Grace have they found in the desert, XXXI. 2 The people escaped from the sword; While Israel makes for his rest from afar The Lord appears to him(629): 3 “With a love from of old I have loved thee, So in troth I (now) draw thee.(630) “I will rebuild thee, and built shalt thou be, 4 Maiden of Israel! “Again thou shalt take(631) thee thy timbrels And forth to the merrymen’s dances. “Again shall vineyards be planted(632) 5 On the hills of Samaria, “Planters shall surely plant them(?) And forthwith enjoy(633) (their fruit). “For comes the day when watchmen are calling 6 On Ephraim’s mountains: “Rise, let us go up to Ṣion, To the Lord our God.” The everyday happiness promised is striking. Here speaks again the man, who, while ruin ran over the land, redeemed his ancestral acres in pledge of the resettlement of all his people upon their own farms and fields. He is back in the country, upon the landscapes of his youth, and in this fresh prospect of the restoration of Israel he puts first the common joys and fruitful labours of rural life, and only after these the national worship centred in Jerusalem. Cornill denies this last verse to Jeremiah, feeling it inconsistent with the Prophet’s condemnation of the Temple and the Sacrifices.(634) But that condemnation had been uttered by Jeremiah because of his contemporaries’ sinful use of the House of God, whereas now he is looking into a new dispensation. How could he more signally clinch the promise of that reunion of Israel and Judah, for which all his life he had longed, than by this call to them to worship together? The next verses are not so recognisable as Jeremiah’s, unless it be in their last couplet. The rest rather reflect the Return from Exile as on the point of coming to pass, which happened long after Jeremiah’s time; and they call the nation _Jacob_, the name favoured by prophets of the end of the Exile. [Ring out with joy for Jacob, 7 Shout for (?) the head of the nations,(635) Publish ye, praise ye and say, The Lord hath saved His(636) people, The Remnant of Israel! Behold from the North I bring them, 8 And gather from ends of the earth; Their blind and their lame together, The mother-to-be and her who hath borne. In concourse great back they come hither. With weeping forth did they go,(637) 9 With consolations(638) I bring them, I lead them by(639) streams of water, On an even way, They stumble not on it](640) For a father I am become to Israel, And my first-born is Ephraim! This couplet may well be Jeremiah’s; but whether it should immediately follow verse 6 is doubtful. The next lines are hardly his, bearing the same marks of the late exile as we have seen in verses 7-9_a_.