Here is one of the illustrious Bible characters who has been held up to
the world for several thousand years as the "sweet singer of Israel,"
and "the man after God's own heart;" whose life is stained by the
commission of a long list of crimes of the blackest character, some of
which would send him to the State prison for life if committed in this
morally enlightened age.
1. One of his first acts of moral delinquency was that of turning
traitor to Achish, King of Gath. After the king had kindly given him
a rulership over the city of Ziklag, he manifested his ingratitude
by waging an unprovoked war for plunder upon the king's friends and
relatives, to rob them of their cattle (1 Sam. xxvii.).
2. David, with an army, committed a similar act of aggression and
spoliation upon the rights and property of Nabal, to attain his cattle
by robbery (1 Sam. xxv.).
3. David at one time turned traitor to his own nation by joining the
army of Achish to fight them (1 Sam. xxix.).
4. David obtained possession of the kingdom of Ishboshett by bribery and
intrigue, after acknowledging him to be a righteous man (2 Sam. iii.).
5. David robbed Mephibosheth, the son of his bosom-friend Jonathan,
and a poor cripple, of one-half of his estate, upon the plea that might
makes right (2 Sam. xvi.).
6. David connived at some of the most abominable and atrocious crimes of
his sons (2 Sam.).
7. The manner in which David obtained his first wife Michal is shocking
to all who possess kind and philanthropic feelings. Saul had proposed a
hundred foreskins of the Philistines as the price of his daughter; but
David, in wanton cruelty, killed two hundred for this purpose.
8. The manner in which David obtained his beautiful wife Bathsheba, to
add to his list of wives, might be tolerated in that era of barbarism;
but it must be looked upon at the present time as an act of cruelty and
wickedness. He said to Joab, "Set Uriah in the front of the battle...
that he may be smitten and die" (2 Sam. xi. 15); which was equivalent to
slaying him with his own hands, and for no crime, but solely to get his
widow for a wife.
9. Thus, we see, David was not only a polygamist, but he obtained his
wives by fraud, murder, and intrigue.
10. David's _dancing naked_ in public was an indecent act, although
several cases are reported of "the holy" men of that age appearing
in public in a state of nudity. His wife Michal upbraided him for
"uncovering himself to the eyes of the handmaids, his servants, as one
of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself" (2 Sam. vi.). It
is said that "David danced before the Lord with all his might." Can we
suppose the Lord would fancy such sights?
11. David's treatment of the Moabites in killing two-thirds of them
without any just provocation is an act that would hang any man of the
present day (2 Sam. viii.).
12. The fiendish act of David in placing the Moabites under saws and
harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and making them walk through
brick-kilns (2 Sam. xii.), bespeaks a heart callous with cruelty,
unmerciful as a tiger. The very thought of it is calculated to chill the
blood of a person with the feelings of common humanity.
13. David's murder of five step-sons and two brothers-in-law, to gratify
a malignant grudge toward the house of Saul, is another act showing the
fiendish character of the man.
14. When David was so old and stricken in years that no amount of
bed-clothing could keep him warm, he made this a plea for marrying
another wife--and a young maid at that--to lie in his bosom him warm (1
Kings i. 1). Lust knows no failure in expedients.
15. David's advice to his son Solomon on his death-bed, to assassinate
Joab and his other enemies, shows that his ruling passions--animosity
and revenge--were strong in death.
16. And finally David's wicked prayer, as found in the hun-dred and
ninth Psalm, in which he invokes a string of the most horrid curses
upon his enemies, culminates his immoral history. It completes the
demoralizing picture of the "man after God's own heart." Now, we ask in
solemn earnest, is it not evident that a book indorsing such characters
as David, placed in the hands of the heathen of other countries or the
children of our own, must have a demoralizing tendency? Most certainly,
if
Franklin was right in saying, "The reading of bad examples will make bad
morals." Remember, the perpetrator of all these crimes is said to be "a
man after God's own heart." If so, then God must have approved of
all his crimes. But such a God will not do for this age; and to teach
children and heathen such a lesson is calculated to effect their moral
ruin.
II. CHARACTER OF SOLOMON.
Solomon's writings and history both show that he was a libertine, a
tyrant, and a polygamist. His tyrannical monopoly-of seven hundred wives
and three hundred prostitutes, making him a practica "Free-lover" on
a large scale, is an indelible stigma upon his character. It was a
usurpation of the rights, and a trespass upon the liberties, of nearly
two thousand men and women. It prevented them from filling the mission
or sphere in life that God designed them to enjoy. The organization of
the sexes shows they were designed to be husbands and wives and parents.
And the nearly equal number of the sexes is an evidence that nearly
a thousand men were deprived of wives by Solomon's monopoly of women;
while, on the other hand, those women were prevented from sustaining the
true relation of wives. When he could not see those women more than once
in three years by calling on one of them each day, it is a farce, and
an insult to reason, to call them wives. Could a woman sustain the
practical relation of wife to a man she only saw as husband once in
three years? The very idea is ridiculous, and a mockery of the true
marriage relation. And yet this is the man who is represented as being
such a special favorite of God as to receive a portion of his divine
wisdom. It is a slander, if any thing can be, upon Infinite Wisdom. By
reading his amorous song, we can learn his motives for enslaving such a
large number of women.
If this "wise man" is to be accepted as authority (and he should be if
he got his wisdom directly from God), then we must relinquish all hope
of an immortal existence. Hear him: "For that which befalleth the sons
of men befalleth the beasts:... as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over
a beast" (Eccles. iii. 19). Here is a plain and unequivocal denial of
man's conscious existence beyond the grave. Nor does the Old-Testament
writer teach the doctrine. Job denies it in still more explicit terms,
if possible. (See Job xiv. 10.)
III. LOT AND HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS.
The act of Abram's brother Lot delivering up his two daughters to the
Sodomites, "to do to them as is good in your eyes" (Gen. xix. 8), must
excite reflections in the highest degree revolting to the mind of every
father who has daughters. The act of a father voluntarily offering up
his virtuous daughters to gratify the depraved passions of a mob is too
shocking to contemplate.
And to accept such a character as a "righteous man" must certainly
weaken the faith of the Bible believer in a true system of morality, and
plant in his mind a very low standard of the moral perfections of God.
We are told (Gen. xix. 26) that Lot's wife was converted into a pillar
of salt as a penalty for the simple act of looking back. Several
absurdities are observable in this story:--
1. It is difficult to conceive how any sin or crime could be attached to
the natural act of turning the head to look in any direction, especially
when no injunction had been laid upon the act.
2. If there were any thing so inherently wrong in the act of looking
back as to be visited with such direful penalties, pillars of salt would
soon become more numerous than frogs were in Egypt.
3. Reason would suggest that, to put the thing in shape to be believed
by future generations, the woman should have been converted into some
imperishable substance, such as granite, gold, silver, or pig-iron.
A woman made of salt, or salt of a woman, would soon dissolve and
disappear.
4. The Hindoos relate that a woman in India was once converted into a
pillar of stone for an act of unchastity; and "the stone is there unto
this day." Here is a story with a better foundation: the Egyptians have
the tradition of a woman being converted into a tree for the act of
plucking some fruit after it had been interdicted. How many of these
stories should we credit?