Excerpt from A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Vol. 13: Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical, With Special Reference to Ministers and Students; Of the Old Testament: Containing Jeremiah and Lamentations Jeremiah was the most prominent personage in a period of deepest distress and humiliation of the Jewish theocracy. He witnessed one by one the departure of all prospects of a reformation and deliverance from impending national ruin. Profoundly sympathizing with the calamities of his people and country, he is emphatically the prophet of sorrow and affliction. The first quotation from him in the New Testament is "a voice of lamentation and weeping and great mourning" (Matt. ii. 17, 18). In his holy grief over Jerusalem and his bitter persecutions he resembles the life of Christ. Should he, instead of David, be the author of the xxii. Psalm, as Hitzig plausibly conjectures, the resemblance would even be more striking; but the superscription is against it. Standing alone in a hostile world, fearless and immovable, he delivered for forty years his mournful warnings and searching rebukes, dashed the false hopes of his deluded people to the ground, counselled submission instead of resistance, denounced the unfaithful priests and false prophets, and thus brought upon himself the charge of treachery and desertion; yet in the midst of gloom and darkness he held fast to trust in Jehovah, and in the stormy sunset of prophecy he beheld the dawn of a brighter day of a new covenant of the gospel written on the heart (xxxi. 31). He is therefore the prophet of the dispensation of the Spirit (Hebr. viii. 13; x.16, 17). The character and temper of Jeremiah is reflected in his strongly subjective, tender, affecting, elegiac style, which combines the truth of history with the deepest pathos of poetry. It is the language of holy grief and sorrow. Even his prose is "more poetical than poetry, because of its own exceeding tragical simplicity." Jeremiah has proved a sympathizing companion and comforter in seasons of individual suffering and national calamity from the first destruction of Jerusalem down to the siege of Paris in our own day. The elaborate Commentary on Jeremiah and the Lamentations, which appeared in 1868, as a part of Dr. Lange's Bibel-work, was prepared by Dr. C. W. Edward Naegelsbach, pastor in Bayreuth, Bavaria, the author of a Hebrew Grammar, of several small monographs, and important articles in Herzog's Theol. Encyclopaedia. The Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah was translated by the Rev. Samuel R. Asbury, Rector of Trinity Church, Moorestown, N. J. The Commentary on the Lamentations was translated by the Rev. Wm. H. Hornblower, D.D., of Paterson, N. J. Considerable additions, amounting to 147 pages, were made in both works, especially the latter. Dr. Hornblower justly dissents from Dr. Naegelsbach's opinion concerning the authorship of the Lamentations, and defends the old tradition which assigns it to Jeremiah. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."