NOTES for Bar 4:8

What do Baruch's words about the "grief of Jerusalem" mean? What the prophet says about God is, in general, understandable: many prophets spoke about the people of God forgetting the One who had made them a people. But what is the "grief of Jerusalem"? One could, of course, think that this refers to the Temple, the place of God's presence, and that the abominations that sometimes took place in the city, in effect before the face of God, naturally brought Him no joy. But is that all?

It is enough to recall the general and spiritual situation in the city shortly before the Babylonian invasion. There was no question of repentance, no question of turning back. On the contrary, everyone was seized by a certain astonishing spiritual and everyday frivolity, so that none of the inhabitants took seriously the danger hanging over the city. They easily yielded to the promises of the many "prophets" who appeared in the city and promised a miraculous victory over all enemies.

The basis for such attitudes was a badly understood and distorted Yahwist tradition. The roots of the problem apparently went back to the persecutions that fell on the followers of Isaiah of Jerusalem, sometimes called "the poor," during Manasseh's reign. Then the Yahwist community of the city was, in effect, split into two parts: one supported the authorities, while the other was persecuted. Such a betrayal of fellow believers, of course, did not remain without spiritual consequences. Over the following century, the spiritual level of Jerusalem's Yahwist community fell quite noticeably and sharply. Ancient, pre-Yahwist legends about the city's enchanted walls, which would withstand any siege, became part of the mass religious consciousness. So did confidence in their own orthodoxy, the belief that God would never abandon Jerusalem, which after Josiah's religious reform had become the only place on earth where Yahwist sacrifices were possible. With all this, the city's residents saw themselves as heirs, bearers, and continuers of a great tradition going back to Moses and David, believing that for this it was enough simply to be born a Jew and to come to the Temple several times a year to offer the required sacrifices, which ended in lavish and cheerful celebration.

Such degeneration of a truly great tradition, such turning of the holy city into a caricature of itself, naturally could not bring joy either to God or to the few righteous people who still remained in Jerusalem. Against this background, the catastrophe that befell Judah becomes an entirely natural event: given the people's spiritual condition on the eve of the Babylonian captivity, nothing else could be expected.