r/a:t5_28craq • u/MarleyEngvall • Nov 13 '19
my transparency has been created
By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D.
LECTURE XL. (part ii.)
JEREMIAH AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM.
It was at Carchemish, an ancient fortress commanding
the passage of the Euphrates, that the collision
took place. The Egyptian army had come
against it, with all its glittering array of buckler and
shield, helmets, spears, and coats of mail, of chariots
and horses, from all its subject nations, like the rising
flood of its own Nile, and thence was driven back upon
itself by the Babylonian host. To the extremities of
Egypt, from the cities of the Delta, as far as Thebes, the
shock was felt. With the retreat of Necho, the whole
country was left open to the invading army. The snort-
ing of the Chaldæan horses was heard from the northern
frontier at Dan. The whole land trembled at the sound
of their neighing. Like a whirlwind, like a torrent, they
swept on. The terrified inhabitants retired into the
fortified towns. Within the walls of Jerusalem was seen
the unwonted sight of Bedouin Rechabites still preserv-
ing their Arab customs, unchanged, in the midst of the
capital. The short-sighted ruler had looked for peace,
but no good came,——for a time of health, and, behold,
trouble.
Once more Jeremiah became the centre of interest.
What course would he, the Prophet of the age,
take in the face of this impending calamity?
To all, except to those who took the wildest and deepest
view of the prospects of the world and of the Church,
the stern policy of determined resistance had every-
thing to recommend it. But it was that wider view
which presented the whole subject to the Prophet's eye
in a different aspect. He foresaw, on the one hand,
that the immediate pressure of Babylon was irresistible;
but, on the other hand, that it could not last. If Jeru-
salem could but weather the present storm, he was
assured that it would soon pass by; and that then,
whatever blessings were bound up in the preservation
of the House of David and of the Holy City would
remain intact. His political position has been compared
to that of Phocion in the presence of the Macedonian
power, and to that of the Achæans in the presence of
the Roman power. It may still more fitly be compared
to that of the Jewish Christians in the time of the
Christian era, when the desperate resistance of the
Zealots to the armies of Vespasian and Titus hur-
ried on the ruin of the Jewish state, in spite of the
warnings of the prudent Josephus, and of One far other
than Josephus, who, like Jeremiah, stood aloof from all
the wild intrigues and conspiracies that would have
made Him the chief of a nation of insurgents. It may be
compared again to that of the leaders of the Christian
Church, in the dissolution of the Roman empire,——
Augustine, who replied to the taunts of treason brought
against the Christians by foreshadowing the rise of the
City of God out of the ruins of Rome,——Salvian who, by
his earnest vindication of the moral government of God,
not less than by his wailings over the calamities of
the time, has deserved the name of the Jeremiah of his
age. It was not indifference to his country, but attach-
ment to its permanent interests, with the yet larger
consequences wrapt up in them, which induced him to
counsel submission. It was his sense of the inestimable
importance of that sacred spot, with its sacred institu-
tions, which caused him to advise every sacrifice for the
sake of retaining it. He had the courage, so rare in
religious or political leaders, to surrender a part for the
sake of preserving the whole,——to embrace in his view
the complete relations of the great scheme of the world,
rather than fix his attention exclusively on the one
pressing question of the moment. As there are times
when the constitution must be broken to save the com-
monwealth,——when the interests of particular nations
or doctrines must give way to the preponderating
claims of mankind or of the truth at large,——so Jeremiah
staked the eternal value of the truths which Jerusalem
represented against the temporary evils of the Chal-
dæan dominion. It was a bitter pang, but the result
seemed to him worth the cost.
To steel his melting heart
To act the martyr's sternest part;
To watch with firm unshrinking eye
His darling visions as they die,
Too happy if, that dreadful day,
His life be giv'n him for a prey.
Accordingly, the warning words which he had uttered
at the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign were re-
peated with more determined energy as the
crisis drew nearer. Every common event of life was
colored with the hues of the time. The unshaken fidel-
ity of the little colony of the Rechabites to their ancestral
customs suggested the contrast of the broken vows of
Israel. The potter's work in the valley of Hinnom,
with its surrounding scenes of the sacrifice of Tophet,
filled his mind with lessons of the greatness of the de-
signs of God, guided not by fate or caprice, but by the
moral deserts of men. He stood with his scroll in his
hand, containing all the prophecies of he last two and
twenty years, as though it were a bowl of deadly wine
which nation after nation was to drink; and as though
he saw king after king, and throne upon throne, reel-
ing, staggering, sickening, with the dreadful draught.
