To all this the Divine answer is stern and decisive. _And Iahvah said unto me: If Moses and Samuel were to stand_ (pleading) _before Me, My mind would not be towards this people: send them away from before Me_ (dismiss them from My Presence), _that they may go forth_! After ages remembered Jeremiah as a mighty intercessor, and the brave Maccabeus could see him in his dream as a grey-haired man "exceeding glorious" and "of a wonderful and excellent majesty," who "prayed much for the people and for the holy city" (2 Macc. xv. 14). And the beauty of the prayers which lie like scattered pearls of faith and love among the prophet's soliloquies is evident at a glance. But here Jeremiah himself is conscious that his prayers are unavailing; and that the office to which God has called him is rather that of pronouncing judgment than of interceding for mercy. Even a Moses or a Samuel, the mighty intercessors of the old heroic times, whose pleadings had been irresistible with God, would now plead in vain (Ex. xvii. 11 _sqq._, xxxii. 11 _sqq._; Num. xiv. 13 _sqq._ for Moses; 1 Sam. vii. 9 _sqq._, xii. 16 _sqq._; Ps. xcix. 6; Ecclus. xlvi. 16 _sqq._ for Samuel). The day of grace has gone, and the day of doom is come. His sad function is to "send them away" or "let them go" from Iahvah's Presence; to pronounce the decree of their banishment from the holy land where His temple is, and where they have been wont to "see His face." The main part of his commission was "to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to overthrow" (i. 10). _And if they say unto thee, Whither are we to go forth? Thou shalt say unto them, thus hath Iahvah said: They that belong to the Death_ (_i.e._ the Plague; as the Black Death was spoken of in medieval Europe) _to death; and they that belong to_ _the Sword, to the sword; and they that belong to the Famine, to famine; and they that belong to Captivity, to captivity!_ The people were to "go forth" out of their own land, which was, as it were, the Presence-chamber of Iahvah, just as they had at the outset of their history gone forth out of Egypt, to take possession of it. The words convey a sentence of exile, though they do not indicate the place of banishment. The menace of woe is as general in its terms as that lurid passage of the Book of the Law upon which it appears to be founded (Deut. xxviii. 21-26). The time for the accomplishment of those terrible threatenings "is nigh, even at the doors." On the other hand, Ezekiel's "four sore judgments" (Ezek. xiv. 21) were suggested by this passage of Jeremiah.