7: 6 How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

7. This thy stature is like to a palm tree, And thy breasts to its clusters.

8. I said, I will climb up into the palm tree, I will take hold of the branches thereof: Let thy breasts be as clusters of the vine, And the smell of thy breath like apples;

9. And thy mouth like the best wine, That goeth down smoothly for my beloved, Gliding through the lips of those that are asleep.

10. I am my beloved’s, And his desire is toward me.

11. Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; Let us lodge in the villages.

12. Let us get up early to the vineyards; Let us see whether the vine hath budded, and its blossom be open, And the pomegranates be in flower: There will I give thee my love.

13. The mandrakes give forth fragrance,

And at our doors are all manner of precious fruits, new and old,

Which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.

8: 1 Oh that thou wert as my brother,

That sucked the breasts of my mother!

When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee;

Yea, and none would despise me.

2. I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house,

Who would instruct me;

I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine,

Of the juice of my pomegranate.

3. His left hand should be under my head,

And his right hand should embrace me.

4. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

That ye stir not up, nor awaken love,

Until it please.

5. Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness,

Leaning upon her beloved?

Under the apple tree I awakened thee:

There thy mother was in travail with thee,

There was she in travail that brought thee forth.

6. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm:

For love is strong as death;

Jealousy is cruel as the grave:

The flashes thereof are flashes of fire,

A very flame of the LORD.

7. Many waters cannot quench love,

Neither can the floods drown it:

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,

He would utterly be contemned.

8. We have a little sister,

And she hath no breasts:

What shall we do for our sister

In the day when she shall be spoken for?

9. If she be a wall,

We will build upon her a turret of silver.

And if she be a door,

We will inclose her with boards of cedar.

10. I am a wall, and my breasts like the towers thereof:

Then was I in his eyes as one that found peace.

11. Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon;

He let out the vineyard unto keepers;

Every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.

12. My vineyard, which is mine, is before me:

Thou, O Solomon, shalt have the thousand,

And those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.

13. Thou that dwellest in the gardens,

The companions hearken for thy voice:

Cause me to hear it.

14. Make haste, my beloved,

And be thou like to a roe or to a young hart

Upon the mountains of spices.

6-10. The king and the bride. Vs. 6-9 are spoken by the king, and v. 10 by the bride. The king addresses the bride, comparing her to palm, vine, and apple-tree for nobility of form and pleasantness of fruit; and the utterances of her mouth to sweetest wine. T. L. K.

It is scarcely necessary to reiterate that these conceptions and illustrations of personal beauty and form are altogether Oriental in their cast, and cannot therefore be judged of in all respects by the standard of our age and country. This is wedded love, thoroughly mutual and promptly responsive, such as takes hold of the deepest sensibilities of our being. Here, too, as throughout this exquisite poem, it manifests the richest sympathy for rural life and for the thousand beauties and charms with which God has invested the face of this fair world. Need it surprise us that God should seize upon this strong and rich affection of human souls to illustrate the love He bears to His people and the responsive love which His Spirit begets in their hearts to Himself in return? Where else can a more vivid and perfect illustration of this spiritual love be found? H. C.

10. His desire is toward me. All His affection has me for its object. The comparison of chaps. 2: 16 and 6: 3 confirms this interpretation. The bride is for the king a true Hephzibah (Isa. 63: 4), one in whom is all his delight. She proceeds to exercise her power over his loving will.

The bride’s invitation (7: 11; 8: 4). Responsive and antithetical to that of the king on the day of their espousals, in which he had asked her to forsake home and occupation for his sake (4: 8), and dwell with him in Jerusalem. The bride in her turn now invites her beloved to revisit in her company the lowly scenes of pastoral life, out of which his grace had raised her, and to which (though once forsaken at his bidding) her heart still innocently clings.

12. It is now again precisely the same season as that in which the king had first visited the bride on that well-remembered morning (2 : 8-17) in her mother’s house. This thought enhances her desire to have him with her there again.

8 : 1. The bride continues to address the king. The thought of home and of having his presence with her there fills her heart. Royal rank and splendor are grown wearisome. The king once called her “sister” and “sister-bride.” Would he were indeed as a “brother,” her mother’s own child whom she might meet, embrace, and welcome everywhere without restraint or shame. Her love for him is simple, sacred, pure, free from the unrest and the stains of mere earthly passion.

2. Who would instruct me. Another rendering gives a better sense both literal and allegorical — thou shouldest teach me (Isa. 54 : 13).

3. His left hand should be. The bride now turns to and addresses the chorus as before (2 : 6, 7). It is an exact repetition of 2 : 6, and here rightly rendered as expressing a wish, not as stating a fact. It introduces the last repetition of the bride’s charge (v. 4), which forms the conclusion of this part of the Song. T. L. K.

THE RETURN HOME. Vs. 5-14.

Last Vows Sealed. Vs. 5-7.

The scene changes from Jerusalem to the birthplace of the bride, where she is seen by former associates and the members of her family coming up from the open champaign toward her mother’s house, leaning on the arm of the great king her beloved.

5. Who is this? Compare and contrast with chap. 3 : 6, and following. There the bride is carried in procession, and with regal state, to meet the king her bridegroom ; here in sole companionship with him, and rustic simplicity, she leans on him as her beloved. In the former scene all is splendor and exaltation, but here condescension, humility, and loving charm.

Beneath this apple-tree I wakened thee. Masoretic pointing of the Hebrew text (the most ancient traditional interpretation to which we can appeal) assigns these words to the bride, but the majority of Christian Fathers to the king.

The whole passage gains in clearness by the latter arrangement, which supposes two speakers, first the king, reminding the bride of a happy past, and then the bride, taking occasion from his words to ask for an assurance of his enduring affection (vs. 6, 7).

6,7. Set me as a seal, etc. The bride says this as she clings to his arm and rests her head upon his bosom. This brief dialogue corresponds to the longer one (4 : 7-5 : 1), on the day of their espousals. There the beloved sought and claimed the bride, here she seeks and clings to him.

6. For love is strong. This glorious assertion of the might and purity of true love gives the key-note of the poem. It forms, as Delitzsch has well observed, the Old Testament counterpart to Paul’s panegyric (1 Cor. 13) under the New. The following is an attempt to analyze it. Love is here regarded as a universal power, an elemental principle of all true being, alone able to cope with the two eternal foes of God and man, death and his kingdom (Sheol).

" For strong as death is love, Tenacious as Sheol is jealousy."

“Jealousy” is here to be taken only as another term for “love,” expressing the inexorable force and ardor of this affection, which can neither yield nor share possession of its object, and is identified in the mind of the sacred writer with Divine or true Life ; so he goes on to describe it as an all-pervading fire, kindled by the Eternal One, and partaking of His essence : “A very flame of the Lord.” If this be the right interpretation of the Hebrew word Shalbebeth-Jab, the poet of the Old Testament surpasses even Paul, and rises here to an intuition subsequently reserved for John, and by him attained only through a life-long communion with incarnate love : “God is love ; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4 : 16). This Divine principle is next represented as overcoming in its might all opposing agencies whatsoever, symbolized by water as the antagonistic element to fire in the natural world :

" Waters many have not power To quench this love, Nor streams to overwhelm it."

They may in a thousand forms hiss and strive against it, but the heavenly fire will be triumphant in the end. From all which follows that love, even as a human affection, must be reverenced, and dealt with as having its motive-power in itself, and not to be bought by aught of different nature; the attempt to do this awakening only scorn:

“Though one should give all substance of his house for love,

With scorn should he be scorned.”

Of such love as this, pure, unbought, and changeless, we believe that the Song of Songs was, in the first instance, designed to give an idealized representation. T. L. K.

In possession of her beloved, the Shulamite now sings of the strength of the bond which unites them to each other—love in all its sublimity. Love is not a feeling having its origin in man; it cannot, therefore, be purchased at any price. It is a flame of Jah (Jehovah), kindled by Him, and of which the supreme object should be Himself. The passion of the rich man who offers everything without giving himself will be treated with contempt, while the true love of the God who brings no present but who gives Himself has in it a power which can measure itself victoriously even against that of death and of the grave. Godet.—Verily, all His life was love: His suffering was fellow-suffering; His death a sacrifice of such priceless value, because it was the highest act of love, which at the cost of His own life sought only our salvation. And certainly He who thus loved still loves. Death cannot quench His love; no distance of time or place can limit it; no unfaithfulness on our side can blunt it. Glorious Gospel of the unbounded, the unquenchable love of Jesus for each, for all His people. This love is the burden of a song of which eternity itself shall never hear the close! Van O.

Some have been tempted to wish that the poem itself had closed with this triumphant strain, and some have even ventured to regard what follows as a spurious addition. Both were wrong. The concluding scene has its own significance and beauty, besides throwing light upon the past, and helping to illustrate the meaning of the whole.

The Bride’s Intercession. Vs. 8-12.

A brief dialogue, commencing with a question and answer probably made by the brothers of the bride concerning a younger sister who will soon be old enough to be asked in marriage. How shall they provide for her when the day comes, or so that it may come well? The answer is given in the form of a parable: “If she be a wall,” i.e., steadfast in chastity and virtue, one on whom no light advances can be made, then let us honor and reward her. This fortress-wall shall be crowned as it were with a tower or battlement of silver. But “if she be a door,” light-minded and accessible to seduction (Prov. 7:11, 12), then let us provide against assailants the protection of a cedar-bar or panel. In either case they wish to show themselves as mindful of the safety of their younger sister as formerly of that of the now exalted bride (1:6; 2:15).

10. I am a wall. The bride herself replies with the pride of innocence and virtue already crowned. She has shown herself to be such a fortress-wall as her brothers have alluded to, and her reward has been the royal favor, or, as she phrases it for the sake of a paronomasia, “her finding peace in the eyes of the peaceful one—Shalom with Shelomoh.”

11. Solomon had a vineyard. She next turns to the king, and commends her brothers to his favorable regard by means of another parable. Solomon owns a vineyard in Baal-hamon. This vineyard he has let out to tenants who have each to pay a rent-charge of a thousand silverlings into the royal treasury. The application follows.

12. My vineyard, which is mine. The bride also has a vineyard of her own (1:6), her beauty and virtue faithfully guarded by these same brothers in time past. This vineyard now belongs to Solomon. Let him have “the thousand” which is his due—she is indeed herself henceforth entirely his—but let the faithful keepers have their meed as well. At least two hundred silverlings should be theirs—a double tithe of royal praise and honor.

13. The poem concludes with a versicle recited by the bride, renewing, at his request and for his ear, the memory of their first day of love.

14. Make haste. Better, Flee, my beloved. The bride complies with the king’s request by repeating the last words of her former strain (2:17), with one significant change. She no longer thinks of the possibility of separation. The “Mountains of Bether” (division) of chap. 2:17 are now “Mountains of Besamim” (spices). His haunts and hers are henceforth the same (compare 4:6). T. L. K.—Thus the voice of the bride, which opens the poem, lingers on the ear in its close, and suggests to us that the whole is as if from her standpoint the aspiration of an ideal love, breathing itself out in desire after the beloved object—that the king may delight himself in her beauty. Redford.

To common view, the Song of Songs seems to close abruptly. But the spiritual interpretation gives to it great emphasis and beauty, and renders it a most fitting termination of this high discourse. It is an aspiration on the part of the Church, or of the individual soul, that the Lord will come and make good all the things that have been represented in these raptures of heavenly love. It closes, in fact, like the last book of the New Testament; “He that testifieth of these things, saith, Surely, I come quickly; Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Kitto, —However one may interpret this inspired book, it will to the end of the ages furnish the Christian with the imagery and vocabulary of adoring love to Jesus, the lover of our souls. Griffis.

Communion with Christ may be interrupted, though union is not broken. From their own experience saints understand the alternations of withdrawal and manifestation on the part of the beloved, related in the Song. He is not always in the garden, or always at the table with them, but is in Lebanon or in the top of Hermon; and when they miss Him, He often comes to them speedily and as with a sweet surprise, like a hart leaping on the mountains, and bounding on the hills. “His love in my heart casteth a mighty beat; He knoweth that the desire I have to be at Himself paineth me. I have sick nights and frequent fits of love-fevers for my well-Beloved. Nothing paineth me now but want of presence. I think it long till day. I challenge time, as too slow in its pace, that holdeth my only, only true One, my well-Beloved from me. Oh, if we were together once!” Rutherford.—The Church now loves an unseen Saviour. She longs for her absent Lord, to whom she is joined in the marriage covenant, and for whose presence she is being prepared and adorned with holy beauties by the Holy Ghost. “Rise up, my Beloved!” is her prayer. She waits the happy hour, when the Lord will gather His saints as the bride, and take them to the high mountains to be forever with Him. “Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Comfort one another with these words, all ye who love His appearing! We have no relish for controversy about the time and manner of the Advent; but we do want more realization of it as our “blessed hope,” more thirst and more meetness for His presence. Let it be added, that this comes in well after the Book of Ecclesiastes. The weariness of heart under the sun is best cured by the fervor of spirit expressed in the Song of Songs. The world’s vanity has no power to occupy or chafe those who are full of a Divine and heavenly love. The world’s gayeties are nothing to hearts which are possessed by the “blessed hope,” or thrilled with a joy unspeakable. D. F.

Thus closes this exquisite Song, of which one cannot easily say whether most to admire its poetic beauty, its painting of wedded love, or its transcendent presentation of the love which Jesus bears to His people and which they should, and sometimes do, bear to Him. The latter, which I take to be the real significance of the poem, is a theme of exhaustless interest; the theme which wakens the strongest and purest emotions ever known to the Christian heart in this life; the theme which is destined to swell the song of the redeemed in their eternal home of purity and bliss. H. C.

[The titles and publishers of leading works, additional to those given in previous volumes, are here appended to the names of authors. A helpful service in the interest of readers and writers is thus subserved.]

Thomas Adams, 1614.

W. H. D. Adams.

William Adams, D.D.

Joseph Addison, d. 1719.

Rev. A. S. Aglen.

Henry Ainsworth, D.D., d. 1622.

J. W. A. Jas. W. Alexander, D.D.

Bp. W. A. Bp. William Alexander.

W. L. A. Wm. L. Alexander, D.D.

Henry Alford, D.D.

Richard Alleine, d. 1681.

Rev. J. K. Allen.

Henry Allon, D.D.

American Theol. Review.

Joseph Anderson, D.D.

M. B. Anderson, D.D.

Anon. An Unknown Writer.

Thomas Arnold, D.D.

William Arnot, D.D.

John Arrowsmith, d. 1659.

Merle D’Aubigne.

Augustine, d. 430.

C. E. Babb, D.D.

Lord Bacon, d. 1626.

John Balguy, D.L., d. 1748.

A. B. Albert Barnes.

Isaac Barrow, D.D., d. 1677.

John H. Barrows, D.D.

W. F. V. Bartlett, D.D.

John Bascom, D.D.

Basil, d. 379.

William Bates, D.D., d. 1699.

Richard Baxter, d. 1691.

Rev. E. Bayley.

Rev. H. W. Beecher.

A. J. F. Behrends, D.D.

James Bennett, D.D.

Jeremy Bentham, 1747-1832.

H. H. Bernard, D.D.

T. D. Bernard, D.D.

E. Bersier, D.D.

Bp. Wm. Beveridge, d. 1708.

T. B. Thomas Binney, D.D.

W. G. B. Wm. G. Blaikie, D.D.

Hugh Blair, D.D.

G. D. B. George D. Boardman, D.D.

Rev. Geo. Body.

Henry M. Booth, D.D.

Prof. Francis Bowen.

Rev. George Bowen.

A. K. H. B. Rev. A. K. H. Boyd.

Rev. E. H. Bradby.

Rev. Wm. Braden.

Rev. Charles Bradley.

Geo. G. Bradley, D.D.

James Brand, D.D.

Brentius, d. 1570.

Rev. Chas. Bridges.

Bp. Phillips Brooks.

Thomas Brooks, d. 1680.

W. R. Brooks, D.D.

Rev. J. B. Brown.

Sir Thomas Browne, d. 1682.

Jas. Bruce, d. 1794.

James Buchanan, D.D.

Jos. S. Buckminster, D.D.

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Jabez Burns, D.D.

Burr. E. F. Burr, D.D. Puter Mundi, Etc.

J. K. Burr, D.D. Book of Job.

Elihu Burritt.

Rev. J. L. Burrows.

H. B. Horace Bushnell, D.D.

Bp. Joseph Butler, d. 1752.

Rev. H. M. Butler.

W. A. B. Wm. Archer Butler, D.D.

B. J. Glentworth Butler, D.D.

George W. Cable.

John Caird, D.D.

A. Calmet, d. 1757.

Rev. G. Calthrop.

John Calvin, d. 1574.

Richard Caren, 1652.

Thomas Carlyle.

Bp. Boyd Carpenter.

Hugh S. Carpenter, D.D.

Rev. Samuel Carr.

Rev. T. T. Carter.

Joseph Caryl, d. 1673.

A. Caspars, D.D.

Rev. R. Cecil.

T. C. Thomas Chalmers, D.D.

Robert Chambers.

T. W. C. Talbot W. Chambers, D.D.

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W. E. Channing, D.D.

C. Chapman, D.D.

Leonard Chappelow, d. 1768.

Stephen Charnoch, d. 1680.

G. B. C. George B. Cheever, D.D.

Lord Chesterfield, 1745.

T. K. Cheyne, D.D.

Christian Advocate, (N. Y.)

M. T. Cicero.

Lord Clarendon.

Adam Clarke, D.D.

S. Clarke, D.D., d. 1682.

S. Clark, D.D., d. 1729.

Rev. C. Clemance.

Rev. J. Clements.

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Joseph Cook.

Prof. Josiah Cooke. Religion and Chemistry.

Rev. G. Coombe.

Rev. J. Coombes.

Rev. E. Cooper.

Rev. E. Copley.

R. Cordley, D D.

Bp. G. E. L. Cotton.

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Rev. Samuel Cox.

Rev. Samuel Crook.

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J. T. Davidson, D.D.

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David Dickson, d. 1662.

Dillmann.

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John Donne, d. 1631.

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Rev. James Drummond.

Rev. J. Duncan.

William Dyer, 1696.

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Sir Matthew Hale. William Hales, D.D., d. 1819. C. Cuthbert Hall, D.D. John Hall, D.D. Bp. H. Bp. Joseph Hall. Newman Hall, D.D. Robert Hall, D.D. Rev. J. N. Hallock. The Christian Life. James Hamilton, D.D. Royal Preacher. Henry Hammond, D.D., d. 1660. William Hanna, D D. Rev. A. W. Hare. Rev. J. C. Hare. J. H. John Harris, D.D. Samuel Harris, D.D. Edward Heath, 1756. H. Matthew Henry, D.D., d. 1714. J. G. Herder. S. E. Herrick, D.D. A. C. H. Bp. A. C. Hervey. J. A. Hessey, D.D. Boyle Lectures, 1873. Rev. J. W. Hicks. Richard Hill. Bernard Hodgson, 1785. H. S. Holland, D.D. J. G. Holland, d. 1881. O. W. Holmes, M.D. Rev. E. P. Hood. H. H. Heman Hooker, D.D. Ellice Hopkins. Bp. Ezekiel Hopkins, d. 1690. M. H. Mark Hopkins, D.D. Bp. George Horne, d. 1792. John Howe, D.D., d. 1705. Rev. J. Howell. Wm. D. Howells. Rev. E. Hull. F. D. H. Bp. Fredk. D. Huntington. Benj. Ibbot, d. 1725. The Interior, (Chicago.) Washington Irving. J. J. Bp. John Jackson. Rev. J. Angell James. Rev. A. Jessopp. Herrick Johnson, D.D.

Rev. Wm. H. Karslake. John Keble, D.D. J. F. Keil, D.D. Commentaries. Thomas a Kempis, d. 1471. John Ker, D.D. T. L. K. T. L. Kingsbury, D.D. Bib. Com. Song of Solomon. Rev. Charles Kingsley. John Kitto, D.D. Daily Bib. Illus., etc. J. H. Kurtz, D.D. Charles Lamb. J. G. Lansing, D.D. Rev. Joseph Lathrop. Stanley Leathes, D.D. R. Lee, D.D. S. V. Leech, D.D. L. Arcbp. Robert Leighton, d. 1684. G. H. Lewes. T. L. Tayler Lewis, LL.D. Book of Job, Lange. W. H. Lewis, D.D. H. P. L. H. P. Liddon, D.D. John Locke, d. 1704. London Congregationalist. Bp. Robert Lowth, d. 1787. Martin Luther, d. 1546. R. S. McArthur, D.D. T. B. Macaulay. R. M. McCheyne, D.D. Henry C. McCook, D.D. James McCosh, D.D. J. M. M. J. M. Macdonald, D.D. Ecclesiastes. J. R. Macduff, D.D. Norman McLeod, D.D. A. M. Alexander Maclaren, D.D. R. P. Macmaster. N. McMichael, D.D. Hugh Macmillan, D.D. Rev. T. McRae. Archbp. Wm. Magee, d. 1831. Asa Mahan, D.D. Mahomet. H. E. Manning, D.D. Bp. Richard Mant. T. M. Thomas Manton, d. 1667.

Frederick Marquand. Bp. Martensen. Rev. Samuel Martin. Erskine Mason, D.D. John Mason, d. 1763. William Mason, d. 1791. Spiritual Treasury. George Matheson, D.D. M. F. Maury, LL.D. Rev. E. Mellor. Henry Melvill, D.D. Rev. G. S. Merriam. Methodist Recorder. J. D. Michaelis, d. 1791. J. R. M. J. R. Miller, D.D. G. M. Bp. George Moberly. A. W. Momerie, D.D. Adolph Monod, D.D. Rev. E. Monro. M. Montaigne, d. 1592. Hannah More. J. H. Morison, D.D. J. B. Mozley, D.D. Joseph Muenscher, D.D. Rev. P. Muffet. Julius Muller, D.D. Max Muller. J. T. Munger, D.D. Sir R. Murchison. Rev. A. Mursell. T. A. Nelson, D.D. J. H. Newman, D.D. John Newton, d. 1807. Bp. Thos. Newton, d. 1782. S. J. Niccolls, D.D. Northern Christian Advocate. N. Western Cristian Advocate. Rev. J. N. Norton. George R. Noyes, D.D. O. G. F. Oehler, D.D. C. Von Orelli, D.D. Howard Osgood, D.D. J. F. Ostervald, D.D., d. 1747. John Owen, D.D., d. 1683. Rev. J. M. Oxley. Benjamin M. Palmer, D.D.

J. P. Joseph Parker, D.D. John Parkhurst, D.D., d. 1797.

C. H. P. Chas. H. Parkhurst, D.D. Blaise Pascal, d. 1662. Bp. Symon Patrick, d. 1707. R. W. Patterson, D.D. Wm. W. Patton, D.D. Edward Payson, D.D., d. 1827.

A. P. Peabody, D.D.

Rev. J. Percival.

Bp. Thos. Percy, d. 1811.

Bp. J. J. S. Perowne.

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Bp. B. Portens, d. 1808.

Bp. H. C. Potter.

Presbyterian Observer, (Baltimore.)

J. Preston, 1634.

E. B. Pusey, D.D.

Rev. Jas. Pyecroft.

Farncis Quarles, d. 1644.

Fasquier Quesnel, d. 1719.

Rev. Marcus Rainsford.

A. R. Alexander Raleigh, D.D.

G. R. George Rawlinson, D.D.

Issac Ray, M.D.

J. Buchanan Read.

R. A. Redford, D.D. Mo. Interpreter, 1886.

John Reid, D.D.

North British Review, etc., etc.

J. P. Richter.

F. W. R. Fredk. W. Robertson, D.D.

E. G. Robinson, D.D.

S. R. Stuart Robinson, D.D. Unpublished Lectures on O. T.

N. Rogers, d. 1658.

E. F. Rosenmuller.

John Ruskin.

Samuel Rutherford, d. 1661.

H. G. Salter.

S. Salter, 1740.

Bp. Robt. Sanderson, d. 1663.

Adolph Saphir, D.D.

J. Saurin, D.D., d. 1730.

F. E. D. Schleiermacher, D.D.

John Scott, D.D., d. 1694.

Thos. Scott, D.D., d. 1821.

C. Scriver, d. 1693.

William Secker, d. 1660.

Archbp. Secker, d. 1768.

Jeremiah Seed, d. 1747.

Thos. Shaw, D.D.

W. G. T. Shedd, D.D.

Bp. Thos. Sherlock, d. 1761.

J. M. Sherwood, D.D.

Rev. T. J. Shore.

R. Sibbes, d. 1635.

James Sime.

John Skelton, D.D., d. 1529.

Samuel Smiles.

H. Smith, d. 1591.

Rev. James Smith.

Charles H. Spurgeon.

Robert South, D.D., d. 1716.

G. L. Spining, D.D.

James Stalker, D.D.

George Stanhope, d. 1738.

A. P. S. A. P. Stanley, D.D.

Rev. H. C. Stanton.

Richard Steele, d. 1692.

Rev. T. H. Steel.

Laurence Sterne, d. 1768.

George B. Stevens, D.D.

Rev. T. R. Stevenson.

Bp. Joseph Stock, 1626.

Audrew L. Stone, D.D.

R. S. S. Richard Salter Storrs, D.D.

John Stoughton, D.D.

C. E. Stowe, D.D.

A. M. Stuart.

M. S. Moses Stuart, D.D.

J. H. Stuckenberg, D.D.

D. Sutherland, D.D.

George Swinnock, d. 1673.

I. T. Isaac Taylor.

Bp. Jeremy Taylor, d. 1667.

N. W. Taylor, D.D.

W. M. T. W. M. Taylor, D.D.

F. T. Bp. Frederick Temple.

D. Thomas, D.D.

Jesse B. Thomas, D.D.

Rev. O. Thomas.

A. C. Thompson, D.D.

J. P. T. Joseph P. Thompson, D.D.

Archbp. Wm. Thompson.

William M. Thomson, D.D.

J. H. T. J. H. Thornwell, D.D.

Rev. E. Thring.

C. F. Thwing, D.D.

Archbp. Tillotson, d. 1694.

S. S. T. Sunday School Times, (Phila.)

R. T. Rev. Reuben Tinker.

L. T. Townsend, D.D.

Archbp. R. C. Trench.

H. B. T. H. B. Tristram, D.D.

T. de Trugillo.

H. C. T. H. Clay Trumbull, D.D.

R. Turnbull, D.D.

H. J. V. Henry J. Van Dyke, D.D.

Henry Van Dyke, D.D.

Van O. J. J. Van Oosterzee, D.D.

H. Van Santvoord.

Henry Varley.

C. J. V. C. J. Vaughan, D.D.

J. V. James Vaughan, D.D.

V. Marvin R. Vincent, D.D.

S rmons, 3 vols.

Alexander Vinet, D.D.

S. D. Waddy, D D.

Charles Wadsworth, D.D.

R. W. Robert Walker, D.D., d. 1783.

Ralph Wardlaw, D.D.

Benj. B. Warfield, D.D.

Bp. H. W. Warren.

E. A. Washburn, D.D.

Bp. Richd. Watson, d. 1816.

Thomas Watson, d. 1689.

Francis Wayland, D.D.

Daniel Webster.

R. B. Welch, D.D.

Edward Wells, D.D., d. 1727.

Bp. B. F. Westcott.

Westminster Confession.

Rev. C. H. Wetherbe.

Archbp. Whately.

William Whewell, D.D.

Charles White, D.D.

John G. Whittier.

Wm. C. Wilkinson, D.D.

W. R. W. Wm. R. Williams, D.D.

Sir Charles Wilson.

Bp. Thos. Wilson, d. 1755.

E. C. W. E. C. Wines, D.D.

William Wogan, 1754.

Bp. J. R. Woodford.

T. D. W. T. D. Woolsey, D.D.

Christopher Wordsworth, D.D.

Rev. J. J. Wray.

G. F. W. G. F. Wright, D.D.

R. Young, D.D., d. 1665.

Y. Loyal Young, D.D.

Rev. C. H. Zimmerman.

Zion’s Herald, (Boston.)

Otto Zockler, D.D.

G. J. Zollikofer, d. 1788.

THE

1. Kings XII-XXII., 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles X-XXXVI., Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah, Four Chapters, Jeremiah, Eighteen Chapters.

KINGDOM OF ISRAEL, KINGDOM OF JUDAH, CAPTIVITY AND RETURN, HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF THE FOUR SILENT CENTURIES.

THE REVISED TEXT, ARRANGED IN SECTIONS; WITH COMMENTS SELECTED FROM THE CHOICEST, MOST ILLUMINATING AND HELPFUL THOUGHT OF THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES.

