Consider ye, and call for the mourning women Consider the evil circumstances you are in, which call for mourning and lamentation: and since you yourselves are not sufficiently affected with the dangers that threaten you, send for those women whose profession it is to mourn at funerals, and upon other sorrowful occasions, and let their lamentations excite true sorrow in you. The prophet seems here to compare the Jewish state to a person dead, and going to be buried, and therefore calls upon the people to send for those who used to be hired to make lamentations and wailings at funerals. The reader will observe, “it was an ancient custom of the Hebrews, at funerals, and on other like occasions, to make use of hired mourners, whose profession it was to exhibit in public all the signs and gestures of immoderate and frantic grief, and by their loud outcries and doleful songs to excite a real passion of sorrow in others. Women were generally employed in this office, either because it was an office more suitable to the softness of a female mind, or because the more tender passions being predominant in that sex, they succeeded better in their parts; nor were there ever wanting those artists well instructed in the discipline of mourning, and ready to hire out their lamentations and tears on any emergency. It was the chief excellence of other arts to imitate nature; it was likewise esteemed so in this; their funeral dirges, therefore, were composed in imitation of those which had been poured forth by genuine and sincere grief. Their sentences were short, querulous, pathetic, simple, and unadorned; somewhat laboured indeed, because they were composed in metre, and to be sung to the pipe, as we learn from Matthew 9:23; and from Homer,” where, speaking of Hector's funeral, he says, Παρα δ ' εισαν αοιδους,
Θρηνων εξαρχους, οιτε σονοεσσαν αοιδην,
Οι μεν αρ ' εθρηνεον, επι δε σεναχοντο γυναικες. ILIAD, Ω. 720.
A melancholy choir attend around, With plaintive sighs, and music's solemn sound; Alternately they sing, alternate flow Th' obedient tears, melodious in their wo. See POPE'S IL., book 24. ver. 900.
Jerome tells us, in his comment on this verse, that the practice was continued in Judea down to his days; “That women, at funerals, with dishevelled hair, and naked breasts, endeavoured, in a modulated voice, to unite others in lamentation with them.” Frequent allusions to this custom are to be met with in Scripture, particularly 2 Chronicles 35:25, where the singing men and singing women are said to have made it a constant rule, after King Josiah's death, to commemorate that excellent prince in all their future dirges or lamentations, as one in whom the public in general had sustained an irreparable loss. Such were the mourners, mentioned Ecclesiastes 12:5, and said to go about the streets; and those whom Amos calls, יודעי נהי, skilful of lamentation; Amos 5:16. And such no doubt were the minstrels and the people making a noise; οχλον θορυβουμενον, whom our Saviour found in the house of the ruler of the synagogue, whose daughter was just dead; who, St. Mark says, wept and wailed greatly, κλαιοντας και αλαλαζοντας πολλα, Mark 5:38. There are especially several traces of this custom to be met with in the prophets, who frequently delivered their predictions of approaching calamities in the form of funeral dirges. The poem before us, from Jeremiah 9:19-22, is both an illustration and confirmation of this, and worthy of the reader's frequent perusal, on account of its affecting pathos, moral sentiments, and fine images; particularly in Jeremiah 9:21, where death is described in as animated a prosopopœia as can be conceived. See Lowth's Prelec., Calmet, and Blaney.