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    My aim in this work is to put within the reach of all Bible students, learned and unlearned alike, the fruits of modern criticism and research, and at the same time to set forth briefly and suggestively those doctrinal and experimental truths which the Written Word itself contains.

    The labors of the agents of the Palestine Exploration Fund have thrown fresh light on many obscure questions of sacred topography and history, and verified in the minutest details the accuracy of Holy Writ. Besides, in an age prone to skepticism, God has given remarkable confirmations of the truth of His own Word in raising men who have been enabled to decipher the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria, and the archaic characters of the Moabite stone. Ephesus with its Temple to the great Diana, Midian and its mines, Rome and its catacombs, have all contributed their quota of witness to the truth. The discoveries thus made, insofar as they elucidate the sacred volume, have been embodied in this encyclopedia. At the same time the commentators, ancient and modern, English and German, have been carefully consulted, and the results of reverent criticism given, in respect to difficult passages.

    Many subjects which most of the Bible dictionaries omit, and which are of deep interest, are handled; as, for instance, Antichrist, The Thousand Years or Millennium, Inspiration, Predestination, Justification, Number, Divination (in its bearing on Spiritualism), etc. Yet the whole, while containing the substance of most that is valuable in other; dictionaries, and several new features, is comprised within much smaller compass, and is offered at considerably less cost.

    It is a storehouse of Scriptural information in a most compact and accessible form; its alphabetical arrangement fitting it, for easy reference by teachers and students who have not, the leisure or opportunity for more extended research.

    The student will find at the end an index of all the books and almost all the chapters in the whole Bible, in consecutive order, with references to the articles which illustrate them; thus, by consulting the index on a passage of Scripture, he will immediately find the article which will afford him the information that he desires.

    Unity of tone and aim is better secured by unity of authorship than if the articles had been composed by different writers. If some errors have been fallen into inadvertently, the reader will remember the vastness of the undertaking by one author, and “Cum mea compenset vitiis bona, pluribus hisce, Si modo plura mihi bona sunt, inclinet.”

    All pains have been conscientiously taken to ensure accuracy, and to put the earnest student in possession of the most trustworthy information on debated points.

    I have to acknowledge gratefully the care which has been bestowed in the execution of this work by Messrs. Butler and Tanner, Frome and also the valuable help received from Mr. W. Lethaby, their proofreader, in revising this vast and responsible work, the fruit of my labors for the last seven years. May the Lord accept and sanctify this undertaking to His own glory, the vindication of His truth, and the edification of His church! ANDREW ROBERT FAUSSET ST.

    CUTHBERT’S RECTORY, YORK A AARON (according to Jerome meaning “mountain of strength”), the oldest son of Amram and Jochebed, of the tribe of Levi; brother of Moses and Miriam ( Numbers 26:59; Exodus 6:20); 1574 B.C. Jochebed, mother of Moses and Aaron, bore them three centuries after the death of Levi ( Exodus 2:1); “daughter of Levi, whom her mother bore to Levi,” means” a daughter of a Levite whom her mother bore to a Levite.” The point of Numbers 26:59 is, Moses and Aaron were Levites both on the father’s side and mother’s side, Hebrews of Hebrews. He was three years older than Moses ( Exodus 7:7): born, doubtless, before Pharaoh’s edict for the destruction of the Hebrew male infants ( Exodus 1:22). Miriam was the oldest of the three, as appears from her being old enough, when Moses was only three months old and Aaron three years, to offer to go and call a Hebrew nurse for Pharaoh’s daughter, to tend his infant brother. The first mention of Aaron is in Exodus 4:14; where, in answer to Moses’ objection that he did not have the eloquence needed for such a mission as that to Pharaoh, Jehovah answers: “Is not Aaron, the Levite, thy brother? I know that he can speak well: and thou shalt speak unto him, and put words in his mouth; and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do; and he shall be thy spokesman unto the people; and he shall be instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God.” His being described as “the Levite” implies that he already took a lead in his tribe; and, as the firstborn son, he would be priest of the household. The Lord directed him to “go into the wilderness to meet Moses” ( Exodus 4:27). In obedience to that intimation, after the forty years’ separation, he met Moses in the “mount of God,” where the vision of the flaming bush had been vouchsafed to the latter, and conducted him back to Goshen. There Aaron, evidently a man of influence already among the Israelites, introduced Moses to their assembled elders; and, as his mouthpiece, declared to them the divine commission of Moses with such persuasive power, under the Spirit, that the people “believed, bowed their heads, and worshipped” ( Exodus 4:29-31). During Moses’ forty years’ absence in Midian, Aaron had married Elisheba or Elizabeth, daughter of Amminadab, and sister of Naashon, a prince of the children of Judah ( Exodus 6:23; 1 Chronicles 2:10). By her he had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar (father of Phinehas), and Ithamar. From his first interview with Pharaoh to the end of his course he always appears in connection with his more illustrious brother, cooperating with and assisting him. On the way to Sinai, in the battle with Amalek, Aaron, in company with Hur, supported Moses’ weary hands, which uplifted the miracle-working rod of God ( Exodus 17:9-13); and so Israel prevailed. His high dignity as interpreter of Moses, and worker of the appointed “signs in the sight of the people,” and his investiture with the hereditary high priesthood, a dignity which Moses did not share, account naturally for his having once harbored envy, and joined with Miriam in her jealousy of Moses’ Ethiopian wife, when they said: “Hath the Lord spoken only by Moses? Hath He not spoken also by us?” (Compare Numbers 12:1,2 with Exodus 15:20.)

    But Moses is always made the principal, and Aaron subordinate. Whereas Moses ascended Sinai, and there received the tables of the law direct from God, as the mediator ( Galatians 3:19), Aaron has only the privilege of a more distant approach with Nadab and Abihu and the seventy elders, near enough indeed to see Jehovah’s glory, but not to have access to His immediate presence. His character, as contrasted with Moses, comes out in what followed during Moses’ forty days’ absence on the mount. Left alone to guide the people, he betrayed his instability of character in his weak and guilty concession to the people’s demand for visible gods to go before them in the absence of Moses, their recognized leader under Jehovah; and instead of the pillar of cloud and fire wherein the Lord heretofore had gone before them ( Exodus 13:21; Exodus 32). Perhaps Aaron had hoped that their love of their personal finery and jewelry, which is the idol of so many in our own days, would prove stronger than their appetite for open idolatry; but men will for superstition part with that which they will not part with for a pure worship. So, casting the responsibility on them, easy and too ready to yield to pressure from outside, and forgetting the precept, “thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” ( Exodus 23:2), he melted, or permitted their gold to be melted in a furnace, and “fashioned it with a graving tool into a calf.” This form was probably designed as a compromise to combine the seemingly common elements of the worship of Jehovah associated with the calf-formed cherubim, and of the Egyptian idol-ox, Mnevis or Apis. Like Jeroboam’s calves long after, the sin was a violation of the second rather than of the first commandment, the worship of the true God by an image (as the church of Rome teaches), rather than the adding or substituting of another god. It was an accommodation to the usages which both Israel and Jeroboam respectively had learned in Egypt.

    Like all compromises of truth, its inevitable result was still further apostasy from the truth. Aaron’s words, “These are thy gods elohim (a title of the true God), O Israel, which brought thee up out of Egypt,” as also his proclamation, “Tomorrow is a feast toJEHOVAH,” show that he did not mean an open apostasy from the Lord, but rather a concession to the people’s sensuous tastes, in order to avert a total alienation from Jehovah.

    But, the so-called “feast of the Lord” sank into gross paganness; “the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play,” “dancing” before the calf, “naked unto their shame among their enemies”; they aroused Moses’ righteous anger when he descended from the mountain, so that he broke in pieces the tables out of his hand, as a symbol of their violation of the covenant. Then he burned the calf in the fire, ground it to powder (a process which required a considerable acquaintance with chemistry), strewed it upon the water, and made the Israelites drink of it. Compare Proverbs 1:31. Aaron alleged, as an excuse, the people’s being “set on mischief,” and seemingly that he had only cast their gold into the fire, and that by mere chance “there came out this calf.”

    Aaron’s humiliation and repentance must have been very deep; for two months after this great sin, God’s foreappointed plan (Exodus 29) was carried into effect in the consecration of Aaron to the high priesthood (Leviticus 8). That it was a delegated priesthood, not inherent like the Messiah’s priesthood, of the order of Melchizedek, appears from the fact that Moses, though not the legal priest but God’s representative, officiates on the occasion, to inaugurate him into it. Compare, for the spiritual significance of this, Hebrews 7. Aaron’s very fall would upon his recovery make him the more fit as a priest, to have compassion on the ignorant and on them that are out of the way, for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity ( Hebrews 5:2); compare the case of Peter, Luke 22:31,32.

    The consecration comprised a sin offering for reconciliation, a burnt offering to express whole-hearted self-consecration to God, and a meat offering (minchah ), unbloody, of flour, salt, oil, and frankincense, to thank God for the blessings of nature (these marking the blessings and duties of man); then also the special tokens of the priestly office, the ram of consecration, whose blood was sprinkled on Aaron and his sons to sanctify them, the sacred robes “for glory and for beauty,” breastplate, ephod, robe, embroidered coat, mitre, and girdle, and linen breeches (Exodus 28); and the anointing with the holy oil, which it was death for anyone else to compound or use ( Exodus 30:22-38), symbolizing God’s grace, the exclusive source of spiritual unction. Aaron immediately offered sacrifice and blessed the people, and the divine acceptance was marked by fire from the Lord consuming upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat, so that the people shouted at the sight and fell on their faces.

    Nadab and Abihu, probably (see Leviticus 10:8,9) under the effects of wine taken when about to be consecrated, instead of taking the sacred fire from the brazen altar, burned the incense on the golden altar with common fire; or, as Knobel and Speaker’s Commentary think, they offered the incense in accompaniment of the people’s shouts, not at the due time of morning or evening sacrifice, but in their own self-willed manner and at their own time. (See FIRE .) God visited them with retribution in kind, consuming them with fire from the Lord; and to prevent a similar evil recurring, forbade henceforth the use of wine to the priests when about to officiate in the tabernacle; the prohibition coming so directly after the sin, if the cause was indeed intemperance, is an undesigned coincidence and mark of genuineness: compare Luke 1:15 and 1 Timothy 3:3 for the present application. The true source of exhilaration to a spiritual priest unto God, is not wine, but the Spirit: Ephesians 5:18,19; compare Acts 2:15-18. Nothing could more clearly mark how grace had raised Aaron above his natural impulsiveness than the touching picture, so eloquent in its brevity, of Aaron’s submissiveness under the crushing stroke, “and Aaron held his peace.” Moses, in chronicling the disgrace and destruction of his brother’s children, evinces his own candor and veracity as an impartial historian. The only token of anguish Aaron manifested was his forbearing to eat that day the flesh of the people’s sin offering: Leviticus 10:12-20. All other manifestations of mourning on the part of the priests were forbidden; compare, as to our spiritual priesthood, Luke 9:60.

    Miriam, in a fit of feminine jealousy, some time afterward acted on Aaron so as to induce him to join in murmuring against Moses: the former relying on her prophetic inspiration ( Exodus 15:20), the latter on his priesthood, as though equal with Moses in the rank of their commission.

    Their pretext against Moses was his Ethiopian wife, a marriage abhorrent to Hebrew feelings. That Miriam was the instigator appears from her name preceding that of Aaron (Numbers 12), and from the leprosy being inflicted on her alone. Aaron, with characteristic impressibleness, repented of his sin almost immediately after he had been seduced into it, upon Jehovah’s sudden address to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, declaring His admission of Moses to speak with Him “mouth to mouth, apparently,” so that he should “behold the similitude of the Lord,” a favor far above all “visions” vouchsafed to prophets. At Aaron’s penitent intercession with Moses, and Moses’ consequent prayer, Miriam was healed.

    Twenty years later (1471 B.C.), in the wilderness of Paran, the rebellion took place of Korah and the Levites against Aaron’s monopoly of the priesthood, and of Dathan, Abiram, and the Reubenites against Moses’ authority as civil leader. It is a striking instance of God’s chastising even His own people’s sin in kind. As Aaron jealously murmured against Moses, so Korah murmured against him. Fire from the Lord avenged his cause on Korah and the 250 priestsn with him burning incense: and the earth swallowed up the Reubenites with Dathan and Abiram. Possibly Reuben’s descendants sought to recover the primogeniture forfeited by his incest ( Genesis 49:3,4; 1 Chronicles 5:1). The punishment corresponded to the sin; pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

    His numbers were so reduced that Moses prays for his deliverance from extinction: “Let Reuben live, and not die, and let not his men be few.” A plague from the Lord had threatened to destroy utterly the people for murmuring against Moses and Aaron as the murderers of Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and their accomplices, when Aaron proved the efficacy of his priesthood by risking his own life for his ungrateful people, and “making atonement for the people” with incense in a censer, and “standing between the living and the dead,” so that the plague was stopped (Numbers 16). To prevent future rivalry for the priesthood, God made Aaron’s rod alone of the twelve rods of Israel, suddenly to blossom and bear almonds, and caused it to be kept perpetually “before the testimony for a token against the rebels” (Numbers 17; Hebrews 9:4).

    Inclined to lean on his superior brother, Aaron naturally fell into Moses’ sin at Meribah, and shared its penalty in forfeiting entrance into the promised land ( Numbers 20:1-13). As Moses’ self-reliance was thereby corrected, so was Aaron’s tendency to be led unduly by stronger natures than his own. To mark also the insufficiency of the Aaronic priesthood to bring men into the heavenly inheritance, Aaron must die a year before Joshua (the type of Jesus) leads the people into their goodly possession.

    While Israel in going down the wady Arabah, to double the mountainous land of Edom, was encamped at Mosera, he ascended Mount Hor at God’s command. There Moses stripped him of his pontifical robes, and put them upon Eleazar his son; and Aaron died, 123 years old, and was buried on the mountain ( Numbers 20:28; 33:38; Deuteronomy 10:6; 32:50). The mountain is now surmounted by the circular dome of the tomb of Aaron, a white spot on the dark red surface. For thirty days all Israel mourned for him; and on the 1st of the 5th month, Ab (our July or August), the Jews still commemorate him by a fast. Eleazar’s descendants held the priesthood until the time of Eli, who, although sprung from Ithamar, received it. With Eli’s family it continued until the time of Solomon, who took it from Abiathar, and restored it to Zadok, of the line of Eleazar; thus accomplishing the prophecy denounced against Eli ( 1 Samuel 2:30). For the Jews’ opinion of Aaron, see the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus 45. His not taking the priestly honor to himself, but being called by God ( Hebrews 5:4,5), his anointing with incommunicable ointment (compare Psalm 45:7 and <19D302> Psalm 133:2), his intercession for his guilty people, his bearing the names of his people on his shoulders and breast ( Exodus 28:12,29,30), his being the only high priest, so that death visited any other who usurped the priesthood, his rod of office (compare <19B002> Psalm 110:2; Numbers 24:17), his alone presenting the blood before the mercy-seat on the day of atonement, theHOLINESS TO THE LORD on his forehead in his intercession within the veil (compare 1 Corinthians 1:30; Hebrews 9:24), the Urim and Thummim (Light and Perfection), all point to the true High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. Aaron’s descendants, to the number of 3,700 fighting men, with Jehoiada, father of Benaiah, their head, joined David at Hebron ( 1 Chronicles 12:27; 27:17); subsequently, Zadok was their chief, “a young man mighty of valor.”

    ABADDON The Hebrew in Job 31:12 and Proverbs 27:20, “destruction,” or the place of destruction, sheol (Hebrew); [Hades (Greek). The rabbis use Abaddon, from Psalm 88:12 (“Shall Thy lovingkindness be declared in destruction?”) (abaddon ) as the second of the seven names for the region of the dead. In Revelation 9:11 personified as the destroyer, Greek, [apolluon , “the angel of the bottomless pit,” Satan is meant; for he is described in Revelation 9:1 as “a star fallen from heaven unto earth, to whom was given the key of the bottomless pit”; and Revelation 12:8,9,12: “Woe to the inhabiters of the earth, for the devil is come down.”

    Also Isaiah 14:12; Luke 10:18. As king of the locusts, that had power to torment not kill ( Revelation 9:3-11), Satan is permitted to afflict but not to touch life; so in the case of Job (Job 1-2). “He walketh about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” ( 1 Peter 5:8). “A murderer from the beginning” ( John 8:44), who abode not in the truth.

    Elliott identifies the locusts with the Muslims; their turbans being the “crowns” (but how are these “like gold”?); they come from the Euphrates River; their cavalry were countless; their “breastplates of fire” being their rich-colored attire; the fire and smoke out of the horses’ mouths being the Turkish artillery; their standard “horse tails”; the period, an hour, day, month, and year, 396 years 118 days between Thogrul Beg going forth Jan. 18, 1057 A.D., and the fall of Constantinople, May 29, 1453 A.D.; or else 391 years and 1 month, as others say, from 1281 A.D., the date of the Turks’ first conquest of Christians, and 1672 A.D., their last conquest. The serpent-like stinging tails correspond to Mohammedanism supplanting Christianity in large parts of Asia, Africa, and even Europe. But the hosts meant seem infernal rather than human, though constrained to work out God’s will ( Revelation 12:1,2). The Greek article once only before all the periods requires rather the translation “for (i.e. against) THE hour and day and month and year,” namely, appointed by God. Not only the year, but also the month, day, and hour, are all definitively foreordained. The article “the” would have been omitted, if a total of periods had been meant.

    The giving of both the Hebrew and the Greek name implies that he is the destroyer of both Hebrews and Gentiles alike. Just as, in beautiful contrast, the Spirit of adoption enables both Jew and Gentile believers to call God, in both their respective tongues, [Abba (Hebrew in marked alliteration with [Abaddon Father (Greek, [pater ). Jesus who unites both in Himself ( Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14) sets us the example: Mark 14:36; Galatians 4:6. Jesus unites Hebrews and Gentiles in a common salvation; Satan combines both in a common “destruction.” (See ABBA .)

    ABAGTHA One of the seven eunuchs in Ahasuerus’ court; akin to the name Bigthan ( Esther 1:10; 2:21). Sanskrit, Bagadata, “given by fortune,” baga, or the sun. Sun worship prevailed early in Persia.

    ABANA The chief river of Damascus, the modern Barada, called by the Greeks “the golden stream,” flowing through the heart of the city and supplying it with water. The Pharpar mentioned with it in 2 Kings 5:12 is further from Damascus, and answers to the Awaj. The Barada rises in the Antilibanus mountain range, 23 miles from the city, and has the large spring Ain Fijah as a tributary. It passes the site of Abila and the Assyrian ruin Tell es Salahiyeh, and empties itself in the marsh Bahret el Kibliyeh or Bahr el Merj, “lake of the meadow.” Porter calculates that 14 villages and 150,000 souls depend on it for their water supply. Hence, we see the significance of Naaman’s boast, “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” These rivers render the environs of Damascus though bordering on a desert one of the loveliest spots on earth; whereas the Israelite streams, excepting Jordan, are dry for a large part of the year, and running in deep channels but little fertilize the land through which they flow. Amana, meaning perennial, is the reading of the Hebrew margin (the Qeri): “b” and “m” often are interchanged in eastern languages.

    Soon after issuing from Antilebanon, it parts into three smaller streams, the central flowing through Damascus and the other two one on each side of the city, diffusing beauty and fertility where otherwise there would be the same barrenness as characterizes the vast contiguous plains. Spiritually, men through proud self sufficiency refuse the waters of Shiloah that go softly ( Isaiah 8:6), the gospel “fountain opened for uncleanness,” preferring earthly “waters” ( Jeremiah 2:18; Zechariah 13:1).

    ABARIM Connected with Nebo and Pisgah in Deuteronomy 32:49; 34:1. Abarim was probably the mountain chain, Nebo one mountain of it, and Pisgah the highest peak of Nebo. Peor also belonged to the range. The chain east of the Dead Sea and lower Jordan commands most extensive views of the country west of the river. It was from Pisgah that Moses took his view of the promised land just before he died. Some identify mount Attarous, the loftiest hill in this region, ten miles north of the river Arnon, with Nebo. Its top is marked by a pistachio tree overshadowing a heap of stones. The7 Hebrew means “the mountains of the regions beyond,” namely, the Jordan, or else “the mountains of the passages.” They were in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho. Compare Numbers 27:12; 33:47,48; Deuteronomy 3:27. Dr. Tristram verified the observation of the landscape from Nebo, as seen by Moses according to the Scripture record. There is one isolated cone commanding a view of the valley where Israel’s battle was fought with Amalek, which may be the Pisgah of holy writ.

    ABBA The Chaldaic-Hebrew form, as ab is the Hebrew form, for the Greek [pater , “father.” Instead of the definite article which the Hebrew uses before the word, the Chaldee or Aramaic adds a syllable to the end, producing thus the emphatic or definitive form. It is used to express a vocative case, and therefore is found in all the passages in which it occurs in the New Testament (being in all, an invocation): Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6. The use of the Hebrew and of the Greek appellation addressed to the one Father beautifully suggests that the Spirit of adoption from Jesus, who first used the double invocation, inspires in both Jew and Gentile alike the experimental knowledge of God as our Father, because He is Father of Jesus with whom faith makes us one, and as our God because He is Jesus’ God. Compare John 20:17, “ascend unto My Father and (therefore) your Father. and to My God and (therefore) your God”; Galatians 3:28, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, for ye are all one in Jesus Christ”; Ephesians 2:18, “through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the leather.” (Especially see ABADDON above.) “Abba” was a title not to be used by slaves to a master, nor Imma to a mistress, only by children: see Isaiah 8:4. “Before the child shall have knowledge to cry Abi, Immi.”

    ABDA 1. 1 Kings 4:6. 2. Nehemiah 11:17; the Obadiah of 1 Chronicles 9:16, “the principal to begin the thanksgiving in prayer.” Meaning “a servant.”

    ABDEEL Jeremiah 36:26; meaning “servant of El,” or God.

    ABDI 1. 1 Chronicles 6:44. 2. 2 Chronicles 29:12. 3. Ezra 10:26. Meaning “my servant.”

    ABDON (1) 1. The tenth judge of Israel ( Judges 12:13,15), probably the same as Bedan, 1 Samuel 12:11; for the Phoenicians often omitted the ‘ayin.

    Son of Hillel, of the tribe of Ephraim. He succeeded Elon, and judged Israel eight years. His rule was a peaceful one, since no oppression of Israel during his time is mentioned. The record that he had 40 sons and nephews (or rather grandsons) who rode on young donkeys, implies their high dignity and consequence: compare Judges 5:9. He died in B.C. Of him Josephus (Ant. 5:7,15) writes: “He alone is recorded to have been happy in his children; for the public affairs were so peaceable and secure that he had no occasion to perform glorious actions.” A prophetical type of Israel’s and the world’s coming millennial blessedness ( Isaiah 1:26,27). Pirathon, the city to which he belonged, is identified by Robinson with the modern Fer’ata, six miles W. of Shechem or Nablous (Bibl. Res., 3). 2. 1 Chronicles 8:30, akin to Saul’s forefathers, 1 Chronicles 9:35,36. 3. 1 Chronicles 8:23. 4. 2 Chronicles 34:20; called Achbor 2 Kings 22:12.

    ABDON (2) A city of Asher given to the Levites of Gershom’s family: Joshua 21:30; 1 Chronicles 6:74. Hebron is substituted for it in Joshua 19:28.

    Many MSS. there read “Abdon”; the Hebrew letters resh ( r ) and daleth ( d ) are very similar, and therefore often interchanged.

    ABEDNEGO The Chaldee name (“servant of Nego.” i.e. Nebo or Mercury, the interpreter of the gods) for Azariah, one of Daniel’s three companions, miraculously delivered from the furnace into which they were cast for not worshipping Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image (Daniel 3). A tyrant may change the name, but he cannot change the nature, of him whose God is Jehovah. “The Son of God” with the three rendered the fire powerless to hurt even a hair of their heads ( Isaiah 43:2; Matthew 10:30). The salvation He worked is herein typified: the Son of God walking in the furnace of God’s wrath kindled by our sins; connected with the church, yet bringing us faith without so much as “the smell of fire” passing on us.

    ABEL Hebrew Hebel . Second of Adam and Eve’s sons, Genesis 4: meaning vanity or weakness, vapor or transitoriness. Cain means possession; for Eve said at his birth, “I have gotten as a possession a man from Jehovah,” or as the Hebrew (eth ) may mean, “with the help of Jehovah”; she inferring the commencement of the fulfillment of the promise of the Redeemer ( Genesis 3:15) herein. On the contrary, Abel’s weakness of body suggested his name: moreover prophetic inspiration guided her to choose one indicative of his untimely death. But God’s way is here from the first shown, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” ( 2 Corinthians 12:9; Hebrews 11:341. The cause of Cain’s hatred was “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” ( 1 John 3:12). Envy of the godly was “the way of Cain” ( Jude 1:11). “Faith” was present in Abel, absent from Cain ( Hebrews 11:4); consequently the kind of sacrifice (the mode of showing faith) Abel offered was “much more a sacrifice” (Wycliffe; so the Greek) than Cain’s. “By faith Abel offered unto God a much more sacrifice than Cain,” i.e. one which had more of the true virtue of sacrifice; for it was an animal sacrifice of the firstlings of the flock, a token of the forfeiture of man’s life by sin, and a type of the Redeemer to be bruised in heel that He might bruise the serpent’s head. God’s having made for man coats of skin presupposes the slaying of animals; and doubtless implies that Abel’s sacrifice of an animal life was an act of faith which rested on God’s command (though not expressly recorded) that such were the sacrifices He required. If it had not been God’s command, it would have been presumptuous will worship ( Colossians 2:23), and taking of a life which man had no right over before the flood ( Genesis 9:2-4). Cain in self-righteous unbelief, refusing to confess his guilt and need of atonement (typified by sacrifice), presented a mere thank offering of the first fruits; not, like Abel, feeling his need of the propitiatory offering for sin. So “God had respect unto Abel (first) and (then) to his offering.” “God testified of his gifts” by consuming them with fire from the shekinah or cherubic symbol E. of Eden (“the presence of the Lord”: Genesis 4:16; 3:24), where the first sacrifices were offered. Thus” he obtained witness that he was righteous,” namely, with the righteousness which is by faith to the sincere penitent. Christ calls him “righteous”: Matthew 23:35. Abel represents the regenerate, Cain the unregenerate natural man.

    Abel offered the best, Cain that most readily procured. The words “in process of time” ( Genesis 4:3 margin), “at the end of days,” probably mark the definite time appointed for public worship already in paradise, the seventh day sabbath. The firstling and the fat point to the divine dignity and infinite fullness of the Spirit in the coming Messiah. “By faith he being dead yet speaketh” to us; his “blood crying from the ground to God” ( Genesis 4:10) shows how precious in God’s sight is the death of His saints ( <19B615> Psalm 116:15; Revelation 6:10). The shedding of Abel’s blood is the first, as that of Jesus is the last and crowning guilt which brought the accumulated vengeance on the Jews ( Luke 11:51; Matthew 23:34,35-38). There is a further avenging of still more accentuated guilt, of innocent blood yet coming on “them that dwell on the earth”: Revelation 11: In Hebrews 12:24, it is written “Christ’s blood of sprinkling speaketh better things than that of Abel,” namely, than the blood of Abel’s animal sacrifice. For Abel’s is but the type, Christ’s the antitype and one only true propitiatory sacrifice. To deny the propitiation would make Cain’s offering to be as much a sacrifice as Abel’s. Tradition makes the place of his murder and grave to be near Damascus. (See ABILA .)

    ABEL-BETH-MAACHA (“Abel the house of Maaacha”) or Abel-Maim (“Abel on the waters”). A city in the extreme N. of Palestine, “a mother in Israel” ( 2 Samuel 20:19), i.e., a city of consequence having many daughters, i.e. inhabitants.

    That the different names represent the same city appears from comparing 2 Samuel 20:14,15,18; 1 Kings 15:20; 2 Chronicles 16:4. Its northern border position made it an early prey to Syria under Benhadad, and 200 years later to Assyria: 2 Kings 15:29. Tiglath Pileser sent away its inhabitants captive to Assyria. The Maacha in the name implies that it adjoined the region so called E. of Jordan under Lebanon. Sheba, son of Bichri, the rebel against David, 80 years before the Syrian invasion under Benhadad, Asa’s ally, was here besieged by Joab; and the city was saved by the proverbial shrewdness of its inhabitants, who hearkened to their fellow townswoman’s wise advice to sacrifice the one man Sheba to the safety of the whole inhabitants. Probably Abel lay in the Ard el Huleh, the marshy land which the sea of Merom drains; perhaps at Abil (Robinson, 3:372), a village on the top of a little conical hill (Porter, Giant Cities of Bashan).

    The Derdara from Ijon falls from the western slope of the mound, and from the neighboring mountain gushes the powerful stream of Ruahiny. Such fountains would make it a paradise of fruits and flowers, and entitle it to be called “Abel on the waters,” “a mother in Israel” (Thomson, The Land and the Book).

    ABEL-CARMAIM (“plain of the vineyards”): Judges 11:33 margin. An Ammonite village, six miles from Rabbath Ammon, or Philadelphia; the limit of Jephthah’s pursuit of the Ammonites. Ruins named Abila still are found in this region.

    De Sauley met with a Beit el Kerm, “house of the vine,” N. of Kerak, possibly identical with Abel-Ceramim.

    ABEL-MEHOLAH (“the plain of the dance”). The birthplace of Elisha, where he was found at his plow by Elijah returning up the Jordan valley from Horeb ( 1 Kings 19:16). N. of the Jordan valley, S. of Bethshean (Scythopolis) ( 1 Kings 4:12). To its neighborhood fled the Midianites routed by Gideon ( Judges 7:22). It pertained to the half tribe of Manasseh.

    ABEL-MIZRAIM (“the mourning of the Egyptians” or “the funeral from Egypt”). The threshingfloor of Atad; so called by the Canaanites, because it was the chief scene of the funeral laments of Joseph and his Egyptian retinue for Jacob ( Genesis 50:4-11). E. of Jordan. Moses, taking Canaan as the central standpoint of the whole history, uses the phrase “beyond Jordan” for east of it. The same route by which Joseph was led captive was, in the striking providence of God, that which they took to do honor to his deceased father, being the longer and more public way from Egypt to Canaan. God’s eternal principle is, “them that honor Me I will honor.” Jerome, however, places it at Beth-Hogla, now Ain Hajla, on the W. of Jordan, which would make Moses’ standpoint in saying “beyond” the E. of Jordan; but Genesis 50:13 plainly shows it was not till after the mourning at Abel- Mizraim that “Jacob’s sons carried him into the land of Canaan.” The phrase, “Joseph spake unto the house of Pharaoh” implies that Pharaoh and his estates in council decreed a state funeral for Jacob, in which the princes, nobles, and chief men of Egypt, with their pomp of chariots and equipages, took part. The funeral celebration lasted for seven days. The usual Egyptian rites on such occasions consisted in banquets and games, as Egyptian monuments show. These having been completed at Atad, Jacob’s sons proceeded alone to the cave of Machpelah, the final burying place of his embalmed body.

    ABEL-SHITTIM (“the meadow or moist place of acacias”). In the plains of Moab, the” Arboth Moab by Jordan Jericho,” on the level of the Jordan, in contrast to “the fields” on the higher land. That is to say, it was in the Arabah or Jordan valley opposite Jericho, at that part which belonged to Moab, where the streams from the eastern mountains flourished many acacias. The last resting place of Israel before crossing Jordan ( Numbers 33:49; 22:1; 26:3; 31:12; 25:1; Joshua 2:1; 3:1; Micah 6:5). Josephus names it: “Abila, 60 stadia from Jordan, embosomed amidst palms, among which Moses delivered Deuteronomy.” The acacias still fringe with green the upper terraces of the Jordan. Near mount Peor, at Shittim, in the shade of the acacia groves, Israel was seduced to Baal Peor’s licentious rites; and here also Israel’s judges, by Moses’ direction under God, slew all the men seduced by Midian and Moab under Balaam’s Satanic counsel (24,000) into whoredom and the worship of Baal Peor ( Numbers 25:1; 31:16).

    ABEL THE GREAT 1 Samuel 6:18. Keil supposes the reading ought to be “Eben” (the stone), for “Abel.” The Septuagint and the Chaldee versions so read; but “Abel” is probably right, and refers to the mourning caused by the destruction of so many Bethshemites for looking into the ark. The field in which Abel the great Stone was, on which the ark was placed on its return from the Philistines, belonged to Joshua, a Bethshemite.

    ABEZ A town in Issachar ( Joshua 19:20). From a Chaldee term meaning “tin”; or else a contraction for Thebez, near Shunem.

    ABI Also called Abijah, 2 Kings 18:2; 2 Chronicles 29:1. Daughter of Zechariah; the witness perhaps taken by Isaiah ( Isaiah 8:2).

    ABIA OR ABIJAH (“Father Jehovah,” i.e. a man of God). 1. Son of Samuel, whose maladministration as judge furnished one plea for Israel’s demand for a king ( 1 Samuel 8:1-5). 2. 1 Chronicles 7:8. 3. 1 Chronicles 2:24.

    ABIASAPH OR EBIASAPH (“whose father God took away,” namely, Korah: Numbers 16. Or else, “the father of gathering, the gatherer”). Head of a family of Korhites (a house of the Kohathites): Exodus 6:24; 1 Chronicles 6:37. Possibly Abiasaph may be a distinct person from Ebiasaph; in genealogies generations are often passed over between two persons of the same name. The descendants of Abiasaph, of whom Shallum was chief, were “keepers of the gates of the tabernacle” ( 1 Chronicles 9:19,31), and “had the set office over the things made in the pans,” in David’s time. Compare Nehemiah 12:25.

    ABIATHAR (“father of abundance”). The only son of Ahimelech, the high priest, who escaped the slaughter committed by Saul at Nob, on Doeg’s information that Ahimelech had inquired of the Lord for David, and given him the shewbread and the sword of Goliath (1 Samuel 22). Eighty-five persons wearing the priestly linen ephod were killed. Abiathar, with an ephod (the high priest’s mystic scarf) in his hand, escaped to David. It is an instance of God’s retributive justice that Saul’s murder of the priests deprived him thenceforth of their services in inquiring of the Lord ( 1 Chronicles 13:3); step by step he sank, until, bereft of legitimate means of obtaining divine counsel, he resorted to the illicit course of consulting the witch of Endor, and so filled the measure of his iniquity and brought on himself destruction ( 1 Chronicles 10:13). David, on the contrary, by sheltering Abiathar was enabled to inquire of the Lord in the ordained way ( Samuel 23:6-9; 30:7; 2 Samuel 2:1; 5:19; 21:1, an undesigned coincidence with Psalm 16:7, and so a proof of genuineness).

    Abiathar adhered to David during all his wanderings, and was afflicted in all wherein David was afflicted; also when he assumed the throne in Hebron, the Aaronite priestly city of refuge. He bore the ark before David when it was brought up from Obed-Edom’s house to Jerusalem ( Chronicles 15:11,12; 1 Kings 2:26). He was loyal in Absalom’s rebellion; and, subordinate to Altithophel, was the king’s counselor ( Chronicles 27:34). But in Adonijah’s attempt to be David’s successor, instead of Solomon, Abiathar, probably from jealousy of Zadok, who was on Solomon’s side, took Adonijah’s part. David had evidently for some time previous given the first place in his confidence to Zadok, a preference the more galling as Abiathar was the high priest and Zadok only his vicar, or sagan; thus it was to Zadok he gave the command to take the ark back in Absalom’s rebellion. Abiathar is mentioned subordinately 1 Samuel 15:25,29,35. Perhaps Zadok was appointed high priest by Saul after the slaughter of Ahimelech. David on succeeding, to conciliate his subjects, allowed him conjointly to hold office with Abiathar. Zadok had joined David in Hebron after Saul’s death, with 22 captains of his father’s house ( 1 Chronicles 12:28). Abiathar had the first place, with the ephod, Urim and Thummim, and the ark, in the tent pitched by David at Jerusalem Zadok officiated before the tabernacle and brazen altar made by Moses and Bezaleel in the wilderness, which were now in Gibeon ( 1 Chronicles 16:1-7,37,39,40; 27:38,34; 2 Chronicles 1:3-5). Moreover, Zadok and Abiathar represented rival houses: Zadok that of Eleazar, the oldest son of Aaron; Abiathar that of Ithamar, the youngest ( 1 Chronicles 24:3,4; 6:8). Eli, of whose family it had been foretold 150 years before that the priesthood should pass from it, was Abiathar’s progenitor fourth backward, and Abiathar would naturally fear the coming realization of the curse. All these undesigned proprieties mark the truth of the history. His own act brought the prophecy to its consummation ( 1 Samuel 2:31-35).

    Solomon banished him to Anathoth, and put Zadok as high priest in his room ( 1 Kings 2:35). But in 1 Kings 4:4 Abiathar is still called the “priest” second to Zadok. The Septuagint, “the king made Zadok the first priest in the room of Abiathar,” solves the difficulty. Abiathar had been first, priest, but henceforth he was made subordinate to Zadok. Ahimelech or Abimelech, son of Ahimelech, is substituted for Ahimelech, son of Ahimelech: 2 Samuel 8:17; 1 Chronicles 18:16; 24:3,6,31. The Lord Jesus ( Mark 2:26) names Ahimelech as the high priest in whose time David ate the shewbread. Probably the sense is: “in the days of Ahimelech, who was afterward high priest,” and under whom the record of the fact would be made. Perhaps too the loaves being his perquisite ( Leviticus 24:9) were actually handed by Ahimelech to David. Both father and son, moreover, it seems from the quotations above, bore both names, and were indifferently called by either.

    ABIB The month Nisan. Meaning ears of grain, namely, barley ( Exodus 13:4). [See MONTHS .] On the 15th day the Jews began harvest by gathering a sheaf of barley firstfruits, and on the 16th offered it ( Leviticus 23:4-14).

    On the 10th day the Passover lamb was taken, on the 14th slain and eaten.

    ABIDA Genesis 25:4; 1 Chronicles 1:33.

    ABIDAN Numbers 1:11; 2:22; 7:60,65; 10:24.

    ABIEL (“father of strength”).= 1. Father of Kish and of Ner; grandfather of Saul and of Abner, according to 1 Samuel 9:1; 14:51. But Abiel seems to have had “Ner” as his second name ( 1 Chronicles 8:33; 9:35,39, where Abiel is also called Jehiel and Saul is represented as his great grandson). Probably in 1 Samuel a link in the genealogy is omitted, as often elsewhere. 2. 1 Chronicles 11:32; named Abi-Albon (of the same meaning) Samuel 23:31.

    ABIEZER (“father of help”). 1. Oldest son of Gilead, descendant of Manasseh; head of a leading family, of which were Joash and Gideon ( Judges 6:11,24,34; 8:2). Gideon soothed the wounded vanity of Ephraim when upbraiding him for not having called in their aid against Midian, saying “Is not the grape of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?” ( Joshua 17:2.) The form is Jeezer in Numbers 26:30, but see JEEZER . Originally Abiezer’s family must have been E. of Jordan. In 1 Chronicles 7:18 Abiezer is made son of Gilead’s sister. The family must have afterward passed to the W. of Jordan; for Joash the Abiezrite lived in Ophrah, which seems to have been on a hill, facing from the S. the Esdraelon plain, the scene of so many contests. 2. 2 Samuel 23:27.

    ABIGAIL (“father of joy”). 1. The churl Nabal’s beautiful wife, of Carmel. Taking on herself the blame of Nabal’s insult to David’s messengers, she promptly, and with a discreet woman’s tact, averted David’s just anger by liberally supplying the wants of his forces, and by deprecating in person at his feet the shedding of blood in vengeance. He hearkened to her prayer and accepted her person; and rejoiced at being “kept back” by her counsel from taking into his own hand God’s prerogative of vengeance ( 1 Samuel 25:26,34,39; compare Romans 12:19). God did “plead His cause” against Nabal: compare the undesigned coincidence of phrase between the history and the independent psalm, a proof of genuineness: Psalm 35:1,7:16; 17:4; 14:1 with Samuel 25:25,36-38 with Luke 12:19-21, 1 Samuel 25:29; the image of a “sling, slinging out the souls of the enemy” with 1 Samuel 17:49. At Nabal’s death by God’s visitation David made her his wife, and by her David had a son, Chileab ( 2 Samuel 3:3), or Daniel ( <130301> Chronicles 3:1), i.e. God is my judge, a name which apparently alludes to the divine judgment on Nabal. 2. A sister of David, daughter of Nahash; wife of Jether or Ithra, an Ishmaelite, rather seduced by him [see ITHRA ]; mother of Amasa ( Chronicles 2:15-17). David was probably her and Zeruiah’s half brother, born of the same mother, but he having Jesse, she and Zeruiah Nahash, for their father. This accounts for the phrase “Abigail, daughter of Nahash, and sister of Zeruiah,” not of David. Zeruiah and she were only his step-sisters.

    ABIHAIL (“father of splendor”). 1. Wife of Rehoboam, king of Judah, daughter, i.e. descendant of Eliab, David’s oldest brother. But Keil argues that Chronicles 11:19,20 shows that in 2 Chronicles 11:18 only one wife is named; therefore the sense is “Mahalath the daughter of Jerimoth [son of David] and of Abihail” (the daughter of Eliab, etc.) 2. Numbers 3:35. 3. 1 Chronicles 2:23. 4. 1 Chronicles 5:14. 5. Father of Queen Esther, and uncle of Mordecai ( Esther 2:15).

    ABIHU Second son of Aaron by Elisheba ( Exodus 6:23; Numbers 3:2). With Aaron, Nadab, and the 70 elders, he accompanied Moses up Sinai to a limited distance ( Exodus 24:1). On his death by fire from heaven, in punishment for offering strange fire, see AARON above. A standing example of that divine wrath which shall consume all who offer God devotion kindled at any other save the one Altar and Offering of Calvary, whereby “He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified.”

    ABIJAH (“father of Jehovah,” i.e. one whose will is that of God), orABIJAM <111501> Kings 15:1; 2 Chronicles 13:1 (called Abijah in Chronicles, not in Kings, because in the former his character is not represented as contrary to Jah’s will, as it is in the latter; Abia in Matthew 1:7). 1. Son and successor of Rehoboam, king of Judah (Clinton, 959 s.c.; Hales, 973); in the 18th year of Jeroboam I of Israel ( 1 Kings 14:31; 2 Chronicles 12:16). He endeavored to recover the ten tribes to Judah, and made war on Jeroboam. His speech on mount Zemaraim in mount Ephraim, before the battle, urged on Jeroboam the justice of his cause, that God had given the kingdom to David and his sons forever “by a covenant of salt,” and that Judah had the regular temple service and priesthood, whereas Israel had made golden calves their idols, and had cast out the priests; therefore “fight not ye against the Lord God of your fathers, for ye shall not prosper” (2 Chronicles 13). Judah’s appeal to God, in a crisis of the battle, when the enemy by an ambushment was both before and behind them, brought victory to their side; they took also Bethel, Jeshanah, and Ephraim. 400,000 men are assigned to Abijah’s army, 800,000 to Jeroboam’s, of whom 500,000 fell. Kennicott thinks the numbers an error of transcribers for 40,000, 80,000, 50,000; and so Abarbanel. Elated by success, he multiplied his wives, like Solomon, and by his 14 wives had sons and 16 daughters. Prosperity tempted him into the wickedness which is attributed to him in Kings; men may boast of temple privileges, yet love carnal practices ( Jeremiah 7:4,5). His reign lasted three years. His mother was Maachah ( 1 Kings 15:2), or Michaiah ( 2 Chronicles 13:2), doubtless named from her grandmother, Absalom’s mother ( Samuel 3:3). She was daughter of Uriel, of Gibeah, and granddaughter of Abishalom, or Absalom ( 1 Chronicles 11:20). “Daughter” in Scripture often means granddaughter, a generation being skipped. Abijah thus was descended from David on both father’s and mother’s side. Uriel had married Tamar, Absalom’s beautiful daughter ( 2 Samuel 14:27). 2. Son of Jeroboam I, “in whom alone of Jeroboam’s house some good thing was found toward the Lord God of Israel” ( 1 Kings 14:13); therefore, he alone was permitted to go down to the grave in peace.

    Jeroboam had sent his wife in disguise with a present to the prophet see AHIJAH (see). Blind with age, he yet knew her and announced the tidings, sad to her but honoring to her son. So Abijah died, and “all Israel mourned for him.” 3. 1 Chronicles 24:10. Only four returned of the 24 courses of the priesthood, of which Abijah’s course was not one ( Ezra 2:36-39; Nehemiah 7:39-42; 12:1). But the four were divided into the original 24, with the original names. Hence, Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, is described as “of the course of Abia” ( Luke 1:5). 4. Wife of Ahaz, and mother of good Hezekiah; perhaps a descendant of the Zechariah slain between the temple and the altar ( 2 Chronicles 24:21; 26:5; 29:1); certainly daughter of Zechariah, probably the one through whom Uzziah sought God.

    ABILA Capital ofABILENE, the tetrarchy of Lysanias ( Luke 3:1), on the eastern slope of Lebanon, in a region fertilized by the river Barada (Abana). Abel (Hebrew) means “a grassy spot.” The tradition of Abel’s murder having taken place here (marked by his tomb 30 feet in length, Nebi Habil, on a hill) arose from confounding his name (properly Hebel ) with abel , a frequent name of rich meadowy places. The lively and refreshing green of the spot is noticed by Burckhardt. Abilene had originally been a tetrarchate under Lysanias, Ptolemy’s son (Josephus, Ant. 14:13,8; 18:6,10), put to death 33 B.C., through Cleopatra’s intrigues, who then took the province.

    Next, it fell to Augustus, who rented it to Zenodorus, but as he did not clear it of robbers it was given to Herod the Great. At his death the southern part was added to Trachonitis and Ituraea, as a tetrarchy for his son Philip. The rest, the larger part, including Abila, was then bestowed on the Lysanias of Luke 3:1, probably descended from the former Lysanias. Ten years afterward the emperor Caligula gave it to Agrippa I as “the tetrarchy of Lysanias.” The division of Abilene between Lysanias and Philip accounts for the seeming difference between Luke who assigns it to Lysanias, and Josephus who assigns it to Philip. Abila stood in the Suk (meaning a market) wady Barada, a gorge where the river breaks down through the mountain Antilebanon toward the plain, with a semicircular background of cliffs three or four hundred feet high, between Heliopolis (Baalbec), 32 miles off; and Damascus,18. Latin inscriptions found here respecting the repairs of the road by the Abileni, and concerning the 16th legion, identify the place.

    ABIMAEL Descendant of Joktan ( Genesis 10:28; 1 Chronicles 1:22). The name is preserved in Mali in Arabia Aromatifera (Theophrastus).

    ABIMELECH (“father of a king, or father king”). A common title of many Philistine kings, as Pharaoh of the Egyptians, and Caesar and Augustus of the Roman: Padishah (father king) is similarly a title of the Persian king. 1. Hence, we find Achish called Abimelech in the title of Psalm 34, which explains the seeming discrepancy of name in 1 Samuel 21:11. 2. Genesis 20:1, 1898 B.C.; Hales, 2054 B.C.: the king of Gerar.

    Abimelech’s taking Sarah into his harem shows that in those times kings claimed the odious despotic right of taking unmarried females, whether subjects or sojourners; compare Genesis 12:15; Esther 2:3. A divine warning that death would be the penalty of keeping her, but that Abraham’s intercession as a prophet would follow the restoring of her, led him to give her back with a present of a thousand pieces of silver (131 British pounds). With delicate sarcasm (in the English KJV) he reproved Abraham’s deception. Rather, as Keil and Delitzsch, instead of “he,” translate “this is to thee a covering of the eyes [i.e. an expiatory gift] with regard to all that are with thee” (because in a mistress the whole family is disgraced), “so thou art justified.” The closing of the wombs of Abimelech’s house then ceased. Abimelech some years after repaired, with Phichol his chief captain, to Abraham to form a treaty of friendship. He restored the well dug by Abraham, but seized by Abimelech’s herdsmen. It was thence named Beersheba, the well of the oath, and consecrated to Jehovah ( Genesis 21:22-34). 3. A son of the former, with whom a similar transaction took place in the case of Isaac’s wife Rebekah. The wells dug by Abraham, being supposed to give a proprietary right in the soil, were stopped by the Philistines, and opened again by Isaac, and the virgin soil yielded to his culture one hundred fold. Jealousy made Abimelech beg him “go from us, for thou art much mightier than we.” In the true spirit of “the meek” who “shall inherit the earth,” he successively abandoned his wells, Esek (contention) and Sitnah (hatred), before the opposition of the Gerarite herdsmen, and found peace at last at the well Rehoboth (room), where the Lord made room for him. So by loving concession shall we find peace and room at last ( Romans 12:18-21; John 14:2; Psalm 31:8; 118:5). At Beersheba Abimelech with Ahuzzath his friend, and Phichol his captain, renewed the treaty of friendship with Isaac, originally made by his father with Abraham, and for the same reason (notwithstanding his past bad treatment of Isaac in sending him away), namely, he saw the Lord was with Isaac. Compare Genesis 26:23 with Genesis 21:22,23. Plainly the Philistines had then a more organized government than the Canaanite nations, one of which had been supplanted by these foreign settlers. 4. Son of Gideon by his Shechemite concubine ( Judges 8:31). At Gideon’s death he murdered his seventy brethren, excepting the youngest, Jotham, who hid himself, and by his mother’s brethren influenced the Shechemites to make him king. Then Jotham addressed to the Shechemites the fable of the trees and the bramble (Judges 9), presaging a feud between Abimelech and Shechem which would mutually consume both. So it came to pass; for God makes in righteous retribution the instruments of men’s sin the instrument also of their punishment at last. After three years Shethem rebelled, under Gaal. At Zebul’s information Abimelech came rapidly on the rebels and slew all, and beat down their city, and sowed it with salt; he burned to death a thousand more men and women who fled for sanctuary to the hold of the idol Baalberith. Thence he marched to Thebez, nine miles eastward, and took the town; but when trying to burn the tower was struck on the head by a piece of a millstone cast down by a woman. Feeling his wound mortal, he was slain by his armorbearer, at his own request, lest it should be said a woman slew him. For the spiritual lesson read Jeremiah 2:19; Proverbs 5:22; 1:31; Job 20:5; Matthew 26:52. The friendship that is based on sin is hollow; compare 2 Samuel 13:3-5,32,33.

    ABINADAB (“father of willingness”). 1. A Levite of Kirjath-jearim, (but see LEVITES for doubts as to Abinadab being a Levite,) in whose house the ark remained twenty years ( 1 Samuel 7:1,2; 1 Chronicles 13:7); Eleazar his son was sanctified to keep it. 2. Jesse’s second son ( 1 Samuel 16:8; 17:13). 3. Saul’s son, slain at Gilboa (2 Samuel 31:2). 4. 1 Kings 4:7,11.

    ABINOAM Judges 4:6,12; 5:1,12.

    ABIRAM (“father of height”). 1. A Reubenite, son of Eliab; conspired with Dathan and On, Reubenites, and Korah, a Levite, against Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16). (See AARON , see KORAH .) 2. Oldest son of Hiel the Bethelite ( 1 Kings 16:34); perished at his father’s laying the foundations of Jericho’s fortified walls, as Joshua’s curse predicted ( 1 Kings 6:26).

    ABISHAG (“father of error”). The beautiful young woman of Shunem in Issachar, who cherished David in his old age. Adonijab persuaded Bathsheba to entreat Solomon to give her to him in marriage. This Solomon construed into virtual treason: as regal rights followed the possession in marriage of a deceased king’s wife, and caused him to be killed ( 1 Kings 1:1-4; 2:13- 25) ABISHAI (“father of gifts”). Nephew of David by his sister Zeruiah; brother of Joab and Asahel. Joab was more of the experienced general, Abishai the devoted champion for David. Thus, when David proposed to Ahimelech the Hittite and Abishai the perilous visit to Saul’s camp, Abishai instantly volunteered, reckless of personal danger. His impulsive nature needed occasional checking, in his zeal for David. We find the consistency of character maintained throughout the history; the same spirit prompting the request at Hachilah,” Let me smite Saul” ( 1 Samuel 26:8), as subsequently at Bahurim, when Shimei cursed David, prompted his exclamation “Why should this dead dog curse my Lord the king? let me take off his head” ( 2 Samuel 16:9). He commanded one third of David’s army at the battle with Absalom (2 Samuel 18), and rescued David when waxing faint and in imminent peril from the giant Ishbi-benob ( 2 Samuel 21:15-17). In the same war probably he, as chief of the three “mighties,” chivalrously broke through the Philistine host to procure water for David from the well of his native Bethlehem ( 2 Samuel 23:14-17). Once he withstood 300 and slew them with his spear. In 2 Samuel 8:13 the victory over the 15,000 Edomites or Syrians in the Valley of Salt is ascribed to David; in Chronicles 18:12, to Abishai. Probably the commander in chief was David, but the victory actually gained by Abishai.

    ABISHALOM (See ABIJAH .)

    ABISHUA (“father of safety”). 1. Son of Phinehas, fourth high priest ( 1 Chronicles 6:50). The Chronicon of Alexandria shows that his pontificate included the period of Ehud’s judgeship, and probably of Eglon’s oppression. Father of Bukki ( 1 Chronicles 6:4,5,50,51; Ezra 7:4,5). Josephus (Ant. 8:1,3) says he was succeeded in the priesthood by Eli; his descendants, until Zadok, falling to the rank of private persons. 2. Son of Bela of Benjamin: 1 Chronicles 8:4.

    ABISHUR 1 Chronicles 2:28.

    ABITAL 2 Samuel 3:4; 1 Chronicles 3:8.

    ABITUB 1 Chronicles 8:11.

    ABNER (“father of light”). Son of Ner, who was the brother of Kish, the father of Saul ( 1 Chronicles 9:36). Made commander in chief by his cousin Saul.

    Introduced David to Saul, after Goliath’s death ( 1 Samuel 14:51; 17:55,57). With Saul at Hachilah ( 1 Samuel 26:8-14). At Saul’s death he upheld the dynasty in Ishbosheth’s person, mainly owing to the paramount influence of the tribe Ephraim, which was jealous of Judah.

    While David reigned over Judah as God’s anointed, at Hebron, Ishbosheth professedly, but Abner really, reigned in Mahanaim beyond Jordan. In Samuel 2:10 Ishbosheth is said to have reigned for two years, but David for seven. Probably for the first five years after the fatal battle of Gilboa David alone reigned in the old capital of Judah, Hebron; but the rest of the country was in the Philistines’ hands. During these five years Israel gradually regained their country, and at length Abner proclaimed Ishbosheth at Mahanaim beyond Jordan, for security against the Philistines: 2 Samuel 2:5-7 confirms this. David’s thanks to the men of Jabesh Gilead for the burial of Saul and his sons imply that no prince of Saul’s line as yet had claimed the throne. His exhortation, “Be valiant,” refers to the struggle with the Philistines, who alone stood in the way of his reign over all Israel. Ishbosbeth’s known weakness, which accounts for his absence from the battle of Gilboa, suited well Abner’s ambition. At Gibeon Abner’s army was beaten by Joab’s; and in fleeing Abner, having tried to deter Asahel, Joab’s brother, from following him (since Abner shrank from a blood feud with Joab), but in vain, was at last constrained in self defense to slay him (2 Samuel 2). Abner, presuming on his position as the only remaining stay of Ishbosbeth, was tempted to take the late king Saul’s concubine wife, Rizpah. This act, involving in oriental idea the suspicion of usurping the succession to the throne (so in the case of Absalom: Samuel 16:21; 20:3; 1 Kings 2:13-25. See ABIATHAR , see ADONIJAH , and see ABISHAG ), called forth a rebuke from even so feeble a person as the nominal king, Ishbosheth. Henceforth, in consequence of the rebuke, Abner set about bringing the northern ten tribes to David’s sway. Received favorably and feasted by David, after his wife Michal was taken from Phaltiel and restored to him, Abner went forth from Hebron in peace. But Joab, by a message, brought him back from the well of Sirah, and, taking him aside to speak peaceably, murdered him, Abishai also being an accomplice, for the blood of Asahel ( Numbers 35:19; 2 Samuel 3:30,39), and on Joab’s part also, as appears likely from Amasa’s case, from fear of Abner’s becoming a rival in the chief command ( 2 Samuel 20:4-10). David felt the sons of Zeruiah too strong for him to punish their crime; but, leaving their punishment to the Lord, he showed every honor to Abner’s memory by following the bier, and composing this dirge: “Ought Abner to die as a villain dies? Thy hands not bound, Thy feet not brought into fetters, As one falls before the sons of wickedness, so fellest thou!”

    The second and third lines are connected with the last, describing the state in which he was when slain. In form, the subject in such propositions comes first, the verb generally becoming a participle. Indignation preponderates over sorrow; the point of the dirge is the mode of Abner’s death. If Abner had been really slain in revenge for blood, as Joab asserted, he ought to have been delivered up “bound hand and foot.” But Joab, instead of waiting for his being delivered up with the legal formalities to the authorized penalty (if he were really guilty, which he was not), as an assassin, stabbed him as a worthless fellow ( 1 Kings 2:5). David added that he felt himself, though a king, weakened by his loss, and that “a prince and great man had fallen.”

    ABOMINATION An object of disgust ( Leviticus 18:22); a detestable act ( Ezekiel 22:11); a ceremonial pollution ( Genesis 43:32); especially an idol ( Kings 11:5-7; 2 Kings 23:13); food offered to idols ( Zechariah 9:7).

    The Egyptians regarded it an abomination, i.e. ceremonially polluting, to eat with the Hebrews as foreigners ( Genesis 43:32), because, as Herodotus says ( Genesis 2:41), the cow was eaten and sacrificed by foreign nations. So when Pharaoh told Israel to offer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt without going to the wilderness, Moses objected: “we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes” (the cow, the only animal which all the Egyptians held sacred), “and will they not stone us?” ( Exodus 8:26) compare the Jews’ own practice in later times ( Acts 10:28). The Hebrews, not only as foreigners, accounted by the intolerant mythology of Egypt as unfit for intercourse except that of war or commerce, but also as nomad shepherds, were an “abomination” to the Egyptians ( Genesis 46:34). Therefore Joseph tells his brethren to inform Pharaoh, “Our trade hath been about cattle, both we and also our fathers,” i.e. hereditarily; for Pharaoh would be sure then to plant them, not in the heart of the country, but in Goshen, the border land. The Egyptians themselves reared cattle, as Pharaoh’s offer to make Joseph’s brethren “overseers of his cattle” proves ( Genesis 47:6), and as their sculptures and paintings show; but they abominated the nomad shepherds, or Bedouins, because the Egyptians, as being long civilized, shrank, and to the present day shrink, from the lawless predatory habits of the wandering shepherd tribes in their vicinity.

    ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION “The idol [see ABOMINATION ] of the desolator,” or “the idol that causeth desolation.” Abomination refers especially to such idolatry only as is perpetrated by apostates from Jehovah ( 2 Kings 21:2-7; 23:13).

    Josephus (B. J., 4:6, sec. 3) refers to the Jews’ tradition that the temple would be destroyed “if domestic hands should first pollute it.” The Lord quotes Daniel 9:27; 11:31; 12:11, in Matthew 24:15 “the abomination of desolation,” as the sign of Jerusalem’s coming destruction.

    Daniel makes the ceasing of the sacrifice and oblation the preliminary to it.

    Jewish rabbis considered the prophecy fulfilled when the Jews erected an idol altar, described as “the abomination of desolation” in 1 Macc. 1:54; 6:7. This was necessarily followed by the profanation of the temple under the Old Testament antichrist, Antiochus Epiphanes. He built an idolatrous altar on the altar of burnt offering to Jupiter Olympius, and dedicated the temple to him, and offered swine’s flesh. The divine law is that where the church corrupts herself, the world, the instrument of her sin, is made also the instrument of her punishment ( Matthew 24:28; Revelation 17:3,16). The bringing of the idolatrous, Roman, image crowned standards into the temple, where they were set over the E. gate, and sacrificed to, upon the destruction of Jerusalem under the Roman Titus, 37 years after Jesus’ prophecy (A.D. 70), is not enough to meet the requirements of the term “abomination,” unless it were shown that the Jews shared in the idolatry. Perhaps the Zealots perpetrated some abomination which was to be the sign of the nation’s ruin. They had taken possession of the temple, and having made a profane country fellow, Phannias, their high priest, they made a mock of the sacred rites of the law. Some such desecration within the city, “in the holy place,” coinciding with Cestius Gallus’ encampment without, “in a holy place,” was the sign foretold by Jesus; noting it, the Christians fled from the city to Pella, and all escaped. The final fulfillment is probably future. The last antichrist, many think, is about to set up an idol on a wing of the restored temple (compare Matthew 4:5; John 5:43) in the latter half of the last, or 70th, of Daniel’s prophetic weeks; for the former three and a half days (years) of the prophetic week he keeps his covenant with the Jews; in the latter three and a half breaks it ( Zechariah 11:16,17; 12; 13; 14; Daniel 9; 11). The Roman emperor Hadrian erected a temple to Jupiter upon the site of the Jewish temple; but probably “the consummation to be poured upon the desolate” is yet future.

    ABRAHAM Abraham (father of a multitude). Up to Genesis 17:4,5, his being sealed with circumcision, the sign of the covenant,ABRAM (father of elevation).

    Son of Terah, brother of Nahor and Haran. Progenitor of the Hebrews, Arabs, Edomites, and kindred tribes; the ninth in descent from Shem, through Heber. Haran died before Terah, leaving Lot and two daughters, Milcah and Iscah. Nahor married his niece Milcah: Abraham Iscah, i.e.

    Sarai, daughter, i.e. granddaughter, of his father, not of his mother ( Genesis 20:12). Ur, his home, is the modern Mugheir, the primeval capital of Chaldaea; its inscriptions are probably of the 22nd century B.C.

    The alphabetical Hebrew system is Phoenician, and was probably brought by Abraham to Canaan, where it became modified. Abraham, at God’s call, went forth from Ur of the Chaldees ( Genesis 11:31-12). In Haran Terah died. The statement in Genesis 11:26, that Terah was 70 when he begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran, must apply only to the oldest, Haran. His being oldest appears from the fact that his brothers married his daughters, and that Sarai was only ten years younger than Abraham ( Genesis 17:17); the two younger were born subsequently, Abram, the youngest, when Terah was 130, as appears from comparing Genesis 11:31 with Genesis 12:4; Acts 7:3,4: “before he dwelt in Charran [Haran], while he was in Mesopotamia,” in his 60th year, at Ur he received his first call: “Depart from thy land, to a land which I will show thee” (as yet the exact land was not defined). In Haran he received a second call: “Depart from thy father’s house unto THE land [Heb., Genesis 12:1] which I will show thee;” and with it a promise, temporal (that God would bless him, and make him founder of a great nation) and spiritual (that in him all families of the earth should be blessed).

    The deluge, the revelation to Noah, and the Babel dispersion had failed to counteract the universal tendency to idolatrous apostasy, obliterating every trace of primitive piety. God therefore provided an antidote in separating one family and nation to be the repository of His truth against the fullness of time when it should be revealed to the whole world. From Joshua 24:2,14,15, it appears Terah and his family served other gods beyond the Euphrates. Silly traditions as to Terah being a maker of idols, and Abraham having been east into a fiery furnace by Nimrod for disbelief in idols, were drawn from this Scripture, and front Ur meaning fire. The second call additionally required that, now when his father was dead and filial duty had been discharged, after the stay of 15 years in Haran, he should leave his father’s house, i.e. his brother Nahor’s family, in Haran. The call was personally to himself. He was to be isolated not only from his nation but from his family. Lot, his nephew, accompanied him, being regarded probably as his heir, as the promise of seed and the specification of his exact destination were only by degrees unfolded to him ( Hebrews 11:8). Nicolaus of Damascus ascribed to him the conquest of Damascus on his way to Canaan. Scripture records nothing further than that his chief servant was Eliezer of Damascus; he pursued Chedorlaomer to Hobah, on the left of Damascus, subsequently ( Genesis 14:15), Abraham entered Canaan along the valley of the Jabbok, and encamped first in the rich Moreh valley, near Sichem, between mounts Ebal and Gerizim. There he received a confirmation of the promise, specifying “this land” as that which the original more general promise pointed to. Here therefore he built his first altar to God. The unfriendly attitude of the Canaanites induced him next to move to the mountain country between Bethel and Ai, where also he built an altar to Jehovah, whose worship was fast passing into oblivion in the world. Famine led him to Egypt, the granary of the world, next. The record of his unbelieving cowardice there, and virtual lie as to Sarai [see ABIMELECH ] is a striking proof of the candor of Scripture. Its heroes’ faults are not glossed over; each saint not only falls at times, but is represented as failing in the very grace (e.g. Abraham in faith) for which he was most noted. Probably the Hyksos (akin to the Hebrews), or shepherds’ dynasty, reigned then at Memphis, which would make Abraham’s visit specially acceptable there. On his return his first visit was to the altar which he had erected to Jehovah before his fall (compare Genesis 13:4 with Hosea 2:7; Revelation 2:5). The greatness of his and Lot’s substance prevented their continuing together. The promise of a direct heir too may have influenced Lot, as, no longer being heir, to seek a more fixed home, in the region of Sodom, than he had with Abraham, “dwelling in tents.”

    Contrast the children of the world with the children of God ( Hebrews 11:9,10,18-16). His third resting place was Mamre, near Hebron (meaning association, namely, that of Abraham, Mamre, Eshcol, and Aner; next called Kirjath Arba; then it resumed its old name, Hebron, the future capital of Judah). This position, communicating with Egypt, and opening on the pastures of Beersheba, marks the greater power of his retinue now, as compared with what it was when he encamped in the mountain fastness of Ai.

    Fourteen years previously Chedorlaomer, king of Elam (the region S. of Assyria, E. of Persia, Susiana), the chief sovereign, with Amrephar of Shinar (Babylon), Arioch of Ellasar (the Chaldean Larissa, or Larsa, half way between Ur, or Mugheir, and Erech, or Warka, in Lower Babylonia), and Tidal, king of nations, attacked Bera of Sodom, Birsha of Gomorrah, Shinab of Admah, and Shemeber of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela or Zoar, because after twelve bears of subordination they “rebelled” (Genesis 14).

    Babylon was originally the predominant power; but a recently deciphered Assyrian record states that an Elamitie king, Kudur Nakhunta, conquered Babylon 2296 B.C. Kudur Mabuk is called in the inscriptions the “ravager of Syria,” so that the Scripture account of Chedorlaomer (from Lagsmar, a goddess, in Semitic; answering to Mabuk in Hamitic) exactly tallies with the monumental inscriptions which call him Apda martu,” ravager,” not conqueror, “of the West.” Abraham, with 318 followers, and aided by the Amorite chiefs, Mamre, Eshcol, and Aner, overtook the victorious invaders near Jordan’s springs, and attacked them by night from different quarters and routed them, and recovered Lot with all the men and the goods carried off. His disinterestedness was evinced in refusing any of the goods which Arabian war usage entitled him to, lest the king of worldly Sodom should say, “I have made Abraham rich” (compare Esther 9:15,16; 2 Kings 5:16; contrast Lot, Genesis 13:10,11). Melchizedek, one of the only native princes who still served Jehovah, and was at once king and priest, blessed Abraham in the name of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed God in Abraham’s name, by a beautiful reciprocation of blessing, and ministered to him bread and wine; and Abraham “gave him tithes of all.” Immediately after Abraham had refused worldly rewards Jehovah in vision said, “I am ... thy exceeding great reward.” The promise now was made more specific: Eliezer shall not be thine heir, but “he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels ... Tell if thou be able to number the stars; so shall thy seed be.” His faith herein was called forth to accept what was above nature on the bore word of God; so “it [his faith] was counted to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15). Hence he passes into direct covenant relation with God, confirmed by the sign of the burning lamp (compare Isaiah 62:1) passing between the divided pieces of a heifer, she goat, and ram, and accompanied by the revelation that his posterity are to be afflicted in a foreign land 400 years, then to come forth and conquer Canaan when the iniquity of the Amorites shall be full. The earthly inheritance was to include the whole region “from the river of Egypt unto the ... river Euphrates,” a promise only in part fulfilled under David and Solomon ( 2 Samuel 8:3; 2 Kings 4:21; 2 Chronicles 9:26). Tyre and Sidon were never conquered; therefore the complete fulfillment remains for the millennial state, when “the meek shall inherit the land,” and Psalm 72 shall be realized (8-10); compare Luke 20:37.

    The taking of Hagar the Egyptian, Sarai’s maid, at the suggestion of Sarai, now 75 years old, was a carnal policy to realize the promise in Ishmael.

    Family quarreling was the inevitable result, and Hagar fled from Sarai, who dealt hardly with her maid when that maid despised her mistress. Abraham in his 99th year was recalled to the standing of faith by Jehovah’s charge, “Walk before Me and be thou perfect” (Genesis 17). God then gave circumcision as seal of the covenant of righteousness by faith, which he had while yet uncircumcised (Romans 4). His name was changed at circumcision from Abram to Abraham (father of many nations), to mark that the covenant was not to include merely his seed after the flesh, the Israelites, but the numerous Gentile nations also, who in his Seed, Christ, should be children of his faith (Galatians 3). Sarai (my princess, or “nobility,” Gesenius) became Sarah (princess) no longer queen of one family, but spiritually of all nations ( Galatians 3:16). The promise now advances a stage further in explicitness, being definitely assigned to a son to be born of Sarah. Its temporal blessings Ishmael shall share, but the spiritual and everlasting with the temporal are only to be through Sarah’s son. Sarah laughed. more from joy though not without unbelief, as her subsequent laugh and God’s rebuke imply ( Genesis 18:12-15). Now first, Jehovah, with two ministering angels, reveals Himself and His judicial purposes (Genesis 18) in familiar intercourse with Abraham as “the friend of God” ( John 15:15; Psalm 25:14; 2 Chronicles 20:7; James 2:23; Amos 3:7), and accepts his intercession to a very great extent for the doomed cities of the plain. The passionate intercession was probably prompted by feeling for his kinsman Lot, who was in Sodom, for he intercedes only for Sodom, not also for Gomorrah, an undesigned propriety, a mark of genuineness. This epiphany of God contrasts in familiarity with the more distant and solemn manifestations of earlier and later times. Loving confidence takes the place of instinctive fear, as in man’s intercourse with God in Eden; Moses similarly ( Exodus 33:11; Numbers 12:8); Peter, James, and John on the mount of transfiguration (Matthew 17). A mile from Hebron stands a massive oak, called “Abraham’s oak.” His abode was “the oaks of Mamre” (as Genesis 18:1 ought to be translated, not “plains”). A terebinth tree was supposed in Josephus’ time to mark the spot. It stood within the enclosure, “Abraham’s house.” Isaac’s birth, beyond nature, the type of Him whose name is Wonderful ( Luke 1:35-37, and contrast Mary’s joy with Sarah’s half incredulous laugh and Zacharias’ unbelief, Luke 1:38,45-47,20), was the first grand earnest of the promise. Ishmael’s expulsion, though painful to the father who clung to him ( Genesis 17:18), was needed to teach Abraham that all ties must give way to the one great end. The full spiritual meaning of it, but faintly revealed to Abraham, appears in Galatians 4:22-31.

    When Isaac was 25 years old the crowning trial whereby Abraham’s. faith was perfected took place ( James 2:21-23). Still it was his faith, not his work, which was “imputed to him for righteousness”; but the faith that justified him was evinced, by his offering at God’s command his son, to be not a dead but a living “faith that works by love.” Paul’s doctrine is identical with James’s ( 1 Corinthians 13:2; Galatians 5:6). The natural feelings of the father, the divine promise specially attached to Isaac, born out of due time and beyond nature, a promise which seemed impossible to be fulfilled if Isaac were slain, the divine command against human bloodshedding ( Genesis 9:5,6), -- all might well perplex him.

    But it was enough for him that God had commanded; his faith obeyed, leaving confidently the solution of the perplexities to God, “accounting that God was able to raise Isaac even from the dead” ( Hebrews 11:19), “from whence he received him in a figure.” The “figure” was: Isaac’s death (in Abraham’s intention) and rescue from it ( 2 Corinthians 1:9,10) vividly represented Christ’s death and resurrection on the “third” day ( Genesis 22:4). The ram’s substitution represented Christ’s vicarious death: it was then that Abraham saw Christ’s day and was glad ( John 8:56). The scene was Moriah (i.e. chosen by Jehovah); others suppose Moreh, three days’ journey from Beersheba. His faith was rewarded by the original promises being now confirmed by Jehovah’s oath by Himself ( Hebrews 6:13,17); and his believing reply to his son, “God will provide Himself a lamb,” received its lasting commemoration in the name of that place, Jehovah Jireh, “the Lord will provide.” His giving up his only and well beloved son (by Sarah) typifies the Father’s not sparing the Only Begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, in order that He might spare us. Sarah died at Kirjath Arba, whither Abraham had returned from Beersheba. The only possession he got, and that, by purchase from the Hittites, was a burying place for Sarah, the cave of Machpelah, said to be under the mosque of Hebron. His care that he and his should be utterly separated from idolatry appears in his strict charge to Eliezer as to the choice of Isaac’s wife, not to take a Canaanite woman nor yet to bring his son back to Abraham’s original home. Abraham being left alone at Isaac’s marriage, and having his youthful vigor renewed at Isaac’s generation, married Keturah. The children by her, Midian and others, he sent away, lest they should dispute the inheritance with Isaac after his death. He died at 175 years, Isaac and Ishmael joining to bury him beside Sarah. Through his descendants, the Arabs, Israelites, and descendants of Midian, “children of the East,” Abraham’s name is still widely known in Asia. As “father of the faithful,” who left home and all at the call of God, to be a sojourner in tents, he typifies Him who at the Father’s call left His own heaven to be a homeless stranger on earth, and to sacrifice Himself, the unspeakably precious Lamb, for us: “the Word tabernacled [Greek John 1:14] among us.”

    ABRAHAM’S BOSOM In Roman times, their custom of reclining on Couches at meals prevailed among the Jews. Each leaned on his left arm, and so lay, as it were, in the bosom of the next below him. This position in the bosom of the master of the house was the place of honor ( John 1:18; 13:23). To lie in Abraham’s bosom was thus a phrase for blessed repose in closest nearness to the father of the faithful in the feast of paradise ( Matthew 8:11; Luke 16:23).

    ABRECH ( Genesis 41:43). Translated “bow the knee” in English Bible. Others translate “a pontifical,” or “pure prince,” a common title in ancient Egyptian tombs; Origen and Jerome, “a native Egyptian.” Thus Abrech will be a proclamation of Joseph’s naturalization, a requisite for his executing successfully his great, undertaking among a people most jealous of foreigners. Canon Cook (Speaker’s Commentary) makes it imperative, from the Egyptian,” Rejoice thou;” but Harkevy “Ap-Rach, Chief of the Rech, or men of learning.”

    ABRONAH Ebronah ( Numbers 33:34,35). Israel’s halting place in the desert, just before Ezion Geber. A name perhaps meaning a ford (from abar , to cross) over the Elanitic gulf.

    ABSALOM (father of peace). Third son of David, by Maachah, daughter of Talmai, king of Geshur, a Syrian region N.E. of Palestine, near lake Merom.

    Polygamy bore its fatal fruits in engendering jealousies among the families by different wives, each with a separate, establishment ( 2 Samuel 13:8; 14:24), and in fostering David’s own lust, which broke forth in the sad adultery with Bathsheba. Absalom, the fruit of David’s polygamy, was made the divine instrument of David’s punishment. Amnon, the half brother, violated Tamar, Absalom’s whole sister. David, though very wroth, would not punish Amnon, because he was his firstborn by Ahinoam the Jezreelitess. As Simeon and Levi avenged on Hamor their sister Dinah’s violation, so Absalom after two years’ dark, silent hatred, took vengeance on Amnon at a sheepshearing feast at Baal Hazor to which he invited all the king’s sons (2 Samuel 13). Then he fled to his father-in-law at Geshur for three years. Joab perceiving how the king took to heart Absalom’s exile suborned a woman of Tekoa, by an imaginary case, to extort from the king (whose justice would not allow his love for Absalom to let him escape some penalty for Amnon’s murder) the admission of the general principle that, in special cases where the life taken could not be recalled, means for restoring the loved and living banished one should be devised; just as God, considering the brevity of man’s life, weak and irrecoverable when gone, “as water spilt on the ground, does not take a (sinner’s) soul away” [so the Hebrews 2 Samuel 14:14 for “neither doth God respect any person”], but deviseth means that His banished be not (for ever) expelled from Him.” David yielded, but would not see Absalom, though living at Jerusalem, for two more years. Impatient of delay in his ambitious schemes, he sent for Joab, and, not being heeded, he burnt Joab’s grain (as Samson did to the Philistines, Judges 15:4), which drove Joab to intercede with David for Absalom’s admission to his presence. possibly he feared the succession of Bathsheba’s son to the throne, to which he had the title, being alone of royal descent by his mother’s side, also the oldest surviving son (Amnon being slain, and Chileab or Daniel dead, as his name does not occur after 2 Samuel 3:3).

    Nathan’s mission from Jehovah to David, announcing that the Lord loved the child, and that his name therefore was to be Jedidiah, “beloved of the Lord,” implied Jehovah’s choice of Solomon as successor to David ( Samuel 12:24,25). This excited Absalom’s fears. At all events, directly after receiving the king’s kiss of reconciliation, he began popularity hunting, to the disparagement of his father, whose moral hold on the people had been weakened by his sin with Bathsheba, and who probably as years advanced attended personally to judicial ministrations less than is the usual policy of oriental kings. Absalom intercepted suitors, lamenting that there was no judge appointed to help them to their rights such as he would be. His beauty too, as in Saul’s case ( 1 Samuel 9:2), and his princely retinue, attracted many ( 2 Samuel 14:25,26, where probably some error of number has crept in: though doubtless 200 shekels after the king’s weight is much less weight of hair than ordinary shekels would be; <101501> Samuel 15:1-6). Judah, from jealousy of Israel, with whom they had been merged by David, seems to have been too ready to be seduced from loyalty. Accordingly, Absalom chose Hebron, Judah’s old capital, as the head quarters of the revolt. He repaired thither after four (so we ought to read instead of “forty,” 2 Samuel 15:7) years, under the hypocritical pretense of a vow like that of pious Jacob (compare 2 Samuel 15:8 with Genesis 28:20,21); David alludes to the hypocrisy of the rebels in Psalm 4:5. Amasa, son of Abigail, David’s sister, and Jether, an Ishmaelite, owing to David’s neglect of him, and preference of his other sister Zeruiah’s sons (probably because of his Ishmaelite fatherhood), was tempted to join the rebellion, and Ahithophel of Giloh also, because of his granddaughter Bathsheba’s wrong ( 2 Samuel 11:8; 23:34). Both were of Judah; Amasa became Absalom’s general, Ahithophel his counselor.

    This David felt most keenly ( Psalm 69:12; 55:12-14,20; 41:9). By Ahithophel’s abominable counsel, Absalom lay with his father’s concubines, at once committing his party to an irreconcilable war, and him to the claim to the throne (according to oriental ideas: so Adonijah, Kings 2:13, etc.), and fulfilling God’s threatened retribution of David’s adultery in kind ( 2 Samuel 12:11,12). Hushai, David’s friend, defeated treachery by treachery. Ahithophel, like his anti-type Judas, baffled, went and hanged himself. Absalom, though well pleased at the counsel of “smiting the king only” and at once, was easily drawn aside by fear of his father’s bravery, and by indecision and vanity; all which Hushai acted on in his counsel to summon all Israel, and that Absalom should command in person. He waited to have himself anointed king first ( 2 Samuel 19:10).

    He lost the opportunity of attacking his father that night, while weak handed. The battle in Gilead in the wood of Ephraim (called from Ephraim’s defeat, Judges 12:4) resulted in the defeat of his cumbrous undisciplined host. His locks, on which he prided himself ( Judges 14:25,26), were the means of his destruction, for they kept him suspended from a terebinth tree until Joab pierced him; and David, whom the unnatural son would have gladly smitten, but who charged Joab, Abishai, and Ittai, his three generals, to spare the youth for his sake, mourned pathetically for his death: “O Absalom, my son, would God I had died for thee; my son, my son!” His grave was a pit, over which the insulting conquerors heaped stones, as over Achan and the king of Ai ( Joshua 7:26; 8:29). After losing his three sons ( 2 Samuel 14:27; compare Psalm 21:10), he had erected in the king’s dale ( Genesis 14:17) a pillar to commemorate his name; a sad contrast to this was his dishonored grave. The so-called tomb of Absalom, in the valley of Jehoshaphat outside Jerusalem, betrays its modern origin by Ionic columns; and besides could not have outlasted the various sieges and conquests to which the city has been exposed. David seems to have been a fond but weak father; and Absalom’s and Amnon’s course showed the evil effects of such indulgence ( 1 Kings 1:6). Absalom’s fair daughter Tamar married Uriel, by whom she had Michaiah or Maachah, wife of Rehoboam and mother of see ABIJAH .

    ABSTINENCE Enjoined by God, from blood ( Genesis 9:4); and by the Jerusalem council, from blood and idol meats ( Acts 15:29), not to offend Jewish brethren in things indifferent ( 1 Corinthians 9:20-22). The blood was considered as the seat of the life, and as typifying the one Blood that cleanseth from all sin therefore it was treated as a sacred thing. “The children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day, because the angel touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank” ( Genesis 32:32); modern Jews, therefore, abstain from the whole hind quarter. The law defined whole classes of animals, by the not eating of which the Israelites were distinguished from other nations (Leviticus 11); to mark the separation of the church from the world. Also certain parts of lawful animals, to teach typically that even in lawful things moderation and self control are needed ( 1 Corinthians 6:12,13; Leviticus 3:9-11). So the priests, from wine, during their ministration [see AARON ] ( Leviticus 10:1-9); also the Nazarites during their separation ( Numbers 6:3,4); also the Rechabites, constantly, by voluntary vow (Jeremiah 35). All idol meats were forbidden, namely, such as after the first portion had been consecrated to the idol were then eaten as food among the Gentiles ( Exodus 34:15; <19A628> Psalm 106:28; 1 Corinthians 8:4-10; Romans 14:3). Paul lays down the principle that Christians should act each according to his conscience in the matter, but not, even in the exercise of Christian liberty, so as to cast a stumblingblock before weaker brethren. This was the principle of the decree, Acts 15:29. In 1 Timothy 4:3,4, he foretells the rise of Gnostic heretics, the forerunners of the ascetics of the apostate Greek and Latin churches who should forbid marriage, and command to abstain from meats which God created to be received with thanksgiving. Holy Scripture does not enjoin, nor yet forbid, vows of abstinence from intoxicants. The sacrifice of one’s lawful right for our neighbor’s good accords with the law of love: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.” ( Romans 14:21; Jeremiah 35.) [See RECHABITES .] ACCAD One of the cities in the land of Shinar, with Babel, Erech, and Calneh, the beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom ( Genesis 10:10). Jerome (Onomasticon) testifies that the Jews then believed Nisibis was Accad, a city on the river Khabour, in the N.E. of Mesopotamia, midway between Orfa and Nineveh. So the Targum of Jerusalem. Nisibis’ ancient name was Acar, which the Syriac Peschito version has here. Akkad was the name of the “great primitive Hamite race who inhabited Babylonia from the earliest time, and who originated the arts and sciences. In the inscriptions of Sargon the name is applied to the Armenian mountains instead of the vernacular Ararat” (Rawlinson, Herodotus, 1:319, note). The form Kinzi Akkad is found in the inscriptions. Agadi was the great city of the earlier Sargon (G. Smith). Bechart fixes on a site nearer the other three cities in the ancient Sittacene: Akker-koof, or Akker-i-Nimrond, a curious pile of ancient buildings. The Babylonian Talmud mentions the site under the name Aggada. A tract N. of Babylon was called Aceere (Knobel).

    ACCHO Ptolemais in the New Testament, Jean d’Acre (named from the knights of John of Jerusalem); called “the key of Palestine.” Its sands were employed by the Sidonians in making glass. The name is akin to the Arab Akeh, a sandy shore heated by the sun. The chief seaport in Syria, 30 miles S. of Tyre; on the N. of the only inlet on the Palestine coast, with Carmel on the S. side. The distance across is eight miles. The river Belus flows into the sea close under the town walls. Accho was Asher’s portion, but never was wrested from the original dwellers ( Judges 1:31). Paul landed here from Tyre, and stayed one day with Christian brethren, before sailing on to Caesarea ( Acts 21:7).

    ACCUSER In a forensic sense. [See SATAN .] Luke 18:3; 1 Peter 5:8; Job 1:6; Revelation 12:10; Zechariah 3:1.

    ACELDAMA “the field of blood.” So called because bought with the price of blood, according to Matthew 27:6-8; and because it was the scene of retribution in kind, the blood which Judas caused to be shed being avenged by his own blood, according to Acts 1:19; Revelation 16:6. The purchase of the field was begun by Judas, and was completed after Judas’ death by the priests, who would not take the price of blood from Judas but used the pieces of silver to pay for the field. He did not pay the money ( Matthew 27:5), but had agreed to pay it, with a view of securing “a habitation” to himself and his wife and children ( <19A909> Psalm 109:9; 69:25).

    Stung with remorse he brought again the 30 pieces of silver, went to the field, hanged himself, and, the cord breaking, his bowels gushed out. Thus there is no discrepancy between Matthew 27:8 and Acts 1:19.

    Substantial unity amidst circumstantial variety is the strongest mark of truth; for it. proves the absence of collusion in the writers. (Bengel.) Or probably Peter’s words ( Acts 1:18) are in irony. All he purchased with the reward of iniquity was the bloody field of his burial. What was bought with his money Peter speaks of as bought by him. The field originally belonged to a potter, and had become useless to him when its clay was exhausted. Jerome says it was still shown S. of mount Zion, where even now there is a bed of white clay. Matthew ( Matthew 27:9) quotes Jeremiah’s prophecy as herein fulfilled. Zechariah 11:12,13 is the nearest approach to the quotation, but not verbatim. Probably Jeremiah 18:1,2 and Jeremiah 32:6-12 are the ultimate basis on which Zechariah’s more detailed prophecy rests, and Jeremiah is therefore referred to by Matthew. The field of blood is now shown on the steep S. face of the ravine of Hinnom, on a narrow level terrace, half way up, near its E. end; now Hak-ed-damm. The chalk favors decomposition; and much of it for this reason, and for its celebrity, was taken away by the empress Helena and others, for sarcophagic cemeteries. A large square edifice, half excavated in the rock, and half massive masonry, stands on the steep bank facing the pool of Siloam, as a charnel house 20 feet deep, the bottom covered with moldering bones. “The potter” represents God’s absolute power over the clay framed by His own hand: so appropriate in the case of Judas, “the son of perdition,” of whom Jesus says, “It had been good for that man if he had not been born”; given over to a reprobate mind and its awful doom. This is the point of Jeremiah 18:6, which is therefore referred to by Matthew ( Isaiah 30:14; 45:9; Romans 9:20,21).

    ACHAIA In New Testament a Roman province, including the whole Peloponnese, and most of Hellas proper, with the islands. This province, with Macedonia, comprehended all Greece ( Acts 18:12; 19:21). The name was given by the Romans, when they took Corinth and destroyed the Achaian League (146 D.C.), which, beginning with the narrow northern region of the Peloponnese called Achaia, afterward included several Grecian states. In Acts 18:12 Gallio, with the minute propriety that marks historical truth, called “deputy” (proconsul). Achaia had only just been restored under Claudius to the senate, whose representatives in the provinces were proconsuls, from having been an imperial province under Tiberius, whose representatives were procurators.

    ACHAICUS A Christian of Achaia, who with Stephanas and Fortunatus was the bearer of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and recommended in it to their regard, as one of those who supplied his yearning for Christian fellowship and “refreshed his spirit” ( 1 Corinthians 16:17,18).

    ACHAN (troubler): Achar ( 1 Chronicles 2:7). Son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, of the tribe of Judah. When Jericho was cursed, with all that was in it, Achan alone, in defiance of the curse, “saw” (compare Job 31:7; Genesis 3:6; James 1:14,15), coveted, took, and hid (see Genesis 3:8; following the first sin in the same awful successive steps downward) “a Babylonian garment” (compare Revelation 17:4,5), “two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold, fifty shekels” ( Joshua 7:21). His guilty presence alone brought from Jehovah defeat upon Israel at Ai ( Ecclesiastes 9:18). Joshua, by Jehovah’s direction, through lots detected the culprit, and having elicited his confession said, “Why hast thou troubled us?” alluding to the meaning of Achar = Achan) “the Lord shall trouble thee this day.” So all Israel stoned him, and burned with fire, after stoning with stones, his sons, daughters, cattle, and the stolen and personal effects. The God who made has the power to destroy a whole family or nation for the guilt of one ( 2 Kings 23:25-27); for the individual members are not isolated atoms, but form one organic whole, and the good or the evil of one affects the whole and is laid to the charge of the whole, as constituting one moral unity, divinely constituted, not a mere civil institution, just as the whole body suffers by the sin or suffering of a single member. Achan fell under the ban by seizing what was banned, and incurred the same penalty as a town lapsing into idolatry ( Deuteronomy 13:16,17). The whole family was involved in the guilt; indeed, the sons and daughters of an age of reason must have been privy to his hiding the spoil in the earth in his tent. Though the law ( Deuteronomy 24:16) forbade the slaying of children for their fathers’ sins, this did not apply to cases where, as here, Jehovah Himself commands execution. Achan’s children were not taken to the valley (as some explain) as mere spectators, to take warning from their father’s doom; for why then should Achan’s cattle have been taken out along with him? On the other hand, Calmet argues: (1) Had his family been stoned, would not the heap of stones have includedTHEM ALSO? Whereas it is raised over HIM. (2) His sons and daughters who, in some degree at least, acted under his authority, were certainly not punished more rigorously (by burning\parAND stoning) than the principal criminal. (3) Was not the burning applied to such things as might suffer by burning, tents, garments, etc., and the stoning to what fire would little affect, etc.?

    But to what effect could Achan’s family be first burned, and then stoned? “They raised over him a great heap of stones,” as cairns are still in the East heaped over infamous persons. Every passer by shows his detestation of the crime by adding a stone to the cairn ( Joshua 8:29; 2 Samuel 18:17). The valley of Achor (see Isaiah 65:10) is identified by some with that of the brook Cherith, before Jordan, now wady el Kelt ( <111701> Kings 17:1-7). The Hebrews of 1 Kings 17:24, “they brought them up unto the valley of trouble,” implies this was higher ground than Gilgal and Jericho. Thomson (The Land and the Book) on Hosea 2:15: “That valley runs up from Gilgal toward Bethel. By Achan’s stoning the anger of the Lord was turned away from Israel, and the door of entrance to the promised inheritance thrown open. Thus the ‘valley of Achor’ (trouble), ‘a door of hope,’ is not a bad motto for those who through much tribulation must enter the promised land.” A salutary warning to all Israel of the fatal effect of robbing God of His due through covetousness. [See ANANIAS .] Israel entered Canaan to take possession of land desecrated by its previous tenants, not as a mere selfish spoil, but for God’s glory. The spoil of Jericho was the firstfruits of Canaan, sacred to Jehovah; Achan’s sacrilegious covetousness in appropriating it needed to be checked at the outset, lest the sin spreading should mar the end for which Canaan was given to Israel.

    ACHBOR 1. Genesis 36:38; 1 Chronicles 1:49. 2. Father of king Jehoiakim’s ready tool in evil, Elnathan ( Jeremiah 26:22,23); Achbor was, on the contrary, an instrument of good Josiah, to inquire the Lord’s will from the prophetess Huldah. Called Abdon, the son of Micah, in 2 Chronicles 34:20,21. Goodness is not always hereditary.

    ACHIM In Jesus’ genealogy ( Matthew 1:14) = Jachin (i.e. he will establish), contracted from Jehoiachin. The name may express the parents’ faith that God would in His own time establish Messiah’s throne, as Isaiah 9:7 foretold.

    ACHISH King of Gath, son of Maoch; called Abimelech, i.e., not merely a king, but also son of a king in the title to Psalm 34: See ABIMELECH for the seeming discrepancy with 1 Samuel 21:10-13; 27:2. Twice David fled to him. On the first occasion, being recognized as the conqueror of the Philistines, he in fear reigned madness (as the Roman L. Junins Brutus did:

    Livy, 1:56), and so was let escape to the cave of Adullam. On the second he stayed at Gath, with 600 men, a year and four months, having had Ziklag assigned to him. The unbelieving propensity to calculate probabilities, instead of trusting implicitly to God, misleads even believers into self sought positions of great spiritual danger. “I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul, there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philistines,” said David. This false step on his part necessitated gross lying to the trustful Philistine king ( <092701> Samuel 27:1,8-12). He finally escaped, only by God’s undeserved providential interposition, from having to march with Achish against his own countrymen (1 Samuel 28; 29). Achish, or his son, is again mentioned ( 1 Kings 2:40) as the receiver of Shimei when he left Jerusalem contrary to Solomon’s command.

    ACHMETHA Ezra 6:2 = Ecbatana. A title applied to cities with a fortress for protecting the royal treasures (Rawlinson, in Kitto’s Cyclop.). [See ECBATANA .] ACHOR On the northern boundary of Judah ( Joshua 15:7). [See ACHAN .] ACHSAH Daughter of Caleb, son of Jephunneh, the Kenezite; given by him in marriage to his younger brother, Othniel, for having taken Debir, or Kirjath Sepher (i.e. the city of the book), or Kirjath Sanna. Like her large hearted father, she looked for great things through faith in God’s promise of the land; and lighting from her ass, and humbly asking for springs, as needed by the south land, she received “the upper and the nether springs” ( Joshua 15:15-19,49; Judges 1:11-15; 1 Chronicles 2:49). Her husband, Israel’s judge and savior from Chushan Rishathaim, had through the Spirit of Jehovah the noble faith of the race: Judges 3:8-11.

    Typically hereby we are taught as children to ask humbly and expect confidently great blessings ( Luke 11:13; 1 John 3:22), both the upper or heavenly and the nether or earthly, from our Father ( Psalm 81:10; 84:11; Isaiah 33:16; John 4:13,14; 7:37-39; 15:7; Ephesians 3:20).

    ACHSHAPH A Canaanite royal city, whose king was smitten by Joshua ( Joshua 11:1; 12:20; 19:25). Within Asher; perhaps the modern Chaifa, in the Septuagint Ceaph. Conder (Pal. Expl. Qy. Star., April, 1876) identifies with Yasif. The hieratic papyrus (Brit. Mus., 1842, pl. 35-61), mentioning Aksapou (identified by M. Chabas with Achshaph), is the account of an Egyptian officer’s travels in a chariot from near Aleppo to the vicinity of the sea of Saltlee, and thence to Egypt via Joppa. He is called a Mohar; his record is at least 3,000 years old. (“Voyage d’un Egypt. en Syrie, en Phenic., en Palest.”: F. Chabas, Paris, 1866.)

    ACHZIB 1. In Judah, in the shephelah or plain country of Judah on the western borderland toward the Philistines and the sea; the Chezib of Genesis 38:5; Joshua 15:44; Micah 1:14, where the meaning of the name (a lie) is alluded to. 2. In Asher, but, like Accho and Sidon, never wrested from the aboriginal Phoenicians ( Judges 1:31). Ten miles N. of Acre, on the Mediterranean; considered on the return from Babylon the northernmost boundary of the Holy Land. Now Es-zib.

    ACTS OF THE APOSTLES The second treatise, in continuation of the Gospel as recorded by Luke.

    The style confirms the identity of authorship; also the address to the same person, Theophilus, probably a man of rank, judging from the title “most excellent.” The Gospel was the life of Jesus in the flesh, the Acts record His life in the Spirit; Chrysostom calls it “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit.”

    Hence Luke says: “The former treatise I made of all that Jesus began to do and teach;” therefore the Acts give a summary of what Jesus continued to do and teach by His Spirit in His disciples after He was taken up. The book breaks off at the close of Paul’s imprisonment, A.D. 63, without recording his release; hence it is likely Luke completed it at this date, just before tidings of the apostle’s release reached him. There is a progressive development and unity of plan throughout. The key is Acts 1:8: “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me in (1) Jerusalem, and (2) in all Judaea, and (3) in Samaria, and (4) unto the uttermost part of the earth.” It begins with Jerusalem, the metropolis of the Jewish dispensation, and ends with Rome, the metropolis of the whole Gentile world. It is divisible into three portions:

    I. From the ascension to the close of Acts 11, which describes the rise of the first purely Gentile church, at Antioch, where the disciples consequently were first called See CHRISTIANS (see); II. Thence down to the special vision at Troas (Acts 16), which carried the gospel, through Paul, to Europe; III. Thence onward, until it reached Rome. In each of the three periods the church has a distinct aspect: in the first, Jewish; in the second, Gentile with a strong Jewish admixture; in the third, after the council at Jerusalem (Acts 15), Gentile in a preponderating degree. At first the gospel was preached to the Jews only; then to the Samaritans ( Acts 8:1-5); then to the Ethiopian eunuch, a proselyte of righteousness ( Acts 8:27); then, after a special revelation as Peter’s warrant, to Cornelius, a proselyte of the gate; then to Gentile Greeks (not Grecians, i.e. Greek speaking Jews, but pagan Greeks, on the whole the best supported reading, Acts 11:20); then Peter, who, as “the apostle of the circumcision,” had been in the first period the foremost preacher, gives place from Acts 13 to Paul, “the apostle of the uncircumcision,” who successively proclaimed the word in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, and Rome. Luke joined Paul at Troas (about A.D. 53), as appears from the “we” taking the place of “they” at that point in his history ( Acts 16:8-10). The repetition of the account of the ascension in Acts 1 shows that an interval of some time had elapsed since writing the more summary account of it at the end of Luke 24; for repetition would have been superfluous unless some time had intervened.

    Matthew’s Gospel, as adapted to Jewish readers, answers to the first period ending about A.D. 40, and was written probably in and for Jerusalem and Judaea; Mark answers to the second or Judaeo-Gentile period, A.D. 40-50, as his Gospel abounds in Latinisms, and is suited to Gentile converts, such as were the Roman soldiers concentrated at Caesarea, their head quarters in Palestine, the second great center of gospel preaching, the scene of Cornelius’ conversion by Mark’s father in the faith, Peter. Luke’s Gospel has a Greek tinge, and answers to the third period, A.D. 50-63, being suited to Greeks unfamiliar with Palestinian geography; written perhaps at Antioch, the third great center of gospel diffusion.

    Antioch is assigned by tradition as his residence (A.D. 52) before joining Paul when entering Europe. Beginning it there, he probably completed it under Paul’s guidance, and circulated it from Philippi, where he was left behind, among the Greek churches. Probably Paul (A.D. 57) alludes to his Gospel in 2 Corinthians 8:18: “the brother whose praise is in the gospel throughout all the churches.” Certainly he quotes his Gospel as Scripture, and by inspiration stamps it as such in 1 Timothy 5:18. His having been chosen by the Macedonian churches joint trustee with Paul of their contributions to Jerusalem implies a long residence, during which he completed and circulated his work. As Acts was the fruit of his second connection with Paul, whose labors down to his imprisonment in Rome form the chief part of the book, so he wrote the Gospel through the help he got in his first connection with him, from Troas down to Philippi. (See Birks’ Horse Evarig., 192, etc., for the probability that Theophilus lived at Antioch.) Jerome says Luke published his Gospel “in the parts of Achaia and Baeotia.”

    The Book of Acts links itself with the Gospels, by describing the foundation and extension of the church, which Christ in the Gospels promised; and with the Pauline epistles by undesigned, because not obvious, coincidences. It forms with the Gospels a historical Pentateuch, on which the Epistles are the inspired commentary, as the Psalms and Prophets are on the Old Testament historical books. Tertullian De Bapt., 17, and Jerome, Vir. Illustr., Luc., 7, mention that John pronounced spurious the Acts of Paul and Thecla, published at Ephesus. As Luke’s Acts of the Apostles was then current, John’s condemnation of the spurious Acts is a virtual sanction of ours as genuine; especially as Revelation 3:2 assigns this office of testing the true and the false to John’s own church’ of Ephesus. The epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienna to those of Asia and Phrygia (A.D. 177) quotes it. Irenseus, Adv.

    Hser., 1:31, Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom., 5, and Origen, in Euseb. H. E., 6:23, attest the book. Eusebius, H.E., 3:25, ranks it among “the universally recognized Scriptures.” Its rejection by the Manicheans on purely doctrinal grounds implies its acceptance by the early church catholic. Luke never names himself. But the identity of the writer with the writer of the Gospel ( Luke 1:3) is plain, and that the first person plural ( Acts 16:10,17; 21:1,18; 27:1; 28:16) includes the writer in the first person singular ( Acts 1:1). Paul’s other companions are distinguished from the writer ( Acts 20:4,5,6,15). The sacred writers keep themselves in the background, so as to put forward their grand subject. The first person gives place to the third at Acts 17:1, as Paul and Silas left Luke behind at Philippi. The nonmention of Luke in Paul’s epistles is due to his not having been with him at Corinth (Acts 18), whence the two epistles to the Thessalonians were written; nor at Ephesus (Acts 19), whence he wrote to the Romans; nor at Corinth again, whence he wrote to the Galatians. The first person is not resumed until Acts 20:5,6, at Philippi, the very place where the first person implies he was with Paul two years before (Acts 16); in this interval Luke probably made Philippi his head quarters.

    Thenceforward to the close, which leaves Paul at Rome, the first person shows Luke was his companion. Colossians 4:14; Philemon 1:24, written there and then, declare his presence with Paul in Rome. The undesigned coincidence remarkably confirms the truth of his authorship and of the history. Just in those epistles written from places where in Acts the first person is dropped, Luke is not mentioned, but Silas and Timothy are; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Corinthians 1:19 compared with Acts 18:5. But in the epistles written where we know, from Acts 28, the writer was with Paul we find Luke mentioned. Alford conjectures that as, just before Luke’s joining Paul at Troas ( Acts 16:10), Paul had passed through Galatia, where he was detained by sickness ( Galatians 4:13, Greek “Ye know that because of an infirmity of my flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first”), and Phrygia, and as the epistle to Colossae in Phrygia terms Luke “the beloved physician,” Luke became Paul’s companion owing to the weak state of the apostle’s health, and left him at Philippi when he was recovered, which would account for the warm epithet “beloved.”

    In Acts 21:10 Agabus is introduced as if he had never been mentioned before, which he was in Acts 11:28. Probably Luke used different written sources of information, guided in the selection by the Holy spirit.

    This view accounts for the Hebraistic style of the earlier parts (drawn from Hebrew sources), and the Grecian style of the latter (from Luke himself).

    The speeches remarkably and undesignedly accord with all that is known of the speakers from other sources. Compare Peter’s speeches, Acts 2:23; 4:11; 10:34, with 1 Peter 1:17,19; 2:7; Paul’s, Acts 14:15-17; 17:24-31, with Romans 1:19-25; 2:5; 3:25 (Greek “the pretermission,” or passing over of sins, “winking” at them), Colossians 1:17; Thessalonians 2:4 (margin of Acts 17:23 “gods worshipped,” the same Greek); Acts 20:19,31 with Philippians 3:18; Acts 20:32 with Ephesians 2:20; Acts 20:24 with 2 Timothy 4:7; “seed according to the promise,” Acts 13:23, with Romans 4:13; Galatians 3:16.

    The Hebraisms mostly found in the speeches, and not in the narrative, prove that the speakers’ very words are essentially though summarily given. Providence so ordered it that during Paul’s two years’ imprisonment in Jerusalem and Caesarea, Luke his companion had the best opportunities for ascertaining the facts of the early part of his work from the brethren on the spot. At Caesarea dwelt Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven ( Acts 21:8), the best authority for Acts 6; 7; 8; also Cornelius the centurion, or at least some witnesses of the events (Acts 10) which initiated the preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles. Probably the portion Acts 17:15--18:5 was inserted by Paul himself, for he was then alone, and none but he could have supplied the facts. Moreover, in Acts 17:16-21 eleven expressions foreign to Luke’s style occur, and in the speech 20 besides, some of which are found nowhere else but in Paul’s epistles.

    Peter, to whom the keys of the kingdom of heaven were given ( Matthew 16:19), opens it as the central figure of the first part, both to the Jews (Acts 3) and to the Gentiles (Acts 10). Another instrument was needed for evangelizing the world, combining the learning of both Hebrew and Greek, which the twelve had not, with the citizenship of Rome, the political mistress of the Gentile world; Paul possessed all these qualifications. A Jew by birth; educated in Hebrew divine truth at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem; in Greek literature at Tarsus, one of its most eminent schools (whence he derived his acquaintance with the writings of Aratus, a Cilician poet, his own countryman, Acts 17:28, and Epimenides, Titus 1:12, and Menander, 1 Corinthians 15:33); and a Roman citizen, a privilege which would gain him influence and protect him from lawless and fanatical violence everywhere. Hence Paul by his catholicity of qualifications and spirit (when his old pharisaism was completely eradicated by the revulsion of feeling attendant on his miraculous conversion) occupies the central place in which records the extension of the gospel to the metropolis of the world. Baumgarten remarks: “the twelve did not enter so fully into the catholic spirit of the new dispensation; a new intervention of the Lord was needed to create a new apostolate, not resting on the Israelite organization.” Three civilizations meet in the introduction of the gospel to the world: the polity of Rome, binding all nations together, securing peace, and facilitating the circulation of the gospel of peace; the intellectual and aesthetic culture of Greece, revealing man’s impotence by his own reasoning to find out God’s law, and yet preparing him for it when divinely revealed in the gospel; and the Judaic law, divinely perfect, but impotent to justify through man’s inability to keep it.

    Alford rightly reasons that the date of composition must have been before the fulfillment of the prophecy, Acts 27:24, “thou must be brought before Ceasar”; else Luke would have recorded it, as he does Paul’s trials before Felix and Festus. The most certain date from the New Testament, Josephus, and Tacitus, is that of Porcius Festus arriving in Palestine in Felix’ room, A.D. 60. Paul therefore went to Rome A.D. 61, when Burrbus, a humane man, was captain of the guard. His successor, the cruel Tigellinus, would not have been likely to have left him “in free custody.”

    Herod Agrippa’s death was A.D. 44. Therefore Paul’s second visit to Jerusalem with the contributions was about A.D. 42 ( Acts 11:30). Corinthians 12:2 (written about A.D. 55-57) refers to this visit. “Fourteen years before” will bring us to about A.D. 41-42. The visit to Antioch, and Agabus’ prophecy fulfilled in Claudius’ reign (A.D. 41) preceded Acts 11:28, namely, A.D. 40. The silence as to Paul, Acts 12:1-19, shows he was not at Jerusalem then, A.D. 43-44, but just before it, A.D. 41-42. The stoning of Stephen was probably A.D. 33, Saul’s conversion A.D. 37, his first visit to Jerusalem A.D. 40, his third visit (Acts 15) fourteen years subsequently to his conversion, A.D. 51 ( Galatians 2:1). After his conversion he went to Arabia, then back to Damascus, whence he escaped under Aretas ( 2 Corinthians 11:32); then to Jerusalem, after three years.

    His first visit was then A.D. 40 or 41, being succeeded by a cessation of persecution, owing to Caligula’s attempt to set up his statue in the temple.

    Next he was brought to Tarsus, to escape from Grecian conspirators in Jerusalem ( Acts 9:30; Galatians 1:21). Thus only the period from A.D. 30 to A.D. 32-33 elapses between Christ’s ascension and the stoning of Stephen. All the hints in the first six chapters imply a miraculously rapid growth of Christianity, and an immediate antagonism on the part of the Jews. The only other cardinal point of time specified is in Acts 18:2, the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under Claudius Ceasar, A.D. 52.

    NO book of the New Testament has suffered more from variations of text.

    Probably these are due to attempts at clearing supposed difficulties, harmonizing Paul’s different accounts of his conversion, and bringing the text into exact likeness to the Gospels and Epistles. The book of Acts was so little read in the churches publicly that there was less opportunity to expunge interpolations by comparing different copies. The principal interpolations alleged are Acts 8:37; 9:5,6; 24:6-8; 28:29.

    ADADAH A city in S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:22).

    ADAH (adornment, beauty). 1. One of LAMECH’S [see LAMECH see ZILLAH ] wives ( Genesis 4:19). 2. Daughter of Elon the Hittite; one of Esau’s three wives; mother of his firstborn, Eliphaz; ancestress of six of the Edomite tribes ( Genesis 36:2- 4,15,16); called Bashemath ( Genesis 26:34), meaning the fragrant.

    Esau’s third wife, daughter of Ishmael, also is called Bashemath, but Mahalath in Genesis 28:9. Moses drew the genealogy from documents of Esau’s tribe, without altering them. Eastern and especially Arabian custom gives surnames (founded on some memorable event in one’s life), which gradually supersede the other name; for instance, Edom, Genesis 25:30. Women received new names when married; so both might be called Bashemath.

    ADAIAH 1. 2 Kings 22:1. 2. 1 Chronicles 6:41. 3. 1 Chronicles 8:21. 4. 1 Chronicles 9:12, Nehemiah 11:12. 5. Ezra 10:29. 6. Ezra 10:39; Nehemiah 11:5. Adalia. Esther 9:8.

    ADAM (1) (red earth). The name given by God to the first man, to remind him of his earthly nature; whereas Ish was the name whereby he designates himself, a man of earth (as opposed to Enosh” a man of low degree” Psalm 62:9) ( Genesis 2:23). The Hebrews Adam never assumes any change to mark the dual or plural numbers, men. Probably the Syro-Arabian is the primitive tongue, whence sprang the Hebrews and other so-called Shemitic tongues.

    The names in Genesis are therefore essentially the same as were actually spoken. Adam’s naming of the animals in Eden implies that God endued Adam with that power of generalization based on knowledge of their characteristics, whereby he classified those of the same kinds under distinctive appellations, which is the fundamental notion of human language. Its origin is at once human and divine. divine, in that “God brought” the animals “to Adam to see what he would call them,” and enabled him to know intuitively their characteristics, and so not at random or with arbitrary appellations, but with such as marked the connection (as all the oldest names did, when truth logical and moral coincided) between the word and the thing, to name them; human, in that Adam, not God, was the name. “He did not begin with names, but with the power of naming; for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as a parrot, from without, but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He gave.” (Abp. Trench.)

    As the crown of creation, he was formed at the close of the sixth day.

    Adam came into the world a full grown man, with the elements of skill and knowledge sufficient to maintain his lordship over nature. The Second Adam came as an infant by humiliation to regain for man his lost lordship.

    Original records are perhaps traceable as employed in the inspired record of Moses. Genesis 1:1--2:3 is one concerning creation and man in a general summary. A second is Genesis 2:4--4:26, treating in a more detailed way what was summarily given as to man (Genesis 1), his innocence, first sin, and immediate posterity. A third is Genesis 5:1- 9:29, “the book of the generations of Adam,” and especially of Noah. But the theory of an Elohist author for Genesis 1, and a Jehovist author for Genesis 2, distinct from Moses, on the ground thatELOHIM is the divine name in Genesis 1, butJEHOVAH ELOHIM in Genesis 2, is untenable. Nay, the names are used in their respective places with singular propriety; for\parELOHIM expresses the mighty God of creation, and is fitting in His relation to the whole world. (Genesis 1) ButJEHOVAH, the unchanging I AM ( Exodus 6:3), in covenant with His people, always faithful to His promises to them, is just the name that the Spirit of God would suggest in describing His relation to man, once innocent, then fallen, then the object of an everlasting covenant of love. It is just one of the undesigned proprieties which confirm Scripture’s divine origination, that theJEHOVAH of the covenant with the church is theELOHIM of the world, and vice versa.

    The Elohim in man’s creation use anthropomorphic language, implying collective counsel: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” Abp. Trench remarks: “The whole history of man, not only in his original creation, but also in his after restoration and reconstitution in the Son, is significantly wrapped up in this double statement; which is double for this very cause, that the divine mind did not stop at the contemplation of his first creation but looked on to him as renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him ( Colossians 3:10); because it knew that only as partaker of this double benefit would he attain the true end for which he was made.” In 1 Corinthians 11:7 man is called “the image and glory of God.” This ideal is realized fully in the Son of man ( Psalm 8:4,5). Man is both the “image” (Greek eikon , Hebrew tzelem )), and made in the “likeness” (Greek homoiosis , Hebrew demuth ) of God ( James 3:9). “Image” (eikon ) alone is applied to the Son of God ( Colossians 1:15); compare Hebrews 1:3, “the express image of His person” (Greek character, the impress). Eicon, “image,” presupposes a prototype, as the monarch is the prototype and his head on the coin the image. But “likeness” implies mere resemblance. Thus the “image” of God remains in some degree after the fall ( Genesis 9:6; James 3:9; 1 Corinthians 11:7). The likeness of God is what we are to be striving toward. The archetype is in God; man in his ideal is molded after the model realized in the Son of Man, “the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn of every creature,” the incarnate God, already existing in the divine point of view ( Colossians 1:15), with body and animal life akin to the animal world, yet the noble temple of an immortal spirit, with reason, imagination, freewill finding its true exercise in conformity to God’s will, and a spiritual nature resembling God’s, reflecting God’s truth, righteousness, and love; capable of reasoning in the abstract which the lower animals cannot, as they have no general signs for universal ideas. Some indeed, as the parrot, can frame articulate sounds, but they have not the power to abstract ideas from the particular outward objects, so as to generalize; as their want of a general language proves. Man is the interpreter of nature’s inarticulate praises to nature’s God. The uniformity of type in the animal kingdom, including man in his bodily nature, and the affinity of structure in the homologous bones, are due not to development from a common parentage, but to the common archetype in the divine mind, of which the cherubim was probably an ideal representation. When man fell, he still is called “in the image of God,” with a view to his future restoration in the God-man. It is a “palace” in God’s design, for a while spoiled by the “strong man” Satan, but to be reinstated by the “stronger” Man with God’s archetypal image and likeness more vividly than ever standing forth ( Luke 11:21).

    Adam is the generic term for man, including woman ( Genesis 1:26,27).

    Christ came to reveal not only God, but MAN to us; He alone is therefore called “THE Son of man”; the common property of mankind; who alone realizes the original ideal of man: body, soul, and spirit, in the image and likeness of God, the body subordinate to the animal and intellectual soul, and the soul to the spirit ( 1 Thessalonians 5:23), combining at once the man and woman ( Galatians 3:28); and in whom believers shall realize it by vital union with Him: having the masculine graces, majesty, power, wisdom, strength, courage, with all woman’s purity, intuitive tact, meekness, gentleness, sympathetic tenderness and love, such as Roman Catholics have pictured in the Virgin Mary. So the first Adam, the type, combined both ( Genesis 1:27). The creation of woman from man (marked by the very names isha, ish) subsequently implies the same truth.

    The Second Adam combined in Himself, as Representative Head of redeemed men and women, both man’s and woman’s characteristic excellencies, as the first Adam contained both before that Eve was taken out of his side. Her perfect suitableness for him is marked by Jehovah’s words, “I will make for him a help suitable as before him,” according to his front presence: a helping being in whom, as soon as he sees her, he may recognize himself (Delitzsch). The complement of man. So the bride, the church, is formed out of the pierced side of Christ the Bridegroom, while in the death sleep; and, by faith vitally uniting her to Him in His death and His resurrection, is “bone of His bone, and flesh of His flesh” ( Ephesians 5:25-32.) The dominion which Adam was given as God’s vicegerent over the lower world, but lost by sin, is more than regained for man in the person of Christ. Even in His humiliation He exercised unlimited sway over man’s bodily diseases and even death itself, over vegetable nature (the fig tree), the dumb animal kingdom (the ass’s colt), the inorganic world, the restless sea, and the invisible world of demons; compare Psalm 8. In His manifested glory, His full dominion, and that of His redeemed with Him, shall be exercised over the regenerated earth: Isaiah 11; 2:4; 65:25; 35:9,10; Psalm 72; Ezekiel 34:25; Hosea 2:18; Revelation 11:15-17; 20; 21; 22. The first man Adam was made a “living soul,” endowed with an animal soul, the vital principle of his body; but “the last Adam a quickening spirit” ( 1 Corinthians 15:45). As the animal souled body (1 Cor.15:44) is the fruit of our union with Adam, an animal souled man, so the spiritual body is the fruit of our union with Christ, the life-giving Spirit. see EDEN [but see] is by Sir H. Rawlinson identified with Babylonia; the Babylonian documents giving an exact geographical account of the garden of Eden, and the rivers bearing the same names: the Hiddekel is certainly the Tigris, and the Phrath the Euphrates; the other two seem tributary branches, though some make Gihon the Nile and Pison the Indus (?). Any fruit tree (some have supposed, from Egyptian representations still extant, the pomegranate) would suffice as a test of obedience or disobedience, by the eating of which the knowledge of evil as well as of good would result.

    To know evil without being tainted by it is the prerogative of God. Man might have attained this knowledge by making his will one with God’s, in not eating it; he then would have attained to a Godlike knowledge of good and evil, and would have exercised true liberty in conformity with his likeness, to God. But man aspired to it by his own way, and fell. Only in Christ shall he know it and triumph over it. To distinguish good and evil is the gift of a king ( 1 Kings 3:9) and the wisdom of angels ( 2 Samuel 14:17). The tree of knowledge suggested to man the possibility of evil, which in the absence of lust might not occur. If he was to be tried at all, it could only be by a positive precept; and the smaller the subject of the command was, the more it tested the spirit of obedience. Satan’s antitrinity, the lust of the flesh (“the woman saw that the tree was good for food”), the lust of the eye (“and that it was pleasant to the eyes”), and the pride of life (and a “tree to be desired to make one wise”) seduced man: 1 John 2:16; compare see ACHAN , Joshua 7:21. As this tree was the sacramental pledge of God’s requirement, so the tree of life was the pledge of God’s promised blessing.

    Abp. Whately thought the tree of life acted medicinally, and that Adam and Eve ate of it; and that hence arose his longevity and that of the patriarchs, so that it was long before human life sank to its present average. Genesis 2:16 seems to imply his free access to it; but perhaps Genesis 3:22 that he had,tot actually touched it. Indeed it is only sacramentally, and in inseparable connection with faith and obedience, when tested first as to the tree of knowledge, that the tree of life could give man true immortal life. In the day that he ate he died ( Genesis 2:17, compare Hosea 13:1), because separation from God, sin’s necessary and immediate consequence, is death; the physical death of Adam was deferred until he was 930. Sin’s immediate effects on Adam and Eve, after she in her turn became a seducer, having first been seduced herself ( Genesis 3:6 end), were shame ( Genesis 3:7), concealment and folly ( Genesis 3:8,9; compare Psalm 139), fear ( Genesis 3:10), selfishness on Adam’s part toward Eve, and presumption in virtually laying the blame on God ( Genesis 3:12), the curse, including sorrow, agony, sweat of the brow in tilling the thorny ground, death. All these are counter worked by Christ. He bore our shame and fear ( Hebrews 12:2; 5:7), denied self wholly ( Matthew 20:28), resisted Satan’s temptation to presumption ( Matthew 4:6), bore the curse ( Galatians 3:13), was “the man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53), endured the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the crown of thorns, and the dust of death ( Psalm 22:15, compare Genesis 3:19). The temporary exclusion from the tree of life was a merciful provision for fallen man, (for immortality in a lost state is a curse), until that, through Christ, he should have it restored ( Revelation 22:2,14; 2:7).

    The cherubim were not outside the garden, blocking up access to it (as Genesis 3:24 is often explained), but “keeping the way to the tree of life,” doing what man had failed to do ( Genesis 2:15). So the cherubim’s position implies, not at the threshold, or even before the mercyseat, but in immediate connection with it, the throne of God ( Exodus 25:18). So in Ezekiel and Revelation they are the living ones, combining the highest forms of creaturely life, suggesting to man his interest still in life and in paradise, and even in a share of God’s throne through divine grace. As the flaming sword represents justice excluding man’s access by his own righteousness, so the cherubim represents man reunited to God upon the ground of the mercy-seat, which is Christ our propitiatory.

    The unity of the human race is plainly asserted in Acts 17:26 [see CREATION ]. The co-extensiveness of sin’s curse upon all men as Adam’s offspring, and of Christ’s redemption for all men ( Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:22-47) implies the same. “That the races of men are not species of one genus, but varieties of one species, is confirmed by the agreement in the physiological and pathological phenomena in them all, by the similarity in the anatomical structure, in the fundamental powers and traits of the mind, in the limits to the duration of life, in the normal temperature of the body, and the average rate of pulsation, in the duration of pregnancy, and in the unrestricted fruitfulness of marriages between the various races.” (Delitzsch.)

    The brain of the lowest savage is larger than his needs require, usually five sixths of the size of a civilized man’s brain. This implies the latent, power of intellectual development, which proves he is essentially one with his more favored brethren.

    ADAM (2) A city beside Zarthan ( Joshua 3:16), on the Jordan. Near the present ford Damieh, which possibly is derived from the ancient name Adam; the northern extremity of Israel’s passage ( Joshua 22:11). Probably Reuben’ s altar of ED, or witness, was near, on the Kurn Surtabeh. Near Damieh the remains of a Roman bridge are still found. Kurn Surtabeh was more than 15 miles from Jericho, which tallies with the words “very far from the city Adam.” Knobel thinks the name Sartabeh preserves the name Zarthan, a long rocky ridge S.W. of Damieh ford. [See ED.] ADAMAH A fenced city of Naphtali, N.W. of the sea of Galilee ( Joshua 19:36).

    ADAMANT (the English = unconquerable). Unusually hard stones, as the diamond, which is a corruption of the word adamant; Hebrews shamir ; Greek [smiris . Probably the emery stone or the uncrystallized corundum ( Ezekiel 3:9). Image for firmness in resisting the adversaries of the truth of God ( Zechariah 7:12). Image of hard heartedness against the truth ( Jeremiah 17:1). The stylus pointed with it engraves deeper than the common iron; with such a pen is Jerusalem’s sin marked. Its absence from the high priest’s breastplate was because it could not be engraven upon; or perhaps it had not been introduced at that early time. [See DIAMOND .] ADAMI A place on the border of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:33); afterward Damin.

    ADAR (1) HebrewADDAR. Southern boundary of Judah and the Holy Land, called alsoHAZARADDAR: Joshua 15:3.

    ADAR (2) The 6th month of the civil, and the 12th of the ecclesiastical, year. [See MONTHS .] ADBEEL (Arabic = miracle of God) one of Ishmael’s 12 sons, and founder of an Arab tribe ( Genesis 25:13; 1 Chronicles 1:29).

    ADDAN A place from which some of the Jewish captives returned with Zerubbabel to Judaea: these “could not show their father’s house, nor their seed (pedigree) whether they were of Israel” ( Ezra 2:59).ADDON, or\parAALAR.

    ADDAR CalledARD ( Genesis 46:21; Numbers 26:40): 1 Chronicles 8:3.

    ADDER Five times in the Old Testament KJV, and thrice in margin for “cockatrice” ( Isaiah 11:8; 14:29; 59:5 ). Four Hebrews terms stand for it. (1) Akshub, (2) Pethen, (3) Tziphoni, and (4) Shephiphon . (1) Meaning one that lies in ambush, swells its skin, and rears its head back for a strike. <19E003> Psalm 140:3 quoted in Romans 3:13, “the poison of asps.” (2) Psalm 58:4; 91:13, “adder” (compare margin), but elsewhere translated asp; from a Hebrews root “to expand the neck.” The deadly haje naja, or cobra of Egypt, fond of concealing itself in walls and holes.

    Serpents are without tympanic cavity and external openings to the ear. The deaf adder is not some particular species; but whereas a serpent’s comparative deafness made it more amenable to those sounds it could hear, in some instances it was deaf because it would not hear ( Jeremiah 8:17; Ecclesiastes 10:11). So David’s unrighteous adversaries, though having some little moral sense yet left to which he appeals, yet stifled it, and were unwilling to hearken to the voice of God. (3) Translated adder only in Proverbs 23:32: “at the last wine biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder,” In Jeremiah 8:17 “cockatrices,” from a root “to dart forward and hiss.” The Greek basilisk , fierce, deadly; distinct from the “serpent” (nachas h), Isaiah 14:29; oviparous ( Isaiah 59:5); subterranean in habits ( Isaiah 11:8). (4) From a root “to creep”; Jacob’s image of Dan ( Genesis 49:17), lurking on the road, and biting at the horses’ heels; the Coluber cerastes, a small and very venomous snake of Egypt. The charmers, by a particular pressure on the neck, can inflate the animal so that the serpent becomes rigid, and can be held out horizontally as a rod. The Egyptian magicians perhaps thus used the haje species as their rod, and restored life to it by throwing it down; at least, so the serpent charmers do at the present day.

    Shrill sounds, as the flute, are what serpents can best discern, for their hearing is imperfect. Music charms the naja (cobra di capello, hooded snake) and the cerastes (horned viper). Moses’ really transformed rod swallowed their pretended rod, or serpent, so conquering the symbol of Egypt’s protecting deity. That the naja haie was the “fiery serpent,” or serpent inflicting a burning bite, appears from the name Ras-om-Haye (Cape of the haje serpents) in the locality where the Israelites were bitten ( Numbers 21:6).

    ADDI ( Luke 3:28). In Jesus’ genealogy. A shortened form of Adiel, or Adaiah, from adi , “ornament.”

    ADER 1 Chronicles 8:15.

    ADIEL 1 Chronicles 4:36. 2. 1 Chronicles 9:12. 3. 1 Chronicles 27:25.

    ADIN Ezra 2:15; 8:6. 2. Nehemiah 10:16.

    ADINA 1 Chronicles 11:42.

    ADINO (his pleasure in the spear). The Ezmte, the Tachmonite; who slew with his spear 800 at once ( 2 Samuel 23:8). [See JASHOBEAM .] But Luther reads, to accord with 1 Chronicles 11:11, arer for Adino ; and, for ha ezni , eth hanitho , i.e., not a proper name but “Jashobeam swung his spear”; compare 1Chronicles11:18. Gesenius reads ye’adno ha’ ezno , “he shook it, even his spear.”

    ADITHAIM A town in Judah, on a height overlooking the shephelah or low hill country ( Joshua 15:36). Probably the same as that called later Hadid and Adida.

    Vespasian used the latter as one of his outposts in besieging Jerusalem.

    ADJURATION The judge, king, or high priest with official authority putting one on his solemn oath; entailing the obligation of witnessing ( Leviticus 5:1). So Saul adjured the people not to eat until evening ( 1 Samuel 14:24-28).

    And Ahab adjured Micaiah to tell the truth, which elicited from him the real result of the approaching battle, after a previous ironical reply.

    Compare Song 2:7 margin; Mark 5:7; Acts 19:13; Thessalonians 5:27 margin. Paul “adjuring” the Thessalonians “by the Lord that the epistle might be read to all the holy brethren.” Jesus, who, as the meek “Lamb dumb before His shearers,” would not reply to false charges, when “adjured (exorkizo se ) by the living God,” by the high priest, to tell the truth whether He be the Christ the Son of God, witnessed the truth concerning His Messiahship and His future advent in glory as the Son of man, which immediately brought on Him sentence of death. We Christians can so far join with the high priest’s reply, “What further need have we of witnesses?” ( Matthew 26:63-65.) Christ’s own witness alone is enough to assure us of His Godhead, the truth which He sealed with His blood.

    ADLAI Near Socoh; a hill side burrowed with caves ( 1 Chronicles 27:29); now Aid el Mieh (Ganneau). [See ADULLAM .] ADMAH One of the cities of the plain, having its own king, linked with Zeboim ( Genesis 10:19; 14:2,8; Deuteronomy 29:23; Hosea 11:8).

    Destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah ( Genesis 19:24).

    ADMATHA Esther 1:14.

    ADNA One of the sons of Pahath-Moab, who, on Ezra’s ( Ezra 10:30) monition (after that God had by great rains intimated His displeasure), put his strange wife away.

    ADNAH 1 Chronicles 12:20. 2. Chief over 300,000, under Jehoshaphat ( Chronicles 17:14).

    ADONI-BEZEK (Lord of Bezek, a city of Canaan.) Leading the confederated Canaanites and Perizzites, he was conquered by Judah and Simeon, who cut off his thumbs and great toes. Conscience struck, he confessed that 70 kings (petty princes) had gleaned (margin) their meat under his table, deprived of thumbs and great toes: “As I have done, so God hath requited me” ( Judges 1:4-7). Brought a prisoner to Jerusalem, he died there. God pays sinners in their own coin ( 1 Samuel 15:33). Judah was not giving vent to his own cruelty, but executing God’s lex talionis ( Leviticus 24:19; Revelation 16:6; Proverbs 1:31). The barbarity of Canaanite war usage’s appears in his conduct. The history shows that Canaan was then parceled out among a number of petty chiefs.

    ADONIJAH [see ABIATHAR and see ABSALOM ] = My Lord is Jehovah, or, Jah my Father. 1. Fourth son of David, by Haggith, born at Hebron. Very goodly in looks, like Absalom. Foolishly indulged by his father, who “had not displeased him at any time in saying, Why hast thou done so?” Never crossed when young, he naturally expected to have his own way when old; and took it, to his father’s grief in his old age, and to his own destruction.

    Compare Proverbs 13:24; 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go;” not in the way he would go: 1 Kings 1:6. When David was seemingly too old to offer energetic resistance, Adonijah as now the oldest son, about 35 years old (compare 2 Samuel 3:2-4 with 2 Samuel 5:5), Amnon, Chileab, and Absalom being dead, claimed the throne, in defiance of God’s expressed will, and David’s oath to Bathsheba that Solomon should inherit the throne ( 1 Chronicles 22:9,10). Like Absalom ( 2 Samuel 15:1) he assumed regal state, with chariots, horsemen, and 50 men to run before him (2 Kings 1; 2). Nathan the prophet, Zadok (Eleazar’s descendant, and so of the older line of priesthood), Benaiah son of Jehoiada, captain of the king’s guard, Shimei and Rei (= Shimma, Raddai), David’s own brothers, supported Solomon.

    Adonijah was supported by Abiathar, Eli’s descendant of Ithamar’s (Aaron’s fourth son’s) line, the junior line, and Joab who perhaps had a misgiving as to the possibility of Solomon’s punishing his murder of Abner and Amasa, and a grudge toward David for having appointed the latter commander in chief in his stead ( 2 Samuel 19:13). Adonijah had also invited to a feast by the stone Zoheleth at En-rogel all the king’s sons except Solomon, and the captains of the host, the king’s servants, of Judah.

    A meeting for a religious purpose, such as that of consecrating a king, was usually held near a fountain, which En-rogel was. Nathan and Bathsheba foiled his plot by inducing David to have Solomon conducted in procession on the king’s mule to Gihon, a spring W. of Jerusalem ( 2 Chronicles 32:30). On his being anointed and proclaimed by Zadok, all the people hailed him, God save the king! Adonijah’s party, surprised suddenly amidst their feasting, typify sinners’ carnal security, from which the Lord’s coming suddenly shall startle them to their destruction ( Matthew 24:48; Luke 12:45; 1 Thessalonians 5:2,3; compare 1 Kings 1:49).

    Adonijah, at the tidings announced by Jonathan, Abiathar’s son, fled for sanctuary, to the horns of the altar. Solomon would have spared him had he shown himself “a worthy man.” But on David’s death he, through the queen mother Bathsheba, now exalted to Special dignity, sought Abishag, David’s virgin widow, to be given him, a contemplated incest only second to that perpetrated by Absalom, whom he so much resembled, and also a connection which was regarded in the East as tantamount to a covert claim to the deceased monarch’s throne. [See ABNER and see ABSALOM .] Benaiah dispatched him. 2. A Levite in Jehoshaphat’s reign ( Chronicles 17:8), sent with the princes to teach the book of the law throughout Judah. 3. Nehemiah 10:16, called Adonikam in Ezra 2:13, whose children were 666 (compare Revelation 13:18, the numerical mark of the beast), Revelation 8:13; Nehemiah 7:18; 10:16, but 667 in Nehemiah 7:18.

    ADONIKAM [See ADONIJAH .] ADONIRAM Son of Abda; over the tribute for about 47 years under David, Solomon, and Rehoboam; also over Solomon’s levy of 30,000 sent by ten thousands monthly to cut timber in Lebanon ( 1 Kings 4:6). Contracted into\parADORAM ( 2 Samuel 20:24) andHADORAM. Stoned by the people of Israel when sent by Rehoboam to collect the tribute which had been their chief ground of complaint against the king ( 1 Kings 12:18; Chronicles 10:18).

    ADONI-ZEDEK (lord of righteousness). An Amorite king of Jerusalem, answering to the ancient king of it, Melchizedek (king of righteousness); one of many proofs that the Canaanite idolatry was an apostasy from the primitive truth of God which they once had. He headed the confederacy against Joshua, which the kings of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon also joined. Attacking Gebeon for having made peace with Israel, they in turn were attacked by Joshua, who came by forced march from Gilgal to the relief of his ally.

    Routed they fled to Bethhoron, thence to Azekah and Makkedah, amidst the fearful hailstorm from God, followed by the sun’s standing still at Joshua’s command. Brought forth from their hiding place, a cave at Makkedah to the mouth of which Joshua had caused great stones to be rolled, they had their necks trodden down by his captains, and then were slain and hung on trees until sunset ( Deuteronomy 21:23), and their bodies were buried in the cave.

    ADOPTION The taking of one as a son who is not so by birth. (I.) Natural: As Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses; Mordecai Esther; Abraham Eliezer (as a slave is often in the East adopted as son) ( Genesis 15:2,3); Sarai the son to be born by Hagar, whom she gave to her husband; Leah and Rachel the children to be born of Zilpah and Bilhah, their handmaids respectively, whom they gave to Jacob their husband. The handmaid at the birth brought forth the child on the knees of the adoptive mother ( Genesis 30:3); an act representative of the complete appropriation of the sons as equal in rights to those by the legitimate wife.

    Jacob adopted as his own Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, on the same footing as Reuben and Simeon, his two elder sons ( Genesis 48:5). Thereby he was able to give Joseph his favorite son more than his single share, with his brothers, of the paternal heritage. The tribes thus were 13, only that Levi had no land division; or Ephraim and Manasseh were regarded as two halves making up but one whole tribe. In Chronicles 2 Machir gives his daughter to Hezron of Judah; she bore Segub, father of Jair. Jair inherited 23 cities of Gilead in right of his grandmother. Though of Judah by his grandfather, he is ( Numbers 32:41) counted as of Manasseh on account of his inheritance through his grandmother. So Mary, being daughter of Heli, and Joseph her husband being adopted by him on marrying his daughter, an heiress (as appears from her going to Bethlehem to be registered in her pregnancy), Joseph is called in Luke’s genealogy son of Heli.

    By the Roman law of adoption, which required a due legal form, the adopted child was entitled to the father’s name, possessions, and family sacred rights, as his heir at law. The father also was entitled to his son’s property, and was his absolute owner. Gratuitous love was the ground of the selection generally. Often a slave was adopted as a son. Even when not so, the son adopted was bought from the natural father. A son and heir often adopted brothers, admitting them to share his own privileges; this explains beautifully John 8:36, compare Hebrews 2:11; or else the usage alluded to is that of the son, on coming into the inheritance, setting free the slaves born in the house. The Jews, though not having exactly the same customs, were familiar with the Roman usage’s. (II.) National: as God adopted Israel ( Romans 9:4; Deuteronomy 7:6; Exodus 4:22,23; Hosea 11:1); compare Jeremiah 3:19, “How shall I put thee among the children (Greek [huio -thesia ) ... thou shalt call Me, my Father.” The wonder expressed is, how shall one so long estranged from God as Israel has been be restored to the privileges of adoption? The answer is, by God’s pouring out on them hereafter the Spirit of adoption crying to God, “Father” ( Isaiah 63:16; 64:8; Hosea 3:4,5; Zechariah 12:10). (III.) Spiritual and individual. An act of God’s sovereign grace, originating in God’s eternal counsel of love ( Ephesians 1:4,5; Jeremiah 31:3); actually imparted by God’s uniting His people by faith to Christ ( John 1:12,13; Romans 8:14-16; Galatians 3:26; 4:4,5).

    The slave once forbidden to say father to the master, being adopted, can use that endearing appellation as a free man. God is their Father, because Christ’s Father ( John 20:17). Sealed by the Holy Spirit, the earnest of the future inheritance ( Ephesians 1:13). Producing the filial cry of prayer in all, Jew and Gentile alike [see ABBA ] ( Galatians 4:6); and the fruit of the Spirit, conformity to Christ ( Romans 8:29), and renewal in the image of our Father ( Colossians 3:10). Its privileges are God’s special love and favor ( 1 John 3:1; Ephesians 5:1); union with God, so perfect hereafter that it shall correspond to the ineffable mutual union of the Father and Son ( John 17:23,26); access to God with filial boldness ( Matthew 6:8,9; Romans 8:15,26,27), not slavish fear such as the law generated ( Galatians 4:1-7; John 4:17,18; 5:14); fatherly correction ( Hebrews 12:5-8); provision and protection ( Matthew 6:31-33; 10:29,30); heavenly inheritance ( 1 Peter 1:3,4; Revelation 21:7).

    The “adoption” is used for its full manifestation in the resurrection of the believer with a body like Christ’s glorious body ( Romans 8:23). Christ was Son even in His humiliation; but He was only “declared [definitively, Greek] the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead” ( Romans 1:4), “the first begotten from the dead” ( Revelation 1:5).

    Hence Paul refers, “Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee” ( Psalm 2:7) to the day of His resurrection. Not that He then first became Son, but His sonship was then openly vindicated by the Father’s raising Him from the dead ( Acts 13:33). So our “adoption” is still waited for, in the sense of its open manifestation ( Romans 8:11,19; 1 John 3:2). It is now a reality, but as yet a hidden reality. Our regeneration is now true ( Titus 3:5), but its full glories await Christ’s coming to raise His saints. The first resurrection shall be the saints’ manifested regeneration ( Matthew 19:28). They have three birthdays: the natural, the spiritual, the glorified. Sonship and the first resurrection are similarly connected ( Luke 20:36; 1 Peter 1:3). By creation Adam ( Luke 3:38) and all men ( Acts 17:28,29) are sons of God; by adoption only believers ( 1 Corinthians 12:3). The tests are in 1 John 3:9; 4:4,6; 5:1,4,18-21.

    ADORAIM A fortress built by Rehoboam in Judah ( 2 Chronicles 11:9). Probably now Dura, a large village on a rising ground W. of Hebron.

    ADORE “To kiss the hand with the mouth” in homage ( Job 31:26,27 “If I beheld the sun when it shineth, or the moon, ... and my mouth hath kissed my hand”). The earliest idolatry, that of the sun, moon, and heavenly hosts (Hebrews tsaba ), Sabeanism. Laying the hand on the mouth expresses deep reverence and submission ( Job 40:4). So “kiss the Son,” i.e. adore ( Psalm 2:12). Portrayed in the sculptures of Persepolis and Thebes.

    Falling down and worshipping prostrate was the worship subsequently paid to Babylonian idols ( Daniel 3:5,6). In the sense of divine worship, it is due to God only, and was rejected by angels and saints when offered to them ( Luke 4:8; Acts 10:25,26; Revelation 19:10; 22:9).

    ADRAMMELECH 1. The idol of the Sepharvite colonists of Samaria planted by Assyria ( Kings 17:31) = burning splendor of the king (compare Molech). The male power of the sun; asANAMMELECH is the female, sister deity. Astrology characterized the Assyrian idolatry. Adrammelech was represented as a peacock or a mule; Anammelech as a pheasant or a horse. Children were burnt in his honor. 2. Son and murderer of Sennacherib in Nisroch’s temple at Nineveh. He and Sharezer his brother escaped to Armenia ( 2 Kings 19:36; Chronicles 32:21). Named so from the idol.

    ADRAMYTTIUM A seaport in Mysia ( Acts 27:2). Its gulf is opposite the isle Lesbos, on the Roman route between Troas and the Hellespont, and Pergames, Ephesus and Miletus. The centurion escorting Paul took an Adramyttian ship, as a vessel going the whole way from Palestine to Italy was hard to find, and as it would bring them so far on their journey toward Rome, and in that coast they would be likely to find another ship to take them the rest of the way. At Myra in Lycia accordingly they found an Alexandrian ship bound for Italy.

    ADRIA The gulf bounded on the E. by Dalmatia and Albania, and on the W. by Italy. It was often however understood in a wider sense, as by Paul’s almost contemporary geographer, Ptolemy, namely, the Mare Superum, including the Ionian sea, between Sicily on the W., and Greece and Crete on the E., and Africa on the S., the “Syrtic basin” ( Acts 27:17). So that the Melita of Acts 28 need not be looked for in the present Adriatic gulf, but may be identified with Malta. Adria, a town near the Po, gave its name.

    Malta marks the division between the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian (Mare Inferum) sea; the Corinthian isthmus divides the AEgean from the Adriatic.

    ADRIEL Son of Barzillai the Meholathite, to whom Saul gave Merab his daughter in marriage, previously promised to David ( 1 Samuel 18:19). Five sons from this union were of the seven slain as a blood satisfaction to the Gibeonites whose blood Saul had, in violation of Israel’s covenant ( Joshua 9:15), shed. 2 Samuel 21:8: “Michal brought up for Adriel:” namely, Merab the mother died young, and her sister brought up her five nephews, as if she were their own mother. The Jewish targums favor this view. But as the Hebrews yalad means to bring forth or bear children, and Michal seems to have had no children ( 2 Samuel 6:23), perhaps Michal is a transcriber’s error for Merab. Still the term “bare” (margin) may mark how completely Michal, evidently a woman of strong affections ( Samuel 19:11,12; 2 Samuel 3:16), acted as a true mother to them.

    ADULLAM A city in the shephelah, or low country between the hill country of Judah and the sea; very ancient ( Genesis 38:1,12,20); the seat of one of the petty king smitten by Joshua ( Joshua 12:15). Fortified by Rehoboam ( 2 Chronicles 11:7) Called for its beauty “the glory of Israel” ( Micah 1:15). Reoccupied on the return from Bahyhm ( Nehemiah 11:30). The limestone cliffs of the shephelah are pierced with caves, one of which was that of Adullam, David’ s resort ( 1 Samuel 22:1; 2 Samuel 23:13; 1 Chronicles 11:15). Tradition fixes on Khureitun as the site, S. of the wady Urtas, between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. This cave on the borders of the Dead Sea six miles S.E. of Bethlehem (his parents’ residence) would be more likely as the place whence David took his parents to Moab close by, than the region of the city Adullam in the far West. Names of western places are sometimes repeated in the East.

    David’s usual haunts were in this eastern region. The cave’s mouth can only be approached on foot across the cliff’s edge; it runs in by a long winding narrow passage, with cavities on either side; a large chamber within, with very high arches, has numerous passages to all directions, joined by others at right angles, and forming a perplexing labyrinth. The air within is dry and pure. David’s familiarity with it, as a Bethlehemite, would naturally lead him to it. Lieut. Conder (Palest. Explor.) at first fixed on the cave Mogharet Umm el Tumaymiyeh, five miles N. of Ayd el Mieh; agreeing with the position assigned by Eusebius 10 miles E. of Eleutheropolis; but the cave with its damp hot atmosphere is unfit for human habitation. In a later report Conder, after surveying the ground, fixes on Ayd el Mieh (feast of the hundred) as the site of the cave and city of Adullam, eight miles N.E. of Beit Jebrin (Libnah), 10 miles S.W. of Tell es Safyeh (Gath), and half way between Socoh and Keilah: 500 feet above wady Sumt (valley of Elah); barring the Philistines’ progress up this valley to Judah’s grain lands. Tombs, wells, terraces, and rock fortifications are to be traced. It is connected by roads with adjoining places, Maresha (El Marash), Jarmuth (Yarmuk), and Socoh (Suweikeh), and has a system of caves close to its wells still inhabited, or used as stables, and large enough for all David’s band. On the top of the city hill are two or three caves which together could accommodate 250 men. The darkness, scorpions, bats, and flies are against Khureitun and Deir Dubban caverns as a residence. From Gibeah (Jeba) David fled to Nob, thence down the valley to Gath (Tell es Safyeh); from Gath he returned to Judah. On the edge of the country between Philistia and Judah, he collected his band into Adullam (Ayd el Mieh); thence, by the prophet’s direction, to the hills, a four miles’ march to Hareth, still within reach of his own Bethlehem. To the present day the cave dwelling peasantry avoid large caves such as Khureitun and Umm el Tuweimin, and prefer the drier, smaller caves, lighted by the sun, such as Ayd el Mieh, meaning in Arabic “feast of the hundred.” The expedition of David’s three mighty men from Ayd el Mieh to Bethlehem would be then 12 leagues, not too far for what is described as an exploit ( 2 Samuel 23:13-17; 1 Chronicles 11:15-19).

    ADULTERY A married woman cohabiting with a man not her husband. The prevalent polygamy in patriarchal times rendered it impossible to stigmatize as adultery the cohabitation of a married man with another besides his wife.

    But as Jesus saith, “from the beginning it was not so,” for “He which made male and female said, They twain shall be one flesh.” So the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Genesis 2:24, as it is quoted in Matthew 19:5. A fallen world undergoing a gradual course of remedial measures needs anomalies to be pretermitted for a time ( Romans 3:25 margin; Acts 17:30), until it becomes fit for a higher stage, in its progress toward its finally perfect state. God sanctions nothing but perfection; but optimism is out of place in governing a fallen world not yet ripe for it. The junction of the two into one flesh when sexual intercourse takes place with a third is dissolved in its original idea. So also the union of the believer with Christ is utterly incompatible with fornication ( 1 Corinthians 6:13-18; 7:1-13; 1 Timothy 3:12). The sanctity of marriage in patriarchal times appears from Abraam’s fear, not that his wife will be seduced from him, but that he may be killed for her sake. The conduct of Pharaoh and Abimelech (Genesis 12; 20), implies the same reverence for the sacredness of marriage. Death by fire was the penalty of unchastity ( Genesis 38:24).

    Under the Mosaic law both the guilty parties (including those only betrothed unless the woman were a slave) were stoned ( Deuteronomy 22:22-24; Leviticus 19:20-22). The law of inheritance, which would have been set aside by doubtful offspring, tended to keep up this law as to adultery. But when the territorial system of Moses fell into desuetude, and Gentile example corrupted the Jews, while the law nominally remained it practically became a dead letter. The Pharisees’ object in bringing the adulterous woman (John 8) before Christ was to put Him in a dilemma between declaring for reviving an obsolete penalty, or else sanctioning an infraction of the law. In Matthew 5:82 He condemns their usage of divorce except in the case of fornication. In Matthew 1:19, Joseph” not willing to make [the Virgin] a public example (paradeigmatisai ) was minded to put her away privily”; i.e., he did not intend to bring her before the local Sanhedrim, but privately to repudiate her. The trial by the waters of jealousy described in Numbers 5:11-29 was meant to restrain oriental impulses of jealousy within reasonable bounds. The trial by “red water” in Africa is very different, amidst seeming resemblance’s. The Israelite ingredients were harmless; the African, poisonous. The visitation, if the woman was guilty, was from God direct; the innocent escaped: whereas many an innocent African perishes by the poison. No instance is recorded in Scripture; so that the terror of it seems to have operated either to restrain from guilt, or to lead the guilty to confess it without recourse to the ordeal.

    The union of God and His one church, in His everlasting purpose, is the archetype and foundation on which rests the union of man and wife ( Ephesians 5:22-33). [See ADAM .] As he ish ) gave Eve (isha ) his name, signifying her formation from him, so Christ gives a new name to the church ( Revelation 2:17; 3:12). As He is the true Solomon (Prince of peace), so she the Shulamite (Song 6:13). Hence idolatry, covetousness, and apostasy are adultery spiritually ( Jeremiah 3:6,8,9; Ezekiel 16:82; Hosea 1; 2; 3; Revelation 2:22). An apostate church, the daughter of Jerusalem becoming the daughter of Babylon, is an adulteress ( Isaiah 1:21; Ezekiel 23:4,7,37). So Jesus calls the Jews “an adulterous generation” ( Matthew 12:39). The woman in Revelation 12, represented as clothed with the Sun (of righteousness), and crowned with the 12 stars (i.e. the 12 patriarchs of the Old Testament and the 12 apostles of New Testament), and persecuted by the dragon, in Revelation 17, excites the wonder of John, because of her transformation into a scarlet arrayed “mother of harlots,” with a cup full of abominations, riding upon a “scarlet colored beast”; but the ten horned beast finally turns upon her, “makes her naked, eats her flesh, and burns her with fire.” The once faithful church has ceased to be persecuted by conforming to the godless world and resting upon it. But the divine principle is, when the church apostatizes from God to intrigue with the world, the world, the instrument of her sin, shall at last be the instrument of her punishment. Compare as to Israel (Aholah ), and Judah (Aholibah ), Ezekiel 23. The principle is being illustrated in the church of Rome before our eyes. Let all professing churches beware of spiritual adultery, as they would escape its penalty.

    ADUMMIM ( Joshua 15:7; 18:17) = the red pass, or “pass of the red men,” the aboriginal inhabitants; on the border between Benjamin and Judah, on a rising ground; whence the phrase is, “the going up of Adummim.” S. of the torrent, and looking toward Gilgal. The road still passes the same way, leading up from Jericho (four miles off) and the Jordan valley to Jerusalem, eight miles distant, S. of the gorge of the wady Kelt. It was believed to be the place where the traveler fell among robbers in the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10). The order of Knights Templar arose out of an association for guarding this road, which has always been infested by robbers; Jerome indeed derives from the Hebrews “bloodshed.”

    ADVERSARY The meaning of Satan ( 1 Peter 5:8); also divine justice ( Luke 12:58,59).

    ADVOCATE (paraklete ); one who pleads another’s cause, exhorts, comforts, prays for another. The Holy Spirit ( John 14:16; 15:26; 16:7); though our KJV always translates it “Comforter” when applied to Him, and “Advocate” when to Christ ( 1 John 2:1). But all the ideas included in the word apply both to the Holy Spirit and to Christ. For if Christ intercedes with God for us above, the Holy Spirit does so in us below; compare Romans 8:26,34 with Hebrews 7:25. The Holy Spirit, testifying of Christ within us, answers, as our Advocate before our consciences, the law’s demands; He, as the Spirit of prayer and adoption, inspires in us prayers which words cannot fully utter. If the Holy Spirit be named “another Comforter” by Jesus, yet He implies that Himself also is so, as indeed the Holy Spirit is His Spirit; absent in body, He is still present by His Spirit ( John 14:16,18). Tertullus (Acts 24) is a sample of the advocates usually employed by clients in the Roman provinces.

    AENEA A paralytic, healed at Lydda by Peter ( Acts 9:33,34).

    AENON Near Salim, where John baptized ( John 3:22,23,26; compare John 1:28), W. of Jordan. The name (= springs) implies” there was much water there.” Robinson found a Salim E. of Nabulus, or Shechem, with two copious springs: compare Genesis 33:18. This would require AEnon to be far W. of Jordan; it agrees with this that, had it been near Jordan, John would scarcely have remarked that “much water” was there: but if far from the river, it explains how the plentiful water at AEnon was convenient for baptisms. There is an Ainun still near Shechem or Nabloos, with many beautiful streams and brooks. Ainun is as distant N. of the springs (three or four miles) as Salim is S. of them. The valley is called the wady Farah. [See SALIM .] The Ainun site is on the main line from Jerusalem to Nazareth.

    Here most probably, at the upper source of the wady Farah stream, between Salim and Ainun, was John’s AEnon. The Palestine explorer, Lieut. Conder, confirms this; moreover, this would explain John 4:4, “Jesus must needs go through Samaria; ... one soweth and another reapeth,” etc. ( John 4:37,38.) John Baptist, the forerunner, prepared the way in Samaria; Jesus and His disciples must needs follow up by preaching the gospel there.

    AGABUS (from Hebrews agab , “he loved”). A Christian prophet ( Acts 9:28; 21:10). He came from Judaea to Antioch while Paul and Barnabas were there, and foretold the famine which occurred the next year in Palestine (for a Jew would mean the Jewish world, by “throughout all the world.”).

    Josephus records that Helena, queen of Adiabene, a proselyte then at Jerusalem, imported provisions from Egypt and Cyprus, wherewith she saved many from starvation. The famine was in the procuratorship of Cuspius Fadus and Tiberius Alexander, A.D. 44, and lasted four years. In the wider sense of “the world,” as the prophecy fixes on no year, but “in the days of Claudius Caesar,” it may include other famines elsewhere in his reign, one in Greece, two in Rome.

    AGAG (fiery one; Arabic = burn). A common title of the Amalekite kings; as Pharaoh of the Egyptian. Numbers 24:7 implies their greatness at that time. Saul’s sparing the Agag of his time ( 1 Samuel 15:32) contrary to God’s command, both then and from the first ( Exodus 17:14; Deuteronomy 25:17-19), because of Amalek’s having intercepted Israel in the desert, so as to defeat the purpose of God Himself concerning His people, entailed on Saul loss of his throne and life. Agag came to Samuel “delicately” (rather contentedly, pleasantly), confident of his life being spared. But Samuel executed retributive justice (as in the case of Adonibezek, Judges 1), hewing him to pieces, and so making his mother childless, as he had made other women childless by hewing their sons to pieces (in consonance with his fiery character, as Agag means). This retribution in kind explains the unusual mode of execution. Haman the Agagite ( Esther 3:1-10; 8:3-5) was thought by the Jews his descendant, whence sprung his hatred to their race.

    AGATE Hebrew kadkod , from kadad , to sparkle. The “windows” being of this gem ( Isaiah 54:12) implies transparency. Gesenius thinks the ruby or carbuncle is meant. It was imported from Syria to Tyre ( Ezekiel 27:16).

    Hebrew Sheba (from Sheba whence it came to Tyre), Exodus 28:19; 39:12, is rightly translated “agate,” a semi-transparent uncrystallized quartz, mainly silica, with concentric layers of various tints; the second stone of the third row on the high priest’s breastplate. The English term is drawn from that of the Greeks, who found agate in the river Acheres, in Sicily, and hence named it.

    AGE A period of time characterized by a certain stage of development of God’s grand scheme of redemption (aion ) ( Ephesians 2:7; 3:5). The people living in the age. There is the patriarchal age; the Mosaic age or dispensation; the Christian age, in which “the kingdom of God cometh without observation” (and evil predominates outwardly); and the future manifested millennial kingdom: the two latter together forming “the world (Greek age) to come,” in contrast to “this present evil world” (age) ( Ephesians 1:21; Galatians 1:4). The Greek for the physical “world” is kosmos , distinct from aion , the ethical world or “age” ( Hebrews 6:5).

    If the 1260 prophetical days of the papal antichrist be years, and begin at A.D. 754, when his temporal power began by Pepin’s grant of Ravenna, the Lombard kingdom, and Rome to Stephen II., the beginning of the millennial age would be A.D. 2014. But figures have in Scripture a mystical meaning as well as a literal; faith must wait until the Father reveals fully “the times and seasons which He hath put in His own power” ( Acts 1:7). Messiah is the Lord by whom and for whom all these ages, or vast cycles of time, have existed and do exist ( Hebrews 1:2), “through whom He made the ages” (Greek) ( Isaiah 26:4), “the Rock of ages” ( <19E513> Psalm 145:13). “This age” (Greek for “world”) is under the prince of darkness, the god of this world (Greek “age”) so far as most men are concerned ( Ephesians 2:2; Luke 16:8; Matthew 13:22; Corinthians 4:4). “The world” when representing the Greek “age” (aion ) means not the material “world” (Greek kosmos ), but the age in its relation to God or to Satan. Continuance is the prominent thought; so “the ages of ages,” expressing continuous succession of vast cycles, stands for eternity; e.g., Messiah’s kingdom ( Revelation 11:15), the torment of the lost ( Revelation 14:11).

    AGE (OLD) The reward of filial obedience, according to the fifth commandment; remarkably illustrated in the great permanence of the Chinese empire; wherein regard for parents and ancestors is so great that it has degenerated into superstition. Patriarchal times and patriarchal governments have most maintained respect for the old. The Egyptians followed the primeval law, which Moses embodies in Leviticus 19:32: “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of the old man, and fear thy God.”

    Their experience made them to be regarded as depositories of knowledge ( Job 15:10); they gave their opinion first ( Job 32:4). A full age was the reward of piety ( Job 5:26; Genesis 15:15); premature death was a temporal judgment for sin ( 1 Samuel 2:32); (spiritually, and as a taking out from the evil to come, it was sometimes a blessing; as in the case of Abijah, Jeroboam’s son, 1 Kings 14; Isaiah 57:1). In the millennium, when there shall be a worldwide theocracy, with Israel for its center, the temporal sanction of exceeding long life (as in patriarchal times) shall be the reward for piety, and shortened years the penalty of any exceptional sin ( Isaiah 65:20; Zechariah 8:4). The rulers under Moses required age as a qualification; hence they and those of the New Testament church are called elders (presbyters), until the word became a term of office, and not necessarily of age. Disobedience to parents and disrespect to seniors and “dignities” ( Jude 1:8; 2 Peter 2:10) are foretold characteristics of the last apostate age ( 2 Timothy 3:2-4; Romans 1:30).

    AGEE 2 Samuel 23:11.

    AGONY (Greek conflict in wrestling; figuratively, a struggle with intense trials.)

    Used only in Luke 22:41. Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane, “so that His sweat was as it were great clotted drops of blood” (thromboi ), namely, blood mixing with the ordinary watery perspiration, medically termed diapedesis, resulting from agitation of the nervous system, turning the blood out of its natural course, and forcing the red particles into the skin excretories. The death of Charles IX. of France was attended with it. Many similar cases are recorded, as the bloody sweat of a Florentine youth, condemned to death unjustly by Sixtus V. (De Thou 82 4 44.) Compare Hebrews 5:7,8; Matthew 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42. Each complements the other, so that the full account is to be had only from all compared together. Luke alone records the bloody sweat and the appearance of all angel from heaven strengthening Him, Matthew and Mark the change in His countenance and manner, and His complaint of overwhelming soul sorrows even unto death, and His repetition of the same prayer. The powers of darkness then returning with double force, after Satan’s defeat in the temptation ( Luke 4:13, “for a season,” Greek “until the season,” namely, in Gethsemane, Luke 22:53), the prospect of the darkness on Calvary, when He was to experience a horror never known before, the hiding of the Father’s countenance, the climax of His vicarious sufferings for our sins, which wrung from Him the “Eli Eli lama sabacthani,” apparently caused His agonizing, holy, instinctive shrinking from such a cup. Sin which He hated was to be girt fast to Him, though there was none in Him; and this, without the consolation which martyrs have, the Father’s and the Savior’s presence. He must tread the winepress of God’s wrath against us alone. Hence the greater shrinking from His cup than that of martyrs from their cup ( John 12:27; Luke 12:49,50).

    The cup was not the then pressing agony; for in John 18:11 He speaks of it as still future. There is a beautiful progression in the subjecting of His will to the Father’s: “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me, nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt” ( Matthew 26:39): “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee,” (lest His previous IF should harbor a doubt of the Father’s power) “take away this cup from Me, nevertheless not what I will but what Thou wilt” ( Mark 14:86): “Father, if Thou be willing” (marking His realizing the Father’s will as defining the true limits of possibility), remove this cup from Me, nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done” ( Luke 22:42): “Oh My Father, if [rather since] this cup may [can] not pass away from Me except I drink it, [now recognizing that it is not the Father’s will to take the cup away], Thy will be done” ( Matthew 26:42): lastly, the language of final triumph of faith over the sinless infirmity of His flesh, “The cup which My Father hath given Me shall I not drink it?” ( John 18:11.) A faultless pattern for us ( Isaiah 50:5-10).

    AGRICULTURE While the patriarchs were in Canaan, they led a pastoral life, and little attended to tillage; Isaac and Jacob indeed tilled at times ( Genesis 26:12; 37:7), but the herdsmen strove with Isaac for his wells not for his crops. The wealth of Gerar and Shechem was chiefly pastoral ( Genesis 20:14; 34:28). The recurrence of famines and intercourse with Egypt taught the Canaanites subsequently to attend more to tillage, so that by the time of the spies who brought samples of the land’s produce from Eshcol much progress had been made ( Deuteronomy 8:8; Numbers 13:23).

    Providence happily arranged it so that Israel, while yet a family, was kept by the pastoral life from blending with and settling among idolaters around.

    In Egypt the native prejudice against shepherds kept them separate in Goshen ( Genesis 47:4-6; 46:34). But there they unlearned the exclusively pastoral life and learned husbandry ( Deuteronomy 11:10), while the deserts beyond supplied pasture for their cattle ( 1 Chronicles 7:21). On the other hand, when they became a nation, occupying Canaan, their agriculture learned in Egypt made them a self subsisting nation, independent of external supplies, and so less open to external corrupting influences. Agriculture was the basis of the Mosaic commonwealth; it checked the tendency to the roving habits of nomad tribes, gave each man a stake in the soil by the law of inalienable inheritances, and made a numerous offspring profitable as to the culture of the land. God claimed the lordship of the soil ( Leviticus 25:23), so that each held by a divine tenure; subject to the tithe, a quit rent to the theocratic head landlord, also subject to the sabbatical year. Accumulation of debt was obviated by prohibiting interest on principal lent to fellow citizens ( Leviticus 25:8- 16,28-87). Every seventh, sabbatic year, or the year of jubilee, every 50th year, lands alienated for a time reverted to the original owner. Compare Isaiah’s “woe” to them who “add field to field,” clearing away families (1 Kings 21) to absorb all, as Ahab did to Naboth. Houses in towns, if not redeemed in a year, were alienated for ever; thus land property had an advantage over city property, an inducement to cultivate and reside on one’s own land. The husband of an heiress passed by adoption into the family into which he married, so as not to alienate the land. The condition of military service was attached to the land, but with merciful qualifications (Deuteronomy 20); thus a national yeomanry of infantry, officered by its own hereditary chiefs, was secured. Horses were forbidden to be multiplied ( Deuteronomy 17:16). Purificatory rites for a day after warfare were required ( Numbers 19:16; 31:19). These regulations, and that of attendance thrice a year at Jerusalem for the great feasts, discouraged the appetite for war.

    The soil is fertile still, wherever industry is secure. The Hauran (Peraea) is highly reputed for productiveness. The soil of Gaza is dark and rich, though light, and retains rain; olives abound in it. The Israelites cleared away most of the wood which they found in Canaan ( Joshua 17:18), and seem to have had a scanty supply, as they imported but little; compare such extreme expedients for getting wood for sacrifice as in 1 Samuel 6:14; 2 Samuel 24:22; 1 Kings 19:21; dung and hay fuel heated their ovens ( Ezekiel 4:12,15; Matthew 6:30). The water supply was from rain, and rills from the hills, and the river Jordan, whereas Egypt depended solely on the Nile overflow. Irrigation was effected by ducts from cisterns in the rocky sub-surface. The country had thus expansive resources for an enlarging population. When the people were few, as they are now, the valleys sufficed to until for food; when many, the more difficult culture of the hills was resorted to and yielded abundance. The rich red loam of the valleys placed on the sides of the hills would form fertile terraces sufficient for a large population, if only there were good government. The lightness of husbandry work in the plains set them free for watering the soil, and terracing the hills by low stone walls across their face, one above another, arresting the soil washed down by the rams, and affording a series of levels for the husbandman. The rain is chiefly in the autumn and winter, November and December, rare after March, almost never as late as May. It often is partial. A drought earlier or later is not so bad, but just three months before harvest is fatal ( Amos 4:7,8). The crop depended for its amount on timely rain. The “early” rain ( Proverbs 16:15; James 5:7) fell from about the September equinox to sowing time in November or December, to revive the parched soil that the seed might germinate. The “latter rain” in February and March ripened the crop for harvest. A typical pledge that, as there has been the early outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, so there shall be a latter outpouring previous to the great harvest of Israel and the Gentile nations ( Zechariah 12:10; Joel 2:23,28-32). Wheat, barley, and rye (and millet rarely) were their cereals.

    The barley harvest was earlier than the wheat. With the undesigned propriety that marks truth, Exodus 9:31,32 records that by the plague of hail “the flax and the barley were smitten, for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bolled [i.e. in blossom], but the wheat and the rye were not smitten, for they were not grown up.” Accordingly, at the Passover (just after the time of the hail) the barley was just fit for the sickle, and the wave sheaf was offered; and not until Pentecost feast,50 days after, the wheat was ripe for cutting, and the firstfruit loaves were offered. The vine, olive, and fig abounded; and traces everywhere remain of former wine and olive presses. Cummin (including the black “fitches,” Isaiah 28:27), peas, beans, lentils, lettuce, endive, leek, garlic, onion, melon, cucumber, and cabbage also were cultivated. The Passover in the month Nisan answered to the green stage of produce; the feast of weeks in Sivan to the ripe; and the feast of tabernacles in Tisri to the harvest home or ingathered.

    A month (Veader) was often intercalated before Nisan, to obviate the inaccuracy of their non-astronomical reckoning. Thus the six months from Tisri to Nisan was occupied with cultivation, the six months from Nisan to Tisri with gathering fruits. The season of rains from Tisri equinox to Nisan is pretty continuous, but is more decidedly marked at the beginning (the early rain) and the end (the latter rain). Rain in harvest was unknown ( Proverbs 26:1). The plow was light, and drawn by one yoke. Fallows were cleared of stones and thorns early in the year ( Jeremiah 4:3; Hosea 10:12; Isaiah 5:2). To sow among thorns was deemed bad husbandry ( Job 5:5; Proverbs 24:30,31). Seed was scattered broadcast, as in the parable of the sower ( Matthew 13:3-8), and plowed in afterward, the stubble of the previous crop becoming manure by decay.

    The seed was trodden in by cattle in irrigated lands ( Deuteronomy 11:10; Isaiah 32:20). Hoeing and weeding were seldom needed in their fine tilth. Seventy days sufficed between sowing barley and the wave sheaf offering from the ripe grain at Passover. Oxen were urged on with a spearlike goad ( Judges 3:31). Boaz slept on the threshingfloor, a circular high spot, of hard ground, 80 or 90 feet in diameter, exposed to the wind for winnowing, ( 2 Samuel 24:16-18) to watch against depredations ( Ruth 3:4-7). Sowing divers seed in a field was forbidden ( Deuteronomy 22:9), to mark God is not the author of confusion, there is no transmutation of species, such as modern skeptical naturalists imagine. Oxen unmuzzled ( Deuteronomy 25:4) five abreast trod out the grain on the floor, to separate the grain from chaff and straw; flails were used for small quantities and lighter grain ( Isaiah 28:27). A threshing sledge (moreg ), Isaiah 41:15) was also employed, probably like the Egyptian still in use, a stage with three rollers ridged with iron, which cut the straw for fodder, while crushing out the grain. The shovel and fan winnowed the grain afterward by help of the evening breeze ( Ruth 3:2; Isaiah 30:24); lastly, it was shaken in a sieve. Amos 9:9; Psalm 83:10, and 2 Kings 9:37 prove the use of animal manure. The poor man’s claim was remembered, the self sown produce of the seventh year being his perquisite ( Leviticus 25:1-7): hereby the Israelites’ faith was tested; national apostasy produced gradual neglect of this compassionate law, and was punished by retribution in kind ( Leviticus 26:34,35); after the captivity it was revived. The gleanings, the grainers of the field, and the forgotten sheaf and remaining grapes and olives, were also the poor man’s right; and perhaps a second tithe every third year ( Leviticus 19:9,10; Deuteronomy 14:28; 26:12; Amos 4:4). The fruit of newly planted trees was not to be eaten for the first three years, in the fourth it was holy as firstfruits, and on the fifth eaten commonly.

    AGRIPPA [See HEROD .] AGUR From agar , “to collect.” “The collector,” a symbolical name, like Ecclesiastes, “the preacher” or “assembler.” Son of Jakeh (obedience); author of inspired counsels to Ithiel and Ucal (Proverbs 30). Called “the prophecy;” rather “the weighty utterance” (Hebrew massa ), “burden.”

    Hitzig imaginatively makes him son of the queen of Massa, and brother of Lemuel. An unknown Hebrew collector of the wise sayings in Proverbs 30, and possibly as Ewald thinks in Proverbs 31:1-9; the three sections of this portion are mutually similar in style. Lemuel = “devoted to God” is probably an ideal name. The rabbis, according to Rashi and Jerome, interpreted the name as symbolizing Solomon the Koheleth. [See ECCLESIASTES .] AHAB 1. Son of Omri; seventh king of the northern kingdom of Israel, second of his dynasty; reigned 28 years, from 919 to 897 B.C. Having occasional good impulses ( 1 Kings 21:27), but weak and misled by his bad wife Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, king of Zidon, i.e. Phoenicia in general. The Tyrian historians, Dius and Menander, mention Eithobalus as priest of Ashtoreth. Having murdered Pheles, he became king of Tyre. Menander mentions a drought in Phoenicia; compare 1 Kings 17. He makes him sixth king after Hiram of Tyre, the interval being 50 years, and Eithobalus’ reign 32; thus he would be exactly contemporary with Ahab (Josephus c. Apion, 1:18.) Ahab, under Jezebel’s influence, introduced the impure worship of the sun-god Baal, adding other gods besides Jehovah, a violation of the first commandment, an awful addition to Jeroboam’s sin of the golden calves, which at Dan and Bethel (like Aaron’s calves) were designed (for state policy) as images of the one true God, in violation of the second commandment; compare 2 Kings 17:9: “the children of Israel did secretly things [Hebrews covered words] that were not right [Hebrews so] against the Lord,” i.e., veiled their real idolatry with flimsy pretexts, as the church of Rome does in its image veneration. The close relation of the northern kingdom with Tyre in David’s and Solomon’s time, and the temporal advantage of commercial intercourse with that great mart of the nations, led to an intimacy which, as too often happens in amalgamation between the church and the world, ended in Phoenicia seducing Israel to Baal and Astarte, instead of Israel drawing Phoenicia to Jehovah; compare 2 Corinthians 6:14-18. Ahab built an altar and temple to Baal in Samaria, and “made a grove,” i.e. a sacred symbolic tree (asheerah ), the symbol of Ashtoreth (the idol to whom his wife’s father was priest), the moon-goddess, female of Baal; else Venus, the Assyrian Ishtar (our “star”). Jehovah worship was scarcely tolerated; but the public mind seems to have been in a halting state of indecision between the two, Jehovah and Baal, excepting 7000 alone who resolutely rejected the idol; or they thought to form a compromise by uniting the worship of Baal with that of Jehovah. Compare Hosea 2:16; Amos 5:25-27; 1 Kings 18; 19.

    Jezebel cut off Jehovah’s prophets, except 100 saved by Obadiah. So prevalent was idolatry that Baal had 450 prophets, and Asherah (“the groves”) had 400, whom Jezebel entertained at her own table. God chastised Israel with drought and famine, in answer to Elijah’s prayer which he offered in jealousy for the honor of God, and in desire for the repentance of his people (1 Kings 17; James 5:17,18). When softened by the visitation, the people were ripe for the issue to which Elijah put the conflicting claims to Jehovah and Baal at Carmel, and on the fire from heaven consuming the prophet’s sacrifice, fell on their faces and exclaimed with one voice, “Jehovah, He is the God; Jehovah, He is the God.” Baal’s prophets were slain at the brook Kishon, and the national judgment, through Elijah’s prayers, was withdrawn, upon the nation’s repentance.

    Ahab reported all to Jezebel, and she threatened immediate death to Elijah.

    Ahab was pre-eminent for luxurious tastes; his elaborately ornamented ivory palace ( 1 Kings 22:39; Amos 3:15), the many cities he built or restored, as Jericho (then belonging to Israel, not Judah) in defiance of Joshua’s curse ( 1 Kings 16:34), his palace and park at Jezreel (now Zerin), in the plain of Esdraelon, his beautiful residence while Samaria was the capital, all show his magnificence. But much would have more, and his coveting Naboth’s vineyard to add to his gardens led to an awful display of Jezebel’s unscrupulous wickedness and his selfish weakness. “Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? ... I will give thee the vineyard.” By false witness suborned at her direction, Naboth and his sons (after he had refused to sell his inheritance to Ahab, Leviticus 25:23) were stoned; and Ahab at Jezebel’s bidding went down to take possession (1 Kings 21; 2 Kings 9:26). This was the turning point whereat his doom was sealed.

    Elijah with awful majesty denounces his sentence, “in the place where dogs licked Naboth’s blood, shall dogs lick thine” (fulfilled to the letter on Joram his offspring, 2 Kings 9, primarily also on Ahab himself, but not “in the place” where Naboth’s blood was shed); while the king abjectly cowers before him with the cry, “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” All his male posterity were to be cut off, as Jeroboam’s and Baasha’s, the two previous dynasties, successively had been [see ELIJAH ]. Execution was stayed owing to Ahab’s partial and temporary repentance; for he seems to have been capable of serious impressions at times ( 1 Kings 20:43); so exceedingly gracious is God at the first dawning of sorrow for sin.

    Ahab fought three campaigns against Benhadad II., king of Damascus. The arrogance of the Syrian king, who besieged Samaria, not content with the claim to Ahab’s silver, gold, wives, and children being conceded, but also threatening to send his servants to search the Israelite houses for every pleasant thing, brought on him God’s wrath. A prophet told Ahab that Jehovah should deliver to him by the young men of the princes of the provinces (compare 1 Corinthians 1:27-29) the Syrian multitude of which Benhadad vaunted, “The gods do so to me and more also, if the dust of Samaria shall suffice for handfuls for all the people that follow me” (1 Kings 20). “Drinking himself drunk” with his 32 vassal princes, he and his force were utterly routed. Compare for the spiritual application 1 Thessalonians 5:2-8. Again Benhadad, according to the prevalent idea of local gods, thinking Jehovah a god of the hills (His temple being on mount Zion and Samaria being on a hill) and not of the plains, ventured a battle on the plains at Aphek, E. of Jordan, with an army equal to his previous one. He was defeated and taken prisoner, but released, on condition of restoring to Ahab all the cities of Israel which he held, and making streets for Ahab in Damascus, as his father had made in Samaria (i.e. of assigning an Israelites’ quarter in Damascus, where their judges should have paramount authority, for the benefit of Israelites resident there for commerce and political objects). A prophet invested with the divine commission (“in the word of the Lord”: Haggai 1:13) requested his neighbor to smite him; refusing, he was slain by a lion. Another, at his request, smote and wounded him. By this symbolic act, and by a parable of his having suffered an enemy committed to him to escape, the prophet intimated that Ahab’s life should pay the forfeit of his having suffered to escape with life one appointed by God to destruction. This disobedience, like Saul’s in the case of Amalek, owing to his preferring his own will to God’s, coupled with his treacherous and covetous murder of Naboth, brought on him his doom in his third campaign against Benhadad three years subsequently. With Jehoshaphat, in spite of the prophet Micaiah’s warning, and urged on by an evil spirit in the false prophets, he tried to recover Ramoth Gilead (1 Kings 22).

    Benhadad’s chief aim was to slay Ahab, probably from personal hostility owing to the gratuitousness of the attack. Conscience made Ahab a coward, and selfishness made him reckless of his professed friendship to Jehoshaphat. Compare 2 Chronicles 18:2: feasting and a display of hospitality often seduce the godly. So he disguised himself, and urged his friend to wear the royal robes. The same Benhadad whom duty to God ought to have led him to execute as a blasphemer, drunkard, and murderer, was in retribution made the instrument of his own destruction ( 1 Kings 20:10,16,42). That false friendship which the godly king of Judah ought never to have formed ( 2 Chronicles 19:2; 1 Corinthians 15:33) would have cost him his life but for God’s interposition ( 2 Chronicles 18:31) “moving them to depart from him.” Ahab’s treachery did not secure his escape, an arrow “at a venture” humanly speaking, but guided by God really, wounded him fatally; and the dogs licked up his blood, according to the Lord’s word of which Joram’s case in 2 Kings 9:25 was a literal fulfillment ( 1 Kings 21:19), on the very spot, while his chariot and armor were being washed ( 1 Kings 22:38). The Assyrian Black Obelisk mentions “Ahab of Jezreel,” his ordinary residence, and that he furnished the confederacy, including Benhadad, against, Assyria 10,000 footmen and 2000 chariots, and that they were defeated. At first sight this seemingly contradicts Scripture, which makes Benhadad Ahab’s enemy. But an interval of peace of three years occurred between Ahab’s two Syrian wars ( 1 Kings 22:1). In it Ahab doubtless allied himself to Benhadad against the Assyrians. Fear of them was probably among his reasons for granting Benhadad easy terms when in his power ( 1 Kings 20:34). When the Assyrians came in the interval that followed, Ahab was confederate with Benhadad. Hence arose his exasperation at the terms granted to Benhadad, whereby he gained life and liberty, being violated in disregard of honor and gratitude ( 1 Kings 22:3). The Moabite stone mentions Omri’s son; “He also said, I will oppress Moab,” confirming Scripture that it was not until after Ahab’s death that Moab rebelled ( 2 Kings 1:1; 3:4,5). [See DIBON .] 2. A false prophet, who deceived with flattering prophecies of an immediate return the Jews in Babylon, and was burnt to death by Nebuchadnezzar ( Jeremiah 29:21,22). The names of him and Zedekiah, his fellow deceiver, were doomed to be a byword for a curse.

    AHARAH 1 Chronicles 8:1.

    AHARHEL 1 Chronicles 4:8.

    AHASAI ( 1 Chronicles 9:12JAHZERAH.) Nehemiah 11:13.

    AHASBAI 2 Samuel 23:34.

    AHASUERUS 1. The Graecised form is Cyaxares; king of Media, conqueror of Nineveh; began to reign 634 B.C. Father of Darius the Mede = Astyages, last king of Media, 594 B.C. Tradition says Astyages’ grandson was Cyrus, son of his daughter Mandane and a Persian noble, Cambyses, first king of Persia, B.C. Cyrus having taken Babylon set over it, as viceroy with royal state, his grandfather Astyages, or (as chronology requires) Astyages’ successor, i.e. Darius the Mede. 2. Cambyses, Cyrus’ son, is the second Ahasuerus, 529 B.C. ( Ezra 4:6.)

    A Magian usurper, impersonating Smerdis, Cyrus’ younger son, succeeded; = Artaxerxes ( Ezra 4:4-7). The Jews’ enemies, in the third year of Cyrus ( Daniel 10:12,18; Ezra 4:5), sought by “hired counselors” to frustrate the building of the temple, and wrote against them to Ahasuerus (Cambyses) and Artaxerxes (Pseudo-Smerdis) successively.

    Ahasuerus reigned seven and a half years. Then the Magian Pseudo- Smerdis, Artaxeres, usurped the throne for eight months. The Magi being overthrown, Darius Hystaspis succeeded, 521 B.C. ( Ezra 4:24.) 3. Darius Hystaspis’ son was Ahasuerus the third = Xerxes [see ESTHER ], father of Artaxerxes Longimanus ( Ezra 7:1). The gap between Ezra and Ezra 7 is filled up with the book of Esther. The character of Ahasuerus III. much resembles that of Xerxes as described by Greek historians.

    Proud, self willed, impulsive, amorous, reckless of violating Persian proprieties, ready to sacrifice human life, though not wantonly cruel. As Xerxes scourged the sea and slew the engineers because his bridge over the Hellespont was swept away by the sea, so Ahasuerus repudiated his queen Vashti because she did not violate female decorum and expose herself to the gaze of drunken revelers; and decreed the massacre of the whole Jewish people to please his favorite, Haman; and, to prevent the evil, allowed them in self defense to slay thousands of his other subjects. In the third year was held Ahasuerus, feast in Shushan ( Esther 1:3): so Xerxes in his third year held an assembly to prepare for invading Greece. In his seventh year Ahasuerus replaced Vashti by marrying Esther (Est. 2:16), after gathering all the fair young virgins to Shushan: so Xerxes in his seventh year, on his defeat and return from Greece, consoled himself with the pleasures of the harem, and offered a reward for the inventor of a new pleasure (Herodotus 9:108). The “tribute” which he “laid upon the land and upon the isles of the sea” ( Esther 10:1) was probably to replenish his treasury, exhausted by the Grecian expedition. The name in the Persepolitan arrow-headed inscriptions is Kshershe. Xerxes is explained by Herodotus as meaning martial; the modern title shah comes from ksahya, “a king,” which forms the latter part of the name; the former part is akin to shir, a lion. The Semitic Ahashverosh = Persian Khshayarsha , a common title of many Medo-Persian kings. Darius Hystaspis was the first Persian king who reigned “from India (which he first subdued) to Ethiopia” ( Esther 1:1); also the first who imposed a stated tribute on the provinces, voluntary presents having been customary before; also the first who admitted the seven princes to see the king’s face; the seven conspirators who slew Pseudo-Smerdis having stipulated, before it was decided which of them was to have the crown, for special privileges, and this one in particular.

    AHAVA A place ( Ezra 8:15); a river ( Ezra 8:21) where Ezra assembled the second band of returning captives, for prayer to God as he says “to seek of Him a right way for us, for our little ones, and for all our substance.” The modern Hit, on the Euphrates, E. of Damascus; Ihi-dakira, “the spring of bitumen,” was its name subsequently to Ezra’s times. Perhaps the Joab of 2 Kings 17:24.

    AHAZ Ahaz (possessor). Son of Jotham; ascended the throne of Judah in his 20th year ( 2 Kings 16:2), a transcriber’s error for 25th year; as read in the Septuagint, Syriac, and Arabic ( 2 Chronicles 28:1); for otherwise Hezekiah his son would be born when Ahaz was 11 years old. Rezin, king of Damascus, and Pekah of Israel leagued against Judah, to put on the throne the son of Tabeal, probably a Syrian ( Isaiah 7:6). Isaiah and Shear-jashub his son (whose name = the remnant shall return was a pledge that, notwithstanding; heavy calamity, the whole nation should not perish), together met Ahaz by Jehovah’s direction at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, and assured him that Rezin’s and Pekah’s evil counsel should not come to pass; nay, that within 65 years Ephraim (Israel) should cease to be a people.

    It is an undesigned propriety in Isaiah 7, and therefore a mark of truth, that the place of meeting was the pool; for there it was we know, from the independent history in Chronicles, that Hezekiah his son, subsequently in Sennacherib’s invasion, with much people stopped the waters without the city to cut off the enemy’s supply ( 2 Chronicles 32:3-5). The place was appropriate to Isaiah’s message from God that their labors were unnecessary, for God would save the city; it was also suitable for addressing the king and the multitude gathered for the stopping of the waters there. Isaiah told Ahaz to “ask a sign,” i.e. a miraculous token from God that He would keep His promise of saving Jerusalem. Ahaz hypocritically refused to “tempt the Lord” by asking one. What mock humility in one who scrupled not to use God’s brazen altar to divine with, and had substituted for God’s altar in God’s worship the pattern, which pleased his aesthetic tastes, of the idol altar at Damascus ( 2 Kings 16:11-15); perhaps the adoption of this pattern, an Assyrian one, was meant as a token of vassalage to Assyria, by adopting some of their religious usage’s and idolatries; indeed Tiglath Pileser expressly records in the Assyrian monuments that he held his court at Damascus, and there received submission and tribute of both Pekah of Samaria and Ahaz of Judah. To ask a miraculous sign without warrant would be to tempt (i.e. put to the proof) God; but not to ask, when God offered a sign, was at once tempting and distrusting Him. Ahaz’s true reason for declining was his resolve not to do God’s will, but to negotiate with Assyria and persevere in idolatry ( 2 Kings 16:7,8,3,4,10). Thereupon God Himself gave the sign: “a virgin should bring forth Immanuel.” [For the primary fulfillment in the birth of a child in Isaiah’s time, see IMMANUEL .] The promise of His coming of the line of David guaranteed the perpetuity of David’ s seed, and the impossibility of the two invaders setting aside David’s line of succession. Ahaz is named Jeho-Ahaz (or Yahu-Khazi) in the Assyrian inscriptions.

    Pekah slew 120,000 valiant men of Judah in one day, “because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers”; Zichri of Ephraim slew the king’s son Maaseiah, and Azrikim the governor of his house, and Elkanah next to the king. Israel carried captive 200,000, and much spoil, to Samaria. But Oded the prophet constrained them to restore the captives fed, arrayed, and shod, and the feeble mounted upon asses, to their brethren at Jericho.

    Pekah took Elath, which Uzziah or Ahaziah had restored to Judah, a flourishing port on the Red Sea; “the Syrians” according to KJV “came and dwelt in it”: or, reading ( 2 Kings 16:6) Adomim for Aromim, “the Edomites”; who also came and smote Judah on the E., and carried away captives ( 2 Chronicles 28:17,18), while the Philistines were invading the. S. and W., the cities of the low hill country (shephelah), Bethshemesh, Ajalon, Gederoth, Shocho, Timnah, Gimzo. The feeble Ahaz, retributively” brought low,” even as he had “made naked” (stripped of the true defense, Jehovah, Exodus 32:25, by sin) Judah, sought deliverance by becoming Tiglath Pileser’s vassal ( 1 Kings 16:7-10). The Assyrian king “distressed him, but strengthened him not.” For Ahaz had to present his master treasures out of the temple, his palace, and the houses of the princes. It is true the Assyrian slew Rezin, and carried captive the Syrians of Damascus to Kir; but their ruin did not prove Ahaz’s safety, “the king of Assyria helped him not.” Isaiah ( Isaiah 7:17; 8:1,2) had warned him against this alliance by writing in a roll Maher-shalal-hashbaz, i.e., hasting to the spoil he hasteth to the prey. To impress this on Ahaz as the coming result of Assyrian interference, he took with him two witnesses, Uriah the priest and Zechariah. Who Uriah was we learn from the independent history ( 2 Kings 16:15,16), the ready tool of Ahaz’s unlawful innovations in worship. Zechariah, the same history tells us ( 2 Kings 18:2), was father of Abi, Ahaz’s wife, mother of Hezekiah. The coincidence between Isaiah’s book and that of Kings in these names is little obvious and so undesigned that it forms a delicate mark of truth. Isaiah chose these two, as the king’s bosom friends, to urge on Ahaz’s attention the solemn communication he had to make. Distress, instead of turning Ahaz to Him who smote them, the Lord of hosts ( Isaiah 9:12,13), only made him “trespass yet more,” sacrificing to the gods of Damascus which had smitten him, that they might help him as he thought they had helped the Syrians; “but they were the ruin of him and of all Israel.” Ahaz cut in pieces God’s vessels, and shut up the doors of the temple, and made altars in every grainer of Jerusalem, and burnt incense on high places in every several city of Judah. He also “cut off the borders of the bases, and removed the laver from off them, and took down the sea from off the brazen oxen and put it upon a pavement of stones,” putting God off with inferior things and taking all the best for his own purposes, whether of idolatry or selfish luxury. The brazen oxen were preserved whole, not melted (compare Jeremiah 52:17-20). “The covert for the sabbath,” i.e., a covered walk like a portico or standing place, to screen the royal worshippers in the temple, and the king’s private entry, he removed into the temple, to please the king of Assyria, that none might go from the palace into the temple without the trouble of going round. Ahaz seems to have practiced necromancy ( Isaiah 8:19) as well as making his son pass through the fire to Moloch (2 Kings 16; 23:11,12; 2 Chronicles 28), and setting up altars on his roof to adore the heavenly hosts. He adopted the Babylonian sun dial (which he probably erected in the temple, perhaps in “the middle court,” where Isaiah saw it and gave its shadow as a sign to Hezekiah), becoming acquainted with it through the Assyrians ( 2 Kings 20:11,4,9). After reigning 16 years (740-724 B.C.) he died and was buried in the city of David, but was, because of his wickedness, “not brought into the sepulchers of the kings.”

    AHAZIAH (whom Jehovah holds). 1. Son of Ahab and Jezebel; king of Israel; a worshipper of Jeroboam’s calves, and of his mother’s idols, Baal and Ashtoreth. After the Israelite defeat at Ramoth Gilead. Syria was master of the region E. of Jordan; so Moab ( 2 Kings 1:1; 3:5), heretofore tributary to Israel, refused the yearly tribute of 100,000 rams with their wool, and 100,000 lambs ( 2 Samuel 8:2; Isaiah 16:1; 2 Kings 3:4). Ahaziah was prevented by a fall through a lattice in his palace at Samaria from enforcing it; but Jehoram his brother subsequently attempted it. Ahaziah sent to Baalzebub (lord of flies), god of Ekron, to inquire, should he recover? Elijah, by direction of the angel of the Lord, met the messengers, and reproving their having repaired to the idol of Ekron as if there were no God in Israel, announced that Ahaziah should die. The king sent a captain of 50 and his men to take Elijah. At Elijah’s word they were consumed by fire. The same death consumed a second captain and his 50.

    The third was spared on his supplicating Elijah. Elijah then in person announced to the king what he had already declared to his messenger. So accordingly Ahaziah died. He was in alliance with Jehoshaphat in building ships at Ezion Geber to go to Tarshish; but the ships were wrecked, the Lord, as He intimated by Eliezer son of Dodavah of Mareshah, thereby manifesting disapproval of the alliance of the godly, with Ahaziah “who did very wickedly. Jehoshaphat therefore, when he built a new fleet of merchant ships (as the phrase “ships of Tarshish” means; the other reading is “had ten ships”), in which undertaking Ahaziah wanted to share, declined further alliance; bitter experience taught him the danger of evil communications ( 1 Corinthians 15:33). Let parents and young people beware of affinity with the ungodly, however rich and great ( Corinthians 6:14, etc.). 2. Nephew of the former. At first viceroy during his father’s sickness, then king of Judah, son of Jehoram of Judah and Athaliah, Ahab’s cruel daughter ( 2 Kings 9:29, compare 2 Kings 8:25). Called Jehoahaz ( 2 Chronicles 21:17-19). Azariah (meaning “whom Jehovah helps,” substantially equivalent to Ahaziah = Jehoahaz by transposition, a name sadly at variance with his character), in Chronicles 22:6, may be a transcriber’s error for Ahaziah. In Chronicles 22:2, for 42 there should be, as in 2 Kings 8:26, “twenty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign,” for his father Jehoram was only 40 when he died ( 2 Chronicles 21:20). Ahaziah walked in all the idolatries of Ahab his maternal grandfather, his mother being his counselor to do wickedly. He allied himself with Jehoram of Israel, brother of the former Ahaziah (in spite of the warning God gave him in the fatal issue of the alliance of godly Jehoshaphat, his paternal grandfather, with wicked Ahab), against Hazael of Syria at Ramoth Gilead. Jehoram was wounded, and Ahaziah went to see him at Jezreel. There his destruction from God ensued by Jehu, who conspired against Joram. Akin to Ahab in character, as in blood, he might have overspread Judah with the same idolatry as Israel, but for God’s intervention. Fleeing by the garden house, he was smitten in his chariot at the going up to Gur by Ibleam, and he fled to Megiddo and died there. God’s people must separate from the world, lest they share the world’s judgments ( Revelation 18:4). In Chronicles 22:9 we read Ahaziah was hid in Samaria, brought to Jehu, and slain. The two accounts harmonize thus. Ahaziah fled first to the garden house (Bethgan), and escaped to Samaria where were his brethren; thence brought forth from his hiding place to Jehu, he was mortally wounded in his chariot at the hill Gut beside Iblcam, and reaching Megiddo died there.