By J. GLENTWORTH BUTLER.

| | PAGE | | — | — | | INDEX OF THE HISTORY. | 3 | | CHAPTERS AND VERSES OF THE BOOKS. | 6 | | POINTS TO BE NOTED RESPECTING THIS VOLUME. | 8 | | THE HISTORY IN 72 SECTIONS. | 9-634 | | AUTHORS CITED. | 635-637 |

| 1 | Preliminary : Suggestive Thoughts Bearing upon the Character and Relations of the Old Testament History ; Witness of the Monuments to its Truthfulness. | 9 | | — | — | — | | 2 | Books of Kings and Chronicles. | 34 | | 3 | Dated Events from Jeroboam to the Exile, by Willis J. Beecher, D.D. | 41 | | 4 | Revolt of the Ten Tribes, and Division of the Kingdom. 1 Kings 12 : 1-20; 2 Chronicles 10 : 1-19. | 56 |

| 5 | Reign of JEROBOAM, the First King. 1 Kings 12 : 25-33 ; 13 : 1-34 ; 14 : 1-20. | 64 | | — | — | — | | 6 | Reigns of NADAB, BAASHA, ELAH, and ZIMRI. 1 Kings 15 : 25-31 ; 16 : 1-20. | 79 | | 7 | Reign of OMRI. 1 Kings 16 : 21-28. | 83 | | 8 | Reign of AHAB (Begun). 1 Kings 16 : 29-34. | 88 | | 9 | ELIJAH Announces Drought to Ahab. At the Brook Cherith and with the Widow of Zarephath. 1 Kings 17 : 1-24. | 93 | | 10 | ELIJAH at Carmel : Meeting with Obadiah and Ahab ; Contest with Baal’s Prophets before Assembled Israel ; Immediate Results. 1 Kings 18 : 1-46. | 103 | | 11 | ELIJAH’s Flight to Horeb ; Jehovah’s Treatment of his Discouraged Spirit. 1 Kings 19 : 1-21. | 118 | | 12 | AHAB’s Double Victory over Benhadad. 1 Kings 20 : 1-43. | 130 | | 13 | AHAB and Naboth. Sacrilegious Murder by Jezebel. 1 Kings 21 : 1-29. | 135 | | 14 | AHAB Defeated by Benhadad, and Slain. 1 Kings 22 : 1-40 ; 2 Chronicles 18 : 1-34. | 143 | | 15 | Reign of AHAZIAH. 1 Kings 22 : 51-53 ; 2 Kings 1 : 1-18. | 149 | | 16 | ELIJAH’s Translation, and ELISHA’s Succession. 2 Kings 2 : 1-18. | 155 | | 17 | Reign of JEHORAM. 2 Kings 3 : 1-27. | 164 | | 18 | Six Miracles of ELISHA : Spring at Jericho Healed ; Mockers at Bethel Punished ; Prophet’s Widow Supplied with Oil ; Shunamite’s Son Restored ; Poisoned Pottage Purified ; Loaves and Corn Distributed ; Lost Axe-head Recovered. 2 Kings 2 : 10-25 ; 4 : 1-44 ; 6 : 1-7. | 169 | | 19 | Naaman’s Leprosy Removed ; Infliction upon Gehazi. 2 Kings 5 : 1-27. | 185 | | 20 | ELISHA Delivers JEHORAM from Syrian Invasions. 2 Kings 6 : 8-23. | 199 | | 21 | Siege and Deliverance of Samaria. 2 Kings 6 : 24-33 ; 7 : 1-20. | 205 | | 22 | Shunamite’s Land Restored. ELISHA and Hazael. 2 Kings 8 : 1-15. | 212 | | 23 | Reign of JEHU (Begun). He Slays JEHORAM, AHAZIAH (of Judah), and Jezebel. 2 Kings 9 : 1-37. | 217 |

| SECTION | | PAGE | | — | — | — | | 24 | Slays AHAB’S Sons, AHAZIAH’S Brethren, and Baal’s Worshippers. His Death. 2 Kings 10:1-36. | 224 | | 25 | Reigns of JEHOAHAZ and JEHOASH. Elisha’s Sickness and Death. The After Miracle. 2 Kings 13:1-25. | 233 | | 26 | Reign of JEROBOAM II. 2 Kings 14:23-29. | 242 | | 27 | Reigns of ZECHARIAH, SHALLUM, MENAHEM, and PEKAHIAH. 2 Kings 15:8-26. | 246 | | 28 | Reigns of PEKAH and HOSHEA. 2 Kings 15:27-31; 17:1-5. | 249 | | 29 | Israel Carried to Assyria. Reasons Assigned for their Captivity. Samaria Repeopled in Part by Assyrian Colonists. Ten Tribes not Lost. 2 Kings 17:6-41; 18:9-12. | 252 | | KINGDOM OF JUDAH. | | | | 30 | Reign of REHOBOAM. 2 Chronicles 11:1-23; 12:1-16; 1 Kings 12:21-24; 14:21-31. | 265 | | 31 | Reign of ABIJAH. 2 Chronicles 13:1-22; 1 Kings 15:1-8. | 273 | | 32 | Reign of ASA. 2 Chronicles, chaps. 14, 15, 16; 1 Kings 15:9-24. | 276 | | 33 | Reign of JEHOSHAPHAT. 2 Chronicles, chaps. 17-20; 1 Kings 22:41-50. | 287 | | 34 | Reigns of JEHORAM, AHAZIAH, and ATHALIAH. 2 Chronicles, chaps. 21, 22, and 23:1-15; 2 Kings 8:16-29; 11:1-16. | 297 | | 35 | Reign of JOASH. 2 Chronicles 23:16-21; 24:1-27; 2 Kings 11:17-21; 12:1-21. | 305 | | 36 | Reign of AMAZIAH. 2 Chronicles 25:1-28; 2 Kings 14:1-22. | 313 | | 37 | Reigns of UZZIAH and JOTHAM. 2 Chronicles 26:1-23; 27:1-9; 2 Kings 15:1-7; 32-38. | 318 | | 38 | Reign of AHAZ. 2 Chronicles 28:1-27; 2 Kings 16:1-20. | 324 | | 39 | Reign of HEZEKIAH. His Religious Reformation. 2 Chronicles, chaps. 29-31; 2 Kings 18:1-8. | 333 | | 40 | " " " Sickness, Recovery, and Psalm of Gratitude. Embassy from Babylon. Sin and Predicted Punishment. 2 Kings 20:1-19; 2 Chronicles 32:24-31; Isaiah, chaps. 38, 39. | 343 | | 41 | " " " Sennacherib’s Army Destroyed. Death of Hezekiah. 2 Kings 18:13-37; 19:1-37; 20:20, 21; Isaiah, chaps. 36, 37; 2 Chronicles 32:1-23, 32, 33. | 356 | | 42 | Reigns of MANASSEH and AMON. 2 Chronicles 33:1-25; 2 Kings 21:1-26. | 372 | | 43 | Reign of JOSIAH. 2 Chronicles 34:1-33; 35:1-27; 2 Kings 22:1-20; 23:1-30. | 380 | | 44 | Reigns of JEHOAHAZ and JEHOIAKIM. Incidents Reported by JEREMIAH. 2 Kings 23:31-37; 24:1-7; 2 Chronicles 36:1-8; Jeremiah, chaps. 26, 36, 45. | 398 | | 45 | Story of the Rechabites, and its Lessons. Jeremiah 35:1-19. | 411 | | 46 | Reigns of JEHOIACHIN and ZEDEKIAH. 2 Kings 24:8-20; 25:1-7, 27-30; Jeremiah 39:1-7; 52:1-11, 31-34; 2 Chronicles 36:9-13. | 418 | | 47 | Main Incidents of JEREMIAH’S Connection with ZEDEKIAH. Jeremiah, chaps. 21, 27, 28, 32, 34, 37, 38. | 427 |

| SECTION | | PAGE | | — | — | — | | 48 | Jerusalem Destroyed and Judah Taken Captive. 2 Kings 25 : 8-21 ; 2 Chronicles 36 : 14-19 ; Jeremiah 39 : 8-18 ; 52 : 12-30. | 447 | | 49 | After History of the Remnant of Judah. 2 Kings 25 : 22-26 ; Jeremiah, chaps. 40-44. | 456 | | 50 | Period of Captivity : Condition of Exiled Jews ; Effects of Captivity. 2 Chronicles 36 : 20-23. Daniel, Isaiah, Deuteronomy and the Levitical Code as Related to Post-Exilic Period. | 465 | | 51 | The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The Law in their Times. Historical Outline. | 476 | | | Chronological Outline of the Persian Period. | 483 | | 52 | Book of Ezra. Introduction. | 484 | | 53 | First Return under Jeshua and Zerubabel. Ezra, chaps. 1, 2 ; 2 Chronicles 36 : 22, 23. | 488 | | 54 | Altar and Sacrifice Restored. Temple Foundation-Work Suspended. Ezra, chaps. 3, 4. | 496 | | 55 | Temple Finished and Dedicated. Passover Kept. Ezra, chaps. 5, 6. | 503 | | 56 | Ezra Leads a Second Colony to Jerusalem. Ezra, chaps. 7, 8. | 511 | | 57 | Idolatrous Marriages Annulled. Ezra, chaps. 9, 10. | 518 | | 58 | Book of Nehemiah. | 524 | | 59 | Nehemiah’s Petition, Commission, and Journey to Jerusalem. Nehemiah, chaps. 1, 2 : 1-11. | 529 | | 60 | Conference and Decision to Build the Wall. Confronting Adversaries. Nehemiah, chaps. 2 : 12-20 ; 3 : 4. | 534 | | 61 | Reform of Usury. Nehemiah’s Generosity. Nehemiah 5 : 1-19. | 545 | | 62 | Opposition. Wall Completed. Second Registry. Nehemiah, chaps. 6, 7. | 551 | | 63 | Convocation for Worship and Covenant. Nehemiah, chaps. 8-10. | 557 | | 64 | Nehemiah’s Return. Dedication of Wall. Reform of Abuses. Nehemiah, chaps. 11-13. | 569 | | 65 | Book of Esther. | 580 | | 66 | Esther Displaces Vashti. Mordecai’s Service to the King. Esther, chaps. 1, 2. | 585 | | 67 | Haman’s Destructive Device. Mordecai’s Charge to Esther. Esther, chaps. 3, 4. | 591 | | 68 | Esther’s First Banquet. The King’s Sleepless Night. Mordecai Honored. Esther, chaps. 5, 6. | 598 | | 69 | Esther Accuses Haman. Mordecai Elevated. Decree in Favor of the Jews. Esther, chaps. 7, 8. | 603 | | 70 | Jews’ Self-Defence. Feast of Purim. Mordecai’s Advancement. Esther, chaps. 9, 10. | 608 | | 71 | Between the Testaments. The History. | 615 | | 72 | " " " The Literature. | 624 |

| 1 KINGS. | | | 2 KINGS. | | | 2 KINGS. | | | 2 CHRONICLES. | | | | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | | CHAP. | VERSES. | PAGE. | CHAP. | VERSES. | PAGE. | CHAP. | VERSES. | PAGE. | CHAP. | VERSES. | PAGE. | | XII. | 1-20 | 56 | I. | 1-18 | 149 | XVI. | 1-20 | 324 | X. | 1-19 | 56 | | | 21-24 | 265 | II. | 1-18 | 155 | XVII. | 1-5 | 249 | XI. | 1-23 | 265 | | | 25-33 | 64 | | 19-25 | 169 | | 6-41 | 252 | XII. | 1-16 | 265 | | XIII. | 1-34 | 64 | III. | 1-27 | 164 | XVIII. | 1-8 | 333 | XIII. | 1-22 | 273 | | XIV. | 1-20 | 64 | IV. | 1-44 | 169 | | 9-12 | 252 | XIV. | 1-15 | 276 | | | 21-31 | 265 | V. | 1-27 | 185 | | 13-37 | 356 | XV. | 1-19 | 276 | | XV. | 1-8 | 273 | VI. | 1-7 | 169 | XIX. | 1-37 | 356 | XVI. | 1-14 | 276 | | | 9-24 | 276 | | 8-23 | 199 | XX. | 1-19 | 343 | XVII. | 1-19 | 287 | | | 25-31 | 79 | | 24-33 | 205 | | 20, 21 | 356 | XVIII. | 1-34 | 287 | | XVI. | 1-20 | 79 | VII. | 1-20 | 205 | XXI. | 1-26 | 372 | XIX. | 1-11 | 287 | | XVII. | 1-24 | 93 | VIII. | 1-15 | 212 | XXII. | 1-20 | 380 | XX. | 1-37 | 287 | | XVIII. | 1-46 | 103 | | 16-29 | 297 | XXIII. | 1-30 | 380 | XXI. | 1-20 | 297 | | XIX. | 1-21 | 118 | IX. | 1-37 | 217 | | 31-37 | 398 | XXII. | 1-12 | 297 | | XX. | 1-43 | 130 | X. | 1-36 | 224 | XXIV. | 1-7 | 398 | XXIII. | 1-15 | 297 | | XXI. | 1-29 | 135 | XI. | 1-16 | 297 | | 8-20 | 418 | | 16-21 | 305 | | XXII. | 1-40 | 143 | | 17-21 | 305 | XXV. | 1-7 | 418 | XXIV. | 1-27 | 305 | | | 41-50 | 287 | XII. | 1-21 | 305 | | 8-21 | 447 | XXV. | 1-28 | 313 | | | 51-53 | 149 | XIII. | 1-25 | 233 | | 22-26 | 456 | XXVI. | 1-23 | 318 | | | | | XIV. | 1-22 | 313 | | 27-30 | 418 | XXVII. | 1-9 | 318 | | | | | | 23-29 | 242 | | | | XXVIII. | 1-27 | 324 | | | | | XV. | 1-7 | 318 | | | | XXIX. | 1-36 | 333 | | | | | | 8-26 | 246 | | | | XXX. | 1-27 | 333 | | | | | | 27-31 | 249 | | | | XXXI. | 1-21 | 333 | | | | | | 32-38 | 318 | | | | XXXII. | 1-23 | 356 | | | | | | | | | | | | 24-31 | 343 | | | | | | | | | | | | 32, 33 | 356 | | | | | | | | | | | XXXIII. | 1-25 | 372 | | | | | | | | | | | XXXIV. | 1-33 | 380 | | | | | | | | | | | XXXV. | 1-27 | 380 | | | | | | | | | | | XXXVI. | 1-8 | 398 | | | | | | | | | | | | 9-13 | 418 | | | | | | | | | | | | 14 19 | 447 | | | | | | | | | | | | 20-23 | 465 |

| EZRA. | | NEHEMIAH. | | ESTHER. | | | — | — | — | — | — | — | | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | | I. | 488 | I. | 529 | I. | 585 | | II. | 488 | II. 1-11 | 529 | II. | 585 | | III. | 496 | 12-20 | 534 | III. | 591 | | IV. | 496 | III. | 534 | IV. | 591 | | V. | 503 | IV. | 534 | V. | 598 | | VI. | 503 | V. | 545 | VI. | 598 | | VII. | 511 | VI. | 551 | VII. | 603 | | VIII. | 511 | VII. | 551 | VIII. | 603 | | IX. | 518 | VIII. | 557 | IX. | 608 | | X. | 518 | IX. | 557 | X. | 608 | | | | X. | 557 | | | | | | XI. | 569 | | | | | | XII. | 569 | | | | | | XIII. | 569 | | |

| ISAIAH. | | JEREMIAH. | | JEREMIAH. | | | — | — | — | — | — | — | | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | CHAPTER. | PAGE. | | XXXVI. | 356 | XXI. | 436 | XXXIX. 8-18 | 447 | | XXXVII. | 356 | XXVI. | 398 | XL. | 456 | | XXXVIII. | 343 | XXVII. | 430 | XLI. | 456 | | XXXIX. | 343 | XXVIII. | 430 | XLII. | 456 | | | | XXXII. | 442 | XLIII. | 456 | | | | XXXIV. | 433 | XLIV. | 456 | | | | XXXV. | 411 | XLV. | 398 | | | | XXXVI. | 398 | LII. 1-11 | 418 | | | | XXXVII. | 436 | 12-30 | 447 | | | | XXXVIII. | 436 | 31-34 | 418 | | | | XXXIX. 1-7 | 418 | | |

1. As the closing Historical Volume of the Old Testament, its orderly place is in connection with Volume III. Volumes IV., V. and VI. (including the Psalms and the Books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon) are interposed at the end of Solomon’s reign because of the relation of David and Solomon to four of these Books, while the subject-matter of the fifth (the Book of Job) brings it into close affinity with the three Books (mainly) of Solomonic origin.

2. Four chapters of Isaiah and eighteen chapters of Jeremiah are embodied in this volume for the simple reason that these chapters are essentially historical. Their contents are necessary to the completeness of the Historical Record, since they contain details either equivalent (and so confirmatory) or additional to those of the Books of Kings and Chronicles. Jeremiah, in particular, furnishes many interesting and instructive personal incidents which disclose with greater fulness the character of the later Kings of Judah, and the causes of the final destruction of the Kingdom; while he alone records the immediate after history of the Remnant of Judah.

3. This volume presents a measurably full account of the contemporary place and work of all of the Writing Prophets, whose inspired acts and disclosures constitute an integral portion of the History, so that a fair knowledge of these Prophets and the substance of their prophecies may be found herein. The volume is thus closely linked with the Prophetic Books which follow, while in those Books will be found a corresponding connection at every point with the History as herein recorded.

4. The careful attention of the reader is earnestly invited to the full and masterly Chronological Summary, kindly prepared by Professor Willis J. Beecher, contained in the Third Section. The method (generally adopted) of attaching isolated dates to specific events is purposely disregarded in this volume, for the sufficient reason that no single date of a disconnected event can convey either intelligible or helpful knowledge to a thoughtful reader. But this accurate, thoroughly digested Table of “Dated Events,” if only its clear explanations and its related events with their dates are carefully studied at the outset, and afterward continuously referred to, will give an intelligent idea of the period in which every event occurred, since it exhibits such event in its relation to other contemporary events, with which it is more or less directly associated. The special study of this admirable Summary (pages 41-55) and the mastery of its chief points of historical detail is therefore strongly urged upon the reader who seeks to obtain a thorough comprehension of the Inspired History.

PRELIMINARY: SUGGESTIVE THOUGHT BEARING UPON THE CHARACTER OF THE OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY, AND ITS RELATIONS TO THE NEW TESTAMENT; WITH HELPFUL EXPLANATIONS TOUCHING MINOR POINTS OF PRACTICAL INTEREST CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY.*

The Bible from God.

THE existence and personality of God is the great postulate of the soul; and that being granted, it is at once seen to be both a possible and a probable thing that He should communicate in some way with man in his state of conscious guilt and spiritual helplessness. The Bible claims to be such a communication; and we can trace it up through the centuries to the dates at which its several component parts were written; we can establish that its books were written by the men whose names they bear; and that in their Greek and Hebrew forms they have come down to us with wonderful accuracy, so that we have more certainty that we have Paul’s epistles as he wrote them than we have that the letters of Cicero to his friend Atticus are preserved in their original form. All these things are settled for the sacred books precisely as we settle the genuineness and authenticity of other ancient writings. W. M. Taylor.

Whoever will impartially consider the great length and variety of times and circumstances through which these books have passed, the many hands through which the copies have gone and by which they have been transcribed, and then observe how few or none of the passages containing any difficulty or inconsistency in them are of any weight or moment that can affect the design or use of the whole—whoever considers this will be so far from being disturbed at the difficulties he may find in the present copies of these or any other of the Holy Books, that he must conclude it a wonderful

• The reader is referred to the first thirty-three pages of Volume III., of which these pages are designed as a supplement and completion. Though the topics are, in part, the same, the treatment will not be found redundant. B.

blessing of Providence that hath preserved these writings so uncorrupt and entire as they are. Pyle.

The Bible grew by degrees to its present size; and as in a house stone is laid on stone and story built upon story, so book was added to book, history to history, prophecy to prophecy, gospel to gospel, and one epistle to another, till the hands of John laid on the cops-stone, and, standing on the pinnacle of this sacred edifice, he pronounced God’s wide and withering curse on all who should impair its integrity. Guthrie.

The Old Testament history, throughout a period of some thousand years, written by different hands, and at many different times, not only exhibits a series of events, arranged and exclusively designed to prepare the way for the advent of the Messiah, and the accomplishment of the plan of salvation, but has woven into its very texture all the doctrines and duties of Christianity—doctrines and duties not fully developed nor understood till the coming of Christ, but now to be clearly traced in the ancient records. Can there be a doubt about the Author of the history? It would be as easy to counterfeit the heavens and the earth as to forge such a series of documents. The Bible, then, must be the book of God. Haldane.

Who but God could make the Bible? What eye but that which surveys the world at a glance, and beholds all nations, with their multifarious ills and complicated wants, as they are, and reads with intuitive certainty the moral pulsation of every heart, could see far enough and wide enough and deep enough for such a work? What but the all-comprehensive mind could devise a religious system, humble in its grandeur and majestic in its simplicity, which should be equally applicable to men in every nation and every age; which has power to reclaim the heart and control the life; to disarm the world of its enmity against God; to restore the wanderer; raise the disconsolate, and light up a smile on the pale cheek of death? Surely, this is no common undertaking. There is but one Being who ever thought of doing it; and the volume that reveals this purpose has, written deeply and indelibly upon its sacred page, the signature of God. Beman.

The Scriptures of the Old Testament that have been so faithfully preserved and so fully attested contain the most satisfactory and convincing internal evidences of their truth. The character of God which they exhibit, nowhere delineated in the writings of any of the wisest of this world, unenlightened by revelation, is such as carries with it its own confirmation. The character they give of man is verified in the history of every nation and of each individual. The majesty, purity, and suitableness to the condition of man, of the doctrine they contain—the soundness and unrivalled excellence of the moral precepts they inculcate, and the glory of the succeeding dispensation which toward their close they indicate with increasing clearness; and all this confirmed and verified in the minutest particulars by the New Testament Scriptures—form a body of internal evidence, to which nothing but the deep corruption of the human heart could render any one insensible. Haldane.

We take these Scriptures, and observe their entire coincidence and harmony, through all their extent and amid all their varieties, in the utterance of one vast spiritual system. We go over their whole range and find them all agreeing upon this, though written by so many and such different persons: Revelation answering to Genesis across the passage of centuries—Deep calling unto Deep;—and the inference seems inevitable that they come to us from God; that One controlling and infinite Mind has been moving in the midst of these changing circumstances. And then we take the system itself which they reveal to us; we observe its unity, its vast sublimity, its absolute purity; we notice how it meets all man’s wants and satisfies his powers, how it interweaves itself at the edges with the ascertained truths of philosophy or of science, accepting them all and reconciling their differences; we see how it points to other departments and realms of truth harmonious with itself, which God sees constantly, but which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and of which no angelic messenger has brought to us a report—and everywhere we find in this system the signatures of Divinity. We accept it as from God. Then we look to its results, and they are all beneficent. So we know it to be God’s. Storrs.

The Old and New Testaments, Two Phases of One Revelation.

In his characteristic and terse way the church father Augustine defines the relation existing between the two Testaments in these words: In Veteri Testamento Novum latet, in Novo Vetus patet (in the Old Testament, the New lies hid; in the New, the Old lies open). The full appreciation of the fundamental truth contained in these words is becoming more and more a feature of the evangelical biblical research of our day. That the two Testaments represent the two phases of the one revelation, differing from each other not in kind, but only in degree, and that the two form the one revelation and history of revelation from God to fallen man, to restore him to his lost estate, is the accepted position of all but negative scholars. In principle the two Testaments are thus one; the New is rooted in the Old, and can find its true interpretation only from this standpoint. . . . The entire New Testament consciously and ex professo stands upon the basis of the Old, of which it is the continuation and completion. The words in Luke 24: 44 are fundamental on this point. And when the New thus refers to the Old, it is solely and alone to the canonical writings of the latter, to the Palestinian collection of Hebrew sacred books. It is a singular and most significant fact that neither directly nor indirectly have any other writings of that day and generation exerted a material influence upon the contents of the New Testament. There is not a single indication of a non-canonical book having been quoted or having in the substance of the New Testament books influenced the writers or the speakers. The appeal, direct and indirect, is always to the canonical books of the Old as the sole authority and source of knowledge. The New Testament literature, which by no means is hermetically sealed to other writings, as is seen from its use of Septuagint, its citations of Greek poets, its moving and living in the atmosphere of its age, in the establishment of its principles and doctrines, builds upon and appeals solely and alone to the canonical writings of the Old Testament, and to these alone, because they and they alone are the inspired Revelation of God to man. For the New Testament the unity of the Old is a fixed and fundamental fact.

And this is in full agreement with the character of the biblical books. They are the record of a gradual unfolding of God’s plans for the redemption of man, and, in fact, this is the golden chord that connects them all and makes them one. The sacred literature of no other people can lay claim to this unique feature. While it may be difficult at present to assign to each and every book its peculiar position and necessary rôle in the development, yet it must not be forgotten that some of the books are as yet imperfectly understood. But this is known, that these books, as far as clearly understood, represent the different stages in one process, the development of principles from germ to full fruit. In this process these books, one and all, have some portion or part to record; and it would be difficult to show that even the smallest could be omitted without in one or the other material point injuring our understanding of the unfolding of God’s kingdom on earth; and, on the other hand, there is no material stage in this process on which the canonical writings are silent. Internally they constitute a one-ness; their unity is undeniable. Comparative religious science can claim no phenomenon of this kind for any other nation. Even when under the scalpel of modern criticism, the truth that the Scriptures practically constitute one volume, consisting of parts mutually complementary and supplementary, remains. Schodde.

Christianity recognizes in the Old Dispensation its divinely ordained preparatory stage. This peculiar connection between the two Testaments, their different stages of revelation being fraught with one and the same spirit and constituting a marvellous whole, is a witness to the Divine origin of the Jewish, as well as the Christian religion. When we examine into the Books of the two Testaments we find, both in their history and doctrine, a connection extending through centuries, a gradual progress which points to one comprehensive plan which could by no possibility have had its origin in the mind of short-lived man, but can only be reasonably explained by that Divine causation to which the Bible itself refers all things; and if we proceed further to test this conclusion by comparing it with our knowledge of other kinds, we shall find that not only do the Divine revelations intimately agree together, but with the condition and needs of our human nature, with the fundamental relations of the universe, and with the being of God. Incomparable wisdom, holiness, and love breathe on us from the Scripture pages, and perfectly satisfy the demands of conscience and the search of the intellect after the highest truth. Hess of Zurich says: “Nothing has so convinced me of the truth of Christianity, its revelation, history, and doctrine, as the having found in the sacred records, on the one hand, what perfectly satisfies the needs of humanity for time and eternity, and, on the other hand, in the Divine provision toward this end such a connected progress from small to great, from the particular to the universal, as would have been impossible to human invention.” Auberlen.

The full sense of the New Testament can only be reached by a thorough study of the Old Testament upon which it was founded. The connection between them is a living organic connection, as between the seed and the fruit. It was the same Being, the same Divine will, the same fundamental principles of salvation that were taught in the one as in the other. These facts are essential to the right understanding of Scripture, and he must sorely miss the meaning of the New Testament who lets go his hold upon the conviction of the eternal truth of the Old. Gardiner.

History the Basis of Both Testaments.

We cannot read the Old Testament without seeing that the whole of it rests on the basis of a history—the history contained in what we call the books of Moses. Now, if you turn to the New Testament, you will find that it begins, in like manner, with a history: the history of the four Gospels; and what the Pentateuch is to the Old Testament, the Gospels are to the New. Here, then, is a symmetry in the two parts of the Bible. Each begins with a history which pervades and inspires all that follows. Only, the two histories are different, while they are connected. The one is that of a divinely chosen people, selected for a special purpose. The other is that of a Divine Person. And a person is superior to a people merely as a people, as a corporate body, for a person has an immortality: a nation has not; and a person can be charged with far higher lessons than a nation. The two histories are on two planes, a lower and a higher; the lower is imperfect without the higher, and the higher assumes and completes the lower. Ker.

Christianity, including therein the dispensation of the Old Testament, is in nothing more distinguished from the other religions of the world than in its objective or historical character. The religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt, India, Persia, and the East generally, were speculative systems, which did not even seriously postulate a historical basis. But it is otherwise with the religion of the Bible. There, whether we look to the Old or the New Testament, to the Jewish dispensation or to the Christian, we find a scheme of doctrine which is bound up with facts; which depends absolutely upon them; which is null and void without them; and which may be regarded as for all practical purposes established if they are shown to deserve acceptance. As a religion of fact, and not merely of opinion—as one whose chief scene is this world, and whose main doctrines are events exhibited openly before the eyes of men—as one, moreover, which, instead of affecting a dogmatic form, adopts from first to last, with very rare exceptions, the historical shape, the religion of the Bible comes necessarily within the sphere of the historical inquirer, and challenges him to investigate it according to what he regards as the principles of his science. Moreover, as Christianity is in point of fact connected intimately with certain records, and as those records extend over a period of several thousands of years, and “profess to contain a kind of abridgment of the history of the world,” its points of contact with profane history are (practically speaking) infinite; and it becomes impossible for the historical inquirer to avoid the question, in what light he is to view the documents which, if authentic, must exercise so important an influence over his studies and conclusions. G. R.

