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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

THE
BIBLE VIEW

OF THE

JEWISH CHURCH,
IN THIRTEEN LECTURES,

DELTVEBED DUBING JANUAEY — AFBIL, 1888, IN THE
FOUETH AVENUE PBESBYTEEIAN CHUECH, N. Y.

BT
HOWARD CROSBY.
FUNK & WAGNALLS.
NEW TORK: LONDON:
1888.
18 AND 20 ASTOR PLACE. 44 FLEET STBEET.
All Bights Reserved.

Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1888,'by
FUNK & WAGNALLS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

PRESS OF
FUNK & WAGNALLS,
18 and 20 Astor Place,
NEW YORK.

PREFACE.
The following lectures were delivered to the peo
ple of my charge, with the design of giving them
a coup oV oeil of the history of the Jewish church as
the Bible sets it forth.
That the grand outline might be distinct, his
toric details and subordinate questions have been
avoided. The church of God is one. The church to-day is
the same church which God brought out of the
land of Egypt, the same which he will glorify in the
future. The same Saviour, the same Holy Spirit,
the same principles of the divine government are
found at Sinai as at Calvary. The Old Testament
and the New are equally in essence (though not in
completeness) the gospel of God. Love to God as
the result of an accepted atonement is the distin
guishing subjective mark of the church, as the sac
rifice of a divine substitute for the sinner is the
great objective truth of revelation.
So also man's weakness and tendency to abandon
God for his own devices is visible in the church of

IV. PREFACE.
all ages, and the need of reminding the church that
its strength is in obedience to God's word and im
plicit reliance on the Divine Spirit is ever apparent.
In these days when philosophy is attempting to
take the place of revelation, and many leaders in
the church are encouraging the attempt, it is es
pecially important to call the church to the contem
plation of the "Word as the only light in this dark
world, that it may walk aright and not fall into the
pits of error that Satan through the specious in
fluence of human learning (" the wisdom of this
world ") has prepared for it.
These lectures are offered as a humble contribu
tion to this end. H. C.

THE BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY.
All the information we have regarding the
origin and early history of the Jews and the Jewish
church comes from the Bible. The monuments of
Egypt and Babylon have not a word for us on the
subject. A few historical fragments of ancient
writing are preserved, which in vague and varied
ways speak of a foreign people migrating from
Egypt, where they had sojourned for a long period
in an early time, which allusions Josephus the
Jewish historian refers to the Jews. And the
Assyrian monuments make mention of a few of the
later Kings of Israel and Judah, who were made
tributary to Assyria. There are also Babylonian
traditions of the creation and the deluge which
bear some resemblance to the accounts given in the
first book of the Bible. But from none of these
sources is any light shed upon the origin and early
history of the Jewish people, and we are shut up
to the Bible only for our knowledge. The matter

8 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
is thus greatly simplified. Every Bible reader is
able to judge of the truth of any writer on the sub
ject. He is able to determine how much is in
serted by mere fancy, or how much is altered to
suit preconceived theories, or how much is omitted
as chargeable to interpolation, and then he can
judge how far these changes are conformable to
reason and common sense.
The history of Israel as given us in the Old Testa
ment was always received by the Jewish and Chris
tian churches as exact and true until quite modern
times. In these latter days a school of learned men
has arisen, whose aim has been to show that the
Old Testament is a mass of jumbled documents^
largely fabulous and fraudulently conceived. In the
goodly name of "higher criticism," which means a
criticism of internal relations rather than of the
outward text, they have professed to dissect the
Old Testament and discover its many independent
and ill-assorted parts. They have gone so far as
even to break up sentences and declare that one
part of the sentence belonged to one writer and
period and the other to another writer and period.
Without a particle of external evidence but only
by the acuteness of their own intellects, they have
taken the books of Moses and parcelled them out
to a dozen different authors and have placed those

INTRODUCTORY. 9
authors in time from 500 to 1000 years after the
time of Moses, in order to do which they deny the
testimony of our Lord and his apostles, they deny
the testimony of the Jewish and Christian church
for ages, and they invent utter impossibilities, such
as the palming off on the Jewish people a detailed
ritual as of Moses by fraudulent schemers of a late
age, in which the main features of the ritual could
not be realized, and the manufacture of a mass of
law and history whose language and references are
all antique and exactly suited to the olden time
for a people to whom such references would be un
meaning. And all this overwhelming absurdity
they venture on solely on the ground of assumed
differences of style in the writing and a priori de
terminations against the supernatural, and in doing
this, they unhesitatingly strike out all passages in
the Old Testament which militate against their
wild theory, and dogmatically assert that they are
interpolations. There never was a more bare-faced falsehood
thrust upon the public than this "Wellhausen the
ory, so called from its most reckless advocate, but
which has numerous modifications (though contain
ing the essential folly) in writings of the German
critics and their servile acolytes in England and
America. Apart from all personal characteristics

10 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
and merits, it is easy to see in this movement the
spirit of that Evil One who is ever watchful to op
pose God's truth and to sow doubt in the minds of
God's people. Fifty years ago the arch-enemy
directed his attack against the New Testament and
in different ways by men like Baur and Strauss and
Renan endeavored to overthrow its authenticity and
authority, but he was fearfully discomfited, and
men like Lightfoot and "Westcott and Abbott were
raised up to show the extreme audacity of these in
fidels and to make as clear as the noonday the gen
uineness and authenticity of the New Testament.
Foiled in this assault, the great enemy of souls and
of God turned to the Old Testament and brought out
some vagaries of learned men of a past generation, on
which to build up, through Kuenen, Graf, Reuss,
"Wellhausen and others, a battery against the Pen
tateuch and the Old Testament history. Satan
well knew that . if the Old Testament could be
made to appear false, then Christ and his apostles,
who constantly quote it as God's word, must be
false too. And so the battery was constructed and
its guns mounted, and their roar frightened the
timid as if all God's revelation was going to pieces,
but again the Lord raised up men like Stuart and
Edersheim in England, and Curtis and Bissell and
Green in our own country, who exposed the stu-

INTRODUCTORY. 11
pendous fallacies of these learned critics and amply
vindicated the integrity of the Old Testament
Scriptures. In such a course of lectures as this
which I begin this evening, it would be out-of-
place to enter into details regarding this contest
and to show the many special absurdities of which
these iconoclasts are guilty, and the complete ex
posure of these by the equally learned men who
have indignantly met their aspirations on the Holy
"Word. I shall content myself with quoting a pas
sage from the learned and devout Edersheim. After
a forcible series of illustrations of the reckless work
wrought by the German dissectors, he says, refer
ring to the preposterous idea of attributing the
Mosaic law to a time a thousand years later than
the Mosaic epoch, " The legislation, supposed to
have been then introduced, made no provision
for, took not the slightest notice of, the wants
of the great majority, not even to the provis
ion of synagogues, which we know to have been
among the first requirements of the dispersed — nay,
even of those who returned to Palestine. Surely
this seems so strange as to be almost incredible. In
times which called for the widest comprehension,
they concocted the narrowest conceivable legisla
tion, and that in the interest of the small number
of priests who returned to Palestine ; and they not

12 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
only succeeded in introducing it as the Mosaic
Law, but in imposing it upon the educated major
ity without eliciting a single contradiction or rais
ing a single question as to its authenticity — until
the ingenuity of critics more than 2000 years later
discovered the forgery ! " Such are Edersheim's
just words. We can characterize the promulga
tion of such a theory as literary impudence. We
come back, therefore, to the impregnable posi
tion of the full inspiration of the Old Testament, in
which holy men of old spake as they were moved
by the Holy Ghost, to which Old Testament our
blessed Lord himself ever directed his hearers, de
claring that not one jot or tittle of it would fail,
that it were " easier for heaven and earth to part
than one tittle of the law to fail" (Luke xvi. 17).
Remember that when our Lord said this, he was
speaking directly of the Old Testament just as we
have it, which was called, "the law and the pro
phets," and this is the phrase he uses in this imme
diate context. Now it is this inspired Old Testa
ment that alone gives us our knowledge of the
origin and early history of the Jewish church, and
the humblest godly soul is quite as competent to
decide on the truth of any general statement con
cerning it as the most learned professor in a Uni
versity.

INTRODUCTORY. 13
From this Old Testament we learn that the Jewish
church was miraculously born and nurtured, and
the Jewish people started on their career from a high
vantage ground of divine revelation, from which they
declined as the centuries passed, through the native
depravity of the human heart. The infidel state
ment is just the reverse. It affirms that the Jews
were originally a barbarous people, and that they
gradually by a process of political and social evo
lution worked their way out into a high civilization,
from polytheists becoming monotheists and from
loose nomadic tribes becoming a solid kingdom.
Of course this position, so antagonistic to the Bible
record, is taken in consistency with the system that
rejects all that is supernatural, whether miracle or
prophecy or revelation.
The whole Jewish history is explicable only on
the theory of a divine call and a divine revelation
at the start. There was nothing in the world be
fore Christ to develop into a pure and holy law of
love to God and love to man. Whatever there was
of that sort must have come from heaven. Look
at Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece and
Rome. Is there any such development in those
great empires? Did those nations with all their
eulture ever conceive a notion of love to God and
man on the fundamental principle of all law and

14 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
social order? And yet here is little Israel pro
claiming this exalted truth. How did Israel get
it ? If Israel developed it from its own heart and
mind, why did not the other nations so develop it ?
No ; there was no development at all in it. Israel
had it at the very start and had it direct from God.
The law of Moses could have had its birth in no
human mind. Like the gospel of Christ, it is aimed
against the common tendencies of our race. It
calls for a heart-service to God. It forbids every
form of advantage over our neighbor. It makes
prominent the exceeding sinfulness of man and his
constant need of the divine forgiveness and divine
guidance. It belittles human pomp and pride and
it makes no compromise with sin. In all this it is
diametrically opposite to the prevailing religions of
the old world, and it is so, because it teaches a re
ligion not of man but of God. Put the Psalms of
David as late as you please in Old Testament his
tory, put them down to the times of the exile and
afterward, and what human source could possibly
have originated such profound views of sin and guilt
and such clear views of the divine forgiveness with
its spiritual comfort and strength ? Compare these
Psalms, which have ever been the sweetest and most
sustaining experiences of spiritual life to the hum
ble behever, with the finest hymns of the Vedas

INTRODUCTORY. 15
and other pagan books, and you feel at once that
you are profaning the Psalms by such a parallel.
In the finest pagan hymns there is but superficial
imagination or intellectual effort. In the Bhagavad
Gita, which is the most devotional of the Hindoo
books, and which perhaps is of a date later than
the time of Christ, we have Arguna, the man, ex
amining the physical constitution of his god and
seeing within him all the sages and celestial snakes,
the god himself being possessed of many arms,
stomachs, mouths and eyes on all sides (Bhagavad
Gita ch. 11, 17). It is such gross and childish ma
terial that makes up the body of pagan sacred lit
erature. Only those who are ignorant of it dare
compare it with the Bible. Look at the Homeric
hymns, so called, and whatever of a religious liter
ature there was in ancient Greece, so highly cul
tured and so proficient in art and oratory and poesy,
and you see only a string of compounded epithets
of deity, many of them only such as weak men
would delight in, but not a glimpse of the true state
of man's heart or the true character of a God of
justice and love. It is so in Babylonia and Assy
ria. It is so in Egypt. Now and then a slight
notice of God as the only one to forgive in response to
the trust of the human heart may be found, as a rem
nant of the original revelation filtered down through

16 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the ages, but the mass of the theology and wor
ship of all those most enlightened nations was gross,
selfish, superficial and sensual. Now put alongside
of all this the pure teachings of the Old Testament,
the deep revelations of the depravity of the human
heart, the absolute need of the Divine Spirit to renew
it, the summons from worldliness, the exaltation of a
spiritual life and the demand of internal purity, and
you must be blind indeed if you do not see that this
grand Bible is of God, bearing on its face the seal
of its heavenly origin.
It is this glorious book of God which tells us of
His wonderful ways with the children of men,
which reveals to us His exact justice that can
never yield to the slightest compromise, and yet
also his abounding love which can show mercy to
the chief of sinners while justice has its perfect
way and exacts the punishment of sin to the utter
most. It is this paradox which is revealed in the
person and work of the Son of God, becoming flesh
and dwelling, suffering and dying among us, becom
ing sin for us, becoming a curse for us, bearing our
sins in his own body on the tree, by whose stripes we
are healed. And this marvel of the Divine wisdom.
and love was adumbrated to the ancient church of
Israel by the typical ceremonial, which was an object
lesson of a substituted Saviour bearing the blow of

INTRODUCTORY. 17
justice, by whose blood theAvorshiper was purged of
his sin and reconciled to God. The Old and the
New Testament are all one. They have one aim.
They treat of one revelation. They disclose one
way of salvation. They fit in together as perfectly
as two sundered fragments of a branch would fit
together, with an undesigned exactness that no
human art could imitate. The Old Testament
must be read in the light of the New, and the
New Testament cannot be understood except in the
light of the Old. As our Lord himself said, the
Old Testament testifies of him all the way through.
Christ is its main underlying thought, and no one
knows how to read the Old Testament, who does
not look for Christ everywhere in it. The infidel
commentators and critics, to whom we have refer
red, by leaving Christ out of the Old Testament
cannot understand it, and talk about it like infants.
And so in reading the New Testament, the Old
is so inwoven into its texture that the reader must
constantly refer to it in order to comprehend the
truths that are there set forth concerning our Lord.
From this sacred volume, it is my purpose to trace
carefully the origin and history of the church of
God in its organized form, which is equivalent to
tracing the origin and history of the Jewish church
and people. I cannot but believe "that such a re-
2

18 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
search, assiduously and devoutly made, must bring
us face to face with truths most important and
precious to our spiritual interests and will
strengthen our faith, kindle our zeal, deepen our
devotion and increase our reverence for Him, who,
as a loving father, condescends to meet our need as
sinners and to feed our souls with the heavenly
manna of his word.

LECTURE II.
ABRAHAM.
Ethnologists find three grand divisions in the
human race, which they call the Semitic, the
Aryan and the Turanian. The Semitic, so called
from Shem, the son of Noah, considered to be its
ancestor, occupies a comparatively small portion
of the earth, clinging to the original seat of the
race and showing little desire for movement or
progress. The Semitic region includes Syria,
Mesopotamia and Arabia with a small strip of
North-eastern Africa. The principal languages of
the Semitic group are the . Assyrian, Aramaic,
Hebrew, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Aryan divi
sion of the race contrasts remarkably with the
Semitic. It is full of movement and progress. It
has penetrated into all parts of the north and has
led the van of civilization. It has peopled the
plains of India, the plateau of Persia, the mount
ain of Armenia, nearly the whole of Europe and
America, many parts of Africa, Australia and the
islands of the sea. It includes the Sanscrit and
Zend as well as the Greek and Latin among ancient

20 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
languages and the English, French, German and
other European languages among the modern ones.
The three great families of the Slaves, the Teutons
and the Celts belong to the Aryan division.
The Turanian division is not so easily described.
The old Persians used to call the country north of
them Turan, the same which we now denominate
Turkestan, and this name has been used by ethno
logists for all people who are not Semitic or Aryan
excepting the Chinese. But there is not the same
certainty, with regard to the homogeneousness of
this division that there is regarding that of the
others. This Turanian division includes the Tartars
and Turks, the Dravidian people of Central and
Southern India, and the Samoyeds of Siberia and
the Hungarians and Finns of Europe.
It is natural to consider these three grand divis
ions of our race as corresponding to the three sons
of Noah, the Semitic being descended from Shem,
the Aryan from Japhet and the Turanian from
Ham, but as yet we have not sufficient evidence for
this apportionment. The Turanian division is es
pecially a puzzle to the learned philologists and
ethnologists, and the Chinese are an independent
problem. We may, however, in general count the
Semitic as Shemites and the Aryan as Japhethites,
while we leave the Turanian as undetermined.

ABRAHAM. 21
Our earliest view of the southern portion of the
Mesopotamian country, where it borders on the
Persian Gulf, and where in ancient times the Tigris
and Euphrates entered that gulf by independent
mouths, more than a hundred miles farther north
than where they now enter it by one mouth, reveals
the several branches of the human race as there
resident. There were Semites and Aryans and
Turanians. But the Turanians seem to have had the
preponderance. They were the founders of what
is called the old Accad civilization, and probably
Nimrod was the earliest of their mighty men and
founder of the Empire known as the old Chaldean
Empire. These Accad people were the inventors
of the Cuneiform writing, so lately interpreted, and
which has revealed so much of ancient history be
fore unknown. They had also made progress in the
arts of building and war, and had shown some
knowledge of state-craft. It was out of their
country and probably by reason of their oppressive
tyranny that the Semitic people of that region
emigrated northward. " Out of that land " says the
Bible (Gen. 10. 11.) "went forth Asshur and
builded Nineveh and the city Rehoboth and Calah
and Resen." Now Asshur was a descendant of
Shem (Gen. 10. 22.), and this passage shows us that
the great Assyrian Empire at the north was the

22 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
outgrowth of a Semitic emigration from Babylonia.
It was probably at the same time and for the same
reason that Terah and his family left the Chaldean
city of Ur in this southern region and migrated to
the northern Euphrates, as those represented by
Asshur migrated to the northern Tigris. But while
the same natural causes existed in both cases, that
of Terah had remarkable elements in it unknown
to the other. The movement of Terah was guided
by an appearance of the God of glory to his son
Abram, and in this divine revelation the direction
of the migration was determined (Acts 7. 2. and Gen.
11. 31.), the land of Canaan on the Mediterranean
Sea being the ultimate goal. The journey thither
was a very long one, 700 miles in a straight line
across the Syrian desert, but a thousand miles by
the only way in which a company could travel,
along the Euphrates to the region of Carchemish
and then westward and southward into Canaan.
The Terah family passed north along the Euphrates
and halted on the Belik, one if its affluents in the
fertile region of Charran, the country that was called
Padan Aram (Gen. 25. 20.), a name that suggests
its habitancy by a Semitic people (Gen. 10. 22.)
before Terah's arrival, although it may have got
this name from Terah's own descendants (Gen. 22.
21). .For some reason not explained Terah and

ABRAHAM. 23
his family took up their abode in Charran, and it
was not till Terah's death, that Abram, probably
after another intimation from God (Gen. 12. 1.),
proceeded to obey the divine command in its ful
ness and seek the land of Canaan, whose nearest
point was three hundred miles south-west of
Charran. Iuto that land, about to play so prom
inent a part in the world by reason of this man's
coming to it, Abram entered with his wife and
nephew and his numerous retinue of servants and
adherents when he was seventy-five years old. The
Canaanites, among whom he came were not Semites
like himself, but a Cushite race that had previously
found their way to the Mediterranean coast from
the region of the Persian Gulf, but had adopted a
Semitic language. Perhaps these Cushites are to
be classed among the Turanians. Certainly the
Cushites, who were descendants of Ham, had a
great deal to do with the populating of southern
Arabia and parts of Africa, and it may be that the
Canaanites were brought into Canaan by a gradual
pushing along the shores of the Persian Gulf, the
Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. However this may
be, Abram found in Canaan a people of a different
division of the human family, but speaking a lan
guage which he could understand. They were idol
aters, like those from whom he had come out,

24 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
when he left Ur of the Chaldees, but he had no
relatives and connections about him from long
residence by which he would be entangled in idol
atrous ways, as he had in his native land. So there
was an opportunity for practical separation from
the heathen while among them, an opportunity
which Abram faithfully seized, but which his
nephew Lot sadly neglected, and by neglecting
which the posterity of Lot became polluted with
the vilest heathenism.
Five hundred years after Abram's time, the great
general of Israel, Joshua, after he had subdued
these very Canaanites and given Abram's descen
dants possession of the land, said to the representa
tives of the tribes, " Your fathers dwelt on the
other side of the flood (that is, the river Euphrates)
in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham and
the father of Nachor, and they served other gods.
And I took your father Abraham from the other
side of the flood and led him throughout all the
land of Canaan." These words of Joshua show that
Terah's family did not get wholly rid of idolatry
when they removed to Padan Aram, and that
Abram needed the divine revelation once and again
to purify himself from the prevailing polytheism.
Probably some of the grosser forms of idolatry
were left behind when they left Ur of the Chaldees.

ABRAHAM 25
Perhaps they no longer worshiped Bel and Mero
dach and Nebo and the many gods of the Baby-
Ionian pantheon, but that certain teraphim or
images were still used seems certain from the narra
tive concerning Rachel when married to Abram's
grandson, which states that such teraphim were
used by her when she came from the Padan Aram
country and were counted by her father as his gods
(Gen. 31. 30.) and it was not till Jacob reached
Bethel that he caused these "strange gods" to be
put away (Gen. 35, 2).
It is hard for us to imagine how strong a hold
idolatry has upon a people and how difficult it is to
wean a people away from some form of image wor
ship. The Romish church has yielded to this ten
dency of the human mind and has placed images
before its votaries, telling them, it is true, to wor
ship the true God through these, but in effect fur
nishing them with a genuine idolatry.
The call of Abram is the initiative movement of
God to the planting of an organized church upon
our sin-smitten earth. In the antediluvian world
there was apparently no religious organization be
yond the family. Perhaps at first, a place of
worship was constituted near the garden whence the
original pair was banished, of which the cherubim
and the sword-like flame were the adumbrations of

26 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the future ark of the Covenant. But we may sur
mise that as the human family spread and as wick
edness multiplied, their special sign of the divine
favor, which kept (in more senses than one) the
way of the tree of life (Gen. 3, 24.) was withdrawn.
After the deluge, for perhaps a thousand years, the
family seems again to have been the only frame
work of a religious system, and again it proved a
failure, vice and violence again filling the earth till
the piety of Noah seemed to have scarcely a repre
sentative on the earth. It was then that God
called Abram. In the divine wisdom, a family was
to be specially and miraculously guarded and
nursed into a nation, which should form an organ
ized depository of divine truth, holding it amid a
wicked world until the .time should come, under
the impulse of a visible Messiah and his atoning
work for sinners, to spread that truth throughout
the earth. To this end the supernatural was neces
sary. Man, without the supernatural, was hope
lessly lost. He was ever sinking deeper and deeper
into pollution. Revelation and miracle were abso
lutely necessary to save him. No church of God
could be established without this double witness of
God — a truth delivered, and the miraculous signs
to evidence that truth. Thus the miracles of the
Old Testament which gather around the birth of

ABRAHAM. 27
the Church, instead of being jarring elements dis
turbing the history, are most fitting in the chain of
events, and the divine interposition to save man
would be incomprehensible without them.
Abram's call was the special revelation of God,
and in the course of Abram's life God appeared
nine times to him to direct his conduct and to sus
tain his faith. In these appearances the foundations
of the coming church were laid in the rite of cir
cumcision and in the promises of a chosen seed in
the land of Canaan. The miracle of Isaac's birth
was a witness and pledge of the promises of God,
and so revelation and miracle were united in
Abram's experience, as they ever have been and
ever must be iu the establishing or re-establishing
of a divine dispensation upon the earth.
Abram's character under the divine guidance
and teaching became admirably adapted to his
position as the historical foundation of God's church.
He appears before our minds as a calm and digni
fied patriarch, patiently bearing trial, yielding rights
for the sake of peace, showing kindness and hospi
tality, helping those that were in distress, courteous
and liberal in his dealings with the surrounding
people and possessing under all an unshaken faith
in God, looking beyond the seen to the unseen, to

28 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the spiritual city prepared for him and his by the
divine Builder and Maker (Heb. 11. 10, 16).
To this noble Abraham, father of the faithful,
God had made known that four centuries of afflic
tion should precede the establishment of his seed
in Canaan (Gen. 15. 13.), so that he looked not for
an immediate earthly fulfilment of the promise of
Canaan, but his hopes were placed on " a better
country, that is, a heavenly " (Heb. 11. 16.), from
which, doubtless, he would also see and enjoy the
furtherance of the divine purpose in the establish
ment of his posterity in Palestine as the church of
God. It is interesting to contemplate this grand soul
as the historic foundation of God's church, as not
belonging to the Jewish church, which was not
constituted till four centuries later, so that we of
the Christian church can claim him, as truly as
they of the Jewish church, as our father Abraham.
As father of the faithful, father of all that have
faith in God, he occupies the fit position before the
beginning of the Jewish church, thus emphasizing
a spiritual rather than a carnal lineage. (Rom. 4.
16; Gal. 3. 7.)
When God thus called out one man to be the
preparation for his church, he did not abandon the
rest of the world. The presence of the church is

ABRAHAM. 29
not the doom of all out of it. Melchizedek and Job
and Hobab are testimonies here. The spirit of
God never ceases to strive with man through his
conscience and whatever of truth has come down
through tradition to his mind, and how far the
spirit is successful is not for us to decide. There
may be a vast host at the judgment who will be
found clothed in white, who will come from the
north and the south and the east and the west from
Babylon and Assyria and Egypt and Ethiopia, who
were never within the visible church on earth, but
who were nevertheless the children of Abraham,
saved by the blood of the atoning Saviour and
anointed by the Holy Ghost.
While the church, then, is God's own institution,
made such by revelation and miracle, it is not to be
considered as the only and necessary means of
reaching the divine salvation. This is one of the
errors of Rome that we must avoid. Yet, as the
institution of God, it is the duty and privilege of
every believer to be identified with it and to receive
of the fulness of its life, while adding, by his own
presence and activity, to that life.
In Abraham's career there were a number of
incidents that bear the mark of typical design on
the part of the Almighty Disposer of events, before
whom his plan of mercy is ever present. We may

30 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
note his coming up out of Egypt, which adum-
brated ' Israel's deliverance from that land and our
Lord's own emigration ( " Out of Egypt have I
called My Son," Hos. 11, 1 ; Matt. 11, 15.), and all
of which typified the redemption of the human
soul from the Egypt of depravity. We may also
note his siiccessful assault upon the great eastern
enemy who had invaded the land and his victorious
return and thanksgiving, as exhibiting the final
triumph of the church over the world-power that
has so often afflicted it. So again the promise
made and repeated to Abraham, that his seed
should possess the land in which he was a stranger,
is but an adumbration of that larger promise of
God, that Abraham's spiritual seed shall possess
this world in which they so long have sojourned as
strangers and pilgrims.
The birth of Ishm'ael showed the impatience of
the church in not awaiting the Lord's time and the
evils that therefore ensue, and the independent and
rebellious character of Ishmael betoken the apos
tasies or defections from the coming church, while
the miracle in the birth of Isaac represented the
miraculous preservation of the church through ages
of defection and corruption.
Abraham's own prevarication twice concerning
Sarah, was a prefigurement of the compromises

