XV. JUDAH AND EPHRAIM AFTER DAVID

The history of the people of God has thus far been brought down to the reign of Solomon, and its general truth and accuracy (I think I may say) established by the application of a test which could scarcely fail us. The great schism of the tribes is now about to divide our attention between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; but before I proceed to offer some observations upon the effects of it, both religious and political, on either kingdom, observations which will involve many more of those undesigned coincidences which are the subject of these pages, I must say a word upon the progress of events towards the schism itself; for herein I discover combinations, of a kind which no ingenuity could possibly counterfeit, and to an extent which verifies a large portion of the Jewish annals. “By faith, Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed his children.” On that occasion, Judah and Ephraim were made to stand conspicuous amongst the future founders of the Israelitish nation. “Judah,” says the prophetic old man, “thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be on the neck of thine enemies: thy father’s children shah bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up. He stooped down, he crouched as a lion, and as an old lion: who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, till Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” [Gen. 49:8.] All this, and more, did Jacob foretel of this mighty tribe. Again, crossing his hands, and studiously laying the right upon the head of Ephraim, the younger of Joseph’s children, “Manasseh also shall be a people,” he exclaimed, “and he also shall be great; but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations. And so he blessed them that day, saying, In thee shall Israel bless, saying, God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh.” [Gen. 48:20.] Thus did these two tribes, Judah and Ephraim, enter the Land of Promise some two hundred and forty years afterwards, with the Patriarch’s blessing on their heads; God having conveyed it to them by his mouth, and being now about to work it out by the quiet operations of his hands. As yet, neither of them was much more powerful than his brethren, the latter less so; Judah not exceeding one other of the tribes, at least, by more than twelve thousand men, and Ephraim actually the smallest of them all, with the single exception of Simeon [Num. 26.] . The lot of Ephraim, however, fell upon a fair ground, and upon this lot, the disposing of which was of the Lord, turned very materially the fortunes of Ephraim; it fell nearly in the midst of the tribes; and accordingly, the invasion and occupation of Canaan being effected, at Shiloh in Ephraim, the Tabernacle was set up, there to abide three hundred years and upwards, during all the time of the Judges [Judges 21:19.] . Hither, we read, Elkanah repaired year by year for worship and sacrifice; here the lamp of God was never suffered to go out “in the Temple of the Lord,” (the expression is remarkable,) “where the Ark of God was;” [1 Sam. 3:3.] here Samuel ministered as a child, all Israel, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, speedily perceiving that he was established to be a prophet, because all Israel was accustomed to resort annually to Shiloh, at the feasts [1 Sam. 3:20, 21.] . Shiloh, therefore, in Ephraim, was the great religious capital, as it were, from the time of Joshua to Saul, the spot more especially consecrated to the honour of God, the resting-place of his tabernacle, of his prophets, and of his priests [Psalm 132:6; 78:67; 1 Sam. 2:14.] ; whilst at no great distance from it appears to have stood Shechem [Judges 21:19; Josh. 24:25, 26.] , once the political capital of Ephraim, till civil war left it for a season in ruins, but which, even then, continued to be the gathering point of the tribes [Josh. 24:1; Judges 9:2; 1 Kings 12:1.] ; Shechem, where was Jacob’s well [John 4:6.] , and where, accordingly, both literally and figuratively, was the prophecy of that Patriarch fulfilled, “Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall.” [See Lightfoot, Vol. i. 49, fol.]

Thus was this district in Ephraim, comprising Shiloh and Shechem, probably the most populous, certainly the most important, of any in all the Holy Land during the government of the Judges; and, constantly recruited by the confluence of strangers, Ephraim seems to have become (as Jerusalem became afterwards) what Jacob again foretold, “a multitude of nations.”

There are other and more minute incidents left upon record, all tending to establish the same fact. For I observe, that amongst the Judges, many, whether themselves of Ephraim or not, do appear to have repaired paired thither as to the proper seat of government. I find that Deborah “dwelt under the palm-tree, between Ramah and Bethel, in Mount Ephraim,” and that there the children of Israel went up to her for judgment [Judges 4:5.] . I find that Gideon, who was of Ophrah in Manasseh, where he appears in general to have lived, and where he was at last buried, had, nevertheless, a family at Shechem it being incidentally said, that the mother of his son Abimelech resided there, and that there Abimelech himself was born [Judges 8:27–32; 9:1.] : a trifle in itself, yet enough, I think, to suggest, that at Shechem in Ephraim, Gideon did occasionally dwell; the discharge of his judicial functions, like those of Pilate at Jerusalem, probably constraining him to a residence which he might not otherwise have chosen. I find this same Shechem the head-quarters of this same Abimelech, and the support of his cause when he usurped the government of Israel [Judges 9:22.] . And I subsequently find Tola, though a man of Issachar, dwelling in Shamir, in Mount Ephraim (Shechem having been recently laid waste), and judging Israel twenty and three years [Judges 10:1.] .