    Jehu allowed Ahaziah’s attendants to bury him honorably in his sepulchre with his fathers in the city of David, “because, said they, he is the son [grandson] of Jehoshaphat, who sought the Lord with all his heart.”

    Otherwise “in Samaria” may mean “in the kingdom of Samaria,” or Chronicles 22:9 may mean merely, he attempted to hide in Samaria, but did not reach it. The recurrence of the same names Joram and Ahaziah in both the dynasties of Israel and Judah is a delicate mark of truth, it being the natural result of the intermarriages.

    AHBAN 1 Chronicles 2:29.

    AHER 1 Chronicles 7:12.

    AHI 1 Chronicles 5:15. 2. 1 Chronicles 7:34. From Hebrews ach , “a brother”; or contracted fromAHIJAH, orAHIAH.

    AHIAM (or Sacar, 1 Chronicles 11:35). 2 Samuel 23:33.

    AHIAN 1 Chronicles 7:17.

    AHIEZER 1. Hereditary prince captain of Dan under Moses ( Numbers 1:12; 2:25; 7:66). 2. 1 Chronicles 12:3.

    AHIHUD 1. Prince of Asher; assisted Joshua and Eleazar in dividing Canaan ( Numbers 34:27). 2. 1 Chronicles 8:7.

    AHIJAH 1. Son of Ahitub, Ichabod’s brother, son of Phinehas, Eli’s son, the Lord’s priest in Shiloh, wearing an ephod ( 1 Samuel 14:3,18). The ark of God was in his charge, and with it and the ephod he used to consult Jehovah. In Saul’s later years, probably after the slaughter of the priests at Nob the ark was neglected as a means of consulting Jehovah. It lay in the house of Abinadab in Gibeah of Benjamin ( 2 Samuel 6:3), probably the Benjamite quarter of Kirjath-jearim, or Baale, on the borders of Judah and Benjamin ( Joshua 18:14,28). Saul’s irreverent haste of spirit appears in his breaking off in the midst of consulting God through Ahijah with the ark and ephod, because he was impatient to encounter the Philistines whose approach he discerned by the tumult. Contrast David’s implicit submission to Jehovah’s guidance in encountering the same Philistines ( 2 Samuel 5:19-25, compare Isaiah 28:16 end). His rash adjuration binding the people not to eat all day, until he was avenged on the Philistines, involved the people in the sin of ravenously eating the cattle taken, with the blood, and Jonathan in that of unwittingly sinning by tasting honey, and so incurring the penalty of death. Saul ought to have had the conscientiousness which would have led him never to take such an oath, rather than the scrupulosity which condemned the people and Jonathan instead of himself. His projected night pursuit was consequently prevented; for the priest met his proposal, which was well received by the people, by suggesting that Jehovah should be consulted. No answer having been given, owing to Jonathan’s sin of ignorance for which Saul was to blame, Saul’s wish was defeated. As Ahijah is evidently = Ahimelech the son of Ahitub (unless he was his brother), this will account for a coldness springing up on Saul’s part toward Ahijah and his family, which culminated in the cruel slaughter of them at Nob on the ground of treasonous concert with David (1 Samuel 21). 2. 1 Chronicles 8:7. 3. 1 Chronicles 2:25. 4. 1 Chronicles 11:36. 5. 1 Chronicles 26:20. 6. A prophet of Shiloh.

    He met outside of Jerusalem in the way, and foretold to, Jeroboam, the transfer of ten tribes to him from Solomon, for Solomon’s idolatries, by the symbolic action of rending the garment on him into twelve pieces, of which he gave ten to Jeroboam. Further he assured him from God of “a sure house, such as He had built for David,” if only Jeroboam would “walk in God’s ways,” as David did. Jeroboam fled from Solomon to Shishak, king of Egypt, where he stayed until Solomon died. The other prophecy of his ( 1 Kings 14:6-16) was given to Jeroboam’s wife, who in disguise consulted him as to her son Abijah’s recovery. Though blind with age he detected her, and announced that as Jeroboam had utterly failed in the one condition of continuance in the kingdom rent from David’s house, which his former prophecy had laid down, namely, to keep God’s commandments heartily as David did, Jeroboam’s house should be taken away “as dung”; but that in reward for the good there was found in Abijah toward God, he alone should have an honorable burial (compare Isaiah 57:1,2), but that “Jehovah would smite Israel as a reed shaken in the water, and root up and scatter Israel beyond the river,” Euphrates. Reference to his prophecy as one of the records of Solomon’s reign is made in 2 Chronicles 9:29.

    Probably it was he through whom the Lord encouraged Solomon in building the temple ( 1 Kings 6:11).

    AHIKAM Son of Shaphan the scribe, sent by Josiah to Huldah the prophetess ( Kings 22:12). In Jehoiakim’s subsequent reign Ahikam successfully pleaded for Jeremiah before the princes and elders, that he should not be given to the people to be put to death for his fearless warnings ( Jeremiah 26:16-24). God rewarded Ahikam by the honor put upon Gedaliah, his son, by Nebuchadnezzar’s making him governor over the cities of Judah, and committing Jeremiah’ to him, when the Babylonians took Jerusalem ( Jeremiah 40:5; 39:14).

    AHILUD 2 Samuel 8:16; 20:24; 1 Kings 4:3; 1 Chronicles 18:15.

    AHIMAAZ (brother of anger, i.e. choleric). 1. 1 Samuel 14:50. 2. Zadok the priest’s son; the messenger in Absalom’s rebellion, with Jonathan, Abiathar’s son, to carry tidings from Hushai, David’s friend and spy. Zadok and Abiathar, who took back the ark to the city at David’s request, were to tell them while staying outside the city at Enrogel whatever Hushai directed. They told David the counsel of Ahlthophel for an immediate attack, which David should baffle by crossing Jordan at once. They narrowly escaped Absalom’s servants at Bahurim, the woman of the house hiding them in a well’s mouth, over which she spread a covering with ground grain on it, and telling the servants what was true in word, though misleading them: “they be gone over the brook of water.” Bahurim, the scene of Shimei’s cursing of David, was thus made the scene of David’s preservation by God, who heard his prayer ( 1 Samuel 16:12; <19A928> Psalm 109:28). David’s estimate of Ahimaaz appears in his remark on his approach after the battle ( Samuel 18:27): “he is a good man, and cometh with good tidings.” Though Cushi was later in arriving he announced the fate of Absalom, which Ahimaaz with courtier-like equivocation evaded announcing, lest he should alloy his good news with what would be so distressing to David. Joab, knowing David’s fondness for Absalom, had not wished Ahimaaz to go at all on that day, but youths will hardly believe their elders wiser than themselves. Good running was a quality much valued in those days, and Ahimaaz was famous for it. The battle was fought on the mount of Ephraim W. of Jordan, and Ahimaaz ran by the plain of the Jordan to David at Mahanaim. Compare as to Asahel 2 Samuel 2:18; Elijah, Kings 18:46. Compare as to runners before kings 2 Samuel 15:1; Kings 1:5; as to courier posts, 2 Chronicles 30:6,10; Esther 3:13,15; 8:14. Comparing 1 Kings 4:2 with 1 Chronicles 6:10, some infer that Ahimaaz died before he attained the priesthood, and before his father Zadok, who was succeeded by Ahimaaz’s son, Azariah. [See ABIATHAR ] 3. 1 Kings 5:7,15.

    AHIMAM (my brother, who? i.e. who is my equal?). 1. He, Sheshai, and Talmai were the three giant Anakim brothers seen by Caleb and the spies in mount Hebron ( Numbers 13:22,23). The three were slain by the tribe of Judah, and the whole race was cut off by Joshua ( Joshua 11:21; Judges 1:10). 2. 1 Chronicles 9:17.

    AHIMELECH 1. [See ABIATHAR , see AHIJAH .] 2. The Hittite who, with Abishai, was asked by David: “Who will go down with me to Saul to the camp?” He lost a precious opportunity of serving the king ( Isaiah 6:8); Abishai alone volunteered ( 1 Samuel 26:6).

    AHIMOTH 1 Chronicles 6:25. For Ahimoth stands Mahath in 1Chronicles6:35, as in Luke 3:26.

    AHINADAB 1 Kings 4:14.

    AHINOAM (brother of grace, i.e. graceful). Of Jezreel. David’s wife; along with Abigail, accompanied him to Achish’s court ( 1 Samuel 25:43; 27:3).

    Taken by the Amalekites at Ziklag, but rescued by David (1 Samuel 30).

    With him when king in Hebron ( 2 Samuel 2:2; 3:2). Mother of Amnon.

    Beauty was David’s snare; the children consequently had more of outward than inward grace.

    AHIO 1. Son of Abinadab. While Uzzah walked at the side of the ark, Ahio went before it, guiding the oxen which drew the cart, after having brought it from his father’s house at Gibeah (the Benjamite quarter of Kirjath-jearim) ( 2 Samuel 6:3,4; 1 Chronicles 13:7). 2. 1 Chronicles 8:14. 3. 1 Chronicles 8:31; 9:37.

    AHIRA Prince captain of Naphtali the year after the exodus: Numbers 1:15; 2:29; 7:78,83; 10:27.

    AHIRAM Numbers 26:38. Called Ehi Genesis 46:21.

    AHISAMACH Exodus 31:6; 35:34.

    AHISHAHAR 1 Chronicles 7:10.

    AHISHAR 1 Kings 4:6.

    AHITHOPHEL [See ABSALOM. ] Of Giloh, in the hill country of Judah. David’s counselor, to whose treachery he touchingly alludes Psalm 41:9; 55:12-14,20,21.

    His name means brother of foolishness, but his oracular wisdom was proverbial. David’s prayer “turned his counsel” indeed into what his name indicated, “foolishness” ( 2 Samuel 15:31; Job 5:12,13; Corinthians 1:20). Ahithophel was the mainspring of the rebellion.

    Absalom calculated on his adhesion from the first ( 2 Samuel 15:12); the history does not directly say why, but incidentally it comes out: he was father of Eliam (or by transposition Ammiel, 1 Chronicles 3:5), the father of Bathsheba ( 2 Samuel 11:3; 23:34,39). Uriah the Hittite and Eliam, being both of the king’s guard (consisting of 37 officers), were intimate, and Uriah married the daughter of his brother officer. How natural Ahithophel’s sense of wrong toward David, the murderer of his grandson by marriage and the corrupter of his granddaughter! The evident undesignedness of this coincidence confirms the veracity of the history.

    The people’s loyalty too was naturally shaken toward one whose moral character they had ceased to respect. Ahithophel’s proposal himself to pursue David that night with 12,000 men, and smite the king only, indicates the same personal hostility to David, deep sagacity and boldness.

    He failed from no want of shrewdness on his part, but from the folly of Absalom. His awful end shows that worldly wisdom apart from faith in God turns into suicidal madness ( Isaiah 29:14). He was the type of Judas in his treachery and in his end. [See JUDAS .] AHITUB 1. [See AHIMELECH or see AHIJAH , whose father he was.] 2. Amariah’s son, and Zadok the high priest’s father, or rather grandfather ( 1 Chronicles 6:7,8; 2 Samuel 8:17). Called “ruler of the house of God,” i.e. high priest, 1 Chronicles 9:11. In Nehemiah 11:11 Ahitub appears as grandfather of Zadok and father of Meraioth, of the house of Eleazar. Thus there would seem to have been in the same age Ahitub of the house of Eli, sprung from Ithamar, and also Ahitub of the house of Eleazar. 3. The mention of a third Ahitub, son of another Amariah, and father of another Zadok ( 1 Chronicles 6:11,12), may be a copyist’s error.

    AHLAB A city of Asher, whence the Canaanites were not driven out ( Judges 1:31). More recently Gush Chaleb, or Giscala, whence came John, son of Levi, leader in the siege of Jerusalem; said to be the birthplace of Paul’s parents. Now Eljish, near Safed, in the hills N.W. of the lake of Tiberias.

    AHLAI 1. 1 Chronicles 11:41. 2. Sheshan’s daughter given to the Egyptian servant Jarha in marriage ( 1 Chronicles 2:31-35).

    AHOAH ( 1 Chronicles 8:4). Hence the patronymic “the Ahchite” ( 2 Samuel 23:9,28; 1 Chronicles 11:12,29; 27:4).

    AHOLAH (her own tent). i.e., she (Samaria, or the northern kingdom of Israel) has a tabernacle of her own; namely, Jeroboam’s golden calves of Dan and Bethel; “will worship” ( Colossians 2:23). See Ezekiel 23: Aholibah (Aholah’s sister). “My (Jehovah’s) tent is in her,” Judah: so far superior to Aholah that her worship was not self devised but God appointed. Compare Psalm 78:67-69; 1 Kings 12:25-33; 1 Chronicles 11:13-16. But both were false to Jehovah their true husband ( Isaiah 54:5). Aholah (Samaria) gave her heart to the Assyrians, trusting in their power, and imitating their splendid luxury, and following their idols. Now God’s just principle is, when the church corrupts herself with the world, the instrument of her sin is the instrument of her punishment. The Assyrians on whom she had leaned carried her away captive to Assyria, whence she has never returned ( 2 Kings 15:18-29; 17). Aholibah (Judah) was worse, in that her privileges were greater, and she ought to have been warned by the awful fate of Samaria. But she gave herself up to be corrupted by the Babylonians; and again the instrument of her sin was also the instrument of her punishment ( Jeremiah 2:19; Proverbs 1:31).

    AHOLIAB Of Dan; with Bezaleel, inspired with artistic skill to construct the tabernacle ( Exodus 35:34).

    AHOLIBAMAH One of Esau’s three wives. Daughter of see ANAH , or see BEERI [see both], a descendant of Seir the Horite. Through her Esau’s descendants the Edomites became occupants of mount Seir. Each of her three sons, Jeush.

    Jaalam, Korah, became head of a tribe. Her personal name was Judith ( Genesis 26:34). Aholibamah was her married name, taken from the district, in the heights of Edom, near mount Hor and Petra; Aholibamah is therefore the name given her in the genealogical table of Edom ( Genesis 36:2,18,25,41,43; the names here are of places, not persons; 1 Chronicles 1:52). Each of Esau’s wives has a name. in the genealogy different from that it, the history.

    AHUMAI 1 Chronicles 4:2.

    AHUZZATH “Friend” (oriental kings have usually such favorites) of the Philistine king Abimelech in his interview with Isaac ( Genesis 26:28). Jerome and the Chaldee Targum explains “a company of friends.” The ending -ath appears in other Philistine names, Gath, Goliath, Timnath.

    AI (heap of rains). 1. HAI, i.e. the Ai ( Genesis 12:8); a royal city ( Joshua 7:2; 8:9,23,29; 10:1,2; 12:9); E. of Bethel, “beside Bethaven.” The second Canaanite city taken by Israel and “utterly destroyed.” The nameAIATH still belonged to the locality when Sennacherib marched against Jerusalem ( Isaiah 10:28). “Men of Bethel and Ai,” (223 according to Ezra 2:28, but 123 according to Nehemiah 7:32,) returned from Babylon with Zerubbzbel. Ezra’s list was made in Babylon; Nehemiah’s in Judaea long after. Death and change of purpose would make many in Ezra’s list of intending returners not appear in Nehemiah’s list of those actually arriving.

    Aija is mentioned among the towns reoccupied by the Benjamites ( Nehemiah 11:31). Perhaps the site is at the head of Wary Harith. [See BETHEL .] There is a hilltop E. of the church remains on the hill adjoining and E. of Bethel (Beitin); its Arab name, et Tel, means “the heap,” and it doubtless is the site of Ai, or Hai (on the east of Abraham’s encampment and altar, Genesis 12:8). In the valley behind Joshua placed his ambush.

    Across the intervening valley is the spot where Joshua stood when giving the preconcerted signal. The plain or ridge can be seen down which the men of Ai rushed after the retreating Israelites, so that the men in ambush rose and captured the city behind the pursuers, and made it. “a heap” or tel for ever. 2. A city of Ammon, near Heshbon ( Jeremiah 49:3).

    AIAH AJAH. 1. Genesis 36:24. 2. 2 Samuel 3:7.

    AIJALON orAJALON, a place of gazelles ( Joshua 19:42; 21:24). 1. Originally of Dan; which tribe, however, could not dispossess the Amorites ( Judges 1:35). Assigned to the Levite Kohathites, among the 48 Levitical cities ( 1 Chronicles 6:69). Fortified by Rehoboam of Judah, in his war with Israel, the northern kingdom, though sometimes, as being a border city, mentioned as in Ephraim ( 2 Chronicles 11:10; 28:18).

    Taken by the Philistines from the weak Ahaz ( 1 Chronicles 6:66,69).

    Now Yalo, N. of the Jaffa road, 14 miles from Jerusalem, on the hill side, bounding on the S. the valley Merj-ibn-Omeir. Alluded to in the memorable apostrophe of Joshua, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon” ( Joshua 10:12). 2. The burial place of the judge ( Judges 12:12) Elon in Zebulun.

    AIJELETH SHAHAR Hebrews ayyeleth hasshachar , “the hind of the morning dawn” (title of Psalm 22). Aben Ezra explains as the name of the melody to which the psalm was to be sung, equivalent to tide rising sun, some well known tune.

    Rather, allegorical allusion to the subject. The hind symbolizes a lovely and innocent one hounded to death, as the bulls, lions, dogs in the psalm are the persecutors. The unusual Heb., Psalm 22:19, ejulathi , “my strength,” alludes to aijeleth , “the hind,” weak in itself but having Jehovah for its strength. The morning dawn represents joy bursting forth after affliction; Messiah is alluded to, His deep sorrow ( Psalm 22:1-21) passes to triumphant joy ( Psalm 22:21-31).

    AIN (eye). 1. Fountain, spring, which flashes in the landscape like a gleaming eye.

    Distinguished from beer, a dug well ( Exodus 15:27), “wells,” rather springs. Generally in compositions En-gedi, “fountain of kids,” En-dor, “fountain of the house,” etc. Plural in John 3:23, AEnon; like the Yorkshire Fountains Abbey. Riblah, E. of Ain (Hebrews the spring), marks the eastern boundary of Palestine ( Numbers 34:11). Riblah is identified as on the N. E. side of the Hermon mountains; and Ain answers to Ain el ‘Azy (nine miles from Riblah, on the N.E. side), the source of the Orerites. 2. A southern city of Judah, afterward of Simeon, then assigned to the priests ( Joshua 15:32; 19:7; 21:16).

    AKAN orJAKAN. Genesis 36:27; 1 Chronicles 1:42.

    AKKUB 1. 1 Chronicles 3:24. 2. 1 Chronicles 9:17. 3. Ezra 2:45. 4. Nehemiah 8:7.

    AKRABBIM also, the going up to, or ascent of, Akrabbim.MAALEH-AKRABBIM = the scorpion pass, between the S. of the Dead Sea and Zin: Judah’s and Palestine’s boundary on the S. ( Numbers 34:4; Joshua 15:3). The boundary of the Amorites ( Judges 1:36). The scene of Judas Maccabens’ victory over Edom. Perhaps now the pass Es-Sufah, the last step from the desert to the level of Palestine. Wilton makes it Sufah.

    ALABASTER Not our gypsum, but the oriental alabaster, translucent, with red, yellow, and gray streaks clue to admixture of oxides of iron with a fibrouscarbonate of lime. A calcareous marble like spar, wrought into boxes or vessels, to keep precious ointments from spoiling (Pliny H. N., 13:8). Mark 14:3: “broke the box,” i.e., broke the seal on the mouth of it, put there to prevent, evaporation of the odor ( Luke 7:37).

    ALAMETH 1. 1 Chronicles 7:8. 2. 1 Chronicles 8:36. Son of Jehoadah, who is called Jarah in Chronicles 9:42.

    ALAMMELECH (king’s oak). A place in Asher’s territory ( Joshua 19:26).

    ALAMOTH (Psalm 46) Title, 1 Chronicles 15:20; i.e., after the virgin manner; a soprano key in music, like the voice of virgins. Others interpret it an instrument played on by virgins, like our old English virginal.

    ALEMETH or Almon. A priests’ city in Benjamin ( 1 Chronicles 6:60; Joshua 21:18). Now Almit, a mile N.E. of Anata, the ancient Anathoth.

    ALEXANDER 1. THE GREAT. Born at Pella, 356 B.C., son of Philip, king of Macedon; not named, but described prophetically: “an he-goat [symbol of ogility, the Graeco-Macedonian empire] coming from the W. on the face of the whole earth and not touching the ground [implying the incredible swiftness of his conquests]; and the goat had ANOTABLE HORN [Alexander] between his eyes, and he came to the ram that had two horns [Media and Persia, the second great world kingdom, the successor of Babylon; under both Daniel prophesied long before the rise of the Macedon-Greek kingdom] standing before the river [at the river Granicus Alexander gained his first victory over Darius Codomanus, 334 B.C.] and ran unto him in the fury of his power, moved with choler against him [on account of the Persian invasions of Greece and cruelties to the Greeks], and smote the ram and broke his two horns; and there was no power in the ram to stand before him; but he cast him down to the ground and stamped upon him, and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand: therefore the he-goat waxed very great, and when he was strong the great horn was broken, and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven” ( Daniel 8:5-8). The “he-goat” answers to the “leopard” ( Daniel 7:6) whose “wings” similarly marked the winged rapidity of the Greek conquest of Persia. In 331 B.C. Alexander finally defeated Darius, and in 330 burned Persepolis, the Persian capital. None, not even the million composing the Persian hosts, could deliver the ram, Persia, out of his hand. But “when he was strong, the great horn [Alexander] was broken.” The Graeco- Macedonian empire was in full strength at Alexander’s death by fever, the result of drunken excesses, at Babylon. At the time it seemed least likely to fall it was “broken.” Alexander’s natural brother, Philip Aridaeus, and his two sons Alexander AEgus and Hercules, in 15 months were murdered; “and for it [the he-goat] came up four notable ones, toward the four winds of heaven”: Seleucus in the E. obtained Syria, Babylonia, Mede-Persia; Cassander in the W. Macedon, Thessaly, Greece; Ptolemy in the S. Egypt, Cyprus, etc.; Lysimachus in the N. Thrace, Cappadocia, and the northern regions of Asia Minor. The” leopard” is smaller than the “lion” ( Daniel 7:4,6); swift ( Habakkuk 1:8), cruel ( Isaiah 11:6), springing suddenly on its prey ( Hosea 13:7). So Alexander, king of a small kingdom, overcame Darius at the head of an empire extending from the AEgean sea to the Indies, and in 12 years attained the rule from the Adriatic to the Ganges. Hence the leopard has four wings, whereas the lion (Babylon) had but two. The “spots” imply the variety of nations incorporated, perhaps also the variability of Alexander’s own character, by turns mild and cruel, temperate and drunken and licentious. “Dominion was given to it” by God, not by Alexander’s own might; for how unlikely it was that 30,000 men should overthrow hundreds of thousands. Josephus (Ant. 11:8, section 5) says that Alexander meeting the high priest Jaddua ( Nehemiah 12:11,22) said that at Dium in Macedonia he had a divine vision so habited, inviting him to Asia and promising him success. Jaddua met him at Gapha (Mizpeh) at the head of a procession of priests and citizens in white.

    Alexander at the sight of the linen arrayed priests, and the high priest in blue and gold with the miter and gold plate on his head bearing Jehovah’s name, adored it, and embraced him; and having been shown Daniel’s prophecies concerning him, he sacrificed to God in the court of the temple, and granted the Jews liberty to live according to their own laws, and freedom from tribute in the sabbatical years. The story is doubted, from its not being alluded to in secular histories: Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, Curtius. But their silence may be accounted for, as they notoriously despised the Jews. The main fact is strongly probable. It accords with Alexander’s character of believing himself divinely chosen for the great mission of Greece to the civilized world, to join the east and west in a union of equality, with Babylon as the capital. “Many kings of the East met him wearing (linen) fillets” (Justin). Jews were in his army. Jews were a strong element in the population of that city which he founded and which still bears his name, Alexandria. The remission of tribute every sabbatical year existed in later times, and the story best explains the privilege. When Aristotle urged him to treat the Greeks as freemen and the Orientals as slaves, he declared that “his mission from God was to be the more fit together and reconciler of the whole world in its several parts.” Arrian says: “Alexander was like no other man, and could not have been given to the world without the special interposition of God.” He was the providential instrument of breaking down the barrier wall between kingdom and kingdom, of bringing the contemplative east and the energetic west into mutually beneficial contact. The Greek language, that most perfect medium of human thought, became widely diffused, so that a Greek version of the Old Testament was needed and made (the Septuagint) for the Greek speaking Jews at Alexandria and elsewhere in a succeeding generation; and the fittest lingual vehicle for imparting the New Testament to mankind soon came to be the language generally known by the cultivated of every land. Commerce followed the breaking down of national exclusiveness, and everywhere the Jews had their synagogues for prayer and reading of the Old Testament in the leading cities. preparing the way and the place for the proclamation of the gospel, which rests on the Old Testament, to the Jews first, and then to the Gentiles. 2. Son of Simon of Cyrene ( Mark 15:21). He and his brother Rufus are spoken of as well known in the Christian church. 3. A kinsman of Annas the high priest ( Acts 4:6); supposed the same as Alexander the alabarch (governor of the Jews) at Alexandria, brother of Philo-Judaeus, an ancient friend of the emperor Claudius. 4. A Jew whom the Jews put forward during Demetrius’ riot at Ephesus to plead their cause before the mob who suspected that the Jews were joined with the Christians in seeking to overthrow Diana’s worship ( Acts 19:33). Calvin thought him a convert to Christianity from Judaism, whom the Jews would have sacrificed as a victim to the fury of the rabble. 5. The coppersmith at Ephesus who did Paul much evil. Paul had previously “delivered him to Satan” (the lord of all outside the church) ( 1 Corinthians 5:5; 2 Corinthians 12:7), i.e. excommunicated, because he withstood the apostle, and made shipwreck of faith and of good conscience, and even blasphemed, with Hymenaeus. The excommunication often brought with it temporal judgment, as sickness, to bring the excommunicated to repentance ( 1 Timothy 1:20; 2 Timothy 4:14,15).

    ALEXANDRIA Founded by Alexander the Great, 332 B.C., successively the Greek, Roman, and Christian capital of Lower Egypt. Its harbors, formed by the island Pharos and the headland Lochias, were suitable alike for commerce and war. It was a chief grain port of Rome, and the grain vessels were large and handsome; usually sailing direct to Puteoli, but from severity of weather at times, as the vessel that carried Paul, sailing under the coast of Asia Minor (Acts 27). At Myra in Lycia ( Acts 27:5) the centurion found this Alexandrian. ship bound for Italy; in Acts 27:10 Paul speaks of the “lading,” without stating what it was; but in Acts 27:38 it comes out casually. The tackling had been thrown out long before, but the cargo was kept until it could be kept no longer, and then first we learn it was wheat, the very freight which an Alexandrian vessel usually (as we know from secular authors) carried to Rome: an undesigned propriety, and so a mark of truth. The population of Alexandria had three prominent elements, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians. The Jews enjoyed equal privileges with the Macedonians, so that they became fixed there, and while regarding Jerusalem as “the holy city,” the metropolis of the Jews throughout the world, and having a synagogue there ( Acts 6:9), they had their own Greek version of the Old Testament. the Septuagint, and their own temple at Leontopolis. At Alexandia the Hebrew divine Old Testament revelation was brought into contact with Grecian philosophy. Philo’s doctrine of the word prepared men for receiving the teaching of John 1 as to the Word, the Son of God, distinct in one sense yet one with God; and his allegorizing prepared the way for appreciating similar teachings in the inspired writings (e.g. Galatians 4:22,31; Hebrews 7). Hence Apollos, born at Alexandia, eloquent and mighty in the Scriptures, being instructed in the way of the Lord and fervent in the spirit, taught diligently (Greek accurately) the things of the Lord, though he knew only the baptism of John ( Acts 18:25); i.e., his Alexandrine education would familiarize him with Philo’s idea of the word as the mediating instrument of creation and providence; and John the Baptist’s inspired announcement of the personal Messiah would enable him to “teach accurately the things of the Lord” up to that point, when Aquila’s and Priscilla’s teaching more perfectly informed him of the whole accomplished Christian way of salvation. Mark is said to have been the first who preached and founded a Christian church in Alexandia.

    Various forms of Gnostic and Arian error subsequently arose there. [See ALLEGORY .] ALGUM ( 2 Chronicles 2:8; 9:10,11) (ALMUG 1 Kings 10:11). From the Arabic article al and mica, “red sandalwood,” or Sanskrit valgu, in the Deccan valgum, “sandalwood.” Brought from Ophir, and from Lebanon.

    Used for pillars and stairs in the Lord’s house and the king’s house, and for harps and psalteries. The cedars and firs came from Lebanon, but the almug trees from Ophir, an Arabian mart on the Red Sea, for eastern produce intended for Tyre and the W. The algums would come with the firs and cedars cut from Lebanon, and so all would be described collectively as “from Lebanon.” The red sandalwood of China and India still used for making costly utensils. Else, the common sandalwood (Santalum album of Malabar coast), outside white and without odor, but within and near the root fragrant, fine grained, and employed still for fancy boxes and cabinets, and used as incense by the Chinese.

    ALLEGORY Once in Scripture ( Galatians 4:24): “which things [the history of Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac] are an allegory;” (are, when allegorized, etc.) not that the history is unreal as to the literal meaning, (such as is the Song of Solomon, a continued allegory); but, besides the literal historical fact, these events have another and a spiritual significance, the historical truths are types of the antitypical truths; the child of the promise, Isaac, is type of the gospel child of God who is free to love and serve his Father in Christ; the child of the bondwoman, Ishmael, is type of those legalists who, seeking justification by the law, are ever ill the spirit of bondage. Origen at Alexandria introduced a faulty system of interpreting Scripture by allegorizing, for which this passage gives no warrant. In an allegory there is (1) an immediate sense, which the words contain; and (2) the main and ulterior sense, which respects the things shadowed forth.

    In pure allegory the chief object aimed at is never directly expressed.

    ALLELUIA (Praise ye Jehovah). Never found in the palms of David and his singers, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun: but in later psalms, namely, those of the captivity and the return, the Fifth Book. So “Selah” is restricted to his and their psalms. Used in the temple liturgy; at the beginning, close, or both, of Psalm 106; 111; 113; 117; 135. So in the heavenly perfect liturgy ( Revelation 19:1,3,4,6), the triumphant shout of the great multitude, the 24 elders, and four living creatures at the judgment on the whore. The Hebrew form may imply the special interest of the Jews in the destruction of antichrist ( <19E908> Psalm 149:8,9). Psalm 113--118 were called by the Jews the Hallel: sung on the first of the month, at the Feast of Dedication, that of Tabernacles, that of Weeks, and that of Passover. They sang Psalm and Psalm 114 before the supper (according to Hillel’s school, or only Psalm 113 according to Shammai’s school), the rest after the last cup. This was the hymn sting by Christ and His disciples ( Matthew 26:30). As the full choir of Levites in the temple service took up the Alleluia, so in heaven the multitude in mighty chorus respond Alleluia to the voice from the throne, “Praise our God, all ye His servants,” etc. ( Revelation 19:1-6.)

    ALLIANCES Framed by dividing a victim into two parts, between which the contracting parties passed, praying the similar cutting up of him who should violate the treaty ( Genesis 15:10; Jeremiah 34:18-2)). Hence the Hebrews and Greek for to make a treaty is “to cut” it. Forbidden with the doomed Canaanites ( Deuteronomy 7:2; Judges 2:2). But peaceable relations with other nations as distinguished from copying their idolatries, were encouraged ( Deuteronomy 2:25; 15:6; Genesis 27:29). Solomon’s alliance with Tyre for building the temple and other purposes was altogether right ( 1 Kings 5:2-12; 9:27); and Tyre is subsequently reproved for not remembering the brotherly covenant (Amos 1:9). But alliances by marriage with idolaters are reprobated as incentives to latitudinarianism first and at last, to conformity with paganism ( Deuteronomy 7:3-6). Solomen’s alliance with Pharaoh by marriage was the precursor of importing horses contrary to the law, leaning too much on human forces, and of contracting alliances with Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite wives, who seduced him from God. Hence the care to guard against the same evil, at the return from Babylon (Ezra 9; 10; Nehemiah 13; Malachi 2:11-17). When pagans renounced idolatry for Israel’s God, Israelites might lawfully wed them, as Rahab, Ruth, Zipporah. Shishak’s invasion of Rehoboam’s kingdom was probably due to Shishak’s alliance with Jeroboam of Israel (2 Chronicles 12; 1 Kings 14:25, etc.). Ahaz’ appeal to Tiglath Pileser for help against Pekah of Israel and Rezin of Syria opened the way to Assyrian and Babylonian predominance (2 Kings 16). Asa’s alliance with Benhadad against Baasha was the turning point from good to evil in his life ( Chronicles 14:15,16; 1 Kings 15:16, etc.). Jehoshaphat’s alliance with ungodly Ahab and Ahaziah his son was the only blot on his character, and involved him in loss and reproof from God (2 Chronicles 18; 19:2; 20:35- 87). Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram’s marriage with Ahab’s daughter, Athaliah, was fatal to him and to Ahaziah and his other sons except Joash (2 Chronicles 21; 22). Hoshea’s alliance with So or Sabacho of Egypt was his encouragement to rebel against Assyria, and brought on him the overthrow of Israel by Shalmaneser ( 2 Kings 17:4). Hezekiah was tempted to lean on Egypt against the Assyrian Sennacherib ( Isaiah 30:2), and Tirhakah of Ethiopia did make a diversion in his favor ( Kings 19:9). Josiah on the other hand was Assyria’s ally against Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, and fell a victim to meddling in the world’s quarrels ( Chronicles 35:20-25). Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, leant on Egypt, and Pharaoh Hophra raised the siege of Jerusalem for a time; but Nebuchadnezzar returned and took it ( Jeremiah 37:1-5; 39).

    A “covenant of salt” ( Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5) expresses one indissoluble and incorruptible, as salt was sprinkled on the victim, implying incorruption and sincerity ( Leviticus 2:13). A pillar was sometimes set up ( Genesis 31:45-52). Presents were sent by the seeker of the alliance ( 1 Kings 15:18; Isaiah 30:6). Violation of it brought down divine wrath, even when made with a pagan ( Joshua 9:18; Samuel 21; Ezekiel 17:16).

    ALLON (oak). 1. Or Elon, a city of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:33); others translate “the oak by Zaanaim” or “the oak of the loading of tents” (compare Judges 4:11), “the plain of Zaanaim [the swamp, Ewald] by Kedesh.” 2. ALLON BACHUTH, “the oak of weeping,” namely, for Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse: corrupted into Tabor ( 1 Samuel 10:3; compare Judges 4:5).

    ALMODAD First of Joktan’s descendents ( Genesis 10:26; 1 Chronicles 1:20).

    His name is preserved in El-Mudad, famous in Arab history, reputed father of Ishmael’s Arab wife, Mir-at-ez-Zeman, and chief of Jarhum, a Joktanite tribe that passed from Yemen to the vicinity of Mekkeh. The Al is the Arabic article.

    ALMON-DIBLATHAIM One of the last stages of the Israelites, between Dibon-Gad (= Dhiban, N. of the Arnon) and the Abarim range ( Numbers 33:46,47); probably the same as Beth-Diblathaim of Moab ( Jeremiah 48:22), which Mesha mentions in the famous Moabite stone as “built” by him and colonized with Moabites.

    ALMOND TREE ( Jeremiah 1:11,12; Hebrews “I see a rod of the wakeful tree [the emblem of wakefulness] ... Thou hast well seen: for I will be wakeful [Hebrews for “hasten”] as to My word.”) It first wakes out of the wintry sleep and buds in January. In Ecclesiastes 12:5, instead of “the almond tree shall flourish,” Gesenius translates “(the old man) loathes (through want of appetite) even the (sweet) almond;” for the blossom is pink, not white, the color of the old man’s hair. But as the Hebrews means “bud” or “blossom” in Song 6:11 it probably means here “the wakefulness of old age sets in.” Or the color may not be the point, but the blossoms on the leafless branch, as the hoary locks flourish as a crown on the now arid body. Exodus 25:33,34: in the tabernacle the candlesticks had “bowls made in the form of the almond flower” or “nut,” most graceful in shape; perhaps the pointed nut within was the design for the cup, the sarcocarp containing the oil, and the flame shaped nut of gold emitting the light from its apex.

    Luz, the original name of Bethel, was derived from one species of almond ( Genesis 28:19; 30:37), luz. It was almond, not hazel, rods wherewith Jacob secured the ringstraked and speckled offspring from the flocks.

    Jordan almonds were famed. The almonds growing on Aaron’s rod, when laid up over night before the Lord, denote the ever wakeful priesthood which should continue until the Antitype should come; type also of the vigilance and fruitfulness which Christ’s ministers should exhibit;. also of the rod of Christ’s strength which shall finally destroy every adversary ( Numbers 17:8; <19B002> Psalm 110:2,5,6).

    ALMS From Greek eleemos yne . The Hebrews “righteousness” in Old Testament and the Greek in many manuscripts of Matthew 6:1, stands forALMS.

    So Daniel 4:27, “Break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor.” The poor were entitled to leavings from the produce of the field, the vineyard, and the olive yard ( Leviticus 19:9,10; 23:22; Deuteronomy 15:11; 24:19; 26:2-13), the third year’s tithing for the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, the widow.

    Compare Job 31:17; 29:16: “I was a father to the poor.” Nehemiah 8:10; Proverbs 10:2; 11:4; Esther 9:22; Psalm 41:1; 112:9.

    Dorcas ( Acts 9:36). Cornelius ( Acts 10:2). God prefers such neighborly love to fasting ( Isaiah 58:7). Thirteen receptacles for free offerings were in the women’s court of the temple ( Mark 12:41-44).

    Begging was a practice only known after the captivity. In every city there were three collectors who distributed alms of two kinds: 1. Of money collected in the synagogue chest every sabbath for the poor of the city, “the alms of the chest.” 2. Of food and money received in a dish, “alms of the dish.” The Pharisees gave much alms, but with ostentation, figuratively blowing the trumpet before them (the figure being from the trumpet blowing in religious feasts): Matthew 6:1,2. The duty was recognized among Christians as a leading one ( Luke 14:13; Romans 15:25-27; Galatians 2:10). A laying by for alms in proportion to one’s means on every Lord’s day is recommended ( 1 Corinthians 16:1-4; Acts 11:29,30; 20:35). Jesus and the twelve, out of their common purse, set the pattern ( John 13:29). Not the costliness, but the love and self denial, and the proportion the gift bears to one’s means, are what God prizes ( Mark 12:42-44). Such “come up as a memorial before God” ( Acts 9:36; 10:2,4). The giving was not imposed as a matter of constraint, but of bounty, on Christians ( Acts 5:4). The individual was not merged in the community, as in socialism; each freely gave, and distribution was made, not to the lazy who would not work, but to the needy ( Acts 2:45; Thessalonians 3:10). A mendicant order is the very opposite of the Christian system. The Jewish tithe was not imposed, but the principle of proportionate giving having been laid down, the definite proportion is left to each one’s faith and love to fix ( 2 Corinthians 9:5-7). Love will hardly give less than legalism. An ecclesiastical order of widowhood attended to charitable ministrations in the early church ( 1 Timothy 5:10). The deacons were appointed primarily for the distribution of alms (Acts 6). Alms are “righteousness,” not that they justify a man (which Romans 3; 4; 5 prove they do not), but they are the doing that which is right and which our neighbor has a rightful claim upon us for, in the court of God’s equity, though not of human law. God gives us means for this very end ( Ephesians 4:28).

    ALOE LIGN ALOE. Hebrews ahalim , ahaloth ; Greek agallochus , from the native name aghil; “eaglewood,” imitating the sound. Not the common aloes, disagreeable in odor and taste. The more precious kind grows in Cochin China and Siam, and is not exported, being worth its weight in gold. The perfume is from the oil thickening into resin within the trunk. The inferior kind, garo, grows in the Moluccas, the Excoecaria agallocha of Linnaeus.

    The best aloe wood is called calambac, the produce of the Aquilaria agallochum of Silhet in N. India. Used for perfuming garments ( Psalm 45:8) and beds ( Proverbs 7:17). An image for all that is lovely, fragrant, flourishing, and incorruptible ( Numbers 24:6; Song 4:14). Used by Nicodemus, along with myrrh, 100 lbs. in all, to enwrap amidst linen the sacred body of Jesus ( John 19:39).

    ALOTH A district with Asher, under the ninth of Solomon’s commissariat officers ( 1 Kings 4:16).

    ALPHA Greek (ALEPH, “chief,” “guide,” Heb.) The first letter, asOMEGA is the last, of the Greek alphabet. So Christ is the First and the Last, including all that comes between, the Author and Finisher of the visible and invisible, and of the spiritual creations ( Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13; Hebrews 12:2; Isaiah 41:4; 44:6). As He made originally, so will He complete the whole.ALPHABET comes from the first two Greek letters, Alpha, Beta = Hebrews Aleph, Beth.

    The Moabite stone of Dibon, probably of the reign of Ahaziah, Ahab’s son, who died 896 B.C., exhibits an alphabet so complete that at that early date it can have been no recent invention. It has been discovered as mason’s marks on the foundation stones of Solomon’s temple. Yet even it was not the earliest form of the Palestinian alphabet. The fine discrimination of sounds, implied in inventing an alphabet, could hardly be brought to perfection at once Rawlinson fixes the invention 15 centuries B.C. The language of the Dibon stone, and the Hebrew of the Bible, most closely agree. Mesha’s victories are recorded there in the same character, and even the same idiom, as in 2 Kings 3.

    In symbols of the early Christian church A and were often combined with the cross, or with Christ’s monogram, e.g., on a tablet in the catacombs at Melos, of the early part of the second century. The rabbis (Jalkut Rubeni, fol. 17, 4, Sohoettgen, Hor. Heb., 1:1086) say, “Adam transgressed the whole law from Aleph to Tau” (the last Hebrews letter); so Christ fulfilled it from Alpha to Omega ( Matthew 3:15).

    ALPHAEUS Father of James the Less, the apostle, and writer of the epistle, and “brother (i.e. cousin) of our Lord” ( Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13); also of Joses ( Mark 15:40). Husband of the Mary who with Jesus’ mother stood at the cross ( John 19:25). The same as Clopas (as it should be written, not Cleophas), both names being Greek variations of Hebrews Chalpai , or Hhalpai . Possibly the Cleopas of Luke 24:18. If the translation Luke 6:16 be correct, “Jude, brother of James,” Alphaeus was his father also. In Mark 2:14 Levi (Matthew) is called the son of Alphaeus. Whether he be the same is not certain: probably not.

    ALTAR The first of which we have mention was built by Noah after leaving the ark ( Genesis 8:20). The English (from the Latin) means an elevation or high place: not the site, but the erections on them which could be built or removed ( 1 Kings 12:7; 2 Kings 23:15). So the Greek [bomos , and Hebrews bamath . But the proper Hebrews name mizbeach is “the sacrificing place;” Septuagint thusiasterion. Spots hallowed by divine revelations or appearances were originally the sites of altars ( Genesis 12:7; 13:18; 26:25; 35:1). Mostly for sacrificing; sometimes only as a memorial, as that named by Moses Jehovah Nissi, the pledge that Jehovah would war against Amalek to all generations ( Exodus 17:15,16), and that built by Reuben, Gad, and half Manasseh, “not for burnt offering, nor sacrifice, but as a witness” ( Joshua 22:26,27). Altars were to be made only of earth or else unhewn stone, on which no iron tool was used, and without steps up to them ( Exodus 20:24-26). Steps toward the E. on the contrary are introduced in the temple yet future ( Ezekiel 43:17), marking its distinctness from any past temple. No pomp or ornament was allowed; all was to be plain and simple; for it was the meeting place between God and the sinner, and therefore a place of shedding of blood without which there is no remission ( Leviticus 17:11; Hebrews 9:22), a place of fellowship with God for us only through death. The mother dust of earth, or its stones in their native state as from the hand of God, were the suitable material. The art of sinful beings would mar, rather than aid, the consecration of the common meeting ground. The earth made for man’s nourishment, but now the witness of his sin and drinker in of his forfeited life, was the most suitable (see Fairbairn, Typology). The altar was at “the door of the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation” ( Exodus 40:29). In the tabernacle the altar of burnt offering was made of shittim (acacia) boards overlaid with brass, terming a square of five cubits, or eight feet. three cubits high or five feet, the hollow within being probably filled with earth or stones. A ledge (Hebrews karkob ) projected on the side for the priest to stand on, to which a slope of earth gradually led up on the S. side, and outside the ledge was a network of brass. At the grainers were four horn shaped projections. to which the victim was bound ( <19B827> Psalm 118:27), and which were touched with blood in consecrating priests ( Exodus 29:12), and in the sin offering ( Leviticus 4:7). The horn symbolizes might. The culmination’s of the altar, being hornlike, imply the mighty salvation and security which Jehovah engages to the believing worshippers approaching Him in His own appointed way. Hence it was the asylum or place of refuge ( 1 Kings 1:50; Exodus 21:14).

    So the Antitype, Christ ( Isaiah 27:5; 25:4). To grasp the altar horns in faith was to lay hold of Jehovah’s strength. In Solomon’s temple the altar square was entirely of brass, and was 20 cubits, or from 30 to 35 feet, and the height 10 cubits. In Malachi 1:7,12, it is called “the table of the Lord.” In Herod’s temple the altar was 50 cubits long, and 50 broad, and 15 high; a pipe from the S.W. grainer conveyed away the blood to the brook Kedron. Except in emergencies (as Judges 6:24; 1 Samuel 7:9,10; 2 Samuel 24:18,25; 1 Kings 8:64; 18:31,32) only the one altar was sanctioned ( Leviticus 17:8,9; Deuteronomy 12:13,14), to mark the unity and ubiquity of God, as contrasted with the many altars of the manifold idols and local deities of pagandom. Every true Israelite, wherever he might be, realized his share in the common daily sacrifices at the one altar in Zion, whence Jehovah ruled to the ends of the earth. Christ is the antitype, the one altar or meeting place between God and man, the one only atonement for sinners, the one sacrifice, and the one priest ( Acts 4:12; Hebrews 13:10). Christ’s Godhead, on which He offered His manhood, “sanctifieth the gift” ( Matthew 23:19), and prevents the sacrifice being consumed by God’s fiery judicial wrath against man’s sin. To those Judaizers who object that Christians have no altar or sacrificial meats, Paul says, “we have” (the emphasis in Greek is on have; there is no we) emphatically, but it is a spiritual altar and sacrifice. So Hebrews 4:14,15; 8:1; 9:1; 10:1,19-21. The interpretation which makes “altar” the Lord’s table is opposed to the scope of the Epistle to the Heb., which contrasts the outward sanctuary with the unseen spiritual sanctuary. Romanisers fall under the condemnation of Hosea 8:11. The Epistle to the Hebrews reasons, servile adherents to visible altar meats are excluded from our Christian spiritual altar and meats: “For He, the true Altar, from whom we derive spiritual meats, realized the sin offering type” (of which none of the meat was eaten, but all was burnt: Leviticus 6:30) “by suffering without the gate: teaching that we must go forth after Him from the Jewish high priest’s camp of legal ceremonialism and meats, which stood only until the gospel times of reformation” ( Hebrews 9:10,11). The temple and holy city were the Jewish people’s camp in their solemn feasts.

    The brass utensils for the altar ( Exodus 27:3) were pans, to receive the ashes and fat; shovels, for removing the ashes; basins, for the blood; flesh hooks, with three prongs, to take flesh out of the cauldron ( 1 Samuel 2:13,14); firepans, or censers, for taking coals off the altar, or for burning incense ( Leviticus 16:12; Numbers 16:6,7; Exodus 25:38); the same Hebrews maktoth means snuff dishes, as “tongs” means snuffers for the candlesticks.

    Asa “renewed” the altar, i.e. reconsecrated it, after it had been polluted by idolatries ( 2 Chronicles 20:8). see AHAZ (see) removed it to the N. side of the new altar which Urijah the priest had made after the pattern which Ahaz had seen at Damascus ( 2 Kings 16:14). Hezekiah had it “cleansed” ( 2 Chronicles 29:12-18) of all the uncleanness brought into it in Ahaz’ reign. Manasseh, on his repentance, repaired it ( 2 Chronicles 33:16). Rabbis pretended it stood on the spot where man was created. In Zerubbabel’s temple the altar was built before the temple foundations were laid ( Ezra 3:2). After its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, Judas Maccabaeus built a new altar of unhewn stones. A perpetual fire kept on it symbolized the perpetuity of Jehovah’s religion; for, sacrifice being the center of the Old Testament worship, to extinguish it would have been to extinguish the religion. The perpetual fire of the Persian religion was different, for this was not sacrificial, but a symbol of God, or of the notion that, fire was a primary element. The original fire of the tabernacle “came out from before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat” ( Leviticus 9:24).

    The rabbis say, It couched upon the altar like a lion, bright as the sun, the flame solid and pure, consuming things wet and dry alike, without smoke.

    The divine fire on the altar; the shekinah cloud, representing the divine habitation with them, which was given to the king and the high priest with the oil of unction; the spirit of prophecy; the Urim and Thummim whereby the high priest miraculously learned God’s will; and the ark of the covenant, whence God gave His answers in a clear voice, were the five things of the old temple wanting in the second temple. Heated stones (Heb.) were laid upon the altar, by which the incense was kindled ( Isaiah 6:6).

    The golden altar of incense (distinguished from the brazen altar of burnt offering), of acacia wood (in Solomon’s temple cedar) underneath, two cubits high, one square. Once a year, on the great day of atonement, the high priest sprinkled upon its horns the blood of the sin offering ( Exodus 30:6-10; Leviticus 16:18,19). Morning and evening incense was burnt on it with fire taken from the altar of burnt offering. It had a border round the top, and two golden rings at the sides for the staves to bear it with. It was “before the veil that is by the ark of the testimony, before the mercy seat;” between the candlestick and the shewbread table.

    In Hebrews 9:4, KJV, “censer,” not “altar of incense,” is right; for the latter was in the outer not the inner holy place. The inner, or holiest, place “had the golden censer” belonging to its yearly atonement service, not kept in it. The altar of incense also was close by the second veil, directly before the ark ( 1 Kings 6:22), “by (Hebrews belonging to) the oracle,” i.e. holiest place. Jesus’ death rent the veil, and has brought the antitypes to the candlestick, shewbread table, and altar of incense into the heavenly, holiest place. This altar alone appears there, namely, that of prayer and praise.

    Christ is the heavenly attar as well as the only intercession, through the incense of whose merits our prayers are accepted. “The souls under the altar” ( Revelation 6:9) are shut up unto Him in joyful expectancy, until He come to raise the sleeping bodies ( Revelation 8:3,4). see NADAB and see ABIHU (see) were smitten for burning “strange fire” (i.e. fire not taken from the altar of burnt offering), thereby breaking the He between the incense altar and the sacrificial burnt offering altar. The incense daily offered symbolized prayer ( <19E102> Psalm 141:2; Luke 1:10). As the incense on the altar within drew its kindling from the fire of the sacrificial altar without, so believing prayer of the heart within, continually ascending to God, rests on one’s having first once for all become sharer in the benefit of Christ’s outward sacrificial atonement. Therefore the inner altar was ornate and golden, the outer altar bore marks of humiliation and death. Nowhere is an altar in the sacrificial sense in the Christian church recognized in the New Testament The words “we have an altar” ( Hebrews 13:10; note that it is not altars, such as apostate churches erect in their worship), so far from sanctioning a Christian altar on earth, oppose the idea; for Christ Himself is our altar of which we spiritually eat, and of which they who Judaize, by serving the tabernacle and resting on meats and ordinances, “have no right to eat.” Our sacrifices are spiritual, not the dead letter; compare Hebrews 13:9,15,16.

    The “altar to an unknown God” mentioned by Paul ( Acts 17:22) was erected in time of a plague at Athens, when they knew not what god to worship for removing it. Epimenides caused black, and white sheep to be let loose from the Areopagus, and wherever they lay down to be offered to the appropriate deity. Diogenes Laertius, Pausanias, and Philostratus, pagan writers, confirm the accuracy of Scripture by mentioning several altars at Athens to the unknown or unnamed deity. “Superstitious” is too severe a word for the Greek; Paul’s object was to conciliate, and he tells the Athenians: Ye are “rather religious,” or “more given to religion” than is common, “rather given to veneration.”

    In Ezekiel 43:15 “altar” is lit. harel , “mount of God,” denoting the high security which it will afford to restored Israel; a high place indeed, but the high place of God, not of idols.

    ALTASCHITH The title of Psalm 57; 58; 59; 75: The maxim of David amidst persecutions, embodying the spirit of his psalm (Kimchi); drawn from Deuteronomy 9:26, Moses’ prayer, “Destroy not Thy people and Thine inheritance, whom Thou hast redeemed.” He used the same “destroy not” in Samuel 26:9, to Abishai, who urged him to slay Saul when in his power.

    We can say “destroy not” to God only when we ourselves beat’ no malice to our enemies. Aben Ezra less probably explains “some song named so, to the tune of which the psalm was to be chanted.”

    ALUSH The last station before Rephidim, of Israel’s journey to Sinai ( Numbers 33:18,14). Rabbis assert, on Exodus 16:30, that here the first sabbath was instituted and kept.

    ALVAH Aliah. Genesis 36:40; 1 Chronicles 1:51.

    ALVAN Alian. Genesis 36:23; 1 Chronicles 1:40.

    AMAD In Asher, between Alammelech and Misheal ( Joshua 19:23).

    AMAL Of Asher ( 1 Chronicles 7:35).

    AMALEK Son of Eliphaz, by his concubine Timnah, of the Horites; grandson of Esau; duke of Edom ( Genesis 36:12,16). The Edomites seized the Horite territory. In Hezekiah’s reign the last remnant of Amalek in Edom was dispersed by the Simeonites ( 1 Chronicles 4:42,43).

    AMALEKITES Philo interprets “a people that licks up.” A nomadic tribe, occupying the peninsula of Sinai and the wilderness between Palestine and Egypt ( Numbers 13:29; 1 Samuel 15:7; 27:8). Arab writers represent them as sprung from Ham, and originally at the Persian gulf, and then pressed westward by Assyria, and spreading over Arabia before its occupation by Joktan’s descendants. This would accord with the mention of them ( Genesis 14:7) long before Esau’s grandson, the Edomite Amalek; also with Judges 3:13; 5:14; 12:15, where “Amalek” and “the mount of the Amalekites” appear in central Palestine, whither they would come in their passage westward. Scripture nowhere else mentions any relationship of them with the Edomites and Israelites. The Amalek of Edom ( Genesis 36:16) in this view afterward became blended with the older Amalekites.

    But Genesis 14:7 mentions merely “the country of the Amalekites,” i.e. which afterward belonged to them; whereas in the case of the other peoples themselves are named, the Rephaims, Zuzims, Emims, Horites, Amorites (Septuagint, however, and Origen read for “the country” “the princes”). The descent of the Amalekites from Amalek, Esau’s grandson, is favored also by the consideration that otherwise a people so conspicuous in Israel’s history would be without specification of genealogy, contrary to the analogy of the other nations connected with Israel in the Pentateuch.

    Their life was nomadic ( Judges 6:5); a city is mentioned in 1 Samuel 15:5. see AGAG (see) was the hereditary title of the king. On Israel’s route from Egypt to Palestine, Amalek in guerrilla warfare tried to stop their progress, and was defeated by Joshua, under Moses, whose hands were stayed up by Aaron and Hur, at Rephidim ( Exodus 17:8-16). It was a deliberate effort to defeat God’s purpose at the very outset, while Israel was as yet feeble, having just come out of Egypt. The motive is stated expressly, “Amalek feared not God” ( Deuteronomy 25:17-19; and Exodus 17:16 margin). “Because the hand of Amalek is against the throne of Jehovah, therefore Jehovah will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” Saul’s failure to carry out God’s purpose of their utter destruction (1 Samuel 15) brought destruction on Saul himself ( 1 Samuel 28:18), and, by a striking retribution in kind, by an Amalekites ( 2 Samuel 1:2-10). David, the instrument of destroying them, was raised to the vacated throne ( 1 Samuel 27:8; 30:1,2,17-26; 2 Samuel 8:12). The Amalekites are mentioned with the Canaanites as having discomfited Israel at Hormah, on the borders of Canaan, permitted by God because of Israel’s unbelief as to the spies’ report, and then presumption in going up to possess the land in spite of Moses’ warning and the non-accompaniment of the ark ( Numbers 14:43-45). Subsequently the Moabite Eglon, in league with Amalek, smote Israel and took Jericho; but Ehud defeated them ( Judges 3:13-30). Next we find them leagued with Midian ( Judges 6:3; 7), and defeated by Gideon: Balaam’s prophecy ( Numbers 24:20 Heb.), “Beginning of the pagan (was) Amalek, and its end (shall be) destruction” (even to the perishing, under Saul, David, and finally Hezekiah, 1 Chronicles 4:42,43). In age, power, and celebrity this Bedouin tribe was certainly not “the first of the nations,” but (as margin) “the first pagan nation which opened the conflict of pagandom against the people of God.” Thus its “latter end” stands in antithesis to its “beginning.” The occasion of Amalek’s attack was significant: at Rephidim, when there was no water for the people to drink, and God by miracle made it gush from the rock. Contentions for possession of a well were of common occurrence ( Genesis 21:25; 26:22; Exodus 2:17); in Moses’ message asking Edom and Sihon the Amorite for leave of passage, water is a prominent topic ( Numbers 20:17; 21:22; compare Judges 5:11). This constitutes the special heinousness of Amalek’s sin in God’s eyes. They tried to deprive God’s people of a necessary of life which God had just supplied by miracle, thus fighting not so much with them as with God. This accounts for the special severity of their doom. The execution was delayed; but the original sentence at Rephidim was repeated by Balaam, and 400 years subsequently its execution was enjoined at the very beginning of the regal government as a test of obedience; compare 1 Samuel 12:12-15. They then still retained their spite against Israel, for we read ( 1 Samuel 14:48), “Saul smote the Amalekites and delivered Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them.” That the Israelites might perceive they were but the executioners of God’s sentence, they were forbidden to take the spoil Saul’s taking of it to gratify the people and himself, under the pretext of “sacrifice,” was the very thing which betrayed the spirit of disobedience, to his ruin.

    AMAM A city in the S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:26).

    AMANA (truth) A mountain near Lebanon, perhaps the southern top of Antilibanus (Song 4:8). Assumed to be the hill whence the Abana springs ( 2 Kings 5:13).

    AMARIAH 1. 1 Chronicles 6:7,52. 2. Highpriest under Jehoshaphat, son of Azariah ( 1 Chronicles 6:11; 2 Chronicles 19:11), a seconder of that good king “in all matters of the Lord.” 3. 1 Chronicles 23:19. 4. Head of one of the 24 courses of priests which bore his name under David, Hezekiah, and Nehemiah ( 1 Chronicles 24:14 = Immer; Chronicles 31:15; Nehemiah 10:3; 12:2,13). 5. Nehemiah 11:4; Ezra 10:42. 6. Zephaniah 1:1.

    AMASA 1. Son (seemingly illegitimate) of Jether or Ithra, an Ishmaelite, by Abigail, David’s sister ( 2 Samuel 17:25; 1 Chronicles 2:15-17). [See ABSALOM .] Joined his rebellion, probably because neglected by David (as appears from his not being mentioned previously) on account of his Ishmaelite parentage (Zeruiah occurs always without mention of her husband; but Abigail always with her husband Jether, as though in disparagement). Defeated in the wood of Ephraim by Joab (2 Samuel 18).

    David, to atone for past neglect, pardoned, and even promoted him to command the army in the room of the overbearing Joab. Amasa’s slowness in crushing Sheba’s rebellion, perhaps owing to the disinclination of the troops to be under his command, obliged David to dispatch Abishai with the household guards, and Joab accompanied them. Amasa and his force overtook them at “the great stone of Gibeon.” There Joab, while taking with his right hand Amasa’s beard to kiss him, with his left stabbed him with his sword ( 2 Samuel 20:10). 2. AMASAI, leader of a body of men of Judah and Benjamin, to join David in the hold at Ziklag; David’s apprehension of treachery on the part of his own tribe was dispelled by Amasa’s words under the spirit which “clothed” him: “Thine are we, David, and on thy side, thou son of Jesse; peace, peace be unto thee, and peace be to thine helpers, for thy God helpeth thee.” (Margin 1 Chronicles 12:16-18.) 3. A prince of Ephraim, son of Hadlai, who, at the prophet Oded’s command from God, opposed the detention of the Jews taken captive by Pekah of Israel from Ahaz of Judah ( 2 Chronicles 28:12).

    AMASHAI Nehemiah 11:13.

    AMASIAH ( 2 Chronicles 17:16.) “Son of Zichri, who willingly, offered himself unto the Lord” as a captain under Jehoshaphat; compare Judges 5:2,9.

    AMAZIAH 1. Son of Joash; on his accession to the Jewish throne punished his father’s murderers, but not their children ( Deuteronomy 24:16); a merciful trait of character, which it is implied other kings had not. He had reigned jointly with his father at least one year before Joash’s death; for 2 Kings 13:10 compared with 2 Kings 14:1 proves he reigned in the 39th year of Jonah of Judah; 2 Chronicles 24:1 shows that Joash of Judah reigned years; therefore Amaziah must have been reigning one year before Joash’s death, The reason comes out in that incidental way which precludes the idea of forgery, and confirms the truth of the history. In 2 Chronicles 24:23,25 we read: “the host of Syria came up against him [Joash] ... to Judah and Jerusalem, and destroyed all the princes; ... and when they were departed [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.” The “great diseases” under which Joash labored, at the time of the Syrian invasion, were no doubt the cause of Amaziah his son being admitted to a share in the government. Blunt well observes how circuitously we arrive at the conclusion, not by the book of Kings alone nor Chronicles alone; either might be read alone without suspicion of such a latent congruity. He slew of Edom in the Valley of Salt (S. of the Dead Sea, the scene of David’s general’s victory: 2 Samuel 8:13; Psalm title; 1 Kings 11:15,16; 1 Chronicles 18:12) 10,000, and his forces threw 10,000 captives from the rocks, and he took Selah or Petra their capital, which he named Jokteel (the reward of God) after a Jewish city ( Joshua 15:38). Then he showed that, whereas he partly did “right in the sight of the Lord,” it was “not like David his father, with a perfect heart” ( 2 Chronicles 25:2; 2 Kings 14:3). “He brought the gods of Seir to be his gods and bowed down himself before them and burned incense unto them.” The Lord’s prophet reproved him: “Why hast thou sought after the gods which could not deliver their own people out of thine hand?” “Art thou made of the king’s counsel? forbear; why shouldest thou be smitten?” was the king’s reply; for God had determined to destroy him, and therefore gave him up to judicial hardening ( Romans 1:28).

    Already he had provoked Israel by sending back 100,000 Israelite soldiers whom he had hired for 100 talents of silver, but whom, as being estranged from God ( 1 Corinthians 15:33), God forbade him to take with him (compare 2 Chronicles 19:2; 20:37); God assuring him that He could give him much more than the 100 talents which he thereby forfeited. The Israelites in returning fell upon the cities of Judah from Samaria to Bethheron. The God who gave him the Edomite capital in compensation for his loss of money could have given amends for the Israelite depredations, if he had not lost His favor. Refusing advice from God’s prophet ( Proverbs 12:1), Amaziah “took advice” of bad counselors, and, irritated at the Israelite depredations, Amaziah challenged Joash, who by the parable of “the thistle (or rather thorn bush) and cedar” warned him not to overrate his strength through pride in his Edomite victories, as though the thorn bush were to think itself a match for the cedar, and to meddle to his own hurt. Routed at Bethshemesh, he was taken by Joash to Jerusalem, the wall of which Joash broke down from the gate of Ephraim to the grainer gate 400 cubits, facing Israel’s frontier, besides taking the vessels of God’s house, with Obed Edom, and the king’s treasures and hostages. Jerusalem, according to Josephus, yielded so quickly, as Joash threatened otherwise to slay Amaziah. Amaziah survived Joash 15 years, and then was slain by conspirators at Lachish, whither he had fled. He reigned from 837 B.C to 809. 2. Priest of the golden calf at Bethel, under Jeroboam II. Fearing that his craft whereby he had his wealth was in danger, he informed the king: “Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words, for thus Amos saith, Jeroboam shall die by the sword and Israel ... be led away captive.” Also he said unto Amos; “O thou seer ... get thee away into Judah and there eat bread [he judges of Amos by his own mercenary motives]. But prophesy not again any more in Bethel, for it is the king’s chapel and ... court.” Therefore the Lord doomed his wife to harlotry, his sons and daughters to the sword, and himself to “die in a polluted land” ( Amos 7:10-17). So far from seeking prophecy as a breadmaking business, Amos replies he gave up his own mode of livelihood to obey the Lord’s call at all costs. Political expediency in all ages is made the pretext for dishonoring God and persecuting His servants ( John 11:48-50; Acts 17:6,7; 19:25-27; 24:5). Probably Amaziah met his doom in Pul’s invasion; God is not anxious to vindicate His word, “the majesty of Scripture does not lower itself to linger on baser persons” (Pusey): the criminal’s sentence implies its execution, whether recorded or not. 3. 1 Chronicles 4:34. 4. 1 Chronicles 6:45.

    AMBASSADOR Stands for two Hebrews words: malahch , “messenger,” and tzeer , “ambassador.” Israel’s commanded isolation rendered embassies an infrequent occurrence; they were mere nuncios rather than plenipotentiaries. The earliest instances occur in the case of Edom, Moab, and the Amorites ( Numbers 20:14; 21:21). Gibeon feigned an ambassage ( Joshua 9:4). The ambassador’s person was regarded as inviolable ( 2 Samuel 10:2-5; 12:26-31). Men of high rank usually; as Sennacherib sent his chief captain, Chief cupbearer, and chief eunuch, Tartan, Rabsaris, Rabshakeh, whom Hezekiah’s chief men of the kingdom, Eliakim over the household, Shebna the secretary, and Joab the recorder, met ( 2 Kings 18:17,18; Isaiah 30:4; 33:7; compare 18:2). Once in New Testament, “we are ambassadors for Christ” ( 2 Corinthians 5:20); treating with men “in Christ’s stead”: God “beseeching,” and His ambassadors “praying” men to be reconciled to God. Majesty, faithfulness, yet withal tenderness, are implied. Our part is to send prayers, as our ambassage, to meet God’s ambassadors, desiring His conditions of peace ( Luke 14:32; Isaiah 27:5).

    AMBER chasmal . Ezekiel 1:4,27; 8:2. Not our amber, a bituminous substance or fossil resin, but a metal. Smooth polished brass (Gesenius). Compare Ezekiel 1:7, brass in a glow or white heat; Ezra 8:27 margin; Revelation 1:15, “His feet like unto glowing brass” (chal colibanus : from libben , “whiten;” brass in a white heat), “as if made red hot in a furnace.”. Else a composed of gold and silver, symbolizing the dazzling brightness of God’s glory. From Hebrews mal (or else melala , “gold”) nechash , “smooth brass.”

    AMEN (firm, faithful, else verily). Jesus is “the Amen, the, faithful and true witness” ( Revelation 3:14). Compare 2 Corinthians 1:20; John 1:14,17; 14:6. “The God of Amen” (Hebrews for “truth”) ( Isaiah 65:16). Jesus alone introduces His authoritative declarations with Amen in the beginning; in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, singly, in John ( John 3:3,5,11; 10:1) always doubled. It is most marked how the apostles and others avoid the use of it in the beginning, which is His divine prerogative. Jeremiah 28:6 is not an exception; it is praying for the divine ratification of what preceded. In oaths those who pronounce the “Amen” bind themselves by the oath ( Numbers 5:22; Deuteronomy 27:15-26).

    God alone can seal all His declarations of promise or threat with the “Amen,” verily, in its fullest sense; our assertions mostly need some qualification. As John records Christ’s discourses on the deeper things of God, which man is slow to believe, the double Amen is appropriately found at the beginning of such discourses 25 times. Amen was the proper response to a prayer, an oath, or a solemn promise ( 1 Kings 1:30; Nehemiah 5:13; 8:6; 1 Chronicles 16:36; Jeremiah 11:5); the God of Amen witnesses our covenants. Jewish tradition states that the people responded to the priest’s prayer not “Amen,” but, “Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom for ever.” But in synagogues, as in the Christian assemblies, and in family and private prayers, Amen was the response ( Matthew 6:13; 1 Corinthians 14:16).

    AMETHYST Hebrews root, dream; supposed to cause dreams to those who wore it.

    Greek, “protecting against drunkenness” Pliny says, because it approaches the color of wine without reaching it. The third jewel in the third row of the breastplate of judgment. The twelfth of the precious foundation stones of the heavenly Jerusalem’s walls ( Revelation 21:20). A violet, or in the East a deep red, quartz; the eastern is a rare variety of the adamantine spar or corundum; the hardest substance next to the diamond, containing 90 per cent. alumine, with iron and silica. It loses color in the fire, and becomes like a diamond.

    AMI Ami, or Amon. Ezra 2:57; Nehemiah 7:59.

    AMITTAI Father of Jonah: 2 Kings 14:25; Jonah 1:1.

    AMMAH A hill facing Giah by way of the wilderness of Gibeon, where Joab ceased pursuing Abner after Asahel’s death ( 2 Samuel 2:24). Vulgate mentions a watercourse near, and Robinson describes an excavated fountain under the high rock near Gibeon.

    AMMI ( Hosea 2:1,23.) “My people;” the name betokening God’s reconciliation to His people, in contrast to Lo-ammi, “not My people” ( Hosea 1:9), though once “Mine” ( Ezekiel 16:8). The Gentiles, once not God’s people, shall become His people ( Romans 9:25,26; Peter 2:10).

    AMMIEL 1. Numbers 13:12. 2. 2 Samuel 9:4,5; 17:27. 3. = Eliam, by transposition of letters; father of Bathsheba [see AHITHOPHEL ] ( 1 Chronicles 3:5; 2 Samuel 11:8). 4. 1 Chronicles 26:5.

    AMMIHUD 1. Numbers 1:10; 2:18; 7:48,53; 10:22. 2. Numbers 34:20. 3. Numbers 34:28. 4. 2 Samuel 13:37. 5. 1 Chronicles 9:4.

    AMMINADAB (of the people of the prince; else, my people is willing). 1. Song 6:12: “My soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib,” one noted for swift driving; compare Song 1:9. Rather: “My soul made me like the chariots of my willing people” ( <19B003> Psalm 110:3), or else, “of the Prince of My people,” Messiah. His chariots are His glorious angel escort. 2. Numbers 1:7; 2:3. Ancestor of David and Jesus ( Matthew 1:4; Luke 3:3; Numbers 1:7; 2:3; Ruth 4:19,20; 1 Chronicles 2:10). As Naasson, Amminadab’s son, was prince at the first numbering of Israel in the second year from the exodus, Amminadab probably died in Egypt before the exodus, at the time of Israel’s heaviest oppression. His daughter Elisheba married Aaron, and bore Nadab (named from Amminadab), Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar; the earliest alliance of the kingly line of Judah and the priestly line of Aaron. 3. Chief of Uzziel’s 112 sons, whom David sent for to bring the ark to Jerusalem ( 1 Chronicles 15:10-12). 4. = Izhar, son of Kohath, father of Korah ( 1 Chronicles 6:22; compare 1 Chronicles 6:2,18).

    AMMISHADDAI Numbers 1:12; 7:66. One of the few names compounded with the ancient name of God, Shaddai.

    AMMIZABAD 1 Chronicles 27:6.

    AMMON A nation sprung from Ben-ammi, Lot’s son by his younger daughter ( Genesis 19:38; Psalm 83:7,8), as Moab by his elder, after Lot escaped from Sodom. Ammon and Moab appear continually together; both are said to have hired Balaam ( Deuteronomy 13:4), though Moab alone is mentioned in the detailed account (Numbers 22; 23). The land from Arnon river to Jabbok is assigned to both ( Judges 11:12-18,25). The Israelites dispossessed the Amorites of land which afterward Ammon occupied, between Arnon and Jabbok, but did not, as Jephthah reasons, dispossess Ammon of it, though now claiming it as theirs ( Numbers 21:24,26,29). Ammon destroyed the aboriginal Rephaim or giants, named Zamzummim, and occupied their land, Jabbok being their boundary ( Deuteronomy 2:20,21,37). Moab was probably the more civilized half of Lot’s descendants; whence we read of the plentiful fields, hay, summer fruits, vineyards, presses, songs of the grape treaders, of Moab (Isaiah 15; 16; Jeremiah 48): Ammon the more fierce, plundering, Bedouin-like half; whence we read of their threat of thrusting out the right eye of all in Jabesh Gilead ( 1 Samuel 11:2), ripping up pregnant women in Gilead ( Amos 1:13), treacherously murdering, as Ishmael, Baalis’ agent, did ( Jeremiah 40:14; 41:5-7), suspecting and insulting their ally David to their own ruin ( 2 Samuel 10:1-5; 12:31). Ammon’s one stronghold, Rabbah, “the city of: waters” (20 cities are mentioned Judges 11:33, perhaps some Moabite cities), forms a contrast to Moab’s numerous towns with their “high places” (Jeremiah 48); their idol, Moloch, accordingly they worshipped in a tent, the token of nomad life, not a fixed temple or high place, such as was appropriated to the god of the more settled people Moab ( Amos 5:26; Acts 7:43). They crossed Jordan and seized Jericho for a time ( Judges 3:13). Chephar-ha-Ammonai (the hamlet of the Ammonites), in Benjamin, at the head of the passes from the Jordan westward, marks their having temporarily been in that region. Their unwillingness to help Israel, and their joining Moab in hiring Balaam ( Deuteronomy 23:2,46; Nehemiah 13:2), caused their exclusion (like that of a bastard) from the Lord’s congregation for ten generations; whereas Edom, who had not hired him, was only excluded for three. The exclusion was from full Israelite citizenship, not from the spiritual privileges of the covenant, if they became proselytes. Previously to David, Jephthah and Saul had sorely punished them ( Judges 11:33; Samuel 11:11; 14:47). Ammon joined with Moab in the expedition for uprooting Judah from its possession, in Jehoshaphat’s reign (2 Chronicles 20; Psalm 83:3-7). So utterly were the confederates routed that the Jews spent three days in gathering the spoil. They had to bring gifts to Uzziah ( 2 Chronicles 26:8). Jotham reduced them to pay 100 talents of silver, 10,000 measures of wheat, and 10,000 of barley. Ammon seized on the cities of Gad from which Tiglath Pileser had carried the Israelites ( Jeremiah 49:1-6; Zephaniah 2:8,9). On the return from Jerusalem Tobiah, an Ammonite, joined with Sanballat, of Horonaim of Moab, in opposing Nehemiah’s restoration of the city walls ( Nehemiah 2:10,19).

    Naamah, Solomon’s wife, mother of Rehoboam, was an Ammonite. Their idol, Moloch, appears also under the varied form Milcom and Malcham, as the Hebrews for “their king” may be rendered. Compare Zephaniah 1:5; 2 Samuel 12:30. Solomon’s Ammonite wives seduced him to rear an altar to this “abomination,” to his own hurt ( Jeremiah 49:1,3). Nahash, perhaps a common title of their kings, means a serpent. Shobi, the son of David’s friend, followed his father’s rather than Hanun his brother’s steps, showing kindness to David in adversity ( 2 Samuel 17:27).

    AMNON 1. David’s oldest son by Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, born in Hebron while David reigned there over Judah only. Forced his half sister Tamar, and was murdered by her brother see ABSALOM (see) (2 Samuel 13). 2. 1 Chronicles 4:20.

    AMOK Nehemiah 12:7,20.

    AMON (1) ( Nahum 3:8). No-Amon, i.e. Thebes, or No, the city of Amon, an Egyptian god ( Jeremiah 46:25), “the multitude of No,” else “Amon of No” = the nourisher, Hebrews The Egyptian name is Amen, “the hidden,” or “mysterious”; one of the eight gods of the first order; thief of the Theban triad, worshipped as Amen-ra (i.e. the sun), represented as a man wearing a cap with two plumes, both male and female; accompanied with sacred trees, like the “groves” connected with Baal’s worship. In the great Oasis he was worshipped as the ram-headed god Num, and in Meroe as Kneph. The Greeks called him Jupiter Ammon.

    AMON (2) 1. Son and successor of Manasseh in the throne of Judah = skillful in his art, Hebrews Possibly the name was given by Manasseh, when an idolater, from the Egyptian god. He reigned from 642 B.C. to 640 ( 2 Kings 21:19; 2 Chronicles 33:20). His own servants conspired and slew him in his own house, and in their turn were slain by the people, who raised his son Josiah to the throne. 2. Governor of the city under Ahab ( 1 Kings 22:26).

    AMORITE (THE) Always singular in the Hebrew, “the dweller on the summits.” The fourth son of Canaan, Ham’s son. The Hamitic races were the earliest developed, and most brilliant, but had the greatest tendency to degeneracy, because averse to true religion, the great preserver of man. The tendency of the children of Japhet was to improve, that of the children of Shem to be stationary. As the Amorites, Hittites, and Jehusites were the highlanders, so were the Canaanites the lowlanders, by the sea W., and the Jordan E.

    Compare Numbers 13:29; Deuteronomy 1:44. As early as Genesis 14:7,18, they occupied the rugged heights afterward called Engedi (fount of the kid); then Hazezon Tamar (the cutting of the palm tree).

    Thence they stretched W. to Hebron. They subsequently crossed the Jordan eastward. Sihon took the pasture land S. of Jabbok, and drove Moab across the Amon ( Numbers 21:13,26-81). Israel, approaching from the S.E., was refused leave to pass through his land to the fords of Jordan. Sihon, having marched against them, was killed with his sons and people ( Deuteronomy 2:32-37), and his land and cattle taken by them.

    The tract bounded by the Jabbok on the N., Arnon S., Jordan W., wilderness E. ( Judges 11:21,22), was specially the “land of the Amorites”; but their possessions embraced all Gilead and Bashan, to Hermon ( Deuteronomy 3:8; 4:48,49), “the land of the two kings of the Amorites,” Sihon and Og ( Deuteronomy 31:4). As the Amorites (highlanders) were the most powerful, the other Canaanites (even lowlanders) were sometimes called by their name. Thus Mature in Hebron, of Genesis 13:18, is the “Amorite” in Genesis 14:13; “Hittite” in Genesis 23; “Canaanite” in Judges 1:10. The Hivites ( Genesis 34:2) are called Amorites in Genesis 48:22. Jerusalem is “Amorite” in Joshua 10:5, but in Joshua 15:63 “Jebusite.” Grove, in Smith’s Dictionary, conjectures that “Amorite” expresses locality (highlander), not distinction of race; because the name is spread over a wide area, no connection appears between the Amorites on the E. and those W. of Jordan, Sihon and Og are both “kings of the Amorites,” and yet their territories are separate. No individual Amorites are named except these two kings and Abraham’s three confederates ( Genesis 14:13). No traces appear of any distinctive government, worship, or customs, different from the other Canaanite nations. The Amorite name Senir (not Shenir) for mount Hermon ( Deuteronomy 3:9) is mentioned; but this may be the Canaanite term, as distinguished from the Hebrews “Hermon” (lofty peak) and the Phoenician “Sirion” (glittering as a breastplate; senir too means a breastplate, from a root, “clatter,” the snowy round top glittering like a breastplate). Mountaineers are usually the most warlike: hence, undeterred by Joshua’s slaughter of the five kings “dwelling in the mountains” ( Joshua 10:5, etc.), they in the next age drove the children of Dan to the mountains, themselves keeping possession of the plain, as well as mount Heres ( Judges 1:34,35); compare also Amos 2:9,10.

    AMOS (a burden). Of Tekoah, in Judah, six miles S.E. of Bethlehem. A shepherd (probably owning flocks) and dresser of sycamore fig trees; specially called of the Lord to prophesy, though not educated in the prophets’ schools ( Amos 1:1; 7:14,15). These personal notices occur only as connected with the discharge of his prophetic function; so entirely is self put in the shade by the inspired men of God, and God is made the one all-absorbing theme. Though of Judah, he exercised his ministry in the northern kingdom, Israel; not later than the 15th year of Uzziah of Judah, when Jeroboam II. (son of Joash) of Israel died (compare 1 Kings 14:23 with 1 Kings 15:1), in whose reign it is written he prophesied “two years before the earthquake”; compare Zechariah 14:5. Allusions to the earthquake appear in Amos 5:8; 6:11; 8:8; 9:1,5. The divine sign in his view confirmed his words, which were uttered before, and which now after the earthquake were committed to writing in an orderly summary. The natural world, being from and under the same God, shows a mysterious sympathy with the spiritual world; compare Matthew 24:7; 27:50-54.

    Probably Amos prophesied about the middle of Jeroboam’s reign, when his conquests had been achieved ( Amos 6:13,14; compare 2 Kings 14:25-27), just before Assyria’s first attack on Israel, for he does not definitely name that power: Amos 1:5; 5:27 ( Hosea 10:6; 11:5). The two forces from God acted simultaneously by His appointment, the invading hosts from without arresting Israel’s attention for the prophet’s message from God within the land, and the prophets showing the spiritual meaning of those invasions, as designed to lead Israel to repentance. This accounts for the outburst of prophetic fire in Uzziah’s and his successors’ reigns. The golden calves, the forbidden representation of Jehovah, not Baal, were the object of worship in Jeroboam’s reign, as being the great grandson of Jehu, who had purged out Baal worship, but retained the calves. Israel, as abounding in impostors, needed the more true prophets of God from Judah to warn her. Her prophets often fled to Judah from fear of her kings. Oppression, luxury, weariness of religious ordinances as interrupting worldly pursuits, were rife: Amos 8:4,5; 3:15. The king’s sanctuary and summer palace were at Bethel ( Amos 7:13); here Amos was opposed by see AMAZIAH (see) for his faithful reproofs, and informed against to Jeroboam. Like the prophet in 1 Kings 13, Amos went up from Judah to Bethel to denounce the idol calf at the risk of his life. Calf worship prevailed also at Dan, Gilgal, and Beersheba, in Judah ( Amos 4:4; 5:5; 8:14), blended with Jehovah’s worship ( Amos 5:14,21-26); 2 Kings 17:32,33, compare Ezekiel 20:39. The book is logically connected, and is divisible into four parts. Amos 1:1 to Amos 2:13: the sins of Syria, Philistia, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, the neighbors of Israel and Judah Amos 2:4 to Amos 6:14: Israel’s own state and consequent punishment; the same coasts “from the entering in of Hamath,” which Jeroboam has just recovered from Syria, shall be “afflicted,” and the people carried into “captivity beyond Damascus” ( Amos 5:27). Amos 7:1--9:10: Amos’s visions of grasshoppers devouring the grass, and fire the land and deep, both removed by his intercession; the plumb line marking the buildings for destruction; Amaziah’s interruption at Bethel, and foretold doom; the basket of summer fruits marking Israel’s end by the year’s end; the Lord standing upon the altar, and commanding the lintel to be smitten, symbolizing Israel’s destruction as a kingdom, but individually not one righteous man shall perish. Amos 9:11-15: David’s fallen tabernacle shall be raised, the people re-established in prosperity in their own land, no more to be pulled out, and the conversion of the pagan shall follow the establishment of the theocracy finally; compare Amos 9:12 with Acts 15:17. Reference to agricultural life and the phenomena of nature abounds, in consonance with his own former occupation, an undesigned propriety and mark of truth: Amos 1:3; 2:13; 3:4,5; 4:2,7,9; 5:18,19; 6:12; 7:1; 9:3,9,13,14. The first six chapters are without figure; the last three symbolical, with the explanation subjoined.

    He assumes his readers’ knowledge of the Pentateuch, and that the people’s religious ritual (excepting the golden calves) accords with the Mosaic law, an incidental confirmation of the truth of the Pentateuch.

    Stephen ( Acts 7:42) quotes Amos 5:25-27; and James ( Acts 15:16) quotes Amos 9:11. Philo, Josephus, the Talmud, Justin Martyr, the catalogues of Melito, Jerome, and the council of Laodicea, confirm the canonicity of Amos. His use of the names Adonai (Lord) and God of hosts marks that Jehovah, Israel’s covenant God, is universal Lord.

    Characteristic and peculiar phrases occur: “cleanness of teeth,” i.e., want of bread ( Amos 4:6); “the excellency of Jacob” ( Amos 6:8; 8:7); “the high places of Isaac” ( Amos 7:9), “the house of Isaac” ( Amos 7:16); “he that createth the wind” ( Amos 4:13). Hosea, his contemporary, survived him a few years.

    AMOZ Father of Isaiah ( Isaiah 1:1).

    AMPHIPOLIS A Macedonian city, through which Paul and Silas passed, by the Ignatian Way, in journeying from Philippi (33 Roman miles distant) to Thessalonica ( Acts 17:1). Their not staying there may have been because there were few, if any, Jews in it: and they hastened on to Thessalonica, “where was a synagogue of Jews,” affording the suitable starting point for a Christian church. It means the city (almost) surrounded by the river Strymon, three miles from its entrance into the sea. An Athenian colony. Its commercial situation, and the neighboring woods of Kerkine, and gold mines of mount Pangtens, gave it importance; also memorable in the Peloponnesian war for the battle fought at it, in which Brasidas and Cleon were killed. The site is now occupied by the village Neokhorio.

    AMPLIAS A Roman Christian ( Romans 16:8).

    AMRAM 1. A Levite; father of Miriam, Aaron, and Moses ( Exodus 6:18-20). [See AARON and see JOCHEBED .] 2. Ezra 10:34.

    AMRAPHEL One of the four invading kings ( Genesis 14:9). Shinar, his kingdom, or Babylonia, was subordinate to the great Elanrite king, see CHEDORLAOMER (see). The Assyrian monuments attest that an Elamite king invaded and plundered Babylonia in 2386 B.C.; and Babylonian remains bear traces of Elamitic influence.

    AMZI 1. 1 Chronicles 6:46. 2. A priest ( Nehemiah 11:12).

    ANAB A town once belonging to the Anakim, in the mountains of Judah ( Joshua 11:21); still so-called; ten miles S.S.W. of Hebron.

    ANAH Son of Zibeon, son of Seir the Horite; father of see AHOLIBAMAH , Esau’s wife ( Genesis 36:2,14,20,25). “Aholibamah, daughter of Ahab, daughter of Zibeon,” is tantamount to granddaughter, i.e. descendant from Zibeon; not that Anah was “daughter of Zibeon,” for Genesis 36:20 calls him” son (i.e. grandson) of Seir.” Those descendants alone of Seir are enumerated who, being heads of tribes, were connected with Edom; so Anah is mentioned because he was head of a tribe, independently of his father. As sprung from Seir, he is called a “Horite,” i.e. a dweller in caves or troglodyte; also a “Hivite,” a branch of the Canaanites; also he is named “Beeri the Hittite,” the “Hittites” being the general name for “Canaanites” ( Genesis 26:34). “Hirite” is thought by some a transcriber’s error for “Horite.” instead of “mules” ( Genesis 36:24) translate yemin “water springs”; not as Luther, “he invented mules” ( Leviticus 19:19), but “discovered hotsprings” (so Vulgate and Syriac vers.) of which there are several S.E. of the Dead Sea, e.g. Callirrhoe in the wady Zerka Maein; another in wady el Ahsa, and in wady Hamad; whence he got the surname Beeri, or “the spring man.” Judith is the same as Aholibamah.

    ANAHARATH Within Naphtali’s territory ( Joshua 19:19).

    ANAIAH Nehemiah 8:4; 10:22.

    ANAKIM (long-necked, or strong-necked). Descended from Arba ( Joshua 15:13; 21:11), dwelling in the S. of Canaan. Hebron was called from him Kirjath Arba, i.e. city of Arba. Anak is the name of the race rather than an individual; compare Josh 14:15. The three tribes bore the names of Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai. They were in the spies’ time a terror to Israel ( Numbers 13:28), but were destroyed by Joshua, except a remnant who escaped to the Philistine cities, Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod ( Joshua 11:21,22). Caleb, who brought tidings as a spy concerning them, was eventually their destroyer ( Joshua 15:14). Hence we find a giant race among the Philistines, and in Gath, in David’s days (1 Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 21:15-22); an undesigned coincidence between the independent histories Joshua and 1 and 2 Samuel, confirming the truth of both. Their chief city Hebron became Caleb’s possession for his faith, shown in having no fear of their giant stature since the Lord was on Israel’s side ( Joshua 15:14; Judges 1:20; compare Numbers 13:22,28,30- 33; 14:24). They are represented on Egyptian monuments as tall and fair.

    The hieroglyphic Tanmahu represents Talmai, and one of his tribe is depicted on the tomb of Oimenapthah I.

    ANAMIM Sprung from Mizraim (Egypt), son of Ham ( Genesis 10:13). An E.

    African people, early absorbed into Egypt or Ethiopia.

    ANAMMELECH The idol of Sepharvaim, introduced into Samaria by the Assyrian settlers ( 2 Kings 17:31). The name means “statue of the king,” Moloch. see ADRAMMELECH (see) is the sun’s male power; Anammelech, the female power.

    ANAN Nehemiah 10:26.

    ANANI 1 Chronicles 3:24.

    ANANIAH 1. Nehemiah 3:23. 2. A place between Nob and Hazor, where the Benjamites lived on returning from the Babylonian captivity ( Nehemiah 11:32).

    ANANIAS 1. Highpriest ( Acts 23:2, etc.; Acts 24:1). Son of Zebedaeus, succeeded Joseph, son of Camydus, and was followed by Ismael, son of Phabi Herod, king of Chalcis A.D. 48, appointed him. The prefect Ummidius Quadratus in A.D. 52 sent him to be tried before the emperor Claudius on the charge of oppressing the Samaritans. Cumanus the procurator, his adversary, was not successful but was banished; so that Ananias seems not to have lost office then, but lost it before Felix left the province; and was at last assassinated by the Sicarii (zealot assassins and robbers) early in the last Jewish war. Violent tempered to such a degree that he caused Paul to be smitten on the mouth for saying, “I have lived in all good conscience before God”; himself on the contrary “a whited wall.”

    Compare Matthew 23:27. 2. A disciple at Jerusalem, Sapphira’s husband (Acts 5). Having sold his property for the good of the church professedly, he kept back part of the price, and handed the rest to the apostles. Peter stigmatized the act as “lying to the Holy Spirit,” who was in the apostles, and whom notwithstanding he thought he could elude. Ananias instantly fell down and expired. That this was no mere natural effect of excitement appears from the sentence expressly pronounced by Peter on Sapphira, and immediately executed by God, whose instrument of justice Peter was. The judgment had the salutary effect designed, of guarding the church in its infancy from the adhesion of hypocrites; for “great fear came upon all the church and upon as many as heard it; and of the rest durst no man join himself to them, but the people magnified them.” Ananias was sincere up to a certain point, for he had cast in his lot with the despised “Nazarenes,” but he wished to gain a high name in the church by seeming to have given his all, while he really gave but a part. He was not obliged to throw his property into a common Christian fund (as Peter’s words show, “after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?”) It was a compromise between love of Christian applause and worldliness; “Satan filled his heart” as “Satan entered into Judas” ( Luke 22:3). At the beginning of the course of the New Testament church an awful example was given to guard her in guileless sincerity from the world’s corruption’s; just as at the beginning of the course of the Old Testament church, Israel, a similar example was given in Achan’s case, to warn her that she was to be a holy people, separate from and witnessing against the world’s pollution’s by lust (Joshua 7). The common fund which the first disciples voluntarily brought was a kind of firstfruits to the Lord in entering on possession of the spiritual Canaan, as Jericho’s spoil was a firstfruit to Jehovah of the earthly Canaan. The need there was for such a prescient warning appears from the last protest of the same apostle Peter in his 2nd Epistle, against the growing covetousness and lust within the church. 3. A Jew Christian at Damascus, “a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews which dwelt there” ( Acts 9:10, etc., Acts 22:12, etc.). By the Lord’s direction in a vision, he sought out Saul in his blindness and foodlessness for three days after Jesus’ appearing to him; putting hands on Saul, Ananias was the Lord’s instrument of restoring his sight, and conveying to him the Holy Spirit, that he might be “a chosen vessel to bear Jesus’ name before the Gentiles, and kings and Israel, as a witness unto all men of what he had seen and heard, suffering as well as doing great things for His name’s sake. Ananias told him, “Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.” How striking that Ananias, whom Saul would have seized for prison and death, should be the instrument of giving him light and life.

    Tradition makes Ananias subsequently bishop of Damascus and a martyr.

    ANATH Judges 3:31; 5:6.

    ANATHEMA Hebrews cheerem : “a thing or person devoted;” so, accursed to the Lord, and incapable of being redeemed, and, if a person, doomed to death ( Leviticus 27:28,29; 1 Corinthians 12:3; 16:22; Galatians 1:9; Romans 9:3, compare Exodus 32:32). “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren,” lit. “I was wishing,” i.e., the wish was rising within me, so intense is my love for Israel, that I myself were sacrificed in soul as well as body for their sake, were such wish lawful, which it is not; the wish remained incomplete, checked by calmer and more sober thoughts, which vehement zeal for the moment forgot. It never passed beyond the region of deepfeeling, wherein he was transported momentarily out of all other considerations into the all absorbing one, “an ecstasy of charity” (Bacon). “ANATHEMA-MARANATHA” (i.e., the Lord cometh: 1 Corinthians 16:22. An Aramaic watchword of the first age, suitable for believers in all ages: If He come not to bless, He shall come to smite with a curse) alludes to Malachi 4:5,6: “To those who fear [in the New Testament ‘love’] the Lord’s name, He comes as the Sun of Righteousness with healing on His wings;” but to those who fear and love Him not, lie will come smiting the earth with a “curse” (cheerem or anathema). Paul pronounces the anathema on those loving Him not, while as yet He is not come, that by fleeing to Him now they may escape the curse and gain the blessing. Paul is God’s inspired mouthpiece proclaiming the doom to which those not loving Jesus are set apart, and his inspired prayer of anathema is but praying that (God’s will be done.

    In the Old Testament forcible setting apart to His glory of what ought to have been, but was not willingly, consecrated to Him, is implied. So in the case of Jericho the city was so devoted to destruction, and all in it, except Rahab; and the silver, gold, brass, and iron, were consecrated to Jehovah ( Joshua 6:17-26). Similarly Israel’s vow ( Numbers 21:1-3): “if Thou wilt deliver this people into my hand, I will utterly destroy [Hebrews make a cheerem or anathema of] their cities.” Therefore they called that place Hormah (Chormah ), i.e., the place made a (cheerem ) or anathema of; put under a ban; devoted to God for destruction as accursed). This gives the true view of the dooming of the Canaanites; the sinners themselves were to be made an awful example of God’s punitive justice to which they were set apart; their possessions were properly the Lord’s, but were given by Him to Israel as a gift henceforth to be used to His glory. The degree of the work of destruction varied: men alone ( Deuteronomy 20:18); men, women, and children, the cattle and spoil kept for the army ( Deuteronomy 2:34,35); every living creature ( Deuteronomy 20:16; 1 Samuel 15:3); virgins excepted ( Numbers 31:17). Had the Canaanites humbled themselves before God’s judgment and submitted, they would have been spared; but they were given up to judicial hardening to their own ruin ( Joshua 11:19,20).

    ANATHOTH 1. 1 Chronicles 7:8. 2. 1 Chronicles 10:19. 3. A priests’ city of Benjamin. Meaning “echoes” ( Joshua 21:18; Chronicles 6:60).

    Abiathar the priest was banished thither by Solomon after his attempt to put Adonijah on the throne ( 1 Kings 2:26). Abiezer’s birthplace, one of David’s 30 captains ( 2 Samuel 23:27); Jehu’s also, one of his mighties ( 1 Chronicles 12:3); Jeremiah’s, the priest and prophet, also ( Jeremiah 1:1). Among the restored captives from Babylon were men of Anathoth The name is variously given: Anethothite, Anetothite, Antothite. Near the road, about three miles N. from Jerusalem ( Isaiah 10:30). Now Anata, on a broad ridge, amidst fields of grain, figs, and olives. There are remains of walls, and quarries supplying stone to Jerusalem.

    ANCIENT OF DAYS Daniel 7:9,13,22. The everlasting Jehovah, as contrasted with the ephemeral transitoriness of the four successive world powers, stable as they seemed for a time.

    ANDREW A Greek name. A fisherman of Bethsaida at the lake of Gennesareth, son of Jonas. One of the first two called of the apostles; who in his turn called his brother Simon to Jesus ( John 1:35-41). Previously he had been John the Baptist’s disciple, and by him had been pointed to Jesus twice as the Lamb of God. Prompt decision for Christ, not levity, led him to obey. A further call took place subsequently and more formally, when, after they had resumed their usual occupation, Jesus found them casting their net into the sea ( Matthew 4:18). Void of the boldness and rocklike robustness of Peter’s character, which but few can aspire to, he had that feature which makes him a pattern within the reach of all, a simple, earnest determination in carrying out the dictates of conscience. Another feature in Andrew was, though not so qualified for public usefulness as some, he was as ardent as any to win souls in private to Jesus. When we admire the foremost apostle through whom 3000 were added to the church on Pentecost, let us not forget that, without Andrew, Simon would never have become Peter. So well known was his love for souls, that when certain Greeks desired to see Jesus, Andrew was the person to whom Philip (whose name also is Greek, and who, like Andrew, when called, in turn called Nathanael) brought them. Then he and Philip (the two whose names imply connection with the Greeks; an interesting coincidence, and who had shown their zeal for conversions) brought them to Jesus ( John 1:43-46; 12:20-22). Andrew had his faults too; he shared in the disciples’ unbelief when Jesus tried their faith, “Whence shall we buy bread that these (5000) may eat?” (John 6).

    Andrew answered, “There is a lad here that hath five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?” Even here he suggests a supply, but with defective faith. Andrew was one of the four who asked Jesus privately, “When shall these things be, and what is the sign of Thy coming and the end of the world?” Andrew was not elsewhere admitted to the private interviews which Peter, John, and James enjoyed: at the raising of Jairus daughter, the transfiguration, and Gethsemane. In Matthew 10:2 and Luke 6:14 Andrew is next after Peter; but in Mark 3:10; Acts 1:14, after the first and foremost three, Peter, James, and John, and before his Greek-named associate Philip. Eusebius makes him after Christ’s ascension preach in Scythia; Jerome, in Greece; where tradition makes him to have been crucified on a crux decussata, an X-shaped cross.

    ANDRONICUS A Christian at Rome, saluted by Paul ( Romans 16:7). He and Junia were Paul’s “kinsmen” (or the Greek may mean “fellow countrymen,” Romans 16:11,21) “and fellow prisoners, of note among the apostles” (in the wider sense than the Twelve: Acts 14:4,14; 2 Corinthians 8:23; 1 Thessalonians 2:6), “and in Christ” (by faith) “before” him.

    Bishop of Pannonia subsequently, says “Hippolytus.”

    ANEM City of Issachar, belonging to the Gershomites ( 1 Chronicles 6:73). In Joshua 19:21 “Engannim,” of which “Anem” may be contraction.

    ANER 1. City of Manasseh, W. of Jordan; of the Kohathites ( 1 Chronicles 6:70); Joshua 21:25, “Tanach,” of which “Aner” may be the corruption. 2. One of the three Hebronite chiefs who helped Abraham against the four invading kings ( Genesis 14:13,24).

    ANGELS (messengers). Often with “of God” or “Jehovah” added. Sometimes called the “holy ones,” “saints.” The “Angel of God” often means the Divide Word, “the Image of the invisible God,” God Himself manifested ( Colossians 1:15; Genesis 22:11,12; 16:7,13; 31:11,13; 48:15,16; 33:14; compare Isaiah 63:9; Exodus 3:2,6,14; 23:20-22; Acts 27:23,24, compare Acts 23:11; Numbers 22:22,32,35); accepting as His due the worship which angels reject as mere creatures ( Revelation 19:10; 22:9); this manifestation was as man, an anticipation of the incarnation ( John 1:18; Genesis 18:2,22; 19:1; 32:24,30; Joshua 5:13,15). “Angel,” “Son of God,” “Gods” (Elohim ), “Holy One,” in the fullest sense, are names of the divine Word alone. His incarnation is the center by reference to which all angelic ministration is best understood.

    Compare John 1:51, Greek (aparti ), “from this time forth ye shall see heaven open” [heretofore shut, against man by sin: Hebrews 9:8; 10:19,20] “and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man,” as the antitypical Jacob’s ladder, the center of communication between men and God, the redeemed and the angelic world; Jesus’ miracles, of which mention immediately follows (John 2), are firstfruit of this newly opened communion of earth and heaven ( Genesis 28:12-17).

    Secondarily, God’s created messengers; as Israel ( Isaiah 42:19), Haggai ( Haggai 1:13), John ( Malachi 3:1; 2:7), the priesthood, ministers ( Ecclesiastes 5:6), the rulers or angels of the Christian churches ( Revelation 1:20), as Elohim , “gods.” Is applied to judges ( Psalm 82:6); compare Jesus’ application, John 10:34-37. As to the nature of “angels” in the limited sense, they are “spirits” ( Hebrews 1:7,14), of wind-like velocity, subtle nature, capable of close communion with God; sharers in His truth, purity, and love, since they ever behold His face ( Matthew 18:10), even as the redeemed shall ( 1 John 3:2); not necessarily incorporeal; Luke 20:36 (compare Philippians 3:21), 1 Corinthians 15:44, seemingly but not certainly imply their having bodies. Their glorious appearance ( Daniel 10:6), like our Lord’s when transfigured and afterward as the ascended Savior ( Revelation 1:14-16), and their human form ( Luke 24:4; Acts 1:10), favor the same view.

    Close kindred of nature between angels and men is implied in both being alike called “sons of God” ( Job 1:6; 38:7; Daniel 3:25,28) and “gods” (Elohim ) ( Psalm 8:5; Hebrews Elohim “angels,” Psalm 97:7; Luke 3:38). Finite, but ever progressing in the participation of God’s infinite perfection ( Job 4:18; Matthew 24:36; 1 Peter 1:12). Our fellow servants, “sent forth unto ministry for the sake of them who shall be heirs of salvation” ( Hebrews 1:14), i.e., on ministrations appointed by God and Christ for the good of them who shall be heirs of salvation.

    Worship and service are their twofold function; priests in the heavenly temple ( Isaiah 6:1-3; 1 Kings 22:19; Daniel 7:9,10; Revelation 5:11), and sent forth thence on God’s missions of love and justice.

    As finite, and having liberty, they were capable of temptation. Some “kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” ( 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6). “The elect angels” fell not; they take part, by act and sympathy, in our affairs, and shall witness the Judgment ( Luke 15:10; 1 Corinthians 4:9). hefallen are not yet actually confined in the bottomless pit, but are doomed to it, “reserved unto judgment,” and though seeming free, and ranging in our air, under the prince of the powers of the air ( Ephesians 2:2), are really in “chains of darkness” already, able only to hurt to the length of their chain. Satan is their prince, a liar, murderer, slanderer; and such are they ( John 8:44). The probation of the elect angels is over; their crown is won, they are the “holy ones” now ( Daniel 8:13), under the blessed necessity of sinning no more. “Watchers” of men, jealous for God’s honor ( Daniel 4:13,23). Bad angels are permitted to try believers now, as Job; good angels are God’s ministers of vengeance on the bad ( Revelation 12:8,9; 20:1,2). Such shall the saints be at last, “equal to the angels,” holy, made perfect, judges of angels and the world, ministering mediators of blessing to subject creatures ( Hebrews 12:23; Corinthians 6:2,3; Revelation 5:10).

    In the natural world angels minister, as in directing wind and flame (according to one translation of <19A404> Psalm 104:4; Hebrews 1:7): “the angel of Jehovah” wrought in the plague on the Egyptian firstborn ( Exodus 12:23; Hebrews 11:28), and on the rebels in the wilderness ( 1 Corinthians 10:10), on Israel under David ( 2 Samuel 24:16; Chronicles 21:16), on Sennacherib’s army ( 2 Kings 19:35), on Herod ( Acts 12:23). An angel troubled the pool of Bethesda (the Alex. manuscript supports the verse, the Sin. and the Vat. manuscripts reject it), giving it a healing power, as in our mineral springs ( John 5:4): They act, in an unknown way, in and through “nature’s laws.” In the spiritual world too: by their ministration the Sinaitic law was given, “ordained by angels” ( Galatians 3:19), “spoken” by them ( Hebrews 2:2), by their “disposition” or appointment ( Acts 7:53; compare Deuteronomy 33:2; Psalm 68:17). From the first creation of our world they took the liveliest interest in the earth ( Job 38:7). When man fell by evil angels, with beautiful propriety it was ordered that other angels, holy and unfallen, should minister for God in His reparation of the evil caused to man by their fallen fellow spirits. They rescued at Jehovah’s command righteous Lot from doomed Sodom, Jacob from his murderous brother (Genesis 19; 32). “Manna” is called “angels’ food,” “the grain of heaven”; not that angels eat it, but it came from above whence angels come, and through their ministry ( Psalm 78:25). When Elisha was in Dothan, surrounded by Syrian hosts, and his servant cried, “Alas! how shall we do?” the Lord opened his eyes to see the mount full of chariots and horses of fire round about ( Kings 6:15,17, compare Psalm 94:7). By God’s angel Daniel was saved in the lions’ den ( Daniel 6:22); compare Daniel 3:28 as to the fiery furnace. Michael (whom some questionably identify with the Son of God) is represented as Israel’s champion against Israel’s (the literal and the spiritual) accuser, Satan ( Daniel 12:1, compare Revelation 12:7-10).

    Daniel 10 unfolds the mysterious truth that there are angel princes in the spirit world, answering to the God-opposed leaders of kingdoms in the political world, the prince of Persia and the prince of Grecia standing in antagonism to Michael. In patriarchal times their ministry is more familiar, and less awful, than in after times. Compare Genesis 24:7,40 (the angelic guidance of Abraham’s servant in choosing a wife for Isaac, and encouraging Jacob in his loneliness at Bethel on first leaving home, Genesis 28) with Judges 6:21,22; 13:16,22. They appear, like the prophets and kings in subsequent times, in the character of God’s ministers, carrying out God’s purposes in relation to Israel and the pagan world powers (Zechariah 1; 2; 3; 4, etc.). When the Lord of angels became flesh, they ministered before and at His birth (Luke 1; 2; Matthew 1:20), after the temptation ( Matthew 4:11), in the agony of Gethsemane ( Luke 22:43), at His resurrection and ascension ( Matthew 28:2; Luke 24:4; John 20:12; Acts 1:10,11). Their previous and subsequent ministrations to men ( Acts 5:19; 8:26; 10:3; 12:7, Peter’s deliverance, Acts 27:23) all hinge on their intimate connection with and ministry to Him, redeemed man’s divine Head ( Psalm 91:11; Matthew 4:6), Hence they are the guardians of Christ’s little ones, not thinking it beneath their dignity to minister to them ( Matthew 18:10); not attached singly to single individuals, but all or one ready at God’s bidding to minister to each. (In Acts 12 the remark, “it is his [Peter’s] angel,” receives no countenance from Peter or the inspired writer of Acts, Luke; but is the uninspired guess of those in Mary’s house.) Rejoice over each recovered penitent ( Luke 15:10); are present in Christian congregations ( Corinthians 11:10); exercising some function in presenting the saints’ prayers, incensed by Christ’s merits, the one Mediator, before God ( Revelation 8:3; 5:8); not to be prayed to, which is thrice forbidden ( Revelation 19:10; 22:9; Colossians 2:18): when we send an offering to the King, the King’s messenger durst not appropriate the King’s exclusive due. Ministers of grace now, and at the dying hour carrying the believer’s soul to paradise ( Luke 16:22), but ministers of judgment, and gathering the elect, in the great day ( Matthew 13:39,41,49; 16:27; 24:31). Their number is counted by myriad’s ( Hebrews 12:22: Greek “to myriads, namely the festal assembly of angels”) ( Deuteronomy 33:2; Psalm 68:17; Daniel 7:10; Jude 1:14). There are various ranks, thrones, principalities, powers in the angelic kingdom of light, as there are also in Satan’s kingdom of darkness ( Ephesians 1:22; 6:12; Colossians 1:16; Daniel 10:13; 12:1; Romans 8:38). [See SERAPHIM , see CHERUBIM , see MICHAEL , see GABRIEL .] Some conjecture that angels had originally natural bodies, which have been developed into spiritual bodies, as the saints’ bodies shall ( 1 Corinthians 15:40-46); for they in Scripture accept material food (Genesis 18) and appear in human form, and never dwell in men’s bodies as the demons, who, naked and homeless, seek human bodies as their habitation (see Luke 20:36, “equal unto the angels”: Philippians 3:20,21). Many of the momentous issues of life are seen often to hinge upon seemingly slight incidents. Doubtless, besides the material instruments and visible agents, the invisible angels work in a marvelous way, under God’s providence, guiding events at the crisis so as to carry out the foreordained end. They “desire to look into” the mysteries of redemption, and they learn “by the church the manifold wisdom of God” ( Ephesians 3:10; 1 Peter 1:12). The saints (the living creatures and 24 elders) occupy the inner circle, the angels the outer circle, round the throne of the Lamb ( Revelation 5:11).

    ANIAM 1 Chronicles 7:19.

    ANIM A city in the mountains of Judah ( Joshua 15:50). Derived from Ainain, “the two springs,” perhaps at Khirbet el Jif, near Khirbet el Dilbeh, the site of Achsah’s upper and lower springs (Conder, Pal. Expl.).

    ANISE Some think the Pimpinella anisum, others more probably the dill, Anethrum graveolens, of the order Umbelliferae; the seeds used in medicine as carminatives, in cookery as condiments, like caraway seed. “Anise” is from the Greek not conquerable (aniketon ) in its healing power; “dill” from the Norse, the soothing herb. The seeds, the leaves, and the stem of dill are (says Rabbi Eliezer) subject to tithe ( Matthew 23:23).

    ANKLET ( Isaiah 3:16,18,20.) Women wore ankle rings on both feet, joined by short chains, which “tinkled” as they walked, and which made them take gracefully short steps. Livingstone describes an African chief’s wife similarly wearing “a profusion of iron rings with little pieces of sheet iron attached to make a tinkling as she walked in her mincing African style.”

    ANNA ( Luke 2:36,37). Daughter of Phanuel, of Asher; a widow of 84; a prophetess, i.e. guided by Providence, when the infant Jesus was being presented in the temple, to come in “that instant,” and enabled by the Spirit to discern and to announce to others the Messiah, and to render praises accordingly. After seven years of married life she had given up all other concerns to join the women who devoted themselves to a continual attendance at the temple services “night and day”; “a widow indeed” ( Timothy 5:5). One of “God’s own elect, which cry day and night unto Him,” looking for the promised redemption “unto which the twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come” ( Acts 26:7; contrast Revelation 12:10; Luke 18:7; compare Exodus 38:8). It is remarkable she is the only one of note mentioned in Scripture of the tribe of Asher, though the name means blessedness. A sample of an aged female’s waiting faith, as Simeon is of an aged man’s.

    ANNAS Son of Seth. Appointed A.D. 7, in his 37th year, to the high priesthood by Quirinius, the imperial governor of Syria; obliged to give way to Ismael by Valerius Gratus, procurator of Judaea, in the beginning of Tiberius’ reign, A.D. 14. Eleazar, son of Annas, followed Ismael; then Simon; then Joseph Caiaphas, son-in-law of Annas ( John 18:13.) He remained until A.D. 37. Annas is put before Caiaphas, and both are called “high priests ( Luke 3:2). Jesus’ case was first heard before Annas, who virtually wielded the high priest’s power, and perhaps was sagan, the high priest’s deputy; then He was tried before Caiaphas. Annas probably was president of the Sanhedrin, Caiaphas actually high priest. But in Acts 4:6 Annas is called “high priest,” Caiaphas, John, and Alexander are called “of his kindred.” He lived to old age, and had five sons high priests.

    ANOINT To put oil on the head or body; a practice common in the E. ( Ruth 3:3).

    To cease anointing was a mark of mourning ( 2 Samuel 14:2; Daniel 10:3; Matthew 6:17). A mark of respect to a guest so common that to omit it implied defective hospitality ( Luke 7:46; Psalm 23:5); Heb., “Thou hast made fat,” or “unctuous” ( John 11:2; 12:3). A body was prepared for burial with unguents ( Mark 16:1; 14:8). Metaphorically, “anointed with oil” means successful, joyous ( Psalm 92:10; Ecclesiastes 9:8). “Anointing with the oiler gladness” ( Psalm 45:7; Hebrews 1:9) expresses spiritual joy, such as Messiah felt and shall feel in seeing the blessed fruit of His sufferings ( Isaiah 61:3). Anointing prevents excessive perspiration in the hot and arid E., gives elasticity to the limbs, and acts as clothing in both sun and shade. The ordinary clothing is thin, and the heat and sand produce weariness and irritation, which the oil relieves. Oil was used as a medicament for the sick, and liniment for bodily pain ( Isaiah 1:6), so that it was used as a symbol in miraculous cures ( Mark 6:13). The usage which Christ practiced Himself ( John 9:6,11) and committed to His apostles was afterward continued with laying on of hands as a token of the highest faculty of medicine in the church.

    Rome vainly continues the sign, when the reality, the power of miraculous healing, is wanting. Rome’s “extreme unction” is administered to heal the soul when the body’s life is despaired of. James’s ( James 5:14,15) unction was to heal the body.

    The sacred use of oil was for consecrating things or persons to God. So Jacob anointed for a pillar the stone which had been his pillow at Bethel ( Genesis 28:18). The oil is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, and as applied to things gave them a ceremonial sacredness, fitting them for holy ministrations. As applied to prophets ( 1 Chronicles 16:22; 1 Kings 19:16), priests ( Leviticus 4:3), and kings ( Isaiah 45:1), it marked their consecration to the office, and was a symbol of the spiritual qualification divinely imparted for its due discharge ( Exodus 30:29,30). 1 Samuel 10:1,6: King Saul. 1 Samuel 16:13,14: David thrice anointed: first to the right; then over Judah; then actually over the whole nation. Isaiah 61:1: Messiah, twice so designated in the Old Testament ( Psalm 2:2; Daniel 9:25,26), at once Prophet, Priest, and King, the Center of all prophecy, the Antitype of all priesthood, and the Source and End of all kingship ( Luke 4:18; Acts 4:27; 10:38). He was anointed with the Holy Spirit from the womb, then at His baptism ( John 1:32,33,41). Hereby the New Testament marks Him as the Messiah of the Old Testament ( Acts 9:22; 17:2,3; 18:5,28.) What He is His people are, Messiahs or “anointed ones” by union with Him ( Zechariah 4:14), having the unction of the Holy Spirit ( 2 Corinthians 1:21; 1 John 2:20). Though priests in general were at first anointed, afterward anointing was restricted to the high priest, called “the priest that is anointed:” the perfume used was of stacte, onycha, and galbanum, with pure frankincense, and it was death to imitate it. Antitypically, to Christ, the true high priest alone, belongs the fullness of the Spirit, which it is blasphemy to arrogate. “The Lord’s anointed” was the ordinary phrase for the theocratic king ( 1 Samuel 12:3; Lamentations 4:20). “Anointing the shield” was to make the hide of which it was made supple and less liable to crack ( Isaiah 21:5). “Anointing the eyes with eyesalve” expresses imparting of spiritual perceptions ( Revelation 3:18). “The yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing” ( Isaiah 10:27), i.e., the Assyrian oppression shall be taken away from Judah, because of the consecration that is upon the elect nation, its prophets, priests, kings, and holy place ( <19A515> Psalm 105:15); the Antitype to all which is Messiah, “the Anointed” ( Daniel 9:24). It is for Messiah’s sake that all their deliverances are vouchsafed to His people.

    ANT ( Proverbs 6:6-8; 30:25: “provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”) So Hesiod, Works and Days, 776; Horace, Sat., 1:1, 33; Virgil, AEneid, 4:402; Plautus, Trinummus, 2:4, 1, 7; AElian, Natura Animal., 2:25, 6:43; AEsop’s Fables, 92 (Tauchnitz edition). Ants in northern Europe lie dormant in winter; and do not feed on grain, but flesh of other insects, worms, birds, the honeydew of aphides, and saccharine matter, exuding from trees. But in southern Europe there are species which feed on grain and store it for winter use. Solomon implies, the ant providently and diligently uses the proper seasons for obtaining her food, though she has “no guide, overseer, or ruler,” such as man has in parents, teachers, and masters; therefore men are inexcusable in sluggishness. “Redeem the time” (Greek favorable season) is the spiritual lesson ( Ephesians 5:16). There is no monarch, such as the queen is among bees; but ants labor together as a republic, having “no ruler” as Solomon describes. Moggridge (Harvesting Ants) has by observation proved that there are four harvesting ants on the Riviera, namely,: Atta barbara, under two forms, the one wholly black, the other red headed; Atta structor, claret brown colored; and Atta megacephala or Pheidole, a minute bodied, yellow ant, with great head, which works chiefly at night. The Atta barbara, mounting the stem of a fruiting plant as shepherd’s purse, and seizing a green pod in its jaws, and fixing its hind legs as a pivot, turns round and round and strains the fibers until they snap. Ants sometimes allow the capsules which they have cut to drop, and their companions below carry them away. Neither the Atta barbara nor the structor bring aphids into their nests. A host of ants seek and bring in the grain; others sort the materials, strip off the useless envelopes of seed or grain, and carry them out to throw away. Moggridge found masses of seeds stored in chambers and long subcylindrical galleries prepared in the soil. The granaries on a rock covered with earth lay horizontally from one and a half to six inches below the surface. The ants have some mysterious power which checks germination. The few seeds which may germinate the ants prevent from further growth by cutting off the end of the radicle. Hebrews “ant,” nemalah , is derived by some from Arabic for” clever.” The Arabs put one in the new-born infant’s hand, saying, “May he prove clever!”

    Others take it from namal , Hebrews “cut off,” the body being cut into segments, joined by but a slight thread. Similarly in Proverbs 30:25 the ants’ wisdom is set forth as making up for the absence of the strength of larger creatures. They belong to the family formicidae, and order Hymenoptera. The mutual affection between the members of the republic is conspicuous in ants. In northern Europe ants strike with their antennae and so make the aphids discharge the juice extracted by their suckers from vegetables; the ants in fact make the aphids their milk cows, imprisoning a number in their nests to serve as a supply in winter (Huber). Both the insect masters and the insect cows are torpid in winter in northern Europe; but in warm winters both at times come to life. The Indian ant (Atta, providens), according to Colossians Sykes, raises up heaps of grass seed in January when they ripen, in store for the season of need.

    ANTICHRIST There are seven sets of passages noteworthy. (I.) Christ’s predictions of false Christs and false prophets ( Matthew 21:3-31). (II.) John’s prophecy of “Antichrist” (this name occurs only with him) ( 1 John 2:18-23; 4:1-3; 2 John 1:5,7). (III.) Paul’s “adversary” (Greek [antikeimenos , in sound and sense answering to Antichrist) ( 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12; 2 Timothy 3:1-5), “in the last days, perilous times,” characterized by heady high mindedness, with the form but without the power of godliness, the love of pleasure supplanting the love of God, contrasted with the earlier “latter times,” marked by seducing spirits, doctrines of demons, celibacy, and abstinence from meats ( 1 Timothy 4:1-5). (IV.) Daniel’s “little horn” from among the ten horns of the fourth beast, or Roman empire ( Daniel 7:7-27). (V.) Daniel’s “little horn” from one of the four notable horns of the third beast, or Graeco Macedonia divided into four at Alexander’s death, the willful king ( Daniel 8:8-25; 11:36-39). (VI.) The beast from the sea ( Revelation 13:1-8), ridden by the whore ( Revelation 17:1-7). (VII.) The beast from the earth and the bottomless pit, or the false prophet ( Revelation 11:7; 13:11-18; 17:8-18, 19:11-21). (I.) The false Christs and false prophets (Matthew 24) point to the pretenders to Messiahship before the fall of Jerusalem, the foreshadowing of the future impostors about to deceive all but; the elect. They are the spirits of demons which prepare the false prophet’s way, but they are not the false prophet himself ( Revelation 16:13,14). (II.) John’s Antichrist is stated to have been a subject of his oral teaching first ( 1 John 2:18; 4:3), so Paul ( 2 Thessalonians 2:5), and is therefore alluded to, not described. All who deny Jesus’s Messiahship and Sonship (as Cerinthus and the Gnostics of John’s days) forerun the Antichrist “to come” (the same Greek verb is used as of Christ’s” coming”). (III.) Paul’s antikeimenos , “who opposeth all that is called God,” is the “Antichrist” of John. He is not to come until “he who now letteth (hinders) and that which withholdeth” (hinders; the same Greek verb as before, only neuter instead of masculine) be taken out of the way; i.e., the curbing power of human law (neuter) and the curber (masculine), namely, the Roman emperor and whoever may be representative of the fourth world kingdom’s power just before Antichrist. The unanimous consent of the early Christians that the Roman empire is “what withholdeth” was so unlikely to suggest itself to them, inasmuch as regarding it as idolatrous and often persecuting, that this explanation seems to have been preserved from Paul’s oral teaching. Another less probable view is that the Holy Spirit is “He who now letteth,” and the elect church the thing “that withholdeth,” and that is to be taken out of the way on the eve of Antichrist’s coming. (IV.) Daniel’s “little horn” ( Daniel 7:7-27) of the fourth kingdom is the papacy as a temporal power, rising on the ruins of the Roman empire, and plucking up three of its ten horns. (V.) Distinct from the” little horn” of Daniel 8, which is connected with the third, not the fourth, kingdom;ANTIOCHUS Epiphanes, of the Syrian fourth part of the divided Graeco-Macedonian or third kingdom, who persecuted the Jews, prohibited circumcision, and substituted the worship of Jupiter Olympius, with whom he identified himself as if God, instead of that of Jehovah, in the templeat Jerusalem. But this Old Testament Antichrist has a worse antitype in the New Testament, namely, the Antichrist of the last days. The language of Daniel 8:8-25 and Daniel 11:36-39, partially fulfilled by Antiochus, is exhaustively fulfilled only in the last Antichrist. (VI.) As the beast from the sea has ten horns, comprising both E. and W., and power is given to it for forty-two months ( Revelation 13:1,5), so the little horn ( Daniel 7:3,7) absorbs the power of the ten-horned fourth beast out of the sea (the Roman empire) and wears out the saints for three and a half times (3 1/2 years, i.e. 42 months, or 1260 years, a year for a day). Both have “a mouth speaking great things” ( Daniel 7:8,11,20,25); both blaspheme against the Most High ( Revelation 13:6,7); both make war with the saints, and prevail; both persecute the saints ( Revelation 13:7-10; 17:6), the beast being under the guidance of the harlot “drunken with their blood.” The little horn of Daniel 7 therefore is the first beast of Revelation 13. Neither the little horn nor the first beast is Antichrist, who is an individual; it is a polity. (VII.) The beast from the earth ( Revelation 13:11), or as he soon reveals himself ( Revelation 11:7; 17:8), from the bottomless pit, the false prophet ( Revelation 16:13; 19:20; 20:10), appears only when the harlot is unseated from the first beast. The harlot, the once pure woman (Revelation 12) corrupted, the apostate church, is distinct from the beast which it rides. The church, though corrupted, retains the human form, i.e.

    God’s image, in which man was originally formed. The beast is the world estranged from God and under Satan, and so, however powerful, intellectual, and refined, essentially bestial. The faithful city ( Isaiah 1:21) having become Babylon, the whore (Rome on the seven hills, Revelation 17:9) is punished in righteous retribution by that world upon which she rode, and for which she abandoned her faithful witness for God (Revelation 17). Then after her judgment follows Antichrist’s development.

    The “falling away” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 answers to the first beast of Revelation 13, also to the departure from the faith, in enforced celibacy, asceticism, doctrines of demons, etc., of 1 Timothy 4:1-3. In the second Council of Nice, A.D. 787, image worship was sanctioned. In 754 the temporal power of the popes began by Pepin’s grant to Pope Stephen III. of the three territories (answering to the three horns plucked up before the little horn, Daniel 7:8): Rome, the kingdom of the Lombards, and the exarchate of Ravenna; 1260 years from this date would end in 2014.

    Others date from A.D. 533, Justinian’s edict acknowledging Pope John II: head of the church. The wounding to death and then the healing of the beast’s deadly wound answers to the revival of idolatry and the setting up of a virtually pagan kingdom again at Rome in the eighth century ( Revelation 13:3). Again, in the case of the second beast or the false prophet, the wound given at the Reformation is healed, and he appears again as “the beast that was, and is not, yet is,” a resurrection man, the embodiment of a resurrection empire, a mock Christ; as the true Christ saith, “I am He that liveth, and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore” ( Revelation 1:18; 17:8). As Christ is the second Person in the Trinity, so Antichrist is the second in the anti-trinity, composed of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet (who bears witness to the first beast, as the Holy Spirit witnesseth of the Son).

    Antichrist’s characteristics (2 Thessalonians 2; 1 John 2:18-22; 4:3) shall be open opposition to God and religion, a claim to God’s exclusive prerogatives, lawlessness, power of lying miracles and of beguiling souls under Satan’s energizing, having a lamb’s horns, i.e., outwardly resembling Christ or Messiah ( Revelation 13:11); sitting in God’s temple as God, apparently restored Israel’s persecutor, whence the sacred Hebrew is the language of Daniel 8--12, wherein the little horn from the East is a leading subject, whereas the world’s language, Chaldee, is that of Daniel 7 wherein the Romish little horn is described. At first hailed by Israel with hosannahs as her Messiah ( John 5:43), and making a covenant with the Jews, then breaking it (Daniel 9; 11; 12; Zechariah 11; 12; 13; 14). Antichrist, as the second beast or false prophet, will be personally an avowed atheist ( John 2:22), yet represent himself as the decaying church’s vindicator, compel men to reverence her, breathe new life into her by using the secular arm in her behalf ( Revelation 13:12-17), concentrating in himself the infidel lawless spirit working in the world from Paul’s days ( Thessalonians 2:7). Heretofore infidelity and superstition have been on opposite sides, but when these shall combine against law, liberty, and Christianity, a period mercifully brief shall ensue, unparalleled in horrors by any that has gone before ( Daniel 12:1-3).

    The two witnesses (Revelation 11) are variously explained as Moses and Elijah; Joshua the high priest and Zerubbabel the civil prince; the Word and the faithful church, to be slain or suppressed, perhaps about the same time that the harlot too is judged by the beast or Antichrist (Revelation 17; 18; 19.) The place of their temporary death is Jerusalem ( Revelation 11:8), “where our Lord was crucified.” “The number of the beast” is 666, i.e. 6, the world’s number, in units, tens, and hundreds. Six is next to the sacred seven, which it mimics but falls short of; it is the number of the world given over to judgment. There is a pause between the sixth and seventh seals, the sixth and seventh trumpets: for the judgments of the world are completed in six; at the seventh the world kingdoms become Christ’s. As twelve is the number of the church, so six, its half, symbolizes the world kingdoms broken. The radicals in Christ are CH, R and ST (X P); Antichrist’s monogram personates it, but falls short of it, Ch X St (X) (666). It is curious that the only unquestionable 666 ( 1 Kings 10:14; 2 Chronicles 9:13) in the Old Testament is the 666 talents of gold that came in yearly to Solomon, and were among the correcting influences that misled him. Moreover, the only two Greek nouns in the New Testament, whose value numerically is exactly 666, are precisely the two expressing the grand corrupters of the church and sources of idolatry, “tradition” (paradosis ), the corrupter of doctrine, “wealth” or the pursuit of it (euporia , only in Acts 19:25), the corrupter of practice ( Colossians 3:5). The children of Adonikam are 666 in Ezra 2:13, but 667 in Nehemiah 7:18. Adonijah, bearing the name of the Lord Jehovah, rose up against the Lord’s anointed, and so is a type of Antichrist. The Hebrew letters of Balaam (type of the false prophet whose spiritual knowledge shall be perverted to Satanic ends; Revelation 2:14 favors this, also the fact that Antichrist mainly shall oppress Israel, Daniel 8; 9; 11; 12) amount to 666. The Greek letters of Lateinos (Irenaeus), Rome’s language in all official acts, amount to 666.

    The forced unity marked by Rome’s ritual being everywhere in Latin is the premature counterfeit of the true unity, only to be realized when Christ, God’s true Vicar on earth, shall appear, and all the earth shall “in a pure language serve the Lord with one consent” ( Zephaniah 3:9). The last Antichrist will be closely connected with his predecessor (as the second beast is with the first in Revelation 13), and will arrogate all Rome’s claims besides those peculiar to himself.

    ANTIOCH 1. In Syria, capital of its Greek kings, and of its Roman governors subsequently. Built where Lebanon running N. and Taurus E., meet at a bend of the river Orontes; partly on an island, partly on the level left bank.

    Near it was Apollo’s licentious sanctuary, Daphne. Nicolas the deacon was a proselyte of Antioch. The Christians dispersed by Stephen’s martyrdom preached at Antioch to idolatrous Greeks, not “Grecians” or Greekspeaking Jews, according to the Alexandrine manuscript ( Acts 11:20,26), whence a church having been formed under Barnabas and Paul’s care, the disciples were first called “Christians” there. From Antioch their charity was sent by the hands of Barnabas and Saul to the brethren at Jerusalem suffering in the famine. Paul began his ministry systematically here. At Antioch Judaizers from Jerusalem disturbed the church ( Acts 15:1). Here Paul rebuked Peter for dissimulation ( Galatians 2:11,12).

    From Antioch Paul started on his first missionary journey ( Acts 13:1-3), and returned to it ( Acts 14:26). He began, after the Jerusalem decree, addressed to the Gentile converts at Antioch, and ended, his second missionary journey there ( Acts 15:36; 18:22,23). His third journey also began there. Ignatius was subsequently bishop there for forty years, down to his martyrdom A. D. 107.

    Antioch was founded by Seleucus Nicator, and Jews were given the same political privileges as Greeks. Antiochus Epiphanes formed a great colonnaded street intersecting it from one end to the other. Pompey made it a free city. The citizens were framed for scurrility and giving nick-names. “CHRISTIAN” (see) was probably a name of their invention, and not of the disciples’ origination. Now called Antakia, a poor mean place; some ancient walls remain on the crags of mount Silpius. A gateway still bears the name of Paul. 2. ANTIOCH IN PISIDIA: Also founded by Seleucus Nicator. Made a colony by Rome; called also Caesarea. Now Yalobatch, on a high ridge. When Paul, on his first missionary tour with Barnabas, preached in the synagogue there, many Gentiles believed. The Jews therefore raised a persecution by the wealthy women of the place, and drove him from Antioch to Iconium, and followed him even to Lystra ( Acts 13:14,50,51; 14:19,21). On his return from Lystra he revisited Antioch to confirm the souls of the disciples amidst their tribulations. In 2 Timothy 3:11 he refers to Timothy’s acquaintance with his trials at Antioch of Pisidia; and Timothy’s own home was in the neighborhood ( Acts 16:1).

    ANTIOCHUS 1. Theus,” King of the N.” ( Daniel 11:6.) Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, to end the war with him, give Berenice his daughter to Antiochus, who divorced Laodice to marry Berenice. But Ptolemy having died, Betentre aid “not retain the power of the arm,” i.e., she was unable to be the mainstay of peace; for on Ptolemy’s death Antiochus took back Laodice, who then poisoned him and caused Berenice and her son to be slain. “But out of a branch other roots stood up” in the place of Philadelphus (margin) Ptolemy Euergetes, Berenice’s brother, who avenged her, overran Syria, and slew Laodice, “carrying captives into Egypt their gods, princes, and vessels of silver and gold.” He restored to Egypt many of the idols carried away formerly by the Persian Cambyses, whence the idolatrous Egyptians surnamed him Euergetes (benefactor). He “continued [four] more years than the king of the N.,” Antiochus. 2. Antiochus the Great, the grandson of Antiochus Theus, and son of Seleucus Callinicus, “came and overflowed and passed through,” recovering all the parts of Syria taken by Euergetes, and reached “even to his (border) fortress,” Raphia, near Gaza. Here “the king of the S.,” Ptolemy Philopator, Euergetes’ son, “shall fight with” Antiochus, and Antiochus’s “multitude [70,000 infantry and 500 cavalry] shall be given into his hand.” 10,000 were slain and 4,000 made captive. Ptolemy’s “heart was lifted up” by the victory, so that though he “cast down many ten thousands, he was not strengthened by it” through his luxurious indulgence. For Antiochus “returned after certain years” (14 after his defeat at Raphia) against Philopator’s son, Ptolemy Epiphanes. “In those times many stood against the king of the’ S.,” Epiphanes, namely, Philip of Macedon and “robbers of the people,” factious Jews, who, revolting from Ptolemy, helped Antiochus unconsciously, “establishing the vision,” i.e. fulfilling God’s purpose of bringing trials on Judaea, “but falling,” i.e. failing in their aim to make Judaea independent. So Antiochus, overcoming the Egyptian general Scopas at Paneas, near the Jordan’s sources, forced him to surrender at Zidon, a “fenced city.” Thus Antiochus “did according to his own will, standing in the glorious land (Judaea) which by his hand was consumed,” Hebrews perfected, i.e. perfectly brought under his sway, or else desolated by being the arena of conflict between Syria and Egypt.

    The “upright ones with him” were Israelites, so called from their high privileges, though their practice of violence in support of a pagan king is reprobated. Next he thought, by wedding his “daughter” Cleopatra to Ptolemy Epiphanes, ultimately to gain Cilicia, Lycia, and even Egypt itself; “corrupting her,” i.e. making her his tool; but “she did not stand on his side, but on that of her husband.” Then he “took many of the isles’” in the AEgean in his war with the Romans. But Scipio Asiaticus routed him at Magnesia 190 B.C., and so “caused the reproach Offered by him [to Rome’s allies] to cease.” Then, compelled to cede his territory W. of Taurus, “he turned his face toward the fort of his own land,” i.e. garrisoned the cities left to him. Finally, trying to plunder Jupiter’s temple at Elymais, he “fell” in an insurrection of the inhabitants. Selenens succeeded,” raiser of taxes in the glory of the kingdom,” or, as Maurer explains, “one who shall cause the taxgatherer to pass through the glorious kingdom,” Judaea; i.e. inheriting it by hereditary right. “Within a few days [12 years, “few” in comparison with Antiochus’s 37 years] he was destroyed, neither in anger nor in battle,” but poisoned by Heliodorus. 3. Antiochus IV. succeeded, surnamed Epiphanes, “the Illustrious,” for establishing the royal line against Heliodorus. Nicknamed Epimanes, “madman,” for his great unkingly freaks, carousing with the lowest, bathing with them in public, and throwing stones at passers by. Hence, and because of his craftily supplanting Demetrius, the rightful heir, he is called in Daniel 11: “a vile person.” He “came into the kingdom by flatteries” to Eumenes and to Attalus of Pergamus, and to the Syrians high and low.

    With his “flood” like hosts the Egyptians and Ptolemy Philometer, “the prince of the covenant,” were “overflown from before him.” Philometor was in covenant with him by right, being son of Cleopatra, Antiochus’s sister, to whom Antiochus the Great had promised, as dowry in marrying Ptolemy Epiphanes, Coelosyria and Palestine. Philometor’s generals in trying to obtain these covenanted promises were defeated, and Pehsium, the key of Egypt, was taken 171 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes “worked deceitfully,” feigning friendship to young Philometor, and” with a small people” or force, “peaceably” in pretense, he took Memphis and “the fattest places,” and seized Philometer. Thus he” did that which his fathers had not done,” namely, gained Egypt, and “scattered among (his dependents) the prey.” “He forecast his devices against the strongholds” of Egypt. He gained all except Alexandria. Retiring Judaea, where the Jews in joy at the report of his death had revolted, he took Jerusalem. He then “stirred up his power with a great army against the king of the S.,” Ptolemy Physcon (the gross), made king by the Egyptians because Philometer was in Antiochus’s hands. The Egyptian king did “not stand,” for his own nobles “forecast devices against him.” At last Antiochus, when checked at Alexandria, met the Egyptian king at Memphis, and “both spoke lies at one table,” trying to deceive one another. In his capture of Jerusalem, guided by Menelaus the high priest “against the holy covenant,” he took away the golden altar, candlestick, vessels of gold and silver from the temple, sacrificed swine on the altar, and sprinkled swine broth through the temple; his spoils from it amounted 1800 talents. A second time he openly invaded Egypt, but his invasion was not successful “as the former,” Popilius.

    Laenas, the Roman ambassador, arriving in Graeco Macedonian ships (“of Chittim”) and compelling him to return. Finding that God’s worship had been restored at Jerusalem, “he had indignation against the holy covenant.”

    He “had intelligence (correspondence) with them that forsook the holy covenant,” Menelaus and others, who had cast off circumcision and treated all religions as equally good for keeping the masses in check, and adopted Greek customs and philosophy. Antiochus’s general, Apollonius, dismantled Jerusalem, and from a high fortress slew the temple worshippers. Antiochus commanded all on pain of death to conform to the Greek religion, and consecrated the temple to Jupiter Olympius or Capitolinus. Identifying himself with that god “whom his fathers knew not,” and whose worship he imported from Rome, he wished to make his own worship universal. The Jews were constrained to profane the sabbath and monthly on the king’s birthday to eat of the idol sacrifices, and to go in procession to Bacchus, carrying ivy. This was the gravest peril that ever betel the theocratic nation; hence arose the need of a prediction so detailed as Daniel 8; 11. Porphyry the opponent of Christianity, had to admit the accurate correspondence of the facts to the prediction, but explained it away by alleging the latter to have been written after the events. But as Messianic events are foretold in Daniel, Jesus’ adversaries, the Jews, would never have forged the prophecies which confirm His claims. Daniel would comfort the faithful Jews amidst the “abominations” against “the covenant,” with the prospect of Messiah, who would confirm it. Bringing salvation, yet abolishing sacrifices, He would show that the temple services which they so missed were not indispensable to real worship. Language is used ( Daniel 11:31-45) which only in type applies to Antiochus, but exhaustively to Antichrist. Antiochus “took away the daily sacrifice, and placed [on the 15th day of Cisleu, on Jehovah’s altar] the abomination [idol, Jupiter Olympius’ image] that maketh desolate,” i.e. that pollutes the temple. The Maccabees (see 1 and 2 Macc. in Apocrypha), “who knew their God, were strong” in their determination not to deny Him, and “did exploits.” Judas, son of the patriot Mattathias, took as his motto the initials of Mi Camokah Baelim Jehovah ( Exodus 15:11), “Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods?” Allusion occurs to the martyrs under Antiochus in Hebrews 11:35-37: “others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.” Seven brothers and their mother submitted to a torturing death rather than deny their faith, the third saying, “Thou takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up who have died for His laws unto everlasting life” (compare Daniel 12:2). Two women who circumcised their infant boys were cast down with them headlong from the wall. Eleazar when forced to eat swine’s flesh spit it out, choosing to suffer death at fourscore and ten rather than deny the faith (compare the apocryphal 2 Macc. 6 and 2 Macc. 7). Some were roasted alive “by flame” in caves, whither they had fled to keep the sabbath. The first of the seven brothers, after his tongue was cut off, was fried to death in a heated pan. The persecution lasted three years; then, by the Maccabees, who defeated Antiochus’s troops under Lysias, the Jews were “holpen with a little help,” i.e. saved from extinction until the times of the Romans. Antiochus, while invading Egypt, hearing “tidings out of the E. and out of the N. of a revolt of his vassal Artaxias, king of Armenia, in the N., and Arsaces of Parthid in the E., went forth with great fury, on the way took Arad in Judah, devastated Phoenicia (according to Porphyry), “planting the tabernacles of his palace between the seas” (the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean), attacked the temple of Nanae at Elymais, (“the desire of women,” the Syrian Venus; but the antitypical reference is to Messiah, whom Antichrist shall try to supplant,) to replenish his treasury, so as to renew the war with the Jews. But, failing, “he came to his end” at Tabes, and “none helped him” (1 Macc. 3:10-37; 6:1-16; Macc. 9:5). “The Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, smote him with an incurable plague; for as soon as he had spoken these words (that he would make Jerusalem a common burying place of the Jews) a remediless pain of the bowels came upon him,” etc., 164 B.C. The prominence given to Antiochus in Daniel is because it was the turning point in Jewish history, deciding whether Greek worldly refinements were to stifle Israel’s true faith. Persecution was God’s appointed way to save His people from seductions which had wellnigh made them compromise their witness for His truth. Antiochus was the unconscious instrument. At first he followed the liberal policy of his predecessors; but when it suited his purpose to plunder the Jews and destroy their polity, he did not hesitate, and the corruptions prevalent and the rivalries of Jason and Menelaus for the high priesthood afforded him the occasion. Disregarding his hereditary gods himself ( Daniel 11:37-39), and only recognizing the Roman war god or “god of forces,” he regarded “fortresses” as the true temples (the Hebrews for “forces” may be translated “fortresses”), and was incapable of appreciating the power which true religion can call forth. Thus he is the vivid type of the last Antichrist, whose terrible, though short, persecutions shall drive Israel to their Savior, and so usher in their coming glory (Zechariah 11; 12; 13; 14; Daniel 12; Ezekiel 37; 38; 39).

    ANTIPAS A martyr faithful unto death at Pergamos ( Revelation 2:13). “I know ... where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is” (the idol AEsculapius was worshipped there under the serpent form); “and thou holdest fast My name, and hast not denied My faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was My faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.”

    Satan, the old serpent, instigated the idol’s devotees, through the magistrates at Pergamos, to slay Antipas. Compare Revelation 2:10; 12:1-17.

    ANTIPATRIS Acts 23:31. The station between Jerusalem and Caesarea where the soldiers left Paul, after their night march, in charge of the horsemen who were to take hint forward to Caesarea on the morrow. The old name was Capharsaba. The modern Arabic Kerr Saba does not exactly correspond to Antipatris; for Antipatris was 16 miles from Jaffa, Kefr Saba is only 14; Antipatris was well watered, Kefr Saba has no spring. Herod rebuilt it, and called it Antipatris from his father. It lay in a well watered and wooded plain, near a hilly ridge. The remains of the old Roman road by Gophna to Antipatris were discovered by Dr. Eli Smith. It reaches Ras-el-Ain by Jifneh and Tibueh, thence along the foot of the hills to Jiljulieh, Kalkilia, and Caesarea (Kaisariyeh). Ras el Ain is probably the true site. The crusaders’ castle of Mirabel was built on the foundations of an older edifice; at its foot are the largest springs in Palestine. The Roman road between Jerusalem and Caesarea strikes the plain immediately E. of Antipatris it is, as Josephus describes, in the plain, yet near the mountains.

    It lies near the nahr Aujeh (Aujeh river), at a point where by a ditch to the mountains the course of a hostile army might be stopped. Not so Kefr Saba. (See Josephus, Ant. 13:15,1; 16:5, 2. B.J. 1:4, sec. 7.)

    ANTOTHIJAH 1 Chronicles 8:24.

    ANUB 1 Chronicles 4:8.

    APELLES A Christian saluted in Romans 16:10 as “approved in Christ.” A common Jewish name, probably not, as Origen thought, Apollos. Said to have been afterward bishop of Smyrna.

    APES Imported once every three years in Solomon’s and Hiram’s Tarshish fleets ( 1 Kings 10:22; 2 Chronicles 9:21). Hebrews quoph . The ape in Sanskrit is called kapi, “ramble;” Greek kepos , akin to Eng. ape. Solomon, as a naturalist, collected specimens from various lands. Tarshish is identified by Sir Emerson Tennent with some Ceylon seaport; so the apes (quophim ) brought to Solomon probably came from Ceylon, which abounds also in “ivory and peacocks.” The Tamil names moreover, for “apes,” “ivory,” and “peacocks,” are identical with the Hebrews Others think Ophir was on the E. African coast; then the apes would be of Ethiopia.

    APHARSATHCHITES Apharsachites identical ( Ezra 4:9; 5:6), Apharsites distinct ( Ezra 4:9). There were mountaineers, Paraetacae, between Media and Persia, who may answer to the former. The latter seems to correspond to the Persians, in a local and restricted sense; else the Parrhasii.

    APHEK (strength). 1. Same as Aphekah ( Joshua 15:58). A Canaanite royal city, the king of which was killed by Joshua ( Joshua 12:18). 2. In the extreme N. of Asher ( Joshua 19:30). The Aphik from which the Canaanites were not expelled ( Judges 1:31). Probably too the Aphek on the N.” border of the Amorites” ( Joshua 13:4,5), the Aphaca of the classics, famed for Venus’ temple, now Afka, on the N.W. slopes of Lebanon; mentioned in company with Baal-Gad, the other northern sanctuary. 3. The place of the Philistines’ encampment before the Israelites’ defeat in which Eli’s sons were killed and the ark was taken (1 Samuel 4); also before the battle in which Saul was slain (1 Samuel 29); on the Philistines’ high road to Jezreel. 4. On the road from Syria to Israel ( 1 Kings 20:25,26), in the level plain E. of Jordan; a common field of battles with Syria. ( 2 Kings 13:17).

    Now Fik; at the head of the wady Fik, six miles E. of the sea of Galilee, still on the great road between Damascus, Nabulus, and Jerusalem.

    APHIAH 1 Samuel 9:1. [See BECHER .] APHRAH Micah 1:10. Meaning dust, which the following words, “roll thyself in the dust,” allude to. Identified by Winer with Ophrah of Benjamin ( Joshua 18:28); or, as Rabbi Tanchum, a town near Jerusalem. The prophet tells his countrymen not to declare their sorrow in hostile Gath, but in their own cities.

    APHSES 1 Chronicles 24:15.

    APOCRYPHA (hidden, and so spurious). Applied by Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian to forged books which heretics put forward as canonical, and as possessing a secret esoteric knowledge, known only to the initiated; compare Colossians 2:3. The orthodox applied in scorn a term which the heretics used in honor. They are not included in the lists by Melito, bishop of Sardis, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Jerome; the last noted as “apocryphal” the writings added in the Septuagint, I. and II. Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the sequel of Esther, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Song of the Three Children, Story of Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, Manasses’ Prayer, and I. and II. Maccabees. In his Prologus Galeatus, having enumerated the canonical books, he says: “whatever is beside these is to be placed in the Apocrypha, and is to be read only for edification, ... not to establish the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines.” In the face of the authority of the Hebrews church, “to whom were committed the oracles of God” ( Romans 3:2), and in the face of Jerome, the author of the Vulgate, Rome’s standard version of the Bible, the Council of Trent raises the Apocrypha to the same level as the inspired Old Testament Scriptures.

    Josephus rejects the Apocrypha; Philo never refers to it; the Lord and His apostles, though quoting the Old Testament so frequently, never quote the Apocrypha. The New Testament links itself immediately with the end of Old Testament, as if no inspired writing came between. The gospel begins at the outset with claiming to be the fulfillment of Malachi ( Malachi 3:1; 4:5,6; compare Mark 1:2; Luke 1:16,17). There is a lack of inherent power and majesty in the Apocrypha, as compared with canonical Scripture. The son of Sirach (Prologue, chap. 39, 7:27) claims no higher pretension than that of wisdom and learning. Compare also 1 Macc. 4:46; 9:27; 14:41 for their own confession of the inferiority in prophetic gifts of the age after, as contrasted with the age before, the canon was closed. No one claims the coming to him of “the word of Jehovah.” Moreover, in the Apocrypha occur unscriptural fables, fictions, and doctrinal errors: compare Tobit 6:1-8; Judith 9:10; 2 Macc. 2, Bel and the Dragon, the merit-earning power of alms, prayers for the dead, ere. They utterly want the progressive plan and mutual interconnection of the Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures. Historical errors, inaccuracies, and evidently fictitious stories and speeches occur.

    Still the apocryphal writings possess great interest as unfolding to us the workings of the Jewish mind in the long uninspired age between Malachi and Matthew. They mirror forth the transition period between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the age of the heroic struggle wherein the Maccabees rescued their country and race from the persecuting fanaticism of Antiochus Epiphanes. The earliest book dates about the beginning of the third century B.C., the 2nd Book of Esdras about 80 B.C.

    Above all the Book of Wisdom rises to a strain among the loftiest in human productions. Its personification of wisdom as “the unspotted mirror of God’s power, and the image of His goodness,” the teacher of all “holy souls” in “all ages” (chap. 7:26,27), guiding and ruling God’s people, foreshadows John’s revelation of “the Word,” the Declaration of the unseen God, the Light that lighteth every man. Its representation of the temple as “a resemblance of the holy tabernacle” which God “has prepared from the beginning” (chap. 9:8) is sanctioned by Hebrews 8. and Hebrews 9. It rises above many Jewish prejudices, vindicating God’s universal love and righteousness and the spirituality of His worship; thus preparing the way for the higher gospel revelation (chaps. 1; 2; 3:1; 11:23-26; 12:16; 13:6).

    The apocryphal books of New Testament times have been universally excluded from Scripture. The Epistle of Clement and the Shepherd of Hennas are among the oldest, and are genuine though uninspired; most of them are spurious, as the Apostolical Constitutions, the Gospel of James, etc.

    APOLLONIA A city of Macedonia. Paul and Silas passed through it on their way to Thessalonica from Philippi and Amphipolis ( Acts 17:1). in Mygdonia, 80 miles from Amphipolis, 37 from Thessalonica.

    APOLLOS (Apollonius, or Apollodorus). An Alexandrine Jew, “eloquent (or learned) and mighty in the Scriptures” (which had been translated into the famous Greek version, the Septuagint, at his birthplace) ( Acts 18:24,25). “Instructed in the way of the Lord,”so far as John the Baptist could instruct hint; for this had been the main subject of John’s ministry, “prepare ye the way of the Lord” ( Matthew 3:3). Apollos was “fervent in spirit;” and so when he came to Ephesus, “he spoke and taught diligently the things of Jesus” (so the three oldest manuscripts read), as John had pointed to Jesus as the Messiah. But Apollos knew only the water baptism of John; he did not yet know that what John had foretold (“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He [Messiah] shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”) had actually come to pass, in the church’s baptism with the Spirit on Pentecost, and that graces and gifts were now being bestowed on the several living stones composing “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” (Compare Acts 19:1-6.) But Aquila and Priscilla, on hearing him, “took him unto them and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly.” Thus having received new light he went forth to Achaia, watering the seed there that Paul had already planted ( 1 Corinthians 3:4-6), and “helped them much which had believed through grace.” His deep knowledge of the Old Testament gave him especial power with the Jews, “for he mightily convinced them publicly, showing by the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.” Some at Corinth abused his name. into a party watchword, saying, “I am of Apollos,” so popular was he. But Paul, while condemning their party spirit, commends Apollos, and writes that he had “greatly desired our brother Apollos to come” unto the Corinthians ( Corinthians 16:12). But Apollos was disinclined to come at that time; probably to give no handle for party zeal, until the danger of it should have passed away. Those who made his name their party cry were attracted by his rhetorical style acquired in Alexandria, as contrasted with the absence of “excellency of speech and enticing words of man’s wisdom” ( <460201> Corinthians 2:1-4), and even in their estimation “the contemptible speech” ( 2 Corinthians 10:10), of Paul. The last Bible notice of him is in Titus 3:13, where Paul charges Titus, then in Crete, “bring Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their way diligently, that nothing may be wanting to them.” Jerome states that Apollos remained at Crete until he heard that the divisions at Corinth had been healed by Paul’s epistle; then he went and became bishop there. Apollos’s main excellency was as builder up,’ rather than founder, of churches. His humility and teachableness in submitting, with all his learning, to the teaching of Aquila and even of Priscilla (a woman), his fervency and his power in Scripture, and his determinably staying away from where his well deserved popularity might be made a handle for party zeal, are all lovely traits in his Christian character.

    APOLLYON (destroyer). Satan ( Revelation 9:11. He is the tempter, in order that he may be at last the destroyer. The Greek translation of the Hebrews abaddon , (destruction). As the twofold names Abba (Heb.) Father (Greek) in Mark 14:36 combine Jew and Gentile in the common salvation, so Satan’s two names abaddon (Heb.) and Apollos (Greek) combine them in a common destruction.

    APOSTLE (one sent forth). The official name of the twelve whom Jesus sent forth to preach, and who also were with Him throughout His earthly ministry. Peter states the qualifications before the election of Judas’ successor ( Acts 1:21), namely, that he should have companied with the followers of Jesus “all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among them, beginning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was taken up, to be a witness with the others of His resurrection.” So the Lord, “Ye are they that have continued with Me in My temptations” ( Luke 22:28). The Holy Spirit was specially promised to bring all things to their remembrance whatever Jesus had said, to guide them into all truth, and to enable them to testify of Jesus with power to all lands ( John 14:26; 15:26,27; 16:13,14). They were some of them fishermen, one a tax collector, and most of them unlearned. Though called before, they did not permanently follow Him until their call as apostles. All were on a level ( Matthew 20:20-27; Mark 9:34-36). Yet three stood in especial nearness to Him, Peter, James, and John; they alone witnessed the raising of Jairus’ daughter, the transfiguration, and the agony in Gethsemane. An order grounded on moral considerations is traceable in the enumeration of the rest: Judas, the traitor, in all the lists stands last. The disciples surrounded Jesus in wider and still wider expanding circles: nearest Him Peter, James, and. John; then the other nine; then the Seventy; then the disciples in general. But the “mystery” was revealed to all alike ( Matthew 10:27).

    Four catalogues are extant: Matthew’s (Matthew 10), Mark’s ( Mark 3:16), Luke’s ( Luke 6:14) in the Gospel, and Luke’s in Acts 1:13. In all four the apostles are grouped in three classes, four in each. Philip heads the second division, i.e. is fifth; James the son of Alpheus heads the third, i.e. is ninth. Andrew follows Peter on the ground of brotherhood in Matthew and Luke; in Mark and Acts James and John, on the ground of greater nearness to Jesus, precede Andrew. In the second division Matthew modestly puts himself after Thomas; Mark and Luke give him his rightful place before Thomas. Thomas, after his doubts were removed ( John 20:28), having attained distinguished faith, is promoted above Bartholomew (= Nathanael) and Matthew in Acts. In Matt, hew and Mark Thaddaeus (= Lebbaeus) precedes Simon Zelotes (Hebrews “Canaanite,” i.e. one of the sect the Zealots). But in Luke and Acts Simon Zelotes precedes Jude 1:(Thaddaeus) the brother of James. John gives no catalogue, but writing later takes it for granted ( Revelation 21:14,19,20). In the first division stand Peter and John, New Testament writers, in the second Matthew, in the third James and Jude. The Zealot stood once the last except the traitor, but subsequently became raised; bigotry is not always the best preparation for subsequent high standing in faith. Jesus sent them in pairs: a good plan for securing brotherly sympathy and cooperation. Their early mission in Jesus’ lifetime, to preach repentance and perform miracles in Jesus’ name, was restricted to Israel, to prepare the way for the subsequent gospel preaching to the Jews first, on and after Pentecost ( Acts 3:25). They were slow to apprehend the spiritual nature of His kingdom, and His crucifixion and resurrection as the necessary preliminary to it. Even after His resurrection seven of them returned to their fishing; and it was only by Christ’s renewed call that they were led’ to remain together at Jerusalem, waiting for the promised Comforter (John 21; Acts 1:4). From the day of the Pentecostal effusion of the Holy Spirit they became new men, witnessing with power of the resurrection of Jesus, as Jesus had promised ( Luke 24:45,49; Acts 1:8,22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 13:31). The first period of the apostles’ working extends down to Acts 11:18. Excepting the transition period (Acts 8--10) when, at Stephen’s martyrdom, the gospel was extended to Samaria and. to the Ethiopian eunuch by Philip, Jerusalem is its center, and Peter’ the prominent figure, who opened the kingdom of heaven (according to Jesus’ promise to him, Matthew 16:18,19) to the Jews and also to the Gentiles (Acts 2; 10). The second period begins with the extension of the kingdom to idolatrous Gentiles. ( Acts 11:19-26).

    Antioch, in concert with Jerusalem, is now the center, and Paul the prominent figure, in concert with the other apostles. Though the ideal number always remained twelve ( Revelation 21:14), answering to the twelve tribes of Israel, yet just as there were in fact thirteen tribes when Joseph’s two sons were made separate tribal heads, so Paul’s calling made thirteen actual apostles. He possessed the two characteristics of an Apostle; he had” seen the Lord,” so as to be an eye witness of His resurrection, and he had the power which none but an Apostle had, of conferring spiritual gifts ( 1 Corinthians 9:1,2; 2 Corinthians 12:12; Romans 1:11; 15:18,19). This period ends with Acts 13:1-5, when Barnabas and Saul were separated by the Holy Spirit unto missionary work. Here the third apostolic period begins, in which the twelve disappear, and Paul alone stands forth, the Apostle of the Gentiles; so that at the close of Acts, which leaves him evangelizing in Rome, the metropolis of the world, churches from Jerusalem unto Illyricum had been founded through him. “Apostle” is used in a vaguer sense of “messengers of the churches” ( Corinthians 8:23; Philippians 2:25). But the term belongs in its stricter sense to the twelve alone; they alone were apostles of Christ. Their distinctive note is, they were commissioned immediately by Jesus Himself.

    They alone were chosen by Christ Himself, independently of the churches.

    So even Matthias ( Acts 1:24). So Paul (Gal 1:1-12; Romans 1:1; 1 Corinthians 15:9,10). Their exclusive office was to found the Christian church; so their official existence was of Christ, and prior to the churches they collectively and severally founded. They acted with a divine authority to bind and loose things ( Matthew 18:18), and to remit or retain sins of persons ( John 20:21-23), which they exercised by the authoritative ministry of the word. Their infallibility, of which their miracles were the credentials, marked them as extraordinary, not permanent, ministers. Paul requires the Corinthians to acknowledge that the things which he wrote were the Lord’s commandments ( 1 Corinthians 14:37).

    The office was not local; but “the care of all the churches.” They were to the whole what particular elders were, to parts of the church ( 1 Peter 5:1; 2 John 1:1). Apostles therefore could have strictly no successors.

    John, while superintending the whole, was especially connected with the churches of Asia Minor, Paul with the W., Peter with Babylon. The bishops in that age coexisted with, and did not succeed officially, the apostles.

    James seems specially to have had a presidency in Jerusalem ( Acts 15:19; 21:18).

    Once the Lord Himself is so designated, “the Apostle of our profession” ( Hebrews 3:1); the, Ambassador sent from the Father ( John 20:21).

    As Apostle He pleads God’s cause with us; as” High Priest,” our cause with God. Appropriate in writing to Hebrews, since the Hebrew high priest sent delegates (“apostles”) to collect the temple tribute from Jews in foreign countries, just as Christ is the Father’s Delegate to claim the Father’s due from His subjects in this world far off from Him ( Matthew 21:37).

    APPAIM 1 Chronicles 2:30,31.

    APPEAL Deuteronomy 17:8,9 implies a court of appeal in hard cases; compare Judges 4:5. The king subsequently deputized persons to inquire into and decide appeals ( 2 Samuel 15:3). Jehoshaphat appointed Levites, priests, and some of the fathers to constitute a court of appeal ( 2 Chronicles 19:8). Compare Ezra 7:25. Afterward the final appeal lay to the Sanhedrim. A Roman citizen could appeal, in criminal cases, from the magistrate to the people; and in after times to the emperor, who succeeded to the power of the people. Paul’s appeal ( Acts 25:11) was from a trial by a provincial magistrate to one by the emperor.

    APPHIA Lat. Appia. The wife, or close relative, of Philemon. She would not otherwise be mentioned with Philemon in the address ( Philemon 1:2), on a domestic matter.

    APPII FORUM ( Acts 28:15.) A stage 48 miles from Rome, on the Appian Way, the road from Rome to the Bay of Naples. Here Christian brethren from Rome met Paul. Called from Appius Claudius, who constructed this part of the road. The site is still marked by ruins near Treponti.

    APPLE Hebrews tappuach . (Song 2:3,5; 7:8; 8:5; Proverbs 25:11.) The color was golden, the odor fragrant, the tree green and shady. Probably the citron tree, of which the foliage is perennial, and the blossoms and golden fruit most fragrant. It abounds in W. Asia. In Song 2:5, “Comfort me with apples,” the Hebrews is “Straw me,” etc., i.e., let my couch be strewed with citrons, to refresh me with their scent, or with citron leaves. Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver “; i.e., like citrons, antifebrile medicinally, attractive to the eye, pleasing the sense of smell and the palate; served up in elaborately figured silver vessels. Oriental ladies make the citron their vinaigrette. “APPLE OF THE EYE” The promise is in Zechariah 2:8, “He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye”; the prayer is Psalm 17:8 “Keep me as the apple of the eye “; the fulfillment Deuteronomy 32:10, “He kept him as the apple of His eye.” A different Hebrews word from tappunch , namely, ishon , “little man,” i.e. pupil (Greek kore ) of the eye. Called so from the image formed on the retina. The part most precious and most guarded from attack; which feels most acutely the least hurt, and the loss of which is irreparable.

    APPLES OF SODOM Found on the shores of the Dead Sea; like a cluster of oranges, yellow to the eye, and soft to the touch; but on pressure they explode with a puff, leaving only shreds of the rind and fibers. The Arabs twist the silk into matches for their guns. Compare Deuteronomy 32:32. The Calotropisprocera, an Indian plant, which thrives in the warm valley of Engedi, but is found scarcely elsewhere in Palestine. Its fruit in winter contains a yellowish dust, of pungent quality. [See WINE OF SODOM ] AQUILA AND PRISCILLA Always spoken of together. Husband and wife one in Christ. She is named Prisca Romans 16:3 in the three oldest manuscripts; Priscilla is its diminutive ( 2 Timothy 4:19), the name of endearment. As she is often named first (only in Acts 18:2; 1 Corinthians 16:19 Aquila has the first place; Acts 18:26 in Sin., Vat., Alex. manuscripts has Priscilla first), she seems to have been the more energetic Christian. Paul found them at Corinth on his first visit there ( Acts 18:2). They had been driven from Rome by Claudius’ decree (mentioned also by Suetonius, Claud., c. 25, who, confounding Judaism with Christianity, writes: “he banished from Rome the Jews who were constantly making disturbances instigated by one Chrestus,” i.e. Christ). Aquila was a Jew, born in Pontus (as was the Aquila who translated the Old Testament into Greek); the name is Lat., assumed as Jews often took a Roman name, when thrown into much intercourse with Romans. Their common work, making the Cilician hair or tent cloth, threw Paul and him together, and probably led to his and Priscilla’s conversion. A year and a half after Priscilla and Aquila accompanied Paul from Corinth to Ephesus on his way to Syria. There they remained and taught see APOLLOS (see) the way of the Lord more perfectly ( Acts 18:18-28). In 1 Corinthians 16:19 we find them still at Ephesus, and having “a church (assembling) in their house.” So also at Rome ( Romans 16:3-5): “My helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks: unto whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Greet the church that is in their house.”

    Afterward we find them near Timothy, in or about Ephesus ( 2 Timothy 4:19). The use of opportunities is one great lesson from their history. Paul probably availed himself of his intercourse in their common trade to bring the gospel home to the Jew Aquila, he to his wife. She and he together, as true yokefellows in the Lord, to all within their reach; to Apollos, who became the mighty champion of Christianity, convincing the Jews from the Scriptures at Corinth; setting up “a church in their house” wherever they were: in Ephesus; then at Rome, risking their lives for Paul, and earning thanks of “all the churches of the Gentiles.”

    AR The chief city (as the name means) Of Moab ( Deuteronomy 2:9; Numbers 21:15,28). On the S. side of the Arnon, due E. of the Dead Sea. Jerome calls it Areopolis, and Rabbath Moab, i.e. great Moab. The site is still called Rabba on the Roman road. Keil however denies that Ar is identical with the modern Rabba; he places Ar at the confluence of the Lejum and Mojeb, “in a fine green pasture, where there is a hill with some ruins” (Burckhardt). Rabba is six hours S. of Lejum. A stone from the Moabite city Medeba has been found inscribed with letters like the Sinaitic. “We drove them away: ... the people of Ar, Moab at the marsh ground (or in the midst of the valley); there they made a thankoffering to God their King, and Jeshurun rejoiced, as also Moses their leader.” Compare Numbers 21:13-15,21-30; Deuteronomy 2:18,29; Joshua 13:9,15,16. “What the Lord did ... at the stream of the brooks that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab ... the city that is in the midst of the river.” The Amorites of Heshbon had laid waste Ar, and in their turn were destroyed by Israel. Thus Israel came into possession of Ar, as the inscription records, confirming Scripture. Thus Keil’s site would be the true one. But the reading of the inscription is doubtful. Eusebius implies that Arcopolls is not Ar, but the same as Rabbath Moab, a city of late growth and not mentioned in the Bible.

    ARA 1 Chronicles 7:38.

    ARAB A city of Judah in the hilly district ( Joshua 15:52).

    ARABAH ( Joshua 18:18) = the plain, is akin to Arabia. The article in Hebrews marks it as some definite spot, namely, the deep sunken gorge extending from mount Hermon to the Elanitic gulf of the Red Sea; the most extraordinary depression on the earth. The Jordan rushes for 150 miles through its northern part (el Ghor) by lakes Huleh and Gennesareth, to the deep abyss of the Dead Sea. The Ghor extends to precipitous cliffs, miles S. of the Dead Sea. Thence to the gulf of Akaba it resumes its old name, wady el Arabah. In Joshua 11:16; 12:8, the Arabah takes its place among the natural divisions of the country, and in Deuteronomy 3:17 in connection with the sea of Chinnereth (Gennesareth) and the Dead Sea. In the plural it is connected with either Jericho or Moab; the Arabah being in Jericho’s case W. of Jordan, in Moab’s case E. of Jordan, bore and parched as contrasted with the rich fields of the upper level. The S. Arabah was the scene of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, N. of which stood Hormah and Kadesh. They went down the Arabah southwards (after Edom’s refusal to let them pass), from mount Hor, toward the head of the gulf, then up one of the left wadies, by the back of mount Seir to Moab.

    Remains of a Roman road are traceable along this route. From the absence of the Jordan in S. Arabah circles of verdure are scarce, such as are met in the Ghor. Its length is 100 miles, its breadth narrowing from 14 at its broadest to about three miles at its entrance into the gulf. The limestone ranges of The in long white lines stand on the W. crowned with the table land of “the wilderness of the wanderings” (et Tih), and rise 1500 feet above the Arabah. The pass En Nukb is that of the Mecca pilgrims, between the Akabah and Suez mounts. The other pass, Es Sufah, is probably that at which Israel was defeated by the Canaanites ( Deuteronomy 1:44; Numbers 14:48-45). It goes not, as En, Nukb, from the Arabah to the plateau, but from it to a level 1000 feet higher. The Ghor stands nearly due N. and S.; the Arabah N.N.E. by S.S.W. On the E. dark porphyry is the body of the mountain; above it sandstone ridges, and highest of all limestone. But Hor is 5000 feet high. According to Isaac’s promise to Esau, the dwelling of his descendants is “the fatness of the earth, with grain and wine” ( Genesis 27:37-39). A line of chalk cliffs six miles S.W. of the Dead Sea is the bound between the Ghor on the N. and the Arabah on the S. The Ghor ends with the marsh beneath them. The Arabah begins level with their summit. The wady el Jeib is the drain of the Arabah, and the route for entering the valley from the N. Heat, desolation, and barrenness characterize this desert. The sirocco blows almost continually, and the ghudah, the arta, the Anthia variegata, the coloquinta, and the tamarisk, almost the only traces of vegetation.

    The supposition that the Jordan once flowed through the Arabah into the Red Sea is not likely; for the Red Sea and the Mediterranean are nearly on one level. The depression of the surface of the sea of Galilee is 652 feet, that of the Dead Sea 1316 feet, below the surface of the Mediterranean, and so of the Red Sea. The Jordan therefore could not have flowed into the gulf of Akabah. The northern part of the Arabah drains into the Dead Sea, the land rising from the N. to the S. The southern part drains into the gulf of Akabah, the land rising from it to the N.

    ARABIA (arid tract). The see ARABAH , originally restricted to one wady, came to be applied to all Arabia. Bounded on the N. by Palestine and Syria, E. by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, S. by the Arabian Sea and strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, W. by the Red Sea and Egypt. 1700 miles long by broad. Designated Genesis 25:6 “the east country,” the people “children of the East” ( Genesis 29:1; Judges 6:3), chiefly meaning the tribes E. of Jordan and N. of the Arabian peninsula. “All the mingled people” is in Hebrews ha ereb ( Exodus 12:38; Jeremiah 25:20; Ezekiel 30:5), possibly the Arabs. The three divisions are Arabia Deserta, Felix, and Petraea. The term Kedem , “the East,” with the Hebrews probably referred toARABIA DESERTA, or N. Arabia, bounded E. by the Euphrates, W. by the mountains of Gilead. Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 2:6) describes its features, “a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought and of the shadow of death, that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt.” Tadmor or Palmyra “in the wilderness” was on its N.E. border ( 1 Kings 9:18).

    Moving sands, a few thorny shrubs, and an occasional palm and a spring of brackish water, constitute its general character. The sand wind, the simoom, visits it. Hither Paul resorted after conversion for that rest and reflection which are needed before great spiritual enterprises ( Galatians 1:17). Moses’ stay of 40 years in the same quarter served the same end of preparatory discipline. Its early inhabitants were the Rephaim, Emim, Zuzim, Zamzummim ( Genesis 14:5); Ammon, Moab, Edom, the Hagarenes, the Nabathaeans, the people of Kedar, and many wandering tent-dwelling tribes, like the modern Bedouins, succeeded. The portion of it called the Hauran, or Syrian desert, abounds in ruins and inscriptions in Greek, Palmyrene, and an unknown tongue.ARABIA FELIX or happy, S.

    Arabia, bounded on the E. by the Persian Gulf, S. by the Arabian Sea, W. by the Red Sea. Yemen, famed for its fertility (= the right hand, so the south, compare Matthew 12:42); and Hadramaut (Hazarmaveth, Genesis 10:26) were parts of it. Sheba answers to Yemen ( Psalm 72:10), whose queen visited Solomon ( 1 Kings 10:1). The dominant family was that of Himyer, son of Sava; one of this family founded the modern kingdom of the Himyerites, now called el Hedjaz, the land of pilgrimage, on account of the pilgrimages to Mecca the birthplace, and Medina the burial place, of Mahomet. The central province of the Nejd is famed for the Arab horses and camels, “the ships of the desert.” Joktan, son of Eber ( Genesis 10:25), was the original founder, Ishmael the subsequent head, of its population. The Hagarenes, originally the same as the Ishmaelites, subsequently are mentioned as distinct ( 1 Chronicles 5:10,19,22; Psalm 83:6). The people of Yemen have always lived in cities, and practiced commerce and agriculture. It was famed for gems and gold, spices, perfumes, and gums ( 1 Kings 10:10; Ezekiel 27:22).

    Many of the luxuries attributed to it, however, were products of further lands, which reached Palestine and Egypt through Arabia.ARABIA PETRAEA, called from its city Petra, the rock, or Selah ( 2 Kings 14:7), now Hadjar, i.e. rock. Between the gulfs of Suez and Akabah; Palestine and Egypt are its northern boundary. The desert of mount Sinai (Burr et tur Sinai), where Israel wandered, Kadesh Barnea, Pharan, Rephidim, Ezion Geber, Rithmah, Oboth, Arad, Heshbon, were in it. The wady Leja (perhaps the valley of Rephidim), near jebel Mousa, and the wady Feiran (Paran, Numbers 13:3), are most luxuriant. Hawarah (Marab, Exodus 15:23) is 33 miles S.E. of Ayoun Mousa (the fountain of Moses); 7 miles S. of this is wady Gurundel, perhaps the Elim of Exodus 15:27. Precipitous bore rocks, void of herbage, form the southern coast.

    Cush, son of Ham, originally peopled Arabia (the ruins of Marib, or Seba, and the inscriptions are Cushite; in Babylonia too there are Cushite traces); then Joktan, of Shem’s race ( Genesis 10:7,20,25,30). The posterity of Nahor, of Abraham and Keturah (Genesis 25), of Lot also, formed a part of the population, namely, in Arabia Deserta. Then Ishmael’s, then Esau’s descendants, for Esau identified himself with Ishmael by his marrying Ishmael’s daughter ( Genesis 28:9). The head of each tribe is the sheikh; the office is hereditary in his family, but elective as to the individual. The people are hospitable, eloquent, poetical, proud of ancestry, but predatory, superstitious, and revengeful. The wandering and wild Bedouins are purest in blood and preserve most the Arab characteristics foretold in Genesis 16:12: “He will be a wild” (Hebrews a wild donkey of a) “man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him” (marking their incessant feuds with one another or with their neighbors), “and he shall dwell [tent] in the presence of all his brethren.” The image of a wild donkey untamable, roaming at its will in the desert (compare Job 39:5-8), portrays the Bedouin’s boundless love of freedom as he rides in the desert spear in hand, despising town life. His dwelling in the presence of his brethren implies that Ishmael would maintain an independent nationality before all Abraham’s descendants. They have never been completely subjugated by any neighboring power. Compare Job 1:15; Jeremiah 49:8; 3:2; 2 Chronicles 21:16. From their dwelling in tents they are called Scenitoe. Their tents are of goats’ hair cloth, black or brown (Song 1:5), arranged in a ring, enclosing their cattle, each about 25 feet long and 7 high. The town populations by intermarriages and intercourse with foreigners have lost much of Arab traits. Mecca, in their belief, is where Ishmael was saved and Hagar died and was buried. The Kaaba or Square was built by Seth, destroyed by the flood, and rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael. Sabeanism, or the worship of the hosts, the sun, moon, and stars, was the first lapse from original revelation ( Job 31:26,27); but just before Mahomet they were divided between it, Judaism, Magianism, and corrupted Christianity. Mahometanism became the universal faith in A.D. 628. The Wahabees are one of the most powerful sects, named from Abd el Wahab, who in the beginning of last century undertook to reform abuses in Mahometanism.

    To the Arabs we owe our arithmetical figures. They took the lead of Europeans in astronomy, chemistry, algebra, and medicine. They spread their colonies from the Senegal to the indus, and from Madagascar to the Euphrates. The Joktanites of southern Arabia were seafaring; the Ishmaelites, more northward, the caravan merchants ( Genesis 37:28).

    The Arabic language is the most developed of the Semitic languages. in the 14th or 13th century B.C. the Semitic languages differed much less than in later times. Compare Genesis 31:47; Judges 7:9-15; Phurah, Gideon’s servant, evidently understood the Midianites. But in the 8th century B.C. only educated Jews understood Aramaic ( 2 Kings 18:26).

    In its classical form Arabic is more modern than Heb., in its ancient form probably sister to Hebrews and Aramaic. The Himyeritic is a mixture with an African language, as appears from the inscriptions; the Ekhili is its modern phase. Monuments with Himyeritic inscriptions are found in Hadramaut and the Yemen. There was a Cushite or Ethiopian Sheba, as well as a Shemitic Sheba ( Genesis 10:7,28). The Himyerites had a Cushite descent. The Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages.

    The Hebrews literature dates from the 15th century B.C, the Arabic only from the 5th century B.C. For this reason, and the greater simplicity of Hebrews modes of expression, it seems probable the Hebrews is the elder sister. A few Arabic forms are plainly older than the corresponding Hebrews The Book of Job in many of its difficult Hebrews roots receives much illustration from Arabic. The Arabic is more flexible and abounding in vowel sounds, as suits a people light hearted and impulsive; the Hebrews is weightier, and has more consonants, as suits a people graver and more earnest. The Arabic version of the Scriptures now extant was made after Mahomet’s time. That in the London Polyglott was in part by R. Saadias Gaon (the Excellent).

    ARAD 1. 1 Chronicles 8:15. 2. A Canaanite royal city ( Joshua 12:14), N. of the wilderness of Judah ( Judges 1:16). In Numbers 21:1; 33:40, for “king Arad the Canaanite” translate “the Canaanite king of Arad.” Robinson identifies it as on the hill Tel Arad between Moladah and Hebron. A large white mound is all that is left to mark the site of the city of the king who attacked Israel.

    ARAH 1. 1 Chronicles 7:39. 2. Ezra 2:5.

    ARAM (high table land). 1. The elevated region from the N. E. of Palestine to the Euphrates and Tigris. Balaam’s home ( Numbers 23:7; Deuteronomy 23:4). Syria, stretching from the Jordan and lake Gennesareth to the Euphrates, rising 2000 feet above the level of the sea. In contrast to Canaan, the lowland bordering on the Mediterranean. In Genesis 24:10 (Heb.) Aram Naharaim means “the highland between the two rivers,” i.e. Mesopotamia.

    Padan Aram (from paddah , a plow), “the cultivated highland,” is the same as Aram ( Genesis 31:18). In Shalmaneser’s inscriptions, 900-860 B.C. the Hittites (Khatte), under the name Palena, occur as occupying the valley of the Orontes and eastward. Some identify this name with Padan Aram and Batanaea or Bashan. Many petty kingdoms in David’s time formed parts of the whole Aram,ARAM REHOB,ARAM ZOBAH, etc. [see.] Damascus subsequently absorbed these. In Genesis 10 Aram is described as son of Shem; Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, and Aram (arranged in the geographical order from E. to W.) being the four brethren. Aram (Syrian) stands for Assyrian in 2 Kings 18:26; Jeremiah 35:11. 2. Another Aram ( Genesis 22:21), son of Kemuel, descended from Nahor; probably head of the tribe Ram, to which belonged Elihu, Job’s friend ( Job 32:2).

    ARAN A Horite ( Genesis 36:28).

    ARARAT Sanskrit = holy ground. A mountainous district in Armenia; the resting place of the ark after the deluge ( Genesis 8:4); but see NOAH . Thither Sennacherib’s sons fled after murdering their father ( 2 Kings 19:37).

    The ally of Minni and Ashchenaz ( Jeremiah 51:27). In Genesis 11:2 translate “they journeyed eastward,” Mesopotamia being described relatively to the writer’s country, rather than to Ararat, which is N. of Mesopotamia. It overlooks the plain of the Araxes on the N. Berosus the Chaldaean, in Alexander the Great’s time, makes the Kurdistan mountains, on the S. frontier of Armenia, the ark’s resting place: Nachdjevan, on the Araxes, is thought to be Noah’s place of landing, from Josephus’ statement (Ant. 1:3), as also his place of burial. The mountain there, the loftiest in the district, is called Massis by the Armenians, Kuh-i-Nuh, i.e. “Noah’s mountain,” by the Persians. There are two conical peaks, the greater and the less, seven miles apart; the former 17,300 feet above the sea, and 14,300 above the plain of the Araxes; the latter 4,000 feet lower; 3000 feet of the greater covered with perpetual snow. Lava, cinders, and porphyry cover the middle region, marking the vol. came origin of the mountain. A second summit is about 400 yards from the highest; and on the slope between the two the ark is surmised to have rested. On the side of the greater is a chasm, probably once the crater of the volcano; silence and solitude reign all around; Arguri, the only village on the descent, is the traditional site of Noah’s vine. yard. In the wide sense Ararat comprises the whole Armenian range in the N. to the Kurdistan range in the S. The plateau of Armenia is a vast extent of plains rising high above the surrounding plain; and from that plateau, as a fresh base, mountain ranges spring, running generally from E. to W.; transverse ridges connect these.

    The whole stands in the central point between the Euxine and Caspian on the N., and the Mediterranean and the Persian gulf on the S. The Acampsis, the Araxes, the Euphrates, and the Tigris connect it respectively with the four great seas. The greatest nations, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Colchians, lay along these routes. Ararat even now is the central boundary between Russia, Turkey, and Persia. The Armenian plateau, from the longer period of action of the volcanic powers, and from there being room for the expansion of the molten masses in the region around, is far more accessible than the neighboring region of Caucasus. At Erzroom, 6000 feet above the sea, crops appear in June and are cut in August. The vine ripens at 5000 feet, but in Europe at not higher than 2,650 feet. Thus it appears the Ararat plateau was one especially suited for being the ark’s appointed resting place, and its geographical and physical features fitted it as the center for the even distribution of the human race. The severe climate would drive them after a time to the milder plains below; and in the meantime the grass such as feeds now the flocks of nomad Kurds, in the same region, would meet the wants of Noah’s descendants in their nomad life. However, in the Babylonian legend of the Flood deciphered by Mr. G. Smith, Nizir answers to Ararat, not the northern mountain near Erivan, but the Ararat of Assyrian and Armenian geography, the precipitous range overlooking the Tigris N.E. of Mosul.

    Arabic Judi, Assyrian Guli.

    ARAUNAH Ornan. A Jebusite, at whose threshing floor the plague sent for numbering the people was, at David’s intercession, stayed. Be offered the area as a site for Jehovah’s altar, and only by constraint accepted David’s pay (50 shekels of silver, 2 Samuel 24:18-24; 600 shekels of gold, Chronicles 21:25. As 50 silver shekels is far too low a price for the whole land, if there be no transcriber’s error here, which is possible, probably the 50 silver shekels were paid for the small floor, the oxen, and wood of the yokes only; the 600 gold shekels for the whole hill on which David afterward built the temple). Contrast his kingly spirit, “Behold, here be oxen for burnt sacrifice and threshing instruments for wood,” with the groveling excuse of the man invited to the king’s banquet ( Luke 14:19).

    But compare Elisha’s similar spirit when called of: God’s prophet ( Kings 19:21). Self sacrifice raises one from degradation low as that of the accursed Jebusites to be in Israel a “king and a priest unto God” (compare 2 Samuel 24:23 with Exodus 19:6; 1 Peter 2:5,9; Revelation 1:6; 5:10; 20:6). “These things did Araunah (as) a king give” hardly warrant the guess that he Was of the royal Jebusite race. Keil translates “all this giveth Araunah, O king, to the king,” which suits the fact that Araunah gave it in intention, but his offer was not accepted (compare Matthew 8:11,12; 1 Corinthians 1:27). Josephus (Ant. 7:13, sec. 9) says Araunah was one of David’s chief friends, and spared by him when he took the citadel @(v. 7). Probably he made his friendship when fleeing before Saul, when also he made that of Uriah the Hittite, Ittai the Gittite, etc.

    ARBA ‘Ar Baal = hero of Baal. Progenitor of the Anakim. From him their city Hebron got its name, Kirjath Arba ( Joshua 14:15; 15:13; 21:11).

    Hebron it was first called, then Mamre, then Kirjath Arba, then it resumed its first name ( Genesis 13:18; 23:2).

    ARBATHITE ( 2 Samuel 23:31) = dweller in the see ARABAH or Ghor.

    ARBITE ( 2 Samuel 23:35). Paarai, one of David’s guard: a native of Arab, called Naarai, the son of Ezbai ( 1 Chronicles 11:37).

    ARCHELAUS Son of Herod the Great by Malthake, a Samaritan. Brought up at Rome with his brother Antipas. Originally Herod excluded him from any share in his dominions, because of his elder brother Antipater’s accusations. But at Herod’s death the kingdom, by a change in the will, was divided between his three sons, Antipus, Archelaus, and Philip. Archelaus received Idumea, Judaea, Samaria, and the cities Caesarea, Sebaste, Joppa, and Jerusalem, which yielded 600 talents income. Augustus refused him the title “king,” and only allowed him the title “ethuarch”; but he had the reality of kingship ( Matthew 2:22), “did reign.” For the short time only between his father’s death and his going to Rome, to seek confirmation of the kingship from Augustus, had he the title. Josephus (Ant. 17:9, sec. 2) at this period calls him “king.” How seemingly near to error, yet how accurately Matthew expresses himself. In the tenth year of his reign (A.D. 6) his brothers and his subjects complained of his tyranny. So he was dethroned, and exiled to Vienne in Gaul, where he died; but Jerome says his sepulchre was near Bethlehem. When Joseph, at Herod’s death, was about to return with the child Jesus from Egypt to the Holy Land, “he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea;” and “he was afraid to go thither” ( Matthew 2:22).

    Archelaus must therefore have given at the outset of his reign some notorious specimen of his cruelty. Josephus undesignedly supplies this confirmation of Scripture. One of Herod’s last deeds was the putting Judas and Matthias to death for instigating young men to pull down a golden eagle set up contrary to Moses’ law over the temple gate by Herod; at the Passover which succeeded Herod’s death, before Archelaus had as yet the emperor’s ratification of his accession, Archelaus, finding several commiserating the martyrs, caused his cavalry to inclose at the temple and slay 3,000 men. The rest fled to the mountains; and all by Archelaus’s command “left the feast, fearing lest something worse should ensue.” A deputation of Jews in consequence went to Rome to beg Augustus not to ratify his appointment; but the emperor confirmed Herod’s will (Ant. 17:9, sec. 3). That this cruel act was what made Joseph afraid of him is the more likely, as before his accession he had no public post whereby men might have known his character. Joseph turned to Galilee, where the less cruel brother Antipas reigned. The kingdom was originally designed for Antipas; its unexpected transference to Archelaus made Joseph change his direction.

    The fact of Joseph’s fear is stated, the cause is not; but Archelaus’s character otherwise known accounts for it. He wedded illegally his brother Alexander’s former wife, Glaphyra, who had children by Alexander, thereby giving much offense to the Jews.

    ARCHEVITES Men of Erech, transplanted to Samaria ( Ezra 4:9).

    ARCHIPPUS A Christian minister at Colossae, whom Paul calls “our fellow soldier,” namely, in the Christian warfare ( 2 Timothy 2:3). A member of Philemon’s family, possibly his son, whence Paul includes him in the same salutation with Philemon and Apphia, and the church in Philemon’s house ( Philemon 1:2). In both the Epistle to the Colossians ( Colossians 4:17) and that to Philemon (which accompanied it) Archippus is mentioned. The Colossians are charged,” Say to Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that thou fulfill (make full proof of) it.” Probably a self sparing and less zealous spirit betrayed itself in Archippus. Laymen may admonish clergy of their duty, when scriptural faithfulness requires it and they admonish in meekness. Martyred, according to tradition, at Chonse, near Laodicea. Archippus with some reason is supposed to be the angel of Laodicea, whom the Lord, like Paul, reproves ( Revelation 3:14-21).

    ARCHITE (THE) ( 2 Samuel 15:32.) Archi was near Bethel ( Joshua 16:2).

    ARCTURUS Greek, answering to the Latin-named constellation Ura Major; Hebrews ‘ash , or ‘aish ( Job 9:9; 38:32,33). The Great Bear always revolves about the pole, and to our northern hemisphere never sets. The Chaldees and Arabs early mimed the stars, and grouped them in constellations. Their nomad life, in tending flocks and traveling often by night, tended to make them observe the stars, marking the seasons by their rise and setting, and using them as their nocturnal guide. This throws light on “Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons (the three stars in its tail)?” Nay, thou art dependent on him for guiding thee ( Genesis 1:14; 8:22).

    ARD ( Genesis 46:21; Numbers 26:40) = Addar ( 1 Chronicles 8:8).

    ARDON 1 Chronicles 2:18.

    ARELI Genesis 46:16; Numbers 26:17.

    AREOPAGUS (Mars’ Hill). A rocky eminence in Athens, separated from the W. of the Acropolis by a raised valley, above which it rises sixty feet. Mythology made it the scene of the god Mars’ trim before the gods, at Poseidon’s accusation, for murdering the son of the latter, Halirrhotius. The most venerable of all the Athenian courts, consisting of all exarchons of blameless life. It was the Upper Council, to distinguish it from the five hundred, who met in the valley below. It met on the S.E. top of the rock.

    Sixteen stone steps in the rock still exist, leading from below to Mars’ hill, and directly above is a bench of stones cut in the rock facing S., and forming three sides of a quadrangle. Here the judges sat, in criminal and religious cases, in the open air. The accuser and accused had two rude blocks, still to be seen, one on the E., the other on the W. side, assigned them. Paul, “daily disputing” in the market (agora ), which lay between the Areopagus, the Acropolis, the Pnyx (the place of political assemblies), and the Museum, attracted the notice of “certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics.” They brought him up from below, probably by the steps already described, and, seated on the benches, heard from him the memorable address, so happily adapted in its uncompromising faithfulness, as well as scholarlike allusions, to the learned auditory, recorded in Acts 17. Paul’s intense earnestness strikingly contrasts with their frivolous dilettantism. With the temple of Mars near, the Parthenon of Minerva facing him, and the sanctuary of the Eumenides just below him, the beautiful temple of Theseus, the national hero (still remaining) in view, what divine power he needed to nerve him to declare, “God that made the world ... dwelleth not in temples made with hands”; and again in the midst of the exquisitely chiseled statues in front, crowning the Acropolis, Minerva in bronze as the armed champion of Athens, and on every side a succession of lesser images, to reason, “Forasmuch as we are the offspring of God” [which he confirms by quoting his fellow countryman Aratus’ poem, ‘We are His offspring’], we ought not to think that the Godhead is like gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art or man’s device.” Yet he does not begin by attacking their national worship, but draws them gently away from their ignorant worship of the Deity under many idols to the one true God, “Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.” In opposition to the Greek boast of a distinct origin from that of the barbarians; he says, “God hath made of one blood all nations to dwell on all the face of the earth”; and ends with announcing the coming judgment by the Lord Jesus.