ABRAHAM. 31
which God's church would make in its failure of
faith and in its fear of the world, while Abraham's
faith in carrying Isaac to the altar and then using
the divinely-introduced substitute, marks the
church's attitude of confession and its acceptance
of the divine victim. Finally the sending to Padan
Aram for a wife for Isaac shows the church's de
sire to be free from worldly alliances, and the chil
dren by Keturah going forth and settling the neigh
boring lands, represent the civilizing influences of
the church outside its own spiritual pale.
In Abraham's life and its recorded incidents,
therefore, we see an epitome of the church as it
was to be in the midst of the world. That church
was to be composed of weak and sinful men called
out from the world, as Abraham was called out of
his pagan environment, and was to be guided, as he
was, by the voice from Heaven and not by the cus
toms of the world or by the promptings of self.
Composed thus of individual men, it is not strange
to see in the individual man, Abraham, the first
thus called out in view of God's purpose, many of
the characteristics of that future church which
should be the Salt of the Earth.
In the call of Abraham, the first step was taken
by Providence for laying the foundation of the
church. The second step must be multiplication of

32 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
his posterity under circumstances that should con
solidate them and should also cause them to ap
preciate their position as the Called of God. If
they grow up in the life that Abraham lived,
they will scatter like Keturah's children and ut
terly fail of union and organization. There must
be some constraining power that shall force them
to keep together and it must be with circumstances
of oppression that shall teach the people to look to
God and welcome a divine deliverance. It was
therefore of God that the promised seed while re
maining in Canaan (as a sort of earnest of what
was to come) should be few — first only Isaac, then
only Jacob and his twelve sons. During the lives
of these three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, the patriarchal family was being instructed
of God and made more and more distinct from all
others in the world. The spiritual type was being
impressed upon them which should appear in their
posterity when the church, as such, should be
born. When the family had reached a household
of twelve sons, Providence arranged their removal
to Egypt, where two contrasted dispensations
availed them ; first, a period of marvelous increase
and prosperity through the position of Joseph and-
the regard paid to him and his memory by the
Pharaohs, and then a period of bitter oppression

ABRAHAM. 33
under the Pharaohs of a new and inimical dynasty.
Both these dispensations were necessary, the first
to make the numbers of a great nation, and the
second to cause the people thus multiplied to desire
an emigration to the land which their family tradi
tions ever kept before their minds as destined for
them by the God of Abraham.
Thus this whole period of more than four cen
turies was requisite to form the nation to which
should be committed the oracles of God. The old
Greek proverb, with its polytheistic word altered,
runs " The mills of God grind slowly, but they
grind exceeding fine." Natural causes are not dis
turbed while the supernatural interposes. Events,
ordered by an all-superintending Providence, meet
the demands of the divine plan, and in spite of all
.opposition from earth and hell, heaven's mercy es
tablishes itself among sinful men in the form of an
organized church, richly laden with the revelation
of grace. Abraham's call from Ur of the Chaldees
was the prepared seed for the fruitage of an elect
nation at Sinai, a nation at once and a church,
whose King was Jehovah and whose law was
from heaven.
In reviewing this period of patriarchal prepara
tion we may revert to the divisions of our race re
ferred to at the beginning of this discourse, and note
3

34 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the fulfilment of the prophecy which ages before
Abraham, the inspired Noah pronounced regarding
the posterity of his three sons who were to repeople
the earth, a prophecy whose fulfilment began in the
separation of Abraham and his seed, but has in
these latter days reached its culmination. The
words of Noah were, " God shall enlarge Japheth
and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem." Here is
a paradox in the prophecy. Japhet is promised
the enlargement and yet he is to dwell humbly in
the tents of Shem. We should have expected that
if Japhet were to be enlarged, Shem would come
and dwell under his superior protection, but no!
Japhet, though marked by his enlargement, will
yield to the protective care of Shem. And now
what does history, the history of at least four thou
sand five hundred years since that prophecy, show
us? Japhet has been wonderfully enlarged. The
Japhetian or Aryan nations have spread (as we
have seen) all over the globe. They hold nearly
all Europe and America, and they hold important
centres in Asia and Africa, while the isolated con
tinent of Australia (as we may call that huge
island) is almost wholly in their hands. Compared
with this world-wide spread of Japhet, how insig
nificant is the domain of Shem — only the circum
scribed region of Syria and Arabia, with an offshoot

ABRAHAM. 35
along Northern Africa. But when God called
Abram, he was preparing the tents of Shem to re
ceive enlarged Japhet. He was forming a church
of Semitic people and Semitic language, out from
which a Semitic Messiah should arise, and in
which Semitic prophets and apostles should be the
repository of the Divine Spirit to communicate
God's will to the world. This church of God is that
which is called in the prophecy "the tents of
Shem," and it is this Semitic, church into which the
Japhetians of Europe and America have found
shelter. The wide-spread Japhet finds protection
in the tents of Shem.
There is another part to the prophecy. It runs,
" and Canaan shall be his servant." While the
literal Canaan, as subdued and subject to Israel was
a fulfilment of this, yet that seems only a primary
and typical fulfilment of the more extended appli
cation to the nations and peoples who are not of
Shem and Japheth. Canaan may stand for Noah's
third son, Ham, and if Ham is the father of the
Turanian nations, then by the prophecy is indicated
the subjugation of the Turanian nations by the
Japhetians or Aryans and their subordination in all
things to this dominant race of the world. Look
at the Turanian people — the Turks and Tartars,
the Dravidians of India, the Mongol and Malay

86 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
tribes, the population of the South Seas and the
American Indians — and see how every where
they are politically the servants of the Aryans.
And so we behold to-day the exact fulfillment of
the prophecy of Noah, the spread of the Japhet
nations over the world, their refuge in the divine
religion of Shem and their dominance over the in ¦
ferior Hamitic peoples of the earth. How every
word of these holy scriptures sparkles with divine
lustre, and what a glorious study is this Word of
God!

LECTURE IIL
SINAI.
A little more than four centuries after Abra
ham's call out of the contamination of paganism, the
patriarchal family had, under both ordinary and
extraordinary providences, developed into a nation
of two millions, compact and isolated, and as such
appeared before Mount Sinai in the rugged, mount
ainous desert of the peninsula of Arabia Petraea.
That the idolatry of Egypt, by which they had
been surrounded, had had an unhappy influence
upon them cannot be denied, but the amount of this
influence is greatly exaggerated, especially by the
infidel writers. Joshua declares that in Egypt the
children of Israel were tainted with idolatry (Josh.
24. 14.), and Ezekiel affirms the same fact (Ezek.
20. 8., and 23. 3). From Amos (ch. 5. 26.), as
quoted by Stephen (Acts 7. 43.), we see that idola
try clung to them in their desert sojourn, although
the names of the gods mentioned, Moloch, Chiun
and Remphan rather point to Semitic than Egyp
tian deities. But although this wastrue, yet we are
to notice two other facts, first, that this idolatry

38 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
was by no means universal in the tribes, as we see
from the readiness of the children of Levi to punish
the idolaters (Exod. 32. 26.), when they practised
their idolatry before Sinai, and secondly, that it
seems in part at least to have been the worship of
Jehovah through images, and not a worship an
tagonistic to that of Jehovah, as Aaron when mak
ing and setting up the golden calf expressly calls
the religious festival, at which it was worshiped
" a feast to Jehovah " (Ex. 32. 5.). It is not at all
strange that the people of Israel should have ac
cepted the idea that the true God could be worshiped
through material representations, and it was also
very natural that in such worship they should
imitate the sad carnalities which marked the image-
worship of Egypt. It was Aaron's fearful error
that he humored this tendency, when he had knowl
edge enough, and ought to have had sanctified
wisdom enough, to repress it. The calf which he
made may not have been an imitation of Mnevis or
Apis the Egyptian bulls which received their
worship, but rather a well-known cherubic emblem
which had been common to the race, and from
which perhaps the Mnevis and Apis worship had
originated. We cannot therefore say that Israel came out, as
an idolatrous people, from Egypt, we can only say

SINAI.

39

that they were worshipers of the true God, who had
mingled idolatrous styles with that worship, which
styles they had adopted partly from Egypt and
partly from other countries, from what Germans
would call the Zeitgeist of that age. It is wonder
ful that amid the universal, or almost universal,
idolatry of the time, they had preserved a monothe
ism, and through generations of servitude held to
the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
We are told that a mixed multitude accompanied
them out of Egypt. These could scarcely have
been Egyptians, but were probably Semites of a
different stock from Israel, remnants perhaps, of
the old Shasu or Shepherd-king population of
Lower Egypt, who felt it unsafe to remain in Egypt
when the anger of the Pharaoh should burn against
the Semitic people as represented by Israel, and
who, therefore, hastened to take advantage of
Israel's organized departure for their own safe
escape. These people were, of course, idolaters, and must
have been a constant evil to Israel. We find them
at a later date the leaders in an insurrection (Num.
11. 4.), and it would seem from the narrative that a
large part of these idolatrous attache's of Israel were
destroyed at that time by the plague which God
sent (Num. 11. 34.).

40 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Such, then, was the composition of the great
host that had found their way from Egypt to Sinai
under the guidance of Moses. It was no confused
mob. On the contrary the nation had been care
fully arranged, during the time of the plagues which
God sent upon Egypt by the hand of Moses, so that
they could march out of Egypt in military order.
The perplexing word rendered " harnessed " in Ex.
13. 18., ("and the children of Israel went up har
nessed out of the land of Egypt ") — Hebrew " chaha-
ushim " — seems to refer to a military system, but,
apart from that, the narrative gives us abundant
evidence that Moses exhibited the skill of a general
in marshalling the multitude of Israel and con
ducting them speedily and safely along their arduous
course. That the supernatural protection and guid
ance of God was also with the exodus is most ap
parent. The pillar of cloud, shooting out its fires
at night was a visible sign of the Divine Presence,
which must have done much to satisfy Israel of'
their divine call, and to make them obedient to
Moses, as their divinely-appointed leader. We
must believe that official grades permeated the host,
so that each family knew where to look for direc
tion, and perfect order was maintained. If that
vast multitude had rushed out of Egypt as a mere
mob, thousands would have perished and they

SINAI. 41
would have been scattered over the country, an easy
prey to the Egyptian pursuers. Nothing is clearer
than the thorough discipline of the movement, and
this must be referred to the skill of Moses and to
the supernatural influences from heaven. God was
testifying by unmistakable tokens to the divine
origin and character of his church. He was show
ing to the world that Israel was called to be his
people and with them his revelation should be
deposited. Egypt saw the evidence, and afterwards
Edom and Canaan beheld it, for the mighty works
were not done in a corner, but the fame of the
miracles that accompanied Israel's career from
Egypt to Palestme was spread abroad on every side.
Rahab in Jericho well represents this where she
says to the spies (Josh. 2. 9. 10.), " I know that the
Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror
is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the
land faint because of you, for we have heard how
the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for
you, when ye came out of Egypt."
The whole action of the Exodus from the
plagues to the entrance upon Canaan was infused
with supernatural elements, just as the correspond
ing period in the establishment of the Christian
dispensation of God's church was marked by the
miracles of Christ and his apostles.

42 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
It was a remarkable region to which Moses
led the men, women and children of Israel.
The Sinai district is one of dark, rugged mountains
of porphyry with beetling cliffs, and towering crags,
where scarce a vestige of verdure may be found.
In the centre of this rockbound wilderness is a
plain of a few miles in extent, like the adytum or
shrine of a vast natural temple. Into this solitude
the hosts of Israel poured, having made their way
among the winding ravines which form the only
approaches. They had been two months making
the tedious journey of two hundred miles with all
the impedimenta of a migration rather than a
march, which, with due allowance for Sabbath rests
and other detentions, would make their daily
journey about four or five miles. Nothing but a
sense of the Divine Will could have led Moses and
this great multitude to such a barren and un
friendly region. On the way there had been mur
murings, notwithstanding the tokens of God's pres.-
ence — murmurings through fear of the Egyptian
pursuers, murmurings from thirst and murmurings
from hunger, but each season of murmuring had
led to a new display of the divine power to supply
all the needs of the people. The Red Sea opened,
the waters of Marah became sweet, and the manna
was miraculously provided for Israel's permanent

SINAI. 43
supply in the desert. These were the preliminaries
of the grand revelation of God's will and glory at
Sinai. In the grand solitudes of that stern wilder
ness, this people, consolidated, marshalled, trained
and educated by supernatural means, and now
brought out from Egyptian bondage, encamped to
await the expression of the Divine Will. Two
days of solemn preparation through the extended
camp followed, and then upon the third day came the
appalling scene of nature's most awe-inspiring agi
tation. Thunders, lightnings, tempest, darkness,
smoke, earthquake — these filled every heart with
terror, as amid it all the loud notes, as it were of a
celestial trumpet, announced the coming king, and
then were uttered by a heavenly voice out from the
thick darkness of the mountain's summit the words
of the central law — the ten commandments, which,
as words spoken by God himself without human
agency, and as written on stone tablets afterwards
by God himself without human agency, and as
preserved uniquely and alone in the sacred ark,
were to belong not simply to Israel, but to the
church of God forever. They formed the basal
law of love to God and love to man, on which all
righteousness is built.
A second display of the Divine Presence was ac
corded to Israel, when, a year later and while the

44 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
nation was still encamped before the holy mount,
the tabernacle had been constructed, its ritual pre
pared and its priests consecrated. Aaron, the high-
priest, had offered up sacrifices for himself and for
the people, as the beginning of his holy ministry.
The young calf for a sin-offering and the ram for a
burnt- offering had been offered for himself, and the
kid of the goats had been offered as a sin-offering
for the people. Then the calf and the lamb for a
burnt-offering for the people were prepared and
placed on the altar but not burned. But by their
side the meat-offering and the bullock and ram for
peace-offerings were regularly burned. After this,
Moses and Aaron entered into the tabernacle, and
thence returned to bless the people.
On this great day of the priests' inauguration,
the beginning of the ritual, we must believe that
the entire host was alert, and that at each tent-
door facing the mountain the family belonging to
that tent was standing with intent gaze upon the
tabernacle that had probably been erected on an
elevated position under the brow of Sinai. In that
clear atmosphere, the distance of a mile is no fur
ther for sight than the distance of a quarter of a
mile in ordinary climes, and we may believe that
the most distant spectator on that day was not

SINAI. 45
more than two miles from the tabernacle and its
altar. After Moses and Aaron had blessed the people,
the Shekinah, the visible glory of God, suddenly
appeared above the Tabernacle, and from that
glorious appearance darted forth a ray of fire,
seized the calf and lamb that lay upon the altar as
the people's burnt-offering, and instantly consumed
them. This typical action of God's punishment
for sin seizing a substitute for guilty man caused
the vast host to shout with joy and fall on their
faces with gratitude.
The whole heart of Israel was warm and true
at this time. Under the deep impression of
the awful scenes of the Sinai wilds Israel was sol
emn and sincere. The golden age of Israel was at
the beginning of the nation, when the Divine guid
ance was conspicuous, and when the scenes of Sinai
were fresh upon the mind. And yet even in that
golden age occurred the sad apostasy of the golden
calf, whose name only would give it a place in a
golden age. But that apostasy was not so much a
deliberate plan as a sudden outburst of desperation,
which the absence of Moses from a people who
were as yet children in religious knowledge ex
plains. Aaron's device was a weak and cowardly
effort to keep the people in subjection by compro-

46 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
mise, in which he probably had no intention to
lead the people into idolatry, but wished by a well-
known sacred symbol to satisfy their longing for a
visible representation of Deity. The forty days
during which Moses was absent in the Mount were
days to test the confidence of Israel in Moses. They
had seen and heard enough to be assured that God
was with Moses, and that their part was to wait-
patiently ; but their faith gave way and they de
spaired of ever seeing Moses again. Hence their
anxiety to find a substitute, not so much for Moses,
as for the pillar of cloud, which probably now
rested on the summit of the mountain, or, it may
be, was temporarily withdrawn while they abode
before Sinai, (See Exod. 24, 15-18, and comp. ch.
33, 9.) Aaron's golden calf was the proposed Elo
him or likeness of God that was to go before them
in their march to Canaan. As we have seen, it
was natural that Israel should use idolatrous cus
toms around the golden calf, notwithstanding the
intention that it should represent the true Elohim
who had brought Israel out of Egypt. The break
ing of the second commandment leads to the
breaking of the first. One may make and bow
down to an image in order to worship the true God
through it, but there is only a step between this
and worshiping the image itself, and God has ex-

SINAI. 47
pressly forbidden both. He has forbidden an im
age of Deity to bow down to, and history shows
that where this command of God has been diso
beyed the one who bowed down to the image
soon became a worshiper of another god than
Jehovah. The churches of Christ that intro
duced image-worship have become idolatrous
churches, and in them superstition has taken the
place of enlightened religion. Israel's sin before
Sinai was therefore not only one of enormous mag
nitude, as showing their lack of faith in God and in
Moses, but was one of great peril to the nation in
leading them into a fatal idolatry, and hence we see
the severe interposition of God and the death of
three thousand of the offenders.
But notwithstanding this sad episode before
Sinai, we assert confidently that when the ritual
was established, and the divine fire consumed the
people's burnt-offering, Israel was enjoying its
golden age. It was full of the revelations of God,
full of delight at the national independence, full of
respect for Moses and the newly-appointed priest
hood, and when the people shouted and fell on
their faces before the divine token of salvation,
there was a hearty sincerity and solemnity through
out the whole host which marked the highest
point of their spiritual experience.

48 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
It was a very brief golden age. The desert life
exhibited many sad rebellions against Moses and
against God. The people grew callous under the
very constancy of the divine manifestations. The
cloudy pillar the manna, the water flowing along
their camp from the smitten rocks (first at Horeb,
then at Kadesh) became every-day affairs, and lost
their hold upon the people's reverence and grati
tude. Punishments were necessary again and again
to bring them to a sense of their position as God's
wards, under a supernatural guidance and enjoying
privileges beyond all others on the earth. They
are not alone as examples of ingratitude and unbe
lief. They are only illustrations of our common
human nature depraved by sin. Familiarity with
the divine mercies soon makes man ungrateful and
forgetful of the Bountiful Giver, and the mass of
men go on in life as stupid and regardless of God as
the brute beasts. We see in Israel a people won
derfully favored, and, at the first full apprehension
of these favors, showing a zeal and faith most com
mendable, but from that time exhibiting a constant
tendency to fall away, the falling being checked re
peatedly by the special punitive interpositions of
God. As we have said before, there was no devel
opment of goodness from a germ within, no natural
growth of Israel into a high ideal, but there was a

SINAI. 49
perfect ideal given to Israel at the start, and from
that they persistently fell away. From Sinai to
Joshua's death we find their best moral period.
After that, their association with the Canaanites
left in the land and their base desire to be like the
nations around them honeycombed the common
wealth with idolatry and all the vices that accom
pany idolatry. But we anticipate. Let us come
back to Sinai, and see what foundations God laid
for his visible church upon the earth. We have
noted the moral law of the Decalogue given as no
other words were ever given to man, and have seen
how the double principle of Love to God and Love
to man constituted the marrow of that wonderful
law. Here were the grand ideas by which all the
rest of God's commandments to Israel were to be
interpreted. The civil law which regulated the
people as a state inculcated habits,, whose only ex
planation is love. The people were not to glean
the corners of their fields, they were to bring back
to its owner the stray ox or ass of an enemy, they
were to help lift up the beast of another if it fell,
even though that other had wronged them and they
were not to vex or oppress strangers but relieve and
refresh them. (Lev. 19, 10 ; Exod.- 23, 4, 5 ; Exod. 22,
21: 23, 12; Lev. 25, 35.)
Who ever heard of such laws in any other
4

50 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
ancient people ? You look in vain for any mani
festation of love in the laws of Egypt, Babylon,
Assyria or any of the enlightened empires of
antiquity. These laws are evidences of the heavenly
origin of Israel's polity. They are just such laws
as were consonant with the ecclesiastical character
of the nation. They were effluences of the divine
truth which made Israel the people of God.
But it is in the ceremonial law given at Sinai
that we most clearly see the stooping of heaven to
save and renew our race in a holy church.
That law had bloody sacrifices as its chief char
acteristic. A domestic animal slain on the altar
atoned for sin. This was the cardinal principle of
salvation. The Israelitish sacrifice differed from
all the sacrifices of the pagans, inasmuch as they
were offered as gifts or presents to God to bribe
him into good nature and mercy, the original idea
of sacrifice being utterly lost by the pagans — but
the sacrifices of the Israelites were offerings of a
victim to receive the blow of justice against sin.
The Israelite did not think he was making a pres
ent to God of a lamb or kid, but asked God to
strike with his just judgment against sin the lamb
or kid as a substitute for himself. This, the original
meaning of sacrifice, perverted as we have seen by
the heathen, was maintained in Israel. In the

SINAI. 51
pagan sacrifice God's justice was resisted or
slighted, but in the sacrifice of Israel God's justice
was honored. Israel's sacrifice was an adumbration
of the Lamb of God who would take away the sin
of the world — the pagan sacrifice had lost all that
significance, and, instead of being the offering of
humility, became the offering of pride.
Here, then, was the soterial foundation of God's
church, if we may use a theological word. Just as
love was its ethical foundation, so atonement by a
substitute was its soterial foundation. The vari
ety of the sacrifices does not interfere with this
general definition. The burnt-offerings, the sin-
offerings, and the peace-offerings, all held the vital
principle of substituted suffering within them,
whatever additional ideas, such as peace with God
and communion, with saints, they may also have
contained. But not only was salvation through a
substitute, and a life of love taught by this Sinai
revelation, but the mode or condition of that life
as consisting in union with God was specially
noted. The Tabernacle was ordered to be con
structed that God might dwell among them (Exod.
25. 8). The Tabernacle was God's house, not in the
loose sense in which we use this phrase of a church-
building, but in its strict sense, where God by a
visible presence, the Shechinah, actually dwelt.

52 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
He, in whom dwelt the fulness of the Godhead
bodily, was prefigured in this central tent of Israel's
camp, this central house in Israel's land. But not
only the fact of God dwelling in Israel betokened
union with God as the mode or condition of the
life of love, but also the priesthood stood forth to
designate the same idea. It was the priest who,
passing the altar of sacrifice and the laver of wash
ing, entered the sanctuary and had access to the
incense altar, the bread of the face and the candle
stick, as representing the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost. Here he appeared as dwelling not
only with God, but in God's house, and this thought
was identified by the High Priest once a year,
when he entered the Holy of Holies and bowed
before the Shechinah. We at once see how fully
this illustrates the believer's abiding in Christ,
who is not only our High Priest, but is the Taber
nacle which the Lord pitched and not man. The
believer, abiding in Christ as the true Tabernacle, is
also identified with Christ as High Priest within
the Holy of Holies. Here, then, in the Sinai ritual,
the third fundamental element of the church of
God was abundantly represented, that union
with God which is the only mode or con
dition of the life of love, obtained by the propitia
tory death of the substituted victim. All the

SINAI. 53
other teachings of the ritual gather around these
or are built upon these three. These three were
constantly taught to Israel by the ritual of every
day, salvation by a substituted sufferer, a life of
love, and union with God as the mode of that life.
In no stronger way (perhaps we may be right in
saying " in no other way ") could these vital truths
be presented to man at that age, before the coming
of the Son of God as the Lamb of sacrifice, than
by this Sinai ritual. And yet, as in all rituals,
there was danger of taking the sign for the thing
signified. This was guarded against in Israel (or
should have been guarded against) by the reading
of the law and the teaching of the Levites. Pious
souls maintained and cherished their faith through
the ritual. All along the ages of Israel's existence
as a nation there were Simeons and Annas, who
fed upon the spiritual things betokened in the rit
ual. But the nation at large lost sight of the
meaning and adhered to the ritual as a magical
scheme, superstitiously making efficacious the mere
formal use of its ordinances. When the Lamb of
God appeared, the ritual had completed its work.
Sacrifice, priest, Tabernacle, were now fulfilled in
Him who was all three, and in whom every
believer finds all that the soul needs. What a sad
error, then, it is for Christians to long for a ritual,

54 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
to seek to re-establish what was necessary at Sinai,
and yet so hard to preserve from a most corrupt
use, and which was wholly done away in Christ !
We need not types and adumbrations now. We
have our Saviour evidently set forth before us, cruci
fied for us. Let us not go back to the twilight. We
have the sunlight. Let us suspect all efforts to
ward a ritual elaboration as a desire to be rid of a
spiritual religion, and let us worship and serve God
as iu the Christian church of light, and not in the
Jewish church of shadows.

