Bathsheba’s function at Solomon’s marriage is celebrated in the Song of Songs:

Bathsheba, as we have seen, was said to have written Proverbs xxxi. as an admonition or reproof to her son on his betrothal with the daughter of Pharaoh. The words of David, “Send me Uriah the Hittite” (2 Sam. xi. 6), and the emphasis laid on Uriah’s being a Hittite (a race with which intermarriage was prohibited, Deut. vii. 1–5) might have been meant as some legal excuse for David’s conduct. He rescued Bathsheba, Hebraised (1 Chr. iii. 5), from unlawful wedlock, it might be said, and her exaltation in Talmudic tradition may have been meant to guard the purity of David’s lineage. But the ascription to Bathsheba of especial opposition to her son’s marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh indicates that the gravamen in Solomon’s posthumous offence lay less in his intermarriage with foreigners than in building for them shrines of their several deities,—Istar, Chemosh, Milcom, and the rest. Against Pharaoh’s daughter the Talmud manifests a special animus: she is said to have introduced to Solomon a thousand musical instruments, and taught him chants to the various idols. (Shabbath, 56, col. 2.)

There is a bit of Solomonic folklore according to which the Devil tempted him with a taunt that he would be but an ordinary person but for his magic ring, in which lay all his wisdom. Solomon being piqued into a denial, was challenged to remove his ring, but no sooner had he done so than the Devil seized it, and, having by its might metamorphosed the king beyond recognition, himself assumed the appearance of Solomon and for some time resided in the royal seraglio. The more familiar legend is that Solomon was cajoled into parting with his signet ring by a promise of the demon to reveal to him the secret of demonic superiority over man in power. Having transformed Solomon and transported him four hundred miles away, the demon (Asmodeus) threw the ring into the sea. Solomon, after long vagrancy, became the cook of the king of Ammon (Ano Hanun), with whose daughter, Naamah, he eloped.1 One day in dressing a fish for dinner Naamah found in it the signet ring which Asmodeus had thrown into the sea, and Solomon thus recovered his palace and harem from the demon.

The connexion of this fish-and-ring legend,—known in several versions, from the Ring of Polycrates (Herodotus III.) to the heraldic legend of Glasgow,—with the Solomonic demonology, looks as if it may once have been part of a theory that the idolatrous shrines were built for the princesses while the Devil was personating their lord. In truth, however, all of these animadversions belong to a comparatively late period. Many struggles had to precede even the recognition of the idolatrous character of the shrines, and to the last the Jews were generally proud of the “graven images” in their temple,—including brazen reproductions of the terrible Golden Calf. At the same time there were no doubt some old priests and soothsayers to whom these new-fangled things were injurious and odious, and superstitious people enough to cling to their ancient unhewn altar rather than to the brilliant cherubim, just as in Catholic countries the devotees cannot be drawn from their age-blackened Madonnas and time-stained crucifixes by the most attractive works of modern art.

Although there is no evidence that the God of Israel was known under the name of either Jah or Jahveh in Solomon’s time, there is little doubt that the rudimentary forces of Jahvism were felt in the Solomonic age. The furious prophetic denunciations of the wise and learned which echoed on through the centuries, and made the burden of St. Paul, indicate that there was from the first much superstition among the peasantry, which might easily in times of distress be fanned into fanaticism. The special denunciation of Solomon by Jahveh, and his suppression during the prophetic age, could hardly have been possible but for some extreme defiance on his part of the primitive priesthood and the soothsayers. The temple was dedicated by the king himself without the help of any priest, and the monopoly of the prophet was taken away by the establishment of an oracle in the temple. And the worst was that these things indicated a genuine liberation of the king, intellectually, from the superstitions out of which Jahvism grew. This was especially proved by his disregard of the sanctuary claimed by the murderer Joab, who had laid hold of the horns of the altar. The altar was the precinct of deity, and beyond the jurisdiction of civil or military authority; yet when the “man of blood” refused to leave the altar our royal forerunner of Erastus compelled the reluctant executioner to slay him at the altar,—even the sacred altar of unhewn stone. As no thunderbolt fell from heaven on the king for this sacrilege, the act could not fail to be a thunderbolt from earth striking the phantasmal heaven of the priest. The Judgment Day for settlement of such accounts was not yet invented, and injuries of the gods were left to the vengeance of their priests and prophets.

