ty of his
moods--now sombre, stern and relentless, now tender and pleading, now in
despair of his people yet identifying himself with them--was this rural
poet, who was called to carry the burdens of prophecy through forty of the
most critical and disastrous years of Israel's history. In next lecture we
shall follow the earlier stages which his great heart pursued beneath
those burdens.

Lecture III.

THE PROPHET--HIS YOUTH AND HIS CALL.

Jeremiah was born soon after 650 B.C. of a priestly house at Anathoth, a
village in the country of Benjamin near Jerusalem. Just before his birth
Egypt and the small states of Palestine broke from allegiance to Assyria.
War was imminent, and it may have been because of some hope in Israel of
Divine intervention that several children born about the time received the
name Yirmyahu--_Yahweh hurls_ or _shoots_.(94) The boy's name and his
father's, Hilkiah, _Yahweh my portion_,(95) are tokens of the family's
loyalty to the God of Israel, at a time when the outburst in Jewry of a
very different class of personal names betrays on the part of many a lapse
from the true faith, and when the loyal remnant of the people were being
persecuted by King Manasseh. Probably the family were descended from Eli.
For Abiathar, the last of that descent to hold office as Priest of the
Ark, had an ancestral estate at Anathoth, to which he retired upon his
dismissal by Solomon.(96) The child of such a home would be brought up
under godly influence and in high family traditions, with which much of
the national history was interwoven. It may have been from his father that
Jeremiah gained that knowledge of Israel's past, of her ideal days in the
desert, of her subsequent declensions, and of the rallying prophecies of
the eighth century, which is manifest in his earlier Oracles. Some have
claimed a literary habit for the stock of Abiathar.(97) Yet the first
words of God to Jeremiah--_before I formed thee in the body I knew thee,
and before thou camest forth from the womb I hallowed thee_(98)--as well as
the singular originality he developed, rather turn us away from his family
traditions and influence.

What is more significant, for its effects appear over all his earlier
prophecies, is the country-side on which the boy was born and reared.

Anathoth, which still keeps its ancient name Anata, is a little village
not four miles north-north-east of Jerusalem, upon the fi