enuine. That was sound history, and in the
circumstances of the day it was also sound sense.

3. The Siege. (XXI, XXXII-XXXIV, XXXVII, XXXVIII.)

History has no harder test for the character and doctrine of a great
teacher than the siege of his city. Instances beyond the Bible are those
of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, 212 B.C., Pope Innocent the First
in that of Rome by Alaric, 417 A.D., and John Knox in that of St. Andrews
by the French, 1547. A siege brings the prophet's feet as low as the feet
of the crowd. He shares the dangers, the duties of defence, the last
crusts. His hunger, and, what is still keener, his pity for those who
suffer it with him, may break his faith into cowardice and superstition.
But if faith stands, and common-sense with it, his opportunities are high.
His powers of spiritual vision may prove to be also those of political and
even of military foresight, and either inspire the besieged to a
victorious resistance, or compel himself, alone in a cityful of fanatics,
to counsel surrender. A siege can turn a prophet or quiet thinker into a
hero.

The Old Testament gives us three instances--Elisha's brave visions during
the Syrian blockade of Dothan and siege of Samaria; Isaiah, upon the
solitary strength of his faith, carrying Jerusalem inviolate through her
siege by the Assyrians; and now a century later Jeremiah, with a more
costly courage, counselling her surrender to the Babylonians.

The records of the Prophet's activity and sufferings during the siege are
so curiously scattered through the Book and furnished with such headlines
as to leave it clear that they were added at different times and possibly
from different sources. Some of them raise the question whether or not
they are doublets.

Three, XXI. 1-10, XXXIV. 1-7, XXXVII. 3-10, bear pronouncements by
Jeremiah that the city must surrender or be stormed and burned. Of these
the first and third each gives as the occasion of the pronouncement it
quotes, Sedekiah's mission of two men to the Prophet. Several critics
regard these missions as identical. But can we doubt that during that
crisis of two years the distracted king would send more than once for a
Divine word? And for this what moments were so natural as when the
Chaldeans were beginning the siege, XXI. 4, and when they raised it,
XXXVII. 5? That one of the two messengers is on each occasion the same
affords an inadequate reason--and no other exists--for arguing that