LECTURE IV
THE LAW.
We saw in our last discourse that the three grand
truths conveyed to Israel at Sinai were first, the
pardon of sin through a substituted sufferer exhib
ited in the sacrifices, second, the life of love thus
made possible, as exhibited in the injunctions of the
moral law, and third, union with God as the mode
and condition of that life of love exhibited in the
Tabernacle and in the priesthood. These three
fundamental truths of salvation, on which a godly
Israelite's faith rested, were constantly and in many
forms impressed upon the minds of the people. It
was indeed a shadow of the realities as we now see
them, but it was a shadow with most distinctly
marked outlines. It was a shadow that heaven's
bright light cast, revealing all around the edges of
what was shadowed, so that shape and relations
could be discerned, even though a closer description
was impossible. The historic Christ was coming
and his personality must be a mystery while he is
coming, but when he has come, the same light, that
shone on the church from all sides of the mystery

56 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
but left the mystery, only outlined, now shines
directly on the mystery which is no longer a mys
tery, as we look upon its enlightened face. We are
thus able to study the old ritual and find details of
meaning which the Israelite of old could not pos
sibly understand. To keep up the figure of the
shadow, we come to see to what features of the great
reality the varied indentations and projections of
the shadowed figure are to be referred. The
ancient Hebrew looked upon these as simply
divinely-ordained details, and if he thought they
had a meaning, it was one which he could deposit
not with his knowledge but with his faith. Some
of these are explained by the inspired writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, such as the heaven-repre
sentation in the holy of holies. " But into the
second (tabernacle) went the high-priest alone once
every year, not without blood * * * * but
Christ being come a high-priest of good things to
come, through the greater and more perfect taber
nacle * * * * by his own blood entered in
once into the holiest, having obtained eternal re
demption for us" (Heb. 9, 7, 11, 12.). We can
not believe that the ancient Israelite recognized the
Holiest (or Holy of Holies) as the type of heaven.
It was- to him the symbol of the awfulness of God's
mysterious being, which it truly was ; but we are

THE LAW. 57-
able to know beyond that, that it was a symbol of
that mysterious heaven, where, in one great High-
priest, we have communion with the Infinite God.
As the Church of God is the same in all time,
and its holy truths are always the same, it was be
coming that the symbols of those truths given to
the church at its foundation at Sinai should involve
such details as could only be understood at a later
period of the church's history. And hence, too, it
is pertinent for the church to-day to study these
symbols and learn through them the connections
and relations of divine truth. The notion that
these symbols were only for the Jewish church is
an error too largely current. The ritual in its
practice, it is true, was only for the Jewish church,
but the study of that ritual belongs to the church
at all times as illustrating the great principles of
the divine salvation. The Old Testament is an in
exhaustible mine of spiritual wealth to be entered
and explored with the light of the New Testament
shining upon its treasures, and the godly soul will
find unspeakable comfort and support from a devout
examination of these old, but ever new, revelations
of God.
The law given to Israel is called in Hebrew the
Torah, a noun derived from the Hiphil of Yarah, "to
instruct." It is the instruction or teaching of God

58 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
to his people, and of course has therefore the very
highest interests of man in view. It may be divided
into the civil, the ceremonial and the moral law.
The civil had regard to the life of Israel as a nation,
the~ church of God then having a national form.
The ceremonial had regard to the duties of religion,
all of which bore direct and symbolic relation to
the truths of salvation and godliness. The moral
law was centered in the Decalogue which was for
all time, and not for Israel only, and which laid
down the principles of love to God and love to man
in a concrete and practical form. These three
departments of instruction from heaven formed the
Torah or law, as a whole. It is of this whole that
David treats in the 119th Psalm, where he uses not
only the word "law " but also "testimonies," "pre
cepts," "statutes," "words," "judgments" and
" commandments." It was this Law he loved and
cherished above all things as God's blessed speech
to man's soul. And it is something of his holy
fervor we should catch as we take up the sacred
volume aud read the Pentateuch.
We have noted the three grand truths presented
so constantly and forcibly by the law, the substi
tuted sufferer for man's sin, the life of love and the
mode and condition of that life in union with God.
Now let us consider some of the resultant truths

THE LAW. 59
that were also taught in this wonderful manifesta
tion of the divine mercy.
In the sacrifice there was inserted the meat or
meal-offering. It was a presentation to God of an
unbloody gift. It was composed of flour anointed
with oil. This was indeed a gift, and hence we see
in the category gifts and sacrifices mentioned as two
distinct things in the ritual. But this gift was
always subsequent to the sacrifice. The propitia
tion had to be made first by a bloody sacrifice and
then the " minhhah " or gift could be offered to
God. What did this indicate? That God was
approachable as a friend only after sin had been
pardoned. When the victim had been slain and
God had accepted this death in place of the sinner's
death, then the gift could be offered to God as a
present of gratitude to the Almighty Saviour. It
showed that men had no approach to God until his
faith in the atoning victim had acted. Carnal
men love to talk of God as the All-Father, as if
they could go to Him unreservedly, but this is all
wrong. They cannot go to Him until they are
pardoned, and they are not pardoned until they
have by faith brought the victim to the altar to be
slain in their stead. Nothing was more fully
taught the Hebrews than the sinful condition of
man and his native inability to approach God by

60 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
reason of his sin. And it is directly in opposition
to this teaching that we have the cry of the infidel
world to-day, in the name of "-liberal Christianity,"
that God welcomes all to his arms. It is a Chris
tianity with Christ (and all that Christ indicates)
left out.
The " minhhah " or meat-offering, then, repre
sented this friendly freedom of access to God after
pardon had been obtained, God consenting to re
ceive a gift from the hands of his creature, now
made a child.
Another religious truth made evident in the
ceremonial had its object lesson in the peace-offer
ings, in which, after the characteristic bloody sacri
fice, the offerers and the priests sat down together
to a feast on the parts of the victim that were not
burned (Lev. 7, 15, 34). Here was the Commun
ion of saints before God. As the "minhhah" or
meat-offering was a Communion with God after
pardon, so the feast of the peace-offering was the
Communion of saints after pardon. Neither can
exist without the pardon first. This feast of the
peace-offering was not a rollicking, roysterous, bac
chanalian feast such as characterized the feasts at
heathen altars, but was a solemn, though cheerful,
festival. It was a sober-minded recognition of a
brotherhood constituted by the divine grace. The

THE LAW. 61
various instances of peace-offerings in the history
clearly shows this (See for example, Exod. 24, 5 ;
Josh. 8, 31 ; 2 Sam. 6, 17 ; 1 Kings 3, 15). It was
a fearful corruption of this holy rite, of which
Israel was guilty, when before Sinai the people in
troduced the idolatrous reveling into its perform
ance (Exod. 32, 6). Men are always prone to cor
rupt the best instruments of holiness and to adapt
them to their own follies. The peace-offering
banquet was to Israel a lesson of brotherhood in
God through the pardon of sin, and every pious
Israelite so understood it.
Another lesson taught daily by the ceremonial
law was the danger of contact with sin. The pol
lutions of various sorts, from disease, from touching
dead bodies and from the ordinary workings of nature,
and the purifications necessary in consequence were
occurring constantly before the eyes of the people.
They well knew that these external pollutions and
purifications pointed to the pollutions of the soul
and the needed applications to God's grace through
the blood of the sacrifice, and hence such earnest
cries from the sinning one as " Purify me with
hyssop and I shall be clean — wash me and I shall
be whiter than snow " went far beyond the outward
rite ih their meaning. The hyssop was dipped in
the blood of the sacrifice and sprinkled on the leper,

62 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
and, if one was otherwise unclean, the hyssop was
dipped in water with the ashes of the slain heifer
and sprinkled on the person (Lev. 14, 7 ; Num. 19,
18). The spiritual needs of the 51st Psalm most
certainly did not rest satisfied with the outward
ordinance, but looked to that which it signified.
It was " Create in me a clean heart " that the sin
ning soul asked. And so every pious Israelite un
derstood the spiritual meaning of the services of the
ceremonial law. That law was very much what
the parable was from our Saviour's mouth to the
Jews of His day, a picture of profound truth to be
received by the humble and godly heart, but a mere
outward performance to the proud and carnal
nature. It was this deep spiritual meaning of the
ceremonial that gave such substantial comfort to the
devout soul, when he could cry " Iwill offer to Thee
the sacrifice of thanksgiving and will call upon the
name of the Lord." " Let my prayer be set forth
before Thee as incense, and the lifting up of my
hands as the evening sacrifice." " The sacrifices of
God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."
No one can study the ceremonial law without re
alizing that it put Israel perpetually on guard
against sin, sin from without and sin from within.
The soul was admonished that it lived in a world

THE LAW. 63
of sin and inhaled an atmosphere of sin. There
was sin even in the holy actions of men. Aaron,
as high-priest, had to bear the iniquity of the
holy things (Exod. 28, 38.'). A constant waiting
upon God as alone able to pardon and sanctify was
thus impressed on the people. And this sin, so pre
vailing, so permeating, was shown to be unspeak
ably evil and abhorrent to God. It was not to be
treated lightly. It deserved death. It was of hell.
It was spiritual leprosy and spiritual corruption and
spiritual banishment from God and truth. Man is
ever disposed to make light of sin, to call it by some
euphemic-name as weakness or misfortune, and to
treat it as a matter for jest or oblivion, but God re
veals its fearful blackness and its destroying power.
That which the New Testament says in didactic
words regarding the heinousness of sin is taught
with graphic power in the Old Testament by its
rites of purification, so that sin may be said to
be the occasion of the whole ritual and of the whole
revelation of God which it represents. And it is
undoubtedly true that no religion can satisfy the
heart and conscience of man, which does not meet
this fearful burden of sin with a relieving power,
which does not offer a forgiving and sanctifying ef
ficiency to the soul awakened to a sense of its real
condition. It was this which eminently character-

64 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
ized the Mosaic ritual as a revelation of God, and
which testified to its divine character. Religions
that would appease God by gifts make God the sin
ner, an ill-tempered and cruel God, who is to be
bought off by presents, and they furnish no comfort
to the awakened sinful soul of man. Even religions
that usurp the name of Christ, but which deny the
sacrificial character of Christ's death as the vicari
ous Lamb of God, can bring no peace to the dis
turbed conscience, and are no better than the human
philosophies which would exalt man by his own
efforts and triumph over evil and sin by a supposed
goodness of the human heart to be brought out by
education or social improvement. Between all
these religions and philosophies on one side and
the gospel of the Old and New Testaments on the
other is the wide and deep gulf which separates
human pride from humble faith in God, which sep
arates man's righteousness from the righteousness
of God.
Another spiritual lesson to Israel was given in the
law of the Nazarite. With a few remarkable excep
tions of Nazarites from birth, the Nazarite was one
who temporarily subjected himself to certain promi
nent self-denials. During the time of his separation
he could drink no wine nor eat any grapes, which in
a wine country like Palestine was a daily self-denial.

THE LAW. 65
He could not shave and so had to appear before
others in an unkempt and unlovely way, in which
he found another self-denial. He could not touch
a dead body, even though it might be the body of
his dearest and nearest. He was prohibited from
giving the parting kiss to the form he loved so well.
Here was another object lesson before Israel, denot
ing the need of self-denial in sustaining a holy life,
in fighting against the flesh in behalf of the spirit.
It was not intended that all men should be Nazar
ites, or temporary Nazarites, but it was intended
that this ritual picture should be hung up before
Israel as an indicator of the inward spiritual con
test against carnality which -every godly heart
should exercise. It was a denoter of the readiness
with which the believer should give up even the
innocent enjoyments of life, when necessary to
achieve conquest over the evil passions within. To
act the Nazarite now-a-days would be to grasp at
the sign instead of the thing signified. The true
Nazarite to-day is not the man who abstains from
wine or lets his hair grow, but the believer who
combats his besetting sins, whatever they are, by
giving up even innocent habits that may promote
those sins, and who is ever ready to relinquish his
rights for the good of his soul. The true Nazarite
is the man who separates himself from the ungodly
5

66 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
world in their follies and time-wastings and, in
order to do that, is perfectly willing to appear ugly
and peculiar to the general public. He does not
try to be eccentric — that is pride — but he tries to
walk with God. To imitate the Nazarite literally
to-day in any respect is as absurd as to imitate Israel
in sacrifices and purifications. All these matters
were alike the object lessons of a typical church,
and all alike are done away in Christ, while the
spiritual things they signified are permanent lessons
for the soul at all times.
The last point we shall indicate wherein the
ritual gave spiritual lessons to Israel in an objec
tive way is in the recurrence of the the three great
annual feasts. The Passover, which made conspic
uous the salvation of God's people by the blood of
the Lamb of God ; the Feast of Weeks, in which
the offering of the first fruits represented the in
debtedness of the people to God as their bouutiful
Father; and the Feast of. Tabernacles which exhib
ited in type the joy of the Holy Ghost; — these
three feasts, having relation to the Father, the Son
and the Holy Ghost, were to be held at the Central
shrine, at the Tabernacle, where God dwelt among
his people, and to them all Israel were to come up.
It is this last fact I wish to mark — the assembling
of the people from Dan to Bersheba. It was a

THE LAW. 67
grand object lesson of unity in God, a protest
against division and disintegration among the peo
ple of God. It also destroyed the notion of individ
uality — the corrupt excess of personal independence,
which begets errors and nurses pride. It taught
the family unity of the Lord's redeemed ones and
upheld the principle of peace. Each believer was
to recognize his co-believer as a brother, all coming
alike to the family hearth-stone, where their
Father dwelt. That which we call to-day Chris
tian brotherhood was here most appositely set
forth, and is a lesson of untold importance to the
varied denominations of Christians now existing,
who should allow no differences of view to interfere
with their hearty inter-communion in the holy
service of the Lord.
Let us now, in conclusion, recapitulate. We
have first noted the three conspicuous truths
taught to Israel in the ritual and moral laws, the
fact of a substituted sufferer for sin in the sacrifices,
the hfe of love to God and man in the Decalogue,
and the mode and condition of that life in union
with God in the Tabernacle and the Priesthood.
We have also noted, this evening, as other impor
tant truths shadowed forth in the ritual, God's
friendship with man in the Meat-offering, the Com
munion of Saints in the Peace-offering, the preva-

68 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
lence, danger and heinousness of sin in the elabo
rate purifications, the need of self-denying separation
from an ungodly world in the Nazarites and the
brotherly unity of believers in the three annual
feasts. There are many more truths regarding the
spiritual life imbedded in the Mosaic law, but we
produce these as examples of the mode by which
God instructed his infant church in the great prin
ciples which form the basis of all true knowledge
and all true faith regarding the all-important sub
jects of sin and salvation.
The gospel is but the translation of these types
into the concrete, the shedding of new light upon
the old truths. The Law and the Gospel are all
one. When the apostle says the law was given by
Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, he
is not making the two opposite, but supplementary
to one another. He says, " The law through Moses
was given," that is, the moral law which only a
perfect man could obey, for it demanded perfect love
to God and man. Then he says, "Grace and truth
came through Jesus Christ," that is, the grace and
spirit of truth by which alone the holy law could
be loved and obeyed entered our world in and
through Jesus, but remember that Jesus was be
fore Israel in the sacrifices, as we have seen. The
moral law was supplemented by the ceremonial

THE LAW. by
law. The holy precept was supplemented by the
Holy Christ and the Holy Spirit as betokened in
all the ritual. That which Christ and the Spirit
are to us, the Ceremonial law was (in its spiritual im
port) to Israel. We see now why it is done away
in Christ. The sign gives way to the thing signi
fied. No longer is it a law to us, but it remains as
containing a remarkable gallery of picture lessons
of the divine truths which centre in Christ.

LECTURE V.
THE DESERT.
Two common errors concerning Israel in the
Desert are to be removed. The first is that of the
Wandering. It is supposed that for forty years the
people were moving about the wilderness with no
fixed abode, on a perpetual journey. The second
is a corollary of the first, that the people had no
national consistency, but were only a disciplined
army and that marching was their principal
business. Now, in contrast to all this, let us note that
Israel traveled only 600 miles in 40 years, and
that this traveling probably did not consume more
than six or seven months of the 40 years. One year
was spent before Sinai in the receiving and estab
lishing the Holy Law, and thirty-eight years were
spent at Kadesh at the southern extremity of the
Land of Canaan. The very name of Kadesh (the
" sacred ") was probably given by reason of the
Tabernacle resting there for a whole generation.
The journey from Sinai to Kadesh was made after
the solemn scenes at the holy mountain, and was

THE DESERT 71
probably a journey of two months. Three conspic
uous acts of insubordination occurred in that march,
an organized complaint at Taberah, another at
Kibroth-hattaavah, where the mixed multitude
(the Shasu idolaters, as we think) were the begin
ners, and in which the heaven-sent manna was
despised, and the third a jealousy of Aaron and
Miriam against Moses, starting from a quarrel with
Moses' wife. We saw that when Israel lost heart
and complained before reaching Sinai and receiving
God's law, the Lord met their complaints with
mercies. He sweetened the water at Marah, He
gave them manna by the Red Sea and He gave them
the victory over the Amalekites with water from
Horeb. But now after the year's training before
the Holy Mount with the stupendous evidences of
God's presence and care there given, the Lord deals
differently with his people. More light demands a
better obedience and a stronger faith. At Taberah
a fire from the Lord, darting forth probably from
the cloudy pillar, consumes some of the ringleaders.
At Kibroth-hattaavah, after a solemn exhibition of
the divine glory before the Tabernacle, the Lord sent
a surfeit of quails to the host and with them a fearful
plague which carried off a great number of the
people. And at Hazeroth, where Miriam seems to
have been the prime mover in opposition to Moses,

72 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
a leprosy fell upon the guilty woman, from which
she was released by Moses' intercession.
The church of God was taught in these visita
tions that the holy light from heaven which shone
upon it could not be slighted with impurity, that
with privilege came respousibilty, and that relations
with God were not to be treated with the easy
carelessness with which men treated earthly rela
tions. From Kadesh (now identified as Ain Gades) the
twelve spies were sent forth who traversed the
whole length of Canaan and returned in 40 days.
Only two of the 12 had faith in God that He would
overcome all difficulties and give the people pos
session of the land. Caleb and Joshua stood alone.
The other ten magnified the perils, and discouraged
the entire host. The lessons of Egypt and Sinai,
of Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah, were in vain.
A new outburst of complaint arose to heaven.
Caleb and Joshua were near being stoned to death
because of their faith and truth. Again Moses
lifted up his intercession for the guilty people, and
hindered their immediate destruction. But the
sentence was then pronounced that the people who
had thus failed in their faith in God should never
enter into the promised land. Caleb and Joshua
only of that vast host should cross the borders and

THE DESERT. 73
take possession of the national home promised to
Abraham four centuries before. And now the pen
dulum of unbelief in God's power to give them
Canaan -swung to the opposite extreme of self-
confidence that they could gain it by their own
efforts, and the people rushed madly up the heights
of the Negeb against the Canaanites only to be
driven back with fearful slaughter. God had
decreed them a forty years delay, but they tried to
make void the divine decree.
While human unbelief was the proximate cause
of the long abode in the desert, yet the whole period
was ordained of God for the preparation of Israel
for a proper entrance upon their promised inherit
ance. Man's freedom and God's ordination work
together in perfect harmony. While we cannot
understand how this is, we know well that it is so.
How clearly Peter puts the double truth at the day
of Pentecost ! " Jesus of Nazareth * * * *
being delivered by the determinate counsel and fore
knowledge of God ye have taken, and by wicked
hands have crucified and slain " (Acts 2, 23.) ; and
again in the prayer of the disciples after the release
of Peter and John they say " of a truth against Thy
holy child Jesus whom Thou hast anointed both
Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles, and
the people of Israel were gathered together for to

74 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined
before to be done." It was in accordance with this
double truth that Israel's unbelief was God's plan
of educating Israel in the long desert abode. God
has no after-thought, no emendation of his plan or
purpose. Man changes, but God is ever the same.
We are now to consider Israel as a nation — an in
choate nation — established for a long sojourn in the
wilderness. National and family life are to be de
veloped there. Children are to be born and grow
up, knowing no other life than the desert life.
Social relations are to be formed on conditions be
longing to such unique surroundings. No towns or
villages are to spring up, but a vast encampment
of two millions of human beings is to take perma
nent form at Kadesh, God's house with the cloud
upon it being the centre, and a daily supply of
manna from heaven and of water from the smitten
rock of Kadesh being afforded to the host. These
three perpetual miracles were the constant evidences
of God as their King and Protector. [I take the
Kadesh smiting of the rock— Numbers 20. 1-13.
— as belonging to the first arrival at K., and the
time of the general complaint recorded in ch. 14.]
They were also evidences that Moses was their God-
given legislator aud governor, and that Aaron was
their God-given High Priest. But notwithstanding

THE DESERT. 75
this clear and constant token, some Reubenites, as
representing the oldest son of Jacob, joined an
ambitious Levite named Korah, and started a for
midable insurrection against Moses and Aaron.
Moses was to be set aside for Dathan or Abiram or .
On, who would represent Reuben as the civil head
of the nation, and Korah, a Kohathite Levite and
cousin of Aaron, would take Aaron's place as High
Priest. This daring revolt called for another divine
interposition. Dathan and Abiram and their as
sociates sank into the earth which opened for them,
and Korah with his company were destroyed by fire
which darted forth upon them from the cloud. This
insurrection was the natural result of man's pride
and jealousy, which even the clearest evidences of
God's presence cannot subdue. Man becomes ac
customed to such evidences and hence they go for
nothing. Every man to-day is surrounded by
evidences of God's presence. These evidences are
not in the form of miracle, that is, of the super
natural. But the natural contains miracles. Evi
dences of God, as clear and convincing as the pillar
of cloud and the manna, are around us all, but, like
Korah and his fellows, we are so accustomed to
them that they have no influence upon us. If the
concrete miracles were wrought daily before us, we
would show the same stolid unbelief. We have

76 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Moses and the prophets — if we hear not Moses and
the prophets ; neither will we be persuaded though
one rose from the dead. This is our Lord's testi
mony to the obstinacy and callousness of the human
heart before the evidences of God and His will.
We know that idolatry was more or less practiced
by Israel while the manna was eaten and while the
cloud of glory rested on the tabernacle. The martyr
Stephen quotes from the prophet Amos to show
that with Israel's offerings to Jehovah in the wilder
ness the people carried their shrines and images of
false gods (Amos 5. 25., Acts 7. 42, 43.). Ezekiel
records the same fact (ch. 20. 15, 16.), "I lifted up
my hand unto them in the wilderness, that I would
not bring them into the land which I had given
them * * * * because they despised my
judgments and walked not in my statutes, but pol
luted my sabbaths ; for their heart went after their
idols." Moses himself is witness of this same de
fection. He says in his great song of God's mercy
and judgment (Deut. 32. 17.), " They sacrificed unto
devils, not to God — to gods whom they knew
not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your
fathers feared not." In all our views, therefore, of
Israel in the desert, we must have before our minds
two things, the tabernacle and its worship, with
Moses and Aaron the representatives of the divine

THE DESERT. 77
will, and a godly portion of the people maintaining
the solemn services, and then, besides, a great deal
of insubordination and recklessness with idolatrous
practices among the people. It was not a nation
of idolaters, but a nation acknowledging Jehovah
and largely tainted with idolatry.
The encampment at Kadesh was formed in perfect
symmetry, the Tabernacle in the centre with the
Levites encamped around it, the Kohathites on the
south, the Gershonites on "the west, the Merarites
on the north, while Moses and Aaron occupied the
east. Beyond this Levitical encampment were the
encampments of the' tribes, Reuben, Simeon and
Gad on the south, Ephraim, Manasseh and Benja
min on the west, Dan, Asher and Naphtali on the
north andJudab, Issachar and Zebulon on the east.
There was probably a distance of a half-mile be
tween the Tabernacle and the first row of the tents,
other than those of the Levites (cf. Josh. 3. 4.).
That this symmetrical order of abode marked the
thirty-eight years' abode in Kadesh there can be no
good reason to doubt. But we may believe that
from time to time detachments were sent out to
pasture cattle in the various oases of the desert, or
even to repel attacks from neighboring nations. God
has not seen fit to gratify our curiosity regarding
the details of this long desert-life of Israel. But

78 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
this we know, that while living a desert-life, they
did not live a nomad or Bedouin life. They were
organized with a central home, a vast encampment,
which probably covered 25 square miles, and their
divine supply of food and drink rendered a nomadic
life unnecessary. A thorough system of law was
enforced, divine intervention occurring when neces
sary to check any looseness in its observance, al
though, with all this, we must allow a large margin
of sin and disorder in so great a multitude, which
it would not have been expedient to notice by
divine intervention.
It is to be particularly noted that the law given
at Sinai, which the cant of modern skeptics calls
the Priest-code, contains much that is applicable
only to the desert life, while the law given in the
plains of Moab forty years later and found in the
book of Deuteronomy, apply wholly to the settle
ment in Canaan. This fact exposes the folly of
those who would put Deuteronomy before Leviti
cus, and place both of them eight hundred years
after Moses. In no other age of Israel's history
could Exodus, Leviticus aud Numbers have been
written but in the Mosaic age, and at no other time
of Moses' life than the Sinai period, and at no other
period could Deuteronomy have been written than

THE DESERT. 79
on the eve of Israel's entrance upon the promised
land. The whole order of encampment and march
could have had no meaning except in the desert,
for only the army marched when in Canaan, and
not the non-combatants. So the methods of keep
ing the camp clean, and the directions regarding
the following the cloud have no application to
Israel in Palestine whether before or after the
exile. And so also the changes in the law which
are found in Deuteronomy are exactly those which
would be made on leaving a desert life for a settled
life in a fertile land, and yet these changes are
quoted by the adversaries as contradictions in the
law. There was very little need to speak of the
priests in Deuteronomy, for the priests and their
functions had been amply treated of in the law as
given at Sinai, but when they are mentioned, it is
not strange that Moses should call them "the
Levitical priests " instead of merely " the priests,"
in order to impress upon Israel on entering their
land that the priests belonged to that tribe of Levi,
which should have no regular tribal inheritance
with the rest, but should be separated to the Lord
and so reverenced by Israel. Priest and Levite
were to be regarded together as the Lord's special
tribe of service. Yet it is on this title of " Leviti-

80 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
cal priests " given to the priests in Deuteronomy
that the skeptics build their principal argument
that Deuteronomy came before the other Penta
teuchal books, at least before what they call the
Priest-code, when they say no distinction was made
between priests and Levites, the distinction being
an after-invention. So absurdly slim is the founda
tion on which the enemies of revelation build.
Nothing can be conceived more exactly adapted
to consolidate the nation and to thoroughly impreg
nate it with the distinctive principles of the re
vealed religion than this long residence in the wil
derness, shut up to themselves, free from the con
taminations of idolatrous nations, and almost
entirely free from disturbance from without. We
cannot tell how far a systematic training in divine
truths was instituted, but we cannot believe that
Moses and Aaron with their position and advan
tages neglected the education of the people, nor can
we believe that family training in religion was
absent. It is also exceedingly probable that the
Levites found occupation in teaching the people,
as we know they did in later times. Surely those
forty years were not passed in spiritual idleness,
but in establishing the divine work of forming a
nation unto God. The earnest injunctions in the
6th chapter of Deuteronomy concerning the educa-

THE DESERT. 81
tion of the children in the law cannot be supposed
to have been an entirely new thing at that time.
It must have been a repetition of faithful- counsel
that had been given from the beginning. Thought
ful souls in Israel must have pondered on the won
derful ways of God with the people and have
pointed the young and ignorant to the events that
had so signalized their career from the time that
the plagues upon Egypt marked Moses as their
heaven-appointed guide. There were other means
of training also, of which we have a few solemn in
stances recorded. The judicial death of Shelomith's
son for cursing God was a warning against the
double sin of blasphemy and rebellion. Another
judicial death, that of the man who gathered sticks
on the Sabbath day, was a clear indication that the
law of the Sabbath was fo be observed in its exact
ness, and that every detail of the ritual was of God,
so that any wilful contempt for any portion of it
was rebellion against Israel's King. It is the
fashion for men who think lightly of religion to
sneer at these instances of severity and to attack
the law of God as cruel and the ancient church as
barbaric because of them. It is only because of
their ignorance of the nature of sin, and of their
consequent incapability of judging of the relations
between God and man, that they thus talk. The
6

82 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
awful chasm which sin has made between God and
man, the fearful character of sin as the enemy of
truth and the perfect holiness of God are the three
facts which explain all and show that severity is an
absolute necessity in the successful action of the
divine mercy, that mercy which rejoiceth against
judgment just because there is a judgment without
mercy (Jas. 2. 16). It is because there is a judg
ment that destroys, that mercy has her place of joy.
They that reject the mercy must be destroyed, and
all who rebel against God and refuse to obey his
ordinances of salvation are the deliberate rejectors
of the mercy. The capital punishments in Israel
which we have referred to were the tokens of this
fundamental truth. The shallow souls, that would
have God's love overlook all sin and allow every
man to exercise his wilfulness in any direction and
to any extent, forget that Divine Love must be a
consuming fire to all that is unclean and hostile to
the truth. For all such it is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God. The love these
worldly ones picture to themselves is simply weak
ness, a weak compromising with evil, the absolute
destruction of holiness.
God's training of Israel had to have these stern
features in it. These stern features of the divine
government of holiness are typed in the storms and

THE DESERT.

