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The battle of Karkor.

They had fled with a confusion which could only be compared to clouds of chaff and weeds flying before the blast of a furious hurricane, or the rapid spread of a conflagration where the flames leap from tree to tree and from hill to hill in the dry forests of the mountains; and in the midst of this were taken the two leaders of the horde, Zeba and Zalmunna. Then came the triumphant return, and the vengeance on the two cities for their inhospitalities. The tower of the Divine Vision was razed, the chiefs of Succoth were beaten to death with the thorny branches of the neighbouring acacia groves. The two kings of Midian, in all the state of royal Arabs, were brought before the conqueror on their richly caparisoned dromedaries. They replied with all the spirit of Arab chiefs to Gideon, who for a moment almost gives way to his gentler feelings at the sight of such fallen grandeur. But the remembrance of his brother's blood on Mount Tabor steels his heart; and when his boy, Jether, shrinks from the task of slaughter, he takes their lives with his own hand, and gathers up the vast spoils, the gorgeous dresses and ornaments, with which they and their camels were loaded.

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How signal the deliverance was, appears from its many memorials: the name of Gideon's altar, of the spring of Harod, of the rock of Oreb, of the winepress of Zeeb;2 whilst the Prophets and Psalmist allude again and again to details not mentioned in the history—"The rod of the oppressor broken as ' in the day of Midian '3--the wild panic of the confused 'noise and garments rolled in blood-the streams of blood that flowed round the rock of Oreb'-the insulting speeches and the desperate rout, as before fire and tempest, of the four chiefs whose names passed even into a curse-'Make Thou 'their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, yea, all their princes like 'Zeba and Zalmunna.'

But the most immediate proof of the importance of this victory was that it occasioned the first direct attempt to ploration Fund, April 1874, p. 40.) Judg. vi. 24; vii. 2, 25.

'Ps. lxxxiii. 9-11. The spots seem to have been identified not far from the fords of Jericho by Lieutenant Conder. (See Quarterly Statement of Palestine Ex

3 Isa. ix. 4; x. 26 Ps. lxxxiii. 9-11.

Royal state of Gideon.

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establish the kingly office, and render it perpetual in the house of Gideon. 'Rule thou over us, both thou and thy son and thy son's son; for thou hast delivered us from the hand 'of Midian.' Gideon declines the office. But he reigns, notwithstanding, in all but regal state. His vast military mantle1 receives the spoils of the whole army. He combines, like David, the sacerdotal and the regal power. An image, clothed with a sacred ephod, is made of the Midianite spoils, and his house at Ophrah becomes a sanctuary, and he apparently is known even to the Phoenicians as a priest.2 He adopts, like David, the unhappy accompaniment of royalty, polygamy, with its unhappy consequences. It is evident that we have reached the climax of the period. We feel 'all the 'goodness' of Gideon. There is a sweetness and nobleness blended with his courage, such as lifts us into a higher region; something of the past greatness of Joshua, something of the future grace of David. But he was, as we should say, before his age. The attempt to establish a more settled form of government ended in disaster and crime. He himself remains as a character apart, faintly understood by others, imperfectly fulfilling his own ideas, staggering under a burden to which he was not equal. In his union of superstition and true religion, in his mysterious loneliness of situation, he recalls to us one of the greatest characters of heathen history, with the additional interest of the high sacred element. 'His mind rose above the 'state of things and men ;' so we may apply to him what has been said of Scipio Africanus-'his spirit was solitary and 'kingly; he was cramped by living amongst those as his equals whom he felt fitted to guide as from a higher sphere; and he 'retired to his native' Ophrah 'to breathe freely, since he 'could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero-king.' 4

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The career of Gideon, so poetical, so elevated, so complete in itself, seems at first sight but unevenly combined with the impotent conclusion of the prosaic and almost secular story of Abimelech. But this story has an interest of its own, in the

1 Judg. viii. 25 (Hebrew). Eus. Pr. Ev. i. 9.

3

3 Judg. viii. 35.

Arnold's Rome, iii. 314.

liveliness of its details, independently of the grander narrative to which it is a close sequel.

Rise of

Abimelech.