    ARETAS A common name of many Arabian kings. 2 Corinthians 11:32: “in Damascus the governor [ethnarch ] under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me; and through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.”

    The ethnarch did it to please the Jews, who ( Acts 9:24) “watched the gates day and night to kill Paul.” His office was to exercise authority under the king, over the many Jews in large cities: compare Acts 9:25.

    Damascus had been a city of the Roman province, Syria; and we have Damascene coins of Augustus and Tiberius, and afterward of Nero, etc., but we have none of Caligula. This implies that some change in the government of Damascus took place under Caligula, Tiberius’s successor.

    Moreover, Aretas, king of Arabia Nabataea dud its capital Petra, made war on Antipas for divorcing Aretas’ daughter, and defeated him. But Tiberius, at Antipas’ entreaty, commanded Vitellius, governor of Syria, to take Aretas dead or alive. Before the order was executed Tiberius himself was dead. Then all was reversed. Antipas was banished by Caligula to Lyons, and his kingdom given to Agrippa, his nephew and his foe. It seems therefore to harmonize with history, as well as with Scripture, to assume that in A.D. 38 or 39, when Caligula made several changes in the E., he also granted Damascus to Aretas. The incidental way in which Paul alludes to Aretas’ kingship over Damascus at the time of his escape from the ethnarch under him, by being let down in a basket from a house on the city wall (compare Acts 9:23-25), is a strong presumption for the truth of the Acts and Second Epistle to Corinthians. This was three years after Paul’s conversion; so that A. D. 36 will be the date of his conversion.

    ARGOB (1) 2 Kings 15:25. Pekahiah’s aide de camp, slain by the conspirators under Pekah, in defending the king.

    ARGOB (2) (the stony). A tract E. of Jordan, in Bashan, in Og’s kingdom, containing 60 great and fortified cities “with walls and brazen bars”; allotted to Manasseh, and taken by Jair a chief of that tribe ( Numbers 32:41).

    Afterward one of Solomon’s commissariat divisions under an officer at Ramoth Gilead ( 1 Kings 4:13). Trachonitis, “the rugged region,” was its later Greek name. Now the Lejah, S. of Damascus, E. of the sea of Galilee; described by Burckhardt, Porter, etc., 22 miles from N. to S., from E. to W.; of oval shape, a vast accumulation of basaltic rocks, in wild disorder, intersected with fissures; the black basalt seemingly having issued from the ground liquid, then become agitated, them split by internal convulsion. The cuplike cavities whence it exuded, and the wavy surface, are still to be seen. The rock is hard as flint, and emits a metallic sound when struck. A singular propriety appears in the Hebrews for “the region of Argob” ( Deuteronomy 3:4,13); it is the same term as for a rope (chebel ), i.e. a sharply defined frontier, as if measured off by a rope, the rocky rampart that encircles the Lejah “in a circle clearly defined as a rocky shore line.” This region stands 30 feet above the plain below. No other term is used of the region of Argob; it is possible therefore that (chebel ) was a provincialism of Manasseh, the tribe that possessed Argob, for we find Manasseh using the term to Joshua ( Joshua 17:5,14), “portion,” Hebrews (chebel ). [See TRACHONITIS .] Improbable as the statement of Scripture appears, yet it is strictly true. Sixty walled cities are still traceable in a space of 308 square miles. The architecture is ponderous and massive.

    Solid walls, four feet thick, and stones on one another without cement; the roofs enormous slabs of basaltic rock, like iron; the doors and gates are of stone,18 inches thick, secured by ponderous bars. The land bears still the appearance of having been “called the land of giants,” under the giant Og.

    A striking contrast to Argob is the surrounding plain of the Hauran (Bashan) described as “the plain” (mishor ), a high plateau of rich pasture and tillage, stretching from the sea of Galilee to the Lejah and beyond to the desert, aligned without a stone. The Hebrews terms could not have been more happily chosen, Argob, Chebel, Mishor.

    ARIDAI Aridatha. Esther 9:8,9.

    ARIEH (lion) ( 2 Kings 15:25). Slain with King Pekahiah by the conspirator Pekah.

    ARIEL (lion of God). 1. A brave “chief,” who directed under Ezra ( Ezra 8:16) the caravan from Babylon to Jerusalem.ARELI is akin ( Numbers 26:17). In Samuel 23:20 Winer translates for “two like-like men” two (sons) of Ariel; but Gesenius supports the KJV. 2. A symbolic name for Jerusalem ( Isaiah 29:1,2), the lion of God, rendered by God invincible. For “the lion of the tribe of Judah” is on her side ( Revelation 5:5). “It shall be unto Me as Ariel”; it shall emerge from its dangers invincible, Sennacherib’s invasion shall recoil on himself.

    In Ezekiel 43:15 “the altar”; the secret of Israel’s lion-like strength, her having God at peace with her through the atoning sacrifice there.

    Menochius guesses that the lieu (aril ) was carved on it; but as the word in Hebrews of Ezekiel 43:15 (arieil ) is somewhat different from that in Isaiah, perhaps in Ezekiel it menus, from an Arabic root, “the hearth of God.” Ganneau has deciphered on the Moabite stone that the Ariel of David is mentioned as taken by Mesha, the Moabite king, at Ataroth, and dragged before the face of Chemosh at Kerioth. The Ariel here must mean a lion carved altar of God.

    ARIMATHEA ( Matthew 27:57). The birthplace or abode of the rich man Joseph, who, by Pilate’s leave, which he “boldly” craved, casting away the “fear” which had previously kept him from open discipleship ( Mark 15:43; John 19:38), buried our Lord’s body in his own “new tomb” at Jerusalem.

    Arimathea, a “city of the Jews” (Luke’s vague expression for the Gentiles, to whom no more precise information seemed needful: Luke 23:51) is possibly identical with Ramah, Samuel’s birthplace, called Armathaim in the Septuagint ( 1 Samuel 1:1,19); but many associate it with Ramleh, on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem.

    ARIOCH (lion-like). 1. King of see ELLASAR (see) ( Genesis 14:1,9). 2. Captain of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard ( Daniel 2:14).

    ARISAI Esther 9:9.

    ARISTARCHUS Aristarchus: of Thessalonica. Paul’s companion on his third missionary tour, and dragged into the theater with Gains by the mob at Ephesus; he accompanied Paul to Asia, afterward to Rome ( Acts 19:29; 20:4; 27:2).

    Paul calls him “my fellow prisoner” (lit. fellow captive, namely, in the Christian warfare), “my fellow laborer,” in his epistles from Rome ( Colossians 4:10; Philemon 1:24). Epaphras similarly ( Philemon 1:23; Colossians 1:7) is called “my fellow prisoner,” “our fellow servant.” Paul’s two friends possibly shared his imprisonment by turns, Aristarchus being his fellow prisoner when he wrote to the Colossians, Epaphras when he wrote to Philemon. Bishop of Apamaea, according to tradition.

    ARISTOBULUS Aristobulus, whose “household” is “saluted” ( Romans 16:10). Himself not being greeted, it is likely either he was not a Christian or was absent from Rome. The family would hardly be called after him, if he were dead.

    ARK [See NOAH ]. The term (teebah ) is applied to the infant Moses’ ark. [see BULRUSH ]. Teebah is evidently the Egyptian teb, “a chest,” Hebraised. It has no Semitic equivalent. It is a type of the manger which disclosed to the shepherds Messiah, who, beginning with the manger, at last ascended to His Father’s throne; also of the paper ark to which God has committed His revelation.

    ARK OF THE COVENANT (aron , not teebah ). An oblong chester shittim wood (acacia), two and a half cubits long, one and a half broad and deep. F. W. Kolland measured acacias nine feet in girth, in the region of Israel’s wandering; he attributes their being usually stunted there to the Arabs cutting off the young shoots for the she goats. Thus Colenso’s cavil that “not a single acacia” is to be seen where the ark is said to have been constructed is answered. It is a propriety characteristic of the truth of the Scripture narrative that it represents the ark as not made of oak or cedar, the best woods of the Holy Land, but of acacia, the wood of the wilderness. Cedar actually was the wood used for the Jerusalem temple. In the thorn of man’s curse appeared the angel of the covenant to Moses, to bless man; and out of its wood was formed the ark of the covenant, the typical source of his blessing. Overlaid with gold within and without. The mercy-seat supporting the cherubim, one at each end, was on the lid, with a crown or raised border, and was Jehovah’s mystical throne. It had rings at the four grainers for the two staves to pass through, wherewith the Kohathite Levites or priests carried it. The staves were permanently in the rings. Within e veil was its proper place, the ends of the staves, however, being visible, in Solomon’s temple, in the outer holy place. When carried about, the ark was wrapped in the veil, the badger’s skin, and blue cloth. Its title, “the ark of the testimony,” implies its purpose, namely, to keep intact God’s “covenant” written by God on the two stone tables ( Exodus 34:28), as the sacred deposit of the Israelite church ( Exodus 25:22; Numbers 10:33). The outward keeping taught symbolically the moral and spiritual keeping of God’s commandments. In the wilderness “the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days’ journey to search out a resting place for them; and when the ark set forward, Moses said, Rise up, Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered, and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee.

    And when it rested, he said, Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel” ( Numbers 10:33-36; Psalm 68:1; 132:8). At the passage of the Jordan it was when the ark was borne by the priests and their feet had touched the water, that an open way was made for Israel. Only when the material ark, apart from obedience, was expected to give that favor of God which only obedience to the law contained within the ark could ensure, did God “deliver His strength” (the pledge of God’s strengthening His people) “into captivity and His glory into the enemy’s hands” ( Psalm 78:61; 1 Samuel 4:11). When the ark was taken the “glory” was departed ( 1 Samuel 4:21,22). The ark and the sanctuary were “the beauty of Israel” ( Lamentations 2:1). The antitype, Messiah, goes before His redeemed, exploring their way through the wilderness, making clear passage through death’s waters into the heavenly Canaan. Like the ark with the Philistines Messiah was the captive of the grave for a brief space, but with triumph He rose again; and as when the ark went up to the tabernacle reared for it by David on Zion, so on Christ’s ascending the heavenly mount the glorious anthem arose: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in” (Psalm 24). Every Dagon must fall before Him now; for even in His temporary captivity in death the powers of darkness were crushed before Him ( Colossians 2:14,15; Matthew 27:50-54). As the ark blessed the house of Obed Edom, so Christ is the true bestower of blessings ( Acts 3:20).

    The restriction of the ark’s contents to the decalogue implies that this is the central core of all the various precepts, the moral end for which the positive precepts were given. They were in the innermost shrine, to mark their perpetually obligatory nature and the holiness of God; in the ark, the type of Christ, to mark that in Him alone, “the Lord our righteousness,” they find their perfect realization. 1 Kings 8:9 states there was nothing in the ark of Solomon’s temple save the two stone tables of the law; but Hebrews 9:4 states there were also the golden pot of manna (the memorial of God’s providential care of Israel), and Aaron’s rod that budded (the memorial of the lawful priesthood, Numbers 17:3-10).

    Probably by the time of Solomon the other two relics had been lost, perhaps when the ark was in the hands of the Philistines. “Before the Lord” and “before the testimony” was where they were directed to be laid up ( Exodus 16:32-36). The mercy-seat was not merely regarded as the lid of the ark, but as the most important feature in the holiest place ( Exodus 25:17; 26:34; Leviticus 16:2), the only meeting place between God and man. It was the (caporeth ) or covering, not merely of the ark. but (when sprinkled with the sacrificial blood once a year on the great day of atonement) of Israel’s sins against the law contained within the ark.

    Hence it is called in the Septuagint “the propitiatory” (hilasterion ); and Christ, the true mercy-seat ( Psalm 85:10) and place of meeting between the holy God and guilty man, is called the very same ( Romans 3:25), “propitiation,” lit. propitiatory. In 1 Chronicles 28:11 the holiest is called” the place of the mercy-seat,” so prominent was the latter in symbolical significance. The ark was never seen save by the high priest; symbol of God whom no man can see, and whose likeness is only to be seen in Christ ( John 1:18; Hebrews 1:3), the true Ark, and our High Priest with the Father. Thus every tendency to idolatry was excluded, an ark occupying the central place of holiness, and that seen only once a year by the one religious representative of the people. Even it is to be superseded in the coming temple at. Jerusalem, when “they shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the Lord, neither shall it come to mind, neither shall they re. member it”; for Jehovah Jesus, the Antitype, will be there, “at that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it” ( Jeremiah 3:16). The absence of the ark after its capture by the Philistines possibly impaired the reverential awe felt toward it ( 1 Chronicles 13:3,9). But the stroke on Uzza, and the rearing of the tabernacle for it in Zion by David, after its long abode of 20 years in Kirjath Jearim, in Abinadab’s house, recovered for it all its sanctity. The altar of burnt offering where the sacrifices were offered continued separate from it at Gibeon, the “great high place” ( 1 Kings 3:4) (in the tabernacle of the ark on Zion the service was song and praise alone) until the two were reunited in the temple of Solomon, a type of the gospel separation of the spiritual service of prayer and praise going on here below, from the priestly intercession being carried on above by our Lord Jesus. The spiritual and the literal priestly services will perhaps be reunited in Ezekiel’s millennial temple at Jerusalem, one antitype to Solomon’s temple. Compare Acts 15:16,17. Manasseh set up an idol, a carved image, instead of the ark which contained the testimony against him. Josiah restored it to its place in the house of God ( 2 Chronicles 33:7; 35:3).

    The ark was wanting in the second temple, having been probably burnt with the temple ( 2 Chronicles 36:19); compare (apocryphal) 2 Esdras 10:22, “the ark of our covenant is spoiled.” Its absence was one of the points wherein the second was inferior to the first temple. [See ALTAR .] There must have been some substitute for it, on which to sprinkle the blood, in the holiest, on the great day of atonement; the Jews mention an altar stone, slightly raised from the floor. Pagan nations too had their mystic arks (whence arcanum is the term for a mystery), but so distinct in use from the Mosaic that the differences are more prominent than the resemblances. The Egyptian arks (on their monuments) were, like the Hebrew ark, carried by poles on men’s shoulders. Some had too on the cover two winged figures like cherubim; but between these was the material symbol of a deity, and the arks were carried about in procession to make a show before the people. The ark of the covenant on the contrary was marked by the absence of any symbol of God. It was never carried in procession. When moved it was carefully covered up from the eyes even of the Levites who bore it ( Numbers 4:5,6,19,20): “they shall not go in to see when the holy things are covered, lest they die.” Compare 1 Samuel 6:19. In the tabernacle the ark was withdrawn from view in the mysterious holy of holies. It was not moved from its “rest” ( <19D208> Psalm 132:8,14) when once Jerusalem became the fixed capital, and the hill of Zion God’s chosen seat, until its forcible removal under Nebuchadnezzar; God giving up the apostate Jews to the pagan world power. Previously it had a few times accompanied the army ( 1 Samuel 4:3; 14:18; 2 Samuel 11:11). But from the first rest was appointed as its final condition, and under David it obtained that “rest” ( Deuteronomy 12:10,11; 1 Chronicles 6:31; 16:1). Its simple and grand purpose was to be the casket containing the precious tables of stone written with the moral law by God Himself. The originality of the tabernacle furniture and arrangements is more striking than the superficial resemblances which have been traced to pagan usages.

    ARKITES One family of Canaanites ( Genesis 10:17; 1 Chronicles 1:15). A place N. of Phoenicia, called subsequently Caesarea Libani (at the base of Lebanon) from being Alexander Severus’ birthplace; well known to the crusaders. Now Arka, two and a half hours from the shore; twelve miles N. of Tripoli; and five S. of Nahr el Kebir (Eleutheris). The ruins are scattered on a hill of about two acres, and on a plateau N. of it.

    ARM Figure for might, of God ( Isaiah 53:1). “Break the arm,” i.e. the power ( Ezekiel 30:21). “Stretched out arm,” image from a warrior with spear or sword thrust forth: all the power put forth ( Joshua 8:26; Isaiah 5:25).

    ARMAGEDDON mount of Megiddo: from a root gadad , “to cut off,” i.e. slaughter ( Revelation 16:16). The plain of Esdraelon, the great Old Testament battle field between Israel and the various enemies of Jehovah’s people: the scene of Barak’s victory over Canaan, and Gideon’s over Midian (Judges 4; 5; 7), the scene also of Saul’s death and Israel’s defeat before the Philistines (1 Samuel 31), and of Josiah’s death in battle with Pharaoh Necho ( 2 Kings 23:29,30). Both this and “the valley of Jehoshaphat” (the scene of his great victory, 2 Chronicles 20:26, compare Zechariah 14:2-4) may be figurative phrases for the scene of the final conflict of Christ and Antichrist. But they may also be literal. The mourning at Josiah’s death in the valley of Megiddo became proverbial for the most poignant grief. As he and his army represent the professing church, so Pharaoh Necho and the Egyptians the God-opposed world. The triumph of Pharaoh then shall be utterly reversed in the last conflict of the ten confederate kings under Antichrist against the Lamb and His hosts (not merely professors, but “called, chosen, and faithful”) ( Revelation 17:12-14; 19:11-21). The last Antichrist is developed after executing judgment on the whore, the apostate church; he then, with his ten confederate kings and the false prophet, opposes Christ Himself, and perishes.

    ARMENIA [See ARARAT .] The name in Heb., translated Armenia from (Har-Mini ), “the mountains of Minni” = Minyas, in the upper valley of the Murad-su branch of the Euphrates. Togarmah is the name of the race, the Armenians referring their own origin to Thorgomass or Tiorgarmah. In Ezekiel 27:14 its trading in “carriage horses, riding horses and mules” (so the Heb.), for which Armenia is still famous, as well as for the keenness of its traffickers, is mentioned.

    ARMLET (bracelet) Hebrews a fetter, from a root, “a step” ( Isaiah 3:18-20). [See ANKLET .] A general ornament in the E. A badge of kings ( 2 Samuel 1:10). The signet was sometimes a jewel on the armlet; which explains, “Set me as a seal upon thine arm” (Song 8:6). Their weight (compare Genesis 24:22), and their tightness on the arm (so that in putting them on blood is often drawn) make their female wearers pay dearly for their love of admiration.

    ARMONI Saul’s son by Rizpah ( 2 Samuel 21:8). Slain to appease the Gibeonites, whose blood Saul had shed.

    ARMS Neither remains of Hebrews Arms, nor representations of them in Scripture, or on vases, bronzes, mosaics, paintings, coins, or jewels, have been preserved to us. Of offensive armor there was theSWORD (chereb ), first mentioned Genesis 3:24. Lighter and shorter than our modern sword ( 2 Samuel 2:16; 20:8-10; 1 Samuel 17:51; 21:9,10). It was carried in a sheath, slung by a girdle, resting upon the thigh ( Psalm 45:3; 2 Samuel 20:8). In peace even a king wore no sword ( Kings 3:24). So that “gird on the sword” was a phrase for begin war ( Psalm 45:3). “Devour with the sword” ( Isaiah 1:20), “smite with the edge (mouth) of the sword,” are familiar personifications. Some swords were “two edged” ( <19E906> Psalm 149:6), type of the Word ( Hebrews 4:12; Revelation 1:16). Traces of the primitive use of flint for swords or knives appear in Exodus 4:25; Joshua 5:2. TheSPEAR (chanith ), Saul’s regular companion (appropriate to his own stately height), at his head when sleeping, in his hand when gathering his soldiers, his leaning staff when dying ( 1 Samuel 26:7; 22:6; 2 Samuel 1:6).

    It was this ponderous (compare 2 Samuel 2:23) weapon, not the lighter “javelin” (as KJV) which he hurled at David twice, and at Jonathan ( 1 Samuel 18:11; 19:10; 20:33). TheJAVELIN (kidon ) was lighter, appropriate to maneuvering, easy to hold outstretched ( Joshua 8:14-27); carried on the back between the shoulders. In 1 Samuel 17:6 translate, not “target,” but “aJAVELIN of brass,” distinguished from “the spear” (chanith ), 1 Samuel 17:7; so 1 Samuel 17:45, “with a javelin,” not “a shield”; Job 39:23, “the glittering spear and the JAVELIN.” TheLANCE (romach ), translated KJV “spear,” “javelin,” “lancet” ( 1 Kings 18:28). TheDART (shelach ) ( 2 Chronicles 32:5).

    TheBATON, orSCEPTRE (shebet ) used in 2 Samuel 18:14 of the “darts” with which Joab killed Absalom. TheBOW (quesheth ). Captains of high rank did not disdain to seek expertness in it: as Jonathan ( Samuel 1:22), Jehu ( 2 Kings 9:24). The tribe Benjamin was noted for archery ( 1 Chronicles 8:40; 12:2), where a bow for shooting stones forth is implied ( 2 Chronicles 14:8). The phrase for “bend the bow” is “tread” it, implying that it was bent with the foot. Some bows were made of brass or “steel” ( Psalm 18:34). In the beginning of Saul’s reign the Philistines had reduced Israel so as that “no smith was found throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears; so in the day of battle there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people but with Saul and with Jonathan” ( 1 Samuel 13:19-22). Curiously analogous to this is the stipulation mentioned in the league which the Etrurian Potsena conceded to the vanquished Romans (Pliny, 34:14), namely, “that they should not use iron save in agriculture.” The arrows (chitzim ) were carried in a quiver (theli ); Job 6:4 refers to poisoned arrows; <19C004> Psalm 120:4 to the practice of attaching burning material to some arrow heads. Divination by arrows was practiced by the Chaldees. Nebuchadnezzar, undecided whether to attack Jerusalem or Ammon first, wrote their names on distinct arrows; the arrow first drawn from the quiver decided his course ( Ezekiel 21:21,22). The\parSLING ( Judges 20:16), the usual weapon of a shepherd, as David, to ward off beasts from the flock. His weapon in slaying Goliath; hence gracefully alluded to by Abigail in her prayer for him ( 1 Samuel 25:29): “the souls of thine enemies ... shall God sling out, as out of the middle of a sling.”ENGINES for “shooting great stones” prepared by king Uzziah ( 2 Chronicles 26:15). Of defensive armor there was theCOAT OF MAIL ( 1 Samuel 17:5), Hebrews “breastplate (shirion ) of scales.” In Kings 22:34, translate as margin “between the joints and the breast. plate.”

    KJV trans. shirion “habergeons” ( 2 Chronicles 26:14; Nehemiah 4:16), i.e. hauberks, a quilted shirt or doublet put over the head. From its breastplate-like outline Hermon is called Sirion, contracted into Sion ( Deuteronomy 3:9; 4:48). TheHELMET from a root meaning “high and round.”GREAVES of brass, for the feet ( 1 Samuel 17:6). Two kinds of\parSHIELD: the tzinnah protecting the whole person ( Psalm 5:12), carried before the warrior when not in actual battle ( 1 Samuel 17:7,41); the Roman doorlike oblong shield, four feet long by two broad (thureon ), from thura , a door), is meant Ephesians 6:16, “above all,” i.e. over all, covering all the body, not the small round shield. The mageen was smaller, a buckler for hand to band fight. 1 Kings 10:16,17: “six hundred shekels of gold went to one target” (tzinnah ), but” three pounds of gold went to one shield” (mageen ); the greater weight required for the tzinnah shows its larger size. The light mageen is that in 2 Chronicles 12:9,10.

    The shelet (“buckler,” from shalat , to exercise authority), probably a small peculiarly shaped shield of gold, the badge of men high in authority. In 2 Samuel 8:7 “shields” of gold taken by David from Hadadezer king of Zobah, and dedicated in the temple, used in proclaiming, Joash king ( Kings 11:10), compare Song 4:4). In the New Testament compare Ephesians 6:14-17 for the Roman armor, except the spear. The breastplate had a girdle beneath to brace up the person. The Greek greaves protected the legs as well as the feet. The light armed troops (psiloi ), instead of shield and cuirass, wore a garment of leather, and fought with parts, bows, stones, and slings. The targeteers (peltastes) also were more lightly equipped than the heavy armed (hoplitoe). Three integuments are specified in Ephesians 6: the breastplate, girdle, and shoes; two defenses, the helmet and shield; two offensive weapons, the sword and the spear (not the type, but its antitype, prayer, shot up as a javelin mightily; ejaculation is derived from jaculum, “a javelin”). There is no armor for the back, but only for the front we must never turn our back to the foe ( Luke 9:62), our only safety is ceaseless fighting ( Matthew 4:11; James 4:7). The girdle kept the armor in its place and supported the sword; so the “truth” in Jesus appropriated secures the believer, and braces him for the good fight ( Ephesians 4:21; compare Exodus 12:11; Luke 12:35). The Roman soldier wore military sandals (caligoe whence the emperor Caligula took his name); so Christians, “your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace”; the peace within beautifully contrasting with the raging war outside ( Isaiah 26:3). To be at peace with God and ourselves we must ever war with Satan. In Assyrian remains we see a coat of scale armor reaching down to the knees or ankles. TheMAUL or mace is alluded to in Psalm 2:9; Proverbs 26:18; Jeremiah 50:23; 51:20; Nahum 2:1: literally “that which scatters in pieces.” So “Martel,” a littleHAMMER, was the surname of the king of the Franks.

    ARMY In Israel’s, at the exodus, every man above 20 was a soldier ( Numbers 1:3); each tribe a battalion, with its own banner and leader ( Numbers 2:2; 10:5,6,14). Their positions in camp and on march were accurately fixed. The whole host moved according to preappointed alarms on the trumpet. So ( Exodus 13:18) they “went up harnessed” (margin five in a rank; chamushim , from chameesh , “five”; or from chomesh , “the loins,” with the loins girt), prepared for the march, not fleeing away as fugitives.

    Five was a number regarded as inauspicious by the Egyptians, but honored by Israel; witness the five books of the pentateuch, the jubilee of fifty years.

    Manetho describes the Israelites as 250,000 lepers, five X fifty thousand.

    The exactness of their martial order is implied in Balaam’s metaphors ( Numbers 24:6). The “scribe of the host” made the conscription and chose the officers when needful ( Deuteronomy 20:5-9; 2 Kings 25:19; 2 Chronicles 26:11). The army was divided into thousands and hundreds with captains over each; the family too was respected in the army organization, as being the unit in the Jewish polity ( Numbers 2:34; 31:14). Before the time of the kings their tactics were of a loose desultory kind; but the kings established a body guard, the first step toward a standing army. Saul had 3000 picked men ( 1 Samuel 13:2; 14:52; 24:2). David had 600 before his accession ( 1 Samuel 23:13); after it he added the Cherethites and Pelethites and Gittites ( 2 Samuel 8:18; 15:18), and veteran guards (shalishim , “captains,” 1 Chronicles 12:18; Ezekiel 23:15,23, “princes,” “great lords”) whose “chief” was about David’s person as adjutant. He called out also monthly a regiment of national militia, twelve regiments in all, under officers ( 1 Chronicles 27:1). A “captain of the host,” or commander in chief, led the army in time of war; as Abner under Saul, Joab under David. Judaea and the northern kingdom Israel being hilly, were little suited for chariots and horsemen, except in the plains of Esdraelon and Philistia, and toward Egypt and Syria.

    Moreover, God had forbidden the multiplication of horses ( Deuteronomy 17:16). But their own unfaithfulness exposed them to the enemy’s powerful chariots; so they too longed to have similar ones ( Joshua 17:16; 11:9; Judges 1:19; 4:2; 1 Samuel 13:5). David reserved 100 from the Syrian spoils ( 2 Samuel 8:4). Solomon afterward largely increased the number from Egypt ( 1 Kings 10:26-29; 9:19); in all 1400 chariots, 12000 horsemen. The grades in the army appear in 1 Kings 9:22, “men of war” (privates), servants (subalterns), princes (captains), captains (staff officers), rulers of chariots and horsemen (cavalry officers). The body guard was permanently maintained ( Kings 14:28), the militia only exceptionally called out. The Syrians reduced the cavalry to a mere fragment in Jehoahaz’s reign. Jotham in Judah had a large cavalry force ( Isaiah 2:7), but it was much brought down in Hezekiah’s reign, so that the Jews, in violation of God’s prohibition ( Deuteronomy 17:16), looked to Egypt for horses and chariots ( Isaiah 31:1; 36:9; Psalm 20:7). In action the army was often in three divisions ( Judges 7:16; 1 Samuel 11:11; 2 Samuel 18:2).

    Jehoshaphat divided his into five bodies (answering to the five geographical divisions then), but virtually Judah’s heavy armed men formed the main army, the two light armed divisions of Benjamin the subsidiary bodies. At the exodus the number of soldiers was 600,000 ( Exodus 12:37), at the borders of Canaan 601,730; under David, 1,300,000 men capable of service, namely, 800,000 for Israel, 500,000 for Judah ( 2 Samuel 24:9), but in 1 Chronicles 21:5,6 it is 1,570,000; namely, 1,100,000 for Israel, and 470,000 for Judah. The discrepancy is due to the census having been broken off ( 1 Chronicles 27:24). The militia ( 1 Chronicles 27:1, etc.), 288,000, was probably included in Chronicles, not in Samuel.

    The exact census was not entered in the annals of the kingdom ( Chronicles 27:24); hence the amount is given in round and not exact numbers. Levi and Benjamin were not reckoned, the latter owing to Joab’s repugnance to the census ( 1 Chronicles 21:6). Jehoshaphat’s army was 1,160,000 ( 2 Chronicles 17:14-18). John Hyrcanus first introduced mercenaries.

    The Roman army was divided into legions, each under six tribunes (“chief captains,” chiliarchs, Acts 21:31), who commanded in turn. The legion had 10 cohorts (“bands,” speira, Acts 10:1), the cohort into three maniples, the maniple into two centuries (each 100 men originally), commanded by a centurion ( Acts 10:1,22; Matthew 8:5). The “Italian band” or cohort consisted of volunteers from Italy, perhaps the procurator’s body guard. “Augustus’ band” or cohort ( Acts 27:1) were either volunteers from Sebaste, or a cohort similar to “the Augustan legion.” Caesarea was the Roman head quarters in Palestine. The ordinary guard was a quaternion of four soldiers, answering to the four watches of the night, and relieving each other every three hours ( Acts 12:4; John 19:23). Two watched outside a prisoner’s door, two inside ( Acts 12:6). “The captain of the guard” ( Acts 28:16) was probably commander of the Praetorian guards, to whom prisoners from the provinces were committed. The “spearmen” (dexiolabi , Acts 23:23) were light armed body guards, literally “protecting the right side,” or else “grasping the weapon with the right hand.”

    ARNAN 1 Chronicles 3:21.

    ARNON (swift, noisy). The torrent; boundary between Moab and the Amorites on the N., and afterward between Moab and Reuben ( Numbers 21:13,14,24,26; Deuteronomy 2:24,36). A branch of the Arnon (Seil es Saideh) flowing N.W. seemingly formed the eastern boundary of Moab ( Judges 11:18; 2 Kings 10:33). Aroer was by its northern brink; the ruins still bear. the name. Rising in the Arabian mountains (the branch Sell es Saideh in the mountains of Gilead near Kalaat el Katrane), it flows through the wilderness and falls into the Dead Sea. Now the wady el Mojeb, flowing through a precipitous, rugged, gloomy ravine. The sides are of red and brown sandstone where it meets the Dead Sea; it is 10 feet; deep at that point. The Roman road between Rabba and Dhiban crosses it at two hours’ distance from Rabba.

    AROD Numbers 26:17; called Arodi Genesis 46:16.

    AROER (ruins, places with the foundations laid bore). [See ARNON .] 1. The city taken from Sihon, king of the Amorites, and assigned to Reuben ( Deuteronomy 2:36; Joshua 13:9,16). Afterward in Moab’s possession ( Jeremiah 48:19), though Aroer may there be regarded as only lying in Moab’s way, when fleeing into the desert, and as asking the cause of Moab’s flight. With Aroer is associated some “city that is in the midst of the river.” Mr. Grove suggests that at the Arnon junction with the Lejum, one hour E. of Arair or Aroer, the hill with ruins on it may be the site of the city in question; no city could have stood in such a position immediately near Aroer. 2. Aroer facing Rabbbah of Ammon: “built,” i.e. restored and enlarged, by Gad ( Numbers 32:34; Judges 11:33); now perhaps Ayra. Isaiah 17:2 refers to this Aroer with its dependent “cities,” then “forsaken” through Tiglath Pileser’s having carried away the inhabitants ( 2 Kings 15:29). 3. A town in Judah ( 1 Samuel 30:28) to which David sent portions after his victory over the Amalekites at Ziklag. In the wady Ararah, geographical miles S. of Hebron, on the road from Petra to Gaza.

    ARPAD A city dependent on Damascus, and always named with Hamath (now Hamah on the Orontes). It fell before Sennacherib ( 2 Kings 18:34; Isaiah 10:9).

    ARPHAXAD ( Genesis 10:21-24. Professor Rawlinson translates: “unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japhet, were children born, Arphaxad”: Genesis 11:10) = the stronghold of the Chaldees. Shem’s descendants are mentioned last, because the subsequent sacred history concerns them chiefly. His being forefather to Eber or Heber is specified, to mark that the chosen people of God, the Hebrews, sprang from Shem: Arphaxad was father of Salah. There was a portion of Assyria called Arrapachitis, from Arapkha, “the city of the four sacred fish,” often seen on cylinders; but the affinity is doubtful.

    ARTAXERXES From arta, “great,” or “honored”; Artaioi, Arii, Sansk. Arya, being the old name of the Persians, and kshershe, “a king” = Xerxes = see AHASUERUS (see). Artaxerxes I. ( Ezra 4:7) is the Magian usurper, who impersonated Smerdis, Cyrus’ younger son. To him the adversaries of the Jews wrote, in order to frustrate the building of the temple. Certainly the Ahasuerus of Ezra 4:6 was Cambyses, and the Darius of Ezra 4:24 was Darius Hystaspes; so that the intermediate king must be Smerdis the pretender, who by usurpation reigned for eight months 522 B.C. Cambyses did not act on the accusation of the Jews’ enemies; Ahasuerus Smerdis did forbidding the continuation of a work commenced under Cyrus, and continued under his son and successor. His creed as a Magian, opposed to that of Zoroaster, as declared in Herodotus 3:61, Ctesias Exc. Pers. 10, Justin 1:9, and Darius’ great inscription at Behistun, account for his reversing the policy of his two predecessors on a point of religion. The sympathy of Cyrus and Cambyses with the Jews in restoring their temple was to him just the reason for prohibiting it. In his decree ( Ezra 4:17-22) no symptom of the faith in the supreme God appears, which characterizes the decree of Cyrus. The Magian creed was pantheism, the worship of the elements, earth, air, water and fire.

    Artaxerxes II. was Artaxerxes Longimanus, son of Xerxes, who reigned 464-425 B.C. He allowed Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 2:1) to spend 12 years at Jerusalem to settle the affairs of the returned Jews. He had 13 years previously permitted Ezra ( Ezra 7:1) to go on a similar errand. The reign of Ahasuerus III. = Xerxes, described in Esther, comes chronologically between Ezra 6 (515 B.C.) and Ezra 7, which is in the 7th year of Artaxerxes Longimanus, 457 B.C. The gap occupies 58 years in all, of which Xerxes’ reign takes 21 years. Thirteen years after Ezra’s going to Jerusalem, 457 B.C., it was found that a civil as well as an ecclesiastical head was required there. So in 444 B.C. Artaxerxes Longimanus, who was noted among the Persian kings for wisdom and right feeling, sanctioned Nehemiah’s going as civil governor. Like Cyrus and Darius he identified Jehovah with his own supreme god, Ormuzd ( Ezra 7:12,21,23), supported the Jewish worship by offerings and grants from the state and provincial treasuries, and threatened death, banishment, imprisonment, or confiscation against opponents. The oriental despot, who at personal inconvenience would suffer his servant’s departure for so long, to cheer him up, must have been more than ordinarily good natured. Secular history so represents him, “the first of Persian monarchs for mildness and magnanimity.” The Persians, says Diodorus Siculus (11:71:2), admired his “equity and moderation in government.”

    ARTEMAS Paul’s companion ( Titus 3:12), whom he proposed sending to Titus at Crete. In tradition, bishop of Lystra.

    ARUBOTH Third of Solomon’s commissariat districts ( 1 Kings 4:10), including Sochoh.

    ARUMAH Near Shechem, where Abimelech resided ( Judges 9:41).

    ARVAD (wandering). “The Arvadite” was a descendant of Canaan like Zidon, Hamath, etc. ( Genesis 10:18; 1 Chronicles 1:16.) In Ezekiel 27:8,11, “the men of Arvad” are among the mariners of the ship, namely, Tyre. Arvad is the isle Ruad, off Tortosa, two or three miles from the Phoenician coast, at the N. end of the bay above Tripoli. It is elevated and rocky, but hardly a mile round. Strabo mentions Arvad’s likeness to Tyre, and the superior seamanship of its people. The inhabitants still, to the number of a thousand, are employed as pilots, shipbuilders, sponge divers, and sailors. There are remains of the sea walls, some of the stones 12 feet long by 10 high, not beveled, but indented with deep grooves on the upper surface, one groove square, three semicircular.

    ARZA Steward of King Elah’s house in Tirzah. Elah, while drinking himself drunk in his house, was slain by the conspirator Zimri. A very different steward from Obadiah ( 1 Kings 18:3, compare 1 Corinthians 4:2).

    ASA (healing). Son of Abijah; third king of Judah. Faithful to Jehovah; determined in rooting out idolatry and its attendant licentiousness ( Kings 15:9-15; 2 Chronicles 14; 15; 16). He built fenced cities, the Lord giving him and his land rest and prosperity. No respecter of persons: so much so that he deposed Maachah, the queenmother (wife of Rehoboam and Asa’s grandmother), because she made an idol (Hebrews “horror,” some abominable and impure object of worship) in a grove; and he cut her idol down, stamped, and burnt it at the brook Kedron, as Moses had done to the golden calf ( Exodus 32:20). For “in a grove,” translate” to Asherah” (Hebrews haasheerah ), the Phoenician Venus ( 1 Kings 15:14; 2 Chronicles 15:16). The high places to idols he took away ( 2 Chronicles 14:3). But those to Jehovah, being an irregularity of a secondary kind, he did not take away ( 2 Chronicles 15:17; 1 Kings 15:14). Moreover, the gifts dedicated by his father Abijah, in the earlier and better part of his reign, silver, gold, and vessels, but afterward appropriated by the pagan priests for idolatry, he brought into the house of God ( 2 Chronicles 15:18). Encouraged by the prophecy of Azariah, the son of Oded, “the Lord is with you while ye be with Him,” he renewed the altar of Jehovah before the porch, after its desecration. The first ten years of his reign were occupied peacefully in such religious reforms. But in the eleventh year danger of war seems to have been anticipated, for “the land,” it is said, “was quiet ten years” only ( 2 Chronicles 14:1,2,8-15). Then follows Asa’s preparation of an army with targets and spears, 300,000 of Judah and 280,000 of Benjamin, bearing shields and drawing bows. In the 14th year the threatened danger came. see ZERAH (see), the Cushite or Ethiopian, invaded Judah at Mareshah with 1,000,000 men and chariots. The valley of Zephathah, at Mareshah (Marisse, S.W. of Judah, near the later Eleutheropolis), was the battle field. Like Judah, in his father Abijah’s time, in the hour of imminent peril ( 2 Chronicles 13:14,15), Asa cried unto Jehovah his God: “Lord, it is nothing with Thee to help, whether with many or with them that have no power; help us, O Lord our God, for we rest on Thee. ... Let not man prevail against Thee” (compare 1 Samuel 14:6). So Jehovah smote the Ethiopians before Asa (compare Isaiah 59:19.) At this very time a king called Azerch Amen, we know from recently deciphered monuments, reigned in Ethiopia (G. Rawlinson).

    Ewald and Hincks identify him with Osorkon I., king of Egypt, second of the 22nd dynasty. Zerah’s army is composed of much the same elements ( 2 Chronicles 16:8; 12:3), Ethiopians and Lubims (Libyans), as Shishak’s (the Sukkiim being peculiar to the latter); mercenaries, we know, were much employed in the 22nd dynasty. Others fix on Osorkon II., son in law of his predecessor, and reigning in right of his wife. He was probably, if this view be true, an Ethiopian, ruling over both Egypt and Ethiopia. Asa, having refused to pay the tribute imposed by Shishak on Rehoboam, was invaded. Asa on his return from the victory gathered all Judah and Benjamin and strangers out of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon, who joined his kingdom, seeing the Lord was with him, in the 15th year of his reign. At this feast of thanksgiving all “entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and with all their soul.” “The Lord gave them rest round about” for a time. But Baasha, king of Israel, jealous of the defections from his own kingdom and the growing prosperity of Judah, fortified Ramah on the road N. of Jerusalem, “that he might not suffer any to go out or come in to Asa” (compare 1 Kings 12:27; 15:17.) This is said (in 2 Chronicles 16:1,11) to be in the 36th year of Asa’s reign; but Baasha was at that time long dead ( 1 Kings 15:33), therefore this 36th year must be calculated from the separation of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This calculation was probably drawn from “the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.” Baasha’s act was probably in the 17th year of Asa’s reign. Asa, instead of trusting in Jehovah, bought the help of the pagan world power, Benhadad I. king of Damascus, against Israel, with the treasures left in the temple and the palace from the tribute for Egypt, which he had ceased to pay. Benhadad smote Ijon, Dan, and Abelmaim, and the store cities of Naphtali. So Baasha had to cease fortifying Ramah, and Asa used the materials to fortify Geba (the hill) and Mizpeh (the watchtower) in Benjamin to guard against future invasion. The large cistern or pit made by Asa to obviate scarcity of water in the event of a siege by Baasha is mentioned long after in Jeremiah 41:7,9. Hanani, the seer, reproved Asa, telling him that if he had not relied on the king of Syria, instead of on Jehovah, he should have had him as a vassal instead of being himself subordinate to Syria. Carnal policy brings on the very evil which it shuns, and which would have been completely averted by a policy of faith. So far from escaping wars by his unbelieving course, he must henceforth have them ( 1 Kings 15:32; 2 Chronicles 16:7-9). Asa, instead of being humbled, was wroth, and put the seer in prison and oppressed some of the people, probably sympathizers with the man of God. It is true he succeeded in capturing cities of Ephraim ( 2 Chronicles 17:2), but his end was under a spiritual cloud. Diseased in his feet, after a reign of 39 years, “he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians,” i.e., his trust was less in Jehovah than in human remedies (compare Jeremiah 17:5). That in the main, nevertheless, he served the Lord truly, appears from 1 Kings 15:14: “Asa’s heart was perfect with the Lord (sincere) all his days.” The funeral, with its “sweet odorous and divers spices” and “very great burning for him,” marks how highly he was esteemed. His whole reign lasted 41 years, 956 to 915 B.C. His later blemishes warn even believers; “let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall” (compare Galatians 5:7).

    ASADIAH (Jehovah loveth). 1 Chronicles 3:20.

    ASAHEL (made by God). 1. David’s nephew, youngest son of Zeruiah, David’s sister; brother of Joab and Abishai. Swift on foot, he pursued Abner after Ishbosheth’s army was defeated at Gibeon, in spite of Abner’s warning, and was pierced with the hinder end of his spear (2 Samuel 2). [See ABNER .] 2. Three others ( 2 Chronicles 17:8; 31:18; Ezra 10:15).

    ASAHIAH or Asaiah. 1. Sent with Hilkiah to inquire of Jehovah concerning the book of the law found in the temple ( 2 Kings 22:12-14). 2. Four others ( 1 Chronicles 9:5; 4:36; 6:30; 15:6,11).

    ASAPH (assembler). 1. A Levite, son of Berachiah; one of David’s choir leaders ( Chronicles 6:39). An inspired seer, as well as a composer of music ( Chronicles 29:30; Nehemiah 12:46). “The sons of Asaph” were poets and musical composers of the school founded by him; as Heman and Jeduthun also were heads of schools of sacred inspired music. <132501> Chronicles 25:1; 2 Chronicles 20:14; Ezra 2:41; Psalm 50; 73; 83, are all attributed to his authorship; but 83, celebrates the victory of Jehoshaphat long after Asaph’s time, therefore “Asaph” in this psalm’s title must mean “one of the school of Asaph.” 2. 2 Kings 18:18,37. 3. Nehemiah 2:8. 4. Nehemiah 11:17.

    ASAREEL 1 Chronicles 4:16.

    ARELAH Asarelah, or Jesharelah. 1 Chronicles 25:2,14.

    ASENATH Daughter of Potipherah, prince priest of On; Joseph’s wife; mother of Ephraim and Manasseh ( Genesis 41:50; 46:20). Her name is probably Egyptian, and means “she who is consecrated to Neith,” the goddess of wisdom, a tutelary deity of On or Revelation Athom, the city of the sun god, the Athene of Greece. If it be the Hebrew name assumed on her conversion (as see BITHIAH means “daughter of Jehovah”) and union with Joseph, it may be from asan , “a storehouse,” in allusion to Joseph’s national service, and Ephraim’s name meaning fruitfulness. Canon Cook makes it a compound of “Isis” and “Neith,” two goddesses akin. The marriage into this idolatrous family seems to have borne evil fruit afterward in the idolatry of Joseph’s descendants, Ephraim, and the calf worship.

    Foreigners had been raised to high rank by Pharaohs of the early empire; Joseph, as Abraham’s descendant, would be regarded as of noble birth, and be admitted, especially at the command of an absolute king, into alliance with the haughty priest caste. His circumcision, if, as in after ages, it was then practiced in Egypt by the priests, would be a recommendation.

    However, as it is not represented in the monuments until the 19th dynasty, long after Joseph, he probably first introduced it.

    ASH ( Isaiah 44:14): Hebrews oren , akin to Arabic atari, slender, graceful.

    Probably a pine; so the Septuagint and Vulgate The Latin ornus seems akin.

    ASHAN ( Joshua 15:42): a city of the low country of Judah. In 1 Chronicles 4:32 mentioned as of Simeon. In 1 Chronicles 6:59 a priests’ city; holding the same place as the similar Ain in Joshua’s list ( Joshua 21:16). In 1 Samuel 30:30 Chor-ashan is in “the south.” Probably it is the same as Ain, of which traces exist at El Ghuweir.

    ASHBEA (I adjure). 1 Chronicles 4:21.

    ASHBEL Genesis 46:21; Numbers 26:38; 1 Chronicles 8:1.

    ASHDOD or Azotus = fortress. Now Esdud. On a commanding height. One of the five confederate Philistine cities, 30 miles from the S. of Palestine, three from the Mediterranean, midway between Gaza and Joppa. A seat of the worship of see DAGON ; there the idol fell before God’s captive ark, the head and palms cut off, and only the fishy stump (margin) left ( Samuel 5:3-8). Ashdod had been originally assigned to Judah ( Joshua 15:47), but never occupied by the Jews, nay, made a point of attack on them: not until King Uzziah was its “wall broken down and cities built about it,” i.e. forts on the surrounding hills ( 2 Chronicles 26:6). In Nehemiah’s time Ashdod still retained its distinctive language and race, and ensnared by marriages the Jews returned from Babylon, after vainly striving to prevent the walls of Jerusalem being built ( Nehemiah 4:7,8; 13:23,24). It was the key of entrance between Palestine and Egypt. As such, it was besieged by the Assyrian general Tartan under Sargon (716 B.C.), to counteract Hezekiah’s league with Egypt ( Isaiah 20:1). So strongly did the Assyrians fortify it that it stood a 29 years’ siege (the longest on record) under the Egyptian Psammeticus, who took it 630 B.C.

    These calamities were foretold Jeremiah 25:20; Amos 1:8; Zephaniah 2:4; Zec. 9:5,6, “a bastard shall dwell in Asdod,” i.e. an alien; perhaps referring to an Arabian occupation of it during the Babylonian exile. Compare Nehemiah 4:7; 13:24. Destroyed by the Maccabees. Restored by the Roman Gabinius 55 B.C. Assigned to Salome by Augustus. Visited by Philip the evangelist, who preached there on his way from Gaza to Caesarea ( Acts 8:40). A bishop from it was present at the councils of Nice and Chalcedon.

    ASHDOTH PISGAH (“Springs of Pisgah,” or “the hill”) ( Deuteronomy 3:17; 4:49; Joshua 12:3; 13:20). The mountains E. of the Dead Sea are hereby defined; “the springs” is one of the leading physical divisions of the country, namely, those at the base of the Moabite mountains ( Joshua 10:40; 12:8). Compare Numbers 21:15: “the stream (pouring) of the brooks (torrents).”

    ASHER or Aser. 1. Eighth son of Jacob by Zilpah, Leah’s handmaid ( Genesis 30:13). “In my happiness the daughters will call me happy: and she called his name Asher” (happy.) Asher had four sons and one daughter, the heads of families ( Numbers 26:44-47). At the exodus they numbered 41,500; at the close of the forty years in the wilderness 53,400. Their allotment was the rich sea coast between Carmel and Lebanon, N. of Manasseh, N.W. of Zebulun and Issachar, and S.W. of Naphtali. The portion near Zidon, Dor, Accho, Ahlab, Achzib, Helbah, Aphik, Rehob, they never made themselves masters of ( Judges 1:31,32; Joshua 19:24-31; 17:10,11.). The southern boundary was a stream S. of Dor (Tantura) flowing into the Mediterranean, Nahr el Defneh or Nahr Zurka. Their land included the maritime portion of the plain of Esdraelon. Moses’ blessing ( Deuteronomy 33:24,25) represents Asher “acceptable to his brethren”; but Keil, “favored among his brethren and dipping his feet in oil” (i.e. having a land flowing with oil: Job 29:6), “his shoes” (but Keil translates castle, min’al ; Maurer, bolt, i.e. dwelling secured by bolt) “iron and brass” (abounding in these metals, which the Phoenicians manufactured). Contented with the luxuries which nature and intercourse with the enterprising Phoenicians afforded (for already Zidon was “the great” or “the strong”), Asher shrank from jeopardizing life with Zebulun and Naphtali, against Sisera the Canaanite; Asher “abode on the sea shore in his breaches” (creeks) ( Judges 5:17,18). “As thy days so shall thy rest (dabeaka ) be,” Maurer and Keil; but Gesenius, “so shall thy death be” ( Deuteronomy 33:24,25). Jacob ( Genesis 49:20) prophesied: “out of Asher his bread shall be fat [the fat that comes from him shall be his own bread, so fruitful shall be his soil] and he shall yield royal dainties:” fulfilled when Solomon thence supplied King Hiram’s household with wheat and oil ( 1 Kings 5:11). Asher’s self indulging inertness acted injuriously on his own people. Selfishness and faint heartedness in the Lord’s cause became their own punishment. From being more numerous at mount Sinai than Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin, in David’s time they had become so few that Asher’s name is omitted from the chief rulers ( 1 Chronicles 27:16-22). Asherites were among those who came to Jerusalem to Hezekiah’s Passover ( 2 Chronicles 30:11). Asher and Simeon are the only tribes W. of Jordan which produced no hero or judge. see ANNA , daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher, in the New Testament alone reflects honor on her tribe (Luke 2). 2. A boundary of Manasseh on the S. ( Joshua 17:7.) Eusebius places it on the road from Shechem to Bethshean or Scythepills. Porter makes it now Teyasir, three quarters of an hour from Tubas or Thebez. Tel um el Aschera (Van de Velde), Um Ajra; (Robinson and Knobel), an hour S. of Beisan.

    ASHES Sitting down in, or covering one’s self with, is the symbol of mourning ( Job 2:8; 42:6; Esther 4:1; Isaiah 61:3; Matthew 11:21). To eat asides expresses figuratively mourning is one’s food, i.e. one’s perpetual portion ( <19A209> Psalm 102:9). “He feedeth on ashes,” i.e., tries to feed his soul with what is at once humiliating and unsatisfying, on an idol which ought to have been reduced to ashes, like the rest of the tree of which it is made ( Isaiah 44:20). The ashes of a red heifer burnt entire (Numbers 19), when sprinkled upon, purified ceremonially the unclean ( Hebrews 9:13) but defiled the clean person.

    ASHIMA The idol of Hamath, introduced by the Hamathites, the colonists planted in Samaria by Esarhaddon king of Assyria ( 2 Kings 17:24,30; Ezra 4:2,10); represented as a goat with short hair, answering to the Egyptian form of the Greek god Pan, to whom the goat was sacred. The Phoenician god Esmun, answering to the Greek AEsculapius as well as Pan.

    ASHKELON Askelon, Ascalon. One of the five Philistine lords’ cities ( Joshua 13:3; 1 Samuel 6:17). Remote in the S. on the coast of the Mediterranean, so less brought into contact with the Jews; omitted in the towns allotted to Judah (Joshua 15; but compare Judges 1:18). Gaza was still more S., but on the main road from Egypt to Palestine. Samson slew thirty of the Ashkelonites, took their spoil, and gave change of raiment unto them of Timhath who expounded his riddle ( Judges 14:19). Later, the temple and lake of Derceto (with a female head and bust and fish’s fail, like Dagon), the Syrian Venus, stood near it. Here Julian cruelly persecuted the Christians. Its name still appears in our “eschalot” or” shallot,” an onion for which it was famous, as for its figs, olives, etc. Within the walls, of which the ruins still stand, Richard I. held his court in the crusades. After the brilliant battle here the crusaders would have taken the city, but for Count Raymond’s jealousy; and for long Ashkelon was a thorn to the Christian kingdom. The Mahometans call it “the bride of Syria.” In the Sam. version of Genesis 20:1,2; 26:1, Ashkelon stands instead of Gerar; and curiously tradition in Origen’s time pointed out wells there as those dug by Isaac. The city stands on the very shore of the Mediterranean, its walls were along the ridge of rock sweeping round inland in continuation of the shore cliffs. Conder (Pal. Expl., July, 1875) thinks that the Ashkelon of the Bible, of Herod, and of the crusaders, is one and the same town on the seashore, distinguished from another early Christian inland Ashkelon by the title Ascalon Maiumas. Maiumas, “watering place,” applies not to a port only, but to any place abounding in water. But Ashkelon and its port town of Maiumas were distinct, as a bishop of each signed the acts of the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 536. The present Ashkelon is the Maiumas of Ascalon; the original Ashkelon was probably inland, and is now buried in sand. (Pusey.)

    ASHKENAZ One of the three sons of Gomer, Japhet’s son, i.e. of the Gomerian branch of the Japhetic division of the human race. Mentioned by Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 51:27) in connection with Ararat and Minni, so that their locality then must have been the Armenan highland. [See ARARAT .] Their accompanying Cyrus to the siege of Babylon (588 B.C.) is there foretold.

    Probably a Cymric tribe. The name perhaps appears in Ascanias, a river in Asia Minor, and in Scandinavia. Knobel derives the German race from Ashkenaz, the name still given by the robbins to Germany. He derives the name from As (the original of As-ia) and genos , gens , “a race,” our “kin.”

    Hasse suggests a connection with Axenus, Euxine Sea.

    ASHNAH Two cities of Judah, both in the shephelah or low hills. 1. Between Zorea and Zanoah, N.W. of Jerusalem, Asena ( Joshua 15:33). 2. Between Jiphtah and Nezib, S.W. of Jerusalem ( Joshua 15:43), now Esna.

    ASHPENAZ Daniel 1:3.

    ASHTAROTH or Astaroth. A city N.E. of Jordan, called so from being a seat of Ashtoreth’s worship, “Og dwelt in Ashtaroth, in Edrei” ( Deuteronomy 1:4; Joshua 12:4; 13:12,31; 9:10). Allotted to Machir, son of Manasseh; and, out of Manasseh’s portion, then allotted to the sons of Gershom, their other Levitical city here being Golan ( Joshua 21:27), called Be-eshterah (i.e. Beth Ashterah, “the house of Ashtaroth”). Between Adara and Abila (according to Eusebius and-Jerome) lay two villages, probably the one Ashtaroth, the other Ashteroth-Karnaim. There is still a Tel Ashterah in this region. One of David’s valiant men was Uzziah the Ashterathite ( 1 Chronicles 11:44).

    ASHTEROTH-KARNAIM “Ashteroth-Karnaim of the two horns” or “peaks,” situated between two hills, perhaps called from the two horned goddess Astarte, the crescent moon on her head. The Rephaim’s abode in the time of Chedorlaomer’s invasion ( Genesis 14:5). Perhaps identical with Esther Sanamein (“the two idols”), 25 miles S. of Damascus, N.W. of the Lejah. Professor Paine identifies Ashteroth-Karnaim with extensive ruins of immense basaltic blocks on a double ridge in the E. border of Gilead. The ridge is called El Birah, in front is the plain of Asherah.

    ASHTORETH The chief goddess of the Phoenicians, as Baal was the male. By the plural (ASHTAROTH, Baalim: Judges 10:6; 1 Samuel 7:4) different phases of the same deity, according to the different places of worship, are indicated. Always plural until under Solomon Ashtoreth or Astarte of Zidon was introduced ( 1 Kings 11:5,3). She appears among the Philistines as the idol in whose temple they hung up Saul’s armor ( Samuel 31:10). She is identified as Ishtar or Nana, the planetary Venus among the Assyrian gods in inscriptions. Her name appears also in Cyprian and Carthaginian monuments; and on the sarcophagus of a king Esmunazar, who restored her temple at Zidon, along with his mother her priestess, Am-ashtoreth. She partly represents the planet Venus, partly the moon, “the queen of heaven” ( Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17,18). [See ASHTEROTH-KARNAIM ] Our “star,” Greekaster ,” Lat. stella, is akin.

    Her worship was most licentious and abominable; closely connected with that of see ASHERAH , “THE GROVE”. Ashtoreh is the goddess, asherah “the grove,” the image or the symbol of the goddess, of wood; asher, yashar , “to be straight,” a straight stem of a tree living, or fixed upright ( 1 Kings 18:19; 2 Kings 21:7; 23:6,13,14,15; Judges 6:25,30).

    The “bringing out the asherah from the house of the Lord,” and the “cutting down,” suit such a symbol, not a grace in our sense. The active and passive powers of nature, generative and receptive, suggested the male and female deities, Baal and Ashtoreh. The ewes of a flock were called Ashteroth on this principle, propagating the flock ( Deuteronomy 7:13).

    The earliest worship of apostasy was that of the sun, moon, etc. This naturally was grafted on idol worship, Baal sometimes being the sun god, sometimes distinct ( 2 Kings 23:5). So Ashtoreh and the moon. The stone pillar was the symbol of Baal, as the sacred tree was the symbol of Ashtoreh; stone marking his strength as the male, the tree her fruitfulness ( Deuteronomy 16:21). The sacred tree constantly accompanies the gods in the Assyrian monuments. In the Moabite Dibon stone the male form Astar is prefixed to Chamos or Chemosh, answering to the female Astarte. Identical with Athtar or Athtor of the Himyeritic inscriptions, and Estar of the Ninevite inscriptions; the Canaanite form of the male Aphroditos answering to the female Aphrodite.

    ASHUR 1 Chronicles 2:24; 4:5.

    ASHURITES Ruled by Ishbosheth ( 2 Samuel 2:9). Arab., Syr., and Vulgate versions have it the Geshurites S.E. of Damascus. But these had Talmai as their king, whose daughter David married about this time ( 1 Chronicles 3:2,4). The Targum of Jonathan reads Beth Asher, “the house of Asher,” so also several Hebrews manuscripts The Asherites will then be the whole country W. of Jordan above Jezreel and the plain of Esdraelon. Thus the enumeration begins with the N. and ends with Benjamin on the S.

    Bachienne suggests the city “Asher” ( Joshua 17:7), S.E. of Jezreel.

    ASHVATH 1 Chronicles 7:33.

    ASIA In the New Testament not the continent, nor Asia Minor, but the W. of Asia Minor, with Ephesus as its capital, including Mysia, Lydia, Caria.

    Attalus, king of Pergamus, left it to the Romans 138 B.C. It was placed by Augustus among the senatorial provinces, as distinguished from the imperial provinces. Hence it was governed by a “proconsul,” as Acts 19:38 (anthupatos ), with the minute propriety which marks truth, incidentally intimates. It had its assize days (agoraioi , margin “the court days are kept”). Here were the seven churches addressed in the Revelation.

    In the Old Testament “Asia” does not occur.

    ASIARCHS “CHIEF OF ASIA” ( Acts 19:31). Officers, like the Roman aediles and Greek leitourgoi , yearly chosen by the cities in that part of Asia of which Ephesus was metropolis, to defray the cost and to undertake all the arrangements of the national games and theatrical sacred spectacles. Only wealthy persons could undertake the office. Each city chose one deputy, and out of the whole number ten were chosen, over whom one presided, selected by the Roman proconsul. The ten probably had the title, as well as the president, pre-eminently called “the Asiarchs.” Ex-asiarchs also probably retained the title.

    ASIEL 1 Chronicles 4:85.

    ASNAH Ezra 2:50.

    ASNAPPER “The great and noble” ( Ezra 4:10). He planted the Cuthaeans, etc., in Samaria, after the deportation of the Israelites. He is either Esarhaddon, as Ezra 4:2 implies, or some able general under him who effected the plantation = Asardanaper = Esarhaddon.

    ASP See ADDER .

    ASPATHA Esth. 9:7.

    ASRIEL Numbers 26:31; Joshua 17:2; 1 Chronicles 7:14.

    ASS Hebrews athon ; from athan , short in step. 1. The domestic she ass, named so from its slowness. 2. The chamor , the he ass, whether domesticated or not, distinguished from the athon , Genesis 45:23. From chamar , “red,” as the Spaniards call the donkey “burro,” from its red color. Used in riding and plowing.

    Not held in contempt for stupidity, as with us. Issachar is compared to an “ass, strong boned, crouching down between the hurdles ( Genesis 49:14): he saw that rest was a good and the land pleasant; so he bowed his shoulder to bear, and became servant unto tribute;” ease at the cost of liberty would be his characteristic. Robust, and with a prime agricultural inheritance, his people would strive after material good, rather than political rule. The prohibition of horses rendered the donkey the more esteemed in Israel. In the E. it is a far superior animal to ours. The bearing of the Arab donkey is erect, the limbs well formed and muscular, and the gait graceful. It is spirited, and withal docile. The upper classes, judges, (as Jair’s 30 sons, and Abdon’s 40 sons and 30 nephews,) and kings, (as David and Solomon,) rode upon donkeys or mules ( Judges 5:10; 10:4; 12:14; 1 Kings 1:33). The white ass, combining symmetry with color, is especially esteemed. The ass, by its long hollow sharp-edged hoofs, is more sure footed than the flat hoofed horse; it suffers little from thirst, and is satisfied with prickly herbs, scarcely sweats at all, and so is best suited for the arid hilly regions of western Asia. It is lowly as compared with the horse; it symbolizes peace, as the horse does war, and as such bore the meek and lowly yet divinely royal Savior, the Prince of peace, in His triumphal entrance into His own capital (Zechariah 9:9); the young untamed colt bearing Him quietly marks His universal dominion over nature as well as spirit. It was not to be yoked with the ox ( Deuteronomy 22:10); for the distinctions which God has fixed in nature are to be observed; humanity would forbid animals of such different size and strength being yoked together. Spiritually see 2 Corinthians 6:14; Leviticus 19:19. As it did not chew the end ( Leviticus 11:26), it was unclean; hence is marked the extremity of the famine in Samaria ( 2 Kings 6:25), when “an ass’ head (an unclean beast from which they would ordinarily shrink) was sold for fourscore pieces of silver.” “Balsam was rebuked for his iniquity, the voiceless beast of burden (ass) speaking with man’s voice forbade the madness of the prophet” ( 2 Peter 2:16). It turned aside at the sight of the angel; but he, after God’s express prohibition, wished to go for gain, a dumb beast forbidding an inspired prophet! The brute’s instinctive obedience rebukes the gifted seer’s self willed disobedience. Hosea ( Hosea 8:9) compares Israel to a wild ass: “they are gone up to Assyria, (whereas he ought to dwell) a wild donkey alone by himself” ( Numbers 23:9). The stubborn wild donkey is wiser than Ephraim, for it avoids intercourse with others through love of freedom, whereas Ephraim courts alliances fatal to his freedom. (Maurer.)

    In Jeremiah 2:24 headstrong, undisciplinable obstinacy, and untamable perversity, and lust after the male, answering to Israel’s spiritual lust after idols and alliances with pagan, are the point ( Hosea 2:6,7): “all they (the males) that seek her will not (have no need to) weary themselves in searching for her, in her month (the season when sexual impulse is strongest), they shall find her” putting herself in their way, and not needing to be sought cut by the males. 3. The arod , the khur of Persia; light red, gray beneath, without stripe or cross; or the wild mule of Mongolia, superior to the wild donkey in beauty, strength and swiftness, called so either from the sound of the word resembling neighing, or from the Arabic arad, “flee.” 4. ‘Air , from ‘ir , to be fervent, lustful; so the chamor , perhaps from chamar , “fervent in lust” ( Ezekiel 23:20). “Young asses; ... donkey colts” ( Isaiah 30:6,24). 5. Pere , the wild donkey of Asia; the ghoorkhur , mouse brown, with a broad dorsal stripe, but no cross on the shoulders, the Latin onager ( Genesis 16:12): Ishmael “shall be a wild donkey man;” from paro , “to run swiftly “; compare Job 39:5: “who hath sent out the wild donkey (pereh ) free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild donkey (arod )?”

    Doubtless some of the most useful animals to man were created to be, from man’s first being, his domestic attendants. Possibly some of the wild species have sprung from those originally tame. The wild asses’ characteristics noticed in holy writ are their love of unrestrained freedom, self will in pursuit of lust ( Jeremiah 2:24), fondness for solitary places ( Hosea 8:9), standing on high places when athirst ( Jeremiah 14:6; when even the pere , usually so inured to want of water, suffers, the drought must be terrible indeed).

    ASSIR 1. Exodus 6:24; 1 Chronicles 6:22. 2. 1 Chronicles 6:23,37. 3. 1 Chronicles 3:17.

    ASSES Assus. Seaport of Mysia, on the N. of the gulf Adramyttium. Seven miles from the island Lesbos opposite, near Methymna; 20 miles from Troas ( Acts 20:13,14). The ship with Luke, Sopater, Aristarchus, etc., from Troas, went round cape Lectum, while he went the shorter way (20 Roman miles) by land on foot to Asses, where he reached the ship in time for her to arrive that evening at Mitylene. It was a thoroughly Greek city. The remains are in good preservation, being of granite. The Citadel above the theater commands a fine view. The Street of Tombs (each formed of one granite block) leading to the great gate is a striking feature. The Assian stone, near the city, was thought to have flesh consuming properties, whence the stone coffins were called sarcophagi, “flesh consumers.”

    ASSUR Assyria, Asshur. The region between the Armenian mountains on the N., Elam or Susiana, now the country near Bagdad, on the S., and beyond it Babylonia, the mountains of Kurdistan, the ancient Lagres chain and Media on the E., the Mesopotamian desert (between Tigris and Euphrates), or else the Euphrates, on the W.; a length of about 500 miles, a breadth of from 350 to 100. W. of the Euphrates was Arabia, higher up Syria, and the country of the Hittites. Kurdistan and the pachalik of Mosul nearly answer to Assyria. Named from Asshur, Shem’s son, latterly made the Assyrian god. Its capital was Nineveh on the Tigris (a name meaning arrow, implying rapidity, but see Hiddekel). Genesis 10:11,12,22; 2:14. All over the vast flat on both sides of the Tigris rise “grass covered heaps, marking the site of ancient habitations” (Layard). They are numbered by hundreds, and when examined exhibit traces of their Assyrian origin. They are on the left bank of the Tigris, and on the right abound both on the N. and the S. of the Sinyar (a limestone range extending from Iwan in Luristan nearly to Rakkah on the Euphrates), and eastward beyond the Khabour, northward to Mardie, and southward to near Bagdad. Huzzab ( Nahum 2:7), answering to Adiabene, the richest region of all, lying on the rivers Zab or Diab, tributaries of the Tigris, whence it is named, is the only district name which occurs in Scripture. The chief cities were Nineveh, answering to the mounds opposite Mosul (Nebi Yunus and Koyunjik), Calah or Hulah, now Nimrud Asshur, now Kilek Sherghent; Sargina, now Khorsabad; Arbela, Arbil (G. Rawlinson). Others identify Kileh Sherghat on the right bank of the Tigris with the ancient Calah, Nimrud with Resen.

    Erech is the modern Warka; Accad, now Akkerkuf. Calneh answers to the classical Ctesiphon on the Tigris, 18 miles below Bagdad, the region round being named by the Greeks Calonitis. Rehoboth answers to ruins still so named on the right of the Euphrates, N.W. of the Shinar plain, and three and half miles S.W. of the town Mayadin (Chesney): Genesis 10:10-12.

    G. Smith thinks the ridges enclosing Koyunjik and Nebi Yunus were only the wall of inner Nineveh, the city itself extending much beyond this, namely, to the mound Yarenijah. Nineveh was at first only a fort to keep the Babylonian conquests in that quarter; but even then a temple was founded to the goddess at Koyunjik. Samsivul, prince of the city Assur, miles S. of Nineveh, rebuilt the temple; the region round Nineveh in the 19th century being under Assyria’s rulers. Again Assurubalid, 1400 B.C., rebuilt, and a century later Shalmaneser, one of whose brick inscriptions G.

    Smith found.

    Classical tradition and the Assyrian monuments confirm Scripture, that Assyria was peopled from Babylon. In Herodotus Ninus the founder of Nineveh is the son of Belus, the founder of Babylon. The remains prove that Babylon’s civilization was anterior to Assyria’s. The cuneiform writing is rapidly punched on moist clay, and so naturally took its rise in Babylonia, where they used “brick for stone” ( Genesis 11:3), and passed thence to Assyria, where chiseling characters on rock is not so easy. In Assyria too the writing is of a more advanced kind; in early Babylonia of a ruder stage.

    Babylon is Hamitic in origin; Assyria Shemitic. The vocabulary of Ur, or S.

    Babylonia, is Cushite or Ethiopian, of which the modern Galla of Abyssinia gives the best idea. At the same time traces exist in the Babylonian language of the other three great divisions of human speech, Shemitic, Aryan, and Turanian, showing in that primitive stage traces of the original unity of tongues. Rehoboth Ir (i.e. city markets), Calah, Resen, and Nineveh (in the restricted sense), formed one great composite city, Nineveh (in the larger sense): Jon. 3:3. The monuments confirm Genesis 10:9-12, that the Shemitic Assyrians proceeding out of Babylonia founded Nineveh long after the Cushite foundation of Babylon.

    The Babylonian shrines were those at which the Assyrians thought the gods most accessible, regarding Babylon as the true home of their gods (Arrian, Exp. Alex., 7).

    Moses knew Assyria ( Genesis 2:14; 25:18; Numbers 24:22,24), but not as a kingdom; had it been a kingdom in Abraham’s time, it must have appeared among Chedorlaomer’s confederates (Genesis 14).

    Chushan-Rishathaim ( Judges 3:8), the first foreign oppressor of Israel, was master of the whole of Syria between the rivers (Aram Naharaim) or Mesopotamia, in the time of the judges, so that at that time (about B.C.) Assyria can have had no great power. According to Herodotus and the Babylonian historian Berosus, we can infer the empire began about 1228 B.C., 520 years before its decay through the revolt of subject nations, the Medes, etc.; or else 526 years from 1273 B.C. (as others suggest) to the reign of Pul. He first brought Assyria into contact with Israelite history by making Menahem his tributary vassal ( 2 Kings 15:19). Under Tiglath Pileser the Assyrian empire included Media, Syria, and N.

    Palestine, besides Assyria proper. Shalmaneser added Israel, Zidon, Acre, and Cyprus. Assyrian monuments, pillars, boundary tablets, and inscriptions are found as far as in Cyprus at Larnaka (a portrait of a king with a tablet, now in Berlin), and in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.

    Their alabaster quarries furnished a material better than the Babylonian bricks for portraying scenes. Their pictures partake more of the actual than the ideal; but in the realistic school they stand high and show a progressive power unknown in stationary Egyptian art The sculptures in Sardanapalus II.’s palace are the best, and the animal forms, the groupings, the attitudes most lifelike. The Assyrians knew the arch, the lever, the roller, gem engraving, tunneling, drainage. Their vases, bronze and ivory ornaments, bells, and earrings, show considerable taste and skill. But their religion was sensual and their government rude. No funeral ceremonies are represented.

    They served as God’s scourge of Israel ( Isaiah 10:5,6), and they prepared the way for a more centralized and better organized government, and a more spiritual religion, such as the Medo-Persians possessed. The apocryphal book of Baruch describes the Assyrian deities exactly as the ancient monuments do. Asshur, the deified patriarch, was the chief god ( Genesis 10:22). Ahaz’ idolatrous altar set up from a pattern at Damascus, where lie had just given his submission to Tiglath Pileser, may have been required as a token of allegiance, for the inscriptions say that wherever they established their supremacy they set up “the laws of Asshur,” and “altars to the great gods.” But this rule was not always enforced and in no case required the supplanting of the local worship, but merely the superaddition of the Assyrian rite. Athur, on the Tigris, five hours N.E. of Mosul, still represents the name Assyria. Syria (properly called Aram) N. of Palestine is probably a shortened form of Assyria, the name being extended by the Greeks to the country which they found subject to Assyria.

    Ctesias’ list of Assyrian kings is evidently unhistorical. However the inscriptions of Sargon, king of Agane near Sippars (Sepharvaim), describe his conquests in Elam and Syria, and his advance to the Mediterranean coast, where he set up a monument 1600 B.C. He records that his mother placed him at his birth in an ark of rushes and set it afloat on the Euphrates; seemingly copied from the account of Moses. The oldest Assyrian remains are found at Kileh Sherghat on the right bank of the Tigris, 60 miles S. of the later capital; here therefore, at this city then called Asshur, not at Nineveh, was the early seat of government. 14 kings reigned there during 350 years, from 1273 to 930 B.C., divisible into three groups.

    Tiglath Pileser I. was contemporary with Samuel about the close of the 12th century B.C. Cylinders of clay, (resembling a small keg diminishing in size from the middle to the ends, more durable for records than the hardest metals.) are now in the British Museum. which had lain under the four grainer stones of the great temple of Assyria at Kileh Sherghat for years, and which relate the five successive campaigns of Tiglath Pileser I., 1130 B.C. He is the first Assyrian king of whose exploits we have full details; two duplicate cylinders in the British Museum were deciphered by Sir H. Rawlinson. Fox Talbot, Hincks, and Oppert, furnished simultaneously with lithographed copies and working independently. The agreement substantially of their readings proves the truth of the decipherment. Asshur-buni-pal (the Greek Sardanapalus) is the only monarch who keenly patronized literature. A royal library of clay tablets, numbering probably 10,000, was made by him at Nineveh, from which the British Museum has got its most precious treasures. They filled the chambers to the height of a foot or more from the floor. A religious character appears in all the Assyrian kings’ names. Tiglath Pileser I. (= Be worship given to Nin or Hercules) claims to have conquered in the first five years of his reign “42 countries from the Lower Zab to the Upper Sea of the setting sun,” the region from Assyria proper to the Euphrates, from Babylon’s borders to mount Taurus, and to have fought the Hittites in northern Syria, and invaded Armenia and Cappadocia. Later on he was defeated by the Babylonian king, who carried captive several Assyrian idols. Sardanapalus I. (Asshur-izir-pal) transferred the seat of government from Kileh Sherghat (Assur) to Nimrud (Calah), where he built the gorgeous palace lately discovered. Most, of the Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum are from it; and from them we learn that Sardanapalus I. (Asshu-izir-pal) warred in Lower Babylonia and Chaldsea, as well as in Syria and upon the Mediterranean coast. Shalmaneser II., or Shalmanubar, his son, set up the black obelisk now in the British Museum to commemorate his father’s victories. He himself overran Cappadocia, Armenia, Azerbijan, Media Magna, the Kurd mountains, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Phoenicia. Cuneiform scholars all agree that Benhadad and Hazael, of Damascus, are mentioned as opposed to him in his Syrian wars, and that he took tribute from Jehu of Israel. In 854 B.C. his advance into Hamath was interrupted by the leagued forces of Syria and Palestine, 85,000 in all, under Benhadad. Among them inscriptions mention 2000 chariots and 10,000 footmen of Ahab of Israel. The battle was at the Orontes. Shalmaneser claims the victory, but he was forced, to return to Nineveh. In 842 B.C., when Moab had revolted from Israel and the league of Syria and Israel was dissolved, Shalmaneser attacked Hazael, Benhadad’s successor, at the mountains of Saniru (Shenir) in Lebanon, and completely defeated him. Unable to take Damascus, Shalmaneser marched to the Mediterranean coast, where he set up a pillar at the mouth of the Dog River commemorating his victories. Jehu, called in the inscription “son (i.e. successor) of Omri,” gave him tribute. (G. Smith in Pal. Expl. Qy.

    Stat.)

    Jonah’s mission to Ninevah was shortly before Pul’s reign. Pul, Phul, or Phaloch, supposed to be his grandson, is the first Assyrian king mentioned in Scripture. Identified by some with Vul-lush of the Assyrian lists, who reigned at Calah (Nimrud) from 800 to 750 B.C., and who married Semiramis of Babylon (whose son Nabonassar Pul is supposed to have sat on the Babylonian throne). But as it is impossible to identify Tiglath Pileser’s predecessor Asshut-lush with Pul, and as Assyria was then in a depressed state through internal troubles, Pul was probably monarch at Babylon (Berosus, the Babylonian historian, calls him “king of the Chaldoeans”) while Asshur-lush reigned at Nineveh. In the disturbed years before Tiglath Pileser’s accession, he probably deprived Assyria of her western province and invaded Palestine from the Assyrian direction, and so was loosely designated “king of Assyria” instead of “Babylon.”

    Tiglath Pileser II., 745 B.C., founded a new dynasty. He was an usurper, for he makes no mention of his father or ancestors. He conquered Rezin, king of Damascus, at Ahaz’ solicitation, also Israel, whom he deprived of much territory. The captives he carried to Kir, a river flowing into the Caspian Sea. In the inscriptions mention is made of Menahem of Syria paying him tribute, also Jahuhazi (Ahaz), of Judah, and of his setting Hoshea on the Israelite throne on Pekah’s death. The Assyrian monuments dear the seeming discrepancy of Isaiah 20 mentioning Sargon, while he is ignored in 2 Kings. Sargon is by them proved to have been successor of Shalmaneser II. (Tiglath Pileser’s successor), and father of Sennacherib, and grandfather of Esarhaddon. The siege of Samaria for three years, under Hoshea, was begun by Shalmaneser and was ended by Sargon (2 Kings 17).

    About the middle of the eighth century B.C. there is a break in the line of Assyrian kings and a loosening of the He which held together the subject nations under Assyria, so that 23 years after Pul, 747 B.C., the Babylonians reckon as the era of their independence. At this time Tiglath Pileser II. seems to have been the founder of the “lower empire.” This more than revived the glories of the former empire, and recovered the supremacy over Babylon. The magnificent palace of Sennacherib (the assailant of see HEZEKIA ) at Nineveh, as also the buildings erected by Sargon and Esarhaddon (the carrier away of Manasseh to Babylon, 2 Chronicles 33:11) show the power and wealth of Assyria at this period. The remains at Koyunjik and Khorsabad are the work of these later kings alone; at Nimrud the earlier kings shared in the erections. By the end of Esarhaddon’s reign Hamath, Damascus, and Samaria had been absorbed, Judaea made tributary, Philistia and Idumea subjected, Babylon recovered, and cities planted in Media. Sardanapalus II. succeeded, who was wholly given to the chase, and who decorated his palace walls at Nineveh with sculptures representing its triumphs. The growing power of the Medes gave the final blow (foretold long ago, Isaiah 10:5-19) to Assyria, already enervated by luxury and having lost in prosperous ease its military spirit. Long before Arbaces the Mede (804 B.C.) is said to have made himself king of Assyria.

    About 633 B.C. they began attacking Assyria, at first unsuccessfully; but Cyaxares the Mede having gained the Babylonians under Nabopolassar, the Assyrian viceroy of Babylon, as allies, about 625 B.C. besieged Nineveh.

    Saracus, probably Esarhaddon’s grandson, after a brave resistance set fire with his own hand to his palace with its treasures, and himself and his wives perished amidst the flames. Nab. 2 and Zephaniah 2:13-15 shortly before the catastrophe foretold it; and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 31) shortly afterward about 586 B.C. attests how completely Assyria was overthrown, as a warning of the fatal end of pride.

    Never again did Assyria rise as a nation, for God had said ( Nahum 3:19) “there is no healing of thy bruise.” The only revolt attempted by her along with Media and Armenia was crushed. The political cause of her downfall was probably the non-fusion of the subject kingdoms into one organic whole. These kingdoms were. feudatories, rendering homage and tribute to the great monarch; as Menahem ( 2 Kings 15:19), Hoshea ( 2 Kings 17:4), Ahaz ( 2 Kings 16:8), Hezekiah ( 2 Kings 18:14), Manasseh ( 2 Chronicles 33:11); and ready therefore at the first opportunity, whether the king’s death or some Assyrian disaster or the promise of some antagonistic ally, to revolt.

    ASTROLOGERS Isaiah 47:13. [See DIVINATION .] Hobreev, Kethib; Hobreey, Queri. “Those who form combinations of the heavens,” i.e. watch conjunctions and oppositions of the stars; “dividers of the heavens” (Gesenius). In casting a nativity they observed: (1) the horoscope, or sign which arose at birth, (2) the mid heaven, (3) the sign opposite the horoscope toward the W., and (4) the hypogee.

    ASUPPIM “gathering” margin 1 Chronicles 26:15,17. Not a proper name. From asaph , to “gather.” The house of stores, where were kept the grain, wine, and other offerings for the sustenance of the priests. Near the S. door of the temple in the outer court; it had. two entrances, for 1 Chronicles 26:19 states that two guard stations were assigned to it. In Nehemiah 12:25 the same Hebrews is translated “thresholds,” margin “treasuries,” “assemblies.”

    ASYNCRITUS A Roman Christian ( Romans 16:14).

    ATAD “the floor of the thorn,” a trodden space for threshing, beyond Jordan, where Joseph and his brethren and the Egyptian retinue made for seven days “great and very sore lamentation” over the body of Jacob, whence the Canaanites called the place Abel Mizraim, “the mourning of the Egyptians.” Canaan being the central standpoint of the sacred history, the E. of Jordan is naturally called “beyond Jordan.” The same route by which Joseph had been led captive was that by which the grand Egyptian procession doing honor to his deceased father proceeded. Grove however makes Atad W. of Jordan, as Jerome identifies it with Beth Hogla (the house of gyratory dances, or movements attendant on the funeral ceremony), known to lie between the Jordan and Jericho. The Canaanites, “the inhabitants of the land,” were on the W. of Jordan (compare Genesis 50:13; Numbers 13:29). “Beyond Jordan” will thus be from the standpoint of the E. of Jordan, where Moses the writer was ( Genesis 50:10,11).

    ATARAH 1 Chronicles 2:26.

    ATAROTH (crowns). 1. A town in the land of Jazer and Gilead, taken and “built” by Gad ( Numbers 32:3,34). 2. A place on the boundary of Ephraim and Manasseh ( Joshua 16:2,5,7); possibly the same asATAROTH ADDAR, on the W. border of Benjamin, “near the hill that lieth on the S. side of the nether Bethheron” ( Joshua 18:13). 3. ATAROTH THE HOUSE OF JOAB ( 1 Chronicles 2:54), or “Crowns the house of Joab,” a town in Judah.

    ATER Nehemiah 10:17.

    ATHALIAH Daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, married Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram, king of Judah. It was a union (compare 1 Corinthians 15:33; 6:14-18) fatal to the cause of piety in Judah, a cause which the godly Jehoshaphat had so much at heart. She bore a hideous likeness to Jezebel her mother, as the history with such unstudied truthfulness brings out. By her influence Jehoram was led to walk in the way of the kings of Israel, like as did the house of Ahab ( 2 Chronicles 21:6). Baal worship through her was introduced into Judah, as it had been through her mother into Israel.

    Worldly policy, the hope of reuniting Israel to Judah, and concession to his son, whose reckless violence was afterward seen in the murder of his own brothers ( 2 Chronicles 21:3,4), infatuated Jehoshaphat to sanction the union. The same bloodthirstiness, lust of dominion over husband and over the state, and unscrupulous wickedness in killing all that stood in the way of ambition, appear in the daughter as in the mother. When her son Ahaziah was slain by Jehu, along with the brethren of Ahaziah and their sons (42 men), she arose and destroyed all the seed royal of the house of Judah ( 2 Chronicles 22:10). As queenmother she was determined to keep the regal power which she exercised during Ahaziah’s absence in Jezreel ( 2 Kings 9:16). Ahaziah’s youngest son Jonah alone escaped her murderous hand, secreted by Jehosheba, his aunt, daughter of Jehoram (probably not by Athaliah, but another wife) and wife of the priest Jehoiada ( 2 Chronicles 22:11,12). For six years he was hid, but in the seventh year Jehoiada took into covenant with him for restoring the rightful king “the captains of hundreds,” two Azariahs, Ishmael, Maaseiah, and Elishaphat; they next enlisted the cooperation of the Levites, gathered out of Judah, and the chief fathers of Israel who came to Jerusalem. Then they made a covenant with the king in the temple. A third part of the soldiers of the guard usually guarded the palace, while two thirds restrained the crowds on the sabbath by guarding the gate Sur ( 1 Kings 11:6), or “the gate of the foundation” ( 2 Chronicles 23:5), and the gate “behind the guard,” the N. and S. entrances to the temple. The two thirds in the temple were to guard the king with David’s spears and shields, that the restoration of his descendant might be connected with his name. Any who should approach beyond the fixed limits were to be killed. Joash was duly anointed, crowned, and received the testimony or law, the statute book of his reign ( Deuteronomy 17:18-20). Athaliah, roused by the acclamations of the people, hastened to the temple, and there saw the king “by a pillar” or “upon” it, i.e. on a throne raised upon it (for “pillar” Gesenius translates “stage” or “scaffold,” such as in 2 Chronicles 6:18). In vain she (who herself was the embodiment, of treason) cried “Treason!” She was hurried out, and slain at the entering of the horse gate by the king’s house. Mattan, Baal’s priest, was the only other person slain.

    Her usurpation lasted 883-877 B.C. As she loved blood, blood was her own end; having lived as her mother, as her mother she died, slain at her own walls amidst the hoofs of the horses (compare Revelation 16:5,6).

    ATHENS Capital of Attica, the center of Grecian refinement and philosophy. Paul visited it in journeying from Macedonia, and stayed sometime ( Acts 17:14, etc.;FOUR-DRACHM OF ATHENS. 1 Thes. 3:1). Four hills are within it, the Acropolis, N.E., a square rock 150 feet high; W. of it is the see AREOPAGUS . S.W. is the Pnyx, or Assembly Hill. S. of this is the Museum Hill. The Agora where Paul disputed was in the valley between the four. The newsmongering taste of the people ( Acts 17:21) is noticed by their great orator Demosthenes, “Ye go about the marketplace asking, Is there any news?” Their pure atmosphere, open air life, and liberal institutions, stimulated liveliness of thought. Pausanias (1:24, sec. 3) confirms Paul’s remark on their religiousness even to superstition: “the zeal devoted by the Athenians to the rites of the gods exceeds that of all others.” [See ALTAR , see AREOPAGUS .] Dionysius the Areopagite convert of Paul was, according to tradition, the first bishop of an Athenian church. Theseus’ temple is the most perfect of the remaining monuments.

    The Parthenon or temple of Minerva, built of Penrelic marble, 228 feet long, 102 broad, 66 high, with 8 Doric columns on each front and 17 on each side, was the masterpiece of Athenian architecture. The colossal statue of Minerva Promachus, Phidias’ workmanship, was 70 feet high, so as to be seen towering above the Parthenon by the mariner in doubling Cape Suniurn. Lord Elgin deposited in the British Museum several of the finest sculptures.

    ATHLAI Ezra 10:28.

    ATONEMENT [See RECONCILIATION .] Literally, the being at one, after having been at variance. Tyndale explains “One Mediator” ( 1 Timothy 2:5): “at one maker between God and man.” To made atonement is to give or do that whereby alienation ceases and reconciliation ensues. “Reconciliation” is the equivalent term given for the same Hebrews word, kopher , in Daniel 9:24; Leviticus 8:15; Ezekiel 45:15. In the New Testament KJV once only “atonement” is used ( Romans 5:11): “by whom (Christ) we have received the atonement” (katallage ), where the reconciliation or atonement must be on God’s part toward us, for it could not well be said, “We have received the reconciliation on our part toward Him.” Elsewhere the same Greek is translated “reconciliation” ( 2 Corinthians 5:18,19).

    A kindred term expressing a different aspect of the same truth is “propitiation” (hilasmos ) ( 1 John 2:2), the verb of which is in Hebrews 2:17 translated “to make reconciliation.” Also “ransom,” or payment for redeeming a captive ( Job 33:24), kopher , “an atonement,” Matthew 20:28. Hebrews 9:12: Christ, “having obtained eternal redemption for us” (lutrosis , the deliverance bought for us by His bloodshedding, the price: 1 Peter 1:18). The verb kipper al , “to cover upon,” expresses the removing utterly out of sight the guilt of person or thing by a ransom, satisfaction, or substituted victim. The use of the word and the noun kopher , throughout the Old Testament, proves that, as applied to the atonement or reconciliation between God and man, it implies not merely what is man’s part in finding acceptance with God, but, in the first instance, what God’s justice required on His part, and what His love provided, to justify His entering into reconciliation with man. In Leviticus 1:4; 4:26; 5:1,16-18; 16; 17:11, the truth is established that the guilt is transferred from the sinful upon the innocent substitute, in order to make amends to violated justice, and to cover (atone: kipper’ al ) or put out of sight the guilt (compare Micah 7:19 end), and to save the sinner from the wages of sin which is death. On the great day of atonement the high priest made “atonement for the sanctuary, the tabernacle, and the altar” also, as well as for the priests and all the people; but it was the people’s sin that defiled the places so as to make them unfit for the presence of the Holy One. Unless the atonement was made the soul “bore its iniquity,” i.e. was under the penalty of death. The exceptions of atonement made with fine flour by one not able to afford the animal sacrifice ( Leviticus 5:11), and by Aaron with incense on a sudden emergency ( Numbers 16:47), confirm the rule. The blood was the medium of atonement, because it had the life or soul (nephesh ) in it. The soul of the offered victim atoned for the soul of the sinful offerer. The guiltless blood was given by God to be shed to atone for the forfeited blood of the guilty. The innocent victim pays the penalty of the offerer’s sin, death ( Romans 6:28).

    This atonement was merely typical in the Old Testament sacrifices; real in the one only New Testament sacrifice, Christ Jesus. Kaphar and kopher is in Genesis 6:14, “Thou shalt pitch the ark with pitch,” the instrument of covering the saved from the destroying flood outside, as Jesus’ blood interposes between believers and the flood of wrath that swallows up the lost. Jacob uses the same verb ( Genesis 32:20), “I will appease Esau with the present,” i.e., cover out of sight or turn away his wrath. The “mercy-seat” whereat God meets man (being reconciled through the blood there sprinkled, and so man can meet God) is called kapporeth , i.e. flee lid of the ark, covering the law inside, which is fulfilled in Messiah who is called by the corresponding Greek term, hilasterion , “the propitiatory” or mercy-seat, “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiatory through faith in His blood” ( Romans 3:23). God Himself made a coat (singular in Heb.) of skin, and clothed Adam and his wife ( Genesis 3:21). The animal cannot have been slain for food, for animal food was not permitted to man until after the flood ( Genesis 9:3); nor for clothing, for the fleece would afford that, without the needless killing of the animal. It must have been for sacrifice, the institution of which is presumed in the preference given to Abel’s sacrifice, above Cain’s offering of firstfruits, in Genesis 4. Typically; God taught that the clothing for the soul must, be from the Victim whom God’s love provided to cover our guilt forever out of sight (Psalm 32:D (not kaphar , but kasah ) ( Romans 4:17; Isaiah 61:10), the same Hebrews (labash ) as in Genesis 3:21, “clothed.”

    The universal prevalence of propitiatory sacrifices over the pagan world implies a primitive revelation of the need of expiatory atonement, and of the inefficacy of repentance alone to remove guilt. This is the more remarkable in Hindostan, where it is considered criminal to take away the life of any animal. God’s righteous character and government interposed a barrier to sinful man’s pardon and reception into favor. The sinner’s mere desire for these blessings does not remove the barrier out of the way.

    Something needed to be done for him, not by him. It was for God, against whom man sinned, to appoint the means for removing the barrier. The sinless Jesus’ sacrifice for, and instead of, us sinners was the mean so appointed. The sinner has simply by faith to embrace the means. And as the means, the vicarious atonement by Christ, is of God, it must be efficacious for salvation. Not that Jesus’ death induced God to love us; but because God loved us He gave Jesus to reconcile the claims of justice and mercy, “that God might be just and at the same time the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus” ( Romans 3:26; 2 Corinthians 5:18-21). Jesus is, it is true, not said in Scripture to reconcile God to the sinner, because the reconciliation in the first instance emanated from God Himself. God reconciled us to Himself, i.e. restored us to His favor, by satisfying the claims of justice against us. Christ’s atonement makes a change, not in God’s character as if God’s love was produced by it, but in our position judicially considered in the eye of the divine law. Christ’s sacrifice was the provision of God’s love, not its moving cause ( Romans 8:32). Christ’s blood was the ransom paid at the expense of God Himself, to reconcile the exercise of mercy and justice, not as separate, but as the eternally harmonious attributes in the same God. God reconciles the world unto Himself, in the first instance, by satisfying His own just enmity against sin ( Psalm 7:11; Isaiah 12:1, compare 1 Samuel 29:4: “reconcile himself unto his master,” not remove his own anger against his master, but his master’s anger against him). Men’s reconciliation to God by laying aside their enmity is the after consequence of their believing that He has laid aside His judicial enmity against their sin. Penal and vicarious satisfaction for our guilt to God’s law by Christ’s sacrificial death is taught Matthew 20:28: “the Son of man came to give His life a ransom for (anti) many” (anti implies vicarious satisfaction in Matthew 5:28; Mark 10:45). 1 Timothy 2:6: “who gave Himself a ransom for (antilutron , an equivalent payment in substitution for) all.” Ephesians 5:25; 1 Peter 2:24; 3:15: “the Just for the unjust ... suffered for us.” John 1:29: “the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world.” Corinthians 5:7; 1 Peter 1:19; John 10:15; Romans 4:25: “He was delivered on account of (dia ) our offenses, and raised again for the sake of (dia ) our justification.” ( Revelation 1:5; Hebrews 9:13,14.)

    Conscience feels instinctively the penal claims of violated divine justice, and can only find peace when by faith it has realized that those claims have been fully met by our sacrificed Substitute ( Hebrews 9:9; 10:1,2,22; 1 Peter 3:21). The conscience reflects the law and will of God, though that law condemns the man.

    Opponents of the doctrine of vicarious atonement say, “it exhibits God as less willing to forgive than His creatures are bound to be;” but man’s justice, which is the faint reflex of God’s, binds the judge, however lamenting the painful duty, to sentence the criminal to death as a satisfaction to outraged law. Also, “as taking delight in executing vengeance on sin, or yielding to the extremity of suffering what He withheld on considerations of mercy.” But the claim of God’s righteousness is not pressed apart from that of God’s love; both move in beautiful unity; the atonement is at once the brightest exhibition of His love and of His justice; it does not render God merciful, but opens a channel whereby love can flow in perfect harmony with His righteous law, yea “magnifying the law and making it honorable” ( Isaiah 42:21). At the same time it is a true remark of Macdonell (Donellan Lectures): “Christ’s work of redemption springs from an intimate relationship to those whom He redeems. It is not only because He suffers what they ought to have suffered that mercy becomes possible; but because He who suffered bore some mysterious relation to the spirits of those for whom He suffered; so that every pang He felt, and every act He did. vibrated to the extremities of that body of which He is the head, and placed not their acts, but the actors. themselves, in a new relation to the divine government and to the fountain of holiness and life.” It is only as Representative Head of humanity, that the Son of man, the second Adam, made full and adequate satisfaction for the whole race whose nature He took. He died sufficiently for all men; efficiently for the elect alone ( Hebrews 2:9-15; 1 John 2:2; Acts 20:28; 2 Peter 2:1; 1 Timothy 4:10). Anything short of an adequate satisfaction would be so far an abatement; of divine justice; and if part of the sin might be forgiven without the satisfaction, why not all? If God can dispense with the claims of justice in part, He can as well do it altogether. A partial satisfaction would be almost more dishonoring to God’s righteousness than a gratuitous forgiveness without any satisfaction whatever. With God alone it rested to determine what is adequate satisfaction, and how it is to become available to each man, without injury to the cause of righteousness. God has determined it, that in Christ’s infinite dignity of person and holiness above that of any creature, there is ensured the adequateness of the satisfaction, made by His obedience and suffering, to meet the claims of justice against those whose nature He voluntarily assumed; nay more, to set forth God’s glory more brightly than ever; also God has revealed that by believing the sinner becomes one with the Redeemer, and so rightly shares in the redemption wrought by Him the Head of the redeemed. No motive has ever been found so powerful as the sinner’s realization of the atonement, to create love in the human heart, constraining the accepted believer henceforth to shun all sin and press after all holiness in order to please God, who first loved him ( Romans 8:1-3; 2 Corinthians 5:14,15; 1 John 4:19).

    ATONEMENT, DAY OF Yom hakkippurim , Heb.: “the day of propitiation “ or “expiations” (exilasmus ), Greek Acts 27:9, “the fast,” the great day of national humiliation, the only one enjoined in the law. For the mode of observance compare Leviticus 16:3-10, which sets forth the general ceremonial, Leviticus 16:11-34 details; Numbers 29:7-11, the special victims; Leviticus 23:26-32, how the people were to act. The day was the 10th of Tisri (the seventh month), from the evening of the 9th to that of the 10th, five days before the feast of tabernacles. For this latter feast implied rest in Israel’s inheritance; and before rest can be realized atonement must precede. It was kept as a sabbath; but not, as other sabbaths, with joy, but with affliction of themselves, as the day on which the nation’s collective sin was brought to remembrance. The mode of affliction was not prescribed, but all work was forbidden on pain of cutting off from the Lord’s congregation. For the one work of atonement by the high priest was to be the all absorbing thought; just as in the case of the work of the great Antitype ( John 6:28,29). Only this once in the year was the high priest to enter the holiest. Having bathed, and dressed, not in his robes “for glory and beauty” (Exodus 28), but in the white linen garments symbolizing the holiness required for admission into God’s presence ( Hebrews 12:14), he brought a bullock fern sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering, at his own cost, to otter for himself and his priestly family; and two goats for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering, at the public cost, to offer for the people. Then he presented the two goats before the Lord at the tabernacle door, and cast lots upon them, implying that Christ’s sacrifice was “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” ( Acts 2:23; 4:28); on one was written “For Jehovah;” on the other “For Azazel.”

    Next he slew the bullock as a sin offering for himself and his family. Taking a censer with burning coals from the brazen altar, and applying a handful of incense, he entered the holiest, where the mercy-seat became enveloped in the cloud of smoke from the incense. Then he took of the bullock’s blood (going out probably for it, and coming in again) and sprinkled it with his finger upon the mercy-seat: not on the top, butt on its front, then seven times before the mercy-seat, upon the ground in front of it; “eastward” ( Leviticus 16:14) means the side of the ark toward the veil. The cloud of incense” covering the mercy-seat upon the testimony, lest he should die,” typifies Christ’s merits incensing our prayers, so as to make them a sweet smelling savor to God ( Revelation 8:3,4). His meritorious obedience makes His atoning blood acceptable, so that the sinner dies not in the presence of Him who would otherwise be a “consuming fire.” The goat “for Jehovah” was then slain, and its blood sprinkled as the bullock’s.

    Going out from the holiest, the high priest purified, by sprinkling seven times with the bullock’s and the gent’s blood, the holy place and the golden altar; and then outside he poured the rest of the blood round the altar of burnt offering; the places defiled by the priest’s and the nation’s sins being thus made ceremonially and typically fit for the indwelling of God; compare as to the Antitype Hebrews 9:22,23. During this no ordinary priest was allowed to be in or about the sanctuary ( Leviticus 16:16-20; Exodus 30:10); teaching that Messiah has a priesthood exclusively His own, and that no work of layman or priest is to be added to His complete work of atonement ( Hebrews 7:24; 9:12; 10:12-18). Then the high priest laid his hands upon the head of the goat “for Azazel,” confessing over it all the sins of the people. Next a man chosen for the purpose led it into the wilderness, “a land not inhabited,” and there let it loose.

    The two goats constitute one offering: the slain one typifying Jesus’ vicarious bearing of our sin’s penalty, death; the scapegoat the complete removal of our sin out of sight to where no witness will rise in judgment against us. The life after death also points to our being dead with Christ to sin and its penalty and power, and becoming alive unto God by union with Him in His resurrection life ( Romans 6:5-11). In Leviticus 16:10,26, instead of “the goat for the scapegoat,” which is tautology, translate “the goat for complete sending away” (from the Arabic root ‘azal, “to remove completely”). Compare <19A312> Psalm 103:12; Micah 7:19.

    Many think Azazel to be the devil, to whom, as the source of sin, “the entirely separate one,” the scapegoat, with its lead of sin taken of from the congregation, was sent to the wilderness (the abode of evil spirits) to be given up to, as sin and the wicked shall be hereafter ( Revelation 20:14,15; Matthew 25:41; Luke 16:20): entirely separated from God. But both goats were presented before Jehovah” as consecrated to Him (ver. 7); and both alike in color, height, and value, form but two parts of one complex act of atonement; the one alone could not in the nature of things have expressed the whole truth. The one “for Jehovah,” by its death, expresses Christ’s life sacrificed instead of our forfeited lives; the “goat for complete sending away” expresses the blessed effect of that sacrifice, “as far as the E. is from the W. so far hath lie removed our transgressions from us” ( <19A312> Psalm 103:12); the slain goat expresses “Christ was delivered for our offenses,” so that in believing union with Him we are dead to sin, and to the law as a condemning power, and to death; the living goat expresses “Christ rose again for our justification” ( Romans 4:25), so that we live by union with His resurrection life, sin being utterly put away in proportion as that life works in us ( John 14:19; Romans 6; Colossians 3). Death and life are marvelously united alike in Christ and His people. Compare the similar two-fold type, the slain bird and the bird let loose after having been dipped in the blood of the killed bird ( Leviticus 14:4-7).

    On the analogy between the high priest’s entrance in his white garments once a year into the holiest, and the Antitype’s entrance into heaven once for all, wherein He so infinitely exceeds the type, inasmuch as He “by that one offering hath forever perfected them that are sanctified,” “having obtained, eternal redemption for us,” so that “there is no more offering for sin” (which condemns the notion of the Lord’s supper being a sacrifice), see Hebrews 9; 10. He needed not. like the type, to atone first for Himself. for He had no sin. The veil was rent at His death, throwing open the holiest heaven continually to all believers through faith in His sacrifice; whereas the veil continued as much after the typical high priest’s atonement as before it to preclude access to priests and people alike.

    As other offerings arched typically for the sins of the individual, the nation’s sins as a whole congregation or church, were expiated on the great day of atonement. As the Passover was the nation’s feast of joy, so the day of atonement was its day of penitent humiliation; and the atonement was its indispensable preparation for the joy that followed in the feast of tabernacles or ingathering of fruits. We can only “joy in God” when “through our Lord Jesus Christ we have received the atonement” ( Romans 5:11). After the live goat was sent away, the high. priest returned into the holy place, bathed again, put on his usual official garments, and offered the two rams as burnt offerings, one for himself, the other for the people: the burnt offering after the atonement expressing whole dedication of themselves to Jehovah. He also burnt upon the altar the fat of the two sin offerings, while their flesh was being burned outside the camp. The entire flesh of the burnt offering was burnt on the altar; but that of the sin offerings, which ordinarily was counted most holy and eaten (type of Christ our holy sin offering, Hebrews 9:14), could not in this case be eaten by the priest properly, as it had been offered for the priests as well as for the people, and was therefore taken and burnt outside ( Leviticus 6:25-27). They who took away the flesh, and the man who had led away the living goat, had to bathe and to wash their clothes afterward. The additional burnt offerings ( Numbers 29:7-11) were a young bullock, a ram, seven lambs, and a young goat. The successive steps in the whole were: the high priest atoned (1) for himself and his family; then, being purified himself, (2) for the sanctuary and all in it; then (3) for the altar of burnt offering outside; (4) for the whole people.

    The Yoma in the Mishna informs us that the high priest on the day of atonement performed all the ordinary duties, as lighting the lamps, offering the daily sacrifices and the incense; then bathed and put on the white linen garments and proceeded with the atonement rites. He went four times into the holiest (which are all regarded as the one “once” entering, Hebrews 9:7): (1) with the censer and incense; (2) with the bullock’s blood; (3) with the goat’s blood; (4) after offering the evening sacrifice, to bring out the censer and plate which had held the incense; compare Leviticus 16:12,14,15.

    The lots were at first of boxwood, latterly of gold, put into an urn, into which he put both his hands and took out a lot in each, while the two goats stood before him, one on the right, the other on the left; the lot in each hand belonged to the corresponding position: when the lot “for Azazel” was in the right, it was a good omen. He then tied a tongue shaped piece of scarlet cloth on the scapegoat. The Gemara says the red cloth ought to turn white as a token of God’s acceptance or the atonement; which illustrates Isaiah 1:18, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” No such change took place for 40 years before the destruction of Jerusalem; a singular testimony from Jewish authority to Messiah, as His ministry was precisely 40 years before the destruction of the holy city; the type ceased when the Antitype came.

    ATROTH ( Numbers 32:35.) City of Gad, named between Aroer and Jaazer.

    Shophall is appended to the name, and no comma should separate it from Atroth, to distinguish it from the neighboring Ataroth.

    ATTAI 1. 1 Chronicles 2:35,36. 2. 1 Chronicles 12:11. 3. 2 Chronicles 11:20.

    ATTALIA ( Acts 14:25.) Whence Paul and Barnabas sailed, on returning from their missionary tour inland to Antioch. The city was founded by and named from Attalus Philadelphus, king of Pergamus, as a port at the mouth of the river Catarrhactes, for the commerce of Egypt and Syria, as Troas was for that of the AEgean. Its modern name is Satalia.

    AUGUSTUS CAESAR The first Roman emperor, reigning at Christ’s birth ( Luke 2:1, etc.).

    His decree that all the world should be taxed, each going to his own city, was the divinely ordered ( Micah 5:2) occasion of Jesus’ birth taking place at Bethlehem. Born 63 B.C. Also called Octavius and Octavianus from his father, who died while he was young. Educated by his great uncle Julius Caesar, triumvir with Antony and Lepidus. Dissension having arisen, Octavianus overcame Antony, and gained supreme power at the battle of Actium, 31 B.C. Saluted emperor (imperator, military commander in chief originally), and surnamed Augustus Caesar, “majestic.” Leaving the names and rights of the chief republican officers unchanged, he united them all, one by one, in himself. Herod, who had been on Antony’s side, he not only pardoned, but even increased in power; Herod thereby became attached to his dynasty, and built him a temple of marble near the sources of the Jordan. Augustus Caesar died at Nola in Campania, in his 76th year, A.D. 14. Some time before his death he associated Tiberius with himself in the empire ( Luke 3:1).

    AVA Ava, in Assyria; colonists thence re. peopled Samaria after the removal of the Israelites ( 2 Kings 17:24). Probably = Ivah ( 2 Kings 18:34).

    The Assyrians according to their usual policy, having conquered Ivah, transplanted its inhabitants to Samaria, vacated by Israel’s deportation.

    AVEN (nothingness, vanity). (Amos 1:5.) A plain in Syria, “the plain of Aven,” i.e. idols threatened with depopulation, probably for idolatry. Probably the great plain of Lebanon, Coele-Syria (included in the Scripture designation, “Syria of Damascus”), in which the idol temple of Baalbek or Heliopolis, the city of the sun god Baal, stood. The Hebrews in Amos 1:5 (see margin) and Joshua 11:17; 12:7, for this “plain” or “valley,” is Biqu’ah ; the very name it still retains, el Buka’a. Aven is the contemptuous term appended to stigmatize its vanity, with all its idolatrous pomp, just as Hosea 5:8 calls Bethel, where the idol calf was set up, Bethaven.

    AVIM Avims, Avites. 1. ProperlyAVVIM ( Deuteronomy 2:28). They had dwelt in Hazerim (“the villages,” or nomad encampments, chatzerim ), even unto Azzah (Gaza), i.e. S.W, of Palestine, the S. part of the shephelah or lower hills of Judah (possibly having come thither from the southern desert). The Caplitorim out of Caphtor (i.e. the Philistines, Amos 9:7) supplanted them; and the latter appear in the plain of Sharon, just N. of the shephelah.

    Compare the order of enumeration from S. to N. ( Joshua 13:2,3.)

    Gesenius interprets the name Avvim, “ruin.” A trace of them may be in Avvim, a city of Benjamin ( Joshua 18:23), whither they may have been driven when the took refuge in the hills of Bethel. The Septuagint and Jerome identify them with the Hivites, in whose district was situated the Avvim city just mentioned. Compare Joshua 9:7,17 with Joshua 18:22-27. 2. The people ofAVVA who were planted by Assyria in Samaria; their idols were Nibhaz and Tartak ( 2 Kings 17:81).

    AVITH The city of Hadad ben Bedad ( Genesis 36:35; 1 Chronicles 1:46), who smote Midian (the main body) in the field of Moab. This would be early in the time of Moab’s sojourn among a branch of the Midianites.

    Moab was allied to Midian in the Mosaic age ( Numbers 22:7), but in Gideon’s time Midian was destroyed. Hence Moses naturally records the fact.

    AWL The boring of a slave’s ear with it was the token of his volunteering perpetual service, when he might be free at the year of release ( Exodus 21:6; Deuteronomy 15:17). So Messiah, volunteering to become God’s servant by taking man’s nature; “Mine ears hast Thou opened” ( Psalm 40:6); Isaiah 1.5, “the Lord God hath opened Mine ear,” i.e., hath made Me obediently attentive as a servant to his master. Hebrews 10:5-10 quotes it as Septuagint renders it: “a body hast Thou prepared Me,” the strongest proof of willing obedience. The ear symbolizes obedience.

    AXE Hebrews kardom , meaning sharp; large, for telling trees ( Judges 9:48; Jeremiah 46:22); garzen , meaning cutting, as “hatchet” from “hack,” securis from seco ; barzel ,”iron “ garzen sometimes means the “adze.” The head was fastened to the handle by thongs, and so was liable to slip off ( Deuteronomy 19:5; 2 Kings 6:5). For “axe” in Isaiah 44:12 margin; Jeremiah 10:3, ma’atzad , others trans. a “knife” or “chisel,” such as a carver of wood idols would use. But KJV is good sense and good Heb.; the “axe” is meant as the instrument to cut down the tree in the forest. Mappeetz ( Jeremiah 51:20), “battle axe,” a heavy mace or maul, whence Charles Martel was designated. Kasshil occurs only once, Psalm 74:6, a large axe.

    AZAL (Zechariah 14:5.) The limit to which “the valley” or cleft of the mount of Olives will extend, when Jehovah shall go forth to fight against those nations which shall have assailed Jerusalem. The Hebrews name means adjoining, i.e. near the city: the valley reaching up to the city gates will enable the citizens fleeing to escape to it.

    AZALIAH 2 Kings 22:3.

    AZANIAH Nehemiah 10:9.

    AZAREEL AZARAEL. 1. Nehemiah 12:36. 2. 1 Chronicles 12:6. 3. Or Uzziel, 1 Chronicles 25:18,4. 4. 1 Chronicles 27:22. 5. Ezra 10:41. 6 . Nehemiah 12:13.

    AZARIAH (whom Jehovah helps) [see UZZIAH ], like in sense to Eleazar = whom God (El ) helps, and toLAZARUS. 1. 1 Chronicles 2:8. 2. Son of Ahimaaz ( 1 Chronicles 6:9), succeeded Zadok his grandfather in the high priesthood in Solomon’s reign, Ahimaaz having died before Zadok ( 1 Chronicles 6:10, the “he” refers to the Azariah in 1 Chronicles 6:9). He officiated at the consecration of Solomon’s temple, and was the first high priest that ministered in it. 3. Isaiah’s contemporary, who with fourscore priests withstood so faithfully king Uzziah when burning in. tense ( 2 Chronicles 26:17-20). 4. Grandson of the Azariah 2, high priest under Abijah and Asa, as Amariah his son was in the days of Jehoshaphat son of Asa. 5. Azariah, son of Oded, also called simply Oded, a prophet along with Hanani; encouraged Asa in his religious reformation ( 2 Chronicles 15:1-8). 6. Chief priest of the house of Zadok, in Hezekiah’s reign, who appointed chambers in the house of the Lord for storing the tithes and offerings, on which were dependent the attendance of the priests at the temple services ( Nehemiah 10:35-39; 12:27-80,44-47; 2 Chronicles 31:10-13). 7. 1 Chronicles 6:13; Ezra 7:1; 2 Kings 25:18. 8. Hebrews name of see ABEDNEGO ( Daniel 1:6-19; 3); of the seed royal of Judah; fulfilling the prophecy to Hezekiah ( Isaiah 39:5-7); famed for beauty, wisdom, above all faithfulness unto death, and for his miraculous deliverance from the furnace. 9. 2 Chronicles 21:2. 10. Several others: 1 Chronicles 6:36 = Ezra, 1 Chronicles 9:11; Nehemiah 3:23,24; 8:7; 2 Chronicles 29:12; 28:12; compare Jeremiah 43:2; Nehemiah 12:32,33, 1 Chronicles 2:38,39; Azariah whose name proves that the genealogy in 1 Chronicles 2:36-41 was made in Hezekiah’s reign, for Azariah ( 1 Chronicles 2:38) appears from <142301> Chronicles 23:1; 24:1, to have been captain when Joash was seven years old, i.e. about one generation elder than Joash. After Azariah in that genealogy are six generations, ending with Elishama; and from Joash to Hezekiah also six; therefore Elishama was contemporary with Hezekiah.

    Zabad in 1 Chronicles 2:36,37 (compare 1 Chronicles 11:41) was contemporary of David. 11. Uzziah, meaning much the same, the might of Jehovah ( 2 Kings 14:21; 15:1-6).

    AZAZ 1 Chronicles 5:8.

    AZAZIAH 1. 1 Chronicles 15:21. 2. 1 Chronicles 27:20. 3. 2 Chronicles 31:18.

    AZBUK Nehemiah 3:16.

    AZEKAH From a root, “to until the ground.” A town of Judah, with dependent villages, in the shephelah, the low hills of Judah, near Shochoh ( <091701> Samuel 17:1; Joshua 15:35). Fortified by Rehoboam ( 2 Chronicles 11:9; Nehemiah 11:30). Assailed by the king of Babylon ( Jeremiah 34:7). Ganneau fixes it at Ellar, half way between Jerusalem and Beit Jibrin; Conder at Deir el Aashek (the monastery of the lover), S. of Sorek valley, eight miles N. of Shochoh (Shuweikeh). A road leads to it from Elah valley.

    AZEL 1 Chronicles 8:37,38; 9:43,44.

    AZEM Ezem. A city S. of Judah; afterward allotted to Simeon ( Joshua 15:29; 19:3).

    AZGAD Ezra 2:12; 8:12; Nehemiah 7:17; 10:15.

    AZIEL Contracted from Jaaziel ( 1 Chronicles 15:18,20).

    AZIZA Ezra 10:27.

    AZMAVETH 1. 2 Samuel 23:31; 1 Chronicles 11:33. 2. 1 Chronicles 8:36; 9:42; 12:3. 3. 1 Chronicles 12:3. 4. 1 Chronicles 27:25. 5. A place in Benjamin ( Ezra 2:24). Beth-Azmaveth ( Nehemiah 7:28; 12:29). The singers from it built villages round Jerusalem.

    AZMON On the S. border of Palestine, near the torrent of Egypt, wady el Arish ( Numbers 34:4,5; Joshua 15:4).

    AZNOTH-TABOR (the ears (earlike summits) of Tabor). Marking the boundary of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:24).

    AZOR Matthew 1:13,14.

    AZRIEL (God my help). Like the Carthaginian Hasdrubal = Baal his help. 1. 1 Chronicles 5:24. 2. 1 Chronicles 27:19. 3. Jeremiah 36:26.

    AZRIKAM 1. 1 Chronicles 3:23. 2. 1 Chronicles 8:38. 3. 1 Chronicles 9:14. 4. Governor of Ahaz’s house; slain by Zichri, a mighty man of Ephraim ( 2 Chronicles 28:7).

    AZUBAH 1. 1 Chronicles 2:18,19. 2. 1 Kings 22:42.

    AZUR Azzur. 1. Jeremiah 28:1. 2. Ezekiel 11:1. 3. Nehemiah 10:17.

    AZZAH The right designation of the Philistine city ( Deuteronomy 2:28; Kings 4:24; Jeremiah 25:20). Elsewhere less accurately read Gaza.

    AZZAN Numbers 34:26.

    B BAAL (1) The chief male deity, as Ashtoreth is the chief goddess, of the Canaanites and Phoenicians. Baalim, the plural form, expresses the various aspects of Baal, as different localities viewed him. Baal is also associated with see ASHERAH , inaccurately translated “THE GROVE” or “groves” ( Judges 3:7; 2 Chronicles 33:3, 34:4; 2 Kings 23:5,6). Baal means lord, in the sense of owner, possessor; but Adown means lord, master. The Hebrew article distinguishes the proper name Baal from the common noun; Bel, the Babylonian idol ( Isaiah 46:1), is related. Midian and Moab, as early as Moses’ time, tempted Israel, by Balaam’s devilish counsel ( Revelation 2:14; Joshua 13:22; Numbers 25:18), to worship the phase of the deity called Baal-peor (Numbers 25), from peor , “aperire hymenem virgineum” corresponding to the Latin, Priapus. Terrible licentiousness not only was sanctioned, but formed part of the worship. A plague from Jehovah destroyed 24,000 Israelites in consequence, and was only stopped by the zeal of Phinehas. Moses subsequently, when warning the people from this example, notices no circumstance of it but one, which, though in the original narrative not stated, was infinitely the most important to advert to, but which none but spectators of the fact, perfectly acquainted with every individual concerned in it, could possibly feel the truth of. “Your eyes have seen what Jehovah did because of Baal-peor, for all the men that followed Baal-peor the Lord thy God hath destroyed them from among you. But ye that did cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day” ( Deuteronomy 4:3). For Moses to have used this argument was extremely natural but if a forger had asserted this at hazard, and put it in Moses’ mouth it seems very strange that it is the only circumstance he should forget to notice in the direct narrative, and the only one he should notice in his reference to it (Graves, Pentateuch, 1:4). Baal worship prevailed much in Israel, except during Gideon’s judgeship (hence called Jerubbaal, “let Baal plead”), up to Samuel’s time ( Judges 2:10-13; 6:26-32; 8:33; 10:6-10). At Samuel’s reproof they put away this worship ( 1 Samuel 7:4). Solomon brought back Ashtoreth worship to please his foreign wives. Ahab, king of Israel, under Jezebel’s influence (daughter of Ethbaal, priest of Baal and king of Zidon), established the worship of Baal and Asherah (“the groves”): 1 Kings 16:31-33; 18:19- 22. Elijah successfully for a time resisted it. His influence and that of king Jehoshaphat produced its effect in the following reign and that of Jehu. It was laid aside for Jeroboam’s calves, under Jehoram, Ahab’s son ( <120301> Kings 3:2), and under Jehu ( 2 Kings 10:28); but for the most part prevailed until the Lord in vengeance removed the ten tribes from their land ( 2 Kings 17:16). Baal worship also in Judah found entrance under Ahaz ( 2 Chronicles 28:2,3), but was suppressed by Hezekiah ( Kings 18:4). Manasseh sought to bring Judah to the same state of Baal worship as Israel had been under Ahab ( 2 Kings 21:3; compare Micah 6:16). Josiah made a thorough eradication of it ( 2 Kings 23:4-14). A remnant of it and an effort to combine idolatry with Jehovah worship still in part survived until the final purgation of all tendency to idols was effected by the severe discipline of the Babylonian captivity ( Zephaniah 1:4-6). The Hebrew for “Sodomites” ( 1 Kings 14:24; 15:12; 22:46; 2 Kings 23:7) is qideshim , “those consecrated” to the vilest filthiness, which constituted part of the sacred worship! Flat roofs at Jerusalem were often used as altars ( Jeremiah 32:29). “Standing images,” or possibly pillars or obelisks (matsebah ) were his symbols ( Kings 14:23; 2 Kings 18:4; 23:14; Micah 5:13). “Sun images” (hammanim , Isaiah 17:8; 27:9; 2 Chronicles 34:4) “were on high above the altars” of Baal ( Jeremiah 43:13); “the images of Bethshemesh,” literally “the pillars (obelisks) of the house of the sun.” At Tyre one title was Malqereth “King of the city.” In a Maltese inscription, Melkart, lord of Tyre, is identified with “Hercules, the prince leader” of the Greeks; from melek “king,” and qereth “of the city.” Tyre’s colonies (Carthage, etc.) honored Melkart, the god of the mother city; the name appears in Hamilcar. An inscription at Palmyra names him Baal Shemesh, owner of the sun. Philo says his title among the Phoenicians was Beelsamen (shamain), “owner of the heavens.” Plautus also in his Poenulus calls him Bal-samen. Contrast Melchizedek’s title for Jehovah, “Possessor Qoneh : not Baal of heaven and earth” ( Genesis 14:19). High places were chosen for Baal worship, and human victims were sometimes offered as burnt offerings ( Jeremiah 19:5). The worshippers wore peculiar vestments ( 2 Kings 10:22). They gashed themselves with knives at times to move his pity ( 1 Kings 18:26-28). The name appears in Asdrubal (“help of Baal”), Hannibal (“grace of Baal”), Adherbaal, Ethbaal.

    His generating, vivifying power is symbolized by the sun ( 2 Kings 23:5), as Ashtoreth is by the moon, Venus, and the heavenly hosts.

    BAAL-BERITH Worshipped at Shechem by Israel after Gideon’s death ( Judges 8:33; 9:4) = Baal in covenant, namely, with his worshippers; or perhaps a compromise, to combine Baal with the “covenant” of Jehovah.

    BAAL-GAD = Baal, the fortune-bringer, the planet Jupiter ( Isaiah 65:11 margin); “Gad” is the Babylonian god of fortune, Bel. The Arabs called it the greater good fortune; and “Meni,” the planet Venus, corresponds to “the lesser good fortune.” The city ( Joshua 11:17) bears the same name.

    BAAL-HAMON = the owner of a multitude, the sun god, and a city where Solomon had a vineyard with a multitude of vines. In Mount Ephraim, not far N. of Samaria (compare Isaiah 28:1; Song of Solomon 8:11).

    BAALHANAN = “Baal is gracious.” Contrast Johannes, “Jehovah is gracious.” 1. An early king of Edom ( Genesis 36:38,39), son of Achbor. 2. David’s officer over his olives and sycamores in the shephelah (low plain). Of Gederah ( Joshua 15:36), or Bethgader ( 1 Chronicles 2:51).

    BAALZEBUB; BEELZEBUB Worshipped at Ekron; consulted by Ahaziah as to his recovery, for which Jehovah by Elijah declared he should die ( 2 Kings 1:2,3,16). “Lord of flies,” i.e., averter of the plague of flies, which often caused such ravages.

    A seal found near Gaza by DeHass represents a human figure with four wings like those of a fly, in low relief, probably the god of Ekron. see BEELZEBUL was the Jewish contemptuous term, by a slight alteration, for Beelzebub; i.e., god of dung.

    BAAL (2) as applied to places. It sometimes refers to Baal’s worship there; sometimes it means that the place possesses some attribute denoted by the other part of the compound. It is a Canaanite not Hebrew term: applied to the men of Jericho while Canaanites ( Joshua 24:11), “the men (baliy , possessors, occupants) of Jericho.” Also “the men (baliy , occupants) of Shechem,” the ancient city of the Hivite Hamor ( Judges 9:2-51); the occupants of Keilah, bordering on pagandom ( 1 Samuel 23:11,12); Uriah the Hittite; “lords of the pagan” ( Isaiah 16:8). So strong was Israelite orthodox feeling against the name, that they altered names in which it occurred: Jerubbaal into Jerubbesheth, Merib-baal into Mephibosheth: compare Hosea 2:16. “At that day, saith Jehovah, thou shalt call Me Ishi, and shalt call Me no more Baali.” Though both express “my husband,” yet Baali by being used for the images of Baal whose name ought not to be taken up into the lips ( Psalm 16:4), was to be renounced for the unambiguous Ishi.

    BAAL (3) A town of Simeon ( 1 Chronicles 4:33), identical withBAALATH BEER ( Joshua 19:8), i.e. Baal of the well, holy well. Also calledRAMATH (NEGEB, “the heights (Ramath) of the S.” (Negeb), a parched region ( Joshua 19:8).

    BAALAH (the Canaanite designation) =KIRJATH JEARIM, orKIRJATH BAAL, now Kuriat el E’nab ( Joshua 15:9,10,11 (“Mount Baal”), 60); supposed by many to be Emmaus. in 2 Samuel 6:2 calledBAALE of Judah; Joshua 19:3 Balah; 1 Chronicles 4:29BILHAH.

    BAALATH A town of Dan, enlarged by Solomon ( 1 Kings 9:18; 2 Chronicles 8:6).

    BAAL GAD A Canaanite sanctuary of Baal, as “the lord of fortune.” The N.W. limit of Joshua’s victories, as Hamath was the N.E. limit ( Joshua 11:17; 12:7; 13:5). “Under mount Hermon, in the valley of Lebanon,” still retaining the Hebrew name for “the valley,” ‘el buka , between Lebanon and Antilebanon. Probably now Banias, at the fountain which is one of the Jordan’s sources, formerly a sanctuary of Pan. Baalbek (= the city of the sun) is situated too far N. at the lowest declivity of Antilibanus to be identified with Baal.

    BAAL HAZOR = Baal’s village. A Canaanite idol sanctuary on the borders of Ephraim and Benjamin. There Absalom had his sheep farm, and invited all David’s sons to feast at his sheepshearing, and killed Amnon ( 2 Samuel 13:23).

    BAAL HERMON Judges 3:3; 1 Chronicles 5:23 (translate Baal Hermon, even Senir, even Mount Hermon”). The mountain had three names ( Deuteronomy 3:9); Baal Hermon was probably one used among the Phoenician worshippers of Baal, whose sanctuary see BAAL GAD was at the base of the mountain.

    BAAL MEON = owner of an habitation. Reuben in occupying it along with Nebo ( Numbers 32:38) changed the names, probably for the idol name Baal substituting Beth Meon. Ezekiel ( Ezekiel 25:9) calls it a city on Moab’s frontiers, and with Beth-jeshimoth and Kiriathaim, “the glory of the country.” The reputed birthplace of Elisha. Jerome describes it as a very large village, nine miles from Heshbon. The famous Moabite stone of Dibon mentions that as Omri made Medeba a military center for opposing Moab, so Mesha occupied Baal Meon as his center for assailing Israel; “I Mesha, son of Kamos (Chemosh), fortified Baal Meon, and I besieged and took Kiriathaim and Nebo,” etc.

    BAAL PERAZIM = lord of breaches, where Jehovah broke forth on David’s enemies, the Philistines, as a breach (“bursting forth”) of waters ( 2 Samuel 5:20; 1 Chronicles 14:11). Compare Isaiah 28:21, “Mount Perazim”; once the idol Baal’s high place, henceforth it was to be noted for Jehovah’s bursting forth on David’s idolatrous foes.

    BAAL SHALISHA = lord of Shalisha ( 2 Kings 4:42; 1 Samuel 9:4). Not far from Gilgal, Baith Sarisain the Septuagint. The Onomasticon places it about 15 Roman miles N. of Lydda (Diospolis). The ruin Sirisia exactly corresponds to this; the fellahin often interchange “l” and “r.” It lies in the low district, where, as the Talmud says, the fruits ripen early.

    BAAL TAMAR = lord of a palm tree ( Judges 20:33), near Gibeah of Benjamin.

    Deborah’s palm tree ( Judges 4:4) was between Ramah and Bethel, in this neighborhood. The battle at Baal Tamar was prior to her time, B.C.

    BAAL ZEPHON In Egypt, where Israel encamped before Pharaoh overtook them at the Red Sea ( Ezekiel 14:2,9; Numbers 33:7), W. of the gulf of Suez, below its head. Migdol and Baal Zephon were opposite one another, Baal Zephon being behind Pihahiroh in relation to the Israelites. Gesenius explains the name = sacred to Typhon; others from the root tsaphah , “to watch” = “watchtower,” as Migdol also means “tower.”

    BAALIS King of the children of Ammon, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem. He hired Ishmael to slay Gedaliah, who was appointed by the king of Babylon governor over the cities of Judah ( Jeremiah 40:14).

    BAANA 1. 1 Kings 4:12. 2. Nehemiah 3:4.

    BANNAH 1. Son of Rimmon, a Benjamite. With his brother Rechab, he murdered Ishbosheth; they were slain in turn by David, their hands and feet cut off, and their bodies hung over the pool at Hebron ( 2 Samuel 4:2-9). 2. 2 Samuel 23:29; 1 Chronicles 11:30. 3. 1 Kings 4:16. 4. Ezra 2:2; Nehemiah 7:7; 10:27.

    BAARA 1 Chronicles 8:8.

    BAASEIAH 1 Chronicles 6:40.

    BAASHA Son of Ahijah, of Issachar, first of the second dynasty of kings of the ten tribes’ northern kingdom, which supplanted Jeroboam’s dynasty ( Kings 15:27). Gesenius explains the name = wicked: others from baah , “he who seeks;” shaah , “he who lays waste.” Though the instrument of God’s vengeance on the seed of Jeroboam who both “sinned and made Israel to sin,” “leaving not to Jeroboam any that breathed,” he walked in the same sinful way. Therefore, the word of Jehovah came to Jehu son of Hanani: “Forasmuch as I exalted thee out of the dust (which implies that he was of low origin), and made thee prince over My people Israel; and thou hast walked in the way of Jeroboam, and hast made My people Israel to sin ...

    Behold, I will take away the posterity of Baasha and his house ... him that dieth of Baasha in the city shall the dogs eat; and him that dieth of his in the fields shall the fowls of the air eat” ( 1 Kings 16:1-4,7,8-14). As he conspired against king Nadab, son of Jeroboam, who was besieging the Philistine town of Gibbethon, and slew all Jeroboam’s seed, so Zimri, a servant, conspired against Baasha’s son, Elah, and slew all Baasha’s house, “leaving him not one of his kinsfolk or of his friends.” Retribution in kind.

    God did not the less punish Baasha “because he killed Nadab,” though in his killing Nadab he was unconsciously fulfilling God’s purpose; the motive is what God looks to, and Baasha’s motive was cruel selfish ambition, reckless of bloodshed if only it furthered his end. His chief act in his reign was “he built Ramah, that he might not suffer any to go out or come in to Asa, king of Judah ( 1 Kings 15:17). It might seem strange that Judah, so much weaker numerically, should not have kept Ramah, as a fortress to guard against invasion by Israel, numerically the stronger state. Instead, the people of Judah took away the stones and timber of Ramah to build Geba of Benjamin and Mizpah. An incidental notice explains it ( 1 Kings 12:26): “Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David if this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of Jehovah at Jerusalem.” Further, in 2 Chronicles 11:13-17 we read, “the priests and Levites in all Israel resorted to Rehoboam out of all their coasts. For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had east them off from executing the priest’s office unto the Lord ... And after them out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel came to Jerusalem, to sacrifice unto the Lord God of their fathers. So they strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and made Rehoboam the son of Solomon strong.”

    Israel’s king Baasha was naturally anxious to stop this continuous drain of the best out of the northern kingdom, and reared Ramah, which commanded the N. road from Jerusalem, into a fortress for the purpose.

    Judah’s king was equally anxious to remove this obstacle put to the influx from Israel of those God fearing men, who would so materially strengthen his kingdom The happy dovetailing of the incidental Scripture notices just mentioned into this solution of the difficulty is a proof of the truth of the narrative. Baasha reigned 24 years, and had the beautiful city Tirzah for his capital ( Song of Solomon 6:4).

    BABEL; BABYLON Babel (Hebrew) means Babylon; so that “the tower” should be designated “the tower of Babel.” Capital of the country Shinar (Genesis), Chaldea (later Scriptures). The name as given by Nimrod ( Genesis 10:10), the founder, means (Bab-il), “the gate of the god Il,” or simply “of God.”

    Afterward the name was attached to it in another sense (Providence having ordered it so that a name should be given originally, susceptible of another sense, signifying the subsequent divine judgment), Genesis 11:9; Babel from baalal , “to confound; .... because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth,” in order to counteract their attempt by a central city and tower to defeat God’s purpose of the several tribes of mankind being “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth,” and to constrain them, as no longer “understand one another’s speech,” to dispel The Talmud says, the site of tower of Babel is Borsippa, the Bits Nimrud, 7 1/2 miles from Hillah, and 11 from the northern ruins of Babylon. The French expedition found at Borsippa a clay cake, dated the 30th day of the 6th month of the 16th year of Nabonid. Borsippa (the Tongue Tower) was a suburb of Babylon, when the old Babel was restricted to the northern ruins.

    Nebuchadnezzar included it in the great circumvallation of 480 stadia.

    When the outer wall was destroyed by Darius Borsippa became independent of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar’s temple or tower of Nebo stood on the basement of the old tower of Babel. He says in the inscription, “the house of the earth’s base (the basement substructure), the most ancient monument of Babylon I built and finished; I exalted its head with bricks covered with copper ... the house of the seven lights (the seven planets); a former king 42 ages ago built, but did not complete its head. Since a remote time people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words; the earthquake and thunder had split and dispersed its sun-dried clay.” The substructure had a temple sacred to Sin, god of the mouth (Oppert). The substructure is 600 Babylonian ft. broad, 75 high; on it Nebuchadnezzar built seven other stages. God had infatuated His will that “the earth should be divided,” the several tribes taking different routes, in the days of Peleg (= division), born 100 years after the flood ( Genesis 10:25,32; Deuteronomy 32:8). Another object the Babel builders sought was to “make themselves a name”; self-relying pride setting up its own will against the will of God, and dreaming of ability to defeat God’s purpose, was their snare. Also their “tower, whose top (pointed toward, or else reached) unto heaven,” was designed as a self-deifying, God-defying boast. Compare Isaiah 14:13; God alone has the right to “make Himself a name” ( Isaiah 63:12,14; Jeremiah 32:20). They desired to establish a grand central point of unity. They tacitly acknowledge they have lost the inward spiritual bond of unity, love to God uniting them in love to one another. They will make up for it by an outward forced unity; the true unity by loving obedience to God they might have had, though dispersed. Their tower toward heaven may have marked its religious dedication to the heavens (sabeanism, worship of the tsaba , the hosts of heaven), the first era in idolatry; as also the first effort after that universal united empire on earth which is to be realized not by man’s ambition, but by the manifestation of Messiah, whose right the kingdom is ( Ezekiel 21:27). “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded,” i.e. (in condescension to human language), Jehovah took judicial cognizance of their act: their “go to, let us,” etc. ( Genesis 11:3,4), Jehovah with stern irony meets with His “Go to, let us,” etc.

    The cause of the division of languages lies in an operation performed upon the human mind, by which the original unity of feeling, thought, and will was broken up. The one primitive language is now lost, dispersed amidst the various tongues which have severally appropriated its fragments, about to rise again with reunited parts in a new and heavenly form when Jehovah will “turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of Jehovah, to serve Him with one consent” ( Zephaniah 3:9). “And the Lord shall be king over all the earth; in that day shall there be one Lord, and His name one” ( Zechariah 14:9). The fact that the Bible names in Genesis 1--10 are Hebrew does not prove it the primitive tongue, for with the change of language the traditional names were adapted to the existing dialect, without any sacrifice of truth. The earnest of the coming restoration was given in the gift of tongues at Pentecost, when the apostles spoke with other tongues, so that “devout men out of every nation under heaven” heard them speak in their own tongues “the wonderful works of God.” The confusion of tongues was not at random, but a systematic distribution of languages for the purpose of a systematic distribution of man in emigration. The dispersion was orderly, the differences of tongue corresponding to the differences of race: as Genesis 10:5,20,31, “By these were ... Gentiles divided in their lands, every one after his tongue, after their families in their nations.”

    ORIGIN. Genesis ( Genesis 10:8-10) represents Nimrod as the son of Cush (Ethiopia), and that “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel (Babylon)” Bunsen held that there were no Cushites out of Africa, and that an “Asiatic Cush existed only in the imagination of Biblical interpreters,” and was “the child of their despair.” But the earliest Babylonian monuments show that the primitive Babylonians whose structures by Nebuchadnezzar’s time were in ruins, had a vocabulary undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian, analogous to the Galla tongue in Abyssinia. Sir H.

    Rawlinson was able to decipher the inscriptions chiefly by the help of the Galla (Abyssinian) and Mahra (S. Arabian) dialects. The system of writing resembled the Egyptian, being pictorial and symbolic, often both using the same symbols. Several words of the Babylonians and their kinsmen the Susianians are identical with ancient Egyptian or Ethiopic roots: thus, hyk or hak, found in the Egyptian name hyksos or shepherd kings, appears in Babylonian and Susianian names as khak. Tirkhak is common to the royal lists of Susiana and Ethiopia, as Nimrod appears in those of both Babylon and Egypt. As Ra was the Egyptian sun god, so was Ra the Cushite name of the supreme god of the Babylonians. Traces appear in the Babylonian inscriptions of all the four great dialects, Hamitic, Semitic, Aryan, and Turanian, which show that here the original one language existed before the confusion of tongues. The Babylonian and Assyrian traditions point to an early connection between Ethiopia, S. Arabia, and the cities on the lower Euphrates near its mouth. A first Cushite empire (Lenormant quoted by G. Rawlinson) ruled in Babylonia centuries before the earliest Semitic empire arose. Chedorlaomer (or Lagomer, an idol), king of Elam, is represented in Genesis 14 as leader of the other kings including the king of Shinar (Babylonia). Now Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions show that Elam (Elymais or Susiana, between Babylonia and Persia) maintained its independence through the whole Assyrian period, and that at a date earlier than that commonly assigned to Abraham (2286 B.C.) an Elamite king plundered Babylonia. About this date a Babylonian king is designated in the inscriptions “ravager of Syria.” Originally “the gate of the god’s” temple, whereat justice used to be ministered, Babel or Babylon was secondary in importance at first to the other cities, Erech, Ur, and Ellasar.

    The earliest seat of the Chaldaeans’ power was close on the Persian gulf; as Berosus, their historian, intimates by attributing their civilization to Oannes the fish god, “who brought it out of the sea.” Naturally the rich alluvial soil near the mouth of great rivers would be the first occupied.

    Thence they went higher up the river, and finally fixed at Babylon, miles above the Persian gulf, and 200 above the junction of the Tigris with the Euphrates.

    SIZE AND GENERAL FEATURES. So extensive was it that those in the center knew not when the extremities were captured ( Jeremiah 51:31).

    Herodotus gives the circumference as 60 miles, the whole forming a quadrangle, of which each side was 15 miles. M. Oppert confirms this by examinations on the spot, which show an area within the wall of square miles. The arable and pasture land within was enough to supply all its inhabitants’ requirements. The population has been conjectured at 1,200,000. The wall was pierced with 100 gates of brass,25 gates on each side ( Isaiah 45:2). The breadth and height of the walls (the latter almost as great as that of the dome of Paul’s Cathedral; 350 ft. high, 87 broad) are alluded to in Jeremiah 51:58,53. A deep wide moat of water surrounded the wall, the 30 lower courses of bricks were wattled with reeds, and the whole cemented with hot asphalt from Is (Hit). The streets crossed at right a angles, the cross streets to the Euphrates being closed at the river end by brazen gates. The temple of Belus was a kind of pyramid, of eight square towers, one above the other, the basement tower being 200 yards each way, and a winding ascent round the tower leading to the summit, on which was a chapel sacred to the god but containing no statue. (Does not this favor the view that the words “whose top ... unto heaven” mean that it was dedicated to the visible heavens, to which it pointed, and of which therefore it needed no symbol or image?) The “hanging gardens” were a square of 400 ft. each way, which rose in terraces, the topmost being planted with large trees. So the monuments of Nineveh speak of the mounds of the palaces being planted with rows of fir trees. Compare Nah. 2:3, “the fir trees shall be terribly shaken.” Oppert thinks that the lesser measurement of the interior of Babylon given by Strabo, Ctesias, etc., is due to their giving the measurement of Herodotus’ inner wall, which alone remained in their day; Herodotus speaks of the outer wall which could be traced in his time. Movable platforms of wood, stretching from stone pier to stone pier, formed a bridge uniting the two parts of the city. Ctesias says there were 250 towers on the walls to guard the weakest parts. In the midst of each half of the city were fortifications, in one the palace, in the other the temple, of Belus. On the W. of the city was an artificial lake, into which the river was turned during the erection of the bridge; when the river was brought back the lake as a marsh defended the city. Herodotus says the Greeks learned from Babylon the pole, the sundial, and the division of the day into twelve parts. The first eclipse on record, a lunar one, was accurately observed at Babylon, March 19th, 721 B.C. Ptolemy has preserved an account of lunar eclipses as far back as this date. Numerous canals intersected the country for drainage and irrigation. <19D701> Psalm 137:1, “By the waters of Babylon ... we hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.” The largest, the royal canal, navigable to merchant vessels, connected the Euphrates and Tigris.

    SITES AND PRESENT STATE. Five miles above Hillah, on the left bank of the Euphrates, enormous mounds mark the site of the capital of S.

    Babylonia. The principal are three of unbaked brickwork; Babil, the Kasr or palace, and a high mound now surmounted by the tomb of Amram ibn Alb; two parallel lines of rampart, on the E. and parallel to the river, and enclosing between them and it the chief ruins; lower lines immediately on the river (which runs from N. to S.) and W. of the ruins, also a line on the N.; a separate heap in a long valley (perhaps the river’s ancient bed); two lines of rampart meeting at a right angle, and forming with the river a triangle enclosing all the ruins except Babil. On the W. or right bank of the river the remains are few. Opposite the Amram mound there is a kind of enclosed building. Scattered mounds of the same date with the general mass upon the river exist throughout the region. The Birs Nimrud (by G.

    Smith regarded as the tower of Babel) six miles S.W. of Hillah, and six from the Euphrates, is the most remarkable, 153 1/2 ft. high and 2,000 ft. around the base; surmounted by a tower. It is torn in two nearly the whole way down, and bears traces of fire. G. Smith reads an Assyrian fragment of writing in columns to the effect that “wickedness of men caused the gods to overthrow Babel; what they built in the day the god overthrew in the night; in his anger he scattered them abroad; their counsel was confused.”

    Sir H. Rawlinson found by excavation the tower consisted of seven stages of brickwork on an earthen platform three feet high, each stage of different color. The temple was devoted to the seven planets: the first stage, an exact square, was 272 ft. each way, and 26 ft. high, the bricks black with bitumen, probably devoted to Saturn; the second stage 230 ft. square, ft. high, orange bricks, devoted probably to Jupiter; the third, 188 ft. square by 26 ft. high, red bricks, probably devoted to Mars; the fourth, ft. square by 15 ft. high, probably plated with gold and devoted to the sun; the fifth, guessed to be 104 ft. square; the sixth 62 ft. ; the seventh 20 ft.; but these three, probably dedicated to Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, are too ruinous for measurement. The whole was probably 156 ft. high. The slope with the grand entrance faced N.E.; the steeper was S.W. It was called “the temple of the seven spheres.” It is thought from the inscriptions to mark the site of Borsippa, beyond the bounds of Babylon. The palace of Nebuchadnezzar, E. of the river Sippara, the ancient course of the Euphrates, and that of Neriglissar on the W. of the river, are still distinguishable. The Shebil canal anciently interposed between the Kasr and Babil. Babil is probably the ancient temple of Belus; 140 ft. high, flat at the top, 200 yards long, 140 yards broad (the temple towers of lower Babylonia had all this oblong shape). It was originally coated with fine burnt brick; all the inscribed bricks bear the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who rebuilt it. The shrine, altars, and priests’ houses were at the foot within a sacred enclosure. Kasr is Nebuchadnezzar’s great palace, a square of yards each way. The pale yellow burnt bricks are stamped with Nebuchadnezzar’s name and titles; “Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon.” The enameled bricks found bear traces of figures, confirming Ctesias’ statement that the walls represented hunting scenes in bright colors. The Amram mound is the ancient palace, as old as Babylon itself; its bricks containing the names of kings before Nebuchadnezzar; that king mentions it in his inscriptions. The separate heaps close upon and W. of the river’s ancient bed answer to the lesser palace, connected with the greater by a bridge across and a tunnel beneath the river (Ctesias). A mound in the middle of the ancient channel marks the site of the piers of the bridge. The inscription of the bricks with Neriglissar’s name marks him as the founder of the lesser palace. The two lines of rampart parallel to the river are probably embankments of the great reservoir mentioned by Nebuchadnezzar in the monuments, and lying E. of his palace. With only “brick for stone,” and at first only “slime for mortar,” the Babylonians by the forced labor of multitudes erected monuments of genius so vast as to be still among the wonders of the world.

    HISTORY. For the last 3,000 years the world has owed its progress manly to the Semitic and the Indo-European races. But originally the Hamitic races (Egypt and Babylon), now so depressed, took the lead the arts, sciences, and power. The first steps in alphabetical writing, sculpture, painting, astronomy, history, navigation, agriculture, weaving, were taken by them. Berosus, their historian’s account of their traditions of the flood, and of the confusion of tongues at Babel, accords with Scripture in most points. Nimrod the son of Cash carne over in ships to lower Mesopotamia, and built Ur on the right of the Euphrates near the mouth. Its inhabitants were Chaldi, i.e. moon worshippers. Hur means “the moon goddess.” Its vocabulary is Cashite or Ethiopian. A dynasty of 11 monarchs followed.

    One Orchamar Urkhur, in the inscriptions, was the builder of gigantic works. Chedorlaomer of Elam established a short-lived empire, extending to the mountains of Elam and to Palestine and Syria. This early Babylonian empire, which subsequently to Chedorlaomer’s reign in Elam lasted years, fell by the revision of barbarian hordes, probably Arabs. For seven and a half centuries it was depressed, during which time it became gradually assimilated to the Semitic stock. Nimrod is not mentioned in the Babylonian remains; he probably answers to their god Bel. He united tribes previously independent. The cuneiform inscriptions often designate the people of the lower Euphrates region Kiriath Arbol, “the four nations;” such a confederacy appears in Genesis 14, of which the king of Shinar was one. The southern tetrarchy (arba lisun , “the four tongues,” or kiprat arbat , “the four nations”) consisted of Ur, Huruk, Nipur, and Larsa or Laruncha, answering to the scriptural Ur of the Chaldees, Erech, Calneh, and Ellasar. The northern tetrarchy consisted of Babylon, Borsippa, and Sippara (Sepharvaim): Genesis 10:10-12. The Assyrians adopted the Babylonian number on their emigration to the N. The “four tongues” and the fourfold league of Chedorlaomer answer to the fourfold ethnic division, Cushite, Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan. Erech (Warka) and Ur (Mugheir) were then the capitals; the land was Shinar, and the people (according to the monuments) Akkadim (Accad, Genesis 10:10). The remains from these two cities date about 2000 B.C. Writing had begun, for the bricks are stamped with their kings’ names. The bricks, rudely molded and of various sizes, are some kiln-burned, others sun-dried; buttresses support their buildings: mortar is unknown, clay and bitumen being substituted. Reed matting compacts the mass, that it may not crumble away. The first dynasty of 11 kings probably lasted from 2234 B.C. to 1976 B.C.; the dynasty succeeding Chedorlaomer’s short lived Elamitic empire from 1976 B.C. to 1518 B.C., 458 years. Then it fell under Semitic influence, Arabia for two and a half centuries, and then (about 1270 B.C.) under Assyria for five. At the close of the earlier and the beginning of the later Assyrian dynasties it again rose to the importance which it had when it colonized and gave letters and the arts to Assyria, and had the supremacy during the second or great Chaldean dynasty. Rawlinson completes Berosus’ chronological scheme.

    DYNASTY — YEARS OF CONTINUANCE — B.C. ================================================= I. of Chaldean kings II. of 8 Median kings 234 — III. of 11 Median kings 48 — IV. of 49 Chaldean kings 458 — V. of 9 Arabian kings 245 — VI. of 45 Arabian kings 526 — Pul, a Chaldean 28 — VII. of 13 kings 122 — VIII. of 6 Babylonian kings 87 — Urukh is mentioned earliest on the monuments after Nimrod; his bricks are the lowest down and the rudest in make. Next comes Elgi, “king of Ur.”

    Kudur Nakhunta of Elam, whose court was at Susa, in 2286 invaded Chaldaea and carried off the Babylonian images. He is identified with Zoroaster (Ziru-Ishtar). Kudur Lagomer (Chedorlaomer, the Cushite) is next in the dynasty, having as vassals Amraphel (Semitic), Arioch (Aryan), Tidal (Turanian or Scythic, or Turgal, “the great chief”) reigning over nomadic races (goim , “nations”). Kudur Mabuk enlarged the dominions of Ur, and was, according to the monuments, Apda Martu, “conqueror of the west.” The early monarchs reign at Ur, and leave traces no further N. than Niffer. Sin-shada holds court at Erech 25 miles to the N. of Ur; Naram-sin, further N., at Babylon. Kara-Indas was contemporary with Asshur-bel-nisisu, 1440 B.C. Purna-puriyas with Buzur-Asshur, 1420-1400. Urukh was the Chaldaean builder to whom belongs the credit of designing the Babylonian temple, with its rectangular base facing the four cardinal points, its receding stages, buttresses, drains, and sloped walls, external staircases, and ornamental shrine crowning the whole. No trace of the original Babylon exists in our day. The oldest structures are Urukh’s. Kudur Lagomer was the great conqueror, subduing distant Palestine and Syria, a feat not again achieved until Nebuchadnezzar, 1,600 years later. Tiglathi- Nin (1300 B.C.) conquered Chaldea. Thenceforward, Semitic superseded Cushite influences and the Babylonian kings have Assyrian instead of Turanian or Cushite names.

    The “canon of Ptolemy” gives the succession of Babylonian kings and their lengths of reign, from 747 B.C. (when Nabonassar began to reign) to B.C. (when the last Darius was dethroned by Alexander). Twelve monarchs and two interreigns interpose between Nabonassar and Nabopolassar; then come consecutively Nebuchadnezzar, Illoarudamus, Nerigassolassarus, Nabonadius, Cyrus. Nabonassar destroyed all his predecessors’ annals, that the Babylonians might date from himself. There was a Semiramis at this time, a Babylonian queen (Herodotus says) five generations before Nitocris, mother of the last king. Assyrian monuments also place her at this date, but do not expressly connect her with Babylon.

    Hence, some guess that Nabonassar was her son or husband, Mardocempalus, the fourth king after him, is the Merodach or Berodach Baladan of Scripture; he reigned twice first for 12 years, contemporaneously with the Assyrian Sargon, and the second time for six months only. During the first year of Sennacherib his sons and grandsons were at war with Esarhaddon and his successor. He shows his independence of Assyria in his embassy to Hezekiah; and his inquiry as to the astronomical wonder done in the land of Judah, the sun’s shadow having gone back on Ahaz’ dial, is characteristic of a prince of the Chaldees whose devotion to astronomy is well known. Sargon, according to the inscriptions deprived him of his throne after his first reign of years. Arceanus was made viceroy, and held the post five years. Two years of anarchy followed. Then one Acises reigned a month, and Merodach Baladan held the throne six months, and was then supplanted by Belibus whom Sennacherib made his viceroy for three years and then placed his oldest son Aparanadius on the throne. Two followed, then a second interreign of eight years, and Asaridanus or Esarhaddon followed, son and successor. of Sennacherib. He held his court alternately in Nineveh and Babylon, which explains the difficulty and shows the accurate propriety of the Scripture statement that Manasseh, king of Judah, was carried by the captains of the king of Assyria to Babylon ( 2 Chronicles 33:11).

    A new era begins with Nabopolassar, appointed ruler of Babylon by the last Assyrian king just when the Medes were making their final assault on Nineveh. Nabopolassar deserted to the enemy, arranged a marriage between his son see NEBUCHADNEZZAR and the Median leader’s daughter, and joined hi besieging the Assyrian capital. On the capture of the city (625 B.C.) the S. W. of Assyria was assigned to Nabopolassar in the division of the spoil. So the Babylonian empire was extended over the whole Euphrates valley to the Taurus range, over Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Idumaea; and the Jews passed as tributaries under Babylon, as they had been under Assyria. Pharaoh Necho, son of Psamatik I (608 B.C.) in the later years of Nabopolassar conquered the whole region between Egypt and the Euphrates. Josiah, as ally of Babylon, met him in spite of warning and was slain at Megiddo ( 2 Chronicles 35:20-25; 2 Kings 23:29). Nabopolassar sent Nebuchadnezzar; and the latter at the battle of Carchemish, on the Euphrates, regained all the lost territory for Babylon ( 2 Kings 24:7; Jeremiah 46:2-12.) Nebuchadnezzar was already at Egypt when news of his father’s death recalled him, and he ascended the throne 604 B.C. He reigned 43 years, during which he recovered Syria and Palestine, destroyed Jerusalem, and carried away the Jews to Babylon, reduced Phoenicia and Tyre, and ravaged Egypt; above all he was the great builder of the most beautiful monuments of his country and city. His palace with threefold enclosure, plated pillars, enameled brick, and hanging gardens, was celebrated throughout the civilized world. The ruins of ancient temples repaired by him, and cities restored and adorned, still attest his genius, with their bricks inscribed with his name. How appropriate the language assigned to him in Daniel 4:29,30, as he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon, possibly on the highest terrace of the hanging gardens: “Is not, this great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power and for the honor of my majesty?”

    Evil Merodach, his son, succeeded in 561 B.C., who in the beginning of his reign “did lift up the head of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, out of prison” ( 2 Kings 25:27; Jeremiah 52:31). After a two years’ reign, in consequence of bad government he was murdered by Neriglissar, his brother-in-law, the Nergal Sharezer, Rabmag (chief of the magi, or priests, a title assigned to Neriglissar in the inscriptions) of Jeremiah 39:3,13,14. He calls himself in the inscriptions “son,” i.e. son in law of the “king of Babylon.” He built the palace on the right bank of the ancient bed of the Euphrates. Nabonidus the last king was an usurper who seized Laborosoarched, Neriglissar’s son, after a nine months’ reign, and tortured him to death. He only claims for his father the rank of Rabmag. Herodotus makes him son of a queen Nitocris and Labynetus; but the inscriptions do not directly support his having any connection with Nebuchadnezzar.

    Probably Balshazzar was grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, as indeed is asserted by Scripture ( Jeremiah 27:7; Daniel 5:2,11,13), and was suffered by the usurper Nabonahit (as Nabonidus is called in the inscriptions), who adopted him as son, to be subordinate king and his acknowledged successor, in order to conciliate the legitimate party; perhaps Nabonahit married Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter or granddaughter (Nitocris) to strengthen his throne, and by her was father to Belshazzar.

    Nabonahit (as Berosus records) having allied himself to Creeses, king of Lydia, Cyrus’ enemy, brought on himself Cyrus’ assault of Babylon in B.C. He headed the forces in the field, while Belshazzar commanded in the city. Shut up in Borsippa (Birs-i-Nimrud, the sacred city of the Babylonians, containing their most revered objects of religion and science) he surrendered and was spared, and Cyrus gave him an estate in Carmania.

    Belshazzar (from Bel the idol, and shat, a prince), by a self confident careless watch and unseasonable and profane revelry (Daniel 5), allowed Cyrus’ forces on a great Babylonian festival to enter by the bed of the river which the invader had drained into another channel, and was slain.

    Babylon’s capture by surprise during a festival was foretold in Jeremiah 51:31,39, and that the capture should be by the Medes and Persians, years earlier in Isaiah 21:1-9. Thus, Berosus’ account of the king not being slain, and Daniel’s account of his being slain, supposed once to be an insurmountable difficulty, is fully cleared up by the monuments. Rawlinson found clay cylinders in Umqeer (Ur of the Chaldees), two of which mention Belshazzar as oldest son of Nabonahit. Berosus gives the Chaldaean account, which suppresses all about Belshazzar, as being to the national dishonor. Had the book of Daniel been the work of a late forger, he would have followed Berosus’ account which was the later one. If he gave a history different from that current in Babylonia, the Jews of that region would not have received it as true.

    Darius the Mede took the kingdom at the age of 62, upon Belshazzar’s death. Rawlinson thinks that he was set up by Cyrus, the captor of Babylon, as viceroy there, and that he is identical with the Median king Astyages, son of Ahasuerus (Cyaxares), whom Cyrus, the Persian king, deposed but treated kindly. The phrase ( Daniel 9:1), “Darius, son of Ahasuerus (Cyaxares), of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldaeans,” implies that Darius owed the kingdom to another, i.e. Cyrus. Herodotus makes Astyages the last king of the Medes, and that he was conquered by Cyrus and left no issue. Josephus, on the contrary (Ant. 10:11, section 4), makes Darius = Cyaxares II., son of Astyages (Ahasuerus). Able critics (Hengstenberg, etc.) think his reign was ignored by Herodotus, etc., because through indolence he yielded the real power to his nephew Cyrus, who married his daughter and received the crown at his death. Xenophon, in his romantic story (Cyropaedia), mentions Cyaxares II. Thus, Cyrus, in assaulting Babylon, acted in his name, which accounts for the prominence given to Darius the Median, and for the Medes being put before the Persians in the capture of Babylon ( Isaiah 13:17; 21:2; Daniel 5:31; 6:28). Future discoveries may decide which is the right view.

    DECLINE. The Persian kings held their court at Babylon a large part of each year. In Alexander’s time it was the second city of the empire. Twice in Darius’ reign (Behistun inscriptions), and once under Xerxes, Babylon rebelled and suffered severely for it. Alexander’s designs for restoring its architectural beauties were frustrated by his death. The seat of empire under his Syrian successors, the Seleucidae, was removed to Antioch.

    Seleucia rose subsequently near it and carried away both its population and much of its materials. Ctesiphon, Bagdad, Kufa, Hillah, etc., are mainly built of its old bricks. Thus, “the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency” has “become heaps” “without an inhabitant” ( Jeremiah 51:37; 50:39). “A drought is upon her waters,” the irrigation which caused Babylonia’s fertility having long ceased. “Wild beasts of the desert,” “doleful creatures,” and “owls (or, ostriches) dwell there” ( Isaiah 13:20-22).

    The “wild beasts of the islands” (rather “of the howlings,” i.e. jackals) and “dragons” (serpents) abound; so that “neither the Arabian pitches his tent, nor the shepherd folds his sheep there,” as believing the whole region haunted.

    BABEL, TOWER OF [See BABEL , see BABYLON .] Bochart (Phaleg, 1:9) records the Jews’ tradition that fire from heaven split it through to its foundation. It is curious that the Birs is so rent; hence perhaps arose the Jews’ tradition.

    Alexander Polyhistor said that the four winds blew it down. The Birs Nimrud was probably its site, and gives an idea of its construction, being the best specimen of a Babylonian temple tower. It is an oblong pyramid, in seven receding and successively lessening stages. Lowest is a platform of crude brick, three feet high. The angles face the cardinal points, N.S.E.W.

    This implies that the temple towers were used as astronomical observatories; which Diodorus expressly states of the temple of Belus. In the third were found two terra cotta cylinders, now in the British Museum, stating that having fallen into decay since it was erected it was repaired by Nebuchadnezzar. The great pyramid was much higher, being 480 ft. The temple at Warka is of ruder style than the tower of Babel (Genesis 11). The bricks are sun-dried, and of different sizes and shapes. The cement is mud; whereas in the tower of Babel they” burnt them thoroughly,” and had bitumen (“slime”) “for mortar.” The Mugheir temple is exactly such in materials. The writing found in it is assigned to 2300 B.C. The tower of Babel was probably synchronous with Peleg ( Genesis 10:25) when the earth was divided, somewhat earlier than 2300 B.C. The phrase “whose top (may reach) unto heaven” is a figure for great height (compare Deuteronomy 1:28). Abydenus in Eusebius’ Praep. Evan. 9:14,15, preserves the Babylonian tradition. “Not long after the flood men were so puffed up with their strength and stature that they began to despise the gods, and labored to erect the tower now called Babylon, intending thereby to settle heaven. But when the winds approached the sky, lo, the gods called in the aid of the winds and overturned the tower. The ruin is still called Babel, because until this time all men had used the same speech, but now there was sent on them a confusion of diverse tongues.” The Greek myth of the giants’ war with the gods, and attempt to scale heaven by piling one mountain upon another, is another corrupted form of the same truth. The character of the language in the earliest Babylonian monuments, as far back as 2800 B.C., is remarkably mixed: Turanian in structure, Ethiopian (Cushite) mainly in vocabulary, with Semitic and Aryan elements, -- conformably with the Bible account that Babel was the scene of the confusion of tongues. Turano Cushite themselves, they adopted several terms from the Aryan and Semitic races, of whom some must have remained at Babel after the migration of the majority. This mixed character is not so observable in other early languages.

    BABYLON, MYSTICAL ( Revelation 16:19; 17; 18; 19:2,3). Not 1 Peter 5:13, where “Babylon” can only mean the literal Babylon: “the (church) at Babylon .... saluteth you.” A friendly salutation is hardly the place wherein to find mystical phraseology. The whole epistle, moreover, is remarkably plain, and contains none of the imagery of prophecy. Moreover the literal Babylon was the center from which the Asiatic “dispersion” (dispersed Jews), whom Peter addresses, was derived. Babylon contained many Jews in the apostolic age (“one of the greatest knots of Jews in the world:” Lightfoot, quoted in Smith’s Dictionary), and doubtless “the apostle of the circumcision,” Peter, who had among his hearers on Pentecost (Acts 2) “the dwellers of Mesopotamia,” would visit the Jews there. “Bosor,” which Peter uses for Pethor ( Numbers 22:5; 1 Peter 5:15), is the Aramaic pronunciation moreover; Josephus contra Apion, 1:7, Ant. 15:3, section 1, also favors the Aramaic Babylon. The “woman arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication, and upon her forehead having a name written,MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT,THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” ( Revelation 17:4,5), is avowedly mystical. The later Jews regarded Rome in the same light as their fathers regarded Babylon ( Jeremiah 51:7, compare Revelation 14:8.) John had seen the woman “clothed with the sun, and the moon (the earth’s satellite) under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars “; i.e. God’s pure church of the Old Testament and of the New Testament clothed with the Sun of righteousness, and having the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles as her coronet (Revelation 12). Then she was “persecuted” by” the dragon, Satan,” but nourished by divine Providence for “three and a half times” “in the wilderness” of the Gentile world. But now he prophetically sees her sadly and awfully changed. So he “wondered great admiration.” The spiritual Jerusalem has become mystical Babylon; the church has become the harlot! The same truth under the same imagery appears in Isaiah 1:21, “How is the faithful city become an harlot!” That the world should be beastly (Daniel 7) is natural, but that she whose calling was to be the faithful bride should become the Babylonian whore is monstrous ( Jeremiah 2:12,13,20). Not that the elect apostatize; but Christendom, as a whole, and as the visible “woman,” has apostatized from its first faith and love. The elect invisible church, the true “woman” and “bride,” remains hidden in the visible that has become the harlot, and shall only be manifested when Christ our Life is manifested ( Colossians 3:1).

    External prevalence over the world, and internal corruption by the world, (the spirit of the world ruling the church) is symbolized by the world-city’s name Babylon; the contrast to “Jerusalem above, the mother of all” believers ( Galatians 4:26), the “holy Jerusalem, that great city,” which shall hereafter on the “new earth” “descend out of heaven from God, having the glory of God” ( Revelation 21:10). The Roman Catholic Church is the prominent type of Babylon, resting on the world power, and arrayed like it in its “scarlet” gauds, and ruling it by its claim of supremacy, while the beast or secular power on which it rests is “full of names of blasphemy,” which after the harlot’s overthrow shall be more glaringly displayed. It and the Greek apostasy are whorish in principle, by external and internal idolatry and systematized worldliness. The evangelical Protestant church is pure in theory, and eschews image and host-mass worship; but in so far as it yields to “covetousness which is idolatry,” and conforms to the world, it partakes of the harlot and ceases to be the bride.

    Compare Achan’s “Babylonian garment,” Joshua 7:21: Hebrew: “a robe of Shinar.” While the Syrians were noted for dyeing, and the Phrygians for patchwork, the Babylonians inwove their garments (Tertullian De Habitu Mul., i.), i.e. tapestry work with colored figures inwoven or wrought with the needle: Pliny H.N., 8:48. Septuagint has psilee poikilee , “a smooth, pictured coat.” Such garments passed through Jericho in the trade between the Phoenicians and Babylon ( Ezekiel 27:24.) In the case of both the Catholic churches and the Protestant churches God’s retributive law holds good. When the church forsakes her true Husband for the love of the world (contrast Psalm 45:10,11), the world, the instrument of her sin, becomes the instrument of her punishment. Already this is taking place in Spain, Italy, Austria, and France ( Revelation 17:16). Our turn shall come next; as in the case of Israel first, then Judah (Ezekiel 23), then the restored Jews at the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome, for whom Jerusalem gave up the true “King of the Jews” ( John 11:48,50; 19:15).

    Then “iniquity” shall be no longer as now in “mystery,” but openly developed in the last awful Antichrist who shall combine the world against Christ in a system of superstitious credulity and infidelity together (2 Thessalonians 2; Revelation 16:13-16; 17:17; 19:19). The final judgment on Babylon the whore (Revelation 17), after the elect shall have been translated out of it and transfigured, seems to be just before the judgment on Antichrist. Babylon, the spiritual whore, is succeeded “the false prophet,” who ministers to Antichrist and perishes with him ( Revelation 19:20). Rome’s forced outward unity, of which its one official language, Latin, is the symbol while inwardly there is spiritual confusion, answers to Babel, the scene of the forced attempt at concentration of power and peoples, issuing in utter confusion of tongues; so too, in a wider sense; does all Christendom in its apostasy from apostolic unworldly purity, faith, and love. The harlot retains human shape as woman, does not become a beast; i.e., has “the form of godliness while denying the power.” (Manliness is godliness, because man was made in the image of God.) The worldliness of the church is therefore the most worldly of all worldliness, and shall be terribly judged by God. But the whore or Babylon is not to be confounded with the beast. She, however degraded, has borne the divine image; the beast never has. She must fall before the beast develops all his hostility to God.

    BACA ( Psalm 84:6). “Valley of Baca”. i.e. the vale of tears (compare Bochim, Judges 2:5, “the place of weepers”). The Hebrew form in Psalm 84:6 means “mulberry trees.” The Hebrew poet, by a play on the name, refers to the similarly sounding word for “tears.” The Baca (mulberry) trees delight in a dry valley; such as the ravine of Hinnom below mount Zion, where the bacaim (mulberry trees) are expressly mentioned on the ridge separating the valley of Rephaim from that of Hinnom ( 2 Samuel 5:23). Abulfadl says Baca is the Arabic for a balsam-like shrub with round large fruit, from which if a leaf be plucked a tear-like drop exudes. As the valley of Baca represents a valley of drought spiritually and dejection, where the only water is that of “tears,” so the pilgrim’s “making it a well” (by having “his strength in Jehovah”) symbolizes ever flowing comfort and salvation ( John 4:14; Isaiah 12:3; compare Psalm 23:4). David, to whom Psalm 84 refers, passed through such a valley of drought and tears when, fleeing from Absalom, he went up mount Olivet weeping as he went.

    BACHRITES The family of Becher ( Numbers 26:35), called Bered 1 Chronicles 7:20. [See BECHER .] BADGER ( Exodus 26:14). Badger skins were the outer covering of the tabernacle, in the wilderness; and of the ark, the table, the candlestick, the golden altar, and altar of burnt offering ( Numbers 4:6-14). In Ezekiel 16:10 Jehovah alludes to this, under the image of the shoes made of badger skins for delicate and beautiful women; “I shod thee with badger skin.” This was the material of the shoes worn by Hebrews on festival days. Weighty authorities render Hebrew tachash a “seal,” not a “badger”; seals were numerous on the shores of the Sinaitic peninsula.

    Others say it is the halicore, a Red Sea fish, which still is used by the Arabs to make soles for shoes and like purposes; called dahash , like tachash .

    Others think it is the stag goat, of the antelope kind, called thacasse, related perhaps to tachash , to be seen on Egyptian monuments. A great objection to the badger is, it is not found in Bible lands, Syria, Arabia, or Egypt, and certainly not in sufficient quantities for the Israelites’ purpose.

    The objection to the halicore is Leviticus 11:10: “all that have not fins and scales in the seas.” But that prohibition refers only to using them as food; moreover, the [tachash] probably includes marine animals in general, their skins made into “leather” were well fitted to protect against the weather. Josephus makes the color sky blue (Ant. 3:6, section 4).

    BAGS The currency in the East being mainly in silver, large sums ready counted, and sealed with a known seal in a bag; passed current (compare 2 Kings 5:23; 12:10; Luke 12:33; Job 14:17, “my transgression is sealed up in a bag”; Deuteronomy 32:34; Hosea 13:12, sealed securely for punishment). Charitim , cone-shaped bags ( 2 Kings 5:23); translated for “crisping pins,” Isaiah 3:22, “reticules.” Kis , bags for carrying weights ( Deuteronomy 25:13) or money ( Proverbs 1:14). Keliy , the “shepherd’s bag,” for carrying materials for healing or binding up lame sheep ( Ezekiel 34:4,16). Glossokomon , used for the mouthpieces of musical instruments ( John 12:6; 13:29). Judas carried in it the common property of the Twelve.

    BAHURIM (“youths”). E. of Jerusalem, the abode, of Shimei, son of Gera ( Samuel 16:5; 17:18; 1 Kings 2:8). When David left the summit of Olivet behind and was descending the eastern slopes to the Jordan valley below, in his flight front Absalom, Shimei came forth from Bahurim and ran along the side (“rib”) of the hill, abusing David and flinging stones and dust, in a manner common in the East in the case of fallen greatness.

    Bahurim was evidently off the main road. Here, in the court of a house, Jonathan and Ahimaaz lay hidden under the well’s covering upon which grain was spread. Here Phaltiel parted with his wife Michal, when she was claimed by David ( 2 Samuel 3:16). Azmaveth, one of David’s valiant men, was a Baharumite ( 1 Chronicles 11:33), or Barhumite ( Samuel 23:31). Ganneau identifies with Fakhoury, a locality between Olivet, Siloam, Bethany, and Abou Dis.

    BAJITH Isaiah 15:2: “he is gone up to Bajith,” rather, “to the temple,” answering to “the sanctuary” ( Isaiah 16:12) in a similar context. With the definite article “the,” the “high places” (Bamoth) follow in the context.

    In the Moabite stone of Dibon there is inscribed: “I Mesha, son of Chemosh god, built Beth Bamoth, for it was destroyed, and Beth Diblathaim, and Beth Baal Meon.” The Bajith, followed by Dibon, and Bamoth in Isaiah 15:2 correspond. Bajith, like Dibon, was a “high place.” The peculiarity of Bajith was it had a sacred “house” or sanctuary, on the high place, to the national god Chemosh. In the same high places where they had exulted in their idol they shall weep, to find it unable to save them from destruction.

    BAKBAKKAR 1 Chronicles 9:15.

    BAKBUK, CHILDREN OF Ezra 2:51; Nehemiah 7:53.

    BAKBUKIAH 1. Nehemiah 11:17; 12:9. 2. Nehemiah 12:25.

    BALAAM (Hebrew balam ) not of the people (Israel), a foreigner; else bilam , “the destroyer of the people,” corresponding to the Greek Nicolaos, “conqueror of the people” ( Revelation 2:14,15), namely, by having seduced them to fornication with the Moabite women (Numbers 25), just as the Nicolaitanes sanctioned the eating of things sacrificed to idols and fornication. The -am, however, may be only a formative syllable. He belonged to Pethor, a city of Aram Naharaim, i.e. Mesopotamia ( Deuteronomy 23:4). “Balak, the king of Moab” (he says, Numbers 23:7), “hath brought me from Aram, out of the mountains of the E.,” a region famous for soothsayers ( Isaiah 2:6). Pethor, from pathar , “to reveal,” was the head quarters of oriental magi, who used to congregate in particular spots ( Daniel 2:2, Matthew 2:1), Phathusae, S. of Circesium. It is an undesigned propriety, which marks the truth of Scripture, that it represents Balak of Moab, the descendant of Lot, as having recourse to a diviner of the land from which Lot came when he accompanied Abraham to Canaan. It was a practice of ancient nations to devote their enemies to destruction at the beginning of their wars; the form of execration is preserved in Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3:9. The traditional knowledge of the true God lingered among the descendants of Laban and Bethuel. Abimelech of Gerar, Melchizedek, Job, Jethro, are all instances of the truth that knowledge of the one true God was not restricted to Abraham’s descendants. Balaam was son of Beor. The same name (omitting the last part, -am, of Balaam), Bela, (and he also “son of Beor,” front baar , to “burn up,) occurs among the Edomites connected with Midian by a victory recorded in Genesis 36:32-37; also with the “river” Euphrates through Saul of Rehoboth which was on it, king of Edom. Now Balaam is mentioned in conjunction with the five kings of Midian ( Numbers 31:8,16). A dynasty of Balaam’s ancestors from near the great river probably reigned once over Edom.

    Moab in his application to him was not alone. “Moab was sore afraid ... because of the children of Israel, and Moab said unto the elders of Midian, Now shall this company lick up all that are round about us, as the ox licketh up the grass of the field” (how natural the image in the mouth of a shepherd king, as “the king of Moab was a sheep master,” 2 Kings 3:4).

    So “the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian departed with the rewards of divination in their hand.” It is natural that Balaam, living amidst idolaters, should, like Laban of old in the same region ( Genesis 31:20), have been somewhat tainted. Hence, while owning Jehovah for his God and following patriarchal tradition ( Job 42:8, who is thought by the decipherers of the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments to have lived in the region about the mouth of the Euphrates, Uz, the early seat of the first Babylonian empire) in offering victims by sevens. Balaam had recourse to “enchantments” also, so that he is called “the soothsayer” ( Joshua 13:22) (ha -kosem , distinguished, from the true prophet, Isaiah 3:2), a practice denounced as “an abomination to the Lord” ( Deuteronomy 18:10,12). In the portion that follows ( Numbers 22:7--24) no further mention of Midian occurs, but only of Moab. But after Balaam’s vain effort to curse, and God’s constraining him to bless, Israel, “he went and returned to his place” ( Numbers 24:14,25). He had said: “Behold, I go unto my people.” But then follows (Numbers 25) Israel’s whoredom, not only with Moabite women but also with Midianite women, of whom Cozbi, daughter of Zur (slain by Phinehas. with Zimri her paramour), was principal; and in Numbers 31:8,16, Israel’s slaughter of the Midianites with their five kings (Zur was one), and also of Balaam, son of Beor, because of his “counsel.” Beside those kings that fell in battle, Israel slew five Midianite kings and executed Balaam judicially after the battle ( Numbers 31:8). So after all Balaam did not return as he had said, to his own place, Mesopotamia. Dismissed by the Moabites in dissatisfaction, He suffered his mind to dwell on the honors and riches which he had lost by blessing Israel, and so instead of going home he turned to the Midianites, who were joined with Moab in the original application to him. Availing himself of his head knowledge of divine truth, he, like Satan in Eden, used it with fiendish wisdom to break the union between God and Israel by tempting the latter to sin by lust. They fell into his trap: but staying among the Midianites, who doubtless rewarded with mammon his hellish counsel which succeeded so fatally against Israel, he in turn fell into the righteous judgment executed by Moses and Israel on his guilty patrons, Israel’s seducers. The undesigned dovetailing together of these scattered incidents into such a harmonious whole is a strong confirmation of the truth of the Scripture history.

    In Numbers 22:12, at the first inquiry of Balaam, God said, “Thou shalt not go with them, thou shalt not curse the people.” Balaam acquiesced, although in language betraying the revolt of his covetous will against God’s will he told Balak’s princes, “Jehovah refuseth to give me leave to go with you.” Hence, instead of going back to Pethor, he begs them to tarry another night to see “what Jehovah will say unto him more.” In the very moment of saying “I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God,” he tempts the Lord as if He might change His purpose, and allow him to earn “the wages of iniquity”; yet himself, with strange inconsistency, such as marks those who “hold the truth in unrighteousness” ( Romans 1:18), declares what condemns his perverse thought, “God is not a man that He should lie, nor the Son of man that He should repent: hath He said, and shall He not do it, or hath He spoken, and shall He not make it good?” ( Numbers 23:19.) God did come that night, and seems to contradict His former command, “If the men come to call thee, rise up and go with them.”

    But God’ s unchangeable principle is, with the pure to show Himself pure ( Psalm 18:26), with the froward to show Himself froward. He at first speaks plainly to the conscience His will; if the sinner resists the voice of His Spirit and His word He “answers the fool according to his folly,” and “gives him up to his own desire” ( Psalm 78:29,30; compare Romans 1:25,26,28; Proverbs 1:31); after long resistance by man, God’s Spirit ceases to strive with him ( Genesis 6:3). Balaam rose up in the morning, and it is not written he waited for the “men to come and call” him.

    Certainly, “God’s anger was kindled because he went”; for his going was in spite of the former plain prohibition; and the second voice was a permission giving him up in judicial anger to his own perversity (compare 1 Kings 22:15), a permission too resting on the condition, which Balaam did not wait for, “if the men come to call thee.” Jude 1:11 saith the “error of Balaam” was his” running greedily for reward.” The apostle Peter ( 2 Peter 2:15) says, “Balaam the son of Bosor” (the same as Beor; Bosor is akin to basar , “flesh,” and Balaam showed himself the “son of carnality.” Bosor is probably the Aramaic or Chaldee equivalent of Beor, tsade ( x ) being submitted for ayin ( [ ). Peter residing at Babylon would naturally adopt the name usual in the Aramaic tradition) “loved the wages of unrighteousness: but was rebuked for his iniquity, the mute (voiceless) donkey, speaking with man’s voice, forbad the madness of the prophet”: an awful contrast, a dumb beast forbidding an inspired prophet. The donkey turned aside at the sight of the angel; but Balaam, after God had said “thou shalt not go,” persevered in wishing to go for gain. Not what the donkey said, but its speaking at all, withstood his perversity. The donkey indirectly, the angel directly, rebuked his worse than asinine obstinacy. The miracle, the object of the infidel’s scoff, has a moral fitness which stamps its truth. He who made the cursing prophet bless could make an ass, His own creature, speak ( Nehemiah 13:2; Joshua 24:9,10). The “seer” lacks the spiritual eye to discern the angel of the Lord, because it was blinded by lust of riches and honor. God opens the mouth of the irrational brute to show the seer his blindness in not seeing what even the brute could see. Even a beast can discern the spiritual world better than a man blinded by lust. Balaam’s worse than brutish mind must be taught by the. brute, in order to chastize his vainly. Not until after the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth is it written that” his eyes were opened” ( Numbers 24:3,4), whereas they had been “shut” (margin): “falling” refers to his falling with his donkey (not as KJV: “into a trance”) and then having his eyes “opened.”

    No more efficient agent than Balaam could have been chosen to testify to his friends, Israel’s enemies, the hopelessness of their conflict with the people whom Jehovah marks as His own. This famed diviner, brought to curse, blesses; lured by love of gain which depended on his cursing, he contradicts his own nature by forfeiting the promised gain, to bless a people from whom he expected no gain. A master of enchantments, he confesses “there is no enchantment (which can avail) against Jacob, neither any divination against Israel” ( Numbers 23:23). The miracle wrought on him, whereby he belied his whole nature, is greater than that wrought on the ass. This truth moreover came with more weight, from him than from any other, and this publicly before a king and a whole people, the most esteemed soothsayer in spite of himself proclaiming Israel’s blessedness.

    Balak first feasted Balaam at Kirjath Huzoth, a place of reputed sanctity on the borders. Thence Balaam was taken to “the high places (bamot ) of Baal,” called Beth Bamoth in the Moabite stone. Thence to Pisgah’s top by the field of Zophim. Thence to Peor’s top looking toward Jeshimon. Then Balaam, seeing God’s determinate counsel, stopped seeking further enchantments, but looking at Israel in their beautiful order by tribes, he compares them to the rows of lign aloes and cedars by the waters, and foretells the advent of a Hebrew prince who should smite Moab and Edom (David, 2 Samuel 8, the type), and of the Messiah, the Star out of Jacob” (compare Revelation 22:16; Matthew 2, announced to the Gentile wise men from the E., Balaam’s country, by the star in the sky) whose “scepter shall have dominion” ( Revelation 2:27,28; <19B002> Psalm 110:2; He shall restore “the scepter departed from Judah,” Genesis 49:10). Balaam foretold also see AMALEK ’S utter ruin; the Kenites’ being carried captive by Assyria; and Assyria in its turn being afflicted by the Greeks and Romans from Chittim (Cyprus, put for all western lands whence the approach to Palestine was by sea); and these, the last destroying power, in turn, “shall perish for ever” before Messiah’s kingdom. “Eber,” who was to be “afflicted” by Assyria, includes Eber’s descendants through Peleg, and also through Joktan; the western Semites, sprung from Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram ( Genesis 10:21). Balaam’s prophecy is a comprehensive germ, which Isaiah and the prophets, especially Daniel, develop, concerning the four successive world empires which, after their successive rise and fall, shall be superseded by the universal and everlasting kingdom of Messiah (Daniel 2; 7). Jacob saw the dominion of the victorious Lion out of Judah attaining its perfection in Shiloh’s (the Prince of peace) peaceful reign.

    Balaam, in the face of Israel’s foes seeking to destroy her, declares that it is they who shall be destroyed. Appropriately the seer that God appoints to announce this belonged to Mesopotamia, the center of the great world powers whose doom he foretells, as rebels against Jehovah’s purpose concerning Israel and Israel’s Messianic king (Psalm 2).

    As a Judas was among the apostles, so Balaam among the prophets, a true seer but a bad man; at the transition to the Mosaic from the patriarchal age witnessing to the truth in spite of himself, as Caiaphas did at the transition from the legal to the Christian dispensation. Head knowledge without heart sanctification increases one’s condemnation. Making “godliness a source of gain” is the damning sin of all such as Balaam and Simon Magus: Timothy 6:5 (Greek). In Micah 6:5 (“O My people, remember now what Balak king of Moab consulted, and what Balaam the son of Beer answered him from Shittim),” the sense is, Remember the fatal effects at Shittim of Israel’s joining Baal Peer and committing whoredom with the daughters of Moab, and how but for God’s sparing mercy Israel would have been given to utter destruction. Like Judas and Ahithophel, Balaam set in motion the train of events which entailed his own destruction.

    Balak’s summons was the crisis in his history, bringing him into contact with God’s people and so giving him the possibility of nearer communion with God than before. Trying to combine prophecy and soothsaying, the service of God and the wages of iniquity, he made the choice that ruined him for ever! He wanted to do opposite things at once, to curse and to bless ( James 3:10-12), to earn at once the wages of righteousness and unrighteousness, if possible not to offend God, yet not to lose Balak’s reward.

    BALAH Joshua 19:3: a town of Simeon.

    BALAK (vain, empty, son of Zipper). Not hereditary king, but imposed on Moab by Sihon [see BALAAM and see HUR (2)]. His employment of Balaam to curse Israel was near the close of Israel’s journeying. His knowing as to the seer in Mesopotamia would imply a circulation of intelligence, great considering the times. Moab’s descent from Lot, originally of Mesopotamia; also the merchant caravans passing across the deserts; also the advanced civilization of Moab in letters, proved by the Moabite stone some centuries later: all make it intelligible. Finding Israel “too mighty” for him ( Numbers 22:6), and his hope of prevailing by Balaam’s enchantments being disappointed, he let them alone thenceforth. His “warring against Israel” ( Joshua 24:9,10) consisted not in “fighting,” which is denied in Judges 11:25, but in hiring Balak against them.

    BALANCE emblem of justice ( Job 31:6; Psalm 62:9; Proverbs 11:1) the test of truth and honesty. The emblem of scarcity, food being weighed out Revelation 6:5). Mozenaim , double scales ( Genesis 23:16). Qaneh , the beam of a balance ( Isaiah 46:6). Peles , “scales” ( Isaiah 40:12): literally, the beam, or else the aperture in which the tongue or beam moves.

    BALDNESS Rare among Israelites; so an object of derision, as Elisha’s was. to the children: 2 Kings 2:23, “Go up thou baldhead,” i.e., thou art old enough to leave this world and “go up” to heaven after thy master. A humiliation to captives ( Deuteronomy 21:12; Isaiah 3:24). A mark of mourning ( Jeremiah 16:6; 47:5; Ezekiel 7:18; Isaiah 15:2). It was sometimes a mark of leprosy: Leviticus 13:40-42. Priests were forbidden to make baldness on their heads, or to shave off the grainers of their beards ( Leviticus 21:5; Ezekiel 44:20); as mourners and idol priests did. ( Jeremiah 9:26 margin; Leviticus 19:27). The reason Israel was forbidden to do so was, “for thou art an holy people unto the Lord” ( Deuteronomy 14:1,2). Nebuchadnezzar’s army grew bald in besieging Tyre with the hardships of their work ( Ezekiel 29:18). The Egyptians, contrary to oriental custom, shaved on joyous occasions and only let the hair grow in mourning; the mention of Joseph’s “shaving” when summoned before Pharaoh is therefore an undesigned coincidence in Genesis 41:14, and mark of the truth of the Scripture record. Artificial baldness marked the ending of a Nazarite’s vow ( Numbers 6:9; Acts 18:18; 21:24).

    BALM Contracted from balsam, a word formed by the Greeks from Hebrew Baal shemen , “lord of oil” That of Gilead was famed as among Canaan’s best fruits as early as Jacob’s time, and was exported by Ishmaelite caravans to Egypt ( Genesis 37:25; 43:11), also to Tyre ( Ezekiel 27:17). Used to heal wounds ( Jeremiah 8:22; 46:11; 51:8). It was cultivated near Jericho and the Dead Sea, in Josephus” time. Burckhardt says: “it still grows in gardens near Tiberius.” Hebrew tsori , from tsarah “to split.” A balsamic oil, the modern “balsam of Jericho,” is extracted from the kernels of the zuckum thorn bush, a kind of elaeagnus, in the region about the Dead Sea; but this cannot be the tree. The queen of Sheba, according to Josephus, brought “the root of the balsam” as a present to Solomon (Ant. 8:6 section 6); but it was in Gilead ages before her. The fragrant resin known as “the balsam of Mecca” is from the Amyris Gileadensis, or opobalsamum. The height is about 14 ft., the trunk 9 in. in diameter.

    Incisions in the bark yield three or four drops a day from each, and left to stand the balsam becomes of a golden color and pellucid as a gem. The balm was so scarce, the Jericho gardens yielding but six or seven gallons yearly, that it was worth twice its weight in silver. Pompey exhibited it in Rome as one of the spoils of the newly conquered province,65 B.C. One of the far famed trees graced Vespasian’s triumph, A.D. 79. Titus had to fight two battles near the Jericho balsam groves, to prevent the Jews destroying them in despair. Then they were put under the care of an imperial guard. The Pistacia lentiscus (mastick) has its Arabic name dseri answering to the Hebrew tsori , which seems to favor its claim to being the balm of Gilead.

    BAMAH Ezekiel 20:29: “What is the high place whereunto ye hie [habaim , alliteration to Bamah? And the name thereof is called. Bamah [i.e. high place, akin to the Greek pagan bomos unto this day.” The very name implies the place is not sanctioned by ME; (God); it implies its own paganness: My place is called mizbeach , “altar.” Your sacrifices even to ME on a “high place” instead of My “altar” in the temple, were therefore a “provocation,” Ezekiel 20:28 ( Deuteronomy 12:1-5). Ewald makes the clause in Ezekiel a quotation from an older prophet.

    BAMOTH-BAAL (“high places of Baal”). ( Joshua 13:17, called “Bamoth in the valley” Numbers 21:20; 22:41.) Baal Meon or Beth Baal Meon was near, sacred to the same idol. [See BAJITH , “the temple,” in close proximity to Bamoth, “high places:” Isaiah 15:2.] Beth Bamoth occurs on the Moabite stone. Mesha says, on the stone, he rebuilt Beth Bamoth, it having been probably destroyed in the struggles between Moab and Reuben or Gad. Israel’s halt at Bamoth is identical with that in Numbers 33:45, connected with Dibon Gad, for Dibon and Bamoth Baal were near ( Joshua 13:17). Bamoth was “in the valley” or ravine ( Numbers 21:20). In the wady Waleh, two miles N. of Dibon, a detached knoll on the right bank of the rivulet contains a quadrangle of rude stones put together without cement; this was one of the Bamoth or high places; others, whence Balsam could have seen Israel, were probably to the W., where are the ruins Keraum Abu el Hossein, or on jebel Attarus.

