End of uer

torn from his native land, and finds himself on the Egyp tian frontier at Tahpenes. Whether, according emiah. to the Christian tradition, he was stoned to death by his fellow-exiles in Egypt, or whether, according to the Jewish tradition, he made his escape to Babylon, the Hebrew Scriptures and Josephus are equally silent. But his legendary and traditional fame shows how large a space he occupied henceforward in the thoughts of his countrymen. More than any other of their heroes, he becomes, as has been truly said, the Patron Saint of Judea. He is the guardian of their sacred relics; carrying off with him the sacred fire from the altar; ascending the "mountain of Sinai "where Moses climbed up and saw the heritage of "God," and there "in a hollow cave he lays the taber"nacle, the ark, and the altar of incense, and closes "the door until the time that God shall gather His people again together, and receive them into mercy."1 He appears in a vision to Judas Maccabæus, “with gray hairs, exceeding glorious, of a wonderful and "excellent majesty, with a sword of gold in his right hand, -a gift from God" to the patriot warrior, "wherewith he shall wound the adversaries."2 That peculiar intercessory mediation which even those who most feared and detested him believed that he possessed in life, he was thought to exercise with yet more potent efficacy after his death," a lover of the brethren, "who prayeth much for the people and for the Holy "City, Jeremiah the Prophet of God." As time rolled on, he became the chief representative of the whole Prophetic order. By some he was placed at

66

66

.6

1 2 Macc. ii. 1-8.

2 Ibid. xv. 13, 15, 16.

3 2 Macc. xv. 14; comp. Jer. xxi

2; xlii. 2.

the head of all the Prophets in the Jewish canon.' His spirit was believed to live on in Zechariah and in all the Prophetical writings which could not be traced back to their real author.2 At the time of the Christian era, his return was daily expected. He was emphatically thought to be "the Prophet "3. "the "Prophet like unto Moses," who should close the whole dispensation.

So long a trail of posthumous fame following on so long a life of misunderstanding and persecution, and perhaps even a death of martyrdom, makes Jeremiah stand forth from the whole ancient dispensation as the most signal instance of the happy inconsistency with which churches and nations build the tombs of the Prophets whom their fathers have stoned. So magnificent a future, following on a life and death of such continual suffering, introduces a new idea into the Prophetic doctrine, which henceforth assumes proportions more and more definite. His contemporaries can have hardly failed to recognize the parallel which Saadia in the Jewish Church, and Grotius in the Christian Church, first drew out at length between the Servant of God, "despised and rejected of men-a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," and Jeremiah, led "as a lamb to the slaughter," laden with sorrows to which no human sorrows were ever like betrayed by his friends, "ever making intercession for the "transgressors," "stricken for the transgression of his "people." The martyrdom of Isaiah in the reign of Manasseh, and of Urijah in the reign of Jehoiakim, may have prepared the way for this change in the Prophetic visions of the Messiah. But as Jeremiah was

1 Lightfoot on Matt. xxvii. 9.

See Note A., p. 646.

3 Matt. xvi. 14.

"the Prophet" who, more than any other, seemed to live over again in the life of the Prophet of Nazareth, so the sorrows of Jeremiah, more than those of any other single Prophet, correspond to the desertion, the isolation, the tenderness, the death, and the final glorification of the Divine Sufferer.1 His "Lamentations," though not reckoned among the Prophetical books by the Jewish Church, though not invoked as predictions by the writers of the New Testament, yet by the sacredness of the grief which they depict, by the grandeur of the Prophetic character which they represent, are not unworthy of the solemn and melancholy use to which they have been consecrated by the Latin Church in its celebration of the Passion of Gethsemane and Calvary.

