message, with no other drawbacks on his part than occasional bursts of
anger at the unparalleled folly and wickedness of his people. What
disinterestedness marks his whole career, from the time when he flies
from Pharaoh to the appointment of his successor, relinquishing without
regret the virtual government of Egypt, accepting cheerfully the
austerities and privations of the land of Midian, never elevating his
own family to power, never complaining in his herculean tasks! With what
eloquence does he plead for his people when the anger of the Lord is
kindled against them, ever regarding them as mere children who know no
self-control! How patient he is in the performance of his duties,
accepting counsel from Jethro and listening to the voice of Aaron! With
what stern and awful majesty does he lay down the law! What inspiration
gilds his features as he descends the Mount with the Tables in his
hands! How terrible he is amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai, at
the rock of Horeb, at the dances around the golden calf, at the
rebellion of Korah and Dathan, at the waters of Meribah, at the burning
of Nadab and Abihu! How efficient he is in the administration of
justice, in the assemblies of the people, in the great councils of
rulers and princes, and in all the crises of the State; and yet how
gentle, forgiving, tender, and accessible! How sad he is when the people
weary of manna and seek flesh to eat! How nobly does he plead with the
king of Edom for a passage through his territories! How humbly does he
call on God for help amid perplexing cares! Never was a man armed with
such authority so patient and so self-distrustful. Never was so
experienced and learned a man so little conscious of his greatness.
"This was the truest warrior
That ever buckled sword;
This the most gifted poet
That ever breathed a word:
And never earth's philosopher
Traced with his golden pen,
On the deathless page, truths half so sage,
As he wrote down for men."
At length--at one hundred and twenty years of age, with undimmed eye and
unabated strength, after having done more for his nation and for
posterity than any ruler or king in the world's history, and won a fame
which shall last through all the generations of men, growing brighter
and brighter as his vast labors and genius are appreciated--the time
comes to lay down his burdens. So he assembles together the princes and
elders of Israel, recapitulates his laws, enumerates the mercies of the
God to whom he has ever been loyal, and gives his final instructions. He
appoints Joshua as his successor, adds words of encouragement to the
people, whom he so fervently loves, sings his final song, and ascends
the mountain above the plains of Moab, from which he is permitted to
see, but not to enter, the promised land; not pensive and sad like
Godfrey, because he cannot enter Jerusalem, but full of joyous visions
of the future glories of his nation, and breaking out in the language of
exultation, "Who is like unto thee, O people saved by Jehovah, the
shield of thy help and the sword of thy excellency!" So Moses, the like
of whom no prophet has since arisen (except that later One whom he
himself foretold), the greatest man in Jewish annals, passes away from
mortal sight, and Jehovah buries him in a valley of the land of Moab,
and no man knoweth his sepulchre until this day.
"That was the grandest funeral
That ever passed on earth;
But no one heard the trampling,
Or saw the train go forth,--
Perchance the bald old eagle
On gray Bethpeor's height,
Out of his lonely eyrie
Looked on the wondrous sight."
* * * * *
"And had he not high honor--
The hillside for a pall--
To lie in state, while angels wait
With stars for tapers tall;
And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes,
Over his bier to wave,
And God's own hand, in that lonely land,
To lay him in the grave?"
* * * * *
"O lonely grave in Moab's land!
O dark Bethpeor's hill!
Speak to these curious hearts of ours,
And teach them to be still!
God hath his mysteries of grace,
Ways that we cannot tell;
He hides them deep, like the hidden sleep
Of him he loved so well."
SAMUEL.
1100 B.C.
THE HEBREW THEOCRACY, UNDER JUDGES.
After Moses, and until David arose, it would be difficult to select any
man who rendered greater services to the Israelitish nation than Samuel.
He does not stand out in history as a man of dazzling intellectual
qualities; but during a long life he efficiently labored to give to the
nation political unity and power, and to reclaim it from idolatries. He
was both a political and moral reformer,--an organizer of new forces, a
man of great executive ability, a judge and a prophet. He made no
mistakes, and committed no crimes. In view of his wisdom and sanctity it
is evident that he would have adorned the office of high-priest; but as
he did not belong to the family of Aaron, this great dignity could not
be conferred on him. His character was reproachless. He was, indeed, one
of the best men that ever lived, universally revered while living, and
equally mourned when he died. He ruled the nation in a great crisis, and
his influence was irresistible, because favored alike by God and man.