83

earthquakes of nature, and on the other hand they
find their counterpart in the agitations and dis
tresses of the human mind. Sin has made man's
way a very hard one, and man would make God
responsible for the hardness. The old couplet,
though very homely, is very true —
No rogue e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law,
and so every sinner is ready to accuse God's holy
law of injustice and cruelty when the evil lies alto
gether in his own sin.
It would be a very interesting narrative that
would give account of the details of desert life in
Israel for those long forty years. We should like
to see the intercourse of families, the daily duties,
the amusements of the people and all that side of
which the Bible naturally does not treat. But we
must leave all this to the imagination, and be con
tent with knowing that the God who provided them
with the means of grace also provided them with
all the materials of a rational life.
One common objection to the Mosaic constitution
of Israel we must notice in conclusion. It is that
no mention is made of the life beyond the grave.
The answer to the objection is twofold; first, that
we have in the Law of Moses a system of life on
earth, not a revelation of the life in heaven. How

84 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
much Moses may have said to Israel, in his daily
intercourse with them, of the future life we cannot
know, but their law was a table of earthly duties,
largely a ritual which they were to use. In this
ritual there were clear types of the future life, but
the great object of the law was to keep the nation
separate from all others and closely bound to
Jehovah. The second answer is that this law im
plied a life beyond, that all its moral meaning
rested on the idea of man's continuance in being,
that the salvation and purification from sin taught
in the ritual would have been trifles not worth at
tention, if they had had respect only to this life.
And then we may add that the people of Israel
were steeped in the knowledge of the life beyond.
Egypt, where they had dwelt for centuries, taught
the doctrine most prominently, and Israel's ances
tors plainly declared that they sought a better
country, that is, a heavenly. (Heb. 11, 14, 16.) No
one can have access to God and suppose himself an
ephemeral being. The intercourse with God is itself
proof to the contrary. The spirit beareth witness
with the man's spirit to his permanence. It is a
spiritual instinct. And so the nation of Israel
could not have lived a month under the marvelous
manifestations of God without an inward conscious
ness that life was not bounded by the grave.

LECTURE VI.
THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN.
Israel was to enter into possession of Canaan as
a renovated people. The old generation, that had
seen the wonders wrought for them by God in
Egypt and at Sinai, and had yet refused to obey
the Lord and enter into the promised land, had en
tirely disappeared, excepting the two brave and
faithful souls, Joshua and Caleb. Aaron, who had
compromised with the rebellious people at Sinai
and with rebellious Miriam at Hazeroth, had been
removed, and even Moses, the honored and stedfast
leader of Israel had had to forfeit his entrance into
Canaan by reason of his error at Kadesh.
The new generation had had its hardships, its
murmuring and its severe chastening, experiences
necessary to correct the evil and strengthen the
faith of God's host. It had repeated the complaint
of the preceding generation against the austerity of
the desert and had wearied of the manna, which
seems to have lost its hold upon them as a constant
testimony to God's presence and, care, and in return
for this outburst of murmuring God had sent

86 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
serpents among the people and multitudes per
ished. It was then that the brazen serpent was
erected on a height and all Israel bidden to look
to it and be healed, a significant token of God's
readiness to pardon the sins of his people through
their faith, although the fulness of the teaching was
reserved for a later day, when the Messiah himself
should explain to the church of God the exact ap
plication of the symbol then erected in the wilder
ness.' The contests with Sihon, King of the Amorites,
and with Og, King of Bashan, were also parts of
the discipline needed by the new generation, in
which they learned that God would give them the
victory over all foes however formidable-.
The sad influences of Moab over Israel in intro
ducing a degrading sensuality into the host and
the severe punishment inflicted both upon Moab
and on sinning Israel, formed the last severe lesson
of the divine government to Israel before the en
trance upon the promised land was achieved. Two
matters of note occurring at the threshold of the
land must be marked. The one is the demand of
the tribes of Reuben and Gad and of the half-tribe
of Manasseh to dwell outside the land. They
would send their men to fight with their brethren
and secure possession of the land for them,

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 87
their wives and children and non-combatants would
remain in the region conquered from Sihon and
Og, and there would be their own permanent home.
The request was granted, but it was granted, as all
requests contrary to the divine order are granted,
with a corresponding loss of the divine protection.
The further history of those trans-Jordanic tribes
abundantly showed this. The other matter is the
faithful and affectionate farewell words of Moses, with
the new ordinance of God by him, delivered to
Israel, as found in the book of Deuteronomy.
He rehearses all God's wonders to them and their
fathers, he shows God's tender love and his neces
sary severity, he exposes their sins, he sets before
them the alternatives of righteousness with bless
ing and wickedness with cursing, and he urges
them with unequalled tenderness to choose the
right and to serve God with all. their hearts.
And now Israel, thus trained and taught and
exhorted, in its new generation, with Joshua its
Military Commander, and Aaron's son Eleazar its
spiritual leader and High Priest, crosses the Jor
dan by miracle, receives the sign of the AbrahamiG
covenant and celebrates the Passover in the plain
of Jericho. To eliminate miracle from this nar
rative is to demolish -the history altogether. Any
attempt to belittle the marvels which God wrought

88 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
at this part of Israel's career is to destroy the sym
metry of the events, and shows an entire obtuse-
ness regarding the function of Israel as the church
of God. As we have seen before, the founding of
a church as a divine repository of truth demanded
miraculous signs, without which no man would have
been warranted in recognizing its pretensions, and
hence Egypt and all other nations were to receive wit
ness that God had set apart Israel for this high mis
sion. The plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the
Red Sea, the scenes at Sinai and throughout the
desert sojourn were to be appropriately followed,
as the conclusion of this miraculous cycle, by the
divine marvels granted Israel in taking possession
of the promised land.
Jericho, a strong- walled city, the first they meet
in Canaan, is to be theirs by no blow struck by
them, but by the unseen forces employed by their
God and King. The priests with the ark march
around the walls once a day for six days and on
the seventh day make the circuit seven times.
Then with a shout from the army and the blowing
of trumpets by the priests the massive fortifications
fall and Israel enters into the city and destroys it.
Here the faith of Israel was marked. They did
not despise Joshua's command regarding these re
peated circuits and this week's delay." They did not

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 89
deem such conduct unmilitary and puerile. But
they performed to the letter all the strange com
mand, as if it were nothing strange, and their re
ward was in the bloodless victory at the last.
Hence it is said by the inspired writer in the New
Testament, " By faith the walls of Jericho fell
down, after they were compassed about seven
days." (Heb. 11. 30.)
When a short time afterwards this aggregated
faith was followed by a breach of God's law regard
ing the destruction* of the contents of Jericho, and
a family (for Achan certainly was helped by his
whole family in his concealment of the Jericho
treasure) was found allowing worldly purposes and
methods to defile the faith of Israel, the same holy
God who rewarded the faith, set his seal of condem
nation on the wickedness which was in Israel. The
disaster at Ai showed the solidarity of the church
and its responsibility to keep itself pure before
God, and the execution of Achan and his family
was the awful exhibition of that holy wrath which
must ever visit the wilful iniquities of God's people.
Remember that these dealings of God were not
with mankind in general, but with his called
church, and moreover that they were dealings at
the beginning of an important dispensation, when
lessons had to be scored deep in the life of the

90 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
favored people. Hence they are not 4o be regarded
as examples of God's dealings with mankind on
this earth, nor even of God's dealings with his
church at all times, but rather as marked object-
lessons of divine truth for the church, and types of
God's ultimate dealings with all mankind, as a God
of both mercy and justice.
It is a striking fact that before any general con
quest of the land, Israel made its way directly to
the heart of the country, (to the mathematical cen
tre, if we take Sidon for the north extremity and
Kadesh for the south extremity), and there between
Gerizim and Ebal swore fealty to Jehovah, and
dedicated themselves and the land to Him. The
solemn transaction at Shechem was a declaration
that their whole movement in taking possession of
Canaan was not a human device of ambition and
lust of conquest, but a humble obedience to God,
who had appointed them to be the executioners of
his judgments against the Canaanites, a people
sunken in the grossest sins. It has been a favorite
theme of infidels to inveigh against the Bible as
advocating murder and wholesale cruelty, and to
describe the God of the Bible as a monster, because
of Israel's destruction of the Canaanites. But any
unprejudiced student of the Word will see that the
treatment of the Canaanites was exceptional, and

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 91
that God's instructions to Israel in his law com
manded gentleness and mercy toward enemies and
all kindliness toward the stranger. " Thou shalt
neither vex a stranger nor oppress him; for ye
were strangers in the land of Egypt " (Exod. 22.
21). " Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye
know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were stran
gers in the land of Egypt " (Exod. 23. 9). " And
if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye
shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth
with you shall be unto you as one born among you,
and thou shalt love him as thyself" (Lev. 19. 33).
" And if thy brother be waxen poor and fallen into
decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea,
though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may
live with thee" (Lev. 25. 35). "The Lord loveth
the stranger — love ye therefore the stranger" (Deut.
10. 18, 19). Such was the marked attention to stran
gers and sojourners which God commanded in time
of peace. There is nothing like it in the whole
world's history. It is the voice of Heaven's won
drous love to man, communicating love for our fel
low-man. The commands of God in his law regarding ene
mies in war were a remarkable contrast to the cus
tom of the times. It was the habit of those days
to torture and slay every enemy taken in war, to

92 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
massacre old and young, male and female, or if any
were spared they were spared only to be the lowest
of slaves. But God commanded Israel never to
slay women and children, and never to destroy the
fruit trees of an enemy's land, nor could they in
dulge in the torturing cruelties in which the nations
then delighted, and the whole law laid down prin
ciples which would prevent any aggressive war,
except the one in which the Canaanites were to be
destroyed. The Canaanites were the sole exception
to these rules of mercy, aud that because God had
condemned them, not because of any cruel spirit on
the part of Israel. The orders of God to Israel run
thus: "Hear, 0 Israel: * * * Speak not thou in
thine heart, after that the Lord thy God hath cast
them out from before thee, saying, ' For my right
eousness the Lord hath brought me in to possess
this land ; ' but for the wickedness of these nations
the Lord doth drive them out from before thee.
Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of
thy heart dost thou go to possess their land, but
for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy
God doth drive them out from before thee, and that
he may perform the word which the Lord sware
unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." This
is reiterated to Israel, so that they should count
themselves as simply the appointed officers of

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 93
God (all unworthy in themselves) to visit his
sentence of punishment upon the Canaanitish na
tions, whose iniquity was now full. Israel, indeed,
held back from performing their duty in extermi
nating the Canaanites, and spared many of them to
be thorns in their side and tempters to idolatry.
God alone was responsible for the utter destruction
of men, women and children of the doomed nations,
so far as that sentence was carried out, that same
God who has often commanded the earthquake, the
famine and the pestilence to go forth and slay thou
sands of every condition, just as now he used Israel
as his agent. And who is he who dares call God
to account? Who is he who can enter into the
counsels of the Most High and judge the reasons
of the Almighty? Who is he who can impugn
the Divine wisdom and righteousness? We are,
therefore, not to accuse Israel of cruelty and sav
agery in the destruction of the Canaanites, any
more than we accuse the sheriff of cruelty for
strangling a man to death. We are to transfer the
whole responsibility to God, and there be satisfied
that the Judge of all the earth doeth right. To
quote Israel's treatment of Canaan as an example
for human action is absurd, for it was God's special
revelation that made Israel an exception, and this
exceptional feature stands forth prominently in all

94 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the sacred record. The love of God is not only
reconcilable with His holy vengeance and its severity,
but absolutely demands it, and the same love that
says, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy-laden, and I will give you rest," also says,
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire
prepared for the devil and his angels." It is a
weak and wicked religion that does not show love
on its reverse side, that apologizes for sin and con
founds holy judgment with cruelty. It is also a
proud and foolish religion which would expect to
fathom all God's doings and call in question his
justice aud truth by reason of the puzzling prob
lems of fact that history presents. The Mosaic
law shows God to be full of love and mercy. It
presents him as long-suffering and tender in his
dealings with man, and yet that same law shows
these severities against which the infidel world in
veigh. The Gospel, as we have seen, presents these
some apparent contrasts, and if we are to reject the
one, we are to reject the other. The whole diffi
culty with scoffing man is that he has no idea of
the awful character of sin, and of the sublime char
acter of holiness, and yet dares to sit in judgment
upon the Holy God. Ignorance and pride resist the
light of God's revelation. They also resist the
light of God's providential dealings in Nature.

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 95
They assume to know better than God how He
should govern theworld.
But to return. After Israel's solemn consecra
tion of nation and land to God at Gerizim and Ebal,
two grand campaigns, one at the south and one at
the north, subjugated the country. The exceptions
were not the inhabitants of the Gibeonite Tetrapolis,
who by guile escaped and became servants to the
congregation, but only those Canaanites who in
special fastnesses entrenched themselves and before
whom Israel's faith failed. The conquest of
Canaan was completed, with this exception, in
about five years. It was Israel's remissness that
protracted the result. But with all this, it was a
remarkable conquest, sweeping out of existence six
distinct nationalities with their many petty kings in
a country full of difficulties by reason of its moun
tainous character. The Canaanites who remained
sporadically in the land were not formidable
enemies, but resident aliens whose danger to Israel
was a moral one. The land was so entirely Israel's
that the surveyors proceeded securely to lay out
the boundaries which should mark the settlement
of the tribes of Israel, and Joshua spent the rem
nant of his days (about twenty years) in presiding
over the people whom he had placed victoriously
in the land. The tabernacle had been set up at

96 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Shiloh, near the centre of the country, the regular
worship of God according to the divine ritual was
maintained, and the only rebuke that Joshua had
to administer to the people was for their remissness
in thrusting out the Canaanitish groups that yet
remained and in settling themselves permanently
within designated limits. The desert habits of the
people overcame their faith and obedience. And
yet we cannot read the last chapters of the book of
Joshua, without being convinced that these faults
of Israel have been greatly exaggerated by com
mentators. The great mass of the nation were full of rever
ence to God and attachment to his worship
although here and there traces of idolatry from
contamination with Egypt and other lands remained.
We have the express statement of the Scriptures
which settles this point ; " and Israel served Jehovah
all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders
that overlived Joshua and which had known all the
works of Jehovah that he had done for Israel."
Those miraculous works had now ceased. The age
of miracles to evidence the establishment of the
divine kingdom upon the earth was now over, and
for five centuries Israel was to live under the writ
ten law, with no miracle but those of the days of
the fathers behind the~ divine statute. In the days

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 97
of Ahab and his successors when idolatry poured
into the laud from Phoenicia, God again vouchsafed
miraculous signs to his prophets who withstood the
gigantic evil, and Elijah and Elisha stand forth as
the representatives of that later day of testimony.
After that no miracle was beheld till the new dis
pensation of the Son of man called for this super
human testimony to the change from the Jewish
to the Christian church.
We may properly count these years of Joshua
and the elders who overlived Joshua as the years
of Israel's purest life. We may believe that for
some thirty years peace and prosperity marked the
newly-settled church of God. The lust for wealth,
the desire to be like other nations, the restlessness
under an exacting ritual and the love of novelty
had not yet entered into the hearts of the people,
and Israel presented among the nations of the earth
the only example of an orderly, happy, contented
and free commonwealth, with laws so just and
equal and beneficent, that they have never been
excelled in these particulars by the laws of the
most advanced and democratic nations of modern
times. This- existence of such a code at a time
when all other national codes were unjust and
tyrannical, or rather when other nations had no
codes but were governed by whim and brute power,
7

98 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
is itself an impregnable argument for the divine
character of Israel's polity, for surely there was
nothing in the conditiou and character of a mass of
Egyptian slaves that could account for it.
That the possession of Canaan by Israel was an
enacted type of the possession of rest by the true
people of God we have Scripture warrant to assert.
In the typical gallery as thus indicated byinspiration,
Egypt represents the depravity in which our human
nature is found, and out from which the trusting
soul is led by the Spirit of God, saved by the blood
of another, and carried through experiences of trial,
but provisioned from heavenly sources, until per
fect rest is attained in the place prepared for it by
a covenant-keeping God. That Canaan-rest of the
soul is to some extent obtained in this hfe, though
its fulness is found only in the life beyond. Its
illustration in this life has some of the detracting
features of Israel's life in Canaan. There is remiss.
ness in taking advantage of all our privileges-^
there is a failure in faith and zeal — there is a per;
mitting the old affections (the Canaanites) to dwell
with the soul and disturb its rest, and there is a
want of realization of the wonderful mercies that
God has wrought for us. Every true Christian
heart will see itself reflected in the conduct of

THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN. 99
Israel in its settlement in Canaan, and will learn a
lesson of self-humiliation before God.
It is for us, who have been led out of Egypt and
through the desert and have been fed on the manna
and have drunk of the Rock water that followed us
— and have thus been led into the rest of the people
of God, — it is for us to ponder on the marvels that
God has shown to us in His Son, redeeming us from
our condemnation and giving us the name and
place of His children, that we answer not these
mercies by ingratitude and worldliness, but be ever
a separated people, rejoicing in our advantages, using
faithfully our spiritual rights, and devoted to our
King and Saviour.

LECTURE VII.
THE JUDGES.
When Joshua died, Israel was a quiet and com
pact commonwealth, the people faithfully serving
the Lord (Judg. 2. 7). The nation was a brilliant
light in the midst of a dark world, a light alto
gether of heaven, kindled and sustained by the
Spirit and the Truth of God. That little land of
Palestine was the token of God's long-suffering
toward the past of our race and of his merciful
purpose toward its future. That separated people
was the church of God concrete and visible, which
in its invisible and spiritual character was in the
future to be as broad as the earth. We can rest
our eyes on this fair oasis of Israel for only a very
brief period. For a few years, the time of one
generation only, the leaf of this tree was green and
its fruit abundant. Then came the mildew, the
frost, the worm at the root, the scorching heat, the
drought, all the varied forces of sin, to corrupt the
growth and to cancel all the advantages which
God had so freely bestowed. The very source of
the evil was in the disregard of what infidels have

THE JUDGES. 101
called God's cruel law to exterminate the Canaanites
and their foul idolatry. It is hard for us to im
agine the wild sensuality and beastliness which
were indissolubly connected with the Canaanitish
idolatry. The more religious they were, the more
filthy were their lives. The obscene and cruel
rites belonging to idolatry dragged every soul into
the deepest defilement and rendered every contact
with the people a moral pollution. Hence God
had ordered the utter extermination of the whole
people with all their unclean apparatus of religion,
as he had before ordered the drowning of a whole
world sunken in sin. It was not what God would
do with every filthy people in this world, but it
was a selected example of God's wrath against sin,
and a warning of the final destruction of all who
indulged in iniquity. The failure to obey God's
command involved Israel in troubles. The altars
of Baal and Ashtoreth, allowed to remain in the
land, and the contact in business aud society with
the immoral idolaters soon began to have their
natural effect, and about twenty years after
Joshua's death the people of God were found bow
ing down to the idols of Canaan and awakening
the just anger of Jehovah. We may imagine that
this idolatry of the people must have been accom
panied by a fearful demoralization of society.

102 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Intermarriages between Israelite and Canaanite
families took place, and so the homes of Israel
were polluted and the poison admitted into the
very arteries of the national life. The govern
ment of Israel was a mild and simple democracy.
The elders of each tribe managed its affairs, and
these elders fairly represented the people. No
monarch controlled the nation to unify it and to
concentrate its force on any given spot. No
oligarchy gathered wealth and power by which to
compel and oppress, for the elders were not an
oligarchy, as they had no hereditary succession
and seem to have held their position by the com
mon consent of the people. Such a government,
although the' best in the world when a people
are righteous and pure, is easily impregnated
with the vices of the people and become its part
ner in wickedness. No stay to the idolatry of
Israel ever, therefore, came from its elders. There
was, indeed, a central figure in Israel, the High
Priest, and he bare the Urim and Thummim by
which the divine will was made known. But his
functions were connected with the ritual at the
central place of worship, and the Urim and Thum
mim were not to be degraded by a common use.
The High Priest, therefore, could do but little to
withstand the wave of idolatry that was flowing

THE JUDGES. 103
over the land. It was the exigency of such a
crisis that called for the Shophet or Judge. He
was the defender of the commonwealth against
idolatry not directly, but' in the way we now des
ignate. According to God's repeated threatenings, he
brought on Israel the scourge of a foreign foe,
from time to time, to punish them for their idola
try and the vices appertaining to idolatry. This
foreign foe seized upon the whole land or a part of
it and forced a tribute, while generally oppressing
the people. Then when the scourge had been suf
ficiently applied, and the people felt their sinful
ness and cried unto God, some man was specially
raised up by God with a clear indication of the
divine will concerning him and this one, as Shophet
or Judge, delivered Israel from the oppressor. The
Shophet was thus an extraordinary officer, desig
nated by God and having, as his function, to
deliver the people from an oppressor and to hold
the delivered people to the truth of God against
idolatry. Twelve of these Shophetim or Judges are named
in the history, some of whom may have been con
temporary. At least it is probable that Samson
judged Israel in the tribes of Dan and Judah,
while Ibzan, Elon and Abdon were also Judges

104 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
in the northern part of the land, during the mid
dle twenty years of the sixty years' Philistine
oppression. It was probably in temporary and local
overthrows of the Philistines that these three
obtained their judgeship. The whole period of
the Judges from the first, Othniel, to the last,
Samuel, (if we take the date of the battle of Eb-
enezer, when the Philistines were overcome), was
about 358 years, and it is interesting to remark
that of those 358 years, two hundred are expresslj''
declared to have been years of peace and prosper
ity, and perhaps we are to add to those the forty-
five years of Tola and Jair, which would give us
245 years of peace and only 113 of oppression.
The whole period of the Judges seems at first sight
to be called a period of 450 years by Paul in his
address at Antioch in Pisidia, but that period evi
dently begins with the Exodus of Israel from
Egypt, from which to the battle of Ebenezer
would be almost exactly 450 years. We are so
accustomed to regard the period of the Judges as a
period of disorder and wretchedness, that it will
appear startling to assert, that, next to theday of
Joshua, it was the very best period of Israelitish
History. More than two centuries of it were years
of peace, when the nation must have been, as a
whole, observant of God's laws and faithful to the

THE JUDGES. 105
holy covenant, for God had declared that when
they should turn from Him He would bring the
foreign oppressor upon them and only remove him
on their repentance and obedience. Hence we
have a right to infer that for more than 200 years
of the period of the Judges, Israel was faithful and
devout before God. It is true that severe judg
ments came upon them, but it is also true that those
judgments wrought their intended work and
brought Israel back to obedience and faith for a
longer or shorter period; at one time for eighty
years, that is, for more than two generations. An
Israelite living at that time in one of those gen
erations must have enjoyed a condition of quiet
ness and happiness in social and political life sel
dom realized elsewhere or at any other time on the
face of the earth. It is a part of the unbelief of
rationalists to blacken the period of the Judges
and to mark the state of society then in Israel as
barbaric and vicious. It is a part of the theory
that Israel began its career as savage, and devel
oped by natural evolution into civilization, when
the truth is exactly the reverse. Israel began with
the enlightenment of Sinai and the training of the
desert. It entered on Palestine as a prepared peo
ple. And its course, instead of being a develop
ment into something better and better, was a down-

106 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
ward progress to worse and worse. Too many
think of civilization as consisting only of a flour
ishing condition of the arts and sciences, forgetting
that the moral life is the standard of a true civili
zation. Israel certainly was not, in the time of the
Judges, marked by any prominence in the arts and
sciences. Babylon aud Egypt were far in advance
of Israel in these matters. But if the moral life
is the true standard of civilization, then Israel was
far in advance of Babylon and Egypt at this early
period in civilization. The land was. full of a
righteous and happy people in the many long in
tervals of whole generations between their lapses
and punishments. It is not sufficiently noted that
the object of the Book of Judges is not to give the
history of Israel, but to point out their lamentable
- failures, their departures from the law and service
of God. The good parts of their history are thus
purposely passed over, or dismissed with a word,
while each instance of sin is enlarged upon. The
whole record of Israel in the Old Testament has
this character. It is a record of Israel's departure
from God. If is an exhibition of man's gravita
tion to evil, thus making clear that only in God
was man's hope. Here was a nation wonderfully
prepared aud set apart with advantages and privi
leges unparalleled to cultivate truth and righteous-

THE JUDGES. 107
ness, and, with all this, it went down by an inclined
plane into infidelity -and rebellion against God, un
til He had to cast them off. Iu the time of the
Judges we see an early and a favorable condition
of the nation, the idolatrous tendency cropping
out again and again, but on the whole and after
punishment the nation yielding to treatment and
serving God in faith and obedience.
The last five chapters of the Book of Judges are
an appendix and give two accounts, one of Micah
and his house of Elohim, and the other of a griev
ous sin at Gibeah and its punishment. These chap
ters are used to support the idea of the barbarism
of those times. But they prove the very reverse.
They show the events recorded in them as some
thing extraordinary. The sin at Gibeah, such a
sin as ia committed constantly iu every city of
Christian lands, was such a horror to Israel, that
they rose up as one man and punished it with the
extremest rigor. Surely that shows a sensitiveness
to sin, which no people have ever since exhibited.
Do you call that barbaric ? Would God, then, that
all nations were now barbaric ! In Micah's case,
we have a story of what occurred probably very
soon after the conquest, and before things were well
settled. The Danites had been remiss in destroy
ing the Canaanites, and suffered in consequence

108 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Some of their tribe had to emigrate and seek a new
settlement. That such a band should become rough
and reckless is what might be expected. As for
Micah's image, it was not an idol, but a representa
tive of Jehovah, for he worshiped only Jehovah.
The man was evidently a man of wealth, and under
the seductive influences of wealth he ran into the
error of instituting a private chapel, in which repre
sentatives of Jehovah, hke the cherubim, should be
placed, and a Levite should act as priest. It was a
gross breach of the Mosaic law, but exactly in the
line in which first errors from order would fall.
These events are recorded to show how sin aud
apostasy crept into Israel, but they by no means
show a general corruption and barbarism among
the people. As we said, they are exceptional cases,
and to use them as proofs of the blackness of the
age of the Judges is like using the bills of mortality
pubhshed quarterly by our city as a history of
the city's career.
There is a phrase in this appendix to the Book of
Judges, which is strangely misapprehended. It is
this : " in those days there was no king in Israel
but every man did that which was right in his own
eyes." The phrase occurs twice (17. 6. and 21. 25)
and the first clause occurs once more (18. 1). " In
those days there was no king in Israel." The com-