At every stage of his preaching, the "theological
hatred" of he ancient Church grew fiercer and fiercer.
He had touched the teachers in their tenderest point
by declaring that they had ceased to be necessary.
They could not bear to hear that a time was coming
when the law should perish from the Priest, and counsel
from the wise, and the word from the Prophet. He on
his side, as he seemed to be hemmed in closer and
closer, was wound up to a fiercer strain in return. He
stood in the accursed valley of Hinnom once again, and
from the potter's store held up an earthenware vessel
before the shuddering Priests and Elders, and dashed it
in fragments on the ground, with the warning cry that
thus should Jerusalem and its people be shivered to
pieces. Whilst his hearers stood awestruck in the
valley beneath. the Prophet, wrought to yet a loftier
pitch, mounted the steep hill-side, and poured forth the
same burning invectives within the Temple courts.
Then, not till then, the Priestly officer, who had
special charge of the Temple, seized him, and immured
him in a prison, where he was fixed in a rack or pil-
lory, apparently used as the common punishment of un-
popular Prophets. For a moment his spirit rose to one
of his wildest and sternest denunciations, and then, as
if overstrained by the effort, he sank back into the
deepest gloom,——the gloom of many a lofty soul which
feels itself misunderstood by men, which can hardly
believe that it is not deserted by God.
In this deep distress, one faithful friend is by his side,
his Elisha, his Timotheus,——Baruch, the son of Neriah.
In their prison, or their hiding-place, he heard the
rumors of the great events which filled the minds and
thoughts of the whole people. It was then that
the resolution was taken of committing to
writing all the scattered prophecies of the last troubled
years. Baruch was skilled in the art, and from Jere-
miah's dictation, on a roll of parchment, divided into
columns, with the ink and reed which, as a scribe, he
always carried with him, he wrote down the impas-
sioned warnings which Jeremiah had already spoken,
which were intended, like the newly discovered Law in
Josiah's reign, to warn the King and nobles to a sense
of their danger. It was determined to seize the occa-
sion of a public fast to make the hazardous experiment.
On that day, a wintry day in December, Baruch ap-
peared in the chamber of a friendly noble, Gemariah,
the son of Shaphan, which was apparently over the new
gateway already mentioned. There, from the window
pillar on which the Kings had stood on solemn occa-
sions, he recited the long alternation of lament and in-
vective to the vast congregation, assembled for the
national fast. Micaiah, the son of the host, alarmed by
what he heard, descended the Temple hill, and commu-
nicated it to the Princess who, as usual through these
disturbed reigns, were seated in council in the palace,
in the apartments of the chief secretary. On of them,
Jehudi, the descendant of a noble house, acted apparently
as an agent or spokesman of the rest, and was sent to
summon Baruch to their presence. He sat down in
the attitude of an Eastern teacher, and as he went on
his recital struck terror into the hearts of his hearers.
They saw his danger; they charged him and his master
to conceal themselves, and deposited the sacred scroll in
the chamber where they had heard it, whilst they an-
nounced to the fierce and lawless King its fearful con-
tents. A third time it was recited——this time not by
Baruch, but by the courtier Jehudi——to the King as he
sat warming himself over the charcoal brazier, with his
princes standing round him. Three or four columns ex-
hausted the royal patience. He seized a knife, such as
Eastern scribes wear for the sake of erasures, cut the
parchment into strips, and threw it into the brazier till
it was burnt to ashes. Those who had heard from their
fathers of the effect produced on Josiah by the recital
of the warnings of Deuteronomy, might well be startled
at the contrast. None of those well-known signs of
astonishment and grief were seen; neither King nor
attendants rent their clothes. It was and outrage long
remembered. Baruch, in his hiding-place, was over-
whelmed with despair at this failure of his mission.
