The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. I

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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. I - Commonly Called the Minor
Author: Smith, George Adam, 1856-1942
Language: English
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THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE. Edited by Rev.

W. R. NICOLL, D.D., Editor of _London Expositor_.

1ST SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=MACLAREN, Rev. Alex.=--COLOSSIANS--PHILEMON.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GENESIS.
=CHADWICK, Rev. Dean.=--ST. MARK.
=BLAIKIE, Rev. W. G.=--SAMUEL, 2 VOLS.
=EDWARDS, Rev. T. C.=--HEBREWS.

2D SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--ISAIAH, VOL. I.
=ALEXANDER, Bishop.=--EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN.
=PLUMMER, Rev. A.=--PASTORAL EPISTLES.
=FINDLAY, Rev. G. G.=--GALATIANS.
=MILLIGAN, Rev. W.=--REVELATION.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--1ST CORINTHIANS.

3D SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--ISAIAH, VOL. II.
=GIBSON, Rev. J. M.=--ST. MATTHEW.
=WATSON, Rev. R. A.=--JUDGES--RUTH.
=BALL, Rev. C. J.=--JEREMIAH. CHAP. I-XX.
=CHADWICK, Rev. Dean.=--EXODUS.
=BURTON, Rev. H.=--ST. LUKE.

4TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=KELLOGG, Rev. S. H.=--LEVITICUS.
=STOKES, Rev. G. T.=--ACTS, VOL. I.
=HORTON, Rev. R. F.=--PROVERBS.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GOSPEL ST. JOHN, VOL. I.
=PLUMMER, Rev. A.=--JAMES--JUDE.
=COX, Rev. S.=--ECCLESIASTES.

5TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=DENNEY, Rev. J.=--THESSALONIANS.
=WATSON, Rev. R. A.=--JOB.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. I.
=STOKES, Rev. G. T.=--ACTS, VOL. II.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GOSPEL ST. JOHN, VOL. II.
=FINDLAY, Rev. C. G.=--EPHESIANS.

6TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=RAINY, Rev. R.=--PHILIPPIANS.
=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--1ST KINGS.
=BLAIKIE, Rev. W. G.=--JOSHUA.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. II.
=LUMBY, Rev, J. R.=--EPISTLES OF ST. PETER.
=ADENEY, Rev. W. F.=--EZRA--NEHEMIAH--ESTHER.

7TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.

=MOULE, Rev. H. C. G.=--ROMANS.
=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--2D KINGS.
=BENNETT, Rev. W. H.=--1ST AND 2D CHRONICLES.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. III.
=DENNEY, Rev. James.=--2D CORINTHIANS.
=WATSON Rev. R. A.=--NUMBERS.

8TH AND FINAL SERIES IN 7 VOLS.

=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--DANIEL.
=SKINNER, Rev. John.=--EZEKIEL.
=BENNETT, Rev. W. H.=--JEREMIAH.
=HARPER, Rev. Prof.=--DEUTERONOMY.
=ADENEY, Rev. W. F.=--SOLOMON AND LAMENTATIONS.
=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--THE MINOR PROPHETS, 2 VOLS.

About 400 pages in each Volume. Price for either series, six volumes
$6.06. (Orders for 2 or more series at same rate will be sent by
Express. prepaid.) (Separate vols. $1.50 postpaid. Descriptive
circular sent on application.)

THE BOOK

THE TWELVE PROPHETS

COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS

FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW

_IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. I.--AMOS, HOSEA AND MICAH

_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND A SKETCH OF PROPHECY
IN EARLY ISRAEL_

NEW YORK

A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON

3 and 5 West Eighteenth Street

London: Hodder and Stoughton

1906

TO
HENRY DRUMMOND

PREFACE

The Prophets, to whom this and a following volume are dedicated,
have, to our loss, been haunted for centuries by a peddling and an
ambiguous title. Their Twelve Books are in size smaller than those
of the great Three which precede them, and doubtless none of their
chapters soar so high as the brilliant summits to which we are swept
by Isaiah and the Prophet of the Exile. But in every other respect
they are undeserving of the niggardly name of "Minor." Two of them,
Amos and Hosea, were the first of all prophecy--rising cliff-like,
with a sheer and magnificent originality, to a height and a mass
sufficient to set after them the trend and slope of the whole
prophetic range. The Twelve together cover the extent of that range,
and illustrate the development of prophecy at almost every stage from
the eighth century to the fourth. Yet even more than in the case of
Isaiah or Jeremiah, the Church has been content to use a passage
here and a passage there, leaving the rest of the books to absolute
neglect or the almost equal oblivion of routine-reading. Among the
causes of this disuse have been the more than usually corrupt state
of the text; the consequent disorder and in parts unintelligibleness
of all the versions; the ignorance of the various historical
circumstances out of which the books arose; the absence of successful
efforts to determine the periods and strophes, the dramatic dialogues
(with the names of the speakers), the lyric effusions and the
passages of argument, of all of which the books are composed.

The following exposition is an attempt to assist the bettering of all
this. As the Twelve Prophets illustrate among them the whole history
of written prophecy, I have thought it useful to prefix a historical
sketch of the Prophet in early Israel, or as far as the appearance of
Amos. The Twelve are then taken in chronological order. Under each
of them a chapter is given of historical and critical introduction
to his book; then some account of the prophet himself as a man and a
seer; then a complete translation of the various prophecies handed
down under his name, with textual footnotes, and an exposition and
application to the present day in harmony with the aim of the series
to which these volumes belong; finally, a discussion of the main
doctrines the prophet has taught, if it has not been found possible
to deal with these in the course of the exposition.

* * * * *

An exact critical study of the Twelve Prophets is rendered necessary
by the state of the entire text. The present volume is based on a
thorough examination of this in the light of the ancient versions and
of modern criticism. The emendations which I have proposed are few
and insignificant, but I have examined and discussed in footnotes all
that have been suggested, and in many cases my translation will be
found to differ widely from that of the Revised Version. To questions
of integrity and authenticity more space is devoted than may seem to
many to be necessary. But it is certain that the criticism of the
prophetic books has now entered on a period of the same analysis
and discrimination which is almost exhausted in the case of the
Pentateuch. Some hints were given of this in a previous volume on
Isaiah, chapters xl.-lxvi., which are evidently a composite work.
Among the books now before us, the same fact has long been clear
in the case of Obadiah and Zechariah, and also since Ewald's time
with regard to Micah. But Duhm's _Theology of the Prophets_, which
appeared in 1875, suggested interpolations in Amos. Wellhausen (in
1873) and Stade (from 1883 onwards) carried the discussion further
both on those, and others, of the Twelve; while a recent work by
Andrée on Haggai proves that many similar questions may still be
raised and have to be debated. The general fact must be admitted
that hardly one book has escaped later additions--additions of an
entirely justifiable nature, which supplement the point of view of
a single prophet with the richer experience or the riper hopes of a
later day, and thus afford to ourselves a more catholic presentment
of the doctrines of prophecy and the Divine purposes for mankind.
This general fact, I say, must be admitted. But the questions of
detail are still in process of solution. It is obvious that settled
results can be reached (as to some extent they have been already
reached in the criticism of the Pentateuch) only after years of
research and debate by all schools of critics. Meantime it is the
duty of each of us to offer his own conclusions, with regard to every
separate passage, on the understanding that, however final they may
at present seem to him, the end is not yet. In previous criticism
the defects, of which work in the same field has made me aware, are
four: 1. A too rigid belief in the exact parallelism and symmetry of
the prophetic style, which I feel has led, for instance, Wellhausen,
to whom we otherwise owe so much on the Twelve Prophets, into many
unnecessary emendations of the text, or, where some amendment is
necessary, to absolutely unprovable changes. 2. In passages between
which no connection exists, the forgetfulness of the principle
that this fact may often be explained as justly by the hypothesis
of the omission of some words, as by the favourite theory of the
later intrusion of portions of the extant text. 3. Forgetfulness of
the possibility, which in some cases amounts almost to certainty,
of the incorporation, among the authentic words of a prophet, of
passages of earlier as well as of later date. And, 4. depreciation
of the spiritual insight and foresight of pre-exilic writers. These,
I am persuaded, are defects in previous criticism of the prophets.
Probably my own criticism will reveal many more. In the beginnings
of such analysis as we are engaged on, we must be prepared for
not a little arbitrariness and want of proportion; these are often
necessary for insight and fresh points of view, but they are as
easily eliminated by the progress of discussion.

* * * * *

All criticism, however, is preliminary to the real work which the
immortal prophets demand from scholars and preachers in our age. In
a review of a previous volume, I was blamed for applying a prophecy
of Isaiah to a problem of our own day. This was called "prostituting
prophecy." _The_ prostitution of the prophets is their confinement to
academic uses. One cannot conceive an ending, at once more pathetic
and more ridiculous, to those great streams of living water, than to
allow them to run out in the sands of criticism and exegesis, however
golden these sands may be. The prophets spoke for a practical purpose;
they aimed at the hearts of men; and everything that scholarship can
do for their writings has surely for its final aim the illustration
of their witness to the ways of God with men, and its application to
living questions and duties and hopes. Besides, therefore, seeking to
tell the story of that wonderful stage in the history of the human
spirit--surely next in wonder to the story of Christ Himself--I have
not feared at every suitable point to apply its truths to our lives
to-day. The civilisation in which prophecy flourished was in its
essentials marvellously like our own. To mark only one point, the rise
of prophecy in Israel came fast upon the passage of the nation from an
agricultural to a commercial basis of society, and upon the appearance
of the very thing which gives its name to civilisation--city-life,
with its unchanging sins, problems and ideals.

A recent Dutch critic, whose exact scholarship is known to all
readers of Stade's _Journal of Old Testament Science_, has said of
Amos and Hosea: "These prophecies have a word of God, as for all
times, so also especially for our own. Before all it is relevant to
'the social question' of our day, to the relation of religion and
morality.... Often it has been hard for me to refrain from expressly
pointing out the agreement between Then and To-day."[1] This
feeling will be shared by all students of prophecy whose minds and
consciences are quick; and I welcome the liberal plan of the series
in which this volume appears, because, while giving room for the
adequate discussion of critical and historical questions, its chief
design is to show the eternal validity of the Books of the Bible as
the Word of God, and their meaning for ourselves to-day.

* * * * *

Previous works on the Minor Prophets are almost innumerable. Those
to which I owe most will be found indicated in the footnotes. The
translation has been executed upon the purpose, not to sacrifice the
literal meaning or exact emphasis of the original to the frequent
possibility of greater elegance. It reproduces every word, with
the occasional exception of a copula. With some hesitation I have
retained the traditional spelling of the Divine Name, Jehovah,
instead of the more correct Jahve or Yahweh; but where the rhythm
of certain familiar passages was disturbed by it, I have followed
the English versions and written Lord. The reader will keep in mind
that a line may be destroyed by substituting our pronunciation of
proper names for the more musical accents of the original. Thus,
for instance, we obliterate the music of "Isra'el" by making it two
syllables and putting the accent on the first: it has three syllables
with the accent on the last. We crush Yerushalayîḿ into Jerúsalem;
we shred off Asshûr into Assyria, and dub Miṣraîḿ Egypt. Hebrew has
too few of the combinations which sound most musical to our ears, to
afford the suppression of any one of them.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] J. J. P. Valeton, jun., _Amos en Hosea_, 1894: quoted by Budde in
the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_, September, 1894.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

PAGE

PREFACE vii

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1

_INTRODUCTION_

CHAP.

I. THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE 3

II. THE PROPHET IN EARLY ISRAEL 11

1. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL SAMUEL.
2. FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA.

III. THE EIGHTH CENTURY IN ISRAEL 31

IV. THE INFLUENCE OF ASSYRIA UPON PROPHECY 44

_AMOS_

V. THE BOOK OF AMOS 61

VI. THE MAN AND THE PROPHET 73

1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE
(i. 1; iii. 3-8; vii. 14, 15).
2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS
(i. 2; iii. 3-8; and _passim_).
3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY
(vii.; viii. 1-4).

VII. ATROCITIES AND ATROCITIES 121

AMOS i. 3-ii.

VIII. CIVILISATION AND JUDGMENT 141

AMOS iii.-iv. 3.

IX. THE FALSE PEACE OF RITUAL 156

AMOS iv. 4-vi.

1. FOR WORSHIP, CHASTISEMENT
(iv. 4-13).
2. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE (v.).
3. "AT EASE IN ZION" (vi.).
4. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE
(vi. 9, 10).

X. DOOM OR DISCIPLINE? 181

AMOS viii. 4-ix.

1. EARTHQUAKE, ECLIPSE AND FAMINE
(viii. 4-14).
2. NEMESIS (ix. 1-6).
3. THE VOICES OF ANOTHER DAWN
(ix. 7-15).

XI. COMMON-SENSE AND THE REIGN OF LAW 196

AMOS iii. 3-8; iv. 6-13; v. 8, 9;
vi. 12; viii. 8; ix. 5, 6.

_HOSEA_

XII. THE BOOK OF HOSEA 211

XIII. THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT 227

XIV. THE STORY OF THE PRODIGAL WIFE 232

HOSEA i.-iii.

XV. THE THICK NIGHT OF ISRAEL 253

HOSEA iv.-xiv.

XVI. A PEOPLE IN DECAY: I. MORALLY 255

HOSEA iv.-vii. 7.

1. THE LORD'S QUARREL WITH ISRAEL
(iv.).
2. PRIESTS AND PRINCES FAIL
(v. 1-14).
3. REPENTANCE FAILS
(v. 15-vii. 2).
4. WICKEDNESS IN HIGH PLACES
(vii. 3-7).

XVII. A PEOPLE IN DECAY: II. POLITICALLY 269

HOSEA vii. 8-x.

1. THE CONFUSION OF THE NATION
(vii. 8-viii. 3).
2. ARTIFICIAL KINGS AND ARTIFICIAL
GODS (viii. 4-13).
3. THE EFFECTS OF EXILE
(ix. 1-9).
4. "THE CORRUPTION THAT IS THROUGH
LUST" (ix. 10-17).
5. ONCE MORE: PUPPET-KINGS AND
PUPPET-GODS (x.).

XVIII. THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD 290

HOSEA xi.

XIX. THE FINAL ARGUMENT 299

HOSEA xii.-xiv. 1.

1. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR FATHER
JACOB (xii.).
2. THE LAST JUDGMENT
(xiii.-xiv. 1).

XX. "I WILL BE AS THE DEW" 308

HOSEA xiv. 2-10.

XXI. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 318

HOSEA _passim_.

XXII. REPENTANCE 333

HOSEA _passim_.

XXIII. THE SIN AGAINST LOVE 346

HOSEA i.-iii.; iv. 11 ff.;
ix. 10 ff.; xi. 8 f.

_MICAH_

XXIV. THE BOOK OF MICAH 357

XXV. MICAH THE MORASTHITE 375

MICAH i.

XXVI. THE PROPHET OF THE POOR 386

MICAH ii., iii.

XXVII. ON TIME'S HORIZON 400

MICAH iv. 1-7.

XXVIII. THE KING TO COME 408

MICAH iv. 8-v.

XXIX. THE REASONABLENESS OF TRUE RELIGION 419

MICAH vi. 1-8.

XXX. THE SIN OF THE SCANT MEASURE 426

MICAH vi. 9-vii. 6.

XXXI. OUR MOTHER OF SORROWS 435

MICAH vii. 7-20.

INDEX OF PASSAGES AND TEXTS 439

CHRONOLOGY OF THE DOUBLE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL, _c._ 940-639 B.C.

*** _c._ = _circa_: it refers only to the accession of the kings of
Judah and Israel; the years are exact so far as they concern the
Assyrian data. A date opposite the mere name of a king signifies the
year of his accession.

-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----
| JUDAH. | ISRAEL. | THE | SYRIA, ETC. | ASSYRIA. |
| | |PROPHETS.| | |
-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----
940_c._|Disruption of the Kingdom. | | | |
|Rehoboam. |Jeroboam I. | | | |
| |Establishment of | | | |
| | calf images in | | | |
| | N. Israel. | | | |
923_c._|Abijam. | | | | |
920_c._|Asa. | | | | |
918_c._| ... |Nadab. | | | |
915_c._| ... |Baasha. | | | |
891_c._| ... |Elah. | | | |
888_c._| ... |Zimri. Omri. | | | |
876_c._| ... |Ahab. |} | Revolt of Mesha of Moab: the | |
874_c._|Jehoshaphat. | ... |} Elijah.| Moabite Stone (_circa_ 860).| |
854 | ... |First contact of |} | Israel and Syria with | Assyria at the Battle | 854
| | |} | | of Ḳarḳar. |
853_c._| ... |Ahaziah. |}} | | |
852_c._| ... |Joram. | } | | |
.... | ... | Invades Moab w. | } | | |
| | Judah and Edom. | } | | |
850 | ... | ... | } ... | }Campaigns in all these 3 yrs| by Shalmaneser II. of |{850
849_c._|Jehoram. | ... | } ... | } Assyria against Dadidri or | Hadadezer of Damascus.|{849
846 | ... | ... | } ... | }Revolt of Edom from Judah | ... |{846
844_c._|Ahaziah. | | } | (2 Kings viii. 20 ff.). | |
842_c._|Athaliah. |Jehu. | }Elisha.| ... | Tribute from Jehu. | 842
... | ... | ... | } ... | War of Hazael with | Assyria. | ...
839 | ... | ... | } ... | War of Hazael with | Assyria. | 839
836_c._|Joash. | ... | } ... | }Hazael subdues Gilead (Amos | ... |{836
814_c._| ... |Jehoahaz. | } ... | } i. 3); attacks Gath, but is| ... |{814
| ... | ... | } ... | } bought off from Jerusalem. | |{
812 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Ac. of Ramman-Nirari. | 812
806 | ... | ... | } ... | Arpad, campaign against, by | Assyria. | 806
803 | ... | ... | } ... | Damascus, under Meri, besieged and taken by Assyria. | 803
... | ... | ... | } ... | A year of pestilence. | ... | ...
798_c._| ... |Joash. | } | | |
797_c._|Amaziah. | | | | |
783_c._| ... |Jeroboam II. | ... | ... | Shalmaneser III. | 783
778_c._|Uzziah | | | | |
| (Azariah). | | | | |
775 | ... |}Jeroboam | ... | ... | Expedition to |
| |}re-conquers | | | Cedar Country. | 775
773 | ... |}Moab, Gilead, | ... | Damascus, campaign against, | by Assyria. | 773
772 | ... |}and part of | ... | Hadrach, campaign against, | by Assyria. | 772
765 | ... |}Aram. | ... | A pestilence. | Ac. of Assur-dan-il. | 765
| | | | Hadrach, campaign against, | by Assyria. |
763 |Total eclipse of the sun on June 15th | visible in Syria and at | Nineveh. | 763
759 | ... | ... | } ... | A pestilence in Western Asia.| ... | 759
755 | ... | ... | } ... | Hadrach suffers attack from | Assyria. | 755
754 | ... | ... | } Amos. | Arpad suffers attack from | Assyria. | 754
753 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Ac. of Assur-Nirari. | 753
745 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Accession of |
| | | } | | Tiglath-Pileser III. | 745
743 | ... |Zechariah, son of|} ... | } | | 743
| |Jeroboam (6 mo.).|} ... | } ... | |
| |Shallum (1 mo.). |} ... | } Arpad besieged, and after | two or three years |
| |Menahem. |} Hosea. | } | taken by Assyria. |
742 | ... | ... |} ... | } | | 742
741 | ... | ... |}} ... | } | | 741
740 |"The yr King | ... |}} | | |
736? |Uzziah died."| |}} | | |
|Jotham sole ruler. |}} | | |
738 | ... |Menahem is |}} | mentioned as tributary to | Assyria. | 738
737_c._| |Pekahiah. |}} | | |
736_c._|Ahaz. |Pekah, the | } | | |
| |Gileadite. | } | [(Isa. vii.).| |
735 |Ahaz is attacked both by Pekah | } | and by Rezin of Damascus | ... | 735
734 | ... |Captivity of Gil-| } | | etc., by Assyria |
| | ead, Galilee, | } | | (Isa. viii., ix.). | 734
733 | ... | ... | } ... |Damascus besieged and taken by| Assyria. | 733
732 |Ahaz pays homage | } | at Damascus to the King of | Assyria. | 732
731 | ... | ... | } ... | ... |Tiglath-Pileser becomes| 731
730_c._| ... |Hoshea. | } | | King of Babylon under|
| | | } | | the name of Pul. |
727_c._|Hezekiah. | ... | }Isaiah.| ... | Shalmaneser IV. | 727
725 | ... |Siege of Samaria | } | | begins. |
722 | ... |Fall of Samaria. | } ... | ... | Sargon takes Samaria. | 722
or 1 | | | } | | | or 1
720 | ... | ... |}} ... | Gaza overthrown by Sargon as he marches past Judah | 720
or 19 | | |}} | and defeats Egypt at Raphia. |or 19
715 | ... |Samaria peopled |}} | |by subjugated tribes | 715
| | |}} | | deported from Assyria.|
711 | ... | ... |}} ... | Ashdod taken by | Sargon. | 711
709 | ... | ... |}} ... | ... |Sargon takes Babylon | 709
| | |}} | | from Merodach-Baladan.|
705 | ... | ... |}} | ... | Death of Sargon. | 705
| | |}} | | Ac. of Sennacherib. |
704 | ... | ... |}} ... | ... War | with Merodach-Baladan.| 704
701 |Invasion of Judah |}} | and of all Syria | by Sennacherib. | 701
|Deliverance of Jerusalem. |}} | Siege of Ekron. Battle of | |
| | |} Micah. | Eltekeh. | |
695 |Manasseh. | ... |} | | |
_c._[2]| | | | | |
681 | ... | ... | ... | ... | Sennacherib murdered. | 681
| | | | | Asarhaddon succeeds. |
678 | ... | ... | ... | Phœnicia subdued by | Asarhaddon. | 678
676 |Manasseh |tributary to | | | Assyria. | 676
671 | ... | ... | ... | Tyre taken by | Asarhaddon on his | 671
| | | | march to Egypt, and conquest of Memphis. |
668 | ... | ... | ... | ... | Assurbanipal. | 668
666 |Manasseh |and the | | other Syrian kings | tributary to Assyria. | 666
641_c._|Amon. | ... | ... | Tyre assists | Assurbanipal against | 641
| | | | the Phœnician Arvad. | |
639_c._|Josiah. | | | | |
-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----

FOOTNOTE:

[2] This date is very uncertain. It may have been 690, or according
to some 685.

_INTRODUCTION_

Καὶ τῶν ιβ' προφητῶν τὰ ὀστᾶ
ἀναθάλοι ἐκ τοῦ τόπου αὐτῶν,
Παρεκάλεσαν δὲ τὸν Ἰακώβ
καὶ ἐλυτρώσαντο αὐτοὺς ἐυ πίστει ἐλπίδος.

_And of the Twelve Prophets may the bones_
_Flourish again from their place,_
_For they comforted Jacob_
_And redeemed them by the assurance of hope._
ECCLESIASTICUS xlix. 10.

CHAPTER I

_THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE_

In the order of our English Bible the Minor Prophets, as they are
usually called, form the last twelve books of the Old Testament.
They are immediately preceded by Daniel, and before him by the three
Major Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah (with Lamentations) and Ezekiel. Why
all sixteen were thus gathered at the end of the other sacred books,
we do not know. Perhaps, because it was held fitting that prophecy
should occupy the last outposts of the Old Testament towards the New.

In the Hebrew Bible, however, the order differs, and is much more
significant. The Prophets[3] form the second division of the
threefold Canon: Law, Prophets and Writings; and Daniel is not among
them. The Minor follow immediately after Ezekiel. Moreover, they are
not twelve books, but one. They are gathered under the common title
_Book of the Twelve_;[4] and although each of them has the usual
colophon detailing the number of its own verses, there is also
one colophon for all the twelve, placed at the end of Malachi and
reckoning the sum of their verses from the first of Hosea onwards.
This unity, which there is reason to suppose was given to them before
their reception into the Canon,[5] they have never since lost.
However much their place has changed in the order of the books of
the Old Testament, however much their own internal arrangement has
differed, the Twelve have always stood together. There has been every
temptation to scatter them because of their various dates. Yet they
never have been scattered; and in spite of the fact that they have
not preserved their common title in any Bible outside the Hebrew,
that title has lived on in literature and common talk. Thus the Greek
canon omits it; but Greek Jews and Christians always counted the
books as one volume,[6] calling them "The Twelve Prophets," or "The
Twelve-Prophet" Book.[7]. It was the Latins who designated them "The
Minor Prophets": "on account of their brevity as compared with those
who are called the Major because of their ampler volumes."[8] And
this name has passed into most modern languages,[9] including our
own. But surely it is better to revert to the original, canonical
and unambiguous title of "The Twelve."

The collection and arrangement of "The Twelve" are matters of
obscurity, from which, however, three or four facts emerge that are
tolerably certain. The inseparableness of the books is a proof of the
ancient date of their union. They must have been put together before
they were received into the Canon. The Canon of the Prophets--Joshua
to Second Kings and Isaiah to Malachi--was closed by 200 B.C. at
the latest, and perhaps as early as 250; but if we have (as seems
probable) portions of "The Twelve,"[10] which must be assigned to
a little later than 300, this may be held to prove that the whole
collection cannot have long preceded the fixing of the Canon of the
Prophets. On the other hand, the fact that these latest pieces have
not been placed under a title of their own, but are attached to the
Book of Zechariah, is pretty sufficient evidence that they were added
after the collection and fixture of twelve books--a round number
which there would be every disposition not to disturb. That would
give us for the date of the first edition (so to speak) of our Twelve
some year before 300; and for the date of the second edition some
year towards 250. This is a question, however, which may be reserved
for final decision after we have examined the date of the separate
books, and especially of Joel and the second half of Zechariah. That
there was a previous collection, as early as the Exile, of the books
written before then, may be regarded as more than probable. But we
have no means of fixing its exact limits. Why the Twelve were all
ultimately put together is reasonably suggested by Jewish writers.
They are small, and, as separate rolls, might have been lost.[11] It
is possible that the desire of the round number twelve is responsible
for the admission of Jonah, a book very different in form from all
the others; just as we have hinted that the fact of there being
already twelve may account for the attachment of the late fragments
to the Book of Zechariah. But all this is only to guess, where we
have no means of certain knowledge.

"The Book of the Twelve" has not always held the place which it now
occupies in the Hebrew Canon, at the end of the Prophets. The rabbis
taught that Hosea, but for the comparative smallness of his prophecy,
should have stood first of all the writing prophets, of whom they
regarded him as the oldest.[12] And doubtless it was for the same
chronological reasons, that early Christian catalogues of the
Scriptures, and various editions of the Septuagint, placed the whole
of "The Twelve" in front of Isaiah.[13]

The internal arrangement of "The Twelve" in our English Bible is the
same as that of the Hebrew Canon, and was probably determined by what
the compilers thought to be the respective ages of the books. Thus,
first we have six, all supposed to be of the earlier Assyrian period,
before 700--Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah; then three
from the late Assyrian and the Babylonian periods--Nahum, Habbakuk
and Zephaniah; and then three from the Persian period after the
Exile--Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. The Septuagint have altered the
order of the first six, arranging Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel and Obadiah
according to their size, and setting Jonah after them, probably because
of his different form. The remaining six are left as in the Hebrew.

Recent criticism, however, has made it clear that the Biblical order
of "The Twelve Prophets" is no more than a very rough approximation
to the order of their real dates; and, as it is obviously best for us
to follow in their historical succession prophecies, which illustrate
the whole history of prophecy from its rise with Amos to its fall
with Malachi and his successors, I propose to do this. Detailed
proofs of the separate dates must be left to each book. All that is
needful here is a general statement of the order.

Of the first six prophets the dates of Amos, Hosea, and Micah (but
of the latter's book in part only) are certain. The Jews have been
able to defend Hosea's priority only on fanciful grounds.[14] Whether
or not he quotes from Amos, his historical allusions are more
recent. With the exception of a few fragments incorporated by later
authors, the Book of Amos is thus the earliest example of prophetic
literature, and we take it first. The date we shall see is about 755.
Hosea begins five or ten years later, and Micah just before 722. The
three are in every respect--originality, comprehensiveness, influence
upon other prophets--the greatest of our Twelve, and will therefore
be treated with most detail, occupying the whole of the first volume.

The rest of the first six are Obadiah, Joel and Jonah. But the Book
of Obadiah, although it opens with an early oracle against Edom, is in
its present form from after the Exile. The Book of Joel is of uncertain
date, but, as we shall see, the great probability is that it is late;
and the Book of Jonah belongs to a form of literature so different from
the others that we may, most conveniently, treat of it last.

This leaves us to follow Micah, at the end of the eighth century,
with the group Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk from the second half
of the seventh century; and finally to take in their order the
post-exilic Haggai, Zechariah i.-ix., Malachi, and the other writings
which we feel obliged to place about or even after that date.

One other word is needful. This assignment of the various books to
different dates is not to be held as implying that the whole of a
book belongs to such a date or to the author whose name it bears. We
shall find that hands have been busy with the texts of the books long
after the authors of these must have passed away; that besides early
fragments incorporated by later writers, prophets of Israel's new dawn
mitigated the judgments and lightened the gloom of the watchmen of her
night; that here and there are passages which are evidently intrusions,
both because they interrupt the argument and because they reflect a
much later historical environment than their context. This, of course,
will require discussion in each case, and such discussion will be
given. The text will be subjected to an independent examination. Some
passages hitherto questioned we may find to be unjustly so; others
not hitherto questioned we may see reason to suspect. But in any case
we shall keep in mind, that the results of an independent inquiry are
uncertain; and that in this new criticism of the prophets, which is
comparatively recent, we cannot hope to arrive for some time at so
general a consensus, as is being rapidly reached in the far older and
more elaborated criticism of the Pentateuch.[15]

* * * * *

Such is the extent and order of the journey which lies before
us. If it is not to the very summits of Israel's outlook that we
climb--Isaiah, Jeremiah and the great Prophet of the Exile--we are
yet to traverse the range of prophecy from beginning to end. We
start with its first abrupt elevations in Amos. We are carried by
the side of Isaiah and Jeremiah, yet at a lower altitude, on to the
Exile. With the returned Israel we pursue an almost immediate rise to
vision, and then by Malachi and others are conveyed down dwindling
slopes to the very end. Beyond the land is flat. Though Psalms are
sung and brave deeds done, and faith is strong and bright, there is
no height of outlook; _there is no more any prophet_[16] in Israel.

But our "Twelve" do more than thus carry us from beginning to end of
the Prophetic Period. Of second rank as are most of the heights of
this mountain range, they yet bring forth and speed on their way not
a few of the streams of living water which have nourished later ages,
and are flowing to-day. Impetuous cataracts of righteousness--_let
it roll on like water, and justice as an everlasting stream_; the
irrepressible love of God to sinful men; the perseverance and
pursuits of His grace; His mercies that follow the exile and the
outcast; His truth that goes forth richly upon the heathen; the
hope of the Saviour of mankind; the outpouring of the Spirit;
counsels of patience; impulses of tenderness and of healing; melodies
innumerable,--all sprang from these lower hills of prophecy, and
sprang so strongly that the world hears and feels them still.

And from the heights of our present pilgrimage there are also clear
those great visions of the Stars and the Dawn, of the Sea and the
Storm, concerning which it is true, that as long as men live they
shall seek out the places whence they can be seen, and thank God for
His prophets.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Including, of course, the historical books, Joshua to 2 Kings,
which were known as "the Former Prophets"; while what we call the
prophets Isaiah to Malachi were known as "the Latter."

[4] עשר תרי ספר, the Aramaic form of the Hebrew עשר שנים, which appears
with the other in the colophon to the book. A later contraction is
תריסר. This is the form transliterated in Epiphanius: δαθαριασαρα.

[5] See Ryle, _Canon of the O.T._, p. 105.

[6] So Josephus, _Contra Apion_, i. 8 (_circa_ 90 A.D.), reckons the
prophetical books as thirteen, of which the Minor Prophets could only
have been counted as one--whatever the other twelve may have been.
Melito of Sardis (_c._ 170), quoted by Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, iv.
26), speaks of τῶν δώδεκα ἐν μονοβίβλῳ. To Origen (_c._ 250: apud
Ibid., vi. 25) they could only have been one out of the twenty-two he
gives for the O.T. Cf. Jerome (_Prolog. Galeatus_), "Liber duodecim
Prophetarum."

[7] Οἱ Δώδεκα Προφῆται: Jesus son of Sirach xlix. 10; Τὸ
δωδεκα-πρόφητον.

[8] Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, xviii. 29: cf. Jerome, _Proem. in Esaiam_.

[9] The German usage generally preserves the numeral, "Die zwölf
kleinen Propheten."

[10] See Vol. II. on Zech. ix. ff.

[11] _Talmud_: Baba Bathra, 14_a_: cf. Rashi's Commentary.

[12] _Talmud_, _ibid._

[13] So the Codices Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, but not Cod. Sin. So
also Cyril of Jerusalem († 386), Athanasius (365), Gregory Naz. (†
390), and the spurious Canon of the Council of Laodicea (_c._ 400)
and Epiphanius (403). See Ryle, _Canon of the O.T._, 215 ff.

[14] By a forced interpretation of the phrase in chap. i. 2, _When the
Lord spake at the first by Hosea_ (R.V.), _Talmud_: Baba Bathra, 14_a_.

[15] For further considerations on this point see pp. 142, 194, 202
ff., 223 ff., 308, etc.

[16] Psalm lxxiv. 9.

CHAPTER II

_THE PROPHET IN EARLY ISRAEL_

Our "Twelve Prophets" will carry us, as we have seen, across the
whole extent of the Prophetical period--the period when prophecy
became literature, assuming the form and rising to the intensity of
an imperishable influence on the world. The earliest of the Twelve,
Amos and Hosea, were the inaugurators of this period. They were not
only the first (so far as we know) to commit prophecy to writing, but
we find in them the germs of all its subsequent development. Yet Amos
and Hosea were not unfathered. Behind them lay an older dispensation,
and their own was partly a product of this, and partly a revolt
against it. Amos says of himself: _The Lord hath spoken, who can but
prophesy?_--but again: _No prophet I, nor prophet's son_! Who were
those earlier prophets, whose office Amos assumed while repudiating
their spirit--whose name he abjured, yet could not escape from it? And,
while we are about the matter, what do we mean by "prophet" in general?

In vulgar use the name "prophet" has degenerated to the meaning of
"one who foretells the future." Of this meaning it is, perhaps, the
first duty of every student of prophecy earnestly and stubbornly
to rid himself. In its native Greek tongue "prophet" meant not
"one who speaks before," but "one who speaks for, or on behalf of,
another." At the Delphic oracle "The Prophētēs" was the title of
the official, who received the utterances of the frenzied Pythoness
and expounded them to the people;[17] but Plato says that this is a
misuse of the word, and that the true prophet is the inspired person
himself, he who is in communication with the Deity and who speaks
directly for the Deity.[18] So Tiresias, the seer, is called by
Pindar the "prophet" or "interpreter of Zeus,"[19] and Plato even
styles poets "the prophets of the Muses."[20] It is in this sense
that we must think of the "prophet" of the Old Testament. He is a
speaker for God. The sharer of God's counsels, as Amos calls him,
he becomes the bearer and preacher of God's Word. Prediction of the
future is only a part, and often a subordinate and accidental part,
of an office whose full function is to declare the character and the
will of God. But the prophet does this in no systematic or abstract
form. He brings his revelation point by point, and in connection
with some occasion in the history of his people, or some phase of
their character. He is not a philosopher nor a theologian with a
system of doctrine (at least before Ezekiel), but the messenger and
herald of God at some crisis in the life or conduct of His people.
His message is never out of touch with events. These form either
the subject-matter or the proof or the execution of every oracle he
utters. It is, therefore, God not merely as Truth, but far more as
Providence, whom the prophet reveals. And although that Providence
includes the full destiny of Israel and mankind, the prophet brings
the news of it, for the most part, piece by piece, with reference
to some present sin or duty, or some impending crisis or calamity.
Yet he does all this, not merely because the word needed for the
day has been committed to him by itself, and as if he were only its
mechanical vehicle; but because he has come under the overwhelming
conviction of God's presence and of His character, a conviction often
so strong that God's word breaks through him and God speaks in the
first person to the people.

1. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL SAMUEL.

There was no ancient people but believed in the power of certain
personages to consult the Deity and to reveal His will. Every man could
sacrifice; but not every man could render in return the oracle of God.
This pertained to select individuals or orders. So the prophet seems
to have been an older specialist than the priest, though in every tribe
he frequently combined the latter's functions with his own.[21]

The matters on which ancient man consulted God were as wide as life.
But naturally at first, in a rude state of society and at a low stage
of mental development, it was in regard to the material defence
and necessities of life, the bare law and order, that men almost
exclusively sought the Divine will. And the whole history of prophecy
is just the effort to substitute for these elementary provisions a
more personal standard of the moral law, and more spiritual ideals of
the Divine Grace.

By the Semitic race--to which we may now confine ourselves, since
Israel belonged to it--Deity was worshipped, in the main, as the god
of a tribe. Every Semitic tribe had its own god; it would appear
that there was no god without a tribe:[22] the traces of belief in
a supreme and abstract Deity are few and ineffectual. The tribe
was the medium by which the god made himself known, and became an
effective power on earth: the god was the patron of the tribe, the
supreme magistrate and the leader in war. The piety he demanded was
little more than loyalty to ritual; the morality he enforced was
only a matter of police. He took no cognisance of the character or
inner thoughts of the individual. But the tribe believed him to
stand in very close connection with all the practical interests of
their common life. They asked of him the detection of criminals, the
discovery of lost property, the settlement of civil suits, sometimes
when the crops should be sown, and always when war should be waged
and by what tactics.

The means by which the prophet consulted the Deity on these subjects
were for the most part primitive and rude. They may be summed up
under two kinds: Visions either through falling into ecstasy or by
dreaming in sleep, and Signs or Omens. Both kinds are instanced in
Balaam.[23] Of the signs some were natural, like the whisper of
trees, the flight of birds, the passage of clouds, the movements of
stars. Others were artificial, like the casting or drawing of lots.
Others were between these, like the shape assumed by the entrails of
the sacrificed animals when thrown on the ground. Again, the prophet
was often obliged to do something wonderful in the people's sight,
in order to convince them of his authority. In Biblical language he
had to work a miracle or give a sign. One instance throws a flood of
light on this habitual expectancy of the Semitic mind. There was once
an Arab chief, who wished to consult a distant soothsayer as to the
guilt of a daughter. But before he would trust the seer to give him
the right answer to such a question, he made him discover a grain
of corn which he had concealed about his horse.[24] He required the
physical sign before he would accept the moral judgment.

Now, to us the crudeness of the means employed, the opportunities
of fraud, the inadequacy of the tests for spiritual ends, are very
obvious. But do not let us, therefore, miss the numerous moral
opportunities which lay before the prophet even at that early
stage of his evolution. He was trusted to speak in the name of
Deity. Through him men believed in God and in the possibility of a
revelation. They sought from him the discrimination of evil from
good. The highest possibilities of social ministry lay open to him:
the tribal existence often hung on his word for peace or war; he
was the mouth of justice, the rebuke of evil, the champion of the
wronged. Where such opportunities were present, can we imagine the
Spirit of God to have been absent--the Spirit Who seeks men more than
they seek Him, and as He condescends to use their poor language for
religion must also have stooped to the picture language, to the rude
instruments, symbols and sacraments, of their early faith?

In an office of such mingled possibilities everything depended--as
we shall find it depend to the very end of prophecy--on the moral
insight and character of the prophet himself, on his conception
of God and whether he was so true to this as to overcome his
professional temptations to fraud and avarice, malice towards
individuals, subservience to the powerful, or, worst snares of all,
the slothfulness and insincerity of routine. We see this moral issue
put very clearly in such a story as that of Balaam, or in such a
career as that of Mohammed.

So much for the Semitic soothsayer in general. Now let us turn to
Israel.

Among the Hebrews the _man of God_,[25] to use his widest designation,
is at first called _Seer_,[26] or _Gazer_,[27] the word which Balaam
uses of himself. In consulting the Divine will he employs the same
external means, he offers the people for their evidence the same signs,
as do the seers or soothsayers of other Semitic tribes. He gains
influence by the miracles, _the wonderful things_, which he does.[28]
Moses himself is represented after this fashion. He meets the magicians
of Egypt on their own level. His use of _rods_; the holding up of
his hands that Israel may prevail against Amaleq; Joshua's casting
of lots to discover a criminal; Samuel's dream in the sanctuary; his
discovery for a fee of the lost asses of Saul; David and the images
in his house, the ephod he consulted; the sign to go to battle _what
time thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry
trees_; Solomon's inducement of dreams by sleeping in the sanctuary at
Gibeah,--these are a few of the many proofs, that early prophecy in
Israel employed not only the methods but even much of the furniture of
the kindred Semitic religions. But then those tools and methods were at
the same time accompanied by the noble opportunities of the prophetic
office to which I have just alluded--opportunities of religious and
social ministry--and, still more, these opportunities were at the
disposal of moral influences which, it is a matter of history, were not
found in any other Semitic religion than Israel's. However you will
explain it, that Divine Spirit, which we have felt unable to conceive
as absent from any Semitic prophet who truly sought after God, that
Light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world, was present
to an unparalleled degree with the early prophets of Israel. He came to
individuals, and to the nation as a whole, in events and in influences
which may be summed up as the impression of the character of their
national God, Jehovah: to use Biblical language, as _Jehovah's spirit_
and _power_. It is true that in many ways the Jehovah of early Israel
reminds us of other Semitic deities. Like some of them He appears
with thunder and lightning; like all of them He is the God of one
tribe who are His peculiar people. He bears the same titles--Melek,
Adon, Baal (_King_, _Lord_, _Possessor_). He is propitiated by the
same offerings. To choose one striking instance, captives and spoil
of war are sacrificed to Him with the same relentlessness, and by a
process which has even the same names given to it, as in the votive
inscriptions of Israel's heathen neighbours.[29] Yet, notwithstanding
all these elements, the religion of Jehovah from the very first
evinced, by the confession of all critics, an ethical force shared by
no other Semitic creed. From the first there was in it the promise and
the potency of that sublime monotheism, which in the period of our
"Twelve" it afterwards reached.[30] Its earliest effects of course
were chiefly political: it welded the twelve tribes into the unity
of a nation; it preserved them as one amid the many temptations to
scatter along those divergent lines of culture and of faith, which the
geography of their country placed so attractively before them.[31] It
taught them to prefer religious loyalty to material advantage, and so
inspired them with high motives for self-sacrifice and every other
duty of patriotism. But it did even better than thus teach them to
bear one another's burdens. It inspired them to care for one another's
sins. The last chapters of the Book of Judges prove how strong a
national conscience there was in early Israel. Even then Israel was
a moral, as well as a political, unity. Gradually there grew up, but
still unwritten, a body of Torah, or revealed law, which, though its
framework was the common custom of the Semitic race, was inspired by
ideals of humanity and justice not elsewhere in that race discernible
by us.

When we analyse this ethical distinction of early Israel, this
indubitable progress which the nation were making while the rest
of their world was morally stagnant, we find it to be due to their
impressions of the character of their God. This character did not
affect them as Righteousness only. At first it was even a more
wonderful Grace. Jehovah had chosen them when they were no people,
had redeemed them from servitude, had brought them to their land; had
borne with their stubbornness, and had forgiven their infidelities.
Such a Character was partly manifest in the great events of
their history, and partly communicated itself to their finest
personalities--as the Spirit of God does communicate with the spirit
of man made in His image. Those personalities were the early prophets
from Moses to Samuel. They inspired the nation to believe in God's
purposes for itself; they rallied it to war for the common faith, and
war was then the pitch of self-sacrifice; they gave justice to it in
God's name, and rebuked its sinfulness without sparing. Criticism has
proved that we do not know nearly so much about those first prophets,
as perhaps we thought we did. But under their God they made Israel.
Out of their work grew the monotheism of their successors, whom we
are now to study, and later the Christianity of the New Testament.
For myself I cannot but believe, that in the influence of Jehovah
which Israel owned in those early times, there was the authentic
revelation of a real Being.

2. FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA.

Of the oldest order of Hebrew prophecy, Samuel was the last
representative. Till his time, we are told, the prophet in Israel was
known as the Seer,[32] but now, with other tempers and other habits,
a new order appears, whose name--and that means to a certain extent
their spirit--is to displace the older name and the older spirit.

When Samuel anointed Saul he bade him, for a sign that he was chosen
of the Lord, go forth to meet _a company of prophets_--Nebi'îm, the
singular is Nabi'--coming down from the high place or sanctuary with
viols, drums and pipes, and _prophesying_. _There_, he added, _the
spirit of Jehovah shall come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with
them, and shalt be turned into another man_. So it happened; and the
people _said one to another, What is this that is come to the son of
Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?_[33] Another story, probably
from another source, tells us that later, when Saul sent troops
of messengers to the sanctuary at Ramah to take David, they saw
_the company of prophets prophesying and Samuel standing appointed
over them, and the spirit of God fell_ upon one after another of
the troops; as upon Saul himself when he followed them up. _And he
stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like
manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore
they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?_[34]

All this is very different from the habits of the Seer, who had
hitherto represented prophecy. He was solitary, but these went
about in bands. They were filled with an infectious enthusiasm, by
which they excited each other and all sensitive persons whom they
touched. They stirred up this enthusiasm by singing, playing upon
instruments, and dancing: its results were frenzy, the tearing of
their clothes, and prostration. The same phenomena have appeared
in every religion--in Paganism often, and several times within
Christianity. They may be watched to-day among the dervishes of
Islam, who by singing (as one has seen them in Cairo), by swaying
of their bodies, by repeating the Divine Name, and dwelling on the
love and ineffable power of God, work themselves into an excitement
which ends in prostration and often in insensibility.[35] The whole
process is due to an overpowering sense of the Deity--crude and
unintelligent if you will, but sincere and authentic--which seems
to haunt the early stages of all religions, and to linger to the
end with the stagnant and unprogressive. The appearance of this
prophecy in Israel has given rise to a controversy as to whether it
was purely a native product, or was induced by infection from the
Canaanite tribes around. Such questions are of little interest in
face of these facts: that the ecstasy sprang up in Israel at a time
when the spirit of the people was stirred against the Philistines,
and patriotism and religion were equally excited; that it is
represented as due to the Spirit of Jehovah; and that the last of
the old order of Jehovah's prophets recognised its harmony with his
own dispensation, presided over it, and gave Israel's first king
as one of his signs, that he should come under its power. These
things being so, it is surprising that a recent critic[36] should
have seen in the dancing prophets nothing but eccentrics into whose
company it was shame for so good a man as Saul to fall. He reaches
this conclusion only by supposing that the reflexive verb used for
their _prophesying_--_hithnabbē'_--had at this time that equivalence
to mere madness to which it was reduced by the excesses of later
generations of prophets. With Samuel we feel that the word had no
reproach: the Nebi'îm were recognised by him as standing in the
prophetical succession. They sprang up in sympathy with a national
movement. The king who joined himself to them was the same who
sternly banished from Israel all the baser forms of soothsaying and
traffic with the dead. But, indeed, we need no other proof than
this: the name Nebi'îm so establishes itself in the popular regard
that it displaces the older names of Seer and Gazer, and becomes the
classical term for the whole body of prophets from Moses to Malachi.

There was one very remarkable change effected by this new order of
prophets, probably the very greatest relief which prophecy experienced
in the course of its evolution. This was separation from the ritual
and from the implements of soothsaying. Samuel had been both priest
and prophet. But after him the names and the duties were specialised,
though the specialising was incomplete. While the new Nebi'îm remained
in connection with the ancient centres of religion, they do not appear
to have exercised any part of the ritual. The priests, on the other
hand, did not confine themselves to sacrifice and other forms of public
worship, but exercised many of the so-called prophetic functions. They
also, as Hosea tells us, were expected to give Tôrôth--revelations
of the Divine will on points of conduct and order. There remained
with them the ancient forms of oracle--the Ephod, or plated image,
the Teraphim, the lot, and the Urim and Thummim,[37] all of these
apparently still regarded as indispensable elements of religion.[38]
From such rude forms of ascertaining the Divine Will, prophecy in its
new order was absolutely free. And it was free of the ritual of the
sanctuaries. As has been justly remarked, the ritual of Israel always
remained a peril to the people, the peril of relapsing into Paganism.
Not only did it materialise faith and engross affections in the
worshipper which were meant for moral objects, but very many of its
forms were actually the same as those of the other Semitic religions,
and it tempted its devotees to the confusion of their God with the gods
of the heathen. Prophecy was now wholly independent of it, and we may
see in such independence the possibility of all the subsequent career
of prophecy along moral and spiritual lines. Amos absolutely condemns
the ritual, and Hosea brings the message from God, _I will have mercy
and not sacrifice_. This is the distinctive glory of prophecy in that
era in which we are to study it. But do not let us forget that it
became possible through the ecstatic Nebi'îm of Samuel's time, and
through their separation from the national ritual and the material
forms of soothsaying. It is the way of Providence to prepare for the
revelation of great moral truths, by the enfranchisement, sometimes
centuries before, of an order or a nation of men from political or
professional interests which would have rendered it impossible for
their descendants to appreciate those truths without prejudice or
compromise.

We may conceive then of these Nebi'îm, these prophets, as enthusiasts
for Jehovah and for Israel. For Jehovah--if to-day we see men cast
by the adoration of the despot-deity of Islam into transports so
excessive that they lose all consciousness of earthly things and fall
into a trance, can we not imagine a like effect produced on the same
sensitive natures of the East by the contemplation of such a God as
Jehovah, so mighty in earth and heaven, so faithful to His people, so
full of grace? Was not such an ecstasy of worship most likely to be
born of the individual's ardent devotion in the hour of the nation's
despair?[39] Of course there would be swept up by such a movement all
the more volatile and unbalanced minds of the day--as these always
have been swept up by any powerful religious excitement--but that is
not to discredit the sincerity of the main volume of the feeling nor
its authenticity as a work of the Spirit of God, as the impression of
the character and power of Jehovah.

But these ecstatics were also enthusiasts for Israel; and this saved
the movement from morbidness. They worshipped God neither out of
sheer physical sympathy with nature, like the Phœnician devotees of
Adonis or the Greek Bacchantes; nor out of terror at the approaching
end of all things, like some of the ecstatic sects of the Middle
Ages; nor out of a selfish passion for their own salvation, like so
many a modern Christian fanatic; but in sympathy with their nation's
aspirations for freedom and her whole political life. They were
enthusiasts for their people. The ecstatic prophet was not confined
to his body nor to nature for the impulses of Deity. Israel was his
body, his atmosphere, his universe. Through it all he felt the thrill
of Deity. Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid.
Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air and its blood is pure.
So in days of national danger the Nebi'îm would be inspired like Saul
to battle for their country's freedom; in more settled times they
would be lifted to the responsibilities of educating the people,
counselling the governors, and preserving the national traditions.
This is what actually took place. After the critical period of Saul's
time has passed, the prophets still remain enthusiasts; but they are
enthusiasts for affairs. They counsel and they rebuke David.[40] They
warn Rehoboam, and they excite Northern Israel to revolt.[41] They
overthrow and they set up dynasties.[42] They offer the king advice
on campaigns.[43] Like Elijah, they take up against the throne the
cause of the oppressed;[44] like Elisha, they stand by the throne
its most trusted counsellors in peace and war.[45] That all this is
no new order of prophecy in Israel, but the developed form of the
ecstasy of Samuel's day, is plain from the continuance of the name
Nebi'îm and from these two facts besides: that the ecstasy survives
and that the prophets still live in communities. The greatest figures
of the period, Elijah and Elisha, have upon them _the hand of the
Lord_, as the influence is now called: Elijah when he runs before
Ahab's chariot across Esdraelon, Elisha when by music he induces
upon himself the prophetic mood.[46] Another ecstatic figure is
the prophet who was sent to anoint Jehu; he swept in and he swept
out again, and the soldiers called him _that mad fellow_.[47] But
the roving bands had settled down into more or less stationary
communities, who partly lived by agriculture and partly by the alms
of the people or the endowments of the crown.[48] Their centres were
either the centres of national worship, like Bethel and Gilgal, or
the centres of government, like Samaria, where the dynasty of Omri
supported prophets both of Baal and of Jehovah.[49] They were called
prophets, but also _sons of the prophets_, the latter name not
because their office was hereditary, but by the Oriental fashion of
designating every member of a guild as the son of the guild. In many
cases the son may have succeeded his father; but the ranks could be
recruited from outside, as we see in the case of the young farmer
Elisha, whom Elijah anointed at the plough. They probably all wore
the mantle which is distinctive of some of them, the mantle of hair,
or skin of a beast.[50]

The risks of degeneration, to which this order of prophecy was
liable, arose both from its ecstatic temper and from its connection
with public affairs.

Religious ecstasy is always dangerous to the moral and intellectual
interests of religion. The largest prophetic figures of the period,
though they feel the ecstasy, attain their greatness by rising
superior to it. Elijah's raptures are impressive; but nobler are
his defence of Naboth and his denunciation of Ahab. And so Elisha's
inducement of the prophetic mood by music is the least attractive
element in his career: his greatness lies in his combination of the
care of souls with political insight and vigilance for the national
interests. Doubtless there were many of the sons of the prophets
who with smaller abilities cultivated a religion as rational and
moral. But for the herd ecstasy would be everything. It was so
easily induced or imitated that much of it cannot have been genuine.
Even where the feeling was at first sincere we can understand how
readily it became morbid; how fatally it might fall into sympathy
with that drunkenness from wine and that sexual passion which Israel
saw already cultivated as worship by the surrounding Canaanites. We
must feel these dangers of ecstasy if we would understand why Amos
cut himself off from the Nebi'îm, and why Hosea laid such emphasis
on the moral and intellectual sides of religion: _My people perish
for lack of knowledge_. Hosea indeed considered the degeneracy of
ecstasy as a judgment: _the prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit
is mad--for the multitude of thine iniquity_.[51] A later age derided
the ecstatics, and took one of the forms of the verb _to prophesy_ as
equivalent to the verb _to be mad_.[52]

But temptations as gross beset the prophet from that which should have
been the discipline of his ecstasy--his connection with public affairs.
Only some prophets were brave rebukers of the king and the people.
The herd which fed at the royal table--four hundred under Ahab--were
flatterers, who could not tell the truth, who said Peace, peace, when
there was no peace. These were false prophets. Yet it is curious that
the very early narrative which describes them[53] does not impute
their falsehood to any base motives of their own, but to the direct
inspiration of God, who sent forth a lying spirit upon them. So great
was the reverence still for the _man of the spirit_! Rather than doubt
his inspiration, they held his very lies to be inspired. One does not
of course mean that these consenting prophets were conscious liars;
but that their dependence on the king, their servile habits of speech,
disabled them from seeing the truth. Subserviency to the powerful was
their great temptation. In the story of Balaam we see confessed the
base instinct that he who paid the prophet should have the word of the
prophet in his favour. In Israel prophecy went through exactly the same
struggle between the claims of its God and the claims of its patrons.
Nor were those patrons always the rich. The bulk of the prophets were
dependent on the charitable gifts of the common people, and in this we
may find reason for that subjection of so many of them to the vulgar
ideals of the national destiny, to signs of which we are pointed by
Amos. The priest at Bethel only reflects public opinion when he takes
for granted that the prophet is a thoroughly mercenary character:
_Seer, get thee gone to the land of Judah; eat there thy bread, and
play the prophet there!_[54] No wonder Amos separates himself from such
hireling craftsmen!

* * * * *

Such was the course of prophecy up to Elisha, and the borders of
the eighth century. We have seen how even for the ancient prophet,
mere soothsayer though we might regard him in respect of the rude
instruments of his office, there were present moral opportunities of
the highest kind, from which, if he only proved true to them, we cannot
conceive the Spirit of God to have been absent. In early Israel we are
sure that the Spirit did meet such strong and pure characters, from
Moses to Samuel, creating by their means the nation of Israel, welding
it to a unity, which was not only political but moral--and moral to a
degree not elsewhere realised in the Semitic world. We saw how a new
race of prophets arose under Samuel, separate from the older forms
of prophecy by lot and oracle, separate, too, from the ritual as a
whole; and therefore free for a moral and spiritual advance of which
the priesthood, still bound to images and the ancient rites, proved
themselves incapable. But this new order of prophecy, besides its moral
opportunities, had also its moral perils: its ecstasy was dangerous,
its connection with public affairs was dangerous too. Again, the test
was the personal character of the prophet himself. And so once more we
see raised above the herd great personalities, who carry forward the
work of their predecessors. The results are, besides the discipline
of the monarchy and the defence of justice and the poor, the firm
establishment of Jehovah as the one and only God of Israel, and the
impression on Israel both of His omnipotent guidance of them in the
past, and of a worldwide destiny, still vague but brilliant, which He
had prepared for them in the future.

This brings us to Elisha, and from Elisha there are but forty years
to Amos. During those forty years, however, there arose within Israel
a new civilisation; beyond her there opened up a new world; and with
Assyria there entered the resources of Providence, a new power. It
was these three facts--the New Civilisation, the New World and the
New Power--which made the difference between Elisha and Amos, and
raised prophecy from a national to a universal religion.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Herodotus, viii. 36, 37.

[18] _Timæus_, 71, 72. The whole passage is worth transcribing:--

"No man, when in his senses, attains prophetic truth and inspiration;
but when he receives the inspired word either his intelligence
is enthralled by sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or
possession. And he who would understand what he remembers to have
been said, whether in dream or when he was awake, by the prophetic
and enthusiastic nature, or what he has seen, must recover his
senses; and then he will be able to explain rationally what all such
words and apparitions mean, and what indications they afford, to this
man or that, of past, present, or future, good and evil. But, while
he continues demented, he cannot judge of the visions which he sees
or the words which he utters; the ancient saying is very true that
'only a man in his senses can act or judge about himself and his own
affairs.' And for this reason it is customary to appoint diviners or
interpreters as discerners of the oracles of the gods. Some persons
call them prophets; they do not know that they are only repeaters of
dark sayings and visions, and are not to be called prophets at all,
but only interpreters of prophecy."--Jowett's _Translation_.

[19] _Nik._, i. 91.

[20] _Phædrus_, 262 D.

[21] It is still a controversy whether the original meaning of the
Semitic root KHN is prophet, as in the Arabic KâHiN, or priest, as in
the Hebrew KôHeN.

[22] Cf. Jer. ii. 10: _For pass over to the isles of Chittim, and
see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently; and see if there
be such a thing. Hath a nation changed their gods?_ From the isles of
Chittim unto Kedar--the limits of the Semitic world.

[23] Numbers xxiv. 4, _falling but having his eyes open_. Ver. 1,
_enchantments_ ought to be _omens_.

[24] Instanced by Wellhausen, _Skizzen u. Vorarb._, No. v.

[25] אלהים איש

[26] רֹאֶה

[27] חזֶה

[28] Deut. xiii. 1 ff. admits that heathen seers were able to work
miracles and give signs, as well as the prophets of Jehovah.

[29] Cf. Mesha's account of himself and Chemosh on the Moabite Stone,
with the narrative of the taking of Ai in the Book of Joshua.

[30] Cf. Kuenen: _Gesammelte Alhandlungen_ (trans. by Budde), p. 461.

[31] So in Deborah's Song.

[32] 1 Sam. ix. 9.

[33] 1 Sam. x. 1-16, xi. 1-11, 15. Chap. x. 17-27, xi. 12-14, belong
to other and later documents. Cf. Robertson Smith, _Old Testament in
the Jewish Church_, 135 ff.

[34] 1 Sam. xix. 20-24.

[35] What seemed most to induce the frenzy of the dervishes whom I
watched was the fixing of their attention upon, the yearning of their
minds after, the love of God. "Ya habeebi!"--"O my beloved!"--they
cried.

[36] Cornill, in the first of his lectures on _Der Israelitische
Prophetismus_, one of the very best popular studies of prophecy, by a
master on the subject. See p. 73 _n_.

[37] It is now past doubt that these were two sacred stones used for
decision in the case of an alternative issue. This is plain from the
amended reading of Saul's prayer in 1 Sam. xiv. 41, 42 (after the
LXX.): _O Jehovah God of Israel, wherefore hast Thou not answered Thy
servant this day? If the iniquity be in me or in Jonathan my son, O
Jehovah God of Israel, give Urim: and if it be in Thy people Israel,
give, I pray Thee, Thummim._

[38] Hosea iii. 4. See next chapter, p. 38.

[39] Cf. Deut. xxviii. 34.

[40] 2 Sam. xii. 1 ff.

[41] 1 Kings xi. 29; xii. 22.

[42] 1 Kings xiv. 2, 7-11; xix. 15 f.; 2 Kings ix. 3 ff.

[43] 1 Kings xxii. 5 ff.; 2 Kings iii. 11 ff.

[44] 1 Kings xxi. 1 ff.

[45] 2 Kings vi.-viii., etc.

[46] 1 Kings xviii. 46; 2 Kings iii. 15.

[47] 3 Kings ix. 11. _Mad fellow_, not necessarily a term of reproach.

[48] 1 Kings xviii. 4, cf. 19; 2 Kings ii. 3, 5; iv. 38-44; v. 20
ff.; vi. 1 ff.; viii. 8 f., etc.

[49] 1 Kings xviii. 19; xxii. 6.

[50] So Elijah, 2 Kings i. 8: cf. John the Baptist, Matt. iii. 4.

[51] Hosea ix. 7.

[52] Jer. xxix. 26: _Every man that is mad, and worketh himself into
prophecy_ (מתנבא, the same form as is used without moral reproach in
1 Sam. x. 10 ff.).

[53] 1 Kings xxii.

[54] Amos vii. 12.

CHAPTER III

_THE EIGHTH CENTURY IN ISRAEL_

The long life of Elisha fell to its rest on the margin of the eighth
century.[55] He had seen much evil upon Israel. The people were smitten
in all their coasts. None of their territory across Jordan was left
to them; and not only Hazael and his Syrians, but bands of their own
former subjects, the Moabites, periodically raided Western Palestine,
up to the very gates of Samaria.[56] Such a state of affairs determined
the activity of the last of the older prophets. Elisha spent his life
in the duties of the national defence, and in keeping alive the spirit
of Israel against her foes. When he died they called him _Israel's
chariot and the horsemen thereof_,[57] so incessant had been both his
military vigilance[58] and his political insight.[59] But Elisha was
able to leave behind him the promise of a new day of victory.[60]
It was in the peace and liberty of this day that Israel rose a step
in civilisation; that prophecy, released from the defence, became
the criticism, of the national life; and that the people, no longer
absorbed in their own borders, looked out, and for the first time
realised the great world, of which they were only a part.

King Joash, whose arms the dying Elisha had blessed, won back in the
sixteen years of his reign (798-783) the cities which the Syrians
had taken from his father.[61] His successor, Jeroboam II., came in,
therefore, with a flowing tide. He was a strong man, and he took
advantage of it. During his long reign of about forty years (783-743)
he restored the border of Israel from the Pass of Hamath between the
Lebanons to the Dead Sea, and occupied at least part of the territory
of Damascus.[62] This means that the constant raids to which Israel
had been subjected now ceased, and that by the time of Amos, about
755, a generation was grown up who had not known defeat, and the most
of whom had perhaps no experience even of war.

Along the same length of years Uzziah (_circa_ 778-740) had dealt
similarly with Judah.[63] He had pushed south to the Red Sea, while
Jeroboam pushed north to Hamath; and while Jeroboam had taken the
Syrian towns he had crushed the Philistine. He had reorganised the
army, and invented new engines of siege for casting stones. On such
of his frontiers as were opposed to the desert he had built towers:
there is no better means of keeping the nomads in subjection.

All this meant such security across broad Israel as had not been
known since the glorious days of Solomon. Agriculture must everywhere
have revived: Uzziah, the Chronicler tells us, _loved husbandry_.
But we hear most of Trade and Building. With quarters in Damascus
and a port on the Red Sea, with allies in the Phœnician towns
and tributaries in the Philistine, with command of all the main
routes between Egypt and the North as between the Desert and the
Levant, Israel, during those forty years of Jeroboam and Uzziah,
must have become a busy and a wealthy commercial power. Hosea calls
the Northern Kingdom a very Canaan[64]--Canaanite being the Hebrew
term for trader--as we should say a very Jew; and Amos exposes all
the restlessness, the greed, and the indifference to the poor of
a community making haste to be rich. The first effect of this was
a large increase of the towns and of town-life. Every document of
the time--up to 720--speaks to us of its buildings.[65] In ordinary
building houses of ashlar seem to be novel enough to be mentioned.
Vast _palaces_--the name of them first heard of in Israel under Omri
and his Phœnician alliance, and then only as that of the king's
citadel[66]--are now built by wealthy grandees out of money extorted
from the poor; they can have risen only since the Syrian wars. There
are summer houses in addition to winter houses; and it is not only
the king, as in the days of Ahab, who furnishes his buildings with
ivory. When an earthquake comes and whole cities are overthrown,
the vigour and wealth of the people are such that they build more
strongly and lavishly than before.[67] With all this we have the
characteristic tempers and moods of city-life: the fickleness and
liability to panic which are possible only where men are gathered
in crowds; the luxury and false art which are engendered only by
artificial conditions of life; the deep poverty which in all cities,
from the beginning to the end of time, lurks by the side of the most
brilliant wealth, its dark and inevitable shadow.

In short, in the half-century between Elisha and Amos, Israel rose
from one to another of the great stages of culture. Till the eighth
century they had been but a kingdom of fighting husbandmen. Under
Jeroboam and Uzziah city-life was developed, and civilisation, in the
proper sense of the word, appeared. Only once before had Israel taken
so large a step: when they crossed Jordan, leaving the nomadic life for
the agricultural; and that had been momentous for their religion. They
came among new temptations: the use of wine, and the shrines of local
gods who were believed to have more influence on the fertility of the
land than Jehovah who had conquered it for His people. But now this
further step, from the agricultural stage to the mercantile and civil,
was equally fraught with danger. There was the closer intercourse with
foreign nations and their cults. There were all the temptations of
rapid wealth, all the dangers of an equally increasing poverty. The
growth of comfort among the rulers meant the growth of thoughtlessness.
Cruelty multiplied with refinement. The upper classes were lifted
away from feeling the real woes of the people. There was a well-fed
and sanguine patriotism, but at the expense of indifference to social
sin and want. Religious zeal and liberality increased, but they were
coupled with all the proud's misunderstanding of God: an optimist faith
without moral insight or sympathy.

It is all this which makes the prophets of the eighth century so
modern, while Elisha's life is still so ancient. With him we are back
in the times of our own border wars--of Wallace and Bruce, with their
struggles for the freedom of the soil. With Amos we stand among the
conditions of our own day. The City has arisen. For the development
of the highest form of prophecy, the universal and permanent form,
there was needed that marvellously unchanging mould of human life,
whose needs and sorrows, whose sins and problems, are to-day the same
as they were all those thousands of years ago.

With Civilisation came Literature. The long peace gave leisure for
writing; and the just pride of the people in boundaries broad as
Solomon's own, determined that this writing should take the form of
heroic history. In the parallel reigns of Jeroboam and Uzziah many
critics have placed the great epics of Israel: the earlier documents
of our Pentateuch which trace God's purposes to mankind by Israel,
from the creation of the world to the settlement of the Promised
Land; the histories which make up our Books of Judges, Samuel and
Kings. But whether all these were composed now or at an earlier date,
it is certain that the nation lived in the spirit of them, proud of
its past, aware of its vocation, and confident that its God, who had
created the world and so mightily led itself, would bring it from
victory by victory to a complete triumph over the heathen. Israel of
the eighth century were devoted to Jehovah; and although passion or
self-interest might lead individuals or even communities to worship
other gods, He had no possible rival upon the throne of the nation.

As they delighted to recount His deeds by their fathers, so they
thronged the scenes of these with sacrifice and festival. Bethel
and Beersheba, Dan and Gilgal, were the principal;[68] but Mizpeh,
the top of Tabor,[69] and Carmel,[70] perhaps Penuel,[71] were also
conspicuous among the countless _high places_[72] of the land. Of
those in Northern Israel Bethel was the chief. It enjoyed the proper
site for an ancient shrine, which was nearly always a market as
well--near a frontier and where many roads converged; where traders
from the East could meet half-way with traders from the West, the
wool-growers of Moab and the Judæan desert with the merchants of
Phœnicia and the Philistine coast. Here, on the spot on which the
father of the nation had seen heaven open,[73] a great temple was
now built, with a priesthood endowed and directed by the crown,[74]
but lavishly supported also by the tithes and free-will offerings
of the people.[75] _It is a sanctuary of the king and a house of
the kingdom._[76] Jeroboam had ordained Dan, at the other end of
the kingdom, to be the fellow of Bethel;[77] but Dan was far away
from the bulk of the people, and in the eighth century Bethel's real
rival was Gilgal.[78] Whether this was the Gilgal by Jericho, or the
other Gilgal on the Samarian hills near Shiloh, is uncertain. The
latter had been a sanctuary in Elijah's day, with a settlement of the
prophets; but the former must have proved the greater attraction to a
people so devoted to the sacred events of their past. Was it not the
first resting-place of the Ark after the passage of Jordan, the scene
of the reinstitution of circumcision, of the anointing of the first
king, of Judah's second submission to David?[79] As there were many
Gilgals in the land--literally _cromlechs_, ancient _stone-circles_
sacred to the Canaanites as well as to Israel--so there were many
Mizpehs, _Watchtowers_, _Seers' stations_: the one mentioned by Hosea
was probably in Gilead.[80] To the southern Beersheba, to which
Elijah had fled from Jezebel, pilgrimages were made by northern
Israelites traversing Judah. The sanctuary on Carmel was the ancient
altar of Jehovah which Elijah had rebuilt; but Carmel seems at
this time to have lain, as it did so often, in the power of the
Phœnicians, for it is imagined by the prophets only as a hiding-place
from the face of Jehovah.[81]

At all these sanctuaries it was Jehovah and no other who was
sought: _thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt_.[82] At Bethel and at Dan He was adored in the form of a calf;
probably at Gilgal also, for there is a strong tradition to that
effect;[83] and elsewhere men still consulted the other images which
had been used by Saul and by David, the Ephod and the Teraphim.[84]
With these there was the old Semitic symbol of the Maççebah, or
upright stone on which oil was poured.[85] All of them had been used
in the worship of Jehovah by the great examples and leaders of the
past; all of them had been spared by Elijah and Elisha: it was no
wonder that the common people of the eighth century felt them to be
indispensable elements of religion, the removal of which, like the
removal of the monarchy or of sacrifice itself, would mean utter
divorce from the nation's God.[86]

One great exception must be made. Compared with the sanctuaries we
have mentioned, Zion itself was very modern. But it contained the
main repository of Israel's religion, the Ark, and in connection with
the Ark the worship of Jehovah was not a worship of images. It is
significant that from this, the original sanctuary of Israel, with the
pure worship, the new prophecy derived its first inspiration. But to
that we shall return later with Amos.[87] Apart from the Ark, Jerusalem
was not free from images, nor even from the altars of foreign deities.

Where the externals of the ritual were thus so much the same as those
of the Canaanite cults, which were still practised in and around the
land, it is not surprising that the worship of Jehovah should be
further invaded by many pagan practices, nor that Jehovah Himself
should be regarded with imaginations steeped in pagan ideas of the
Godhead. That even the foulest tempers of the Canaanite ritual,
those inspired by wine and the sexual passion, were licensed in the
sanctuaries of Israel, both Amos and Hosea testify. But the worst
of the evil was wrought in the popular conception of God. Let us
remember again that Jehovah had no real rival at this time in the
devotion of His people, and that their faith was expressed both by
the legal forms of His religion and by a liberality which exceeded
these. The tithes were paid to Him, and paid, it would appear,
with more than legal frequency.[88] Sabbath and New Moon, as days
of worship and rest from business, were observed with a Pharisaic
scrupulousness for the letter if not for the spirit.[89] The
prescribed festivals were held, and thronged by zealous devotees who
rivalled each other in the amount of their free-will offerings.[90]
Pilgrimages were made to Bethel, to Gilgal, to far Beersheba, and the
very way to the latter appeared as sacred to the Israelite as the
way to Mecca does to a pious Moslem of to-day.[91] Yet, in spite
of all this devotion to their God, Israel had no true ideas of Him.
To quote Amos, they sought His sanctuaries, but Him they did not
seek; in the words of Hosea's frequent plaint, they _did not know
Him_. To the mass of the people, to their governors, their priests,
and the most of their prophets, Jehovah was but the characteristic
Semitic deity--patron of His people, and caring for them alone--who
had helped them in the past, and was bound to help them still--very
jealous as to the correctness of His ritual and the amount of His
sacrifices, but indifferent about real morality. Nay, there were
still darker streaks in their views of Him. A god, figured as an ox,
could not be adored by a cattle-breeding people without starting
in their minds thoughts too much akin to the foul tempers of the
Canaanite faiths. These things it is almost a shame to mention; but
without knowing that they fermented in the life of that generation,
we shall not appreciate the vehemence of Amos or of Hosea.

Such a religion had no discipline for the busy, mercenary life of
the day. Injustice and fraud were rife in the very precincts of the
sanctuary. Magistrates and priests alike were smitten with their
generation's love of money, and did everything for reward. Again
and again do the prophets speak of bribery. Judges took gifts and
perverted the cause of the poor; priests drank the mulcted wine,
and slept on the pledged garments of religious offenders. There
was no disinterested service of God or of the commonweal. Mammon
was supreme. The influence of the commercial character of the age
appears in another very remarkable result. An agricultural community
is always sensitive to the religion of nature. They are awed by
its chastisements--droughts, famines and earthquakes. They feel
its majestic order in the course of the seasons, the procession of
day and night, the march of the great stars all the host of the
Lord of hosts. But Amos seems to have had to break into passionate
reminders of Him that maketh Orion and the Pleiades, and turneth
the murk into morning.[92] Several physical calamities visited the
land. The locusts are bad in Palestine every sixth or seventh year:
one year before Amos began they had been very bad. There was a
monstrous drought, followed by a famine. There was a long-remembered
earthquake--_the earthquake in the days of Uzziah_. With Egypt so
near, the home of the plague, and with so much war afoot in Northern
Syria, there were probably more pestilences in Western Asia than
those recorded in 803, 765 and 759. There was a total eclipse of
the sun in 763. But of all these, except perhaps the pestilence, a
commercial people are independent as an agricultural are not. Israel
speedily recovered from them, without any moral improvement. Even
when the earthquake came _they said in pride and stoutness of heart,
The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the
sycamores are cut down, but we will change to cedars_.[93] It was
a marvellous generation--so joyous, so energetic, so patriotic, so
devout! But its strength was the strength of cruel wealth, its peace
the peace of an immoral religion.

I have said that the age is very modern, and we shall indeed go to
its prophets feeling that they speak to conditions of life extremely
like our own. But if we wish a still closer analogy from our history,
we must travel back to the fourteenth century in England--Langland's
and Wyclif's century, which, like this one in Israel, saw both the
first real attempts towards a national literature, and the first real
attempts towards a moral and religious reform. Then as in Israel a
long and victorious reign was drawing to a close, under the threat
of disaster when it should have passed. Then as in Israel there had
been droughts, earthquakes and pestilences with no moral results upon
the nation. Then also there was a city life developing at the expense
of country life. Then also the wealthy began to draw aloof from the
people. Then also there was a national religion, zealously cultivated
and endowed by the liberality of the people, but superstitious,
mercenary, and corrupted by sexual disorder. Then too there were many
pilgrimages to popular shrines, and the land was strewn with mendicant
priests and hireling preachers. And then too prophecy raised its voice,
for the first time fearless in England. As we study the verses of Amos
we shall find again and again the most exact parallels to them in the
verses of Langland's _Vision of Piers the Plowman_, which denounce the
same vices in Church and State, and enforce the same principles of
religion and morality.

* * * * *

It was when the reign of Jeroboam was at its height of assured
victory, when the nation's prosperity seemed impregnable after the
survival of those physical calamities, when the worship and the
commerce were in full course throughout the land, that the first of
the new prophets broke out against Israel in the name of Jehovah,
threatening judgment alike upon the new civilisation of which they
were so proud and the old religion in which they were so confident.
These prophets were inspired by feelings of the purest morality,
by the passionate conviction that God could no longer bear such
impurity and disorder. But, as we have seen, no prophet in Israel
ever worked on the basis of principles only. He came always in
alliance with events. These first appeared in the shape of the great
physical disasters. But a more powerful instrument of Providence, in
the service of judgment, was appearing on the horizon. This was the
Assyrian Empire. So vast was its influence on prophecy that we must
devote to it a separate chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] He died in 798 or 797.

[56] 2 Kings x. 32, xiii. 20, 22.

[57] 2 Kings xiii. 14.

[58] vi. 12 ff., etc.

[59] viii., etc.

[60] xiii. 17 ff.

[61] 2 Kings xiii. 22-25.

[62] xiv. 28, if not Damascus itself.

[63] 2 Kings xv.: cf. 2 Chron. xxvi.

[64] xii. 7 (Heb. ver. 8). Trans., _As for Canaan, the balances, etc._

[65] Amos, _passim_. Hosea viii. 14, etc.; Micah iii. 12; Isa. ix. 10.

[66] ארמון, a word not found in the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, or
Samuel, is used in 1 Kings xvi. 18, 2 Kings xv. 25, for a citadel
within the palace of the king. Similarly in Isa. xxv. 2; Pro. xviii.
19. But in Amos generally of any large or grand house. That the name
first appears in the time of Omri's alliance with Tyre, points to a
Phœnician origin. Probably from root ארם, _to be high_.

[67] Isa. ix. 10.

[68] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff., and Amos and Hosea _passim_.

[69] Hosea v. 1.

[70] 1 Kings xviii. 30 ff.

[71] 1 Kings xii. 25.

[72] Originally so called from their elevation (though oftener on the
flank than on the summit of a hill); but like the name High Street or
the Scottish High Kirk, the term came to be dissociated from physical
height and was applied to any sanctuary, even in a hollow, like so
many of the sacred wells.

[73] The sanctuary itself was probably on the present site of the Burj
Beitin (with the ruins of an early Christian Church), some few minutes
to the south-east of the present village of Beitin, which probably
represents the city of Bethel that was called Luz at the first.

[74] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff.; Amos vii.

[75] Amos iv. 4.

[76] Amos vii. 13.

[77] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff.

[78] Curiously enough conceived by many of the early Christian
Fathers as containing the second of the calves. Cyril, _Comm. in
Hoseam_, 5; Epiph., _De Vitis Proph._, 237; _Chron. Pasc._, 161.

[79] Josh. iv. 20 ff., v. 2 ff.; 1 Sam. xi. 14, 15, etc.; 2 Sam.
xix. 15, 40. This Gilgal by Jericho fell to N. Israel after the
Disruption; but there is nothing in Amos or Hosea to tell us,
whether it or the Gilgal near Shiloh, which seems to have absorbed
the sanctity of the latter, is the shrine which they couple with
Bethel--except that they never talk of "going up" to it. The passage
from Epiphanius in previous note speaks of the Gilgal with the calf
as the "Gilgal which is in Shiloh."

[80] Site uncertain. See _Hist. Geog._, pp. 579, 586.

[81] Amos ix. 3. But cf. i. 2.

[82] 2 Kings xii. 28.

[83] See above, p. 37, _n._ 1.

[84] The Ephod, _the plated thing_; presumably a wooden image covered
either with a skin of metal or a cloak of metal. The Teraphim were
images in human shape.

[85] The _menhir_ of modern Palestine--not a hewn pillar, but oblong
natural stone narrowing a little towards the top (cf. W. R. Smith,
_Religion of the Semites_, 183-188). From Hosea x. 1, 2, it would
appear that the maççeboth of the eighth century were artificial.
_They make good_ maççeboth (A.V. wrongly _images_).

[86] So indeed Hosea iii. 4 implies. The Asherah, the pole or
symbolic tree of Canaanite worship, does not appear to have been used
as a part of the ritual of Jehovah's worship. But, that there was
constantly a temptation so to use it, is clear from Deut. xvi. 21,
22. See Driver on that passage.

[87] See below, p. 99.

[88] Amos iv. 4 ff.

[89] Amos vii. 4: cf. 2 Kings v. 23.

[90] Amos iv. 4 f.

[91] See below, p. 185.

[92] But whether these be by Amos see Chap. XI.

[93] Isa ix. 10.

