-above and apart from his literary merits or demerits, Jeremiah des(;rves the l1ighest honour for his almost unparalleled conscientiousness. Under the most trying circumstances, ho never swerved from his fidelity to the truth nor gave way to the" grief that saps the mind." In a quieter age he migh~ (for his talent is ohiefly lyrical) have developed into a great lyric poet. Even as it is, he may fairly claim to have written some of the most sym- pathetic pages of the Old Testament; and yet--his greatest poem is his life.
§ 2. GROWTH OF THE BooK OF JERElllAH. The question naturally suggests itself-Do we possess the prophecies of Jeremiah in the form in which they were delivered by him from the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah onwards? In reply, let us first of all look to the analogy of the occasional prophecies of Isaiah. These, it can be. reasonably well proved, have not come down to us in the form in which they were delivered, but have grown together out of several smaller books or prophetic collections. Analogy is in favour of a somewhat similar origin of the Book of Jeremiah, which was, at any rate once, much smaller. The collection which formed the nucleus of the present book may be con- jectured to have been as follows :-Oh. i. 1, 2; i. 4-ix. 22; x. 17-xii. 6; xxv.; :tlvi. 1-xlix. 83; xxvi.; xxxvi.; :tlv. These were, perhaps, the contents of the roll referred to in eh. xxxvi.-if at least, with the great majority of commentators, we give a strict interpretation to ver. 2 of that chapter, in which the command is given to write in the roll "all the words that I have spoken unto thee . . . from the clays of Josiah, even unto this day." On this view of the case, it was not till twenty-three years after Jeremiah's entrance upon his ministry that he caused his prophecies to be committed to writing by Baruch. This obviously excludes the possibility of an exact reproduction of the early discourses, even if the main outlines were, by God's blessing upon a tenacious memory, faithfully reported. But even if we adopt the alternative view mentioned in the introduction to eh. xxxvi., the analogy of other prophetic collections ( especially of those embodied in the first part of Isaiah) forbid'3 us to assume that we have Jeremiah'is original utterances, unmodified by later thoughts and experiences. That the Book of Jeremiah has been gradually enlarged can, indeed, be shown (1) by a simple inspection of the heading of the book, which, as we shall see, originally ran thus: "The word of Jehovah which came to Jere- miah in the days of-Josiah, etc., in the thirteenth year of his reign." It is clear that this was not intended to refer to more than eh. i., or, more precisely, to eh. i. 4-ii. 37, which appears to represent the earliest discourse of our prophet. Two further chronological specifications, one relative to Jehoialrim, the other to Zedekiah, appear to have been successively added, and even the later of these will not cover eh. xl.-xliv. (2) The same result follows from the remark at the close of eh. Ii., "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah." This evidently proceeds from an editor, in whose time the book terminated at Ii. 64. Ch. lii. is, in fact, not an independent narrative, 'Lut the conclu- INTRODUCTION TO
sion of a history oft.he kings of Jndah-the same historical work whioh was followed by the editor or our "Books of the Kings," except that vers. 28-30 (a notice of the number of the Jewish captives) appears from the chronology to be frow another source ; it is wanting, moreover, in the Septuagint Version. Granting (1) that the Book of Jeremiah was edited and brought into ittl present form snbsequently to the time of the prophet himself, and (2) that an important addition in the narrative style has been made to it by one of its editors, it is not a priori inconceivable that it should also contain passages in the prophetic style not by Jeremiah himself. The passages respecting which the greatest doubt exists are eh. x. 1-16 and eh. 1., li. (the longest and one of the least original of all the prophecies). It is unnecessary to enter upon the question of their origin here; it is enough to refer the reader to the special introductions in the course of this work. 'l'he case, however, is sufficiently strong for the negative critics to make it desirable to caution the reader not to suppose that a negative position is necessarily inconsistent with the doctrine of inspiration. In words which the author asks permission to quote from a recent work of his own, "The editors of the Scri1)tures were inspired; there is no maintaining the authority of the Bible without this postulate. True, we must allow a distinction in degrees of inspiration, as the Jewish doctors themselves saw, though it was some time before they clearly formulated their view. I am glad to notice that one so free from the suspicion of rationalism or Romanism as Rudolf Stier adopts the Jewish distinction, remarking that even the lowest grade of inspiration (b'rualdi hakkodesh) remains one of faith's mysteries" (' The Prophecies of Isaiah,' ii. 205).
§ 3. RELATION OF THE RECEIVED HEBREW TEXT TO THAT REPRESENTED BY THE 8EPTUAGI1!i.T, The differences between the two recensions relate (1) to the arrangement of the prophecies, (2) to the reading of the text. I. Variation in arrangement is only found in one instance, but that a very remarkable one. In the Hebrew, the prophecies concerning foreign nations occupy eh. xlvi.-li.; in the Septuagint they are inserted imme- diately after eh. xxv. 13. The following table will show the differences:- Hebrew text. Text of Septuagint. Ch. xlix. 34-39 eh. xxv. 14-18. Ch. xlvi. 2-12 eh. xxvi. 1-11. Ch. xlvi. Ia-28 eh. xxvi. 12-26. Ch. xlvi. 40-51 eh. xxvi. 27, 28. Ch. xlvii. 1-7 eh. xxix. 1-7. Ch. xlix. 7-22 eh. xxix. 7-22. Ch. xlix. 1-6 eh. xxx. 1-5. Ch. x.lix.. 28-33 eh. xxx. 6-11. Ch. xlix. 23-27 eh. :xn. 12-16. Ch. :xlviii. eh. xxxi. ~h YTV lfi-38 eh. x:xxii. THE BOOK OF 'l'HE PROPHET JEREMIAH. xvii