The Expositor's Bible: The First Book of Kings
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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The First Book of Kings
Author: F. W. Farrar
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: June 7, 2013 [eBook #42891]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE FIRST BOOK OF KINGS ***
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
_Editor of "The Expositor"_
THE FIRST BOOK OF KINGS
BY
F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
=London=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCIII
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE.
_Crown 8vo, cloth, price 7s. 6d. each vol._
FIRST SERIES, 1887-8.
Colossians.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D.
St. Mark.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh.
Genesis.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
1 Samuel.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
2 Samuel.
By the Same Author.
Hebrews.
By Principal T. C. EDWARDS, D.D.
SECOND SERIES, 1888-9.
Galatians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Pastoral Epistles.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Isaiah I.--XXXIX.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. I.
The Book of Revelation.
By Prof. W. MILLIGAN, D.D.
1 Corinthians.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
The Epistles of St. John.
By Rt. Rev. W. ALEXANDER, D.D.
THIRD SERIES, 1889-90.
Judges and Ruth.
By Rev. R. A. WATSON, D.D.
Jeremiah.
By Rev. C. J. BALL, M.A.
Isaiah XL.--LXVI.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. II.
St. Matthew.
By Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.
Exodus.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh.
St. Luke.
By Rev. H. BURTON, B.A.
FOURTH SERIES, 1890-1.
Ecclesiastes.
By Rev. SAMUEL COX, D.D.
St. James and St. Jude.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Proverbs.
By Rev. R. F. HORTON, M.A.
Leviticus.
By Rev. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D.
The Gospel of St. John.
By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. I.
The Acts of the Apostles.
By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. I.
FIFTH SERIES, 1891-2.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. I.
1 and 2 Thessalonians.
By JAS. DENNEY, B.D.
The Book of Job.
By R. A. WATSON, D.D.
Ephesians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Gospel of St. John.
By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. II.
The Acts of the Apostles.
By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. II.
SIXTH SERIES, 1892-3.
1 Kings.
By Ven. Archdeacon FARRAR.
Philippians.
By Principal RAINY, D.D.
Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.
By Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.
Joshua.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
Daniel.
By Prof. FULLER, M.A.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. II.
THE
FIRST BOOK OF KINGS
F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; ARCHDEACON OF
WESTMINSTER
=London=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCIII
_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
_INTRODUCTION._
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE HIGHER CRITICISM 3
CHAPTER II.
THE BOOKS OF KINGS 14
CHAPTER III.
THE HISTORIAN OF THE KINGS 30
CHAPTER IV.
GOD IN HISTORY 39
CHAPTER V.
HISTORY WITH A PURPOSE 46
CHAPTER VI.
LESSONS OF THE HISTORY 50
BOOK II.
_DAVID AND SOLOMON._
CHAPTER VII.
DAVID'S DECREPITUDE 61
1 KINGS i. 1-4.
CHAPTER VIII.
AN EASTERN COURT AND HOME 70
1 KINGS i.
CHAPTER IX.
ADONIJAH'S REBELLION 81
1 KINGS i. 5-53.
CHAPTER X.
DAVID'S DEATH-BED 94
1 KINGS ii. 1-11.
CHAPTER XI.
AVENGING JUSTICE 105
1 KINGS ii. 13-46.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BOY-KING'S WISDOM 120
1 KINGS iii. 5-28.
CHAPTER XIII.
SOLOMON'S COURT AND KINGDOM 134
1 KINGS iv. 1-34.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE TEMPLE 149
1 KINGS v., vi., vii.
CHAPTER XV.
THE IDEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TEMPLE 172
1 KINGS vii. 13-51; viii. 12-61.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ARK AND THE CHERUBIM 177
1 KINGS vi. 23-30; viii. 6-11.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE GRADUAL GROWTH OF THE LEVITIC RITUAL 186
1 KINGS viii. 1-66.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TEMPLE WORSHIP 193
1 KINGS viii. 1-11.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE TEMPLE SACRIFICES 202
1 KINGS viii. 62-66, ix. 25.
CHAPTER XX.
SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY 222
1 KINGS x. 1-29.
CHAPTER XXI.
HOLLOW PROSPERITY 230
1 KINGS xi.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE OLD AGE OF SOLOMON 239
1 KINGS xi. 1-13.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND 250
1 KINGS xi. 14-41.
BOOK III.
_THE DIVIDED KINGDOM._
B.C. 937-889.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A NEW REIGN. B.C. 937 269
1 KINGS xii. 1-5.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE DISRUPTION 275
1 KINGS xii. 6-20.
CHAPTER XXVI.
"JEROBOAM THE SON OF NEBAT, WHO MADE ISRAEL
TO SIN." B.C. 937-915 286
1 KINGS xii. 21-23.
CHAPTER XXVII.
JEROBOAM, AND THE MAN OF GOD 296
1 KINGS xiii. 1-34.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
DOOM OF THE HOUSE OF NEBAT 302
1 KINGS xiv. 1-20.
CHAPTER XXIX.
NADAB; BAASHA; ELAH. B.C. 915-889 309
1 KINGS xv. 25; xvi. 10.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE EARLIER KINGS OF JUDAH. B.C. 937-851 313
1 KINGS xiv. 21-31; xv. 1-24.
CHAPTER XXXI.
JEHOSHAPHAT. B.C. 876-851 327
1 KINGS xxii. 41-50.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE KINGS OF ISRAEL FROM ZIMRI TO AHAB. B.C.
889-877 337
1 KINGS xvi. 11-34.
BOOK IV.
_AHAB AND ELIJAH._
B.C. 877-855.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
KING AHAB AND QUEEN JEZEBEL 347
1 KINGS xvi. 29-34.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
ELIJAH 357
1 KINGS xvii. 1-7.
CHAPTER XXXV.
ELIJAH AT SAREPTA 372
1 KINGS xvii. 7-xviii. 19.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
ELIJAH AND AHAB 377
1 KINGS xviii. 1-20.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
ELIJAH ON MOUNT CARMEL 383
1 KINGS xviii. 20-40.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE RAIN 399
1 KINGS xviii. 41-46.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
ELIJAH'S FLIGHT 404
1 KINGS xix. 1-4.
CHAPTER XL.
ELIJAH'S DESPAIR 415
1 KINGS xix. 1-10.
CHAPTER XLI.
HOW GOD DEALS WITH DESPONDENCY 424
1 KINGS xix. 5-8.
CHAPTER XLII.
THE THEOPHANY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE 429
1 KINGS xix. 9-18.
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE CALL OF ELISHA 445
1 KINGS xix. 19-21.
CHAPTER XLIV.
AHAB AND BENHADAD 450
1 KINGS xx. 1-30.
CHAPTER XLV.
AHAB'S INFATUATION 463
1 KINGS xx. 31-43.
CHAPTER XLVI.
NABOTH'S VINEYARD 473
1 KINGS xxi. 1-29.
CHAPTER XLVII.
ALONE AGAINST THE WORLD 485
1 KINGS xxii. 1-40.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CONCLUSION 497
APPENDIX.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE FIRST BOOK OF KINGS 500
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED.
Josephus, _Antiquities_, Books VII. to X.
Munk, _Palestine_. 1845.
Jahn, _Hist. of the Hebrew Commonwealth_, E. T. 1828.
Reuss, _La Bible. Hist. des Israelites._ Paris, 1877.
Renan, _Histoire du Peuple Israel_. 1885-1890.
Lange, _Bibelwerk_ (_K. C. W. F. Bähr_, 1868).
Bunsen, _Bibelwerk_.
Heinrich von Ewald, _The History of Israel_, E. T.
" " _The Rise and Splendour of the Hebrew Monarchy_.
London, 1871.
Grätz, _Geschichte der Israeliten_, vol. ii. Leipzig, 1875.
Hitzig, _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_. 1847, 1857, 1870.
Stade, _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, vol. i. 1887.
Kuenen, _Religion of Israel_, E. T. 1874.
Eisenlohr, _Das Volk Israel unter der Herrschaft der Könige_.
Leipzig, 1856.
Klostermann, _Die Bücher Samuels und der Könige_. 1887.
Van Oort, _Bible for Young People_, E. T., vol. iii. 1877.
F. W. Newmann, _Hebrew Monarchy_, Second Edition. 1853.
Milman, _Hist. of the Jews_, 3 vols.
Edersheim, _Hist. of the Jewish Nation_.
" _The Temple and its Services_. 1874.
Stanley, _Lectures on the Jewish Church_, Second Series. 1865.
Kittel, _Geschichte der Hebräer_. Gotha, 1888, 1892.
Wellhausen-Bleek, _Einleitung_, Fourth Edition. Berlin, 1878.
Wellhausen, _Geschichte Israel_, E. T., Third Edition. 1891.
Driver, _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament_. 1891.
Prof. J. R. Lumby, _The First Book of Kings_ (Cambridge Bible for
Schools). 1890.
Canon Rawlinson, _Speaker's Commentary,_ 1 _Kings_. 1872.
Prof. Robertson Smith, _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_,
Second Edition. 1892.
K. F. Keil, _The Books of Kings_, E. T. 1857.
Maurice, _Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament_, Third Edition.
1871.
Canon Rawlinson, _The Kings of Israel and Judah_ (Men of the Bible).
1889.
Farrar, _Solomon_ (Men of the Bible). 1887.
Prof. Milligan, _Elijah_ (Men of the Bible).
Prof. Robertson, _Early Religion of Israel_. Baird Lecture, 1887.
Riehm, _Handwörterbuch des Biblischen Altertums_. Leipzig, 1884.
Herzog, _Encyclopädie_, E. T. 1856.
Smith, _Dictionary of the Bible_. 1860.
Kitto, _Biblical Encyclopædia_. 1864.
Duncker, _Geschichte des Altherthums_ (Bd. II. _Geschichte Israel_),
Fifth Edition. Leipzig, 1878.
Oppert, _Salomon et les successeurs_. Paris.
E. Maspero, _Hist. anc. des peuples de l'Orient_, E. T. 1892.
Schrader, _Keilinschriften u. das Alte Testament_, Second Edition.
Giessen, 1883.
Brugsch-Bey, _Geschichte Ægyptens_. Leipzig, 1877.
Hamburger, _Real-Encyklopädie für Bibel und Talmud_. Strelitz, 1865,
1883.
Book by Book, _Popular Studies in the Canon of Scripture by various
authors_. Isbister & Co., 1892.
Prof. Robertson, D. D., _Early Religion of Israel_. Baird Lectures,
1889. Blackwood, 1892.
Robinson, _Researches in Palestine_, 3 vols. 1841.
BOOK I.
_INTRODUCTION._
"Ich bin überzeugt, dass die Bibel immer schöner wird, je mehr
man sie versteht, d.h. je mehr man einsieht und anschaut,
dass jedes Wort, das wir allgemein auffassen und in Besondern
auf uns anwenden, nach gewissen Umständen, nach Zeit- und
Orts-verhältnissen einen, eigenen, besondern, unmittelbar
individuellen Bezug gehabt hat."--GOETHE.
"Es bleibt dabei, das beste Lesen der Bibel, dieses Göttlichen
Buchs, ist _menschlich_. Ich nehme dies Wort im weitesten Umfang
und in der andringendsten Bedeutung. Menschlich muss man die
Bibel lesen: denn sie ist ein Buch durch Menschen für Menschen
geschrieben; menschlich ist die Sprache, menschlich die äussern
Hülfsmittel, mit denen sie geschrieben und aufbehalten ist.... Es
darf also sicher geglaubt werden: je humaner (im besten Sinn des
Worts) man das Wort Gottes liest, desto näher kommt man dem Zweck
seines Urhebers, welcher Menschen zu seinem Bilde schuf ... und
für uns menschlich handelt."--HERDER.
CHAPTER I.
_THE HIGHER CRITICISM._
"God shows all things in the slow history of their
ripening."--GEORGE ELIOT.
God has given us many Bibles. The book which we call the Bible
consists of a series of books, and its name represents the Greek
plural τὰ Βίβλια. It is not so much a book, as the extant fragments
of a literature, which grew up during many centuries. Supreme as is
the importance of this "Book of God," it was never meant to be the
sole teacher of mankind. We mistake its purpose, we misapply its
revelation, when we use it to exclude the other sources of religious
knowledge. It is supremely profitable for our instruction, but, so
far from being designed to absorb our exclusive attention, its work
is to stimulate the eagerness with which, by its aid, we are able to
learn from all other sources the will of God towards men.
God speaks to us in many voices. In the Bible He revealed Himself
to all mankind by His messages to the individual souls of some of
His servants. But those messages, whether uttered or consigned to
writing, were but one method of enabling us to hold communion with
Him. They were not even an _indispensable_ method. Thousands of
the saints of God lived the spiritual life in close communion with
their Father in heaven in ages which possessed no written book; in
ages before any such book existed; in ages during which, though it
existed, it was practically inaccessible; in ages during which it
had been designedly kept out of their hands by priests. This fact
should quicken our sense of gratitude for the inestimable boon of
a Book wherein he who runs may now read, and respecting the main
teaching of which wayfaring men, and even fools, need not err. But
it should at the same time save us from the error of treating the
Bible as though it were in itself an amulet or a fetish, as the
Mohammedan treats his Koran. The Bible was written in human language,
by men for men. It was written mainly in Judæa, by Jews, for Jews.
"_Scripture_," as the old theological rule said, "_is the sense of
Scripture_,"[1] and the sense of Scripture can only be ascertained
by the methods of study and the rules of criticism without which no
ancient document or literature can be even approximately understood.
In these respects the Bible cannot be arbitrarily or exceptionally
treated. No _a priori_ rules can be devised for its elucidation. It
is what it is, not what we might have expected it to be. Language,
at the best, is an imperfect and ever-varying instrument of thought.
It is full of twilight, and of gracious shadows. Vast numbers of
its words were originally metaphorical. When the light of metaphor
has faded from them they come to mean different things at different
times, under different conditions, in different contexts, on
different lips. Language can at the best be but an _asymptote_ to
thought; in other words, it resembles the mathematical line which
approaches nearer and nearer to the circumference of a circle,
but which, even when infinitely extended, can never actually touch
it. The fact that the Bible contains a Divine revelation does not
alter the fact that it represents a nation's literature. It is the
library of the Jewish people, or rather all that remains to us of
that library, and all that was most precious in it. Holy men of old
were moved by the Spirit of God, but as this Divine inspiration did
not make them personally sinless in their actions, or infallible in
their judgments, so neither does it exempt their messages from the
limitation which attaches to all human conditions. Criticism would
have rendered an inestimable service to every thoughtful reader of
the Scriptures if it had done nothing more than impress upon them
that the component books are not one, but complex and multiform,
separated from each other by centuries of time, and of very varying
value and preciousness. They too, like the greatest apostles of God,
have their treasure in earthen vessels; and we not only may, but
must, by the aid of that reason which is "the candle of the Lord,"
estimate both the value of the treasure, and the age and character of
the earthen vessel in which it is contained.
There are hundreds of texts in Scripture which may convey to some
souls a very true and blessed meaning, but which do not in the
original possess any such meaning as that which is now attached to
them. The words of Hebrew prophets often seem perfectly clear, but
in some cases they had another set of connotations in the mouths of
those by whom they were originally spoken. It requires a learned
and a literary training to discover by philology, by history, or by
comparison, what alone they could have meant when they were first
spoken. In many cases their exact significance is no longer to be
ascertained with certainty. It must be more or less conjectural.
There are passages of Scripture which have received scores of
differing interpretations. There are entire books of Scripture about
the general scope of which there have been diametrically opposite
opinions. The spiritual intuition of the saint may in some instances
be keener to read aright than the laborious researches of the
scholar, because spiritual things can only be spiritually discerned.
But in general it is true that the _ex cathedra_ assertions of
ignorant readers, though they are often pronounced with an assumption
of infallibility, are not worth the breath which utters them. All
artificial dogmas as to what Scripture _must_ be, and _must_ mean,
are worse than idle; we have only to deal with what it _really is_,
and what it _really says_. Even when opinions respecting it have
been all but unanimously pronounced by the representatives of all
the Churches, they have nevertheless been again and again shown to
be absurdly erroneous. The slow light of scholarship, of criticism,
of comparative religion, has proved that in many instances not only
the interpretations of former ages, but the very _principles_ of
interpretation from which they were derived, had no basis whatever in
fact. And the methods of interpretation--dogmatic, ecclesiastical,
mystic, allegorical, literal--have changed from age to age.[2] The
asserted heresy of yesterday has in scores of instances become the
accepted commonplace of to-morrow. The duty of the Church in the
present day is neither to make out that the Bible is what men have
imagined that it was, nor to repeat the assertions of ancient writers
as to what they declared it to be, but honestly and truthfully to
discover the significance of the actual phenomena which it presents
to the enlightened and cultivated intelligence.
If it were not so common a failing to ignore the lessons of the
past, it might have been hoped that a certain modesty, of which the
necessity is taught us by centuries of error, would have saved a
multitude of writers from rushing into premature and denunciative
rejection of results which they have not studied, and of which they
are incapable to judge. St. Jerome complained that in his day there
was no old woman so fatuous as not to assume the right to lay down
the law about Scriptural interpretation. It is just the same in these
days. Half-taught dogmatists--ἀυτοσχέδιοι δογματισταὶ, as they have
been called--may sweepingly condemn the lifelong researches of men
far superior to themselves, not only in learning, but in love of
truth; they may attribute their conclusions to faithless infatuation,
and even to moral obliquity. This has been done over and over again
in our own lifetime; and yet such self-constituted and unauthorised
defenders of their own prejudices and traditions--which they always
identify with the Catholic faith--are impotent to prevent, impotent
even greatly to retard, the spread of real knowledge. Many of the
now-accepted certainties of science were repudiated a generation ago
as absurd and blasphemous. As long as it was possible to put them
down by persecution, the thumbscrew and the stake were freely used
by priests and inquisitors for their suppression. _E pur si muove._
Theologians who mingled the gold of Revelation with the clay of their
own opinions have been driven to correct their past errors. Untaught
by experience, religious prejudice is ever heaping up fresh obstacles
to oppose the progress of new truths. The obstacles will be swept
away in the future as surely as they have been in the past. The
eagle, it has been said, which soars through the air does not worry
itself how to cross the rivers.
It is probable that no age since that of the Apostles has added
so much to our knowledge of the true meaning and history of the
Bible as has been added by our own. The mode of regarding Scripture
has been almost revolutionised, and in consequence many books of
Scripture previously misunderstood have acquired a reality and
intensity of interest and instructiveness which have rendered them
trebly precious. A deeper and holier reverence for all eternal truth
which the Bible contains has taken the place of a meaningless letter
worship. The fatal and wooden Rabbinic dogma of verbal dictation--a
dogma which either destroys intelligent faith altogether, or
introduces into Christian conduct some of the worst delusions of
false religion--is dead and buried in every capable and well-taught
mind. Truths which had long been seen through the distorting mirage
of false exegesis have now been set forth in their true aspect. We
have been enabled, for the first time, to grasp the real character
of events which, by being set in a wrong perspective, had been made
so fantastic as to have no relation to ordinary lives. Figures which
had become dim spectres moving through an unnatural atmosphere now
stand out, full of grace, instructiveness and warning, in the clear
light of day. The science of Biblical criticism has solved scores of
enigmas which were once disastrously obscure, and has brought out
the original beauty of some passages, which, even in our Authorised
Version, conveyed no intelligible meaning to earnest readers. The
Revised Version alone has corrected hundreds of inaccuracies which
in some instances defaced the beauty of the sacred page, and in
many others misrepresented and mistranslated it. Intolerance has
been robbed of favourite shibboleths, used as the basis of cruel
beliefs, which souls unhardened by system could only repudiate with
a "God forbid!" Familiar error has ever been dearer to most men than
unfamiliar truths; but truth, however slow may seem to be the beat of
her pinions, always wins her way at last.
"Thro' the heather an' howe gaed the creepin' thing,
But abune was the waft of an angel's wing."
Can there be any doubt that mankind has everything to gain and
nothing to lose from the ascertainment of genuine truth? Are we so
wholly devoid of even an elementary faith as to think that man can
profit by consciously cherished illusions? Does it not show a nobler
confidence in facts to correct traditional prejudices, than to rest
blindly content with conventional assertions? If we do not believe
that God is a God of truth, that all falsity is hateful to Him,--and
religious falsity most hateful of all, because it adds the sin of
hypocrisy to the love of lies,--we believe in _nothing_. If our
religion is to consist in a rejection of knowledge, lest it should
disturb the convictions of times of ignorance, the dicta of "the
Fathers," or dogmas which arrogate to themselves the sham claim of
Catholicity--if we are to give only to the Dark Ages the title of the
Ages of Faith, then indeed
"The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble."
