Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922

by George Adam Smith

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Such was the Book discovered in the Temple in 621-20 and accepted as Divine by King and Nation. Modern efforts to connect Jeremiah with its discovery and introduction to the Monarch, and even with its composition, may be ignored. Had there been a particle of evidence for this, it would have been seized and magnified by the legalists in Israel, not to speak of those apocryphal writers who foist so much else on Jeremiah and Baruch.[268] That they have not even attempted this is proof—if proof were needed—that Jeremiah, the youthful son of a rural family, and probably [pg 140] still unknown to the authorities in the Capital, had nothing whatever to do either with the origins, or with the discovery, of the Book of the Law or with its presentation to the King by the priests of the Temple.

Yet so great a discovery, so full a volume of truth poured forth in a style so original and compelling, cannot have left unmoved a young prophet of the conscience and heart of Jeremiah.[269] That he was in sympathy with the temper and the general truths of Deuteronomy we need not doubt. As for its ethics, its authors were of the same school as himself and among their teachers they had the same favourite, Hosea. In his earliest Oracles Jeremiah had expressed the same view as theirs of God's constant and clear guidance of Israel and of the nation's obstinacy in relapsing from this. His heart, too, must have hailed the Book's august enforcement of that abolition of the high places and their pagan ritual, which he had ventured to urge from his obscure position in Anathoth. Nor did he ever throughout his ministry protest against the substitute which the Book prescribed for those—the concentration of the national worship upon a single sanctuary. On the contrary in a later Oracle he looks for the day when that shall be observed by all Israel and the watchmen on Mount Ephraim shall cry,

Rise, let us up to Ṣion,

To the Lord our God![270]

On the other hand, the emphasis which Deuteronomy equally lays upon ethics and upon ritual, and its absolute doctrines of morality and Providence were bound to provoke questions in a mind so restlessly questioning as his. Then there was the movement of reform which followed upon the appeal of the Book to the whole nation. Jeremiah himself had called for a national repentance and here, in the people's acceptance of the Covenant and consent to the reforms it demanded, were the signs of such a repentance. No opposition appears to have been offered to those reforms. The King who led them was sincere; a better monarch Judah never knew, and his reign was signalised by Jeremiah at its close as a reign of justice when all was well. Yet can we doubt that the Prophet, who had already preached so rigorous a repentance and had heard himself appointed by God as the tester of His people, would use that detached position jealously to watch the progress of the reforms which the nation had so hurriedly acclaimed and to test their moral value?

In modern opinion of Jeremiah's attitude to the discovered Law-Book there are two extremes. One is of those who regard him as a legalist and [pg 142] throughout his career the strenuous advocate of the Book and the system it enforced. The other is of those who maintain that he had no sympathy with legal systems or official reforms, and that the passages in the Book of Jeremiah which allege his assent to, and his proclamation of, the Deuteronomic Covenant, or represent him as using the language of Deuteronomy, are not worthy of credit.[271] Of these extremes we may say at once that if with both we neglect the twofold character of Deuteronomy—its emphasis now on ethics and now on ritual—and again, if with both we assume that Jeremiah's attitude to the Law-Book and to the reforms it inspired never changed, then the evidences for that attitude offered by the Book of Jeremiah are inconsistent and we may despair of a conclusion. But a more reasonable course is open to us. If we keep in mind the two faces of Deuteronomy as well as the doubtful progress for many years of the reforms started by it, and if we also remember that a prophet like all the works of God was subject to growth; if we allow to Jeremiah the same freedom to change his purpose in face of fresh developments of his people's character as in the Parable of the Potter he imputes to his God; if we recall how in 604 the new events in the history of Western [pg 143] Asia led him to adapt his earlier Oracles on the Scythians to the Chaldeans who had succeeded the Scythians as the expected Doom from the North—then our way through the evidence becomes tolerably clear, except for the difficulty of dating a number of his undated Oracles. What we must not forget is the double, divergent intention and influence of Deuteronomy, and the fact that Josiah's reformation, though divinely inspired, was in its progress an experiment upon the people, whose mind and conduct beneath it Jeremiah was appointed by God to watch and to test.

These considerations prepare us first for the story in Ch. XI. 1-8 of Jeremiah's fervent assent to the ethical principles of Deuteronomy and of the charge to him to proclaim these throughout Judah; and then for his later attitude to the written Law, to the Temple and to sacrifices.

XI. 1. The Word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2. Hear thou[272] the words of this Covenant, and speak them to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 3. And thou shalt say to them, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: 4. Cursed be the man who hears not the words of this Covenant, which I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought [pg 144] them out of the land of Egypt, out of the iron-furnace, saying, Hearken to My Voice and do[273] according to all that I command you, and ye shall be to Me a people, and I will be God to you; [5] in order to establish the oath which I sware unto your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day. 6. And I answered and said, Amen, O Lord! 7. And the Lord said unto me, Proclaim[274] these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, saying, [8] Hear ye the words of this Covenant and do them, but they did them not.[275]

The story has its difficulties. It is undated; it is followed by verses 9-17, apparently from the reign of Jehoiakim; what the Prophet is called to hear and gives his solemn assent to is generally described as this Covenant; and in verses 7 and 8 there is what may be a mere editorial addition since the Greek Version omits it, which has led some to assert the editorial character of the whole. But for the reasons given above, there is no cause to doubt the substantial truthfulness of the story, unless with Duhm we were capable of believing that Jeremiah never spoke in prose, nor [pg 145] can be conceived as, at any time in his life the advocate of what was a legal as well as a prophetic book. Of the first of these assertions we have already disposed;[276] the second is met by the fact that what Jeremiah was called to assent to was not a legal programme but a spiritual covenant, of which ethical obedience alone was stated as the condition. In Josiah's reign what else could this Covenant mean than the Covenant set forth in the recently discovered Book of the Law and solemnly avouched by the whole people?[277] That its essence was spiritual and ethical is expressed in the Deuteronomic phrases which follow, and the quotation of these is most relevant to the occasion. Nor do the recollections, the command and the promise which they convey go beyond what Jeremiah had already enforced in his earlier Oracles.[278]