PULPIT COMMENTARY, EDITED BY THE REV. CANON H. D. M. SPENCE, M.A., VICAR AND RURAL DEAN OF ST. PANCRAS, AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND BRISTOL; AND BY THE REV. JOSEPH S. EXELL, M.A. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY THE REV. CANON F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S. London: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1883. 1012 PULPIT COMMENTARY, EDITED BY THE REV. CANON H. D. M. SPENCE, M.A., VICAR AND RURAL DEAN OF ST. PANCRAS, AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE Lord AND BY THE REV. JOSEPH S. EXELL, M.A. JEREMIAII. Exposition BY REV. T. K. CHEYNE, M.A., RECTOR OF TENDRING, AND LATE FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD. KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET JEREMIAH. INTRODUCTION. § 1. THE LIFE, TIMES, AND CHARACTERISTICS OF JEREMIAH. 1. THE name of Jeremiah at once suggests the ideas of trouble and lamentation; and not without too much historical ground. Jeremiah was, in fact, not only "the evening star of the declining day of prophecy," but the herald of the dissolution of the Jewish commonwealth. The outward show of things, however, seemed to promise a calm and peaceful ministry to the youthful prophet. The last great political misfortune mentioned (in 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11, not in Kings) before his time is the carrying captive of King Manasseh to Babylon, and this is also the last occasion on which a king of Assyria is recorded to have interfered in the affairs of Judah. Manasseh, however, we are told, was restored to his kingdom, and, apostate and persecutor as he was, found mercy from the Lord God of his fathers. Before he closed his eyes for ever a great and terrible event occurred— the sister kingdom of the ten tribes was finally destroyed, and one great burden of prophecy found its fulfilment. Judah was spared a little longer. Manasseh acquiesced in his dependent position, and continued to pay tribute to the "great King" of Nineveh. In B.C. 642 Manasseh died, and, after a brief interval of two years (it is the reign of Amon, a prince with an ill-omened Egyptian name), Josiah, the grandson of Manasseh, ascended the throne. This king was a man of a more spiritual religion than any of his predecessors except Hezekiah, of which he gave a solid proof by putting down the shrines and chapels in which the people delighted to worship the true God, Jehovah, and other supposed gods under idolatrous forms. This extremely popular form of religion could never be entirely eradicated; competent travellers agree that traces of it are still visible in the religious usages of the professedly Mohammedan peasantry of Palestine. "Not only have the fellahs preserved (Robinson had already a presentiment of this), by the erection of their Mussulman kubbes, and through their fetishworship of certain great isolated trees, the situation and the memory of those sanctuaries which Deuteronomy gives up to the execration of the Israelites entering the promised land, and which it points out to them crowning the lofty summits, surmounting the hills, and sheltering themselves under the b JEREMIAH, |