"There is and will be much discussion," says Goethe, "as to the
advantage or disadvantage of the popular dissemination of the Bible. To
me it is clear that it will be mischievous, as it always has been, if
used dogmatically and capriciously; beneficial, as it always has been,
if accepted didactically (for our instruction) and with feeling." There
is abundance in the Bible for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness;--we shall weaken its moral and
spiritual force, and gain nothing in its place, if we turn it into an
idol adorned with impossible claims which it never makes for itself,
and if we support its golden image upon the brittle clay of an exegesis
which is morally, critically, and historically false.
I do not see how there can be any loss in the positive results of
what is called the Higher Criticism. Certainly its suggestions must
never be hastily adopted. Nor is it likely that they will be. They
have to fight their way through crowds of opposing prejudices. They
are first held up to ridicule as absurd; then exposed to anathema
as irreligious; at last they are accepted as obviously true. The
very theologians who once denounced them silently ignore or readjust
what they previously preached, and hasten, first to minimise the
importance, then to extol the value of the new discoveries. It is
quite right that they should be keenly scrutinised. All new sciences
are liable to rush into extremes. Their first discoverers are misled
into error by premature generalisations born of a genuine enthusiasm.
They are tempted to build elaborate superstructures on inadequate
foundations. But when they have established certain irrefragable
principles, can the obvious deductions from those principles be other
than a pure gain? Can we be the better for traditional delusions? Can
mistakes and ignorance--can anything but the ascertained fact--be
desirable for man, or acceptable to God?
No doubt it is with a sensation of pain that we are compelled to give
up convictions which we once regarded as indubitable and sacred. That
is a part of our human nature. We must say with all gentleness to the
passionate devotees of each old erroneous _mumpsimus_--
"Disce; sed ira cadat naso rugosaque sanna
Cum veteres avias tibi de pulmone revello."
Our blessed Lord, with His consummate tenderness, and Divine insight
into the frailties of our nature, made tolerant allowance for
inveterate prejudices. "No man," He said, "having drunk old wine
straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is good." But the
pain of disillusionment is blessed and healing when it is incurred
in the cause of sincerity. There must always be more value in
results earned by heroic labour than in conventions accepted without
serious inquiry. Already there has been a silent revolution. Many
of the old opinions about the Bible have been greatly modified.
There is scarcely a single competent scholar who does not now admit
that the Hexateuch is a composite structure; that much of the
Levitical legislation, which was once called Mosaic, is in reality
an aftergrowth which _in its present form_ is not earlier than the
days of the prophet Ezekiel; that the Book of Deuteronomy belongs, in
its present form, whatever older elements it may contain, to the era
of Hezekiah's or Josiah's reformation; that the Books of Zechariah
and Isaiah are not homogeneous, but preserve the writings of more
prophets than their titles imply; that only a small section of the
Psalter was the work of David; that the Book of Ecclesiastes was not
the work of King Solomon; that most of the Book of Daniel belongs
to the era of Antiochus Epiphanes; and so forth. In what respect is
the Bible less precious, less "inspired" in the only tenable sense
of that very undefined word, in consequence of such discoveries?
In what way do they touch the outermost fringe of our Christian
faith? Is there anything in such results of modern criticism which
militates against the most inferential expansion of a single clause
in the Apostolic, the Nicene, or even the Athanasian Creed? Do they
contravene one single syllable of the hundreds of propositions to
which our assent is demanded in the Thirty-nine Articles? I would
gladly help to mitigate the needless anxiety felt by many religious
minds. When the Higher Criticism is in question I would ask them to
distinguish between established premisses and the exorbitant system
of inferences which a few writers have based upon them. They may
rest assured that sweeping conclusions will not be hastily snatched
up; that no conclusion will be regarded as proved until it has
successfully run the gauntlet of many a jealous challenge. They need
not fear for one moment that the Ark of their faith is in peril, and
they will be guilty not only of unwisdom but of profanity if they
rush forward to support it with rude and unauthorised hands. There
never has been an age of deep thought and earnest inquiry which
has not left its mark in the modification of some traditions or
doctrines of theology. But the truths of essential Christianity are
built upon a rock. They belong to things which cannot be shaken, and
which remain. The intense labours of eminent scholars, English and
German, thanklessly as they have been received, have not robbed us
of so much as a fraction of a single precious element of revelation.
On the contrary, they have cleared the Bible of many accretions by
which its meaning was spoilt, and its doctrines wrested to perdition,
and they have thus rendered it more profitable than before for
every purpose for which it was designed, that the man of God may be
perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
When we study the Bible it is surely one of our most primary duties
to beware lest any idols of the caverns or of the forum tempt us "to
offer to the God of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie."[3]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Scriptura est sensus Scripturæ."--St. Augustine.
[2] For a decisive proof of these statements I refer to my Bampton
Lectures on the _History of Interpretation_ (Macmillan, 1890).
[3] Bacon.
CHAPTER II.
_THE BOOKS OF KINGS._
The "Two Books of Kings," as we call them, are only one book (Sepher
Melakîm), and were so regarded not only in the days of Origen (_ap._
Euseb., _H. E._, vi. 25) and of Jerome (A.D. 420), but by the Jews
even down to Bomberg's Hebrew Bible of 1518. They are treated as one
book in the Talmud and the Peshito. The Western Bibles followed the
Alexandrian division into two books (called the third and fourth of
Kings), and Jerome adopted this division in the Vulgate (_Regum_,
iii. et iv.). But if this separation into two books was due to the
LXX. translators, they should have made a less awkward and artificial
division than the one which breaks off the first book in the middle
of the brief reign of Ahaziah. Jerome's version of the Books of
Samuel and Kings appeared first of his translations, and in his
famous _Prologus Galeatus_ he mentions these facts.
The History was intended to be a continuation of the Books of Samuel.
Some critics, and among them Ewald, assign them to the same author,
but closer examination of the Book of Kings renders this more than
doubtful. The incessant use of the prefix "King," the extreme frequency
of the description "Man of God," the references to the law, and above
all the constant condemnation of high places, counterbalance the minor
resemblance of style, and prove a difference of authorship.
What has the Higher Criticism, as represented in historic sequence
by such writers as Vatke, de Wette, Reuss, Graf, Ewald, Kuenen,
Bleek, Wellhausen, Stade, Kittel, Renan, Klostermann, Cheyne, Driver,
Robertson Smith, and others, to tell us about the structure and
historic credibility of the Books of Kings? Has it in any way shaken
their value, while it has undoubtedly added to their intelligibility
and interest?
1. It emphasises the fact that they are a compilation. In this there
is nothing either new or startling, for the fact is plainly and
repeatedly acknowledged in the page of the sacred narrative. The
sources utilised are:--
(1) The Book of the Acts of Solomon (1 Kings xi. 41).
(2) The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah (referred to
fifteen times).
(3) The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (referred to
seventeen times).[4]
By comparing the authority referred to in 1 Kings xi. 41 with those
quoted in 2 Chron. ix. 29, we see that "the Book of the Acts of
Solomon" must have been to a large extent identical with the annals
of that king's reign contained in "the Book (R.V., Histories) of
Nathan the Prophet," the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and "the
story (R.V., commentary) or visions of Iddo the Seer."[5] Similarly
it appears that the Acts of Rehoboam, Abijam, Jehoshaphat, Uzziah,
were compiled, at any rate in part, from the histories of Shemaiah,
Jehu the son of Hanani,[6] Isaiah the son of Amoz, Hozai (2 Chron.
xxxiii. 18, R.V.), and other seers. In the narrative of a history of
450 years (from B.C. 1016 to 562) the writer was of course compelled
to rely for his facts upon more ancient authorities. Whether he
consulted the original documents in the archives of Jerusalem, or
whether he utilised some outline of them which had previously been
drawn up, cannot easily be determined. The work would have been
impossible but for the existence of the officials known as recorders
and historiographers (_Mazkirim, Sopherim_), who first make their
appearance in the court of David. But the _original_ documents could
hardly have survived the ravages of Shalmanezer in Samaria and of
Nebuchadnezzar in Jerusalem, so that Movers is probably right in the
conjecture that the author's extracts were made, not immediately, but
from the epitome of an earlier compiler.[7]
2. Although no direct quotations are referred to other documents, it
seems certain from the style, and from various minor touches, that
the compiler also utilised detailed accounts of great prophets like
Elijah, Elisha, and Micaiah son of Imlah, which had been drawn up
by literary students in the Schools of the Prophets. The stories of
prophets and men of God who are left unnamed were derived from oral
traditions so old that the names had been forgotten before they had
been committed to writing.[8]
3. The work of the compiler himself is easily traceable. It is seen
in the constantly recurring formulæ, which come almost like the
refrain of an epic poem, at the accession and close of every reign.
They run normally as follows. For the Kings of Judah:--
"And in the ... year of ... King of Israel reigned ... over Judah."
"And ... years he reigned in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was ...
the daughter of.... And ... did that which was {right/evil} in the
sight of the Lord."
"And ... slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers
in the City of David his father. And ... his son reigned in his
stead." In the formulæ for the Kings of Israel "_slept with his
fathers_" is omitted when the king was murdered; and "_was buried
with his fathers_" is omitted because there was no unbroken dynasty
and no royal burial-place. The prominent and frequent mention of
the queen-mother is due to the fact that as _Gebira_ she held a far
higher rank than the favourite wife.
4. To the compiler is also due the moral aspect given to the annals
and other documents which he utilised. Something of this religious
colouring he doubtless found in the prophetic histories which he
consulted; and the unity of aim visible throughout the book is due to
the fact that his standpoint is identical with theirs. Thus, in spite
of its compilation from different sources, the book bears the impress
of one hand and of one mind. Sometimes a passing touch in an earlier
narrative shows the work of an editor after the Exile, as when in the
story of Solomon (1 Kings iv. 20-26) we read, "And he had dominion
over all the region _on the other side of the river_," _i.e._, west
of the Euphrates, exactly as in Ezra iv. 10. Here the rendering of
the A.V., "on this side the river," is certainly inaccurate, and is
surprisingly retained in the R.V. also.[9]
5. To this high moral purpose everything else is subordinated.
Like all his Jewish contemporaries, the writer attaches small
importance to accurate chronological data. He pays little attention
to discrepancies, and does not care in every instance to harmonise
his own authorities.[10] Some contradictions may be due to additions
made in a later recension,[11] and some may have arisen from the
introduction of marginal glosses,[12] or from corruptions of the
text which (apart from a miraculous supervision such as was not
exercised) might easily, and indeed would inevitably, occur in
the constant transcription of numerical letters closely resembling
each other. "The numbers as they have come down to us in the Book
of Kings," says Canon Rawlinson, "are untrustworthy, being in part
self-contradictory, in part opposed to other Scriptural notices, in
part improbable, if not impossible."[13]
6. The date of the book as it stands was _after_ B.C. 542, for the last
event mentioned in it is the mercy extended by Evil-merodach, King of
Babylon, to his unfortunate prisoner Jehoiachin (2 Kings xxv. 27) in
the thirty-seventh year of his captivity. The language--later than that
of Isaiah, and earlier than that of Ezra--confirms this conclusion.
That the book appeared before B.C. 536 is clear from the fact that
the compiler makes no allusion to Zerubbabel, Jeshua, or the first
exiles who returned to Jerusalem after the decree of Cyrus. But it is
generally agreed that the book was _substantially_ complete before the
Exile (about B.C. 600), though some exilic additions may have been made
by a later editor.[14] "The writer was already removed by at least six
hundred years from the days of Samuel, a space of time as long as that
which separates us from the first Parliament of Edward I."
This date of the book--which cannot but have some bearing on its
historic value--is admitted by all, since the peculiarities of the
language from the beginning to the end are marked by the usages of
later Hebrew.[15] The chronicler lived some two centuries later "in
about the same chronological relation to David as Professor Freeman
stands to William Rufus."[16]
7. Criticism cannot furnish us with the name of this great
compiler.[17] Jewish tradition, as preserved in the Talmud,[18]
assigned the Books of Kings to the prophet Jeremiah, and in the
Jewish canon they are reckoned among "the earlier prophets." This
would account for the strange silence about Jeremiah in the Second
Book of Kings, whereas he is prominently mentioned in the Book of
Chronicles, in the Apocrypha, and in Josephus. But unless we accept
the late and worthless Jewish assertion that, after being carried
to Egypt by Johanan, son of Kareah (Jer. xlii. 6, 7), Jeremiah
escaped to Babylon,[19] he could not have been the author of the last
section of the book (2 Kings xxv. 27-30).[20] Yet it is precisely in
the closing chapters of the second book (in and after chap. xvii.)
that the resemblances to the style of Jeremiah are most marked.[21]
That the writer was a _contemporary_ of that prophet, was closely
akin to him in his religious attitude, and was filled with the
same melancholy feelings, is plain; but this, as recent critics
have pointed out, is due to the fact that both writers reflect the
opinions and the phraseology which we find in the Book of Deuteronomy.
8. The critics who are so often charged with rash assumptions have
been led to the conclusions which they adopt by intense and infinite
labour, including the examination of various books of Scripture
phrase by phrase, and even word by word. The sum total of their most
important results as regards the Books of Kings is as follows:--
i. The books are composed of older materials, retouched, sometimes
expanded, and set in a suitable framework, mostly by a single author
who writes throughout in the same characteristic phraseology, and
judges the actions and characters of the kings from the standpoint
of later centuries. The annals which he consulted, and in part
incorporated, were twofold--prophetic and political. The latter
were probably drawn up for each reign by the official recorder
(מַזְכִּיר), who held an important place in the courts of all the
greatest kings (2 Sam. viii. 16, xx. 24; 1 Kings iv. 3; 2 Kings
xviii. 18), and whose duty it was to write the "acts" or "words" of
the "days" of his sovereign (הימים דברי).
ii. The compiler's work is partly of the nature of an epitome,[22] and
partly consists of longer narratives, of which we can sometimes trace
the Northern Israelitish origin by peculiarities of form and expression.
iii. The synchronisms which he gives between the reigns of the kings
of Israel and Judah are computed by himself, or by some redactor, and
only in round numbers.
iv. The speeches, prayers, and prophecies introduced are perhaps
based on tradition, but, since they reflect all the peculiarities of
the compiler, must owe their ultimate form to him. This accounts for
the fact that the earlier prophecies recorded in these books resemble
the tone and style of Jeremiah, but do not resemble such ancient
prophecies as those of Amos and Hoshea.
v. The numbers which he adopts are sometimes so enormous as to be
grossly improbable; and in these, as in some of the dates, allowance
must be made for possible errors of tradition and transcription.
vi. "Deuteronomy," says Professor Driver, "is the standard by which
the compiler judges both men and actions; and the history from the
beginning of Solomon's reign is presented, not in a purely 'objective'
form (as _e.g._ in 2 Sam. ix.-xx.), but from the point of view of
the Deuteronomic code.[23]... The principles which, in his view, the
history as a whole is to exemplify, are already expressed succinctly
in the charge which he represents David as giving to his son Solomon
(1 Kings ii. 3, 4); they are stated by him again in chap. iii. 14,
and more distinctly in chap. ix. 1-9. Obedience to the Deuteronomic
law is the qualification for an approving verdict; deviation from
it is the source of ill success (1 Kings xi. 9-13, xiv. 7-11, xvi.
2; 2 Kings xvii. 7-18), and the sure prelude to condemnation. Every
king of the Northern Kingdom is characterised as doing 'that which
was evil in the eyes of Jehovah.' In the Southern Kingdom the
exceptions are Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham,
Hezekiah, Josiah--usually, however, with the limitation that 'the high
places were not removed' as demanded by the Deuteronomic law.[24]
The constantly recurring Deuteronomic phrases which most directly
illustrate the point of view from which the history is regarded are,
'_To keep the charge of Jehovah'; 'to walk in the ways of Jehovah';
'to keep_ (or execute) _His commandments, or statutes, and judgments';
'to do that which is right in the eyes of Jehovah'; 'to provoke
Jehovah to anger'; 'to cleave to Jehovah_.' If the reader will be at
the pains of underlining in his text the phrases here cited" (and many
others of which Professor Driver gives a list), "he will not only
realise how numerous they are, but also perceive how they seldom occur
indiscriminately in the narrative as such, but are generally aggregated
in particular passages (mostly comments on the history, or speeches)
which are thereby distinguished from their context, and shown to be
presumably the work of a different hand."[25]
vii. It must not be imagined that the late compilation of the book,
or its subsequent recensions, or the dogmatic colouring which it may
have insensibly derived from the religious systems and organisations
of days subsequent to the Exile, have in the least affected the main
historic veracity of the kingly annals. They may have influenced
the omissions and the moral estimates, but the events themselves
are in every case confirmed when we are able to compare them with
any records and monuments of Phœnicia, Moab, Egypt, Assyria, or
Babylon. The discovery and deciphering of the Moabite stone, and
of the painted vaunts of Shishak at Karnak, and of the cuneiform
inscriptions, confirm in every case the general truth, in some
cases the minute details, of the sacred historian. In so passing an
allusion as that in 2 Kings iii. 16, 17 the accuracy of the narrative
is confirmed by the fact that (as Delitzsch has shown) the method of
obtaining water is that which is to this day employed in the Wady
el-Hasa at the southern end of the Dead Sea.[26]
viii. The Book of Kings consists, according to Stade,[27] of, (_a_)
1 Kings i., ii., the close of a history of David, in continuation
of 1 and 2 Samuel. The continuity of the Scriptures is marked in an
interesting way by the word "and," with which so many of the books
begin. The Jews, devout believers in the work of a Divine Providence,
saw no discontinuities in the course of national events.[28]
(_b_) 1 Kings iii.-xi., a conglomerate of notices about Solomon,
grouped round chaps. vi., vii., which narrate the building of the
Temple. They are arranged by the præ-exilic compiler, but not without
later touches from the Deuteronomic standpoint of a later editor
(_e.g._, iii. 2, 3). Chap. viii. 14-ix. 9 also belong to the later
editor.
(_c_) 1 Kings xi.-2 Kings xxiii. 29, an epitome of the entire regal
period of Judah and Israel, after the three first reigns over the
undivided kingdom, compiled mainly before the Exile.
(_d_) 2 Kings xxiii. 30-xxv. 30, a conclusion, added, in its present
form, after the Exile.
Two positions are maintained (A) as regards the text, and (B) as
regards the chronology.
A. As regards the _text_ no one will maintain the old false
assertion that it has come down to us in a perfect condition. There
are in the history of the text three epochs: 1, The Præ-Talmudic;
2, The Talmudic-Massoretic up to the time when vowel-points were
introduced; 3, The Massoretic traditions of a later period. The
marginal annotations known as Q'ri, "read" (plural, _Qarjan_),
consist of glosses and euphemisms which were used in the service
of the synagogue in place of the written text (K'tib); the oral
tradition of these variations was known as the Massora (_i.e._,
tradition). The Greek version (Septuagint, LXX.), which is of immense
importance for the history of the text, was begun in Alexandria under
Ptolemy Philadelphus (B.C. 283-247). It presents many additions and
variations in the Books of Kings.[30]
All Hebrew manuscripts, as is well known, are of comparatively
recent date, owing to the strict rule of the Jewish Schools that any
manuscript which had in the slightest degree suffered from time or
use was to be instantly destroyed. The oldest Hebrew manuscript is
supposed to be the Codex Babylonicus at St. Petersburg (A.D. 916),
unless one recently discovered by Dr. Ginsburg in the British Museum
be older. Most Hebrew manuscripts are later than the twelfth century.
The variations in the Samaritan Pentateuch, and in the Septuagint
version--the latter of which are often specially valuable as
indications of the original text--furnish abundant proof that no
miracle has been wrought to preserve the text of Scripture from the
changes and corruptions which always arise in the course of constant
transcriptions.
A further and serious difficulty in the reproduction of events in
their historic exactitude is introduced by the certainty that many
books of the Bible, in their present form, represent the results
arrived at after their recension by successive editors, some of whom
lived many centuries after the events recorded. In the Books of
Kings we probably see many _nuances_ which were not introduced till
after the epoch-making discovery of the Book of the Law (perhaps the
essential parts of the Book of Deuteronomy) in the reign of Josiah,
B.C. 621 (2 Kings xxii. 8-14). It is, for instance, impossible to
declare with certainty what parts of the Temple service were really
coæval with David and Solomon, and what parts had arisen in later
days. There appear to be liturgical touches, or alterations as
indicated by the variations of the text in 1 Kings viii. 4, 12, 13.
In xviii. 29-36 the allusion to the _Minchah_ is absent from the LXX.
in verse 36, and in 2 Kings iii. 20 another reading is suggested.
