There seems no way out of the difficulty, but either to date the piece much earlier, assigning it, _e.g._, to the time of the prophet's earnest preaching in connexion with the reforming movement of Josiah, when the living generation would certainly remember the human sacrifices under Manasseh; or else to construe the passage in a very different sense, as follows. The first verse declares that the sin of _Judah_ is graven upon the tablet of _their heart_, and upon the horns of _their_ altars. The pronouns evidently shew that it is the guilt of _the nation_, not of a particular generation, that is asserted. The subsequent words agree with this view. The expression, "_Their_ sons" is to be understood in the same way as the expressions "_their_ heart," "_their_ altars." It is equivalent to the "sons of Judah" (_benê Jehudah_), and means simply the people of Judah, as now existing, the present generation. Now it does not appear that image-worship and the cultus of the high-places revived after their abolition by Josiah. Accordingly, the symbols of impure worship mentioned in this passage are not high-places and images but altars and Asherim, _i.e._, the wooden poles which were the emblems of the reproductive principle of Nature. What the passage therefore intends to say would seem to be this: "The guilt of the nation remains, so long as its children are mindful of their altars and Asherim erected beside[71] the evergreen trees on the high hills"; _i.e._, so long as they remain attached to the modified idolatry of the day.
The general force of the words remains the same, whether they accuse the existing generation of serving sun-pillars (_maççeboth_) and sacred poles (_asherim_), or merely of hankering after the old forbidden rites. For so long as the popular heart was wedded to the former superstitions, it could not be said that any external abolition of idolatry was a sufficient proof of national repentance. The longing to indulge in sin is sin; and sinful it is not to hate sin. The guilt of the nation remained, therefore, and would remain, until blotted out by the tears of a genuine repentance towards Iahvah.
But understood thus, the passage suits the time of Jehoiachin, as well as any other period.
"Why," asks Naegelsbach, "should not Moloch have been the terror of the Israelitish children, when there was such real and sad ground for it, as in wanting in other bugbears which terrify the children of the present day?" To this we may reply, (1) Moloch is not mentioned at all, but simply altars and _asherim_; (2) would the word "remember" be appropriate in this case?
The beautiful strophes which follow (5-13) are not obviously connected with the preceding text. They wear a look of self-completeness, which suggests that here and in many other places Jeremiah has left us, not whole discourses, written down substantially in the form in which they were delivered, but rather his more finished fragments; pieces which being more rhythmical in form, and more striking in thought, had imprinted themselves more deeply upon his memory.
"Thus hath Iahvah said: Cursed is the man that trusteth in human kind, And maketh flesh his arm, And whose heart swerveth from Iahvah! And he shall become like a leafless tree in the desert, And shalt not see when good cometh; And shall dwell in parched places in the steppe, A salt land and uninhabited.
"Blessed is the man that trusteth in Iahvah, And whose trust Iahvah becometh! And he shall become like a tree planted by water, That spreadeth its roots by a stream, And is not afraid when heat cometh, And its leaf is evergreen; And in the year of drought it feareth not, Nor leaveth off from making fruit."
The form of the thought expressed in these two octostichs, the curse and the blessing, may have been suggested by the curses and blessings of that Book of the Law of which Jeremiah had been so faithful an interpreter (Deut. xxvii. 15-xxviii. 20); while both the thought and the form of the second stanza are imitated by the anonymous poet of the first psalm. The mention of "the year of drought" in the penultimate line may be taken, perhaps, as a link of connexion between this brief section and the whole of what precedes it so far as chap. xiv., which is headed "Concerning the droughts." If, however, the group of chapters thus marked out really constitute a single discourse, as Naegelsbach assumes, one can only say that the style is episodical rather than continuous; that the prophet has often recorded detached thoughts, worked up to a certain degree of literary form, but hanging together as loosely as pearls on a string. Indeed, unless we suppose that he had kept full notes of his discourses and soliloquies, or that, like certain professional lecturers of our own day, he had been in the habit of indefinitely repeating to different audiences the same carefully elaborated compositions, it is difficult to understand how he would be able without the aid of a special miracle, to write down in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the numerous utterances of the previous three and twenty years. Neither of these suppositions appears probable. But if the prophet wrote from memory, so long after the original delivery of many of his utterances, the looseness of internal connexion, which marks so much of his book, is readily understood.