CHAPTER IV

_THE INFLUENCE OF ASSYRIA UPON PROPHECY_

By far the greatest event in the eighth century before Christ was the
appearance of Assyria in Palestine. To Israel since the Exodus and
Conquest, nothing had happened capable of so enormous an influence at
once upon their national fortunes and their religious development.
But while the Exodus and Conquest had advanced the political and
spiritual progress of Israel in equal proportion, the effect of the
Assyrian invasion was to divorce these two interests, and destroy the
state while it refined and confirmed the religion. After permitting
the Northern Kingdom to reach an extent and splendour unrivalled
since the days of Solomon, Assyria overthrew it in 721 and left all
Israel scarcely a third of their former magnitude. But while Assyria
proved so disastrous to the state, her influence upon the prophecy
of the period was little short of creative. Humanly speaking, this
highest stage of Israel's religion could not have been achieved by
the prophets except in alliance with the armies of that heathen
empire. Before then we turn to their pages it may be well for us
to make clear in what directions Assyria performed this spiritual
service for Israel. While pursuing this inquiry we may be able to
find answers to the scarcely less important questions: why the
prophets were at first doubtful of the part Assyria was destined to
play in the providence of the Almighty? and why, when the prophets
were at last convinced of the certainty of Israel's overthrow, the
statesmen of Israel and the bulk of the people still remained so
unconcerned about her coming, or so sanguine of their power to resist
her? This requires, to begin with, a summary of the details of the
Assyrian advance upon Palestine.

In the far past Palestine had often been the hunting-ground of the
Assyrian kings. But after 1100 B.C., and for nearly two centuries
and a half, her states were left to themselves. Then Assyria resumed
the task of breaking down that disbelief in her power with which
her long withdrawal seems to have inspired their politics. In 870
Assurnasirpal reached the Levant, and took tribute from Tyre and
Sidon. Omri was reigning in Samaria, and must have come into close
relations with the Assyrians, for during more than a century and a
half after his death they still called the land of Israel by his
name.[94] In 854 Salmanassar II. defeated at Karkar the combined
forces of Ahab and Benhadad. In 850, 849 and 846 he conducted
campaigns against Damascus. In 842 he received tribute from Jehu,[95]
and in 839 again fought Damascus under Hazael. After this there
passed a whole generation during which Assyria came no farther
south than Arpad, some sixty miles north of Damascus; and Hazael
employed the respite in those campaigns which proved so disastrous
for Israel, by robbing her of the provinces across Jordan, and
ravaging the country about Samaria.[96] In 803 Assyria returned, and
accomplished the siege and capture of Damascus. The first consequence
to Israel was that restoration of her hopes under Joash, at which
the aged Elisha was still spared to assist,[97] and which reached
its fulfilment in the recovery of all Eastern Palestine by Jeroboam
II.[98] Jeroboam's own relations to Assyria have not been recorded
either by the Bible or by the Assyrian monuments. It is hard to think
that he paid no tribute to the "king of kings." At all events it is
certain that, while Assyria again overthrew the Arameans of Damascus
in 773 and their neighbours of Hadrach in 772 and 765, Jeroboam
was himself invading Aramean land, and the Book of Kings even
attributes to him an extension of territory, or at least of political
influence, up to the northern mouth of the great pass between the
Lebanons.[99] For the next twenty years Assyria only once came as
far as Lebanon--to Hadrach in 759--and it may have been this long
quiescence which enabled the rulers and people of Israel to forget,
if indeed their religion and sanguine patriotism had ever allowed
them to realise, how much the conquests and splendour of Jeroboam's
reign were due, not to themselves, but to the heathen power which had
maimed their oppressors. Their dreams were brief. Before Jeroboam
himself was dead, a new king had usurped the Assyrian throne (745
B.C.) and inaugurated a more vigorous policy. Borrowing the name
of the ancient Tiglath-Pileser, he followed that conqueror's path
across the Euphrates. At first it seemed as if he was to suffer
check. His forces were engrossed by the siege of Arpad for three
years (_c._ 743), and this delay, along with that of two years more,
during which he had to return to the conquest of Babylon, may well
have given cause to the courts of Damascus and Samaria to believe
that the Assyrian power had not really revived. Combining, they
attacked Judah under Ahaz. But Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-Pileser, who
within a year (734-733) had overthrown Damascus and carried captive
the populations of Gilead and Galilee. There could now be no doubt
as to what the Assyrian power meant for the political fortunes of
Israel. Before this resistless and inexorable empire, the people of
Jehovah were as the most frail of their neighbours--sure of defeat,
and sure, too, of that terrible captivity in exile which formed the
novel policy of the invaders against the tribes who withstood them.
Israel dared to withstand. The vassal Hoshea, whom the Assyrians
had placed on the throne of Samaria in 730, kept back his tribute.
The people rallied to him; and for more than three years this
little tribe of highlanders resisted in their capital the Assyrian
siege. Then came the end. Samaria fell in 721, and Israel went into
captivity beyond the Euphrates.

In following the course of this long tragedy, a man's heart cannot
but feel that _all_ the splendour and the glory did not lie with the
prophets, in spite of their being the only actors in the drama who
perceived its moral issues and predicted its actual end. For who can
withhold admiration from those few tribesmen, who accepted no defeat
as final, but so long as they were left to their fatherland rallied
their ranks to its liberty and defied the huge empire. Nor was their
courage always as blind, as in the time of Isaiah Samaria's so fatally
became. For one cannot have failed to notice, how fitful and irregular
was Assyria's advance, at least up to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser;
nor how prolonged and doubtful were her sieges of some of the towns.
The Assyrians themselves do not always record spoil or tribute after
what they are pleased to call their victories over the cities of
Palestine. To the same campaign they had often to return for several
years in succession.[100] It took Tiglath-Pileser himself three years
to reduce Arpad; Salmanassar IV. besieged Samaria for three years, and
was slain before it yielded. These facts enable us to understand that,
apart from the moral reasons which the prophets urged for the certainty
of Israel's overthrow by Assyria, it was always within the range of
political possibility that Assyria would not come back, and that
while she was engaged with revolts of other portions of her huge and
disorganised empire, a combined revolution on the part of her Syrian
vassals would be successful. The prophets themselves felt the influence
of these chances. They were not always confident, as we shall see,
that Assyria was to be the means of Israel's overthrow. Amos, and in
his earlier years Isaiah, describe her with a caution and a vagueness
for which there is no other explanation than the political uncertainty
that again and again hung over the future of her advance upon Syria.
It, then, even in those high minds, to whom the moral issue was so
clear, the political form that issue should assume was yet temporarily
uncertain, what good reasons must the mere statesmen of Syria have
often felt for the proud security which filled the intervals between
the Assyrian invasions, or the sanguine hopes which inspired their
resistance to the latter.

We must not cast over the whole Assyrian advance the triumphant
air of the annals of such kings as Tiglath-Pileser or Sennacherib.
Campaigning in Palestine was a dangerous business even to the Romans;
and for the Assyrian armies there was always possible besides some
sudden recall by the rumour of a revolt in a distant province. Their
own annals supply us with good reasons for the sanguine resistance
offered to them by the tribes of Palestine. No defeat, of course, is
recorded; but the annals are full of delays and withdrawals. Then the
Plague would break out; we know how in the last year of the century
it turned Sennacherib, and saved Jerusalem.[101] In short, up almost
to the end the Syrian chiefs had some fair political reasons for
resistance to a power which had so often defeated them; while at the
very end, when no such reason remained and our political sympathy is
exhausted, we feel it replaced by an even warmer admiration for their
desperate defence. Mere mountain-cats of tribes as some of them were,
they held their poorly furnished rocks against one, two or three
years of cruel siege.

In Israel these political reasons for courage against Assyria were
enforced by the whole instincts of the popular religion. The century
had felt a new outburst of enthusiasm for Jehovah.[102] This was
consequent, not only upon the victories He had granted over Aram, but
upon the literature of the peace which followed those victories: the
collection of the stories of the ancient miracles of Jehovah in the
beginning of His people's history, and of the purpose He had even then
announced of bringing Israel to supreme rank in the world. Such a God,
so anciently manifested, so recently proved, could never surrender His
own nation to a mere Goî[103]--a heathen and a barbarian people. Add
this dogma of the popular religion of Israel to those substantial hopes
of Assyria's withdrawal from Palestine, and you see cause, intelligible
and adequate, for the complacency of Jeroboam and his people to the
fact that Assyria had at last, by the fall of Damascus, reached their
own borders, as well as for the courage with which Hoshea in 725 threw
off the Assyrian yoke, and, with a willing people, for three years
defended Samaria against the great king. Let us not think that the
opponents of the prophets were utter fools or mere puppets of fate.
They had reasons for their optimism; they fought for their hearths and
altars with a valour and a patience which proves that the nation as a
whole was not so corrupt, as we are sometimes, by the language of the
prophets, tempted to suppose.

But all this--the reasonableness of the hope of resisting Assyria,
the valour which so stubbornly fought her, the religious faith which
sanctioned both valour and hope--only the more vividly illustrates
the singular independence of the prophets, who took an opposite view,
who so consistently affirmed that Israel must fall, and so early
foretold that she should fall to Assyria.

The reason of this conviction of the prophets was, of course, their
fundamental faith in the righteousness of Jehovah. That was a belief
quite independent of the course of events. As a matter of history,
the ethical reasons for Israel's doom were manifest to the prophets
within Israel's own life, before the signs grew clear on the horizon
that the doomster was to be Assyria.[104] Nay, we may go further,
and say that it could not possibly have been otherwise. For except
the prophets had been previously furnished with the ethical reasons
for Assyria's resistless advance on Israel, to their sensitive minds
that advance must have been a hopeless and a paralysing problem.
But they nowhere treat it as a problem. By them Assyria is always
either welcomed as a proof or summoned as a means--the proof of their
conviction that Israel requires humbling, the means of carrying that
humbling into effect. The faith of the prophets is ready for Assyria
from the moment that she becomes ominous for Israel, and every
footfall of her armies on Jehovah's soil becomes the corroboration
of the purpose He has already declared to His servants in the terms
of their moral consciousness. The spiritual service which Assyria
rendered to Israel was therefore secondary to the prophets' native
convictions of the righteousness of God, and could not have been
performed without these. This will become even more clear if we look
for a little at the exact nature of that service.

In its broadest effects, the Assyrian invasion meant for Israel a very
considerable change in the intellectual outlook. Hitherto Israel's
world had virtually lain between the borders promised of old to
their ambition--_the river of Egypt,_[105] _and the great river, the
River Euphrates_. These had marked not merely the sphere of Israel's
politics, but the horizon within which Israel had been accustomed to
observe the action of their God and to prove His character, to feel
the problems of their religion rise and to grapple with them. But now
there burst from the outside of this little world that awful power,
sovereign and inexorable, which effaced all distinctions and treated
Israel in the same manner as her heathen neighbours. This was more
than a widening of the world: it was a change of the very poles. At
first sight it appeared merely to have increased the scale on which
history was conducted; it was really an alteration of the whole
character of history. Religion itself shrivelled up, before a force so
much vaster than anything it had yet encountered, and so contemptuous
of its claims. _What is Jehovah_, said the Assyrian in his laughter,
_more than the gods of Damascus, or of Hamath, or of the Philistines_?
In fact, for the mind of Israel, the crisis, though less in degree,
was in quality not unlike that produced in the religion of Europe by
the revelation of the Copernican astronomy. As the earth, previously
believed to be the centre of the universe, the stage on which the Son
of God had achieved God's eternal purposes to mankind, was discovered
to be but a satellite of one of innumerable suns, a mere ball swung
beside millions of others by a force which betrayed no sign of sympathy
with the great transactions which took place on it, and so faith in the
Divine worth of these was rudely shaken--so Israel, who had believed
themselves to be the peculiar people of the Creator, the solitary
agents of the God of Righteousness to all mankind,[106] and who now
felt themselves brought to an equality with other tribes by this sheer
force, which, brutally indifferent to spiritual distinctions, swayed
the fortunes of all alike, must have been tempted to unbelief in the
spiritual facts of their history, in the power of their God and the
destiny He had promised them. Nothing could have saved Israel, as
nothing could have saved Europe, but a conception of God which rose
to this new demand upon its powers--a faith which said, "Our God is
sufficient for this greater world and its forces that so dwarf our
own; the discovery of these only excites in us a more awful wonder
of His power." The prophets had such a conception of God. To them He
was absolute righteousness--righteousness wide as the widest world,
stronger than the strongest force. To the prophets, therefore, the rise
of Assyria only increased the possibilities of Providence. But it could
not have done this had Providence not already been invested in a God
capable by His character of rising to such possibilities.

Assyria, however, was not only Force: she was also the symbol of
a great Idea--the Idea of Unity. We have just ventured on one
historical analogy. We may try another and a more exact one. The
Empire of Rome, grasping the whole world in its power and reducing
all races of men to much the same level of political rights,
powerfully assisted Christian theology in the task of imposing upon
the human mind a clearer imagination of unity in the government of
the world and of spiritual equality among men of all nations. A
not dissimilar service to the faith of Israel was performed by the
Empire of Assyria. History, that hitherto had been but a series of
angry pools, became as the ocean swaying in tides to one almighty
impulse. It was far easier to imagine a sovereign Providence when
Assyria reduced history to a unity by overthrowing all the rulers
and all their gods, than when history was broken up into the
independent fortunes of many states, each with its own religion
divinely valid in its own territory. By shattering the tribes Assyria
shattered the tribal theory of religion, which we have seen to be
the characteristic Semitic theory--a god for every tribe, a tribe
for every god. The field was cleared of the many: there was room for
the One. That He appeared, not as the God of the conquering race,
but as the Deity of one of their many victims, was due to Jehovah's
righteousness. At this juncture, when the world was suggested to have
one throne and that throne was empty, there was a great chance, if we
may so put it, for a god with a character. And the only God in all
the Semitic world who had a character was Jehovah.

It is true that the Assyrian Empire was not constructive, like the
Roman, and, therefore, could not assist the prophets to the idea of a
Catholic Church. But there can be no doubt that it did assist them to
a feeling of the moral unity of mankind. A great historian has made
the just remark that, whatsoever widens the imagination, enabling it
to realise the actual experience of other men, is a powerful agent
of ethical advance.[107] Now Assyria widened the imagination and the
sympathy of Israel in precisely this way. Consider the universal Pity
of the Assyrian conquest: how state after state went down before it,
how all things mortal yielded and were swept away. The mutual hatreds
and ferocities of men could not persist before a common Fate, so
sublime, so tragic. And thus we understand how in Israel the old envies
and rancours of that border warfare with her foes which had filled the
last four centuries of her history is replaced by a new tenderness and
compassion towards the national efforts, the achievements and all the
busy life of the Gentile peoples. Isaiah is especially distinguished
by this in his treatment of Egypt and of Tyre; and even where he
and others do not, as in these cases, appreciate the sadness of the
destruction of so much brave beauty and serviceable wealth, their
tone in speaking of the fall of the Assyrian on their neighbours is
one of compassion and not of exultation.[108] As the rivalries and
hatreds of individual lives are stilled in the presence of a common
death, so even that factious, ferocious world of the Semites ceased
to _fret its anger and watch it for ever_ (to quote Amos' phrase) in
face of the universal Assyrian Fate. But in that Fate there was more
than Pity. On the data of the prophets Assyria was afflicting Israel
for moral reasons: it could not be for other reasons that she was
afflicting their neighbours. Israel and the heathen were suffering
for the same righteousness' sake. What could have better illustrated
the moral equality of all mankind! No doubt the prophets were already
theoretically convinced[109] of this--for the righteousness they
believed in was nothing if not universal. But it is one thing to hold
a belief on principle and another to have practical experience of
it in history. To a theory of the moral equality of mankind Assyria
enabled the prophets to add sympathy and conscience. We shall see all
this illustrated in the opening prophecies of Amos against the foreign
nations.

But Assyria did not help to develop monotheism in Israel only by
contributing to the doctrines of a moral Providence and of the
equality of all men beneath it. The influence must have extended
to Israel's conception of God in Nature. Here, of course, Israel
was already possessed of great beliefs. Jehovah had created man; He
had divided the Red Sea and Jordan. The desert, the storm, and the
seasons were all subject to Him. But at a time when the superstitious
mind of the people was still feeling after other Divine powers in
the earth, the waters and the air of Canaan, it was a very valuable
antidote to such dissipation of their faith to find one God swaying,
through Assyria, all families of mankind. The Divine unity to which
history was reduced must have reacted on Israel's views of Nature,
and made it easier to feel one God also there. Now, as a matter of
fact, the imagination of the unity of Nature, the belief in a reason
and method pervading all things, was very powerfully advanced in
Israel throughout the Assyrian period.

We may find an illustration of this in the greater, deeper meaning in
which the prophets use the old national name of Israel's God--Jehovah
Ṣeba'oth, _Jehovah of Hosts_. This title, which came into frequent
use under the early kings, when Israel's vocation was to win freedom
by war, meant then (as far as we can gather) only _Jehovah of the
armies of Israel_--the God of battles, the people's leader in
war,[110] whose home was Jerusalem, the people's capital, and His
sanctuary their battle emblem, the Ark. Now the prophets hear Jehovah
go forth (as Amos does) from the same place, but to them the Name has
a far deeper significance. They never define it, but they use it in
associations where _hosts_ must mean something different from the
armies of Israel. To Amos the hosts of Jehovah are not the armies
of Israel, but those of Assyria: they are also the nations whom He
marshals and marches across the earth, Philistines from Caphtor,
Aram from Qir, as well as Israel from Egypt. Nay, more; according to
those Doxologies which either Amos or a kindred spirit has added to
his lofty argument,[111] Jehovah sways and orders the powers of the
heavens: Orion and Pleiades, the clouds from the sea to the mountain
peaks where they break, day and night in constant procession. It is
in associations like these that the Name is used, either in its old
form or slightly changed as _Jehovah God of hosts_, or _the hosts_;
and we cannot but feel that the hosts of Jehovah are now looked upon
as all the influences of earth and heaven--human armies, stars and
powers of nature, which obey His word and work His will.

FOOTNOTES:

[94] "The house of Omri": so even in Sargon's time, 722-705.

[95] The Black Obelisk of Salmanassar in the British Museum, on which
the messengers of Jehu are portrayed.

[96] 2 Kings x. 32 f.; xiii. 3.

[97] 2 Kings xiii. 14 ff.

[98] The phrase in 2 Kings xiii. 5, _Jehovah gave Israel a saviour_,
is interpreted by certain scholars as if the saviour were Assyria. In
xiv. 27 he is plainly said to be Jeroboam.

[99] The entering in of Hamath (2 Kings xiv. 25).

[100] Salmanassar II. in 850, 849, 846 to war against Dad'idri of
Damascus, and in 842 and 839 against Hazael, his successor.

[101] See in this series _Isaiah_, Vol. I., pp. 359 ff.

[102] See above, pp. 35 ff.

[103] To use the term which Amos adopts with such ironical force: vi.
14.

[104] When we get down among the details we shall see clear evidence
for this fact, for instance, that Amos prophesied against Israel at
a time when he thought that the Lord's anger was to be exhausted
in purely natural chastisements of His people, and before it was
revealed to him that Assyria was required to follow up these
chastisements with a heavier blow. See Chap. VI., Section 2.

[105] That is, of course, not the Nile, but the great Wady, at present
known as the Wady el 'Arish, which divides Palestine from Egypt.

[106] So already in the JE narratives of the Pentateuch.

[107] Lecky: _History of European Morals_, I.

[108] The present writer has already pointed out this with regard to
Egypt and Phœnicia in _Isaiah_ (Expositor's Bible Series), I., Chaps.
XXII. and XXIII., and with regard to Philistia in _Hist. Geog._, p. 178.

[109] I put it this way only for the sake of making the logic
clear; for it is a mistake to say that the prophets at any time
held merely theoretic convictions. All their conviction was really
experimental--never held apart from some illustration or proof of
principle in actual history.

[110] צבאות יהוה: 1 Sam. i. 3; iv. 4; xvii. 45, where it is explained
by the parallel phrase _God of the armies of Israel_; 2 Sam. vi. 2,
where it is connected with Israel's battle emblem, the Ark (cf. Jer.
xxii. 18); and so throughout Samuel and Kings, and also Chronicles,
the Psalms, and most prophets. The plural צבאות is never used in the
Old Testament except of human hosts, and generally of the armies or
hosts of Israel. The theory therefore which sees the same meaning
in the Divine title is probably the correct one. It was first put
forward by Herder (_Geist der Eb. Poesie_, ii. 84, 85), and after
some neglect it has been revived by Kautzsch (_Z. A. T. W._, vi.
ff.) and Stade (_Gesch._, i. 437, _n._ 3). The alternatives are that
the hosts originally meant those of heaven, either the angels (so,
among others, Ewald, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., iii. 62) or the stars (so
Delitzsch, Kuenen, Baudissin, Cheyne, _Prophecies of Isaiah_, i.
11). In the former of these two there is some force; but the reason
given for the latter, that the name came to the front in Israel when
the people were being drawn into connection with star-worshipping
nations, especially Aram, seems to me baseless. Israel had not been
long in touch with Aram in Saul's time, yet even then the name is
accepted as if one of much earlier origin. A clear account of the
argument on the other side to that taken in this note will be found
in Smend, _Altiestamentliche Religionsgeschichte_, pp. 185 ff.

[111] See below, Chap. XI.

_AMOS_

"Towers in the distance, like an earth-born Atlas ... such a man in
such a historical position, standing on the confines of light and
darkness, like day on the misty mountain-tops."

CHAPTER V

_THE BOOK OF AMOS_

The genuineness of the bulk of the Book of Amos is not doubted by
any critic. The only passages suspected as interpolations are the
three references to Judah, the three famous outbreaks in praise of
the might of Jehovah the Creator, the final prospect of a hope that
does not gleam in any other part of the book, with a few clauses
alleged to reflect a stage of history later than that in which Amos
worked.[112] In all, these verses amount to only twenty-six or
twenty-seven out of one hundred and forty-six. Each of them can be
discussed separately as we reach it, and we may now pass to consider
the general course of the prophecy which is independent of them.

The Book of Amos consists of Three Groups of Oracles, under one
title, which is evidently meant to cover them all.

The title runs as follows:--

_Words of 'Amoṣ--who was of the herdsmen of Teḳôa'--which he saw
concerning Israel in the days of 'Uzziah king of Judah, and in
the days of Jarab'am son of Joash,_[113] _king of Israel: two
years before the earthquake._

The Three Sections, with their contents, are as follows:--

FIRST SECTION: CHAPS. I., II. THE HEATHEN'S
CRIMES AND ISRAEL'S.

A series of short oracles of the same form, directed impartially
against the political crimes of all the states of Palestine, and
culminating in a more detailed denunciation of the social evils
of Israel, whose doom is foretold, beneath the same flood of war
as shall overwhelm all her neighbours.

SECOND SECTION: CHAPS. III.-VI. ISRAEL'S
CRIMES AND DOOM.

A series of various oracles of denunciation, which have no further
logical connection than is supplied by a general sameness of
subject, and a perceptible increase of detail and articulateness
from beginning to end of the section. They are usually grouped
according to the recurrence of the formula _Hear this word_, which
stands at the head of our present chaps. iii., iv. and v.; and by
the two cries of _Woe_ at v. 18 and vi. 1. But even more obvious
than these commencements are the various climaxes to which they
lead up. These are all threats of judgment, and each is more
strenuous or explicit than the one that has preceded it. They
close with iii. 15, iv. 3, iv. 12, v. 17, v. 27 and vi. 14; and
according to them the oracles may be conveniently divided into six
groups.

1. III. 1-15. After the main theme of judgment is stated in 1, 2,
we have in 3-8 a parenthesis on the prophet's right to threaten
doom; after which 9-15, following directly on 2, emphasise the
social disorder, threaten the land with invasion, the people with
extinction and the overthrow of their civilisation.

2. IV. 1-3, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, is
directed against women and describes the siege of the capital and
their captivity.

3. IV. 4-12, with no opening formula, contrasts the people's
vain propitiation of God by ritual with His treatment of them
by various physical chastisements--drought, blight and locusts,
pestilence, earthquake--and summons them to prepare for another,
unnamed, visitation. _Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name._

4. V. 1-17, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, and
a dirge over a vision of the nation's defeat, attacks, like
the previous group, the lavish ritual, sets in contrast to it
Jehovah's demands for justice and civic purity; and, offering a
reprieve if Israel will repent, closes with the prospect of an
universal mourning (vv. 16, 17), which, though introduced by a
_therefore_, has no logical connection with what precedes it.

5. V. 18-26 is the first of the two groups that open with _Woe_.
Affirming that the eagerly expected _Day of Jehovah_ will be
darkness and disaster on disaster inevitable (18-20), it again
emphasises Jehovah's desire for righteousness rather than worship
(21-26), and closes with the threat of captivity beyond Damascus.
_Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name_, as at the close of 3.

6. VI. 1-14. The second _Woe_, on them _that are at ease in
Zion_ (1, 2): a satire on the luxuries of the rich and their
indifference to the national suffering (3-6): captivity must come,
with the desolation of the land (9, 10); and in a peroration the
prophet reiterates a general downfall of the nation because of its
perversity. _A Nation_--needless to name it!--will oppress Israel
from Hamath to the River of the Arabah.

THIRD SECTION: CHAPS. VII.-IX. VISIONS WITH
INTERLUDES.

The Visions betray traces of development; but they are
interrupted by a piece of narrative and addresses on the same
themes as chaps. iii.-vi. The FIRST TWO VISIONS (vii. 1-6) are
of disasters--locusts and drought--in the realm of nature;
they are averted by prayer from Amos. The THIRD (7-9) is in
the sphere, not of nature, but history: Jehovah standing with
a plumbline, as if to show the nation's fabric to be utterly
twisted, announces that it shall be overthrown, and that the
dynasty of Jeroboam must be put to the sword. Upon this mention
of the king, the first in the book, there starts the narrative
(10-17) of how Amaziah, priest at Bethel--obviously upon hearing
the prophet's threat--sent word to Jeroboam; and then (whether
before or after getting a reply) proceeded to silence Amos, who,
however, reiterates his prediction of doom, again described as
captivity in a foreign land, and adds a FOURTH VISION (viii.
1-3), of the Ḳaits or _Summer Fruit_, which suggests Ḳêts, or
_End_ of the Nation. Here it would seem Amos' discourses at
Bethel take end. Then comes viii. 4-6, another exposure of the
sins of the rich; followed by a triple pronouncement of doom
(7), again in the terms of physical calamities--earthquake (8),
eclipse (9, 10), and famine (11-14), in the last of which the
public worship is again attacked. A FIFTH VISION, of the Lord by
the Altar commanding to smite (ix. 1), is followed by a powerful
threat of the hopelessness of escape from God's punishment (ix.
1_b_-4); the third of the great apostrophes to the might of
Jehovah (5, 6); another statement of the equality in judgment
of Israel with other peoples, and of their utter destruction
(7-8_a_). Then (8_b_) we meet the first qualification of the
hitherto unrelieved sentence of death. Captivity is described,
not as doom, but as discipline (9): the sinners of the people,
scoffers at doom, shall die (10). And this seems to leave room
for two final oracles of restoration and glory, the only two in
the book, which are couched in the exact terms of the promises
of later prophecy (11-15) and are by many denied to Amos.

Such is the course of the prophesying of Amos. To have traced it must
have made clear to us the unity of his book,[114] as well as the
character of the period to which he belonged. But it also furnishes
us with a good deal of evidence towards the answer of such necessary
questions as these--whether we can fix an exact date for the whole
or any part, and whether we can trace any logical or historical
development through the chapters, either as these now stand, or in
some such re-arrangement as we saw to be necessary for the authentic
prophecies of Isaiah.

Let us take first the simplest of these tasks--to ascertain the
general period of the book. Twice--by the title and by the portion
of narrative[115]--we are pointed to the reign of Jeroboam II.,
_circa_ 783-743; other historical allusions suit the same years. The
principalities of Palestine are all standing, except Gath;[116] but the
great northern cloud which carries their doom has risen and is ready
to burst. Now Assyria, we have seen, had become fatal to Palestine
as early as 854. Infrequent invasions of Syria had followed, in one
of which, in 803, Rimmon Nirari III. had subjected Tyre and Sidon,
besieged Damascus, and received tribute from Israel. So far then as the
Assyrian data are concerned, the Book of Amos might have been written
early in the reign of Jeroboam. Even then was the storm lowering as he
describes it. Even then had the lightning broken over Damascus. There
are other symptoms, however, which demand a later date. They seem
to imply, not only Uzziah's overthrow of Gath,[117] and Jeroboam's
conquest of Moab[118] and of Aram,[119] but that establishment of
Israel's political influence from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, which must
have taken Jeroboam several years to accomplish. With this agree other
features of the prophecy--the sense of political security in Israel,
the large increase of wealth, the ample and luxurious buildings, the
gorgeous ritual, the easy ability to recover from physical calamities,
the consequent carelessness and pride of the upper classes. All these
things imply that the last Syrian invasions of Israel in the beginning
of the century were at least a generation behind the men into whose
careless faces the prophet hurled his words of doom. During this
interval Assyria had again advanced--in 775, in 773 and in 772.[120]
None of these expeditions, however, had come south of Damascus,
and this, their invariable arrest at some distance from the proper
territory of Israel, may have further flattered the people's sense
of security, though probably the truth was that Jeroboam, like some
of his predecessors, bought his peace by tribute to the emperor. In
765, when the Assyrians for the second time invaded Hadrach, in the
neighbourhood of Damascus, their records mention a pestilence, which,
both because their armies were then in Syria, and because the plague
generally spreads over the whole of Western Asia, may well have been
the pestilence mentioned by Amos. In 763 a total eclipse of the sun
took place, and is perhaps implied by the ninth verse of his eighth
chapter. If this double allusion to pestilence and eclipse be correct,
it brings the book down to the middle of the century and the latter
half of Jeroboam's long reign. In 755 the Assyrians came back to
Hadrach; in 754 to Arpad: with these exceptions Syria was untroubled by
them till after 745. It was probably these quiet years in which Amos
found Israel _at ease in Zion_.[121] If we went down further, within
the more forward policy of Tiglath-Pileser, who ascended the throne in
745 and besieged Arpad from 743 to 740, we should find an occasion for
the urgency with which Amos warns Israel that the invasion of her land
and the overthrow of the dynasty of Jeroboam will be immediate.[122]
But Amos might have spoken as urgently even before Tiglath-Pileser's
accession; and the probability that Hosea, who prophesied within
Jeroboam's reign, quotes from Amos seems to imply that the prophecies
of the latter had been current for some time.

Towards the middle of the eighth century--is, therefore, the most
definite date to which we are able to assign the Book of Amos. At so
great a distance the difference of a few unmarked years is invisible.
It is enough that we know the moral dates--the state of national
feeling, the personages alive, the great events which are behind the
prophet, and the still greater which are imminent. We can see that Amos
wrote in the political pride of the latter years of Jeroboam's reign,
after the pestilence and eclipse of the sixties, and before the advance
of Tiglath-Pileser in the last forties, of the eighth century.

A particular year is indeed offered by the title of the book, which,
if not by Amos himself, must be from only a few years later:[123]
_Words of Amos, which he saw in the days of Uzziah and of Jeroboam,
two years before the earthquake_. This was the great earthquake
of which other prophets speak as having happened in the days of
Uzziah.[124] But we do not know where to place the year of the
earthquake, and are as far as ever from a definite date.

The mention of the earthquake, however, introduces us to the answer
of another of our questions--whether, with all its unity, the Book
of Amos reveals any lines of progress, either of event or of idea,
either historical or logical.

Granting the truth of the title, that Amos had his prophetic eyes
opened two years before the earthquake, it will be a sign of
historical progress if we find in the book itself any allusions to
the earthquake. Now these are present. In the first division we find
none, unless the threat of God's visitation in the form of a shaking
of the land be considered as a tremor communicated to the prophet's
mind from the recent upheaval. But in the second division there is
an obvious reference: the last of the unavailing chastisements, with
which Jehovah has chastised His people, is described as a _great
overturning_.[125] And in the third division, in two passages, the
judgment, which Amos has already stated will fall in the form of an
invasion, is also figured in the terms of an earthquake. Nor does
this exhaust the tremors which that awful convulsion had started;
but throughout the second and third divisions there is a constant
sense of instability, of the liftableness and breakableness of the
very ground of life. Of course, as we shall see, this was due to the
prophet's knowledge of the moral explosiveness of society in Israel;
but he could hardly have described the results of that in the terms
he has used, unless himself and his hearers had recently felt the
ground quake under them, and seen whole cities topple over. If,
then, Amos began to prophesy two years before the earthquake, the
bulk of his book was spoken, or at least written down, after the
earthquake had left all Israel trembling.[126]

This proof of progress in the book is confirmed by another feature.
In the abstract given above it is easy to see that the judgments
of the Lord upon Israel were of a twofold character. Some were
physical--famine, drought, blight, locusts, earthquake; and some
were political--battle, defeat, invasion, captivity. Now it is
significant--and I do not think the point has been previously
remarked--that not only are the physical represented as happening
first, but that at one time the prophet seems to have understood
that no others would be needed, that indeed God did not reveal to
him the imminence of political disaster till He had exhausted the
discipline of physical calamities. For this we have double evidence.
In chapter iv. Amos reports that the Lord has sought to rouse Israel
out of the moral lethargy into which their religious services have
soothed them, by withholding bread and water; by blighting their
orchards; by a pestilence, a thoroughly Egyptian one; and by an
earthquake. But these having failed to produce repentance, God must
visit the people once more: how, the prophet does not say, leaving
the imminent terror unnamed, but we know that the Assyrian overthrow
is meant. Now precisely parallel to this is the course of the Visions
in chapter vii. The Lord caused Amos to see (whether in fancy or in
fact we need not now stop to consider) the plague of locusts. It was
so bad as to threaten Israel with destruction. But Amos interceded,
and God answered, _It shall not be_. Similarly with a plague of
drought. But then the Vision shifts from the realm of nature to that
of politics. The Lord sets the plumbline to the fabric of Israel's
life: this is found hopelessly bent and unstable. It must be pulled
down, and the pulling down shall be political: the family of Jeroboam
is to be slain, the people are to go into captivity. The next Vision,
therefore, is of the End--the Final Judgment of war and defeat, which
is followed only by Silence.

Thus, by a double proof, we see not only that the Divine method in that
age was to act first by physical chastisement, and only then by an
inevitable, ultimate doom of war and captivity; but that the experience
of Amos himself, his own intercourse with the Lord, passed through
these two stages. The significance of this for the picture of the
prophet's life we shall see in our next chapter. Here we are concerned
to ask whether it gives us any clue as to the extant arrangement of
his prophecies, or any justification for re-arranging them, as the
prophecies of Isaiah have to be re-arranged, according to the various
stages of historical development at which they were uttered.

We have just seen that the progress from the physical chastisements
to the political doom is reflected in both the last two sections of
the book. But the same gradual, cumulative method is attributed to the
Divine Providence by the First Section: _for three transgressions, yea,
for four, I will not turn it back_; and then follow the same disasters
of war and captivity as are threatened in Sections II. and III. But
each section does not only thus end similarly; each also begins with
the record of an immediate impression made on the prophet by Jehovah
(chaps. i. 2; iii. 3-8; vii. 1-9).

To sum up:--The Book of Amos consists of three sections,[127]
which seem to have received their present form towards the end of
Jeroboam's reign; and which, after emphasising their origin as
due to the immediate influence of Jehovah Himself on the prophet,
follow pretty much the same course of the Divine dealings with
that generation of Israel--a course which began with physical
chastisements, that failed to produce repentance, and ended with the
irrevocable threat of the Assyrian invasion. Each section, that is to
say, starts from the same point, follows much the same direction, and
arrives at exactly the same conclusion. Chronologically you cannot
put one of them before the other; but from each it is possible to
learn the stages of experience through which Amos himself passed--to
discover how God taught the prophet, not only by the original
intuitions from which all prophecy starts, but by the gradual events
of his day both at home and abroad.

This decides our plan for us. We shall first trace the life and
experience of Amos, as his book enables us to do; and then we shall
examine, in the order in which they lie, the three parallel forms in
which, when he was silenced at Bethel, he collected the fruits of
that experience, and gave them their final expression.

* * * * *

The style of the book is simple and terse. The fixity of the
prophet's aim--upon a few moral principles and the doom they
demand--keeps his sentences firm and sharp, and sends his paragraphs
rapidly to their climax. That he sees nature only under moral
light renders his poetry austere and occasionally savage. His
language is very pure. There is no ground for Jerome's charge that
he was "imperitus sermone": we shall have to notice only a few
irregularities in spelling, due perhaps to the dialect of the deserts
in which he passed his life.[128]

The text of the book is for the most part well-preserved; but there are
a number of evident corruptions. Of the Greek Version the same holds
good as we have said in more detail of the Greek of Hosea.[129] It is
sometimes correct where the Hebrew text is not, sometimes suggestive of
the emendations required, and sometimes hopelessly astray.

FOOTNOTES:

[112] The full list of suspected passages is this: (1) References
to Judah--ii. 4, 5; vi. 1, _in Zion_; ix. 11, 12. (2) The three
Outbreaks of Praise--iv. 13; v. 8, 9; ix. 5, 6. (3) The Final
Hope--ix. 8-15, including vv. 11, 12, already mentioned. (4) Clauses
alleged to reflect a later stage of history--i. 9-12; v. 1, 2, 15;
vi. 2, 14. (5) Suspected for incompatibility--viii. 11-13.

[113] So designated to distinguish him from the first Jeroboam, the
son of Nebat.

[114] Apart from the suspected parentheses already mentioned.

[115] Chap. vii.

[116] And, if vi. 2 be genuine, Hamath.

[117] 2 Chron. xxvi. 6. In the list of the Philistine cities, Amos
i. 6-8, Gath does not occur, and in harmony with this in vi. 2 it is
said to be overthrown; see pp. 173 f.

[118] 2 Kings. In Amos ii. 3 the ruler of Moab is called, not king, but
שׁופט, or regent, such as Jeroboam substituted for the king of Moab.

[119] According to Grätz's emendation of vi. 13: _we have taken
Lo-Debar and Karnaim_. Perhaps too in iii. 12, though the verse is
very obscure, some settlement of Israelites in Damascus is implied.
For Jeroboam's conquest of Aram (2 Kings xiv. 28), see p. 177.

[120] In 775 to Erini, "the country of the cedars"--that is, Mount
Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch; in 773 to Damascus; in 772 to
Hadrach.

[121] vi. 1.

[122] vii. 9.

[123] Even König denies that the title is from Amos (_Einleitung_,
307); yet the ground on which he does so, the awkwardness of the
double relative, does not appear sufficient. One does not write a
title in the same style as an ordinary sentence.

[124] Zech. xiv. 5, and probably Isa. ix. 9, 10 (Eng.).

[125] iv. 11.

[126] Of course it is always possible to suspect--and let us by all
means exhaust the possibilities of suspicion--that the title has
been added by a scribe, who interpreted the forebodings of judgment
which Amos expresses in the terms of earthquake as if they were
the predictions of a real earthquake, and was anxious to show, by
inserting the title, how they were fulfilled in the great convulsion
of Uzziah's days. But to such a suspicion we have a complete answer.
No later scribe, who understood the book he was dealing with, would
have prefixed to it a title, with the motive just suspected, when
in chap. iv. he read that an earthquake had just taken place. The
very fact that such a title appears over a book, which speaks of the
earthquake as past, surely attests the _bona fides_ of the title.
With that mention in chap. iv. of the earthquake as past, none
would have ventured to say that Amos began to prophesy before the
earthquake unless they had known this to be the case.

[127] Except for the later additions, not by Amos, to be afterwards
noted.

[128] Cf. ii. 13; v. 11.; vi. 8, 10; vii. 9, 16; viii. 8 (?).

[129] See below, p. 221.

CHAPTER VI

_THE MAN AND THE PROPHET_

The Book of Amos opens one of the greatest stages in the religious
development of mankind. Its originality is due to a few simple ideas,
which it propels into religion with an almost unrelieved abruptness.
But, like all ideas which ever broke upon the world, these also have
flesh and blood behind them. Like every other Reformation, this one
in Israel began with the conscience and the protest of an individual.
Our review of the book has made this plain. We have found in it, not
only a personal adventure of a heroic kind, but a progressive series
of visions, with some other proofs of a development both of facts and
ideas. In short, behind the book there beats a life, and our first duty
is to attempt to trace its spiritual history. The attempt is worth the
greatest care. "Amos," says a very critical writer,[130] "is one of the
most wonderful appearances in the history of the human spirit."

1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE.

AMOS i. 1; iii. 3-8; vii. 14, 15.

When charged at the crisis of his career with being but a
hireling-prophet, Amos disclaimed the official name and took his
stand upon his work as a man: _No prophet I, nor prophet's son, but
a herdsman and a dresser of sycomores. Jehovah took me from behind
the flock._[131] We shall enhance our appreciation of this manhood,
and of the new order of prophecy which it asserted, if we look for a
little at the soil on which it was so bravely nourished.

Six miles south from Bethlehem, as Bethlehem is six from Jerusalem,
there rises on the edge of the Judæan plateau, towards the desert, a
commanding hill, the ruins on which are still known by the name of
Teḳôa'.[132]

In the time of Amos Tekoa was a place without sanctity and almost
without tradition. The name suggests that the site may at first have
been that of a camp. Its fortification by Rehoboam, and the mission
of its wise woman to David, are its only previous appearances in
history. Nor had nature been less grudging to it than fame. The men
of Tekoa looked out upon a desolate and haggard world. South, west
and north the view is barred by a range of limestone hills, on one
of which directly north the grey towers of Jerusalem are hardly to
be discerned from the grey mountain lines. Eastward the prospect
is still more desolate, but it is open; the land slopes away for
nearly eighteen miles to a depth of four thousand feet. Of this
long descent, the first step, lying immediately below the hill of
Tekoa, is a shelf of stony moorland with the ruins of vineyards. It
is the lowest ledge of the settled life of Judæa. The eastern edge
drops suddenly by broken rocks to slopes spotted with bushes of
"retem," the broom of the desert, and with patches of poor wheat.
From the foot of the slopes the land rolls away in a maze of low
hills and shallow dales, that flush green in spring, but for the rest
of the year are brown with withered grass and scrub. This is the
_Wilderness_ or _Pastureland of Tekoa_,[133] across which by night
the wild beasts howl, and by day the blackened sites of deserted
camps, with the loose cairns that mark the nomads' graves, reveal a
human life almost as vagabond and nameless as that of the beasts.
Beyond the rolling land is Jeshimon, or Devastation--a chaos of
hills, none of whose ragged crests are tossed as high as the shelf
of Tekoa, while their flanks shudder down some further thousands of
feet, by crumbling precipices and corries choked with debris, to the
coast of the Dead Sea. The northern half of this is visible, bright
blue against the red wall of Moab, and the level top of the wall,
broken only by the valley of the Arnon, constitutes the horizon.
Except for the blue water--which shines in its gap between the torn
hills like a bit of sky through rifted clouds--it is a very dreary
world. Yet the sun breaks over it, perhaps all the more gloriously;
mists, rising from the sea simmering in its great vat, drape the
nakedness of the desert noon; and through the dry desert night the
planets ride with a majesty they cannot assume in our more troubled
atmospheres. It is also a very empty and a very silent world, yet
every stir of life upon it excites, therefore, the greater vigilance,
and man's faculties, relieved from the rush and confusion of events,
form the instinct of marking, and reflecting upon, every single
phenomenon. And it is a very savage world. Across it all, the towers
of Jerusalem give the only signal of the spirit, the one token that
man has a history.

Upon this unmitigated wilderness, where life is reduced to poverty and
danger; where nature starves the imagination, but excites the faculties
of perception and curiosity; with the mountain tops and the sunrise
in his face, but above all with Jerusalem so near,--Amos did the work
which made him a man, heard the voice of God calling him to be a
prophet, and gathered those symbols and figures in which his prophet's
message still reaches us with so fresh and so austere an air.

Amos was _among the shepherds of Tekoa_. The word for _shepherd_ is
unusual, and means the herdsman of a peculiar breed of desert sheep,
still under the same name prized in Arabia for the excellence of their
wool.[134] And he was _a dresser of sycomores_. The tree, which is
not our sycamore, is very easily grown in sandy soil with a little
water. It reaches a great height and mass of foliage. The fruit is
like a small fig, with a sweet but watery taste, and is eaten only by
the poor. Born not of the fresh twigs, but of the trunk and older
branches, the sluggish lumps are provoked to ripen by pinching or
bruising, which seems to be the literal meaning of the term that
Amos uses of himself--_a pincher of sycomores_.[135] The sycomore
does not grow at so high a level as Tekoa;[136] and this fact, taken
along with the limitation of the ministry of Amos to the Northern
Kingdom, has been held to prove that he was originally an Ephraimite,
a sycomore-dresser, who had migrated and settled down, as the peculiar
phrase of the title says, _among the shepherds of Tekoa_.[137] We shall
presently see, however, that his familiarity with life in Northern
Israel may easily have been won in other ways than through citizenship
in that kingdom; while the very general nature of the definition,
_among the shepherds of Tekoa_, does not oblige us to place either
him or his sycomores so high as the village itself. The most easterly
township of Judæa, Tekoa commanded the whole of the wilderness beyond,
to which indeed it gave its name, _the wilderness of Tekoa_. The
shepherds of Tekoa were therefore, in all probability, scattered across
the whole region down to the oases on the coast of the Dead Sea, which
have generally been owned by one or other of the settled communities in
the hill-country above, and may at that time have belonged to Tekoa,
just as in Crusading times they belonged to the monks of Hebron, or are
to-day cultivated by the Rushaideh Arabs, who pitch their camps not far
from Tekoa itself. As you will still find everywhere on the borders
of the Syrian desert shepherds nourishing a few fruit-trees round the
chief well of their pasture, in order to vary their milk diet, so in
some low oasis in the wilderness of Judæa Amos cultivated the poorest,
but the most easily grown of fruits, the sycomore.[138] All this
pushes Amos and his dwarf sheep deeper into the desert, and emphasises
what has been said above, and still remains to be illustrated, of the
desert's influence on his discipline as a man and on his speech as a
prophet. We ought to remember that in the same desert another prophet
was bred, who was also the pioneer of a new dispensation, and whose
ministry, both in its strength and its limitations, is much recalled by
the ministry of Amos. John the son of Zacharias _grew and waxed strong
in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto
Israel_.[139] Here, too, our Lord was _with the wild beasts_.[140] How
much Amos had been with them may be seen from many of his metaphors.
_The lion roareth, who shall not fear?... As when the shepherd rescueth
from the mouth of the lion two shin-bones or a bit of an ear.... It
shall be as when one is fleeing from a lion, and a bear cometh upon
him; and he entereth a house, and leaneth his hand on the wall, and a
serpent biteth him._

As a wool-grower, however, Amos must have had his yearly journeys
among the markets of the land; and to such were probably due his
opportunities of familiarity with Northern Israel, the originals of
his vivid pictures of her town-life, her commerce and the worship
at her great sanctuaries. One hour westward from Tekoa would bring
him to the high-road between Hebron and the North, with its troops
of pilgrims passing to Beersheba.[141] It was but half-an-hour more
to the watershed and an open view of the Philistine plain. Bethlehem
was only six, Jerusalem twelve miles from Tekoa. Ten miles farther,
across the border of Israel, lay Bethel with its temple, seven miles
farther Gilgal, and twenty miles farther still Samaria the capital,
in all but two days' journey from Tekoa. These had markets as well
as shrines;[142] their annual festivals would be also great fairs.
It is certain that Amos visited them; it is even possible that he
went to Damascus, in which the Israelites had at the time their own
quarters for trading. By road and market he would meet with men of
other lands. Phœnician pedlars, or Canaanites as they were called,
came up to buy the homespun for which the housewives of Israel were
famed[143]--hard-faced men who were also willing to purchase slaves,
and haunted even the battle-fields of their neighbours for this
sinister purpose. Men of Moab, at the time subject to Israel; Aramean
hostages; Philistines who held the export trade to Egypt,--these
Amos must have met and may have talked with; their dialects scarcely
differed from his own. It is no distant, desert echo of life which
we hear in his pages, but the thick and noisy rumour of caravan and
market-place: how the plague was marching up from Egypt;[144] ugly
stories of the Phœnician slave-trade;[145] rumours of the advance of
the awful Power, which men were hardly yet accustomed to name, but
which had already twice broken from the North upon Damascus. Or it
was the progress of some national mourning--how lamentation sprang
up in the capital, rolled along the highways, and was re-echoed
from the husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides.[146] Or, at
closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals
and fairs--the _solemn assemblies_, the reeking holocausts, the
_noise of songs and viols_;[147] the brutish religious zeal kindling
into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the altar;[148] the
embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the covetous restlessness of
the traders, their false measures, their entanglement of the poor
in debt;[149] the careless luxury of the rich, their _banquets_,
_buckets of wine_, _ivory couches_, pretentious, preposterous
music.[150] These things are described as by an eyewitness. Amos
was not a citizen of the Northern Kingdom, to which he almost
exclusively refers; but it was because he went up and down in it,
using those eyes which the desert air had sharpened, that he so
thoroughly learned the wickedness of its people, the corruption of
Israel's life in every rank and class of society.[151]

But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos learned at
home. They came to him over the desert, and without further material
signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of Jerusalem. This
is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he describes his call
from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he reveals it, with
that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of Jerusalem saw
the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all the inaugural
vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived in the figures
of the Temple--the altar, the smoke, the burning coals. But to his
predecessor _among the shepherds of Tekoa_, although revelation also
starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not in the sacraments of her
sanctuary, but across the bare pastures, and as it were in the roar
of a lion. _Jehovah from Zion roareth, and uttereth His voice from
Jerusalem._[152] We read of no formal process of consecration for
this first of the prophets. Through his clear desert air, the word
of God breaks upon him without medium or sacrament. And the native
vigilance of the man is startled, is convinced by it, beyond all
argument or question. _The lion hath roared, who shall not fear?
Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_

These words are taken from a passage in which Amos illustrates
prophecy from other instances of his shepherd life. We have seen
what a school of vigilance the desert is. Upon the bare surface all
that stirs is ominous. Every shadow, every noise--the shepherd must
know what is behind and be warned. Such a vigilance Amos would have
Israel apply to his own message, and to the events of their history.
Both of these he compares to certain facts of desert life, behind
which his shepherdly instincts have taught him to feel an ominous
cause. _Do two men walk together except they have trysted?_--except
they have made an appointment. Hardly in the desert, for there men
meet and take the same road by chance as seldom as ships at sea.
_Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey, or a young lion
let out his voice in his den except he be taking something?_ The
hunting lion is silent till his quarry be in sight; when the lonely
shepherd hears the roar across the desert, he knows the lion leaps
upon his prey, and he shudders as Israel ought to do when they
hear God's voice by the prophet, for this also is never loosened
but for some grim fact, some leap of doom. Or _doth a little bird
fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose upon her?_ The
reading may be doubtful, but the meaning is obvious: no one ever
saw a bird pulled roughly down to earth when it tried to fly away
without knowing there was the loop of a snare about her. Or _does the
snare itself rise up from the ground, except indeed it be capturing
something?_--except there be in the trap or net something to flutter,
struggle and so lift it up. Traps do not move without life in them.
Or _is the alarum trumpet_[153] _blown in a city_--for instance, in
high Tekoa up there, when some Arab raid sweeps from the desert on
to the fields--_and do the people not tremble?_ Or _shall calamity
happen in a city and Jehovah not have done it? Yea, the Lord Jehovah
doeth nothing but He has revealed His purpose to His servants the
prophets._ My voice of warning and these events of evil in your midst
have the same cause--Jehovah--behind them. _The lion hath roared, who
shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_[154]

We cannot miss the personal note which rings through this triumph
in the reality of things unseen. Not only does it proclaim a man of
sincerity and conviction: it is resonant with the discipline by which
that conviction was won--were won, too, the freedom from illusion and
the power of looking at facts in the face, which Amos alone of his
contemporaries possessed.

St. Bernard has described the first stage of the Vision of God as the
Vision Distributive, in which the eager mind distributes her attention
upon common things and common duties in themselves. It was in this
elementary school that the earliest of the new prophets passed his
apprenticeship and received his gifts. Others excel Amos in the powers
of the imagination and the intellect. But by the incorrupt habits of
his shepherd's life, by daily wakefulness to its alarms and daily
faithfulness to its opportunities, he was trained in that simple power
of appreciating facts and causes, which, applied to the great phenomena
of the spirit and of history, forms his distinction among his peers.
In this we find perhaps the reason why he records of himself no solemn
hour of cleansing and initiation. _Jehovah took me from following the
flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel._
Amos was of them of whom it is written, "Blessed are those servants
whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching." Through all his
hard life, this shepherd had kept his mind open and his conscience
quick, so that when the word of God came to him he knew it, as fast
as he knew the roar of the lion across the moor. Certainly there is
no habit, which, so much as this of watching facts with a single eye
and a responsible mind, is indispensable alike in the humblest duties
and in the highest speculations of life. When Amos gives those naïve
illustrations of how real the voice of God is to him, we receive them
as the tokens of a man, honest and awake. Little wonder that he refuses
to be reckoned among the professional prophets of his day, who found
their inspiration in excitement and trance. Upon him the impulses of
the Deity come in no artificial and morbid ecstasy, removed as far as
possible from real life. They come upon him, as it were, in the open
air. They appeal to the senses of his healthy and expert manhood.
They convince him of their reality with the same force as do the most
startling events of his lonely shepherd watches. _The lion hath roared,
who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_

The influence of the same discipline is still visible when Amos
passes from the facts of his own consciousness to the facts of
his people's life. His day in Israel sweltered with optimism. The
glare of wealth, the fulsome love of country, the rank incense of
a religion that was without morality--these thickened all the air,
and neither the people nor their rulers had any vision. But Amos
carried with him his clear desert atmosphere and his desert eyes. He
saw the raw facts: the poverty, the cruel negligence of the rich,
the injustice of the rulers, the immorality of the priests. The
meaning of these things he questioned with as much persistence as he
questioned every suspicious sound or sight upon those pastures of
Tekoa. He had no illusions: he knew a mirage when he saw one. Neither
the military pride of the people, fostered by recent successes over
Syria, nor the dogmas of their religion, which asserted Jehovah's
swift triumph upon the heathen, could prevent him from knowing that
the immorality of Israel meant Israel's political downfall. He was
one of those recruits from common life, by whom religion and the
state have at all times been reformed. Springing from the laity and
very often from among the working classes, their freedom from dogmas
and routine, as well as from the compromising interests of wealth,
rank and party, renders them experts in life to a degree that almost
no professional priest, statesman or journalist, however honest or
sympathetic, can hope to rival. Into politics they bring facts, but
into religion they bring vision.

It is of the utmost significance that this reformer, this founder of
the highest order of prophecy in Israel, should not only thus begin
with facts, but to the very end be occupied with almost nothing
else, than the vision and record of them. In Amos there is but one
prospect of the Ideal. It does not break till the close of his
book, and then in such contrast to the plain and final indictments,
which constitute nearly all the rest of his prophesying, that many
have not unnaturally denied to him the verses which contain it.
Throughout the other chapters we have but the exposure of present
facts, material and moral, nor the sight of any future more distant
than to-morrow and the immediate consequences of to-day's deeds.
Let us mark this. The new prophecy which Amos started in Israel
reached Divine heights of hope, unfolded infinite powers of moral
and political regeneration--dared to blot out all the past, dared to
believe all things possible in the future. But it started from the
truth about the moral situation of the present. Its first prophet not
only denied every popular dogma and ideal, but appears not to have
substituted for them any others. He spent his gifts of vision on the
discovery and appreciation of facts. Now this is necessary, not only
in great reformations of religion, but at almost every stage in her
development. We are constantly disposed to abuse even the most just
and necessary of religious ideals as substitutes for experience or
as escapes from duty, and to boast about the future before we have
understood or mastered the present. Hence the need of realists like
Amos. Though they are destitute of dogma, of comfort, of hope, of the
ideal, let us not doubt that they also stand in the succession of the
prophets of the Lord.

Nay, this is a stage of prophecy on which may be fulfilled the prayer
of Moses: _Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets!_ To
see the truth and tell it, to be accurate and brave about the moral
facts of our day--to this extent the Vision and the Voice are possible
for every one of us. Never for us may the doors of heaven open, as they
did for him who stood on the threshold of the earthly temple, and he
saw the Lord enthroned, while the Seraphim of the Presence sang the
glory. Never for us may the skies fill with that tempest of life which
Ezekiel beheld from Shinar, and above it the sapphire throne, and on
the throne the likeness of a man, the likeness of the glory of the
Lord. Yet let us remember that to see facts as they are and to tell the
truth about them--this also is prophecy. We may inhabit a sphere which
does not prompt the imagination, but is as destitute of the historic
and traditional as was the wilderness of Tekoa. All the more may our
unglamoured eyes be true to the facts about us. Every common day leads
forth her duties as shining as every night leads forth her stars. The
deeds and the fortunes of men are in our sight, and spell, to all who
will honestly read, the very Word of the Lord. If only we be loyal,
then by him who made the rude sounds and sights of the desert his
sacraments, and whose vigilance of things seen and temporal became the
vision of things unseen and eternal, we also shall see God, and be sure
of His ways with men.

Before we pass from the desert discipline of the prophet, we
must notice one of its effects, which, while it greatly enhanced
the clearness of his vision, undoubtedly disabled Amos for the
highest prophetic rank. He who lives in the desert lives without
patriotism--detached and aloof. He may see the throng of men more
clearly than those who move among it. He cannot possibly so much feel
for them. Unlike Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos was not a citizen
of the kingdom against which he prophesied, and indeed no proper
citizen of any kingdom, but a nomad herdsman, hovering on the desert
borders of Judæa. He saw Israel from the outside. His message to her
is achieved with scarcely one sob in his voice. For the sake of the
poor and the oppressed among the people he is indignant. But with the
erring, staggering nation as a whole he has no real sympathy. His
pity for her is exhausted in one elegy and two brief intercessions;
hardly more than once does he even call her to repentance. His sense
of justice, in fact, had almost never to contend with his love. This
made Amos the better witness, but the worse prophet. He did not rise
so high as his great successors, because he did not so feel himself
one with the people whom he was forced to condemn, because he did
not bear their fate as his own nor travail for their new birth. "Ihm
fehlt die Liebe." Love is the element lacking in his prophecy; and
therefore the words are true of him, which were uttered of his great
follower across this same wilderness of Judæa, that mighty as were
his voice and his message to prepare the way of the Lord, yet _the
least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he_.

2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS.

AMOS i. 2; iii. 3-8; and _passim_.

We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word. We are now
to ask, Whence came the Word to the Man?--the Word that made him a
prophet. What were its sources and sanctions outside himself? These
involve other questions. How much of his message did Amos inherit
from the previous religion of his people? And how much did he teach
for the first time in Israel? And again, how much of this new element
did he owe to the great events of his day? And how much demands some
other source of inspiration?

To all these inquiries, outlines of the answers ought by this time to
have become visible. We have seen that the contents of the Book of
Amos consist almost entirely of two kinds: facts, actual or imminent,
in the history of his people; and certain moral principles of the
most elementary order. Amos appeals to no dogma nor form of law, nor
to any religious or national institution. Still more remarkably, he
does not rely upon miracle nor any so-called "supernatural sign."
To employ the terms of Mazzini's famous formula, Amos draws his
materials solely from "conscience and history." Within himself
he hears certain moral principles speak in the voice of God, and
certain events of his day he recognises as the judicial acts of God.
The principles condemn the living generation of Israel as morally
corrupt; the events threaten the people with political extinction.
From this agreement between inward conviction and outward event Amos
draws his full confidence as a prophet, and enforces on the people
his message of doom as God's own word.

The passage in which Amos most explicitly illustrates this harmony
between event and conviction is one whose metaphors we have already
quoted in proof of the desert's influence upon the prophet's
life. When Amos asks, _Can two walk together except they have
made an appointment?_ his figure is drawn, as we have seen, from
the wilderness in which two men will hardly meet except they have
arranged to do so; but the truth, he would illustrate by the figure,
is that two sets of phenomena which coincide must have sprung from
a common purpose. Their conjunction forbids mere chance. What kind
of phenomena he means, he lets us see in his next instance: _Doth
a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey? Doth a young lion let
forth his voice from his den except he be catching something?_ That
is, those ominous sounds never happen without some fell and terrible
deed happening along with them. Amos thus plainly hints that the
two phenomena on whose coincidence he insists are an utterance on
one side, and on the other side a deed fraught with destruction.
The reading of the next metaphor about the bird and the snare is
uncertain; at most what it means is that you never see signs of
distress or a vain struggle to escape without there being, though
out of sight, some real cause for them.[155] But from so general
a principle he returns in his fourth metaphor to the special
coincidence between utterance and deed. _Is the alarum-trumpet blown
in a city and do the people not tremble?_ Of course they do; they
know such sound is never made without the approach of calamity. But
who is the author of every calamity? God Himself: _Shall there be
evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_ Very well then; we have
seen that common life has many instances in which, when an ominous
sound is heard, it is because it is closely linked with a fatal deed.
These happen together, not by mere chance, but because the one is the
expression, the warning or the explanation of the other. And we also
know that fatal deeds which happen to any community in Israel are
from Jehovah. He is behind them. But they, too, are accompanied by a
warning voice from the same source as themselves. This is the voice
which the prophet hears in his heart--the moral conviction which he
feels as the Word of God. _The Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He
hath revealed His counsel to His servants the prophets._ Mark the
grammar: the revelation comes first to the prophet's heart; then he
sees and recognises the event, and is confident to give his message
about it. So Amos, repeating his metaphor, sums up his argument.
_The Lion hath roared, who shall not fear?_--certain that there is
more than sound to happen. _The Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can
but prophesy?_--certain that what Jehovah has spoken to him inwardly
is likewise no mere sound, but that deeds of judgment are about to
happen, as the ominous voice requires they should.[156]

The prophet then is made sure of his message by the agreement between
the inward convictions of his soul and the outward events of the day.
When these walk together, it proves that they have come of a common
purpose. He who causes the events--it is Jehovah Himself, _for shall
there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_--must be
author also of the inner voice or conviction which agrees with them.
_Who_ then _can but prophesy?_ Observe again that no support is here
derived from miracle; nor is any claim made for the prophet on the
ground of his ability to foretell the event. It is the agreement of
the idea with the fact, their evident common origin in the purpose of
Jehovah, which makes a man sure that he has in him the Word of God.
Both are necessary, and together are enough. Are we then to leave
the origin of the Word in this coincidence of fact and thought--as
it were an electric flash produced by the contact of conviction with
event? Hardly: there are questions behind this coincidence. For
instance, as to how the two react on each other--the event provoking
the conviction, the conviction interpreting the event? The argument
of Amos seems to imply that the ethical principles are experienced by
the prophet prior to the events which justify them Is this so, or
was the shock of the events required to awaken the principles? And
if the principles were prior, whence did Amos derive them? These are
some questions that will lead us to the very origins of revelation.

The greatest of the events with which Amos and his contemporaries
dealt was the Assyrian invasion. In a previous chapter we have tried
to estimate the intellectual effects of Assyria on prophecy.[157]
Assyria widened the horizon of Israel, put the world to Hebrew
eyes into a new perspective, vastly increased the possibilities
of history and set to religion a novel order of problems. We can
trace the effects upon Israel's conceptions of God, of man and
even of nature.[158] Now it might be plausibly argued that the new
prophecy in Israel was first stirred and quickened by all this
mental shock and strain, and that even the loftier ethics of the
prophets were thus due to the advance of Assyria. For, as the most
vigilant watchmen of their day, the prophets observed the rise of
that empire, and felt its fatality for Israel. Turning then to
inquire the Divine reasons for such a destruction, they found these
in Israel's sinfulness, to the full extent of which their hearts
were at last awakened. According to such a theory the prophets were
politicians first and moralists afterwards: alarmists to begin with,
and preachers of repentance only second. Or--to recur to the language
employed above--the prophets' experience of the historical event
preceded their conviction of the moral principle which agreed with it.

In support of such a theory it is pointed out that after all the
most original element in the prophecy of the eighth century was the
announcement of Israel's fall and exile. The Righteousness of Jehovah
had often previously been enforced in Israel, but never had any voice
drawn from it this awful conclusion that the nation must perish. The
first in Israel to dare this was Amos, and surely what enabled him
to do so was the imminence of Assyria upon his people. Again, such a
theory might plausibly point to the opening verse of the Book of Amos,
with its unprefaced, unexplained pronouncement of doom upon Israel:--

_The Lord roareth from Zion,_
_And giveth voice from Jerusalem;_
_And the pastures of the shepherds mourn,_
_And the summit of Carmel is withered!_

Here, it might be averred, is the earliest prophet's earliest
utterance. Is it not audibly the voice of a man in a panic--such a
panic as, ever on the eve of historic convulsions, seizes the more
sensitive minds of a doomed people? The distant Assyrian thunder has
reached Amos, on his pastures, unprepared--unable to articulate its
exact meaning, and with only faith enough to hear in it the voice of
his God. He needs reflection to unfold its contents; and the process
of this reflection we find through the rest of his book. There he
details for us, with increasing clearness, both the ethical reasons
and the political results of that Assyrian terror, by which he was at
first so wildly shocked into prophecy.

But the panic-born are always the still-born; and it is simply
impossible that prophecy, in all her ethical and religious vigour, can
have been the daughter of so fatal a birth. If we look again at the
evidence which is quoted from Amos in favour of such a theory, we
shall see how fully it is contradicted by other features of his book.

To begin with, we are not certain that the terror of the opening verse
of Amos is the Assyrian terror. Even if it were, the opening of a book
does not necessarily represent the writer's earliest feelings. The rest
of the chapters contain visions and oracles which obviously date from
a time when Amos was not yet startled by Assyria, but believed that
the punishment which Israel required might be accomplished through a
series of physical calamities--locusts, drought and pestilence.[159]
Nay, it was not even these earlier judgments, preceding the Assyrian,
which stirred the word of God in the prophet. He introduces them with
a _now_ and a _therefore_. That is to say, he treats them only as the
consequence of certain facts, the conclusion of certain premises. These
facts and premises are moral--they are exclusively moral. They are the
sins of Israel's life, regarded without illusion and without pity. They
are certain simple convictions, which fill the prophet's heart, about
the impossibility of the survival of any state which is so perverse and
so corrupt.

This origin of prophecy in moral facts and moral intuitions, which are
in their beginning independent of political events, may be illustrated
by several other points. For instance, the sins which Amos marked in
Israel were such as required no "red dawn of judgment" to expose their
flagrance and fatality. The abuse of justice, the cruelty of the rich,
the shameless immorality of the priests, are not sins which we feel
only in the cool of the day, when God Himself draws near to judgment.
They are such things as make men shiver in the sunshine. And so the
Book of Amos, and not less that of Hosea, tremble with the feeling
that Israel's social corruption is great enough of itself, without
the aid of natural convulsions, to shake the very basis of national
life. _Shall not the land tremble for this_, Amos says after reciting
some sins, _and every one that dwelleth therein_?[160] Not drought nor
pestilence nor invasion is needed for Israel's doom, but the elemental
force of ruin which lies in the people's own wickedness. This is enough
to create gloom long before the political skies be overcast--or, as
Amos himself puts it, this is enough

_To cause the sun to go down at noon,_
_And to darken the earth in the clear day._[161]

And once more--in spite of Assyria the ruin may be averted, if only the
people will repent: _Seek good and not evil, and Jehovah of hosts will
be with you, as you say_.[162] Assyria, however threatening, becomes
irrelevant to Israel's future from the moment that Israel repents.

Such beliefs, then, are obviously not the results of experience, nor
of a keen observation of history. They are the primal convictions
of the heart, which are deeper than all experience, and themselves
contain the sources of historical foresight. With Amos it was not
the outward event which inspired the inward conviction, but the
conviction which anticipated and interpreted the event, though when
the event came there can be no doubt that it confirmed, deepened, and
articulated the conviction.[163]

But when we have thus tracked the stream of prophecy as far back as
these elementary convictions we have not reached the fountain-head.
Whence did Amos derive his simple and absolute ethics? Were they
original to him? Were they new in Israel? Such questions start an
argument which touches the very origins of revelation.

It is obvious that Amos not only takes for granted the laws of
righteousness which he enforces: he takes for granted also the
people's conscience of them. New, indeed, is the doom which sinful
Israel deserves, and original to himself is the proclamation of it;
but Amos appeals to the moral principles which justify the doom, as
if they were not new, and as if Israel ought always to have known
them. This attitude of the prophet to his principles has, in our
time, suffered a curious judgment. It has been called an anachronism.
So absolute a morality, some say, had never before been taught in
Israel; nor had righteousness been so exclusively emphasised as the
purpose of Jehovah. Amos and the other prophets of his century were
the virtual "creators of ethical monotheism": it could only be by
a prophetic licence or prophetic fiction that he appealed to his
people's conscience of the standards he promulgated, or condemned his
generation to death for not having lived up to them.

Let us see how far this criticism is supported by the facts.

To no sane observer can the religious history of Israel appear
as anything but a course of gradual development. Even in the
moral standards, in respect to which it is confessedly often most
difficult to prove growth, the signs of the nation's progress
are very manifest. Practices come to be forbidden in Israel and
tempers to be mitigated, which in earlier ages were sanctioned to
their extreme by the explicit decrees of religion. In the nation's
attitude to the outer world sympathies arise, along with ideals of
spiritual service, where previously only war and extermination had
been enforced in the name of the Deity. Now in such an evolution it
is equally indubitable that the longest and most rapid stage was the
prophecy of the eighth century. The prophets of that time condemn
acts which had been inspired by their immediate predecessors;[164]
they abjure, as impeding morality, a ceremonial which the spiritual
leaders of earlier generations had felt to be indispensable to
religion; and they unfold ideals of the nation's moral destiny, of
which older writings give us only the faintest hints. Yet, while the
fact of a religious evolution in Israel is thus certain, we must not
fall into the vulgar error which interprets evolution as if it were
mere addition, nor forget that even in the most creative periods
of religion nothing is brought forth which has not already been
promised, and, at some earlier stage, placed, so to speak, within
reach of the human mind. After all it is the mind which grows; the
moral ideals which become visible to its more matured vision are so
Divine that, when they present themselves, the mind cannot but think
they were always real and always imperative. If we remember these
commonplaces we shall do justice both to Amos and to his critics.

In the first place it is clear that most of the morality which Amos
enforced is of that fundamental order which can never have been
recognised as the discovery or invention of any prophet. Whatever
be their origin, the conscience of justice, the duty of kindness to
the poor, the horror of wanton cruelty towards one's enemies, which
form the chief principles of Amos, are discernible in man as far back
as history allows us to search for them. Should a generation have
lost them, they can be brought back to it, never with the thrill
of a new lesson, but only with the shame of an old and an abused
memory. To neither man nor people can the righteousness which Amos
preached appear as a discovery, but always as a recollection and a
remorse. And this is most emphatically true of the people of Moses
and of Samuel, of Nathan, of Elijah and of the Book of the Covenant.
Ethical elements had been characteristic of Israel's religion from
the very first. They were not due to a body of written law, but
rather to the character of Israel's God, appreciated by the nation
in all the great crises of their history.[165] Jehovah had won for
Israel freedom and unity. He had been a spirit of justice to their
lawgivers and magistrates.[166] He had raised up a succession of
consecrated personalities,[167] who by life and word had purified
the ideals of the whole people. The results had appeared in the
creation of a strong national conscience, which avenged with horror,
as _folly in Israel_, the wanton crimes of any person or section of
the commonwealth; in the gradual formation of a legal code, founded
indeed in the common custom of the Semites, but greatly more
moral than that; and even in the attainment of certain profoundly
ethical beliefs about God and His relations, beyond Israel, to all
mankind. Now, let us understand once for all, that in the ethics of
Amos there is nothing which is not rooted in one or other of these
achievements of the previous religion of his people. To this religion
Amos felt himself attached in the closest possible way. The word of
God comes to him across the desert, as we have seen, yet not out
of the air. From the first he hears it rise from that one monument
of his people's past which we have found visible on his physical
horizon[168]--_from Zion_, _from Jerusalem_,[169] from the city of
David, from the Ark, whose ministers were Moses and Samuel, from the
repository of the main tradition of Israel's religion.[170] Amos
felt himself in the sacred succession; and his feeling is confirmed
by the contents of his book. The details of that civic justice
which he demands from his generation are found in the Book of the
Covenant--the only one of Israel's great codes which appears by this
time to have been in existence;[171] or in those popular proverbs
which almost as certainly were found in early Israel.[172]

Nor does Amos go elsewhere for the religious sanctions of his
ethics. It is by the ancient mercies of God towards Israel that he
shames and convicts his generation--by the deeds of grace which made
them a nation, by the organs of doctrine and reproof which have
inspired them, unfailing from age to age. _I destroyed the Amorite
before them.... Yea, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and
I led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the
Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your
young men for Nazirites. Was it not even thus, O ye children of
Israel? saith Jehovah._[173] We cannot even say that the belief which
Amos expresses in Jehovah as the supreme Providence of the world[174]
was a new thing in Israel, for a belief as universal inspires those
portions of the Book of Genesis which, like the Book of the Covenant,
were already extant.

We see, therefore, what right Amos had to present his ethical truths
to Israel, as if they were not new, but had been within reach of his
people from of old.

We could not, however, commit a greater mistake, than to confine the
inspiration of our prophet to the past, and interpret his doctrines as
mere inferences from the earlier religious ideas of Israel--inferences
forced by his own passionate logic, or more naturally ripened for him
by the progress of events. A recent writer has thus summarised the
work of the prophets of the eighth century: "In fact they laid hold
upon that bias towards the ethical, which dwelt in Jahwism from Moses
onwards, and they allowed it alone to have value as corresponding to
the true religion of Jehovah."[175] But this is too abstract to be an
adequate statement of the prophets' own consciousness. What overcame
Amos was a Personal Influence--the Impression of a Character; and it
was this not only as it was revealed in the past of his people. The God
who stands behind Amos is indeed the ancient Deity of Israel, and the
facts which prove Him God are those which made the nation--the Exodus,
the guidance through the wilderness, the overthrow of the Amorites,
the gift of the land. _Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel?_
But what beats and burns through the pages of Amos is not the memory
of those wonderful works, so much as a fresh vision and understanding
of the Living God who worked them. Amos has himself met with Jehovah
on the conditions of his own time--on the moral situation provided
by the living generation of Israel. By an intercourse conducted, not
through the distant signals of the past, but here and now, through the
events of the prophet's own day, Amos has received an original and
overpowering conviction of his people's God as absolute righteousness.
What prophecy had hitherto felt in part, and applied to one or other
of the departments of Israel's life, Amos is the first to feel in its
fulness, and to every extreme of its consequences upon the worship,
the conduct and the fortunes of the nation. To him Jehovah not only
commands this and that righteous law, but Jehovah and righteousness are
absolutely identical. _Seek Jehovah and ye shall live ... seek good
and ye shall live._[176] The absoluteness with which Amos conceived
this principle, the courage with which he applied it, carry him along
those two great lines upon which we most clearly trace his originality
as a prophet. In the strength of this principle he does what is really
new in Israel: he discards the two elements which had hitherto existed
alongside the ethical, and had fettered and warped it.

Up till now the ethical spirit of the religion of Jehovah[177] had
to struggle with two beliefs which we can trace back to the Semitic
origins of the religion--the belief, namely, that, as the national God,
Jehovah would always defend their political interests, irrespective
of morality; and the belief that a ceremonial of rites and sacrifices
was indispensable to religion. These principles were mutual: as the
deity was bound to succour the people, so were the people bound to
supply the deity with gifts, and the more of these they brought the
more they made sure of his favours. Such views were not absolutely
devoid of moral benefit. In the formative period of the nation they had
contributed both discipline and hope. But of late they had between them
engrossed men's hearts, and crushed out of religion both conscience and
common-sense. By the first of them, the belief in Jehovah's predestined
protection of Israel, the people's eyes were so holden they could
not see how threatening were the times; by the other, the confidence
in ceremonial, conscience was dulled, and that immorality permitted
which they mingled so shamelessly with their religious zeal. Now the
conscience of Amos did not merely protest against the predominance of
the two, but was so exclusive, so spiritual, that it boldly banished
both from religion. Amos denied that Jehovah was bound to save His
people; he affirmed that ritual and sacrifice were no part of the
service He demands from men. This is the measure of originality in our
prophet. The two religious principles which were inherent in the very
fibre of Semitic religion, and which till now had gone unchallenged
in Israel, Amos cast forth from religion in the name of a pure and
absolute righteousness. On the one hand, Jehovah's peculiar connection
with Israel meant no more than jealousy for their holiness: _You only
have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I visit
upon you all your iniquities._[178] And, on the other hand, all their
ceremonial was abhorrent to Him: _I hate, I despise your festivals....
Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not
accept them.... Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will
not hear the music of thy viols. But let justice run down as waters,
and righteousness as a perennial stream._[179]

It has just been said that emphasis upon morality as the sum of
religion, to the exclusion of sacrifice, is the most original element
in the prophecies of Amos. He himself, however, does not regard
this as proclaimed for the first time in Israel, and the precedent
he quotes is so illustrative of the sources of his inspiration that
we do well to look at it for a little. In the verse next to the one
last quoted he reports these words of God: _Did ye offer unto Me
sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness, for forty years, O house of
Israel?_ An extraordinary challenge! From the present blind routine
of sacrifice Jehovah appeals to the beginning of His relations with
the nation: did they then perform such services to Him? Of course, a
negative answer is expected. No other agrees with the main contention
of the passage. In the wilderness Israel had not offered sacrifices
and gifts to Jehovah. Jeremiah quotes a still more explicit word of
Jehovah: _I spake not unto your fathers in the day that I brought
them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and
sacrifices: but this thing I commanded them, saying, Obey My voice,
and I will be your God, and ye shall be My people._[180]

To these Divine statements we shall not be able to do justice if
we hold by the traditional view that the Levitical legislation was
proclaimed in the wilderness. Discount that legislation, and the
statements become clear. It is true, of course, that Israel must
have had a ritual of some kind from the first; and that both in the
wilderness and in Canaan their spiritual leaders must have performed
sacrifices as if these were acceptable to Jehovah. But even so the
Divine words which Amos and Jeremiah quote are historically correct;
for while the ethical contents of the religion of Jehovah were its
original and essential contents--_I commanded them, saying, Obey
My voice_--the ritual was but a modification of the ritual common
to all Semites; and ever since the occupation of the land, it had,
through the infection of the Canaanite rites on the high places,
grown more and more Pagan, both in its functions and in the ideas
which these were supposed to express.[181] Amos was right. Sacrifice
had never been the Divine, the revealed element in the religion of
Jehovah. Nevertheless, before Amos no prophet in Israel appears to
have said so. And what enabled this man in the eighth century to
offer testimony, so novel but so true, about the far-away beginnings
of his people's religion in the fourteenth, was plainly neither
tradition nor historical research, but an overwhelming conviction
of the spiritual and moral character of God--of Him who had been
Israel's God both then and now, and whose righteousness had been,
just as much then as now, exalted above all purely national interests
and all susceptibility to ritual. When we thus see the prophet's
knowledge of the Living God enabling him, not only to proclaim an
ideal of religion more spiritual than Israel had yet dreamed, but
to perceive that such an ideal had been the essence of the religion
of Jehovah from the first, we understand how thoroughly Amos was
mastered by that knowledge. If we need any further proof of his
"possession" by the character of God, we find it in those phrases
in which his own consciousness disappears, and we have no longer
the herald's report of the Lord's words, but the very accents of
the Lord Himself, fraught with personal feeling of the most intense
quality. _I_ Jehovah _hate, I despise your feast days.... Take thou
away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music of
thy viols._[182]... _I abhor the arrogance of Jacob, and hate his
palaces._[183]... _The eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the sinful
kingdom._[184]... _Jehovah sweareth, I will never forget any of
their works._[185] Such sentences reveal a Deity who is not only
manifest Character, but surgent and importunate Feeling. We have
traced the prophet's word to its ultimate source. It springs from
the righteousness, the vigilance, the urgency of the Eternal. The
intellect, imagination and heart of Amos--the convictions he has
inherited from his people's past, his conscience of their evil life
to-day, his impressions of current and coming history--are all
enforced and illuminated, all made impetuous and radiant, by the
Spirit, that is to say the Purpose and the Energy, of the Living God.
Therefore, as he says in the title of his book, or as some one says
for him, Amos _saw_ his words. They stood out objective to himself.
And they were not mere sound. They glowed and burned with God.

