habits Jeremiah invited some of them to one of the Temple
chambers and offered them wine. They refused, for they said that their
ancestor Jehonadab ben-Rechab(362) had charged them to drink no wine,
neither to build houses, nor sow seed nor plant vineyards. Whereupon
Jeremiah went forth and held them up as an example to the men of Judah,
not because of any of the particular forms of their abstinence, but
because of their constancy. Here were people who remembered, and through
centuries had remained loyal to, the precepts of an ancestor; while Israel
had fallen from their ancient faithfulness to their God and ignored His
commandments. The steadfast loyalty of these simple nomads to the
institutions of a far-away human father, how it put to shame Judah's
delinquency from the commands of her Divine Father! This contrast is in
line with the others, which we have seen Jeremiah emphasising, between his
people's fickleness towards God and the obdurate adherence of the Gentiles
to their national gods, or the constancy of the processes of nature: the
birds that know the seasons of their coming, the unfailing snows of
Lebanon and the streams of the hills. The whole story is characteristic of
Jeremiah's teaching.(363)

3. Oracles on the Edge of Doom. (VII. 16-XVIII _passim_, XXII, XLV.)

From the seventh to the tenth chapters of the Book of Jeremiah there are a
number of undated passages in prose and in verse, which are generally held
to have been included in the collection of the Prophet's Oracles written
out by Baruch in 604-3, and of which some may have been delivered during
the reign of Josiah, but the most of them more probably either upon its
tragic close at Megiddo in 608, or under Jehoiakim. We have already
considered the addresses reported in VII. 1-15, 21-27,(364) as well as the
metrical fragments VII. 28, 29, and VIII. 8, 9.(365) There are other prose
passages describing (1) VII. 16-20, the worship of the Queen, or the Host,
of Heaven, which had been imposed upon Jerusalem by the Assyrians, and
either survived the decay of their power from 625 onwards, or if
suppressed by Josiah in obedience to Deuteronomy,(366) had been revived
under Jehoiakim; (2) VII. 30-34, the high-places in Topheth, upon which
children were sacrificed, also condemned by Deuteronomy and recorded as
destroyed by Josiah;(367) (3) VIII. 1-3, the desecration of the graves of
Jerusalem. It is not necessary to reproduce these prose passages, whet