B. As regards the difficult question of _Chronology_ we need add
but little to what has been elsewhere said.[31] Even the most
conservative critics admit that (1) the numbers of the Biblical text
have often become corrupt or uncertain; and (2) that the ancient
Hebrews were careless on the subject of exact chronology. The
Chronology of the Kings, as it now stands, is historically true in
its general outlines, but in its details presents us with data which
are mutually irreconcilable. It is obviously artificial, and is
dominated by slight modifications of the round number 40.[32] Thus
from the Exodus to the Building of the Temple is stated at 480 years,
and from that period to the fiftieth year of the Exile also at 480
years. In the Chronicles there are eleven high priests from Azariah
ben-Ahimaaz to the Exile of Jozadak, which, with the Exile period,
gives twelve generations of 40 years each. Again, from Rehoboam to
the Fall of Samaria in the sixth year of Hezekiah, following the 40
years' reign of Saul, of David, and of Solomon, we have:--
Rehoboam, Abijah 20 years.
Asa 41 "
Jehoshaphat, Jehoram} 40 "
Ahaziah, Athaliah }
Joash 40 "
Amaziah, Uzziah 81 "
Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah 38 "
After the Fall of Samaria we have:--
Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon 80 "
and it can hardly be a mere accident that in these lists the number
40 is only modified by slight necessary details.
The history of the Northern Kingdom seems to be roughly trisected
into 80 years before Benhadad's first invasion, 80 years of Syrian
war, 40 years of prosperity under Jeroboam II., and 40 years of
decline.[33] This is probably a result of chronological system, not
uninfluenced by mystical considerations. For 480 = 40 × 12. _Forty_
is repeatedly used as a sacred number in connexion with epochs of
penitence and punishment. _Twelve_ (4 × 3) is, according to Bähr (the
chief student of numerical and other symbolism), "the signature of
the people of Israel"--as a whole (4), in the midst of which God (3)
resides. Similarly Stade thinks that 16 is the basal number for the
reigns of kings from Jehu to Hoshea, and 12 from Jeroboam to Jehu.[34]
It is possible that the synchronistic data did not proceed from the
compiler of the Book of Kings, but were added by the last redactor.
Are these critical conclusions so formidable? Are they fraught with
disastrous consequences? Which is really dangerous--truth laboriously
sought for, or error accepted with unreasoning blindness and
maintained with invincible prejudice?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] How closely these documents are transcribed is shown by the
recurrence of "_unto this day_," though the phrase had long ceased to
be true when the book appeared.
[5] It is inferred from 1 Kings viii. 12, 13, which have a poetic
tinge, and to which the LXX. add "Behold they are written in the
Book of the Song," that in this section the "Book of Jashar" has
been utilised, and that the reading הישר has been confused with שירה
(Driver, p. 182).
[6] 2 Chron. xx. 34, R.V., "The history of Jehu, the son of Hanani,
which _is inserted in the Book of the Kings of Israel_" (not "who is
mentioned," A.V., which, however, gives in the margin the literal
meaning "was made to ascend").
[7] Movers, _Krit. Untersuch._, p. 185 (Bonn, 1836). The use of older
documents explains the phrase "till this day," and the passages which
speak of the Temple as still standing (1 Kings viii. 8, ix. 21, xii.
19; 2 Kings x. 27, xiii. 23). Sometimes the traces of earlier and later
date are curiously juxtaposed, as in 2 Kings xvii. 18, 21 and 19, 20.
[8] Difference of sources is marked by the different designations of
the months, which are called sometimes by their numbers, as in the
Priestly Codex (1 Kings xii. 32, 33), sometimes by the old Hebrew names
Zif ("_blossom_," April, May, 1 Kings vi. 1), Ethanim ("_fruit_,"
Sept., Oct., 1 Kings viii. 2), and Bul ("_rain_," 1 Kings vi. 38).
[9] מִז־הַנָּהָר (compare עֲבַר־נַהֲרָה). _Lit._, "_Beyond_ the
river," _i.e._, from the Persian standpoint. It becomes a fixed
geographical phrase. Traces of the editor's hand occur in 1 Kings
xiii. 32 ("the cities of Samaria"); 2 Kings xiii. 23 ("as yet").
[10] Comp. 2 Kings viii. 25 with ix. 29.
[11] See 2 Kings xv. 30 and 33, viii. 25 and ix. 29.
[12] As, perhaps, the clause "In the thirty and first year of Asa
king of Judah" in 1 Kings xvi. 23; and the much more serious "in the
480th year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of
Egypt," which are omitted by Origen (_comm. in Johannem_, ii. 20),
and create many difficulties. The only narratives which critics have
suggested as possible interpolations, from the occurrence of unusual
grammatical forms, are 2 Kings viii. 1-6 and iv. 1-37 (in the story
of Elisha); but these forms are perhaps northern provincialisms.
[13] _Speaker's Commentary_, ii. 475. Instances will be found in 1
Kings xiv. 21, xvi. 23, 29; 2 Kings iii. 1, xiii. 10, xv. 1, 30, 33,
xiv. 23, xvi. 2, xvii. 1, xviii. 2.
[14] Stade, p. 79; Kalisch, _Exodus_, p. 495.
[15] See Keil, pp. 9, 10.
[16] R. F. Horton, _Inspiration_, p. 843.
[17] He was not the author of the Book of Samuel, for the standpoint
and style are quite different. In the First and Second Books of
Samuel the high places are never condemned, as they are incessantly
in Kings (1 Kings iii. 2, xiii. 32, xiv. 23, xv. 14, xxii. 43, etc.).
[18] Baba Bathra, 15 a.
[19] _Seder Olam Rabba_, 20.
[20] Even then he would have been ninety years old.
[21] There are, however, some _differences_ between 2 Kings xxv. and
Jer. lii. (see Keil, p. 12), though the manner is the same, Carpzov,
_Introd._, i. 262-64 (Hävernick, _Einleit._, ii. 171). Jer. li. (verse
64) ends with "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah," excluding him from
the authorship of chap. lii. (Driver, _Introd._, p. 109). The last
chapter of Jeremiah was perhaps added to his volume by a later editor.
[22] "The Old Testament does not furnish a history of Israel,
though it supplies the materials from which such a history can be
constructed. For example, the narrative of Kings gives but the
merest outline of the events that preceded the fall of Samaria. To
understand the inner history of the time we must fill up this outline
with the aid of the prophets Amos and Hoshea."--ROBERTSON SMITH'S
_Preface_ to translation of Wellhausen, p. vii.
[23] "In der Chronik," on the other hand, "ist es der Pentateuch, d.h.
vor Allem der _Priestercodex_, nach dessen Muster die Geschichte des
alten Israels dargestellt wird" (Wellhausen, _Prolegom._, p. 309).
It has been said that the Book of Kings reflects the political and
prophetic view, and the Book of Chronicles the priestly view of Jewish
history. It is about the Pentateuch, its date and composition, that
the battle of the Higher Criticism chiefly rages. With that we are
but indirectly concerned in considering the Book of Kings; but it is
noticeable that the ablest and most competent defender of the more
conservative criticism, Professor James Robertson, D.D., both in his
contribution to _Book by Book_ and in his _Early Religion of Israel_,
makes large concessions. Thus he says, "It is particularly to be
noticed that in the Book of the Pentateuch itself the Mosaic origin is
not claimed" (_Book by Book_, p. 5). "The anonymous character of all
the historical writings of the Old Testament would lead us to conclude
that the ancient Hebrews had not the idea of literary property which we
attach to authorship" (p. 8). "It is long since the composite character
of the Pentateuch was observed" (p. 9). "There may remain doubts as to
when the various parts of the Pentateuch were actually written down; it
may be admitted that the later writers wrote in the light of the events
and circumstances of their own times" (p. 16).
[24] Driver, p. 189. Comp. Professor Robertson Smith: "The most
notable feature in the extant redactions of the book is the strong
interest shown in the Deuteronomic law of Moses, and especially in
the centralisation of worship in the Temple on Zion, as pre-supposed
in Deuteronomy and enforced by Josiah. This interest did not exist
in ancient Israel, and is quite foreign to the older memories
incorporated in the book."
[25] Driver, p. 192.
[26] Delitzsch, _Genesis_, 6th ed., p. 567.
[27] _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, i. 73.
[28] Even the First Book of Maccabees begins with καὶ ἐγένετο.
[29] Stade thinks that this is confirmed by viii. 46-49.
[30] Stade, pp. 32 ff. Thus, in 1 Kings viii. 14-53, verses 12, 13
are in the Septuagint placed _after_ verse 53, are incomplete in the
Hebrew text, and have a remarkable reading in the Targum. Professor
Robertson Smith infers that a Deuteronomic insertion has misplaced
them in one text, and mutilated them in another. The order of the
LXX. differs in 1 Kings iv. 19-27; and it omits 1 Kings vi. 11-14;
ix. 15-26. It transposes the story of Naboth, and omits the story
of Ahijah and Abijah, which is added from Aquila's version to the
Alexandrian MS. See Wellhausen-Bleek, _Einleitung_, §§ 114, 134.
[31] See Appendix on the Chronology.
[32] See Wellhausen, _Prolegomena_, pp. 285-87; Robertson Smith,
_Journ. of Philology_, x. 209-13.
[33] _Encycl. Brit._, s.v. Kings (W.R.S.).
[34] See Stade, i. 88-99; W. R. Smith, _l. c._; Kreuz, _Zeitschr. f.
Wiss. Theol._, 1877, p. 404. Some of the dates, as Dr. W. R. Smith
shows, are "traditional," and are probably taken from Temple records
(_e.g._, the invasion of Shishak, and the change of the revenue
system in the twenty-third year of Joash). Taking these as data, we
have (roughly) 160 years to the twenty-third year of Joash, + 160 to
the death of Hezekiah, + 160 years to the return from the Exile =
480. He infers that "the existing scheme was obtained by setting down
a few fixed dates, and filling up the intervals with figures in which
20 and 40 were the main units."
CHAPTER III.
_THE HISTORIAN OF THE KINGS._
"The hearts of kings are in Thy rule and governance, and Thou dost
dispose and turn them as it _seemeth best_ to Thy godly wisdom."
Were we to judge the compiler or epitomator of the Book of Kings
from the literary standpoint of modern historians, he would, no
doubt, hold a very inferior place; but so to judge him would be
to take a mistaken view of his object, and to test his merits and
demerits by conditions which are entirely alien from the ideal of his
contemporaries and the purpose which he had in view.
It is quite true that he does not even aim at fulfilling the
requirements demanded of an ordinary secular historian. He does not
attempt to present any philosophical conception of the political events
and complicated interrelations of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms.
His method of writing the story of the Kings of Judah and Israel in so
many separate paragraphs gives a certain confusedness to the general
picture. It leads inevitably to the repetition of the same facts in
the accounts of two reigns. Each king is judged from a single point
of view, and that not the point of view by which his own age was
influenced, but one arrived at in later centuries, and under changed
conditions, religious and political. There is no attempt to show that
"God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
The military splendour or political ability of a king goes for
nothing. It has so little interest for the writer that a brilliant
and powerful ruler like Jeroboam II. seems to excite in him as little
interest as an effeminate weakling like Ahaziah. He passes over
without notice events of such capital importance as the invasion
of Zerah the Ethiopian (2 Chron. xiv. 9-15, xvi. 8); the wars of
Jehoshaphat against Edom, Ammon, and Moab (2 Chron. xx. 1-25); of
Uzziah against the Philistines (2 Chron. xxvi. 6-8); and of the
Assyrians against Manasseh (2 Chron. xxxiii. 11-13). He neither
tells us that Omri subdued Moab, nor that he was defeated by Syria.
He scarcely more than mentions events of such deep interest as
the conquest of Jerusalem by Shishak (1 Kings xiv. 25, 26); the
war between Abijam and Jeroboam (1 Kings xv. 7); of Amaziah with
Edom (2 Kings xiv. 7); or even the expedition of Josiah against
Pharaoh-nechoh (2 Kings xxiii. 29).[35] For these events he is
content to relegate us to the best authorities which he used, with
the phrase "and the rest of his acts, his wars, and all that he
did." The fact that Omri was the founder of so powerful a dynasty
that the Kings of Israel were known to Assyria as "the House of
Omri," does not induce him to give more than a passing notice to that
king. It did not come within his province to record such memorable
circumstances as that Ahab fought with the Aramæan host against
Assyria at the battle of Karkar, or that the bloodstained Jehu had to
send a large tribute to Shalmaneser II.
There is a certain monotony in the grounds given for the moral
judgments passed on each successive monarch. One unchanging formula
tells us of every one of the kings of Israel that "_he did that which
was evil in the sight of the Lord_," with exclusive reference in most
cases to "the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, wherewith he made
Israel to sin." The unfavourable remark about king after king of
Judah that "_nevertheless the high places were not taken away; the
people offered and burnt incense yet in the high places_" (1 Kings
xv. 14, xxii. 43; 2 Kings xii. 3, xiv. 4) makes no allowance for
the fact that high places dedicated to Jehovah had been previously
used unblamed by the greatest judges and seers, and that the feeling
against them had only entered into the national life in later days.
It belongs to the same essential view of history that the writer's
attention is so largely occupied by the activity of the prophets,
whose personality often looms far more largely on his imagination
than that of the kings. If we were to remove from his pages all that
he tells us of Nathan, Ahijah of Shiloh, Shemaiah, Jehu the son of
Hanani, Elijah, Elisha, Micaiah, Isaiah, Huldah, Jonah, and various
nameless "men of God,"[36] the residuum would be meagre indeed. The
silence as to Jeremiah is a remarkable circumstance which no theory
has explained; but we must remember the small extent of the compiler's
canvas, and that, even as it is, we should have but a dim insight into
the condition of the two kingdoms if we did not study also the extant
writings of contemporary prophets. His whole aim is to exhibit the
course of events as so controlled by the Divine Hand that faithfulness
to God ensured blessing, and unfaithfulness brought down His
displeasure and led to national decline. So far from concealing this
principle he states it, again and again, in the most formal manner.[37]
These might be objections against the author if he had written his
book in the spirit of an ordinary historian. They cease to have any
validity when we remember that he does not profess to offer us a
secular history at all. His aim and method have been described as
"prophetico-didactic." He writes avowedly as one who believed in the
Theocracy. His epitomes from the documents which he had before him were
made with a definite religious purpose. The importance or unimportance
of kings in his eyes depended on their relation to the opinions which
had come home to the conscience of the nation in the still recent
reformation of Josiah. He strove to solve the moral problems of God's
government as they presented themselves, with much distress and
perplexity, to the mind of his nation in the days of its decadence and
threatened obliteration. And in virtue of his method of dealing with
such themes, he shares with the other historical writers of the Old
Testament a right to be regarded as one of the _Prophetæ priores_.[38]
What were those problems?
They were the old problems respecting God's moral government of
the world which always haunted the Jewish mind, complicated by the
disappointment of national convictions about the promises of God to
the race of Abraham and the family of David.
The Exile was already imminent--it had indeed partly begun in the
deportation of Jehoiakin and many Jews to Babylon (B.C. 598)--when
the book saw the light. The writer was compelled to look back
with tears on "the days that were no more." The epoch of Israel's
splendour and dominion seemed to have passed for ever. And yet, was
not God the true Governor of His people? Had He not chosen Jacob for
Himself, and Israel for His own possession? Had not Abraham received
the promise that his seed should be as the sand of the sea, and that
in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed? Or was it
a mere illusion that "when Israel was a child I loved him, and out of
Egypt I called My son"? The writer clung with unquenchable faith to
his convictions about the destinies of his people, and yet every year
seemed to render their fulfilment more distant and more impossible.
* * * * *
The promise to Abraham had been renewed to Isaac, and to Jacob, and
to the patriarchs; but to David and his house it had been reiterated
with special emphasis and fresh details. That promise, as it stood
recorded in 2 Sam. vii. 12-16, was doubtless in the writer's hands.
The election of Israel as "God's people" is "a world-historic fact,
the fundamental miracle which no criticism can explain away."[39]
And, in addition, God had sworn in His holiness that He would not
forsake David. "When thy days be fulfilled," He had said, "and thou
shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee
... and will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for My
name, and _I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever, I
will be his father, and he shall be My son_. If he commit iniquity,
I will chastise him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of
the children of men. _But My mercy shall not depart from him, as I
took it from Saul whom I put away before thee, and thy house and thy
kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall
be established for ever._" This promise haunted the imagination of
the compiler of the Book of Kings. He repeatedly refers to it, and it
is so constantly present to his mind that his whole narrative seems
to be a comment, and often a perplexed and half-despairing comment,
upon it.[40] Yet he resisted the assaults of despair. The Lord had
made a faithful oath unto David, and He would _not_ depart from it.
It is this that makes him linger so lovingly on the glories of
the reign of Solomon. At first they seem to inaugurate an era of
overwhelming and permanent prosperity. Because Solomon was the heir
of David whom God had chosen, his dominion is established without an
effort in spite of a formidable conspiracy. Under his wise, pacific
rule the united kingdom springs to the zenith of its greatness. The
writer dwells with fond regret upon the glories of the Temple, the
Empire, and the Court of the wise king. He records God's renewed
promises to him that there should not be any among the kings like
unto him all his days. Alas! the splendid visions had faded away
like an unsubstantial pageant. Glory had led to vice and corruption.
Worldly policy carried apostasy in its train. The sun of Solomon set
in darkness, as the sun of David had set in decrepitude and blood.
"And the Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned
from the Lord God of Israel, who had appeared unto him twice: ...
but he kept not that which the Lord commanded. Wherefore the Lord
said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou
hast not kept My covenant, ... I will surely rend the kingdom from
thee.... Notwithstanding in thy day I will not do it for David thy
father's sake.... Howbeit I will not rend away all the kingdom; but
will give one tribe to thy son, for David My servant's sake, and for
Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen."[41]
Thus at one blow the heir of "Solomon in all his glory" dwindles
into the kinglet of a paltry little province not nearly so large as
the smallest of English counties. So insignificant, in fact, do the
fortunes of the kingdom become, that, for long periods, it has no
history worth speaking of. The historian is driven to occupy himself
with the northern tribes because they are the scene of the activity
of two glorious though widely different prophets. From first to last
we seem to hear in the prose of the annalist the cry of the troubled
Psalmist, "Lord, where are Thy old loving-kindnesses which Thou
swarest unto David in Thy truth? Remember, Lord, the rebukes that Thy
servants have, and how I do bear in my bosom the rebukes of many
people wherewith thine enemies have blasphemed Thee, and slandered the
footsteps of Thine anointed." And yet, in spite of all, with invincible
confidence, he adds, "Praised be the Lord for evermore. Amen and Amen."
And this is one of the great lessons which we learn alike from
Scripture and from the experience of every holy and humble life. It
may be briefly summed up in the words, "Put thou thy trust in God and
be doing good, and He shall bring it to pass." In multitudes of forms
the Bible inculcates upon us the lesson, "Have faith in God," "Fear
not; only believe." The paradox of the New Testament is the existence
of joy in the midst of sorrow and sighing, of exultation (ἀγαλλίασις)
even amid the burning fiery furnaces of anguish and persecution.
The secret of both Testaments alike is the power to maintain an
unquenchable faith, an unbroken peace, an indomitable trust amid
every complication of disaster and apparent overthrow. The writer of
the Book of Kings saw that God is patient, because He is eternal;
that even the histories of nations, not individual lives only, are
but as one ticking of a clock amid the eternal silence; that God's
ways are not man's ways. And because this is so--because God sitteth
above the water floods and remaineth a King for ever--therefore
we can attain to that ultimate triumph of faith which consists in
holding fast our profession, not only amid all the waves and storms
of calamity, but even when we are brought face to face with that
which wears the aspect of absolute and final failure. The historian
says in the name of his nation what the saint has so often to say in
his own, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Amos, earliest
of the prophets whose written utterances have been preserved,
undazzled by the magnificent revival of the Northern Kingdom under
Jeroboam II., was still convinced that the future lay with the poor
fallen "booth" of David's royalty: "And I will raise up his ruins,
and I will build it as in the days of old, ... saith the Lord that
doeth this."[42] In many a dark age of Jewish affliction this fire of
conviction has still burned amid the ashes of national hopes after it
had seemed to have flickered out under white heaps of chilly dust.[43]
FOOTNOTES:
[35] _Speaker's Commentary_, ii. 477.
[36] 1 Kings xiii. 1-32, xx. 13-15, 28, 35, 42; 2 Kings xxi. 10-15.
[37] 2 Kings xvii. 7-23, 32, 41, xxiii. 26, 27.
[38] רֹאשׁוֹנִים נְבִיאִים. The three greater and twelve minor
prophets are called _prophetæ posteriores_ (אַחֲרוֹנִים). Daniel is
classed among the Hagiographa (כְּתּוּבִים). This title of "former
prophets" was, however, given by the Jews to the historic books from
the mistaken fancy that they were all _written_ by prophets.
[39] Martensen, _Dogmatics_, p. 363.
[40] 2 Sam. vii. 12-16; 1 Kings xi. 36, xv. 4; 2 Kings viii. 19, xxv.