When we realise this, we feel how inadequate it is to express
prophecy in the terms of evolution. No doubt, as we have seen,
the ethics and religion of Amos represent a large and measurable
advance upon those of earlier Israel. And yet with Amos we do
not seem so much to have arrived at a new stage in a Process, as
to have penetrated to the Idea which has been behind the Process
from the beginning. The change and growth of Israel's religion are
realities--their fruits can be seen, defined, catalogued--but a
greater reality is the unseen Purpose which impels them. They have
been expressed only now. He has been unchanging from old and for
ever--from the first absolute righteousness in Himself, and absolute
righteousness in His demands from men.

3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY.

AMOS vii., viii. 1-4.

We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word; we have sought
to trace to its source the Word which came to the Man. It now remains
for us to follow the Prophet, Man and Word combined, upon his
Ministry to the people.

For reasons given in a previous chapter,[186] there must always be
some doubt as to the actual course of the ministry of Amos before
his appearance at Bethel. Most authorities, however, agree that
the visions recounted in the beginning of the seventh chapter form
the substance of his address at Bethel, which was interrupted by
the priest Amaziah. These visions furnish a probable summary of
the prophet's experience up to that point. While they follow the
same course, which we trace in the two series of oracles that now
precede them in the book, the ideas in them are less elaborate. At
the same time it is evident that Amos must have already spoken upon
other points than those which he puts into the first three visions.
For instance, Amaziah reports to the king that Amos had explicitly
predicted the exile of the whole people[187]--a conviction which,
as we have seen, the prophet reached only after some length of
experience. It is equally certain that Amos must have already exposed
the sins of the people in the light of the Divine righteousness. Some
of the sections of the book which deal with this subject appear to
have been originally spoken; and it is unnatural to suppose that the
prophet announced the chastisements of God without having previously
justified these to the consciences of men.

If this view be correct, Amos, having preached for some time to
Israel concerning the evil state of society, appeared at a great
religious festival in Bethel, determined to bring matters to a
crisis, and to announce the doom which his preaching threatened and
the people's continued impenitence made inevitable. Mark his choice
of place and of audience. It was no mere king he aimed at. Nathan had
dealt with David, Gad with Solomon, Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel.
But Amos sought the people, them with whom resided the real forces
and responsibilities of life: the wealth, the social fashions,
the treatment of the poor, the spirit of worship, the ideals of
religion.[188] And Amos sought the people upon what was not only a
great popular occasion, but one on which was arrayed, in all pomp and
lavishness, the very system he essayed to overthrow. The religion
of his time--religion as mere ritual and sacrifice--was what God
had sent him to beat down, and he faced it at its headquarters, and
upon one of its high days, in the royal and popular sanctuary where
it enjoyed at once the patronage of the crown, the lavish gifts of
the rich and the thronged devotion of the multitude. As Savonarola
at the Duomo in Florence, as Luther at the Diet of Worms, as our
Lord Himself at the feast in Jerusalem, so was Amos at the feast in
Bethel. Perhaps he was still more lonely. He speaks nowhere of having
made a disciple, and in the sea of faces which turned on him when
he spoke, it is probable that he could not welcome a single ally.
They were officials, or interested traders, or devotees; he was a
foreigner and a wild man, with a word that spared the popular dogma
as little as the royal prerogative. Well for him was it that over
all those serried ranks of authority, those fanatic crowds, that
lavish splendour, another vision commanded his eyes. _I saw the Lord
standing over the altar, and He said, Smite._

Amos told the pilgrims at Bethel that the first events of his time in
which he felt a purpose of God in harmony with his convictions about
Israel's need of punishment were certain calamities of a physical kind.
Of these, which in chapter iv. he describes as successively drought,
blasting, locusts, pestilence and earthquake, he selected at Bethel
only two--locusts and drought--and he began with the locusts. It may
have been either the same visitation as he specifies in chapter iv.,
or a previous one; for of all the plagues of Palestine locusts have
been the most frequent, occurring every six or seven years. _Thus the
Lord Jehovah caused me to see: and, behold, a brood_[189] _of locusts
at the beginning of the coming up of the spring crops._ In the Syrian
year there are practically two tides of verdure: one which starts after
the early rains of October and continues through the winter, checked
by the cold; and one which comes away with greater force under the
influence of the latter rains and more genial airs of spring.[190] Of
these it was the later and richer which the locusts had attacked. _And,
behold, it was after the king's mowings._ These seem to have been a
tribute which the kings of Israel levied on the spring herbage, and
which the Roman governors of Syria used annually to impose in the month
Nisan.[191] _After the king's mowings_ would be a phrase to mark the
time when everybody else might turn to reap their green stuff. It was
thus the very crisis of the year when the locusts appeared; the April
crops devoured, there was no hope of further fodder till December.
Still, the calamity had happened before, and had been survived; a
nation so vigorous and wealthy as Israel was under Jeroboam II. need
not have been frightened to death. But Amos felt it with a conscience.
To him it was the beginning of that destruction of his people which
the spirit within him knew that their sin had earned. So _it came to
pass, when_ the locusts _had made an end of devouring the verdure of
the earth, that I said, Remit, I pray Thee,_ or _pardon_--a proof that
there already weighed on the prophet's spirit something more awful than
loss of grass--_how shall Jacob rise again? for he is little_.[192]
The prayer was heard. _Jehovah repented for this: It shall not be,
said Jehovah._ The unnameable _it_ must be the same as in the frequent
phrase of the first chapter: _I will not turn It back_--namely, the
final execution of doom on the people's sin. The reserve with which
this is mentioned, both while there is still chance for the people to
repent and after it has become irrevocable, is very impressive.

The next example which Amos gave at Bethel of his permitted insight
into God's purpose was a great drought. _Thus the Lord Jehovah made
me to see: and, behold, the Lord Jehovah was calling fire into the
quarrel._[193] There was, then, already a quarrel between Jehovah
and His people--another sign that the prophet's moral conviction of
Israel's sin preceded the rise of the events in which he recognised
its punishment. _And_ the fire _devoured the Great Deep, yea, it was
about to devour the land_.[194] Severe drought in Palestine might well
be described as fire, even when it was not accompanied by the flame
and smoke of those forest and prairie fires which Joel describes as
its consequences.[195] But to have the full fear of such a drought, we
should need to feel beneath us the curious world which the men of those
days felt. To them the earth rested in a great deep, from whose stores
all her springs and fountains burst. When these failed it meant that
the unfathomed floods below were burnt up. But how fierce the flame
that could effect this! And how certainly able to devour next the solid
land which rested above the deep--the very _Portion_[196] assigned by
God to His people. Again Amos interceded: _Lord Jehovah, I pray Thee
forbear: how shall Jacob rise? for he is little._ And for the second
time Jacob was reprieved. _Jehovah repented for this: It also shall not
come to pass, said the Lord Jehovah._

We have treated these visions, not as the imagination or prospect of
possible disasters,[197] but as insight into the meaning of actual
plagues. Such a treatment is justified, not only by the invariable
habit of Amos to deal with real facts, but also by the occurrence of
these same plagues among the series by which, as we are told, God had
already sought to move the people to repentance.[198] The general
question of sympathy between such purely physical disasters and the
moral evil of a people we may postpone to another chapter, confining
ourselves here to the part played in the events by the prophet himself.

Surely there is something wonderful in the attitude of this shepherd
to the fires and plagues that Nature sweeps upon his land. He is
ready for them. And he is ready not only by the general feeling of
his time that such things happen of the wrath of God. His sovereign
and predictive conscience recognises them as her ministers. They
are sent to punish a people whom she has already condemned. Yet,
unlike Elijah, Amos does not summon the drought, nor even welcome
its arrival. How far has prophecy travelled since the violent
Tishbite! With all his conscience of Israel's sin, Amos yet prays
that their doom may be turned. We have here some evidence of the
struggle through which these later prophets passed, before they
accepted their awful messages to men. Even Amos, desert-bred and
living aloof from Israel, shrank from the judgment which it was his
call to publish. For two moments--they would appear to be the only
two in his ministry--his heart contended with his conscience, and
twice he entreated God to forgive. At Bethel he told the people all
this, in order to show how unwillingly he took up his duty against
them, and how inevitable he found that duty to be. But still more
shall we learn from his tale, if we feel in his words about the
smallness of Jacob, not pity only, but sympathy. We shall learn that
prophets are never made solely by the bare word of God, but that even
the most objective and judicial of them has to earn his title to
proclaim judgment by suffering with men the agony of the judgment he
proclaims. Never to a people came there a true prophet who had not
first prayed for them. To have entreated for men, to have represented
them in the highest courts of Being, is to have deserved also supreme
judicial rights upon them. And thus it is that our Judge at the Last
Day shall be none other than our great Advocate who continually
maketh intercession for us. It is prayer, let us repeat, which, while
it gives us all power with God, endows us at the same time with moral
rights over men. Upon his mission of judgment we shall follow Amos
with the greater sympathy that he thus comes forth to it from the
mercy-seat and the ministry of intercession.

The first two visions which Amos told at Bethel were of disasters in
the sphere of nature, but his third lay in the sphere of politics.
The two former were, in their completeness at least, averted; and
the language Amos used of them seems to imply that he had not even
then faced the possibility of a final overthrow. He took for granted
_Jacob_ was _to rise again_: he only feared as to _how_ this should
be. But the third vision is so final that the prophet does not even
try to intercede. Israel is measured, found wanting and doomed.
Assyria is not named, but is obviously intended; and the fact that
the prophet arrives at certainty with regard to the doom of Israel,
just when he thus comes within sight of Assyria, is instructive as to
the influence exerted on prophecy by the rise of that empire.[199]

_Thus He gave me to see: and, behold, the Lord had taken His
station_--'tis a more solemn word than the _stood_ of our
versions--_upon a city wall_ built to _the plummet,_[200] _and in
His hand a plummet. And Jehovah said unto me, What art thou seeing,
Amos?_ The question surely betrays some astonishment shown by the
prophet at the vision or some difficulty he felt in making it out.
He evidently does not feel it at once, as the natural result of his
own thinking: it is objective and strange to him; he needs time to
see into it. _And I said, A plummet. And the Lord said, Behold, I
am setting a plummet in the midst of My people Israel. I will not
again pass them over._ To set a measuring line or a line with weights
attached to any building means to devote it to destruction;[201]
but here it is uncertain whether the plummet threatens destruction,
or means that Jehovah will at last clearly prove to the prophet the
insufferable obliquity of the fabric of the nation's life, originally
set straight by Himself--originally _a wall of a plummet_. For God's
judgments are never arbitrary: by a standard we men can read He shows
us their necessity. Conscience itself is no mere voice of authority:
it is a convincing plummet, and plainly lets us see _why_ we should
be punished. But whichever interpretation we choose, the result is
the same. _The high places of Israel shall be desolate, and the
sanctuaries of Isaac laid waste; and I will rise against the house
of Jeroboam with the sword._ A declaration of war! Israel is to be
invaded, her dynasty overthrown. Every one who heard the prophet
would know, though he named them not, that the Assyrians were meant.

It was apparently at this point that Amos was interrupted by Amaziah.
The priest, who was conscious of no spiritual power with which to
oppose the prophet, gladly grasped the opportunity afforded him by
the mention of the king, and fell back on the invariable resource of
a barren and envious sacerdotalism: _He speaketh against Cæsar._[202]
There follows one of the great scenes of history--the scene which,
however fast the ages and the languages, the ideals and the deities
may change, repeats itself with the same two actors. Priest and Man
face each other--Priest with King behind, Man with God--and wage
that debate in which the whole warfare and progress of religion
consist. But the story is only typical by being real. Many subtle
traits of human nature prove that we have here an exact narrative
of fact. Take Amaziah's report to Jeroboam. He gives to the words
of the prophet just that exaggeration and innuendo which betray the
wily courtier, who knows how to accentuate a general denunciation
till it feels like a personal attack. And yet, like every Caiaphas
of his tribe, the priest in his exaggerations expresses a deeper
meaning than he is conscious of. _Amos_--note how the mere mention
of the name without description proves that the prophet was already
known in Israel, perhaps was one on whom the authorities had
long kept their eye--_Amos hath conspired against thee_--yet God
was his only fellow-conspirator!--_in the midst of the house of
Israel_--this royal temple at Bethel. _The land is not able to hold
his words_--it must burst; yes, but in another sense than thou
meanest, O Caiaphas-Amaziah! _For thus hath Amos said, By the sword
shall Jeroboam die_--Amos had spoken only of the dynasty, but the
twist which Amaziah lends to the words is calculated--_and Israel
going shall go into captivity from off his own land_. This was the
one unvarnished spot in the report.

Having fortified himself, as little men will do, by his duty to
the powers that be, Amaziah dares to turn upon the prophet; and he
does so, it is amusing to observe, with that tone of intellectual
and moral superiority which it is extraordinary to see some men
derive from a merely official station or touch with royalty.
_Visionary,_[203] _begone! Get thee off to the land of Judah;
and earn_[204] _thy bread there, and there play the prophet. But
at Bethel_--mark the rising accent of the voice--_thou shalt not
again prophesy. The King's Sanctuary it is, and the House of the
Kingdom._[205] With the official mind this is more conclusive than
that it is the House of God! In fact the speech of Amaziah justifies
the hardest terms which Amos uses of the religion of his day. In all
this priest says there is no trace of the spiritual--only fear, pride
and privilege. Divine truth is challenged by human law, and the Word
of God silenced in the name of the king.

We have here a conception of religion, which is not merely due to
the unspiritual character of the priest who utters it, but has its
roots in the far back origins of Israel's religion. The Pagan Semite
identified absolutely State and Church; and on that identification
was based the religious practice of early Israel. It had many healthy
results: it kept religion in touch with public life; order, justice,
patriotism, self-sacrifice for the common weal, were devoutly held
to be matters of religion. So long, therefore, as the system was
inspired by truly spiritual ideals, nothing for those times could be
better. But we see in it an almost inevitable tendency to harden to
the sheerest officialism. That it was more apt to do so in Israel
than in Judah, is intelligible from the political origin of the
Northern Schism, and the erection of the national sanctuaries from
motives of mere statecraft.[206] Erastianism could hardly be more
flagrant or more ludicrous in its opposition to true religion than at
Bethel. And yet how often have the ludicrousness and the flagrancy
been repeated, with far less temptation! Ever since Christianity
became a state religion, she that needed least to use the weapons of
this world has done so again and again in a thoroughly Pagan fashion.
The attempts of Churches by law established, to stamp out by law all
religious dissent; or where such attempts were no longer possible,
the charges now of fanaticism and now of sordidness and religious
shopkeeping, which have been so frequently made against dissent by
little men who fancied their state connection, or their higher social
position, to mean an intellectual and moral superiority; the absurd
claims which many a minister of religion makes upon the homes and
the souls of a parish, by virtue not of his calling in Christ, but
of his position as official priest of the parish,--all these are the
sins of Amaziah, priest of Bethel. But they are not confined to
an established Church. The Amaziahs of dissent are also very many.
Wherever the official masters the spiritual; wherever mere dogma or
tradition is made the standard of preaching; wherever new doctrine is
silenced, or programmes of reform condemned, as of late years in Free
Churches they have sometimes been, not by spiritual argument, but
by the _ipse dixit_ of the dogmatist, or by ecclesiastical rule or
expediency,--there you have the same spirit. The dissenter who checks
the Word of God in the name of some denominational law or dogma is
as Erastian as the churchman who would crush it, like Amaziah, by
invoking the state. These things in all the Churches are the beggarly
rudiments of Paganism; and religious reform is achieved, as it was
that day at Bethel, by the abjuring of officialism.

_But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor prophet's
son. But a herdsman_[207] _I, and a dresser of sycomores; and Jehovah
took me from behind the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy
unto My people Israel._

On such words we do not comment; we give them homage. The answer
of this shepherd to this priest is no mere claim of personal
disinterestedness. It is the protest of a new order of prophecy,[208]
the charter of a spiritual religion. As we have seen, the _sons of the
prophets_ were guilds of men who had taken to prophesying because of
certain gifts of temper and natural disposition, and they earned their
bread by the exercise of these. Among such abstract craftsmen Amos
will not be reckoned. He is a prophet, but not of the kind with which
his generation was familiar. An ordinary member of society, he has been
suddenly called by Jehovah from his civil occupation for a special
purpose and by a call which has not necessarily to do with either gifts
or a profession. This was something new, not only in itself, but in
its consequences upon the general relations of God to men. What we see
in this dialogue at Bethel is, therefore, not merely the triumph of a
character, however heroic, but rather a step forward--and that one of
the greatest and most indispensable--in the history of religion.

There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this
fresh voice of God. _Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah
thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy words
against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah...._ Thou
hast presumed to say; _Hear what God will say_. Thou hast dared to
set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how
they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar
flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the
priest's estate along with the scene of its desecration. _Thy wife
in the city--shall play the harlot; and thy sons and thy daughters
by the sword--shall fall; and thy land by the measuring rope--shall
be divided; and thou in an unclean land--shalt die._ Do not let us
blame the prophet for a coarse cruelty in the first of these details.
He did not invent it. With all the rest it formed an ordinary
consequence of defeat in the warfare of the times--an inevitable item
of that general overthrow which, with bitter emphasis, the prophet
describes in Amaziah's own words: _Israel going shall go into
captivity from off his own land_.

There is added a vision in line with the three which preceded the
priest's interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that
Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close of
his address at Bethel. _Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see: and,
behold, a basket of Ḳaits_, that is, _summer fruit. And He said, What
art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Ḳaits. And Jehovah
said unto me, The Ḳets--the End--has come upon My people Israel. I
will not again pass them over._ This does not carry the prospect
beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and there is
therefore added a vivid realisation of the result. By four disjointed
lamentations, _howls_ the prophet calls them, we are made to feel
the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end an awful
silence. _And the songs of the temple shall be changed into howls
in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In every
place! He hath cast out! Hush!_

These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel.
If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself,
and he may have meant them as such. He was _cast out_; he was
_silenced_. They might almost be the verbal repetition of the
priest's orders. In any case the silence is appropriate. But Amaziah
little knew what power he had given to prophecy the day he forbade it
to speak. The gagged prophet began to write; and those accents which,
humanly speaking, might have died out with the songs of the temple
of Bethel were clothed upon with the immortality of literature. Amos
silenced wrote a book--first of prophets to do so--and this is the
book we have now to study.

FOOTNOTES:

[130] Cornill: _Der Israelitische Prophetismus. Five Lectures for the
Educated Laity._ 1894.

[131] Amos vii. 14. See further pp. 76 f.

[132] Khurbet Taḳûa', Hebrew Teḳôa', תְּקֹוע, from תקע, _to blow a
trumpet_ (cf. Jer. vi. 1, _Blow the trumpet in Tekoa_) or _to pitch a
tent_. The latter seems the more probable derivation of the name, and
suggests a nomadic origin, which agrees with the position of Tekoa
on the borders of the desert. Tekoa does not occur in the list of
the towns taken by Joshua. There are really no reasons for supposing
that some other Tekoa is meant. The two that have been alleged are
(1) that Amos exclusively refers to the Northern Kingdom, (2) that
sycomores do not grow at such levels as Tekoa. These are dealt with
on pp. 79 and 77 respectively.

[133] 2 Chron. xx. 20.

[134] נֹקֵד, nôḳêd, is doubtless the same as the Arabic "naḳḳâd,"
or keeper of the "naḳad," defined by Freytag as a short-legged and
deformed race of sheep in the Bahrein province of Arabia, from
which comes the proverb "viler than a naḳad"; yet the wool is very
fine. The king of Moab is called נוֹקֵד in 2 Kings iii. 4 (A.V.
_sheep-master_). In vii. 14 Amos calls himself בּוֹקֵר, _cattleman_,
which there is no reason to alter, as some do, to נֹוקֵד.

[135] בֹּולֵס, bôlês, probably from a root (found in Æthiopic) balas,
_a fig_; hence one who _had to do with figs, handled them, ripened
them_.

[136] The Egyptian sycomore, _Ficus sycomorus_, is not found in Syria
above one thousand feet above the sea, while Tekoa is more than twice
as high as that. Cf. 1 Kings x. 27, _the sycomores that are in the
vale_ or _valley land_, עֵמֶק; 1 Chron. xxvii. 28, _the sycomores
that are in the low plains_. "The sycamore grows in sand on the
edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered
country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates
as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely even
where drought seems to reign supreme" (Maspero on the Egyptian
sycomore; _The Dawn of Civilization_, translated by McClure, p. 26).
"Everywhere on the confines of cultivated ground, and even at some
distance from the valley, are fine single sycamores flourishing as
though by miracle amid the sand.... They drink from water, which has
infiltrated from the Nile, and whose existence is nowise betrayed
upon the surface of the soil" (_ib._, 121). Always and still
reverenced by Moslem and Christian.

[137] So practically Oort (_Th. Tjidsch._, 1891, 121 ff.), when
compelled to abandon his previous conclusion (_ib._, 1880, 122 ff.)
that the Tekoa of Amos lay in Northern Israel.

[138] In 1891 we met the Rushaideh, who cultivate Engedi, encamped
just below Tekoa. But at other parts of the borders between the
hill-country of Judæa and the desert, and between Moab and the
desert, we found round most of the herdsmen's central wells a few
fig-trees or pomegranates, or even apricots occasionally.

[139] Luke i. 80.

[140] Mark i. 18.

[141] v. 5; viii. 14.

[142] See p. 36.

[143] Prov. xxxi. 24.

[144] vi. 10.

[145] i. 9.

[146] v. 16.

[147] v. 21 ff.

[148] li. 7, 8.

[149] viii. 4 ff.

[150] vi. 1, 4-7.

[151] See pp. 136 f.

[152] i. 2.

[153] שׁופר, as has been pointed out, means in early Israel always
the trumpet blown as a summons to war; only in later Israel was the
name given to the temple trumpet.

[154] See further on this important passage pp. 89 ff.

[155] _Shall a little bird fall on the snare earthwards and there be no
noose about her? Shall a snare rise from the ground and not be taking
something?_ On this see p. 82. Its meaning seems to be equivalent to
the Scottish proverb: "There's aye some water whan the stirkie droons."

[156] There is thus no reason to alter the words _who shall not
prophesy_ to _who shall not tremble_--as Wellhausen does. To do so is
to blunt the point of the argument.

[157] See Chap. IV.

[158] See pp. 53 ff.

[159] See pp. 69 f.

[160] viii. 8.

[161] viii. 9.

[162] v. 14.

[163] How far Assyria assisted the development of prophecy we have
already seen. But we have been made aware, at the same time, that
Assyria's service to Israel in this respect presupposed the possession
by the prophets of certain beliefs in the character and will of
their God, Jehovah. The prophets' faith could never have risen to
the magnitude of the new problems set to it by Assyria if there had
not been already inherent in it that belief in the sovereignty of a
Righteousness of which all things material were but the instruments.

[164] Compare, for instance, Hosea's condemnation of Jehu's murder of
Joram, with Elisha's command to do it; also 2 Kings iii. 19, 25, with
Deut. xx. 19.

[165] See above, p. 10.

[166] Isa. xxviii.

[167] Amos ii.

[168] _Ante_, p. 74.

[169] i. 2.

[170] Therefore we see at a glance how utterly inadequate is Renan's
brilliant comparison of Amos to a modern revolutionary journalist
(_Histoire du Peuple Israel_, II.). Journalist indeed! How all this
would-be cosmopolitan and impartial critic's judgments smack of the
boulevards!

[171] Exod. xx.; incorporated in the JE book of history, and,
according to nearly all critics, complete by 750; the contents must
have been familiar in Israel long before that. There is no trace in
Amos of any influence peculiar to either the Deuteronomic or the
Levitical legislation.

[172] See especially Schultz, _O. T. Theol._, Eng. Trans. by
Paterson, I. 214.

[173] ii. 9-11. On this passage see further p. 137.

[174] If iv. 13, v. 8 and ix. 6 be genuine, this remark equally
applies to belief in Jehovah as Creator.

[175] Kayser, _Old Testament Theology_.

[176] v. 6, 14.

[177] See above, p. 18.

[178] iii. 2.

[179] v. 21 ff.

[180] Jer. vii. 22 f.

[181] See above, p. 23.

[182] v. 21-23.

[183] vi. 8.

[184] ix. 8

[185] viii. 7.

[186] Chap. V., p. 71.

[187] vii. 11.

[188] On the ministry of eighth-century prophets to the people see
the author's _Isaiah_, I., p. 119.

[189] So LXX., followed by Hitzig and Wellhausen, by reading יֵצֶר
for יֹוצֵר.

[190] Cf. _Hist. Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 64 ff. The word
translated _spring crop_ above is לקש, and from the same root as
the name of the latter rain, מַלְקֹושׁ, which falls in the end
of March or beginning of April. Cf. _Zeitschrift des deutschen
Palästina-Vereins_, IV. 83; VIII. 62.

[191] Cf. 1 Kings xviii. 5 with 1 Sam. vii. 15, 17; 1 Kings iv. 7 ff.
See Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 228.

[192] LXX.: _Who shall raise up Jacob again?_

[193] So Professor A. B. Davidson. But the grammar might equally well
afford the rendering _one calling that the Lord will punish with the
fire_, the ל of לריב marking the introduction of indirect speech (cf.
Ewald, § 338_a_). But Hitzig for קרא reads קרה (Deut. xxv. 18), to
occur, happen. So similarly Wellhausen, _es nahte sich zu strafen mit
Feuer der Herr Jahve_. All these renderings yield practically the
same meaning.

[194] A. B. Davidson, _Syntax_, § 57, Rem. 1.

[195] i. 19 f.

[196] Cf. Micah ii. 3. חֵלֶק is the word used, and according to the
motive given above stands well for the climax of the fire's destructive
work. This meets the objection of Wellhausen, who proposes to omit
חֵלֶק, because the heat does not dry up first the great deep and then
the fields (_Ackerflur_). This is to mistake the obvious point of the
sentence. The drought was so great that, after the fountains were
exhausted, it seemed as if the solid framework of the land, described
with very apt pathos as the _Portion_, would be the next to disappear.
Some take הלק as _divided_, therefore cultivated, ground.

[197] So for instance, Von Orelli.

[198] Chap. iv.

[199] See Chap. IV., p. 51.

[200] Literally _of the plummet_, an obscure expression. It cannot
mean plumb-straight, for the wall is condemned.

[201] 2 Kings xxi. 13: _I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of
Samaria and the plummet_ or _weight_ (מִשְׁקֹלֶת) _of the house
of Ahab_. Isa. xxxiv. 11: _He shall stretch over it the cord of
confusion, and the weights_ (literally _stones_) _of emptiness_.

[202] John xix. 12.

[203] The word _seer_ is here used in a contemptuous sense, and has
therefore to be translated by some such word as _visionary_.

[204] Literally _eat_.

[205] מַמְלָכָה בֵּית--that is, a _central_ or _capital sanctuary_.
Cf. הַמַּמְלָכָה עִיר (1 Sam. xxvii. 5), _city of the kingdom_,
_i.e._ chief or capital town.

[206] 1 Kings xii. 26, 27.

[207] _Prophet_ and _prophet's son_ are equivalent terms, the latter
meaning one of the professional guilds of prophets. There is no need
to change herdsman, בוקר, as Wellhausen does, into נוקד, shepherd,
the word used in i. 1.

[208] Cf. Wellhausen, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., § 6: "Amos was the founder
and the purest type of a new order of prophecy."

CHAPTER VII

_ATROCITIES AND ATROCITIES_

AMOS i. 3-ii.

Like all the prophets of Israel, Amos receives oracles for foreign
nations. Unlike them, however, he arranges these oracles not after,
but before, his indictment of his own people, and so as to lead up
to this. His reason is obvious and characteristic. If his aim be
to enforce a religion independent of his people's interests and
privileges, how can he better do so than by exhibiting its principles
at work outside his people, and then, with the impetus drained from
many areas, sweep in upon the vested iniquities of Israel herself?
This is the course of the first section of his book--chapters i. and
ii. One by one the neighbours of Israel are cited and condemned in
the name of Jehovah; one by one they are told they must fall before
the still unnamed engine of the Divine Justice. But when Amos has
stirred his people's conscience and imagination by his judgment of
their neighbours' sins, he turns with the same formula on themselves.
Are they morally better? Are they more likely to resist Assyria? With
greater detail he shows them worse and their doom the heavier for all
their privileges. Thus is achieved an oratorical triumph, by tactics
in harmony with the principles of prophecy and remarkably suited to
the tempers of that time.

But Amos achieves another feat, which extends far beyond his own day.
The sins he condemns in the heathen are at first sight very different
from those which he exposes within Israel. Not only are they sins of
foreign relations, of treaty and war, while Israel's are all civic and
domestic; but they are what we call the atrocities of Barbarism--wanton
war, massacre and sacrilege--while Israel's are rather the sins of
Civilisation--the pressure of the rich upon the poor, the bribery
of justice, the seduction of the innocent, personal impurity, and
other evils of luxury. So great is this difference that a critic more
gifted with ingenuity than with insight might plausibly distinguish
in the section before us two prophets with two very different views
of national sin--a ruder prophet, and of course an earlier, who
judged nations only by the flagrant drunkenness of their war, and a
more subtle prophet, and of course a later, who exposed the masked
corruptions of their religion and their peace. Such a theory would be
as false as it would be plausible. For not only is the diversity of
the objects of the prophet's judgment explained by this, that Amos had
no familiarity with the interior life of other nations, and could only
arraign their conduct at those points where it broke into light in
their foreign relations, while Israel's civic life he knew to the very
core. But Amos had besides a strong and a deliberate aim in placing
the sins of civilisation as the climax of a list of the atrocities of
barbarism. He would recall what men are always forgetting, that the
former are really more cruel and criminal than the latter; that luxury,
bribery and intolerance, the oppression of the poor, the corruption
of the innocent and the silencing of the prophet--what Christ calls
offences against His little ones--are even more awful atrocities than
the wanton horrors of barbarian warfare. If we keep in mind this moral
purpose, we shall study with more interest than we could otherwise do
the somewhat foreign details of this section. Horrible as the outrages
are which Amos describes, they were repeated only yesterday by Turkey:
many of the crimes with which he charges Israel blacken the life of
Turkey's chief accuser, Great Britain.

In his survey Amos includes all the six states of Palestine
that bordered upon Israel, and lay in the way of the advance of
Assyria--Aram of Damascus, Philistia, Tyre (for Phœnicia), Edom,
Ammon and Moab. They are not arranged in geographical order. The
prophet begins with Aram in the north-east, then leaps to Philistia
in the south-west, comes north again to Tyre, crosses to the
south-east and Edom, leaps Moab to Ammon, and then comes back to
Moab. Nor is any other explanation of his order visible. Damascus
heads the list, no doubt, because her cruelties had been most felt
by Israel, and perhaps too because she lay most open to Assyria. It
was also natural to take next to Aram Philistia,[209] as Israel's
other greatest foe; and nearest to Philistia lay Tyre. The three
south-eastern principalities come together. But there may have been a
chronological reason now unknown to us.

The authenticity of the oracles on Tyre, Edom and Judah has been
questioned: it will be best to discuss each case as we come to it.

Each of the oracles is introduced by the formula: _Thus saith,_ or
_hath said, Jehovah: Because of three crimes of ... yea, because
of four, I will not turn It back._ In harmony with the rest of the
book,[210] Jehovah is represented as moving to punishment, not for a
single sin, but for repeated and cumulative guilt. The unnamed _It_
which God will not recall is not the word of judgment, but the anger
and the hand stretched forth to smite.[211] After the formula, an
instance of the nation's guilt is given, and then in almost identical
terms he decrees the destruction of all by war and captivity. Assyria
is not mentioned, but it is the Assyrian fashion of dealing with
conquered states which is described. Except in the case of Tyre and
Edom, the oracles conclude as they have begun, by asserting themselves
to be the _word of Jehovah_, or of _Jehovah the Lord_. It is no
abstract righteousness which condemns these foreign peoples, but the
God of Israel, and their evil deeds are described by the characteristic
Hebrew word for sin--_crimes_, _revolts_ or _treasons_ against Him.[212]

* * * * *

1. ARAM OF DAMASCUS.--_Thus hath Jehovah said: Because of three
crimes of Damascus, yea, because of four, I will not turn It
back; for that they threshed Gilead with iron_--or _basalt
threshing-sledges._ The word is _iron_, but the Arabs of to-day call
basalt iron; and the threshing-sledges, curved slabs[213] drawn
rapidly by horses over the heaped corn, are studded with sharp basalt
teeth that not only thresh out the grain, but chop the straw into
little pieces. So cruelly had Gilead been chopped by Hazael and his
son Ben-Hadad some fifty or forty years before Amos prophesied.[214]
Strongholds were burned, soldiers slain without quarter, children
dashed to pieces, and women with child put to a most atrocious
end.[215] But _I shall send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall
devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad_--these names are chosen, not because
they were typical of the Damascus dynasty, but because they were the
very names of the two heaviest oppressors of Israel.[216] _And I
will break the bolt_[217] _of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant
from Biḳ'ath-Aven_--the Valley of Idolatry, so called, perhaps,
by a play upon Biḳ'ath On,[218] presumably the valley between the
Lebanons, still called the Beḳ'a, in which lay Heliopolis[219]--_and
him that holdeth the sceptre from Beth-Eden_--some royal Paradise
in that region of Damascus, which is still the Paradise of the Arab
world--_and the people of Aram shall go captive to Ḳir_--Kir in the
unknown north, from which they had come:[220] _Jehovah hath said_ it.

2. PHILISTIA.--_Thus saith Jehovah: For three crimes of Gaza and
for four I will not turn It back, because they led captive a whole
captivity, in order to deliver them up to Edom._ It is difficult
to see what this means if not the wholesale depopulation of a
district in contrast to the enslavement of a few captives of war.
By all tribes of the ancient world, the captives of their bow and
spear were regarded as legitimate property: it was no offence to
the public conscience that they should be sold into slavery. But
the Philistines seem, without excuse of war, to have descended
upon certain districts and swept the whole of the population
before them, for purely commercial purposes. It was professional
slave-catching. The Philistines were exactly like the Arabs of to-day
in Africa--not warriors who win their captives in honourable fight,
but slave-traders, pure and simple. In warfare in Arabia itself
it is still a matter of conscience with the wildest nomads not to
extinguish a hostile tribe, however bitter one be against them.[221]
Gaza is chiefly blamed by Amos, for she was the emporium of the trade
on the border of the desert, with roads and regular caravans to Petra
and Elah on the Gulf of Akaba, both of them places in Edom and depots
for the traffic with Arabia.[222] _But I will cut off the inhabitant
from Ashdod, and the holder of the sceptre from Askalon, and I will
turn My hand upon Ekron_--four of the five great Philistine towns,
Gath being already destroyed, and never again to be mentioned with
the others[223]--_and the last of the Philistines shall perish:
Jehovah hath said it_.

3. TYRE.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Tyre and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they gave up a whole
captivity to Edom_--the same market as in the previous charge--_and did
not remember the covenant of brethren_. We do not know to what this
refers. The alternatives are three: that the captives were Hebrews
and the alliance one between Israel and Edom; that the captives were
Hebrews and the alliance one between Israel and Tyre;[224] that the
captives were Phœnicians and the alliance the natural brotherhood
of Tyre and the other Phœnician towns.[225] But of these three
alternatives the first is scarcely possible, for in such a case the
blame would have been rather Edom's in buying than Tyre's in selling.
The second is possible, for Israel and Tyre had lived in close alliance
for more than two centuries; but the phrase _covenant of brethren_ is
not so well suited to a league between two tribes who felt themselves
to belong to fundamentally different races,[226] as to the close
kinship of the Phœnician communities. And although, in the scrappy
records of Phœnician history before this time, we find no instance of
so gross an outrage by Tyre on other Phœnicians, it is quite possible
that such may have occurred. During next century Tyre twice over basely
took sides with Assyria in suppressing the revolts of her sister
cities.[227] Besides, the other Phœnician towns are not included in the
charge. We have every reason, therefore, to believe that Amos expresses
here not resentment against a betrayal of Israel, but indignation at
an outrage upon natural rights and feelings with which Israel's own
interests were not in any way concerned. And this also suits the lofty
spirit of the whole prophecy. _But I will send fire upon the wall of
Tyre, and it shall devour her palaces...._

This oracle against Tyre has been suspected by Wellhausen,[228] for
the following reasons: that it is of Tyre alone, and silence is kept
regarding the other Phœnician cities, while in the case of Philistia
other towns than Gaza are condemned; that the charge is the same as
against Gaza; and that the usual close to the formula is wanting. But
it would have been strange if from a list of states threatened by the
Assyrian doom we had missed Tyre, Tyre which lay in the avenger's
very path. Again, that so acute a critic as Wellhausen should cite
the absence of other Phœnician towns from the charge against Tyre
is really amazing, when he has just allowed that it was probably
against some or all of these cities that Tyre's crime was committed.
How could they be included in the blame of an outrage done upon
themselves? The absence of the usual formula at the close may perhaps
be explained by omission, as indicated above.[229]

4. EDOM.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Edom and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that he pursued with the
sword his brother_, who cannot be any other than Israel, _corrupted
his natural feelings_--literally _his bowels of mercies--and kept aye
fretting_[230] _his anger, and his passion he watched_--like a fire,
or _paid heed_ to it--_for ever._[231] _But I will send fire upon
Teman_--the _South_ Region belonging to Edom--_and it shall devour the
palaces of Boṣrah_--the Edomite Boṣrah, south-east of Petra.[232] The
Assyrians had already compelled Edom to pay tribute.[233]

The objections to the authenticity of this oracle are more
serious than those in the case of the oracle on Tyre. It has been
remarked[234] that before the Jewish Exile so severe a tone could not
have been adopted by a Jew against Edom, who had been mostly under
the yoke of Judah, and not leniently treated. What were the facts?
Joab subdued Edom for David with great cruelty.[235] Jewish governors
were set over the conquered people, and this state of affairs seems
to have lasted, in spite of an Edomite attempt against Solomon,[236]
till 850. In Jehoshaphat's reign, 873-850, _there was no king of
Edom, a deputy was king_, who towards 850 joined the kings of Judah
and Israel in an invasion of Moab through his territory.[237] But,
soon after this invasion and perhaps in consequence of its failure,
Edom revolted from Joram of Judah (849-842), who unsuccessfully
attempted to put down the revolt.[238] The Edomites appear to have
remained independent for fifty years at least. Amaziah of Judah
(797-779) smote them,[239] but not it would seem into subjection,
for, according to the Chronicler, Uzziah had to win back Elath for
the Jews after Amaziah's death.[240] The history, therefore, of the
relations of Judah and Edom before the time of Amos was of such a
kind as to make credible the existence in Judah at that time of the
feeling about Edom which inspires this oracle. Edom had shown just
the vigilant, implacable hatred here described. But was the right
to blame them for it Judah's, who herself had so persistently waged
war, with confessed cruelty, against Edom? Could a Judæan prophet
be just in blaming Edom and saying nothing of Judah? It is true
that in the fifty years of Edom's independence--the period, we must
remember, from which Amos seems to draw the materials of all his
other charges--there may have been events to justify this oracle
as spoken by him; and our ignorance of that period is ample reason
why we should pause before rejecting the oracle so dogmatically as
Wellhausen does. But we have at least serious grounds for suspecting
it. To charge Edom, whom Judah has conquered and treated cruelly,
with restless hate towards Judah seems to fall below that high
impartial tone which prevails in the other oracles of this section.
The charge was much more justifiable at the time of the Exile, when
Edom did behave shamefully towards Israel.[241] Wellhausen points
out that Teman and Boṣrah are names which do not occur in the Old
Testament before the Exile, but this is uncertain and inconclusive.
The oracle wants the concluding formula of the rest.[242]

5. AMMON.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Ammon and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they ripped up
Gilead's women with child--in order to enlarge their borders!_ For such
an end they committed such an atrocity! The crime is one that has been
more or less frequent in Semitic warfare. Wellhausen cites several
instances in the feuds of Arab tribes about their frontiers. The Turks
have been guilty of it in our own day.[243] It is the same charge
which the historian of Israel puts into the mouth of Elisha against
Hazael of Aram,[244] and probably the war was the same; when Gilead was
simultaneously attacked by Arameans from the north and Ammonites from
the south. _But I will set fire to the wall of Rabbah_--Rabbath-Ammon,
literally _chief_ or _capital_ of Ammon--_and it shall devour her
palaces, with clamour in the day of battle, with tempest in the day of
storm_. As we speak of "storming a city," Amos and Isaiah[245] use the
tempest to describe the overwhelming invasion of Assyria. There follows
the characteristic Assyrian conclusion: _And their king shall go into
captivity, he and his princes_[246] _together, saith Jehovah_.

6. MOAB.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Moab
and because of four I will not turn It back; for that he burned
the bones of the king of Edom to lime._[247] In the great invasion
of Moab, about 850, by Israel, Judah and Edom conjointly, the rage
of Moab seems to have been directed chiefly against Edom.[248]
Whether opportunity to appease that rage occurred on the withdrawal
of Israel we cannot say. But either then or afterwards, balked of
their attempt to secure the king of Edom alive, Moab wreaked their
vengeance on his corpse, and burnt his bones to lime. It was, in
the religious belief of all antiquity, a sacrilege; yet it does not
seem to have been the desecration of the tomb--or he would have
mentioned it--but the wanton meanness of the deed, which Amos felt.
_And I will send fire on Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of
The-Cities_--Ḳerîoth,[249] perhaps the present Ḳureiyat,[250] on
the Moab plateau where Chemosh had his shrine[251]--_and in tumult
shall Moab die_--to Jeremiah[252] the Moabites were the sons of
tumult--_with clamour and with the noise of the war-trumpet. And I
will cut off the ruler_--literally _judge_, probably the vassal king
placed by Jeroboam II.--_from her_[253] _midst, and all his_[254]
_princes will I slay with him: Jehovah hath said_ it.

* * * * *

These, then, are the charges which Amos brings against the heathen
neighbours of Israel.

If we look as a whole across the details through which we have been
working, what we see is a picture of the Semitic world so summary and
so vivid that we get the like of it nowhere else--the Semitic world
in its characteristic brokenness and turbulence; its factions and
ferocities, its causeless raids and quarrels, tribal disputes about
boundaries flaring up into the most terrible massacres, vengeance that
wreaks itself alike on the embryo and the corpse--_cutting up women
with child in Gilead,_ and _burning to lime the bones of the king of
Edom_. And the one commerce which binds these ferocious tribes together
is the slave-trade in its wholesale and most odious form.

Amos treats none of the atrocities subjectively. It is not because
they have been inflicted upon Israel that he feels or condemns
them. The appeals of Israel against the tyrant become many as the
centuries go on; the later parts of the Old Testament are full of
the complaints of God's chosen people, conscious of their mission to
the world, against the heathen, who prevented them from it. Here we
find none of these complaints, but a strictly objective and judicial
indictment of the characteristic crimes of heathen men against each
other; and though this is made in the name of Jehovah, it is not in
the interests of His people or of any of His purposes through them,
but solely by the standard of an impartial righteousness which, as we
are soon to hear, must descend in equal judgment on Israel.

Again, for the moral principles which Amos enforces no originality
can be claimed. He condemns neither war as a whole nor slavery as a
whole, but limits his curse to wanton and deliberate aggravations of
them: to the slave-trade in cold blood, in violation of treaties and
for purely commercial ends;[255] to war for trifling causes, and that
wreaks itself on pregnant women and dead men; to national hatreds, that
never will be still. Now against such things there has always been in
mankind a strong conscience, of which the word "humanity" is in itself
a sufficient proof. We need not here inquire into the origin of such
a common sense--whether it be some native impulse of tenderness which
asserts itself as soon as the duties of self-defence are exhausted,
or some rational notion of the needlessness of excesses, or whether,
in committing these, men are visited by fear of retaliation from the
wrath they have unnecessarily exasperated. Certain it is, that warriors
of all races have hesitated to be wanton in their war, and have
foreboded the special judgment of heaven upon every blind extravagance
of hate or cruelty. It is well known how "fey" the Greeks felt the
insolence of power and immoderate anger; they are the fatal element in
many a Greek tragedy.[256] But the Semites themselves, whose racial
ferocity is so notorious, are not without the same feeling. "Even the
Beduins' old cruel rancours are often less than the golden piety of
the wilderness. The danger past, they can think of the defeated foemen
with kindness, ... putting only their trust in Ullah to obtain the
like at need for themselves. It is contrary to the Arabian conscience
to extinguish a Kabîla."[257] Similarly in Israel some of the earliest
ethical movements were revolts of the public conscience against
horrible outrages, like that, for instance, done by the Benjamites of
Gibeah.[258] Therefore in these oracles on his wild Semitic neighbours
Amos discloses no new ideal for either tribe or individual. Our view is
confirmed that he was intent only upon rousing the natural conscience
of his Hebrew hearers in order to engage this upon other vices to which
it was less impressionable--that he was describing those deeds of
war and slavery, whose atrocity all men admitted, only that he might
proceed to bring under the same condemnation the civic and domestic
sins of Israel.

We turn with him, then, to Israel. But in his book as it now stands
in our Bibles, Israel is not immediately reached. Between her and
the foreign nations two verses are bestowed upon Judah: _Thus saith
Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Judah and because of four I
will not turn It back; for that they despised the Torah of Jehovah,
and His statutes they did not observe, and their falsehoods_--false
gods--_led them astray, after which their fathers walked. But I will
send fire on Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem._
These verses have been suspected as a later insertion,[259] on the
ground that every reference to Judah in the Book of Amos must be
late, that the language is very formal, and that the phrases in which
the sin of Judah is described sound like echoes of Deuteronomy. The
first of these reasons may be dismissed as absurd; it would have been
far more strange if Amos had never at all referred to Judah.[260]
The charges, however, are not like those which Amos elsewhere makes,
and though the phrases may be quite as early as his time,[261] the
reader of the original, and even the reader of the English version,
is aware of a certain tameness and vagueness of statement, which
contrasts remarkably with the usual pungency of the prophet's style.
We are forced to suspect the authenticity of these verses.

We ought to pass, then, straight from the third to the sixth verse
of this chapter, from the oracles on foreign nations to that on
Northern Israel. It is introduced with the same formula as they are:
_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Israel and because
of four I will not turn It back_. But there follow a greater number
of details, for Amos has come among his own people whom he knows
to the heart, and he applies to them a standard more exact and an
obligation more heavy than any he could lay to the life of the
heathen. Let us run quickly through the items of his charge. _For
that they sell an honest man_[262] _for silver, and a needy man for a
pair of shoes_--proverbial, as we should say "for an old song"--_who
trample to the dust of the earth the head of the poor_--the least
improbable rendering of a corrupt passage[263]--_and pervert the way
of humble men. And a man and his father will go into the maid_,
the same maid,[264] _to desecrate My Holy Name_--without doubt some
public form of unchastity introduced from the Canaanite worship into
the very sanctuary of Jehovah, the holy place where He reveals His
Name--_and on garments given in pledge they stretch themselves by
every altar, and the wine of those who have been fined they drink
in the house of their God_. A riot of sin: the material of their
revels is the miseries of the poor, its stage the house of God! Such
is religion to the Israel of Amos' day--indoors, feverish, sensual.
By one of the sudden contrasts he loves, Amos sweeps out of it into
God's ideal of religion--a great historical movement, told in the
language of the open air: national deliverance, guidance on the
highways of the world, the inspiration of prophecy, and the pure,
ascetic life. _But I, I destroyed the Amorite_[265] _before you,
whose height was as the cedars, and he was strong as oaks, and I
destroyed his fruit from above and his roots from below._ What a
contrast to the previous picture of the temple filled with fumes
of wine and hot with lust! We are out on open history; God's gales
blow and the forests crash before them. _And I brought you up out of
the land of Egypt, and led you through the wilderness forty years,
to inherit the land of the Amorite._ Religion is not chambering and
wantonness; it is not selfish comfort or profiting by the miseries
of the poor and the sins of the fallen. But religion is history--the
freedom of the people and their education, the winning of the land
and the defeat of the heathen foe; and then, when the land is firm
and the home secure, it is the raising, upon that stage and shelter,
of spiritual guides and examples. _And I raised up of your sons to
be prophets, and of your young men to be Nazirites_--consecrated
and ascetic lives. _Is it not so, O children of Israel? (oracle of
Jehovah). But ye made the Nazirites drink wine, and the prophets ye
charged, saying, Prophesy not!_

Luxury, then, and a very sensual conception of religion, with all
their vicious offspring in the abuse of justice, the oppression of
the poor, the corrupting of the innocent, and the intolerance of
spiritual forces--these are the sins of an enlightened and civilised
people, which Amos describes as worse than all the atrocities of
barbarism, and as certain of Divine vengeance. How far beyond his own
day are his words still warm! Here in the nineteenth century is Great
Britain, destroyer of the slave-traffic, and champion of oppressed
nationalities--yet this great and Christian people, at the very time
they are abolishing slavery, suffer their own children to work in
factories and clay-pits for sixteen hours a day, and in mines set
women to a labour for which horses are deemed too valuable. Things
improve after 1848, but how slowly and against what callousness of
Christians Lord Shaftesbury's long and often disappointed labours
painfully testify. Even yet our religious public, that curses the
Turk, and in an indignation, which can never be too warm, cries out
against the Armenian atrocities, is callous, nay, by the avarice of
some, the haste and passion for enjoyment of many more, and the
thoughtlessness of all, itself contributes, to conditions of life and
fashions of society, which bear with cruelty upon our poor, taint our
literature, needlessly increase the temptations of our large towns,
and render pure childlife impossible among masses of our population.
Along some of the highways of our Christian civilisation we are just
as cruel and just as lustful as Kurd or Turk.

* * * * *

Amos closes this prophecy with a vision of immediate judgment.
_Behold, I am about to crush_ or _squeeze down upon you, as a waggon
crushes_[266] _that is full of sheaves._[267] An alternative reading
supplies the same general impression of a crushing judgment: _I will
make the ground quake under you, as a waggon makes it quake,_ or _as
a waggon_ itself _quakes under its load of sheaves_. This shock is to
be War. _Flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not
prove his power, nor the mighty man escape with his life. And he that
graspeth the bow shall not stand, nor shall the swift of foot escape,
nor the horseman escape with his life. And he that thinketh himself
strong among the heroes shall flee away naked in that day--'tis the
oracle of Jehovah._

FOOTNOTES:

[209] As is done in chap. vi. 2, ix. 7.

[210] So against Israel in chap. iv.

[211] So Isa. v. 25: נטויה ידו ועוד אפו שב לא Cf. Ezek. xx. 22: ידי
את והשיבותי

[212] פשעים

[213] Called _lûh_, _i.e._ slab.

[214] These Syrian campaigns in Gilead must have taken place between
839 and 806, the long interval during which Damascus enjoyed freedom
from Assyrian invasion.

[215] 2 Kings viii. 12; xiii. 7: cf. above, p. 31.

[216] _He delivered them into the hand of Hazael king of Aram, and
into the hand of Ben-Hadad the son of Hazael, continually_ (2 Kings
xiii. 3).

[217] No need here to render _prince_, as some do.

[218] So the LXX.

[219] The present Baalbek (Baal of the Beḳ'a?). Wellhausen throws
doubt on the idea that Heliopolis was at this time an Aramean town.

[220] ix. 7.

[221] Doughty: _Arabia Deserta_, I. 335.

[222] On the close connection of Edom and Gaza see _Hist. Geog._, pp.
182 ff.

[223] See _Hist. Geog._, pp. 194 ff. Wellhausen thinks Gath was
not yet destroyed, and quotes vi. 2; Micah i. 10, 14. But we know
that Hazael destroyed it, and that fact, taken in conjunction with
its being the only omission here from the five Philistine towns,
is evidence enough. In the passages quoted by Wellhausen there is
nothing to the contrary: vi. 2 implies that Gath has fallen; Micah i.
10 is the repetition of an old proverb.

[224] Farrar, 53; Pusey on ver. 9; Pietschmann, _Geschichte der
Phönizier_, 298.

[225] To which Wellhausen inclines.

[226] Gen. x.

[227] Under Asarhaddon, 678-676 B.C., and later under Assurbanipal
(Pietschmann, _Gesch._, pp. 302 f.).

[228] And he omits it from his translation.

[229] So far from such an omission proving that the oracle is an
insertion, is it not more probable that an insertor would have taken
care to make his insertion formally correct?

[230] There seems no occasion to amend with Olshausen to the _kept_
of Psalm ciii. 9.

[231] Read with LXX. לנצח שׁמר, though throughout the verse the LXX.
translation is very vile.

[232] In other two passages, Boṣrah, the city, is placed in parallel
not to another city, but just as here to a whole region: Isa. xxxiv.
6, where the parallel is the _land of Edom_, and lxiii. 1, where it
is _Edom_. There is therefore no need to take Teman in our passage as
a city, as which it does not appear before Eusebius.

[233] Under Rimmân-nirari III. (812-783). See Buhl's _Gesch. der
Edomiter_, 65: this against Wellhausen.

[234] Wellhausen, _in loco_.

[235] 2 Sam. viii. 13, with 1 Kings xi. 16.

[236] 1 Kings xi. 14-25.

[237] 2 Kings iii.

[238] 2 Kings viii. 20-22.

[239] 2 Kings xiv. 10.

[240] 2 Chron. xxvi. 2.

[241] See, however, Buhl, _op. cit._, 67.

[242] It is, however, no reason against the authenticity of the
oracle to say that Edom lay outside the path of Assyria. In answer to
that see the Assyrian inscriptions, _e.g._ Asarhaddon's: cf. above,
p. 129, _n._ 4.

[243] Notably in the recent Armenian massacres.

[244] 2 Kings viii. 12.

[245] xxviii. 2, xxvii. 7, 8, where the Assyrian and another invasion
are both described in terms of tempest.

[246] The LXX. reading, _their priests and their princes_, must be
due to taking Malcam = _their king_ as Milcom = the Ammonite god. See
Jer. xlix. 3.

[247]

"Great Cæsar dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to turn the wind away."

[248] 2 Kings iii. 26. So rightly Pusey.

[249] Jer. xlviii. 24 without article, but in 41 with.

[250] Though this is claimed by most for Ḳiriathaim.

[251] Moabite Stone, l. 13.

[252] xlviii. 45.

[253] The land's.

[254] The king's.

[255] See above, p. 126.

[256] δυσσεβίας μὲν ὕβρις τέκος (Æschylus, _Eumen._, 534): cf.
_Odyssey_, xiv. 262; xvii. 431.

[257] _I.e._ a tribe; Doughty, _Arabia Deserta_, I. 335.

[258] Judges xix., xx.

[259] Duhm was the first to publish reasons for rejecting the passage
(_Theol. der Propheten_, 1875, p. 119), but Wellhausen had already
reached the same conclusion (_Kleine Propheten_, p. 71). Oort and Stade
adhere. On the other side see Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_,
398, and Kuenen, who adheres to Smith's arguments (_Onderzoek_).

[260] "It is plain that Amos could not have excepted Judah from the
universal ruin which he saw to threaten the whole land; or at all
events such exception would have required to be expressly made on
special grounds."--Robertson Smith, _Prophets_, 398.

[261] _Ibid._

[262] צדיק, _righteous_: hardly, as most commentators take it, the
_legally_ (as distinguished from the _morally_) _righteous_; the
rich cruelly used their legal rights to sell respectable and honest
members of society into slavery.

[263] By adapting the LXX. So far as we know Wellhausen is right in
saying that the Massoretic text, which our English version follows,
gives no sense. LXX. reads, also without much sense as a whole, τὰ
πατοῦντα ἐπὶ τὸν χοῦν τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐκονδύλιζον εἰς κεφαλὰς πτῶχων.

[264] So rightly the LXX. Or the definite article may be here used in
conformity with the common Hebrew way of employing it to designate, not
a definite individual, but a member of a definite, well-known genus.

[265] On the use of Amorite for all the inhabitants of Canaan see
Driver's _Deut._, pp. 11 f.

[266] The verb עוק of the Massoretic text is not found elsewhere, and
whether we retain it, or take it as a variant of, or mistake for,
צוק, or adopt some other reading, the whole phrase is more or less
uncertain, and the exact shade of meaning has to be guessed, though the
general sense remains pretty much the same. The following is a complete
note on the subject, with reasons for adopting the above conclusion.

(1) LXX.: _Behold, I roll_ (κυλίω) _under you as a waggon full
of straw is rolled_. A.V.: _I am pressed under you as a cart is
pressed_. Pusey: _I straiten myself under you, etc._ These versions
take עוּק in the sense of צוּק, _to press_, and תחת in its usual
meaning of _beneath_; and the result is conformable to the well-known
figure of the Old Testament by which God is said to be laden and
weary with the transgressions of His people. But this does not mean
an actual descent of judgment, and yet vv. 14-16 imply that such an
intimation has been made in ver. 13; and besides טעיק and תעיק are
both in the Hiphil, the active, _to press_, or causative, _make to
press_. (2) Accordingly some, adopting this sense of the verb, take
תחת in an unusual sense of _down upon_. Ewald: _I press down upon you
as a cart that is full of sheaves presseth_. Guthe (in Kautzsch's
_Bibel_): _Ich will euch quetschen_. Rev. Eng. Ver.: _I will press
you in your place_.--But וקע has been taken in other senses. (3)
Hoffmann (_Z.A.T.W._, III. 100) renders it _groan_ in conformity
with Arab. 'îḳ. (4) Wetzstein (_ibid._, 278 ff.) quotes Arab. 'âḳ,
to _stop_, _hinder_, and suggests _I will bring to a stop_. (5) Buhl
(12th Ed. of Gesenius' _Handwört_, sub עוּק), in view of possibility
of עגלה being threshing-roller, recalls Arab. 'aḳḳ, _to cut in
pieces_. (6) Hitzig (_Exeg. Handbuch_) proposed to read מפיק and
תפיק: _I will make it shake under you, as the laden waggon shakes_
(the ground). So rather differently Wellhausen: _I will make the
ground quake under you, as a waggon quakes under its load of sheaves_.

I have only to add that, in the Alex. Cod. of LXX., which reads κωλύω
for κυλίω, we have an interesting analogy to Wetzstein's proposal;
and that in support of the rendering of Ewald, and its unusual
interpretation of תחתיכם which seems to me on the whole the most
probable, we may compare Job xxxvi. 16, תחתיה מוצק לא. This, it is
true, suggests rather the choking of a passage than the crushing of
the ground; but, by the way, that sense is even more applicable to a
harvest waggon laden with sheaves.

[267] _Waggon full of sheaves._--Wellhausen goes too far when he
suggests that Amos would have to go outside Palestine to see such
a waggon. That a people who already knew the use of chariots for
travelling (cf. Gen. xlvi. 5, JE) and waggons for agricultural
purposes (1 Sam. vi. 7 ff.) did not use them at least in the lowlands
of their country is extremely improbable. Cf. _Hist. Geog._, Appendix
on _Roads and Wheeled Vehicles in Syria_.

CHAPTER VIII

_CIVILISATION AND JUDGMENT_

AMOS iii.-iv. 3.

We now enter the Second Section of the Book of Amos: chaps. iii.-vi.
It is a collection of various oracles of denunciation, grouped partly
by the recurrence of the formula _Hear this word_, which stands
at the head of our present chapters iii., iv. and v., which are
therefore probably due to it; partly by two cries of _Woe_ at v. 18
and vi. 1; and also by the fact that each of the groups thus started
leads up to an emphatic, though not at first detailed, prediction of
the nation's doom (iii. 13-15; iv. 3; iv. 12; v. 16, 17; v. 26, 27;
vi. 14). Within these divisions lie a number of short indictments,
sentences of judgment and the like, which have no further logical
connection than is supplied by their general sameness of subject, and
a perceptible increase of articulateness from beginning to end of
the Section. The sins of Israel are more detailed, and the judgment
of war, coming from the North, advances gradually till we discern
the unmistakable ranks of Assyria. But there are various parentheses
and interruptions, which cause the student of the text no little
difficulty. Some of these, however, may be only apparent: it will
always be a question whether their want of immediate connection
with what precedes them is not due to the loss of several words
from the text rather than to their own intrusion into it. Of others
it is true that they are obviously out of place as they lie; their
removal brings together verses which evidently belong to each other.
Even such parentheses, however, may be from Amos himself. It is only
where a verse, besides interrupting the argument, seems to reflect
a historical situation later than the prophet's day, that we can be
sure it is not his own. And in all this textual criticism we must
keep in mind, that the obscurity of the present text of a verse, so
far from being an adequate proof of its subsequent insertion, may be
the very token of its antiquity, scribes or translators of later date
having been unable to understand it. To reject a verse, only because
_we_ do not see the connection, would surely be as arbitrary, as the
opposite habit of those who, missing a connection, invent one, and
then exhibit their artificial joint as evidence of the integrity of
the whole passage. In fact we must avoid all headstrong surgery, for
to a great extent we work in the dark.

The general subject of the Section may be indicated by the title:
Religion and Civilisation. A vigorous community, wealthy, cultured
and honestly religious, are, at a time of settled peace and growing
power, threatened, in the name of the God of justice, with their
complete political overthrow. Their civilisation is counted for
nothing; their religion, on which they base their confidence, is
denounced as false and unavailing. These two subjects are not, and
could not have been, separated by the prophet in any one of his
oracles. But in the first, the briefest and most summary of these,
chaps. iii.-iv. 3, it is mainly with the doom of the civil structure
of Israel's life that Amos deals; and it will be more convenient
for us to take them first, with all due reference to the echoes of
them in later parts of the Section. From iv. 4-vi. it is the Religion
and its false peace which he assaults; and we shall take that in the
next chapter. _First_, then, Civilisation and Judgment (iii.-iv. 3);
_Second_, The False Peace of Ritual (iv. 4-vi.).

* * * * *

These few brief oracles open upon the same note as that in which the
previous Section closed--that the crimes of Israel are greater than
those of the heathen; and that the people's peculiar relation to God
means, not their security, but their greater judgment. It is then
affirmed that Israel's wealth and social life are so sapped by luxury
and injustice that the nation must perish. And, as in every luxurious
community the women deserve especial blame, the last of the group of
oracles is reserved for them (iv. 1-3).

_Hear this word, which Jehovah hath spoken against you, O children of
Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land of
Egypt_--Judah as well as North Israel, so that we see the vanity of
a criticism which would cast out of the Book of Amos as unauthentic
every reference to Judah. _Only you have I known of all the families
of the ground_--not world, but _ground_, purposely chosen to stamp
the meanness and mortality of them all--_therefore will I visit upon
you all your iniquities_.

This famous text has been called by various writers "the keynote," "the
licence" and "the charter" of prophecy. But the names are too petty
for what is not less than the fulmination of an element. It is a peal
of thunder we hear. It is, in a moment, the explosion and discharge
of the full storm of prophecy. As when from a burst cloud the streams
immediately below rise suddenly and all their banks are overflowed,
so the prophecies that follow surge and rise clear of the old limits
of Israel's faith by the unconfined, unmeasured flood of heaven's
justice that breaks forth by this single verse. Now, once for all, are
submerged the lines of custom and tradition within which the course of
religion has hitherto flowed; and, as it were, the surface of the world
is altered. It is a crisis which has happened more than once again in
history: when helpless man has felt the absolute relentlessness of the
moral issues of life; their renunciation of the past, however much they
have helped to form it; their sacrifice of every development however
costly, and of every hope however pure; their deafness to prayer, their
indifference to penitence; when no faith saves a Church, no courage a
people, no culture or prestige even the most exalted order of men; but
at the bare hands of a judgment, uncouth of voice and often unconscious
of a Divine mission, the results of a great civilisation are for its
sins swept remorselessly away.

Before the storm bursts, we learn by its lightnings some truths
from the old life that is to be destroyed. _You only have I known
of all the families of the ground: therefore will I visit your
iniquities upon you._ Religion is no insurance against judgment, no
mere atonement and escape from consequences. Escape! Religion is
only opportunity--the greatest moral opportunity which men have, and
which if they violate nothing remains for them but a certain fearful
looking forward unto judgment. You only have I known; and because you
did not take the moral advantage of My intercourse, because you felt
it only as privilege and pride, pardon for the past and security for
the future, therefore doom the more inexorable awaits you.

Then as if the people had interrupted him with the question, What
sign do you give us that this judgment is near?--Amos goes aside into
that noble digression (vv. 3-8) on the harmony between the prophet's
word and the imminent events of the time, which we have already
studied.[268] From this apologia, verse 9 returns to the note of
verses 1 and 2 and develops it. Not only is Israel's responsibility
greater than that of other people's. Her crimes themselves are more
heinous. _Make proclamation over the palaces in Ashdod_--if we are
not to read Assyria here,[269] then the name of Ashdod has perhaps
been selected from all other heathen names because of its similarity
to the Hebrew word for that _violence_[270] with which Amos is
charging the people--_and over the palaces of the land of Egypt, and
say, Gather upon the Mount_[271] _of Samaria and see! Confusions
manifold in the midst of her; violence to her very core! Yea, they
know not how to do uprightness, saith Jehovah, who store up wrong and
violence in their palaces._

"To their crimes," said the satirist of the Romans, "they owe their
gardens, palaces, stables and fine old plate."[272] And William
Langland declared of the rich English of his day:--

"For toke thei on trewly · they tymbred not so heigh,
Ne boughte non burgages · be ye full certayne."[273]

_Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Siege and Blockade of the
Land!_[274] _And they shall bring down from off thee thy fortresses,
and plundered shall be thy palaces._ Yet this shall be no ordinary
tide of Eastern war, to ebb like the Syrian as it flowed, and leave
the nation to rally on their land again. For Assyria devours the
peoples. _Thus saith Jehovah: As the shepherd saveth from the mouth
of the lion a pair of shin-bones or a bit of an ear, so shall the
children of Israel be saved--they who sit in Samaria in the corner
of the diwan and ... on a couch._[275] The description, as will be
seen from the note below, is obscure. Some think it is intended
to satirise a novel and affected fashion of sitting adopted by
the rich. Much more probably it means that carnal security in the
luxuries of civilisation which Amos threatens more than once in
similar phrases.[276] The corner of the diwan is in Eastern houses
the seat of honour.[277] To this desert shepherd, with only the
hard ground to rest on, the couches and ivory-mounted diwans of the
rich must have seemed the very symbols of extravagance. But the
pampered bodies that loll their lazy lengths upon them shall be left
like the crumbs of a lion's meal--_two shin-bones and the bit of an
ear!_ Their whole civilisation shall perish with them. _Hearken and
testify against the house of Israel--oracle of the Lord Jehovah,
God of Hosts_[278]--those addressed are still the heathen summoned
in ver. 9. _For on the day when I visit the crimes of Israel upon
him, I shall then make visitation upon the altars of Bethel, and the
horns of the altar_, which men grasp in their last despair, _shall
be smitten and fall to the earth. And I will strike the winter-house
upon the summer-house, and the ivory houses shall perish, yea, swept
away shall be houses many--oracle of Jehovah._

But the luxury of no civilisation can be measured without its women,
and to the women of Samaria Amos now turns with the most scornful
of all his words. _Hear this word_--this for you--_kine of Bashan
that are in the mount of Samaria, that oppress the poor, that crush
the needy, that say to their lords, Bring, and let us drink. Sworn
hath the Lord Jehovah by His holiness, lo, days are coming when
there shall be a taking away of you with hooks, and of the last of
you with fish-hooks._ They put hooks[279] in the nostrils of unruly
cattle, and the figure is often applied to human captives;[280] but
so many should these cattle of Samaria be that for the _last of them
fish-hooks_ must be used. _Yea, by the breaches_ in the wall of the
stormed city _shall ye go out, every one headlong, and ye shall be
cast ..._[281] _oracle of Jehovah_. It is a cowherd's rough picture
of women: a troop of kine--heavy, heedless animals, trampling in
their anxiety for food upon every frail and lowly object in the way.
But there is a prophet's insight into character. Not of Jezebels,
or Messalinas, or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the ordinary
matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness and luxury are able to make
brutes out of women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion.[282]

* * * * *

Such are these three or four short oracles of Amos. They are probably
among his earliest--the first peremptory challenges of prophecy to
that great stronghold which before forty years she is to see thrown
down in obedience to her word. As yet, however, there seems to be
nothing to justify the menaces of Amos. Fair and stable rises the
structure of Israel's life. A nation, who know themselves elect, who
in politics are prosperous and in religion proof to every doubt,
build high their palaces, see the skies above them unclouded, and
bask in their pride, heaven's favourites without a fear. This man,
solitary and sudden from his desert, springs upon them in the name of
God and their poor. Straighter word never came from Deity: _Jehovah
hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_ The insight of it, the justice of
it, are alike convincing. Yet at first it appears as if it were sped
on the personal and very human passion of its herald. For Amos not
only uses the desert's cruelties--the lion's to the sheep--to figure
God's impending judgment upon His people, but he enforces the latter
with all a desert-bred man's horror of cities and civilisation. It is
their costly furniture, their lavish and complex building, on which
he sees the storm break. We seem to hear again that frequent phrase
of the previous section: _the fire shall devour the palaces thereof_.
The palaces, he says, are simply storehouses of oppression; the
palaces will be plundered. Here, as throughout his book,[283] couches
and diwans draw forth the scorn of a man accustomed to the simple
furniture of the tent. But observe his especial hatred of houses.
Four times in one verse he smites them: _winter-house on summer-house
and the ivory houses shall perish--yea, houses manifold, saith the
Lord_. So in another oracle of the same section: _Houses of ashlar
ye have built, and ye shall not inhabit them; vineyards of delight
have ye planted, and ye shall not drink of their wine_.[284] And in
another: _I loathe the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate; and I
will give up a city and all that is in it.... For, lo, the Lord is
about to command, and He will smite the great house into ruins and
the small house into splinters._[285] No wonder that such a prophet
found war with its breached walls insufficient, and welcomed, as the
full ally of his word, the earthquake itself.[286]

Yet all this is no mere desert "razzia" in the name of the Lord, a
nomad's hatred of cities and the culture of settled men. It is not
a temper; it is a vision of history. In the only argument which
these early oracles contain, Amos claims to have events on the side
of his word. _Shall the lion roar and not be catching_ something?
Neither does the prophet speak till he knows that God is ready to
act. History accepted this claim. Amos spoke about 755. In 734
Tiglath-Pileser swept Gilead and Galilee; in 724 Shalmaneser overran
the rest of Northern Israel: _siege and blockade of the whole land!_
For three years the Mount of Samaria was invested, and then taken;
the houses overthrown, the rich and the delicate led away captive. It
happened as Amos foretold; for it was not the shepherd's rage within
him that spoke. He had _seen the Lord standing, and He said, Smite_.

But this assault of a desert nomad upon the structure of a nation's
life raises many echoes in history and some questions in our own
minds to-day. Again and again have civilisations far more powerful
than Israel's been threatened by the desert in the name of God, and
in good faith it has been proclaimed by the prophets of Christianity
and other religions that God's kingdom cannot come on earth till the
wealth, the culture, the civil order, which men have taken centuries
to build, have been swept away by some great political convulsion.
To-day Christianity herself suffers the same assaults, and is told by
many, the high life and honest intention of whom cannot be doubted,
that till the civilisation which she has so much helped to create
is destroyed, there is no hope for the purity or the progress of
the race. And Christianity, too, has doubts within herself. What is
the world which our Master refused in the Mount of Temptation, and
so often and so sternly told us that it must perish?--how much of
our wealth, of our culture, of our politics, of the whole fabric of
our society? No thoughtful and religious man, when confronted with
civilisation, not in its ideal, but in one of those forms which
give it its very name, the life of a large city, can fail to ask,
How much of this deserves the judgment of God? How much must be
overthrown, before His will is done on earth? All these questions
rise in the ears and the heart of a generation, which more than any
other has been brought face to face with the ruins of empires and
civilisations, which have endured longer, and in their day seemed
more stable, than her own.

In face of the confused thinking and fanatic speech which have risen
on all such topics, it seems to me that the Hebrew prophets supply us
with four cardinal rules.

First, of course, they insist that it is the moral question upon
which the fate of a civilisation is decided. By what means has this
system grown? Is justice observed in essence as well as form? Is
there freedom, or is the prophet silenced? Does luxury or self-denial
prevail? Do the rich make life hard for the poor? Is childhood
sheltered and is innocence respected? By these, claim the prophets,
a nation stands or falls; and history has proved the claim on wider
worlds than they dreamt of.

But by themselves moral reasons are never enough to justify a
prediction of speedy doom upon any system or society. None of the
prophets began to foretell the fall of Israel till they read, with
keener eyes than their contemporaries, the signs of it in current
history. And this, I take it, was the point which made a notable
difference between them, and one who like them scourged the social
wrongs of his civilisation, yet never spoke a word of its fall.
Juvenal nowhere calls down judgments, except upon individuals. In his
time there were no signs of the decline of the empire, even though,
as he marks, there was a flight from the capital of the virtue which
was to keep the empire alive. But the prophets had political proof of
the nearness of God's judgment, and they spoke in the power of its
coincidence with the moral corruption of their people.

Again, if conscience and history (both of them, to the prophets,
being witnesses of God) thus combine to announce the early doom of a
civilisation, neither the religion that may have helped to build it,
nor any remanent virtue in it, nor its ancient value to God, can avail
to save. We are tempted to judge that the long and costly development
of ages is cruelly thrown away by the convulsion and collapse of an
empire; it feels impious to think that the patience, the providence,
the millennial discipline of the Almighty are to be in a moment
abandoned to some rude and savage force. But we are wrong. _You only
have I known of all the families of the ground_, yet I must _visit upon
you your iniquities._ Nothing is too costly for justice. And God finds
some other way of conserving the real results of the past.

Again, it is a corollary of all this, that the sentence upon
civilisation must often seem to come by voices that are insane, and
its execution by means that are criminal. Of course, when civilisation
is arraigned as a whole, and its overthrow demanded, there may be
nothing behind the attack but jealousy or greed, the fanaticism of
ignorant men or the madness of disordered lives. But this is not
necessarily the case. For God has often in history chosen the outsider
as the herald of doom, and sent the barbarian as its instrument. By
the statesmen and patriots of Israel, Amos must have been regarded as
a mere savage, with a savage's hate of civilisation. But we know what
he answered when Amaziah called him rebel. And it was not only for its
suddenness that the apostles said the _day of the Lord should come as
a thief_, but also because of its methods. For over and over again has
doom been pronounced, and pronounced truly, by men who in the eyes of
civilisation were criminals and monsters.

Now apply these four principles to the question of ourselves. It will
scarcely be denied that our civilisation tolerates, and in part
lives by, the existence of vices which, as we all admit, ruined the
ancient empires. Are the political possibilities of overthrow also
present? That there exist among us means of new historic convulsions
is a thing hard for us to admit. But the signs cannot be hid. When
we see the jealousies of the Christian peoples, and their enormous
preparations for battle; the arsenals of Europe which a few sparks
may blow up; the millions of soldiers one man's word may mobilise;
when we imagine the opportunities which a general war would furnish
to the discontented masses of the European proletariat,--we must
surely acknowledge the existence of forces capable of inflicting
calamities, so severe as to affect not merely this nationality
or that type of culture, but the very vigour and progress of
civilisation herself; and all this without our looking beyond
Christendom, or taking into account the rise of the yellow races to a
consciousness of their approach to equality with ourselves. If, then,
in the eyes of the Divine justice Christendom merits judgment,--if
life continue to be left so hard to the poor; if innocence be still
an impossibility for so much of the childhood of the Christian
nations; if with so many of the leaders of civilisation prurience
be lifted to the level of an art, and licentiousness followed as
a cult; if we continue to pour the evils of our civilisation upon
the barbarian, and "the vices of our young nobles," to paraphrase
Juvenal, "are aped in" Hindustan,--then let us know that the
means of a judgment more awful than any which has yet scourged a
delinquent civilisation are extant and actual among us. And if one
should reply, that our Christianity makes all the difference, that
God cannot undo the development of nineteen centuries, or cannot
overthrow the peoples of His Son,--let us remember that God does
justice at whatever cost; that as He did not spare Israel at the
hands of Assyria, so He did not spare Christianity in the East when
the barbarians of the desert found her careless and corrupt. _You
only have I known of all the families of the ground, therefore will I
visit upon you all your iniquities._

CHAPTER IX

_THE FALSE PEACE OF RITUAL_

AMOS iv. 4-vi.

The next four groups of oracles[287]--iv. 4-13, v. 1-17, v. 18-27
and vi.--treat of many different details, and each of them has its
own emphasis; but all are alike in this, that they vehemently attack
the national worship and the sense of political security which it
has engendered. Let us at once make clear that this worship is the
worship of Jehovah. It is true that it is mixed with idolatry, but,
except possibly in one obscure verse,[288] Amos does not concern
himself with the idols. What he strikes at, what he would sweep away,
is his people's form of devotion to their own God. The cult of the
national God, at the national sanctuaries, in the national interest
and by the whole body of the people, who practise it with a zeal
unparalleled by their forefathers--this is what Amos condemns. And
he does so absolutely. He has nothing but scorn for the temples and
the feasts. The assiduity of attendance, the liberality of gifts,
the employment of wealth and art and patriotism in worship--he tells
his generation that God loathes it all. Like Jeremiah, he even
seems to imply that God never instituted in Israel any sacrifice
or offering.[289] It is all this which gives these oracles their
interest for us; and that interest is not merely historical.

It is indeed historical to begin with. When we find, not idolatry, but
all religious ceremonial--temples, public worship, tithes, sacrifice,
the praise of God by music, in fact every material form in which
man has ever been wont to express his devotion to God--scorned and
condemned with the same uncompromising passion as idolatry itself, we
receive a needed lesson in the history of religion. For when one is
asked, What is the distinguishing characteristic of heathenism? one is
always ready to say, Idolatry, which is not true. The distinguishing
characteristic of heathenism is the stress which it lays upon
ceremonial. To the pagan religions, both of the ancient and of the
modern world, rites were the indispensable element in religion. The
gifts of the gods, the abundance of fruits, the security of the state,
depended upon the full and accurate performance of ritual. In Greek
literature we have innumerable illustrations of this: the _Iliad_
itself starts from a god's anger, roused by an insult to his priest,
whose prayers for vengeance he hears because sacrifices have been
assiduously offered to him. And so too with the systems of paganism
from which the faith of Israel, though at first it had so much in
common with them, broke away to its supreme religious distinction.
The Semites laid the stress of their obedience to the gods upon
traditional ceremonies; and no sin was held so heinous by them as the
neglect or infringement of a religious rite. By the side of it offences
against one's fellow-men or one's own character were deemed mere
misdemeanours. In the day of Amos this pagan superstition thoroughly
penetrated the religion of Jehovah, and so absorbed the attention of
men, that without the indignant and complete repudiation of it prophecy
could not have started on her task of identifying morality with
religion, and of teaching men more spiritual views of God. But even
when we are thus aware of ceremonialism as the characteristic quality
of the pagan religions, we have not measured the full reason of that
uncompromising attack on it, which is the chief feature of this part
of the permanent canon of our religion. For idolatries die everywhere;
but everywhere a superstitious ritualism survives. It continues with
philosophies that have ceased to believe in the gods who enforced it.
Upon ethical movements which have gained their freedom by breaking away
from it, in the course of time it makes up, and lays its paralysing
weight. With offers of help it flatters religions the most spiritual
in theory and intention. The Pharisees, than whom few parties had at
first purer ideals of morality, tithed mint, anise and cummin, to the
neglect of the essence of the Law; and even sound Christians, who
have assimilated the Gospel of St. John, find it hard and sometimes
impossible to believe in salvation apart from their own sacraments, or
outside their own denominational forms. Now this is because ritual is
a thing which appeals both to the baser and to the nobler instincts of
man. To the baser it offers itself as a mechanical atonement for sin,
and a substitute for all moral and intellectual effort in connection
with faith; to the nobler it insists on a man's need in religion of
order and routine, of sacrament and picture. Plainly then the words
of Amos have significance for more than the immediate problems of his
day. And if it seem to some, that Amos goes too far with his cry to
sweep away all ceremonial, let them remember, besides the crisis of
his times, that the temper he exposes and seeks to dissipate is a rank
and obdurate error of the human heart. Our Lord, who recognised the
place of ritual in worship, who said, _Thus it behoveth us to fulfil
all righteousness_, which righteousness in the dialect of His day
was not the moral law, but man's due of rite, sacrifice, tithe and
alms,[290] said also, _I will have mercy and not sacrifice_. There is
an irreducible minimum of rite and routine in worship; there is an
invaluable loyalty to traditional habits; there are holy and spiritual
uses in symbol and sacrament. But these are all dispensable; and
because they are all constantly abused, the voice of the prophet is
ever needed which tells us that God will have none of them; but let
justice roll on like water, and righteousness like an unfailing stream.