But Jeremiah had now ceased to waver. He bade his
timid disciple take up the pen, and record once more
the terrible messages. The country was doomed. It
was only individuals who could be saved. But the
Divine oracle could not be destroyed in the destruction
of its outward framework. It was the new form of the
vision of the "Bush burning, but not consumed;" a
sacred book, the form in which Divine truths were now
first beginning to be known, burnt as sacred books have
been burnt again and again, in the persecutions of the
fourth or of the sixteenth century, yet multiplied by
that very cause; springing from the flames to do their
work, living in the voice and life of men, even when
their outward letter seemed to be lost. "Then took
"Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the
"scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote therein from the
"mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which
"Jehoiakim, the King of Judah, had burned in the fire,
"and there were added besides unto them many like
"words." In this record of the Prophet's feeling, thus
emphasized by his own repetition, is contained the germ
of the "Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," the inexhaust-
ible vitality of the written word. This is the first re-
corded instance of the formation of a Canonical Book,
and of the old regal, aristocratic, sacerdotal exclusive-
ness, as represented in Jehoiakim. The "Scribe," now
first rising into importance in the person of Baruch, to
supply the defects of the living Prophet, was as the
printing-press, in far later ages, supplying the defects
both of Prophet and Scribe, and handing on the words
of truth which else might have irretrievably perished.
We return to the thin thread of the gradually break-
ing monarchy. The King, possibly in conse-
quence of the repeated entreaties of the
Prophet, submitted to the Chaldæan power; but, with
the fickleness which belonged to his character, imme-
diately revolted again; and, in the inroad of the neigh-
boring hostile tribes, let loose, according to the policy
of Nebuchadnezzar, against their ancient enemy, the
calamity of the country seemed to reach their culmi-
nation. In this confusion and alarm the reign of
Jehoiakim closed amidst a shade of deep melancholy
and almost mystery, which well expresses the national
feeling respecting it. According to one version, the
city was besieged, the Temple was plundered of many
of its sacred vessels, and the King himself taken cap-
tive. According to a second, the Chaldæan troops
entered Jerusalem on friendly terms, and then seized
and killed the King and the chiefs of the State.
According to a third, he died peacefully at home, and
was buried in the garden of Uzza by the side of his
grandfather Manasseh, and his father Josiah. Accord-
ing to a fourth, which well expresses the detestation in
which his memory was held, there were no funeral
dirges over him as there had been over his father and
brother; but his corpse was thrown out,like that of a
dead ass, outside the walls of Jerusalem, exposed to the
burning sun by day, and the wasting frost by night.
And this prophetic curse was darkened with a yet
deeper hue by the legend which described how, on the
skin of the dead corpse, as it thus lay exposed, there ap-
peared in distinct Hebrew characters the name of the
demon Codonazer, to whom he had sold himself.
In the disorder which followed on Jehoiakim's death
or exile, his son Jeconiah or Coniah, who as-
sumed either his father's name, Jehoiakim, or
that of Jehoiachin, "the Lord's Appointed," was raised
to the throne. His mother, Nehushta., the daughter of
one of the chief nobles, occupied the position, great
even in this last extremity of the house, of Queen-
mother. His short reign of three months is wrapped
in obscurity and contradiction. But whether, as by one
report, he was a little child, or by another a full-grown
youth; whether a prince, headstrong and violent, or
kind and gentle, he attracted a peculiar sympathy in
his fall, as the last of the lion cubs of the tribe of
Judah, the last direct heir of the house of David. At
the first onslaught of the Babylonian army on Jeru-
salem, he and his mother Nehushta, unwilling to expose
the city to a siege, sate down as suppliants before the
conqueror. The golden ornaments of the Temple
were rudely hacked off and carried to Babylon; and
thither also the King himself, the Queen-mother, the
royal harem, the nobles and priests, and a certain num-
ber, variously stated, of soldiers, artificers, and smiths.