There is an unconscious humour in the solemn reading by English clergymen of Jahvist rebukes of Solomon for his tolerance towards idolatry, at a time when the Queen of England and Empress of India is protecting temples and idols throughout her realm, and has just rebuilt the ancient temple of Buddha at Gâya; while the sacred laws of Brahman, Buddhist, Parsee, Moslem, are used in English courts of justice. If any modern Josiah should insult a shrine of Vishnu, or of any Hindu deity, he would have to study his exemplar inside a British prison.

When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem must have been a wretched place, without any art or architecture, with a swarming mongrel population, mainly of paupers. The holy ark was kept in a tent, and the altar of unhewn stone accurately symbolised the rude condition of the people, among whom Solomon could find no workmen of skill enough to build a temple. It is not easy to forgive him for compelling a good many of them into the public works; but it was probably no more than a national conscription of the unemployed paupers in Jerusalem, chiefly on fortifications for their own defence. There was apparently no slave-mart, and it seems rather better to conscript people for public industries than, in our modern way, for cutting their neighbors’ throats. Most of them were the remnants of tribes that once occupied the region, much despised by the Israelites, and probably they looked on Solomon’s plan of building Jerusalem into a city of magnificence, giving everybody employment and support, as a grand socialistic movement. An Ephraimite, Jeroboam, who tried to get up a revolt in Jerusalem does not seem to have found any adherents. The only people who complained of any yoke—and their complaint is only heard of after some centuries—were the priest-ridden and prophet-ridden Israelites who had become fanatically excited about the strange shrines built for the king’s foreign wives, and the splendid carvings and forms in the temple itself. Probably the first two commandments in the decalogue were put there with special reference to some Solomonic cult with an æsthetic taste for graven images and foreign shrines.

There can be little doubt that Solomon, by his patronage of these foreign religions, detached them from the cruel rites traditionally associated with them. Among all the censures pronounced against him none attributes to him any human sacrifices, though such are ascribed to David and Samuel, (1 Sam. xv. 33, 2 Sam. xxi. 9). The earliest rebukes of sacrifice in the Bible are those attributed to Solomon. “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Prov. xxi. 3). “By mercy and truth iniquity is atoned for” (Prov. xvi. 6). “Mercy and truth preserve the king; he upholdeth his throne by mercy” (Prov. xx. 28). “Deliver them that are carried away to death: those that are ready to be slain forbear not thou to save” (Prov. xxiv. 11). “Love covereth all transgressions” (Prov. x. 12).

Solomon may not indeed have written these and the many similar maxims ascribed to him, but they are among the most ancient sentences in the Bible, and they would not have been attributed to any man who had not left among the people a tradition of humanity and benevolence. Had the royal “idolator” or his wives stained their shrines with human blood the prophets would have been eager to declare it. Two acts of cruelty are ascribed to Solomon’s youth, in the book of Kings: one of these, the execution of Shimei, carried out his father’s order, but only after Shimei had been given fair warning with means of escape; while the other, the execution of Adonijah (Solomon’s brother), if true, is too much wrapped up in obscurity to enable us to judge its motives; but it cannot be regarded as historical.

The second historiographer of Kings, setting out to record Jahveh’s anger about Solomon’s foreign wives and shrines (1 Kings xi) says, with unconscious humour, that Jahveh raised Satan against him,—two Satans. One of these was Hadad, an Edomite, the other Rezon, a Syrian. The writer says that this was when Solomon was old, his wives having then turned away his heart after other gods. Fortunately, however, this writer has embodied in his record some items, evidently borrowed, which contradict his Jahvistic legend. One of these tells us that Hadad had been carried away from Edom to Egypt, when David and his Captain Joab massacred all the males in Edom; that he there married the sister of Pharaoh; and that he returned to his own country on hearing of the death of David and Joab. When this occurred, Solomon, so far from being old, was about eighteen. The Septuagint (Vatican MS.) says that Hadad “reigned in the land of Edom.” We may conclude then that on the return of this heir to the throne Edom declared its independence, nor is there any indication that Solomon tried to prevent this. Another contradiction of this writer is a note inserted about Rezon the Syrian,—“He was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon.” Not, therefore, a Satan raised up by Jahveh against Solomon when in old age he had turned to other gods. Rezon “reigned over Syria,” and there is no indication of any expedition against him sent out by Solomon. Bishop Colenso (Pentateuch, Vol. III., p. 101), in referring to these points remarks that we do not read of a single warlike expedition undertaken by Solomon.1

