can be no new dispensation without a reckoning of what’ s been lost. 10 Jeremiah had warned Zedekiah that Judah would fall 11 to the Babylonians, a message which cost him his freedom. Having been proven correct, he could have left the court of the prison and joined the exiled Judean elite. Instead, Jeremiah wished only to sit by the ruins of the destroyed sanctuary – much as Yehuda Halevy desired in his odes to Zion.
All these emotions seem encapsulated in this painting. While there are other great seventeenth-century artists, Rembrandt van Rijn 12 had no contemporary equal as an interpreter of the biblical text in hundreds of sketches, etchings, and oils. His biblical art has engendered a sea of scholarship. Rembrandt’ s“ Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem” is dated 1630. Although most of his biblical paintings come from the 1650s,“ Jeremiah” shows that the young painter has already mastered the techniques of chiaroscuro, impasto, and presentation in a dark manner that give his works unique emotional and psychological power.( His Dutch contemporary Baruch Spinoza was also only twenty-four when he was excommunicated). While the Temple fires still burn off-center, certainly the historically significant event, Rembrandt focuses our attention on the aged Jeremiah, lamenting the inevitable consequences of the very falling away from God that he had spent decades condemning. But the face expresses sorrow and desolation, not anger. Jeremiah is regarded by Rembrandt( I think rightly) as an intensely solitary mourner. With the left half of his face darkened and lying on an open palm with an arm that rests on a tome( anachronistically) labelled Bible, the right half of his face and balding head catch a glimmer of light.
10
“ Old Hearts and New Covenants” in Michael Morgan, ed., The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim( Detroit: Wayne State, 1987).
11
Jer 34:1-3
12
1606-1669
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