An examination of the chief characteristics of the Hebrew Scriptures indicates: a Vital Connection between Religion and History; a unity of thought, sentiment, and practical aim underlying their great variety of form, and a progressive development of religious doctrine, not final, but pointing forward to a fuller unfolding.

1. In these Old Testament Scriptures, religion is shown as the soul of history; the supreme reality and central power in human affairs; the deepest foundation of human life. The Bible account of the ORIGIN OF RELIGION is that man began his journey on this globe not as a deserted orphan, turned adrift to seek God as best he could, but in communion with the Father of spirits. God talked with him, and he could talk with God. God marked for him the path of duty, and it lay in his choice to walk in it or to wander from it. Compared with recent hypotheses of the slow and painful ascent of man from irrational, speechless, lawless, godless apehood, the Bible account has at all events the advantage of dignity, beauty, intelligibility, and analogy with the known facts of human experience. In Genesis God is shown as the ultimate source of all being, preparing the earth from the beginning to be the home of man. Man’s very existence is traced to God’s purpose to realize His own likeness in human nature. Man is shown as conversant with God, as soon as he began to know himself and the world around him. The foundations of marriage, property, labor, moral duty and responsibility, are all laid in God’s revealed will, and man’s conscious relation to his Maker. Moral evil, or sin, is represented as wilful disobedience to the known will of God. The tendency to evil is shown to be hereditary as well as personal, and teeming with seeds of increase. Human life is regarded as a whole; and God is seen as the Ruler and Judge of Mankind, as well as the personal Friend and Saviour of every one who fears and trusts Him. FAITH, as the mainspring and sheet anchor of the religious life; PRAYER, as direct personal converse with the Unseen Father of spirits, and as actually heard and answered by Him; and DIVINE PROVIDENCE as regulating all human affairs from the greatest to the least, are so exemplified in these ancient Hebrew annals, that the story of Abraham, of Jacob, of Joseph, possesses an undecaying charm for Christian minds of the highest spiritual culture. They are typical for all time. No example of after ages has been able to cast them into the shade. In the “Pentateuch” there is no break of continuity. The narrative passes briefly over the centuries, at first of peaceful prosperity, then of bitter adversity, during which Israel’s descendants “increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty.” It hastens to tell the story of the deliverance from bondage, and of the creation of an organized nation.

With the narrative of the Exodus, the forty years in the wilderness, and the conquest of Canaan, is interwoven the record of the National Code and Constitution, political, religious, moral, and social. The historic reality of the Divine manifestation to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, is assumed as the necessary starting-point of God’s dealings with their descendants. His promise to Abraham is treated as a “covenant,” to which Divine faithfulness stands irrevocably pledged. But a new starting-point is given immediately after the deliverance, by a fresh “covenant” granted by Jehovah, and freely accepted by the people (Ex. 19: 3-8). This description of the founding of a nation, and laying the basis of national legislation, by a solemn contract of sovereignty and obedience between the Almighty Creator and the representatives of the whole nation, is absolutely unique in its sober majesty, severe literal reality, and moral grandeur. On the basis thus laid, the whole fabric of legislation and framework of national life, according to the books of Moses, rested. All the subsequent history proceeds from this starting-point. The religion of personal faith, prayer, and obedience, depicted in Genesis, is never lost sight of; but it is overshadowed by the religion of national faith, public worship, and obedience to the law binding on the nation. The Ten Commandments and the subsequent laws given by Moses are expressed in such a form that the word “Thou” may apply equally to the individual Israelite or to the nation. Divine providence and government are illustrated on a corresponding scale. The wanderings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the sufferings and glory of Joseph, illustrate God’s care and control of PERSONAL history down to its least details. Egypt, the Red Sea, Sinai, the desert, the manna, the water from the rock, the pillar of cloud and fire, teach a like lesson in regard to NATIONAL history, on a scale never equalled, never to be repeated.

The connection between Religion and History, noticed above as the first great distinctive character of the religion of the Old Testament Scriptures, is strongly marked with regard to the three essential elements of the system set up by Moses: the tabernacle, the Priesthood, the Sacrificial Ritual. All three, in the records which have come down to us, are inseparably interwoven with the main facts of Hebrew story—the deliverance from Egypt, the encampment at Sinai, the covenant between Jehovah and His people, the giving of the Law, the stubborn rebelliousness of Israel, and the consequent delay of their entrance into Canaan until the death of Moses in the fortieth year from the Exodus.

As the recorded history of ancient Israel furnishes the only key to the religion of the Old Testament, otherwise inexplicable, so the religion bears witness to the history. Solomon’s Temple presupposes the Tabernacle. It actually contained the Ark. But the Ark and the Tabernacle presuppose the wandering in the Wilderness; which in its turn presupposes Sinai and the Deliverance. The whole history from the birth of Samuel attests the importance of both the Ark and the Tabernacle. David’s institutions, which survived the Captivity and lasted into the Christian era, attest the national importance and numerical strength of the tribe of Levi; their sacred character; and the hereditary priesthood of the descendants of Aaron. How can these (joined with the fact that Levi was a landless tribe) be explained apart from a legislation coeval with the existence of the nation? In a word, is it rationally conceivable that a nation so numerous, compact, tenacious of tradition, yet sturdily independent, prone to strife, and obstinately addicted to forbidden rites, should have been persuaded (before, during, or after the reigns of David and Solomon) to receive a body of new institutions, forged laws, and fictitious public annals, and that this astonishing fabrication, unparalleled in all literature, should have gained that prodigious hold on national belief and reverence which the writings ascribed to Moses undeniably possessed after the return from Babylon? The demands made on our faith by modern sceptical criticism far exceed in fact those made by all the miracles of the Bible.

Further, as matter of historic fact, an unbroken living chain of religious faith, teaching, sympathy, prayer, and practice connects the tent of Abraham and the legislation of Sinai, through the life and teaching of JESUS, with the religious life of modern Christendom, and with the moral power (the only one yet discovered) which has shown itself capable in the Sandwich Islands, in Polynesia, in New Guinea, in Madagascar, in South and Central Africa, of lifting half-barbarous or wholly savage and brutal tribes into civilization, morality, and liberty.

2. The intimate blending of history and religion, which we have noted as the first great characteristic of the Hebrew Scriptures, is the condition of the two other characteristics also indicated: Unity and Development. These may be best considered together. For development implies unity. And the unity discoverable in the Bible is a unity of growth; not formal and mechanical, but vital, internal, spiritual.

Clearly, if the books of the Old Testament possess any real unity, it must be of this nature. For they do not compose a Book in any ordinary sense of the word. They are a library, a literature. They range over a thousand years. Their writers differ widely in character, genius, education, position. They reflect the most opposite phases of national life. Diversity of contents and variety of form could scarcely be more strongly exemplified than in this collection of annals, laws, biography, poems, aphorisms, prophetic oracles. If the unity of these sacred writings were merely artificial and conventional, conferred by authority and custom, it would dissolve at the touch of serious examination. If, on the contrary, deep below this diversified and broken surface we find a unity of thought, an unbroken vein of religious teaching, growing richer from age to age, then this unity is a fact more important than the diversity. It must have an adequate cause. It demands an intelligent explanation. If natural causes cannot explain it, we must infer supernatural. If human authors could not (or manifestly did not) combine to produce it, the only possible explanation is Divine Authorship. And such unity, progressively unfolding itself, does actually characterize the Hebrew sacred writings. The central conception which gives unity to their religious teaching is found in the moral character of God, in personal relation with mankind and with each human being. The Book of Genesis opens with affirming the deepest relation we and all other beings sustain to God as our Creator. Creation appears in the record as an orderly process, crowned with the birth of man. Man is represented as from the first placed in direct moral relations with his Maker. A specially prepared home, work, the Sabbath, marriage, and a positive command, the test of obedience, bless and fence his life. Disobedience is represented as putting him in a sadly altered relation to God. He is called to account, found guilty, sentenced to the loss of Eden, made subject to death. Nevertheless, man retains his highest privilege—direct converse with his Maker.

We search in vain the sacred books and the entire literature of pagan nations for any adequate parallel to these representations of the absolute authority and just severity of the Creator, united with fatherly tenderness toward the sinner, and effort to win to repentance and hold him back from sin. As examples, we may refer to the startling description of Divine sorrow over man’s sin, and the hundred and twenty years’ respite granted in Noah’s time to the doomed world; the place assigned to intercession, as of Abraham for Sodom, of Moses and Samuel for Israel, of Job for his friends; the pathetic warnings of Moses to Israel; the echo of those warnings by his successor, Joshua; Samuel’s faithful and solemn rebuke to the National Assembly, joined with the assurance that the Lord would “not forsake His people, for His great name’s sake;” Isaiah’s call to come and reason together with God, joined with a gracious promise of pardon to the penitent; Jeremiah’s thunderbolts of terror, flashing and pealing through a tempest of tears; Ezekiel’s trumpet blast of warning; the homely remonstrance and final warning of the latest of the prophets. The list might be indefinitely extended. The preaching of John the Baptist, the last prophet of the Old Testament, sounded afresh the key-note which thus rings through the Hebrew Bible. Its full-toned harmony is heard in the preaching of Jesus: in His invitation to the “laboring and heavy-laden;” His picture of the prodigal returning to his father; His lament over impenitent Jerusalem. From these specimens it is clear that a consistent strain of teaching, in the form not of dogma, but of historic narrative and practical appeal, pervades the books of the Old Testament. Human life is everywhere regarded in direct moral relation to Divine law, authority, and mercy. The aim throughout is not to inform and convince the intellect, but to affect and control the affections, conscience, and conduct.

Thus we are brought back to the central conception which gives unity to the religious teaching of the whole body of the Hebrew Scriptures, the moral character of God, in personal relation with mankind and with each human being. This great central doctrine (which includes the truths of man’s personality, moral character, and accountableness) is developed by means of human history and experience—especially the experience of sin. Four main lines of illustration combine to unfold this greatest of lessons: 1. Public history, especially as concerned with those calamities which the Scriptures represent as Divine judgments on sin: as the Deluge, the destruction of Sodom, the overthrow of Pharaoh, the punishment of the rebellious Israelites, the extermination of the depraved idolaters of Canaan, the Babylonish captivity, the overthrow of Babylon. 2. Symbolic worship and priestly mediation. 3. Prophetic ministry, interpreting God’s law, will, truth, and promises. 4. Personal experience; vividly illustrating, on the one hand, the care and guidance of God’s providence, and leading and teaching of His Spirit, bestowed on those who fear Him; on the other hand, the life of faith, penitence, prayer, and loving obedience to God. In this last method the teaching of the three other methods is brought to a practical focus. It may be summed up in the words in which the most sorrowful of the prophets, in the most mournful book of Scripture, utters his peaceful faith: “The LORD is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him” (Lam. 3: 25). E. R. Conder.

Structural Characteristics of the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament we have a national literature; not one book, but many, a whole library or collection of books, with certainly not less than twenty-five writers, extending over a period of at least a thousand years. In so long a space of time we should naturally expect to find a great difference in language. Think of the difference in language between the English of modern London, and that tongue that was spoken here—for we cannot call it English—in the time of Alfred the Great, who came to the throne a thousand years ago. In fact, the language of Chaucer, which is somewhere midway between these two extremes, and rather nearer to our own time than to that of Alfred, is not commonly intelligible now. But it is not too much to say that the language of Moses and the language of Malachi are identical. The one writer would have had no difficulty in understanding the other. There are indeed slight indications of change in the language of the two; but it is, after all, the same language. The difference between Chaucer and Shakespeare is far greater than that between Moses and Malachi. The differences that do exist correspond to dialectical variations rather than differences of age; and it is a fact which we may endeavor to account for in various ways, that the language of the Old Testament does not present those marked differences of age that we should expect to find in compositions separated by long periods of time, and which are met with in the literature of other languages. The Hebrew Bible does not contain probably a tenth part of the vocabulary of the language as it was spoken at any one period, and several books are so short and so various in their subject-matter, that it could hardly be otherwise than that many words should be used by one writer, which would not be found in another. Almost every book has certain words peculiar to itself, and in some cases (as Job and Canticles) the number of these is very large. The Old Testament is composed in two cognate but totally distinct languages. By far the greater portion of it is written in Hebrew; but certain parts of Ezra (4: 8-6: 18, and 7: 12-26), one verse of Jeremiah (10: 11), and certain parts of Daniel (2: 45-7) are in Chaldee, which is presumed to have been the language acquired and spoken by the Jews during the Captivity, and which after their return gradually superseded the ancient biblical Hebrew. This language approximates more nearly to that used on the Assyrian monuments, which are Semitic, and not Persian or Scythic; to the language of the Targums, or the Chaldee paraphrases of certain portions of the Scriptures; to the Syriac of the oldest translation of the New Testament; and to it may be assigned those few Semitic words which are found in the Greek of the New Testament. On the other hand, the pure biblical Hebrew is more nearly represented by the language of the Phoenician inscriptions, and, above all, by that of the famous Moabite Stone.

The difference between these two languages is a difference of grammar, and not merely of vocabulary. There are, indeed, in several books, certain peculiarities of form, which are termed Chaldaisms, but these are for the most part trifling variations, consisting frequently of nothing more than a change of letter, and, however they are to be accounted for, are not sufficient to indicate the gradual approximation of the one dialect to the other. The difference between Hebrew and Chaldee is analogous to that between French and Italian, rather than to that between any two dialects of either language, or of our own. We have evidence from Scripture itself that a person speaking in Chaldee would not have been understood by an ordinary Jew, and the reverse from the request made to Rabshakeh (Isa. 36: 11 and 2 K. 18: 26). Another point to be noted is the family of languages to which the dialects of the Old Testament belong. This is what is called the Semitic family, comprising, for the most part, the languages spoken by the descendants of Shem. These are chiefly the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Ethiopic. Besides the Arabic and Ethiopic, another modern representative of this family exists in the Maltese. The Semitic languages are totally distinct in structure and formation, as well as vocabulary, from the Aryan or Indo-Germanic family, to which Greek, the language of the New Testament, and Latin and Gothic, the parents of our own, all belong.

From the existence of the Septuagint, from the reference in the preface to Ecclesiasticus, and from the testimony of Josephus, we can trace backward the pedigree of the Old Testament for a period of three hundred years from the birth of Christ. It is equally certain that at that time it must have acquired a considerable amount of celebrity to have been translated at Alexandria, more especially as the strong antipathy of the Greeks to the Jews would have prejudiced them against the Jewish literature, while for the use of the Jews themselves, who were living there, such a translation was not wanted. The fact, therefore, of this Greek version existing when it did is itself an evidence of a certain prior antiquity in the book; and whether the version was that of a part only or the whole, for the Law would naturally be translated first, it matters little, because it would have been an absolute impossibility that any books that were translated afterward should have originated in the interval, or, supposing them to have originated, should have acquired sufficient celebrity to be translated. For it must be borne in mind that though the Septuagint contains books which are not in the Hebrew, there are no books in the Hebrew which the Septuagint does not contain.

In an analysis of its structure and contents, the first thing which strikes us about the Old Testament, regarding it for the moment as a single book, is the multiplicity of its topics and the variety of its contents. This is, of course, less remarkable when we remember that though conventionally regarded as one book, it is really a national literature; and almost every species of writing finds its representative in the Old Testament. There are legal documents, sacrificial prescriptions, and ritual ordinances; there are family records and genealogical tables; there are complete historical monuments of the nation from its very infancy till the time when it ceased to have the distinct individual existence of the past. These monuments, though indeed much more meagre than we could desire, are none the less complete, inasmuch as they form, as it were by accident, a connected whole. The gaps which exist appear to be left almost by design. For example, we have few details given us of the wanderings, next to none of the captivity, but in either case this was not so much because an historian was lacking, as because, apparently from his point of view, the materials were deficient in interest. To us the record of these would have been most precious; nor can we conceive any period of the national history when it would not have been so to the nation; but, as a matter of fact, those who were directly interested in it, Moses, Daniel, and the rest, have passed it by in silence. Then, in addition to the history, we have poetry of every kind, elegiac, pastoral, warlike, devotional; poetry which, in the range of its subjects, and in the scope of its object, need fear comparison with none in any language, and, indeed, in this last respect is incomparably superior to all other poetry. Then there are ethical treatises, collections of moral maxims for the guidance of conduct, and speculations as to the destiny of man, and attempts at the solution of the mystery of his being, which have even now lost none of their interest; added to which there is in the Hebrew literature a cosmogony which alone, of all the cosmogonies of the ancient world, has at the present time, in the midst of the light and discoveries of modern science, any sort of claim to come into competition with it. There is no other which any one would even dream of attempting to reconcile with or oppose to the present condition of scientific knowledge, no other which is entitled to the smallest consideration as embodying any truth, whether physical or otherwise.

A similar variety is to be perceived also in the several writers whose works are comprised in the Old Testament. They are of all classes and occupations. There is the king, the priest, the warrior, the sage, the chorister in the temple, the cupbearer in the palace, the chamberlain in the court, and the herdsman in the field; and if we cannot add to the list, it is only because the scanty information we possess about certain individuals does not enable us to do so. S. Leathes.

The Traditional Order of the Old Testament Books the True Order.

Two considerations deserve to be borne in mind. First, that supposing the books of the Old Testament to be genuine, any dislocation of their real historical order (such as the conjecture that portions of the Pentateuch were written by Ezekiel or by Ezra) must altogether confuse and disguise their religious teaching. Secondly, that if these books, taken in their traditional order, exhibit a unity and progress which disappear on any other arrangement, a powerful argument will be supplied that the traditional order is the true order. If the pieces of a model fitted in one order produce a symmetrical building, and in any other arrangement a shapeless heap, no sane mind doubts which of these shows the design with which they were fashioned. E. R. Conder.

The Credibility of the History as Recorded.

We learn to appreciate this on internal grounds, and mainly for two reasons. There is no evidence of individual partiality on the part of the writers. The greatest characters are drawn without regard to the sympathies that may be presumed to be on their side. David’s vices are recorded with the stern severity of truth. If the writer seems almost for a moment to be carried away with admiration for the greatness of Solomon, he is not slow to depict his disgraceful fall, and that in such terms that certain critics have rejected the story as altogether incredible. But the same impartiality is observable as regards the nation and the national honor that we see as regards the principal personages of it. The impression left on the reader’s mind, after closing the books of Kings, is one certainly not favorable to the nation. Wonderful victories have at times been won, but they are attributed less to national prowess than to the Divine protection, and very often it is defeat, and not victory, that is recorded; while from a moral point of view, ingratitude, unfaithfulness, apostasy, are the very serious charges continually advanced against the nation. On both these grounds there is a natural presumption in favor of the writer’s credibility. In fact, this would probably never be questioned if it were not for another feature too prominent to escape observation, and this is the strong undercurrent of Divine interposition which everywhere runs through the whole narrative. The question, of course, is how this is to be dealt with. The ordinary historian and philosopher will at once set it aside. But it seems strange to do so hastily, when, as we have seen, there is so much on other grounds to dispose us to trust the narrative—more especially as this undercurrent of Divine interposition is ever associated with a claim to the possession of Divine knowledge. The writer professes to know how a man’s conduct was estimated in the Divine judgment; he claims to know something of the Divine purposes, as well as to record instances of the Divine interposition. These things, however much they may affect his credibility in ordinary matters, must evidently stand or fall together. The question is whether his acknowledged general credibility throws more credit on his statements in these matters, than his statements on these matters tend to bring discredit upon him in the others. And this is simply a question of preponderating evidence. The only thing to be said is that there are many features in the history as we accept and cannot but accept it, merely in its human aspect, that are certainly more consistent than inconsistent with the tenor of these remarkable statements. The history in its merely natural features is a unique and unparalleled phenomenon in literature. There is nothing which bears any, even a remote, analogy to it in the whole literature of mankind. The obscurity, the cohesion, the consistency which characterizes its composition finds nowhere anything correspondent to it. And then the complexion and the form of the history itself, in its broadest and most obvious features, is such as to produce in us the conviction that it is marked with the impress of the Divine finger, and overshadowed by the Divine hand, as the incidents of no other history can pretend to be. S. Leathes.

We may specify nine elements in the Sacred Books of the Jews as they stood about 400 n.c.—viz., their multiplicity and variety, their national, tribal, and personal interests, their genealogical, official, chronological, and topographical characteristics. Now, these things are just the class of phenomena in any literature which give it reality and stamp it as trustworthy. As we look down the long vista of narrative, hedged in as it ever is with prophecy and poetry, and reaching back from the comparatively modern period of Nehemiah to the patriarchal and pre-patriarchal ages, we feel that we are dealing, not with myths, legends, or old wives’ fables, but with solid historical realities. Girldestone.

It may safely be averred, putting the question of inspiration altogether out of view, that the natural character of the sacred historians ranks them with the first of human beings. In point of grandeur and sublimity of conception, of discrimination, of unaffected simplicity, of ingenuous disinterestedness, of unbending integrity, of successful execution, they are unrivalled; and it is only necessary to compare their productions with the most admired compositions of antiquity, to assign to them, unhesitatingly, the preference. Enc. Met.

Certainly if the Old Testament histories have the same origin as the chronicles of other nations, they present most anomalous features. Where do we find any other people whose annals contain nothing that can minister to national vanity, and have for one of their chief themes the sins of the nation? The history of Israel, as told in Scripture, is one long indictment of Israel. The peculiarity is explicable, if we believe that, whoever or how numerous soever its authors, God was its true author, as He is its true theme, and that the object of its histories is not to tell the deeds of Israel, but those of God for Israel. These continual relapses have an important bearing on the question of the origin of the “Jewish conception of God.” They are intelligible only if we take the old-fashioned explanation, that its origin was a Divine revelation, given to a rude people. They are unintelligible if we take the new-fashioned explanation that the monotheism of Israel was the product of natural evolution, or was anything but a treasure put by God into their hands, which they did not appreciate, and would willingly have thrown away. The foul Canaanitish worship was the kind of thing which, if left to themselves, they would have wallowed in. How came such people by such thoughts as these? The history of Israel’s idolatry is not the least conclusive proof of the supernatural revelation which made Israel’s religion. A. M.

Under the government of God idolatry is the greatest of crimes, a rebellion, a treason against the authority and the throne of Jehovah, and against His loyal subjects and true worshippers. It is a denial of His supremacy, His perfections, and His prerogatives; a scheme of degradation, misery, and destruction to men; a system of wickedness involving every species of immorality and corruption (as described in Rom. 1) and every element of Satanic malice and cruelty. Historically, this great system of tyranny and blood is the groundwork of the civil and social annals of a large portion of the race. It stands forth as the comprehensive organized embodiment of antagonism to the true religion; to virtue, truth, and righteousness. To counteract and prevent its universal success under the ancient dispensation, it was necessary to institute a theocratic administration over a particular community of true worshippers to preserve and protect them, and for their defence and the vindication of the Divine authority to inflict retributive and avenging judgments on the surrounding idolaters. Thus the destruction of Sodom, the plagues of Egypt, the extirpation of the Canaanites, the overthrow of other pagan nations from time to time, and the various subjections and captivities of the Israelites when they apostatized to idol worship, were successive vindications of the true God and the true religion against the arrogance and treason of idolatry. E. L.

Israel’s history, from beginning to end, is one continuous miracle; and its once glorious exaltation, with its dismal fall and present condition, one of the most overwhelming proofs conceivable of the divinity of Christianity and the truth of the Bible. Its historical eminence, its pure knowledge of God, its manifold covenant privileges, Israel owed not to its own merit, but solely to the sovereign mercy of God. For the Jews were by nature, as Moses and the prophets often lament, the most stiff-necked, rebellious, and unthankful nation on earth. Schaff.

The continued existence of the Jewish people is the great wonder of history. No other nanation has so tenaciously clung to its religion and nationality, and that, too, almost without a community of language. The great nations of antiquity that dwelt round about Palestine have all perished, though scarcely ever driven from their own countries. Israel has continued, though dispersed into the whole world. It stands before us still as the historical nation in a pre-eminent sense, an indestructible witness to the oldest and most sacred history—amid the changes in the other nations of the world, the guarantee of a great divine past and a great divine future. Auberlen.

For nearly two thousand years the revelation of God’s will was deposited with a single nation—the seed of Abraham. This is the sole reason why the history of the Jews is given so much more fully in the Bible than that of any other nation. It is remarkable, however, that Bible history brings us into contact, more or less close, with almost every great nation of the ancient world. Any one called on to name the greatest nations of antiquity would at once mention, in Africa—Egypt, Ethiopia, and Carthage, the daughter of Tyre; in Asia—Phoenicia, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, Arabia, and Medo-Persia; and in Europe—Greece, Macedonia, and Rome: it is remarkable that there is hardly one of these countries on which Bible history does not touch. W. G. B.

The Old Testament is, in fact, the most reliable source of extra-Israelitic history in so far as it touches upon it. Niebuhr, in characterizing the sources of the Assyria-Babylonian history he had written, says: “The Old Testament alone is an exception to patriotic untruth; it never conceals or passes over a national error or reverse. Its truthfulness is the highest thing in history, even for him who does not believe in Divine inspiration. At the same time, I must claim for the Old Testament the minutest accuracy as well as the utmost truthfulness of all our sources of history.” Auberlen.

I can bear testimony to the minute truth of innumerable incidental allusions in Holy Writ to the facts of nature, of climate, of geographical position, corroborations of Scripture, which, though trifling in themselves, reach to minute details that prove the writers to have lived when and where they are asserted to have lived; which attest their scrupulous accuracy in recording what they saw and observed around them; and which, therefore, must increase our confidence in their veracity where we cannot have the like means of testing it. I can find no discrepancies between their geographical or physical statements and the evidence of present facts. I can find no standpoint here for the keenest advocate against the full inspiration of the scriptural record. The HOLY LAND not only elucidates, but bears emphatic witness to the truth of the HOLY BOOK. Tristram.

God in History.

The Old Testament puts its loud and extended emphasis upon the direct control of God in the life of men and nations. It affirms this so distinctly and so constantly as to leave the later Testament nothing to add in confirmation. Its histories and biographies are not presented as more divinely overruled, but only as being directed to a special purpose, indicating the particular tide, in the current of world-history, which bore the ark of salvation down the ages. God may have specially interposed at times for this end, and wrought signs and wonders which are beyond the ordinary course of His providence. But the same essential presence, knowledge, and power have mingled themselves in every drop of that current, so that no sparrow has fallen to the ground in the most remote wilderness, and no hair has fallen from the humbled head, without Him. No purpose of His has failed, and no weapon raised to arrest that purpose has prospered. Of course we do not understand this at all, and there is no use in our trying, and only impiety in our demanding, to understand it now. But the Word makes it as indisputable as the existence of God Himself. Zabriskie.

In reading the Old Testament history, the thoughtful reader will be able to perceive more clearly the development of the plans of Providence. He will there discover in what manner events apparently unconnected all tend in a greater or less degree to the fulfilment of some wonderful events which were previously foretold, but which at the time when these results were delivered appeared impossible to be brought about; he will perceive that all the circumstances recorded in the Scripture tend to one end, with as much regularity as the incidents in a regular drama bring about the catastrophe. He will see them combine in one purpose, prove one point, develop one mighty scheme, which was planned in the councils of Omnipotence, gradually revealed to mankind, and is still in progress among mankind. G. Townsend.

God in history is God not in clouds and darkness, not in repelling and reserved majesty, not in distant, silent immensity, but God descended upon the earth; moving among the nations; employing visibly and effectively every one of

His mighty attributes; setting up and pulling down; turning and overturning; pouring abroad prosperity; executing judgment; declaring His righteousness; walking in His omnipotence; intimating His counsels of wisdom; unveiling the heart of everlasting love; carrying forward in a grand, resistless course, individuals, families, nations, to the consummation of His own exalted purposes. C. White.

There is a living spirit in history, which is as the creature in the wheels of Ezekiel’s vision. He who does not discern this will perceive in the records of the Church or the chronicles of time only a lifeless succession of isolated and meaningless events—the disjecta membra of the ages, or the anarchy of atoms in the confusion of a complicated chance work. And what can this life-spirit be but He whose presence fills all time and space, giving motion and order and beauty to the material world, and whose evolving purpose in the final historic development will bring a higher beauty and harmony to the moral world.