    BANDS (I) Of love ( Hosea 11:4), parallel to “cords of a man,” not such as oxen are led by, but humane methods, as a father draws his child by leading strings, “teaching him to go ( Hosea 11:1). (II) Christ’s “bands” ( Psalm 2:3), an “easy yoke” to the regenerate, seem galling chains to the natural man, and he strives to “break them asunder.” (III) Christ’s body, the church, ‘ by bands,” i.e. sinews and nerves binding limb to limb, “having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God” ( Colossians 2:19). Faith, love, and peace are the spiritual “bands” ( Colossians 2:2; 3:14; Ephesians 4:3). (IV) The bands tying the yoke to the neck of a beast of burden is the image of the captivity in which Jerusalem and Israel have been held, and from which Christ shall free them at His glorious coming ( Ezekiel 34:27; Isaiah 28:22; 52:2); also the captivity to Satan of the spiritual Israel, from which Christ releases us. (V) “Bands” means, in Zechariah 11:7, the bond of brotherhood which originally hound together Judah and Jerusalem, severed because of their unfaithfulness to the covenant, but to be restored everlastingly when they shall turn to Messiah ( Ezekiel 37:15-28), and when Messiah “shall make them one nation upon the mountains of Israel.” (VI) “There are no bands in their death” ( Psalm 73:4); i.e., the prosperous wicked, thought the psalmist in a desponding fit of unbelief for a time, have no pains enchaining them in their dying hour; passion and impatience here lost sight of the real death-bringing pains hanging over the wicked ( Job 21:17; Psalm 11:6).

    BANI 1. 2 Samuel 23:36. 2. 1 Chronicles 6:46. 3. 1 Chronicles 9:4. 4. Ezra 2:10; 10:29,34. 5. Nehemiah 3:17; 8:7; 9:4; 10:13; 11:22.

    BANNER Hebrew neec , not, in the English sense of the term, an arbitrary token to distinguish one band or regiment of Israel from another, but a common object of regard, a signal of observation, a rallying point to awaken men’s hopes and efforts ( Exodus 17:15). Moses called the altar of thanksgiving, after Amalek’s defeat,JEHOVAH NISSI, “Jehovah is my banner.” The altar is the pledge that Jehovah, in covenant with Israel, shall enable His people to defeat utterly Amalek and all his foes. (Compare Numbers 21:8, “a pole”; Isaiah 5:26; 11:10, “a root of Jesse shall stand for an ensign of the people,” Isaiah 13:2; 30:17; 49:22; Psalm 60:4.) Messiah set forth manifestly as the crucified Savior ( Galatians 3:1) is the rallying point for the gathering together in one unto Him of all the redeemed in spirit, in the glorified body also hereafter ( Genesis 49:10; Matthew 24:31; 2 Thessalonians 2:1). His love displayed is the “banner” under which His people rally for almighty protection and unspeakable comfort ( Song of Solomon 2:4). As neec is a “signal,” raised on some special occasion, always on an elevation and conspicuous, so degel is a military standard for a large division of an army; [oth], for a small one. [See ENCAMPMENT .] BANQUETS Both social and religious. At the three great religious feasts, when all the males appeared before Jehovah, the family had its feast, of which the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow had their share ( Deuteronomy 16:11). Sacrifices were accompanied by a feast ( Exodus 34:15; Judges 16:23-25). The “lovefeasts” of the early Christians sprung from these sacrificial feasts; as the Lord’s supper came from the Passover. The tithes and firstlings were to be eaten at the sanctuary, if not too far off ( Deuteronomy 12:17,18; 14:22,23). Males and females met together at feasts of old ( John 2:1). Vashti’s separate Women’s banquet was a Persian, not Jewish, custom ( Esther 1:9). In magnificent feasts, as at royal weddings, a general invitation was given; the accepters were summoned by a second message at the time of the feast ( Proverbs 9:1-3; Luke 14:17; Matthew 22). The entertainer provided robes for the guests, to be worn in his honor and as a token of his regard, in Old Testament times the Israelites sat at table ( 1 Samuel 16:11); and in the order of their dignity or seniority ( Genesis 43:33); which explains the point of Jesus’ exhortation to take the lowest place ( Luke 14:7-10; Matthew 23:6). The Persians reclined on couches ( Esther 7:8). So the Romans. From these the Jews adopted reclining. Thus, the sinful woman could come behind the conch where Jesus lay, and anoint His feet ( Luke 7:37,38); and Mary, sister of Lazarus ( John 12:2,3); and “John leaned on the Lord’s bosom” at the last supper ( John 13:23,25).

    Amos reprobates the luxury ( Amos 6:4-6). Perfumes were freely used at rich feasts ( Psalm 23:5; Ecclesiastes 9:7,8). A “governor of the feast” was appointed ( John 2:8,9). The usual time was evening, to begin earlier was a mark of excess ( Isaiah 5:11; Ecclesiastes 10:16). “Spiced wine” was often used ( Song of Solomon 8:2). Garlands or crowns of flowers on the head ( Isaiah 28:1). Music, vocal and instrumental ( Isaiah 5:12), and dancing ( Luke 15:25). Wedding feasts often lasted seven days ( Judges 14:12). Portions were sent from the entertainer to each guest, and a double or fivefold portion, or special part, to a distinguished guest ( 1 Samuel 1:5; 9:23,24; compare Samuel 11:8; Genesis 43:34). Portions direct from table were sent to poorer friends ( Nehemiah 8:10; compare Luke 14:13; Esther 9:19,22). A kiss was the proper courtesy wherewith the heat received each guest; to omit it was to be wanting in kindliness ( Luke 7:4,5). In the absence of modern knives, forks and spoons, they dipped their hands together in the same dish ( Mark 14:20; Proverbs 19:24; 26:15, for “bosom” translate dish). After dinner the hands were wiped in a cloth, after a servant had poured water on them (compare Elisha’s office for Elijah, 2 Kings 3:11), or were wiped on pieces of bread, which were then thrown to the household dogs (which illustrates Matthew 15:27). A banquet is a frequent emblem of heavenly happiness ( Isaiah 25:6; Luke 14:15; Revelation 19:9). “To eat bread” includes drinking. So in the case of the Lord’s supper ( Acts 20:7). So the cup is not expressly mentioned in the Passover supper in the Old Testament but Deuteronomy 14:26; Isaiah 25:6 imply the use of wine at it. In Eli’s days drinking to excess even at the Lord’s feasts was not uncommon ( Samuel 1:14,15). Four cups of wine were mixed with water, blessed and passed round by the master of the feast at the Passover. In Song of Solomon 2:4 the heavenly Bridegroom’s “banqueting house” (house of wine) is the church in its public ordinances for refreshing the soul, the ministry of the word, joint prayer, and the Lord’s supper (compare Psalm 36:8).

    BAPTISM Baptisms in the sense of purifications were common in the Old Testament The “divers washings” (Greek “baptisms”) are mentioned in Hebrews 9:10, and “the doctrine of baptisms,” Hebrews 6:2. The plural” baptisms” is used in the wider sense, all purifications by water; as of the priest’s hands and feet in the laver outside before entering the tabernacle, in the daily service ( Exodus 30:17-21); of the high priest’s flesh in the holy place on the day of atonement ( Leviticus 16:23); of persons ceremonially unclean (Leviticus 14; 15; 16:26-28; 17:15; 22:4-6), a leper, one with an issue, one who ate that which died of itself, one who touched a dead body, the one who let go the scapegoat or buried the ashes of the red heifer, of the people before a religious festival ( Exodus 19:10; John 11:55). The high priest’s consecration was threefold: by baptism, unction, and sacrifice ( Exodus 29:4; 40:12-15; Leviticus 8). “Baptism” in the singular is used specially of the Christian rite. Jewish believers passed naturally from the Old Testament baptismal purifications, through John’s transitional baptism, to Christian baptism and the subsequent laying on of hands, accompanied with the Holy Spirit ( Acts 8:12,14-17). The spiritual sense of ceremonial baptisms was recognized in the Old Testament ( Psalm 26:6; 51:2,7; 73:13; Isaiah 1:16; 4:4; Jeremiah 4:14; Zechariah 13:1.) Ceremonial washings had been multiplied by tradition, before the Lord’s coming ( Mark 7:3,4). Even the Gentile Pilate washed his hands to symbolize his innocence of Jesus’ blood. The Targum of Jonathan on Exodus 12:44 is the earliest authority for the common notion that the Jews baptized male (besides circumcising them) and female proselytes. No notice of such a custom occurs in Philo, Josephus, or the Targum of Onkelos; the commonness of such ceremonial purifications makes it a probable one. In the 4th century A.D. it certainly prevailed. In the case of Jewish proselytes from Ishmaelites and Egyptians, who were already circumcised, some such rite would be needed. Probably it was at first merely the customary purificatory washing before the sacrifice offered in admitting the proselyte, whence Philo and Josephus would omit mentioning it as being usual at all sacrifices. When sacrifices ceased, after the destruction of the temple, the washing would be retained as a baptism of initiation into Judaism.

    John’s “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” ( Luke 3:3) was the pledge his followers took of their determination to separate themselves from the prevalent pollutions, as the needful preparation for receiving the coming Messiah, who remits the sins of His believing people. The “remission” was not present but prospective, looked for through Messiah, not through John ( Acts 10:43). John’s baptism was accompanied with confession ( Matthew 3:6), and was an act of obedience to the call to renounce all sin and believe in the coming Redeemer from sin. The universal expectation of the Messianic king “in the whole East” (says Suetonius, a pagan writer, Vespas. 4) made all ready to flock to the forerunner. The Jews hoped to be delivered from Rome’s supremacy ( Malachi 3:1; 4:5,6). The last of the prophets had foretold the coming of Elijah before the great day of the coming of the Lord, the Sun of righteousness, the messenger of the covenant. Elijah was to “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers,” namely, the disobedient children to the faith and fellowship of their pious forefathers, Abraham, Jacob, Levi, Elijah ( Luke 1:17), lest Messiah at His coming” should smite the earth with a curse.” The scribes accordingly declared, “Elias must first come.” Jesus declared that John was this foretold Elias ( Matthew 11:13,14; 17:10-12). John’s preaching was “Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand,” the latter phrase referring to Daniel 2:44; 7:14. The Jews, as a nation, brought the “curse” on their land (“earth”) by not repenting, and by rejecting Messiah at His first advent. Their sin delayed the kingdom’s manifestation, just as their unbelief in the wilderness caused the 40 years of delay in entering into their inheritance in Canaan. He brought blessing to those who accepted Him (John was the instrument in turning many to Him: John 1:11,36), and shall bring blessing to the nation at His second advent, when they shall turn to the Lord ( Romans 11:5,26; Luke 13:35).

    John’s baptism began and ended with himself; he alone, too, administered it. But Christ’s baptism was performed by His disciples, not Himself, that He might mark His exclusive dignity as baptizer, with the Holy Spirit ( John 4:2), and that the validity of baptism might not depend on the worth of the minister but on God’s appointment. It continues to the end of this dispensation ( Matthew 28:19,20). John’s was with water only; Christ’s with the Holy Spirit and with fire ( Luke 3:16). The Holy Spirit in full measure was not given until Jesus’ glorification at His ascension ( John 7:39). Apollos’ and John’s disciples at Ephesus knew not of the Holy Spirit’s baptism, which is the distinctive feature of Christ’s ( Acts 18:25; 19:2-6; compare Acts 1:5; 11:16). The outward sign of an inward sorrow for sin was in John’s baptism; but there was not the inward spiritual grace conferred as in Christian baptism. Those of the twelve who had. been baptized by John probably received no further baptism until the extraordinary one by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Christian baptism implies grafting into fellowship or union with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; for the Greek expresses this ( Matthew 28:19): “Go ye, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name (the revealed person) of the Father,” etc. John, being among the Old Testament prophets, not in the kingdom of God or New Testament church, preached the law and baptism into legal repentance and reformation of morals, and Messiah’s immediate advent. Christian baptism is the seal of gospel doctrine and spiritual renewal.

    Jesus’ own baptism by John was, Christ saith, in order “to fulfill all righteousness” ( Matthew 3:15). Others in being baptized confessed their sins; Jesus professed” all righteousness.” He submitted, as part of the righteousness He undertook to fulfill, to be consecrated to His ministry in His 30th year, the age at which the Levites began their ministry ( Luke 3:23), by the last of the Old Testament prophets and the harbinger of the New Testament, His own forerunner. At the same time that the outward minister set Him apart, the Holy Spirit from heaven gave Him inwardly the unction of His fullness without measure; and the Father declared His acceptance of Him as the sinners’ savior, the anointed prophet, priest, and king ( John 3:34; 1:16): “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Since God, against whom we have sinned, is satisfied with Him (and God cannot but be so, seeing it was the Father’s love and justice which provided Him), so also may we. As the high priest’s consecration was threefold, by baptism, unction, and sacrifice, so Jesus’ (compare Acts 10:38) baptism began His consecration, the Holy Spirit’s unction was the complement of His baptism, and His sacrifice fully perfected His consecration as our priest forevermore ( Hebrews 7:28, margin). This is the sense of 1 John 5:6: “this is He that came by water and blood;” by water at His consecration by baptism to His mediatorial ministry for us, when He received the Father’s testimony to His Messiahship and His divine Sonship ( John 1:33,34).

    Corresponding to His is our baptism of water and the Spirit, the seal of initiatory incorporation with Him ( John 3:5). Jesus came “by blood” also, namely, “the blood of His cross” ( Hebrews 9:12). His coming “by water and blood,” as vividly set forth in the issue of water and blood from His pierced side, was seen and solemnly attested by John ( John 19:34,35). John Baptist came only baptizing with water; therefore was not Messiah. Jesus came, undergoing Himself the double baptism of water and blood, then baptizing us with the Spirit cleansing, of which water is the sacramental seal, and with His atoning blood once for all shed and of perpetual efficacy; therefore He Messiah. It is His shed blood which gives water baptism its spiritual significancy. We are baptized into His death, the point of union between us and Him, and, through Him, between us and God, not into His birth or incarnation ( Romans 6:3,4; Colossians 2:12) “The Spirit, the water, and the blood agree in one” (Greek: “tend to the one result,” “testify to the one truth”), i.e., agree in testifying to Jesus’ Sonship and Messiaship by the sacramental grace in water baptism received by the penitent believer through His droning blood and His inwardly witnessing Spirit ( 1 John 5:5,6,8,10), answering to the testimony to Jesus’ Sonship and Messiahship by His baptism, by His crucifixion, and by the Spirit’s manifestation in Him. By Christ’s baptism, by His blood shedding, and by the Spirit’s past and present working in Him, the Spirit, the water, and the blood are the threefold witness to His divine Messiahship. On and after the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the apostles preached, Repent (including faith in Christ), and be baptized, as the sacramental seal to yourselves inwardly of your faith, and the open confession outwardly of it before the world. Compare Romans 10:9,10; Acts 2:38; 8:12,36; 10:47; 16:15,33. As circumcision was the painful entrance into the yoke of bondage, the law of Sinai, so baptism is the easy entrance into the light yoke of Christ, the law of liberty and love.

    Circumcision was the badge of Jewish exclusiveness in one aspect; baptism is the badge of God’s world-wide mercy in Christ. As He was “the desire of all nations,” consciously or unconsciously, so all nations are invited to Him. Any spiritualizing that denies outward baptism with water, in the face of Christ’s command and the apostles’ practice, must logically lead to rationalistic evasions of Scripture in general. Preaching, no doubt, takes the precedency of baptism with the apostles, whose office was evangelistic rather than pastoral ( 1 Corinthians 1:14,17). The teaching and acceptance of the truth stands first. the sealing of belief in it by baptism comes next not vice versa. “Go ye, teach (or make disciples), baptizing,” etc. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not (whether he be baptized or not) shall be damned.” There might be salvation without baptism, as the penitent thief on the cross was saved; but not salvation without believing, to those capable of it.

    As circumcision bound the circumcised to obedience to the law, and also admitted him to the spiritual privileges of Judaism, so baptism binds the baptized to Christ’s service, and gives him a share in all the privileges of the Christian covenant. But in stating these privileges Scripture presumes that the baptized person has come in penitence and faith. Thus 1 Peter 3:21, literally “which water, being antitype (to the water of the flood) is now saving (puts in a state of salvation) us also (as well as Noah), to wit, baptism.” It saves us also, not of itself (any more than the water saved Noah of itself; the water saved him only by sustaining the ark, built in faith), but the spiritual thing conjoined with it, repentance and faith, of which it is the seal: as Peter proceeds to explain, “not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God (the instrument whereby it so saves, being) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” ( Colossians 2:12; Ephesians 1:19,20); not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but of the soul. Water baptism can put away that filth, but the Spirit’s baptism alone can put away this ( Ephesians 2:11). The ark (Christ) and His Spirit-filled true church saves, by living union with Him and it; not the water which only flowed round the ark and buoyed it up, and which so far from saving was the very instrument of destroying the ungodly. The “good conscience’s” ability to give a satisfactory “answer” to the interrogation concerning faith and repentance ensures the really saving baptism of the Spirit into living fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The same union of the sign and the grace signified, repentance and faith being presupposed, occurs ( John 3:5; Acts 22:16): “Be baptized, washing away thy sins, calling upon the name of the Lord” ( Ephesians 5:26; Titus 3:5; compare 1 Corinthians 10:1,2). The passage through the Red Sea delivered Israel completely from Egyptian bondage, and thenceforward they were, under God’s protecting cloud, on their way to the promised land. hence it is written, “they were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (the sea, according to some of the fathers, representing the water, the cloud the Spirit).

    In Colossians 2:11,12, baptism is represented as our Christian “circumcision made without hands,” implying that not the minister, but God Himself, confers it; spiritual circumcision (“putting off the body of the sins of the flesh”) is realized in union with Christ, whose “circumcision” implies His having undertaken for us to keep the whole law ( Luke 2:21). Baptism, coincident with this spiritual circumcision, is the burial of the old carnal life, to which immersion corresponds. “Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him by faith IN the operation of God who hath raised Him from the dead” ( Colossians 2:12; Ephesians 1:19,20). Here, and in Romans 6:3,4,5,6, baptism is viewed as identifying us with Christ, by our union to His once crucified and now risen body, and as entailing in us also a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness, and as involving as the final issue our bodily sharing in the likeness of His resurrection, at the coming first resurrection, that of the saints.

    Figuratively, death is called a “baptism” ( Matthew 20:22; Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50). The Greek word does not necessarily mean immersion of the whole body: compare Mark 7:3,4; Luke 11:38; Hebrews 9:10). In some cases the palpable descent of the Spirit was before, in others after, the baptism, and. in connection with the laying on of hands ( Acts 2:38; 10:47; 19:5,6); proving that the water sign and the Spirit are not inseparably connected. At the same time, there being but one preposition to govern both nouns, “born of water and the Spirit” implies the designed close connection of the two in the case of penitent believers ( John 3:5). In Ephesians 5:26 “Christ gave Himself for the church, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the laver (Greek) of water by the word.” The bride, the church, must pass through her purifying bath before being presented to the Bridegroom, Christ. The gospel word of faith, confessed in baptism, carries with it the real, cleansing, regenerating power ( John 15:3; 17:17; 1 Peter 1:23; 3:21). Baptism being regarded according to its high ideal, Scripture asserts of its efficacy all that is involved in a believing appropriation of the divine truths it symbolizes. In Titus 3:5, “He saved us by the laver (Greek) of regeneration, and (by) the (subsequent, gradually progressive) renewal of the Holy Spirit,” Paul in charity assumes that Christian professors are really penitent believers (though some were not so: 1 Corinthians 6:11), in which case baptism with water is the visible laver of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. “Faith then is confirmed, and grace increased, by virtue of prayer to God” (Church of England, Article 27).

    Infants are charitably presumed to have received a grace in connection with their Christian descent, in answer to the believing prayers of their parents or guardians presenting them for baptism ( 1 Corinthians 7:14), which grace is visibly sealed and increased by baptism. They are presumed to be regenerated, until years of developed consciousness prove whether they have been actually so or not. The tests whether it has or has not taken place in the baptized are 1 John 3:9,14; 5:1,4. The infants of pagan parents are not admissible to baptism, because faith is not in the parents.

    The faith of the beads consecrated the households ( 1 Corinthians 7:14), as in the case of Lydia and the jailer of Philippi, so that even the young were fit recipients of baptism. Christ’s power and willingness to bless infants is proved by Matthew 19:13-15. So that infant unconsciousness is no valid objection to infant baptism. Since the believer’s children are “holy” in the Lord’s view, why refuse them the seal of consecration? ( Corinthians 7:14; Acts 16:1,15,33.) Infant baptism tacitly superseded infant circumcision, just as the Lord’s day superseded the Jewish sabbath, without our having express command for the transference. A child may be heir of an estate, though incapable of using or comprehending its advantage; he is not hereafter to acquire the title to it; he will hereafter understand his claim, take his wealth, and be responsible for the use. So the baptized infant. The words which follow Jesus’ command, “baptizing them,” etc., express the necessary complement of baptism for it to be availing, “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” ”Illumination,” in subsequent writers used for “baptism,” is found connected with it in Hebrews 6:4; 10:32. The “baptizing with fire” ( Matthew 3:11), symbolized by the “tongues of fire” at Pentecost ( Acts 2:3), expresses the purifying of the soul by the Spirit, as metal is by fire. In Galatians 3:27, “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ (compare Romans 6:3; Matthew 28:19, Greek: ‘into the name’) have put on Christ;” ye did, in that act of being baptized into Christ, clothe yourselves in Christ. Christ is to you the man’s robe (the toga virilis assumed by every Roman on reaching manhood). Christ being the Son of God by generation, and ye being one with film, ye also become sons by adoption. Baptism, when it answers to its ideal, is a mean of spiritual transference from legal condemnation to living union with Christ, and sonship to God through Him ( Romans 13:14). Christ alone, by baptizing with the Spirit, can make the inward grace correspond to the outward sign. As He promises the blessing in the faithful use of the means, the church rightly presumes in charity that it is so, nothing appearing to the contrary (compare on the other hand Acts 8:13,18-24). In Corinthians 12:13, “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, ... and were all made to drink into one Spirit” (all the oldest manuscripts omit “into”), the two sacraments are alluded to. Where baptism answers to its ideal, by the Spirit the many members are baptized into the one body ( Ephesians 4:4,5), and are all made to drink the one Spirit (symbolized by the drinking of the wine in the Lord’s Supper). Jesus gives the Spirit to him only that is athirst ( John 7:37). God ( 1 John 3:9; 5:1,4,18) gives us crucial tests of regeneration: whosoever lacks these, though, baptized, is not, in the Scripture view, “regenerate” or “born again.” “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin (habitually); for his seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin (be sinning), because he is born of God”; i.e., his higher nature doth not sin, his normal direction is against sin; the law of God after the inward man is the ruling principle of his true self ( Romans 6:14; 7:22), though the old nature, not yet fully deadened, rebels: “whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”; “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world”; “whosoever is born of God sinneth not, but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.” The Nicene Creed has no authority but so far as it can be proved from Scripture; the clause, “one baptism for the remission of sins” was the decision arrived at by its members as to the question, Were those baptized by heretics, or those who having been baptized had lapsed into heresy, to be rebaptized? Basil on the contrary thought they ought to be rebaptized.

    A questioning at the time of baptism as to the candidate’s repentance and faith seems implied as customary in 1 Peter 3:21. A profession of faith in a “form of sound words” is spoken of in 2 Timothy 1:13. Timothy “professed a good profession before many witnesses” ( 1 Timothy 6:12).

    Christians derived “sponsors” from the Jewish usage in baptizing proselytes; mention of them occurs first in Tertullian in the 3rd century.

    The laying on of hands after baptism is spoken of as among the first principles of the Christian teaching in Hebrews 6:1,2. Though the miraculous gifts imparted thereby at first have long ceased, the permanent gifts and graces of the spirit are in all ages needed. The sevenfold gift is described Isaiah 11:2,3. Our dispensation is that of the Holy Spirit, who is Christ’s second Self, His only Vicar in His bodily absence ( John 14:16-18). Besides the first sealing by the Spirit in baptism, a further confirmation, unction, or sealing by the Spirit is needed to establish us firmly in the faith, and to be an earnest, or installment, of future blessedness ( Acts 8:12-14 [see PETER ]; 2 Corinthians 1:21,22; Ephesians 1:13; 4:30; 1 John 2:20). The laying on of hands; as a sign of spiritual blessing or strengthening, occurs in Jacob’s blessing on Ephraim and Manasseh ( Genesis 48:14); Joshua’s ordination in Moses’ room ( Numbers 27:18; Deuteronomy 34:9); in Christ’s blessing of children ( Matthew 19:13) and healing the blind man ( Mark 8:23); in the apostles’ healing of the sick ( Mark 16:18); in Saul’s recovery of sight, and Publius’ father’s healing of fever ( Acts 9:17; 28:8). The laying on of hands, originally following close on baptism as a corollary to it ( Acts 19:5,6), became subsequently, and rightly in the case of infants, separated by a long time from it. The Latins made it then a sacrament, though wanting both the material element or sign and the institution of Christ.

    Baptism for the dead. 1 Corinthians 15:29: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?” What profit would they get who are baptized to take the place of the dead? ( Timothy 2:2.) Of what use are fresh witnesses for Christianity, baptized to minister instead of those dead? “Why are they then baptized for” (literally, in behalf of) “the dead? Why then (too) stand we in jeopardy every hour?” “Why are they baptized, filling up the place of the martyred dead, at the risk of sharing the same fate?” Possibly some symbolical rite of baptism or dedication of themselves to follow the martyred dead even to death, grounded on Matthew 20:22,23, is alluded to. Or, without such rite, “baptized” may be figuratively used, as in 1 Corinthians 10:2 (where “baptized in the cloud,” which became FIRE by night, typifies the baptism with water and the Holy Spirit). As the ranks of the faithful are thinned by death (natural or violent), others step forward to be baptized to take their place. This is in behalf of the dead saints, seeing that the consummated glory will not be until the full number of saints shall have been completed.

    BARABBAS (“son of the father”). A contrast to the true Son of the Father! The Jews asked the murderous taker of life to be given as a favor to them (it being customary to release one prisoner at the passover), and killed the Prince of life! ( Acts 3:14,15.) A robber ( John 18:40) who had committed murder in an insurrection ( Mark 15:7) and was cast into prison (compare Matthew 27:15-26). (See PILATE for the probable reason of the Jews’ keenness for his release.)

    BARETHEL (“blessing of God”): implying his separation from the surrounding idolatry ( Job 32:2-6).

    BARACHIAS [See ZACHARIAS .] BARAK (“lightning”). So the family name of Hannibal was Barres, “the thunderbolt of war”; also Boanerges, “sons of thunder,” applied to James and John.

    Son of Abinoam, of Kedesh, a refuge city of Naphtali. Incited by Deborah the prophetess to deliver Israel from the yoke of Jabin II, king of northern Canaan, of which Hazor, on lake Merom (now Hulah), was the capital.

    Hazor had been destroyed with Jabin I, its king, more than a century before, under Joshua; but owing to Israel’s unfaithfulness had been permitted to be rebuilt, and a succeeding Jabin regained the possessions taken from his forefather. But his general Sisera, of Harosheth, inhabited by a race half Israelite half Gentile, where he had systematically and “mightily oppressed Israel” for 20 years, was defeated by Barak and Deborah at the head of 10,000 men of Naphtali and Zebulon ( Psalm 83:9,10). This little army, aided by a providential storm in the enemy’s face (according to Josephus), rushed down the hill of their encampment, Tabor, and routed Jabin’s 900 iron chariots and unwieldy host in the plain of Jezreel (Esdraelon), “the battlefield of Palestine.” The Kishon’s impetuous current (especially that of Megiddo, its western branch), and the sandy soil (as Taanach means), contributed to the enemy’s disaster, as their chariots were entangled, like Pharaoh’s at the Red Sea. Harosheth was taken, Sisera slain by Heber’s wife, Jabin’s country taken, and a peace of 40 years secured. The triumphal ode of Deborah and Barak is very spirited (Judges 4; 5). Lord Hervey makes the narrative a repetition of Joshua 11:1-12, from the sameness of names, Jabin and Hazor; the subordinate kings ( Judges 5:19; Joshua 11:2, etc.); the locality; the chariots; “Mizrephoth Maim,” burning by the waters margin But if fancied chronological difficulties [see JUDGES ] be hereby removed, geographical difficulties are thus created; above all, the plain word God, which “cannot be broken” makes Jabin’s oppression of Israel: Hazor to be “when Ehud was dead”; it is impossible then it can be identical with the narrative in Joshua. The judges Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, and Barak, did not rule all their lives, but were raised up at intervals as need required. Jabin (= prudent) was probably a standing title of the kings of Hazor. Heretofore, foes without, Mesopotamia and Moab, had chastised Israel; but now their sin provokes God to raise an oppressor within their own borders, Canaan itself! Jabin seduced them into idolatry, besides oppressing them ( Judges 5:8). Barak is made an example of faith ( Hebrews 11:32), though it was weak; he was therefore deprived of the glory of stronger faith by a woman, Jael (compare Judges 4:8).

    BARBARIAN All not Greek, in contrast to the Greeks ( Romans 1:14). Primitively all speaking an unknown tongue ( 1 Corinthians 14:11); the Maltese, as speaking a Punic dialect ( Acts 28:2,4). Subsequently the word implied cruelty and savagery. Distinguished from Scythians, the wild races beyond the Roman empire; “barbarians” were within it ( Colossians 3:11).

    BARIAH 1 Chronicles 3:22.

    BARKOS, CHILDREN OF Ezra 2:53; Nehemiah 7:55.

    BARLEY First mentioned in Exodus 9:31, which shows the barley harvest was earlier than the wheat, a month earlier in Egypt. Neither is found wild.

    Cereals and the art of converting them into bread were probably God’s direct gift to man from the first. The worship of Ceres was probably a corruption of this truth. Canaan was “a land of wheat and barley” ( Deuteronomy 8:8). Barley was a food for horses ( 1 Kings 4:28), but also for men. The hordeum distichum, or “two rowed barley” was that usual in Palestine ( Judges 7:13; Ezekiel 4:12). Its inferiority to wheat is marked by the jealousy offering being of barley, whereas the ordinary (minchah ) meat, offering was of fine wheaten flour ( Leviticus 2:1), and the purchase price of the adulteress ( Hosea 3:2). The scanty supply, marking the poverty of the disciples, but multiplied by Jesus, was five barley loaves ( John 6:9). The people in Palestine still complain that their oppressors leave them nothing but barley bread to eat (Thomson’s Land and Book, p. 449). A measure of wheat is made equivalent to three of barley ( Revelation 6:6). Barley rapidly ripens. Some was sowed at the autumnal rains in October or November, other barley seed immediately after winter. Barley harvest was a note of time; as when it is said Rizpah, the afflicted widow of Saul, watched over her seven sons’ bodies “from the beginning of barley harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven” ( 2 Samuel 21:9,10), i.e., from May until September. In the Midianite’s dream Gideon was regarded as a mere vile barley cake, yet it is just such whom God chooses to overthrow the mighty ( Judges 7:13; Corinthians 1:27).

    BARNABAS (“son of prophecy, or exhortation and consolation”). The surname given by the apostles to Joses or Joseph (as the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus manuscripts read), a Levite, settled in Cyprus ( Acts 4:36).

    As a Christian, he brought the price of his field and laid it as a contribution at the apostles’ feet. It was he who took Saul after his conversion, when the other disciples were afraid of him, and “brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way,” etc., and had “preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus” ( Acts 9:27).

    The book of Acts does not tell us why Barnabas knew Saul better than the rest. But the pagan writer Cicero (Epist. Familiar., 1:7) informs us that Cyprus (Barnabas’ country) was generally annexed so as to form one province with Cilicia (Paul’s country, of which Tarsus, his native city, was capital). Possibly they were educated together in Tarsus, famed for its learning, and but 70 miles distant from Cyprus; still] more probably at Jerusalem, where] Paul was brought up at Gamaliel’s feet. As fellow countrymen, they would have mutual friends. Moreover, when Paul had withdrawn from Grecian assailants at Jerusalem to Tarsus, and when subsequently it was thought safe for him to return in the direction of Syria, Barnabas was the one who sought him and brought him from Tarsus to Antioch ( Acts 11:25,26). All this bears that impress of unstudied coincidence which marks the truth of the Scripture record.

    When men of Cyprus preached at see ANTIOCH (see) to Greeks (according to the Alexandrinus manuscript and the Sinaiticus manuscript corrected manuscript; but “Grecians,” i.e. Greek speaking Jews according to the Vaticanus manuscript. The latter must be wrong; for there could be no difficulty about preaching to Greek speaking Jews), and the news reached Jerusalem, the church there sent Barnabas to Antioch; “who when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad and exhorted (in consonance with his surname, “son of exhortation”) them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord” ( Acts 11:22-24).

    The Book of Acts here assigns no reason for the choice of Barnabas; but incidentally it comes out elsewhere that Barnabas was of Cyprus, and so was the fit person to deal with men of Cyprus; besides, his spiritual gift of exhortation and consolation qualified him for the office (compare Acts 15:31). His being “a good man,” i.e. beneficent and kind (compare Romans 5:7), would make him gentle and sympathetic in dealing with the new class of converts, namely, those gathered not from proselytes, as the eunuch and Cornelius, but from idolaters (an additional argument for reading “Greeks”). Instead of narrow Jewish jealousy at “God s grace” being extended to non-Judaized Gentiles, being “full of the Holy Spirit,” be was “glad,” and sought Saul as one specially commissioned to evangelize the Gentiles ( Acts 26:17; 22:17-21). The two together, on Agabus’ prophetic announcement of a coming famine, showed the Jewish brethren that they and the Gentile disciples were not forgetful of the love they owed the church in Jerusalem and Judea, by being bearers of contributions for the relief of the brethren in Judea ( Acts 11:27-30). On their return to Antioch, they were marked by the Holy Spirit for missionary work, and were ordained by the church ( Acts 13:2), A.D. 45. With the title of see APOSTLES (see), i.e. delegates of the church ( Acts 14:14), (Paul was also counted with the Lord’s apostles by a special call: Galatians 1:1-17) they made their first missionary journey to Cyprus and Pamphylia, Pisidia, Lycaonia, and back to Antioch, A.D. 47 (Acts 13; 14). Next (A.D. 50), as apostles of the uncircumcision they were sent to Jerusalem, to the council concerning the question raised by Judaizing Christians whether Gentile converts must be circumcised (Acts 15). Judas and Silas were sent “with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” to bear back the epistle to Antioch, settling the question in the negative. After some stay in Antioch Paul proposed to revisit the brethren in the various cities where they had preached. But in consequence of Barnabas desiring to take with them John Mark, his sister’s son, and Paul opposing it because of Mark’s desertion at Pamphylia in the previous journey, so sharp a contention arose that they separated; and while Paul, with Silas, “being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God” (which marks their approval of Paul’s course) “went through Syria and Cilicia confirming the churches,” Barnabas took Mark with him to Cyprus, his native island. His prominent usefulness ceases at this point; Scripture is henceforth silent about him. In Galatians 2:1,9,13, Barnabas suffers himself to be carried away by Peter’s and the Jews’ dissimulation, in declining to eat with Gentile Christians, contrary to his previous course. Softness of character, and undue regard for relations, were his weak points, as compared with Paul.

    He was evidently a man of strong attachments to kindred and country; so that in both his missionary tours his native island and the Jewish synagogue took the first place. The so-called “Epistle of Barnabas” was probably written early in the 2nd century. Its superficial views of the truth and blunders as to Jewish history and worship could never have emanated from the Levite Barnabas. The Clementine Homilies make him a disciple of our Lord, and to have preached in Rome and Alexandria, and converted Clement of Rome. Loving sympathy with others, freedom from narrowness and suspicion, and largeness of heart characterized him in his frank trustfulness toward the late persecutor but now converted Saul, and toward those converted from pagandom without any transitional stage of Judaism. His not claiming maintenance as a minister ( 1 Corinthians 9:6), but preferring to work for his livelihood, flowed from the same sincere disinterestedness as led him at the first to sell his land and give the price to the church. He was probably soon removed by death after parting with Paul; for Mark is mentioned subsequently as in Paul’s favor and ministering to Paul ( Colossians 4:10; 2 Timothy 4:11), which he would not be likely to be, but rather with Barnabas his uncle, if Barnabas were alive.

    Chrysostom justly infers that Barnabas was of a commanding and dignified appearance, as the people of Lystra, on the cure of the impotent man, supposed that he was their national god, Jupiter, king of the gods, come down from heaven ( Acts 14:8-12).

    BARTHOLOMEW (“son of Tolmai or Talmai”), an Old Testament name, Joshua 14:14.

    One of Christ’s 12 apostles ( Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13). His own name probably was Nathanael ( John 1:45-51), just as Joses or Joseph is called Barnabas. The three synoptical Gospels never mention Nathanael, John never mentions Bartholomew; the two names belong probably to the same person. Brought by Philip to Jesus.

    It is in undesigned accordance with this that Philip is coupled with Bartholomew in the first three lists, as Philip is coupled with Nathanael in John 1. The place given him also in the fishing after the resurrection of the Lord ( John 21:2) implies his being one of the twelve. Thomas is put before him and after Matthew in Acts 1:13 [see APOSTLE ], perhaps because of his taking a more prominent position spiritually after his doubts were removed. Nathanael was of Cans in Galilee. India (i.e. Arabia Felix, as many think) is assigned to him as his subsequent sphere of missionary labors (Eusebius, H. E. 5:10).

    His prominent characteristics: narrowness of prejudice in him (“Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”) immediately gave place to conviction, when the Savior revealed Himself. Like Jacob, he wrestled alone with God in prayer under the fig tree. But, unlike that cunning supplanter, he was “an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile”; compare Revelation 14:5. Adam and Eve vainly cloaked their shame under fig leaves. Nathanael bored his whole soul before God under the fig tree in simplicity and sincerity. Fearless candor made him avow his convictions as promptly as he reached them, “Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel.” His reward was according to his faith: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given.” “Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these: hereafter (from this time forth, Greek) ye (not merely thou alone, but all My disciples) shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man,” the true ladder between earth and heaven, of which that in Jacob’s dream was the type ( Genesis 28:12), and upon which angels delight to minister. The “ascending” stands first, because the Lord was now below on earth, not above, as when Jacob saw Him; and from Him as their center they go up, and to Him they return: the communication between earth and heaven, closed by sin, is opened by Christ’s making earth His home. His miracles and His teaching and His divine manifestation, of which Bartholomew had just a taste, were a sample and installment of a continually progressing opening of heaven to earth and earth to heaven ( Revelation 4:1; Acts 7:56; Hebrews 9:8; 10:19,20) wherein angels minister to and for Him ( Luke 2:9,13; 22:43; Acts 1:10); to be consummated when “the tabernacle of God shall be with men,” and “the holy Jerusalem shall descend out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21; 1 Corinthians 13:12).

    BARTIMAEUS (“son of Timaeus or Timai”). A blind beggar of Jericho, who had his sight restored by Christ as He was going out of the town ( Mark 10:46); Luke ( Luke 18:35; 19:1,5) describes the cure as Christ was entering Jericho the day before. Probably the beggar, with the persevering faith which characterized him, applied to Jesus first as He was entering Jericho, and renewed his petition the next day, as Jesus was leaving Jericho. Eliciting, as He was wont, first of all from the blind man the expression of his want, “What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?” Christ next grants his prayer, and praises his faith “Receive thy sight; thy faith hath saved thee.” Matthew ( Matthew 20:29-34) describes it, as Jesus was going from Jericho; and mentions two blind men. Probably Bartimaeus, after applying on the day of Jesus’ entry into Jericho, was joined by the second blind man while Jesus was passing the night with Zacchaeus; so both shared in the cure on Christ’s leaving Jericho. Bartimaeus, being the more prominent, is alone mentioned by Mark and Luke; just as they mention only the colt, Matthew both the donkey (the mother) and the colt; Luke ( Luke 24:4) the two angels, Matthew and Mark the one alone who spoke. Seeming discrepancies establish the independence of the witnesses and the absence of collusion. Substantial agreement of many witnesses, amidst circumstantial variety, is the strongest proof of truth. Modes of reconciling seeming discrepancies may not be the true ones, but they at least prove the discrepancies not to be irreconcilable and that they result only from our ignorance of all the facts of each case.

    BARUCH (“blessed, Benedict”). Neriah’s son, Jeremiah’s ( Jeremiah 32:12; 36:4- 32) steadfast attendant and amanuensis; brother to Seraiah, of princely family ( Jeremiah 51:59) and position. He was the friend to whom Jeremiah in prison entrusted the papers of the purchase of his uncle’s field at Anathoth, the year before Jerusalem’s destruction, to assure the Jews of the certainty of their return from Babylon. He wrote out Jeremiah’s prophecies against the Jews and other nations, and, while the prophet was shut up, i.e. prevented coming forward, read them before the people; in consequence of which king Jehoiakim sought to kill him and Jeremiah, but the Lord hid them. Jehoiakim having destroyed the first roll, Baruch wrote again the same words with many additions. Azariah and Johanan after the capture of the city, when Jeremiah warned them against going to Egypt, said: “Baruch setteth thee on against us for to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans.” On, the former occasion Baruch yielded to despondency; and as Paul subjoins epistles to individuals after epistles to churches, so Jeremiah subjoins a prophecy concerning Baruch after the prophecies and histories concerning the Jews and their kings: “Thus saith the Lord the God of Israel, unto thee, O Baruch. Thou didst say, Woe is me now, for the Lord hath added grief to my sorrow, I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest.” When a “whole land,” the people of My “planting,” are being plucked up; “seekest thou great things for thyself?” i.e., dost thou expect to be exempt from trial? A promise is added to the reproof: “thy life will I give unto thee for a prey.” How striking, that Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 12:1-5; 15:10-18; 45), who once was so desponding himself, is enabled to minister counsel to Baruch falling into the same error. God allows His servants to be tempted, in order to fit them for succoring others who are tempted. Baruch was carried with Jeremiah by Johanan into Egypt ( Jeremiah 43:6). The apocryphal book of Baruch is evidently one of later composition. 2. Son of Zabbai ( Nehemiah 3:20). 3. Son of Colhozeh ( Nehemiah 11:5).

    BARZILLAI (“iron”). A Gileadite chief. of Rogelim, whose friendship David probably made during his flight from Saul in that trans-Jordanic region. He ministered disinterestedly, sympathizingly, and liberally, to David’s wants during the whole time of his stay at, Mahanaim in his flight from Absalom ( 2 Samuel 17:27-29; 19:32-40). David in prosperity did not forget the friend of his adversity: “Come thou over with me, and I will feed thee with me in Jerusalem.” But Barzillai was unmercenary, and sought his reward simply in having done his duty. Instead of grasping at honors and favors at court, he remembers his age, fourscore, “How long have I to live, that I should go P” and prefers to die among his own people, independent though in less grandeur. In the father’s stead Chimham and other sons of his shared David’s favor, and were commended by him to Solomon ( Kings 2:7). Chimham’s name appears ages subsequently in Jeremiah’s time, “the habitation of Chimham by Bethlehem” being the gift of David to him out of his own patrimony, and bearing that name to late generations: an undesigned coincidence and mark of truth ( Jeremiah 41:17). [See BETHLEHEM .] BASHAN (“rich soil”). The tract beyond Jordan ( Deuteronomy 3:3,10,14; Joshua 12:5; 1:Chronicles 5:23), between mount Hermon on the N., and Gilead on the S., the Arabah or Jordan valley on the W., and Salkah and the Geshurites and Maacathites on the E. Fitted for pasture; so assigned with half Gilead from Mahanaim to the half tribe of Manasseh, as the rest of Gilead was to Reuben and Gad, as those tribes abounded in flocks and herds ( Joshua 13:29-32; Numbers 32:1-33). Famed for its forests of oaks ( Isaiah 2:13). It was taken by Israel after conquering Sihon’s land from Arnon to Jabbok. They “turned and went up by the way of Bashan,” the route to Edrei on the W. border of the Lejah. Og, the giant king of Bashan, “came out” from the rugged strongholds of see ARGOB (see) to encounter them, and perished with all his people ( Numbers 21:33-35; Deuteronomy 3:1-5,12,13). Argob and its 60 “fenced cities” formed the, principal part of Bashan, which had “beside unwalled towns a great many.” Ashtaroth (Beeshterah, Joshua 21:27, compare Chronicles 6:71), Golan (a city of refuge, assigned with Ashtaroth to the Gershomite Levites), Edrei, Salkah, were the chief cities. Argob in Bashan (see BASHAN-HAVOTH-JAIR ), with its 60 walled and barred cities still standing, was one of Solomon’s commissariat districts ( 1 Kings 4:13).

    Hazael devastated it subsequently ( 2 Kings 10:33). The wild cattle of its pastures, “strong bulls of Bashan,” were proverbially famed ( Psalm 22:12; Amos 4:1); also its oaks ( Ezekiel 27:6); and hills ( Psalm 68:15); and pastures (Jeremiah 1.19; Micah 7:14). The name “Gilead,” connected with the history of the patriarch Jacob ( Genesis 31:47,48), supplanted “Bashan,” including Bashan as well as the region originally called “Gilead,” After the return from Babylon Bashan was divided into (1) Gaulanitis or Jaulan, the most western, on the sea of Galilee, and lake Merom, and rising to a table land 3,000 ft. above the water, clothed still in the N.W. with oaks, and having the ruins of 127 villages. (2) Auranitis, the Hauran ( Ezekiel 47:16), the most fertile region in Syria, S.E. of the last, and S. of the Lejah, abounding in ruins of towns, as Bozrah, and houses with stone roofs and doors and massive walls, and having also inhabited villages. (3) Trachonitis = rugged: see ARGOB , (see) now the Lejah, rocky and intricate, in contrast to the rich level of the Hauran and Jaulan. (4) Batanaea (akin to Bashan), now Ard el-Bathanyeh, E. of the Lejah, N. of the Jebel Hauran range, of rich soil, abounding in evergreen oaks; with many towns deserted, but almost as perfect as the day they were built. E. of Jebel Hauran lies the desert El Harrah covered with black volcanic stones. The Safah E. of this is a natural fortress thickly strewed with shattered basalt, through which tortuous fissures are the only paths. On the eastern side of volcanic hills lie ruined villages of a very archaic structure.

    Traces appear of an ancient road with stones placed at intervals and inscribed with characters like the Sinaitic. N. of Hauran and Jaulan lies Jedur, the Ituraea of the New Testament; the country of Jetur, son of Ishmael; possibly once part of Og’s kingdom of Bashan. Psalm 68:22, “I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring My people again from the depths of the sea,” means, “I will restore Israel from all quarters, and from dangers as great as their conflict with Og of Bashan, and, as the passage through the Red Sea. “Why leap ye, ye high hills?” namely, with envy. Or translate, “Why do ye look with suspicion and envy?” namely, at God’s hill, Zion, which He hath raised to so high a spiritual elevation above you.

    BASHAN-HAVOTH-JAIR A name given to Argob after Jair’s conquest of it. Reuben’s and Gad’s request to have the eastern Jordanic region followed immediately after Israel’s conquest of Og and Sihon, and Jair immediately occupied Bashan The events in Numbers 22, etc., occurred between the occupation of Bashan and Moses’ parting address ( Deuteronomy 3:4,5,13,14). The name still adhering to it “unto this day,” saith Moses, proves Jair’s occupation of it in the face of so mighty a nation as Moab, and is a pledge of further conquests. Haoth means “dwelling places,” from hawah “life”; as the German leben, “life,” is a termination of many towns, e.g. Eisleben. The “Jair’s lives” or “dwellings was the collective name given by Jair to all the 60 fortified towns of Argob ( Numbers 32:41,42; Joshua 13:30; Kings 4:13). The statement in 1 Chronicles 2:22,23, “Jair had 23 cities in Gilead (i.e. the whole eastern Jordanic region) with Kenath and the towns thereof, even threescore cities,” is not at variance but in harmony with the preceding passages. The 23 Havoth Jair, with Kenath and its dependent towns,37, conquered by Nobah (a family of sons of Machir related to Jair), amounted to “threescore in all.” Bashan or Argob was divided between two chief families of Machir the Manassite, namely, that of Nobah who conquered Kenath and her dependencies, and Jair who conquered and named the Havoth Jair. Jair being supreme, and Nobah a subordinate branch of the Jair family, Moses comprehends the whole under the name Havoth Jair. The words “unto this day” do not imply a long interval between the naming and the time of Moses’ address, but mark the wonderful change due to God’s gift, that the giant Og’s 60 fenced cities are now become Havoth Jair! In the time of the judges, 30 were in possession of the judge Jair ( Judges 10:4), so that the old name, Havoth Jair, was revived. In undesigned coincidence the name Jair-us recurs in the same quarter in the New Testament, but W. of the sea of Galilee ( Matthew 9:18).

    BASHEMATH (“fragrant”). 1. The Hittite Elon’s daughter; wife of Esau ( Genesis 26:34). Called see ADAH in the genealogy of Edom ( Genesis 36:2,3). Bashemath is doubtless a name of praise conferred on her at marriage. 2. Ishmael’s daughter; the last of Esau’s three wives according to the Edomite genealogy inserted by Moses ( Genesis 36:3,4,13). From her son Reuel four Edomite tribes descended. CalledMAHALATH in the narrative, Genesis 28:9. Esau’s Seirite wife, called Judith daughter of Beeri in the narrative ( Genesis 26:34), is called see AROLIBAMAH (the name of a district in Idumaea) the genealogy ( Genesis 36:41). 3. Solomon’s daughter, married to Ahimaaz, one of his commissariat officers ( 1 Kings 4:15).

    BASKET Genesis 40:16: “I had three white (margin ‘full of holes,’ i.e. of open work, or rather ‘baskets of white bread’) baskets on my head.” The Bible accurately represents Egyptian custom (Herodotus, 2:35), whereby men carried burdens on the head, women on the shoulders.

    In the distinct miracles of feeding the 5,000 and the 4,000 the KJV uses the stone term “baskets” for distinct Greek words. In Matthew 14:20; Mark 6:43; Luke 9:17; John 6:13, the disciples took up twelve kophinoi of fragments at the feeding of the 5,000. In feeding the 4,000 with seven loaves recorded by two evangelists, the disciples took up seven spurides ( Matthew 15:37; Mark 8:8). Now kofinoi is always used by the evangelists when the miracle of the 5,000 is spoken of, [spurides ] when that of the 4,000 is spoken of. Thus also in referring back to the miracle ( Matthew 16:9,10) Jesus says: “Do ye not ... remember the five loaves of the 5,000, and how many [kofinoi ] ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the 4,000, and how many [spurides ] ye took up?” That the [spurides ] were of large size appears from Paul’s having been let down in one from the wall ( Acts 9:25). The [kofinoi ] being twelve probably answers to the twelve disciples, a provision basket for each, and so are likely to have been smaller. The accurate distinction in the use of the terms so invariably made in the record of the miracles marks both events as real and distinct, not, as rationalists have guessed, different versions of one miracle. The coincidence is so undesigned that it escaped our translators altogether; it therefore can only be the result of genuineness and truth in the different evangelists’ accounts. In traveling through Samaria or Gentile regions the Jews used [kofinoi ], not to be defiled by eating Gentile unclean foods.

    Smith’s Bible Dictionary wrongly makes the [kofinos ] larger than the [spuris ].

    BASTARDS mamzer . Forbidden to enter the Lord’s congregation to the tenth generation, i.e. forever ( Deuteronomy 23:2,3). Yet Jephthah, son of a strange woman, and therefore driven out by the legitimate children, was called to be a judge to Israel ( Judges 11:1,2). The Talmud and the rabbis are probably therefore right in explaining mamzer , not illegitimate children in general, but those begotten in incest or adultery: from mazar , “to be corrupt.” The only other occurrence of mamzer is Zechariah 9:6: “a bastard (a vile alien) shall dwell in Ashdod.” Arabs about that time occupied much of S. Palestine, and the prophet foretells Ashdod will be ruled by them. Bastards were not excluded from public worship ordinarily.

    They had no claim to the paternal inheritance, or to the standing privileges and filial discipline of children ( Hebrews 12:7).

    BAT (hatalleph = the darkness bird). Delighting in dark holes and caverns. This is the point of Isaiah 2:20, “a man shall cast his idols to the bats,” while the idolaters themselves shall vainly hide in the rock from the wrath of the Lamb ( Revelation 6:16). Unclean in the eye of the law ( Deuteronomy 14:18,19; Leviticus 11:19,20). Ranked among “all fowls that creep, going upon all four;” it has claws on its pinions, by which it attaches itself to a surface, and creeps along it. It is connected with quadrupeds: the bones of the arm (answering to a bird’s wing) and fingers being elongated, and a membrane extended over them to the hind limbs.

    BATH (1) Washing was required by the law for purification of uncleanness of any kind, as leprosy, etc. (Leviticus 15; 16:28; 22:6; Numbers 19:7,19; Samuel 11:2,4; 2 Kings 5:10); mourning ( Ruth 3:3; 2 Samuel 12:20). The high priest on the day of atonement, before each act of expiation ( Leviticus 16:4,24); also at his own consecration ( Leviticus 8:6). Anointing with perfumes was joined to the washing ( Esther 2:12). The laver at the door of the tabernacle was for the priests to wash in before entering ( Exodus 30:18-20). The legal ritual prescribed washing, not bathing; also sprinkling. Baptism by immersion is not confirmed by legal types.

    BATH (2) A measure for liquids, about seven gallons.

    BATHRABBIM GATE Belonging to Heshbon, close to which were two pools, which the bridegroom makes the image of his beloved’s eyes ( Song of Solomon 7:4). = Daughter of a multitude; a crowded thoroughfare of Heshbon. Her eyes are placid as a pool, even amidst the crowd ( John 16:33).

    BATHSHEBA or Bath Shua (a Canaanite name, Genesis 38:2,12; 1 Chronicles 2:3) [see AHITHOPHEL , her grandfather]. Eliam or Ammiel ( 1 Chronicles 3:5), one of David’s officers, was her father. Uriah, being a brother officer, formed an intimacy which ended in his marrying Eliam’s daughter. David committed adultery with her, and caused her husband’s murder (2 Samuel 11; 23:34,39). Mother of Solomon, whose mind she helped much to mold; also of Shimea (or Shammua), Shobab, and Nathan ( 1 Chronicles 3:5).

    Nathan and Solomon were both ancestors of the Lord Jesus ( Luke 3:31; Matthew 1:6). Her strength of intellect, kindness and influence over David and her son, appear in 1 Kings 1:11-31; 2:13-21. She is said by tradition to have composed Proverbs 31 as an admonition to Solomon on his marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter.

    BATTLE ”Them that turn the battle to the gate” ( Isaiah 28:6), “those defenders of their country who not only repel the foe, but drive him to the gate of his own city.” “In battles of shaking” ( Isaiah 30:32), i.e. in shock of battles; Isaiah 19:16, “because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts”; a mere waive of His hand, the slightest display of His power, shall be enough to discomfit ( Isaiah 37:36).

    BAVAI Nehemiah 3:18.

    BAYTREE Psalm 37:35: Ezrach . Rather “an indigenous tree,” not transplanted yet, “flourishing” with the vigor of its native soil. An Israelite, with all the privileges temporal and spiritual of his birth, his possessions therefore inalienable; yet a “wicked” man. Farthest removed from hurt as he and his seemed, “yet he passed away, and lo! he was not,” etc.

    BAZLITH Children of. Nehemiah 7:54.

    BAZLUTH Ezra 2:52.

    BDELLIUM Bedolach ( Genesis 2:12), a production of Havilah. Numbers 11:7: “The color of the manna was as the color of Bdellium.” A gum exuding from a tree (the Borassus flabelliformis) in Arabia, India, and Babylonia, white and transparent, according to some; but this is hardly precious enough to be ranked with the gold and precious stones of Havilah. Others, a precious stone, crystal or beryl. This hardly suits Genesis 2:12, where “stone” is added to onyx, but not to it. Gesenius therefore takes it pearls, found abundant at the Persian gulf. This answers to the parallel comparison of manna to the white hoar frost on the ground ( Exodus 16:14).

    Smith’s Dictionary Appendix adheres to its being a gum.

    BEALIAH Combining Baal and Jah ( 1 Chronicles 12:5).

    BEALOTH A town on the extreme S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:24). Feminine plural of Baal.

    BEANS Among the supplies brought to David at Mahanaim ( 2 Samuel 17:28).

    An ingredient in Ezekiel’s ( Ezekiel 4:9) bread for 390 days, during his representative siege of Jerusalem. The food of the poor, and of horses. Our pulse is akin to the Hebrew pul .

    BEAR The Ursus Syriacus is the particular species meant in Scripture. Akin to the polar bear. As large as the European brown bear, but lower on the legs. it has a high mane of bristling hair between the shoulders. Of a buff or yellow white color. One is represented in an Egyptian picture of tribute brought to Thothmes III by Phoenicians. The crusader Godfrey of Bouillon rescued a man from its attack, at, the imminent risk of his own life, being unhorsed and severely wounded by it. The she-bear is peculiarly fierce when she has lost or is defending her cubs ( 2 Samuel 17:8; Proverbs 17:12; Hosea 13:8). Almost as formidable as the lion ( Amos 5:19). The instrument of punishing the 42 youths who mocked Elisha, in a wood between Jericho and Bethel, probably in winter when bears descend from the mountains to the lowlands ( 2 Kings 2:24). It attacks flocks and cattle ( 1 Samuel 17:34-37; Isaiah 11:7). Its roaring, ranging widely for food, and lying in wait for its prey, are alluded to in Isaiah 59:11, where however translate, “We moan like (hungry) bears,” growling for food ( Proverbs 28:15; Lamentations 3:10). It was carnivorous. Daniel 7:5: “it raised up itself on one side,” lying on one of its fore feet and standing on the other; a figure still to be seen in Babylonian monuments, but see margin. Persia is meant. Media was the lower and passive side; Persia, the upper and active. It had three ribs in its mouth, namely, it seized on Babylon, Lydia, and Egypt. From a Hebrew root, “to move by creeping”: dob , dabab . Bochart, from Arabic,” hairy.”

    BEARD With Asiatics a badge of manly dignity. The Egyptians mostly shaved the hair of the face and head, except in mourning. In consonance with this Egyptian usage, Scripture, with the undesigned propriety of truth, represents Joseph as having “shaved his beard,” which he had allowed to grow in prison, before entering Pharaoh’s presence ( Genesis 41:14).

    Many Egyptians wore a false beard of plaited hair, private individuals small ones, kings long ones square below, the gods one turning at the end. Their enemies are represented bearded on the monuments. The Jews were forbidden to “round the corners of their heads or mar (i.e. shave off) the corners of their beards” ( Leviticus 19:27; 21:5). Baal worshippers rounded the beard and hair to make their faces round, like the sun. The Arabs trimmed their beard round in sign of dedication to some idol.

    Possibly the Israelites retained the hair between the ear and eye, which the Arabs shaved away ( Jeremiah 9:26 margin; 25:23; 49:32; compare Herodotus, 3:8). The beard is sworn by in the E. as an object of veneration. Not to trim it marked affliction, as in Mephibosheth’s case during Absalom’s occupation of Jerusalem ( 2 Samuel 19:24). An insult to it was resented as a gross outrage, as David did when Hanun shaved off half the beards of his ambassadors ( 2 Samuel 10:4). Compare God’s threat of “shaving” away His people as “hair” with the Assyrian king as His “razor” ( Isaiah 7:20). This was one gross indignity to which Jesus was subjected: “I gave My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair” ( Isaiah 50:6). It was shaved in mourning ( Isaiah 15:2; Jeremiah 41:5; 48:37). Only the nearest friends were permitted to touch the beard, which marks the foul treachery of Joab in taking his cousin Amasa’s beard to kiss him, or rather it ( 2 Samuel 20:9). The precious ointment flowed from Aaron’s head at his consecration, upon his beard ( <19D302> Psalm 133:2). The leper, at purification, had to shave his head and beard and eyebrows ( Leviticus 14:9).

    BEAST Representing two distinct Hebrew words, bihemah and chay , “cattle” and “living creature,” or “animal.” Beir means either collectively all cattle ( Exodus 22:4; Psalm 78:48) or specially beasts of burden ( Genesis 45:17). The “beheemah” answer to the hoofed animals. In Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 some principal divisions of the animal kingdom are given; the cloven footed, chewing the cud, ruminantia. The aim of Scripture is not natural science, but religion. Where system is needful for this, it is given simple and effective for the purposes of religion.

    If Scripture had given scientific definitions, they would have been irrelevant and even marring to the effect designed. The language is therefore phenomenal, i.e. according to appearances. Thus the hare and hyrax have not the four stomachs common to ruminant animals, but they move the jaw in nibbling like the ruminants. The hare chews over again undigested food brought up from the aesophagus though not a genuine ruminant. The teeth of the rodentia grow during life, so that they necessarily have to be kept down by frequent grinding with the jaws; this looks like rumination. The hare and the coney represent really the rodentia; (the see CONEY , or see HYRAX , though a pachyderm, is linked with the hare, because externally resembling the rodentia;) swine, pachydermata; “whatsoever goeth upon his paws,” “all manner of beasts that go on all four,” carnivora: only those of a limited district, and those at all possible to be used as food, are noticed, it is noteworthy that it is only “every animal of the field” that Jehovah brought to Adam to name, namely, animals in any way useful to man ( Genesis 2:19), mainly the herbivora. Dominion is not specified as given over the (wild, savage) “beasts of the earth” (mainly carnivora), but only “over all the earth.” So in Psalm 8:7 man’s dominion is over “the beasts of the field.” Noah is not said to take into the ark beasts of the earth; but in Genesis 9:9,10, “beasts of the earth” are distinguished from “all that go out of the ark.” Next to fear of a deluge was their fear of the beasts of the earth; but God assures men “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth” ( Genesis 9:2).

    Symbolically, man severed from God and resting on his own physical or intellectual strength, or material resources, is beastly and brutish. He is only manly when Godly, for man was made in the image of God. So Asaph describes himself, when envying the prosperous wicked,” I was as a beast before Thee” ( Psalm 73:22). “Man in honor (apart from God) abideth not, he is like the beasts that perish” ( Psalm 49:12). The multitude opposing Messiah are but so many “bulls” and “calves” to be stilled by His “rebuke” ( Psalm 68:30). Those “that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, as natural brute beasts, are made only to be taken and destroyed” ( 2 Peter 2:12). So persecutors of Christians, as Paul’s opponents at Ephesus ( 1 Corinthians 15:32). The “beast” (Revelation 13; Revelation 15; Revelation 17; Revelation 19) is the combination of all these sensual, lawless, God opposing features. The four successive world empires are represented as beasts coming up out of the sea whereon the winds of heaven strove (Daniel 7). The kingdom of Messiah, on the contrary, is that of “the Son of MAN,” supplanting utterly the former, and alone everlasting and world wide. In Revelation 4; 5, the four cherubic forms are not “beasts” (as KJV), but “living creatures” (zoa ). The “beast” (teeeerion ) is literally the wild beast, untamed to the obedience of Christ and God ( Romans 8:7). The “harlot” or apostate church (compare Revelation 12:1, etc., with Revelation 17:1, etc.; Isaiah 1:21) sits first on the beast, which again is explained as “seven mountains upon which she sitteth”; probably seven universal God-opposed empires (contrast Jeremiah 51:25 with Isaiah 2:2) of which the seven-hilled Rome is the prominent embodiment, namely, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Mede Persia, Greece, Rome (including the modern Latin kingdoms), and the Germano- Sclavonic empire. The woman sitting on them is the church conformed to the world; therefore the instrument of her sin is retributively made the instrument of her punishment (Ezekiel 23; Jeremiah 2:19; Revelation 17:16). ”The spirit of man,” even as it normally ascends to God, whose image he bore, so at death “goeth upward”; and the spirit of the beast, even as its desires tend downward to merely temporal wants, “goeth downward” ( Ecclesiastes 3:21). God warns against cruelty to the brute ( Deuteronomy 22:6,7). He regarded the “much cattle” of Nineveh ( Jonah 4:11). He commanded that they should be given the sabbath rest. As to the creature’s final deliverance, see Romans 8:20-23.

    BEBAI Sons of ( Ezra 2:11; 8:11; 10:28; Nehemiah 7:16; 10:15).

    BECHER (first-born); Gesenius, young camel:BECHORATH. 1. Benjamin’s second son ( Genesis 46:21; 1 Chronicles 7:6). In <130801> Chronicles 8:1 the reading possibly ought to be” Bela, Becher, and (instead of ‘his firstborn,’ only one Hebrew letter is thus omitted) Ashbel.” Then “the second,” “the third,” etc., were probably added, after the change in the original. Or vice versa, Becher in Genesis 46:21 and 1 Chronicles 7:6 may be a corruption for Bela “his firstborn.” In Numbers 26:38 Becher is not mentioned in enumerating the Benjamite families, but Bela’s and Ashbel’s sons. However, among the Ephraimites occur “the Bachrites of Becher” ( Numbers 26:35). In a border raid on cattle ( Chronicles 7:21) the Ephraimites had been slain by the men of Gath who invaded Goshen; thus Ephraimite heiresses, for lack of Ephraimite husbands, would marry into other tribes. Becher, or his heir, would marry one, and so be reckoned among the Ephraimites instead of in Benjamin.

    Abiah (Aphiah, 1 Samuel 9:1), Becher’s younger son, would remain in Benjamin. From him descended Bechorath, then Zeror, Abiel (Jehiel, Chronicles 9:35), Ner, Kish, Saul. Abiel settled in Gibeon or Gibeah, afterward described as “of Saul” ( 1 Samuel 11:4, Isaiah 10:29).

    From Becher came also Sheba, son of Bichri, the rebel against David (2 Samuel 20); also Shimei, son of Gera of Bahurim ( 2 Samuel 17:5), “of the house of Saul.” The nonappearance of Becher in 1 Chronicles 8:1 and Numbers 26:38 may be due to the difference of the principle of the genealogy and the failure of the lines of the older heads of houses, as compared with Genesis 46:21; 1 Chronicles 7:6. Thus no change of reading may be needed. 2. Son of Ephraim ( Numbers 26:35). Bered, in 1 Chronicles 7:20, same asBECHER above.

    BED The outer garment worn by day sufficed the poor for bedstead, bed beneath, and covering above, whence it was forbidden to keep it in pledge after sunset, lest the poor man should be without covering ( Deuteronomy 24:13). The bolster was often of platted goat’s hair ( 1 Samuel 19:13). A quilt to wrap one’s self in is the bed meant in the miracle of Jesus when He said “Take up thy bed and walk” ( John 5:8-11). The cushion or seat at the stern was our Lord’s “pillow” on the lake of Galilee ( Mark 4:38). Stones served as Jacob’s “pillows” (Hebrew) and afterwards as the consecrated pillar to commemorate the divine vision granted him ( Genesis 28:11). The divan or platform at the end or sides of a room often served as bedstead. In such a room the master of the house and his family lay, according to the parable ( Luke 11:7), “My children are with me in bed.” The little chamber, bed, stool, table, and candlestick of Elijah ( 2 Kings 4:10) were and are the usual furniture of a sleeping room. Some bed frame is implied in Esther 1:6; 2 Samuel 3:31, “bier,” margin bed. The giant Og had one of iron, a marvel in those days (one made of palm sticks is common in the present day), and required by his enormous weight and size ( Deuteronomy 3:11). Og in some expedition of his against Ammon may have left behind him his gigantic bed, to impress his enemy with his super-human greatness, and the Ammonites may have preserved it in Rabbath, their capital; or Israel may have sent it to Ammon as a pledge of their friendly intentions (Jehovah having charged them not to disturb Ammon), and also a visible proof of their power in having conquered so mighty a prince as Og. Royal beds ( Song of Solomon 3:9,10 margin) had pillars of marble or silver, the bottom gold, the covering of purple and divers colors, hangings fastened to the pillarsupported canopy, the beds of gold upon a tesselated pavement ( Esther 1:6); compare Amos 6:4, “beds of ivory.” Often used as couches in the day ( Ezekiel 23:41; Esther 7:8). Watchers of vineyards had hammocks slung from trees ( Isaiah 1:8; 24:20). Hebrew melunah , “a lodge for the night.” Arab watchers sleep in them to be secure froth wild beasts; translate “the earth shall wave to and fro like a hammock,” swung about by the wind. The “bedchamber” where Joash was hidden was a storeroom for beds, and so well fitted for concealment ( 2 Kings 11:2; 2 Chronicles 22:11), not the usual reclining chamber. The bedroom was usually in the most retired part of the house ( 1 Kings 22:25; Exodus 8:3; Ecclesiastes 10:20). In Ezekiel 13:18, “Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes” (“elbows”) the allusion is to false prophetesses making their dupes rest on elbow cushions in fancied ecstasy, a symbol of the “peace” they falsely promised ( Ezekiel 13:16). Beds were placed at the end of the chamber, on an ascent approached by steps: hence “I will not go up into my bed” ( <19D203> Psalm 132:3).

    BEDAD Genesis 36:35; 1 Chronicles 1:46.

    BEDAN A judge of Israel between Jerubbaal and Jephthah, in 1 Samuel 12:11.

    Seemingly not, mentioned in Judges, but the name is probably identical with Abdon, which has the same radical consonants ( Judges 12:13-15).

    No achievement of his for Israel’s deliverance is recorded, but may it not be inferred from the record “he was buried ... in the mount of the Amalekites,” that he probably smote them, and took the land which they had robbed Israel of? Compare Judges 3:13,27; 5:14. A Bedan is mentioned among Manasseh’s descendants ( 1 Chronicles 7:17), whence some identify him with the Jair ( Judges 10:3), and suppose the surname Bedan was added to distinguish him from the elder Jair ( Numbers 32:41). The Chaldee paraphrase reads “Samson” for “Bedan” in Samuel 12:11. Whence some guess Bedan = Ben-Dan, or Be (Hebrew in ) Dan, to be an epithet of Samson, namely, the Danite; compare Judges 13:25. But the order of the names forbids it. The Septuagint, Syrian, and Arabic versions read “Barak,” which also the order forbids; however, see Hebrews 11:32. Other and spiritual considerations, besides chronology, often rule the order.

    BEDEIAH Ezra 10:35.

    BEE (Deborah). Whence Rebekah’s nurse ( Genesis 35:8) and the judge (Judges 4) were named; the bee’s industry, fruitfulness, and sweetness suggesting the similitude. In Deuteronomy 1:44 “the Amorites chased you as bees do”; <19B812> Psalm 118:12; Isaiah 7:18; the bold pertinacity with which bees in swarming hosts assail the object of their wrath is the point of comparison. “The Lord shall hiss for the bee that is in the land of Assyria”; i.e., He will call for the enemy to invade the Holy Land. Bees were drawn out of their hives by hissing or whistling. They were as numerous in Assyria as “the fly” in marshy Egypt. “They shall come and rest all of them in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the reeks, and upon all thorns, and upon all bushes”; the foes, like bees, swarming and settling on all places. Hereafter He will “hiss for” His people to “gather them, for He hath redeemed them” ( Zechariah 10:8). Wild honey, such as John Baptist ate ( Matthew 3:4), abounded in Palestine, often liquid, whence the laud is described as “flowing with milk and honey” ( Exodus 3:8). Often found in the reeks ( Psalm 81:16; Deuteronomy 32:13), or in a hollow tree ( 1 Samuel 14:25). Samson, having slain a young lion, found on his return within the dried carcass a swarm of bees and honeycomb, with which he refreshed himself and iris father and mother, without telling them whence it came. (The heat in 24 hours often so dries up the moisture that, without decomposition, the bodies remain like mummies, free from odor.) Hence, he made a riddle: “out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness” ( Judges 14:14).

    A type of the antitypical Samson the stronger One, spoiling the strong and roaring lion, “dividing the spoils” among His friends, and bringing forth life and divine nourishment out of death, and sweetness out of misery ( Luke 11:21,22; Hebrews 2:14,15). Samson’s history, of which this incident is the epitome, sets forth Satan’s lion-like violence and harlot-like subtlety, overruled by divine might to his own destruction and fallen man’s redemption.

    The scarcity of honey (dibash ) in Egypt is implied in Jacob’s thinking “a little honey” worth including in the present sent to conciliate the Egyptian viceroy ( Genesis 43:11); but it was the boiled down, thickened juice of grapes, dates, etc., still called dibs, an article of commerce in the E., which Jacob sent Joseph, and which the Tyrians brought from Palestine ( Ezekiel 27:17). The decoction of the grape, or must boiled down, is mixed with wine or milk, and looks like coarse honey. In Isaiah 7:15,16, of Immanuel it is written, “butter and honey shall He eat,” i.e. curdled milk (the acid of which is grateful in the hot East) and honey mixed together shall He eat, as the ordinary food of infants, marking His real humanity ( Luke 2:52). In the type, the prophetess’ child, a state of distress is also implied; when, owing to invaders, milk and honey, things produced spontaneously, should be the only abundant articles of food. That distress and the invasion should cease before the child reached the age of consciousness to distinguish good and evil. The commonness of honey in Palestine as an article of diet appears in 2 Samuel 17:29; 2 Kings 14:3; Jeremiah 41:8; Ezekiel 16:13,19.

    BEELIADA 1 Chronicles 14:7. El-iada ( 2 Samuel 5:16), with ‘Eel (“God”) substituted for Baal .

    BEELZEBUL So it ought to be read in Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15, etc. The Jews, in ridicule, changed Baal-zebub, the Ekronite god of flies, into Beelzebul, “god of dung” (which however is zebel , as they changed Beth-el (house of God) into Beth-aven (house of vanity), when the golden calf was set up there. Zebul means “dwelling,” lord of this lower world, “prince of the power of the air” ( Ephesians 2:2), and taking up his “dwelling” in human bodies ( Matthew 12:45). Thus “master of the house” and “master of the dwelling” (Beelzebul) stand in happy contrast ( Matthew 10:25). As the Ekronite god was applied to by Ahaziah to east, out his disease, so the Jews taunted Jesus as using the same idol power to east out demons. Idols and demons, moreover, had a close connection ( 1 Corinthians 10:20,21). Beelzebul was thought to be the foul prince of both.

    BEER 1. A dug well, whereas EN or AIN is a fountain or spring. Israel’s last halting place was so-called, from the well dug there, beyond the Arnon, by the princes and nobles. A poetical fragment celebrates the fact ( Numbers 21:16-18): “Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it. The princes digged the well; the nobles of the people digged it, by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves” What a contrast was this Beer, digged amidst the people’s joyous songs in honor of their princes, to the miraculous smiting of the rock amidst their murmuring against God and their leaders ( Numbers 20:2). Perhaps theBEER-ELIM, “well of the princes,” of Isaiah 15:8, on the border of Moab southwards. The howling (yillelathah : Beer-elim is chosen as similar in sound) shall reach even that remote point. Tradition made this the last appearance of the water that “followed” the people before their entrance into Canaan; compare 1 Corinthians 10:4. 2. A place whither Jotham, Gideon’s son, fled from Abimelech ( Judges 9:21).

    BEERA 1 Chronicles 7:37.

    BEERAH 1 Chronicles 5:6.

    BEERI 1. The Hittite =ANAH. [See THE HORITE .] Father of Judith, Esau’s wife = see AHOLIBAMAH . In the narrative where stress is laid on Esau’s wife being a Canaanite, her father is called a Hittite; in the genealogy, where the stress is on Esau’s marriage connection with the former holders of mount Seir, he is properly termed a Horite. [See BASHEMATH .] 2. Hosea’s father.

    BEER-LA-HAI-ROI (the well of Him that liveth and seeth). Named by Hagar, because God looked after her with loving providence even in the wilderness ( Genesis 16:14; 22:14; compare 2 Chronicles 16:9; Psalm 139). Between Kadesh and Bered, in the S. country. Here Isaac lived before and after his father’s death ( Genesis 24:62; 25:11). Identified with a well at Moilahi, a station on the road to Beersheba; near it is the cavern Beit-Hagar. Not to be confounded with the well whereby Ishmael was saved, in Genesis 21:19, subsequently.

    BEEROTH (“wells”). One of the four Hivite cities (the others being Gibeon, Chephirah, and Kirjath Jearim: Joshua 9:17), which obtained peace with Joshua by false pretenses. Allotted to Benjamin ( Joshua 18:25).

    Ishbosheth’s murderers Baanah and Rechab, and their father Rimmon, belonged to it. Its original occupants repaired to the Philistine Gittaim ( Nehemiah 11:33; 2 Samuel 4:2,3,7). The men of Beeroth were among those who returned from Babylon ( Ezra 2:25). Now El-bireh, on the road to Nablus, ten miles N. of Jerusalem, below a ridge bounding the northward view. The traditional site of Jesus’ parents not finding Him in their company ( Luke 2:43-45). The usual halt at the first day’s close for caravans going N. from Jerusalem. Naharai, one of David’s mighty men, was a Beerothite ( 1 Chronicles 11:39).

    BEEROTH OF THE CHILDREN OF JAAKAN ( Deuteronomy 10:6; Numbers 33:31.) Israel’s halting place next before Mosera, where Aaron died. The tribe took its name from Jaakan, son of Ezer, son of Seirthe Horite ( 1 Chronicles 1:42 = Akan, Genesis 36:27).

    BEERSHEBA Beersheba = “well of the oath.” The southern limit of the Holy Land, as Dan in the N.: “from Dan to Beersheba” (compare in David’s census, Chronicles 21:2; 2 Samuel 24:2-7) comprehends the whole. Called so from the oath of peace between Abraham and Abimelech, king of the Philistines ( Genesis 21:31), else from the seven (sheba’ ) ewe lambs slain there: indeed [sheba’], an oath, is from the custom of binding one’s self by seven things, as Abraham made the seven ewe lambs a pledge of his covenant with Abimelech. Again, from the like oath between Abimelech (with Phichol, his captain) and Isaac, it being not uncommon for an event to be recorded as occurring apparently for the first time, which has been recorded as occurring earlier before: so Bethel ( Genesis 26:31-33). The well dug by Abraham and secured to him by oath had been covered and lost. It is found by Isaac’s servants just after the covenant made between him and Abimelech. The series of events recalls to Isaac’s mind the original name and that which gave rise to the name; so he restores both the well itself and the name. Seven (sheba’ : which also may explain the name) wells are at the place, so that a different one may have been named by Isaac from that named by Abraham. They all pour their streams into the wady es Seba, and are called Bir es seba, the largest 12 ft. diameter, and masonry round reaching 28 ft. down, and 44 from bottom to surface of the water. The second, at a hundred yards distance, 5 in diameter, 42 in depth. The other five further off. The stones around the mouth are worn into grooves by the action of ropes for so many ages. Around the large are nine stone troughs; around the smaller, five. The water is excellent, and grass with crocuses and lilies abounds. Abraham planted here a” grove” (‘eshel ) (distinct from the idol grove, Asheerah, or Astarte [see BAAL ]), or tree, the tamarisk, long living, of hard wood, with long, clustering, evergreen leaves, as a type of the ever enduring grace of the faithful, covenant keeping God ( Genesis 21:33), “and called on the name (the self manifested character and person) of Jehovah, the everlasting God.” Here it was that Isaac lived when Jacob stole from his father the blessing already forfeited by Esau’s profane sale of his birthright ( Genesis 26:33,27; 28:10). Long afterward, on Jacob’s descent to Egypt, he halted there, sacrificed unto the God of Isaac, and had a vision of God encouraging him to go down. The dispensation of the promise, which began with Abraham’s call from Ur to Canaan, ended on the last night of the sojourn of his grandson Israel in Canaan. So God’s promise was repeated for the last time ( Genesis 46:1-5). Possibly the 430 years ( Galatians 3:17) dates from this, the end, not from the beginning, of the dispensation of the promise.

    Beersheba was given to Simeon, in the extreme S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:28; 19:1,2; 1 Chronicles 4:28). Samuel’s sons, Joel and Abiah, were judges there ( 1 Samuel 8:2), its distance preventing his going in circuit to it, as he did to others yearly ( 1 Samuel 7:16,17). Here Elijah left his confidential servant (narow ) on his way to Horeb ( 1 Kings 19:3,4). ”From Geba to Beersheba” or “from Beersheba to mount Ephraim” was the formula comprehending the southern kingdom of Judah after the severance of Israel’s ten tribes ( 2 Kings 23:8; 2 Chronicles 19:4), and on the return from Babylon still narrower, “from Beersheba to the valley of Hinnom” ( Nehemiah 11:30). Ahaziah’s wife, Zibiah, mother of Joash, was of Beersheba ( 2 Kings 12:1.) It became seat of an idolatry akin to that of Bethel or Gilgal, so that it was a formula of superstition, “the manner (cultus, or religion, as in Acts 9:2 the new religion of Christ is designated “this way”) of Beersheba liveth” ( Amos 5:5; 8:14).

    In Christian times it became an episcopal city under the Bishop of Jerusalem.

    BEESHTERA Bosra . [See ASHTAROTH .] BEETLE chargol , only in Leviticus 11:21,22: mentioned between the locust and grasshopper, and among “flying creeping things that go upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth.” From an Arabic root, to leap. The Septuagint translates it the “serpent killer,” a kind of locust not having wings. A species of truxalis, some think, one of the orthoptera, like the locust, but with elongated, projecting, conical forehead; carnivorous. It keeps down the multiplication of noisome insects.

    The beetle was not an article of food, the see LOCUST (see) was. A beetle cannot therefore be meant.

    BEHEMOTH ( Job 40:15-24.) The Egyptian, Coptic, pehemout, “the water ox,” Hebraized; our river horse, hippopotamus. “Behold I made him with thee.”

    Yet how great the difference! “He eateth grass as an ox;” a marvel in an animal so much in the water, and that such a monster is not carnivorous. “His force is in the navel (rather muscles) of his belly”; the elephant’s skin there is thin, but the hippopotamus’ skin thick. “He moveth his tail like a cedar,” short indeed, but straight and rigid as the cedar. “The sinews of his thighs are twisted together,” like a thick rope. “His bones are as strong tubes of copper .... his spine like bars of iron.” He that made him hath furnished him with his sword” (his sickle-like teeth). Though so armed, he lets “all the beasts of the field play” near him, for he is herbivorous. “He lieth under the lotus bushes,” in the covert of the reed and fens (being amphibious). “The lotus bushes cover him with their shadow.” “Behold (though) a river be overwhelming, he is not in hasty panic (for he can live in water as well as land); he is secure, though a Jordan swell up to his mouth.” Job cannot have been a Hebrew, or he would not adduce Jordan, where there were no river horses. He alludes to it as a name known only by hearsay, and representing any river. “Before his eyes (i.e. openly) will any take him, or pierce his nose with cords?” Nay, he can only be taken by guile. Jehovah’s first discourse (Job 38--39) was limited to land animals and birds; this second discourse requires therefore the animal classed with the crocodile to be amphibious, as the river horse.

    BELA (a swallowing up), called so from earthquakes having affected it. 1. One of the five cities of the plain, spared at Lot’s intercession, and named Zoar, “a little one” ( Genesis 14:2; 19:22). S.E. of the Dead Sea, on the route to Egypt, not far from where Sodom and Gomorrah stood, according to Holland, arguing from the smoke of the burning cities having been seen by Abraham from the neighborhood of Hebron, and also because if Sodom had been N. of the Dead Sea Lot would not have had time to escape to gear on the S.E. of the sea. But Grove places the cities of the plain N.W. of the Dead Sea, between Jericho and the sea, as the plain was seen by Lot from the neighborhood of Bethel. From the hills between Bethel and Hai ( Genesis 13:3,10) it is impossible to see the S. of the Dead Sea. Bela is joined with Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, in Genesis 14:2,8, forming a confederacy against the invading kings of Elam, Shinar, etc. Bela was probably the name of the king of Zoar, as his name alone of the five would otherwise not be given. Bela is also the name of an Edomite king ( Genesis 36:32). Robinson perhaps rightly identifies Bela with a ruin on the N. side of Lisan, “the tongue” of land jutting out into the Dead Sea at the S.E., between the wady Beni Hamid and the wady el Dera’ah. It was a Moabite city ( Isaiah 15:5; Jeremiah 48:34); Deuteronomy 34:3 does not prove that its site was further S., but only that Moses’ eye caught no more southward town than Zoar. 2. A king of Edom, son of Beor, a Chaldean probably by birth (like Balaam also descended from Beor, and originally residing in Pethor of Aram by the Euphrates: Numbers 22:5; 23:7), and reigning in Edom by conquest ( Genesis 36:31-39; 1 Chronicles 1:43-51). 3. Benjamin’s oldest son ( Genesis 46:21; Numbers 26:38; Chronicles 7:6; 8:1). From Gera (one house of his family) came Ehud, Israel’s judge and deliverer Eglon of Moab ( Judges 3:14-30). As Husham is like Bela a king of Edom, so with Bela son of Benjamin is connected a Benjamite family of Hushim, sprung from a foreign woman of Moab ( 1 Chronicles 7:12; 8:8-11). 4. Azaz’s son, a Reubenite ( 1 Chronicles 5:8). He too “in Aroer, even unto Nebo and Baal Meon, eastward unto the entering in of the wilderness from the river Euphrates” ( 1 Chronicles 5:8,9).

    BELIAL (worthlessness): recklessness, lawlessness. Not strictly a proper name, but used so by personification. Beli = “without” and ya’al “usefulness,” i.e. good for nothing. “A man of Belial” is a worthless, lawless fellow ( Deuteronomy 13:13; Judges 19:22; 1 Samuel 2:12). Latterly “Rake” (“vain fellows” ( 2 Samuel 6:20, harekim ), and Feel were used instead: Matthew 5:22. Nabal (= fool) is called “man of Belial” ( Samuel 25:25.) In the New Testament “Beliar” is the form in some oldest manuscripts ( 2 Corinthians 6:15.) As Satan is opposed to God, Antichrist to Christ, so Belial standing here in contrast to Christ must denote all anti-Christian pollutions personified.

    BELLOWS Jeremiah 6:29: the bellows are burned,” so intense a heat is made that the very bellows are almost set on fire; “the lead is consumed of the fire.”

    Used in heating a furnace for smelting metals, not required for the wood fires which were the ancient fuel, and were commonly blown with a fan.

    The Egyptian bellows, as represented in paintings of the time of Thothmes III, contemporary with Moses, were worked by the feet alternately pressing upon two inflated skins sending the air through reed tubes tipped with iron into the furnace; as each skin became exhausted the blower raised it by a cord in the hand to admit a fresh supply of air.

    BELLS No large ones like ours, for assembling congregations to worship, were anciently known. In Exodus 28:33,34, small golden bells are mentioned (72 according to the rabbis) as alternating with blue, purple, and scarlet pomegranates, on the hem of the high priest’s ephod. The object was “his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not.” The pomegranates with pleasant odor, and refreshing juice, and delicious kernel, symbolized the word of God, the spiritual food refreshing the soul ( Psalm 19:8-11; Deuteronomy 8:3; Proverbs 25:11). The bells symbolize the sounding forth of the word ( Romans 10:18). Through the robe, with this pendant attached, Aaron wits represented as the receiver and transmitter of the word from heaven. No ordinary priest could enter Jehovah’s immediate presence. The high priest alone was admitted, as wearing the robe of God’s word and bearing the divine testimony, upon which the covenant fellowship was founded which ensured his not dying.

    The sounding bells also assured the people waiting outside that their interceding representative priest was not dead, though in God’s immediate presence. So the sounding word assures Christ’s waiting people here below that, though withdrawn from their eyes within the heavenly veil, “He ever liveth to make intercession for them” ( Hebrews 7:25).

    The pamoney are strictly bells ( Exodus 28:33), from paam , “to strike.”

    But in Zechariah 14:20 metsillot , from tsalal “to strike,” means flat pieces or plates of brass, like cymbals, attached as ornaments to the horses’ necks. By their tinkling they enliven the animal, and keep the party from wandering far from one another. Bells are represented attached to horses on the walls of Sennacherib’s palace at Koyunjik. “Holiness unto the Lord,” inscribed on even the horse bells, whereas formerly it was only on the plate of the high priest’s miter ( Exodus 28:36), marks that sanctity shall, in the coming day of the Lord, invest even the common occupations and things of life.

    In Isaiah 3:16,18,20, women are represented as wearing “tinkling ornaments” (probably with bells attached) about their feet, to attract admiration; ankle rings were worn on both feet joined by a chain, and the tinkling ornaments hanging therefrom.

    BELSHAZZAR Contracted from Belsharezar: from Bel , the Babylonian idol, and shar , a king; zar is a common Babylonian termination, as in Nebuchadnez-zar. His solemnly instructive history is graphically told in Daniel 5. See BABEL , see BABYLON , for the remarkable confirmation of the Scripture account of his death on the night of revelry in the siege of Babylon; which is also stated by Xenophon; whereas Berosus in Josephus calls the last king Nabonedus (Nabonahit, i.e. Nebo makes prosperous) and says that in the 17th year of his reign Cyrus took Babylon, the king having retired to Borsippa (the Chaldaean sacred city of religion and science); and that having surrendered there, he had a principality assigned to him in Carmania by Cyrus. The inscription at Umqeer (Ur of the Chaldees), read by Sir H. Rawlinson, strews that Nabonedus admitted his son Belshazzar into a share of the kingdom, just as Nabopolassar admitted Nebuchadnezzar his sort to share in the government, Xerxes admitted his son Artaxerxes, and Augustus his successor Tiberius; so that the discrepancy is cleared. Nabonedus, defeated by Cyrus in the field, fled to Borsippa, and survived. Belshazzar fell in the last assault of Babylon.

    Xenophon calls the last king of Babylon “impious,” and illustrates his cruelty by the fact that he killed a courtier for having struck down the game in hunting before him, and unmanned Gadates a courtier at a banquet, because one of the king’s courtiers praised him as handsome. His reckless infatuation is marked by his making a feast when the enemy was thundering at his gates; compare 1 Thessalonians 5:3-7 for the lesson to us. He set at nought eastern propriety by introducing women and even concubines at the feast. His crowning guilt, which made the cup overflow in vengeance, was his profaning the vessels of Jehovah’s temple to be the instrument of revelry to himself, his princes, wives, and concubines, drinking out of them in honor of his idols. Security, sensuality, and profanity are the sure forerunners of the sinner’s doom. Intoxicating drinks tempt men to daring profanity, which even they would shrink from when sober. To mark the inseparable connection of sin and punishment, “the same hour” that witnessed his impious insult to Jehovah witnessed the mysterious hand of the unseen One writing his doom in full view of his fellow transgressors on the same palace wall which had been covered with cuneiform inscriptions glorifying those Babylonian kings. Compare Proverbs 16:18. His daring bravado was in an instant changed into abject fear; conscience can turn the most foolhardy into a coward.

    His promise that whosoever should read the writing should be “third ruler in the kingdom” is probably an undesigned coincidence with the historic truth now known that Nabonedus was the chief king, Belshazzar secondary, and so the ruler advanced to the next place would beTHIRD ( Daniel 5:7). Daniel having been summoned at the suggestion of Nitocris, the queen mother, probably wife of Evil Merodach, Nebuchadnezzar’s son, faithfully reproved him for that though knowing how God had humbled his forefather Nebuchadnezzar for God-despising, self-magnifying pride, he yet “lifted himself against the Lord of heaven”; therefore MENE , God has numbered thy years of reign and the number is complete, compare Psalm 90:12. TEKEL , weighed in the balances of God’s truth, thou art found wanting. UPHARSIN , or PERES , alluding to the similar word “Persians,” thy kingdom is divided among the Medes and Persians. Cyrus diverted the Euphrates into a channel, and guided by Gobryas and Gadatas, deserters, marched by the dry channel into Babylon, while the citizens were carousing at an annual feast to the idols ( Isaiah 21:5; 44:27; Jeremiah 50:29-35,38,39; 51:36,57). Belshazzar was slain; compare Isaiah 14:18-20.

    BEN (“son”). 1 Chronicles 15:18.

    BENAIAH (“whom Jehovah builds up”). Son of Jehoiada, the chief priest ( Chronicles 27:5), so of the tribe of Levi, though of Kabzeel in S. Judah ( 2 Samuel 23:20; 1 Chronicles 11:22,25; 18:17; 27:6); set over David’s body guard, the Cherethites and Pelethites ( 2 Samuel 8:18; 20:23; 23:20,22,23; 1 Kings 1:38). Midway between the first three of “the mighty men” (gibborim ), and the 30 “valiant men of the armies.” “Mighty among the 30), and above the 30.” He earned his position by slaying “two lion-like men of Moab,” and “a lion in a pit in a snowy day,” and “an Egyptian of great stature, a goodly man ( 2 Samuel 23:21), five cubits high,” out of whose hand he plucked the spear like a weaver’s beam, “and slew him with his own spear” ( 1 Chronicles 11:22,23). Having remained faithful in Adonijah’s rebellion ( 1 Kings 1:8,10,32,38,44), and having by Solomon’s command slain him and Joab, he was promoted to the latter’s post as commander in chief ( 1 Kings 2:25,34,35; 4:4). Jehoiada, father of Benaiah, was next after Ahithophel in David’s court ( Chronicles 27:34).

    Eight others of the name are mentioned. 1. One of David’s 30 “valiant men of the armies,” the Pirathonite, an Ephraimite, captain of the 11th monthly course ( 2 Samuel 23:30; Chronicles 11:31; 27:14). 2. A Levite of David’s time who “played with a psaltery on alamoth” ( Chronicles 15:18-20; 16:5). 3. A priest in David’s time who blew the trumpet before the ark ( Chronicles 15:24; 16:6). 4. A Levite of the sons of Asaph ( 2 Chronicles 20:14). 5. A Levite overseer of offerings, under Hezekiah ( 2 Chronicles 31:13). 6. A prince in the family of Simeon ( 1 Chronicles 4:36). 7. Four who took strange wives ( Ezra 10:25,30,35,43). 8. Father of Pelatiah, a prince of the people, who gave presumptuous counsel against Ezekiel’s inspired warnings, and was visited with death (Ezekiel 11).

    BEN-AMMI (“son of my people”). Son of Lot’s younger daughter; progenitor of Ammon ( Genesis 19:38).

    BENE-BERAK A city of Dan ( Joshua 19:45). Now Ibn Abrak, an hour from Jehud.

    BEN-HADAD (“son [i.e. worshipper] of Hadad”), the Syrian sun-god. A name common to three kings of Damascus. Hadad-ezer (“Hadad helps”) is a similar Syrian name. David, having conquered him, put garrisons in Syria of Damascus; Rezon retook Damascus, and reigned there “an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon” ( 1 Kings 11:23). Ben-Hadad I. grandson of Rezon (probably), as king in Damascus, which had absorbed by that time the petty kingdoms around, helped Baasha against see ASA king of Judah. But the latter, by a present of “all the silver and gold left in the treasures of the Lord’s house and of the king’s house,” tempted Ben-Hadad to “break his league with Baasha” ( 1 Kings 15:18,19). He therefore “smote Ijon, Dan, Abel-beth-Maachah, Cinneroth, with all Naphtali” in the northern kingdom, namely, that of the ten tribes under Baasha, thus enabling Asa to take away the stones of Ramah, which Baasha had built to prevent any repairing from the northern to the southern kingdom, Judah.

    Ben-Hadad II., son of Ben-Hadad I.; 32 vassal kings accompanied him in his first siege of Samaria ( 1 Kings 20:1) [see AHAB ]. After Ahab’s death, Moab having revolted from Ahaziah and Jehoram, successive kings of Israel ( 2 Kings 1:1,6,7), Ben-Hadad took advantage of Israel’s consequent weakness, and after having been baffled several times by Elisha besieged Samaria a second time so straitly that mothers gave their own sons to be eaten, a horror similar to what occurred in later times in Titus’ siege of Jerusalem. A sudden panic, owing to a divinely sent noise, caused the Syrians to flee from their camp, and leave its rich contents to be spoiled, under the impression that Israel had hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings. The consequent plenty had been foretold by Elisha. Shortly after Ben-Hadad fell sick, and sent Hazael with large presents to consult Elisha who was in Damascus ( 2 Kings 8:7-15). The prophet replied, “Thou mayest certainly recover,” i.e. the disease is not mortal; “howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall surely die.” Hazael’s latent cruelty and ambition were awakened by what ought to have awakened remorse, Elisha’s tears at the horrors which the prophet foresaw he would perpetrate. His murder of Ben-Hadad with a wet cloth (the wetting solidifying the cloth, and making it impervious to air) was consonant to his subsequent bloodthirstiness. Hazael is evidently the subject of 2 Kings 8:15; the introduction of his name at the end does not disprove this: it is introduced to emphasize Hazael’s succession to the throne, in contrast to Ben-Hadad’s decease. Many fancy the wet cloth was put on to cool the fevered face, and by Ben-Hadad himself, and that death naturally resulted from the sudden chill. (?) So ended with Ben-Hadad, after reigning about 30 years, the dynasty founded by Rezon.

    Ben-Hadad III, Hazael’s son and successor. Jehovah, moved by Jehoahaz’ repentance of his previous wickedness, and by his beseeching prayers, and by the oppression suffered by his people from Hazael, “who had made them like the dust by threshing,” gave Israel a savior from Ben-Hadad in Joash his son’s days. Joash, visiting Elisha on his deathbed, by his direction shot arrows eastward, the pledge of the Lord’s deliverance from Syria. But instead of smiting the ground repeatedly he only smote thrice from want of faith; so, instead of destroying the Syrians as he might have done, he only was to smite them thrice, which he did in Aphek ( 2 Kings 13:14-19) in the Esdraelon plain, where Ahab had defeated Ben-Hadad I ( 1 Kings 20:26); compare Amos 1:3,4, which foretells Ben-Hadad’s overthrow.

    Jeroboam II completed Israel’s deliverance, according to Jonah’s prophecy ( 2 Kings 14:25).

    BENHAIL 2 Chronicles 17:7.

    BEN-HANAN 1 Chronicles 4:20.

    BENINU Nehemiah 10:13.

    BENJAMIN (“son of my right hand”), as Jacob named him; first called by his dying mother Rachel Benoni, son of my sorrow (compare Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:17,18). Jesus the antitype was first “a man of sorrows” ( Isaiah 53:3), the mother’s sorrows attending tits birth also at Bethlehem; afterward “the man of God’s right hand,” on whom God’s hand was laid strengthening Him ( Revelation 1:17; Psalm 80:17; 89:21; Acts 5:31). 1. Rachel’s second son, the only son of Jacob born in Palestine ( Genesis 35:16-19), on the road between Betheland Bethlehem Ephrath, near the latter ( Genesis 48:7) (probably = the fertile, from parah , corresponding to the town’s other name, Bethlehem, “bread-house”). The Arabic jamin means fortunate. And in the expression “sons of Benjamin” or a “man of Benjamin, ... land of Benjamin,” the first syllable is suppressed Benee Ha- Jemini, Ish Jemini, Erets Jemini, compare Genesis 46:10. Benjamin was his father’s favorite after Joseph’s supposed death ( Genesis 44:30); as the youngest, the child of his old age, and the child of his beloved Rachel.

    Joseph’s gifts to him exceeded far those to each of his elder brothers ( Genesis 43:34; 45:22). Benjamin was only 23 or 24 years old when Jacob went down to Egypt. He clearly could not then have had ten sons already ( Genesis 46:6-21), or eight sons and two grandsons ( Numbers 26:38-40). It is plain that the list in Genesis 46 includes those grandsons and great grandsons of Jacob born afterward in Egypt, and who in the Israelite mode of thought came into Egypt “in the loins” of their fathers (compare Hebrews 7:9,10). Hence, arises the correspondence in the main between the list given in connection with Jacob’s descent to Egypt in Genesis 46, and the list taken by Moses ages afterward in Numbers 26. Benjamin’s sons, Becher, Gera, Rosh, are missing in Moses’ list, because they either died childless, or did not leave a sufficient number of children to form independent families.

    After the exodus the tribe was the smallest but one ( Numbers 1:1,36,37; 1 Samuel 9:21; Psalm 68:27). On march it held the post between Manasseh and Ephraim, its brother tribes, W. of the tabernacle, which it followed ( Psalm 80:2) under its captain Abidan, son of Gideoni ( Numbers 2:18-24). Palti, son of Raphu, was the spy representing it ( Numbers 13:9). In the division of the land Elidad, son of Chislon, represented it ( Numbers 34:21). Its predominant characteristic of warlike tastes is foretold by Jacob ( Genesis 49:27); “Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf, in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night shall divide the spoil.” How truly is attested by the war waged them alone (and victoriously at against all the tribes, rather give up the wicked men of Gibeah (Judges 19; 20; compare Matthew 26:52). Their number was reduced thereby to 600, who took refuge in the cliff Rimmon, and were provided with wives partly from Jabesh, partly from Shiloh (Judges 21).

    The period of the judges must have been a long one to admit of the increase to Benjamin’s subsequent large numbers ( 1 Chronicles 7:6-12; 8; 12:1-8). The same determined spirit, but in a better cause, appears in their resisting Saul, their own kinsman’s, appeal to them to betray David’s movements ( 1 Samuel 22:7-18). Moreover Ehud, judge and deliverer of Israel from Eglon of Moab, was of Benjamin; also Saul and Jonathan, whose prowess was famed ( 2 Samuel 1:18,19,23). Also Baanah and Rechab, captains of marauding bands and murderers of Ishbosheth (2 Samuel 4). Archers and slingers, generally left handed (as also Ehud was), were the chief force of the “sons of Jacob’s right hand” ( Judges 3:15, etc.; 20:16; 1 Chronicles 12:2; 2 Chronicles 14:8; 17:17). The “morning” and “night” in Jacob’s prophecy mark that Benjamin, as he was in the beginning, so he should continue to the end of the Jewish state.

    Similarly in Moses’ prophecy ( Deuteronomy 33:12), “Benjamin, the beloved of the Lord (attached to David = beloved after Saul’s dynasty fell), shall dwell in safety by Him; the Lord shall cover him all the day long;” implying a longer continuance to Benjamin than to the other tribes. So Benjamin alone survived with Judah, after the deportation of the ten tribes to Assyria, arid accompanied Judah to and front the Babylonian captivity, and lasted until Shiloh came and until Jerusalem was destroyed.

    As on the march, so in the promised land, Benjamin’s position was near that of Ephraim, between it on the N. and Judah on the S., a small but rich territory, advantageously placed in commanding the approach to the valley of the Jordan, and having Dan between it and the Philistines ( Joshua 18:11, etc.); a parallelogram, 26 miles long, 12 broad, extending from the Jordan to the region of Kirjath Jearim eight miles W. of Jerusalem, and from the valley of Hinnom S. to Bethel N. When the Lord rejected the tabernacle of Joseph at Shiloh He chose mount Zion, Jerusalem which chiefly belonged to Benjamin (the of the Jebusite, “Jebusi, which Jerusalem” ( Joshua 18:28), and all the land N. of the valley of Hinnom), and only in part to Judah, God’s chosen tribe ( Psalm 78:60,67,68). In this sense Benjamin fulfilled Moses’ prophecy in “dwelling between” Judah’s (the Lord’s representative) “shoulders,” or ridges of the ravines which on the W., S., and E. environ the holy city. Primarily, however, the idea is, Benjamin as “the beloved of Jehovah shall dwell in safety with Him (literally, founded upon Him), and he (Benjamin) shall dwell between His (Jehovah’s) shoulders,” as a son borne upon his father’s back ( Deuteronomy 1:31; 32:11; Exodus 19:4; Isaiah 46:3,4; 63:9).

    This choice of Jerusalem as the seat of the ark and David’s place of residence formed a strong He between Judah and Benjamin, though Saul’s connection with the latter had previously made the Benjamites, as a tribe, slow to recognize David as king ( 1 Chronicles 12:29; 2 Samuel 2:8,9). Hence at the severance of the ten tribes Benjamin remained with Judah ( 1 Kings 12:23; 2 Chronicles 11:1). The two coalesced into one, under the common name Jews, whence they are called “one tribe” ( 1 Kings 11:13,32; 12:20,21). Moreover, a part of Benjamin including Bethel, the seat of Jeroboam’s calf worship, went with the ten tribes.

    Possibly Jeroboam’s having appropriated it for the calf worship may have helped to alienate Benjamin from him and attach Benjamin to Judah. They two alone were the royal tribes. David was connected with Saul of Benjamin by marriage with his daughter, and therefore, feeling the political importance of the connection, made it a preliminary of his league with Abner that Michal should be restored to him, though Phaltiel had her heart ( 2 Samuel 3:13-16). Above all, what knit together Benjamin and Judah most was the position fixed by God for the great national temple, which deprived Ephraim of its former glory ( Psalm 78:60-68); not in Judah only, or in Benjamin only, but on part of the confines of both, so that one text places it in Judah and the parallel text in Benjamin; compare Joshua 15:63 with Joshua 18:28. These elements of union between Benjamin and Judah are not obviously put forward in the sacred writings, but are found in them on close observation, just such seeds as would produce the ultimate union which the history records. Such undesigned coincidences agree best with the belief that the narrative is minutely true, not forged.

    Benjamin occupied a plateau generally about 2,000 feet above the Mediterranean plain, and 3,000 feet above the valley of the Jordan. The hilly nature of the country is marked by the names Gibeon, Gibeah, Geba, Ramah, Mizpeh (watchtower), “the ascent of Bethhoron,” the cliff Rimmon, the pass of Michmash. Torrent beds and ravines are the only avenues from the Philistian and Sharon plains on the W., and from the deep Jordan valley on the E. These ravines were frequented once by many wild beasts, as the names of places testify: Zeboim, “hyaenas” ( 1 Samuel 13:17,18); Shual and Shaalbim ( Judges 1:35), “foxes” or “jackals”; Ajalon, “gazelle.” Up these western passes the Philistines advanced against Saul in the beginning of his reign, and drove him to Gilgal in the Arabah, occupying from Michmash to Ajalon. Down them they were driven again by Saul and Jonathan. Joshua chased the Canaanites down the long slopes of Bethhoron. The regular road between Jericho and Jerusalem was another of these passes, the scene of the parable of the good Samaritan.

    Lod, Ono, Aijalon were westward extensions of Benjamin’s bounds beyond the original limit ( Nehemiah 11:35).

    The presence of the ark at Kirjath Jearim in Benjamin, the prophet Samuel’s residence in the sanctuary Ramah ( 1 Samuel 7:17; 9:12), the great assemblies of “all Israel” at Mizpeh ( 1 Samuel 7:5), and the sanctity attached of old to Bethel, “the great high place” at Gibeon ( Kings 3:4; 2 Chronicles 1:3), all tended to raise B. high in the nation, and to lead them to acquiesce in the choice of Saul as king, though belonging to “the smallest of the tribes of Israel” ( 1 Samuel 9:21). After Saul’s and then Ishbosheth’s death, Benjamin sent 3,000 men to Hebron to confirm the kingdom to David ( 1 Chronicles 12:23,29; 2 Samuel 5:3), Abner having declared for him. But the Benjamite Shimei’s curses and Sheba’s rebel. lion indicate that Saul’s party among the Benjamites, even after his dynasty had ceased, cherished the old grudge against David.

    Besides the causes mentioned before, which finally united Benjamin and Judah, there was Jeroboam’s setting up the calf worship in Bethel (a Benjamite city) in rivalry of the temple of Jehovah in the joint city of Benjamin and Judah, Jerusalem ( 1 Kings 12:29); also Rehoboam’s wise policy in dispersing his children through all Judah and Benjamin, into every” fenced city” ( 2 Chronicles 11:12,23); also Asa’s covenant with Jehovah, in which Benjamin took part (2 Chronicles 15); also the advancement of Benjamites to high posts in the army ( 2 Chronicles 17:17). “The high gate of Benjamin” ( Jeremiah 20:2) marked the tribe’s individuality even in the joint metropolis of Benjamin and Judah; compare Ezra 2; Ezra 10:9; Nehemiah 7; 11:31-35 in proof of this individuality even after the return from Babylon. The genealogy of Kish and Saul, traced to a late date, brings us down to a Kish, father of Mordecai, the savior of the Jewish nation from Haman’s intended destruction ( Esther 2:5). The royal name reappears in Saul of Tarsus, whose glory was that he belonged to “the tribe of Benjamin” ( Romans 11:1; Philippians 3:5.) His full sense of that honor appears in his reference to his forefather,” Saul the son of Cis, a man of the tribe of Benjamin” ( Acts 13:21.) In his own person he realized some of the prominent characteristics of his tribe: fierce obstinacy when be was “exceedingly mad against Christians, and persecuted them even unto strange cities” ( Acts 26:11), equally persistent firmness when he declares, in spite of friends’ entreaties, “I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” ( Acts 21:13). Thus Benjamin had the distinction of producing one of Israel’s first judges, her first king, and the great apostle of the uncircumcision. 2. A Benjamite, head of a family of giant men; son of Bilhan ( Chronicles 7:10). 3. One who married a foreign wife ( Ezra 10:32).

    BENO 1 Chronicles 24:26,27.

    BENZOHETH 1 Chronicles 4:20.

    BEON Contracted from Baal Meon ( Numbers 32:3,38).

    BEOR 1. Father of see BELA . 2. Father of see BALAAM .

    BERACHAH One of Saul’s brethren, yet attached himself to David at Ziklag ( Chronicles 12:3).

    BERACHAH, VALLEY OF (“blessing”). Where Jehoshaphat and his people on the fourth day assembled to “bless” Jehovah for overthrowing the invading Ammonites, Moabites, Hagarenes, Edomites, and Amalekites who sought to “cut off Israel from being a nation” (Psalm 83; 2 Chronicles 20:26). Now Bereikut, in a valley between Tekua and the road from Bethlehem to Hebron. It is a broad, rich vale, watered with copious springs, affording space for a large multitude.

    BERACHIAH 1 Chronicles 6:39.BERECHIAH ( 1 Chronicles 15:17).

    BERAIAH 1 Chronicles 8:21.

    BEREA A city of Macedon, whither Paul withdrew, with Silas and Timothy, at his first visit to Europe, from Jewish persecution at Thessalonica, whence also, when the persecutors followed him from Thessalonica, he retired seawards to proceed to Athens ( Acts 17:10-15). The Berean Jews were “more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word (preached) with all readiness of mind (not in a cavilling, critical spirit), and (yet not in a credulous spirit, for they) searched the Scriptures daily whether those things were so.” (See Isaiah 8:20: John 5:39; Galatians 1:8,9.)

    The result was necessarily, “many believed; also of honorable women, which were Greeks, and of men not a few.” Sopater, or Sosipater, one of them, became Paul’s missionary companion ( Acts 20:4; Romans 16:21) in returning to Asia from his second visit to Europe, where he had been with him at Corinth. Now Verria, or Kara-verria, commanding a wide view of the plain of the Axius and Haliacmon; one of the most pleasant towns of Roumelia, with 20,000 inhabitants. One of the two roads from Thessalonica to Berea passed by Pella. A road led from Berea to Dium, whence probably Paul sailed to Athens, leaving Silas and Timothy behind.

    BERECHIAH Berechiahu (Hebrew). 1. 1 Chronicles 3:20. 2. Nehemiah 3:4,30; 6:18. 3. 1 Chronicles 9:16. 4. 1 Chronicles 15:23. 5. 2 Chronicles 28:12. 6. 2 Chronicles 1:1. 7. Zechariah 1:1,7.

    BERED 1. Near Beer-la-hai-roi ( Genesis 16:14). Identified by some with Elusa. 2. Descendant of Ephraim, the same perhaps as see BECHER ( Numbers 26:35; 1 Chronicles 7:20).

    BERI 1 Chronicles 7:36.

    BERIAH (“in evil” or “a gift”). 1. Asher’s son, from whom descended “the family of the Beerites” ( Genesis 46:17; Numbers 26:44,45). 2. A son of Ephraim, so-called “because it went evil with Ephraim’s house” at the time, the men of Gath “born in that land” (Goshen, or else the eastern part of Lower Egypt) having slain his sons in a raid on cattle ( Chronicles 7:20-23). if Beriah mean a “gift,” he will be regarded as an extraordinary gift from God to Ephraim, now old, to stand “instead of” his sons whom he had lost; such was Seth ( Genesis 4:25 margin). The incident perhaps belongs to the time, otherwise unnoticed, between Jacob’s death and the Egyptian enslaving of his seed; for Ephraim’s sons must, some of them, have been full grown and the Hebrews still free. The men of Gath were children of Philistine settlers in Goshen or the adjoining region.

    In Joshua 13:2,3 the Sihor, or (Pelusiac branch of) the Nile, is the boundary between Egypt and Canaan; and in Genesis 46:34 the pastoral population in Goshen being an “abomination to the Egyptians,” Goshen must have been regarded as non-Egyptian, but a kind of border land between the two countries, Egypt and Canaan. The men of Gath may have been mercenaries in the Egyptian army, with lands allotted them in that quarter. The bloody attack of Simeon and Levi on Shechem ( Genesis 34:25-29), and Pharaoh’s fear lest in war the Israelites should join Egypt’s foes and so get up out of the land (Exodus 1), show the possibility of their having been the aggressors, but as “come down” is more applicable to coming into than going from Egypt, probably the men of Gath were the aggressors. Translate therefore “when they came down.” Keil thinks that” Ephraim” here is not the patriarch, but his descendant ages after bearing his name. Ezer and Elead his sons went down from mount Ephraim to Gath to carry off the Gittites’ cattle and were slain in the attempt. Their father’s sorrow for them was alleviated by the birth of Beriah. This view is possible. 3. A Benjamite who, with Shema, his brother, were ancestors of the inhabitants of Aijalon, and “drove away the inhabitants of Gath” ( Chronicles 8:13). 4. A Gershomite Levite ( 1 Chronicles 23:10,11).

    BERITES; BERIM A clan mentioned with Abel and Beth-Maachah in N. Palestine, visited by Joab in pursuing Sheba, son of Bichri ( 2 Samuel 20:14), “all the Berites.” They followed him at his call.

    BERNICE; BERENICE Oldest daughter of Herod Agrippa I ( Acts 12:1). Married to her uncle Herod, king of Chalcis. Suspected after his death of intimacy with her own brother, Agrippa II, with whom she visited Festus, on his appointment as procurator of Judaea, and heard Paul’s defense ( Acts 25:13,23; 26:30).

    Next, she was married to Polemon, king of Cilicia; but left him for her brother. Subsequently, she was mistress of Vespasian, then of Titus, who, when emperor, cast her off.

    BEROTHAH; BEROTHAI In Ezekiel 47:16 connected with Hamath and Damascus, as the northern boundary of the future inheritance of restored Israel. In Samuel 8:8 a city of Zobah, taken by David from Hadadezer. Possibly identical with Berytus, now the commercial mart Beirut, called from the wells, Beeroth, still seen, bored in the rocks at Beirut. In the parallel ( Chronicles 18:8) “Chun” is substituted. Near Beyrut are Assyrian tablets of a king (Shalmaneser), who overran Phoenicia. it is the traditional scene of the combat of Saint George and the dragon.

    BERYL The first in the fourth row of precious stones in the high priest’s breastplate ( Exodus 28:20; 39:13), Hebrew tarshish , the tartessus stone, found in Spain. Sea green, pale blue, yellow, and almost white, are its various colors. The color of the cherubic wheels ( Ezekiel 1:16; 10:9). In Ezekiel 28:13 it is one of the Tyrian king’s treasures, margin: chrysolite. Set in rings of gold ( Song of Solomon 5:14); not as Smith’s Bible Dictionary, “his wrists are circlets of gold full set with topazes,’ but the hands bent in are compared to beautiful rings in which beryl is set, as the nails are in the fingers The body of the man seen in vision ( Daniel 10:6) resembled it. In Revelation 21:19,20, the city’s eighth foundation, the chrysolite being the seventh. The aquamarine, according to Schleusner.

    BESAI Ezra 2:49; Nehemiah 7:52.

    BESODEIAH Nehemiah 3:6.

    BESOR TheBROOK = fresh, cool; a wady or torrent bed, S. of Ziklag, where David left 200 men so faint as not to be able to accompany him in pursuing the Amalekites into the desert whither they had withdrawn after burning Ziklag ( 1 Samuel 30:9,10,21), BETAH By inversion of letters, Tibhath ( 1 Chronicles 18:8). Belonging to Hadadezer, king of Zobah. Spoiled by David of its “exceeding much brass” ( 2 Samuel 8:8).

    BETEN Joshua 19:25. A city on the borders of Asher.

    BETH (“a fixed dwelling”); as in Genesis 33:17, “Jacob built him an house,” marking his settlement after wanderings (compare 2 Samuel 7:2-6).

    Then any dwelling, as a tent. Then a family. Also a temple. ”The garden house,” Beth-haggan ( 2 Kings 9:27), by way of which Ahaziah fled; now Jenin, formerlyEN-GANNIN, on the way from Samaria northward, overlooking the great plain.

    BETHABARA (“house of a ford or passage”) (see Judges 7:24), where John was when he baptized Jesus ( John 1:28; compare John 1:29,30-35). The same as see BETH-NIMRAH , “the house of leopards,” now Beyt-nemir. Thence Elijah ascended. The leopards having come back after their temporary ejectment, during which the name Bethabara prevailed, the place resumed its original name. But perhaps the name means rather, “house of pure water.” The Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, the three oldest manuscripts, read “Bethany,” which also may mean “house of a ferryboat,” i.e. a passage. Yet Origen prefers the reading Bethabara. Some explain Bethany = boathouse, virtually = Bethabara. Lieut. Conder places the Bethabara of Judges at the traditional site, the pilgrims’ bathing place near Kasr el Yahud, E. of Jericho, within easy reach of Jerusalem. But he shows there is an objection to placing Bethabara’s) far S., for Christ’s baptism. A site is required within 30 miles of Cana of Galilee; for ( John 1:43) “the day following (the events at Bethabara, John 1:28-36) Jesus would go forth into Galilee,” and on the third day (John 2) was in Cana. Now just one mile N. of wady Jalud, two days journey from Nazareth and Cana (25 miles), is Makhadhet Abara, “the ford of crossing over.” The great road on the N. side of wady Jalud to Gilead and S. Hauran passes over by it. The nearness to Galilee, and the openness of the sides of the river here, leaving a broader space for the crowd seeking baptism, favor the view. The name Bethabara might probably belong to more points than one where Jordan is forded.

    BETHANATH A fenced city of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:38), whence the Canaanites were not expelled ( Judges 1:33).

    BETH-ANOTH Joshua 15:59. Now Hanin (Conder, Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement, April, 1876).

    BETHANY (“house of dates”) [see BETHABARA ], though dates have long disappeared from the locality, and only olives and figs remain (whence Olivet and Bethphage are named). Bethany is not mentioned until the New Testament time, which agrees with the Chaldee hinee being the word used for “dates” in the composition of the name, Beth-any. Associated with the closing days of the Lord Jesus, the home of the family whom He loved, Mary, Martha. and Lazarus where He raised Lazarus froth the dead; from whence He made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem; His nightly abode each of the six nights preceding His betrayal; where at the house of Simon the leper He was anointed by Mary ( Mark 14:3); and where, most of all, we are introduced to the home circle of His private life. In John 11:1 His arrival at Bethany is recorded, namely, in the evening. The sending of the two disciples for the colt was evidently on the following morning, to allow time for the many events of the day of His triumphal entry and visiting the temple, after which it was “eventide” ( Mark 11:11), which coincides with John’s ( John 12:12) direct assertion, “the next day”; at the eventide of the day of triumphal entry He “went out unto Bethany with the twelve,” His second day of lodging there. On the morrow, in coming from Bethany, He cursed the figtree ( Mark 11:12,13), cast out the money-changers from the temple, and at “even” “went out of the city” ( Mark 11:19), lodging at Bethany for the third time, according to Mark. “In the morning” they proceeded by the same route as before (as appears from their seeing the dried up fig tree), and therefore from Bethany to Jerusalem ( Mark 11:27; 12:41) and the temple, where He spoke parables and answered cavils, and then “went out of the temple” ( Mark 13:1), to return again to Bethany, as appears from His speaking with Peter, James, Jehu, and Andrew privately “upon the mount of Olives” ( Mark 13:3), on the S.E. slope of which Bethany lies,15 stadia or less than two miles from Jerusalem ( John 11:18), the fourth day, according to Mark, who adds, “after two days was the feast of the Passover” ( Mark 14:1). Thus Mark completes the six days, coinciding (with that absence of design which establishes truth) exactly with John, “Jesus six days before the Passover came to Bethany” ( John 12:1.)

    Though John does not directly say that Jesus went in the evenings to Bethany, yet he incidentally implies it, for he says, “they made Him a supper” at Bethany, i.e. an evening meal ( John 12:2).

    The anointing by Mary, introduced by Mark, after mention of the chief priests’ plot “two days” before the Passover, is not in chronological order, for it was six days before the Passover (John 12), but stands here parenthetically, to account for Judas’ spite against Jesus. Judas “promised and sought opportunity to betray Him unto them in the absence of the multitude “ ( Luke 22:6); Matthew ( Matthew 26:5) similarly represents the chief priests, in compassing His death, as saying,” Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.” Jesus therefore in the day could clear the temple of the money-changers, but at night He was exposed to stratagem; so the very first night that He did not retire to Bethany, but remained in Jerusalem, He was seized. It is striking how God’s ordering brought about the offering of the true Paschal Lamb on the feast day, though the opposite was intended by the Jewish rulers. From the vicinity of Bethany, on the wooded slopes beyond the ridge of Olivet, He ascended to heaven, still seen to the moment of His being parted from His disciples, and carried up from their “steadfast gaze,” blessing them with uplifted hands ( Luke 24:50,51; Acts 1:9-12).

    Bethany was “at” the mount of Olives ( Mark 11:1; Luke 19:1,29), near the usual road from Jericho to Jerusalem ( Mark 10:46; 11:1), close to Bethphage = the house of figs, frequently named with it. Now el- Azariyeh, named so from Lazarus; on the E. of the mount of Olives, a mile beyond the summit, near the point at which the road to Jericho makes a sudden descent toward the Jordan valley; a hollow, wooded with olives, almonds, pomegranates, oaks, and carobs; lying below a secondary ridge which shuts out the view of the summit of Olivet. The village is a miserable one, of some 20 families of thriftless inhabitants. The house and tomb of Lazarus, and the house of Simon the leper, exhibited here, are of very doubtful genuineness.

    BETH-ARABAH Joshua 15:6,61. One of the six cities of Judah, situated in the Arabah or sunken valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea; between Bethhoglah and the high land on the W. Included in Benjamin ( Joshua 18:22).

    BETHARAM A town of Gad, E. of Jordan ( Joshua 13:27). Same as Bethharan ( Numbers 32:36); ages later named Libias or Livias, from the emperor Augustus’ wife, Livia. In the wady Seir, which falls rate the Ghor, opposite Jericho.

    BETHARBEL (“house of the snare” (or, “ambush of God”)). Scene of the sack and massacre by Shalmaneser at his first invasion ( 2 Kings 17:3; Hosea 10:14). “As Shalman spoiled Betharbel in the day of battle: the mother was dashed in pieces upon her children.” Perhaps identical with the stronghold Arbela in Galilee. Jerome curiously refers “Shalman” to “Zalmunna,” and Betharbel = the house of him who judged Baal, i.e. Jerubbaal (Judges 8).

    Now Irbid, a ruin S.W. of the sea of Galilee, N. of Tiberias, remarkable for its caves, hard to approach and still more to storm. Hence the resort of robbers. When they turned Bethel (“the house of God”) into Bethaven (“the house of vanity”), then it became Betharbel (“the house of ambush of God”), the scene and occasion of their desolation (Pusey).

    BETHAVEN (“house of nothingness or vanity”). On the mountains of Benjamin, E. of Bethel ( Joshua 7:2; 18:12), between it and Michmash (1 Sam 13:5; 14:23). Near it was the “wilderness,” i.e. pasture land of Bethaven ( Joshua 18:12.) In Hosea 4:15; 5:1; 10:5 Bethel, “house of God,” is called Bethaven, “house of vanity,” because of Jeroboam’s golden calf.

    BETHAZMAVETH Nehemiah 7:28. [See AZMAVETH .] Possibly Hizmeh, S.E. of Jeba, on the Benjamite hills.

    BETH BAAL MEON [See BAALMEON .] On the downs or “plain” E. of Jordan ( Joshua 13:17), in Reuben. Contracted into Been ( Numbers 32:3,38), Bethmeon in Jeremiah 48:23. Now the ruin called “the fortress of Miun,” S.W. of Hesban, in the wady Zerka Maein.

    BETHBARAH (“house of the passage”) ( Judges 7:24). The point to which Ephraim took, before the Midianites, “the waters” (the streams wady Maleh, Fyadh, Jamel, Tubas, etc., descending from the E. side of the highlands of Ephraim toward the Jordan, and flowing through the Ghor to Bethbarah). Possibly, though not probably, identical with see BETHBARA where John baptized.

    Ephraim’s intercepting of Midian was probably not so far S. as Bethabara, whither people flocked from Judaea, Jerusalem, and the “region round about.” Grove supposes Bethbarah to be the ford Jacob crossed in returning from Mesopotamia, and at which Jephthah slew the Ephraimites.

    BETH-BIREI A town of Simeon ( 1 Chronicles 4:31), corresponding to Bethlebaoth in Joshua 19:6; 15:32, in the extreme S. of Judah.

    BETHCAR (“house of lambs”). The point W. from Mizpeh to which Israel pursued the Philistines ( 1 Samuel 7:11) “under Bethcar,” i.e. to the spot beneath, Bethcar being on a height. Here the stone Ebenezer was set up, to mark how far the rout of the Philistines extended.

    BETH DAGON 1. A town in the plain (shephelah) of Judah. 2. A town on the border of Asher ( Joshua 19:27). The name, implying the presence of a house to Dagon, the Philistine idol shows how this worship extended itself beyond the Philistine territory, probably during the time of the Philistine overrunning of the Israelites’ land W. of the Jordan from Michmash on the S. to Gilboa on the N., the latter retiring to Gad and Gilead ( 1 Samuel 13:5-7,17,18; 29:1; 31:1).

    BETH-DIBLATHAIM (“house of double cake”) of figs. Same as see ALMON-DIBLATHAIM ( Jeremiah 48:22).

    BETHEL (“house of God”). 1. Abram pitched his tent on a mountain E. of Bethel, abounding in pasture ( Genesis 12:8; 13:3). The city, near the place, then bore the Canaanite name Luz. Bethel is the name given by anticipation to the place; appropriately so, as Abram virtually made it the “house of God.” It was expressly so named by Jacob, when he had the vision of the heavenly ladder, on his way from his father at Beersheba to Harsh ( Genesis 28:19; 31:13). He set up a pillar, and anointed it with oil, to mark the place where God spoke with him. Bethel, the place, is expressly distinguished from Luz, the old Canaanite city. “Jacob called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of that city was called Luz at the first” ( Joshua 16:1,2). The naming of Bethel Jacob repeated more publicly on his return home,20 years later, with his family purified of idols, when God again appeared to him, and confirmed his change of name to Israel ( Genesis 35:1-15; 32:28). Bethel belonged by lot to Benjamin, but was falcon by Ephraim (Bethel being on his southern border) through the treachery of an inhabitant ( Judges 1:22-26). It was about 12 miles N. of Jerusalem. In Judges 20:26 translate for “the house of God” Bethel. During the civil war with Benjamin the tribes took the ark thither to consult God (compare 1 Samuel 10:3). It was one of Samuel’s towns of circuit for judging ( 1 Samuel 7:16). One of Jeroboam’s two sanctuaries for the calf worship, selected doubtless because of its religious associations (1 Kings 12--13). There the prophet from Judah foretold the overthrow of the calf altar by Josiah. Abijah, king of Judah, took Bethel from Jeroboam ( Chronicles 13:19), but it was soon recovered by Israel. Under Ahab the Baal worship at Samaria and Jezreel drew off attention from the calf worship at Bethel. This accounts for a school of prophets of Jehovah being there in Elijah’s time ( 2 Kings 2:2,3). The existence of “bears,” two, near the town, implies that Bethel was then less frequented ( 2 Kings 2:23-25). Under Jehu, who restored the calf worship, and Jeroboam II his great grandson, Bethel comes again into prominence ( 2 Kings 10:29).

    Bethel became the king’s chapel” (sanctuary) “the king’s court” (“house of the kingdom”) ( Amos 7:13; 3:14,15). More altars, besides the original one were erected. “Summer and winter houses” too, and “great houses” and “houses of ivory.” After the overthrow of Israel, the king of Assyria sent one of the Israelite priests to settle at Bethel, and teach the new settlers from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, “the manner of the god of the land,” and “how they should fear Jehovah” ( 2 Kings 17:27,28). Josiah, as foretold, defiled the altar with dead men’s bones, but disturbed not the sepulchre of the prophet of Judab when he discerned its title. It was ordered by God that the votaries of the calf worship at Bethel never dared to violate the sepulchre and title of the prophet who denounced their idol. The worship of Jehovah and of the calves had been all along strangely blended [see BETHAVEN ]. Among those returning from captivity were men of Bethel ( Ezra 2:28; Nehemiah 7:32; 11:31.)

    The ruins, covering three or four acres, still bear a like name, Beitin, on a low bill, between two wadies, which unite in the main valley of es- Suweinit, toward the S.E. Bethel still abounds in stones such as Jacob used for his pillow and afterward for a sanctuary. On the round mount S.E. of Bethel. Abram doubtless built the altar, and afterwards stood with Lot when giving him his choice of the land ( Genesis 12:7; 13:10). E. of this mount stands the ruin Tel er Rijmah, “the mound of the heap,” answering to Ai or Hai. Ritter makes Medinet Gai answer to Ai. 2. A town in southern Judah ( Joshua 12:16; 1 Samuel 30:27). Bethel in Joshua 19:4 answers to Chesil in Joshua 15:30. Bethuel, Chronicles 4:30. Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho under the curse ( 1 Kings 16:34).

    BETHEMEK Joshua 19:27. On the border of Asher, S. of the valley of Jiphthahel.

    BETHER Song of Solomon 2:17. Perhaps Bithron, separated from the main part of Palestine by Jordan ( 2 Samuel 2:29), a ravine district, through “all” of which Abner passed, on the N. of the Jabbok, between the Jordan and Mahanaim. It means a cutting. Spiritually “the mountains of Bether” mean mountains of division (margin), or mountains intersected with deep valleys, separating the bride from the heavenly Bridegroom.

    BETHESDA (“house of mercy”). A water reservoir, or swimming pool (as John 5:2, kolumbeethra , means), with five porches, or colonnades, close to the sheep gate ( Nehemiah 3:1) in Jerusalem. The porches accommodated those waiting for the troubling of the waters. John 5:4, as to the angel troubling the water, is omitted in the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts, but is found in the Alexandrinus, and John 5:7 favors it. The angels, in a way unknown to us, doubtless act as God’s ministers in the world of nature. Many curative agencies are directed by them ( <19A404> Psalm 104:4).

    God maketh His angelic messengers the directing powers, acting by the winds and flaming lightning. The angelic actings, limited and fitful, attested at that time that God was visiting His people, throwing into the brighter prominence at the same time the actings of the divine Son (compare Hebrews 1), who healed not merely one exceptionally but all who came to Him, whatever might be their disease, and instantaneously. Now Birket Israil, within the walls, close by Stephen’s gate, under the N.E. wall of the Haram area. Eusebius, in the 3rd century, describes it as consisting of two pools and named Bezatha, answering to the N.E. suburb Bezetha in the gospel times. Robinson suggested that “the pool of the Virgin” may answer to “the pool of Bethesda,” “the king’s pool” in Nehemiah. Ganneau identifies with the church of Anne, mother of Mary, Beit Hanna, really = Bethesda, “house of grace.”

    BETHEZEL (“house of firmness”). Situated probably in the shephelah or low hilly land of Judah, near Zaanan or Zenan ( Joshua 15:37). Though Bethezel means the house on the side, i.e. near Zaanan, it got no comfort from Zaanan’s inhabitants in its mourning ( Micah 1:11). There was an Azal near Jerusalem ( Zechariah 14:5) [see ZAANAN ].

    BETHGADER A place ( Joshua 12:13, Geder), 1 Chronicles 2:51, occupied by Caleb’s descendants.

    BETHGAMUL (“house of the weaned,” elsewhere used of the camel). A town of Moab, in the mishor or downs E. of Jordan ( Jeremiah 48:23,21). Probably now Um el Jemal, “mother of a camel,” one of the heretofore deserted cities of the Hauran [see BASHAN ]. A good sample of an unwalled town, with large open spaces and broad streets, one 150 ft. wide, the houses of stone, the finest E. of Jordan.

    BETHHACCEREM (“house of the vineyard”) ( Jeremiah 6:1). S. of Jerusalem, near Tekoa, on an eminence suitable for a fire signal. The ruler of the region round Bethhaccerem helped Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 3:14) in rebuilding the Jerusalem wall. The so-called Frank mountain (Herodium) probably now corresponds to it. Herod’s residence is supposed to have been here; its nearness to Bethlehem, the scene of his massacre of the innocents, well accords with this.

    BETH-HARAN A fenced city, E. of Jordan, built by the Gadites ( Numbers 32:36). The same as Beth-aram ( Joshua 13:27).

    BETH-HOGLAH (“house of partridge”) ( Joshua 15:6; 18:19,21). In Benjamin, on the border of Judah. The Ain Hajla, “fount of Hoglah,” on the road from Jericho, near the Jordan, marks the site.

    BETHHORON (“house of caverns”). Two towns, the upper and the nether, separated half an hour’s journey; now Beitur et tahta and Beitur el foka. On the road from Gibeon (now el Jib) to Azekah and the Philistine plain ( Joshua 10:10,11; 16:3,5; 18:13,14), on the boundary between Benjamin and Ephraim, but counted to the latter and given to the Kohathites ( Joshua 21:22). Sherah, a granddaughter or descendant of Ephraim, built (i.e. enlarged and fortified) both the upper and nether Bethhoron, and was of the family whence sprang Joshua ( 1 Chronicles 7:24,27). [See SHERAH and see UZZEN-SHERAH .] Here Joshua conquered the five kings of the Amorites. On the mountain S. of the nether village (Ajalon) over which the sun stood still there remains still the name Yalo. From Gibeon to upper Bethhoron is a distance of four miles, partly descent, but mainly ascent; hence it is called the “going up” to Bethhoron ( Joshua 10:10,11), but in the second stage of Joshua’s pursuit it is the “going down to Bethhoron,” the descent beginning from the upper village toward the lower one. This has been for ages the road of communication for heavy baggage between Jerusalem and the Philistine sea coast; it goes W. to Gimzo (Jimzu) and Lydda (Ludd), where it parts into three, the N. to Capharsaba (Antipatris), the S. to Gaza, and the W. to Joppa (Jaffa). Hence, as the route is key to a large part of the country, Solomon fortified both villages ( 2 Chronicles 8:5). Still great foundation stones are visible.

    BETH-JESHIMOTH (“house of the wastes”). A town E. of Jordan in the “deserts” of Moab; last but one of the stations in Israel’s journeys in the wilderness ( Numbers 33:49). Originally belonging to Sihon’s kingdom; assigned to Reuben ( Joshua 12:3; 13:20); afterward it became “the glory” of Moab ( Ezekiel 25:9). According to Eusebius, ten miles S. from opposite Jericho, on the Dead Sea.

    BETHLEBAOTH (“house of lionesses”). A town in Simeon’s lot ( Joshua 19:6; 15:32) in the far S. of Judah. In 1 Chronicles 4:31BETH-BIREI.

    BETHLEHEM (“house of bread”), i.e. in a fertile region. Two hours journey, in a southward or rather southwesterly direction from Jerusalem, by the Jaffa gate. Existing at the time of Jacob’s return to Palestine; originally called Ephrath or Ephrath, i.e. fruitful ( Genesis 35:16,19; 48:7; <19D206> Psalm 132:6). Hur and Salma, Hur’s son, both have the title “father of Bethlehem” ( 1 Chronicles 2:51; 4:4). Hur is the father of Uri, father of Bezaleel ( 1 Chronicles 2:20; Exodus 31:2-11). Tradition made Jesse “a weaver of the veils of the sanctuary”; and as trades are hereditary in the E. he may have inherited the embroidering skill of his forefather whom Moses employed for the tabernacles being “filled with the spirit of God” ( Exodus 25:35). Hence appears the appropriateness of the allusions to the “weaver’s beam” in representing the spears of giants slain by David and his heroes. After the conquest of Canaan it bears the name Bethlehem Judah; distinguishing it from Bethlehem in Zebulun ( Joshua 19:15,16; now Beit-lahm, six miles W. of Nazareth). It was occupied once by a Philistine garrison, when David desired a draught from the well by the gate, so familiar to his childhood ( 2 Samuel 23:14,15; 1 Chronicles 11:15-19). The Levite Jonathan, son of Gershom, who became the Danites’ priest at their northern settlement, and the Levite’s concubine whose cruel death at Gibeah caused the destruction of Benjamin, came from Bethlehem ( Judges 17:7; 18:30; 19:9.) The connection of Bethlehem with Moab appears in the book of Ruth. Hence the undesigned propriety appears of David, Ruth’s descendant, choosing the king of Moab’s house at Mizpeh as the safest retreat for his parents, when he was outlawed by Saul ( Samuel 22:3,4). Bethlehem was fortified by Rehoboam ( 2 Chronicles 11:6). In Jeremiah’s time ( Jeremiah 41:17) the caravansary of Chimham near Bethlehem (see 2 Samuel 19:37-40) was the usual starting place for Egypt. The inn (kataluma ) mentioned in Luke 2 was a similar one, and possibly the same. At the return from Babylon, 123 “children of Bethlehem” accompanied Zerubbabel ( Ezra 2:21; Nehemiah 7:26).

    Bethlehem is called the “city of David” ( Luke 2:4), but the “town (Greek village) where David was” in John 7:42. Now Beitlahm, “the house of flesh.” Solomon’s pools and “gardens” ( Ecclesiastes 2:5) lay S. of Bethlehem. Thekoa, built (fortified)by Rehoboam, lay S.E., the place of Amos’ ( Amos 1:1) birth ( Amos 7:10-15). S.W. is the valley of Sennacherib’s overthrow. N.E. is the traditional scene of the angels’ vision to the shepherds; but the hills were more likely to have been the scene of the flocks being kept than the grain abounding valley. Dr. Clarke identified a well of pure water here with that which David thirsted for; but the traditional site is a group of three cisterns half a mile away on the other side of the wady on the N., and Robinson denies the existence of any well of living water in or near the town ( 2 Samuel 23:15-18). Bethlehem is now a village with one chief street, and population (wholly Christian) of 3,000. The slopes outside abound in figs, vines, almonds and olives. The Church of the Nativity at the N. side was originally built by the empress Helena over the Lord’s presumed birthplace; Justin Martyr in the 2nd century said that our Lord’s birth took place in a cave close to the village.

    Justinian erected a more sumptuous church, with gray limestone columns and a lofty roof of cedar wood; but the present roof is of English oak, presented by Edward IV. The grotto of the nativity is beneath a crypt, feet long, 11 broad, 9 high, hewn out of the rock and lined with marble. A rich altar is over the supposed site of the Savior’s birth, and a star of silver inlaid in white marble, with the inscription “Hie de virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est.” A manger too is there of white marble ( Luke 2:12).

    Jerome’s sepulchre is near; Bethlehem being where he lived for 30 years, and diligently studied the Hebrew Scriptures, to prepare the Vulgate translation.

    In Micah 5:2, “Thou Bethlehem Ephratah, (though) thou be little among the thousands of Judah, (yet) out of thee shall He come forth unto Me (that is) to be ruler in Israel” seems to contradict Matthew 2:6, “Thou art not the least among the princes of Juda.” Really, Matthew by independent inspiration unfolds further Micah’s prophecy. For “Ephratah,” now become obsolete, he substitutes” in the land of Jude”; furthermore he implies, “though thou art little in a worldly point of view, thou art the reverse of least among Jude’s princes, in the spiritual glory of being Messiah’s birthplace” ( 1 Corinthians 1:27,28). The low state of David’s line when Messiah was born is also implied in Micah ( Isaiah 53:2).

    BETH-MAACHAH 2 Samuel 20:14,15. [See MAACHAH and see MAACAH .] BETHMARCABOTH (“house of the chariots”). A town of Simeon, in the extreme S. of Judah ( Joshua 19:5; 1 Chronicles 4:31). Depots or stations of chariots were required in Solomon’s reign, when a regular trade in them was carried on with Egypt (t Kings 9:19). As Madmannah appears instead of Bethmarcaboth in the list Joshua 15:30,31, possibly Bethmarcaboth was substituted for Madmannah in Joshua 19:5, in Solomon’s times.

    BETHNIMRAH (“house of sweet water,” or “house of leopards” [see BETHABARA ]. A Gadite “fenced city” E. of Jordan, “in the valley” beside Betharan ( Numbers 32:3,36; Joshua 13:27). The Arabs calls the lower end of the wady Shoaib Nahr nimrin. The wady Shoaib (possibly the modern form of Hobab) discharges its waters into the Jordan near a ford above Jericho.

    By it tradition makes Israel to have descended to the Jordan. The Septuagint reads Bethanabra, almost identical with Bethabara. That this is the scene of John 1:28; Mark 1:5; Matthew 3:5, appears from there being abundant water, and its being near “the region round about Jordan,” theCICCAR of the Old Testament, the oasis of Jericho, accessible to “Jerusalem and all Judea.” But see for Conder’s viewBETHABARA.

    BETHPALET (“house of flight”). A town in the extreme S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:27; Nehemiah 11:26).

    BETHPAZZEZ A town of Issachar ( Joshua 19:21).

    BETHPEOR A sanctuary of Baal Poor, E. of Jordan, over against Jericho; in Reuben’s possession, Joshua 13:20. One of Israel’s last halting places is called “the valley over against Baal-peor” ( Deuteronomy 3:29; 4:46). Here Moses was buried ( Deuteronomy 34:6).

    BETHPHAGE (“house of unripe figs”): testifying the former fertility which no longer remains; a village on the mount of Olives, on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. Close to Bethany, E. of it, since Bethphage stands first in describing a journey from E. to W. The traditional site is above Bethany, between it and the mountain’s top. Schwarz places it W. of Bethany, on the S. shoulder of the mount, above Siloam. Here the colt for Jesus’ triumphal entry was found ( Matthew 21:1, etc.). The Talmud made Bethphage a district extending from Olivet to the Jerusalem walls. Others allege the sacrificial victims were kept there; this would give significance to its being the point whence the antitypical sacrifice proceeded to Jerusalem.

    BETHRAPHA ( 1 Chronicles 4:12.) Son of Eshton in the genealogy of Judah.

    BETHREHOB (“house of Rechob, or room”). A place near the valley containing the town Laish or Dan ( Judges 18:28). The modern Hunin, a fortress commanding the plain Huleh in which the city of Dan (Tell el Kady) was.

    One of Aram’s (Syria’s) little kingdoms, like Zobah, Maacah, Ishtob; hired by Ammon against David ( 2 Samuel 10:6,8). Shortened into Rechob ( Numbers 13:21). Being “far from Zidon,” it is distinct from the Rehob in Asher, which is not very far from Zidon. Hadadezer king of Zobah was son of Rehob (2 Samuel 8).

    BETHSAIDA (“house of fish”). A city of Galilee, W. of and close to the sea of Tiberias, in the land of Gennesareth ( Mark 6:45-53; John 6:16,17; 1:44; 12:21). Andrew, Peter, and Philip belonged to it, Near Capernaum and Chorazin ( Matthew 11:21; Luke 10:13). When Jesus fed the 5,000 on the N.E. of the lake, they entered into a boat to cross to Bethsaida ( Mark 6:45), while John says” they went over the sea toward Capernaum.” Being driven out of their course, Jesus came to them walking on the sea; they landed in Gennesaret and went to Capernaum; so that Bethsaida must have been near Capernaum. In Luke 9:10-17 another Bethsaida, at the scene of feeding the 5,000, is mentioned (though the Curetonian Syriac and later Sinaitic omit it), which must have been therefore N.E. of the lake; the same as Julias, called from the emperor’s daughter Julia. The miracle was wrought in a lonely “desert place,” on a rising ground at the back of the town, covered with much “green grass” ( Mark 6:39). In Mark 8:10-22 a Bethsaida on the E. side of the lake in Gaulonitis (now Jaulan) is alluded to; for Jesus passed by ship from Dalmanutha on the W. side “to the other side,” i.e. to the E. side. Thus, Caesarea Philippi is mentioned presently after, Bethsaida being on the road to it; and the mount of the transfiguration, part of the Hermon range, above the source of the Jordan ( Mark 9:2,3); the snow of Hermon suggested the image, “His raiment became white as snow.”

    BETHSHEAN Bethshan = house of quiet, now Beisan. A city of Manasseh ( Chronicles 7:29), though within Issachar’s boundary; 14 miles S. of the sea of Galilee,4 miles W. of and on the height over the Ghor or valley of the Jordan, connected with the great plain of Jezreel, Esdraelon ( Joshua 17:11). The Canaanites were not driven out thence ( Judges 1:27). One of Solomon’s commissariat districts was named from it, extending thence to Abel-meholah ( 1 Kings 4:12). Except its temporary subjection in his reign, it kept a kind of independence of Israel, holding close relations with the Phoenicians on the N. and the Philistines on the S. Hence the latter fastened Saul’s body to the wall of Bethshean, and put his armor in the house of Ashtaroth ( 1 Samuel 31:10,12). The men of Jabesh Gilead stole the bones of Saul and Jonathan and Saul’s other two sons from the wall in “the street” or open space before the gate of Bethshean ( Samuel 21:12.) In 1 Samuel 29:1 translate “the Israelites pitched (before the fatal battle at Gilboa), by THE fountain in Jezreel.” Close to Bethshean is the water of Ain Jalud, of which “the fountain is in Jezreel.”

    The abundant supply of water, and the level country favoring the use of chariots, were the secondary causes which enabled the Canaanites to keep hold of Bethshean against Israel. Robinson places Jabesh Gilead at Ed Deir; so the distance to Bethshean which “the valiant men of Jabesh Gilead” took “all night” to traverse was 20 miles. The ruins are of a pagan character, and occupy a space three miles in circumference.

    BETHSHEMESH (“house of the sun”). 1. A town on the N. boundary of Judah ( Joshua 15:10), itself low in situation. A “valley” of wheat fields is mentioned accordingly as nigh ( Samuel 6:13). Now Ain Shems, on the N.W. slopes of the mountains of Judah, “a low plateau at the junction of two fine plains” (Robinson), two miles from the Philistian plain, and seven from Ekron. From the latter was the road to Bethshemesh, on which the Philistines sent back the ark to Israel after its fatal stay among them. In the field of Joshua the Bethshemite was “the great Abel” (the Septuagint reads Aben “stone”; others retaining Abel explain it “the stone of mourning,” compare 1 Samuel 6:19) whereon the ark was set ( 1 Samuel 6:18). Providence fitly arranged that Bethshemesh being a priests’ city ( Joshua 21:16; 1 Chronicles 1:59) had Levites and priests ready on the spot duly to receive the ark and sacrifice before it. Curiosity tempted many to stare at (not necessarily “into”) the ark beneath the cover; compare Numbers 4:20; 2 Samuel 6:6,7. So God smote in the proportion of 50 out of the 1,000, i.e. one twentieth instead of one tenth of the population, as sometimes; seventy men in all, out of the population of Bethshemesh, which amounted to 1,400 in this view. The numbers in the English Bible are evidently a mistake ( Samuel 6:19). Josephus (Ant. 6:4) makes it only 70. It was one of Solomon’s commissariat districts under Bendekar (margin 1 Kings 4:9).

    Here Joash king of Israel encountered and made prisoner of Amaziah of Judah ( 2 Kings 14:11-13; 2 Chronicles 25:21-23). In Ahaz’ reign the Philistines occupied Bethshemesh ( 2 Chronicles 28:18.) Ir-shemesh was the older name (compare Joshua 15:10; 19:41,43; 1 Kings 4:9).

    Harcheres, “mount of the Sun.” was another name for Bethshemesh ( Judges 1:35.) 2. A city on Issachar’s border ( Joshua 19:22). 3. A fenced city of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:38; Judges 1:33). The inhabitants were not expelled, but became Israel’s tributaries. 4. An idol sanctuary in Egypt ( Jeremiah 43:13), the Greek Heliopolis, Egyptian On, E. of the Nile, a few miles N. of Memphis ( Genesis 41:45). The statue in honor of the sun rose to 60 cubits, the base was 10, above there was a miter a thousand pounds weight. These many towns of this name show how widespread the worship of the sun had been.

    BETHSHITTA (“house of the acacia”): whither the Midianites fled after their overthrow by Gideon ( Judges 7:22). Near to the Jordan in Zererath, probably Zeredath or Zartan.

    BETHTAPPUA (“house of the citron or apple”). A town in the hilly part of Judah ( Joshua 15:46,53; 1 Chronicles 2:43, where Tappuah is the son of Hebron). Now Teffuh, five miles W. of Hebron. The terraces still are there, and olives, vines, and grain, but no apples or citrons.

    BETHUEL ”The Syrian” (Aramite). 1. Nahor’s son by Miclah, nephew of Abraham, father of Rebekah ( Genesis 22:22,23; 24:15,24,47; 28:2). Bethuel appears personally only in Genesis 24:50, and then after his son. Blunt (Undesigned Coincidences) notices Bethuel’s consistent insignificance in the whole affair of his daughter’s marriage. When Abraham’s servant at the well asks Rebekah, “Is there room in thy father’s house for us?” she “ran and told them of her mother’s house” (not of her father’s, as Rachel did when Jacob introduced himself: Genesis 29:12). Laban her brother ran out and invited him in, not Bethuel, the natural person to do it. The servant makes presents of jewels and precious things to Rebekah, “and to her brother, and to her mother,” but not to Bethuel. The brother and mother propose her abiding a few days before going. Finally, in the next generation, Rebekah’s son, in inquiring after his kindred, asks, “Know ye Laban, the son of Nahor?” the father’s name being omitted and the grandfather’s substituted ( Genesis 29:5). The consistency of omission is too marked to be accidental, and yet such as a forger would never have devised. Bethuel was probably incapable, from age or imbecility, of managing his own affairs; but see LABAN . 2. A place [see BETHUL ] ( 1 Chronicles 4:30).

    BETHUL A town of Simeon in the S. ( Joshua 19:4) answering toCHESIL in Joshua 15:30; also the southern Bethel ( Joshua 12:16), not the northern Bethel.

    BETHZUR (“house of rock”). One of Judaea’s strongest fortresses in the mountains of Judah, between Halhul and Gedor ( Joshua 15:58). Maon, sprung from Hebron, was the father, i.e. founder, of Bethzur. It was fortified by Rehoboam as a stronghold of his new kingdom ( 2 Chronicles 11:7).

    The people of Bethzur helped Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 3:16) to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. A district was attached to it, half of which Nehemiah, son of Azbuk, was ruler over. Now Beitsur, commanding the road from Beersheba and Hebron, the main way to Jerusalem from the S. The adjoining spring traditions made the scene of the eunuch’s baptism by Philip. The fact of its not being near the road to Gaza makes this doubtful ( Acts 8:26,36).

    BETONIM (“pistachio nuts”). A town on the N. boundary of Gad ( Joshua 13:26).

    BEULAH (“married”). Israel’s future name when restored to her divine Husband, Protector, and Lord ( Isaiah 62:4; compare Isaiah 54:4-6).

    BAZAI. Ezra 2:17; Nehemiah 7:23; 10:18.

    BEZALEEL (“under the shadow [i.e. protection] of God”). 1. Son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, filled with the Spirit of God to work all manner of workmanship in metal, wood, and stone for the tabernacle ( Exodus 31:1-6), as Aholiab wrought in textile fabrics.

    Bezaleel was the principal, Aholiab the subordinate ( Exodus 36:1,2; 38:22; 37; 38). Hur was the offspring of Caleb and Ephrath, and one of his descendants was Salmon, or Salmah, figuratively “father of Bethlehem,” actually father of Boaz, and progenitor of the royal house of David of Bethlehem ( 1 Chronicles 2:19,50,51,54; Ruth 4:20,21). 2. Son of Pahath Moab, who took a foreign wife ( Ezra 10:30).

    BEZEK 1. see ADONI-BEZEK ’S residence, in Judah’s lot ( Judges 1:3-5). Now Beit-zata, S. of Jerusalem, or else Bezik on the road from Nablus to Beisan. 2. Where Saul numbered the national forces before relieving Jabesh Gilead from Ammon ( 1 Samuel 11:8); somewhere near the Jordan valley, within marching distance from Jabesh, 17 miles from Shechem, on the road to Bethshan.

    BOZER (“in the wilderness”). 1. A Reubenite city with suburbs, in the mishor or downs. One of the three cities of refuge E. of Jordan, allotted to the family of Merari ( Deuteronomy 4:43; Joshua 20:8; 21:36). 2. 1 Chronicles 7:37.

    BIBLE THE Book by preeminence. “Next to God the Word,” says Fuller (Pisgah Sight), “I love the word of God. I profess myself a pure leveler, desiring that all human conceits, though built on specious bottoms, may be laid flat, if opposing the written word.” The term “Bible,” though dating only from the 5th century in its sacred and exclusive use, is virtually expressed in the designations occurring in itself: “The Scripture” ( John 10:35; 20:9; Romans 4:3; 2 Peter 1:20); “the Book” ( Psalm 40:7, cepher ); “the Scripture (kithab ) of truth” ( Daniel 10:21). The books composing it are not isolated, but form together an organic unity, one whole made up of mutually related parts, progressively advancing to the one grand end, the restoration of the fallen creature through the love and righteousness of our God. The Lord comprehends and stamps with divine sanction the whole Old Testament, under the threefold division recognized by the Jews, “the law, the prophets, and the psalms” (including all the holy writings not included in the other two, namely, the Hagiographa) ( Luke 24:44).

    The Torah, or law, is mentioned as a book (including the five books of the Pentateuch) ( Joshua 1:8; 8:31-35; 24:26). The Hebrew names of the five books of the Pentateuch are taken from the initial words of the several books. The names we use are from the Greek Septuagint: “Genesis” (creation) answering to bereeshit (“in the beginning”). And so the rest:

    Exodus (Israel’s departure from Egypt) answering to weeleh shemot (“and these are the names”), etc. “The prophets” comprise the former (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings), and the latter, comprising the greater (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) and the less (the twelve minor prophets). The including of histories among the prophets arose from the fact that they were the inspired productions of such prophetic men as Samuel, Gad the seer of David ( 1 Chronicles 29:29), Nathan, Ahijah, and Iddo ( 2 Chronicles 9:29). The schools of the prophets trained such men as Isaiah for the office of historian ( 2 Chronicles 26:22; 32:32).

    Daniel is not included among the prophets, because he did not hold the prophet’s office among the chosen people. The Hagio-grapha, or “sacred writings” (kethubim , from kathab , to write), include (1) Psalms, Proverbs, Job; (2) The Song of Solomon of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther; (3) Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles. The first three, from their initial letters, were called meth , “truth.” The second five were called “the five rolls” (chamesh megillot ), written for use in the synagogue on special feasts. Ecclesiastes (qoheleth ) means “The Preacher.” Chronicles bear the Hebrew name meaning “words of days,” i.e. records, the Greek paraleipomena , “things omitted” in Kings and here supplied as a supplement. The apocryphal books are never found in the Hebrew canon, and exist only in the Greek Septuagint.

    The Second Epistle of Peter ( 2 Peter 3:16) shows that the epistles of Paul were recognized as part of “Scripture” at the time when Peter wrote: “in all his epistles are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned ... wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures;” compare Peter 3:2: “be mindful of the words ... spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Savior.” Justin Martyr (Apology 1:66) states that “the memoirs of the apostles” were read side by side with the scriptures of the prophets. Clement of Alexandria speaks of the New Testament making up with the Old Testament “one knowledge.” Tertullian terms them together “the whole instrument of both Testaments,” “the complete-together Scripture.” The Syrian version (Peshitto) at the close of the 2nd century contains the New Testament with the Old Testament.

    The eastern churches set the catholic epistles before the Pauline. The quotations, Luke 20:37, “at the bush,” i.e. the section concerning the flaming bush; Romans 11:2 margin, “in Elias,” i.e. in the passage concerning Elias; Acts 8:32, “the place of the Scripture”; show that some divisions of the Old Testament existed, with titles from their subjects.

    A cycle of lessons is implied in Luke 4:17; Acts 13:15; 15:21; Corinthians 3:14. The law was divided into 54 Parshioth or sections; a section for each sabbath in the year. Shorter Parshioth also existed, subdivided into open sections (Petuchoth) like our paragraphs, marking a change of subjects; and shut ones (Satumoth) or less divisions. The divisions of the prophets were called Haphtaroth, from patar , to “dismiss”; as Missa or “Mass” comes from the dismissal of the congregation on its completion. Verses (Pecuqiym) were marked by the Masoretic editors of the text in the 9th century A.D. Stephens adopted them in his Vulgate, 1555; the English translation in the Geneva Bible of 1560. Our arrangement has adopted Cardinal Hugo’s chapters and the Masoretic verses. Tartan, in the 2nd century, formed the first harmony of the four Gospels, called the Diatessaron. The elder Stephens, in a riding journey from Paris to Lyons, subdivided the New Testament chapters into verses, and the first edition with this division appeared in 1551. In reading the Bible we should remember these divisions have no authority; and where they break the sense, or mar the flow of thought, they are to be disregarded.

    The Four Gospels stand first in the New Testament, setting forth the Lord Jesus’ ministry in the flesh; the Acts, His ministry in the Spirit, His church’s (the temple of the Holy Spirit) foundation and extension, internally and externally. To the histories succeed the epistles of Paul the apostle of faith, Peter of hope, and John of love, unfolding the gospel facts and truths more in detail; just as in the Old Testament the histories come first, then the inspired teachings based on and intimately connected with them, in Psalms, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon of Solomon, and the Prophets. Finally comes Revelation, answering to Daniel, the prophetic Apocalypse of the Old Testament The first three Gospels are called “the synoptical Gospels,” giving a synopsis of Christ’s ministry in Galilee; John’s gives His ministry in Judea. They dwell more on Christ’s Spirit-filled humanity; He on His Divinity, from everlasting one with God.

    The New Testament 27 books, emanating from nine different persons, and the Old Testament 39 books, separated from each other by distances of time, space, and character, yet form a marvelously intertwined unity, tending all to the one end. Internal and external evidence disprove the possibility of their being written by several authors combining to palm an imposture on the world. How are we to account for the mutual connection and profound unity? The only answer that meets the exigencies of the case is, the word of God “came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” ( 2 Peter 1:21).

    Rationalists try to disintegrate the parts of the sacred volume, but the more they do so the greater is the need for believing in one divine superintending Mind to account for a unity which palpably exists, though the writers themselves did not design it (see 1 Peter 1:10-12). If the parts of a watch be disconnected, it needs only for the maker to put them together again, to show their unity of design. However widely apart the makers of the several parts may live, the master mind used the makers as his workmen, and contrived and combined the parts into one. Infinite intelligence alone could combine into one the works of men of so various minds and of ages so. wide apart as the sacred writers, beginning with Moses the legislator and ending with John the divine. Moreover, anyone book cannot be taken from the canon without breaking a link in the complete chain. Inspiration was needed alike in producing each sacred book, and in guiding the church (while it was still possessing the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit) which to omit of even inspired books.

    Whatever was not necessary for all ages, though needed for the church’s good for a time, were omitted (see Colossians 4:16).

    The credibility of the Old Testament is established by establishing that of the New Testament, for the Lord quotes the Old Testament in its threefold parts, “the law, the prophets, and the psalms,” as the word of God. The sacred see CANON of the Old Testament was completed under Ezra. We find Daniel shortly before having in his hands the book of Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 9:2). Paul says that one grand preeminence of the Jews was that unto them were committed the oracles of God ( Romans 3:2), and they are never accused of unfaithfulness in their trust. The monotheism of the Old Testament is the very opposite to the tendencies of Gentile and Israelite alike to idolatry. Again the Bible inverts the relative importance of events as men commonly regard them. Its sole aim is the honor of God, contrary to man’s inclination. The great events of ordinary history are untouched, except in so far as flier bear upon the kingdom of God. Yet God is throughout represented as ruling in the kingdoms of men, Gentiles as well as Jews ( Daniel 4:17). Pharaoh, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus while doing their own will, appear in the Bible as God’s instruments, overruled to carry out His purposes. It is no Jewish vanity which causes the Bible to be silent about most of the great political events of the world and to dwell so much on Israel; for what the Bible records redounds to Israel’s shame as an apostate people, and its allusions to surrounding nations are often to record their being made God’s instruments to chastise themselves. Yet it is to the Bible alone we have owed for ages almost all that is most certain of the history of Moab (since confirmed by the Moabite stone), of the Amorites, and even of Nineveh and Babylon. The two latter were entombed for thousands of years until lately, and the discovery of their monuments has remarkably confirmed holy writ. The analogies of nature and of history to Bible truths powerfully confirm its emanation from the same God. The gradual development of the divine plan of redemption answers to the gradual development of God’s design in the formation and in the moral government of the world. The historic development of the Bible scheme corresponds to God’s working out His plans in the world by moral agents. And His revealing His will “in many portions” (polumeros , Hebrews 1:1, one prophet or inspired person or writer receiving one portion of revelation, another another: to Noah the quarter of the world where Messiah should appear, to Abraham the nation, to Jacob the tribe, to David and Isaiah the family, to Micah the town, to Daniel the time), and “in divers manners,” corresponds to tits sending from time to time a Bacon, Newton, Shakespeare, etc., into the social world for the advancement of mankind in science and civilization.

    As to natural science, the Bible is so framed in language as to adapt itself (on being closely examined) to advancing intelligence, according as the ruder theories are superseded by the more accurate. The language being for all classes, not merely the so-called scientific, is phenomenal; it speaks by appearances, which even philosophers must often do, as in the phrase “sunrise,” “sunset.” The tongue through which the Old Testament revelation of God speaks is the Hebrew, that of the chosen nation, except parts of Ezra and Daniel and Jeremiah. The tongue of the New Testament is the Greek, best adapted of all languages for expressing most accurately the nicest and most delicate shades of thought and doctrine.

    A very remarkable proof of the Divinity of the New Testament is the marked difference between it and the writings of even the apostolic fathers that immediately succeeded: Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and Polycarp.

    Daille remarked, “God has allowed a fosse to be drawn by human weakness round the sacred canon, to keep it from invasion.”

    How remarkably too God kept the Jews, our librarians of the Old Testament, from altering, to meet their prejudices, the sacred books that record their sins and national disgrace. Though they hated and killed the prophets, they never mutilated their prophecies. King Jehoiakim alone cut a roll of Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 36:23,24), and burnt it in the fire. But the act is recorded as one of exceptional profanity; and immediately the same words were written again with added woes, to show man’s impotence against the word of God. Also for 14 centuries the church, though in various sections of it falling into various unscriptural heresies, has never added to, nor taken from, the New Testament canon. How natural it, would have been for the church of Rome to have added something favorable to her pretensions. She has burnt saints, with their writings hung round their neck. She has shown her will to add to Scripture itself adding the Apocrypha to the Old Testament just where her addition cannot prejudice the cause of truth fatally, for the Jews witness against her in this.

    But in the New Testament, where she might have done mischief, she has been divinely constrained to maintain, without addition or subtraction, the canon which testifies against herself.

    The exact adaptation of the Bible to man’s complex being, body, soul, and spirit -- reason, emotion, conscience -- and to outward nature in its varied aspects, confirms its divine authorship. It stands in marked contrast to all Gentile cosmogonies, in its majestic simplicity and evidently unmythical character. Of all other nations the oldest writings are poems, and they abound in poetic inventions. In the Bible, on the contrary, poetry is least found in the earliest books. Not until the broad midday light of David’s reign does the first collection of poems, namely, his psalms, appear. The pagan ancient sacred stories, as those of the Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, present scenes of the unseen world merely gratifying idle curiosity and a prurient imagination. The same is true of the Koran. The Bible, with its old law of the Ten Commandments, gives the most perfect manifestation of the divine character and requirements from man, and this at a time when the human legislator, Moses, had just come from a nation sunk in the most debasing pollution and superstition.

    Another striking fact is, Israel has left scarcely any remains of art, and certainly nothing comparable to the masterpieces of the pagan; but it has handed down the Book which infinitely excels all that the genius of the whole world beside has produced. Pantheism, and the worship of nature as an abstract entity, lay at the root of all pagan idolatries. The Bible alone reveals the holy, just, loving, omnipotent, omniscient, personal, one and only God. Whenever their gods became personal, they ceased to be ONE; they were mere personifications of various powers of nature; fate, not the will of God, ruled all. But the word reflects the moral character of the perfectly holy God, and requires His worshippers to be what He is, holy.

    That such a book should originate among a small and rather perverse people, surrounded by idolatrous nations, and that it should receive additions in successive ages of the same people, harmonizing marvelously with the earliest books, in spite of frequent apostasy in the nation, can only be accounted for by believing its authorship to be divine. The Koran’s moral precepts are at variance with its picture of the sensual heaven which awaits its votaries. The pagan mythologies in their indecent histories of gods counteracted their moral precepts. The morality of the Bible rests on the infinitely pure attributes of the God of the Bible. The Bible faithfully portrays man’s universal corruption, its origin, and at the same time the sure hope of redemption, thus meeting fully man’s profoundest wants. It gives peace to the conscience, without lowering the holy strictness of God’s justice, but, on the contrary, in Christ “magnifying the law and making it honorable.” There is an entire correspondence between the gospel way of salvation and the soul’s deep conviction of the need of atonement for guilt. The lovely character of Christ in the Bible, the perfect manhood and Godhead combined, above whatever uninspired man conceived not to say attained, the adaptation of the Bible to man’s varied distresses (which occupy the larger part of it), and to his circumstances in all times and places, the completeness wherewith the end corresponds to the beginning, the close presenting before us man enjoying God’s presence and marriage-like union with Him, no curse, no sin, no pain, no death, and the tree of life and waters of life which the beginning represented him as possessing before the fall, all assure us that “the words of the Lord are pure, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times” ( Psalm 12:6).

    There is a break in revelation now, just as there was for 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, after the outburst of them in connection with the rearing of the second temple. John the Baptist, at the close of the 400 years, ushered in the brightest light yet manifested. This period of New Testament revelations lasted for one century. Then have followed the 18 centuries which walk in the light of that last manifestation.

    The silence has been longer than before, but it will be succeeded by a more glorious revelation than all the past. The former 400 years’ break directed the world’s undivided attention to Messiah, so that His identity could not be mistaken. The Jews scattered providentially over the world by the captivity, and everywhere bearing the Old Testament, matured the universal expectancy during the silent centuries. Their present longer dispersion, and the diffusion of the whole Bible in all lands, are preparing for Messiah’s manifestation in glory.

    Finally, the miracles wrought in connection with the Bible, and attested on infallible proofs, and the prophecies of the Old Testament (proved to have been given when they profess to be, by the fact that the Jews who oppose Christianity attest their age, and fulfilled minutely in the New Testament) establish the inspired truth of the Bible. Bad men could never have written so holy a book, and good men would never have written it if it were an imposture. Its sobriety and freedom from fanaticism and mysticism preclude the idea of its being the production of self deceiving fanatics. The national prejudices of all the New Testament writers, as Jews, were in behalf of an immediate temporal kingdom and an outwardly reigning Messiah, the very reverse of what His actual manifestation was. Nothing but superhuman inspiration could have turned them to write so spiritually and so at variance with all their early prejudices.

    Reader, if you want to know the divinity of the Bible, experimentally taste and feed upon it. The best defense of the Bible is the Bible itself. The best commentary on the Bible is the Bible itself. “Diamonds alone cut diamonds” (Fuller). “Have thou the palate of faith, that thou mayest taste the honey of God” (Augustine).

    BICHRI Youthful; else firstborn; else son of Becher. (Sheba: 2 Samuel 20:1.)

    BIDKAR Jehu’s captain, and formerly his fellow officer ( 2 Kings 9:25). He executed the concluding doom pronounced by Jehovah on Ahab’s son’s son ( 1 Kings 21:29), Jehoram, by casting his body into Naboth’s plat, after Jehu had pierced him with an arrow.

    BIGTHA Esther 1:10.

    BIGTHAN Persian and Sanskrit, Bagadana, “gift of fortune” ( Esther 2:21; 6:2). “Wroth,” because degraded at the same time as Queen Vashti, and a keeper of the door, Bigthan with Teresh “sought to lay bands on Ahasuerus.” Detected by Mordecai, he was hanged. The Septuagint states that the conspirators’ cause of wrath was Mordecai’s advancement; but Mordecai was not advanced until subsequently, in reward for detecting the conspiracy (Esther 6).

    BIGVAI 1. 2056 ( Ezra 2:14), 2067 ( Nehemiah 7:19), children of Bigvai returned from Babylon with Zerubbabel; 72 subsequently with Ezra ( Ezra 8:14). The different circumstances under which the two registers were made account for the variation of numbers: Ezra’s in Babylon, Nehemiah’s in Judaea, after the walls had been built. Many, who intended to return and were so put down in the former list, were prevented by death, or changed their minds and stayed. Many, not entered in it, afterward joined the caravan when starting. The variation is a plain proof of the absence of collusion between the two writers. 2. A chief of Zerubbabel’s expedition, who subsequently signed the covenant ( Ezra 2:2; Nehemiah 7:7).

    BILDAD Benledad = son of contention, disputant. Second of Job’s ( Job 2:11; 8; 18; 25) three friends. The Shuhite, i.e. sprung from Shuah, Abraham’s son by Keturah, who was sent eastward by Abraham and founded an Arab tribe ( Genesis 25:2) Syccea, in Arabia Deserta, E. of Batanea, mentioned by Ptolemy, is identified by Gesenius with the Shuhite country. Bildad is less violent than Zophar, though more so than Eliphaz.

    BILEAM A town in the western half of Manasseh, given to the Kohathites ( Chronicles 6:70).IBLEAM is the same name by transposition of letters ( Joshua 17:11);GATH-RIMMON in Joshua 21:24.

    BILGAH 1. 1 Chronicles 24:14. 2. Nehemiah 12:5,18; 10:8.

    BILHAH 1. Rachel’s handmaid ( Genesis 29:29). Rachel having no children gave Bilhah to her husband Jacob, who by the latter had two sons, Dan and Naphtali ( Genesis 30:1-8; 35:25; 46:25; 1 Chronicles 7:13). Reuben, Jacob’s firstborn, defiled her, and was therefore deprived of the birthright, which was given to the sons of Joseph ( Genesis 35:22; 49:4; 1 Chronicles 5:1). Blunt says, so vivid was the desire for the promised Redeemer, that “the wife provoked, instead of resenting, the faithlessness of her husband, the mother taught her own child deceit, daughters deliberately worked their own and their fathers’ shame, and the daughterin- law courted the incestuous bed, and to be childless was a by-word” ( Genesis 16:2; 30:3,9; 25:23; 27:13; 19:31; 38:14). 2. A Simeonite town ( 1 Chronicles 4:29), named also Baalah or Balah ( Joshua 19:3).

    BILHAN 1. Akin in etymology to Bilhah ( Genesis 36:27; 1 Chronicles 1:42). 2. 1 Chronicles 7:10. Sprung from Benjamin’s son Bela; for Ehud, Bilhan’s son, was sprung from Bela ( 1 Chronicles 8:3,6).

    BILSHAN Ezra 2:2; Nehemiah 7:7.

    BIMHAL 1 Chronicles 7:33.

    BINEA 1 Chronicles 8:37; 9:43.

    BINNUI 1. Ezra 8:33. 2. Ezra 10:30. 3. Ezra 10:38. 4. Nehemiah 3:24; 10:9; 12:8.

    BIRD Hebrew ‘oph , “a flying thing,” in general; including even winged insects, though mostly used of birds. Ravenous birds are expressed by the Hebrew ‘ait ; Greek aetos , one that pounces on prey; smaller birds, as the sparrow, are called in Hebrew tsippor , the “tsip” imitating its note.

    Snaring of birds by net and gin is the image used for the plots of bad men and Satan, to catch souls to their ruin ( Psalm 91:3; 124:7; Jeremiah 5:26,27). The “cage full of birds” is the trap with decoy birds to lure others, upon whom then the trap door was dropped. It is also the image for the awfully sudden and unexpected surprise with which Christ’s second coming shall overtake the worldly in the midst of carnal security ( Luke 21:35).

    The lake of Galilee still abounds in wild duck. The swan and goose (supposed to be meant in 1 Kings 4:23) also are found. Snaring and shooting with arrows were the usual modes of taking them. The youth seduced by the strange woman’s fair speech, “till a dart strike through his liver,” is like such a bird “hasting to the snare and not knowing that it is for his life” ( Proverbs 7:23).

    The Lord commanded Israel ( Deuteronomy 22:6), “If a bird’s nest chance to be before thee, ... whether they be young ones or eggs, ... thou shalt not take the dam with the young.” By this the extirpation of the species was prevented. God cares for even sparrows ( Matthew 10:29), much more for His children. He would have us imitate His tenderness even toward the inarticulate brutes beneath us. Birds kept in cages for pleasure are not mentioned in Scripture; except there be an allusion to them in Job 41:5, “Wilt thou play with him as with a bird?” Singing birds were rarer in Palestine than with us, still there were some ( <19A412> Psalm 104:12; Ecclesiastes 12:4). Birds, as the turtle dove and pigeon, were allowed to be substituted in sacrifices for more costly animals by the poor ( Leviticus 1:14-17; 12:2,6,8), but they were not to be divided as other victims ( Genesis 15:10). The Virgin Mary’s poverty appears from her presenting the offering of the poor ( Luke 2:24). The abundance of birds in Palestine appears from their devouring the seed sown by the wayside in the parable of the sower ( Matthew 13:4). Psalm 84:3 is understood as if sparrows and swallows made their nests in the two “altars” (observe the plural) of the tabernacle. But such a position for a birds’ nest would be neither enviable nor safe, indeed scarcely possible in the altar of incense in the holy place before the veil.

    Rather there is an abbreviated comparison: what the house is to the sparrow, and what her nest is to the swallow, that Thine altars, are to my soul, and therefore my soul longs for them. Like a little bird, which after a long defenseless wandering has found a house (compare Matthew 8:20) in which it may dwell securely, a nest to which it may entrust confidently its dearest possession, its young, thus have I a homeless wanderer found in Thy house the true nest for the soul; otherwise I should have been like the lonely bird on the housetop (compare <19A206> Psalm 102:6; 74:19). Our two great needs are: (I) atonement for guilt, seas to be at peace with God; (II) access to God, and acceptance for our imperfect prayers. The altar of burnt offering outside (I) represented in type the former, namely, Christ’s atonement for all guilt by His precious b1ood shedding; the altar of incense inside (II) typified the latter, our prayers being perfumed by our great Intercessor’s merits, and so becoming a sweet-smelling savor before God (compare <19E102> Psalm 141:2; Revelation 8:3,4).

    The bird killed over running water, and the second bird dipped into the mixed water and blood and set free, for cleansing the leper, symbolize Christ slain to atone for our guilt, and living again and forever by His resurrection for our justification (Leviticus 14). As the “blood” represents our reconciliation to God by the atonement so the “water” our cleansing ( John 19:34; 1 John 5:6).

    In Isaiah 31:5 Jehovah’s solicitous, affectionate care for His people is illustrated. “As birds flying (i.e. parent birds hovering over their young to defend them from the vulture), so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem.”

    Compare the beautiful image of the parent eagle teaching the young the first flight ( Deuteronomy 32:1; Psalm 91:4). Men, like birds, are weak, soon ensnared, prone to wander from their true rest ( Proverbs 7:23; 27:8; Lamentations 3:52). Under Christ, in the gospel church. they find their rest lodging under the overshadowing branches of the true Vine ( Ezekiel 17:23; Matthew 13:32) a better protection than that of the world power ( Ezekiel 31:6; Daniel 2:38). Jeremiah 12:9: “Mine heritage is unto Me as a speckled bird,” i.e., the Jewish nation had blended paganism with the altogether diverse Mosaic ritual; so the nations around, God’s instruments of vengeance, as birds of prey like herself (through her assimilation to them) were ready to pounce upon her (compare Revelation 18:2).

    The birds’ instinctive observance of their seasons of migration, returning every spring from their winter abodes ( Song of Solomon 2:12), is made a tacit reproof of God’s people not returning to Him now that the winter of His judicial wrath is past, and the spring of His gracious favor set in ( Jeremiah 8:7).

    Translate Proverbs 26:2, “as the sparrow (is prone to) wandering, as the swallow (is prone to) flying (yet never lights upon us), so the curse causeless shall not come” ( Deuteronomy 23:5, Balaam and Israel; Samuel 16:5-12, Shimei and David; <19A928> Psalm 109:28). Ecclesiastes 10:20, “a bird of the air shall carry the matter.” Proverbial: the fact will reach the king’s knowledge in a marvelous way, as if a bird had carried it to him. The bird was regarded as the emblem of superhuman intelligence.

    BIRSHA King of Gomorrah, at Chedorlaomer’s invasion ( Genesis 14:2).

    BIRTH Child. Emblem of acute and sudden suffering, such as shall overtake those unprepared for the Lord’s second coming ( 1 Thessalonians 5:3). The special suffering laid on woman as part of the curse from the fall is overruled to a blessing, if she shall faithfully do and suffer the part assigned by God to her, namely, childbearing and home duties, her sphere as distinguished from public teaching, which is man’s ( 1 Timothy 2:11-15), “she shall be saved (though) with childbearing”; i.e., though suffering her part of the primeval curse, in childbearing, just as man shall be saved, though having to bear his part, the sweat of the brow. The passage may further imply: her childbearing, though in sorrow, being the function of her sex whereby the Savior was born, shall be the mean of her salvation.

    Ellicott translates, “through THE childbearing,” namely, that of Jesus ( Genesis 3:15,16).

    A special interposition mitigated the penalty to the Hebrew women, under the cruel edict of Pharaoh for the destruction of all Hebrew males born ( Exodus 1:15-19). A woman was unclean under the Mosaic law for days after giving birth to a male, and 80 days in the ease of a female. Then she offered a burnt offering and a sin offering for her cleansing; less costly victims were required for the poor, as the Virgin Mary [see BIRD ]. A child when born was washed, rubbed with salt, and wrapped in swaddling bands, as appears in the Lord’s touching picture of His adopting and ultimately marrying Israel ( Ezekiel 16:4), where for “to supple thee” (i.e. to make the skin soft), translate, “to the (or my) sight,” i.e. in order to be sightly for me to look upon [see margin]. The salting was to make the skin dense and firm.

    Natural birth unto life is the constant image in Scripture for spiritual quickening, the new birth of the soul by the Holy Spirit, who convicts of sin and also points the eye of faith to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world ( John 3:3-8; 1:13; Galatians 6:15; Titus 3:5; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23; 1 John 3:9; 2 Corinthians 5:17; compare Job 33:24-26).

    Birthdays were generally observed with rejoicing. So Pharaoh’s ( Genesis 40:20); Job’s ( Job 1:4, etc.); Herod’s ( Matthew 14:6), though his day was perhaps rather that of his accession to the throne, compare Hosea 7:5, “the day of our king.” The Jews latterly viewed birthday celebrations unfavorably, on account of the idolatrous rites and revelry associated with them. Josephus (Ant. 19:7, section 1) mentions that Herod, the brother of Herodias, who succeeded the Herod of Matthew 14:6, “made a feast on his birthday, when all under his command partook of his mirth.” This is in coincidence with Matthew and Mark ( Mark 6:21), for it proves that birthday feasts were observed in Herod’s family, and that officers of the government customarily shared in them.

    BIRTHRIGHT A double portion fell to the firstborn, compare Deuteronomy 21:15-17, whence Joseph’s two sons, who received the birthright forfeited by Reuben the firstborn, were counted as heads of the tribes Ephraim and Manasseh ( Genesis 48:5,6,22; 49:4; 1 Chronicles 5:1). The “princes” of the congregation were so probably by primogeniture ( Numbers 7:2; 21:18).

    The rebellion of the Reubenite leaders, Dathan and Abiram, may have arisen through jealousy at the preeminence which others enjoyed above them, Reuben their first father baring had originally the primogeniture; compare Numbers 16:1,2, with Numbers 26:5-9. Esau transferred his birthright to Jacob for a paltry mess of pottage, profanely setting at nought what was the spiritual privilege connected with it, the being progenitor of the promised Messiah ( Genesis 25:33; Hebrews 12:16,17).

    It is striking how often God set aside the birthright, in order to show that the objects of His choice are “born not of bloods (Greek natural descents), nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” ( John 1:13). Thus Isaac is preferred to Ishmael, Jacob to Esau, Joseph to Reuben, David to his elder brothers. Solomon to Adonijah the elder of the two ( 1 Kings 2:15). Ordinarily the firstborn inherited the throne ( 2 Chronicles 21:3), typifying Messiah the “first begotten” of the Father, “the Firstborn among many brethren,” and Heir of all things ( Romans 8:29; Hebrews 1:6). All the firstborn of Israel were claimed by Jehovah as His, He having saved them when Egypt’s firstborn were slain ( Exodus 22:29). He allowed them to be redeemed, and the tribe of Levi to serve Him in their stead ( Numbers 3:12,13). The whole nation was God’s firstborn among all the peoples ( Exodus 4:22). The spiritual Israel in a still higher sense is “the church of the first born written in heaven” (enrolled as its citizens in the book of life) ( Hebrews 12:23; James 1:18; Revelation 14:1-4).

    BIRZAVITH In Asher’s genealogies ( 1 Chronicles 7:31), a place. In the marginal or keri reading = “well of olives.”

    BISHOP Greek episkopos , applied to the inspectors sent by Athens to her subject states, to inquire into their state, to rule and defend them. The Greek speaking Jews or Hellenists applied it in the Septuagint to officers who had “the oversight of the tabernacle” ( Numbers 4:16; 31:14), “the officers overseeing the host” ( <19A908> Psalm 109:8, “his charge of overseeing let another take,” quoted in Acts 1:20 “his bishopric”; Isaiah 60:17, “thine overseers righteousness.” Presbyter or elder was the term in the Christian church at Jerusalem for the pastoral superintendent; episcopus or bishop was naturally adopted in Gentile Christian churches, the word being already in use among the Greeks. The terms were originally equivalent; presbuteros (whence “priest” comes by contraction) marking the age, rank, and respect due to him, episcopus marking his official duty. Bishops and deacons are the two orders alone mentioned in Philippians 1:1. The plural shows there was more than one bishop and more than one deacon there. Those called “elders” (presbyters) are also termed “overseers” (bishops, Greek) as if the terms were interchangeable ( Acts 20:17,28; Titus 1:5,7). The presbyters discharged episcopal functions, i.e. overseeing the flock ( 1 Timothy 5:17; 1 Peter 5:1,2). So in the epistles of Clement of Rome the two terms are interchangeable. But in Ignatius’ epistles the bishop is regarded as superior to the presbyter.

    However, in the genuine epistles, in the Syriac version edited by Cureton, the bishop is much less exalted. “Elder” is the correlative term to “younger men” (Greek neoteroi ), Acts 5:6. “Elders” are first mentioned in the church in Judaea ( Acts 11:30). Paul and Barnabas transplanted the same Jewish government to the Gentile churches ( Acts 14:23) by “ordaining elders in every church.” “Bishops” are first mentioned in Paul’s address at Miletus ( Acts 20:28), describing the duty of the elders, namely, to be faithful “overseers.” Then, during Paul’s first imprisonment, in Philippians 1:1 “bishops” is the recognized term for “elders” Every Jewish synagogue had its council of “elders” ( Luke 7:3) presided over by one of themselves, “the chief ruler of the synagogue.”

    In their apostleship the apostles have no successors, for the signs of an apostle have not been transmitted. But the presidents over the presbyters and deacons, while still continuing of the same order as the presbyters, have succeeded virtually, by whatever name designated, angel, bishop, moderator, to a superintendency analogous to that exercised by the apostles, and evidently derived from the synagogue; see Vitringa, Synag. 2, chapters 3, 7. The superintending pastor of each of the seven churches is in Revelation called its “angel,” (the abuse of the term “apostle” by pretenders led to its restriction to the twelve and Paul, Revelation 2:2) just as in Old Testament the prophet Haggai ( Haggai 1:13) is termed “the Lord’s messenger (angel) in the Lord’s message.” In the larger churches, as Ephesus and Smyrna, there were many presbyters, but only one angel under the one “chief Shepherd and Bishop of Souls,” the term “bishop” thus being applicable to the highest pastoral superintendence ( 1 Peter 2:25; 5:4). The enigmatic symbolism of Revelation transfers the term of office, angel, from Jehovah’s heavenly to His earthly ministers; reminding them that, like angels above, they should do God’s will lovingly and perfectly. The “legate (angel) of the church” (sheliach tsibbur ) recited the prayers in the name of the assembled worshippers in the synagogue; the apostles, as Jews, naturally followed this pattern, under God’s providential sanction: compare James 2:2, “assembly,” Greek synagogue,” Corinthians 8:23.

    Timothy either at his ordination as presbyter, or else consecration as temporary overseer or bishop over Ephesus, received a spiritual gift “by prophecy,” i.e. by the Spirit speaking through the prophets ( Acts 13:1-3; 1 Timothy 1:18; 4:14,15), accompanied “WITH the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.” The laying on of hands symbolized the impartation of spiritual strength; as in Joshua’s case ( Numbers 27:18-20; Deuteronomy 34:9). The “with” implies that the presbyters’ laying on of hands accompanied the conferring of the gift. The “by” in Timothy 1:6 implies that Paul was the more immediate instrument of conferring it: “stir up the gift of God which is in thee BY the putting on of my hands.” The Jewish council was composed of the elders (the presbytery, Luke 22:66; Acts 22:5), and a presiding rabbi; so the Christian church was composed of elders and a president ( Acts 15:19,23). At the ordination of the president three presbyters were always present to lay on hands; so the early church canons required three bishops to be present at the consecration of a bishop. The president ordained in both cases as the representative, in the name of the presbytery. Ordination (compare Acts 6:6; 13:3) is meant in 1 Timothy 5:22, “lay hands suddenly (without careful inquiry into his character beforehand) on no man”; not, as Ellicott explains, “receive penitent backsliders into church fellowship by laying on hands.”

    The qualifications are stated in 1 Timothy 3:1-7. “Husband of one wife” confutes the Roman Catholic celibacy. He who has a virtuous wife and family will more attractively teach those who have similar ties, not only by precept but by example. The Jews teach a priest should neither be unmarried nor childless, test he be unmerciful. Yet as Jews and Gentiles regarded second marriages with prejudice (compare Anna, Luke 2:36,37), and a bishop ought to stand well in the esteem of his flock, he should be married but once. That prohibition no longer holds good, now that no such prejudice exists, which might otherwise have required lawful liberty to yield to Christian expediency. The prohibition may also refer to a second marriage after a divorce. Of ruing (presiding, Greek) presbyters there were two kinds, those who “labored in the word and teaching,” and those who did not. The former were to receive “double honor” and remuneration. Both had “government” ( 1 Corinthians 12:28). The “apostle” and evangelist” preached to the pagan, but the bishop-presbyter’s office was pastoral ( Titus 1:9; 1 Thessalonians 5:12), including ministration to the sick ( James 5:14). Timothy as vicar apostolic heard accusations against elders, and deposed the guilty, and ordained presbyters and deacons ( 1 Timothy 5:19; Titus 3:10). The presiding bishops in the next age naturally succeeded in a permanent and settled sphere to these duties, which were previously discharged in a less settled charge by the apostles and their deputies, who moved from place to place.

    The sum of the arguments amounts to this, that episcopacy in the sense of superintendency, not in that of succession to the apostleship, has the apostolic precedent to recommend it; but no directions for the form of church government so positive and explicit as those in the Old Testament concerning the Aaronic priesthood and Levitical ministry are laid down in the New Testament as to the Christian ministry. Various other orders and gifts are mentioned besides bishop-presbyters and deacons, with superintending apostles and apostolic vicars (as Timothy and Titus). These have not been permanent in all times and places ( 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11,12). The absence of literal, positive directions as to church government, and the statement of the broad principle, “Let all things be done unto edifying” 1 Corinthians 14:26), and the continual presence of the Holy Spirit in the church to raise up fresh agencies for fresh needs of the church, while justifying episcopacy in its general following of the apostolic order, show us that it is not exclusively the divine platform, but that in all churches holding the essential truths of Scripture “we ought to judge those ministers lawfully called and sent, who be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given unto them in the congregation, to call and send ministers into the Lord’s vineyard.” (Ch. of Eng. Art. 23) BITHIAH (“daughter [i.e. worshipper] of Jehovah”). Pharaoh’s daughter and wife of Mered, a descendant of Judah. Her name shows she was a convert from Egyptian idolatry to Jehovah’s worship; and Mered’s other wife is distinguished from her, as” Jehudijah” the Jewess. This princess evidently, like Ruth, renounced home, country, and a royal court to take an Israelite husband and to have Israel’s God for her God. The marriage probably took place in the wilderness shortly after the exodus. Perhaps the disaster of Egypt at the Red Sea led some Egyptians to become proselytes. In Lepsius’ Kings’ Book, Amenophis II, (in his view) father of the Pharaoh drowned at the Red Sea, has among his children one with the hieroglyphic Amun P or B T H, i.e. beloved of Amun (god of Thebes). On conversion the -jah added to her name would mark her new religion. (See EGYPT , where is stated Canon Cook’s view that Thothmes II., much earlier; was the Pharaoh drowned; Amenophis III. had a wife not Egyptian in creed, and not of royal birth, named Tel, and her parents Juaa and Tuaa, names not unlike Bithia.)

    BITHRON properly “the Bithron,” i.e. divided place; “all the B.” a district in the Arabah or Jordan valley E. of the river ( 2 Samuel 2:29). The whole country in the Ghor on the other side of the river is broken and intersected. [See BETHER .] BITHYNIA Paul and Silas from Mysia “assayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus (so the Sin., Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, the oldest manuscripts, read) suffered them not” ( Acts 16:7). But afterward the gospel reached Bithynia; and Bithynians, both Jews and Gentiles [see PETER ], became Christians; for Peter ( 1 Peter 1:1) addresses them along with those of “Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Asia.” Delay is not denial of believing prayer; God’s time, God’s place, and God’s way are the best. Bithynia is the nearest point to Europe; bounded by Paphlagonia on the E., by the Euxine on the N., by the Propontis on the W, by Mysia, Phrygia, and Galatia on the S. Bithynia was originally bequeathed to Rome by Nicomedes III, 74 B.C., the last of the kings, one of whom invited the Gauls; whence the central province was called Gallo-Graecia or Galatia.