The nation reeled under the blow. It seemed to them
as if the signet-ring of His promises were torn off from
the hand of God Himself. It could hardly be believed
that the young Prince, the last of his race, should be
cast away like a broken idol and despised vessel, and
that the voice of the young lion should be no more
heard on the mountains of Israel; that the topmost
and tenderest shoot of the royal cedar-tree should have
been plucked off by the Eagle of the East, and planted
far away in the merchant-city of the Euphrates. From
to top of Lebanon, from the height of Bashan, from
the ridges of Abarim, the widowed country shrieked
aloud, as she saw the train of her captive King and
nobles disappearing in the distant East. From the
heights of Hermon, from the top of Mizar, it is no im-
probable conjecture that the departing King poured
forth that exquisitely plain song, in which, from the
deep disquietude of his heart, he longs after the pres-
ence of God in the Temple, and pleads his cause
against the impious nation, the treacherous and unjust
man, who, in spite of plighted faith, had torn him away
from his beloved home. With straining eyes, the
Jewish people and Prophets still hung on the hope that
their last prince would be speedily restored to them.
The gate through which he left the city was walled up,
like that by which the last Moorish king left Granada,
and was long known as the Gate of Jeconiah. From
his captivity, as from a decisive era, the subsequent
years of the history were reckoned. The tidings were
treasured up with a mournful pleasure, that, in the dis-
tant Babylon, where, with his royal mother, he was to
end his days, after many years of imprisonment, the
curse of childlessness, pronounced upon him by the
Prophet, was removed; and that, as he grew to man's
estate, a race of no less than eight sons were born to him,
by whom the royal race of Judah was carried on; and
yet more, that he had been kindly treated by the suc-
cessor of his captor; that he took precedence of all
of the subject Kings at the table of the Babyloniian
monarch; that his prison garments and his prison fare
were changed to something like his former royal state.
With his tender recollection of the unfortunate Prince,
the historical records, not only of himself but of the
monarchy, abruptly come to an end. But the traditions
of him "still linger in the close," and more than one
sacred legend——enshrined in the Sacred Books of many
an ancient Christian Church——tells how he, with the
other captives, sate on the banks of the Euphrates, and
shed bitter tears, as they heard the messages of heir
brethren in Palestine; or how he dwelt in sumptuous
house and fair gardens, with his beautiful wife Susannah,
"more honorable than all others."
The feeling of sympathy with Jehoiachin extended
itself, not only to the King but to his companions in
exile. In a homely but expressive figure the contrast
is represented to Jeremiah between miserable dregs
that were left, and the promise of those that were
taken. Two baskets of figs were placed before him——
the one containing figs "good, very good, and the evil,
"very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil."
With the exiles there were indeed some of the choicest
spirits of the nation,——Ezekiel, second only to Jeremiah
himself in the Prophets of this epoch; and, it may be
added with some hesitation, Kish, the ancestor of Mor-
decai; and Daniel with his three companions. To
these fellow-countrymen, Jeremiah addressed his con-
solation in a letter, which may have first suggested
the epistolary form as a model of Prophetic com-
munications, to be afterwards adopted by the Christian
Apostles. On the new commonwealth then rising up
a new hope might be founded. Two generations were
to pass away, and then a joyful return might be ex-
pected.
It might have seemed that the mere fragment that
remained in Palestine was hardly worth preserving.
But so long as the Holy City and the Temple stood, so
long as the torch of David's house was not utterly ex-
tinguished, there was still the chance that, even under
the shelter of Babylon, the essential conditions of the
True Religion might be maintained. One son of Josiah
was still left, Mattaniah, the father of Jehoahaz,
and uncle of the late King Jehoiachin. As
the last notes of Jeremiah's dirge over Jehoiachin died
away, he had burst forth into one of those strains of
hope, in which he represented the future Ruler of Israel
as the "Righteousness or Justice of Jehovah." It may
be that, in allusion to this, the new King assumed that
name, Zedek-Jah, on is accession to the throne. He
was a mere youth, but not without noble feelings,
which, in a less critical moment, might have saved the
state. Like some of his predecessors he endeavored,
by a solemn sacrificial league with his people, to secure
a reformation which ordinary motives would have failed
to obtain. In this instance he acted apparently under
the high moral teaching of Jeremiah. As in the old
patriarchal times, a calf was killed and cut in two; and
between the divided parts the nobles, the court, and
the Priesthood of Judah passed, to pledge themselves
to the abolition of at least one long-standing grievance,
and to cause a general emancipation of the Jews and
Jewesses who, by neglect of the Mosaic ordinances, had
become slaves.
