His followers regarded the spectacle with amazement and dismay. Had it been worth their while to fight for such a king? One by one they slunk away, and it seemed as if he would soon be left alone to the company of himself and his harîm. But once more Joab came to the rescue of his old master and companion in arms. It was indeed with the rough speech of the soldier, but plain speech was needed even though it was rough and rude. ‘Thou hast shamed this day,’ he said, ‘the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life, and the lives of thy sons and of thy daughters, and the lives of thy wives, and the lives of thy concubines; in that thou lovest thine enemies, and hatest thy friends. For thou regardest neither princes nor servants: for this day I perceive, that if Absalom had lived, and all we had died this day, then it had pleased thee well. Now therefore arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy servants: for I swear by the Lord, if thou go not forth, there will not tarry one with thee this night: and that will be worse unto thee than all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now.’

David was roused from his selfish and unworthy grief; weak and self-indulgent as he had become, the words of Joab nevertheless forced him to recognise the dangers he had provoked. But he never forgave his monitor. He soon found an opportunity of punishing Joab for his loyalty, and his dying orders to his successor were to put his grey-haired servant to death.

Secret word was sent to the priests at Jerusalem that they should shame the elders of Judah into demanding the return of the king, seeing that he was their own tribesman, and that the rest of Israel had already acknowledged his sovereignty. At the same time Amasa was appointed commander-in-chief in place of Joab. David thus revenged himself upon his too outspoken general, and also made a bid for popularity among the Jewish forces who had followed Amasa.

The act was as foolish as it was unjust, and it soon brought its penalty with it. The elders of Judah indeed begged the king to return, and he was led across the Jordan in a sort of triumphal procession by the delegates of that tribe. But the other tribes resented this appropriation of the royal person. It was the Jews rather than the rest of Israel who had revolted and made Absalom their king, while the veterans of Joab who had remained loyal represented the whole nation. For the first time since the death of Esh-Baal, the men of Israel and of Judah stood over against one another with antagonistic interests and angry rivalry; Israel claimed to have ten parts in the king, whereas Judah had but one, and yet David’s action had implied that Judah alone was his rightful heritage. Hardly was he again in Jerusalem before a new and more dangerous revolt broke out against his rule. Sheba, a Benjamite, raised the standard of rebellion, and his cry, ‘We have no part in David,’ found an echo in the hearts of the northern tribes. ‘Every man of Israel,’ we are told, deserted ‘the son of Jesse’; Judah alone adhered to him. But the strong arm and able brain that had so long fought for David were no longer there to help him; Joab had been superseded by Amasa; and the raw levies of Judah who had escaped from the forest of Ephraim were but a poor substitute for the disciplined forces which had created an empire. David at last awoke to the fact that in a moment of weak passion he had done his best to throw away a crown; Abishai was summoned in haste and sent with the bodyguard and ‘Joab’s men’ against the new foe.

It would seem that Sheba’s camp had been at Gibeon, not far to the north of Jerusalem. On the advance of the Jewish army he retreated northward. Joab had accompanied his brother, and at ‘the great stone’ of Gibeon the Jewish forces were overtaken by their new commander-in-chief. Amasa placed himself at the head of them, clad in the robe of office which Joab had worn for so many years. The provocation was great, and the murder of Abner with which Joab had begun his career was repeated in the murder of Amasa at the close of it. Abner, however, had been a general of considerable ability and influence; and Joab had not yet accumulated so many claims upon the gratitude of the king. The army took Joab’s side in the matter: Amasa’s body was thrown into a field with a common cloth above it, and the Jewish soldiers hurried on along the high-road in pursuit of the foe. They would have no other commander but Joab, and his degradation by the king was tacitly set aside.

With Joab once more at their head, the insurrection soon came to an end. Sheba fled to the northern extremity of Israelitish territory and flung himself into the city of Abel of Beth-Maachah.^[504] Here he was closely besieged until ‘a wise woman’ persuaded her fellow-citizens to cut off his head and throw it to Joab. The rebellion was over, and Joab returned in triumph to Jerusalem.

The last ten years of David’s life were passed in tranquillity. His bodily and mental powers grew enfeebled, and he sank slowly into the grave. The hardships of his youth and the self-indulgence and polygamy of his later years had weakened his constitution prematurely. While his early companions Joab and Abiathar still retained their vigour, the king became old and worn-out. The intrigues of the harîm, it is true, still continued, but there was no Absalom to steal away the hearts of the people by his beauty and winsomeness of manner; no Amnon to assert in deeds the rights of a crown-prince.

Israel was at peace with her neighbours. Edom and Zobah had been utterly crushed; Moab and Ammon feared to move while Joab was alive. The petty kings of Northern Syria paid intermittently their tribute; Tyre and Sidon courted their powerful neighbour, whose friendship was preferable to his hostility. Egypt was divided against herself; more than one dynasty ruled in the country, and the Tanite sovereigns of the Delta had neither wealth nor men. Like Egypt, Babylonia had fallen into decay, and the defeat of the Assyrian king Assur-irbi by the Aramæans had cut off Assyria from the nations of the West. The Philistines had been compelled to become the servants of David; and the pirate-hordes who had flocked to their aid from Krete and the Ægean now passed into the service of the Israelitish king, or else transferred their attention to other parts of the Mediterranean Sea. According to Greek legend, Thrace, Rhodes, and Phrygia occupied the waters of which they had once been the masters. Phœnician trading-ships could at last sail peaceably across them, and Tyre accordingly, under Abibal and Hiram, became a centre of maritime trade.

In the north, the Hittite empire had long since passed away. Kadesh, on the Orontes, had become the capital of a small district, formidable to no one, and on good terms with its Israelitish neighbours.^[505] Hamath, also, was in alliance with the Israelitish king. Among the wadis of the Lebanon, near Damascus, Rezon, indeed, led the life of a bandit-chief, and robbed the caravans which passed his way; but it was not until after David’s death that he succeeded in establishing himself at Damascus, and there founding a dynasty of kings.

At home, however, though outwardly all seemed calm, the seeds of disunion and discontent were lying thick below the surface. The rebellion of Absalom in Judah, of Sheba in Northern Israel, had shown how fragile were the bonds of union that bound the tribes to one another and to their king. The affections of Judah were not yet entwined around the house of David; the feeling that they were a single nation had not yet penetrated very deeply into the hearts of the other tribes. The Davidic dynasty itself was not yet secure. It depended for its support rather on the sword than on the loyalty of the people. The fallen dynasty still had its followers and secret supporters, and now and then an event occurred which showed how dangerous they might become. Shimei the Benjamite doubtless represented the feeling of his tribe when he cursed David in the hour of his humiliation; and David’s conduct after his restoration to the throne shows that he could not trust even Merib-Baal or Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, whom he had treated as his own son.^[506] An incident which had happened in an earlier part of his reign is another proof of his readiness to root out as far as possible the family of Saul. Three years in succession Palestine had suffered from want of rain and consequent famine, and the oracle of Yahveh declared that the cause of the visitation was Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites. The massacre of the priests at Nob had indeed been avenged by the death of the Israelitish king and his sons, and by the fall of his throne, but other temple-servants besides the priests had suffered from Saul’s outburst of mad anger, and their blood was still crying out for revenge. Blood demanded blood, and the sacrifice of Saul’s descendants could alone atone for the guilt of their forefather.