THE JUDGES. 109
mon impression is that this phrase describes a
chaotic and turbulent condition of the community,
but a little observation will correct this judgment.
The Book of Judges was probably written by
Samuel, when he had had to yield to the rebel
lious desires of Israel and give them a king. In
his old age the faithful prophet writes the account
of Israel's advantages and defections, and when
copying the old records of the earlier day, he inserts
the memorandum that the events recorded belonged
to a time when Israel was enjoying great personal
liberty without a king, and that will account for so
much independent action of individuals aud sec
tions, which under Saul's tyrannical sway would
appear very strange indeed.
So the arguments for the barbaric character of
the age of the Judges all fall to the ground, and we
re- assert that the age was, next to that of Joshua,
immediately preceding, the very purest and best
age of Israel's history. Of course, we do not mean
that Israel was a perfect nation, nor that its whole
population were equally faithful at any one time.
There was much iniquity in the land at all times.
In every nation there are base souls and companies,
a lower stratum of immoral and abandoned men and
women, and Israel was not without these. No
doubt, if we had traveled through Israel in the best

110 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
portion of the period of the Judges we should have
seen just such breaches of law and order, and just
such crimes as we see to-day in every civilized
nation, but we firmly believe that these breaches
and crimes would have been found far less gross
than those which occur among us and far less
numerous in proportion to the population.
That idolatry again and again crept in among
the people we have seen, but the common notion
that it prevailed over the worship of Jehovah is
absurd. Statements in the Book of Judges are
perverted and exaggerated to prove the corruption
of Israel at this time. For example, Gideon's altar
in Ophrah is quoted as a proof that Israel had aban
doned the law concerning one central altar and had
erected altars all over the land. But Gideon's altar
is the only other constructed altar than the central
one mentioned in the Book of Judges, and that altar
was erected unto Jehovah where God had appeared
to him, this special appearance of God sanctifying
the spot and justifying the altar. It is true that
Manoah offered up sacrifices on a rock at Zoreh,
but here again God had appeared to Manoah and
thus sanctified the rock as an altar and Manoah as
a priest (after the manner of Gideon) for that par
ticular time. Such exceptional cases, with their
peculiar features, instead of showing that the law

THE JUDGES. Ill
was broken and altars erected everywhere, go to
prove the opposite.
In Gideon's case, there was a very important
reason for the exception, that Gideon's father
Joash, had built an idol altar in the place. Baal's
altar was to be thrown down and Jehovah's altar
erected in its place, as an emblem of Gideon's work
for Israel.
Again Jephthah's band and its performances are
quoted as examples of departure from the Mosaic
law and of a coarse and barbarous state of society.
But we are to remember that Jephthah belonged to-
the east side of the Jordan, where the people by
their own choice had settled outside of Canaan,
exposed to all the moral and social dangers from
their neighbors the Ammonites and Moabites. A
corruption of society in that region was a natural
consequence. Moreover Jephthah lived toward the
close of the period of the Judges, when Israel had
indeed become corrupt and was needing a Samuel
to arise to withstand the tendency to moral and
national ruin. It was at the same time that we
find Samson on the west side of Jordan, such a
miserable specimen of a man in his moral character,
acting as Judge, and gifted by the Lord with mar
velous physical strength with which to worry and
harass the Philistines, but not to subdue them, as if

112 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the low state of the country did not justify a higher
order of Judge or a more thorough deliverance.
At these closing years of the period of the
Judges we find that the nation was fast becoming
base and corrupt to the core. No longer appeared
such noble souls as Othniel, Caleb's nephew, who
graced the early portion of the period of the
Judges, or as Deborah and Gideon who marked its
middle years. Patriotism and piety had together
languished and well-nigh perished, so that Jeph
thah and Samson appear in strong contrast with the
heroes of two centuries before.
Bear in mind that in this period of the Judges
we are considering a range of over 350 years, and
we cannot give the same character to each part of
this long epoch. What we unhesitatingly assert
is that, if we take the period as a whole, it com
pares favorably with any other part of Israel's
history of like length, that it exhibits, it is true,
a simplicity of life that is not a mark of brilliant
civilization", but that the moral basis of a true civ
ilization was there as it was nowhere else, and that
the earlier half of this period represented generally
a peaceful and faithful people of God.
In order to have a correct idea of the times, we
must see the two conflicting currents of thought
and life both at work, that of the Law and its

THE JUDGES. 113
earnest defenders, and that of the idolatrous
Canaanites and those ready to compromise with
them. At one time the former prevails and a long,
happy experience is the result. At another time
the latter prevails and then come invasion, con
fusion and ruin. Toward the close of the period
the latter element seems to have gained a perma
nent mastery, and so the Philistines are ordained
by God to be a permanent rod of punishment.
For sixty years that fierce people persecute Israel,
and the nation is brought to the very lowest con
dition of national life, humbled in the dust, and
ground down in poverty and wretchedness by these
stalwart foes from one end of the land to the other.
But this fearful prostration of Israel at the close
of the period of the Judges is not to be made the
characterization of the whole period. There is the
mistake of the ordinary commentary. It is a super
ficial view, fostered, as we have said,by those who
would deny the supernatural in Israel's history,
and would make Israel a nation of savages gradu
ally evolving into the civilization of Solomon's day.
Israel was more brilliant in Solomon's day. It
was larger, wealthier, and more powerful. But
it was far lower in the moral scale in Solomon's
day, than it was in the earlier portion of the period
of the Judges. — Between these two periods, however,
8

114 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
there was a reformation, and the dreadful condition
of the commonwealth was relieved by the presence
and work of a Great Reformer, a grand figure, one of
the grandest in all history, that now appears upon
the scene. This was Samuel, whom we may con
sider either as the first of the Prophets or as the
last of the Judges. He is the connecting link be
tween the Judges and the Kings. His position is
so prominent and his importance as an agent of
God for Israel's salvation so great and his life so
long and varied in its relations to the people, that
we must devote a special discourse to the consider-
tion of Samuel and his place in the history of the
Jewish church.

LECTURE VIII.
SAMUEL.
From the constitution of Israel as an organized
church of God at Sinai to the captivity in Babylon
was a period of nearly nine centuries. Samuel
stands midway between the extremes of this period.
His life divides the democratic era from the
monarchic. Before him Israel was in its original
polity, but had so abused and corrupted the free
dom which such a polity gave them, that they de
served no longer its enjoyment, and a new form of
government was to be given them of God, aud yet
according to their own wicked wish (for God acts
through the evil desires of men, as in the cruci
fixion of Christ), under which government they
would have a new opportunity of obeying God and
serving him according to His holy law. In Samuel's
time this new polity was formed and after him it
continued until the Babylonian captivity.
We have seen how Israel constantly tended to
ward idolatry, and how each Judge who was raised
up was a sort of reformer who stayed for a time the
sad defection. But Samuel, who was the twelfth

116 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
and last of the Judges, stands far above all his
predecessors both as to personal character and as
to the work he wrought for Israel. Indeed his life
forms by itself a historic epoch in Israel. He was
not only specially called of God to judge Israel, as
were all the Judges, but he was gifted with extra
ordinary powers as priest aud prophet, although he
was not a priest by birth but only a Levite. Born
of godly parents, he was dedicated to God before
his birth, and was one of the three Nazarites for
life, of whom we read, Samson and John the Baptist
being the others. The Nazarite was separated
from the rest of men, as his name indicates (Nazar
being the Hebrew word for " separate "), and as dis
tinctive of this ritual and symbolic separation, his
hair was never cut, nor did he drink wine or eat
grapes, nor could he touch a dead body. He was
an object lesson of the separation between holiness
and sin. The common life of man was to be
eschewed by him. Of course his- was no example
of what all men should do. He was simply a
typical picture of a great principle, that holiness
required a spiritual separation from the ordinary
world. Like sacrifices and purifications and the
other divinely-ordained machinery of the law,
Nazaritism had its special function in the typical

SAMUEL. 117
church, but, like the other ordinances, is now a
thing of the past.
The Nazaritism of Samuel, of course, made him
the more conspicuous before Israel in his career,
and doubtless this was part of the divine plan in
leading his pious mother so to destine him from
his birth.
Samuel was born shortly after the oppression of
the Philistines had been checked by the marvelous
deeds of Samson, but still it was a very dark day
for Israel, and Samuel was probably only fifteen
years old when Samson died a prisoner in Ashdod,
and when the ark of God was captured by the
Philistines at the first battle of Ebenezer. Eli, the
old and weak high priest, died at the same time.
We may believe that it was at this time also that
the tabernacle at Shiloh, the tabernacle that Moses
had reared in the desert, and that had been Israel's
sanctuary for more than three centuries, was de
stroyed, and the nation was without that central
symbol of the divine presence. It was the fearful
time referred to in the 78th Psalm (ver. 59, 60,)
when "God abhorred Israel and forsook the taber
nacle of Shiloh." The prophet Jeremiah, five hun
dred years later, refers to this overthrow. " Go ye
now into my place which was in Shiloh, where I
set my name at the first, and see what I did to it

118 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
for the wickedness of my people Israel " (Jer. 7. 12).
How profound was the abyss into which Israel had
fallen! Its central shrine destroyed, the holy ark
in a foreign land, the high priest and his sons dead,
the Philistines swarming over the land, Samson,
the last stalwart defender of Israel, gone — surely
the wrath of God was outpoured upon His people
and His vengeance burned against them for their
disobedience and idolatries. And what was to save
the wretched land ? Who now was to be the de
liverer? It was this youth of fifteen years, who
had been brought up by Eli as an attendant upon
the temple, as the tabernacle was called long before
the temple of Solomon was built, the word so used
meaning the "palace," that is " the palace of the
Great King of Israel."
It was this young Samuel who was now to come
forward as the Lord's selected agent of Israel's
reformation and restoration. We cannot tell when
Samuel stood forth as the acknowledged guide of
the bruised and scattered flock. There was proba
bly for five years after the disaster at Ebenezer and
the destruction of Shiloh a chaotic condition of
affairs. Under the pressure of severe judgments,
the Philistines had sent back the ark, and the men
of Kirjath-jearim, a town about twenty miles S.W.
of Jerusalem, had received it. This ia the only

SAMUEL. 119
light that breaks in upon the dark landscape. We
may suppose that at twenty years of age, the
age in which Levites entered upon his active
service, Samuel entered upon his extraordinary
service, as not only a Levite, but as priest (and
temporary high-priest during the minority of
Ahitub and then of Ahiah, Eli's descendants) and
as prophet of the Lord. His judgeship (for thus it
is expressly called, 1 Sam. 7. 15.) was thus a very
exalted and composite judgeship, of a very different
sort from that of his predecessors, the divine ele
ment being much more prominent. As judge,
Samuel made Bethel, Gilgal, Ramah and Mizpeh,
four places only a few miles apart, north of Jerusa
lem, the seats of government, perhaps because that
region only was free from the Philistine occupation.
It was not till fifteen years after the time in which
we suppose Samuel to have assumed his high func
tions, and twenty years after the first battle of
Ebenezer which so prostrated Israel, that the second
battle of Ebenezer occurred and the great deliver
ance was effected. Doubtless the way had been
prepared for this deliverance by the teachings of
Samuel and his appeals to the people. What we
first see in the sacred story is a gathering of the
representatives of Israel at Mizpeh (probably Neby
Samwil, five miles N, W. of Jerusalem) at the call

120 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
of Samuel for the purpose of special prayer to God
(1 Sam. 7. 5). It was a most solemn meeting. The
people had already listened to the earnest appeals
of Samuel and had put away the Baalim and Ash-
teroth, whose worship had brought them into dis
tress. They had declared again for Jehovah, and
now this meeting at Mizpeh was what might be
called a ratification meeting with regard to their new
choice. The representatives of Israel on the height
of Mizpeh fasted before God, and drawing water
poured it out before the altar as a sign of their deep
repentance, confessing their sins. Here was a
turning-point in Israel's life. It had seemed as if"
their final destruction had come. The national life
was held by a very slender thread. But this Miz
peh assembly changed all. Here Israel formally
repented and God turned away the fierceness of his
anger. The gathering at Mizpeh was soon known to the
Philistine government, and they prepared an im
mediate blow to crush this revival of courage on
the part of Israel. Their host marched directly on
Mizpeh, and the representatives of Israel trembled.
They must have been very few in number compared
with the Philistine army and they were ready to
faint at the approach of these victorious veterans.
They appealed to Samuel to intercede with God for

SAMUEL. 121
them, and a special solemn service was held of in
tercession, in which Samuel (as a divine agent
raised up for the crisis with extraordinary powers)
offered up on the altar at Mizpeh a burnt-offering
and lifted up his voice in prayer. It must be re
membered that the ark was at Kirjath-jearim and
the tabernacle was destroyed. In this emergency
Samuel as an extraordinary high-priest set up an
extraordinary altar at Mizpeh, as afterward he did
at Gilgal.
The Philistine host meantime marched rapidly
up the ascent of Beth-horon, and swarmed out upon
the Gibeon plain, where twenty years before they
had dealt Israel such a deadly blow capturing the
ark and slaying the sons of Eli. It was while
Samuel was in the act of offering the burnt-offering,
that the Philistine army met an unexpected foe.
It was not Israel. The small band of Israelites
were up on the Mizpeh height with Samuel. Phil-
istia's foe was God himself, who sent a terrific
storm upon the army with awful thunderings and
destructive lightnings, that decimated the host and
put everything into confusion, so that the Israelites
rushed down into the plain, fell upon the Philistines
in their bewilderment and drove them in thorough
rout down the pass to Beth-horon.* So complete
* The Beth-ear of Samuel Is supposed to be the Beth-horon of
Joshua and Chronicles.

122 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
was this destruction of the Philistine host, and so
rapid was Israel's recovery of strength that the
Philistines withdrew entirely from the land and
never entered it again until forty years afterward
when Saul's sins and the renewed sins of the people
again brought them in as the Lord's rod. On the
battle-field Samuel erected a stone (a menhir, as it
would be called to-day) and called it Eben-ezer,
Stoyie of help, as indicative of the Lord's continued
help to Israel. The spot is probably now marked
by the well, called Bir-Azeir, a half-mile north-west
of Gibeon, a mile and a half north of the Mizpeh
hill, and two miles south of the opening of the pass
of Beth-horon.
The battle of Ebenezer (this second battle on
the spot) was thus a mere pursuit of a flying en
emy, whom God had by the intervention of the
elements disordered and defeated. It was not
Israel's strength, but God's mercy, that gained " the
day, and by this the people were practically
taught that the way of repentance was the way of
safety and success.
Samuel had now, as Judge, delivered Israel
from its oppressor, but, not as the other judges had
done, by the use of carnal weapons. It was the
intercessory prayer of Samuel that had wrought
the work, and the prophet Jeremiah, 500 years

SAMUEL. 123
afterward, refers to this intercessory power of
Samuel, when he says, " Thus said the Lord unto
me, ' Though Moses and Samuel stood before me,
yet my mind could not be toward this people.' "
(Jer. 15. 1). Samuel is coupled with Moses, as equally
a conspicuous example of a successful intercessor
for Israel before God in Israel's past history. The
forty years that followed are barely noticed in the
sacred record. It- is because the record relates
only to Israel's decline, and hence the periods of
prosperity and obedience are not enlarged upon.
All that the record has of these 40 years is this,
"And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his
life. And he went from year to year in circuit to
Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in
all those places, and his return was to Ramah, for
there was his house ; and there he judged Israel,
and then he built an altar unto the Lord." Mizpeh,
Ramah, Bethel and Gilgal were near.one another, as
we have seen, and after the destruction of Shiloh
served as a tetrapolis sanctuary, at each of which
an altar was erected, and at each of which prob
ably Samuel officiated as priest and even as high-
priest while Ahitub and Ahiah, Eli's descendants,
were minors. It will be borne in mind that Eli's
posterity was destined to die young (1 Sam. 2. 33.)
and hence Ahitub, who was a babe, when Samuel

124 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
began his career, may have died very shortly after
his active high-priesthood began, and his son and
successor in that case would be a babe, so that for
the most part of the forty years after the battle of
Ebenezer Samuel would be virtually the nation's
high-priest, irregularly, but as ordered of God.
The peculiar character of this epoch when there
was no tabernacle and the ark was in temporary
quarters at Kirjath-jearim, is used by the rational
istic abusers of the higher criticism as a proof that
Israel had not yet received the law attributed to
Moses! But we see that the exceptional character
of the crisis explains all. The nation was exper
iencing by reason of its sins a period of ecclesias
tical derangement^ and the order of four centuries
is disturbed. A peculiar sanctuary and a peculiar
high-priest mark the peculiar crisis, until under
David and Zadok a new settlement is adjusted.
The forty years between the battle of Ebenezer
and the establishment of the kingdom under Saul
-must have been a period of great peace and privi
lege. Samuel,' honored, by God very much as
Moses had been honored, was at the head of affairs,
filling both a civil and an ecclesiastical position of
supremacy. These forty years included (we think)
his life from 35 to 75 years of age. He was a man
of large frame and strong muscle and must have

SAMUEL. 125
exhibited the lineaments of moral power in his
face. As a Nazarite he had long hair, and perhaps
wore the ordinary dress of a Levite. His presence
evidently was imposing and calculated to beget
confidence and obedience. Israel, under his sway,
recovered largely its strength, after the long period
of Philistine domination and oppression. The
worship of Jehovah was again pure, aud unmixed
with the follies of Paganism. The people were
happy in their homes. And one might have hoped,
on looking at this changed condition, that now
new life had been given God's people which
could not possibly fail.
But weak human nature is going to disturb this
picture. Toward the close of these forty years, a
desire that had been gradually growing in the
minds of the people finds an occasion for expres
sion. The desire was to have a king and a mon
archical government like the nations around them,
and the occasion was one unfortunately given them
by the weakness of Samuel himself. What sad
spots are found in the best characters ! A Moses
and a Samuel disappoint us. Samuel had made his
two sons judges in the South Country with their
station at Beersheba. It was probable as he grew
old and felt that he needed assistants. It was a
pity that he chose members of his own family, es-

126 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
pecially when, as we learn, they were covetous men
and destitute of principle. Their corruption to
gether with a threatened assault of the Ammonites
gave the occasion which the people only needed to
fan their wicked desire for a king into a flame. A
representative gathering of all Israel came to
Samuel and -demanded that he should give them a
king. The old saint and patriot was grieved at the
disclosure. Here was a spirit of opposition to-
God, for God had constituted the nation without
an earthly king and had been greeted himself as
their king in the triumphal ode which they sang at
the Red Sea. Doubtless Samuel also felt the in
gratitude and implied' reproach against himself in
the people's demand. But instead of following any
natural impulse of his heart in reply to the demand,
he betook himself to prayer, and received from God
directions for his conduct under these trying cir
cumstances. In conformity with this revelation
from heaven the aged prophet first protested
against the people's wish, and when they refused to
obey his voice he then told them that the Lord
would grant them their evil desire, but that the
king they so craved would act the tyrant and op
pressor of the land.
The romantic story of Saul's anointing by
Samuel and the inauguration of the young and

SAMUEL. 127
bashful monarch at Mizpeh is one of the exquisite
narratives of the sacred volume. We need not re
peat the details. The young Benjamite king sig
nalized the beginning of his reign by the gallant
relief of Jabesh-gilead in the trans- Jordanic region,
which was besieged by the Ammonites. This
splendid victory confirmed Saul's position, and
won to him the hearts of all Israel, so that a new
assembly of the people was held at Mizpeh and a
second solemn inauguration was celebrated. Samuel
took this occasion to rehearse the history of Israel
to the people, to call their attention to the fact that
God had always blessed them when they obeyed
him and scourged them when they sinned against
him, to show them that they had done wrong in
asking a king, and yet to tell them that the king
dom would be blessed or cursed according to their
future obedience or disobedience to God. The
venerable prophet then declared to the assembled
multitude that the Lord would ratify all he had
said by sending them a storm of thunder and rain
that day in the wheat-harvest time, when storms
do not occur in Palestine. The storm was to be a
special witness to them of their sin in determining
to have a king. When Samuel ended his address,
the clouds gathered, the rain poured down and the
thunders burst upon the multitude, and they ap-

128 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
pealed to Samuel again to plead with God that they
should not die.
The memorable occasion concluded with an
earnest entreaty of the prophet to obedience with a
conditioned promise of the Lord's protection and
guidance. Thus far all looked well with the new
kingdom, and here the history again leaves a great
hiatus. We pass over twenty years in silence. And now
we look out upon Israel again. What a change
has been wrought ! The Philistines are again
everywhere in the land. Two thousand men with
Saul at Michmash and a thousand with his son Jon
athan at Gibeah are the two little bands which are
left to represent the strength of all Israel. The
Philistines had forbidden the use of sword or spear
to any Israelite, and had prohibited any smith from
practising his art in the land, lest Israel might pro
cure arms. This sad condition of the country
shows that Saul's reign had been what Samuel had
predicted, a reign of tyranny aud oppression, a
reign, moreover, of selfishness and rebellion against
God. The modest young Benjamite had become a
hardened, cruel despot, and had. led the people far
away from God. He had had great victories over
Ammou and Moab and Edom and Syria and Ama-
lek and Philistia, but these had only filled him

SAMUEL. 129
with pride, in which he dared to disobey God and
his prophet Samuel again and again*
Samuel, now nearly a hundred years old, had re
tired to his home at Ramah and there mourned for
the condition of Israel and the madness of the king.
It was then that the secret visit to Bethlehem took
place and the anointing of the youthful David in
his father's home. Then followed the victory of
the young David over Goliath, and then the fierce
persecution of David by the royal monster in his
jealousy, until at last on Gilboa's height the tyrant
fell before the Philistine foe, the country being in
full possession of the enemy. It was in the , midst
of the period of Saul's persecution of David, that
Samuel died and was buried at Ramah, where he
was born. He had lived nearly, if not quite, a
century. He was born amid the desolations of
Israel. He grew up to build again the waste
places, to restore Israel to obedience and order.
And he lived to see the rebellious spirit again let
loose, and, as personated in Saul, plunging the na
tion once more into the mire of sin and misery in
which he had found it. Was his mission, then, in
vain? Was this great Reformer a fruitless laborer?
No mission of God is in vain. No reformer labors

* Chapters 13 and 14 of 1 Samuel as far as verse 47 of chapter 14 are
out of place or rather chapter 14. 47-52, belongs to the end of chapter 12.

130 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
fruitlessly. It is true Israel sank again into cor
ruption and was again wasted by the enemy, but
we may trace to the mission and labors of Samuel
the preparation of the nation to receive the noblest
of all earthly monarchs, the sweet singer of Israel,
the man after God's own heart, who was in his
turn to destroy the enemies of Israel and to renew
the nation's devotion to the central sanctuary and
its divine worship. A new period of peace and
prosperity was to come, and Samuel was its fore
runner. It was his grand personality with his stern
denunciation of sin, his bold rebuke of the wilful
monarch, his persistent entreaties to obedience, and
the divine testimony confirming all, that saved the
nation from an utter collapse, by sowing the seed
that sprang up after his death in the career of David,
the noblest human type of the Messiah who was
to come.

LECTURE IX.
DAVID.
We have seen that the colossal form of Samuel
marks the midway of the history of the Jewish
state before the captivity, and that it divides dem
ocratic Israel from regal Israel. Samuel's excep
tional career was a re-modeling of the polity,
caused by the rebellious disposition of the people,
The religious element of reformation was also in-
eluded, though amid powerful obstacles and with
diminished effectiveness. The first monarch proved
a failure. He was a man after the people's heart.
He had the physical and mental vigor of a leader,
and he proved himself a brave and successful war
rior, and he, moreover, imitated the example of the
pagan potentates around him in making himself a
fierce and cruel tyrant, disregarding the rights of
man and the laws of God. He massacred the
Lord's priests and persecuted the Lord's anointed,
and brought on his land the terrible vengeance of
the Most High.
In the midst of his savage despotism the vener
able Samuel had clandestinely visited Bethlehem

132 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
and poured the oil of consecration upon the head
of the youngest son of a distinguished family of
that now world-celebrated town.
From that day David was God's anointed
king of Israel, and Samuel himself proclaimed
Saul a usurper (1 Sam. 15. 28). The remainder of
Saul's reign was occupied largely in the persecu
tion of David, who had become prominent before
the people by the slaying of Goliath, and who, af
ter being admitted into Saul's family, had become
generally recognized as the divinely-appointed suc
cessor to the tyrant. The interesting scenes of the
contest with Goliath, the praises of the people, the
marrying of Saul's daughter, the friendship with
Jonathan, the repeated efforts of Saul to slay his
young rival, and the wanderings of David as a fu
gitive from place to place for several years, we
must pass over as familiar stories to all.
The people had'had a king after their own heart.
God was now determined that they should have a
king after His own heart. He would give them a
monarch who, by his character, should offer them
the very best opportunity of serving God faithfully
and of retrieving, as far as possible, the fearful error
of turning the theocratic democracy into a king
dom. The new king had been born probably
at the very time when Saul's victories over Am-

DAVID. 133
mon, Moab, Edom, Syria and Philistia, had be
gotten in him the pride of power, and his career
of despotism had fairly begun. The family in
Bethlehem, to which he belonged, was of a dis
tinguished line, and was doubtless well known to
the tyrant. It seems, however, to have lived a
retired life, and its youngest son, in the simplicity
of those times, had as his occupation the business
of tending the sheep in the neighboring pas
tures. He first appears to us at about seventeen
years of age, a strong and hearty lad of large size
and handsome face and figure, skilled in the use of
the harp and fond of song, and with a record of
manly courage in guarding his flocks from the
beasts of prey. The wretched state of the coun
try at this time, through Saul's misgoverument,
has probably an illustration in this statement of the
incursion of lions and bears into Bethlehem's neigh
borhood. The glories of Saul's early victories
had been eclipsed by the disasters of his reign, and
the Philistines, who had felt the severity of his
power, were now in turn avenging themselves bit
terly on Israel.
It was then that the, lad of. seventeen suddenly
appeared before the nation as Israel's hero, and the
people sang "Saul had slain his thousands, but
David his ten thousands." David was exalted in

134 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHUECH.
the eyes of the nation, but the Philistines were
only checked for a moment. Their strength was
re-gathered and they desolated the land, while
Saul was seeking to destroy the young Bethlehem-
ite. The final catastrophe came at Gilboa, and
amid the ruins of the nation David was proclaimed
king at Hebron by the tribe of Judah, while Ab
ner, Saul's general, escaping from the Gilboa car
nage to the eastern side of the Jordan, set up Ish-
bosheth, Saul's son, as Saul's successor.
Two marked victories of David over the Philis
tines, at Baal-perazim and at Gibeah, restored the
independence of the country, and Abner's treach
ery toward Ish-bosheth brought all Israel in a few
years to the support of David as king.
Jerusalem, which had been left as a Jebusite
stronghold for the four centuries of Israel's occu
pation of the land, was assaulted aud captured by
David, and was made the capital of the united na
tion. The Davidic epoch of Israel had now fairly
begun. The desolations of Saul's reign were
repaired. The tyrannies of the throne were at an
end. The enemies of Israel were no more within
the border. The ark was brought from Kirjath-
jearim (where it had been for a whole century) to
Jerusalem and placed within a new Tabernacle.
The priesthood was carefully disciplined for a regu-