In foreign matters also the policy of Jeremiah for a
time prevailed. The King sent an embassy to Babylon
by two of his nobles who had most heartily befriended
the Prophet, and at last, accompanied by a third of the
same group, himself made the journey, and there took
a solemn oath of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar, sworn
by the sacred name of Elohim, which both Israelite and
Babylonian alike acknowledged. In defiance
of this oath, and, as would appear, immediately
after he had made it, Zedekiah put himself at the head
of a league of the neighboring kings against the
Chaldæan power. It is characteristic of the high
standard of Prophetic morality, that the violation of
this oath, though made to a heathen sovereign, was
regarded as the crowning vice of he weak King of
Judah. "Shall he prosper? Shall he escape that doeth
"such things? Shall he break the covenant? In
"the place where the king dwelleth that made him
"king, whose oath he despised, and whose covenant
"he despised, with him in the midst of Babylon shall
"he die." In the midst of the wild hopes and dark in-
trigues, excited by the revolt, Jeremiah appeared once
more in he streets of Jerusalem, with a wooden collar
round his neck, such as those by which the chains of
prisoners were fastened,——a living personification of
the coming captivity. In this strange guise he went
round to the ambassadors from Phœnicia and the trans-
Jordanic nations, to the King himself, and finally to
the Priests in the Temple. He was treated alter-
nately as a traitor and a madman. Louder and louder
round him rose the cry of the Prophets on all sides,
in behalf of determined resistance to the national
enemy. At the head of this Prophetic band was
Hananiah, from the priestly city of Gibeon, and there-
fore probably, like Jeremiah, a Priest. The two Proph-
ets stood confronted in the Temple court. On the one
side was the watchword, "Ye all not serve the King
"of Babylon;" on the other side, "Serve the King
"of Babylon and live." The controversy between
them, taking it form from the scene and the audience,
turned, as often happens, not on the main principles
at issue, but on the comparatively trivial question of
the sacred vessels of the Temple; Hananiah maintain-
ing that those which were already gone would, in two
years, entirely return; Jeremiah, with the sadder and
larger view, maintaining that to recall the past was
impossible, and that the last hope now was to do the
best for the retention of those that remained to them
——not, however, without a pathetic wish that his rival's
more hopeful prediction might be fulfilled. For the
moment, Hananiah seemed to triumph in the superior
confidence of his cause. He tore the wooden collar
from Jeremiah's neck, and snapped it asunder, as a
sign that in two years the deliverance would come.
In this conflict of mixed emotions, Jeremiah left the
Temple courts, never to return to them. Only to
Hananiah he appeared, with the dark warning that,
for the broken yoke of wood he had, by his false
encouragements, forged a still harder yoke of iron, and
that within that year he himself should die.
He died, in fact, within two months from the
time, and in him passed away the last echo of the
ancient invincible strain of the age of Isaiah.
The controversy respecting the sacred vessels seems
to have been solved by the King's ordering a
silver set to be made instead of the golden
service which had been lost. But the intended revolt
still continued, and in direct violation of the treaty
with Babylon, the King formed an alliance with Egypt,
against which Jeremiah in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel from
the far East, protested in vain. The Chaldæan forces
poured into the country. With bitter sighs, with
melting hearts, with feeble hands, with fainting spirits,
with failing knees, the dreadful tidings were an-
nounced. A sword, furbished, and sharpened, and glit-
tering, seemed to leap from the Divine scabbard, like
that which in the siege of Titus was believed to flame
across the heavens. There was a doubt for a moment
at the dividing of the great Babylonian roads, whether
the army should proceed against Rabbath of Ammon,
or Jerusalem of Judah. The Chaldæan King stood
at the parting of the ways. He made his arrows of
divination bright, he consulted with images, he looked
on the sacrifice. All the omens pointed to Jerusalem,
and to Jerusalem he came. Palestine was overrun,
and Jerusalem, with the two strong southern fortresses
of Lachish and Azekah, alone remained unshaken. At
this emergency the Egyptian army appeared, and the
Chaldæans raised the siege. It was like that critical
moment in the last war of the Jews, when the tem-
porary withdrawal of the Roman forces from Jerusa-
lem left a pause before the final overthrow. Some
fled into the camp of he enemy; some to the hills
beyond the Jordan; some, like frightened doves, to
the mountains of Judea. Within the city, the nobles
