the additions of 604 referring to the
Chaldeans. The prose which follows is certainly from the Chaldean period,
for it was not Scythians but Chaldeans who threatened with exile the
peoples whom they overran.

V. 18. Yet even in those days--Rede of the Lord--I will not make a
full end of you. 19. And it shall be when they say, For what hath
the Lord our God done to us all these things?--that thou shalt say
to them, Just as ye have left Me and have served foreign gods in
your own land, so shall ye serve strangers in a land not yours.

There follows a poem, verses 20-31, that has nothing to do with the
Scythian series; and that with the preceding prose, with which also it has
no connection, shows us what a conglomeration of Oracles the Book of
Jeremiah is. It seems as though the compiler, searching for a place for
it, had seen the catch-word _harvest_ in the previous Scythian song and,
this one having the same word, he had copied it in here. The Book shows
signs elsewhere of the same mechanical method. But like all the Oracles
this has for its theme the foolish dulness of Israel to their God and His
Word, and the truth that it is their crimes which are the cause of all
their afflictions yet now not in history but in Nature. There is no reason
to doubt that the verses are Jeremiah's, and nothing against our dating
them in the early years of his ministry.

Declare ye this in the House of Jacob, V. 20
Through Judah let it be heard:(232)
Hear ye now this, people most foolish, 21
And void of sense.(233)
[They have eyes but they do not see,
Ears but they hear not.]
Fear ye not Me, Rede of the Lord, 22
Nor tremble before Me?--
Who have set the sand a bound for the sea,
An eternal decree it cannot transgress;
Though (its waters)(234) toss, they shall not prevail,
And its rollers boom, they cannot break over.
Yet this people heart-hard and rebellious, 23
Have swerved and gone off;
For not with their hearts do they say, 24
"Now fear we the Lord our God,
"Who giveth the rain in its season,
The early and latter;
"And the weeks appointed for harvest
Secureth for us."
These have your crimes deranged, 25
Your sins withholden your luck.
For scoundrels are found in My folk, 26
Who prowl with the crouch of a fowler(?)(235)
And set their traps to destroy,
'Tis men they w