God is the life of the world’s history as really as He is of the history of the Church, although by a different manifestation. Herder undertook a universal history on the plan of excluding Christ; a work as impracticable and absurd as the reconstruction of the solar system on a principle that leaves out the sun. The elegant historian of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” fell into a similar error. Comte finds the end of the historic course in a social or scientific regeneration of the race. The acme of Hegel’s scheme is a political freedom, the idea of the old Roman commonwealth, of which Prussia has well-nigh attained the realization. But with the excellences peculiar to each of these distinguished writers, their works are essentially defective in the main element of a truly philosophical history. Their errors as philosophers made them partial and false as historians. “What is the history of the world without Christ?” exclaims Müller. What would the world be without the purpose of redemption, the pivot on which its whole government turns? Every event in its history is modified by the remedial element, of which the Church is the organized exponent. Lawrence.

Redemption the Central Theme of Old and New Testaments.

However much critics may differ in regard to the order of the successive stages in the development of Bible history and religion, they agree in recognizing in these books the official records of one process. They thus accept in reference to the biblical books an inner unity and connection not found in the Vedas, the Avesta, the Eddas, or similar collections of sacred literatures. However deep the “chasm” may be, to use a word of the lamented Delitzsch, between the naturalistic and naturalizing schools on the one hand, and the supernatural on the other, there is practically an agreement on this point. Even for the most advanced critics the Bible books are more than an accidental collection of interesting literary remains of one of the Oriental peoples. All this is deeply significant. It demonstrates anew that there is one grand central thought and process going through the entire Scriptures, notwithstanding the great diversity of authors, objects, contents, time and character of the different books; and that this unity of thought and purpose impresses itself most emphatically upon the Bible student. This central thought is the restoration of fallen man to the original relations established at creation between him and his God, which re-establishment is the work of God’s mercy and grace, and is appropriated by confiding faith. That this is the kernel of New Testament teaching is the common confession of all evangelical Christians. That it is equally the central thought of the Old Testament economy, in which at first glance the nomistic principle seems to be the sum and substance of the religious scheme, becomes clearer on closer examination.

That there exists between the two Testaments only a difference of degree and not of kind; that they are two stages or steps in one and the same historical development with a complete agreement of cardinal principles, is evident from the attitude of Christ and His apostles over against the official theology of their day. They appealed to the oracles of old, to the Law and the Prophets. The antagonism of the scribes and the Pharisees and other accepted teachers of the New Testament era to Christ and the Gospel, was caused by the departure of the former from the landmarks of revelation. For them the Law had become an end in itself, and was no longer the means to an end—namely, to be a “schoolmaster unto Christ,” as Paul says. Nomism had usurped the prerogatives of the evangelical principle of the Old Testament Covenant, and Christ’s new departure consisted in a return to the doctrines of an Isaiah, a David, and other representative types of the Old Testament economy. This one fact alone shows that the New Covenant in the eyes and purpose of its Founder was only relatively and not absolutely new; it was intended to be only the fully unfolded and ripened fruits from the germs in the proclamations of the seers and sages of old. The central thought of both must be the same. This, too, is plainly inculcated in the New Testament, and from this standpoint alone the Old Testament economy can be understood and appreciated in its whole length, breadth, and depth. Schodde.

The prophecy of the Seed of the woman, which should bruise the serpent’s head, is manifestly the nucleus, the single cell (to take an image from the formation of a flower) round which the whole Bible has formed itself, of which the whole is a development, on which the whole is a commentary. The great steps of the plan which runs through the Bible are very easy to trace. A nation of teachers is first reared amid various fortunes, knit together by the endurance of a common bondage, and impressed with marked national characteristics, in order that they may present a strong front to the prevailing idolatries and wickedness of the world; and in order that they may disseminate among other people of the earth the elementary religious notions which they had themselves imbibed from the Divine teaching. As soon as, through God’s wonderful dealings with them, they had been thoroughly imbued with these notions, they were dispersed among the nations of the earth, and made to sojourn there. By their instrumentality a class of men called proselytes are raised up in Gentile countries, who, attracted by the elements of truth which there were in the Mosaic religion, adopt it, and become eventually the bridge by which the Gospel passes from the Jewish to the Gentile mind. The way having been thus prepared for Messiah in the hearts of men, the long-promised Deliverer appears at a time of universal peace, and when the union of the civilized world under one empire was favorable to the spread of the tidings of salvation. What remains of the Sacred Volume briefly records the rapid spread of these tidings, gives certain comments upon them, and predicts the complete triumph of the Messiah’s cause. Thus there is an uniform plan running through the whole of Scripture, and cementing together its various books, inasmuch as the entire Old Testament looks forward to Messiah historically—represents the stages of discipline by which the Jews, and through the Jews the human race, were prepared for His appearance. And we well know that it looks forward to Messiah in another way, typically and prophetically, and that not only all the ritual of the Jews, and all the predictions of their prophets, but also most narratives of the Old Testament, foreshow His appearance in a glass darkly. Thus in the Bible, though its elements are so various, there is a glorious harmony of design, and, as the whole of it emanates from one Spirit, a harmony of agency also. E. M. G.

The history of the Old Testament is large and particular where the great affair of redemption required it, as where there was most done toward this work, and most to typify Christ, and to prepare the way for Him. Thus it is very large and particular in the history of Abraham and the other patriarchs; but very short in the account we have of the time which the children of Israel spent in Egypt. So, again, it is large in the account of the redemption out of Egypt, and the first settling of the affairs of the Jewish Church and nation in Moses’ and Joshua’s times; but much shorter in the account of the times of the Judges. So, again, it is large and particular in the account of David’s and Solomon’s times, and then very short in the history of the ensuing reigns. Thus the accounts are large or short, just as there is more or less of the affair of redemption to be seen in them. Christ and His redemption is the great subject of the prophecies of the Old Testament. He is the great subject of the songs of the Old Testament, and the moral rules and precepts are all given in subordination to Him. And Christ and His redemption are also the great subject of the history of the Old Testament from the beginning all along; and even the history of the creation is brought in as an introduction to the history of redemption that immediately follows it. The whole Book, both Old Testament and New, is filled up with the Gospel; only with this difference, that the Old Testament contains the Gospel under a veil, but the New contains it unveiled, so that we may see the glory of the Lord with open face. Edwards.

The traces of God’s mercy and wisdom in the history of salvation come first and most clearly to light, they appear in their most wonderful and attractive form, when we see how Divine prophecy was introduced as a living and organic part of history, and how the course of history was so directed by God, and His operations therein were of such a kind, as to be constantly opening the way and preparing a place for new and more glorious forms of prophecy. I fall in the dust and worship when I thus discover how the living God was ever moving in history and prophecy, how the mercy and wisdom of God, through His adorable condescension, adapted themselves in both of these to existing wants and circumstances. To my mind, prophecy first acquires its full value when I can see what God has done in history to prepare a fitting place for prophecy. The incarnation of God in the fulness of time loses nothing of its adorable worth, but rather gains the more, from the fact that it required a historical preparation of four thousand years. Kurtz.

Miracles of the Old Testament.

Just as in other history of life in general, the beginning of that life is due solely to the direct creative act of God, without the use of any means whatever, so in the beginning and founding of Christianity we have the manifestation of the direct, immediate power of God, acting in a manner independent of the ordinary laws and forces of nature. And what is true of the miracles of Christ is no less true of the miracles of the other great epochs of God’s kingdom upon earth—viz., the epochs of Moses and of Elijah. The limitation of miracles to these several distinct epochs indicates that such limitation of this peculiar manifestation of Divine power is analogous to the same limitation observed in other spheres of the Divine activity. According to this view the miracle simply marks a renewed impartation of Divine creative energy, and the beginning of a new, distinct era in the history of God’s kingdom on earth.

Those miracles which unquestionably stand at the head of all miracles—viz., the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, and the Mission of the Holy Spirit—sustain the closest possible relation to the founding of Christianity. Without these miracles no conception of Christianity is possible. The other miracles of the Bible, the miracles of the Old Testament, are mainly clustered together in two groups, occurring respectively at the two most important points in the history of the covenant people—the time of Moses and the time of Elijah. Thus the miracles of Scripture are found mainly in these three groups, and occur at the time of Moses, the time of Elijah, and the time of Christ. Huizinga.

The New Testament rests upon the broad foundation of the patriarchal promises, of the Mosaic institutions, of the prophetic instructions, and of the providential history recorded in the Old Testament. Independently of the light thrown back upon it from the New Testament, the miraculous history of the Old would be difficult of belief. But to him who has accepted Christ as He is revealed in the New Testament, there is no more reason for rejecting the miracles of the Old Testament than there is for discrediting the mass of supernatural facts connected with Christ’s ministry. We are not compelled to establish the truth of each specific miraculous account by itself, but the unity of the revelation and the congruity of the whole system are such that the burden of proof is thrown upon him who would discard any Old Testament miracle. G. F. Wright.

The general character of the miracles of the Old Testament is that of facts, plain, palpable, in their nature, at the same time inseparably connected with other facts and histories, and always immediately necessary to the occasion on which they were exhibited. The end to be obtained by them was obvious, and was also generally, previous to their performance, distinctly announced, so that the attention of the beholders was often particularly directed to their progressive and frequently long-protracted completion. The universal deluge, the confusion of the tongues at Babel, and the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire from heaven, were visible and immediate interpositions of God for the punishment of wicked men, different from His usual mode of procedure in the government of the world. On the separation of Israel, as a nation, from the rest of mankind, and onward for many centuries, a remarkable train of miraculous interpositions was interwoven with their history and laws. Both their character and the relation in which they stand to that history, of which they form so essential a part, mark the total contrariety between them and all pretended miracles, the falsity of which never disturbs the train of those histories in which they are narrated. But either the whole of the history of the Israelites is false, or the accounts of the miracles which it records must be true. If that people passed through the sea, as the history testifies, it must have been by miracle. If they remained forty years in the wilderness, they must have been miraculously fed while there. All the events related in the history depend upon the truth of that public and long-continued miraculous agency, without which they could not have had place. These miracles were recorded at the time when they occurred, and are not only minutely detailed in a way that stamps their authenticity, but are constantly appealed to both in the acts of public government, in the legislation, and in the execution of the laws. Unless the people of Israel had seen and known them to be facts, they never could have been influenced by such appeals.

The whole train of miraculous interposition from the beginning, before there was any written revelation, materially contributed to maintain the knowledge and worship of God in the world. To Israel, as separated from the other nations, it was essential to the circumstances in which they were placed. Nothing but that miraculous Providence under which they were placed could have retained them in obedience, subdued their incredulity, or impressed on their minds a conviction of the Divine origin and nature of that dispensation under which they were placed. But such has been the force of this impression, that all their subsequent trials and dispersions, and all their disappointments, occasioned by the errors they have embraced, have not effaced it to this day. At length, when the purposes intended by miraculous interpositions were accomplished, they became gradually less frequent, till the spirit of prophecy was withdrawn, when they seem to have ceased altogether, not to appear again in Israel till they were renewed by the Messiah Himself, in a way better adapted to the genius of that more spiritual dispensation which He introduced, as well as more illustrative of the beneficent nature of the Divine mission of Him who came not to condemn the world, but to save it, but in a way equally beyond the utmost stretch of human power. Haldane.

The Bible is the Book of Miracles. Men sometimes sadly turn away from the great Book because inspiration is upon every page, and miracle pervades the activity which fills it from end to end. But believing souls rejoice in the great Bible because it deals with the eternal as well as with the present, with the infinite as well as with the finite, because it deals with man, who is the child of God. Only then shall the soul of man rest content in the great Bible, when in the new nature that has come to him the supernatural becomes his home. P. Brooks.

The historical books of the Old Testament contain such references, direct and indirect, to the Pentateuch history and codes in their united form as the Torah (Law) mediated by Moses, that we are fully justified in the circumstances in inferring, what these histories would plainly have us infer, that they all and severally belong to the Mosaic period. In the Books of Kings, the law of the land, precedent, what is sanctioned in distinction from what is often in vogue is everywhere represented as something that has come down from the fathers. In a surprising number of instances it is definitely connected by name with Moses and with the institutions of Moses (1 K. 2 : 3 ; 8 : 9, 53, 56 ; 2 K. 14 : 6 ; 28 : 4, 6 ; 21 : 8 ; 23 : 25). Of Jeroboam it is said that he purposely transgressed the law respecting the feast of the seventh month, the Feast of Tabernacles (1 K. 12 : 32). And of Jehu that he took “no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel” (2 K. 10 : 31). In 2 K. 8 : 3, during the famine in Samaria, we find a company of lepers treated just as the Levitical statutes enjoin, in their exclusion from the camp (Lev. 13 : 46 ; Num. 5 : 3).

Other passages represent as something known to every one the hour of morning and evening sacrifice (1 K. 18 : 29 ; 2 K. 3 : 20) ; the law of the trespass-offering and sin-offering (2 K. 12 : 17), and that of the Sabbath (2 K. 4 : 23 ; cf. 11 : 5 f.). In 2 K. 14 : 6, Amaziah is declared to have acted in a certain matter according to that which was “written in the book of the law of Moses,” the code of Deuteronomy being obviously referred to (Deut. 24 : 16). A few chapters later we are informed concerning the mixed peoples whom the king of Assyria transplanted to the northern kingdom, that they did not “after the law and commandment which the Lord commanded the children of Jacob, whom He named Israel ; with whom the Lord had made a covenant and charged them, saying, Ye shall not fear other gods . . . but the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. . . . And the statutes, and the ordinances, and the law, and the commandment which He wrote for you, ye shall observe to do for evermore ; and ye shall not fear other gods” (2 K. 17 : 34-37 ; cf. Deut. 13 : 4, 36).

Whence came Elijah the Tishbite? and Obadiah and Joel, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah? Unlike in natural gifts and training, they were yet impelled by one spirit ; uttered really but one message. Prophets of two fiercely rival kingdoms, they never waver in their loyalty to one invariable standard and to one King. It was Amos of Judah who, while tending his flocks in Tekoa, heard the call of God, and hurried to confront the haughty king of Israel and his false priests at Bethel. It was Elijah of Israel who won from the people of Judah such love and reverence that, to this day, in certain ceremonies, their descendants still set for him a chair as an invisible guest. What gave to these men this unity of spirit, this fiery zeal, this mysterious power over kings and people? What was it that took away all sense of fear in the discharge of duty? Whence that idea of solemn, imperative duty? It was the Mosaic law given amid the awful sanctions of Mount Sinai, that was at once their bond and inspiration ; that ruled them and heartened them. They severally make direct and unmistakable allusions to it, or its essential historic setting. All their utterances are based on such a presupposition. They recognize a covenant made with God through Mosaic mediation. That covenant had not been kept. Their whole activity proclaims a perverse trend of thought and conduct against which they relentlessly fight, one and all. Founders of a religion they were not, and could not be, men like these, without a sign of collusion ; but mighty reformers they were, who set their faces like a flint against a prevailing degeneracy and lapse of the people whom God had chosen for His own. E. C. Bissell.

We have no record of any period in the history of Israel subsequent to the occupation of Canaan, at which the Law was not known ; and as far as the evidence of the records that we have is available, it clearly witnesses to the authority and influence of the Law from the very first. Whether or not this evidence is accepted historically, it is certain that there is no one section or era of Hebrew literature, whether it be the Prophets, Psalms, or history, which is free from the traces of an influence which can only be referred to the Law recognized as an authoritative code of Divine obligation and origin. The entire literature of the Old Testament, unless it is necessary to except such books as Job and Canticles, is penetrated and permeated with the influence of the Law. It is the one foundation underlying the whole. We come upon traces of it wherever we search. And it is this fact which gives to the several and widely different component elements of the literature a bond of cohesion and a substantive and substantial unity such as we can discover in no other literature whatever. It is, moreover, a unity which is entirely independent of the individual will of the various writers. It is a phenomenon which arises out of the fact that each separate writer was a member of a nation of whose existence one of the most marked features was the possession of the Law, and which was created and bound together by nothing so much as by it, and by the traditions enshrined in it.

From these books of Kings there is not only evidence of the existence of the Tabernacle, which was superseded by the Temple, but there is continual implication of a positive and external Law, which the nation and its kings were ever violating. This Law is mentioned explicitly in 2 K. 23 : 24, 25, and is called the Law of

Moses. Some critics have attempted to prove that the finding of the book of the Law here mentioned is the earliest indication of its existence, and that this incident does actually disguise its origin. But the theory is really too monstrous and visionary to be entertained. It is manifest that the writer of the Kings did not himself regard the discovery of Hilkiah as the origin of the Law, because in 2 K. 18 : 4, 6, 12, he traces the captivity of the ten tribes to their forgetfulness of the Law of Moses, and mentions the destruction by Hezekiah of the brazen serpent that Moses had made. It is impossible to suppose he invented or inserted the narrative of this incident to give credit to the newly discovered law of Moses, or to the copy of it which was afterward found in the Temple. There was unquestionably a brazen serpent destroyed by Hezekiah, and, rightly or wrongly, this was believed to be identical with that made by Moses in the wilderness. I say rightly or wrongly, for it matters not. What is really important is the fact that toward the end of the eighth century before Christ there was in the national memory a clear recollection of the incident recorded only at Num. 21 : 6, and a supposed relic of it existing. And this there is no reason to doubt. But, of course, if the brazen serpent destroyed by Hezekiah was the one made by Moses, the historic truth of that part of the Pentateuchal history is established ; but even if it was not, the supposed incident is shown to have been so old in the national memory, that a vicious accretion of superstitious observances had gathered around it ; and yet, as far as we know, there was nothing to keep alive this memory but the record in Numbers, and the existence of this particular brazen serpent. We have, then, in the testimony of the books of Kings, evidence to the existence, at least in part, of the Mosaic history long before the age of Hezekiah. But even before this time, on the testimony of the same books, we find Amaziah, in the ninth century before Christ, acting in accordance with the written precept of Deut. 24 : 16, in not slaying the children of those who had slain his father. There are, moreover, several indications in the books of Kings of verbal acquaintance on the part of the writer with the Law—e.g., 2 K. 17 : 8–15 ; cf. Lev. 5 : 15, 18 ; 7 : 7 ; Num. 18 : 9 ; 1 K. 21 : 10 ; cf. Ex. 22 : 28, and Lev. 24 : 15, 16 ; 1 K. 19 : 10 ; cf. Num. 25 : 11, 13. The conduct of Elijah in 1 K. 18 : 40 is in literal accordance with Deut. 13 : 5 and 18 : 20. S. Leathes.

The references in the later Scriptures make us feel sure that the writers had before them some such records as we possess in the Pentateuch. That at least is the impression which they are calculated to produce on the mind of any plain reader. Nor must we ever forget that the Historical Books give us only a very brief outline of Israel’s course, and do not refer to feasts, laws, etc., except where the story makes it necessary. It is indeed only too true that the people did not keep the law. Their hearts were hard, and they were constantly relapsing ; but they were severely punished for their disobedience. There have been dark ages in Christendom as there were dark ages in Israel, and we must no more infer the non-existence of the Law of Moses through the one period than we can prove the non-existence of the Gospel of Christ in the other. The truth is that the theory of a late origin of these books creates far more difficulties than it solves. To most minds it would be impossible to conceive that the Book of Exodus was a late invention, when they reflect on the shameful episode concerning the golden calf—imbedded as it is in the heart of the Mosaic law. Nor can one understand the purpose of such an elaborate description of the ark of the Tabernacle, of the ritual and ceremonial connected therewith, and of the exact arrangements for moving from place to place, with full details and names of persons and localities, if these descriptions first saw daylight when the history of some of them (notably the Tabernacle) was already a story of the past. We ask ourselves whether there ever was a time, except during the wilderness period, in which the Mosaic and Leviticus legislation could possibly have been imposed on Israel ; and we ask in vain. We see no marks of a forger, and we see no reason for a forgery. On the contrary, each book bears testimony to the candor of the writer, and to his honesty of purpose ; and the real reason of the ritual is to be found in the New Testament. In a word, we know of no critical or linguistic arguments which can justify us in disintegrating the Pentateuch in the face of all the plain facts of the case as they stand before us in its vivid pages. Girdlestone.

According to the modern school of critics, the work of preparing the sacred books, of recasting the alleged history of Moses, and blending into the narrative the doctrines and prescriptions of ritualism, one central place of worship, and the distinctions of priests and Levites, was begun in the age of Josiah, and went on till the compilation of the historical books, some time after the Exile. According to this school, that period of renaissance or awakening must have been a creative religious age, an age of discovery and production, of literary brilliancy in religion, outside of the writings of the prophets. For these writers ascribe to that age a most complicated and skilful series of literary creations, so adroitly managed and woven in with authentic facts, that they carried the whole nation over to the practice of the injunctions of the forgeries without questioning their genuineness. But we look in vain for the evidence of such a creative age. There is not a scintilla of historical proof of its existence. The only freshness that appears from the historical evidence coming down to us was in the prophets; and their whole aim and influence was to call the people up to something higher and more important than ritualism, to revive the moral and spiritual ideas of worship and of practical righteousness, which had already been too much covered up and lost sight of by the popular ceremonial. The only creative power of the age of which there is any trace was directed against the very end for which our critics suppose the age was ripe.

Moreover, they are involved in another difficulty. By discarding the accounts in the historical books detailing the practice of the ceremonial in the earlier times and holding that it sprang up under the influence of the prophets, they have this strange phenomenon on their hands: the introduction among a historical people of a revolutionary ritualism, not only with no record of its introduction, and in an age showing no signs of invention or creation apart from the prophets whose influence was antagonistic, but with no recorded historical preparations for it. Historically uncaused and unannounced, it sprang into such instant dazzling and bewildering power as to send its glamour back over the past and cause a new history of the preceding times to be written, in which it should have a seeming of the gravity and dignity of hoary age, and this is done in the name of historical criticism by those who think that sacred history is an orderly and natural flow of events, and is to be explained on rational principles. J. E. Dwinell.

In Recapitulation and Conclusion.

We recognize the fact that the Old Testament, as we now have it, is to all intents and purposes the same as it was in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that He stamps it as a whole with His authority, constantly appealing to it and quoting it as “the Scriptures” and “the Word of God.” We trace these Scriptures back from the time of Christ to that of Nehemiah (n.c. 400), in whose age the canon of the Old Testament seems to have been closed; and we see sufficient reason for believing that the “Library” of Jewish religious books was the same then as now, though doubtless the sacred text suffered much in the course of transcription between the age of Nehemiah and the period when it was issued in its present condition by the Jewish scribes of Tiberias, circ. 500 A.D. We recognize nine literary characteristics of the Old Testament which would equally justify a Jew of n.c. 400 or a Christian of A.D. 1900 in believing that the books which make up this Sacred Library are genuine and trustworthy. We see that the numerous casual references to external history contained in these books may be illustrated and confirmed from other sources, and this fact coupled with the plain proofs of the writers’ honesty inclines us to accept the whole of their historical records as veracious, unless very strong proofs are forthcoming to the contrary. We observe that the prophetic writings were not only predictive, but also historic and hortative, bearing the same relation to the history that the Epistles in the New Testament do to the Acts—confirming and being confirmed—and that the historical element in these writings gives great literary weight to the predictive element. We then pass to the question of the age and compilation of certain books. After considering the general characteristics of the Hebrew language and the unity of theological diction which exists beneath the diversity of style in the sacred writers, noting also the fact that we have no contemporary Hebrew literature by which to test the age of each book, we are led to the conclusion that there were not sufficient grounds for bringing any of the books down from their professed dates, or for dividing up among several authors books which were professedly issued or authorized by one person. This conclusion justifies us in adhering to the Mosaic origin of the four last books of the Pentateuch—Genesis being in substance pre-Mosaic—and it encourages us to uphold the literary integrity of such books as Isaiah, Daniel and Zechariah, unless the evidence of their being compilations is demonstrative.

What shall we say to these things? We invite every reader to ponder over them, and we urge every critic to give them full and fair weight. There are many things we do not know about the compilation and dates and contents of the Old Testament, but there is much that we do know. Mistakes have been made by ancient copyists; notes and interpolations may have found their way into the text in early times; doubts may exist as to the age and authorship of some books; we may be uncertain as to the historic foreground or occasion of many a psalm and prophecy; and numerous linguistic questions will be battled over till the end of time; but, in spite of all these things, we are manifestly on safe literary ground in taking the Old Testament as it stands, and in using it as Christ and His apostles used it.

These venerable books have been dragged before the court of modern criticism, but they need not be ashamed; they can stand the full glare of linguistic and literary daylight. They share the fate of the Christian confessors of old time; and they share their triumph. They testify to Christ, and Christ testifies to them. They bear the mark of God in their histories, their hymns, their predictions. Man is the writer, using human language, human modes of thought, and often even secular materials; but God is the Inspirer, and these blessed writings are His lesson books, leading men to feel their need of salvation, keeping up in their hearts from generation to generation a spirit of expectancy, and enabling them to recognize the crucified and risen Jesus as the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. R. B. Girdlestone. (Age and Trustworthiness of the Old Testament Scriptures.)

Let any set of men combine to write such a book as the Bible. Let their plan be laid so as to extend through a period of fifteen hundred years. Let those who shall first enter upon the work obtain others to succeed them during that space of time. Let them write history, poetry, theology, and prophecies concerning the state of the world. Let them at length procure some one to come forward in whom all that they have written shall find its accomplishment. Let him be born in the place they had foretold, of the family they had singled out, at the exact period they had predicted. Let him be exhibited in the most critical situations, in the midst of enlightened, powerful, and determined adversaries, while they still uphold him as perfect, and defy his enemies to prove the contrary. Let his own death be a part of their plan, which he himself shall foretell. Let a number of persons arise immediately afterward to carry forward the design, charge the government under which he suffered as his murderers, affirm that he is alive, and has given them convincing evidence that he will reward them in a future world. Let these men support their doctrines by an appeal to miracles openly performed before enemies armed with civil power; and let them adhere to their testimony at the expense of life, and all things dear in this world. Let them promulgate a new religion and code of laws, completely subversive of every existing religion on earth, and directly opposed to the indulgence of the strongest propensities of the human heart. Let this religion, by the force of its own evidence, win its way through the world, overthrow every opposing system, extend its triumphs, and finally establish itself in the most civilized nations, in spite of the most learned, the most determined, and the most powerful adversaries; and let the character of the leader, as set forward by his associates, be thus vindicated as “the light of the nations.” Who does not see the total impracticability, the absolute absurdity of such an attempt? As soon might men of understanding be induced to undertake to climb up to the stars, as to propose to themselves such a scheme; yet all that has been thus supposed has been accomplished in Jesus Christ. Haldane.

As the countries with which Israel had mainly to do were Chaldea, Egypt, Syria, Assyria, the later Chaldean Empire, and finally Persia, it becomes possible to compare the numerous though somewhat casual statements concerning these nations, which the Old Testament contains, with the inscriptions on rock and clay, in palace and temple, which have been brought to light in the course of this century. If these secular references are in the main proved to be accurate and historical, and not mythical, then the trustworthiness of the writers is so far established thereby; and if they are trustworthy when dealing with things external, there is equal reason to trust them when they relate the internal history of their own nation. What, then, is the verdict of historical students on this point? It is unanimous that the references to external history in the Old Testament are trustworthy.

Perhaps the most striking testimony is to be obtained from the writings of Dr. Schrader, the Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Berlin. Dr. Schrader is what the ordinary English student would call “free” in his ideas about the inspiration and compilation of the sacred books, but this makes his testimony all the more valuable. His method is to follow straight through the Old Testament, noting every verse and sometimes every word which can be illustrated by a wide and careful study of the cuneiform inscriptions. The result is that whether our attention is directed to the pre-Mosaic period, which includes the narrative of the Creation, the Deluge, Babel, the dispersion, and the invasion of the cities of the plain, or whether we are studying the later histories, we find illustrations of the historical value of the sacred narratives at every turn. Girldstone.

The coincidences between the sacred record and the profane during the period from the revolt to the Captivity include notices of almost every foreign monarch mentioned in the course of the (sacred) narrative—of Shishak, Zerah, Ben-hadad, Hazael, Mesha, Rezin, Pul, Tiglath-pileser, Shalmanezer, So, Sargon, Sennacherib, Tirhakah, Merodach Baladan, Esarhadon, Necho, Nebuchadnezzar, Evil-Merodach, and Apries—and of the Jewish or Israelite kings, Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Ahaziah, Menahem, Pekah, Ahaz, Hoshea, Hezekiah, and Manasseh. All these monarchs occur in profane history in the order and at or near the time which the sacred narrative assigns to them. The synchronisms which that narrative supplies are borne out wherever there is any further evidence on the subject. The general condition of the powers which came into contact with the Jews is rightly described; and the fluctuations which they experience, their alternations of glory and depression, are correctly given. No discrepancy occurs between the sacred and the profane throughout the entire period, excepting here and there a chronological one. And these chronological discrepancies are in no case serious. G. R.

