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._