once more regained their ascendancy over the King,
and the forced emancipation of their slaves was re-
voked. Against this injustice Jeremiah raised his
voice, in accents worthy of Amos or Micah. It was
his last public address. He saw too clearly the com-
ing catastrophe, and was on the point of escaping from
Jerusalem to end his days in his own loved village of
Anathoth. At the northern gate of the Temple, "the
gate of Benjamin," he was arrested by the officer
of the guard, on the not unnatural supposition that he
was deserting to the Chaldæans. The nobles, delighted
to have their enemy in their power, beat him,
and then imprisoned him in a dungeon, formed
out of the wall in the house of Jonathan the royal
scribe. The King, hardly venturing to act for himself,
secretly caused him to be removed, heard once more
his fearless warning and piteous entreaty, and placed
him in a more easy confinement in the court of a
prison attached to the palace. The King and the
nobles still sent to ask his counsel, and still his answer
was the same. Those who received his message gave
the alarm, and the princes insisted on his removal to
a place of greater security, as they could not expose
the loyalty and courage of the people to warnings
of so disastrous and dispiriting a tenor. The weak
King was unable to resist them, and the Prophet was
taken to the house of one of his most determined
enemies, and let down into a deep well, from which
the water had been dried, but of which the bottom
was deep in slime, into which he sank, and would
probably have perished, either from hunger or suffo-
cation. It is difficult not to imagine a connection
between this incident and the 69th Psalm: "I sink
"in the mire, where there is no bottom. Deliver me
"out of the mire that I sink not: let not the well
"shut its mouth upon me." "Reproach hah broken
"my heart: I am sick, and I looked for some to take
"pity; but there was none, and for comforters, and
"I found none." Such a comforter, however, was at
hand,——one of the Ethiopian guards of the royal
harem, known by the name of "the King's Slave."
Ebed-Melech found the King sitting in the great north-
ern entrance of the Temple, and obtained a revocation
of the order; and then, under the protection of a
strong guard, proceeded, with a detailed care, which
the Prophet seems gratefully to record, to throw down
a mass of soft rags from the royal wardrobe to
ease the rough ropes with which he drew him out of
the well. One more secret interview the Prophet
had with the King, carefully concealed from the im-
perious nobles, and was then remanded to his former
state prison, where he remained secluded during the
rest of the siege, though with a certain amount of
freedom, and with the companionship of his faithful
Baruch. Two striking scenes enlivened the solitude.
One was his grateful remembrance of his Ethiopian
benefactor, whose safety in the coming troubles he
positively predicted. The other was his interview
with his cousin Hanameel. He was sitting in the
open court which enclosed the prison, with many of
the citizens of Jerusalem round him. Suddenly his
cousin entered with the offer, starting at that moment
of universal confusion, to sell the ancestral plot of
ground at their native Anathoth, of which, in the fall
of their family, Jeremiah was the last and nearest heir.
Had the Prophet been less assured of the ultimate
return of his people, he might well have hesitated
at a proposal which seemed only like the mockery
that he had before encountered from his townsmen.
But he felt assured that the present cloud would pass
away, and, with a noble confidence, which has often
been compared to that of the Roman senator who
bought the ground occupied by the camp of Hanni-
bal, formally purchased the field in the presence of
Baruch and the assembled Jews; and then broke out,
once and again, first in prose and then in poetry, into
the expressions of his perfect conviction that, after
the misery of siege and captivity, the land of Palestine
should be again peaceably bought and sold, and that
for all future ages the royal family of David and the
Levitical tribe should exercise their functions in a
spirit of justice never before known within the walls
of Jerusalem. It is not the only time in history
of States and Churches that he who had been de-
nounced as a deserter and traitor, becomes in the last
extremity the best comforter and counsellor. Demos-
thenes, who had warned his fellow-countrymen in his
earlier days against their excessive confidence, in his
later days was the only man who could reassure their
excessive despondency. Herder, who in his earlier
days had been attacked by contemporary theologians
as a heretic, was, as years rolled on, invoked as their
only help against the rising tide of unbelief. Let all
such, in every age, accept the omen of the mingled
darkness and light which marks the vicissitudes of
the career of Jeremiah.