Nor is this all. The comparative importance of Ephraim amongst the tribes during the time of the Judges is further detected in the tone of authority, not to say menace, which it occasionally assumes towards its weaker brethren. Gideon leads several of the tribes against the Midianites, but Ephraim had not been consulted. “Why hast thou served us thus,” is the angry remonstrance of the Ephraimites, “that thou calledst us not when thou wentest to fight with the Midianites? And they did chide with him harshly.” [Judges 8:1.] Gideon stoops before the storm; he disputes not the vast superiority of Ephraim, his gleaning being more than another’s grapes. Jephthah, in later times, ventures upon a similar invasion of the children of Ammon, and discomfits them with a great slaughter, but he, too, without Ephraim’s help or cognizance: again the pride of this powerful tribe is wounded, and “they gather themselves together, and go northward, and say unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire.” [Judges 12:1.] —All this, the unreasonable conduct of a party conscious that it has the law of the strongest on its side, and, by virtue of that law, claiming to itself the office of dictator amongst the neighbouring tribes. Well, then, might David express himself with regard to the support he expected from this tribe, in terms of more than common emphasis, when at last seated on the throne, his title acknowledged throughout Israel, he reviews the resources of his consolidated empire, and exclaims, “Ephraim is the strength of my head.” [Psalm 60:7.] Accordingly, all the ten tribes are sometimes expressed under the comprehensive name of Ephraim [2 Chron. 25:6, 7.] ; and the gate of Jerusalem which looked towards Israel appears to have been called, emphatically, the gate of Ephraim [2 Kings 14:13.] ; and Ephraim and Judah together represent the whole of the people of Israel, from Dan to Beer-sheba [Isai. 7:9–17, et alibi; Ezek. 37:19.] .

In tracing the seeds of the future dissolution of the ten from the two tribes, I further remark, that whilst Samuel himself remains at Ramah, a border town of Benjamin and Ephraim (for Shiloh and Shechem were probably now in possession of the Philistines), there to sit in judgment on such causes as Ephraim and the northern states should bring before him, he sends his sons to be judges in Beer-sheba [1 Sam. 8:2.] , a southern town belonging to Judah [Josh. 15:28.] , as though there was already some reluctance between these rival tribes to resort to the same tribunal: and the fierce words that passed between the men of Israel and the men of Judah, on the subject of the restoration of David to the throne, the former claiming ten parts in him, the latter nearness of kin [2 Sam. 19:43.] , still indicate that the breach was gradually widening, and that however sudden was the final disruption of the bond of union, events had weakened it long before. Indeed, humanly speaking, nothing could in all probability have preserved it, but a continuance of the government by judges, under God; who, taken from various tribes, and according to no established order, might have secured the commonwealth from that jealousy which an hereditary possession of power by any one tribe was sure to create, and did create; and which burst out in that bitter cry of Israel, at the critical moment of the separation, “What portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse—to your tents, O Israel: now see to thine own house, David.” [1 Kings 12:16.] And so, by the natural motions of the human heart, did God take vengeance of the people whom He had chosen, for rejecting Him for their sovereign; and a king, indeed, He gave them, as they desired, but He gave him in his wrath.

Thus have we detected, by the apposition of many distinct particulars, a gradual tendency of the Ten Tribes to become confederate under Ephraim; an event, to which the local position, numerical superiority, and the seat of national worship, long fixed within the borders of Ephraim, together conspired.

But meanwhile, it may be discovered in like manner, that Judah and Benjamin were also, on their part, knitting themselves in close alliance; a union promoted by contiguity; by the sympathy of being the only two royal tribes; by the connection of the house of David with the house of Saul (the political importance of which David appears to have considered, when he made it a preliminary of his league with Abner, that Michal should be restored, whose heart he had nevertheless lost [2 Sam. 3:13.] ); and finally, and perhaps above all, by the peculiar position selected by the Almighty [1 Chron. 28:11.] , for the great national temple which was soon to rob Ephraim of his ancient honours [Psalm 78:67.] ; for it was not to be planted in Judah only, or in Benjamin only, but on the confines of both; so that whilst the altars, and the holy place, were to stand within the borders of the one tribe, the courts of the temple were to extend into the borders of the other tribe [Comp. Josh. 15:63, and 18:28; and see Lightfoot, Vol. i. p. 1050, fol.] , and thus, the two were to be riveted together, as it were, by a cramp, bound by a sacred and everlasting bond, being in a condition to exclaim, in a sense peculiarly their own, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are we.”

