John Kitto Evening Bible Devotions: May 18

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John Kitto Evening Bible Devotions: May 18

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Father-Land

Jer_22:10

Jeremiah is eminently the prophet, the historian, and the mourner of captivity—or rather of exile; for what is called captivity in the authorized version of the Scripture is really exile and nothing more, except in the case of a few persons of high station, who were sometimes, but not generally, kept under restraint. Captivity is the state of those who have been, by war, brought into an altered and subjugated condition; and so far it is properly applied to the state to which the Hebrew kingdoms were successively reduced. But the term has acquired the sense also of imprisonment, so that “captive” and “prisoner” are, in popular and poetical language, synonymous terms. But, in fact, a man may be a captive without being a prisoner; and hence, to us, the term “captivity,” although in the strict sense proper, is apt to suggest a severer condition than it is actually intended to denote.

The object of the great Eastern conquerors in enforcing the removal of the people of conquered nations—a policy which appears to us so peculiar and remarkable—seems to have grown out of the vast extent of the empires these conquerors formed: for their distant provinces being thus beyond the immediate reach of the central power, and it being hence an onerous and expensive operation to move troops to reduce them in case of revolt, it became the obvious policy to weaken those provinces, so as to render revolt impossible. This was effected by rooting up all local ties, and destroying all local influence and power, in the removal to other lands of the flower of the population—of all whose presence could give strength to a nation in war or in peace. The process was, in fact, that of denationalization: and how successful it was generally, is shown by the fact, that the ten tribes of the kingdom of Israel, expatriated by the Assyrians, speedily lost their separate existence in the land of their exile, and have never since been found.

But the object of this policy was not only to weaken the extremities, by destroying their power of spontaneous action, but, in the same proportion, to strengthen the central force and prosperity of the empire, by bringing into it all the valuable parts of foreign populations. This object is clearly traced in the statement, that the successive deportations of the people of Judah by the Chaldeans, comprised the princes, the nobles, the priests, the warriors, the skilled artisans, leaving nothing but the unskilled laborers, “the poor of the land, to be husbandmen and vine-dressers.”

In the lands to which they were taken, they were not slaves or captives, but free colonists—free to follow their several pursuits, and to enrich themselves by their exertions, but not free to quit the region to which they had been transferred, nor free, perhaps—but judging in this from analogy, rather than known fact—from paying a tax to the government higher than that required from the native population; though we may conclude that any distinction to their disadvantage in this respect, ceased with the lapse of time. Of all people that ever lived, the Jews were a people adapted to thrive under such circumstances. If they have thriven in modern times, in all the countries of their dispersion, in spite of the dislike and abhorrence with which they have been regarded by those among whom they dwelt—in spite of the persecutions to which they have been subjected and in spite of the most cruel and impoverishing exactions—how much more must they have thriven among a people who had no strong hatred against them, and under a government which had a due sense of their value, as useful citizens and servants of the state, and which, therefore, sought rather to encourage than to depress them. No doubt there were exceptions. We know historically of some. But that, upon the whole, the Jews did not eventually find themselves in an evil case, is shown by the fact of their general backwardness to return to their own land, when the decree of Cyrus left them free to do so; and by the acknowledged fact, that, as it was the flower of the nation which had been taken into exile, so it was the flower of the nation which chose to remain in the land to which it had been exiled.

But although the exiled Hebrews eventually found their lot to be attended with many ameliorations, some time passed before these could be realized; and they were only fully realized by the generation composed of those born in exile, or too young at the time of deportation to cherish any disturbing recollections of what they had lost. In all cases, exile is a bitter thing, and bitterest of all when it is known to be a life exile, from which there is no hope of return. Only those who have spent years in distant lands can tell the yearning of the heart for one’s native land—the craving, increasing in intensity as time passes, to return to its fair shores—to live there a few more years before life closes, and at last to die in our own nest.

“’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.”

Distance of either time or place lends this enchantment to the view which the mind takes of the far-off or long-forsaken home; and not less to the returned exile than to the man long sick, when he “breathes and walks again,”—

“The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening paradise.”

But the feeling is more enduring; for if one is at length privileged to return to his own land, he finds that land has required an interest in his eyes which age cannot wither nor use exhaust. This is not speculation, but experience. For the writer can declare, that after some years of absence in the far-off lands of the morning, with little thought or intention of ever returning, and after the first agonizing rapture of greeting once more his natal soil had subsided, he has not ceased, during nineteen years, to feel it as a joy and a privilege, which has, in its measure, been a balm to many sorrows, to dwell in this land; and he has experienced a constant intensity of enjoyment in the mere fact of existence in it, which had not formerly been imagined, and which only the facts of privation and comparison can enable one thoroughly to realize.

Now, if this be merely the common feeling of all men towards their father-land, Note: This term has now been naturalized from the Germans: but if our own good old “mother country” had not been spoiled by its use in petty colonial politics, it would have been far more significant and expressive. As it is, no one can use the term with comfort, after the newspapers have defiled it, by appropriating to the permanent Under-Secretary for the Colonies the title of “Mr. Mother Country.” in what intensity must not this feeling have existed among the Jews, to whom their native country possessed not only the common interest which every land offers to the native thereof, but to whom the land from which they were cast forth was the land of the promise made to their fathers—the land consecrated by the special presence of Jehovah—the land, the possession of which was so interwoven with their laws and religion, that without it they could not discharge the obligations of the covenant, and their very worship must become a service shorn of its essential rites. To be cast forth from that land, was avowedly a mark of their Lord’s displeasure; and the burden of this consciousness, heavy upon their souls, imparts a peculiar horror to the denunciations of the prophets, and an agony, not known before or since among men, to the lamentations of the people. In the same proportion, the certainty that few of even the youngest then living could ever hope to return, must have been felt with an intensity of anguish, to which, in the more refined minds,

“The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,

Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel,”

had been but light torture; and on this, the tenderest point of all, Jeremiah spared them not—“Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for him that goeth away; for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.”