For the superstition that ritual is the indispensable bond between
God and man, Amos substitutes two other aspects of religion. They are
history as God's discipline of man; and civic justice, as man's duty
to God. The first of them he contrasts with religious ceremonialism
in chap. iv. 4-13, and the second in chap. v.; while in chap. vi. he
assaults once more the false political peace which the ceremonialism
engenders.

1. FOR WORSHIP, CHASTISEMENT.

AMOS iv. 4-13.

In chap. ii. Amos contrasted the popular conception of religion as
worship with God's conception of it as history. He placed a picture
of the sanctuary, hot with religious zeal, but hot too with passion
and the fumes of wine, side by side with a great prospect of the
national history: God's guidance of Israel from Egypt onwards. That
is, as we said at the time, he placed an indoors picture of religion
side by side with an open-air one. He repeats that arrangement here.
The religious services he sketches are more pure, and the history he
takes from his own day; but the contrast is the same. Again we have
on the one side the temple worship--artificial, exaggerated, indoors,
smoky; but on the other a few movements of God in Nature, which,
though they all be calamities, have a great moral majesty upon them.
The first opens with a scornful call to worship, which the prophet,
letting out his whole heart at the beginning, shows to be equivalent
to sin. Note next the impossible caricature of their exaggerated
zeal: sacrifices every morning instead of once a year, tithes every
three days instead of every three years.[291] To offer leavened
bread was a departure from the older fashion of unleavened.[292] To
publish their liberality was like the later Pharisees, who were not
dissimilarly mocked by our Lord: _When thou doest alms, cause not
a trumpet to be sounded before thee, as the hypocrites do in the
synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men._[293]
There is a certain rhythm in the taunt; but the prose style seems
to be resumed with fitness when the prophet describes the solemn
approach of God in deeds of doom.

_Come away to Bethel and transgress,
At Gilgal exaggerate your transgression!
And bring every morning your sacrifices,
Every three days your tithes!
And send up the savour of leavened bread as a thank-offering,
And call out your liberalities--make them to be heard!
For so ye love_ to do, _O children of Israel:
Oracle of Jehovah._

_But I on My side have given you cleanness of teeth in all your
cities, and want of bread in all your places--yet ye did not return
to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_But I on My side withheld from you the winter rain,_[294] _while it
was still three months to the harvest: and I let it rain repeatedly
on one city, and upon one city I did not let it rain: one lot was
rained upon, and the lot that was not rained upon withered; and two
or three cities kept straggling to one city to drink water, and were
not satisfied--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I smote you with blasting and with mildew: many of your gardens and
your vineyards and your figs and your olives the locust devoured--yet
ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I sent among you a pestilence by way of Egypt:_[295] _I slew with
the sword your youths--besides the capture of your horses--and I
brought up the stench of your camps to your nostrils--yet ye did not
return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I overturned among you, like God's own overturning of Sodom and
Gomorrah, till ye became as a brand plucked from the burning--yet ye
did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

This recalls a passage in that English poem of which we are again and
again reminded by the Book of Amos, _The Vision of Piers Plowman_. It
is the sermon of Reason in Passus V. (Skeat's edition):--

"He preved that thise pestilences · were for pure synne,
And the southwest wynde · in saterday et evene
Was pertliche[296] for pure pride · and for no poynt elles.
Piries and plomtrees · were puffed to the erthe,
In ensample ze segges[297] · ze shulden do the bettere.
Beches and brode okes · were blowen to the grounde.
Torned upward her tailles · in tokenynge of drede,
That dedly synne at domesday · shal fordon[298] hem alle."

In the ancient world it was a settled belief that natural calamities
like these were the effects of the deity's wrath. When Israel suffers
from them the prophets take for granted that they are for the people's
punishment. I have elsewhere shown how the climate of Palestine lent
itself to these convictions; in this respect the Book of Deuteronomy
contrasts it with the climate of Egypt.[299] And although some, perhaps
rightly, have scoffed at the exaggerated form of the belief, that God
is angry with the sons of men every time drought or floods happen,
yet the instinct is sound which in all ages has led religious people
to feel that such things are inflicted for moral purposes. In the
economy of the universe there may be ends of a purely physical kind
served by such disasters, apart altogether from their meaning to man.
But man at least learns from them that nature does not exist solely
for feeding, clothing and keeping him wealthy; nor is it anything else
than his monotheism, his faith in God as the Lord both of his moral
life and of nature, which moves him to believe, as Hebrew prophets
taught and as our early English seer heard Reason herself preach. Amos
had the more need to explain those disasters as the work of the God
of righteousness, because his contemporaries, while willing to grant
Jehovah leadership in war, were tempted to attribute to the Canaanite
gods of the land all power over the seasons.

What, however, more immediately concerns us in this passage is its
very effective contrast between men's treatment of God and God's
treatment of men. They lavish upon Him gifts and sacrifices. He--_on
His side_--sends them cleanness of teeth, drought, blasting of their
fruits, pestilence, war and earthquake. That is to say, they regard
Him as a being only to be flattered and fed. He regards them as
creatures with characters to discipline, even at the expense of their
material welfare. Their views of Him, if religious, are sensuous and
gross; His views of them, if austere, are moral and ennobling. All
this may be grim, but it is exceeding grand; and short as the efforts
of Amos are, we begin to perceive in him something already of the
greatness of an Isaiah.

And have not those, who have believed as Amos believed, ever been the
strong spirits of our race, making the very disasters which crushed
them to the earth the tokens that God has great views about them?
Laugh not at the simple peoples, who have their days of humiliation,
and their fast-days after floods and stunted harvests. For they
take these, not like other men, as the signs of their frailty and
helplessness; but as measures of the greatness God sees in them, His
provocation of their souls to the infinite possibilities which He has
prepared for them.

Israel, however, did not turn even at the fifth call to penitence,
and so there remained nothing for her but a fearful looking forward
to judgment, all the more terrible that the prophet does not define
what the judgment shall be.

_Therefore thus shall I do to thee, O Israel: because I am going to
do this to thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, He that
formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth to man
what His thought is, that maketh morning darkness, and marcheth on
the high places of earth, Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His Name._[300]

2. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE.

AMOS v.

In the next of these groups of oracles Amos continues his attack on
the national ritual, and now contrasts it with the service of God in
public life--the relief of the poor, the discharge of justice. But
he does not begin with this. The group opens with an elegy, which
bewails the nation as already fallen. It is always difficult to mark
where the style of a prophet passes from rhythmical prose into what
we may justly call a metrical form. But in this short wail, we catch
the well-known measure of the Hebrew dirge; not so artistic as in
later poems, yet with at least the characteristic couplet of a long
and a short line.

_Hear this word which I lift up against you--a Dirge, O house of
Israel_:--

_Fallen, no more shall she rise,_
_Virgin of Israel!_
_Flung down on her own ground,_
_No one to raise her!_

The _Virgin_, which with Isaiah is a standing title for Jerusalem and
occasionally used of other cities, is here probably the whole nation
of Northern Israel. The explanation follows. It is War. _For thus
saith the Lord Jehovah: The city that goeth forth a thousand shall
have an hundred left; and she that goeth forth an hundred shall have
left ten for the house of Israel._

But judgment is not yet irrevocable. There break forthwith the only
two promises which lighten the lowering darkness of the book. Let the
people turn to Jehovah Himself--and that means let them turn from the
ritual, and instead of it purge their civic life, restore justice in
their courts and help the poor. For God and moral good are one. It
is _seek Me and ye shall live_, and _seek good and ye shall live_.
Omitting for the present all argument as to whether the interruption
of praise to the power of Jehovah be from Amos or another, we read
the whole oracle as follows.

_Thus saith Jehovah to the house of Israel: Seek Me and live. But
seek not Bethel, and come not to Gilgal, and to Beersheba pass not
over_--to come to Beersheba one had to cross all Judah. _For Gilgal
shall taste the gall of exile_--it is not possible except in this
clumsy way to echo the prophet's play upon words, "Ha-Gilgal galoh
yigleh"--_and Bethel_, God's house, _shall become an idolatry_. This
rendering, however, scarcely gives the rude force of the original;
for the word rendered idolatry, Aven, means also falsehood and
perdition, so that we should not exaggerate the antithesis if we
employed a phrase which once was not vulgar: _And Bethel, house of
God, shall go to the devil!_[301] The epigram was the more natural
that near Bethel, on a site now uncertain, but close to the edge
of the desert to which it gave its name, there lay from ancient
times a village actually called Beth-Aven, however the form may
have risen. And we shall find Hosea stereotyping this epigram of
Amos, and calling the sanctuary Beth-Aven oftener than he calls it
Beth-El.[302] _Seek ye Jehovah and live,_ he begins again, _lest He
break forth like fire, O house of Joseph, and it consume and there
be none to quench at Bethel._[303] ...[304] _He that made the Seven
Stars and Orion,_[305] _that turneth the murk_[306] _into morning,
and day He darkeneth to night, that calleth for the waters of the
sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth--Jehovah His Name.
He it is that flasheth out ruin_[307] _on strength, and bringeth
down_[308] _destruction on the fortified._ This rendering of the
last verse is uncertain, and rightly suspected, but there is no
alternative so probable, and it returns to the keynote from which the
passage started, that God should break forth like fire.

Ah, _they that turn justice to wormwood, and abase_[309]
_righteousness to the earth! They hate him that reproveth in the
gate_--in an Eastern city both the law-court and place of the popular
council--_and him that speaketh sincerely they abhor_. So in the
English mystic's Vision Peace complains of Wrong:--

"I dar noughte for fere of hym · fyghte ne chyde."[310]

_Wherefore, because ye trample on the weak and take from him a present
of corn,_[311] _ye have built houses of ashlar,_[312] _but ye shall not
dwell in them; vineyards for pleasure have ye planted, but ye shall
not drink of their wine. For I know how many are your crimes, and
how forceful_[313] _your sins--ye that browbeat the righteous, take
bribes, and bring down the poor in the gate! Therefore the prudent in
such a time is dumb, for an evil time is it_ indeed.

_Seek good and not evil, that ye may live, and Jehovah God of Hosts be
with you, as ye say_ He is. _Hate evil and love good; and in the gate
set justice on her feet again--peradventure Jehovah God of Hosts may
have pity on the remnant of Joseph._ If in the Book of Amos there be
any passages, which, to say the least, do not now lie in their proper
places, this is one of them. For, firstly, while it regards the nation
as still responsible for the duties of government, it recognises them
as reduced to a remnant. To find such a state of affairs we have to
come down to the years subsequent to 734, when Tiglath-Pileser swept
into captivity all Gilead and Galilee--that is, two-thirds, in bulk,
of the territory of Northern Israel--but left Ephraim untouched. In
answer to this, it may, of course, be pointed out that in thus calling
the people to repentance, so that a remnant might be saved, Amos may
have been contemplating a disaster still future, from which, though
it was inevitable, God might be moved to spare a remnant.[314] That
is very true. But it does not meet this further difficulty, that the
verses (14, 15) plainly make interruption between the end of ver. 13
and the beginning of ver. 16; and that the initial _therefore_ of the
latter verse, while it has no meaning in its present sequence, becomes
natural and appropriate when made to follow immediately on ver. 13. For
all these reasons, then, I take vv. 14 and 15 as a parenthesis, whether
from Amos himself or from a later writer who can tell? But it ought
to be kept in mind that in other prophetic writings where judgment
is very severe, we have some proof of the later insertion of calls to
repentance, by way of mitigation.

Ver. 13 had said the time was so evil that the prudent man kept
silence. All the more must the Lord Himself speak, as ver. 16 now
proclaims. _Therefore thus saith Jehovah, God of Hosts,_[315] _Lord:
On all open ways lamentation, and in all streets they shall be
saying, Ah woe! Ah woe! And in all vineyards lamentation,_[316] _and
they shall call the ploughman to wailing and to lamentation them
that are skilful in dirges_--town and country, rustic and artist
alike--_for I shall pass through thy midst, saith Jehovah._ It is
the solemn formula of the Great Passover, when Egypt was filled with
wailing and there were dead in every house.

The next verse starts another, but a kindred, theme. As blind as
was Israel's confidence in ritual, so blind was their confidence in
dogma, and the popular dogma was that of the _Day of Jehovah_.

All popular hopes expect their victory to come in a single sharp
crisis--a day. And again, the day of any one means either the day he
has appointed, or the day of his display and triumph. So Jehovah's
day meant to the people the day of His judgment, or of His triumph:
His triumph in war over their enemies, His judgment upon the heathen.
But Amos, whose keynote has been that judgment begins at home, cries
woe upon such hopes, and tells his people that for them the day of
Jehovah is not victory, but rather insidious, importunate, inevitable
death. And this he describes as a man who has lived, alone with wild
beasts, from the jungles of the Jordan, where the lions lurk, to the
huts of the desert infested by snakes.

_Woe unto them that long for the day of Jehovah! What have you to do
with the day of Jehovah? It is darkness, and not light. As when a man
fleeth from the face of a lion, and a bear falls upon him; and he comes
into his home_,[317] _and_, breathless, _leans his hand upon the wall,
and a serpent bites him._ And then, as if appealing to Heaven for
confirmation: Is it not so? _Is it not darkness, the day of Jehovah,
and not light? storm darkness, and not a ray of light upon it?_

Then Amos returns to the worship, that nurse of their vain hopes,
that false prophet of peace, and he hears God speak more strongly
than ever of its futility and hatefulness.

_I hate, I loathe your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your
gatherings to sacrifice._ For with pagan folly they still believed that
the smoke of their burnt-offerings went up to heaven and flattered the
nostrils of Deity. How ingrained was this belief may be judged by us
from the fact that the terms of it had to be adopted by the apostles
of a spiritual religion, if they would make themselves understood, and
are now the metaphors of the sacrifices of the Christian heart.[318]
_Though ye bring to Me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings I will
not be pleased, or your thank-offerings of fatted calves, I will not
look at them. Let cease from Me the noise of thy songs; to the playing
of thy viols I will not listen. But let justice roll on like water, and
righteousness like an unfailing stream._

Then follows the remarkable appeal from the habits of this age
to those of the times of Israel's simplicity. _Was it flesh- or
meal-offerings that ye brought Me in the wilderness, forty years,
O house of Israel?_[319] That is to say, at the very time when God
made Israel His people, and led them safely to the promised land--the
time when of all others He did most for them--He was not moved to
such love and deliverance by the propitiatory bribes, which this
generation imagine to be so availing and indispensable. Nay, those
still shall not avail, for exile from the land shall now as surely
come in spite of them, as the possession of the land in old times
came without them. This at least seems to be the drift of the very
obscure verse which follows, and is the unmistakable statement of the
close of the oracle. _But ye shall lift up ... your king and ... your
god, images which you have made for yourselves;_[320] _and I will
carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah--God of
Hosts is His Name!_[321] So this chapter closes like the previous,
with the marshalling of God's armies. But as there His hosts were
the movements of Nature and the Great Stars, so here they are the
nations of the world. By His rule of both He is the God of Hosts.

3. "AT EASE IN ZION."

AMOS vi.

The evil of the national worship was the false political confidence
which it engendered. Leaving the ritual alone, Amos now proceeds to
assault this confidence. We are taken from the public worship of
the people to the private banquets of the rich, but again only in
order to have their security and extravagance contrasted with the
pestilence, the war and the captivity, that are rapidly approaching.

_Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion_[322]--it is a proud
and overweening ease which the word expresses--_and that trust
in the mount of Samaria! Men of mark of the first of the
peoples_--ironically, for that is Israel's opinion of itself--_and
to them do the house of Israel resort!_...[323] _Ye that put
off the day of calamity_[324] _and draw near the sessions of
injustice_[325]--an epigram and proverb, for it is the universal
way of men to wish and fancy far away the very crisis that their
sins are hastening on. Isaiah described this same generation as
drawing iniquity with cords of hypocrisy, and sin as it were
with a cart-rope! _That lie on ivory diwans and sprawl on their
couches_--another luxurious custom, which filled this rude shepherd
with contempt--_and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the
midst of the stall_[326]--that is, only the most delicate of
meats--_who prate_ or _purr_ or _babble to the sound of the viol,
and as if they were David_ himself _invent for them instruments of
song;_[327] _who drink wine by ewerfuls--waterpotfuls--and anoint
with the finest of oil--yet never do they grieve at the havoc of
Joseph!_ The havoc is the moral havoc, for the social structure of
Israel is obviously still secure.[328] The rich are indifferent to
it; they have wealth, art, patriotism, religion, but neither heart
for the poverty nor conscience for the sin of their people. We know
their kind! They are always with us, who live well and imagine they
are proportionally clever and refined. They have their political
zeal, will rally to an election when the interests of their class
or their trade is in danger. They have a robust and exuberant
patriotism, talk grandly of commerce, empire and the national
destiny; but for the real woes and sores of the people, the poverty,
the overwork, the drunkenness, the dissoluteness, which more affect a
nation's life than anything else, they have no pity and no care.

_Therefore now_--the double initial of judgment--_shall they go into
exile at the head of the exiles, and stilled shall be the revelry of
the dissolute_--literally _the sprawlers_, as in ver. 4, but used
here rather in the moral than in the physical sense. _Sworn hath the
Lord Jehovah by Himself--'tis the oracle of Jehovah God of Hosts: I
am loathing_[329] _the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and
I will pack up a city and its fulness._[330]... _For, behold, Jehovah
is commanding, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the
small house into splinters._ The collapse must come, postpone it as
their fancy will, for it has been worked for and is inevitable. How
could it be otherwise? _Shall horses run on a cliff, or the sea be
ploughed by oxen_[331]--_that ye should turn justice to poison and
the fruit of righteousness to wormwood! Ye that exult in Lo-Debar
and say, By our own strength have we taken to ourselves Ḳarnaim._ So
Grätz rightly reads the verse. The Hebrew text and all the versions
take these names as if they were common nouns--Lo-Debar, _a thing
of nought_; Ḳarnaim, _a pair of horns_--and doubtless it was just
because of this possible play upon their names, that Amos selected
these two out of all the recent conquests of Israel. Karnaim, in
full Ashteroth Karnaim, _Astarte of Horns_, was that immemorial
fortress and sanctuary which lay out upon the great plateau of Bashan
towards Damascus; so obvious and cardinal a site that it appears
in the sacred history both in the earliest recorded campaign in
Abraham's time and in one of the latest under the Maccabees.[332]
Lo-Debar was of Gilead, and probably lay on that last rampart of
the province northward, overlooking the Yarmuk, a strategical point
which must have often been contested by Israel and Aram, and with
which no other Old Testament name has been identified.[333] These two
fortresses, with many others, Israel had lately taken from Aram; but
not, as they boasted, _by their own strength_. It was only Aram's
pre-occupation with Assyria now surgent on the northern flank,
which allowed Israel these easy victories. And this same northern
foe would soon overwhelm themselves. _For, behold, I am to raise
up against you, O house of Israel--'tis the oracle of Jehovah God
of the hosts_[334]--_a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the
Entrance of Hamath to the Torrent of the 'Arabah._ Every one knows
the former, the Pass between the Lebanons, at whose mouth stands Dan,
northern limit of Israel; but it is hard to identify the latter. If
Amos means to include Judah, we should have expected the Torrent of
Egypt, the present Wady el 'Arish; but the Wady of the 'Arabah may
be a corresponding valley in the eastern watershed issuing in the
'Arabah. If Amos threatens only the Northern Kingdom, he intends some
wady running down to that Sea of the 'Arabah, the Dead Sea, which is
elsewhere given as the limit of Israel.[335]

The Assyrian flood, then, was about to break, and the oracles close
with the hopeless prospect of the whole land submerged beneath it.

4. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE.

In the above exposition we have omitted two very curious verses, 9
and 10, which are held by some critics to interrupt the current of
the chapter, and to reflect an entirely different kind of calamity
from that which it predicts. I do not think these critics right, for
reasons I am about to give; but the verses are so remarkable that it is
most convenient to treat them by themselves apart from the rest of the
chapter. Here they are, with the verse immediately in front of them.

_I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate. And I
will give up a city and its fulness_ to ...(perhaps _siege_ or
_pestilence_?). _And it shall come to pass, if there be left ten men
in one house, and they die,_[336] ... _that his cousin_[337] _and
the man to burn him shall lift him to bring the body_[338] _out of
the house, and they shall say to one who is in the recesses of the
house_,[339] _Are there any more with thee? And he shall say, Not one
... and they shall say, Hush!_ (_for one must not make mention of the
name of Jehovah_).

This grim fragment is obscure in its relation to the context. But
the death of even so large a household as ten--the funeral left to a
distant relation--the disposal of the bodies by burning instead of
the burial customary among the Hebrews[340]--sufficiently reflect
the kind of calamity. It is a weird little bit of memory, the
recollection of an eye-witness, from one of those great pestilences
which, during the first half of the eighth century, happened not
seldom in Western Asia.[341] But what does it do here? Wellhausen
says that there is nothing to lead up to the incident; that before
it the chapter speaks, not of pestilence, but only of political
destruction by an enemy. This is not accurate. The phrase immediately
preceding may mean either _I will shut up a city and its fulness_,
in which case a siege is meant, and a siege was the possibility
both of famine and pestilence; or _I will give up the city and its
fulness_..., in which case a word or two may have been dropped,
as words have undoubtedly been dropped at the end of the next
verse, and one ought perhaps to add _to the pestilence_.[342] The
latter alternative is the more probable, and this may be one of the
passages, already alluded to,[343] in which the want of connection
with the preceding verses is to be explained, not upon the favourite
theory that there has been a violent intrusion into the text, but
upon the too much neglected hypothesis that some words have been lost.

The uncertainty of the text, however, does not weaken the impression
of its ghastly realism: the unclean and haunted house; the kinsman
and the body-burner afraid to search through the infected rooms,
and calling in muffled voice to the single survivor crouching in
some far corner of them, _Are there any more with thee?_ his reply,
_None_--himself the next! Yet these details are not the most weird.
Over all hangs a terror darker than the pestilence. _Shall there be
evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_ Such, as we have heard
from Amos, was the settled faith of the age. But in times of woe it
was held with an awful and a craven superstition. The whole of life
was believed to be overhung with loose accumulations of Divine anger.
And as in some fatal hollow in the high Alps, where any noise may
bring down the impending masses of snow, and the fearful traveller
hurries along in silence, so the men of that superstitious age
feared, when an evil like the plague was imminent, even to utter the
Deity's name, lest it should loosen some avalanche of His wrath. _And
he said, Hush! for_, adds the comment, one _must not make mention of
the name of Jehovah_.

This reveals another side of the popular religion which Amos has been
attacking. We have seen it as the sheer superstition of routine;
but we now know that it was a routine broken by panic. The God who
in times of peace was propitiated by regular supplies of savoury
sacrifice and flattery, is conceived, when His wrath is roused and
imminent, as kept quiet only by the silence of its miserable objects.
The false peace of ritual is tempered by panic.

FOOTNOTES:

[268] See above, pp. 82 ff. and pp. 89 ff.

[269] With the LXX. באשור for באשדוד.

[270] שד (ver. 10).

[271] Singular as in LXX., and not plural as in the M.T. and English
versions.

[272] Juvenal, _Satires_, I.

[273] _Vision of Piers Plowman._ Burgages=tenements.

[274] Or _The Enemy, and that right round the Land!_

[275] _In Damascus on a couch: on a Damascus couch: on a
Damascus-cloth couch:_ or _Damascus-fashion on a couch_--alternatives
all equally probable and equally beyond proof. The text is very
difficult, nor do the versions give help. (1) The consonants of
the word before _a couch_ spell _in Damascus_, and so the LXX.
take it. This would be in exact parallel to the _in Samaria_ of
the previous half of the clause. But although Jeroboam II. is
said to have recovered Damascus (2 Kings xiv. 28), this is not
necessarily the town itself, of whose occupation by Israel we have
no evidence, while Amos always assumes it to be Aramean, and here
he is addressing Israelites. Still retaining the name of the city,
we can take it with _couch_ as parallel, not to _in Samaria_, but
to _on the side of a diwan_; in that case the meaning may have been
_a Damascus couch_ (though as the two words stand it is impossible
to parse them, and Gen. xv. 2 cannot be quoted in support of this,
for it is too uncertain itself, being possibly a gloss, though it
is curious that as the two passages run the name Damascus should be
in the same strange grammatical conjunction in each), or possibly
_Damascus-fashion on a couch_, which (if the first half of the
clause, as some maintain, refers to some delicate or affected
posture then come into fashion) is the most probable rendering. (2)
The Massoretes have pointed, not _bedammeseq_ = _in Damascus_, but
_bedemesheq_, a form not found elsewhere, which some (Ges., Hitz.,
Ew., Rev. Eng. Ver., etc.) take to mean some Damascene stuff (as
perhaps our Damask and the Arabic _dimshaq_ originally meant, though
this is not certain), _e.g._ _silk_ or _velvet_ or _cushions_. (3)
Others rearrange the text. _E.g._ Hoffmann (_Z. A. T. W._, III. 102)
takes the whole clause away from ver. 12 and attaches it to ver. 13,
reading _O those who sit in Samaria on the edge of the diwan, and in
Damascus on a couch, hearken and testify against the house of Jacob_.
But, as Wellhausen points out, those addressed in ver. 13 are the
same as those addressed in ver. 9. Wellhausen prefers to believe that
after the words _children of Israel_, which end a sentence, something
has fallen out. The LXX. translator, who makes several blunders in
the course of this chapter, instead of translating ערשׂ couch, the
last word of the verse, merely transliterates it into ἱερεῖς!!

[276] Cf. vi. 4: _that lie on ivory diwans and sprawl on their
couches_.

[277] Van Lennep, _Bible Lands and Customs_, p. 460.

[278] See p. 205, _n._ 4.

[279] The words for hook in Hebrew--the two used above, צִנּוֹת and
סִירות; and a third, חוֹחַ--all mean originally _thorns_, doubtless
the first hooks of primitive man; but by this time they would signify
metal hooks--a change analogous to the English word _pen_.

[280] Cf. Isa. xxxvii. 29; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11. On the use
fish-hooks, Job xl. 26 (Heb.), xli. 2 (Eng.); Ezek. xxix. 4.

[281] The verb, which in the text is active, must be taken in the
passive. The word not translated above is הַהַרְמוֹנָה _unto the
Harmôn_, which name does not occur elsewhere. LXX. read εἰς τὸ ὄρος
τὸ Ῥομμάν, which Ewald renders _ye shall cast the Rimmon to the
mountain_ (cf. Isa. ii. 20), and he takes Rimmon to be the Syrian
goddess of love. Steiner (quoted by Wellhausen) renders _ye shall
be cast out to Hadad Rimmon_, that is, _violated as_ קדשֹות Hitzig
separates ההר from מונה, which he takes as contracted from מענה, and
renders _ye shall fling yourselves out on the mountains as a refuge_.
But none of these is satisfactory.

[282] I have already treated this passage in connection with Isaiah's
prophecies on women in the volume on Isaiah i.-xxxix. (Expositor's
Bible), Chap. XVI.

[283] Cf. chap. vi. 4.

[284] v. 11.

[285] vi. 8, 11.

[286] Cf. what was said on building above, p. 33.

[287] See p. 141.

[288] v. 26.

[289] v. 25.

[290] Another proof of how the spirit of ritualism tends to absorb
morality.

[291] Ver. 4: cf. 1 Sam. i.; Deut. xiv. 28. Wellhausen offers
another exegesis: Amos is describing exactly what took place at
Bethel--sacrifice on the morning, _i.e._ next to the day of their
arrival, tithes on the third day thereafter.

[292] See Wellhausen's note, and compare Lev. vii. 13.

[293] Matt. vi. 2.

[294] גֶשֶׁם: _Hist. Geog._, p. 64. It is interesting that this
year (1895) the same thing was threatened, according to a report in
the _Mittheilungen u. Nachrichten des D.P.V._, p. 44: "Nachdem es
im December einigemal recht stark geregnet hatte besonders an der
Meeresküste ist seit kurz vor Weihnachten das Wetter immer schön u.
mild geblieben, u. wenn nicht weiterer Regen fällt, so wird grosser
Wassermangel entstehen denn bis jetzt (16 Febr.) hat Niemand Cisterne
voll." The harvest is in April-May.

[295] Or in the fashion of Egypt, _i.e._ a thoroughly Egyptian
plague; so called, not with reference to the plagues of Egypt, but
because that country was always the nursery of the pestilence. See
_Hist. Geog._, p. 157 ff. Note how it comes with war.

[296] Apertly, openly.

[297] Men.

[298] Undo.

[299] _Hist. Geog._, Chap. iii., pp. 73 f.

[300] This and similar passages are dealt with by themselves in Chap.
XI.

[301] Cf. LXX.: Βαιθὴλ ἔσται ὡς οὐχ ὑπάρχουσα.

[302] The name Bethel is always printed as one word in our Hebrew
texts. See Baer on Gen. xii. 8.

[303] Wellhausen thinks _at Bethel_ not genuine. But Bethel has been
singled out as the place where the people put their false confidence,
and is naturally named here. LXX.: τῷ οἴκῳ Ἰσραήλ.

[304] Ver. 7 is plainly out of place here, as the LXX. perceived, and
therefore tried to give it another rendering which would make it seem
in place: ὁ ποιῶν εἰς ὕψος κρίμα, καὶ δικαιοσύνην εἰς γὴν ἔθηκεν.
So Ewald removed it to between vv. 9 and 10. There it begins well
another oracle; and it may be that we should insert before it הוי, as
in vv. 18, vi. 1.

[305] Literally _the Group_ and _the Giant_. כימה, Kimah, signifies
group, or little heap. Here it is rendered by Aq. and at Job ix. 9
by LXX. Ἀρκτοῦρος; and here by Theod. and in Job xxxviii. 31, _the
chain_, or _cluster, of the group_ Πλειάδες. The Targ. and Pesh. always
give it as Kima, _i.e._ Pleiades. And this is the rendering of most
moderns. But Stern takes it for Sirius with its constellation of the
Great Dog, for the reason that this is the brightest of all stars, and
therefore a more suitable fellow for Orion than the dimmer Pleiades can
be. כסיל, the Fool or Giant, is the Hebrew name of Ὠρίων, by which the
LXX. render it. Targum ניפלא. To the ancient world the constellation
looked like the figure of a giant fettered in heaven, "a fool so far as
he trusted in his bodily strength" (Dillmann). In later times he was
called Nimrod. His early setting came at the time of the early rains.
Cf. with the passage Job ix. 9 and xxxviii. 31.

[306] The abstract noun meaning _deep shadow_, LXX. σκιά, and
rendered _shadow of death_ by many modern versions.

[307] So LXX., reading שׁבר for שׁד; it improves the rhythm, and
escapes the awkward repetition of שׁד.

[308] So LXX.

[309] Possible alternative: _make stagnant_.

[310] _Vision of Piers Plowman_, Passus IV., l. 52. Cf. the whole
passage.

[311] Uncertain; Hitzig takes it as the apodosis of the previous
clause: _Ye shall have to take from him a present of corn_, _i.e._ as
alms.

[312] See above, p. 33.

[313] Cf. "Pecca fortiter."

[314] As, for instance, the prophet looks forward to in iii. 12.

[315] _God of Hosts_, perhaps an intrusion (?) between אדני and יהוה.

[316] I have ventured to rearrange the order of the clauses, which in
the original is evidently dislocated.

[317] Lit. _the house_.

[318] Eph. v. 2; etc.

[319] No one doubts that this verse is interrogative. But the
Authorised Eng. Ver. puts it in a form--_Have ye brought unto Me?_
etc.--which implies blame that they did not do so. Ewald was the
first to see that, as rendered above, an appeal to the forty years
was the real intention of the verse. So after him nearly all critics,
also the Revised Eng. Ver.: _Did ye bring unto Me?_ On the whole
question of the possibility of such an appeal see above, pp. 100
ff., and cf. Jer. vii. 22, which distinctly declares that in the
wilderness God prescribed no ritual to Israel.

[320] Ver. 26 is very difficult, for both the text and the rendering
of all the possible alternatives of it are quite uncertain. (1) As to
the _text_, the present division into words must be correct; at least
no other is possible. But the present order of the words is obviously
wrong. For _your images_ is evidently described by the relative
clause _which you have made_, and ought to stand next it. What then
is to be done with the two words that at present come between--_star
of your god_? Are they both a mere gloss, as Robertson Smith holds,
and therefore to be struck out? or should they precede the pair of
words, צלמיכם כיון, which they now follow? This is the order of
the text which the LXX. translator had before him, only for כון he
misread רֵיפָן or רֵיוָן: καὶ ἀνελάβετε τὴν σκηνὴν τοῦ Μωλὸχ καὶ τὸ
ἄστρον τοῦ Θεοῦ ὑμῶν Ῥαιφάν [Ῥεφάν, Q], τοὺς τύπους αὐτῶν [om. AQ]
οὓς ἐποιήσατε ἑαυτοῖς. This arrangement has the further evidence in
its favour, that it brings _your god_ into proper parallel with _your
king_. The Hebrew text would then run thus:--

[אלהיכם כוכב] ואת מלככם סכות את ונשאתם
לכם עשיתם אשר צלמיכם כיון

(2) The translation of this text is equally difficult: not in the
verb ונשאתם, for both the grammar and the argument oblige us to
take it as future, _and ye shall lift up_; but in the two words
סכות and כיון. Are these common nouns, or proper names of deities
in apposition to _your king_ and _your god_? The LXX. takes סכות as
= _tabernacle_, and כיון as a proper name (Theodotion takes both as
proper names). The Auth. Eng. Ver. follows the LXX. (except that it
takes _king_ for the name _Moloch_). Schrader (_Stud. u. Krit._,
1874, 324; _K.A.T._, 442 f.) takes them as the consonants of Sakkut,
a name of the Assyrian god Adar, and of Kewan, the Assyrian name for
the planet Saturn: _Ye shall take up Sakkut your king and Kewan your
star-god, your images which_... Baethgen goes further and takes both
the מלך of מלכיכם and the צלם of צלמיכם as Moloch and Ṣelam, proper
names, in combination with Sakkut and Kewan (_Beitr. z. Sem. Rel._,
239). Now it is true that the Second Book of Kings implies that the
worship of the host of heaven existed in Samaria before its fall (2
Kings xvii. 16), but the introduction into Samaria of Assyrian gods
(among them Adar) is placed by it after the fall (2 Kings xvii. 31),
and besides, Amos does not elsewhere speak of the worship of foreign
gods, nor is the mention of them in any way necessary to the argument
here. On the contrary, even if Amos were to mention the worship of
idols by Israel, would he have selected at this point the Assyrian
ones? (See, however, Tiele, _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_,
III., p. 211, who makes Koun and the planet Keiwan purely Phœnician
deities.) Some critics take סכות and כיון as common nouns in the
construct state. So Ewald, and so most recently Robertson Smith
(_O.T.J.C._, 2): _the shrine of your king and the stand of your
images_. This is more in harmony with the absence from the rest of
Amos of any hint as to the worship of idols, but an objection to it,
and a very strong one, is that the alleged common nouns are not found
elsewhere in Hebrew. In view of this conflicting evidence it is best
therefore to leave the words untranslated, as in the text above. It
is just possible that they may themselves be later insertions, for
the verse would read very well without them: _And ye shall lift up
your king and your images which you have made to yourselves_.

[321] The last clause is peculiar. Two clauses seem to have run into
one--_saith Jehovah, God of Hosts_, and _God of Hosts is His Name_.
The word שמו = _His Name_, may have been added to give the oracle the
same conclusion as the oracle at the end of the preceding chapter;
and it is not to be overlooked that שמו at the end of a clause
does not occur elsewhere in the book outside the three questioned
Doxologies iv. 13, v. 8, ix. 6. Further, see below, pp. 204 f.

[322] _In Zion_: "very suspicious," Cornill. But see pp. 135 f.

[323] I remove ver. 2 to a note, not that I am certain that it is
not by Amos--who can be dogmatic on such a point?--but because the
text of it, the place which it occupies, and its relation to the
facts of current history, all raise doubts. Moreover it is easily
detached from the context, without disturbing the flow of the
chapter, which indeed runs more equably without it. The Massoretic
text gives: _Pass over to Calneh, and see; and go thence to Hamath
Rabbah, and come down to Gath of the Philistines: are they better
than these kingdoms, or is their territory larger than yours?_
Presumably _these_ _kingdoms_ are Judah and Israel. But that can
only mean that Israel is the best of the peoples, a statement out
of harmony with the irony of ver. 1, and impossible in the mouth of
Amos. Geiger, therefore, proposes to read: "Are you better than these
kingdoms--_i.e._ Calneh, Hamath, Gath--or is your territory larger
than theirs?" But this is also unlikely, for Israel's territory was
much larger than Gath's. Besides, the question would have force only
if Calneh, Hamath and Gath had already fallen. Gath had, but it is
at least very questionable whether Hamath had. Therefore Schrader
(_K.A.T._, 444) rejects the whole verse; and Kuenen agrees that if we
are to understand Assyrian conquests, it is hardly possible to retain
the verses. Bickell's first argument against the verse, that it does
not fit into the metrical system of Amos vi. 1-7, is precarious; his
second, that it disturbs the grammar, which it makes to jump suddenly
from the third person in ver. 1 to the second in ver. 2, and back to
the third in ver. 3, is not worth anything, for such a jump occurs
within ver. 3 itself.

[324] Davidson, _Syntax_, § 100, R. 5.

[325] חמם שׁבת; LXX. σαββάτων ψευδῶν, on which hint Hoffmann renders
the verse: "you that daily demand the tribute of evil (cf. Ezek.
xvi. 33), and every Sabbath extort by violence." But this is both
unnecessary and opposed to viii. 5, which tells us no trade was done
on the Sabbath. שבת is to be taken in the common sense of sitting
in judgment (rather than with Wellhausen), in the sense of the
enthronement of wrong-doing.

[326] To this day, in some parts of Palestine, the general fold into
which the cattle are shut contains a portion railed off for calves
and lambs (cf. Dr. M. Blanckenhorn of Erlangen in the _Mittheilungen
u. Nachrichten_ of the D.P.V., 1895, p. 37, with a sketch). It must
be this to which Amos refers.

[327] Or perhaps _melodies_, _airs_.

[328] Of course, it is possible that here again, as in v. 15 and 16,
we have prophecy later than the disaster of 734, when Tiglath-Pileser
made a great _breach_ or _havoc_ in the body politic of Israel by
taking Gilead and Galilee captive. But this is scarcely probable,
for Amos almost everywhere lays stress upon the moral corruption of
Israel, as her real and essential danger.

[329] מתאב for מתעב.

[330] Some words must have dropped out here. For these and the
following verses 9 and 10 on the pestilence see pp. 178 ff.

[331] So Michaelis, יָם בְּבָקָר for בִּבְקָרִים.

[332] Gen. xiv. 5; 1 Macc. v. In the days of Eusebius and Jerome (4th
century) there were two places of the name: one of them doubtless the
present Tell Ashtara south of El-Merkez, the other distant from that
fourteen Roman miles.

[333] Along this ridge ran, and still runs, one of the most important
highways to the East, that from Beth-Shan by Gadera to Edrei. About
seven miles east from Gadera lies a village, Ibdar, "with a good
spring and some ancient remains" (Schumacher, _N. Ajlun_, 101).
Lo-Debar is mentioned in 2 Sam. ix. 45; xvii. 27; and doubtless the
Lidebir of Josh. xiii. 26 on the north border of Gilead is the same.

[334] With the article, an unusual form of the title. LXX. here
κύριος τῶν δυνάμεων.

[335] 2 Kings xiv. 25. The Torrent of the 'Arabah can scarcely be
the Torrent of the 'Arabim of Isa. xv. 7 for the latter was outside
Israel's territory, and the border between Moab and Edom. The LXX.
render _Torrent of the West_, τῶν δυσμῶν.

[336] Here there is evidently a gap in the text. The LXX. insert καὶ
ὑπολειφθήσονται ὁι κατάλοιποι; perhaps therefore the text originally
ran _and the survivors die_.

[337] Or _uncle_--that is, a distant relative, presumably because all
the near ones are dead.

[338] Literally _bones_.

[339] LXX. τοῖς προεστηκόσι: evidently in ignorance of the reading or
the meaning.

[340] The burning of a body was regarded, as we have seen (Amos
ii. 1), as a great sacrilege; and was practised, outside times of
pestilence only in cases of great criminals: Lev. xx. 14; xxi. 9;
Josh. vii. 25. Doughty (_Arabia Deserta_, 68) mentions a case in
which, in Medina, a Persian pilgrim was burned to death by an angry
crowd for defiling Mohammed's tomb.

[341] The Assyrian inscriptions record at least three--in 803, 765, 759.

[342] As in Psalm lxxviii. 50. הִסְגִּיר, to give up, is so seldom
used absolutely (Deut. xxxii. 30 is poetry and elliptic) that we may
well believe it was followed by words signifying to what the city was
to be given up.

[343] Pp. 141 f.

CHAPTER X

_DOOM OR DISCIPLINE?_

AMOS viii. 4-ix.

We now enter the Third Section of the Book of Amos: chaps. vii.-ix.
As we have already treated the first part of it--the group of four
visions, which probably formed the prophet's discourse at Bethel,
with the interlude of his adventure there (vii.-viii. 3)[344]--we may
pass at once to what remains: from viii. 4 to the end of the book.
This portion consists of groups of oracles more obscure in their
relations to each other than any we have yet studied, and probably
containing a number of verses which are not from Amos himself. They
open in a denunciation of the rich, which echoes previous oracles,
and soon pass to judgments of a kind already threatened, but now with
greater relentlessness. Then, just as all is at the darkest, lights
break; exceptions are made; the inevitable captivity is described no
more as doom, but as discipline; and, with only this preparation for
a change, we are swept out on a scene, in which, although the land
is strewn with the ruins that have been threatened, the sunshine of
a new day floods them; the promise of restoration is given; Nature
herself will be regenerated, and the whole life of Israel planted on
its own ground again.

Whether it was given to Amos himself to behold this day--whether
these last verses of the book were his "Nunc Dimittis," or the hope
of a later generation, which found his book intolerably severe,
and mingled with its judgments their own new mercies--we shall try
to discover further on. Meanwhile there is no doubt that we start
with the authentic oracles of the prophet. We know the ring of his
voice. To the tyranny of the rich, which he has so often lashed, he
now adds the greed and fraud of the traders; and he paints Israel's
doom in those shapes of earthquake, eclipse and famine with which
his own generation had recently become familiar. Note that in this
first group Amos employs only physical calamities, and says nothing
of war and captivity. If the standard which we have already applied
to the growth of his doctrine be correct, these ought therefore to
be counted among his earlier utterances. War and captivity follow in
chap. ix. That is to say, this Third Section follows the same line of
development as both the First and the Second.

1. EARTHQUAKE, ECLIPSE AND FAMINE.

AMOS viii. 4-14.

_Hear this, ye who trample the needy, and would put an end to_[345]
_the lowly of the land, saying, When will the New-Moon be over, that
we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, that we may open corn_ (_by
making small the measure, but large the weight, and falsifying the
fraudulent balances; buying the wretched for silver, and the needy
for a pair of shoes!_), _and that we may sell as grain the refuse
of the corn!_ The parenthesis puzzles, but is not impossible: in
the speed of his scorn, Amos might well interrupt the speech of the
merchants by these details of their fraud,[346] flinging these in
their teeth as they spoke. The existence at this date of the New-Moon
and Sabbath as days of rest from business is interesting; but even
more interesting is the peril to which they lie open. As in the
case of the Nazirites and the prophets, we see how the religious
institutions and opportunities of the people are threatened by
worldliness and greed. And, as in every other relevant passage of the
Old Testament, we have the interests of the Sabbath bound up in the
same cause with the interests of the poor. The Fourth Commandment
enforces the day of rest on behalf of the servants and bondsmen. When
a later prophet substitutes for religious fasts the ideals of social
service, he weds with the latter the security of the Sabbath from all
business.[347] So here Amos emphasises that the Sabbath is threatened
by the same worldliness and love of money which tramples on the
helpless. The interests of the Sabbath are the interests of the poor:
the enemies of the Sabbath are the enemies of the poor. And all this
illustrates our Saviour's saying, that _the Sabbath was made for man_.

But, as in the rest of the book, judgment again follows hard on sin.
_Sworn hath Jehovah by the pride of Jacob, Never shall I forget their
deeds._ It is as before. The chief spring of the prophet's inspiration
is his burning sense of the personal indignation of God against crimes
so abominable. God is the God of the poor, and His anger rises, as
we see the anger of Christ arise, heavy against their tyrants and
oppressors. Such sins are intolerable to Him. But the feeling of their
intolerableness is shared by the land itself, the very fabric of
nature; the earthquake is the proof of it. _For all this shall not the
land tremble and her every inhabitant mourn? and she shall rise like
the Nile in mass, and heave and sink like the Nile of Egypt._[348]

To the earthquake is added the eclipse: one had happened in 803, and
another in 763, the memory of which probably inspired the form of this
passage. _And it shall be in that day--'tis the oracle of the Lord
Jehovah--that I shall bring down the sun at noon, and cast darkness
on the earth in broad day._[349] _And I will turn your festivals into
mourning, and all your songs to a dirge. And I will bring up upon all
loins sackcloth and on every head baldness, and I will make it like the
mourning for an only son, and the end of it as a bitter day._

But the terrors of earthquake and eclipse are not sufficient for
doom, and famine is drawn upon.

_Lo, days are coming--'tis the oracle of the Lord Jehovah--that I
will send famine on the land, not a famine of bread nor a drouth of
water, but of hearing the words of Jehovah. And they shall wander
from sea to sea, and from the dark North to the Sunrise shall they
run to and fro, to seek the word of Jehovah, and they shall not find
it; ... who swear by Samaria's Guilt_--the golden calf in the house
of the kingdom at Bethel[350]--_and say, As liveth thy God, O Dan!
and, As liveth the way to Beersheba! and they shall fall and not rise
any more_. I have omitted ver. 13: _in that day shall the fair maids
faint and the youths for thirst_; and I append my reasons in a note.
Some part of the received text must go, for while vv. 11 and 12 speak
of a spiritual drought, the drought of 13 is physical. And ver. 14
follows 12 better than it follows 13. The oaths mentioned by Bethel,
Dan, Beersheba, are not specially those of young men and maidens,
but of the whole nation, that run from one end of the land to the
other, Dan to Beersheba, seeking for some word of Jehovah.[351] One
of the oaths, _As liveth the way to Beersheba_,[352] is so curious
that some have doubted if the text be correct. But strange as it may
appear to us to speak of the life of the lifeless, this often happens
among the Semites. To-day Arabs "swear _wa hyât_, 'by the life of,'
even of things inanimate; 'By the life of this fire, or of this
coffee.'"[353] And as Amos here tells us that the Israelite pilgrims
swore by the way to Beersheba, so do the Moslems affirm their oaths
by the sacred way to Mecca.

Thus Amos returns to the chief target of his shafts--the senseless,
corrupt worship of the national sanctuaries. And this time--perhaps
in remembrance of how they had silenced the word of God when he
brought it home to them at Bethel--he tells Israel that, with all
their running to and fro across the land, to shrine after shrine in
search of the word, they shall suffer from a famine and drouth of
it. Perhaps this is the most effective contrast in which Amos has
yet placed the stupid ritualism of his people. With so many things
to swear by; with so many holy places that once were the homes of
Vision, Abraham's Beersheba, Jacob's Bethel, Joshua's Gilgal--nay,
a whole land over which God's voice had broken in past ages, lavish
as the rain; with, too, all their assiduity of sacrifice and prayer,
they should nevertheless starve and pant for that living word of the
Lord, which they had silenced in His prophet.

Thus, men may be devoted to religion, may be loyal to their sacred
traditions and institutions, may haunt the holy associations of the
past and be very assiduous with their ritual--and yet, because of
their worldliness, pride and disobedience, never feel that moral
inspiration, that clear call to duty, that comfort in pain, that
hope in adversity, that good conscience at all times, which spring
up in the heart like living water. Where these be not experienced,
orthodoxy, zeal, lavish ritual, are all in vain.

2. NEMESIS.

AMOS ix. 1-6.

There follows a Vision in Bethel, the opening of which, _I saw
the Lord_, immediately recalls the great inauguration of Isaiah.
He also _saw the Lord_; but how different the Attitude, how other
the Word! To the statesman-prophet the Lord is _enthroned_,
surrounded by the court of heaven; and though the temple rocks to
the intolerable thunder of their praise, they bring to the contrite
man beneath the consciousness of a life-long mission. But to Amos
the Lord is _standing_ and alone--to this lonely prophet God is
always alone--and His message may be summed up in its initial word,
_Smite_. There--Government: hierarchies of service, embassies,
clemencies, healings, and though at first devastation, thereafter
the indestructible hope of a future. Here--Judgment: that Figure of
Fate which terror's fascinated eye ever sees alone; one final blow
and irreparable ruin. And so, as with Isaiah we saw how constructive
prophecy may be, with Amos we behold only the preparatory havoc, the
levelling and clearing of the ground of the future.

_I have seen the Lord standing over the Altar, and He said, Smite the
capital_--of the pillar--_that the very thresholds_[354] _quake, and
break them on the head of all of them!_ It is a shock that makes the
temple reel from roof-tree to basement. The vision seems subsequent
to the prophet's visit to Bethel; and it gathers his whole attack
on the national worship into one decisive and irreparable blow.
_The last of them will I slay with the sword: there shall not flee
away of them one fugitive: there shall not escape of them a_ single
_survivor!_ Neither hell nor heaven, mountain-top nor sea-bottom,
shall harbour one of them. _If they break through to Sheol, thence
shall My hand take them; and if they climb to heaven, thence shall
I bring them down. If they hide in Carmel's top, thence will I find
them out and fetch them; and if they conceal themselves from before
Mine eyes in the bottom of the sea, thence shall I charge the Serpent
and he shall bite them; and if they go into captivity before their
foes_--to Israel as terrible a distance from God's face as Sheol
itself!--_thence will I charge the sword and it shall slay them; and
I will set Mine eye upon them for evil and not for good_.

It is a ruder draft of the Hundred and Thirty-Ninth Psalm; but the
Divine Pursuer is Nemesis, and not Conscience.

_And the Lord, Jehovah of the Hosts; Who toucheth the earth and it
melteth, and all its inhabitants mourn, and it rises like the Nile,
all of it_ together, _and sinks like the Nile of Egypt; Who buildeth
His stories in the heavens, and His vault on the earth He foundeth;
Who calleth to the waters of the sea and poureth them forth on the
face of the earth--Jehovah_ of Hosts _is His Name_.[355]

3. THE VOICES OF ANOTHER DAWN.

AMOS ix. 7-15.

And now we are come to the part where, as it seems, voices of another
day mingle with that of Amos, and silence his judgments in the chorus
of their unbroken hope. At first, however, it is himself without
doubt who speaks. He takes up the now familiar truth, that when it
comes to judgment for sin, Israel is no dearer to Jehovah than any
other people of His equal Providence.

_Are ye not unto Me, O children of Israel--'tis the oracle of
Jehovah--just like the children of Kushites?_ mere black folk and far
away! _Did I not bring up Israel from Egypt, and the Philistines from
Caphtor, and Aram from Ḳir?_ Mark again the universal Providence which
Amos proclaims: it is the due concomitant of his universal morality.
Once for all the religion of Israel breaks from the characteristic
Semitic belief that gave a god to every people, and limited both his
power and his interests to that people's territory and fortunes. And
if we remember how everything spiritual in the religion of Israel,
everything in its significance for mankind, was rendered possible only
because at this date it broke from and abjured the particularism in
which it had been born, we shall feel some of the Titanic force of the
prophet, in whom that break was achieved with an absoluteness which
leaves nothing to be desired. But let us also emphasise, that it was by
no mere method of the intellect or observation of history that Amos was
led to assert the unity of the Divine Providence. The inspiration in
this was a moral one: Jehovah was ruler and guide of all the families
of mankind, because He was exalted in righteousness; and the field in
which that righteousness was proved and made manifest was the life and
the fate of Israel. Therefore to this Amos now turns. _Lo, the eyes of
the Lord Jehovah are on the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from
the face of the ground._ In other words, Jehovah's sovereignty over the
world was not proved by Israel's conquest of the latter, but by His
unflinching application of the principles of righteousness, at whatever
cost, to Israel herself.

Up to this point, then, the voice of Amos is unmistakable, uttering
the doctrine, so original to him, that in the judgment of God Israel
shall not be specially favoured, and the sentence, we have heard
so often from him, of her removal from her land. Remember, Amos
has not yet said a word in mitigation of the sentence: up to this
point of his book it has been presented as inexorable and final. But
now to a statement of it as absolute as any that has gone before,
there is suddenly added a qualification: _nevertheless I will not
utterly destroy the house of Jacob--'tis the oracle of Jehovah_.
And then there is added a new picture of exile changed from doom to
discipline, a process of sifting by which only the evil in Israel,
_all the sinners of My people_, shall perish, but not a grain of
the good. _For, lo, I am giving command, and I will toss the house
of Israel among all the nations, like_ something _that is tossed in
a sieve, but not a pebble_[356] _shall fall to earth. By the sword
shall die all the sinners of My people, they who say, The calamity
shall not reach nor anticipate us._[357]

Now as to these qualifications of the hitherto unmitigated judgments
of the book, it is to be noted that there is nothing in their language
to lead us to take them from Amos himself. On the contrary, the last
clause describes what he has always called a characteristic sin of his
day. Our only difficulties are that hitherto Amos has never qualified
his sentences of doom, and that the change now appears so suddenly that
the two halves of the verse in which it does so absolutely contradict
each other. Read them again, ver. 8: _Lo, the eyes of the Lord Jehovah
are on the sinful nation, and I will destroy it from off the face of
the ground--nevertheless destroying I shall not destroy the house of
Jacob: 'tis the oracle of Jehovah._ Can we believe the same prophet to
have uttered at the same time these two statements? And is it possible
to believe that prophet to be the hitherto unwavering, unqualifying
Amos? Noting these things, let us pass to the rest of the chapter.
We break from all shadows; the verses are verses of pure hope. The
judgment on Israel is not averted; but having taken place her ruin is
regarded as not irreparable.

_In that day_--the day Amos has threatened of overthrow and ruin--_I
will raise again the fallen hut of David and will close up its
breaches, and his ruins I will raise, and I will build it up as in the
days of old_,[358] _that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all
the nations upon whom My Name has been called_--that is, as once their
Possessor--_'tis the oracle of Jehovah, He who is about to do this_.

The _fallen hut of David_ undoubtedly means the fall of the kingdom
of Judah. It is not language Amos uses, or, as it seems to me, could
have used, of the fall of the Northern Kingdom only.[359] Again,
it is undoubted that Amos contemplated the fall of Judah: this is
implicit in such a phrase as _the whole family that I brought up
from Egypt_.[360] He saw then _the day_ and _the ruins_ of which
ver. 11 speaks. The only question is, can we attribute to him the
prediction of a restoration of these ruins? And this is a question
which must be answered in face of the facts that the rest of his book
is unrelieved by a single gleam of hope, and that his threat of the
nation's destruction is absolute and final. Now it is significant
that in face of those facts Cornill (though he has changed his
opinion) once believed it was "surely possible for Amos to include
restoration in his prospect of ruin," as (he might have added) other
prophets undoubtedly do. I confess I cannot so readily get over the
rest of the book and its gloom; and am the less inclined to be sure
about these verses being Amos' own that it seems to have been not
unusual for later generations, for whom the daystar was beginning to
rise, to add their own inspired hopes to the unrelieved threats of
their predecessors of the midnight. The mention of Edom does not help
us much: in the days of Amos after the partial conquest by Uzziah
the promise of _the rest of Edom_ was singularly appropriate. On the
other hand, what interest had so purely ethical a prophet in the mere
addition of territory? To this point we shall have to return for our
final decision. We have still the closing oracle--a very pleasant
piece of music, as if the birds had come out after the thunderstorm,
and the wet hills were glistening in the sunshine.

_Lo, days are coming--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--when the ploughman
shall catch up the reaper, and the grape-treader him that streweth the
seed._ The seasons shall jostle each other, harvest following hard
upon seed-time, vintage upon spring. It is that "happy contention
of seasons" which Josephus describes as the perpetual blessing of
Galilee.[361] _And the mountains shall drip with new wine, and all the
hills shall flow down. And I will bring back the captivity of My people
Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and dwell_ in them, _and
plant vineyards and drink the wine thereof, and make gardens and eat
their fruits. And I will plant them on their own ground; and they shall
not be uprooted any more from their own ground which I have given to
them, saith Jehovah thy God._[362] Again we meet the difficulty: does
the voice that speaks here speak with captivity already realised? or is
it the voice of one who projects himself forward to a day, which, by
the oath of the Lord Himself, is certain to come?

* * * * *

We have now surveyed the whole of this much-doubted, much-defended
passage. I have stated fully the arguments on both sides. On the one
hand, we have the fact that nothing in the language of the verses,
and nothing in their historical allusions, precludes their being by
Amos; we have also to admit that, having threatened a day of ruin,
it was possible for Amos to realise by his mind's eye its arrival,
and standing at that point to see the sunshine flooding the ruins and
to prophesy a restoration. In all this there is nothing impossible
in itself or inconsistent with the rest of the book. On the other
hand, we have the impressive and incommensurable facts: _first_, that
this change to hope comes suddenly, without preparation and without
statement of reasons, at the very end of a book whose characteristics
are not only a final and absolute sentence of ruin upon the people,
and an outlook of unrelieved darkness, but scornful discouragement of
every popular vision of a prosperous future; and, _second_, that the
prophetic books contain numerous signs that later generations wove
their own brighter hopes into the abrupt and hopeless conclusions of
prophecies of judgment.

To this balance of evidence is there anything to add? I think there
is; and that it decides the question. All these prospects of the
future restoration of Israel are absolutely without a moral feature.
They speak of return from captivity, of political restoration, of
supremacy over the Gentiles, and of a revived Nature, hanging with
fruit, dripping with must. Such hopes are natural and legitimate to
a people who were long separated from their devastated and neglected
land, and whose punishment and penitence were accomplished. But they
are not natural to a prophet like Amos. Imagine him predicting a future
like this! Imagine him describing the consummation of his people's
history, without mentioning one of those moral triumphs to rally his
people to which his whole passion and energy had been devoted. To me
it is impossible to hear the voice that cried, _Let justice roll on
like waters and righteousness like a perennial stream_, in a peroration
which is content to tell of mountains dripping with must and of a
people satisfied with vineyards and gardens. These are legitimate
hopes; but they are the hopes of a generation of other conditions and
of other deserts than the generation of Amos.

If then the gloom of this great book is turned into light, such a
change is not due to Amos.

FOOTNOTES:

[344] See Chapter VI., Section 3.

[345] The phrase is uncertain.

[346] Wellhausen thinks that the prophet could not have put the
parenthesis in the mouth of the traders, and therefore regards it as
an intrusion or gloss. But this is hypercriticism. The last clause,
however, may be a mere clerical repetition of ii. 6.

[347] Isa. lviii. See the exposition of the passage in the writer's
_Isaiah_ xl.-lxvi. (Expositor's Bible Series), pp. 417 ff.: "Our
prophet, while exalting the practical service of man at the expense
of certain religious forms, equally exalts the observance of the
Sabbath; ... he places the keeping of the Sabbath on a level with the
practice of love."

[348] _She shall rise_, etc.--The clause is almost the same as in ix.
5_b_, and the text differs from the LXX., which omits _and heave_. Is
it an insertion?

[349] Literally _in the day of light_.

[350] That is, Samaria is used in the wider sense of the kingdom, not
the capital, and there is no need for Wellhausen's substitution of
Bethel for it.

[351] This in answer to Gunning (_De Godspraken van Amos_, 1885),
Wellh. _in loco_, and König (_Einleitung_, p. 304, _d_), who reckon
vv. 11 and 12 to be the insertion: the latter on the additional
ground that the formula of ver. 13, _in that day_, points back to
ver. 9; but not to the _Lo, days are coming_ of ver. 11. But thus
to miss out vv. 11 and 12 leaves us with greater difficulties than
before. For without them how are we to explain the _thirst_ of ver.
13. It is left unintroduced; there is no hint of a drought in 9
and 10. It seems to me then that, since we must omit some verse,
it ought to be ver. 13; and this the rather that if omitted it is
not missed. It is just the kind of general statement that would be
added by an unthinking scribe; and it does not readily connect with
ver. 14, while ver. 12 does do so. For why should youths and maids
be specially singled out as swearing by Samaria, Dan and Beersheba?
These were the oaths of the whole people, to whom vv. 11 and 12
refer. I see a very clear case, therefore, for omitting ver. 13.

[352] LXX. here gives a mere repetition of the preceding oath.

[353] Doughty: _Arabia Deserta_ I. 269.

[354] Since it is the capital that has been struck, and the command
is given to break _the thresholds on the head of all of them_, many
translate _lintels_ or _architraves_ instead of _thresholds_ (_e.g._
Hitzig, and Guthe in Kautzsch's _Bibel_). But the word סִפִּים always
means thresholds and the blow here is fundamental.

[355] LXX. adds _of Hosts_: on the whole passage see next chapter.

[356] We should have expected _a grain_, but the word צְרֹור only
means small stone: cf. 2 Sam. xvii. 13. The LXX. has here σύντριμμα,
fracture, ruin. Cf. _Z.A.T.W._, III. 125.

[357] The text has been disturbed here; the verbs are in forms not
possible to the sense. For תַּגִּישׁ read either תָּשׂיג with Hitzig
or תִּגַּשׁ with Wellhausen. תַּקְדִּים, Hiph., is not impossible in
an intransitive sense, but probably Wellhausen is right in reading
Pi, תְּקַדֵּם. The reading עדינו which the Greek suggests and
Hoffmann and Wellhausen adopt is not so appropriate to the preceding
verb as בעדינו of the text.

[358] The text reads _their breaches_, and some accordingly point
סֻכַּת _hut_, as if it were the plural _huts_ (Hoffmann, _Z.A.T.W._,
1883, 125; Schwally, _id._, 1890, 226, n. 1; Guthe in Kautzsch's
_Bibel_). The LXX. has the sing., and it is easy to see how the
plur. fem. suffix may have risen from confusion with the following
conjunction.

[359] This against Cornill, _Einleitung_, 176.

[360] iii. 1.

[361] III. _Wars_, x. 8. With the above verses of the Book of Amos Lev.
xxvi. 5 has been compared: "your threshing shall reach to the vintage
and the vintage to the sowing time." But there is no reason to suppose
that either of two so natural passages depends on the other.

[362] LXX. _God of Hosts_.

CHAPTER XI

_COMMON-SENSE AND THE REIGN OF LAW_

AMOS iii. 3-8; iv. 6-13; v. 8, 9; vi. 12; viii. 8; ix. 5, 6.

Fools, when they face facts, which is seldom, face them one by one,
and, as a consequence, either in ignorant contempt or in panic. With
this inordinate folly Amos charged the religion of his day. The
superstitious people, careful of every point of ritual and very greedy
of omens, would not ponder real facts nor set cause to effect. Amos
recalled them to common life. _Does a bird fall upon a snare, except
there be a loop on her? Does the trap itself rise front the ground,
except it be catching something_--something alive in it that struggles,
and so lifts the trap? _Shall the alarum be blown in a city, and the
people not tremble?_ Daily life is impossible without putting two and
two together. But this is just what Israel will not do with the sacred
events of their time. To religion they will not add common-sense.

For Amos himself, all things which happen are in sequence and in
sympathy. He has seen this in the simple life of the desert; he is
sure of it throughout the tangle and hubbub of history. One thing
explains another; one makes another inevitable. When he has illustrated
the truth in common life, Amos claims it for especially four of the
great facts of the time. The sins of society, of which society is
careless; the physical calamities, which they survive and forget; the
approach of Assyria, which they ignore; the word of the prophet, which
they silence,--all these belong to each other. Drought, Pestilence,
Earthquake, Invasion conspire--and the Prophet holds their secret.

Now it is true that for the most part Amos describes this sequence
of events as the personal action of Jehovah. _Shall evil befall, and
Jehovah not have done it?... I have smitten you.... I will raise up
against you a Nation.... Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel!_[363] Yet
even where the personal impulse of the Deity is thus emphasised, we
feel equal stress laid upon the order and the inevitable certainty
of the process. Amos nowhere uses Isaiah's great phrase: _a God of
Mishpat_, a _God of Order_ or _Law_. But he means almost the same
thing: God works by methods which irresistibly fulfil themselves. Nay
more. Sometimes this sequence sweeps upon the prophet's mind with
such force as to overwhelm all his sense of the Personal within it.
The Will and the Word of the God who causes the thing are crushed out
by the "Must Be" of the thing itself. Take even the descriptions of
those historical crises, which the prophet most explicitly proclaims
as the visitations of the Almighty. In some of the verses all thought
of God Himself is lost in the roar and foam with which that tide of
necessity bursts up through them. The fountains of the great deep
break loose, and while the universe trembles to the shock, it seems
that even the voice of the Deity is overwhelmed. In one passage,
immediately after describing Israel's ruin as due to Jehovah's word,
Amos asks how could it have happened otherwise:--

_Shall horses run up a cliff, or oxen plough the sea? that ye
turn justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into
wormwood._[364] A moral order exists, which it is as impossible to
break without disaster as it would be to break the natural order by
driving horses upon a precipice. There is an inherent necessity in
the sinners' doom. Again, he says of Israel's sin: _Shall not the
Land tremble for this? Yea, it shall rise up together like the Nile,
and heave and sink like the Nile of Egypt._[365] The crimes of Israel
are so intolerable, that in its own might the natural frame of things
revolts against them. In these great crises, therefore, as in the
simple instances adduced from everyday life, Amos had a sense of what
we call law, distinct from, and for moments even overwhelming, that
sense of the personal purpose of God, admission to the secrets of
which had marked his call to be a prophet.[366]

These instincts we must not exaggerate into a system. There is no
philosophy in Amos, nor need we wish there were. Far more instructive
is what we do find--a virgin sense of the sympathy of all things, the
thrill rather than the theory of a universe. And this faith, which is
not a philosophy, is especially instructive on these two points: that
it springs from the moral sense; and that it embraces, not history
only, but nature.

It springs from the moral sense. Other races have arrived at a
conception of the universe along other lines: some by the observation
of physical laws valid to the recesses of space; some by logic and the
unity of Reason. But Israel found the universe through the conscience.
It is a historical fact that the Unity of God, the Unity of History
and the Unity of the World, did, in this order, break upon Israel,
through conviction and experience of the universal sovereignty of
righteousness. We see the beginnings of the process in Amos. To him the
sequences which work themselves out through history and across nature
are moral. Righteousness is the hinge on which the world hangs; loosen
it, and history and nature feel the shock. History punishes the sinful
nation. But nature, too, groans beneath the guilt of man; and in the
Drought, the Pestilence and the Earthquake provides his scourges. It is
a belief which has stamped itself upon the language of mankind. What
else is "plague" than "blow" or "scourge"?

This brings us to the second point--our prophet's treatment of Nature.

Apart from the disputed passages (which we shall take afterwards
by themselves) we have in the Book of Amos few glimpses of nature,
and these always under a moral light. There is not in any chapter
a landscape visible in its own beauty. Like all desert-dwellers,
who when they would praise the works of God lift their eyes to the
heavens, Amos gives us but the outlines of the earth--a mountain
range,[367] or the crest of a forest,[368] or the bare back of the
land, bent from sea to sea.[369] Nearly all his figures are drawn
from the desert--the torrent, the wild beasts, the wormwood.[370]
If he visits the meadows of the shepherds, it is with the terror of
the people's doom;[371] if the vineyards or orchards, it is with
the mildew and the locust;[372] if the towns, it is with drought,
eclipse and earthquake.[373] To him, unlike his fellows, unlike
especially Hosea, the whole land is one theatre of judgment; but it
is a theatre trembling to its foundations with the drama enacted upon
it. Nay, land and nature are themselves actors in the drama. Physical
forces are inspired with moral purpose, and become the ministers of
righteousness. This is the converse of Elijah's vision. To the older
prophet the message came that God was not in the fire nor in the
earthquake nor in the tempest, but only in the still small voice. But
to Amos the fire, the earthquake and the tempest are all in alliance
with the Voice, and execute the doom which it utters. The difference
will be appreciated by us, if we remember the respective problems set
to prophecy in those two periods. To Elijah, prophet of the elements,
wild worker by fire and water, by life and death, the spiritual had
to be asserted and enforced by itself. Ecstatic as he was, Elijah
had to learn that the Word is more Divine than all physical violence
and terror. But Amos understood that for his age the question was
very different. Not only was the God of Israel dissociated from the
powers of nature, which were assigned by the popular mind to the
various Ba'alim of the land, so that there was a divorce between His
government of the people and the influences that fed the people's
life; but morality itself was conceived as provincial. It was
narrowed to the national interests; it was summed up in mere rules
of police, and these were looked upon as not so important as the
observances of the ritual. Therefore Amos was driven to show that
nature and morality are one. Morality is not a set of conventions.
"Morality is the order of things." Righteousness is on the scale of
the universe. All things tremble to the shock of sin; all things work
together for good to them that fear God.

With this sense of law, of moral necessity, in Amos we must not fail
to connect that absence of all appeal to miracle, which is also
conspicuous in his book.

We come now to the three disputed passages:--

iv. 13:--_For, lo! He Who formed the hills,_[374] _and createth
the wind,_[375] _and declareth to man what His_[376] _mind is; Who
maketh the dawn into darkness, and marcheth on the heights of the
land--Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His Name._

v. 8, 9:--_Maker of the Pleiades and Orion,_[377] _turning to morning
the murk, and day into night He darkeneth; Who calleth for the waters
of the sea, and poureth them forth on the face of the earth--Jehovah
His Name; Who flasheth ruin on the strong, and destruction cometh
down on the fortress._[378]

ix. 5, 6:--_And the Lord Jehovah of the Hosts, Who toucheth the
earth and it rocketh, and all mourn that dwell on it, and it riseth
like the Nile together, and sinketh like the Nile of Egypt; Who hath
builded in the heavens His ascents, and founded His vault upon the
earth; Who calleth to the waters of the sea, and poureth them on the
face of the earth--Jehovah_[379] _His Name._

These sublime passages it is natural to take as the triple climax
of the doctrine we have traced through the Book of Amos. Are they
not the natural leap of the soul to the stars? The same shepherd's
eye which has marked sequence and effect unfailing on the desert
soil, does it not now sweep the clear heavens above the desert, and
find there also all things ordered and arrayed? The same mind which
traced the Divine processes down history, which foresaw the hosts of
Assyria marshalled for Israel's punishment, which felt the overthrow
of justice shock the nation to their ruin, and read the disasters of
the husbandman's year as the vindication of a law higher than the
physical--does it not now naturally rise beyond such instances of the
Divine order, round which the dust of history rolls, to the lofty,
undimmed outlines of the Universe as a whole, and, in consummation of
its message, declare that "all is Law," and Law intelligible to man?

But in the way of so attractive a conclusion the literary criticism
of the book has interposed. It is maintained[380] that, while none
of these sublime verses are indispensable to the argument of Amos,
some of them actually interrupt it, so that when they are removed it
becomes consistent; that such ejaculations in praise of Jehovah's
creative power are not elsewhere met with in Hebrew prophecy before
the time of the Exile; that they sound very like echoes of the Book
of Job; and that in the Septuagint version of Hosea we actually find
a similar doxology, wedged into the middle of an authentic verse of
the prophet.[381] To these arguments against the genuineness of the
three famous passages, other critics, not less able and not less
free, like Robertson Smith and Kuenen,[382] have replied that such
ejaculations at critical points of the prophet's discourse "are
not surprising under the general conditions of prophetic oratory";
and that, while one of the doxologies does appear to break the
argument[383] of the context, they are all of them thoroughly in the
spirit and the style of Amos. To this point the discussion has been
carried; it seems to need a closer examination. .. We may at once
dismiss the argument which has been drawn from that obvious intrusion
into the Greek of Hosea xiii. 4. Not only is this verse not so suited
to the doctrine of Hosea as the doxologies are to the doctrine of
Amos; but while they are definite and sublime, it is formal and
flat--"Who made firm the heavens and founded the earth, Whose hands
founded all the host of heaven, and He did not display them that thou
shouldest walk after them." The passages in Amos are vision; this is
a piece of catechism crumbling into homily.

Again--an argument in favour of the authenticity of these passages
may be drawn from the character of their subjects. We have seen the
part which the desert played in shaping the temper and the style of
Amos. But the works of the Creator, to which these passages lift
their praise, are just those most fondly dwelt upon by all the poetry
of the desert. The Arabian nomad, when he magnifies the power of
God, finds his subjects not on the bare earth about him, but in the
brilliant heavens and the heavenly processes.

Again, the critic who affirms that the passages in Amos "in every
case sensibly disturb the connection,"[384] exaggerates. In the
case of the first of them, chap. iv. 13, the disturbance is not at
all "sensible"; though it must be admitted that the oracle closes
impressively enough without it. The last of them, chap. ix. 5,
6--which repeats a clause already found in the book[385]--is as much
in sympathy with its context as most of the oracles in the somewhat
scattered discourse of that last section of the book. The real
difficulty is the second doxology, chap. v. 8, 9, which does break
the connection, and in a sudden and violent way. Remove it, and the
argument is consistent. We cannot read chap. v. without feeling that,
whether Amos wrote these verses or not, they did not originally stand
where they stand at present.

Now, taken with this dispensableness of two of the passages and this
obvious intrusion of one of them, the following additional fact
becomes ominous. _Jehovah is His Name_ (which occurs in two of the
passages),[386] or _Jehovah of Hosts is His Name_ (which occurs at
least in one),[387] is a construction which does not happen elsewhere
in the book, except in a verse where it is awkward and where we
have already seen reason to doubt its genuineness.[388] But still
more, the phrase does not occur in any other prophet, till we come
down to the oracles which compose Isaiah xl.-lxvi. Here it happens
thrice--twice in passages dating from the Exile,[389] and once in a
passage suspected by some to be of still later date.[390] In the
Book of Jeremiah the phrase is found eight times; but either in
passages already on other grounds judged by many critics to be later
than Jeremiah,[391] or where by itself it is probably an intrusion
into the text.[392] Now is it a mere coincidence that a phrase,
which, outside the Book of Amos, occurs only in writing of the time
of the Exile and in passages considered for other reasons to be
post-exilic insertions--is it a mere coincidence that within the Book
of Amos it should again be found only in suspected verses?

There appears to be in this more than a coincidence; and the present
writer cannot but feel a very strong case against the traditional
belief that these doxologies are original and integral portions
of the Book of Amos. At the same time a case which has failed to
convince critics like Robertson Smith and Kuenen cannot be considered
conclusive, and we are so ignorant of many of the conditions of
prophetic oratory at this period that dogmatism is impossible. For
instance, the use by Amos of the Divine titles is a matter over
which uncertainty still lingers; and any further argument on the
subject must include a fuller discussion than space here allows of
the remarkable distribution of those titles throughout the various
sections of the book.[393]

But if it be not given to us to prove this kind of authenticity--a
question whose data are so obscure, yet whose answer fortunately is of
so little significance--let us gladly welcome that greater Authenticity
whose undeniable proofs these verses so splendidly exhibit. No one
questions their right to the place which some great spirit gave them
in this book--their suitableness to its grand and ordered theme, their
pure vision and their eternal truth. That common-sense, and that
conscience, which, moving among the events of earth and all the tangled
processes of history, find everywhere reason and righteousness at work,
in these verses claim the Universe for the same powers, and see in
stars and clouds and the procession of day and night the One Eternal
God Who _declareth to man what His mind is_.

FOOTNOTES:

[363] iii. 6_b_; iv. 9; vi. 14; iv. 12_b_.

[364] vi. 12.

[365] viii. 8.

[366] iii. 7: _Jehovah God doeth nothing, but He hath revealed His
secret to His servants the prophets._

[367] i. 2; iii. 9; ix. 3.

[368] ii. 9.

[369] viii. 12.

[370] v. 24; 19, 20, etc.; 7; vi. 12.

[371] i. 2.

[372] iv. 9 ff.

[373] iv. 6-11; vi. 11; viii. 8 ff.

[374] LXX. _the thunder_.

[375] Or _spirit_.

[376] _I.e. God's_; a more natural rendering than to take _his_ (as
Hitzig does) as meaning _man's_.

[377] See above, pp. 166 f. _n._

[378] Text of last clause uncertain; see above, p. 167.

[379] LXX. _Jehovah of Hosts_.

[380] First in 1875 by Duhm, _Theol. der Proph._, p. 119; and after
him by Oort, _Theol. Tjidschrift_, 1880, pp. 116 f.; Wellhausen, _in
locis_; Stade, _Gesch._, I. 571; Cornill, _Einleitung_, 176.

[381] Hosea xiii. 4

[382] Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 399; Kuenen, _Hist. Krit.
Einl._ (Germ. Ed.), II. 347.

[383] v. 8, 9.

[384] Cornill, _Einl._, 176.

[385] Cf. viii. 8.

[386] v. 8; ix. 6, though here LXX. read _Jehovah of Hosts is His Name_.

[387] iv. 13. See previous note.

[388] v. 27. See above, pp. 172 f. _n._: cf. Hosea xii. 6.

[389] xlvii. 4 and liv. 5.

[390] xlviii. 2: cf. Duhm, _in loco_, and Cheyne, _Introduction to
the Book of Isaiah_, 301.

[391] x. 16; xxxi. 35; xxxii. 18; l. 34 (perhaps a quotation from
Isa. xlvii. 4); li. 19, 57.

[392] xlvi. 18, where the words שמו צבאות fail in LXX.; xlviii. 15
_b_, where the clause in which it occurs is wanting in the LXX.

[393] But I have room at least for a bare statement of these
remarkable facts:--

The titles for the God of Israel used in the Book of Amos are these:
(1) _Thy God, O Israel_, ישראל אלהיך; (2) _Jehovah_, יהוה; (3) _Lord
Jehovah_, יהוה אדני; (4) _Lord Jehovah of the Hosts_, יהוה אדני צבאות;
(5) _Jehovah God of Hosts_ or _of the Hosts_, צבאות אלהי יהוה or הצבאות.

Now in the First Section, chaps. i., ii., it is interesting that we
find none of the variations which are compounded with _Hosts_, צבאות.
By itself יהוה (especially in the phrase _Thus saith Jehovah_, אמר כה
יהוה) is general; and once only (i. 8) is _Lord Jehovah_ employed.
The phrase, _oracle of Jehovah_, יהוה נְאֻם, is also rare; it occurs
only twice (ii. 11, 16), and then only in the passage dealing with
Israel, and not at all in the oracles against foreign nations.

In Sections II. and III. the simple יהוה is again most frequently used.
But we find also _Lord Jehovah_, יהוה אדני (iii. 7, 8; iv. 2, 5; v.
3, with יהוה alone in the parallel ver. 4; vi. 8; vii. 1, 2, 4 _bis_,
5, 6; viii. 1, 3, 9, 11), used either indifferently with יהוה; or in
verses where it seems more natural to emphasise the sovereignty of
Jehovah than His simple Name (as, _e.g._, where _He swears_, iv. 2, vi.
8, yet when the same phrase occurs in viii. 7 יהוה alone is used); or
in the solemn Visions of the Third Section (but not in the Narrative);
and sometimes we find in the Visions _Lord_, אדני, alone without יהוה
(vii. 7, 8; ix. 1). The titles containing צבאות or צבאות אלהי occur
_nine_ times. Of these _five_ are in passages which we have seen other
reasons to suppose are insertions: two of the Doxologies--iv. 13, צבאות
אלהי יהוה and ix. 5, הצבאות יהוה אדני (in addition the LXX. read in
ix. 6 צבאות יהוה), and in v. 14, 15 (see p. 168) and 27 (see p. 172),
in all three צבאות אלהי יהוה. The _four_ genuine passages are iii. 13,
where we find הצבאות אלהי יהוה preceded by אדני; v. 16, where we have
צבאות אלהי יהוה followed by אדני; vi. 8, אלהי יהוה צבאות, and vi. 14,
צבאות אלהי יהוה. Throughout the last two sections of the book נְאֻם is
used with all these forms of the Divine title.

_HOSEA_

"For leal love have I desired and not sacrifice
And the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings."

