ton, backsliding Israel, under the figure of the faithless wife: "Thine adulteries on the hills, in the fields; everywhere have I seen thine abominations. Woe to thee, Jerusalem! Wilt thou not be pure? How long?" till when, usque quo? "When shall it once be?" says our translation, but the simplest and shortest rendering is the best. Every addition of a word is a diminution of the pathos. We have called it a bold anthropopathism; but it is this very figure which gives it its exceeding tenderness. It is the impatience of the Infinite One. The odiousness of sin (of such sin as Israel commits) makes the time seem long even to Him "who inhabits eternity." The effect of the passage is greatly enhanced by the soliloquizing style. The direct address to the faithless wife, the backsliding Church, the wandering sinner, is closed with the previous expostulation, "Wilt thou not be pure?" and then the particles that follow are an outburst of emotion, spoken aside, as it were, or addressed by the speaker to himself: "O how long!" It is like one dwelling on his own thought, carried away by the enormity presented in his own picture. Object to the anthropopathism! Not only every emotion of piety, but every sentiment of taste for the eloquent, cries out against the miserable cavil. Language is performing its truest office when making its greatest effort to express the inexpressible. We cannot ascend to God, but God can come down to us, and in this way give us a better and more humbling conception of the distance between us and himself. It is the infinity of height as seen in the infinity of condescension; it is the sublimest aspect of the holy heavens, ever loftier, purer, more serene, as we gaze upon them from the lowest valley of our humiliation. There are, perhaps, no portions of the Bible to which the caviling unbeliever, or the fastidious religionist, more strongly object than to those from which this and similar passages are taken. It is so human, so very human, so indelicately human, they would say, this imagery of the faithless wife, these offensive descriptions of the adulterous woman. And yet for the purer soul, humbled by a sense of its own sins, what a power of emotion do they possess! What other language, by its contrasting power, can so set forth the divine compassion, the divine forbearance, or, as it is expressed in that exhaustless Anglo-Saxonism, "God's long-suffering, loving-kindness, and FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.-7 tender mercy." Thus a similar passage, Jeremiah iii, 1, may be the scorn of the witling, it may be a stumbling-block in the way of the halting; even the professedly devout may pass it over in the public reading of the Scriptures; there is, indeed, in it that which offends the fastidious, but what a power of love and tenderness does it all impart to that deeply touching close: "And yet come back to me saith the Lord." Shall we render any homage to this false taste by declining to repeat the whole passage? "Lift up thine eyes to the high places and see where thou hast not been polluted: in the ways hast thou sat for them like the Arabian in the wilderness; thou hast filled the land with thy whoredoms and thy wickedness,"-all this hast thou done, "yet come back to me saith the Lord." "If a man put away his wife and she go from him and become another man's, will he return unto her again? but thou hast played the harlot with many lovers, and yet come back to me again saith the Lord." We may regard the touching refrain as coming after every rebuke, or as holding back its power of suppressed emotion to the finale of this impassioned complaint. And then the assurance of peace and restoration that immediately follows, how is it heightened by that sharp language, that very plain speaking, as some would call it, that went before: "Will thou not from this time cry unto me, My Father, thou art the guide of my youth." As an effect of the same false delicacy, that long chapter, the sixteenth of Ezekiel, has become almost a sealed blank in our Bibles. It is not read in the public exercises of the sanctuary, it is not heard in the family worship, it is, perhaps, avoided often in the private perusal of the Scriptures. But what a loss would be its expurgation! It is regarded, perhaps, as unsuited to our day, as having become obsolete, and therefore unedifying; but we hesitate not to say again, this is all a false religionism. Is there that in the language that offends us? Is there something revolting even in this minute picture of the adulterous woman and her vile adulterous ways? It may be so, especially to the man who is all unconscious how perfect a representation there is here given of his own false wandering heart; but even as eloquence, even as rhetorical imagery, how it adds again to the power of that appeal with which the chapter terminates; and who that has the least hope that he is a forgiven Christian would lose this pathetic close, or aught that adds to its deep tenderness? "For thus saith the Lord God, I could* deal with thee even as thou hast done, who hast despised the oath in breaking the covenant; nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish with thee a covenant of eternity. Then shalt thou remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou shalt receive thy sisters, thine elder and thy younger. And I will establish my covenant with thee, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord; that thou mayest remember and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I have made atonement for thee, (,) when I have made a covering for thy sins, after all that thou hast done, saith the Lord." How pure, how holy the air that breathes throughout this passage! Surely, O Lord, "thy ways are not as our ways.' Such love, such forgiveness, "is not after the manner of men.' No human affection, no human forgiveness can measure the intensity of the divine. This is "the love which many waters cannot quench, which the floods cannot drown-" Higher than the heights above, "Thy thoughts are not as our