The tribal territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin's. Even where not actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given to the tribe and its few historical personages. Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf.[100] Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei, Jeremiah's persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed threatenings and slaughter against the Church—while Jeremiah himself, in his moods of despair, seems to have caught the temper of the [pg 070] tribe among whom his family dwelt. Whether in the land or in its sons it was hard, thorny soil that needed deep ploughing.[101] It was, too, as Isaiah had predicted, the main path of invasion from the North,[102] by Ai, Migron, Michmash, the Pass, Geba, Ramah, Gibeah of Saul, Laish, and poor Anathoth herself. It had been the scene of many massacres, and above all of the death of the Mother of the people, who returns to bewail their new disasters:—
A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children,
And will not be comforted,
For they are not.[103]
The cold northern rains and the tears of a nation's history alike swept these bare uplands. The boy grew up with many ghosts about him—not Rachel's only but the Levite and his murdered wife, the slaughtered troops at Gibeah and Rimmon, Saul's sullen figure, Asahel stricken like a roe in the wilderness of Gibeon, and the other nameless fugitives, whom through more than one page of the earlier books we see cut down among the rocks of Benjamin.
The empty, shimmering desert and the stony land thronged with such tragedies—Jeremiah [pg 071] was born and brought up on the edge between them.
It was a nursery not unfit for one, who might have been (as many think), the greatest poet of his people, had not something deeper and wider been opened to him, with which Anathoth was also in touch. The village is not more than an hour's walk from Jerusalem. Social conditions change little in the East; then, as now, the traffic between village and city was daily and close—country produce taken to the capital; pottery, salted fish, spices, and the better cloths brought back in exchange. We see how the history of Jerusalem may have influenced the boy. Solomon's Temple was nearly four hundred years' old. There were the city walls, some of them still older, the Palace and the Tombs of the Kings—perhaps also access to the written rolls of chroniclers and prophets. Above all, Anathoth lay within the swirl of rumour of which the capital was the centre. Jerusalem has always been a tryst of the winds. It gathers echoes from the desert far into Arabia, and news blown up and down the great roads between Egypt and Damascus and beyond to the Euphrates; or when these roads are deserted and men fear to leave their villages, news vibrating as it vibrates only in the tremulous East, from hamlet to hamlet and camp to camp across incredible spaces. As one has finely said of a rumour of invasion:—
I saw the tents of Cushán in affliction,