For more than fifty years the historical credibility of the Old Testament Scriptures has been assailed on the ground that the narratives contained in it are not contemporaneous with the events they profess to record, because they represent an incredible amount of civilization as existing in the ancient Eastern world, and are inconsistent with the accounts of classical writers, and because writing was little known or practised by the Jews at so early a period. The same half century, however, which has witnessed these assaults on the Old Testament has also witnessed the discovery and decipherment of monuments which belong to Old Testament times. At the very moment when the assailants of Scripture had adopted new methods of attack which could no longer be met by the old modes of defence, God was raising up unexpected testimonies to the truth of biblical history. The ancient civilizations of Egypt, of

Babylonia, and of Assyria now lie outspread before us as fully and clearly as the civilization of Imperial Rome. Sennacherib and Tiglath-pileser, Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, tell us in their own words the story of the deeds in which they themselves took part; and we can trace the very forms of the letters in which Isaiah and Jeremiah recorded their prophecies. The discoveries of the Moabite Stone and the Siloam Inscription have shown that writing was known and practised in Judah at the time to which the larger part of the Old Testament Scriptures professes to belong. The Moabite Stone was a monument erected by Mesha, the contemporary of Ahab, who is called “a sheepmaster” in 2 K. 3 : 4. (See Sec. 7.) The chief interest attaching to the inscription in our eyes lies, perhaps, in the language and characters in which it is written. The language is almost exactly the same as that of the Old Testament, and shows that the dialect of Moab differed much less from Hebrew than does one English dialect from another. The very phrases recur which the Old Testament has made familiar to us, and at times we might fancy that we were listening to a chapter of the Bible. The characters, too, in which the text is written belong to a form of the Phoenician alphabet which must have resembled very closely that used by the Jews. We may thus see in them the mode of writing employed by the earlier prophets, and correct by their means the corrupt readings which the carelessness of copyists has allowed to creep into the sacred text.

Since the discovery of the Moabite Stone, another early inscription has been found in Jerusalem itself, which shows us precisely how the books of the Old Testament, which were composed between the time of David and the Babylonian Captivity, must have been originally written. This is the Siloam Inscription, engraved in the rock-cut tunnel which conveys the water of the Virgin’s Spring—the only natural spring in or about Jerusalem—to the pool of Siloam. Its strange position in a dark underground conduit, through which the water was perpetually flowing, caused it to remain unnoticed until a few years ago. The exact date at which the tunnel was executed is disputed, since while there are several reasons which would make us assign it to the age of Solomon, there are others which have led the majority of scholars to place it in the reign of Hezekiah. In this case it will be the conduit made by Hezekiah which is mentioned in 2 K. 20 : 20 and 2 Chron. 32 : 30. Now the forms of the letters used in the inscription make it quite clear that the engraver was accustomed to write on parchment or papyrus, and not on stone. They are rounded and not angular like the characters on the Moabite Stone. It is plain, therefore, that the alphabet employed in Judah was that of a people who were in the habit of writing and reading books.

What we now know about the history of writing in the East not only makes it possible that the biblical books were written at the time to which tradition assigns them, but makes it probable that they were. It is not likely that the Israelites would have abstained from composing books when they were acquainted with the art of writing, and when the nations by whom they were surrounded had long been in the possession of libraries. And that the biblical books actually belong to the time to which tradition assigns them is evidenced by the confirmation their contents have received from the decipherment of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. The accuracy they display in small points is only explicable on the hypothesis that the histories contained in them were related by contemporaries. While, on the one side, the progress of modern discovery has tended to destroy the credit once attached to the works of Alexandrine Jews or Greek compilers, it has, on the other side, confirmed and verified, illustrated and explained, the statements and allusions in the historical and prophetic books of Holy Writ. The one are shown to belong to a later age than that of which they profess to give an account, the other to be contemporaneous with the events which they record. We may turn to them with increased confidence and faith; confidence in the historical picture they set before our eyes, and faith in the Divine message which they were commissioned to deliver.

To sum up. The witness of ancient monuments to the Old Testament Scriptures is of a twofold nature. It is positive, inasmuch as it proves that they are in agreement with actual facts; and negative, inasmuch as it shows how far this is from being the case with documents which lay claim to the same amount of credibility, and deal with the same subject-matter, but which really belong to a later age. The witness is therefore complete. Difficulties may still exist here and there, since as long as our knowledge is imperfect, there are things which cannot be satisfactorily explained; but difficulties enough have been already cleared away, confirmations sufficient of the truth of the biblical record have been produced, to banish such doubts as may have found place in our minds, and to inspire us with a calm confidence that with the increase of knowledge and the discovery of fresh monuments the difficulties which still remain will be diminished, and the great body of verifying facts continually enlarged. The critical objections to the truth of the Old Testament once drawn from the armory of Greek and Latin writers can never be urged again; they have been met and overthrown once for all. The answers to them have come from papyrus and clay and stone, from the tombs of ancient Egypt, from the mounds of Babylonia, and from the ruined palaces of the Assyrian kings. These long-buried witnesses have been disinterred to cry out against the assailants of our faith, the long-forgotten empires of the ancient East have arisen out of the grave of centuries to testify to the truth of “the oracles of God.” Sayee.

Looking back for less than forty years, it requires no small effort to grasp the vast advance which has been made in a single generation in the confirmation and illustration of Old Testament history from external sources. The sepulchres of Egypt have been ransacked, the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia have been excavated, the hills and rivers of Palestine have been searched, and the result is that there is scarcely a single incident, wherever the sacred narrative impinges on the history or transactions of neighboring nations, in which the minute accuracy of the biblical record is not established.

. . . The historic accuracy of the Old Testament from Abraham downward is now all but established in every minute detail from contemporary records and evidence; and it is harder than ever to untwine the woof of its miracles from the warp of its history. One theory, research—whether in Mesopotamia, Syria, Arabia or Egypt—renders more untenable every day—viz., that which would resolve the individual man and events of early sacred history into myths and legends. Everywhere the stones cry out. Each fresh explanation attests or illustrates an incident the more confirmatory, often, from its very triviality, like that of the platform before the Palace of Tâhpanhes. The Divine reproach on the rejecters of Christ becomes year by year more scathing: “If ye believe not Moses’ writings, how shall ye believe My words?” Tristram.

In confirmation of the scriptural account of the origin and growth of early civilization, we may refer to the daily increasing mass of translated Assyrian and Chaldean documents, in which the long list of names, once peculiar to the Scripture, recur as familiarly as household words; or to the Moabite Stone recovered in so romantic a way, which tells so freely the story of “Mesha, king of Moab,” and interprets together the Hebrew and Phoenician, as the Rosetta Stone had done the Greek and Egyptian, and the Behistun Inscription, the Persian, Assyrian and Babylonian; or to the testimony from the comparative study of language, ethnology, ethnography, etc. In this connection we note: (1) The preservation of these unique and perishable memorials from so great antiquity and in so improbable ways, while the nearer, more abundant and multiplied copies of the Greek and Latin classics have almost wholly perished; (2) their hiding through so many centuries, entombed in rubbish or sealed up in occult languages, making their authority, when revealed, indisputable; (3) their almost simultaneous issuance, and the strangely coincident appearance of the several undreamed of keys for their interpretation; (4) the exact response of the testimony so evoked to the antiquity and genuineness of the Scripture documents; (5) the abundant points of contact and consequently of test between the new data and the Scripture, because of the circumstantiality of each; (6) and the prescient minuteness of the Scripture in name, date and circumstance avowedly for this end. Surely “this also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working.” J. B. Thomas.

For twenty-five years the peculiar phase of anti-supernatural criticism which in this country is called “Higher Criticism” has busied itself with discovering in the Old Testament contradictory narratives, statements, dates and, above all and in all, a wretched, incomprehensible editing of the whole. Having for twenty-five years followed this criticism in all its works, I can speak for myself and say that I do not see one discrepancy where Kuenen, Wellhausen, Budde, Cornill, and their followers see a hundred contradictions, and I turn from their works to the Bible as one turns from a dark Indian temple, with its hideous forms of man-made gods, to the fair light of the Sun in God’s temple of the sky. These writers declare that they have proved the historical parts of the Bible to be no history at all. But they have proved it only to those who would exclude the supernatural. They assert that the early history of the Bible is fable and legend, because man is there represented as having a high ideal of God and a religious sense that belongs only to later ages. But their fellow-professors tell us that early man, as he is shown by his monuments in Egypt and Asia, had a high ideal of God, of morals, and an elaborate scheme of religion. This criticism dogmatically states that the Israelites, before David’s time, could not write, and, therefore, composed no books, kept no records before that time, B.C. 1000. Egyptology and Assyriology give us myriad proofs that as soon as man appears on monuments, earlier than B.C. 3000, it is with the hand of a master in all written characters, and that the Semites, of whom the Hebrews were a part, from the earliest times held in their trained hands all the great roads of the world’s commerce. The Jew has never, except in this criticism, been accounted the dunce of the nations.

The history of this school of criticism brings before us many facts which would never be supposed unless proved by so many witnesses. But among all these facts there is none more astounding than that, while professing to be above all things historical and to utter the voice of history, it has persistently shut its eyes from seeing, its ears from hearing, and its pages from telling, the history with which it is most concerned. By the side of these Old Testament professors in their own universities, there have been for decades professors of Egyptology and Assyriology. These sciences are represented by men as learned and as numerous as the Protestant professors of Old Testament literature in Germany and England, who do not number sixty, all told. They have established stately reviews in French, German, and English. The literature of these sciences is greater than that of this Old Testament criticism, as the texts on which they work are far greater than all the Old Testament and the Greek and Latin classics combined. The press during most of this century has poured forth works of the highest class of scholarship in these sciences. These works treat of extra-biblical history parallel with the Old Testament. They treat of the history of these languages, of religion, education, civilization, ethics, law, poetry, architecture, archaeology. Now we should suppose that this criticism which professes to be historical would take all this as, at least, one of the factors of its problem. But its volumes will be searched in vain for the first evidence of any acquaintance with this most learned and scientific help to the understanding of the Old Testament. From these volumes one would never imagine the existence of this vast sphere of knowledge, which has revolutionized the whole idea of ancient history, and gives us the environment of Palestine from at least a thousand years before Moses to the time of Christ.

For seventy years the monuments of Egypt, and for fifty years the monuments of Babylonia and Assyria, have been studied by a host of scholars, the peers of any others the world has known. M. Menant, of France, says that the texts already discovered would fill five hundred octavo volumes—a larger amount than all the Greek and Latin classics. In Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Leyden, Upsala, and elsewhere, professorships of Egyptology and Assyriology have been long established. The permanent literature of these subjects, the sober, scientific works of these scholars issued in the past fifty years, would make a library by themselves. Wherever sound philological and historical study is honored, there the names of the great Egyptian and Assyrian scholars will be placed high in the list of those who have benefited their fellows. The immense value of this work arises from the well-nigh numberless monuments discovered. These scholars give us the monuments and their story, so that the learner can compare the story with its source. If now we can ascertain the points on which these Egyptian and Assyrian scholars—French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Russian—are unanimously agreed, we may be sure there is good foundation for those points; and it is also certain that those points will represent the most scientific historical teaching of the present-day concerning early man. Beyond the monuments all is, must be, mere speculation. The monuments form the horizon of all extra-biblical knowledge of early man. On the following four points there is unanimous agreement:

1. That with the earliest monuments man appears before us with language fully formed, and elaborate written characters responding to all his needs. Never afterward in Babylonia or Egypt are the signs of language more beautifully shaped and chiselled than on the numerous diorite statues of Tello, or on the granite and limestone of the tablet of Senoforu, of the pyramids of Unas, Pepi, Mirinri, of the tomb of Ti. The long and many inscriptions of Tello and of the pyramids show us the language capable of expressing all religious thought, rich in the terms of settled, civilized, refined life, abundant in geographical names, and speaking of gold, iron, bronze, and precious woods and minerals, as of common possessions. 2. The earliest monuments show us the religions of Babylonia and Egypt already fully formed; their main fundamental doctrines remaining the same throughout the existence of their peoples, though with the centuries there were many changes in non-fundamental points. Up to 1880 there were many attempts to trace the evolution of the religion of Egypt; but by the opening of the inscribed pyramids in 1881 all historical ground was taken from these speculations—for these inscriptions display all the main doctrines of the Egyptian religion fully elaborated. So that it is now agreed on all hands by the masters of these sciences that one must go behind all monuments, all historic proof, if he would attempt to trace the beginnings of Egyptian or Babylonian religion. 3. The art of Tello in Babylonia and of the pyramid times in Egypt was the highest art ever reached in these lands; their earliest art was their best. At this earliest period the numerous extant remains of their art show a mastery of all details, an ease and grace of handling, a simplicity and truth to nature, a refinement of conception, and a deftness in execution never attained again in the later centuries of these peoples. The statues of Tello, the intaglios of early Chaldea, the statues and bas-reliefs of early Egypt, the pyramids, enormous in mass, yet with exquisitely finished, inscribed, painted inner passages and chambers; the tomb of Ti at Sakkarah, with its wealth of sharp-cut letters, and more abundant bas-reliefs of all the forms of most ancient home life, and many other tombs—all tell the same story, that man at this era had reached the acme of the art of his people. 4. Language and religion fully formed, and art at its best, prove the fourth point—that at the earliest age of man, shown by the monuments, a very high degree of civilization reigned in Babylonia and Egypt, and both these lands were intimately acquainted and in commercial exchange with the Sinaitic Peninsula and the Syrian-Phenician coast.

If these results of Egyptology and Assyriology are true, as these scholars believe, then there is far greater reason for placing the composition of the Pentateuch in the classic age than in the age of the decline and abasement of Western Asiatic and Egyptian literature. Both Driver and Cornill imagine a state of society and religion before the age of David that is in blank contradiction to the facts shown by the monuments. Without this purely imaginary society and religion their theory could have no basis. If the Pentateuch written in the most classic Hebrew, if the Psalms and Prophets, the Old Testament as we have it, was to a large extent written, edited, and issued only from 650 to 160 n.c., then the miracle of its appearance is still greater than at earlier dates, for the decadence of all Western Asiatic and Egyptian literature was in full course. The literary sceptre had long passed from Asiatic to Greek hands. And if by all the analogies of environment there is no reason why the Pentateuch should not have been composed 1400 B.C., there is also no reason why the principal actor in the history should not have been its historian. When we have a document claiming to narrate contemporary history by an apparent or asserted author, we are told by those who write on historical method that it must be tested by the following questions: 1. Was the apparent author a contemporary? 2. Was he a participant or eye-witness of the events? 3. What was the author’s ability to observe and conceive, his education, his understanding of the matters related, his position in life, the theme and form of his narratives, his tendency and party? 4. Does the author show in his writings and in his acts that he prefers truth above all things? 5. Are there any reasons why he should deceive? Now no “concision” of the Pentateuch can efface from it the noble character of Moses. If, then, the Pentateuch is in a fitting literary environment only in the age of Moses, are not all these questions best answered by the character of Moses, by his education, understanding, position in life, and relation to the events? Are there any reasons conceivable why he should deceive? H. Osgood.

The recent wonderful discovery at Tell-el-Amarna of scores and scores of tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions, shows that fifteen hundred years before Christ there was an active literary movement in Western Asia and Egypt, and that extensive correspondence was carried on throughout the whole region. Professor Sayce has made a special study of these tablets, and of their wonderful tale he makes detailed mention in his now famous address on the subject before the Victoria Institute of London. According to his statements we learn that in the fifteenth century before Christ—a century before the Exodus—active literary intercourse was carried on throughout the civilized world of Western Asia, between Babylonia and Egypt, and the smaller states of Palestine, of Syria, of Mesopotamia, and even of Eastern Cappadocia. And this intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian language and in the complicated Babylonian script. It implies that all over the civilized East there were libraries and schools where the Babylonian language and literature were taught and learned. Babylonian was in fact as much the language of diplomacy and cultivated society as French has been in modern times, with the difference that the cuneiform syllabary required years of hard labor to acquire. The existence of a literature at such an extremely early period has received a wonderful confirmation in the inscriptions found by Dr. Edward Glazer last year in Southern Arabia. He gathered 1031 of these tablets, and they are revealing a new world of biblical history. It appears that as early as almost two thousand years before Christ there was a kingdom established under Jewish influence in Southern Arabia, and that this and its Christian successors flourished there until the Mohammedan crusade. The Minæo-Sabæan kingdoms have now stepped upon the stage of history. The visit of the Queen of Sheba need now no longer cause any astonishment, as one of the inscriptions mentions the city of Gaza. Throughout this vast region from Southern Arabia to the Mediterranean there flourished at this early period an alphabetic method of writing, being derived from the Phoenician alphabet. The belief that in the pre-Mohammedan times this was a country of illiterate nomads must now be abandoned. Dr. Hommel, of Munich, has discovered that some of these inscriptions bear the date of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before our era.

The bearing of these discoveries on biblical discussions are apparent. For decades it has been the favorite view of neological critics that the traditional views of an early literature in Israel, dating back to the days of Moses, must be given up for want of evidence. It was confidently maintained that no records of the Old Testament before the times of David were historically reliable because there were no written records before that date. Now within almost the immediate present is discovered a wealth of evidence going to prove beyond the shadow of any and every doubt that already between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries before Christ, in the very days of the patriarchs, and even before, there existed an active literary movement throughout the whole length and breadth of the land in which Israel moved and lived. If all the nations of Western Asia and Northeastern Africa, and even all the tribes with whom Israel was ethnologically related, were at that time in possession of an alphabet and of a literature, then surely the beginnings of literature in Israel too must be set down to this date. The gain thus made for conservative biblical research is immense, and the chagrin of destructive criticism in seeing its fantastic structure of what the early history of God’s people ought to have been according to their hypotheses undermined and overthrown, is not hard to understand. The data thus furnished by the tiles of Egypt and the rocks of Arabia are cold facts before which subjective rationalizing must hush.

Another of the most gratifying and remarkable finds in this line within the last half dozen years has been the actual re-discovery of a once powerful Oriental and biblical people, of whom nearly all traces had been lost in secular literature, and the reference to whom by the Bible was often made the base of a charge of unhistorical character. The nation in question are the Hittites. Abraham bought his family burial-place from Ephron the Hittite; Esau married two wives that were Hittites. They are constantly mentioned as among the powerful tribes that inhabited Canaan before the conquest by Joshua. Even as late as the date of 1 K. 10 : 29 and 2 Chron. 1 : 17, they are a mighty nation. Recent discoveries in Asia Minor, Egypt and Babylonia have brought to light evidences in abundance that this people not only existed as described in the Scriptures, but that they were a most important factor in the ups and downs of the politics of Asia Minor. As early as ten years ago, Dr. Schliemann found on the site of ancient Troy curious monuments and vases which were neither Greek nor Egyptian. These are now seen to be the Hittites. Lately some hieroglyphics have been deciphered which state that after the expulsion of the mysterious shepherd kings, King Thotmes III., the greatest warrior of the Pharaohs, made fourteen campaigns to the northwest, and that his chief opponents were the Hittites, whose southern capital was Kadesh, near Damascus. Similar accounts of later contests with the Hittites have also been discovered. Some recently found cuneiform inscriptions in the valley of the Euphrates show that the northern capital of the Hittites was Charcemish, the famous city on the western bank of the river not far from Babylon. It is now known that the Hittites were a strong nation as far back as the days of Sargon I., the great emperor of Western Asia, twenty-four hundred years before the Christian era.

But ancient Babylon and Nineveh have proved veritable storehouses for the Bible student. Literally tens of thousands of cuneiform inscriptions on brick and tile have been unearthed. A whole library has been discovered in the palace of Assurbanipal, covering all the departments of knowledge current among the Chaldeans. The literature of these inscriptions embrace poetry and prose, the former of epics—of which there are two—lyrics and other kinds; the latter chiefly history, especially the records of military achievements. Of special interest, beside the historical documents running parallel with the records of the Bible, is the religious literature of this people. In one of the great epics, of which the biblical Nimrod is the hero, there are also found accounts of the creation and the flood which have a remarkable similarity to those of the Bible, both of which go further into details than do the scriptural descriptions; angelology and demonology are extensively developed; religious psalmody exists in great abundance, etc.

Although scholars have been laboring for twenty and more years on the decipherment of these inscriptions, the materials have accumulated on their hands more rapidly than they could be utilized, while much yet remains buried in the ruins of the East. In the British Museum there are yet thousands of tablets and cylinders awaiting the investigators. The gain from this study has been exceedingly great. The Book of Daniel is a notable example of this. Subjective criticism for a century had claimed that this book could not be authentic, but must be a product of the Maccabean struggle. Recent discoveries have shown that this historical background of Daniel demands just such a period as it claims for itself. The tendency of this whole field of research has been to confirm and strengthen the biblical records. Indeed, this is true of all modern Oriental research. Experience has shown that the more light science and investigation throw upon the Scriptures all the more these appear to be the truth and nothing but the truth. Schodde.

The historic East is giving up its dead, and the story of the ruins and remains of its most ancient civilization is even more deeply interesting and instructive for the biblical student than for the secular historian. In an altogether new sense the classical Ex Oriente lux is proving itself true. The recent finds and discoveries in Bible lands have put an altogether new face on many of the oldest phases of history, and pick and spade have been making valuable contributions to biblical archaeology. In the face of the facts unearthed in the last decade or two, the idea, current in many critical circles, that Abraham and his children and descendants, down to the Exodus, were a wholly rude and uncultured race, is demonstrably incorrect. It is now certain that in Babylonia, where the forefathers of the Hebrews lived for many years, the Semites who had emigrated into those districts had, at a very early age, appropriated and developed further the civilization which the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia, the Summarians and Accadians, then already possessed. This immigration of Semites, the stock and family to which also the Hebrews belonged, began centuries before Terah, the father of Abraham, settled there, and Abraham himself lived there for seventy-five years. In fact, such was the state of civilization of these people that, as early as the twentieth century B.C. the Semitic crowded out of Babylonia the old Turanian Summeric tongue, and in turn became the language of the people, the court, and of literature, the old language being retained only as a dead tongue, by priests and savants. Such is the story now told us by the cuneiform inscriptions found in late years in the Euphrates and Tigris lands.

Just within recent months a new and unexpected turn has been given to this problem by the researches of the Assyriologist of Munich, Professor Fr. Hommel, who in an autograph volume has furnished data to show that even the oldest civilization of Egypt, which all along has been tacitly accepted as having been indigenous and self-developed, drew largely on Babylonia for its culture and religion. In this way the earliest homes of the ancestors of the Israelites are shown to have been the very original seats of the highest culture developed at that early age. In view of these data the naturalistic idea at the bottom of so much negative biblical criticism of the day, according to which the Hebrews were originally an exceedingly crude nomadic tribe, without law or letters, and only gradually acquiring the first elements of civilization, is inconsistent with the results of scholarly research. Hommel argues his proposition along four lines—viz., by a comparison of sacred places in Babylon and Egypt, then by placing side by side the mythologies of the two countries, and next their languages and writing, and to the satisfaction of many scholars has proved that the dependence of Egyptian culture on the Babylonian prehistoric times is a fact that can no longer be denied. V. von Strauss und Torney.

According to the researches of Dr. Schliemann there was neither a Stone Age nor a Metal Age in Greece and Asia Minor. In the finds at Troy, especially, there is the most striking evidence of devolution. Here, as well as at Mycenae, the ornaments and implements discovered, even in the lowest strata, far from indicating a state of savagery and degradation, betoken one of high civilization. In the light of Schliemann’s discoveries, not to speak of others pointing in the same direction, made in

Egypt, and among the ruins of Assyria and Babylonia, bearing on the condition of primitive man in the Orient, the conclusion seems to be inevitable that the modern evolution school is wrong—that the history of our race is not one of development, but one of degeneration. Thus, the story of the Fall, as recorded in Holy Writ, is corroborated by the declarations of the newest of sciences—prehistoric archaeology. When examining some of the evidence presented by geologists in favor of the antiquity of man, one cannot help saying with Goethe, “The thing the most terrible to hear is the constantly reiterated assurance that geologists agree on a given point.” In 1857, the famous Neanderthal skull was discovered near Düsseldorf. Professor Schaaffhausen adjudged it to be “the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe.” Professor Fuhbrott wrote a book on it, in which he declared the age of the relic to be from 200,000 to 300,000 years, but Dr. Mayer, of Bonn, after a critical examination of the “fossil,” and the locality in which it was found, came to the conclusion that it was the skull of a Cossack killed in 1814! J. A. Zahm.

The fierce criticism to which the books of the Bible have been subjected since the beginning of the present century is but a reflection of a general spirit of scepticism which has rejected traditional beliefs in regard to ancient history and writings, and insisted on bringing them before the bar of the modern inductive method. It is not only the ancient history of Israel which has been relegated to the region of myth; the ancient histories of Greece and Rome have fared no better, and it has been obstinately maintained that the history of civilization begins with the age of Cyrus, and that literary documents in the true sense of the word were unknown before the closing days of the Jewish monarchy. There has been a tacit assumption that the nations of antiquity were practically illiterate, and that it is useless to search for grains of truth in the traditions of their earlier history which have come down to us.

The high water-mark of historical scepticism is represented in Greek history by Sir George Cox, in Roman history by Sir George Cornwall Lewis, in sacred history by Havet and Vernes. The reaction naturally came first in the case of Greek history. The excavations of Dr. Schliemann proved that the early history of Greece was not that mass of myths and fables which it has been the fashion to suppose it to be; that, on the contrary, the story of

Achaian power and culture was founded on fact, and that a race of kings once held sway in Mycenae who were in contact with the civilizations of Egypt and Phoenicia. At first the scholars scoffed; but facts are stubborn things, and before his death Dr. Schliemann had the satisfaction of knowing that he had by means of the spade re-established the credit of a history which the higher criticism seemed to have demolished forever.

As the destructive criticism of the Old Testament had but followed in the wake of that of early Greek history, it was natural that it should share the fortunes of the latter. The discovery and decipherment of the monuments of Egypt, of Assyria, and of other Oriental lands, have done for the older records of the Bible what the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann have done for the early traditions of Greece. The historical fabric which the higher criticism had claimed to have destroyed is being reconstructed by the archaeologist and decipherer. We have come to know that much which had been pronounced impossible was not only possible, but true, and that the difficulties raised by the critic were really due to his own ignorance.

Of course we must not conclude that the work of the “higher criticism” has been altogether barren of results. On the contrary, it has elucidated points which had previously been neglected, and has caused the text of the Old Testament to be minutely examined in a way which cannot but be helpful to the cause of truth. Doubtless there is a portion of its work which will prove to be a permanent acquisition of science. But it has been disfigured by a spirit of arrogance and scepticism, and a disposition to prefer the conclusions of the student in his library to the solid facts of archaeological research. The critic forgot that as long as the Old Testament and the history it embodied remained isolated and solitary, the last relic of a literature which seemed elsewhere to have perished, it was what the logicians would call a “single instance,” and that from a “single instance” no generalizations of any scientific value can be drawn. To-day the case is different; the past has yielded up its dead, and the contemporaries of the writers and heroes of the Old Testament are speaking to us once more in living tones. And the witness they bear is clear and unmistakable to the antiquity of writing in the ancient world and the substantial accuracy of the historical statements of Holy Scripture. Sayce.

THE Book of Kings is probably the work of the prophet Jeremiah. This is the tradition of the Jews; and so many little coincidences are found between the acknowledged works of Jeremiah and this composition, that it is almost impossible to doubt that they proceeded from the same author. Jeremiah’s authorship is indeed especially apparent in the later chapters, but as those chapters are the natural sequence of the earlier ones, and harmonize with them very remarkably in style and general character, the entire work must be ascribed to the same hand that wrote its last section. This unity of authorship must, however, be understood with a difference. The Book of Kings, like most histories which cover a considerable space of time, is in the main a compilation. Divine inspiration did not, in the case of the writers of Holy Scripture, susupersede the use of the ordinary methods of obtaining knowledge. The author of Kings constantly refers his readers to authorities from whom they may obtain fuller particulars concerning the personages mentioned in his narrative than he himself places before them; and it can scarcely be doubted that he drew his knowledge of the past principally, if not wholly, from these authorities. He cites a “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 K. 11 : 41), a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah,” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” (1 K. 14 : 19, 20)—works which must clearly have covered exactly the ground that he traverses; works which he evidently regards as authentic. It appears from the Books of Chronicles that it was among the regular duties of the prophets and seers, who succeeded one another without interruption from the commencement of the Jewish kingdom under Saul to the Captivity of Zedekiah, to compose histories of the kings with whom they were contemporary on a scale much larger than that in which their histories are delivered to us in the Old Testament. Samuel began, Nathan continued, and Gad finished a “Book of the Chronicles of King David” (1 Chron. 27:24; 29:29); Nathan, Abijah, and Iddo wrote accounts of the reign of Solomon (2 Chron. 9:29); Shemaiah and Iddo related the history of the reign of Rehoboam (12:15); Iddo recorded the history of Abijah, Rehoboam’s son (13:22); Jehu, the son of Hanani, that of Jehoshaphat (20:34); Isaiah, that of Uzziah (26:22) and Hezekiah (32:32); Hosai, that of Manasseh (33:19).