Mephibosheth was spared, partly because of his father Jonathan’s friendship towards David, whose life he had once saved, partly because little was to be feared from a lame man. But the five sons of Michal (?) by Adriel of Meholah were handed over to the executioner.^[507] They stood too near the throne; apart from Mephibosheth they were, in fact, the only direct descendants of the late king, and David was doubtless glad of the opportunity of removing them from his path. His dying injunctions to Solomon proved how merciless he could be when the safety of his dynasty was at stake.

Two other descendants of Saul still remained, who might possibly be a source of trouble. These were the sons of his concubine Rizpah, and they also were condemned to die. The sacred number of seven victims was thus made up, and David satisfied at once the religious scruples of the Gibeonites and the political exigencies of his own position. Shimei had some reason for calling him a ‘man of blood’ who had shed ‘the blood of the house of Saul.’

The human victims were hanged on the sacred hill of Gibeah ‘before the Lord,’ and none was allowed to take the bodies down until at last the rain fell. Then they were buried solemnly in the ancestral tomb of Saul’s family at Zelah, along with the ashes of Saul and Jonathan, which David had brought from Jabesh-gilead. The great atonement had been made and accepted by Yahveh, and at the same time David had cleared himself from all charges of impiety towards the dead. The fallen dynasty had ceased to be formidable.

Hence it was that when the northern tribes under Sheba broke away from the house of David, they could find no representative of the family of Saul to lead them. Sheba, it is true, was a Benjamite, but he came from Mount Ephraim, and was not related to Saul. He was rather one of those military generals who in after days played so large a part in the history of the northern kingdom in dethroning and founding dynasties.

Nevertheless, the yoke of the royal supremacy was borne with impatience. In spite of the support of the priesthood and the swords of Joab and the foreign bodyguard, David’s reign was troubled by rebellion. As long, indeed, as it was signalised by victories over a foreign foe, by the conquest of neighbouring states, by the influx of captive slaves and the acquisition of spoil, his subjects were well content with their successful leader in war. His influence over those who were brought into personal contact with him had always been great, and there were few who could resist his charm of manner. But when the era of conquests was past, when David had delegated his military duties to others, and had retired more and more into the privacy of an Oriental palace, the seeds of discontent began to grow and spread. Even in Judah there were complaints that justice was neglected (2 Sam. xiv. 2-6); further off the complaints must have been loud and deep. The unpopularity of the conscription by which the ranks of the army were filled was patent even to Joab (2 Sam. xxiv. 3), and the census on which it depended was regarded as hateful to God as well as to man.

Even David himself half repented of his determination to number the people (2 Sam. xxiv. 10), and the general feeling was expressed by the seer Gad when he declared that the punishment of heaven would be visited for the deed, not indeed upon the guilty king, but upon his innocent subjects (2 Sam. xxiv. 13, 17). In the plague that devastated Palestine they saw the anger of Yahveh, and the conscience-stricken king at once assented to the common view.

The cessation of the plague was connected with the foundation of the temple. At the very spot where David had seen the angel of death standing with his sword unsheathed, the altar was built and the sacrifice offered which appeased the wrath of the Lord. It was the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, on the level summit of Mount Moriah, where the old Jebusite population of Jerusalem still dwelt. It may even be that Araunah was the last Jebusite king whose life and freedom were spared when Jerusalem was surrendered to David.^[508]

The threshing-floor was bought by David, and became the great ‘high-place’ of the new capital of the kingdom. Everything marked it out as the site of that temple which in the Eastern world was a necessary supplement of the royal palace. It was the highest part of the city; it was, moreover, a smooth and sunny rock, and the place which it occupied was open and unconfined. It had been the scene of a special revelation of Yahveh to the king, and the altar erected on it had been the means of preserving the people of Israel from death. It is possible, too, that the spot was already sacred. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Ebed-Tob, king of Jerusalem, speaks of the Temple of Nin-ip as standing on ‘the mountain of Uru-salim,’ and of all the mountains of Jerusalem the future temple-mount was the most prominent and commanding.

We do not know when the pestilence occurred which thus had such momentous consequences for the later religion of Judah. The empire of David already extended as far as ‘Kadesh of the Hittites,’^[509] but Edom does not as yet seem to have become a province of Israel. The census was taken in order to ascertain the number of fighting men in Israel, not with a view to the levying of taxes. In the latter case the conquered provinces would have been included in the registration. We may gather, therefore, that the event happened about the middle of David’s reign, probably at the time when the struggle with Zobah was still going on.

It was at a later period, when ‘the Lord had given him rest round about from all his enemies’ (2 Sam. vii. 1), that he announced to Nathan his purpose of building a temple. Nathan had taken Gad’s place as the seer and confidant of the king, and the palace of David had already been erected. But Yahveh would not allow him to carry out his plan. His hands were stained too deeply with blood; the work was destined for the son whose name signified ‘the peaceful one,’ and in whose birth and training the seer had taken so profound an interest.^[510] All that David could do was to prepare the way for his successor, to collect the materials for the work, and to determine the place whereon the temple of God should stand.

Two lists have come down to us of David’s chief officers, extracted from the State annals. The first list is given at the end of the annalistic summary of the events of his reign (2 Sam. viii. 16-18), and belongs to the earlier portion of it; the second must have been drawn up not long before his death. From the outset, it is clear, the kingdom was as thoroughly organised as that of the surrounding states. There was the ‘recorder’ or ‘chronicler’ whose duty it was to hand down the memory of all that happened to future generations; the scribe or chief secretary who wrote and answered official letters, and superintended the copying and re-editing of older documents in the record office; the commander-in-chief of the army, who corresponded to the turtannu or tartan of the Assyrians, and the commander of the foreign troops. The administration, in fact, seems to have closely resembled that of Assyria, excepting only that there was no Vizier or Prime Minister who acted as the representative of the king. It presupposes a long-established use of writing and all the machinery of a civilised Oriental state. The scribe and the chronicler make their appearance in Israel simultaneously with the establishment of an organised government. A knowledge of the art of writing could have been no new thing.