We have thus traced, by means of the hints with which Scripture supplies us (for little more than hints have we had), the two great confederacies into which the tribes were gradually, perhaps unwittingly, subsiding; as well as some of the circumstances by which either confederacy was cemented. Let us pursue the subject, but still by means of the under-current of the history only, towards the schism.

And now Ephraim was called upon to witness preparations for the transfer of the seat of national worship from himself to his great rival, with something, we may believe, of the anguish of Phinehas’ wife, when she heard that the Ark of God was taken, and Shiloh to be no longer its resting-place; and I-chabod might be the name for the mothers of Ephraim at that hour to give to their offspring, seeing that the glory was departing from among them [1 Sam. 4:21.] . For what desolation and disgrace were felt to accompany this loss may be gathered from more passages than one in Jeremiah, where he threatens Jerusalem with a like visitation, “I will do unto this house” (saith the Lord, by the mouth of the prophet), “which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you, and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.” And again—“I will make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.” [Jer. 7:14, 15; 26:6.] With a heavy heart, then, must this high-spirited and ambitious tribe have found that “the place which God had chosen to set his name there” (so often spoken of by Moses, and the choice suspended so long,)was at length determined, and determined against him; that his expectation (for such would probably be indulged) that God would finally fix his seat where He had so long fixed his Tabernacle, was overthrown; that the Messiah, whom some sanguine interpreters of the prophets amongst his sons had declared should come from between his feet, was not to be of him [See on this subject, Allix, Reflections upon the Four last Books of Moses, p. 180.] ; but that “refusing the tabernacle of Joseph, and not choosing any longer the tribe of Ephraim, (mark the patriotic exultation with which the Psalmist proclaims this,) God chose the Tribe of Judah and Mount Zion, which he loved.” [Psalm 78:67.]

Such was the posture of the nation of Israel, such the temper of the times, “a breach,” as it were, “ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant,” when Solomon began to collect workmen, and to levy taxes throughout all Israel, for those vast and costly structures which he reared, even “the house of the Lord and his own house, and Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem,” [1 Kings 9:15.] besides many more; in some of them, indeed, showing himself the pious founder, or the patriot prince; but in some, the luxurious sensualist; and in some, again, the dissolute patron of idolatry [1 Kings 11:7.] . On, however, he went; and as if in small things as well as great, this growing division amongst the tribes (fatal as it was in many respects to prove) was ever to be fostered; as if the coming event was on every occasion to be casting its shadow before, a separate ruler, we read, “was placed over all the charge of the house of Joseph;” [1 Kings 11:28.] that is, one individual was made overseer over the work, or the tribute, or both, of the ten tribes; for so I understand the phrase, agreeably to its meaning in other passages of Scripture [See 2 Sam. 19:20, and Pole in loc. The rights of primogeniture, which Reuben had forfeited, appear to have been divided between Judah and Joseph: to Judah, the headship; to Joseph the double portion of the eldest son, and whatever else belonged to the “birthright.” See 1 Chron. 5:2. Thus the people of Israel became biceps, and were comprised under the names of the two heads. See Judges 10:9, where the house of Ephraim is synonymous with the house of Joseph. Lightfoot considers Joseph to have been the principal family while the Ark was at Shiloh, and all Israel to have been named after it, as in Ps. 80:1, but that when God refused Joseph, and chose Judah for the chief, Ps. 78:68, 69, then there began, and continued, a difference and distinction betwixt Israel and Judah, Joseph and Judah, Ephraim and Judah, the rest of the tribes being called by all these names, in opposition to Judah.—Lightfoot, i. 66, fol.] . And who was he?—a young man, an industrious man, a mighty man of valour, (for these qualities Solomon made choice of him,) and above all, a man of Ephraim [1 Kings 11:26.] ; Jeroboam it was.

