Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922. George Adam Smith
in Ch. XV. 1–2, prose is followed by a couplet, this by more prose (verses 3, 4) and this by verse again (verses 5–9). But these parts are relevant to each other, and some of Duhm's objections to the prose seem inadequate and even trifling. For while the heavy judgment is suitably detailed by the prose, the following dirge is as naturally in verse:—
Jerusalem, who shall pity,
Who shall bemoan thee?
Who shall but turn him to ask
After thy welfare?
And once more, in the Oracle Ch. III. 1–6 the first verse, a quotation from the law on a divorced wife, is in prose, and no one doubts that Jeremiah himself is the quoter, while the rest, recounting [pg 053] Israel's unfaithfulness to her Husband is in verse. See below, pages 98, 99.
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So much for the varied and often irregular streams of the Prophet's verse and their interruptions and connections by “portages” of prose. Let us turn now from the measures to the substance and tempers of the poetry.
As in all folk-song the language is simple, but its general inevitableness—just the fit and ringing word—stamps the verse as a true poet's. Hence the difficulty of translating. So much depends on the music of the Hebrew word chosen, so much on the angle at which it is aimed at the ear, the exact note which it sings through the air. It is seldom possible to echo these in another language; and therefore all versions, metrical or in prose, must seem tame and dull beside the ring of the original. Before taking some of the Prophet's renderings of the more concrete aspects of life I give, as even more difficult to render, one of his moral reflections in verse—Ch. XVII. 5 f. Mark the scarceness of abstract terms, the concreteness of the figures:—
Curséd the wight that trusteth in man
Making flesh his stay!
[And his heart from the Lord is turned]
Like some desert-scrub shall he be,
Nor see any coming of good,
But dwell in the aridest desert,
A salt, uninhabited land.
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Blesséd the wight that trusts in the Lord,
And the Lord is his trust!
He like a tree shall be planted by waters,
That stretches its roots to the stream,
Unafraid73 at the coming of heat,
His leaf shall be green.
Sans care in a year of drought,
He fails not in yielding his fruit.
As here, so generally, the simplicity of the poet's diction is matched by that of his metaphors, similes, and parables. A girl and her ornaments, a man and his waist-cloth—thus he figures what ought to be the clinging relations between Israel and their God. The stunted desert-shrub in contrast to the river-side oaks, the incomparable olive, the dropped sheaf and even the dung upon the fields; the vulture, stork, crane and swift; the lion, wolf and spotted leopard coming up from the desert or the jungles of Jordan; the hinnying stallions and the heifer in her heat; the black Ethiopian, already familiar in the streets of Jerusalem, the potter and his wheel, the shepherd, plowman and vinedresser, the driver with his ox's yoke upon his shoulders; the harlot by the wayside; the light in the home and sound of the hand-mill—all everyday objects of his people's sight and hearing as they herded, ploughed, sowed, reaped or went to market in the city—he brings them in simply and with natural [pg 055] ease as figures of the truths he is enforcing. They are never bald or uncouth, though in translation they may sometimes sound so.
In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as in the following—a passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.74 The Deity is addressing the prophet:—
And thou shalt say unto this people,
“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”
and it shall be if they say unto thee, “Don't we know of course75 that
“Every jar shall be filled with wine,”
then thou shalt say unto them: Thus saith the Lord, Lo, I am about to fill the inhabitants of this land, the kings and princes, the priests and prophets, even Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness [the drunkenness, that is, of horror at impending judgments] and I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together. I will not pity, saith the Lord, nor spare nor have compassion that I should not destroy them.
How one catches the irritation of the crowd on being told what seems to them such a commonplace—till it is interpreted!
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Like his fellow-prophets, whose moral atmosphere was as burning as their physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright sun drew breath (as Isaiah puts it) in the fear of the Lord and saw the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human as well as animal, which their skirts leave behind are rendered with vividness, poignancy and horror of detail.
Take, to begin with, the following, XIV. 1 ff.:—
The Word of the Lord to Jeremiah Concerning the Drought.
Jerusalem's cry is gone up,
Judah is mourning,
The gates thereof faint in
Black grief to the ground.
Her nobles sent their menials for water,
They came to the pits;
Water found none and returned,
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Empty their vessels.
[Abashed and confounded
They cover their heads.]76
The tillers77 of the ground are dismayed,
For no rain hath been78;
And abashed are the ploughmen,
They cover their heads.
The hind on the moor calves and abandons,
For the grass has not come.
On the bare heights stand the wild asses,
Gasping for air
With glazen eyes—
Herb there is none!
Though our sins do witness against us,
Lord act for the sake of Thy Name!
[For many have been our backslidings,
'Fore Thee have we sinned.]
Hope of Israel, His Saviour
In time of trouble,
Why be like a traveller79 through the land,
Or wayfaring guest of a night?
Why art Thou as one that is stunned—
Strong yet unable to save?
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Yet Lord, Thou art in our midst,
[O'er us Thy Name hath been called]
Do not forsake us!
Thus saith the Lord of this people:—
So fond to wander are