And violence in the land, ruler against ruler. Therefore behold, the days come, That I will do judgment upon the graven images of Ba bylon: And her whole land shall be confounded, And all her slain shall fall in the midst of her. 47 Then the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, 48 shall sing for Babylon: For the spoilers shall come unto her from the north, saith the LORD. As Babylon hath caused the slain of Israel to fall, 49 Ye that have escaped the sword, go away, stand not still: 50 Remember the LORD afar off, And let Jerusalem come into your mind. We are confounded, because we have heard reproach: For strangers are come into the sanctuaries of the LORD'S house. Wherefore behold, the days come, saith the LORD, And though she should fortify the height of her strength, 47. confounded] ashamed. See note on chap. xlviii. 20. 48. shall sing for Babylon] shall rejoice over her fall. 49. The Eng. Vers. is probably correct. There is a brevity and consequent obscurity about the Heb., which has made it possible to propose other renderings, e.g. that of the Eng. margin (Both Babylon is to fall, O ye slain of Israel, and with Babylon, etc.). The sense is, that the fact of Babylon's having caused the death of Israelites, shall be visited upon the representatives of many nations, which shall be mixed up in her overthrow. 50. This is addressed to the Israelites, who were in exile in Babylon, and had thus escaped death in the preliminary struggles between that empire and Israel. afar off] from afar, from Babylon. 51. confounded] ashamed. The exiles speak, while yet in exile, and lament the reproaches that are cast in their teeth for worshipping a God who will not defend His people from misfortune, and His Temple from sacrilege. 53. the height of her strength] either the height of her walls, or that of the tower of Belus. 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 53 Yet from me shall spoilers come unto her, saith the LORD. And great destruction from the land of the Chaldeans: And destroyed out of her the great voice; A noise of their voice is uttered: Because the spoiler is come upon her, even upon Babylon, Every one of their bows is broken: For the LORD God of recompences shall surely requite. The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken, And the people shall labour in vain, 55. hath spoiled] spoileth. destroyed] will destroy. the great voice] the hum of the city's life. when her waves] and their waves, the surging hosts which encompass the city. a noise] See note on xxv. 31. 56. every one of] These words do not occur in the Heb., but the verb is sing. (is broken). This however is not as much of an obstacle in Heb. as it would be in Eng. to our rendering simply their bows are broken. for the Lord God of recompences shall surely requite] for a God of recompences is the Lord; he will assuredly requite. 58. The broad walls] According to Herodotus, the outer wall of Babylon was 200 royal cubits (about 373 English feet) high, while it was fifty cubits wide. This, however, both from the nature of the case, and from the conflicting testimony of other writers, seems exaggerated. Probably the height was about 60 or 70 English feet. The walls may have been 30 or 40 feet wide, as they allowed of a team of four horses being driven along them. See Herod., Bk. 1. 179, and Rawlinson's notes on that passage. utterly broken] literally, made bare, destroyed, so that the very foundations shall be uncovered. high gates] "In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts." Herod. I. 179. the people shall labour...] a quotation from Hab. ii. 13, transposing And the folk in the fire, and they shall be weary. 59-64. Appendix, containing the history of this prophecy. The word which Jeremiah the prophet commanded Se- 59 raiah the son of Neriah, the son of Maaseiah, when he went with Zedekiah the king of Judah into Babylon in the fourth year of his reign. And this Seraiah was a quiet prince. So 60 Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon. And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, When thou comest to 61 Babylon, and shalt see, and shalt read all these words; then 62 however the words for 'in vain' and 'the fire'. Jeremiah throws light on Habakkuk's meaning, and at the same time gives it a more particular application. The fact that the Chaldaean conquests involve nothing in the end but exhaustion and suffering to the nations who have to do the behests of their ambitious rulers ("quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi") is by Jeremiah applied to the final overthow of the Babylonian empire. 59-64. APPENDIX, CONTAINING THE HISTORY OF THIS PROPHECY. 59. Seraiah] brother of Baruch, both being sons of Neriah. See xxxii. 12. when he went with Zedekiah] This journey to Babylon was probably made as an act of homage to Nebuchadnezzar. Possibly it was in consequence of suspicions aroused in the mind of that king by the coming of ambassadors in the same year to Zedekiah from Edom, Moab, and Ammon (xxvii. 3). (The order of these two events may however have been just the converse; see note on lii. 3.) The command to Seraiah is not actually stated till ver. 61, etc., the intermediate words being explanatory and so of the nature of a parenthesis. a quiet prince] a prince of the camping place, what we should now call a quarter-master-general. It seems to have been his duty, as in attendance on the king in a journey, to ride forward each day, and arrange that matters should be in readiness at the next halting place. 60. in a book] literally, in one book. Although the numeral is sometimes used in Heb. simply as an indefinite article, yet it may well have its proper force here, implying that the whole prophecy of chapters 1., li., was written upon one parchment, that so it might be the more conveniently sunk in the river. 