The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

82 THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
with Ezekiel.^ Similarly the " perfection of beauty "
ascribed to the daughter of Jerusalem in the second
elegy ^ reminds us of the similar phrase that occurs
more than once in Ezekiel.^ Still, that prophet wrote
before the time to which the Lamentations introduce
us, and it cannot be affirmed that Jeremiah could not
have seen his writings, or would not have condescended
to echo a phrase from them. A difficulty of a broader
character must be felt in the fact that the poems them-
selves give us no hint of Jeremiah. The appearance
of the five elegies in the Hagiographa without any
introductory notice is a grave objection to the theory
of a Jeremiah authorship. If so famous a prophet
had composed them, would not this have been re-
corded ? Even in the Septuagint, where they are
associated with Jeremiah, they are not translated by
the same hand as the version of the prophet's acknow-
ledged works. It may be that none of the objections
which have been adduced against the later tradition
can be called final ; nor when regarded in their total
force do they absolutely forbid the possibility that
Jeremiah was the author of the Lamentations. But
then the question is not so much one of possibility as
one of probability. We must remember that we are
dealing with anonymous poems that make no claim
upon any particular author, and that we have no pleas
whatever, special or more general, on which to defend
the guesses of a much later and quite uncritical age,
when people cultivated a habit of attaching every shred
of literature that had come down from their ancestors
to some famous name.
E.g. Ezek. xii. 24, xiii. 6, 7, xxii. 28.
^ Ezek. xxvii. 3, xxviii. 12,
'^ Lam. ii. 15.