J.J. Blunt's Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences
AN ARGUMENT FOR THE VERACITY OF THE HOLY BIBLE
Introduction
Part One:
The Books of Moses
Part Two:
The Historical Scriptures
Part Three:
The Prophetical Scripture
Part Four:
The Gospels and Acts
Appendix:
The Gospels, Acts
and Josephus

XXVIII. THE PRIESTS AND THE REVOLT OF LIBNAH

I am confirmed in the supposition that the revolt of Libnah is correctly ascribed to the indignation of the Priests at the worship of Baal, by other circumstances in the history of those times; for many things conspire to show, on the one side, the reckless idolatry of the royal house of Judah (so true to their God till the blood of the house of Ahab began to run in their veins); and, on the other side, the general disaffection of the ministers of God, and the desperate condition to which they were reduced. For when the Temple of Jerusalem was to be repaired, which was done by Joash, the grandson of Athaliah [2 Chron. 24:4.] , the effects of her wicked misrule incidentally come out. Not only had the utensils of the Temple been removed to the house of Baal, but its very walls had in many places been broken up, the ample funds put into the hands of the young king being principally devoted, not to decorations, but to the purchase of substantial materials, timber and stones; and from a casual expression touching the rites of the Temple, that “there were offered burnt-offerings in the House of the Lord continually all the days of Jehoiada,” [2 Chron. 24:14.] it is pretty evident that, whilst Athaliah was in power, even these had been discontinued; that even Judah, the tribe of God’s own choice, even Zion, the hill which he loved, paid him no longer any public testimony of allegiance, the faithful city herself became an harlot. So wanton was the defiance of the Most High God, during the reigns of Jehoram, Ahaziah, and the subsequent usurpation of Athaliah, when these, her husband, and her son, were dead.

On the other hand, Joash, the rightful possessor of the throne of Judah, an infant plucked from among his slaughtered kindred by an aunt, and saved from the murderous hands of a grandmother, grew up unobserved—where, of all places?—in the Lord’s House, contiguous as it was to the palace of Athaliah, who little dreamed that she had such an enemy in such a quarter; the High Priest his protector; the Priests and Levites his future partizans; so that when events were ripe for the overthrow of Athaliah, the child was set up as the champion of the Church of God, so long prostrate before Baal, but still not spirit-broken—cast down, but not destroyed; and by that Church, and no party else, was he established; and the unnatural usurper was hurled from her polluted throne, with the shriek of treason upon her lips; and having lived like her mother, like her mother she died, killed under her own walls, and among the hoofs of the horses [2 Kings 11:16.] . This, I say, is a very consistent consummation of a resistance, of which the revolt of Libnah, some fourteen years before, was the earnest: in the revolt of Libnah, a city of the Priests, the disaffection of the Priests prematurely breaks out; in the dethronement of Athaliah, achieved by the Priests, that same disaffection finds its final issue; the interval between the two events having sufficed to fill up the iniquity of Baal’s worshippers, and to organize a revolt upon a greater scale than that of Libnah, which restored its dues to the Church, and to God his servants, his offerings, and his house.

But will any man say that the sacred historian so ordered his materials, that such incidents as these which I have named should successively turn up—that he guided his hands in all this wittingly—that he let fall, with consummate artifice, first a brief and incidental notice (a mere parenthesis) of the revolt of a single town, suppressing meanwhile all mention of its peculiar constitution and character, though such as prepared it above others for revolt—that then, after abandoning not only Libnah, but the subject of Judah in general, and applying himself to the affairs of Israel in their turn, he should finally revert to his former topic, or rather to a kindred one, and lay before us the history of a general revolt, organized by the Priests; and all in the forlorn hope that the uniform working of the same principle of disaffection in the same party, and for the same cause, in two detached instances, would not pass unobserved; but that such consistency would be detected, and put down to the credit of the narrative at large? This surely is a degree of refinement much beyond belief.

Thus having traced this singular people through a long and most diversified history, we are come to see planted in both kingdoms of Israel and Judah the idolatrous principle which was shortly to be the downfal of both. God usually works out his own ends in the way of natural consequence, even his judgments being in general the ordinary fruits of the offences which called for them; and in this instance the calves of Jeroboam and the groves of Baal were the sin; and from the sin were made to flow, as a matter of course, the disgust of all virtuous Israelites, and the intestine divisions resulting from it; the interruption or suspension of all public worship; the mischiefs of a perpetual conflict between a national code of laws still in force, and national idolatry, no less actually established than the laws; the depravity of morals which that idolatry encouraged, and which served to sap the people’s strength; all, elements of ruin which only wanted to be developed in order to be fatal, and which in a very few generations did their work.

It is curious to observe how the origin, the progress, and the consummation of the devastating principle, correspond in the two kingdoms.

Israel is the first to offend, both by the sin of Jeroboam and the sin of Ahab; and Israel is the first to have illustrious Prophets sent to him to counteract the evil, if it were possible—whom, however, he persecutes or slays; and Israel is the first to be carried into captivity.

Judah, after some years, follows the example of his rival. Idolatry, even the worst, that of the same Baal, is brought into Judah. Prophets, many and great, are now in turn sent to warn him of the evil to come; but now he too has declared for the groves; and those Prophets he stones, in one instance even between the porch and the altar; and, accordingly, by nearly the same interval as Judah followed Israel in his idolatries, did he follow him in his fate, and went after him to sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon. There is something very coincident in this relative scale of sin and suffering.

It was the office of those Prophets of whom I spoke, not only to foretel things to come, but also to denounce the sins of the times in which they lived; they were censors, as well as seers. Of the earlier race, Ahijah, Elijah, Elisha, and others, we have no writings at all, otherwise they would have doubtless offered, in their province as moralists, a mirror of their own age, in their own nation of Israel. Of the latter race, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and more, we possess the records, and in those records not unfrequently a picture of the condition of either kingdom; of Judah more especially. Here, therefore, a new scene opens before us; a new, though limited field of argument, such as I have been exploring, presents itself. It remains to produce a few such allusions to contemporary transactions as are blended with the prophecies—to examine how they tally with facts, as we find them set forth elsewhere by the sacred historians; and thence to derive vouchers for the veracious character of the Prophets themselves, such as may promote a disposition to give them at least a favourable hearing.