The "deaths of agony" seem to indicate the pestilence, which always ensued upon the scarcity and vile quality of food, and the confinement of multitudes within the narrow bounds of a besieged city (see Josephus' well-known account of the last siege of Jerusalem).
The attitude of solitary watchfulness and strict separation, which the prophet thus perceived to be required by circumstances, was calculated to be a warning of the utmost significance, among a people who attached the highest importance to marriage, and the permanence of the family.
It proclaimed more loudly than words could do, the prophet's absolute conviction that offspring was no pledge of permanence; that universal death was hanging over a condemned nation. But not only this. It marks a point of progress in the prophet's spiritual life. The crisis, through which we have seen him pass, has purged his mental vision. He no longer repines at his dark lot; no longer half envies the false prophets, who may win the popular love by pleasing oracles of peace and well-being; no longer complains of the Divine Will, which has laid such a burden upon him. He sees now that his part is to refuse even natural and innocent pleasures for the Lord's sake; to foresee calamity and ruin; to denounce unceasingly the sin he sees around him; to sacrifice a tender and affectionate heart to a life of rigid asceticism; and he manfully accepts his part. He knows that he stands alone--the last fortress of truth in a world of falsehood; and that for truth it becomes a man to surrender his all.
That which follows tends to complete the prophet's social isolation. He is to give no sign of sympathy in the common joys and sorrows of his kind.
"For thus hath Iahvah said: Enter thou not into the house of mourning, Nor go to lament, nor comfort thou them: For I have taken away My friendship from this people ('Tis Iahvah's utterance!) The lovingkindness and the compassion; And old and young shall die in this land, They shall not be buried, and men shall not wail for them; Nor shall a man cut himself, nor make himself bald, for them: Neither shall men deal out bread to them in mourning, To comfort a man over the dead; Nor shall they give them to drink the cup of consolation, Over a man's father and over his mother.
"And the house of feasting thou shalt not enter, To sit with them to eat and to drink. For thus hath Iahvah Sabaoth, the God of Israel, said: Lo, I am about to make to cease from this place, Before your own eyes and in your own days, Voice of mirth and voice of gladness, The voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride."
Acting as prophet, that is, as one whose public actions were symbolical of a Divine intent, Jeremiah is henceforth to stand aloof, on occasions when natural feeling would suggest participation in the outward life of his friends and acquaintance. He is to quell the inward stirrings of affection and sympathy, and to abstain from playing his part in those demonstrative lamentations over the dead, which the immemorial custom and sentiment of his country regarded as obligatory; and this, in order to signify unmistakably that what thus appeared to be the state of his own feelings, was really the aspect under which God would shortly appear to a nation perishing in its guilt. "Enter not into the house of mourning ... _for_ I have taken away My friendship from this people, the lovingkindness and the compassion." An estranged and alienated God would view the coming catastrophe with the cold indifference of exact justice. And the consequence of the Divine aversion would be a calamity so overwhelming, that the dead would be left without those rites of burial, which the feeling and conscience of all races of mankind have always been careful to perform. There should be no burial, much less ceremonial lamentation, and those more serious modes of evincing grief by disfigurement of the person,[66] which, like tearing the hair and rending the garments, are natural tokens of the first distraction of bereavement. Not for wife or child (מֵת: see Gen. xxiii. 3), nor for father or mother should the funeral feast be held; for men's hearts would grow hard at the daily spectacle of death, and at last there would be no survivors.