It is impossible to imagine events working more steadily towards a given point, than here. The knot had already shown itself far from indissoluble, and now, time, opportunity, and a skilful hand, combine to loose it. Here we have a great body of artificers, almost an army of themselves, kept together some twenty years—Ephraimites and their colleagues engaged in works consecrated to the glory and aggrandizement of Judah and Benjamin, rather than to their own—Ephraimites contributing to the removal of the seat of government from Ephraim to Judah—Ephraimites paying taxes great and grievous, not merely to the erection of a national place of worship, (for to this they might have given consent, the command being of God,) but to the construction of palaces for princes, never again to be of their own line; and temples for the idols of those princes, living and dead, which were expressly contrary to the command of God—and lastly, we have an Ephraimite, even Jeroboam, with every talent for mischief, endowed with every opportunity for exercising it, put into an office which at once invested him with authority, and secured him from suspicion, so that his future crown was but the consummation of his present intrigues; the issue of his own subtilty, and the people’s discontent. Nor is this matter of conjecture. Is it not written in the Book of Kings (most casually, however), that the people of Israel—I speak of Israel as distinguished from Judah and Benjamin—in the first moment of madness, on the accession of Rehoboam, wreaked their vengeance—upon whom, of all men?—upon Adoniram, the very man whom Solomon his father had appointed to levy men and means throughout Israel, the tax-gatherer for the erection of these stupendous works! and him, the victim of popular indignation, did all Israel stone with stones till he died [1 Kings 5:4; 12:18.] . The wisdom and policy of Solomon, indeed, in spite of his faults and follies, upheld his empire till the last, and saved it from falling in pieces before the time; but how completely the fulness of that time was come is clear, when no sooner was he dead, than his son, and rightful successor, found it expedient to hasten to Shechem, there to meet all Israel, conscious as he was, that however his title was admitted by Judah, it was quite another thing whether Ephraim would give in his allegiance too; and, as the event proved, his apprehensions were not without a cause [1 Kings. 12:1.] .

And now Jeroboam, a man to seize upon any seeming advantages which his situation afforded him, at once enlisted the ancient sympathies of the people, by forthwith rebuilding Shechem, which had been burned by Abimelech [1 Kings 12:25.] , and making it his residence, though he had all the northern tribes among whom to choose; and, with similar policy, he proceeded to provide for them a worship of their own, nor would allow that “in Jerusalem alone was the place where men ought to worship”—a worship, rather, I think, a gross corruption, than an utter abandonment of the true, the idolatry of the second, more than of the first commandment, though the two offences are very closely connected, and almost of necessity run into one another. For I observe, throughout the whole history of the kings of Israel, a distinction made between the sin of Jeroboam and the worship of Baal, somewhat in favour of the former; and that, offensive as they both were to the one Eternal and Invisible God, Baal-worship was the greater abomination. Perhaps, too, it may be added, that this distinction is recognised by the Apostle, whose words are, that, “the glory of the uncorruptible God was,”—not altogether abjured—but “changed into an image made like four-footed beasts.” [Rom. 1:23.] But, however this may be, a worship of their own, independent of the temple, and of the regular priesthood, Jeroboam established, still building upon the religious rites of old time, and accommodating the calendar of feasts in some measure to that which had existed before [1 Kings 12:32; Hosea 2:11; 9:5.] ; and whatever might be his reason for selecting Bethel for one of his calves, whether the holy character of the place itself, or its vicinity to the still holier Shiloh [Judges 21:19.] , whither the people had habitually resorted, I discover a very sufficient reason for his choice of Dan for the other, exclusive of all consideration of local convenience, the curious circumstance, that in this town there had already prevailed for ages a form of worship, or of idolatry (I should rather say), very closely resembling that which he now proposed to set up throughout Israel, and furnishing him, if not with a strict precedent, at least with a most suitable foundation on which to work. For in this town stood the teraphim, or images of Micah, whatever might be their shape, which the original founders of Dan had taken with them, and planted there; and a priesthood there was to minister to these images, precisely like that of Jeroboam, not of the sacerdotal order, for they were sons of Manasseh; and thus was there an organized system of dissent from the national church, existing in the town of Dan, “all the time that the House of God was in Shiloh;” [Judges 18:31.] and thus was accomplished, I suspect, that mysterious prediction of Jacob, “Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.” [Gen. 49:17.]

On the present occasion, those undesigned coincidences, which are the staple of my argument, have not been presented in so perspicuous a manner as they may have been sometimes; for the attention has, in this instance, been directed not to one point, singled out of several, but to the details of a continuous history. This I could not avoid. At the same time, these details, on a review of them, will be found to involve many minute coincidences, and those just such as constitute the difference between the best-imagined story in the world and a narrative of actual facts. For let this be borne in mind, that the sketch which I have offered of the gradual development of the schism between Israel and Judah, is by no means an abridgment of the obvious Scripture account of it—very far from it.—Looking to that part of Scripture which directly relates to this schism, and confining ourselves to that, we might be led to think the rent of the kingdom as sudden and unshaped an event, as the rending of the prophet’s mantle, which was its type: for here, as elsewhere, the history is rapid and abrupt. What I have offered is, strictly speaking, a theory; a theory by which a great many loose and scattered data, such as Scripture affords to a diligent inquirer, and to no other, are, with much seeming consistency, combined into a whole; it is the pattern which gradually comes out, when the many-coloured threads, gleaned up as we have gone along, are worked into a web.