Jehoshaphat, the son of Ahilud, we are told, was the recorder, Seraiah was the secretary,^[511] Benaiah the commander of the Kretan and Philistine bodyguard. By the side of the civil functionaries were the two high priests Zadok and Abiathar, while the office of royal chaplains was filled by the sons of David himself. Their duties were probably to offer such sacrifices as were not public in the absence or in place of their father. That there should have been two high priests is difficult to explain. Zadok was the son of Ahitub, whom the Chronicler makes the son of Amariah, and a descendant of Phinehas the son of Eleazar (1 Chron. vi. 7), while Abiathar was the son of Ahimelech or Ahiah, the grandson of Ahitub, and great-grandson of Phinehas the son of Eli.^[512] Abiathar appears to have represented the family of Ithamar the younger brother of Eleazar the son of Aaron; at any rate, it was to his family that the safe keeping of the ark had been intrusted as well as the high priesthood at the sanctuary of Shiloh. The destruction of Shiloh dealt a blow at its influence and prestige, the massacre of the priests at Nob almost annihilated it. Room was thus given for another line of priests who claimed descent from the elder branch of Aaron’s family, and who had probably preserved the Mosaic tradition in another part of Israel. Is it possible that Zadok had followed the fortunes of Esh-Baal, while Abiathar attached himself to David? At all events, the unification of the kingdom brought with it the unification of the high-priestly families; throughout the greater part of David’s reign the ark at Jerusalem was served by both Zadok and Abiathar, with numerous Levites under them (2 Sam. xv. 24-29). That Zadok is always named first, though Abiathar had been the early friend and priest of David, implies that his claim to represent the elder branch of the high priest’s family was recognised.

When the second list of David’s officials was compiled certain important changes had taken place. Seraiah, the secretary, had been succeeded by Sheva or Shisha (2 Sam. xx. 25; 1 Kings iv. 3); ‘Ira, the Jairite,’ had become the chaplain of David, and the growth of the empire had necessitated the creation of a new office. This was the imperial treasurership which was held by a certain Hadoram, who seems to have been of Syrian origin, and whose duty it was to collect the tribute of the conquered provinces.^[513] Possibly he had already gained experience of the office under one of the Syrian kings.

Other officers of David are enumerated by the Chronicler (1 Chron. xxvii. 25-34). They had their analogues in Assyria and Egypt, and show how thoroughly the court of Israel was modelled after those of the neighbouring states. Among them we read of Azmaveth, the son of Adiel, who presided over the exchequer; of Jonathan, the son of Uzziah, who superintended the public granaries, which must therefore have been established in imitation of those of Egypt and Babylonia;^[514] of Ezri, the superintendent of the peasants who worked on the crown lands; of Shimei and Zabdi, who had charge of the royal vineyards and wine-cellars; of Baal-hanan and Joash, to whom were intrusted the olive plantations and storehouses of oil; of Obil, the Ishmaelite, the chief of the camel-drivers; of Jehdeiah, the head of the ass-drivers; and of Jaziz, the Hagarene, who superintended the shepherds of the king.^[515]

David sank slowly into the grave, old in mind as well as in years. A young maiden, Abishag the Shunammite, was brought to lie beside the king, and so keep up the warmth of his body. But it was all in vain, and it became clear that he could not last long. The bed of the dying king was surrounded by intrigue. Adonijah, the eldest of his surviving sons, naturally looked upon himself as the rightful heir. He could count upon two powerful supporters. One was the priest Abiathar, who had first given David’s title to the crown a religious sanction; the other was Joab, who had created his empire. But Bath-sheba had long since determined that she should be queen-mother, and that her son Solomon should wear the crown. Behind her stood Nathan, the spiritual director both of herself and of her son. The adhesion of Abiathar and Joab to Adonijah, moreover, drove their rivals Zadok and Benaiah into the opposite camp, and Benaiah took with him the foreign bodyguard of which he was commander, and which, as in other countries, thus showed itself ready from the outset to make and unmake kings. Above all, Bath-sheba still exercised her old influence over the half-conscious monarch, and it did not need the incitements of Nathan to induce her to exert it once more on behalf of Solomon. Backed as she was by the prophet, the issue was not doubtful, and David did as he was bid. Bath-sheba reminded him of his old promise to herself, Nathan craftily represented that Adonijah was already seizing the crown before his father’s life was extinct.

Zadok and Benaiah were accordingly summoned, and ordered to escort the young prince on David’s own mule to the spring of Gihon, and there, just outside the eastern wall of Jerusalem, where the Spring of the Virgin now gushes from the ground, to anoint him with the oil of consecration, and proclaim his accession by the sound of trumpet. The presence of the priests and the bodyguard was a visible sign that the kingship and the power had been transferred from David to Solomon.

Meanwhile Adonijah was holding a feast at the stone of Zoheleth, near En-Rogel, the Fuller’s Spring, the modern Well of Job south of the Pool of Siloam. Abiathar and Joab were with him; so also were his brothers, who seem to have had but little affection for the favourite of Nathan, as well as those representatives of Judah who had been the mainstay of Absalom’s rebellion. Solomon appears to have been regarded as tainted by foreign blood; at all events, Judah followed Adonijah as it had followed Absalom.^[516] But Nathan and Bath-sheba had taken their measures in time. In the midst of the feast news was brought to the conspirators by Johanan, the son of Abiathar, that Solomon had been proclaimed king, and that his person was already protected by the royal bodyguard. The guests fled in dismay, and Adonijah took refuge at the altar. There the sovereign-elect promised him that he would spare his life.

Solomon next received the last commands of the dying king. David’s last thought was for the maintenance of the kingdom and the dynasty. Solomon was to follow in the footsteps of his father, to obey the law of Yahveh and His priests. More especially he was to seek an early opportunity of ridding himself of possible rivals or antagonists whom the weakness or policy of David himself had hitherto spared. Joab was to be put to death; he was too powerful a subject to be allowed to live, aged though he now was, and his complicity with Adonijah made him dangerous to the new king. Shimei, too, was to be slain; as long as he lived the fallen dynasty had a leader around whom the disaffected might rally. On the other hand, the kindness of Barzillai, the Gileadite, was not to be forgotten; favour to him would win the hearts of the men of Gilead.^[517]

David died, leaving behind him a name which his countrymen never forgot. He became the ideal of a patriot king. He had founded a dynasty and an empire; and though the empire soon fell to pieces, the dynasty survived and exercised a momentous influence upon the religious history of the world. He had established once for all the principle of monarchy in Israel; never again could the Israelites return to the anarchic days of the Judges, or forget the lessons of unity which they had been taught.

In character he was generous and kind-hearted, though in his later years his kindheartedness degenerated into weakness. He was, moreover, brave and skilful, with a personal charm of manner and readiness of speech which those about him found it impossible to withstand. Alone of his sons, Absalom seems to have inherited these gifts of his father, which may perhaps account for the blind love David had for him. But along with these gifts went a rich fund of Oriental selfishness, which made him never lose an opportunity of securing his own advantage or promotion. It was a selfishness so deep as to be wholly unconscious; whatever made for his interests was necessarily right. It was combined with clearness of head and definiteness of aim, which ensured success in whatever he undertook. A good judge of men, he first attached them to himself by his gifts of manner, and then knew how to trust and employ them.

