242 LAMENTATIONS
adopted by Josephus, but the evidence that it had an established place among the Jews of Palestine at or even after his time is scanty and precarious.[1] At any rate the artificial scheme which accommodates the number of sacred books to the number of the twenty-two Hebrew letters is one that can hardly be original. It first appears about the time of the labours of the rabbins in the last days of the Jewish state to give final form to the canon.
Here then there is nothing to carry us beyond the evidence of the Septuagint, and Nöldeke has pointed out that there is some reason to suspect that the Septuagint translation of Lamentations is not by the same hand with that of Jeremiah, which goes to prove that even in the Greek the two books (which are in fact separated by the Apocryphal Baruch) were not originally one. Certainly the book of Lamentations has not shared the very peculiar history of the text of Jeremiah, the Greek of the former agreeing with the Hebrew so closely as to make it probable that the text was early established by frequent liturgical use, while the prophecies underwent many variations in transmission. There is, however, one piece of evidence in the Hebrew canon itself which ancient writers accepted as connecting the name of Jeremiah with our book. In 2 Chron. xxxv. 25 we read that Jeremiah pronounced a dirge over Josiah, and that the death of Josiah was still referred to according to stated usage in the dirges used by singing men and women in the author's day, and collected in a volume of ni^p – the ordinary Jewish name of our book. Josephus says that the dirge of Jeremiah on this occasion was extant in his days (Ant., x. 5, 1), and no doubt means by this the canonical Lamentations. Jerome on Zech. xii. 11 understands the passage in Chronicles in the same sense; but modern writers have generally assumed that, as our book was certainly written after the fall of Jerusalem, the dirges alluded to in Chronicles must be a separate collection. This, however, is far from clear. The nirp of the Chronicler had, according to his statement, acquired a fixed and statutory place in Israel, and were connected with the name of a prophet. In other words, they were canonical as far as any book outside the Pentateuch could be so called at that age. Moreover, the allusion to the king, the anointed of Jehovah, in Lam. iv. 20, though it really applies to Zedekiah, speaks of him with a warm sympathy which later ages would not feel for any king later than Josiah. The Chronicler in particular recognizes only thoroughly good kings (of whom Josiah was the last), and kings altogether bad, for whom he had nothing but con demnation, and with whom he certainly could not imagine a prophet to sympathize. 2 It thus seems highly probable that in the time of the Chronicles, that is, about the close of the Persian period, the book of Lamentations had a recognized liturgical use in the hands of a guild of singers, and was already connected with the name of Jeremiah, though the passage in Chronicles does not make it apparent that the whole official collection of dirges was ascribed to him. But even this testimony is some two centuries and a half later than the events which the book of Lamentations bewails, and is connected with an undoubted error, though a natural one, as to the reference of the book. We cannot therefore feel sure that the tradition current in the guild of singers was authentic and continuous; the general subject of the Lamentations, and particularly the obvious applicability to the personal circumstances of Jeremiah of
1 The supposed testimony of Origen (Bus., H. E., vi. 25) breaks down, for if it applied to the Hebrew Bible it would also prove, what we know to be false, that the epistle of Jeremiah stood in the Hebrew canon. Origen, Jerome, and other Christian writers were probably influenced by the statement of Josephus. The testimony of the Book of Jubilees, as cited by Syncellus and Cedrenus, is very doubtful (Rönsch, B. der Jub., p. 527 sq.).
2 See Nöldeke, ATliche Literatur, p. 144.
such passages as iii. 14, 55 (comp. Jer. xx. 7; xxxviii.), made it natural or even inevitable to think of him as author, if any attempt was made to connect the book, as the later Jews sought to connect all books, with some known name. Nor can we lay special weight on the acceptance of the tradition by an author who transfers post-exile Psalms to the Davidic age (1 Chron. xvi. 7 sq.).
When we proceed to test the internal probability of the tradition we find it to be surrounded by grave difficulties. The language, as Ewald observes, and Nägelsbach (p. xi. sq.) has shown with great completeness, is very remote from that of Jeremiah, and even if we separate out chap. v., in which the features already pointed out make it peculiarly difficult to think of him as author, the standpoint of the book corresponds very imperfectly with that of the prophet. Jeremiah, through all his life, was a man standing by -himself, isolated from his people. At the taking of the city the Chaldæans themselves acknowledged this and treated him with favour. He was carried into Egypt against his will, still counselling patient submission to the foreign rule, and there he continued in opposition to the mass of the fugitives as decidedly as before. The Lamentations, on the contrary, show us a poet in sympathy with the old life of the nation, whose attitude to the temple services, and especially to the king, is far more popular than Jeremiah s. Nor could Jeremiah speak of the calamity as involving the cessation of revelation and the silence of prophecy (ii. 9); for the Divine word in his breast was as clear and strong after the catastrophe as before it. The judgment, terrible as it was, had far less painful significance to Jeremiah than to the nation at large (Jer. xxiv. 1 sq., xlii. 9 sq.). To this it may be objected that in chap, iii., where the singer's complaint takes a more personal turn, Jeremiah himself is pictured in his isolation from Israel at large. A closer examination shows, however, that this interpretation turns on a single word in iii. 14. The addition of a final D, not always written in old times, changes "all my people" into "all peoples," restores the harmony between iii. 14 and verses 61-63, and makes the singer of chap, iii., as the general argument of the chapter requires, a representative of Israel among the heathen, not an isolated figure among unsympathetic countrymen.
Thus viewed, the Lamentations are the earliest evidence of the great national repentance wrought by the fall of the Jewish state. We have here for the first time a genuine expression of popular feeling fully penetrated by those convictions of Israel's sin and Jehovah's righteousness which the people of Judah had long resisted, mocking and persecuting the divine messengers who had sought to force them on the conscience of their countrymen. This cry of deepest anguish from the depths of a nation's despair, chastened by a sense of sin, and rising at length into an attitude of sublime faith in the confident appeal to the righteousness and love of Jehovah, contains the germ of the new life of the Israel of the restoration, and may be taken as the starting point of a fresh epoch in the Old Testament development. It is not probable that these new thoughts and new hopes found so clear and perfect literary expression in the very first days of the exile. Several passages, especially ii. 14 compared with Ezek.
- }$), appear to indicate acquaintance with the
book of Ezekiel, which is, as Nägelsbach points out, another argument against authorship by Jeremiah, and combines with the expression in ii. 9 to point to the time when the study of the written word, so characteristic of the age of the exile, had begun to supply the lack of con tinuous oral revelation. It is hardly possible to give a more exact determination of the place and time of writing. Ewald argues for an origin among the fugitives in Egypt; but the passages to which he appeals (i. 3; iv. 18 sq; v.
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