 |
| Prophet Jeremiah, by Michelangelo |
From the outset, we learn that Jeremiah was destined for great things, with God telling him: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations" (1:5). What intrigues me about this is that, if God has the foresight to choose his prophets before they're even born, why did he opt for someone that would be ignored by the city elders for 40 years as opposed to someone with real influence? That way he could have stopped all the needless destruction, mass killings and enslavement. Mysterious ways, etc.
A familiar trope emerges in chapter 2, with God accusing Israel of "playing the harlot" and becoming a "degenerate plant" (2:20-21). In the prophetic books, the image of Jerusalem as cheating wife crops up several times and is something that – rightly in my view – has been criticised by scholars for its misogyny. There are also a lot of parables and poems involving fauna and flora (mainly trees), often to underline the core theme of punishment for a "backsliding Israel" (3:6, 3:8, 3:11-12). When Jeremiah envisions Jerusalem after God's punishment, the picture is typically bleak – "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light (4:23)", indeed "the heavens above be black" (4:28).
In fact, the first half of the Book of Jeremiah is chocked full of these gloomy prophecies, with no sense of Jerusalem being able to change its destiny, so engrained are its bad habits – "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" (13:23). There's the occasional flicker of promise and light, such as the "righteous branch" (23:5), which appears to foretell the coming of Jesus Christ, but more often there's a poetic sense of future desolation: "Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle." All those slain by this vengeful God will be just "dung upon the ground" (25:33).
A comic aside amid the dark foreboding – sometimes the KJV translation throws up some unintentionally comic passages, like the "naughty figs" of 24:2-3: "One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe: and the other basket had very naughty figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad. Then said the Lord unto me, What seest thou, Jeremiah? And I said, Figs; the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil." To my ears, it sounds like Donald Trump reviewing the latest crop of figs.
In chapter 28, Jeremiah faces competition from rival prophet Hananiah, who offers up an easy religion to the nation of Israel, but Jeremiah decries it as offering false optimism. However, this encounter seems to compel Jeremiah to offer up his own positive vision: "Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel: thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets [like tambourines], and shalt go forth in the dances of them that make merry" (31:4). Jeremiah again describes Jerusalem as a "virgin" at the end of chapter 31, to emphasise the sense of a new future covenant:
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people (31:31-33)As in Isaiah, there's a sense of a foretelling of a future Messiah, in the case the "Branch of righteousness" (33:15) that Christians believe to be a reference to Jesus. As part of this hopeful vision, Jeremiah envisages an in-gathering of the diaspora back to this new Jerusalem.
One of the unique features of the Book of Jeremiah among the prophets is that he has a sidekick, Baruch the scribe, and in chapter 36 we're told of a scroll that he wrote – a sort of compendium of Jeremiah's prophecies, notably the future Babylonian captivity – that was read out in the temple of Jerusalem before the king, and subsequently burned. As a result, Jeremiah has to escape the city and is later thrown into a dungeon. Even his friend Gedaliah, who was appointed a governor in Judah, is killed by the Baylonian royal family, and this leads to Jeremiah and Baruch being taken by Judean refugees to Egypt (this is the basis for the theory that the ark, or tabernacle, was brought to Egypt).
Jeremiah's sorrow during these closing episodes is expressed in the Book of Lamentations, in the ancient poetic form of the lament (see below for more). The final chapters of the book are also a record of evil slaughter (41) and of a vengeful Old Testament God (46), now on the rampage against Babylon (47-52). Some of the verses are wonderfully poetic about the corrupting power of Babylon, and its "pagan" gods like Bel (51:44), notably: "Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad" (51:7). The end of the Book of Jeremiah often reminded me of reading Herodotus' Histories – "Come up, ye horses; and rage, ye chariots; and let the mighty men come forth; the Ethiopians and the Libyans, that handle the shield; and the Lydians, that handle and bend the bow" (46:9) – while references to "people of the north" are reminiscent of Game of Thrones. We're given this glimpse of a wonderfully diverse array of Middle Eastern cultures (Israel, Babylon, Egypt, etc), viewed through the lens of monotheism.
Book of Lamentations
Although traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, the Book of Lamentations does not match the Book of Jeremiah in terms of themes or style. Considered as part of the five megillot (Hebrew for "scrolls"), along with the books of Ruth, Esther and Ecclesiastes, as well as the Song of Solomon, it is still read publicly in Jewish synagogues.
From the outset, Jerusalem is referred to as a woman, or a "widow" (1:1) whose "nakedness" is on show and who has lost her honour to sin (1:8). There's even a reference to a "menstruous woman" (1:17), as though this somehow evokes Jerusalem's uncleanliness – it's difficult to swallow the clear misogyny at play here.
We're told that Jeremiah is the epitome of woe whose "sighs are many" and whose "heart is faint" (1:22), and there are graphic scenes of the true devastation – "the young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword" (2:21) – that God has inflicted on Jerusalem. Chapter 3 is the only one of the five that explores Jeremiah's personal response to the devastation, rather than focusing on the city itself, and it's the most poetically powerful section of the book, expressing feelings of being cut off from God – "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44) – but still hope for redemption, both for him and the nation of Israel: "I am their musick. Render unto them a recompence, O Lord" (3:63-64).
Laments such as this were a recognised form of poetry in the ancient world, stretching back almost a thousand years before the Book of Lamentations, to Sumer (modern Iraq) and the Lamentation over the Destriction of Ur. This respect for genre might explain why the Book of Lamentations refuses to end on a positive note, with gloomy references to a joyless present – "The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick" (5:14) – and the stark final words of Jeremiah:
Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us (5:20-22)
Comments