With the strong and healthy mind of the peasant there was, however, combined a depth of passionate emotion which doubtless had much to do with the influence he possessed over others. David was a man of strong impulses, and we cannot understand his character unless we remember the fact. The impulses, it is true, were controlled and regulated by the cool judgment and politic self-restraint which distinguished more especially his earlier life; but they swayed him to the end, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. Above all, he was a religious man, deeply attached to the faith into which he had been born, full of trust in priests and prophets and oracles, and convinced that Yahveh would protect and befriend him as long as he obeyed the divine law. But there was neither asceticism nor fanaticism in his religion; it was the firm faith and religious conviction of a healthy mind.

David was not cruel by nature; if he showed himself merciless at times, it was either for reasons of policy, or because the action was in accordance with the public opinion of the age. The Assyrian kings gloat over the barbarities they practised towards their conquered enemies, and the Hebrew Semite similarly prayed that Yahveh might dip His foot in the blood of His foes. David might indeed be a man of blood, but by the side of the rulers of Nineveh he was mercy itself; and the very fact that the blood he had shed prevented him from building a temple to his God shows how different the conception of Yahveh must have been from that which prevailed among the neighbouring nations of their own deities.

Such, then, was David’s character, with all its apparent anomalies. Brave and active, clear-headed and politic, generous and kind-hearted, he was at the same time selfish and impulsive, at times unforgiving and merciless. He had nevertheless a genuine and fervid trust in Yahveh, and a fixed belief that Yahveh demanded an upright life and ‘clean hands.’ Up to the last he remained at heart the Oriental peasant, who takes a healthy view of life, whose shrewdness is crossed and chequered by the impulses of the moment, and whose religion is deep and unquestioning. But, like the peasant, he failed to be proof against success and prosperity. The bold and hardy warrior degenerated into the self-indulgent and even sensual despot. It is true that he repented of the crimes to which his self-indulgence had led, and which to most other Oriental despots would have soon become a second nature; the self-indulgence, however, remained, and a weak will and infirmity of purpose marred the latter years of his life.

Future generations saw in him the ‘sweet psalmist of Israel.’ As far back as we can trace it, tradition averred that a large part of the psalter owed its origin to him. It has been left for the nineteenth century to be wiser than the past, and to deny to David the authorship of even a single psalm. But there are some of them which seem to bear their Davidic authorship on their face,^[518] and if there are many which belong to a later date, while others are pieced together from earlier fragments,^[519] this is only what we should expect when once the nucleus of a collection had been formed, and the psalms embodied in it employed liturgically. Assyrian discovery has shown that penitential psalms, similar in spirit and form to those of David, had been composed in Babylonia centuries before his time, and there collected together for liturgical purposes.^[520] In Egypt, what we should call ‘Messianic psalms’ had been written before the age of the Exodus.^[521] There is, therefore, no reason why a part of the Hebrew psalter should not belong to the Davidic period, and be the work of David himself. There is nothing in it inconsistent with the character of David or the ideas of his time. It is only the false theory of ‘the development of Hebrew religion’ which finds in it the religious conceptions of a later era. Those indeed who maintain that in the age of David the law of Moses was as yet unknown, and that faith in Yahveh was hardly to be distinguished from that in Baal or Chemosh, may be compelled to deny that any of the psalms, with their high spiritual level, can belong to the king who was ‘after God’s own heart’; but history cannot take note of theories which are built upon assumptions and not facts. Even in the northern kingdom of Israel, where the memory of the founder of the Davidic dynasty was naturally held in little esteem, tradition was obliged to confess that he had been the inventor of ‘instruments of music’ (Am. vi. 5).

The exact date of David’s death is doubtful. The chronology of the books of Kings, so long the despair of chronologists, has at length been corrected by the synchronisms that have been established between the history of Israel and Judah and that of Assyria. Thanks to the so-called Lists of Eponyms or Officers from whom the years of the state calendar took their name, we now possess an exact chronology of Assyria from B.C. 911. In B.C. 854 Ahab took part in the battle of Qarqar, which was fought by the princes of the west against their Assyrian invaders, and his death, therefore, could not have happened till after that date. In B.C. 842 Jehu offered homage to the Assyrian monarch, and Hazael of Damascus was defeated in a battle on Mount Shenir. Four years previously the Syrian opponent of the Assyrians was Hadad-idri or Ben-Hadad. Lastly, Menahem of Israel paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser III. in B.C. 738, Pekah and Rezin were overthrown in B.C. 734, and Damascus was taken and destroyed by the Assyrian king in B.C. 732. It is only after the capture of Samaria by Sargon in B.C. 722, when the kingdom of Judah stands alone, that the Biblical dates harmonise with the Assyrian evidence, or indeed with one another. It is evident, therefore, that the Biblical chronology is more than forty years in excess. Ahab, instead of dying in B.C. 898, as Archbishop Usher’s chronology makes him do, cannot have died till some forty-five years later. We have no means of checking the earlier chronology of the divided kingdom, but assuming its correctness, the revolt of the Ten Tribes would have taken place about B.C. 930.

Solomon, like Saul, is said to have reigned forty years. But this merely means that the precise length of his reign was unknown to the compiler. It could not have exceeded thirty years. Hadoram, who was ‘over the tribute’ in the latter part of David’s life (2 Sam. xx. 24), still occupied the same office in the first year of Rehoboam’s reign (1 Kings xii. 18), and Rezon, who had fled from Zobah when David conquered the country, was ‘an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon’ (1 Kings xi. 24, 25). No clue is given by the statement of Rehoboam’s age in 1 Kings xiv. 21, since when it is said that he was ‘forty and one years’ at the time of his accession this is merely equivalent to ‘x + 1.’

The length of David’s reign is more accurately fixed. Seven years and a half did he reign in Hebron, and thirty-three years over Israel and Judah (2 Sam. iv. 5), or forty and a half years in all. Approximately, therefore, we may date his reign from B.C. 1000 to 960. Saul’s accession may have been ten or fifteen years earlier.

David’s palace at Jerusalem, it is stated in 2 Sam. v. 11, was built by the artisans of Hiram of Tyre, who also furnished him with cedar wood. The fragment of Tyrian annals quoted by Josephus from Menander^[522] throws some light on the chronology of the time. Hiram, we are told, was the son of Abibal, and the names of his successors are recorded one after the other, together with the length of their reigns. But unfortunately the sum of the reigns does not agree with their total as twice given by Josephus, nor indeed are our authorities agreed among themselves in regard to the length of certain of them. The fact, however, that Josephus twice gives the same total raises a presumption in its favour, more especially when we find that it is possible by a little manipulation to make the sum of the several reigns harmonise with it.^[523] This total is one hundred and forty-three years and eight months, which, it is said, elapsed from the building of Solomon’s temple in the twelfth year of Hiram down to the foundation of Carthage in the seventh year of Pygmalion. But the date of the foundation of Carthage is itself not a wholly certain quantity, though B.C. 826 is probably that which was assigned to it by the native historians.^[524] A hundred and forty-three years and eight months reckoned back from 826 would bring us to B.C. 969 or 970. As the temple was begun in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (1 Kings vi. 1), this would give B.C. 973 for the accession of Solomon, and B.C. 1013 for that of David. The palace constructed for David at Jerusalem by the workmen of Hiram must have been erected at the very end of David’s life, after the suppression of the revolt of Absalom, unless, indeed, the author of the books of Samuel has mistaken the name of the Tyrian king, and written Hiram instead of Abibal.