thoughts." So says philosophy, and the Scripture transcends philosophy in the sublimity with which it makes the same announcement. God's thinking is not our thinking. He must have a mode of intelligence which altogether transcends the human, in kind as well as in degree; and yet he has our thinking too. Dwelling in the world of immutable truth, he yet knows and notes our changing ways, even as we know and note them. He draws from them, in his language to us, his holiest and most loving comparisons. Abiding evermore in the sphere of the fixed eternal ideas, he can yet think our finite flowing thoughts even as we * An interrogative sense might seem to be demanded here, "Shall I deal with thee as thou hast done, etc.;" but there is an absence in the Hebrew of any particle, or of any order of words that would exegetically justify it. An equivalent force, however, is given to the translation of the passage by taking it hypotheti cally, and this is justified, not only by the exigentia loci, but by good grammatical So Rosenmüller: Ego quidem agerem tecum sicut tu fecisti, etc., sed record reasons. abor, etc. think them. "He inhabits eternity," and yet he dwells too with us in time. He is infinite, yet because he is infinite can he take the aspect of the finite, and commune with the finite in their finiteness. He can know as we know, yea, he can feel as we feel. He can come down to that which is most human in our humanity. He can employ our language as we employ it. It is thus he can "speak comfortably to us," or "talk to our heart," as the Hebrew has it. Blessed be his name, that there is thus a mode of communication from heaven to earth, from the eternal intelligence to the lowly human mind. It is through these telegraphic signals, this far writing, that we learn what otherwise we could have never known. It is the message of the Divine love; it is the announcement that his mercy, too, is infinite, that "his righteousness is like the great mountains, his judgments are as the mighty deep, his covenant standeth sure forever." "His counsels of old are faithfulness and truth." The emotional power of the Hebrew poetry is exhibited in its sudden transitions; whether from the stormy to the calm, or in the opposite direction. The former is the more frequent. Sometimes it is in the thought alone; the language maintaining its regularity of construction, and even flow of style. Of this we have a striking example in Nahum i, 2-6: "The Lord is jealous and avengeth; his way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. The mountains tremble before him, the hills are melted, the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and they that dwell therein. Before his anger who may stand, and who may abide the fierceness of his wrath? Its heat is poured forth like fire, and the rocks are kindled beneath it." How striking the change that immediately follows: "Jehovah is good; he is a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knoweth them that put their trust in him." Again, this transition is produced, or, we may say, greatly heightened, by an abrupt change of construction, demanding a sudden pause, as it were, preparatory to the change of thought and emotion. One of the best examples of this kind we have in Psalm xlvi, 5. The transition there is one of the most remarkable in the Scriptures: "God is our refuge and strength, a help in trouble ever near. Therefore we will not fear though earth pass away,* and though the mountains be tossed into the heart of the seas. Let the waves thereof roar and surge; let the mountains rock in the swelling thereof." Thus far all is commotion, turbulence, tempest-wild, upheaving storm. From this surging of the elements we are let down, or to use a better figure perhaps, out of it we are elevated by a single word. The musical term selah is preparatory to it, but that is no part of the sacred writing, except, perhaps, as denoting something well known in the ancient accentuation of the songs of the temple. It represents an emotional power that was truly there, and such mode of representation was probably the beginning of that invaluable system of sacred rhetoric which the Masoretic accents afterward rendered so complete.+ But this emotional power itself is in the words, in the style, in the structure of the language, aside from any rhetorical marks. It may come into the soul through the eye, as it takes in the bare words, though unaccompanied by any of those suggestive signs that would make it more perfect through the ear. In this passage then, we may say, it is all done by a single word, in a singular position, and with a singular destitution of accompaniment. It is a mere name without an article, without a suffix, without an epithet, without any visible trace of assertive significance, expressed or implied. It is a single yet most vivid picture, simply presented to the eye, or ear, and through it to the imagining faculty of the soul. It is one of nature's most majestic objects, combining, beyond almost anything else, the ideas of beauty, calmness, placid motion, and, at the same time, irresistible power. It is the single Hebrew word denoting a large, full-flowing, majestically, yet gently-moving river. The primary sense of the root makes the term applicable to light as well as to flowing water. Hence, in the Arabic, it *The Hebrew verb here means to change. There is the same idea although it is a different word, Psalm cii, 17: "Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed." It represents nature undergoing her great transformation in the final catastrophe. +We cannot help thinking that Selah was simply a stronger Silluk. This latter is the accent which in the later system of the Masorites is used for the close of verses, or to denote the fullest and strongest pause. Selah was probably something still more uncommon, and having perhaps some mark in the temple music, for which, in the other and more common copies of the Scriptures, there was employed the name itself. Selah and Silluk (o prbo) both denote elevation, ascension. |