le under
Sedekiah is concerned, Ch. XXIV. Once more the Word of the Lord starts to
him from a vision, this time of two baskets, one of good the other of bad
figs, which the Lord, he says, _caused me to see_: a vision which I take
to be as physical and actual as those of the almond-rod and the caldron
upon his call, or of the potter at his wheel, though others interpret it
as imaginative like the visions of Amos.(486) Note how easily again the
Prophet passes from verse to prose. The verse is slightly irregular. The
stresses of the four couplets are these--3 + 3; 4 + 3; 4 + 3; 3 + 3--to
which the following version only approximates.

XXIV. 3. And the Lord said to me, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah?
And I said, Figs, the good figs very good, and the bad very bad,
which for their(487) badness cannot be eaten. 4. And the Word of
the Lord came unto me, [5] saying, Thus saith the Lord, the God of
Israel--

Like unto these good figs
I look on the exiles of Judah,
Whom away from this place I have sent
To the Chaldeans' land for (their) good.
For good will I fix Mine eye upon them, 6
And bring them back to this land,
And build them and not pull them down,
And plant them and not pluck up.

7. And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord,
and they shall be for a people unto Me, and I will be to them for
God, when they turn to me with all their heart. 8. But like the
bad figs which cannot be eaten for their(488) badness--thus saith
the Lord--so I give up Sedekiah, king of Judah, and his princes and
the remnant of Jerusalem, the left in this land,(489) with them
that dwell in the land of Egypt.(490) 9. And I will set them for
consternation(491) to all kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a
proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I drive them.
And I will send among them the sword, the famine and the
pestilence, till they be consumed from off the ground which I gave
to them.(492)

We cannot overestimate the effect upon Jeremiah himself, and through him
and Ezekiel upon the subsequent history of Israel's religion, of this
drastic separation in 597 of the exiles of Judah from the remnant left in
the land. After suffering for years the hopelessness of converting his
people, the Prophet at last saw an Israel of whom hope might be dared. It
was not their distance which lent enchantment to his view for h