DAVID. 135
lar service, and the burnt-offerings and peace-offer
ings at the grand festival at Jerusalem declared the
beginning of a new era of order and faithfulness in
the religious hfe of the nation.
David's reign from this point of vantage con
tinued for more than thirty years. They were busy
years. He was in the prime of his life when he was
established over united Israel reformed and revived.
The nations, around, that had taken occasion of
the weakness of Israel to invade it, were all driven
back and the conquering arms of David in turn
brought these nations into subjection, so that Phil
istia, Moab, Ammon, Edom aud Syria all yielded to
his sword and became part of the Hebrew Empire.
At this time both Egypt and Assyria were in a
low condition of national strength. In Egypt the
feeble monarchs of the 21st dynasty were on the
throne, and the country was in that torn and rent
condition, which preceded the reviving reign of
Shishak. In Assyria we find the vacant epoch, of
which so little is known, between the reigns of Sha-
mas Vul in B. C. 1070 and Asshar-dayan 2nd in B. C.
930, the blanks in the Assyrian record showing us
that it was a time of national depression. Provi
dence thus gave David an undisputed sway from the
Euphrates to the River of Egypt, and made him
the ruler of a peaceful empire, most powerful of all

136 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the nations of that day. In all external things so
grand was the opportunity to Israel for a faithful
service of God in all the ways of his appointment.
A marvelous change had been wrought in a decade.
A little kingdom between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean, torn to pieces by intestine strife and
by foreign oppression and apparently moribund
with anarchy and poverty, had become the most
powerful and the wealthiest of nations, compact
and strong in its military, civil and ecclesiastical
systems, extending its sway to the borders of the
two great empires of the age, Egypt and Assyria,
itself superior to either in its resources. What-
had wrought this change ? He is blind who does
not see in it the hand of the Almighty, according
to his promise to Israel. It is true that David, God's
instrument, was a man of versatile genius aud
immense force of character. It is true that he was
the favorite of his people and united them all in
his service. It is true that he was a consummate
general and a wise administrator of government.
And above all, it is true that he was a man of prayer
and faith ; who looked to God alone for guidance
and upholding. But it was God who raised up
David and gave him these remarkable talents and
advantages, and it was God who made these talents
and advantages successful (for oftentimes such fail),

DAVID. 137
and he reads history wrongly who does not behold
the purposes of God in constant activity behind all
these second causes.
It is not our purpose to give a history of David's
reign. We only design to mark this period
of Jewish history as a period of renewal, a
period in which (as it were) the old con
fusion was wiped out, and the slate made clean for
a new writing, a period in which the Church of God
would, under altered political surroundings, have a
fresh opportunity of fulfilling its high function in
obeying the Divine Law and offering a Divine
Light to the nations.
David's part in this renewal was a varied one.
He was first the warrior, a man of war from his
youth. The disorders and calamities of the nation
needed the strong arm of military force. David's
courage, skill and prowess enforced order at home
and drove the enemies of the land beyond its bor
ders. His conquest of foreign countries were all
gained in wars of self-defence. The lust of con
quest did not appertain to him or to theTsraelitish
nation. He extended his empire to the Euphrates
solely in repelling the attacks pf Syrians and others
who determined to destroy his growing power.
This fact is not sufficiently noted by commentators
on David's history. They would condemn him for his

138 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
assaults upon other nations, and thus class him with
the Alexanders and Napoleons, whose wanton am
bition led. them in their unjust and cruel careers.
David was no such scourge of mankind. His mis
sion was to conserve Israel, and it was strictly in
doing this, that he repelled its enemies to their
subjugation. In a very few years this work was
achieved, and for the remainder of his reign, his
kingdom was at peace.
But David was far more than a warrior. He
was a statesman. .He saw that obedience to God's
law was the safety of his people, and he decreed
obedience to that law in every detail. He restored
the tabernacle worship in its fulness, and added to
it the department of music, we must believe, by
divine revelation. For his Psalms were of God, as
the testimony of our Lord himself shows, and these
Psalms were composed (at least, many of them) for
the sacred services of the sanctuary. This musical
accompaniment to the sanctuary services seems to
have been one of the divine tokens of a renewal of
the Church of God. David, as a statesman, more
over brought into the service of the State prominent
men of the subject nations.- Hittites and Gittites
and Cherethites and Pelethites were brought into
the army and into the civil service. These,
doubtless, received the mark of proselytes and were

DAVID. 139
incorporated in the Israelitish nation. The Jewish
people were to be an exclusive people, only in not
receiving the sinful practices of the pagan nations,
but never exclusive in the excluding of prose
lytes from pagan nations. Rahab and Ruth were
early examples of the ^receiving and honoring of
those who came from the most depraved nations.
Another feature of David's statesmanship was
his gentleness and fatherly care of his people. He
was at the opposite pole from Saul. He had not a
fibre of the tyrant in him. He loved to help the
poor and oppressed ; and his kindness to the house
of Saul, who had persecuted him, is unparalleled by
history. He won the affection of his people by
his own loving regard for them and so placed his
dynasty on a firm foundation. But David was still
more than a skilled warrior and a wise statesman.
He was a godly man. He sought not selfj but God.
It is in this especially that he answers to the
inspired description of him as a man after God's
own heart. There is much flippant cant about
David's sins, which the enemies of God love to use.
They write out these sins in capital letters, ignore
all the rest of David's hfe and doings, and then tri
umphantly exclaim, "This is your man after God's
own heart !" And now let us examine this cant
and see its shallowness.

140 BIBLE VIEW O'F THE JEWISH CHURCH.
David was absolute monarch of a mighty people
for- thirty years. He could kill, confiscate, banish
and appropriate whatever he wished. He had full
power for all this. He had, moreover, the example
of Egypt aud Assyria and of every smaller king
dom for all this. Every other Oriental despot used
that power continually. No family was safe from
ruin, no estate was safe from plunder, no man was
sure of his own wife or could protect his own
daughter. Such was the tyranny of the times.
Here was David, the most absolute despot of that
day, in the midst of this accustomed style of kings,
and what do we find against him for the whole
thirty years of his absolute sway ?
One act of immorality with a virtual murder
concerned in it — that is all. Why, the purity of
such a life is most wonderful. In any other abso
lute monarch like Alexander or Caesar, the immor
alities would have been a daily affair all through
the thirty years, and the murders would have been
quite as numerous. Even in our enlightened age
(as we call it) and in enlightened Europe, the one
example of absolute power which we have, that of
Napoleon, is one stained with debauchery and
crime. The Romans all thought Augustus had a
right to take Livia from her husband, and never
conceived of an immorality in the matter, so low

DAVID. 141
was the moral sense of the community. And these
enemies of God's truth to-day never have a word
against Aiigustus, but when David a thousand
years before Augustus takes Bathsheba from her
husband, they cannot cease their maledictions upon
the awful wretch, and damn his whole life for the
one act. So Uriah's death would have been justi
fied by any of the casuists of antiquity. It would
not have been deemed murder at all. The
casuists would have said that Uriah was a soldier,
and death in the field of battle was glorious, and
as somebody had to die in the front rank, it might
as well be Uriah as any one else. That is the way
in which some would argue if Alexander or Csesar
was the subject of discussion. But David took no
such view of his own case. David is his own
accuser. It is he that has emphasized his own
wickedness. He sees nothing in his own act but
adultery and murder. He palliates nothing. He
casts himself before God in deep self-abasement.
He is overcome with the grief of remorse. He
sheds the bitter tears of repentance. He writes his
own condemnation for all ages to read, and for
these very men of Belial in our age to use against
him. Is this like Alexander? Is this like
Csesar? Is this like Napoleon? Ah! it is
through this one conspicuous sin of David we see

142 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the tender piety of his character, the purity of his
godly soul. We hardly hazard anything in saying
that not another man who ever lived could have
carried thirty years of temptation so safely, so free
from stain as did this wonderful man after God's
own heart.
A man after God's own heart is not a sinless
man — there is none such. But a man after God's
own heart is a man who walks with God and feels
his own weakness, and, if he falls, turns to God for
pardon and guidance. And such was David.
There were other incidents iu his life which show
human weakness, but it is only the one on which
we have commented that has whetted^ the edge of
calumny and malignity.
David was wrong in numbering the people, and
God punished him for it, but we see that in doing
this he was following a popular impulse. Whether
he was wrong in his severe treatment of the Moab
ites and Ammonites depends first on our under
standing what the phrases regarding their punish
ment mean, and then upon our knowledge of the
divine element in the act. Too little is said in the
record to enable us to judge. We may say the
same of the delivery of Rizpah's sons and their
nephews to the Gibeonites to be hanged. The
record gives us every reason to believe that this

DAVID. 143
was a divine order involving exact justice, with
circumstances which are unknown to us.
But the greatest evil of David's life was his
polygamy and its sad consequences. Polygamy
was not a sin, but it was a fearful evil. Man was
left by God to work out of it by a long experience
and study of the great principles of life. David,
though a man of God, was not ahead of his age ih
the matter of matrimony. He followed the custom
of the day and in it transgressed no precept of
God's law as given to Israel. It must be a hard
thing for a monarch to bring up his children in
purity and righteousness even under the most favor
able circumstances, surrounded as they are by flat
terers and sycophants who are ever ready to minister
to the base passions of princes, and so court their
favor. But when the monarch is polygamous, the evil
is increased a hundred-fold. The rivalry of wives and
their jealousy of each other's children introduce an
element of tremendous force to produce disturbance
and destruction in the royal family. It was so
with David. A harem of wives produced a bear
garden of children, and the latter part of David's
life was sorely burdened with the excesses of his
sons, the culmination of this evil being the king's
own banishment for a season from his throne by
one of his rebellious sons. It was through these

144 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
afflictions, the results of his own folly, that God
trained his soul to the contemplation of higher
things and made him a sweet singer for the whole
church of all ages, sympathizing with every phase
of human suffering aud expounding the blessedness
of God's healing mercies. Man is but man at best,
poor, weak man, and David, glorious as he was as
God's King and Prophet, was full of the weakness
that marks our common humanity. Compared
with other men, he stands, among the pre-eminent
few, but before the standard of God's hohness,
David must with us all bow in the dust.
If we regard the history of the divine grace
among fallen men, which is mostly the history of
the Church of God, David appears as holding a
place of peculiar conspicuity for personal attainment
and for far-reaching influence. Though living in
age which some love to consider an age of igno
rance and semi-barbarism, he exhibited a knowledge
of men and things that the wisest might envy, and
showed a tenderness and refinement of feeling that
would put modern society to the blush. In his
religious life, he approached very near the throne
of God, and in his exquisite spiritual songs uttered
a voice of faith and love that serves the need of the
most exalted saint of our gospel day. The whole
church of God from David's day to ours has found

DAVID. 145
its loftiest worship in the use of David's Psalms,
and in this way his life has been brought nearer the
life of every' saint than that of any before or since.
Moreover God has put upon him an honor unequaled
in giving to the Eternal Son, as coming to earth for
our redemption, the name of David. The David of
prophecy is Jesus Christ. Speaking of the Mes
sianic period, the prophet says, "Thus saith the
Lord God *****! w[\\ sei Up one Shep.
herd over them and he shall feed them, even my
servant David" (Ezek. 34. 23). No man's name
was ever given to the Son of God but David's with
the single exception that he is called "the last
Adam" by way of contrast and not of likeness.
Such, then, is the grand and good man who stands
at the head of Israel's second opportunity, and pre
pares a new period for Israel's probation, a man with
his full share of human weakness, but yet gifted with
a wonderful versatility of genius, exalted to a
great prominence in worldly affairs, holding withal
a profound spirit of devotion to God and made the
recipient of an inspiration which gave a new Scrip
ture to the church of God.
If Samuel was a type of John the Baptist prepar
ing the way for new things, David was the higher
type of the Messiah himself, who brought in the
new day by his personal presence and life.
10

LECTURE X.
SOLOMON.
David's reign, we have seen, was a new start for
the Jewish church and nation. The nation in its
new form as a kingdom, and the church with its new
tabernacle and restored ark and service, had every
earthly circumstance for a true prosperity, and we
might expect that what had proved so great a fail
ure under the original polity might become a suc
cess under the new order of things. In its first
probation the nation of Israel had been given a
simple and retired life, that the church of God
might be nurtured spiritually, the people being sep
arated from the idolatrous nations. But the desire
of the people to be like the other nations broke
through the bounds that God had set around them,
and led them into the excesses of idolatry and well-
nigh to their utter destruction both as a church and
as a nation. Four centuries- had served only to
show the persistent downward tendency of the peo
ple, notwithstanding the providential checks which
God's mercy had prepared, and now another period
of four centuries was to be given Israel under a

SOLOMON. 147
new polity and in a new probation. In this new
trial the nation was no longer to be a simple and
retired folk, but to exhibit the features of other na
tions with king and court and' subject provinces
and the manifold results of wealth and power. It
was indeed a perilous trial, but the people would
have it so. They had failed under God's simple
plan. They were now to try their own human plan.
And yet God, after allowing Saul to prove to them
how tyrannical a king might be, had placed a man
of exalted piety and consummate wisdom on the
throne in the person of David, that the new exper
iment might under him be begun with the most
favoring circumstances. David's thorough reform
of the tabernacle service and the composition of
his exquisite inspired Psalms were parts of God's
gracious provision for the new probation.
We have already considered the noble character
of David, and we have also noted the evils that
beset him in his eventful life. After forty years of
royal experience the great reforming king was gath
ered to his fathers, and his young son Solomon sat
upon the throne.
Solomon was born in the purple. He knew only
the royal side of life. And it is one of the side-
proofs of David's godly influence in his family (not
withstanding the waywardness of his other sons)

148 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
that this Solomon should on ascending the throne
in his youth exhibit a moderation and regard for
the proprieties of life most unusual in a palace-born
prince. He felt the responsibility of his position
as ruler over a great nation of imperial size, and ho
sought wisdom to govern aright. His visit to Gib
eon, where what remained of the old Shiloh taber
nacle was standing, was undoubtedly the prompting
of a reverential spirit. The high-place at Gibeon
was probably the same as Ramah, where Samuel
had lived and where he had set up the old Shiloh
tabernacle, when Shiloh was destroyed. This lofty
hill rises up close by Gibeon, and is now known as
Neby Samwil (or the "Prophet Samuel"). When
David erected a new tabernacle for the ark in Jeru
salem, he did not see fit to remove this memento
of Samuel's day aud work, but left it on the mem
orable hill. The brazen altar seems also to have
been left on this high-place of Gibeon during David's
reign. The spot is only five miles from Jerusalem,
in full view, and David may have considered it
sufficiently near so as not to warrant any further
union of ark and altar. However that may be,
Solomon's visit to the high-place of Gibeon was
blessed with a vision of God in a dream, in which
he received the promise of executive wisdom for
his royal office, and so was directed at the very be-

SOLOMON. 149
ginning of his reign in the way of truth. Sol
omon's sacrifices both at Gibeon on the brazen
altar aud at Jerusalem before the ark were tokens
of his regard for religion and indications of a godly
reign like that of his father David.
At this period Jerusalem was a great centre of
political influence and of commerce. With the ex
ception of Phenicia, all the neighboring lands were
tributary to Israel, and even Phenicia seems to
have had a humble deference toward Israel that
bordered on subjection. The trade between the
East and West passed through Israel's capital.
The roads from Syria to Egypt and from Arabia to
Tyre (and so to the Tyrian colonies) alike passed
through Jerusalem. This city consequently in
creased rapidly in wealth. Stately mansions were
erected and the markets displayed the purple robes
of Phenicia, the rich stuffs of Babylon, the spark
ling gems of India, the golden ornaments of Ophir
and the curious art-objects of Egypt. Wealth
poured in upon the favored city, and Solomon, with
rare wisdom, improved all the channels of trade,
and furthered the unexampled prosperity of the
land. He entered into close alliance with Hiram the
king of Tyre (and the terms used appear to show
that Solomon was a liege lord to Hiram), and then

150 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
began to ornament Jerusalem with the spoils of
Lebanon. The rocky height of Moriah was taken
in hand. Its top was cut off and the summit that
remained became a broad level, oil which the most
costly temple of antiquity was to be reared. Huge
stones fully prepared at the quarry formed the
gigantic foundations and walls which supported and
bounded this grand area. Courts and porticoes of
rarest workmanship were built upon this plane, and
the central shrine itself, the successor of the humble
tabernacle of old, was richly adorned with the firs
and cedars from friendly Tyre. For seven years
two hundred thousand men were employed in this
colossal task and reared the wonderful fane, whose
remnants to-day .so astonish the beholder. A royal
palace that was thirteen years in building, the
famous " house of the forest of Lebanon " and a
palace for his wife, the daughter of Pharaoh, were
among the other magnificent buildings which this
weal thy monarch erected in the capital city of Israel.
So great was his fame that a queen from southern
Arabia came a thousand miles to witness the glory
of Israel and of Israel's king, and was astonished
when she saw a grandeur far beyond her highest
anticipations. Forty millions of dollars' worth of
gold alone was received by Solomon in a year, and
we cannot put the purchasing value of that at less

SOLOMON. 151
than $400,000,000. Such enormous wealth no king
or nation has ever seen, either before or since Solo
mon. God had ordered it probably that the great
gold fields of Arabia should, just at that point of
history when Solomon was the most powerful
monarch of the earth, be either discovered or vastly
widened, and the result was like that of the open
ing of the gold mines of California in our own day.
Only in Solomon's case, the produce came largely to
one man, who controlled the channels of commerce,
while in the case of California thousands joined in
the acquisition. Moreover it is probable that the
Arabian gold fields were richer than those of Cali
fornia. It is this limitless wealth of Solomon and
his remarkable worldly wisdom, which has made
his name a name for all that is weird and magical,
and all that is strange and colossal is attributed to
his powerful hand. The empire of Solomon en
joyed profound peace, as if his name (which means
"man of peace") were prophetic of the character
of his reign. In this it differed from the ages be
fore it and the ages that followed, and in this long
continued peace the opportunities for the great
wealth of Israel were afforded.
The splendor of the court and the capital city
and the general animation of commercial life must
have pleased the pride of an Israelite of that golden

152 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
day. The rich arrivals by way of the Red Sea and
the Dead Sea from Ophir, and by way of Joppa
from Tarshish, the embassies from distant kingdoms
to pay court to Israel's sovereign, the processions
of tribute-bearers from the subject nations, the
building of aqueducts and fortresses, the making of
roads, the growth of towns and cities, and the
world-wide fame of the monarch as a miracle of
wisdom must have made the Israelitish bosom heave
with delight and the Israelitish mind to believe
that Israel's ultimate and permanent gloryiiad ar
rived. But how different was the reality ! Beneath this
golden surface the most potent elements, of corrup
tion were at work. The king, intoxicated by his
prosperity, forgot the law and the God of Israel.
He brought iu wives by the hundred from the idol
atrous nations around him and made his chief
queen the daughter of Egypt's Pharaoh. To please
these ladies he set up chapels to their gods all
around the holy city, and it was but another step
when the monarch himself worshiped these gods
in their immoral shrines. Religious principle was
forgotten in political expediency and social courtesy.
While the priests of Jehovah were offering up the
sacrifices of thelaw on Jehovah's altar before the mag
nificent fane which Solomon had erected, the priests

SOLOMON. 153
of Chemosh and Molech, of Baal and Ashtoreth were
performing their horrid rites in full sight of the
holy temple, and Solomon was attending the pol
luted services in company with his foreign wives.
The evil that wealth and foreign intercourse pro
duced in the court wrought its work through the
whole body of the state. The people became
greedy for display. Religion became a formality,
while the heart was set on earthly advantage.
Every form of vice was admitted with the foreign
habits, and David's piety and puritanism were all
matters of the past.
As Israel had failed, when God gave it a sim
plicity of life for its model, so it failed when God
gave it earthly prosperity and magnificence. The
human heart in both forms of opportunity proved
its native depravity aud turned away from God.
It is an interesting fact that the 490 years, in
which Israel neglected to observe the Sabbatical
years, and for which the nation had to spend 70
years (each year for a neglected Sabbatical year) in
Babylon, began, as a calculation will readily show,
in the reign of this favored king Solomon.
Worldly prosperity is a strong ally of Satan, and
under its potent wand the soul easily neglects and
then despises heavenly things.
It was in the midst of this Solomonian glory of"

154 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Israel that God sent a prophet, Ahijah of Shiloh,
to an Ephraimite of high rank, having an impor
tant charge as engineer in Jerusalem, who an
nounced the divine will that he should, on Solo
mon's death, be the king of the ten northern tribes,
and promised the divine protection and guidance to
him as they had been given to David, if he should
walk in the ways of God. This engineer, Jero
boam, probably let out the secret in the delight of
his proud anticipations. At any rate, Solomon
heard of it and straightway sought to slay the
man whom God had appointed to succeed him in
Israel. Jeroboam fled to Egypt, where a new dynasty
had just come into power, and, in its representa
tive, Shishak, was renewing the strength of Egypt
and again making it a formidable empire. The
Pharaoh, whose daughter Solomon had married
early in his reign was dead and his dynasty ended,
and Shishak had probably been the destroyer of
that royal family.
At the same time Hadad of Edom and Rezon
of Syria began revolts in those countries against
the magnificent monarch of Israel. And so Solo
mon's sun went down amid gathering clouds that
predicted the coming night of storm. The glory,
so dazzling, was to pass away like the morning

SOLOMON. 155
dew. The Davidic throne, that had been exalted
so high above all thrones, was to be brought down
to the dust of abasement, and the nations that had
feared it and bowed down to it in awe were to de
spise and insult it. And the exaltation and the
degradation were alike the action of the just and
holy God who offers opportunity of righteousness
but scourges those who despise it.
Forty years of unexampled peace and prosperity
had been given Israel, and these years had been
used only to inflate pride and secularize the nation.
All the reforms of David's day were virtually can
celled, and the stately worship of the temple was a
hollow mockery. The temple was itself a human
error. God had never ordered it. The idea came
into David's head that God ought to have as fine a
house as he, David, had. It was a pious thought,
but a foolish one, for some piety is very foolish.
He ought to have considered that if God was to
have a house proportioned to his perfection, earth
could not contain such a shrine, and hence any
house of God built on the principle of giving God
a house worthy of Him was absurd. He should
have remembered that the simplicity of the old
Tabernacle far better represented the dwelling of
God among men than the gorgeous temple which
would liken God to an earthly potentate.

156 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Nathan, the prophet, tried to teach David this
lesson, but he would not hear it, and so God yielded,
just as He yielded before to the people who de
manded a king, and He promised that David's son
should build the grand temple which David so
longed to erect.
And, just as God used the kingship as a type of
the Messiah, so He used the temple in a like way,
although both were human institutions permitted
by God and not according to His divine pattern.
And, as God, when He allowed Israel to have its
way and be governed by a king, told the manner
of the kingdom and laid down its rules and blessed
the monarch, so also when He allowed Israel to
have a gorgeous temple He gave directions how
the temple should be built, and honored the struc
ture with His miraculous presence. The building
of the temple was the cause (or one of the causes)
of Israel's final ruin. It was part of that false life
which put outward splendor for inward devotion,
and which destroyed true religion by magnifying
its earthly shell.
It is a great mistake to suppose that God is hon
ored according to the amount of money put into a
place of worship. No such standard will endure
the test. The gold and silver and precious stones
of such a system will prove to be but wood and

SOLOMON. 157
hay and stubble. It is the gold and silver and
precious stones of faith and love that God seeks to
honor Him, and not man's pride built up in a cathe
dral. That a place of worship should be neat and
orderly, that it should not offend taste or suggest
aught unpleasant, is undoubtedly true, but this is
quite a different thing from making it grand and
gorgeous as though the "grand and gorgeous" of
man reached nearer to God. The experience of
the Hebrew commonwealth under Solomon, so often
referred to byhierarchists as a model for us, teaches
directly the opposite lesson. It shows us the fear
ful danger of making a display of architecture and
ritual in our worship of God, and bids us look to
the awful gulf into which Israel plunged by reason
of this display. If society becomes luxurious, let
not the church of God follow it into luxury. Let
the church of God ever bear witness for simplicity
and. humility against the tide of fashion and
wealth. But now, turning from, the condition of Israel in
the time of Solomon, what shall we say of the man
himself? Was he a man of God? Is he to be
considered a saint, only wandering away from God
for a time ? This seems to be the conception with
many. They say that he could not have written

158 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the three books of the Bible which bear his name,
unless he had been a man of God, and so they
affirm that he repented of his sins before he died,
and must be written in the list of the ancient
worthies. On the other hand it is quite a common thing
with a certain class of commentators to deny that
Solomon was the author of the Book of Proverbs
(that is, the part that claims, to be his) or of the
Book of Ecclesiastes, and to affirm that the Song
of Solomon is a mere secular love-song without
any spiritual meaning. If this position were true,
of course the three Books would be no argument
for Solomon's piety. But we do not adopt this
method. We firmly believe that the parts of the
Proverbs assigned to Solomon and the Book of
Ecclesiastes were of his authorship and that the
Song of Solomon is a spiritual song. In no other
way than as such could they have entered into the
Canon, and the arguments offered against their gen
uineness are exceedingly weak. How then do we
account for their position as sacred books if Solo
mon was not a man of God? Precisely as we
account for the Messianic prophecies of Balaam.
God has seen fit at times to make worldly men the
vehicles of his trust, and in this case it was spe
cially a powerful testimony to the vanity of earthly

SOLOMON. 159
things that so great a monarch as Solomon could
give, when he had had his earthly cup of pleasure
filled to the full. For such a one to declare to the
world that all earthly pleasure is vanity and vexa
tion of spirit was a testimony of value as coming
from an unregenerate heart. This^will account for
the Book of Ecclesiastes. As for the Proverbs and
the Song of Solomon, Balaam's case will illustrate
the matter. The ro3ral position of the writer would
make his words current, and that would be reason
enough why God might inspire in an unregener
ate soul the thoughts and utterance. For certainly
we can find nothing in Solomon's life that looks
like piety. His calling upon God in a dream at
Gibeon in his youth was iu the first place an occur
rence in a dream, and secondly, it was a request
only for worldly wisdom and not for godliness. It
was a good thing as far. as it went and received the
approbation of God in the dream, but it proves
nothing as to piety. His beautiful prayer at the
dedication of the temple was undoubtedly prepared
for him by the ecclesiastical authorities. It was
no impromptu of the king. His whole reign was
marked by the boldest contempt for the Divine
law, and one of his latest- recorded acts was to seek
the death of the man whom God had appointed his

160 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
successor, just as Saul had sought the death of
David. To make such a man a saint is to confound evil
and good, and to destroy all the incentives to a
godly life. Immense harm is done by holding up
such debauchees and reckless characters as Samson
and Solomon among the saints of God. As well
may we hold up Balaam and Judas Iscariot, because
the former uttered glorious prophecies and the lat
ter wrought miracles. Let us stand by the sacred
record, and see in Solomon a man of splendid abili
ties and exalted dignity and unparalleled resources
becoming a slave to self and sin, a solemn beacon
and warning to all men regarding the dangers of
earthly prosperity and the determination of the
human heart away from God.
David exalted the kingdom by his godliness.
Solomon destroyed it by his impiety. The history
of Israel after Solomon is the downward plunge,
interrupted by a few checks from godly prophets
and godly kings. The royal experiment was vir
tually proved a failure in Solomon. The question
whether Israel could obey God's law was solved in
the negative.