CHAPTER XII

_THE BOOK OF HOSEA_

The Book of Hosea consists of two unequal sections, chaps. i.-iii.
and chaps. iv.-xiv., which differ in the dates of their standpoints,
to a large extent also in the details of their common subjects,
but still more largely in their form and style. The First Section
is in the main narrative; though the style rises to the pitch of
passionate pleading and promise, it is fluent and equable. If one
verse be omitted and three others transposed,[394] the argument
is continuous. In the Second Section, on the contrary, we have a
stream of addresses and reflections, appeals, upbraidings, sarcasms,
recollections of earlier history, denunciations and promises, which,
with little logical connection and almost no pauses or periods, start
impulsively from each other, and for a large part are expressed in
elliptic and ejaculatory phrases. In the present restlessness of
Biblical Criticism it would have been surprising if this difference
of style had not prompted some minds to a difference of authorship.
Grätz[395] has distinguished two Hoseas, separated by a period of
fifty years. But if, as we shall see, the First Section reflects
the end of the reign of Jeroboam II., who died about 743, then the
next few years, with their revolutionary changes in Israel, are
sufficient to account for the altered outlook of the Second Section;
while the altered style is fully explained by difference of occasion
and motive. In both sections not only are the religious principles
identical, and many of the characteristic expressions,[396] but there
breathes throughout the same urgent and jealous temper, which renders
Hosea's personality so distinctive among the prophets. Within this
unity, of course, we must not be surprised to find, as in the Book of
Amos, verses which cannot well be authentic.

FIRST SECTION: HOSEA'S PROPHETIC LIFE.

With the removal of some of the verses the argument becomes clear and
consecutive. After the story of the wife and children (i. 2-9), who
are symbols of the land and people of Israel in their apostasy from
God (2, 4, 6, 9), the Divine voice calls on the living generation to
plead with their mother lest destruction come (ii. 2-5, Eng.; ii. 4-7,
Heb.[397]), but then passes definite sentence of desolation on the land
and of exile on the people (6-13, Eng.; 8-15, Heb.), which however
is not final doom, but discipline,[398] with the ultimate promise of
the return of the nation's youth, their renewed betrothal to Jehovah
and the restoration of nature (14-23). Then follows the story of the
prophet's restoration of his wife, also with discipline (chap. iii.).

Notice that, although the story of the wife's fall has preceded the
declaration of Israel's apostasy, it is Israel's restoration which
precedes the wife's. The ethical significance of this order we shall
illustrate in the next chapter.

In this section the disturbing verses are i. 7 and the group of
three--i. 10, 11, ii. 1 (Eng.; but ii. 1-3 Heb.). Chap. i. 7
introduces Judah as excepted from the curse passed upon Israel; it is
so obviously intrusive in a prophecy dealing only with Israel, and
it so clearly reflects the deliverance of Judah from Sennacherib in
701, that we cannot hold it for anything but an insertion of a date
subsequent to that deliverance, and introduced by a pious Jew to
signalise Judah's fate in contrast with Israel's.[399]

The other three verses (i. 10, 11, ii. 1, Eng.; ii. 1-3, Heb.)
introduce a promise of restoration before the sentence of judgment is
detailed, or any ethical conditions of restoration are stated. That is,
they break and tangle an argument otherwise consistent and progressive
from beginning to end of the Section. Every careful reader must feel
them out of place where they lie. Their awkwardness has been so much
appreciated that, while in the Hebrew text they have been separated
from chap. i., in the Greek they have been separated from chap. ii.
That is to say, some have felt they have no connection with what
precedes them, others none with what follows them; while our English
version, by distributing them between the two chapters, only makes
more sensible their superfluity. If they really belong to the prophecy,
their proper place is after the last verse of chap. ii.[400] This is
actually the order in which part of it and part of them are quoted
by St. Paul.[401] At the same time, when so arranged, they repeat
somewhat awkwardly the language of ii. 23, and scarcely form a climax
to the chapter. There is nothing in their language to lead us to doubt
that they are Hosea's own; and ver. 11 shows that they must have been
written at least before the captivity of Northern Israel.[402]

The only other suspected clause in this section is that in iii. 5,
_and David their king_;[403] but if it be struck out the verse is
rendered awkward, if not impossible, by the immediate repetition of
the Divine name, which would not have been required in the absence of
the suspected clause.[404]

The text of the rest of the section is remarkably free from
obscurities. The Greek version offers few variants, and most of these
are due to mistranslation.[405] In iii. 1 for _loved of a husband_ it
reads _loving evil_.

Evidently this section was written before the death of Jeroboam II.
The house of Jehu still reigns; and as Hosea predicts its fall by war
on the classic battleground of Jezreel, the prophecy must have been
written before the actual fall, which took the form of an internal
revolt against Zechariah, the son of Jeroboam. With this agrees the
tone of the section. There are the same evils in Israel which Amos
exposed in the prosperous years of the same reign; but Hosea appears to
realise the threatened exile from a nearer standpoint. It is probable
also that part of the reason of his ability to see his way through the
captivity to the people's restoration is due to a longer familiarity
with the approach of captivity than Amos experienced before he wrote.
But, of course, for Hosea's promise of restoration there were, as we
shall see, other and greater reasons of a religious kind.[406]

SECOND SECTION: CHAPS. iv.-xiv.

When we pass into these chapters we feel that the times are changed.
The dynasty of Jehu has passed: kings are falling rapidly: Israel
devours its rulers:[407] there is no loyalty to the king; he is
suddenly cut off;[408] all the princes are revolters.[409] Round so
despised and so unstable a throne the nation tosses in disorder.
Conspiracies are rife. It is not only, as in Amos, the the sins of
the luxurious, of them that are at ease in Zion, which are exposed;
but also literal bloodshed: highway robbery with murder, abetted by
the priests;[410] the thief breaketh in and the robber-troop maketh a
raid.[411] Amos looked out on foreign nations across a quiet Israel;
his views of the world are wide and clear; but in the Book of Hosea
the dust is up, and into what is happening beyond the frontier we
get only glimpses. There is enough, however, to make visible another
great change since the days of Jeroboam. Israel's self-reliance is
gone. She is as fluttered as a startled bird: _They call unto Egypt,
they go unto Assyria._[412] Their wealth is carried as a gift to King
Jareb,[413] and they evidently engage in intrigues with Egypt. But
everything is hopeless: kings cannot save, for Ephraim is seized by
the pangs of a fatal crisis.[414]

This broken description reflects--and all the more faithfully because
of its brokenness--the ten years which followed on the death of
Jeroboam II. about 743.[415] His son Zechariah, who succeeded him,
was in six months assassinated by Shallum ben Jabesh, who within a
month more was himself cut down by Menahem ben Gadi.[416] Menahem
held the throne for six or seven years, but only by sending to
the King of Assyria an enormous tribute which he exacted from the
wealthy magnates of Israel.[417] Discontent must have followed these
measures, such discontent with their rulers as Hosea describes.
Pekahiah ben Menahem kept the throne for little over a year after his
father's death, and was assassinated by his captain,[418] Pekah ben
Remaliah, with fifty Gileadites, and Pekah took the throne about 736.
This second and bloody usurpation may be one of those on which Hosea
dwells; but if so it is the last historical allusion in his book.
There is no reference to the war of Pekah and Rezin against Ahaz
of Judah which Isaiah describes,[419] and to which Hosea must have
alluded had he been still prophesying.[420] There is no allusion to
its consequence in Tiglath-Pileser's conquest of Gilead and Galilee
in 734-733. On the contrary, these provinces are still regarded as
part of the body politic of Israel.[421] Nor is there any sign that
Israel have broken with Assyria; to the last the book represents them
as fawning on the Northern Power.[422]

In all probability, then, the Book of Hosea was closed before 734
B.C. The Second Section dates from the years behind that and back to
the death of Jeroboam II. about 743, while the First Section, as we
saw, reflects the period immediately before the latter.

We come now to the general style of chaps. iv.-xiv. The period,
as we have seen, was one of the most broken of all the history
of Israel; the political outlook, the temper of the people, were
constantly changing. Hosea, who watched these kaleidoscopes, had
himself an extraordinarily mobile and vibrant mind. There could be
no greater contrast to that fixture of conscience which renders the
Book of Amos so simple in argument, so firm in style.[423] It was a
leaden plummet which Amos saw Jehovah setting to the structure of
Israel's life.[424] But Hosea felt his own heart hanging at the end
of the line; and this was a heart that could never be still. Amos is
the prophet of law; he sees the Divine processes work themselves
out, irrespective of the moods and intrigues of the people, with
which, after all, he was little familiar. So each of his paragraphs
moves steadily forward to a climax, and every climax is Doom--the
captivity of the people to Assyria. You can divide his book by these
things; it has its periods, strophes and refrains. It marches like
the hosts of the Lord of hosts. But Hosea had no such unhampered
vision of great laws. He was too familiar with the rapid changes of
his fickle people; and his affection for them was too anxious. His
style has all the restlessness and irritableness of hunger about
it--the hunger of love. Hosea's eyes are never at rest. He seeks, he
welcomes, for moments of extraordinary fondness he dwells upon every
sign of his people's repentance. But a Divine jealousy succeeds, and
he questions the motives of the change. You feel that his love has
been overtaken and surprised by his knowledge; and in fact his whole
style might be described as a race between the two--a race varying
and uncertain up to almost the end. The transitions are very swift.
You come upon a passage of exquisite tenderness: the prophet puts
the people's penitence in his own words with a sympathy and poetry
that are sublime and seem final. But suddenly he remembers how false
they are, and there is another light in his eyes. The lustre of their
tears dies from his verses, like the dews of a midsummer morning in
Ephraim; and all is dry and hard again beneath the brazen sun of
his amazement. _What shall I do unto thee, Ephraim? What shall I do
unto thee, Judah?_ Indeed, this figure of his own is insufficient
to express the suddenness with which Hosea lights up some intrigue
of the statesmen of the day, or some evil habit of the priests, or
some hidden orgy of the common people. Rather than the sun it is the
lightning--the lightning in pursuit of a serpent.

The elusiveness of the style is the greater that many passages do not
seem to have been prepared for public delivery. They are more the
play of the prophet's mind than his set speech. They are not formally
addressed to an audience, and there is no trace in them of oratorical
art.

Hence the language of this Second Section of the Book of Hosea is
impulsive and abrupt beyond all comparison. There is little rhythm
in it, and almost no argument. Few metaphors are elaborated. Even
the brief parallelism of Hebrew poetry seems too long for the quick
spasms of the writer's heart. "Osee," said Jerome,[425] "commaticus
est, et quasi per sententias loquitur." He speaks in little clauses,
often broken off; he is impatient even of copulas. And withal he uses
a vocabulary full of strange words, which the paucity of parallelism
makes much the more difficult.

To this original brokenness and obscurity of the language are due,
_first_, the great corruption of the text; _second_, the difficulty
of dividing it; _third_, the uncertainty of deciding its genuineness
or authenticity.

1. The TEXT of Hosea is one of the most dilapidated in the Old
Testament, and in parts beyond possibility of repair. It is probable
that glosses were found necessary at an earlier period and to a larger
extent than in most other books: there are evident traces of some; yet
it is not always possible to disentangle them.[426] The value of the
Greek version is curiously mixed. The authors had before them much the
same difficulties as we have, and they made many more for themselves.
Some of their mistranslations are outrageous: they occur not only in
obscure passages, where they may be pardoned;[427] but even where
there are parallel terms with which the translators show themselves
familiar.[428] Sometimes they have translated word by word, without
any attempt to give the general sense; and as a whole their version
is devoid both of beauty and compactness. Yet not infrequently they
supply us with a better reading than the Massoretic text. Occasionally
they divide words properly which the latter misdivides.[429] They often
give more correctly the easily confused pronominal suffixes;[430]
and the copula.[431] And they help us to the true readings of many
other words.[432] Here and there an additional clause in the Greek
is plethoric, perhaps copied by mistake from a similar verse in the
context.[433] All of these will be noticed separately as we reach them.
But, even after these and other aids, we shall find that the text not
infrequently remains impracticable.

2. As great as the difficulty of reaching a true text in this Second
Section of the book is the difficulty of DIVIDING it. Here and there,
it is true, the Greek helps us to improve upon the division into
chapters and verses of the Hebrew text, which is that of our own
English version. Chap. vi. 1-4 ought to follow immediately on to the
end of chap. v., with the connecting word _saying_. The last few
words of chap. vi. go with the first two of chap. vii., but perhaps
both are gloss. The openings of chaps. xi. and xii. are better
arranged in the Hebrew than in the Greek. As regards verses we shall
have to make several rearrangements.[434] But beyond this more or
less conventional division into chapters and verses our confidence
ceases. It is impossible to separate the section, long as it is, into
subsections, or into oracles, strophes or periods. The reason of this
we have already seen, in the turbulence of the period reflected, in
the divided interests and abrupt and emotional style of the author,
and in the probability that part at least of the book was not
prepared for public speaking. The periods and climaxes, the refrains,
the catchwords by which we are helped to divide even the confused
Second Section of the Book of Amos, are not found in Hosea. Only
twice does the exordium of a spoken address occur: at the beginning
of the section (chap. iv. 1), and at what is now the opening of the
next chapter (v. 1). The phrase _'tis the oracle of Jehovah_, which
occurs so periodically in Amos, and thrice in the second chapter
of Hosea, is found only once in chaps. iv.-xiv. Again, the obvious
climaxes or perorations, of which we found so many in Amos, are very
few,[435] and even when they occur the next verses start impulsively
from them, without a pause.

In spite of these difficulties, since the section is so long, attempts
at division have been made. Ewald distinguished three parts in three
different tempers: _First_, iv.-vi. 11 _a_, God's Plaint against His
people; _Second_, vi. 11 _b_-ix. 9, Their Punishment; _Third_, ix.
10-xiv. 10, Retrospect of the earlier history--warning and consolation.
Driver also divides into three subsections, but differently: _First_,
iv.-viii., in which Israel's Guilt predominates; _Second_, ix.-xi.
11, in which the prevailing thought is their Punishment; _Third_, xi.
12-xiv. 10, in which both lines of thought are continued, but followed
by a glance at the brighter future.[436] What is common to both these
arrangements is the recognition of a certain progress from feelings
about Israel's guilt which prevail in the earlier chapters, to a clear
vision of the political destruction awaiting them; and finally more
hope of repentance in the people, with a vision of the blessed future
that must follow upon it. It is, however, more accurate to say that the
emphasis of Hosea's prophesying, instead of changing from the Guilt to
the Punishment of Israel, changes about the middle of chap. vii. from
their Moral Decay to their Political Decay, and that the description of
the latter is modified or interrupted by Two Visions of better things:
one of Jehovah's early guidance of the people, with a great outbreak
of His Love upon them, in chap. xi.; and one of their future Return to
Jehovah and restoration in chap. xiv. It is on these features that the
division of the following Exposition is arranged.

3. It will be obvious that with a text so corrupt, with a style so
broken and incapable of logical division, questions of AUTHENTICITY
are raised to a pitch of the greatest difficulty. Allusion has been
made to the number of glosses which must have been found necessary
from even an early period, and of some of which we can discern the
proofs.[437] We will deal with these as they occur. But we may here
discuss, as a whole, another class of suspected passages--suspected
for the same reason that we saw a number in Amos to be, because of
their reference to Judah. In the Book of Hosea (chaps. iv.-xiv.)
they are twelve in number. Only one of them is favourable (iv. 15):
_Though Israel play the harlot, let not Judah sin._ Kuenen[438]
argues that this is genuine, on the ground that the peculiar verb
_to sin_ or _take guilt to oneself_ is used several other times in
the book,[439] and that the wish expressed is in consonance with
what he understands to be Hosea's favourable feeling towards Judah.
Yet Hosea nowhere else makes any distinction between Ephraim and
Judah in the matter of sin, but condemns both equally; and as iv.
15 f. are to be suspected on other grounds as well, I cannot hold
this reference to Judah to be beyond doubt. Nor is the reference in
viii. 14 genuine: _And Israel forgat her Maker and built temples, and
Judah multiplied fenced cities, but I will send fire on his cities
and it shall devour her palaces_. Kuenen[440] refuses to reject the
reference to Judah, on the ground that without it the rhythm of the
verse is spoiled; but the fact is the whole verse must go. Chap. v.
13 forms a climax, which v. 14 only weakens; the style is not like
Hosea's own, and indeed is but an echo of verses of Amos.[441] Nor
can we be quite sure about v. 5: _Israel and Ephraim shall stumble by
their iniquities, and_ (LXX.) _stumble also shall Judah with them_;
or vi. 10, 11: _In Bethel I have seen horrors: there playest thou the
harlot, Ephraim; there Israel defiles himself; also Judah_ ... (the
rest of the text is impracticable). In both these passages Judah is
the awkward third of a parallelism, and is introduced by an _also_,
as if an afterthought. Yet the afterthought may be the prophet's own;
for in other passages, to which no doubt attaches, he fully includes
Judah in the sinfulness of Israel. Cornill rejects x. 11, _Judah must
plough_, but I cannot see on what grounds; as Kuenen says, it has no
appearance of being an intrusion.[442] In xii. 3 Wellhausen reads
_Israel_ for _Judah_, but the latter is justified if not rendered
necessary by the reference to Judah in ver. 1, which Wellhausen
admits. Against the other references--v. 10, _The princes of Judah
are as removers of boundaries_; v. 12, _I shall be as the moth to
Ephraim, and a worm to the house of Judah_; v. 13, _And Ephraim saw
his disease, and Judah his sore_; v. 14, _For I am as a roaring lion
to Ephraim, and as a young lion to the house of Judah_; vi. 4, _What
shall I do to thee, Ephraim? what shall I do to thee, Judah?_--there
are no apparent objections; and they are generally admitted by
critics. As Kuenen says, it would have been surprising if Hosea had
made no reference to the sister kingdom. His judgment of her is amply
justified by that of her own citizens, Isaiah and Micah.

Other short passages of doubtful authenticity will be treated as we
come to them; but again it may be emphasised that, in a book of such
a style as this, certainty on the subject is impossible.

Finally, there may be given here the only notable addition which the
Septuagint makes to the Book of Hosea. It occurs in xiii. 4, after
_I am Jehovah thy God_: "That made fast the heavens and founded the
earth, whose hands founded all the host of the heaven, and I did not
show them to thee that thou shouldest follow after them, and I led
thee up"--_from the land of Egypt_.

At first this recalls those apostrophes to Jehovah's power which
break forth in the Book of Amos; and the resemblance has been taken
to prove that they also are late intrusions. But this both obtrudes
itself as they do not, and is manifestly of much lower poetical
value. See page 203.

* * * * *

We have now our material clearly before us, and may proceed to the more
welcome task of tracing our prophet's life, and expounding his teaching.

FOOTNOTES:

[394] See below, pp. 213 f.

[395] _Geschichte_, pp. 93 ff., 214 ff., 439 f.

[396] A list of the more obvious is given by Kuenen, p. 324.

[397] The first chapter in the Hebrew closes with ver. 9.

[398] Cf. this with Amos; above, pp. 192 ff.

[399] König's arguments (_Einleitung_, 309) in favour of the
possibility of the genuineness of the verse do not seem to me to be
conclusive. He thinks the verse admissible because Judah had sinned
less than Israel; the threat in vv. 4-6 is limited to Israel; the
phrase _Jehovah their God_ is so peculiar that it is difficult to
assign it to a mere expander of the text; and if it was a later hand
that put in the verse, why did he not alter the judgments against
Judæa, which occur further on in the book?

[400] So Cheyne and others, Kuenen adhering. König agrees that they
have been removed from their proper place and the text corrupted.

[401] Rom. ix. 25, 26, which first give the end of Hosea ii. 23 (Heb.
25), and then the end of i. 10 (Heb. ii. 2). See below, p. 249, _n._ 2.

[402] 721 B.C.

[403] Stade, _Gesch._, I. 577; Cornill, _Einleitung_, who also would
exclude _no king and no prince_ in iii. 4.

[404] This objection, however, does not hold against the removal of
merely _and David_, leaving _their king_.

[405] ii. 7, 11, 14, 17 (Heb.). In i. 4 B-text reads Ἰούδα for יהוא
while Q^{mq} have Ἰηου.

[406] In determining the date of the Book of Hosea the title in chap.
i. is of no use to us: _The Word of Jehovah which was to Hosea ben
Be'eri in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah,
and in the days of Jeroboam ben Joash, king of Israel._ This title
is trebly suspicious. First: the given reigns of Judah and Israel
do not correspond; Jeroboam was dead before Uzziah. Second: there
is no proof either in the First or Second Section of the book that
Hosea prophesied after the reign of Jotham. Third: it is curious that
in the case of a prophet of Northern Israel kings of Judah should
be stated first, and four of them be given while only one king of
his own country is placed beside them. On these grounds critics are
probably correct who take the title as it stands to be the work of
some later Judæan scribe who sought to make it correspond to the
titles of the Books of Isaiah and Micah. He may have been the same
who added chap. i. 7. The original form of the title probably was
_The Word of God which was to Hosea son of Be'eri in the days of
Jeroboam ben Joash, king of Israel_, and designed only for the First
Section of the book, chaps, i.-iii.

[407] vii. 7. There are also other passages which, while they may
be referred, as they stand, to the whole succession of illegitimate
dynasties in Northern Israel from the beginning to the end of that
kingdom, more probably reflect the same ten years of special anarchy
and disorder after the death of Jeroboam II. See vii. 3 ff.; viii. 4,
where the illegitimate kingmaking is coupled with the idolatry of the
Northern Kingdom; xiii. 10, 11.

[408] x. 3, 7, 8, 15.

[409] ix. 15.

[410] vi. 8, 9.

[411] vii. 1.

[412] vii. 11.

[413] x. 6.

[414] xiii. 12 f.

[415] The chronology of these years is exceedingly uncertain.
Jeroboam was dead about 743; in 738 Menahem gave tribute to Assyria;
in 734 Tiglath-Pileser had conquered Aram, Gilead and Galilee in
response to King Ahaz, who had a year or two before been attacked by
Rezin of Aram and Pekah of Israel.

[416] 2 Kings xv. 8-16. It may be to this appearance of three kings
within one month that there was originally an allusion in the now
obscure verse of Hosea, v. 7.

[417] 2 Kings xv. 17-22.

[418] Or prince, שׂר: cf. Hosea's denunciation of the שׂרים as rebels.

[419] Isa. vii.; 2 Kings xv. 37, 38.

[420] Some have found a later allusion in chap. x. 14: _like unto the
destruction_ of (?) _Shalman_ (of ?) _Beth' Arbe'l_. Pusey, p. 5 _b_,
and others take this to allude to a destruction of the Galilean Arbela,
the modern Irbid, by Salmanassar IV., who ascended the Assyrian throne
in 727 and besieged Samaria in 724 ff. But since the construction of
the phrase leaves it doubtful whether the name Shalman is that or the
agent or object of the destruction, and whether, if the agent, he be
one of the Assyrian Salmanassars or a Moabite King Salman _c._ 730
B.C., it is impossible to make use of the verse in fixing the date of
the Book of Hosea. See further, p. 289. Wellhausen omits.

[421] v. 1; vi. 8; xii. 12: cf. W. R. Smith, _Prophets_, 156.

[422] Cf. W. R. Smith, _l.c._

[423] Cf. W. R. Smith, _Prophets_, 157: Hosea's "language and the
movement of his thoughts are far removed from the simplicity and
self-control which characterise the prophecy of Amos. Indignation and
sorrow, tenderness and severity, faith in the sovereignty of Jehovah's
love, and a despairing sense of Israel's infidelity are woven together
in a sequence which has no logical plan, but is determined by the
battle and alternate victory of contending emotions; and the swift
transitions, the fragmentary unbalanced utterance, the half-developed
allusions, that make his prophecy so difficult to the commentator,
express the agony of this inward conflict."

[424] See above, p. 114.

[425] _Præf. in Duod. Prophetas._

[426] Especially in chap. vii.

[427] As in xi. 2 _b_.

[428] This is especially the case in x. 11-13; xi. 4; xiv. 5.

[429] _E.g._ vi. 5 _b_: M.T. יצא אור משפטיך which is nonsense; LXX.
כאור משפטי, _My judgment shall go forth like light._ xi. 2: M.T.
מִפְּנֵיהֶם; LXX. הֵם מִפָּנַי.

[430] iv. 4, עמי for עמך; 8, נפשם for נפ--perhaps; 13, צִלָּה for
צִלָּהּ; v. 2; vi. 2 (possibly); viii. 4, read יכרתוּ; ix. 2; xi. 2,
3; xi. 5, 6, where for לא read לו; 10, read לֵֶךְ; xii. 9; xiv. 9
_a_, לֹו for לִי. On the other hand, they are either improbable or
quite wrong, as in v. 2 _b_; vi. 2 (but the LXX. may be right here);
vii 1 _b_; xi. 1, 4; xii. 5; xiii. 14, 15 (ter.).

[431] v. 5 (so as to change the tense: _and Judah shall stumble_);
xii. 3, etc.

[432] vi. 3; viii. 10, 13; ix. 2; x. 4, 13 _b_, 15 (probably); xii.
2; xiii. 9; xiv. 3. Wrong tense, xii. 11. Cf. also vi. 3.

[433] _E.g._ viii. 13.

[434] Cf. the Hebrew and Greek, of _e.g._, iv. 10, 11, 12; vi. 9, 10;
viii. 5, 6; ix. 8, 9.

[435] viii. 13 (14 must be omitted); ix. 17.

[436] _Introd._ 284.

[437] _E.g._ iv. 15 (?); vi. 11-vii. 1 (?); vii. 4; viii. 2; xii. 6.

[438] _Einl._, 323.

[439] אשם, v. 15; x. 2; xiii. 1; xiv. 1.

[440] P. 313.

[441] viii. 14 is also rejected by Wellhausen and Cornill.

[442] _Loc. cit._

CHAPTER XIII

_THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT_

Amos was a preacher of righteousness almost wholly in its judicial
and punitive offices. Exposing the moral conditions of society in
his day, emphasising on the one hand its obduracy and on the other
the intolerableness of it, he asserted that nothing could avert the
inevitable doom--neither Israel's devotion to Jehovah nor Jehovah's
interest in Israel. _You alone have I known of all the families of
the ground: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities._
The visitation was to take place in war and in the captivity of the
people. This is practically the whole message of the prophet Amos.

That he added to it the promise of restoration which now closes his
book, we have seen to be extremely improbable.[443] Yet even if that
promise is his own, Amos does not tell us how the restoration is to
be brought about. With wonderful insight and patience he has traced
the captivity of Israel to moral causes. But he does not show what
moral change in the exiles is to justify their restoration, or by
what means such a moral change is to be effected. We are left to
infer the conditions and the means of redemption from the principles
which Amos enforced while there yet seemed time to pray for the
doomed people: _Seek the Lord and ye shall live_.[444] According to
this, the moral renewal of Israel must precede their restoration; but
the prophet seems to make no great effort to effect the renewal. In
short Amos illustrates the easily-forgotten truth that a preacher to
the conscience is not necessarily a preacher of repentance.

Of the great antitheses between which religion moves, Law and Love,
Amos had therefore been the prophet of Law. But we must not imagine
that the association of Love with the Deity was strange to him.
This could not be to any Israelite who remembered the past of his
people--the romance of their origins and early struggles for freedom.
Israel had always felt the grace of their God; and, unless we be
wrong about the date of the great poem in the end of Deuteronomy,
they had lately celebrated that grace in lines of exquisite beauty
and tenderness:--

_He found him in a desert land,_
_In a waste and a howling wilderness._
_He compassed him about, cared for him,_
_Kept him as the apple of His eye._
_As an eagle stirreth up his nest,_
_Fluttereth over his young,_
_Spreadeth his wings, taketh them,_
_Beareth them up on his pinions--_
_So Jehovah alone led him._[445]

The patience of the Lord with their waywardness and their stubbornness
had been the ethical influence on Israel's life at a time when
they had probably neither code of law nor system of doctrine. _Thy
gentleness_, as an early Psalmist says for his people, _Thy gentleness
hath made me great_.[446] Amos is not unaware of this ancient grace of
Jehovah. But he speaks of it in a fashion which shows that he feels it
to be exhausted and without hope for his generation. _I brought you up
out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness,
to possess the land of the Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for
prophets and of your young men for Nazirites._[447] But this can now
only fill the cup of the nation's sin. _You alone have I known of
all the families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all
your iniquities._[448] Jehovah's ancient Love but strengthens now the
justice and the impetus of His Law.

We perceive, then, the problem which Amos left to prophecy. It
was not to discover Love in the Deity whom he had so absolutely
identified with Law. The Love of God needed no discovery among a
people with the Deliverance, the Exodus, the Wilderness and the Gift
of the Land in their memories. But the problem was to prove in God so
great and new a mercy as was capable of matching that Law, which the
abuse of His millennial gentleness now only the more fully justified.
There was needed a prophet to arise with as keen a conscience of
Law as Amos himself, and yet affirm that Love was greater still; to
admit that Israel were doomed, and yet promise their redemption by
processes as reasonable and as ethical as those by which the doom
had been rendered inevitable. The prophet of Conscience had to be
followed by the prophet of Repentance.

Such an one was found in Hosea, the son of Be'eri, a citizen and
probably a priest of Northern Israel, whose very name, _Salvation_,
the synonym of Joshua and of Jesus, breathed the larger hope, which
it was his glory to bear to his people. Before we see how for this
task Hosea was equipped with the love and sympathy which Amos lacked,
let us do two things. Let us appreciate the magnitude of the task
itself, set to him first of prophets; and let us remind ourselves
that, greatly as he achieved it, the task was not one which could be
achieved even by him once for all, but that it presents itself to
religion again and again in the course of her development.

For the first of these duties, it is enough to recall how much all
subsequent prophecy derives from Hosea. We shall not exaggerate if we
say that there is no truth uttered by later prophets about the Divine
Grace, which we do not find in germ in him. Isaiah of Jerusalem was a
greater statesman and a more powerful writer, but he had not Hosea's
tenderness and insight into motive and character. Hosea's marvellous
sympathy both with the people and with God is sufficient to foreshadow
every grief, every hope, every gospel, which make the books of Jeremiah
and the great Prophet of the Exile exhaustless in their spiritual value
for mankind. Those others explored the kingdom of God: it was Hosea
who took it by storm.[449] He is the first prophet of Grace, Israel's
earliest Evangelist; yet with as keen a sense of law, and of the
inevitableness of ethical discipline, as Amos himself.

But the task which Hosea accomplished was not one that could be
accomplished once for all. The interest of his book is not merely
historical. For so often as a generation is shocked out of its
old religious ideals, as Amos shocked Israel, by a realism and a
discovery of law, which have no respect for ideals, however ancient
and however dear to the human heart, but work their own pitiless way
to doom inevitable; so often must the Book of Hosea have a practical
value for living men. At such a crisis we stand to-day. The older
Evangelical assurance, the older Evangelical ideals have to some
extent been rendered impossible by the realism to which the sciences,
both physical and historical, have most healthily recalled us, and by
their wonderful revelation of Law working through nature and society
without respect to our creeds and pious hopes. The question presses:
Is it still possible to believe in repentance and conversion, still
possible to preach the power of God to save, whether the individual
or society, from the forces of heredity and of habit? We can at least
learn how Hosea mastered the very similar problem which Amos left to
him, and how, with a moral realism no less stern than his predecessor
and a moral standard every whit as high, he proclaimed Love to be
the ultimate element in religion; not only because it moves man to
a repentance and God to a redemption more sovereign than any law;
but because if neglected or abused, whether as love of man or love
of God, it enforces a doom still more inexorable than that required
by violated truth or by outraged justice. Love our Saviour, Love our
almighty and unfailing Father, but, just because of this, Love our
most awful Judge--we turn to the life and the message in which this
eternal theme was first unfolded.

FOOTNOTES:

[443] See above, pp. 193 ff.

[444] v. 4.

[445] Deut. xxxii. 10-12: a song probably earlier than the eighth
century. But some put it later.

[446] Psalm xviii.

[447] ii. 10 f.

[448] iii. 2.

[449] Matt. xi. 12.

CHAPTER XIV

_THE STORY OF THE PRODIGAL WIFE_

HOSEA i.-iii.

It has often been remarked that, unlike the first Doomster of Israel,
Israel's first Evangelist was one of themselves, a native and
citizen, perhaps even a priest, of the land to which he was sent.
This appears even in his treatment of the stage and soil of his
ministry. Contrast him in this respect with Amos.

In the Book of Amos we have few glimpses of the scenery of Israel,
and these always by flashes of the lightnings of judgment: the towns
in drought or earthquake or siege; the vineyards and orchards under
locusts or mildew; Carmel itself desolate, or as a hiding-place from
God's wrath.

But Hosea's love steals across his whole land like the dew, provoking
every separate scent and colour, till all Galilee lies before us,
lustrous and fragrant as nowhere else outside the parables of Jesus.
The Book of Amos, when it would praise God's works, looks to the
stars. But the poetry of Hosea clings about his native soil like its
trailing vines. If he appeals to the heavens, it is only that they
may speak to the earth, and the earth to the corn and the wine, and
the corn and the wine to Jezreel.[450] Even the wild beasts--and
Hosea tells us of their cruelty almost as much as Amos--he cannot
shut out of the hope of his love: _I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with
the creeping things of the ground_.[451] God's love-gifts to His
people are corn and wool, flax and oil; while spiritual blessings
are figured in the joys of them who sow and reap. With Hosea we feel
all the seasons of the Syrian year: early rain and latter rain, the
first flush of the young corn, the scent of the vine blossom, the
_first ripe fig of the fig-tree in her first season_, the bursting of
the lily; the wild vine trailing on the hedge, the field of tares,
the beauty of the full olive in sunshine and breeze; the mists and
heavy dews of a summer morning in Ephraim, the night winds laden with
the air of the mountains, _the scent of Lebanon_.[452] Or it is the
dearer human sights in valley and field: the smoke from the chimney,
the chaff from the threshing-floor, the doves startled to their
towers, the fowler and his net; the breaking up of the fallow ground,
the harrowing of the clods, the reapers, the heifer that treadeth out
the corn; the team of draught oxen surmounting the steep road, and at
the top the kindly driver setting in food to their jaws.[453]

Where, I say, do we find anything like this save in the parables
of Jesus? For the love of Hosea was as the love of that greater
Galilean: however high, however lonely it soared, it was yet rooted
in the common life below, and fed with the unfailing grace of a
thousand homely sources.

But just as the Love which first showed itself in the sunny Parables
of Galilee passed onward to Gethsemane and the Cross, so the love of
Hosea, that had wakened with the spring lilies and dewy summer mornings
of the North, had also, ere his youth was spent, to meet its agony and
shame. These came upon the prophet in his home, and in her in whom so
loyal and tender a heart had hoped to find his chiefest sanctuary next
to God. There are, it is true, some of the ugliest facts of human life
about this prophet's experience; but the message is one very suited to
our own hearts and times. Let us read this story of the Prodigal Wife
as we do that other Galilean tale of the Prodigal Son. There as well
as here are harlots; but here as well as there is the clear mirror of
the Divine Love. For the Bible never shuns realism when it would expose
the exceeding hatefulness of sin or magnify the power of God's love to
redeem. To an age which is always treating conjugal infidelity either
as a matter of comedy or as a problem of despair, the tale of Hosea
and his wife may still become, what it proved to his own generation, a
gospel full of love and hope.

The story, and how it led Hosea to understand God's relations to
sinful men, is told in the first three chapters of his book. It opens
with the very startling sentence: _The beginning of the word of
Jehovah to Hosea:--And Jehovah said to Hosea, Go, take thee a wife of
harlotry and children of harlotry: for the Land hath committed great
harlotry in departing from Jehovah._[454]

The command was obeyed. _And he went and took Gomer, daughter of
Diblaim;_[455] _and she conceived, and bare to him a son. And
Jehovah said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little and
I shall visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will
bring to an end the kingdom of the house of Israel; and it shall
be on that day that I shall break the bow of Israel in the Vale
of Jezreel_--the classic battle-field of Israel.[456] _And she
conceived again, and bare a daughter; and He said to him, Call her
name Un-Loved_, or _That-never-knew-a-Father's-Pity;_[457] _for I
will not again have pity_--such pity as a Father hath--_on the house
of Israel, that I should fully forgive them._[458] _And she weaned
Un-Pitied, and conceived, and bare a son. And He said, Call his name
Not-My-People; for ye are not My people, and I--I am not yours._[459]

It is not surprising that divers interpretations have been put upon
this troubled tale. The words which introduce it are so startling
that very many have held it to be an allegory, or parable, invented
by the prophet to illustrate, by familiar human figures, what
was at that period the still difficult conception of the Love of
God for sinful men. But to this well-intended argument there are
insuperable objections. It implies that Hosea had first awakened
to the relations of Jehovah and Israel--He faithful and full of
affection, she unfaithful and thankless--and that then, in order to
illustrate the relations, he had invented the story. To that we have
an adequate reply. In the first place, though it were possible, it
is extremely improbable, that such a man should have invented such
a tale about his wife, or, if he was unmarried, about himself. But,
in the second place, he says expressly that his domestic experience
was the _beginning of Jehovah's word to him_. That is, he passed
through it first, and only afterwards, with the sympathy and insight
thus acquired, he came to appreciate Jehovah's relation to Israel.
Finally, the style betrays narrative rather than parable. The simple
facts are told; there is an absence of elaboration; there is no
effort to make every detail symbolic; the names Gomer and Diblaim are
apparently those of real persons; every attempt to attach a symbolic
value to them has failed.

She was, therefore, no dream, this woman, but flesh and blood: the
sorrow, the despair, the sphinx of the prophet's life; yet a sphinx
who in the end yielded her riddle to love.

Accordingly a large number of other interpreters have taken the story
throughout as the literal account of actual facts. This is the theory
of many of the Latin and Greek Fathers,[460] of many of the Puritans
and of Dr. Pusey--by one of those agreements into which, from such
opposite schools, all these commentators are not infrequently drawn
by their common captivity to the letter of Scripture.[461] When you
ask them, How then do you justify that first strange word of God
to Hosea,[462] if you take it literally and believe that Hosea was
charged to marry a woman of public shame? they answer either that
such an evil may be justified by the bare word of God, or that it was
well worth the end, the salvation of a lost soul.[463] And indeed
this tragedy would be invested with an even greater pathos if it
were true that the human hero had passed through a self-sacrifice
so unusual, had incurred such a shame for such an end. The
interpretation, however, seems forbidden by the essence of the story.
Had not Hosea's wife been pure when he married her she could not have
served as a type of the Israel whose earliest relations to Jehovah
he describes as innocent. And this is confirmed by other features of
the book: by the high ideal which Hosea has of marriage, and by that
sense of early goodness and early beauty passing away like morning
mist, which is so often and so pathetically expressed that we cannot
but catch in it the echo of his own experience. As one has said to
whom we owe, more than to any other, the exposition of the gospel in
Hosea,[464] "The struggle of Hosea's shame and grief when he found
his wife unfaithful is altogether inconceivable unless his first love
had been pure and full of trust in the purity of its object."

How then are we to reconcile with this the statement of that command
to take a wife of the character so frankly described? In this way--and
we owe the interpretation to the same lamented scholar.[465] When,
some years after his marriage, Hosea at last began to be aware of the
character of her whom he had taken to his home, and while he still
brooded upon it, God revealed to him why He who knoweth all things
from the beginning had suffered His servant to marry such a woman; and
Hosea, by a very natural anticipation, in which he is imitated by other
prophets,[466] pushed back his own knowledge of God's purpose to the
date when that purpose began actually to be fulfilled, the day of his
betrothal. This, though he was all unconscious of its fatal future, had
been to Hosea the beginning of the word of the Lord. On that uncertain
voyage he had sailed with sealed orders.

Now this is true to nature, and may be matched from our own experience.
"The beginning of God's word" to any of us--where does it lie? Does it
lie in the first time the meaning of our life became articulate, and we
were able to utter it to others? Ah no; it always lies far behind that,
in facts and in relationships, of the Divine meaning of which we are
at the time unconscious, though now we know. How familiar this is in
respect to the sorrows and adversities of life: dumb, deadening things
that fall on us at the time with no more voice than clods falling on
coffins of dead men, we have been able to read them afterwards as the
clear call of God to our souls. But what we thus so readily admit about
the sorrows of life may be equally true of any of those relations which
we enter with light and unawed hearts, conscious only of the novelty
and the joy of them. It is most true of the love which meets a man as
it met Hosea in his opening manhood.

How long Hosea took to discover his shame he indicates by a few
hints which he suffers to break from the delicate reserve of his
story. He calls the first child his own; and the boy's name, though
ominous of the nation's fate, has no trace of shame upon it. Hosea's
Jezreel was as Isaiah's Shear-Jashub or Maher-shalal-hash-baz. But
Hosea does not claim the second child; and in the name of this little
lass, Lo-Ruhamah, _she-that-never-knew-a-father's-love_, orphan not
by death but by her mother's sin, we find proof of the prophet's
awakening to the tragedy of his home. Nor does he own the third
child, named _Not-my-people_, that could also mean _No-kin-of-mine_.
The three births must have taken at least six years;[467] and once at
least, but probably oftener, Hosea had forgiven the woman, and till
the sixth year she stayed in his house. Then either he put her from
him, or she went her own way. She sold herself for money, and finally
drifted, like all of her class, into slavery.[468]

Such were the facts of Hosea's grief, and we have now to attempt to
understand how that grief became his gospel. We may regard the stages
of the process as two: first, when he was led to feel that his sorrow
was the sorrow of the whole nation; and, second, when he comprehended
that it was of similar kind to the sorrow of God Himself.

While Hosea brooded upon his pain one of the first things he would
remember would be the fact, which he so frequently illustrates, that
the case of his home was not singular, but common and characteristic
of his day. Take the evidence of his book, and there must have been
in Israel many such wives as his own. He describes their sin as the
besetting sin of the nation, and the plague of Israel's life. But to
lose your own sorrow in the vaster sense of national trouble--that
is the first consciousness of a duty and a mission. In the analogous
vice of intemperance among ourselves we have seen the same experience
operate again and again. How many a man has joined the public warfare
against that sin, because he was aroused to its national consequences
by the ruin it had brought to his own home! And one remembers from
recent years a more illustrious instance, where a domestic grief--it
is true of a very different kind--became not dissimilarly the opening
of a great career of service to the people:--

"I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in
the depths of grief--I may almost say of despair, for the light
and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left
on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and
a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber
above us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend, and addressed
me, as you may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he
looked up and said: 'There are thousands and thousands of homes in
England at this moment where wives and mothers and children are
dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is
passed, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest
until the Corn Laws are repealed.'"[469]

Not dissimilarly was Hosea's pain overwhelmed by the pain of his
people. He remembered that there were in Israel thousands of homes
like his own. Anguish gave way to sympathy. The mystery became the
stimulus to a mission.

But, again, Hosea traces this sin of his day to the worship of
strange gods. He tells the fathers of Israel, for instance, that they
need not be surprised at the corruption of their wives and daughters
when they themselves bring home from the heathen rites the infection
of light views of love.[470] That is to say, the many sins against
human love in Israel, the wrong done to his own heart in his own
home, Hosea connects with the wrong done to the Love of God, by His
people's desertion of Him for foreign and impure rites. Hosea's own
sorrow thus became a key to the sorrow of God. Had he loved this
woman, cherished and honoured her, borne with and forgiven her, only
to find at the last his love spurned and hers turned to sinful men:
so also had the Love of God been treated by His chosen people, and
they had fallen to the loose worship of idols.

Hosea was the more naturally led to compare his relations to his wife
with Jehovah's to Israel, by certain religious beliefs current among
the Semitic peoples. It was common to nearly all Semitic religions
to express the union of a god with his land or with his people by
the figure of marriage. The title which Hosea so often applies to
the heathen deities, Ba'al, meant originally not "lord" of his
worshippers, but "possessor" and endower of his land, its husband and
fertiliser. A fertile land was "a land of Ba'al," or "Be'ulah," that
is, "possessed" or "blessed by a Ba'al."[471] Under the fertility
was counted not only the increase of field and flock, but the human
increase as well; and thus a nation could speak of themselves as
the children of the Land, their mother, and of her Ba'al, their
father.[472] When Hosea, then, called Jehovah the husband of Israel,
it was not an entirely new symbol which he invented. Up to his time,
however, the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of a god and his people,
seems to have been conceived in a physical form which ever tended to
become more gross; and was expressed, as Hosea points out, by rites
of a sensual and debasing nature, with the most disastrous effects on
the domestic morals of the people. By an inspiration, whose ethical
character is very conspicuous, Hosea breaks the physical connection
altogether. Jehovah's Bride is not the Land, but the People, and
His marriage with her is conceived wholly as a moral relation. Not
that He has no connection with the physical fruits of the land: corn,
wine, oil, wool and flax. But these are represented only as the
signs and ornaments of the marriage, love-gifts from the husband to
the wife.[473] The marriage itself is purely moral: _I will betroth
her to Me in righteousness and justice, in leal love and tender
mercies_.[474] From her in return are demanded faithfulness and
growing knowledge of her Lord.

It is the re-creation of an Idea. Slain and made carrion by the
heathen religions, the figure is restored to life by Hosea. And this
is a life everlasting. Prophet and apostle, the Israel of Jehovah,
the Church of Christ, have alike found in Hosea's figure an unfailing
significance and charm. Here we cannot trace the history of the
figure; but at least we ought to emphasise the creative power which
its recovery to life proves to have been inherent in prophecy. This
is one of those triumphs of which the God of Israel said: _Behold, I
make all things new_.[475]

Having dug his figure from the mire and set it upon the rock, Hosea
sends it on its way with all boldness. If Jehovah be thus the husband
of Israel, _her first husband, the husband of her youth_, then
all her pursuit of the Ba'alim is unfaithfulness to her marriage
vows. But she is worse than an adulteress; she is a harlot. She has
fallen for gifts. Here the historical facts wonderfully assisted
the prophet's metaphor. It was a fact that Israel and Jehovah were
first wedded in the wilderness upon conditions, which by the very
circumstances of desert life could have little or no reference to
the fertility of the earth, but were purely personal and moral. And
it was also a fact that Israel's declension from Jehovah came after
her settlement in Canaan, and was due to her discovery of other
deities, in possession of the soil, and adored by the natives as the
dispensers of its fertility. Israel fell under these superstitions,
and, although she still formally acknowledged her bond to Jehovah,
yet in order to get her fields blessed and her flocks made fertile,
her orchards protected from blight and her fleeces from scab, she
went after the local Ba'alim.[476] With bitter scorn Hosea points out
that there was no true love in this: it was the mercenariness of a
harlot, selling herself for gifts.[477] And it had the usual results.
The children whom Israel bore were not her husband's.[478] The new
generation in Israel grew up in ignorance of Jehovah, with characters
and lives strange to His Spirit. They were Lo-Ruhamah: He could not
feel towards them such pity as a father hath.[479] They were Lo-Ammi:
not at all His people. All was in exact parallel to Hosea's own
experience with his wife; and only the real pain of that experience
could have made the man brave enough to use it as a figure of his
God's treatment by Israel.

Following out the human analogy, the next step should have been for
Jehovah to divorce His erring spouse. But Jehovah reveals to the
prophet that this is not His way. For He is _God and not man, the
Holy One in the midst of thee. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
How shall I surrender thee, O Israel? My heart is turned within Me,
My compassions are kindled together!_

Jehovah will seek, find and bring back the wanderer. Yet the
process shall not be easy. The gospel which Hosea here preaches
is matched in its great tenderness by its full recognition of the
ethical requirements of the case. Israel may not be restored without
repentance, and cannot repent without disillusion and chastisement.
God will therefore show her that her lovers, the Ba'alim, are unable
to assure to her the gifts for which she followed them. These are His
corn, His wine, His wool and His flax, and He will take them away
for a time. Nay more, as if mere drought and blight might still be
regarded as some Ba'al's work, He who has always manifested Himself
by great historic deeds will do so again. He will remove herself from
the land, and leave it a waste and a desolation. The whole passage
runs as follows, introduced by the initial _Therefore_ of judgment:--

_Therefore, behold, I am going to hedge_[480] _up her_[481] _way with
thorns, and build her_[482] _a wall, so that she find not her paths.
And she shall pursue her paramours and shall not come upon them, seek
them and shall not find them; and she shall say, Let me go and return
to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now. She knew
not, then, that it was I who gave her the corn and the wine and the
oil; yea, silver I heaped upon her and gold--they worked it up for
the Ba'al!_[483] Israel had deserted the religion that was historical
and moral for the religion that was physical. But the historical
religion was the physical one. Jehovah who had brought Israel to the
land was also the God of the Land. He would prove this by taking
away its blessings. _Therefore I will turn and take away My corn in
its time and My wine in its season, and I will withdraw My wool and
My flax that should have covered her nakedness. And now_--the other
initial of judgment--_I will lay bare her shame to the eyes of her
lovers, and no man shall rescue her from My hand. And I will make
an end of all her joyaunce, her pilgrimages, her New-Moons and her
Sabbaths, with every festival; and I will destroy her vines and her
figs of which she said, "They are a gift, mine own, which my lovers
gave me," and I will turn them to jungle and the wild beast shall
devour them. So shall I visit upon her the days of the Ba'alim, when
she used to offer incense to them, and decked herself with her rings
and her jewels and went after her paramours, but Me she forgat--'tis
the oracle of Jehovah._ All this implies something more than such
natural disasters as those in which Amos saw the first chastisements
of the Lord. Each of the verses suggests, not only a devastation of
the land by war,[484] but the removal of the people into captivity.
Evidently, therefore, Hosea, writing about 745, had in view a speedy
invasion by Assyria, an invasion which was always followed up by the
exile of the people subdued.

This is next described, with all plainness, under the figure of
Israel's early wanderings in the wilderness, but is emphasised as
happening only for the end of the people's penitence and restoration.
The new hope is so melodious that it carries the language into metre.

_Therefore, lo! I am to woo her, and I will bring her to the
wilderness,_
_And I will speak home to her heart._
_And from there I will give to her her vineyards,_
_And the Valley of Achor for a doorway of hope._
_And there she shall answer_ Me _as in the days of her youth,_
_And as the day when she came up from the land of Miṣraim._

To us the terms of this passage may seem formal and theological.
But to every Israelite some of these terms must have brought back
the days of his own wooing. _I will speak home to her heart_ is a
forcible expression, like the German "an das Herz" or the sweet
Scottish "it cam' up roond my heart," and was used in Israel as
from man to woman when he won her.[485] But the other terms have an
equal charm. The prophet, of course, does not mean that Israel shall
be literally taken back to the desert. But he describes her coming
Exile under that ancient figure, in order to surround her penitence
with the associations of her innocency and her youth. By the grace
of God, everything shall begin again as at first. The old terms
_wilderness_, _the giving of vineyards_, _Valley of Achor_, are, as
it were, the wedding ring restored.

As a result of all this (whether the words be by Hosea or another),[486]

_It shall be in that day--'tis Jehovah's oracle--that thou
shalt call Me, My husband,_
_And thou shalt not again call Me, My Ba'al:_
_For I will take away the names of the Ba'alim from her
mouth,_
_And they shall no more be remembered by their names._

There follows a picture of the ideal future, in which--how unlike the
vision that now closes the Book of Amos!--moral and spiritual beauty,
the peace of the land and the redemption of the people, are wonderfully
mingled together, in a style so characteristic of Hosea's heart. It is
hard to tell where the rhythmical prose passes into actual metre.

_And I will make for them a covenant in that day with the wild beasts,
and with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping things of the
ground; and the bow and the sword and battle will I break from the
land, and I will make you to dwell in safety. And I will betroth thee
to Me for ever, and I will betroth thee to Me in righteousness and in
justice, in leal love and in tender mercies; and I will betroth thee to
Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know Jehovah._

_And it shall be on that day I will speak--'tis the oracle of
Jehovah--I will speak to the heavens, and they shall speak to the
earth; and the earth shall speak to the corn and the wine and the
oil, and they shall speak to Jezreel, the scattered like seed_ across
many lands; _but I will sow him_[487] _for Myself in the land: and
I will have a father's pity upon Un-Pitied; and to Not-My-People_ I
will say. _My people thou art! and he shall say, My God!_[488]

The circle is thus completed on the terms from which we started. The
three names which Hosea gave to the children, evil omens of Israel's
fate, are reversed, and the people restored to the favour and love of
their God.

We might expect this glory to form the culmination of the prophecy.
What fuller prospect could be imagined than that we see in the close
of the second chapter? With a wonderful grace, however, the prophecy
turns back from this sure vision of the restoration of the people as
a whole, to pick up again the individual from whom it had started,
and whose unclean rag of a life had fluttered out of sight before
the national fortunes sweeping in upon the scene. This was needed to
crown the story--this return to the individual.

_And Jehovah said unto me, Once more go, love a wife that is loved
of a paramour and is an adulteress,_[489] _as Jehovah loveth the
children of Israel, the while they are turning to other gods, and love
raisin-cakes_--probably some element in the feasts of the gods of the
land, the givers of the grape. _Then I bought her to me for fifteen
pieces of silver and a homer of barley and a lethech of wine._[490]
_And I said to her, For many days shall thou abide for me alone; thou
shall not play the harlot, thou shall not be for any husband; and
I for my part also shall be so towards thee. For the days are many
that the children of Israel shall abide without a king and without a
prince, without sacrifice and without maççebah, and without ephod and
teraphim._[491] _Afterwards the children of Israel shall turn and seek
Jehovah their God and David their king, and shall be in awe of Jehovah
and towards His goodness in the end of the days._[492]

Do not let us miss the fact that the story of the wife's restoration
follows that of Israel's, although the story of the wife's
unfaithfulness had come before that of Israel's apostasy. For this
order means that, while the prophet's private pain preceded his
sympathy with God's pain, it was not he who set God, but God who set
him, the example of forgiveness. The man learned the God's sorrow out
of his own sorrow; but conversely he was taught to forgive and redeem
his wife only by seeing God forgive and redeem the people. In other
words, the Divine was suggested by the human pain; yet the Divine Grace
was not started by any previous human grace, but, on the contrary,
was itself the precedent and origin of the latter. This is in harmony
with all Hosea's teaching. God forgives because _He is God and not
man_.[493] Our pain with those we love helps us to understand God's
pain; but it is not our love that leads us to believe in His love. On
the contrary, all human grace is but the reflex of the Divine. So St.
Paul: _Even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye_. So St. John: _We
love Him_, and one another, _because He first loved us_.

But this return from the nation to the individual has another
interest. Gomer's redemption is not the mere formal completion of the
parallel between her and her people. It is, as the story says, an
impulse of the Divine Love, recognised even then in Israel as seeking
the individual. He who followed Hagar into the wilderness, who met
Jacob at Bethel and forgat not the slave Joseph in prison,[494]
remembers also Hosea's wife. His love is not satisfied with His
Nation-Bride: He remembers this single outcast. It is the Shepherd
leaving the ninety-and-nine in the fold to seek the one lost sheep.

* * * * *

For Hosea himself his home could never be the same as it was at the
first. _And I said to her, For many days shalt thou abide, as far as
I am concerned, alone. Thou shalt not play the harlot. Thou shalt not
be for a husband: and I on my side also shall be so towards thee._
Discipline was needed there; and abroad the nation's troubles called
the prophet to an anguish and a toil which left no room for the sweet
love or hope of his youth. He steps at once to his hard warfare for
his people; and through the rest of his book we never again hear him
speak of home, or of children, or of wife. So Arthur passed from
Guinevere to his last battle for his land:--

"Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God
Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest.
But how to take last leave of all I loved?

* * * * *

I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine;...
I cannot take thy hand; that too is flesh,
And in the flesh thou hast sinned; and mine own flesh,
Here looking down on thine polluted, cries
'I loathe thee'; yet not less, O Guinevere,
For I was ever virgin save for thee,
My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,
Hereafter in that world where all are pure
We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband, not a smaller soul....
Leave me that,
I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence,
Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."

FOOTNOTES:

[450] ii. 23, Heb.

[451] ii. 20, Heb.

[452] vi. 3, 4; vii. 8; ix. 10; xiv. 6, 7, 8.

[453] vii. 11, 12; x. 11; xi. 4, etc.

[454] Pregnant construction, _hath committed great harlotry from
after Jehovah_.

[455] These personal names do not elsewhere occur. גֹּמֶר; Γομερ.
דִּבְלַיִם; Δεβηλαιμ B; Δεβηλαειμ, AQ. They have, of course, been
interpreted allegorically in the interests of the theory discussed
below. גמר has been taken to mean "completion," and interpreted as
various derivatives of that root: Jerome, "the perfect one"; Raschi,
"that fulfilled all evil"; Kimchi, "fulfilment of punishment";
Calvin, "consumptio," and so on. דבלים has been traced to דִּבלה, Pl.
דִּבְלִים, cakes of pressed figs, as if a name had been sought to
connect the woman at once with the idol-worship and a rich sweetness;
or to an Arabic root, דבל, to press, as if it referred either to the
plumpness of the body (cf. Ezek. xvi. 7; so Hitzig) or to the woman's
habits. But all these are far-fetched and vain. There is no reason
to suppose that either of the two names is symbolic. The alternative
(allowed by the language) naturally suggests itself that דבלים is the
name of Gomer's birthplace. But there is nothing to prove this. No
such place-name occurs elsewhere: one cannot adduce the Diblathaim in
Moab (Num. xxxiii. 46 ff.; Jer. xlviii. 2).

[456] _Hist. Geog._, Chap. XVIII.

[457] רֻחָמָה לֹא, probably 3rd pers. sing. fem. Pual (in Pause
cf. Prov. xxviii. 13); literally, _She is not loved_ or _pitied_.
The word means love as pity: "such pity as a father hath unto his
children dear" (Psalm ciii.), or God to a penitent man (Psalm
xxviii. 13). The Greek versions alternate between love and pity.
LXX. οὐκ ἠλεημένη διότι οὐ μὴ προσθήσω ἔτι ἠλεῆσαι, for which the
Complutensian has ἀγαπῆσαι, the reading followed by Paul (Rom. ix,
25: cf. 1 Peter ii. 10).

[458] Here ver. 7 is to be omitted, as explained above, p. 213.

[459] Do not belong to you; but the _I am_, אהיה, recalls the _I am
that I am_ of Exodus.

[460] Augustine, Ambrose, Theodoret, Cyril Alex. and Theodore of
Mopsuestia.

[461] It is interesting to read in parallel the interpretations of
Matthew Henry and Dr. Pusey. They are very alike, but the latter has
the more delicate taste of his age.

[462] i. 2.

[463] The former is Matthew Henry's; the latter seems to be implied
by Pusey.

[464] Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_.

[465] Apparently it was W. R. Smith's interpretation which caused
Kuenen to give up the allegorical theory.

[466] Two instances are usually quoted. The one is Isaiah vi., where
most are agreed that what Isaiah has stated there as his inaugural
vision is not only what happened in the earliest moments of his
prophetic life, but this spelt out and emphasised by his experience
since. See _Isaiah I.-XXXIX._ (Exp. Bible), pp. 57 f. The other
instance is Jeremiah xxxii. 8, where the prophet tells us that he
became convinced that the Lord spoke to him on a certain occasion
only after a subsequent event proved this to be the case.

[467] An Eastern woman seldom weans her child before the end of its
second year.

[468] iii. 2.

[469] From a speech by John Bright.

[470] iv. 13, 14.

[471] Cf. the spiritual use of the term, Isa. lxii. 4.

[472] For proof and exposition of all this see Robertson Smith,
_Religion of the Semites_, 92 ff.

[473] ii. 8.

[474] So best is rendered חסד, ḥesedh, which means always not merely
an affection, "lovingkindness," as our version puts it, but a
relation loyally observed.

[475] An expansion of this will be found in the present writer's
_Isaiah XL.-LXVI._ (Expositor's Bible Series), pp. 398 ff.

[476] ii. 13.

[477] ii. 5, 13.

[478] ii. 5.

[479] See above, p. 235.

[480] The participle Qal, used by God of Himself in His proclamations
of grace or of punishment, has in this passage (cf. ver. 16) and
elsewhere (especially in Deuteronomy) the force of an immediate future.

[481] So LXX.; Mass. Text, _thy_.

[482] The reading גְּדֵרָהּ is more probable than גְּדֵרָה.

[483] Or _they made it into a Ba'al_ image. So Ew., Hitz., Nowack.
But Wellhausen omits the clause.

[484] Wellhausen thinks that up to ver. 14 only physical calamities
are meant, but the הצלתו of ver. 11, as well as others of the terms
used, imply not the blighting of crops before their season, but the
carrying of them away in their season, when they had fully ripened,
by invaders. The cessation of all worship points to the removal of
the people from their land, which is also implied, of course, by the
promise that they shall be sown again in ver. 23.

[485] Cf. Isa. xl. 1: which to the same exiled Israel is the
fulfilment of the promise made by Hosea. See _Isaiah XL.-LXVI._
(Expositor's Bible), pp. 75 ff.

[486] Wellhausen calls ver. 18 a gloss to ver. 19.

[487] Massoretic Text, _her_.

[488] It is at this point, if at any, that i. 10, 11, ii. 1 (Eng.,
but ii. 1-3 Heb.) ought to come in. It will be observed, however,
that even here they are superfluous: _And the number of the children
of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured
nor counted; and it shall be in the place where it was said to them,
No People of Mine are ye! it shall be said to them, Sons of the
Living God! And the children of Judah and the children of Israel
shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint themselves one
head, and shall go up from the land: for great is the day of Jezreel.
Say unto your brothers, My People, and to your sisters_ (LXX.
_sister_), _She-is-Pitied_. On the whole passage see above, p. 213.

[489] Or _that is loved of her husband though an adulteress_.

[490] So LXX. The homer was eight bushels. The lethech is a measure
not elsewhere mentioned.

[491] On these see above, Introduction, Chap. III., p. 38.

[492] On the text see above, p. 214.

[493] xi. 9.

[494] As the stories all written down before this had made familiar
to Israel.

CHAPTER XV

_THE THICK NIGHT OF ISRAEL_

HOSEA iv.-xiv.

It was indeed "thick night" into which this Arthur of Israel stepped
from his shattered home. The mists drive across Hosea's long agony
with his people, and what we see, we see blurred and broken. There
is stumbling and clashing; crowds in drift; confused rallies; gangs
of assassins breaking across the highways; doors opening upon lurid
interiors full of drunken riot. Voices, which other voices mock, cry
for a dawn that never comes. God Himself is Laughter, Lightning,
a Lion, a Gnawing Worm. Only one clear note breaks over the
confusion--the trumpet summoning to war.

Take courage, O great heart! Not thus shall it always be! There wait
thee, before the end, of open Visions at least two--one of Memory and
one of Hope, one of Childhood and one of Spring. Past this night,
past the swamp and jungle of these fetid years, thou shalt see thy
land in her beauty, and God shall look on the face of His Bride.

* * * * *

Chaps, iv.-xiv. are almost indivisible. The two Visions just
mentioned, chaps. xi. and xiv. 3-9, may be detached by virtue of
contributing the only strains of gospel which rise victorious above
the Lord's controversy with His people and the troubled story of
their sins. All the rest is the noise of a nation falling to pieces,
the crumbling of a splendid past. And as decay has no climax and ruin
no rhythm, so we may understand why it is impossible to divide with
any certainty Hosea's record of Israel's fall. Some arrangement we
must attempt, but it is more or less artificial, and to be undertaken
for the sake of our own minds, that cannot grasp so great a collapse
all at once. Chap. iv. has a certain unity, and is followed by a new
exordium, but as it forms only the theme of which the subsequent
chapters are variations, we may take it with them as far as chap.
vii., ver. 7; after which there is a slight transition from the
moral signs of Israel's dissolution to the political--although Hosea
still combines the religious offence of idolatry with the anarchy
of the land. These form the chief interest to the end of chap. x.
Then breaks the bright Vision of the Past, chap. xi., the temporary
victory of the Gospel of the Prophet over his Curse. In chaps.
xii.-xiv. 2 we are plunged into the latter once more, and reach in
xiv. 3 ff. the second bright Vision, the Vision of the Future. To
each of these phases of Israel's Thick Night--we can hardly call them
Sections--we may devote a chapter of simple exposition, adding three
chapters more of detailed examination of the main doctrines we shall
have encountered on our way--the Knowledge of God, Repentance, and
the Sin against Love.

CHAPTER XVI

_A PEOPLE IN DECAY: 1. MORALLY_

HOSEA iv.-vii 7.

Pursuing the plan laid down in the last chapter, we now take the
section of Hosea's discourse which lies between chap. iv. 1 and
chap. vii. 7. Chap. iv. is the only really separable bit of it; but
there are also slight breaks at v. 15 and vii. 2. So we may attempt
a division into four periods: 1. Chap. iv., which states God's
general charge against the people; 2. Chap. v. 1-14, which discusses
the priests and princes; 3. Chaps. v. 15-vii. 2, which abjures the
people's attempts at repentance; and 4. Chap. vii. 3-7, which is a
lurid spectacle of the drunken and profligate court. All these give
symptoms of the moral decay of the people,--the family destroyed by
impurity, and society by theft and murder; the corruption of the
spiritual guides of the people; the debauchery of the nobles; the
sympathy of the throne with evil,--with the despairing judgment that
such a people are incapable even of repentance. The keynotes are
these: _No troth, leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land. Priest
and Prophet stumble. Ephraim and Judah stumble. I am as the moth to
Ephraim. What can I make of thee, Ephraim? When I would heal them,
their guilt is only the more exposed._ Morally, Israel is rotten.
The prophet, of course, cannot help adding signs of their political
incoherence. But these he deals with more especially in the part of
his discourse which follows chap. vii. 7.

1. THE LORD'S QUARREL WITH ISRAEL.

HOSEA iv.

_Hear the word of Jehovah, sons of Israel!_[495] _Jehovah hath a
quarrel with the inhabitants of the land, for there is no troth nor
leal love nor knowledge of God in the land. Perjury_[496] _and murder
and theft and adultery!_[497] _They break out, and blood strikes upon
blood._

That stable and well-furnished life, across which, while it was still
noon, Amos hurled his alarms--how quickly it has broken up! If there
be still _ease in Zion_, there is no more _security in Samaria_.[498]
The great Jeroboam is dead, and society, which in the East depends
so much on the individual, is loose and falling to pieces. The sins
which are exposed by Amos were those that lurked beneath a still
strong government, but Hosea adds outbreaks which set all order at
defiance. Later we shall find him describing housebreaking, highway
robbery and assassination. _Therefore doth the land wither, and every
one of her denizens languisheth, even to the beast of the field and
the fowl of the heaven; yea, even the fish of the sea are swept up_
in the universal sickness of man and nature: for Hosea feels, like
Amos, the liability of nature to the curse upon sin.

Yet the guilt is not that of the whole people, but of their
religious guides. _Let none find fault and none upbraid, for My
people are but as their priestlings._[499] _O Priest, thou hast
stumbled to-day: and stumble to-night shall the prophet with thee._
One order of the nation's ministers goes staggering after the other!
_And I will destroy thy Mother_, presumably the Nation herself.
_Perished are My people for lack of knowledge._ But how? By the
sin of their teachers. _Because thou_, O Priest, _hast rejected
knowledge, I reject thee from being priest to Me; and as thou hast
forgotten the Torah of thy God, I forget thy children_[500]--_I on
My side. As many as they be, so many have sinned against Me._ Every
jack-priest of them is culpable. _They have turned_[501] _their glory
into shame. They feed on the sin of My people, and to the guilt of
these lift up their appetite!_ The more the people sin, the more
merrily thrive the priests by fines and sin-offerings. They live
upon the vice of the day, and have a vested interest in its crimes.
English Langland said the same thing of the friars of his time. The
contention is obvious. The priests have given themselves wholly to
the ritual; they have forgotten that their office is an intellectual
and moral one. We shall return to this when treating of Hosea's
doctrine of knowledge and its responsibilities. Priesthood, let us
only remember, priesthood is an intellectual trust.

_Thus it comes to be--like people like priest_: they also have fallen
under the ritual, doing from lust what the priests do from greed.
_But I will visit upon them their ways, and their deeds will I
requite to them. For they_--those _shall eat and not be satisfied_,
these _shall play the harlot and have no increase, because they have
left off heeding Jehovah_. This absorption in ritual at the expense
of the moral and intellectual elements of religion has insensibly
led them over into idolatry, with all its unchaste and drunken
services. _Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the brains!_[502]
The result is seen in the stupidity with which they consult their
stocks for guidance. _My people! of its bit of wood it asketh
counsel, and its staff telleth to it_ the oracle! _For a spirit of
harlotry hath led them astray, and they have played the harlot from
their God. Upon the headlands of the hills they sacrifice, and on
the heights offer incense, under oak or poplar or terebinth, for
the shade of them is pleasant._ On _headlands_, not summits, for
here no trees grow; and the altar was generally built under a tree
and near water on some promontory, from which the flight of birds
or of clouds might be watched. _Wherefore_--because of this your
frequenting of the heathen shrines--_your daughters play the harlot
and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. I will not come with
punishment upon your daughters because they play the harlot, nor
upon your daughters-in-law because they commit adultery._ Why? For
_they themselves_, the fathers of Israel--or does he still mean the
priests?--_go aside with the harlots and sacrifice with the common
women of the shrines_! It is vain for the men of a nation to practise
impurity, and fancy that nevertheless they can keep their womankind
chaste. _So the stupid people fall to ruin!_

(_Though thou play the harlot, Israel, let not Judah bring guilt on
herself. And come not to Gilgal, and go not up to Beth-Aven, and take
not your oath_ at the Well-of-the-Oath, Beer-Sheba,[503] _By the life
of Jehovah!_ This obvious parenthesis may be either by Hosea or a
later writer; the latter is more probable.[504])

_Yea, like a wild heifer Israel has gone wild. How now can Jehovah
feed them like a lamb in a broad meadow?_ To treat this clause
interrogatively is the only way to get sense out of it.[505]
_Wedded to idols is Ephraim: leave him alone._ The participle means
_mated_ or _leagued_. The corresponding noun is used of a wife as
the _mate_ of her husband[506] and of an idolater as the _mate_ of
his idols.[507] The expression is doubly appropriate here, since
Hosea used marriage as the figure of the relation of a deity to his
worshippers. _Leave him alone_--he must go from bad to worse. _Their
drunkenness over, they take to harlotry: her rulers have fallen in
love with shame, or they love shame more than their pride._[508] But
in spite of all their servile worship the Assyrian tempest shall
sweep them away in its trail. _A wind hath wrapt them up in her
skirts; and they shall be put to shame by their sacrifices._

This brings the passage to such a climax as Amos loved to crown his
periods. And the opening of the next chapter offers a new exordium.

2. PRIESTS AND PRINCES FAIL.

HOSEA v. 1-14.

The line followed in this paragraph is almost parallel to that of chap.
iv., running out to a prospect of invasion. But the charge is directed
solely against the chiefs of the people, and the strictures of chap.
vii. 7 ff. upon the political folly of the rulers are anticipated.

_Hear this, O Priests, and hearken, House of Israel, and, House
of the King, give ear. For on you is the sentence!_ You, who have
hitherto been the judges, this time shall be judged.

_A snare have ye become at Mizpeh, and a net spread out upon Tabor,
and a pit have they made deep upon Shittim;_[509] _but I shall be
the scourge of them all. I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hid from
Me--for now hast thou played the harlot, Ephraim, Israel is defiled._
The worship on the high places, whether nominally of Jehovah or not,
was sheer service of Ba'alim. It was in the interest both of the
priesthood and of the rulers to multiply these sanctuaries, but they
were only traps for the people. _Their deeds will not let them return
to their God; for a harlot spirit is in their midst, and Jehovah_, for
all their oaths by Him, _they have not known. But the pride of Israel
shall testify to his face; and Israel and Ephraim shall stumble by
their guilt--stumble also shall Judah with them._ By Israel's pride
many understand God. But the term is used too opprobriously by Amos
to allow us to agree to this. The phrase must mean that Israel's
arrogance, or her proud prosperity, by the wounds which it feels in
this time of national decay, shall itself testify against the people--a
profound ethical symptom to which we shall return when treating of
Repentance.[510] Yet the verse may be rendered in harmony with the
context: _the pride of Israel shall be humbled to his face. With their
sheep and their cattle they go about to seek Jehovah, and shall not
find_ Him; _He hath drawn off from them. They have been unfaithful
to Jehovah, for they have begotten strange children_. A generation
has grown up who are not His. _Now may a month devour them with their
portions!_ Any month may bring the swift invader. Hark! the alarum of
war! How it reaches to the back of the land!

_Blow the trumpet in Gibeah, the clarion in Ramah;_
_Raise the slogan, Beth-Aven: "After thee, Benjamin!"_[511]

_Ephraim shall become desolation in the day of rebuke! Among the
tribes of Israel I have made known what is certain!_

At this point, ver. 10, the discourse swerves from the religious to
the political leaders of Israel; but as the princes were included
with the priests in the exordium (ver. 1), we can hardly count this a
new oracle.[512]

_The princes of Judah are like landmark-removers_--commonest of
cheats in Israel--_upon them will I pour out My wrath like water.
Ephraim is oppressed, crushed is_ his _right, for he wilfully
went after vanity._[513] _And I am as the moth to Ephraim, and as
rottenness to the house of Judah._ Both kingdoms have begun to
fall to pieces, for by this time Uzziah of Judah also is dead, and
the weak politicians are in charge whom Isaiah satirised. _And
Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his sore; and Ephraim went
to Asshur and_[514] _sent to King Jareb--King Combative, King
Pick-Quarrel_,[515] a nickname for the Assyrian monarch. The verse
probably refers to the tribute which Menahem sent to Assyria in
738. If so, then Israel has drifted full five years into her "thick
night." _But He cannot heal you, nor dry up your sore. For I_,
Myself, _am like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the
house of Judah. I, I rend and go My way; I carry off and there is
none to deliver._ It is the same truth which Isaiah expressed with
even greater grimness.[516] God Himself is His people's sore; and not
all their statecraft nor alliances may heal what He inflicts. Priests
and Princes, then, have alike failed. A greater failure is to follow.

3. REPENTANCE FAILS.

HOSEA v. 15-vii. 2.

Seeing that their leaders are so helpless, and feeling their wounds,
the people may themselves turn to God for healing, but that will
be with a repentance so shallow as also to be futile. They have no
conviction of sin, nor appreciation of how deeply their evils have
eaten.

This too facile repentance is expressed in a prayer which the
Christian Church has paraphrased into one of its most beautiful
hymns of conversion. Yet the introduction to this prayer, and its
own easy assurance of how soon God will heal the wounds He has made,
as well as the impatience with which God receives it, oblige us to
take the prayer in another sense than the hymn which has been derived
from it.[517] It offers but one more symptom of the optimism of this
light-hearted people, whom no discipline and no judgment can impress
with the reality of their incurable decay. They said of themselves,
_The bricks are fallen, let us build with stones_,[518] and now they
say just as easily and airily of their God, _He hath torn_ only _that
He may heal_: we are fallen, but _He will raise us up again in a day
or two_. At first it is still God who speaks.

_I am going My way, I am returning to My own place,_[519] _until they
feel their guilt and seek My face. When trouble comes upon them, they
will soon enough seek Me, saying_:[520]--

"_Come and let us return to Jehovah:_
_For He hath rent, that He may heal us,_
_And hath wounded,_[521] _that He may bind us up._
_He will bring us to life in a couple of days;_
_On the third day He will raise us up_ again,
_That we may live in His presence._
_Let us know, let us follow up_[522] _to know, Jehovah;_
_As soon as we seek Him, we shall find Him._[523]
_And He shall come to us like the winter-rain,_
_Like the spring-rain, pouring on the land!_"

But how is this fair prayer received by God? With incredulity, with
impatience. _What can I make of thee, Ephraim? what can I make of thee,
Judah? since your love is like the morning cloud and like the dew so
early gone._ Their shallow hearts need deepening. Have they not been
deepened enough? _Wherefore I have hewn_ them _by the prophets, I have
slain them by the words of My mouth, and My judgment goeth forth like
the lightning._[524] _For leal love have I desired, and not sacrifice;
and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings._

That the discourse comes back to the ritual is very intelligible.
For what could make repentance seem so easy as the belief that
forgiveness can be won by simply offering sacrifices? Then the
prophet leaps upon what each new year of that anarchy revealed
afresh--the profound sinfulness of the people.

_But they in human fashion_[525] _have transgressed the covenant!
There_--he will now point out the very spots--_have they
betrayed_[526] _Me! Gilead is a city of evildoers: stamped with
bloody footprints; assassins_[527] _in troops; a gang of priests
murder on the way to Shechem. Yea, crime_[528] _have they done. In
the house of Israel I have seen horrors: there Ephraim hath played
the harlot: Israel is defiled--Judah as well._[529]

Truly the sinfulness of Israel is endless. Every effort to redeem
them only discovers more of it. _When I would turn, when I would
heal Israel, then the guilt of Ephraim displays itself and the evils
of Samaria_, these namely: _that they work fraud, and the thief
cometh in_--evidently a technical term for housebreaking[530]--while
_abroad a crew_ of highwaymen _foray. And they never think in their
hearts that all their evil is recorded by Me. Now have their deeds
encompassed them: they are constantly before Me._

Evidently real repentance on the part of such a people is impossible.
As Hosea said before, _Their deeds will not let them return._[531]

4. WICKEDNESS IN HIGH PLACES.

HOSEA vii. 3-7.

There follows now a very difficult passage. The text is corrupt, and
we have no means of determining what precise events are intended. The
drift of meaning, however, is evident. The disorder and licentiousness
of the people are favoured in high places; the throne itself is guilty.

_With their evil they make a king glad, and princes with their
falsehoods: all of them are adulterers, like an oven heated by the
baker,..._[532]

_On the day of our king_--some coronation or king's birthday--_the
princes were sick with fever from wine. He stretched forth his hand
with loose fellows_,[533] presumably made them his associates.
_Like an oven have they made_[534] _their hearts with their
intriguing._[535] _All night their anger sleepeth:_[536] _in the
morning it blazes like a flame of fire. All of them glow like an
oven, and devour their rulers: all their kings have fallen, without
one of them calling on Me._

An obscure passage upon obscure events; yet so lurid with the
passion of that fevered people in the flagrant years 743-735 that
we can make out the kind of crimes described. A king surrounded by
loose and unscrupulous nobles: adultery, drunkenness, conspiracies,
assassinations: every man striking for himself; none appealing to God.

From the court, then, downwards, by princes, priests and prophets,
to the common fathers of Israel and their households, immorality
prevails. There is no redeeming feature, and no hope of better
things. For repentance itself the capacity is gone.

* * * * *

In making so thorough an indictment of the moral condition of Israel,
it would have been impossible for Hosea not to speak also of the
political stupidity and restlessness which resulted from it. But he
has largely reserved these for that part of his discourse which now
follows, and which we will take in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[495] כי formally introduces the charge.

[496] Lit. _swearing and falsehood_.

[497] Ninth, sixth, eighth and seventh of the Decalogue.

[498] Amos vi. 1.

[499] iv. 4. According to the excellent emendation of Beck (quoted
by Wünsche, p. 142), who instead of ועמככמריב proposes ככמריו ועמי,
for the first word of which there is support in the LXX. ὁ λαός μου.
The second word, כמר, is used for priest only in a bad sense by
Hosea himself, x. 5, and in 2 Kings xxiii. 5 of the calf-worship and
in Zech. i. 4 of the Baal priesthood. As Wellhausen remarks, this
emendation restores sense to a passage that had none before. "Ver. 4
cannot be directed against the people, but must rather furnish the
connection for ver. 5, and effect the transference from the reproof
of the people (vv. 1-3) to the reproof of the priests (5 ff.)." The
letters יכהן which are left over in ver. 4 by the emendation are then
justly improved by Wellhausen (following Zunz) into the vocative הכהן
and taken with the following verse.

[500] The application seems to swerve here. _Thy children_ would
seem to imply that, for this clause at least, the whole people, and
not the priests only, were addressed. But Robertson Smith takes _thy
mother_ as equivalent, not to the nation, but to the priesthood.

[501] A reading current among Jewish writers and adopted by Geiger,
_Urschrift_, 316.

[502] Heb. _the heart_, which ancient Israel conceived as the seat of
the intellect.

[503] Wellhausen thinks this third place-name (cf. Amos v. 5) has
been dropped. It certainly seems to be understood.

[504] But see above, p. 224.

[505] So all critics since Hitzig.

[506] Mal. ii. 4.

[507] Isa. xliv. 11.

[508] The verse is very uncertain. LXX. read a different and a
fuller text from _Ephraim_ in the previous verse to _harlotry_ in
this: "Ephraim hath set up for himself stumbling-blocks and chosen
Canaanites." In the first of alternate readings of the latter half
of the verse omit הבו as probably a repetition of the end of the
preceding word; the second alternative is adapted from LXX., which
for מגיניה must have read מגאונה.

