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:—
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:—