With Jeremiah the history of the Jewish monarchy, it might almost be said of the Jewish Church and Commonwealth in the fullest sense, is brought

Ezekiel.

to an end. But there still remain between the verge of this epoch, and the beginning of the next, one at least it may be others also in whom the mission of Jeremiah is continued for a while, both in letter and in spirit. On the banks of the Chebar2 was a colony of Jewish exiles, who dated their migration year by year from the captivity of Jehoiachin, and who seem to have kept up a kind of organization like that which existed in their own

1 Comp. Jer. xv. 15-18, with Isa. i. 5-8; Jer. xi. 19, with Isa. liii. 7; vii. 16, xi. 14, xiv. 11, with Isa. liii. 12; Lam. i. 12, iii. 1, 5, 15, 19, with Isa. liii. 3, 4. See the whole parallel worked out by Bunsen (Gott in der Geschichte, 204-207).

Professor Rawlinson would trans

fer the "Chebar" to one of the branches of the Euphrates in the neighborhood of Babylon. Layard (Nineveh and Babylon, p. 283) ad heres to the usual identification (borne out by the use of the word "river ") with the Khabour

chiefs who acted as Amongst these was

country, consisting of elders or the representatives of the rest. conspicuous Ezekiel the son of Buzi. Like Jeremiah, he was a Priest as well as a Prophet, but with the Priestly element more largely developed; and also one step farther removed from the ancient Prophets, inasmuch as he is the first in whom the author and the writer entirely preponderate over the seer, the poet, and the statesman. The scroll and the inkhorn, which we see only from time to time in Jeremiah, is never absent from Ezekiel. The speeches or odes of the earlier Prophets have been preserved, according to the original character of their utterance, in scattered fragments; Ezekiel's first constitute a book, arranged in regular chronological order from beginning to end. The atmosphere which he breathes, the visions by which he is called to his office, are alike strange to the older period; no longer Hebrew, but Asiatic; no longer the single, simple figure of cloud, or flame, or majestic human form, which had been the means of conveying the truth of the Divine Presence to Moses or Isaiah, but a vast complexity, "wheel within wheel," as if corresponding to the new order of a larger, wider, deeper Providence now opening before him. The imagery that he sees is that which no one could have used unless he had wandered through the vast halls of Assyrian Palaces, and there gazed on all that Assyrian monuments have disclosed to us of human dignity and brute strength combined, the eagle-winged lion, humanheaded bull.4 These complicated forms supplied the

1 See Ewald, Propheten, ii. 208. 2 Ezek. i. 16-22.

3

3 Ezek. i. 6-11.

Compare Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 448, 464

vehicle of the sublime truths that dawned upon him from amidst the mystic wheels, the sapphire throne, the amber fire, and the rainbow brightness. It is the last glimpse of those gigantic emblems, which vanished in the Prophet's lifetime, only to reappear in our own age, from the ruins of the long-lost Nineveh.

Later traditions fondly identified him with his Mesopotamian home. In them he was represented as foretelling the flood of the river by which they were encamped; and as judging the tribes of Gad and Dan. He was buried in state near Babylon, in a sepulchre which has for centuries been visited by Jewish pilgrims, who believe that it was erected by Jehoiachin, and that the lamp which still burns upon it was lighted by Ezekiel himself. But, according to the Prophet's own record of his life, his heart was not in the land of his exile, but "in the land of his "nativity." His own home,2 where he dwelt with his wife, and guided the counsels of the small community of the Chebar, faded from his eyes. Across the rich garden of that fertile region, across the vast Euphrates, across the intervening desert, his spirit still yearned towards Jerusalem, still lived in the Temple courts, where once he had ministered. Though an exile he was still one with his countrymen; and in the sense of that union, and in the strength of a mightier power than his own, the bounds of space and time were overleaped, and during the seven years that elapsed before the city was overthrown, he lived absorbed in the Prophetic sight of the things that were to be, and in the Prophetic hearing of the words that were to be spoken, in this last crisis of his country's fate.

1 Chron. Pasch. 158, 159; Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 500.

2 Ezek. viii. 1; xxiv. 16.