[509] So by slightly altering the consonants. But the text is uncertain.

[510] _Note on the Pride of Israel._--גאון means _grandeur_, and is
(1) so used of Jehovah's majesty (Micah v. 3; Isa. ii. 10, 19, 21;
xxiv. 14), and (2) of the greatness of human powers (Zech. x. 11; Ezek.
xxxii. 12). In Psalm xlvii. 5 it is parallel to the land of Israel
(cf. Nahum ii. 3). (3) In a grosser sense the word is used of the rank
vegetation of Jordan (Eng. wrongly _swelling_) (Jer. xii. 5; Zech. xi.
3: cf. Job xxxviii. 11). It would appear to be this grosser sense of
_rankness_, _arrogance_, in which Amos vi. 8 takes it as parallel to
_the palaces of Israel_ which _Jehovah loathes and will destroy_. In
Amos viii. 7 the phrase may be used in scorn; yet some take it even
there of God Himself (Buhl, last ed. of Gesenius' _Lexicon_).

Now in Hosea it occurs twice in the phrase given above--וענה בפניו
ישראל גאון (v. 5, vii. 10). LXX., Targum and some Jewish exegetes
take ענה as a ל״ו verb, _to be humbled_, and this suits both
contexts. But the word בפניו _to his face_ almost compels us to take
ענה as a ל״י verb, _to witness against_ (cf. Job xvi. 8; Jer. xiv.
7). Hence Wellhausen renders "With his arrogance Israel witnesseth
against himself," and confirms the plaint of Jehovah--the arrogance
being the trust in the ritual and the feeling of no need to turn from
that and repent (cf. vii. 10). Orelli quotes Amos vi. 8 and Nahum
ii. 3, and says injustice cleaves to all Israel's splendour, so it
testifies against him.

But the context, which in both cases speaks of Israel's gradual
decay, demands rather the interpretation that Israel's material
grandeur shows unmistakable signs of breaking down. For the ethical
development of this interpretation, see below, pp. 337 f.

[511] Probably the ancient war-cry of the clan. Cf. Judg. v. 14.

[512] Yet ver. 9 goes with ver. 8 (so Wellhausen), and not with ver.
10 (so Ewald).

[513] For צו read שׁוא.

[514] Wellhausen inserts _Judah_, with that desire to complete a
parallel which seems to me to be overdone by so many critics. If
Judah be inserted we should need to bring the date of these verses
down to the reign of Ahaz in 734.

[515] Guthe: "King Fighting-Cock."

[516] See _Isaiah I.-XXXIX._ (Expositor's Bible), pp. 242 ff.

[517] Cheyne indeed (Introduction to Robertson Smith's _Prophets
of Israel_) takes the prayer to be genuine, but an intrusion. His
reasons do not persuade me. But at least it is clear that there is a
want of connection between the prayer and what follows it, unless the
prayer be understood in the sense explained above.

[518] Isaiah ix. 10.

[519] Cf. Isaiah xviii. 4.

[520] _Saying_: so the LXX. adds and thereby connects chap. v. with
chap. vi.

[521] Read ויִךְ.

[522] Literally _hunt_, _pursue_. It is the same word as is used of
the unfaithful Israel's pursuit of the Ba'alim, chap. ii. 9.

[523] So by a rearrangement of consonants (נמצאהו כשחרנו) and the
help of the LXX. (εὑρήσομεν αὐτόν) Giesebrecht (_Beiträge_, p. 208)
proposes to read the clause, which in the traditional text runs,
_like the morn His going forth shall be certain_.

[524] Read יֵצֵא כָאוֹר מִשְׁפָּטִי.

[525] Or _like Adam_, or (Guthe) _like the heathen_.

[526] The verb means to prove false to any contract, but especially
marriage.

[527] Read מחכי.

[528] In several passages of the Old Testament the word means
unchastity.

[529] Here the LXX. close chap. vi., taking 11 _b_ along with chap.
vii. Some think the whole of ver. 11 to be a Judæan gloss.

[530] Cf. Joel ii. 9, and the New Testament phrase _to come as a
thief_.

[531] v. 4.

[532] The text is unsound. Heb.: "like an oven kindled by the
baker, the stirrer (stoker or kneader?) resteth from kneading the
dough until it be leavened." LXX.: ὡς κλίβανος καιόμενος εἰς πέψιν
κατακαύματος ἀπὸ τῆς φλογός ἀπὸ φυράσεως στέατος ἑῶς τοῦ ξυμωθῆναι
αὐτό--_i.e._ for ישבת they read לחבת אש. Oort emends Heb. to אפהו
הם בוער, which gets rid of the difficulty of a feminine participle
with תנור. Wellhausen omits whole clause as a gloss on ver. 6. But if
there be a gloss it properly commences with ישבת.

[533] LXX. μετατοιμῶν??

[534] LXX. _kindled_, בָּעְרַוּ. So Vollers, _Z.A.T.W._, III. 250.

[535] Lit. _lurking_.

[536] Massoretic Text with different vowels reads _their baker_. LXX.
Εφραιμ!

CHAPTER XVII

_A PEOPLE IN DECAY: II. POLITICALLY_

HOSEA vii. 8-x.

Moral decay means political decay. Sins like these are the gangrene
of nations. It is part of Hosea's greatness to have traced this,
a proof of that versatility which distinguishes him above other
prophets. The most spiritual of them all, he is at the same time the
most political. We owe him an analysis of repentance to which the New
Testament has little to add;[537] but he has also left us a criticism
of society and of politics in Israel, unrivalled except by Isaiah. We
owe him an intellectual conception of God,[538] which for the first
time in Israel exploded idolatry; yet he also is the first to define
Israel's position in the politics of Western Asia. With the simple
courage of conscience Amos had said to the people: You are bad,
therefore you must perish. But Hosea's is the insight to follow the
processes by which sin brings forth death--to trace, for instance,
the effects of impurity upon a nation's powers of reproduction, as
well as upon its intellectual vigour.

So intimate are these two faculties of Hosea, that in chapters
devoted chiefly to the sins of Israel we have already seen him
expose the political disasters that follow. But from the point we
have now reached--chap. vii. 8--the proportion of his prophesying is
reversed: he gives us less of the sin and more of the social decay
and political folly of his age.

I. THE CONFUSION OF THE NATION.

HOSEA vii. 8-viii. 3.

Hosea begins by summing up the public aspect of Israel in two
epigrams, short but of marvellous adequacy (vii. 8):--

_Ephraim--among the nations he mixeth himself:_
_Ephraim has become a cake not turned._

It is a great crisis for any nation to pass from the seclusion of
its youth and become a factor in the main history of the world. But
for Israel the crisis was trebly great. Their difference from all
other tribes about them had struck the Canaanites on their first
entry to the land:[539] their own earliest writers had emphasised
their seclusion as their strength;[540] and their first prophets
consistently deprecated every overture made by them either to Egypt
or to Assyria. We feel the force of the prophets' policy when we
remember what happened to the Philistines. These were a people as
strong and as distinctive as Israel, with whom at one time they
disputed possession of the whole land. But their position as traders
in the main line of traffic between Asia and Africa rendered the
Philistines peculiarly open to foreign influence. They were now
Egyptian vassals, now Assyrian victims; and after the invasion of
Alexander the Great their cities became centres of Hellenism, while
the Jews upon their secluded hills still stubbornly held unmixed
their race and their religion. This contrast, so remarkably developed
in later centuries, has justified the prophets of the eighth in
their anxiety that Israel should not annul the advantages of her
geographical seclusion by trade or treaties with the Gentiles. But it
was easier for Judæa to take heed to the warning than for Ephraim.
The latter lies as open and fertile as her sister-province is barren
and aloof. She has many gates into the world, and they open upon many
markets. Nobler opportunities there could not be for a nation in the
maturity of its genius and loyal to its vocation:--

_Rejoice, O Zebulun, in thine outgoings:_
_They shall call the nations to the mountain;_
_They shall suck of the abundance of the seas,_
_And of the treasure that is stored in the sands._[541]

But in the time of his outgoings Ephraim was not sure of himself
nor true to his God, the one secret and strength of the national
distinctiveness. So he met the world weak and unformed, and, instead
of impressing it, was by it dissipated and confused. The tides of a
lavish commerce scattered abroad the faculties of the people, and
swept back upon their life alien fashions and tempers, to subdue
which there was neither native strength nor definiteness of national
purpose. All this is what Hosea means by the first of his epigrams:
_Ephraim--among the nations he lets himself be poured out_, or
_mixed up_. The form of the verb does not elsewhere occur; but it
is reflexive, and the meaning of the root is certain. _Balal_ is to
_pour out_, or _mingle_, as of oil in the sacrificial flour. Yet
it is sometimes used of a mixing which is not sacred, but profane
and hopeless. It is applied to the first great confusion of mankind,
to which a popular etymology has traced the name Babel, as if for
Balbel. Derivatives of the stem bear the additional ideas of staining
and impurity. The alternative renderings which have been proposed,
_lets himself be soaked_ and _scatters himself_ abroad like wheat
among tares, are not so probable, yet hardly change the meaning.[542]
Ephraim wastes and confuses himself among the Gentiles. The nation's
character is so disguised that Hosea afterwards nicknames him
Canaan;[543] their religion so filled with foreign influences that he
calls the people the harlot of the Ba'alim.

If the first of Hosea's epigrams satirises Israel's foreign
relations, the second, with equal brevity and wit, hits off the
temper and constitution of society at home. For the metaphor of which
this epigram is composed Hosea has gone to the baker. Among all
classes in the East, especially under conditions requiring haste,
there is in demand a round flat scone, which is baked by being laid
on hot stones or attached to the wall of a heated oven. The whole art
of baking consists in turning the scone over at the proper moment. If
this be mismanaged, it does not need a baker to tell us that one side
may be burnt to a cinder, while the other remains raw. _Ephraim_,
says Hosea, _is an unturned cake._

By this he may mean one of several things, or all of them together,
for they are infectious of each other. There was, for instance, the
social condition of the people. What can better be described as an
unturned scone than a community one half of whose number are too
rich, and the other too poor? Or Hosea may refer to that unequal
distribution of religion through life with which in other parts of
his prophecy he reproaches Israel. They keep their religion, as
Amos more fully tells us, for their temples, and neglect to carry
its spirit into their daily business. Or he may refer to Israel's
politics, which were equally in want of thoroughness. They rushed
hotly at an enterprise, but having expended so much fire in the
beginning of it, they let the end drop cold and dead. Or he may wish
to satirise, like Amos, Israel's imperfect culture--the pretentious
and overdone arts, stuck excrescence-wise upon the unrefined bulk
of the nation, just as in many German principalities last century
society took on a few French fashions in rough and exaggerated forms,
while at heart still brutal and coarse. Hosea may mean any one of
these things, for the figure suits all, and all spring from the
same defect. Want of thoroughness and equable effort was Israel's
besetting sin, and it told on all sides of his life. How better
describe a half-fed people, a half-cultured society, a half-lived
religion, a half-hearted policy, than by a half-baked scone?

We who are so proud of our political bakers, we who scorn the rapid
revolutions of our neighbours and complacently dwell upon our equable
ovens, those slow and cautious centuries of political development
which lie behind us--have we anything better than our neighbours,
anything better than Israel, to show in our civilisation? Hosea's
epigram fits us to the letter. After all those ages of baking,
society is still with us _an unturned scone_: one end of the nation
with the strength burnt out of it by too much enjoyment of life, the
other with not enough of warmth to be quickened into anything like
adequate vitality. No man can deny that this is so; we are able to
live only by shutting our hearts to the fact. Or is religion equably
distributed through the lives of the religious portion of our nation?
Of late years religion has spread, and spread wonderfully, but of how
many Christians is it still true that they are but half-baked--living
a life one side of which is reeking with the smoke of sacrifice,
while the other is never warmed by one religious thought. We may
have too much religion if we confine it to one day or one department
of life: our worship overdone, with the sap and the freshness burnt
out of it, cindery, dusty, unattractive, fit only for crumbling; our
conduct cold, damp and heavy, like dough the fire has never reached.

Upon the theme of these two epigrams the other verses of this
chapter are variations. Has Ephraim mixed himself among the peoples?
_Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not_,
senselessly congratulating himself upon the increase of his trade and
wealth, while he does not feel that these have sucked from him all
his distinctive virtue. _Yea, grey hairs are sprinkled upon him, and
he knoweth it not._ He makes his energy the measure of his life, as
Isaiah also marked,[544] but sees not that it all means waste and
decay. _The pride of Israel testifieth to his face, yet_--even when
the pride of the nation is touched to the quick by such humiliating
overtures as they make to both Assyria and Egypt[545]--_they do not
return to Jehovah their God, nor seek Him for all this_.

With virtue and single-hearted faith have disappeared intellect and
the capacity for affairs. _Ephraim is become like a silly dove--a dove
without heart_, to the Hebrews the organ of the wits of a man--_they
cry to Egypt, they go off to Assyria_. Poor pigeon of a people,
fluttering from one refuge to another! But _as they go I will throw
over them My net, like a bird of the air I will bring them down. I
will punish them as their congregation have heard_--this text as it
stands[546] can only mean "in the manner I have publicly proclaimed in
Israel." _Woe to them that they have strayed from Me! Damnation to them
that they have rebelled against Me! While I would have redeemed them,
they spoke lies about Me. And they have never cried unto Me with their
heart, but they keep howling on their beds for corn and new wine._ No
real repentance theirs, but some fear of drought and miscarriage of
the harvests, a sensual and servile sorrow in which they wallow. They
seek God with no heart, no true appreciation of what He is, but use
the senseless means by which the heathen invoke their gods: _they cut
themselves,_[547] _and_ so _apostatise from Me! And yet it was I who
disciplined them, I strengthened their arm, but with regard to Me they
kept thinking_ only _evil!_ So fickle and sensitive to fear, _they
turn_ indeed, _but not upwards_; no Godward conversion theirs. In their
repentance _they are like a bow which swerves_--off upon some impulse
of their ill-balanced natures. _Their princes must fall by the sword
because of the bitterness_--we should have expected "falseness"--_of
their tongue: this is their scorn in the land of Egypt!_ To the
allusion we have no key.

With so false a people nothing can be done. Their doom is inevitable. So

"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war."

_To thy mouth with the trumpet! The Eagle is down upon the house of
Jehovah!_[548] Where the carcase is, there are the eagles gathered
together. _For_--to sum up the whole crisis--_they have transgressed
My covenant, and against My law have they rebelled. To Me they cry,
My God, we know Thee, we Israel!_ What does it matter? _Israel hath
spurned the good:_[549] _the Foe must pursue him._

It is the same climax of inevitable war to which Amos led up his
periods; and a new subject is now introduced.

2. ARTIFICIAL KINGS AND ARTIFICIAL GODS.

HOSEA viii. 4-13.

The curse of such a state of dissipation as that to which Israel had
fallen is that it produces no men. Had the people had in them "the
root of the matter," had there been the stalk and the fibre of a
national consciousness and purpose, it would have blossomed to a man.
In the similar time of her outgoings upon the world Prussia had her
Frederick the Great, and Israel, too, would have produced a leader, a
heaven-sent king, if the national spirit had not been squandered on
foreign trade and fashions. But after the death of Jeroboam every man
who rose to eminence in Israel, rose, not on the nation, but only on
the fevered and transient impulse of some faction; and through the
broken years one party monarch was lifted after another to the brief
tenancy of a blood-stained throne. They were not from God, these
monarchs; but man-made, and sooner or later man-murdered. With his
sharp insight Hosea likens these artificial kings to the artificial
gods, also the work of men's hands; and till near the close of his
book the idols of the sanctuary and the puppets of the throne form
the twin targets of his scorn.

_They have made kings, but not from Me; they have made princes, but
I knew not. With their silver and their gold they have manufactured
themselves idols, only that they_[550] _may be cut off_--king after
king, idol upon idol. _He loathes thy Calf, O Samaria_, the thing
of wood and gold which thou callest Jehovah. And God confirms this.
_Kindled is Mine anger against them! How long will they be incapable of
innocence?_--unable to clear themselves of guilt! The idol is still in
his mind. _For from Israel is it also_--as much as the puppet-kings;
_a workman made it, and no god is it. Yea, splinters shall the Calf of
Samaria become._[551] Splinters shall everything in Israel become.
_For they sow the wind, and the whirlwind shall they reap._ Indeed like
a storm Hosea's own language now sweeps along; and his metaphors are
torn into shreds upon it. _Stalk it hath none: the sprout brings forth
no grain: if it were to bring forth, strangers would swallow it._[552]
Nay, _Israel hath let herself be swallowed up! Already are they become
among the nations like a vessel there is no more use for._ Heathen
empires have sucked them dry. _They have gone up to Assyria like a
runaway wild-ass. Ephraim hath hired lovers._[553] It is again the
note of their mad dissipation among the foreigners. _But if they_ thus
_give themselves away among the nations, I must gather them in, and_
then _shall they have to cease a little from the anointing of a king
and princes_.[554] This wilful roaming of theirs among the foreigners
shall be followed by compulsory exile, and all their unholy artificial
politics shall cease. The discourse turns to the other target. _For
Ephraim hath multiplied altars--to sin; altars are his own--to sin.
Were I to write for him by myriads My laws,_[555] _as those of a
stranger would they be accounted. They slay burnt-offerings for Me and
eat flesh._[556] _Jehovah hath no delight in them. Now must He remember
their guilt and make visitation upon their sin. They--to Egypt--shall
return_....[557] Back to their ancient servitude must they go, as
formerly He said He would withdraw them to the wilderness.[558]

3. THE EFFECTS OF EXILE.

HOSEA ix. 1-9.

Hosea now turns to describe the effects of exile upon the social and
religious habits of the people. It must break up at once the joy
and the sacredness of their lives. Every pleasure will be removed,
every taste offended. Indeed, even now, with their conscience of
having deserted Jehovah, they cannot pretend to enjoy the feasts of
the Ba'alim in the same hearty way as the heathen with whom they
mix. But, whether or no, the time is near when nature-feasts and all
other religious ceremonies--all that makes life glad and regular and
solemn--shall be impossible.

_Rejoice not, O Israel, to_ the pitch of _rapture like the heathen,
for thou hast played the harlot from thy God; a harlot's hire hast
thou loved on all threshing-floors._[559] _Threshing-floor and
wine-vat shall ignore_[560] _them, and the new wine shall play them
false. They shall not abide in the land of Jehovah, but Ephraim shall
return to Egypt, and in Assyria they shall eat what is unclean. They
shall not pour libations to Jehovah, nor prepare_[561] _for Him
their sacrifices. Like the bread of sorrows shall their bread_[562]
_be; all that eat of it shall be defiled:_ yea, _their bread shall
be_ only _for their appetite; they shall not bring it_[563] _to the
temple of Jehovah._ He cannot be worshipped off His own land. They
will have to live like animals, divorced from religion, unable to
hold communion with their God. _What shall ye do for days_[564] _of
festival, or for a day of pilgrimage to Jehovah? For lo,_ they _shall
be gone forth from destruction_,[565] the shock and invasion of
their land, only _that Egypt may gather them in, Memphis give them
sepulture, nettles inherit their jewels of silver, thorns_ come up
_in their tents_. The threat of exile still wavers between Assyria
and Egypt. And in Egypt Memphis is chosen as the destined grave of
Israel; for even then her Pyramids and mausoleums were ancient and
renowned, her vaults and sepulchres were countless and spacious.

But what need is there to seek the future for Israel's doom, when
already this is being fulfilled by the corruption of her spiritual
leaders?

_The days of visitation have come, have come the days of requital.
Israel already experiences_[566] _them! A fool is the prophet, raving
mad the man of the spirit._ The old ecstasy of Saul's day has become
delirium and fanaticism.[567] Why? _For the mass of thy guilt and
the multiplied treachery! Ephraim acts the spy with my God._ There
is probably a play on the name, for with the meaning a _watchman_
for God it is elsewhere used as an honourable title of the prophets.
_The prophet is a fowler's snare upon all his ways. Treachery--they
have made it profound in the very house of their God._[568] _They
have done corruptly, as in the days of Gibeah. Their iniquity is
remembered; visitation is made on their sin._

* * * * *

These then were the symptoms of the profound political decay which
followed on Israel's immorality. The national spirit and unity of the
people had disappeared. Society--half of it was raw, half of it was
baked to a cinder. The nation, broken into factions, produced no man
to lead, no king with the stamp of God upon him. Anarchy prevailed;
monarchs were made and murdered. There was no prestige abroad,
nothing but contempt among the Gentiles for a people whom they had
exhausted. Judgment was inevitable by exile--nay, it had come already
in the corruption of the spiritual leaders of the nation.

Hosea now turns to probe a deeper corruption still.

4. "THE CORRUPTION THAT IS THROUGH LUST."

HOSEA ix. 10-17: cf. iv. 11-14.

Those who at the present time are enforcing among us the revival of a
Paganism--without the Pagan conscience--and exalting licentiousness
to the level of an art, forget how frequently the human race has
attempted their experiment, with far more sincerity than they
themselves can put into it, and how invariably the result has been
recorded by history to be weariness, decay and death. On this
occasion we have the story told to us by one who to the experience of
the statesman adds the vision of the poet.

The generation to which Hosea belonged practised a periodical
unchastity under the alleged sanctions of nature and religion. And,
although their prophet told them that--like our own apostates from
Christianity--they could never do so with the abandon of the Pagans,
for they carried within them the conscience and the memory of a higher
faith, it appears that even the fathers of Israel resorted openly
and without shame to the licentious rites of the sanctuaries. In an
earlier passage of his book Hosea insists that all this must impair
the people's intellect. _Harlotry takes away the brains._[569] He has
shown also how it confuses the family, and has exposed the old delusion
that men may be impure and keep their womankind chaste.[570] But now he
diagnoses another of the inevitable results of this sin. After tracing
the sin, and the theory of life which permitted it, to their historical
beginnings at the entry of the people into Canaan, he describes how
the long practice of it, no matter how pretentious its sanctions,
inevitably leads not only to exterminating strifes, but to the decay of
the vigour of the nation, to barrenness and a diminishing population.

_Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the first fruit
on a fig-tree in her first season I saw your fathers._ So had the
lusty nation appeared to God in its youth; in that dry wilderness all
the sap and promise of spring were in its eyes, because it was still
pure. But _they--they came to Ba'al-Peor_--the first of the shrines
of Canaan which they touched--_and dedicated themselves to the Shame,
and became as abominable as the object of their love_. _Ephraim_--the
_Fruitful_ name is emphasised--_their glory is flown away like a
bird. No more birth, no more motherhood, no more conception!_[571]
_Blasted is Ephraim, withered the root of them, fruit they produce
not: yea, even when they beget children I slay the darlings of their
womb. Yea, though they bring up their sons I bereave them_, till
they are _poor in men. Yea, woe upon themselves also, when I look
away from them! Ephraim_--again the _Fruitful_ name is dragged to
the front--_for prey, as I have seen, are his sons destined._[572]
_Ephraim_--he _must lead his sons to the slaughter_.

And the prophet interrupts with his chorus: _Give them, O LORD--what
wilt Thou give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and breasts that
are dry!_

_All their mischief is in Gilgal_--again the Divine voice strikes the
connection between the national worship and the national sin--_yea,
there do I hate them: for the evil of their doings from My house I will
drive them. I will love them no more: all their nobles are rebels._[573]

And again the prophet responds: _My God will cast them away, for they
have not hearkened to Him, and they shall be vagabonds among the
nations_.

Some of the warnings which Hosea enforces with regard to this sin
have been instinctively felt by mankind since the beginnings of
civilisation, and are found expressed among the proverbs of nearly
all the languages.[574] But I am unaware of any earlier moralist
in any literature who traced the effects of national licentiousness
in a diminishing population, or who exposed the persistent delusion
of libertine men that they themselves may resort to vice, yet keep
their womankind chaste. Hosea, so far as we know, was the first
to do this. History in many periods has confirmed the justice of
his observations, and by one strong voice after another enforced
his terrible warnings. The experience of ancient Persia and Egypt;
the languor of the Greek cities; the "deep weariness and sated
lust" which in Imperial Rome "made human life a hell"; the decay
which overtook Italy after the renascence of Paganism without the
Pagan virtues; the strife and anarchy that have rent every court
where, as in the case of Henri Quatre, the king set the example of
libertinage; the incompetence, the poltroonery, the treachery, that
have corrupted every camp where, as in French Metz in 1870, soldiers
and officers gave way so openly to vice; the checks suffered by
modern civilisation in face of barbarism because its pioneers mingled
in vice with the savage races they were subduing; the number of great
statesmen falling by their passion, and in their fall frustrating
the hopes of nations; the great families worn out by indulgence;
the homes broken up by infidelities; the tainting of the blood of a
new generation by the poisonous practices of the old,--have not all
these things been in every age, and do they not still happen near
enough to ourselves to give us a great fear of the sin which causes
them all? Alas! how slow men are to listen and to lay to heart! Is
it possible that we can gild by the names of frivolity and piquancy
habits the wages of which are death? Is it possible that we can enjoy
comedies which make such things their jest? We have among us many
who find their business in the theatre, or in some of the periodical
literature of our time, in writing and speaking and exhibiting as
closely as they dare to limits of public decency. When will they
learn that it is not upon the easy edge of mere conventions that
they are capering, but upon the brink of those eternal laws whose
further side is death and hell--that it is not the tolerance of their
fellow-men they are testing, but the patience of God Himself? As for
those loud few who claim licence in the name of art and literature,
let us not shrink from them as if they were strong or their high
words true. They are not strong, they are only reckless; their claims
are lies. All history, the poets and the prophets, whether Christian
or Pagan, are against them. They are traitors alike to art, to love,
and to every other high interest of mankind.

It may be said that a large part of the art of the day, which takes
great licence in dealing with these subjects, is exercised only
by the ambition to expose that ruin and decay which Hosea himself
affirms. This is true. Some of the ablest and most popular writers
of our time have pictured the facts, which Hosea describes, with
so vivid a realism that we cannot but judge them to be inspired to
confirm his ancient warnings, and to excite a disgust of vice in a
generation which otherwise treats vice so lightly. But if so, their
ministry is exceeding narrow, and it is by their side that we best
estimate the greatness of the ancient prophet. Their transcript of
human life may be true to the facts it selects, but we find in it
no trace of facts which are greater and more essential to humanity.
They have nothing to tell us of forgiveness and repentance, and yet
these are as real as the things they describe. Their pessimism is
unrelieved. They see the _corruption that is in the world through
lust_; they forget that there is an _escape_ from it.[575] It is
Hosea's greatness that, while he felt the vices of his day with all
needed thoroughness and realism, he yet never allowed them to be
inevitable or ultimate, but preached repentance and pardon, with the
possibility of holiness even for his depraved generation. It is the
littleness of the Art of our day that these great facts are forgotten
by her, though once she was their interpreter to men. When she
remembers them the greatness of her past will return.

5. ONCE MORE: PUPPET-KINGS AND PUPPET-GODS.

HOSEA x.

For another section, the tenth chapter, the prophet returns to the
twin targets of his scorn: the idols and the puppet-kings. But few
notes are needed. Observe the reiterated connection between the
fertility of the land and the idolatry of the people.

_A wanton vine is Israel; he lavishes his fruit:_[576] _the more his
fruit, the more he made his altars; the goodlier his land, the more
goodly he made his_ maççeboth, or _sacred pillars. False is the heart
of them: now must they atone for it. He shall break the neck of their
altars; He shall ruin their pillars. For already they are saying,
No king have we, for we have not feared Jehovah, and the king--what
could he do for us? Speaking_[577] _of words, swearing of false
oaths, making of bargains--till law_[578] _breaks out like weeds in
the furrows of the field._

_For the Calf of Beth-Aven the inhabitants_[579] _of Samaria shall
be anxious: yea, mourn for him shall his people, and his priestlings
shall writhe for him--for his glory that it is banished from him._ In
these days of heavy tribute shall the gold of the golden calf be safe?
_Yea, himself shall they pack_[580] _to Assyria; he shall be offered
as tribute to King Pick-Quarrel._[581] _Ephraim shall take disgrace,
and Israel be ashamed because of his counsel._[582] _Undone Samaria!
Her king like a chip_[583] _on the face of the waters!_ This may refer
to one of the revolutions in which the king was murdered. But it seems
more appropriate to the final catastrophe of 724-1: the fall of the
kingdom, and the king's banishment to Assyria. If the latter, the verse
has been inserted; but the following verse would lead us to take these
disasters as still future. _And the high places of idolatry shall be
destroyed, the sin of Israel; thorn and thistle shall come up on their
altars. And they shall say to the mountains, Cover us, and to the
hills, Fall on us._ It cannot be too often repeated: these handmade
gods, these chips of kings, shall be swept away together.

Once more the prophet returns to the ancient origins of Israel's
present sins, and once more to their shirking of the discipline
necessary for spiritual results, but only that he may lead up as
before to the inevitable doom. _From_[584] _the days of Gibeah thou
hast sinned, O Israel. There have they remained_--never progressed
beyond their position there--_and this without war overtaking them
in Gibeah against the dastards_.[585] _As soon as I please, I
can chastise them, and peoples shall be gathered against them in
chastisement for their double sin._ This can scarcely be, as some
suggest, the two calves at Bethel and Dan. More probably it is still
the idols and the man-made kings. Now he returns to the ambition of
the people for spiritual results without a spiritual discipline.

_And Ephraim is a broken-in heifer, that loveth to thresh._[586] _But
I have come on her fair neck. I will yoke Ephraim; Judah must plough;
Jacob must harrow for himself._ It is all very well for the unmuzzled
beast[587] to love the threshing, but harder and unrewarded labours of
ploughing and harrowing have to come before the floor be heaped with
sheaves. Israel must not expect religious festival without religious
discipline. _Sow for yourselves righteousness; then shall ye reap the
fruit of God's leal love._[588] _Break up your fallow ground, for it
is time to seek Jehovah, till He come and shower salvation_[589] _upon
you._[590] _Ye have ploughed wickedness; disaster have ye reaped:
ye have eaten the fruit of falsehood; for thou didst trust in thy
chariots,_[591] _in the multitude of thy warriors. For the tumult_ of
war _shall arise among thy tribes,_[592] _and all thy fenced cities
shall be ruined, as Salman beat to ruin Beth-Arbel_[593] _in the day of
war: the mother shall be broken on the children_--presumably the land
shall fall with the falling of her cities. _Thus shall I do to you, O
house of Israel,_[594] _because of the evil of your evil: soon shall
the king of Israel be undone--undone._

The political decay of Israel, then, so deeply figured in all these
chapters, must end in utter collapse. Let us sum up the gradual
features of this decay: the substance of the people scattered abroad;
the national spirit dissipated; the national prestige humbled; the
kings mere puppets; the prophets corrupted; the national vigour
sapped by impurity; the idolatry conscious of its impotence.

FOOTNOTES:

[537] See below, Chap. XXII.

[538] See Chap. XXI.

[539] Numb. xxiii. 9 _b_; Josh. ii. 8.

[540] Deut. xxxiii. 27.

[541] Deut. xxxiii. 18, 19.

[542] יִתְבֹּלֵל from בלל. In Phœn. בלל seems to have been used
as in Israel of the sacrificial mingling of oil and flour (cf.
Robertson Smith, _Religion of Semites_, I. 203); in Arabic _ball_
is to weaken a strong liquid with water, while _balbal_ is to be
confused, disordered. The Syriac _balal_ is to mix. Some have taken
Hosea's יתבלל as if from בליל (Isa. xxx. 24; Job vi. 5), usually
understood as a mixed crop of wheat and inferior vegetables for
fodder; but there is reason to believe בליל means rather fresh corn.
The derivation from בלה to grow old, does not seem probable.

[543] xii. 8.

[544] ix. 9 f.

[545] See above, p. 261, and below, p. 337.

[546] But the reading is very doubtful.

[547] For יתגררו read יתגדדו.

[548] Wellhausen's objection to the first clause, that one does not set
a trumpet to one's _gums_, which חֵךְ literally means, is beside the
mark. חֵךְ is more than once used of the mouth as a whole (Job viii.
7; Prov. v. 3). The second clause gives the reason of the trumpet, the
alarum trumpet, in the first. Read נשר כי (so also Wellhausen).

[549] Cf. Amos: _Seek Me_ = _Seek the good_; and Jesus: _Not every
one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord; but he that doeth the will of My
Father in heaven_.

[550] So LXX., but Hebrew _it_.

[551] Davidson's _Syntax_, § 136, Rem. 1, and § 71, Rom. 4.

[552] So by the accents runs the verse, but, as Wellhausen has
pointed out, both its sense and its assonance are better expressed by
another arrangement: _Hath it grown up?_ then _it hath no shoot, nor
bringeth forth fruit_.

ên lo ṣemach,
b'li ya'aseh qemach.

Yet to this there is a grammatical obstacle.

[553] Wellhausen's reading _to Egypt with love gifts_ scarcely suits
the verb _go up_. Notice the play upon P(h)ere', _wild-ass_ and
Ephra'[îm].

[554] So LXX. reads. Heb.: _they shall involve themselves with
tribute to the king of princes_, presumably the Assyrian monarch.

[555] So LXX.

[556] Text obscure.

[557] LXX. addition here is plainly borrowed from ix. 3. For the
reasons for omitting ver. 14 see above, p. 223.

[558] ii. 16.

[559] On this verse see more particularly below, pp. 340 ff.

[560] So LXX.

[561] Read יערכו. Cf. with the whole passage iii. 4 f.

[562] לחמם for להם.

[563] יָבִיאוּ.

[564] Plural: so LXX.

[565] Others read _they are gone to Assyria_.

[566] Literally _knows_. See below, p. 321, _n._ 9.

[567] See above, p. 28.

[568] So, after the LXX., by taking העמיקו with this verse, 8,
instead of with ver. 9.

[569] iv. 12.

[570] iv. 13, 14.

[571] Here, between vv. 11 and 12, Wellhausen with justice proposes
to insert ver. 16.

[572] So Wellhausen, after LXX.; probably correct.

[573] So we may attempt to echo the play on the words.

[574] Cf., _e.g._, the _Proverbs of Ptah-Hotep_ the Egyptian, _circa_
2500 B.C. "There is no prudence in taking part in it, and thousands
of men destroy themselves in order to enjoy a moment, brief as a
dream, while they gain death so as to know it. It is a villainous
... that of a man who excites himself (?); if he goes on to carry it
out, his mind abandons him. For as for him who is without repugnance
for such an [act], there is no good sense at all in him."--From the
translation in _Records of the Past_, Second Series, Vol. III., p. 24.

[575] 2 Peter i.

[576] Doubtful. The Heb. text gives an inappropriate if not
impossible clause, even if ישׁוה be taken from a root שׁוח, to _set_
or _produce_ (Barth, _Etym. Stud._, 66). LXX.: ὁ καρπὸς εὐθηνῶν αὐτῆς
(A.Q. αὐτῆς εὐθηνῶν), "her [the vine's] fruit flourishing." Some
parallel is required to בקק of the first clause; and it is possible
that it may have been from a root שׁוּחַ or שִׁיח, corresponding to
Arabic sâḥ, "to wander" in the sense of scattering or being scattered.

[577] After LXX.

[578] Doubtful. Lawsuits?

[579] "Calf," "inhabitants"--so LXX.

[580] LXX. supplies.

[581] See above, p. 263.

[582] Very uncertain. Wellhausen reads _from his idol_, מעצבו.

[583] קצף: compare Arabic qṣf, "to break"; but there is also the
assonant Arabic qṣb, "reed." The Rabbis translate _foam_: cf. the
other meaning of קצף--outbreak of anger, which suggests _bubble_.

[584] Rosenmüller: _more than in_. These days are evidently not the
beginning of the kingship under Saul (so Wellhausen), for with that
Hosea has no quarrel, but either the idolatry of Micah (Judg. xvii. 3
ff.), or more probably the crime of Benjamin (Judg. xix. 22).

[585] Obscure; text corrupt, and in next verse uncertain.

[586] For the tense of the verse both participles are surely needed.
Wellhausen thinks two redundant.

[587] Deut. xxv. 4; 1 Cor. ix. 9; 1 Tim. v. 18.

[588] LXX.: _fruit of life_.

[589] צדק surely in the sense in which we find it in Isa. xl. ff.
LXX.: _the fruits of righteousness shall be yours_.

[590] We shall return to this passage in dealing with Repentance; see
p. 345.

[591] So LXX. Wellhausen suspects authenticity of the whole clause.

[592] Wellhausen proposes to read בעריך for בעמיך, but there is no
need.

[593] See above, p. 216, _n._ 5.

[594] So LXX.

CHAPTER XVIII

_THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD_

HOSEA xi.

From the thick jungle of Hosea's travail, the eleventh chapter breaks
like a high and open mound. The prophet enjoys the first of his two
clear visions--that of the Past.[595] Judgment continues to descend.
Israel's Sun is near his setting, but before he sinks--

"A lingering light he fondly throws
On the dear hills, whence first he rose."

Across these confused and vicious years, through which he has painfully
made his way, Hosea sees the tenderness and the romance of the early
history of his people. And although he must strike the old despairing
note--that, by the insincerity of the present generation, all the
ancient guidance of their God must end in this!--yet for some moments
the blessed memory shines by itself, and God's mercy appears to triumph
over Israel's ingratitude. Surely their sun will not set; Love must
prevail. To which assurance a later voice from the Exile has added, in
verses 10 and 11, a confirmation suitable to its own circumstances.

_When Israel was a child, then I loved him,_
_And from Egypt I called_ him _to be My son._

The early history of Israel was a romance. Think of it historically.
Before the Most High there spread an array of kingdoms and peoples.
At their head were three strong princes--sons indeed of God, if all
the heritage of the past, the power of the present and the promise of
the future be tokens. Egypt, wrapt in the rich and jewelled web of
centuries, basked by Nile and Pyramid, all the wonder of the world's
art in his dreamy eyes. Opposite him Assyria, with barer but more
massive limbs, stood erect upon his highlands, grasping in his sword
the promise of the world's power. Between the two, and using both
of them, yet with his eyes westward on an empire of which neither
dreamed, the Phœnician on his sea-coast built his storehouses and
sped his navies, the promise of the world's wealth. It must ever
remain the supreme romance of history, that the true son of God,
bearer of His love and righteousness to all mankind, should be found,
not only outside this powerful trinity, but in the puny and despised
captive of one of them--in a people that was not a state, that had
not a country, that was without a history, and, if appearances be
true, was as yet devoid of even the rudiments of civilisation--a
child people and a slave.

That was the Romance, and Hosea gives us the Grace which made it.
_When Israel was a child, then I loved him._ The verb is a distinct
impulse: _I began, I learned, to love him_. God's eyes, that passed
unheeding the adult princes of the world, fell upon this little slave
boy, and He loved him and gave him a career: _from Egypt I called_
him _to be My son_.

Now, historically, it was the persuasion of this which made Israel.
All their distinctiveness and character, their progress from a
level with other nomadic tribes to the rank of the greatest
religious teachers of humanity, started from the memory of these
two facts--that God loved them, and that God called them. This was
an unfailing conscience--the obligation that they were not their
own, the irresistible motive to repentance even in their utmost
backsliding, the unquenchable hope of a destiny in their direst days
of defeat and scattering.

Some, of course, may cavil at the narrow, national scale on which such
a belief was held, but let them remember that it was held in trust for
all mankind. To snarl that Israel felt this sonship to God only for
themselves, is to forget that it is they who have persuaded humanity
that this is the only kind of sonship worth claiming. Almost every
other nation of antiquity imagined a filial relation to the deity, but
it was either through some fabulous physical descent, and then often
confined only to kings and heroes, or by some mystical mingling of the
Divine with the human, which was just as gross and sensuous. Israel
alone defined the connection as a historical and a moral one. _The sons
of God are begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor
of the will of man, but of God._[596] Sonship to God is something not
physical, but moral and historical, into which men are carried by a
supreme awakening to the Divine love and authority. Israel, it is true,
felt this only in a general way for the nation as a whole;[597] but
their conception of it embraced just those moral contents which form
the glory of Christ's doctrine of the Divine sonship of the individual.
The belief that God is our Father does not come to us with our carnal
birth--except in possibility: the persuasion of it is not conferred by
our baptism except in so far as that is Christ's own seal to the fact
that God Almighty loves us and has marked us for His own. To us sonship
is a becoming, not a being--the awakening of our adult minds into the
surprise of a Father's undeserved mercy, into the constraint of His
authority and the assurance of the destiny He has laid up for us. It is
conferred by love, and confirmed by duty. Neither has power brought it,
nor wisdom, nor wealth, but it has come solely with the wonder of the
knowledge that God loves us, and has always loved us, as well as in the
sense, immediately following, of a true vocation to serve Him. Sonship
which is less than this is no sonship at all. But so much as this is
possible to every man through Jesus Christ. His constant message is
that the Father loves every one of us, and that if we _know_[598] that
love, we are God's sons indeed. To them who feel it, adoption into the
number and privileges of the sons of God comes with the amazement and
the romance which glorified God's choice of the child-slave Israel.
_Behold_, they cry, _what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon
us, that we should be called the sons of God_.[599]

But we cannot be loved by God and left where we are. Beyond the
grace there lies the long discipline and destiny. We are called from
servitude to freedom, from the world to God--each of us to run a
course, and do a work, which can be done by no one else. That Israel
did not perceive this was God's sore sorrow with them.

_The more I_[600] _called to them, the farther they went from Me._[601]
_They to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering
incense._ But God persevered with grace, and the story is at first
continued in the figure of Fatherhood with which it commenced; then
it changes to the metaphor of a humane man's goodness to his beasts.
_Yet I taught Ephraim to walk, holding them on Mine arms,_[602] _but
they knew not that I healed them_--presumably when they fell and hurt
themselves. _With the cords of a man I would draw them, with bands of
love; and I was to them as those who lift up the yoke on their jaws,
and gently would I give them to eat._[603] It is the picture of a team
of bullocks, in charge of a kind driver. Israel are no longer the
wanton young cattle of the previous chapter, which need the yoke firmly
fastened on their neck,[604] but a team of toiling oxen mounting some
steep road. There is no use now for the rough ropes, by which frisky
animals are kept to their work; but the driver, coming to his beasts'
heads, by the gentle touch of his hand at their mouths and by words
of sympathy _draws_ them after him. _I drew them with cords of a man,
and with bands of love._ Yet there is the yoke, and it would seem that
certain forms of this, when beasts were working upwards, as we should
say _against the collar_, pressed and rubbed upon them, so that the
humane driver, when he came to their heads, eased the yoke with his
hands. _I was as they that take the yoke off their jaws_;[605] and
then, when they got to the top of the hill, he would rest and feed
them. That is the picture, and however uncertain we may feel as to some
of its details, it is obviously a passage--Ewald says "the earliest of
all passages"--in which "human means precisely the same as love." It
ought to be taken along with that other passage in the great Prophecy
of the Exile, where God is described as He that led them through _the
deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble: as
a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave him
rest_.[606]

Thus then the figure of the fatherliness of God changes into that
of His gentleness or humanity. Do not let us think that there is
here either any descent of the poetry or want of connection between
the two figures. The change is true, not only to Israel's, but to
our own experience. Men are all either the eager children of happy,
irresponsible days, or the bounden, plodding draught-cattle of life's
serious burdens and charges. Hosea's double figure reflects human
life in its whole range. Which of us has not known this fatherliness
of the Most High, exercised upon us, as upon Israel, throughout our
years of carelessness and disregard? It was God Himself who taught
and trained us then;--

"When through the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe,
And led me up to man."

Those speedy recoveries from the blunders of early wilfulness, those
redemptions from the sins of youth--happy were we if we knew that
it was _He who healed us_. But there comes a time when men pass
from leading-strings to harness--when we feel faith less and duty
more--when our work touches us more closely than our God. Death must
be a strange transformer of the spirit, yet surely not more strange
than life, which out of the eager buoyant child makes in time the
slow automaton of duty. It is such a stage which the fourth of these
verses suits, when we look up, not so much for the fatherliness as
for the gentleness and humanity of our God. A man has a mystic power
of a very wonderful kind upon the animals over whom he is placed. On
any of these wintry roads of ours we may see it, when a kind carter
gets down at a hill, and, throwing the reins on his beast's back,
will come to its head and touch it with his bare hands, and speak to
it as if it were his fellow; till the deep eyes fill with light, and
out of these things, so much weaker than itself, a touch, a glance, a
word, there will come to it new strength to pull the stranded waggon
onward. The man is as a god to the beast, coming down to help it,
and it almost makes the beast human that he does so. Not otherwise
does Hosea feel the help which God gives His own on the weary hills
of life. We need not discipline, for our work is discipline enough,
and the cares we carry of themselves keep us straight and steady.
But we need sympathy and gentleness--this very humanity which the
prophet attributes to our God. God comes and takes us by the head;
through the mystic power which is above us, but which makes us like
itself, we are lifted to our task. Let no one judge this incredible.
The incredible would be that our God should prove any less to us than
the merciful man is to his beast. But we are saved from argument
by experience. When we remember how, as life has become steep and
our strength exhausted, there has visited us a thought which has
sharpened to a word, a word which has warmed to a touch, and we have
drawn ourselves together and leapt up new men, can we feel that
God was any less in these things, than in the voice of conscience
or the message of forgiveness, or the restraints of His discipline?
Nay, though the reins be no longer felt, God is at our head, that we
should not stumble nor stand still.

Upon this gracious passage there follows one of those swift revulsions
of feeling, which we have learned almost to expect in Hosea. His
insight again overtakes his love. The people will not respond to
the goodness of their God; it is impossible to work upon minds so
fickle and insincere. Discipline is what they need. _He shall return
to the land of Egypt, or Asshur shall be his king_ (it is still an
alternative), _for they have refused to return_ to Me....[607] 'Tis but
one more instance of the age-long apostasy of the people. _My people
have a bias_[608] _to turn from Me; and though they_ (the prophets)
_call them upwards, none of them can lift them_.[609]

Yet God is God, and though prophecy fail He will attempt His Love
once more. There follows the greatest passage in Hosea--deepest if
not highest of his book--the breaking forth of that exhaustless mercy
of the Most High which no sin of man can bar back nor wear out.

_How am I to give thee up, O Ephraim?_
How _am I to let thee go, O Israel?_
_How am I to give thee up?_
_Am I to make an Admah of thee--a Ṣeboim?_
_My heart is turned upon Me,
My compassions begin to boil:_
_I will not perform the fierceness of Mine anger,_
_I will not turn to destroy Ephraim;_
_For God am I and not man,_
_The Holy One in the midst of thee, yet I come not to
consume!_[610]

Such a love has been the secret of Hosea's persistence through so
many years with so faithless a people, and now, when he has failed,
it takes voice to itself and in its irresistible fulness makes this
last appeal. Once more before the end let Israel hear God in the
utterness of His Love!

The verses are a climax, and obviously to be succeeded by a pause.
On the brink of his doom, will Israel turn to such a God, at such a
call? The next verse, though dependent for its promise on this same
exhaustless Love, is from an entirely different circumstance, and
cannot have been put by Hosea here.[611]

FOOTNOTES:

[595] See above, p. 253.

[596] St. John's Gospel, i. 12, 13.

[597] Or occasionally for the king as the nation's representative.

[598] See below, pp. 321-3.

[599] 1 John iii.

[600] So rightly the LXX.

[601] LXX., rightly separating מִפְּנֵיהֶם into מִפָּנָי and הֵם,
which latter is the nominative to the next clause.

[602] So again rightly the LXX.

[603] The reading is uncertain. The לֹא of the following verse (6)
must be read as the Greek reads it, as לֹו, and taken with ver. 5.

[604] x. 11.

[605] Or lifted forward from the neck to the jaws.

[606] Isa. lxiii. 13, 14.

[607] Ver. 6 has an obviously corrupt text, and, weakening as it does
the climax of ver. 5, may be an insertion.

[608] _Are hung_ or _swung towards turning away from Me_.

[609] This verse is also uncertain.

[610] For בעיר, which makes nonsense, read לבעור, _to consume_, or with
Wellhausen amend further לבער אובה לא, _I am not willing to consume_.

[611] _They will follow Jehovah; like a lion He will roar, and they
shall hurry trembling from the west. Like birds shall they hurry
trembling from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I
will bring them to their homes--'tis the oracle of Jehovah._ Not only
does this verse contain expressions which are unusual to Hosea, and a
very strange metaphor, but it is not connected either historically or
logically with the previous verse. The latter deals with the people
before God has scattered them--offers them one more chance before
exile comes on them. But in this verse they are already scattered,
and just about to be brought back. It is such a promise as both in
language and metaphor was common among the prophets of the Exile. In
the LXX. the verse is taken from chap. xi. and put with chap. xii.

CHAPTER XIX

_THE FINAL ARGUMENT_

HOSEA xii.-xiv. 1.

The impassioned call with which last chapter closed was by no means an
assurance of salvation: _How am I to give thee up, Ephraim? how am I
to let thee go, Israel?_ On the contrary, it was the anguish of Love,
when it hovers over its own on the brink of the destruction to which
their wilfulness has led them, and before relinquishing them would
seek, if possible, some last way to redeem. Surely that fatal morrow
and the people's mad leap into it are not inevitable! At least, before
they take the leap, let the prophet go back once more upon the moral
situation of to-day, go back once more upon the past of the people, and
see if he can find anything else to explain that bias to apostasy[612]
which has brought them to this fatal brink--anything else which may
move them to repentance even there. So in chaps. xii. and xiii. Hosea
turns upon the now familiar trail of his argument, full of the Divine
jealousy, determined to give the people one other chance to turn; but
if they will not, he at least will justify God's relinquishment of
them. The chapters throw even a brighter light upon the temper and
habits of that generation. They again explore Israel's ancient history
for causes of the present decline; and, in especial, they cite the
spiritual experience of the Father of the nation, as if to show that
what of repentance was possible for him is possible for his posterity
also. But once more all hope is seen to be vain; and Hosea's last
travail with his obstinate people closes in a doom even more awful than
its predecessors.

The division into chapters is probably correct; but while chap. xiii.
is well-ordered and clear, the arrangement, and in parts the meaning,
of chap. xii. are very obscure.

1. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR FATHER JACOB.

HOSEA xii.

In no part even of the difficult Book of Hosea does the sacred text
bristle with more problems. It may well be doubted whether the
verses lie in their proper order, or, if they do, whether we have
them entire as they came from the prophet, for the connection is
not always perceptible.[613] We cannot believe, however, that the
chapter is a bundle of isolated oracles, for the analogy between
Jacob and his living posterity runs through the whole of it,[614]
and the refrain that God must requite upon the nation their deeds is
found both near the beginning and at the end of the chapter.[615]
One is tempted to take the two fragments about the Patriarch (vv.
4, 5, and 13 f.) by themselves, and the more so that ver. 8 would
follow so suitably on either ver. 2 or ver. 3. But this clue is not
sufficient; and till one more evident is discovered, it is perhaps
best to keep to the extant arrangement.[616]

As before, the argument starts from the falseness of Israel, which is
illustrated in the faithlessness of their foreign relations. _Ephraim
hath compassed Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit, and
Judah_ ...[617] _Ephraim herds the wind_[618] _and hunts the sirocco.
All day long they heap up falsehood and fraud:_[619] _they strike
a bargain with Assyria, and carry oil to Egypt_, as Isaiah also
complained.[620]

_Jehovah hath a quarrel with Israel_[621] _and is about to visit upon
Jacob his ways; according to his deeds will He requite him. In the
womb he supplanted his brother, and in his man's strength he wrestled
with God._[622] _Yea, he wrestled with_ the _Angel and prevailed; he
wept and besought of Him mercy. At Bethel he met with Him, and there
He spake with him_[623] (or _with us_--that is, in the person of
our father)....[624] _So thou by thy God_--by His help,[625] for no
other way is possible except, like thy father, through wrestling with
Him--_shouldest return: keep leal love and justice, and wait on thy
God without ceasing_.[626] To this passage we shall return in dealing
with Hosea's doctrine of Repentance.

In characteristic fashion the discourse now swerves from the ideal to
the real state of the people.

_Canaan!_ So the prophet nicknames his mercenary generation.[627]
_With false balances in his hand, he loves to defraud. For Ephraim
said_, Ah but _I have grown rich, I have won myself wealth._[628]
_None of my gains can touch me with guilt which is sin._[629] _But
I, Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt--I could make thee dwell
in tents again, as in the days of the Assembly_ in Horeb--I could
destroy all this commercial civilisation of thine, and reduce thee to
thine ancient level of nomadic life--_and I spake to the prophets:
it was I who multiplied vision, and by the hand of the prophets gave
parables. If Gilead_ be for _idolatry, then shall it become vanity!_
If _in Gilgal_--Stone-Circle--_they sacrifice bullocks,_[630]
_stone-heaps shall their altars become among the furrows of the
field._ One does not see the connection of these verses with the
preceding. But now the discourse oscillates once more to the national
father, and the parallel between his own and his people's experience.

_And Jacob fled to the land_[631] _of Aram, and Israel served for
a wife, and for a wife he herded_ sheep. _And by a prophet Jehovah
brought Israel up from Egypt, and by a prophet he was shepherded. And
Ephraim hath given bitter provocation; but his blood-guiltiness shall
be upon him, and his Lord shall return it to him._

I cannot trace the argument here.

2. THE LAST JUDGMENT.

HOSEA xiii.-xiv. 1.

The crisis draws on. On the one hand Israel's sin, accumulating,
bulks ripe for judgment. On the other the times grow more fatal, or
the prophet more than ever feels them so. He will gather once again
the old truths on the old lines--the great past when Jehovah was God
alone, the descent to the idols and the mushroom monarchs of to-day,
the people, who once had been strong, sapped by luxury, forgetful,
stupid, not to be roused. The discourse has every mark of being
Hosea's latest. There is clearness and definiteness beyond anything
since chap. iv. There are ease and lightness of treatment, a playful
sarcasm, as if the themes were now familiar both to the prophet and
his audience. But, chiefly, there is the passion--so suitable to last
words--of how different it all might have been, if to this crisis
Israel had come with store of strength instead of guilt. How these
years, with their opening into the great history of the world, might
have meant a birth for the nation, which instead was lying upon them
like a miscarried child in the mouth of the womb! It was a fatality
God Himself could not help in. Only death and hell remained. Let
them, then, have their way! Samaria must expiate her guilt in the
worst horrors of war.

Instead of with one definite historical event, this last effort of
Hosea opens more naturally with a summary of all Ephraim's previous
history. The tribe had been the first in Israel till they took to idols.

_Whenever Ephraim spake there was trembling._[632] _Prince_[633] _was
he in Israel; but he fell into guilt through the Ba'al, and so--died.
Even now they continue to sin and make them a smelting of their
silver, idols after their own model,_[634] _smith's work all of it.
To them_--to such things--_they speak! Sacrificing men kiss calves!_
In such unreason have they sunk. They cannot endure. _Therefore shall
they be like the morning cloud and like the dew that early vanisheth,
like chaff which whirleth up from the floor and like smoke from the
window. And I was thy God_[635] _from the land of Egypt; and god
besides Me thou knowest not, nor saviour has there been any but
Myself. I shepherded_[636] _thee in the wilderness, in the land of
droughts_--long before they came among the gods of fertile Canaan.
But once they came hither, _the more pasture they had, the more they
ate themselves full, and the more they ate themselves full, the more
was their heart uplifted, so they forgat Me. So that I must be_[637]
_to them like a lion, like a leopard on the way I must leap._[638] _I
will fall on them like a bear robbed of its young, and will tear the
caul of their hearts, and will devour them like a lion--wild beasts
shall rend them._[639]

When _He hath destroyed thee, O Israel--who then may help thee?_[640]
_Where is thy king now? that he may save thee, or all thy princes?
that they may rule thee;_[641] _those of whom thou hast said, Give
me a king and princes._ Aye, _I give thee a king in Mine anger, and
I take him away in My wrath!_ Fit summary of the short and bloody
reigns of these last years.

_Gathered is Ephraim's guilt, stored up is his sin._ The nation is
pregnant--but with guilt! _Birth pangs seize him, but_--the figure
changes, with Hosea's own swiftness, from mother to child--_he is an
impracticable son;_[642] _for_ this _is no time to stand in the mouth
of the womb_. The years that might have been the nation's birth are by
their own folly to prove their death. Israel lies in the way of its
own redemption--how truly this has been forced home upon them in one
chapter after another! Shall God then step in and work a deliverance on
the brink of death? _From the hand of Sheol shall I deliver them? from
death shall I redeem them?_ Nay, let death and Sheol have their way.
_Where are thy plagues, O death? where thy destruction, Sheol?_ Here
with them. _Compassion is hid from Mine eyes._

This great verse has been very variously rendered. Some have taken
it as a promise: _I will deliver ... I will redeem...._ So the
Septuagint translated, and St. Paul borrowed, not the whole Greek
verse, but its spirit and one or two of its terms, for his triumphant
challenge to death in the power of the Resurrection of Christ.[643]
As it stands in Hosea, however, the verse must be a threat. The last
clause unambiguously abjures mercy, and the statement that His people
will not be saved, for God cannot save them, is one in thorough
harmony with all Hosea's teaching.[644]

An appendix follows with the illustration of the exact form which
doom shall take. As so frequently with Hosea, it opens with a play
upon the people's name, which at the same time faintly echoes the
opening of the chapter.

_Although he among his brethren_[645] _is the fruit-bearer_--yaphri',
he Ephraim--_there shall come an east wind, a wind of Jehovah rising
from the wilderness, so that his fountain dry up and his spring be
parched_. He--_himself_, not the Assyrian, but Menahem, who had to
send gold to the Assyrian--_shall strip the treasury of all its
precious jewels. Samaria must bear her guilt: for she hath rebelled
against her God._ To this simple issue has the impenitence of the
people finally reduced the many possibilities of those momentous
years; and their last prophet leaves them looking forward to the
crash which came some dozen years later in the invasion and captivity
of the land. _They shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be
dashed in pieces, and their women with child ripped up._ Horrible
details, but at that period certain to follow every defeat in war.

FOOTNOTES:

[612] xi. 7.

[613] This is especially true of vv. 11 and 12.

[614] Even in the most detachable portion, vv. 8-10, where the און of
ver. 9 seems to refer to the באונו of ver. 4.

[615] Viz. in vv. 3 and 15.

[616] Beer indeed, at the close of a very ingenious analysis of
the chapter (_Z.A.T.W._, 1893, pp. 281 ff.), claims to have proved
that it contains "eine wohlgegliederte Rede des Propheten" (p.
292). But he reaches this conclusion only by several forced and
precarious arguments. Especially unsound do his pleas appear that
in 8_b_ לעשק is a play upon the root-meaning of כנען, "lowly"; that
כנען, in analogy to the בבטן of ver. 4, is the crude original, the
raw material, of the Ephraim of ver. 9; and that מועד כימי is "the
determined time" of the coming judgment on Israel.

[617] Something is written about Judah (remember what was said
above about Hosea's treble parallels), but the text is too obscure
for translation. The theory that it has been altered by a later
Judæan writer in favour of his own people is probably correct: the
Authorised Version translates in favour of Judah; so too Guthe
in Kautzsch's _Bibel_. But an adverse statement is required by
the parallel clauses, and the Hebrew text allows this: _Judah is
still wayward with God, and with the Holy One who is faithful_. So
virtually Ewald, Hitzig, Wünsche, Nowack and Cheyne. But Cornill
and Wellhausen read the second half of the clause as נצמד עם־קדשים,
_profanes himself with Qedeshim_ (_Z.A.T.W._, 1887, pp. 286 ff.).

[618] Why should not Hosea, the master of many forced phrases, have
also uttered this one? This in answer to Wellhausen.

[619] So LXX., reading שוא for שד.

[620] Isa. xxx. 6.

[621] Heb. _Judah_, but surely Israel is required by the next verse,
which is a play upon the two names Israel and Jacob.

[622] _Supplanted_ is 'aqab, the presumable root of Ja'aqab (Jacob).
_Wrestled with God_ is Sarah eth Elohim, the presumable origin of
Yisra'el (Israel).

[623] Heb. _us_, LXX. _them_.

[624] Ver. 6--_And Jehovah God of Hosts, Jehovah is His memorial_,
_i.e._ name--is probably an insertion for the reasons mentioned
above, pp. 204 f.

[625] This, the most natural rendering of the Hebrew phrase, has been
curiously omitted by Beer, who says that באלהיך can only mean _to thy
God_. Hitzig: "durch deinen Gott."

[626] Some take these words as addressed by Jehovah at Bethel to the
Patriarch.

[627] So nearly all interpreters. Hitzig aptly quotes Polybius, _De
Virtute_, L. ix.: διὰ τὴν ἔμφυτον Φοίνιξι πλεονεξίαν, κ.τ.λ.. One
might also refer to the Romans' idea of the "Punica fides."

[628] Or, full man's strength: ct. ver. 4.

[629] But the LXX. reads: _All his gains shalt not be found of him
because of the iniquity which he has sinned_; and Wellhausen emends
this to: _All his gain sufficeth not for the guilt which it has
incurred_.

[630] Others _to demons_.

[631] Field, but here in sense of territory. See _Hist. Geog._, pp.
79 f.

[632] Uncertain.

[633] נשיא for נשא.

[634] Read with Ewald כתבנתם. LXX. read כתמות.

[635] Here the LXX. makes the insertion noted on pp. 203, 226.

[636] So LXX., רעיתיך.

[637] Read וֶאֱהִי.

[638] אשׁור, usually taken as first fut. of שור, to lurk. But there
is a root of common use in Arabic, sar, to spring up suddenly, of
wine into the head or of a lion on its prey; sawâr, "the springer,"
is one of the Arabic names for lion.

[639] We shall treat this passage later in connection with Hosea's
doctrine of the knowledge of God: see pp. 330 f.

[640] After the LXX.

[641] Read with Houtsma וישפטוך שריך וכל.

[642] Literally a _son not wise_, perhaps a name given to children
whose birth was difficult.

[643] The LXX. reads: Ποῦ ἡ δίκη σου, θάνατε· ποῦ τὸ κέντρον σου,
ᾴδη; But Paul says: Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος· ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ
κέντρον; I Cor. xv. 55 (Westcott and Hort's Ed.).

[644] The following is a list of the interpretations of verse 14.

A. Taken as a threat 1. "It is I who redeemed you from the grip of
the grave, and who delivered you from death--but now I will call up
the words (_sic_) of death against you; for repentance is hid from
My eyes." So Raschi. 2. "I would have redeemed them from the grip of
Sheol, etc., if they had been wise, but being foolish I will bring
on them the plagues of death." So Kimchi, Eichhorn, Simson, etc. 3
"Should I" or "shall I deliver them from the hand of Sheol, redeem
them from death?" etc., as in the text above. So Wünsche, Wellhausen,
Guthe in Kautzsch's _Bibel._ etc.

B. Taken as a promise. "From the hand of Sheol I will deliver
them, from death redeem them," etc. So Umbreit, Ewald, Hitzig and
Authorised and Revised English Versions. In this case repentance
in the last clause must be taken as _resentment_ (Ewald). But, as
Ewald sees, the whole verse must then be put in a parenthesis, as an
ejaculation of promise in the midst of a context that only threatens.
Some without change of word render: "I will be thy plagues, O death?
I will be thy sting, O hell." So the Authorised English Version.

[645] Text doubtful.

CHAPTER XX

"_I WILL BE AS THE DEW_"

HOSEA xiv. 2-10.

Like the Book of Amos, the Book of Hosea, after proclaiming the
people's inevitable doom, turns to a blessed prospect of their
restoration to favour with God. It will be remembered that we decided
against the authenticity of such an epilogue in the Book of Amos;
and it may now be asked, how can we come to any other conclusion
with regard to the similar peroration in the Book of Hosea? For the
following reasons.

We decided against the genuineness of the closing verses of Amos,
because their sanguine temper is opposed to the temper of the whole
of the rest of the book, and because they neither propose any ethical
conditions for the attainment of the blessed future, nor in their
picture of the latter do they emphasise one single trace of the
justice, or the purity, or the social kindliness, on which Amos has
so exclusively insisted as the ideal relations of Israel to Jehovah.
It seemed impossible to us that Amos could imagine the perfect
restoration of his people in the terms only of requickened nature,
and say nothing about righteousness, truth and mercy towards the
poor. The prospect which now closes his book is psychologically alien
to him, and, being painted in the terms of later prophecy, may be
judged to have been added by some prophet of the Exile, speaking from
the standpoint, and with the legitimate desires, of his own day.

But the case is very different for this epilogue in Hosea. In the
first place, Hosea has not only continually preached repentance, and
been, from his whole affectionate temper of mind, unable to believe
repentance impossible; but he has actually predicted the restoration
of his people upon certain well-defined and ethical conditions. In
chap. ii. he has drawn for us in detail the whole prospect of God's
successful treatment of his erring spouse. Israel should be weaned
from their sensuousness and its accompanying trust in idols by a
severe discipline, which the prophet describes in terms of their
ancient wanderings in the wilderness. They should be reduced, as at
the beginning of their history, to moral converse with their God; and
abjuring the Ba'alim (later chapters imply also their foreign allies
and foolish kings and princes) should return to Jehovah, when He,
having proved that these could not give them the fruits of the land
they sought after, should Himself quicken the whole course of nature
to bless them with the fertility of the soil and the friendliness
even of the wild beasts.

Now in the epilogue and its prospect of Israel's repentance we find
no feature, physical or moral, which has not already been furnished
by these previous promises of the book. All their ethical conditions
are provided; nothing but what they have conceived of blessing is
again conceived. Israel is to abjure senseless sacrifice and come
to Jehovah with rational and contrite confession.[646] She is to
abjure her foreign alliances.[647] She is to trust in the fatherly
love of her God.[648] He is to heal her,[649] and His anger is to
turn away.[650] He is to restore nature, just as described in chap.
ii., and the scenery of the restoration is borrowed from Hosea's own
Galilee. There is, in short, no phrase or allusion of which we can
say that it is alien to the prophet's style or environment, while the
very keynotes of his book--_return, backsliding, idols the work of
our hands, such pity as a father hath_, and perhaps even the _answer_
or _converse_ of verse 9--are all struck once more.

The epilogue then is absolutely different from the epilogue to
the Book of Amos, nor can the present expositor conceive of the
possibility of a stronger case for the genuineness of any passage
of Scripture. The sole difficulty seems to be the place in which we
find it--a place where its contradiction to the immediately preceding
sentence of doom is brought out into relief. We need not suppose,
however, that it was uttered by Hosea in immediate proximity to
the latter, nor even that it formed his last word to Israel. But
granting only (as the above evidence obliges us to do) that it is
the prophet's own, this fourteenth chapter may have been a discourse
addressed by him at one of those many points when, as we know, he
had some hope of the people's return. Personally, I should think
it extremely likely that Hosea's ministry closed with that final,
hopeless proclamation in chap. xiii.: no other conclusion was
possible so near the fall of Samaria, and the absolute destruction of
the Northern Kingdom. But Hosea had already in chap. ii. painted the
very opposite issue as a possible ideal for his people; and during
some break in those years when their insincerity was less obtrusive,
and the final doom still uncertain, the prophet's heart swung to
its natural pole in the exhaustless and steadfast love of God, and
he uttered his unmingled gospel. That either himself or the unknown
editor of his prophecies should have placed it at the very end of his
book is not less than what we might have expected. For if the book
were to have validity beyond the circumstances of its origin, beyond
the judgment which was so near and so inevitable, was it not right to
let something else than the proclamation of this latter be its last
word to men? was it not right to put as the conclusion of the whole
matter the ideal eternally valid for Israel--the gospel which is ever
God's last word to His people?[651]

At some point or other, then, in the course of his ministry, there
was granted to Hosea an open vision like to the vision which he has
recounted in the second chapter. He called on the people to repent.
For once, and in the power of that Love to which he had already said
all things are possible, it seemed to him as if repentance came.
The tangle and intrigue of his generation fell away; fell away the
reeking sacrifices and the vain show of worship. The people turned
from their idols and puppet-kings, from Assyria and from Egypt, and
with contrite hearts came to God Himself, who, healing and loving,
opened to them wide the gates of the future. It is not strange that
down this spiritual vista the prophet should see the same scenery
as daily filled his bodily vision. Throughout Galilee Lebanon[652]
dominates the landscape. You cannot lift your eyes from any spot of
Northern Israel without resting them upon the vast mountain. From the
unhealthy jungles of the Upper Jordan, the pilgrim lifts his heart to
the cool hill air above, to the ever-green cedars and firs, to the
streams and waterfalls that drop like silver chains off the great
breastplate of snow. From Esdraelon and every plain the peasants
look to Lebanon to store the clouds and scatter the rain; it is not
from heaven but from Hermon that they expect the dew, their only
hope in the long drought of summer. Across Galilee and in Northern
Ephraim, across Bashan and in Northern Gilead, across Hauran and on
the borders of the desert, the mountain casts its spell of power, its
lavish promise of life.[653] Lebanon is everywhere the summit of the
land, and there are points from which it is as dominant as heaven.

No wonder then that our northern prophet painted the blessed future
in the poetry of the Mountain--its air, its dew and its trees.
Other seers were to behold, in the same latter days, the mountain
of the Lord above the tops of the mountains; the ordered city, her
steadfast walls salvation, and her open gates praise; the wealth of
the Gentiles flowing into her, profusion of flocks for sacrifice,
profusion of pilgrims; the great Temple and its solemn services; and
_the glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, fir-tree and pine and
box-tree together, to beautify the place of My Sanctuary_.[654] But,
with his home in the north, and weary of sacrifice and ritual, weary
of everything artificial whether it were idols or puppet-kings, Hosea
turns to the _glory of Lebanon_ as it lies, untouched by human tool
or art, fresh and full of peace from God's own hand. Like that other
seer of Galilee, Hosea in his vision of the future _saw no temple
therein_.[655] His sacraments are the open air, the mountain breeze,
the dew, the vine, the lilies, the pines; and what God asks of men
are not rites nor sacrifices, but life and health, fragrance and
fruitfulness, beneath the shadow and the Dew of His Presence.

_Return, O Israel, to Jehovah thy God, for thou hast stumbled by
thine iniquity. Take with you words_[656] _and return unto Jehovah.
Say unto Him, Remove iniquity altogether, and take good, so will we
render the calves_[657] _of our lips_; confessions, vows, these are the
sacrificial offerings God delights in. Which vows are now registered:--

_Asshur shall not save us;_
_We will not ride upon horses_ (from Egypt);
_And we will say no more, "O our God," to the work of our
hands:_
_For in Thee the fatherless findeth a father's pity._

Alien help, whether in the protection of Assyria or the cavalry which
Pharaoh sends in return for Israel's homage; alien gods, whose idols
we have ourselves made,--we abjure them all, for we remember how Thou
didst promise to show a father's love to the people whom Thou didst
name, for their mother's sins, Lo-Ruhamah, the Unfathered. Then God
replies:--

_I will heal their backsliding,_
_I will love them freely:_
_For Mine anger is turned away from them._
_I will be as the dew unto Israel:_
_He shall blossom as the lily,_
_And strike his roots_ deep _as Lebanon;_
_His branches shall spread,_
_And his beauty shall be as the olive-tree,_
_And his smell as Lebanon--_

smell of clear mountain air with the scent of the pines upon it. The
figure in the end of ver. 6 seems forced to some critics, who have
proposed various emendations, such as "like the fast-rooted trees
of Lebanon,"[658] but any one who has seen how the mountain himself
rises from great roots, cast out across the land like those of some
giant oak, will not feel it necessary to mitigate the metaphor.

The prophet now speaks:--

_They shall return and dwell in His shadow._
_They shall live well-watered as a garden,_
_Till they flourish like the vine,_
_And be fragrant like the wine of Lebanon._[659]

God speaks:--

_Ephraim, what has he_[660] _to do any more with idols!_
_I have spoken_ for him, _and I will look after him._
_I am like an ever-green fir;_
_From Me is thy fruit found._

This version is not without its difficulties; but the alternative
that God is addressed and Ephraim is the speaker--_Ephraim_ says,
_What have I to do any more with idols? I answer and look to Him:
I am like a green fir-tree; from me is Thy fruit found_--has even
greater difficulties,[661] although it avoids the unusual comparison
of the Deity with a tree. The difficulties of both interpretations
may be overcome by dividing the verse between God and the people:--

_Ephraim! what has he to do any more with idols:_
_I have spoken_ for him, _and will look after him._

In this case the _speaking_ would be intended in the same sense as
the _speaking_ in chap. ii. to the heavens and earth, that they might
_speak_ to the _corn and wine_.[662] Then Ephraim replies:--

_I am like an ever-green fir-tree;_
_From me is Thy fruit found._

But the division appears artificial, and the text does not suggest
that the two _I_'s belong to different speakers. The first version
therefore is the preferable.

* * * * *

Some one has added a summons to later generations to lay this book
to heart in face of their own problems and sins. May we do so for
ourselves!

_Who is wise, that he understands these things?_
_Intelligent, that he knows them?_
_Yea, straight are the ways of Jehovah,_
_And the righteous shall walk therein, but sinners shall
stumble upon them._

FOOTNOTES:

[646] Cf. vi. 6, etc.

[647] Cf. xii. 2, etc.

[648] Cf. i. 7; ii. 22, 25.

[649] Cf. xi. 4.

[650] Cf. xi. 8, 9.

[651] Since preparing the above for the press there has come into
my hands Professor Cheyne's "Introduction" to the new edition of
Robertson Smith's _The Prophets of Israel_, in which (p. xix.) he
reaches with regard to Hosea xiv. 2-10 conclusions entirely opposite
to those reached above. Professor Cheyne denies the passage to Hosea
on the grounds that it is akin in language and imagery and ideas to
writings of the age which begins with Jeremiah, and which among other
works includes the Song of Songs. But, as has been shown above, the
"language, imagery and ideas" are all akin to what Professor Cheyne
admits to be genuine prophecies of Hosea; and the likeness to them
of, _e.g._, Jer. xxxi. 10-20 may be explained on the same ground as
so much else in Jeremiah, by the influence of Hosea. The allusion
in ver. 3 suits Hosea's own day more than Jeremiah's. Nor can I
understand what Professor Cheyne means by this: "The spirituality
of the tone of vers. 1-3 is indeed surprising (contrast the picture
in Hos. v. 6)." Spirituality surprising in the book that contains
"I will have love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God
rather than burnt-offerings"! The verse, v. 6, he would contrast
with xiv. 1-3 is actually one in which Hosea says that when they go
"with flocks and herds" Israel shall not find God! He says that "to
understand Hosea aright we must omit it" (_i.e._ the whole epilogue).
But after the argument I have given above it will be plain that if
we "understand Hosea aright" we have every reason _not_ "to omit
it." His last contention, that "to have added anything to the stern
warning in xiii. 16 would have robbed it of half its force," is fully
met by the considerations stated above on p. 310.

[652] By Lebanon in the fourteenth chapter and almost always in the
Old Testament we must understand not the western range now called
Lebanon, for that makes no impression on the Holy Land, its bulk
lying too far to the north, but Hermon, the southmost and highest
summits of Anti-Lebanon. See _Hist. Geog._, pp. 417 f.

[653] Full sixty miles off, in the Jebel Druze, the ancient Greek
amphitheatres were so arranged that Hermon might fill the horizon of
the spectators.

[654] Isa. lx. 13.

[655] Revelation of St. John xxi. 22.

[656] On all this exhortation see below, p. 343.

[657] LXX. _fruit_, פרי for פרים; the whole verse is obscure.

[658] So Guthe; some other plant Wellhausen, who for ויך reads וילכו.

[659] Ver. 8 obviously needs emendation. The Hebrew text contains at
least one questionable construction, and gives no sense: "They that
dwell in his shadow shall turn, and revive corn and flourish like
the vine, and his fame," etc. To cultivate corn and be themselves
like a vine is somewhat mixed. The LXX. reads: ἐπιστρέψουσιν καὶ
καθιοῦνται ὑπὸ τὴν σκέπην αὐτοῦ, ζήσονται καὶ μεθυσθήσονται σίτῳ·
καὶ ἐξανθήσει ἄμπελος μνημόσυνην αὐτοῦ ὡς οῖνος Διβάνου. It removes
the grammatical difficulty from clause 1, which then reads ויָשְׁבוּ
יָשֻׁבוּ בְצִלּוֹ; the supplied _vau_ may easily have dropped after
the final _vau_ of the previous word. In the 2nd clause the LXX.
takes יהיו as an intransitive, which is better suited to the other
verbs, and adds καὶ μεθυσθήσονται, ורויו (a form that may have easily
slipped from the Hebrew text, through its likeness to the preceding
ויהיו). _And they shall be well-watered._ After this it is probable
that דגן should read כַגַּן. In the 3rd clause the Hebrew text may
stand. In the 4th זכר may not, as many propose, be taken for זכרם and
translated _their perfume_; but the parallelism makes it now probable
that we have a verb here; and if זכר in the Hiph. has the sense
_to make a perfume_ (cf. Isa. lxvi. 3), there is no reason against
the Kal being used in the intransitive sense here. In the LXX. for
μεθυσθήσονται Q^a reads στηριχθήσονται.

[660] LXX.

[661] This alternative, which Robertson Smith adopted, "though not
without some hesitation" (_Prophets_, 413) is that which follows the
Hebrew text, reading in the first clause לִי, and not, like LXX.,
לוֹ, and avoids the unusual figure of comparing Jehovah to a tree.
But it does not account for the singular emphasis laid in the second
clause on the first personal pronoun, and implies that God, whose
name has not for several verses been mentioned, is meant by the mere
personal suffix, "I will look to Him." Wellhausen suggests changing
the second clause to _I am his Anat and his Aschera_.

[662] ענה, ii. 23.

CHAPTER XXI

_THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD_

HOSEA _passim_.

We have now finished the translation and detailed exposition of
Hosea's prophecies. We have followed his minute examination of his
people's character; his criticism of his fickle generation's attempts
to repent; and his presentation of true religion in contrast to
their shallow optimism and sensual superstitions. We have seen an
inwardness and spirituality of the highest kind--a love not only warm
and mobile, but nobly jealous, and in its jealousy assisted by an
extraordinary insight and expertness in character. Why Hosea should
be distinguished above all prophets for inwardness and spirituality
must by this time be obvious to us. From his remote watchfulness,
Amos had seen the nations move across the world as the stars across
heaven; had seen, within Israel, class distinct from class, and
given types of all: rich and poor; priest, merchant and judge; the
panic-stricken, the bully; the fraudulent and the unclean. The
observatory of Amos was the world, and the nation. But Hosea's was
the home; and there he had watched a human soul decay through every
stage from innocence to corruption. It was a husband's study of a
wife which made Hosea the most inward of all the prophets. This was
_the beginning of God's word by him_.[663]

Among the subjects in the subtle treatment of which Hosea's service
to religion is most original and conspicuous, there are especially
three that deserve a more detailed treatment than we have been able
to give them. These are the Knowledge of God, Repentance and the Sin
against Love. We may devote a chapter to each of them, beginning in
this with the most characteristic and fundamental truth Hosea gave to
religion--the Knowledge of God.

* * * * *

If to the heart there be one pain more fatal than another, it is the
pain of not being understood. That prevents argument: how can you
reason with one who will not come to quarters with your real self? It
paralyses influence: how can you do your best with one who is blind
to your best? It stifles Love; for how dare she continue to speak
when she is mistaken for something else? Here as elsewhere "against
stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain."

This anguish Hosea had suffered. As closely as two souls may live
on earth, he had lived with Gomer. Yet she had never wakened to
his worth. She must have been a woman with a power of love, or
such a heart had hardly wooed her. He was a man of deep tenderness
and exquisite powers of expression. His tact, his delicacy, his
enthusiasm are sensible in every chapter of his book. Gomer must have
tasted them all before Israel did. Yet she never knew him. It was
her curse that, being married, she was not awake to the meaning of
marriage, and, being married to Hosea, she never appreciated the holy
tenderness and heroic patience which were deemed by God not unworthy
of becoming a parable of His own.