    On the death of Mithridates king of Pontus,63 B.C., the W. of Pontus including Paphlagonia was joined to Bithynia. The Roman province is sometimes called “Pontus and Bithynia.” In Acts 2:9 Pontus alone is mentioned, in 1 Peter 1:1 both are mentioned. It is hilly, well wooded, and productive. The river Rhyndacus, and the snowy range of mount Olympus of Mysia, are marked features on the W. At Nicaea in it met the famous council early in the 4th century. In the 2nd century Pliny the Younger, its governor, wrote the letter still extant to the emperor Trajan: “in the case of those Christians who were brought before me I adopted this method. I asked them, Were they Christians? On their confessing it, I asked them a second and third time, threatening punishment. When they persevered I ordered them to be led off for execution. For I did not doubt that inflexible obstinacy ought to he punished. Nothing can compel those who are real Christians to call on the gods, and supplicate thy image with frankincense and wine, and to curse Christ. Their error is this; they are wont to meet on a stated day before dawn and to repeat in turns among themselves a hymn to Christ as God; and to bind themselves by oath not to commit any wickedness, such as theft, robbery, or adultery, nor to break their word. When this is over, their custom is to depart and to meet again to take food, but ordinary and innocuous. Many of every age and rank, also of both sexes, are in question. For the contagion of that superstition has spread not only through cities, but even villages and the country. At least it is certain that our temples now are almost deserted, and the customary sacred rites for long omitted, and a purchaser of victims is very rarely found.”

    BITTERN (qippod . The accompaniment of the desolation reigning in Babylon ( Isaiah 14:23), Idumea ( Isaiah 34:11), Nineveh ( Zephaniah 2:14).

    An aquatic solitary bird, frequenting marshy pools, such as the plain of Babylonia abounded in: the Al-houbara of the Arabic version, the size of a large fowl. The Botaurus stellaris, of the heron kind. Gesenius translates “the hedgehog” (from its rolling itself together; qaapad , “to contract oneself”), and Strabo says that enormous hedgehogs were found in the islands of the Euphrates. The Arabic kunfud resembles qippod somewhat.

    But the hedgehog or porcupine would never “lodge” or perch on the chapiters of columns,” as margin Zephaniah 2:14 says of the qippod .

    Still the columns might be fallen on the ground within reach of the hedgehog, and Idumea is not a marshy region suited to an aquatic bird such as the bittern.

    BIZJOTHJAH A town in southern Judah ( Joshua 15:28).

    BIZTHA Second of the seven eunuchs of king Ahasuerus’ harem ( Esther 1:10).

    The Persian Beste means eunuch.

    BLAINS aba’ buoth . The sixth Egyptian plague, which followed after Moses’ sprinkling of the furnace ashes toward heaven; “the botch of Egypt” ( Deuteronomy 28:27,35), black leprosy, a kind of elephantiasis, producing burning ulcerous pustules on the skin. The magicians, whose scrupulous cleanliness is noticed by Herodotus, could not stand before Moses because of the boils ( Exodus 9:9-11).

    BLASPHEMY Literally a “railing accusation” against anyone ( Jude 1:9). “Evil speaking” is probably meant by it in Colossians 3:8. But it is more often used in the sense of any speech directly dishonoring God ( 1 Kings 21:10; 2 Samuel 12:14; Psalm 74:18; Isaiah 52:5; Romans 2:24). Stoning was the penalty, as upon the son of Shelomith, a woman of Dan, and of an Egyptian father ( Leviticus 24:11); Stephen was so treated by a sudden outbreak of Jewish zeal ( Acts 7:57-60). The Savior would have been stoned for the blasphemy alleged as the ground of His condemnation ( Matthew 26:65; Luke 5:21; John 10:36); but the Romans, to whom He was delivered, used crucifixion. So the fulfillment of the prophecy (contrary to what might have been expected, seeing that crucifixion was not a Jewish punishment) was brought about, “they pierced My hands and My feet” ( Psalm 22:16; compare John 18:31,32; 19:6,7). The Jews, in spite of themselves, fulfilled the prophecies to the letter ( John 11:50-52). The hearer of the blasphemy rent his garment, which might never be mended, and laid his hand, putting the guilt wholly, on the offender’s head.

    The Jews, because of Leviticus 24:16, superstitiously shrank from even naming Jehovah. In Exodus 22:28, “thou shalt not curse the gods” (elohim ) refers to disrespectful language toward magistrates. From Exodus 23:13, “make no mention of the name of other gods,” they thought themselves bound to turn the idols’ names into nicknames, as Baal into Bosheth, Beth-aven for Beth-el, Beel-zebul for Beel-zebub.

    When the Jewish rulers, who had such numerous proofs of Jesus’ Messiahship, shut their hearts against conviction, and at last stifled conscience and the light so utterly as to attribute His miracles of love, as the casting out of unclean spirits, to the help of the prince of demons, Christ pronounced that they were either committing or on the verge of committing the sin against the Holy Spirit which is forgiven neither in this world nor in the world to come, though all sin against the Son of man can be forgiven ( Matthew 12:31, etc.; Mark 3:28, etc.). None can now commit formally the same sin of attributing Jesus’ miracles against Satan’s kingdom to Satan’s help, so evident a self contradiction that nothing short of a seared conscience, and a hardened determination to resist every spiritual impression and even malign the Spirit’s work before other men, could have given birth to such a sin. But a man may commit virtually the same sin by continued malignant resistance of the gracious Spirit in one’s own heart, with, at the same time, blasphemous and Satanic misrepresentation of it to others. He who has committed it is so given over to a reprobate mind as to have no pang of conscience about it, and the very fear of anyone that he has committed it is proof positive that he has not, for if he had he would have been “past feeling” ( Hebrews 6:4-6; 1 John 5:16).

    BLASTUS Herod Agrippa I’s chamberlain; mediator between him and the people of Tyre and Sidon, who made him their friend ( Acts 12:20).

    BLESSING ”The less is blessed of the better” ( Hebrews 7:7). Aaron and the priests pronounced the benediction (Nun. 6:22-27; Deuteronomy 10:8). Jacob and Moses gave dying blessings prophetical of the character and history of the several tribes (Genesis 49; Deuteronomy 33). The cup in the Lord’s supper is called “the cup of blessing” from the Passover cup of wine called so because “blessing” was offered over it to God. 1 Corinthians 10:15 Paul says, “the cup which WE bless,” namely, the minister and the congregation; not he alone by any priestly authority, but as representing the congregation who virtually through Him bless the cup. The celebrant is the church. The minister is the leader of the congregation. The consecration is the corporate act of the whole church. The joint blessing by him and them (not the cup itself, which in the Greek is not nominative but accusative) and the consequent drinking together constitute the “communion,” i.e. joint participation of the blood of Christ.

    BLINDNESS Its cure is one of our Lord’s most frequent miracles ( Luke 7:21; Matthew 9:27; Mark 8:23; John 5:3; 9:1), as had been foretold ( Isaiah 29:18; 35:5). In coincidence with this is the commonness of it in the E. In Ludd (Lydda) the saying is, every one is either blind or has but one eye. Jaffa has 500 blind out of 5,000 of a population. The dust and sand pulverized by the intense heat, the constant glare, and in the sandy districts the absence of the refreshing “green grass,” (the presence of which Mark notices as noteworthy in the miracle of the feeding the multitudes,) the cold sea air on the coasts, the night dews affecting those sleeping on the roofs, all tend to produce blindness.

    It is a constant image used of spiritual darkness, and Jesus’ restoration of sight to the blind pointed to the analogous spiritual bestowal of sight on the soul. Paul, who had passed through both the physical and the spiritual transition from darkness to light ( Acts 9:8,9), instinctively, by an obviously undesigned coincidence confirming authenticity, often uses the expressive image ( Acts 26:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 1:18; 4:18; Colossians 1:13). Elymas was smitten with blindness at Paul’s word ( Acts 13:11, compare Genesis 19:11; 2 Kings 6:18).

    The blind were to be treated kindly ( Leviticus 19:14; Deuteronomy 27:18). The pagan conquerors sometimes blinded captives ( 2 Kings 25:7; 1 Samuel 11:2).

    BLOOD Forbidden to be eaten ( Genesis 9:4) under the Old Testament, on the ground that “the life (soul) of the flesh (the soul which gives life to the flesh) is in the blood,” and that “God gave it upon the altar to make atonement with for men’s souls” ( Leviticus 17:11). Translate the next clause, “for the blood maketh atonement by virtue of the soul.” The blood, not in itself, but as the vehicle of the soul, atones, because the animal soul was offered to God on the altar as a. substitute for the human soul. Now that Christ’s one, and only true, sacrifice has superseded animal sacrifices, the prohibition against eating blood ceases, the decree in Acts 15 being but temporary, not to offend existing Jewish prejudices needlessly. In Leviticus 3:17 the “fat” is forbidden as well as the blood. God reserved the blood to Himself, investing it with a sacramental sanctity, when allowing man animal food. Besides the atoning virtue it typically had, it brought a curse when not duly expiated, as by burial ( Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:13). The blood of victims was caught by the priest in a basin, and sprinkled seven times (that of birds was squeezed out at once) on the altar, its four corners or horns, on its side above and below the line running round it, or on the mercy-seat, according to the nature of the offering; the blood of the Passover lamb on the lintel and doorposts (Exodus 12; Leviticus 4:5-7; 16:14-19). A drain from the temple carried the blood into the brook Kedron. A land was regarded as polluted by blood shed on it, which was to be expiated only by the blood of the murderer, and not by any “satisfaction” ( Genesis 4:10; 9:4-6; Hebrews 12:24; Numbers 35:31,33; <19A638> Psalm 106:38). The guilt of bloodshed, if the shedder was not known, fell on the city nearest by measurement, until it exculpated itself, its elders washing their hands over an expiatory sacrifice, namely, a beheaded heifer in a rough, unplowed, and unsown valley ( Deuteronomy 21:1-9).

    The blood and water from Jesus’ side, when pierced after death, was something extraordinary; for in other corpses the blood coagulates, and the water does not flow clear. The “loud voice” just before death ( Luke 23:46) shows that He did not die from mere exhaustion. The psalmist, His typical forerunner, says ( Psalm 69:20), “reproach hath broken my heart.” Crucifixion alone would not have killed Him in so short a time.

    Probably the truth is, if we may with reverence conjecture from hints in Scripture, that mental agony, when He hung under the Father’s displeasure at our sins which He bore, caused rupture of the pericardium, or sac wherein the heart throbs. The extravasated blood separated into the crassamentum and serum, the blood and the water, and flowed out when the soldier’s spear pierced the side. Hence appears the propriety of Hebrews 10:19,20, “having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He hath consecrated for us through the veil (which was ‘rent’ at His death), that is to say His flesh.”

    Also, “this is My body which is broken for you” ( 1 Corinthians 11:24) is explained by the breaking of the heart, though it was true “a bone of Him shall not be broken” ( John 19:32-27); compare also 1 John 5:6, “this is He that came by water (at His baptism by John in Jordan) and blood” (by His bloody baptism, at Calvary).

    THE AVENGING OF BLOOD by the nearest kinsman of the deceased was a usage from the earliest historical times ( Genesis 9:5,6; 34:30; Samuel 14:7). Among the Bedouin Arabs the thar, or law of blood, comes into effect if the offer of money satisfaction be refused. So among the Anglo-Saxons the wer-gild, or money satisfaction for homicide, varying in amount according to the rank, was customary. The Mosaic law mitigated the severity of the law of private revenge for blood, by providing six cities of refuge (among the 48 Levitical cities), three on one side of Jordan, three on the other, for the involuntary homicide to flee into. The avenger, or goel (derived from a Hebrew root “pollution,” implying that he was deemed polluted until the blood of his slain kinsman was expiated), was nearest of kin to the man slain, and was bound to take vengeance on the manslayer. If the latter reached one of the six cities, (Kedesh in Naphtali, Shechem in mount Ephraim, Hebron in the hill country of Judah, W. of Jordan; Bezor in Reuben, Ramoth in Gilead (Gad), Golan in Manasseh, E. of Jordan,) he was safe until the elders of the city, and then those of his own city, decided whether it was an involuntary act. In this case he was kept safe from the avenger in the city of refuge, so long as he did not go 2,000 cubits beyond its precincts. After the high priest’s death he might return home in safety ( Numbers 35:25,28; Joshua 20:4-6). The roads were to be kept clear, that nothing might retard the flight of the manslayer, to whom every moment was precious ( Deuteronomy 19:3). Jewish tradition adds that posts inscribed “Refuge,” “Refuge,” were to be set up at the cross roads.

    All necessaries of water, etc., were in the cities. No implements of war were allowed there. The law of retaliation in blood affected only the manslayer, and not also (as among pagan nations) his relatives ( Deuteronomy 24:16). Blood revenge still prevails in Corsica.

    The law of blood avenging by the nearest kinsman, though incompatible with our ideas in a more civilized age and nation, is the means of preventing much bloodshed among the Arabs; and its introduction into the law of Israel, a kindred race, accords with the provisional character of the whole Mosaic system, which establishes not what is absolutely best, supposing a state of optimism, but what was best under existing circumstances. Moreover, it contained an important typical lesson, hinted at in Hebrews 6:18; 2:14,15. The Son of man, as He to whom the Father hath committed all judgment, is the goel or avenger of blood on guilty man, involved by Satan the “murderer from the beginning” in murderous rebellion against God. He, in another sense, is the goel or redeemer of man, as the high priest whose death sets the shut up captive free; He is also the priestly city of refuge (His priestly office being the mean of our salvation), by fleeing into which man is safe; but in this latter sense, as our High priest “ever liveth,” we must not only eater the city, and moreover abide in Him, but also abide in Him forever for eternal safety ( John 15:1-11). “The way” to Him is clearly pointed out by God Himself ( Isaiah 30:21). “Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope” ( Zechariah 9:12) Once in Christ, He can defy avenging justice ( Romans 8:33,34).

    BOANERGES ”Sons of thunder.” The Aramaic name given to James and John by Jesus.

    Hebrew beney regesh ; Their fiery zeal appears in ( Luke 9:54) their desiring the Lord’s permission that they should command fire from heaven (like Elias) to consume the Samaritans who would not receive Him, “because His face was as though He would go to Jerusalem.” Also in ( Mark 9:38) their forbidding one casting out demons in Christ’s name, because he followed not with them. Compare also their ambition for the highest place in Christ’s kingdom, next Himself ( Mark 9:35-41). Grace subsequently corrected this zeal without knowledge, making James the willing martyr (Acts 12) and John the apostle of gentleness and love. Still the old zeal against perverters of the truth as it is in Jesus appears in John 1:10,11; 3 John 1:10.

    BOAR The flesh of “swine” (domestic) was forbidden food to Israel. Eating it was the token of apostasy under Antiochus Epiphanes’ persecution, and is mentioned among Judah’s provocations of Jehovah ( Isaiah 65:4; 66:17). E. of the sea of Galilee, some Gadarenes are mentioned as having a herd of 2,000. Probably they refrained themselves from the flesh, and compromised between conscience and covetousness by selling them to their neighbors the Gentiles. But they gained nothing by the compromise, for the whole herd perished in the wafters, in judicial retribution. The Lord of the land, peculiarly set apart as the Holy Land, finds it defiled with demons and unclean beasts. The demons beg leave not to be sent to the abyss of torment, but into the swine With His leave they do so, and the swine rush down the steep and perish in the waters. Instead of gratitude for the deliverance, the Gadarenes prefer their swine, though at the cost of the demons’ presence, to the Savior at the cost of sacrificing their swine; so they entreat Him to “depart out of their coasts,” forgetting His word, “Woe to them when I depart from them” ( Hosea 9:12); a striking contrast to him who was delivered from the demons and who “prayed that he might be with Jesus ( Mark 5:15-18). The lowest point of the prodigal’s degradation was when he was sent into the fields to feed swine ( Luke 15:15). The sensual professor’s backsliding into “the pollutions of the world,” after he has “escaped them through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior,” is fitly compared to “the sow that was washed returning to her wallowing in the mire” ( 2 Peter 2:20-22). “As a jewel of gold (worn often by women as ‘nose jewels,’ Isaiah 3:21) in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion” (Hebrew: taste, i.e. without moral perception of what is pure and impure) ( Proverbs 11:22). The brutish stolidity of those who appreciate only what gratifies their own foul appetites disqualifies them for appreciating heavenly mysteries; to present these holy truths to them would be as unwise as to east pearls before swine, which would only trample them under foot ( Matthew 7:6).

    The wild boar is mentioned once only ( Psalm 80:13). Its destroying a vineyard partly by eating the grapes, partly by trampling the vines under foot, is the image of the pagan world power’s ravaging of Israel, Jehovah’s choice vine, transplanted from Egypt into the Holy Land. Pococke saw large herds among the reeds of Jordan, where it flows into the sea of Galilee; and so it is sculptured on Assyrian monuments as among reeds. Its Hebrew name, chazir , is from a root to roll in the mud.

    BOAZ Explained in margin 1 Kings 7:15-21, “in it (is) strength.” Others, fleetness. 1. Of Bethlehem: Elimelech’s (Naomi’s husband’s) kinsman. When the next of kin to Ruth, Naomi’s daughter-in-law, declined to do the part of redeemer (god) [see BLOOD ] of the inheritance of her deceased husband Mahlon (compare Deuteronomy 25:5-10), Boaz did so by marrying her, though much her senior ( Ruth 3:10). Their son Obed was grandfather of David. There being no objection to an Israelite’s marriage with a Moabitess marks an early date (contrast Ezra 9). David’s descent from Ruth the Moabitess accounts for the intimacy of David with the king of Moab, so that it was with him he left his father and mother in his flight from Saul ( 1 Samuel 22:3-5); an undesigned coincidence between the books of Samuel and Ruth, a mark of genuineness (compare Psalm 27:10). In the genealogy ( Ruth 4:18-22) several, at least three, generations must be inserted, as the list there only allows ten generations for 850 years, and only four for the 450 years between Salmon and David. 2. The name of one of the two brass pillars in Solomon’s temple porch, on the left, as Jachin was on the right. The difference of the height as given in 1 Kings 7:15,21; 2 Chronicles 3:15, arises from the height in one place including, in the other place excluding, the ornament which united the shaft to the chapiter (compare Jeremiah 52:17-21). The pillars, which were hollow, were broken up and carried to Babylon at the fall of Jerusalem before Nebuchadnezzar.

    BOCHERU 1 Chronicles 8:38; 9:44. Son of Azel. But the Septuagint reads Bekoru, “his firstborn.” [See BECHER ].

    BOCHIM (“the weepers”). A place W. of Jordan, above Gilgal ( Judges 2:1,5). “The (Hebrew) angel of the Lord (the Second Person in the Trinity, “the Lord,” Exodus 23:20) came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you go up out of Egypt,” etc. He identifies Himself with Jehovah, as no created angel would do. Their sacrificing to the Lord at Bochim, where there was no sanctuary, implies that the angel was Jehovah Himself, whose appearing at any place justified the offering of sacrifices there ( Judges 6:20,26,28; 2 Samuel 24:25). The mention of His coming up “from Gilgal to Bochim” is not so much a geographical as a spiritual intimation.

    The Angel Prince of Jehovah’s host announced to Joshua at Gilgal the fall of Jericho, directly after their rolling away the reproach of Egypt by circumcision, whence the place got its name (Gilgal meaning “rolling”) ( Joshua 5:2-15). As there they entered into covenant with the Lord with the ritual act of self consecration, and so were assured of victory from the Lord, so here at Bochim (unknown geographically) the divine Angel makes known to them that by their making peace with the Canaanites, instead of rooting them out, they have broken the covenant and so must pay the penalty. It is implied that the same Angel who was Israel’s champion at Gilgal is now manifesting Himself as Israel’s punisher, by means of those very Canaanites whose residence permitted among them was their sin.

    Shiloh, not Gilgal, was the place of meeting for the nation at the tabernacle set up there ( Joshua 18:1-10). Compare the phrase, “O My people, remember now from Shittim unto Gilgal” ( Micah 6:5): not so much a geographical notice as a reference to the people’s spiritual and national obligations to God in connection with those places.

    BOHAN (“the thumb”). A son of Reuben (not mentioned in Exodus 6:14; Numbers 26:5; 1 Chronicles 5:3), after whom a stone was named.

    Probably commemorating some achievement of his in the conquest of Palestine ( Joshua 15:6; 18:17). It was a boundary mark between Judah and Benjamin, the exact point where the mountains W. of the Dead Sea change their direction to the eye. Now called “the stone of the finger,” Hadjar el Asbah. Ganneau observes that a rock on an isolated peak on the hill side resembles a fist closed with the thumb raised; the name of this peak probably was transferred to the fallen block close by, namely, Hadjar el Asbah.

    BOLSTER The pillow of goat’s hair which Michal put for a bolster ( 1 Samuel 19:13) was probably a curtain to protect the sleeper from mosquitoes, or a counterpane, with which sleepers in the East protect the head and face. Kebir means something woven, from kaabar “to weave.” The indefinite article implies it was one of the articles of regular use, as a counterpane or veil woven of goat’s hair to cover the head and face while sleeping.

    BONES The framework of the body; so the breaking of them expresses overwhelming sorrow, which prostrates body and mind ( Isaiah 38:13).

    As the surgeon must sometimes break a bone to save a patient lameness for life, so God breaks that He may heal Self will and self righteousness must be broken, that we may run the way of God’s commandments. When one has a “broken and contrite heart,” “the bones which God has broken rejoice” ( Psalm 51:8,17). Not a bone of Jesus was broken, as antitype of the paschal lamb ( Exodus 12:46; John 19:33,36).

    BOOK ”Eat ... a roll of a book” ( Ezekiel 2:8,9), meaning, Appropriate its contents in thy mind so entirely that it shall become part of thyself ( Ezekiel 3:2). God’s messenger must first inwardly possess as his own and him. self digest the truth of God before he can speak it effectually to others, to their believing appropriation of it ( Revelation 10:9). Jeremiah 15:16 is the inspired explanation of the phrase: “Thy words were found, and I did eat them, and Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.”

    A seal secured books anciently, when designed to be kept secret. A book was then a roll of paper, often written within and on the back ( Revelation 5:1), so as not to be wholly readable until the seal was broken. The fragments readable outside would excite curiosity and the desire to read the whole. Precisely the nature of God’s roll of inspired Scripture, the successive parts being unfolded as God’s grand scheme of redemption develops itself; the parts revealed whetting the desire for more and more, until the whole stands forth in its finally consummated perfection. Unbelief seals up to many (however learned) even what is revealed. Docile, childlike receptivity is needed ( Isaiah 29:11; Matthew 13:10-17; 11:25). Prophecy in the Old Testament was comparatively a sealed volume until Jesus, who “alone is worthy,” “opened the seals” ( Daniel 12:4-9). John reveals what Daniel veils; therefore Daniel is told to “seal the book,” John “not to seal the book” ( Revelation 22:10). Daniel’s book was sealed because referring to the then distant future; John’s unsealed because the events foretold were immediately to begin their fulfillment. ”The book of the living” ( Psalm 69:28); Philippians 4:3, “the book of life.” the Israelites who came up out of Egypt were entered in a muster roll of the living citizens, called “the writing of the house of Israel,” “the book of life” ( Ezekiel 13:9). Those who died were erased each year. An image of God’s book of predestination to eternal life ( <19D916> Psalm 139:16; 87:6; Exodus 32:32; Daniel 12:1; Luke 10:20; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 13:8; 17:8; 21:27). In man’s point of view it has in it names of highly privileged professors who have but a name to live, but are dead spiritually, and therefore may be blotted out, as was Judas ( Revelation 3:5; Matthew 13:12; 25:29); but in God’s point of view it contains those only who are never blotted out, but elected finally to life ( John 10:28,29; Acts 13:48; Revelation 20:12,15), “written among the living in (the heavenly) Jerusalem” ( Isaiah 4:3).

    BOOTHS [See SUCCOTH , and see FEAST OF TABERNACLES ] BOOTY Within Canaan no captives were to be made; all that breathed were to be destroyed ( Deuteronomy 20:14,16); but outside, if resistance were offered, the women and children were to be made captives, the men slain.

    Pictures and images, as temptations to idolatry, were to be destroyed ( Numbers 33:52). In the ease of Amalek the very cattle Saul was commanded to destroy ( 1 Samuel 15:2,3). So also in the case of Arad ( Numbers 21:1-3) and Jericho, where everything was put under the cherem or curse and became the Lord’s ( Joshua 6:19-21). Abraham devoted one tenth of the spoil of Sodom, rescued from Chedorlaomer, to Jehovah through Melchizedek the king-priest ( Genesis 14:19-24).

    David “made a statute and an ordinance for Israel unto this day” that the part of the army which guarded the families and baggage should share equally in the spoil with the troops actually engaged. The occasion of its enactment was upon the capture of immense spoil from Amalek, a part of it recovered property of Ziklag ( 1 Samuel 30:25, etc.). He also sent presents of the spoil to those of the eiders of Judah who were his friends.

    Indeed by the law ( Numbers 31:26-47) booty was to be shared equally between the army engaged and Israel; only that of the former half only one 500th part was appropriated to the priests of God, of the latter one 50th to the Levites. The spoils dedicated by David and his chiefs to the temple were freewill offerings ( 2 Samuel 8:11; 1 Chronicles 26:27).

    BORROW In Exodus 3:22; 12:35,36 not in the sense of taking on loan, which has given a handle for scoffers, as if the Israelites borrowed what they did not return, and so purloined from the Egyptians. Shaal means only to ask: the Israelites asked, and “the Egyptians MADE THEM ASK,” i.e. urged them to ask, so eager were they to get them away, through fear of the plagues, which Exodus 11:8 confirms, also <19A537> Psalm 105:37,38; they allowed them to ask (not “lent”), i.e. received favorably their asking jewels of silver, gold, and raiment, yea, even urged them to ask for more than the Israelites at first asked. The Egyptians could not for a moment have expected the Israelites would return them; for Jehovah’s demand, “Let My people go, that they may serve Me,” enforced by the rapidly successive plagues, must have convinced the Egyptians that Israel had before them some far more momentous movement than a three days’ march to a feast.

    The Egyptians’ gifts, though outwardly seeming to flow from their goodwill, if viewed more deeply were the result of Jehovah’s constraining power, which made them just and generous in spite of themselves. As they had spoiled Israel by the bondservice unremunerated, so Israel, Jehovah’s host ( Exodus 12:41) marched forth “with an high hand” ( Exodus 14:8),” by strength of Jehovah’s hand” ( Exodus 13:16), having “spoiled” their spoilers, an earnest of the saints’ and Israel’s final victory over the world powers and the prince of this world ( Zechariah 14:14).

    In 1 Samuel 1:28 the same Hebrew verb ought not to be translated “I lent him to the Lord ... he shall be lent to the Lord,” but “I also (on my part in return for His favor) make him one asked of the Lord (and therefore returned to the Lord, see margin); ... he shall be as one asked of (and therefore returned to) the Lord.”

    BOSOM The nearest friend reclining on a couch at a feast lay in the bosom of his friend, as John “on Jesus’ bosom” ( John 13:23); Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, i.e. figuratively for in a high place at the heavenly banquet ( Luke 16:23). It implies closest and secret intimacy ( 2 Samuel 12:8): the Son in the bosom of the Father with whom He is One ( John 1:18); the lambs carried in the bosom of the Good Shepherd ( Isaiah 40:11).

    BOSSES The projecting center of a shield. Job 15:26: “he (the rebel) runneth upon Him (God), even on (rather with) his neck (i.e. the rebel’s haughtily uplifted neck, Psalm 75:5); upon (rather with) the thick bosses of his (the rebel’s, not God’s) bucklers.” The rebel and his fellows, as it were, join shield to shield as a compact covering against the Almighty’s darts.

    What suicidal folly! for “the shields of the earth belong unto God” ( Psalm 47:9). The invading godless Gog and Magog’s shields Israel shall “set on fire” ( Ezekiel 39:9).

    BOTTLE Of two kinds: (1) Of skin or leather, used for carrying water, wine, and milk. A goatskin whole, the apertures at the feet and tail being bound up, and when filled tied at the neck. They are tanned with acacia bark and left hairy at the outside. The Gibeonites’ bottles were rent, as they pretended, with their distant journey ( Joshua 9:4,13). New wines by fermenting would rend “old bottles” of skin ( Matthew 9:17). It is therefore put in new goatskin bottles, and without a vent to work off the fermentation strains even them.

    So Elihu, the young friend of Job, after the older ones had failed to comfort him, compares himself, filled with the spirit which inspired him so as to be full of words seeking for utterance, to new bottles of wine: “my belly is as wine which hath no vent, it is ready to burst like new bottles” ( Job 32:19). Hung in the smoke to dry, the skin bottles become parched and shriveled; whence the psalmist ( <19B983> Psalm 119:83) says, “I am become like a bottle in the smoke.” Skins for wine are still used in Spain, called borrachas. (2) Bottles of glass or “potters’“ earthenware, easily “dashed in pieces”: a frequent image of sinners, God’s creatures ( Romans 9:21-23; Timothy 2:20,21) dashed in pieces by God their Maker at His righteous pleasure when they do not answer His end, namely His glory ( Jeremiah 13:12-14; 19:1-10; Psalm 2:9; Revelation 2:27). The Egyptian monuments illustrate the pottery and glass work of that country fifteen hundred years B.C. The clouds pouring down water are figuratively “the bottles of heaven” ( Job 38:37). “Who can stay (rather, incline, so as to empty out and pour) the bottles of heaven?” the rain filled clouds. “Put Thou my tears (as a precious treasure in Thy sight) into thy bottle” (the repository of precious objects, sealed up anciently), so as to reserve them for a manifold recompence of joy hereafter (Psalm 136:5, Isaiah 61:7) BOW RAINBOW. God, after the flood, took the rainbow, previously but a natural object of sight shining beautifully in the sky, when the sun’s rays are refracted through failing rain at different angles and so produce different prismatic colors, and elevated it to spiritual significance, to be to Noah and the world the sign of His love and pledge of His sparing mercy, that He would no more destroy the earth with waters. The language in Genesis gives no reason for supposing the writer ignorant of the natural cause of the rainbow, as if he made God then for the first time setting it in the sky.

    So naathan , “give,” means appoint in Numbers 14:4; 1 Samuel 12:13; 1 Kings 2:35. It is the pledge of “the world’s covenant, not the church’s, a charter of natural blessings.” “Set” means simply, “I do appoint My bow in the cloud” ( Genesis 9:13-16). In Ezekiel 1:28 and Revelation 4:3 the rainbow round about the throne of Jehovah is the symbol of mercy to God’s children amidst coming judgments on the wicked. Though the divine righteousness requires a deluge of wrath on the faithless, God’s faithfulness will only shine forth on the elect remnant the brighter for the tribulation that necessarily precedes (compare Isaiah 54:8-10). The complete circle typifies God’s perfection and eternity, not broken into a half, as the earthly rainbow. As the various prismatic colors unite to form one pure ray, so God’s varied providence combine in one harmonious whole. As the rainbow was reflected on the waters of the world’s ruin, and is seen only when a cloud is over the earth, so another deluge of fire shall precede the new heavens and earth” granted to redeemed man, as the earth after the flood was restored to Noah. The cloud was the token of God’s presence in Israel’s wilderness journey and in the holiest place of the temple; and on Mount Sinai at the giving of the law; and at the Lord’s ascension ( Acts 1:9), and at His coming again ( Revelation 1:7). The bow represents calm sunshine after the world’s shipwreck through sin. It is the emblem of God’s loving faithfulness to His covenant with His people, and the pledge of sure hope to them.

    BOWELS including the heart, the seat of the affections and emotions. “My bowels are troubled for him,” namely, with tender yearnings of compassionate love ( Jeremiah 31:20; Isaiah 63:15; Hosea 11:8; Philippians 2:1).

    BOWLS Round and hollow. Babylonian bowls are to be seen in the British Museum, with Chaldean inscriptions, probably designed as charms against evil and sickness (compare Joseph’s “divining cup,” Genesis 44:5). The writing is of a Hebrews type, and may have belonged to the descendants of the Jewish captives in Babylon.

    BOX Isaiah 41:19; 60:13: rather the scherbin, a cedar remarkable for its small cones and upright branches; teasshur from ashar, to be upright. Some read this in Ezekiel 27:6, instead of “the Ashurites.” Maurer translated: “they have made thy benches of ivory inlaid in the daughter of cedars,” or the best boxwood. The box when not trimmed grows often 25 feet high. The wood, hard and firm, so as to be the only European wood that sinks in water, is used now especially for inlaying and wood engraving, and takes a fine polish.

    BOZEZ (“shining”). The name of one of two “sharp rocks” (Hebrew: “tooth of the cliff”), on the N. side “over against Michmash,” “between the passages” whereby Jonathan entered the Philistines’ garrison ( 1 Samuel 14:4,5).

    BOZKATH A city of the shephelah or low land of Judah ( Joshua 15:39; 2 Kings 22:1), to which Josiah’s grandmother belonged.

    BOZRAH from a root “restrain,” a sheepfold, Septuagint version of Jeremiah 49:22. Jobab is styled” of Bozrah” (Genesis 36:33) among the kings of Edom ( 1 Chronicles 1:44). 1. Now El-busaireh, containing about 50 houses and a castle on a hill, in the mountain district S.E. of the Dead Sea, half way between Petra and the Dead Sea. Burckhardt saw goats in large numbers there, just as Isaiah ( Isaiah 34:6) describes; compare Isaiah 63:1; Amos 1:12; Micah 2:12. 2. Another Bozrah in Moab, in “the plain country,” i.e. the high level downs E. of the Dead Sea ( Jeremiah 48:21,24), enumerated among the cities of Moab. The Bozrah of Edom on the mountains ( Jeremiah 49:13) and Edom’s other cities are to be “perpetual wastes”; but the Bozrah of Moab “in the plain” is to be restored “in the latter days” ( Jeremiah 48:47). Though not mentioned elsewhere, this Bozrah of Moab, where kings were “sheepmasters” ( 2 Kings 3:4), would be a name (meaning “sheepfold”) of probable occurrence. Others identify this Bozrah with the Roman Bostra in Bashan,60 miles from Heshbon, containing magnificent remains; Jeremiah’s including the cities “far and near’ may favor this view; but Jeremiah 48:21, “in the plain,” seems to mark it among the other Moabite cities.

    BRACELET [See ARMLET , which encircled the arm, asBRACELETS the wrist.] In Genesis 38:18,25, instead of “bracelets” translate (pathiyb ) “the ribband” or guard by which Judah’s signet was suspended to his neck. In Isaiah 3:19 wreathed chainwork bracelets are meant, as the root of sheerah implies. Bracelets of fine twisted gold are still common in Egypt.

    Men wore them as well as women. The Assyrian kings had “in the center of theirs stars and rosettes, probably inlaid with precious stones” (Layard).

    In Exodus 35:22, for “bracelets” (chach ) translate clasp or ring (literally, “a hook”). The “bracelet on Saul’s arm,” i.e. armlet, was one of the insignia of royalty found after his death ( 2 Samuel 1:10).

    BRAMBLE (atad ). Not our English trailing blackberries; but the Paliurus rhamnus aculeatus, a lowly stunted tree with drooping jagged branches, from which project sharp stiff thorns, affording no shade, but only scratching those who touched it; fit emblem of the self important, petty, but mischievous speaker (answering to Abimelech) in Jotham’s parable ( Judges 9:8-20), the oldest fable extant. The “bramble bush” ( Luke 6:44) is probably the same as Christ’s thorn (Zizyphus spina Christi) supposed to be the kind of which Christ’s crown of thorns was platted; a shrub about six feet high, producing an acid fruit as large as the sloe; the prickles grow in pairs, the one straight, the other curved back. The nebk of the Arabs, common everywhere, easily procurable, and pliable for platting, the leaves a deep green like the ivy; so suited to be a mock crown in imitation of the garlands or crowns with which emperors and generals used to be crowned.

    BRANCH “The branch of Jehovah” ( Isaiah 4:2), the sprout of Jehovah, Messiah ( Jeremiah 23:5; 33:15; Zechariah 3:8; 6:12; Luke 1:78 margin).

    Fruit bearing, so as to “fill the face of the world with fruit” ( Isaiah 27:6). He is at once a “branch” and a “root” ( Isaiah 11:1; 53:2). “The root and offspring (offshoot) of David” ( Revelation 22:16), the Brother of man and the Source of manhood. Luke 2:7 shows the depressed state of David’s royal line, represented by Joseph and Mary, at the time when Jesus was born “out of the stem of Jesse” (the stump cut close to the roots at that time); “a root out of a dry ground.” Perfect purity and grace were wrapped up under the root’s seemingly unattractive scales. Sin had dried up the life of the humanity out of which He sprang. Degenerate human nature, even Judaism, could never have produced Him. Though rooted in the dry ground of earth, He had a heavenly and self derived life. Believers being such “as He is in this world” ( 1 John 4:17) are also “branches” in Him the living vine, yielding fruit instinctively, spontaneously, naturally, their love corresponding to His (John 15), “the branch of My planting” ( Isaiah 60:21). “An abominable branch,” a useless sucker cut away by the husbandman; else the tree’s branch on which a malefactor was hung, and which was buried with him. “They put the branch to their nose” ( Ezekiel 8:17), expressing insolent security; they turn up their nose with scorn, or rather they held up a branch of tamarisk to their nose at daybreak, while singing hymns to the rising sun.

    BRASS With us a mixed metal, consisting of copper and zinc; but the brass of the Bible is one dug simple out of the earth ( Deuteronomy 8:9; Job 28:2), probably copper. Bronze, a composition of copper and tin, extensively known in ancient times, may m some passages be meant. In Deuteronomy 33:25, “thy shoes shall be iron and brass,” it is implied Asher should have a mine abounding territory. Keil and Delitzsch translate, “iron and brass shall be thy castle” min’al ); Asher’s dwellings were to be impregnable as if of iron and brass. Copper was used earlier than iron, its ductility being its recommendation for general use. Tubal-cain is termed “the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron” ( Genesis 4:22). “Brass” is used in a good sense for strength ( <19A716> Psalm 107:16; Jeremiah 1:18). In a bad sense, for impudent stubbornness ( Isaiah 48:4; Jeremiah 6:28). For money, Matthew 10:9. In Leviticus 26:19, “I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass,” i.e. hard, yielding no rain, and producing no fruit. “Flesh of brass,” i.e. invulnerable ( Job 6:12). The thighs of brass in Nebuchadnezzar’s image ( Daniel 2:32) represent the brazen armed Greeks. In Revelation 1:15,” His feet like unto fine brass,” rather, “glowing brass, as if they had been made red hot in a furnace.”

    BREAD First undoubtedly mentioned in Genesis 18:6. The best being made of wheat; the inferior of barley, used by the poor, and in scarcity ( John 6:9,13; Revelation 4:6; 2 Kings 4:38,42). An ephah or “three measures” was the amount of meal required for a single baking, answering to the size of the oven ( Matthew 13:33). The mistress of the house and even a king’s daughter did not think baking beneath them ( 2 Samuel 13:8). Besides there were public bakers ( Hosea 7:4), and in Jerusalem a street tenanted by bakers ( Jeremiah 37:21); Nehemiah mentions “the tower of the furnaces,” or ovens ( Nehemiah 3:11; 12:38). Their loaf was thinner in shape and crisper than ours, from whence comes the phrase, not cutting, but breaking bread ( Matthew 14:19; Acts 20:7,11). Exodus 12:34 implies the small size of their kneading troughs, for they were “bound up in their clothes (the outer garment, a large square cloth) upon their shoulders.” As bread was made in thin cakes it soon became dry, as the Gibeonites alleged as to their bread ( Joshua 9:12), and so fresh bread was usually baked every day, which usage gives point to “give us day by day our daily bread” ( Luke 11:3). When the kneading was completed leaven was added; but when time was short unleavened cakes were hastily baked, as is the present Bedouin usage; termed in Exodus 12:8-20 matsowt , i.e. pure loaves, having no leaven, which ferments the dough and so produces corruption, and is therefore symbol of mortal corruption ( 1 Corinthians 5:8); therefore excluded from the Passover, as also to commemorate the haste of Israel’s departure. Leaven was similarly excluded from sacrifices ( Leviticus 2:11).

    The leavened dough was sometimes exposed to a moderate heat all night while the baker slept: Hosea 7:4-6; “as an oven heated by the baker who ceaseth from raising (rather, heating) after he hath kneaded the dough, until it be leavened; for they have made ready their heart like an oven, whiles they lie in wait ... their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth as a flaming fire.” Their heart was like an oven first heated by Satan, then left to burn with the pent up fire of their corrupt passions. Like the baker sleeping at night, Satan rests secure that at the first opportunity the hidden fires will break forth, ready to execute whatever evil he suggests. The bread was divided into round cakes, or “loaves,” three of which sufficed for one person’s meal ( Luke 11:5). “Bread of affliction” or “adversity” would be a quantity less than this ( 1 Kings 22:27; Isaiah 30:20). Oil was sometimes mixed with the flour. There were also cakes of finer flour, called “heart cakes” (as our “cordial” is derived from cor, “the heart”), a heart strengthening pastry ( 2 Samuel 13:8-10 margin), a pancake, possibly with stimulant seeds in it, quickly made; such as Tamar prepared and shook out (not “poured” as a liquid) from the pan, for Amnon. The loaves used to be taken to the oven in a basket upon the head ( Genesis 40:16), which exactly accords with Egyptian usage, men carrying burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. The variety of Egyptian confectionery is evident from the monuments still extant. The “white baskets” may mean “baskets of white bread.” The oven of each house was a stone or metal jar, heated inwardly, often with dried “grass” (illustrating Matthew 6:30). When the fire burned down the cakes were applied inwardly or outwardly. Cakes were sometimes baked on heated stones, or between layers of dung, the slow burning of which adapts it for baking ( Ezekiel 4:15). They needed to be turned in baking, like Scotch oatcakes. Hosea 7:8, “Ephraim is a cake not turned”: burnt on one side, unbaked on the other, the fire spoiling, not penetrating it; so religious professors, outwardly warm, inwardly cold; on one side overdone, on the other not vitally influenced at all; Jehus professing great “zeal for the Lord,” really zealous for themselves.

    BRICK The earliest were those used in building Babel, of clay burned in the fire. Genesis 11:3, “Let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly (margin burn them to a burning). And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.” So Herodotus states that in building Babylon’s walls the clay dug out of the ditch was made into bricks, being burnt in kilns. The bricks were cemented with hot bitumen (asphalt), and at every thirtieth row reeds were stuffed in. The materials were ready to their hands, clay and bitumen bubbling up from the ground. But in Assyria and Egypt the bricks are sundried, not fireburnt, though in Jeremiah 43:9 a brick kiln is mentioned in Egypt. The Babylonian are larger than English bricks, being about 13 in. square, and 3 1/2 in. thick; more like our tiles, and often enameled with patterns (compare Ezekiel 4:1); such have been found at Nimrud. The Babylonians used to record astronomical observations on tiles. Nebuchadnezzar’s buildings superseded those of his predecessors; hence, most of the Babylonian bricks bear his name m cuneiform character.

    The Egyptian are from 15 to 20 in. long, 7 wide, 5 thick. Those of clay from the torrent beds near the desert need no straw, and are as solid now as when put up m the reigns of the Egyptian kings before the exodus.

    Those made of Nile mud need straw to prevent cracking; and frequently a layer of reeds at intervals acted as binders. In the paintings on the tomb of Rekshara, an officer of Thothmes III (1400 B.C.), captives, distinguished from the natives by color, are represented as forced by taskmasters to make brick; the latter armed with sticks are receiving “the tale of bricks.”

    This maybe a picture of the Israelites in their Egyptian bondage; at least it strikingly illustrates it.

    In Assyria artificial mounds, encased with limestone blocks, raised the superstructure 30 or 40 feet above the level of the plain. The walls of crude brick were cased with gypsum slabs to the height of 10 feet; kiln-burned bricks cased the crude bricks from the slabs to the top of the wall. The brick kiln is mentioned in David’s time as in use in Israel (2, Sam. 12:31); they in Isaiah’s time ( Isaiah 65:3) substituted altars of brick for the unhewn stone which God commanded.

    BRIDGE The only hint of bridges in Scripture is the proper name Geshur, in Bashan, N.E. of the sea of Galilee. The Israelites forded their rivers, but had no bridges to cross over them. A bridge of planks on stone piers was constructed by Nitocris, 600 B.C., to connect the parts of Babylon together ( Jeremiah 51:31,32; 50:38). The arch was known in Egypt centuries B.C., yet the Romans were the first to construct arched bridges.

    Remains of their bridges over the Jordan and the Syrian rivers, notably at Beyrut, still exist. The most remarkable one is Jacob’s Bridge over the upper Jordan near lake Hooleh.

    BRIDLE Isaiah 37:29, “I will put My hook in thy nose and My bridle in thy lips,” is illustrated in the Assyrian monuments, which represent captives with bridles attached to rings inserted in their under lip, and held in the hand of the king; some of the captives with short beards, tasseled caps, long tunics, and hosen or boots ( Daniel 3:21), seem in physiognomy Jews, or Israelites of the ten tribes. The king in one representation is thrusting out the captive’s eye with a spear, as Zedekiah was treated by Nebuchadnezzar.

    BRIER Judges 8:7,16: “Gideon said, I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers.” Gesenius for “briers” translates “with threshing machines with stones or flints underneath,” barquan being iron pyrites. But the KJV is supported by the old versions; prickly plants such as grow on strong ground. In Ezekiel 2:6 Gesenius translates as margin “rebels”; “though rebellions men like thorns be with thee.” But “briers” answers better to “thorns” which follows: sarubim from saaraph , “to sting.” The wicked are often so called ( 2 Samuel 23:6; Song 2:2). In Isaiah 55:13 “instead of the brier (sirpad ) shall come up the myrtle tree.” The sirpad , from saaraph “to sting,” and saphad “to prick,” is the nettle.

    BRIGANDINE Jeremiah 46:4; 55:3: sirion , a coat of mail, or scale armor, worn by the light troops called brigands.

    BRIMSTONE gaphrith , related to gopher wood, and so expressing any inflammable substance, as sulphur, which burns with a suffocating smell. It is a mineral found in quantities on the shores of the Dead Sea. It was the instrument used in destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, the adjoining cities of the plain ( Genesis 19:24), for divine miracle does not supersede the use of God’s existing natural agents, but moves in connection with them. An image of every visitation of God’s vengeance on the ungodly, especially of the final one ( Deuteronomy 29:23; Job 18:15; Psalm 11:6; Isaiah 34:9; Ezekiel 38:22; Revelation 19:20; 20:10; 21:8).

    BROOK aphiquw . A torrent sweeping through a mountain gorge, in the poetical books alone. Yeor, the Nile canals, Isaiah 19:6-8; 23:3,10, but general in Daniel 12:5-7. Mical, a rivulet ( 2 Samuel 17:20). Nachal, the torrent bed, and the torrent itself ( Numbers 21:12; 1 Kings 17:3); the Arabic wady; Indian nullah; Greek cheimarrous .

    BROTHER Includes, besides sons of the same parents, cousins and near relatives, as a nephew ( Genesis 13:8; 14:16; Deuteronomy 25:5,6 margin). One of the same tribe ( 2 Samuel 19:12). Of the same or a kindred people ( Exodus 2:11; Numbers 20:14). A friend ( Job 6:15). A fellow man ( Leviticus 19:17). “A brother to (i.e. a fellow on a level with) the dragons” or “jackals” ( Job 30:29).

    As the outer pagan world knew believers by the name “Christian,” so they know one another by the name “brethren” ( Acts 11:26; 26:28; Peter 4:16: compare Matthew 25:40; Acts 11:29). The Jews distinguished a “brother” as an Israelite by birth, and a “neighbor” a proselyte, and allowed neither title to the Gentiles. But Christ applied “brother” to all Christians, and “neighbor” to all the world ( Corinthians 5:11; Luke 10:29,30).

    The arguments for the “brethren” of Jesus (James, Joses, Simon, and Judas) mentioned in Matthew 13:56 being literally His brothers, born of Joseph and Mary, are: (1) their names are always connected with Mary, “His brethren” is the phrase found nine times in the Gospels, once in Acts ( Acts 1:14); (2) nothing is said to imply that the phrase is not to be taken literally. But: (1) “My brethren” is found in the wide sense ( Matthew 28:10; John 20:17). (2) If Joseph had been their father, they would have been some one time at least designated in the usual mode “sons of Joseph.” The statement that. His “brethren did not believe in Him” ( John 7:5) may refer to His near relations generally, excepting the two apostles James (who is expressly called “the Lord’s brother,” Galatians 1:19) and Jude ( Jude 1:1). In Acts 1:14 His “brethren,” as distinct from the apostles, may refer to Simon and Joses and other near relatives. It is not likely there would be two pairs of brothers named alike, of such eminence; James and Jude. His brethren are, most probably, the writers of the epistles. (3) It is expressly stated that Mary, wife of Cleophas and sister of the Virgin Mary ( John 19:25), had sons, of whom James and Joses are named ( Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40). How unlikely that two mothers of the same name, Mary the Virgin and her sister, should have sons also bearing the same names. (4) If the Virgin had had sons of her own, Jesus would not have given her in charge to John ( John 19:26), who was not a relative. (5) It is a fitting thing that in Jesus the line of David should have its final consummation. The naming of Jesus’ brethren with His virgin mother so often may be because Jesus and she took up their abode at the home of Mary, the Virgin’s sister, after Joseph’s death; for that he soon died appears from his name being never mentioned after Luke 2. Hence the cousins would grow up as brothers. The very difficulty implies the absence of collusion or mythical origin in the gospel narrative. “Firstborn son” ( Matthew 1:25) does not imply that any sons were born of the Virgin afterwards, but that none were born before Him. Exodus 13:2 defines “the firstborn” “whatsoever openeth the womb”: whether other children followed or not. “Knew her not until” does not necessarily imply he even then knew her; compare Genesis 28:15, “I will not leave thee until I have done,” not meaning He would leave Jacob even then. The main truth asserted is the virginity of Mary up to Jesus’ birth. What was afterward is not dearly revealed, being of less consequence to us.

    BUKKI 1. Abishua’s son; father of Uzzi; fifth in the high priestly line through Eleazar from Aaron ( 1 Chronicles 6:5,51). Abishua seems to have had the high priesthood; but Bukki not so, the office having passed to the house of Ithamar, until Zadok, of the family of Eleazar, was made high priest in David’s reign. 2. Son of Jogli, and prince of Dan, one of the ten chosen to divide Canaan among the tribes ( Numbers 34:22).

    BUKKIAH ( 1 Chronicles 25:4,13). Leader of the sixth bourse of musicians in the temple service; “of the sons of Heman, the king’s seer in the words of God.”

    BULL Used as synonymous with ox in the KJV. Baaqaar is the Hebrews for horned cattle fit for the plow. Tor is one head of horned cattle, akin to our steer. Egel , a calf, properly of the first year; specially one offered in sacrifice. Hosea 14:2: “so shall we render the calves of our lips;” instead of sacrifices of calves, which we cannot offer to Thee in exile, we present the praises of our lips. The exile, by its enforced cessation of sacrifices during Israel’s separation from the temple, the only lawful place of offering them, prepared the people for the superseding of all sacrifices by the one great antitypical sacrifice; henceforth “the sacrifice of praise continually, the fruit of our lips,” is what God requires ( Hebrews 13:15). The abriym express “strong bulls” ( Psalm 22:12; 50:13; 68:30).

    Caesar describes wild bulls of the Hercynian forest, strong and swift, almost as large as elephants, and savage. The Assyrian remains depict similarly the wild urns. The ancient forest round London was infested with them. The wild bull (toh ) in Isaiah 51:20, “thy sons lie at the head of all the streets as a wild bull in a net,” seems to be of the antelope kind, Antilope bubalis, the “wild ox” of the Arabs; often depicted in Egyptian remains as chased not for slaughter, but for capture, it being easily domesticated.

    BULRUSH ’Agmon , from ‘aagam , a marsh. “The head or tail, branch or rush,” i.e. high or low; the lofty palm branch, or the humble reed ( Isaiah 9:14,15; 19:15). It used to be platted into rope; Job 41:2,” canst thou put an hook (rather a rope of rushes) into his nose?” Moses’ ark was woven of it (gomeh ): Exodus 2:3; Isaiah 18:2. “Vessels of bulrushes,” light canoes of papyrus of the Nile, daubed over with pitch; derived from gaamah , “to absorb.” The Egyptians used it for making also garments, shoes, and baskets. In Exodus 2:3; Isaiah 18:2, it means the papyrus of which the Egyptians made light boats for the Nile; the same Hebrews (gomeh ) is translated rush ( Job 8:11; Isaiah 35:7). The Egyptian kam is related. This papyrus is no longer found below Nubia. It is a strong bamboo-like rush, as thick as a finger, three grainered, from 10 to 15 feet high. It is represented on the tomb of Tel, of the sixth dynasty, and other oldest Egyptian monuments.

    BUNAH 1 Chronicles 2:25.

    BUNNI 1. Nehemiah 9:4; 10:15. 2. Nehemiah 11:15. 3. The alleged Jewish name of Nicodemus ( John 3:1).

    BURIAL The Jews entombed, if possible, or else inferred, their dead; the rabbis alleging as a reason” Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” ( Genesis 3:19). Even enemies received burial ( 1 Kings 11:15). The law ordained the same treatment of the malefactor ( Deuteronomy 21:23). Nothing but extreme profanity on the part of the deceased during life was deemed a warrant for disturbing their remains ( 2 Kings 23:16,17; Jeremiah 8:1,2). A cave was the usual tomb, as Palestine abounds in caves. The funeral rites were much less elaborate than those of the Egyptians. Jacob and Joseph dying in Egypt were embalmed; the Egyptians, through lack of a better hope, endeavoring to avert or delay corruption. Kings and prophets alone were buried within the walls of towns. A strong family feeling led the Israelites to desire burial in the same tomb as their forefathers. So Jacob ( Genesis 49:29-32). The burial place of Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob, in the field of Machpelah (Genesis 23), bought by Abraham from Ephron the Hittite, and the field bought by Jacob from Shechem’s father, Hamor, where Joseph’s bones were buried ( Joshua 24:32), were the only fixed possessions the patriarchs had in Canaan, and the sole purchases they made there. They felt their bodies belonged to the Lord. To be excluded from the family burying place, as Uzziah and Manasseh were, was deemed an indignity. Chronicles 26:23; 33:20; compare 1 Kings 13:22,31, which shows it was a mark of great respect to one not of one’s family to desire burial with him (compare Ruth 1:17). The greatest indignity was to be denied burial ( 2 Kings 9:10; Isaiah 14:20; Jeremiah 22:18,19; Samuel 21:12-14). David’s magnanimity appears in his care to restore his enemy Saul’s remains to the paternal tomb. To give a place in one’s own sepulchre was a special honor; as the children of Heth offered Abraham, and as Jehoiada was buried among the kings ( Genesis 23:6; Chronicles 24:16). So Joseph of Arimathea could not have done a greater honor to our crucified Lord’s body than giving it a place in his own new tomb, fulfilling the prophecy Isaiah 53:9 ( John 19:31-42). A common tomb for all the kindred, with galleries, is not uncommon in the East.

    Burning was only practiced in peculiar circumstances, as in the case of Saul’s and his sons’ mutilated headless bodies, where regular burial was impossible and there was a possibility of the Philistines coming and mutilating them still more. However, the bones were not burned but buried ( 1 Samuel 31:11-13). Also in a plague, to prevent contagion ( Amos 6:9,10). Costly spices were wrapped up in the linen swathes round the corpse, and also were burnt at the funeral ( 2 Chronicles 16:14); so Nicodemus honored Jesus with 100 pounds weight of “myrrh and aloes.”

    The rapidity of decomposition in the hot East, and the legal uncleanness of association with a dead body, caused immediate interment; as in the case of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5; Numbers 19:11-14). Hired mourners with shrill pipes increased the sound of wailings for the dead ( Matthew 9:23; Jeremiah 9:17; 2 Chronicles 35:25). The body without any coffin was carried to burial on a bier ( Luke 7:12). A napkin was bound round the head, and linen bandages wound round the body ( John 11:44; 19:40). The whole of the preparations are included in the Greek word [entafiasmos which Jesus uses ( Mark 14:8). After burial the funeral feast followed ( Jeremiah 16:6-8). Ezekiel 24:17, “Eat not the bread of men,” i.e. the bread or viands, as well as “the cup of consolation,” which men usually bring mourners in token of sympathy. The law ( Leviticus 19:28) forbade cuttings in the flesh for the dead, usual among the pagan.

    Families often reduced their means by lavish expenditure in gifts at funerals, to which there may be reference in Deuteronomy 26:14. By the law also nothing ought to be carried into a mourning house (as being unclean) of that which was sanctified, as for instance tithes.

    Samuel was buried in his own house at Ramah; and the sepulchers of Judah’s kings were in the city of David ( 2 Chronicles 16:14). Fine ranges of tombs, said to be of the kings, judges, and prophets, still remain near Jerusalem; but these, many think, are the tomb of Helena, the widow of the king of Adiabene, who settled at Jerusalem and relieved poor Jews in the famine foretold by Agabus under Claudius Caesar. The “graves of the children of the people” were and are in the valley of Kedron or Jehoshaphat ( 2 Kings 23:6); and on the graves of them that had sacrificed to the idols and groves Josiah strawed the dust of their idols ( 2 Chronicles 34:4): “the graves of the common people” outside the city ( Jeremiah 26:23). Tophet, the valley E. of the city, was once the haunt of Moloch worship, but was doomed to defilement by burials there ( Jeremiah 7:32; 19:11). “The potters’ field,” with its holes dug out for clay, afforded graves ready made “to bury strangers in.” Tombs were often cut out of the living rock.

    One of the kings’ tombs near Jerusalem has a large circular stone set on its edge. A deep recess is cut in the solid rock at the left of the door, into which the stone might be rolled aside, when the tomb was opened; when closed, the stone would be rolled back to its proper place. The disk is large enough, not only to cover the entrance, but also to fit into another recess at the right of the door, and thus completely shut it in. There is an incline to its proper place, so that to roll it back is much harder than to roll it into it.

    The women going to Jesus’ tomb might well say,” Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?” ( Mark 16:3.) Mary stooped to look in, because the door was low; the angel sat on the stone rolled aside into its recess, as the women drew near ( Matthew 28:2; John 20:11; compare Isaiah 22:16; Luke 23:53).

    Demoniacs and outcasts would haunt such tombs for shelter, when open ( Isaiah 60:4; Mark 5:5). Sepulchers used to be whitened, after the rains, before the Passover, each year, to guard against any defiling himself by touching them. This explains Jesus’ comparison of hypocrites to “whited sepulchers” ( Matthew 23:27). To repair the prophets’ tombs was regarded as an act of great piety ( Matthew 23:29).

    BURNT OFFERING ‘olah , “what ascends” in smoke to God, being wholly consumed to ashes.

    Also kaliyl , “perfect.” Part of every offering was burnt in the sacred fire, the symbol of God’s presence; but this was wholly burnt, as a “whole burnt offering.” In Genesis 8:20 is the first mention of it; Throughout Genesis it is seemingly the only sacrifice ( Genesis 15:9,17; 22:2,7,8,13). It was the highest of gifts to God (eucharistic, prosforai , “offerings,” Hebrew minchsh ), representing entire, unreserved dedication of the offerer, body, soul, spirit, will, to God ( Psalm 40:8,9; Hebrews 10:5,6). The other kind of “sacrifices,” namely, propitiatory (thusiai ) and sin offerings, are distinct ( Hebrews 10:8,9; compare Exodus 10:25; 1 Samuel 15:22). Other “gifts” to God were of a lower kind, only a part being given; as the meat (not flesh, but flour, etc.) offering, which was unbloody, and the peace offering, a thank offering ( 1 Kings 3:15, 8:64; Psalm 51:17,19).

    The most perfect surrender of human will to God’s is that of Jesus in the temptation, and agony, and on Calvary; the antitype to the whole burnt offering ( Hebrews 5:1-8). This could only be offered by one free from sin; therefore the sin offering always came first ( Exodus 29:36-38; Leviticus 8:14,18; 9:8,12; 16:3,5). So, only when we are first reconciled by Christ’s atonement for our sin to God, can we “present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” ( Romans 12:1). A “meat offering” (flour and oil, fruits of the earth) accompanied the burnt offering; for when men dedicated themselves wholly to God they also dedicated the earthly gifts which He had given them ( Leviticus 9:16,17). It was to be brought of the offerer’s own free will, and slain by himself, after he had laid his hands on its head, to mark it as his representative; a young bullock, or he goat, era turtle dove, or pigeon (if the person was poor), not to be divided in offering it. The skin alone was reserved. There was a daily burnt offering, a lamb of the first year, every morning and evening ( Exodus 29:38-42); that for the sabbath double the daily one; the offering at the new moon of the three great feasts, Passover, pentecost, and tabernacles; also on the great day of atonement and the feast of trumpets; private burnt offerings at the consecration of a priest, etc., etc. ( Exodus 29:15) They were offered in vast numbers at Solomon’s dedication of the temple; but ordinarily were restricted in extent by God, to preclude the idea of man’s buying His favor by costly gifts.

    Jephthah’s vow was without divine warrant, and due to the half paganism of his early life ( Judges 11:4).

    BUSH Exodus 3:2. literally, “out of the midst of the bush,” namely, that bush of which Moses often spoke to Israel, “the thorny acacia,” a pure Egyptian term, sen’eh, Coptic sheno.

    BUTTER cheme’ah , from an Arabic root meaning “coagulated.” Curdled milk, curds, butter, and cheese ( Judges 5:25; 2 Samuel 17:29). But the butter in the East is more fluid and less solid than ours. The milk is put in a whole goatskin bag, sewed up, and hung on a frame so as to swing to and fro. The fluidity explains Job 20:17, “brooks of honey and butter”; Job 29:6, “I washed my steps with butter.” Isaiah 7:15,22, “butter and honey shall he eat”: besides these being the usual food for children, and so in the case of the prophetess’ child typifying the reality of Christ’s humanity, which stooped to the ordinary food of infants, a state of distress over the land is implied, when through the invaders milk and honey, things produced spontaneously, should be the only abundant food. In Psalm 55:21 the present reading is properly “smooth are the butter-masses (i.e. sweetness) of his mouth.” The Chaldee version translated as KJV Gesenius explains Proverbs 30:33, “the pressure (not ‘churning’) of milk bringeth forth cheese.”

    BUZ (“contempt”). 1. Second son of Milcah and Nahor, Abraham’s brother ( Genesis 22:21). Kennel was the father of Aram, i.e. Syria. Elihu ( Job 32:2) is called “the son of Barachal the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram” (i.e. Aram); he therefore probably was descended from Buz. The family settled in Arabia Deserta, for Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 25:23), in denouncing judgments against Buz, associates the tribe with Tema and Dedan. 2. The name also occurs in Gad’s genealogy ( 1 Chronicles 5:14).

    C CABBON ( Joshua 15:40). A town in the shephelah (low hilly region) of Judah.

    CABUL On the boundary of Asher ( Joshua 19:27). Solomon gave to Hiram a district containing 20 cities, Cabal included. Not liking the district, Hiram said, “What, kind of cities are these?” and called the whole from the one city Cabul, which in Phoenician means displeasing ( 1 Kings 9:13). From 2 Chronicles 8:2 it seems that Hiram restored the 20 cities. The district was “Galilee of the Gentiles” ( Isaiah 9:1), i.e. the N. part of Galilee, only in part occupied by Israel, more completely so after Hiram restored the cities. Tiglath Pileser carried the inhabitants captive to Assyria ( Kings 15:29). The cities were occupied chiefly by Canaanite pagans ( Samuel 24:7), and were in a bad condition. Gesenius explains Cabul “the pawned land.” Solomon borrowed sixscore talents of gold from Hiram for his extensive buildings, and gave the 20 cities as an equivalent. But on Hiram expressing dissatisfaction with them, he took them back, and, doubtless in course of time, repaid the gold.

    CAESAR The common title of the successive Roman emperors, taken from Julius Caesar. In the New Testament Augustus in Luke 2:1, Tiberius in Luke 3:1, Claudius in Acts 11:28, Nero in Acts 25:11, etc.

    Roman citizens as Paul had the right of “appeal to Caesar,” and in criminal cases were sent for judgment to Rome, where was the emperor’s court ( Philippians 4:22; compare Philippians 1:13); Nero is the emperor meant. John’s exile to Patmos ( Revelation 1:9) was probably in Domitian’s reign. The current coin bore Caesar’s image, the argument which Jesus used to show Caesar could claim tribute ( Matthew 22:17, etc.). Though Caesar did not call himself “king,” the Jews did ( John 19:15), in which respect Josephus (B. J. 5:2, section 2) confirms the gospel undesignedly.

    CAESAREA 1. Named also Sebaste (i.e. of Augustus, in whose honor Herod the Great built it in ten years with a lavish expenditure, so that Tacitus calls it “the head of Judaea”). Also Stratonis, from Strato’s tower, and Palaestinae, and Maritime. The residence of Philip the deacon and his four prophesying daughters ( Acts 8:40; 21:8,16). Also the scene of the Gentile centurion Cornelius’ conversion (Acts 10:; 11:11). Herod Agrippa I. died there ( Acts 12:19-23). Paul sailed thence to Tarsus ( Acts 9:30); and arrived there from his second missionary journey ( Acts 18:22), also from his third Acts 21:8); and was a prisoner there for two years before his voyage to Italy ( Acts 24:27; 25:1,4,6,13). It was on the high road between Tyre and Egypt; a little more than a day’s journey from Joppa on the S. ( Acts 10:24), less than a day from Ptolemais on the N. ( Acts 21:8.) About 70 miles from Jerusalem, from which the soldiers brought Paul in two days ( Acts 23:31,32) by way of Antipatris. It had a harbor 300 yards across, and vast breakwater, (the mole still remains,) and a temple with colossal statues sacred to Caesar and to Rome. Joppa and Dora had been previously the only harbors of Palestine. It was the Roman procurators’ (Felix, Festus, etc.) official residence; the Herodian kings also kept court there. The military head quarters of the province were fixed there. Gentiles outnumbered Jews in it; and in the synagogue accordingly the Old Testament was read in Greek. An outbreak between Jews and Greeks was one of the first movements in the great Jewish war. Vespasian was declared emperor there; he made it a Roman colony, with the Italian rights. It was the home of Eusebius, the scene of some of Origen’s labors, and the birthplace of Procopius. Now a desolate ruin, called Kaisariyeh; S. of the mediaeval town is the great earthwork with its surrounding ditch, and a stone theater within, which Josephus alludes to as an amphitheater. 2. Caesarea Philippi. Anciently Paneas or Panium (from the sylvan god Pan, whose worship seemed appropriate to the verdant situation, with groves of olives and Hermon’s lovely slopes near); the modern Bahias. At the eastern of the two sources of the Jordan, the other being at Tel-el-Kadi (Dan or Laish, the most northerly city of Israel). The streams which flow from beneath a limestone rock unite in one stream near Caesarea Philippi.

    There was a deep cavity full of still water there. Identified with the see BAAL see GAD (see) of Old Testament Herod erected here a temple of white marble to Augustus. Herod’s son Philip, tetrarch of Trachonitis, enlarged and called it from himself, as well as Caesar, Caesarea Philippi.

    Agrippa II called it Neronias; but the old name prevailed. It was the seat of a Greek and a Latin bishopric in succession. The great castle (Shubeibeh) built partly in the earliest ages still remains the most striking fortress in Palestine. The transfiguration probably took place on mount Hermon. which rears its majestic head 7,000 feet above Caesarea Philippi. The allusion to “snow” agrees with this, and the mention of Caesarea Philippi in the context ( Matthew 16:13; Mark 8:27; 9:3). The remoteness and privacy of Caesarea Philippi fitted it for being the place where Jesus retired to prepare His disciples for His approaching death of shame and His subsequent resurrection; there it was that Peter received the Lord’s praise, and afterward censure. The transfiguration gave them a foretaste of the future glory, in order to prepare them for the intermediate shame and suffering.

    CAGE ( Jeremiah 5:27), rather “a trap” with decoy birds in it. In Revelation 18:2 a prison, guardhouse. [See BIRD .] CAIAPHAS, JOSEPH Appointed high priest (after Simon ben Camith) by the procurator Valerius Gratus, under Tiberius. He continued in office from A.D. 26 to 37, when the proconsul Vitellius deposed him. The president of the Jewish council (Sanhedrim) which condemned the Lord Jesus, Caiaphas declaring Him guilty of blasphemy. see ANNAS , his father-in-law, and father of five highpriests, besides having been highpriest himself, wielded a power equal to that of Caiaphas, whose deputy (sagan) he probably was. Hence he and Caiaphas are named as high priests together ( Luke 3:2); and the band led away the Lord to him first, then to Caiaphas ( John 18:13-24).

    Annas is called the high priest Acts 4:6, perhaps because he presided over the council (Sanhedrin). The priesthood at the time no longer comprehended the end of their own calling. Providence therefore, while employing him as the last of the sacerdotal order (for it ceased before God at the death of Messiah, the true and everlasting Priest, whose typical forerunner it was) to prophesy Christ’s death for the people, left him to judicial blindness as to the deep significance of his words: “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” ( John 11:50-52). A proof that the Holy Spirit, not merely man’s spirit, is the inspirer of the sacred writers ( 1 Peter 1:10-12). Balaam similarly was a bad man, yet uttered under the Spirit true and holy prophecies. Unscrupulous vigor, combined with political. shrewdness, characterizes him in the New Testament, as it also kept him in office longer than any of his predecessors.

    See Matthew 26:3,57-65.

    CAIN (1) (acquired). For Eve said, “I have gotten a man from (or with the help of) Jehovah.” She recognized this gift of Jehovah, though accompanied with the foretold “sorrow” of conception, as a first step toward fulfilling the promise of the Redeemer, “the seed of the woman” ( Genesis 3:15).

    Cain, her supposed acquisition, proved a deadly loss. Parents’ expectations are very different from after realities. Cain was of that wicked one ( John 3:12), not associated with Jehovah, except as incurring His curse.

    Augustine (City of God, 15:1) says: “Cain, the author of the city of the world, is born first, and is called an acquisition because he buildeth a city, is given to the cares and pomp of the world, and persecutes his brother that was chosen out of the world. But see ABEL (see), the beginner of the city of God, is born second, called ‘vanity’ because he saw the world’s vanity, and is therefore driven out of the world by an untimely death. So early came martyrdom into the world; the first man that died died for religion.”

    Jealousy was Cain’s motive, “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.” His “offering of the fruit of the ground,” not “the firstling’s of the flock,” seems to have been an unhumbled self-willed setting aside of God’s will (to be inferred from the “coats of skin,” Genesis 3:21, involving animal sacrifices) that the death which man’s sin incurred should be acknowledged as due by the sinner offering penitently a slain victim, and a substitution of his own act of will worship (“the error of Cain,” Jude 1:11), a mere thankoffering. Jehovah “had not respect to Cain and his offering,” but had to Abel and his offering; probably God gave the visible token of acceptance, fire from heaven consuming the sacrifice. So Theodotion; compare Genesis 15:17; Leviticus 9:24; Judges 6:21; 13:19,21); 1 Kings 18:39. Abel, according to Hebrews 11:4, “by faith offered a more excellent sacrifice than Cain”; lit. a fuller sacrifice, partaking more largely of the nature of a sacrifice. “Faith” presupposes a revelation of God’s will concerning sacrifice, otherwise it would have been an act of presumptuous will worship ( Colossians 2:23), and taking of a life which man had no right to before the flood ( Genesis 9:2-4). E. of Eden before the cherubic symbols of God was probably the appointed place of offering. “In process of time,” lit. “at the end of days,” namely, at some fixed sacred season, as the sabbath.

    Cain’s “countenance fell” at the rejection of his sacrifice, which possibly involved the loss of his privileges of primogeniture. Jehovah, who still vouchsafed intercourse to man though fallen, argues with Cain as a wayward child, “If thou doest well shalt thou not be accepted?” (or “have the excellency,” namely, that belonging to the elder born [compare Genesis 49:3]. Literally, will there not be lifting up? alluding by contrast to Cain’s fallen countenance.) “But if thou doest not well (which is thy real case, and thy not confessing it, but offering a mere thank offering, leaves thee still under guilt), a sin offering (so ‘sin’ is used Hosea 4:8; Leviticus 6:26; 10:17; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 9:28) lieth at the door,” i.e. is within thy reach (compare Matthew 24:33), you have only to go to the appointed place (probably E. of Eden where the cherubim were), and offering it in faith thou shalt be accepted and may have lifting up of countenance again ( Job 11:15; 22:26). The explanation, “if thou doest not well (i.e. sinnest), sin lieth at the door ready to assail you as a serpent” is tautology. The “sin” feminine joined with the masculine verb in the Hebrews implies that a male victim is meant by “sin” or sin offering. “And unto thee shall be his desire” as that of a younger brother subordinate in rank to the elder. You need not in jealousy fear losing your priority of birth, if you do well. Cain talked with Abel, proposing probably that they should go to the field, and when there away from man’s eye rose up and slew him. Adam’s sin now bears fratricide among its first and terrible fruits; and the seed of the serpent stands forth thenceforward throughout man’s history, as distinguished from the seed of the woman ( Genesis 3:15).

    Adam hid in the trees and then confessed his sin; but Cain stoutly denies it, showing himself the child of him who is the father of lying and the murderer from the beginning ( John 8:44). But God convicted him, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.” Herein God shows He takes cognizance of man’s sin, though there be no other accuser; next, that innocent blood is too precious to be shed with impunity; thirdly, that not only He cares for the godly in life but “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” ( <19B615> Psalm 116:15) (Calvin). Exile from the original seat of the human family and the scene of God’s manifestations was the sentence, a mild one, in consonance with the mild administration of the divine government before the flood. “My punishment is greater than I can bear” marks Cain’s unhumbled spirit, regretting only the punishment not the sin. “It shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me,” words implying that the human race had even then multiplied since Adam’s expulsion from Eden, a fact also appearing from Cain having a wife, doubtless one of Adam’s descendants; the sacred historian only giving one or two prominent links of the genealogy, not the sons, much less the daughters, all in full. God “set a mark upon,” or set a sign for, “Cain,” (what it was we know not) to assure him of safety from the blood avenger ( Judges 6:17; Isaiah 7:14). Cain, the second head of the race, namely, of the ungodly seed, must live, as the tares among the wheat, until the harvest, God reserving judgment to His own time and not allowing man to take avenging into his own hands. But after the flood God delegated in part the avenging of blood to man ( Genesis 9:6).

    In Nod (= exile) he built a city and named it from his son Enoch (high dedication); the first step in the founding of the spiritual world city upon which the carnal fix their affections as their lasting home, instead of seeking the heavenly city and continuing pilgrims on earth ( Psalm 49:11; Hebrews 11:10-16), To make up for his loss of unity in the fellowship of God and His people, Cain creates for himself and his an earthly center of unity. There civilization, but without God, developed itself, while the Sethites continued in godly pastoral simplicity ( Genesis 4:26). Lamech began polygamy; Jabal, nomadic life; Jubal, musical instruments; Tubal-cain, working in brass and iron. Lamech made his manslaughters an occasion for composing poetry in parallelism. The names of the women, Naamah (pleasant), Zillah (shadow), Adah (ornament), all imply refinement. But all this allied to godlessness, violence, and luxurious self indulgence, only prepared the world for the consummated corruption which brought down judgment, as it soon shall again in the last days (Revelation 17; 18; 19; Luke 17:26-37).

    The traditions of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Greeks, refer the invention of agriculture and breeding of cattle to prehistoric times, also the preparation of metals; whereas in the historic period these arts have made comparatively small advances. But ethnologists from the art-formed flints in the gravel and drift formations on the earth’s surface infer three successive ages, the flint, the bronze, the iron; also from the lower type of older skulls they infer that civilization was a slow growth from original barbarism. But Scripture does not represent man as possessed of superior intellectual power and refined knowledge. Adam was placed in Eden to until it, and his power of knowledge and speech was exercised in naming the beasts. China has been in a state of mental cultivation and art far beyond Adam, yet for ages has made no progress. All that Scripture states is man’s original innocence, and that his state was not savagery but rudimentary civilization. High art in the valley of Ohio is proved by the dug up remains to have preceded the forests which the Red Indians tenanted.

    Cereals have been found among very early remains of man’s industry, whether Cain cultivated them, or knew only roots, fruits, and vegetables.

    The oldest skulls are by no means all of low type.

    CAIN (2) (the lance, or else the nest). A city in the low hilly country (shephelah) of Judah ( Joshua 15:57).

    CAINAN (“possessor” or “weapon-maker”), as Tubal-cain comes from the Arabic “to forge” ( Genesis 4:22). Son of Enos; aged 70 when he begat Mahalaleel; he lived 840 years more, and died at 910 ( Genesis 5:9-14; 1 Chronicles 1:2). In Luke 3:36,37, second Cainan is introduced in the genealogy of Shem after the flood, a son of Cainan. A transcriber seems to have inserted it from the margin, where it was noted down from the Septuagint version of Genesis 10:24; 11:12; 1 Chronicles 1:18, but not in verse 24. For no Hebrew manuscript has it, nor the Samaritan Pentateuch, Chaldee, Syriac, and Vulgate versions from the Hebrew. Nor had even the Septuagint originally, according to Berosus, Polyhistor, Josephus, Philo, Theophilus of Antioch, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome. Beza’s manuscript D, of Luke, omits it. Ephrem Syrus says the Chaldees in the time of Terah and Abraham worshipped a graven god, Cainan. The rabbis represented him as the introducer of idol worship and astrology.

    CALAH A most ancient Assyrian city founded by Asshur ( Genesis 10:11), or rather by Nimrod; for the right translation is, “out of that city (namely, Babel in Shinar) he (Nimrod) went forth to Asshur (Assyria E. of the Tigris) and builded Nineveh and Rehoboth-ir (i.e. city markets), and Calah and Rosen, ... the same is a great city.” The four formed one “great” composite city, to which Nineveh, the name of one of the four in the restricted sense, was given; answering now to the ruins E. of the Tigris, Nebi Yunus, Koyunjik, Khorsabad, Nimrud. If Calah answer to Nimrud it was between 900 and 700 B.C. capital of the empire. The war-like Sardanapalus I and his successors resided here, down to Sargon, who built a new city and called it from his own name (now Khorsabad). Esarhaddon built there a grand palace. The district Calachene afterwards took its name from it.

    CALAMUS ( Exodus 30:23). An ingredient in the holy anointing oil (Song 4:14; Ezekiel 27:19), an import to Tyre. Aromatic cane: an Indian and Arabian plant. The Acorus Calamus ( Isaiah 43:24; Jeremiah 6:20), “sweet cane.” A scented cane is said to have been found in a valley of Lebanon, reedlike, much jointed, and very fragrant when bruised.

    CALCOL A man of Judah, descended from Zerah ( 1 Chronicles 2:6). Probably identical with Chalcol or Calcol, the same in the Hebrew, one of the four wise men whom Solomon exceeded ( 1 Kings 4:31). He and Darda or Dara are called “the sons of Mahol,” i.e. of the choir; they were the famous musicians, two of whom are named in the titles of Psalm 88 and Psalm 89.

    However, if Mahol is a proper name, he is their immediate father, Zerah their ancestor, of the great family of Pharez of Judah.

    CALDRON A vessel for boiling flesh ( 2 Chronicles 35:13).

    CALEB ( 1 Chronicles 2:9,18,19,42,50). Son of Hezron, son of Pharez, son of Judah; father of Hur by Ephrath; grandfather of Caleb the son of Hur, the firstborn of Ephratah. In 1 Chronicles 4:15 Caleb the spy is called “son of Jephunneh,” and in 1 Chronicles 2:49 the elder Caleb seemingly is father of the daughter Achsa. In Joshua 15:17 Caleb the spy is father of Achsah. Possibly, after all, the Caleb of 1 Chronicles 2 is the same as Caleb the spy; his adoption into Hezron’s family accounting for his appearing in the public Israelite record as his son. In this case the different families assigned to him he must have had by different wives, having their lots in different localities. This genealogy (1 Chronicles 2), drawn up in Hezekiah’s reign, alone mentions the supposed elder Caleb.

    Caleb, the illustrious spy, is also called” the Kenezite,” or “son of Kenaz” ( Numbers 32:12). Caleb was “head” ( Numbers 13:3) of the Hezronite family in Judah; while Nahshon son of Amminadab was head or prince of the whole tribe ( Numbers 1:7). He and Oshea or Joshua, alone of the twelve, on returning from Canaan to Kadesh Barnea, encouraged the people when dispirited by the other spies: “Let us go up at once, and possess the land (he does not for a moment doubt Israel’s ability; not Let us try; success is certain, the Lord being on our side), for we are well able to overcome it” ( Numbers 13:30). His character answers to his name, all heart.

    His reward was according to his faith ( Numbers 14:24). “My servant Caleb, because he had another spirit, and hath followed Me fully, him will I bring into the land where unto he went, and his seed shall possess it.”

    Forty-five years afterward Caleb reminded Moses of God’s promise, adding that now at 85 he was as strong as then. “Hebron therefore (the land he had trodden upon in faith as a spy, Deuteronomy 1:36) became the inheritance of Caleb, ... because that he wholly followed the Lord God of Israel” ( Joshua 14:8,9,14). He dislodged the three sons of see ANAK , Joshua 15:14, and gave see ACHSAH his daughter to Othniel, son of Kenaz his brother, for taking see DEBIR . In Joshua 15:13, “unto Caleb Joshua gave a part among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the Lord, ... even the city of Arba, father of Anak- Hebron,” it is implied that he was not by birth of Judah, but was given his portion in that tribe by the special command of the” God of Israel.” By marriage and submission to the bond of Jehovah’s covenant with Israel he became a true Israelite by adoption; a specimen of God’s mercy to the Gentiles even in Old Testament times, and a pledge of the opening of the door of faith to them widely in the New Testament So Jethro, Rahab, Ruth, Naaman. Kenaz his ancestor was a duke of Edom ( Genesis 36:11,15).

    The names Shobal and Manahath are other Edomite ( Genesis 36:20-23) names which appear among the sons of the Caleb in 1 Chronicles 2:50,52. Jephunneh, his father’s name, is probably the same as Pinon ( Chronicles 1:52; Genesis 36:41). Termanites too are among the children of Ashur, Hezron’s son ( 1 Chronicles 4:6). This consideration helps to account for the large numbers of Israelites at the exodus; proselytes and marriage connections from other races swelled the number of Israelites of pure blood.

    Hebron was afterward a priests’ city, belonging to the Kohathites; but the territory about continued in Caleb’s family (from which sprang the churl Nabal, for faith does not always come by blood descent)at the time of David ( 1 Samuel 25:3; 30:14).

    CALEB EPHRATAH A place where Hezron died. But no such place is named elsewhere; and Hezron died in Egypt, and could hardly have named a place there, nor his son either, both being in bondage there ( 1 Chronicles 2:24). Therefore, the reading in Jerome’s Hebrew Bible and in the Septuagint is probably correct, “Caleb came in unto Ephrath” (compare 1 Chronicles 2:19,50).

    Hezron had two wives, the mother of Jerahmeel, Ram, and Caleb or Chelubai; and Abiah, Machir’s daughter, whom he married when 60 years old, and who bore him Segub, and posthumously (according to KJV) Ashur. Caleb had two wives, Azubah mother of Jerioth (according to Jerome’s reading), and Ephrath mother of Hur, this second marriage of Caleb not taking place until after Hezron’s death. Others suppose Caleb Ephratah named jointly from husband and wife, and identify it with Bethlehem Ephratah. In KJV reading, Hezron must be supposed to have died in the place afterward called Caleb Ephratah.

    CALF WORSHIP [See AARON .] The Israelites “in Egypt” had served the Egyptian idols ( Joshua 24:14), including the sacred living bulls Apis, Basis, and Mnevis, and sacred cows Isis and Athor; worshipped for their utility to man, and made symbols of the sun and Osiris. In fact Nature, not the personal Creator, God, was symbolized by the calf and worshipped. But Aaron’s golden calf he expressly calls, “thy Elohim which brought thee up out of Egypt”; and the feast to it “a feast to Jehovah” ( Exodus 32:4- 8,17-19). Israel too had just seen that “upon Egypt’s gods Jehovah executed judgments” ( Numbers 33:4). What they yearned for therefore was not the vanquished Egyptian idols, but some visible symbol of the unseen Jehovah; the cherubic emblem, the calf or ox, furnished this. So <19A620> Psalm 106:20, “they changed their glory (i.e. God) into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass”; indeed the Egyptians used to offer a bottle of hay to Apis. The rites of Mnevis’ feast at Heliopolis, boisterous revelry, dancing, offerings, etc., which the Israelites were familiar with in Egypt, they transferred to Jehovah’s calf image. Acts 7:40,41 marks this first stage of idolatry. The second more glaring stage surely followed: “God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven” ( Acts 7:42,43). Jeroboam’s calves, which his exile in Egypt familiarized him with, and which he subsequently set up at Dan and Bethel similarly, were not set up to oppose Jehovah’s worship, but to oppose His worship by Jeroboam’s subjects at Jerusalem, lest they should thereby be alienated from him ( Kings 12:26-29). It was notorious that it was Jehovah who delivered Israel out of Egypt; and, like Aaron, Jeroboam says of the calves, thereby identifying them with Jehovah, “Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of Egypt.” Jehu’s worship of the calves is markedly distinguished from the Baal worship of Ahab which he overthrew ( Kings 10:18-29). Baal worship breaks the first commandment by having other gods besides Jehovah. The calf worship breaks the second by worshipping Jehovah with an image or symbol; Rome’s sin in our days.

    Moreover, there was only one Apis, there were two calves answering to the two cherubim. Hence, this was the only idolatry into which Judah never fell. As having the original cherubim in the temple at Jerusalem, she did not need the copies at Dan and Bethel. The prophets of the calves regarded themselves as “prophets of Jehovah” ( 1 Kings 22:5,6). Hosea denounces the calf worship, and calls Bethel Bethaven, the house of vanity, instead of the house of God ( Hosea 8:5,6; 10:5,6). Kissing them was one mode of adoration ( Hosea 13:2); contrast God’s command,” Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and ye perish” ( Psalm 2:12). Tiglath Pileser carried away the calf at Daniel Shalmaneser, 10 years later, carried away that at Bethel ( 2 Kings 15:29; 17:6). In Hosea 14:2 we read “calves of our lips”: instead of calves which we can no longer offer in our exile, we present praises of our lips; so Hebrews 13:15.

    CALNEH or Calno ( Genesis 10:10). One of Nimrod’ s original seats = the fort of the god Anu (worshipped afterwards at Babylon) in the land of Shinar, i.e.

    Babylonia. proper, extending to the Persian gulf, now Niffer. The place where the tower of Babel was built, according to the Septuagint and Arab tradition, taken by Assyria in the eighth century B.C. ( Amos 6:2). “Is not Calno as Carchemish?” i.e., it was no more able to withstand me than Carchemish. Isaiah 10:9 60 miles S.E.E. of Babylon, in the marshes on the left bank of the Euphrates, towards the Tigris. ElsewhereCANNEH ( Ezekiel 27:23).

    CALVARY ( Luke 23:33). The Latin translation of the Hebrew GOLGOTHA , “the place of a skull,” a place of executions. A fit place; in death’s stronghold the Lord of life gave death his deathblow through death ( Hebrews 2:14). There is no “mount,” such as popular phraseology associates with Calvary. It was simply “a low, rounded bore hill” outside the N. gate of Jerusalem (Ewald, Gesch. Chronicles, 434, quoted in Ellicott’s Life of our Lord.)

    CAMEL gamal . A ruminant animal, the chief means of communication between places separated by sandy deserts in Asia, owing to its amazing powers of endurance. The “ship of the desert,” able to go without food, and water for days, the cellular stomach containing a reservoir for water, and its fatty hump a supply of nourishment; and content with such coarse, prickly shrubs as the desert yields and its incisor teeth enable it to divide. Their natural posture of rest is lying down on the breast; on which, as well as on the joints of the legs, are callosities. Thus, Providence by their formation adapts them for carriers; and their broad, cushioned, elastic feet enable them to tread sure-footedly upon the sinking sands and gravel. They can close their nostrils against the drifting sand of the parching simoom. Their habitat is Arabia, Syria, Asia Minor, S. Tartary, and part of India; in Africa from the Mediterranean to Senegal, and from Egypt and Abyssinia to Algiers and Morocco. The dromedary (beeker ) is from a better breed, and swifter; from the Greek [dromas , a runner; going often at a pace of nine miles an hour ( Esther 8:10,14). The Bactrian two-humped camel is a variety. Used in Abraham’s time for riding and burdens ( Genesis 24:64; 37:25); also in war ( 1 Samuel 30:17; Isaiah 21:7). Camel’s hair was woven into coarse cloth, such as what John the Baptist wore ( Matthew 3:4). The Hebrew gamal is from a root “to revenge,” because of its remembrance of injuries and vindictiveness, or else “to carry.” In Isaiah 60:6 and Jeremiah 2:23 beeker should be translated not “dromedary,” but “young camel.” In Isaiah 66:20 kirkaroth , from karar to bound, “swift beasts,” i.e. dromedaries. Its milk is used for drink as that of the goats and sheep for butter.

    CAREEN Jair’s burial place ( Judges 10:5); probably E. of Jordan.

    CAMPHIRE Song 1:14: “My beloved is unto Me as a cluster of camphire” (Song 4:13).

    The shrub Lawsonia. inermis of Linnaeus, or alba, a kind of privet, having bunches of scented, small, lilac and yellowish white flowers, the bark dark, the foliage light green. Hebrew kopher , from kaaphar to paint, because its dry leaves were and are still made to yield a red unguent for staining women’s nails. Indeed the nails of female mummies show traces of staining. Compare Deuteronomy 21:12. The Arabs call it henna. Still women in the East place in their bosom its sweet bunches of flowers.

    CANA Of Galilee. A town where Jesus performed His first miracle, turning the water into wine, and a second one, healing the nobleman’s or courtier’s son at Capernaum, by a word spoken at a distance (John 2; 4:46,54).

    Nathanael belonged to Cana ( John 21:2); it was more elevated than Capernaum, as Jesus “went down” from it there ( John 2:12). The traditional site is Kefr Kenna, 5 miles N.E. of Nazareth. Another site has been proposed by Dr. Robinson, namely, Khirbet Kana or Kana el Jelil, but the balance of evidence supports the traditional spot. [See WINE .] CANAAN From Ham came four main races; Cush (Ethiopia), Mizraim (Egypt), Phut (Nubia), and Canaan (originally before Abraham extending from Hamath in the N. to Gaza in the S.), comprising six chief tribes, the Hittites, Hivites, Amorites, Jebusites, Perizzites, and Girgashites; to which the Canaanites (in the narrow sense) being added make up the mystic number seven. Ten are specified in Genesis 15:19-21, including some on E. of Jordan and S. of Palestine. The four Hamitic races occupied a continuous tract comprising the Nile valley, Palestine, S. Arabia, Babylonia, and Kissia. The Phoenicians were Semitic (from Shem), but the Canaanites preceded them in Palestine and Lower Syria. Sidon, Area, Arvad, and Zemara or Simra ( Genesis 15:19-21) originally were Canaanite; afterward they fell under the Phoenicians, who were immigrants into Syria from the shores of the Persian gulf, peaceable traffickers, skillful in navigation and the arts, and unwar-like except by sea. With these the Israelites were on friendly terms; but with the Canaanites fierce and war-like, having chariots of iron, Israel was commanded never to be at peace, but utterly to root them out; not however the Arvadite. Arkite, Sinite, Zemarite, and Hamathite. The Semitic names Melchizedek, Hamer, Sisera, Salem, Ephrath are doubtless not the original Canaanite names, but their Hebraized forms.

    Ham, disliking his father’s piety, exposed Noah’s nakedness (when overtaken in the fault of intoxication) to his brethren. Contrast Shem and Japhet’s conduct (compare 1 Corinthians 13:6 and 1 Peter 4:8).

    Noah’s prophetic curse was therefore to reach him in the person of Canaan his son (the sorest point to a parent), on whom the curse is thrice pronounced. His sin was to be his punishment; Canaan should be as undutiful to him as he had been to his father Noah. In Ham’s sin lies the stain of the whole Hamitic race, sexual profligacy, of which Sodom and Gomorrah furnish an awful example. Canaan probably shared in and prompted his father’s guilt toward Noah; for Noah’s “younger son” probably means his “grandson” ( Genesis 9:24), and the curse being pronounced upon Canaan, not Ham, implies Canaan’s leading guilt, being the first to expose to Ham Noah’s shame. Canaan’s name also suggested his doom, from kaanah , “to stoop.” Ham named his son from the abject obedience which he required, though he did not render it himself (Hengstenberg). So Canaan was to be “servant of servants,” i.e. the most abject slave; such his race became to Israel ( 1 Kings 9:20,21). Canaan more than any other of Ham’s race came in contact with and obstructed Shem and Japhet in respect to the blessings foretold to them.

    The Hamitic descent of Canaan was formerly questioned, but is now proved by the monuments. The ancients represent the Canaanites as having moved from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Mythology connects the Phoenicians’ ancestors Agenor and Phoenix with Belus and Babylon, also with Egyptus, Danaus (the Ethiop), and Libya. The Canaanites acquired the Semitic tongue through Semitic and Hamitic races intermingling. Their civilization and worship was Hamite. The Shemites were pastoral nomads, like Seth’s race; the Hamites, like Cain’s race were city builders, mercantile, and progressive in a civilization of a corrupt kind. Contrast Israel and the Ishmaelite Arabs with the Hamitic Egypt, Babylon, Sidon, etc. The Canaanites were Scythic or Hamite. Inscriptions represent the Khatta or Hittites as the dominant Scythic race, which gave way slowly before the Aramaean Jews and the Phoenician immigrants. Some think Canaan = lowland, from Hebrew kana , “to depress.” In Ezekiel 17:4; Isaiah 23:8; Hosea 12:7, Canaan is taken in the secondary sense,” merchant,” because the Hebrew bears that sense; but that was not the original sense. The iniquity of the Amorites was great in Abraham’s time, but was “not yet full” ( Genesis 15:16). In spite of the awful warning given by the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah, Canaanite profligacy at last became a reproach to humanity; and the righteous Ruler of the world required that the land originally set apart for Shem, and where Jehovah was to be blessed as the God of Shem ( Genesis 9:26), should be wrested from “the families of the Canaanites spread abroad,” and encroaching beyond their divinely assigned limits ( Genesis 10:18). The Hamite races, originally the most brilliant and enlightened (Egypt, Babylon, Canaan), had the greatest tendency to degenerate, because the most disinclined to true religion, the great preserver of men. The races of Japhet tend to expand and improve, those of Shem to remain stationary. Procopius, Belisarius’ secretary, confirms the Scripture account, of the expulsion of the Canaanites, for he mentions a monument in Tigitina (Tangiers) with the inscription, “We are exiles from before the face of Joshua the robber.”

    Rabbi Samuel ben Nachman says: “Joshua. sent three letters to the Canaanites, before the Israelites invaded it, proposing three things: Let those who choose to fly, fly; let those who choose peace, enter into treaty; let those who choose war, take up arms. In consequence, the Girgashites, fearing the power of God, fled away into Africa; the Gibeonites entered into league, and continued inhabitants of Israel; the 31 kings made war and fell.” So the Talmud states, says Selden, the Africans claimed part of Israel’s land from Alexander the Great, as part of their paternal possession.

    It is an undesigned coincidence that the Girgashites are never named (except in Joshua 24:11, the recapitulation) as having fought against Israel in the detailed account of the wars. They are enumerated in Joshua 24:11 in the general list, probably as having been originally arrayed against Israel (and some may have in the beginning joined those who actually “fought”), but they withdrew early from the conflict; hence elsewhere always the expression is “the Lord cast out the Girgashite,” “He will drive out the Girgashite” ( Deuteronomy 7:1; Joshua 3:10; compare Genesis 15:21; Nehemiah 9:8). The warnings given to Israel against defiling themselves with the abominations of the previous occupiers of Canaan show that the Israelites were not ruthless invaders, but the divinely appointed instruments to purge the land of transgressors hopelessly depraved. Leviticus 18:24: “Defile not yourselves in any of these things, for in all these the nations are defiled that I cast out before you, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.” The Canaanites had the respite of centuries, the awful example of the cities of the plain, and the godly example of Abraham, Melchizedek, and others; but all failed to lead them to repentance.

    The Israelites, in approaching the cities of the seven doomed nations, were to offer peace on condition of their emigrating forever from their own country, or else renouncing idolatry, embracing the Noachian patriarchal religion, resigning their land and nationality, and becoming slaves. But “there was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel save the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; all other they took in battle. For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts that they might come against Israel in battle, that He might destroy them utterly and that they might have no favor, but that He might destroy them” ( Joshua 11:18-20). All admit that the execution of the law’s sentence on a condemned criminal is a duty, not a crime. That God may permit the innocent to suffer with the guilty is credible, because He does constantly in fact and daily experience permit it.

    The guilty parent often entails on the innocent offspring shame, disease, and suffering. A future life and the completion of the whole moral scheme at the righteous judgment will clear up all such seeming anomalies. The Israelites with reluctance executed the divine justice. So far was the extermination from being the effect of bloodthirstiness, that as soon as the terror of immediate punishment was withdrawn they neglected God’s command by sparing the remnant of the Canaanites. The extermination of idolatry and its attendant pollution was God’s object. Thus even a Hebrew city that apostatized to idolatry was to be exterminated (Deuteronomy 13).

    The Israelites by being made the instruments of exterminating the idolatrous Canaanites were made to feel Jehovah’s power to make man the instrument of punishing idolatry, and so were impressed with a salutary terror, preparing them for being governed without further miraculous interposition. Their constitution, encouraging agriculture, prohibiting horses, and requiring their attendance at the one house of God thrice a year, checked the spirit of conquest which otherwise the subjugation of Canaan might have engendered. Humanity and mercy breathe through the Mosaic law ( Exodus 23:4,5,9,11; 22:22-24). (See Graves, Pentateuch.)

    The Canaanites’ first settlement in Palestine was on the Mediterranean, in the region of Tyre and Sidon; thence they spread throughout the land. A great branch of the Hittites in the valley of the Orontes is mentioned in inscriptions concerning the wars of see EGYPT (see) with Assyria. In Genesis 12:6 “the Canaanite was then in the land” is no gloss (as if it meant the Canaanite was STILL in the land), nor proof of the Pentateuch’s composition after Israel had driven them out, but implies that the aboriginal peoples (compare Genesis 14:5-7) were by this time dispossessed, and the Canaanite settlersALREADY in the land (compare Genesis 13:7).

    Canaan is in Scripture made the type of the heavenly land of rest and inheritance ( Hebrews 4:1-11). We must win it only under the heavenly Joshua, Jesus the Captain of our salvation, and by faith, the victory that overcomes the world and extirpates sin, self, and Satan ( 1 John 4:4,5; 5:4,5). The new heaven and earth, purged of all them that offend, shall be the portion of those who, like Caleb and Joshua, have previously in faith trodden the earth occupied by the ungodly, of whom the Canaanites are the type.

    The lowland especially was the country of the Canaanites; the plains between the Mediterranean on one side, and the hills of Benjamin, Judah, and Ephraim on the other; the shephelah, or low hills of Philistia, on the S.; the plain of Sharon and seashore between Jaffa and Carmel; that of Esdraelon, or Jezreel, behind the bay of Acta; that of Phoenicia containing Tyre and Sidon ( Numbers 13:29). The Jordan valley, Arabah, now the Ghor, reaches from the sea of Chinneroth, or Galilee, to the S. of the Dead Sea, 120 miles, with a breadth from eight to 14; this, the most sunken region in Palestine, also was occupied by the Canaanite; Amalek occupied the S. region between Egypt and Palestine. So too, Genesis 10:18-20, the border of the Canaanites was the seashore from Sidon on the N. to Gaza on the S., and on the E. the Jordan valley to Sodom, Gomorrah, and Lasha (Callirhoe) by the Dead Sea. The Amorites occupied the mountainous country between ( Joshua 11:3; 13:2-4). The chariots of iron could be used in the Canaanites’ plains, but not in the mountains. So we find them in the upper Jordan valley at Bethshean, Esdraelon (Jezreel), Taanach, Ibleam, Megiddo, the Sharon plain, Dor, the Phoenician Accho and Sidon ( Joshua 17:16; Judges 1:19; 4:3.

    Canaan in the larger sense is used for the whole country. The Arabah, reaching from the foot of mount Hermon to the gulf of Akabah, is the most remarkable depression on the earth. The Jordan, rising in the slopes of Hermon, spreads out in the waters of Merom 126 feet above the level of the ocean; after ten miles’ swift descent it enters the sea of Chinneroth, feet below the ocean. From this the gorge holds the average breadth of ten miles, the river at last losing itself in the Dead Sea, the surface of which is 1,312 feet below the sea level, and the depth 1,300 feet below the surface.

    The ascent of Akrabbim (scorpions, Joshua 15:3) or else mount Halak, a range of low cliffs, crosses the valley eight miles S. of the Dead Sea; thence the valley at a greater height gradually leads to Akabah. The plain or circle of Jordan on which Sodom and Gomorrah stood was probably, according to Grove, at the N. cud of the Dead Sea, but see GOMORRAH .

    Grove states there are no clear traces of volcanic action there, nor in the Holy Land or near it, except in the Leja, or Argob.

    God’s promise to Abraham was, “Unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river the river Euphrates, the Kenites, the Kenezites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaims, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites” ( Genesis 15:18-2l). “The river (nahar ) of Egypt” is the Nile, or Sihor, here representing (according to Grove) Egypt in general, as “Euphrates” represents Assyria (compare Isaiah 8:7,8). The Israelite kingdom even in Solomon’s time did not literally reach to the Nile. The truth seems to be, his kingdom is but the type of the Israelite kingdom to come ( Acts 1:6), when Messiah her Prince shall be manifested ( 1 Kings 4:21; Chronicles 9:26; compare Ezekiel 48; Psalm 72:8; Numbers 34:5). “The border shall fetch a compass from Azmon unto the river (nachal ) of Egypt.” The [nachal ], or brook, here is distinct from nahar above. The brook is generally thought to be the wady el Arish, the S.W. bound of the Holy Land. So also Joshua 15:4. But Joshua 13:3 expressly mentions Sihor, “the black turbid river,” Nile, as the ultimately appointed border; this extended dominion twice foretold (for the simple language in histories as Genesis and Joshua hardly sanctions Grove’s view that the river represents merely Egypt, in general), and so accurately defining the limits, awaits Israel in the last days ( Isaiah 2:11; Zechariah 9:9,10).

    In Exodus 23:31, “I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines (the Mediterranean), and from the desert (Paran and Shur) to the river” (Euphrates), the immediate territory of Israel in the Old Testament is assigned. So Deuteronomy 11:24; Joshua 1:4.

    Solomon accordingly possessed Tiphsah, the old ford of Euphrates on the N., and on the S. Ezion Geber and Elath, the Edomite ports of the Red Sea.

    In Numbers 34:1-12 the bounds of Canaan W. of Jordan are given from “the entrance of Hamath” between Lebanon and Antilebanon on the N., to Edom on the S. In Deuteronomy 1:7 the natural divisions are given, THE PLAIN,THE HILLS,THE VALE,THE SOUTH,THE SEASIDE;THE WILDERNESS also is mentioned ( Joshua 12:8), and theSPRINGS OF PISGAH ( Deuteronomy 3:17). Thus there are in all seven physical divisions.THE SOUTH, orTHE NEGEB, containing 29 cities ( Joshua 15:21-32), extended from mount Halak to a line from N.E. to S.W., a dry and thirsty land ( <19C604> Psalm 126:4), liable to whirlwinds ( Isaiah 21:1; 30:6). TheWILDERNESS (midbar ) of Judah, N.W. of the Dead Sea, had but six cities ( Joshua 15:61,62). The Hills (har ), from theWILDERNESS to the S. of Lebanon, were once the home of the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites ( Numbers 13:29); the cities are enumerated in Joshua 15:48-60. The hill country abounds in traces of terraces which once kept up the soil on the side of the gray limestone, for tillage and vines. Also marks of forests, which must have caused there to be then much more of fertilizing rain than now. The fertility improves continually as one goes northward, and the valleys and uplands of Galilee are beautiful, and the slopes of Carmel park-like.THE VALLEY, orLOW HILLS (shephelah), is the fertile region between theHIGHER HILLS and the coast, from Carmel to Gaza; including Philistia on the S. and the beautiful plain of Sharon from Joppa to Carmel on the N. Part of the shephelah was called Goshen, from its resembling in fertility the old Goshen at the mouth of the Nile ( Joshua 10:41; 11:16); it perhaps contained Beersheba.THE SEA COAST is that N. of Carmel between Lebanon and the sea. The portion N. of Accho Israel never gained, but S. of Accho David gained by the conquest of the Philistines ( Judges 1:31).THE PLAIN orCHAMPAIGN (the Arabah, Joshua 18:18, i.e. “the sterile place “) originally ( Deuteronomy 2:8, where “the plain” is theARABAH; compare Deuteronomy 1:1) comprehended the whole valley from Lebanon to the gulf of Akabah. The Arabs call its N. part the Jordan valley, the Ghor, and the part S. of the Holy Land wady el Arabah. TheSPRINGS OF (ASHDOTH)PISGAH may represent the peculiarly fertile circle round the head of the Dead Sea, on both sides of the Jordan (compare Joshua 10:40; 12:3,8; Deuteronomy 3:17; 4:9).

    The land, as receiving its blessings so evidently by the gift of God, not as Egypt by the labor of man, and as being so continually by its narrowness within view of the desert, was well calculated to raise Israel’s heart in gratitude to her divine Benefactor. It lay midway between the oldest world kingdoms, on one side Egypt and Ethiopia, on the other Babylon, Assyria, and India; then it had close by the Phoenicians, the great traffickers by sea, and the Ishmaelites the chief inland traders. So that though separated as a people dwelling alone, ( Numbers 23:9) on the N. by mountains, by the desert on one hand, and by an almost harborless sea on the other, from too close contact with idolatrous neighbors, it yet could act, with a powerful influence, through many openings, on the whole world, if only it was faithful to its high calling. “Instead of casting the seed of godliness on the swamps, God took in a little ground to be His seed plot. When His gracious purpose was answered, He broke down the wall of separation, and the field is now the world ( Matthew 13:38).” The long valley between the ranges of Lebanon, the valley of El Bukaa, leading to “the entering in of (i.e. to Palestine by) Hamath,” opened out Palestine on the N. Roman roads, and the harbor made at Caesarea, at the exact time when it was required, made avenues for the gospel to go forth from Judaea into all lands.

    Tristram remarks, What has been observed of the physical geography of Palestine holds equally true of its fauna and flora. No spot on earth could have been selected which could have better supplied the writers of the book, intended to instruct the men of every climate, with illustrations familiar cue or other of them to dwellers in every region.

    Ganneau derives the modern fellaheen from the Canaanites, arguing from their language, manners, customs, and superstitious, and the analogy which there is between Joshua’s invasion and that of Caliph Omar. This view explains those prophecies which speak of those ancient nations existing in the last days and being then destroyed by God ( Isaiah 11:14; Jeremiah 48; 49; Daniel 11:41). The Israelite invaders as shepherds could not at once have become agriculturists, but would compel the subject Canaanites to until for them the land. The “places” (maqowm ) which God commanded Israel to destroy, where the Canaanites “served their gods upon the high mountains, and hills, and under every green tree” ( Deuteronomy 12:2), exactly answer to the fellaheen’s Arabic makam (the same word as in Deut.) in Palestine, or Mussulman kubbehs with little white topped cupolas dotted over the hills. Their fetishism also for certain isolated trees marks the site of the Canaanite worship which God forbade; an oath on their local sanctuary is far more binding to them than on the name of God.

    CANDACE Queen of Ethiopia (the island of Meroe, in upper Nubia, between the Nile on one side and the Atbara on the other). The name of the dynasty, not merely the individual. Her eunuch or treasurer was converted to Christ by Philip the evangelist, through the power of the word (Isaiah 53), and the Holy Spirit ( Acts 8:27, etc.); named Judich in Ethiopian tradition, which represents him as having propagated the gospel in Arabia Felix and Ethiopia, and brought Candace herself to the faith. Pliny (6:35) and Strabo (17:820), pagan authors, confirm Scripture as to Candace being the name of the Ethiopian queens, as Pharaoh was common to the Egyptian kings.

    Ethiopian monuments singularly confirm the prominence given to females as queens and armed warriors; the more singular as not an instance of the kind occurs in the Egyptian remains.

    CANDLE Lamp more accurately represents the original than candle. Image of conscience, “the candle of the Lord, searching the inward man” ( Proverbs 20:27). Of prosperity; the sinner’s short candle soon goes out, the righteous shall shine as the sun forever ( Job 21:17; 18:5; Proverbs 13:9; Matthew 13:43). Of believers’ bright example leading others to spiritual light ( Matthew 5:14). Of the gladdening influence of a ruler ( 2 Samuel 21:17). Of the all-seeing accuracy with which Jehovah will search out sinners, so that in no dark grainer can they escape punishment ( Zephaniah 1:12; Amos 9:3). In beautiful contrast, as the woman in the parable “lit the candle, swept the house, and sought diligently until she found” the lost piece of silver, so God ( Luke 15:8) searches out His elect so that not one is lost, and takes each out of the darkness of this world, and restores the divine image, with a view to their salvation.

    CANDLESTICK Lampstand: menowrah . Exclusively that of the tabernacle made of a. talent of pure gold, symbolizing preciousness and sacredness and incorruptibility ( Exodus 25:31-39); of beaten work,5 feet high and 3 1/2 between the outside branches, according to the rabbis. An upright central stem, with three branches on one side and three on the other, still to be seen represented on the arch of Titus at Rome, erected after his triumph over Jerusalem. On the central shaft were four almond shaped bowls, four round knops, and four flowers, i.e. 12 in all; on each of the six branches three bowls, three knops, and three flowers, i.e. 54 on the six, and adding the of the shaft, 66 in all. Josephus counts 70, a mystical number, as was the seven, the number of branches, implying divine perfection. Aaron lit it each evening; in the morning it was allowed to go out, as 1 Samuel 3:3 proves; compare also 2 Chronicles 13:11; Leviticus 24:2,3, “from the evening unto the morning before the Lord continually.” It stood in the tabernacle “without the veil” that shut in the holiest. It illumined the table of shewbread obliquely (Josephus, Ant. 3:6, section 7). “To burn always” is explained by “from evening to morning” ( Exodus 27:20,21; 30:8).

    Aaron or his successor was “always” at the appointed time to light the lamp every evening, and dress it every morning with the golden snuffers, removing the snuff in golden dishes. The artificial light had to give place each morning to the light of the sun which rendered it needless, as the light of Old Testament ordinances gives place to the Sun of righteousness ( Malachi 4:2). Under the New Testament of the True Light, Christ Jesus, the seven separate candlesticks represent the churches or the church in its entirety ( Revelation 1:12,13,20); no longer as the one Jewish church (represented by the one sevenfold candlestick), restricted to one outward unity and locality. The several churches are mutually independent as to external ceremonies and government (provided all things are done to edification, and needless schisms are avoided), yet one in the unity of the Spirit and headship of Christ. The Gentile churches will not realize their unity until the Jewish church as the stem, unites all the lamps in one candlestick ( Romans 11:16-24). Zechariah’s candlestick (Zechariah 4) is prophetical of that final church which shall join in one all the earth under Messiah the King, reigning in Jerusalem as the spiritual center and rallying point of all (compare Zephaniah 3:9; Zechariah 14:9,16,17; Jeremiah 3:17). The candlestick is not the light, but bears it for the enlightening of all ( Matthew 5:16). The light is the Lord’s ( Philippians 2:15,16). The candlestick stands in the outer sanctuary, the type of the present dispensation on earth; but not in the inner holiest place, the type of the heavenly world wherein the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are both the temple and the light ( Revelation 21:22,23). In Revelation 2:5 “remove thy candlestick” threatens not extinction of the candle, but removal of the seat of the light elsewhere. In Revelation 11:4 “the two candlesticks” are connected with “the two witnesses,” which Wordsworth identifies with the two Testaments; so they would represent the Old Testament and the New Testament churches. The olive oil represents the grace of the Holy Spirit flowing in God’s appointed channels. In Solomon’s temple there were ten golden candlesticks ( Kings 7:49; 2 Chronicles 4:7). These were taken to Babylon ( Jeremiah 52:19). In the second temple, namely, Zerubbabel’s, a single candlestick was again placed ( Zechariah 4:2-6,11), taken by Titus from the temple as restored by Herod, and carried in his triumph at Rome and deposited in the Temple of Peace. Genseric 400 years later transferred it to Carthage. Belisarius recovered it, and carried it to Constantinople, and then deposited it in the church of Jerusalem, A.D. 533. It has never since been heard of.

    In John 8:12, “I am the light of the world,” there is allusion to the two colossal golden candlesticks lighted at the feast of tabernacles (which was then being held: John 7:2,37) after the evening sacrifice in one of the temple courts, and casting their beams on mount Olivet and on Jerusalem.

    Jesus coming to the temple at daybreak ( John 8:1,2), as they were extinguishing the artificial lights in the face of the superior light of the rising sun, virtually says, Your typical light is passing away, I am the Sun of righteousness, the True Light ( John 1:9).

    CANKERWORM yeleq , “the licking locust”; the locust when it emerges from the caterpillar state, and takes wing. Nahum 3:16: “spoileth,” rather “the cankerworm puts off (the envelope of its wings) and fleeth away,” so shall thy merchants flee. The small wings enable them to leap better, but not to fly; so, until their wings are matured, they continue devouring all vegetation in front of them.

    CANON OF SCRIPTURE [See BIBLE .] The collection of sacred books constituting the Christian church’s authoritativeRULE (Greek canon) of faith and practice. The word occurs in Galatians 6:16; 2 Corinthians 10:13-16. The law, i.e. the Pentateuch or five books of Moses, is the groundwork of the whole. The after written sacred books rest on it. The Psalms, divided into five books to correspond with it, begin, “Blessed is the man” whose “delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law will he meditate day and night.” In Joshua ( Joshua 1:8) similarly the Lord saith, “this book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night.”

    Moses directed the Levites, “Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God” ( Deuteronomy 31:25,26). “The testimony,” or Decalogue written by God’s finger on the tables of stone, was put into the ark ( Exodus 25:16; 40:20; 1 Kings 8:9). Hilkiah “found the book of the law in the house of the Lord,” where it had lain neglected during the reigns that preceded godly Josiah’s reign ( 2 Kings 22:8; 2 Chronicles 34:14), “the law of the Lord by (the hand of) Moses.” Joshua under inspiration added his record, “writing these words in the book of the law of God” ( Joshua 24:26). Samuel further wrote “the manner of the kingdom in a book” ( 1 Samuel 10:25). Isaiah ( Isaiah 8:20) as representative of the prophets makes the law the standard of appeal: “to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” The earlier sacred writings by his time seem to have been gathered into one whole, called “the book of the Lord”: “seek ye out of the book of the Lord” ( Isaiah 33:16; 29:18). Just as our Lord saith” Search the Scriptures” ( John 5:39).

    CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT The spirit of prophecy continued in the Israelite church, with intervals of intermission, down to Malachi. If any uninspired writing had been put forward as inspired it would have been immediately tested and rejected.

    Compare the instances, 1 Kings 22:5-28; Jeremiah 28; 29:8-32. At the same time the presence of the living prophets in the church caused the exact definition of the completed canon to be less needful, until the spirit of prophecy had departed. Accordingly (as the rabbis allege, compare Esdras) it was at the return from the Babylonian captivity that Ezra and “the great synagogue” (a college of 120 scholars) collected and promulgated all the Old Testament Scriptures in connection with their reconstruction of the Jewish church. Nehemiah, according to 2 Macc. 2:13, “gathered together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David.”

    Zechariah ( Zechariah 7:12) speaks of “the law” and “the former prophets” upon which the later prophets rested; the succeeding sacred writers, under inspiration, setting their seal to their predecessors by quotations from them as Scripture. Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 9:30) saith, “Thou testifiedst by Thy Spirit in Thy prophets.” Daniel ( Daniel 9:2) “understood by THE books (so the Hebrew) the number of the years whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that He would accomplish seventy years in the desolation of Jerusalem”; probably Jeremiah’s letter to the captives in Babylon ( Jeremiah 29:1-10), others explain it the books of the Old Testament or of the prophets. “The book of the law of the Lord” ( 2 Chronicles 17:9) was what the Levites under Jehoshaphat taught throughout all Judah.

    An increased attention to the law, the sanctified result of affliction during the captivity, was the probable cause under God of the complete abandonment of idolatry on their return ( <19B967> Psalm 119:67,71). Psalm 119, one continued glorification of the law or word of God, was probably the composition of Ezra “the priest and ready scribe in the law of Moses” ( Ezra 7:6; Nehemiah 8:9). The restorer of the national polity based it on the law, the Magna Charta of the theocracy. Israel is the real speaker throughout; and the features of the psalm suit the Jews’ position just after their return from Babylon. Their keenness to return to the law appears in Nehemiah 8:1-8; Ezra the priest read to “all the people gathered as one man into the street before the water gate ... from the morning until the midday.” The arrangement and completion of the canon accounts for Ezra’s honorable title “priest” becoming merged in that of” scribe.” “The synagogue of scribes” (1 Macc. 7:12) was a continuation probably of that founded by Ezra. Nehemiah and Malachi added their own writings as the seal to the canon.

    The translator of Ecclesiasticus (131 B.C.) mentions the three integral parts, “the law, the prophets, and the remainder of the books,” as constituting a completed whole; just as the Lord Jesus refers to the whole Old Testament: “the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms” (answering to the hagiographa or the Kethubim), Luke 24:44, compare Acts 28:23; and comprehends all the instances of innocent blood shedding in the formula “from Abel to Zacharias,” i.e. from Genesis the first book to 2 Chronicles, the last of the Hebrew Bible ( Matthew 23:35). So Philo, our Lord’s contemporary, refers to “the laws, ... the prophets, ... and the other books.” The law is the basis of the whole, the prophets apply the law to the national life, the hagiographa apply it to the individual. [See BIBLE .] Josephus refers to the 22 books of Scripture, namely, 5 of Moses,13 of the prophets extending to the reign of Artaxerxes (the time of Nehemiah), containing hymns and directions for life (c. Apion, 1:8): i.e. theFIVE of\parMOSES;THIRTEEN prophetical books, namely, (1) Joshua, (2) Judges and Ruth, (3) the two of Samuel, (4) the two of Kings (5) the two of Chronicles, (6) Ezra and Nehemiah, (7) Esther, (8) Isaiah, (9) Jeremiah and Lamentations, (10) Ezekiel, (11) Daniel, (12) the twelve minor prophets, (13) Job; andFOUR remaining, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon: the 22 thus being made to answer to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Joshua Judges, Job, etc., are reckoned, in the Jewish use of the term “prophet” for inspired historian or writer, among” the former prophets.” These sacred 22 are distinct from other Hebrew writings such as Ecclesiastes 12:12. Josephus says: “it is an innate principle with every Jew to regard them as announcements of the divine will, perseveringly to adhere to them, and if necessary willingly to die for them.” “The faith with which we receive our Scriptures is manifest; for though so long a period has elapsed, no one has dared to add to, detract from, or alter them in any respect.”

    The warnings: “add thou not to His words, lest He reprove thee and thou be found a liar” ( Proverbs 30:6), “neither shall ye diminish ought from it” ( Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32), fenced in the Old Testament canon as Revelation 22:18,19 fences in the New Testament The Lord and His apostles quote all the books of the Old Testament except Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, the Song of Solomon, Lamentations, and Ezekiel.

    Josephus denies the Apocrypha the same authority: “from the time of Artaxerxes to our own everything has been recorded; but these accounts are not worthy of the same credit, owing to the absence of the regular succession of prophets.”

    The Apocrypha was never in the Hebrew canon. The cessation of the prophetic gift marks the point of time in both Testaments when the canon was complete. Antiochus Epiphanes (168 B.C.) in persecuting the Jews sought out “the books of the law” and burnt them (1 Macc. 1:56). To possess a book of the covenant was made a capital offense. Just so the persecution of Diocletian in New Testament times was especially directed against those possessing the Christian Scriptures. The New Testament writers have not one authoritative quotation from the Apocrypha. Some quotations in the New Testament are not directly found in the canonical books; thus Jude 1:17 takes a portion of the uninspired book of Enoch, and by inspiration stamps that portion as true; Paul also refers to facts unrecorded in Old Testament ( 2 Timothy 3:8; Ephesians 5:14; Hebrews 11:24); see also John 7:38; James 4:5,6; 2 Timothy 3:8.

    Melito of Sardis (A.D. 179), after an exact inquiry in the East gives the Old Testament books substantially the stone as ours, including under “Esdras” Nehemiah, Ezra, and Esther. Origen excludes expressly 1 Maccabees from the canon though written in Hebrew Jerome gives our canon exactly, which is also the Hebrew one, and designates all others apocryphal. “Whatever is not included in the enumeration here made is to be placed among the Apocrypha” He puts Daniel in the hagiographa. The Alexandrine Jews, though more lax in their views, had at the beginning of the Christian era the same canon as the Hebrews of Palestine. But by admitting into the Septuagint Greek version of Old Testament the Apocrypha they insensibly influenced those Christian fathers who depended on that version for their knowledge of Old Testament, so that the latter lost sight of the gulf that separates the Hebrew canon from the Apocrypha. To the Jews, saith Scripture,” were committed the oracles of God” ( Romans 3:2). It never accuses them of altering the Scriptures. Their testimony condemns the decree of Rome’s council of Trent that the apocryphal books deserve “equal veneration” as Scripture, and that all are “accursed” who do” not receive the entire books with all their parts as sacred and canonical.” [See APOCRYPHA .] CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT “The prophets” in the Christian church, speaking themselves under inspiration, and those having the Spirit’s gift,” the discerning of spirits,” acted as checks on the transmission of error orally before the completion of the written word. Secondly it was under their inspired superintendence that. the New Testament Scriptures were put forth as they were successively written. 1 Corinthians 14:37: “if any man ... be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write ... are the commandments of the Lord.”

    Thus by the twofold sanction of inspiration, that of the authors and that of the judges, the canonicity of each book is established. By God’s gracious providence most of the books of the New Testament were in the church’s possession years before the death of leading apostles, all of them before the death of John. If spurious books had crept into the cycle of professedly inspired books, they would have been at once removed by apostolic authority. The history of the New Testament canon in its collected form is not so clear as the evidence for the inspiration of its separate books.

    Probably each leading church made for itself a collection of those books which were proved on good testimony to have been written by inspired men, and sanctioned as such originally by men having the “discerning of spirits,” as well as by uninspired men in the several churches. See Corinthians 12:10; 1 John 4:1. Thus, many collections would be made.

    Their mutual accordance in the main, as that of independent witnesses, is the strongest proof of the correctness of our canon, especially when we consider the jealous care with which the early churches discriminated between spurious and authentic compositions. This view is confirmed by the doubts of some, churches at first concerning certain New Testament books, proving that each church claimed the right to judge for itself; while their mutual love led to the freest communication of the inspired writings to one another. At last, when the evidence for the inspiration of the few doubted ones was fully sifted, all agreed. And the third council of Carthage (A.D. 397) declared that agreement by ratifying the canon of the New Testament as it is now universally accepted.

    The earliest notice of a collection is in 2 Peter 3:16, which speaks of “all the epistles” of Paul as if some collection of them then existed and was received in the churches as on a par with “the other Scriptures.” The earliest uninspired notice is that of the anonymous fragment of “the canon of the New Testament” attributed to Caius, a Roman presbyter, published by Muratori (Ant. Ital., 3:854). It recognizes all the books except Epp.

    Hebrews, James, the 2 Epp. Peter, and perhaps 3 John. It condemns as spurious “the Shepherd, written very recently in our own times at Rome by Hermes, while his brother Plus was bishop of the see of Rome,” i.e. between A.D. 140 and 150. Thus the canon in far the greater part is proved as received in the first half of the 2nd century, while some of John’s contemporaries were still living. In the same age the Peshito or Syriac version remarkably complements the Muratorian fragment’s canon, by including also Hebrews and James. In the latter part of the 2nd century Clement of Alexandria refers to “the gospel” collection and that of all the epistles of “the apostles.” The anonymous epistle to Diognetus still earlier speaks of “the law, the prophets, the gospels, and the apostles.” Ignatius of Antioch, a hearer of John (Ep. ad Philad., section 5), terms the written gospel “the flesh of Jesus,” and the apostles, i.e. their epistles, “the presbytery of the church.” Theophilus of Antioch (Ad Autolycum, 3:11) and Irenaeus (Adv. Haer., 2:27) term the New Testament writings “the Holy Scriptures.” Tertullian (Adv. Marc, 4:2) uses for the first time the term” New Testament,” and calls the whole Bible “the whole instrument of both Testaments.” Thus, there is a continuous chain of evidence from the apostles down to the 3rd century. The quotations by the fathers (of whom Origen quotes at least two thirds of New Testament), and the oldest versions, the Syriac, Latin, and Egyptian, prove that their Scriptures were the same as ours. Eusebius the ecclesiastical historian (A.D. 330) mentions (3:25) all the 27 books of the New Testament, dividing them into the universally acknowledged and the debated; the latter the epistles of James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 John, and 3 John, and Apocalypse, “received by the majority,” and at last received by all the churches when the evidence had been more fully tested. A third class he calls “the spurious,” as “the Shepherd of Hermas,” “the Epistle of Barnabas,” “the Acts of Paul,” which all rejected. Moreover all our oldest Greek manuscripts of the epistles contain those epistles once doubted by some; so do all the versions except the Syriac; see above.

    The church of Rome was certainly not infallible when it once rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews. Afterward it acknowledged its error and accepted it. Rome says we received the canon from the church (meaning herself), and that therefore we are bound to receive her authority as infallible in interpreting it. But we did not receive her original view of the spuriousness of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Nor have we received most of our manuscripts, testimonies of fathers and versions, from Rome, but, from the Greek, Syrian, and African churches. Further, even if the premises were true the conclusion is false. Because a body of men witness to and transmit a work deriving all its authority from God, it does not follow they are its infallible interpreters. If the argument were true the Jews could use it with tenfold power against all Christians, for the Jews unquestionably are the witnesses and transmitters of the Old Testament to us ( Romans 3:2); and on Rome’s principle we should be bound to accept the Jews’ interpretation of it, renounce Christianity and become Jews. Nothing but almighty Providence could have constrained both the Jews (in the case of the Old Testament) and the Roman and Greek apostate churches (in the case of the New Testament) to witness for the very Scriptures which condemn them. It utterly disproves the infidel allegation of collusion and corruption of the Scriptures.

    Again Rome argues, since the rule of faith must be known, and since some books of Scripture were not universally received until the 4th century, Scripture cannot be the rule of faith. The answer is: those portions of Scripture are not the rule of faith to those to whom they are not given with full means of knowing them as such. But all Scripture is the rule of faith to all to whom it is given, and who may, if they will, know it. That could not become a portion of inspired Scripture in the 4th century which was not so before. Man can never make that inspired which God has not; nor can the doubts of some divest of inspiration that which God has inspired. The council of Carthage did not make aught part of Scripture which was not so before. It merely sealed by declaration the decision which the churches previously came to by carefully sifting the testimony for each book’s inspiration. Even at the council of Nicea (A.D. 325) Constantine appeals to “the books of the evangelists, apostles; and prophets” as “the divinely inspired books for deciding their controversies.” Accordingly in the Nicene Creed, “according to the Scriptures,” quoted from 1 Corinthians 15:4, implies their being recognized as the standard. The Diocletian persecution (A.D. 303) was directed against the Christian Scriptures; whoever delivered them were stigmatized as “traitors” (tradilores), so that they must have then existed as a definite collection. They were publicly read in the churches ( Colossians 4:16) as an essential part of worship, just as the law and the prophets were in the synagogue (Justin Martyr, Apol., 1:66).

    Practically, as soon as they were severally thus read and accepted in the apostolic age by men in the churches having the discernment of spirits, they were canonized, i.e. immediately after having been written.

    The transition from oral to written teaching was gradual. Catechizing, i.e. instructing by word of mouth, was the mode at first, and “faith” then “came by hearing” ( Luke 1:4; Romans 10:17), in which however there was always an appeal to Old Testament Scripture ( Acts 17:11).

    But that the orally taught might know more fully “the (unerring) certainty [ten asphaleian] of those things wherein they had been instructed,” and to guard against the dangers of oral tradition (illustrated in John 21:23,24), the word was committed to writing by apostles and evangelists, and was accredited publicly by the churches in the lifetime of the writers.

    The approach of their death, their departure to foreign lands, their imprisonment, and the need of a touchstone to test heretical writings and teachings in their absence, all made a written record needful. The cessation of miracles and personal inspiration was about the same time as the written inspired word was completed. Bishop Kaye (Ecclesiastes Hist., 98-100) observes that Justin Martyr, Theophilus, etc., only make general assertions of miracles still continuing, being loath to see what seemingly weakened their cause, the cessation of miracles; but they give no specific instance.

    The cessation was so gradual as hardly to be perceived at first. The power probably did not extend beyond those younger disciples on whom the apostles conferred it by laying on hands ( Acts 8:17,19). Thus miracles would cease early in the 2nd century, shortly after John’s death and the completion of the canon.

    The scantiness of direct quotations from Scripture in the apostolic fathers arises from their being so full of all they had seen and heard, and so dwelling less on the written word. But they take it for granted, and imitate the tone and salutations of the apostolic epistles. All four make some express references to New Testament Scripture. With much that is good in the apostolic fathers, their works “remind us what the apostles would have been, had they not been inspired, and what we ourselves should be, if we had not the written word” (Wordsworth, Canon Scr., p. 137). So far from there being a gradual waning of inspiration from the writings of the apostles and evangelists to those of succeeding Christian writers, there is so wide a chasm (the more remarkable as the early fathers had the apostolic writings to guide them) that this alone is a strong proof that the Scripture writers were guided by an extraordinary divine power. Their previous habits (as being some of them illiterate, and all bigoted Jew) prove that nothing but divine power could have so changed them from their former selves as to be the founders of a spiritual and worldwide dispensation (see Luke 24:25,49), utterly alien to their Jewish prejudices. Their style accords with their supposed position, simple and unlearned (except Paul’s), yet free from aught offensive to the polished.

    If it be asked why we do not receive the epistles of Barnabas and of Clement, the Acts of Paul and Thecla (one of the earliest apocryphal writings), etc., we answer not because (as Rome would have us say) the churches could not err in judgment in rejecting them, but because as a matter of evidence we believe they did not err. These works were not received by contemporary Christians who had the best opportunity of knowing evidences of authenticity and inspiration. If one or two cite them it is the exception, not invalidating the otherwise uniform testimony against them. The internal evidence of their style is fatal to their pretensions. So “The Acts of Paul”; Tertullian (De Bapt., 17) testifies its author was excluded by John from the office of presbyter for having written it.

    The New Testament is a complete organic whole, so that even one book could not be omitted without loss to the completeness of the Christian cycle of truth. As the Old Testament is made up of the law, and the doctrinal, historical, and prophetical books; so in the New Testament the four Gospels are the fundamental law, based, as in the Pentateuch, on the included history; the Acts unfold the continued history; the Epistles are the doctrinal, the Apocalyptic revelations the prophetical, elements.

    Canonical is sometimes used in the Christian fathers, not in the sense divinely authoritative, but proper for public reading in church. Thus Gregory of Nazianzum calls the Apocalypse the last work of grace, and yet apocryphal, i.e. fit for private not public reading in church.

    CANTICLES: THE SONG OF SOLOMON “The song of songs,” i.e. the most excellent of songs; even as the antitypical Solomon, its subject and its author (by His Spirit), is King of kings, i.e. the greatest of kings (so the heaven of heavens means the highest heaven, Deuteronomy 10:14). The fourth of the hagiographa (chethubim, “writings”) or the third division of the Old Testament [See CANON and see BIBLE .] Its divine canonicity and authority are certain, as it is found in all Hebrew manuscripts of Scripture; also in the Greek Septuagint version; in the catalogues of Melito, bishop of Sardis A.D. (Eusebius, H. E., 4:26), and others.

    The literalists explain it as displaying “the victory of humble and constant love over the temptations of wealth and royalty”: Solomon tempting a Shulamite shepherdess, who, in spite of the fascinations of his splendid court, pines for her shepherd lover from whom she has been severed. But had it been a representation of merely human love, it would have been positively indelicate and never would have been inserted in the holy canon (see Song 5:2-6; 7:2,3). The sudden transitions from the court to the grove are inexplicable on the literal interpretation. Nor is the other literal interpretation tenable, namely, that the love of Solomon and] Pharaoh’s daughter is the subject. “Pharaoh’s chariots” (Song 1:9) allude not to this, but to the Old Testament church’s miraculous deliverance from Pharaoh’s hosts at the Red Sea. A shepherdess (Song 1:7) would have been an abomination to the Egyptians; nor do Song 1:6; 3:4; 4:8; 5:7 suit this view.

    Origen and Theodover compare Solomon’s teaching to a ladder with three steps; Ecclesiastes, natural (sensible things naturally vain); Proverbs, moral; Canticles, mystical, figuring the union of Christ and the church. Proverbs, said the rabbis, are the outer court of Solomon’s temple; Ecclesiastes, the holy place; Cantitles, the holy of holies. See the treatise Yadaim in the Mishna: “all the chethubim are holy, but the Canticles are holy of holies.”

    Shulamith (Song 6:13), i.e. the daughter of peace, is fitly the bride of Solomon, “the prince of peace.” Taken allegorically there is nothing incongruous in what would be, if literally taken, inexplicable; she by turns being a vinedresser, shepherdess, midnight inquirer, prince’s consort, and at the same time daughter; just as under the same image in Psalm 45:9,10,13,14, the church is at once the Lord’s bride and daughter; as Psalm 45, “a song of loves,” answers to Canticles, so Psalm 37 to Proverbs, and Psalm 39; Psalm 73 to Job. As Ecclesiastes sets forth them vanity of the love of the creature, so Canticles the all satisfying love which unites the church and her Lord. Love in man was created as the transcript of the divine love. This song portrays the latter in imagery from the former.

    The union of Christ and His church was the original fact in the mind of God, on which human marriage is based ( Ephesians 5:23-32). This idea pervades all Scripture, from the original Eden ( Genesis 2:21-24) down to the restored paradise ( Revelation 19:7; 21:2,9,10; 22:17). Israel was the Old Testament wife of Jehovah ( Isaiah 54:5; 62:5; Jeremiah 3:1, etc.; Hosea 1; 2; 3; Ezekiel 16; 23). To her as His destined earthly bride the song primarily refers; secondarily to the spiritual and heavenly bride, the elect church, of all ages and countries ( Matthew 9:15; 22:2; 25:1; John 3:29; 2 Corinthians 11:2). “The experimental knowledge of Christ’s loveliness, and the believer’s love, is the best commentary on this allegorical song” (Leighton). The name of God does not occur, because throughout the allegory, to the exclusion of everything literal, is maintained, and Solomon throughout represents MessiahJEHOVAH, whose love is the grand theme. Love to Christ is the most intense, as it is the purest, of human passions, and therefore is expressed in the most intenselyardent language. The details of the imagery are not to be strained in the interpretation. Many lovely natural objects, not always mutually congruous if pressed literally, are combined, to bring out the varied, and often seemingly opposite, beauties which meet in the Lord Jesus.

    The significance of the name Solomon, “the peace giver,” appears at the outset (Song 1:3), “thy name is as ointment poured forth, diffusing peace and love ( John 14:27); the same image as in Psalm 133. Not until toward the close does the bride receive her name Shulamith (Song 6:13), “the peace receiver,” and so the “prince’s daughter” (Song 7:1; compare Matthew 5:9). She explains her name (Song 8:10) as expressing “one that found peace” (Song 8:10 margin). Not until her union with Solomon had been effected did she find peace, and received her name accordingly ( Romans 5:1). Shulamith is passive in meaning, the reconciled one ( Ephesians 2:14; 2 Corinthians 5:19,20). Her becoming sensible of His being the king, in whose presence is peace and fullness of joy (Song 1:2,4,7) leads her to seek in Him peace, and finally to find it. Driven from the vineyard of paradise which was once her own into the wilderness (Song 3:6), and to keep very different vineyards (Satan’s and the world’s), she became black with affliction, though still beautiful (Song 1:5,6; compare Lamentations 4:7,8; <19C005> Psalm 120:5,6): in contrast to His countenance, “white and ruddy” (Song 5:10). But He at the close brings her up from the wilderness of affliction (Song 3:6; 8:5; Revelation 12:6), and restores her her own vineyard (Song 8:12), where He desires to hear her voice.

    If we view the bride as Israel (the primary sense), Hosea 2:14-16 is exactly parallel to the whole song. Five parts are to be traced: Song 1:1-- 2:7; 2:8--3:5, both parts ending “I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,” etc.; Song 3:6--6:9; 6:10--8:4; 8:5-14, these three parts beginning severally with “Who is this?” etc. In the song’s Israelite aspect the third or central part probably refers to the sealing of the union between Jehovah and the Old Testament church by Solomon’s erection of the temple (Song 3:6-11). “The daughter of Zion was at that time openly married to Jehovah; for it is thenceforth that the prophets in reproving Israel’s sin speak of it as a breach of her marriage covenant. The songs heretofore sung by her were the preparatory hymns of her childhood; the last and crowning ‘song of songs’ was prepared for the now mature maiden against the day of her marriage to the King of kings” (Origen: see Moody Stuart’s admirable commentary). Her wilderness state then gave place to peaceful and prosperous settlement in manifested union with her God; “the day of Solomon’s espousals” (Song 3:11).

    But a further marriage is intended, that of the individual soul to the Lord, for Christ “loves one, as if that one were all”; and finally the yet future marriage of the whole elect church ( Revelation 19:7,8; 21:2,9). In the individual soul we have (1) its longing for Christ’s manifestation to it, and the various alternations in its experience of His manifestation (Song 1:2-4; 2:8; 3:1,4,6,7); (2) the abundant enjoyment of His sensible consolations, which is withdrawn through the bride’s carelessness ( <220501> Song 5:1-3), and her longings after Him and reconciliation (Song 5:8-16; 6:3, etc.; 7:1, etc.); (3) effects of Christ’s manifestation on the believer, assurance, labors of love, anxiety for the salvation of the impenitent, eagerness for His second coming.

    In the church aspect her longing for His first advent appears in the beginning ( Song 1:2); joyful anticipation of His advent (Song 2:8- 13,17); His stay with her during the one only whole day in the allegory (there are but two nights, Song 2:17; 4:6), answering to His sojourn here with His disciples, the last supper, the pledge of His return to her (Song 3:6--4:5); His death in figurative language, and ascension to the heavenly mount where still He is to be met with spiritually in prayer until the everlasting daybreak when we shall see face to face ( Song 4:6,8,15). “My sister, ... My spouse, excludes carnal ideas of love. As Eve was formed from Adam, so Christ took our flesh to be brother and also husband (compare Hebrews 2:11; Mark 3:35). In <220501> Song 5:1 “I am come into My garden” is the central point of the whole, the bridegroom and bride are one; the Spirit, answering to the awakening N. wind and the softly blowing S. wind, having been shed on the church at Pentecost, to make the spiritual union complete (Song 4:10). “Eat, O friends,” etc., follows immediately ( Isaiah 55:1), the gospel being thenceforth preached in all its grace to all ( Acts 2:38; 3:19). Then succeeds the period of declension and the consequent withdrawing of the grieved Spirit (Song 5:2-6). Then her earnest search for Him and praises of Him to others, wherein she regains her own assurance, “I am my Beloved’s” (Song 6:3).

    Here Israel’s sighing after Messiah, and finding Him hereafter as one united nation, combining “Tirzah” the northern capital and. “Jerusalem” the southern capital, is hinted at (Song 6:4); she the queen, and the attendant Gentile churches” threescore queens and fourscore concubines” (Song 6:8; Psalm 45:9-15). Then Shulamith having found Solomon, i.e. Israel,” made like the chariots of Amminadib” (“My willing people”) instead of as heretofore “Lo-ammi,” not My people ( Hosea 1:9,10), shall “look forth as, the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners” ( Daniel 12:1-3; Revelation 12:1; 19:14). The nations shall then admire and flow unto her (Song 6:13; 7:1, etc., answering to Isaiah 52:7-10). The “return, return, O Shulamite” answers to “when the Lord shall bring again Zion” through the instrumentality of the nations who shall then long to “look upon” her as the source of spiritual blessing to them ( Micah 5:7; Zechariah 8:13). The daughters of Jerusalem, i.e. the nations (a phrase drawn by Jesus from the song, Luke 23:28, Galilean women standing in the same relation to the Jews as Gentiles afterward did), become united to Christ through the instrumentality of the bride, and they also appropriate her words, “I am my Beloved’s,” etc. (Song 7:10).

    At the close of this part (Song 8:4) is restored Israel’s charge to the Gentile converted nations not to interrupt the millennial rest of Christ with His worldwide church, “I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up ... My love;” for an apostasy succeeds, as one precedes, the millennium ( Revelation 20:4-9).

    Then the elect church from Jews and Gentiles, now being gathered, is described, Song 8:5-14, which is chronologically before the millennial church just described, but fitly brought in as the closing subject (“make haste, My beloved,” etc.) to remind us our position is to be “hasting unto the coming of the day of God” ( 2 Peter 3:12; Revelation 22:20).

    The “little sister” having “no breasts” (neither faith nor love, the springs of spiritual nourishment, 1 Thessalonians 5:8; compare in connection with breasts, Luke 11:27,28) answers to the Gentile church admitted to be a “wall” in Zion founded on Christ; “spoken for,” i.e. sought in marriage by Him. No “stubble” of Jewish rites is to be built on her ( 1 Corinthians 3:11,12), but a “palace of silver,” i.e. the highest privileges of church fellowship ( Galatians 2:11-18; Ephesians 2:11-22). The “door” is that of faith opened to the Gentiles, implying universal accessibleness ( Corinthians 16:9), but safely enclosed with fragrant enduring “cedar,” lest it should be corrupted by latitudinarianism.

    The bride’s joyous anticipation and desires at the beginning (Song 1:6,12, etc.) are thus realized in the spiritual church, now in part (Song 4:12-15; 5:1), and in the hereafter restored Israel (Song 6:4-12; 7:7), in the Gentile nations converted through her (Song 7:10, etc.), and in the hereafter to be completed election church from Jews and Gentiles (Song 8:5-13). The vineyard she had lost (Song 1:6) is regained, and presented by her, who now is in peace and favor, to her Lord (Song 8:10-12). She is addressed, “thou that dwellest (permanently) in the gardens” (the paradise of God) (Song 8:13).

    Words of the Syriac and Arabic tongues found nowhere else in Hebrew occur, which leads to the inference that Solomon composed it among his “one thousand and five songs” (perhaps referring to this one song in five cantos) while staying in his Lebanon “buildings” (distinct from “the house of the forest of Lebanon” at Jerusalem: 1 Kings 7:2; 9:19; Chronicles 8:6; his country home for the hot summer: compare Song 4:8), and enriched this idyllic poem with words of an archaic and rural stamp.

    Robinson found there remains of massive buildings.

    CAPERNAUM (the village of Nachum). N.W. of sea of Tiberius, in the land of Gennesaret (now El Ghuweir. compare Matthew 14:34 with John 6:17,21,24), a most populous and prosperous region. By some identified now with the mound at Khan Minyeh; by others with Tell Hum. Visited by Jesus for a few days ( John 2:12); afterward “His own city” and home, to which He retired from Nazareth (where He was reared, as in Bethlehem He was born), when He heard that Herod Antipas, who often resided at Sepphoris, or Diocaesarea, near Nazareth, had imprisoned John the Baptist.

    Capernaum was less conspicuous, and more suited to be the center of the unobtrusive but energetic ministry of Jesus in Galilee. Remains of ancient potteries, tanneries, etc., still are seen at Tabiga, the manufacturing suburb of Capernaum The prophet Isaiah ( Isaiah 9:2) had foretold that this region, namely, Zabulon and Nephthalim, the one most bordering on Gentile darkness, was to be the first to see the great light ( Matthew 4:12-16). Designated “His own city” ( Matthew 9:1; Mark 2:1, “at home,” KJV “in the house”). The scene of most of His mighty words, and therefore the most guilty in its impenitence. Matthew 11:20-24: “exalted unto heaven” in privileges, it was doomed for neglect of them to be “brought down to hell.”

    Josephus mentions a fountain in Gennesaret, “Capharnaum,” identified by some with Ain et Tin (the spring of the fig tree) near Khan Minyeh. The “round fountain” is three miles southward. Tell Hum is three or four miles more to the N. than Khan Minyeh, and so more convenient for the people to run round the N. end of the lake afoot to the E. side while Jesus crossed there by water ( Mark 6:32,33). Hum is the last. syllable of Kefr na hum, and was used as an abbreviation. Tell Hum is the site, according to Arab and Jewish tradition. It is on a point of the shore running into the lake, and backed by rising ground, three miles from where the Jordan enters the lake.

    Ruins of walls and foundations cover a space half a mile long by a quarter wide.

    Josephus says: “Gennesaret plain is watered by a most fertile fountain, which the people call Capharnaum. Some have thought this fountain a vein of the Nile, since it produces a fish like the coracinus in the lake near Alexandria.” The round fountain at Tabiga, two miles S. of Tell Hum, meets the requirements of Josephus’ description. Tristram (Land of Israel) fixes on the round fountain Ain Mudawarah as the fount meant by Josephus (and the site of Capernaum); for he found in it the siluroid catfish or coracine, identical with that of the ponds of Lower Egypt. But this site is too far S., and the catfish is found in the lake also, and was probably in Tabiga. The recent discovery of the aqueduct which once led Tabiga’s waters into the plain of Gennesaret, watering the plain as Josephus describes, decides the question. And the city’s site needs not to be put close to the fountain bearing its name in the time of Josephus.

    The synagogue called “the White Synagogue,” is 74 ft. 9 in. long, and ft. 9 inches broad, built N. and S., with three entrances at the S end. Luke 7:5: the centurion (probably of the detachment quartered there, for it was large enough to be called a “city “) “hath built us a (Greek text has “the”), i.e. our, synagogue,” the only one in the place. Jairus was its “ruler.” Vine leaves, and the pot of manna, are still to be seen among the rich carvings of the ruins Of the lintel at Tell Hum. If Jesus’ discourse at Capernaum ( John 6:31,32) was delivered in the synagogue of what is now Tell Hum, how appropriate is the Jews’ reference to the manna, and His reply, “My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.” Capernaum was lower than Nazareth and Cana, from whence He “went down” to it ( John 2:12; Luke 4:31); the “exalted” in Matthew 11:23 is not in respect to physical but spiritual elevation. There was a receipt of customs there of the commerce both of the lake and of the caravans passing by land by “the way of the sea” southwards. Here Levi, or Matthew, was called ( Matthew 9:9; 17:24). Simon Peter and Andrew belonged to Capernaum ( Mark 1:21,29), and perhaps received Jesus’ call at the adjoining sea beach ( Mark 1:16,17). He healed the centurion’s servant there, and Simon’s wife’s mother ( Matthew 8:5,14), the paralytic ( Matthew 9:1), the unclean demon-possessed man ( Luke 4:33). The nobleman’s son at Capernaum was healed by Jesus at Cana ( John 4:46).

    Jesus’ teaching humility by a child occurred here ( Mark 9:33-36). The utter uncertainty of the site shows the exact fulfillment of its doom foretold by the Lord.

    CAPHAR From a root “to cover,” denoting “a village,” smaller than ‘iyr , “a city.”

    Appearing in Capharnaum. Arabic Kefr.

    CAPHTOR CAPHTORIM. The original seat of the Philistines ( Deuteronomy 2:23).

    Sprung from Mizraim ( Genesis 10:14), akin to the Philistines who proceeded from the Casluhim, who sprung from Mizraim ( Genesis 10:13,14). In Jeremiah 47:4 “the isle (margin i.e. the maritime or even the river bordering coast) of Caphtor” is mentioned, implying their neighborhood to either the sea (the Philistines’ position) or to the Nile (whose waters are called “the sea,” Nahum 3:8). The Egyptian names Copt (Kebtu, Keb-her in the hieroglyphics, the modern Coptic Kuft) and Egypt, i.e. Ee (the isle or coast of) Caphtor, are evidently the source of Caphtor. Capht-ur, i.e. the Great Calpht, probably the northern delta from which the Phoenicians emigrated into Asia, from whence Capht was the Egyptian name for the oldest Phoenicians in Asia or in Africa. The time of migration must have been very early, as the Philistines were settled in Palestine in Abraham’s time ( Genesis 21:32,34). A seafaring race related to the Egyptians spread abroad at an ancient date. For at Medcenet Haboo the monuments of Rameses III state that the Egyptians were at war with the Philistines, the Tok-karn (the Carians) and the Shayratana (the Cherethim or Cretans) of the sea. (“The isle of Caphtor” in its later sense may mean Crete.) All three resemble the Egyptians. In Amos 9:7, “Have I not caused the Philistines to go up from Caphtor?” (i.e. from subjection to Caphtor, previous to their migration, as the context proves) Philistiym means immigrants, from the Ethiopic fallasa. The Cherethim are seemingly identified with or formed a part of the Philistines ( 1 Samuel 30:14,16). Pusey suggests there were different immigrations of the same tribe into Palestine, which afterward merged in one name: the Casluhim first; a second from the Caphtorim; a third the Cherethim or Cretans, Crete being an intermediate resting place in their migrations from whence some passed into Philistia. The Philistines were first a Casluchian colony between Gaza and Pelusium, which was afterward strengthened by immigrants from Caphtor, and extended its territory by pressing out the Avvim ( Deuteronomy 2:23; Joshua 13:3). Tacitus (Hist., 5:2) says “the inhabitants of Palestine came from Crete”; perhaps many of the Cherethim settlers in Crete from Egypt, when disturbed by Minos and the Hellenes, withdrew from Crete to Philistia, where their kinsmen were settled.

    CAPPADOCIA The most eastern province of Asia Minor. Jews resident in it were among Peter’s hearers at his memorable Pentecostal sermon ( Acts 2:9). To them accordingly, among others, he addressed his First Epistle ( 1 Peter 1:1). Judaism there paved the way for Christianity. Seleucus first introduced Jewish colonists into Asia Minor (Josephus, Ant. 12:3, section 4). Rome, by the civilization and improved roads which it carried with it every where, facilitated the spread first of Judaism, then of Christianity.

    The approach to Cappadocia from Palestine and Syria was by the pass called “the Cilician gates,” leading up through the Taurus range from the low region of Cilicia. Once Cappadocia reached to the Euxine Sea; but Rome made two provinces of the ancient Cappadocia, Pontus on the N. along the sea, and Cappadocia on the S. Tiberius it was who reduced the Cappadocian Archclaus’ kingdom to a province (A.D. 17), of which Caesarea was the capital, afterward the birthplace and see of Basil. Its cities, Nyssa, Nazianzus, Samosata, and Tyana, were noted in church history.

    CAPTAIN OF THE TEMPLE ( Luke 22:4; Acts 4:1; 5:24): not military, but over the guard of the temple, consisting of priests and Levites ( 2 Kings 12:9), “the priests that kept the door” ( 2 Kings 25:18); they visited the posts by night, and saw that the sentries were on the alert. In Hebrews 2:10, (Greek “Prince leader of their salvation,”) the antitypical Joshua who leads us into the heavenly Canaan. The same Greek in Hebrews 12:2, “the Author,” rather “Prince leader of our faith.” Acts 3:15, “Prince of life.”

    CAPTIVITY Used in Scripture for compulsory exile. Besides minor captivities six under the judges, namely, that by Chushan-rishathaim, Eglon, the Philistines, Jabin of Canaan, Midian, Ammon (Judges 3; Judges 4; Judges 6; Judges 10), and that by Hazael of Syria ( 2 Kings 10:32), there were three great captivities. First in the reign of Pekah of Israel, when Tiglath Pileser, king of Assyria, carried away the people. of Gilead, Galilee, and all Naphtali ( 2 Kings 15:29; Isaiah 9:1). As Pul his predecessor is named with Tiglath Pileser as having carried away Reuben, Gad, and half Manasseh to Halah, Habor, Hara, and the river Gozan ( 1 Chronicles 5:25,26), probably Tiglath Pileser carried (740 B.C.) out what Pul had intended but was diverted from by Menahem’s bribe (771 or 762 B.C., Rawlinson) ( 2 Kings 15:19,20). Secondly, in the reign of Hoshea of Israel, Shalmaneser king of Assyria, after letting him remain as a tributary prince for a time, at last when Hoshea omitted to send his yearly “present,” and made a league with So or Sabacho II of Egypt (of which the record still exists on clay cylindrical seals found at Koyunjik), put Hoshea in prison and besieged Samaria three years, and in the ninth year of Hoshea’s reign (721 B.C.) took it, and “carried Israel away to Halah and Habor by the river Gozan, and to the cities of the Medes” ( 2 Kings 17:1-6). Sargon ( Isaiah 20:1), according to the Assyrian monuments, completed the capture of Samaria which Shalmaneser began. In striking minute coincidence with Scripture, he was the first Assyrian monarch who conquered Media. In the monuments he expressly says that, in order to complete the subjugation of Media, he founded in it cities which he planted with colonists from other parts of his dominions. Sennacherib (713 B.C.) carried into Assyria 200,000 from the Jewish cities he captured ( Kings 18:13). Thirdly, Nebuchadnezzar carried away Judith under Zedekiah to Babylon, 588 B.C. (2 Kings 24; 25.) A previous deportation of Jewish captives (including Ezekiel, Ezekiel 1:1-3, and Mordecai, Esther’s uncle, Esther 2:6) was tint of King Jehoiachin, his princes, men of valor, and the craftsmen, 599 B.C. From Jeremiah 52:12,15,28,29,30 we learn Nebuchadnezzar in his seventh (or eighth, according to the month with which the counting of the year begins) year carried away 3,023; but in 2 Kings 24:14,16, 10,000, and 7,000 men of might, and 1,000 craftsmen; the 3,023 were probably of Judah, the remaining 7,000 were of the other tribes of Israel, of whom some still had been left after the Assyrian deportation; the 1,000 craftsmen were exclusive of the 10,000. Or else the 3,023 were removed in the seventh year, the 7,000 find 1,000 craftsmen in the eighth year. In the 18th or 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar 832 of the most illustrious persons were carried away. In the 23rd year of Nebuchadnezzar, 745 persons, besides the general multitude of the poor, and the residue of the people in the city, and the deserters, were carried away by Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard. In Daniel 1:1,2, we find that in the third year of Jehoiakim Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and carried away part of the temple vessels of Jehovah to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god Bel. (Subsequently he took all away; they were restored under Cyrus: Ezra. 1:7; 2 Kings 24:13; Jeremiah 52:19.)

    Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, of the blood royal of Judah, were among the captives. With this first deportation in the third year of Jehoiakim (607 or 606 B.C.) the foretold (Jeremiah 25; 29:10) 70 years’ “captivity” (i.e. subjection of Judah to Babylon) begins. Nebuchadnezzar had intended to carry Jehoiakim to Babylon ( 2 Chronicles 36:6,7); but Jehoiakim died before Nebuchadnezzar’s intention could be effected ( Jeremiah 22:18,19; 36:30), and. his dead body was dragged out of the gates by the Chaldaean besiegers and left unburied. This was eight years before the deportation under Jehoiachin.

    In the first year of Darius ( Daniel 9:2-19) the 70 years were nearly run out. Now Jehoiachin’s third year was one year before Nebuchadnezzar’s accession ( 2 Kings 23:36; 24:12). 67 years elapsed from that time to the taking of Babylon (Ptolemy’s canon). So it would be in the 68th year of the captivity that Daniel prayed pardon for Jerusalem. Cyrus’ decree, granting liberty and encouragement to the Jews to return to their own land, was one or two years after taking Babylon, 536 B.C. ( Ezra 1:2). The captivity ecclesiastically began with the destruction of the temple, 586 B.C. The restoration was 70 years afterward, in the sixth year of Darius, 515 or B.C. ( Ezra 6:15). The political aim of the deportation was to separate them from local associations, and from proximity to Egypt, their ally in every revolt, and so fuse them into the general population of the empire ( Isaiah 36:16; Genesis 47:21). The captives were treated as colonists. Daniel (Daniel 2; 6) and his three friends and Nehemiah (Nehemiah 1) subsequently held high offices near the king. Jeremiah had recommended the Jews to settle quietly in the land of their exile. They did so, and increased in numbers and wealth. They observed the law ( Esther 3:8), and distinctions of rank ( Ezekiel 20:1). The synagogues for prayer and reading the law publicly began during the captivity, and afterward were set up in every city ( Acts 15:21). The apocryphal Tobit pictures the inner life of a Naphtalite family among Shalmaneser’s captives at Nineveh.

    Jeremiah, Ezekiel (who died after 27 years’ exile at least, Ezekiel 29:17), and Daniel, and some of the Psalms (e.g. 137) give a general view of the state of the whole people in their exile.

    A portion of the people returned under Sheshbazzar or Zerubbabel, B.C., who set up the altar and began the temple. Then, after along interruption of the building of the temple through Samaritan opposition, the work was completed in the second year of Darius, through Haggai and Zechariah (515 B.C., Ezra 5) the prophets, Jeshua the high priest, and Zerubbabel. A further portion returned under Ezra 458 B.C., and under Nehemiah 445 B.C. ( Ezra 7:6,7; Nehemiah 2) In 536, besides servants, 42,360 returned; 30,000 belonging to Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, the remainder probably belonging to the Israelite tribes. Ezra 6:17 recognizes, in the sacrifices, the twelve tribes (compare 1 Chronicles 9). Of the 24 courses of priests but four returned, so that seemingly only one sixth returned of the people, five sixths remained behind ( Ezra 2:36-39, compare 1 Chronicles 24:4,18). The latter who kept up their national distinctions were termed “the dispersion” ( Esther 8:9,11; John 7:35; 1 Peter 1:1; James 1:1).

    The Afghans, the black Jews of Malabar, and the Nestorians, have been severally conjectured to represent the lost tribes. All we know is, some blended with the Jews, as Anna of Asher ( Luke 2:36), Saul or Paul of Benjamin ( Philippians 3:5); some with the Samaritans ( Ezra 6:21; John 4:12); many, staying in their land of exile, founded colonies in the E. and were known as “the dispersion” ( Acts 2:9-11; 26:7). The prayer, the 10th of the Shemoneh Esre, is still offered by the Jews: “Sound the great trumpet for our deliverance, lift up a banner for the gathering of our exiles, and unite us all together from the four ends of the earth!” evidently alluding to Isaiah 11:12; 27:13; <19A647> Psalm 106:47. Those who apostatized to Assyrian and Babylonian idolatry were absorbed among the pagan. The Jews’ language became then much affected by Chaldaisms ( Nehemiah 8:7,8), so that they could no longer understand, without interpretation, the pure Hebrew of the law. A Chaldee targum or paraphrase became necessary. An increased reverence for the law (Psalm 119 witnesses to this), and an abhorrence thenceforth of idolatry to which they once had been so prone, were among the beneficial effects of affliction on their national character.

    The prophets foretell the restoration, spiritually and also nationally in their own land, of Israel and Judah distinct, and hereafter to be combined ( Isaiah 11:12,13), to be miraculously “gathered one by one” ( Isaiah 27:12; Jeremiah 3:18; 16:15,16; 31:7-20; Ezekiel 37:16-28; Hosea 1:10,11; 3:4,5; Zechariah 9:13; 10:6,10). Their return under Messiah (then to be manifested) and their spiritual glory shall be the appointed instrumentality of the conversion of all nations (Isaiah 2; Isaiah 60; Micah 5:7; Zechariah 8:13).

    The Lord Jesus foretold the Jews’ dispersion, in that very generation, under Titus and the Romans, 37 years before the event (A.D. 70), and the treading under foot of Jerusalem by all nations “until the times of the Gentiles shall be fulfilled” ( Luke 21:20-24,32). In the siege 1,100,000 Jews perished, according to the contemporary witness Josephus; but not one Christian, for the Christians obeyed the Lord’s warning by fleeing to Pella, when Cestius Gallus first advanced against Jerusalem, and then providentially, without seeming reason, withdrew ( Matthew 24:15,16).

    The market was glutted with Jewish slaves, and Moses’ words were fulfilled: “Ye shall be sold unto your enemies ... and no man shall buy you.”

    Again returning they revolted under Bar-Cochaba “the son of a star” ( Numbers 24:17); but Adrian destroyed them, and built a pagan city, AEia, where Jerusalem had stood. “Captivity of the land” ( Judges 18:30) refers to the capture of the ark.

    So in Psalm 14:7 “bring back the captivity” means restore from depression; Job 42:10, “the Lord turned the captivity of Job,” i.e. amply indemnified him for all he lost: which passages prove the error of those who refer to the times after the Babylonian captivity any passage which mentions “the captivity,” as if it were the only one in the Bible.

    Christ Jesus, the antitypical David (who took captive His foes), “when He ascended on high led captivity captive,” i.e. led in triumphal procession as captives for destruction those who once had led men captive, namely, Satan, death, hell, the curse, sin ( Ephesians 4:8; Psalm 68:18; Colossians 2:15; 2 Peter 2:4). Revelation 20:10,14, thus: “he that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity” ( Revelation 13:10); Satan who “brings into captivity to the law of sin and death” ( Romans 7:23) is brought into captivity ( 2 Corinthians 10:5; Isaiah 49:24; Hosea 13:14).

    CARBUNCLE (in English meaning “a little coal,” “a bright red gem”): eqedach , boreqeth , the former in Isaiah 54:12 from qadach “to burn,” the latter from baraq “to flash.” A brightly flashing stone. A smaragd (Septuagint) or corundum, of green glass color, transparent, and doubly refractive; the emerald ( Exodus 28:17); third stone in the first row m the high priest’s breastplate ( Ezekiel 28:13).

    CARCHEMISH (“the fort of Chemosh”), the Moabite idol. The Assyrian monuments show it to be a city of the Hittites who held all Syria (between 1100 and B.C.) from Damascus to the Euphrates at Bir; 200 miles higher up on the Euphrates than the classical Circesium. It stood where Hierapolis (Mabog) was subsequently. Important in position as commanding a passage of the Euphrates, from whence its possession was a matter of contest between Babylon and Egypt ( 2 Chronicles 35:20). Taken by Pharaoh Necho after the battle of Megiddo in which king Josiah, Babylon’s ally, fell B.C. Retaken by Nebuchadnezzar three years later, 607 B.C. ( Jeremiah 46:2.) Assyria had originally taken it from the Hittites ( Isaiah 10:9).

    CARMEL Generally with the article, “the park,” derived from kerem Eel , “the vineyard of God.” Sometimes not a proper name: Isaiah 32:15, “a fruitful field,” Hebrew Karmel ; a characteristic feature of the Holy-Land. 1. A mountain promontory in Asher,12 miles long, jutting out into the Mediterranean. a few miles S. of Ptolemais or Acre; toward its eastern extremity 1,600 feet above the level of the sea, at the W. end 600. Now Mar Elyas (Elijah), rarely Kurmul. The only bold headland of Palestine. It separates the plain of Sharon on the S. from the more inland plain of Esdraelon or Jezreel on the N., by which the river Kishon flows into the sea in a direction parallel to the mountain range. The stone is mostly soft white limestone, with nodules of flint; at the W. chalk; on the N.E. plutonic rocks. “Elijah’s melons,” or lapides Judaici, is the name applied to stones of light brown flint outside, hollow inside, and lined with quartz crystals or chalcedony, the geological “geodes.” Fossil spines of echinus are called “olives.” The “apples” are the shells of the Cidaris glandifera.

    Carmel’s characteristic shrubbery’s are still to be seen, with rocky dells amidst jungles of copse oaks, evergreens, and numerous caves. The forests have disappeared. Flowering and fragrant herbs abound, hollyhocks, jasmine, and various vegetable creepers, “the excellency (i.e. the beauty) of Carmel” ( Isaiah 35:2.) Hence it is the image of the bride’s head with luxuriant tresses (Song 7:5). “thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple (Hebrew the pendulous hair is of glossy black, like purple), the king is held captivated with the flowing ringlets” (not galleries).

    The scene of Elijah’s conflict with, and execution of, Baal’s prophets was at the N.E. of the range, beside a spring said to be perennial. But Blunt (Undesigned Coincidences) thinks that sea water was used, as water would not have been otherwise so wasted in a drought. The distance of the sea forbids this view; the sea is far W. of the scene. The spring is 250 feet below the steep rocky altar plateau. It is in the former a vaulted tank, with steps leading down to it. Carmel was so covered with thicket and forest as to be difficult of access, so that the fountain was not so available in the drought as otherwise it would have been. The shade of the trees and the vaulting (if it then existed) would check evaporation.

    The site of Elijah’s sacrifice is still marked by the Arab name El- Maharrakah,” the burning.” The spring still flowing amidst the drought is close by. Josephus says the water was obtained from the neighboring spring (Ant. 8:13, section 5). The distance from Jezreel agrees with the narrative. A knoll between the ridge and the plain is called Tell Kasis, “the hill of the priests;” the Kishon below is named Nahr el Mukatta, “the river of slaughter.” From it Ahab “went up” to the sides of Carmel to take part in the sacrificial feast; Elijah went up to “the top” of the mountain to pray for rain: while Gehazi seven times climbed the highest point from whence the Mediterranean is to be fully seen over the W. shoulder of the ridge, and at last saw the little cloud rising out of the sea “like a man’s hand,” the sure forerunner of rain. An altar of Jehovah had existed on Carmel before that Baal worship was introduced; Jezebel had east it down (1 Kings 28:30); this Elijah repaired and used as the altar for his sacrifice. Hence, as being a sacred spot, he had convened Israel and Ahab there. They and the prophets of Baal stood close beneath the high place of the altar, near the spring, in full view of Jezreel and Ahab’s palace and Jezebel’s temple in the distance. Subsequently it was the place of resort for worship on new moons and sabbaths ( 2 Kings 4:23). Here too the successive fifties of king Ahaziah, at Elijah’s call, were consumed by fire from heaven. ( Kings 1:9, where it ought to be “he sat on the top of THE hill,” i.e.

    Carmel.) Elisha repaired there, after Elijah’s ascension ( 2 Kings 2:25).

    Here too Elisha was visited by the bereaved mother, with a view to his restoring to life her deceased son ( 2 Kings 4:25).

    Tacitus mentions that ages afterward Vespasian went there to consult the oracle which was without image or temple, and with “only an altar and reverential sanctity” attached to the place. On Carmel is the convent, the seat of the barefooted Carmelite monks, whose establishments spread over Europe from the 13th century. Bertholdt, a Calabrian, and a crusader in the 12th century, had founded the order, and Louis of France the convent, in the 13th century, at the traditional site of Elijah’s abode. The Latin traditions as to Elijah being connected with the origin of that order of monks are purely mythical. Edward I of England was a brother of the order; Simon Stokes of Kent was one of its famous generals. 2. A city in the hilly country of Judah ( Joshua 15:55). The abode of the churl Nabal and Abigail “the Carmelitess” (1 Samuel 25; 27:3). Saul set. up a “place,” i.e. a memorial, there after his victory over Amalek ( Samuel 15:12). Here Uzziah had his vineyards ( 2 Chronicles 26:10).

    Ten miles S.E. of Hebron. In A.D. 1172 King Amalric held it against Saladin. The ruins of the castle (Kasr el Birkeh) are still visible, of great strength, with the large beveled masonry characteristic of Jewish architecture. To the E. is a glaring white desert, without shrub or water. inhabited by the partridge and ibex alone, the very two noticed in the narrative ( 1 Samuel 26:20): “the king of Israel doth hunt a partridge”; “David upon the rocks of the wild goats” ( 1 Samuel 24:2).

    CARMI 1. Descendant (as “son” must mean in 1 Chronicles 4:1) of Judah: father of Achan. the “troubler of Israel” ( Joshua 7:1,18; Chronicles 2:7); son of Zabdi or Zimri. 2. Reuben’s fourth son; forefather of “the Carmites” ( Genesis 46:9; Numbers 26:6).

    CARPUS A Christian at Troas, with whom Paul left his cloak ( 2 Timothy 4:13) on his last hurried journey previous to his second captivity and martyrdom at Rome. Bishop of Berytus in Thrace subsequently, according to Hippolytus. He must have been a trustworthy friend to have had Paul’s “books” (on papyrus), and “especially” his “parchments” (perhaps containing some of his inspired epistles) committed to him.

    CARRIAGES In our sense vehicles. Only in 1 Samuel 17:20; 26:5,7, margin “place of carriages,” i.e. “the trench,” alluding to the circle of wagons round the encampment. Elsewhere the things carried, baggage ( 1 Samuel 17:22; Isaiah 10:28; Judges 18:21), literally, heavy things, i.e. the precious goods which the Danites had just seized on. Isaiah 46:1: “your carriages were heavy laden,” rather “(the images) which used to be carried by you (in solemn procession) are become heavy burdens”; instead of carrying you as Jehovah does His people ( Isaiah 46:3,4), they have to be carried as heavy burdens by you. Acts 21:15: “we took up our carriages,” i.e. our baggage.

    CARSHENA Esther 1:14.

    CARTS Drawn by cattle ( 2 Samuel 6:6). Open or covered ( Numbers 20:3).

    TheCHARIOT was drawn by horses. There are scarcely any roads in Syria and Palestine, so that horse carriages are almost unknown. The cart wheels are often of solid wood.WAGONS: Genesis 45:19 Goods are mostly conveyed on the backs of camels, asses, oxen. The Assyrian wagon is seen represented in bas-relief on the monuments at Nimrud and Koyunjik.

    CASIPHIA On the road between Babylon and Jerusalem ( Esther 8:17).

    CASLUHIM Of Mizraite (Egyptian) origin ( Genesis 10:14; 1 Chronicles 1:12).

    Herodotus (2:104.) says the Colchians were of Egyptian origin; so Bochart identifies the Casluhim with the Colchians. Out of them proceeded the Philistines. Forster (Ep. ad Michael., 16, etc.) conjectures Casiotis, a region between Gaza and Pelusium, called from Mount Custos. Knobel says the name in Coptic means burning, i.e. a dry desert region. The Colchians were probably a colony from Casiotis.

    CASSIA An ingredient in the holy oil used in anointing the high priest ( Exodus 30:24). An article of Tyre’s merchandise ( Ezekiel 27:19). The inner bark of an aromatic plant, like cinnamon. Quddah , from qaadad “to split,” namely, the stalks. Also Qetsi’owt from qaatsah , to “scrape off” bark.

    Used in scenting garments ( Psalm 45:8).

    CASTER AND POLLUX The Dioscuri or two mythical sons of the chief idol of Rome and Greece, Jupiter. The tutelary gods of sailors, identified with the phosphoric lights which play about masts and sails. The constellation Gemini, “the Twins.”

    At Cyrene in the region of Africa, adjoining Alexandria, they were especially worshipped. This accords with the Alexandrian vessel that Paul sailed in ( Acts 28:11), having as the figure head or painting on the bow these deities, as they may be seen on coins of Rhegium (where the ship touched); two youths on horseback, with conical caps, and stars above their heads.

    CATERPILLAR Chacil , from chaacal to consume. As gazam is the gnawing locust, ‘arbet the swarming locust, yalaq the licking locust, so chacil is the consuming, i.e. the most destructive, locust. Yeleq is also translated “caterpillar” ( <19A534> Psalm 105:34), in other places “cankerworm.” The chacil or consuming locust is the climax. The real foe meant in Joel 1:4 is the Assyrian Babylonian power, the Medo-Persian, the Graeco-Macedonian and Antiochus Epiphanes, Rome the fourth and most consuming foe of the four which successively ravaged Judaea.

    CAULS Head-dresses, or ornaments of Hebrew headdresses, of checker or network ( Isaiah 3:18). Shebisim .

    CAVES The chalky limestone prevalent in Syria and Palestine abounds in caves, clefts, and fissures, which are so frequently alluded to in Scripture under a variety of names. From hor , “a cavern,” the Horites take their name, who originally occupied mount Seir, and were driven thence by the Edomites.

    Henc,e also comes the name Beth-horon, “the house of caverns,” and\parHORONAIM, “the two caverns;” andHAURAN, “the land of caverns” ( Ezekiel 47:16,18). The caverns were the resort of the people in times of danger: ( Judges 6:2) when Midian oppressed them, ( 1 Samuel 13:6; 14:11) when the Philistines oppressed them. Michmash, the scene of Jonathan’s enterprise, implies the same. Still the shepherds dwell in caves during summer to be nearer their flocks and fields; at Gadara the dwellings are almost all caves. For particular caves see ENGEDI , see ADULLAM , see MACHPELAH , see MAKKEDAH . Lot dwelt in a cave such as are still to be seen near the Dead Sea, after Sodom’s overthrow ( Genesis 19:30). Obadiah hid the Lord’s prophets by fifties in a cave ( 1 Kings 18:4), Elijah at Horeb was in a cave when the Lord revealed Himself ( Kings 19:9). The custom of fleeing to caves in time of earthquakes illustrates Isaiah 2:10,19,21. They were also the resort of marauders [see BETHARBEL ] and the final refuges of the Jewish leaders in their war with the Romans. Josephus relates his own hiding in the caves of Jotapata.

    Rock caverns abound along the shore of the sea of Tiberias, and were often used as tombs, the bodies being laid in excavated shelves at the sides. Here accordingly the demoniac had his dwelling continually ( Mark 5:3,5).

    The cave of Machpelah, Abraham’s burying place, Aaron’s tomb on mount Hor, Joseph’s, and Rachel’s are with strong probability identified. The rock tombs near Jerusalem are assigned to kings and prophets with less certainty. Owing to the abundance of grottoes in the valley of Jehoshaphat, tradition assigns to them the sites of such unlikely events to occur in them as the birth of the Virgin, the annunciation, the salutation, the Baptist’s and our Lord’s birth, the agony, Peter’s denial, the composition of the Apostles’ Creed, and the transfiguration.

    CEDAR ‘Erez , from ‘aIraz, “coiled” or “compressed,” a deeply rooted tree.

    According to Scripture, tall ( Isaiah 2:13), spreading ( Ezekiel 31:3), fit for beams, boards, and pillars ( 1 Kings 6:10,15; 7:2), masts ( Ezekiel 27:5), and carved work as images ( Isaiah 44:14). The timber for the second temple, as for Solomon’s, was cedar ( Ezra 3:7).

    As our modern cedar is hardly fit for masts, and is of a worse quality than inferior deal, probably by the “cedar” of Scripture is meant Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris). In Ezekiel 27:3 the Septuagint translate “masts of fir,” and by “fir” is meant cypress. Moreover the deodara cedar (the tree of God, <19A416> Psalm 104:16, the sacred tree of the Hindus, of which they construct their temples) has the durability wanting in our modern cedar of Lebanon. The Nineveh inscriptions state that the palaces were in part constructed of cedar; this proves on microscopic examination to be yew; so that by “cedar of Lebanon” the wood of more than one tree is meant, the pine cedar, Scotch fir, yew, deodara.

    Cedar was also used in purification, probably the oxycedrus abounding in Egypt, Arabia, and the wady Mousa; indeed, the greater cedar not being found there, the tree meant in the laws of purification must have been a distinct one ( Leviticus 14:4; Numbers 19:6). It was anciently burnt as a perfume at funerals.

    In a hollow of Lebanon, where no other trees are near, about 400 cedars of Lebanon stand alone, 3,000 feet below the summit and 6,400 above the sea. Only eleven or twelve are very large and old. This forest is regarded by the neighboring people with superstitious reverence. Sennacherib had desired to “go up to the sides of Lebanon and cut down the tall cedars thereof” ( 2 Kings 19:23), but was baffled by the interposition of Jehovah. Another Assyrian king accomplished it, as an inscription at Nimrud states in recording his conquests in N. Syria. But God in retributive justice “consumed the glory of the Assyrian’s forest” figuratively; fulfilling His threat, “the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few that a child may write them” ( Isaiah 10:18,19). Solomon’s 80,000 hewers must have inflicted such havoc that the cedar forest never recovered it completely. The cedar of Lebanon is an evergreen, its leaves remaining on for two years, and every spring contributing a fresh supply.

    CEDRON or Kedron. “The black torrent,” in the ravine below the E. wall of Jerusalem ( John 18:1). Gethsemane was beyond it.

    CEILINGS ( 1 Kings 6:9; margin 6:15; 7:3; Jeremiah 22:14; 2 Chronicles 3:5,9.) Cedar planks were applied to the beams crossing from wall to wall, with sunk panels edged with gold and carved or painted in patterns. The vermilion painting of the ceiling in Jehoiakim’s palace was probably borrowed from Egypt.

    CENCHREA or Cenchreae. Now Kikries; from Greek Kenchri , “the millet,” a grain abounding there. The harbor of Corinth on the Saronic gulf, and its channel of trade with Asia Minor, as Lechaeum, on the Corinthian gulf, was with Italy and the W. Corinth was joined by walls to Lechaeum; so that the pass between Corinth and Cenchrea (nine miles apart from one another) was the only one into the Morea from Greece. Paul sailed from Cenchrea, returning to Syria from his second missionary journey ( Acts 18:18), after having shorn his head there in fulfillment of a vow. He wrote to the Romans in his third journey, and alludes to the church at Cenchrea, of which Phoebe was “deaconess” (Greek Romans 16:1).

    CENSER An instrument to seize or hold burning coals. Latterly the portable metal vessel for receiving from the altar burning coals, on which the priest sprinkled the incense for burning ( 2 Chronicles 26:16,18,19; Luke 1:9). Korah and his company were told to take censers, with which they had furnished themselves as aspiring to share in Aaron’s priesthood. So Uzziah. So Ezekiel 8:11. But Aaron was told to take “the censer” (Hebrew), namely, that of the sanctuary or of the high priest, and make atonement to stay the plague ( Numbers 16:46). On the day of atonement the high priest was to carry the censer of the golden altar within the most holy place, and put the incense on the fire in the censer “before the Lord” ( Leviticus 16:12,13). Solomon made censers of pure gold, probably to take fire from the brazen altar, and to convey incense to the golden altar on which it was to be offered morning and evening ( Exodus 30:7,8; 1 Kings 7:50).

    In Revelation 8:3,4 the “angel” is not Christ, who always has His own title in Revelation, but a ministering spirit. The incense, i.e. Christ’s meritorious obedience and death, is given to the angel that he may give it to (so the Greek) the prayers of all saints, to render them a sweet smelling savor to God. “The golden altar,” moreover, is Christ Himself ( Hebrews 13:10), resting on whom alone prayer is accepted before God. How the angels’ ministry exactly is exercised we know not, but we do know they are not to be prayed to ( Revelation 19:10). If we send an offering to the King, the King’s messenger is not to appropriate what is due to the King alone.

    In Hebrews 9:4 “the holiest ... had the golden censer “does not mean it was deposited there, for then the high priest would have had to go in and bring it out before burning incense in it, but that the golden censer was one of the articles belonging to the yearly service in the holiest place; it was taken into the holiest on that anniversary by the high priest. Its shape was probably that of a pan with a handle.

    CENSUS Miphqad , “numbering combined with lustration” or “purification.” By the law ( Exodus 30:12,13) half a shekel was to be paid by every man above 20 years as a ransom for his soul, that there should be no plague whenever a numbering of the people took place. The number at the census in the third or fourth month after the exodus was 603,550 above 20 years ( Exodus 38:26); in Exodus 12:37 the round number 600,000. There were besides 22,000 male Levites of a month old and upwards ( Numbers 3:39). Adding the wives and children we should have about 2,000,000. Of the 70 that went down to Egypt, after deducting Jacob, his 12 sons, Dinah, Zerah (Asher’s daughter), Levi’s three sons, the four grandsons of Judah and Benjamin, and those grandsons of Jacob who died without posterity, there remain at least 41 grandsons of Jacob who founded families, besides the Levites. Reckoning 40 years as a generation, there would be ten generations passed in the 400th year of the sojourn in Egypt.

    Compare 1 Chronicles 7:20-27, where ten or eleven generations elapse between Ephraim and Joshua. Assuming three sons and three daughters to each married couple of the first six generations, and two sons and two daughters in the last four, there would be 478,224 sons about the 400th year of the sojourn, besides 125,326 of the ninth generation, still living; in all 603,550 men coming out of Egypt upward of 20 years old. Besides, the Israelites were under a special dispensation of fruitfulness from God, and preservation from plague and from serious diminution even by Pharaoh’s repressive measures.

    In Numbers 3:43 all the firstborn males for whom the Levites were accepted as a substitute are stated to be 22,273, which, if it were the suni of the firstborn sons in the entire nation, would require there to be males begotten of each father in each family to make up 608,550 men of years and upward, or a population of more than 1,000,000 males. But Exodus 13:2,11,12 shows that the law does not apply retrospectively, but only to the sanctification to God of all the firstborn of men and cattle that should be born from that time forward. It appears from Numbers 3:13; 8:17, God had actually sanctified already all the firstborn to Himself by having protected His people from the destroyer on the paschal night ( Exodus 12:22,23; 4:22), and had adopted the whole nation in instituting the Passover. The presentation of their firstborn to the Lord thenceforth was to be the practical manifestation of their sonship. The number of Levites ( Numbers 3:39,51), 22,000, does not agree with the numbers assigned to the three families 7,500 + 8,600 + 6,200 = 22,300.

    But the total is correct; for it is written, the number of the firstborn, 22,273, exceeded that of the Levites by 273. Probably there is a copyist’s error in the number of one of the Levitical families, perhaps in Numbers 3:28 read 8,300 for 8,600. For the surplus 278 each was to pay five shekels, 1,365 in all.

    The earlier numbering for collecting atonement money from every male of 20 or upward ( Exodus 30:11-16; 38:25,26) gave the same number, 603,550, as that nine months later ( Numbers 1:1-3,46; Exodus 40:17), in the second month of the second year, four weeks after the rearing of the tabernacle. The reason is, because the former census for gathering the atonement head money was taken as the basis for mustering all fit for war nine months later. This latter mustering merely consisted in registering those already numbered in the public records according to their families and fathers’ houses; probably according to Jethro’s suggestion of classification for administering justice, namely, in thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens ( Exodus 18:25). Each tribe was placed under a special leader; head of the tribe, as is usual among the Arabs to this day. The supernumerary units would be used to balance the changes that had taken place in the actual condition of the families and fathers’ houses between the earlier provisional numbering and the subsequent preparation of the master rolls, so that the few changes that had taken place during the nine months’ interval among those fit for war was made no account of, but the number was left the same.

    A new census was taken 38 years afterwards in the plains of Moab (Numbers 26) for the division of Canaan among the tribes according to their families ( Numbers 33:54). The number then was 601,730, of years and upward, of whom Joshua and Caleb alone were in the former census, the whole generation having died in the wilderness. The tribe of Simeon especially suffered a diminution of its numbers; probably owing to the plague which followed Zimri’s sin with Cozbi the Midianite woman ( Numbers 25:9-15; 26:51,63-65; compare Numbers 11:21). The history does not detail the events of the intervening 38 years, but only of the beginning and the close of the 40 years. The total of Israel, including the 23,000 Levite males from a month old upwards, would be thus about 2,000,000 ( Numbers 26:62). The objection of rationalists that the peninsula of Sinai could not have sustained such a number is answered by the consideration (1) that Israel was sustained by a miracle, (2) the peninsula yielded much more anciently than at present. The destruction of the trees diminishes the rainfall; in the monumental period of ancient Egypt it is evident that the land was more cultivated; and the water in the wadies and the rain might, by artificial means, be made available to increase the fertility. The inscriptions of Sinai, Serbal, and the wady Mokatteb, and other valleys prove that formerly a numerous population lived there.

    The next numbering was that by David, contrary to Joab’s advice ( <102401> Samuel 24:1-9; 1 Chronicles 21:1,5; 27:24). “Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel.” Pride is peculiarly of Satan ( Isaiah 14:12), and proud presumption actuated David. It was not so much the act which was faultworthy (for indeed the taking of the census was recognized in the pentateuch: Exodus 30:12) as the motive, trust in the arm of flesh instead of in Jehovah ( Jeremiah 17:5). Psalm 30 (see its authoritative heading, which ought to be read “A Psalm of David at the dedication of the house,” namely, of God) commemorates “the dedication,” or consecration, of the site whereon subsequently Solomon’s temple was built. When David, after the plague sent for numbering the people, sacrificed upon an altar of burnt offering on the threshing floor of Araunah on mount Moriah, Jehovah by fire from heaven consecrated the place as “the house of God,” even before the actual building of the temple (compare 1 Chronicles 22:1,2 with Genesis 28:17-19). Pride through prosperity, and a sudden, severe, but temporary, reverse appear in the psalm as in the history. The deliverance was the answer to David’s prayer, Jehovah at the same time interceding; for while we pray below our Intercessor is pleading above (compare Psalm 30:8-10 with Chronicles 21:15-18). Apparently David had neglected to have the half shekel apiece payment made to God in recognition of His sovereignty ( Exodus 30:12,13); in which respect the people shared the guilt and therefore the punishment. Probably he sought popularity by omitting it.

    The number in 1 Chronicles 21:5 is 1,100,000 of Israel and 470,000 of Judah. But in 2 Samuel 24:9 of Israel 800,000, of Judah 500,000. The census was not completed, through the reluctance of Joab to proceed, and through David’s revoking the order before it was finished. The number was never put “in the account of the chronicles of King David” ( Chronicles 27:24). Levi was omitted, as it was for men fit for war that the census was taken. Benjamin, which came last in order on the return home to Jerusalem, had not been numbered when the census was interrupted ( 1 Chronicles 21:6). The 30,000 difference in the number of Judah, as given in Chronicles and according to Samuel, was perhaps due to Benjamin being given in Samuel but not in Chronicles. or, possibly, Chronicles omits the 30,000 army of observation stationed on the Philistine frontier ( <100601> Samuel 6:1). The 300,000 more in Israel according to Chronicles probably included the standing army in 24, courses of 24,000 each, i.e. 288,000 in all (1 Chronicles 27), besides 12 captains with 1,000 each as the king’s own guard, in all 300,000, not counted in 2 Samuel 24. These were in actual service; the larger numbers in the census are those capable of service. At best, oral tradition was the basis of the numbers here, seeing that it was not recorded in the chronicles of David. The whole population would thus amount to about 5,000,000; a number not too large for the well attested fertility of the land then to sustain. Even profane writers noticed Palestine’s fertility, of which its present neglected state affords no test.

    God had promised a populous race. In A.D. 66, just before the Roman siege of Jerusalem, a census taken by the priests at the Passover gave the approximate number 2,700,000, independently of foreigners and those ceremonially defiled. 1,100,000 perished in the siege; 97,000 were taken captives. These facts give us a glimpse of the populousness of the Holy Land.

    Solomon completed David’s census by causing the resident foreigners to be numbered and employed on his great works, namely, 153,600 ( Chronicles 2:17,18; compare Joshua 9:27). Jehoshaphat’s army was one of the largest, 1,160,000 ( 2 Chronicles 17:14-18); this probably included subject foreigners.

    The object of the census on the return from Babylon was to settle against the year of jubilee the inheritances of the Holy Land ( Leviticus 25:10), which had been disarranged by the captivity, and to ascertain the family genealogies and ensure purity of Jewish blood. This accounts for differences appearing between the total and the details ( Ezra 2:59,64) of the 42,360 who returned with Zerubbabel, 12,542 belonging to other tribes than Judah and Benjamin ( Ezra 10:2,8,18,44; Nehemiah 7:1-67). [See CAPTIVITY .] The second caravan (458 B.C.) numbered 1496, exclusive of women and children ( Ezra 8:1-14). The genealogies (1 Chronicles 1--9) were compiled for a similar object. The Septuagint and Josephus confirm in the main the correctness of the Scripture numbers.

    A “taxing” under Cyrenius, governor of Syria, is recorded Luke 2:1; a disturbance caused by one Judas of Galilee “in the days of the taxing” is referred to in Acts 5:37. God’s providence overruled Augustus’ order for the provincial enrollment of all persons and estates under Roman sway, to effect His foretold purpose that Bethlehem should be the scene of Jesus’ nativity ( Micah 5:2) 4 B.C.; His parents going up there to be registered for the taxation, a plain proof that the foretold time for Shiloh’s appearing was come, for “the scepter was departed from Judah” to Rome ( Genesis 49:10). Quirinus did not, according to history, become president of Syria until 9 or 10 years afterward, A.D. 6. But Justin Martyr thrice (Apol., 1:34,46; Trypho, 78) asserts Quirinus was president when Luke says he was. Zumpt moreover has recently brought to light the interesting fact that, owing to Cilicia when separated from Cyprus being joined to Syria Quirinus as governor of Cilicia was also governor of Syria; his subsequent special connection with Syria caused his earlier and briefer one to be thus specified.

    The word “first” too is to be noticed: “this taxing,” ordered by Augustus just before Jesus’ birth, was interrupted by the Jews’ bitter opposition, and “was first carried into effect” when Cyrenius was governor of Syria; grammatically the Greek expresses, “this taxing took place as a first one while Cyrenius was governor of Syria” (Ellicott). The omission, however, of the Greek article in one oldest manuscript (Vatican) would thus modify the translation, “this first taxation was carried into effect when Cyrenius,” etc.

    CENTURION It is a propriety in the New Testament that centurions are so often favorably noticed. Good conduct was generally the cause of their promotion to the command of a century (properly 100 men). Truthful straightforwardness would make them open to conviction. For instance, the one whose faith Jesus so commends in Matthew 8; Cornelius, whom Peter was by vision sent to, and who is described as “devout, fearing God with all his house, giving much alms to the people, and praying to God always” (Acts 10); Julius, the centurion of Augustus’ band, who entreated Paul courteously and saved his life when threatened by the soldiers ( Acts 27:1,3,42,43). In Acts 24:23 translate “the centurion,” namely, the commander of the horse who had conveyed Paul to Caesarea after the other of the two centurions had come back with the infantry (compare Acts 23:23,32). The centurion at the Lord’s crucifixion uttered the testimony so remarkable from a Gentile: “certainly this was a righteous man”; Luke’s explanation ( Luke 23:47) of what a Gentile would mean by saying, “Truly this was the Son of God” ( Matthew 27:54).