27-30. "His object evidently was," says Professor Robertson, "to
exhibit the bloom and decay of the Kingdom of Israel, and to trace
the influences which marked its varying destiny. He proceeds on the
fixed idea that the promise given to David of a sure house remained
in force during all the vicissitudes of the divided kingdom, and was
not even frustrated by the fall of the kingdom of Judah."
[41] 1 Kings xi. 9-13.
[42] Amos ix. 11, 12.
[43] Psalm lxxxix. 48-50.
CHAPTER IV.
_GOD IN HISTORY._
"The Lord remaineth a King for ever."
Had the compiler of the Book of Kings been so incompetent and valueless
an historian as some critics have represented, it would indeed have
been strange that his book should have kindled so immortal an interest,
or have taken its place securely in the Jewish canon among the most
sacred books of the world. He could not have secured this recognition
without real and abiding merits. His greatness appears by the manner in
which he grapples with, and is not crushed by, the problems presented
to him by the course of events to him so dismal.
1. He wrote after Israel had long been scattered among the nations.
The sons of Jacob had been deported into strange lands to be
hopelessly lost and absorbed amid heathen peoples. The district
which had been assigned to the Ten Tribes after the conquest of
Joshua had been given over to an alien and mongrel population. The
worst anticipations of northern prophets like Amos and Hoshea had
been terribly fulfilled. The glory of Samaria had been wiped out, as
when one wipeth a dish, wiping and turning it upside down. From the
beginning of Israel's separate dominion the prophets saw the germ of
its final ruin in what is called the "calf-worship" of Jeroboam,
which prepared the way for the Baal-worship introduced by the House
of Omri. In the two and a half centuries of Samaria's existence the
compiler of this history finds nothing of eternal interest except
the activity of God's great messengers. In the history of Judah the
better reigns of a Jehoshaphat, of a Hezekiah, of a Josiah, had shed
a sunset gleam over the waning fortunes of the remnant of God's
people. Hezekiah and Josiah, with whatever deflections, had both
ruled in the theocratic spirit. They had both inaugurated reforms.
The reformation achieved by the latter was so sweeping and thorough
as to kindle the hope that the deep wound inflicted on the nation by
the manifold crimes of Manasseh had been healed. But it was not so.
The records of these two best kings end, nevertheless, in prophecies
of doom.[44] The results of their reforming efforts proved to be
partial and unsatisfactory. A race of vassal weaklings succeeded.
Jehoahaz was taken captive by the Egyptians, who set up Jehoiakim as
their puppet. He submits to Nebuchadnezzar, attempts a weak revolt,
and is punished. In the short reign of Jehoiachin the captivity
begins, and the futile rebellion of Zedekiah leads to the deportation
of his people, the burning of the Holy City, and the desecration of
the Temple. It seemed as though the ruin of the olden hopes could not
have been more absolute. Yet the historian will not abandon them.
Clinging to God's promises with desperate and pathetic tenacity he
gilds his last page, as with one faint sunbeam struggling out of the
stormy darkness of the exile, by narrating how Evil-merodach released
Jehoiachin from his long captivity, and treated him with kindness,
and advanced him to the first rank among the vassal kings in the
court of Babylon. If the ruler of Judah must be a hopeless prisoner,
let him at least occupy among his fellow-prisoners a sad pre-eminence!
2. The historian has been blamed for the perpetual gloom which
enwraps his narrative. Surely the criticism is unjust. He did not
invent his story. He is no whit more gloomy than Thucydides, who had
to record how the brief gleam of Athenian glory sank in the Bay of
Syracuse into a sea of blood. He is not half so gloomy as Tacitus,
who is forced to apologise for the "hues of earthquake and eclipse"
which darken his every page. The gloom lay in the events of which
he desired to be the faithful recorder. He certainly did not love
gloom. He lingers at disproportionate length over the grandeur of
the reign of Solomon, dilating fondly upon every element of his
magnificence, and unwilling to tear himself away from the one period
which realised his ideal expectations. After that period his spirits
sink. He cared less to deal with a divided kingdom of which only
the smallest fragment was even approximately faithful. There could
be nothing but gloom in the record of shortlived, sanguinary, and
idolatrous dynasties, which succeeded each other like the scenes of
a grim phantasmagoria in Samaria and Jezreel. There could be nothing
but gloom in the story of that northern kingdom in which king after
king was dogged to ruin by the politic unfaithfulness of the rebel
by whom it had been founded. Nor could there be much real brightness
in the story of humiliated Judah. There also many kings preferred a
diplomatic worldliness to reliance on their true source of strength.
Even in Judah there were kings who defiled God's own temple with
heathen abominations; and a saint like Hezekiah had been followed
by an apostate like Manasseh. Had Judah been content to dwell in
the defence of the Most High and abide under the shadow of the
Almighty, she would have been defended under His wings and been safe
beneath His feathers; His righteousness and truth would have been
her shield and buckler. He who protected her in the awful crisis of
Sennacherib's invasion had proved that He never faileth them that
trust Him. But her kings had preferred to lean on such a bruised reed
as Egypt, which broke under the weight, and pierced the hand of all
who relied on her assistance. "But ye said, Nay, but we will flee
upon horses; therefore shall ye flee: and, We will ride upon the
swift; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift."[45]
3. And has not gloom been the normal characteristic of many a long
period of human history? It is with the life of nations as with the
life of men. With nations, too, there is "a perpetual fading of
all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust." Humanity
advances, but it advances over the ruins of peoples and the wrecks of
institutions. Truth forces its way into acceptance, but its progress
is "from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake." All who have
generalised on the course of history have been forced to recognise
its agonies and disappointments. There, says Byron,
"There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past;
First Freedom, and then Glory--when that fails,
Wealth, Vice, Corruption--Barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page: 'tis better written here
Where gorgeous tyranny hath thus amassed
All treasures, all delights that eye or ear,
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask."
Mr. J. R. Lowell, looking at the question from another side, sings:--
"Careless seems the Great Avenger; History's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt all systems and
the Word;
Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the
throne--
Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and behind the dim
unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."
Mr. W. H. Lecky, again, considering the facts of national story from
the point of view of heredity, and the permanent consequences of
wrong-doing, sings:--
"The voice of the afflicted is rising to the sun,
The thousands who have perished for the selfishness of one;
The judgment-seat polluted, the altar overthrown,
The sighing of the exile, the tortured captive's groan,
The many crushed and plundered to gratify the few,
The hounds of hate pursuing the noble and the true."
Or, if we desire a prose authority, can we deny this painful estimate
of Mr. Ruskin?--"Truly it seems to me as I gather in my mind the
evidence of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen
toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope in which the nations
of the world have lived since first they could bear record of
themselves, it seems to me, I say, as if the race itself were still
half serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; a lacertine brood of
bitterness, the glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger and blotted
with venomous stain, and the track of it on the leaf a glittering
slime, and in the sand a useless furrow."[46]
Dark as is the story which the author of the Book of Kings has
to record, and hopeless as might seem to be the conclusion of
the tragedy, he is responsible for neither. He can but tell the
things that were, and tell them as they were; the picture is,
after all, far less gloomy than that presented in many a great
historic record. Consider the features of such an age as that
recorded by Tacitus, with the "Iliad of woes" of which he was the
annalist.[47] Does Jewish history offer us nothing but this horrible
monotony of delations and suicides? Consider the long ages of
darkness and retrogression in the fifth and following centuries;
or the unutterable miseries inflicted on the seaboard of Europe
by the invasions of the Norsemen--the mere thought of which drove
Charlemagne to tears; or the long complicated agony produced by
hundreds of petty feudal wars, and the cruel tyranny of marauding
barons; or the condition of England in the middle of the fourteenth
century when the Black Death swept away half of her population; or
the extreme misery of the masses after the Thirty Years' War; or the
desolating horror of the wars of Napoleon which filled Germany with
homeless and starving orphans. The annals of the Hebrew monarchy are
less grim than these; yet the House of Israel might also seem to have
been chosen out for a pre-eminence of sorrow which ended in making
Jerusalem "a rendezvous for the extermination of the race." When once
the Jewish wars began--
"Vengeance! thy fiery wing their race pursued,
Thy thirsty poniard blushed with infant blood!
Roused at thy call and panting still for game
The bird of war, the Latin eagle came.
Then Judah raged, by ruffian discord led,
Drunk with the steamy carnage of the dead;
He saw his sons by dubious slaughter fall,
And war without, and death within the wall."
Probably no calamity since time began exceeded in horror and anguish
the carnage and cannibalism and demoniac outbreak of every vile and
furious passion which marked the siege of Jerusalem; and, in the
dreary ages which followed, the world has heard rising from the
Jewish people the groan of myriads of broken hearts.
"The fruits of the earth have lost their savour," wrote one poor
Rabbi, the son of Gamaliel, "and no dew falls."
In the crowded Ghettos of mediæval cities, during the foul tyranny
of the Inquisition in Spain, and many a time throughout Europe, amid
the iron oppression of ignorant and armed brutality, the hapless
Jews have been forced to cry aloud to the God of their fathers:
"Thou feedest Thy people with the bread of tears, and givest them
plenteousness of tears to drink!" "Thou sellest Thy people for
nought, and givest no money for them."
When the eccentric Frederic William I. of Prussia ordered his Court
chaplain to give him in one sentence a proof of Christianity, the
chaplain answered without a moment's hesitation: "The Jews, your
Majesty." Truly it might seem that the fortunes of that strange people
had been designed for a special lesson, not to them only, but to the
whole human race; and the general outlines of that lesson have never
been more clearly and forcibly indicated than in the Book of Kings.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] 2 Kings xx. 16-18, xxii. 16-20.
[45] Isa. xxx. 16.
[46] _Queen of the Air_, p. 87.
[47] Tac., _Hist._, 1, 2: "Opus aggredior opimum casibus, atrox
prœliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace sævum."
CHAPTER V.
_HISTORY WITH A PURPOSE._
"History, as distinguished from chronicles or annals, must
always contain a theory whether confessed by the writer or not.
A sound theory is simply a general conception which co-ordinates
a multitude of facts. Without this, facts cease to have interest
except to the antiquarian."--LAURIE.
The prejudice against history written with a purpose is a groundless
prejudice. Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Sallust, had each his
guiding principle, no less than Ammianus Marcellinus, St. Augustine,
Orosius, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Turgot, Condorcet,
Hegel, Fichte, and every modern historian worthy the name. They
have all, as Mr. Morley says, felt the intellectual necessity for
showing "those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way
for great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more
immediately brought them to pass." Orosius, founding his epitome on
the hint given by St. Augustine in his _De Civitate Dei_, begins with
the famous words, "_Divina providentia agitur mundus et homo._" Other
serious writers may vary the formula, but in all their annals the
lesson is essentially the same. "The foundation upon which, at all
periods, Israel's sense of its national unity rested was religious in
its character." "The history of Israel," says Stade, "is essentially
a history of religious ideas."[48]
Of course the history is rendered valueless if, in pursuing his
purpose, the writer either falsifies events or intentionally
manipulates them in such a way that they lead to false issues. But
the man who is not inspired by his subject, the man to whom the
history which he is narrating has no particular significance, must be
a man of dull imagination or cold affections. No such man can write a
true history at all. For history is the record of what has happened
to men in nations, and its events are swayed by human passions, and
palpitate with human emotions. There is no great historian who may
not be charged with having been in some respects a partisan. The ebb
and flow of his narrative, the "to-and-fro-conflicting waves" of the
struggles which he records, must be to him as idle as a dance of
puppets if he feels no special interest in the chief actors, and has
not formed a distinct judgment of the sweep of the great unseen tidal
forces by which they are determined and controlled.
The greatness of the sacred historian of the Kings consists in his
firm grasp of the principle that God is the controlling power and sin
the disturbing force in the entire history of men and nations.
Surely he does not stand alone in either conviction. Both
propositions are confirmed by all experience. In all life, individual
and national, sin is weakness; and human life without God, whether
isolated or corporate, is no better than
"A trouble of ants 'mid a million million of suns."
"Why do the heathen so furiously rage together," sang the Psalmist,
"and why do the people imagine a vain thing?... He that dwelleth in
the heavens shall laugh them to scorn; the Lord shall have them in
derision." Even the oldest of the Greek poets, in the first lines
of the _Iliad_, declares that amid those scenes of carnage, and the
tragic fate of heroes, Διὸς δ' ἐτέλειετο βουλή:--
"Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, Heavenly Goddess sing;
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of countless chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
Since great Achilles and Atreides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!"
In the _Odyssey_ the same conviction is repeated, where Odysseus
says that "it is the fate-fraught decree of Zeus which stands by
as arbiter, when it is meant that miserable men should suffer many
woes."[49] The heathen, too, saw clearly that,
"Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;"
and that, alike for Trojans and Danaans, the chariot-wheels of Heaven
roll onward to their destined goal.
Such words express a belief in the hearts of pagans identical with
that in the hearts of the early disciples when they exclaimed: "Of a
truth in this city against Thy holy Servant Jesus, whom Thou didst
anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the
peoples of Israel, were gathered together, _to do whatsoever Thy hand
and Thy counsel foreordained to come to pass_."[50]
The ever-present intensity of these convictions leads the historian
of the Kings to many shorter or longer "homiletic excursuses," in
which he develops his main theme. And if he inculcates his high faith
in the form of speeches and other insertions which perhaps express
his own views more distinctly than they could have been expressed by
the earlier prophets and kings of Judah, he adopts a method which was
common in past ages and has always been conceded to the greatest and
most trustworthy of ancient historians.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Wellhausen, _History of Israel_, p. 432; Stade, _Gesch. des Volkes
Israel_, i., p. 12; Robinson, _Ancient History of Israel_, p. 15.
[49] _Od._, ix. 51, 52.
[50] Acts iv. 27, 28.
CHAPTER VI.
_LESSONS OF THE HISTORY._
"Great men are the inspired texts of that Divine Book of
Revelation of which a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch,
and by some named History."--CARLYLE.
Thus history becomes one of the most precious books of God. To
speak vaguely of "a stream of tendency not ourselves which makes
for righteousness," is to endow "a stream of tendency" with a moral
sense. Philosophers may talk of "dass unbekannte höhere Wesen das wir
ahnen"; but the great majority, alike of the wisest and the humblest of
mankind, will give to that moral "Not-ourselves" the name of God. The
truth was more simply and more religiously expressed by the American
orator when he said that "One with God is always in a majority," and
"God is the only final public opinion." Only thus can we account for
the fact that events apparently the most trivial have repeatedly
been overruled to produce the most stupendous issues, and opposition
apparently the most overwhelming has been made to further the very ends
which it most fiercely resisted. "The fierceness of man shall turn to
Thy praise, and the fierceness of them shalt Thou restrain."
St. Paul expresses his sense of this fact when he says, "Not many
wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:
but God chose the foolish things of the world, and the weak things
of the world, and the base things of the world, and the things that
are despised did God choose, and the things that are not, that He
might bring to nought the things that are":[51] and that "because
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men."[52]
The most conspicuous instance of these laws in history is furnished
by the victories of Christianity. It was against all probability that
a faith not only despised but execrated--a faith whose crucified
Messiah kindled unmitigated contempt, and its doctrine of the
Resurrection unmingled derision--a faith confined originally to a
handful of ignorant peasants drawn from the dregs of a tenth-rate
and subjugated people--should prevail over all the philosophy,
and genius, and ridicule, and authority of the world, supported
by the diadems of all-powerful Cæsars and the swords of thirty
legions. It was against all probability that a faith which, in the
world's judgment, was so abject, should in so short a space of time
achieve so complete a triumph, not by aggressive force, but by
meek non-resistance, and that it should win its way through armed
antagonism by the sole powers of innocence and of martyrdom--"not by
might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."
But though the thoughtful Israelite had no such glorious spectacle
as this before him, he saw something analogous to it. The prophets
had been careful to point out that no merit or superiority of its own
had caused the people to be chosen by God from among the nations
for the mighty functions for which it was destined, and which it had
already in part fulfilled. "And thou shalt answer before the Lord
thy God, and say, A Syrian ready to perish was my father; he went
down to Egypt, and sojourned there, few in number."[53] The chosen
people could boast of no loftier ancestry than that they sprang from
a fugitive from the land of Ur, whose descendants had sunk into a
horde of miserable slaves in the hot valley of Egypt. Yet from that
degraded and sensuous serfdom God had led them into the wilderness
"through parted seas and thundering battles," and had spoken to them
at Sinai in a voice so mighty that its echoes have rolled among the
nations for evermore. If through their sins and shortcomings they
had once more been reduced to the rank of captive strangers in a
strange land, the historian knew that even then their lot was not
so abject as it once had been. They had at least heroic memories
and an imperishable past. He believed that though God's face was
darkened to them, the light of it was neither utterly nor finally
withdrawn. Nothing could henceforth shake his trust that, even when
Israel walked in the valley of the shadow of death, God would still
be with His people; that "He would _love_ their souls out of the pit
of destruction."[54] The vain-glorious efforts of the heathen were
foredoomed to final impotence, for God ruled the raging of the sea,
the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people.
If this high faith seemed so often to lead only to frustrate hopes,
the historian saw the reason. His philosophy of history reduced
itself to the one rule that "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but
sin is the reproach of any people." It is a sublime philosophy, and
no other is possible. It might be written as the comment on every
history in the world. The prophets write it large, and again and
again, as in letters of blood and fire. Upon their pages, even from
the days of Balaam,
"In outline dim and vast
Their mighty shadows cast
The giant forms of Empires on their way
To ruin: one by one
They tower, and they are gone!"
Balaam had uttered his denunciation on Moab and Amalek and the
Kenite. Amos hurled defiance on Moab, Ammon, and the Philistines.
Isaiah taunted Egypt with her splendid impotence, and had said of
Babylon: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the
morning!" As the sphere of national life enlarged, Nahum had poured
forth his exultant dirge over the falling greatness of Assyria; and
Ezekiel had painted the desolation which should come on glorious
Tyre. These great prophets had read upon the palace-walls of the
mightiest kingdoms the burning messages of doom, because they knew
that (to quote the words of a living historian) "for every false
word and unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust and
vanity, the price has to be paid at last.... Justice and truth alone
endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but
doomsday comes to them at last."
Has the course of ages at all altered the incidence of these eternal
laws? Do modern kingdoms offer any exceptions to the universal
experience of the past? Look at Spain. Corrupted by her own vast
wealth, by the confusion of religion with the indolent acceptance
of lies which paraded themselves as catholic orthodoxy, and by the
fatal disseverance of religion from the moral law, she has sunk
into decrepitude. Read in the utter collapse and ruin of her great
Armada the inevitable Nemesis on greed, indolence, and superstition.
Look at modern France. When the inflated bubble of her arrogance
collapsed at Sedan as with a touch, two of her own writers, certainly
not prejudiced in favour of Christian conclusions--Ernest Renan
and Alexandre Dumas, _fils_--pointed independently to the causes
of her ruin, and found them in her irreligion and her debauchery.
The warnings which they addressed to their countrymen in that hour
of humiliation, on the sanctity of family life and the eternal
obligations of national righteousness, were identical with those
addressed to the Israelites of old by Amos or Isaiah. The only
difference was that the form in which they were uttered was modern
and came with incomparably less of impassioned force.
The historian who, six hundred years before Christ, saw so clearly,
and illustrated with such striking conciseness, the laws of God's
moral governance of the world stands far above the casual censure
of those who judge him by a mistaken standard. We owe him a debt of
the deepest gratitude, not only because he has preserved for us the
national records which might otherwise have perished, but far more
because he has seen and pointed out their true significance. Imagine
an English writer trying to give a sketch of English history since
the death of Henry VI. in a thin volume of sixty or seventy octavo
pages! Is it conceivable that even the most gifted and brilliant
of our historians could in so short a space have rendered such a
service as this sacred historian has rendered to all mankind? Do
we owe nothing to the vivid insight which enabled him to set so
many characters clearly before us with a few strokes of the pen?
It is true that it is the _history_ which is inspired rather than
the _record_ of the history; but the record itself is of quite
exceptional value. It is true that the prophetic historian and the
scientific historian must be judged by wholly different canons of
criticism; but may not the prophetic historian be much the greater
of the two? By the light of his histories we can read all histories,
and see the common lesson taught us by the life of nations, as by the
life of individuals--which is, that obedience to God's law is the
only path of safety, the only condition of permanence. To fear God
and keep His commandments is the end of the matter, and is the whole
duty of man. To one who follows the guiding clue of these convictions
history becomes "Providence made visible."
Bossuet, like St. Augustine, found the key to all events in a Divine
Will controlling and overruling the course of human destinies by a
constant exercise of superhuman power. Even Comte "ascribed a hardly
less resistible power to a Providence of his own construction,
directing present events along a groove cut ever more and more deeply
for them by the past." And Mr. John Morley admits that "whether
you accept Bossuet's theory or Comte's--whether men be their own
Providence, or no more than instruments or secondary agents in other
hands--this classification of either Providence equally deserves
study and meditation."
