We can reasonably deny to Jeremiah nothing of all this passage, not even the prose by which the metre is interrupted. We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pass from verse to prose and again from prose to verse. Nor are the repetitions superfluous, not even that four-fold into the hand of in the prose section, for at each recurrence of the phrase we feel the grip of their captor closing more fast upon the doomed king and people. Nor are we required to take the pathetic words, the land to which they shall be lifting up their soul, as true only of those who have been long banished. For the exiles to Babylon felt this home-sickness from the very first, as Jeremiah well knew.
* * * * *
If we are to trust the date given by its title—and no sufficient reason exists against our doing so—there is still an Oracle of Jeremiah, which, though now standing far down in our Book, Ch. XLV, belongs to the reign of Jehoiakim, and [pg 227] is properly a supplement to the story of the writing of the Rolls by Baruch in 605.[458] The text has suffered, probably more than we can now detect.
XLV. 1. The Word, which Jeremiah the prophet spake to Baruch, the son of Neriah, while he was writing these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah,[459] in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah.[460] 2. Thus saith the Lord[461] concerning thee, O Baruch, [3] for thou didst say:—
Woe is me! Woe is me![462]
How hath the Lord on my pain heaped sorrow!
I am worn with my groaning,
Rest I find none!
[Thus shalt thou say to him[463]] thus sayeth the Lord: 4
Lo, what I built I have to destroy,