    CHAFF All refuse of threshed and winnowed grain, not merely the outer covering as with us. Image of all worthless doctrine, and vain counsels, and hollow professors, about to perish utterly. Jeremiah 23:28: “What is the chaff to the wheat?” God answers the objection, What must we do when lies are spoken as truths and prophets oppose prophets? Do as you would with wheat mixed with chaff; do not reject the wheat, because of the chaff mixed with it, but bring both to the test of “My word” ( Jeremiah 23:27,29); so discriminate as to what to reject, and what to keep. My word, which is wheat or food to the true prophet and his hearers, is a consuming “fire” to the “chaff,” i.e. false prophets, their followers and doctrine. ( Psalm 1:4; Isaiah 33:11; 17:13; Hosea 13:3; Matthew 3:12.) Chaff is separated from the grain, after having been threshed, on high threshing floors on hills, to earth the wind. So the final doom of the world powers before the coming manifested kingdom of Messiah ( Daniel 2:35). “(Before) the day pass as the chaff” in Zephaniah 2:2 means, Before the day of repentance pass, and with it you, ungodly, pass away as the chaff.

    CHAIN Of gold on Joseph’s neck ( Genesis 41:42). Was the badge of a judge, and a prime minister, in Egypt. Judges wore the image of Thmei, or truth, attached from their neck (compare Proverbs 1:9). Daniel was given by Belshazzar a chain of gold about his neck, a token of investiture as “the third ruler in the kingdom” of Babylon ( Daniel 5:7,29). Secondly, chares, besides the necklace, were used for ornament, hanging down to the waist ( Ezekiel 16:11; Isaiah 3:19). “Chains,” hanetiphot , from naataph , to drop; pendants about the neck, dropping on the breast. Some had ornamental miniature lunettes attached (18), “round tires like the moon,” such as the Midianites adorned their camels’ necks with ( Judges 8:21,26; compare Numbers 31:50); the chumarah or crescent is still worn in front of the headdress in western Asia; (20) “tablets” or scentbottles, lit. houses of the breath or soul, were often suspended by chains. “Tinkling ornaments,” i.e. step chains attached to ankle rings, shortened the step so as to give a tripping (margin) gait (16, 18).

    Prisoners were chained to one or even two guards, by a chain from each hand, as Peter ( Acts 12:6,7). Paul’s right hand was chained to the soldier’s left ( Acts 28:20). Originally he was bound with two chains ( Acts 21:33). Joseph’s “feet they hurt with fetters, he was laid in (margin his soul, came into) iron,” i.e. his soul suffered more pain than even the fetters caused to his body. As the Hebrew verb is feminine, and “the iron” masculine, the Prayer-Book version, “the iron entered into his soul,” is wrong ( <19A518> Psalm 105:18).

    CHALCEDONY Revelation 21:19. With it the third foundation of the wall of New Jerusalem is adorned. An agate-like quartz in modern mineralogy, of pearly luster and transparent, found in the Travascus mine in Cornwall. Cups, plates, knife handles, etc. are formed of it in India. Pliny makes it resemble turquoise; others make it of a light brown. The chalcedony of Theophrastus is called from Chalcedon in ancient Thrace, and was the copper emerald obtained from the mines there.

    CHALDAEA [See BABEL .] Properly the S. part of Babylonia, chiefly on the right bank of the Euphrates, but used to designate the whole country. Ur or Umqueir, more toward the mouth of the Euphrates, was the original chief city of Chaldaea; here inscriptions of the 22nd century B.C., deciphered lately, prove that the early seat of the Babylonian empire was there rather than higher up the Euphrates. In Isaiah 23:13 the prophet reminds Tyre of the fact so humbling to her pride, that the upstart Chaldees should destroy her: “Behold the land of the Chaldaeans; this people was not, until the Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness:” i.e., their latter empire started into importance only after Assyria, in whose armies they had previously been mercenaries. The mountains of Armenia are thought by some to be their original seat (the Carduchian mountains, according to Xenophon, Cyrop. 3:2,3), from whence they proceeded S. in wandering “bands” ( Job 1:17) before they became a settled empire, but their Cushite language disproves this. Rawlinson distinguishes three periods. 1.

    When their empire was in the S., toward the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; this is the Chaldaean period (from 2340 to 1500 B.C.) in which see CHEDORLAOMER of Elam conquered Syria (Genesis 14), as the inscriptions show. 2. From 1500 to 625 B.C., the Assyrian period. 3. From 625 to 538 B.C., the Babylonian period. The Hebrew name is Chasdim , relative to Chesed , Abraham’s nephew apparently ( Genesis 22:22). But their existence was centuries earlier ( Genesis 11:28). Chesed’s name implies simply that Abraham’s family had a connection with them. The Kurds still in Kurdistan between Nineveh and Media may be akin to the ancient Casdim. But G. Rawlinson considers the Chaldi to he more probably one of the Cushite (Ethiopian) tribes that crossed over the Persian gulf and settled in Babylonia. Their name ultimately prevailed over that of the other tribes in the country. The remains found of their language correspond to that of the modern Galla of Abyssinia, the ancient language of Ethiopia. Scripture is thus confirmed, that Babel came from Cush and Ham, not from Shem ( Genesis 10:6-10). Some interpret Ur = the moon goddess; the Chaldees being moon worshippers or Sabeans, from tsaba’ “the heavenly hosts,” worshipped Bel, the planet Jupiter, Nebo, Mercury, etc. ( Job 31:26,27.)

    Chaldaea lies between the Tigris and Euphrates, and comprises also an average of 30 miles along the W. of the Euphrates; a vast alluvial plain, running N.E. and S.W. 400 miles, with the Persian gulf on the S., and a line from Hit on the Euphrates to Tekrit on the Tigris forming its N. boundary, Elam, or Susiana, lies on the E. An arid waste, with great mounds of rubbish and brick here and there, all that is left of that “glory of kingdoms,” now extends where once, by a perfect network of canals for irrigation, a teeming population was supplied abundantly from the rich soil with grain and wine. Scripture is to the letter fulfilled: “a drought is upon her waters” ( Jeremiah 50:38). It was once said to be the only country where wheat grew wild. Berosus states also that barley, sesame, palms, apples, and many shelled fruit, grew wild. Herodotus (1:193) stated that grain yielded the sower from two to three hundred fold. Strabo says it yielded bread, wine, honey, ropes, and fuel equal to charcoal. Now, while dry in some parts, it is a stagnant marsh in others, owing to neglect of the canals; as Scripture also foretells: “the sea is come up upon Babylon,” etc. ( Jeremiah 51:42); “she is a possession for the bittern, and pools of water” ( Isaiah 14:23).

    The Chaldaean cities are celebrated in Scripture: “Babel, Erech (now Warka), Accad, Calneh (Niffer)” ( Genesis 10:10). Borsippa is Birs- Nimrud now; Sepharvaim or Sippara, Mosaib; Cutha, Ibrahim; Chilmad, Calwadha; Larancha, Senkereh; Is, Hit, where the canal leaving the Euphrates at the point where the alluvial plain begins passed along the whole edge of the plain, and fell into the Persian gulf. There is one large inland fresh water sea, Nedjef, 40 miles long by 35 wide, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs; about 20 miles from the right bank of the Euphrates.

    Above and below this sea are the Chaldaean marshes in which Alexander was almost lost.

    In another sense the “CHALDAEANS” are a priest caste, with a peculiar tongue and learning, skilled in divination. In the ethnic sense we saw it was applied first to a particular Cushite tribe, then to the whole nation from the time of Nabopolassar. The Semitic language prevailed over the Cushite in Assyrian and later Babylonian times, and was used for all civil purposes; but for sacred and mystic lore the Cushite language was retained as a learned language. This is “the learning and the tongue of the Chaldaeans” ( Daniel 1:4), in which the four Jewish youths were instructed, and which is quite distinct from the Aramaean, or Chaldee so-called (allied to Hebrew), of those parts of the book of Daniel which are not Hebrew, as not being so connected with the Jews as with the Babylonians. The Cushite Chaldee had become a dead language to the mass of the people who had become Semitized by the Assyrians. All who studied it were called “Chaldaeans,” whatever might be their nation; so Daniel is called “master of the Chaldaeans” ( Daniel 5:11). Their seats of learning were Borsippa, Ur, Babylon, and Sepharvaim. The serene sky and clear atmosphere favored their astronomical studies; Cahisthenes sent Aristotle from Babylon their observations for 1903 years. Afterward their name became synonymous with diviners and fortunetellers. They wore a peculiar dress, like that seen on the gods and deified men in Assyrian sculptures. At the time of the Arab invasion the Chaldaeans chiefly still preserved the learning of the East. We owe to them the preservation of many fragments of Greek learning, as the Greeks had previously owed much of their eastern learning to the Chaldees.

    The Aramaean and the Hebrew are sister languages. The former is less developed and cultivated than either Hebrew or Arabic. Of its two dialects, Chaldee and Syriac, the former prevailed in the E., the latter in the W. of Aram. To express the article it employs an affix instead of a prefix as the Hebrew The dual number and the purely passive conjugations are wanting.

    The Chaldee of parts of the Bible ( Daniel 2:4--7:28; Ezra 4:8--6:18; 7:12-26; Jeremiah 10:11) more closely approaches the Hebrew idiom than the Chaldee of the Targum of Onkelos. Some think the seeming Hebraisms in it are remnants of an older form of the language than that found in the targums.

    CHAMBERLAIN Romans 16:23: Erastus, oikonomos , steward or public treasurer of the city, who kept account of the revenues. Latin arcarius. So in inscriptions in Marm. Oxon., 85, Neilos is called oikonomos of Asia. On the other hand Blastus was chamberlain (epi tou koitonos tou basileos ) in a different sense, namely, over the king’s bedchamber, a post of honor and intimacy ( Acts 12:20).

    CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY Ezekiel 8:7,10,12. The vision is not of an actual scene, but an ideal pictorial representation of the Egyptian idolatries into which the covenant people had relapsed; having light enough to be ashamed of their idolatries, and therefore practicing them in secret, but not decision enough to renounce them, casting away their superstitious fears and self willed devices to allay them. Idolatry tends more and more to degrade its votaries, so that in Egypt they sank so low as to worship abominable creeping things. Their own perverse imaginations answer to the priests’ chambers in the vision, whereon the pictures were portrayed. If “in the wall” of most men’s religious profession “a hole” were opened whereby the inner heart might be seen, what awful pictures would be seen in “the chambers of imagery”! (See John 3:20.)

    CHAMELEON A kind of large lizard, called koach from its great strength ( Leviticus 11:30). Kuebel makes it “the croaking frog”; Gesenius, “the Nile lizard.”

    The word translated “the mole,” tinshemeth , is rather the chameleon, literally, “the inflating animal,” as it inflates its body when excited. The koach answers well to the qecko lizard, small, clumsy, hiding by day in holes, and at night coming forth to prey upon insects. They can crawl like flies on the under side of ceilings by the laminated structure of the under surface of their toes.

    CHAMOIS Zemer , from zaamar to leap. Allowed as clean food ( Deuteronomy 14:5). The giraffe according to Gosse, (from the Arabic version and the Septuagint). The objection is, the giraffe is not a native of Palestine; but it is of Nubia, and may have been of the Arabian peninsula at the exodus.

    Clearly it is not the chamois found only on high peaks of the Alps, auras, and Caucasus. It may be some other species of antelope. Colossians Smith suggests the aoudad mountain sheep. The Syriac has “the mountain goat.”

    CHANGERS OF MONEY Matthew 21:12; John 2:14. They set up their tables in the court of the Gentiles, to exchange at a price the foreign coin of Jews and proselytes coming from distant lands for the Hebrew half shekel (which was required from every adult from 20 years old and upward: Exodus 38:26) in presenting themselves to worship at the tabernacle or temple. At the beginning of His ministry, and at its close, Christ marked His mission as the foretold Purifier of the temple ( Malachi 3:1-5), for the presence of Jehovah, of which His own divinely formed body was the type. The court of the Gentiles, as distinguished from that of Israel and that of the priests, was designed not only for an unclean Jew, but also for the uncircumcised Gentile proselytes. The Jewish traffic here was an insult to the Gentiles. It made what God designed to be “a house of prayer for all people” ( Isaiah 56:7) to become “a house of merchandise.” The bustle around rendered prayer almost impossible. The priests let the court to the moneychangers, making godliness into a source of gain. Christ’s clearing them oat with so puny a weapon as “a whip of small cords” is a warrant of His having “all power given” to Him by the Father, and of His future purging out of His kingdom “all things which offend, and them which do iniquity” ( Matthew 13:41). Then and then only shall the temple be mate “a house of prayer for all people” ( Isaiah 2:2-4).

    CHAPITER The capital of a pillar; also a molding at the top of a work of art, as the lavers ( Exodus 38:17; 1 Kings 7:27,31,38).

    CHARASHIM, VALLEY OF i.e., of craftsmen. Joab, of Othniel’s family, of Judah, founded the settlement there ( 1 Chronicles 4:14; Nehemiah 11:35). E. of Jaffa, at the rising ground behind the plain of Sharon, near Lod or Lydda.

    CHARGER (what bore any weight). A hollow plate for presenting offerings of fine flour and oil ( Numbers 7:79). Among the vessels of the temple taken by Nebuchadnezzar and restored by Cyrus, and brought back by Sheshbazzar ( Ezra 1:9). In such a “charger” John’s head was presented to the cruel Herodias ( Matthew 14:8).

    CHARIOT sometimes including the horses ( 2 Samuel 8:4; 10:18). Mentioned first in Genesis 41:43, where Joseph rides in Pharaoh’s second chariot; also Genesis 46:29. In the Egyptian monuments they occur to the number of 27,000 in records of the reign of Rameses II, 1300 B.C., and even earlier in the 18th dynasty 1530 B.C., when Amosis I. used them against the shepherd kings. A leading purpose of chariots was war. Pharaoh followed Israel with 600 chosen chariots ( Exodus 14:7). The Canaanites of the valleys armed theirs apparently with iron scythes ( Joshua 17:18; Judges 1:19). Jabin had 900, which enabled him to “oppress the children of Israel mightily,” because of their sins ( Judges 4:3). The Philistines in Saul’s time had 30,000 ( 1 Samuel 13:5). David took from Hadarezer of Zobah 1,000, and from the Syrians 700; these to retrieve their loss gathered 32,000 ( 1 Chronicles 19:7).

    God forbad their use to His people, lest they should depend on human help rather than on Him ( Deuteronomy 17:16; 20:1; Psalm 20:7), also lest there should be a turning of the elect nation’s heart back to Egypt and its corrupt ways. Solomon from carnal state policy allied himself to Egypt, and disregarded God’s prohibition, as Samuel foretold would be the case if Israel, not content with God, should set up a human king ( 1 Samuel 8:11,12). Solomon had 1,400 chariots, and bought each out of Egypt at 600 shekels of silver, and a horse for 150; and taxed certain cities for the cost, according to eastern usage ( 1 Kings 9:19; 10:26,29).

    In Exodus 14:7 translate “captains (literally, men of the king’s council of 30) over the whole of them.” Not as some thought, “third men in every one of them.” For the Egyptian chariots only carried two, the driver and the warrior. The Assyrian chariots ( Nahum 2:3,4) depicted on the monuments often contain a third, namely, the warrior’s shieldbearer.

    In Exodus 14:9 “horsemen” are mentioned. Hengstenberg thinks rekeb does not mean cavalry, as they are not depicted in the Egyptian monuments, but merely “riders in chariots.” But Diodorus Siculus states that Rameses II. had 24,000 cavalry. Egyptian art seems even in later times, when certainly cavalry were employed, to have avoided depicting horsemen. The language of Exodus 15:1; Isaiah 31:1, can be reconciled with either view. Ancient papyri allude to mounting on horseback (Cook, in Speaker’s Commentary).

    The men in the chariot always stood. The Egyptian chariot consisted of a semicircular frame of wood with straight sides, resting on the axle-tree of a pair of wheels; and on the frame a rail attached by leather thongs; one wooden upright in front; open at the back for mounting. On the right side the bowcase and the quiver and spearcase crossed diagonally. The horses wore only breastband and girths attached to the saddle, and a bearing rein fastened to a ring in front of it.

    In New Testament the only chariots mentioned are that of the Ethiopian eunuch of Candace ( Acts 8:28,29,38), and Revelation 9:9.

    The Persians sacrificed horses to the sun; so the Jews under the idolatrous Manasseh dedicated chariots and horses to the sun ( 2 Kings 23:11).

    Josiah burned these chariots with fire, thus making the object of their superstition, fire, to consume their instruments of worship.

    CHARITY The Greek “love,” “loving esteem”; Latin caritas. The outward benefaction, or alms, is a mere manifestation of the inward and true charity of Scripture ( 1 Corinthians 13:3): “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, ... and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”

    CHEBAR A river of Chaldaea, where Ezekiel saw his earlier visions ( Ezekiel 1:1,3; 3:15,23). Nebuchadnezzar had planted many of the captives taken with Jehoiachin there ( 2 Kings 24:15). The Habor or river of Gozan, where the Assyrians planted the Israelites ( 2 Kings 17:6), is conjectured to be the same. The Greek Chaboras. It flows into the Euphrates at Circesium. But the name Chaldaea does not reach so far N. More probably the Chebar is the nahr Malcha, Nebuchadnezzar’s royal canal, the greatest (chabeer means great) in Mesopotamia. The captives may have been made to excavate the channel. Tradition places Ezekiel’s tomb at Keffil, which favors our placing Chebar in Chaldaea, rather than upper Mesopotamia.

    CHEDORLAOMER Genesis 14. King of Elam, who for twelve years had in subjection to him the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela, or Zoar. In the 13th they revolted, whereupon he, with his subordinate allies, the kings of Shinar (Babylonia), and Ellasar, and Tidal, “king of nations” (Median Scyths, belonging to the old population) smote the Rephaims in Ashteroth Karnaim, the Zuzims in Ham, the Emims in Shaveh Kiriathaim, the Horites in mount Seir, the Amalekites, and the Amorites in Hazezon Tamar; and finally encountered and defeated the five allied kings in the vale of Siddim.

    Among the captives whom he took was Lot. Abraham with 318 armed servants however defeated him in turn, and rescued Lot, and pursued the invader to Hobah on the left of Damascus. A recently deciphered record states that an Elamite king, Kudur-Nakhunta, conquered Babylon about 2290 B.C. Assurbanipal, king of Assyria 668 B.C., recovered an image of Nana captured by the Elamires from Uruk = Erech 1635 years previously, i.e. 2286. Babylonian documents of the age 2200-2100 B.C. also allude to an interruption in the native dynasty about this date by a king from Elam or Susiana between the Tigris and Persia. There is mentioned among the Babylonian kings one who held his court at Ur in Lower Chaldaea, an Elamite prince, Kudur-Mabuk (= Chedorlaomer; Lagomer being an Elamite goddess of which Mabuk is the Hamitic name). Kudur is thought to mean mother, i.e. attendant or worshipper of Lagomer. Kudur the king bears in the inscriptions the surname Apda Martu, “the ravager of the West.” He did not establish a lasting empire over Syria, as his Assyrian and Babylonian successors, but was simply its “ravager,” exactly as the Bible represents him. He was Semitic, and had made himself lord paramount over the Hamite kings of Shinar and Ellasar.

    CHEESE Job 10:10; 1 Samuel 17:18; 2 Samuel 17:29. The modern Arabs use either butter, or coagulated buttermilk dried so as to be hard. Our “butter” means in derivation “cheese of kine.” In ancient Palestine probably by “cheese” is meant milk compressed in cakes, salted, soft when new, but soon becoming hard and dry.

    CHELAL Ezra 10:30.

    CHELUB 1. 1 Chronicles 27:26. 2. Written Cheleb.; Hebrew Chelub ( 1 Chronicles 4:11).

    CHELUBAI 1 Chronicles 2:9; same as Caleb ( 1 Chronicles 2:18,42). Brother of Jerahmeel; the Jerahmeelites’ position was S. of Judah, where also was the inheritance of Caleb’s house ( Judges 1:15; 1 Samuel 25:3; 27:10; 30:14).

    CHEMARIM In Zephaniah 1:4 distinct from “the priests,” from chamar “to burn” or “blacken,” the black-attired ministers of the idol priests, who felled the victim at the altar. Or they were named from branding idol marks on their foreheads, idol fanatics. Others derive it from chmar “to resound,” namely, their howling during the rites. Josiah put them down ( 2 Kings 23:5 margin; Hosea 10:5). The root in Syriac is “to be sad”: an ascetic priest.

    CHEMOSH The “abomination” (i.e. idol, in Scripture’s contemptuous phrase) of Moab ( Numbers 21:29; Jeremiah 48:7,13,46). Depicted on coins with sword, lance, and shield, and two torches at his side. Ammon, from its close connection with Moab, also worshipped Chemosh, but Moloch (kin) was their peculiar deity ( Judges 11:24). Solomon introduced, and Josiah overthrew, Chemosh worship in Jerusalem. A black star, according to Jewish tradition, was his symbol, whether as identical with Mars or Saturn. Jerome states that Dibon was his chief seat of worship. A black stone was the Arab symbol of him. The inscribed black stone set up at Dibon, lately discovered, is full of the Moabite king Mesha’s praises of Chemosh as the giver of his martial successes against Israel. [See MOAB see DIBON .] Derived from kabash, to vanquish. Idolatry originated in appropriating to separate deities the attributes combined in the one true God. “Ashtar Chemosh,” mentioned on the Moabite stone, connects the Moabite and the Phoenician worship. Ashtar is the masculine of Astarte, an androgynous god, combining the active and passive powers of nature.

    Chemosh required human sacrifices as god of war; Mesha, after taking Ataroth, offered all the warriors in sacrifice.

    CHENAANAH Feminine of Canaan. 1. Among Benjamin’s descendants; son of Bilhan ( 1 Chronicles 7:10). 2. The false prophet Zedekiah’s father or ancestor ( 1 Kings 22:11,24).

    CHENANI Nehemiah 9:4.

    CHENANIAH (the favor of Jehovah). 1 Chronicles 15:22; 26:29.

    CHEPHAR-HAAMMONAI (hamlet of the Ammonites). Among Benjamin’s towns ( Joshua 18:24).

    The name alludes to some Ammonite inroad up the ravines from the Jordan valley to the Benjamite highlands.

    CHEPHIRAH One of Gibeon’s four cities ( Joshua 9:17), afterward belonging to Benjamin ( Joshua 18:26). The men of C. returned with Zerubbabel from Babylon ( Ezra 2:25; Nehemiah 7:29). Now Kefir, on the W. of Benjamin, near Ajalon (Jalo).

    CHERAN Genesis 36:26.

    CHERETHIMS or Cherethites. David’s body guard, along with the see PELETHITES ( 2 Samuel 8:18; 15:18; 20:7,23; 1 Kings 1:38,44; 1 Chronicles 18:17). Saul had “footmen” (runners) as his guard ( 1 Samuel 22:17); so Rehoboam ( 1 Kings 14:27,28). Couriers afterward took their place.

    The Cherethites and Pelethites were called out from attending the king’s person only on extraordinary emergencies, as the rebellion of Sheba ( Samuel 20:6,7). Benaiah was their commander ( 2 Samuel 23:23). The name is a national name; a tribe of the Philistines ( 1 Samuel 30:14; compare 30:16; Ezekiel 25:16; Zephaniah 2:5).

    Crete seems a kindred name to Cherethites; it was famed for archery, as were they; for which David chose a number of them as his body guard.

    Some of them probably joined him during his sojourn among the Philistines (1 Samuel 27; 29). Others he may have afterward enrolled on his conquest of the Philistines ( 2 Samuel 8:1). Some of the Philistine Cherethites probably colonized Crete originally, while others remained in Philistia, where they had migrated from Africa. Gittites of the Philistine Gath, to the number of 600, under Ittai, similarly followed David ( 2 Samuel 15:18,19). The name Pelethites may be another form of Philistines, or possibly be from Peleetim, (political) “refugees” from Philistia. Ewald supports the former. It is probably an ethnic name, as Cherethim. [See CAPHTOR .] CHERITH (“separation”). The brook or torrent channel (wady) by which Elijah sojourned in the early part of the three years drought ( 1 Kings 17:3,5).

    Probably running into the Jordan from the E. side, Elijah’s native region, where he would be beyond Ahab’s reach. Possibly now the W. Fasail, further North.

    CHERUB (1) Cherubim. Composite animal forms, always spoken of as familiar to the Hebrews: fourfold, Consisting of man, lion, ox, and eagle; ideal representatives of redeemed creaturely life, in which man is prominent ( Ezekiel 1:5; Revelation 4:7). Distinct from the Assyrian and Egyptian winged forms still existing (almost always a beast’ form with human head) in having the fourfold composite animal aspect, with the characteristics of manhood as the basis and body of the whole. “At the E. of Eden [after Adam’s fall] God placed (yashkeen , ‘set as the dwelling place of His Shekinah glory’) the Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of life” ( Genesis 3:24). As the flaming sword proclaimed God’s just wrath against sin, so the Cherubim mercy in store for lost man. They were “the provisional occupants of man’s lost inheritance” (Fairbairn), the pledge of the restoration of man and the creaturely world closely allied with and subject to him (Psalm 8; Isaiah 11:6-9; Romans 8:17-24; Ezekiel 34:25; Hosea 2:18); the symbolical prophecy of the recovery of the tree of life; for they guard it, not against but for man, against the time when man shall be fit to enjoy it and never to lose it. Revelation 2:7; 22:14: they, with the flaming sword, were the forerunners of the sanctuary, where the Cherub on either side of the bright Shekinah cloud (from which, as on Sinai, the flame might at any moment dart) looked down on the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat of the ark, God’s meeting place in reconciliation with sinners by the stoning blood; mercy and justice meeting together in man’s redemption. Hence it was before God’s manifested presence, between the Cherubim at the E. of Eden, the first sacrifices were offered ( Genesis 4:3,4,16; 3:21).

    Whereas pagan sacrificed to appease their God, Bible sacrifices were brought before God expressing the propitiation which He had already in His gracious purpose made by His Son ( Revelation 13:8).

    The placing of the man-like Cherub on the inheritance once man’s suggested the truth that man and the creatures involved in his fall have still by some gracious mystery, of which the Cherubim are the pledge, an interest in Eden. The appearance of the Cherubim in the holiest place afterward suggested to man the same assurance of a common meeting ground with God at peace and in holiness. Finally, their appearance in Revelation, round God’s throne as the redeemed, crowned that hope with joyful certainty. As the glory of God was last seen on the E., so shall “the glory of the God of Israel come from the way of the E.” ( Genesis 3:24; Ezekiel 11:23; 43:2.)

    As the redeemed will hereafter be one with Christ in His executing vengeance on the ungodly ( Revelation 19:11-16), so the Cherubim ( Revelation 15:7; Ezekiel 10:7). In Ezekiel 1 the four living creatures of the Cherubim stand in contrast with the four world monarchies (Daniel 7), termed “beasts.” The four answers to the four quarters of the world, implying worldwide extension, true universality, which the world powers sought vainly to attain by ambitious selfishness. The Mosaic cherubim were formed out of the same mass of pure gold as the mercy-seat ( Exodus 25:19,20).

    The wings express rapidity in fulfilling God’s will. The eyes all over ( Ezekiel 10:12) express manifold and ubiquitous wisdom. The ox form represents tame animals, of which he is chief; the lion represents wild animals; the eagle represents birds; man, representing the head of all, in his ideal realized by the Son of man, combines all animal excellencies. The redeemed shall be the ruling powers, through whom, as now by the angels, God shall administer the government of the world, and proclaim His manifold wisdom ( Matthew 19:28; 1 Corinthians 6:2; Ephesians 3:10; Revelation 3:21; 4:6-8). In Ezekiel 10:13 “it was cried unto the wheels ... O wheel,” i.e. “Roll on.” Jehovah by His word in connection with His ministering powers sets the whole “wheel of nature” (Greek text of James 3:6) and providence in motion.

    In Revelation 5:9-12 the four living creatures (zooa , not theeria , “beasts”) identify themselves as the redeemed (All creation is summed up in man its lord; from whence Christ’s command, “preach the gospel to every creature,” for man’s redemption involves the restoration of the creature now subject to vanity: Romans 8) “Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred and tongue ... and hast made us unto our God kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth.” Whereas in Ezekiel ( Ezekiel 1:6) each living creature has all four faces, in Revelation 4:6-9 the four faces are distributed, one to each.

    The Christian fathers identify them with the four Gospels: Matthew, the lion, the kingly aspect of Christ’s manifestation; Mark, the ox, Christ’s laborious endurance; Luke, the man, Christ’s brotherly sympathy with our whole race; John, the eagle, the soaring majesty of the divine Word made flesh. The grain of truth in this view is that the church of the redeemed, like Christ her Head and His gospel, is one under a fourfold aspect answering to the several characteristics represented by the four heads of animal life. In and with Christ she shall realize the ideal of man combining fourfold creaturely perfection: (1) kingly righteousness with hatred of evil, as “the lion springing terribly on the victim”; (2) laborious diligence in duty, as the “ox bound to the soil”; (3) human sympathy, as “the man”; (4) sublime contemplation of heavenly things, as “the eagle.”

    In Revelation the four living creatures represent the elect redeemed, as they shall be when perfected, ministering as king-priests unto God, and media of blessing to the redeemed earth with its nations and its animal creation.

    The four standards under which Israel encamped in the wilderness were a lion for Judah on the E., an eagle for Dan on the N., an ox for Ephraim on the W., and a man for Reuben on the S. In the midst was the tabernacle with the Shekinah cloud symbolizing God’s presence, “the picture of the blessed period when the earth being fitted for the kingdom of the Father ... heaven’s court will be transferred here ( Revelation 21:3), and the world is subject to a never ending theocracy” (DeBurgh). The cherubic four stand always in nearest relationship to God in His holiness and life-imparting presence; compare Exodus 25:22; Psalm 80:1. Whereas angels are “round about the throne,” the living creatures occupy the innermost circle next it and Him who is in their midst ( Revelation 5:6,11). Thirty times they are called “the living creatures,” full of the life of God everlastingly flowing into them. [See ADAM .] The griffins of northern fable and the winged beasts of Assyria and Egypt seem a relic of primeval tradition corrupted. The Greek [grups ], [glufo ], and the Syriac and Arabic words for “carve” and griffin, seem kindred words to cherub; cherob is the rabbinical term for an image; cherub, the Coptic. Gesenius takes the root chaarab “to consecrate a shrine.” Colossal figures of compound living creatures are still found “guarding the portals of the Assyrian temples” (Layard). The pagan knowledge of the cherubim of the Book of Revelation is implied in Ezekiel 28:13,14, where the king of Tyre is represented as having been “in Eden the garden of God,” and as boasting that he is “the anointed cherub that covereth,” i.e. the cherub of the temple anointed by the consecrating oil, and defending Tyre as the cherubim “covered” or overshadowed the mercy-seat; the type of Antichrist who shall usurp the attributes of the true Anointed One, who “covers” His church, the beautiful ideal of humanity. The clearness of the type as symbolizing the redeemed increases as the revelation of the scheme of redemption becomes fuller. At Eden the cherubim are mysteriously indefinite. In the tabernacle they are lifeless carved figures, with faces ever turned to the mercy seat, the pledge of redemption. In Solomon’s temple they are of colossal size, symbolizing the future grandeur of the church, reigning with the antitypical Solomon over the earth. In Ezekiel, for the first time, instinct with life, zeal, and ceaseless untiring motion. In Revelation they reveal who and what they are, and sing the song of praise for their redemption ( Revelation 5:8,9). As the mercy-seat (typifying Christ as our propitiation) interposed between the law inside the ark and the cherubim outside, so Christ interposes between the divine justice and the redeemed. As the cherubim were of one piece with the ark, so the redeemed are one with Christ, and one with Him as their propitiation ( Peter 1:4; Hebrews 2:11; Exodus 29:42-46; 25:22; 1 Corinthians 3:16,17; Galatians 2:20). Freeman suggests that the cherubim were the archetype in heaven upon which God molded all the various genre and species of the animal kingdom on earth; hence arises the strange similarity in difference; it is the token of a universal pattern, though not of a common parentage, a mutual relation between them, but not a development of one out of the other by natural selection, as Darwin thinks.

    CHERUB (2) In the low salt region near the Persian gulf. Chiripha in Ptolemy. [See TEL MELAH .] CHESALON “The side of Mount Jearim (forests) which is Chesalon” ( Joshua 15:10.)

    A landmark N.W. of Judah. Now the village Kesla, eight miles W. of Jerusalem.

    CHESED Nahor’s fourth son ( Genesis 22:22).

    CHESIL S. of Judah ( Joshua 15:30). Perhaps the same as Bethul, of Simeon, within Judah’s inheritance, or Bethuel ( Joshua 19:4; 1 Chronicles 4:30; 1 Samuel 30:27), “Bethel” among the cities of the extreme S.

    CHEST 1. ‘Aron , always, except twice (Joseph’s coffin and Jehoiada’s alms chest, Genesis 50:26; 2 Kings 12:9,10), used for the ark of the covenant; the “ark” (teebah ) of Noah, and that of bulrushes in which Moses was put, is quite distinct. 2. Genazim , “chests of rich apparel” ( Ezekiel 27:24), from ganaz “to hoard.”

    CHESTNUT TREE (‘armon ). Genesis 30:37, from which Jacob pilled rods to set before the flock. Ezekiel 31:7,8, to which the Assyrian empire is compared in beauty and strength. A tree, stately and wide spreading and growing near water, must be meant. The eastern plane tree (not ours, which is a maple, Acer pseudoplatanus) fulfills the conditions; its root, ‘aaram “to be naked,” “to strip off the bark,” corresponds; for it yearly sheds its bark.

    The groves of the Academy at Athens, where Plato and Aristotle taught, were of eastern plane.

    CHESULLOTH In Issachar ( Joshua 19:18). The Xaloth of Josephus. Meaning “the loins,” probably therefore on a hill slope.

    CHEZIB Genesis 38:5. Same as Achzib and Chozeba.

    CHIDON (“javelin”): 1 Chron 13:9. Elsewhere Nachon’s (= firm) threshingfloor (2 Samuel 6), where Uzza touched the shaking ark.

    CHILDREN Ben , “son;” bath , “daughter;” both from baanah , to build. Regarded as consecrated to God, in the same covenant relation as the parents; therefore sons on the eighth day were circumcised ( Genesis 17:12). Hence, flowed parents’ responsibility to rear children in the way of the Lord ( Genesis 18:19; Deuteronomy 6:7; 11:19); also children’s responsibility to obey parents, as a preparatory discipline for the higher relationship to God. At five years of age, the boy passed under the father’s training. At 12 he became “son of (i.e. subject to) the law,” and was advanced to a fuller instruction in it. Smiting, or even cursing, a parent was punishable with death ( Exodus 21:15,17); also contumacy ( Deuteronomy 21:18-21; compare Deuteronomy 27:16). The child might be sold to bondage until the jubilee year for a parent’s debt ( <120401> Kings 4:1; Nehemiah 5:5).

    Children were often nursed until they were three years old. They were carried on the mother’s hip or shoulder ( Isaiah 49:22; 66:12).

    Governors or tutors watched them in nonage ( Numbers 11:12; <121001> Kings 10:1,5; Isaiah 49:23; Galatians 3:24, paidagoogos , the guardian slave who led the child to school). The mother’s example and authority were weighty over sons and daughters alike ( Proverbs 10:1; 15:20), even with a royal son ( 1 Kings 2:19). Daughters had no right of inheritance; but if a man had no son the daughters received the inheritance, but they must marry inside their own tribe.

    Metaphorically:CHILDREN OF LIGHT ( Luke 16:8; 1 Thessalonians 6:5), of obedience ( 1 Peter 1:14, “as children of obedience” Greek), of this world, of see BELIAL [which see], of wisdom ( Matthew 11:19), of faith. As children resemble their parent, so those in whom these several qualities, good or bad, predominate, are children of them severally ( Samuel 23:6). So Barnabas is termed “son of consolation,” expressing his predominant grace ( Acts 4:36); John and James “sons of thunder,” characterized by fiery zeal ( Mark 3:17). So “sons of might,” “daughters of sons” (compare Isaiah 5:1, “a very fruitful hill,” Hebrew: “the horn (i.e. peak) of the son of oil,”) “children of the bridechamber” ( Matthew 9:15), the heavenly Bridgegroom’s best men (friends) who go and fetch the bride, the apostles and evangelists who seek to bring sinners to Jesus and to heaven (Matthew 25).

    CHILEAB David’s son by Abigail ( 2 Samuel 3:3). Elsewhere called Daniel ( <130301> Chronicles 3:1).

    CHILION Orpah’s husband, son of Elimelech and Naomi ( Ruth 1:2-5; 4:9). An Ephrathite of Bethlehem Judah (formerly Ephrath, Genesis 35:19).

    CHILMAD Named with Sheba and Asshur ( Ezekiel 27:23). Ptolemy mentions a Gaala of Media, which compounded forms Chil-mad. The Chaldee version has “Media,” others “Carmanda,” a large city beyond the Euphrates (Xenophon).

    CHIMHAM 2 Samuel 19:34,37-40. Taken by David to court, instead of Barzillai the Gileadite, his father, to whom the king owed a debt of gratitude for help in his flight from Absalom. In Jeremiah 41:17, ages after, the Jewish refugees from the Babylonians “dwelt in the habitation of Chimham, which is by Bethlehem, to go to enter into Egypt.” David’s patrimony was at Bethlehem; and this incidental notice leads to the inference that, having undertaken to provide for Chimham, he conferred on him his personal patrimony, subject to the reversion to David’s heirs at the year of jubilee; hence it was called “the habitation of Chimham.”

    CHINNERETH, SEA OF or Chinneroth. 1. Afterward the lake of Gennesaret, a corruption of Chinnereth ( Joshua 12:3; 13:27). The district of Chinnereth is called “all Chinnereth” ( 1 Kings 15:20). 2. A fortified city of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:35); probably the same as Tiberius, from which the lake or sea was named in a similar way ( Numbers 34:11; John 6:1).

    CHIOS Acts 20:14,15; 21. Now Scio, an island of the Archipelago, near which Paul passed going from Mitylene, in Lesbos, to Samos, between which two islands it lay, 32 miles long, from 8 miles to 18 miles wide; mountainous, beautiful, and fertile. Its modern inhabitants suffered severely in the war of independence.

    CHISLON Father of Elidad, prince of Benjamin, chosen to help in dividing Canaan ( Numbers 34:21).

    CHISLOTH TABOR On the boundary of Zebulun ( Joshua 19:12) (perhaps Iksul, W. of mount Tabor), meaning “confidences of Tabor,” i.e. fort of Tabor (compare 1 Chronicles 6:77).

    CHITTIM A race sprung from Javan, i.e. of Ionian or Greek origin ( Genesis 10:4; 1 Chronicles 1:7). Balaam foretold that a fleet from Chittim should “afflict Asshur” ( Numbers 24:24). There Tyre’s fleets resorted ( Isaiah 23:2,12). The name Chittim is applied by the Hebrews to Cyprus, of which the cities, including Citium, its capital, were mostly Phoenician. Thence the Tyrians procured the boxwood which they inlaid with ivory ( Ezekiel 27:6). (Hebrew, instead of “the company of the Ashurites,” “they have made thy (rowing) benches of ivory inlaid in the daughter of cedars,” i.e. the best boxwood, which came from Cypress and Macedonia. “Chittim” was applied subsequently to the other islands of the AEgean, and to the maritime mainlands of Greece and Italy. The Assyrians in an inscription 710 B.C. designate Cyprus as “the land of Yavnan,” as the Scripture traces it to Javan. The Ionian stream of migration proceeding from Asia to Greece would leave some of the race in Cyprus or Chittim on its way, as it did in Magnesia under Sipylus. When Cyprus first comes before us in history it is predominantly a Greek island (G. Rawlinson). The Phoenicians also colonized it. Chittim = Hittim, the Hittites, a Canaanite race. The “ships of Chittim” in Daniel 11:30 are the Macedonian-Greek or even Italian vessels, in which the Roman ambassador Popilius Laenas arrived to check Antiochus Epiphanes. As Kedar expresses generally the East, so Chittim the West ( Jeremiah 2:10).

    CHIUN [See REMPHAN .] CHLOE 1 Corinthians 1:11. A matron at Corinth, some of whose household informed Paul of the divisions in the Corinthian church. The Corinthians had “written” to Paul consulting him about marriage, things offered to idols, decorum in church assemblies, but not a syllable about the disorders that had crept in. That information reached him from other quarters: compare 1 Corinthians 5:1,2. “It hath been declared unto me,” “it is reported.” All this he says before he notices their letter, which shows it gave him no intimation of these evils. An undesigned proof of genuineness (Paley). He names the family, to show he has authority for his allegation, but not individuals, to avoid exciting odium against them. He tacitly implies that the information ought to have come from their presbyters, who consulted him about matters of less importance.

    CHORASHAN 1 Samuel 30:30. Probably Ashan of Simeon, one of David’s haunts. To its citizens among the cities of the S. he sent presents of the Amalekite spoils.

    CHORAZIN With Capernaum and Bethsaida doomed to “woe,” because of neglected spiritual privileges. The scene of many of Jesus’ mighty works, which failed to bring its people to repentance and faith ( Matthew 11:21; Luke 10:13). No work of Jesus is recorded in it, a proof of how much more he did than is written ( John 21:25). Probably at Kerazeh, near Tell Hum.

    CHOZEBA [See CHEZIB .] The descendants of Shelah, Judah’s son, are called “the men of Chozeba, ... and these are ancient things” ( 1 Chronicles 4:22).

    Identified by Conder (Palestine Exploration, Jan. 1875) with Khirbet Kueizibah. The houses are standing to the height of eight or ten feet. The indications on the hill imply great antiquity. How accurate Scripture is in its names and topography! The Talmud mentions that a plain is in front of Chozeba; so Kueizibah has before it the valley of Berachoth (wady Arrub).

    CHRISTIAN The name first given at Antioch to Christ’s followers. In the New Testament it only occurs in 1 Peter 4:16; Acts 11:26; 26:27,28.

    Their name among themselves was “brethren,” “disciples,” “those of the way” ( Acts 6:1,3; 9:2), “saints” ( Romans 1:7). The Jews, since they denied that Jesus is the Christ, would never originate the name “Christians,” but called them “Nazarenes” ( Acts 24:5). The Gentiles confounded them with the Jews, and thought them to be a Jewish sect. But a new epoch arose in the church’s development when, at Antioch, idolatrous Gentiles (not merely Jewish proselytes from the Gentiles, as the eunuch, a circumcised proselyte, and Cornelius, an uncircumcised proselyte of the gate) were converted. Then the Gentiles needed a new name to designate people who were Jews, neither by birth nor religion. And the people of Antioch were famous for their readiness in giving names:

    Partisans of Christ, Christiani, as Caesariani, partisans of Caesar; a Latin name, as Antioch had become a Latin city. But the name was divinely ordered (as chreematizoo always expresses, Acts 11:26), as the new name to mark the new era, namely, that of the church’s gospel missions to the Gentiles. The rarity of its use in the New Testament marks its early date, when as yet it was a name of reproach and hardly much recognized among the disciples. So in our age “Methodist,” a term originally given in reproach, has gradually come to be adopted by Wesley’s disciples themselves. Blunt well says: “if the Acts were a fiction, is it possible that this unobtrusive evidence of the progress of a name would have been found in it?”

    CHRISTIANITY [See JESUS CHRIST .] The law and Mosaic system, though distinct from the gospel, yet clearly contemplates the new dispensation as that for which itself was the preparation. The original promise to Abraham, “in thee ... and thy seed ... shall all families of the earth be blessed” ( Genesis 12:3; 22:16), still awaited its fulfillment, and the law came in as the parenthesis between the promise of grace and its fulfillment in Christ the promised “seed.” Romans 5:20: “the law entered (as a parenthesis, incidentally, Greek) that the offense might abound.” Galatians 3:8-25: “the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but after that, faith is come we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”

    Jacob’s prophecy contemplated the theocratic scepter passing from Judah, when Shiloh should come as the gatherer of the peoples to Himself ( Genesis 49:10). Many psalms (as Psalm 2; Psalm 72; Psalm 22; Psalm 67) and all the prophets (compare Isaiah 2; Isaiah 53) look forward to the Messiah as about to introduce a new and worldwide dispensation. Nay, even Moses himself ( Deuteronomy 18:15, etc.) announces the coming of another Lawgiver like him, about to promulgate God’s new law; for to be like Moses He must be a lawgiver, and to be so He must have a new law, a fuller development of God’s will, than Moses’ law, its germ. Psalm 110 declared that His priesthood should be one “forever, after the order of Melchizeded” (the king of righteousness and king of peace), to which the Levitical priesthood did homage in the person of Abraham their ancestor, paying tithes to Melchizedek (compare Hebrews 6--7).

    The law was the type; the gospel was the antitype ( Hebrews 10:1-10).

    Christ came not to destroy it (i.e. its essence) but to fulfill (complete) it ( Matthew 5:17). The letter gives place to the spirit which realizes the end of the letter ( 2 Corinthians 3:3-18). As also Jeremiah foretells ( Jeremiah 31:31-34; compare Hebrews 8:4-13; 10:15-18). If Christianity had not been of God, it could never have prevailed, without human might or learning, to supersede the system of the mightiest and most civilized nations (1 Corinthians 1--2). Its miracles, its fulfillment of all prophecy, and its complete adaptation to meet man’s deep spiritual needs, pardon, peace, holiness, life, immortality for soul and body, are the only reasonable account to be given of its success.

    CHRONICLES, 1 & Hebrew “Words” or “Acts of days.” In the Septuagint Paraleipomena , i.e. “Supplements” to 1 and 2 KINGS. Probably compiled by Ezra. One genealogy, indeed, of a later date, namely, Zerubbabel’s, was doubtless added by a more recent hand ( 1 Chronicles 3:22-24) as was Nehemiah 12:10,11,22,23. The Book of Ezra forms a continuation to Chronicles. The chief difficulty at the return from Babylon was to maintain the genealogical distribution of lands, which was essential in the Jewish polity. Ezra and Nehemiah therefore, as restorers of that polity, gave primary attention to this. Again, the temple service, the religious bond of the nation, could only be maintained by the Levites’ residence in Jerusalem, for which end the payment of tithes and firstfruits was indispensable.

    Moreover, the Levitical genealogies needed to be arranged, to settle the order of the temple courses, and who were entitled to allowances as priests, porters, and singers. The people also needed to have their inheritances assigned according to their families, to be able to pay tithes.

    Hence, genealogies occupy a prominent place in the Chronicles, just as we should expect in a book compiled by Ezra under such circumstances.

    Zerubbabel, and subsequently Ezra and Nehemiah, not only strove in the face of difficulties (Ezra 2--3; Ezra 5--6; Ezra 8; Nehemiah 7--8) to restore the temple service to its state under the kings of Judah, but also to infuse into the people a national spirit. For this end, the Chronicles give a summary history of David, introduced by the closing scene of Saul’s life, and of the succeeding kings, especially of some of the greatest and best kings who built or restored the temple, abolished corruption, and established the services in due order, as Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, Josiah, etc.

    Since the northern kingdom of Israel had passed away, and Samaria its only remaining representative was among Judah’s bitterest foes, Israel’s history occupies a subordinate place. Accordingly, 1 Chronicles 1--8 give the genealogies and settlements; 1 Chronicles 9:1-24 their disturbance by the captivity, and partial restoration at the return; this portion is reinserted in Nehemiah 11:3-22 with additional matter from the archives, as to times succeeding the return from Babylon, down to Nehemiah 12:27, where Nehemiah’s narrative is resumed from Nehemiah 11:2. At 1 Chronicles 9:35 begins Saul’s genealogy, taken from the tables drawn up in Hezekiah’s reign (for 14 generations from Jonathan to Azel correspond to the 14 from David to Hezekiah); then the history of (mainly) Judah’s kings follows, and of the events down to the end of the book of Ezra, which suit the patriotic purpose of the compiler. Chronicles 15--17; 22--29; 2 Chronicles 13--15; 17--20; 24; 26; 29--31; 35, are mainly unique to Chronicles, and manifestly are calculated to awaken by the glorious (as well as the sad) memories of the past a desire in the people to restrain the corruption which had led to the captivity, and to restore the national polity in church and state.

    The conclusion of Chronicles and the beginning of Ezra are similar, the one ending with Cyrus’ decree for the restoration, the other telling how that decree was obtained and was carried out. If this connection of the two books were rejected, it would be hard to account for the breaking off of the narrative in Chronicles’ close, in Ezra’s lifetime, and the abruptness with which the book of Ezra opens ( Ezra 1:1). The style of both, tinged with Chaldaisms, accords with this view. The mention in both Chronicles 29:7 and Ezra 2:69 of the Persian coin, “darics” (as it ought to be translated instead of “dram”), is another proof. The law is often quoted in both, and in a similar formula, “according to the law of Moses” ( 1 Chronicles 23:31; Ezra 3:4). The sacrifices, the Passover celebration, the Levitical order, are similarly described in both. The high priests’ genealogy is given in the descending line ending with the captivity, in 1 Chronicles 6:1-15; in Ezra 7:1-5 in the ascending line from Ezra himself to Aaron, abridged by the omission of many links, as the writer had in Chronicles already given a complete register.

    The writer’s sources of information are genealogies drawn up in different ages, and accordingly terminating in the particular reign when they were severally drawn up. Thus, Sheshan’s ( 1 Chronicles 2:34-41) ends with a generation contemporary with Hezekiah. That of the high priests ( <130601> Chronicles 6:1-15) must have been drawn up during the captivity; that in 1 Chronicles 6:50-53, and those of Heman and Asaph ( 1 Chronicles 6:33-39, etc.) in David’s or Solomon’s time; that of the sons of Azel ( Chronicles 8:38) in Hezekiah’s time; that of the sons of Zerubbabel in Ezra’s time ( 1 Chronicles 3:19-24). The sources must have been very ancient from which the compiler drew the account of the kings of Edom before Saul’s reign, the slaughter of the sons of Ephraim by the Gittites ( 1 Chronicles 7:21; 8:13), the notice of the sons of Shelah, and their dominion in Moab ( 1 Chronicles 4:21,22). The genealogical records of Jotham and Jeroboam probably embodied from contemporary documents the details as to the Reubenites and Gadites ( 1 Chronicles 5:1-22). The account in 1 Chronicles 9:1-34 is drawn from records subsequent to the return from captivity; also 2 Chronicles 36:20. In Ezra (Ezra 2; Ezra 4) the documents used were still later, namely, the time of Pseudo-Smerdis or Artaxerxes.

    Thus, it appears that the Books of Chronicles and Ezra are compiled by one writer from records of various dates, extant when the compilation was made. The Books of Samuel the seer, Nathan the prophet, and Gad the seer ( 1 Chronicles 29:29), furnished information for David’s reign; “the book of Nathan,” and “the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite,” and “the visions of Iddo the seer” ( 2 Chronicles 9:29), for Solomon’s reign; “the story (midrash , ‘interpretation’) of the prophet Iddo,” for king Abijah’s “acts, ways, and sayings” ( 2 Chronicles 12:22). Iddo’s “book concerning genealogies and the prophet Shemaiah’s words,” for Rehoboam’s acts ( 2 Chronicles 12:15); “the book of the kings of Israel and Judah” ( 2 Chronicles 25:26; 27:7; 32:32; 33:18), “the sayings of the seers” ( 2 Chronicles 33:19, choza ), for many subsequent reigns; “the words of Jehu the son of Hanani” ( 2 Chronicles 20:34), for Jehoshaphat’s reign; “the vision of the prophet Isaiah” ( 2 Chronicles 26:22; 32:32), for Uzziah’s and Hezekiah’s reigns. There were besides the national records, “the book of the chronicles” ( Nehemiah 12:23), which began as early as David ( 1 Chronicles 27:24), “the chronicles of king David,” probably the same as Samuel’s, Nathan’s and Gad’s books above noticed. So there was” the book of the acts of Solomon” ( 1 Kings 11:41). From “the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah,” or “of Israel” (1 Kings 11:28; 15:7), continued down to the end of Jehoiakim’s reign ( 2 Kings 24:5; 2 Chronicles 36:8), the compilers of Chronicles and Kings drew the passages which are identical in both. Genealogical registers ( Nehemiah 7:5) furnished many of the materials.

    The writer of the closing chapters of Kings lived in Judah, and died under Nebuchadnezzar; the writer of the close of Chronicles lived at Babylon and survived until the Persian dynasty began. Compare 2 Chronicles 36:9-23 and Ezra 1 with 2 Kings 24; 25. For the writer of Chronicles and Ezra gives no details of Jehoiachin or Zedekiah, or what occurred in Judah after the temple was burnt; but only dwells on the spiritual lessons which Jerusalem’s overthrow teaches, and proceeds at once to the return from Babylon. One in Babylon would be the most likely to know all about Cyrus’ decree, the presents to the captives, the bringing out of the temple vessels, their weight, the Chaldee treasurer Mithredath, and Zerubbabel’s Chaldee name Sheshbazzar. Lord A. Hervey conjectures that Daniel at Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar, and afterward under the Persian kings, vividly remembering Jeremiah’s prophecies and bewailing the nation’s perversity, wrote the close of Chronicles and Ezra 1, just as Jeremiah wrote the close of Kings. Compare with these passages Daniel 5:2,23; 9:2,5-8; 1:3,7,11. The close of 2 Chronicles and Ezra 1 supplies the gap between Daniel 9 and Daniel 10. Ezra, by the help of this portion, carried forward the history from the point where the Chronicles closed.

    The division of Chronicles into two books is due to the Septuagint. Much is omitted that was unsuitable to the compiler’s patriotic design, e.g.

    Amnon’s defilement of Tamar, David’s adultery with Bathsheba and Absalom’s rebellion, Sheba’s revolt, the delivery of Saul’s sons to the Gibeonites, etc.

    Unique to Chronicles are the lists of heroes who came to David at Ziklag, and those hosts who came to Hebron to make him king (1 Chronicles 12).

    David’s preparation for building the temple (1 Chronicles 22). The order of the Levites and priests (1 Chronicles 23--24), of the army and captains (1 Chronicles 27). David’s public directions (1 Chronicles 28--29).

    Rehoboam’s fortifications, reception of priests and Levites from Israel (2 Chronicles 11). Abijah’s successful war with Jeroboam (2 Chronicles 13).

    Asa’s terrifying his kingdom and overcoming’ Zerab the Ethiopian’s vast host (2 Chronicles 14); his suppression of idolatry with the help of Azariah’s prophecy (2 Chronicles 15); Hanani’s reproof of Asa’s reliance on Syria instead of on Jehovah (2 Chronicles 16). Jehoshaphat’s garrisoning the cities of Judah and of Ephraim; removal of high places and groves; sending his princes and Levites throughout the land to teach the people in “the book of the law of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 17--18); reproval by Jehu, son of Hanani the seer, and by Eliezer, son of Dodavah of Mareshah, for his alliance with the ungodly kings of Israel; instructions to the judges; victory over the vast, allied forces of Ammon and Moeb (2 Chronicles 19--20). Jehoram’s idolatry and punishment (2 Chronicles 21).

    Apostasy of Joash, and murder of Zechariah his reprover, on the death of Jehoiada, Zechariah’s father (2 Chronicles 24). Amaziah’s war-like preparations; idolatry (2 Chronicles 25). Uzziah’s victory and forces (2 Chronicles 26). Jotham’s success against Ammon “because he prepared his ways before the Lord his God” (2 Chronicles 27). Hezekiah’s reformation and Passover; riches (2 Chronicles 29--31). Manasseh’s captivity, repentance, and restoration (2 Chronicles 33). All these instances were just what suited the purpose of one seeking the restoration of the religious and civil polity of the Jews on their return from the captivity, as we know was Ezra’s great mission.

    Chronicles, with Ezra and Nehemiah, form the last link of the Old Testament genealogical chain which is resumed in the New Testament (Matthew 1). Messianic prophetic hints occur ( 1 Chronicles 17:17): “Thou hast regarded me according to the order (law) of the man from above”; and in the genealogy ( 1 Chronicles 5:2), “Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler,” referring to the Messianic prophecy ( Genesis 49:8-10, compare 1 Chronicles 28:4).

    The accuracy of the book appears from such incidental touches as Chronicles 2:13-17, where Abigail is not called the daughter of Jesse, but only the sister of David; she was the daughter of Nahash, not of Jesse, and so only the half-sister to David. Also from its giving the very words of the documents used, even when inappropriate in the compiler’s time, “unto this day” ( 1 Chronicles 4:42,43; 2 Chronicles 5:9). Also other scriptures confirm statements in Chronicles; compare 2 Chronicles 32:1-6 with Isaiah 22:8-11; 2 Chronicles 20 with Psalm 48; 83; Joel 3. The names of the scribes before the restoration express the national hope at the time ( 1 Chronicles 3:19,20): Hananiah (Jehovah’s grace); Berechiah (Jehovah’s blessing); Hasadiah (Jehovah’s mercy); Jushab-hesed (“mercy returns”). Akkub and Talmon, mentioned in 1 Chronicles 9:17,18, are stated in Nehemiah 12:25,26 to have been Levitical porters “in the days of Nehemiah and of Ezra, the priest, the scribe.” Thus, every hint accords with the date and the author presumed above.

    CHRONOLOGY There are three principal systems, the Long, the Short, and the Rabbinical The nature of the evidence hardly admits of certainty as to all details. The dates of the flood, etc., are thus differently given in the Septuagint, the Hebrew, and the Samaritan Pentateuch:

    Septuagint Hebrews Sam.

    Flood after Creation 2262 1656 Peleg’s birth 401 101 Abram’s departure from Haran 616 266 --- ---- ---- 3279 2023 Hales takes the long system mainly from the Septuagint account of the patriarchal generations. He rightly rejects the number 480 years assigned in 1 Kings 6:1 as having elapsed from the exodus to the foundation of the temple in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign. It must be an ancient error of transcribers, because 40 years elapsed from the exodus to the death of Moses, Joshua was for more than seven years Israel’s leader in Canaan, Israel’s servitude and the rule of the judges to Eli’s death occupied years, thence to Saul’s accession was more than 20 years, Saul’s reign was 40 years, David’s reign was 40 years, Solomon’s reign, before the temple’s foundation, was 3 years; i.e. 580 years in all: besides the unknown intervals between Joshua’s leadership of seven years and his death; and again between his death and the first servitude; also the unknown period, above 20 years, between Eli’s death and Saul’s accession. These unknown times are approximately estimated at 6 years, 32 years, and 20 years respectively, i.e. 58 years in all; which, added to the 580 years, will give 638 years. The Old Testament never dates events from an era, which makes 1 Kings 6:1 suspicious. Origen, Commentary ( John 2:20), quotes 1 Kings 6:1 without the words “in the 480th year.” See also Judges 11:26. But see EGYPT below as to Thothmes III and the inscription favoring <110601> Kings 6:1. Ussher is the representative of the short system, following the Hebrew in the patriarchal generations, and taking the 480 years as given in 1 Kings 6:1 between the exodus and the foundation of the temple. The rabbinical system is partly accepted in Germany; it takes the Biblical numbers, but makes arbitrary corrections:

    HALES USSHER Creation 5411 Flood 3155 Abram leaving Haran 2078 Exodus 1648 Foundation of the temple 1027 Destruction of the temple 586 The differences between the Hebrew and the Septuagint consist in the periods assigned by them respectively to the patriarchs before and after the births of their oldest sons. Thus, Adam lives 130 years before the birth of his oldest son in Hebrew, but 230 years in the Septuagint; Seth is 105 in the Hebrew text, but 205 years in the Septuagint, etc. After the births of their oldest sons, Adam, 800; Seth, 807 in Hebrew, but 700 and 707 in the Septuagint; thus, the totals come to the same, Adam (930), Seth (912), in both Hebrew and Septuagint Similarly, in the case of Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel. This proves that the change, whether by shortening (if the Septuagint is the true reading, or by lengthening if the Hebrew is the true reading) is NOT accidental but was made on system. The Septuagint and Luke 3:36,37 have a second Cainan, who is omitted in the Hebrew Bible; Philo and Josephus also know nothing of him.

    In genealogies (e.g. Matthew 1:8) names are often passed over, a man being called “the son of” a remote ancestor, his father and grandfather and great grandfather being omitted; as Joram is followed by Ozias, Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah being omitted. For some divine purpose connected with the mystical sense of numbers the generations are condensed into fourteen (the double of the sacred seven) in each of the three periods, from Abraham to David, from David to the captivity, and thence to Christ.

    Compare Ezra 7:1-5; 1 Chronicles 26:24. So Jehu is “son of Nimshi,” also “of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi” ( 2 Kings 9:2,14,20; Kings 19:16). Again, the length of generations varies: Abraham, at a time when life was so much longer than now, implies a generation was about 100 years ( Genesis 15:16, compare Genesis 15:13), “the fourth generation” answering to “four hundred years.” The Hebrew text was preserved with much more scrupulous care than the Septuagint on the other hand, the civilization and history of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria reach further back than accords with the Hebrew, and so favor the Septuagint. “The sojourning of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was 430 years” ( Exodus 12:40,41). Paul, in Galatians 3:16,17, dates this period from God’s promise to Abraham. In Genesis 15:13,14, compare Acts 7:6,7: “thy seed shall be a stranger in a land not theirs ... and they shall afflict them 400 years”; by putting the comma after “afflict them,” the “400 years” refers to the whole time of their being “a stranger in a land not theirs,” compare Hebrews 11:9. It would not be literally true that the Israelites were afflicted for the whole 400 years by the Egyptians, even if the 400 be applied to the sojourn in Egypt alone. Therefore, there is no greater strain put on the words by supposing the 400 includes the sojourn in Canaan.

    Abraham probably means ( Genesis 15:16), “in the fourth generation they (i.e. some of the fourth generation, allowing 100 years for each generation) shall come hither again.” There were more than four generations in fact; thus, in Ruth 4:18, etc., 1 Chronicles 2:5,6, there are six generations from Judah to Nahshon, the tribe prince in Moses’ time; nine generations from Joseph to Joshua ( 1 Chronicles 7:20, etc.).

    Abram was 75 years old upon leaving Haran; 100 at Isaac’s birth; Isaac was 60 at Jacob’s birth; and Jacob was 130 years old upon entering Egypt -- in all 215 years. Again, Joseph was about 45 years old upon entering Egypt, 92 occupied the rest of his life; then followed, after all Joseph’s brethren and that generation were dead ( Exodus 1:6, etc.), the oppression; Moses was 80 years old at the exodus. Thus, there will be years, besides the interval between Joseph’s generation dying and the oppression, and between the beginning of the oppression and the birth of Moses; which may be reasonably set down as 215 in all; which, added to the 215 in Canaan, will yield the 430 years.

    The increase from 70 years, at Jacob’s going down to Egypt, to 600,000 at the exodus is accountable when we remember the special fruitfulness promised by God. There were at the eisodus 51 pairs at least bearing children, for there were 67 men, namely, Jacob’s 12 sons, 51 grandsons, and four great grandsons, besides one daughter and one granddaughter ( Genesis 46:8-27). These 51 must have taken foreign wives. Then, besides, polygamy prevailed. All these causes together fully account for the great increase in 215 years.

    Another note of time is furnished by Paul ( Acts 13:19-21): “after that (the division of Canaan) He; gave judges about the space of 450 years until Samuel”; or rather, as the three oldest manuscripts -- the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus manuscripts, “He distributed their land to them for an inheritance, about 450 years. And after that He gave unto them judges until Samuel.” The dative in the Greek text marks, not duration of time, as KJV, but a point of time. The point of time backward to which the 450 refers is implied in Acts 13:19, “when He had destroyed seven nations”; i.e., about 450 or 462 elapse between God’s promise to drive out those nations in 400 years from that time ( Genesis 15:13-21), and God’s commencing the fulfillment of it under Joshua; the former date is about 1913, the latter 1451 (Joshua 1). Jephthah makes 300 years elapse between his time and Joshua’s division of Canaan ( Judges 11:26).

    Theophilus of Antioch (Autol. 3:22) states that the Tyrian archives of Hiram, David’s contemporary, prove that the building of the temple took place 566 years after the exodus from Egypt.

    The whole period between the foundation and the destruction of the temple is about 425 years; that of the undivided kingdom 120, that of Judah 388, that of Israel 255. The Median, Hebrew, Babylonian, and Assyrian chronicles, according to J. W. Bosanquet, coincide in making Nebuchadnezzar’s reign begin 581 B.C. He makes Jotham’s 16 years’ reign begin in 734 B.C.; Ahaz’ 16 years begin at 718; Hezekiah’s 29 begin at 702; Manasseh’s 55 begin at 673; Amon’s two begin at 618; Josiah’s begin at 616; Jehoiakim’s 11 begin at 585.

    Two periods of 70 years are specified by Jeremiah; that during which Babylon’s dominion over Palestine and the East was to last (Jeremiah 25), and that of the captivity ( Jeremiah 29:10; Daniel 9:2), probably identical. The former begins the 1st of Nebuchadnezzar and the 4th of Jehoiakim (606 or 607 B.C.), and ends with Babylon’s fall ( Jeremiah 25:26), 536 B.C., when Cyrus decreed the return of the Jewish captives ( Jeremiah 29:10). Ptolemy’s famous canon counts it 66 years; but if the Jewish years meant be the prophetical ones of 360 days each, as in Daniel 12:7, the sum will be about 69 tropical years. [See CAPTIVITY .] Ecclesiastically, the 70 years began with the destruction of the temple B.C., and ended with its restoration in the sixth year of Darius, 516 B.C.

    The Apis tablets of Egypt prove the synchronism of Josiah and Pharaoh Necho; also they demonstrate that of Hezekiah and Tirhakah. An inscription on the quarries of Silsilis in Upper Egypt records the cutting of stone in the 22nd year of Sheshonk I, or Shishak, for the chief temple of Thebes, where still is to be seen a record of his conquest of Judah; thus confirming the Scripture account of his synchronism with Rehoboam whom he conquered. The Bible puts Rehoboam 249 years before Hezekiah, i.e. 973 B.C.; and Shishak’s invasion in his fifth year, i.e. 969; before that would make Shishak’s accession 990 B.C., which closely agrees with Manetho’s list.

    R. P. Stewart (Smith’s Bible Dictionary) mentions the coincidence, in their commencements, of the vague year of the Egyptians and the Hebrew year at the first Passover; i.e., the 14th of Abib, the full moon of the Passover exodus, corresponded to the 14th day of a Phamenoth in a vague year commencing at the autumnal equinox; this took place, it is computed, on Thursday, April 21st, 1652 B.C. This date for the exodus is but four years earlier than Hales’s, and the interval to Solomon’s temple foundation is 642, only four more than the 638 obtained above by Bible calculations.

    Thus, 430 back to the promise to Abraham (Genesis 15) will bring the promise to 2082 B.C. But see above on the 450 years in Acts 13:20.

    Stewart takes Peleg’s birth, 2698 or (correcting Terah’s age at Abraham’s birth) 2758. Abraham was perhaps youngest son of Terah; for Terah was 70 when he began having sons, and died at 205 years old ( Genesis 11:26,32), and Abraham was 75 when he left Haran ( Genesis 12:4).

    This would make Terah survive Abraham’s migration 60 years, if Abraham were the oldest ( Genesis 11:26). But Acts 7:4 says Terah died BEFORE it. Therefore, Terah was probably 130 years old when Abraham was born, and died when Abraham was 75, at his migration from Haran.

    Haran, the older brother of Abraham, was father of Iscah = Sarah ( Genesis 11:27-29). Since Milcah married her uncle Nahor, so Iscah, = Sarai, her uncle Abraham; hence, he calls her his sister, as granddaughter of (i.e. sprung from) his father, though not sprung from his mother ( Genesis 20:12). She was only ten years younger than Abraham ( Genesis 17:17), which shows Abraham was Terah’sYOUNGEST son.

    The flood he assigns to 3099 or 3159. The Egyptian monuments do not carry us back for the foundation of its first kingdom earlier than the latter end of the 28th century B.C. Adam’s creation he makes 5361 or 5421. G.

    Rawlinson truly says: nothing in ancient manuscripts is so liable to corruption from mistakes of copyists as numbers, it is quite possible that we may not possess Moses’ real scheme in any of the three extant versions of his words.”

    The traditions of Greece, Babylon, and Egypt confirm the Scripture account of the longevity of the patriarchs. Sprung from a pair originally immortal, living a simple even course of life, they retained some of the original vitality of Adam’s state in paradise. This longevity favored the multiplication of mankind, and the formation of marked character for good or evil in the different races. The geological arguments for man’s great antiquity are relics of man, flints, etc., in recent formations, along with bones of the mammoth and extinct animals; it is argued that, at the present rate of deposition, the beds that overlie these remains must have taken a vast time to form. But probably causes were at work at the time of their formation which made the rate much speedier than it is now. A mammoth has been found in the Siberian ice with skin, hair, and flesh; and it is hardly likely that it was dead more than 6,000 years. Many animals have become extinct within the human period. The present population is about that which would spring from a single pair in 6,000 years. The historical arguments for man’s great antiquity, from Egyptian lists of dynasties, are set aside by the strong probability that many of these are contemporary dynasties. Another argument is drawn from the slowness of growth of languages, e.g. 1,500 years have been taken in forming from Latin the French, Italian, and Spanish languages. But it is only the languages with a literature that change slowly; a few years suffice to change completely a language without a literature, wild tribes in a single generation cannot comprehend one another. The 3,000 years between the flood and the Christian era in the Septuagint allow 1,800 years before the Vedas for the Sanskrit tongue to have reached the perfection apparent in that poem.

    Besides, the miraculous Babel-confounding of tongues is to be taken into account. The ethnological objection from the fixity of type in the negro as represented under Sethos I on the monuments is answered by the consideration that races placed continuously under the same conditions of climate and other circumstances do not change. The negroes may have been in Africa 1,500 years before Sethos I. Rapid changes take place when circumstances change rapidly, as in Europeans settling in N. America. The see GENEALOGIES in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 give only the great leading links, omitting many intermediate ones.

    CHRYSOLITE (gold stone). The garniture of the seventh foundation of New Jerusalem.

    The modern topaz.

    CHRYSOPRASUS (“gold leek”). A transparent gem, an agate of the color of the leek’s juice; it owes its color to oxide of nickel. Found only in Silesia; also in antique Egyptian jewelry. The garniture of the tenth foundation of New Jerusalem ( Revelation 21:20).

    CHUB Ezekiel 30:5. A people named Kufa, on the monuments. Ptolemy (4:2,5,9) mentions a Chob-at in Mauritania, and a Chob-ion in the Mareotic nome in Egypt.

    CHUN A city of Hadarezer ( 1 Chronicles 18:8) = Berethat ( 2 Samuel 8:8).

    CHURCH From the Greek kuriakee , “house of the Lord,” a word which passed to the Gothic tongue; the Goths being the first of the northern hordes converted to Christianity, adopted the word from the Greek Christians of Constantinople, and so it came to us Anglo-Saxons (Trench, Study of Words). But Lipsius, from circus, from whence kirk, a circle, because the oldest temples, as the Druid ones, were circular in form. Ekkleesia in the New Testament never means the building or house of assembly, because church buildings were built longAFTER the apostolic age. It means an organized body, whose unity does not depend on its being met together in one place; not an assemblage of atoms, but members in their several places united to the One Head, Christ, and forming one organic living whole (1 Corinthians 12). The bride of Christ ( Ephesians 5:25-32; 1:22), the body of which He is the Head. The household of Christ and of God ( Matthew 10:25; Ephesians 2:19). The temple of the Holy Spirit, made up of living stones ( Ephesians 2:22; 1 Corinthians 3:16; Peter 2:5). Ekkleesia is used of one or more particular Christian associations, even one small enough to worship together in one house ( Romans 16:5). Also of “the whole church” ( Romans 16:23; 1 Corinthians 12:28). Ekkleesia occurs twice only in Matthew ( Matthew 16:18; 18:17), elsewhere called “the kingdom of the heavens” by Matthew, “the kingdom of God” by Mark, Luke and John. Also called Christ’s “flock,” never to be plucked out of His hand ( John 10:28), “branches” in Him “the true Vine.” Founded on the Rock, “the Christ the Son of the living God,” the only Foundation ( Matthew 16:16,18; 1 Corinthians 3:11). Constituted as Christ’s mystical body on Pentecost; thenceforth expanding in the successive stages traced in ACTS . Described in a beautiful summary ( Acts 2:41,47). (On its apostasy see BABYLON .) Professing Christendom numbers now probably 80 million of Greek churches, 90 million of Teutonic or Protestant churches, and 170 million of Roman Catholic churches. The Church of England’s definition of the church is truly scriptural (Article xix): “a congregation of faithful men in the which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”

    The church that shall reign with Christ is made up of those written in heaven, in the Lamb’s book of life, the spirits of just, men made perfect ( Hebrews 12:22,23; Revelation 21:27). The faultless perfection and the glorious promises in Scripture assigned to the church (election, adoption, spiritual priesthood, sure guidance by the Spirit into all truth, eternal salvation) belong not to all of the visible church, but to those alone of it who are in living union with Christ ( Ephesians 5:23-27; Hebrews 12:22,23). The claim for the visible church of what belongs to the invisible, in spite of Christ’s warning parable of the tares and wheat ( Matthew 13:24-30,36-43), has led to some of Rome’s deadliest errors.

    On the other hand, the attempt to sever the tares from the wheat prematurely has led to many schisms, which have invariably failed in the attempt and only generated fresh separations. We must wait until Christ’s manifestation for the manifestation of the sons of God ( Romans 8:19; Colossians 3:4).

    The true universal church is restricted to “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours” ( 1 Corinthians 1:2). They are visible in so far as their light of good works so shines before men that their Father in heaven is glorified ( Matthew 5:16). They are invisible insofar that it is God alone who can infallibly see who among professors are animated by a living, loving faith, and who are not.

    A visible community, consisting of various members and aggregations of members, was founded by Christ Himself, as needed for the extension and continuation of Christianity to all lands and all ages. The ministry of the word and the two sacraments, baptism, and the supper of the Lord, (both in part derived from existing Jewish rites, Matthew 26:26-28; Corinthians 5:7,8) [see BAPTISM , see LORD’S SUPPER ] were appointed as the church’s distinctive ordinances ( Matthew 28:19,20, Greek text): “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them ... Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and (only on condition of your doing so) I am with you always,” etc. The professing church that neglects the precept forfeits the promise, which is fatal to Rome’s claims.

    No detailed church government is explicitly commanded by Jesus in the New Testament. The Old Testament ministry of high priest, priests, and Levites necessarily ended with the destruction of the one and only temple appointed by God. That the Christian ministry is not sacerdotal, as the Old Testament ministry, is proved by the title hiereus , the Greek of the Latin sacerdos, never once being used of Christian ministers. When used at all as to the Christian church it is used of the whole body of Christians; since not merely ministers, as the Aaronic priests, but all equally, have near access to the heavenly holy place, through the torn veil of Christ’s flesh ( Hebrews 10:19-22; 13:15,16; 1 Peter 2:19; Revelation 1:6). All alike offer “spiritual sacrifices.” For a minister to pretend to offer a literal sacrifice in the Lord’s supper, or to have the sacerdotal priesthood (which pertains to Christ alone), would be the sin which Moses charged on Korah: “Seemeth it but a small thing unto you that the God of Israel hath separated you from the congregation to bring you near to Himself, ... to stand before the congregation to minister to them; and seek ye the priesthood also?”

    The temple then not being the model to the Christian church, the synagogue alone remained to be copied. In the absence of the temple during the captivity the people assembled together on sabbaths and other days to be instructed by the prophet ( Ezekiel 14:1; 20:1; 33:31). In Nehemiah 8:1-8 a specimen is given of such a service, which the synagogues afterward continued, and which consisted in Scripture reading, with explanation, prayers, and thanksgivings. The synagogue officers consisted of a “ruler of the synagogue,” the “legate of the church” (sheliach tsibbur ), corresponding to the angel of the church (Revelation 1- -3), a college of elders or presbyters, and subordinate ministers (chazzan ), answering to our deacons, to take care of the sacred books. Episcopacy was adopted in apostolic times as the most expedient government, most resembling Jewish usages, and so causing the least stumblingblock to Jewish prejudices ( Acts 4:8; 24:1). James, the brother of our Lord, after the martyrdom of James, the son of Zebedee and the flight of Peter ( Acts 12:17), alone remained behind in Jerusalem, the recognized head there. His Jewish tendencies made him the least unpopular to the Jews, and so adapted him for the presidency there without the title ( Acts 15:13-19; 21:18; Galatians 2:2,9,12). This was the first specimen of apostolic local episcopacy without the name. The presbyters of the synagogue were called also see BISHOPS , or overseers. “Those now called ‘bishops’ were originally ‘apostles.’ But those who ruled the church after the apostles’ death had not the testimony of miracles, and were in many respects inferior, therefore they thought it unbecoming to assume the name of apostles; but dividing the names, they left to ‘presbyters’ that name, and themselves were called ‘bishops’” (Ambrose, in Bingham Ecclesiastes Ant., 2:11; and Amularius, De Officiis, 2:13.) The steps were apostle; then vicar apostolic or apostolic delegate, as Timothy in Ephesus and Titus in Crete, temporarily ( 1 Timothy 1:3; 2 Timothy 4:21; Titus 3:12; 1:5), then angel, then bishop in the present sense.

    Episcopacy gives more of centralized unity, but when made an absolute law it tends to spiritual despotism. The visible church, while avoiding needless alterations, has power under God to modify her polity as shall tend most to edification ( Matthew 18:18; 1 Corinthians 12:28-30; 14:26; Ephesians 4:11-16). The Holy Spirit first unites souls individually to the Father in Christ, then with one another as “the communion of saints.” Then followed the government and ministry, which are not specified in detail until the pastoral epistles, namely, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the latest epistles. To be “in Christ” (John 15) presupposes repentance and faith, of which the sacraments are the seal.

    The church order is not imposed as a rigid unchangeable system from without, but is left to develop itself from within outwardly, according as the indwelling Spirit of life may suggest. The church is “holy” in respect to those alone of it who are sanctified, and “one” only in respect to those who “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” ( Ephesians 4:3- 6,15,16), “growing up ... into the Head, Christ, in all things.”

    The latest honorable and only Christian use of “synagogue” (KJV “assembly”) occurs in James ( James 2:2), the apostle who maintained to the latest the bonds between the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church. Soon the continued resistance of the truth by the Jews led Christians to leave the term to them exclusively ( Revelation 2:9).

    Synagogue expresses a congregation not necessarily bound together; church, a people mutually bound together, even when not assembled, a body called out (ekkleesia , from ekkalein ) from the world in spirit, though not in locality ( John 17:11,15). The Hebrew qahal , like, church,” denotes a number of people united by definite laws and bonds, whether collected together or not; but ‘eedah is an assembly independent of any bond of union, like “synagogue.”

    Christian church buildings were built like synagogues, with the holy table placed where the chest containing the law had been. The desk and pulpit were the chief furniture in both, but no altar. When the ruler of the synagogue became a Christian, he naturally was made bishop, as tradition records that Crispus became at Corinth ( Acts 18:8). Common to both church and synagogue were the discipline ( Matthew 18:17), excommunication ( 1 Corinthians 5:4), and the collection of alms ( Corinthians 16:2).

    CHUSHAN RISHATHAIM (“the Ethiopian of double wickedness”). (A Cushite or Hamitic element was prominent in the oldest Babylonian race as their vocabulary proves.)

    The Mesopotamian king who oppressed Israel eight years in the generation succeeding Joshua ( Judges 3:8). About 1402 B.C. he was king of the Syrian country about Haran, the region between the Euphrates and the Khabour, held by the Nairi, divided into petty tribes, as Assyria had not at this time extended her dominion to the Euphrates. Cuneiform inscriptions two centuries later confirm this; in 1270 B.C. the Assyrian empire rose.

    Othniel delivered Israel from him. Chushan Rishathaim, a chieftain, probably had established a temporary dominion over the petty tribes of Mesopotamia, which ceased long before Assyria marched there.

    CHUZA Herod’s house steward, husband of Joanna, who ministered to the Lord of her substance ( Luke 8:3). Subsequently, she was one of the women who, on the morning of the resurrection, brought spices to complete the Lord’s burial ( Luke 24:10), and who came and told the eleven and all the rest of His being no longer in the tomb, and of their having seen angels.

    We read in Matthew 14:1, “Herod heard of the fame of Jesus, and said unto his servants, This is John the Baptist, who is risen from the dead.”

    The reason does not in Matthew appear why Herod addressed his servants about Christ; but we infer it from Luke’s incidental mention of Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, as among the women ministering to Christ. Also from the margin of Acts 13:1, where “Manaen, Herod’s foster brother,” appears among the Christian “prophets.” How naturally, since Christ had followers among Herod’s household, did that prince turn to his servants for information about Christ. The undesigned coincidence is a proof of the gospel veracity.

    CICCAR KJV “the plain” ( Genesis 13:10,12). The Hebrew means the “circuit” or low tract round about the Jordan. [See REGION ROUND ABOUT .] CILICIA A province S.E. of Asia Minor, having the Mediterranean on the S., Pamphylia on the W., the Taurus and Antitaurus range on the N., separating it from Lycaonia and Cappadocia, and on the E. the range of Areanus separating it from Syria. The eastern portion is level, well watered, and fruitful; the western rugged, and chiefly fit for pasture.

    Tarsus, on the Cydnus, capital of the E., became a favorite residence of the Greeks and seat of learning under the Graeco-Macedonian empire. Many Jews were settled there and had their synagogue ( Acts 6:9). Paul belonged to Tarsus, and there acquired his knowledge of the Greek poets, three of whom he quotes: Aratus of Cilicia, Menander, and Epimenides ( Acts 17:28; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12). He naturally visited it after his conversion, and probably founded the church there.

    Cilicia was the high road between Syria and the W.; from Syria into Cilicia by the gates of Amanus, a pass at the head of the valley of Pinarus; from Cilicia by the gates of Cilicia, near the sources of Cydnus, through the Antitaurus into Lycaonia and Cappadocia, the pass whereby Paul crossed into Lycaonia ( Acts 15:41). The goats’ hair cloth, called cilicium, was one of its products. Paul, according to the excellent Jewish custom that all boys should learn a trade, wrought at; making tents of this hair cloth procurable in every large town of the Levant, a profitable trade in those days of traveling. The hair cloth is still manufactured in Asia Minor, and the word still retained in French, Spanish, and Italian (cilicio). Theodore of Mopsus in Cilicia was another of its eminent Christian writers.

    CINNAMON The aromatic inner rind of the Laurus cinnamomum. A perfume only in Old Testament ( Exodus 30:23); a condiment with us. Imported into Judaea by the Phoenicians. It now grows best in S.W. Ceylon. From the coarser pieces oil of cinnamon is obtained, and a finer oil by boiling the ripe fruit.

    This last gives the delightful odor to incense when burning. Gesenius derives it from qun , qaneh , “cane,” the idea being that of standing upright.

    Cassia lignea is often substituted in the markets for the more delicate flavored cinnamon. Others derive the word from Cinn (Chinese), amomum (nard). It reached Phoenicia overland from China by way of Persia.

    CINNEROTH, ALL The district by the N. side of the lake Chinnereth or Tiberius; afterward “the plain of Gennesareth.” Laid waste by Benhadad king of Damascus, ally of Asa king of Judah ( 1 Kings 15:20).

    CIRCUMCISION The cutting off all round of the foreskin (the projecting skin in the male member, the emblem of corruption, Deuteronomy 10:16; Jeremiah 4:4) of males, appointed by God as token of His covenant with Abraham and his seed ( Genesis 17:10-14). The usage prevailed, according to Herodotus (2:104, section 36,37), among the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Syrians. But his statement may refer only to the Egyptian priests, and those initiated in the mysteries. The Jews alone of the inhabitants of the Syrian region were circumcised. So, circumcision kept them distinct from uncircumcised Canaanite pagan around. If the rite existed before Abraham it was then first sanctioned as a token of God’s covenant with Abraham and his seed, and particular directions given by God as to the time of its being performed, the eighth day, even though it were a sabbath ( John 7:22,23), and the persons to be circumcised, every male, every slave, and (at the exodus it was added) every male foreigner before he could partake of the Passover ( Genesis 17:12,13; Exodus 12:48). So, the rainbow existed before the flood, but in Genesis 9:13-17 first was made token of the covenant. The testimony of the Egyptian sculptures, mummies, and hieroglyphics, is very doubtful as to the pre-Abrahamic antiquity of circumcision. (See note Genesis 17, Speaker’s Commentary.) The Hamite races of Palestine, akin to the Egyptians, as ( Judges 14:3) the Philistines and Canaanites (the Hivites, Genesis 34), were certainly not circumcised.

    The Egyptian priests probably adopted the rite when Joseph was their governor and married to the daughter of the priest of On. The Israelites by the rite, which was associated with the idea of purity, were marked as a whole “kingdom of priests” ( Exodus 19:6; Deuteronomy 7:6,7). In Jeremiah 9:25, “I will punish all them which are circumcised with the uncircumcised: Egypt, and Judah, and Edom,” two classes seem distinguished: Israel circumcised in flesh, but uncircumcised in heart; and the Gentile nations uncircumcised both in flesh and heart. Hyrcanus first compelled the Edomites to be circumcised (Josephus, Ant. 13:9, section 1; compare Ezekiel 31:18).

    Its significance is, the cutting the outside flesh of the organ of generation denotes corruption as inherent in us from birth, and transmitted by our parents, and symbolizes our severance from nature’s defilement to a state of consecrated fellowship with God. Jehovah consecrated the nation to Himself; and whatsoever male was not circumcised on the eighth day was liable to be “cut off.” Moses had neglected to circumcise his son, owing to Zipporah’s repugnance to it, as a rite not generally adopted in the East, even by the descendants of Abraham and Keturah, the Midianites.

    Therefore he was attacked by some sudden seizure in the resting place for the night, which he and his wife were divinely admonished arose from the neglect. She took a sharp stone or flint (compare margin Joshua 5:2,8), the implement sanctioned by patriarchal usage as more sacred than metal (as was the Egyptian usage also in preparing mummies), and cut off her son’s foreskin, and cast it at Moses’ feet, saying, “a bloody husband art thou to me,” i.e., by this blood of my child I have recovered thee as my husband, and sealed our union again ( Exodus 4:25).

    The name was given at circumcision, as at baptism ( Luke 1:59; 2:21).

    The painfulness of Old Testament initiatory rite, as compared with the New Testament sacrament of baptism, marks strongly the contrast between the stern covenant of the law and the loving gospel. Jesus’ submission to it betokened His undertaking to fulfill the law in all its requirements, and to suffer its penalty incurred by us. “Oh wherefore bring ye here this holy Child? Such rite befits the sinful, not the clean; Why should this tender Infant undefiled Be thus espoused in blood, while we have been So gently into covenant beguiled? No keen edged knife our bleeding foreheads scored With the sharp cross of our betrothed Lord: But we belike in quiet wonder smiled. While on our brow the priest, with finger cold, Traced with the hallowed drops the saving sign; While Thou, unsparing of Thy tears, the old And sterner ritual on Thyself didst take: Meet opening for a life like Thine, Changing the blood to water for our sake.” --Whytehead “Uncircumcised” is used of the lips ( Exodus 6:12,20), the ears ( Jeremiah 4:4; 6:10), the heart ( Leviticus 26:41; Deuteronomy 10:16; Acts 7:51), in the sense closed by the foreskin of inborn fleshliness; impure, rebellious ( Deuteronomy 30:6; Isaiah 52:1).

    Even the fruit of the Canaanites’ trees was called “uncircumcised,” i.e. unclean ( Leviticus 19:23). Christians “are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands in putting off the body (not merely the foreskins, as in literal circumcision) of the sins of the flesh (i.e. the whole old fleshly nature with its sins) by the circumcision of Christ” ( Colossians 2:11; Romans 2:28,29).

    The reason of the omission of circumcision in the wilderness ( Joshua 5:5,6) was, while suffering the penalty of their unbelief the Israelites were practically discovenanted by God, and so were excluded from the sign of the covenant. “The reproach of Egypt” was the taunt of the Egyptians that God brought them into the wilderness to slay them ( Numbers 14:13-16; Deuteronomy 9:23-28); which reproach lay on them so long as they were in danger of being “cut off” in the wilderness as uncircumcised, but was rolled off the younger generation by their circumcision at Gilgal.

    Paul warned Christians who regarded circumcision as still possessing spiritual virtue, that thereby they made themselves “debtors to do the whole law,” and “Christ should profit them nothing” ( Galatians 5:2,3,12). He calls its practisers “the concision,” in contrast to the true circumcision ( Philippians 3:2,3), a mere flesh cutting. So he resisted the demand that Titus should be circumcised; for, being a Greek, Titus did not fall under the rule of expediency that Jewish born Christians should be circumcised, as Timothy was (Acts 15; 16:1,3; Galatians 2:3-5).

    Christianity did not interfere with Jewish usages, as social ordinances (no longer religiously significant) in the case of Jews, while the Jewish polity and temple stood. After their overthrow the Jewish usages necessarily ceased. To insist on them for Gentile converts would have been to make them essential to Christianity. To violate them in the case of Jews would have been inconsistent with the charity which in matters indifferent becomes all things to all men, that by all means it may win some ( Corinthians 9:22; Romans 14). The Arabians circumcised in the 13th year, after Ishmael’s example ( Genesis 17:25). The Muslims and the Abyssinian Christians practice it still.

    CISTERN Bor , a dug pit for receiving water conducted from a spring or the rainfall. [See CONDUIT .] The dryness between May and September in Palestine makes reservoirs necessary; of which the larger are called “pools,” the smaller “cisterns.” The rocky soil facilitates their construction. The top, with stonework and a round opening, has often a wheel for the bucket; an image of the aorta or great artery circulating the blood from the ventricle of the heart, or the wheel expresses life in its rapid motion ( James 3:6; Ecclesiastes 12:6). The rain is conducted to them from the roofs of the houses, most of which are furnished with them; from whence is derived the metaphor, Proverbs 5:15, “drink waters out of thine own cistern,” i.e. draw thy enjoyments only from the sources that are legitimately thine.

    Hezekiah stopped the water supply outside Jerusalem at the invasion of Sennacherib, while within there was abundant water ( 2 Chronicles 32:3,4). So it has been in all the great sieges of Jerusalem, scarcity of water outside, abundance within.

    Empty cisterns were used as prisons. So Joseph was cast into a “pit” ( Genesis 37:22); Jeremiah into one miry at the bottom, and so deep that he was let down by cords ( Jeremiah 38:6), said to be near “Herod’s gate.” Cisterns yield only a limited supply of water, not an everflowing spring; representing creature comforts soon exhausted, and therefore never worth forsaking the never failing, ever fresh supplies of God. for ( Jeremiah 2:13). The stonework of tanks often becomes broken, and the water leaks into the earth; and, at best, the water is not fresh long.

    Compare Isaiah 55:1,2; Luke 12:33.

    CITIZENSHIP Paul’s Roman citizenship was of the lower kind, which though not entitling him to vote with the tribes and enjoy a magistracy, yet secured to him the protection of the laws of the empire, and the right of appeal from his own hostile countrymen to Caesar, as also exemption from scourging ( Acts 16:37; 22:25-28; 25:11). He seems to have inherited it from his father.

    Hence, he naturally uses the image to express the believer’s high privileges as a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. “Our citizenship (Greek, or rather our life as citizens; politeuma , not politeia ) is in heaven,” etc. ( Philippians 3:20); an image especially appropriate at Philippi, it being a Roman colony and possessing Roman citizenship of which its people were proud. Moreover, it was there that Paul had compelled the magistrates publicly to recognize a Roman citizen’s privileges. So believers, though absent from their heavenly city in body, still enjoy its civic privileges and protection; pilgrims on earth, citizens of heaven ( Ephesians 2:6; Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 11:9,10,13-16; 12:22; Revelation 21:2,10; Luke 10:20).

    CITY Cain first founded one ( Genesis 4:16,17). The material civilization of the Cainite race was superior to that of the Sethite. To the former belonged many inventions of useful arts and luxury ( Genesis 4:20-22). Real refinement and moral civilization are by no means necessary concomitants of material civilization; in these the Sethites took the lead ( Genesis 4:25,26). The distinction between tent or nomadic and town life early began. The root meaning of the Hebrew terms for “city,” ‘ar or ‘ir (from ‘ur “to keep watch”), and kirat (from qarah “to approach as an enemy,” Genesis 23:2) implies that a leading object of gathering into towns was security against marauders. So, “the tower of Edar,” i.e. flocks ( Genesis 35:21). Of course, the first “cities” would be mere groups of rude dwellings, fenced round together.

    Sir H. Rawlinson supposes Rehoboth, Calah, etc., in Genesis 10:11, denote only sites of buildings afterward erected. The later dates assigned to the building of Nineveh, Babylon, etc., refer to their being rebuilt on a larger scale on the sites of the primitive towns. Unwalled towns are the symbol of peace and security ( Zechariah 2:4).

    Special cities furnished supplies for the king’s service ( 1 Kings 9:19; 4:7; 1 Chronicles 27:25; 2 Chronicles 17:12). So, our Lord represents the different servants having the number of cities assigned them in proportion to their faithfulness ( Luke 19:17,19).

    Forty-eight cities were assigned to the Levites, of which 13 were for the family of Aaron, nine were in Judah, four were in Benjamin, and six were cities of refuge. The streets of eastern cities are generally narrow, seldom allowing more than two loaded camels to pass one another. But Nineveh’s admitted of chariots passing, and had large parks and gardens within ( Nahum 2:4). Those of one trade generally lived on the same street ( Jeremiah 37:21). TheGATES are the usual place of assembly, and there courts of judges and kings are held ( Genesis 23:10; Ruth 4:1).

    CITIES OF REFUGE. [See BLOOD, AVENGING OF .] Kedesh (“holy,” so Jesus our city of refuge, Hebrews 6:18; 7:26), now Kedes, 20 miles E.S.E. from Tyre.

    Shechem (“shoulder,” upon Jesus’ shoulder the government is, Isaiah 9:6), now Nablous. Hebron (“fellowship,” so Christ to us, 1 Corinthians 1:9), now El-Khalil. Bezer, perhaps Bozor in the Book of Maccabees (= “fortress,” so is Jesus, Isaiah 32:2; 26:1,4). Ramoth Gilead, on the site of Ez-Szalt (Ramoth = “high,” so is Jesus to us, Acts 5:31). Golan, Jaulan (= “joy”; Jesus is our joy, Romans 5:11). All the 48 cities of Levi had the right of asylum. But the six of refuge were bound to entertain the involuntary manslayer gratuitously. The cities on each side of the Jordan were nearly opposite one another ( Deuteronomy 19:2; Numbers 35:6,13,15; Joshua 20:2,7,9). If manslayers had been driven out of the country as among the Greeks, they would have been exposed to the temptation of worshipping strange gods ( 1 Samuel 26:19).

    The Levitical cities were to have a space of 1,000 cubits (583 yards) beyond the city walls for pasture and other purposes ( Numbers 35:4,5).

    The 2,000 cubits also specified mean probably the sum of the two single thousands on opposite sides of the city, exclusive of the city itself; as here shown. Clermont-Ganneau has discovered a bilingual inscription, Greek and Hebrew, meaning “limit of Gezer” (now Tel-el-Jezer), on a horizontal slab E. of that royal Canaanite city; also a second similarly inscribed stone 1,696 yards due N.W. of the first. This proves that the sacred boundary was a square, having its four angles at the four cardinal points (Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement, Oct. 1874).

    CIVILIZATION The early invention of the arts, recorded in Genesis 4, agrees with the Greek tradition that Prometheus in the beginning stole fire from heaven, and taught people all the arts and ornaments of life (Grote, History of Greece, i., 68), especially to work metals. So Oannes long before the flood, in the Babylonian tradition, taught the Chaldaeans art and science, “so that no grand discovery was ever made afterward” (Berosus, Fragment 1:1).

    The earliest remains in Egypt and Babylonia soon after the flood indicate advanced civilization, with metallic implements. On the other hand, no instance can be given of a savage race having ever, without light introduced from without from civilized races, risen by their own independent efforts to civilization (see Whately’s Civilization). The inference follows that man began not with savagery but with a considerable civilization, especially its highest constituent the moral and religious element. At the same time, it is noteworthy that the arts of secular life began with the corrupt line of Cain. The fall soon developed a divorce between secular art, refinements and luxuries, and religious civilization.

    The two were joined, and shall be again, in the perfect state. So after the flood the Hamitic, which was the corrupter race, developed as to civilization the earliest; theirs were the first great empires, Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Sidon; but they degenerated the soonest because apostates front true religion, the great conservator. So, though they were the foremost in commencing, however rudely, alphabetic writing, astronomy, history, sculpture, navigation, agriculture, weaving, they are now among the lowest.

    CLAUDA (Gaudos) (Pliny); Gaudonesi is its present Greek name. Due W. of cape Matala, S. of Crete, and due S. of Phoenice. Paul’s ship on her way from Fair Havens to Phoenice ( Acts 27:12-17) was attacked by a gale coming down from the island, and was in danger of being driven into the African “quicksands” (Syrtis). She ran under the lee of Clauda. The Euroclydon (rather as the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus manuscripts read, Euraquilon) or E.N.E. wind would be exactly the one to drive the vessel as described. In the smooth water under the lee of Clauda they got the boat on board, and undergirt the ship (Smith, Voyage, etc., of Paul). Now Gozzo.

    CLAUDIA Mentioned ( 2 Timothy 4:21) with Pudens, whose wife she afterward became (Martial, 4:13; 11:54); he was a Roman knight; she was a Briton, surnamed Rufina. Tacitus (Agricola, 14) mentions that territory in S.E.

    Britain was given to a British king, Cogilunus, for his fidelity to Rome A.D. 52, while Claudius was emperor. In 1772 a marble was dug up at Chichester (now in the gardens at Goodwood) mentioning Cogidunus, with the surname Claudius from his patron the emperor’s name. Pudens is also mentioned, Cogidunus’ son-in-law. Cogidunus’ daughter would be Claudia, probably sent to Rome for education, as a pledge of her father’s fidelity. There she was put under the patronage of Pomponia, wife of Aulus Plautius, conqueror of Britain. Pomponia was accused of foreign superstitions A.D. 57 (Tacitus, Annals, 3:32), probably Christianity.

    Claudia probably learned Christianity from Pomponia, and took from her the surname of the Pomponian clan, Rufina; so we find Rufus, a Christian in Romans 16:13. Pudens in Martial, and in the inscription, appears as a pagan. He, or perhaps his friends, through fear, concealed his Christian faith. Tradition represents Timothy, Pudens’ son, as taking part in converting the Britons.

    CLAUDIUS Tiberius Nero Drusus Germanicus; fourth Roman emperor; reigned from A.D. 41 to 54; successor of Caligula; son of Nero Drusus; born 9 B.C.; lived in privacy until he became emperor (A.D. 41) mainly through the influence of Herod Agrippa I (Josephus, Ant. 19:2, section 1, 3, 4), whose territory therefore he enlarged by adding Judaea, Samaria, and part of Lebanon. He appointed Herod’s brother to Chalcis and the presidency over the temple at Jerusalem. In Claudius’ reign occurred the famine in Palestine and Syria ( Acts 11:28-30) under the procurators Cuspins Fadus and Tiberius Alexander. Suetonius (Claud., 25) writes: “Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, as they were constantly raising disturbances under the instigation of one Christ” (this was between A.D. 50 and 52): a sample of the ignorance of pagan writers in respect to Christ and Judaism. Claudius was poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina Nero’s mother (A.D. 54), after a weak reign in which, according to Suetonius (29), “he showed himself not a prince but a servant” in the hands of others.

    CLAY Tough plastic earth, containing silica and alumina. Used for making pottery in Palestine ( Jeremiah 18:2,6). Vessels of dark blue clay are still made at Gaza. Used by Jesus in curing the blind man ( John 9:6), a mixture of dust and spittle. Doors are sealed with clay in the East, to facilitate detection of thieves. Wine jars were so sealed. It may have been with clay our Lord’s tomb, and the earthen vessel with the proofs of Jeremiah’s purchase, were sealed ( Matthew 27:66; Jeremiah 32:14). At Koyunjik fine clay cylinders with Assyrian impressions have been found, which were made by rolling the seals on the moist clay, which was then baked in the fire.

    CLEMENT Paul’s fellow helper at Philippi, whom Origen (Commentary, John 1:29) identifies with the Clement, the apostolical father afterward bishop of Rome, whose epistle to the Corinthian church (part of the Alexandrius manuscript of Greek Old and New Testament) is extant. Philippi being closely connected with Rome, as a Roman colony, might easily have furnished a, bishop to the Roman church.

    CLEOPAS One of the two disciples who walked to Emmaus on the day of Christ’s resurrection, and unconsciously spoke with Him ( Luke 24:18).

    Identified by some with see ALPHAEUS or Clopas or Cleophas ( John 19:25). But Alphaeus or Clopas is an Aramaic name; whereas Cleopas is a Greek name, contracted from Cleopater, as Antipas from Antipater. Clopas was probably dead before Jesus’ ministry began; for his wife and children constantly appear with Joseph’s family in the time of our Lord’s ministry.

    CLOUD A type of refreshment, as it shades off the oppressive sun in Palestine, and gives promise of rain ( 1 Kings 18:45). It stands out the more prominent because of the clear sky that surrounds it, and the usually cloudless weather that prevails in the East. “Cloud without rain,” therefore, symbolizes a man that promises much, but does not perform ( Proverbs 16:15; 25:14; Jude 1:12). Isaiah 25:5: “as the heat in dry place (is brought down by the shadow of a cloud, so) Thou shalt bring down the triumphant shout of the foreigners.” Also typifying transitoriness ( Job 30:15; Hosea 6:4). Also of what intercepts God’s favor from us ( Lamentations 2:1; 3:44). As the veil between things seen and things unseen, it, with its floating undefined form, is the symbol manifesting the mysterious unseen presence of God ( 2 Samuel 22:12,13). Sometimes in thick gloom portending judgment ( Joel 2:2). “Clouds and darkness round about Him” ( Psalm 97:2). The fire of lightning, too, warped in the clouds, suggesting the same punitive aspect of God ( Isaiah 19:1), especially as He shall come to judgment ( Daniel 7:13; Revelation 1:7; Matthew 26:64). The supernatural cloud on mount Sinai was attended with fire ( Exodus 19:16,18; Deuteronomy 4:11), a fit symbol of the legal dispensation which speaks the divine terror to the transgressor, in contrast to the gospel which speaks Jesus’ loving invitation from the heavenly mount ( Hebrews 12:18-25).

    PILLAR OF CLOUD. The symbol of God’s presence with Israel, guiding them from Egypt to Canaan ( Exodus 13:21,22). It became fire by night.

    So in the Red Sea it gave light to the escaping Israelites, while interposing between them and the pursuing Egyptians, to whom it” was a cloud and darkness.” When Israel was appointed to rest in any place, it rested on the tabernacle over the mercy-seat, and was named by later Jews the Shekinah ( Exodus 29:42,43); at the door ( Exodus 33:9,10; Numbers 12:5; 9:15-23); covering the tabernacle of the congregation ( Exodus 40:34-38).

    The ark ( Numbers 10:33-36, Speaker’s Commentary) went in the midst of the people, and the cloud rested on them, guiding them where to halt.

    The cloud covered them from the heat ( <19A539> Psalm 105:39; Isaiah 4:5).

    Its fire symbolized God’s purity and glory ( Exodus 24:17; Daniel 7:10), and His consuming wrath against transgressors ( Leviticus 10:2; Numbers 16:35; Deuteronomy 4:24; Hebrews 12:29). Its nebulous haze typifies His hiding Himself, even while revealing Himself ( Isaiah 45:15); unfolding only a small part of His ways to our finite faculties ( Job 26:14; 1 Timothy 6:16). The cloud is not mentioned as having been on the tabernacle after Israel’s entrance into Canaan, until it rested on Solomon’s temple at the dedication ( 2 Chronicles 5:13,14), in the moment when the trumpeters and singers together “made one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord.”

    Again, Ezekiel in vision saw the glory of the Lord leaving the temple ( Ezekiel 10:4; 11:23). Its return is foretold ( Ezekiel 43:2; Isaiah 4:5). Paul speaks of “the glory,” i.e. the divine glory cloud, as Israel’s peculiar privilege ( Romans 9:4).

    CNIDUS A magnificent city S.W. of Asia Minor, in Caria on the promontory, now cape Crio, projecting between the islands Cos and Rhodes ( Acts 21:1).

    Passed by Paul in sailing from Myra, N. of Rhodes, to Crete. The promontory is what was originally an island, joined to the mainland by an artificial causeway, forming two harbors, one on the N. the other on the S.

    COAL pecham , “a black coal,” and gachelath , “burning coals.” Proverbs 26:21: “as coals (fuel) are to burning coals,” etc.; so we speak of quarrelsome men “adding fuel to the flame.” “Coals of fire” in 2 Samuel 22:9,13, represent the lightning of God’s wrath. In Proverbs 25:22, “heap coals of fire upon thine enemy’s head” ( Romans 12:20), the meaning is, melt him into burning shame at his own unworthy hatred, and love for thee who hast overcome his evil with thy good. Either he shall be like metals melted by fire or like clay hardened by it.

    In <19C004> Psalm 120:4 “coals of juniper” rather burning brands of broom, retamim . The Arabs regard the retem (broom) the best firewood. As their slanders burnt like coals on fire, so, by righteous retribution in kind, God will give them hot coals. <19E010> Psalm 140:10; 18:12,13; compare the same image of the tongue, James 3:6.

    In 2 Samuel 14:7 “they shall quench my coal that is left,” i.e., extinguish the only surviving light of my home, my only son.

    In Isaiah 6:6 and 1 Kings 19:6 the “coals” are in the Hebrew (rezeph ) hot stones, on which cakes were baked and flesh cooked.

    In Habakkuk 3:5 (resheph ) “burning coals” poetically and figuratively express “burning diseases,” as the parallel “pestilence” shows; also compare Deuteronomy 32:24; Psalm 91:6.

    In Lamentations 4:8 translate as margin darker than blackness.” Mineral coal protrudes through the strata to the surface of parts of Lebanon, at Cornale, eight miles from Beirut, the coal seams are three feet thick; but it seems not to have been anciently known as fuel. Charcoal is what is meant by “coal.”

    COCK “Cockcrowing” was the third watch of the four see WATCHES introduced by the Romans. The Jews originally had but three. The first ended at 9, the second at 12, the third or” cockcrowing” at 3, and the fourth at 6 o’clock a.m. ( Mark 13:35). The second cockcrowing ( Mark 14:72), which marked Peter’s third denial of Jesus, was probably at the beginning of the fourth watch between 3 and 4 in the morning, not long before the first day dawn, just when our Lord was being led bound to Caiaphas across the court where Peter was standing. The Mishna, states that “cocks were not bred at Jerusalem because of the holy things.” But Peter could easily hear their shrill crow on mount Olivet, only a half-mile off from where he was in the porch of the high priest’s palace, in the stillness of night. Moreover, the restriction could only apply to the Jews, not to the Romans who used fowl for food. The first crowing being fainter in the distance did not awaken his slumbering conscience; but the second with its loud sound was the crowing which alone is recorded by Matthew ( Matthew 26:34), Luke ( Luke 22:34), and John ( John 13:38), being that which roused him to remember bitterly his Lord’s neglected warning.

    COCKATRICE Isaiah 14:29. [See ADDER .] COCKLE ba’esha , from a root “to stink” ( Job 31:40). Probably the “tares” (zizania ) of Matthew 13:30. Bad weeds in general; or barley affected by Uredo fetida, “the stinking rust.”

    COLHOZEH A man of Judah in Nehemiah’s time ( Nehemiah 3:15; 11:5); father of Shallum and Baruch.

    COLLAR Job 30:18: “my affliction (disease) bindeth me about as the collar of my (inner) coat”; just as in the preceding clause, “my (outer) garment is changed into affliction “; comprising Job’s trials, both those from without and those from within.

    COLLEGE Not a school of learning in 2 Kings 22:14, but the second part or suburb or lower part of the city. Zephaniah 1:10, answering to Akra N. of Zion; the Bezetha or Newtown, Hebrew [ha-mishneh ]; called by Josephus “the other city,” i.e. the lower city (Ant. 15:11, section 5). “Outside the wall, between the two walls, which was a second part of the city” (Rashi).

    COLONY Philippi was one, planted with Italian colonists, transplanted from those parts of Italy which had espoused Antony’s side, and which Augustus assigned therefore to his veterans. Inscriptions and coins of Augustus are still extant, with the designation “colonia” assigned to Philippi. It had the “jus Italicum,” or privileges of Italian citizens. The accuracy of Acts 16:12 appears in calling Philippi kolonia (Roman), not Greek apoikia .

    COLOSSE properly Colossae. A city on the Lycus, an affluent of the Maeander. To the Christians there was addressed Paul’s epistle, before he had seen their face ( Colossians 2:1; 1:4,7,8). Epaphras probably founded the Colossian church ( Colossians 1:7; 4:12). Colosse was ethnologically in Phrygia, but politically then in the province of Asia. On the site of the modern Chonos. The foundation of the church must have been subsequent to Paul’s visitation, “strengthening in order” all the churches of Galatia and Phrygia ( Acts 18:24), for otherwise he must have visited the Colossians, which Colossians 2:1 implies he had not. Hence, as in the epistle to the Romans, so in the epistle to Colosse there are no allusions to his being their father in the faith, such as there are in 1 Corinthians 3:6,10; 4:15; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; 2:1. Probably during Paul’s “two years” stay at Ephesus, when “all which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus” ( Acts 19:10,26), Epaphras, Philemon ( Philemon 1:2,13,19), Archippus, Apphia, and other natives of Colosse (which was on the high road from Ephesus to the Euphrates), becoming converted at Ephesus, were subsequently the first preachers in their own city. This accounts for their personal acquaintance with, and attachment to, Paul and his fellow ministers, and their salutations to him. So as to “them at Laodicea” ( Colossians 2:1). He hoped to visit Colosse when he should be delivered from his Roman prison ( Philemon 1:22; compare Philippians 2:24).

    The angel worship noticed in Colossians 2:18 is mentioned by Theodoret as existing in his days. A legend connected with an inundation was the ground of erecting a church to the archangel Michael near a chasm, probably the one noticed by Herodotus. “The river Lycus, sinking into a chasm in the town, disappears under ground, and, emerging at five stadia distance, flows into the Maeander” (7:30). Two streams, one from the N. the other from the S., pour into the Lycus, both possessing the power of petrifying. The calcareous deposits on the plants, and obstructions which the stream met with, gradually formed a natural arch, beneath which the current flowed as Herodotus describes; the soft crust was probably broken up by an earthquake. In the 4th century the council of Laodicea (in the same region) in its 35th canon prohibited calling upon angels. EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS: written by Paul during his first captivity at Rome ( Acts 28:16), in that part of it when as yet it had not become so severe as it did when the epistle to the Philippians ( Philippians 1:20,21,30) was written (probably after the death of Burrhus, A.D. 62, to whom Tigellinus succeeded as praetorian prefect). Its genuineness is attested by Justin Martyr (contra Tryphon, p. 311 b.), Theophilus of Antioch (Autol., 2:100), Irenaeus (3:14, section 1), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, 1:325), Tertullian (Praescr. Haeret., 7), Origen (c. Celsus, 5:8).

    Object: to counteract the Jewish false teaching there, of which Paul had heard from Epaphras ( Colossians 4:12), by setting before them their standing inCHRIST ALONE, exclusive of angels. the majesty of His person ( Colossians 1:15), and the completeness of redemption by Him. Hence, they ought to be conformed to their risen Lord ( Colossians 3:1-5), and exhibit that conformity in all relations of life. The false teaching opposed in this epistle ( Colossians 2:16,18, “new moon ... sabbath days”) is that of Judaizing Christians, mixed up with eastern theosophy, angel worship, and the asceticism of the Essenes ( Colossians 2:8,9,16-23). The theosophists professed a deeper insight into the world of spirits and a greater subjugation of the flesh than the simple gospel affords. Some Alexandrian Jews may have visited Colosse and taught Philo’s Greek philosophy, combined with the rabbinical angelology and mysticism, afterward embodied in the Cabbala.

    Alexander the Great had garrisoned Phrygia with Babylonian Jews. The Phrygians’ original tendency had been to a mystic worship, namely, that of Cybele; so, when Christianized, they readily gave heed to the incipient gnosticism of Judaizers. Later, when the pastoral epistles were written, the evil had reached a more deadly phase, openly immoral teachings ( <540401> Timothy 4:1-3; 6:5).

    The place of writing was Rome. The three epistles, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, were sent at the same time. The epistle to Colossians, though carried by the same bearer, Tychicus, who bore that to the Ephesians, was written earlier, for the similar phrases in Ephesians appear more expanded than those in Colossians. The “ye also” (as well as the Colossians) may imply the same fact ( Ephesians 6:21). The similarity between the three epistles written about the same date to two neighboring cities (whereas those written at distant dates and under different circumstances have little mutual resemblance) is an undesigned coincidence and proof of genuineness. Compare Ephesians 1:7 with Colossians 1:14; Ephesians 1:10 with Colossians 1:20; Ephesians 3:2 with Colossians 1:25; Ephesians 5:19 with Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 6:22 with Colossians 4:8; Ephesians 1:19; 2:5 with Colossians 2:12,13; Ephesians 4:2-4 with Colossians 3:12-15; Ephesians 4:16 with Colossians 2:19; Ephesians 4:32 with Colossians 3:13; Ephesians 4:22-24 with Colossians 3:9,10; Ephesians 5:6-8 with Colossians 3:6-8; Ephesians 5:15,16 with Colossians 4:5; Ephesians 6:19,20 with Colossians 4:3,4; Ephesians 5:22,23; 6:1-9 with Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 4:24,25 with Colossians 3:9; Ephesians 5:20-22 with Colossians 3:17,18.

    Onesimus traveled with Tychicus, bearing the letter to Philemon. The persons sending salutations are the same as in epistle to Philemon, except Jesus Justus ( Colossians 4:11). Archippus is addressed in both. Paul and Timothy head both. Paul appears in both a prisoner.

    The style has a lofty elaboration corresponding to the theme, Christ’s majestic person and office, in contrast to the Judaizers’ beggarly system. In the epistle to the Ephesians, which did not require to be so controversial, he dilates on these truths so congenial to him, with a fuller outpouring of spirit and less antithetical phraseology.

    COMMERCE In Solomon’s time first, the foreign trade of the Israelites to any extent began; chiefly consisting in imports, namely, linen yarn, horses, and chariots from Egypt. For these he paid in gold brought by his fleets, in concert with the Phoenicians, from India, East Africa, and Arabia ( Kings 10:22-29). He supplied provisions for the workmen in Lebanon, while the Phoenicians brought the timber by sea to Joppa ( 1 Kings 5:6,9). Palestine supplied Tyre with grain, honey, oil, balm, and wine ( Ezekiel 27:17; Acts 12:20). Solomon’s and the Phoenician united fleets brought on the Indian Ocean, from Ophir to Elath and Ezion Geber on the Elanitic gulf of the Red Sea (ports gained by David from Edom), gold, silver, ivory, see ALGUM OF ALMUG (see) trees, and precious stones, peacocks and apes ( 1 Kings 9:26; 10:11,22). He fortified Baalbek and Palmyra too, as a caravan station for the inland commerce of eastern and south eastern Asia. Oil was exported to Egypt ( Hosea 12:1). Fine linen and girdles were sold to merchants ( Proverbs 31:24).

    Jerusalem appears in Ezekiel 26:2 as the rival of Tyre, who exulted at the thought of her fall; “she is broken that was the gates (the mart) of the people, she (i.e. her commerce from Palmyra, Petra, and the East) is turned unto me. I shall be replenished now she is laid waste.” Caesarea was made a port by Herod; besides Joppa.

    The law strictly enjoined fair dealing, and just weights ( Leviticus 19:35,36; Deuteronomy 25:13-16).

    COMPEL The Greek angareuein is a Tartar word adopted by the Persians for impressing into the government service men and horses to carry the dispatches without interruption, by relays of men and horses stationed at intervals ( Matthew 5:41; Mark 15:21).

    CONANIAH 2 Chronicles 35:9.

    CONCUBINE The desire of offspring in the Jew was associated with the hope of the promised Redeemer. This raised concubinage from the character of gross sensuality which ordinarily it represents, especially when a wife was barren.

    This in some degree palliates, though it does not justify, the concubinage of Nahor, Abraham, and Jacob. The concubine’s children were adopted, as if they were the wife’s own offspring; and the suggestion to the husband often came from the wife herself (Genesis 30). The children were regarded, not as illegitimate, but as a supplementary family to that of the wife.

    Abraham sent them away with gifts during his lifetime, so as not to interfere with the rights of Isaac, the son of the promise.

    The seeming laxity of morals thus tolerated is a feature in the divine scheme arising from its progressive character. From the beginning, when man was sinless it was not so; for God made male and female that in marriage “they TWAIN should be one flesh” Matthew 19:4,5,8). But when man fell, and, in the course of developing corruption, strayed more and more from the original law, God provisionally sanctioned a code which imposed some checks on the prevalent licentiousness, and exercised His divine prerogative of overruling man’s evil to ultimate good. Such a provisional state was not the best absolutely, but the best under existing circumstances. The enactment was not a license to sin, but a restraint upon existing sin, and a witness against the hardness of man’s heart. The bondmaid or captive was not to be cast away arbitrarily after lust had been gratified ( Exodus 21:7-9; Deuteronomy 21:10,11); she was protected by legal restraints whereby she had a kind of secondary marriage relationship to the man. Thus, limits were set within which concubinage was tolerated until “the times of this ignorance” which “God winked at” ( Acts 17:30) passed by, and Christ restored the original pure code.

    Henceforward, fornication is a sin against one’s own body, and against the Lord Christ, with whom the believer is one in body and spirit ( Corinthians 6:15-20).

    To take the royal concubines was regarded as tantamount to seizing on the throne. [See ABNER , see ADONIJAH .] CONDUIT Hezekiah stopped the “upper watercourse of Gihon,” and brought it down straight to the W. of the city of David ( 2 Chronicles 32:30). Robinson identifies Gihon with the pool Birket-es-Mamilla at the head of the valley of Hinnom S.W. of Jerusalem. He thinks the lately discovered subterranean conduit in the city to be a branch from Hezekiah’s watercourse. Williams places Gihon N. of Jerusalem, near the tombs of the kings, and thinks that the watercourse flowed S. to the temple, and thence into the pool of Siloam, the lower pool. The proximity of “the upper pool” to “the fuller’s field” ( 2 Kings 18:17) favors this; as “the fuller’s monument” was N.E. of the city (Josephus).

    The pools of Solomon beyond Bethlehem for irrigating his garden ( Ecclesiastes 2:6) were probably connected with the supply of water for Jerusalem, which Talmudic tradition assigns to him. Pontius Pilate applied the sacred treasure of the corban to an aqueduct of 200 or 300 stadia, which is about the measure of the existing one. Probably he repaired Solomon’s original watercourse. The water is still conveyed from the fountains which supply the pools two miles S. of Bethlehem. It crosses the Hinnom valley on a nine-arched bridge above the pool Birket-es-Sultan, and at last is conducted to the Haram; repaired by Sultan Mahomet Ibn Kalaun of Egypt about A.D. 1300.

    CONEY shaphan , from the root “to hide”; the S. Arab, thofun; the Syrian Arab, weber. A pachydermatous animal, gregarious, greybacked, white on the belly, with long hair, short tail, and round ears; common on the ridges of Lebanon; living in caves and clefts; the Hyrax Syriacus, not the rabbit or coney. Proverbs 30:26: “the coneys are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks:” exactly true of the hyrax; with weak teeth, short incisors, and nails instead, it seems defenseless, but its security is in rocky hiding places, such as Ain Feshkah on the Dead Sea shore. “No animal” (says Tristram). “gave us so much trouble to secure.” It is described as “chewing the cud” ( Leviticus 11:5; Deuteronomy 14:7), in phenomenal language, because the motion of its jaws is like that of ruminating animals; so also the hare. Though in some respects like the rodentia, it is really akin to the rhinoceros; its molar teeth differ only in the size; its body is as large as the rabbit. The “exceeding wisdom” of the coneys is illustrated in their setting an old male sentry near their holes to warn his companions when danger approaches, by a whistling sound.

    CONFESSION James 5:16: “confess your faults one to another (the apostle does not say to the priest), and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” The “faults” (paraptoomata ) are literally “falls” in relation to one another. But the Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, and Vaticanus manuscripts and Vulgate read “sins” (hamartias ). Confession is desirable (1) in case of wrong done to a neighbor, Matthew 18:15; (2) to a Christian adviser, ordained or unordained, anyone who can apply God’s written word suitably to one’s need, and “pray for” and with one, James 5:16; (3) open confession of any wrong done to the church, which has caused scandal to religion, in token of penitence. Not auricular: Matthew 3:6; Acts 19:18, “many confessed and shewed (openly, not in the ear of a priest under the seal of secrecy) their deeds.”

    CONFIRMATION [See BAPTISM . Laying on hands.] CONGREGATION ‘eedah .CONVOCATION, qaahaal (restricted to the Pentateuch, except Isaiah 1:13). The Hebrews, regarded in their collective capacity as a “holy” community, gathered in sacred assembly composed of the homeborn Israelites. Settlers, only if circumcised, were admitted to the privileges ( Exodus 12:19). Each Israelite was member of a house; the family was a collection of houses; the tribe, a collection of families; the congregation, a collection of tribes. TheCONGREGATION was a national parliament, with legislative and judicial powers. TheCONVOCATION was restricted to religious meetings (Leviticus 23). Each house, family, and tribe had its head; these representative heads were “the elders” or “princes.”

    Moses selected 70 elders by God’s appointment to share the burden of government with him ( Numbers 11:16). The sounding of the two silver trumpets was the signal for the whole body of the people assembling at the door of the tabernacle, which was there called “the tabernacle of the congregation,” the moed , literally, a place of meeting ( Numbers 10:2-4). The princes were convened with only one trumpet. The people were bound to abide by the acts of their representatives ( Joshua 9:18).

    In later times the Sanhedrin council (corresponding to Moses’ seventy elders) represented the congregation. Synagogue, which originally applied to the assembly, came to mean the place of worship.

    CONONIAH 2 Chronicles 31:12,13.

    COPPER ( Ezra 8:27). But for KJV “brass” the translation elsewhere ought to be copper, (nechoshath ,) or where native ore is not meant, probably bronze.

    Zinc, one ingredient of brass, was then unknown. Used by the ancients for many purposes, for which its ductile nature adapted it. The earliest inhabitants of Europe used flint weapons, now discovered in various places. But Tubal-cain ( Genesis 4:22, from whence probably by corrupted tradition was derived the classic idol, Vulcan, the god of the forge) was “an instructor of every artificer in brass (copper) and iron,” years after creation according to Hebrew, or 1,000 according to Septuagint, chronology. The ignorance of large portions of mankind, of iron and copper, subsequently or even at that early date, does not disprove Tubal-cain’s and his artificers’ acquaintance with them. Savage nations, or races which have sunk in course of ages into barbarism, first used flint, then copper or bronze (an alloy of tin and copper), then iron; But there is no well-established instance of a savage race gradually civilizing themselves; the civilization has always been introduced from outside. Thus, bronze or copper was probably introduced among savages from more civilized nations. The American Indians at Cape Honduras visited by Columbus had hatchets, etc., of copper, and crucibles for melting it.

    Seth’s race was less distinguished for advancement in arts and luxuries than Cain’s race, which was wise in their generation; but the truest civilization is that which develops man’s moral and highest nature; in this respect Seth’s descendants were far superior, walking in recognition of conscience and of the providence and grace of God.

    Many intimations show that the Israelites knew how to dig out and smelt metals ( Deuteronomy 4:20; 8:9; Ezra 22:18). Their mirrors of polished copper ( Exodus 38:8 margin) and “bows of copper” (Hebrew text of Psalm 18:34) and “helmets,” etc. ( 1 Samuel 17:38), show they had some secret of rendering copper harder than ours is.

    The absence of iron remains does not necessarily prove it was unknown in Egypt, for it and the making of good steel have been known from very ancient times in India. It quickly decomposes, and so would leave no remains of implements. The copper mines worked by the Moschi, whose merchants imported it into Tyre, are mentioned Ezekiel 27:13.

    CORAL More precious in ancient times than now, when it is more easily procured ( Job 28:18; Ezekiel 27:16). The red coral is the stony skeleton of a red zoophyte. In the Mediterranean, on the African coast off Tunis, attached to the rock at a considerable depth, and broken off from them by long hooked poles, and thus drawn out (Hebrew for “price,” Job 28:18, is meshek , “the drawing out”). From Carthage (where Tunis now stands) the rough coral was imported to the mother city Tyre, and there manufactured into ornaments to be purchased by merchants for the women of Syria. Its tree-like growth is implied by its name ramoth , from raam “to be high”; others from the Sanskrit ramye, “pleasant.”

    CORBAN An offering to God in fulfillment of a vow; from which the temple treasury into which such gifts were east is called in Greek, korbanas ( Matthew 27:6). Also whatever men by vow interdicted themselves from, as wine, etc., was called qorban (Leviticus 27; Numbers 30; Judges 13:7; Jeremiah 35). Undutiful children, under the plea of having consecrated as corban to the Lord whatever help they might otherwise have given to their parents, evaded their filial obligation; this Christ denounced as a “making the commandment of God of none effect by man’s traditions” ( Matthew 15:5; Mark 7:11,12). The rabbis allowed a youth even to pronounce corban upon his property, and retain it for himself, though withholding it from his own parents. This extreme case however was not immediately referred to by our Lord.

    CORD “Lengthen thy cords, strengthen thy stakes” ( Isaiah 54:2); an image from a tent (appropriate, as the Israelite church was symbolized by the tabernacle); it, when enlarged, needs at once longer cords and stronger stakes. The church must not merely seek new converts, but strengthen in faith existing members. So in Job 4:21, “is not their cord in them unstrung?” or “snapped,” so that their earthly tabernacle comes down ( 2 Corinthians 5:1). In Ecclesiastes 12:6, “or ever the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken,” the meaning is, before life’s gilded lamp suspended from on high by the cord of intertwined silk and silver, be broken by the snapping of the cord. “The golden bowl” may hint at the skull; “the silver cord,” the spinal marrow attached to the brain, white and precious as silver. “He hath loosed my cord” ( Job 30:11) is animate from a bow unstrung (contrast Job 29:20). In Hosea 11:4, “I drew them with cords of a man,” i.e., with human methods, as a father would draw his child by leading strings. In Micah 2:5, “cast a cord by lot” i.e. have any measured out possession, cords being used for measurement ( Joshua 13:6; Psalm 16:6).

    CORIANDER To it in form and color the manna is compared ( Exodus 16:31; Numbers 11:7). The gad;, Phoenician, goid. An umbelliferous plant, with white or red flowers producing globular, gray, spicy, striated, seedvessels.

    Used as a condiment with food in Egypt, and in making confectionery.

    CORINTH Famed for its commerce, chiefly due to its situation between the Ionian and AEgean seas, on the isthmus connecting the Peloponnese with Greece. In Paul’s time it was capital of Achaia, and seat of the Roman proconsul ( Acts 18:12). Its people had the Greek love of philosophical subtleties.

    The immorality was notorious even in the pagan world; so that “to Corinthianize” was proverbial for playing the wanton. The worship of Venus, whose temple was on Acrocorinthus, was attended with shameless profligacy, 1,000 female slaves being maintained for the service of strangers. Hence, arose dangers to the purity of the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 5--7), founded by Paul on his first visit in his second missionary journey ( Acts 18:1-17).

    The early Greek Corinth had been left desolate for 100 years; its merchants had withdrawn to Delos, and the presidency of the isthmian games had been transferred to Sicyon, when Julius Caesar refounded the city as a Roman colony. Gallio the philosopher, Seneca’s brother, was proconsul during Paul’s first residence, in Claudius’ reign. Paul had come from Athens, shortly afterward Silas and Timothy from Macedonia joined him.

    His two earliest epistles,1 and 2 Thessalonians, were written there, A.D. 52 or 53. Here he made the friendship of Aquila and Priscilla, and labored at tentmaking with the former. Here, after his departure, Apollos came from Ephesus.

    The number of Latin names in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, written during his second visit of three months at Corinth ( Acts 20:3), A.D. 58, is in undesigned harmony with the origin of many of its people as a Roman colony. At the time of Paul’s visit Claudius’ decree banishing the Jews from Rome caused an influx of them to Corinth. Hence, many Jewish converts were in the Corinthian church (Acts 18), and a Judaizing spirit arose.

    Clement’s epistles to the Corinthians are still extant. Corinth is now the seat of an episcopal see. It is a poor village, called by a corruption of the old name, Gortho. The remains of its ancient Greek temple, and of the Posidonium or sanctuary of Neptune (N.E. of Corinth, near the Saronic gulf), the scene of the Isthmian games, are remarkably interesting. The stadium for the foot race (alluded to in 1 Corinthians 9:24), and the theater where the pugilists fought ( 1 Corinthians 9:26), and the pine trees of which was woven the “corruptible crown” or wreath for the conquerors in the games ( 1 Corinthians 9:25), are still to be seen. The Acrocorinthus eminence rising 2,000 feet above the sea was near Corinth, and as a fortress was deemed the key of Greece. N. of it was the port Lechaeum on the Corinthian gulf; on the other side on the Saronic gulf was Cenchraea ( Acts 18:18).

    The ornate “Corinthian order” of architecture, and “the Corinthian brass” or choice bronze statuary, attest the refinement of its people.

    FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. Its authenticity is attested by Clement of Rome (Ep., c. 47), Polycarp (Ep. to Philipp., c. 11), Ignatius (ad Eph., 2), and Irenaeus (Adv. Haer., 4:27, section 3).

    Its occasion and subject. Paul had been instrumental in converting many Gentiles ( 1 Corinthians 12:2) and some Jews ( Acts 18:8), notwithstanding the Jews’ opposition ( Acts 18:5,6), during his one year and a half sojourn. The converts were mostly of the humbler classes ( 1 Corinthians 1:26). Crispus, Erastus, and Gaius (Caius), however, were men of rank ( 1 Corinthians 1:14; Acts 18:8; Romans 16:23). Corinthians 11:22 implies a variety of classes. The immoralities abounding outside at Corinth, and the craving even within the church for Greek philosophy and rhetoric which Apollos’ eloquent style gratified, rather than for the simple preaching of Christ crucified ( 1 Corinthians 2:1, etc.; Acts 18:24, etc.), as also the opposition of Judaizing teachers who boasted of having “letters of commendation” from Jerusalem the metropolis of the faith, caused the apostle anxiety. The Judaizers depreciated his apostolic authority ( 1 Corinthians 9:1,2; <471001> Corinthians 10:1,7,8), professing, some to be the followers of the chief apostle, Cephas; others to belong to Christ Himself, rejecting all subordinate teaching ( 1 Corinthians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 10:7). Some gave themselves out to be apostles ( 2 Corinthians 11:5,13), alleging that Paul was not of the twelve nor an eye-witness of the gospel facts, and did not dare to prove his apostleship by claiming support from the church (1 Corinthians 9). Even those who declared themselves Paul’s followers did so in a party spirit, glorying in the minister instead of in Christ.

    Apollos’ followers also rested too much on his Alexandrian rhetoric, to the disparagement of Paul, who studied simplicity lest aught should interpose between the Corinthians and the Spirit’s demonstration of the Savior (1 Corinthians 2). Epicurean self-indulgence led some to deny the resurrection ( 1 Corinthians 15:32). Hence, they connived at the incest of one of them with his stepmother (1 Corinthians 5).

    The elders of the church had written to consult Paul on minor points: (1) meats offered to idols; (2) celibacy and marriage; (3) the proper use of spiritual gifts in public worship; (4) the collection for the saints at Jerusalem ( 1 Corinthians 16:1, etc.). But they never told him about the serious evils, which came to his ears only through some of the household of Chloe ( 1 Corinthians 1:11), contentions, divisions, lawsuits brought before pagan courts by Christian brethren against brethren ( <460601> Corinthians 6:1). Moreover, some abused spiritual gifts to display and fanaticism (1 Corinthians 14); simultaneous ministrations interrupted the seemly order of public worship; women spoke unveiled, in violation of eastern usage, and usurped the office of men; even the Holy Communion was desecrated by reveling (1 Corinthians 11). These then formed topics of his epistle, and occasioned his sending Timothy to them after his journey to Macedonia ( 1 Corinthians 4:17).

    In 1 Corinthians 4:18; 5:9, he implies that he had sent a previous letter to them; probably enjoining also a contribution for the poor saints at Jerusalem. Upon their asking directions as to the mode, he now replies ( 1 Corinthians 16:2). In it he also announced his design of visiting them on his way to and from Macedon ( 2 Corinthians 1:15,16), which design he changed on hearing the unfavorable report from Chloe’s household ( 1 Corinthians 16:5-7), for which he was charged with fickleness ( Corinthians 1:15-17). Alford remarks, Paul in 1 Corinthians alludes to the fornication only in a summary way, as if replying to an excuse set up after his rebuke, rather than introducing it for the first time.

    Before this former letter, he paid a second visit (probably during his three years’ sojourn at Ephesus, from which he could pass readily by sea to Corinth Acts 19:10; 20:31); for in 2 Corinthians 12:14; 13:1, he declares his intention to pay a third visit. In 1 Corinthians 13:2 translated “I have already said (at my second visit), and declare now beforehand, as (I did) when I was present the second time, so also (I declare) now in my absence to them who have heretofore sinned (namely, before my second visit, 1 Corinthians 12:21) and to all others” (who have sinned since it, or are in danger of sinning). “I write,” the Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus manuscripts rightly omit; KJV “as if I were present the second time,” namely, this time, is inconsistent with verse 1, “this is the third time I am coming” (compare 2 Corinthians 1:15,16).

    The second visit was a painful one, owing to the misconduct of many of his converts ( 2 Corinthians 2:1). Then followed his letter before the Corinthians, charging them “not to company with fornicators.” In Corinthians 5:9-12 he corrects their misapprehensions of that injunction.

    The Acts omits that second visit, as it omits other incidents of Paul’s life, e.g. his visit to Arabia ( Galatians 1:17-28).

    The place of writing was Ephesus ( 1 Corinthians 16:8). The English subscription “from Philippi” arose from mistranslating 1 Corinthians 16:5, “I am passing through Macedonia;” he intended ( 1 Corinthians 16:8) leaving Ephesus after Pentecost that year. He left it about A.D. ( Acts 19:21). The Passover imagery makes it likely the date was Easter time ( 1 Corinthians 5:7), A.D. 57. Just before his conflict with the beastlike mob of Ephesus, 1 Corinthians 15:32 implies that already he had premonitory symptoms; the storm was gathering, his “adversaries many” ( 1 Corinthians 16:9; Romans 16:4). The tumult ( Acts 19:29,30) had not yet taken place, for immediately after it he left Ephesus for Macedon.

    Sosthenes, the ruler of the Jews’ synagogue, after being beaten, seems to have been won by Paul’s love to an adversary in affliction ( Acts 18:12-17). Converted, like Crispus his predecessor in office, he is joined with Paul in the inscription, as “our brother.” A marvelous triumph of Christian love! Paul’s persecutor paid in his own coin by the Greeks, before Gallio’s eyes, and then subdued to Christ by the love of him whom he sought to persecute. Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, were probably the bearers of the epistle ( 1 Corinthians 16:17,18); see the subscription.

    SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. Reasons for writing. To explain why he deferred his promised visit to Corinth on his way to Macedonia ( 1 Corinthians 4:19; 16:5; 2 Corinthians 1:15,16), and so to explain his apostolic walk, and vindicate his apostleship against gainsayers ( Corinthians 1:12,24; 6:3-18; 7:2; 10; 11; 12). Also to praise them for obeying his first epistle, and to charge them to pardon the transgressor, as already punished sufficiently ( 2 Corinthians 2:1-11; 7:6-16). Also to urge them to contributions for the poor brethren at Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 8).

    Its genuineness is attested by Irenaeus (Haer., 3:7, section 1), Athenagoras (De Res. Mort.), Clement of Alexandria (Strom., 3:94, 4:101), and Tertullian (Pudic., 13).

    Time of writing. After Pentecost A.D. 57, when Paul left Ephesus for Troas. Having stayed for a time at Troas preaching with success ( Corinthians 2:12,13), he went on to Macedonia to meet Titus there, since he was disappointed in not finding him at Troas as he had expected. In Macedonia he heard from him the comforting intelligence of the good effect of the first epistle upon the Corinthians, and having experienced the liberality of the Macedonian churches (2 Corinthians 8) he wrote this second epistle and then went on to Greece, where he stayed three months; then he reached Philippi by land about Passover or Easter, A.D. ( Acts 20:1-6). So that the autumn of A.D. 57 will be the date of Corinthians.

    Place of writing. Macedonia, as 2 Corinthians 9:2 proves. In “ASIA” (see) he had been in great peril ( 2 Corinthians 1:8,9), whether from the tumult at Ephesus ( Acts 19:23-41) or a dangerous illness (Alford).

    Thence he passed by way of Troas to Philippi, the first city that would meet him in entering Macedonia ( Acts 20:1), and the seat of the important Philippian church. On comparing 2 Corinthians 11:9 with Philippians 4:15,16 it appears that by “Macedonia” there Paul means Philippi. The plural “churches,” however, ( 2 Corinthians 8:1) proves that Paul visited other Macedonian churches also, e.g. Thessalonica and Berea. But Philippi, as the chief one, would be the center to which all the collections would be sent, and probably the place of writing 2 Corinthians Titus, who was to follow up at Corinth the collection, begun at the place of his first visit ( 2 Corinthians 8:6).

    The style passes rapidly from the gentle, joyous, and consolatory, to stern reproof and vindication of his apostleship against his opponents. His ardent temperament was tried by a chronic malady ( 2 Corinthians 4:7; 5:1-4; 12:7-9). Then too “the care of all the churches” pressed on him; the weight of which was added to by Judaizing emissaries at Corinth, who wished to restrict the church’s freedom and catholicity by bonds of letter and form ( 2 Corinthians 3:8-18). Hence, he speaks of ( 2 Corinthians 7:5,6) “rightings without” and “fears within” until Titus brought him good news of the Corinthian church. Even then, while the majority at Corinth repented and excommunicated, at Paul’s command, the incestuous person, and contributed to the Jerusalem poor fund, a minority still accused him of personal objects in the collection, though he had guarded against possibility of suspicion by having others beside himself to take charge of the money ( 2 Corinthians 8:18-28). Moreover, their insinuation was inconsistent with their other charge, that his not claiming maintenance proved him to be no apostle. They alleged too that he was always threatening severe measures, but was too cowardly to execute them ( 2 Corinthians 10:8-16; 13:2); that he was inconsistent, for he had circumcised Timothy but did not circumcise Titus, a Jew among the Jews, a Greek among the Greeks ( 1 Corinthians 9:20, etc.; Galatians 2:3).

    That many of his detractors were Judaizers appears from 2 Corinthians 11:22. An emissary from Judaea, arrogantly assuming Christ’s own title “he that cometh” ( Matthew 11:3), headed the party ( 2 Corinthians 11:4); he bore “epistles of commendation” ( 2 Corinthians 3:1), and boasted of pure Hebrew descent, and close connection with Christ Himself ( 2 Corinthians 11:13,22,23). His high-sounding pretensions and rhetoric contrasted with Paul’s unadorned style, and carried weight with some ( 2 Corinthians 10:10,13; 11:6). The diversity in tone, in part, is due to the diversity between the penitent majority and the refractory minority.

    Two deputies chosen by the churches to take charge of the collection accompanied Titus, who bore this 2 Corinthians ( 2 Corinthians 8:18-22).

    CORMORANT The Pelicanus bassanus, of the family Colymbidoe, order Natatores.

    Hebrew shalak , i.e. the diver, from a root “to cast down” itself, or plunge after its prey. Unclean ( Leviticus 11:17; Deuteronomy 14:17).

    Septuagint katarraktes , which Speaker’s Commentary makes the “cormorant,” Phalacrocorax crabo, often seen in Syria, and occasionally at the sea of Galilee; this the Appendix to Smith’s Dict. contradicts. But for “cormorant” in Isaiah 34:11; Zephaniah 2:14, translated “pelican,” Hebrew qa’ath .

    CORN Wheat, barley, spelt (as the Hebrew for “rye,” Exodus 9:32, ought to be translated, for it was the common food of the Egyptians, called doora, as the monuments testify; also in Ezekiel 4:9 for “fitches” translated spelt). “Principal wheat,” i.e. prime, excellent ( Isaiah 28:25). “Seven ears on one stalk” ( Genesis 41:22) is common still in Egypt.

    The sheaves in harvest used to be decorated with the lilies of the field, which illustrates Song 7:2. “Plenty of grain” was part of Jacob’s blessing ( Genesis 27:28). From Solomon’s time the Holy Land exported grain to Tyre ( Ezekiel 27:17). See Amos 8:5. It is possible Indian grain or maize was known and used in Palestine as it was at Thebes in Egypt, where grains and leaves of it have been found under mummies. The wheat root will send up many stalks, but never more than one ear upon one stalk. But seven full ears upon one maize grain stalk have often been found. Maize grain in the milky state roasted is delicious: this, if meant in Leviticus 2:14, would give zest to the offering.

    CORNELIUS Centurion of the Italian band or cohort at Caesarea (Acts 10); “devout and one that feared God with all his house”: he ordered not merely himself but all his family in God’s ways. Compare Genesis 18:19; Joshua 24:15.

    He had made the most of his spiritual opportunities; for coming to the Holy Land a heathen, when he knew of the true God there he became a true proselyte. Now “whosoever hath to him shall be given” ( Matthew 13:12; Isaiah 64:5; Micah 2:7; John 7:17). So, “giving much alms to the people,” which showed the self sacrificing sincerity of his religion, and “praying to God always,” he was vouchsafed a further revelation, namely, the gospel, through Peter’s instrumentality. A vision to Cornelius desiring him to send to Joppa for Peter, and a vision to Peter on the morrow, just as Cornelius’ messengers, two household servants and “a devout soldier of them that waited on him continually” (for he followed David’s rule, <19A106> Psalm 101:6), were drawing nigh the city, instructing him to regard as clean those whom “God had cleansed,” though heretofore ceremonially “unclean,” and desiring him to go with Cornelius’ messengers “doubting nothing,” prepared the way. Whatever uncertainty there might be of the miraculous nature of either vision by itself, there can be none of the two mutually supporting each other. While Peter preached Jesus to them the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard. This left no doubt as to the propriety of baptizing these Gentile proselytes of the gate with Christian baptism.

    Thus Peter showed in act what Jesus meant by His promise, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever (ceremonies) thou shalt bind (declare obligatory), etc., loose (declare not so), etc., shall be bound ... loosed.” The question which perplexed the early church was not whether Gentiles might, become Christians (for that was plainly declared Mark 16:15; Luke 24:47), but whether they could be admitted without circumcision. Cornelius’ case decided this ( Acts 11:17; 10:28,34,35). Cornelius already “knew” by hearsay of Jesus’ preaching ( Acts 10:36,37); but now the faith was authoritatively declared to and accepted by him.

    An undesigned coincidence (a mark of truth) is to be observed in comparing “four days ago,” Acts 10:30, with Acts 10:9,23,24, front which it incidentally comes out that four days in all intervened between Cornelius’ vision and Peter’s arrival, two days in going to Joppa and two in returning, just as Cornelius states. Cornelius, representing Roman nationality and force, was peculiarly fitted to be the first Gentile convert, the firstfruits of the harvest that followed.

    CORNER A merciful provision of the law left the grainers of the fields and whatever crop was on them to be enjoyed by the poor ( Leviticus 19:9). So also gleanings of fields and fruit trees ( Leviticus 23:22; Deuteronomy 24:19-21). Such regulations diminished, much the amount of poverty. In David’s time only 500 or 600 in debt or distress joined him out of all Judaea ( 1 Samuel 21:11). Later the prophets constantly complain of the rich defrauding the poor ( Isaiah 3:14,15; 10:2; Amos 5:11).

    CORNERSTONE Binding together the sides of the building. Some of the temple ones are ft. long and 7 1/2 thick. Compare Solomon’s temple, 1 Kings 5:17; 7:9.

    Christ is the true grainer stone, laid by the Father in Zion, on whom the whole church rests ( Isaiah 28:16). He is also “the head stone,” or fifth crowning top grainer of the pyramid, in which the whole building meets and culminates ( Zechariah 4:7). Compare Genesis 49:24; <19B822> Psalm 118:22; Matthew 21:42; Romans 9:33,34; Ephesians 2:21.

    CORNET A horn trumpet used for war, for signals, for proclaiming the jubilee and new year. The shophar was long and straight; the qeren (Daniel 3) crooked. [Shophar] is generally translated “trumpet,” qeren “cornet” (Daniel 3). God appointed the making of two silver trumpets. They were 120 in Solomon’s time ( 2 Chronicles 5:12), and were employed for other purposes besides those originally contemplated, namely, in the temple orchestra.

    The first day of the seventh month was “the memorial of blowing of trumpets” ( Leviticus 23:24; Numbers 29:1). The beginning of the civil new year was thus ushered in with joyful thanksgivings for the mercies of the old year, the Levites chanting Psalm 81. This usage, however, cannot be proved so early as Moses’ time, when the beginning of the (religious) year was fixed at the spring equinox, the period of the institution of the Passover, the month Abib ( Exodus 12:2).

    The rabbis represent the seventh month as the anniversary of creation. The first day “memorial of blowing of trumpets” preluded the tenth day yearly great “atonement.”

    COS Coos: now Stancho, a contraction of eis teen CHoa . Paul passed the night on this island on his way by sea from Miletus to Rhodes ( Acts 21:1). It is N.W. of Rhodes; 25 miles long by 10 miles wide. The chief town was on the N.E. of the island, near the promontory Scandarium.

    COSAM Luke 3:28. (See GENEALOGIES .)

    COTTON Karpas . KJV has “green” ( Esther 1:6), where “cotton” ought to be; for kurpasa in Sanskrit and kindred terms of other eastern languages means “cotton.” Cotton was manufactured, though not grown, anciently in Egypt.

    In India is the earliest record of its use for dress.

    COUNCIL TheSANHEDRIN, a term formed from the Greek sunedrion . The Jews’ supreme council in Christ’s time. Moses’ tribunal of seventy seems to have been temporary ( Numbers 11:16,17), for there are no traces of it in Deuteronomy 17:8-10, nor under Joshua, judges, and the kings. As the permanent great council it probably took its rise after the return from Babylon, under the Graeco-Macedonian supremacy. 2 Macc. 1:10; 4:44; 11:27, contain the earliest allusion to it. The number was probably derived from Moses’ council. Its members were the chief priests or heads of the courses, and those who had been high priests; also the elders and scribes learned in Jewish law ( Matthew 26:57,59; Mark 15:1; Luke 22:66; Acts 5:21). Seventy-one is the number, according to Jewish tradition, to correspond to the 70 and Moses ( Numbers 11:16). Others say 72, since to the 70) Eldad and Medad are to be added ( Numbers 11:26).

    The president was called nasi’ ; generally the high priest ( Matthew 26:62). The vice-president is called “father of the house of judgment” in the Talmud One scribe registered the votes for acquittal, another those for condemnation, according to the Babylonian Gemara. They sat in the form of a half circle; the vice-president or the oldest at the president’s right hand, the rest sat before these two according to their dignity. The Gazzith or council hall was in the S.E. corner of a court near the temple.

    Sometimes they met in the high priest’s palace ( Matthew 26:3). In Christ’s time the sessions were moved from Gazzith to a hall further from the temple, but still on mount Moriah. Its final seat was at Tiberias.

    They tried cases of idolatry and false prophets. On this allegation Jesus, and subsequently Peter, John, Stephen, and Paul were brought before them ( John 11:47). Their authority extended even to Jews in foreign cities ( Acts 9:2). The Gemara states that power of life and death was taken from them just forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, coinciding with John 18:31,32. The confirmation and execution of a capital sentence rested with the Roman procurator, from whence they took Jesus before Pontius Pilate on a different charge from that of blasphemy, for which the Sanhedrin condemned Him, namely, that of treason against Caesar, the only one which Pilate would have entertained. The stoning of Stephen ( Acts 7:56, etc.) was an illegal assumption of power, an outbreak of fanatical violence, as also the execution of the apostle James in the procurator’s absence (Josephus, Ant. 20:9, section 1).

    There were two lesser courts or “councils” ( Matthew 10:17) in Jerusalem; one in each town of Palestine, 23 members in each in a town of 120, three when the population was below 120 (Talmud). They were connected with the several synagogues and possessed the right of scourging ( 2 Corinthians 11:24); but Josephus represents the local courts, as constituted by Moses, to have consisted of seven, with two Levitical assessors apiece. Matthew 5:21,22, “the judgment,” perhaps alludes to such courts.

    There was also a privy “council” to assist the Roman procurator when he chose to consult them ( Acts 25:12).

    COVENANT Hebrew berit , Greek diatheekee . From baarah “to divide” or” cut in two” a victim (Gesenius), between the parts of which the covenanting parties passed ( Genesis 15:9, etc.; Jeremiah 34:18,19). Probably the covenanting parties eating together (which barah sometimes means) of the feast after the sacrifice entered into the idea; compare Genesis 31:46,47, Jacob and Laban. “ACOVENANT OF SALT,” taken in connection with the eastern phrase for friendship, “to eat salt together,” confirms this view. Salt, the antidote to corruption, was used in every sacrifice, to denote purity and perpetuity ( Leviticus 2:13; Mark 9:49). So a perpetual covenant or appointment ( Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5).

    The covenant alluded to in Hosea 6:7 margin is not with Adam (KJV “men” is better, compare Psalm 82:7), for nowhere else is the expression “covenant” applied to Adam’s relation to God, though the thing is implied in Romans 5:12-19; 1 Corinthians 15:22; but the Sinaitic covenant which Israel transgressed as lightly as “men” break their every day covenants with their fellow men, or else they have transgressed like other “men,” though distinguished above all men by extraordinary spiritual privileges. “Covenant” in the strict sense, as requiring two independent contracting parties, cannot apply to a covenant between God and man. His covenant must be essentially one of gratuitous promise, an act of pure grace on His part ( Galatians 3:15, etc.). So in Psalm 89:28 “covenant” is explained by the parallel word “mercy.” So God’s covenant not to destroy the earth again by water (Genesis 9; Jeremiah 33:20). But the covenant, on God’s part gratuitous, requires man’s acceptance of and obedience to it, as the consequence of His grace experienced, and the end which He designs to His glory, not that it is the meritorious condition of it. The Septuagint renders berit by diatheekee (not suntheekee , “a mutual compact”), i.e. a gracious disposal by His own sovereign will. So Luke 22:29, “I appoint (diatithemai , cognate to diatheekee , by testamentary or gratuitous disposition) unto you a kingdom.”

    The legal covenant of Sinai came in as a parenthesis (pareiselthee , Romans 5:20) between the promise to Abraham and its fulfillment in his promised seed, Christ. “It was added because of the (so Greek) transgressions” ( Galatians 3:19), i.e. to bring them, and so man’s great need, into clearer view ( Romans 3:20; 4:15; 5:13; 7:7-9). For this end its language was that, of a more stipulating kind as between two parties mutually covenanting, “the man that doeth these things shall live by them” ( Romans 10:5). But the promise to David (2 Samuel 7; Psalm 89; 2; 72; Isaiah 11) took up again that to Abraham, defining the line, the Davidic, as that in which the promised seed should come. As the promise found its fulfillment in Christ, so also the law, for He fulfilled it for us that He might be “the Lord our righteousness,” “the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” ( Jeremiah 23:6; 1 Corinthians 1:30; Romans 10:4; Matthew 3:15; 5:17; Isaiah 42:21; 45:24,25).

    In Hebrews 9:15-18 the gospel covenant is distinguished from the legal, as the New Testament contrasted with the Old Testament “Testament” is the better translation here, as bringing out the idea of diatheekee , God’s gracious disposal or appointment of His blessings to His people, rather than suntheekee , mutual engagement between Him and them as though equals. A human “testament” in this one respect illustrates the nature of the covenant; by death Christ chose to lose all the glory and blessings which are His, that we, who were under death’s bondage, might inherit all. Thus the ideas of “mediator of the covenant,” and “testator,” meet in Him, who at once fulfills God’s “covenant of promise,” and graciously disposes to us all that is His. In most other passages “covenant” would on the whole be the better rendering. “Testament” for each of the two divisions of the Bible comes from the Latin Vulgate version.

    In Matthew 26:28, “this is My blood of the new testament” would perhaps better be translated “covenant,” for a testament does not require blood shedding. Still, here and in the original ( Exodus 24:8) quoted by Christ the idea of testamentary disposition enters. For his blood was the seal of the testament. See below. Moses by “covenant” means one giving the heavenly inheritance (typified by Canaan) after the testator’s death, which was represented by the sacrificial blood he sprinkled. Paul by testament means one with conditions, and so far a covenant, the conditions being fulfilled by Christ, not by us. We must indeed believe, but even this God works in His people ( Ephesians 2:8). Hebrews 9:17, “a testament is in force after men are dead,” just as the Old Testament covenant was in force only in connection with slain sacrificial victims which represent the death of Christ. The fact of the death must be “brought forward” ( Hebrews 9:16) to give effect to the will.

    The word” death,” not sacrifice or slaying, shows that “testament” is meant in Hebrews 9:15-20. These requisites of a “testament” here concur: 1. The Testator. 2. The heirs. 3. Goods. 4. The Testator’s death. 5. The fact of His death brought forward. In Matthew 26:28 two additional requisites appear. 6. Witnesses, His disciples. 7. The seal, the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, the sign of His blood, wherewith the testament is sealed.

    The heir is ordinarily the successor of him who dies, and who so ceases to have possession. But Christ comes to life again, and is Himself (including all that He had), in the power of tits now endless life, His people’s inheritance; in His being heir ( Hebrews 1:2; Psalm 2:8) they are heirs.

    COZ 1 Chronicles 4:8.

    COZBI Numbers 25:15-18.

    CRACKNELS 1 Kings 14:3; biscuits baked hard.

    CRANE Isaiah 38:14, “like a crane or a s wallow, so did I chatter” (rather “twitter”); rather “like a swallow or a crane”: sus agur . A plaintive and migratory ( Jeremiah 8:7) bird is implied by sus ; Italian zisilla, “swallow.” Gesenius takes gahur as an epithet, “like the circling swallow.”

    Thirteen manuscripts of Kennicott read [isis] for [sus] or [sis]; that goddess having been, according to Egyptian fable, changed into a swallow; a fable transferred to the Greek mythology, in the story of Procne.

    CREATION Science and revelation being from the same God cannot be mutually opposed. But either, or both, may be misinterpreted; and there have been as many false interpretations of the book of nature as of revelation. As the Copernican theory was ultimately found not to militate against, but to harmonize with, Scripture, when the language of the latter was better understood; so no real scientific discovery ever since has been found adverse to full belief in revelation, when the latter has been better understood. The full knowledge of both has ever advanced side by side.

    The Bible, having not scientific but religious truth for its object, speaks in phenomenal language, which in part even the scientific have to do, as in the phrases sunrise and sunset.

    Creation, in the strict sense of the first origination of being out of nothing, does not come within the scope of science. It is by the Bible alone, and” through faith we understand that the worlds were framed (fitly formed) by the word of God, so that not (as, from the analogy of things reproduced from previously existing and visible materials, one naturally would suppose) out of things which appear hath that which is seen been made” ( Hebrews 11:3). No human being was witness of creation ( Job 38:4). Geology traces ages ascending backward, marked by animal and vegetable existence, less and less highly organized the further back we go; but at last comes to a point beyond which it has no light, and I must fall back on revelation and faith for information. “In the beginning God created” the world, “the heaven and the earth” ( Genesis 1:1): “In the beginning the Word WAS” ( John 1:1). Bara’ , “created,” used of creating (1) the universe; (2) the sea monsters whose vastness causes amazement at God’s power; (3) man, in the image of God ( Genesis 1:27). Everywhere else God “makes” (‘asah ), as from an already created material, the firmament, sun and stars, and the brute ( Genesis 1:7,16,25), or “forms” (yaatsar ) beasts out of the ground ( Genesis 2:19), and “builds up” ( Genesis 2:22 margin) the woman of the rib from man. The three verbs occur together ( Isaiah 43:7). Bara’ is confined to GOD’s acts; the other two verbs are used also of man’s acts.

    Though bara’ extends to other acts of God besides the original creation, it is only in a secondary application, without reference to preexisting materials; still, except in the original creation, they are not excluded.

    Moreover, the contextual “in the beginning” can only mean an absolute beginning, in contrast to the previous nonexistence of the world and sole existence of the Creator. This creation of all things out of nothing distinguishes the Bible from all pagan cosmogonies and philosophical speculations, which make matter eternal. The Creator’s mode of “creating” is not revealed, but simply the fact, that it was by the putting forth of His will.

    Two narratives of creation, the latter ( Genesis 2:4, etc.) the supplement to the former (Genesis 1--2:3), appear at the forefront as the basis of the Bible revelation. That in Genesis 2:4, etc., evidently continues and recapitulates that in Genesis 1--2:3, in order to prepare the way for the account of paradise and man’s fall. The first gives a clear summary of creation, man included, down to the sabbath rest from creation. The second concentrates attention on man. Accordingly, in the first Elohim (from ‘alah “strong”), the name for the mighty God of creation in general, appears. In the second Jehovah (Yahweh , the personal God in covenant relation to man, the unchanging “I AM.” To mark the identity of this personal Jehovah with the Elohim of the previous part, the two, the personal and the generic names, are joined, Jehovah-Elohim “the Lord God.” The mighty Elohim who created all things is also the Jehovah, who from the days of paradise down to the days of Moses, the writer of the pentateuch, has been in personal and unchangeable covenant relation with His people. Moreover, Jehovah, being derived from hawah, the Syriac and Chaldee for the Hebrew hayah “to be,” must have come down from a time prior to the separation of the Hebrews from the Aramaeans, i.e., prior to Abraham (for Syriac was soon after quite distinct from Hebrew, Genesis 31:47).

    The accounts of creation and of the construction of the tabernacle resemble each other (the world being God’s great tabernacle, Psalm 19); the general plan first (Genesis 1), then the actual creation of the first pair, Eden, etc., next. Scripture’s design being to unfold redemption, only so much of the natural world is set forth as is needed for that design. Genesis 1 is not so much a full narrative of details as a revelation of the scheme in the Creator’s mind, the archetype of the actual ( Genesis 2:4,5; Gesenius, Targum, and Syriac). “Now no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprouted forth, for the Lord God had not caused it to ram,” etc. The earth already had brought forth grass ( Genesis 1:11); but no cultivated land and no vegetables fit for man’s use existed yet; “plant,” “field,” “grew,” do not occur in Genesis 1. In the pattern of the tabernacle shown on the mount the description begins with the furniture of the tabernacle, then goes on to the priests, and ends with the sabbatical law. So, in creation, the process begins with the lower creatures, plants, and animals, then, man, creation’s priest, Eden, and lastly the sabbath. Genesis 1:1 teaches the religious truth needed for a right knowledge of God, that the world is not eternal, that God created it in the beginning; when that beginning was it does not state. But the high antiquity of the earth is expressly taught in Psalm 90:2, where God’s formation of “the earth” in general is distinguished from that of “the (Hebrew tebel ) habitable world,” Greek oikoumenee ( <19A225> Psalm 102:25; Proverbs 8:22). Geology shows that creation occupied immense ages, but that man’s creation was its closing act and at a comparatively recent date.

    Two views are held as to Genesis 1: The one that between Gen.1:1 and Gen.1:2 intervened the vast geological periods, and that these are undescribed in Genesis 1; and that Genesis 1:2 describes the chaotic state which succeeded the last geological period before the earth’s preparation for man; and that the description of the six days refers to this preparation. If the seventh day sabbath in Genesis 2:2 be an ordinary day, then the six days must be ordinary days and this view is favored. But geology seems to oppose any such state of the earth intervening between the preceding age and that of man’s creation as could be described as” without form (desolate) and void.” No universal convulsion (IF these words are to be pressed literally) separates the present orders of life from those preceding. No one series of stratified rocks is void of traces of life.

    Thus, we seem led to the conclusion (2) that the stage in the earth’s progress when it became surrounded with chaotic waters (how long after “the beginning” we know not), described in Genesis 1:2, is that which existed before the arrangement of its surface took place. (But see below.)

    The sabbath of God is described in Hebrews 3--4, as not yet ended; it will last until He who sitteth on the throne shall say, “Behold I make all things new.” God’s creating this dark and desolate state of the earth was not in vain, but that in due time it might be “inhabited” ( Isaiah 45:18). It was no “fortuitous concourse of atoms,” or “laws of nature” acting independently of the continually active divine will of their Author. “The Spirit of God” as the Giver of life “brooded (‘moved’) upon the waters.”

    Then began organic life, at first in the lower types. Sir W. Jones (Asiatic Researches) states that the Indian philosophers similarly believed (doubtless from the primitive tradition) that water was the first element and work of the creative power. “The waters are called Nara, since they are the offspring of Nera or Iwara, and thence was Narayana named, because His first moving was upon them.THAT WHICH IS (the exact meaning of the I\parAM orJEHOVAH), the invisible Cause eternal, self-existing, but unperceived, is Brahma.” This address of Menu, Brahma’s son, to the sages who consulted him concerning the formation of the world, evidently corresponds with the revelation in Genesis.

    Then God said “Let there be light,” and there was light. Light was first in a diffused state. It is not a separate, distinct body in itself, but caused by undulations of ether propagated through space with inconceivable rapidity.

    Hence it is not said God created, but God commanded it to be.

    Scientifically the Bible distinguishes between “light” (‘or ), Genesis 1:3-5, and the light hearing “luminaries” (me’orot ), Genesis 1:14-18. Much of the preexisting light diffused through space on the fourth day gathered round the sun’s body (compare Job 38:19). Still, through the incandescent photosphere that enwraps the sun we catch glimpses of the orb itself by the spots visible on it. “Day” is used often for a long period, with a beginning and’ close, like morning and evening ( Genesis 49:27; Deuteronomy 33:12). As the prophetic “days” at the close ( Daniel 12:11,12), so the historical “days” at the beginning of the Bible seem to be not literal but “days of the Lord”; compare Psalm 90:4, “a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday,” and 2 Peter 3:8, “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” Psalm 104 is an inspired commentary on the history of creation in Genesis 1; compare the account in <19A408> Psalm 104:8; Proverbs 8:25-28, of the upheaval of mountains from beneath the waters and depression of valleys, whereby land was severed from sea; just as we still find traces (sea shells, etc.) of their former submersion on the highest mountains.

    The special phrase in the Hebrew for the first day, “one day,” marks it as a day unique, just as the day that shall usher in the millennium is called” one (extraordinary and unique) day” ( Zechariah 14:7). The seventh day is not described as the previous six, “it was evening, it was morning,” because the Lord’s sabbath extends over the whole present order of things, eventuating in the “sabbath rest that remaineth for the people of God” ( Hebrews 4:9 margin). The Creator entered into the sabbath rest when He ceased from material creation, to carry on the new and spiritual creation in man ( 2 Corinthians 5:17; Hebrews 4:10). Yet God’s sabbath is not an idle one: “My Father worketh hitherto,” namely, upholding all creation. Compare Jesus’ “day” ( John 9:4; 5:17); man’s present short-day-sabbath is a type of God’s and the saints’ saboatism. The proportion of the seventh day to the previous six, of whatever length it and they be, is the ground of our seventh-day sabbath.

    For the “firmament” ( Genesis 1:6) translated “the (air) expanse,” or sky overhead which supports the clouds or” waters above the heavens.” Air, involved in the creation of the expanse, was the second necessity after light. Light was needed for the crystallization of inorganic forms and the molecular arrangement of the mineral matter of rocks. Light and air are needed for even the lowest types of life.

    Hugh Miller identifies the first day’s work with the azoic period; the second day with the silurian or palaeozoic; the third day with the carboniferous; the fourth day with the permian and triassic; the fifth day with the oolitic or cretaceous, the period when, the air and the waters having been previously prepared, the waters brought forth in swarms insects, fish, and monstrous reptiles of sea and land, and fowl flew in the air; the sixth day with the tertiary, which saw first the higher animals, the land mammalia, and lastly MAN.

    Plants appear before animals in Genesis 1. Geology does not directly as yet confirm this; but it may hereafter; the cellular structure of the earlier plants was not favorable to their preservation. Moreover, dependent as animals are on vegetation, it must have preceded them.

    Traces of life are found in the laurentian and certainly in the cambrian strata, the former the oldest rocks, whereas animal creation seemingly does not appear until the fifth day in Genesis 1:20-22. But “fish” (dag ) is omitted in the fifth day; an omission the more remarkable, as “fish” occurs ( Genesis 1:26,28) as among the animals over which God gave man dominion. The creation of fish long previously is therefore assumed, not stated. The tannin , from tanan “to stretch, and romesheth , from raamas “to trample” (“whales” and” every living creature that moveth,” Genesis 1:21), answer to the saurians and allied reptiles occurring in the rocks precisely at the point assigned them by Moses. The narrative in Genesis does not assert simultaneous creation of all the plants on the third day, and of reptiles and birds on the fifth, and of mammals on the sixth day; the divine command and its fulfillment are narrated as distinct. What Moses narrates is, not the first appearance of each class, but the time when each came into remarkable development and prominence. The simplicity and brevity of the narrative exclude the noting of the creation of the primeval types which passed out of existence ages before man appeared. God ordered His own work on a system of law, and from time to time supplied new forces, or gave new directions to existing forces; not that He changed His design, or found His original plan defective. He contemplated the interference from the first, but did not introduce them until their time was come.

    In the theory of the correlation of forces, electricity, galvanism, chemical action, gravitation, light and heat, are various manifestations of the same thing, called force or energy. Light is not a material substance, but a mode of motion, undulations of ether propagated with inconceivable velocity.

    Accurately Moses writes, not God made light, but said on the first day Let light be. But why at the first, before organisms needing light existed?

    Because, to call forth light was to call into action FORCE in its various manifestations. Matter and force are the two elements out of which visible creation is formed. Matter was already made, but it remained chaotic ( Genesis 1:2) until force in the form of “light” was evolved. Then gravitation would begin, light and heat would permeate the mass, elementary substances which chemistry reveals would be developed, and the whole would move toward the center of gravity. The great nebula of Orion illustrates the state of the solar system when light first appeared.

    God’s dividing the light from the darkness, and calling the light Day and the darkness Night, is the Mosaic phrase which marks His communicating rotatory motion to the mass, so that the earth revolved on its axis, from whence now results the division of day and night; a result however not then ensuing until the sun concentrated the diffused light in itself on the fourth day, when accordingly again the division of day and night is mentioned.

    Laplace’s nebular hypothesis is possible only by supplying what revelation supplies, namely, God’s interposition to impart force and rotation to matter. The nebulae in Orion and Argo represent the state of our system on the first appearance of light; there are changes passing over nebulae, some in the purely gaseous stage, others (as the nebula Draco) in transition, others in incipient central condensation. The 118 Andromeda nebula assumes a lenticular form resulting from rapid rotation, the mass being ready to break up into separate worlds. All the motions of the bodies of our solar system are from W. to E., proving that their motions have a common origin, all at one time existing as a single mass revolving in the same direction. Uranus’ satellites alone on the outer verge of our system retrograde, having been acted upon by some disturbing force. Bode’s law of planetary distances ceases beyond Uranus, and does not hold good in Neptune. The figure of the earth is that naturally assumed by a plastic mass revolving about its axis; also its traces of intense heat accord with the nebular theory as modified by revelation; also the sun’s state as a nebulous star which has not yet gathered up the whole of the original nebula.

    At the beginning ofTHE SECOND DAY the earth had become separated from the gradually condensing mass of the solar system, and formed into a sphere. The “waters” mean the fluid mass of what afterward was divided into solid, fluid, and gas. The sorting of them was the work of the second day. Hydrogen and nitrogen in an incandescent state compose mainly many nebulae, as the spectroscope shows. God’s introduction ofOXYGEN into active operation produced air and water in our earth, which before the second day had consisted of a fused heterogeneous mass. Almost half of the earth’s crust consists of oxygen, which enters into the composition of every rock and metallic ore. Chemical action therefore must have been most intense during the whole second day. By it the waters above the firmament were separated from that molten mass under the firmament which subsequently consolidated into rocks and ores. Probably all the water, strictly so-called, floated above, in the condition in which Jupiter now appears. His apparent surface is crossed by alternating belts of light and shade, due to vast masses of steam ejected forcibly from the body of the fiery planet. His atmosphere being of vast depth (7,850 miles), the rotatory velocity of its upper portions is much greater than that of the planet’s surface; hence the steam arranges itself in belts parallel to its equator. The eight greater planets are divided into two groups of four by the intervening belt of minor planets. The two groups differ much; but the members of each differ little in density, size, and length of day; the moon is the only satellite of the inner group; the outer has 17 satellites. The steam of the earth floating at the second day’s commencement would soon lose its heat by radiation into space, and would descend to the surface as rain.

    So the nucleus would gradually cool, and solids be formed, as granite, from the heat, moisture, and enormous pressure; and the globe internally molten would have a solid crust, covered all round with water, and surrounded by an atmosphere denser and more complex and extensive than now.

    The laurentian is the earliest sedimentary rock, 200,000 square miles N. of the Lawrence; the lower laurentian has been displaced from its original horizontal position before the upper was deposited above it. At this point is the first trace of upheaval and subsidence; here the Creator’s interposition is marked, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear,” the first work ofTHE THIRD DAY. The first appearance of life is not noted in Genesis In the laurentian rock the first traces of life appear, a lowly organization akin to the foraminifera, the individuals being connected together as in varieties of coral. In the cambrian, the next rocks, ripple marks occur showing that those rocks (the Harlech grit) formed a sea beach. The silurian, deposited in the bed of a sea, and the old red sandstone, afresh water formation, come next. Then the carboniferous, with the coal measures above, testifying to an uniformly high temperature (since coal is found in far N. latitudes), a moist atmosphere, and an enormous terrestrial vegetation. This answers to God’s command on the third day, “Let the earth sprout sprouts (‘the herb seeding seed,’” and the fruit trees yielding fruit, etc. The majority of the vegetation then was cryptogamous, having only spores which only contain the germ; but seeds contain the germ and nourishment for it. No traces of grasses are found. The first of the three classes in God’s words is the cryptogamous or seedless, the other are seedbearers. Not the first beginnings, but the extraordinary development, of vegetable life is here marked. The cryptogams thrive best in an atmosphere such as then existed, in which light was diffused rather than concentrated in the sun, and in which the atmosphere was full of moisture. They absorbed and decomposed the excess of carbonic acid, and so purified the atmosphere. The great heat was derived from other sources than the sun, perhaps from the interior of the earth.

    On THE FOURTH DAY the concentration of light and heat in the sun was so far completed that he became the luminary of the system which heretofore had derived its light and heat from other sources; possibly the light now in the sun had existed as a nebulous ring warming the planets within it, as the nebula ring in Lyra; or as diffused luminous matter, filling a space which included the earth’s orbit. The system’s light is not even yet wholly concentrated into the sun, but a vast chromosphere or ring of light surrounds his disc. Enormous volumes of hydrogen are ejected from it, and rotate on their axis as a cyclone. A corona, like the nebula in 4,373, extends beyond the chromosphere, reaching from 400,000 to 1,800,000 miles beyond the sun; besides gaseous hydrogen the corona contains solid or fluid particles giving a spectrum with dark lines indicating matter capable of reflecting light. The zodiacal light is thought to be a faint extension of the corona. The fourth day work was the concentration of light into the sun, “God made two luminaries” (light bearers, marking the distinction between them and light itself). The permian and triassic rocks, of which the magnesian limestone and the new red sandstone are chief representatives in England, answer to the fourth day. The earliest saurian fossils occur in very small numbers, and the first traces of mammalia, namely, small marsupials. Old forms pass away, and the barrenness of new forms of life answers to the Mosaic silence as to new forms of life on the fourth day.

    The great-sized saurians characterize the lias and oolite and chalk, answering exactly to Moses’ account ofTHE FIFTH DAY.

    The mammalia, the rodentia, and mustelidae, predominating in the tertiary period, answer to Moses’ account ofTHE SIXTH DAY.

    However, in favor of the six days being ordinary days, D’Orbigny maintains that a gulf of darkness and death must have intervened between the tertiary strata and our present fauna and flora; for that not a single species, vegetable or animal, is common to the tertiary and the human periods. Dr. Pusey (Daniel, preface, 19) thinks that the condition of the earth “without form and void” was such as God, who made all things “very good,” never created ( Genesis 1:2); then for an undefined period ( Genesis 1:3) “the Spirit of God was brooding (Hebrew) upon the face of the waters” of the dark and disordered “deep.” Then followed successive action in God’s remodeling the earth for man’s habitation.

    Possibly the order of Creation of the whole world in six vast periods, called “days,” was repeated in six literal days in preparing the earth for man, its noblest occupant, “the minister and interpreter of nature” (Bacon).

    Natural selection, and sexual selection, the causes conjectured lately as accounting for change of species, are inadequate; for in each individual the concurrence of many contingent causes through ages is needed for producing the result. The probabilities against this concurrence in any one case are enormous, and in a large number of cases are out of the question.

    Such causes do not account for the development of a new organ, as mammary glands; or for the case of man, in whom intellectual superiority is accompanied by loss of physical power. No one case is known of natural or sexual selection altering species, and man’s molding of breeds to his mind has never been carried beyond narrow limits. The plan of creation is progressive development modified by continual superintendence and occasional interpositions of the Creator, just at the points where they were required to make the theory of Darwin possible. God’s “breathing into man the breath of lives” marks that while his body is allied to lower animals his moral and intellectual qualities come directly from above. The facts of observation confirm Genesis, and prove that these never could have been developed by natural or sexual selection, or the struggle for life out of lower organizations. Man’s moral and intellectual superiority, while he is physically inferior, distinguishes his creation from that of all below him. (Condensed from Ackland’s Story of Creation.) Unless one abnormal variety in a species furnished both a male and a female of the new kind, the new species would cease. Even if both were produced simultaneously, unless intermixture with the original species were secured, hybrids would result, and these do not propagate. No trace in all the strata of geology occurs of intermediate links between species. Cuvier’s principle of final causes and conditions of existence requires the coordination of each being so as to render the total possible. Every organized being has an entire system of its own, all the parts of which mutually correspond and combine by reciprocal action to the same end; no one can change in one part without a corresponding change in its other members. Thus, if the viscera be fitted only for digesting recent fish, the jaws must be constructed for devouring, the claws for seizing and tearing prey, the teeth for dividing its flesh, the limbs for pursuing and overtaking it, the organs of sense for discovering it far off, and the brain for such instincts as will enable it to plot for its prey.

    The Assyrian tradition of creation, discovered by G. Smith, agrees with the Bible rather than with Berosus. The fall of an evil angel is described; the creation by the gods out of chaos (over which a goddess Tisglat, the Greek thalassa , “sea,” presides) in successive stages; its being pronounced good by the gods; its culmination in the creation of man with the faculty of speech; man’s original innocence, temptation, fall, and curse. There is however an elaborate lengthening of details (e.g. the deity’s long address to the newly-created man on his duties, privileges, and glory), and an introduction of gods many, which contrasts with the sublime simplicity and divine brevity of the inspired record. The Bible account of the primeval tradition, in its reticence of all details save what subserve the end s of a moral and spiritual revelation, is just what man would never have given except by inspiration. The Assyrian account is uninspired man’s expansion and dilution of the original history; at the same time confirming remarkably the true story.

    The general harmony in the, order of plants, animals, and man, between Scripture and science is strikingly confirmatory of revelation. Geology and Scripture agree: (1) that the material world had a “beginning” the flora and fauna advancing progressively from the less perfect to the more perfect. The Greeks and Latins mark the orderly formation of the universe by expressing “order” and “world” by the same term, kosmos , mundus. Furthermore, revelation states the scientific truth that God “hangeth the earth upon nothing” ( Job 26:7). The mention of the northern hemisphere here, and the southern hemisphere ( Job 9:9), “the chambers of the S.,” hints plainly at the globular form of the earth; (2) that fire (“light”) and water were two great agents of the mighty changes on the earth ( Genesis 1:3,9; <19A402> Psalm 104:2,3,6-9); the connection of light and heat is admitted, the sun’s light being now known to come from its photosphere of incandescent hydrogen; (3) that continents were formed under the ocean ( Genesis 1:9,10; <19A406> Psalm 104:6-9; 24:2, “He founded it above (not upon) the seas”; <19D606> Psalm 136:6); (4) that creation was not sudden, but progressive; (5) that man was the last created (no fossil remains of man are found), that his appearance is comparatively recent. Man is the crowning apex of creation; all the previous steps described are preparations for, and so silent prophecies of, his advent. Man is the summary of all preceding organizations; hence his brain in the embryo passes through the successive types of the fish’s, reptile’s, and mammal’s brain.

    Geology gives no support to the theory that every species grew out of some species less perfect, the lower animal developing into the higher, the stronger surviving the weaker in the struggle for existence, and by the law of “natural selection” assuming those members which it needed for its development. There is no unbroken chain of continuity. New forms appear on the stage of life, having no close affinity to the old. The marvelous instinct of the working bee has not grown by cultivation and successive inheritance. It does not inherit its cell building or honey making power from its parents; for the drone and queen bee do neither. It does not transmit it to its offspring, for it has none. Man degenerates indeed to an almost brutish state. But, as such, the race becomes enfeebled and dies out; whereas the domesticated animal which reverts to the wild state becomes stronger and more fruitful. This proves that the wild state is natural to the brutes, the civilized to man. Civilization never conics to savages from themselves, but from without; almost all barbarous races have traditions of having sprung from ancestors more powerful and enlightened than themselves.

    Man retains in a rudimentary form certain muscles and organs which are fully developed in the quadrumana (apes, etc.); the tail is a remarkable instance. But man’s development has taken the form most disadvantageous (in the Darwinian view) in the struggle of life. His body unclothed, slowness of foot, lack of power in teeth, hands, and feet compared with many brutes, bluntness of smell and sight, put him at an immense disadvantage in the struggle for life. “Man must have had human proportions of mind before he could afford to lose bestial proportions of body” (Duke of Argyll, Good Words, April 1868).

    Specific centers for the creation of many animals and plants are generally now supposed, since each species is confined to a certain habitat. Probably, those specific centers which are very far from man’s primitive home were the scene of the creation of animals going on during the six days, simultaneously with the creation of the animals in the region of Adam’s paradise.

    No clear proof of pre-Adamite man exists. If such yet be found, no physiological reason can forbid the Scripture view that God, after having formed the body of Adam on the highest type of human form,” breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” so that man thenceforward “became a living soul;” thus he is distinct from the brute, of which it is not said that God so breathed into them, but only that they have body and “living soul” ( Genesis 1:20,21); man, besides “body and soul,” has “spirit” ( Thessalonians 5:23; Ecclesiastes 3:21).

    The unity of the human species is a fundamental principle of the Bible scheme of redemption ( Deuteronomy 32:8; Matthew 19:4; Acts 17:26; Romans 5:14,19; 1 Corinthians 15:22). The differences of races, though hard to explain on the supposition of their unity, are not so hard as it is to account, on the opposite theory, for the close affinities, physical, intellectual, and moral, of all the human family. The germs of various characteristics were doubtless originally implanted in man by the Creator, to be manifested as the race progressed, in order to diffuse man over the earth of which he was the appointed lord under God ( Genesis 1:28). The subsequent confusion of tongues at see BABEL was not at random, but a systematic distribution of languages in connection with corresponding varieties of characteristics, for the purpose of a systematic distribution of the human race, as Genesis 10:5,20,31 proves. The several varieties of race are gradually shaded off from one another, so that there is no alternative between the extremely improbable theory of eleven distinct species (!) and the Bible statement of only one. All men have reason and articulate speech; general words used by all prove in all the power of abstract reasoning; the absence of the former proves the absence of the latter, in beasts. All have the sense of responsibility to unseen powers; all are capable of being Christianized and civilized. All are reducible to one original ideal type, to which the Indo European comes nearest. The cubic contents of the skull of the lowest savage is 82 inches; the highest is 94; the gorilla is only 30. Man alone walks erect; the negro’s skull, unlike the ape’s, is as perfectly balanced on the vertebral column as the European’s skull. The lowest savage has more brain than he needs for the few wants of his crude life.

    Man brought death upon himself by sin ( Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21; Genesis 2:17; 3:19). But he did not entail death on the animal world according to any scripture; and geology proves the death of whole races of animals before man. That the lower creaturely world has a connection with man in its common present subjection to “vanity” (i.e. failure as yet of their designed end), and its future emancipation into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, appears from Romans 8:18-28.

    Man’s fall is only a segment of a wider circle of evil which began with Satan and his angels’ previous fall.

    CRESCENS Paul’s companion at Rome who had gone to Galatia when Paul wrote Timothy 4:10. In Galatia he preached the gospel, according to the Apostolic Constitutions.

    CRETE now Candia. 158 miles long, from cape Salmone on the E. ( Acts 27:7,12) to cape Criumetopen on the W. beyond Phoenice. Its breadth is small. (On its connection with the see CHERETHIM .) It abounded with Jews in the apostolic age; hence, “Cretans” were among the witnesses of the effusion of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost ( Acts 2:11). Paul’s ship was constrained by contrary winds off Cnidus to sail under the lee of Crete “over against Salmone”; having passed which with difficulty the ship reachedFAIR HAVENS, near Lasea. Thence it made for Phoenice to winter there, but was driven by a sudden gale from the N.E., sweeping down from the region of mount Ida, to the island Clauda, from whence it drifted to Melita or Malta ( Acts 27:13-16).

    Paul visited Crete between his first and second imprisonment at Rome, and left see TITUS to “set in order the things wanting, and to ordain elders in every city” ( Titus 1:5). In Titus 1:12 he quotes Epimenides a Cretan poet. Crete was without wild beasts; the poet’s sarcasm was that beastly men supplied their place: “the Cretians are always (not merely at times, as all natural men are) liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.” “To Cretanize” was proverbial for to lie, as “to Corinthianize” for to be dissolute. In Crete was the fabled birthplace of Jupiter, king of the gods. They themselves are called “bellies,” since it is for their bellies they live ( Philippians 3:19).

    Christianity won its triumphs for truth and holiness even in such an unpromising soil.

    In the middle ages the cathedral of Megalocastron was dedicated to Titus.

    CRISPUS Ruler of the Corinthian synagogue; converted and baptized by Paul ( Acts 18:8; 1 Corinthians 1:14).

    CROSS The instrument of a slave’s death, associated with the ideas of pain, guilt, and ignominy. “The very name,” writes Cicero (Pro Rab., 5), “ought to be excluded not merely from the body, but from the thought, eyes, and ears of Roman citizens.” The Hebrews, having no term for it as not being a punishment in their nation, called it “warp and woof.”

    Scourging generally preceded crucifixion: so Jesus ( Matthew 27:26; Mark 15:15; foretold in Isaiah 50:6; 53:5). Pilate had probably hoped the Jews would be content with this scourging, and still let Him escape crucifixion ( Luke 23:22; John 19:1). Jesus bore His own cross toward Golgotha outside the city ( Hebrews 13:12; so Stephen, Acts 7:58), but sinking exhausted probably He was relieved, and it was transferred to Simon of Cyrene; prefigured in Isaac carrying the wood ( Genesis 22:6; contrast Isaiah 9:6, “the government shall be upon His shoulder”). Jesus’ sacred and lacerated body was raised aloft, the hands nailed to the transverse beam, the feet separately nailed to the lower part of the upright beam so as to be a foot or two above the ground (others think the two feet were pierced by one and the same nail). Stupefying drink, vinegar mixed with gall and myrrh, was first offered to Him and refused ( Matthew 27:34), for He would meet suffering consciously.

    Near death, to fulfill Psalm 69:21, He drank of the sour wine or vinegar kindly offered Him on a sponge. His death was hastened by rupture of the heart (see BLOOD ; also Mark 15:23; compare John 19:28; Matthew 27:48). The sour wine called posca was the common drink of the Roman soldiers. Pilate marveled at His speedy death, crucifixion often not terminating in death for days. The approach of the Passover sabbath, one of peculiar solemnity, led to his permitting the Jewish law to be carried out which forbids bodies to hang after sunset ( Deuteronomy 21:22,23).

    His legs could not be broken, because the Passover type must be fulfilled ( Exodus 12:46).

    Constantine when converted abolished crucifixion. The agony consisted in: (1) the unnatural position of the body, causing pain at the least motion; (2) the nails being driven through the hands and feet, which are full of nerves and tendons, yet without a vital part being directly injured; (3) the wounds so long exposed bringing on acute inflammation and gangrene; (4) the distended parts causing more blood to flow through the arteries than can be carried back through the veins; (5) the lingering anguish and burning thirst.

    After Constantine’s vision of the cross in the air and the inscription, “Under this standard thou shalt conquer,” a new standard was adopted, the Labarum, with a pendent cross and embroidered monogram of Christ, the first two Greek letters of His name, and Alpha and Omega ( Revelation 1:8).

    The Andrew’s cross is shaped like an X, through Hippolytus says he was crucified upright.

    The Anthony cross (embroidered on his cope) was shaped as a T. The pagan Egyptians, Copts, Indians, and Persians, all have the same sacred emblem.

    Tradition, and the inscription over our Lord’s head, make it likely that the form of His cross was +. The pole on which the brazen serpent was lifted by Moses was the type ( John 3:14; Numbers 21:8,9). The fathers regarded its four limbs pointing above, below, and to both sides, as typifying” the height, depth, length, and breadth” of the love of Christ, extending salvation to all ( Ephesians 3:18). The harmlessness of cruciform flowers is another suggested type in nature. Christ’s cross transforms the curse into a blessing ( Galatians 3:13,14); the inscription was written with letters of black on a white gypsum ground.

    By a striking retribution in kind, the Jewish people, whose cry was “crucify Him,” were crucified in such numbers by Titus “that there was not room enough for the crosses, nor crosses enough for their bodies” (Joseptius, B.

    J., 6:28). The piercing of Jesus’ hands was foretold in Psalm 22:16; Zechariah 12:10.

    The story of “the invention of the cross,” A.D. 326, is: Helena the empress, mother of Constantine, then nearly 80 years old, made a pilgrimage to the holy places, and there, by help of a Jew who understood her superstitious tastes, found three crosses, among which Christ’s cross was recognized by its power of working miracles, at the suggestion of Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem. Bits of this real cross were distributed as relics throughout Christendom. To supply the enormous demand, they were alleged to have been miraculously multiplied! In the church of the Holy Jerusalem Cross at Rome, relics of the top of the cross with the inscription are annually exhibited to the people for veneration. The falsity of the whole story appears from the fact that the Jews’ law required the cross to be burnt; Eusebius is silent as to the alleged discovery of it.

    A symbol or emblem merely at first, it soon began to have the notion of spiritual and supernatural efficacy attached to it. In the 6th century the crucifix image was introduced, and worship (latria) to it was sanctioned by the Church of Rome.

    Figuratively, the cross and crucifixion are used for spiritually mortifying the flesh, in union spiritually by faith with Christ crucified, not self-imposed austerities ( Matthew 16:24; Philippians 3:18; Galatians 6:14; Colossians 2:20-23). Our will and God’s will are as two separate pieces of wood; so long as both lie side by side there is no cross; but put them across one another, then there is a cross. We must take up the cross Christ lays on us if we would be His disciples.

    CROWN A band encircling the head by way of honor; the royal badge of kings; the sacerdotal badge of priests; the prize winner’s badge of victory. The Greek diadeema , “diadem” which KJV less fitly translated “crown” in Revelation 12:3; 19:12. is restricted to Christ the King of kings; Satan wears it only as usurping Christ’s right ( Revelation 13:1). Stephanos is once applied to His golden “crown” ( Revelation 14:14), which refers to Him viewed as a victor, the image being from the wreaths of conquerors in contests. This is also the sense of “crown” in the reward promised to believers who overcome the world, the flesh, and Satan; the “incorruptible crown” ( 1 Corinthians 9:25); “crown of righteousness,” for righteousness will be its own reward ( Revelation 22:11; Exodus 39:30; 2 Timothy 4:8). “Crown of life” ( James 1:12; Revelation 2:10; 3:11), “crown of glory that fadeth not away” as the withering garlands of wild olive, ivy, or parsley, given to the victors in the Isthmian and other games ( 1 Peter 5:4). The priests’ miter was a linen crown or fillet. The mitsnepheth or linen tiara of the high priest was preeminent in splendor ( Leviticus 8:9). A “blue (the color of heaven) lace” fillet was underneath, and the golden plate graven with “Holiness to the Lord” on the front of the miter ( Exodus 28:36-38,40). In Ezekiel 21:26, “remove the diadem (mitsnepheth ), and take off the crown” (‘atarah ), i.e. remove the miter, the last Jewish king Zedekiah’s priestly emblem, as representing the priestly people. The “miter” elsewhere is always used of the high priest; but the anointed king partook of the priestly character, from whence his “diadem” is so-called ( Exodus 19:6; 28:4; Zechariah 3:5); also the crown, the emblem of the kingdom; until they be restored and united in the Mediator Messiah ( <19B002> Psalm 110:2,4; Zechariah 6:13). Gold was the chief material of the king’s crown ( Psalm 21:3); compare 2 Samuel 12:30, the Ammonites’ crown, with its precious stones, was worth (rather than “weighed”) a talent of gold.

