XXIV. AMAZIAH AND HIS FATHER JOASH

Such arrangements, indeed, were not unusual in those days and in those countries. Here is a further proof of it, and at the same time a coincidence which is a companion to the last.

1. “In the thirty-seventh year of Joash king of Judah, began Jehoash, the son of Jehoahaz, to reign over Israel in Samaria.” So we are told in one passage [2 Kings 13:10.] . But, in another [2 Kings 14:1.] , that, “In the second year of Joash (Jehoash), the son of Jehoahaz, king of Israel, reigned Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah.

2. Therefore, Amaziah, king of Judah, reigned in the thirty-ninth of Joash, king of Judah.

3. Now we learn from a passage in the second Book of Chronicles [2 Chron. 24:1.] , that “Joash reigned forty years in Jerusalem.”

4. Therefore Amaziah must have begun to reign one year at least before the death of his father Joash.

Can we discover any reason for this? The clue will be found in a parenthesis of half a line, which the following paragraph in the Chronicles presents: “And it came to pass at the end of the year, that the host of Syria came up against him (Joash); and they came to Jerusalem, and destroyed all the princes of the people … And when they were departed from him (for they left him in great diseases), his own servants conspired against him, for the blood of the sons of Jehoiada the priest, and slew him on his bed, and he died.” [2 Chron. 24:23. 25.]

The great diseases, therefore, under which, it seems, Joash was labouring at the moment of the Syrian invasion, presents itself as the probable cause why Amaziah his son, then in the flower of his age, was admitted to a share in the government a little before his time. Yet how circuitously do we arrive at this conclusion! The Book of Kings alone would not establish it; the Book of Chronicles alone would not establish it. From the former, we might learn when Amaziah began to reign; from the latter, when Joash, the father of Amaziah, died; and accordingly, a comparison of the two dates would enable us to determine that the reign of Amaziah began before that of Joash ended; but neither document asserts the fact that the son did reign conjointly with the father. We infer it: that is all. Neither does the Book of Kings make the least allusion to any accident whatever which rendered this co-partnership necessary; nor yet the Book of Chronicles directly, only an incidental parenthesis, a word or two in length, intimates that at the time of the Syrian invasion Joash was sick.

I have adduced this coincidence, strong in itself, chiefly in illustration and confirmation of the principles upon which the last proceeded; the simultaneous and premature assumption of the sceptre by the sons of Jehoshaphat and Ahab, as compared with the date of the combined expedition of those two kings against Ramoth-gilead. But I must not dismiss the subject altogether without calling your attention to the undesignedness manifested in either case. Nothing can be more latent than the congruity, such as it is, which is here found; either history might be read a thousand times without a suspicion that any such congruity was there; investigation is absolutely necessary for the discovery of it; patient disembroilment of a labyrinth of names, many being identical, where the parties are not the same; scrutiny and comparison of dates, seldom so given as to expedite the labours of the inquirer. All this must be done, or these singular tokens of truth escape us, and many, I doubt not, do escape us after all. What imposture can be here? What contrivers could be prepared for such a sifting of their plausible disclosures? What pretenders could be provided with such vouchers; or, having provided them, would bury them so deep as that they should run the risk of never being brought to light at all, and thus frustrate their own end in the fabrication?

Once more I commit to my readers facts which speak, I think, to the truth of Scripture, as things having authority; facts, which afford proof infallible that there is a mine of evidence, “deep things of God,” in this sense, in the sacred writings, which they who look upon them with a hasty and impatient glance—and such very generally is the manner of sceptics, and almost always the manner of youthful sceptics,—leave under their feet unworked; a treasure hid in a field which they only who will be at the pains to dig for it will find.

But if an investigation, such as this that we are conducting, leads to such a conclusion—to a conclusion, I mean, that there is a substratum of truth running through the Bible, which none can discover but he who will patiently and perseveringly sink the well at the bottom of which it lies—and such is the conclusion at which we must arrive—is it not a lamentable thing to hear, as we are sometimes condemned to hear it, the superficial objection, or supercilious scoff, proceeding from the mouth of one whose very speech betrays that he has walked over the surface of his subject merely, if even that, and who nevertheless pretends and proclaims that truth he finds not?