1. For instance—I can conceive it very possible, without claiming to myself any peculiar sagacity, for a man to read, and not inattentively either, the sacred books from Joshua to Chronicles, and yet never happen to be struck with the fact that Ephraim was a leading tribe—that it was the head, allowed or understood, of an easy confederacy; the thing is scarcely to be discovered but by the apposition of many passages, dispersed through these books, bearing, perhaps, little or no relation to one another, except that of having a common bias towards this one point. The same may be said of the main cause of this comparative superiority of Ephraim, the accidental, as some would call it,—as we will call it, the providential—establishment of the Tabernacle within its borders. The circumstance of Shiloh being the place whither all Israel went up to worship for three centuries and more, all important as it was to the tribe whom it concerned, is not put forward either as accounting for the prosperity of Ephraim above its fellows, whilst in Ephraim the Ark stood; or for the jealousy which it discovered towards Judah, when to Judah the Ark had been transferred; nor yet as being the natural means by which the remarkable words of Jacob were brought to pass, touching the future pre-eminence of Ephraim and Judah, howbeit, as tribes, they were then but in the loins of their fathers. So far from this, when in the Book of Joshua we are told that the Tabernacle was set up in Shiloh, not a syllable is added by which we can guess where Shiloh was, whether in Ephraim or elsewhere [Josh. 18:1.] ; and it is only after some investigation, and by inference at last, that in Ephraim we can fix it.

2. The same is true of the league between Benjamin and Judah. What were the sympathies beyond mere proximity, which cemented them so firmly, is altogether a matter for ourselves to unravel, if unravel it we can. We see them, indeed, acting in concert, as we also see the other tribes acting, but the books of Scripture enter into no explanations in either case. Nevertheless, I find in one place, that Saul, the first king, was of Benjamin, and in another, that David, the second king, was of Judah, with a prospect of a continuance of the succession in that line; and here I perceive a mutual sympathy likely to spring out of the exclusive honours of the two royal tribes. Elsewhere, I find that the two royal houses of Saul and David were united by marriage, and here I detect a further approximation. I look again, and learn that a temple was built for national worship in a city, which one text places in Judah, and a parallel text in Benjamin, leaving me to infer (as was the fact) that the city was on the confines of both, and that upon the confines of both (as was also the fact) the foundations of the temple were laid. In these, and perhaps in other similar matters, which might be enumerated, I certainly do discover elements of union, however the writers, who record them, may never speak of them as such.

3. Again, the motives which operated with Jeroboam in the selection of Shechem for his residence, or of Dan for his idolatry, are not even glanced at, though, in either instance, reasons there were, we have seen, to make the choice judicious. And whilst we are told that he fled from Solomon, when the conspirator was detected in him, or when Ahijah’s prophecy awakened the monarch’s fears, and went into Egypt, and that from Egypt, at the death of Solomon, he hasted back to take his part in those stirring times, no hint, the most remote, is thrown out, that his sojourn in that idolatrous land, and the peculiar nature of its idolatry, influenced him in the choice of a calf for the representative of his own God, though the one fact does very curiously corroborate the other, and still adds credibility to the whole history.

In all this I discover much of coincidence, nothing of design. I see an extraordinary revolution asserted, and, then my eyes being opened, I perceive that the seeds of it, not however described as such, and often so small as to be easily overlooked, had been cast upon the waters generations before. I see coalitions and convulsions in the body politic of Israel, and I find, not without some pains-taking, and after all but in part, attractive or repulsive principles at work in that body, which, without being named as causes, do account for such effects. I see both in persons and places, so soon as I become intimately acquainted with their several bearings, something appropriate to the events with which they are connected, though I see nothing of the kind at first, because no such propriety appears upon the surface. These I hold to be the characters of truth, and the history upon which they are stamped I accordingly receive, nothing doubting—meanwhile, not failing to remark, and to admire, the silent transition of event into those very channels which Jacob in spirit had declared ages before; and to acknowledge, without attempting fully to understand, the mysterious workings of that Controlling Power, which can make men its instruments without making them its tools; at once compelling them to do his will, and permitting them to do their own; proving Himself faithful, and leaving them free.