The remark (1 Kings xi.) about the Satans set against Solomon is more applicable to the Shiloh traitors, Ahijah and Jeroboam. Jeroboam,—a servant whom Solomon had raised to high office,—was instigated by Ahijah, a “prophet” neglected by Solomon, to his ungrateful treason. Ahijah pretended that he had a divine revelation that he (Jeroboam) was to succeed Solomon on account (of course!) of the king’s shrines to Istar, Chemosh, and Milcom. If the narrative were really historic nothing could be more “Satanic” than the lies and treacheries related of those self-seekers. Were the story true, the failure of these divinely appointed “Satans” to overthrow the kingdom of Solomon, who did not arm against them, must have been due to his popularity. In after times this impunity of the glorious “idolator” would have to be explained; consequently we find Jahveh telling Solomon that, offended as he was by the shrines, he would spare him for his father’s sake, but would rend the kingdom, save one tribe, from his (Solomon’s) son. That this should be immediately followed by the raising up of “Satans” to harass Solomon and Israel, Jahveh having just said the trouble should be postponed till after the king’s death, suggests that the whole account of these quarrels (1 Kings xi. 14–40) is a late interpolation. Up to that point the old record is unbroken. “He had peace on all sides round about him. And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon” (1 Kings iv. 24–25).

Jahveh, in his personal interview with Solomon (1 Kings xi. 11–13), said, “I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant.” That is, as explained by the “prophet” Ahijah, to Jeroboam. As a retribution and check on idolatry the selection, besides violating Jahveh’s promise to David (1 Chron. xxii), was not successful: after the sundering of Israel and Judah into internecine kingdoms, Jeroboam, King of Israel, established idolatry more actively than either Solomon or his son Rehoboam. On Jeroboam, his selected Nemesis, Jahveh inflicted his characteristic punishment of visiting the sins of the fathers on the children; as David was left the seduced wife whose husband he had murdered, while his son was executed; as Solomon was left in peaceful enjoyment of his kingdom and none of the sinful shrines destroyed, while his son bore the penalty; so now Jeroboam, elect of Jahveh, built golden calves, surpassed Solomon’s offences, and vengeance was taken on his son Abijah, who died. This Abijah left a son, Baasha, who, undeterred by these fatalities, continued the “idolatries” with impunity for the twenty-four years of his reign, the punishment falling on his son Elah, who was slain after only two years’ reign by his military servant, Zimri. And this Zimri, who thus carried on Jahveh’s decree against idolatry, himself continued “in the ways of Jeroboam,” the shrines and idols themselves being meanwhile unvisited by any executioner or iconoclast until some centuries later.

In Josiah there arrived a king, of the line of David, who might seem by his fury against idolatry to be another “man after God’s own heart.” He pulverised the images and the shrines, he “sacrificed the priests on their own altars,” he even dug up the bones of those who had ministered at such altars and burnt them. He trusted Jahveh absolutely. He went to the prophetess, Hulda, who told him that he should be “gathered to his grave in peace.” He was slain miserably, by the King of Egypt, to whom the country then became subject.

Josephus ascribed the act of Josiah, in hurling himself against an army that was not attacking him, to fate. The fate was that Josiah, having exterminated the wizards and fortune-tellers, repaired to the only dangerous one among them, because she pretended to be a “prophetess,” inspired by Jahveh. Her assurances led him to believe himself invulnerable, personally, and that in his life-time Jerusalem would not suffer the woes she predicted. Josiah, “of the house of David,” seems to have thought that his zeal in destroying the shrines which his ancestor Solomon had introduced, mainly Egyptian, would be so grandly consummated if he could destroy a Pharaoh, that he insisted on a combat. Pharaoh-Necho sent an embassy to say that he was not his enemy, but on his way to fight the Assyrian: “God commanded me to hasten; forbear thou from opposing God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not.” Here, however, was the fanatic’s opportunity for an Armageddon: Pharaoh had appealed to what Solomon would have regarded as their common deity, but which to Josiah meant a chance to pit Jahveh against the God of Egypt. On Jahveh’s invisible forces he must have depended for victory. So perished Josiah, and with him the independence of his country.