61. and shalt see and shalt read] then see that thou read, not to the people of Babylon, nor even perhaps to a solemnly convoked assembly of Jews, as either course would have been at least attended with much danger, and the first of them probably impossible to carry out. The words are nevertheless to be pronounced in the presence of Jewish witnesses, who could in after days testify that thus, long before the overthrow of Babylon, these words had been read in the midst of shalt thou say, O LORD, thou hast spoken against this place, to cut it off, that none shall remain in it, neither man nor 63 beast, but that it shall be desolate for ever. And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of 64 Euphrates: and thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her: and they shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah. the very city where they were to take effect, and then buried in the heart of the same. 64. and they shall be weary] This utterance by Seraiah of that which forms the (one) last word of the prophecy in the original, is for the solemn coupling of the symbolic act with the prophecy which has thus been read. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah] These words are added in all probability by the writer of the concluding chapter, and shew how careful he was that he should not be identified with the prophet by future generations. See Introd., chap. iii. § 6. CHAP. LII. HISTORICAL APPENDIX TO THE BOOK. With respect to this concluding portion, two questions at once arise; (i) is its author Jeremiah? (ii) what relation does it bear to the two other portions of the Bible with which it has much in common, viz. chap. xxxix. of this Book, and 2 Kings xxiv. 18-xxv. 30? As regards (i), this question seems already settled by the last words of chap. li. We find moreover a certain diversity from Jeremiah's style, the most noteworthy instance of which perhaps is the use of the name Jehoiachin (Coniah and Jeconiah being the forms always used in the early part of this Book). Moreover, verses 31-34 refer to events which in all probability Jeremiah did not live to witness, though it is just possible that he may have recorded them in extreme old age. Much of this chapter may be in a sense the work of Jeremiah, as we shall now see in replying to the second enquiry mentioned above. In answer to (ii) we note that while a considerable portion of the three narratives is almost verbally identical, yet the account now before us contains, in common with that of the Kings, particulars relating to the Temple vessels, etc., which are omitted in chap. xxxix., while Nebuchadnezzar's charge concerning Jeremiah's safety (xxxix. 11—14), and the subsequent Jewish history connected with Gedaliah (2 Kings xxv. 22-26, and given also in full, Jer. xl.-xlii.), are not found in the present narrative. Practically, we have to choose between these two solutions of the question, (a) that the present passage was taken from the Book of the Kings, held by many persons to be the work of Jeremiah, while the modifications and additions represent independent sources of information possessed by the person who introduced it here, or (b), that the only connexion between the passages lies in their being both derived from some older historical record, which has been therefore made use of in a somewhat different manner and degree in each. CHAP. LII. Historical Appendix to the Book. I-II. Capture of the City. 2 Zedekiah was one and twenty year old when he began to 52 reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. And he did that which was evil in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that Jehoiakim had done. For 3 through the anger of the LORD it came to pass in Jerusalem and Judah, till he had cast them out from his presence, that Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. And it Other differences, as in the matter of numbers, have doubtless arisen from corruptions of the text in the hands of copyists, and are by no neans peculiar to these passages, which, however, form an easy and interesting method of testing the extent (hereby shewn to be extremely slight) to which such corruptions may be considered to have affected the sacred Text. The Septuagint Version, which omits xxxix. 4-13 (see introductory notes to that chapter for further remarks), contains the whole of lii. with the exception of verses 2, 3, 15, 28—30. CHAP. LII. 1-11. CAPTURE OF THE CITY. 1. Zedekiah was one and twenty year old] So 2 Chron. xxxvi. 1I, but, if we compare 1 Chron. iii. 15 with 2 Kings xxiii. 31 (=2 Chron. xxxvi. 2), we find that, supposing the numbers which we now read there to be correct, Zedekiah should by this time have been thirty-four or thirty-five years of age. We must therefore assume that an error in the figures has somewhere crept into the text. year] This and not years is the original reading of the Eng. Vers.: so in 2 Kings xxiii. 36 ("twenty and five year"); Dan. v. 31; Am. i. 1; Rom. iv. 19; so "mile" in marg. of John xi. 18. his mother's name was Hamutal] Hamital is the other reading both here, and in the parallel passage in 2 Kings. So in the Heb. of 1 Sam. xxv. 18, we have Abugail, but in the rest of the chap. Abigail. Zedekiah was thus brother of Jehoahaz but half-brother of Jehoiakim (2 Kings xxiii. 31, 36). 2. did that which was evil] We have already noticed Zedekiah's weakness of character in xxxvii. 2, 3, xxxviii. 5, 24, etc. 3. it came to pass] this came to pass, i.e. the evil courses of the king. that Zedekiah rebelled] and Zedekiah rebelled. It has been suggested that as there was an impression prevalent both at Jerusalem (xxviii. 1— 11) and at Babylon (xxix.), that Jehoiachin and the rest would return soon from exile, Zedekiah's personal visit to Nebuchadnezzar (li. 59) may have been in consequence of this, while his failure may possibly have been the cause of the assembling of the ambassadors of Edom, etc. (xxvii. 3), and of Zedekiah's overtures to Egypt (Ezek. xvii. 15). Then came open revolt on the part of the Jews, encouraged by the 4 |