Thus, though the Jews were a small and insignificant people--though
their kings were mere local sheykhs in comparison with the Pharaohs,
or the kings of Assyria and Babylon; though they had none of that
sense of beauty which gave immortality to the arts of Greece; though
their temple was an altogether trivial structure when compared
with the Parthenon or the Serapeum; though they had no drama which
can be distantly compared with the Oresteia of Æschylus, and no
epic which can be put beside the Iliad or the Nibelungen; though
they had nothing which can be dignified with the name of a system
of Philosophy--yet their influence on the human race--rendered
permanent by their literature, or by that fragment of it which we
call "The Books" as though there were none other in the world worth
speaking of--has been more powerful than that of all nations upon
the development of humanity. Millions have known the names of David
or Isaiah, who never so much as heard of Sesostris or of Plato.
The influence of the Hebrew race upon mankind has been a moral and
a religious influence. Leaving Christianity out of sight--though
Christianity itself was nursed in the cradle of Judaism, and was the
fulfilment of the Messianic idea which was the most characteristic
element in the ancient religion of the Hebrews--the history of Israel
is more widely known a million-fold than any history of any people.
Professor Huxley is an unsuspected witness to this truth. He has
declared that he knows of no other work in the world by the study of
which children could be so much humanised, and made to feel that each
figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves,
but a momentary space in the interval between the two eternities.
What other nation has contributed to the treasure of human thought
elements so immeasurably important as the idea of monotheism, and
the Ten Commandments, and the high spiritual teaching by which the
prophets brought home to the consciousness of our race the nearness,
the holiness, and the love of God? We do not underrate the value
of Eternal Inspiration in the "richly-variegated wisdom" which
"multifariously and fragmentarily" the Creator has vouchsafed to man;
but the Jews will ever be the most interesting of nations, chiefly
because to them were entrusted the oracles of God.[55]
FOOTNOTES:
[51] 1 Cor. i. 26-28.
[52] _Id._, v. 25.
[53] Deut. xxvi. 5.
[54] Isa. xxxviii. 17 (Heb.).
[55] See Stade, i. 1-8.
BOOK II.
_DAVID AND SOLOMON._
CHAPTER VII.
_DAVID'S DECREPITUDE._
1 KINGS i. 1-4.
"Praise a fair day at night."
The old age of good men is often a beautiful spectacle. They show
us the example of a mellower wisdom, a larger tolerance, a sweeter
temper, a more unselfish sympathy, a clearer faith. The setting sun
of their bright day tinges even the clouds which gather round it with
softer and more lovely hues.
We cannot say this of David's age. After the oppressive splendour of
his heroic youth and manhood there was no dewy twilight of honoured
peace. We see him in a somewhat pitiable decrepitude. He was not
really old; the expression of our Authorised Version, "stricken in
years," is literally "entered into days," but the Book of Chronicles
calls him "old and full of days."[56] Josephus says that when he died
he was only seventy years old. He had reigned seven years and a half
in Hebron and thirty-three years in Jerusalem.[57] At the age of
seventy many men are still in full vigour of strength and intellect,
but the conditions of that day were not favourable to longevity.
Solomon does not seem to have survived his sixtieth year; and it is
doubtful whether any one of the kings of Israel or Judah--excepting,
strange to say, the wicked Manasseh--attained even that moderate age.
Threescore years and ten have always been the allotted space of human
life, and few who long survive that age find that their strength then
is anything but labour and sorrow.
But the decrepitude of David was exceptional. He was drained of all
his vital force. He took to his bed, but though they heaped clothes
upon him he could get no warmth. "He remained cold amid the torrid
heat of Jerusalem." Then his physicians recommended the only remedy
they knew, to give heat to his chilled and withered frame. It was the
primitive and not ineffectual remedy--which was suggested twenty-two
centuries later to the great Frederic Barbarossa--of contact with
the warmth of a youthful frame.[58] So they sought out the fairest
virgin in all the coasts of Israel to act as the king's nurse, and
their choice fell on Abishag, a maiden of Shunem in Issachar.[59]
There was no question of his taking another wife. He had already
many wives and concubines, and what the bed-ridden invalid required
was a strong and youthful nurse to cherish him. We are surprised at
such total failure of life's forces. But David had lived through a
youth of toil and exposure, of fight and hardship, in the days when
his only home had been the dark and dripping limestone caves, and
he had been hunted like a partridge on the mountains by the furious
jealousy of Saul. The sun had smitten him by day and the moon by
night, and the chill dews had fallen on him in the midnight bivouacs
among the crags of Engedi. Then had followed the burdens and cares of
royalty with guilty anxieties and deeds which shook his pulses with
wrath and fear. Coincident with these were the demoralising luxuries
and domestic sensualism of a polygamous palace. Worst of all, he
had sinned against God, and against light, and against his own
conscience. For a time his moral sense had slumbered, and retribution
had been delayed. But when he awoke from his sensual dream, the
belated punishment burst over him in thunder and his conscience with
outstretched finger and tones of menace must often have repeated to
the murderous adulterer the doom of Nathan and the stern sentence,
"Thou art the man!" Many a vulgar Eastern tyrant would hardly have
regarded David's sin as a sin at all; but when such a man as David
sins, the fact that he has been admitted into a holier sanctuary adds
deadliness to the guilt of his sacrilege. True he was forgiven, but
he must have found it terribly hard to forgive himself. God gave back
to him the clean heart, and renewed a right spirit within him; but
the sense of forgiveness differs from the sweetness of innocence,
and the remission of his sins did not bring with it the remission of
their consequences. From that disastrous day David was a changed man.
It might be said of him as of the Fallen Spirit:--
"His face
Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek."
The Nemesis of sin's normal consequences pursued him to the end. Dark
spirits walked in his house. Joab knew his guilty secrets, and Joab
became the tyrannous master of his destiny. Those guilty secrets
leaked out, and he lost his charm, his influence, his popularity among
his subjects. He was haunted by an ever-present sense of shame and
humiliation. Joab was a murderer, and went unpunished; but was not he
too an unpunished murderer? If his enemies cursed him, he sometimes
felt with a sense of despair, "Let them curse. God hath said unto them,
Curse David." His past carried with it the inevitable deterioration of
his present. In the overwhelming shame and horror which rent his heart
during the rebellion of Absalom, he must often have felt tempted to the
fatalism of desperation, like that guilty king of Greek tragedy who,
burdened with the curse of his race, was forced to exclaim,--
"Ἔπει τὸ πρᾶγμα καρτ' ἐπισπέρχει θεός
Ἴτω κατ' οὖρον, κῦμα Κωκυτοῦ λαχόν,
Θεῷ στυγηθὲν πᾶν το Λαΐου γένος."[60]
Curses in his family, a curse upon his daughter, a curse upon
his sons, a curse upon himself, a curse upon his people,--there
was scarcely one ingredient in the cup of human woe which, in
consequence of his own crimes, this unhappy king had not been forced
to taste. Scourges of war, famine, and pestilence--of a three years'
famine, of a three years' flight before his enemies, of a three
days' pestilence--he had known them all. He had suffered with the
sufferings of his subjects, whose trials had been aggravated by his
own transgressions. He had seen his sons following his own fatal
example, and he had felt the worst of all sufferings in the serpent's
tooth of filial ingratitude agonising a troubled heart and a weakened
will. It is no wonder that David became decrepit before his time.
Yet what a picture does he present of the vanity of human wishes,
of the emptiness of all that men desire, of the truth which Solon
impressed on the Lydian king that we can call no man happy before
his death! David's youth had been a pastoral idyll; his manhood an
epic of war and chivalry; his premature age becomes the chronicle
of a nursery. What different pictures are presented to us by David
in his sweet youth and glowing bloom, and David in his unloved and
disgraced decline! We have seen him a beautiful ruddy boy, summoned
from his sheepfolds, with the wind of the desert on his cheek and
its sunlight in his hair, to kneel before the aged prophet and feel
the hands of consecration laid upon his head. Swift and strong, his
feet like hart's feet, his arms able to bend a bow of steel, he
fights like a good shepherd for his flock, and single-handed smites
the lion and the bear. His harp and song drive the evil spirit from
the tortured soul of the demoniac king. With a sling and a stone the
boy slays the giant champion, and the maidens of Israel praise their
deliverer with songs and dances. He becomes the armour-bearer of
the king, the beloved comrade of the king's son, the husband of the
king's daughter. Then indeed he is driven into imperilled outlawry by
the king's envy, and becomes the captain of a band of freebooters;
but his influence over them, as in our English legends of Robin Hood,
gives something of beneficence to his lawlessness, and even these
wandering years of brigandage are brightened by tales of his splendid
magnanimity. The young chieftain who had mingled a loyal tenderness
and genial humour with all his wild adventures--who had so generously
and almost playfully spared the life of Saul his enemy--who had
protected the flocks and fields of the churlish Nabal--who, with the
chivalry of a Sydney, had poured on the ground the bright drops of
water from the Well of Bethlehem for which he had thirsted, because
they had been won by imperilled lives--sprang naturally into the
idolised hero and poet of his people. Then God had taken him from
the sheepfolds, from following the ewes great with young ones,
that he might lead Jacob His people and Israel His inheritance.
Generous to the sad memories of Saul and Jonathan, generous to the
princely Abner, generous to the weak Ishbosheth, generous to poor
lame Mephibosheth, he had knit all hearts like the heart of one
man to himself, and in successful war had carried all before him,
north and south, and east and west. He enlarged the borders of his
kingdom, captured the City of Waters, and placed the Moloch-crown of
Rabbah on his head. Then in the mid-flush of his prosperity, in his
pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, "the tempting
opportunity met the susceptible disposition," and David forgat God
who had done so great things for him.
The people must have felt how deep was the debt of gratitude which
they owed to him. He had given them a consciousness of power
yet undeveloped; a sense of the unity of their national life
perpetuated by the possession of a capital which has been famous
to all succeeding ages. To David the nation owed the conquest of
the stronghold of Jebus, and they would feel that "as the hills
stand about Jerusalem so standeth the Lord round about them that
fear Him."[61] The king who associates his name with a national
capital--as Nebuchadnezzar built great Babylon, or Constantine chose
Byzantium--secures the strongest claim to immortality. But the
choice made by David for his capital showed an intuition as keen as
that which has immortalised the fame of the Macedonian conqueror
in the name of Alexandria. Jerusalem is a city which belongs to
all time, and even under the curse of Turkish rule it has not
lost its undying interest. But David had rendered a still higher
service in giving stability to the national religion. The prestige
of the Ark had been destroyed in the overwhelming defeat of Israel
by the Philistines at Aphek, when it fell into the hands of the
uncircumcised. After that it had been neglected and half forgotten
until David brought it with songs and dances to God's holy hill of
Zion. Since then every pious Israelite might rejoice that, as in the
Tabernacle of old, God was once more in the midst of His people.
The merely superstitious might only regard the Ark as a fetish--the
fated Palladium of the national existence. But to all thoughtful men
the presence of the Ark had a deeper meaning, for it enshrined the
Tables of the Moral Law; and those broken Tables, and the bending
Cherubim which gazed down upon them, and the blood-sprinkled gold of
the Mercy-Seat were a vivid emblem that God's Will is the Rule of
Righteousness, and that if it be broken the soul must be reconciled
to Him by repentance and forgiveness. That meaning is beautifully
brought out in the Psalm which says, "Who shall ascend into the hill
of the Lord, or who shall rise up into the holy place? Even he that
hath clean hands and a pure heart: who hath not lifted up his mind
unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour."
To David more than to any man that conviction of the supremacy of
righteousness must have been keenly present, and for this reason his
sin was the less pardonable. It "tore down the altar of confidence"
in many hearts. It caused the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, and
was therefore worthy of a sorer punishment. And God in His mercy
smote, and did not spare.
He sinned: then came earthquake and eclipse. His earthly life was
shipwrecked in that place where two seas meet--where the sea of
calamity meets the sea of crime.[62] Then followed the death of his
infant child; the outrage of Amnon; the blood of the brutal ravisher
shed by his brother's hands; the flight of Absalom; his insolence,
his rebellion, his deadly insult to his father's household; the long
day of flight and shame and weeping and curses, as David ascended
the slope of Olivet and went down into the Valley of Jordan; the
sanguinary battle; the cruel murder of the beloved rebel; the
insolence of Joab; the heartrending cry, "O Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom; would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
Not even then had David's trials ended. He had to endure the fierce
quarrel between Israel and Judah; the rebellion of Sheba; the murder
of Amasa, which he dared not punish. He had to sink into the further
sin of pride in numbering the people, and to see the Angel of the
Plague standing with drawn sword over the threshing-floor of Araunah,
while his people--those sheep who had not offended--died around him
by thousands. After such a life he was made to feel that it was
not for blood-stained hands like his to rear the Temple, though he
had said, "I will not suffer mine eyes to sleep nor mine eyelids
to slumber, neither the temples of my head to take any rest till I
find a place for the tabernacle of the Lord, a habitation for the
mighty God of Jacob." And now we see him surrounded by intrigues;
alienated from the friends and advisers of his youth; shivering in
his sick-room; attended by his nurse; feeble, apathetic, the ghost
and wreck of all that he held been, with little left him of his life
but its "glimmerings and decays."
It is an oft-repeated story. Even so we see great Darius
"Deserted at his utmost need
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare ground exposed he lies
Without a friend to close his eyes."
So we see glorious Alexander the Great, dying as a fool dieth,
remorseful, drunken, disappointed, at Babylon. So we see our great
Plantagenet:--
"Mighty victor, mighty lord,
Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies."
So we see Louis XIV., _le grand monarque_, peevish, _ennuyé_,
fortunate no longer, an old man of seventy-seven left in his vast
lonely palace with his great-grandson, a frivolous child of five,
and saying to him, "_J'ai trop aime la guerre; ne m'imitez point_."
So we see the last great conqueror of modern times, embittering his
dishonoured island-exile by miserable disputes with Sir Hudson Lowe
about etiquette and champagne. But among all the "sad stories of
the deaths of kings" none ends a purer glory with a more pitiful
decline than the poet-king of Israel, whose songs have been to so
many thousands their delight in the house of their pilgrimage. Truly
David's experience no less than his own may have added bitterness to
the traditional epitaph of his son on all human glory: "Vanity of
vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
FOOTNOTES:
[56] 1 Chron. xxiii. 1.
[57] 2 Sam. v. 5.
[58] It is mentioned by Galen, vii.; Valesius, _De Sacr. Philos._,
xxix., p. 187; Bacon, _Hist. Vitæ et Mortis_, ix. 25; Reinhard,
_Bibel-Krankheiten_, p. 171. See Josephus, _Antt._, VII. xv. 3.
[59] Now Solam, near _Zerin_ (Jezreel), five miles south of Tabor
(Robinson, _Researches_, iii. 462), on the south-west of Jebel
el-Duhy (Little Hermon), Josh. xix. 18; 1 Sam. xxviii. 4.
[60] Æsch., _Sept. c. Theb._, 690.
[61] See Psalm cxxii. 3-5.
[62] See Kittel, ii. 147.
CHAPTER VIII.
_AN EASTERN COURT AND HOME._
1 KINGS i.
"Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness."--EZEK. xvi.
49.
A man does not choose his own destiny; it is ordained for higher
ends than his own personal happiness. If David could have made his
choice, he might, indeed, have been dazzled by the glittering lure of
royalty; yet he would have been in all probability happier and nobler
had he never risen above the simple life of his forefathers. Our
saintly king in Shakespeare's tragedy says:--
"My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen. My crown is called Content;
And crown it is which seldom kings enjoy."
David assuredly did not enjoy that crown. After his establishment at
Jerusalem it is doubtful whether he could count more happy days than
Abderrahman the Magnificent, who recorded that amid a life honoured
in peace and victorious in war he could not number more than fourteen.
We admire the generous freebooter more than we admire the powerful
king. As time went on he showed a certain deterioration of character,
the inevitable result of the unnatural conditions to which he
had succumbed. Saul was a king of a very simple type. No pompous
ceremonials separated him from the simple intercourse of natural
kindliness. He did not tower over the friends of his youth like a
Colossus, and look down on his superiors from the artificial elevation
of his inch-high dignity. "In himself was all his state," and there
was something kinglier in his simple majesty when he stood under his
pomegranate at Migron, with his huge javelin in his hand, than in
"The tedious pomp which waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold
Dazzles the crowd, and sets them all agape."
We should not have assumed beforehand that there was anything
in David's character which rendered external pomp and ceremony
attractive to him. But the inherent flunkeyism of Eastern servility
made his courtiers feed him with adulation, and approach him with
genuflexions. Apparently he could not rise superior to the slowly
corrupting influences of autocracy which gradually assimilated the
court of the once simple warrior to that of his vulgar compeers
on the neighbouring thrones. There is something startling to see
what a chasm royalty has cleft between him and the comrades of his
adversity, and even the partner of his guilt who had become his
favourite queen. We see it throughout the story of the last scenes
in which he plays a part. He can only be addressed with periphrases
and in the third person. "Let there be sought for _my lord the king_
a young virgin; and let her stand before _the king_, and let her
lie in thy bosom, that _my lord the king_ may get heat." Bathsheba
can only speak to him in such terms as, "Didst not thou, my lord,
O king, swear unto thy handmaid?" and even she, when she enters
the sick-chamber of his decrepitude, prostrates herself and does
obeisance. Every other word of her speech is interlarded with "my
lord the king," and "my lord, O king"; and when she leaves "the
presence" she again bows herself with her face to the earth, and does
reverence to the king[63] with the words, "May my lord, King David,
live for ever." The anointed dignity of the prophet who had once so
boldly rebuked David's worst crime does not exempt him from the same
ceremonial, and he too goes into the inner chamber bowing his face
before the king to the earth.
Insensibly David must have come to require it all, and to like it.
Yet the unsophisticated instincts of his more natural youth would
surely have revolted from it. He would have deprecated it as sternly
as the Greek conqueror in the mighty tragedy who hates to walk to his
throne on purple tapestries, and says to his queen:--
"Ope not the mouth to me, nor cry amain
As at the footstool of a man of the East,
Prone on the ground: so stoop not thou to me;"
or, as another has more literally rendered it:--
"Nor like some barbarous man
Gape thou upon me an earth-grovelling howl."[64]
But the royal position of David brought with it a surer curse
than that which follows the extreme exaltation of a man above
his fellows. It brought with it the permitted luxury of imaginary
necessity for polygamy, and the man-enervating, woman-degrading
paraphernalia of an Eastern harem. Jesse and Boaz, in their paternal
fields at Bethlehem, had been content with one wife, and had known
the true joys of love and home. But monogamy was thought unsuitable
to the new grandeur of a despot, and under the curse of polygamy the
joy of love, the peace of home, are inevitably blighted. In that
condition man gives up the sweetest sources of earthly blessing for
the meanest gratifications of animal sensuousness. Love, when it is
pure and true, gilds the life of man with a joy of heaven, and fills
it with a breath of Paradise. It renders life more perfect and more
noble by the union of two souls, and fulfils the original purpose of
creation. A home, blessed by life's most natural sanctities, becomes
a saving ark in days of storm.
"Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels."
But in a polygamous household a home is exchanged for a troubled
establishment, and love is carnalised into a jaded appetite. The
Eastern king becomes the slave of every wandering fancy, and can
hardly fail to be a despiser of womanhood, which he sees only on its
ignoblest side. His home is liable to be torn by mutual jealousies
and subterranean intrigues, and many a foul and midnight murder has
marked, and still marks, the secret history of Eastern seraglios. The
women--idle, ignorant, uneducated, degraded, intriguing--with nothing
to think of but gossip, scandal, spite, and animal passion; hating
each other worst of all, and each engaged in the fierce attempt to
reign supreme in the affection which she cannot monopolise--spend
wasted lives of _ennui_ and slavish degradation. Eunuchs, the
vilest products of the most corrupted civilisation, soon make their
loathly appearance in such courts, and add the element of morbid and
rancorous effeminacy to the general ferment of corruption. Polygamy,
as it is a contravention of God's original design, enfeebles the
man, degrades the woman, corrupts the slave, and destroys the home.
David introduced it into the Southern Kingdom, and Ahab into the
Northern;--both with the most calamitous effects.
Polygamy produces results worse than all the others upon the children
born in such families. Murderous rivalry often reigns between them,
and fraternal affection is almost unknown. The children inherit the
blood of deteriorated mothers, and the sons of different wives burn
with the mutual animosities of the harem, under whose shadowing
influence they have been brought up. When Napoleon was asked the
greatest need of France, he answered in the one laconic word,
"_Mothers_"; and when he was asked the best training ground for
recruits, he said, "_The nurseries, of course._" Much of the manhood
of the East shows the taint and blight which it has inherited from
such mothers and such nurseries as seraglios alone can form.
