The invasion of Western Asia by the Scythians happened some time between 627 and 620 B.C.203 The following series of brief poems unfold the panic actually caused, or to the Prophet's imagination likely to be caused, in Judah by the advance of these marauding hordes, and clearly reflect their appearance and manner of raiding. It is indeed doubtful that Judah was visited by the Scythians, who appear to have swept only the maritime plain of Palestine. And once more we must remember that when the Prophet dictated his early Oracles to Baruch for the second time in 604, and added to them many more like words,204 the impending enemy from the North was no longer the Scythians but Nebuchadrezzar and his Chaldeans; for this will explain features of the poems that are not suited to the Scythians and their peculiar warfare, which avoided the siege of fortified towns but kept to the open country [pg 111] and the ruin of its villages and fields. Jeremiah does not give the feared invaders a name. The Scythians were utterly new to his world; yet their name may have occurred in the poems as originally delivered and have been removed in 604, when the Scythians were no longer a force to be reckoned with.205

1. As it has reached us, the First Scythian Song, Ch. IV. 5-8, opens with the general formula—

which may be the addition of a later hand, but is as probably Jeremiah's own; for the capital, though not likely to be besieged by the Scythians, was just as concerned with their threatened invasion as the country folk, to whom, in the first [pg 112] place, the lines are addressed. The trump or horn of the first line was the signal of alarm, kept ready by the watchman of every village, as Amos and Joel indicate.206

These lines are followed by a verse with an introduction to itself, and therefore too separate from the context, and indeed too general to have belonged to so vivid a song:—

4. The Fourth Scythian Song follows immediately, also without introduction. The first four couplets vividly describe the flight of the peasantry, [pg 117] actual or imagined, before the invaders. The rest seems addressed to the City as though being threatened she sought to reduce her foes with a woman's wiles, only to find that it was not her love but her life they were after, and so expired at their hands in despair. All this is more suitable to the Chaldean than to the Scythian invasion, and may be one of the Prophet's additions in 604 to his earlier Oracles. However we take it, the figure is of Jeremiah's boldest and most vivid. The irony is keen.

The next poem, Ch. V. 1-13, says little of the Scythians, possibly only in verse 6, but details the moral reasons for the doom with which they threatened the people. It describes the Prophet's search through Jerusalem for an honest, God-fearing man and his failure to find one. Hence the fresh utterance of judgment. Perjury and whoredom are rife, with a callousness to chastisement already inflicted. Some have relegated Jeremiah's visit to the capital to a year after 621-20 when the deuteronomic reforms had begun and Josiah had removed the rural priests to the Temple.220 But, as we have seen, Anathoth lay so near to Jerusalem, and intercourse between them was naturally so constant, that Jeremiah may well have gained the following experience before he left his village for residence in the city. The position of the poem among the Scythian Songs, along with the possible allusion to the Scythians [pg 119] in verse 6, suggests a date before 620. There is no introduction.

5. The Fifth Song upon the Scythians, Ch. V. 15-17, besides still leaving them nameless, emphasises their strangeness to Israel's world. There was a common language in Western Asia, Aramean, the lingua franca of traders from Nineveh to Memphis; and Jew, Assyrian and Egyptian conversed in it. But the tongue of these raiders from over the Caucasus was unintelligible. Yet how they would set their teeth into the land! Mixed with the verses which thus describe them are others which suit not them but the Chaldeans and must have been added by the Prophet in 604. A people so new to the Jews might hardly have been called by Jeremiah an ancient nation, from of old a nation, and in fact these phrases are wanting in the Greek version.

The last couplet is unsuitable to the Scythians, incapable as they were of sieges and avoiding fortified towns—though once they rushed Askalon. It is probably, therefore, another of 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.

6. In the Sixth Song on the Scythians, VI. 1-5, which also is given without introduction, Jerusalem is threatened—even Jerusalem to which in the previous songs the country-folk had been bidden to fly for shelter—and the foes are described in the attempt to rush her, as they rushed Askalon according to Herodotus. That they are represented as faltering and no success is predicted for them, and also that they are called shepherds, are signs that it is the Scythians, though still nameless, who are meant in verses 3-5. The next three verses, separately introduced, point rather to [pg 126] a Chaldean invasion by their picture of besiegers throwing up a mound against the walls, and may therefore be one of the additions to his earlier Oracles made by the Prophet, when in 604 the enemy from the North was clearly seen to be Nebuchadrezzar, with the siege-trains familiar to us from the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments; upon which are represented just such a hewing of timber and heaping of mounds against a city's walls.

Here follows another and separately introduced Oracle:—

Still another Oracle which gives no glimpse of the Scythians, but threatens a vague disaster and once more states the moral reasons for Judah's doom. Its allusion to incense and sacrifices is no reason for dating it after the discovery of Deuteronomy.250

None of the foregoing brief and separate Oracles diverts from the moral theme of all these earlier utterances of the Prophet, that Judah's afflictions, whether from Nature or from invaders, are due to her own wickedness. And this record even the foreign peoples are called to witness—another proof that from the first Jeremiah had a sense of a mission to the nations as well as to his own countrymen.

7. There follows the Seventh, the last of the Songs which may be referred to the Scythian invasion, Ch. VI. 22-26. It repeats the distance from which, in the fateful North, those hordes have been stirred to their work of judgment, their [pg 131] ruthlessness and terrific tumult, the panic they produce, and bitter mourning. The usual formula introduces the verses.

This is the last of Jeremiah's Oracles on the Scythians. There is little or no doubt of their date—before 621-20. What knowledge of this new people and their warfare the Prophet displays! What conscience of the ethical purpose of the Lord of Hosts in threatening Judah with them! Yet some still refuse to credit the story of his Call, that from the first he heard himself appointed as a prophet to the nations.257

This section of Jeremiah's earlier Oracles concludes with one addressed to himself, Ch. VI. 27-30. It describes the task assigned him during the most of his time under Josiah, whether before the discovery and promulgation of the Book of the Law in 621-20, or subsequently to this while he watched the nation's new endeavour to repent and reform. During the years from 621-20 till 608 when Josiah was defeated and slain at Megiddo, there can have been but little for him to do except to follow, as his searching eyes and detached mind alone in Israel could follow, the great venture of Judah in obedience to the Book of the Law. For this interval the outside world had ceased to threaten Israel. The Assyrian control of her was relaxed: the people of God were free, and had their first opportunity for over a century to work out their own salvation.

To take these lines as subsequent to the institution of Deuteronomy and expressive of the judgment of the Prophet upon the failure of the reformation under Josiah to reach the depth of a real repentance,261 is unnecessary. The young [pg 134] Jeremiah had already tested his people and in his earliest Oracles reached conclusions as hopeless as that here. At least he had already been called to test the people; and in next section we shall see how he continued to fulfil his duty after the discovery of Deuteronomy, and onwards through the attempts at reformation which it inspired.