There is yet another synchronism between Hebrew and profane history which must not be overlooked. Jerusalem was captured in the fifth year of Rehoboam by Shishak I., the founder of the twenty-second Egyptian dynasty. But Egyptian chronology is more disputable even than that of Israel, and we do not know in what year of the Pharaoh’s reign the invasion of Palestine took place. Boeckh, on the authority of Manetho, places the commencement of his reign in B.C. 934; Unger, on the same authority, in B.C. 930; while Lepsius pushes it back to B.C. 961.

On the whole, then, we must be content with approximate dates for the founders of the Hebrew monarchy. The revolt of the Ten Tribes will have taken place somewhere between B.C. 940 and 930; the accession of David somewhere between B.C. 1010 and 1000. It coincided with the period when the older kingdoms of the Oriental world—Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt—were in their lowest stage of weakness and decay.

Solomon succeeded to a brilliant heritage. The nations which surrounded him had been conquered or forced into alliance with Israel; there was none among them adventurous or strong enough to attack the newly risen power. The caravan-roads which brought the merchandise of both north and south to the wealthy states of Western Asia passed through Israelitish territory; Edom, which communicated with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, was in Jewish hands, as well as Zobah, which commanded the road to the Euphrates. The tolls levied on the trade which thus passed through the empire filled the treasury at Jerusalem with abundant riches, while the products and luxuries of the whole eastern world flowed into the Hebrew market. The alliance with the Tyrians gave Solomon a port in the Mediterranean; the possession of Edom gave him ports of his own in the Gulf of Aqaba. In return for the use of the Edomite harbours by the ships of Phœnicia, he was allowed to send forth merchantmen of his own from the havens of Hiram on the Phœnician coast. The ships themselves were manned with Phœnician sailors; like the Assyrian kings in later days he had to turn to the experienced mariners of Phœnicia to work his fleet.

At home the kingdom had been fully organised. There were an army of veterans, a foreign bodyguard, who had no interests beyond those of the master who paid them, a well-selected capital, and a fiscal administration. The revolts which had disturbed the later years of David had been suppressed with a heavy hand, and such murmurs as may have been raised against the enfeebled government and neglected justice of the late reign were hushed in presence of a young and well-educated prince, the protégé of priests and prophets, whose very name promised his people the blessings of peace. The wars of David, with their tax of blood and treasure, were at an end. Those who had conspired against the elevation of Solomon to the throne had been put to death at the outset of his reign: the grey hairs of Joab were stained with his own blood as he clung to the unavailing altar; Adonijah was executed on the ground that he had asked to have Abishag for a wife, and it was not long before a pretext was found for removing Shimei out of the way. Benjamin and Judah had alike lost their leaders, and Solomon henceforth did his utmost to win them to himself.

Abiathar was banished to the priests’ city of Anathoth, and the glory of the high priesthood was left to Zadok and his descendants alone. They alone were allowed to serve before the ark of the covenant, and the doom pronounced upon the house of Eli was thus fulfilled. The act placed the religion of Israel for many generations to come under the domination of the king. Solomon declared by it his supremacy in the church as well as in the state. It meant that the king claimed the power and the right to appoint and dismiss the ministers of the Mosaic law. The central sanctuary became the royal chapel rather than the temple of the national God, and its priests were the paid officials of the sovereign rather than the administrators and interpreters to the people of the divine law. The democratic element passed out of Hebrew religion, and the king more than the high priest came to stand at the head of it. The erection of the temple completed the work which the deposition of Abiathar had begun; sanctuary, services, and priesthood were all alike under the royal control. The family of Eli had preserved the tradition of the days when the priests of Shiloh exercised independent authority, and interpreted the law which all were called upon to obey. With the banishment of Abiathar came a break with the past; no venerable memories were connected with the rival house of Zadok, no recollection of a time when the word of the priest of Shiloh had been a teacher in Israel. Under Zadok and his successors the old meaning of the high priesthood gradually faded out of sight; as in Assyria or Southern Arabia the priests of an earlier age were supplanted by kings, so too in Israel the place and influence of the high priest were absorbed by the Davidic dynasty. Even a Jeroboam could assert his right to establish sanctuaries and appoint the priests who should serve them.

Solomon had been brought up under the eye and instruction of Nathan, and to Nathan, therefore, we must probably trace his religious policy. There was much to be said in favour of it. It prevented friction between the priesthood and the monarchy; it guaranteed the stability of the dynasty of David by extending to it the sanction of religion; above all, it secured the maintenance of the religion itself. It gave it as it were a local habitation in a costly sanctuary built and endowed out of the royal revenues, and attached to the royal palace. The ark ceased to be national, and became instead the sacred treasure of the chapel of the king. While the monarchy lasted, the religion of the monarchy would last also, and Nathan and Zadok might be pardoned if they believed that the Davidic monarchy would last for ever.

The administration of the country next claimed the attention of the new king. It was organised on an Assyrian model, Palestine being divided into districts, each of which was placed under a governor who was responsible for the taxes as well as for the civil and judicial government of it. Hitherto, it would appear, the old system of tribal government had been preserved, the tribes owning allegiance to hereditary chieftains or ‘princes,’ who, like the chieftains of a Highland clan, represented the tribe, and led its members to war. David seems to have modified this system for military purposes, if we may judge from the list of ‘captains’ given in 1 Chron. xxvii., but no attempt was made to carry out a general system of taxation, or appoint governors with fiscal powers. The conquered provinces alone were required to furnish an annual tribute to the treasury, and for this a single officer, Hadoram, was found sufficient.

The territory of the Israelites themselves was now formed into fiscal districts. Twelve officers were appointed, who were required to provide in turn for the necessary expenses of the royal household during the twelve months of the year. A list of them, extracted from some official document, is given in 1 Kings iv. 8-19. In the earlier part of the list the names of the officers have been lost, those only of their fathers having been preserved. Two of them were married to daughters of Solomon, indicating that the list must have been drawn up towards the end of Solomon’s life. One of the king’s sons-in-law was the governor of Naphtali; the other presided over the Phœnician coast-land south of Tyre. Here, at Dor, in a country occupied by the Zakkal kinsmen of the Philistines, and in proximity to Tyre, it was needful that the prefect should be connected with the king by closer ties than those of officialism. The direction of the Mediterranean trade was mainly in his hands, and the resources which were thus at his disposal, as well as the neighbourhood of Hiram, might have tried the loyalty of any but a relative of the king. The plateau of Bashan was under the jurisdiction of one governor who had his residence at Ramoth-gilead; Gilead was under a second, while a third governor had Mahanaim. We may, therefore, gather that Ammon and Moab, as well as Geshur, had been absorbed into Israelitish territory. This may in part explain why at the revolt of the Ten Tribes Moab went with Israel rather than with Judah.