The darkest elements of a polygamous household showed themselves
in the unhappy family of David. The children of the various wives
and concubines saw but little of their father during their childish
years. David could only give them a scanty and much-divided attention
when they were brought to him to display their beauty. They grew up
as children, the spoiled and petted playthings of women and debased
attendants, with nothing to curb their rebellious passions or
check their imperious wills. The little influence over them which
David exercised was unhappily not for good. He was a man of tender
affections. He repeated the errors of which he might have been warned
by the effects of foolish indulgence on Hophni and Phinehas, the sons
of Eli, and even on the sons of the guide of his youth, the prophet
Samuel. The wild careers of David's elder sons show that they had
inherited his strong passions and eager ambition, and that in their
case, as well as Adonijah's, he had not displeased them at any time
in saying, "Why hast thou done so?"
The consequences which followed had been frightful beyond precedent.
David must have learnt by experience the truth of the exhortation,
"Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children, neither delight in
ungodly sons. Though they multiply, rejoice not in them, except the
fear of the Lord be with them: for one that is just is better than
a thousand; and better it is to die without children, than to have
those that are ungodly."[65]
David's eldest son was Amnon, the son of Ahinoam of Jezreel; his second
Daniel or Chileab, son of Abigail, the wife of Nabal of Carmel; the
third Absalom, son of Maacah, daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur;
the fourth Adonijah, the son of Haggith. Shephatiah and Ithream were
the sons of two other wives, and these six sons were born to David
in Hebron. When he became king in Jerusalem he had four sons by
Bathsheba, born after the one that died in his infancy, and at least
nine other sons by various wives, besides his daughter Tamar, sister of
Absalom. He had other sons by his concubines. Most of these sons are
unknown to fame. Some of them probably died in childhood. He provided
for others by making them priests.[66] His line, down to the days of
Jeconiah, was continued in the descendants of Solomon, and afterwards
in those of the otherwise unknown Nathan. The elder sons, born to
him in the days of his more fervent youth, became the authors of the
tragedies which laid waste his house. They were youths of splendid
beauty, and, as they bore the proud title of "the king's sons," they
were from their earliest years encircled by luxury and adulation.[67]
Amnon regarded himself as the heir to the throne, and his fierce
passions brought the first infamy into the family of David. By the
aid of his cousin Jonadab, the wily son of Shimmeah, the king's
brother, he brutally dishonoured his half-sister Tamar, and then
as brutally drove the unhappy princess from his presence. It was
David's duty to inflict punishment on his shameless heir, but he
weakly condoned the crime. Absalom dissembled his vengeance for two
whole years, and spoke to his brother neither good nor evil. At the
end of that time he invited David and all the princes to a joyous
sheep-shearing festival at Baal Hazor. David, as he anticipated,
declined the invitation, on the plea that his presence would burden
his son with needless expense. Then Absalom asked that, as the king
could not honour his festival, at least his brother Amnon, as the
heir to the throne, might be present. David's heart misgave him, but
he could refuse nothing to the youth whose magnificent and faultless
beauty filled him with an almost doting pride, and Amnon and all the
princes went to the feast. No sooner was Amnon's heart inflamed with
wine, than, at a preconcerted signal, Absalom's servants fell on him
and murdered him. The feast broke up in tumultuous horror, and in the
wild cry and rumour which arose, the heart of David was torn with
the intelligence that Absalom had murdered all his brothers. He rent
his clothes, and lay weeping in the dust surrounded by his weeping
servants. But Jonadab assured him that only Amnon had been murdered
in revenge for his unpunished outrage, and a rush of people along
the road, among whom the princes were visible riding on their mules,
confirmed his words. But the deed was still black enough. Bathed
in tears, and raising the wild cries of Eastern grief, the band of
youthful princes stood round the father whose incestuous firstborn
had thus fallen by a brother's hand, and the king also and all his
servants "wept greatly with a great weeping."
Absalom fled to his grandfather the King of Geshur; but his purpose
had been doubly accomplished. He had avenged the shame of his sister,
and he was now himself the eldest son and heir to the throne.[68]
His claim was strengthened by the superb physique and beautiful
hair of which he was so proud, and which won the hearts both of king
and people. Capable, ambitious, secure of ultimate pardon, the son
and the grandson of a king, he lived for three years at the court
of his grandfather. Then Joab, perceiving that David was consoled
for the death of Amnon, and that his heart was yearning for his
favourite son,[69] obtained the intercession of the wise woman of
Tekoah, and got permission for Absalom to return. But his offence
had been terrible, and to his extreme mortification the king refused
to admit him. Joab, though he had manœuvred for his return, did not
come near him, and twice refused to visit him when summoned to do so.
With characteristic insolence the young man obtained an interview
by ordering his servants to set fire to Joab's field of barley. By
Joab's request the king once more saw Absalom, and, as the youth felt
sure would be the case, raised him from the ground, kissed, forgave,
and restored him to favour.
For the favour of his weakly-fond father he cared little; what he
wanted was the throne. His proud beauty, his royal descent on both
sides, fired his ambition. Eastern peoples are always ready to concede
pre-eminence to splendid men. This had helped to win the kingdom for
stately Saul and ruddy David; for the Jews, like the Greeks, thought
that "loveliness of person involves the blossoming promises of future
excellence, and is, as it were, a prelude of riper beauty."[70] It
seemed intolerable to this prince in the zenith of glorious life that
he should be kept out of his royal inheritance by one whom he described
as a useless dotard. By his personal fascination, and by base
intrigues against David, founded on the king's imperfect fulfilment of
his duties as judge, "he stole the hearts of the children of Israel."
After four years[71] everything was ripe for revolt. He found that
for some unexplained reason the tribe of Judah and the old capital
of Hebron were disaffected to David's rule. He got leave to visit
Hebron in pretended fulfilment of a vow, and so successfully raised
the standard of revolt that David, his family, and his followers had
to fly hurriedly from Jerusalem with bare feet and cheeks bathed in
tears along the road of the Perfumers. Of that long day of misery--to
the description of which more space is given in Scripture than to that
of any other day except that of the Crucifixion--we need not speak,
nor of the defeat of the rebellion. David was saved by the adhesion
of his warrior-corps (the _Gibborim_) and his mercenaries (the Krêthi
and Plêthi). Absalom's host was routed. He was in some strange way
entangled in the branches of a tree as he fled on his mule through the
forest of Rephaim.[72] As he hung helpless there, Joab, with needless
cruelty, drove three wooden staves through his body in revenge for his
past insolence, leaving his armour-bearer to despatch the miserable
fugitive. To this day every Jewish child flings a contumelious stone
at the pillar in the King's Dale, which bears the traditional name of
David's Son, the beautiful and bad.[73]
The days which followed were thickly strewn with calamities for the
rapidly ageing and heart-broken king. His helpless decline was yet to
be shaken by the attempted usurpation of another bad son.
FOOTNOTES:
[63] The same word is rendered "worship" in Psalm xlv. 11. Comp. 2
Sam. ix. 6; Esth. iii. 2-5. In 1 Chron. xxix. 20 we are told that the
people "_worshipped_" the Lord and the king.
[64]
"Μηδὲ βαρβάρου φωτὸς δίκην
Χαμαιπετὲς βόαμα προσχανῇς ἐμοί."
Æsch., _Agam._, 887.
[65] Ecclus. xvi. 1-3. He must have had at least twenty sons, and at
least one daughter (2 Sam. iii. 1-5, v. 14-16; 1 Chron. iii. 1-9,
xiv. 3-7). Josephus again (_Antt._, VII. iii. 3) has a different list.
[66] _Kohanim._
[67] From the fact that his son Eliada (2 Sam. v. 16) is called
Beeliada (_i.e._, "Baal knows") in 1 Chron. xiv. 7, it is surely a
precarious inference that "now and then he paid his homage to some
Baal, perhaps to please one of his foreign wives" (Van Oort, _Bible
for Young People_, iii. 84). The true explanation seems to be that at
one time Baal, "Lord," was not regarded as an unauthorised title for
Jehovah. The fact that David once had _teraphim_ in his house (1 Sam.
xix. 13, 16) shows that his advance in knowledge was gradual.
[68] Chileab was either dead, or was of no significance.
[69] 2 Sam. xiii. 39. "The soul of king David longed to go forth unto
Absalom."
[70] Max. Tyr., _Dissert._, 9 (Keil, _ad loc._).
[71] In 2 Sam. xv. 7 we should certainly alter "forty" into four.
[72] Rephaim seems a more probable reading than Ephraim in 2 Sam.
xviii. 6; see Josh. xvii. 15, 18. Yet the name "Ephraim" may have
been given to this transjordanic wood. The notion that he _hung by
his hair_ is only a conjecture, and not a probable one.
[73] His three sons had pre-deceased him; his beautiful daughter
Tamar (2 Sam. xiv. 27) became the wife of Rehoboam. She is called
Maachah in 1 Kings xv. 2, and the LXX. addition to 2 Sam. xiv. 27
says that she bore both names. The so-called tomb of Absalom in the
Valley of Hebron is of Asmonæan and Herodian origin.
CHAPTER IX.
_ADONIJAH'S REBELLION._
1 KINGS i. 5-53.
"The king's word hath power; and who may say unto him, What doest
thou?"--ECCLES. viii. 4.
The fate of Amnon and of Absalom might have warned the son who was
now the eldest, and who had succeeded to their claims.
Adonijah was the son of Haggith, "the dancer." His father had piously
given him the name, which means "Jehovah is my Lord." He, too, was
"a very goodly man," treated by David with foolish indulgence, and
humoured in all his wishes. Although the rights of primogeniture
were ill-defined, a king's eldest son, endowed as Adonijah was,
would naturally be looked on as the heir; and Adonijah was impatient
for the great prize. Following the example of Absalom "he exalted
himself, saying, I will be king," and, as an unmistakable sign of
his intentions, prepared for himself fifty runners with chariots and
horsemen.[74] David, unwarned by the past, or perhaps too ill and
secluded to be aware of what was going on, put no obstacle in his way.
The people in general were tired of David, though the spell of his
name was still great. Adonijah's cause seemed safe when he had won over
Joab, the commander of the forces, and Abiathar, the chief priest. But
the young man's precipitancy spoiled everything. David lingered on. It
was perhaps a palace-secret that a strong court-party was in favour
of Solomon, and that David was inclined to leave his kingdom to this
younger son by his favourite wife. So Adonijah, once more imitating
the tactics of Absalom, prepared a great feast at the Dragon-stone by
the Fullers' Well, in the valley below Jerusalem.[75] He sacrificed
sheep and fat oxen and cattle, and invited all the king's fifteen sons,
omitting Solomon, from whom alone he had any rivalry to fear. To this
feast he also invited Joab and Abiathar, and all the men of Judah, the
king's servants, by which are probably intended "all the captains of
the host" who formed the nucleus of the militia forces.[76] At this
feast Adonijah threw off the mask. In open rebellion against David, his
followers shouted, "God save king Adonijah!"
The watchful eye of one man--the old prophet-statesman, Nathan--saw
the danger. Adonijah was thirty-five; Solomon was comparatively a
child. "Solomon, my son," says David, "is young and tender."[77]
What his age was at the date of Adonijah's rebellion we do not know.
Josephus says that he was only twelve, and this would well accord
with the fact that he seems to have taken no step on his own behalf,
while Nathan and Bathsheba act for him. It accords less well with
the calm magnanimity and regal decisiveness which he displayed from
the first day that he was seated on the throne. The Greek proverb
says, Ἀρχὴ ἄνδρα δείκνυσιν, "Power shows the man." Perhaps Solomon,
hitherto concealed in the seclusion of the harem, was, up to this
time, ignorant of himself as well as unknown to the people. Being
unaware of the boy's capacity, many were taken in by the more showy
gifts of the handsome Adonijah, whose age might seem to promise
greater stability to the kingdom.
But Solomon from his birth upwards had been Nathan's special
charge.[78] No sooner had he been born than David had entrusted
the infant to the care of the man who had awakened his slumbering
conscience to the heinousness of his offence, and had prophesied
his punishment in the death of the child of adultery. An oracle had
forbidden him to build the Temple because his hands were stained with
blood, but had promised him a son who should be a man of rest, and in
whose days Israel should have peace and quietness.[79] Long before,
in Hebron, David, yearning for peace, had called his eldest son
Absalom ("the father of peace"). To the second son of Bathsheba, whom
he regarded as the heir of oracular promise, he gave the sounding
name of Shelōmoh ("the Peaceful").[80] But Nathan, perhaps with
reference to David's own name of "the Beloved," had called the child
Jedidiah ("the beloved of Jehovah").
The secret of his destiny was probably known to few, though it was
evidently suspected by Adonijah. To have proclaimed it in a crowded
harem would have been to expose the child to the perils of poison,
and to have doomed him to certain death if one of his unruly brothers
succeeded in seizing the royal authority. The oath to Bathsheba that
her son should succeed must have been a secret known at the time to
Nathan only. It is evident that David had never taken any step to
secure its fulfilment.
The crisis was one of extreme peril. Nathan was now old. He had
perhaps sunk into the courtly complaisance which, content with one
bold rebuke, ceased to deal faithfully with David. He had at any rate
left it to Gad the Seer to reprove him for numbering the people.
Now, however, he rose to the occasion, and by a prompt _coup d'état_
caused the instant collapse of Adonijah's conspiracy.
Adonijah had counted on the jealousy of the tribe of Judah, on the
king's seclusion and waning popularity, on the support of "all the
captains of the host," on the acquiescence of all the other princes,
and above all on the favour of the ecclesiastical and military power of
the kingdom as represented by Abiathar and Joab. To Solomon himself, as
yet a shadowy figure and so much younger, he attached no importance.
He treated his aged father as a cipher, and Nathan as of no particular
account.[81] He overlooked the influence of Bathsheba, the prestige
which attached to the nomination of a reigning king, and above all the
resistance of the body-guard of mercenaries and their captain Benaiah.
Nathan had no sooner received tidings of what was going on at
Adonijah's feast than he shook off his lethargy and hurried to
Bathsheba. She seems to have retained the same sort of influence over
David that Madame de Maintenon exercised over the aged Louis XIV.
"Had she heard," asked Nathan, "that Adonijah's coronation was going
on at that moment? Let her hurry to King David, and inquire whether
he had given any sanction to proceedings which contravened the oath
which he had given her that her son Solomon should be his heir." As
soon as she had broken the intelligence to the king, he would come
and confirm her words.[82]
Bathsheba did not lose a moment. She knew that if Adonijah's
conspiracy succeeded her own life and that of her son might not
be worth a day's purchase. The helplessness of David's condition
is shown by the fact that she had to make her way into "the inner
chamber" to visit him. In violation of the immemorial etiquette of an
Eastern household, she spoke to him without being summoned, and in
the presence of another woman, Abishag, his fair young nurse. With
profound obeisances she entered, and told the poor old hero that
Adonijah had practically usurped the throne, but that the eyes of all
Israel were awaiting his decision as to who should be his successor.
She asked whether he was really indifferent to the peril of herself
and of Solomon, for Adonijah's success would mean their doom.[83]
While she yet spoke Nathan was announced, as had been concerted
between them, and he repeated the story of what was going on at
Adonijah's feast. It is remarkable that he says nothing to David
either about consulting the Urim, or in any way ascertaining the will
of God. He and Bathsheba rely exclusively on four motives--David's
rights of nomination, his promise, the danger to Solomon, and the
contempt shown in Adonijah's proceedings. "The whole incident,"
says Reuss, "is swayed by the ordinary movements of passion and
interest."[84] The news woke in David a flash of his old energy. With
instant decision he summoned Bathsheba, who, as custom required,
had left the chamber when Nathan entered. Using his strong and
favourite adjuration, "As the Lord liveth, that hath redeemed my
soul out of all distress,"[85] he pledged himself to carry out that
very day the oath that Solomon should be his heir. She bowed her
face to the earth in adoration with the words, "Let my lord, King
David, live for ever." He then summoned Zadok, the second priest,
Nathan, and Benaiah, and told them what to do. They were to take the
body-guard[86] which was under Benaiah's command, to place Solomon on
the king's own she-mule[87] (which was regarded as the highest honour
of all honours), to conduct him down the Valley of Jehoshaphat to
Gihon,[88] where the pool would furnish the water for the customary
ablutions, to anoint him king, and then to blow the consecrated ram's
horn (_shophar_)[89] with the shout, "God save King Solomon!" After
this the boy was to be seated on the throne, and proclaimed ruler
over Israel and Judah.
Benaiah was one of David's twelve chosen captains, who was placed
at the head of one of the monthly courses of 24,000 soldiers in the
third month. The chronicler calls him a priest.[90] His available
forces made him master of the situation, and he joyfully accepted
the commission with, "Amen! So may Jehovah say!" and with the prayer
that the throne of Solomon might be even greater than the throne
of David. Joab was commander-in-chief of the army, but his forces
had not been summoned or mobilised. Accustomed to a bygone state
of things he had failed to observe that Benaiah's palace-regiment
of six hundred picked men could strike a blow long before he was
ready for action. These guards were the Krêthi and Plêthi,[91]
"executioners and runners," perhaps an alien body of faithful
mercenaries originally composed of Cretans and Philistines. They
formed a compact body of defenders, always prepared for action. They
resemble the Germans of the Roman Emperors, the Turkish Janissaries,
the Egyptian Mamelukes, the Byzantian Varangians, or the Swiss Guard
of the Bourbons. Their one duty was to be ready at a moment's notice
to carry out the king's behests. Such a picked regiment has often
held in its hands the prerogative of Empire. They were, originally at
any rate, identical with the _Gibborim_,[92] and had been at first
commanded by men who had earned rank by personal prowess. But for
their intervention on this occasion Adonijah would have become king.
While Adonijah's followers were wasting time over their turbulent
banquet, the younger court-party were carrying out the unexpectedly
vigorous suggestions of the aged king. While the eastern hills
echoed with "Long live King Adonijah!" the western hills resounded
with shouts of "Long live King Solomon!" The young Solomon had been
ceremoniously mounted on the king's mule, and the procession had gone
down to Gihon. There, with the solemnity which is only mentioned in
cases of disputed succession,[93] Nathan the prophet and Zadok as
priest anointed the son of Bathsheba with the horn of perfumed oil
which the latter had taken from the sacred tent at Zion.[94] These
measures had been neglected by Adonijah's party in the precipitation
of their plot, and they were regarded as of the utmost importance, as
they are in Persia to this day.[95] Then the trumpets blew, and the
vast crowd which had assembled shouted, "God save King Solomon!" The
people broke into acclamations, and danced, and played on pipes, and
the earth rang again with the mighty sound.[96] Adonijah had fancied,
and he subsequently asserted, that "all Israel set their faces on
me that I should reign." But his vanity had misled him. Many of the
people may have seen through his shallow character, and may have
dreaded the rule of such a king. Others were still attached to David,
and were prepared to accept his choice. Others were struck with the
grave bearing and the youthful beauty of the son of Bathsheba. The
multitude were probably opportunists ready to shout with the winner
whoever he might be.
The old warrior Joab, perhaps less dazed with wine and enthusiasm
than the other guests of Adonijah, was the first to catch the sound
of the trumpet blasts and of the general rejoicing, and to portend
its significance. As he started up in surprise the guests caught
sight of Jonathan, son of Abiathar, a swift-footed priest who had
acted as a spy for David in Jerusalem at Absalom's rebellion,[97] but
who now, like his father Abiathar and so many of his betters, had
gone over to Adonijah. The prince welcomed him as a "man of worth,"
one who was sure to bring tidings of good omen;[98] but Jonathan
burst out with, "Nay, but our Lord king David hath made Solomon
king." He does not seem to have been in a hurry to bring this fatal
intelligence; for he had not only waited until the entire ceremony
at Gihon was over, but to the close of the enthronisation of Solomon
in Jerusalem.[99] He had seen the young king seated on the throne of
state in the midst of the jubilant people. David had been carried
out upon his couch, and, bowing his head in worship before the
multitude, had said, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which hath
given one to sit on my throne this day, mine eyes even seeing it."
This intelligence fell like a thunderbolt among Adonijah's unprepared
adherents. A general flight took place, each man being only eager to
save himself. The straw fire of their enthusiasm had already flared
itself away. Deserted by every one, and fearing to pay the forfeit
of his life, Adonijah fled to the nearest sanctuary, where the Ark
stood on Mount Zion under the care of his supporter the high priest
Abiathar.[100] There he caught hold of the horns of the altar--wooden
projections at each of its corners, overlaid with brass. When a
sacrifice was offered the animal was tied to these horns of the
altar,[101] and they were smeared with the victim's blood just as
in after days the propitiatory was sprinkled with the blood of the
bull and the goat on the Great Day of Atonement. The mercy-seat thus
became a symbol of atonement, and an appeal to God that He would
forgive the sinful priest and the sinful nation who came before Him
with the blood of expiation. The mercy-seat would have furnished an
inviolable sanctuary had it not been enclosed in the Holiest Place,
unapproachable by any feet but that of the high priest once a year.