LECTURE XI.
THE DIVIDED KINGDOM.
Thus far we have seen the church of God as in
cluded in the democratic Israel a failure, notwith
standing the halcyon days of Joshua and the elders
that outlived Joshua, and as included in the mon
archical Israel a failure, notwithstanding the hal
cyon days of David. Between the two eras stands
Samuel, whom we may style a second Moses,
chosen of God to restore order in Israel and to see
a man after God's own heart anointed king of the
renewed nation. The first era, dating from the
Sinai revelation, comprised about four centuries,
the second era, ending with the Babylonian cap
tivity, comprised more than four centuries, if we
begin with Samuel's death. Samuel's life of a
century occupies the middle period of ruin and re
form, in which the sacred services of the sanctuary
-received so rude a shock, and tabernacle and ark
were separated and each was moved from place to
place, indicative of Israel's wretched moral and
political condition.
We have seen how Solomon's reign of outward
11

162 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
magnificqnee both in the civil and ecclesiastical
spheres was the thorough demoralization of the
state and church, and that with the death of that
"grand monarch" the cleavage asunder of Israel
became a lasting mark of God's indignation.
The act of Jeroboam in separating the ten tribes
from Judah was in direct obedience to the express
command of God, and we are not to charge Jero
boam with any sin in this national crisis. The sin
of Jeroboam consisted in attempting to strengthen
his God-given kingdom by altering the worship of
Jehovah, and setting up a system distinct from that
which centred at Jerusalem. It was very natural
to suppose that if the people of the northern king
dom should continue to go to Jerusalem at the na
tional feasts, they would soon lose their distinctive
nationality and become again absorbed in Judah,
and to avoid this Jeroboam set up the two calves,
as symbols of Jehovah at the two extremities of
his kingdom, one at Bethel in the south and the
other at Dan in the north. He probably considered
these as the two cherubim of the Jerusalem
temple, which overshadowed the ark, and thus
placed his whole kingdom under their protection,
sanctifying the land, as it were, between the cheru
bim. He did not mean that the people should
worship idols, but that they should worship Jeho-

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 163
vah by these instrumentalities. One change neces
sitated another. He had to form a priesthood of
others than the tribe of Levi, and then, to make
matters more sure, he ordained a new feast in the
eighth month. It was this new ecclesiastical ar
rangement which constituted the heinous sin of
Jeroboam, and gave him the unenviable title
through history as " the man who caused Israel to
sin." If he had humbly accepted the throne God
gave him, and had faithfully observed the ecclesi
astical law God had given, letting his people go
and going himself regularly to Jerusalem to wor
ship, it would have been 'poor politics but good re
ligion, and God would have rewarded his faithful
ness and that of his people. But man always
thinks he can improve on God, and is ready to add
his inventions to God's plan. How many sins have
been committed for ".reasons of state ! " How
often has political necessity been the excuse for the
plainest departures from the right ! God did not
leave himself without witness against Jeroboam's
deliberate apostasy. His prophet appeared before
the Bethel altar, and at his word the altar was rent,
and the outstretched arm of Jeroboam was tem
porarily paralyzed. But the king had gone too far
to turn back. He rejected the sign and persisted
in his worldly policy.

164 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Meanwhile Rehoboam, who had succeeded his
father Solomou on the throne of Judah, had for
saken the law of the Lord after the loose and
lamentable manner of the times, and God brought
up Shishak, the Pharaoh of Egypt's new and strong
dynasty, to devastate the kingdom of Judah and to
plunder Jerusalem. The weakness of Rehoboam
on this account, in addition to the positive word of
Shemaiah a prophet of God, restrained the king of
Judah from any attempt to recover the lost prov
inces of DaVid's kingdom. But Rehoboam's son,
Abijah, in his brief reign, made a formidable raid
upon Israel twenty years after the separation and,
after a fearful destruction of Jeroboam's army in
Zemaraim, reft away from him some of his south
ern cities, including Bethel, where he had placed
one of his golden calves.
But we do not purpose to pursue the history of
the two kingdoms in detail. It comes within our
scope simply to trace the general outlines of Israel's
decline, a decline which was checked in the north
ern kingdom by only one event, but which in the
southern kingdom was checked repeatedly by the
excellent character of a number of the monarchs
who occupied David's throne.
The northern kingdom had a duration from the
separation of 253 years, and nineteen kings occupied

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 165
its throne, thus giving only a little over thirteen
years as the average length of a reign, and, if the
remarkably long reign of Jeroboam II. be taken
out, eleven years will be the average length of a
reign. The duration of the southern kingdom from the
separation was 385 years, 132 years longer than
that of its rival. The number of kings during this
period of 385 years was also nineteen, giving an
average length of reign of over twenty years. In
this fact of the average reign in Judah being nearly
double that in the kingdom of Israel we see a mark
of the better order in the former kingdom and of
a larger share in the divine favor. The north
ern kingdom, with the impetus given it by Jero
boam, went rapidly down to flagrant apostasy.
Civil wars racked the land. Jeroboam's dynasty
was succeeded by Baasha's, and Baasha's by Omri's
in less than fifty years, and meanwhile a Zimri had
occupied the throne for a few days, who perhaps
claimed it as a descendant of Saul, for we find a
Zimri in the sixth generation from Saul in 1 Chron.
8. 36 and 9. 42. Omri was noted as a warrior, as
we may infer from his name on the " Moabite
stone " as marking his house, and he married his
son Ahab to Jezebel the Tyrian princess. This
alliance brought the filthy idolatry of Phenicia

166 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
bodily into Israel. Jezebel was a woman of extraor
dinary force and she almost extirpated the religion
of Jehovah from the land. Israel was a pitiable
sight in Ahab's day. The last remnants of
Jehovah's worship had apparently left the nation.
Altars of Baal and Ashtoreth were seen on every
side. Priests of these Phenician deities swarmed
throughout the country. The court was altogether
pagan. Out of the entire population of the king
dom, there were but seven thousand who had not
become gross idolaters, and these were hidden
through fear of the merciless queen. It was at
this crisis that Elijah appeared as God's reproving
prophet and maintained a bold and severe antagon
ism to the iniquity of the idolatrous court and peo
ple. With prophecy and miracle this stalwart
seer alarmed Ahab and angered Jezebel, at one
time slaying four hundred and fifty of- Baal's
prophets, at another fleeing into the Sinai desert
before the queen's wrath. Once and again he de
nounced the wicked king to his face, and in the
name of Jehovah predicted the fearful doom of
himself and his house.
At Ramoth Gilead the guilty Ahab received his
death-wound, and for fourteen years after the
Tyrian Jezebel was the ruler of Israel, although her
sons Ahaziah and Jehoram, the one for two years

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 167
and the other for twelve years were nominally the
kings. Meantime Elisha had succeeded Elijah as
the Lord's prophet in Israel, and under his orders
Jehu, an officer of the army at a new siege of
Ramoth-gilead, assumed the crown of Israel. Jehu
became the instrument in God's hand for the com
plete overthrow of the idolatry which, introduced
from Phenicia, had cursed Israel for over thirty
years. He destroyed Jezebel, now a woman of over
fifty years of age, and with her the whole family
of Ahab, including the King Jehoram and his
nephew Ahaziah, who was King of Judah and on
a visit to his pagan relatives of Israel.
This act of Jehu was the one check of which we
spoke that held back the destruction of Israel.
Jehu's motive was a selfish and worldly one.
His zeal for Jehovah, of which he boasted, was zeal
for himself, but nevertheless as he destroyed the
worship of Baal and Ashtoreth and restored the
worship of Jehovah (although in its mutilated
form), God honored him with the reward of a con
tinuance of his dynasty for five generations, and
one of his descendants, the fourth in order, Jero
boam IL, had a long reign of fifty-two years, in
which the kingdom enjoyed an unwonted prosper
ity. The last king of Jehu's dynasty was, however,
slain, in a conspiracy almost as soon as he mounted

168 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the throne, and then followed fifty years of rapid
decline under six successive monarchs, only one of
whom, Pekah, achieved any distinction, until the
Assyrian power, which had even from Jehu's time
interfered with Israel's independence, put an end to
the kingdom, destroyed its cities and removed the
people to Mesopotamia and Media. From this
date B. C. 721 Israel (that is, the ten tribes as such)
disappears from history.
In all the list of nineteen monarchs that reigned
over Israel during these 250 years from Solomon's
death, we find not one godly man. They were
all, like the monarchs of the pagan nations around
them, selfish and generally cruel tyrants. With
the exception of Jeroboam and Jehu and his
family they showed not even an outward reverence
for the God of Israel. Nine dynasties had reigned
in these two and one-half centuries, and all but
Jehu's had cursed the land with their iniquities.
The great empire of Solomon had dwindled down
to a very small and insignificant state, and the
power, first of Syria, and then of Assyria, had
become a scourge to the apostate nation. Civil
wars, assassinations, and general insecurity marked
the larger part of the history of the kingdom, the
period of the Jehu dynasty — a period of 112 years
—being the marked exception. But this Jehu

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 169
period was disturbed by frequent wars with Syria,
whose powerful monarchs Hazael and Benhadad
III. made great inroads upon the country, although
two of Jehu's dynasty, Jehoash aud Jeroboam II,
successfully resisted this Syrian foe. In spite of
the comparative excellence of Jehu's family the
nation became wholly corrupt.
The mission of Elijah and Elisha had been in
vain. The long suffering of God had waited for
two and a-half centuries, when the blow of justice
had to fall and Israel was utterly extinguished.
Tiglath-pileser, Shalmanezer and Sargon were the
three Assyrian monarchs who became the instru
ments of God's anger, blotting out the nation and
leaving the kingdom of Judah only to represent the
favored people of God.
To that kingdom of Judah we now turn. There
we find a different record. The period there from
Solomon's death is 385 years, instead of 253, the
length of Israel's career. The nineteen monarchs
who reign over Judah are all of one family,
David's, while those of Israel were of nine families.
Eight of these monarchs were decidedly godly
men. Two of them, Hezekiah and Josiah, were
conspicuous for their piety. The other eleven
could compare evenly with their rivals on the
throne of Israel. The general tendency of the

170 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
kingdom of Judah was like that of Israel, but its
godly kings and its maintenance of the true wor
ship at Jerusalem served as a brake upon this ten
dency, lengthening its time of probation and making
the final catastrophe, though fearful, not hopeless,
as was the case with Israel. The example of Solo
mon had rendered idolatry in Judah almost ineradi
cable. Accustomed as the people had become
during that reign of splendor to temples of Baal
and Chemosh and other pagan gods, the impression
of an unrighteous liberality toward heathenism
could not be removed, and the heathen habit of
placing shrines on high places found many imita
tors even among the earnest worshipers of
Jehovah. Only four of the whole line of Judah's
kings were true enough and bold enough to destroy
these shrines on the high places. These four were
Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah. The
rest, even such good kings as Joash and Amaziah
and Uzziah, left these snares in the land, so calcu
lated to lead the people away from Jehovah. The
four kings, who removed these shrines, were the
four who were the chief restraints to the nation's
growing wickedness. Jehoshaphat was the son of
Asa, and their two reigns extended over sixty-four
years. These were certainly the best years of
Judah after David's time. Asa's time is called in

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 171
the record a time in which the Lord gave rest to
Judah. Twice during his long reign of over forty
years there was a threat of evil. The first was
when the Egyptian monarch invaded the land with
a vast host, but was signally defeated by Asa, and
the second was when Baasha, the usurper of Israel,
began movements against Judah on the northern
frontier. In this latter case Asa fell from his high
position of trust in God and sought aid from Ben
hadad of Syria, for which God's prophet Hanani
rebuked him and the angry prince put the faithful
prophet in prison. Such a stain is found on so
good a king. But a still darker stain is found on
good King Jehoshaphat, Asa's son, who reigned
twenty-five years. This excellent monarch, who
was so powerful as a prince and so exemplary as a
man of faith in God, and whose prayer to God was
answered by a marvelous victory over a formida
ble confederacy of the neighboring nations against
him, became so infatuated with a false notion of
union with Israel (perhaps with an idea of restoring
the old Davidic monarchy and its glory) that he
formed a close alliance with the depraved Ahab, and
took the daughter of Jezebel as a wife for his son
and successor. This intimacy and union between
the courts of Judah and Israel became the cause of
the direst evils to Judah, and did more for the

172 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
moral and religious corruption of the people than
any other event in the nation's history. Jezebel's
vile influence was felt at once at Jerusalem, and
when Jehoshaphat died, Jezebel's daughter,
Athaliah, was virtually ruler in Judah. For eight
years her husband, Jehoram, under her inspiration
made Judah to rival Israel with its bold idolatries,
and when he died, her son, Ahaziah, continued the
curse till he was slain with his uncle by Jehu on
his visit to the northern court. Then this new
Jezebel of Judah with the fierceness of a tigress
murdered all the members of the royal family and
seized the throne for herself, where she held her
own for six years, not knowing that one babe, a
child of her son's, had been preserved by its aunt,
the wife of Jehoiada, the priest, at the time of her
massacre of the royal family. Those fourteen
years of Athaliah's power in Judah were fearful
years. They sufficed to saturate the land with the
worst idolatries. And good Jehoshaphat had been
the cause of it all. So dangerous are the intimate
alliances of the godly with the depraved.
From the time when the noble priest Jehoiada
by a well-planned revolution overthrew Athaliah
and placed the youug Joash on the throne of his
ancestors to the time of Ahaz, a period of 137 years
there were only four kings and their reigns were

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 173
prosperous. Of each it is said that they did that
which was right in the sight of the Lord. Yet they
were not forward and zealous for the cause of God.
They allowed the high places to remain as places
of worship, and idolatry to manifest itself in rivalry
with the worship of Jehovah (2 Chron. 24. 18. 2
Kings 12. 3.— 14. 4.— 15. 4-35). The restraint
therefore, that these kings, Joash, Amaziah, Uzziah
and Jotham, put upon the moral decline of Judah
was very slight. Yet their four reigns were cer
tainly marked by political prosperity, with two
exceptional events, a successful raid of the Syrians
on Judah in the reign of Joash as a punishment for
the murder of the prophet Zechariah by the king,
and the capture of Jerusalem and its payment of a
heavy ransom to the king of Israel in the reign of
Amaziah as a punishment for the introduction of
Edomite gods into Judah after Amaziah's victory
over Edom. Uzziah's long reign of 52 years was
one of wonderful prosperity until in his pride he
dared to assume the function of the high-priest and
was smitten with leprosy, and from that time till
his death had to live apart from others in a separate
house as a leper and leave the active government
to his son Jotham.
This son Jotham, after Uzziah's death, main
tained the political prosperity of the country. But

174 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
the carelessness and compromises of these kings
had allowed the deep-seated corruption of the land
to increase, and when Jotham's son, Ahaz, came to
the throne at 20 years of age, the iniquity became
universal and flagrant. This young prince imitated
Solomon in his indiscriminate worship of all the
heathen gods. He erected images of Baal, the
Tyrian god, and he performed the cruel and bloody
rites of Moloch, the god of Ammon, in the valley
of Hinnom to the south of Jerusalem. It was this
heathenish abomination which probably made the
name of this valley a synonym of hell, Gehenna
being the Greek form of the Hebrew Ge-hinnom
(valley of Hinnom). This outburst of the corrup
tion, which had been to some extent kept under by
the preceding monarchs, brought upon Judah the
rod of the Almighty. He called the Syrians and
the people of the northern kingdom to descend upon
sinning Judah. A hundred and twenty thousand
of Judah's army fell in one day, and two hundred
thousand were led away for a time into captivity.
The Edomites and Philistines also attacked Judah
on the south and west, and the land, lately so pros
perous, was brought to the verge of utter desolation.
The depraved king then begged Tiglath-pileser the
new king of Assyria to come to his rescue, but
though that monarch assailed Syria and Israel, and

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 175
so relieved Ahaz for a time from his northern
enemies, yet the Assyrian monarch made Ahaz
pay so dearly for this help that the country was
impoverished and the people rendered more miser
able than ever.
It was at this crisis that the prophet Isaiah, who
had prophesied in the last year of Uzziah and
through the reign of Jotham, now stood up conspic
uously before Judah and denounced the abomina
tions of king, nobles and people, foretelling both
the severe judgments of God and also the salvation
which God would render to His faithful ones.
Isaiah's place in Judah was very much what
Elijah's place was in Israel 160 years before. It
was the place of warning a people that were fast
destroying themselves, and as the word of God by
Elijah and Elisha led to the overthrow of Ahab's
dynasty and the ameliorated condition of things
under Jehu's dynasty, so the word of God by Isaiah
led to the godly reign of Hezekiah, which gave
Judah thirty years of a prince like David 2 (Chron.
29.2). Hezekiah was with one exception the most exem
plary king Judah knew after the separation of the
northern kingdom. From the very first month of
his reign he began to undo the evils his depraved
father had created. By a thorough renewal of

176 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Jehovah's worship in its purity and an earnest invi
tation to the people of Israel to participate in the
ancestral services (to which, however, only a few
responded), and by a thorough destruction of idols
and idol altars and hill-top shrines throughout the
land, he restored order to his country and gained
the protection of God. The vast army of Assyria's
king, Sennacherib, was annihilated by a direct
stroke of the Almighty, as it was about to pounce
upon Jerusalem and destroy the nation. And yet
it seems as if Hezekiah and Isaiah stood almost by
themselves in thus saving their country. The
people generally were poisoned through and through
with the corruptions of idolatry and the manners
of the heathen. The personal character and force
of the king and prophet stayed the inevitable catas
trophe, so powerful before God is a single soul that
is faithful to the divine law.
Hezekiah's reign and its wonderful deliverance
was followed by the flood -tide of wickedness under
Manasseh, when the restraint of the good king and
the devoted prophet was removed. For fifty -five
years this monster of iniquity led the land in its
excesses, with the remarkable episodes of a personal
captivity in Babylon and a late repentance, and was
followed by two years of the equally vicious reign
of his son Amon, and then appeared the last of the

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 177
checks to Judah's destruction. This was Amon's
son Josiah, who at eight years of age became king,
and who at eighteen became an earnest reformer of
the kingdom. Whence he got hisdetermination to
serve the Lord we cannot tell. With such a father
and grandfather we should have expected a Nero or
a Caligula in Josiah. Perhaps a godly mother,
whose name is mentioned as Jedidah, was the secret
spring of Josiah's piety. He found co-adjutors in
his holy reforms in Shaphan the scribe and Hilkiah
the high-priest. Ahikan and Achbor are also men
tioned, together with Huldah, the prophetess, as
taking part in this last attempt at reformation. The
idols and idolatrous priests throughout the land
were exterminated, the houses of vice connected
with heathen temples together with the temples
themselves were razed to the ground and the valley
of Hinnom, which paganism had made sacred to its
abominations, was defiled and made a place to
deposit the filth of the city.
Even remnants of idolatry, which Hezekiah had
left, were destroyed by this ardent reformer (2
Kings 23. 12). The wizards aud magicians were
driven away, and, not content with purging Judah
of its idolatries, he passed into the northern coun
try, as far as his political power could extend (it
was a century after the deportation of Israel by
12

178 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
Assyria) and overthrew what remained of the old
Israelitish idolatry at Bethel and in the cities of
Samaria. It is of this godly monarch that the sa
cred record says, " like unto him was there no king
before him that turned to the Lord with all his
heart and with all his soul and with all his might
according to all the law of Moses, neither after
him arose there any like him." (2 Kings 23. 25.)
And yet twenty-one years after this good man's
death Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon, the great temple burned to the ground
and the people en masse carried captive to the dis
tant capital of the empire and its environs. For
this good king's sons were copies of the monster
Manasseh. Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin and
Zedekiah followed one another in those twenty-one
years, three of them sons, and one a grandson, of
Josiah. They were bold defiers of God and his
laws. The last three supposed that Egypt would
defend them from the threatening power of Baby
lon, and in this reliance they rebelled again and
again against the suzerainty of Nebuchad
nezzar. Three times that monarch came against
the revolting kingdom. One of the monarchs, Je
hoiakim he slew and another, Jehoiachin, he car
ried captive and on each of these occasions deported
large numbers of princes and others to Babylon,

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM. 179
until at last, wearied with their revolts, this mighty
Babylonian emperor laid siege to the city and after
eighteen months gained possession and utterly de-
stroj^ed it, slaying Zedekiah's children before him
and then putting out the wretched king's eyes.
During all these sad days, Jeremiah the prophet,
was the faithful witness for God and his truth, and
a few upright souls stood with him, but they were
like lambs in the midst of wolves, for the city was
a mass of turbulence and debauchery.
Such was the end of the monarchical experiment
for the church of God. The republican experi
ment had ended with the Philistine devastation
and Samuel became the healer of the dreadful
breach and the inauguration of the new monarch
ical system, and now the new experiment, so hope
ful in David, had proved equally a failure. The
nation was wrecked. The larger portion had dis
appeared from the face of the earth, or, at least,
from the page of history. And the remnant had
now been transported to a distant land. But there
was a ray of hope left. Jeremiah had predicted a
return after seventy years of punishment. Daniel
and Ezekiel were in Babylon among the captives
to testify for God and be the means of securing a
holy seed for that return. A third experiment
would be tried. A provincial condition under the

180 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
great monarchies of Persia, Greece and Rome
would be the last period of Israel's probation. For
that condition the exile would be a preparation.
By that the idolatrous poison would be extracted
from the people, and the remnant who should re
turn, according to Isaiah's prophecy, would at least
be free from that destroying sin. Though the na
tion was virtually extinct, the church of God still
lived, and the secret of its life was in the few, who,
amid all the overturnings and disasters of the age,
remained faithful to the God of Israel.

LECTURE XII.
THE EXILE.
The prophet Jeremiah, eighteen years before the
destruction of Jerusalem, uttered these words " Thus
saith the Lord of hosts, Because ye have not heard
my words, behold, I will send and take all the
families of the North, saith the Lord, and Nebuchad
rezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will
bring them against this land aud against the in
habitants thereof, and against all these nations
round about, and will utterly destroy them and
make them an astonishment and a hissing and per
petual desolations. Moreover I will take from them
the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the
voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride,
the sound of the millstones and the light of the
candle. And this whole land shall be a desolation
aud an astonishment, and these nations shall serve
the king of Babylon seventy years. And it shall
come to pass when seventy years are accomplished,
that I will punish the king of Babylon and that
nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the
land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual

182 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
desolations." Seven years later the same prophet
spake thus : " Thus saith the Lord, that after seventy
years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you
and perform my good word toward you in causing
you to return to this place." .( Jer. 25. 9-12 and
29. 10.)
The sacred writer of the Chronicles (2 Chron. 36.
21.) declares that these seventy years of Exile were
ordered of God that the land might enjoy sabbati
cal years to the number of those years that had
been neglected.
Now we find that from the first deporation
of Jews by Nebuchadnezzar in the year B. C.
606, when Daniel was one of the captives, to
the return of the Jews under Zerubbabel in B. C.
536 there were exactly seventy years, aud we also
find that from the destruction of the temple, by
Nebuchadnezzar in B. C. 586 to the sixtrfyear of
Darius, when the new temple was finished (B. C.
516) there were exactly seventy years. The former
period of seventy years would represent the politi
cal captivity and the latter the ecclesiastical cap
tivity of Judah. The deportation was of that
thorough sort which was customary in those days,
when monarchs of the great empires transferred
whole peoples to new positions, a thousand miles
distant, without any regard to the expense or the

THE EXILE. 183
cruelty, so as to prevent further insurrection by
separating the people from their institutions and
breaking down their spirit. Thousands would
perish, especially the women and children, in such
a migration, but that was nothing to these relentless
tyrants. The Jewish deportation must have been
attended with all the fearful incidents of such a
great calamity. Death, wounds, sickness, separa
tions, poverty, despondency, despair were the bitter
portion of Judah's cup. The royalty, priesthood
and nobility that had defied God and indulged in
their idolatrous practices and their reckless de
bauchery, proud of their wealth and power, were
now brought down to the level of slavery with the
lowest of the people, and in Babylon they learned
the painful lesson of humiliation and contempt.
Jerusalem, the holy and glorious city, was a ruin.
Its massive walls were broken down, its magnifi
cent temple and its rich palaces were ashes, its
treasures were in the coffers of the Babylonian king,
and the land, of which it had been the mistress,
was laid waste. The kingdom was no more. The
experiment begun with Saul and David was ended,
and ended in a dreadful failure. The church of God
survived, but the human shell in which it dwelt
was broken to pieces, and a new dwelling was to be
prepared for it through the furnace of affliction. Of

184 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
this period of the exile we are to note several im
portant characteristics.
I. It was an entire deportation. The only excep
tion was a few of " the poor of the land to be vine
dressers and husbandmen " (2 Kings 25. 12., Jer.
52. 16). Only a few were taken in Jehoiakim's
reign, when Daniel was carried captive, a larger
number were deported with Jehoiachin, seven years
later, but in the third visitation of the land by God's
arm of vengeance (as Nebuchadnezzar was) the
sweeping out of the inhabitants was complete. We
have noted the only exception. Such a wholesale
transfer of a people to a far distant land shakes to
pieces every structure of society. It obliterates all
old lines and makes a chaos, out of which a new
organization must arise. The local and the inherited
go for nothing. The national life is a tabula rasa.
Its story must begin again. There is a total sepa
ration from all that has gone before. It was this
thoroughness of treatment that Judah needed, in
order that it might still, as Judah, hold the church
of God till the Messiah should appear.
We must estimate the number of the nation
thus deported, after all the losses in siege and battle
and disease, as at least two millions, and these must
have been distributed all over Babylonia.
II. There was a. complete cessation of the Mosaic

THE EXILE. 185
ritual. The temple was burned. The vessels of
the temple were in the Babylonian treasury. There
could be no sacrifice or offering according to the
law. The functions of high-priest and priest were
suspended, the annual feasts were necessarily ig
nored, the ritual purifications were impossible and
the imposing rites of the Day of Atonement could
no more be seen. Two courses lay open for the
people. One was a merging into the Babylonian
nation, a union as far as possible with the life and
interests of the community into which they had
been brought, by which they would forget their
exile and improve their fortunes. Of course this
could be done only by a proportionate abandonment
of both patriotism and religion. A species of in-
differentism, at least, would mark the minds of those
Jews who would thus become practically Baby
lonians. Tho other course was to hold fast to the written
Law of God and to give heed to the teachings of
the Levites as those specially versed in that law.
(See Neh. 8. 7. for an illustration of this function of
the Levites in the succeeding century, and we may
not believe that it was then a new function, as Lev.
10. 11. and Deut. 33. 10. show the contrary.) This
course would demand a separate religious life
from the people around them, and would interfere

