Whether this piece of prose be from Jeremiah himself or from another is uncertain and of no importance. It is a true statement of his own interpretation of the cause of his people’s doom. The next Oracle addressed to the nation is upon King Jeconiah, or Koniyahu. I follow mainly the Greek. Up to Lebánon and cry, XXII. 20 Give forth thy voice in Bashán, And cry from Abarîm(453) that broken Be all thy lovers. I spake to thee in thy prosperity, 21 Thou saidst, I hear not! This was thy way from thy youth, Not to hark to My Voice. All thy shepherds the wind shall shepherd, 22 Thy lovers go captive. Then shamed shalt thou be and confounded For all thine ill-doing. Thou in Lebánon that dwellest, 23 Nested on cedars, How shalt thou groan(454) when come on thee pangs, Anguish as hers that beareth. As I live—’t is the Rede of the Lord— 24 Though Konyahu were Upon My right hand the signet, Thence would I tear him.(455) 25. And I shall give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life and into the hand of them thou dreadest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans; [26] and I will hurl thee out, and thy mother who bare thee, upon another land, where ye were not born, and there shall ye die. 27. And to the land, towards which they shall be lifting their soul,(456) they shall not return. Is Konyahu then despised, 28 Like a nauseous vessel? Why is he flung and cast out On a land he knows not? Land, Land, Land, 29 Hear the Word of the Lord! Write this man down as childless, 30 A fellow ...(?) For none of his seed shall flourish Seated on David’s throne, Or ruling still in Judah.(457) We can reasonably deny to Jeremiah nothing of all this passage, not even the prose by which the metre is interrupted. We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pass from verse to prose and again from prose to verse. Nor are the repetitions superfluous, not even that four-fold _into the hand of_ in the prose section, for at each recurrence of the phrase we feel the grip of their captor closing more fast upon the doomed king and people. Nor are we required to take the pathetic words, _the land to which they shall be lifting up their soul_, as true only of those who have been long banished. For the exiles to Babylon felt this home-sickness from the very first, as Jeremiah well knew. * * * * * If we are to trust the date given by its title—and no sufficient reason exists against our doing so—there is still an Oracle of Jeremiah, which, though now standing far down in our Book, Ch. XLV, belongs to the reign of Jehoiakim, and is properly a supplement to the story of the writing of the Rolls by Baruch in 605.(458) The text has suffered, probably more than we can now detect.