which was soon to become exceedingly formidable. His power entirely shut Solomon out from the trade across the desart, at least by its natural channel; and the activity of two such adversaries as Rezon and Hadad must have awakened the slumbering enmities of Ammon and Moab, which, as well as Edom, had fearful wrongs to avenge.

Thus clouds were gathering over the late splendid Hebrew empire. The secret began to transpire among the enemies of the house of David, that the lofty statue of Hebrew ascendancy before which they had crouched in homage, was nothing but a gaudy gigantic doll. The veterans of David had passed away, and as no new wars of importance or continuity had arisen to train up successors to them, the very instrument of dominion had been seriously impaired; nor was military exertion in accordance with Solomon's tastes and habits. The embarrassments in which he was involved were in part bequeathed to him by his father; for empire begun by prowess and established by massacre is certain to breed smothered enmities, which at last blaze out in retaliation. But another still more formidable danger rose out of his own pomp and voluptuousness. To support these simultaneously with the heavy expenses of his over-grasping empire, the ample revenues of his own domains, of his exclusive trade, and of his foreign tribute, had not sufficed; and it had become requisite to lay heavy taxes on his own people. They had discovered that his wealth was their poverty; and, having no constitutional mode of remonstrance, waited with impatience for the commencement of a new reign, hoping then to exact some conditions from the prince, and not allow him to ascend the throne in as arbitrary and unformal a manner as Solomon had done. To men in such a temper, the declaration of Ahijah the Shilonite in favour of Jeroboam fell as spark upon tinder. The house of Ephraim, over whom Jeroboam was placed, accepted Ahijah's address as a protest against the king personally, and as a sanction given to Jeroboam, to whom they were favourably disposed; while Solomon's immediate persecution of him must assuredly have increased his

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popularity.-Once more; the lavish display of wealth in which the Hebrew monarch indulged, excited the cupidity of neighbouring powers. While his army was in its prime of strength, such conduct may have been not impolitic; but when he had been seen unable to repress the attacks of petty potentates, like Rezon and Hadad, his temple and his treasures were but a mark to the spoiler, and presently lured the powerful king of Egypt against the land.

It was well for Solomon that death overtook him before this calamity and disgrace overwhelmed Jerusalem. His career had come to its natural termination, when the primitive impulse of prosperity had been spent. In spite of his muchvaunted wisdom, there had been no vitality or reproductive power infused into the national finances. All were sensible that the public weal was decaying; and when he died, very few regretted him1.

The sagacity attributed to him seems to have been threefold: wisdom in the administration of justice, which consisted chiefly in cleverness to discover truth, when the evidence was insufficient, doubtful or contradictory: wisdom in general government, as to which the actual results prove him to have been most lamentably deficient: and wisdom of a more scholastic kind, such as was evidenced in the writing of proverbs and books of natural history. Of his merit in the last, no means of judging exist; but those chapters of the Proverbs, which are regarded as his genuine writing, are the production of no common mind, and explain how, in that age, he was regarded as intellectually towering above other kings.

There is a marked contrast between the tone of the authorities on which we are dependent for the lives of David and Solomon. The books of Samuel and Kings show a general impartiality in which the Chronicles are wholly wanting. All the dark events which sully these two reigns are carefully hushed up by the last work. In it we read nothing of David's civil war during his reign in Hebron over

1 B.C. 955. See Appendix.

L

Judah; nothing of his cruelty towards Moab and Edom; nothing of his deeds of adultery and murder; nothing of Amnon's brutality, of the fierce revenge and wicked rebellion of Absalom; nothing of the immolation of Saul's sons, or of the revolt of Adonijah and his slaughter by Solomon; nothing of the crimes and the punishments either of Joab or of Shimei. On the other hand, we have a great deal in the Chronicles calculated to magnify the religious zeal, and especially the devotion to the Levitical system, displayed by David, of which the earlier history takes no notice. So too, the Chronicler suppresses all mention of the disgust of Hiram, of the idolatries of Solomon, and the reverses of his later years; of the insurrectionary movement of the prophet Ahijah, and the cause of Jeroboam's flight into Egypt. In short, it will record nothing but what tends to glorify this prince, the great establisher of the priestly dignity. Accordingly, it imputes his building of his queen's palace to a scruple of conscience as to this child of idolaters dwelling in the house of the pious David: "because" (said he) "the places are holy, whereunto the ark of Jehovah hath come." A few differences of this kind might be honourably accounted for; but a general review puts it beyond reasonable doubt, that the book of Chronicles is not an honest and trustworthy narrative, and must be used with great caution as an authority, where anything is involved which affects Levitical influence.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV.

