en
burst out with the vision--an extraordinarily interesting phase of
prophetic ecstasy--of another mockery which the king would suffer from his
own women if he did not yield but waited to be taken captive.

XXXVIII. 21. But if thou refuse to go forth this is the thing the
Lord has given me to see: 22. Behold all the women, that are left
in the king of Judah's house,(600) brought forth to the princes of
the king of Babylon and saying,

They set thee on and compelled thee,
The men of thy peace;
Now they have plunged thy feet in the swam
They turn back from thee!(601)

The verse is in Jeremiah's favourite measure, and its figures spring
immediately from his experience. The mire can hardly have dried on him,
into which he had been dropped, but at least his friends had pulled him
out of it; the king had been forced into far deeper mire by his own
counsellors, and they were leaving him in it!

The nervous king jibbed from the vision without remark and begged Jeremiah
not to tell what had passed between them, but, if asked, to say that he
had been supplicating Sedekiah not to send him back to the house of
Jonathan; which answer the Prophet obediently gave to the inquisitive
princes and so quieted them: _the matter was not perceived_. He has been
blamed for prevaricating. On this point Calvin is as usual candid and
sane. "It was indeed not a falsehood, but this evasion cannot wholly be
excused. The Prophet had an honest fear; he was perplexed and anxious--it
would be better to die at once than be thus buried alive in the earth....
Yet it was a kind of falsehood. He confesses that he did as the king
charged him and there is no doubt that he had before him the king's
timidity.... He cannot be wholly exempted from blame. In short, we see how
even the servants of God have spoken evasively when under extreme fear."
The prophets were _men of like passions with ourselves_. By now Jeremiah
had aged, and was strained by the flogging, the darkness, the filth and
the hunger he had suffered. Can we wonder at or blame him? But with what
authenticity does its frankness stamp the whole story!

With most commentators I have treated Ch. XXXVIII as the account of a
fresh arrest of Jeremiah and a fresh interview between him and Sedekiah. I
see, however, that Dr. Skinner takes the whole chapter to be "a
duplication."(602) He considers it a general improbability that two such
interviews, as XXXVII. 17-