We are suddenly introduced for the first and only time in the Book of Judges to the ancient capital of the nation in Shechem. In that beautiful and venerable city, the old inhabitants had still lingered after the conquest. One of the maidens of the city had become a slave1 of the great Gideon, and by her he had added another son to his already numerous offspring. Abimelech inherited the daring energy of his father, without his self-control and magnanimity. He determined, on the one hand, to avail himself of the growing tendency to a monarchical form of government (‘Is it 'better that threescore and ten persons or that one reign over 'you?'); and, on the other hand, he appealed to the common element of race between himself and the subject Shechemites, like our Henry, the first Norman son of a Saxon mother: 'Remember that I am your bone and your flesh.'2 To this appeal they at once responded, 'He is our brother.' From the treasury of the sanctuary, which they in league with the neighbouring cities had established, they granted him a subsidy; and with this and a body of insurgents he marched on Ophrah, where his seventy brothers still held their aristocratic court, and slew the whole family on 'one stone;' probably on that same consecrated rock whence, years before, his father had thrown down the altar at Baal. It is the first recorded instance of the dreadful usage of Oriental monarchies—'the slaughter of the 'brothers of kings,' which has continued down to our own days in the Turkish Empire, and has passed long ago into Bacon's famous proverb. To Shechem, his birthplace, and the seat of the ancient government of Joshua, of the future monarchy of Israel, Abimelech retired in triumph; and there, beside the oak whence Joshua had addressed the nation, where probably in after days the princes of Israel were inaugurated, Abimelech received, the first in the Sacred history, the name of KING. It was in the midst of this festive solemnity that a voice was heard from the heights of Gerizim, memorable in this crisis of 2 Judg. ix. 2.

1 Judg. viii. 31.

3 See Lecture XIII.

Parable of

1

Shechem, but memorable also in the history of the Church, for it is the first recorded PARABLE. One only child of Jotham. the family of Gideon had escaped—Jotham, who in this quaint address developes the quiet humour and sagacity of his father and grandfather, who had each turned away the wrath of their hearers by a short apologue. He from his concealment suddenly presented himself on one of the rocky spurs that project from Gerizim over the valley, probably from the conspicuous cliff that rises precipitously above what must have been the exact situation of the ancient Shechem. From that lofty pulpit, inaccessible, but audible from below, he broke forth, no doubt in the chant or loud lament in which Eastern story-tellers recite their tales, with the fable, intended to describe the disadvantages of government and of monarchy in all countries, but drawn from the very imagery which lay beneath him at the moment. Like all the parables of the earlier times of the Jewish nation, it turns on the vegetable world. The vine,2 the cedar, the thistle, in the fables of Palestine, take the place which, in the fables of India or of Greece, is occupied by the talking beasts or birds. His eye rested on that unparalleled mass of living verdure in which, alone of all the cities of Palestine, Shechem is embosomed. He imagined the ancient days of the earth when all those trees were endued with human instincts and human speech, and bade his hearers listen to them as they gathered themselves together in that green council to elect their king. First (so we may fill up the outline which then must have been supplied by the actual sight of the hearers) came all the lower trees to the chief of all that grow in that fertile valley-the venerable Olive. But the olive could not leave his useful and noble task of supplying the sacred purposes of God and man, and remained rooted in his ancient place. Next they approached the broad green shade of the Fig-tree. But he, too, had the delicious sweetness of his good fruit to care for, and his answer was the same as that of the olive. Then they addressed the luxuriant Vine, as he threw

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his festoons from tree to tree along the side of the hill. the vine clings to his appointed work of 'cheering God and 'man,' and he, too, abjured the idle state of monarchy. One and all the nobler trees were the true likenesses of the noble race of Gideon-in his usefulness, his sweetness, and his gaiety of speech and life. The Trees must descend to a lower growth before they could find any that would undertake the thankless task of ruler. The Briar, the Bramble, the Thorn, that crept along the barren side of the mountain, or under the cover of the walls of the vineyard or the orchard, had no loftier cares to distract him from the calling they proposed. It was the Briar, with which, doubtless then, as now, in the sacrificial feast on Mount Gerizim, huge fires were kindled; and from him, useless and idle as he seemed to be, a blaze would come forth in which friends and foes alike would burn-a widespreading conflagration which would fly from hill to hill, till it. swept within its range the distant cedars of Lebanon. This was the true likeness of the worthless but fierce Abimelech, of the first tyrant of the Jewish nation. So, from the rock, the youthful Seer pronounced his curse-in that faithful picture of the degraded politics of a degenerate or half-civilised state, when only the worst take any concern in public interests, when all that is good and noble turns away in disgust from so thankless and vulgar an ambition. He spoke like the Bard of the English Ode, and before the startled assembly below could reach the rocky pinnacle where he stood, he was gone. Immediately behind him (if we have rightly conjectured the spot where he stood) vast caverns open in the mountain side. There he might halt for the moment. But he stayed not till he was far away in the south, perhaps beyond the Jordan.1

The three years' reign of Abimelech which follows discloses to us the interior of society in this centre of Palestine. That light which the inventive genius of Walter Scott and the brilliant exaggeration of Thierry threw on the complicated relations of

'He fled to Beer.' Ewald conjectures that it was the Beer of Num. xxi. 16, on the frontier of Moab. If this seems too

remote, it may be Beeroth, in the tribe of Benjamin (the modern Bireh), or BaalathBeer, in Judah.

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