panic!
Lord we acknowledge our evil,
The guilt of our fathers—
To Thee have we sinned.
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And now the measure changes to one of longer irregular lines, hardly distinguishable from rhythmical prose, which Duhm therefore takes, precariously, as from a later hand:—
For Thy Name's sake do not despise,
Demean not the Throne of Thy Glory,
Remember and break not Thy Covenant with us!
Can any of the gentile Bubbles bring rain,
Or the Heavens give the showers?
Art not Thou He72 on whom we must wait?
For all