The object proposed to himself by the author of Kings was the carrying on of the Israelitish history from the point to which he found it brought at the close of the Second Book of Samuel to his own time, in a compendious form, and in the spirit of the earlier sacred writers. He commences his work with the conjunction “and,” thereby indicating that it has the character of a continuation. He then devotes his first section (1 K. 1:2; 1-11) to the closing years of David, less, however, with the object of completing David’s history, which he perhaps found completed in Samuel, than with that of introducing to us the person and history of Solomon, which was what he especially proposed to set before his readers in the first great division of his narrative. That narrative really consists of three main portions—1. A history of Solomon from his association by David to his death (1 K. 1-11). 2. A history of the parallel kingdoms of Israel and Judah, down to the extinction of the former (1 K. 12; 2 K. 17); and, 3. A history of the kingdom of Judah from the time of the downfall of the sister state to the final destruction of the Davidic monarchy by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (2 K. 18-25). The authenticity of the general narrative of Kings is scarcely questioned by any writer, ancient or modern. No one doubts that from the time of David the Jews were familiar with writing, and adopted the practice of keeping state records; nor is it questioned that, in the main, the writer of Kings honestly drew from this source. G. R.

The Jewish tradition which ascribes them to Jeremiah is borne out by the strongest internal evidence, in addition to that of the language. The last chapter, especially as compared with the last chapter of the Chronicles, bears distinct traces of having been written by one who did not go into captivity, but remained in Judaea after the destruction of the Temple. This suits

Jeremiah. The events singled out for mention in the concise narrative are precisely those of which he had personal knowledge, and in which he took special interest. The writer in Kings has nothing more to tell us concerning the Jews or Chaldees in the land of Judah, which exactly agrees with the hypothesis that he is Jeremiah, who we know was carried down to Egypt with the fugitives. In fact, the date of the writing and the position of the writer seem as clearly marked by the termination of the narrative at verse 26, as in the case of the Acts of the Apostles. But though the general unity and continuity of plan lead us to assign the whole history in a certain sense to one author, yet it must be borne in mind that the authorship of those parts of the history of which Jeremiah was not an eye-witness—that is, of all before the reign of Josiah—would have consisted merely in selecting, arranging, inserting the connecting phrases, and, when necessary, slightly modernizing the old histories which had been drawn up by contemporary prophets through the whole period of time. See, e. g., 1 K. 13:32. For, as regards the sources of information, it may truly be said that we have the narrative of contemporary writers throughout. There was a regular series of state annals both for the kingdom of Judah and for that of Israel, which embraced the whole time comprehended in the Books of Kings, or at least to the end of the reign of Jehoiakim (2 K. 24:5). These annals are constantly cited by name as “the Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 K. 11:41); and, after Solomon, “the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, or Israel”—e.g., 1 K. 14:29, etc.; and it is manifest that the author of Kings had them both before him while he drew up his history, in which the reigns of the two kingdoms are harmonized, and these annals constantly appealed to. But in addition to these national annals, there were also extant, at the time that the Books of Kings were compiled, separate works of the several prophets who had lived in Judah and Israel. P. S.

A very simple theory of the origin of the Books of Kings which will account for all the existing phenomena, and which has some positive evidence in its favor, may be stated as follows: From the days of Solomon to the Exile there was produced in Israel and Judah a succession of writings by prophets, more or less historical in character. Public records were also kept. The Books of Kings were produced from these two sources, mainly by the simple process of copying such passages as the compiler found himself inspired to copy for the purpose, doubtless with just such changes and occasional comments as appear in the Book of Chronicles, in the passages there taken from Samuel and Kings. This hypothesis is consistent with the integrity of the book, and explains its diversities of style, its abrupt transitions, its occasional rough joinings of parts, and all the other like phenomena which occur. There is no need to suppose that the original documents had been previously edited into continuous histories before the compiler of Kings used them. There is no need to suppose that any part of the book has passed through the hands of successive editors or redactors since it was first compiled. It is possible that the work of compiling was done at two or three different periods. The post-classical character of the Hebrew of the last chapter suggests the probability that it, at least, is later than the rest, and therefore that the rest was completed before the burning of the Temple. Most of the difficulties in regard to the text in Kings may be naturally accounted for by the way in which the book was produced. A writer working in this way would use works of unequal literary merit, and might sometimes transcribe without change statements of fact that were ill written. Other passages, both in what he transcribed and in what he himself added, need the light of the omitted parts of the context, and are obscure for lack of it. In such circumstances one should not be hasty in asserting, from internal evidence merely, that an ancient text is corrupt and needs emendation.

At first thought the parallel passages in Chronicles seem to be of the nature of variant copies of those portions of the text, and to have weight against the opinion that the text has been handed down with verbal accuracy. But a close examination shows that most of these variations are either short abridgments, or modernizations, or insertions of particles, evidently made by the author of Chronicles for the sake of a more flowing narrative, or else are longer insertions of new matter, generally in Hebrew, that is decidedly of the later age; that is, that most of the differences are to be attributed to the author of Chronicles, and not to the copyists of either book.

The peculiarities of the construction of the book should not be forgotten in our inquiries as to its chronology. Nothing is more likely than that different writers should use numerals in different ways, or that these peculiarities should be conveyed by transcription into the compiled work, thus giving it the appearance of being contradictory in its numerical statements. All the phenomena of the numbers given in the Books of Kings are readily explained in this way, without admitting even a single numeral to be mistaken. Those who account for them by supposing that the numbers are a later interpolation are obliged also to regard a large proportion of them as mistakes. W. J. Beecher.

The purpose of the writer in composing the Book of Kings evidently was to exhibit the bloom and decay of the kingdom of Israel, and to trace the influences which moulded its varying destiny. He represents the whole history, from first to last, as under the direct control of the religious government of Jehovah, the national God, and he proceeds on the fixed idea that the promise given to David of a sure house remained in force during all the vicissitudes of the divided kingdom, and was not even frustrated by the fall of the kingdom of Judah. His whole aim is to exhibit the course of events as so controlled by the Divine Hand that faithfulness to God ensured blessing, and unfaithfulness brought down His displeasure and led to national decline. Writing at a period when the influences, human and divine, which had moulded the history, had had time to show their developments, he holds these up to light in his pages, exhibiting at once what God had done for His people, and the manner in which they had requited His goodness. In the true spirit of prophecy he does not reprove the people for their neglect of outward ordinances nor insist on the ceremonial part of the law, but reproves them for forgetting the God that brought them out of the land of Egypt, for turning a deaf ear to the prophets, and for rejecting “His statutes and His covenant that He made with their fathers, and His testimonies which He testified against them” (2 K. 17: 15). In his brief, dry records of the doings and failings of the rulers of Israel and Judah, he has pointed out where the strength or weakness of a kingdom lies, and given us the most valuable lessons on political freedom. How many patriots and reformers, since his day, have been nerved to brave the fury of princes and do valiantly for the truth by the example of Old Testament prophets as set before them in these pages! And had the author of the Books of Kings done nothing more than this he had rendered incalculable service to the world. His views may not be wide, but he does not deviate from his main position that a state stands secure only when it is founded on God’s truth, and that it is preserved from danger only by His constant defence. He sees also, and the whole world has seen, that God had a special purpose in setting up the house of David at Jerusalem, and that His promise to that house did not fail of effect. The great empires of the East, with all their magnificence, have passed away and contributed but little to the world’s good. The house of Omri perished and nearly involved the house of David in its fall; but the little kingdom of Judah, amid backslidings and shortcomings, was preserved till it was enabled to hand down to the world an enduring spiritual blessing. The fabric of an organized state held together till the seed of Divine truth had time to germinate and take deep root in the minds of those to whom it was revealed, and the decay of the outward state, and the failures of the best of human rulers, were the means by which these chosen ones were led to look for a kingdom which is not of this world. J. Robertson.

At the present stage of discussion an Old Testament book is put under the critical microscope, not so much for its own sake as for the purpose of learning what it can contribute toward the solution of the central problem of the debate. The newer criticism of Moses and the prophets aims at an entirely new reconstruction of the traditional views of the Old Testament religion and its literary records. For centuries, in fact at all times, it has been considered virtually an axiom in the Christian church and among Christian scholars that the Old Testament is the record of the unfolding of God’s plans for the restoration of sinful man; that Moses and the law stand at the head of the old dispensation, both chronologically and theologically—i.e., that the law was the basis of the educational process by which Jehovah was training his own peculiar and chosen people; that prophecy, in so far as it found expression in literature, appeared later, and that its purpose was to assist in the work of the theocratic government of God in Israel; in other words, the Old Testament has been regarded as a revelation from God and as a history of God’s revelation of Himself to Israel and to mankind, and as the narrative of the gradual growth and increase of revealed truth quantitatively and qualitatively through God’s chosen messengers. The summa summarum of the Church’s faith has been that the Old Testament was a revealed book, and the Old Testament religion was a revealed religion. This, we are now told by the adherents of the Kuenen-Wellhausen school, is all a mistake. The religion of Israel differs in kind and essentially in no manner from the religions of the surrounding nations. It is simply one of many religions; only one of many ways in which the heart and thought of man have given expression to his religious needs and feelings. Israel’s religion is not one resulting from a special revelation from a higher being, but a purely natural product. According to these views there is no need of a God, neither in explaining the conduct of Israel’s history nor in order to understand the records of this history. Everything is purely the result of natural factors, and the result is a natural and human product.

The conservative criticism of the day maintains, and we are convinced with reason and right, that this book in all of its statements is historically reliable, based, as it itself claims to be, upon official and contemporary documents; while the defenders of the new views maintain that the bulk of the book may indeed be historically correct, that it has nevertheless been changed to suit a later condition of affairs, and things had been introduced that it did not originally contain; so that, if a fair criticism is to be practised, all these later changes, additions, etc., must be cut out, the book restored to its original character, and then be heard on the question under discussion. That in this critical amputation those members are cut off which militate against the favorite views of these scholars needs scarcely to be mentioned, and that this is done with a cruelty and lack of fairness not in harmony with a true exegesis of Holy Writ needs scarcely to be mentioned to those who are acquainted with the productions of this school. Schodde.

To conclude that there was no ceremonial prescribed before the time of Solomon, and no recognized code of law beyond the Book of the Covenant up to the time of Josiah, is not warranted by anything stated in the Books of Kings, nor, it may be added, by the omission of anything which is not stated. It is self-evident that an orderly Temple service is necessary in a recognized Temple, and the very condemnation of the sacrifices of the heathen implies legalized and authoritative sacrifices. It is incredible that a writer should continually uphold the honor and dignity of a priesthood that had no prescribed functions, and blame the people for worship on the high-places if they knew no other worship to practise. Whatever may have been the law-book that was found in the reign of Josiah (and, after all has been said, it is not proved that it was nothing but the Code of Deuteronomy), the writer of our books proceeds on the supposition that there was one central sanctuary from the time of Solomon at least, and implies that Israel was in possession of laws and ceremonies distinctly opposed to those of the nations around them. If he does not furnish us with details of the history of ritual worship, it is simply because this lay beyond the purpose he had before him, and was only remotely connected with his guiding principle. J. Robertson.

The consentient voice of the Jewish commentators on the Hebrew Scriptures declares both Chronicles and Ezra to have been written by Ezra. When both are critically examined and analyzed, the Hebrew tradition as to their authorship is very greatly strengthened and confirmed. The parts of Ezra where the writer uses the first person are admitted on all hands to have been the work of the “ready scribe” (Ezra 7:6). But the rest of Ezra is completely homogeneous in style with these parts, and must almost certainly have proceeded from the same writer. And between Ezra and Chronicles there is so very great a resemblance that the critics who care least for tradition pronounce them the composition of the same mind. The internal evidence thus entirely confirms the external testimony; and Ezra’s authorship of Chronicles may be regarded as not far short of being an “established fact.” The fact of Ezra’s authorship of Chronicles, which seems to us almost certain, throws much light on the scope and intention of the work, and on the question of how it came to be written. There is this peculiarity in Chronicles, markedly distinguishing it from all the other historical books of the Old Testament, that it is not a continuation of the previous history, but a repetition. The writer does not occupy new ground, but traverses ground which he knows well to have been previously trodden by others. He rewrites the events of Jewish history from the death of Saul to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, notwithstanding that they have been already put upon record by the authors of Samuel and Kings. We must then look for some motive which animated the writer of Chronicles, and induced him to commence and carry through an elaborate work, which at first sight has the appearance of being almost supererogatory. This motive is to be found in the circumstances of the Jewish nanation at the time when Chronicles was written. The people in their long and toilsome captivity, scattered among their conquerors, and ground down by taskwork, had forgotten their past, had become ignorant of their sacred books, and had even lost the capacity of grasping and retaining the long and complicated account of their former history which had been familiar to their ancestors. On their return to Palestine they were a band of emancipated slaves, ignorant, illiterate, and requiring very simple elementary teaching. Again, they were a multitude rather than a people; in their long-continued oppression and isolation they had lost the sentiment of nationality, the very idea of patriotism; they had forgotten their tribal distinctions and relationships; and though they had not fallen away from the worship of Jehovah, they had come to have a very dim and faint notion of what that worship in reality was, as established by the greatest of their monarchs, David and Solomon. To restore the national life, to reunite the present with the past, to reawaken the slumbering spirit of patriotism, to recall the glories of old times, and set them before the nation as the standard which they should aim at reaching in the future, was the hard but grand task which the leaders of the Jewish people set themselves at this time, and which none did more to accomplish than the writer of Chronicles. Instead of throwing the people back upon their old histories, written on too large a scale for their present needs, and in language of a more or less archaic type, he composed for their use a condensed narrative, written in the idiom of the day, with frequent allusions to recent events, and brought down to his own times, which was far more calculated to affect them strongly and deeply than the ancient larger compositions. At the same time, having to deal with persons in a childish and undeveloped state, he adopted a tone not elsewhere found in the historical Scriptures—a didactic tone of extreme directness and simplicity—a plan of pointing the moral in every case, of openly ascribing all the events of the history to the Divine agency, and referring in the plainest language every great calamity or deliverance to the good or evil deeds of the monarch or the nation to whom they were sent as rewards or judgments.

The moral object of the writer of Chronicles, in the concluding as in the earlier sections, is his main one, and is throughout most distinctly—almost nakedly—indicated. He will show his nation, by the records of their past, that in almost every instance temporal rewards and punishments were dispensed in exact accordance with the attitude of the king and people toward the national religion, signal vengeance following every neglect of the authorized rites, every insult offered to the priests, every profanation of the Temple, every introduction of an alien worship; while wealth, and glory, and military success, and prosperity of every kind accompanied the manifestations of a religious spirit. And here, as Chronicles now stands, he may be said to end. As the work, however, was originally written, he followed down the past into the present—he related the recovery as he had related the downfall of his nation; he placed on record the return from the Captivity, the rebuilding of the Temple, the second colonization under Artaxerxes Longimanus, and the religious reforms of Ezra. This portion of his work is, in our present arrangement of the Jewish Scriptures, separated off from the rest, and made into a distinct work, the Book of Ezra. We would impress upon the biblical student the incompleteness of Chronicles as it stands, and the propriety of reading it in connection with Ezra, and of viewing it as that history of their past which the “ready scribe,” writing under Longimanus, about B.C. 456, thought best fitted to impress and improve the Jews of his day. G. R.

We must have regard to the period at which the writer of these books lived, and the circumstances of the people for whom he wrote, if we would understand the form in which they appear and the object for which they were composed. The national independence of Israel was a thing of the past, but the descendants of David, to whom had been given the promise of a sure house, survived. The Captivity had done its work; the exiles, thoroughly cured of the old tendency to idolatry, had been allowed to gather on their ancestral soil, to erect a temple on the ruins of that of Solomon, and to observe the rites of their national religion. The voice of prophecy had become silent; the two precious possessions that survived the Exile and bound the present to the past were the exercise of their religion and the offspring of David; round these clustered the hopes of the future, at a time when restored Israel was at the mercy of a heathen power for corporate existence and the semblance of national life. At such a time and in such circumstances an author, taking a review of the past history of his nation, saw everything in a peculiar light, and would approach his work with a peculiar purpose. It had become a settled conviction that

Israel had suffered for unfaithfulness in the matter of religion; and, as the forms of religion were more punctiliously observed after the Captivity, our author would look for the reigns in which these received due attention and dwell upon them as “the good old times” of the nation’s life, while he would perceive and emphasize the fact that it was when these were neglected that the unfaithful kings had suffered. From this point of view he set himself the task of writing the whole history of his nation, so as to sustain the courage of his people in their depressed condition, and give them guidance and hope for the future. The encouragement was, that so long as the community, deprived though they were of their old political independence, adhered to the observances of their national religion, they would be preserved from mingling among the nations and being lost; and the hope was, that if they so remained steadfast to the covenant, the God of their fathers would remember “the sure mercies of David,” and would, in His good time, “restore the kingdom to Israel.” Such a book, in short, would contribute not a little to keep alive the persistent separate existence of the Jewish race, which is one of the most striking features of history, and to stamp upon their later religious life the character which it retained for the succeeding centuries. The book was at once the result of the new impulse that had been given to the observance of the law at the time of Ezra, and at the same time would tend to foster the same adherence to the forms of worship as the sole remaining bond of Israel’s union and the mark of their separation from the heathen nations. J. Robertson.

Probable Date.—That the Book of Chronicles was composed after the return from the Captivity is evident, not only from its closing passage, but from other portions of it. A comparison of 1 Chron. 9:10-16 with Neh. 11:10-17 will show that almost the whole of 1 Chron. 9 belongs to the period after the Captivity. 1 Chron. 3 of the same part of the work contains a genealogy of the descendants of Zerubbabel (verses 19-24), which is continued down to, at least, the third generation. The evidence of style accords with the evidence furnished by the contents. The phraseology is similar to that of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, all books written after the Exile. It has numerous Aramaean forms, and at least one word derived from the Persian. The date cannot therefore well be earlier than B.C. 538, but may be later, and is indeed thought by some to be very considerably later. If Ezra was the author, the date could not well be much later than B.C. 435, for Ezra probably died about that time. There is nothing in the contents or style of the work to make the date B.C. 450-435 improbable. B. C.

Sources Used by the Author. For the period from Saul to Zedekiah, which forms the chief subject of his work, the author of Chronicles seems to have possessed and used: (1) A general history, called the Book of the Kings of Israel and Judah (or Judah and Israel), which had probably been compiled before his day from the two earlier separate works used by the author of Kings—the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, and the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel; (2) our present books of Samuel and Kings; and (3) a number of works, more full and ample in their details than any of these three, treating of certain periods, usually of the reigns of particular monarchs, the composition of a succession of prophets, and the real ultimate sources from which the general histories had been compiled by their writers. Of these, some twelve or thirteen are mentioned by the author of Chronicles in the course of his work (1 Chron. 27: 24; 29: 29; 2 Chron. 9: 29; 12: 15; 13: 22; 20: 34; 24: 27; 26: 22; 32: 32); but it is quite possible, or rather very probable, that he possessed others besides those which he has named.

For the period from the Creation to the death of Saul, which forms the subject of 1 Chron. 1-8, the writer of Chronicles possessed and used: (1) The historical Books of our present Scriptures, from Genesis down to Ruth; and (2) various other documents, genealogical and historical, of which the exact nature cannot be stated, but which appear to have been in many cases exceedingly ancient and curious. There is reason to believe that the genealogies of families, and numerous important points of family history, were carefully preserved by the “chiefs of the fathers” in almost all the Israelite tribes, and were even carried through the trying time of the Captivity, so that the writer of Chronicles could make use of them. A large portion of his introductory section (1 Chron. 1-8) consists of statements unsupported by the earlier Scriptures; and these the author must have drawn from such (comparatively speaking) private sources as have been indicated. B. C.

Relation of the Books of Kings to those of Chronicles. It is manifest, and is universally admitted, that the former is by far the older work. While the Books of Chronicles were written especially for the Jews after their return from Babylon, the Book of Kings was written for the whole of Israel before their common national existence was hopelessly quenched. Another comparison of considerable interest between the two histories may be drawn in respect to the main design, that design having a marked relation both to the individual station of the supposed writers and the peculiar circumstances of their country at the times of their writing. Jeremiah was himself a prophet. He lived while the prophetic office was in full vigor, in his own person, in Ezekiel and Daniel, and many others both true and false. In his eyes, as in truth, the main cause of the fearful calamities of his countrymen was their rejection and contempt of the Word of God in his mouth and that of the other prophets; and the one hope of deliverance lay in their hearkening to the prophets who still continued to speak to them in the name of the Lord. Accordingly we find in the Books of Kings great prominence given to the prophetic office. Ezra was only a priest. In his days the prophetic office had wholly fallen into abeyance. That evidence of the Jews being the people of God, which consisted in the presence of prophets among them, was no more. But to the men of his generation, the distinctive mark of the continuance of God’s favor to their race was the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem, the restoration of the daily sacrifice and the Levitical worship, and the wonderful and providential renewal of the Mosaic institutions. The chief instrument, too, for preserving the Jewish remnant from absorption into the mass of heathenism, and for maintaining their national life till the coming of Messiah, was the maintenance of the Temple, its ministers, and its services. Hence we see at once that the chief care of a good and enlightened Jew of the age of Ezra, and all the more if he were himself a priest, would naturally be to enhance the value of the Levitical ritual and the dignity of the Levitical caste. And in compiling a history of the past glories of his race, he would as naturally select such passages as especially bore upon the sanctity of the priestly office, and show the deep concern taken by their ancestors in all that related to the honor of God’s house, and the support of His ministering servants. Hence the Levitical character of the Books of Chronicles, and the presence of several detailed narratives not found in the Books of Kings, and the more frequent reference to the Mosaic institutions, may most naturally and simply be accounted for, without resorting to the absurd hypothesis that the ceremonial law was an invention subsequent to the Captivity. Moreover, upon the principle that the sacred writers were influenced by natural feelings in their selection of their materials, it seems most appropriate that while the prophetic writer in Kings deals very fully with the kingdom of Israel, in which the prophets were much more illustrious than in Judah, the Levitical writer, on the contrary, should concentrate all his thoughts round Jerusalem, where alone the Levitical caste had all its power and functions, and should dwell upon all the instances preserved in existing muniments of the deeds and even the minutest ministrations of the priests and Levites, as well as of their faithfulness and sufferings in the cause of truth.

From the comparison of parallel narratives in the two books, it appears that the results are precisely what would naturally arise from the circumstances of the case. The writer of Chronicles, having the Books of Kings before him, and to a great extent making those books the basis of his own, but also having his own personal views, predilections, and motives in writing, composing for a different age, and for people under very different circumstances, and, moreover, having before him the original authorities from which the Books of Kings were compiled, as well as some others, naturally rearranged the older narrative as suited his purpose and his tastes, gave in full passages which the other had abridged, inserted what had been wholly omitted, omitted some things which the other had inserted, including nearly everything relating to the kingdom of Israel, and showed the color of his own mind, not only in the nature of the passages which he selected from the ancient documents, but in the reflections which he frequently adds upon the events which he relates, and possibly also in the turn given to some of the speeches which he records. P. S.

ANY one who wishes to understand the chronological data of the Bible should, first of all, fix in his mind certain facts in regard to the mode in which dates are given in the Bible, and certain other facts in regard to the connection of biblical chronology with other chronology. Without this he is sure to misapprehend the questions involved. With a few simple facts in mind, it is actually less work for the average reader to perform the arithmetical operations required, and so reach conclusions for himself as to the dates, than it is to read what scholars have written, and thus form an opinion based upon the opinions of others.

1. The ordinary regnal years, in the Bible, are natural years determined by observation, beginning with a new moon near the spring equinox. There are several clear instances in which the months of the year are counted from this terminus (Ex. xii. 2, 3, 6, 18, cf. xiii. 4, xvi. 1, xl. 2, 17, etc., 2 Chron. xxix. 17, xxxv. 1, 1 Ki. vi. 1, 2 Chron. iii. 2, xxx. 2, 13, Esth. viii. 9, 12, 1 Ki. viii. 2, etc.), and no perfectly clear instances of their being counted from any other terminus. Whether the Israelites, for the period between Solomon and the exile, knew of any other way of counting the years is a thing which I neither affirm nor deny; but at least, for this period, there is no instance in which the hypothesis of different sorts of years has any real utility.

2. The Bible method is to count by units only, disregarding fractions. The best instance by which to fix this in mind is that of the three days during which our Saviour lay in the grave. According to the commonly received understanding of the matter, the three days were Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; though, counting from sunset to sunset, He lay there only an hour or two or less of Friday, and less than twelve hours of Sunday. When the New Testament writers say that He was in the grave three days (in Matt. xii. 40, “three days and nights”) they do not intend to be understood that He was there seventy-two hours, but only that He was there during some part of the time covered by three successive periods of twenty-four hours each. Exactly the same method is adopted in counting the years that the kings reigned.

3. This way of counting is unambiguous excepting in the case of the broken year in which one reign ends and the next begins. The broken year is always counted, in full, to the closing reign. Usually the “first year” of the new reign is the one that begins with the following new year. Thus the year 1889 is the last year of Cleveland, and the year 1893 the last year of Harrison. By the usual way of counting, the first year of Harrison is 1890, and the first year of Cleveland’s second administration is 1894, and each reign is four years. By the method adopted in the Assyrian records, which are in this respect strictly parallel to the biblical records, an official act performed by Harrison in 1889, or by Cleveland in 1893, would be assigned, not to his “first year,” but to his “accession year;” or some other like way of designating the year would be used. According to this mode of speaking, a king may actually be on the throne nearly a year before his “first year” begins.

But there is sometimes a variation from this way of speaking, and one which leads to ambiguities. Sometimes the broken year is also counted to the following reign. The year 1889, for example, already counted as the fourth year of Cleveland, may also be counted as the first year of Harrison. In this case Harrison’s reign will be five years, and not four, and the year 1893 will be his fifth year. This way of counting appears occasionally in the Assyrian records. In the Bible it is commonly used in counting the reigns of the first four dynasties of the northern kingdom, and exceptionally elsewhere.

This peculiarity is important. For example, in 1 Ki. xv. 1, we are told that Abijam reigned in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam. Presumptively this means that the first year of his reign was the year corresponding to the eighteenth of Jeroboam; but instead, it may possibly mean that his first year is the one that began at the close of the eighteenth of Jeroboam, or, in other words, that his actual accession occurred at some time during the eighteenth year of Jeroboam. It is vital to the understanding of the statement that we determine in which of these two senses it is used. This can be done beyond a doubt, in nearly every case, by comparing the succession of cardinal numbers, as given in the Bible, with the succession of ordinal numbers; and it can be determined in no other way. All other methods of dealing with the difficulties in the case (by making averages, for example, or by emending the text, or by supposing artificial modes of counting, or years of different sorts) are entirely fallacious, except as they are based on the previous correct performing of this work of comparison between the cardinal and ordinal numbers.

4. The most convenient point of contact between the biblical chronology of the kings and the chronology of the Greeks and Romans and of modern times is given in the fact that the first year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, was 604 B.C. He became king at some time during B.C. 605, the year before his “first year.” His first year was the fourth year of Jehoiakim, king of Judah (Jer. xxv. 1, and other passages). It is important to note here that the Ussher chronology, as found in the margins of our Bibles, wrongly gives this date as 606 B.C., and thus throws all synchronisms based upon it about two years out of their true relations.

5. In using the extra-biblical sources of information, we need to emphasize the principle of going as near to the original sources as possible. Secondary treatments of Assyrian and Babylonian history are numerous and conflicting; the primary statements in which this history comes into contact with that recorded in the Bible are much better ascertained than any of the theories built upon them.

These primary statements exist for us in three different forms: First, the original slabs, tablets, and other inscriptions themselves; second, photographs or other accurate copies in the original languages; third, translations. Much is still in dispute in regard to the translation of these records; but, fortunately, a large part of the material that bears on chronological questions is undisputed, and is of the kind that can be studied as well in translations as in the original. Fortunately, also, much of it is accessible in English translations. One who is an expert in the originals would criticise sharply much of the translation work that has been done, and would emphasize the fact that only a part of the records is available in translations. But only in rare instances would he either differ with the translations, or add to them, in the facts that bear on biblical chronology.

The following easily accessible books in English constitute a fairly good working library for these studies; and by the aid of these one can find his way to the entire literature of the subject:

Records of the Past, old series. Twelve small volumes. Samuel Bagster & Sons, London.