    Those feasting at banquets wore “crowns” or wreaths. Compare Isaiah 28:1,5: “woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower”; Samaria, Ephraim’s capital on the brow of a hill, is the proud crown of his drunkards; it shall perish as the flower crown on his drunkard’s brow soon “fades”; but “the Lord of hosts (in striking contrast) shall be for a crown of glory and for a diadem (tsephirah ), splendid head-dress) of beauty unto the residue (the remnant left after consuming judgments) of His people.”

    The Jews boast of three crowns: the law, the priesthood, the kingly crown.

    Better than all, a good name. So “crown” is used figuratively ( Proverbs 12:4; 14:24; 17:6; 1 Thessalonians 2:19). “Crown” is used in the sense of the projecting rim round the top of an altar or a table ( Exodus 25:25; 30:4; 37:27).

    Christ’s “crown of thorns” has been supposed to have been made of the Ramnus nabeca (Hasselquist) or the Lycium spinosum, probably the latter (Sieber). To mock rather than to pain Him was the soldiers’ object, and they took whatever came to their hand first. The dark green was a parody of the triumphal ivy wreath.

    CRUSE tsappachath . Probably like the vessels still made at Gaza; a blue, clay, porous globular vessel, about nine inches wide, a neck three long, a handle below the neck, and a straight spout, with an opening the size of a straw ( 1 Samuel 26:11,12,16; 1 Kings 19:6; 17:12,14,16).

    The bakbok , from the gurgling noise in pouring ( 1 Kings 14:3). Tsellachah , from a root to sprinkle; a flat saucer or dish ( 2 Kings 2:20).

    In Proverbs 19:24, “a slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom” (tsallachath , the cruse or dish like cavity in the bosom, or else translated “in the dish”).

    CRYSTAL zekukith , from zaakak , “to be pure.” Job 28:17: “the gold and the crystal cannot equal wisdom.” Glass is meant, some costly goblet composed of glass and gold, such as Wilkinson says the Egyptians made (Ancient Egyptians 2:61). Kerach , literally, ice, the ancients believing rock crystal to be ice intensely congealed. In Ezekiel 1:22, “the likeness of the firmament was as the terrible (rather Splendid, dazzling) crystal” ( Revelation 4:6; 21:11).

    CUCKOO shachaph , Leviticus 11:16; Deuteronomy 14:15: unclean. Rather the Greek [cepphus] of Aristotle, a large petrel, as the Puffinus cinereus. From a root to be slender. light of body like a gull, whose body is small compared with its apparent size and outspread wings; it skims the waves, seeking its food in the agitated water. Andouini’s gull, abounding on the shores of Syria (Tristram), a more likely bird than the storm petrel, which is seldom seen on land.

    CUCUMBER A product abounding in Egypt, a variety of which, the Cucurtis chafe, is “the queen of cucumbers” (Hasselquist). A variety of the melon; hence the Israelites pined for this Egyptian dainty in the wilderness ( Numbers 11:5). [Qishu], from qaasha’ “to be hard,” it being an indigestible food.

    Tristram observed quantities of the common cucumber in Palestine. Isaiah 1:8: “a lodge (a lonely box for watching in against depredations) in a garden of cucumbers,” so solitary was Zion to be, as such a lodge when deserted and wrecked by the winds, the poles fallen or leaning every way, and the green boughs which had shaded it scattered.

    CUMMIN An umbelliferous plant like fennel, with aromatic, pungent, carminative seeds; beaten out with a rod, not threshed ( Isaiah 28:25,27); tithed by the punctilious Pharisees ( Matthew 23:23). “Cummin splitting” was a Greek adage for cheese-paring parsimony (Aristophanes, Wasps). Grown still in Malta.

    CUP Genesis 40:11, for drinking; Genesis 44:5, for divination, practiced by dropping gold, silver, or jewels into the water, and examining their appearance; or looking into the water as a mirror. The sacred cup symbolized the Nile (which was “the cup of Egypt,” Pliny H. N., 8:71) into which a golden and silver goblet was yearly thrown. Joseph’s cup was of silver; the Egyptians ordinarily drank from vessels of brass. Joseph’s preserving his disguise by language adapted to his supposed character before his brethren, “Wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?” is inconsistent with his disclaiming all knowledge except what God revealed ( Genesis 41:16), but was the act of a good but erring man.

    Scripture does not sanction it. One alone there was in whose mouth was found no guile ( 1 Peter 2:22).

    Solomon and the Assyrians probably derived their art mainly from Phoenicia. Assyrian cups from Khorsabad resemble the heads of animals, some terminating in the head of a lion. In Matthew 26:7 an “alabaster vase” for ointment is meant, broad at the base, tapering to the neck, with little projections at the sides; such as are in the British Museum. Glass was a material for cups, and a glass bead bearing a Pharaoh’s name of the 18th dynasty has been found, i.e. 3,200 years ago. Alabastron, a town in Upper Egypt, had quarries of alabaster near, from whence the name is derived.

    Figuratively, one’s portion ( Psalm 11:6; 16:5; 23:5). Babylon was called a golden cup ( Jeremiah 51:7), because of her sensuality, luxury, and idolatries which she gave draughts of to the subject nations; so mystical Babylon, the apostate church ( Revelation 17:4). So “the cup of devils” is opposed to “the cup of the Lord” ( 1 Corinthians 10:21). To partake of a wine feast where a libation was first poured to an idol made one to have fellowship with the idol, just as believing participation of the Lord’s supper gives fellowship with the Lord. This is called “the cup of blessing which WE bless,” the celebrants being the whole church, whose leader and representative the minister is; answering to the passover “cup of blessing,” over which “blessing” was offered to God. It was at this part of the feast Jesus instituted His supper ( 1 Corinthians 10:15; Luke 22:17,20; compare 1 Chronicles 16:2,3). Figurative also is the cup of affliction ( Psalm 75:8; Isaiah 51:17,22). Christ’s sufferings ( Matthew 20:22). The cup of salvation ( <19B613> Psalm 116:13).

    CUPBEARER Genesis 40:1-21. A high officer in eastern courts, e.g. Solomon’s ( Kings 10:5). Pharaoh’s was the instrument of Joseph’s elevation ( Genesis 41:9). Rabshakek was “chief cupbearer” in Sennacherib’s court ( Isaiah 36:2), as his name implies. Nehemiah was cupbearer to Artaxerxes Longimanus, king of Persia ( Nehemiah 1:11; 2:1).

    CURTAINS 2 Samuel 7:2: “the ark of God dwelleth within curtains” or “the curtain” = the curtain covered tabernacle ( Exodus 26:1-13; 36:8-17), implying its transitoriness and slightness. In Isaiah 54:2 = the cloth forming the covering and sides of the tent. Black haircloth is used for the Bedouin’s tent. Jeremiah 49:29; Habakkuk 3:7, “curtains,” i.e. shifting tents. Song 1:5: “the curtains of Solomon” mean the hangings and veil of Solomon’s temple, typifying Christ’s righteousness, the covering of saints who together constitute the living temple of the antitypical Solomon ( Isaiah 61:10; Revelation 19:8; 1 Corinthians 3:16).

    CUSH (1) “the Benjamite,” heading of Psalm 7. An enigmatic title for Saul the Benjamite, with an allusion to the similar sounding name of Saul’s father, Kish. Cush or the Ethiopian expresses one black at heart, who” cannot change his skin” or heart ( Jeremiah 13:23; Amos 9:7). David in this Psalm 7:4 alludes to Saul’s gratuitous enmity and his own sparing “him that without cause is mine enemy,” namely, in the cave at Engedi, when Saul was in his power (1 Samuel 24).

    CUSH (2) Genesis 10:6-8; 1 Chronicles 1:8-10. Oldest son of Ham; his descendants were Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabtechah; Raamah’s sons, Sheba and Dedan; Nimrod, mentioned after the rest as Cush’s son, was probably a more remote descendant: Cush ethnologically includes not only Ethiopia (meaning the sunburnt, Nubia and N. Abyssinia.) in Africa, its chief representative, but the Cush of Asia, watered by the Gihon river of paradise ( Genesis 2:13). Isaiah couples it with Elam ( Isaiah 40:11), Ezekiel with Persia ( Ezekiel 38:5). Also part of Arabia ( Genesis 10:7; Isaiah 43:3, especially 2 Chronicles 21:16), Mesopotamia ( Genesis 10:8-10), and still further E.

    Chuzistan in the region of Susiana, in S. Asia, was their first home. Thence the main body crossed over to Ethiopia. Cush’s connection with Midian appears in Habakkuk 3:7, where Cush-an is joined to Midi-an. But the Cushan there may be Israel’s first oppressor, see CHUSHAN RISHATHAIM ; the name however shows a Cushite origin. The Babylonian inscriptions of the mounds of Chaldaea proper, the primitive seat of the Babylonian empire close to the Persian gulf, prove there was a Cush on the E. or Asiatic side of the Arabia, gulf, as well as on the W. or African side.

    So Homer (Odys., 1:23) speaks of the Ethiopians as divided, part towards the E., part toward the W. Nimrod’s kingdom began with Babel or Babylon, from whence “he went forth into Assyria and builded Nineveh” ( Genesis 10:11 margin).

    Two streams of Hamitic migration appear to have taken place: (1) an earlier one of Nigritians through the Malayan region, the Mizraites spreading along the S. and E. coasts of the Mediterranean resembled the modern seafaring Malays. (2) A later one of Cushites through Arabia, Babylonia, Susiana, eastward to W. of India. Meroe of Ethiopia is called in the Assyrian inscriptions by the name Nimrod, which must therefore be a Cushite name. The writing and vocabulary at Ur or Umqueir, near the Persian gulf, is Hamitic rather than Semitic. Ideographic rather than phonetic writing characterizes the Turanian races. Massive architectural remains, and a religion of nature worship from the highest to the lowest (fetish) kind, are found in all the Mizraite and Cushite settlements; and the language is partly Turanian, partly Semitic.

    The 22nd Egyptian dynasty, to which Zerah the Cusbite who invaded Asa belonged, contains names of Babylonian origin, Shishak = Sheshak, Namuret = Nimrod, Tekhit = Tiglath. (See BABEL .)

    CUSHI 1. Jeremiah 36:14; 2. Zephaniah 1:1; 3. Joab’s retainer, a foreigner, probably from his name a Cushite, and so unrecognized by the watchman, and ignorant of David’s devoted affection for Absalom, as appears from the abrupt inconsiderateness with which he announced Absalom’s death. Less acquainted also with “the way of the Ciccar,” the ground in the Jordan valley, from whence Ahimaaz outran him ( 2 Samuel 18:21-23).

    CUTHAH The region of the Assyrian empire from whence Shalmaneser transported colonists, after the deportation of Israel from it. The seat of the worship of Nergal ( 2 Kings 17:24,30). The name is akin to see CUSH , as the Chaldaeans said Athur for Ashur. Its locality is probably Chuzistan in the region of Susiana E. of the Tigris. The mountainous region between Elam and Media was called Cuthah. It would be a natural policy to transplant some of the hardy mountaineers (called also Cossaei) from their own region, where they gave the Assyrians trouble, to Samaria. There is also a town Cuthah, now Towiba, close to Babylon. G. Smith and Rawlinson identify it with Tel Ibrahim. Intermixing with the ten tribes’ remnant, they became progenitors of the Samaritans who are called “Cuthaeans” by the Jews. The Samaritans claimed kindred with the Sidonians, and these again with the Cuthaeans (Josephus, Ant. 11:8, section 6; 12:5, section 5; Chald.

    Paraphr. Genesis 10:19; 1 Chronicles 1:13).

    CUTTINGS Leviticus 19:28: “ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for (in behalf of) the dead, nor print any mark upon you.” And ( Leviticus 21:5) the priests “shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the grainer of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.”

    The prohibition was directed against the pagan self inflicted mutilation or baldness which was supposed to propitiate the manes of the dead; probably a milder substitute (Homer, Iliad 23:141) for the human sacrifices offered over the dead, as the 12 Trojans immolated by Achilles at Patrochus’ burial (Homer, Iliad 23:171,176), and as among the ancient Seythians (Herodotus, 4:71) and modern Africans (e.g. in Dahomey) at the death of chiefs both men and animals are sacrificed. The cuttings also expressed excessive grief, death being to the pagan a dark blank future (contrast Thessalonians 4:13).

    Self mutilation and cuttings were also supposed to propitiate the idols at other times ( 1 Kings 18:28). The Syrians (Lucian de Des Syr., 2:658,681; compare Ezekiel 8:14), the neighbors of Israel in Canaan, not the Egyptians from whose land Israel had come, practiced these self cuttings, expressive of excited feeling.

    Tattooing also, in mark of allegiance to a deity, as soldiers and slaves indicated their devotion to those over them, is hereby forbidden. Voluntary disfigurement of the person is an outrage on God’s workmanship (Speaker’s Commentary, Leviticus 19:28). This explains the “mark in the right hand or in the forehead” ( Revelation 13:16; 17:5; 19:20). God signs His people with His own name on their forehead mystically (the most conspicuous, highest part of the body, whereon the helmet “the hope of salvation” is worn; implying open compression on their part as well as on His): Revelation 14:1-9; 22:4. Paul’s bodily sears, suffered for Jesus’ sake, were God’s own marks that Paul was His, in contrast to the circumcision marks in the flesh of their followers in which the Judaizing teachers gloried ( Galatians 6:17,13,14; Colossians 1:24; Revelation 7:3). Isaiah 44:5, “another shall subscribe his hand unto the Lord,” Lowth explains, shall write upon his hand, I am Jehovah’s; as soldiers punctured their hands in token of devotion to their commander.

    Brahmins bear similar marks on their foreheads.

    Cuttings of the flesh, the beard, whiskers, and hair of the head expressed extreme grief ( Jeremiah 41:5; 47:5; 48:37; compare Isaiah 15:2). In spite of the prohibition the Jews often practiced it in Jeremiah’s time ( Jeremiah 16:6).

    CYMBALS tsiltselim , from a root to tingle or tinkle. Of two kinds: “loud cymbals,” castanettes; four small plates of brass; two plates were attached to each hand, and smitten together, marking for the choir their time for joining in the sacred song; see 1 Chronicles 13:8. And “high sounding cymbals,” two larger plates, one held in each hand, and struck together as an accompaniment to other music, like the Italian piatti, marking the rhythm. Zechariah 14:20, “the bells,” rather concave plates of brass attached to horses as an ornament, and tinkling in striking against one another; even the common things shall have sanctity attached to them.

    CYPRESS Isaiah 44:14: tirzah , from taaraz “to be hard.” Ecclus. 24:13; 1:1-21. A large, coniferous, evergreen tree; the wood very durable, hard, and fragrant. The cypress, which is a native of Taurus, is now only found in lower levels of Syria. Since it seldom rots, it was used for idol statues. The juniper is found 7,000 ft. up Lebanon, but not at the top, which is 10,500 ft. high.

    CYPRUS The Chittim of Ezekiel 27:6. Citium, one of its towns, is a kindred name. This island in easternmost part of the Mediterranean runs from N.E. to S.W., 148 miles long, about 40 broad for the most part, facing Phoenicia and Lebanon on the E., and Cilicia with the Taurus range on the N.; containing the mountain range of Olympus. Notorious for its licentious worship of Venus, or the Assyrian Astarte. Yet in this unpromising soil Christianity took early root, the Jews having prepared the way. Its copper mines in the mountains were once farmed to Herod the Great; hence, the number of Jews on the island was natural. Barnabas was born there, and “being a good man and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” was keen to impart to his countrymen that gospel which he so much loved ( Acts 4:36). Moreover those scattered abroad in the persecution whereby Stephen suffered “traveled as far as Cyprus, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only.” Some of the men of Cyprus too preached the Lord Jesus to the Greeks effectually at Antioch ( Acts 11:19,20).

    Moreover, when Barnabas and Paul were there “separated for the Lord’s work” by the Holy Spirit ( Acts 13:1-13), Cyprus was their first destination. With John Mark as their minister they preached in the Jews’ synagogue at Salamis; and then passing by the Roman road to Paphos, the proconsular residence in the W., at his request they preached before Sergius Paulus the “proconsul,” KJV “deputy.” A delicate mark of truth.

    Cyprus had been an imperial province, and governed by the emperor’s “lieutenants”; but the emperor transferred it to the senate, and so Luke accurately designates its governor, as under the senate, “proconsul,” anthupatos (Dion Cassius, 53:12; 54:4). Coins and inscriptions confirm this (one on the lintel of a doorway with the name of the very officer referred to by Luke, confuting Beza’s doubt). Elymas or Barjesus, a sorcerer and false prophet, a Jew, withstood Paul and Barnabas, “seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith”; but on his being struck with blindness at Paul’s word the deputy was astonished and believed.

    Barnabas visited his native island again, with his nephew Mark, when Paul had refused to allow Mark’s attendance because of his former departure from them from Pamphylia, instead of going forward with them to the work ( Acts 15:36-39). Mnason, “an old disciple” of Cyprus, is mentioned in Acts 21:16 as the appointed entertainer of Paul at Jerusalem. In sailing from Rhodes and Patara Paul’s ship “sighted” Cyprus, leaving it on the left in going to Phoenicia ( Acts 21:3). In sailing from Sidon on their way to Rome they went N. of it, to be under lee of land, and to take advantage of the current, which flows northward along Phoenicia and westward along Cilicia ( Acts 27:4).

    CYRENE The chief city of Cyrenaica (now Tripoli), or the Libyan pentapolis (five cities) in N. Africa, between Egypt and Carthage, S., across the sea, of Crete and the Greek Peloponnese. A Dorian Greek colony, reigned over by Battus and his family 630 B.C. Afterward joined to its eastern neighbor Egypt. A table land descending by terraces to the sea. Famed for luxuriant vegetation and grandeur of its hills; for its intellectual activity in philosophy and poetry; and for its commerce. Jews in large number were settled there, and had a synagogue at Jerusalem, some of whose members took part against Stephen ( Acts 6:9). Others were hearers of Peter and witnesses of the Spirit’s miraculous effusion on Pentecost ( Acts 2:10). Being converted, and subsequently scattered at the persecution of Stephen, they preached to the Greeks at Antioch, at which time and place believers were first called Christians ( Acts 11:19,20). Simeon, who bore Jesus’ cross, was of Cyrene ( Luke 23:26). Among “the prophets and teachers” at Antioch who ministered to the Lord was Lucius of Cyrene ( Acts 13:1), whom some identify with Luke the evangelist and physician. Certainly, it is from Luke alone that we hear so much of Cyrene. (But see LUKE .) Cyrene was a great center from which the gospel afterwards went forth, raising the famous N. African churches.

    CYRENIUS (See CENSUS .) Publius Sulpicius Quirinus (not Quirinius). Consul B.C., made governor of Syria after Archelaus’ banishment, A.D. (Josephus, Ant. 17:13, section 5). He was directed to make a census or “enrollment” of property ( Luke 2:2, apografee ) in Syria and Judaea.

    Varus was governor up to the end of 4 B.C. Volusius Saturninus was governor (we know from an Antioch coin) A.D. 4 or 5. In the interval between Varus’ governorship ending 4 B.C. and Volus. Saturninus’ government A.D. 4 falls the census ( Luke 2:2). Quirinus, as having been consul 12 B.C., must have had a proconsular province subsequently.

    A. W. Zumpt shows by an exhaustive reasoning that Cilicia was the only province that could have been his, and that Syria was at this time attached to Cilicia. Quirinus was rector or adviser to Caius Caesar when holding Armenia (Tacitus, Ann. 3:48). This cannot have been during Quirinus’ governorship of Syria in 6 B.C., for Caius Caesar died A.D. 4, and the nearness of Syria to Armenia was probably a reason for choosing Qurinus, Syria’s governor, to be the young prince’s adviser. He must then have had a first governorship, 4 B.C. to 1 B.C., when he was succeeded by M.

    Lollius. Probably in Luke 2:2 the “first” implies that “the first enrollment” or registration of persons and families was in Quirinus’ first government; intimating indirectly that there was a second enrollment which carried into effect the taxation ultimately contemplated by the previous enrollment. The second enrollment we know from Josephus (Ant. 18:1) was to ascertain the resources. Cyrenius is called therefore an “appraiser” of these. Tacitus (Annals 3:48) records that the emperor Tiberius asked for Qairinus the honor of a public funeral from the senate. He represents him as unpopular because of his meanness and undue power in old age.

    It was during his first governorship of Cilicia and Syria that he conquered the Homonadenses of Cilicia, and obtained the insignia of a triumph.

    A breviarium of the empire was ordered by Augustus (Tacitus, Annals 1:11), giving a return of its population and resources. The enrollment in Luke 2:1,2 perhaps was connected with this, “all the world” meaning the whole Roman empire.

    CYRUS Koresh, from the Persian kohr “the sun,” as Pharaoh from phrah “the sun.”

    Founder of the Persian empire. Represented as the son of Mandane, who was daughter of Astyages last king of Media, and married to Cambyses a Persian of the family of the Achaemenidae. Astyages, because of a dream, directed Harpagus his favorite to have the child Cyrus destroyed; but the herdsman to whom he was given preserved him. His kingly qualities, when he grew up, betrayed his birth. Astyages enraged served up at a feast to Harpagus the flesh of his own son. Harpagus in revenge helped Cyrus at Pasargadae near Persepolis, 559 B.C., to defeat and dethrone Astyages, and make himself king of both Medes and Persians. Afterward Cyrus conquered Croesus, and added Lydia to his empire. In 538 B.C. he took see BABYLON by diverting the course of the Euphrates into another channel, and entering the city by the dry bed during a feast at which the Babylonians were reveling, as Isaiah 21:44:27; Jeremiah 50:38; 51:57 foretell He finally fell in a battle against the Massagetae. His tomb is still shown at Pasargadae.

    In Daniel 5:31, at the overthrow of Babylon, we read “Darius the Median took (received) the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.” Isaiah 13:17; 21:2 confirm Daniel as to the Medes’ share in destroying Babylon. Daniel ( Daniel 6:28) joins the two, “Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.”

    Compare also Jeremiah 51:11,28. The honorary precedency given to the Medes in the formula, “the law of the Medes and Persians altereth not,” also in Daniel 5:28, marks their original supremacy. But the expressions “Darius received the kingdom” ( Daniel 5:31), and “Darius the son of Ahasuerus (the same name as Cyaxares and Xerxes) of the seed of the Medes ... was made king over the realm of the Chaldaeans” ( Daniel 9:1), mark that Cyrus was the supreme king and conqueror, and Darius made subordinate king under him. It is probable that this Darius was representative of the deposed Median line of supreme kings, whether he is to be identified with Astyages or his successor Cyaxares II, and that Cyrus deemed it politic to give him a share of royal power, in order to consolidate by union the two dynasties and conciliate the Medes. (See DARIUS .) Darius reigned as viceroy at Babylon from 538 to 536 B.C., when Cyrus assumed the throne there himself; from whence Ezra ( Ezra 1:1) regards the year of Cyrus’ beginning to reign at Babylon as the first year of his reign over the whole empire, though he was king of Persia years before. So also 2 Chronicles 36:22. The prophecies of Isaiah attribute the capture of Babylon to Cyrus, not Darius: Isaiah 44:27,28; 45:1, “Cyrus My (Jehovah’s) shepherd ... the Lord’s anointed,” a type of Messiah, the true King, Sun of righteousness ( Malachi 4:2), and Redeemer of His people from mystical Babylon. “Ahasuerus” is another form of Cyaxares, whom Xenophon represents as uncle of Cyrus and son of Astyages.

    The pure monotheism in which Cyrus had been reared as a Persian predisposed him to hate the Babylonian idols and favor the Jewish religion.

    Zoroaster about, this very time reformed the popular nature worship of Persia, and represented the sun or fire as only a symbol of the one God. In Cyrus’ decree for the Jews’ restoration from Babylon he intimates his acquaintance with Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s prophecies concerning him, which he doubtless heard from Daniel the prophet of Belshazzar’s doom: “the Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me to build Him an house at Jerusalem which is in Judah ... He is the God.”

    Smith’s Bible Dictionary (B.F. Westcott) truly says: “the fall of Sardis and Babylon was the starting point of European life; and the beginning of Grecian art and philosophy, and the foundation of the Roman constitution, synchronize with the triumph of the Aryan race in the East.” Cyrus represents eastern concentration and order, Alexander western individuality and independence. The two elements exercised an important influence upon the history of the world and of the church, and Cyrus’ restoration of the Jews is one of the great turning points in the development of God’s mighty scheme for ultimate redemption. Xenophon (Cyrop. 1:2, section 1) celebrates Cyrus’ humanity. This, with his Zoroastrian abhorrence of idolatry and its shameless rites, and veneration for the “great god Ormuzd,” the special object of ancient Persian worship, would interest him in behalf of the sufferings of the Jews, whose religion so nearly resembled his own. Thus, their restoration, an act unparalleled in history, is accounted for. His acknowledgment of “the Lord God of heaven” ( Ezra 1:2), whom he identifies with the Jehovah of the Jews, and his pious ascription of his wide dominion to His gift, accord with his belief as a votary of the old Persian religion. His gift of the golden vessels out of the treasury ( Ezra 1:7-11; 6:5), the allowance of the temple rebuilding expenses out of the royal revenue ( Ezra 6:4), and the charge to Ills subjects to “help with silver, gold, goods, and beasts” ( Ezra 1:4) accord with his characteristic munificence. His giving so high a post as the government of Babylon to a Mede agrees with his magnanimity in appointing two Medes in succession to govern the rich Lydia (Herodotus, 1:156,162). See Rawlinson’s Historical Illustrations of Old Testament J.W. Bosanquet gives reasons for thinking that the Cyrus (son of Cyaxares and grandson of Astyages) who took Babylon is distinct from Cyrus son of Cambyses who conquered Astyages.

    D DABAREH rather, Daberath. Joshua 21:28; 19:12. A Levitical town on the boundary of Zebulun. Also stated to be in Issachar ( 1 Chronicles 6:72).

    Probably on the border between Issachar and Zebulun. Called Dabaritta by Josephus. Now Debarieh, at the base of Mount Tabor.

    DABBASHETH A town on the boundary of Zebulun ( Joshua 19:11). Now Duweibeh.

    DAGON Diminutive (expressing endearment) of dag , “a fish.” The male god to which Atargatis corresponds (2 Macc. 12:26), the Syrian goddess with a woman’s body and fish’s tail, worshipped at Hierapolis and Ascalon. Our fabulous mermaid is derived from this Phoenician idol. She corresponds to the Greek foam-sprung Aphrodite. The divine principle supposed to produce the seeds of all things from moisture. Twice a year, water was brought from distant places and poured into a chasm in the temple, through which the waters of the flood were said to have been drained away (Lucian de Syr. Dea, 883). Derived from [tarag ], [targeto ], “an opening,” the goddess being also calledDERCETO; or else [addir ], “glorious,” and [dagto ], “a fish.” The tutelary goddess of the first Assyrian dynasty, the name appearing in Tiglath.

    Dag-on was the national god of the Philistines, his temples were at Gaza and Ashdod ( Judges 16:21-30; 1 Samuel 5:5,6). The temple of Dagon, which Samson pulled down, probably resembled a Turkish kiosk, a spacious hall with roof resting in front upon four columns, two at the ends and two close together at the center. Under this hall the Philistine chief men celebrated a sacrificial meal, while the people assembled above upon the balustraded roof. The half-man half-fish form (found in bas-relief at Khorsabad) was natural to maritime coast dwellers. They senselessly joined the human form divine to the beast that perishes, to symbolize nature’s vivifying power through water; the Hindu Vishnu; Babylonian Odakon. On the doorway of Sennacherib’s palace at Koyunjik there is still in bas-relief representations of Dagon, with the body of a fish but under the fish’s head a man’s head, and to its tail women’s feet joined; and in all the four gigantic slabs the upper part has perished, exactly as 1 Samuel 5:4’s margin describes: now in the British Museum. The cutting off of Dagon’s head and hands before Jehovah’s ark, and their lying on the threshold (from whence his devotees afterward did not dare to tread upon it), prefigure the ultimate cutting off of all idols in the great day of Jehovah ( Isaiah 2:11-22). Beth-Dagon in Judah and another in Asher ( Joshua 15:41; 19:27) show the wide extension of this worship. In his temple the Philistines fastened up Saul’s head ( 1 Chronicles 10:10).

    DALAIAH 1 Chronicles 3:24.

    DALMANUTHA On the W. of the sea of Galilee as what Mark ( Mark 8:10) calls “the regions of Dalmanutha.” Matthew ( Matthew 15:39) calls “the borders of Magdala.” Magdala was at the S. end of the plain of Gennesaret, near the water. Dalmanutha is probably now ‘Ain-el-Barideh, “the cold fountain,” surrounded by ancient walls and ruins of a village, at the mouth of a glen a mile S. of Magdala, near the beach.

    DALMATIA A region E. of the Adriatic Sea, forming part of Illyricum. Paul sent Titus there ( 2 Timothy 4:10), and had himself preached in the neighborhood ( Romans 15:19).

    DALPHON Esther 9:7.

    DAMARIS An Athenian woman converted by Paul’s preaching ( Acts 17:34.).

    When most “mocked” or deferred, she and Dionysius the Areopagite “clave unto Paul and believed.”

    DAMASCUS The most ancient city of Syria, at the foot of the S.E. range of Antilibanus, which rises 1,500 ft. above the plain of Damascus, which is itself 2,200 above the sea. Hence, Damascus enjoys a temperate climate cooled by breezes. The plain is a circle of 30 miles diameter, watered by the Barada (theABANA of 2 Kings 5), which bursts through a narrow cleft in the mountain into the country beneath, pouring fertility on every side. This strikes the eye the more, as bareness and barrenness characterize all the hills and the plain outside. Fruit of various kinds, especially olive trees, grain and grass abound within the Damascus plain. The Barada flows through Damascus, and thence eastward 15 miles, when it divides and one stream falls into lake el Kiblijeh: another into lake esh-Shurkijeh, on the border of the desert. The wady Helbon on the N. and Awaj on the S. also water the plain. The Awaj is probably the scripturalPHARPAR.

    First mentioned in Genesis 14:15; 15:2. Abraham entering Canaan by way of Damascus there obtained Eliezer as his retainer. Josephus makes Damascus to have been founded by Uz, son of Aram, grandson of Shem.

    The next Scriptural notice of Damascus is 2 Samuel 8:5, when “the Syrians of Damascus succored Hadadezer king of Zobah” against David.

    David slew 22,000 Syrians, and “put garrisons in Syria of Damascus, and the Syrians became servants to David and brought gifts” ( 1 Chronicles 18:3-6). Nicholaus of Damascus says Hadad (so he named him) reigned over “all Syria except Phoenicia,” and began the war by attacking David, and was defeated in a last engagement at the Euphrates River.

    His subject Rezon, who escaped when David conquered Zobah, with the help of a band made himself king at Damascus over Syria ( 1 Kings 11:23-25), and was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon. Hadad’s family recovered the throne; or else see BENHADAD I, who helped Baasha against Asa and afterward Asa against Baasha, was grandson of Rezon. He “made himself streets” in Samaria ( 1 Kings 20:34), so completely was he Israel’s master. His son, Benhadad II, who besieged Ahab ( 1 Kings 20:1), is the Ben-idri of the Assyrian inscriptions. These state that in spite of his having the help of the Phoenicians, Hittites and Hamathites, he was unable to oppose Assyria, which slew 20,000 of his men in just one battle.

    Hazael, taking advantage of his subjects’ disaffection owing to their defeats, murdered Benhadad ( 2 Kings 8:10-15; 1 Kings 19:15). see HAZAEL was defeated by Assyria in his turn, with great loss, at Antilibanus; but repulsed Ahaziah’s and Jehoram’s attack on Israel ( Kings 8:28), ravaged Gilead, the land of Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh ( Kings 10:32,33); took also Gath, and was only diverted from Jerusalem by Jehoash giving the royal and the temple treasures ( 2 Kings 12:17,18).

    Benhadad his son continued to exercise a lordship over Israel ( 2 Kings 13:3-7,22) at first; but Joash, Jehoahaz’ son, beat him thrice, according to Elisha’s dying prophecy ( 2 Kings 13:14-19), for “the Lord had compassion on His people ... because of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, neither east He them from His presence us yet” ( Kings 13:23). Jeroboam II, Joash’s son, further “recovered Damascus and Hamath, which belonged to Judah, for Israel ... according to the word of the Lord ... by Jonah the prophet” ( 2 Kings 14:23-28), 836 B.C.

    Rezin of Damascus, a century later, in a respite from the Assyrian invasions, allied himself to Pekah of Israel against Judah, with a view to depose see AHAZ and set up one designated “the son of Tabeal.” The successive invasions of Pul and Tiglath Pileser suggested the thought of combining Syria, Israel, and Judah as a joint power against Assyria. Ahaz’ leaning to Assyria made him obnoxious to Syria and Israel. But, as their counsel was contrary to God’s counsel that David’s royal line should continue until Immanuel, it came to nought ( 2 Kings 15:19,29,57; 16:5; Isa 7:1-6). Elath on the shore of the Red Sea, in Edom, built by Azariah of Judah on territory alleged to be Syrian, was “recovered” by Rezin.

    Whereupon Ahaz begged Assyria’s alliance; and the very policy of Damascus and Israel against Assyria, namely, to absorb Judah, was the very means of causing their own complete absorption by Assyria ( Kings 16:6-9; 17; Isaiah 7:14-25; 8:6-10; 10:9).

    The people of Damascus were carried captive to Kir, as Amos (Amos 1:5) foretold, the region from which they originally came, associated with Elam ( Isaiah 22:6), probably in Lower Mesopotamia = Kish or Cush, i.e. eastern Ethiopia, the Cissia of Herodotus (G. Rawlinson). Isaiah ( Isaiah 17:1) and Amos (Amos 1:4) had prophesied that Damascus should be “taken away from being a city, and should be a ruinous heap,” that Jehovah should “send a fire into the house of Hazael, which should devour the palaces of Benhadad”; and Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 49:24,25) that “Damascus is waxed feeble .... How is the city of praise not left, the city of my joy!”

    By the time of the Mede-Persian supremacy Damascus had not only been rebuilt, but was the most famous city in Syria (Strabo, 16:2,19). In Paul’s time ( 2 Corinthians 11:32) it was part of see ARETAS ’ (see) kingdom.

    It is still a city of 150,000 inhabitants, of whom about 130,000 are Mahometans, 15,000 Christians, and about 5,000 Jews.

    Damascus was the center through which the trade of Tyre passed on its way to Assyria, Palmyra, Babylon, and the East. It supplied “white wool and the wine of Helbon” (in Antilebanon, 10 miles N.W. of Damascus) in return for “the wares of Tyre’s making” ( Ezekiel 27:18). Its once famous damask and steel were not manufactured until Mahometan times, and are no longer renowned. The street called “Straight” is still there, leading from one gate to the pasha’s palace, i.e. from E. to W. a mile long; it was originally divided by Corinthian colonnades into three avenues, of which the remains are still traced ( Acts 9:11); called by the natives “the street of bazaars.” The traditional localities of Acts 9:3,25; Corinthians 11:33 (Paul’s conversion on his way to Damascus, and his subsequent escape in a basket let down from the wall) are more than doubtful. Now es-Sham, “The East.” Magnus was its bishop at the council of Nice, A.D. 325. The khalif Omar A.D. 635 took it. It fell into the hands of the Turks, its present masters, under Selim I, A.D. 1516.

    DAN (1) (“judge”). Jacob’s fourth son, Bilhah’s (maid of Rachel) first ( Genesis 30:6), own brother to Naphtali. The female corresponding name is Dinah (“judgment”). Rachel’s exclamation originated the name, “God hath judged me,” i.e. vindicated my cause by giving me a son. Jacob on his deathbed said, “Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel” ( Genesis 49:16), i.e., having the full tribal standing as much as Leah’s descendants. (See CONCUBINE .) The judgeship of Samson may also be a fulfillment of Jacob’s words ( Judges 15:20). Hushim (the plural implying a family) or Shuham alone is mentioned as Dan’s son ( Genesis 46:23); but at the exodus the tribe stood second of Israel in numbers ( Numbers 1:39), 62,700; 64,400 at the close of the wilderness sojourn ( Numbers 26:43).

    It occupied the N. side of the tabernacle, the hindmost in the march ( Numbers 2:25,31; 10:25), with Asher and Naphtali. Of Dan was Aholiab, associated with Bezaleel, in the construction of the tabernacle ( Exodus 31:6, etc.).

    Its allotment was on the coast W. of Judah and Benjamin, S. of Ephraim, N. of Simeon; small, but most choice, extending from Joppa on the N. to Ekron on the S., 14 miles long, part of the shephelah (or vale sweeping along the whole coast, the N. part of which is Sharon). The powerful Philistines near them drove them partly toward the mountainous region bordering on Judah, so as to encroach on Judah’s towns, Zorah and Eshtaol and Ir-shemesh or Beth-shemesh; compare Joshua 15:33 with Joshua 19:41. The Amorites previously “would not suffer them to come down into the valley” ( Judges 1:34). Hence, Samson resides at Mahaneh-Dan (the camp of Dan) in the hills, between Zorah and Eshtaol, behind Kirjath Jearim, and thence “comes down” to the vineyards of Timnath and the valley of Sorek. There too was his final resting place ( Judges 13:25; 14:1,5,19; 16:4,31; 18:12). The Phoenician king Esmunazar made this rich plain his prize long after, as an inscription records if rightly deciphered.

    In Joshua 19:47,” the coast of Dan went out (too little)’ for them,” rather “went out from them” (Hebrew meehem ), i.e. to a distance from their original allotment, namely, to Leshem or Laish, (which 600 of their warriors armed went forth from Zorah and Eshtaol to seize on, in the far N.) and named Dan after their father, at the W. source of the Jordan River, four miles W. of Paneas. Thrice stress is laid on the 600 being “appointed with weapons of war” ( Judges 18:11,16,17), for the Philistines deprived all Israelites they could of arms, so that we find Samson using a donkey’s jawbone as his only weapon ( 1 Samuel 13:19-21). Hence, as being so occupied with the Philistine warfare, Danites were not among Barak’s and Deborah’s helpers against Sisera (Judges 4; 5:17, where allusion occurs to Dan’s possession of the only Israelite port, “Why did Dan remain in ships?”).

    The N. Danites of Laish (named by them Dan) carried with them Micah the Ephraimite’s Levitical family priest (Judges 17; 18) and graven image, which they worshipped” until the day of the captivity of the land” ( Judges 18:30,31), i.e. until the Israelite reverse whereby the Philistines carried away the ark; what aggravated their idolatry was it was at the very time “that the house of God was in Shiloh,” within their reach. This probably suggested the city Dan to Jeroboam as one of the two seats of the golden calf worship ( 1 Kings 12:29).

    Dan’s genealogy is not given in 1 Chronicles 2--12. Its unsettled state audits connection with the far N. Dan, the headquarters of idolatry, may have caused the loss of the genealogy. Dan is omitted among the sealed in Revelation 7 as having been the first to lapse into idolatry, for which cause Ephraim also is omitted (Judges 17; Hosea 4:17) and Joseph substituted. Arethas of the 10th century suggests that Dan’s omission is because Antichrist is to be from him, or else to be his tool (compare Genesis 49:17; Jer 8:16; Amos 8:14), as there was a Judas among the twelve.

    Jacob’s prophecy, “Dan shall be a serpent in the way, ... that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward,” alludes primarily to Dan’s local position in front of the royal Judah; so ready to meet the horse, forbidden in Israelite warfare, with the watchword “I have waited for Thy salvation,” and to fall unawares on the advancing enemy by the way Dan’s mode of warfare is illustrated in its attack on the men of Laish,” careless, quiet, and secure,” as also in their great judge Samson’s mode of attack, watching for an opportunity and striking an unlooked for, stealthy, sudden blow. Mainly perhaps, by the Spirit, he has in view the old serpent which was to “bruise the heel” of the promised Savior ( Genesis 3:15), but ultimately to have its head bruised by Him; therefore he adds the desire of all believers, “I have waited for Thy salvation,” which abrupt exclamation is thus clearly accounted for.

    DAN (2) The city at the northern bound of Israel, as Beersheba was the southern, so that” from Dan even to Beersheba” ( Judges 20:1, etc., and bitterly, 1 Chronicles 21:2, “from Beersheba even to Dan”) expresses the whole country. Originally Leshem or Laish, see above. “Far from Zidon, in the valley that lieth by Beth Rebob,” but belonging to Zidon, as their living “after the manner of the Zidonians” implies; they were too far off for Zidon to help them when attacked by the Danites ( Judges 18:7,28). Already in Abraham’s time, the spot was called by him Dan, the scene of God’s “judgment” on Chedorlaomer and the invaders ( Genesis 14:14; compare Isaiah 41:1-3). But its ordinary name was even then Lasha or Laish, the north-eastern bound of Canaan, as Sodom was the southwestern bound ( Genesis 10:19). This too would be an additional reason for the Danites naming their city close by Abraham’s camping ground, Daniel The repetition thrice of “the city” ( Judges 18:28,29) marks that there was already another application of the name “Dan,” namely, to Abraham’s camping ground (compare Deuteronomy 34:1).

    Le Clerc suggests that the fountain was called Dan, “judge,” as Ainmishpat means “the fount of justice.” The city was smitten by Benhadad ( 1 Kings 15:20, the last place of mentioning it). Now Tel-el-Kady (the Arabic equivalent to Dan), “the judge’s mound,” whose long level top is strewed with ruins, probably those of Daniel From its foot gushes out one of the largest fountains in the world, the main source of the Jordan, called el Led-dan, a corruption of Dan, and the stream from it Nahr ed Dahn; all these names confirming Le Clerc’s view. The land is truly “a large land, where there is no want of anything that is on the earth” ( Judges 18:10).

    In 1 Kings 7:13,14, Hiram the worker in brass is said to be of Naphtali; but in 2 Chronicles 2:13,14, he is called “son of a woman of Dan.” As the “outgoings” of Naphtali were at Jordan, the city Dan probably was in the tribe of Naphtali. So she dwelt in Naphtali, but was by birth of the Danite colony there. An undesigned mark of truth. The seeming discrepancy, thus cleared, powerfully disproves the possibility of collusion, and shows the witness of Kings and of Chronicles to be mutually independent and true.

    A place in S. Arabia from whence the Phoenicians obtained wrought iron, cassia, and calamus ( Ezekiel 27:19). “Dan also.” Since none of the other places begin with “also” (Hebrew [w¦-]), Fairbairn translates it as Vedan, the modern Aden, near the straits of Babelmandeb. Ptolemy mentions a Dara. But probably, as Judah is mentioned in Ezekiel 27:17, so Dan in Ezekiel 27:19 represents northern Israel. Sailors from ports of Dan, with descendants of Javan, traded in the fairs of Tyre, “going to and fro.”

    DAN-JAAN 2 Samuel 24:6. Visited by Joab in taking the census for David; lying on the route between Gilead and Zidon. Septuagint and Vulgate read “Dan in the wood” (Dan-jaar), corresponding to the country about Tel-el-Kady.

    Baal-jaan, a Phoenician god’s name, is found upon coins. The Dan forming the northern bound of Israel at the sources of the Jordan is probably meant.

    DANCE machol , literally, moving or leaping in a circle. Gesenius however translates machalath “a stringed instrument,” and machol “dancing” Mendelssohn makes machol , “a hollow musical instrument” ( <19F004> Psalm 150:4, margin) Expressing joy, as contrasted with mourning ( Ecclesiastes 3:4; Psalm 30:11). The woman nearest of kin to the champion in some national triumph or thanksgiving, and who had a kind of public character with her own sex, led a choir of women; as Miriam ( Exodus 15:1,20) (while Moses led the men), Jephthah’s daughter ( Judges 11:34), Deborah (Judges 5) (while Barak led the men). Some song or refrain in antiphonal answer. forming the burden of the song, accompanied the dance ( Exodus 32:18,19; 1 Samuel 18:7; 21:11).

    The women are represented as “coming out” to do this and meet the hero.

    Miriam went out before “Jehovah, the Man of war” ( Exodus 15:3,20,21), and answered the entire chorus. But the women glorifying Saul and David, having no leader, “answered one another.” The special feature of David’s conduct before the returning ark ( 2 Samuel 6:5-22) is that he was choir leader, the women with their timbrels ( 2 Samuel 6:5,19,20,22) taking a prominent part. Michal ought to have led them; but jealousy of David’s other wives, married while she was with Phaltiel, and attachment to the latter ( 2 Samuel 3:15,16), and the feeling that David’s zeal rebuked her apathy, led her to “come out to meet” him with sneers not songs. The dance necessitated his taking off his royal upper robes to “dance with all his might.” This she called “uncovering himself in the eyes of the handmaids.” His leading thought was to do honor to God who had delivered him from all his enemies ( 1 Chronicles 13:8,16; 2 Samuel 6:21-23).

    Enthusiasm was kindled by these religious dances, which enlisted at once the tongue and the other members of the body in acts of worship; which explains Psalm 35:10. David says, “All my bones shall say, Lord, who is like unto Thee?” the very language that the Israelites, while the women danced to the Lord, uttered as their song after the Red Sea deliverance ( Exodus 15:11). The dance, however, was generally left to women ( Judges 21:19-23). It is mentioned as a censure on their looseness that “the people rose up to play” at Aaron’s calf festival ( Exodus 32:6; Corinthians 10:7), also that the Amalekites were “dancing” ( 1 Samuel 30:16). The woman leader usually in the East leads off the dance, and the other women exactly follow her graceful movements. In Song 6:13 allusion possibly is made in the “two armies” to two rows of female dancers vis-avis in performing; but the spiritual sense refers to the two parts of the one church army, the militant and the triumphant.

    Dancing accompanied festivity of a secular kind ( Jeremiah 31:4,13; Lamentations 5:15; Luke 15:25), especially that of women and children ( Job 21:11; Matthew 11:17). Dancing by men and women together was unknown; as indeed the oriental seclusion of women from men would alone have sufficed to make it seem indecorous. Maimonides says that in the joyous Feast of Tabernacles the women danced separately in an apartment above, and the men danced below. Herod’s extravagant promise to Herodias’ daughter shows that it was a rare deed in those regions ( Mark 6:22,23).

    DANIEL i.e. “God is my judge”; or as others, “the judge of God,” as his Chaldee name Belteshazzar means “the prince of Bel.” Probably from royal blood; compare Daniel 1:3 with 1 Chronicles 3:1, from whence it appears he bore the same name as David’s son by Abigail (who is called Chileab in 2 Samuel 3:3 = like his father). Carried to Babylon in Nebuchadnezzar’s first deportation of captives, in the fourth ( Jeremiah 25:1; 46:2) or third ( Daniel 1:1 counting only complete years) year of Jehoiakim, the first of Nebuchadnezzar (acting under Nabopolassar in the last year of the latter’s reign, but reigning alone not until the year after; as Daniel 2:1 proves, for after Daniel’s three years’ training the year is nevertheless called the “second” of Nebuchadnezzar, i.e. of his sole reign).

    Daniel was put in training with three others of the royal seed, still “children” ( Daniel 1:4), according to eastern etiquette, to become courtiers; and to mark his new position he received a Babylonian name, Belteshazzar (compare 2 Kings 23:34; 24:17; Ezra 5:14; Esther 2:7). He gave a noble proof of faithfulness combined with wisdom at this early age, by abstaining from the food of the king’s table, as being defiled with the usual idolatry at pagan feasts ( Daniel 1:8-16), living for ten days’ trial on pulse and water, and at the end looking fairer and fatter than those fed on the king’s dainties. Those who would excel in piety and wisdom must early subject the flesh to the spirit. Daniel experienced the truth of Deuteronomy 8:3.

    Ezekiel in the early part of his ministry refers to hint as a model of “righteousness” and “wisdom” ( Ezekiel 14:14,20; 28:3), for Daniel had not yet become a writer. Noah before and at the flood, Job in the postdiluvian patriarchal age, and Daniel toward the close of the legal theocracy are made types of “righteousness.” So Ezekiel’s reference, in what it alleges and in what it omits, exactly tallies with what we should expect, presuming that Ezekiel and Daniel lived and wrote when and where they are represented. Daniel’s high position while still a mere youth ( Daniel 1:3-5,11-16; 2:1), at the court of the Jews’ conqueror and king, gave them a vivid interest in their illustrious countryman’s fame for righteousness and wisdom; for in his person they felt themselves raised from their present degradation. As at the beginning of the covenant people’s history their kinsman Joseph, so toward its close Daniel, by the interpretation of dreams (Daniel 2; Daniel 4), was promoted to high place in the court of their pagan masters. Thus, they both represented Israel’s destined calling to be a royal priesthood among the nations, and ultimately to be the bearers of Messiah’s light to the whole Gentile world ( Romans 11:12,15). Daniel was made by Nebuchadnezzar, governor of Babylonia and president of the Babylonian “wise men,” not to be confounded with the later Persian magi.

    Under Belshazzar Daniel was in a lower office, and was occasionally away from Babylon ( Daniel 5:7,8,12) at Susa ( Daniel 8:2,27). His interpretation of the mystical handwriting on the wall caused his promotion again, a promotion which continued under Darius and Cyrus. Under Darius he was first of the three presidents of the empire. Envy often follows high office which men so covet; so, by a law cunningly extorted by his enemies from the weak Darius, that none should offer petition to man or god except to the king for 30 days, as though it were a test of loyalty, on pain of being cast into a lions’ den, Daniel was cast in and was delivered by God, who thus rewarded his pious faithfulness (Daniel 6). It is an accordance with Medo-Persian ideas which flows from the truth of Scripture, that the mode of capital punishment under the Babylonian rule is represented as burning (Daniel 3), but under the Medes and Persians’ exposure to wild beasts, for they would have regarded fire as polluted by contact with a corpse, while they approved the devouring of bodies by animals.

    Berosus calls the last Babylonian king Nabonidus, and says that he surrendered to Cyrus in Borsippa, and was assigned an honorable abode in Carmania. Rawlinson has shown that the Babylonian inscriptions at Ur (Umqueir) explain the seeming discrepancy. see BELSHAZZAR or Bel- shar-ezer (on the mother’s side descended front Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel 5:11) was joint king with his father; having shut himself up in Babylon he fell there while his father at Borsippa survived. Berosus as being a Chaldaean suppressed all concerning Belshazzar, since it was to the national dishonor. If Daniel’s book had been a late one, he would have copied Berosus; if it had been at variance with that prevalent in Babylonia, the Jews there would have rejected it. His mention of Darius the Mede’s reign, which profane history ignores (probably because it was eclipsed by Cyrus’ glory), shows that he wrote as a contemporary historian of events which He knew, and did not borrow from others. He must have been about 84 years old when he saw the visions (Daniel 10--12) concerning his people, extending down to the resurrection and the last days. Though advanced years forbade his return to the Holy Land, yet his people’s interests were always nearest his heart (Daniel 9; 10:12). His last recorded vision was in the third year of Cyrus (534 B.C.), on the banks of the Tigris (Hiddekel) Daniel 10:1-4.

    In Daniel 3:2, Hebrew for “princes,” Nebuchadnezzar summons his satraps (‘achashdarpni , Persian khshtrapa). Some allege that Daniel erroneously attributes to the Babylonians the satrapial form of government.

    But Gedaliah was virtually a satrap under Nebuchadnezzar in Judaea, i.e. a governor over a province, instead of its being left under the native kings ( 2 Kings 25:23). Berosus speaks of Nabopolassar’s “satrap of Egypt, Coelosyria, and Phoenicia.” Daniel writing for Jews under Persia at the time uses naturally the familiar Persian term “satrap” instead of the corresponding Babylonian term. (On Daniel’s representation of the relation of the Medes to the Persians and Darius the Mede (possibly = Astyages, or his son, the former of whom Cyrus deposed and treated kindly) to Cyrus, see CYRUS .)

    The objection to Daniel on the ground that Susa, or at least its palace, was not built when Daniel saw the vision there, rests on Pliny alone, who alleges it to have been built by Darius Hystaspis. But the Assyrian inscriptions prove it was one of the most ancient Mesopotamian cities, and its palace (the Memnonium is the name the Greeks give it) famous centuries before Daniel. Darius Hystaspes was only the first to build at Susa a palace in Persian fashion.

    Daniel, like Moses, was trained in all the learning of the world; his political experience moreover, as a minister of state under successive dynasties of the great world powers, gave the natural qualifications to which God added supernatural spiritual insight, enabling him to characterize to the life the several world monarchies which bore or were to bear sway until Messiah’s kingdom shall come with power. Personal purity and selfrestraint amidst the world’s corrupting luxuries ( Daniel 1:8-16; compare Moses, Hebrews 11:25; Joseph, Genesis 39:9); faithfulness to God at all costs, and fearless witnessing for God before great men ( Daniel 5:17-23), unbribed by lucre and unawed by threats ( Daniel 6:10,11); the holiest and most single-minded patriotism which with burning prayers interceded for his chastened countrymen (Daniel 9); intimate communion with God, so that, like the beloved disciple and apocalyptic seer of the New Testament, John, Daniel also is called” a man greatly beloved,” and this twice, by the angel of the Lord ( Daniel 9:23; 10:11), and received the exact disclosure of the date of Messiah’s advent, the weeks of years, and the successive events down to the Lord’s final advent for the deliverance of His people: these are all prominent characteristics of this man of God.

    It is not stated in Daniel 3 why Daniel was not among the rulers summoned to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image. Perhaps he was on state business in some distant part of the empire where the summons had not time to reach him. The Jews’ enemies found it more political to attack first the three nearer at hand before proceeding to attack Daniel, the most influential. The king also, regarding him as divine ( Daniel 2:46), forbore to summon him to worship the image, the self-deifying formation and setting up of which Daniel’s own interpretation probably had suggested unintentionally to Nebuchadnezzar ( Daniel 2:37-39).

    As Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 go together, so Daniel 3 and Daniel 6; Daniel and Daniel 5; the pair Daniel 3 and Daniel 6 shows God’s nearness to save His saints, if faithful, just when they are on the point of being crushed by the world power. The pair Daniel 4 and Daniel 5 shows God’s power to humble the world power in the height of its impious arrogance; first Nebuchadnezzar, whose coming hypochondriacal exile among the beasts Daniel foretells with fidelity and tenderness; then Belshazzar, whose blasphemy he more sternly reproves. As Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse positive homage to the world power’s image, so Daniel refuses it even negative homage by omitting even for a few days worship to Jehovah. Jehovah’s power manifested for the saints against the world first in individual histories (Daniel 3; 6) is exhibited next in worldwide prophetical pictures (Daniel 2 and Daniel 7). God manifested His irresistible power in Daniel and his friends, as representing the theocracy then depressed, before the pagan king who deemed himself divine. Thus, God secured the heathen’s respect for His covenant people which found its culmination in Cyrus’ decree for their restoration and the rebuilding of the temple of Jehovah, whom he confessed to be preeminently “THE God of heaven” ( Ezra 1:1-4). Ezra 8:2 and Nehemiah 10:6 mention another Daniel, Ithamar’s descendant.

    THE BOOK OF DANIEL.

    AUTHENTICITY. That Daniel composed it is testified by Daniel 7:1,28; 8:2; 9:2; 10:1,2; 12:4,5. In the first six chapters, which are historical, he does not mention himself in the first person, for in these the events, not the person, are prominent (compare Isaiah 7:3; 20:2). In the last six, which are prophetical, wherein his divine commission needed to be shown, he comes forward personally as the writer. Being a “seer,” having the gift and spirit, not the theocratical office and work, of a prophet, his book stands in the third rank in the Hebrew canon, namely, in the Hagiographa (Kethubim) between Esther and Ezra, the three relating to the captivity. Its position there, not among the prophets as one would expect, shows it was not an interpolation of later times, but deliberately placed where it is by Ezra and the establishers of the Jewish canon. Daniel was “the politician, chronologer, and historian among the prophets” (Bengel). Similarly, the Psalms, though largely prophetic, are ranked with the Hagiographa, not the prophets. He does not, as they writing amidst the covenant people do, make God’s people the foreground; but writing in a pagan court he makes the world kingdoms the foreground, behind which he places the kingdom of God, destined ultimately to be all in all. His book written amidst pagan isolation is the Old Testament Apocalypse, as the Revelation of John written in the lonely Patmos is the New Testament Apocalypse; the two respectively stand apart, his from the prophets, John’s from the epistles.

    Porphyry in the third century A.D. assailed the Book of Daniel as a forgery in the time of the Maccabees, 170-164 B.C. But the forgery of a prophecy, if Daniel were spurious, would never have been received by the Jews from an age when confessedly there were no prophets. Antiochus Epiphanes’ history and attack on the holy people are so accurately detailed (Daniel 11) that Porphyry thought they must have been written after the event. But Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah allude to it; Jesus in His peculiar designation “the Son of man” ( Matthew 24:30, compare Daniel 7:13) refers to it, and especially in the crisis of His trial when adjured by the living God ( Matthew 26:64), and stamps him authoritatively as “the prophet Daniel,” and ratifies his particular prophecies ( Matthew 24:15,21; compare Daniel 12:1, etc.). Luke 1:19-26 mentions Gabriel, whose name occurs elsewhere in Scripture only in Daniel 8:16; 9:21. The prophecies tally with those in Revelation. The judgment of the world given to the saints, and the destruction of the blasphemous king at the Lord’s coming, ( Daniel 7:8,25; 11:36) foretold by Daniel, are further unfolded by Paul ( 1 Corinthians 6:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12). The deliverance from fire and lions (Daniel 2 and Daniel 6) are referred to in Hebrews 11:33,34. Thus, the New Testament attests (Daniel 2--3; 6--7; 11) expressly on the three points to which rationalists object, namely, the predictions, the miracles narrated, and the manifestations of angels. The former part also is referred to by Christ, namely, as to “the stone” smiting the image ( Daniel 2:34,35,44,45), in Matthew 21:44. The miracles, like those of Moses in Egypt, were designed to show to the seemingly victorious world power the really superior might of the seemingly prostrate kingdom of God, and so to encourage the captive Jews to patient trustfulness in God. What completely disproves Porphyry’s theory is, 1 Maccabees (1:24; 9:27,40) refers to Daniel as an accredited book, and even to Septuagint version of it; compare Daniel 11:26 (Septuagint 12:1). Daniel’s place in the Septuagint shows it was received by the Jews before the Maccabean times.

    What a strange testimony then does Porphyry unwillingly bear to the divine inspiration of the book; the events so minutely fulfilling the prophecies about Antiochus that it might be supposed to be a history of the past instead of, as it is proved to be, a prediction of events then future.

    Josephus (Ant. 7:11, section 8) records that Alexander the Great had designed to punish the Jews for their fidelity, to Darius; but Jaddua (332 B.C.) the high priest, at the head of a procession, met him and averted his wrath by showing him Daniel’s prophecy that a Grecian monarch should overthrow Persia ( Daniel 8:5-8). Josephus’ statement, if true, accounts for the fact that Alexander favored the Jews; it certainly proves that the Jews of Josephus’ time believed in the existence of Daniel’s book in Alexander’s time long before the Maccabees.

    With Jaddua, high priest in 341-322 B.C, the Old Testament history ends ( Nehemiah 12:11). As this was long after Nehemiah, who died about 400 B.C., the register of priests and Levites must have been inserted in Nehemiah with divine sanction subsequently. The language of Daniel from Daniel 2:4 to the end of Daniel 7 is Chaldee, the world empire’s language, the subject here being about the world at large. The rest is Hebrew generally, as the subject concerns the Jews and their ultimately restored theocratic kingdom. Daniel’s circumstances exactly tally to this, he being Hebrew by birth and still keeping up intercourse with Hebrews, and at the same time Chaldee by residence and associations. The union of the two languages in one book would be as unnatural to one in a later age, and therefore not similarly circumstanced, as if, is natural to Daniel.

    Daniel’s Hebrew is closely like that of Ezekiel and Habakkuk, that is, just those prophets living nearest the assumed age of Daniel. The Aramaic, like Ezra’s, is of an earlier form than in any other Chaldaic document.

    Two predictions establish Daniel’s prophetic character, and that the events foretold extend to subsequent ages. (1) That the four world monarchies should rise (Daniel 2; Daniel 7), Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, and that Rome in a tenfold divided form should be the last, and should be overthrown by Messiah’s kingdom alone; Charlemagne, Charles V, and Napoleon have vainly tried to raise a fifth. (2) The time of Messiah’s advent dating from the foretold decree to restore the temple, His being cut off, and the city’s destruction, are foretold definitely. “He who denies Daniel’s prophecies undermines Christianity, which is founded on Daniel’s prophecies concerning Christ” (Sir Isaac Newton).

    The vision mode of revelation, which is the exception in other prophets, is the rule in Daniel and in Zechariah 1--6. A new stage in the theocracy begins with the captivity. Hence arose the need for miracles to mark the new era. National miracles in Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan marked the beginning of the theocracy or outwardly manifested kingdom of God.

    Personal miracles mark the beginning of the church, the spiritual kingdom of God, coming not with outward observation in “the times of the Gentiles,” which began from the captivity. Originally, Abraham was raised out, of the “sea” ( Daniel 7:2) of nations as an island holy to God, and his seed chosen as God’s mediator of His revelation of love to mankind.

    Under David and Solomon the theocracy attained its Old Testament climax, being not only independent but ruling the surrounding pagan; so this period was made type of the Messianic (as it ultimately shall be manifested). But when God’s people rested on the world powers the instrument of their sin was made the instrument of their punishment. So the ten tribes’ kingdom, Israel, fell by Assyria (722 B.C.), on whom it had leaned, and Judah similarly by Babylon (Ezekiel 23). The theocracy, in the strict sense of the manifested kingdom of God on earth, has ceased since the Babylonian exile, and shall only be resumed with a glory vastly exceeding the former at the millennium ( Revelation 11:15,20).

    Daniel’s position in the Babylonian court answers to the altered relations of the theocracy and the world power; see above. He represents the covenant nation in exile, and in subjection to the world power externally. But his heavenly insight into dreams which baffle the Chaldaeans’ lore represents the covenant people’s inner superiority to their pagan lords. His high dignities in the world typify the ultimate giving of the earth kingdom “to the people of the saints of the Most High” ( Daniel 7:27). Thus his personal history is the basis of his prophecy.

    Daniel 2--7 represent the world powers developed historically; Daniel 8-- 12 their development in relation to Israel. The period of Daniel’s prophecies is that from the downfall of the theocracy to its final restoration; it is the period of the world’s outward supremacy, “the times of the Gentiles” ( Luke 21:24; Daniel 9:27; 12:7), not set aside by Christ’s first coming ( John 18:36; Matthew 4:8-10); for Satan yet is “prince of this world,” and Israel has been depressed and Judah’s kingdom prostrate ever since the Babylonian captivity. But His second advent shall usher in the restored Israelite theocracy and His worldwide manifested kingdom.

    In Daniel 2 the world kingdoms are seen by the pagan king in their outward unity and glory, yet without life, a metal colossus; in Daniel 7 they appear to the prophet of God in their real character as instinct with life, but mere beast life, terrible animal power, but no true manhood; for true manhood can only be realized by conscious union with God, in whose image man was made. The Son of God as “the Son of man” is the true ideal Standard and Head of humanity. [See BEAST .] In Revelation 4; 5, the four cherubim are “living creatures,” not “beasts” as KJV. The “beast” (theerion ) appears in Revelation 13; Revelation 14; Revelation 17; Revelation 19, as in Daniel 7--8. When Nebuchadnezzar glorified and deified self, becoming severed from God, he became beast-like and consorted with the beasts, that look downward to the earth, having lost his true humanity; but when “he lifted up his eyes to heaven his understanding returned, and he blessed the Most High, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion” ( Daniel 4:28-34). Nebuchadnezzar’s degradation, repentance, and restoration contrast strikingly with Belshazzar’s sacrilegious luxury and consequent doom; and Daniel develops definitely the prophetical germs already existing as to Messiah (Daniel 7; Daniel 9), the resurrection ( Daniel 12:2,3), and the ministry of angels ( Daniel 8:16,10; 12:1).

    The “seventy weeks” ( Daniel 9:24) probably date from 457 B.C., when Ezra (Ezra 7) in the 7th year of Artaxerxes Longimenus returned to Jerusalem empowered to restore the temple and the national polity, years before the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, who carried out the commission of Ezra, which virtually included the rebuilding of the city. 457 B.C. (the A.D. dating four years after Christ’s actual birth.) 30 A.D. the crucifixion. 3 1/2 years, afterward, of gospel preaching to the Jews only. ------- 490 1/2 So, Jeremiah foretold that 70 years of the captivity would begin at B.C., 18 years before the actual destruction of Jerusalem, when Judah’s independent theocracy ceased, Jehoiakim being put in fetters by Nebuchadnezzar. The seventy weeks of years are divided into 7, 62, and 1.

    The 70th one week, the period of New Testament revelation in Messiah, consummates the preceding ones, as the sabbath succeeds and crowns the work days. The Messianic time (seven years) is the sabbath of Israel’s history, in which it had the offer of all God’s mercies, but was cut off temporarily for rejecting them. The seven weeks or sevens in the beginning, i.e. 49 years, answer to the period closing Old Testament revelation, namely, that of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Malachi. The 62 are the intermediate period of 434 years between the seven and the one, and in them was no revelation; in all 490 years. The closing one week (or seven years) includes the 3 1/2, years of Jesus’ own preaching to the Jews, and 1/2 of the apostles’ preaching to the Jews only; then the persecution as to Stephen drove the evangelists from Jerusalem to Samaria. The universal expectation of a Savior existed even in the Gentile world at the very time He came; doubtless due to Daniel’s prophecy carried far and wide by the Jews (Tacitus, Hist., 5:13; Suetonius, Vespasian 4). Jerusalem was not actually destroyed until A.D. 70, but virtually and theocratically was “dead” A.D. 33, 3 1/2 years after Christ’s death, having failed to use that respite of grace ( Luke 13:7-9). Genesis 2:17, in the day that Adam sinned he died, though his actual death was long subsequent. Hosea 13:1,2: Jerusalem’s destruction by Titus only consummated the removal of the kingdom of God from Israel to the Gentiles, which took place at the scattering of the disciples from Jerusalem ( Matthew 21:43), to be restated at Christ’s second advent, when Israel shall head the nations ( Matthew 23:39; Acts 1:6,7; Romans 11:25-31; Romans 15).

    DANNAH A city in the mountains of Judah, S.W. of Hebron ( Joshua 15:49).

    Identified by Conder (Palestine Explorations) with Domeh, two miles N. of Dhoheriyeh (Debir).

    DARA; DARDA 1 Chronicles 2:6; 1 Kings 4:31. One of the four men noted for wisdom, but excelled by Solomon ( 1 Kings 4:31), sons of Zerach, of Pharez’ distinguished family of Judah. [See CALCOL .] “Sons of Mahol” probably mean “sons of the choir,” i.e. the famous musicians of whom Ethan and Heman are named in the titles of Psalm 88 and Psalm 89. As “son” is often used for descendant, even if Mahol is a proper name their being called “sons of Mahol” in 1 Kings 4, but “sons of Zerah” in Chronicles 2:6, is no objection to their identity.

    DARIC A gold coin current in Palestine after the return from Babylon. The Persian kings issued it; the obverse having the king with bow and javelin or dagger, the reverse a square; 128 grains troy. Ezra 2:69; 8:27; Nehemiah 7:70-72; 1 Chronicles 29:7, “drams” KJV. Derived from Darius the Mede, or else dara , a king, the regal coin (compare our “crown”). The Greek drachma , our dram, is related.

    DARIUS A common name of several Medo-Persian kings, from a Persian root darvesh, “restraint;” Sanskrit, dhari, “firmly holding.” 1. Darius the Mede. [See DANIEL , see BABYLON , see BELSHAZZAR , and see CYRUS .] Daniel 5:31; 6:1; 9:1; 11:1. This Darius “received the kingdom” ( Daniel 5:31) of Babylon as viceroy from Cyrus, according to G. Rawlinson, which may be favored by Daniel 9:1: “Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldaeans.” He in this view gave up the kingdom to his superior Cyrus, after holding it from 538 to 536 B.C. Abydenus makes Nebuchadnezzar prophesy that a Persian and a Mede,” the pride of the Assyrians,” should take Babylon, i.e. a prince who had ruled over the Medes and Assyrians. Cyrus, having taken such a prince 20 years before Babylon’s capture, advanced him to be deputy king of Babylon. Hence he retained the royal title and is called “king” by Daniel. Thus Astyages (the last king of the Medes, and having no issue, according to Herodotus, 1:73,109,127) will be this Darius, and Ahasuerus (Achashverosh) = Cyaxares (Huwakshatra), father of Astyages. Aeschylus (Persae, 766, 767) represents Cyaxares as the first founder of the empire and a Mede, and Sir H. Rawlinson proves the same in opposition to Herodotus. Aeschylus describes Cyaxares’ son as having “a mind guided by wisdom”; this is applicable both to Darius in Daniel 6:1-3, and to Astyages in Herodotus. The chronology however requires one junior to Astyages to correspond to Darius the Mede and Cyrus’ viceroy, whether a son or one next in succession after Astyages, probably Cyaxares. Harpocration makes him to have introduced the coin named from him the daric. Xenophon’s account of Cyaxares agrees remarkably with Daniel’s account of Darius.

    Xenophon says Cyrus conquered Babylon by Cyaxares’ permission, and appointed for him a royal palace and rule and home there (see Daniel 6:1,28; 9:1; 5:31). Daniel’s statement that Darius was 62 years old accords with Xenophon that when Cyaxares gave Cyrus his daughter he gave him along with her the Median kingdom, himself having no male heir, and being so old as not to be likely to have a son. Darius’ weakness in yielding to his nobles (Daniel 6) accords with Xenophon’s picture of Cyaxares’ sensuality.

    The shortness of his reign and the eclipsing brilliancy of Cyrus’ capture of Babylon caused Herodotus and Berosus to pass Darius unnoticed.

    Cyaxares is the Median uwakshatra, “autocrat,” answering to Darius the Persian, Darjawusch “the ruler;” kschaja, “kingdom,” is the root in the Persian Ahasuerus, Kschajarscha, and the Median Astyages. 2. Darius, son of Hystaspes, fifth from Achaemenes, who founded the Persian dynasty. The Magian Pseudo-Smerdis [see ARTAXERXES , see; Ezra 4:7] usurped the throne, pretending to be Cyrus’ younger son. As he restored the Magian faith, effecting a religious as well as political revolution, he readily gave ear to the enemies of the Jews whose restorer Cyrus had been ( Ezra 4:7-24). Darius Hystaspes with six Persian chiefs overthrew the impostor and became king 521 B.C. As soon as Darius was on the throne the Jews treated Smerdis’ edict as null and void. This bold step is accounted for by Darius’s own inscription at Behistun stating that in his zeal for Zoroastrianism he reversed Smerdis’ policy, “rebuilding the temples which the Magian had destroyed and restoring the religious chants and worship which he had abolished.” The Jews so counted on his sympathy as not to wait for his express edict. Their enemies, hoping that Smerdis had destroyed Cyrus’ decree, informed the king of the Jews’ proceeding and proposed that the archives at Babylon should be searched to see whether Cyrus had ever really given such a decree. It was found at Ecbatana. In his second year Haggai ( Haggai 1:1; 2:1,10) and Zechariah (Zechariah 3-4; 7:1-3) the prophets encouraged Zerubbabel and Jeshua to resume the building of the temple that had been discontinued (Ezra 5).

    Tatnai and Shethar Boznai’s effort to hinder it only occasioned the ratification of Cyrus’ original decree by Darius. Darius in his decree in Ezra (Ezra 6) writes as might have been expected from the Zoroastrian Darius of secular history; he calls the Jews’ temple “the house of God,” Jehovah “the God of heaven,” and solicits their prayers “for the life of the king and of his sons.” Herodotus (vii. 2) confirms the fact that he had sons when he ascended the throne. His curse ( Ezra 6:12) on those who injure the temple answers to that on those who should injure the inscriptions at Behistun, and his threat of impaling such ( Ezra 6:11) answers to the Behistun and Herodotus (iii. 159) record of the ordinary punishment he inflicted. The “tribute” ( Ezra 6:8) too he was the first to impose on the provinces (Herodotus, 3:89). in four years it was completed, i.e. in the sixth year of Darius ( Ezra 6:15), in 516 B.C. In this same year he suppressed with severity a Babylonian revolt. He reduced under his supremacy Thrace, Macedon, and the islands in the Aegean Sea, 513-505 B.C. Invading Greece, he was defeated at Marathon 590. Before he could renew the campaign, with preparations completed he died 455 B.C. 3. Darius the Persian ( Nehemiah 12:11,22). As “Jaddua” was high priest at the invasion of Alexander the Great, Darius III, Codomanus, his enemy (336-330 B.C.), last king of Persia, is meant. Darius II, or Nothus, king from 424 to 405 B.C., would be meant if Nehemiah were the writer; but it is more likely he was not, and that the continuation of the register down to Alexander’s contemporary, Jaddua, is inserted by a later hand.

    DARKNESS The ninth Egyptian plague ( Exodus 10:21, etc.). Especially calculated to affect the Egyptians who worshipped Ra, the sun god. Its sudden and intense coming when Moses stretched out his hand marked it as supernatural. Its basis was natural, namely, the chamsin or sandstorm (see Septuagint), from the S.W. desert. It produces a darkness denser than the densest fog, so that no man rises from his place; men and beasts hide until it is over, for it penetrates even through well closed windows. This explains the peculiar phrase “darkness which may be felt.” What still more marked its judicial character was (compare Isaiah 13:9,10; Joel 2:31; 3:15; Matthew 24:29) “the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.” The date of Amos 8:9 coincides with a total eclipse visible at Jerusalem shortly after noon, Feb. 9th, 784 B.C.; the date of Micah 3:6 with the eclipse June 5th, 716 B.C. (Dionys. Hal., 2:56); the date of Jeremiah 15:9 with the eclipse of Sept. 30th, 610 B.C. (Herodotus, 1:74,103.)

    The darkness over all the land (Juaea) from the sixth to the ninth hour during Christ’s crucifixion ( Matthew 27:45) cannot have been an eclipse, for it would not last three hours, seldom intensely more than six minutes. The eclipse, darkness and earthquake in Bithynia, noted by Phlegon of Tralles, was probably in the year before. This darkness at Christ’s crucifixion was nature’s sympathy with her suffering Lord; perhaps partly intended by the prophecy Amos 8:9. As the glory of the Lord shone around the scene of His birth ( Luke 2:9), so a pall of darkness was fitly spread over His dying scene. By the paschal reckoning the moon must then have been at its full phae, when the sun could not be eclipsed.

    Darkness is the image of spiritual ignorance and unbelief ( Isaiah 60:2; John 1:5; 3:19; 1 John 2:8). “Outer darkness” expresses exclusion from the brightness of the heavenly banquet ( Matthew 8:12). “The works of darkness,” i.e. sins ( Ephesians 5:11). God dwells in thick darkness; i.e., we cannot penetrate the awe inspiring mysteries of His person and His dealings. But God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all ( 1 John 1:5; 1 Kings 8:12; Psalm 97:2).

    DARKON children, of. “Servants of Solomon” ( Ezra 2:56; Nehemiah 7:58).

    DATHAN [See AARON and see KORAH .] He and see ABIRAM , sons of Reuben, conspired with Korah against Moses and Aaron ( Numbers 16:1,26: 9- 11; Deuteronomy 11:6; <19A617> Psalm 106:17).

    DAUGHTER used also for granddaughter, or female descendant ( Genesis 31:43; 27:46). “Daughter of Zion,” “daughter of Jerusalem” ( Isaiah 37:22); i.e., Zion or Jerusalem and her inhabitants, personified poetically as an abstract collective feminine. Hengstenberg takes “daughter of Zion” = Zion, “daughter of Jerusalem” = Jerasalem (compare Psalm 9:14). “Daughters of music,” ( Ecclesiastes 12:4): songs and instrumental performances sound low to the old ( 2 Samuel 19:35); otherwise the voice and ear, the organs which produce and enjoy music. Analogy favors the former view. As the principal city is termed “mother,” so its dependent villages are called “daughter towns” ( Joshua 15:45, Hebrew).

    DAVID (“beloved”). His outer life is narrated in the histories of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles; his inner life is unfolded by himself in the Psalms. The verbal coincidences in Psalms and the allusions incidentally to facts which the histories detail are evidently undesigned, and therefore confirm the genuineness of both. The youngest of the eight sons of Jesse of Bethlehem ( 1 Samuel 16:11); great grandson of Ruth and Boaz, “a mighty man of wealth” ( Ruth 2:1; 4:21;22). Born, according to the common chronology, 1085 B.C. Began to reign when 30 years of age. but over Judah alone, 1055 B.C. ( 2 Samuel 5:4; 1 Kings 2:11; Chronicles 29:27); over all Israel, seven years and six months later, B.C. He died in 1015 B.C., 70 years old. In early life he tended Jesse’s flocks, thereby being trained for his subsequent career, for he had ample scope for quiet and prayerful meditations such as Moses had in his 40 years retirement in Midian before his call to public life, and as Paul had in the Arabian sojourn ( Galatians 1:17) before his worldwide ministry. Those who are to be great public men often need first to be men of privacy. His intimate acquaintance with the beauties of nature, alike water, field, hill, and forest below, and the sun, moon, and glorious heavens above, gives coloring to many of his psalms (Psalm 29; Psalm 8; Psalm 19, etc.). His shepherd life, exposed to wild beasts, yet preserved by God amidst green pastures and still waters, furnishes imagery to Psalm 22:20,21; Psalm 23; Psalm 7:2. His active energies were at the same time exercised in adventures amidst the hills and dales of Judah, in one of which his courage was tested by a close encounter with a lion, and in another with a bear, both of which he slew, grasping the beast by the beard and rescuing a lamb out of his mouth. These encounters nerved him for his first great victory, the turning point of his life, the slaying of Goliath of Gath ( 1 Samuel 17:35). Moreover, his accurate acquaintance with all the hiding places in the cavern-pierced hills, e.g. the cave of Adullam, proved of great service to him afterwards in his pursuit by Saul.

    The Bible authorities for his biography are the Davidic psalms and poetic fragments in the histories ( 2 Samuel 1:19-27; 3:33,34; 22; 23:1-7); next the chronicles or state annals of David ( 1 Chronicles 27:24); the book (history) of Samuel the seer, that of Nathan the prophet, and that of Gad the seer ( 1 Chronicles 29:29). Jesse had a brother, Jonathan, whom David made one of his counselors ( 1 Chronicles 27:32). Jesse’s wife, David’s mother, is not named; but Nahash her former husband is the one by whom she had two daughters, David’s half-sisters: Zeruiah, mother of Abishai, Joab and Asahel; and Abigail, mother of Amasa by Jether or Ithra ( 1 Chronicles 2:13-17; 2 Samuel 17:25). Jesse was an old man when David was a mere youth ( 1 Chronicles 17:12). His sisters were much older than David, so that their children, David’s nephews, were his contemporaries and companions more than his own brothers. David shared some of their war-like determined characteristics, but shrank from their stern recklessness of bloodshed in whatever object they sought ( Samuel 3:39; 19:7). His oldest brother, Eliab, behaved unkindly and imperiously toward him when he went like a second Joseph, sent by his father to seek his brethren’s welfare ( 1 Samuel 17:17,18,28,29). Eliab’s “command,” as head of Jesse’s sons, was regarded by the rest as authoritative ( 1 Samuel 20:29), and the youngest, David, was thought scarcely worth bringing before the prophet Samuel ( 1 Samuel 16:11).

    Hence, he had assigned to him the charge of the flock, ordinarily assigned to the least esteemed of the family, women, and servants, as was the case with Moses, Zipporah, Jacob, Rachel. When David became king, instead of returning evil for evil he made Eliab head of the tribe of Judah ( Chronicles 27:18), Elihu = Eliab. His brother Shimeah had two sons connected with his subsequent history, Jonadab, the subtle, bad, selfish adviser of incestuous Amnon ( 2 Samuel 13:3,32,33), and Jonathan who killed a giant of Gath ( 2 Samuel 21:21).

    Nahash was probably one of the royal family of Ammon, which will account for David’s friendship with the king of the same name, as also with Shobi, son of Nahash, from both of whom he received “kindness” in distress ( 2 Samuel 10:2; 17:27). Ammon and David had a common enemy, Saul (1 Samuel 11); besides David’s Moabite great grandmother, Ruth, connected him with Moab, Ammon’s kinsmen. Hence, it was most natural to him to repair to Moab and Ammon when pursued by Saul. At first sight, we wonder at his leaving his father and mother for safe-keeping with the king of Moab (1 Samuel 22); but the Book of Ruth shows how coincident with probability this is, and yet how little like the harmony contrived by a forger! His Gentile connection gave him somewhat enlarged views of the coming kingdom of Messiah, whose type and ancestor he was privileged to be ( Psalm 2:8; Matthew 1:5).

    His birthplace was Bethlehem (as it was of his Antitype, Messiah: Luke 2:4, etc.); and of his patrimony there he gave to Chimham a property which long retained Chimham’s name, in reward for the father Barzillai’s loyalty and help in Absalom’s rebellion ( 2 Samuel 19:37,38; Jeremiah 41:17). His early associations with Bethlehem made him when in a hold desire a drink of water from its well while the Philistines held it. Three of his 30 captains broke through and brought it; but David, with the tender conscientiousness which characterized him (compare 1 Samuel 24:5; 2 Samuel 24:10), and which appreciated the deep spirituality of the sixth commandment, would not drink it but poured it out to the Lord, saying, “My God forbid it me: shall I drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in jeopardy?” ( 1 Chronicles 10:15-19). see SAUL , the people’s choice, having been rejected from being king for disobedience, God manifested His sovereignty by choosing one, the very last thought of by his own family or even by the prophet; not the oldest, but the youngest; not like Saul, taller than the people by head and shoulders, but of moderate stature. A yearly sacrificial feast used to be held at Bethlehem, whereat Jesse, as chief landowner, presided with the elders (1 Samuel 16; 20:6; compare at Saul’s selection, 1 Samuel 9:12). But now suddenly at God’s command, Samuel, though fearful of Saul’s deadly enmity, appears there driving a heifer before him, to offer an extraordinary sacrifice. The elders trembling, lest his visit should be for judicial punishment of some sin, inquired, “Comest thou peaceably?” He answered, “Peaceably.” Then inviting them and Jesse’s sons he caused the latter to pass successively before him. Seven sons passed by but were rejected, notwithstanding Samuel’s pre-possession in favor of Eliab’s countenance and stature, since Jehovah, unlike man, “looks not on the outward appearance but on the heart.” David, seemingly the least likely and the youngest, was fetched from the sheep; and his unction with oil by the prophet previous to the feast was accompanied with the unction of the Spirit of the Lord from that day forward. Simultaneously, the Spirit of Jehovah left Saul and an evil spirit from Jehovah troubled him. David was “a man after the Lord’s own heart” ( 1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22).

    Moreover, he did not lack those outward graces which were looked for in a king; “ruddy,” i.e. with auburn hair, esteemed to be a beauty in the South and East, where black hair is usual; with “bright eyes” (margin, Samuel 16:12,18); goodly in countenance, and comely in person ( Samuel 17:42); besides being “mighty, valiant, a man of war,” and altogether “prudent.” Like his nephew, Asahel, his feet were by his God made “like hinds’ feet.” David adds ( Psalm 18:33,34): “He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.” Nothing could be more homely than his outward attire, with a staff or wand in hand used for dogs, and a pouch around his neck for carrying a shepherd’s necessaries ( 1 Samuel 17:40-43). But God gave him “integrity of heart and skillfulness of hands,” qualifying him for “feeding and guiding Israel,” after that he was “taken from the sheepfolds” ( Psalm 78:70-72), and “from the sheepcote” ( 2 Samuel 7:8). Nor was he ashamed of his early life, but he delighted gratefully to acknowledge before God that he was “the man raised up on high” ( 2 Samuel 23:1; compare Psalm 89).

    The first glimpse we have of David’s taste in music and sacred poetry, which afterward appears so preeminent in his psalms, is in his having been chosen as the best minstrel to charm away the evil spirit when it came upon Saul ( 1 Samuel 16:15-23). Thus, the evil spirit departed, but the good Spirit did not come to Saul; and the result was, when David was driven away, the evil returned worse than ever. (Compare 1 Samuel 28 with Matthew 12:43-45). David doubtless received further training in the schools of the prophets, who connected their prophesying with the soothing and elevating music of psaltery, tabret, pipe, and harp ( Samuel 10:5); for he and Samuel (who also feared Saul’s wrath for his having anointed David: 1 Samuel 16:2) dwelt together in see NAIOTH near Ramah, i.e. in the “habitations” of the prophets there, connected together by a wall or hedge round; a school over which Samuel presided, as Elisha did over those at Gilgal and Jericho; schools not for monastic separation from life’s duties, but for mental and spiritual training with a view to greater usefulness in the world. Thus, he became “the sweet singer of Israel” ( 2 Samuel 23:1), “the inventor of instruments of music” ( Amos 6:5). Compare 1 Chronicles 23:5; 15:16,19-21,24; 25:1; Chronicles 29:25,26. The use of cymbals, psalteries, and harps, in a form suitable for the temple worship, was by his command; the kinnor (the lyre) and the nebel (the psaltery, a stringed instrument played by the hand) being improved by him and added to the cymbals, as distinguished from the “trumpets.”

    The portion 1 Samuel 17--18:2 has been thought a parenthesis explaining how David became first introduced to Saul. But 1 Samuel 17:12,15 show that Saul already had David in attendance upon him, for Jesse his father is called “that Ephrathite” (namely, that one spoken of above), and it is said before David’s going forth to meet Goliath that “David went and returned from Saul to feed his father’s sheep at Bethlehem.” How then shall we account for Saul’s question just before the encounter, “Abner, whose son is this youth?” and after it,” Whose son art thou, young man?” ( 1 Samuel 17:55-58.) Also, is this question consistent with his being already “Saul’s armor-bearer and loved greatly” by him ( 1 Samuel 16:20,21.) The title “armor-bearer” was honorary, like our aide-de-camp, e.g. Joab had ten ( 2 Samuel 18:15). David merely attended Saul for a time, and returned to tend his father’s sheep, where he was when the war broke out in which Goliath was the Philistine champion. Saul’s question ( 1 Samuel 17:55-58), “Whose son art thou?” must therefore imply more than asking the name of David’s father. Evidently, he entered into a full inquiry about him, having lost sight of him since the time David had been in attendance. The words ( 1 Samuel 18:1) “when David made an end of speaking unto Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit unto the soul of David,” imply a lengthened detail of all concerning his father and himself. The sacred writer of 1 Samuel probably embodied in his narrative some fragments of the authoritative documents mentioned above, stamping them with divine sanction; hence arises a variation between the different documents which would be cleared up if we knew more fully the circumstances. Both are true, though the explanation of how they harmonize can only be conjectured with more or less probability.

    The battle was at see EPHES-DAMMIM in the boundary hills of Judah; Saul’s army on one side of the valley, the Philistines on the other, the brook Elah (i.e. the Terebinth) running between. Goliath’s complete armor contrasted with the ill-armed state of Israel, whose king alone was well armed ( 1 Samuel 17:38). For, as Porsena imposed on the Romans the stipulation that they should use no iron except in farm work (Pliny, 34:14), so the Philistines forced the Israelites to have “no smith throughout all their land, lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears” ( 1 Samuel 13:19,20). David at this moment, when all the Israelites were dismayed, came to bring supplies for his brethren and to get from them a “pledge” that they were alive and well. Arriving at the wagon rampart (not “the trench” as KJV) round Israel’s camp, he heard their well-known war shout ( Numbers 23:21, compare Numbers 10:35). Leaving his see CARRIAGE (the vessels of supplies which he carried) in the hand of the baggage-master, he ran to greet his brethren in the midst of the lines, and there heard Goliath’s challenge repeated on the 40th day for the 40th time.

    The meekness with which David conquered his own spirit, when Eliab charged him with pride, the very sin which prompted Eliab’s own angry and uncharitable imputation, was a fit prelude to his conquest of Goliath; self must be overcome before we can overcome others ( Proverbs 16:32; 13:10). The same principle,” judge not according to the appearance” ( John 7:24), as. at his anointing ( 1 Samuel 16:7), is set forth in the victory of this “youth” over “a man of war from his youth.” Physical strength and size, severed from God; is mere beast strength, and must fall before the seemingly feeblest whose God is the Lord. This is the force of his words: “thy servant slew both the lion and the bear, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath defied the armies of the living God.” Man becomes beastlike when severed from God, and is only manly when he is godly. [See BEAST , and see DANIEL .] Confidence in God, not self, grounded on past deliverance, and on God’s honor being at stake before the assembled people of God and the enemies of God ( 1 Samuel 17:45-48), filled him with such alacrity that he “ran” toward the enemy, and with his simple sling and stone smote him to the ground. His armor David took first to his tent, and afterward to the tabernacle at Nob; his head David brought to Jerusalem (the city, not the citadel, which was then a Jebusite possession).

    At this point begins the second era of David’s life, his persecution by Saul.

    A word is enough to rouse the jealous spirit, especially in a king towards a subject. That word was spoken by the women, unconscious of the effect of their words while they sang in responsive strains before the king and his champion, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” “They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me but thousands, and what can he have more but the kingdom?” Conscience told him he had forfeited his throne; and remembering Samuel’s word after his disobedience as to the Amalekites ( 1 Samuel 15:28), “the Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbor of thine that is better than thou,” he “eyed David” as possibly the “neighbor” meant. Envy moved Saul under the evil spirit to cast his javelin at him, but twice he eluded it. His already noted ( 1 Samuel 16:18) prudence, whereby “he behaved himself wisely in all his ways,” was now brought into play; a quality which in dependence upon Jehovah, its Giver ( Psalm 5:8), he in <19A101> Psalm 101:1, by an undesigned coincidence, professes in the same words his determination to exercise, and which as it was the characteristic of Jacob, Israel’s forefather, so it has been prominent in his descendants in all ages, modern as well as ancient, especially in times of persecution; analogous to the instinctive sagacity of hunted animals. So wisely did he behave, and so manifestly was the Lord with him, that Saul the king was afraid of David his subject; “therefore Saul removed him from him and made him captain over a thousand” ( 1 Samuel 18:13).

    Subsequently, he was captain of the king’s bodyguard, next to Abner the captain of the host and Jonathan the heir apparent, and sat with the king at table daily ( 1 Samuel 20:25; 22:14). Next, after Saul broke his promise of giving Merab his older daughter to be David’s wife, by giving her to Adriel instead, Michal, Saul’s second daughter, became attached to David.

    Saul used her as a “snare” that David might fall by the Philistines. The dowry Saul required was 100 foreskins of the Philistines. David brought him 200, which, so far from abating his malice, seeing that the Lord was so manifestly, with David, made him only the more bitter “enemy.” But God can raise up friends to His people in their enemy’s house; and as Pharaoh’s daughter saved Moses, so Saul’s son Jonathan and daughter Michal saved David. After having promised in the living Jehovah’s name David’s safety to Jonathan, and after David had “slain the Philistines with a great slaughter” from which they did not recover until the battle in which Saul fell, Saul hurled his javelin at David with such force that it entered into the wall and then would have killed David in his own house, but that by Michal’s help he escaped through a window. Jonathan, his bosom friend, he saw once again and never after. Michal was given to Phaltiel, and was not restored to him until he made her restoration a condition of peace with Abner (1 Samuel 19; 2 Samuel 3:13-16). How striking a retribution by the righteous God it was, that Saul himself fell by the very enemy by whom he hoped to kill David! How evidently this and kindred cases must have been in David’s mind when he wrote of the sinner, “he made a pit and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made” ( Psalm 7:15,16); the title of this psalm probably refers to Saul, the black-hearted son of Kish the Benjamite, enigmatically glanced at as “Cush (Ethiopia; compare Jeremiah 13:23; Amos 9:7) the Benjamite.”

    This first act in his long wanderings forms the subject of Psalm 59. The title states the occasion: “when Saul sent and they watched the house to kill him.” The “bloody men” are Saul and his minions ( Psalm 59:2). “The mighty are gathered against me, not for my transgression; ... they run and prepare themselves without my fault” ( Psalm 59:3,4); herein he appeals to the all-knowing Jehovah, since the earthly king will not believe his protestations of innocence of the treason laid to his charge. This psalm harmonizes with the independent history, 1 Samuel 18:8-end; 20:30,31; 22:8; 24:9. This is the “lying” alluded to ( Psalm 59:12). Saul’s “pride” would not brook that David’s exploits should be extolled above his; hence flowed the “lying” and malice. His minions, “like a dog returning at evening,” thirsting for prey which they had in vain sought throughout the day, came tumultuously besieging David’s house “that night” after Saul’s vain attempt to destroy him in the day. His doom answered to his sin.

    Greatly trembling at the Philistine hosts, war-like though he was, but cowed by a guilty conscience, he who had made David to “wander up and down” now in his turn wanders hither and there for that spiritual guidance which Jehovah withheld and at last by night in disguise was a suppliant before the witch of Endor, which sealed his destruction (1 Samuel 28; Chronicles 10:13). As David was “watched” by Saul’s messengers ( Samuel 19:11) so David’s remedy was, “because of his (Saul’s) strength will I wait upon (watch unto, Hebrew) Thee.”

    David, seeing no hope of safety while within Saul’s reach, fled to Samuel and dwelt with him at the prophet’s school in Naioth. Saul sent messengers to apprehend him; but they and even Saul himself, when he followed, were filled with the spirit of prophecy; and they who came to seize the servant of God joined David in Spirit-taught praises of God; so, God can turn the hearts of His people’s foes ( Proverbs 16:7; 21:1); compare Acts 18:17 with 1 Corinthians 1:1, especially Saul’s namesake ( Acts 7:58 with Acts 9).

    After taking affectionate leave of Jonathan, David fled to Nob, where the tabernacle was, in order to inquire God’s will concerning his future course, as was David’s custom. Herein Psalm 16:7 undesignedly coincides with 1 Samuel 22:10,15. see AHIMELECH , alarmed at David’s sudden appearance alone, lest he should be charged with some unwelcome commission, asked, “Why art thou alone?” (1 Samuel 21.) David, whom neither beast nor giant had shaken from his trust in the Lord, now through temporary unbelief told a lie, which involved the unsuspecting high priest and all his subordinates in one indiscriminate massacre, through Doeg’s information to Saul. Too late David acknowledged to the only survivor, see ABIATHAR , that he had thereby occasioned their death (1 Samuel 22); so liable are even believers to vacillation and to consequent punishment. By the lie he gained his immediate object, the 12 shewbread loaves just removed from the table to make place for the new bread on the sabbath, and also Goliath’s sword wrapped up in cloth behind the high priest’s own ephod (shoulder dress), so precious a dedicatory offering was it deemed.

    One gain David derived and Saul lost by his slaughter of the priests; Abiathar, the sole survivor of the line of Ithamar, henceforth attended David, and through him David could always inquire of God, in God’s appointed way ( Psalm 16:7, in undesigned coincidence with Samuel 23:2,4,6,9; 30:7,8). Saul on the contrary had bereft himself of those through whom he might have consulted the Lord. So at last, “when the Lord answered him, neither by dreams, by Urim, nor by prophets,” he filled up the measure of his guilt by repairing to the witch of Endor. Surely men’s “sin will find them out” ( 1 Samuel 28:6,7; Numbers 32:23).

    The title of Psalm 52 informs us that it was composed in reference to Saul’s cruel act on Doeg’s officious tale-telling information. The “boaster in mischief, the mighty man” (the very term used of Saul, 2 Samuel 1:19), is not the herdsman Doeg, the ready tool of evil, but the master of hero might in animal courage, Saul. True hero might belongs to the godly alone, as Psalm 18:25 saith, “with an upright hero (Hebrew for ‘man’) Thou wilt show Thyself upright.” Saul’s “lying and all devouring words” ( Psalm 5:3) are, with undesigned coincidence, illustrated by the independent history ( 1 Samuel 24:9), “wherefore hearest thou men’s words, ... Behold, David seeketh thy hurt?” Saul’s courtiers knew the road to his favor was to malign David. Saul was thus the prime mover of the lying charge. Doeg, for mischief and to curry favor, told the fact; it was Saul who put on it the false construction of treason against David and the innocent priests; compare David’s similar language, Psalm 17:3,4. Saul was “the man that made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and strengthened himself in his wickedness” ( Psalm 52:7).

    For in undesigned coincidence with this the history ( 1 Samuel 22:7-9) represents him saying, “Will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards?” etc., implying that he had all these (as Samuel foretold would be “the manner of the king,” 1 Samuel 8:14) to give, which David had not. Singularly prophetic of Saul’s own doom are the Words ( Psalm 52:5) hinting at his having rooted out Ahimelech’s family, “God shall likewise ... pluck thee out of try dwelling-place, and root thee out of the land of the living.” Not only Saul, but all his bloody house save Mephibosheth, died by a violent death, by a righteous retribution in kind ( 1 Samuel 31:6; 2 Samuel 21:1-14; Psalm 18:25,26).

    Unbelieving calculation of probabilities, instead of doing the right thing in prayerful faith, led David to flee to Israel’s enemies, the Philistines and see ACHISH of Gath. As Psalm 56 represents him praying for deliverance at this crisis, so Psalm 34 (in alphabetical acrostic arrangement in Hebrew), which by its tranquil tone shows it was composed in a season of quiet, is his permanent memorial of thanksgiving for the deliverance granted to his prayers. The title of Psalm 56, Jonath-elem-rechokim, means “the dumb dove among strangers.” David was “dumb,” inasmuch as, feeling words useless to enemies who “wrested” all he said ( Psalm 56:5), he silently left his cause with God ( Psalm 38:13,14). “Dove” represents his defenseless innocence, while pursued as a bird. He longed to have “wings like a dove to fly away and be at rest” (Pa. 55:6,7; 1 Samuel 26:20).

    The “strangers” are the Philistines, among whom he was sojourning in his “wanderings” ( Psalm 56:8). The title of Psalm 34 says “he changed his behavior” or “concealed his intellect” (Hengstenberg), i.e. feigned madness,” scrabbling on the doors and letting his spittle fall on his heard” ( 1 Samuel 21:10-15): so that Achish “see ABIMELECH ” , (literally, father of a king, hereditary not elective monarch) drove him away, and he departed. “Goliath’s sword” perhaps betrayed him, for Achish’s servants immediately said, “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing, ... David hath slain his ten thousands?” The sword which he had dishonestly got from Ahimelech now cuts the ground from under him, before Abimelech ( Numbers 32:23), and the song of his former triumph is the very occasion of their interpreting it to mean his kingship. The title of Psalm 56 implies he was “taken” prisoner, and only escaped by feigning madness.

    He now became an independent outlaw ( 1 Samuel 22:1), and gathered a band of fugitives through debt or distress, in the cave some miles S.W. of Bethlehem, the largest in the land, see ADULLAM . “His father’s house (probably including Zeruiah’s sons, certainly Abishai: 2 Samuel 23:13,18) went down there to him,” an appropriate expression, for the path goes down from Bethlehem to it toward the Dead Sea. As formerly a shepherd he knew every winding of the cavern, as the Arabs now do. Some of Canaanite origin joined him, as Ahimelech the Hittite ( 1 Samuel 26:6). Long after we read of “600 men coming after him from Gath” ( Samuel 15:18).

    As Psalm 56 refers to his stay with the Philistine king, so Psalm 57 title, “when he fled from Saul in the cave,” refers to his subsequent stay in the cave of Adullam. The “cave” symbolizes a gloomy position ( Hebrews 11:38); and perhaps never did David’s position seem darker than at that time, as he subsequently sets forth in the maschil (spiritual instruction) Psalm 142, for the edification and comfort of God’s people when in similar cavelike positions of gloom and trial.

    From Adullam he went to Mizpeh (“watchtower, mountain height”) of Moab, the Moabite royal residence on Mount Pisgah, and there, on the ground of kindred through Ruth the Moabitess, committed his aged parents to the charge of the king to secure them from Saul’s enmity. This was the time probably when Nahash the Ammonite king showed him kindness ( 2 Samuel 10:2). Here too his future biographer, the prophet Gad, whose acquaintance he may have made when among the prophets at Naioth, joined him. His name makes it possible he was a Gadite, the forerunner of the 11 Gadite chieftains who crossed the then overflowing Jordan to reach David shortly afterward. But now he was on the E. side of Jordan in Mizpeh-hold. Gad’s warning, “Abide not in the hold, depart into Judah” ( 1 Samuel 22:5), implies that he was not to seek refuge outside the Holy Land, but trust in the Lord as his refuge. Tradition reports that the Moabites murdered his parents; if true, it must have been subsequently, since here it is implied David’s parents left the hold when David left it. One thing is certain, that many years afterward David treated the subjugated Moabites with extraordinary severity,” making them lie down upon the ground, and then with two lines measuring to put to death, and with one full line to keep alive,” i.e. killing two-thirds of their fighting men, and sparing only one third. If in the interim, in violation of the rights of hospitality and kindred, they treacherously murdered his parents, his exceptional severity is accounted for. In Psalm 60:8, “Moab is my washpot,” he marks their ignominious subjection to the slave’s office of washing the feet of the master. Annually they had to pay 10,000 lambs and as many rams ( 2 Kings 3:4; Isaiah 16:1). In Psalm 27 he alludes to this severance from his parents, who possibly (such is man’s selfishness in calamity) blamed him for their exile: “when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up” (yaaspheeni ), as a child disowned by its parents, and taken up by the adoptive father from the streets; compare Ezekiel 16:5,6.

    The “sorrow multiplying” idolatries surrounding him, while among the Philistines and in Moab, and his prayer for preservation amidst all, suggested the related pair of psalms, Ps 16 and Psalm 17 “Preserve me, O God, for in Thee do I put my trust” ( Psalm 16:1); “their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another God”; in contrast to which his blessed experience is, “the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance,” “the lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places, yea I have a goodly heritage.”

    The names for idol gods and sorrows are almost identical; ‘alztseboth , ‘atsabbim ; a bad augury for those who “hasten after” (as one buying a wife at the price of a costly dowry, Hebrew) them. In undesigned coincidence with this, David at Hachilah, in his appeal to Saul, fixes on this as the chief hardship of his exile from the Holy Land; they who stirred thee up against me” have driven me out from abiding in the inheritance of the Lord, saying, Go serve other gods:” The Moabite stone of Dibon strikingly confirms the Scripture representation of the free contact carried on between Israelites and Moabites, not being impeded by difference of language; Moab, if sprung from Lot as the Bible states, would use a language not widely different from that of Lot’s uncle Abraham’s descendants; so the Dibon stone is inscribed (about 900 B.C.) with a language almost identical with the Hebrew of the Bible histories, Samuel and Kings.

    Next, David by Gad’s warning fled to see HARETH forest. But hearing that the Philistines were robbing the threshing floors of see KEILAH (in the lowland of Judah toward Philistia), love of country prevailed over every thought of his own safety. But first he inquired of the Lord, “Shall I go, ... and save Keilah?” Upon receiving a favorable response twice, probably through Gad, he went in spite of the remonstrance of his men, whose faith yielded to fears. He saved the city, killed many Philistines, and carried away their cattle. His self-devotion in behalf of Keilah was rewarded by treacherous ingratitude on the part of the citizens so saved.

    For, on Saul’s secretly plotting mischief against him while shut up in Keilah, he learned by inquiry of the Lord, through Abiathar with the ephod, that the men of Keilah would betray him if he stayed, a type of Him who was betrayed by those whom He came to save (1 Samuel 23). From Keilah David and his 600 men (to which number they had increased from 400 in Adullam, 1 Samuel 22:2,) going to a mountain in the wilderness of Ziph, dispersed in the fastnesses “wheresoever they could go.”

    It is to this occasion that Psalm 11 refers: “in the Lord put I my trust, how say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain.” Literally he did flee; but the flight from which his spiritual instincts recoiled (compare Nehemiah 6:11) was that from trust in Jehovah; though his followers’ faith was giving way, especially when even Saul was claiming God as on his side against David ( 1 Samuel 23:3,7.) The image of a “bird” is the very one the independent history represents him using while in the same neighborhood ( 1 Samuel 26:20): “the king of Israel is come out as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.” At an alarm birds flee from the open plain to the covert of a hill. “The wicked bending their bow ... that they may privily shoot at the upright” ( Psalm 11:2), points to the treacherous Ziphites tracking “his foot” (the margin of 1 Samuel 23:22), and guiding Saul and his Benjamite bowmen toward David. They “compassed” him (as Psalm 17:9 expresses it, in agreement with the history) so closely at the wilderness of Maon, they on the one side while he was on the other, that David only by “making haste got away.” God’s providence interposed, for just as Saul was on the verge of overtaking him the Philistines unintentionally saved David by invading Judah and so requiring Saul in haste to meet them, the very enemies by whom Saul had hoped to kill David ( 1 Samuel 18:21)! The name Sela-hammah-lekoth, “the rock of divisions,” marked the spot where David climbed down one side while Saul was surrounding the mountain on the other side. Psalm 54 was written “when the Ziphims came and said to Saul, Doth not David hide himself with us?” Twice they informed Saul (1 Samuel 23; 1 Samuel 26).

    The exact words corresponding in both show that 1 Samuel 23:19 is the occasion meant in Psalm 54 “Strangers are risen up against me” ( Psalm 54:3); i.e., the Ziphites, who by the ties of country ought to have been friends, are behaving as hostile “strangers”; compare Isaiah 25:5, <19C005> Psalm 120:5. So in Psalm 54:5 the” enemies” are shoreray , “those who watch me,” liers in wait.

    Next, David dwelt in the strongholds of Engedi (= “the fountain of the goat or kid”), “the rocks of the wild goats” (1 Samuel 24). This was in the neighborhood of the Dead Sea, the scene of the destruction by fire of the guilty cities of the plain. How naturally here the idea would suggest itself ( Psalm 11:6), “upon the wicked Jehovah shall rain fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest” (“the wrath wind,” zil’aphot ; compare” the breath of the Lord,” Isaiah 30:33). See last paragraph for the undesigned coincidence between Psalm 11:1,2 and 1 Samuel 26:20-end. Here Providence put Saul the persecutor in his victim David’s power. For Saul went into one of the caves with which the chalk and limestone conical hills W. of the Dead Sea abound, “to cover his feet” (to perform nature’s necessities, Judges 3:24; i.e. to defecate) while David’s men were lurking in the sides. David silently cut off Saul’s skirt on his spreading out his long robe before and behind. But though his men regarded it as an opportunity for killing him, appointed by Jehovah, David said,” Jehovah forbid that I should ... stretch forth mine hand against ... Jehovah’s anointed.” Nay, his conscience even “smote him because he had cut off Saul’s skirt.” After Saul had left the cave David cried after him, “wherefore hearest thou men’s words, ... Behold, David seeketh thy hurt?” So in Psalm 7:3 he says, “if I have done this,” namely, what my calumniators allege, “if there be iniquity in my hands.” How undesignedly and naturally his words in the history coincide: “My father, see the skirt of try robe in my hand, for in that I killed thee not, know there is neither evil nor transgression in mine hand, yet thou huntest my soul.” The same favorite expressions occur in the psalm, “lest he tear my soul” ( Psalm 7:2,5), and “persecute me” ( Psalm 7:1), as in I Sam. 24:14, “whom dost thou persecute?” (Hebrew) Saul was astonished at David’s magnanimity as something above the mere natural man:” if a man find his enemy, will he let him go well away? Wherefore the Lord reward thee good for that thou hast done unto me this day.” How natural that the charge which Saul had alleged against David as his plea for persecuting him, but which really lay at Saul’s own door, should be uppermost in David’s mind: Psalm 7:4, “if I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me.” Moreover, the same phrases occur in 1 Samuel 26, describing the similar magnanimity of David toward Saul ( 1 Samuel 26:18), and the same allusion to men’s calumnies against David to gain Saul’s favor.

    In Psalm 7:3-5 he defends himself against these calumnies; and the title, “concerning the words,” refers to them, for the real calumniator was Saul himself, and his flatterers uttered the calumnies to please him, therefore the title attributes “the words” to “Cush the Benjamite,” i.e. the Ethiopian (black) hearted son of Kish of Benjamin = Saul. As in 1 Samuel 24:12; 26:15, David says, “The Lord judge between me and thee ... but mine hand shall not be upon thee; the Lord render to every man his righteousness”; so in Psalm 7:8,11 “Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness ...

    God judgeth the righteous.” In both alike appears the same committing of his righteous cause to the righteous God (compare Psalm 18:20).

    Jehovah’s “whetted sword” and “arrows ordained against the persecutors” literally smote Saul, in accordance with David’s prophecy in Psalm 7:13, for he was smitten by the arrows of the very Philistines by whom he had hoped to smite David, and he fell by his own sword ( 1 Samuel 18:17,21; compare 1 Samuel 31:3,4). David, of whom Saul had said, Let the hand of the Philistines be upon him, was actually saved by them ( 1 Samuel 27:1-3), it was Saul who was slain by them. So accurately was the retributive law fulfilled; “he made a pit and digged, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come upon his own pate” ( Psalm 7:15,16).

    The last interview between Saul and David was further S. in the same region, at the hill of Hachilah before Jeshimon, where Saul lay in the camp with the usual fortification of wagons and baggage around ( 1 Samuel 26:5 margin). David abode in the wilderness, and having ascertained by spies Saul’s presence, sallied forth with Ablshai, and found Saul asleep, with his spear stuck in the ground beside him. Abishai would have smitten him with the spear, but David interposed: “Destroy him not, for who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” adding prophetically, “the Lord shall smite him ... or he shall descend into battle and perish” (compare 1 Samuel 31:6). This phrase became a motto to him, “Destroy not,” Altaschith, prefixed to Psalm 57; 58; 59, and copied by Asaph, Psalm 75 He could say “Destroy not” to God, when he “destroyed not” his enemy ( Matthew 18:32-35; 26:52). Contenting himself with taking Saul’s cruse, and the spear which had so nearly transfixed him, David appealed to the persecutor, whose heart was touched, and so David overcame evil with good.

    While in Maon David sought contributions from Nabal of Carmel (1 Samuel 25), of the house of Caleb but sadly degenerate from his wholehearted ancestor; David’s men had been “very good” to Nabal’s shepherds, neither hurting men nor taking property though in their power, yea “being a wall unto them both by night and day.” But Nabal churlishly replied, “Shall I take my bread, my water, and my flesh (the repeated “my” marks his covetous God-forgetting selfishness, Hosea 2:5), and give it to men whom I know not from whence they be? There be many servants (glancing at David) nowadays that break away every man from his master.” David here was strongly tempted to that which he had abstained from in the case of Saul, personal revenge. Abigail, Nabal’s wife, by her timely present of bread, wine, sheep, and fruit, saved herself and her house when David was bent on vengeance for having been requited evil for good. With wise unselfishness she said, “Upon me let this iniquity be ... let not my lord regard this man of Belial, for as his name is so is he; Nabal (= “fool”) is his name, and folly is with him.” At the same time she salved over the dishonor Nabal had done to David personally:” my lord fighteth the battles of the Lord (compare 1 Samuel 18:17); yet a man is risen ... to seek thy soul; but the soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life, ... and the souls of thine enemies shall the Lord sling out as out of the middle of a sling,” with feminine tact alluding to the great achievement of David, his slaying Goliath with a sling. In ten days after Nabal’s unreasonable and drunken feast, from which he awoke only to hear of his imminent danger, the Lord struck Nabal down in such a way that he died. Then David blessed Jehovah for having” “pleaded his cause” (the phrase in the history coinciding undesignedly with that in Psalm 35:1) against Nabal, and having kept David from self-revenge; compare Romans 12:19.

    Another coincidence between David’s language in the independent history and that in his sacred poetry appears from comparing 1 Samuel 25:39, “the Lord hath returned the wickedness of Nabal upon his own head,” with Psalm 7:16, “his mischief shall return upon his own head.” Scripture, which calls things by their right names, designates the unbelieving sinner a “fool,” however wise in his own eyes and those of the world because gilded by worldly success. David could not fail to be deeply impressed with this in Nabal’s case, whose name expressed his self-indulging, unbelieving folly. Having taken Abigail as his wife, David must have often thought of the remarkable providence under which he met her. How naturally then in the psalm which was indited for private devotion in the form of Psalm 53, and for public use in the sanctuary in the form of Psalm 14, does he stigmatize godlessness as the secret spring of the FOLLY of worldlings: “the fool (Nabal) hath said in his heart, No God!” How suddenly “great fear” came upon him in the midst of his godless feasting, “when no fear was” ( Psalm 53:5). For when told, in the morning after his revel, of his danger, “his heart died within him, and he became as a stone”; the same heart which just before had been so “merry within him”; like the rich man who in the midst of his self-aggrandizing and indulging plans received the awful summons,” Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee” ( Luke 12:16-20). The death of Saul, after he had “played the fool and erred exceedingly” ( 1 Samuel 26:21), and the utter “perishing” of see AMALEK ’S “memorial with them,” because their “hand was against the throne of the Lord” ( Exodus 17:16 margin), illustrate the same principle as set forth in David’s Psalm 9, with the title Muth-Labben, i.e. an anagram for Nabal,” concerning the dying of the fool,” the phrase of David again in 2 Samuel 3:33.

    Unbelieving fear (“I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul”) and human calculations (such is the vacillation even in believers) induced David again to seek refuge among the Philistines; but now no longer a fugitive, but captain of an organized band, 600 men with their wives and families.

    Achish of Gath (son of the former Achish says tradition), according to the usage of eastern monarchs, gave him Ziklag for his maintenance, which thenceforth appertained to Judah (1 Samuel 27). So did his power grow that a band of Benjamites, of Saul’s brethren, right-handed and left-handed slingers and archers, with their captains, including Ismaiah the Gibeonite, a mighty man over the 30, joined him here ( 1 Chronicles 12:1-7), and he stayed “a full year and four months.” David during his stay smote the Geshurites, Gezrites, and Amalekites, the very people the sparing of whom in disobedience to God was the cause of Saul’s rejection; but he was guilty of a deception to Achish, saying his inroad was upon the Jerahmeelites and Kenites, nomadic races on the S. of Judah, allied to Israel. But for God’s providential interposition his putting himself in this false position would have been fatal to his peace of conscience, for he would have had to join with the pagan Philistines in the battle of Gilboa against his own countrymen. He narrowly escaped by the protest of the Philistine nobles (1 Samuel 28--29). Psalm 34, referring probably to both his stays in Philistia (see title), celebrates how “the angel of the Lord encamped around” him because he “feared” God, and “delivered” him; and how “the Lord redeemeth the soul of His servants,” besides “keeping all his bones” so that “not one of them is broken.” On the march toward Gilboa, and as he turned back to Ziklag, several captains of the thousands of Manasseh joined him, “all mighty men of valor,” so that his army increased “day by day until it was a great host, like the host of God” ( 1 Chronicles 12:19-22).

    Upon returning, he discovered that the Amalekites had burned Ziklag with fire (1 Samuel 30), and they carried away all its inhabitants -- women and children -- as captives. “David was greatly distressed,” for besides his own deep grief, his two wives Ahinoam and Abigail being among those carried off, the people with characteristic fickleness “bade stone him.” But distress now brought out into strong relief his faith which had vacillated in his coming to Philistia, so “he encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” In undesigned coincidence with this representation, in the history of his fears silenced by his faith, in Psalm 56, which commemorates his two stays in Philistia, he says ( Psalm 56:3), “what time I am afraid I will trust in Thee.” Consulting, as was his custom, God through Abiathar and the ephod, and receiving a favorable response, he pursued with 400 men (probably including some of the recently joined Manassites, Chronicles 12:21), leaving 200 who were faint at the brook Besor. By an Egyptian’s information he came upon the Amalekites and killed all except 400 who escaped on camels, and recovered all the captives and spoil.

    Besides, he took large spoil belonging to Amalek, and of it distributed “presents to all the places where David and his men were wont to haunt.”

    This suggested his language Psalm 68:18, “Thou hast received gifts for men,” as explained in relation to the Antitype ( Ephesians 4:8). The law of division of plunder equally, among those engaged in the field and those guarding the baggage, was established ( 1 Samuel 25:13; 30:25).

    David’s generosity to his fallen enemy appears in his punishment of the Amalekite, who, bringing news of Saul’s death, and carrying to David the crown and bracelet stripped from him, confessed that he had put an end to Saul. David composed the beautiful elegy on Saul and Jonathan ( Samuel 1:17-27), which he bade the children of Judah to be “taught” (compare title Psalm 60) in, designated “the bow” song, not as KJV “he bade them teach the children of Judah (the use of) the bow.”

    Having first consulted the Lord, as always, David by His direction went up to Hebron, the sacred city where the patriarchs were buried and Caleb had his inheritance, and was there anointed king over Judah, which he continued to be 7 1/2 years. His noble-heartedness appears in his thanks to the men of Jabesh Gilead for burying Saul: “Blessed be ye of the Lord, that ye have showed this kindness ... now the Lord show kindness and truth unto you... I also will requite you this kindness.” What a contrast to Saul’s thanks to the Ziphites for betraying David: “Blessed be ye of the Lord (thus claiming God’s sanction to treachery, malice, and bloodthirsty persecution of the innocent), for ye have compassion of me.” Ishbosheth was not made king at Mahanaim until after David had reigned five years.

    Probably all the country, except Judah in the S. and part of the transjordanic tribes on the E., were under the Philistine dominion after the fatal battle of Gilboa. Gradually, Israel recovered its land, and Abner at the close of the five years made Ishbosheth king. David however “waxed stronger and stronger,” while “Saul’s house waxed weaker and weaker” (2 Samuel 2--3). After a skirmish, disastrous to Ishbosheth’s cause, that weak king offended Abner by charging him with an intrigue with Rizpah, Saul’s concubine. Abner embraced David’s side and procured David’s wife Michal for him, severing her from her second husband Phaltiel. Then followed Joab’s murder of Abner, which David felt himself politically unable to punish; but left the avenging of his blood to God, “these men the sons of Zeruiah be too hard for me, the Lord shall reward the doer of evil according to his wickedness” ( 2 Samuel 3:39), in coincidence with David’s Psalm 28:4. David paid every honor to his memory, following the bier, and composing a dirge on his death. [See ABNER .] Next followed Ishbosheth’s murder and David’s punishment of the murderers, Rechab and Baanah, who thought to gratify David by bringing his enemy’s head. The coincidence between 2 Samuel 4:9, “as the Lord liveth who hath redeemed my soul out of all adversity,” and Psalm 31:5,7, is obvious. His sense of justice, even in the case of adversaries, his dependence continually on Jehovah, and humble ascription of all that he was to Him alone, kept him from behaving proudly in prosperity. Then he was anointed for the third time king, namely, over Israel (his reign lasting 33 years besides the previous 7 1/2 years over Judah), upon his making a league with them; and they kept a three days’ joyous feast ( 1 Chronicles 12:38-40). Contingents from every tribe formed his army, which he put under Joab’s command. The men of Issachar are especially noted as “men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do,” also of Zebulun men “expert in war, with all instruments of war ... which could keep rank, and were not of a double heart.” The Aaronites Jehoiada and Zadok, then young, of the rival house of Eleazar. also joined David, in addition to Abiathar of the house of Ithamar already with him ( Chronicles 12:27,28; 27:5).

    Prosperity now tested David. He, in conformity with the usage of eastern kings, but in opposition to Deuteronomy 17:17, multiplied wives to himself besides Abigail, Ahinoam, and Michal: Maachah daughter of Talmai king of Geshur, whom probably he took in his raid ( 1 Samuel 27:8), Haggith, Abital, Eglah. Beauty was his snare; and Ammon, Absalom, and Adonijah, the offspring of these connections, proved his subsequent curse.

    David’s martial achievements as king of the nation began with taking from the Jebusites the stronghold of Zion, thenceforth the city of David and the capital. The Jebusites had said that, so secure was their fort, the blind and the lame would suffice to defend it. David said, “Whosoever ... smites ... the lame and blind (i.e. all the defenders of Zion, whom David designates derisively after the Jebusites’ words) hated of David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain.” For “getteth up to the gutter” as Keil translated it, “whosoever smites the Jebusites, let him hurl into the waterfall (at the foot of the precipice) both the lame and the blind, hated of David’s soul.”

    Thence the proverb arose, “the blind and the lame (i.e. repulsive persons) shall not come into the house.” Hence, the extraordinariness of their entering the temple and being healed by Christ ( Matthew 21:14; compare Leviticus 21:17,18). Others take it as proverbial of an impregnable fort; “the blind and lame are there, let him enter if he can.”

    The objection to this is, David did enter in spite of “the lame and the blind”; how then could the proverb originate of an impregnable house or fortress? Thus, Joab won the commander-in-chiefship (1 Chronicles 11; Samuel 5).

    The Philistines were the first to assail David. With characteristic dependence on God, David first consulted God’s will, and then assailed them. Attributing the victory to Jehovah alone, “the Lord hath broken forth upon mine enemies as the breach of waters,” he called the place Baal Perazim (the plain of breaches). Their idols he took and burned. On their spreading themselves in the valley of Rephaim again, David once more consulted Jehovah, and on being told to “turn away from them and come upon them over against the mulberry trees,” instead of the impatience and disobedience of Saul ( 1 Samuel 13:8-14; 14:18,19; 15:22,23) he patiently took God’s time and God’s way, and so prevailed (1 Chronicles 14). Compare Isaiah 28:16,21. The imagery of the thunderstorm in Psalm 18:7-14 and Psalm 29 may allude to this breaking forth of the Lord on the flood of enemies, and so giving His people peace.

    Hiram of Tyre now became David’s ally, and helped with cedars toward building his palace ( 2 Samuel 5:11; 7:2). David’s next concern was to remove the ark from the forest town, Kirjath Jearim or Baale of Judah, where it had lain mostly neglected during Saul’s reign ( 1 Chronicles 13:3), to the tabernacle which David pitched for it in the city of David.

    After a three months stay of the ark at Obed Edom’s house, owing to the breach upon Uzzah because of irreverent rashness (2 Samuel 6; compare 1 Samuel 6:19, a sad contrast to God’s breaking forth upon David’s enemies at Baal Perazim), David brought it up, stripping off his royal robe in the presence of the symbol of Jehovah’s throne, the true King, and in a linen ephod, to mark his assuming the priestly along with the kingly function, “dancing before the Lord with all his might,” The sacrosanctity of the ark, thus solemnly vindicated by the breach on Uzzah, naturally suggested the stress laid on holiness as the requisite for dwelling in God’s house in Psalm 15; Psalm 24, written on this occasion. In Psalm 14 the words “when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of His people Jacob shall rejoice” give no ground for assigning the date to the Babylonian captivity.

    It is a Hebrew phrase for reversing misfortune. In Judges 18:30 “the captivity of the land” means the capture of the ark by the pagan Philistines ( 1 Samuel 4:10,11; 7:4). Psalm 78:60,61 proves this, “God forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh and delivered His strength into captivity.” When this captivity was reversed by the bringing back of the ark to Kirjath Jearim, “they of Bethshemesh rejoiced to see it,” just as David says “Jacob shall rejoice.” The hitherto victorious Philistines were defeated by Jehovah’s thunderings, through Samuel’s intercession at Mizpeh, and so “were in great fear where no fear was,” i.e. when they had supposed they had nothing to fear from the prostrated Israelites. God’s presence “in the congregation of the righteous” was the cause; so “God scattered the bones of him that encamped against” Israel ( Psalm 53:5). David’s “bringing again” the ark and settling it permanently on Zion amidst all “Israel’s gladness” completed the reversal of Israel’s captivity, prayed for in Psalm 14. So Psalm 15 appropriately follows. The settlement of the ark on Zion marked Jehovah’s new relation to His people, as manifesting Himself in Jerusalem, thenceforth to be the center of the nation’s devotions. Ephraim is gently warned by David’s contemporary musician, Asaph, not to resist this appointment of God for transferring the seat of worship from Shiloh of Israel to Zion of Judah ( Psalm 78:67-71). David’s love for God’s abode appears in Psalm 26:8, “Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thine house and the place where Thine honor dwelleth,” harmonizing with the history, “I have set my affection to the house of my God” ( 1 Chronicles 29:3). On the occasion of bringing up the ark David convened a national assembly, the Levites foremost ( 1 Chronicles 13:2,5,6; 15:3,4), and appointed the music, Heman, Asaph, Ethan, with cymbals, others with psalteries and harps, and Chenaniah chief of the Levites for song. David as a king priest offered burnt offerings and peace offerings and blessed the people in the name of the Lord ( 1 Chronicles 16:2; 2 Samuel 6:17).

    Michal’s contemptuous reception of him when he returned to bless his house (for public piety should be followed by home piety) was the only drawback to the joy of that day ( 1 Chronicles 15:29; 16:43; Samuel 6:16-23).

    As Psalm 101 embodies David’s good resolutions, of a thankful perfect walk, in entering his new house, followed by Psalm 102 implying distress and praying for deliverance, and Psalm 103 rendering the thanksgiving here resolved on, the three forming a trilogy; so Psalm 15; Psalm 24, were composed to commemorate the bringing up of the ark to David’s tabernacle for it on Zion, while the Mosaic tabernacle and altar remained at Gibeon ( 1 Chronicles 16:39).

    The anonymous pilgrim song, Psalm 132, was probably composed like most of the “songs of degrees” (i.e. going up to the three great feasts at Jerusalem) after the return from Babylon, pleading that Jehovah should remember David’s former zeal for His house, as a ground for remembering David’s race now in affliction (compare Psalm 89). The progress of the ark’s removal is traced; while we were “in Ephratah (Bethlehem) we heard of it,” as a mere hearsay, “we found it in” Kirjath Jearim = the city of the woods. Then the prayer: “arise, O Lord, into Thy rest; Thou and the ark of Thy strength; let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness, and let Thy saints shout for joy,” is followed by God’s immediate answer exactly corresponding to the prayer: “Jehovah hath chosen Zion ... this is My rest for ever ... I will clothe her priests with salvation, and her saints shall shout aloud for joy.” Fragments of David’s poetry he at this time delivered into the hand of Asaph for the tabernacle service ( 1 Chronicles 16:8-36).

    Long afterward they were embodied in Psalm 96, which comforts Judah, when threatened by Assyria, with the prospect of Messiah’s coming kingdom; also Psalm 105; Psalm 106, which console the Jews, now probably in the Babylonian captivity, with the thought that God’s promise of Canaan to their fathers when “few and strangers” there gives hope that God will restore their covenanted possession, and pardon their unfaithfulness now that they turn to Him ( <19A512> Psalm 105:12,23,44,45; 106:3-6,44-48). God overruled David’s words, which in his time applied to the captive Jews taken by Edomite invaders (Psalm 60’s title), to suit the nation in the Babylonian captivity, and at present also in their long dispersion.

    With David begins the widely extending Israelite monarchy. The sudden rise of Israel to power and magnificence in the reigns of David and Solomon for above 50 years, and its collapse at Solomon’s death, seem at first sight inconsistent with its position midway between the great rival powers, Egypt and Assyria. But in the East such sudden rises and falls are common, as in the case of Babylon, Media, Persia, Timur, Jenghis Khan.

    Moreover the monuments show that exactly at that time Egypt and Assyria were exceptionally weak. Egypt after Rameses III’s time (1200 B.C.) ceased to be aggressive in the Syrian direction, and continued until Shishak’s (Sheshonk’s) accession (990 B.C.) quiet and unwarlike. Assyria about 1100 B.C. ruled as far as the Orontes and threatened Palestine, but was defeated by an Aramaean monarch 1050 B.C. and driven again beyond the Euphrates. Syria revolted, and Assyria declined in power until 884 B.C. when again Assur-nazir-pal crossed the Euphrates and threatened Syria.

    For an Israelite empire to arise it was necessary that both its powerful neighbors should be weak. Their simultaneous weakness was precisely at the time of the rise of the Israelite empire under Saul, David, and Solomon, between 1100 and 990 B.C.

    Solomon alone of David’s sons seems to have possessed his father’s higher qualities. Solomon’s line became united with Absalom’s daughter or granddaughter, Maachah, and so carried on the royal race. David’s strong parental affection betrayed him into too fond indulgence of his sons ( Samuel 13:31-36; 14:33; 18:5,33; 19:4; 1 Kings 1:6). David “had not displeased Adonijah at any time in saying, Why hast thou done so?” Thus, David laid up scourges in store for himself.

    David’s militia was twelve divisions of 24,000 each, on duty month by month (1 Chronicles 27). His bodyguard numbered 600 “mighty men,” subdivided into three bands of 200 each with “the three” over them, and bodies of 20 each with “the thirty” over them. “The captain of the mighty men” commanded the whole, namely, Abishai David’s nephew ( Chronicles 11:9-47; 2 Samuel 23:8-39). Gad “the seer” represented the old prophetic schools, and accompanied his exile. Nathan’s first appearance was to announce the continuation of his dynasty (of which he was the founder and is therefore called “the patriarch,” Acts 2:29) and kingdom. So there were two high priests, Abiathar and Zadok, representing the two rival Aaronic houses, Ithamar and Eleazar. Also there were the masters of music, Asaph, Heman Samuel’s grandson, and Jeduthun (1 Chronicles 25). David was the great center of all, at once himself the soldier, prophet, priest ( 2 Samuel 6:14,17,18) in acts (his sons are called so 2 Samuel 8:18, Hebrew for “chief rulers”), and poet musician. Such a combination was never before or since realized, and shall only be eclipsed by the divine Antitype “sitting and ruling upon His throne, and being a priest upon His throne” ( Zechariah 6:13).

    Within ten years from capturing Zion David reduced Philistia on the W., Moab on the E (2 Samuel 8; 23:20), Syria on the N.E. as far as the Euphrates, Edom on the S., and Ammon S.E. The capture of Rubbah, at which David was present, crowned the last war, in which the ark accompanied the host ( 2 Samuel 11:11; 12:31). The cruel punishment inflicted upon the fighting prisoners was a righteous retribution for Ammon’s own cruelties which they sought to inflict on Israel ( 1 Samuel 11:2; Amos 1:13). Solomon “the peaceful” was at this time so named in token of universal peace secured. David had now “a great name like unto the name of the great men in the earth” ( 2 Samuel 7:9).

    Psalm 68, modeled after Deborah’s song ( Psalm 68:7,8; compare Judges 4:14; 5:4, and Psalm 68:18 with Judges 5:12), commemorates the ark’s return to Zion in triumph, after God bad scattered the Ammonites before him; compare Psalm 68:1,24 with Numbers 10:35,36. “Thou settest a crown of pure gold on his head” ( Psalm 21:3) alludes to the costly crown of Ammon ( 2 Samuel 12:31).

    Psalm 44 is Israel’s cry of distress sung by the sons of Korah when Edom had invaded the Holy Land during the absence of David and his warriors, who were then striving with Aram of the two floods and Aram Zobah, on the Euphrates. Israel’s slain lay unburied until Joab returned from smiting Edom. The scattering among the pagan ( Psalm 44:11) was only partial ( 2 Samuel 8:13; 1 Chronicles 18:12; 1 Kings 11:15,16). Psalm was composed by David subsequently when he had beaten down Aram Naharaim (Syria of the two floods), 2 Samuel 8; 2 Samuel 10. Joab did not return until he had, at the head of the main army, conquered fully the Syrians. The victory over Edom in the Valley of Salt is variously attributed to David as king, Joab as commander in chief, and Abishai under Joab ( 2 Samuel 8:13; 10:10; 1 Chronicles 18:12). Abishai killed 6,000, and Joab slew 12,000. Psalm 60:4 alludes to the victory as the earnest that the expedition at this time setting out to occupy Edom and Petra, “their strong city” of rock, for its invasion of Israel, would succeed. “Over Edom will I cast out my shoe” in token of taking possession of Edom. The casting of the shoe implied transference of possession ( Ruth 4:7; Joshua 10:24; compare Psalm 60:8,9,12 with 2 Samuel 8:14).

    Psalm 108 passes from the literal Edom to the foes of God’s people in general, of which it was the type ( <19A809> Psalm 108:9,10).

    The three years famine (2 Samuel 21) seems to have been chronologically earlier, and only placed where it is as no opportunity for its insertion occurred earlier. “God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Saul, who had been so little zealous in fulfilling God’s commands against Amalek ( 1 Samuel 15:20), “in his zeal to Israel” sought to slay the Gibeonites to whom the Israelites had on oath promised security (Joshua 9). Jehovah, on David’s inquiry, declared the famine to be “because of bloodguiltiness (resting) upon Saul’s house.”

    So on the Gibeonites’ demand, in obedience to the law ( Numbers 35:33), David gave up to be executed and hanged on a tree Saul’s two sons by Rizpah, and the five sons of Merab (which ought to be read for “Michal”), Saul’s oldest daughter. David spared Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth because of the Lord’s oath between him and Jonathan. He had probably before this admitted Mephibosheth to his table. Mephibosheth perhaps alludes to his having been spared when the others were put to death, 2 Samuel 19:28; “all of my father’s house were but dead men before my lord, yet didst thou set thy servant among them that did eat at thine own table.” David took this occasion to show his tenderness in giving honorable burial to Saul’s and Jonathan’s remains.

    The great blot of David’s life, his adultery with see BATHSHEBA and murder of Uriah, is omitted in see CHRONICLES , which avoided all that would tarnish the glory of the kingdom, at the time when Ezra the compiler wished to fire the patriotism of the returned captives from Babylon. Great as is the scandal of David’s act to the cause of religion, the gain is greater; for God’s mercy shines the brighter in covering over the guilt of such a transgressor when, conscience stung at Nathan’s rebuke, he truly repented (2 Samuel 11--12). Though forgiven at once (“the Lord bath put away thy sin,” or else “hath made it to pass” upon thy child: Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences), he did not at once experimentally realize his forgiveness. So in Psalm 51 he sues for that which God had already promised by Nathan; and promises, when God should “restore to him the joy of His salvation, he would teach other transgressors the way, and so sinners should be converted to God.” This gives the true answer to scoffers. Believers, when left to themselves, fall, and when restored by God’s grace become more useful to the church of God than ever before. David’s fall has made many stand upright; it warns saints to walk humbly and not presume. It keeps from despair those who have deeply fallen, assuring them of pardon on repentance. David’s sorrows ever after show how evil are the results of sin, even after sin has been forgiven. In Psalm 32, having realized his forgiveness, he fulfills his promise by teaching backsliding and other sinners the only way of peace, namely, believing, penitent confession to the Lord.

    God chastizes His own people especially for sin, even though He forgive it, both to vindicate His justice before the world (hence, Nathan announces “the sword shall never depart from thine house”), and in love to discipline His people themselves ( Leviticus 10:3; Amos 3:2; 1 Peter 4:17).

    Contrast David’s true repentance ( Psalm 51:4 and 2 Samuel 12) with Saul’s self excusing, reluctant, popularity seeking confession (1 Samuel 15). The words “build Thou the walls of Jerusalem” refer to David’s “building from Millo round about,” while “Joab repaired the rest of the city” ( 1 Chronicles 11:8). David feared his sin, in which Joab was his accomplice, might impede the work in which also Joab assisted. His prayer was heard, and the city wall completed by Solomon ( 1 Kings 3:1; 9:15).

    Yet Psalm 51:18 has been made an argument for dating the psalm after the Babylonian captivity!

    Trial after trial clouded his remaining days. First, see AMNON ’S outrage on Tamar; see ABSALOM ’S murder of Amnon, expulsion, and almost successful rebellion, in which David’s murder and adultery were repaid exactly in kind before all Israel ( 2 Samuel 16:22). see AHITHOPHEL , the grandfather of Bathsheba with whom he sinned, was the instrument of his punishment (compare Psalm 41:9; 4:12-14,20,21). David and all the people “tarried at the house of the distance” (Hebrew text of 2 Samuel 15:17), i.e. a house so-called near the city, on the road to Jericho; “the farthest house,” namely, from the city. The personal attachment of his men of the bodyguard, including men of Gath under Ittai, appears from Ittai’s words: “as the Lord liveth, in what place the lord my king shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant be.” He showed his reverence for the ark, and freedom from the superstition that it would save like a charm, by desiring Zadok and Abiathar to carry it back to the city, and casting himself on Jehovah’s grace to “bring him back and show him it and His habitation.” Crossing Kedron brook and ascending Olivet weeping David typifies the Man of Sorrows on the night of His betrayal. Hushai, “David’s friend,” with torn coat (the Hebrew expresses a priestly garment) met him, and undertook to foil Ahithophel’s traitorous counsel by countervailing treachery.

    We might wonder that so brave a man as David should betray such fear when he first heard the report of Absalom’s conduct: “Arise and let us flee, for we shall not else escape from Absalom; make speed to depart, lest he overtake us suddenly.” The people noticed it subsequently: “the king saved us out of the hand of the Philistines, and now he is fled out of the land for Absalom!” The fact is true to nature; for conscience can disarm the brave, while “thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.” Now Ahithophel’s desertion reminded David that it was his own sin with Ahithophel’s granddaughter which caused this severe chastisement from the Lord.

    Absalom had from the first calculated on his adhesion, and sent for him to come from his abode in the hill country of Judah, Giloh, while he (Absalom) offered sacrifices. Already Absalom had got the king’s leave to go to Hebron, a sacred seat of the nation, by the specious lie: “thy servant vowed a vow while ... at Geshur (imitating with sanctimonious hypocrisy the patriarch Jacob’s pious language), If the Lord shall bring me again indeed to Jerusalem, then I will serve the Lord” (compare Genesis 28:20,21). How, with undesigned propriety, David warns the rebels ( Psalm 4:5), “Offer the sacrifices of righteousness,” not those of parricidal rebellion! Ahithophel possibly suggested the scheme of the pretended vow and sacrifices. In the Psalm 55:20,21; Psalm 31:13; Psalm 69; Psalm 109, the treachery is mainly laid to his charge. Psalm 3:1, “Lord, how are they increased that trouble me,” coincides with the history; “the conspiracy was strong, for the people increased continually with Absalom” ( 2 Samuel 15:12). Psalm 4 seems to refer to the evening of the first day of David’s flight, at the ford where he passed the night: Psalm 4:8, “I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou Lord only,” or rather “Thou Lord makest me to dwell in safety alone,” i.e. separated from foes; he quotes Deuteronomy 33:28, lebadad labetach (compare Leviticus 25:18,19). Having appointed to Zadok, “I will tarry in the plain of the wilderness, until there come word from you to certify me” ( 2 Samuel 15:28), and having received the tidings there from Ahimaaz and Jonathan, David and his retinue crossed Jordan before dawn.

    To this time Psalm 3:5 refers: “I laid me down and slept, I awaked, for the Lord sustained me.” Psalm 3:2 refers to the Benjamite of Saul’s house, Shimet’s, cursing the previous day, on David’s descending from Olivet toward the Jordan and reaching Bahurim: “many there be which say of my soul, There is no salvation (Hebrew) for him in God,” to which David replies, “Salvation belongeth to the Lord.” In Psalm 25:18 David prays,” Look upon mine affliction and my pain, and. forgive all my sin.” So in the independent history, when Shimei east stones at David (the punishment of an adulterer), and cursed saying, “Come out thou, bloody man, The Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul” (the hanging of Saul’s seven sons, 1 Samuel 21, was probably before this in time and is Shimei’s reference), and when Abishai would have punished him, David meekly ( Psalm 25:8-10), feeling his sin brought the chastisement, replied in unstudied coincidence with the psalm: “Let him curse, because the Lord hath said unto him, Curse David. It may be that the Lord will look on mine affliction” ( 2 Samuel 16:5-12). Again his words, “It may be that the Lord will requite me good for his cursing,” answer to <19A928> Psalm 109:28: “Let them curse, but bless Thou.” So it came to pass. Shimei the curser had the curse brought home to himself. David the object of his cursing was finally blessed, and “his throne established before the Lord for ever” ( 1 Kings 2:44,45).

    David learned from Hushai’s two messengers during the night Ahithophel’s counsel to pursue David that very night with “twelve thousand” chosen men. How naturally in Psalm 3:6 he says, “I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people that have set themselves against me round about.”

    In Psalm 4:7 how naturally David says, “Thou hast put gladness in my heart more than in the time that their grain and their wine increased,” when we know from the history that just before ( 1 Samuel 16:1,2) Ziba had brought him 200 loaves of bread, 100 bunches of raisins, 100 of summer fruits, and “wine,” supplying David’s immediate wants, and affording an earnest of Jehovah’s continued care. His courage, which conscience had for a time robbed him of, now returned when he saw that God though chastening was not forsaking him; so he, in confidence of restoration, assigned Ziba the land. The revolters had restlessly sought their good from earthly sources, and so had lent a ready ear to the “leasing” ( 1 Samuel 16:2, compare 2 Samuel 10:2-6), i.e. lying promises of Absalom.

    David’s cry on the contrary was, “Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us” ( Psalm 4:6). In opposition to their ignoring of God’s appointment of David he warns them, “How long, ye sons of men” (bineey iysh , “heroes,” ironically), with all your boasting will ye not “know that Jehovah set apart him that is godly for Himself?” It is “vanity” for you to think to enthrone ungodliness, as represented by Absalom, in opposition to God’s enthronement of the godly principle in the person of David ( Psalm 4:2,3.)

    Psalm 42, by the sons of Korah, speaks in the person of David when in exile during Absalom’s rebellion, beyond Jordan (compare Psalm 42:6).

    They regarded him head of their choral school. The faithfulness of the Lerites to him appears in 2 Samuel 15:24. It was David who appointed the Korahites to lead the tabernacle music ( 2 Chronicles 20:19; compare 1 Chronicles 6:16,22,32). The title of Psalm 143 in the Septuagint attributes it also to this period, His head quarters were at Mahanaim, where Ishbosheth previously had reigned. The highland chief see BARZILLAI the Gileadite, Shobi son of David’s former friend Nahash, and put by David in his insolent brother Hanun’s place over Rabbah of Ammon ( 2 Samuel 12:30), and Machir son of Ammiel of Lodebar, ministered abundant supplies. Doubtless this, as well as Ziba’s providentially brought necessaries previously, was before his mind when he wrote his exquisite Psalm 23, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Machir’s kindness was probably called forth by the remembrance of David’s kindness to Mephibosheth, Machir’s former protege ( 2 Samuel 17:27, compare 2 Samuel 9:4). The battle fought in the wood of Ephraim between see ABSALOM ’s forces under Amasa against David’s forces under Joab, Abishai, and Ittai, was fatal to Absalom.

    David’s loving charge, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man, with Absalom,” stands in striking contrast with Absalom’s unnatural heartlessness ( 2 Samuel 17:2,4); Ahithophel said, “I will smite the king only,” “and the saying pleased Absalom well.” Not the will, but the wit, to carry out Ahithophel’s devilishly-wise counsel, was by God’s appointment wanting. Hushai’s picture of David as “a man of war, chafed as a bear robbed of her whelps, and hid in some pit,” as when an outlaw in Saul’s days of old, is true to the life, and frightened the dastardly son, and misled him to his ruin.

    David’s magnanimous forgiveness of Shimet the curser, reinstatement in part of Mephibosheth whose loyalty was somewhat doubtful, and gratitude to Barzillai, all illustrate David’s noble character. His design of superseding Joab, and appointing Amasa to the chief command, offended Joab and was frustrated by Joab’s murder of Amasa. Joab crushed Sheba’s rebellion by his promptness and energy at Abel of Beth-Maachah (2 Samuel 20). So David was fully reestablished on his throne.

    On the see CENSUS : “God and Satan had their hand in this work: God by permission, Satan by suggestion; God as a judge, Satan as an enemy; God in just punishment for sin, Satan as in an act of sin; God in a wise ordination of it for good, Satan in a malicious intent of confusion” (Hall, Contempl., 16:6). Satan-suggested pride was the motive and brought on David’s people, who shared in his sin, a plague which would have lasted “three days” but that the Lord interposed; as it was it lasted “from the morning to the time of assembly” (not as KJV “even to the time appointed”) i.e., to the time of evening sacrifice, three o’clock. The apparition of the angel of the Lord with drawn sword over Jerusalem led David to intercede, laying all the guilt on himself: “It is I who has sinned; ... but as for these sheep, what have they done?” Unlike Saul, who laid the blame on the people ( 1 Samuel 15:21). Typifying Him who took on Himself the iniquity of us all. While David pleaded on earth the Lord interceded above; “it is enough; stay now thine hand.” Jerusalem was saved, and Araunah’s threshing floor, the scene of the apparition, David bought as the site of the altar whereon he offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings which the Lord accepted by fire from heaven consuming them. This was afterward the site of the temple altar; Mussulmen have it enclosed, as is thought by many, in their “Dome of the Rock.” Certain it is that here (and scarcely anywhere as here) the rock projects above the present level of the ground, while all around are either chambers and passages or the shifting sand and rubbish. Psalm 30 commemorates the “dedication,” i.e. consecration, of the house or temple site. The words “of David” in the title do not belong to “the house,” but to “a psalm and song,” namely, by David. The heaven-sent fire was the consecration of the site, which is called “the house of God” even before the temple was built (compare 1 Chronicles 22:1,2 with Genesis 28:17-19). Pride through prosperity, and a sudden and severe but temporary reverse, appear alike in the psalm and in the history (2 Samuel 24; 1 Chronicles 21). Not the act, but the motive, was the sin, and was displeasing to that unscrupulous man, Joab: verse 6 ( Psalm 30:6; 1 Chronicles 21). The deliverance resulted from David’s prayer (compare Psalm 30:8-10 with 1 Chronicles 21:17,18); the” sackcloth,” Psalm 30:11, accords with 1 Chronicles 21:16. The “weeping endured for a night,” but “joy came in the morning,” after the one day’s plague; God “put off his sackcloth, and girded him with gladness.”

    The rest of David’s life was occupied in preparing Solomon for carrying out his cherished wish of building the temple on this spot. David’s numerous wars excluded him from building it himself, but the Lord comforted him with the assurance of his son’s carrying his design into effect (2 Samuel 7; 1 Chronicles 22; 1 Chronicles 28; 1 Chronicles 29).

    And to Solomon therefore David committed the vast stores which even “in his trouble” David had prepared for the house of the Lord. see ADONIJAH ’S conspiracy was the. last cloud on David’s reign. see JOAB and see ABIATHAR from personal pique. (Joab perhaps because of David’s former appointment of Amasa, and Abiathar because of the honor paid to his rival, Zadok) joined Adonijah. The plot failed through the firmness of Nathan and David (1 Kings 1.) In David’s old age the young Shunammite Abishag was introduced to cherish his person. David’s last charge to Solomon directs, first as to Joab, that he should pay the penalty of double murder, that of Abner and Amasa; secondly, that Barzillai’s sons should eat at the king’s table, in grateful acknowledgment of their loyal services in Absalom’s rebellion; thirdly, that Shimei the curser on the one hand should “not be held guiltless,” on the other hand, as David sware to him not to kill him with the sword, that Solomon should “not bring down his hoar head with blood to the grave.” “Not” must be inserted, for in Hebrew when two prohibitions come together the negative is only put in the former clause (compare 1 Samuel 2:3). The fact confirms this, for Solomon did not put him to death for his cursing, but kept him under restraint and gave him a chance of life; so that it was Shimei’s own disregard of the condition that brought the penalty on him. That personal revenge did not actuate David is plain, for he restrained Abishai when he would have “taken off his head,” and spared him when, as restored to the kingdom, he could have justly destroyed him. At his dying hour least of all was such a man as David likely to harbor revenge, when about to go before the Judge whose forgiveness we all need. But justice needed that the sin of Joab’s and Shimei’s past impunity should not lie on David’s conscience; he therefore gave charge as to both before his death.

    Psalm 18 (2 Samuel 22) seems to have been among his latest psalms, for it was written “when the Lord had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies” besides his earliest and deadliest enemy “Saul.” To him he refers, Psalm 18:17, “He delivered me from my strong enemy;” to his various pagan enemies whom he vanquished, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Syria, Zobah ( Psalm 18:43), “Thou hast delivered me from the strivings of the people, Thou hast made me the head of the pagan.” The various trials of David were the occasion of giving birth to those psalms which have been the comfort of God’s people in all ages, when in affliction. To Nathan’s announcement of the Lord’s promise that David’s “house, his kingdom, his throne should be established for ever” ( 2 Samuel 7:13,16), he refers in Psalm 18:50: “He showeth mercy to His anointed, to David and to his seed for evermore.” The fatherly discipline through which he had passed, through the instrumentality of Saul and afterward Absalom, etc., he refers to, Psalm 18:35, “Thy gentleness (P.B.V. ‘loving correction’) hath made me great.” So Septuagint, Vulgate, Syr., “Thy discipline.”

    Compare as to God’s gentleness even in correcting, Isaiah 27:8; 40:11; Hosea 11:1-4. Acts 13:8. margin, “He bore or fed them as a nurse beareth or feedeth her child,” Deuteronomy 1:31; 32:10-12; Isaiah 63:9; Hebrews 12:6-11. So the Antitype ( 2 Corinthians 10:1), “the gentleness of Christ” ( Matthew 11:28-30). His claim to “righteousness” is not inconsistent with his one or two grievous falls: “the Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness, for I have kept the ways of the Lord” ( Psalm 18:20,21); for his sins he sincerely repented of, and the main current of his life was one of communion with God and true striving by faith after holiness. Not only in God’s original choice was David declared to be “a man after Jehovah’s own heart” ( 1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22), but also in 1 Kings 15:3-5 it is written “ the heart of David was perfect with the Lord his God ... he did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, and turned not aside from anything that He commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” The impartial truthfulness of the Bible appears in its faithful record of the sins of one of its greatest heroes. His great fall and recovery has saved thousands from despair, and warned thousands. “Let him that thinketh lie standeth take heed lest he fall.”

    Psalm 18, “the great Hallelujah with which David retires from the theater of life” (Hengstenberg), is followed by the prophetic last will of David ( 2 Samuel 23:1.) “David ... hath said (Hebrew na’um , the divine saying of David), the sweet psalmist of Israel” (Hebrew: the lovely one in Israel’s songs of praise). Not only the first of the dynasty whose shall be the everlasting kingdom, but the one whom God has enabled to sing lovely songs of praise for edifying that kingdom (compare Balaam’s prophecy, Numbers 24:3,15). This divine utterance of David through “the Spirit of God speaking by him” is the seal of those prophetic psalms (e.g. Psalm 2; Psalm 21; Psalm 110) concerning the eternal dominion of his seed, based on Nathan’s prophecy. In spirit he beholds the model Ruler ruling justly in the fear of God, under whom the sons of Belial shall be thrust away and burned, but salvation shall grow for the righteous; and the pledge of this is God’s everlasting covenant with him and his house ( 2 Samuel 23:5), “for is not my house thus with God (i.e. in such a relation to God that the Righteous Ruler will spring from it), for He hath made with me an everlasting covenant ... For all my salvation and all (God’s) good pleasure ( Luke 2:14; Ephesians 1:9, expressed in that covenant) should He then not make it to grow?” Solomon’s Psalm 72 ( Psalm 72:6) is evidently based on this his father’s last prophetic utterance which describes the coming “just Ruler,” Messiah, and the effect of His government, “as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.”

    David died at the age of 70 (Josephus, Ant. 8:15). On the return from Babylon “the sepulchers of David” still existed between the pool of Siloah and the house of the mighty men ( Nehemiah 3:16). It became the general tomb of the kings of Judah. “His sepulchre is with us unto this day” ( Acts 2:29). The so-called “tombs of the kings” are outside the walls, and so cannot be the tomb of David which was within them. Captain Warren, from references in Josephus, thinks the entrance to the king’s tomb was outside the N. wall of Jerusalem to the E. David may have here quarried the stones for the temple, and then taken advantage of the subterranean recesses so made (called the Cotton Grotto) for the formation of his sepulchre. So unique is his character that none else is so-called in Scripture; and of him alone of men is Christ called “the Son,” as the title marking His earthly kingdom, “the Son of David” ( Luke 1:32.) His psalms and those with them are the only liturgy of devotion used in common by people of every denomination.

    DAY Reckoned from sunset to sunset by the Hebrews. Genesis 1:5: “the evening and the morning were the first day.” 2 Corinthians 11:25: “a night and a day.” Daniel 8:14 margin. So our fortnight = fourteen nights. “Evening, morning, and noon” (Ps 55:17) are the three general divisions. Fuller divisions are: dawn, of which the several stages appear in Christ’s resurrection ( Mark 16:2; John 20:1; Revelation 22:16, “the bright and morning star” answering to Aijeleth Shahar, “gazelle of the morning,” Psalm 22 title; Matthew 28:1; Luke 24:1); sunrise; heat of the day; the two noons (tsaharaim , Hebrew; Genesis 43:16); the cool of the day ( Genesis 3:8); evening (divided into early evening and late evening after actual sunset). Between the two evenings the paschal lamb and the evening sacrifice used to be offered. “Hour” is first mentioned Daniel 3:6,15; 5:5. The Jews learned from the Babylonians the division of the day into twelve parts ( John 11:9). Ahaz introduced the sun dial from Babylon ( Isaiah 38:8). The usual times of prayer were the third, sixth, and ninth hours ( Daniel 6:10; Acts 2:15; 3:1). “Give us day by day our daily bread” ( Luke 11:3); i.e., bread for the day as it comes (epiousion arton ).

    DAYSMAN Derived from” day” in the sense of a day of trial ( 1 Corinthians 4:3 margin). An arbitrator. Job 9:33: “neither is there any daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both.” The umpire in the East lays his hand on both parties to mark his power to adjudicate between them. An arbitrator could have been found on a level with Job; but none on a level with Jehovah, the other Party with whom Job was at issue. We know a Mediator on a level with God, and also on a level with us, the God-man Jesus ( 1 Timothy 2:5).

    DEACON The appointment of the seven was designed to remedy the “murmuring of the Grecians (Greek-speaking Jews) against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.” The apostles said, “It is not reason that we should leave the word of God and serve (“be deacons to”; diakonein ) tables,” i.e. secular business. It is an undesigned coincidence confirming the narrative, that, while no mention is made of their country, their names are all Grecian. The church’s design evidently was that, since the murmurers were Grecians, their cause should be advocated by Hellenists. There was a common fund to which most disciples contributed by the sale of their property, and out of which the widows were relieved; a proof of the strong conviction of the truth of Christianity, which could constrain men to such self sacrifice. It is doubtful whether these seven correspond fully to the modern deacons of either episcopal or congregational churches. On the one hand, the distribution of alms was the immediate occasion of their appointment; on the other the qualifications involved higher functions, “men ... full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom.” The result was, “the word of God increased, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly, and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith; and Stephen (one of the seven), full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among the people.” Philip, too, was an “evangelist.” They were probably commissioners to superintend the deacons in distributing the alms, so that the Grecian (Hellenist, Greek-speaking Jewish) widows should not be neglected, and at the same time to minister in spiritual things, as their solemn ordination by laying on of hands implies.

    The “young men” ( Acts 5:6,10, neoteroi ) imply a subordinate ministration answering to the “deacons” ( Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:8, etc.). As bishops and presbyters or elders are different aspects of the same upper ministry, so “young men” and “deacons” are different aspects of the same subordinate ministry. Clement of Rome (1 Corinthians 42) notices that the Septuagint ( Isaiah 60:17) prophetically use the two together. The synagogue had its “pastors” ([paruasim]) and its subordinate “deacons” (chazzanim ) or ministers ( Luke 4:20). The church naturally copied from it. The deacons baptized new converts, distributed the bread and wine of the Lord’s supper (Justin Martyr, Apol., 65,67), and distributed alms, at first without superintendence, afterward under the presbyters. The diaconate was not a probationary step (as now in episcopal churches) to the presbytery. What is meant by 1 Timothy 3:13 is, “they that have used the office of a deacon well are acquiring to themselves (not “a good degree” for promotion, but) a good standing place” against the day of judgment ( 1 Corinthians 3:13,14); not a step to promotion.

    DEACONESS Romans 16:1: “Phoebe, servant” (Greek text: “deaconess”) of the church at Cenchrea.” 1 Timothy 3:11: “even so (marking a transition to another class from deacons) must the women (i.e. the deaconesses) be grave,” etc. Domestic duties are omitted, though specified in the case of the deacons ( 1 Timothy 3:12). The same qualifications are required in deaconesses as in deacons, with such modifications as the difference of sex suggested. Pliny in his letter to Trajan calls them “female ministers.” The earliest instance of such female ministers (though of course not then formally appointed) is in Luke 8:2,3: “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, and many others which ministered unto Him of their substance.”

    The social seclusion of women from men in many parts of the East would render necessary the services of women in teaching those of their own sex. See WIDOWS : an ecclesiastical order of widowhood, a female presbytery, existed from those of at least 60 years old, standing in the same relation to the deaconesses of younger age ( 1 Timothy 5:9-11) that the male presbyters did to the deacons.

    DEAD SEA The name in the Old Testament is never this, but “the see SALT SEA ” , “sea of the plain.”

    DEBIR (1) 1. In the highlands of Judah, near Hebron. First taken by Joshua ( Joshua 10:38,39; 11:21; 12:13; 15:49). Formerly Kirjath Sepher (city of the book), or K. Sannah (palm). There is still a Dewirban three miles W. of Hebron.

    But Debir was S. of Hebron ( Joshua 15:49); so Van de Velde identifies it with Dilbeh, S.W. of Hebron. Conder (Palestine Exploration) identifies it better with El hoheriyeh, a corruption of the old name Deberah, meaning in Arabic “the village on the ridge.” Exactly at 3,000 (16-inch) cubits on the main S. road a large stone still there marked the bounds assigned outside to Debir as a Levitical city (which also may be the limit of a sabbath day’s journey); and another stone on the W. At 6 1/2 miles northward are the “upper and lower springs,” which Caleb’s daughter begged for, in the valley Seil el Dilbeh, in all 14 springs divided into three groups; no other such are found in the Judah “south country,” or Negeb; a brook flows through the small gardens for four or five miles ( Judges 1:15; Joshua 15:19). Conder states the important discovery that “the list in Joshua 12, which precedes all the other topographical lists, forms the key of the whole system.” They are the 31 royal cities; these divide the country into districts which have natural boundaries, and contain severally one or more of the royal cities. Debir stood, according to Joshua 15:19, in “a dry ]and” (“south land”), therefore Dilbeh near fine springs cannot be the site.

    Dhoheriyeh is remarkable for its broad rolling downs and fruitful soil; it is truly “a dry land” without a spring. “Joshua returned to (made a detour to attack) Debir” ( Joshua 10:38-40.) His direct march after Eglon and Lachish would have been northwards from Hebron to Gilgal, therefore it was probably S.W. of Hebron. The Negeb or “south land” consists of soft, porous, chalky limestone extending from the desert on the E. (the Jeshimon) to ‘Anab and the plain on the W., and from Dilbeh and Yutta on the N. to Beersheba on the S. The dwellings of Dhoheriyeh are mostly caves in the rock, with rude arches carved over doorways; rock excavation is a mark of great antiquity, and is a relic of the troglodyte or primitive Canaanite way of living. It was originally the seat of a king of the Anakim.

    This people reoccupied it when the Israelite army withdrew and was engaged with the northern Canaanites. Othniel, son of Kenaz, for love of Achsah, Caleb’s daughter, took it again. It was allotted to the priests ( Joshua 21:15; 1 Chronicles 6:58). 2. A place on the northern bound of Judah, near the valley of Achor ( Joshua 15:7), between Jericho and Jerusalem ( Joshua 15:7). 3. Part of the boundary of Gad ( Joshua 13:26); in the high pastures E. of Jordan, and possibly akin to dabar, Hebrew for a wilderness pasture, Reland identifies it with Lodebar.

    DEBIR (2) King of Eglon (a town in the lowland of Judah), one of the five hanged by Joshua ( Joshua 10:3,23).

    DEBORAH 1. Rebekah’s nurse ( Genesis 24:59), faithful as a servant from Rebekah’s childhood, and so, when dead at an advanced age, lamented as much as one of the family. Her burial place at the oak beneath Bethel was hence called Allon-Bachuth,” the oak of weeping” ( Genesis 35:8). She was in Jacob’s household now, as she had been in his mother’s, who was by this time dead, as appears from Genesis 35:27. 2. The prophetess and judge = “a bee,” a personal or possibly an official name applied to poets, seers, and priestesses. The symbol of a monarch in Egypt; a honey bee to her friends, a stinging bee to the enemy (Cornelius a Lapide). “Lived under the palm tree”; a landmark, as palms were rare in Palestine ( Judges 4:5); possibly = Baal Tamar, “the sanctuary of the palm” ( Judges 20:33). Wife of Lapidoth; “a mother in Israel,” a patriotic and inspired heroine like Miriam. Jabin oppressed the northern tribes adjacent to Hazor his capital (Zebuhn, Naphtali, and Issachar, which she judged). Barak, at her call, summoned these (to whom the central tribes, Ephraim, Manasseh (Machir), and Benjamin in part sent contingents, Judges 20:14) in a long train (draw: Judges 5:6,7) toward the broad topped mount Tabor. Deborah accompanied him at his request. With but 10,000 in his train (“at his feet”), by the Lord’s interposition, descending from Mount Tabor, he defeated Sisera’s mighty host and 900 chariots who were in the famous battlefield of Jezreel or Esdraelon, in the valley of Kishon. Deborah’s prediction was fulfilled by the “Lord’s selling Sisera into the hand of a woman,” namely, Jael, the Kenite Heber’s wife.

    Enthusiasm for the cause of Israel, so closely allied with the Kenites through Moses’ father-in-law Hobab, caused her to commit the treacherous murder.

    The praise, “blessed above women in the tent (i.e. shepherdesses) shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be” commends her faith, not her treachery.

    Some actions of faith are mixed with the corrupt motions of the flesh, as that of the midwives and Rahab’s treatment of the spies. So Jael’s act showed real faith in the case of God’s controversy with the godless Canaanites. The approval of her faith, the mainspring of her conduct, by no means implies approval of the deceit by which its true character was obscured. Yet faith is precious and “blessed” in spite of grievous infirmities, and will at last outgrow and stifle them utterly. God is keen to see the faith, slow to condemn the fault, of His children.

    Deborah and Barak together sang the song of victory composed by her. It begins with a reference to Jehovah’s original, grand, and awful manifestation at Sinai (Exodus 19; Deuteronomy 33:2), the sealing of the covenant with Israel, and the ground of all His subsequent interpositions for them. Then follows Israel’s deep degradation, its highways deserted, its 40,000 soldiers (a round number for a diminished army) without shield or spear, because they forsook Jehovah for “new gods” (compare Deuteronomy 32:17). Then “war (pressed up) to their (very) gates.” But now deliverance is come, for which “bless the Lord.” All should join in “speaking” His praise: the upper classes “who ride upon white-spotted asses,” and those “that sit upon coverings” (middin , the rich, Matthew 21:7) spread upon the asses; also the humbler “who walk on the way,” foot travelers. Those delivered from the plundering “archers “who infest “the places of drawing water” to plunder the shepherds, shepherdesses, and their flocks in lawless times ( Exodus 2:17), should rehearse there, now that all is peace, “the Lord’s righteous acts.” “Then shall the people of Jehovah go down (from their past mountain hiding places) to their gates” and towns now delivered. “Barak, lead away thy captivity (train of captives) captive” (quoted in Psalm 68:18); fulfilled exhaustively in Christ the ascended Conqueror ( Ephesians 4:8,13). “Out of Zebulun came they that handle the pen of the writer,” i.e. the scribes of the host ( Jeremiah 52:25) who wrote down the names of the soldiers. “Barak was sent by his feet into the valley,” i.e. impelled irresistibly to the battle. “At the brooks of Reuben were great resolutions of the heart,” but issuing in no practical action, the tribe resembling their forefather. Reuben preferred hearing “the bleatings of the flocks” to the blast of the war trumpets. Dan with its port Joppa preferred merchandise to warring for the fatherland. “Asher abode in his bags.” “The kings of Canaan took no gain of money,” i.e. no booty, as they expected, from the battle; for “the stars from heaven fought against Sisera;” i.e., a Jehovah-sent storm beat in their faces and on the Israelites’ back (Josephus), swelling the Kishon, which suddenly fills up the dry channel and overflows the plain of Esdraelon, making it impassable with mud, especially to chariots, so that the” prancing horses” and their “mighty” riders were swept away. Meroz might have intercepted the retreating foe and Sisera, but is “cursed by the angel of Jehovah” for not doing so; and Jael is blessed” for her zeal, though mixed with earthly alloy. So “the land had rest for 40 years.” [See BARAK .] Neither Ehud nor Jael are in the list of examples of faith in Hebrews 11.

    Jael apparently received Sisera in good faith, with the intention of hospitality, but a sudden impulse may have urged her to destroy the enemy of God’s people. Her faith and patriotism are commendable, but not the means she took of delivering Israel.

    DECAPOLIS Thrice mentioned in Scripture: Mark 5:20, which shows that it was around Gadara ( Mark 7:31; Matthew 4:25). A district containing ten cities, rebuilt, colonized, and granted special privileges by Rome 65 B.C.

    Other cities afterward receiving similar privileges cause confusion as to which are the original ten; probably Scythopolis (W. of Jordan), Hippos, Gadara, Philadelphia, Pella, Gerasa, Dion, Canatha, Damascus, Raphana (all E. of Jordan). The region once so populous is now almost without inhabitants, except a few living in savagery amidst the ruins and cavern tombs of Scythopolis, Gadara, and Canatha.

    DEDAN Son of Raamah, son of Cush ( Genesis 10:7), brother of Sheba. A second Dedan is son of Jokshan, son of Keturah ( Genesis 25:3), and is brother of a second Sheba. The recurrence of the same names points to an intermarriage between the Cushite (Ethiopian, rather Hamitic) Dedan and the Semitic Dedan, which is referred to as Edomite ( Jeremiah 49:8; 25:23; Ezekiel 25:13; Isaiah 21:13, “ye traveling companies (merchant caravans) of Dedanim”). The Cushite Dedan near the head of the Persian gulf and Chaldaea, the avenue of commerce to India, is referred to in Ezekiel 27:15, as the names in the context prove; but Ezekiel 27:20 Dedan is connected with N.W. Arabia, and associated with Assyria ( Ezekiel 27:23), i.e. the Semitic or Edomite Dedan, yet also connected with the Cushite “Sheba and Raamah” ( Ezekiel 27:22) on the Persian gulf. The Semitic Sabeans, descended from Sheba tenth son of Joktan, dwelt in S.W. Arabia, from the Red Sea to the straits of Bab el Mandeb.

    Ezekiel thus recounts the two channels of merchandise, Raamah on the Persian gulf, and Sheba on the Red Sea in Arabia. The name Dedan still remains in Dadan, an island on the border of the Persian gulf. [See RAAMAH ] DEDICATION, FEAST OF John 10:22. In “winter,” about our December (1 Macc. 4:52-59; Macc. 10:5). Commemorating the purging of the temple and rebuilding of the altar after Judas Maccabaeus had driven out the Syrians, 164 B.C. It began on the 25th of Chisleu (December), the anniversary of Antiochus Epiphanes’ pollution of the temple 167 B.C. Lasted eight days. Celebrated like the feast of tabernacles with much joy and singing, and with carrying of branches. The Hallel was sung in the temple daily. The feast was called “lights,” and there was much illumination of houses.

    The “dedication of the second temple” was on the 3rd of Adar ( Ezra 6:15,16); that of Solomon’s temple at the feast of tabernacles ( 1 Kings 8:2; 2 Chronicles 5:3).

    DEEP Romans 10:7, “who shall descend into the deep?” A proverb for impossibility: “say not in thine heart, I wish one could bring Christ up from the dead, but it is impossible.” Nay, salvation “is nigh thee,” only “believe” in the Lord Jesus raised from the dead, “and thou shalt be saved.” Greek abyss ( Luke 8:31), literally, the bottomless place. Translated in Revelation 9:1,2,11; 11:7,17, “bottomless pit.” The demons in the Gadarene besought not to be cast into the abyss, i.e. before their time, the day of final judgment. 2 Peter 2:4: they are “delivered into chains of darkness, and reserved unto judgment.” They are free to hurt meanwhile, like a chained beast, only to the length of their chain ( Jude 1:6). The “darkness of this present world,” the “air” ( Ephesians 2:2), is their peculiar element; they look forward with agonizing fear to their final torment in the bottomless pit ( Revelation 20:10). Language is used as though the abyss were in the lowest depth of our earth. We do not know whether this is literal, or an accommodation to human conceptions, to express the farthest removal from the heavenly light.

    DEGREES, SONGS OF Fifteen: Psalm 120--134: four by David, one by Solomon, ten anonymous.

    Pilgrim songs: shir hama’alot , “a song for the ascendings,” i.e. for the going up (Jerusalem and its temple being regarded as on a moral elevation above other places, as it was in fact on the most elevated tableland of the country, requiring a going up from all sides) to the three great feasts ( Exodus 34:24; 1 Kings 12:27,28); <19C201> Psalm 122:1,4, which is the oldest, being composed by David to supply the northern Israelites with a pilgrim song in their journeys to Zion, where Asaph had warned them to repair now that the ark was transferred from Shiloh there ( Psalm 78:67-69). Solomon wrote Psalm 127, round which as a center a third poet, on the return from Babylon, grouped, with David’s four psalms, ten others, seven on one side and seven on the other. The simple style, brevity, and transitions formed by retaining a word from the previous verse (e.g. <19C101> Psalm 121:1,2, “from whence cometh my help; my help cometh,” etc.), are suitable to pilgrim-song poetry. They all have a general, not an individual, character, referring to the literal and the spiritual Israel, whom God’s providence always and in all places guards (Psalm 121; Psalm 124; <19C505> Psalm 125:5; <19C806> Psalm 128:6; <19D008> Psalm 130:8; <19D103> Psalm 131:3). The posture of affairs contemplated in most of these psalms is that after the Babylonian captivity, when the building of the temple was interrupted by the Samaritans. The sanctuary in <19D402> Psalm 134:2 is the altar erected at the return, 536 B.C., for the daily sacrifice ( Ezra 3:2-4,8). The temple was completed under Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest, with the help of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah ( Ezra 5:1,2; 6:14).

    DEHAVITES Ezra 4:9. Persian colonists planted in Samaria by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, after carrying away Israel. Probably the Dahi (Herodotus, 1:125). Widely-scattered; under the name Dabae, at the E. of the Caspian (Strabo, 11:8, section 2, and 9, section 3), and near the sea of Azof; also as Dacians, upon the Danube. Possibly, ancestors of the Danes.

    DEKAR Margin 1 Kings 4:9.

    DELAIAH (“Jehovah’s freedman”); the modern Godfrey. 1. 1 Chronicles 24:18. 2. Ezra 2:60; Nehemiah 7:62,64. 3. Neh, 6:10. 4. Interceded that king Jehoiakim would not burn Jeremiah’s prophetic roll, but in vain ( Jeremiah 36:12,25).

    DELILAH (“the languishing one”). A Philistine harlot, of the valley of Sorek, whom the five Philistine lords, when they found Samson loved her, bribed for 1,100 shekels each to be their political emissary, to find out from Samson the secret of his strength. On four different occasions she tempted him to tell the secret. On the third occasion Samson trifled so presumptuously with the divine gift committed to him as to suggest that his seven consecrated locks should be woven with the web; when we go to the edge of temptation our gall is near. This “languishing” prostitute, with her vile challenging of his “love,” “How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me?” and by daily vexing importunity, wrung the secret from him at the fourth time. His strength lay in dedication to God, of which his Nazarite locks were the sign. Laying down his head in her lap he lost them, and with them lost God in him, the spring of a strength which was not his own. Lust, severing from God the source of strength, makes the strongest powerless; only by waiting on the Lord, we, like Samson, renew the strength which was lost by self-indulgence and self-reliance. Contrast Daniel 1:8-16; Isaiah 40:30,31; Proverbs 7:6-27. So Israel, strong while faithful to Jehovah, incurs the curse which Balaam, however wishing it, could not inflict, the moment that the people commits whoredom with the daughters of Moab ( Numbers 25:1,6; 31:15,16).

    DELUGE See NOAH .

    DEMAS Contracted fromDEMETRIUS, or Demarchus. Paul’s “fellow laborer,” along with Mark and Luke ( Philemon 1:24), and companion ( Colossians 4:14) during his first Roman imprisonment. But he declined; for in Timothy 4:10 Paul writes, “Demas hath forsaken (Greek text: “left behind”) me, having loved this present world (world course), and is departed unto Thessalonica,” probably his home (Chrysostom). Love of worldly ease and home comforts was his snare, a sad contrast to “all them that love Christ’s appearing” ( 2 Timothy 4:8).

    DEMETRIUS 1. A maker of silver portable models of the great temple and statue of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus ( Acts 19:24). They were kept as amulets against danger. Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen, in fear for their gains, raised a tumult against Paul as saying “they be no gods which are made with hands.” Like many men he made regard for religion his plea, while really having an eye to self; “not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought, but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised and her magnificence destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.” A religious party cry is sure to rouse many who care little at heart about piety. It shows how soon Christianity, notwithstanding its seeming weakness, was felt as a mighty power threatening pagandom with all its then greatness. 2. A Christian “having good report of all men, and of the truth itself,” and of John ( 3 John 1:12). The gospel standard of truth witnessed his conformity to it in love and good works; a transparently real Christian.

    DEPUTY (“proconsul” or “propraetor”); Greek anthupatos . The supreme governor of the provinces left by the emperors, still under the Roman senate ( Acts 13:7; 19:38, plural for singular). The emperor gave the peaceable provinces to the senate. Over these the senate appointed those who had been praetors; governing only one year; having no power of life and death, not wearing sword or military costume (Dion. Cass., 53:13,14). Achaia had been imperial, governed by a procurator, but was restored to the senate by Claudius (Tacitus, Annals 1:76; Suet., Claud., 25). So Gallio is rightly named “proconsul” or “deputy” ( Acts 18:12). Cyprus after the battle of Actium was an imperial province (Dion. Cuss., 53:12), but five years later was given to the senate and had a deputy; so, Acts 13:7,8,12 is accurate. A coin of Ephesus, in the senate’s province of Asia, illustrates the use of “deputies” in Acts 19:38.

    DERBE Near Lystra, E. of the upland plain of Lycaonia, stretching eastwards along the N. of the Taurus range. Probably near the pass (“the Cilician gates”) from the plain of Cilicia up to the table land of the interior. Paul fled there from Iconium and Lystra ( Acts 14:6,20,21; 16:1). In enumerating places ( 2 Timothy 3:11) he mentions Lystra but not Derbe, though in the independent history they are mentioned together: a delicate instance of accuracy, for he is here enumerating only those places where he suffered persecution. Gaius or Caius belonged to Derbe, Paul’s companion in travel ( Acts 20:4). Identified by Hamilton (Researches in Asia Minor, 2:313) with Dirle, near the roots of Taurus near lake Ak-gol.

    DESERT Not meaning a barren, burning, sandy waste, in the case of Sinai and Palestine. Sand is the exception, not the rule, in the peninsula of Sinai.

    Even still it is diversified by oases and verdant valleys with wells. Much more formerly, for traces exist in many parts of Egyptian miners’ smelting furnaces. But forest after forest being consumed by them for fuel, the rain decreased, and the fertility of the land has sunk down to what it now is.

    Arabah (now the Ghor) is the designation of the sunken valley N. and S. of the Dead Sea, especially the N., the deepest and hottest depression on the earth. Though in its present neglected state it is desolate, it formerly exhibited tropical luxuriance of vegetation, because the water resources of the country were duly used. Jericho, “the city of palm trees,” at the lower end, and Bethshean at the upper, were especially so noted. Though there are no palms growing there now, yet black trunks of palm are still found drifted on to the shores of the Dead Sea ( Ezekiel 47:8). In the prophets and poetical books arabah is used generally for a waste ( Isaiah 35:1). It is not so used in the histories, but specifically for the Jordan valley. [See ARABAH .] The wilderness of Israel’s 40 years wanderings (Paran, now the Tih) afforded ample sustenance then for their numerous cattle; so that the skeptic’s objection to the history on this ground is futile. Midbar , the regular term for this “desert” or “wilderness” ( Exodus 3:1; 5:3; 19:2), means a pasture ground (from daabar , “to drive flocks”) ( Exodus 10:26; 12:38; Numbers 11:22; 32:1). It is “desert” only in comparison with the rich agriculture of Egypt and Palestine. The midbars of Ziph, Maon, and Paran, etc., are pasture wastes beyond the cultivated grounds adjoining these towns or places; verdant in spring, but dusty, withered, and dreary at the end of summer. Charbah also occurs, expressing dryness and desolation: <19A206> Psalm 102:6, “desert,” commonly translated “waste places” or “desolation.” Also Jeshimon, denoting the wastes on both sides of the Dead Sea, in the historical books.

    The transition from “pasture land” to “desert” appears Psalm 65:12, “the pastures of the wilderness” ( Joel 2:22.).

    DEUEL Numbers 1:14; 7:42; in Numbers 3:14 Reuel, the Hebrew letter resh ( r ) closely resembling the Hebrew letter daleth ( d ).

    DEUTERONOMY (“repetition of the law”). Containing Moses’ three last discourses before his death, addressed to all Israel in the Moabite plains E. of Jordan, in the eleventh month of the last year of their wanderings, the fortieth after their departure from Egypt; with the solemn appointment of his successor Joshua, Moses’ song, blessing, and the account of his death subjoined by Joshua or some prophet ( Deuteronomy 1:1--4:40; 5:1--26:19; 27:1-- 29:29). The first is introductory, reminding Israel of God’s protection and of their ungrateful rebellion, punished by the long wandering; and warning them henceforth to obey and not lose the blessing. The second discourse begins with the Ten Commandments, the basis of the law, and develops and applies the first table; next declares special statutes as to: (1) religion, (2) administration of justice and public officers, (3) private and social duties.

    The third discourse renews the covenant, reciting the blessings and curses.

    The discourses must have been all spoken in the eleventh month; for on the tenth day of the 41st year Jordan was crossed ( Joshua 4:19). Joshua 1:11; 2:22, three days previous were spent in preparations and waiting for the spies; so the encampment at Shittim was on the seventh day ( Joshua 2:1). Thirty days before were spent in mourning for Moses ( Deuteronomy 34:8); so that Moses’ death would be on the seventh day of the twelfth month, and Moses began his address the first day of the eleventh month, fortieth year ( Deuteronomy 1:3). Hence, the discourses, being delivered about the same time, exhibit marked unity of style, inconsistent with their being composed at distant intervals. The style throughout is hortatory, rhetorical, and impressive. A different generation had sprung up from that to which the law at Sinai had been addressed.

    Parts of it had been unavoidably in abeyance in the wilderness.

    Circumcision itself had been omitted ( Joshua 5:2). Now when Israel was to enter Canaan, their permanent abode, they needed to be reminded of much of the law which they but partially knew or applied, and to have under divine sanction, besides the religious ordinances of the previous books, supplementary enactments, civil and political, for their settled organization. Thus, Deuteronomy is not a mere summary recapitulation, for large parts of the previous code are unnoticed, but Moses’ inspired elucidation of the spirit and end of the law. In it he appears as “the prophet,” as in the previous books he was the historian and legislator.

    Two passages especially exhibit him in this character. The first Deuteronomy 18:15-19: “the Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; according to all that thou desiredst of the Lord ... in Horeb, Let me not hear again the voice of ... God ... that I die not; and the Lord said, I will raise them up a Prophet ... and I will put My words in His mouth ... And whosoever will not hearken unto My words which He shall speak in My name, I will require it of him.” In the ultimate and exhaustive sense Messiah fulfills the prophecy; Deuteronomy 34:10 expressly says “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” So Numbers 12:6-8; Hebrews 3:2-5, state how the Antitype exceeded the type. In a lower sense the whole order of prophets, the forerunners ofTHE PROPHET, is included; hardly Joshua, for he was already designated as Moses’ successor ( Numbers 27:18,23), and the prophecy contemplates a future “prophet.” Our Lord Himself must have had this prophecy in view in John 5:46, “Moses wrote of Me.” The Samaritans, who received the Pentateuch alone, must have drawn their expectation of the all-revealing Messiah from it: “when He is come He will tell us all things,” answering to “I will put My words in His mouth ... He shall speak in My name.” In Acts 3:22, etc., Acts 7:37, Peter and Stephen both quote it as fulfilled in Jesus. The Jews, the adversaries of Christianity, are our librarians, so that we Christians cannot have altered the passage to favor our views. It at once foretells Christ’s coming and their own chastisement from God (“I will requite it”) for “not hearkening” to Him.

    The second passage is Deuteronomy 28, where he declares more fully than in Leviticus 26 what evils should overtake Israel in the event of their disobedience, with such specific particularity that the Spirit in him must be not declaring contingencies, but foretelling the penal results of their sin which have since so literally come to pass; their becoming “a byword among all nations where the Lord has led them”; their being besieged by “a nation of a fierce countenance, until their high walls wherein they trusted came down”; their “eating the fruit of their own body, the flesh of their sons and daughters, in the straitness of the siege, and the eye of the tender and delicate woman being evil toward the husband of her bosom and toward her child which she shall eat for want of all things secretly in the siege”; their dispersion so as to “find no ease, and the sole of their foot to have no rest among the nations,” but to have “a trembling heart, failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind, their life hanging in doubt, in fear day and night, and having none assurance of life”; “the whole land ( Deuteronomy 29:23) not sown, nor bearing, nor having grass.” Nay, more, Moses foresaw their disobedience: “I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you, and evil will befall you in the latter days” ( Deuteronomy 31:29).

    So also Deuteronomy 32, Moses song.

    But in the distant future he intimates, not merely their continued preservation, but also a time when Israel, dispersed “among all the nations, shall call to mind how all these things, the blessing and the curse, have come upon them, and shall return unto the Lord with all their heart and soul; though they be driven unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord their God gather them, and He will circumcise their heart, and make them plenteous in the fruit of their land, and again rejoice over them for good” (Deuteronomy 30, also Deuteronomy 32:36,43). In Deuteronomy 32:8 Moses intimates that from the beginning the distribution of races and nations had a relation to God’s final purpose that Israel should be the spiritual center of the kingdom of God; “when the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bound: of the people according to the number of the children of Israel,” i.e., that their inheritance should be proportioned to their numbers.

    The coincidences of Moses’ song with other parts of the Pentateuch and of Deuteronomy confirm its genuineness. The style is no more different than was to be expected in a lyrical, as compared with a historical, composition.

    Psalm 90, which is Moses’ work, resembles it: Psalm 90:1,13-16, with Deuteronomy 32:4,7,36; explain Deuteronomy 32:5 “they are not His children but their spot,” i.e. a disgrace to them (to God’s children).

    Also Deuteronomy 32:42, not “from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy,” but “from the head (i.e. the chief) of the princes of the enemy.” These are the germs in Hoses which the prophets expand, setting forth the coming glory of the gospel church, and especially of Israel under the final Messianic kingdom. Herein Deuteronomy, “the second law,” is the preparation for the gospel law; and Moses, in the very act of founding the Sinaitic law, prepares for its giving place to the higher law which is its end and fulfillment.

    The falsity of the theory that Deuteronomy is of a later age is proved by the fact that the archaisms of vocabulary and grammar characterizing the Pentateuch occur in Deuteronomy. The demonstrative pronoun haeel, characteristic of the Pentateuch, occurs Deuteronomy 4:42; 7:22; 19:11, and nowhere else but in the Aramaic ( 1 Chronicles 20:8 and Ezra 5:15). The use of h local. The future ending in -un. The passive construed with ‘eth of the direct object. Keseb for Kebes ( Deuteronomy 14:4). Zakur for Zakar ( Deuteronomy 16:16). Ancient words: ‘abib , yequm , shegar , ‘alaphim , methim , hermeesh for magal , teneh for sal . The Canaanite ‘ashteroth hatsion , “offspring of the flocks.” Yeshurun , for Israel, copied in Isaiah 44:2. Madweh , “sickness.” The resemblance of Jeremiah to Deuteronomy is accounted for by the fact that the sins denounced in Deuteronomy were those abounding in Jeremiah’s time.

    Jeremiah, as a priest of Anathoth, familiar with the law from childhood, naturally adopts the tone of Deuteronomy (as does Huldah his contemporary; compare 2 Kings 22:16, etc., with Deuteronomy 29:2, etc.), both in denunciation and in final consolation. Possibly also the book of the law found in the temple by Hilkiah the high priest and brought before king Josiah, after disuse for the 60 years of the two previous reigns, was Deuteronomy alone. But if it was the whole Pentateuch put by the Levites, at Moses’ command, in the sides of the ark ( Deuteronomy 31:9,26; 2 Chronicles 34:14), still Deuteronomy was the part that mainly awakened the conscience of king and people ( Deuteronomy 12:2,3; 16; 18; 29:25-27; compare 2 Kings 22:13-17; 23). Josiah’s reforms are just those most insisted upon in Deuteronomy. Jeremiah was the son of Hilkiah, probably related to the high priest, and his uncle, Shallum, was apparently the husband of Huldah, the prophetess. But while having some resemblance the language and idioms of Jeremiah are of an altogether later date than Deuteronomy. While he imitates or repeats phrases of Deuteronomy, he uses characteristic expressions never found in Deuteronomy; for instances see The Introduction to Deuteronomy, Speaker’s Commentary. The writer of Deuteronomy, if a forger, would never, having the rest of the Pentateuch before him, have left apparent discrepancies between his work and it, when desiring his work to appear as if by the same author. The original writer, Moses, could alone treat his own work in such a free spirit.

    The different circumstances and objects in view clear the seeming discrepancies. Thus, the directions in Deuteronomy 12:6,17; 14:22,28,29; 26:12, etc., do not supersede the directions in Leviticus 27:30-34; Numbers 18:20, etc. The earlier directions refer to the general and first tithe of all produce, animal and vegetable, for the maintenance of the priests and Levites. The later in Deuteronomy refer to the second and additional tithe on the increase of the field only, and for celebrating the sacred feasts each first and second year in the sanctuary, every third year at home with a feast to the Levites, the stranger, fatherless, and widow; like the love-feasts of New Testament ( Deuteronomy 11:5.) The first tithe is taken for granted in Deuteronomy ( Deuteronomy 10:9; 18:1,2), and no fresh injunction as to it is given, it being from the first recognized in Genesis 14:20; 28:22, as well as in Leviticus and Numbers.

    The different way in which the priests and Levites respectively are regarded in Deuteronomy and in the preceding books (in these “the Levites” ministering to the priests “the sons of Aaron,” as the priests minister to God ( Numbers 3:5, etc.; 4; Exodus 28:1; 29:1, etc.), and not mentioned as “blessing” the people, the prerogative of the priests ( Numbers 6:23-27, compare Deuteronomy 10:8,9); but in Deuteronomy ( Deuteronomy 18:7; 11:6) the Levites and Aaronite priests not being mutually distinguished, and Korah not being mentioned with Dathan and Abiram in their rebellion) is accounted for by the consideration that Moses in Deuteronomy is addressing the people, and for the time takes no notice of the distinction of orders among ministers, and, similarly referring to the rebellions of the people against God, takes no notice of the minister Korah’s share in the rebellion, as not suiting his present purpose. His additional enactment are just of that supplementary and explanatory kind which would come from the legislator himself, after a practical experience of the working of the law during the years of the wilderness wanderings. In Deuteronomy 19:14, “thou shalt not remove ... landmark which they of old time have set in thine inheritance which thou shalt inherit,” “they of old time” are those about first to occupy the land.

    Moses lays down a law for distant generations, as the land was to be a lasting inheritance; the words “shalt inherit” prove that the occupation was still future. The relaxation granted in Deuteronomy 12:15 as to killing in all their gates, whereas in Leviticus 17:3,4, the victim even for ordinary eating must be killed at the door of the tabernacle, is precisely what we might expect when Israel was on the verge of entering Canaan, which they were at the time of the delivering of Deuteronomy.

    Our Lord attests Deuteronomy by quoting from it alone the three passages wherewith He foiled the tempter in the wilderness (Matthew 4; Deuteronomy 8:3; 6:13,16). Paul ( Romans 10:6,19; 15:10 attests it Deuteronomy 30:12,18; 32:21,43). Moses tells us that all the words of this law he wrote and gave to the Levites to be put in the side of the ark at the one time ( Deuteronomy 31:9,22-26. Paul’s quotations, “Rejoice, O ye nations (Gentiles), with His people,” and “I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people,” prove that Moses did not understand his own law as possessing that localized narrowness to which Judaism would restrict it.

    Many circumstances which would naturally be noticed on the eve of Israel’s entrance into Canaan occur for the first time in Moses’ last address. Now first he enjoins the observance of the three great feasts (mentioned previously), at the place which the Lord shall choose ( Deuteronomy 12:5). Now first he introduces the appointment of judges in the different cities ( Deuteronomy 16:18; 19:11; 21:18). Tents were the abodes spoken of in the previous books, now houses. In first recording the appointment of captains, he attributes it to Jethro’s counsel ( Exodus 18:17, etc.); in repeating the fact to the people ( Deuteronomy 1:9, etc.) he notices their part in the selection. Jethro doubtless suggested the plan, and Moses, after consulting God, laid it before the people, assigning the choice to them. So in Numbers 13; 14, the Lord commands the sending of the spies; but in addressing the people ( Deuteronomy 1:19, etc.) Moses reminds them of what was not noticed before, but was most to his point now, their share in sending them. They had been told to go up at once and possess the land, but requested leave first to send spies; God in compliance with their wish gave the command.

    His allusion to the Lord’s anger and exclusion of himself, when speaking of that of the people, accords with the character of the meekest of men ( Deuteronomy 1:34-38). A forger would magnify the miracles in referring to them; Moses alludes to them as notorious, and uses them only as an incentive to enforce obedience. His notices of the children of Esau supplanting the Horims by God’s help, and Moab supplanting the giant Emim ( Deuteronomy 2:9-13) are made the argument why Israel need not, as their fathers, fear the giant Anakims. References to Jehovah’s miraculous descent on Horeb are only so introduced as would be clear to the people if they had been spectators, and not otherwise. Finally, one miracle not noted in the direct narrative he here adds: “thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years” ( Deuteronomy 8:2-4; 29:5,6). He mentions this just at the proper place, where the real author would put it, as the people were on the point of entering Canaan, where the natural means of procuring food and raiment being attainable, the supernatural would cease. All these proprieties and harmonies confirm the genuineness and authenticity of Deuteronomy. See Graves, Pentateuch, 1:70-110.

    DEVIL (Greek) “the accuser” or “the slanderer” ( Job 1:6-11; 2:1-7; Revelation 12:10). In Hebrew Satan means “adversary.” The two-fold designation marks the two-fold objects of his malice -- the Gentiles and the Jews.

