xxxvii.-xliv., and chap. xlvi. 13-28) contains historical matter, and predictions about Egypt, but concludes with the usual promise of the ultimate return of the Jewish nation to its ancestral home.
The last chapter of Jeremiah is purely historical, and, like the historical portions of Isaiah, need not be considered under the prophets; but it must be noted that chaps. l. and li. are not by Jeremiah, being the work of a much later writer, who lived in Palestine, and who composed them to show that the words of the genuine Jeremiah were fulfilled in the destruction of Babylon by the Medes, which was taking place at this time (P. A. B., vol. iii. p. 140 ff). The small Book of Lamentations over the unhappy fate of Jerusalem, ascribed to Jeremiah, is an artistic attempt to embody the grief of the writer in a song of which each verse begins with a new letter, in alphabetical order.
We pass now to the prophet Ezekiel, a Jew who was taken into captivity with Jehoiachin, and lived at a small town of Mosopotamia. He felt the first prophetic impulses in the fifth year of the Captivity (Ib., vol. ii. p. 322 ff). At this time the heavens were opened; he saw visions, and the word of the Lord came expressly to him. Such was the nature of his consecration. The first section of Ezekiel extends from chap. i. to xxiv., and contains utterances about Israel before the destruction of Jerusalem. The second section (chap. xxv.-xxxii.) deals with foreign nations, and the third (chap. xxxiii.-xlviii.) holds out promises of restoration.
Ezekiel is very inferior to his great predecessors, Isaiah and Jeremiah. He has neither the fervid, manly oratory of the first nor the pathetic, though rather soft and feminine flow of the second. He takes pleasure in rather course images, such as that of the bread baked with human dung (Ezek. iv), that of Jehovah with his two concubines, who bore him sons and vexed him with their licentious conduct (Ezek. xxiii), or that of the child whose naval was not cut, who grew up into a woman, over whom Jehovah spread his skirt and covered her nakedness (Ezek. xvi. 8). And in general, Ezekiel is particularly prone to teaching by means of similes and illustrations. Sometime he sees visions in which God explains his meaning; at other times