Samuel lived in one of the most tumultuous and unsettled periods of
Jewish history, when the nation was in a transition state from anarchy
to law, from political slavery to national independence. When he
appeared, there was no settled government; the surrounding nations were
still unconquered, and had reduced the Israelites to humiliating
dependence. Deliverers had arisen occasionally from the time of
Joshua,--like Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson,--but their victories were
not decisive or permanent. Midianites, Amorites, and Philistines
successively oppressed Israel, from generation to generation; they even
succeeded in taking away their weapons of war. Resistance to this
tyranny was apparently hopeless, and the nation would have sunk into
despair but for occasional providential aid. The sacred ark was for a
time in the hands of enemies, and Shiloh, the religious capital,--abode
of the tabernacle and the ark,--had been burned. Every smith's forge
where a sword or a spear-head could be rudely made was shut up, and the
people were forced to go to the forges of their oppressors to get even
their ploughshares sharpened.
On the death of Joshua (about 1350 B.C.), who had succeeded Moses and
led the Israelites into Canaan, "nearly the whole of the sea-coast, all
the strongholds in the rich plain of Esdraelon, and, in the heart of
the country, the invincible fortress of Jebus [later site of Jerusalem],
were still in the hands of the unbelievers." The conquest therefore was
yet imperfect, like that of the Christianized Saxons in the time of
Alfred over the pagan Danes in England. The times were full of peril and
fear. They developed the military energies of the Israelites, but bred
license, robbery, and crime,--a wild spirit of personal independence
unfavorable to law and order. In those days "every man did that which
was right in his own eyes." It was a period of utter disorder, anarchy,
and lawlessness, like the condition of Germany and Italy in the Middle
Ages. The persons who bore rule permanently were the princes or heads of
the several tribes, the judges, and the high-priest; and in that
primitive state of society these dignitaries rode on asses, and lived in
tents. The virtues of the people were rough, and their habits warlike.
Their great men were fighters. Samson was a sort of Hercules, and
Jephthah an Idomeneus,--a lawless freebooter. The house of Micah was
like a feudal castle; the Benjamite war was like the strife of Highland
clans. Jael was a Hebrew Boadicea; Gideon, at the head of his three
hundred men, might have been a hero of mediaeval romance.
The saddest thing among these social and political evils was a great
decline of religious life. The priesthood was disgraced by the
prevailing vices of the times. The Mosaic rites may have been
technically observed, but the officiating priests were sensual and
worldly, while gross darkness covered the land. The high-priests
exercised but a feeble influence; and even Eli could not, or did not,
restrain the glaring immoralities of his own sons. In those evil days
there were no revelations from Jehovah, and there was no divine vision
among the prophets. Never did a nation have greater need of a deliverer.
It was then that Samuel arose, and he first appears as a pious boy,
consecrated to priestly duties by a remarkable mother. His childhood was
passed in the sacred tent of Shiloh, as an attendant, or servant, of the
aged high-priest, or what would be called by the Catholic Church an
acolyte. He belonged to the great tribe of Ephraim, being the son of
Elkanah, of whom nothing is worthy of notice except that he was a
polygamist. His mother Hannah (or Anna), however, was a Hebrew Saint
Theresa, almost a Nazarite in her asceticism and a prophetess in her
gifts; her song of thanksgiving on the birth of Samuel, for a special
answer to her prayer, is one of the most beautiful remains of Hebrew
poetry. From his infancy Samuel was especially dedicated to the service
of God. He was not a priest, since he did not belong to the priestly
caste; but the Lord was with him, and raised him up to be more than
priest,--even a prophet and a judge. When a mere child, it was he who
declared to Eli the ruin of his house, since he had not restrained the
wickedness and cruelty of his sons. From that time the prophetic
character of Samuel was established, and his influence constantly
increased until he became the foremost man of his nation, second to no
one in power and dignity since the time of Moses.
But there is not much recorded of him until twenty years after the death
of Eli, who lived to be ninety. It was during this period that the
Philistines had carried away the sacred ark from Shiloh, and had overrun
the country and oppressed the Hebrews, who it seems had fallen into
idolatry, worshipping Ashtaroth and other strange gods. It was Samuel,
already recognized as a great prophet and judge, who aroused the nation
from its idolatry and delivered it from the hand of the Philistines at
Mizpeh, where a great battle was fought, so that these terrible foes
were subdued, and came no more into the borders of Israel during the
days of Samuel; and all the cities they had taken, from Ekron unto Gath,
were restored. The subjection of the Philistines was followed by the
undisputed rule of Samuel, under the name of Judge, during his life,
even after the consecration of Saul.