186 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
with their social and pecuniary successes. It would
be the course of self-denial. We should have an
ticipated that only the few would adopt this latter
course. The great majority of the Jews in Baby
lon became confounded with the heathen, so far as
any distinctive attachment to spiritual religion was
concerned. They may have preserved their na
tional traditions and social exclusiveness, as Jews
have done throughout the world since the final
ruin of their local services and habitation, but even
of this we are by no means certain, for what the
remnant, who returned to Judaea, have in the late
centuries done, may not be a guide as to what the
older Jews did iu the Babylonian day. It is quite
probable that the Jews in Babylon, who abandoned
their piety, also abandoned their distinctive na
tional and social unity and, like those of the ten
tribes who were carried to Mesopotamia and Me
dia, became wholly heathenized and lost to history
as Jews. It thus may be very true that the Af
ghanistan people are, as they declare themselves to
be, the descendents of the Jews, and many other
peoples of the earth, both pagan and Mohamme
dan, may now represent those who once were the
people of God in Israel and Judah.
At any rate the majority of the Jews in Baby
lonia were enamored of the commerce and worldly

THE EXILE. 187
enterprise of the land of their exile, and became
regardless of all the privileges and promises which
attached to God's ancient people. It was the small
minority who humbly sought the Lord in the place
of their captivity, and nursed the piety that was
to enjoy the return. Without temple and ritual,
they had a faithful prophet of God for twenty-
seven years, who ministered to them and endeav
ored to save the people from the worldly fascina
tions around them. Ezekiel, a priest, was chosen
of God to teach and warn the exiled nation, and it
was doubtless to his earnest labors that a remnant
of godliness was preserved in the nominal people
of God. He was among the first captives of Nebu
chadnezzar deported at the same time with Daniel
and many of his prophecies were uttered in Baby
Ion against the still existing Judah and Jerusalem
These prophecies were of the severest type. Eze
kiel also dealt sternly with those of the captivity
who showed no contrition of heart before the
Lord's judgment, while he denouuced the woes
that should come upon the enemies of Israel and
foretold the blessings in store for God's redeemed
people. How far . Daniel may also have been a teacher to
Israel in this time of the ritual's cessation, we can
not tell. That he was a devoted man of God, a
%

188 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
bold professor of his faith in the face of the most
formidable opposition, we certainly know. Be
longing to the royal family, and therefore attached
by Nebuchadnezzar to his court, he probably could
not get as near to his own people as could Ezekiel.
His special function in the course of Providence
seemed to have been to temper the minds of the
ruling powers toward the Jews, and to produce that
toleration which certainly did mark the general
treatment of Captive Israel by the Babjdonian
monarchy. To this end God bestowed upon him
marvelous powers in addition to a superior natural
genius. These made his influence at the court
supreme. He was to Nebuchadnezzar for forty
years, what Joseph had been to the Egyptian
Pharaoh more than a thousand years before.
Through such a distinguished man God made His
poor captive people to be regarded with respect
and saved them from the annihilating treatment
that the people of the Israelitish kingdom had
received from the Assyrian power a century and a
half previously. Daniel's unflinching faithfulness
to God puts him conspicuously in the same cate
gory with Hezekiah and Josiah as sustaining the
Davidic piety in the line of David. A prince, flat
tered for his accompliments, exalted to the high
est rank in the government, surrounded by a thou-

THE EXILE. 189
sand temptations to self-indulgence and sin, and
yet keeping himself unstained in his character and
pronounced in his adherence to God, was one of the
wonders of the world. The sublime courage by
which he maintained his spiritual separation from
the idolaters, with whom, including king and court,
he came into contact daily must have been a con
stant example and appeal to his countrymen,
although he may have been by his exalted posi
tion, personally unknown to them. So we have
Ezekiel, the priest and prophet, meeting the cap
tive Jews face to face and testifying for God, and
Daniel, the prince of the house of David, at a
greater distance but yet clearly seen by all, adding
his powerful testimony in the same direction,
while Israel was reft of its ritual. Who followed
Ezekiel when he died, we are not sure. Perhaps
Haggai continued what Ezekiel began, for Haggai
was an old prophet at the time of the building of
the second temple. Perhaps the high-priests became
godly instructors of the people as undoubtedly
Jeshua was on the return from exile. Many of the
priests and Levites seem to have retained their
spiritual sentiments, if we may judge from the
number who went back under Jeshua, although it
may be that in their case the expectation of posi
tion and influence in the renewed nation arising

190 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
from their office may have been a more unworthy
motive. At any rate, God provided for His people
throughout the term of their captivity, so that
though they were without temple or ritual ser
vices, they were not without instruction in divine
things. And here we mark our third thought regarding
the exile.
III. There was a thorough conversion from idola
try. It is most remarkable that the Jews, cast out
of their land because of their idolatry aud brought
into a land distinguished for the multitude of its
idols and the intensity of its idolatry, should there
learn to rid themselves not only of the practice,
but also pf the tendency. They went to Babylon
idolaters, they came back to Jerusalem sincere
worshipers of the one God. Of course we do not
mean that every Jew who went into captivity was
an idolater, nor do we mean that the worship of
Jehovah was extinct in the nation at the time of
the captivity. What we affirm is that idolatry,
and that of a very debased sort, abounded in Judah,
and Jehovah was treated as one of many gods to
whom the people offered their worship, when Nebu
chadnezzar carried them away. That amid this
corruption of worship, accompanied as it was with

THE EXILE.' 191
a corresponding corruption of morals, there were a
few who remained steadfast in their allegiance to
the true God and sighed over the abominations of
king and people there is no doubt. God always
preserves a seed to serve him. But, notwithstand
ing this, we are right in saying that the Jews car
ried to Babylon were idolaters, but the Jews return
ing from Babylon were rigid observers of the wor
ship of the one only and true God. Aud further
more, this devoted adherence (if not in a heart ser
vice yet in bold profession) to the one God con
tinued through all their subsequent history, so
that they never had again to be corrected for the
sin that in all their former history had been their
besetting sin, against which God had, through His
prophets thundered His severest threatenings.
Whether the- Jews, who had become absorbed in
the nations, had experienced this remarkable change,
we cannot tell. Probably not. But those that
returned were firm haters of idolatry. The exile
had proved successful. This great and deeply-
planted sin of Israel had been completely washed
away by the fierce billows of God's judgments.
No prophet ever complains of this sin after this.
It is worldliness, selfishness, formality, that form
the burden of prophetic denunciation after the
exile. Idolatry is a thing of the past. Surely

192 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
nothing but an extraordinary providence could have
effected this change. The ordinary workings of
events would have produced a far different result.
The fashionable idolatry of Babylon, the centre of
learning and power, would have captivated hearts
already fond of idolatrous services, and Israel would
have become more and more hopelessly an idola
trous people. Especially would this have been the
case, when the temple aud all its holy rites were
no more seen and enjoyed by them and could not
act as a constant reminder of Jehovah. We are
shut up to see the extraordinary hand of God in
this, in appropriate accompaniment with the pro
phetic spirit given to Ezekiel and the interpreting
spirit given to Daniel. Israel's whole history is a
supernatural history, and cannot be accounted for
on natural grounds. It is the effort to do this which
makes the German treatment of this history so
puerile and absurd.
The three chief characteristics, then, of the exile, as
we have attempted to show, were the entire deporta
tion of the nation, the complete cessation of the
Mosaic ritual and the thorough conversion from
idolatry. The judgment of God was made a bless
ing to Israel in accordance with the mercy ever
manifested by the Almighty in his dealings with
his people.

• THE EXILE. 193
That which seemed like annihilation was the
sowing of seed beneath the ground for a healthy
crop to start up in due time. The nation was
purged again for a new trial. Sinai had been one
starting-point, Ebenezer a second and now Baby
lon was to become a third. Marvels had accom
panied the start at Sinai, marvels accompanied the
start at Ebenezer, and now marvels accompany the
third start at Babylon. Not miracles do we mean,
but marvels, both prodigies from heaven and unex
pected providences upon the earth. There were
the thunderings and lightnings at Sinai, there was
a like voice of nature used by God in the day of
Ebenezer, and there were the marvels of the writing
on the wall and the abode of Daniel in the den of
lions that marked the close of Israel's exile. Be
sides this double prodigy granted to Daniel as
Israel's representative, in which we see the figures
of Israel's reading the mystery of God's truth and
of Israel's security amid the lions of Satanic enmity,
there was the providence that brought the Medes
and Persians down from the highlands of Asia
upon the Mesopotamian plain to destroy the old
centre of empire by the .Tigris and Euphrates.
From Nimrod's day down this great plain had been
for more than two thousand years the seat of
imperial power and civilization. But now a mount-
13

194 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
aiu people, reckoned rude by these cultured em
pires, was to swoop down from the Zagros heights
and, after subjugating all their rich lands, to remove
the seat of Empire to the Persian hills. And God
so ordered it that this Medo-Persian people, who
should accomplish this epoch-making change, should
be a monotheistic people, who by their sympathy
on this score with the Jews should be led to dis
charge them from their captive state and honor
them with gifts and privileges for their return to
Palestine. The force of this marvelous fact some have
tried lately to weaken, because an inscription has
been found, in which it is recorded that Cyrus, the
Persian conqueror, built the temples of Bel and
Nebo, and lavished honors upon these Babylonian
deities. This, say these enemies of God's truth,
ever ready to find a stone that they may cast at
the Bible, — this is a proof that Cyrus was a
polytheist, and that Isaiah as prophet and Ezra as
historian were both in error when they pic
tured Cyrus as a friend to the Jewish monotheism.
As if a monotheistic king might not for political
reasons act with toleration and even studious re
gard for the polytheism he found in the conquered
country, while at the same time heartily favoring
the monotheistic people he found dwelling as aliens

THE EXILE. 195
in the land. We do not believe that Cyrus was a
spiritual man, but a politically wise man, and as
such humored and honored his new subjects, while
in convictions he was a Zoroastriau and ¦ sincerely
favored the Jews and their religion, so that he
could honestly say in his proclamation for their re
turn, "Jehovah, the God of heaven, hath given me
all the kingdoms of the earth." (Ezra 1. 2.) In
this light we see that the Persian monarchy was
raised up to be a nursing father to God's people
and renew their national life in their own land.

LECTURE XIII.
THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD.
We learn from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah
that only 50,000 Jews returned from Babylon
under Zerubbabel aud Jeshua in response to
the proclamation of Cyrus. That proclamation
ran thus, "Thus saith Cyrus, king 'of Persia,
Jehovah, God of heaven hath given me all
the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged
me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in
Judah. Who is there among you of all his people,
— his God be with him, and let him go up to Jeru
salem which is in Judah, and build the house of
Jehovah, God of Israel, (he is the God) which is in
Jerusalem. And whosoever remaineth in any place
where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help
him with silver and with gold aud with goods and
with beasts, besides the free-will offering for the
house of God that is in Jerusalem." This proclama
tion was faithfully obeyed by the heathens, and -the
Jews were loaded with silver aud gold and goods
by the people, and Cyrus himself handed over to
the prince of Judah, who was to lead the return,

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 197
5400 vessels of gold and silver that had belonged
to the old temple and had been seized by Nebu
chadnezzar. Besides these gifts many of those who
returned had riches, of which they gave liberally
to the general cause. With all these favorable ac
companiments of the return, only 50,000 of the
whole nation availed themselves of the opportunity,
the rest remaining either from love for the foreign
life or from fear of the results of the new transfer.
It was 80 years afterward that the priest Ezra
made a new effort to carry back to Judah some of
the Babylonian Jews and succeeded in taking 1700
men (the women are not given) under a most favor
able proclamation of the king Artaxerxes. We have
put the number of the Jews who were carried cap
tive at two millions, judging from the wealth and
power of the land in Josiah's day, and remember
ing that in Amaziah's day that monarch had an
army of three hundred thousand choice men. If
our estimate be correct, and if we do not reckon
any increase in the 70 years, only one out of forty
Jews returned to Judah. It was a sad exhibition
of the prevailing indifference to all the privileges
and duties of God's covenant, a proof of the aliena
tion of the people from God and the need of their
thorough sifting. The 50,000 who returned were
the good wheat after the sifting, and yet we must

198 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
make an exception even here and surmise that
quite a number joined the returning expedition
from selfish and adventurous motives. Still it is
comfortable to believe that the majority of these
returning Jews came back by that long journey to
their ancestral land with devout gratitude to God
and in faithful service to Him. They were going to
a ruined capital and a wasted country. They were
going as a feeble folk among inimical tribes, but
with no power of arms to sustain and defend them,
and although Judah and the surrounding countries
were now provinces of Persia, yet the empire was
so new, aud affairs so unsettled, that these prov
inces, distant from the Persian capital, might act
very independently in contests with one another.
Hence, with all the royal send-off of the returning
Jews, there was a self-denial in the movement,
which probably tended to reduce the unworthy
members of the return to a minimum.
Two men appear conspicuous in the management
and conduct of the Return. These are Zerubbabel
or Sheshbazzar and Jeshua or Joshua. The former
was of the royal family of Judah, the latter the
higi -priest of Israel. They were both dignitaries,
and doubtless reckoned by Cyrus as the representa
tives of the civil and ecclesiastical sides of the
people. That they had any special qualities for

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 199
leadership besides that of birth and position it is
hard to tell. From the manner in which they
allowed the building of the new temple to drag, we
cannot argue for their eminent zeal and persistency,
and yet they obeyed the prophet Haggai, when he
aroused them to new exertion after years of delay,
caused by the neighboring enemies of Judah and
their intrigues with the Persian court. Young
Zechariah was joined with old Haggai in this
rebuke and appeal, aud under the influence of these
prophets Zerubbabel prosecuted the work of build
ing the temple with earnestness so that in four
years it was completed. The work had been
stopped for fifteen years, during which however
some of the people had built themselves fine houses
and, we may believe, had used in their construction
some of the cedar wood which had originally been
brought from Lebanon . for the new temple. But
though the temple had been so delayed, the daily
sacrifice had been renewed and the altar erected
from the very beginning.
The period from the Return to the birth of
Christ was one of five hundred and thirty-two
years. The Jewish people during this period were
a province of the Persian, the Macedonian and the
Roman empires. For two hundred and four years
they belonged to Persia, for two hundred and sixty-

200 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
nine years to the Macedonian monarchs, and the
the rest of the period to the Romans.
Under the Persian kings the Jews were pros
pered. Iu God's providence those first two cen
turies after the Return were peaceful, the yoke of
Persia being light and the disposition of the court
friendly. The new opportunity for the develop
ment of Judah in the ways of God was most favora
ble. With the temple rebuilt, with the priesthood
reinstated and with the counsel of prophets still
sent to the chosen people, they ought to have
grown in spiritual life. It is true they now abhor
red idolatry and not a taint of the sin that had before
cursed them was upon them now, but .they were
still inclined to forget that they were a separated
people to the Lord, and they continually showed a
tendency to adopt all the other habits of the heathen
except their formal idolatry. Covetousness, greed,
fraud, display and worldliness in general marked
these centuries, and marriage with the people of the
nations about them helped the spiritual decline.
Three events marked this Persian period, each of
which was a divine intervention to stay their fall.
The first was the coming of Ezra the priest seventy-
seven years after the Return with two or three
thousand Jews whom he had prevailed to come
with him from Babylon to Jerusalem. This de-

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 201
voted priest was under the divine guidance, "the
good hand of his God," as he uses the significant
phrase, and by his authority and energy worked a
reform with success, inducing multitudes of the
Jews to dissolve their social and matrimonial con
nections with the surrounding heathen. It is proba
ble that those whom Ezra brought with him from
Babylon were selected by him for their patriotism
and piety, the cream of the new generation, who
were born after the Return,>but who had an in
herited longing for the ancestral condition of sepa
ration unto God. If so, these would be a great
help in the work of reform and their coming to
Jerusalem" would be the leavening of the nation
with new zeal. Fourteen years after Ezra's expedi
tion to Jerusalem, Nehemiah, who was probably of
the old royal house of Judah, and who occupied a
high official position in the court of the Persian
monarch Artaxerxes, obtained leave to go to Jeru
salem as governor of the province and to rebuild its
walls, which had not been restored since their de
struction by Nebuchadnezzar 140 years before. The
Jews had since the Return, a period of ninety
years, dwelt in their capital as an open un walled
city, and the general peacefulness of the Persian
empire permitted this neglect of precautions against
the assaults of enemies. But Nehemiah's patriot-

202 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
ism was stirred when he had his attention called to
the exposed condition of the Holy City. The
reforms of Ezra seem also to have been but of tem
porary avail, and there was need of a strong charac
ter in Jerusalem again to revive the people in faith
fulness. Nehemiah's visit to Jerusalem in the year
B. C. 446, was the second divine intervention after
the Return to stay the decline of the people in their
allegiance to God. He inspired the people with
energy and the walls were built in a marvelously
short period in the face of formidable .threatenings
from the Samaritans and others, and while there
were many disaffected traitors within the city.
Nehemiah was soon joined by the priest Ezra
again, who had probably been iu Babylon after his
reforming- work, and the two, governor and priest,
used the most diligent measures to instruct the
people in the truth and to separate them from their
heathen neighbors, with whom they had made the
most intimate alliances, the high-priest's family
being a leader in this iniquity which threatened
the stability of church and nation.
Nehemiah repeated his vist to Jerusalem twelve
years later aud had to use strong measures against
the same tendency of the people, especially those of
high rank, to throw down the barrier of social in
tercourse between the Jews and the Gentiles. The

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 203
high-priest had not only married his grandson to
Sanballat's daughter, but had prepared a dwelling
for Tobiah, the Ammonite noble, within the sacred
precincts of God's temple.
The third intervention of God to stop Judah's
decline during the Persian period was the appear
ance of Malachi, the last of the prophets, who
probably prophesied in Judah a generation later
Nehemiah. The words of this prophet show that
both priests and people had become indifferent to
God's service, and with a formal religion exhibited
a scene of vice, oppression and superstition almost
equal to that which the nation had exhibited in the
old days of idolatry. There were only a few who
still earnestly feared aud served the Lord and who
encouraged one another amid the prevailing ini
quity. With Malachi the supernatural in- Judah ended.
The Spirit of God withdrew from a people so
determined in their resistance to the truth. For
four hundred years the nation was to live a sort of
twilight life until a new day should arise; a day
not now for the one nation, but for all nations,
wherein the light should shine on the Gentile
world, and all mankind should greet the Messiah.
The connection between Israel in its best estate
and the church of Christ at Pentecost was to be a

204 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
very attenuated thread of godly men and women
amid a self-willed and worldly people, covering
their sins with a lifeless formalism.
When, two hundred years after the return, the
Macedonian power overthrew the Persian empire
aiid the Greek language and manders spread so
wonderfully through the Orient, the Jews became
infected Avith the Hellenic culture to a surprising
extent. The higher classes courted the Greek
fashions in society and politics. Under the Syro-
Greek kings of the line of Seleucus, Jews dressed
like Greeks and talked like Greeks. The Greek
language was the sign of high breeding. The old
Hebrew names of Jacob and Zadok and Shimei
and Mattahiah gave way to Alexander and Jason
and Aristobulus and Menelaus. Greek amphithe
atres were established in the cities and Greek games
were celebrated in them. Against this Hellenic
tide a slight breakwater was erected first by the
Maccabean revolution, and afterward (when the
Maccabees themselves hellenized by the sect of
the Pharisees.
The Maccabean revolution occurred in the year
B. C. 167, a hundred and seventy years after the
Macedonian conquest. The occasion was the cruel
oppression of the Syro-Greek king Antiochus IV.
(Epiphanes) who endeavored to stamp out the dis-

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 205
tinctive nationality and religion of his Jewish
province, and who carried out this endeavor by the
basest pollution of the holy temple and by the
fearful slaughter of the Jewish people. An aged'
priest at Modin began the revolt by slaying an
officer of Antiochus, and calling upon "his country
men to resist the tyrant in the name of God. This
old priest with his five sons made a rendezvous in
the mountains and gathered an army of patriots.
The old priest soon died and Judas his son, called
Maccabaeus, (or the Hammer) became the hero of
the war. The struggle lasted twenty-eight years,
ending in the independence of the Jewish state
under Simon the brother of Judas. The war was
somewhat a religious war, a priestly family leading
it, and the defence of religion and religious separa
tion being the ostensible reason for the insurrec
tion. But, nevertheless, it was largely a civil
strife, with a burning patriotic desire for political
independence actuating the people. Simon aud his
son John Hyrcanus held authority over the nation
as high-priests, so constituted by the people, the
direct line of the high-priesthood apparently hav
ing lapsed. But Aristobulus the grandson of
Simon adopted the title of king and five of the
Maccabean family followed on the throne, but only
two of these reigned in an independent kingdom,

206 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
for in the reign of the third Pompey entered Jeru
salem, and Judaea became virtually a Roman prov
ince. The Maccabasan kingdom as an independent
kingdom lasted but a little over 70 years.
It was during this monarchy that the Pharisees
arose, a sect who were protestants against the Hel-
lenizing tendencies of the royal family and the
nation. Alexander Jannaeus, the son of John
Hyrcanus, had become a thorough Greek in his style
and habits, and he treated these Pharisees with
relentless cruelty, but his wife Alexandra who suc
ceeded him on the throne was their fast friend and
patroness. The Pharisees formed the purer part
of the Jewish nation, and there were doubtless
among them many truly godly persons, but as a
whole their effort was rather to preserve the out
ward ancestral religion and the independence of the
nation from foreign contamination than to establish
a spiritual life. And to a large extent their efforts
were successful. There can be no doubt that their
zeal accomplished much to check the Hellenism of
the land, and to keep the Jewish people within
their old circumscriptions.
It was during the Macedonian period that the
Hellenic spirit started a new impulse in literature
among the Jews, wholly different in kind however
from that which had marked the people in more

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 207
.ancient times. This new literature was in the
Greek language and not the Hebrew, and much of
it had its birth-place in Egypt where so many of
the Jews resided in Alexandria, in which place the
great Alexander had given them peculiar privileges.
This literature was separated by two or three cen
turies from the last of the prophets and was never
oonfounded by the Jews with their sacred writings.
The remains of this literature form what we now
know as the Apocrypha. It varies much in its
style and character. Some of it, like Ecclesiasticus
and the first book of the Maccabees, is wholesome
and dignified composition, while other portions, like
Tobit, Judith and Susanna, are weak aud puerile.
We are now brought to the Roman period which
may be said to begin in the year B. C. 63, when
Pompey the Great became master of Jerusalem.
From that time Rome was the lord of Judaea. By
his intriguing with Rome, Herod, the Idumean, set
aside the Maccabaean princes, married into the
family and set himself on the throne. . For forty
years he ruled with a skilled but cruel hand, be
coming a terror to his own country and a wonder of
savagery to the Roman Emperor. It was near the
close of his long reign, in which he had embellished
Jerusalem and built many magnificent cities
throughout the land, that Jesus was born at Bethle-

208 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
hem, and was carried to Egypt to escape the fangs
of the monster. -
We have now noted the three periods of Jewish
history between the Return and Christ, the 204
years, when Judaea was a peaceful Persian province,
the 269 years in which it was a Macedonian (Syrp-
Greek) province, including, however, 72 years of
independence, and the 63 years in which it was
tributary to Rome. We have seen how the first
period was misimproved, and the nation showed its
old tendency to depart from God, not now in idol
atry, but in the forms of vice and violence, and how
in the second period it was involved in war and
disaster, until in the third period, under the iron
hand of imperial Rome, it was ready to be utterly
destroyed, the promised Messiah having come.
If we had entered Jerusalem in the time pf
Herod, we should have found a city of a Graecp-
Roman character, with theatre, xystus, praetorium,
the Greek language spoken in the streets, the cos
tumes largely of Greek or Roman type, the inscrip.-
tions often in Latin, and Roman soldiers reviewed
in the public squares. "But with all this we should
have seen a bigoted and turbulent populace, proud
of their Semitic blood, sticklers for the details of
their hereditary ritual, insisting on preserving the
precincts of their sanctuary free from the tread of a

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 209
Gentile, and ready to die for these ends, and we
should have seen, mingled with the adherents of
foreign manners, the turbaned Pharisees with their
broad phylacteries, whom this bigoted populace
reverenced as the models of piety and learning.
Here and there, too, we should have seen an Essene
with his eyes downcast, a thorough Oriental ascetic,
who counted the Pharisee as heterodox as the
Pharisee counted the Hellenizing or Romanizing
Jew. But among all these we should have looked
in vain for an Israelite of the old Davidic type, for
any who felt the elevating power of the Spirit of
God and communed with God in the use of the
sacred ritual, with the exception of here a Simeon
and there an Anna, who had amid the prevailing
corruption found refuge from the dense worldliness
of the nation in a retired life of prayer.
. It was thus to a people thrice-tried and thrice
proved worthless, that Messiah came, and at a time
when almost every spark of piety had died out, and
all the means of grace had become mere foundations
of pride and contention. More than fourteen cen
turies of God's long suffering had been showed
them, and now the final scene of judgment was at
hand. Messiah would with a Jewish remnant
form a Gentile church — the spiritual sceptre would
depart from Judah — and the old covenant would be

210 BIBLE VIEW OF THE JEWISH CHURCH.
ground to powder under the falling walls of the
temple. In this brief survey of the history of God's
ancient people we have noted that Israel was not a
nation gradually growing out of barbarism into
mental and moral strength by reason of inherent
Hfe, as the fashionable philosophers of the day
would make it, but a nation possessing already a
degree of culture by its training from Abraham to
Moses, gifted with a divine revelation and a com
plete gospel in ritual type, and furnished with in
spired instructors, and, with all these marvelous
advantages, steadily declining in its moral status
for the whole fourteen or fifteen centuries, except
where divine interventions stayed the decline and
started the people anew on a fresh plane of oppor
tunity. In this history of Israel we see in epitome the
story of man in general, ever sinking away from
God, while God offers him again and again the
opportunity of return and a new trial. The lesson
to us is most emphatic, the lesson of human weak
ness, and the necessity of trust positive and implicit
in the Divine grace for the true hfe.
The Church of God can have no self-reliance.
Self-reliance corrupts and destroys it. The church
must be guided by the written law given through

THE POST-EXILIAN PERIOD. 211
men who were moved by the Holy Ghost. The
church has no patent of impunity. Its sins will be
severely dealt with. Judgments will begin at the
house of God. The fate of Israel shows us the folly
of trusting to the bulwarks of forms and names and
offices, all which the wrath of God will sweep
away, if the Spirit of God is not dwelling within
the forms and the church is not partaker of the
divine holiness. The Christian church has no more
guarantee of security than had the Jewish church.
Worldliness, if cherished, will be its destruction,
and in godliness only is its pledge of life.

THE END.