pherds(415) are brutish 21
Nor seek of the Lord,
Therefore prosper they shall not,
All scattered their flock.(416)
Hark the bruit, X. 22
Behold it comes,
And uproar great
From land of the North,
To lay the cities of Judah waste,
A lair of jackals.

As we have seen, Jeremiah in the excitement of alarm falls on short lines,
ejaculations of two stresses each, sometimes as here with one longer
line.(417)

A quatrain follows of longer, equal lines as is usual with Jeremiah when
expressing spiritual truths:--

Lord I know! Not to man is his way, 23
Not man's to walk or settle his steps.
Chasten me, Lord, but with judgment, 24
Not in wrath, lest Thou bring me to little!

The last verse of the chapter is of a temper unlike that of Jeremiah
elsewhere towards other nations, and so like the temper against them felt
by later generations in Israel, that most probably it is not his.

[Pour out Thy rage on the nations, 25
Who do not own Thee,
And out on the kingdoms
Who call not Thy Name!
For Jacob they devoured and consumed,
And wasted his homestead](418)

Another series of Oracles, as reasonably referred to the reign of
Jehoiakim as to any other stage of Jeremiah's career, is scattered over
Chs. XI-XX. I reserve to a later lecture upon his spiritual conflict and
growth those which disclose his debates with his God, his people and
himself--XI. 18-XII. 6, XV. 10-XVI. 9, XVII. 14-18, XVIII. 18-23, XX. 7-18,
and I take now only such as deal with the character and the doom of the
nation.

Of these the first in the order in which they appear in the Book is XI.
15, 16, with which we have already dealt,(419) and the second is XII.
7-13, generally acknowledged to be Jeremiah's own. It is undated, but of
the invasions of this time the one it most clearly reflects is that of the
mixed hordes let loose by Nebuchadrezzar on Judah in 602 or in 598.(420)
The invasion is more probably described as actual than imagined as
imminent. God Himself is the speaker: His _House_, as the parallel
_Heritage_ shows, is not the Temple but the Land, His _Domain_. The
sentence pronounced upon it is a final sentence, yet delivered by the
Divine Judge with pain and with astonishment that He has to deliver it
against His _Beloved_; and this pathos Jeremiah's poetic rendering of the
sentence finely brings out by putting verse 9_a_ in the form