Records of the Past, new series. Six small volumes. Same publishers.

George Smith’s Assyrian Canon.

George Smith’s Assyrian Discoveries.

Schrader’s Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament.

A set of the Transactions and a set of the Proceedings of The Society of Biblical Archaeology.

A large amount of additional material is to be found in volumes and in journals of learned societies and other periodicals.

6. The most important sources for Oriental chronology, for the period now under consideration, are the following:

First. The biblical numerals.

Second. The history contained in the Bible, often throwing light on the numerals.

Third. The Assyrian Eponym Canon, a list of officers, one officer for every year, containing, in the imperfect copies now known, about 265 names, in a series backward from B.C. 647. The existing copies date, perhaps, from a time before the downfall of Assyria. There are some slight discrepancies, but the Canon is in a high degree trustworthy. Some copies have historical notes appended, and these are not always confirmed by the other Assyrian records. Translations may be found in Smith’s Assyrian Canon, in Records of the Past, new series, vol. ii., in Schrader, vol. ii., in the Assyrische Lesestücke of Professor Friedrich Delitzsch, and in other works.

Fourth. Assyrian records, variously throwing light on the Canon. Among these are annals of Shalmaneser II., Sargon, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, Assur-bani-pal, and other kings, giving dated accounts of their exploits, year by year; and other accounts, less well dated, of Tiglath-pileser III. and others.

Fifth. Ancient Babylonian documents, especially what may be called, in a general way, the Babylonian Chronicles, written in the Persian period or earlier, including lists of kings, with the years they reigned, other lists with dated records of exploits in the reign of each king, and the so-called “synchronous history” of Babylonia and Assyria. These documents carry the chronology back to a very early date, but they are so marred at various places as to break up the continuity of it. Translations may be found in the new series of the Records of the Past, vols. i., iv., v.

Sixth. The Canon of Ptolemy, a list of Grecian, Persian, and Babylonian kings, with the years of their reigns, back to 747 B.C. Made after Christ by an Alexandrian astronomer, and undervalued in the Ussher chronology, but now certainly known to be correct. The part of it that belongs to the Assyrian and Babylonian periods may be found in Smith’s Canon and in Records of the Past, new series, vol. i.

Seventh. Calculated eclipses, especially an eclipse of the sun, B.C. 763, the tenth year of Assur-daan, king of Assyria.

Eighth. Certain “long numbers.” See notes on A.Di. 241, 265, 361, 390, 396.

7. All continuous chronology earlier than the accession of Assur-daan of Assyria, 773 B.C., and all continuous biblical chronology earlier than the accession of Hezekiah, 723 B.C., is conjectural, and is in dispute. Back to these dates the sources just mentioned substantially agree, and we have independent lines of evidence, one confirming the other. The possible differences of opinion are differences as to details. But for the time immediately before 773 B.C. we have only the Bible, vaguely confirmed by the long numbers of Josephus and the Assyrian eponym list, and these, as commonly interpreted, are in contradiction. Assyriologists insist that the list of eponyms is continuous; and if it is, it makes the interval between Jehu and Hezekiah about fifty years less than the numbers in the Bible apparently make it. It is supposable that either the one chronology or the other is false. Again, it is supposable that there is a break in the continuity of the Assyrian list, which is, at a point just earlier than 773 B.C., unsupported by any strong evidence. Still, again, it is supposable that the Bible numbers overlap each other, and can be so understood as to fit the shorter period. The problem may some time be solved, but at present it is unsolved—that is, there is no one solution that can positively be proved to be true, and none in which men generally agree. And most of the dates for the kings between Jehu and Hezekiah are involved in these unsettled interpretations.

8. For the period before Hezekiah, therefore, it is not claimed that the dates in the following list are known to be correct; it is only claimed that they are the dates that seem to be given in the Bible. Taking the Bible statements at their apparent value, these dates are exact, within very narrow limits of variation. Any person can verify them, with arithmetical certainty, by beginning at 604 B.C. and working forward or backward. So far there is really no room for doubt. Whether this apparent meaning of the Bible numbers is the true meaning is another question. Most of the published schemes assume that it is not the true meaning. They do not profess to give the Bible numerals simply, but these numerals so corrected or interpreted as to make them consistent with the facts; but none of these schemes succeeds in winning acceptance to the exclusion of the others. It seems to me better, therefore, not to attempt a final statement of the chronology, but simply to give the Bible numbers at their apparent value.

9. The date 982 B.C. for the first year of Jeroboam and Rehoboam (the date with which our list begins) may be verified by beginning at 604 B.C. and working back to it; but it seems well to give, at the outset, a more compact verification of it. The fourth year of Jehoiakim of Judah was 604 B.C. To 604 add the previous 3 years of Jehoiakim, the 31 years of Josiah (2 Ki. xii. 1), the 2 years of Amon (2 Ki. xxi. 19), the 55 years of Manasseh (2 Ki. xxi. 1), the 29 years of Hezekiah (2 Ki. xviii. 2), the 16 years of Ahaz (2 Ki. xvi. 2), the 16 years of Jotham (2 Ki. xv. 33), and the 52 years of Uzziah (2 Ki. xv. 2), and we have 808 B.C. for the first year of Uzziah. But a comparison of the cardinal and ordinal numbers shows that the 16th year of Ahaz was the first year of Hezekiah, so that there is here the overlapping of one year, and there is probably another overlapping of a year in the case of Amon (see notes on the list at these places). Deducting these two years, we have 806 B.C. as the true first year of Uzziah, according to the Bible. The first year of Uzziah was the 27th of Jeroboam II. (2 Ki. xv. 1), and Jeroboam’s first year was the 15th of Amaziah (2 Ki. xiv. 23). To 806 add 26 years of Jeroboam II., 14 years of Amaziah, 40 years of Joash (2 Ki. xii. 1), 6 years of Athaliah (2 Ki. xi. 3), and 90 years (see the list) for the times before Athaliah, and we have 982 B.C. for the first year of the two kingdoms.

If we assume that the Assyrian eponym list is continuous throughout, but otherwise retain this computation unmodified, the date for the beginning of the two kingdoms will be reduced to 931 B.C. This is about the date assigned by most Assyrian scholars. By variant counting, either of these dates might be made a year or two more or a year or two less. As the evidence now stands, these two dates for the bebeginning of the two kingdoms are the only ones that have any claim to be regarded as based on primary evidence. The different dates for this event given in recent chronological schemes are mainly either compromises between these two or attempts to reconcile them.

This date, as given in the margins of our Bibles, is 975 B.C., 7 years less than that given in our list. This difference is accounted for as follows: First, the marginal chronology shortens the period by 11 years by assuming a co-reign (of which there is neither proof nor disproof) of Jeroboam II. with his father (2 Ki. xv. 1). On the other hand, it incorrectly lengthens the period two years by taking 603 B.C. as the first year of Nebuchadnezzar. Further, it does not count one of the years of Amon as overlapping, and thus gains a year. Thus the 11 years of difference are reduced to 8 years, leaving one year to be accounted for by variation of method. Except for these differences and others depending upon them, the variations between our list and the marginal chronology are slight.

9. In the list the events are dated in years A.Di. (Anno Discidii, the year of the disruption of the kingdom), as well as in years B.C. This has two important advantages: First, it is easier to work with an increasing series of numerals than with a decreasing series, as years B.C. must necessarily be. Second, it enables us to block together in their proper relations the earlier events, in regard to which we can only conjecture the proper date in years B.C. It gives us a method, for example, by which we can make an accurate and intelligible statement of the synchronisms between Shalmaneser II. and Ahab and Jehu, even if there be an uncertainty of half a century as to the date B.C. when these events occurred; and this is an important advantage.

The list does not contain all the dated events; and conjectural dates and dates of particular prophecies are inserted only when they serve to throw light on the continuity of the history.

B.C. A.Di.

| 982 | 1 | 1st y. of Jeroboam; 1st y. of Rehoboam (1 Ki. xii., 2 Chron. x.); SHEMAIAH; JEDO (wrongly transliterated IDDO, 2 Chron. ix. 29 cf. Jos. Ant. VIII. ix., 1 Ki. xiii.); AHIJAH. | | — | — | — | | 980 | 3 | Rehoboam forsakes the way of David (2 Chron. xi. 17, xii. 1). | | 978 | 5 | Invasion of Shishak (1 Ki. xiv. 25, 2 Chron. xii. 2). | | 966 | 17 | 17th y. of Rehoboam; his death, and accession of Abijam (1 Ki. xiv. 21, 31, 2 Chron. xii. 13). |

| B.C. | A.Di. | | | — | — | — | | 965 | 18 | 18th y. of Jeroboam ; 1st y. of Abijam (1 Ki. xv. 1, 2 Chron. xiii. 1). | | 963 | 20 | 20th y. of Jeroboam ; 3rd y. of Abijam ; his death, and accession of Asa (1 Ki. xv. 2, 8, 2 Chron. xiii. 2). | | 962 | 21 | 1st y. of Asa, following 20th y. of Jeroboam (1 Ki. xv. 9) ; 2nd y. of Rimman-nirari II., king of Assyria, the first king within the limits of the existing copies of the Assyrian Eponym list.* | | 961 | 22 | 22nd y. of Jeroboam ; his death (1 Ki. xiv. 20) ; 1st y. of Nadab, and 2nd of Asa (1 Ki. xv. 25). | | 960 | 23 | 2nd y. of Nadab ; his death (1 Ki. xv. 25) ; 1st y. of Baasha and 3rd y. of Asa (1 Ki. xv. 28, 33). | | 956 | 27 | Jehoshaphat born (1 Ki. xxii. 41, 42). Ten years of quiet (2 Chron. xiv. 1). Invasion of Zerah (2 Chron. xiv. 9). | | 948 | 35 | 15th y. of Asa, and great religious gathering (2 Chron. xv. 10) ; ODED (2 Chron. xv. 8) ; AZARIAH, son of Oded (2 Chron. xv. 1). | | 947 | 36 | ‘36th y. of the kingdom of Asa’ (2 Chron. xvi. 1) ; † war with Baasha (2 Chron. xvi. 1 sq., 1 Ki. xv. 16 sq.) ; HANANI (2 Chron. xvi. 7) ; Asa’s league with Benhadad against Baasha. | | 941 | 42 | 1st y. of Tiglath-uras II. of Assyria. | | 937 | 46 | 24th y. of Baasha and 26th of Asa ; death of Baasha (1 Ki. xv. 33) ; 1st y. of Elah (1 Ki. xvi. 8-10) ; JEHC, son of Hanani (perhaps earlier, 1 Ki. xvi. 1). | | 936 | 47 | 2nd y. of Elah and 27th of Asa ; Zimri (1 Ki. xvi. 10, 15) ; 1st y. of Omri over part of northern Israel (1 Ki. xvi. 16, 23, 29). Tibni (1 Ki. xvi. 21). | | 935 | 48 | 1st y. of Assur-nazir-pal of Assyria. Marriage of Ahab and Jezebel (1 Ki. xvi. 31) ; ‡ Omri reconquers Moab (2 Ki. i. 1, and the Moabite Stone).§ | | 932 | 51 | Omri is king—probably sole king, on the death of Tibni—31st of Asa (1 Ki. xvi. 23), probably just at the close of the 30th of Asa (Jos. Ant. VIII. xii. 5) ; Jehoram of Judah born (2 Ki. viii. 16, 17). Omri moves the capital to Samaria, six years after one or the other of the two dates given for his accession—either A.Di. 52 or 56 (1 Ki. xvi. 23, 24). | | 926 | 57 | 11th y. of Omri ; Jehoshaphat becomes co-regnant with Asa (Sept. of 1 Ki. xvi. 28, perhaps). |

• This is computed, of course, according to the apparent value of the Bible numerals. There is a definite and exact synchronism, in the time of Ahab and Jehu, between the biblical and the Assyrian dates (see note at B.C. 905) ; and by comparing the numerals back from that date, we obtain the dates for Rimman-nirari II. On the supposition that the Assyrian list is continuous, the second year of Rimman-nirari is 911 B.C., and this is the date actually accepted by most Assyrian scholars.

In different Assyriological works this name, like many other Assyrian names, appears in several different forms, some of them bearing no resemblance one to another. Those who deal with these matters have to learn to identify particular men, no matter for the different forms their names may take.

† Here and in the previous verse the numerals cannot refer to the personal reign of Asa, for the 35th and 36th years of his personal reign came after the death of Baasha. The hypothesis that here is a genuine case of reckoning in years A.Di. fits well all the facts in the case.

‡ This marriage cannot have been much earlier than this date, for it certainly did not take place till after Omri came to the throne ; and it cannot have been much later, for the grandson of Ahab and Jezebel was 22 years old at the beginning of A.Di. 90 (2 Ki. viii. 25, 26).

§ The Moabite Stone says, according to the reading that now seems to be preferred, that the oppression of Moab, in the days of Omri and part of the days of his “son,” lasted 40 years. This seems to imply that the 40 years closed before the overthrow of Omri’s dynasty, which occurred A.Di. 90, hence Omri’s conquest of Moab was earlier than A.Di. 50.

| B.C. | A.Di. | | | — | — | — | | 925 | 58 | 12th y. of Omri; 38th y. of Asa; 1st y. of Ahab (1 Ki. xvi. 29); 2nd y. of Jehoshaphat (Sept. of 1 Ki. xvi. 28).* | | 924 | 59 | Asa’s disease, his 39th y. (1 Ki. xv. 23, 2 Chron. xvi. 12). | | 922 | 61 | 41st y. of Asa; his death and accession of Jehoshaphat (1 Ki. xv. 10, 2 Chron. xvi. 13, xvii. 1). | | 921 | 62 | 1st y. of Jehoshaphat, following 4th y. of Ahab (1 Ki. xxii. 41). ‘Strengthened himself against Israel’ (2 Chron. xvii. 1). | | 919 | 64 | 3rd y. of Jehoshaphat; teaching (2 Chron. xvii. 7-9). | | 916 | 67 | Marriage of Jehoram and Athaliah (2 Chron. xviii. 1, cf. 1 Ki. xxii., 2 Chron. xxii. 2, xxi. 6, 2 Ki. viii. 18, 25, 26, etc.).† | | 915 | 68 | Ahaziah of Judah born, 22 years before the close of the 11th y. of Jehoram of Israel (2 Ki. viii. 25, 26, ix. 29, see A.Di. 90). Shunammite’s son promised, etc. (2 Ki. iv. 16); ELISHA.‡ Ahab persecutes the prophets (1 Ki. xviii. 4, etc.). | | 911 | 72 | 25th y. of Assur-nazir-pal of Assyria, his death, and accession of Shalmaneser II. | | 910 | 73 | 1st y. of Shalmaneser II. Close of the 3½ years of drought, etc. (1 Ki. xvii.-xix.); ELIJAH. | | 909 | 74 | Shalmaneser on the Orontes, the Mediterranean, and Lebanon; his 2nd y. | | 907 | 76 | 1st defeat of Benhadad by Ahab (1 Ki. xx. 1-22). | | 906 | 77 | 2nd defeat of Benhadad (1 Ki. xx. 22-43, xxii. 1, 2); followed by 3 years of peace with Syria, the ’third year’ being the last y. of Ahab. Naboth (1 Ki. xxi.). | | 905 | 78 | 17th y. of Jehoshaphat, and 1st y. of Ahaziah of Israel (1 Ki. xxii. 51); it is a co-reign, as the y. is the 21st of Ahab; 6th y. of Shalmaneser, when he defeated a coalition of which Benhadad was chief and Ahab one of the allies.§ | | 904 | 79 | 22nd y. of Ahab (1 Ki. xvi. 29); his death; MICAIAH, son of Imlah (1 Ki. xxii.); 2nd y. of Ahaziah; his death (1 Ki. xxii. 51, 2 Ki. i.); revolt of Mesha (2 Ki. i. 1, and Moabite Stone); Jehoshaphat’s shipping alliance with Ahaziah (1 Ki. xxii. 48, 49); ELIEZER, son of Dodavah (2 Chron. xx. 37); fire from heaven |

• The Septuagint may be correct in assigning this co-reign to Jehoshaphat; but it contradicts the Hebrew when it counts the co-reign as a part of his 25 years.

† Jehoram was now 16 or 17 years old, and Athaliah about the same age (see A.Di. 51 and before). Their age proves that the marriage cannot have occurred much earlier, and the age of Ahaziah, their son (see A.Di. 68), proves that it cannot have been later.

‡ The king spoken of in 2 Ki. viii. 1-8 is Jehoram; for Benhadad of Syria has not yet been succeeded by Hazael; hence the raising of the Shunammite’s son from the dead, after he was ‘grown’ (2 Ki. iv. 18), occurred more than 7 years (2 Ki. viii. 1-3) before the death of Joram; hence his birth must have occurred some years before the close of the reign of Ahab. As the prophets of Jehovah seem at the time to have been safe and influential (2 Ki. iv. 13, for instance), we are safe in placing it before Ahab’s persecution of the prophets began. It does not follow that Elisha was senior to Elijah, but only that this incident is earlier than any incident that is related of Elijah.

§ This synchronism is perfectly definite. Shalmaneser says that he defeated Ahab, in coalition with Benhadad, the 6th y. of his own reign, and received tribute from Jehu the 18th year; hence the 6th y. of Shalmaneser cannot be later than the 21st of Ahab; for Ahab died the following year, and was then not in alliance with Benhadad. And the 6th of Shalmaneser cannot have been earlier than the 21st of Ahab; for, if it were, the 18th of Shalmaneser would fall earlier than the 12th of Joram, A.Di. 90, the accession year of Jehu.

The taking of Ahaziah into co-regnancy was an arrangement made in connection with the coalition against Assyria. If 2 Ki. i. 17 is correct, a similar arrangement was made at the same time in Judah, Jehoram becoming co-king with Jehoshaphat. It is likely enough that this was done, though, if it was, the arrangement was soon changed. If here was a co-reign it was temporary, and was a different thing from the co-reign of a few years later, mentioned in 2 Ki. viii. 16, 2 Chron. xxi. 4, 5.

B.C. A.Di.

| | | (2 Ki. i.); Jehoshaphat’s reform, and judging mission (2 Chron. xix.); invasion (led by Mesha? helped by Assyria?) by Moab, Ammon, and others (2 Chron. xx., and perhaps Ps. lxxxiii.). | | — | — | — | | 901 | 82 | 10th y. of Shalmaneser; Benhadad and allies defeated by him.* Somewhere about this time belong Elijah’s translation, most of Elisha’s miracles (2 Ki. ii.-viii.), and the beginning of the 7 years of famine (2 Ki. viii. 1-3). | | 900 | 83 | 11th of Shalmaneser; Benhadad and allies defeated again; 5th of Jehoram of Israel; Jehoram of Judah becomes co-regnant with Jehoshaphat (2 Ki. viii. 16, 2 Chron. xxi. 4, 5); Mesha defeated (2 Ki. iii.), the successes recorded on the Moabite Stone coming later; posthumous message from Elijah (2 Chron. xxi. 12). | | 897 | 86 | 14th y. of Shalmaneser; Benhadad and allies defeated again; 25th y. of Jehoshaphat; his death (1 Ki. xxii. 42), Jehoram becoming sole king. Edom and Libnah revolt; Arabian and Philistine invasion; Syrian guerillas and invasion in the northern kingdom (2 Ki. viii. 20-22, 2 Chron. xxi. 8-xxii. 1, 2 Ki. vi., vii); Moab, under Mesha, becomes independent (Moabite Stone). | | 893 | 90 | 8th y. of Jehoram of Judah (2 Ki. viii. 17); 12th y. of Jehoram of Israel, and 1st y. of Ahaziah of Judah (2 Ki. viii. 25); † death of these two, and accession of Jehu (2 Ki. ix., x.); Hazael king in Damascus (2 Ki. viii. 7-15, 28); 18th y. of Shalmaneser, in which he overthrows Hazael, and takes tribute from Jehu. | | 892 | 91 | 1st y. of Jehu; 1st y. of Athaliah; Shalmaneser cuts cedars in Lebanon. | | 890 | 93 | Shalmaneser, in his 21st y., conquers Hazael again. | | 887 | 96 | 6th y. of Athaliah (2 Ki. xi. 3, 4). | | 886 | 97 | 1st y. of Joash (2 Ki. xi. 4 sq.). In the last years of Shalmaneser a great revolt in Assyria, under Assur-dayin. | | 876 | 107 | 35th y. of Shalmaneser; accession of Samas-rimman. | | 875 | 108 | 1st y. of Samas-rimman; he conquers Assur-dayin. | | 874 | 109 | Assyrian operations on the Mediterranean coast. | | 873 | 110 | Assyrians at the Mediterranean again. | | 871 | 112 | Amaziah born (2 Ki. xiv. 2). During the reign of Jehu and his successors Israel suffered both from Hazael and from the Moabites (2 Ki. x. 32 sq., xiii. 20, etc.). Here belong the triumphs of Mesha, as recorded on the Moabite Stone. | | 865 | 118 | 28th y. of Jehu (2 Ki. x. 36); his death; accession of Jehoahaz.‡ | | 864 | 119 | 1st y. of Jehoahaz; 23rd y. of Joash; he pushes the work of repairing the temple (2 Ki. xii. 6). | | 863 | 120 | 13th y. of Samas-rimman; accession of Rimman-nirari III. | | 862 | 121 | 1st y. of Rimman-nirari. | | 850 | 133 | 37th y. of Joash; co-reign of Jehoash of Israel with Jehoahaz begins (2 Ki. xiii. 10). | | 848 | 135 | 17th of Jehoahaz (2 Ki. xiii. 1); Hazael reduces Israel low, takes Gath, and at- |

• It is suspicious that Shalmaneser has to defeat Benhadad and his allies so often. If we had the Syrian accounts we should perhaps find these battles claimed as victories, and credit given to a certain great man of Damascus named Naaman (2 Ki. v.).

† Jehoram died just at the beginning of a new year (2 Chron. xxi. 18, 19), so that the narrator in 2 Ki. ix. 29 counts his successor as from the 11th of Jehoram of Israel, instead of from the 12th.

‡ Josephus here gives different numerals, which are workable, and, if accepted, shorten the time by two years.

B.C. A.Di.

tacks Jerusalem (2 Ki. xiii. 2-9, xii. 17, 18, 2 Chron. xxiv. 23-25); death of Jehoahaz, and accession of Jehoash of Israel; encouraging promises of Elisha before his death; the prophecy of JOEL.*

Rimman-nirari III. represents himself as taking tribute from all this region, and reducing Mariha, king of Damascus.†

847 136 40th y. of Joash (2 Ki. xii. 1); his death, and accession of Amaziah.

846 137 2nd y. of Jehoash of Israel, and 1st y. of Amaziah (2 Ki. xiv. 1).

Successes of Jehoash over the Syrians under Benhadad, the successor of Hazael (2 Ki. xiii. 24, 25).

Amaziah’s victory over Edom (2 Ki. xiv. 7, 2 Chron. xxv. 5-16); OBADIAH. (?)

Jehoash of Israel captures Jerusalem (2 Ki. xiv. 8-14, 2 Chron. xxv. 17-24).

834 149 29th y. of Rimman-nirari, and his death.

Not far from this time, the events of the Book of JONAH; also Jonah’s prophecies of the successes of Jeroboam II. (2 Ki. xiv. 25).‡

• Some place Joel earlier than this, while many regard Joel as post-exilian.

† The date of this inscription is lost. In the eponym canon Rimman-nirari is said to have made an expedition to Arpad in his sixth year, and another to “over the sea” in his ninth year. Schrader holds that the latter is the expedition referred to in the inscription, but this identification rests on slender evidence. More probably the expedition was later, just before Jehoash of Israel began to gain victories over the younger Benhadad. Rimman-nirari calls the king whom he reduced Mariha—that is, the Lord. Perhaps this is a title rather than a name, the king being either Hazael or his successor Benhadad. Schrader makes him to be the successor of this Benhadad, but this brings the Assyrian records into contradiction with the biblical records.

‡ The Bible numerals apparently give us 61 years as the duration of the interval between the death of Rimman-nirari III. and the accession of Assur-daan III. For this interval the Assyrian eponym list gives but one king, Shalmaneser III., who reigned 10 years. There is some slight evidence to the effect that his reign immediately preceded that of Assur-daan, and, provisionally, we place him in that position, leaving a clean interval of 51 years not accounted for in the Assyrian canon.

Is it true that there was such an interval? Or must the biblical dates be so corrected, and made to overlap one another, that the seeming interval will be extinguished? I shall not attempt to answer this question. But it is worth while to notice that it can only be answered by studying the history of the period, and that, at present, we have no materials for this study, except those found in the Bible. The Assyrian records are silent.

But their silence is not quite without significance. Whether this interval was 10 years or 61 years, it was an interval of revolution. Just before the interval of silence begins Rimman-nirari is collecting tribute over all the region, to the Mediterranean, having inherited this domain from his fathers. Just after its close the Assyrian kings have to reconquer the region (see note at 765 B.C.). This shows that they had lost their hold upon it.

The interval, therefore, whether long or short, was a time of Assyrian weakness. Jonah’s visit to Nineveh is somehow connected with this time of weakness. Jeroboam’s successes are also connected with it. After humbling Damascus, Assyria herself lost her hold of power. This combination of circumstances enabled Jeroboam to seize and hold the leadership of the confederated nations between the upper Euphrates and the Mediterranean. It was substantially the same body of nations in which Benhadad exercised the hegemony in the times of Ahab; but Jeroboam’s dominion was probably something more permanent than a mere hegemony for purposes of war.

The Assyrian records represent (see note at 765 B.C.) that, when they reconquered the region, Azariah of Judah was at the head of these confederated peoples; and this agrees with the large military establishment attributed to Azariah in the Bible, and with such hints as the one in Zech. xi. 10. Many assume that the reigns of Jeroboam and Uzziah were a period of bitter hostility between the northern and southern kingdoms, but all the evidence indicates the contrary. It was a period of growing prosperity for both kingdoms, and therefore a period when they were closely united by common interests. Uzziah could hardly have succeeded Jeroboam in the headship of the confederacy, unless his relations with the northern kingdom had been cordial. If there was an expectation that the two kingdoms would now be reunited, under the dynasty of David, that accounts for the interregnum in Israel that followed the death of Jeroboam. In the same way we may account for the fact that Amos and Hosea, just at this time, urge upon the northern Israelites the claims of David their king, as well as of Jehovah their God (Am. ix. 11, Hos. iii. 5).

Possibly the fact of this time of Assyrian adversity may have a bearing on other questions. When the scribes came to write up the history, did they deliberately throw out this half century of disgrace to Assyria? Is there this much of truth in the tradition that Nabonassar suppressed

| B.C. | A.Di. | | | — | — | — | | 832 | 151 | 15th y. of Amaziah; 16th y. of Joash of Israel; 1st y. of Jeroboam II. (2 Ki. xiv. 23). | | 822 | 161 | Uzziah born (2 Ki. xv. 1, 2). | | 818 | 165 | 29th y. of Amaziah; his death (2 Ki. xiv. 2, 17). | | 806 | 177 | 27th y. of Jeroboam; 1st y. of Uzziah (2 Ki. xv. 1, 2).* | | 793 | 190 | Prophecies of AMOS(?) ; first prophecy of HOSEA (chaps. i., ii.). ? | | 792 | 191 | 41st y. of Jeroboam II.; his death (2 Ki. xiv. 23), followed by interregnum in Israel. | | 791 | 192 | The great earthquake (Am. i. 1). ? Second prophecy of HOSEA (chap. iii.). ? | | 782 | 201 | 1st y. of Shalmaneser III. of Assyria. | | 779 | 204 | Jotham born (2 Ki. xv. 32, 33). Shalman storms Beth-arbel (Hos. x. 14). Perhaps Arbela in the Ararat region, in which region the Assyrian canon says that Shalmaneser III. operated. | | 773 | 210 | 10th y. of Shalmaneser; expedition to Damascus; his death, and accession of Assur-daan III. | | 772 | 211 | 1st y. of Assur-daan; expedition to Hadrach. Later prophecies of HOSEA (chaps. iv.-x.). ? † | | 769 | 214 | 38th y. of Uzziah; Zechariah king the last six months of the year (2 Ki. xv. 8). | | 768 | 215 | 39th y. of Uzziah; Shallum 30 days (2 Ki. xv. 13); accession of Menahem (2 Ki. xv. 17). | | 767 | 216 | 1st y. of Menahem. Retirement of Uzziah (2 Ki. xv. 5, 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-23) ? ; Jotham regent, 12 years of age; earliest prophecy of ISAIAH (ii.-iv.). ? | | 765 | 218 | 8th y. of Assur-daan (3rd y. of Menahem and 42nd y. of Uzziah); the Assyrians break up a confederacy extending from Hamath southward, headed by Uzziah ;† Menahem pays tribute to Pul of Assyria (2 Ki. xv. 17-21). | the records of the kings who preceded him? Does this afford an explanation at once of the differences between the biblical and Assyrian chronologies, and of the silence of the Assyrian annals at this point?

