It shall eat up thy harvest and bread, 17
Eat thy sons and thy daughters,
It shall eat up thy flocks and thy cattle,
Eat thy vines and thy figs.
It shall beat down thy fortified towns,
Wherein thou dost trust, with the sword.
The last couplet is unsuitable to the Scythians, incapable as they were of sieges and avoiding fortified towns—though once they rushed Askalon. It is probably, therefore, another of the additions of 604 referring to the Chaldeans. The prose which follows is certainly from the Chaldean period, for it was not Scythians but Chaldeans who threatened with exile the peoples whom they overran.
V. 18. Yet even in those days—Rede of the Lord—I will not make a full end of you. [pg 123] 19. And it shall be when they say, For what hath the Lord our God done to us all these things?—that thou shalt say to them, Just as ye have left Me and have served foreign gods in your own land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land not yours.
There follows a poem, verses 20-31, that has nothing to do with the Scythian series; and that with the preceding prose, with which also it has no connection, shows us what a conglomeration of Oracles the Book of Jeremiah is. It seems as though the compiler, searching for a place for it, had seen the catch-word harvest in the previous Scythian song and, this one having the same word, he had copied it in here. The Book shows signs elsewhere of the same mechanical method. But like all the Oracles this has for its theme the foolish dulness of Israel to their God and His Word, and the truth that it is their crimes which are the cause of all their afflictions yet now not in history but in Nature. There is no reason to doubt that the verses are Jeremiah's, and nothing against our dating them in the early years of his ministry.
Declare ye this in the House of Jacob, V. 20