Throughout thy borders.
Thine heritage thou shalt surrender(442) 4
Which I have given thee,
And thy foes I shall make thee to serve
In a land thou knowest not.
Ye have kindled a fire in my wrath
That for ever shall burn.(443)

These verses, characteristic of Jeremiah, are more so of his earliest
period than of his work in the reign of Jehoiakim, and may have been among
those which he added to his Second Roll. They are succeeded by the
beautiful reflections on the man who does not trust the Lord and on the
man who does, verses 5-8, quoted in a previous lecture.(444) The rest of
the chapter consists of passages personal to himself, to be considered
later, and of an exhortation to keep the Sabbath, verses 19-27, which is
probably post-exilic.(445)

In Ch. XVIII the Parable of the Potter is followed by a metrical Oracle
which has all the marks of Jeremiah's style and repeats the finality of
the doom, to which the nation's forgetfulness of God and idolatry have
brought it. Once more the poet contrasts the constancy of nature with his
people's inconstancy. Neither the metre nor the sense of the text is so
mutilated as some have supposed.

Therefore thus saith the Lord: XVIII. 13
Ask ye now of the nations,
Who heard of the like?
The horror she hath grossly wrought,
Virgin of Israel.
Fails from the mountain rock 14
The snow of Lebanon?
Or the streams from the hills dry up,
The cold flowing streams?(446)
Yet Me have My people forgotten, 15
And burned(447) to vanity,
Stumbling from off their ways,
The tracks of yore,
To straggle along the by-paths,
An unwrought road;
Turning their land to a waste, 16
A perpetual hissing.
All who pass by are appalled,
And shake their heads.
With(448) an east wind strew them I shall, 17
In face of the foe.
My back not my face shall I show them
In their day of disaster.

Personal passages follow in verses 18-23, and in XIX-XX. 6, the Symbol of
the Earthen Jar and the episode of the Prophet's arrest with its
consequences, which we have already considered,(449) and then other
personal passages in XX. 7-18. Ch. XXI. 1-10 is from the reign of
Sedekiah; 11, 12 are a warning to the royal house of unknown date, and 13,
14 a sentence upon a certain stronghold, which in this connection ought to
be Jerusalem, but cannot be because