How one catches the irritation of the crowd on being told what seems to them such a commonplace—till it is interpreted!
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;