Solomon, the Prince of Peace, had made the house of Pharaoh the ally of his country. Josiah carries his people back under Egyptian bondage. Solomon had built the metropolitan Temple, whose shrines, symbols, works of art, represented a catholicity to all races and religions,—peace on earth, good will to man. Josiah, panic-stricken about a holy book purporting to have been found in the Temple, concerning which the king by his counsellors consulted a female fortune-teller, makes a holocaust of all that Solomon had built up.

“And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of Jahveh, Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jahveh.” (2 Chron. xxxiv. 14, 15.) The Chronicler adds to the earlier account (2 Kings xxii. 8) the words “given by Moses,” which looks as if the authenticity of the book (Deuteronomy) had not been without question. The finding of the Book is set forth in a sort of picture, wherein are grouped the priest, the theologian, the phantom prophet, the deity, the temple, and the contribution-box. Every part of the ecclesiastical machine is present.

One is irresistibly reminded of the finding of the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, although it would be unfair to ascribe Deuteronomist atrocities to the revelations of the American phantom, Mormon. Nor is this a mere coincidence. There are lists of the early Mormons which show a large proportion of them to have borne Old Testament names, derived from Puritan ancestors. When Solomon set up his philosophic throne at Harvard University, and the parishes of the Pilgrims became Unitarian, and Boston became artistic, literary, and worldly, the Jahvists began to migrate, carrying with them their Sabbatarian Ark, in which so many frontier communities are imprisoned “unto this day.” Some of them have become conquerors of Hawaiian “Canaanites,” appropriating their lands. But the Vermont Hilkiah, Joseph Smith, discerned that a new Deuteronomy was needed to deal with the many American sects, and was guided by an Angel of the Lord to a spot in Ontario County, New York, where the Book was found (1827), which he was enabled to translate by the aid of his “Urim and Thummim” spectacles, found beside the Book. In the Book were discussed the principles of all the sects, though not by name, as in Deuteronomy Moses is made to deal with the conditions which had arisen since the time of Solomon. Unfortunately for these American Jahvists, they had left the New English brains behind, with Channing and Emerson, and had not carried with them enough to produce a western Jeremiah to save their movement from ridicule and popular hatred.

“Thy words were found and I did eat them,” says Jeremiah (xv. 16). Whether, as some scholars think, Jeremiah had any part in the composition of the Book “found,” or not, his rage attests the existence at the time of an important Solomonic School. “How say you, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Behold the lying pen of the scribes has turned it to a fiction.” (viii. 8.) “They are grown strong in the land but not for the faith.” (ix. 3.) “Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might.” (ix. 23.)

The Deuteronomist especially aims at suppression of the Solomonic cult and régime. The law, not found in Exodus, against marriage with foreigners (Deut. vii. 3) is especially turned against Solomon’s example by the addition that such a marriage will “turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.” The wife, or other member of a man’s family, who entices him to serve other gods, is to be stoned to death. (xiii. 6–11.) Moses is represented as anticipating the setting up of kings, and even the particular events of Solomon’s reign. Solomon’s “forty thousand stalls of horses” (1 Kings iv. 26), his horses brought out of Egypt (1 Kings x. 28), his wives, his silver and gold, are all foreseen by the ancient lawgiver, who provides that: “He [your king] shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply horses ... neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away; neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.” (Deut. xvii. 16, 17.)

This Deuteronomist Moses foresaw, too, that some check on the divine appointments to the throne would be needed. “Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee whom thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set over thee: thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee.” As all of these commandments were received by Moses from Jahveh himself (Deut. vi. 1, and elsewhere), it is worthy of remark that there should be no trace of that anger with which Jahveh met the proposal for a monarchy: “they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” (1 Sam. viii.) In 1776 Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, used this scriptural denunciation of kings with much effect, and it no doubt contributed much to overthrow British monarchy in America.

