l no more than Deuteronomy has already
regarded as possible, XXX. 11 ff., and desirable, VI. 6-8: namely, that
every man should be at home in the Law and honestly follow it." He
continues: "it is impossible for me to hold any longer to the Jeremian
origin of the passage. I find in it only the effusion of one learned in
the Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that every one of the
Jewish people should know the Law by heart."

But in his resolve "not to let himself be dazzled" has not Duhm gone to
the opposite extreme and seriously under-read the whole spirit of the
passage--besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness of the presence in
the text of a legalist at work?(816) The choice of the term _covenant_ for
the frame of his ideal was not unnatural to Jeremiah nor irrelevant to his
experience and teaching. Formally the term may mean a legal contract; but
it is open to a prophet or a poet to use any metaphor for his ideals and
transform its mere letter by the spirit he puts into it; and after all
_covenant_ is only a metaphor for a relation which was beyond the compass
of any figure to express. Yet it was a term classical in Israel and most
intelligible to the generation whom Jeremiah was addressing. Its
associations, especially as he had recalled them,(817) had been those not
of the Law but of Love. It was not a contract or bargain but an approach
by God to His people, an offer of His Grace, a statement of His Will and
accompanied by manifestations of His Power to redeem them. One might as
well charge Jesus with legalism in adopting a term sanctioned by God
Himself, and so historical, sacred and endeared to the national memory.
Nor need Torah, or Law, be taken as Duhm takes it in its sense of the
legal codes of Israel, but in its wider meaning of the Divine
_instruction_ or _revelation_. Further the epithet _New_ applied to
Covenant was most relevant to the Prophet's and his people's recent sense
of the failure of the ancient covenant, as restated and enforced in
Deuteronomy. In spite of the excitement caused by the discovery of the
Book in which it was written, and the recital of its words throughout the
land, the Old Covenant had failed to capture the heart of the people or to
secure from them more than the formal and superstitious observance of the
letter of its Torah. Was it not a natural antithesis to predict that His
Torah would be set by God _in their inward parts and written on their
hearts_? How els