And, referring to his signal deliverance, "Thou that shewedst me many and sore troubles, Thou makest me live again; And out of the deeps of the earth again Thou bringest me up." The allusion in the 90th Psalm, as well as the case of Barzillai, who is described as extremely old and decrepit at fourscore (2 Sam. xix. 33), proves that life in ancient Palestine did not ordinarily transcend the limits of seventy to eighty years. Still, after all that may be urged to the contrary, Jeremiah may have been an exception to his contemporaries in this, as in most other respects. Indeed, his protracted labours and sufferings seem almost to imply that he was endowed with constitutional vigour and powers of endurance above the average of men; and if, as some suppose, he wrote the book of Job in Egypt, to embody the fruits of his life's experience and reflexion, as well as arranged and edited his other writings, it is evident that he must have sojourned among the exiles in that country for a considerable time. The tale is told. In meagre and broken outline I have laid before you the known facts of a life which must always possess permanent interest, not only for the student of religious development, but for all men who are stirred by human passion, and stimulated by human thought. And fully conscious as I am of failure in the attempt to reanimate the dry bones of history, to give form and colour and movement to the shadows of the past; I shall not have spent my pains for nought, if I have awakened in a single heart some spark of living interest in the heroes of old; some enthusiasm for the martyrs of faith; some secret yearning to cast in their own lot with those who have fought the battle of truth and righteousness and to share with the saints departed in the victory that overcometh the world. And even if in this also I have fallen short of the mark, these desultory and imperfect sketches of a good man's life and work will not have been wholly barren of result, if they lead any one of my readers to renewed study of that truly sacred text which preserves to all time the living utterances of this last of the greater prophets. FOOTNOTES: [1] The same root is used in the Targ. on i. 15 for _setting_ or fixing thrones, cf. Dan. vii. 9: (רְמִיו) [2] Clem. Alex., _Strom._, I., § 120. [3] At least seven times. [4] Hitzig. [5] i. 6. [6] i. 2, xxv. 3. [7] נער _puer_; (1) Ex. ii. 6, of a three months' babe; (2) of a young man up to about the twentieth year, Gen. xxxiv. 19, of Shechem ben Hamor; 1 Kings iii. 7, of Solomon, as here. [8] Hitzig, _Vorbemerkungen_. [9] The Cimmerians are the Gomer of Scripture, the Gimirrâ'a of the cuneiform inscriptions. [10] Ewald, _Die Psalmen_, 165. [11] Zeph. ii. 4 _sqq._, תהיה עזובה עזה ... תעקר עקרון [12] התורה ספר, 2 Kings xxii. 8; הברית ספר, 2 Kings xxiii. 2.