The special denunciations of sun-worship in Deuteronomy (iv. 19, xvii. 3) suggest a probability that Solomon’s allusion to the sun, when dedicating the temple, may have been popularly associated with the punishable practice alluded to in Job xxxi. 26, of kissing the hand to the sun and moon. The words of Solomon are cancelled in the Massoretic text, and do not appear in any English version, but they are preserved by the LXX., and there declared to be in the book of Jasher. “They are,” says Dr. Briggs, “recognised by the best modern critics as belonging to the original text [of 1 Kings viii. 12, 13] which then would read:

This suppression of the opening line of the Dedication, at cost of a grand poetic antithesis, reveals the hand of mere bigoted ignorance. How many other fine things have been eliminated, how many reduced to commonplaces, we know not, but the additions and interpolations in the Old Testament have been nearly all traced. Many of these are novelettes more prurient than the tales forbidden in families when found in the pages of Boccaccio and Balzac, and it is a notable evidence of the mere fetish that the Bible has become to most sects, that a chorus of abuse instead of welcome still meets the scholars who prove the quasi-spurious character of the most odious stories in Genesis.

Bishop Colenso seems to have found in such tales only the work of a Jahvist with a taste for obscene details, but too little attention has been paid to the investigations of Bernstein, who discovers in many of these legends a late Ephraimic effort to blacken the character of the whole house and line of Judah.2 Bernstein does not deal with the story of Adonijah and Jedidiah (Solomon), whose relative antiquity is shown, I think, in the fact that no shameful action is ascribed to the elder brother to account for the deprivation of his primogenitive right. After Solomon’s accession, however, Adonijah proposed to marry the maiden Abishag, who technically belonged to his father’s harem, and probably this tradition gave a cue to the inventor of the story of Absalom’s having gone to his father’s concubines in order to base on the act a claim to the kingdom while his father was yet alive.

Absalom’s shameful action is supposed to be a fulfilment of the sentence pronounced against David because of his crime against Uriah. A close examination of that passage (2 Sam. xii. 10–14) must suggest doubts about verses 11, 12, but at any rate the sentence is not fulfilled by Absalom’s alleged act: David’s “wives” were not taken away “before his eyes,” and given “unto his neighbor,” but some of his concubines were appropriated by his son. Absalom’s act (2 Sam. xvi. 20–23) and that of David’s consigning the concubines to perpetual isolation or imprisonment (2 Sam. xx. 3) are not alluded to in David’s mourning for Absalom, nor in Joab’s rebuke of this grief. In these strange incoherent items one seems to find the debris, so to say, of some masterly work, picturing a sort of Nemesis pursuing David and his family for the crime against Uriah. Ahithophel, who is described as “the word of God,” was the grandfather of Bathsheba and the chief friend and counsellor of David, yet it was he who suddenly becomes a traitor to the King, foreshadowing Judas—as his sinister name (“brother of lies”) implies—even to the extent of hanging himself. It was Bathsheba’s grandfather who moved Absalom to dishonor his father’s concubines. But were they only concubines in the original story, or were they David’s wives, as predicted in the verses 11, 12 (2 Sam. xii.) which seem misplaced and unfulfilled? It may have been that some of the details of the story were too gross for preservation, or too disgraceful to David, but I cannot think that we possess in its original form the tragedy suggested by the presence of an ancestor of seduced Bathsheba,—the sinister “word of God” Ahithophel,—and the death of the child of that adultery, the deflowering of Tamar, David’s daughter, the disgrace and violent death of Amnon, Absalom, apparently of Daniel also, and finally of Adonijah. What became of the eight wives of David? Was that prediction ascribed to Nathan, of their defilement, without any corresponding narrative?

In a previous chapter I have pointed out the improbability that the fatal wrath of Solomon against Adonijah could have been excited by his brother’s proposal of honorable wedlock with the maiden Abishag, and conjectured that there may have been a story, now lost, of rivalry between the brothers for this “very fair” damsel. Whatever may have been the real history there is little doubt that there was substituted for it some real offence by Adonijah, perhaps such as that afterwards ascribed to Absalom. Bathsheba herself is here the Nemesis, as her grandfather is in the case of Absalom.