The horns of the altar were, however, available for refuge to any
offender, and their protection involved an appeal to the mercy of man
as to the mercy of God.[102]
There in wretched plight clung the fallen prince, hurled down in one
day from the summit of his ambition. He refused to leave the spot
unless King Solomon would first of all swear that he would not slay
his servant with the sword.[103] Adonijah saw that all was over with
his cause. "God," says the Portuguese proverb, "can write straight on
crooked lines;" and as is so often the case, the crisis which brought
about His will was the immediate result of an endeavour to defeat it.
Solomon was not one of those Eastern princes who
"Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne."
Many an Eastern king has begun his reign as Baasha, Jehu, and
Athaliah did, by the exile, imprisonment, or execution of every
possible rival. Adonijah, caught red-handed in an attempt at
rebellion, might have been left with some show of justice to starve
at the horns of the altar, or to leave his refuge and face the
penalty due to crime. But Solomon, unregarded and unknown as he had
hitherto been, rose at once to the requirements of his new position,
and magnanimously promised his brother a complete amnesty[104] so
long as he remained faithful to his allegiance. Adonijah descended
the steps of the altar, and having made sacred obeisance to his new
sovereign[105] was dismissed with the laconic order, "Go to thine
house." If, as some have conjectured, Adonijah had once urged on his
father the condign punishment of Absalom, he might well congratulate
himself on receiving pardon.[106]
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Morier tells us that in Persia "runners" before the king's
horses are an indispensable adjunct of his state.
[75] The Stone of Zoheleth, probably a sacred stone--one of the
numerous isolated rocks of Palestine; is not mentioned elsewhere.
The Fuller's Fountain is mentioned in Josh. xv. 7, xviii. 16; 2 Sam.
xvii. 17. It was south-east of Jerusalem, and is perhaps identical
with "Job's Fountain," where the wadies of Kedron and Hinnom meet
(_Palestine Exploration Fund_, 1874, p. 80).
[76] Comp. 1 Kings i. 9-25.
[77] The same phrase is used of Rehoboam (2 Chron. xii. 13, xiii. 7)
when he was twenty-one, reading כא for מא, forty-one.
[78] 2 Sam. xii. 25: "And he sent by the hand of Nathan, the prophet;
he called his name Jedidiah, because of the Lord" (A.V.). The verse
is somewhat obscure. It either means that David sent the child to
Nathan to be brought up under his guardianship, or sent Nathan to ask
of the oracle the favour of some well-omened name (Ewald, iii. 168).
Nathan was perhaps akin to David. The Rabbis absurdly identify him
with Jonathan (1 Chron. xxvii. 32; 2 Sam. xxi. 21), nephew of David,
son of Shimmeah.
[79] 1 Chron. xxii. 6-9.
[80] LXX., Σαλωμών, and in Ecclus. xlvii. 13. Comp. Shelōmith (Lev.
xxiv. 11), Shelōmi (Num. xxxiv. 27). But it became Σαλόμων in the New
Testament, Josephus, the Sibylline verses, etc. The long vowel is
retained in Salōme and in the Arabic Sūleyman, etc.
[81] Among Solomon's adherents are mentioned "Shimei and Rei" (1 Kings
i. 8), whom Ewald supposes to stand for two of David's brothers, Shimma
and Raddai, and Stade to be two officers of the Gibborim. Thenius
adopts a reading partly suggested by Josephus, "Hushai, the friend of
David." Others identify Rei with Ira; a Shimei, the son of Elah, is
mentioned among Solomon's governors (_Nitzabim_, 1 Kings iv. 18); and
there was a Shimei of Ramah over David's vineyards (1 Chron. xxvii.
27). The name was common, and meant "famous."
[82] Duncker, Meyer, Wellhausen, Stade, regard Solomon's accession
as due to a mere palace intrigue of Nathan and Bathsheba, and
David's dying injunctions as only intended to excuse Solomon. They
treat 1 Kings ii. 1-12 as a Deuteronomic interpolation. Dillmann,
Kittel, Kuenen, Budde, rightly reject this view. Stade says, "Nach
menschlichen Gefühl, ein Unrecht war die Salbung Salomos." He thinks
that "the aged David was over-influenced by the intrigues of the
harem and the court" (i. 292).
[83] She said that they would be counted as "offenders" (_chattaim_)
Comp. 1 Kings i. 12, where Nathan assumes that they will both be put
to death. Thus Cassander put to death Roxana, the widow of Alexander
the Great, and her son Alexander (Justin., xv. 2).
[84] Reuss, _Hist. des Israelites_, i. 409.
[85] Comp. 2 Sam. iv. 9; Psalm xix. 14.
[86] "The servants of your Lord." Comp. 2 Sam. xx. 6, 7.
[87] Comp. Gen. xli. 43; 1 Kings i. 33; Esth. vi. 8.
[88] 2 Chron. xxxii. 30, xxxiii. 14. It was apparently "the Virgin's
Fountain," east of Jerusalem, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.
[89] Comp. 2 Kings ix. 13.
[90] 1 Chron. xxvii. 5, where the true rendering is not "Benaiah the
chief priest," as in A.V., nor "principal officer," as in the margin:
but "Benaiah the priest, as chief."
[91] 1 Sam. xxx. 14; Josephus, σωματοφύλακες. The Targum calls them
"archers and slingers" (which is unlikely), or "nobles and common
soldiers." This body-guard is also said to be composed of Gittites (2
Sam. xv. 18, xviii. 2); but some suppose that they were so called not
by nationality, but because they had served under David at Gath. The
question is further complicated by the appearance of "Carians" (A.V.,
captains) in 2 Kings xi. 4, 15, and also in 2 Sam. xx. 23 (Heb.). The
Carians were universal mercenaries (Herod., ii. 152; Liv., xxxvii.
40). That there was an early intercourse between Palestine and the
West is shown by the fact that such words as peribolory, machaera,
macaina, lesche, pellex, have found their way into Hebrew (see Renan,
_Hist. du Peuple Israel_, ii. 33).
[92] 2 Sam. xxiii. 8-39; 1 Chron. xi. 10-47; 1 Kings i. 8. The Gibborim
are by some supposed to be a different body from the Krêthi and Plêthi
(2 Sam. xv. 18, xx. 7); but from 1 Kings i. 8, 10, 38 they seem to be
the same (Stade, i. 275). The thirty heroes at their head furnish, as
Renan says, the first germ of a sort of "Legion of Honour."
[93] Saul (1 Sam. x. 1), David (1 Sam. xvi. 13, and twice afterwards, 2
Sam. ii. 4, v. 3), Jehu (1 Kings xix. 16), Joash (2 Chron. xxiii. 11).
[94] 1 Kings i. 39. "Tent," not "tabernacle," as in A.V. It has
generally been supposed that Zadok took it from the tabernacle at
Gibeon (1 Chron. xvi. 39), but there would have been no time to send
so far. Zadok is called a "Seer" in the A.V. (2 Sam. xv. 27); but the
true version may be "Seeth thou?" The LXX. and Vulgate omit the words.
[95] Morier, quoted by Stanley, p. 172, says that the Mustched, or
chief priest, and the Munajem, or prophet, are always present at a
Persian coronation.
[96] LXX., ἐῤῥάγη, ἤχησεν; Vulg., insonuit. Comp. Josephus, _Antt._,
VII. xiv. 3, 5.
[97] 2 Sam. xv. 27, xvii. 17.
[98] 2 Sam. xviii. 27. Heb., אִישׁחַי; LXX., ἀνὴρ δυνάμεως; Vulg.,
vir fortis. It is rather "virtuous," as in Prov. xii. 4.
[99] It is true that Solomon's adherents had wasted no time over a
feast.
[100] 1 Kings i. 50.
[101] Psalm cxviii. 27, and Exod. xxvii. 2 ff., xxix. 12, xxx. 10.
Comp. Exod. xxi. 14.
[102] Exod. xxi. 14. It protected the homicide, but not the wilful
murderer.
[103] 1 Kings i. 51. The words "this day" should be "first of all,"
_i.e._, before I leave the sanctuary. Many must have been reminded of
this scene when Eutropius, the eunuch-minister of Arcadius, under the
protection of St. Chrysostom, cowered in front of the high altar at
Constantinople.
[104] "There shall not a hair of him fall." Comp. 1 Sam. xiv. 45; 2
Sam. xiv. 11.
[105] "Bowed himself." Comp. 1 Kings i. 47.
[106] Grätz, i. 138 (E. T.).
CHAPTER X.
_DAVID'S DEATH-BED._
1 KINGS ii. 1-11.
"Omnibus idem exitus est, sed et idem domicilium."--PETRON.,
_Satyr._
In the Book of Samuel we have the last words of David in the form of
a brief and vivid psalm, of which the leading principle is, "He that
ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God." A king's
justice must be shown alike in his gracious influence upon the good and
his stern justice to the wicked. The worthless sons of Belial are, he
says, "to be beaten down like thorns with spear-shafts and iron."[107]
The same principle dominates in the charge which he gave to Solomon,
perhaps after the magnificent public inauguration of his reign
described in 1 Chron. xxviii., xxix. He bade his young son to
show himself a man, and be rigidly faithful to the law of Moses,
earning thereby the prosperity which would never fail to attend true
righteousness.[108] Thus would the promise to David--"There shall
not fail thee a man on the throne of Israel"--be continued in the
time of Solomon.
With our Western and Christian views of morality we should have
rejoiced if David's charge to his son had ended there. It is painful
to us to read that his last injunctions bore upon the punishment of
Joab who had so long fought for him, and of Shimei whom he had publicly
pardoned. Between these two stern injunctions came the request that he
would show kindness to the sons of Barzillai,[109] the old Gileadite
sheykh who had extended such conspicuous hospitality to himself and
his weary followers when they crossed the Jordan in their flight from
Absalom. But the last words of David, as here recorded, are: "his
(Shimei's) hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood."[110]
In these avenging behests there was nothing which was regarded as
unnatural, nothing that would have shocked the conscience of the
age. The fact that they are recorded without blame by an admiring
historiographer shows that we are reading the annals of times of
ignorance which God "winked at." They belong to the era of imperfect
moral development, when it was said to them of old time, "Thou
shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy," and men had not
fully learnt the lesson, "Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith
the Lord." We must discriminate between the _vitia temporis_ and
the _vitia hominis_. David was trained in the old traditions of
the "avenger of blood"; and we cannot be astonished, though we may
greatly regret, that his standard was indefinitely below that of
the Sermon on the Mount. He may have been concerned for the safety
of his son, but to us it must remain a proof of his imperfect moral
attainments that he bade Solomon look out for pretexts to "smite the
hoary head of inveterate wickedness," and use his wisdom not to let
the two offenders go down to the grave in peace.
The character of Joab furnishes us with a singular study. He,
Abishai, and Asahel were the brave, impetuous sons of Zeruiah, the
sister or half-sister of David. They were about his own age, and it
is not impossible that they were the grandsons of Nahash, King of
Ammon.[111] In the days of Saul they had embraced the cause of David,
heart and soul. They had endured all the hardships and fought through
all the struggles of his freebooting days. Asahel, the youngest, had
been in the front rank of his _Gibborim_, and his foot was fleet as
that of a gazelle upon the mountain. Abishai had been one of the
three who, with jeopardy of their lives, had burst their way to
Bethlehem when David longed to drink of the water of its well beside
the gate. He had also, on one occasion, saved David's life from the
giant Ishbi of Gath, and had slain three hundred Philistines with his
spear. His zeal was always ready to flash into action in his uncle's
cause. Joab had been David's commander-in-chief for forty years. It
was Joab who had conquered the Ammonites and Moabites and stormed
the City of Waters. It was Joab who, at David's bare request, had
brought about the murder of Uriah. It was Joab who, after wise but
fruitless remonstrance, had been forced to number the people. But
David had never liked these rough imperious soldiers, whose ways
were not his ways. From the first he was unable to cope with them,
or keep them in order. In the early days they had treated him with
rude familiarity, though in late years they, too, were obliged to
approach him with all the forms of Eastern servility. But ever since
the murder of Uriah, Joab knew that David's reputation and David's
throne were in his hand. Joab himself had been guilty of two wild
acts of vengeance for which he would have offered some defence, and
of one atrocious crime. His murder of the princely Abner, the son of
Ner, might have been excused as the duty of an avenger of blood, for
Abner, with one back-thrust of his mighty spear, had killed the young
Asahel, after the vain warning to desist from pursuing him. Abner had
only killed Asahel in self-defence; but, jealous of Abner's power as
the cousin of King Saul, the husband of Rizpah, and the commander of
the northern army, Joab, after bluntly rebuking David for receiving
him, had without hesitation deluded Abner back to Hebron by a false
message and treacherously murdered him. Even at that early period of
his reign David was either unable or unwilling to punish the outrage,
though he ostentatiously deplored it.
Doubtless in slaying Absalom, in spite of the king's entreaty, Joab
had inflicted an agonising wound on the pride and tenderness of his
master. But Absalom was in open rebellion, and Joab may have held that
David's probable pardon of the beautiful rebel would be both weak and
fatal. This death was inflicted in a manner needlessly cruel, but might
have been excused as a death inflicted on the battle-field, though
probably Joab had many an old grudge to pay off besides the burning
of his barley field. After Absalom's rebellion David foolishly and
unjustly offered the commandership of the army to his nephew Amasa.
Amasa was the son of his sister Abigail by an Ishmaelite father, named
Jether.[112] Joab simply would not tolerate being superseded in the
command which he had earned by lifelong and perilous services. With
deadly treachery, in which men have seen the antitype of the world's
worst crime, Joab invited his kinsman to embrace him, and drove his
sword into his bowels. David had heard, or perhaps had seen, the
revolting spectacle which Joab presented, with the blood of war shed
in peace, dyeing his girdle and streaming down to his shoes with its
horrible crimson. Yet, even by that act, Joab had once more saved
David's tottering throne. The Benjamite Sheba, son of Bichri, was
making head in a terrible revolt, in which he had largely enlisted the
sympathy of the northern tribes, offended by the overbearing fierceness
of the men of Judah. Amasa had been either incompetent or half-hearted
in suppressing this dangerous rising. It had only collapsed when the
army welcomed back the strong hand of Joab. But whatever had been
the crimes of Joab they had been condoned. David, on more than one
occasion, had helplessly cried, "What have I to do with you, ye sons of
Zeruiah?" "I am this day weak though anointed king, and these men, the
sons of Zeruiah, are too hard for me." But he had done nothing, and,
whether with or against his will, they continued to hold their offices
near his person. David did not remind Solomon of the murder of Absalom,
nor of the words of menace--words as bold as any subject ever uttered
to his sovereign--with which Joab had imperiously hushed his wail over
his worthless son. Those words had openly warned the king that, if he
did not alter his line of conduct, he should be king no more. They were
an insult which no king could pardon, even if he were powerless to
avenge. But Joab, like David himself, was now an old man. The events
of the last few days had shown that his power and influence were gone.
He may have had something to fear from Bathsheba as the wife of Uriah
and the granddaughter of Ahithophel; but his adhesion to the cause of
Adonijah had doubtless been chiefly due to jealousy of the ever-growing
influence of the priestly soldier Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, who had so
evidently superseded him in his master's favour. However that may be,
the historian faithfully records that David, on his death-bed, neither
forgot nor forgave; and all that we can say is, that it would be unfair
to judge him by modern or by Christian principles of conduct.
The other victim whose doom was bequeathed to the new king was
Shimei, the son of Gera. He had cursed David at Bahurim on the day
of his flight, and in the hour of his extremest humiliation. He had
walked on the opposite side of the valley, flinging stones and dust
at David,[113] cursing him with a grievous curse as a man of Belial
and a man of blood, and telling him that the loss of his kingdom
was the retribution which had fallen upon him for the blood of the
House of Saul which he had shed. So grievous was the trial of these
insults that the place where the king and his people rested that
night received the pathetic name of _Ayephim_, "the place of the
weary."[114] For this conduct Shimei might have pleaded the pent-up
animosities of the House of Saul, which had been stripped by David
of all its honours, and of which poor lame Mephibosheth was the only
scion left, after David had impaled Saul's seven sons and grandsons
in human sacrifice at the demand of the Gibeonites. Abishai,
indignant at Shimei's conduct, had said, "Why should this dead dog
curse my lord the king?" and had offered, then and there, to cross
the valley and take his head. But David rebuked his generous wrath,
and when Shimei came out to meet him on his return with expressions
of penitence, David not only promised but swore that he should not
die. No further danger surely could be anticipated from the ruined
and humiliated House of Saul; yet David bade Solomon to find some
excuse for putting Shimei to death.
How are we to deal with sins which are recorded of God's olden saints
on the sacred page, and recorded without a word of blame?
Clearly we must avoid two errors--the one of injustice, the other of
dishonesty.
1. On the one hand, as we have said, we must not judge Abraham,
or Jacob, or Gideon, or Jael, or David, as though they were
nineteenth-century Christians. Christ Himself taught us that some
things inherently undesirable were yet permitted in old days because
of the hardness of men's hearts; and that the moral standards of the
days of ignorance were tolerated in all their imperfection until men
were able to judge of their own deeds in a purer light. "The times
of ignorance God overlooked," says St. Paul, "but now He commandeth
men that they should all everywhere repent."[115] "Ye have heard that
it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But _I say unto you, Love your enemies_," said our Lord.[116] When
Bayle and Tindal and many others declaim against "the immorality
of the Bible" they are unfair in a high degree. They pass judgment
on men who had been trained from infancy in opinions and customs
wholly unlike our own, and whose conscience would not be wounded by
many things which we have been rightly taught to regard as evil.
They apply the enlightenment of two millenniums of Christianity
to criticise the more rudimentary conditions of life a millennium
before Christ. The wild justice inflicted by an avenger of blood, the
rude atrocity of the _lex talionis_, are rightly abhorrent to us in
days of civilisation and settled law: they were the only available
means of restraining crime in unsettled times and half-civilised
communities. In his final injunctions about his enemies, whom he
might have dreaded as enemies too formidable for his son to keep in
subjection, David may have followed the view of his day that his
former condonations had only been co-extensive with his own life,
and that the claims of justice _ought_ to be satisfied.[117]
2. But while we admit every palliation, and endeavour to judge
justly, we must not fall into the conventionality of representing
David's unforgiving severity as otherwise than reprehensible _in
itself_. Attempts to gloss over moral wrong-doing, to represent it
as blameless, to invent supposed Divine sanctions and intuitions
in defence of it, can but weaken the eternal claims of the law
of righteousness. The rule of right is inflexible: it is not a
leaden rule which can be twisted into any shape we like. A crime
is none the less a crime though a saint commits it; and imperfect
conceptions of the high claims of the moral law, as Christ expounded
its Divine significance, do not cease to be imperfect though they
may be sometimes recorded without comment on the page of Scripture.
No religious opinion can be more fatal to true religion than that
wrong can, under any circumstances, become right, or that we may do
evil that good may come. Because an act is relatively pardonable, it
does not follow that it is not absolutely wrong. If it be dangerous
to judge the essential morality of any earlier passage of Scripture
by the ultimate laws which Scripture itself has taught us, it is
infinitely more dangerous, and essentially Jesuitical, to explain
away misdeeds as though, under any circumstances, they could be
pleasing to God or worthy of a saint. The total omission of David's
injunctions and of the sanguinary episodes of their fulfilment by
the author of the Books of Chronicles, indicates that, in later
days, they were thought derogatory to the pure fame both of the
warrior-king and of his peaceful son.
David slept with his fathers, and passed before that bar where
all is judged of truly. His life is an April day, half sunshine
and half gloom. His sins were great, but his penitence was deep,
lifelong, and sincere. He gave occasion for the enemies of God to
blaspheme, but he also taught all who love God to praise and pray.
If his record contains some dark passages, and his character shows
many inconsistencies, we can never forget his courage, his flashes
of nobleness, his intense spirituality whenever he was true to his
better self. His name is a beacon-light of warning against the
glamour and strength of evil passions. But he showed us also what
repentance can do, and we are sure that his sins were forgiven him
because he turned away from his wickedness. "The sacrifices of God
are a troubled spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou
wilt not despise." "I go the way of all the earth," said David. "In
life," says Calmet, "each one has his particular route: one applies
to one thing, another to another. But in the way to death they are
all re-united. They go to the tomb by one path."[118]
David was buried in his own city--the stronghold of Zion; and his
sepulchre--on the south part of Ophel, near the pool of Siloam--was
still pointed out a thousand years later in the days of Christ.[119] As
a poet who had given to the people splendid specimens of lyric songs;
as a warrior who had inspired their youth with dauntless courage; as a
king who had made Israel a united nation with an impregnable capital,
and had uplifted it from insignificance into importance; as the man
in whose family the distinctive Messianic hopes of the Hebrews were
centred, he must remain to the end of time the most remarkable and
interesting figure in the long annals of the Old Dispensation.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] 2 Sam. xxiii. 1-7. It is no part of my duty here to enter into
the extent of David's share in the Psalms; but I think that it is an
exaggerated inference (of Wellhausen and others) from Amos vi. 5, 6
to suppose that he only wrote festal and warlike songs.