It is noticeable that there was no governor in Judah. Here, in fact, the king himself ruled in person. It would seem that Judah was exempt from the taxes levied on the rest of Palestine. This was in accordance with the policy which made Solomon court the goodwill of his father’s tribe, and identify with its interests those of himself and his house. So far as the continuance of the Davidic dynasty was concerned, the policy succeeded. Judah identified itself with the house of David, and rallied faithfully round its king. There was no longer any talk of rebellion, or of transporting the capital to Hebron; from henceforth Judah and its kings were one. But the fact only made the breach between Judah and the rest of Israel wider and more visible, and alienated the other tribes from the reigning house. They were treated like the conquered Gentiles; the place of their old hereditary princes and leaders was taken by governors appointed by the crown, and fixed taxes were rigorously exacted from them for the support of the royal treasury. They derived no benefit, however, from the royal expenditure; it was lavished upon Jerusalem and the Jewish towns which lay near to it. They were too far off to see even a reflection of that royal glory of which they may have heard, and for which they certainly had to pay. The same causes which strengthened the ties of allegiance of Judah to the reigning dynasty weakened those of Israel.

Throughout the reign of Solomon, Hadoram remained ‘over the tribute,’ and his duties were enlarged by the supervision of the home taxation and corvée being added to that of the foreign tribute.^[525] Jehoshaphat still continued ‘recorder,’ but the secretary Shisha had been succeeded by his two sons. The literary correspondence of the empire was increasing, and one chief secretary was no longer sufficient for it. The family of Nathan, as might have been expected, was well provided for. One son was made Vizier; the other became the royal chaplain as well as ‘the king’s friend.’ The latter title, which had been given to Hushai in the time of David (1 Chron. xxvii. 33), had been borrowed from Egypt; the title of the Vizier, or ‘head of the officers,’ corresponded with the Assyrian Rab-saki or Rabshakeh, ‘the chief of the princes.’ Another office which may have been borrowed from Assyria was that of royal steward, which was held by Ahishar; along with him the Septuagint associates a second steward Eliak, and a captain of the bodyguard called Eliab, the son of Saph or Shaphat.^[526] Like the list of governors, the list of officials must have been drawn up at the end of Solomon’s reign, since Azariah has already taken the place of his grandfather Zadok as high priest (see 1 Chron. vi. 9, 10, where a confusion has been made between Ahimaaz the son of Zadok and Johanan or Jonathan the son of Abiathar). It is significant that the list begins with the ‘priest,’ not with the general of the army as in the warlike days of David.

The fame of Solomon’s wealth and magnificence was spread through the Oriental world. Foreign sovereigns sought his alliance or courted his favour. Even the Queen of Sheba came to visit him. Modern criticism has long since banished the Queen to the realm of fiction, but archæological discovery has again restored her to history. Sheba or Saba was already a flourishing kingdom in the time of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III.; its territories extended from the spice-bearing coasts of Southern Arabia to the borders of Babylonia and Palestine. If Glaser and Hommel are right in their interpretation of the south Arabian inscriptions, it had entered on the older heritage of the kingdom of Ma’ân. The Minæan kings of Ma’ân had ruled not only in the south but in the north as well; their records are found near Teima, and they had command of the great highroad of commerce which led from the Indian Ocean to Egypt and Gaza. Egypt and Gaza, indeed, are mentioned in Minæan inscriptions.^[527] From an early period the kingdoms of Southern Arabia had been in commercial contact with Canaan.

The conquest of Edom by David and the Hebrew fleets which sailed from the Gulf of Aqaba must soon have acquainted the merchant princes of Ma’ân and Saba with the fact that a new power had risen in Western Asia, and a new market been opened for their goods. The road to Palestine was well-known and frequently travelled, and Minæan or Sabæan settlements existed upon it almost as far as the frontiers of Edom. What more natural, therefore, than that a Sabæan queen should visit her wealthy neighbour whose patronage had become important for Sabæan trade? That queens might rule in the Arabian peninsula we know from the annals of Tiglath-pileser III., which refer to Zabibê and her successor Samsê, each of whom is called a ‘queen of the land of the Arabs.’

Even the Pharaoh of Egypt condescended to mingle the blood of the solar race with that of the grandson of a Hebrew fellah. Solomon married the daughter of the Egyptian monarch. But it was a monarch of the twenty-first dynasty, who, though acknowledged as the sole legitimate representative of the line of the Sun-god Ra, had nevertheless been sadly shorn of his ancient rights and authority. His power was confined to the Delta, where he held his court in the old Hyksos capital of Tanis or Zoan, close to the Asiatic frontier, and as far removed as possible from the rival dynasty which ruled in Upper Egypt. He was doubtless glad to secure a son-in-law who could defend him from his enemies at home in case of need, and whose friendship was preferable to his hostility.

The Egyptian princess had brought with her as dowry the Canaanitish city of Gezer. That it should have been in the power of the Pharaoh to give it is at first sight surprising. It shows that Egypt had never relinquished in theory her old claims to be mistress of Canaan. Like the title of ‘king of France,’ which so long lingered in the royal style of England, they were never abandoned, but were ready to be revived whenever an opportunity occurred. Towards the close of the period of the Judges, but before the Philistines had become formidable, Assyria and Egypt had met on friendly terms on the coast of Palestine. The Assyrian conqueror, Tiglath-pileser I. (in B.C. 1100), had found his way to the Phœnician city of Arvad, and there received from the Egyptian Pharaoh various presents which included a crocodile and a hippopotamus. The campaign of the Assyrian king had brought him to the edge of the territory which the Egyptian rulers of the twenty-first dynasty still regarded as their own, and they hastened accordingly to propitiate the invader, and thus to stay his further advance. The embassy and gifts further show that the occupation of the coast by the Philistines did not prevent the Egyptians from maintaining their old relations with Phœnicia, though they may have done so by sea rather than by land. At all events an expedition sent to Gebal by Hir-Hor, the high priest of Thebes, at the beginning of the twenty-first dynasty, was despatched in ships.^[528] Had the coast-road been free from danger, the Egyptians would doubtless have asserted their right to march along it. They seized the first occasion to do so, when the Philistines had been conquered by David, and the successor of David was the Pharaoh’s ally.

Solomon engaged in no wars of his own. He was no general himself, and it may be that he feared to intrust a subject with an army. Joab had taught him how easily the commander-in-chief might defy his master, Abner how readily he might betray him. In the list of officials given in the Hebrew text, Benaiah indeed is stated to have been ‘over the host’ (1 Kings iv. 4), but Benaiah was actually the commander of the bodyguard, so that his command of the army must have been merely nominal. Practically the army which had played so large a part in the history of David had ceased to exist. Hence it was that Rezon was able to establish an independent kingdom in Damascus, and that when the Ten Tribes revolted there was no army at hand with which to suppress the rebellion. Hence, too, the curious fact that just as Solomon sought the help of Hiram in fitting out his merchant fleet in the Gulf of Aqaba, so also he sought the help of the Egyptian king in subduing the one Canaanitish city of importance which still preserved its freedom. Gezer had maintained its Canaanitish continuity from the days when as yet the Israelites had not entered Canaan, and the mounds of Tel Jezer which mark its site must still conceal beneath them the records of its early history. Doubtless the Egyptian court was gratified at the arrangement with the Hebrew king. It admitted the Egyptian claim of suzerainty over Palestine, and admitted the right of its armies to march along its roads. But the substantial advantages remained with Solomon. He gained Gezer without either expense or trouble, and at the same time he allied himself by marriage with the oldest and most exclusive royal race in the Oriental world. Like the kings of Mitanni in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, the son-in-law of the Pharaoh was on a footing of equality with the proudest princes of Asia.