It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with the age which produced the thrilling story of Joseph and his brothers, and Potiphar’s wife, and the contrast with his chastity represented in the profligacy of Judah. Indications have been left in Gen. xxxv. at the end of verse 22 of the suppression of a story of Reuben and Bilhah, and no doubt there were other suppressions. How very bad the story of Reuben was we may judge, as Bernstein points out, by the severity of his condemnation by Jacob (Gen. xlix.) and by the shocking things about Judah (Gen. xxxviii.) allowed to remain in the text. In the latter chapter Bernstein finds the same personages,—David, Bathsheba, Solomon,—acting in a similar drama to that presented in the Samuel fragments, and under their disguises may perhaps be discovered some of the details suppressed in the Davidic records. Bernstein says:

“In Genesis xxxviii. Judah, the fourth son of the patriarch, is shown in a light which is to lay bare the stain of his existence. Judah went to Adullam, where lived his friend ‘Chirah.’ He married a Canaanite, the daughter of Shuah.3 His eldest son was called Er. He (Er) was displeasing in the eyes of Jahveh, therefore Jahveh slew him. His second son was called Onan: he died in consequence of his sexual sins. The third son’s name was Shelah, and, as it is mysteriously stated after his name, ‘he was at Chezib when his mother bare him.’ Chezib is certainly the name of a place, and the addition may therefore signify that the mother had named the boy Shelah because the father happened to be in Chezib at the time, absent from home. Chezib has, however, a second meaning.... Chezib means ‘deception, lie,’ and is used by the prophet Micah in this sense (i. 4). Now as Shelah, in our narrative, serves to deceive Tamar’s hopes, held out by Judah, the allusion to Chezib is appropriate. However this may be, Judah’s sons are all represented as despicable. Even Judah himself fell into bad ways and was trapped into the snares laid by his daughter-in-law Tamar, who played the prostitute. Thus only did Judah found a generation, from which King David is said to descend, from a son of Judah called Paretz, meaning ‘breaking through,’ in which manner he is supposed to have behaved towards his brother at his birth.

“Veiled as the libel is here, it becomes apparent as soon as we cast a glance upon David’s family. The picture which this libel draws of Judah hits David himself sharply. The ‘Canaanite’—namely, whom Judah marries [?]—is no other than the wife of Uriah the Hittite (murdered at David’s command) whom David himself married adulterously. This wife of Judah is said to have been the daughter of a man named Shuah. Therefore she is a Bath-shua, and is thus called (verse 12). But Bathshua is also Bathsheba herself, as one may conclude from 1 Chron. iii. 5. The eldest son died, hateful in the sight of God, just like the first son of Bathsheba (2 Sam. xii. 15). The son of Judah is alleged to have been called Er (עֵר); why? because reading it backwards (רֵעַ, wrong) it means ‘bad,’ ‘wicked.’ The second son is called Onan (אוֹנָנ), and dies for sexual sins. He is no other than David’s son Amnon (אַמנוֹנ), who meets his death on account of his sexual sins (2 Sam. xiii). The Tamar of Judah’s story is the same as the Tamar dishonored by Amnon,—the daughter of David, who, in spite of her misfortune and her purity, is, to the entire ruin of her good name, humiliated to a person who plays the prostitute. And Shelah (שֵׁלָה) who does not die,—add to his name only the letter מ, and you have שְׁלֹמה, Solomon.”

If in the light of these facts, which reveal the mythical character of some of the worst things told of Judah and David, the blessings of Jacob (Gen. xlix.) be carefully read, the blessing on Judah will be found rather equivocal. Colenso translates:

Is this couplet related to Nathan’s parable of the rich man taking away the poor man’s one little ewe lamb which smote the conscience of David?

Is this merely a device of the Ephraimite rebels, Jeroboamites, pretending to find in a patriarchal prophecy a prediction that Judah is to be superseded by the descendants of Joseph (on whom Jacob’s encomiums and blessings are unstinted)? Shiloh was always their headquarters.

It is probable, however, that there is here a play upon words. The words “Until Shiloh come” are rendered by some scholars “Till he (Judah) come to Shiloh,” and interpreted as meaning “Till he come to rest.” The Samaritan version (”donec veniat Pacificus”) seems to identify Shiloh with Solomon. (Colenso, Pent. iii. p. 127.) But this is transparently Shelah over again. Shelomoh (Solomon), Shelah, and Shiloh are substantially of the same etymological significance. It will be observed that in Gen. xxxviii. Shelah is the only person whose character is not blackened. The Ephraimic poem, the “Blessings of Jacob,”—each blessing a vaticinium ex evento,—could well afford a half-disguised compliment to Solomon who had made no attempt to suppress the rebels of Shiloh,—the city of Abijah, who originated the Jeroboamic revolution which divided the Davidic kingdom. Jacob’s blessing on Joseph is of course a blessing on Ephraim: it closes with a transfer of the crown (from Judah) to “him that is a prince among his brethren.” This is “rest” from the arrows of David, this is the coming of Shiloh; it occurred under the reign of the Prince of Peace, Solomon, and it could not be undone by Solomon’s son Rehoboam.

