XI. DAVID AND THE WOOD OF EPHRAIM

My subject has compelled me to anticipate some of the events of David’s history according to the order of time. I must now, therefore, revert to certain incidents in it, which it would before have interrupted my argument to notice, but which are too important, as evidences of its credibility, to be altogether overlooked.

The conspiracy of Absalom being now organized, it only remained to try the issue by force of arms; and here another coincidence presents itself.

In the seventeenth chapter of the second Book of Samuel, we read that “David arose, and all the people that were with him, and they passed over Jordan” (v. 22); and in the same chapter, that “Absalom passed over Jordan, he and all the men of Israel with him” (v. 24); and that “they pitched in the land of Gilead” (26). Now in the next chapter, where an account is given of a review of David’s troops, and of their going forth to the fight, it is said, “So the people went out into the field against Israel, and the battle was in the wood of Ephraim.” [2 Sam. 18:6.] But is not the sacred historian, in this instance, off his guard, and having already placed his combatants on one side the river, does he not now place his combat on the other? Is he not mistaken in his geography, and does he not thereby betray himself and the credit of his narrative? Certain it is, that Absalom had passed over Jordan eastward, and so had David, with their respective followers, pitching in Gilead; and no less certain it is, that the tribe of Ephraim lay altogether west of Jordan, and had not a foot of ground beyond it: how then was the battle in the wood of Ephraim? By any fabulous writer this seeming difficulty would have been avoided, or care would have been taken that, at least, it should be explained. But the Book of Samuel, written by one familiar with the events he describes, and with the scenes in which they occurred; written, moreover, in the simplicity of his heart, probably without any notion that his veracity could be called in question, or that he should ever be the subject of suspicious scrutiny, contents itself with stating the naked facts, and then leaves it to the critics to reconcile them as they can. Turn we then to the twelfth chapter of the Book of Judges. There we are told of an attack made by the Ephraimites upon Jephthah, in the land of Gilead, on pretence of a wrong done them when they were not invited by the latter to take part in his successful invasion of Ammon. It was a memorable struggle. Jephthah indeed, endeavoured to soothe the angry assailants by words of peace, but when he spake of peace, they only made themselves ready for battle. Accordingly, “he gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim.” Ephraim was discomfited with signal slaughter; those who fell in the action, and those who were afterwards put to death upon the test of the word Shibboleth, amounting to forty-two thousand men; almost an extinction of all the fighting men of Ephraim. Now an event so singular, and so sanguinary, was not likely to pass away without a memorial; and what memorial so natural for the grave of a tribe, as its own name for ever assigned to the spot where it fell, the Aceldama of their race?

Thus, then, may we account most naturally for a “wood of Ephraim” in the land of Gilead; a point which would have perplexed us not a little, had the Book of Judges never come down to us, or, coming down to us, had no mention been made in it of Jephthah’s victory; and though we certainly cannot prove that the battle of David and Absalom was fought on precisely the same field as this of Jephthah and the Ephraimites some hundred and twenty years before, yet it is highly probable that this was the case, for both the battles were assuredly in Gilead, and both apparently in that part of Gilead which bordered upon one of the fords of Jordan.

Thus does a seeming error turn out, on examination, to be an actual pledge of the good faith of the historian; and the unconcern with which he tells his own tale, in his own way, never pausing to correct, to balance, or adjust, to supply a defect, or to meet an objection, is the conduct of a witness to whom it never occurred that he had anything to conceal, or anything to fear; or, if it did occur, to whom it was well known that truth is mighty, and will prevail.