urn from Exile or from after the Return that they seem to be based on
the latter. In any case they reflect the situation and feelings of Israel
in Babylonia about 540 B.C. Some find place in our Book among the earlier
Oracles of Jeremiah,(29) others in his later,(30) but the most in the
group of Oracles on Foreign Nations.(31) And, finally, there are the long
extracts from the Second Book of Kings, bringing, as I have said, the
history down to at least 561.(32)

All these, then, we lay aside, so far as our search for Jeremiah himself
and his doctrine is concerned, and we do so the more easily that they are
largely devoid of the style and the spiritual value of his undoubted
Oracles and Discourses. They are more or less diffuse and vagrant, while
his are concise and to the point. They do not reveal, as his do, a man
fresh from agonising debates with God upon the poverty of his
qualifications for the mission to which God calls him, or upon the
contents of that mission, or upon his own sufferings and rights; nor do
they recount his adventures with his contemporaries. They are not the
outpourings of a single soul but rather the expression of the feelings of
a generation or of the doctrines of a school. We have in our Bible other
and better utterances of the truths, questions, threats and hopes which
they contain.

But once more--in what remains of the Book, what belongs to Jeremiah
himself or to his time, we have again proofs of compilation from more
sources than one. Some of this is in verse--among the finest in the Old
Testament--some in prose orations; some in simple narrative. Some Oracles
are introduced by the Prophet himself, and he utters them in the first
person, some are reported of him by others. And any chronological or
topical order lasts only through groups of prophecies or narratives.
Fortunately, however, included among these are more than one account of
how the writing of them and the collection of them came about.

In 604-603 B.C., twenty-one, or it may have been twenty-three, years after
Jeremiah had begun to prophesy, the history of Western Asia rose to a
crisis. Pharaoh Necoh who had marched north to the Euphrates was defeated
in a battle for empire by Nebuchadrezzar, son of the King of Babylon. From
the turmoil of nations which filled the period Babylon emerged as that
executioner of the Divine judgments on the world, whom Jeremiah since 627
or 625 had been describing generally as _out of the North_. H