The ferocities of Josiah and his Jahvists indicate the presence of an important Solomonist School. Their culture and tendencies are reflected, as we have seen, in the rage of prophets against them, and the continuance of their strength is shown in the preservation of Agur’s Voltairian satire on Jahvism, and Job’s avowed blasphemies:

This translation from Job, quoted from Professor Dillon, need only be compared with that of the authorised and the revised versions to show us the causa causans to-day which of old added four hundred interpolations to the Book of Job to soften its criticism.

It appears strange, however, that Professor Dillon has not included among The Sceptics of the Old Testament three writers in the composite eighty-ninth Psalm, nor remarked its relation to the Book of Job. At the head of this wonderful composition the mythical wise man of 1 Kings iv. 31, Ethan, rises (“Maschil of Ethan the Ezrahite,” perhaps meaning Wisdom of the Everlasting Helper) to attest the divine mercies and faithfulness in all generations. This is in two verses, evidently ancient, which a later hand, apparently, has pointed with a specification of the covenant with David. After the “Selah” which ends these four verses come fourteen verses of sermonising upon them, in which nearly all of the points made by Job’s “comforters” are put in a nutshell. The sons of God who presented themselves, Satan among them, in his council (Job i. 6) appear here also (Ps. lxxxix. 6):

After the mighty things that “Jah” had done to his enemies have been affirmed an Elohist takes up the burden and a “vision” like that of Eliphaz (Job iv. 13) is appealed to:

The vision’s revelation (Job v. 17) “Happy is the man whom God correcteth” is also in this psalm (32, 33): “Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes, but my mercy will I not utterly take from him.” And Eliphaz’s assurance “thy seed will be great” (v. 25) corresponds with that in our psalm (verse 36), “His seed shall endure forever.”

When the psalmist of the vision has pictured, as if in dissolving views, the military renown of David, God’s “servant,” and his “horn,” pointing to Solomon, God’s “first-born,” the transgressions of the latter are intimated (30–33), but the seer continues to utter the divine promises:

Then breaks out the indignant accuser:

A sarcastic “Selah,” or “so it is!”—if Eben Ezra’s definition of Selah be correct.

Then follow four verses by a more timid plaintiff, who, almost in the words of Job (e.g., x. 20), reminds Jahveh of the shortness of life, and the impossibility of any return from the grave, and asks how long he intends to wait before fulfilling his promises. He also supplies Koheleth with a text by the pessimistic exclamation, “For what vanity hast thou created all the children of men”!

After this writer has sounded his “Selah,” another rather more bitterly reminds Jahveh, in three verses, that not only his chosen people are in disgrace, but his own enemies are triumphant.

(These two are much like the writer of Psalms xliv. 9–26, who almost repeats the points made by the above three remonstrants, and asks Jahveh, “Why sleepest thou?”)

Finally a Jahvist doxology, fainter than any appended to the other four books, completes this strange eighty-ninth psalm:

Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Or is this the half-sardonic submission of Job under the whirlwind-answer, which extorted from him no tribute except a virtual admission that when the ethical debate became a question of which could wield the loudest whirlwinds, he surrendered!

In Job’s case the only recantation is that of Jahveh himself, who admits (xlii. 7) that Job had all along spoken the right thing about him (Jahveh). The epilogue is a complete denial of Jahvist theology.

