'These nations feared the Lord, and served their own gods.'--2 KINGS
xvii. 33.
The kingdom of Israel had come to its fated end. Its king and people
had been carried away captives in accordance with the cruel policy of
the great Eastern despotisms, which had so much to do with weakening
them by their very conquests. The land had lain desolate and
uncultivated for many years, savage beasts had increased in the
untilled solitudes, even as weeds and nettles grew in the gardens and
vineyards of Samaria. At last the king of Assyria resolved to people
the country; and for this purpose he sent a mixed multitude from the
different nationalities of his empire to the land of Israel. They were
men of five nationalities, most of them recently conquered. Israel had
been deported to different parts of the Assyrian empire; men from
different parts of the empire were deported to the land of Israel.
Such cruel uprootings seemed to be wisdom, but were really a policy
that kept alive disaffection. It was the same mistake (and bore the
same fruits) as Austria pursued in sending Hungarian regiments to keep
down Venice, and Venetian-born soldiers to overawe Hungary.
These new settlers brought with them their national peculiarities, and
among the rest, their gods. They knew nothing about the Jehovah whom
they supposed to be the local deity of Israel; and when they were
troubled by the wild beasts which had, of course, rapidly increased in
the land, they attributed it to their neglect of His worship, and sent
an embassy to the king of Assyria telling that as they 'know not the
manners of the God of the land,' He has sent lions among them.
This is an instructive example of the heathen way of thinking. They
have their local deities. Each land, each valley, each mountain top,
has its own. They are ready to worship them all, for they have no real
worship for any. Their reason for worship is to escape from harm, to
pay the tribute to which the god has a right on his own territory,
lest he should make it the worse for them if they neglect it. 'The
mild tolerance of heathendom' simply means the utter absence of
religion and an altogether inadequate notion of deity.
So the settlers have sent to them one of these schismatic priests who
had belonged to the extinct sanctuary at Beth-el, and he, apparently,
not having any truer notions of God or of worship than they had,
nothing loth, teaches them the rites of the Israelite worship, which
was not like that of Judah, as is distinctly stated in the context.
This worship of Jehovah was, however, blended by them with their own
national idolatry. How contemptuously the historian enumerates the
hard names of their gods and the rabble rout of them which each nation
made! 'The men of Babylon _made_ Succoth-benoth' (probably a
deity, though the name may mean booths for purposes of prostitution)
and the others '_made_ Nergal and Ashima and Nibhaz and Tartak.'
What names, and what a pantheon! 'They feared the Lord and served
their own gods.'
This was the beginning of the Samaritan people, whom we find through
the rest of Scripture even down to the Acts of the Apostles, retaining
some trace of their heathen origin. Simon Magus bewitched them in his
sorceries. They began as heathen, though in lapse of years they came
to be pure monotheists, even more rigid than the Jews themselves, and
today, if you went to Nablus, you would find the small remnant of
their descendants adhering to Moses and the law, guarding their sacred
copy of the Pentateuch with unintelligent awe, and eating the Paschal
Lamb with wild rites. They have changed the object of their worship,
but one fears that it is little more real and deep than in old days,
2500 years ago, when their forefathers 'feared the Lord and served
their own gods.'
Now I venture to take this verse as indicative of a tendency which
belongs to a great many more people than the confused mass of settlers
that were shot down on the hills of Israel by the king of Assyria. It
is really a description of a great deal of what goes by the name of
religion amongst us.