[108] Apparently an allusion to Deut. xvii. 18-20. We read of no such
exhortation having been addressed to Saul, or to David.
[109] Chimham accompanied David to Jerusalem (2 Sam. xvii. 27, xix.
37-40), and perhaps inherited his property at Bethlehem, where he
founded the Khan (Jer. xli. 17), in the cavern stable of which it may
be that Christ was born.
[110] Wellhausen, Stade, and others venture on the conjecture that
David never gave these injunctions at all, but that they were
invented afterwards to excuse Solomon for his acts of severity
towards Adonijah's conspirators. I cannot see any valid ground for
such arbitrary re-writing of the history. Shimei had taken no part in
Adonijah's rebellion.
[111] Zeruiah was "a sister of the sons of Jesse" (1 Chron. ii. 16),
and was therefore a sister of Abigail, mother of Amasa; but she is
called "the daughter of _Nahash_" (2 Sam. xvii. 25).
[112] 1 Chron. ii. 17. "Jether (_i.e._, Jethro, 'pre-eminence')
the Ishmaelite" has been altered in 2 Sam. xvii. 25 into Ithra, an
_Israelite_ (see 2 Sam. xix. 13). The way in which names have been
tampered with is an interesting study, and often conceals Masoretic
secrets.
[113] David's enemies thought but little of the fact that David had
spared Mephibosheth. They may have supposed that David spared him,
not only because he was the son of the beloved Jonathan, but because
being lame he could never become king. David's relations to him do
not seem to have been very cordial.
[114] 2 Sam. xvi. 14 (Heb.). For Bahurim, see 2 Sam. xvi. 5, xvii. 18.
[115] Acts xvii. 30.
[116] Matt. v. 43, 44.
[117] There is something analogous to protection _granted only for a
lifetime_ in the fact that the homicide at a refuge city could not be
slain there while the high priest lived. See Num. xxxv. 28.
[118] Comp. Josh. xxiii. 14; Keil, _ad loc._
[119] Acts ii. 29. Josephus says that both Hyrcanus and Herod
opened it to find the treasures which legend asserted to have been
buried there (_Antt._, VII. xv. 3. Comp. XIII. viii. 4, XVI. vii.).
The kings alone were buried in Jerusalem; but legend says that an
exception was made in favour of Huldah the prophetess.
CHAPTER XI.
_AVENGING JUSTICE._
1 KINGS ii. 13-46.
"The wrath of a king is as messengers of death."--PROV. xvi. 14.
The reign of Solomon began with a threefold deed of blood. An Eastern
king, surrounded by the many princes of a polygamous family, and
liable to endless jealousies and plots, is always in a condition of
unstable equilibrium; the _death_ of a rival is regarded as his only
safe imprisonment.[120] On the other hand, it must be remembered that
Solomon allowed his other brethren and kinsmen to live; and, in point
of fact, his younger brother Nathan became the ancestor of the Divine
Messiah of his race.[121]
It was the restless ambition of Adonijah which again brought down
an avalanche of ruin. He and his adherents were necessarily under
the cold shadow of royal disfavour, and they must have known that
they had sinned too deeply to be forgiven. They felt the position
intolerable. "In the light of the king's countenance is life, and
his favour is as a cloud of the latter rain"; but Adonijah, in the
prime of strength and the heyday of passion, beautiful and strong,
and once the favourite of his father, could not forget the banquet
at which all the princes and nobles and soldiers had shouted, "Long
live King Adonijah!" That the royalty of one delirious day should be
succeeded by the dull and suspected obscurity of dreary years was
more than he could endure, if, by any possible subtlety or force,
he could avert a doom so unlike his former golden dreams. Was not
Solomon at least ten or fifteen years younger than himself? Was not
his seat on the throne of his kingdom still insecure? Were not his
own followers powerful and numerous?
Perhaps one of those followers--the experienced Joab, or Jonathan,
son of Abiathar--whispered to him that he need not yet acquiesce in
the ruin of his hopes, and suggested a subtle method of strengthening
his cause, and keeping his claim before the eyes of the people.
Every one knew that Abishag, the fair damsel of Shunem, the ideal
of Hebrew maidenhood, was the loveliest virgin who could be found
throughout all the land of Israel. Had she been in the strict sense
David's wife or concubine, it would have been regarded as a deadly
contravention of the Mosaic law that she should be wedded to one of
her stepsons. But as she had only been David's nurse, what could be
more suitable than that so bright a maiden should be united to the
handsome prince?
It was understood in all Eastern monarchies that the harem of a
predecessor belonged to the succeeding sovereign. The first thing that
a rival or a usurper aimed at was to win the prestige of possessing the
wives of the royal house. Nathan reminds David that the Lord had given
his master's wives into his bosom.[122] Ishbosheth, weak as he was,
had been stung into indignation against his general and great-uncle
the mighty Abner, because Abner had taken Rizpah, the daughter of
Aiah, Saul's concubine, to wife, which looked like a dangerously
ambitious encroachment upon the royal prerogative. Absalom, by the
vile counsel of Ahithophel, had openly taken possession of the ten
concubines whom his father, in his flight from Jerusalem, had left in
charge of the palace. The pseudo-Smerdis, when he revolted against the
absent Cambyses, at once seized his seraglio.[123] It is noted even in
our English history that the relations between the Earl of Mortimer
and Queen Isabella involved danger to the kingdom; and when Admiral
Seymour married Queen Catharine Parr, widow of Henry VIII., he at once
entered into treasonable conspiracies. Adonijah knew well that he would
powerfully further his ulterior purpose if he could secure the hand of
the lovely Shunamite.
Yet he feared to make the request to Solomon, who had already
inspired him with wholesome awe. With pretended simplicity he
sought the intercession of the _Gebira_ Bathsheba, who, being the
queen-mother, exercised great influence as the first lady of the
land.[124] She it was who had placed the jewelled bridal crown with
her own hand on the head of her young son.[125]
Alarmed at his visit she asked, "Comest thou peaceably?" He came,
he humbly assured her, to ask a favour. Might she not think of his
case with a little pity? He was the elder son; the kingdom by right
of primogeniture was his; all Israel, so he flattered himself, had
wished for his accession. But it had all been in vain, Jehovah had
given the kingdom to his brother. Might he not be allowed some small
consolation, some little accession to his dignity? at least some
little source of happiness in his home?
Flattered by his humility and his appeal, Bathsheba encouraged him to
proceed, and he begged that, as Solomon would refuse no request to
his mother, would she ask that Abishag might be his wife?
With extraordinary lack of insight, Bathsheba, ambitious as she was,
failed to see the subtle significance of the request, and promised to
present his petition.
She went to Solomon, who immediately rose to meet her, and seated
her with all honour on a throne at his right hand.[126] She had only
come, she said, to ask "a small petition."
"Ask on, my mother," said the king tenderly, "for I will not say thee
nay."
But no sooner had she mentioned the "small petition" than Solomon burst
into a flame of fury. "Why did she not ask for the kingdom for Adonijah
at once? He was the elder. He had the chief priest and the chief
captain with him. They must be privy to this new plot. But by the God
who had given him his father's kingdom, and established him a house,
Adonijah had made the request to his own cost, and should die that day."
The command was instantly given to Benaiah, who, as captain of the
body-guard, was also chief executioner. He slew Adonijah that same
hour, and so the third of David's splendid sons died in his youth a
death of violence.
We pause to ask whether the sudden and vehement outburst of King
Solomon's indignation was only due to political causes? If, as
seems almost certain, Abishag is indeed the fair Shulamite of the
Song of Songs, there can be little doubt that Solomon himself loved
her,[127] and that she was "the jewel of his seraglio."[128] The true
meaning of Canticles is not difficult to read, however much it may
lend itself to mystical and allegorical applications. It represents
a rustic maiden, faithful to her shepherd lover, resisting all the
allurements of a king's court, and all the blandishments of a king's
affection. It is the one book of Scripture which is exclusively
devoted to sing the glory of a pure love. The king is magnanimous;
he does not force the beautiful maiden to accept his addresses.
Exercising her freedom, and true to the dictates of her heart, she
rejoicingly leaves the perfumed atmosphere of the harem of Jerusalem
for the sweet and vernal air of her country home under the shadow
of its northern hills. Solomon's impetuous wrath would not be so
unaccountable if an unrequited affection added the sting of jealousy
to the wrath of offended power. The scene is the more interesting
because it is one of the very few personal touches in the story of
Solomon, which is chiefly composed of external details, both in
Scripture and in such fragments as have been preserved of the pagan
historian Dios, Eupolemos, Nicolas Polyhistor, and those referred to
by Josephus, Eusebius, and Clemens of Alexandria.
The fall of Adonijah involved his chief votaries in ruin. Abiathar had
been a friend and follower of David from his youthful days. When Doeg,
the treacherous Edomite, had informed Saul that the priests of Nob had
shown kindness to David in his hunger and distress, the demoniac king
had not shrunk from employing the Edomite herdsman to massacre all on
whom he could lay his hands. From this slaughter of eighty-five priests
who wore linen ephods, Abiathar had fled to David, who alone could
protect him from the king's pursuit.[129] In the days when the outlaw
lived in dens and caves, the priest had been constantly with him, and
had been afflicted in all wherein he was afflicted, and had inquired of
God for him. David had recognised how vast was his debt of gratitude to
one whose father and all his family had been sacrificed for an act of
kindness done to himself. Abiathar had been chief priest for all the
forty years of David's reign. In Absalom's rebellion he had still been
faithful to the king. His son Jonathan had been David's scout in the
city. Abiathar had helped Zadok to carry the Ark to the last house by
the ascent to the Mount of Olives, and there he had stood under the
olive tree by the wilderness[130] till all the people had passed by. If
his loyalty had been less ardent than that of his brother-priest Zadok,
who had evidently taken the lead in the matter, he had given no ground
for suspicion. But, perhaps secretly jealous of the growing influence
of his younger rival, the old man, after some fifty years of unswerving
allegiance, had joined his lifelong friend Joab in supporting the
conspiracy of Adonijah, and had not even now heartily accepted the rule
of Solomon. Assuming his complicity in Adonijah's request, Solomon
sent for him, and sternly told him that he was "a man of death,"
_i.e._, that death was his desert. But it would have been outrageous
to slay an aged priest, the sole survivor of a family slaughtered for
David's sake, and one who had so long stood at the head of the whole
religious organisation, wearing the Urim and carrying the Ark. He was
therefore summarily deposed from his functions, and dismissed to his
paternal fields at Anathoth, a priestly town about six miles from
Jerusalem.[131] We hear no more of him; but Solomon's warning, "I will
not _at this time_ put thee to death," was sufficient to show him that,
if he mixed himself with court intrigues again, he would ultimately pay
the forfeit with his life. Solomon, like Saul, paid very little regard
to "benefit of the clergy."[132]
The doom fell next on the arch-offender Joab, the white-haired
hero of a hundred fights, "the Douglas of the House of David." He
had, if the reading of the ancient versions be correct, "turned
after Adonijah, and _had not turned after Solomon_." Solomon could
hardly have felt at ease when a general so powerful and so popular
was disaffected to his rule, and Joab read his own sentence in the
execution of Adonijah. On hearing the news the old hero fled up Mount
Zion, and clung to the horns of the altar. But Abiathar, who might
have asserted the sacredness of the asylum, was in disgrace, and Joab
was not to escape. "What has happened to thee that thou hast fled to
the altar?" was the message sent to him by the king. "Because," he
answered, "I was afraid of thee, and fled unto the Lord."[133] It was
Solomon's habit to give his autocratic orders with laconic brevity.
"Go, fall upon him," he said to Benaiah.
The scene which ensued was very tragic.
The two rivals were face to face. On the one side the aged general,
who had placed on David's head the crown of Rabbah, who had saved
him from the rebellions of Absalom and of Sheba, and had been the
pillar of his military glory and dominion for so many years; on the
other the brave soldier-priest, who had won a chief place among
the _Gibborim_ by slaying a lion in a pit on a snowy day, and "two
lion-like men of Moab,"[134] and a gigantic Egyptian whom he had
attacked with only a staff, and out of whose hand he had plucked a
spear like a weaver's beam and killed him with his own spear. As
David lost confidence in Joab he had reposed more and more confidence
in this hero. He had placed him over the body-guards, whom he
trusted more than the native militia.
The Levite-soldier had no hesitation about acting as executioner, but
he did not like to slay any man, and above all such a man, in a place
so sacred,[135]--in a place where his blood would be mingled with that
of the sacrifices with which the horns of the altar were besmeared.
"The king bids thee come forth," he said.
"Nay," said Joab, "but I will die here."
Perhaps he thought that he might be protected by the asylum, as
Adonijah had been; perhaps he hoped that in any case his blood might
cry to God for vengeance, if he was slain in the sanctuary of Mount
Zion, and on the very altar of burnt offering.
Benaiah naturally scrupled under such circumstances to carry out
Solomon's order, and went back to him for instruction. Solomon had no
such scruples, and perhaps held that this act was meritorious.[136]
"Slay him," he said, "where he stands! He is a twofold murderer; let
his blood be on his head." Then Benaiah went back and killed him, and
was promoted to his vacant office. Such was the dismal end of so much
valour and so much glory! He had taken the sword, and he perished by
the sword. And the Jews believed that the curse of David clung to his
house for ever, and that among his descendants there never lacked one
that was a leper, or a lame man, or a suicide, or a pauper.[137]
Shimei's turn came next. A watchful eye was fixed implacably on this
last indignant representative of the ruined House of Saul. Solomon
had sent and ordered him to leave his estate at Bahurim, and build
a house at Jerusalem, forbidding him to go "any whither,"[138] and
telling him that if on any pretence he passed the wady of Kidron he
should be put to death. As he could not visit Bahurim, or any of
his Benjamite connexions, without passing the Kidron, all danger
of further intrigues seemed to be obviated.[139] To these terms
the dangerous man had sworn, and for three years he kept them
faithfully. At the end of that time two of his slaves fled from him
to Achish, son of Maachah, King of Gath.[140] When informed of their
whereabouts, Shimei, apparently with no thought of evil, saddled his
mule and went to demand their restoration. As he had not crossed the
Kidron, and had merely gone to Gath on private business, he thought
that Solomon would never hear of it, or would at any rate treat the
matter as harmless. Solomon, however, regarded his conduct as a proof
of retributive dementation. He sent for him, bitterly upbraided him,
and ordered Benaiah to slay him. So perished the last of Solomon's
enemies; but Shimei had two illustrious descendants in the persons of
Mordecai and Queen Esther.[141]
Solomon perhaps conceived himself to be only acting up to the
true kingly ideal. "A king that sitteth on the throne of judgment
scattereth away all evil with his eyes." "A wise king scattereth the
wicked, and bringeth the wheel over them." "An evil man seeketh only
rebellion; therefore a cruel messenger shall be sent against him."
"The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion, whoso provoketh
him to anger endangereth his own soul."[142] On the other hand,
he continued hereditary kindness to Chimham, son of the old chief
Barzillai the Gileadite, who became the founder of the Khan at
Bethlehem in which a thousand years later Christ was born.[143]
The elevation of Zadok to the high priesthood vacated by the disgrace
of Abiathar restored the priestly succession to the elder line of the
House of Aaron. Aaron had been the father of four sons: Nadab, Abihu,
Eleazar, and Ithamar. The two eldest had perished childless in the
wilderness, apparently for the profanation of serving the tabernacle
while in a state of intoxication and offering "strange fire" upon
the altar.[144] The son of Eleazar was the fierce priestly avenger
Phinehas. The order of succession was as follows:--
AARON.
|
+---------+------+
| |
Eleazar. Ithamar.
Phinehas. (gap.)
Abishua. Eli.
Bukki. Phinehas.
Uzzi. Ahitub.
Zerahiah. Ahiah (1 Sam. xiv. 3).
Meraioth. Ahimelech.
Amariah. Abiathar (1 Sam. xxii. 20).
Ahitub.
Zadok.[145]
The question naturally arises how the line of succession came to be
disturbed, since to Eleazar, and his seed after him, had been promised
"the covenant of an everlasting priesthood."[146] As the elder line
continued unbroken, how was it that, for five generations at least,
from Eli to Abiathar, we find the _younger_ line of Ithamar in secure
and lineal possession of the high priesthood? The answer belongs to the
many strange reserves of Jewish history. It is clear from the silence
of the Book of Chronicles that the intrusion, however caused, was an
unpleasant recollection. Jewish tradition has perhaps revealed the
secret, and a very curious one it is. We are told that Phinehas was
high priest when Jephthah made his rash vow, and that his was the hand
which carried out the human sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. But the
inborn feelings of humanity in the hearts of the people were stronger
than the terrors of superstition, and arising in indignation against
the high priest who could thus imbrue his hands in an innocent maiden's
blood, they drove him from his office and appointed a son of Ithamar
in his place. The story then offers a curious analogy to that told of
the Homeric hero Idomeneus, King of Crete. Caught in a terrible storm
on his return from Troy, he too vowed that if his life were saved he
would offer up in sacrifice the first living thing that met him. His
eldest son came forth with gladness to meet him. Idomeneus fulfilled
his vow, but the Cretans rose in revolt against the ruthless father,
and a civil war ensued, in which a hundred cities were destroyed and
the king was driven into exile. The Jewish tradition is one which could
hardly have been invented. It is certain that Jephthah's daughter _was_
offered up in sacrifice, in accordance with his rash vow. This could
hardly have been done by any but a priest, and the ferocious zeal of
Phinehas would not perhaps have shrunk from the horrible consummation.
Revolting, even abhorrent, as is such a notion from our views of God,
and decisively as human sacrifice is condemned by all the highest
teaching of Scripture, the traces of this horrible tendency of human
guilt and human fear are evident in the history of Israel as of all
other early nations. Some thought akin to it must have lain under the
temptation of Abraham to offer up his son Isaac. Twelve centuries later
Manasseh "made his son pass through the fire," and kindled the furnaces
of Moloch at Tophet in Gehenna, the valley of the sons of Hinnom.[147]
His grandfather Ahaz had done the same before him, offering sacrifice
and burning his children in the fire.[148] Surrounded by kindred
tribes, to which this worship was familiar, the Israelites, in their
ignorance and backsliding, were not exempt from its fatal fascination.
Solomon himself "went after," and built a high place for Milcom, the
abomination of the Ammonites, on the right hand of "the hill that is
before Jerusalem," which from this desecration got the name of "The
Mount of Corruption." These high places continued, and it must be
supposed, had their votaries on "that opprobrious hill," until good
Josiah dismantled and defiled them about the year 639, some three
centuries after they had been built.
But whether this legend about Phinehas be tenable or not, it is
certain that the House of Ithamar fell into deadly disrepute and
abject misery. In this the people saw the fulfilment of an old
traditional curse, pronounced by some unknown "man of God" on the
House of Eli, that there should be no old man in his house for ever;
that his descendants should die in the flower of their age; and that
they should come cringing to the descendants of the priest whom God
would raise up in his stead, to get some humble place about the
priesthood for a piece of silver and a morsel of bread.[149]
The prolongation of the curse in the House of Joab and of Eli
furnishes an illustration of the menacing appendix to the second
commandment--"For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth
generation of them that hate Me, and showing mercy unto thousands (of
generations) of them that love Me and keep My commandments."
There is in families, as in communities, a solidarity alike of blessing
and curse. No man perishes alone in his iniquity, whether he be an
offender like Achan or an offender like Joab. Families have their
inheritance of character, their prerogative examples of misdoing, their
influence of the guilty past flowing like a tide of calamity over the
present and the future! The physical consequences of transgression
remain long after the sins which caused them have ended. Three things,
however, are observable in this, as in every faithfully recorded
history. One is that mercy boasteth over justice, and the area of
beneficent consequence is more permanent and more continuous than that
of the entailed curse, as right is always more permanent than wrong.
A second is that, though man at all times is liable to troubles and
disabilities, no innocent person who suffers temporal afflictions
from the sins of his forefathers shall suffer one element of unjust
depression in the eternal interests of life. A third is that the
ultimate prosperity of the children, alike of the righteous and of
sinners, is in their own control; each soul shall perish, and shall
only perish, for its own sin. In this sense, though the fathers have
eaten sour grapes, the teeth of the children shall _not_ be set on
edge. In the long generations the line of David no less than the line
of Joab, the line of Zadok no less than that of Abiathar, was destined
to feel the Nemesis of evil-doing, and to experience that, of whatever
parentage men are born, the law remains true--"Say ye of the righteous,
that it shall be well with him: for
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