Job’s small voice of scepticism which followed the whirlwind was never silenced. The fragment of Agur (Proverbs xxx. 1–4) appears to have been written as the alternative reply of Job to Jahveh. Job had said, “I am vile, I will lay my hand upon my mouth, I have uttered that I understand not.” Agur adds ironically, “I am more stupid than other men, in me is no human understanding nor yet the wisdom to comprehend the science of sacred things.” Then quoting Jahveh’s boast about distributing the wind (Job xxxviii. 24), about his “sons shouting for joy” (Ibid. 7), and giving the sea its garment of cloud (Ibid. 9), Agur, the “Hebrew Voltaire,” as Professor Dillon aptly styles him, asks:

The stupid Jahvist commentator who follows Agur (Proverbs xxx. 5–14) and in the same chapter interpolates 17 and 20, has the indirect value of rendering it probable that there were a great many “Agurites” (a “bad generation” he calls them) and that they were rather aristocratic and distrustful of the masses. This commentator, who cannot understand the Agur fragments, also shows us, side by side with the brilliant genius, lines revealing the mentally pauperised condition into which Jahvism must have fallen when such a writer was its champion.

It is tolerably certain that such fragments as those of Agur imply a literary atmosphere, a cultured philosophic constituency, and a long precedent evolution of rationalism. Such peaks are not solitary, but rise from mountain ranges. Professor Dillon, whose admirable volume merits study, finds Buddhistic influence in Agur’s fragments.1 But I cannot find in them any trace of the recluse or of the mystic; he does not appear to be even an “agnostic,” for when he says “I have worried myself about God and succeeded not,” the vein is too satirical for a mind interested in theistic speculations. He is a man of the world,—more of a Goethe than a Voltaire; he regards Jahveh as a phantasm, is well domesticated in his planet, and does not moralise on the facts of nature in the Oriental any more than in the Pharisaic way. He appears to be a true Solomonic philosopher and naturalist. I cannot agree to Professor Dillon’s omission of the “Four Cunning Ones” (Proverbs xxx. 24–28), because they are not of the same metrical form as the others, and lead “nowhither.” The lines

no doubt led to the famous parable of Proverbs vi. 6–11, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard.” Being there imbedded in an otherwise commonplace editorial chapter, they may have been derived from some commentator on Agur.

Agur apparently represents the Solomonic thinkers brought with the rest of the people under the trials that made Israel the Job of nations. They are such as those who led astonished Jeremiah to ask “what kind of wisdom is in them?” (Jeremiah viii.) They “do not recognise Jahveh’s judgments”; in “shame, dismay, captivity, they have rejected Jahveh’s word.” The exquisite humor of Agur shows that these philosophers did not lose their serenity. Agur sees man passing his life between two insatiable daughters of the ghoul, “the Grave and the Womb,”—Birth and Death,—and amid the inevitable evils of life he will be wise to refrain from rage and lay his hand upon his lips.

But silence was just what the Jahvist omniscients could not attain to. Notwithstanding Jahveh’s confession that Job was right in his position, and the orthodox wrong in their theory that all evil is providential, the “comforters” rise again in the commentator who begins (Proverbs xxx. 5):

and proceeds in verse 14 with his inanities. And these have prevailed ever since. Even Jesus, when he took up the burden of Wisdom, and rebuked the Jahvist superstition that those on whom a tower fell were subjects of a judgment, must have his stupid corrector to add, “Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish.” This simpleton’s superstition has taken the place of the great successor of Solomon, and to-day, amid all the learning of Christendom, is proclaiming that the Father is “permitting” all the Satans,—war, disease, earthquake, famine,—to harry his children just to test them or to chasten them. Why should omnipotence create a race requiring worse than inquisitorial tortures for its discipline? In all the literature of Christendom there is not one honest attempt to deal with the evils and agonies of nature; and at this moment we find theists apotheosizing the “Unknowable from which all things proceed,” without any appreciation of the fact that in the remote past Jahvism sought the same refuge, and that it was proved by Job a refuge of fallacies. In an awakening moral and humane sentiment Job stands in this latter day upon the earth, and again steadily repeats his demand why one should respect an Unknowable from whom all things,—all horrors and agonies,—proceed.

Ethically we are required to do no evil that good may come; theologically, to worship a deity who is doing just that all the time. This is no doubt a convenient doctrine for the Christian nations that wish to preserve their own property and peace at home, while acting as banditti in remote continents and islands. All such atrocities are enacted and adopted as part of the providential plan of spreading the Gospel, latterly “civilisation”; but it is very certain that there can be no such thing as national civilisation until evil is recognised as evil, good as good,—the one to be abhorred, the other loved,—and no deity respected whose government would wrong a worm.