On the Chronology.

THERE is no difference of opinion among chronologers, that the date of the capture of Samaria by Shalmaneser is B.C. 721; but when we reckon the times backward from this, various inconsistencies are discovered. It is not requisite here to

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recapitulate what has been so often treated. What we have particularly to remark, is, that after making the corrections which are usually approved, two great gaps still remain in the Israelitish history, which have been called Interregnums; the one, of ten years, between the death of Jeroboam the 2nd and the accession of his son Zachariah; the other, of nine years, between the death of Pekah and the accession of his murderer Hoshea. In the text we read simply, "Jeroboam slept with his fathers, and Zachariah his son reigned in his stead" and "Hoshea slew Pekah and reigned in his stead, in the twentieth year of Jotham son of Uzziah2." It is manifest that the compiler had in neither case the remotest idea of an interregnum, and we therefore ought not to interpolate so serious an event merely in deference to figures, which are easily corrupted, and often in these books undeniably faulty.

Hitzig has rightly remarked, that the second interregnum vanishes, if we properly interpret the reign of Jotham, who began to exercise royal power before his father died. Yet, when we have no new facts for Pekah's reign, it is hard to approve of lengthening it by eight years, which indeed involves more alterations than are enough. It suffices instead to correct the age of Hezekiah3 by deducting ten years; by which indeed we make Ahaz twenty or twenty-one years older than his son, while Hitzig computes nineteen only. In the common chronology there is but ten or eleven years between them, which is obviously absurd. Accordingly in the following pages, we follow a reckoning which reduces the dates of Uzziah, Pekah, and his near predecessors, by nine or ten years, which is the imaginary interregnum between Pekah and Hoshea.

As for the other gap, we have to choose between lengthening by ten years the reign of some Israelitish king, or shortening by a like sum that of a king of Judah. If the former plan be approved, we find one reason for lengthening that of Jeroboam; namely, that one correction then suffices: for the number 27 in 2 Kings, xv. 1, must on other grounds necessarily be altered, and is not here to be reckoned. Yet

1 2 Kings, xiv. 29.

2 2 Kings, xv. 30.

3 Chap. xviii. 2.

as Jeroboam has already a reign of forty-one years, we shrink from increasing it to fifty-one; a length of time which, though possible, ought hardly to be obtruded by conjectural emendation. Instead of this, to lengthen the reign of Menahem from above, though we have then three alterations to make in xv. 13, 17,—might still be better than the former change.

If we follow the general belief, that the same Hosea who composed the last eleven chapters of the book which bears his name, wrote his first chapter in the reign of Jeroboam II., we can scarcely doubt that the received chronology is in this part much too long; for as his last chapters date from the siege of Samaria, it assigns to him full sixty years of prophesying. Isaiah and Micah also were believed by the ancient compilers of their works to have written under four successive kings of Judah; which is another hint to us that they held a shorter chronology. On the whole, then, we see reasons for preferring the alternative of deducting ten years from some Jewish reign.

When we endeavour to pick out the particular reign, we find that there is danger of lowering too much the excess of age of father over son. On this ground, Amaziah and Uzziah are the only two reigns to be thought of, unless we choose to encounter the need of several other changes. Their ages exceed those of their sons by thirty-eight and forty-three years respectively. Yet we cannot thus deal with Uzziah, (whose accession we have already lowered by nine or ten years,) without making Jotham die before his father. It remains therefore to deduct ten years from Amaziah's reign 1, and to suppose that he was only twenty-eight years older than his son Uzziah. From these changes we finally bring out, that the death of Solomon was in the year B.C. 955.

The reigns of Solomon, of David, and (according to St. Paul in the Acts of the Apostles) of Saul likewise, are forty years each. This does not appear too long a period in itself, either

1 For this we must change twenty-nine into nineteen in 2 Kings, xiv. 2, and fifteen into twenty-five in v. 23. This imputes an error which is no mere accident of transcription, but that is perhaps in any way inevitable.