Now I think we do not go far wrong if we conclude that it was partly
this long experience of a soul that loved, but had neither conscience
nor ideal in her love, which made Hosea lay such frequent and pathetic
emphasis upon Israel's _ignorance_ of Jehovah. To have his character
ignored, his purposes baffled, his gifts unappreciated, his patience
mistaken--this was what drew Hosea into that wonderful sympathy with
the heart of God towards Israel which comes out in such passionate
words as these: _My people perish for lack of knowledge._[664] _There
is no troth, nor leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land._[665]
_They have not known the Lord._[666] _She did not know that I gave her
corn and wine._[667] _They knew not that I healed them._[668] _For now,
because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will reject thee._[669] _I will
have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than
burnt-offerings._[670] Repentance consists in change of knowledge. And
the climax of the new life which follows is again knowledge: _I will
betroth thee to Me, and thou shall know the Lord._[671] _Israel shall
cry, My God, we know Thee._[672]

To understand what Hosea meant by knowledge we must examine the
singularly supple word which his language lent him to express it.
The Hebrew root "Yadh'a,"[673] almost exclusively rendered in the
Old Testament by the English verb to know, is employed of the many
processes of knowledge, for which richer languages have separate
terms. It is by turns to perceive, be aware of, recognise, understand
or conceive, experience and be expert in.[674] But there is besides
nearly always a practical effectiveness, and in connection with
religious objects a moral consciousness.

The barest meaning is to be aware that something is present or has
happened, and perhaps the root meant simply to see.[675] But it was
the frequent duty of the prophets to mark the difference between
perceiving a thing and laying it to heart. Isaiah speaks of the
people _seeing_, but not so as _to know_;[676] and Deuteronomy
renders the latter sense by adding _with the heart_, which to the
Hebrews was the seat, not of the feeling, but of the practical
intellect:[677] _And thou knowest with thy heart that as a man
chastiseth his son, so the Lord your God chastiseth you_.[678]
Usually, however, the word _know_ suffices by itself. This practical
vigour naturally developed in such directions as _intimacy_,
_conviction_, _experience_ and _wisdom_. Job calls his familiars
_my knowers_;[679] of a strong conviction he says, _I know that my
Redeemer liveth_,[680] and referring to wisdom, _We are of yesterday
and know not_;[681] while Ecclesiastes says, _Whoso keepeth the
commandment shall know_--that is, _experience_, or _suffer--no
evil_.[682] But the verb rises into a practical sense--to the
knowledge that leads a man to regard or care for its object. Job uses
the verb _know_ when he would say, _I do not care for my life_;[683]
and in the description of the sons of Eli, that _they were sons
of Belial, and did not know God_, it means that they did not have
any regard for Him.[684] Finally, there is a moral use of the word
in which it approaches the meaning of conscience: _Their eyes were
opened, and they knew that they were naked_.[685] They were aware
of this before, but they felt it now with a new sense. Also it is
the mark of the awakened and the fullgrown to know, or to feel, the
difference between good and evil.[686]

Here, then, we have a word for _knowing_, the utterance of which
almost invariably starts a moral echo, whose very sound, as it were,
is haunted by sympathy and by duty. It is knowledge, not as an effort
of, so much as an effect upon, the mind. It is not _to know_ so as to
see the fact of, but _to know_ so as to feel the force of; knowledge,
not as acquisition and mastery, but as impression, passion. To quote
Paul's distinction, it is not so much the apprehending as the being
apprehended. It leads to a vivid result--either warm appreciation
or change of mind or practical effort. It is sometimes the talent
conceived as the trust, sometimes the enlistment of all the affections.
It is knowledge that is followed by shame, or by love, or by reverence,
or by the sense of a duty. One sees that it closely approaches the
meaning of our "conscience," and understands how easily there was
developed from it the evangelical name for repentance, Metanoia--that
is, change of mind under a new impression of facts.

There are three writers who thus use knowledge as the key to
the Divine life--in the Old Testament Hosea and the author of
Deuteronomy, in the New Testament St. John. We likened Amos to St.
John the Baptist: it is not only upon his similar temperament, but
far more upon his use of the word knowledge for spiritual purposes,
that we may compare Hosea to St. John the Evangelist.

Hosea's chief charge against the people is one of stupidity. High and
low they are _a people without intelligence_.[687] Once he defines
this as want of political wisdom: _Ephraim is a silly dove without
heart_, or, as we should say, _without brains_;[688] and again, as
insensibility to every ominous fact: _Strangers have devoured his
strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are scattered upon
him, and he knoweth it not_,[689] or, as we should say, _lays it not
to heart_.

But Israel's most fatal ignorance is of God Himself. This is the sign
and the cause of every one of their defects. _There is no troth, nor
leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land._[690] _They have not
known the LORD._[691] _They have not known Me._

With the causes of this ignorance the prophet has dealt most
explicitly in the fourth chapter.[692] They are two: the people's
own vice and the negligence of their priests. Habitual vice destroys
a people's brains. _Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the heart
of My people._[693] Lust, for instance, blinds them to the domestic
consequences of their indulgence in the heathen worship, _and so
the stupid people come to their end_.[694] Again, their want of
political wisdom is due to their impurity, drunkenness and greed to
be rich.[695] Let those take heed who among ourselves insist that art
is independent of moral conditions--that wit and fancy reach their
best and bravest when breaking from any law of decency. They lie:
such licence corrupts the natural intelligence of a people, and robs
them of insight and imagination.

Yet Hosea sees that all the fault does not lie with the common
people. Their teachers are to blame, priest and prophet alike, for
both _stumble_, and it is true that a people shall be like its
priests.[696] _The_ priests _have rejected knowledge and forgotten
the Torah_ of their God; they think only of the ritual of sacrifice
and the fines by which they fill their mouths. It was, as we have
seen, _the_ sin of Israel's religion in the eighth century. To
the priests religion was a mass of ceremonies which satisfied the
people's superstitions and kept themselves in bread. To the prophets
it was an equally sensuous, an equally mercenary ecstasy. But to
Hosea religion is above all a thing of the intellect and conscience:
it is that _knowing_ which is at once common-sense, plain morality
and the recognition by a pure heart of what God has done and is doing
in history. Of such a knowledge the priests and prophets are the
stewards, and it is because they have ignored their trust that the
people have been provided with no antidote to the vices that corrupt
their natural intelligence and make them incapable of seeing God.

In contrast to such ignorance Hosea describes the essential
temper and contents of a true understanding of God. Using the word
_knowledge_, in the passive sense characteristic of his language, not
so much the acquisition as the impression of facts, an impression
which masters not only a man's thoughts but his heart and will,
Hosea describes the _knowledge of God_ as feeling, character and
conscience. Again and again he makes it parallel to loyalty,
repentance, love and service. Again and again he emphasises that it
comes from God Himself. It is not something which men can reach by
their own endeavours, or by the mere easy turning of their fickle
hearts. For it requires God Himself to speak, and discipline to
chasten. The only passage in which the knowledge of God is described
as the immediate prize of man's own pursuit is that prayer of the
people on whose facile religiousness Hosea pours his scorn.[697]
_Let us know, let us follow on to know the Lord_, he heard them say,
and promise themselves, _As soon as we seek Him we shall find Him_.
But God replies that He can make nothing of such ambitions; they
will pass away like the morning cloud and the early dew.[698] This
discarded prayer, then, is the only passage in the book in which the
knowledge of God is described as man's acquisition. Elsewhere, in
strict conformity to the temper of the Hebrew word to know, Hosea
presents the knowledge of the Most High, not as something man finds
out for himself, but something which comes down on him from above.

The means which God took to impress Himself upon the heart of His
people were, according to Hosea, the events of their history. Hosea,
indeed, also points to another means. _The Torah of thy God_, which
in one passage[699] he makes parallel to _knowledge_, is evidently
the body of instruction, judicial, ceremonial and social, which has
come down by the tradition of the priests. This was not all oral;
part of it at least was already codified in the form we now know
as the Book of the Covenant.[700] But Hosea treats of the Torah
only in connection with the priests. And the far more frequent and
direct means by which God has sought to reveal Himself to the people
are the great events of their past. These Hosea never tires of
recalling. More than any other prophet, he recites the deeds done
by God in the origins and making of Israel. So numerous are his
references that from them alone we could almost rebuild the early
history. Let us gather them together. The nation's father Jacob _in
the womb overreached his brother, and in his manhood strove with
God; yea, he strove with the Angel and he overcame_,[701] _he wept
and supplicated Him; at Bethel he found Him, and there He spake with
us--Jehovah God of Hosts, Jehovah is His name_.[702] _... And Jacob
fled to the territory_[703] _of Aram, and he served for a wife, and
for a wife he tended sheep. And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel
up out of Egypt, and by a prophet he was tended._[704] _When Israel
was young,_[705] _then I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called
My son._[706] _As often as I called to them, so often did they go
from Me:_[707] _they to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images
offering incense. But I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon
Mine_[708] _arms, and they did not know that I nursed them._[709] ...
_Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the firstfruits
on an early fig-tree I saw your fathers; but they went to Ba'al-Peor,
and consecrated themselves to the Shame._[710] ... _But I am Jehovah
thy God from the land of Egypt, and gods besides Me thou knowest not,
and Saviour there is none but Me. I knew thee in the wilderness, in
the land of burning heats. But the more pasture they had, the more
they fed themselves full; as they fed themselves full their heart was
lifted up: therefore they forgat Me._[711] ... _I Jehovah thy God
from the land of Egypt._[712] And all this revelation of God was not
only in that marvellous history, but in the yearly gifts of nature
and even in the success of the people's commerce: _She knew not that
it was I who have given her the corn and the wine and the oil, and
silver have I multiplied to her._[713]

This, then, is how God gave Israel knowledge of Himself. _First_ it
broke upon the Individual, the Nation's Father. And to him it had
not come by miracle, but just in the same fashion as it has broken
upon men from then until now. He woke to find God no tradition, but
an experience. Amid the strife with others of which life for all so
largely consists, Jacob became aware that God also has to be reckoned
with, and that, hard as is the struggle for bread and love and
justice with one's brethren and fellow-men, with the Esaus and with
the Labans, a more inevitable wrestle awaits the soul when it is left
alone in the darkness with the Unseen. Oh, this is our sympathy with
those early patriarchs, not that they saw the sea dry up before them
or the bush ablaze with God, but that upon some lonely battle-field
of the heart they also endured those moments of agony, which imply a
more real Foe than we ever met in flesh and blood, and which leave
upon us marks deeper than the waste of toil or the rivalry of the
world can inflict. So the Father of the Nation came to _find_ God at
Bethel, and there, adds Hosea, where the Nation still worship, God
_spake with us_[714] in the person of our Father.

The _second_ stage of the knowledge of God was when the Nation awoke
to His leading, and _through a prophet_, Moses, were _brought up out
of Egypt_. Here again no miracle is adduced by Hosea, but with full
heart he appeals to the grace and the tenderness of the whole story.
To him it is a wonderful romance. Passing by all the empires of
earth, the Almighty chose for Himself this people that was no people,
this tribe that were the slaves of Egypt. And the choice was of love
only: _When Israel was young I came to love him, and out of Egypt I
called My son._ It was the adoption of a little slave-boy, adoption
by the heart; and the fatherly figure continues, _I taught Ephraim
to walk, taking him upon Mine arms_. It is just the same charm, seen
from another point of view, when Hosea hears God say that He had
_found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, like the firstfruits on
an early fig-tree I saw your fathers_.

Now these may seem very imperfect figures of the relation of God to
this one people, and the ideas they present may be felt to start more
difficulties than ever their poetry could soothe to rest: as, for
instance, why Israel alone was chosen--why this of all tribes was
given such an opportunity to know the Most High. With these questions
prophecy does not deal, and for Israel's sake had no need to deal.
What alone Hosea is concerned with is the Character discernible in
the origin and the liberation of his people. He hears that Character
speak for itself; and it speaks of a love and of a joy, to find
figures for which it goes to childhood and to spring--to the love a
man feels for a child, to the joy a man feels at the sight of the
firstfruits of the year. As the human heart feels in those two great
dawns, when nothing is yet impossible, but all is full of hope and
promise, so humanly, so tenderly, so joyfully had God felt towards
His people. Never again say that the gods of Greece were painted more
living or more fair! The God of Israel is Love and Springtime to His
people. Grace, patience, pure joy of hope and possibility--these are
the Divine elements which this spiritual man, Hosea, sees in the
early history of his people, and not the miraculous, about which,
from end to end of his book, he is utterly silent.

It is ignorance, then, of such a Character, so evident in these facts
of their history, with which Hosea charges his people--not ignorance
of the facts themselves, not want of devotion to their memory, for
they are a people who crowd the sacred scenes of the past, at Bethel,
at Gilgal, at Beersheba, but ignorance of the Character which shines
through the facts. Hosea also calls it forgetfulness, for the people
once had knowledge.[715] The cause of their losing it has been their
prosperity in Canaan: _As their pastures were increased they grew
satisfied; as they grew satisfied their heart was lifted up, and
therefore they forgat Me._[716]

Equally instructive is the method by which Hosea seeks to move Israel
from this oblivion and bring them to a true knowledge of God. He
insists that their recovery can only be the work of God Himself--the
living God working in their lives to-day as He did in the past of
the nation. To those past deeds it is useless for this generation to
go back, and seek again the memory of which they have disinherited
themselves. Let them rather realise that the same God still lives.
The knowledge of Him may be recovered by appreciating His deeds in
the life of to-day. And these deeds must first of all be violence
and terror, if only to rouse them from their sensuous sloth. The
last verse we have quoted, about Israel's complacency and pride, is
followed by this terrible one: _I shall be_[717] _to them like a
lion, like a leopard I shall leap_[718] _upon the way. I will meet
them as a bear bereft_ of her cubs, _that I may tear the caul of
their heart, that I may devour them there like a lion: the wild beast
shall rend them._[719] This means that into Israel's insensibility
to Himself God must break with facts, with wounds, with horrors they
cannot evade. Till He so acts, their own efforts, _then shall we know
if we hunt up to know_,[720] and their assurance, _My God, we do know
Thee_,[721] are very vain. Hosea did not speak for nothing. Events
were about to happen more momentous than even the Exodus and the
Conquest of the Land. By 734 the Assyrians had depopulated Gilead and
Galilee; in 725 the capital itself was invested, and by 721 the whole
nation carried into captivity. God had made Himself known.

We are already aware, however, that Hosea did not count this as God's
final revelation to His people. Doom is not doom to him, as it was
to Amos, but discipline; and God withdraws His people from their
fascinating land only that He may have them more closely to Himself. He
will bring His Bride into the wilderness again, the wilderness where
they first met, and there, when her soul is tender and her stupid heart
broken, He will plant in her again the seeds of His knowledge and His
love. The passages which describe this are among the most beautiful of
the book. They tell us of no arbitrary conquest of Israel by Jehovah,
of no magic and sudden transformation. They describe a process as
natural and gentle as a human wooing; they use, as we have seen, the
very terms of this: _I will woo her, bring her into the wilderness,
and speak home to her heart.... And it shall be in that day that thou
shalt call Me, My husband, ... and I will betroth thee to Me for ever
in righteousness and in justice, and in leal love and in mercies and in
faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah._[722]

FOOTNOTES:

[663] i. 2.

[664] iv. 6.

[665] iv. 1.

[666] v. 4.

[667] ii. 10.

[668] xi. 3.

[669] iv. 6.

[670] vi. 6.

[671] ii. 22.

[672] viii. 2.

[673] ידע.

[674] The Latin _videre_, _scire_, _noscere_, _cognoscere_,
_intelligere_, _sapere_ and _peritus esse_.

[675] Cf. the Greek οἰδα from εἰδειν.

[676] vi. 9.

[677] See above, pp. 258, 275; and below, p. 323.

[678] viii. 5: cf. xxix. 3 (Eng. 4), _Jehovah did not give you a
heart to know_.

[679] Job xix. 13: still more close, of course, the intimacy between
the sexes for which the verb is so often used in the Old Testament.

[680] xix. 25: cf. Gen. xx. 6.

[681] viii. 9.

[682] viii. 5: cf. Hosea ix. 7.

[683] ix. 21.

[684] 1 Sam. ii. 12. A similar meaning is probably to be attached to
the word in Gen. xxxix. 6: Potiphar _had no thought_ or _care for
anything_ that was in Joseph's hand. Cf. Prov. ix. 13; xxvii. 23; Job
xxxv. 15.

[685] Gen. iii. 7.

[686] Gen. iii. 5; Isa. vii. 15, etc.

[687] iv. 14, לא־יבין עם: if the original meaning of בין be to _get
between_, _see through_ or _into_, so _discriminate_, _understand_,
then intelligence is its etymological equivalent.

[688] vii. 11. See above, p. 321, _n._ 4.

[689] vii. 9.

[690] iv. 1.

[691] v. 4.

[692] For exposition of this chapter see above, pp. 256 ff.

[693] iv. 11, 12, LXX.

[694] iv. 14 f. See above, pp. 258 f.

[695] vii. _passim_.

[696] iv. 4-9. Above, pp. 257 f.

[697] vi. 1 ff. See above, pp. 263 ff.

[698] vi. 4.

[699] iv. 6. See above, p. 257.

[700] See above, pp. 97 f. On the other doubtful phrase, viii.
12--literally _I write multitudes of My Torah, as a stranger they
have reckoned it_--no argument can be built; for even if we take the
first clause as conditional and render, _Though I wrote multitudes
of My Torôth, yet as those of a stranger they would regard them_,
that would not necessarily mean that no Torôth of Jehovah were yet
written, but, on the contrary, might equally well imply that some at
least had been written.

[701] Or _was overcome_.

[702] xii. 4-6. See above, p. 302. LXX. reads _they supplicated Me
... they found Me ... He spoke with them_. Many propose to read the
last clause _with him_. The passage is obscure. Note the order of the
events--the wrestling at Peniel, the revelation at Bethel, then in the
subsequent passage the flight to Aram. This however does not prove that
in Hosea's information the last happened after the two first.

[703] שׁדה, _field_, here used in its political sense: cf. _Hist.
Geog._, p. 79. Our word _country_, now meaning territory and now the
rural as opposed to the urban districts, is strictly analogous to the
Hebrew _field_.

[704] xii. 13, 14.

[705] _A youth._

[706] LXX., followed by many critics, _his sons_. But _My son_ is a
better parallel to _young_ in the preceding clause. Or trans.: _to be
My son_.

[707] So LXX. See p. 293.

[708] So rightly LXX.

[709] xi. 1-3.

[710] ix. 10.

[711] xiii. 4-6.

[712] xii. 10. Other references to the ancient history are the story
of Gibeah and the Valley of Achor.

[713] ii. 10.

[714] See above, p. 302.

[715] iv. 6.

[716] xiii. 5.

[717] With Wellhausen read אֶהְיֶה for וָאֱהִי.

[718] See above, p. 305, _n._ 4.

[719] xiii. 7 ff.

[720] vi. 3.

[721] viii. 2.

[722] i. 16, 18, 21, 22.

CHAPTER XXII

_REPENTANCE_

HOSEA _passim_.

If we keep in mind what Hosea meant by knowledge--a new impression
of facts implying a change both of temper and of conduct--we shall
feel how natural it is to pass at once from his doctrine of knowledge
to his doctrine of repentance. Hosea may be accurately styled the
first preacher of repentance yet so thoroughly did he deal with this
subject of eternal interest to the human heart, that between him and
ourselves almost no teacher has increased the insight with which it
has been examined, or the passion with which it ought to be enforced.

One thing we must hold clear from the outset. To us repentance is
intelligible only in the individual. There is no motion of the heart
which more clearly derives its validity from its personal character.
Repentance is the conscience, the feeling, the resolution of a man
by himself and for himself--"_I_ will arise and go to my Father."
Yet it is not to the individual that Hosea directs his passionate
appeals. For him and his age the religious unit was not the Israelite
but Israel. God had called and covenanted with the nation as a
whole; He had revealed Himself through their historical fortunes and
institutions. His grace was shown in their succour and guidance as
a people; His last judgment was threatened in their destruction as a
state. So similarly, when by Hosea God calls to repentance, it is the
whole nation whom He addresses.

At the same time we must remember those qualifications which we
adduced with regard to Hosea's doctrine of the nation's knowledge of
God.[723] They affect also his doctrine of the national repentance.
Hosea's experience of Israel had been preceded by his experience
of an Israelite. For years the prophet had carried on his anxious
heart a single human character--lived with her, travailed for her,
pardoned and redeemed her. As we felt that this long cure of a soul
must have helped Hosea to his very spiritual sense of the knowledge
of God, so now we may justly assume that the same cannot have been
without effect upon his very personal teaching about repentance. But
with his experience of Gomer, there conspired also his intense love
for Israel. A warm patriotism necessarily personifies its object. To
the passionate lover of his people, their figure rises up one and
individual--his mother, his lover, his wife. Now no man ever loved
his people more intimately or more tenderly than Hosea loved Israel.
The people were not only dear to him, because he was their son,
but dear and vivid also for their loneliness and their distinction
among the peoples of the earth, and for their long experience as the
intimate of the God of grace and lovingkindness. God had chosen this
Israel as His Bride; and the remembrance of the unique endowment
and lonely destiny stimulated Hosea's imagination in the work of
personifying and individualising his people. He treats Israel with
the tenderness and particularity with which the Shepherd, leaving
the ninety and nine in the wilderness, seeks till He find it the one
lost lamb. His analysis of his fickle generation's efforts to repent,
of their motives in turning to God, and of their failures, is as
inward and definite as if it were a single heart he were dissecting.
Centuries have passed; the individual has displaced the nation;
the experience of the human heart has been infinitely increased,
and prophecy and all preaching has grown more and more personal.
Yet it has scarcely ever been found either necessary to add to the
terms which Hosea used for repentance, or possible to go deeper in
analysing the processes which these denote.

* * * * *

Hosea's most simple definition of repentance is that _of returning unto
God_. For _turning_ and _re-turning_ the Hebrew language has only one
verb--shûbh. In the Book of Hosea there are instances in which it is
employed in the former sense;[724] but, even apart from its use for
repentance, the verb usually means to return. Thus the wandering wife
in the second chapter says, _I will return to my former husband_;[725]
and in the threat of judgment it is said, _Ephraim will return to
Egypt_.[726] Similar is the sense in the phrases _His deeds will I turn
back upon him_[727] and _I will not turn back to destroy Ephraim_.[728]
The usual meaning of the verb is therefore, not merely to turn or
change, but to turn right round, to turn back and home.[729] This is
obviously the force of its employment to express repentance. For this
purpose Hosea very seldom uses it alone.[730] He generally adds either
the name by which God had always been known, Jehovah,[731] or the
designation of Him, as _their own God_.[732]

We must emphasise this point if we would appreciate the thoroughness
of our prophet's doctrine, and its harmony with the preaching of the
New Testament. To Hosea repentance is no mere change in the direction
of one's life. It is a turning back upon one's self, a retracing of
one's footsteps, a confession and acknowledgment of what one has
abandoned. It is a coming back and a coming home to God, exactly as
Jesus Himself has described in the Parable of the Prodigal. As Hosea
again and again affirms, the Return to God, like the New Testament
Metanoia, is the effect of new knowledge; but the new knowledge is
not of new facts--it is of facts which have been present for a long
time and which ought to have been appreciated before.

Of these facts Hosea describes three kinds: the nation's misery, the
unspeakable grace of their God, and their great guilt in turning from
Him. Again it is as in the case of the prodigal: his hunger, his
father, and his cry, "I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight."

We have already felt the pathos of those passages in which Hosea
describes the misery and the decay of Israel, the unprofitableness
and shame of all their restless traffic with other gods and alien
empires. The state is rotten;[733] anarchy prevails.[734] The
national vitality is lessened: _Ephraim hath grey hairs_.[735] Power
of birth and begetting have gone; the universal unchastity causes the
population to diminish: _their glory flieth away like a bird_.[736]
The presents to Egypt,[737] the tribute to Assyria, drain the wealth
of the people: _strangers devour his strength_.[738] The prodigal
Israel has his far-off country where he spends his substance among
strangers. It is in this connection that we must take the repeated
verse: _the pride of Israel testifieth to his face_.[739] We have
seen[740] the impossibility of the usual exegesis of these words,
that by _the Pride of Israel_ Hosea means Jehovah; the word "pride"
is probably to be taken in the sense in which Amos employs it of the
exuberance and arrogance of Israel's civilisation. If we are right,
then Hosea describes a very subtle symptom of the moral awakening
whether of the individual or of a community. The conscience of many
a man, of many a kingdom, has been reached only through their pride.
Pride is the last nerve which comfort and habit leave quick; and
when summons to a man's better nature fail, it is still possible in
most cases to touch his pride with the presentation of the facts
of his decadence. This is probably what Hosea means. Israel's
prestige suffers. The civilisation of which they are proud has its
open wounds. Their politicians are the sport of Egypt;[741] their
wealth, the very gold of their Temple, is lifted by Assyria.[742]
The nerve of pride was also touched in the prodigal: "How many hired
servants of my father have enough and to spare, while I perish
with hunger." Yet, unlike him, this prodigal son of God will not
therefore return.[743] Though there are grey hairs upon him, though
strangers devour his strength, _he knoweth it not_; of him it cannot
be said that "he has come to himself." And that is why the prophet
threatens the further discipline of actual exile from the land and
its fruits,[744] of bitter bread[745] and poverty[746] on an unclean
soil. Israel must also eat husks and feed with swine before he arises
and _returns to his God_.

But misery alone never led either man or nation to repentance: the
sorrow of this world worketh only death. Repentance is the return to
God; and it is the awakening to the truth about God, to the facts of
His nature and His grace, which alone makes repentance possible. No
man's doctrine of repentance is intelligible without his doctrine
of God; and it is because Hosea's doctrine of God is so rich, so
fair and so tender, that his doctrine of repentance is so full and
gracious. Here we see the difference between him and Amos. Amos
had also used the phrase with frequency; again and again he had
appealed to the people to seek God and to return to God.[747] But
from Amos it went forth only as a pursuing voice, a voice crying
in the wilderness. Hosea lets loose behind it a heart, plies the
people with gracious thoughts of God, and brings about them, not the
voices only, but the atmosphere, of love. _I will be as the dew unto
Israel_, promises the Most High; but He is before His promise. The
chapters of Hosea are drenched with the dew of God's mercy, of which
no drop falls on those of Amos, but there God is rather the roar
as of a lion, the flash as of lightning. Both prophets bid Israel
turn to God; but Amos means by that, to justice, truth and purity,
while Hosea describes a husband, a father, long-suffering and full
of mercy. "I bid you come back," cries Amos. But Hosea pleads, "If
only you were aware of what God is, you would come back." "Come back
to God and live," cries Amos; but Hosea, "Come back to God, for He
is Love." Amos calls, "Come back at once, for there is but little
time left till God must visit you in judgment"; but Hosea, "Come
back at once, for God has loved you so long and so kindly." Amos
cries, "Turn, for in front of you is destruction"; but Hosea, "Turn,
for behind you is God." And that is why all Hosea's preaching of
repentance is so evangelical. "I will arise and go _to my Father_."

But the _third_ element of the new knowledge which means repentance is
the conscience of guilt. _My Father, I have sinned._ On this point it
might be averred that the teaching of Hosea is less spiritual than that
of later prophets in Israel, and that here at last he comes short of
the evangelical inwardness of the New Testament. There is truth in the
charge; and here perhaps we feel most the defects of his standpoint,
as one who appeals, not to the individual, but to the nation as a
whole. Hosea's treatment of the sense of guilt cannot be so spiritual
as that, say, of the fifty-first Psalm. But, at least, he is not
satisfied to exhaust it by the very thorough exposure which he gives
us of the social sins of his day, and of their terrible results. He,
too, understands what is meant by a conscience of sin. He has called
Israel's iniquity harlotry, unfaithfulness to God; and in a passage
of equal insight and beauty of expression he points out that in the
service of the Ba'alim Jehovah's people can never feel anything but a
harlot's shame and bitter memories of the better past.

_Rejoice not, O Israel, to the pitch of rapture like the heathen:
for thou hast played the harlot from thine own God; 'tis hire
thou hast loved on all threshing-floors. Floor and vat shall not
acknowledge them; the new wine shall play them false._[748] Mere
children of nature may abandon themselves to the riotous joy of
harvest and vintage festivals, for they have never known other gods
than are suitably worshipped by these orgies. But Israel has a
past--the memory of a holier God, the conscience of having deserted
Him for material gifts. With such a conscience she can never enjoy
the latter; as Hosea puts it, they will not _acknowledge_ or _take
to_[749] her. Here there is an instinct of the profound truth, that
even in the fulness of life conscience is punishment; by itself the
sense of guilt is judgment.

But Hosea does not attack the service of strange gods only because
it is unfaithfulness to Jehovah, but also because, as the worship of
images, it is a senseless stupidity utterly inconsistent with that
spiritual discernment of which repentance so largely consists. And
with the worship of heathen idols Hosea equally condemns the worship
of Jehovah under the form of images.

Hosea was the first in Israel to lead the attack upon the idols.
Elijah had assaulted the worship of a foreign god, but neither he nor
Elisha nor Amos condemned the worship of Israel's own God under the
form of a calf. Indeed Amos, except in one doubtful passage,[750]
never at all attacks idols or false gods. The reason is very obvious.
Amos and Elijah were concerned only with the proclamation of God as
justice and purity: and to the moral aspects of religion the question
of idolatry is not relevant; the two things do not come directly into
collision. But Hosea had deeper and more wide views of God, with which
idolatry came into conflict at a hundred points. We know what Hosea's
_knowledge of God_ was--how spiritual, how extensive--and we can
appreciate how incongruous idolatry must have appeared against it. We
are prepared to find him treating the images, whether of the Ba'alim
or of Jehovah, with that fine scorn which a passionate monotheism,
justly conscious of its intellectual superiority, has ever passed upon
the idolatry even of civilisations in other respects higher than its
own. To Hosea the idol is an _'eseb, a made thing_.[751] It is made
of the very silver and gold with which Jehovah Himself had endowed
the people.[752] It is made only _to be cut off_[753] by the first
invader! Chiefly, however, does Hosea's scorn fall upon the image under
which Jehovah Himself was worshipped. _Thy Calf, O Samaria!_[754] he
contemptuously calls it. _From Israel is it also_, as much as the
Ba'alim. _A workman made it, and no god is it: chips shall the Calf of
Samaria become!_ In another place he mimics the _anxiety of Samaria
for their Calf; his people mourn for him, and his priestlings writhe
for his glory_, why?--_because it is going into exile_:[755] the gold
that covers him shall be stripped for the tribute to Assyria. And
once more: _They continue to sin; they make them a smelting of their
silver, idols after their own modelling, smith's work all of it. To
these things they speak! Sacrificing men_ actually _kiss calves!_[756]
All this is in the same vein of satire which we find grown to such
brilliance in the great Prophet of the Exile.[757] Hosea was the first
in whom it sparkled; and it was due to his conception of _the knowledge
of God_. Its relevancy to his doctrine of repentance is this, that so
spiritual an apprehension of God as repentance implies, so complete a
_metanoia_ or _change of mind_, is intellectually incompatible with
idolatry. You cannot speak of repentance to men who _kiss calves_ and
worship blocks of wood. Hence he says: _Ephraim is wedded to idols:
leave him alone_.[758]

There was more than idolatry, however, in the way of Israel's
repentance. The whole of the national worship was an obstacle. Its
formalism and its easy and mechanical methods of _turning to God_
disguised the need of that moral discipline and change of heart,
without which no repentance can be genuine. Amos had contrasted the
ritualism of the time with the duty of civic justice and the service
of the poor:[759] Hosea opposes to it leal love and the knowledge of
God. _I will have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of
God rather than burnt-offerings._[760] It is characteristic of Hosea
to class sacrifices with idols. Both are senseless and inarticulate,
incapable of expressing or of answering the deep feelings of the
heart. True repentance, on the contrary, is rational, articulate,
definite. _Take with you words_, says Hosea, _and_ so _return to
Jehovah_.[761]

To us who, after twenty-five more centuries of talk, know painfully
how words may be abused, it is strange to find them enforced as
the tokens of sincerity. But let us consider against what the
prophet enforces them. Against the _kissing of calves_ and such
mummery--worship of images that neither hear nor speak. Let us
remember the inarticulateness of ritualism, how it stifles rather
than utters the feelings of the heart. Let us imagine the dead
routine of the legal sacrifices, their original symbolism worn
bare, bringing forward to the young hearts of new generations no
interpretation of their ancient and distorted details, reducing those
who perform them to irrational machines like themselves. Then let
us remember how our own Reformers had to grapple with the same hard
mechanism in the worship of their time, and how they bade the heart
of every worshipper _speak_--speak for itself to God with rational
and sincere words. So in place of the frozen ritualism of the Church
there broke forth from all lands of the Reformation, as though it
were birds in springtime, a great burst of hymns and prayers, with
the clear notes of the Gospel in the common tongue. So intolerable
was the memory of what had been, that it was even enacted that
henceforth no sacrament should be dispensed but the Word should be
given to the people along with it. If we keep all these things in
mind, we shall know what Hosea means when he says to Israel in their
penitence, _Take with you words_.

No one, however, was more conscious of the danger of words. Upon
the lips of the people Hosea has placed a confession of repentance,
which, so far as the words go, could not be more musical or
pathetic.[762] In every Christian language it has been paraphrased to
an exquisite confessional hymn. But Hosea describes it as rejected.
Its words are too easy; its thoughts of God and of His power to save
are too facile. Repentance, it is true, starts from faith in the
mercy of God, for without this there were only despair. Nevertheless
in all true penitence there is despair. Genuine sorrow for sin
includes a feeling of the irreparableness of the past, and the true
penitent as he casts himself upon God does not dare to feel that he
ever can be the same again. _I am no more worthy to be called Thy
son: make me as one of Thy hired servants._ Such necessary thoughts
as these Israel does not mingle with her prayer. _Come and let us
return to Jehovah, for He hath torn_ only _that He may heal, and
smitten_ only _that He may bind up. He will revive us again in a
couple of days, on the third day raise us up, that we may live before
Him. Then shall we know if we hunt up to know the Lord. As soon
as we seek Him we shall find Him: and He shall come upon us like
winter-rain, and like the spring-rain pouring on the land._ This
is too facile, too shallow. No wonder that God despairs of such a
people. _What am I to make of thee, Ephraim?_[763]

Another familiar passage, the Parable of the Heifer, describes the
same ambition to reach spiritual results without spiritual processes.
_Ephraim is a broken-in heifer--one that loveth to tread_ out the
corn. _But I will pass upon her goodly neck. I will give Ephraim a
yoke, Judah must plough. Jacob must harrow for himself._[764] Cattle,
being unmuzzled by law[765] at threshing time, loved this best of
all their year's work. Yet to reach it they must first go through
the harder and unrewarded trials of ploughing and harrowing. Like a
heifer, then, which loved harvest only, Israel would spring at the
rewards of penitence, the peaceable fruits of righteousness, without
going through the discipline and chastisement which alone yield them.
Repentance is no mere turning or even re-turning. It is a deep and
an ethical process--the breaking up of fallow ground, the labour and
long expectation of the sower, the seeking and waiting for Jehovah
till Himself send the rain. _Sow to yourselves in righteousness;
reap in proportion to love_ (the love you have sown), _break up your
fallow ground: for it is time to seek Jehovah, until He come and rain
righteousness upon us_.[766]

A repentance so thorough as this cannot but result in the most clear
and steadfast manner of life. Truly it is a returning not by oneself,
but _a returning by God_, and it leads to the _keeping of leal love
and justice, and waiting upon God continually_.[767]

FOOTNOTES:

[723] See above, p. 320.

[724] vii. 16, _They turn, but not upwards_; xiv. 5, _Mine anger is
turned away_.

[725] ii. 9.

[726] viii. 13; ix. 3; xi. 5.

[727] iv. 9: cf. xii. 3, 15.

[728] xi. 9: cf. ii. 11.

[729] This may be further seen in the very common phrase שבות שוב
עמי, _to turn again_ the captivity of My people (see Hosea vi. 11);
or in the use of שוב in xiv. 8, where it has the force, auxiliary
to the other verb in the clause, of repeating or coming back to do
a thing. But the text here needs emendation: cf. above, p. 315. Cf.
Amos' use of the Hiphil form to _draw back_, _withdraw_, i. 3, 6, 9,
11, 13; ii. 1, 4, 6.

[730] Cf. xi. 5, _they refused to return_.

[731] vi. 1, _Come and let us return to Jehovah_; vii. 10, _They did
not return to Jehovah_; xiv. 2, 3, _Return, O Israel, to Jehovah_.

[732] iii. 5, _They shall return and seek Jehovah their God_; v. 4,
_Their deeds do not allow them to return to their God_.

[733] v. 12, etc.

[734] iv. 2 ff.; vi. 7 ff., etc.

[735] vii. 7.

[736] ix. 11 ff.

[737] xii. 2.

[738] vii. 7.

[739] v. 5; vii. 10.

[740] See above, p. 261.

[741] vii. 16.

[742] x. 5.

[743] vii. 10.

[744] ii. 16, etc.; ix. 2 ff., etc.

[745] ix. 4.

[746] xii. 10.

[747] iv. 6, 8, 9, 10, 11.

[748] ix. 1. See above, p. 279.

[749] See above, p. 279, _n._ 4.

[750] v. 26.

[751] עֵצֶב from עָצַב, which in Job x. 8 is parallel to עשה.

[752] ii. 8.

[753] viii. 4.

[754] viii. 5.

[755] x. 5.

[756] xiii. 2.

[757] Isa. xli. ff.

[758] iv. 17.

[759] Amos v.

[760] vi. 6.

[761] xiv. 2. Perhaps the curious expression at the close of
the verse, _so will we render the calves of our lips_, or (as a
variant reading gives) _fruit of our lips_, has the same intention.
Articulate confession (or vows), these are the sacrifices, _the
calves_, which are acceptable to God.

[762] vi. 1-4.

[763] For the reasons for this interpretation see above, pp. 263 ff.

[764] x. 11.

[765] See above, p. 288.

[766] x. 12.

[767] xii. 7.

CHAPTER XXIII

_THE SIN AGAINST LOVE_

HOSEA i.-iii.; iv. 11 ff.; ix. 10 ff.; xi. 8 f.

The Love of God is a terrible thing--that is the last lesson of the
Book of Hosea. _My God will cast them away._[768]

_My God_--let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these
words. Of all prophets he was the first to break into the full
aspect of the Divine Mercy--to learn and to proclaim that God is
Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own
heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and
tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and
waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this
long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with
the cry _My God_. As he had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel,
past hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy.
Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care
and affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he
declares God's love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and
broader than all their patience: _How can I give thee up, Ephraim?
How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of
Mine anger. For I am God, and not man._ And yet, like poor human
affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure--_My God
shall cast them away._ It is God's sentence of relinquishment upon
those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which deliver
it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more explicitly in
twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be equally the doom
of those who outrage the love of their fellow men and women.

We have heard it said: "The lives of men are never the same after
they have loved; if they are not better they must be worse." "Be
afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your
hell." "All the discipline of men springs from their love--if they
take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same
source." "There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to
a soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself
fallen." These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and
of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he
learned how, for strength and weakness, for better for worse, our
human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined.

Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea learned
it--at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when love
is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which
love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the
contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and
the littleness of her power to realise them. A mother feels it,
bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with
pain or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of
her love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel
herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become
the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the
anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now
tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea
upon the ebb from which there is no returning.

But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing to
the agony that Sin inflicts when he takes the game into his unclean
hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair face and
fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand by, as if
with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike heart, and a
frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and clever mind. Our
powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more tormented when Sin
comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah, that is Love's greatest
torment when her children, who have run from her to the bosom of sin,
look back and their eyes are changed! That is the greatest torment
of Love--to pour herself without avail into one of those careless
natures which seem capacious and receptive, yet never fill with
love, for there is a crack and a leak at the bottom of them. The
fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are not the sick-bed
and not death's margin, not the cold lips and sealed eyes kissed
without response; but the changed eyes of children, and the breaking
of "the full-orbed face," and the darkening look of growing sons
and daughters, and the home the first time the unclean laugh breaks
across it. To watch, though unable to soothe, a dear body racked with
pain, is peace beside the awful vigil of watching a soul shrink and
blacken with vice, and your love unable to redeem it.

Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God, we
are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms and
kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a true
whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman--no power even at
the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had once placed
all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Love's moral power is not
absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest issues of life.
Sin may conquer Love.

Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate
revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing and beaten her down
beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment.

There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread
penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of
life. But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far
more condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and
particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against the
weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: _Woe unto him that
offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that he had
never been born._ God's little ones are not only little children,
but all things which, like little children, have only love for their
strength. They are pure and loving men and women--men with no weapon
but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They are the
innocent affections of our own hearts--the memories of our childhood,
the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the faith in
us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ spake,
that he who sins against them had better never have been born. Often
may the dear solicitudes of home, a father's counsels, a mother's
prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a world,
calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the vows and
enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the temptations which
are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to the weak, for if
we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin against law and
maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love is to be cast out
of life altogether. He who violates the purity of the love with which
God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love God has sent to meet
him in his opening manhood, he who slights any of the affections,
whether they be of man or woman, of young or of old, which God lays
upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces of our life, next to
that of His dear Son--he sinneth against his own soul, and it is of
such that Hosea spake: _My God will cast them away_.

We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But
if we sin against Love, we do destroy her; we take from her the power
to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think Love a
quick and careless thing--a servant always at their side, a winged
messenger easy of despatch--let them know that every time they send
her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken wings.
When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she is no
more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love abused is
love lost, and love lost means Hell.

II.

This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an
abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and
the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and
the sin against that.

The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love
of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on
some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has
suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a
theologian, "is the mystery of this love, ... that God can never by
His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the
life of His creatures--love to Himself, but that He receives it as
the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men
to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea also
has told us how God does not compel, but allure or _woo_, the sinful
back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophet's
heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man's apathy
or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses
in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his
discourse. _I have redeemed them--yet have they spoken lies against
Me._[769] _I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness--they went to
Ba'al-Peor._[770] _When Israel was a child, then I loved him ... but
they sacrificed to Ba'alim._[771] _I taught Ephraim to walk, but they
knew not that I healed them._[772] _How can I give thee up, Ephraim?
how can I let thee go, O Israel?... Ephraim compasseth Me with lies,
and the house of Israel with deceit!_[773]

We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to
the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He
commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders
of Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the
caresses of a little child; Who met men with no angelic majesty
or heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that
we should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man,
and His form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own
received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world,
loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted and
betrayed,--it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: _I drew them
with cords of a man and with bands of love_.

We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which
draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the
weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is
possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has
compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as
John in his great simplicity says, _We love Him because He first
loved us_.

Now this is surely the terror of God's love--that it can be resisted;
that even as it is manifest in Jesus Christ we men have the power,
not only to remain, as so many do, outside its scope, feeling it to
be far-off and vague, but having tasted it to fall away from it,
having realised it to refuse it, having allowed it to begin its moral
purposes in our lives to baffle and nullify these; to make the glory
of Heaven absolutely ineffectual in our own characters; and to give
our Saviour the anguish of rejection.

Give Him the anguish, yet pass upon ourselves the doom! For, as I
read the New Testament, the one unpardonable sin is the sin against
our Blessed Redeemer's Love as it is brought home to the heart by
the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other sin is forgiven to men but
to crucify afresh Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. The most
terrible of His judgments is "the wail of a heart wounded because
its love has been despised": _Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often would
I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye
would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!_

Men say they cannot believe in hell, because they cannot conceive how
God may sentence men to misery for the breaking of laws they were
born without power to keep. And one would agree with the inference,
if God had done any such thing. But for them which are under the law
and the sentence of death, Christ died once for all, that He might
redeem them. Yet this does not make a hell less believable. When we
see how Almighty was that Love of God in Christ Jesus, lifting our
whole race and sending them forward with a freedom and a power of
growth nothing else in history has won for them; when we prove again
how weak it is, so that it is possible for millions of characters
that have felt it to refuse its eternal influence for the sake of
some base and transient passion; nay, when _I myself_ know this power
and this weakness of Christ's love, so that one day being loyal I
am raised beyond the reach of fear and of doubt, beyond the desire
of sin and the habit of evil, and the next day finds me capable
of putting it aside in preference for some slight enjoyment or
ambition--then I know the peril and the terror of this love, that it
may be to a man either Heaven or Hell.

Believe then in hell, because you believe in the Love of God--not
in a hell to which God condemns men of His will and pleasure, but a
hell into which men cast themselves from the very face of His love
in Jesus Christ. The place has been painted as a place of fires.
But when we contemplate that men come to it with the holiest flames
in their nature quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather a
dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with snow--some ribbed and
frosted Arctic zone, silent in death, for there is no life there, and
there is no life there because there is no Love, and no Love because
men in rejecting or abusing her have slain their own power ever again
to feel her presence.

FOOTNOTES:

[768] x. 17.

[769] vii. 13.

[770] ix. 10.

[771] xi. 1, 2.

[772] xi. 4.

[773] xi. 8; xii. 1.

_MICAH_

"But I am full of power by the Spirit of Jehovah
To declare to Jacob his transgressions, and to Israel his
sin."

CHAPTER XXIV

_THE BOOK OF MICAH_

The Book of Micah lies sixth of the Twelve Prophets in the Hebrew
Canon, but in the order of the Septuagint third, following Amos and
Hosea. The latter arrangement was doubtless directed by the size of
the respective books;[774] in the case of Micah it has coincided with
the prophet's proper chronological position. Though his exact date be
not certain, he appears to have been a younger contemporary of Hosea,
as Hosea was of Amos.

The book is not two-thirds the size of that of Amos, and about half
that of Hosea. It has been arranged in seven chapters, which follow,
more or less, a natural method of division.[775] They are usually
grouped in three sections, distinguishable from each other by their
subject-matter, by their temper and standpoint, and to a less degree
by their literary form. They are A. Chaps. i.-iii.; B. Chaps. iv.,
v.; C. Chaps, vi., vii.

There is no book of the Bible, as to the date of whose different
parts there has been more discussion, especially within recent
years. The history of this is shortly as follows:--

Tradition and the criticism of the early years of this century
accepted the statement of the title, that the book was composed
in the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah--that is, between
740 and 700 B.C. It was generally agreed that there were in it
only traces of the first two reigns, but that the whole was put
together before the fall of Samaria in 721.[776] Then Hitzig
and Steiner dated chaps, iii.-vi. after 721; and Ewald denied
that Micah could have given us chaps, vi., vii., and placed them
under King Manasseh, _circa_ 690-640. Next Wellhausen[777] sought
to prove that vii. 7-20 must be post-exilic. Stade[778] took a
further step, and, on the ground that Micah himself could not
have blunted or annulled his sharp pronouncements of doom, by the
promises which chaps, iv. and v. contain, he withdrew these from
the prophet and assigned them to the time of the Exile.[779] But
the sufficiency of this argument was denied by Vatke.[780] Also
in opposition to Stade, Kuenen[781] refused to believe that Micah
could have been content with the announcement of the fall of
Jerusalem as his last word, that therefore much of chaps, iv. and
v. is probably from himself, but since their argument is obviously
broken and confused, we must look in them for interpolations, and
he decides that such are iv. 6-8, 11-13, and the working up of v.
9-14. The famous passage in iv. 1-4 may have been Micah's, but was
probably added by another. Chaps, vi. and vii. were written under
Manasseh by some of the persecuted adherents of Jehovah.

We may next notice two critics who adopt an extremely
conservative position. Von Ryssel,[782] as the result of a
very thorough examination, declared that all the chapters were
Micah's, even the much doubted ii. 12, 13, which have been
placed by an editor of the book in the wrong position, and chap.
vii. 7-20, which he agrees with Ewald can only date from the
reign of Manasseh, Micah himself having lived long enough into
that reign to write them himself. Another careful analysis by
Elhorst[783] also reached the conclusion that the bulk of the
book was authentic, but for his proof of this Elhorst requires a
radical rearrangement of the verses, and that on grounds which
do not always commend themselves. He holds chap. iv. 9-14 and v.
8 for post-exilic insertions. Driver[784] contributes a thorough
examination of the book, and reaches the conclusions that ii. 12,
13, though obviously in their wrong place, need not be denied to
Micah; that the difficulties of ascribing chaps, iv., v., to the
prophet are not insuperable, nor is it even necessary to suppose
in them interpolations. He agrees with Ewald as to the date of
vi.-vii. 6, and, while holding that it is quite possible for
Micah to have written them, thinks they are more probably due to
another, though a confident conclusion is not to be achieved. As
to vii. 7-20, he judges Wellhausen's inferences to be unnecessary.
A prophet in Micah's or Manasseh's time may have thought
destruction nearer than it actually proved to be, and, imagining
it as already arrived, have put into the mouth of the people a
confession suited to its circumstance. Wildeboer[785] goes further
than Driver. He replies in detail to the arguments of Stade and
Cornill, denies that the reasons for withdrawing so much from
Micah are conclusive, and assigns to the prophet the whole book,
with the exception of several interpolations.

We see, then, that all critics are practically agreed as to the
presence of interpolations in the text, as well as to the occurrence
of certain verses of the prophet out of their proper order. This
indeed must be obvious to every careful reader as he notes the somewhat
frequent break in the logical sequence, especially of chaps, iv. and
v. All critics, too, admit the authenticity of chaps, i.-iii., with
the possible exception of ii. 12, 13; while a majority hold that
chaps, vi. and vii., whether by Micah or not, must be assigned to the
reign of Manasseh. On the authenticity of chaps, iv. and v.--_minus_
interpolations--and of chaps, vi. and vii., opinion is divided; but we
ought not to overlook the remarkable fact that those who have recently
written the fullest monographs on Micah[786] incline to believe in the
genuineness of the book as a whole.[787] We may now enter for ourselves
upon the discussion of the various sections, but before we do so let
us note how much of the controversy turns upon the general question,
whether after decisively predicting the overthrow of Jerusalem it was
possible for Micah to add prophecies of her restoration. It will be
remembered that we have had to discuss this same point with regard both
to Amos and Hosea. In the case of the former we decided against the
authenticity of visions of a blessed future which now close his book;
in the case of the latter we decided for the authenticity. What were
our reasons for this difference? They were, that the closing vision of
the Book of Amos is not at all in harmony with the exclusively ethical
spirit of the authentic prophecies; while the closing vision of the
Book of Hosea is not only in language and in ethical temper thoroughly
in harmony with the chapters which precede it, but in certain details
has been actually anticipated by these. Hosea, therefore, furnishes us
with the case of a prophet who, though he predicted the ruin of his
impenitent people (and that ruin was verified by events), also spoke of
the possibility of their restoration upon conditions in harmony with
his reasons for the inevitableness of their fall. And we saw, too, that
the hopeful visions of the future, though placed last in the collection
of his prophecies, need not necessarily have been spoken last by the
prophet, but stand where they do because they have an eternal spiritual
validity for the remnant of Israel.[788] What was possible for Hosea is
surely possible for Micah. That promises come in his book, and closely
after the conclusive threats which he gave of the fall of Jerusalem,
does not imply that originally he uttered them all in such close
proximity. That indeed would have been impossible. But considering how
often the political prospect in Israel changed during Micah's time, and
how far the city was in his day from her actual destruction--more than
a century distant--it seems to be improbable that he should not (in
whatever order) have uttered both threat and promise. And naturally,
when his prophecies were arranged in permanent order, the promises
would be placed after the threats.[789]

FIRST SECTION: CHAPS. I.-III.

No critic doubts the authenticity of the bulk of these chapters. The
sole question at issue is the date or (possibly) the dates of them.
Only chap. ii. 12, 13, are generally regarded as out of place, where
they now stand.

Chap. i. trembles with the destruction of both Northern Israel and
Judah--a destruction either very imminent or actually in the process
of happening. The verses which deal with Samaria, 6 ff., do not
simply announce her inevitable ruin. They throb with the sense either
that this is immediate, or that it is going on, or that it has just
been accomplished. The verbs suit each of these alternatives: _And I
shall set_, or _am selling_, or _have set_, _Samaria for a ruin of
the field_, and so on. We may assign them to any time between 725
B.C., the beginning of the siege of Samaria by Shalmaneser, and a
year or two after its destruction by Sargon in 721. Their intense
feeling seems to preclude the possibility of their having been
written in the years to which some assign them, 705-700, or twenty
years after Samaria was actually overthrown.

In the next verses the prophet goes on to mourn the fact that the
affliction of Samaria reaches even to the gate of Jerusalem, and he
especially singles out as partakers in the danger of Jerusalem a
number of towns, most of which (so far as we can discern) lie not
between Jerusalem and Samaria, but at the other corner of Judah, in
the Shephelah or out upon the Philistine plain.[790] This was the
region which Sennacherib invaded in 701, simultaneously with his
detachment of a corps to attack the capital; and accordingly we
might be shut up to affirm that this end of chap. i. dates from that
invasion, if no other explanation of the place-names were possible.
But another is possible. Micah himself belonged to one of these
Shephelah towns, Moresheth-Gath, and it is natural that, anticipating
the invasion of all Judah, after the fall of Samaria (as Isaiah[791]
also did), he should single out for mourning his own district of the
country. This appears to be the most probable solution of a very
doubtful problem, and accordingly we may date the whole of chap.
i. somewhere between 725 and 720 or 718. Let us remember that in
719 Sargon marched past this very district of the Shephelah in his
campaign against Egypt, whom he defeated at Raphia.[792]

Our conclusion is supported by chap. ii. Judah, though Jehovah be
planning evil against her, is in the full course of her ordinary
social activities. The rich are absorbing the lands of the poor
(vv. i. ff.): note the phrase _upon their beds_; it alone signifies
a time of security. The enemies of Israel are internal (8). The
public peace is broken by the lords of the land and men and women,
disposed to live quietly, are robbed (8 ff.). The false prophets
have sufficient signs of the times in their favour to regard Micah's
threats of destruction as calumnies (6). And although he regards
destruction as inevitable, it is not to be to-day; but _in that day_
(4), viz. some still indefinite date in the future, the blow will
fall and the nation's elegy be sung. On this chapter, then, there
is no shadow of a foreign invader. We might assign it to the years
of Jotham and Ahaz (under whose reigns the title of the book places
part of the prophesying of Micah), but since there is no sense of a
double kingdom, no distinction between Judah and Israel, it belongs
more probably to the years when all immediate danger from Assyria
had passed away, between Sargon's withdrawal from Raphia in 719
and his invasion of Ashdod in 710, or between the latter date and
Sennacherib's accession in 705.

Chap. iii. contains three separate oracles, which exhibit a similar
state of affairs: the abuse of the common people by their chiefs and
rulers, who are implied to be in full sense of power and security.
They have time to aggravate their doings (4); their doom is still
future--_then at that time_ (_ib._). The bulk of the prophets
determine their oracles by the amount men give them (5), another sign
of security. Their doom is also future (6 f.). In the third of the
oracles the authorities of the land are in the undisturbed exercise
of their judicial offices (9 f.), and the priests and prophets of
their oracles (10), though all these professions practise only for
bribe and reward. Jerusalem is still being built and embellished
(10). But the prophet, not because there are political omens pointing
to this, but simply in the force of his indignation at the sins of
the upper classes, prophesies the destruction of the capital (12). It
is possible that these oracles of chap. iii. may be later than those
of the previous chapters.[793]

SECOND SECTION: CHAPS. IV., V.

This section of the book opens with two passages, verses 1-5 and verses
6, 7, which there are serious objections against assigning to Micah.

1. The first of these, 1-5, is the famous prophecy of the Mountain
of the Lord's House, which is repeated in Isaiah ii. 2-5. Probably
the Book of Micah presents this to us in the more original form.[794]
The alternatives therefore are four: Micah was the author, and Isaiah
borrowed from him; or both borrowed from an earlier source;[795] or
the oracle is authentic in Micah, and has been inserted by a later
editor in Isaiah; or it has been inserted by later editors in both
Micah and Isaiah.

The last of these conclusions is required by the arguments first
stated by Stade and Hackmann, and then elaborated, in a very strong
piece of reasoning, by Cheyne. Hackmann, after marking the want of
connection with the previous chapter, alleges the keynotes of the
passage to be three: that it is not the arbitration of Jehovah,[796]
but His sovereignty over foreign nations, and their adoption of His
law, which the passage predicts; that it is the Temple at Jerusalem
whose future supremacy is affirmed; and that there is a strong
feeling against war. These, Cheyne contends, are the doctrines of a
much later age than that of Micah; he holds the passage to be the
work of a post-exilic imitator of the prophets, which was first
intruded into the Book of Micah and afterwards borrowed from this
by an editor of Isaiah's prophecies. It is just here, however, that
the theory of these critics loses its strength. Agreeing heartily
as I do with recent critics that the genuine writings of the early
prophets have received some, and perhaps considerable, additions from
the Exile and later periods, it seems to me extremely improbable
that the same post-exilic insertion should find its way into _two_
separate books. And I think that the undoubted bias towards the
post-exilic period of all Canon Cheyne's recent criticism, has in
this case hurried him past due consideration of the possibility of
a pre-exilic date. In fact the gentle temper shown by the passage
towards foreign nations, the absence of hatred or of any ambition
to subject the Gentiles to servitude to Israel, contrasts strongly
with the temper of many exilic and post-exilic prophecies;[797]
while the position which it demands for Jehovah and His religion
is quite consistent with the fundamental principles of earlier
prophecy. The passage really claims no more than a suzerainty of
Jehovah over the heathen tribes, with the result only that their war
with Israel and with one another shall cease, not that they shall
become, as the great prophecy of the Exile demands, tributaries and
servitors. Such a claim was no more than the natural deduction from
the early prophets' belief of Jehovah's supremacy in righteousness.
And although Amos had not driven the principle so far as to promise
the absolute cessation of war, he also had recognised in the most
unmistakable fashion the responsibility of the Gentiles to Jehovah,
and His supreme arbitrament upon them.[798] And Isaiah himself, in
his prophecy on Tyre, promised a still more complete subjection of
the life of the heathen to the service of Jehovah.[799] Moreover the
fifth verse of the passage in Micah (though it is true its connection
with the previous four is not apparent) is much more in harmony with
pre-exilic than with post-exilic prophecy: _All the nations shall
walk each in the name of his god, and we shall walk in the name of
Jehovah our God for ever and aye_. This is consistent with more
than one prophetic utterance before the Exile,[800] but it is not
consistent with the beliefs of Judaism after the Exile. Finally,
the great triumph achieved for Jerusalem in 701 is quite sufficient
to have prompted the feelings expressed by this passage for the
_mountain of the house of the Lord_; though if we are to bring it
down to a date subsequent to 701, we must rearrange our views with
regard to the date and meaning of the second chapter of Isaiah. In
Micah the passage is obviously devoid of all connection, not only
with the previous chapter, but with the subsequent verses of chap.
iv. The possibility of a date in the eighth or beginning of the
seventh century is all that we can determine with regard to it; the
other questions must remain in obscurity.

2. Verses 6, 7, may refer to the Captivity of Northern Israel, the
prophet adding that when it shall be restored the united kingdom
shall be governed from Mount Zion; but a date during the Exile is, of
course, equally probable.

3. Verses 8-13 contain a series of small pictures of Jerusalem in
siege, from which, however, she issues triumphant.[801] It is
impossible to say whether such a siege is actually in course while
the prophet writes, or is pictured by him as inevitable in the near
future. The words _thou shalt go to Babylon_ may be, but are not
necessarily, a gloss.

4. Chap. iv. 14-v. 8 again pictures such a siege of Jerusalem, but
promises a Deliverer out of Bethlehem, the city of David.[802]
Sufficient heroes will be raised up along with him to drive the
Assyrians from the land, and what is left of Israel after all these
disasters shall prove a powerful and sovereign influence upon the
peoples. These verses were probably not all uttered at the same time.

5. Verses 9-14.--In prospect of such a deliverance the prophet
returns to what chap. i. has already described and Isaiah frequently
emphasises as the sin of Judah--her armaments and fortresses, her
magic and idolatries, the things she trusted in instead of Jehovah.
They will no more be necessary, and will disappear. The nations that
serve not Jehovah will feel His wrath.

In all these oracles there is nothing inconsistent with authorship
in the eighth century: there is much that witnesses to this date.
Everything that they threaten or promise is threatened or promised
by Hosea and by Isaiah, with the exception of the destruction (in
ver. 12) of the Maççeboth, or sacred pillars, against which we find
no sentence going forth from Jehovah before the Book of Deuteronomy,
while Isaiah distinctly promises the erection of a Maççebah to
Jehovah in the land of Egypt.[803] But waiving for the present the
possibility of a date for Deuteronomy, or for part of it, in the
reign of Hezekiah, we must remember the destruction, which took place
under this king, of idolatrous sanctuaries in Judah, and feel also
that, in spite of such a reform, it was quite possible for Isaiah to
introduce a Maççebah into his poetic vision of the worship of Jehovah
in Egypt. For has he not also dared to say that the _harlot's hire_
of the Phœnician commerce shall one day be consecrated to Jehovah?

THIRD SECTION: CHAPS. VI., VII.

The style now changes. We have had hitherto a series of short
oracles, as if delivered orally. These are succeeded by a series of
conferences or arguments, by several speakers. Ewald accounts for the
change by supposing that the latter date from a time of persecution,
when the prophet, unable to speak in public, uttered himself in
literature. But chap. i. is also dramatic.

1. Chap. vi. 1-8.--An argument in which the prophet as herald calls
on the hills to listen to Jehovah's case against the people (1,
2). Jehovah Himself appeals to the latter, and in a style similar
to Hosea's cites His deeds in their history, as evidence of what
He seeks from them (3-5). The people, presumably penitent, ask how
they shall come before Jehovah (6, 7). And the prophet tells them
what Jehovah has declared in the matter (8). Opening very much like
Micah's first oracle (chap. i. 1), this argument contains nothing
strange either to Micah or the eighth century. Exception has been
taken to the reference in ver. 7 to the sacrifice of the first-born,
which appears to have become more common from the gloomy age of
Manasseh onwards, and which, therefore, led Ewald to date all chaps.
vi. and vii. from that king's reign. But child-sacrifice is stated
simply as a possibility, and--occurring as it does at the climax of
the sentence--as an extreme possibility.[804] I see no necessity,
therefore, to deny the piece to Micah or the reign of Hezekiah. Of
those who place it under Manasseh, some, like Driver, still reserve
it to Micah himself, whom they suppose to have survived Hezekiah and
seen the evil days which followed.

2. Verses 9-16.--Most expositors[805] take these verses along with
the previous eight, as well as with the six which follow in chap.
vii. But there is no connection between verses 8 and 9; and 9-16
are better taken by themselves. The prophet heralds, as before, the
speech of Jehovah to _tribe and city_(9). Addressing Jerusalem,
Jehovah asks how He can forgive such fraud and violence as those
by which her wealth has been gathered (10-12). Then addressing the
people (note the change from feminine to masculine in the second
personal pronouns) He tells them He must smite; they shall not enjoy
the fruit of their labours(14, 15). They have sinned the sins of
Omri and the house of Ahab (query--should it not be of Ahab and
the house of Omri?), so that they must be put to shame before the
Gentiles[806](16). In this section three or four words have been
marked as of late Hebrew.[807] But this is uncertain, and the
inference made from it precarious. The deeds of Omri and Ahab's house
have been understood as the persecution of the adherents of Jehovah,
and the passage has, therefore, been assigned by Ewald and others
to the reign of the tyrant Manasseh. But such habits of persecution
could hardly be imputed to the City or People as a whole; and we
may conclude that the passage means some other of that notorious
dynasty's sins. Among these, as is well known, it is possible to
make a large selection--the favouring of idolatry, or the tyrannous
absorption by the rich of the land of the poor (as in Naboth's case),
a sin which Micah has already marked as that of his age. The whole
treatment of the subject, too, whether under the head of the sin or
its punishment, strongly resembles the style and temper of Amos. It
is, therefore, by no means impossible for this passage also to have
been Micah's, and we must accordingly leave the question of its date
undecided. Certainly we are not shut up, as the majority of modern
critics suppose, to a date under Manasseh or Amon.

3. Chap. vii. 1-6.--These verses are spoken by the prophet in his own
name or that of the people's. The land is devastated; the righteous
have disappeared; everybody is in ambush to commit deeds of violence
and take his neighbour unawares. There is no justice: the great ones
of the land are free to do what they like; they have intrigued with
and bribed the authorities. Informers have crept in everywhere. Men
must be silent, for the members of their own families are their foes.
Some of these sins have already been marked by Micah as those of his
age (chap. ii.), but the others point rather to a time of persecution
such as that under Manasseh. Wellhausen remarks the similarity to the
state of affairs described in Mal. iii. 24 and in some Psalms. We
cannot fix the date.

4. Verses 7-20.--This passage starts from a totally different temper of
prophecy, and presumably, therefore, from very different circumstances.
Israel, as a whole, speaks in penitence. She has sinned, and bows
herself to the consequences, but in hope. A day shall come when her
exiles shall return and the heathen acknowledge her God. The passage,
and with it the Book of Micah, concludes by apostrophising Jehovah as
the God of forgiveness and grace to His people. Ewald, and following
him Driver, assign the passage, with those which precede it, to the
times of Manasseh, in which of course it is possible that Micah was
still active, though Ewald supposes a younger and anonymous prophet as
the author. Wellhausen[808] goes further, and, while recognising that
the situation and temper of the passage resemble those of Isaiah xl.
ff., is inclined to bring it even further down to post-exilic times,
because of the universal character of the Diaspora. Driver objects to
these inferences, and maintains that a prophet in the time of Manasseh,
thinking the destruction of Jerusalem to be nearer than it actually
was, may easily have pictured it as having taken place, and put an
ideal confession in the mouth of the people. It seems to me that all
these critics have failed to appreciate a piece of evidence even more
remarkable than any they have insisted on in their argument for a late
date. This is, that the passage speaks of a restoration of the people
only to Bashan and Gilead, the provinces overrun by Tiglath-Pileser
III. in 734. It is not possible to explain such a limitation either by
the circumstances of Manasseh's time or by those of the Exile. In the
former surely Samaria would have been included; in the latter Zion and
Judah would have been emphasised before any other region. It would be
easy for the defenders of a post-exilic date, and especially of a date
much subsequent to the Exile, to account for a longing after Bashan and
Gilead, though they also would have to meet the objection that Samaria
or Ephraim is not mentioned. But how natural it would be for a prophet
writing soon after the captivity of Tiglath-Pileser III. to make this
precise selection! And although there remain difficulties (arising from
the temper and language of the passage) in the way of assigning all
of it to Micah or his contemporaries, I feel that on the geographical
allusions much can be said for the origin of this part of the passage
in their age, or even in an age still earlier: that of the Syrian
wars in the end of the ninth century, with which there is nothing
inconsistent either in the spirit or the language of vv. 14-17. And I
am sure that if the defenders of a late date had found a selection of
districts as suitable to the post-exilic circumstances of Israel as the
selection of Bashan and Gilead is to the circumstances of the eighth
century, they would, instead of ignoring it, have emphasised it as a
conclusive confirmation of their theory. On the other hand, ver. 11 can
date only from the Exile, or the following years, before Jerusalem was
rebuilt. Again, vv. 18-20 appear to stand by themselves.

It seems likely, therefore, that chap. vii. 7-20 is a Psalm composed
of little pieces from various dates, which, combined, give us a
picture of the secular sorrows of Israel, and of the conscience
she ultimately felt in them, and conclude by a doxology to the
everlasting mercies of her God.

FOOTNOTES:

[774] See above, pp. 6 f.

[775] Note that the Hebrew and English divisions do not coincide
between chaps. iv. and v. In the Hebrew chap. iv. includes a
fourteenth verse, which in the English stands as the first verse of
chap. v. In this the English agrees with the Septuagint.

[776] Caspari.

[777] In the fourth edition of Bleek's _Introduction_.

[778] _Z.A.T.W._, Vols. I., III., IV.

[779] See also Cornill, _Einleitung_, 183 f. Stade takes iv. 1-4,
iv. 11-v. 3, v. 6-14, as originally one prophecy (distinguished by
certain catchwords and an outlook similar to that of Ezekiel and the
great Prophet of the Exile), in which the two pieces iv. 5-10 and v.
4, 5, were afterwards inserted by the author of ii. 12, 13.

[780] _Einleitung in das A.T._, pp. 690 ff.

[781] _Einleitung._

[782] _Untersuchungen über dis Textgestalt u. die Echtheit des Buches
Micha_, 1887.

[783] _De Profetie van Micha_, 1891, which I have not seen. It is
summarised in Wildeboer's _Litteratur des A.T._, 1895.

[784] _Introduction_, 1892.

[785] _Litteratur des A.T._, pp. 148 ff.

[786] Wildeboer (_De Profet Micha_), Von Ryssel and Elhorst.

[787] Cheyne, therefore, is not correct when he says ("Introduction"
to second edition of Robertson Smith's _Prophets_, p. xxiii.) that it
is "becoming more and more doubtful whether more than two or three
fragments of the heterogeneous collection of fragments in chaps.
iv.-vii. can have come from that prophet."

[788] See above, p. 311.

[789] Wildeboer seems to me to have good grounds for his reply to
Stade's assertion that the occurrence of promises after the threats
only blunts and nullifies the latter. "These objections," says
Wildeboer, "raise themselves only against _the spoken_, but not
against the written word." See, too, the admirable remarks he quotes
from De Goeje.

[790] See below, pp. 383 ff.

[791] x. 18.

[792] Smend assigns the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem
in iii. 14, along with Isaiah xxviii.-xxxii., to 704-701, and
suggests that the end of chap. i. refers to Sennacherib's campaign
in Philistia in 701 (_A. T. Religionsgeschichte_, p. 225, _n._). The
former is possible, but the latter passage, following so closely on
i. 6, which implies the fall of Samaria to be still recent, if not in
actual course, is more suitably placed in the time of the campaign of
Sargon over pretty much the same ground.

[793] See above, p. 363, _n._ 2.

[794] So Hitzig ("ohne Zweifel"), and Cheyne, _Introduction to the
Book of Isaiah_; Ryssel, _op. cit._, pp. 218 f. Hackmann (_Die
Zukunftserwartung des Jesaia_, 127-8, _n._) prefers the Greek of
Micah. Ewald is doubtful. Duhm, however, inclines to authorship by
Isaiah, and would assign the composition to Isaiah's old age.

[795] Hitzig; Ewald.

[796] As against Duhm.

[797] So rightly Duhm on Isa. ii. 2-4.

[798] Amos i. and ii. See above, pp. 124, 133.

[799] Isa. xxiii. 17 f.

[800] Jer. xvii.

[801] Wellhausen indeed thinks that ver. 8 presupposes that Jerusalem
is already devastated, reduced to the state of a shepherd's tower in
the wilderness. This, however, is incorrect. The verse implies only
that the whole country is overrun by the foe, Jerusalem alone standing,
with the flock of God in it, like a fortified fold (cf. Isaiah i.).

[802] Roorda, reasoning from the Greek text, takes _House of
Ephratha_ as the original reading, with Bethlehem added later; and
Hitzig properly reads Ephrath, giving its final letter to the next
word which improves the grammar, thus: הצעיר אפרת

[803] Isa. xix. 19.

[804] So also Wellhausen.

[805] _E.g._ Ewald and Driver.

[806] For עמי read עמים with the LXX.

[807] Wellhausen states four. But תושיה of ver. 9 is an uncertain
reading. רמיה is found in Hosea vii. 16, though the text of this,
it is true, is corrupt. זכה in another verbal form is found in Isa.
i. 16. There only remains מטה, but again it is uncertain whether we
should take this in its late sense of tribe.

[808] And also Giesebrecht, _Beiträge_, p. 217.

CHAPTER XXV

_MICAH THE MORASTHITE_

MICAH i.

Some time in the reign of Hezekiah, when the kingdom of Judah was
still inviolate, but shivering to the shock of the fall of Samaria,
and probably while Sargon the destroyer was pushing his way past
Judah to meet Egypt at Raphia, a Judæan prophet of the name of Micah,
standing in sight of the Assyrian march, attacked the sins of his
people and prophesied their speedy overthrow beneath the same flood
of war. If we be correct in our surmise, the exact year was 720-719
B.C. Amos had been silent thirty years, Hosea hardly fifteen; Isaiah
was in the midway of his career. The title of Micah's book asserts
that he had previously prophesied under Jotham and Ahaz, and though
we have seen it to be possible, it is by no means proved, that
certain passages of the book date from these reigns.

Micah is called the Morasthite.[809] For this designation
there appears to be no other meaning than that of a native of
Moresheth-Gath, a village mentioned by himself.[810] It signifies
_Property_ or _Territory_ of Gath, and after the fall of the latter,
which from this time no more appears in history, Moresheth may have
been used alone. Compare the analogous cases of Helkath (_portion
of_--) Galilee, Ataroth, Chesulloth and Iim.[811]

In our ignorance of Gath's position, we should be equally at fault
about Moresheth, for the name has vanished, were it not for one
or two plausible pieces of evidence. Belonging to Gath, Moresheth
must have lain near the Philistine border: the towns among which
Micah includes it are situate in that region; and Jerome declares
that the name--though the form, Morasthi, in which he cites it is
suspicious--was in his time still extant in a small village to the
east of Eleutheropolis or Beit-Jibrin. Jerome cites Morasthi as
distinct from the neighbouring Mareshah, which is also quoted by
Micah beside Moresheth-Gath.[812]

Moresheth was, therefore, a place in the Shephelah, or range of low
hills which lie between the hill-country of Judah and the Philistine
plain. It is the opposite exposure from the wilderness of Tekoa,[813]
some seventeen miles away across the watershed. As the home of Amos
is bare and desert, so the home of Micah is fair and fertile. The
irregular chalk hills are separated by broad glens, in which the
soil is alluvial and red, with room for cornfields on either side of
the perennial or almost perennial streams. The olive groves on the
braes are finer than either those of the plain below or of the Judæan
tableland above. There is herbage for cattle. Bees murmur everywhere,
larks are singing, and although to-day you may wander in the maze
of hills for hours without meeting a man or seeing a house, you are
never out of sight of the traces of ancient habitation, and seldom
beyond sound of the human voice--shepherds and ploughmen calling to
their flocks and to each other across the glens. There are none of the
conditions or of the occasions of a large town. But, like the south of
England, the country is one of villages and homesteads, breeding good
yeomen--men satisfied and in love with their soil, yet borderers with
a far outlook and a keen vigilance and sensibility. The Shephelah is
sufficiently detached from the capital and body of the land to beget in
her sons an independence of mind and feeling, but so much upon the edge
of the open world as to endue them at the same time with that sense of
the responsibilities of warfare, which the national statesmen, aloof
and at ease in Zion, could not possibly have shared.

Upon one of the westmost terraces of this Shephelah, nearly a
thousand feet above the sea, lay Moresheth itself. There is a great
view across the undulating plain with its towns and fortresses,
Lachish, Eglon, Shaphir and others, beyond which runs the coast road,
the famous war-path between Asia and Africa. Ashdod and Gaza are
hardly discernible against the glitter of the sea, twenty-two miles
away. Behind roll the round bush-covered hills of the Shephelah, with
David's hold at Adullam,[814] the field where he fought Goliath, and
many another scene of border warfare; while over them rises the high
wall of the Judæan plateau, with the defiles breaking through it to
Hebron and Bethlehem.

The valley-mouth near which Moresheth stands has always formed the
south-western gateway of Judæa, the Philistine or Egyptian gate, as
it might be called, with its outpost at Lachish, twelve miles across
the plain. Roads converge upon this valley-mouth from all points
of the compass. Beit-Jibrin, which lies in it, is midway between
Jerusalem and Gaza, about twenty-five miles from either, nineteen
miles from Bethlehem and thirteen from Hebron. Visit the place at any
point of the long history of Palestine, and you find it either full
of passengers or a centre of campaign. Asa defeated the Ethiopians
here. The Maccabees and John Hyrcanus contested Mareshah, two miles
off, with the Idumeans. Gabinius fortified Mareshah. Vespasian and
Saladin both deemed the occupation of the valley necessary before
they marched upon Jerusalem. Septimius Severus made Beit-Jibrin
the capital of the Shephelah, and laid out military roads, whose
pavements still radiate from it in all directions. The _Onomasticon_
measures distances in the Shephelah from Beit-Jibrin. Most of the
early pilgrims from Jerusalem by Gaza to Sinai or Egypt passed
through it, and it was a centre of Crusading operations whether
against Egypt during the Latin kingdom or against Jerusalem during
the Third Crusade. Not different was the place in the time of Micah.
Micah must have seen pass by his door the frequent embassies which
Isaiah tells us went down to Egypt from Hezekiah's court, and seen
return those Egyptian subsidies in which a foolish people put their
trust instead of in their God.

In touch, then, with the capital, feeling every throb of its
folly and its panic, but standing on that border which must, as
he believed, bear the brunt of the invasion that its crimes were
attracting, Micah lifted up his voice. They were days of great
excitement. The words of Amos and Hosea had been fulfilled upon
Northern Israel. Should Judah escape, whose injustice and impurity
were as flagrant as her sister's? It were vain to think so. The
Assyrians had come up to her northern border. Isaiah was expecting
their assault upon Mount Zion.[815] The Lord's Controversy was not
closed. Micah will summon the whole earth to hear the old indictment
and the still unexhausted sentence.

The prophet speaks:--

_Hear ye, peoples_[816] _all;_
_Hearken, O Earth, and her fulness!
That Jehovah may be among you to testify,_
_The Lord from His holy temple!_
_For, lo! Jehovah goeth forth from His place;_
_He descendeth and marcheth on the heights of the earth._[817]
_Molten are the mountains beneath Him,_
_And the valleys gape open,_
_Like wax in face of the fire,_
_Like water poured over a fall._

God speaks:--

_For the transgression of Jacob is all this,_
_And for the sins of the house of Israel._
_What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria?_
_And what is the sin of the house_[818] _of Judah? is it not
Jerusalem?_
_Therefore do I turn Samaria into a ruin of the field,_[819]
_And into vineyard terraces;_
_And I pour down her stones to the glen,_
_And lay bare her foundations._[820]
_All her images are shattered,_
_And all her hires are being burned in the fire;_
_And all her idols I lay desolate,_
_For from the hire of a harlot they were gathered,_[821]
_And to a harlot's hire they return._[822]

The prophet speaks:--

_For this let me mourn, let me wail,_
_Let me go barefoot and stripped_ (of my robe),
_Let me make lamentation like the jackals,_
_And mourning like the daughters of the desert._[823]
_For her stroke_[824] _is desperate;_
_Yea, it hath come unto Judah!_
_It hath smitten right up to the gate of my people,_
_Up to Jerusalem._

Within the capital itself Isaiah was also recording the extension of
the Assyrian invasion to its walls, but in a different temper.[825] He
was full of the exulting assurance that, although at the very gate,
the Assyrian could not harm the city of Jehovah, but must fall when
he lifted his impious hand against it. Micah has no such hope: he is
overwhelmed with the thought of Jerusalem's danger. Provincial though
he be, and full of wrath at the danger into which the politicians of
Jerusalem had dragged the whole country, he profoundly mourns the
peril of the capital, _the gate of my people_, as he fondly calls her.
Therefore we must not exaggerate the frequently drawn contrast between
Isaiah and himself.[826] To Micah also Jerusalem was dear, and his
subsequent prediction of her overthrow[827] ought to be read with the
accent of this previous mourning for her peril. Nevertheless his heart
clings most to his own home, and while Isaiah pictures the Assyrian
entering Judah from the north by Migron, Michmash and Nob, Micah
anticipates invasion by the opposite gateway of the land, at the door
of his own village. His elegy sweeps across the landscape so dear to
him. This obscure province was even more than Jerusalem his world, the
world of his heart. It gives us a living interest in the man that the
fate of these small villages, many of them vanished, should excite in
him more passion than the fortunes of Zion herself. In such a passion
we can incarnate his spirit. Micah is no longer a book, or an oration,
but flesh and blood upon a home and a countryside of his own. We see
him on his housetop pouring forth his words before the hills and the
far-stretching heathen land. In the name of every village within sight
he reads a symbol of the curse that is coming upon his country, and
of the sins that have earned the curse. So some of the greatest poets
have caught their music from the nameless brooklets of their boyhood's
fields; and many a prophet has learned to read the tragedy of man and
God's verdict upon sin in his experience of village life. But there was
more than feeling in Micah's choice of his own country as the scene
of the Assyrian invasion. He had better reasons for his fears than
Isaiah, who imagined the approach of the Assyrian from the north. For
it is remarkable how invaders of Judæa, from Sennacherib to Vespasian
and from Vespasian to Saladin and Richard, have shunned the northern
access to Jerusalem and endeavoured to reach her by the very gateway at
which Micah stood mourning. He had, too, this greater motive for his
fear, that Sargon, as we have seen, was actually in the neighbourhood,
marching to the defeat of Judah's chosen patron, Egypt. Was it not
probable that, when the latter was overthrown, Sargon would turn back
upon Judah by Lachish and Mareshah? If we keep this in mind we shall
appreciate, not only the fond anxiety, but the political foresight
that inspires the following passage, which is to our Western taste so
strangely cast in a series of plays upon place-names. The disappearance
of many of these names, and our ignorance of the transactions to
which the verses allude, often render both the text and the meaning
very uncertain. Micah begins with the well-known play upon the name
of Gath; the Acco which he couples with it is either the Phœnician
port to the north of Carmel, the modern Acre, or some Philistine
town, unknown to us, but in any case the line forms with the previous
one an intelligible couplet: _Tell it not in Tell-town; Weep not in
Weep-town_. The following Beth-le-'Aphrah, _House of Dust_, must be
taken with them, for in the phrase _roll thyself_ there is a play upon
the name Philistine. So, too, Shaphir, or Beauty, the modern Suafîr,
lay in the Philistine region. Sa'anan and Beth-esel and Maroth are
unknown; but if Micah, as is probable, begins his list far away on the
western horizon and comes gradually inland, they also are to be sought
for on the maritime plain. Then he draws nearer by Lachish, on the
first hills, and in the leading pass towards Judah, to Moresheth-Gath,
Achzib, Mareshah and Adullam, which all lie within Israel's territory
and about the prophet's own home. We understand the allusion, at least,
to Lachish in ver. 13. As the last Judæan outpost towards Egypt, and on
a main road thither, Lachish would receive the Egyptian subsidies of
horses and chariots, in which the politicians put their trust instead
of in Jehovah. Therefore she _was the beginning of sin to the daughter
of Zion_. And if we can trust the text of ver. 14, Lachish would pass
on the Egyptian ambassadors to Moresheth-Gath, the next stage of their
approach to Jerusalem. But this is uncertain. With Moresheth-Gath is
coupled Achzib, a town at some distance from Jerome's site for the
former, to the neighbourhood of which, Mareshah, we are brought back
again in ver. 15. Adullam, with which the list closes, lies some eight
or ten miles to the north-east of Mareshah.