• This makes an interregnum of 11 years in Judah between the death of Amaziah and the accession of Uzziah. To avoid this, the chronology of the marginal Bibles assumes that the 27th year of Jeroboam is here not counted from his 1st year in the 15th of Amaziah, but from a time 11 years earlier, when he is assumed to have become co-regnant with his father. Of this we could judge better if we knew more of the history of those times. Against this assumed co-reign it is to be said that the usual evidence is lacking, there being here no sufficient numerical data. Further, the assumption of a co-reign here breaks up the agreement with the “long numbers” (see A.Di. 241, 265, 362, 390, 396).

† These prophecies are largely an indignant protest against intrigues with Assyria and Egypt, and especially with an Assyrian king whom Hosea calls Jareb (v. 13, x. 6). Jareb signifies one who takes part in contested causes, as a champion, or judge, or umpire. It reads like a transformation of the Assyrian name Daan, which has the same meaning. So long as the interregnum in Israel continued, a process of assimilation was going on between the two kingdoms, which would ultimately lead to union; but now that the Assyrians are again in the region, they are intriguing to break up this process and get a king once more on the northern throne, to the end that, by causing divisions, they may the more easily conquer these peoples. Hosea is indignant at the success of their intrigues, and speaks accordingly.

‡ The account is found on two mutilated fragments. Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions, vol. iii., page 9, Nos. 2, 3; Smith’s Assyrian Canon, page 117 sq; Smith’s Assyrian Discoveries, page 275 sq.; Schrader on 2 Ki. xv., etc. The inscriptions speak of fighting, and we may therefore infer that they claim a great Assyrian victory. Assyriologists seem to be agreed in assigning these inscriptions to Tigliah-pileser III., though they do not contain his name, and present a historical situation different from that presented by any that contain his name. They say that the Assyrian king not only defeated Azariah, but took tribute from Rezin of Damascus and

| B.C. | A.Di. | Second prophecy of ISAIAH (chap. v.). ? The Hadrach burden in ZECHARIAH (ix.-xi.). ? | | — | — | — | | 763 | 220 | 10th y. of Assur-daan; great eclipse, June 15; Ahaz born (according to Sept. of 2 Chron. xxviii. 1). | | 758 | 225 | 10th y. of Menahem; his death and accession of Pekahiah (2 Ki. xv. 17, 22); Ahaz born (Hebrew of 2 Chron. xxviii. 1). | | 757 | 226 | 50th y. of Uzziah; 1st y. of Pekahiah (2 Ki. xv. 23). | | 756 | 227 | 2nd y. of Pekahiah; his death; accession of Pekah. | | 755 | 228 | 52nd y. of Uzziah; his death; accession of Jotham; 1st y. of Pekah (2 Ki. xv. 27, 32, 33); 18th y. of Assur-daan III.; his death; accession of Assur-nirari II.; third prophecy of ISAIAH (chap. vi.). | | 754 | 229 | 2nd y. of Pekah; 1st y. of Jotham; 1st y. of Assur-nirari. | | 747 | 236 | 1st y. of Nabonassar of Babylon; 1st y. of the celebrated Canon of Ptolemy: Hezekiah born (2 Ki. xviii. 1, 2).* | | 745 | 238 | 10th y. of Assur-nirari; his death; accession of Tiglath-pileser III. (11th y. of Pekah; 10th y. of Jotham); Tiglath-pileser seizes Babylonia. | | 744 | 239 | 1st y. of Tiglath-pileser; conquests in the east. Deportations from east of the Jordan (1 Chron. v. 6, 26).† MICAH begins to prophesy (i. 1), continuing to the earlier years of Hezekiah. The historical situation fits that of the “burden,” ZECHARIAH xii.-xiv. To this period Josephus assigns NAHUM.‡ Rezin and Pekah invade Judah (2 Ki. xv. 37). |

Menahem of Samaria. But unless we reject the Bible statements by the wholesale, we must hold that both Azariah and Menahem were dead some years before Tiglath-pileser came to the throne, B.C. 745. Further, each of the two inscriptions gives an account of an expedition to Hadrach, and the Eponym list assigns to Assur-daan three expeditions to Hadrach, and none to any other monarch; though Hadrach is mentioned in some undoubted Tiglath-pileser inscriptions. Further, one of the two inscriptions proceeds to tell what happened in the 9th year of the king in question, thus apparently assigning the previous events to his 8th year; but the Eponym list says that Tiglath-pileser was in Media his 8th year, while it ascribes to Assur-daan’s 8th year one of his three expeditions to Hadrach.

The Bible says that the Assyrian king to whom Menahem paid tribute was Pul; and there are strong reasons for identifying the name Pul with the name Tiglath-pileser. But there may have been two men of the same name, or Tiglath-pileser III. may have been, at this time, 20 years before he became king, the commander of the Assyrian forces in Palestine. Either of these suppositions is more credible than that the whole biblical account is to be discarded.

The views thus indicated seem to me tenable. The view, however, more commonly held by recent scholars is that the events mentioned in this inscription, instead of being the events of a single expedition, extended over several years previous to B.C. 737, the 8th year of Tiglath-pileser, and that they were practically continuous with Tiglath-pileser’s interference in the times of Pekah and Ahaz.

• As this makes Ahaz but 11 years old at his son’s birth, there is probably a numerical error somewhere.

† In its details this deportation is different from any other mentioned in the Bible. The Assyrian king is called Pul “and” Tiglath-pileser, whether the distinction intended be between two persons or between two names of the same person. According to the Eponym list, Tiglath-pileser was at Arpad four successive years, B.C. 743-740, and he may have ravaged this region during any part of that time.

Possibly Josephus (Ant. IX. xiv. 1) gives a specific date for this deportation. He says that the deportation at the downfall of Samaria occurred 240 years and 7 months after the revolt under Rehoboam. His numerals are certainly not correct for that final deportation, but they are so explicit as to suggest that they may be historical; and so the question suggests itself whether they may refer to some earlier deportation. The events of the time of Menahem are too early. If we follow the chronology of Ussher, the date of Josephus might coincide with the later deportation of the time of Ahaz; but it seems to me that the best supported conjecture is that, while Tiglath-pileser was operating at Arpad, an expedition was made, in his 3rd year, to the east of the Jordan.

‡ See Ant. IX. xi. 3. He says further that this was 115 years before the downfall of Nineveh. This would date the final overthrow of Nineveh, 629-624 B.C. The date of this event must still

| B.C. | A.Di. | | | — | — | — | | 739 | 244 | 17th y. of Pekah ; 16th y. of Jotham ; his death ; accession of Ahaz (2 Ki. xvi. 1, 2). | | 738 | 245 | 1st y. of Ahaz. Rezin and Pekah again operate against Judah (2 Chron. xxviii. 1-15, 2 Ki. xvi. 5 sq., Isa. vii. sq.) ; Philistine and Edomite invasion (2 Chron. xxviii. 17, 18) ; Ahaz seeks help from Tiglath-pileser. ODED (2 Chron. xxviii. 9). Tiglath-pileser captures towns in northern Palestine, deporting many people (2 Ki. xv. 29) ; Ahaz becomes tributary.* | | 736 | 247 | 20th y. of Pekah ; 20th y. of Jotham, counting from his accession ; Pekah smitten by Hoshea, who succeeds him (2 Ki. xv. 30). | | 734 | 249 | Tiglath-pileser in Palestine (Eponym canon). | | 733 | 250 | Tiglath-pileser in Damascus (Ep. can.). | | 732 | 251 | Tiglath-pileser in Damascus (Ep. can.). Within these years the visit of Ahaz to Damascus (2 Ki. xvi. 10 sq., 2 Chron. xxviii. 23) ; the march upon Jerusalem (Isa. x. 28 sq.) ; the uttering of the fourth prophecy of ISAIAH (vii.-xii.), though this incorporates earlier prophecies ; also, conquest of Philistia by Tiglath-pileser. | | 731 | 252 | Tiglath-pileser—Porus—reigns with Khinzios in Babylonia (Ptolemy’s canon).† | | 728 | 255 | 1st y. of Tiglath-pileser in Babylon (Bab. Chron.). | | 727 | 256 | 18th y. of Tiglath-pileser ; his death ; accession of Shalmaneser IV.; 12th y. of Ahaz ; accession of Hoshea (2 Ki. xvii. 1).‡ | | 726 | 257 | 1st y. of Shalmaneser ; § 1st y. of Hoshea. | | 723 | 260 | Close of 3rd y. of Hoshea ; 16th y. of Ahaz ; his death ; 1st y. of Hezekiah (2 Ki. xvi. 1, 2, xviii. 1, 2) ; the ‘burden’ of Isa. xiv. 28. | | 722 | 261 | 1st y. of Hezekiah, as differently counted ; he begins to repair the temple (2 Chron xxix. 3) ; 5th y. of Shalmaneser, and accession of Sargon, as commonly counted ; Sargon captures Samaria, and reimposes the tribute. Latest prophecies of HOSEA (xi.-xiv.). | | 721 | 262 | 1st y. of Sargon ; 1st y. of Merodach-baladan in Babylonia. | | 720 | 263 | 2nd y. of Sargon ; 4th y. of Hezekiah ; 7th y. of Hoshea ; Samaria, Damascus, Hamath, and others in alliance with Sebek of Egypt (So) against Assyria ; Sargon’s victory at Raphia ; Samaria besieged (2 Ki. xvii. 1 sq., xviii. 9 sq., and records of Sargon).|| | be regarded as uncertain, though there is a strong trend of opinion in favor of the idea that Nineveh perished about 608 B.C. (q.v.). Further, Nahum iii. 8-10 is regarded as an allusion to the sack of Thebes by Assur-bani-pal, 664 B.C., showing that Nahum prophesied later than that event.

• This seems to be the campaign described in the two mutilated inscriptions given in Smith’s Assyrian Discoveries, pages 284-86, cited from Layard, page 66, and Rawlinson iii. 10. 2. Tiglath-pileser captured Gaza and made conquests toward Egypt and in Arabia, as well as to the north. In both inscriptions he mentions Pekah, but what he says of him has been obliterated. He says that he appointed Hoshea to succeed Pekah.

† He had virtually been sovereign in Babylonia from the very beginning of his reign in Assyria.

‡ Possibly he had reigned as Assyrian governor from the time of his appointment at the death of Pekah, but now assumed the style of king, on learning of the death of Tiglath-pileser.

§ Shalmaneser was also king of Babylon, under the name of Ilulæus.

|| One Assyrian inscription (Smith’s Assyrian Discoveries, chap. xv., and Schrader) counts B.C. 719 as the first year of Sargon, instead of B.C. 721. On the face of it this appears to give the years 721 and 720 to Shalmaneser. Perhaps the same way of counting is followed in 2 Ki. xviii. 9, where the siege of Samaria is said to have begun in the reign of Shalmaneser. Against this is the statement of the Babylonian chronicle that Shalmaneser died in his 5th year ; but if the chronicler made a mistake here, it is a mistake easily accounted for.

B.C. A.Di.

9th y. of Hoshea; 6th y. of Hezekiah; Samaria taken after 3 years’ siege.*

At various times from his 3rd to his 10th y. Sargon speaks of the deportation and importation of inhabitants for these regions, in some cases mentioning Samaria. Hezekiah rebels; smites the Philistines (2 Ki. xviii. 7, 8).

11th y. of Sargon; his expedition to Ashdod (Assyr. records and Isa. xx.).

14th y. of Hezekiah; Sennacherib’s first invasion of Judah (2 Ki. xviii. 13-16, Isa. xxxvi. 1); Hezekiah’s illness (2 Ki. xx. 6); ambassadors of Merodach-baladan (2 Ki. xx. 12 sq.); Sargon subdues Merodach-baladan.

1st y. of Sargon as king of Babylon, being his 13th as king of Assyria.

17th y. of Sargon; his death; accession of Sennacherib; Manasseh born (2 Ki. xxi. 1).

1st y. of Sennacherib.

Sennacherib’s second invasion of Judah; 4th y. of Sennacherib; battle of Eltekeh (Assyr. records, 2 Ki. xviii. 17 sq., Isa. xxxvi. 2 sq.); 23rd y. of Hezekiah.

5th y. of Sennacherib; 3rd y. of Bel-ibni of Babylon; Sennacherib devastates Accad, and places his son Assur-nadin-suma on the throne at Babylon.

6th y. of Sennacherib; 1st y. of Assur-nadin-suma; Sennacherib operating in the Nipur mountains; the Assyrian forces withdrawn from Palestine, so as to make the resumption of agriculture possible (2 Ki. xix. 29).

7th y. of Sennacherib; he operates against Elam, and subdues a revolt in Babylonia.

8th y. of Sennacherib; 3rd y. of Assur-nadin-suma; Sennacherib operates against Elam; is compelled by a terrible storm to return to Nineveh.

9th y. of Sennacherib; he puts down a formidable revolt in Babylonia, Elam assisting the rebels.†

ISAIAH. The bulk of his prophecies belong to Hezekiah’s time.

• Josephus says (Ant. IX. xiv. 1) that the capture was the 7th y. of Hezekiah. Perhaps this indicates that it occurred just at the close of the 6th and the beginning of the 7th—that is, as we now count, March, 717 B.C.

The date in the marginal Bibles is 721 B.C. This has misled scholars very generally into identifying this final capture with the capture by Sargon, B.C. 722. But this is untenable. As Sargon expressly tells us, that capture of Samaria was not final. It was before the entanglement with the Egyptian king, and not after.

It is possible to understand Isa. vii. 8 as affirming that when the year 65 arrives (for the construction of the numeral cf. Gen. xiv. 4, 5) Ephraim will be broken. Is it possible that the prophet means the year 265 of the disruption? His counting from that era is perhaps paralleled in 2 Chron. xv. 19, xvi. 1, and Ezek. iv. 5. His saying “sixty-five” for “two hundred sixty-five” is analogous to our own current usages, and to the Jewish distinction between their “great chronology” and “small chronology” (Mitchell’s Ges. Grammar, sec. 5, note). The current explanation of this numeral is by noticing the fact that the 65th year from the time when the prophet spoke would fall within the reign of Esar-haddon, and then assuming that the political power of Samaria was not broken till then; but this is hardly consistent with either the biblical or the Assyrian accounts.

Josephus says (Ant. X. ix. 7) that the carrying away of Judah, which he dates the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar, A.Di. 396, was 130½ years after that of the ten tribes. This contradicts his own date, A.Di. 241, for the deportation of the ten tribes, and exactly fits the date 265 A.Di.

† These are the dates as given by Sennacherib. They are contradicted in some details, but in the main confirmed by other records of Sennacherib, and by the Babylonian Chronicle.

Jehovah’s deliverance of Judah was not accomplished, as many have inferred from 2 Ki. xix. 35, by a sudden large destruction of Assyrians in Palestine, the night after the prophet gave his message. “That night” is the night when Jehovah executed judgment on Sennacherib, whether just after the prophet spoke or years later. The place of the judgment may have been Palestine, or may have been any other region of the earth. The blow of Jehovah’s angel may have fallen in the form of a pestilence, or in that of a desert wind, or a mountain storm, or in some other form. That the actual rescue was to take two years appears from 2 Ki. xix. 29.

| B.C. | A Di. | | | — | — | — | | 695 | 288 | 29th y. of Hezekiah ; his death ; accession of Manasseh (2 Ki. xviii. 1, 2, xx. 21) ; 10th y. of Sennacherib. | | 694 | 289 | 1st y. of Manasseh ; 11th y. of Sennacherib ; 6th y. of Assur-nadin-suma ; the Elamites carried him captive and made Nergal-yuezib king at Babylon. | | 693 | 290 | 12th y. of Sennacherib ; he again conquers Babylon, and devastates Elam. | | 681 | 302 | 24th y. of Sennacherib ; slain by his son, the 24th day of the 10th month ; insurrection in Assyria till the 2nd day of the 12th month (Bab. Chron., cf. 2 Ki. xix. 37) ; nominal accession of Esar-haddon. | | 680 | 303 | Actual accession of Esar-haddon, 8th day of 3rd month (Bab. Chron.) ; his 1st y. ; expedition to Chaldæa ; 1st y. of Esar-haddon as king of Babylon (15th y. of Manasseh). Early in his reign Esar-haddon operated against Sidon ; in undated inscriptions he claims Manasseh of Judah and all the neighboring kings as tributary. Isaiah still living (Isa. xxxvii. 38, cf. 2 Chron. xxxii. 32) ; ? his martyrdom. (?) | | 676 | 307 | 5th y. of Esar-haddon ; Sidon finally subdued (Bab. Chron.). | | 675 | 308 | 6th y. of Esar-haddon ; campaign in Egypt (Bab. Chron.) ; Assur-bani-pal associated with him as king. (?) | | 674 | 309 | 7th y. of Esar-haddon ; campaign in Egypt ; the gods of Accad move from Elam to the city of Accad. | | 671 | 312 | 10th y. of Esar-haddon ; severe and decisive fighting in Egypt ; captivity of Manasseh (see B.C. 648). ? | | 668 | 315 | 13th y. of Esar-haddon ; his death ; accession of his two sons : Saul-suma-yukina in Babylon, and Assur-bani-pal in Assyria (Bab. Chron., which, however, gives but 12 years to Esar-haddon) ; the gods of Accad move from the city of Assur to Babylon ; expedition of Assur-bani-pal to Egypt ; tribute from Judah and 21 other kingdoms on the way ; he captures Thebes. Revolt in Egypt, headed by Tirhakah. | | 664 | 319 | Tirhakah’s death (Apis-stele, Schrader on Nah. iii. 8). Assur-bani-pal’s second expedition ; submission of Egypt and Ethiopia ; sack of Thebes (Nah. iii. 8). ? His fifth expedition—sixth, according to some documents—campaign in Elam ; general rebellion, fomented by Saul-suma-yukina, and including the peoples of Syria and the seacoast. | | 648 | 335 | 20th y. of Saul-suma-yukina ; Assur-bani-pal’s sixth—or seventh—expedition ; terrible siege of Babylon by him ; Saul-suma-yukina dies by fire ; Manasseh of Judah carried to Babylon by the captains of the king of Assyria (2 Chron. xxxiii. 11). ? * In his seventh and eighth expeditions Assur-bani-pal took vengeance on the allies of his brother, especially on Elam ; and in his ninth, his vengeance reached Arabia and the peoples of the seacoast. Manasseh’s return and reformation (2 Chron. xxxiii. 13 sq.). | | 645 | 338 | Josiah born (2 Ki. xxii. 1). NAHUM. (?) But see foot-note before B.C. 739. |

The facts seem to be these. What Sennacherib proposed was the deportation of Judah (2 Ki. xviii. 31, 32). He was diverted from the attack on Jerusalem by the approach of Tirhakah (xix. 9). Then the news reached him of the uprisings in the east, and he was obliged to return to Nineveh, and was never able to renew his attempt to deport Judah, though when he returned to Nineveh he received a heavy fine from Hezekiah.

• Or, Manasseh may have been carried to Babylon at any time during Esar-haddon’s reign ; or in the time of Assur-bani-pal’s ninth expedition, when he took vengeance on the peoples of the seacoast. But, probably, the larger part of Manasseh’s reign—the bad part of it—was before he was carried away ; and, probably, he was not kept captive many years.

| B.C. | A.Di. | | | — | — | — | | 640 | 343 | 55th y. of Manasseh ; his death ; accession of Amon (2 Ki. xxi. 1, 18). | | 639 | 344 | 1st y. of Amon. | | 638 | 345 | 2nd y. of Amon ; his death ; accession and 1st y. of Josiah (2 Ki. xxi. 19, 26).* | | | | ZEPHANIAH. (?) | | 632 | 351 | Jehoiakim born (2 Ki. xxiii. 36). | | 631 | 352 | 8th y. of Josiah (2 Chron. xxxiv. 3). | | 630 | 353 | Jehoahaz born (2 Ki. xxiii. 31). | | 627 | 356 | 12th y. of Josiah (2 Chron. xxxiv. 3) ; reform begun. | | 626 | 357 | 13th y. of Josiah ; JEREMIAH begins prophesying (Jer. i. 2, xxv. 3, 1) ; accession of Nabopolassar in Babylon. | | 625 | 358 | 1st y. of Nabopolassar. | | 621 | 362 | 18th y. of Josiah ; his great passover and reformation ; finding of the book of the law ; overthrow of the altar at Bethel (2 Ki. xxii. 3 sq., 2 Chron. xxxiv. 8 sq.).† | | 617 | 366 | Zedekiah born (2 Ki. xxiv. 18). | | 615 | 368 | Jehoiachin born (2 Ki. xxiv. 8).‡ | | 608 | 375 | 31st y. of Josiah (2 Ki. xxii. 1) ; his death ;‡ Jehoahaz 3 months ; accession of Jehoiakim. | | 607 | 376 | 1st y. of Jehoiakim. | | 605 | 378 | 21st y. of Nabopolassar ; his death ; accession of Nebuchadnezzar ; Jehoiakim becomes his servant (2 Ki. xxiv. 1) ; Daniel and others carried into exile (Dan. i. 1) ; beginning of the 70 years of exile. | | 604 | 379 | 1st y. of Nebuchadnezzar ; 4th y. of Jehoiakim ; 23rd y. of the prophesying of Jeremiah (Jer. xxv. 1, 3, xlvi. 1, 2, Jos. Ant. X. vi. 1) ; Nebuchadnezzar wins the decisive battle of Carchemish ; BARUCH writes a book of JEREMIAH’s prophecies, and reads it publicly (Jer. xxxvi. 1 sq., xlv. 1 sq.). | | 603 | 380 | 5th y. of Jehoiakim ; Baruch again reads his book, which is destroyed by the king, and afterward rewritten (Jer. xxxvi.) ; Jehoiakim, having served Nebuchadnezzar 3 years, rebels (2 Ki. xxiv. 1, Jos. Ant. X. vi. 2) ; Daniel expounds Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Dan. ii. 1, i. 5, 18). | | 600 | 383 | 8th y. of Jehoiakim, following 4th y. of Nebuchadnezzar ; Jehoiakim, frightened back to allegiance, pays tribute two years, but revolts the third (Jos. Ant. X. vi. 1, and 1st sentence of 2). | | 598 | 385 | 7th y. of Nebuchadnezzar ; 3023 persons deported (Jer. lii. 28). | | 597 | 386 | 11th y. of Jehoiakim ; 8th y. of Nebuchadnezzar ; Jehoiakim slain ; short reign of Jehoiachin ; accession of Zedekiah ; the great deportation to Babylon (2 Ki. xxiv. 6-16, etc.). | | | | Jeremiah’s letter (Jer. xxix.). | | | | His prophecy concerning Elam (xlix. 34-39). | | 593 | 390 | 4th y. of Zedekiah ; Hananiah’s case (Jer. xxvii.-xxviii.) ; Zedekiah’s special act |

• At this point there are no checking numbers, and so it would be possible to assign either a year more or a year less of actual time to the reign of Amon. I have, on the whole, preferred the mean, especially as it fits well with the long number at A.Di. 362.

† Josephus says that this was 361 years after Jadon’s prophecy of the overthrow of this altar (Ant. X. iv. 4). This exactly fits the present scheme of the chronology, and fits none of the others.

‡ Ten years later, according to 2 Chron. xxxvi. 9.

‡ Josiah died by a wound received in battle with Necho of Egypt. Josephus says (Ant. X. v. 1) that Necho was on his way to fight the Medes and Babylonians, who had overthrown Assyria ; but according to 2 Ki. xxiii. 29, he was going against the king of Assyria

| B.C. | A.Di. | of homage (Jer. li. 59); Jeremiah prophesying against Babylon (Jer. l. and li., especially li. 60); 5th y. of Jehoiachin’s exile; EZEKIEL i.-vii. (i. 2.)* | | — | — | — | | 591 | 392 | 6th y. of Zedekiah, last half; EZEKIEL viii.-xix. (viii. 1); Zedekiah’s perjury and rebellion (Ezek. xvii. 12-21, cf. 2 Ki. and 2 Chron.). | | 590 | 393 | 7th y. of Zedekiah (Ezek. xx. 1). | | 588 | 395 | 9th y. of Zedekiah; Jerusalem invested; EZEKIEL xxiv., xxv. | | 587 | 396 | 10th y. of Zedekiah; 18th y. of Nebuchadnezzar; † 832 persons deported (Jer. lii. 29); ineffectual Egyptian interference (Jer. xxxvii.); Egypt denounced (Ezek. xxix.); fiery furnace (Sept. of Dan. lii. 1). | | 586 | 397 | 11th y. of Zedekiah; 19th y. of Nebuchadnezzar; Jerusalem taken and burned (2 Ki. xxv., etc.); Gedaliah governor; flight into Egypt (Jer. xl.-xliv.); EZEKIEL xxvi.-xxviii., xxx., xxxi., xxxiii. 21-xxxvii. | | 582 | 401 | 23rd y. of Nebuchadnezzar; 745 persons deported (Jer. lii. 30); Josephus says (Ant. X. ix. 7) that Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt. | | 573 | 410 | 25th y. of ‘our exile’; 14th y. after destruction of Jerusalem; EZEKIEL’s visions of the restored Israel (xl. 1). | | 570 | 413 | 27th of Zedekiah (Ezek. xxix. 17); Egypt promised to Nebuchadnezzar. | | 568 | 415 | 37th y. of Nebuchadnezzar; he invades Egypt. | | 562 | 421 | 43rd y. of Nebuchadnezzar; his death; accession of Evil-merodach. | | 561 | 422 | 1st y. of Evil-merodach; 37th y. of the exile of Jehoiachin; just at the close of the year, Jehoiachin released and honored (2 Ki. xxv. 27-30, Jer. lii. 31-34).‡ | | 539 | 444 | Accession year of Cyrus in Babylon. | | 533 | 445 | 1st y. of Cyrus; proclamation of return. |

• The year of “our captivity” or the year of Jehoiachin’s captivity is five times mentioned: 2 Ki. xxv. 27, Jer. lii. 31, and Ezek. i. 2, xxxiii. 21, xl. 1. In four of these instances, and therefore in the fifth also, the count is made from the 11th year of Jehoiakim, the year in which the exile of Jehoiachin began. But I assume that all the other numerals in Ezekiel count from the first year of Zedekiah. For instance, compare Ezek. xxiv. 1 with 2 Ki. xxv. 1, or Ezek. xxvi. 1 with 2 Ki. xxv. 2.

The “thirtieth year” of Ezek. i 1 coincides with the thirtieth from Josiah’s great reformation. The 390 of Ezek. iv. 5 coincides with the number of years from the disruption. Whether these coincidences are significant or not, it is not so easy to match them with a coincidence for the 40 of Ezek. iv. 6.

† Josephus not very consistently says that the destruction of Jerusalem occurred the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar. But he makes this the basis of certain long numbers that have no small importance. The destruction, let us remember, occurred in the middle of the year. Josephus says (Ant. X. ix. 7) it was 130½ years after the destruction of Samaria. Subtract 130½ from 395½, and we have 265 A.Di. for the destruction of Samaria. This is the date I have found for it above.

He says (Ant. X. viii. 5) that the temple was destroyed 470½ years after it was built. But he says that Solomon reigned 80 years (Ant. VIII. vii. 8), whence it follows that he reigned 76 years after founding the temple in his fourth year. Add 76 to 395½, and we have 471½, which fits the 470½ within one year.

Again he says that the monarchy of David’s dynasty lasted 514½ years (Ant. X. viii. 4). Add the 40 years of David and the first 4 years of Solomon to the 470½, and we have the 514½.

To the 514½ add 18 years for the reign of Saul during the lifetime of Samuel (Ant. VI. xiv. 9), and we have the 532½ years (Ant. XI. iv. 8, some copies) spoken of by Josephus as the entire duration of the kingdom.

With this compare the notes at A.Di. 241, 265, 362, 390. In arguing from these “long numbers” to confirm my conclusions as to the chronology, I build nothing on any assumption that Josephus is trustworthy in these matters; for the contexts of the passages cited abundantly prove that our present copies of Josephus are not trustworthy in their chronological data. Apparently he had access to some trustworthy numerals, and to some that were not trustworthy, and used them without discrimination. In these circumstances I allege nothing more than that the coincidences of these data among themselves, and their coincidences with data obtained from other sources, constitute evidence of no inconsiderable value in favor of the coinciding data.

‡ But both in Jeremiah and in Kings this is said to have occurred, apparently, in the accession year of Evil-merodach. Perhaps, therefore, we ought to date it a year earlier, so near the close of the 36th year of his exile that it is counted from the beginning of the 37th year. By our current style of counting, that would be just before Easter, B.C. 561.