The Israelitish Judge seems to have been a sort of dictator, called to
power by the will of the people in times of great emergency and peril,
as among the Romans. "The Theocracy," says Ewald, "by pronouncing any
human ruler unnecessary as a permanent element of the State, lapsed into
anarchy and weakness. When a nation is without a government strong
enough to repress lawlessness within and to protect from foes without,
the whole people very soon divides once more into the two ranks of
master and servant. In Deborah's songs all Israel, so far as lay in her
circle of vision, was divided into princes and people. Hence the nation
consisted of innumerable self-constituted and self-sustained kingdoms,
formed whenever some chieftain elevated himself whom individuals or the
body of citizens in a town were willing to serve. Gaal, son of Zobah,
entered Shechem with troops raised by himself, just like a condottiere
in Italy in the Middle Ages. As it became evident that the nation could
not permanently dispense with an earthly government, it was forced to
rally round some powerful leader; and as the Theocracy was still
acknowledged by the best of the nation, these leaders, who owed their
power to circumstances, could not easily be transformed into regular
kings, but to exceptional dictators the State offered no strong
resistance."
And yet these rulers arose not solely by force of individual prowess,
but were expressly raised up by God as deliverers of the nation in times
of peculiar peril. And further, the spirit of Jehovah came upon them,
as it did upon Deborah the prophetess, and as it did still more
remarkably upon Moses himself.
The last and greatest of these extemporized leaders called Judges, was
Samuel. In him the people learned to put their trust; and the national
assembly which he summoned was completely guided by him. No one of the
Judges, it would seem, had his seat of government in any central city,
but where he happened to live. So the residence of Samuel was at his
native town of Ramah, where he married. It would seem that he travelled
from city to city to administer justice, like the judges of England on
their circuits; but, unlike them, on his own supreme authority,--not
with power delegated by a king, but acknowledging no superior except God
himself, from whom he received his commission. We know not at what time
and whom he married; but his two sons, who in his old age shared power
with him, did not discharge their delegated functions more honorably
than the sons of Eli, who had been a disgrace to their office, to their
father, and to the nation. One of the greatest mysteries of human life
is the seeming inability of pious fathers to check the vices of their
children, who often go astray under an apparently irresistible impulse
or innate depravity, in spite of parental precept and example,--thus
seeming to show that neither virtue nor vice can be surely transmitted,
and that every human being stands on his individual responsibility, with
peculiar temptations to combat, and peculiar circumstances to influence
him. The son of a saint becomes mysteriously a drunkard or a fraud, and
the son of a sensualist becomes an ascetic. This does not uniformly
occur: in fact, the sons of good men are more likely to be an honor to
their families than the sons of the wicked; but why are exceptions so
common as to be proverbial?
It was no light work which was imposed on the shoulders of Samuel,--to
establish law and order among the demoralized tribes of the Jews, and to
prepare them for political independence; and it was a still greater
labor to effect a moral reformation and reintroduce the worship of
Jehovah. Both of these objects he seems to have accomplished; and his
success places him in the list of great reformers, like Mohammed and
Luther,--but greater and better than either, since he did not attempt,
like the former, to bring about a good end by bad means; nor was he
stained by personal defects, like the latter. "It was his object to
re-enkindle the national life of the nation, so as to combat
successfully its enemies in the field, which could be attained by
rousing a common religious feeling;" for he saw that there could be no
true enthusiasm without a sense of dependence on the God of battles, and
that heroism could be stimulated only by exalted sentiments, both of
patriotism and religion.
But how was Samuel to rekindle a fervent religious life among the
degenerate Israelites in such unsettled times? Only by rousing the
people by his teachings and his eloquence. He was a preacher of
righteousness, and in all probability went from city to city and village
to village,--as Saint Bernard did when he preached a crusade against the
infidels, as John the Baptist did when he preached repentance, as
Whitefield did when he sought to kindle religious enthusiasm in England.
So he set himself to educate his countrymen in the great truths which
appealed to the inner life,--to the heart and conscience. This he did,
first, by rousing the slumbering spirits of the elders of tribes when
they sought his counsel as a prophet, the like of whom had not appeared
since Moses, so gifted and so earnest; and secondly, by founding a
school for the education of young men who should go with his
instructions wherever he chose to send them, like the early
missionaries, to hamlets and villages which he was unable to visit in
person. The first "school of the prophets" was a seminary of
missionaries, animated by the spirit of a teacher whom they feared and
admired as no prophet had been revered in the whole history of the
nation since Moses.
Samuel communicated his own burning spirit wherever he went, and the
burden of his eloquence was zeal and loyalty for Jehovah. Before his
time the prophets had been known as seers; but Samuel superadded the
duties of a religious teacher,--the spokesman of the Almighty. The
number of his disciples, whom he doubtless commissioned as evangelists,
must have been very large. They lived in communities and ate in common,
like the primitive monks. They probably resembled the early Dominican
and Franciscan friars of the Middle Ages, who were kindled to enthusiasm
by such teachers as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura. Like them they were
ascetics in their habits and dress, wearing sheepskins, and living on
locusts and wild honey,--on the fruits which grew spontaneously in the
rich valleys of their well-watered country. It did not require much
learning to arouse the common people to new duties and a higher
religious life. The Bible does not inform us as to the details by which
Samuel made his influence felt, but there can be no doubt that by some
means he kindled a religious life before unknown among his countrymen.