The alliance with Hiram was no less advantageous. Hiram had done for Tyre what Solomon was doing for Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that his father Abibal, or Abi-Baal, was the founder of a dynasty; at all events the accession of Hiram ushered in a new era for the Tyrian state. He succeeded to the throne at the age of nineteen years, and during his long reign of thirty-four years he raised Tyre to an unprecedented height of prosperity and power, and rebuilt the city itself. The ancient ‘rock’ from which it had derived its name was connected by an embankment with another rocky islet close to it, and a new and splendid city was erected upon the space thus won from the sea. Excellent harbours were constructed, massive walls built round the city, and the venerable temple of Melkarth restored from its foundations, and decorated with all the sumptuous splendour of Phœnician art.

Tyre had always been famous for its sailors and its ships, and its wealth is celebrated even in the letters of Tel el-Amarna. But under Hiram its maritime trade underwent an enormous development. The conquest of the Philistines by David, and the consequent disappearance of piracy from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, were the immediate causes of this. Tyrian ships could now venture into the bays and havens of the Greek seas in quest of slaves, or the precious purple-fish, and their merchants could make voyages in safety as far as Tarshish. Riches poured into ‘the merchant-city,’ and Hiram had resources in abundance for his public works.

The Hebrew king was eager to follow the example of his Tyrian neighbour. It was true that his subjects were neither sailors nor traders; it was true, also, that the harbours on the Mediterranean coast which the conquest of the Philistines had added to his dominions were few and poor. But the conquest of Edom had given him the entrance to the spice-lands of Southern Arabia, and the gold-mines which recent discovery has found in Central Africa.^[529] An agreement was therefore come to with Hiram which was to the profit of both. Hiram gave Solomon sailors and boat-builders, as well as the use of his Mediterranean ports; in return he received from Solomon the right of using the harbours of the Red Sea. While the products of Europe made their way to Solomon through Tyre, the products of the south passed to Hiram from the Edomite havens of Elath and Ezion-geber.

Hiram was useful to Solomon in yet another way. The age of empire-building was over; the time had come to create a capital which should be worthy of the empire. Like Ramses II. of Egypt, Solomon made himself an imperishable name as a builder. Jerusalem was strongly fortified; royal palaces were erected; above all, a temple was raised to Yahveh that vied in splendour with those of Phœnicia and the Nile. But the architects and artisans had to be brought from the dominions of the Tyrian king; the Israelites had been too much barbarised by the long struggle for existence they had had to wage for another Bezaleel to be born among them, as in the days when they had but just quitted the cultured land of the Delta. It is true that the master-artificer in bronze, who designed the bronze-work of the temple, was a Hebrew on his mother’s side, but he bore the Tyrian name of Hiram, and his father was ‘a man of Tyre.’ Even for his carpenters and masons Solomon was indebted to his Tyrian ally; it was only the gangs of labourers driven to their forced work among the forests and quarries of Lebanon that were levied by Hadoram out of ‘Israel.’ The Israelites had become hewers of wood and drawers of water for their king, and, as in the old days of Egyptian bondage, 3300 taskmasters were employed in keeping them to their work.^[530] Like the architects, the skilled artificers were lent by Hiram; from Hiram came also the logs of cedar and fir that were needed for the buildings at Jerusalem.

In return Solomon provided his ally with wheat and oil. The island-city was dependent on others for its corn; on the rock of Tyre and on the barren crags of the opposite mainland no wheat could be grown. Twenty cities of Galilee, moreover, were ceded to Hiram. But for these Hiram had to pay one hundred and twenty talents of gold; and in the end, the wily Hebrew, like his forefather Jacob, had the best of the bargain. When the Tyrian king came to inspect his new territory, it ‘pleased him not.’ Solomon, in fact, had given him what it was not worth his own while to keep.

The royal palace was thirteen years in building. Attached to it was the armoury, or House of the Forest of Lebanon as it was called from the cedar used in its construction. Here the three hundred shields and two hundred targets of gold were stored, which were made for the bodyguard, and served also as a reserve fund in case of need. The architecture of the palace itself culminated, as in Persia, in the audience-chamber with its throne of ivory overlaid with gold, and approached by six steps which were guarded on either side by the images of lions. Another palace was erected for the Egyptian queen; like the palace of the king it was in the Upper City, close to the spot on which the temple was destined to stand.

The old palace of David, in the lower town or ‘City of David,’ was deserted; as soon as the new buildings were completed on Moriah, the king moved to them with his harîm and court. The palace which had satisfied the simple tastes of the father was no longer sufficient for the luxury and display of the more cultured son. The ‘City of David’ was left to the Jews and Benjamites; the court and the priesthood settled above them by the side of the old Jebusite population, which had been reduced to serfdom (1 Kings ix. 20). None but slaves and serfs might dwell where the monarch lived surrounded by his armed bodyguard; the free Israelite was confined to another quarter of the town.

The palace was protected by a huge fortress called the Millo, which was connected with the new walls of Jerusalem, and begun as soon as the palace of the Egyptian princess had been finished. Whether it stood on the eastern or western side of the city is doubtful; the topography of pre-exilic Jerusalem is unfortunately still involved in obscurity. The pool of Siloam, and the identification of the Upper Gihon or ‘Spring’ with the Virgin’s Fountain, the only natural spring of water in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, are almost the only two points which can be fixed with certainty. If the subterranean tunnel which conveys the water of the Virgin’s Fountain to the pool of Siloam is the conduit made by Hezekiah when he ‘stopped the upper water-course of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David’ (2 Chron. xxxii. 30), the west side will be that which overlooks the Tyropœon valley, where the tunnel ends. In this case the city of David, which is stated in 2 Sam. v. 7 to have been on Mount Zion, will be the so-called southern hill or ‘Ophel,’ which lies south of the Mosque of Omar, and the Tyropœon valley will be the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom so often referred to in the Old Testament. The Jerusalem of the kings will thus have been, like most of the cities of the ancient Oriental world, of no great size according to our modern conceptions; its population will have been as closely packed together as it is to-day in the native quarters of Cairo, and the fortifications which surrounded it would not have occupied too wide a circumference for a Jewish army to defend. The Tyropœon valley is choked with the rubbish of ancient Jerusalem to a depth of more than seventy feet; but under it must lie the tombs of the kings of Judah. The recent excavations of Dr. Bliss have thrown but little light on the question, since the walls he has found seem mostly of a late date; but if the rock-cut steps he has discovered north of the pool of Siloam are really ‘the stairs that go down from the city of David’ (Neh. iii. 16), a striking verification will have been given of the theory which sees in the southern hill the Zion of Scripture, and in the valley of ‘the Cheesemakers’ the gorge of the sons of Hinnom.^[531]

