"Our eyes do yet fail in looking for our vain help: In watching we have watched for a nation that could not save."[94]
[94] iv. 17.
Would Jeremiah, who bade the Jews bow to the scourge of Jehovah's chastisement and look for no earthly deliverer, thus confess participation in the worldly policy which he, in common with all the true prophets, had denounced as faithless and disobedient? Then, while sharing Jeremiah's condemnation of the priests and prophets, the writer appears to have only commiseration for the fate of the poor weak king Zedekiah.[95] This is very different from Jeremiah's treatment of him.[96]
[95] iv. 20.
[96] Jer. lii. 2, 3.
It is not a serious objection that our poet says of Zion,
"Yea, her prophets find no vision from the Lord,"[97]
while we know that Jeremiah had visions after the destruction of Jerusalem,[98] because the general condition may still have been one characterised by the silencing of the many prophets with whose oracles the Jews had been accustomed to solace themselves in view of threatened calamities; nor that he exclaims,
"Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?"[99]
although Jeremiah makes no mention of this twofold assassination, because we have no justification for the assumption that he recorded every horror of the great tragedy; nor, again, that the author is evidently familiar with the Book of Deuteronomy, and refers frequently to the "Song of Moses" in particular, for this is just what we might have expected of Jeremiah; and yet these and other similar but even less conclusive points have been brought forward as difficulties. Perhaps it is a more perplexing in view of the traditional hypothesis, that the poet appears to have made use of the writings of Ezekiel. Thus the allusion to the prophets who have "seen visions ... of vanity and foolishness,"[100] points to the fuller description of these men in the writings of the prophet of the exile, where the completeness of the picture shews that the priority is with Ezekiel.[101] Similarly the "perfection of beauty" ascribed to the daughter of Jerusalem in the second elegy[102] reminds us of the similar phrase that occurs more than once in Ezekiel.[103] Still, that prophet wrote before the time to which the Lamentations introduce us, and it cannot be affirmed that Jeremiah could not have seen his writings, or would not have condescended to echo a phrase from them. A difficulty of a broader character must be felt in the fact that the poems themselves give us no hint of Jeremiah. The appearance of the five elegies in the _Hagiographa_ without any introductory notice is a grave objection to the theory of a Jeremiah authorship. If so famous a prophet had composed them, would not this have been recorded? Even in the Septuagint, where they are associated with Jeremiah, they are not translated by the same hand as the version of the prophet's acknowledged works. It may be that none of the objections which have been adduced against the later tradition can be called final; nor when regarded in their total force do they absolutely forbid the possibility that Jeremiah was the author of the Lamentations. But then the question is not so much one of possibility as one of probability. We must remember that we are dealing with anonymous poems that make no claim upon any particular author, and that we have no pleas whatever, special or more general, on which to defend the guesses of a much later and quite uncritical age, when people cultivated a habit of attaching every shred of literature that had come down from their ancestors to some famous name.
[97] ii. 9.
[98] _E.g._ Jer. xlii. 7.
[99] ii. 20.
[100] ii. 14.
[101] _E.g._ Ezek. xii. 24, xiii. 6, 7, xxii. 28.