He infused courage and hope into their despairing hearts, and laid the
foundation of military enthusiasm by combining with it religious ardor;
so that by the discipline of forty years,--the same period employed by
Moses in transmuting a horde of slaves into a national host of warriors;
a period long enough to drop out the corrupted elements and replace
them with the better trained rising generation,--the nation was prepared
for accomplishing the victories of Saul and David. But for Samuel no
great captains would have arisen to lead the scattered and dispirited
hosts of Israel against the Philistines and other enemies. He was thus a
political leader as well as a religious teacher, combining the offices
of judge and prophet. Everybody felt that he was directly commissioned
by God, and his words had the force of inspiration. He reigned with as
much power as a king over all the tribes, though clad in the garments of
humility. Who in all Israel was greater than he, even after he had
anointed Saul to the kingly office?
The great outward event in the life of Samuel was the transition of the
Israelites from a theocratic to a monarchical government. It was a
political revolution, and like all revolutions was fraught with both
good and evil, yet seemingly demanded by the spirit of the times,--in
one sense an advance in civilization, in another a retrogression in
primeval virtues. It resulted in a great progress in material arts,
culture, and power, but also in a decline in those simplicities that
favor a religious life, on which the strength of man is apparently
built,--that is, a state of society in which man in his ordinary life
draws nearest to his Maker, to his kindred, and his home; to which
luxury and demoralizing pleasures are unknown; a life free from
temptations and intellectual snares, from political ambition and social
unrest, from recognized injustice and stinging inequalities. The
historian with his theory of development might call this revolution the
change from national youth to manhood, the emerging from the dark ages
of Hebrew history to a period of national aggrandizement and growth in
civilization,--one of the necessary changes which must take place if a
nation would become strong, powerful, and cultivated. To the eye of the
contemplative, conservative, and God-fearing Samuel this change of
government seemed full of perils and dangers, for which the nation was
not fully prepared. He felt it to be a change which might wean the
Israelites from their new sense of dependence on God, the only hope of
nations, and which might favor another lapse to pagan idolatries and a
decline in household virtues, such as had been illustrated in the life
of Ruth and Boaz,--and hence might prove a mere exchange of that rugged
life which elevates the soul, for those gilded glories which adorn and
pamper the mortal body. He certainly foresaw and knew that the change in
government would produce tyranny, oppression, and injustice, from which
there could be no escape and for which there could be no redress, for he
told the people in detail just what they should suffer at the hands of
any king whom they might have; and these were in his eyes evils which
nothing could compensate,--the loss of liberty, the extinction of
personal independence, and a probable rebellion against the Supreme
Jehovah in the degrading worship of the gods of idolatrous nations.
When the people, therefore, under the guidance of so-called "progressive
leaders," hankered for a government which would make them like other
nations, and demanded a king, the prophet was greatly moved and sore
displeased; and this displeasure was heightened by a bitter humiliation
when the elders reproached him because of the misgovernment of his own
sons. He could not at first say a word, in view of a demand apparently
justified by the conduct of the existing rulers. There was a just cause
of complaint. If his own sons would take bribes in rendering judgment,
who could be trusted? Civilization would say that there was needed a
stronger arm to punish crime and enforce the laws.
So Samuel, perplexed and disheartened, fearing that the political
changes would be evil rather than good, and yet feeling unable to combat
the popular voice, sought wisdom in prayer. "And the Lord said, hearken
unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee, for they
have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should reign
over them. Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit yet protest
solemnly unto them, and show them the manner of the king that shall
reign over them." The Almighty would not take away the free-will of the
people; but Samuel is required to show them the perversity of their
will, and that if they should choose evil the consequences would be on
their heads and the heads of their children, from generation to
generation.
Samuel therefore spake unto the people,--probably the elders and leading
men, for the aristocratic element of society prevailed, as in the Middle
Ages of feudal Europe, when even royal power was merely nominal, and
barons and bishops ruled,--and said: "This will be the manner of the
king that shall reign over you: He shall take your sons and appoint them
for himself for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run
before his chariots; and he shall appoint captains over thousands and
captains over fifties, and will set them to ear [plough] his ground and
reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be
confectioners [or perfumers] and cooks and bakers. And he will take your
fields and your vineyards and your olive-yards, even the best of them,
and give them to his servants; and he will take the tenth of your seed
and of your vineyards, and give to his officers and to his servants. And
he will take your men-servants and your maid-servants, and your
goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. And he
will take the tenth of your sheep; and ye shall be his servants. And ye
will cry out in that day because of your king which ye have chosen you,
and the Lord will not hear you in that day."