The crown of all the building activity of Solomon was the temple, even though it did not take so long to construct as his own palace. Materials for it had already been accumulated by David, and the architects and workmen came from Tyre. It was built of large blocks of square stone, the edges of which were probably bevelled as in early Phœnician work, and the walls inside were covered with panels of cedar. Walls and doors alike were profusely decorated with the designs of Phœnician art. Cherubs and palms, lotus flowers and pomegranates were depicted on them in the forms that have been made familiar to us by the relics of ancient Phœnician workmanship. The temple itself was of rectangular shape, not unlike the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, and in front of it were two large courts, one of which—the ‘inner’ or ‘upper’ court—stood on a higher level than the other. The whole design, in fact, was purely Phœnician; in form and ornamentation the building exactly resembled the temples of Phœnicia. Like them, it must have looked externally like a huge rectangular box, which was further disfigured by chambers, in sets of three, being built one over the other against the walls. The great temple of Melkarth, which Hiram had just completed at Tyre, probably served as the model for the temple of Jerusalem.

The entrance was approached by steps, and consisted of a porch, on either side of which were two lofty columns of bronze, called Jachin and Boaz.^[532] Similar columns were planted before the entrance of a Phœnician temple where they symbolised the fertilising power of the Sun-god, and Herodotos (ii. 44) states that the two which stood in front of the temple at Tyre were made of gold and emerald glass. Two similar columns of stone, though of small size, have been found in the Temple of the Giants in the island of Gozo, one of which still remains in its original place. In the outer court was a bronze ‘sea’ or basin, thirty cubits in circumference, and supported on twelve oxen. The ‘sea’ had been imported into the West from Babylonia, where it similarly stood in the court of a temple, and represented the apsu or ‘watery abyss,’ out of which Chaldæan philosophy taught that all things had been evolved. A Babylonian hymn which describes the casting of a copper ‘sea’ for the temple of Chaos tells us that, like the ‘sea’ at Jerusalem, it rested on the heads of twelve bulls.^[533] Along with the ‘sea’ bronze lavers and basins were provided for the ablutions of the priests and the vessels of the sanctuary.

The temple was but a shell for enclosing the innermost shrine or Holy of Holies where, as in a casket, the ark of the covenant was placed under the protecting wings of two gilded cherubim. What they were like we may gather from the Assyrian sculptures, in which the two winged cherubs are depicted on either side of the sacred tree.^[534] The over-shadowing wings formed a ‘mercy-seat,’ the parakku of the Babylonian texts, whereon, according to Nebuchadrezzar, Bel seated himself on the festival of the new year, while the other gods humbly ranged themselves around him bowing to the ground.^[535] At Babylon, moreover, the table of shewbread which stood before Bel was of solid gold, like the table which Solomon made for the service of Yahveh.^[536] Indeed, the description of the lavish use of gold in the temple of Jerusalem finds its echo in the description given by Nebuchadrezzar of the temples he reared in Babylon. The altar of Yahveh, it is said, was of gold, so too were the candlesticks and lamps and vessels; even the hinges of the doors that opened into the Holy of Holies were of the same precious metal, while the cedar work was richly gilded, and the floor itself was overlaid with golden plates. In similar terms Nebuchadrezzar describes his decoration of Ê-Sagila, the temple of Bel, at Babylon. Here too, the beams and panels of cedar were overlaid with gold, the gates were gilded, and the vessels for the service of the sanctuary were of solid gold.^[537] There was one point, however, in which the temples of Jerusalem and Babylon differed from one another; in the shrine of Ê-Sagila was the image of Bel: the Hebrew shrine contained no likeness of a god. The only graven figures within it were the cherubim whose wings overshadowed the ark.

The temple was finished in seven (or more exactly seven and a half) years. Perhaps an effort was made to restrict the years of building to the sacred number. At all events, it was in the seventh month of the Hebrew year, the Ethanim of the Phœnicians, that the feast of the dedication was kept.^[538] It coincided with the ancient festival of the Ingathering of the Harvest, a fitting season for commemorating the completion of the work.

The dedication of Solomon’s temple is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Jewish state and of Hebrew religion. It became the visible centre round which the elements of the Israelitish faith gathered and cohered together until the terrible day came when the enemy stormed the walls of the capital and laid its temple in the dust. But it had already exercised a profound influence upon the history of Judah. It had helped to unify the kingdom; to bind the population of southern Palestine, mixed in blood though it were, into a single whole. Unlike the northern tribes with their two great sanctuaries at Dan and Bethel, Judah and Benjamin had a common centre in the one sanctuary of Jerusalem. Around it, moreover, were grouped all the traditions and memories of a venerable past. It alone was connected with the traditions of the Mosaic Law and the priesthood of Shiloh, with the rites and ceremonies that had come down from the primeval days of the Israelitish people, and with the foundation of the monarchy itself. It was the dwelling-place on earth of Yahveh of Israel; here was the sacred ark of the covenant which had once been carried before the invaders of Canaan, and was still the outward sign and symbol of God’s presence among His people. With the preservation of the temple the preservation of the Jewish religion itself seemed to be bound up, as well as of the Jewish state.

But the temple did something more than help to unify the southern monarchy and preserve the traditions of the Mosaic law. It served also to strengthen and perpetuate the Davidic dynasty, and to keep alive in the hearts of the people their allegiance to the line of Solomon. The temple, as we have seen, was not only a national sanctuary, it was also a royal chapel. It formed, as it were, part of the royal palace, in which the king overshadowed the high priest himself. The halo of veneration which surrounded the temple was thus communicated to the royal line. The temple and the descendants of David became parts of the same national conception; the one necessarily implied the other. When the throne of David fell, the temple also fell with it. While the temple lasted, Judah remained a homogeneous state, yielding willing obedience to its theocratic monarchy, and gradually gaining a clearer idea of the meaning and practice of the Mosaic Law. The temple of Solomon made Jewish religion conservative, but it was a conservatism which, as time went on, evolved the consequences of its own principles, and sought how best to carry them out in ritual and practice.

Jerusalem had become one of the great capitals of the world. Its public buildings were worthy of the empire which had been created by David, of the wealth that had poured into the coffers of Solomon from the trade of the whole Orient, of the culture and art which the young king had done his best to introduce. But the necessities of defence were not forgotten. The fortifications of the city were pushed on—though, it would seem, not with sufficient rapidity to allow them to be finished before the king’s death—and horses and chariots were imported from Egypt and the land of the Hittites in the north. With these Solomon equipped a standing force of 1400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, who served as garrisons in Jerusalem and the other fortresses of the country.