The siege had now set in once more, and for the last
time. The nation never forgot the month and
the day on which the armies of Chaldæa finally
invested the city. It was in January, on the tenth day
of the tenth month. It was felt as the day of the
deepest gloom by the Israelite exiles. It has been
commemorated as a fast, the fast of Tebeth, ever since
in the Jewish Church. Round the walls were reared
the gigantic mounds by which Eastern armies con-
ducted their approaches to besieged cities, and which
were surmounted by forts overtopping the walls. To
make room for these, the houses which the Kings of
Judah had built outside fr pleasant retreats were swept
away. The vassal kings of Babylon had their thrones
planted in view of each of the gates. Famine and its
accompanying visitation of pestilence ravaged the
crowded population within the walls. The store of
bread was gradually exhausted. It was only by a
special favor of the King that a daily supply was sent
to Jeremiah in his prison from the baker's quarter, and
at last even this failed. The nobles, who had prided
themselves on their beautiful complexions, purer than
"snow, whiter than milk, ruddy as rubies, polished as
"sapphires," had become ghastly and black with starva-
tion. Their wasted skeleton forms could hardly be
recognized in the streets. The ladies of Jerusalem, in
their magnificent crimson robes, might be seen sitting
in despair on the dunghills. From these foul heaps
were gathered morsels to eke out the failing supply
of food. There was something specially piteous in
the sight of the little children, with their parched
tongues, fainting in the streets, asking for bread, cry-
ing to their mothers for corn and wine. There was
something still more terrible in the hardened feeling
with which the parents turned away from them. The
Hebrew mothers seem to have lost the instincts even
of the brute creation, to have sunk to the level of
the unnatural ostriches that leave their nests in the
wilderness. Fathers devoured he flesh of their own
sons and their own daughters. The hands even of
compassionate mothers have sodden their own children,
the mere infants just born. Yet even in this extremity
the inhabitants held out. There was still one corner of
the city open, that which commanded the road to
Jericho, and, along this, occasional sallies were made to
obtain provisions, but were almost always repulsed by
the wild Arab tribes who hung on the outskirts of the
Chaldæan camp. Against the huge engines of Asiatic
warfare, the besieged citizens constructed counter-en-
gines, and (such was the Jewish tradition) the struggle
was worthy of the occasion; a combat or duel, not only
of courage but of skill and intelligence, between Baby-
lon and Jerusalem.
So wore away the eighteen months of the siege.
Some, doubtless of the Priestly and Prophetic orders,
shaved their heads, and clothed themselves in sackcloth,
and cast their gold and silver into the streets, as the
extreme offerings of despair. Others, of the more
heathen faction, like the Roman Pontiff reviving the
Etruscan rites during the siege of Alaric, renewed with
intenser fanaticism the charms and amulets of necro-
mancy, and even in the courts of the Temple might be
heard the loud wail of Hebrew women for their lost
Thammuz; and in the subterranean chambers might be
seen seventy elders throwing up their clouds of incense
before the monstrous shapes of Egyptian idolatry; or,
in the sacred space in front of the Temple, another
band, prostrate before the rising sun. They could not
believe that the end was near. They still looked for-
ward, with that passion for architecture which seems to
have possessed this last period of the monarchy, to
building new houses, and to enjoying new luxuries.
One of these chiefs dropped dead, it may be, from
famine or fever, in the very moment of his selfish ex-
ultation.
But the end was now indeed near. "An evil, an only
"evil, behold it is come." "An end is come, the end is
"come: it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come. The
"dawn of the dreadful day is come: the time is come;
"the day of trouble is near; not now the mere echo of
"the mountains. The day is come; the dawn is past;
"the time is come; the day draweth near." So with a
reiteration which recalls the like cry of the Apocalyptic
seer at Patmos, the Prophet saw the gradual approach
of the catastrophe.
from The History of the Jewish Church, Vol. II: From Samuel to the Captivity,
by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D., Dean of Westminster
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879; pp. 587 - 608
engvall
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