The prophet speaks:--

_Tell it not in Gath,_
_Weep not in Acco,_[828]
_In Beth-le-'Aphrah_[829] _roll thyself in dust._
_Pass over, inhabitress of Shaphir,_[830] _thy shame
uncovered!_
_The inhabitress of Sa'anan_[831] _shall not march forth;_
_The lamentation of Beth-esel_[832] _taketh from you its
standing._
_The inhabitress of Maroth_[833] _trembleth for good,
For evil hath come down from Jehovah to the gate of
Jerusalem._
_Harness the horse to the chariot, inhabitress of
Lachish,_[834]
_That hast been the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion;_
_Yea, in thee are found the transgressions of Israel._
_Therefore thou givest ..._[835] _to Moresheth-Gath:_[836]
_The houses of Achzib_[837] _shall deceive the kings of
Israel._
_Again shall I bring the Possessor_ [_conqueror_] _to thee,
inhabitress of Mareshah;_[838]
_To Adullam_[839] _shall come the glory of Israel._
_Make thee bald, and shave thee for thy darlings;_
_Make broad thy baldness like the vulture,_
_For they go into banishment from thee._

This was the terrible fate which the Assyrian kept before the peoples
with whom he was at war. Other foes raided, burned and slew: he
carried off whole populations into exile.

Having thus pictured the doom which threatened his people, Micah
turns to declare the sins for which it has been sent upon them.

FOOTNOTES:

[809] Micah i.; Jer. xxvi. 18.

[810] i. 14.

[811] Ataroth (Numb. xxxii. 3) is Atroth-Shophan (_ib._ 35);
Chesulloth (Josh. xix. 18) is Chisloth-Tabor (_ib._ 12); Iim (Numb.
xxxiii. 45) is Iye-Abarim (_ib._ 44).

[812] "Michæam de Morasthi qui usque hodie juxta Eleutheropolim,
haud grandis est viculus."--Jerome, Preface to Micha. "Morasthi,
unde fuit Micheas propheta, est autem vicus contra orientem
Eleutheropoleos."--_Onomasticon_, which also gives "Maresa, in
tribu Juda: cuius nunc tantummodo sunt ruinæ in secundo lapide
Eleutheropoleos." See, too, the _Epitaphium S. Paulæ_: "Videam
Morasthim sepulchrum quondam Michææ, nunc ecclesiam, et ex latere
derelinquam Choræos, et Gitthæos et Maresam." The occurrence of a
place bearing the name Property-of-Gath so close to Beit-Jibrin
certainly strengthens the claims of the latter to be Gath. See _Hist.
Geog._, p. 196.

[813] See above, pp. 74 ff.

[814] For the situation of Adullam in the Shephelah see _Hist.
Geog._, p. 229.

[815] Isa. x. 28 ff. This makes it quite conceivable that Micah i.
9, _it hath struck right up to the gate of Jerusalem_, was composed
immediately after the fall of Samaria, and not, as Sinend imagines,
during the campaign of Sennacherib. Against the latter date there
is the objection that by then the fall of Samaria, which Micah i. 6
describes as present, was already nearly twenty years past.

[816] The address is either to the tribes, in which case we must
substitute _land_ for _earth_ in the next line; or much more probably
it is to the Gentile _nations_, but in this case we cannot translate
(as all do) in the third line that the Lord will be a witness _against_
them, for the charge is only against Israel. They are summoned in
the same sense as Amos summons a few of the nations in chap. iii. 9
ff.--The opening words of Micah are original to this passage, and
interpolated in the exordium of the other Micah, 1 Kings xxii. 28.

[817] Jehovah's _Temple_ or _Place_ is not, as in earlier poems,
Sinai or Seir (cf. Deborah's song and Deut. xxxiii.), but Heaven (cf.
Isaiah xix. or Psalm xxix.).

[818] So LXX. and other versions.

[819] Wellhausen's objections to this phrase are arbitrary and
incorrect. A ruin in the midst of soil gone out of cultivation, where
before there had been a city among vineyards, is a striking figure of
desolation.

[820] Which is precisely how Herod's Samaria lies at the present day.

[821] So Ewald.

[822] It must be kept in mind that all the verbs in the above passage
may as correctly be given in the future tense; in that case the
passage will be dated just before the fall of Samaria, in 722-1,
instead of just after.

[823] יענה בנות, that is, the ostriches: cf. Arab, wa'ana, "white,
barren ground." The Arabs call the ostrich "father of the desert: abu
sahârâ."

[824] LXX.

[825] Isa. x. 28 ff.

[826] It is well put by Robertson Smith's _Prophets_^2, pp. 289 ff.

[827] iii. 12.

[828] LXX. ἐν Ἀκειμ; Heb. "weep not at all."

[829] לְֽעַפְרָה cannot be the Ophrah, עָפְרָה, of Benjamin. It may
be connected with עֹפֶר, a gazelle; and it is to be noted that S. of
Beit-Jibrin there is a wady now called El-Ghufr, the corresponding
Arabic word. But, as stated in the text above, the name ought to be
one of a Philistine town.

[830] Beauty town. This is usually taken to be the modern Suafîr
on the Philistine plain, 4-1/2 miles S.E. of Ashdod, a site not
unsuitable for identification with the Σαφειρ of the _Onom._,
"between Eleutheropolis and Ascalon," except that Σαφειρ is also
described as "in the hill country." Guérin found the name Safar a
very little N. of Beit-Jíbrin (_Judée_, II. 317).

[831] March-town: perhaps the same as Ṣenan (צֵנַן) of Josh. xv. 37;
given along with Migdal-Gad and Hadashah; not identified.

[832] Unknown.

[833] "Bitternesses": unknown.

[834] Tell-el-Hesy.

[835] _Ambassadors_ or _letters of dismissal_.

[836] See above, p. 376.

[837] Josh. xv. 44; mentioned with Keilah and Mareshah; perhaps the
present Ain Kezbeh, 8 miles N.N.E. of Beit-Jibrin.

[838] מָרֵשָׁה, but in Josh. xv. 44 מראשה, which is identical with
spelling of the present name of a ruin 1 mile S. of Beit-Jibrin.
Μαρησα is placed by Eusebius (_Onom._) 2 Roman miles S. of
Eleutheropolis ( = Beit-Jibrin).

[839] 6 miles N.E. of Beit-Jibrin.

CHAPTER XXVI

_THE PROPHET OF THE POOR_

MICAH ii., iii.

We have proved Micah's love for his countryside in the effusion of
his heart upon her villages with a grief for their danger greater
than his grief for Jerusalem. Now in his treatment of the sins
which give that danger its fatal significance, he is inspired by
the same partiality for the fields and the folk about him. While
Isaiah chiefly satirises the fashions of the town and the intrigues
of the court, Micah scourges the avarice of the landowner and the
injustice which oppresses the peasant. He could not, of course, help
sharing Isaiah's indignation for the fatal politics of the capital,
any more than Isaiah could help sharing his sense of the economic
dangers of the provinces;[840] but it is the latter with which Micah
is most familiar and on which he spends his wrath. These so engross
him, indeed, that he says almost nothing about the idolatry, or the
luxury, or the hideous vice, which, according to Amos and Hosea, were
now corrupting the nation.

Social wrongs are always felt most acutely, not in the town, but in
the country. It was so in the days of Rome, whose earliest social
revolts were agrarian.[841] It was so in the Middle Ages: the
fourteenth century saw both the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants'
Rising in England; Langland, who was equally familiar with town and
country, expends nearly all his sympathy upon the poverty of the
latter, "the poure folk in cotes." It was so after the Reformation,
under the new spirit of which the first social revolt was the
Peasants' War in Germany. It was so at the French Revolution, which
began with the march of the starving peasants into Paris. And it is
so still, for our new era of social legislation has been forced open,
not by the poor of London and the large cities, but by the peasantry
of Ireland and the crofters of the Scottish Highlands. Political
discontent and religious heresy take their start among industrial and
manufacturing centres, but the first springs of the social revolt are
nearly always found among rural populations.

Why the country should begin to feel the acuteness of social wrong
before the town is sufficiently obvious. In the town there are
mitigations, and there are escapes. If the conditions of one trade
become oppressive, it is easier to pass to another. The workers are
better educated and better organised; there is a middle class, and
the tyrant dare not bring matters to so high a crisis. The might of
the wealthy, too, is divided; the poor man's employer is seldom at
the same time his landlord. But in the country power easily gathers
into the hands of the few. The labourer's opportunities and means of
work, his home, his very standing-ground, are often all of them the
property of one man. In the country the rich have a real power of
life and death, and are less hampered by competition with each other
and by the force of public opinion. One man cannot hold a city in
fee, but one man can affect for evil or for good almost as large a
population as a city's, when it is scattered across a countryside.

This is precisely the state of wrong which Micah attacks. The social
changes of the eighth century in Israel were peculiarly favourable
to its growth.[842] The enormous increase of money which had been
produced by the trade of Uzziah's reign threatened to overwhelm
the simple economy under which every family had its croft. As in
many another land and period, the social problem was the descent
of wealthy men, land-hungry, upon the rural districts. They made
the poor their debtors, and bought out the peasant proprietors.
They absorbed into their power numbers of homes, and had at their
individual disposal the lives and the happiness of thousands of
their fellow-countrymen. Isaiah had cried, _Woe upon them that join
house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room_
for the common people, and the inhabitants of the rural districts
grow fewer and fewer.[843] Micah pictures the recklessness of those
plutocrats--the fatal ease with which their wealth enabled them to
dispossess the yeomen of Judah.

The prophet speaks:--

_Woe to them that plan mischief,_
_And on their beds work out evil!_
_As soon as morning breaks they put it into execution,_
_For--it lies to the power of their hands!
They covet fields and--seize them,_
_Houses and--lift them up._
_So they crush a good man and his home,_
_A man and his heritage._

This is the evil--the ease with which wrong is done in the country!
_It lies to the power of their hands: they covet and seize._ And
what is it that they get so easily--not merely field and house,
so much land and stone and lime: it is human life, with all that
makes up personal independence, and the security of home and of the
family. That these should be at the mercy of the passion or the
caprice of one man--this is what stirs the prophet's indignation.
We shall presently see how the tyranny of wealth was aided by the
bribed and unjust judges of the country; and how, growing reckless,
the rich betook themselves, as the lords of the feudal system in
Europe continually did, to the basest of assaults upon the persons of
peaceful men and women. But meantime Micah feels that by themselves
the economic wrongs explain and justify the doom impending on the
nation. When this doom falls, by the Divine irony of God it shall
take the form of a conquest of the land by the heathen, and the
disposal of these great estates to the foreigner.

The prophet speaks:--

_Therefore thus saith Jehovah:_
_Behold, I am planning evil against this race,_
_From which ye shall not withdraw your necks,_
_Nor walk upright;_
_For an evil time it is!_[844]
_In that day shall they raise a taunt-song against you,_
_And wail out the wailing_ ("_It is done_");[845] _and say,_
_"We be utterly undone:_
_My people's estate is measured off!_[846]
_How they take it away from me!_[847]
_To the rebel our fields are allotted."_
_So thou shalt have none to cast the line by lot_
_In the congregation of Jehovah._

No restoration at time of Jubilee for lands taken away in this
fashion! There will be no congregation of Jehovah left!

At this point the prophet's pessimist discourse, that must have
galled the rich, is interrupted by their clamour to him to stop.

The rich speak:--

_Prate not, they prate, let none prate of such things!_
_Revilings will never cease!_
_O thou that speakest_ thus _to the house of Jacob,_[848]
_Is the spirit of Jehovah cut short?_
_Or are such His doings?_
_Shall not His words mean well with him that walketh
uprightly?_

So the rich, in their immoral confidence that Jehovah was neither
weakened nor could permit such a disaster to fall on His own people,
tell the prophet that his sentence of doom on the nation, and
especially on themselves, is absurd, impossible. They cry the eternal
cry of Respectability: "God can mean no harm to the like of us! His
words are good to them that walk uprightly--and we are conscious of
being such. What you, prophet, have charged us with are nothing but
natural transactions." The Lord Himself has His answer ready. Upright
indeed! They have been unprovoked plunderers!

God speaks:--

_But ye are the foes of My people,_
_Rising against those that are peaceful;_
_The mantle ye strip from them that walk quietly by,_
_Averse to war!_[849]
_Women of My people ye tear from their happy homes,_[850]
_From their children ye take My glory for ever._
_Rise and begone--for this is no resting-place!_
_Because of the uncleanness that bringeth destruction,_
_Destruction incurable._

Of the outrages on the goods of honest men, and the persons of women
and children, which are possible in a time of peace, when the rich
are tyrannous and abetted by mercenary judges and prophets, we have
an illustration analogous to Micah's in the complaint of Peace in
Langland's vision of English society in the fourteenth century. The
parallel to our prophet's words is very striking:--

"And thanne come Pees into parlement · and put forth a bille,
How Wronge ageines his wille · had his wyf taken.
'Both my gees and my grys[851] · his gadelynges[852] feccheth;
I dar noughte for fere of hym · fyghte ne chyde.
He borwed of me bayard[853] · he broughte hym home nevre,
Ne no ferthynge ther-fore · for naughte I couthe plede.
He meynteneth his men · to marther myne hewen,[854]
Forstalleth my feyres[855] · and fighteth in my chepynge,
And breketh up my bernes dore · and bereth aweye my whete,
And taketh me but a taile[856] · for ten quarters of otes,
And yet he bet me ther-to · and lyth bi my mayde,
I nam[857] noughte hardy for hym · uneth[858] to loke.'"

They pride themselves that all is stable and God is with them. How can
such a state of affairs be stable! They feel at ease, yet injustice can
never mean rest. God has spoken the final sentence, but with a rare
sarcasm the prophet adds his comment on the scene. These rich men had
been flattered into their religious security by hireling prophets, who
had opposed himself. As they leave the presence of God, having heard
their sentence, Micah looks after them and muses in quiet prose.

The prophet speaks:--

_Yea, if one whose walk is wind and falsehood were to try to cozen_
thee, saying, _I will babble to thee of wine and strong drink, then
he might be the prophet of such a people._

At this point in chap. ii. there have somehow slipped into the text
two verses (12, 13), which all are agreed do not belong to it, and
for which we must find another place.[859] They speak of a return
from the Exile, and interrupt the connection between ver. 11 and
the first verse of chap. iii. With the latter Micah begins a series
of three oracles, which give the substance of his own prophesying
in contrast to that of the false prophets whom he has just been
satirising. He has told us what they say, and he now begins the first
of his own oracles with the words, _But I said_. It is an attack upon
the authorities of the nation, whom the false prophets flatter. Micah
speaks very plainly to them. Their business is to know justice, and
yet they love wrong. They flay the people with their exactions; they
cut up the people like meat.

The prophet speaks:--_But I said,_
_Hear now, O chiefs Of Jacob,_
_And rulers of the house of Israel:_
_Is it not yours to know justice?--_
_Haters of good and lovers of evil,_
_Tearing their hide from upon them_
(he points to the people),
_And their flesh from the bones of them;_
_And who devour the flesh of my people,_
_And their hide they have stripped from them_
_And their bones have they cleft,_
_And served it up as if from a pot,_
_Like meat from the thick of the caldron!_
_At that time shall they cry to Jehovah,_
_And He will not answer them;_
_But hide His face from them at that time,_
_Because they have aggravated their deeds._

These words of Micah are terribly strong, but there have been many
other ages and civilisations than his own of which they have been no
more than true. "They crop us," said a French peasant of the lords
of the great Louis' time, "as the sheep crops grass." "They treat us
like their food," said another on the eve of the Revolution.

Is there nothing of the same with ourselves? While Micah spoke he
had wasted lives and bent backs before him. His speech is elliptic
till you see his finger pointing at them. Pinched peasant-faces peer
between all his words and fill the ellipses. And among the living
poor to-day are there not starved and bitten faces--bodies with
the blood sucked from them, with the Divine image crushed out of
them? Brothers, we cannot explain all of these by vice. Drunkenness
and unthrift do account for much; but how much more is explicable
only by the following facts! Many men among us are able to live in
fashionable streets and keep their families comfortable only by
paying their employés a wage upon which it is impossible for men
to be strong or women to be virtuous. Are those not using these
as their food? They tell us that if they are to give higher wages
they must close their business, and cease paying wages at all; and
they are right if they themselves continue to live on the scale
they do. As long as many families are maintained in comfort by the
profits of businesses in which some or all of the employés work
for less than they can nourish and repair their bodies upon, the
simple fact is that the one set are feeding upon the other set. It
may be inevitable, it may be the fault of the system and not of the
individual, it may be that to break up the system would mean to make
things worse than ever--but all the same the truth is clear that
many families of the middle class, and some of the very wealthiest
of the land, are nourished by the waste of the lives of the poor.
Now and again the fact is acknowledged with as much shamelessness as
was shown by any tyrant in the days of Micah. To a large employer of
labour, who was complaining that his employés, by refusing to live
at the low scale of Belgian workmen, were driving trade from this
country, the present writer once said: "Would it not meet your wishes
if, instead of your workmen being levelled down, the Belgians were
levelled up? This would make the competition fair between you and the
employers in Belgium." His answer was, "I care not so long as I get
my profits." He was a religious man, a liberal giver to his Church,
and he died leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds.

Micah's tyrants, too, had religion to support them. A number of the
hireling prophets, whom we have seen both Amos and Hosea attack,
gave their blessing to this social system, which crushed the poor,
for they shared its profits. They lived upon the alms of the rich,
and flattered according as they were fed. To them Micah devotes the
second oracle of chap. iii., and we find confirmed by his words
the principle we laid down before, that in that age the one great
difference between the false and the true prophet was what it has
been in every age since then till now--an ethical difference; and
not a difference of dogma, or tradition, or ecclesiastical note. The
false prophet spoke, consciously or unconsciously, for himself and
his living. He sided with the rich; he shut his eyes to the social
condition of the people; he did not attack the sins of the day. This
made him _false_--robbed him of insight and the power of prediction.
But the true prophet exposed the sins of his people. Ethical insight
and courage, burning indignation of wrong, clear vision of the facts
of the day--this was what Jehovah's spirit put into him, this was
what Micah felt to be inspiration.

The prophet speaks:--

_Thus saith Jehovah against the prophets who lead my people astray,_
_Who while they have ought between their teeth proclaim peace._
_But against him who will not lay to their mouths they sanctify war!_
_Wherefore night shall be yours without vision,_
_And yours shall be darkness without divination;_
_And the sun shall go down on the prophets,_
_And the day shall darken about them;_
_And the seers shall be put to the blush,_
_And the diviners be ashamed:_
_All of them shall cover the beard,_
_For there shall be no answer from God._
_But I--I am full of power by the spirit of Jehovah, and justice and
might,_
_To declare to Jacob his transgressions and to Israel his sin._

In the third oracle of this chapter rulers and prophets are
combined--how close the conspiracy between them! It is remarkable
that, in harmony with Isaiah, Micah speaks no word against the king.
But evidently Hezekiah had not power to restrain the nobles and the
rich. When this oracle was uttered it was a time of peace, and the
lavish building, which we have seen to be so marked a characteristic
of Israel in the eighth century,[860] was in process. Jerusalem was
larger and finer than ever. Ah, it was a building of God's own city _in
blood_! Judges, priests and prophets were all alike mercenary, and the
poor were oppressed for a reward. No walls, however sacred, could stand
on such foundations. Did they say that they built her so grandly, for
Jehovah's sake? Did they believe her to be inviolate because He was in
her? They should see. Zion--yes, Zion--should be ploughed like a field,
and the Mountain of the Lord's Temple become desolate.

The prophet speaks:--

_Hear now this, O chiefs of the house of Jacob,_
_And rulers of the house of Israel,_
_Who spurn justice and twist all that is straight,_
_Building Zion in blood, and Jerusalem with crime!_
_Her chiefs give judgment for a bribe,_
_And her priests oracles for a reward,_
_And her prophets divine for silver;_
_And on Jehovah they lean, saying:_
"_Is not Jehovah in the midst of us?_
_Evil cannot come at us._"
_Therefore for your sakes shall Zion be ploughed like a field,_
_And Jerusalem become heaps,_
_And the Mount of the House mounds in a jungle._

It is extremely difficult for us to place ourselves in a state of
society in which bribery is prevalent, and the fingers both of justice
and of religion are gilded by their suitors. But this corruption
has always been common in the East. "An Oriental state can never
altogether prevent the abuse by which officials, small and great,
enrich themselves in illicit ways."[861] The strongest government takes
the bribery for granted, and periodically prunes the rank fortunes of
its great officials. A weak government lets them alone. But in either
case the poor suffer from unjust taxation and from laggard or perverted
justice. Bribery has always been found, even in the more primitive and
puritan forms of Semitic life. Mr. Doughty has borne testimony with
regard to this among the austere Wahabees of Central Arabia. "When I
asked if there were no handling of bribes at Hâyil by those who are
nigh the prince's ear, it was answered, 'Nay.' The Byzantine corruption
cannot enter into the eternal and noble simplicity of this people's
(airy) life, in the poor nomad country; but (we have seen) the art is
not unknown to the subtle-headed Shammar princes, who thereby help
themselves with the neighbour Turkish governments."[862] The bribes
of the ruler of Hâyil "are, according to the shifting weather of the
world, to great Ottoman government men; and now on account of Kheybar,
he was gilding some of their crooked fingers in Medina."[863] Nothing
marks the difference of Western government more than the absence of all
this, especially from our courts of justice. Yet the improvement has
only come about within comparatively recent centuries. What a large
space, for instance, does Langland give to the arraigning of "Mede,"
the corrupter of all authorities and influences in the society of
his day! Let us quote his words, for again they provide a most exact
parallel to Micah's, and may enable us to realise a state of life so
contrary to our own. It is Conscience who arraigns Mede before the
King:--

"By ihesus with here jeweles · youre justices she shendeth,[864]
And lith[865] agein the lawe · and letteth hym the gate,
That feith may noughte have his forth[866] · here floreines go so
thikke,
She ledeth the lawe as hire list · and lovedays maketh
And doth men lese thorw hire love · that law myghte wynne,
The mase[867] for a mene man · though he mote[868] hir eure.
Law is so lordeliche · and loth to make ende,
Without presentz or pens[869] · she pleseth wel fewe.

* * * * *

For pore men mowe[870] have no powere · to pleyne[871] hem though
thei smerte;
Suche a maistre is Mede · amonge men of gode."[872]

FOOTNOTES:

[840] Isa. v. 8.

[841] Mr. Congreve, in his Essay on Slavery appended to his edition
of Aristotle's _Politics_, p. 496, points out that all the servile
wars from which Rome suffered arose, not in the capital, but in the
provinces, notably in Sicily.

[842] See above, pp. 32 ff.

[843] Isa. v. 8.

[844] Cf. Amos v. 13.

[845] "Fuit." But whether this is a gloss, as of the name of the
dirge or of the tune, or a part of the text, is uncertain. Query:
ואמר ינהה ונחה.

[846] So LXX., and adds: "with the measuring rope."

[847] Or (after the LXX.) _there is none to give it back to me_.

[848] Uncertain. "Is the house of Jacob...?" (Wellhausen). "What a
saying, O house of Jacob?" (Ewald and Guthe). In the latter case the
interruption of the rich ceases with the previous line, and this one
is the beginning of the prophet's answer to them.

[849] So we may conjecture the very obscure details of a verse whose
general meaning, however, is evident. For ואתמול read ל ואתם. The LXX.
takes שלמה as _peace_ and not as _cloak_, for which there seems to be
no place beside אדר (or אדרת). Wellhausen with further alterations
renders: "But ye come forward as enemies against My people; from good
friends ye rob their ..., from peaceful wanderers war-booty."

[850] Wellhausen reads בני for בית, "tenderly bred children," another
of the many emendations which he proposes in the interests of
complete parallelism. See the Preface to this volume.

[851] Little pigs.

[852] Fellows.

[853] A horse.

[854] Servants.

[855] Fairs, markets.

[856] A tally.

[857] Am not.

[858] Scarcely.

[859]

_I will gather, gather thee, O Jacob, in mass,_
_I will bring, bring together the Remnant of Israel!_
_I will set them like sheep in a fold,_
_Like a flock in the midst of the pasture._
_They shall hum with men!_
_The breach-breaker hath gone up before them:_
_They have broken the breach, have carried the gate, and are gone out
by it;_
_And their king hath passed on before them, and Jehovah at their
head._

[860] See above, p. 33.

[861] Nöldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_, translated by Black,
pp. 134 f.

[862] _Arabia Deserta_, I. 607.

[863] _Id._, II. 20.

[864] Ruins.

[865] Lieth.

[866] Course.

[867] Confusion.

[868] Summon.

[869] Pence.

[870] May.

[871] Complain.

[872] Substance or property.

CHAPTER XXVII

_ON TIME'S HORIZON_

MICAH iv. 1-7.

The immediate prospect of Zion's desolation which closes chap. iii.
is followed in the opening of chap. iv. by an ideal picture of her
exaltation and supremacy _in the issue of the days_. We can hardly
doubt that this arrangement has been made of purpose, nor can we deny
that it is natural and artistic. Whether it be due to Micah himself,
or whether he wrote the second passage, are questions we have already
discussed.[873] Like so many others of their kind, they cannot be
answered with certainty, far less with dogmatism. But I repeat, I
see no conclusive reason for denying either to the circumstances
of Micah's times or to the principles of their prophecy the
possibility of such a hope as inspires chap. iv. 1-4. Remember how
the prophets of the eighth century identified Jehovah with supreme
and universal righteousness; remember how Amos explicitly condemned
the aggravations of war and slavery among the heathen as sins against
Him, and how Isaiah claimed the future gains of Tyrian commerce as
gifts for His sanctuary; remember how Amos heard His voice come forth
from Jerusalem, and Isaiah counted upon the eternal inviolateness
of His shrine and city,--and you will not think it impossible for a
third Judæan prophet of that age, whether he was Micah or another, to
have drawn the prospect of Jerusalem which now opens before us.

It is the far-off horizon of time, which, like the spatial horizon,
always seems a fixed and eternal line, but as constantly shifts
with the shifting of our standpoint or elevation. Every prophet has
his own vision of _the latter days_; seldom is that prospect the
same. Determined by the circumstances of the seer, by the desires
these prompt or only partially fulfil, it changes from age to age.
The ideal is always shaped by the real, and in this vision of the
eighth century there is no exception. This is not any of the ideals
of later ages, when the evil was the oppression of the Lord's people
by foreign armies or their scattering in exile; it is not, in
contrast to these, the spectacle of the armies of the Lord of Hosts
imbrued in the blood of the heathen, or of the columns of returning
captives filling all the narrow roads to Jerusalem, _like streams
in the south_; nor, again, is it a nation of priests gathering
about a rebuilt temple and a restored ritual. But because the pain
of the greatest minds of the eighth century was the contradiction
between faith in the God of Zion as Universal Righteousness and the
experience that, nevertheless, Zion had absolutely no influence upon
surrounding nations, this vision shows a day when Zion's influence
will be as great as her right, and from far and wide the nations
whom Amos has condemned for their transgressions against Jehovah
will acknowledge His law, and be drawn to Jerusalem to learn of
Him. Observe that nothing is said of Israel going forth to teach
the nations the law of the Lord. That is the ideal of a later age,
when Jews were scattered across the world. Here, in conformity with
the experience of a still untravelled people, we see the Gentiles
drawing in upon the Mountain of the House of the Lord. With the same
lofty impartiality which distinguishes the oracles of Amos on the
heathen, the prophet takes no account of their enmity to Israel; nor
is there any talk--such as later generations were almost forced by
the hostility of neighbouring tribes to indulge in--of politically
subduing them to the king in Zion. Jehovah will arbitrate between
them, and the result shall be the institution of a great peace, with
no special political privilege to Israel, unless this be understood
in ver. 5, which speaks of such security to life as was impossible,
at that time at least, in all borderlands of Israel. But among the
heathen themselves there will be a resting from war: the factions
and ferocities of that wild Semitic world, which Amos so vividly
characterised,[874] shall cease. In all this there is nothing beyond
the possibility of suggestion by the circumstances of the eighth
century or by the spirit of its prophecy.

A prophet speaks:--

_And it shall come to pass in the issue of the days,_[875]
_That the Mount of the House of Jehovah shall be established on the
tops_[876] _of the mountains,_
_And lifted shall it be above the hills,_
_And peoples shall flow to it,_
_And many nations shall go and say:_
"_Come, and let us up to the Mount of Jehovah,_
_And to the House of the God of Jacob,_
_That He may teach us of His ways,_
_And we will walk in His paths._"
_For from Zion goeth forth the law,_
_And the word of Jehovah from out of Jerusalem!_
_And He shall judge between many peoples,_
_And decide_[877] _for strong nations far and wide;_[878]
_And they shall hammer their swords into ploughshares,_
_And their spears into pruning-hooks:_
_They shall not lift up, nation against nation, a sword,_
_And they shall not any more learn war._
_Every man shall dwell under his vine_
_And under his fig-tree,_
_And none shall make afraid;_
_For the mouth of Jehovah of Hosts has spoken._

What connection this last verse is intended to have with the preceding
is not quite obvious. It may mean that every family among the Gentiles
shall dwell in peace; or, as suggested above, that with the voluntary
disarming of the surrounding heathendom, Israel herself shall dwell
secure, in no fear of border raids and slave-hunting expeditions, with
which especially Micah's Shephelah and other borderlands were familiar.
The verse does not occur in Isaiah's quotation of the three which
precede it. We can scarcely suppose, fain though we may be to do so,
that Micah added the verse in order to exhibit the future correction
of the evils he has been deploring in chap. iii.: the insecurity of
the householder in Israel before the unscrupulous land-grabbing of the
wealthy. Such are not the evils from which this passage prophesies
redemption. It deals only, like the first oracles of Amos, with the
relentlessness and ferocity of the heathen: under Jehovah's arbitrament
these shall be at peace, and whether among themselves or in Israel,
hitherto so exposed to their raids, men shall dwell in unalarmed
possession of their houses and fields. Security from war, not from
social tyranny, is what is promised.

The following verse (5) gives in a curious way the contrast of the
present to that future in which all men will own the sway of one God.
_For_ at the present time _all the nations are walking each in the
name of his God, but we go in the name of Jehovah for ever and aye_.

To which vision, complete in itself, there has been added by another
hand, of what date we cannot tell, a further effect of God's blessed
influence. To peace among men shall be added healing and redemption,
the ingathering of the outcast and the care of the crippled.

_In that day--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--I will gather the halt,_
_And the cast-off I will bring in, and all that I have afflicted;_
_And I will make the halt for a Remnant,_[879]
_And her that was weakened_[880] _into a strong people,_
_And Jehovah shall reign over them_
_In the Mount of Zion from now and for ever._

Whatever be the origin of the separate oracles which compose this
passage (iv. 1-7), they form as they now stand a beautiful whole,
rising from Peace through Freedom to Love. They begin with obedience
to God and they culminate in the most glorious service which God or
man may undertake, the service of saving the lost. See how the Divine
spiral ascends. We have, first, Religion the centre and origin of
all, compelling the attention of men by its historical evidence of
justice and righteousness. We have the world's willingness to learn
of it. We have the results in the widening brotherhood of nations,
in universal Peace, in Labour freed from War, and with none of her
resources absorbed by the conscriptions and armaments which in our
times are deemed necessary for enforcing peace. We have the universal
diffusion and security of Property, the prosperity and safety of the
humblest home. And, finally, we have this free strength and wealth
inspired by the example of God Himself to nourish the broken and to
gather in the forwandered.

Such is the ideal world, seen and promised two thousand five hundred
years ago, out of as real an experience of human sin and failure as
ever mankind awoke to. Are we nearer the Vision to-day, or does it
still hang upon time's horizon, that line which seems so stable from
every seer's point of view, but which moves from the generations as
fast as they travel to it?

So far from this being so, there is much in the Vision that is not
only nearer us than it was to the Hebrew prophets, and not only
abreast of us, but actually achieved and behind us, as we live and
strive still onward. Yes, brothers, actually behind us! History
has in part fulfilled the promised influence of religion upon the
nations. The Unity of God has been owned, and the civilised peoples
bow to the standards of justice and of mercy first revealed from
Mount Zion. _Many nations_ and _powerful nations_ acknowledge the
arbitrament of the God of the Bible. We have had revealed that High
Fatherhood of which every family in heaven and earth is named; and
wherever that is believed the brotherhood of men is confessed. We
have seen Sin, that profound discord in man and estrangement from
God, of which all human hatreds and malices are the fruit, atoned
for and reconciled by a Sacrifice in face of which human pride and
passion stand abashed. The first part of the Vision is fulfilled.
_The nations stream to the God of Jerusalem and His Christ._ And
though to-day our Peace be but a paradox, and the "Christian" nations
stand still from war not in love, but in fear of one another, there
are in every nation an increasing number of men and women, with
growing influence, who, without being fanatics for peace, or blind
to the fact that war may be a people's duty in fulfilment of its own
destiny or in relief of the enslaved, do yet keep themselves from
foolish forms of patriotism, and by their recognition of each other
across all national differences make sudden and unconsidered war
more and more of an impossibility. I write this in the sound of that
call to stand upon arms which broke like thunder upon our Christmas
peace; but, amid all the ignoble jealousies and hot rashness which
prevail, how the air, burned clean by that first electric discharge,
has filled with the determination that war shall not happen in the
interests of mere wealth or at the caprice of a tyrant! God help us
to use this peace for the last ideals of His prophet! May we see, not
that of which our modern peace has been far too full, mere freedom
for the wealth of the few to increase at the expense of the mass of
mankind. May our Peace mean the gradual disarmament of the nations,
the increase of labour, the diffusion of property, and, above all,
the redemption of the waste of the people and the recovery of our
outcasts. Without this, peace is no peace; and better were war
to burn out by its fierce fires those evil humours of our secure
comfort, which render us insensible to the needy and the fallen at
our side. Without the redemptive forces at work which Christ brought
to earth, peace is no peace; and the cruelties of war, that slay and
mutilate so many, are as nothing to the cruelties of a peace which
leaves us insensible to the outcasts and the perishing, of whom there
are so many even in our civilisation.

One application of the prophecy may be made at this moment. We are
told by those who know best and have most responsibility in the
matter that an ancient Church and people of Christ are being left a
prey to the wrath of an infidel tyrant, not because Christendom is
without strength to compel him to deliver, but because to use the
strength, would be to imperil the peace, of Christendom. It is an
ignoble peace which cannot use the forces of redemption, and with the
cry of Armenia in our ears the Unity of Europe is but a mockery.

FOOTNOTES:

[873] See above, pp. 365 ff.

[874] See above, Chap. VII.

[875] אחרית is the hindmost, furthest, ultimate, whether of space
(Psalm cxxxix. 9: "the uttermost part of the sea"), or of time (Deut.
xi. 12: "the end of the year"). It is the end as compared with the
beginning, the sequel with the start, the future with the present
(Job xlii. 12). In Proverbs it is chiefly used in the moral sense
of issue or result. But it chiefly occurs in the phrase used here,
הימים אחרית, not "the latter days," as A.V., nor ultimate days,
for in these phrases lurks the idea of time having an end, but the
_after-days_ (Cheyne), or, better still, the _issue of the days_.

[876] LXX.

[877] Or _arbitrate_.

[878] Literally: "up to far away."

[879] That which shall abide and be the stock of the future.

[880] LXX. _cast off_.

CHAPTER XXVIII

_THE KING TO COME_

MICAH iv. 8-v

When a people has to be purged of long injustice, when some high aim
of liberty or of order has to be won, it is remarkable how often the
drama of revolution passes through three acts. There is first the
period of criticism and of vision, in which men feel discontent,
dream of new things, and put their hopes into systems: it seems then
as if the future were to come of itself. But often a catastrophe,
relevant or irrelevant, ensues: the visions pale before a vast
conflagration, and poet, philosopher and prophet disappear under
the feet of a mad mob of wreckers. Yet this is often the greatest
period of all, for somewhere in the midst of it a strong character
is forming, and men, by the very anarchy, are being taught, in
preparation for him, the indispensableness of obedience and loyalty.
With their chastened minds he achieves the third act, and fulfils all
of the early vision that God's ordeal by fire has proved worthy to
survive. Thus history, when distraught, rallies again upon the Man.

To this law the prophets of Israel only gradually gave expression. We
find no trace of it among the earliest of them; and in the essential
faith of all there was much which predisposed them against the
conviction of its necessity. For, on the one hand, the seers were so
filled with the inherent truth and inevitableness of their visions,
that they described these as if already realised; there was no room
for a great figure to rise before the future, for with a rush the
future was upon them. On the other hand, it was ever a principle of
prophecy that God is able to dispense with human aid. "In presence of
the Divine omnipotence all secondary causes, all interposition on the
part of the creature, fall away."[881] The more striking is it that
before long the prophets should have begun, not only to look for a
Man, but to paint him as the central figure of their hopes. In Hosea,
who has no such promise, we already see the instinct at work. The age
of revolution which he describes is cursed by its want of men: there
is no great leader of the people sent from God; those who come to the
front are the creatures of faction and party; there is no king from
God.[882] How different it had been in the great days of old, when
God had ever worked for Israel through some man--a Moses, a Gideon, a
Samuel, but especially a David. Thus memory equally with the present
dearth of personalities prompted to a great desire, and with passion
Israel waited for a Man. The hope of the mother for her firstborn,
the pride of the father in his son, the eagerness of the woman for
her lover, the devotion of the slave to his liberator, the enthusiasm
of soldiers for their captain--unite these noblest affections of
the human heart and you shall yet fail to reach the passion and the
glory with which prophecy looked for the King to Come. Each age, of
course, expected him in the qualities of power and character needed
for its own troubles, and the ideal changed from glory unto glory.
From valour and victory in war, it became peace and good government,
care for the poor and the oppressed, sympathy with the sufferings of
the whole people, but especially of the righteous among them, with
fidelity to the truth delivered unto the fathers, and, finally, a
conscience for the people's sin, a bearing of their punishment and
a travail for their spiritual redemption. But all these qualities
and functions were gathered upon an individual--a Victor, a King, a
Prophet, a Martyr, a Servant of the Lord.

Micah stands among the first, if he is not the very first, who thus
focussed the hopes of Israel upon a great Redeemer; and his promise
of Him shares all the characteristics just described. In his book it
lies next a number of brief oracles with which we are unable to trace
its immediate connection. They differ from it in style and rhythm:
they are in verse, while it seems to be in prose. They do not appear
to have been uttered along with it. But they reflect the troubles out
of which the Hero is expected to emerge, and the deliverance which
He shall accomplish, though at first they picture the latter without
any hint of Himself. They apparently describe an invasion which is
actually in course, rather than one which is near and inevitable; and
if so they can only date from Sennacherib's campaign against Judah
in 701 B.C. Jerusalem is in siege, standing alone in the land,[883]
like one of those solitary towers with folds round them which were
built here and there upon the border pastures of Israel for defence
of the flock against the raiders of the desert.[884] The prophet sees
the possibility of Zion's capitulation, but the people shall leave
her only for their deliverance elsewhere. Many are gathered against
her, but he sees them as sheaves upon the floor for Zion to thresh.
This oracle (vv. 11-13) cannot, of course, have been uttered at the
same time as the previous one, but there is no reason why the same
prophet should not have uttered both at different periods. Isaiah had
prospects of the fate of Jerusalem which differ quite as much.[885]
Once more (ver. 14) the blockade is established. Israel's ruler is
helpless, _smitten on the cheek by the foe_.[886] It is to this last
picture that the promise of the Deliverer is attached.

The prophet speaks:--

_But thou, O Tower of the Flock,_
_Hill of the daughter of Zion,_
_To thee shall arrive the former rule,_
_And the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Zion._
_Now wherefore criest thou so loud?
Is there no king in thee,[887] or is thy counsellor perished,_
_That throes have seized thee like a woman in childbirth?_
_Quiver and writhe, daughter of Zion, like one in childbirth:_
_For now must thou forth from the city,_
_And encamp on the field (and come unto Babel);_[888]
_There shalt thou be rescued,_
_There shall Jehovah redeem thee from the hand of thy foes!_

_And now gather against thee many nations, that say,_
"_Let her be violate, that our eyes may fasten on Zion!_"
_But they know not the plans of Jehovah,_
_Nor understand they His counsel,_
_For He hath gathered them in like sheaves to the floor._
_Up and thresh, O daughter of Zion!_
_For thy horns will I turn into iron,_
_And thy hoofs will I turn into brass;_
_And thou wilt beat down many nations,_
_And devote to Jehovah their spoil,_
_And their wealth to the Lord of all earth._

_Now press thyself together, thou daughter of pressure_:[889]
The foe _hath set a wall around us,_
_With a rod they smite on the cheek Israel's regent_!
_But thou, Beth-Ephrath,_[890] _smallest among the thousands_[891] _of
Judah,_
_From thee unto Me shall come forth the Ruler to be in Israel!_
_Yea, of old are His goings forth, from the days of long ago!_
_Therefore shall He suffer them till the time that one bearing shall
have born._[892]
(_Then the rest of His brethren shall return with the children of
Israel._)[893]
_And He shall stand and shepherd His flock_[894] _in the strength of
Jehovah,_
_In the pride of the name of His God._
_And they shall abide!_
_For now is He great to the ends of the earth._
_And Such an One shall be our Peace._[895]

Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, but when Micah says that the
Deliverer shall emerge from her he does not only mean what Isaiah
affirms by his promise of a rod from the stock of Jesse, that the
King to Come shall spring from the one great dynasty in Judah. Micah
means rather to emphasise the rustic and popular origin of the
Messiah, _too small to be among the thousands of Judah_. David, the
son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, was a dearer figure than Solomon son
of David the King. He impressed the people's imagination, because he
had sprung from themselves, and in his lifetime had been the popular
rival of an unlovable despot. Micah himself was the prophet of the
country as distinct from the capital, of the peasants as against the
rich who oppressed them. When, therefore, he fixed upon Bethlehem as
the Messiah's birthplace, he doubtless desired, without departing
from the orthodox hope in the Davidic dynasty, to throw round its new
representative those associations which had so endeared to the people
their father-monarch. The shepherds of Judah, that strong source of
undefiled life from which the fortunes of the state and prophecy
itself had ever been recuperated, should again send forth salvation.
Had not Micah already declared that, after the overthrow of the
capital and the rulers, the glory of Israel should come to Adullam,
where of old David had gathered its soiled and scattered fragments?

We may conceive how such a promise would affect the crushed peasants
for whom Micah wrote. A Saviour, who was one of themselves, not
born up there in the capital, foster-brother of the very nobles who
oppressed them, but born among the people, sharer of their toils and
of their wrongs!--it would bring hope to every broken heart among the
disinherited poor of Israel. Yet meantime, be it observed, this was a
promise, not for the peasants only, but for the whole people. In the
present danger of the nation the class disputes are forgotten, and the
hopes of Israel gather upon their Hero for a common deliverance from
the foreign foe. _Such an One shall be our peace._ But in the peace He
is _to stand and shepherd His flock_, conspicuous and watchful. The
country-folk knew what such a figure meant to themselves for security
and weal on the land of their fathers. Heretofore their rulers had not
been shepherds, but thieves and robbers.

We can imagine the contrast which such a vision must have offered to
the fancies of the false prophets. What were they beside this? Deity
descending in fire and thunder, with all the other features of the
ancient Theophanies that had now become so much cant in the mouths
of mercenary traditionalists. Besides those, how sane was this, how
footed upon the earth, how practical, how popular in the best sense!

We see, then, the value of Micah's prophecy for his own day. Has
it also any value for ours--especially in that aspect of it which
must have appealed to the hearts of those for whom chiefly Micah
arose? "Is it wise to paint the Messiah, to paint Christ, so much as
a working-man? Is it not much more to our purpose to remember the
general fact of His humanity, by which He is able to be Priest and
Brother to all classes, high and low, rich and poor, the noble and
the peasant alike? Is not the Man of Sorrows a much wider name than
the Man of Labour?" Let us answer these questions.

The value of such a prophecy of Christ lies in the correctives which
it supplies to the Christian apocalypse and theology. Both of these
have raised Christ to a throne too far above the actual circumstance
of His earthly ministry and the theatre of His eternal sympathies.
Whether enthroned in the praises of heaven, or by scholasticism
relegated to an ideal and abstract humanity, Christ is lifted away
from touch with the common people. But His lowly origin was a fact.
He sprang from the most democratic of peoples. His ancestor was a
shepherd, and His mother a peasant girl. He Himself was a carpenter:
at home, as His parables show, in the fields and the folds and the
barns of His country; with the servants of the great houses, with
the unemployed in the market; with the woman in the hovel seeking
one piece of silver, with the shepherd on the moors seeking the lost
sheep. _The poor had the gospel preached to them; and the common
people heard Him gladly._ As the peasants of Judæa must have listened
to Micah's promise of His origin among themselves with new hope and
patience, so in the Roman empire the religion of Jesus Christ was
welcomed chiefly, as the Apostles and the Fathers bear witness, by
the lowly and the labouring of every nation. In the great persecution
which bears his name, the Emperor Domitian heard that there were two
relatives alive of this Jesus whom so many acknowledged as their
King, and he sent for them that he might put them to death. But when
they came, he asked them to hold up their hands, and seeing these
brown and chapped with toil, he dismissed the men, saying, "From such
slaves we have nothing to fear." Ah but, Emperor! it is just the
horny hands of this religion that thou and thy gods have to fear! Any
cynic or satirist of thy literature from Celsus onwards could have
told thee that it was by men who worked with their hands for their
daily bread, by domestics, artisans and all manner of slaves, that
the power of this King should spread, which meant destruction to thee
and thine empire! _From little Bethlehem came forth the Ruler_, and
_now He is great to the ends of the earth_.

There follows upon this prophecy of the Shepherd a curious fragment
which divides His office among a number of His order, though the
grammar returns towards the end to One. The mention of Assyria stamps
this oracle also as of the eighth century. Mark the refrain which
opens and closes it.[896]

_When Asshûr cometh into our land,_
_And when he marcheth on our borders,_[897]
_Then shall we raise against him seven shepherds_
_And eight princes of men._
_And they shall shepherd Asshûr with a sword,_
_And Nimrod's land with her own bare blades_
_And He shall deliver from Asshûr,_
_When he cometh into our land._
_And marcheth upon our borders._

There follows an oracle in which there is no evidence of Micah's hand
or of his times; but if it carries any proof of a date, it seems a
late one.

_And the remnant of Jacob shall be among many peoples_
_Like the dew from Jehovah,_
_Like showers upon grass,_
_Which wait not for a man,_
_Nor tarry for the children of men._
_And the remnant of Jacob_ (_among nations_,) _among many peoples,_
_Shall be like the lion among the beasts of the jungle,_
_Like a young lion among the sheepfolds,_
_Who, when he cometh by, treadeth and teareth,_
_And none may deliver._
_Let thine hand be high on thine adversaries,_
_And all thine enemies be cut off!_

Finally in this section we have an oracle full of the notes we had
from Micah in the first two chapters. It explains itself. Compare
Micah ii. and Isaiah ii.

_And it shall be in that day--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--_
_That I will cut off thy horses from the midst of thee,_
_And I will destroy thy chariots;_
_That I will cut off the cities of thy land,_
_And tear down all thy fortresses,_
_And I will cut off thine enchantments from thy hand,_
_And thou shall have no more soothsayers;_
_And I will cut off thine images and thy pillars from the midst of
thee,_
_And thou shall not bow down any more to the work of thy hands;_
_And I will uproot thine Asheras from the midst of thee,_
_And will destroy thine idols._
_So shall I do, in My wrath and Mine anger,_
_Vengeance to the nations, who have not known Me._

FOOTNOTES:

[881] Schultz, _A. T. Theol._, p. 722.

[882] See above, pp. 276 ff.

[883] Wellhausen declares that this is unsuitable to the position
of Jerusalem in the eighth century, and virtually implies her ruin
and desolation. But, on the contrary, it is not so: Jerusalem is
still standing, though alone (cf. the similar figure in Isa. i.).
Consequently the contradiction which Wellhausen sees between this
eighth verse and vv. 9, 10, does not exist. He grants that the latter
may belong to the time of Sennacherib's invasion--unless it be a
_vaticinium post eventum_!

[884] See above, p. 32.

[885] This in answer to Wellhausen, who thinks the two oracles
incompatible, and that the second one is similar to the
eschatological prediction common from Ezekiel onwards. Jerusalem,
however, is surely still standing.

[886] Even Wellhausen agrees that this verse is most suitably dated
from the time of Micah.

[887] Those who maintain the exilic date understand by this Jehovah
Himself. In any case it may be He who is meant.

[888] The words in parenthesis are perhaps a gloss.

[889] Uncertain.

[890] The name Bethlehem is probably a later insertion. I read with
Hitzig and others הצעיר אפרת, and omit להיות.

[891] Smallest form of district: cf. English _hundreds_.

[892] Cf. the prophecy of Immanuel, Isa. vii.

[893] This seems like a later insertion: it disturbs both sense and
rhythm.

[894] So LXX.

[895] Take this clause from ver. 4 and the following oracle and put
it with ver. 3.

[896] Wellhausen alleges in the numbers another trace of the late
Apocalyptic writings--but this is not conclusive.

[897] So LXX. Cf. the refrain at the close.

CHAPTER XXIX

_THE REASONABLENESS OF TRUE RELIGION_

MICAH vi. 1-8.

We have now reached a passage from which all obscurities of date
and authorship[898] disappear before the transparence and splendour
of its contents. "These few verses," says a great critic, "in
which Micah sets forth the true essence of religion, may raise
a well-founded title to be counted as the most important in the
prophetic literature. Like almost no others, they afford us an
insight into the innermost nature of the religion of Israel, as
delivered by the prophets."

Usually it is only the last of the verses upon which the admiration of
the reader is bestowed: _What doth the Lord require of thee, O man,
but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?_ But in
truth the rest of the passage differeth not in glory; the wonder of it
lies no more in its peroration than in its argument as a whole.

The passage is cast in the same form as the opening chapter of the
book--that of an Argument or Debate between the God of Israel and His
people, upon the great theatre of Nature. The heart must be dull that
does not leap to the Presences before which the trial is enacted.

The prophet speaks:--

_Hear ye now that which Jehovah is saying;_
_Arise, contend before the mountains,_
_And let the hills hear thy voice!_
_Hear, O mountains, the Lord's Argument,_
_And ye, the everlasting! foundations of earth!_

This is not mere scenery. In all the moral questions between God and
man, the prophets feel that Nature is involved. Either she is called
as a witness to the long history of their relations to each other, or
as sharing God's feeling of the intolerableness of the evil which men
have heaped upon her, or by her droughts and floods and earthquakes
as the executioner of their doom. It is in the first of these
capacities that the prophet in this passage appeals to the mountains
and eternal foundations of earth. They are called, not because they
are the biggest of existences, but because they are the most full of
memories and associations with both parties to the Trial.

The main idea of the passage, however, is the Trial itself. We have
seen more than once that the forms of religion which the prophets had
to combat were those which expressed it mechanically in the form of
ritual and sacrifice, and those which expressed it in mere enthusiasm
and ecstasy. Between such extremes the prophets insisted that
religion was knowledge and that it was conduct--rational intercourse
and loving duty between God and man. This is what they figure in
their favourite scene of a Debate which is now before us.

_Jehovah hath a Quarrel with His People,_
_And with Israel He cometh to argue._

To us, accustomed to communion with the Godhead, as with a Father,
this may seem formal and legal. But if we so regard it we do it
an injustice. The form sprang by revolt against mechanical and
sensational ideas of religion. It emphasised religion as rational
and moral, and at once preserved the reasonableness of God and the
freedom of man. God spoke with the people whom He had educated: He
pled with them, listened to their statements and questions, and
produced His own evidences and reasons. Religion, such a passage as
this asserts--religion is not a thing of authority nor of ceremonial
nor of mere feeling, but of argument, reasonable presentation and
debate. Reason is not put out of court: man's freedom is respected;
and he is not taken by surprise through his fears or his feelings.
This sublime and generous conception of religion, which we owe
first of all to the prophets in their contest with superstitious
and slothful theories of religion that unhappily survive among us,
was carried to its climax in the Old Testament by another class of
writers. We find it elaborated with great power and beauty in the
Books of Wisdom. In these the Divine Reason has emerged from the
legal forms now before us, and has become the Associate and Friend of
Man. The Prologue to the Book of Proverbs tells how Wisdom, fellow of
God from the foundation of the world, descends to dwell among men.
She comes forth into their streets and markets, she argues and pleads
there with an urgency which is equal to the urgency of temptation
itself. But it is not till the earthly ministry of the Son of God,
His arguments with the doctors, His parables to the common people,
His gentle and prolonged education of His disciples, that we see the
reasonableness of religion in all its strength and beauty.

In that free court of reason in which the prophets saw God and man
plead together, the subjects were such as became them both. For God
unfolds no mysteries, and pleads no power, but the debate proceeds
upon the facts and evidences of life: the appearance of Character
in history; whether the past be not full of the efforts of Love;
whether God had not, as human wilfulness permitted Him, achieved the
liberation and progress of His people.

God speaks:--

_My people, what have I done unto thee?_
_And how have I wearied thee--answer Me?_
_For I brought thee up from the land of Miṣraim,_
_And from the house of slavery I redeemed thee._
_I sent before thee Moses, Aharon and Miriam._
_My people, remember now what Balak king of Moab counselled,_
_And how he was answered by Bala'am, Be'or's son--_
_So that thou mayest know the righteous deeds of Jehovah._[899]

Always do the prophets go back to Egypt or the wilderness. There God
made the people, there He redeemed them. In lawbook as in prophecy,
it is the fact of redemption which forms the main ground of His
appeal. Redeemed by Him, the people are not their own, but His.
Treated with that wonderful love and patience, like patience and
love they are called to bestow upon the weak and miserable beneath
them.[900] One of the greatest interpreters of the prophets to our
own age, Frederick Denison Maurice, has said upon this passage: "We
do not know God till we recognise him as a Deliverer; we do not
understand our own work in the world till we believe we are sent into
it to carry out His designs for the deliverance of ourselves and the
race. The bondage I groan under is a bondage of the will. God is
emphatically the Redeemer of the will. It is in that character He
reveals Himself to us. We could not think of God at all as the God,
the living God, if we did not regard Him as such a Redeemer. But if
of my will, then of all wills: sooner or later I am convinced He will
be manifested as the Restorer, Regenerator--not of something else,
but of this--of the fallen spirit that is within us."

In most of the controversies which the prophets open between God and
man, the subject on the side of the latter is his sin. But that is
not so here. In the controversy which opens the Book of Micah the
argument falls upon the transgressions of the people, but here upon
their sincere though mistaken methods of approaching God. There God
deals with dull consciences, but here with darkened and imploring
hearts. In that case we had rebels forsaking the true God for idols,
but here are earnest seekers after God, who have lost their way and
are weary. Accordingly, as indignation prevailed there, here prevails
pity; and though formally this be a controversy under the same legal
form as before, the passage breathes tenderness and gentleness from
first to last. By this as well as by the recollections of the ancient
history of Israel we are reminded of the style of Hosea. But there is
no expostulation, as in his book, with the people's continued devotion
to ritual. All that is past, and a new temper prevails. Israel have at
last come to feel the vanity of the exaggerated zeal with which Amos
pictures them exceeding the legal requirements of sacrifice;[901] and
with a despair, sufficiently evident in the superlatives which they
use, they confess the futility and weariness of the whole system, even
in the most lavish and impossible forms of sacrifice. What then remains
for them to do? The prophet answers with the beautiful words, that
express an ideal of religion to which no subsequent century has ever
been able to add either grandeur or tenderness.

The people speak:--

_Wherewithal shall I come before Jehovah,_
_Shall I bow myself to God the Most High?_
_Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings,_
_With calves of one year?_
_Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams,_
_With myriads of rivers of oil?_
_Shall I give my firstborn for a guilt-offering,_[902]
_The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?_

The prophet answers:--

_He hath shown thee, O man, what is good;_
_And what is the LORD seeking from thee,_
_But to do justice and love mercy,_
_And humbly_[903] _to walk with thy God?_

This is the greatest saying of the Old Testament; and there is only
one other in the New which excels it:--

_Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest._
_Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in
heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls._
_For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light._

FOOTNOTES:

[898] See above, pp. 369 ff.

[899] Omitted from the above is the strange clause _from Shittim to
Gilgal_, which appears to be a gloss.

[900] See the passages on the subject in Professor Harper's work on
Deuteronomy in this series.

[901] See above, p. 161.

[902] See above, p. 370, on the futility of the argument which
because of this line would put the whole passage in Manasseh's reign.

[903] This word הצנע is only once used again, in Prov. xi. 2, in
another grammatical form, where also it might mean _humbly_. But the
root-meaning is evidently _in secret_, or _secretly_ (cf. the Aram.
צנע, to be hidden; צניע, one who lives noiselessly, humble, pious; in
the feminine of a bride who is modest); and it is uncertain whether
we should not take that sense here.

CHAPTER XXX

_THE SIN OF THE SCANT MEASURE_

MICAH vi. 9-vii. 6.

The state of the text of Micah vi. 9-vii. 6 is as confused as the
condition of society which it describes: it is difficult to get
reason, and impossible to get rhyme, out of the separate clauses. We
had best give it as it stands, and afterwards state the substance
of its doctrine, which, in spite of the obscurity of details, is,
as so often happens in similar cases, perfectly clear and forcible.
The passage consists of two portions, which may not originally have
belonged to each other, but which seem to reflect the same disorder
of civic life, with the judgment that impends upon it.[904] In the
first of them, vi. 9-16, the prophet calls for attention to the
voice of God, which describes the fraudulent life of Jerusalem, and
the evils He is bringing on her. In the second, vii. 1-6, Jerusalem
bemoans her corrupt society; but perhaps we hear her voice only in
ver. 1, and thereafter the prophet's.

The prophet speaks:--

_Hark! Jehovah crieth to the city!_
('_Tis salvation to fear Thy Name!_)[905]
_Hear ye, O tribe and council of the city!_ (?)[906]

God speaks:--

... in _the house of the wicked treasures of wickedness,_
_And the scant measure accursed!_
_Can she be pure with the evil balances,_
_And with the bag of false weights,_
_Whose rich men are full of violence,_[907]
_And her citizens speak falsehood,_
_And their tongue is deceit in their mouth?_
_But I on My part have begun to plague thee,_
_To lay_ thee _in ruin because of thy sins._
_Thou eatest and art not filled,_
_But thy famine_[908] _is in the very midst of thee!_
_And_ but _try to remove,_[909] _thou canst not bring off;_
_And what thou bringest off, I give to the sword._
_Thou sowest, but never reapest;_
_Treadest olives, but never anointest with oil,_
_And must, but not to drink wine!_
_So thou keepest the statutes of Omri,_[910]
_And the habits of the house of Ahab,_
_And walkest in their principles,_
Only _that I may give thee to ruin,_
_And her inhabitants for sport--_
_Yea, the reproach of the Gentiles_[911] _shall ye bear!_

Jerusalem speaks:--

_Woe, woe is me, for I am become like sweepings of harvest,_
_Like gleanings of the vintage--_
_Not a cluster to eat_, not _a fig that my soul lusteth after._
_Perished are the leal from the land,_
_Of the upright among men there is none:_
_All of them are lurking for blood;_
_Every man takes his brother in a net._
_Their hands are on evil to do it thoroughly._[912]
_The prince makes requisition,_
_The judge_ judgeth _for payment,_
_And the great man he speaketh his lust;_
_So_ together _they weave it out._
_The best of them is but a thorn thicket,_[913]
_The most upright_ worse _than a prickly hedge._[914]
_The day that thy sentinels_ saw, _thy visitation, draweth on;_
_Now is their havoc_[915] _come!_
_Trust not any friend! Rely on no confidant!_
_From her that lies in thy bosom guard the gates of thy mouth._
_For son insulteth father, daughter is risen against her mother,
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;_
_And the enemies of a man are the men of his house._

Micah, though the prophet of the country and stern critic of its
life, characterised Jerusalem herself as the centre of the nation's
sins. He did not refer to idolatry alone, but also to the irreligion
of the politicians, and the cruel injustice of the rich in the
capital. The poison which weakened the nation's blood had found
its entrance to their veins at the very heart. There had the evil
gathered which was shaking the state to a rapid dissolution.

This section of the Book of Micah, whether it be by that prophet
or not, describes no features of Jerusalem's life which were not
present in the eighth century; and it may be considered as the more
detailed picture of the evils he summarily denounced. It is one of
the most poignant criticisms of a commercial community which have
ever appeared in literature. In equal relief we see the meanest
instruments and the most prominent agents of covetousness and
cruelty--the scant measure, the false weights, the unscrupulous
prince and the venal judge. And although there are some sins
denounced which are impossible in our civilisation, yet falsehood,
squalid fraud, pitilessness of the everlasting struggle for life are
exposed exactly as we see them about us to-day. Through the prophet's
ancient and often obscure eloquence we feel just those shocks and
sharp edges which still break everywhere through our Christian
civilisation. Let us remember, too, that the community addressed by
the prophet was, like our own, professedly religious.

The most widespread sin with which the prophet charges Jerusalem in
these days of her commercial activity is falsehood: _Her inhabitants
speak lies, and their tongue is deceit in their mouth._ In Mr.
Lecky's _History of European Morals_ we find the opinion that "the
one respect in which the growth of industrial life has exercised a
favourable influence on morals has been in the promotion of truth." The
tribute is just, but there is another side to it. The exigencies of
commerce and industry are fatal to most of the conventional pretences,
insincerities and flatteries, which tend to grow up in all kinds of
society. In commercial life, more perhaps than in any other, a man
is taken, and has to be taken, in his inherent worth. Business, the
life which is called _par excellence_ Busy-ness, wears off every
mask, all false veneer and unction, and leaves no time for the cant
and parade which are so prone to increase in all other professions.
Moreover the soul of commerce is credit. Men have to show that they
can be trusted before other men will traffic with them, at least upon
that large and lavish scale on which alone the great undertakings of
commerce can be conducted. When we look back upon the history of trade
and industry, and see how they have created an atmosphere in which
men must ultimately seem what they really are; how they have of their
needs replaced the jealousies, subterfuges, intrigues, which were once
deemed indispensable to the relations of men of different peoples, by
large international credit and trust; how they break through the false
conventions that divide class from class, we must do homage to them, as
among the greatest instruments of the truth which maketh free.

But to all this there is another side. If commerce has exploded
so much conventional insincerity, it has developed a species of
the genus which is quite its own. In our days nothing can lie like
an advertisement. The saying "the tricks of the trade" has become
proverbial. Every one knows that the awful strain and harassing of
commercial life is largely due to the very amount of falseness that
exists. The haste to be rich, the pitiless rivalry and competition,
have developed a carelessness of the rights of others to the truth
from ourselves, with a capacity for subterfuge and intrigue, which
reminds one of nothing so much as that state of barbarian war out of
which it was the ancient glory of commerce to have assisted mankind
to rise. Are the prophet's words about Jerusalem too strong for large
portions of our own commercial communities? Men who know these best
will not say that they are. But let us cherish rather the powers
of commerce which make for truth. Let us tell men who engage in
trade that there are none for whom it is more easy to be clean and
straight; that lies, whether of action or of speech, only increase
the mental expense and the moral strain of life; and that the health,
the capacity, the foresight, the opportunities of a great merchant
depend ultimately on his resolve to be true and on the courage with
which he sticks to the truth.

One habit of falseness on which the prophet dwells is the use of
unjust scales and short measures. The _stores_ or fortunes of his
day are _stores of wickedness_, because they have been accumulated
by the use of the _lean ephah_, the _balances of wrong_ and _the
bag of false weights_. These are evils more common in the East than
with us: modern government makes them almost impossible. But, all
the same, ours is the sin of the scant measure, and the more so in
proportion to the greater speed and rivalry of our commercial life.
The prophet's name for it, _measure of leanness_, of _consumption_ or
_shrinkage_, is a proper symbol of all those duties and offices of
man to man, the full and generous discharge of which is diminished
by the haste and the grudge of a prevalent selfishness. The speed
of modern life tends to shorten the time expended on every piece of
work, and to turn it out untempered and incomplete. The struggle for
life in commerce, the organised rivalry between labour and capital,
not only puts every man on his guard against giving any other more
than his due, but tempts him to use every opportunity to scamp and
curtail his own service and output. You will hear men defend this
parsimony as if it were a law. They say that business is impossible
without the temper which they call "sharpness" or the habit which
they call "cutting it fine." But such character and conduct are the
very decay of society. The shrinkage of the units must always and
everywhere mean the disintegration of the mass. A society whose
members strive to keep within their duties is a society which cannot
continue to cohere. Selfishness may be firmness, but it is the
firmness of frost, the rigour of death. Only the unselfish excess
of duty, only the generous loyalty to others, give to society the
compactness and indissolubleness of life. Who is responsible for the
enmity of classes, and the distrust which exists between capital and
labour? It is the workman whose one aim is to secure the largest
amount of wages for the smallest amount of work, and who will, in
his blind pursuit of that, wreck the whole trade of a town or a
district; it is the employer who believes he has no duties to his men
beyond paying them for their work the least that he can induce them
to take; it is the customer who only and ever looks to the cheapness
of an article--procurer in that prostitution of talent to the work
of scamping which is fast killing art, and joy and all pity for the
bodies and souls of our brothers. These are the true anarchists and
breakers-up of society. On their methods social coherence and harmony
are impossible. Life itself is impossible. No organism can thrive
whose various limbs are ever shrinking in upon themselves. There is
no life except by living to others.

But the prophet covers the whole evil when he says that the _pious
are perished out of the land_. _Pious_ is a translation of despair.
The original means the man distinguished by "ḥesedh," that word which
we have on several occasions translated _leal love_, because it
implies not only an affection but loyalty to a relation. And, as the
use of the word frequently reminds us, "ḥesedh" is love and loyalty
both to God and to our fellow-men. We need not dissociate these: they
are one. But here it is the human direction in which the word looks.
It means a character which fulfils all the relations of society with
the fidelity, generosity and grace, which are the proper affections
of man to man. Such a character, says the prophet, is perished from
the land. Every man now lives for himself, and as a consequence preys
upon his brother. _They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every
man his brother with a net._ This is not murder which the prophet
describes: it is the reckless, pitiless competition of the new
conditions of life developed in Judah by the long peace and commerce
of the eighth century. And he carries this selfishness into a very
striking figure in ver. 4: _The best of them is as a thorn thicket,
the most upright_ worse _than a prickly hedge_. He realises exactly
what we mean by sharpness and sharp-dealing: bristling self-interest,
all points; splendid in its own defence, but barren of fruit, and
without nest or covert for any life.

FOOTNOTES:

[904] See above, pp. 370 ff.

[905] Probably a later parenthesis. The word תושׁיה is one which,
unusual in the prophets, the Wisdom literature has made its own Prov.
ii. 7, xviii. 1; Job v. 12, etc. For _Thy_ LXX. read _His_.

[906] Translation of LXX. emended by Wellhausen so as to read העיר
מועד, the עיר being obtained by taking and transferring the עוד of
the next verse, and relieving that verse of an unusual formation,
viz. עוד before the interrogative האש. But for an instance of עוד
preceding an interrogative see Gen. xix. 12.

[907] The text of the two preceding verses, which is acknowledged to
be corrupt, must be corrected by the undoubted 3rd feminine suffix
in this one--"_her_ rich men." Throughout the reference must be to
the city. We ought therefore to change האזכה of ver. 11 into התזכה,
which agrees with the LXX. δικαιωθήσεται. Ver. 10 is more uncertain,
but for the same reason that "the city" is referred to throughout vv.
9-12, it is possible that it is the nominative to זעומה; translate
"cursed with the short measure." Again for אצרות LXX. read אֹצְרוֹת
אוֹצֶרֶת, to which also the city would be nominative. And this
suggests the query whether in the letters בית האש, that make little
sense as they stand in the Massoretic Text, there was not originally
another feminine participle. The recommendation of a transformation
of this kind is that it removes the abruptness of the appearance of
the 3rd feminine suffix in ver. 12.

[908] The word is found only here. The stem יחשׁ is no doubt the same
as the Arabic verb waḥash, which in Form V. means "Inami ventre fuit
præ fame; vacuum reliquit stomachum" (Freytag). In modern colloquial
Arabic waḥsha means a "longing for an absent friend."

[909] Jussive. The objects removed can hardly be goods, as Hitzig and
others infer; for it is to _the sword_ they afterwards fall. They
must be persons.

[910] LXX. _Zimri_.

[911] So LXX.; but Heb. _My people_.

[912] Uncertain.

[913] Cf. Prov. xv. 19.

[914] Roorda, by rearranging letters and clauses (some of them
after LXX.), and by changing points, gets a reading which may be
rendered: _For evil are their hands! To do good the prince demandeth
a bribe, and the judge, for the reward of the great, speaketh what
he desireth. And they entangle the good more than thorns, and the
righteous more than a thorn hedge._

[915] Cf. Isa. xxii. 5.

CHAPTER XXXI

_OUR MOTHER OF SORROWS_

MICAH vii. 7-20.

After so stern a charge, so condign a sentence, confession is
natural, and, with prayer for forgiveness and praise to the mercy
of God, it fitly closes the whole book. As we have seen,[916] the
passage is a cento of several fragments, from periods far apart in
the history of Israel. One historical allusion suits best the age of
the Syrian wars; another can only refer to the day of Jerusalem's
ruin. In spirit and language the Confessions resemble the prayers of
the Exile. The Doxology has echoes of several Scriptures.[917]

But from these fragments, it may be of many centuries, there rises
clear the One Essential Figure: Israel, all her secular woes upon
her; our Mother of Sorrows, at whose knees we learned our first
prayers of confession and penitence. Other nations have been our
teachers in art and wisdom and government. But she is our mistress in
pain and in patience, teaching men with what conscience they should
bear the chastening of the Almighty, with what hope and humility they
should wait for their God. Surely not less lovable, but only more
human, that her pale cheeks flush for a moment with the hate of the
enemy and the assurance of revenge. Her passion is soon gone, for she
feels her guilt to be greater; and, seeking forgiveness, her last
word is what man's must ever be, praise to the grace and mercy of God.

Israel speaks:--

_But I will look for the LORD,_
_I will wait for the God of my salvation:_
_My God will hear me!_
_Rejoice not, O mine enemy, at me:_
_If I be fallen, I rise;_
_If I sit in the darkness, the LORD is a light to me._

_The anger of the LORD will I bear--_
_For I have sinned against Him--_
_Until that He take up my quarrel,_
_And execute my right._
_He will carry me forth to the light;_
_I will look on His righteousness:_
_So shall mine enemy see, and shame cover her,_
_She that saith unto me, Where is Jehovah thy God?--_
_Mine eyes shall see her,_
_Now is she for trampling, like mire in the streets!_

The prophet[918] responds:--

_A day for the building of thy walls shall that day be!_
_Broad shall thy border be_[919] _on that day!_

...[920]_and shall come to thee_
_From Assyria unto Egypt, and from Egypt to the River,_
_And to Sea from Sea, and Mountain from Mountain;_[921]
_Though_[922] _the land be waste on account of her inhabitants,_
_Because of the fruit of their doings._

An Ancient Prayer:--

_Shepherd Thy people with Thy staff,_
_The sheep of Thy heritage dwelling solitarily...._[923]
_May they pasture in Bashan and Gilead as in days of old!_
_As in the days when Thou wentest forth from the land of Miṣraim, give
us wonders to see!_
_Nations shall see and despair of all their might;_
_Their hands to their mouths shall they put,_
_Their ears shall be deafened._
_They shall lick the dust like serpents;_
_Like worms of the ground from their fastnesses,_
_To Jehovah our God they shall come trembling,_
_And in fear before Thee!_

A Doxology:--

_Who is a God like to Thee? Forgiving iniquity,_
_And passing by transgression, to the remnant of His heritage;_
_He keepeth not hold of His anger for ever,_
_But One who delighteth in mercy is He;_
_He will come back, He will pity us,_
_He will tread underfoot our iniquities--_
_Yea, Thou wilt cast to the depths of the sea every one of our sins._
_Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob, leal love to Abraham,_
_As Thou hast sworn to our fathers from the days of yore._

FOOTNOTES:

[916] Above, pp. 372 ff.

[917] Cf. with it Exod. xxxiv. 6, 7 (J); Jer. iii. 5, l. 20; Isa.
lvii. 16; Psalms ciii. 9, cv. 9, 10.

[918] It was a woman who spoke before, the People or the City. But
the second personal pronouns to which this reply of the prophet is
addressed are all masculine. Notice the same change in vi. 9-16
(above p. 427).

[919] ירחק־חק, Ewald: "distant the date." Notice the assonance. It
explains the use of the unusual word for _border_. LXX. _thy border_.
The LXX. also takes into ver. 11 (as above) the הוא יום of ver. 12.

[920] Something has probably been lost here.

[921] For ההר read מהר.

[922] It is difficult to get sense when translating the conjunction
in any other way. But these two lines may belong to the following.

[923] The words omitted above are literally _jungle in the midst
of gardenland_ or _Carmel_. Plausible as it would be to take the
proper name Carmel here along with Bashan and Gilead (see _Hist.
Geog._, 338), the connection prefers the common noun _garden_ or
_gardenland_: translate "dwelling alone like a bit of jungle in the
midst of cultivated land." Perhaps the clause needs rearrangement:
יערבתוככרמל, with a verb to introduce it. Yet compare כַּרְמִלּוֹ
יַעַר, 2 Kings xix. 23; Isa. xxxvii. 24.

INDEX OF PASSAGES AND TEXTS

_A single text will always be found treated in the exposition of the
passage to which it belongs. Only the other important references
to it are given in this index. In the second of the columns Roman
numerals indicate the chapters, Arabic numerals the pages._

AMOS

i., ii. 62

i. 1 61, 67 f., 69 _n._

i. 2 81, 93, 98

i. 3-ii. VII.

ii. 13 72

iii.-vi. 62 ff.

iii.-iv. 3 62, 63, VIII.

iii. 3-8 81 ff., 89 ff., 196

iii. 7 198

iv. 4-13 IX., Sec. 1; 199 f.

iv. 11 68

iv. 12 197

iv. 13 164, 201 ff.

v. 63; IX., Sec. 2

v. 8, 9 166, 201 ff.

v. 26, 27 108, 170 ff., 204

vi. 63; IX., Sec. 3

vi. 9, 10 IX., Sec. 4

vi. 12 198

vii.-ix. 63 f.

vii.-viii. 4 70; V., Sec. 3

vii. 218

vii. 12 28 f.

vii. 14, 15 27, 74, 76 ff.

viii. 4-ix. 64; X.

viii. 4-14 X., Sec. 1

viii. 8 68, 95, 198

viii. 9 66, 95

ix. 1-6 64; X., Sec. 2

ix. 1 111, 151

ix. 5, 6 201 ff.

ix. 7-15 64; X., Sec. 3

HOSEA

i. 1, _Title_ 215 _n._ 1

i.-iii. 211, 212 ff.; XIV.; XXIII.

i. 7 213 _n._ 1

ii. 1-3 213, 249 _n._ 2

ii. 8 341

ii. 9 335

ii. 10 328

iii. 1 214

iii. 5 214

iv.-xiv. 215 ff.; XV.

iv.-vii. 7 223; XVI.

iv. XVI., Sec. 1

iv. 1 323

iv. 2 320

iv. 4 221 _n._ 4

iv. 4-9 324

iv. 6 320, 326, 330

iv. 9 335

iv. 12-14 241, 282, 323; XXIII.

iv. 15 224

iv. 17 342

v. 1-14 XVI., Sec. 2

v. 5 225, 337 f.

v. 10, 12-14 225

v. 15-vii. 2 XVI., Sec. 3

v. 14-vi. 1 222

vi. 1-4 344

vi. 5 221 _n._ 3

vi. 8, 9 216

vi. 11-vii. 1 222

vii. 3-7 XVI., Sec. 4

vii. 8-x. XVII.

vii. 8-viii. 3 XVII., Sec. 1

vii. 9-11 323, 337

vii. 16 335 _n._ 1

viii. 4-13 XVII., Sec. 2

viii. 4 221 _n._ 4

viii. 5 341

viii. 10 221 _n._ 6

viii. 13 221 _n._ 7

viii. 14 224

ix. 1-9 XVII., Sec. 3

ix. 1 340

ix. 2 221 _n._ 6

ix. 7 28, 222 _n._ 1

ix. 8, 9 222 _n._ 1

ix. 10-17 XVII., Sec. 4; XXIII.

ix. 17 222 _n._ 2

x. XVII., Sec. 5

x. 1, 2 38 _n._ 4

x. 5 221 _n._ 6 (read x. 5); 341, 342

x. 9 327 _n._ 10

x. 11, 12 225, 344 f.

x. 13 221 _n._ 6

x. 14 217 _n._ 5

x. 15 221 _n._ 6

xi. XVIII.

xi. 1 327

xi. 2-4 221 _nn._ 1-4

xi. 5 221 _n._ 4, 336 _n._ 2

xi. 8 XXIII.; 351

xii.-xiv. 1 XIX.

xii. XIX., Sec. 1

xii. 1 225

xii. 2 221 _n._ 6

xii. 3 225

xii. 4, 5 326

xii. 7 345

xii. 8 33

xii. 13, 14 327

xiii.-xiv. 1 XIX., Sec. 2

xiii. 2 342

xiii. 4 203, 226

xiii. 6 327, 330

xiii. 7 330 f.

xiv. 2-10 XX.

xiv. 3 343

xiv. 5 335 _n._ 1

xiv. 6-9 233

MICAH

i. 1, _Title_ 358

i.-iii. 358, 360, 362 ff.

i. 362 f.; XXV.

ii., iii. 363, 364; XXVI.

ii. 12, 13 359, 360, 362, 393 _n._ 1

iii. 14 363 _n._ 2

iv., v. 357, 358, 360, 365 ff.

iv. 1-7 XXVII.

iv. 1-5 358, 365

iv. 5 367

iv. 6-8 358, 367

iv. 8-13 367

iv. 8-v. XXVIII.

iv. 9-14 358, 359

iv. 11-13 358

iv. 14-v. 8 368

v. 8 359

v. 9-14 368

vi., vii. 357, 358, 359, 360, 369

vi. 1-8 369; XXIX.

vi. 9-vii. 6 XXX.

vi. 9-16 370

vii. 1-6 359, 371

vii. 7-20 359, 372 ff.; XXXI.

vii. 11 373

vii. 14-17 373

vii. 18-20 373

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout.

Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.

Page 364: Verse references have been updated to reflect their actual
references.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. I - Commonly Called the Minor" ***

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