1. A brisk walk of an hour northward from Jerusalem, along one of the great highways which radiate from the sacred city, brings one to the little town of Anâta, the Anathoth of the Hebrews. It is unattractive to-day, with its few poor hovels, and it must have been insignificant also in antiquity. Although shut off from Jerusalem by hills, it figured as one of the northern military outposts of the capital. It is referred to in the Book of Joshua (Jos_21:8) as the residence of certain priestly families.
To one of these families belonged Hilkiah, the father of Jeremiah. It is easy to imagine that, on the day of his birth (which he later, in a time of deep despondency, bitterly cursed) heavy clouds shut out the warm sunshine, and the descending rains converted the filth, which is never wanting in an Oriental town, into slippery slime-a true suggestion of the unpleasant environment amidst which he was destined to spend his long life.
Concerning his boyhood, we have some hints in the opening chapters of his prophecy. In the character of his parents he recognized an important element in his preparation for the work of a prophet. Possibly some one of his ancestors belonged to that group of disciples who drank in and treasured the teachings of the great Isaiah. Jeremiah's sermons demonstrated that he was also a careful student of the earlier prophets. With Hosea, whose language and ideas made the deepest impression upon him, he must have recognized the closest kinship, in experience as well as in thought. For both lived in the deep shadow of a great national catastrophe which they were powerless to avert; both were rejected by their contemporaries, and both, though capable of the most intense happiness, were denied all the joys which their age held dear.
Anathoth was the city to which Abiathar was banished when he was deposed by Solomon from the priesthood of Jerusalem, and it is by no means improbable that Jeremiah, who is said to be of the priests that were in Anathoth, was a descendant of Abiathar, and thus of Eli the custodian of the ark at Shiloh. If so, his family would cherish some of the proudest memories in Israel, and additional point would thus be given to his reference to the destruction of Shiloh and the obsoleteness of the ark in the Messianic period.1 [Note: A. S. Peake.]
2. The religious reform of Hezekiah's time had been followed by a terrible reaction in the reign of Manasseh. His subsequent repentance seems to have come too late to have much permanent effect upon the ordering of the kingdom, nor was Amon's brief reign productive of improvement. This was the state of affairs when Josiah came to the throne. With good advisers in Ahikam, Hilkiah, and others, and with a nation probably more than half weary of idolatry and its attendant evils, even before the discovery of the lost Book of the Law, it was an opportunity not to be neglected for an attempt at the revival of religion. And yet the reformation, as in the time of Hezekiah, seems not to have penetrated much below the surface. Dishonesty, open licentiousness, murder, adultery, false swearing-such is the picture that Jeremiah draws. The state of religion in Judah called for a reformer.
It was not merely the religious situation, however, that was responsible for Jeremiah's appearance as a prophet. The tidings had come to Judah that a new and terrible danger threatened her from the north. A great migration of the Scythians from their home in the far north had been set in motion. They poured as a vast irresistible torrent over a large area of Western Asia. They were like locusts for numbers and rapacity, sparing neither age nor sex, leaving ruin everywhere in their train. It was a new kind of terror that these uncivilized hordes inspired in peoples long inured to the brutality of Assyria. No deliberate design of founding an empire seems to have animated them; indeed they were not skilled in the art of war and won their conquests by sheer force of numbers and ruthless ferocity. They were not equipped for storming cities, but they could starve the inhabitants into surrender. They influenced political history mainly by weakening the power of Assyria, and thus preparing for its ultimate downfall. We are told that their dominion lasted for twenty-eight years. Since the fall of the Assyrian empire was an event whose importance for the history of Judah can scarcely be exaggerated, the Scythian invasion would on that ground alone claim to be mentioned in the story of Jeremiah's times. But the Scythians' influence on Jewish history was not merely indirect. The tide swept nearer and nearer to Palestine, and Jeremiah like Zephaniah seems to have seen in these unwelcome visitors from the north the instruments of Divine judgment on Judah. In the vision of the seething caldron which followed his call he learned that evil was to come out of the north, and that Jehovah was bringing all the kingdoms of the north against Jerusalem.
3. Such, then, was the situation in Judah when Jeremiah received his call. An apostate people on the one hand, the approach of the uncanny foe from the north on the other. It was not primarily the danger but the sin of Judah that filled her prophets with foreboding of her ruin; and since Jeremiah was convinced that the cup of her iniquity was full, it was natural that he should indentify the agents of God's vengeance with the Scythians. Such being the situation at the time of his call, we must now consider the call itself.