    There is one one Devil, many “demons” as KJV ought to translate the plural.

    Devil is also used as an adjective. 1 Timothy 3:11, “slanderers”; Timothy 3:3, “false accusers.” Peter when tempting Jesus to shun the cross did Satan’s work, and therefore received Satan’s name ( Matthew 16:23); so Judas is called a “devil” when acting the Devil’s part ( John 6:70). Satan’s characteristic sins are lying ( John 8:44; Genesis 3:4,5); malice and murder ( 1 John 3:12; Genesis 4); pride, “the condemnation of the Devil,” by which he “lost his first estate” ( Timothy 3:6; Job 38:15; Isaiah 14:12-15; John 12:31; 16:11; 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:#6 1:6).

    He slanders God to man, and man to God (Genesis 3; Zechariah 3). His misrepresentation of God as one arbitrary, selfish, and envious of His creature’s happiness, a God to be slavishly-feared lest He should hurt, rather than filially loved, runs through all pagan idolatries. This calumny is refuted by God’s not sparing His only begotten Son to save us. His slander of good men, as if serving God only for self’s sake, is refuted by the case of “those who lose (in will or deed) their life for Christ’s sake.”

    Demons, “knowing ones,” from a root [daemi], to know, are spirits who tremble before, but love not, God ( James 2:19), incite men to rebellion against Him ( Revelation 16:14). “Evil spirits” ( Acts 19:13,15) recognize Christ the Son of God ( Matthew 8:29; Luke 4:41) as absolute Lord over them, and their future Judge; and even flee before exorcism in His name ( Mark 9:38). As “unclean” they can tempt man with unclean thoughts. They and their master Satan are at times allowed by God to afflict with bodily disease ( Luke 13:16): “Satan hath bound this woman these eighteen years” with “a spirit of infirmity,” so that she was “bowed together.” Scripture teaches that in idolatry the demons are the real workers behind the idol, which is a mere “nothing.” Compare Corinthians 10:19-21; 1 Timothy 4:1; Revelation 9:20. Compare Deuteronomy 32:17, Hebrew sheedim , “lords” ( 1 Corinthians 8:5); Acts 16:16, “a spirit of divination” (Greek of Python, an idol); Acts 17:18, “a setter forth of strange gods” (Greek: demons); 2 Chronicles 11:15; <19A637> Psalm 106:37; Leviticus 17:7. Idolatry is part of the prince of this world’s engines for holding dominion. Our word “panic,” from the idol Pan, represented as Satan is, with horns and cloven hoofs, shows the close connection there is between the idolater’s slavish terror and Satan his master. The mixture of some elements of primitive truth in paganism accords with Satan’s practice of foiling the kingdom of light by transforming himself at times into an “angel of light.” Error would not succeed if there were not some elements of truth mixed with it to recommend it. Corrupting the truth more effectually mars it than opposing it.

    Satan as Beelzebub ( Matthew 12:24-30) is at the head of an organized kingdom of darkness, with its “principalities and powers” to be “wrestled” against by the children of light. For any subordinate agent of this kingdom, man or demon, to oppose another agent would be, reasons Christ, a division of Satan against Satan (involving the fall of his kingdom), which division Satan would never sanction ( Ephesians 6:12,13). Demons are “his angels” ( Matthew 25:41; Revelation 12:7,9). Natural science can give no light when we come to the boundary line which divides mind from matter. The Bible-asserted existence of evil among angels affords no greater difficulty than its manifest existence among men. As surely as Scripture is true, personality is as much attributed to them as it is to men or to God.

    Possession with or by a demon or demons is distinctly asserted by Luke ( Luke 6:17,18), who as a “physician” was able to distinguish between the phenomena of disease and those of demoniac possession. The Spirit of God in the evangelists would never have sanctioned such distinction, or left people under a superstitious error, not merely connived at but endorsed, if the belief were really false. There is nothing wrong in our using the word “lunacy” for madness; but if we described its cure as the moon’s ceasing to afflict, or if the doctor addressed the moon commanding it to leave the patient alone, it would be a lie (Trench, Miracles, 153). In Matthew 4:24, “those possessed with demons” are distinguished from “those lunatic” (probably the epileptic, but even this caused by a demon: Mark 9:14, etc.). Demons spoke with superhuman knowledge ( Acts 16:16); recognized Jesus, not merely as son of David (which they would have done had their voice been merely that of the existing Jewish superstition), but as “Son of God” ( Matthew 8:29). Our Lord speaks of the disciples’ casting out of demons as an installment or earnest of the final “fall” of Satan before the kingdom of Christ ( Luke 10:18). People might imagine the existence of demons; but swine could only be acted on by an external real personal agent; the entrance of the demons into the swine of Gadara, and their consequent drowning, prove demons to be objective realities.

    Seeing that physical disease itself is connected with the introduction of evil into the world, the tracing of insanity to physical disorganization only partially explains the phenomena; mental disease often betrays symptoms of a hostile spiritual power at work.

    At our Lord’s advent as Prince of Light, Satan as prince of darkness, whose ordinary operation is on men’s minds by invisible temptation, rushed into open conflict with His kingdom and took possession of men’s bodies also. The possessed man lost the power of individual will and reason, his personal consciousness becoming strangely confused with that of the demon in him, so as to produce a twofold will, such as we have in some dreams. Sensual habits predisposed to demoniac possession. In pagan countries instances occur wherein Satan seemingly exercises a more direct influence than in Christian lands. Demoniac possession gradually died away as Christ’s kingdom progressed in the first centuries of the church.

    There are four gradations in Satan’s ever-deepening fall. (1) He is deprived of his heavenly excellency, though still having access to heaven as man’s accuser (Job 1--2), up to Christ’s ascension. All we know of his original state as an archangel of light is that he lost it through pride and restless ambition, and that he had some special connection, possibly as God’s vicegerent over this earth and the animal kingdom; thereby we can understand his connection and that of his subordinate fallen angels with this earth throughout Scripture, commencing with his temptation of man to his characteristic sin, ambition to be “as gods knowing good and evil;” only his ambition seems to have been that of power, man’s that of knowledge. His assuming an animal form, that of a serpent, and the fact of death existing in the pre-Adamite world, imply that evil probably was introduced by him in some way unknown to us, affecting the lower creation before man’s creation. As before Christ’s ascension heaven was not yet fully open to man ( John 3:13), so it was not yet shut against Satan. The old dispensation could not overcome him (compare Zechariah 3). (2) From Christ to the millennium he is judicially cast out as “accuser” of the elect; for Christ appearing before God as our Advocate ( Hebrews 9:24), Satan the accusing adversary could no longer appear against us ( Romans 8:33,34). He and his angels range through the air and the earth during this period ( Ephesians 2:2; 6:12). “Knowing that he hath but a short time” (Revelation 12), in “great wrath” he concentrates his power on the earth, especially toward the end, when he is to lose his standing against Israel and expulsion shall be executed on him and his by Michael ( Revelation 12:7-9; Daniel 12:1; Zechariah 3, where Joshua the high priest represents “Jerusalem,” whose “choice” by the Lord is the ground of the Lord’s rebuke to Satan). (3) He is bound at the eve of the millennium ( Revelation 20:1-3).

    Having failed to defeat God’s purpose of making this earth the kingdom of Christ and His transfigured saints, by means of the beast, the harlot, and finally Antichrist, who is destroyed instantly by Christ’s manifestation in glory, Satan is bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years during which he ceases to be the persecutor or else seducer of the church and “the god and prince of the world” that “lieth in the wicked one.” (4) At its close, being loosed for a while, in person Satan shall head the last conspiracy against Christ (permitted in order to show the security of believers who cannot fall as Adam fell by Satan’s wiles), and shall be finally cast into the lake of life forever ( Revelation 20:7-10). As the destroyer, he is represented as the “roaring lion seeking whom he may devour” ( Peter 5:8). As the deceiver he is the “serpent.” Though judicially “cast down to hell” with his sinning angels, “and delivered into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment” ( 2 Peter 2:4), he is still free on earth to roam to the length of his chain, like a chained dog, but no further.

    He cannot hurt God’s elect; his freedom of range in the air and on earth is that of a chained prisoner under sentence.

    DEVOTED THING ( Leviticus 27:28). Cherem . Man was not to be offered in sacrifice.

    Translated, Leviticus 1:2: “if any man of you bring an offering to Jehovah from the beasts, from the herd or from the flock shall ye bring your offering” (compare Exodus 13:13; 34:20; Numbers 18:15). But certain persons and nations were doomed by God, who alone has the prerogative of taking, as He alone gives, life. Man in carrying out God’s clearly revealed sentence is the executioner bound to execute God’s will.

    So magistrates and soldiers ( Romans 13:4). So Israel utterly destroyed the Canaanites at Hormah ( Numbers 21:2,3; Deuteronomy 13:12-18). So Samuel hacked Agag in pieces before the Lord ( 1 Samuel 15:33). Rash vows, as Saul’s ( 1 Samuel 14:24) and Jephthah’s ( Judges 11:30), are no objection to the soundness of the principle, for here self-will usurps the right of devoting another’s life which belongs to God alone. Sacrifices rest on a different ground, namely, the voluntary offering of an innocent life of a creature’ without blemish, approved of God to represent the great Substitute. The pagan confounded the two ideas, the devoted thing under ban (as criminals and captives), and the sacrifice of one’s flock or herd as a voluntary offering in worship; but Scripture keeps them distinct.

    DEW In Palestine failing in early summer, again in autumn, and supplying the absence of rain. So copious as to saturate Gideon’s fleece, so that a bowl full of water was wrung out, and to wet the ground in one night ( Judges 6:37-40). A leading source of fertility ( Genesis 27:28; Deuteronomy 33:13; Job 29:19; Hosea 14:5; Isaiah 18:4; Zechariah 8:12).

    Its being withheld brought barrenness ( 1 Kings 17:1; Haggai 1:10).

    Its speedy drying up symbolizes the formalist’s goodness ( Hosea 6:4; 13:3). On the other hand its gentle, silent, benignant influence, diffusing itself over the parched ground, represents the blessed effect of God’s word and God’s grace ( Deuteronomy 32:2); also brotherly love ( <19D303> Psalm 133:3),the “dew of Hermon (i.e. copious and refreshing dew) that descended upon Zion”; or else, believers from various parts are joined by brotherly love on the one spiritual Zion, like the countless dewdrops wafted together, if it were physically possible, from various mountains, as Hermon, to the one natural Zion. The effect on the world of brotherly love among various believers would be like that of dew, all simultaneously saturating the dry soil and making it fruitful ( John 17:21,23). The dew springing “from the womb of the morning,” not by visible irrigation, is the emblem of youthful, fresh, living, beautiful, infinite rigor, namely, that of Christ and of Christ’s people in union with Him ( <19B003> Psalm 110:3). Israel shall hereafter be “in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord” ( Micah 5:7); overwhelming their enemies “as the dew falleth on the ground” ( 2 Samuel 17:12), and as “life from the dead” to the millennial earth, as “the dew of herbs” causes them to revive after the deadness of winter ( Isaiah 26:19).

    DIADEM [See CROWN ] The diadem in Gentile nations was a white fillet, two inches broad, bound round the head, the badge of the monarch. In Persia the king’s diadem differed from that of the queen and the highest princes, in having an erect triangular peak. In Israel mitsenepheth is always the high priest’s turbaned cap, “miter,” or “diadem,” ( Isaiah 28:5) “diadem (tsephirah ) of beauty.”

    DIAL ma’alot , “degrees” or “steps” ( Isaiah 38:8). The sun dial arid the division of the day into 12 hours were Babylonian inventions. As Ahaz copied the altar at Damascus ( 2 Kings 16:7,10) so he probably c)pied the sun dial 700 B.C. But the division into 12 hours is not implied in the Old Testament [See DAY .] The “degrees” were “steps” ascending to his palace (Josephus). The shadow of a column or obelisk fell on a greater or less number of steps according as the sun was high or low. The dial was of such a size and so placed that Hezekiah, when convalescent, could witness the miracle from his chamber; probably “in the middle court,” the point where Isaiah turned back to announce to Hezekiah God’s answer to his prayer ( 2 Kings 20:4,9; Isaiah 38:21,22). Ahaz’ intimacy with Tiglath Pileser would naturally lead the “princes of Babylon to inquire of the wonder done in the land,” which shows that the miracle of the recession of the shadow on the dial was local, perhaps produced by divinely ordered refraction, a cloud denser than the air being interposed between the gnomon and the “degrees” or “dial.”

    DIAMOND Third in the second row of precious stones on the high priest’s breastplate ( Exodus 28:18). Yahalim , which some translate “onyx,” others translate it as “jasper.” There is no proof the diamond was then known. Its engraving is very difficult, and the large size of the stones on the high priest’s breastplate makes it not probable the diamond is meant. Shamir is the usual term. [See ADAMANT .] DIANA GreekARTEMIS (Acts 19). Her original temple founded 580 B.C., finished 460, was burnt by Erostratus 356 B.C. The second temple, alluded to in Acts, was built in the reign of Alexander the Great. The Ephesian Diana in attributes resembled the Phoenician see ASTARTE , see ASHTORETH . She symbolized the generative and nutritive powers of nature, and so was represented with many breasts. On her head was a mural crown, each hand held a metal bar, the lower part was a rude block covered with mystic inscriptions and animals. The image was believed to have fallen from heaven, probably an aerolite. The bee was sacred to her, and her high priest was called by a corresponding name (essen), as also the hierarchy of women (Melissse) and eunuchs (Megabyzae). The temple was the public treasury and bank, and had the right of asylum. No bloody sacrifices were allowed. As Ephesus was the capital of see ASIA in the limited sense, Diana of Ephesus was naturally the idol “whom all Asia and the world worshipped.” Games were celebrated at Ephesus in her honor, and her worship was the He uniting politically Ephesus and other cities. In the great theater at Ephesus, on one of the walls of the entrance lobby, Mr.

    Wood found a letter from the emperor Hadrian to the Ephesians, dated Sept. 20th, A.D. 120, and an inscription referring to the temple of Diana, concerning its endowments and ritual, such as lists of votive statues of gold and silver with their weights and the regulations under which such objects were to be carried in procession. In the list mention occurs of many figures of Diana with two stags. This illustrates the Scripture mention of see DEMETRIUS the silversmith as the maker of silver portable models of Diana’s shrine. The inscription orders such votive objects to be carried in procession on certain days from the temple through the. Magnesian gate to the great theater, and thence through the Coressian gate back to the temple. This clause gave a clue to the discovery of the temple. First Mr.

    Wood found the Magnesian gate, and at a depth of 11 ft. a road with tombs on each side and the bases of piers. Secondly, near the stadium he found the Coressian gate. At the convergence of these two roads he found the enclosing wall of the temple and an inscription that Augustus built it; also a white marble pavement on a level bed of black marble and several drums of columns, 6 ft. 4 inches in diameter, including the sculptures in relief, and Ionic capitals, all now deposited in the British Museum, The intercolumniations are more than 19 ft. Gold was largely used in the decoration. A fragment was found, composed of two astragals, between which a fold of lead enfolded a fillet strip of gold. Remains of brilliant colors too are found, blue, in the background, red and yellow, prominent.

    The bases of several of the columns are inscribed with their donors’ names and the dedication to Artemis or Diana. The pro-naos was fenced off from the peristyle, as some of the mortises for the iron standards have been discovered. Remains of a wide portico surrounding the temple on three sides have been discovered. The base of one column remains in situ, of the outer row of columns, also one of the inner row. The temple was octastyle, eight columns in front. It has 18 on the sides, and the intercolumniations are three diameters. making the temple diastyle. Pliny’s statement is correct, the external and internal pillars being 120. The projection of the sculpture of “the 36 carved columns” is as much as 13 inches. The diameter of the columns them. selves is about 5 ft. 10 inches. The width of the platform measured at the lowest step was 238 ft. 3 1/2 inches, the length is 421 ft. 4 inches; Pliny gives the length 425 ft. The dimensions of the temple itself, “out to out,” are 163 ft. 9 1/2 inches by 308 ft. 4 1/2 inches. The height of the platform was 9 ft. 5 3/8 inches. The interior was adorned with two tiers of elliptical columns, Ionic and Corinthian, fragments of which are found near the walls of the cella or inner shrine.

    DIBLAIM (doubled grape cakes). Gomer, Hosea’s ( Hosea 1:3) wife, was “daughter of Diblaim” i.e., wholly given up to sensuality. [See HOSEA .] DIBLATH RatherDIBLAH ( Ezekiel 6:14). “I will make the land desolate from the wilderness (midbar ) to Diblah,” i.e. from the unenclosed pastures S. and S.E. of Palestine to some town in the extreme N., probably Riblab, the Hebrew letter resh ( r ) and the Hebrew letter daleth ( d ), from close resemblance, becoming easily interchanged by copyists. Here it was that Nebuchadnezzar had sat in judgment on the last Jewish king, Zedekiah, and killed his sons before his eyes, and then blinded him and slain the chief men of Jerusalem.

    DIBON 1. Originally a town of Moab. Taken by Sihon, king of the Amorites ( Numbers 21:30). Taken from Sihon with his other possessions by Israel, and assigned to Gad ( Numbers 32:33,34); mentioned also as belonging to Reuben ( Joshua 13:9), the two pastoral tribes less strictly defining their boundaries than settled populations would. Gad rebuilt it and gave it the name Dibon-Gad ( Numbers 33:45). It was in Moab’s possession in Isaiah’s time ( Isaiah 15:2; Jeremiah 48:18,22,24). Also called Dimon, the Hebrew letter mem (m) and the Hebrew letter beth (b) being often interchanged. Dibon was probably the modern Dhiban, on low ground three miles N. of the Arnon; translated in Isaiah 15:2, “Dibon (the people of Dibon) is gone up to the high places,” the usual places of sacrifice. F. A. Klein, of the Church Missionary Society, in traveling from Es-Salt to Kerak was informed by a sheikh of the Beni Hamide of the now well-known basalt stone of Dibon, with its remarkable inscription by King Mesha. It was 3 1/2 ft. high, and 2 ft. in width and 2 ft. in thickness; rounded off at both ends. Unfortunately, the Arabs, in jealousy of the Turkish government which demanded the surrender of the stone, broke it in pieces by lighting a fire around and throwing cold water on it; but not before M. Ganneau had secured an impression of the inscription. Captain Warren obtained another impression and fragments of the stone. Ganneau and Warren subsequently obtained most of the fragments; so that only oneseventh of the whole is missing. It is now in the Louvre at Paris. Of 1,100 letters 669 have been secured. The first part (lines 1-21) records Mesha’s wars with Omri, king of Israel (i.e. his successors); the second (line 21-31) his public buildings; the third part (31-34) his wars against Horonaim with the help of Chemosh, “the abomination (idol) of Moab.” The Moabite stone confirms the connection of Israel with Moab, founded on their common descent through Lot and Abraham, and afterward renewed through Ruth and her descendant David. The language of the stone is almost identical with that of the historical portions of the Hebrew Bible.

    The Aleph ( a ), He ( h ), Waw ( w ), and Yodh ( y ), are used (just as in the Old Testament) as “matres lectionis,” to express vowel sounds, and the He ( h ) at the end of a word; confirming the Masoretic text. The alphabet is almost the same as the Phoenician one. It has the 22 letters of the earliest Hebrew, except Teth, which probably is on the missing fragments. The present square Hebrew characters, which we find in our Hebrew Bibles, are probably of Chaldean origin, and resemble those in the inscriptions at Palmyra. The Greeks borrowed their alphabet from the Phoenicians. In Isaiah 15:2 Dibon is termed a “high place”; Mesha on the stone terms it his birthplace, and chose it as the site of his monument. The phrase of “Mesha” (named on the stone just as we read it 2 Kings 3:4-27), “Chemosh let me see my desire upon all my enemies,” is word for word, substituting Jehovah for the idol of apostate Moab, David’s phrase ( Psalm 59:10). The revolt of Mesha (recorded on the stone) from Judah, to which he had paid a tribute of 100,000 lambs and 100,000 rams ( 2 Kings 3:4; Isaiah 16:1), was probably in Ahaziah’s reign, who died 896 B.C., so that as early as nine centuries B.C. the alphabet was so complete as it appears on the stone. As this tribute seems enormous for so small a country it was probably imposed temporarily as compensation for damages sustained in the revolt of Moab after Ahab’s death. Or if the revolt followed the tragic end of the confederacy of Judah, Israel, and Edom against Moab ( 2 Kings 3:26,27), the date of the stone is but little later, and the completeness of the alphabet on it shows it was then no recent invention. [See ALPHA .] Jehoshaphat’s own territory had been previously invaded by Moab (2 Chronicles 20). Hence, he was ready to ally himself to Ahaziah ( Chronicles 20:85); then to Jehoram and Edom against Moab. Mesha’s words on the stone imply that he had more than Israel alone to contend with: “he let me see my desire upon all my enemies” (line 4).

    A confirmation of the Scripture account of Mesha’s defeat by the three confederates appears in the Black Obelisk from Nimrud, of the same age as the Moabite stone. Moab is omitted in the list of Syrian independent states confederate with Benhadad of Damascus against Shalmaneser of Nineveh.

    Scripture explains why; Moab was then subject to Judah. In later Assyrian lists, when Moab had recovered its independence, three distinct Moabite kings are named.

    The circuitous route taken by the three confederates to invade the E. of Moab is probably accounted for by the fact recorded on the Moabite stone; Mesha was carrying all before him in the W., and it would have been dangerous to have assailed him in that quarter. The stone notices expressly Israel’s oppression of Moab in the reign of “Omri king of Israel and his son (and ‘his son’s son’ is to be supplied in one gap of the inscription) forty years,” and Mesha’s breaking off the yoke; after which it says “all Dibon was loyal”; whereas previously “the men of Gad dwelt in the land of Ataroth” (compare Numbers 32:84-88), and “the king of Israel fortified” it. The 40 years would be the round number for the 36 during which Omri, Ahab, and Ahaziah reigned. The Moabite stone probably takes up the narrative broken off at 2 Kings 3:27. There we read “Israel departed from the Moabite king, and returned to their own land;” ultimately, the Dibon stone informs us Mesha took town after town of Gad, “Medeba, Jahaz, Dibon, and Kir.” Thus is explained how these towns in Isaiah 15; 16 (150 years later), are assigned to Moab, though David ( 2 Samuel 8:2) had long before so effectually subjugated the nation.

    From the time of Mesha, Israel was from time to time subjected to Moabite invasions ( 2 Chronicles 20:1; 2 Kings 13:20). Mesha, according to the Dibon stone, “built (i.e. rebuilt and fortified) Baalmeon, Kiriathaim, and Nebo,” all once in Reuben’s hands; also “Bezer” ( Deuteronomy 4:43).

    Mesha says in the inscription on the basalt stone, “I made this high place a [stone] of salvation;” compare Ebenezer, “the stone of help,” 1 Samuel 7:12 margin See “The Moabite Stone,” by W. P. Walsh.

    In three points the Dibon stone confirms Scripture: (1) The men of Gad dwelt, in the land of old. (2) Moab’s successes caused the confederacy of Israel, Judah, and Edom. (3) Moab’s successes in the N.W. forced the allies to take the circuitous route S.E. 2. Dibon, reinhabited by men of Judah, returned from Babylon ( Nehemiah 11:25) = Dimonah.

    DIBRI of Dan, father of Shelomith, whose son by an Egyptian husband was stoned for blaspheming Jehovah ( Leviticus 24:11).

    DIDYMUS Greek: twin = Hebrew: Thomas. Compare John 11:16; 20:24; 21:2.

    DIKLAH Arab tradition confirms Genesis 10:26-29 in making Joktan (= Kahtan) the great progenitor of all the pure tribes of central and southern Arabia.

    Thus Almodad = the Arabic Elmudad; Sheleph = Es-Sulaf in the Yemen; Hazarmaveth = Hadramaut on the S.E. coast of Arabia; Diklah = Dakalah, an important city in the Yemen; it means a fruit-abounding palm tree.

    DILEAN A city of the shephelah or low country of Judah ( Joshua 15:38), meaning gourd or cucumber. Perhaps now Tina, S. of Ekron, in Philistia.

    DIMNAH A city of Zebulun given to the Merarite Levites ( Joshua 21:35).

    Possibly = Rimmon ( 1 Chronicles 6:77).

    DIMON E. of the Dead Sea in Moab ( Isaiah 15:9). Probably = Dibon, as a play between it and dam, “blood”; Dimon’s waters shall be full of dam.

    DIMONAH A city in southern Judah, near the Idumean desert ( Joshua 15:22 = Dibon), Nehemiah 11:25.

    DINAH The feminine of Dan = judged, averaged. Jacob’s daughter by Leah. After his return from Mesopotamia he pitched his tent in Shechem, and bought a field of Ham or, Shechem’s father. Dinah, then at maturity between 13 and 15 years old, through her parents’ remissness and her own love of sight seeing (she “went out to see the daughters of the land”), instead of being a “keeper at home” as young women ought to be ( Titus 2:2), gave occasion to Shechem to “see” (contrast Job 31:1), and lust after, and defile her. Sin, shame, and death enter the soul through the windows of the eyes and ears ( Genesis 39:7). Evil communications corrupt good manners. Fondness to see novelties, worldly fashions, and worldly company, ruin many. “It is the first step that costs.” The laxity of Canaanite morals ought to have made both her parents and herself more on their guard. Josephus (Ant. 1:21) states she went to a Canaanite annual festival of nature worship (compare Numbers 25:2). Young women are often led astray as much by their own sex as by the other.

    Shechem offered the usual reparation, marriage, and a payment to her father. This was sufficient Hebrews, according to Deuteronomy 22:28,29. But the offense was by an alien Hamor therefore proposed to establish intermarriage and commerce between the two peoples. But Simeon and Levi, her own brothers, eager for revenge, required the see CIRCUMCISION of the Shechemites as a condition of union, a rite already known in Egypt as an act of priestly consecration; and when the feverish pain of the operation was at its height, on the third day, the two brothers, with their retainers, took cowardly advantage of their state, attacked, and killed all the males in the city. Their vindication of Israel’s sacred calling, separated from the Gentiles, was right; and their refusal to sacrifice Jehovah’s promises for the Hivite prince’s offers of mammon was right. Seduction still is punished by death among the Arabs, generally inflicted by the brothers. “They were very angry, because lie had wrought folly in Israel,” the phrase for offenses, especially carnal ones, against the honor and calling of the people of God ( Deuteronomy 22:21; Judges 20:10; 2 Sam 13:12). But the way they took was treacherous, cruel, and wicked. The innocent townsmen were punished with the one delinquent, and all the sons joined in plundering the town. Jealousy for the high calling of Israel was made the plea for gross sin against the God of Israel. Jacob in reproving them lays stress only on the dangerous consequences of their crime, “ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land ... and ... being few ... they shall gather themselves and slay me,” because it was the only argument that would weigh with his sons; but, his dying words show his abhorrence of their” cruelty” and “cursed anger” ( Genesis 49:5-7). Nothing but Jehovah’s special interposition saved him and them from the penalty; Genesis 35:5, “the terror of God was upon the cities ... round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob.”

    God made this tragedy the occasion of reviving Jacob’s earnestness, which had declined into worldliness for a time through his settlement near Shechem ( Genesis 33:17-20); reminding him of his vow to make an altar at Bethel to God, who had appeared to him there in the day of his distress when fleeing from Esau. So his family gave up their strange gods and purified themselves, and Jacob went up to Bethel and fulfilled his heretofore forgotten vow. Thus, God overruled evil for good ( Genesis 35:1-5).

    DINAITES Cuthean colonists planted in Samaria by the Assyrians, after Shalmaneser’s carrying away of the ten tribes ( Ezra 4:9).

    DINHABAH Genesis 36:32; 1 Chronicles 1:43. The king of Edom, Bela’s capital.

    In the list of Edomite kings the son does not succeed the father; the monarchy must therefore have been elective, and the kings chosen by the “dukes” ( 1 Chronicles 1:40-43), who ruled subordinately and contemporaneously with the kings.

    DINNER The early meal, generally at 11 o’clock, as “supper” was the later meal, and that to which friends were asked as to a feast ( Luke 14:12).

    DIONYSIUS, THE AREOPAGITE Converted through Paul at Athens ( Acts 17:34), and, by tradition, its first bishop.

    DIOTREPHES 3 John 1:9, loving to have the preeminence” through ambition. A Judaizer, who opposed the missionaries when preaching grace to the Gentiles, see 3 John 1:7. He “prated against” John and the orthodox “with malicious words”; he “received not” John, by not receiving with love the brethren whom John recommended ( Matthew 10:40). His influence was so great that he “cast out” of the church such as were disposed to receive them. But Neander thinks that the missionaries were Christian Jews who “took nothing of the Gentiles” ( 3 John 1:7), in contrast to the Jews who elsewhere abused ministers’ right of maintenance ( 2 Corinthians 11:22; Philippians 3:2,5,19); and that Diotrephes stood at the head of an ultra-Pauline party of anti-Jewish tendency, forerunners of Marcion.

    This accounts for Diotrephes’ domineering opposition to the missionaries and to John, whose love combined with truth sought to harmonize the various elements in the Asiatic churches. Demetrius is praised as of the opposite spirit to Diotrephes; as the former was to be followed, so the latter to be shunned ( 3 John 1:11,12).

    Perhaps Diotrephes as the local bishop simply resented the interference of John’s apostolic legates as an infringement of his personal rights. For whereas in the 2nd Epistle of John corruption of doctrine is spoken of as disqualifying one from the hospitality of the church, in this 3rd Epistle no hint is given of erroneous doctrine; but only of Diotrephes’ “love of preeminence.” Diotrephes and the presbyters influenced by him (whether as their bishop or not) treated the apostle’s messengers as persons claiming an authority derogatory to his own. But John ( 3 John 1:10) uses language implying his own unquestionable power of restraining Diotrephes’s “prating” opposition: such as none but an apostle could properly have employed, an indirect confirmation of the Johannine authorship of the epistle.

    DISCERNING OF SPIRITS 1 Corinthians 12:10. Discerning between the operation of God’s Spirit and that of the evil spirit, or unaided human spirit claiming to utter the dictates of God’s Spirit. Acts 5:1-11; 8:28; 1 Corinthians 14:23,37: “if any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.” It is this which assures us of the inspiration of the New Testament The books were accepted as inspired, by churches having men possessing” the discerning of spirits” ( 1 John 4:1; 1 Timothy 4:1).

    DISEASES The effect of sin’s entrance. Healed by the Lord Jesus, as Isaiah foretold, “Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses” ( Matthew 8:17; Isaiah 53:4; 1 Peter 2:24). His bearing our guilt in His manhood, assumed with all its infirmities, was the ground of His sympathetically feeling for and relieving our sickness by His miraculous power. At His second coming His people “shall not say, I am sick,” for “they shall be forgiven their iniquity” ( Isaiah 33:24).

    DISH Guests handled food with their fingers. Each dips a “sop” or piece of bread in the dish, and takes up therewith a portion of meat or other contents of the dish. Judas’ dipping in the same dish as the Lord betokened friendly intimacy. To hand a delicate morsel from the dish was a compliment ( John 13:25-27; Matthew 26:23).

    DISHAN Genesis 36:21,28,30; 1 Chronicles 1:38,42.

    DISHON 1. [See DISHAN .] Genesis 36:20,21,26,30. 2. Genesis 36:25.

    DISPENSATIONS Various dispensations have been traced in the development of God’s dealings with mankind. (1) The dispensation of innocence in Eden. (2) The Adamic dispensation of promise ( Genesis 3:15) after the fall, down to the flood; the remembrance of the promise being kept alive by sacrifice. (3) The dispensation of Noah, like that of Adam, requiring, besides the duties of the light of nature, repentance for sin, faith in God’s mercy, hope of the promised Savior, kept up by sacrifices; to which were added the prohibition to shed blood of man on penalty of death, and to eat animals’ blood, and the permission to eat flesh (Genesis 9); extending from the flood to Abraham. (4) The Abrahamic covenant of more explicit promise (Genesis 12; Genesis 15; Genesis 17; Genesis 22; Galatians 3), extending to the dispensation of (5) The law, which was parenthetically introduced to be the schoolmaster until Christ, the end of the promise and the law, should come.

    It is made an objection to the Jewish dispensation that it was restricted to one nation; but its influence extended beyond Israel to the adjoining nations, Egypt famed for wisdom, the Canaanites for war, Phoenicia for commerce, and ultimately to Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

    Compare Exodus 9:16; Numbers 14:20,21; Jeremiah 39:12; 40:2. [See DANIEL ] ( Daniel 4:37; 6:25-27; Ezra 1:1, etc.) Zoroaster was probably contemporary with Daniel, and drew from the Hebrew Scriptures the principles on which he reformed the Persian religion which had become corrupted by the worship of fire, and of an evil principle as well as a good.

    Judea’s position at the head of the Mediterranean, near Phoenicia, Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, adapted it for a worldwide influence.

    The Divine Lawgiver from the very time of instituting the Law (Deuteronomy 18) looked forward to ( Deuteronomy 18:6) the Christian dispensation, which was to embody its spirit while superseding its letter ( 2 Corinthians 3:6-18). The gospel dispensation is the last, and is called “the world to come” ( Hebrews 2:5), “the ends of the world” ( Corinthians 10:11), “these last days” ( Hebrews 1:2), “the kingdom of God” or “of the heavens” ( Matthew 4:17). It has successive stages: (i.) the present, “the ministration of the Spirit” ( 2 Corinthians 3:8), “the times of the Gentiles” ( Luke 21:24), the period during which “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation” ( Luke 17:20); (ii.) the epiphany of the glory of the great God and Savior ( Titus 2:13), the manifested kingdom when He “will restore it to Israel” ( Acts 1:6,7; Ezekiel 21:27), and Himself shall “take His great power and reign” with His transfigured saints for a thousand years over the nations in the flesh, and Israel at their head (Zechariah 14; Isaiah 2; 65; 66; Revelation 11:15,17; 5:10,20); (iii.) the final ages of ages, when there shall be the new heavens and earth and the holy new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven (Revelation 21; 22).

    DISPERSION [See CAPTIVITY .] Galuth ( Jeremiah 24:5; Ezra 6:16). Literally, “the spoliation,” those stripped of the temple and home of their fathers.

    Septuagint used diaspora , “dispersion,” in Deuteronomy 28:25; compare Deuteronomy 30:4, “driven out unto the outermost parts of heaven”; Jeremiah 34:17; John 7:35, “the dispersed among the Gentiles.” They became, in God’s gracious providence, seed sown for a future harvest in the Gentile lands of their sojourn ( 1 Peter 1:1). The dispersion included all the twelve tribes, the ten tribes carried away by the Assyrians as well as Judah carried to Babylon, though Judah alone returned to Palestine ( James 1:1; Acts 26:7). “The pilgrim troops of the law became caravans of the gospel” (Wordsworth). The difficulties of literally observing the Mosaic ritual, while in Babylon and elsewhere, led them to see that they could be united by a common faith, though unable to meet at the same Jerusalem temple, and that the spirit of the law is the essential thing when the letter is providentially set aside. Still, connection with the temple was kept up by each Jew everywhere contributing the half shekel to its support ( Matthew 17:24).

    The three great sections of the dispersion at Christ’s coming were the Babylonian, the Syrian, and the Egyptian (including Alexandria where the Grecian element was strongest, and with African offshoots, Cyrene and N.

    Africa). Pompey, upon occupying Jerusalem 63 B.C., took with him, and settled, many Jews in the trans-Tiberine quarter of Rome. The apostles in every city followed God’s order, as Paul told the Jews at Antioch in Pisidia, “it was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken unto you” ( Acts 3:26; 13:46); so Romans 1:16, “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”

    In the assembly on Pentecost the several dispersions were represented: (1) Parthians, Mesopotamia; (2) Judaea (Syria), Pamphylia; (3) Egypt, Greece; (4) Romans.

    The converts from these pioneered the way for the subsequent labors of the apostles in their respective countries. Lucius of Cyrene and Simeon Niger (the black) from N. Africa were leading members of the church of Antioch.

    So we find Aquila from Pontus, Barnabas of Cyprus, Apollos of Alexandria, Clement probably of Rome. Besides the Jews, in the several cities there were the “devout” Gentiles who in some degree acknowledged the God of Israel. All these formed stepping stones for the ultimate entrance of the gospel among the idolatrous Gentiles. Forty years after Peter’s martyrdom, Pliny, Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia, writing to the emperor Trajan, says: “the contagion (Christianity) has seized not only cities, but the smaller towns and country, so that the temples are nearly forsaken and the sacred rites intermitted.”

    DIVINATION Ezekiel 13:7. Used in Scripture of false systems of ascertaining the divine will, such as are allied to idolatry: as necromancy, which evoked the dead ( 1 Samuel 28:8); prognostication by arrows ( Ezekiel 21:21).

    The arrows marked with names of places to be attacked were shaken (for “He made His arrows bright,” translated, “He shook”) together in a quiver; whichever came out first intimated the place selected; or else threw them in the air to see in alighting which way they inclined, toward Jerusalem or Ammon. Inspecting entrails. The healthy or unhealthy state of the sacrificial entrails intimated success or failure. In the Nineveh sculptures the king is represented with a cup in his right hand, his left hand resting on a bow, also two arrows in the right hand, possibly for divination.

    The “magicians” of Egypt in Genesis 41:8, (chartumim , from cheret “a style” or pen,) were sacred “scribes” of the hieroglyphics, devoted to astrology, magic, etc.; else from Egyptian chertom, “wonder workers,” or cher-tum, “bearers of sacred spells.” Daniel was made “master of the magicians” ( Daniel 5:11); chokmim , wise men, our wizards ( Exodus 7:11);” sorcerers” (mekaskphim ), “mutterers of magic formulae” ( Isaiah 47:9-12). Jannes or Anna in Egyptian means “scribe,” a frequent name in papyri of the time of Rameses II. Jambres, the other name of an Egyptian magician preserved by Paul ( 2 Timothy 3:8), means “scribe of the south.”

    The earliest prohibition of witchcraft is Exodus 22:18, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Witchcraft was an appeal to a power alien from God. So it was accounted rebellion against Jehovah. Saul’s disobedience and rebellion against God’s will led him, though zealous to extirpate witches so long as God’s law did not interfere with his impatient self-will, at last to consult the witch of Endor; Samuel’s words as to his disobedience in the case of Amalek proving prophetic, “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” ( Samuel 15:23; compare 1 Samuel 28:3-20). “So Saul died for his transgression (Hebrew shuffling evasion of obedience) ... and also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, to inquire of it” ( Chronicles 10:13). “Wizards,” yid’oniym , from yaada “to know” ( Leviticus 19:31).

    Consulters of “the dead,” ‘oboth ( Leviticus 20:6), “those having familiar spirits” which they consulted to evoke the dead; literally, “bottles” (leather) inflated by the spirit; compare Job 32:19, “my belly is as wine which hath no vent ... ready to burst like new bottles.” The pythonesses (margin of Acts 16:16) spoke with a deep voice as from the belly; by ventriloquism (Septuagint so translated “them that have familiar spirits,” ventriloquists) they made a low voice sound (= “peep and mutter”) as from the grave or departed person’s spirit ( Isaiah 19:3; 29:4).

    Scripture has written for all ages ( Isaiah 8:19,20):”when they shall say, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits; and unto wizards that peep and that mutter, should not a people seek unto their God? (should they seek) for the (good of) the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony ... if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” This tests and condemns modern spiritualism, the sign of “the latter times and the last days” ( 1 Timothy 4:1), “seducing spirits and doctrines suggested by demons” ( 2 Timothy 3:1-8). The phenomena seem supernatural and Satanic, and the communications often lying, as was to be expected from “the father of lying” ( John 8:44). The Angekoks, Esquimaux sorcerers, when converted, have declared that their sorceries, when they were heathen, were not mere impostures, that they were acted on by a power they could not control; but when they believed in Jesus they had neither the will nor the power to do what they used in their pagan state. Brainerd states the same as to the Indian diviners, namely, that all their former powers of divination departed the moment the word of God entered their souls. Satan’s design in spiritualism is, judging from the alleged spirit communications, to supersede Scripture with another authority (namely, spirit communications) in matters of faith. Satan and his demons are the real speakers in these pretended communications from the spirits of the dead. The “associate spirit” of spiritualism answers to the Scripture “familiar spirit” of the wizards. The pythoness and the witch of Endor were each a “medium” between the consulters and the powers of darkness. The consulters are put en rapport with the latter, not really with the departed dead. Scripture ( Ecclesiastes 9:5,6, “the dead know not anything ... neither have they any more a portion forever in anything done under the sun”; 2 Kings 2:9; Luke 16:19-31) implies that it is not the spirits of the dead that make the alleged communications, though these communications assert that it is; this assertion is from a lying spirit, such as was in Ahab’s prophets ( 1 Kings 22:22). The dead do not return, they are personated by evil spirits. Spiritualism is virtually condemned in Deuteronomy 18:10; 2 Kings 17:17; 21:6. “Sorcerers” are especially mentioned as about to abound with “lying wonders,” and to be adjudged to damnation, at the Lord’s coming again ( 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11; Malachi 3:5; Revelation 21:8; 22:15). The three frog-like demons out of the mouths of the anti-trinity, the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet, shall “work miracles” to tempt the ten kings under Antichrist to the last battle for the kingship of the world, against Christ, in “the great day of God Almighty” ( Revelation 16:13,14; compare Zechariah 13:2; Matthew 24:24; Revelation 13:14,15). Paul was “grieved,” so far was he from seeking and welcoming like spiritualists the pythoness’ testimony to him ( Acts 16:17,18); for the Spirit of Christ and the spirit of divination cannot dwell together in the same soul. God condemns those who “remain among the graves and lodge in the monuments” ( Isaiah 65:4) for necromancy, to consult the dead. The warning in Isaiah 8:19,20, Mark 5:3, applies to all times.

    The witch of Endor was “mistress of a spirit by which the dead are conjured up” ( 1 Samuel 28:7, ba’alath owb ). Saul’s request, “bring me him up whom I shall name,” explains the previous “divine (qacomi ) unto me by the familiar spirit.” The witch’s recognizing Saul as soon as Samuel appeared proves that her art was not mere jugglery: “Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul”; she was in a state of clairvoyance. On the other hand, her “crying with a loud voice,” startled at the sight of Samuel, shows that his appearance differed essentially from anything she had ever by demon art effected before. She tells Saul, “I saw gods (a supernatural being) ascending out of the earth ... an old man covered with a (prophet’s) mantle” (me’il ). Saul apparently did not see Samuel’s person, but recognized the “mantle.” Saul’s inconsistency is convicted by Samuel: “wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the Lord is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy?” If God was departed from him he should have been the more afraid to increase Jehovah’s displeasure by breaking the laws in consulting the dead, as if they were less under God’s control than the living. Abject superstition never reasons.

    Samuel’s prophecy of his and his sons’ death on the morrow, and Israel’s defeat by the Philistines, proves Samuel’s appearance to have been of God, and not by demoniac agency nor an illusion (Ecclesiasticus 46:20). God for special reasons awakened His servant out of his repose (“why hast thou disquieted me,” etc.) to appear, not at a conjuring call which He forbids, but to show the witch and the king the terrible penalty of disobedience and witchcraft, as he (Samuel) had long ago declared in more general terms when alive ( 1 Samuel 15:23; 28:17-19). Jehovah’s principle is ( Ezekiel 14:4,7,8), “every man that setteth up his idols in his heart and putteth the stumbling block of his iniquity before his face, and cometh to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him that cometh, according to the multitude of his idols, that I may take the house of Israel in their own heart ... I will answer him by Myself” (by My own special interposition), answering the fool according to his folly, making the sinner’s sin his own punishment.

    In Egypt books containing magic formulae belonged exclusively to the king, the priests and wise men, who formed a college, being called in by Pharaoh when needful. The qecem divined the future by any mode of taking omens, from a root “to cut.” But the kashaph , mekashphim , “sorcerers” above, used fascinations and magic charms ( Exodus 7:11; 22:18; Daniel 2:2; Deuteronomy 18:10). The me’oneen ( 2 Kings 21:6),”an observer of times,” from ‘aanan “to cover,” using covert arts; or else from ‘on , “time,” “fixed time”; those who define the exact auspicious time to travel, to traffic, etc.; or else “astrologers,” who judge by the stars auspicious and inauspicious days. The Septuagint explain it of “observers of words,” so as to decide by them whether success will attend an undertaking or not ( Genesis 24:14; 1 Samuel 14:9,10; 1 Kings 20:33). Others take it from ‘ayin , “the eye,” “one fascinating with the eyes” ( Matthew 20:15). “Monthly prognosticators” (mod’im ), who every new moon professed by observations of it to foretell the future ( Isaiah 47:13). Menachashim , “charmers of serpents,” from naachaash , “serpent,” “to augur.” Hobreb shamaim , “dividers of the heavens,” watching conjunctions and oppositions of the stars; in casting a nativity they observed the sign which arose at the time of one’s birth, the mid heaven, the sign in the west opposite the horoscope, and the hypogee.

    Divination by rods is alluded to in Hosea 4:12, “their staff declareth unto them”; a rod stripped of bark on one side, not on the other, was thrown up; if the bore side alighted uppermost it was a good omen, otherwise a bad omen. The Arabs mark one rod God bids, the other God forbids; whichever came out first from the case decided the issue.

    Consultation of idols’ oracles is referred to in 2 Kings 1:2-6. The only true “oracle” (debir ) was the holy of holies ( 1 Kings 6:16; Psalm 28:2); previously, consultation of the Lord through the priest with the ephod ( 2 Samuel 2:1; 5:23). Our “oracles” are the Holy Scriptures ( Acts 7:38; Romans 3:2). Of dealings in magic in the New Testament instances occur: Simon Magus ( Acts 8:9-11); Elymas Bar Jesus ( Acts 13:6,8); the pythoness ( Acts 16:16’s margin); the vagabond Jews, exorcists ( Acts 19:13,19), the Ephesian books treating of “curious arts”; Galatians 5:20, “witchcraft”; Revelation 9:21, “sorceries.”

    DIVORCE Deuteronomy 24:1-4 permits the husband to divorce the wife, if he find in her “uncleanness,” literally, “matter of nakedness,” by giving her “a bill of divorcement,” literally, a book of cutting off. Polygamy had violated God’s primal law joining in one flesh one man to one woman, who formed the other half or converse side of the male. Moses’ law does not sanction this abnormal state of things which he found prevalent, but imposes a delay and cheek on its proceeding to extreme arbitrariness. He regulates and mitigates what he could not then extirpate. The husband must get drawn up by the proper authorities (the Levites) a formal deed stating his reasons ( Isaiah 50:1; Jeremiah 3:8), and not dismiss her by word of mouth.

    Moses threw the responsibility of the violation of the original law on the man himself; tolerating it indeed (as a less evil than enforcing the original law which the people’s “hardness of heart” rendered then unsuitable, and thus aggravating the evil) but throwing in the way what might serve as an obstacle to extreme caprice, an act requiring time and publicity and formal procedure.

    The school of Shammai represented fornication or adultery as the “uncleanness” meant by Moses. But ( Leviticus 20:10; John 8:5) stoning, not merely divorce, would have been the penalty of that, and our Lord ( Matthew 19:3,9, compare Matthew 5:31) recognizes a much lower ground of divorce tolerated by Moses for the hardness of their heart.

    Hillel’s school recognized the most trifling cause as enough for divorce, e.g. the wife’s burning the husband’s food in cooking. The aim of our Lord’s interrogators was to entangle Him in the disputes of these two schools. The low standard of marriage prevalent at the close of the Old Testament appears in Malachi 2:14-16.

    Rome makes marriage a sacrament, and indissoluble except by her lucrative ecclesiastical dispensations. But this would make the marriage between one pagan man and one pagan woman a “sacrament,” which in the Christian sense would be absurd; for Ephesians 5:23-32, which Rome quotes, and Mark 10:5-12 where even fornication is not made an exception to the indissolubility of marriage, make no distinction between marriages of parties within and parties outside of the Christian church. What marriage is to the Christian, it was, in the view of Scripture, to man before and since the fall and God’s promise of redemption. Adulterous connection with a third party makes the person one flesh with that other, and so, ipso facto dissolves the unity of flesh with the original consort ( 1 Corinthians 6:15,16). The divorced woman who married again, though the law sanctions her remarriage ( Deuteronomy 24:1-4), is treated as “defiled” and not to be taken back by the former husband. The reflection that, once divorced and married again, she could never return to her first husband, would check the parties from reckless rashness.

    DIZAHAB ( Deuteronomy 1:1) = “where gold is abundant”: an early stage of Israel’s march after Sinai. Marks of former mining abound in the Arabian peninsula, and have led to recent discoveries. Dahal is probably too far out of the way on the W. of the gulf of Akaba to be the ancient Dizahab.

    DODAI 1. ( 1 Chronicles 27:4) =DODO ( 1 Chronicles 11:12; 2 Samuel 23:8). Possibly the clause “Eleazar, the son of,” has fallen out before “Dodai” in 1 Chronicles 27:4. Jewish tradition makes Dodo or Dodai the brother of Jesse. 2. DODO of Bethlehem ( 2 Samuel 23:24, 1 Chronicles 11:12). 3. Dodai of Issachar ( Judges 10:1).

    DODANIM ( Genesis 10:4) =RODANIM ( 1 Chronicles 1:7); since the Hebrew letter daleth ( d ) and the Hebrew letter resh ( r ), closely resemble One another in Hebrew, Septuagint and Samaritan versions translate “the inhabitants of Rhodes,” the large island in the E. part of the Mediterranean; in Greek meaning “island of roses;” its coins are stamped with a rose.

    Sprung from Javan (= Ionia, the Greek race), son of Japhet. Gesenius identifies them with the Dardani of Illyricum and Troy, a semi-Pelasgic race, akin to the Kittim or Chittim. Dodona, seat of the oracle in Epirus, is a kindred name.

    DODAVAH 2 Chronicles 20:37.

    DOEG An Idumean, chief of Saul’s herdsmen. At Nob ( 1 Samuel 21:7) “detained before the Lord” by some act of purification or vow, which as a proselyte he was performing, when Ahimelech gave David Goliath’s sword and the shewbread. With officious eagerness and talebearing exaggeration (marked in the title of Psalm 52 by the tautology “came and told and said”) he gave information which he knew well his master Saul would keenly listen to. Doeg told substantially the fact; it was Saul who put on it the “lying” construction of treason on the part of the priests (compare Psalm 52:3,4 with 1 Samuel 22:13). “The Edomite” in the title reminds us that herein Doeg represented Edom’s and the world’s undying enmity to Israel and the godly. He was but the accomplice and ready tool; Saul, the “mighty man” ( Psalm 52:1) who “trusted in the abundance of his riches” ( Psalm 52:7) as means of destroying David, was the real” boaster in mischief,” for this was the very appeal that Saul made, and that induced Doeg to inform ( 1 Samuel 22:7): “Hear now, ye Benjamites, will the son of Jesse (as I can) give every one of you fields and vineyards?” (compare 1 Samuel 8:14.) On Doeg’s information, and by Doeg’s own sacrilegious hand, at Saul’s command, when the king’s “footmen” declined in reverential awe to kill Jehovah’s priests, eighty-five of them fell, and Saul “boasted” ( Psalm 52:1) of it as a sample of the fate of all who should help David. The undesigned coincidences here noted, between the psalm and independent history, confirm the authenticity of both. The cruel sycophancy of Doeg was so well known to David that he said unto Abiathar, the only survivor of the slaughter, “I knew it that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul;” therefore with characteristic sensitiveness of conscience David adds, “I have occasioned the death of all the persons of thy father’s house.”

    DOG The watch of the house, and of the flock ( Isaiah 56:10,11; Job 30:1). Sometimes domesticated, as the Syrophoenician woman’s comparison and argument imply, “the household (kunaria , ‘little’ or ‘pet’) dogs eat of the crumbs ( Matthew 15:26,27; Mark 7:27,28) which fall from their master’s table.” More commonly ownerless, and banded in troops which divide cities into so many quarters; each half-starved, ravenous troop keeps to its own quarter, and drives off any intruder; feeding on blood, dead bodies, and offal; therefore regarded as “unclean” ( 1 Kings 14:11; 16:4; 21:19,23; 22:38; 2 Kings 9:10,35,36). Their dismal howlings at night are alluded to in Psalm 59:6,14,15: “they return at evening, they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city”; perhaps in allusion to Saul’s agents thirsting for David’s blood coming to Michal’s house at evening, and to the retribution on Saul in kind, when he who had made David a wanderer himself wandered about seeking vainly for help against the Philistines, and went at last by night to the witch of Endor.

    As unclean ( Isaiah 66:3), dog, dead dog, dog’s head, are terms of scorn or else self-abasement ( 1 Samuel 24:14; 2 Samuel 3:8; 9:8; 16:9; 2 Kings 8:13). A wanton, self-prostituting man is called a “dog” ( Deuteronomy 23:18). One Egyptian god had a dog form. “Beware of the (Greek) dogs,” those impure persons of whom I told you often” ( Philippians 3:2,18,19); “the abominable” ( Revelation 21:8; compare Revelation 22:15; Matthew 7:6); pagan in spirit ( Titus 1:15,16); dogs in filthiness, snarling, and ferocity against the Lord and His people ( Psalm 22:16,20); backsliding into former carnality, as the dog “is turned to his own vomit again” ( 2 Peter 2:22). The Jews regarded the Gentiles as “dogs,” but by unbelief they ceased to be the true Israel and themselves became dogs ( Isaiah 56:10,11). “Deliver my darling from the power of the dog,” i.e. my soul (literally, my unique one, unique in its preciousness) from the Jewish rabble; as “deliver My soul from the sword” is Messiah’s cry for deliverance from the Roman soldiery and governor. The Assyrian hunting dog as vividly depicted on Assyrian sculptures resembled exactly our harrier or foxhound.

    DOORKEEPER A place of dignity in the East; therefore translate as margin Psalm 84:10, “I had rather lie at the threshold (as the lame man at the temple gate, Acts 3:2; or as the poor in the synagogue, James 2:3) in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness;” for that is an abiding house, however low my position in it; these are but shifting tents, though one have a dwelling in them.

    DOPHKAH a station in the wilderness ( Numbers 33:12) between Rephidim and the sea.

    DOR (“habitation”). An ancient, royal, Canaanite city, on the Mediterranean, S. of Carmel; assigned to Manasseh, though within Asher ( Joshua 11:2; 12:23; 17:11); 9 miles N. of Caesarea toward Ptolemais; now Tantura. The coast line runs parallel to a spur of Carmel at a mile and a half distance; the intervening “region” is the “border” or “coast” of Dor. The original inhabitants were not expelled, but David made them tributary, and Solomon stationed one of his commissariat officers there ( 1 Kings 4:11; Judges 1:27,28).

    DOTHAN i.e. Dothain, “two wells.” At it Joseph was put into a well pit (from whence it derived its name) become dry, and afterward sold to Ishmaelite merchants who traveled that route between Syria and Egypt ( Genesis 37:17); near Shechem. Elisha’s place of sojourn, when the Syrian king invested the city with horses and chariots, to Gehazi’s dismay; but “the mountain” whereon it stood he saw, when the Lord opened his eyes, to be “full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” ( 2 Kings 6:13-18). Situated in the center of the country near the S. edge of the Esdraelon plain, from which hills extending from Carmel range separate it. The ruins on a large tell or mound mark the place, Dotan; beneath the S. side is a spring. Close by is an ancient road with massive pavement running N. and S. To this day there are numerous cisterns hewn in the rock, and bottle shaped with hallow mouth, such as egress, would be impossible from without help. Into such a pit doubtless Joseph was cast here.

    DOVE Emblem of peace ( Genesis 8:7-12). After God’s wrath for sin had been executed upon the earth, the dove was thrice sent forth; at the first sending she found no rest for the sole of her foot until she put herself in Noah’s (meaning “comforter”) hand, and was drawn into the ark; on the second trip, she brought back the olive leaf, the earnest of the restored earth; on the third trip, she was able to roam at large, no longer needing the ark’s shelter. As the raven messenger “going forth to and fro,” alighting on but never entering into the ark, symbolizes the unbelieving that have “no peace,” “like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest” ( Isaiah 57:20,21): so the dove, in its threefold embassy, represents respectively the first return of the soul to its rest, the loving hand of Jesus; its subsequent reception of the dovelike spirit, the earnest of the final inheritance ( Ephesians 1:13,14); and its actual entrance finally on the new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21), where there will be no need of the arklike church to separate between the world and God’s people, between the saved and unsaved, where all shall be safe and blessed forever and the church shall be co-extensive with the world.

    As the lamb is the emblem of the Savior, so the dove of the Holy Spirit the Comforter, because of its gentleness, tenderness, innocence, and constant love ( Matthew 3:16). He changes us into His own likeness. The liquid full soft eye is the emblem of the heavenly bride’s eye, through which the soul beams out (Song 1:15). Contrast the sinner’s eye ( Matthew 20:15; 2 Peter 2:14). The church’s unsheltered innocence in the world calls forth the prayer: “Deliver not the soul of Thy turtle dove unto the multitude of the wicked” ( Psalm 74:19; 55:11). Their plaintive note symbolizes the mourning penitent ( Isaiah 59:11).

    The change from the Egyptian bondage amidst the face blackening potteries to the freedom and beauty of Israel’s theocratic state is expressed in Psalm 68:13,14, “though ye have lien (lain) among the pots yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold,” the dove’s outspread wings reflecting a golden or silver splendor according to the direction in which the sunshine falls on them, typifying the dovelike spirit of joy and peace beaming forth from the believer, once darkness, but now light in the Lord. The dove’s timidity answers to the believer fleeing from sin, self, and wrath, to the refuge in the cleft Rock of ages (Song 2:14; Jeremiah 48:28; Isaiah 26:4, margin).

    Its gregariousness answers to the communion of saints, all having flocked together to Christ ( Isaiah 60:8); the returning Israelites shall so flock to Jerusalem, as doves in a cloud to their cotes; and the converted Gentiles to Israel.

    Saints must imitate its harmless simplicity ( Matthew 7:16), but not its silliness ( Hosea 7:11). The Israelites under God’s visitation of the enemy’s invasion “shall be on the mountains like doves of the valleys” ( Ezekiel 7:16); as doves which usually frequent valleys mount up to the mountains when fearing the birdcatcher ( Psalm 11:1), so Israel, once dwelling in the peaceful valleys, shall flee from the foe to the mountains, once the scene of their highplace idolatries, now retributively the scene of their abject flight.

    In Jeremiah 25:38, “because of the fierceness of the oppressor” (Hebrew: the dove), the allusion is to the Chaldaean standard, the dove, the symbol of Venus. Semiramis the queen was said to have been nourished by doves when exposed at birth, and at death to have been transformed into a dove.

    In 2 Kings 6:25 the “dove’s dung” sold for food in the famine seems to have been a vegetable or poor grain or vetch pea, so named, that grew in the land not built upon and lying, as is common in the East, within the city.

    Linnaeus identified it with the Ornithogalum umbellatum, with eatable bulbs, “the star of Bethlehem”; the color of the flowers, white mixed with green, originated the name “dove’s dung,” which is of like color. Keil thinks it to be a saltwort yielding alkali, Herba alkali. Josephus, however (B. J., 5:13, section 7), mentions literal dung having been eaten in terrible famine.

    The offering of a dove was the alternative permitted to those unable to afford a more costly one, an alternative adopted instead of the lamb by the Virgin mother at her purification, a proof of the poverty to which our Lord stooped at His incarnation. The sellers of doves profaned the temple court by selling doves to meet the wants of the poorer classes ( John 2:13-17).

    DOWRY The suitor’s payment to the father for the wife ( Genesis 24:53, Isaac; Genesis 29:18, Jacob; Genesis 34:12, Shechem).

    DRAGON Tannin , tan . Tan in Jeremiah 14:6, “dragons” “snuffing up the wind” is translated by Henderson jackals; rather the great boas and python serpents are meant, which raise their body vertically ten or twelve feet high, surveying the neighborhood above the bushes, while with open jaws they drink in the air. They were made types of the deluge and all destructive agencies; hence the dragon temples are placed near water in Asia, Africa, and Britain, e.g. that of Abury in Wiltshire. The ark is often associated with it, as the preserver from the waters. The dragon temples are serpentine in form; dragon standards were used in Egypt and Babylon, and among the widely-scattered Celts. Apollo’s slaying Python is the Greek legend implying the triumph of light over darkness and evil. The tannin are any great monsters, whether of land or sea, trans. Genesis 1:21 “great sea monsters.” So ( Lamentations 4:3) “even sea monsters (tannin ) draw out the breast,” alluding to the mammalia which sometimes visit the Mediterranean, or the halichore cow whale of the Red Sea. Large whales do not often frequent the Mediterranean, which was the sea that the Israelites knew; they apply “sea” to the Nile and Euphrates, and so apply “tannin ” to the crocodile, their horror in Egypt, as also to the large serpents which they saw in the desert. “The dragon in the sea,” which Jehovah shall punish in the day of Israel’s deliverance, is Antichrist, the antitype to Babylon on the Euphrates’ waters ( Isaiah 27:1). In Psalm 74:13, “Thou brokest the heads of the dragons in the waters,” Egypt’s princes and Pharaoh are poetically represented hereby, just as crocodiles are the monarchs of the Nile waters.

    So ( Isaiah 51:9,10) the crocodile is the emblem of Egypt and its king on coins of Augustus struck after the conquest of Egypt. “A habitation of dragons” expresses utter desolation, as venomous snakes abound in ruins of ancient cities ( Deuteronomy 32:33; Jeremiah 49:33; Isaiah 34:13).

    In the New Testament it symbolizes Satan the old serpent (Genesis 3), combining gigantic strength with craft, malignity, and venom ( Revelation 12:3). The dragon’s color, “red,” fiery red, implies that he was a murderer from the beginning.

    DRAMS ( 1 Chronicles 29:7; Ezra 2:69; 8:27; Nehemiah 7:70-72).

    Adarconim, the Persian daric, from dara “a king,” a gold coin circulated among the Jews during their subjection to Medo-Persia; the earliest coined money used by the Jews, and the oldest gold coin of which specimens are extant; a crowned archer is impressed on it; heavier than an English guinea; = 25 shillings.

    TheDRACHM is different, it was a Greek coin which the RomanDENARIUS (translated unfortunately see PENNY Revelation 6:6, a laborer’s daily wages Matthew 20:2-9) superseded: Luke 15:8,9, “PIECE OF SILVER,” Greek drachmee . The “penny,” denarius, in metal was equivalent to 7 1/2 pence, but could purchase more than our shilling.

    DREAM The revelation of God’s will in dreams is characteristic of the early and less perfect patriarchal times ( Genesis 28:12; 31:24; 37:5-10); to Solomon, 1 Kings 3:5, in commencing his reign; the beginnings of the New Testament dispensation ( Matthew 1:20; 2:13,19,22); and the communications from God to the rulers of the pagan world powers, Philistia, Egypt, Babylon ( Genesis 20:3; 40:5; 41:1); Elihu, Job 33:15; Daniel 2; 4:5, etc. The dream form of revelation is that most appropriate to those outside the kingdom of God. So the Midianite ( Judges 7:13), Pilate’s wife ( Matthew 27:19). But it is the Israelites Joseph and Daniel who interpret; for pagandom is passive, Israel active, in divine things to the glory of the God of Israel.

    Dreams were a frequent means of imposture and idolatry Deuteronomy 13:1-3; Zechariah 10:2). The dream form of revelation is placed below that of prophecy and even divination ( Numbers 12:6; Joel 2:28; Samuel 28:6). “Trances” and “visions” are mentioned in the Christian church, but not dreams. While God has acted and can act on the mind in a dream (wherein the reason and judgment are dormant, but the sensations and imaginations active and uncontrolled by the judgment), His higher mode of revelation is that wherein the understanding is active and conscious; consequently, the former mode appears more in imperfect stages of the development of God’s scheme than in the advanced stages. “In the multitude of dreams are divers vanities” ( Ecclesiastes 5:7), i.e., God’s service becomes by “dreams” (foolish fancies as to what God requires of worshippers); and random “words,” positive vanity of manifold kinds; compare Matthew 6:7, “they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.”

    DRESS Aprons of figleaves were our first parents’ earliest attempt at dress to clothe their shame [see ADAM , see ABEL ] ( Genesis 3:7,21); “God made coats of skin and clothed them,” doubtless taken from animals slain in sacrifice at His command; type of the garment of righteousness provided by God through His Son’s sacrifice, wherewith we, whose own faulty righteousness could not clothe our shame, are completely covered so as to stand before the all-searching eye of God ( Isaiah 61:10).

    Such a coat of skin Elijah and the prophets commonly wore, ‘addereth implying its amplitude. ( 1 Kings 19:13,19; 2 Kings 2:13; Zechariah 13:4; Matthew 7:15, “false prophets come to you in sheep’s clothing, but,” etc.)

    The kutoneth , or shirtlike inner vest, Greek chitoon , is inappropriately trans. “coat” ( Matthew 10:10; John 19:23). Those stripped of every garment but this are termed “naked,” it being but a partial covering, our “undress”: 1 Samuel 19:24 Saul to imitate the prophets; David ( Samuel 6:20); Peter ( John 21:7); Isaiah 20:2, the prophet’s undress being a silent monition to repentance.

    Sackcloth, woven of hair, was the mourner’s garment. So the king of Nineveh ( Jonah 3:6) laid aside his ample addereth for sackcloth. Cloth of camel’s hair was John Baptist’s garment, silently condemning the prevalent luxury ( Matthew 3:4). Cloth of goat’s hair (the Roman cilicium) was the material used by the poor.

    The Israelites learned when bondmen in Egypt to fabricate fine linen ( Chronicles 4:21). The ketoneth or kutoneth is related to our word cotton.

    The Syrian term for linen, butz, is the root of bussos , the Greek for “fine linen” ( Luke 16:19; Revelation 18:12,16). Shesh , the earlier term, was Egyptian, their linen being of the finest texture. Sadin , related to our word satin, was a fine linen for summer wear. A wrapper sometimes used as a nightshirt ( Mark 14:51). Silk was of late introduction ( Revelation 18:12).

    The mixture of wool and flax was forbidden ( Leviticus 19:19; Deuteronomy 22:11), the combination being reserved to the high priest alone ( Exodus 28:4), and that a combination of different threads, not of different materials in one thread, such as linsey woolsey. The general object of the prohibition was to symbolize simplicity and purity. They were even in minute distinctions to be separated from the pagan, and to remember God is the God of order; and if so in small details, now much more will He disallow the confounding of the eternal distinctions of right and wrong ( Genesis 1:11; 1 Corinthians 11:10-15; Deuteronomy 22:5).

    White was the prevalent color of garments. It symbolized purity ( Revelation 3:4,5; 7:9,13). Joseph’s “coat (vest) was of many colors” ( Genesis 37:3). On the tomb of Chnoumhotep of the 12th dynasty, at Beni Hassan, the Semitic visitors are represented in patchwork garments of many colors. An Arab sheikh to this day wears an aba or garment composed of stripes of many colors, as emblem of his office. Jacob hereby marked Joseph, the firstborn of his darling Rachel, as successor to the primogeniture, birthright, and priesthood as head of the family, which Reuben by incest had forfeited ( 1 Chronicles 5:1 confirms this). “Cunning work” had the devices woven into the stuff; “needlework” had the devices cut out of other stuff and attached by the needle (compare Judges 5:30, “needlework on both sides).” The brilliant colors of the Assyrian nobles spiritually seduced Israel; Ezekiel 23:12, “clothed most gorgeously,” lit. to perfection. The ampler robes and the finer texture distinguished the rich from the poor Hebrews.

    Women and men were forbidden to assume the dress characteristic of the opposite sex ( Deuteronomy 22:5). The veil distinguished women. She was not to assume the signet ring, the staff, and the weapons of man.

    The ketoneth underneath was made of two pieces sewn together at the side. Jesus’ “seamless tunic” was probably the meil or upper tunic without sleeves, reaching to the ankles, worn by kings, prophets, youths, and nobles ( 1 Samuel 24:4; 28:14; 2:19; Job 1:20), whereas the ketoneth reached only to the knee. Joseph, Tamar, and the priests wore one reaching to the ankles and wrists ( 2 Samuel 13:18; Exodus 28:31; 1 Samuel 15:27; 18:4; Judges 14:12,13). “Sheets,” i.e. shirts, sedinim , clothes worn next the skin. John 21:7; Peter wore the linen coat which was worn by Syrian fishermen.

    The usual outer garment was a quadrangular woolen cloth; simlah ; beged of a handsome kind, kesuth a covering; lebush a warrior’s, priest’s, or king’s cloak ( 2 Samuel 20:8; 2 Kings 10:22; Esther 6:11). Malbush a state dress, court apparel ( 1 Kings 10:5), or religious vestment ( 2 Kings 10:22). Mad , the long cloak ( Judges 3:16). The Greek himation is the outer robe, stole” long robes” of rich amplitude and grandeur ( Mark 12:38; 16:5; Luke 15:22; Revelation 6:11; 7:9,13) The chitoon , “coat,” rather inner vest, is contrasted with the “cloak” or outer himation ( Matthew 5:40; Acts 9:39). The outer beged might be wrapped round the body or the shoulders, with the ends hanging in front or covering the head, as 2 Samuel 15:30; Esther 6:12. The ends had a fringe, and upon it a blue or purple riband, which continually being before their eyes, with its heavenly hue, would be a remembrance to them that they should “remember all the Lord’s commandments” ( Numbers 15:38). A girdle secured it around the waist; the fold made by the overlapping of the robe served as a pocket ( 2 Kings 4:39; Psalm 79:12; Haggai 2:12).

    The ketoneth was worn by both sexes. Women’s distinctive garments were the mitpachat , or shawl ( Ruth 3:15); Isaiah 3:22, “wimples,” thrown over the head and body. The maatapha , full tunic with sleeves and reaching to the feet, worn over the ordinary tunic ( Isaiah 3:22). The tsaiph , a handsome ample summer cloak-like veil, thrown at pleasure over the head ( Genesis 24:65; 38:14). The radid , “veils” ( Isaiah 3:23), large enough to cover the head and person, distinct from the smaller “mufflers,” or veils closely covering the face above, with apertures for the eyes, but loosely flowing below (harhhalot ). The veil on the head marks the woman’s subjection ( 1 Corinthians 11:3-10); “the woman ought to have power on her head,” i.e. the head covering or veil, the emblem of her being under the power of man, her head. Radid , “a veil,” is akin to radad, “subjection.” The pethigil , “stomacher,” or broad plaited girdle ( Isaiah 3:24).

    In Daniel 3:21, for “coats,” sarbalin , translated as wide, long “pantaloons,” such as the Babylonians wore (Herodotus i. 195). For “hosen” (as stockings are not common in the East), translated patish inner “tunics.” For “hats,” translated karbla “mantles.” In Matthew 27:28 “robe,” chlamus , is the military cloak of officers.

    In 2 Timothy 4:13 Paul’s felonee , the Graecized poenula of the Romans, is the long, thick, sleeveless, traveling cloak, with only an opening for the head. Paul then, on the confines of two worlds, in this wanted a cloak to cover him from the “winter” cold ( 2 Timothy 4:21); in that world was about to be “clothed upon with his house from heaven,” even as his soul was already covered with the righteousness of saints. A graphic touch, not unworthy of inspiration.

    The beged was often used as a coverlet at night, as the Bedouin uses his aba. The law, in mercy to the poor, forbade the creditor to retain it after nightfall ( Exodus 22:26,27). Tearing it expressed grief, indignation, etc. ( Job 1:20). Shaking it, renunciation ( Nehemiah 5:13; Acts 18:6).

    Spreading it before another, loyal and joyful submission to his rule ( Kings 9:13; Acts 21:8). Wrapping it around the head, reverent awe or grief ( 1 Kings 19:13; 2 Samuel 15:30).

    The long outer robes needed girding up around the waist, when active work was needed; hence, metaphorically ( 1 Peter 1:13), “gird up the loins of’ your mind.” Workers, pilgrims, runners, wrestlers, warriors, typify the Christian; they all needed girding. So Israel at the Passover ( Exodus 12:11, compare Luke 12:35). The feet were covered in reverence of the presence of a king ( Isaiah 6:2).

    The readiness with which their loose garments were changed is noted in Jeremiah 43:12: “he shall array himself with Egypt as (speedily and easily as) a shepherd putteth on his garment” (compare <19A226> Psalm 102:26).

    Changes of raiment were a leading constituent of wealth in the East ( Isaiah 3:6,7; Job 27:16; Matthew 6:19; James 5:2) and a usual present ( 2 Kings 5:5). To present one’s own robe was a strong token of love ( 1 Samuel 18:4). The gift of a robe installed in office ( Genesis 41:42; Esther 8:15). The presenting of the best robe was a special honor ( Luke 15:22). In Isaiah 3:22, “changeable suits” are those reserved for special occasions. A princely host sometimes caused “the keeper of the wardrobe” ( 2 Chronicles 34:22) to furnish robes to his guests (compare Matthew 22:11). White being the ordinary color a spot was immediately visible ( Jude 1:23; Revelation 3:4).

    DRINK, STRONG shechar . Any intoxicating beverage, wine especially from the grape (compare Numbers 28:7 with Exodus 29:40). Strong drink was extracted from other fruit also, as the pomegranate (Song 8:2). Beer was made from barley, lupin, skirrett, and other herbs being substituted for hops. Spices were mingled with it ( Isaiah 5:22). Cider, or “apple wine,” is noticed in the Mishna, Terum, 2, section 2. Honey wine was a mixture of wine, honey, and pepper, also a concoction from the grape called debaash by the Hebrews, by modern Syrians dibs, wine, milk or water being added.

    Date wine also was made in Egypt. The Speaker’s Commentary explains the proverbial phrase, Deuteronomy 29:19, “so that the soul that is drunken with sin carry away that which thirsts for sin.” “Drinking iniquity like water himself ( Job 15:16), he corrupts others thirsting for it.”

    DROMEDARY [See CAMEL .] DRUSILLA The fair but loose daughter of Herod Agrippa I and Cypros (Acts 12); sister of Herod Agrippa II; married to Azizus, king of Emesa, on his becoming a Jew; seduced by Felix, procurator of Judea, through Simon the Cyprian sorcerer (Josephus, Ant. 20:7, section 2). Present at Paul’s hearing before Felix at Caesarea. By Felix she had a son, Agrippa, who perished with his mother in the Vesuvian eruption, under Titus.

    DULCIMER A Hebraized Greek name, sumfonia , in Daniel 3:5,15. A bagpipe, consisting of two pipes thrust through a leather bag, emitting a plaintive sound; the modern Italian zampogna. Some Greek Ionian of western Asia probably introduced the instrument into Babylon. However, Furst makes the word Semitic = a tube. The old spinet resembled its tone.

    DUMAH (“silence”). An Ishmaelite tribe and region ( Genesis 25:14; Chronicles 1:30; Isaiah 21:11). The name survives in Doomat el Jendel, “Dumah of the blocks of stone,” namely, of which it was built. On the borders of Arabia and the Syrian desert. Put for all Idumea, to imply it should soon be put to silence, i.e. be destroyed. The name indicates its unhewn cyclopean masonry, like the gigantic buildings of Bashan.

    A town in the hills of Judah, near Hebron ( Joshua 15:52). Perhaps now Duweimeh, on the W. of the high district, N. of the Negeb or dry south land.

    DUNG Used as manure and fuel. Straw was trodden in the water of the dungheap to make it manure (compare Psalm 83:10). Isaiah 25:10, “Moab shall be trodden down ... as straw is trodden down for the dunghill”; also Isaiah 5:25, margin The dung sweepings of the streets were collected in heaps at fixed places outside the walls, e.g. “the dung gate” at Jerusalem ( Nehemiah 2:13), and thence removed to the fields. The dunghill is the image of the deepest degradation ( <19B307> Psalm 113:7; Lamentations 4:5; 1 Samuel 2:8). Manure is inserted in holes dug about the roots of fruit trees to the present day in S. Italy ( Luke 13:8). The dung of sacrifices was burnt outside the camp ( Exodus 29:14).

    In Malachi 2:3, “I will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts,” the point is, the maw was the priests’ prequisite ( Deuteronomy 18:3); you shall get the dung in the maw, instead of the maw. The sanctity of the Israelites’ camp through Jehovah’s presence is made the ground for rules of cleanliness such as in Deuteronomy 23:12.

    The removal to separate receptacles, and exposure of human and other ordure, gives the force to the threats, Daniel 2:5; 3:29; Ezra 6:11; 2 Kings 10:27; “a draught house,” 2 Kings 9:37, 1 Kings 14:10; Jeremiah 8:2. In Isaiah 36:12 the sense is, Is it to thy master and thee I am sent? Nay, it is to the men off the wall, to let them know that (so far am I from wishing them not to hear), if they do not surrender they shall be reduced to eating their own excrement ( 2 Chronicles 32:11).

    Scarcity of fuel necessitated the use of cows’ dung and camels’ dung, formed in cakes with straw added, for heating ovens as at this day; but to use human dung implied cruel necessity ( Ezekiel 4:12). In Philippians 3:8, “I do count them dung,” skubala means “refuse cast to the dogs.”

    DURA Now Duair, S.E. of Babil ( Daniel 3:1). Oppert found there the pedestal of a colossal statue.

    DUST To shake off dust from one’s feet against a city or person implied a solemn refusal to take anything away, even the very dust of their ground, but to leave it to witness against them ( Mark 6:11); shaking off all connection with them, and all responsibility for their guilt and consequent punishment for rejecting the gospel.

    E EAGLE Nesher . Leviticus 11:13. The golden eagle (W. Drake). The griffon vulture; the Arab nisr plainly = Hebrew nesher . In Micah 1:16, “make thee bald (shaving the head betokening mourning) ... enlarge thy baldness as the nesher ,” the griffon vulture must be meant; for it is “bald,” which the eagle is not. “A majestic and royal bird, the largest and most powerful seen in Palestine, far surpassing the eagle in size and power” (Tristram). The Egyptians ranked it as first among birds.

    The da’ah ( Leviticus 11:14) is not “the vulture” but the black kite. The Hebrew qaarach is to make bald the back of the head, very applicable to the griffon vulture’s head and neck, which are destitute of true feathers.

    The golden eagle; the spotted, common in the rocky regions; the imperial; and the Circaeros gallicus (short-toed eagle, living on reptiles only:

    Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement, October, 1876), are all found in Palestine. Its swift flight is alluded to, and rapacious cruelty, representing prophetically ( Habakkuk 1:8; Jeremiah 4:13) the Chaldean, and ultimately, the Roman, invaders of Israel ( Deuteronomy 28:49; Ezekiel 17:3-7). Compare Josephus, B. J., 6. Its soaring high and making its nest in the inaccessible rock, also its wonderful far-sightedness and strength ( Job 39:27-30). <19A305> Psalm 103:5 says: “thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s”; not as if the eagle renewed its youth in old age, but by the Lord’s goodness “thy youth is renewed” so as to be as vigorous as the eagle. The eagle’s vigor and longevity are illustrated by the Greek proverb, “the eagle’s old age is as good as the lark’s youth.” Its preying on decomposing carcass symbolizes the divine retributive principle that, where corruption is, there vengeance shall follow. “Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together,” quoted by our Lord from Job 39:30; Matthew 24:28 -- the vulture chiefly feeds on carcass.

    The eagle’s forcibly training its young to fly pictures the Lord’s power, combined with parental tenderness, in training and tending His people ( Deuteronomy 32:11; Exodus 19:4). In the law the fostering mother is the eagle, God manifesting His power and sternness mingled with tenderness in bringing His people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; in the gospel the fostering mother is the hen ( Matthew 23:37), Christ coming in grace, humility, and obedience unto death (Bochart). Subsequently, Christ rescues His people “from the face of the serpent” by giving His church the “two wings of a great eagle” ( Revelation 12:14). The eagle “hovers over her young” in teaching them their first flight, ready in a moment to save them when in danger of falling on the rocks below. Compare Isaiah 31:5. God stirred up Israel from the foul nest of Egypt, which of their own accord they would have never left, so satisfied were they with its fleshpots in spite of its corruptions. The “stirring up the nest” spiritually corresponds to the first awakening of the soul; the “fluttering over her young” to the brooding of the Holy Spirit over the awakened soul; the “taking and bearing on her wings” to His continuous teaching and guardian care. The eagle assists the young one’s first effort by flying under to sustain it for a moment and encourage its efforts. So the Spirit cooperates with us, after He has first given us the good will ( Philippians 2:12,13). The eagle rouses from the nest, the hen gathers to herself; so the law and the gospel respectively.

    The Persians under Cyrus had a golden eagle on a spear as their standard ( Isaiah 46:11). The eagle is represented in Assyrian sculptures as accompanying their armies; Nisroch, their god, had an eagle’s head. The Romans had the eagle standard, hence, the appropriateness of their being compared to an eagle ( Deuteronomy 28:49).

    EARING Old English for plowing. “Neither earing, nor harvest” ( Genesis 45:6; Exodus 34:21; Deuteronomy 21:4; Isaiah 30:24).

    EARNEST 2 Corinthians 1:20,22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:13,14. Money given by a purchaser as a pledge for the full payment of the sum promised. The Holy Spirit is to the believer the first installment to assure him that his full inheritance as a son of God shall follow hereafter; the token of the fulfillment of “all the promises.” Hence, the Spirit is called “the Holy Spirit of promise,” “the first fruits of the Spirit” ( Romans 8:23), i.e., we have the Spirit Himself as the first fruits of our full redemption. Hebrew arabon , brought by the Phoenicians to Greece and Rome, Latin arrhabo. The payment of an earnest or deposit bound both seller and purchaser to carry out the contract (i.e. a guarantee, a down payment).

    This partial payment implies the identity in kind of the deposit with the future full payment; but a “pledge” may be of a quite different kind ( Genesis 38:17,18). “Earnest” implies, besides the security of the believer’s future inheritance, its identity in kind, though not in degree, with his present possessed enjoyment of the spirit. Heaven perfected will continue heaven already begun in part ( Revelation 22:11 ff).

    EARRINGS nezem , which also includes the nose ring hanging on one side of the nose ( Genesis 24:47, where the words “upon her face” imply either a nose ring or one to be hung from her forehead, Genesis 35:4). Circular, as its other name ‘agil implies. Oriental men wore them as well as women. Judges 8:24 seems to imply that the Israelite men did not wear them, as did the Ishmaelites; but Exodus 32:2 proves that young “sons” wore them.

    There were besides netiphot ( Judges 8:26), not “collars” but pearlshaped “ear drops,” or jewels attached to the rings, or else pendent scent bottles, or pendants from the neck on the breast, “Chains” KJV ( Isaiah 3:19,21), “earrings” (leehashim , from laachash “to whisper”),AMULETS with magic inscriptions, and so surrendered along with the idols by Jacob’s household ( Genesis 35:4).

    The best use made of them was that in Numbers 31:50, an offering to the Lord to “make atonement for souls”; not that our gifts can wipe away guilt, but acknowledgments of God’s grace not being offered in loving gratitude evince an unatoned state, and so a state of guilt. When offered in loving faith, they evidence and seal visibly our reception of the atonement ( Luke 7:44-47).

    The “phylacteries,” headbands, totapkot ( Matthew 23:5) in the Talmudists’ opinion were the sanctioned antidote to the idolatrous amulets and “earrings” ( Deuteronomy 6:7,8; 11:18,19; contrast Hosea 2:13; Isaiah 3:21, lechashim . But the language in Deuteronomy and in Exodus 13:9,16 is rightly taken by the Karaite Jews as proverbial, not literal; as is apparent from the reason added, “that the law of Jehovah may be in thy mouth”; for it is by receiving the law into the heart, and by keeping it, that it would be naturally on the tongue continually. God does not say that His law was to be written upon scrolls, but to be “for a sign upon thine hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes,” i.e., was to be kept in view like memorials upon the forehead and the hand, the prominent visible parts symbolizing respectively open confession and action ( Revelation 13:16; 22:4). This view is proved by Proverbs 3:3; 4:21; 6:21,22; 7:3. But latterly the Jews used the “phylacteries,” totaphot , or tephillim , prayer fillets, parchment strips with sentences of the law, bound on the forehead or left arm during prayer.

    EARTH ‘erets in Hebrew; gee in Greek, designating either the whole globe, or land as opposed to sea, or a particular land; to be distinguished by the context.

    A distinct term expresses the material of which the earth consists damaah , the “ground,” “soil,” from whence Adam was named ( Genesis 2:7), his body coming from and returning to the earth ( Genesis 3:19), a different word “dust” ( Job 10:9; Ecclesiastes 12:7).

    Naaman desired to have two mules’ burden of earth of the Holy Land, whether for an altar or other sacred purpose ( Exodus 20:24), a halfpaganish nation that God would accept devotions in connection with that soil rather than with any other. In James 5:17 it is translated: “it rained not on the land (of Israel)”; for the drought was a judgment, not on the whole earth, but on Israel; compare Luke 4:25. So in Luke 23:44 “there was darkness over all the land,” not “all the earth”; compare Matthew 27:45.

    In 1 Corinthians 15:47-49, “the first man is of the earth, earthy,” contrasted with “the Lord from heaven” and “the heavenly,” the term is choikos , not merely earthly, i.e. born upon earth, but “earthy,” literally, “of heaped clay,” answering to the surface “dust” in the Old Testament of which man is made; not merely terrestrial, but terrene, therefore, transitory.

    EARTHQUAKE Traces of volcanic agency abound in Palestine. Yet the only recorded earthquake is that in Uzziah’s reign ( Amos 1:1). It must have been a terrible one, since two and a half centuries later it was still being made an epoch in Zechariah 14:5; his sin in the spiritual world was connected with the convulsion in the natural world. Such physical signs and premonitory upheavals shall accompany the closing conflict between the powers of light and darkness ( Isaiah 24:20; Zechariah 14:4; Matthew 24:7). Also that in 1 Kings 19:11. The awe it inspires made it an accompaniment attributed to Jehovah’s presence ( Judges 5:4; Samuel 22:8; Psalm 77:18; 104:32; Amos 8:8; Habakkuk 3:10).

    The valley of Siddim, S. of the Dead Sea, probably subsided owing to an earthquake. Bela is so-called (= “swallowed up”) from having been engulfed by an earthquake, as Dathan and Abiram were ( Numbers 16:30-32; Genesis 14:2). The miraculous darkness and earthquake at our Lord’s death ( Matthew 27:51-54) agree with the natural fact of darkness often accompanying earthquakes. The Jordan Valley, with a lower and a lower valley, the sulphurous and bituminous neighborhood of the Dead Sea, the lava, pumice stones, and hot springs, the crater like depression of the Dead Sea, 1,300 ft. below the Mediterranean level, and 3,500 ft. below Jerusalem, only 20 miles away (the deepest depression on the earth), its basaltic columns, disturbed strata, and numerous crevices, all betoken action of volcanoes and earthquakes. The line of earthquakes extends from Hebron and Jerusalem to Baalbek and Aleppo, from S.W. to N.E., following the central chain of Syria, parallel to the Jordan Valley, and terminating in the volcanic slope of Taurus on the N. and in the mountains of Arabia Petrea on the S.

    EAST qedem , literally, “before”; for in describing the points of the compass the person faced the E. or sunrise (Greek anatolee , the E.), which was thus before or in front of him; the S. was on his right, and so is called in Hebrew the right hand; the N. was on his left, and so is called in Hebrew “the left hand.” Job 23:8,9, “forward,” i.e. eastward; “backward,” i.e. westward; “on the left hand,” i.e. to the N.; “on the right hand,” i.e. in the S. So the Hindus call the E. para, “before “; the W. apara, “behind “; the S. doschina, “the right hand”; the N. bama, “the left.” Mizrach, “the sunrise,” is used when the E. is distinguished from the W. Qedem is also used to designate the lands lying immediately E. of Palestine, namely, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia. Genesis 25:6: trans. “unto the land of Qedem, for unto the E. country”; Genesis 29:1, Haran.

    Mizrach is used of the E. more indefinitely. The Greek plural anatolai , “the sunrisings,” is used of the E. indefinitely, the eastern point of the compass ( Matthew 2:1); but hee anatolee , “the sunrising,” singular, is used of a definite locality. So Qedem with the article ( Genesis 10:30) expresses the definite country S, Arabia; “Sephara mount of the E.,” a seaport on the coast of Hadramaut. More generally said of N. Arabia and Mesopotamia. Job 1:3: “the children of the E.” are mentioned with the Midianites and Amalekites ( Judges 6:3,33; 7:12). Gideon and his servant understood their talk, showing that theirs was a Semitic dialect akin to the Hebrew, before it had greatly diverged from the common parent tongue. In Ezekiel 25:4 “the men of the E.” are the wandering Bedouin tribes of Arabia Deserta; “they shall set their palaces in thee” (Ammon); irony; where thy palaces once stood, they shall set up very different “palaces,” namely, nomadic encampments and mud-surrounded folds ( Jeremiah 49:28,29). Arab is the Old Testament name for “the children of the E.” [See ARAM .] Isaiah 2:6, “replenished from the E., i.e., filled with the superstitions of the E., namely, the astrology and sorceries of Chaldea.

    EAST SEA Joel 2:20; Ezekiel 47:18. Literally, the front sea, i.e. the Dead Sea, which one looking E. would face; “the utmost (hinder) sea” is the Mediterranean, at such a one’s back ( Numbers 34:6).

    EAST WIND Dry, parching, and blighting, as blowing from over burning deserts. The E. wind was what blasted the grain in Pharaoh’s dream; strictly the S.E. wind (chamsin ) is what is most hurtful in Egypt to animals and vegetation. While it lasts doors and windows are shut; but the fine dust penetrates everywhere, wooden vessels warp and crack, the thermometer suddenly rises, the grass withers (Ukert in Hengstenberg on Egypt and the Books of Moses). Israel’s passage through the Red Sea after the passover was just the time of year when the “strong E. wind” from the Red Sea blows, exactly as the sacred narrative records ( Exodus 14:21).

    EASTER The KJV of pascha (to be translated instead as “the Passover”) in Acts 12:4. “Easter” is a Christian feast; the Passover is a Jewish feast.

    EBAL 1. The hill upon which the curses of the law were to be read; as on the opposite hillGERIZIM the blessings ( Deuteronomy 11:29,30; 27:12,13; Joshua 8:30-35). The valley wherein Shethem or Sichem (now Nablous) lay runs between the two hills. Ebal the mount of the curse, is steeper and more barren; Gerizim, the mount of the blessing, more sloping, and having a ravine opposite the W. of Shechem full of fountains and trees. Gerizim, as the southernmost, was chosen for the blessing, light and life being associated with the S. by the Hebrews. The central position of these mountains adapted them for the scene of the reading. The associations of the locality were another recommendation. Here first in Canaan Abraham rested, and built an altar to Jehovah who appeared unto him ( Genesis 12:6,7). Here too Jacob dwelt upon returning from Mesopotamia, and bought a field from the children of Hamer, father of Shethem, and built the altar El-elohe-Israel ( Genesis 33:19,20). On Gerizim the Samaritans in ages long after built their temple in rivalry of that at Jerusalem. The remains of the road to it still exist. There is still a rocky amphitheatrical recess on the side of Ebal, and a corresponding one of the same dimensions on the side of Gerizim; probably formed for the accommodation of the people, when all Israel, their elders, officers, and judges, stood: half of them, the six blessing tribes, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin (sprung from Jacob’s proper wives), over against Gerizim; and half, the six cursing tribes (four sprung from Zilpah and Bilhah, and Reuben the incestuous oldest and Zebulun the youngest) over against Ebal: with the ark and the priests and Levites in the center between the two mountains. The priests pronounced after Joshua ( Joshua 8:33,34) the blessings and curses, the people responded Amen. The voices of those standing on Ebal can be distinctly heard by those on Gerizim (such are the acoustic properties of the place, according to Tristram, etc.) and in the intermediate valley, which is about 1,600 ft. broad and runs from Gerizim S.E. to Ebal N.W. The voice of the priests in the middle would only have to traverse half the interval between the hills. The mountains are about 2,500 ft. high. On Ebal the great altar of unhewn stones was erected, plastered with lime and inscribed with the law ( Deuteronomy 27:2-8) immediately after entering the Holy Land, when Joshua had the first leisure after destroying Ai. It symbolized their setting up of Jehovah’s law as the permanent law of Israel in their land of inheritance; and it was the pledge, in the event of their continued obedience, that Jehovah would conquer all their foes and establish them in security. The distance which Joshua had to march from Ai to Shechem was 30 miles in a straight line.

    Translated in Deuteronomy 11:30, “are they not on the other side Jordan, beyond (‘achiree ) the way (road) of the W.” (the sunset), i.e. on the further side of the main route from Syria and Damascus to Jerusalem and Egypt, through the center of Palestine. This road skirts Ebal and Gerizim. Moses adds “over against Gilgal” (not the Gilgal near Jericho and the Jordan, first named by Joshua ( Joshua 5:9), but the modern Jiljulieh, 12 miles S. of Gerizim and on the brow of lofty hills, a suitable landmark, 2 Kings 2:1,2), “and beside the oaks (not ‘plains,’ but terebinths) of Moreh.” These “terebinths of Moreh” near Shechem were familiar to the people, as marking the spot where Abraham first entered the land ( Genesis 12:6). The significance of the cursing and blessing is much increased by its scene being placed at Shechem in the heart of the country, equidistant between N. and S., E. and W., rather than on the outskirts of the country, at the Gilgal near Jericho. “The Canaanites” are mentioned in Deuteronomy 11:30, as in Genesis 12:6, as then already in the land, which originally was held by a Semitic race, but was afterward taken by the Hamitic Canaanites whose original seat was near the Red Sea, from whence they migrated northwards. The conquest of the heart of the country by Joshua, mount Ephraim, Esdraelon or the Jezreel valley, is not detailed; but the narrative passes from his conquest of the S. and Gilgal to Merom waters in the far N., the Ebal altar building and the blessing and cursing being the only allusion to the central country. The Samaritan Pentateuch reads “Gerizim “for Ebal ( Deuteronomy 27:4) as the site of the altar and the plastered and law-inscribed stones; but all the Hebrew authorities are against it, and the site of the cursing is fitly the site of the altar where the penalty of the curse is borne by the typical victim. Moreover, the cursings alone are specified in the context ( Deuteronomy 27:14-26), an ominous presage at the beginning of Israel’s disobedience and consequent chastisement. The Samaritans’ aim in their reading was to justify their erection of the temple on Gerizim.

    The curses of Ebal have been literally fulfilled on the literal Israelites. Why should not also the blessings be literally fulfilled to literal Israel? The cross, our glory, was Israel’s stumblingblock. Why should the crown, both our and their glory, be our stumblingblock? See Micah 5:7; Zechariah 8:13; Zephaniah 3:20; Romans 11:12,15. 2. EBAL, son of Shobal, son of Seir ( Genesis 36:23).

    EBED (“slave”). 1. Father ofGAAL who helped the men of Shechem against Abimelech. 2.

    Son of Jonathan; one of “the sons of Adin” ( Ezra 8:6), who returned from Babylon with Ezra.

    EBED-MELECH (“king’s stare”) (an oriental phrase), an Ethiopian eunuch of king Zedekiah, instrumental in Jeremiah’s deliverance out of Malchiah’s dungeon pit.

    Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian Gentile slave, did that which none of Jeremiah’s own countrymen attempted in his behalf. Often God raises friends to His people from quarters from whence least they could expect it. Ebedmelech’s courageous interference in Jeremiah’s behalf, at a time when he might naturally fear the wrath of the princes to which even the king had to yield ( Jeremiah 38:4-13; 39:16-18), brought deliverance not only to the prophet, but ultimately to himself as his reward from God. None ever loses by being bold for God ( Matthew 10:42). He might have spoken privately to the king, as being over the king’s harem (Nubians being chosen for that office to the present day), but Ebed-melech “went forth out of the king’s house to the gate of Benjamin,” and there spoke publicly to the king, “these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah whom they have cast into the dungeon, and he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is, for there is no more bread in the city.” With 30 men to guard against the princes’ opposition, and by means of torn clothes and worn garments (“cast clouts and rotten rags,” for God chooses weak things to confound the mighty, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29), he raised Jeremiah up from the pit. So when his enemies should perish God promised Ebedmelech should be saved, “because thou hast put thy trust in Me” (compare 1 Chronicles 5:20; Psalm 37:40). Trust in God generates fearlessness of man and brings true safety for eternity, and often even here (Jeremiah 39). So shall they be rewarded who have visited Christ, in the person of His servants, in prison ( Matthew 25:34 ff).

    EBEN-EZEL 1 Samuel 20:19, the stone of departure.

    EBEN-EZER (“the stone of help”). Set up to the Lord by Samuel after Israel’s defeat of the Philistines ( 1 Samuel 7:12), “saying, Hitherto hath Jehovah helped us.” Between Mizpeh (“the watchtower”) and Shen (“the tooth”) or crag, a few miles N. of Jerusalem. The “great stone” (Eben, 1 Samuel 6:14) on which the ark rested after coming from Ekron is now Deir Eban (Ganneau, Palestine Exploration).

    EBER Son of Salah, great grandson of Shem ( Genesis 10:21,24; Chronicles 1:19; Numbers 24:24, where the “Eber” whom “ships from Chittim shall afflict” represents not the Hebrews, but in general the western descendants of Shem, sprung from Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram; the posterity of Abraham who descended from Eber through Peleg, and also the descendants of Eber through Joktan. As “Asshur” represented the Shemites who dwelt in the far East, including Elam, so Eber represents the western Shemites.

    EBIASAPH 1 Chronicles 6:23,37; 9:19, contracted into Asaph, 1 Chronicles 26:1.

    EBONY A dark hard wood, Diospyros ebenum, growing in Ethiopia, India, and the Mauritius ( Ezekiel 27:15). The dark portion is in the heart of the trunk.

    ECBATANA Margin of Ezra 6:2 forACHMETHA = Hagmatana, the native appellation; a Median town where was a palace. There were two of this name: the capital of N. Media,” the seven walled town,” with each wall of a different color, white, black, scarlet, blue, orange, silver, and gold (Herodotus, 1:98,99,153); the capital of Cyrus, therefore probably the town where the roll was found containing Cyrus’ decree for rebuilding the Jerusalem temple, which induced Darius to issue a new decree sanctioning the recommencement of the suspended work; now the ruins of Takht-i- Suleiman. The other town was capital of the larger province, Media Magna; now Hamadan. Takht-i-Suleiman contains a lake of pure water in its center, 300 paces round. The Zendavesta makes Demshid, but Herodotus Deioces, its founder. The seven walls were designed to put the city under the guardianship of the seven planets. The finding of Cyrus’ decree at Ecbatana, whereas, when Ezra wrote, the Persian kings resided usually at Susa or Babylon, visiting only occasionally in summer time Ecbatana or Persepolis, is one of those little points of agreement between sacred and profane history which confirm the truth of Scripture, because their very minuteness proves the undesignedness of the harmony. Susa and Babylon were the ordinary depositories of the archives. But Cyrus held his court permanently at Ecbatana, and therefore kept his archives there. Ezra, living a century after, would not have been likely to have fixed on Ecbatana as the place of finding Cyrus’ decree, had he been inventing, instead of recording facts.

    ECCLESIASTES The speaker so entitles himself, Hebrew: Qoheleth , Greek Ecclesiastes, “the convener of, and preacher to, assemblies,” namely, church assemblies.

    The feminine form, and its construction once with a feminine verb ( Ecclesiastes 7:27), show that divine Wisdom herself speaks through the inspired king Solomon. God had especially endowed him with this wisdom ( 1 Kings 3:5-14; 6:11,12; 9:1, etc.; 1 Kings 11:9-11). “The preacher taught the people (and inquirers) knowledge” in a divan assembled for the purpose ( 1 Kings 4:34; 10:2,8,24; 2 Chronicles 9:1,7,23). “Spake,” thrice in 1 Kings 4:32,33, refers not to written compositions, but to addresses spoken in assemblies.

    Solomon’s authorship is supported by Ecclesiastes 1:12,16; 2:1-15; 12:9. But in the book are found words: (1) rarely employed in the earlier, frequently in the later books of Scripture. (2) Words never found in Hebrew writings until the Babylonian captivity; as zimaan , “set time,” for moed , Ecclesiastes 3:1, namely, in Nehemiah 2:6; Esther 9:27,31. So pithgam , “sentence” ( Ecclesiastes 8:11); “thought,” madang ; ‘illuw “though” ( Ecclesiastes 6:6); bikeen , “so” ( Ecclesiastes 8:10): thus, Esther approximates most to Ecclesiastes in idioms. (3) Words not found in the late Hebrew, but only in the Aramaic sections of Daniel and Ezra: yithron , “profit “; compare yuthran in the Aramaic targums; kibaar , “already,” “long ago”; taaqam , “make straight” ( Ecclesiastes 1:15; 7:13; Daniel 4:33) (36 “established”); ruwth , “desire,” found also in the Aramaic parts of Ezra. (4) The grammatical constructions agree with the transition period from Hebrew to Aramaic; frequent participles, the uses of the relative, wawconversive rare. Probably, since the book is poetical not historical, a later writer, in the person of Solomon as an idealized Solomon, writes under inspiration the lessons that such an experience as that of Solomon would properly afford. Hence, Solomon is not named; the writer speaks as Qoheleth , “the preacher.” If it were merely Solomon’s penitent confession in old age, he would have used his own name. The spirit of Solomon speaks, the true Qoheleth (“gatherer”), a type of Him who is “Wisdom” and calls Himself so, and who “would have gathered Jerusalem’s children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; compare Luke 11:49 with Matthew 23:34-37. The writer makes Solomon’s saying after his late repentance, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” his text which he expands under the Spirit. So the sons of Korah write Psalm 42 as from David’s soul, in his trans-jordanic flight from Absalom, so that David is the speaker throughout. [Qoheleth] addresses “the great congregation” ( Psalm 22:25; 49:2-4), giving his testimony for godliness as the only solid good, as the seal of his repentance under chastisement for apostasy ( 1 Kings 11:14,23; Psalm 89:30,33). It is just possible that the peculiarities of language may be due to Solomon’s long intercourse with foreigners; also the Chaldaisms may be fragments preserved from the common tongue of which Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Arabic were offshoots. So Solomon himself would be the writer.

    Its canonicity rests on the testimony of the Jewish church, “to whom were committed the oracles of God,” and who are never charged in the New Testament with unfaithfulness in that respect, though so unfaithful in other respects ( Romans 3:2). Many allusions to Ecclesiastes occur in New Testament: Ecclesiastes 7:2; Matthew 5:3,4; Ecclesiastes 5:2; Matthew 6:7; Ecclesiastes 6:2; Luke 12:20; Matthew 6:19- 84; Ecclesiastes 11:5; John 3:8; Ecclesiastes 9:10; John 9:4; Ecclesiastes 10:12; Colossians 4:6; Ecclesiastes 12:14; Corinthians 5:10; Ecclesiastes 5:1; 1 Timothy 3:15; James 1:19; Ecclesiastes 5:6; 1 Corinthians 11:10. The Old Testament would be incomplete without the book that sets forth the unsatisfying vanity of the creature apart from God, even as the Song depicts the all-satisfying fullness there is for us in God our Savior.

    The theme is the vanity of all human pursuits when made the chief end, and the consequent wisdom of making the fear of God and His commandments our main aim. This presumes the immortality of the soul, which was more needed as a doctrine at the time when God, whose theocratic kingship Israel’s self chosen king in some measure superseded, was withdrawing the extraordinary providences from whence the Mosaic law had drawn its sanctions of temporal reward or punishment. The anomalies that virtue is not always rewarded, nor vice always punished, here ( Ecclesiastes 2:16; 3:19; 4:1; 5:8; 7:15; 8:14; 9:2,11), suggested the truth that there must be a future life and. a judgment, wherein God will deal with men according to their present works. This is “the conclusion of the whole” discussion, that man’s wisdom and “whole duty” is to “fear God and keep His commandments” ( Ecclesiastes 12:13,14), and meanwhile to use in joyful and serene sobriety, and not abuse, life’s present passing goods ( Ecclesiastes 3:12,13).

    David, Solomon’s father ( Psalm 39:12), and Job ( Job 7:16), had already taught the vanity of man and man’s earthly aims. So Solomon speaks of man (‘adam , not ‘iysh ) as such, frail and mortal, not redeemed man nor the elect nation Israel. Hence, not Jehovah, expressing the covenant relation to His people, but the general name God (‘Elohim ), appears throughout, the correlative to “man” (‘adam ) in general. The fatiguing toil or travail (‘amal ) of man is another characteristic phrase; it bereaves of “quietness” and “good” ( Ecclesiastes 4:6,8). In contrast stands “the work of God,” which “no man can find out from the beginning to the end”: yet this much he sees, it is “beautiful,” and “in His time,” and “for ever”; “nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it” ( Ecclesiastes 3:11,14); none” can make that straight which He hath made crooked” ( Ecclesiastes 7:13). So the” all” that is “vanity” is whatever work man, frail and mortal, undertakes, not falling in with God’s irresistible work. Man’s way to escape from the vanity that attends his work, however successful it seem for a time, is to “fear God,” and to make His commandments the end of all our work; also to acquiesce patiently, cheerfully, and contentedly in all God’s dispensations, however trying and dark ( Ecclesiastes 2:24; 3:12,13,22; 5:17; 8:15; 9:7). The recommendation to “eat and drink,” etc., was mistaken as recommending the Epicurean sensuality against which Paul ( 1 Corinthians 15:32,33) protests, and was made an objection to the book; but the eating and drinking recommended is that associated with labor, not idleness; with pious “fear of God,” not sensual ignoring of the future Judge; the cheerful, contented “eating and drinking” which characterized Judah and Israel under Solomon ( 1 Kings 4:20), and under Josiah ( Jeremiah 22:15, “Did not thy father (Josiah) eat and drink, and do judgment and justice, and then it was well with him?”) So Nehemiah enjoins ( Nehemiah 8:10-12). Ecclesiastes 2:24 has: “is it not good for man that he should eat?” etc.

    This is opposed to a self-harassing, covetous, grasping carefulness ( Philippians 4:6,7; Matthew 6:24-34; Ecclesiastes 5:18, compare Ecclesiastes 5:11-15). The joy of sensual levity is explicitly forbidden ( Ecclesiastes 7:2-6; 11:9; 12:1). The reference to hopeless oppression ( Ecclesiastes 4:1-3) is made the ground for supposing the period was one of the congregations’s suffering, as Israel suffered under Persia after the return from Babylon. But even in Solomon’s days, in the provinces, and especially when he fell into idolatry and consequent troubles, oppression must have often occurred, which his power was not able to prevent altogether in subordinate governors.

    Fatalism and skepticism might seem to be taught in Ecclesiastes 7:16; 9:2-10, but Ecclesiastes 7:17,18; 9:11; 11:1-6; 12:13, confute such notions. What is forbidden is a self-made “righteousness” which would constrain God to grant salvation to man’s works, and ceremonial strictness with which it wearies itself profitlessly; also that speculation which would fathom God’s inscrutable counsels ( Ecclesiastes 8:17). “Under the sun” or “the heavens” is another characteristic phrase ( Ecclesiastes 1:13; compare Ecclesiastes 7:11; 11:7; 12:2).

    Irresistible death is what stamps “vanity” on earthly aims and works ( Ecclesiastes 1:4; 8:8).; in this respect man has “no preeminence above a beast” ( Ecclesiastes 3:19). With all man’s ceaseless round of toils he returns to the point from whence he came, like the winds and the currents ( Ecclesiastes 1:5-11). He can bring forth no “new” thing, nor ensure his “remembrance.” “What profit then hath he of all his labor?” Ecclesiastes 1:3 answering to Matthew 16:26. The answer is: “Remember God thy Creator” ( Ecclesiastes 12:1,13). He will create for His people a NEW covenant, name, heart, heavens, and earth, in which the “crooked shall be made straight” ( Ecclesiastes 1:15; compare Isaiah 40:4; 43:18,19; 62:2; 65:17; Jeremiah 31:31; Ezekiel 11:19; 18:31). Also God will have “the righteous in everlasting remembrance” ( <19B206> Psalm 112:6; Malachi 3:16). At His “judgment” all thy works for Him shall be remembered ( Ecclesiastes 12:14). The hope of eternal life is involved in the “fear of God” enjoined; hence flows the assertion of the difference between “the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth” ( Ecclesiastes 3:21, so Ecclesiastes 12:7; compare Genesis 2:7). But it is not prominently put forward; for Christ first “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” ( 2 Timothy 1:10; contrast Ecclesiastes 9:5-10 with Philippians 1:21-23). However, what is denied is that “the dead know anything” of the mere earthly concerns which their bodily senses formerly took cognizance of. Therefore, infers the preacher, now is the only time to work for eternity, and at the same time enjoy, in subordination to this first aim, whatever innocent enjoyment God vouchsafes; “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, etc., in the grave;” to which our Lord refers, John 9:4.

    This book is the believing philosopher’s inspired reasoning as to life’s true end, and as to the practical way to draw from the present scene of vanity the greatest amount of profit and enjoyment. Compare Solomon’s view of wisdom ( Proverbs 1:7,20; 8; 9:10; <19B110> Psalm 111:10).

    The introduction is Ecclesiastes 1:1-11; the body of the argument, Ecclesiastes 1:12--12:12; the conclusion arrived at is Ecclesiastes 12:13,14. The experience of Solomon is given, Ecclesiastes 1:12--2:26; and that of mankind is appealed to in the remainder. In the former the dark side of the picture preponderates; in the latter God’s beautiful work relieves the gloom, which is perfectly cleared off to the godly it the close.

    God’s providential work, so infinitely manifold, is in all its parts ordered as to time and place. Man’s work loses its vanity only by falling into harmony with God’s; faith and reverential fear of God is his true wisdom. The gleams of light from God, amidst the dreary catalogue of vanities, appear at Ecclesiastes 3:11,17; 7:29; 8:12. Even in troubled times and perplexing dispensations of Providence, cheerfully and contentedly enjoy whatever present mercies He gives ( Ecclesiastes 3:12,22; 5:18; 8:15; 9:7-10). At the same time, not worldly carnal joys are to be sought, but the young are to remember God will judge them for sensual indulgences; therefore, “remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not.”

    The Book of Ecclesiastes is mainly in poetical parallelism. The epithets, imagery, inverted order of words, ellipses, and similarity of diction, when parallelism is absent, mark versification.

    ED ( Joshua 22:34), i.e. witness (compare Joshua 24:27). It is remarkable that not one of the famous towns of Palestine owes its originate Israel. The rock cut cemeteries, and ancient cultivation, are almost the only Israelite remains in the country. The great altar of Ed also was an Israelite work, founded by Reuben, Gad, and half Manasseh, to be a witness of their having a share in the national covenant and sanctuary of Jehovah. In Joshua 22:11 the Hebrew expresses, “Reuben, ... Gad, and ... half Manasseh built an altar at the boundary of (literally, in the fore part of, not as KJV over against) Canaan, by the gelilot (circles, i.e. the portion of the Ghor on the W. side of Jordan) of Jordan, at the passage of ... Israel,” namely, where Reuben, etc., crossed Jordan to return to their eastern possessions; not the ford near Jericho, but the Damieh ford the highway from the eastern uplands to central Palestine (identified with the “city Adam”), opposite to the opening of the broad wady Far’ah, the route from Shiloh the national sanctuary to Gilead and Bashan. The altar was erected on the W. side of and above (so Hebrew for “by,” Joshua 22:10) Jordan, the pledge that the two and a half tribes held possession still with the remaining tribes on the W. The altar was “a great altar to see to,” i.e. visible from afar. Gelilot is transled in the Vulgate as “mounds,” probably the round islands with flat tops, formed by broad water channels and salt springs on the level of the Ghor or upper plain. The high cone of Kurn Surtabeh realizes the description of the altar of witness; it crowns an almost isolated block of hill, closing in the broader part of the Jordan valley on the N. The ancient road, cut in steps, arrives at the summit on the S., but on every side the valleys are deep, and the only natural ascent is from the N., by which the watershed is reached and followed along its winding course to the summit. The cone has sides sloping at 35 degrees, and 270 ft. high on the W. where it joins a narrow plateau. On the other sides the slope is sheer to the mountain’s base. Human skill evidently has in part given the cone its peculiar shape. On it is an oblong area, 30 yards by yards, enclosed by a ruined wall of fine hewn blocks; within this is a platform, 18 ft. high, consisting of ten courses of beautifully cut stones, each three or four feet long, with a broad marginal draft. The stones were brought probably from caves in the S.E. side of the hill. An aqueduct runs round the whole mountain block. The cone stands above the Damieh ford, on the W. side of Jordan, and beside the direct route to the ford from Seilun, or Shiloh. It is conspicuous from afar. The gelilot or insulated mounds of the upper plain lie at the foot of the hill. The monument on the top is such as the Bible describes the altar to have been. On the N. side lies a valley, Tal’at abu ‘Ayd, “the ascent of the father of ‘Ayd,” i.e. the going up which leads to Ayd = Ed (Conder, Palestine Exploration). The altar of Ed was 11 miles from the national sanctuary at Shiloh, and separated from it by a range of mountains. It was not in sight of Phinehas when addressing the leaders of the two and a half tribes on mount Gilead. In the phrase, “in the fore part,” or “front of Canaan,” the Ghor or sunken land along the Jordan on its W. side may be meant by “Canaan,” as the Arabs there still call themselves Ghawarni (Conder). Or else “Canaan” may be used of the whole country of the nine and a half tribes, the Jordan valley being excepted; the altar Ed being in front of the country of the nine and a half tribes (Keil and Delitzsch).

    EDAR, TOWER OF Genesis 35:21. Jacob’s first halting place between Bethlehem and Hebron was “beyond” this. The name means “a flock” or “drove.” The tower was to watch the flock against wild beasts or robbers. Jewish tradition made it the destined birthplace of Messiah. Jerome saw in it the foreshadowing of the announcement of His birth to the “shepherds.”

    Probably the Tower of Edar answers to the present Khirbet Sir el Ghanem, “the ruin of the sheepfold,” which however contains Christian remains, arches, cisterns, tombs, etc.

    EDEN (“delight”). Paradise = the Septuagint translation of “garden,” a park and pleasure ground. From the Zendic pairidaeza, a hedging round. In N.W.

    Mesopotamia an Eden is mentioned near the Tigris ( 2 Kings 19:12; Isaiah 37:12; Ezekiel 27:23). Another, in Coelosyria, near Damascus (Amos 1:5). The primitive Eden was somewhere in the locality containing the conjoined Euphrates and the Tigris (= Hiddekel) which branch off northward into those two rivers, and southward branch into two channels again below Bassera, before failing into the sea, Gihon the E. channel, and Pison the W. Havilah, near the W. channel, would thus be N.E. Arabia; and Cush (= Ethiopia), near the E. channel, would be Kissia, Chuzestan, or Susiana. The united livers are called the Shat-el-Arab.

    Eden, was but a temporary nursery for the human family: from there people, if they had remained innocent, would have spread out in every direction until the whole earth became “the garden of the Lord.” God’s purpose, though deferred, will, in His own time, be realized by the Second Adam, the Lord Jesus from heaven. The rivers are named as they were after the flood, which must have altered the face of the ancient Eden. The four took their rise in it, as their center, which is not true of the present Tigris (= “arrow”) and Euphrates (= “the good and fertile”). Armenia’s highlands are the traditional cradle of the race; thence probably, from Eden as their source, flowed the two eastern rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, and the two western ones through the regions answering to Arabia and Egypt.

    Man was to dress and keep the garden, for without human culture, grain and other plants will degenerate. As nature was made for man, his calling was to ennoble it, and to make paradise, which though so lovely, was susceptible of development, a transparent mirror of the Creator’s glory. It was designed also as the scene of man’s own spiritual development by its two trees, of life and of knowledge. Here also the “beasts of the field,” i.e. that live on its produce (game and tame cattle, as distinguished from “beasts of the earth”), were brought to him to develop that intellect which constitutes his lordship and superiority to the brutes. His inner thought in observing their natures found expression in names appropriate.

    The Paradise regained can never be lost by those who overcome through the Lord Jesus ( Revelation 2:7; 22:14). The traditions of almost all nations have preserved the truth, in some form, that there was an original abode of man’s innocence; the Greek and Latin garden of the Hesperides; the Hindu golden Mount Meru; the Chinese enchanted gardens; the Medo- Persian Ormuzd’s mountain Albordj (compare Ezekiel 28:13; Joel 2:3). The Hindus’ tradition tells of a “first age of the world when justice, in the form of a bull, kept herself firm on her four feet, virtue reigned, man free from disease saw all his wishes accomplished, and attained an age of 400 years.” In the Teutonic Edda, Fab. 7, etc., corruption is represented as suddenly produced by strange women’s blandishments who deprived men of their pristine integrity. In the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Singhalese traditions, a covetous temper works the sad change. The Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese had the tradition of man’s life once reaching thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans made it from 800 to 1,000 years.

    EDER (“flock”). 1. A town in S. of Judah, on Edom’s border ( Joshua 15:21). 2. A Levite of Merari’s family in the time of David ( 1 Chronicles 23:23).

    EDOM Idumea = “red.” Esau’s surname, the firstborn of Isaac; Jacob’s twin brother, who sold his birthright for the red pottage (of yellow brown lentils, dashim ; the cooking of which is still seen in Egyptian representations), from whence came his surname ( Genesis 25:29-34).

    The name was appropriate to Edom’s possession, “mount Seir,” the mountainous territory having a reddish hue. Seir means rugged, applicable alike to Seir the hirsute (like Esau) progenitor of the Horites, Edom’s predecessors, and to their rugged forest covered territory ( Genesis 14:6; 32:3; 36:1-8,20-22). It extended from the Dead Sea S. to the Elanitic gulf of the Red Sea. Esau, with his 400 armed men ( Genesis 32:6), commenced driving out the Horites, and permanently settled in mount Seir after his father’s death, yielding Canaan to Jacob, in accordance with his father’s blessing.

    It is objected to Genesis 36:31 that the language supposes kings had already reigned over Israel. But in Genesis 35:11 “God Almighty” (‘Eel Shaday ) had promised Jacob “kings shall come out of thy loins.” Moses, too, foretold of the Israelites having a king over them. Naturally then he notices that eight kings had reigned of Esau’s family up to his own time, “before the reigning of any king to the children of Israel.” The prosperity of the worldly is often immediate and brilliant, but it is transitory; that of God’s people is slower in coming, that they may believingly and patiently wait for it, but when it does come it will abide for ever. Of the kingdom of the Messiah, Israel’s king, there shall be no end ( Luke 1:33). The dukes did not precede the line of Edomite kings, and afterward succeed again (Genesis 36); but a single king (emir) reigned in all Edom contemporaneous with several dukes (skeikhs) or princes of local tribes.

    The king is mentioned ( Judges 11:17), and the dukes a short while before ( Exodus 15:15). Moreover, the monarchy was not hereditary, but the kings apparently were elected by the dukes.

    The Edomites became “dwellers in the clefts of the rocks” (Jer 49:16; compare 2 Chronicles 25:11,12), like their Horite predecessors who were troglodytes or “dwellers in caves” (Obad. 1:3,4) Petra (Sela, Hebrew, rock), their chief city, was cut in the rocks. S. Idumea abounds in cave dwellings. Red baldheaded sandstone rocks are intersected by deep seams rather than valleys. In the heart of these, itself invisible, lies Petra (Stanley), Edom’ s stronghold in Amaziah’s days ( 2 Kings 14:7). see BOZRAH , now Buseireh, was its ancient capital, near the N. border. Elath and Ezion Geber were Edom’s seaports; afterward taken by David and made by Solomon his ports for equipping his merchant fleet ( 2 Samuel 8:14; 1 Kings 9:26). Edom (100 miles long, 20 broad) stretched Edom of the Arabah valley, southward as far as Elath. Eastward of Elath lay the desert.

    Israel, when refused a passage through Moab N. of Edom, as also through Edom, went from Kadesh by the S. extremity of Edom past. Elath into the desert E. of Edom ( Deuteronomy 2:8,13,14,18; Judges 11:17,18; 2 Kings 3:6-9).

    The Brook Zered (wady el Ahsy) was the boundary between Moab (Kerak) and Edom (now Jebal, Hebrew Gebal, mountainous, the N. district, along with Esh. Sherah, the S. district), Edom subsequently took also the territory once occupied by Amalek, S. of Palestine, the desert of Et Tih (“wandering”) ( Numbers 13:29; 1 Samuel 15:1-7; 27:8). Low calcareous hills are on the W. base of the mountain range of igneous porphyry rock, surmounted by red sandstone. On the E. is a limestone ridge, descending with an easy incline to the Arabian desert. The promised ( Genesis 27:40) “fatness of the earth” is in the glens and terraces of Edom ( Genesis 27:39), while from their rocky aeries they sallied forth “living by the sword.” When navigation was difficult merchants’ caravans took Edom as their route from the Persian gulf to Egypt, which became a source of wealth to Edom.

    At Kadesh Edom came out against Israel, on the latter marching eastward across the Arabah to reach the Jordan River through Edom, and offering to pay for provisions and water; for the rocky country there enabled them to oppose Israel. The wady Ghuweir (where probably was “the king’s highway”) would be the defile by which Israel tried to pass through Edom being the only practicable defile for an army, with pasture and springs ( Numbers 20:14-21). But Edom dared not resist Israel’s passage along their eastern border, which is more defenseless than their frontier toward the Arabah. Edom then at last made a virtue of necessity and let Israel purchase provisions ( Deuteronomy 2:2-8,28,29). In both accounts Israel offered to pay for provisions, and did so at last on Edom’s eastern side, whereas they and Moab ought to have “met (Israel as their brother) with bread and water” ( Deuteronomy 23:4). Edom was among the enemies on the frontier from whom Saul at the beginning of his reign delivered Israel ( 1 Samuel 14:47). Hadad the Edomite, who escaped from David’s slaughter to Egypt, returned thence from Pharaoh Shishak to excite Edom to revolt against Solomon ( 1 Kings 11:14). Jehoshaphat of Judah reduced the Edomites 897 B.C., dethroning their king for a deputy from Jerusalem, and trying by a fleet at Ezion Geber to regain the trade; but his vessels were broken by the Edomites or the Egyptians. Amaziah of Judah killed many thousands in the Valley of Salt near the Dead Sea, and took Selah, afterward Joktheel, the first mention of this extraordinary city ( 2 Kings 14:7), and adopted their gods of mount Seir. Uzziah built Elath on the opposite side of the bay from Ezion Geber, the Roman (Etana, now Akabah; but in Ahaz’ reign the Edomites (as 2 Kings 16:6 should be read for “Syrians”) recovered it ( 2 Kings 14:22).

    When Israel and Judah declined Edom “broke off Israel’s yoke,” as Isaac had foretold, in Jehoram’s reign ( 2 Kings 8:20-22), re-conquered their lost cities and invaded southern Judah ( 2 Chronicles 28:17). Edom also joined the Chaldaeans against the Jews ( <19D707> Psalm 137:7). Hence, the denunciations against Edom in Obad. 1:1, etc.; Jeremiah 49:7, etc.; Ezekiel 25:12, etc.; 35:3, etc. At the Babylonian captivity they seized on the Amalekite territory, and even Hebron in southern Judaea, so that Idumaea came to mean the region between the Arabah and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile mount Stir or Edom proper, was occupied by the Nabathaeans (descended from Nebaioth, Ishmael’s oldest son and Esau’s brother in law), a powerful people of S. Arabia; they founded the kingdom of Arabia Petraea in ancient Edom, and their monarchs took the name Aretas. Aretas, the father-in-law of Herod Antipas (Matthew 14), took Damascus at the time of Paul’s conversion ( Acts 9:25; Corinthians 11:32). Rome subdued this kingdom of Arabia A.D. 105.

    Idumea S. of Palestine was joined to Judaea under Judas Maccabaeus and John Hyrcanus. Antipater, one of the Jewish prefects, an Idumean by birth, by the Roman senate’s decree (37 B.C.) became procurator of all Judaea.

    His son was Herod the Great. Just before the siege under Titus 20,000 Idumeans were admitted into Jerusalem and filled it bloodshed and rapine.

    Muslim misrule finally destroyed Edom’s prosperity in fulfillment of prophecy ( Ezekiel 35:3-14).

    Psalm 44 was written by the sons of Korah in the midst of Edom’s invasion of Israel, taking advantage of David’s absence at the Euphrates. David was striving with Aram of the two rivers (Naharaim) and Aram-Zobah when Joab returned and smote of Edom in the Valley of Salt (the scene also of Amaziah’s victory over Edom, the plain S. of the Dead Sea, where the Ghor or the Jordan Valley ends; the mount of rock salt, Khasm Usdum, is in its N.W. grainer) 12,000 men ( 2 Samuel 8:13; 10:6,8,10-19; Chronicles 18:12; 1 Kings 11:15,16). Israel’s slain lay unburied until Joab returned from smiting Edom along with Abishai. The scattering of Israel among the pagan ( Psalm 44:11) was but partial, enough to gratify Edom’s desire to falsify the prophecy, “the elder shall serve the younger.”

    Edom’s spite is marked ( Joel 3:19; Amos 1:6,9,11). Israel pleads faithfulness to the covenant, which suits David’s time; also they had no “armies” in Babylon ( Psalm 44:9), which precludes the time of the captivity there. David wrote Psalm 60 when victory was in part gained, and he was sending forth the expedition against Edom. Translated in the title, “when David had beaten down Aram of the two floods,” “when Joab returned,” which he did not do all he had fully conquered the Syrians; Psalm 60:4, “Thou hast given a banner,” etc., alludes to this victory and to that over Edom (in 2 Samuel 8:13 “Edom” should be read for “the Syrians,” Aram) in the Valley of Salt, the token that the expedition ( Psalm 60:9-12) for occupying Edom in revenge for invading Israel would succeed. “Over (rather, to) Edom I will cast out my shoe,” as one about to wash his feet casts his shoe to his slave ( Matthew 3:11; John 13:8; Acts 13:25); and the casting of the shoe marked transference of possession ( Ruth 4:7; Joshua 10:24). David as king, Joab as commander in chief and Abishai under Joab, smote Edom. Abishai first killed 6,000, Joab afterward 12,000 (as the title of Psalm 60 states); so in all 18,000 (in 2 Samuel 8:13).

    Edom was also linked with Ammon and Moab in the desperate effort made to root out Israel from his divinely given inheritance (their main guilt, Chronicles 20:11; Psalm 83:12) under Jehoshaphat, as recorded in Chronicles 20. They joined craft with force, marching S. round the Dead Sea instead of from the E. No news reached Jehoshaphat until the vast multitude was in his territory at Engedi; “they have taken crafty counsel,” etc. Psalm 83:3-5,12 probably was written by Jahaziel, of the sons of Asaph, upon whom’” came the Spirit of the Lord in the midst of the congregation.” Psalm 47 (compare Psalm 47:4,5,8,9) was sung on the battle field of Berachah (“blessing”) after the victory. Psalm 48 was sung “in the midst of God’s temple” ( Psalm 48:9); Psalm 48:7 alludes to Jehoshaphat’s chastisement in the breaking of his Tarshish ships for his ungodly alliance. This danger from within and the foreign one alike God’s grace averted. Psalm 83 is the earliest of the series, for it anticipates victory and is a thanksgiving beforehand, which was the very ground of the victory which actually followed ( 2 Chronicles 20:21,22). See “Studies in the CL. Psalms,” by Fausset. N. Edom is now called El Jebal (Gebal), with the villages Tufileh, Buserah, and Shobek. Its S. part is Esh Sherah, inhabited by fellahin; of these the Ammarin are so degraded as not to have the Bedouin virtue of keeping their word. The Liyathoneh are a branch of the Kheibari Jews near wady Musa.

    EDREI (“strength”). 1. One of Bashank, two capitals ( Numbers 21:33; Deuteronomy 1:4; 3:10; Joshua 12:4). Mentioned only in connection with the victory over Og, and the acquisition of the Amorite territory. Allotted to Manasseh ( Numbers 33:33). Its rains, Edra, stand in black masses, stone roofed and doored houses, of massive walls, on a projection of the S.W. angle of the Lejah or Argob. The site is without water, without access except through rocky defiles, strong and secure, one mile and a half wide by two and a half long, about 25 ft. above the fertile plain. It seems to have been the stronghold of the Geshurites subsequently. 2. A town of Naphtali, near Kedesh ( Joshua 19:37). Now Aitherun (Conder).

    EDUCATION Chiefly in the law of God ( Exodus 12:26; 13:8,14; Deuteronomy 4:5,9,10; 6:2,7,20; 11:19,21; Acts 22:3; 2 Timothy 3:15). The Book of Proverbs inculcates on parents, as to their children, the duty of disciplinary instruction and training in the word of God. This was the ONE book of national education in the reformations undertaken by Jehoshaphat and Josiah ( 2 Chronicles 17:7-9; 34:30). The priests’ and Levites’ duty especially was to teach the people ( 2 Chronicles 15:3; Leviticus 10:11; Malachi 2:7; Nehemiah 8:2,8,9,13; Jeremiah 18:18). The Mishna says that parents ought to teach their children some trade, and he who did not virtually taught his child to steal. The prophets, or special public authoritative teachers, were trained in schools or colleges ( Amos 7:14). “Writers,” or musterers general, belonging to Zebulun, who enrolled recruits and wrote the names of those who went to war, are mentioned ( Judges 5:14). “Scribes of the host” ( Jeremiah 52:25) appear in the Assyrian bas-reliefs, writing down the various persons or objects brought to them, so that there is less exaggeration than in the Egyptian representations of battle. Seraiah was David’s scribe or secretary, and Jehoshaphat, son of Ahilud, was “recorder” or writer of chronicles, historiographer ( 2 Samuel 8:16,17); Shebun was Hezekiah’s scribe ( 2 Kings 18:37).

    The learned, according to the rabbis, were called “sons of the noble,” and took precedence at table. Boys at five years of age, says the Mishna, were to begin reading Scripture, at ten they were to begin reading the Mishna, and at thirteen years of age they were subject to the whole law ( Luke 2:46); at fifteen they entered study of the Gemara. The prophetic schools included females such as Huldah ( 2 Kings 22:14). The position and duties of females among the Jews were much higher than among other Orientals ( Proverbs 31:10-31; Luke 8:2,3; 10:38, etc.; Acts 13:50; 2 Timothy 1:5).

    EDUTH “Testimony,” title of Psalm 60; Psalm 80.

    EGLAH (“heifer”). One of David’s wives, especially called “his wife” while at Hebron; mother of Ithream ( 2 Samuel 3:5; 1 Chronicles 3:3).

    EGLAIM (“two ponds”). Same as Eneglaim = fountain of two calves. On the extreme boundary of Moab ( Isaiah 15:8), over against Engedi, near where Jordan enters the Dead Sea.

    EGLON 1. King of Moab. With Amalekites and Ammonites crossed the Jordan and took Jericho the city of palmtrees, left unwalled, and therefore an easy prey to the foe, because of Joshua’s curse in destroying it 60 years before.

    There (according to Josephus) Eglon built a palace. For 18 years he oppressed Israel. Ehud, a young Israelite of Jericho, gained his favor by a present (or in Keil’s view presented the king tribute, as in 2 Samuel 8:2,6, “gifts” mean), and after dismissing its bearers turned again from “the graven images,” or else stone quarries, where he had temporarily withdrawn from the king’s reception room, and was cordially admitted by the king into his private summer parlor or cooling apartment. On Ehud’s announcing “I have a message from God unto thee,” the king rose reverentially to receive it, and was instantly stabbed in the belly by Ehud’s dagger in the left hand, and Eglon’s fat closed over it. Ehud retired to Seirath, in Mount Ephraim, and summoning by trumpet Israel from the E. and W. descended upon the Moabites and took the fords, not suffering one of 10,000 to escape. So the land had rest for 80 years ( Judges 3:12-30).

    The mode of deliverance, assassination, is not approved by the Spirit of God. Scripture simply records the fact, and that Ehud was raised up by Jehovah as Israel’s deliverer. His courage, patriotism, and faith are commendable, but not his means of gaining his end. 2. An Amorite town ( Joshua 15:39), in the Shephelah (low country) of Judah. One of the confederacy of five towns (including Jerusalem), which attacked Gibeon on its making peace with Joshua; was destroyed with Debit, then its king (Joshua 10). Now Ajian, a “shapeless mass of ruins” (Porter, Handbook), 14 miles from Gaza, on the S. of the great coast plain.

    EGYPT The genealogies in Genesis 10 concern races, not mere descent of persons; hence, the plural forms, Madai, Kittim, etc. In the case of Egypt the peculiarity is, the form is dual, Mizraim, son of Ham (i.e. Egypt was colonized by descendants of Hain), meaning “the two Egypts,” Upper and Lower, countries physically so different that they have been always recognized as separate. Hence, the Egyptian kings on the monuments appear with two crowns on their heads, and the hieroglyph for Egypt is a double clod of earth, representing the two countries, the long narrow valley and the broad delta. The Speaker’s Commentary suggests the derivation Mes-ra-n, “children of Ra,” the sun, which the Egyptians claimed to be. It extended from Migdol (near Pelusium, N. of Suez) to Syene (in the far S.) ( Ezekiel 29:10; 30:6 margin). The name is related to an Arabic word, “red mud.” The hieroglyphic name for Egypt is Kem, “black,” alluding to its black soil, combining also the idea of heat, “the hot dark country.” The cognate Arabic word means “black mud.” Ham is perhaps the same name, prophetically descriptive of “the land of Ham” ( <19A523> Psalm 105:23,27).

    The history of states begins with Egypt, where a settled government and monarchy were established earlier than in any other country. A king and princes subordinate are mentioned in the record of Abram’s first visit. The official title Pharaoh, Egyptian Peraa, means “the great house” (De Rouge). Egypt was the granary to which neighboring nations had recourse in times of scarcity. In all these points Scripture accords with the Egyptian monuments and secular history. The crown of Upper Egypt was white, that of Lower red; the two combined forming the pschent. Pharaoh was Suten, “king,” of Upper Egypt; Shebt, “bee” (compare Isaiah 7:18), of Lower Egypt; together theSUTEN-SHEBT. The initial sign of Suten was a bent reed, which gives point to 2 Kings 17:21: “thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed ... Egypt on which if a man lean it trill go into his hand and pierce it.” Upper. Egypt always is placed before Lower, and its crown in the pschent above that of the latter. Egypt was early divided into nomes, each having its distinctive worship.

    The fertility of soil was extraordinary, due to the Nile’s overflow and irrigation; not, as in Palestine, due to rain, which in the interior is rare ( Genesis 13:10; Deuteronomy 11:10,11; Zechariah 14:18). The dryness of the climate accounts for the perfect preservation of the sculptures on stone monuments after thousands of years. Limestone is the formation as far as above Thebes, where sandstone begins. The first cataract is the southern boundary of Egypt, and is caused by granite and primitive rocks rising through the sandstone in the river bed and obstructing the water. Rocky sandstrewn deserts mostly bound the Nilebordering fertile strip of land, somewhat lower, which generally in Upper Egypt is about 12 miles wide. Low mountains border the valley in Upper Egypt. In ancient times there was a fertile valley in Lower Egypt to the east of the delta, the border land watered by the canal of the Red Sea; namely, Goshen. The delta is a triangle at the Nile’s mouth, formed by the Mediterranean and the Pelusiac and Canopic branches of the river. The land at the head of the gulf of Suez in centuries has become geologically raised, and that on the N. side of the isthmus depressed, so that the head of the gulf has receded southwards. So plentiful were the fish, vegetables, and fruits, that the Israelites did “eat freely,” though but bondservants. But now political oppression has combined with the drying up of the branches and canals from the Nile and of the artificial lakes (e.g. Moeris) and fishponds, in reversing Egypt’s ancient prosperity. The reeds and waterplants, haunted by waterfowl and made an article of commerce, are destroyed and Goshen, once “the best of the land,” is now among the worst by sand and drought.

    The hilly Canaan, in its continued dependence on heaven for rain, was the emblem of the world of grace upon which “the eyes of the Lord are always,” as contrasted with Egypt, emblem of the world of nature, which has its supply from below and depends on human ingenuity. The Nile’s overflow lasts only about 100 days, but is made available for agriculture throughout the year by tanks, canals, and forcing machines. The “watering with the foot” was by treadwheels working sets of pumps, and by artificial channels connected with reservoirs, and opened, turned, or closed by the feet. The shadoof, or a pole with a weight at one end and a bucket at the other, the weight helping the laborer to raise the full bucket, is the present plan. Agriculture began when the inundating water had sunk into the soil, a month after the autumn equinox, and the harvest was soon after the spring equinox ( Exodus 9:31,32).

    Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo, and the monuments confirm Genesis 47:20,26, as to Joseph’s arrangement of the land, that the king and priests alone were possessors and the original proprietors became crown tenants subject to a rent or tribute of one-fifth. Joseph had taken up one-fifth in the seven plenteous years. Naturally then he fixed on one-fifth to be paid to the king, so that he might, by stores laid up, be prepared against any future famine. The warriors too were possessors (Diodorus, 1:73, 74; and Egyptian monuments), but probably not until after Joseph’s time, since they are not mentioned in Genesis, and at all events their tenure was distinct from the priests’, for each warrior received (Herodotus, 2:168) aruroe (each axura a square of 100 Egyptian cubits); i.e., there were no possessions vested in the soldier caste, but portions assigned to each soldier tenable at the sovereign’s will. The priests alone were left in full possession of their lands. Lake Menzaleh, the most eastern of the existing lakes, has still large fisheries, which support the people on its islands and shore. Herodotus (ii. 77) and Plutarch are wrong in denying the growth of the vine in Egypt before Psammetichus, for the monuments show it was well known from the time of the pyramids. Wine was drunk by the rich people, and beer was drunk by the poor as less costly. Wheat was the chief produce; barley and spelt (asin Exodus 9:32) ought to be translated instead of “rie,” Triticum spelta, the common food of the ancient Egyptians, now called by the natives doora, the only grain, says Wilkinson, represented on the sculptures, but named on them often with other species) are also mentioned. The flax was “boiled,” i.e. in blossom, at the time of the hail plague before the exodus. This accurately marks the time just before Passover. In northern Egypt the barley ripens and flax blossoms in the middle of February or early in March, and both are gathered before April, when wheat harvest begins. Linen was especially used by the Egyptian priests, and for the evenness of the threads, without knot or break, was superior to any of modern manufacture.

    Papyrus is now no longer found in the Nile below Nubia. In ancient times, light boats were made of its stalks, and paper of its leaves. It is a strong rush, three-cornered, the thickness of the finger,10 or 15 ft. high, represented on the monuments. The “flags” are a species called tuff or sufi, Hebrew suph , smaller than that of which the ark was made ( Exodus 2:3), “bulrushes,” “flags” ( Isaiah 18:2; 19:7). The lotus was the favorite flower.

    Camels are not found on the monuments, yet they were among Abram’s possessions by Pharaoh’s gift. But it is certain Egypt was master of much of the Sinai Peninsula long before this, and must have had camels, “the ships of the desert,” for keeping up communications. They were only used on the frontier, being regarded as unclean, and, hence, are not found on monuments in the interior. The hippopotamus, the behemoth of Job, was anciently found in the Nile and hunted. The generic term tannim , “dragon,” (i.e. any aquatic reptile, here the crocodile) is made the symbol of the king of Egypt ( Ezekiel 29:3-5.) God made Amasis the hook which He put in the jaws of Pharaoh Hophra (Apries), who was dethroned and strangled, in spite of his proud boast that “even a god could not wrest from him his kingdom” (Herodotus, 2:169). Compare Isaiah 51:9,10.

    Rahab, “the insolent,” is Egypt’s poetical name ( Psalm 87:4; 89:10; Isaiah 51:9). Psalm 74:13,14: Thou brokest the heads of the dragons in the waters, ... the heads of Leviathan, ... and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness”; alluding to Pharaoh and his host overthrown in the Red Sea and their bodies cast on shore and affording rich spoil to Israel in the wilderness. Compare “the people ... are bread for us” ( Numbers 14:9). The marshes and ponds of Egypt make it the fit scene for the plague of frogs. Locusts come eating all before them, and are carried away by the wind as suddenly as they come. The dust-sprung “lice” are a sort of tick, as large as a gram of sand, which when filled with blood expands to the size of a hazel nut ( Exodus 8:17,21, etc.). The “flies” were probably the dog-fly (Septuagint) whose bite causes severe inflammation, especially in the eyelids; compare Isaiah 7:18, “the fly that is in the uttermost parts of the rivers of Egypt” Oedmann makes it the beetle, kakerlaque, Blatta orientalis, which inflicts painful bites; peculiarly appropriate, as the beetle was the Egyptian symbol of creative power.

    ORIGIN. -- The Egyptians were of Nigritian origin; like modern Nigritians, the only orientals respectful of women. There was no harem system of seclusion, the wife was “lady of the house.” Their kindness to Israel, even during the latter’s bondservice, was probably the reason for their being admitted into the congregation in the third generation ( Deuteronomy 23:3-8). An Arab or Semitic element of race and language is added to the Nigritian in forming the Egyptian people and their tongue. The language of the later dynasties appears in the demotic or enchorial writing, the connecting link between the ancient language and the present Coptic or Christian Egyptian.

    The great pyramid (the oldest architectural monument in existence according to Lepsius) is distinguished from all other Egyptian monuments in having no idolatrous symbols. Piazzi Smith says, when complete, it was so adjusted and exactly fashioned in figure that it sets forth the value of the mathematical term pi, or demonstrates the true and practical squaring of a circle. The length of the front foot of the pyramid’s casing stone, found by Mr. W. Dixon, or that line or edge from which the angular pi slope of the whole stone begins to rise, which therefore may be regarded as a radical length for the theory of the great pyramid, measures exactly 25 pyramid inches, i.e. the ten-millionth part of the length of the earth’s semi-axis of rotation; 25 pyramid inches were the cubit of Noah, Moses, and Solomon “the cubit of the Lord their God.” It is a monument of divinely-ordered number [see WEIGHT AND MEASURE ] before the beginning of idolatry.

    RELIGION. -- Nature worship is the basis of the Egyptian apostasy from the primitive revelation; it degenerated into the lowest fetishism, the worship of cats, dogs, beetles, etc., trees, rivers, and hills. There were three orders of gods; the eight great gods, 12 lesser, and those connected with Osiris. However, the immortality of the soul and future rewards and punishments at the judgment were taught. The Israelites fell into their idolatries in Egypt ( Joshua 24:14; Ezekiel 20:7,8.) This explains their readiness to worship the golden calf, resembling the Egyptian ox-idol, Apis (Exodus 32).

    THE TEN PLAGUES. -- The plagues were all directed against the Egyptian goes, from whom Israel was thus being weaned, at the same time that Jehovah’s majesty was vindicated before Egypt, and His people’s deliverance extorted from their oppressors. Thus, the turning of the Nile into blood was a stroke upon Hapi, the Nile god. The plague of frogs attacked the female deity with a frog’s head, Heka, worshipped in the district Sah, i.e. Benihassan, as wife of Chnum, god of cataracts or of the inundation; this was a very old form of nature worship in Egypt, the frog being made the symbol of regeneration; Seti, father of Rameses II, is represented on the monuments offering two vases of wine to an enshrined frog, with the legend “the sovereign lady of both worlds”; the species of frog called now dofda is the one meant by the Hebrew-Egyptian zeparda ( Exodus 8:2), they are small, do not leap much, but croak constantly; the ibis rapidly consumes them at their usual appearance in September, saving the land from the “stench” which otherwise arises ( Exodus 8:14). The third plague of dust-sprung lice fell upon the earth, worshipped in the Egyptian pantheism as Seb, father of the gods ( Exodus 8:16); the black fertile soil of the Nile basin was especially sacred, called Chemi, from which Egypt took its ancient name. The fourth plague, of flies ( Exodus 8:21), was upon the air, deified as Shu, son of Ra the sun god, or as Isis, queen of heaven. The fifth was the murrain on cattle, aimed at their ox worship ( Exodus 9:1-7). The sixth, the boils from ashes sprinkled toward the heaven, was a challenge to Neit, “the great mother queen of highest heaven,” if she could stand before Jehovah, also a reference to the scattering of victims’ ashes to the wind in honor of Sutech or Typhon; human sacrifices at Hellopolis, offered under the shepherd kings, had been abolished by Amosis I, but this remnant of the old rite remained; Jehovah now sternly reproves it ‘by Moses’ symbolic act. The seventh, the hail, thunder, and lightning; man, beast, herb, and tree were smitten, so that Pharaoh for the first time recognizes Jehovah as God; “Jehovah is righteous, and I and my people are wicked” ( Exodus 9:27). The eighth, the locusts eating every tree, attacked what the Egyptians so prized that Egypt was among other titles called “the land of the sycamore.” The destruction at the Red Sea took place probably under Thothmes II., and it is remarkable that his widow imported many trees from Arabia Felix. The ninth, darkness, the S.W. wind from the desert darkening the arm: sphere with dense masses of fine sand, would fill with gloom the Egyptians, whose chief idol was Ra, the sun god. The tenth, the smiting of the firstborn of man and beast, realized the threat, “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment” ( Exodus 12:12); for every town and nome had its sacred animal, frog, beetle, ram, cow, cat, etc., representing each a god; Remphan and Chiun were adopted from abroad. [See EXODUS .] Egyptian religions law depended on future rewards and punishments; the Mosaic law on the contrary mainly depended on temporal rewards and punishments, which only could have place in a system of miraculous and extraordinary divine interposition. The Mosaic law therefore cannot have been borrowed from the Egyptians. The effect of the divine plagues on the Egyptians is seen in the fact that a “mixed multitude,” numbering many Egyptians who gave up their idols to follow Israel’s God, accompanied Israel at the exodus ( Exodus 12:38), besides Semitics whose fathers had come in with the Hyksos.

    POWER AND CONQUESTS OF KINGS. -- The kings seem to have been absolute; but the priests exercised a controlling influence so great that the Pharaoh of Joseph’s time durst not take their lands even for money.

    Tablets in the Sinaitic peninsula record the Egyptian conquest of Asiatic nomads there. The kings of the 18th dynasty reduced the countries from Syria to the Tigris under tribute, from 1500 to 1200 B.C. Hittites of the valley of the Orontes were their chief opponents.

    RELATION TO ISRAEL. -- Egyptian power abroad declined from 1200 to 990 B.C. the very interval in which David’s and Solomon’s wide empire fits in; then Shishak reigned and invaded Judah. The struggle with Assyria and Babylonia for the intermediate countries lasted until Pharaoh Necho’s defeat at Carchemish ended Egypt’s supremacy. Except Zerah and Shishak (of Assyrian or Babylonian extraction), the Egyptian kings were friendly to Israel in Palestine. Solomon married a Pharaoh’s daughter; Tirhakah helped Hezekiah; So made a treaty with Hoshea; Pharaoh Necho was unwilling to war with Josiah; and Pharaoh Hophra (Apries) raised the Chaldaean siege of Jerusalem as Zedekiah’s ally. In Africa they reduced the Rebu or Lubim.

    W. of Egypt; Ethiopia was ruled by a viceroy “prince of Kesh.”

    The many papyri and inscriptions, religious, historical, and one a papyrus tale about two brothers, the earliest extant fiction (in the British Museum), show what a literary people the Egyptians were. Geometry, mechanics, chemistry (judging from Moses’ ability, acquired probably from them, to burn and grind to powder the golden calf), astronomy (whereby Moses was able to form a calendar, Acts 7:22), and architecture massive and durable, were among Egypt’s sciences. Magic was practiced ( Exodus 7:11,12,22; 8:18,19; 9:11; 2 Timothy 3:8,9). Pottery was part of Israel’s bondservice ( Psalm 81:6; 68:13). The Israelites’ eating, dancing, singing, and stripping themselves at the calf feast, were according to Egyptian usage ( Exodus 32:5-25).

    Antiquity and dynasties. -- The antiquity of the colonization of Egypt by Noah’s descendants is shown by the record of the migration of the see PHILISTINES from see CAPHTOR , which must have been before Abram’s arrival in Palestine, for the Philistines were then there. The Caphtorim sprang from the Mizraim or Egyptians ( Genesis 10:13,14; Jeremiah 47:4; Amos 9:7). The Egyptians considered themselves and the Negroes, the red and the black races, as of one stock, children of the god Horus; and the Shemites and Europeans, the yellow and the white, as of another stock, children of the goddess Pesht. No tradition of the flood, though found in almost every other country, is traceable among them, except their reply to Solon (Plato, Tim., 23) that there had been many floods. There are few records of any dynasty before the 18th, except those of the 4th and 12th; but the names of the Pharaohs of the first six dynasties have been found, with notices implying the complete organization of the kingdom (Rouge, Recherches). The Memphite line under the 4th dynasty raised the most famous pyramids. The shepherd kings came from the East as foreigners, and were obnoxious to native Egyptians. Indeed so intense was Egyptian prejudice that foreigners, and especially Easterners, are described as devils; much in the same way as the Chinese regard all outside the Celestial empire. A Theban line of kings reigned in Upper Egypt while the shepherds were in Lower. Hence arose the opinion that a shepherd king, not a native Egyptian, was the foreigner Joseph’s patron; Apophis is generally named. Pharaoh’s invitation to Joseph’s family to settle in Goshen ( Genesis 46:34; 47:6), not among the Egyptians, may indicate a desire to strengthen himself against the Egyptian party. The absence of mention of the Israelites on the monuments would be accounted for by the troubled character of the times of the shepherd kings. But see below.

    The authorities for Egyptian history are (1) the monuments; (2) the papyri (the reading of hieroglyphics having been discovered by Young and Champollion from the trilingual inscription, hieroglyphics, enchorial or common Egyptian letters, and Greek, in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes, on the Rosetta stone); (3) the Egyptian priest Manetho’s fragments in Josephus, containing the regal list beginning with gods and continued through 30 dynasties of mortals, from Menes to Nectanebo, 343 B.C., these fragments abound in discrepancies; (4) accounts of Greek visitors to Egypt after the Old Testament period.

    The two most valuable papyri are the Turin papyrus published by Lepsius; and the list of kings in the temple of Abydos, discovered By Mariette, which represents Seti I with his son Rameses II worshipping his ancestors, beginning with Menes. The interval between the 6th and 11th dynasties is uncertain, the monuments affording no contemporary notices.

    The kings of this period in Manetho’s list were probably rulers of parts only of Egypt, contemporary with other Pharaohs. The Pharaohs of the 12th dynasty, and the early kings of the 13th, were lords of all Egypt, which the shepherd kings were not; the latter must therefore belong to a subsequent period. Sculpture and architecture were at their height in the 12th dynasty, and the main events of the time are recorded in many inscriptions. From the fourth king of the 13th dynasty to the last of the 17th, the period of the Hyksos or shepherd kings, the monuments afford no data for the order of events. The complete list of the ancestors of Seti I gives no Pharaoh between Amenemha, the last king of the 12th dynasty, and Aahmes or Amosis, the first of the 18th, who expelled the Hyksos.

    From the 18th dynasty Egypt’s monumental history and the succession of kings are somewhat complete, but the chronology uncertain. No general era is based on the ancient inscriptions. Apephis or Apepi was the last of the Hyksos, Ta-aaken Rasekenen the last of the contemporary Egyptian line.

    Abram’s visit ( Genesis 12:10-20) was in a time of Egypt’s prosperity; nor is Abram’s fear lest Sarai should be taken, and he slain for her sake, indicative of a savage state such as would exist under the foreign Hyksos rather than the previous native Egyptian kings; for in the papyrus d’Orbiney in the British Museum, of the age of Rameses II of a native dynasty, the 19th, the story of the two brothers (the wife of the elder of whom acts toward the younger as Potiphar’s wife toward Joseph) represents a similar act of violence (the Pharaoh of the time sending two armies to take a beautiful wife and murder her husband on the advice of the royal councilors), at the time of Egypt’s highest civilization; and this attributed not to a tyrant, but to one beloved and deified at his decease. So in an ancient papyrus at Berlin a foreigner’s wife and children are taken by the king, as an ordinary occurrence. Moreover, in the Benihassan monuments, on the provincial governor’s tomb is represented a nomadic chief’s arrival with his retinue to pay homage to the prince. The pastoral nomads N.W. of Egypt, and the Shemites in Palestine, are called Amu; the chief, called Abshah in this papyrus (father of a multitude numerous as the sand, meaning much the same as Abraham), is the hak, i.e. sheikh, with a coat of many colors. Shasous is another name for wandering nomads; and Hyksos = prince of the Shasous. The story of Saneha (i.e. son of the sycamore) in one of the oldest papyri relates that he, an Amu, under the 12th dynasty, rose to high rank under Pharaoh, and after a long exile abroad was restored and made “counselor among the chosen ones,” to develop the resources of Egypt (just as Joseph), taking precedence among the courtiers. This proves there is nothing improbable in the account of Abram’s kind reception and Joseph’s elevation by the Pharaoh of a native dynasty, earlier than the foreign Hyksos, who were harsh and fierce, and more likely to repel than to welcome foreigners.

    Asses, regarded as unclean under the middle and later empire, were among Pharaoh’s presents to Abram ( Genesis 12:16). Horses are omitted, which accords with the earlier date, for they were unknown (judging from the monuments) to the 12th or any earlier dynasty, and were probably introduced from Arabia by the Hyksos. So that Abram’s visit seems to have been under an early Pharaoh, perhaps Amenemha, the first king of the 12th dynasty; Joseph’s visit two centuries later, toward the end of the 12th or the beginning of the 13th. Thenceforward, horses abounded in the Egyptian plains and were largely bought thence by Solomon ( 1 Kings 4:26; 10:25,29) in defiance of the prohibition, Deuteronomy 17:16; compare 2 Kings 7:6.

    SHEPHERD KINGS. -- Salatis (= mighty, in Semitic) was first of the shepherd dynasty, which lasted about 250 years and comprised six kings, Apophis last. The long term, 500 years, assigned by Manetho to the shepherd kings, (and by Africanus 800,) is unsupported by the monuments, and is inconsistent with the fact that the Egyptians, at the return to native rulers under the 18th dynasty, after so complete an overthrow of their institutions for five or eight centuries (?), wrote their own language without a trace of foreign infusion, and worshipped the old gods with the old rites. The only era on Egyptian monuments distinct from the regnal year of the sovereign is on the tablet of a governor of Tanis under Rameses II, referring back to the Hyksos, namely, the 400th year from the era of Set the Golden under the Hyksos king, Set-a-Pehti, “Set the Mighty.” Set was the chief god worshipped by the Hyksos from the first. From Rameses II (1340 B.C.) 400 years would take us to 1740 or 1750 B.C. 250 years of the Hyksos dynasty would bring us to 1500 B.C. for their expulsion, and 250 before 1750 B.C. would be Abram’s date. Thus the period assigned to the dynasties before Rameses by Lepsius is much reduced. Joseph was quite young at his introduction to Pharaoh, and lived 110 years; but if Apophis, the contemporary of Rasekenen, the predecessor of Aahmes I who took Avaris and drove out the Hyksos, were Joseph’s Pharaoh, Joseph would have long outlived Apophis; how then after his patron’s expulsion could he have continued prosperous? Moreover, Apophis was not master of all Egypt, as Joseph’s Pharaoh was; Rasekenen retained the Thebaid, and after Apophis’ defeat erected large buildings in Memphis and Thebes. The papyrus Sallier I represents Apophis’ reign as cruel and ending in an internecine He and his predecessors rejected the national worship for of Sutech = Set = the evil principle Typhon exclusively; his name Apepi means the great serpent, enemy of Ra and Osiris. Sutech answers to the Phoenician Baal, and is represented in inscriptions as the Hittites’ chief god, and had human sacrifices at Heliopolis under the Hyksos, which Aahmes I suppressed.

    JOSEPH’ S PHARAOH. -- There is nothing of Joseph’s history which does not agree with the most prosperous period of the native dynasties; their inscriptions illustrate every fact recorded in Genesis concerning Joseph’s Pharaoh. Shepherds were, according to Genesis, “an abomination to the Egyptians” in Joseph’s time; this is decisive against his living under a shepherd king. The names of the first three of the 48 kings of the 13th dynasty in the papyrus at Turin resemble Joseph’s Egyptian title given by Pharaoh as his grand vizier Zafnath Paanaeh the food of life,” or “the living” (compare the apposite title of the type, John 6:35). Joseph may therefore have lived trader an early Pharaoh of the 13th dynasty, prior to the Hyksos, or else of the 12th; compare the story of Saneha under Osirtasin above. This 12th dynasty was especially connected with On or Heliopolis, where Osirtasin I, the second king of that dynasty, built the temple, and where his name and title stand on the famous obelisk, the oldest and finest in Egypt. On was the sacerdotal city and university of northern Egypt; its chief priest, judging from the priests’ titles, was probably a relative of Pharaoh. As absolute, Pharaoh could command the marriage of Joseph to the daughter of the priest of On, however reluctant the priesthood might be to admit a foreigner. Moreover, Joseph being naturalized would hardly be looked on as such, especially as being the king’s prime minister. The “Ritual,” 17th chapter, belongs to the 11th dynasty, and is the oldest statement of Egyptian views of the universe. It implies a previous pure monotheism, of which it retains the unity, eternity, self-existence of the unseen God; a powerful confirmation of the primitive Bible revelation to Adam handed down to Noah, and thence age by age becoming more and more corrupted by apostasies from the original truth; the more the old text of the “Ritual” is freed from subsequent glosses, the more it approaches to revealed truth. A sound pure morality in essentials and the fundamentals of primeval religion underlies the forms of worship, in spite of the blending with superstitious. This partly accounts for Joseph’s making such a marriage. Chnumhotep, a near relative and favorite of Osirtasin I, is described on the tombs of Benihassan as having precisely such qualities as Pharaoh honored in Joseph: “he injured no little child, oppressed no widow, detained for his own purpose no fisherman, took from work no shepherd or overseer’s men; there was no beggar in his days, no one starved in his time; when years of famine occurred, he plowed all the lands producing abundant food; he treated the widow as a woman with a husband to protect her.” The division of land permanently into 36 nomes (Diodorus, 1:54), the redistribution of property, and the tenure under the crown subject to a rent of the fifth of the increase, are measures which could only emanate from a native Pharaoh. Long afterward, Rameses II himself, or else popular tradition, appropriated these works to him or to his father Seti I; also the name Sesostris was appropriated to him. Had it been the work of the Hyksos, it would have been undone on the restoration of the legitimate Pharaohs. Amenemha III, sixth king of the 12th dynasty, first established a complete system of dikes, cocks, and reservoirs, to regulate the Nile’s inundation; he caused the lake Moeris to be made to receive the overflow and have it for irrigation in the dry season. Moeris (from the Egyptian mer a “lake”) was near a place, Pianeh, “the house of life,” corresponding to Joseph’s title, Zafnath Paanah the food of life.” Probably was the Pharaoh to whom Joseph owed his elevation, for Joseph was just such a minister as would carry out this Pharaoh’s grand measures. The restoration of this lake would be the greatest boon to modern Egypt.

    Amenemha III also formed the Labyrinth as a place of assembly for the representatives of the nomes on national matters of moment. The table of Abydos represents him as the last king of all Egypt in the old empire, and as such receiving worship from his descendant, Rameses.

    The Israelites remained undisturbed under the Hyksos, partly as offering no temptation to their cupidity, partly from the Hyksos’ respect to the Israelites’ ancestor Joseph’s high character in his dealings with the Hyksos’ ancestors when visiting Egypt in the famine. The Hyksos would have less motive for molesting the Israelites than for molesting native Egyptians.

    Restoration of the native dynasties; Pharaoh at the exodus. Aahmes I (Amosis), founder of the 18th dynasty, married Neterfurt, an Ethiopian princess, named and portrayed on many monuments. With Ethiopian allies thus obtained, probably, he marched on Avaris in northern Egypt, Apophis’ stronghold, and overthrew and expelled the Hyksos. Of him it could best be said “there arose up a new king” ( Exodus 1:8), new to most Egyptians and especially those of northern Egypt. He “knew not Joseph,” and found Joseph’s people Israel in Goshen, settled in the richest land, rather favored than molested by the preceding Hyksos kings, in numbers ( Exodus 1:9) exceeding the native population, and so perhaps likely to join ( Exodus 1:10) any future invaders such as the Arab Hyksos had been, and commanding the western approach to the center of the land. His policy then was to prevent their multiplication, and set them to build depositories of provisions and arms on the eastern frontier: Pithom (either = Pachtum en Zaru, “the fortress of foreigners,” in the monuments of Thothmes III., or more probably “the sanctuary of Tum,” connected with a fortress), and Rameses, from Ra “the sun god” and mesu “children,” the Egyptians’ peculiar name to distinguish themselves from foreigners (Mizra- im is related), a name naturally given in a district associated with the sun god’s worship. Aahmes I named his son Rames, and being the restorer of the sun worship would be most likely to name one treasure city Raamses the city of Rameses II, Meiamon, named from himself, in the 19th dynasty, in the midst of a flourishing population, was vastly changed from the earlier Raamses built by Israel in the midst of their oppressed and groaning population. In an inscription of the 22nd year of Aahmes I Fenchu are described as transporting limestone blocks from the quarries of Rufu to Memphis and other cities; the name means “bearers of the shepherd’s staff,” an appropriate designation of the nomadic tribes of Semitic origin near Egypt, including the Israelites, who are designated by no proper name, though undoubtedly they were in Egypt in the 18th dynasty.

    Lepsuis fixes the accession of Aahmes I at 1706 B.C. Thethroes II was probably the Pharaoh who perished in the Red Sea, the year of the exodus 1647 B.C. (1652 B.C., Smith’s Bible Dictionary) The interval between the temple building, 1010 B.C., [see CHRONOLOGY .] and the exodus is calculated by advocates of the longer chronology to be 638 years. The years interval between the exodus and Solomon’s temple is probably a copyist’s error ( 1 Kings 6:1). However, the later date, 1525 B.C., for Aahmes I, and 1463 for the last year of Thothmes II, would support the shorter interval 480; and if two stouts found at the temple built by Thothroes III at Elephantine refer to the same time (?), one giving his name, the other stating that the 28th of the month Epiphi was the festival of the rising of Sothis, i.e. Sirius, the date would be 1445 B.C.; and as the temple was built in the last seven years of his 48 years’ reign, the last year of Thothmes II would be 1485-1492, in accordance with 1 Kings 6:1.

    Probably nearly 100 years (including the 80 years from Moses’ birth to his return from Midian) elapsed between the accession of Aahmes I and the exodus. On his death the dowager queen, an Ethiopian, Nefertari, was regent, Moses’ second marriage to an Ethiopian subsequently may have been influenced by his former connection with Pharaoh’s daughter, and by the court’s connection with Ethiopia. Her son Amenophis (Amenhotep I) succeeded. He, with his admiral Ahmes, led an expedition into Ethiopia against an insurgent. Moses as the adopted child of the king’s sister naturally accompanied his master, and proved himself as Stephen says ( Acts 7:22), and Josephus in detail records, “mighty in words and in deeds.” His connection with Ethiopia would thus be intimate. During the reign of Thothmes I, Moses was in Midian. Thothmes I, according to a rock inscription opposite the island of Tombos, subjugated the region between Upper Egypt and Nubia proper; and Ethiopia was henceforth governed by princes of the blood royal of Egypt, the first being named Memes, a name related to that given by Pharaoh’s daughter to her adopted son, Moses. A sepulchral inscription records a great victory of Thothmes I in Mesopotamia. The acquisition of Nubia (= the land of gold) furnished the means of acquiring chariots, for which after this date Egypt was famous.

    Aahmes (Amessis in Josephus), wife and sister of Thothmes I (an incestuous marriage unknown to the early Pharaohs), succeeded him as regent for 20 years. Then Thothroes II, son of Thothmes I, in the beginning of his short reign warred successfully against the Shasous or N.E. nomadic tribes. He was married to his sister Hatasou, who succeeded as queen regnant. At his death the confederate nations N. of Palestine revolted, and no attempt to recover them was made until the 22nd year of Thothemes III. The sudden collapse after a brilliant beginning, his death succeeded by the reigning of a woman for so long after him instead of his son, the absence of the glorious records which marked his predecessors’ reigns, and no effort being made to regain Egypt’s former possessions, all accord with the view that the plagues which visited Egypt, the exodus after the slaying of the firstborn, and the final catastrophe at the Red Sea, occurred in his reign. Of course no monument would commemorate the king’s and the nation’s disasters. Moses returning from Midian at the close of the reign of Thothmes II found him at Zoan (i.e. Tunis or Avaris), the city taken by Aahmes I in Lower Egypt ( Psalm 78:12); the restlessness of the neighboring Shasous or Bedouins would require his presence there. This Pharaoh was weak, capricious, and obstinate, and such a one as Hatasou (a superstitions devotee as the inscriptions prove, and there fore furious at the dishonors done through Moses’ God to her favorite idols and priests, and above all at the crowning calamity, the death of her firstborn) would urge on to avenge all her wrongs on the escaped bondservants. On her beautiful monument at Thebes she is represented with masculine attire and beard, and boasting of the idol Ammon’s favor and of her own gracious manners.

    Each fit of terror which each fresh plague excited in the monarch soon gave way to renewed hardening of, his heart under her influence, until the door of repentance was forever shut against him; compare Corinthians 7:10; Proverbs 29:1. Artapanus, a Jewish historian quoted by Alexander Polyhistor (Fragm. Hist. Greek, 3:223), Sylla’s contemporary, wrote: “the Memphites say that Moses led the people across the bed of the sea at the ebb of the tide; but they of Heliopolis that the king was with a vast force pursuing the Jews, because they were carrying away the riches borrowed of the Egyptians. Then God’s voice commanded Moses to smite the sea with his rod, so the sea parted asunder, and the host marched through on dry ground.”

    ISRAEL IN EGYPT. -- The Egyptian monuments illustrate Israel’s oppression in many points. Bricks were the common material of building, and for the king’s edifices were stamped with his name. Chopped straw was used, as hair by plasterers, to make them more durable. Captives did the work in the royal brickfields; taskmasters with rods and the bastinado punished the idle. The entire stalk was left standing in cutting the wheat, so that stubble was easy to find in the fields. Though field labor is light, yet from the continued succession of crops and intense heat the cultivators’ lot is a hard one. The storing of water in vessels of wood and stone ( Exodus 7:19) is uniquely Egyptian. Reservoirs and cisterns were needless where the Nile and its canals made water so plentiful. But its turbid water at certain seasons needs purification for drinking; so it is kept in stone or wooden vessels until the sediment falls to the bottom. The arts which Israel as a nomadic race knew not when they entered Egypt, such as writing, gem setting, working metals, carving, tanning, dyeing, linen weaving, building, they acquired before they left, and probably some Egyptians accompanied them ( Exodus 12:38).

    Thothmes III remained against his will a subject, while his sister ruled for 17 years. On ascending the throne he effaced her titles on the monuments, and reckoned his own reign from his predecessor’s death. In the 22nd year of his reign, according to the inscriptions in his temple dedicated to Ammon on his return, he marched to encounter the allied kings of all the districts between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. He defeated them with great slaughter at Megiddo. The chiefs presented him as tribute gold, silver, bronze, lapis lazuli, precious coffers, gold- and silver-plated chariots, highly wrought Phoenician vases, a gold inlaid bronze harp, ivory, perfumes, wine; proofs of the high civilization of the then lords of Palestine. The confederacy which gave unity and strength to its Canaanite and other inhabitants was thus, in God’s special providence, broken by Thothmes III just 17 years before Israel’s invasion, to prepare an easy conquest for them. He defeated their “892 chariots” (curiously answering to Jabin’s 900, Judges 4); also the “Cheta” or Hittites, and the “Rutens” or Syrians of Mesopotamia, Assur, Babel, Nineveh, Shinar, and the Remenen or Armenians. He brought home numerous captives, who are represented in Ammon’s temple at Abd el Kurna making bricks, as the Israelites had done. His wars ended in the 40th year of his reign, i.e. just at the close of Israel’s 40 years in the desert, when about to enter Canaan.

    Thus, the terror of Midian and Moab at Israel’s approach ( Numbers 22:3,4) is partly accounted for, as they were still smarting under Thothmes’ defeat. Egypt retained only such strongholds as commanded the N. road by the coast rate Syria, and left the petty kings (broken-spirited and disunited, and, as Scripture represents, liable to panics before any new foe) to keep their almost impregnable forts. The Israelites in the desert of Tih, out of the way of the coast road, offered no inducement to the conqueror. Had they remained in the peninsula of Sinai, they would have been within his reach; for its western district was subject to Egypt from the time of Snefru, the last Pharaoh of the 3rd dynasty. The most ancient existing monument records that he defeated the Ann, the old inhabitants, and founded a colony at Wady Mughara. The copper mines there were worked under Churn (Cheops) of the 4th dynasty and other monarchs long after, though it seems they were not worked and the Sinai peninsula not occupied by Egyptians at the date of the exodus. To the mines of this district attention has of late afresh been drawn.

    It may seem strange that the Pharaohs, supreme in western Asia up to Saul’s time, yet allowed Israel to invade and permanently occupy Palestine.

    But Egypt’s policy was to be content with plunder, tribute of submissive chieftains, and prisoners; and not, like Assyria, to occupy conquered countries permanently. The warrior caste, the Calasirians and Hermotybians, preferred returning to their settled homes to cultivate the fields after the inundation each year. Besides, Israel attacked Egypt’s enemies, the Hittites and Amorites; and the Israelite kingdom, while not so large as to excite the jealousy of Egypt, was large enough to prevent the reunion of the powers overthrown by Thothmes III.

    His successor, Amenhotep II, in making war transported his troops to Phoenicia by sea, as the representations on Aahmes’ tomb at El-kab, of this period, show. He conquered the Rutens (according to an inscription in Amada in Nubia), advanced as far as Nineveh, and hanged seven princes of the confederates at Tachis, a city in Syria, with head downward, on the prow of his ship.

    Amenhotep III also conducted expeditions to the Soudan, but mainly was occupied in erecting magnificent works. He was married to a remarkable woman, not of royal birth or Egyptian creed, Tel, daughter of Juan (akin to Judah) and Tuaa. In 1 Chronicles 4:17 Mered, son of Ezra two generations after Caleb founded a family by an Egyptian wife see BITHIAH , daughter of Pharaoh, a name closely resembling Tei daughter of Juaa. Its settlement was at Eshtemoa in the hills of Judah S. of Hebron. Amenophis IV, Tei’s son (whose features are distinctly Semitic), revolutionized, under her influence, Egypt’s religion as to its grosser idolatries, such as the phallus worship of Khem, and introduced a more spiritual worship. His name Khun Aten (akin to Adon “THE LORD”), i.e. glory of the sunbeam, refers to the Semitic name for God.

    Thus, Egypt remained supreme in Mesopotamia in the earlier part of the judges’ period. Then, during internal struggles, the Egyptian yoke was thrown off, and then scope was left for the invasion of Israel by Chushan Rishathaim of Mesopotamia, about a century after Joshua. He being expelled on one side, by Othniel, (and the Rutens or Assyrians consequently losing the ascendancy, toward the end of the 18th dynasty,) and Egypt being prostrated on the other side, Moab, Ammon, Amalek, under king Eglon, and Midian or Edom, naturally grew into power. The Cheta or Hittites also gradually extended their power from Cilicia to the Euphrates, holding Syria’s strongholds, and encroaching on the powers of Palestine during all the time of the 19th dynasty.

    Manetho’s testimony. -- Manetho’s account recognizes the scriptural fact that: (1) the Israelites whom he confounds with the Hyksos had been employed in forced labors, and that they (2) went forth from the region about Avaris (related to the Hebrews, i.e.

    Goshen) “by permission” (3) of the Theban king whose father (i.e. the first king of the 18th dynasty) had driven out the Hyksos from the rest of Egypt, and that (4) they took with them their “furniture and cattle” and traversed the region between Egypt and Syria, and settled in Judaea, and that the king in resisting them felt (5) “he was fighting against the gods,” and (6) was afraid for the safety of his young son. Elsewhere he calls them “lepers,” and confounds Moses with Joseph of Heliopolis (On) whom he makes leader of the exodus (perhaps drawn from the fact that Israel and Moses carried with them Joseph’s body, Exodus 13:19) under the name Ostirsiph (i.e. rich in food zaf), and notices the historical fact that it was with an Ethiopian army the Theban king ejected (the lepers and their allies) the shepherds. (See above.) The “leprosy” attributed to them is drawn from the leprous hand whereby Moses proved his divine mission ( Exodus 4:6), also from its prevalence among the Hebrews (Leviticus 13; 14).

    In the two centuries’ interval between the early judges and Deborah, the chief strongholds of Palestine were occupied by the Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, etc., during Egypt’s 19th dynasty, and are so represented in the monuments describing the attacks on them by Seti I. and Rameses II. The open country was held by the Amorites. against whose iron chariots Israel could not stand ( Judges 1:19); so the district from the S. border northward is called in the monuments” the land of the Amorites.” Compare Judges 5:6, “the highways were unoccupied ... the villages ceased ... war was in the gates (of the strongholds). Was there a shield or spear seen among 40,000 in Israel?” Thus the Egyptian armies in traversing Syria would encounter no Israelite in the field and would only encounter Israel’s foes.

    Seti I, 150 years after the exodus, overwhelmed the anti-Egyptian confederacy of tribes from Cilicia to Mesopotamia, headed by the Assyrians. Under Rameses II, the Assyrians are not even mentioned in his great campaign in his fifth year. The Hittites or Cheta, N. of Palestine ( Judges 1:26), became the great power opposed to Egypt under Seti I.

    Sisera is a Chetan name; and his master Jabin ruled the whole country in Merneptah’s reign. Seti I overcame the Shasous, i.e. the warlike nomads who overran Palestine, Moah, Ammon, Amalek the Hittites, etc., his aim being to conquer Syria and to occupy Kadesh which was its chief city (Edessa, on the Orontes).

    Rameses Merammon (Sesostris) was associated in the kingdom with his father from infancy, and succeeded him as sole king, with a family of princes, at his death. Rameses reigned 67 years (according to the monument at Tunis), but it is uncertain how long before his father’s death his reign is counted. He venerated his father in his early inscriptions, afterward effaced “Seti” for his own name. He is made by some the “new king” (Exodus 1). But facts and dates contradict it; and the assumption is false that he reigned 67 years after his father. The fortresses of Zaru and Pa-Ramesses which he enlarged existed previously, and therefore afford no argument for his being the Pharaoh who set Israel to work at Pithem and Rameses (which moreover are not certainly identical with Zaru and Pa- Ramesses). Rameses set certain Aperu (identified by some with “Hebrews,” by others explained” workmen”) to work on the frontier in the region where Israel’s forefathers had been bondservants in hard service.

    Four Egyptian documents quoted by Cook (Speaker’s Commentary) contain the following particulars bearing on e question. The report of one.

    Kawisar (a Chetan), a commissariat officer at Pa-Ramesson, states to Rameses II that he has distributed rations to the Aperu who drew stores for the great fortress (Bekken) and to the soldiers. Another report, that of a scribe, Keniamen, to the kazana or high officer of Rameses’ household, implies by their being employed to draw stones S. of Memphis, that the Aperu, if Israelites, were prisoners of war under military surveillance, not (as the Israelites before the exodus) residents working in their own district under Egyptian taskmasters. Moreover, 2,083 Aperu resided under Rameses III, 800 worked in the Hamamat quarry under Rameses IV similarly. These could not have been stayers behind after Israel’s exodus, for the Egyptians would not then have tolerated them.

    Rameses, in his 21st year, made a treaty with Chetasar, king of the Cheta, on equal terms, and married his daughter. Palestine thus remained in quiet between the times of Eglon and Shamgar. Merneptah succeeded, and defeated confederate Libyans, Asiatics, and Tyrrhenians, Sicilians and Achaeans. Had Moses returned to Egypt at that time he would surely have mentioned some of these races in Genesis 10. In Merneptah’s reign southern Palestine was for the first time occupied by the Philistines, and northern Palestine subdued by Jabin the Canaanite king and his captain Sisera, who was chief of the Syrian confederates, with 900 chariots answering to the 892 taken by Thethroes III on the same battlefield, Megiddo. This was about 1320 B.C., which year all Egyptologers agree occurred in Merneptah’s reign. Rameses III was the last Egyptian who gained great victories in Syria, transporting his forces there by sea, and conquering the Cheta. This overthrow of the Chetan confederacy, after Jabin’s defeat by Deborah, secured peace to Palestine. When Egypt’s monarchy became weaker some years later, Midian oppressed Israel (Judges 6). But Egypt retained a general ascendancy in Syria and Mesopotamia until the end of the Second dynasty, answering to the end of the period of the Judges.

    Thus, God’s providence secured Israel from being crushed by tire overwhelming rival empires; and meanwhile the nation’s character’ was being molded and its resources prepared for the high place width it assumed among the great, kingdoms under Saul, David, and Solomon. The general scheme and facts above (as also the table below) are drawn in part from Cook’s interesting essay in the Speaker’s Commentary, also from Professor Rawlinson’s, Dr. Birch’s, and Hengstenberg’s works:

    YEAR DYNASTIES CONTEMPORARY EVENTS RECORDED ON THE MONUMENTS SCRIPTURAL PARALLEL EVENTS B.C. 2700 ... FIRST DYNASTY: THINITES (named from This, W. of the river, or Abydos). Begins with Menes.

    B.C. 2470 ... SECOND: alsoTHINITES (contem- In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a tablet records poraneous with the Fourth). a king of the 2nd dynasty whose existence is known to us by the Tablet of Abydos B.C. 2650 ... THIRD:MEMPHITES The last of the 3rd dynasty, with whom real history begins, Snefru, conquers the Anu, plants a colony at Wady Mughara, and occupies the W. of the Sinai peninsula and explores its turquoise and copper mines.

    B.C. 2500 ... FOURTH:MEMPHITES Erection of the pyramids of Jizeh by Suphis and Sensuphis, the Great one the oldest of the three. The names Suphis, or Shofo (= Cheops), and Nou-shofo (Chephren, Herodotus), were found in “the chambers of construction,” but hieroglyphics are not in the Great Pyramid itself. Explained by Piazzi Smith that they were shepherd kings (compare Genesis 49:24) of an earlier dynasty than those of the 14th and 17th dynasties; from Jerusalem, holding the (pure faith of Melchizedek, and therefore hated Manetho and Herodotus) by the Egyptians. as foreigners and opponents of idolatry; forbidding any sculptures or painted emblems of the idols, in the pyramid, which was designed as the sacred standard of metrology of time, capacity, weight, line, square and cubic measure, heat, latitude, temperature, and indicated the mean density and true figure of the earth, standing in the political center of the earth. Shofo warred with the Arabs, according to the monuments.

    FIFTH: ELEPHANTINES (contem-poraneous with the Fourth).

    B.C. 2200 ... SIXTH:MEMPHITES (contempo- In the Boulak Museum, Cairo, a monumental inscription raneous with the Ninth and exists, set up by Una, scribe and crown-bearer Eleventh). to King Teta, and “priest of the place of his pyramid,” to Pepi, successor of Teta, of the 6th dynasty.

    SEVENTH:MEMPHITES EIGHTH: Memphites NINTH:HERACLEOPOLITES (contemporaneous with the 6th and 11th dynasties) TENTH: Heracleopolites ELEVENTH:DIOSPOLITES (contemporaneous with the 6th and 9th dynasties) About B.C. 2000 TWELFTH:DIOSPOLITES: Seven Dawn of poetry and philosophy; astronomy added Abram was graciously received. Pharaohs:

    Amenemha I, the five Epact days to the old 360. The capital Osirtasin I, Amenemha II, shifted from Memphis to Thebes. Foreigners Osirtasin II, Osirtasin III, from western Asia received and promoted by the Amenemha III, Amenemha IV; early Pharaohs. The latter execute great works and a queen, Ra-Sebek- of irrigation, to guard against famine. This Nefrou. 12th dynasty worshipped Amen (the occult god, hidden in nature), at Thebes.

    The Labyrinth, and the artificial Lake Moeris, their work.

    THIRTEENTH: DIOSPOLITES (contemporary with the Shepherds).

    Pharaohs named Sebek-hotep.

    About B.C. 1750 Fourteenth : XOITES, in Upper The early Pharaohs lords of all Egypt. Then the Joseph under an early Egypt (contemporaneous Hyksos, chief of the Shasous or” Nomads,” seize Pharaoh, of the 13th dynasty, with the 15th and 16th N. Egypt; introduce worship of Sut, Sutech, or or under Amenemha III, dynasties in Lower Egypt). Baal-Salatis, the first Hyksos king; Apepi, the the sixth king of the 12 th FIFTEENTH:HYKSOS, or SHEP- last, overcome by Aahmes I; and Avaris, Tanis, dynasty.HERDS (contemporaneus with or Zoan, the Hyksos stronghold, taken, and the the 14th and 16th dynasties), Shepherds expelled. Rasetnub (the Saites of Sixteenth:SHEPHERDS (con- Manetho) was leader of the Hyksos; his name temporaneous with the occurs on a tablet of Rameses II, 1300 B.C., who 14th and 15th dynasties). says Rasetnub’s era was 400 years before, i.e. 1700 B.C.; also on a lion at Bagdad (Dr. Birch).

    About B.C 1525; SEVENTEENTH:APEPI, or but Lepsius,APOPHIS, last of the Hyksos. B.C. 1706 Ta-aaken Rasckenen, last of the contemporary Egyptian Pharaohs.

    B.C. 1525; or EIGHTEENTH: DIOSPOLITES: Expels the Shepherds. Great buildings by forced Aahmes I., the” new king” B.C. 1706 Aahmes I (Nefertari, a Nubian labor. Theban worship restored. Expedition who imposed bond-service queen, regent), Amenhotep I, into Ethiopia under Amenhotep I. Successful upon Israel, building Thothmes I (Aahmes regent), expeditions into Nubia and Mesopotamia under forts in their own land. Thothmes II, Thothmes III, Thothmes I. First part of reign of Thothmes II Moses was saved and adopted Amenhotep IV (Khun-Aten); prosperous. Ends in a blank, followed by a by an Egyptian princess. B.C. 1463; or three kings, Horemheb, ille- general revolt of the Syrian confederates. Hata- Flees into Midian. Re- B.C. 1485. gitimate. son queen regnant for 17 or 22 years. Thothmes turn of Moses. The exodus. Lepsius, B.C. III recovers the ascendancy in Syria in the Pharaoh and his army 22nd year, and invades Mesopotamia, and reduces perish in the Red Sea.

    Nineveh. His wars end in the 40th year of his Israel was in the wilderness reign. Monuments of him exist in El Karnak, for forty years. Joshua in the sanctuary of Thebes. Amenhotep II invades the 40th year enters Syria by sea; overthrows the confederates N. of Canaan. Israel acquires Palestine.

    Amenhotep III, and his queen Tel, most of Canaan. a foreigner favor a purer worship. Raise the temple at Thebes, where the vocal Memnon and its fellow now stand. Amenhotep IV, Khun-Aten, completes the religious revolution. A period Chushan Rishathaim invades follows of internal struggles, during which Israel. Mesopotamia threw off Egypt’s yoke.

    NINETEENTH. Rameses I, Seti I, Wars with the Cheta, now the dominant race in The interval between Chushan Rameses II, Merneptah I, Syria. Seti I subdues the Shasous or nomads Rishathaim and Seti II, Am-Emmeses, Siptah, from Egypt to Syria, the Cheta, and Mesopota- Jabin. Palestine still in Tauser. mians. The great hypostyle hall of El Karnak the hands of the Amorites built. Bas-reliefs of his successes on the N. wall. and Canaanites.

    Toward The empire’s highest civilization. Rameses II the end of this period, co-regent with his father many years. Defeats subject to the Philistines the Cheta; contracts a treaty with their king, on the south, and whose daughter he marries. Captives employed to the Cheta or Hittites in enlarging fortresses, etc. The Aperu employed on the north. Revolt at Pa- Ramesses and Zaru. Reigns, dating, from against Jabin. Over- B.C. 1320 ... his co-regency, 67 years in all. The temples he throw of the Chetan built in Egypt and Nubia outshone all others. Sisera, in Merneptab’s reign.

    TWENTIETH: Rameses III. Successes in Africa and Asia. The Cheta subdued. Events in Judges, after 12 more of the same name, Aperu employed in the king’s domains; also in Deborah and Barak. with distinguishing surnames. the quarries. Rameses III records his successes on his great temple of Medeenet Haboo in western Thebes; among them a naval victory in the Mediterranean over the Tokkaree (Carians) and Shairetana (Cretans). Other Shairetana (Cherethim) serve in his forces.

    After Rameses III anarchy succeeded, the high priests usurping the throne at Thebes, and a Lower Egypt dynasty, the 21st, arising at Tanis.

    Solomon’s wife was probably of the latter dynasty.

    Sheshonk I (Shishak), head of the 22nd dynasty, reunited the kingdom B.C. He received Jeroboam Solomon’s enemy, who went forth from him to take the kingdom of the ten tribes. Outside the southern wall of the temple of El Karnak is a list of Sheshonk’s conquests, among them “the kingdom of Judah.” The overthrow of his successor (Zerah), Osorkon I, by Asa caused the decline of the dynasty ( 2 Chronicles 14:9).

    The 25th dynasty was an Ethiopian line which boldly withstood the progress of Assyria. So, either Shebek II or Shebek I, Sabacho, was ally to Hoshea, Israel’s last king ( 2 Kings 17:4). Tirhakah, the third of this dynasty ( 2 Kings 19:9), made a diversion in favor of Hezekiah when threatened by Sennacherib.

    The 26th dynasty was a native line, Saites. Psammetik I (664 B.C.) Neku (Necho) his son marched against Assyria, and unwillingly encountered and slew Josiah at Megiddo, 608 B.C. 2 Chronicles 35:21; “I come not against thee, thou king of Judah, but against the house wherewith I have war; for God commanded me to make haste; forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that He destroy thee not”: characteristic of the kindly relations which all along subsisted between Israel and Egypt after the exodus; the recognition of God is remarkable. Necho was routed at Carchemish by Nebuchadnezzar, 605 B.C. ( Jeremiah 46:2.) He “came not again any more out of his laud, for the king of Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto the river Euphrates all that pertained to the king of Egypt” ( 2 Kings 24:7.)

    Pharaoh Hophra, his second successor, after temporarily raising the siege of Jerusalem as Zedekiah’s ally ( Jeremiah 37:5,7,11), was afterward attacked by Nebuchadnezzar in his own country. Next, Amasis reigned prosperously; but his son, after a six months’ reign, was conquered by Cambyses, who reduced Egypt to a province of the Persian empire B.C. He took Pelusium, the key of Egypt, by placing before his army dogs, cats, etc., held sacred in Egypt, so that no Egyptian would use weapon against them. The Ptolemies, successors of the Greek Alexander the Great, ruled for three hundred years, and raised Egypt to eminence by their patronage of literature; but they were a foreign line.

    Thus, Ezekiel’s prophecies (Ezekiel 29--32) were fulfilled. Jeremiah’s prediction is fulfilled in the disappearance of Memphis and its temples; Jeremiah 46:19, “Noph shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant”; “I will destroy the idols, and I will cause images to cease out of Noph.” Ezekiel 30:13: “and there shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt.” Cambyses slew Apis, the sacred ox, and burnt the other idols. From the second Persian conquest, upward of 2,000 years ago, no native prince of an Egyptian race has reigned. [See PHARAOH , see EXODUS , see MOSES , see ALEXANDRIA .] EHI Genesis 46:21. Ahiram is probably the full name ( Numbers 26:38); 1 Chronicles 8:1, Aharah; 1 Chronicles 8:4, Ahoah; 1 Chronicles 8:7, Ahiah.

    EHUD [See EGLON .] An hereditary name in Benjamin ( 1 Chronicles 7:10; 8:6). The second of the judges was son of Gera, also an hereditary name in Benjamin ( Genesis 46:21; 2 Samuel 16:5; 1 Chronicles 8:3).

    Israel’s “deliverer,” under God, from the Moabite Eglon who had crossed the Jordan westward, and seized Jericho, in Ehud’s tribe, Benjamin ( Judges 3:9,12-30; Nehemiah 9:27, “saviors”). He could use his left hand as readily as his right hand ( Judges 20:16). “He made him” a dagger; for, as under the Philistines (1 Samuel 13: 19) so now under Moab the making of iron weapons publicly was forbidden. He girt on” his right thigh” where its presence would never be suspected, the left being the sword side and where to his left hand it would be most convenient. He may have been one of the 600 left-handed slingers who escaped to the Rock Rimmon just thirteen years before.

    EKER 1 Chronicles 2:27.

    EKRON (“the firm rooted”). Most northerly of the five Philistine lordship cities, farthest from the sea, to the right of the great road from Egypt northwards to Syria, in the Shephelah (low country). A landmark of Judah on the northern boundary which ran thence to the sea at Jabneel ( Joshua 15:45,46; Judges 1:18). Afterward in Dan ( Joshua 19:43); but the Philistines permanently appropriated it ( 1 Samuel 5:10; 17:52; Jeremiah 25:20). There the ark of the covenant was taken last before its return to Israel. A shrine and oracle of Baalzebub was there, to which king Ahaziah applied for consultation in his sickness ( 2 Kings 1:2,16). Zechariah 9:5, “Ekron for her expectation shall be ashamed”: she had expected Tyre would withstand Alexander in his progress southward toward Egypt; but her expectation shall bear the shame of disappointment. Zephaniah 2:4 plays on her name, ‘Ekron tee’akeer ,” the firm-rooted one shall be rooted up.” Now Akir, 3 miles E. of Yebna, N. of the wady Surar; a village consisting of 50 mud houses, with two well-built wells, is all that remains of the once leading Philistine city, fulfilling the prophecy that she should be rooted up.

    ELADAH 1 Chronicles 7:20.

    ELAH 1. Baasha’s son and successor on the Israelite throne ( 1 Kings 16:8-10); reigned little more than a year. A beacon to warn drunkards, killed by the captain of half his chariots, Zimri, while “drinking himself drunk” in the house of his steward Arza in Tirzah. Josephus (Ant. 8:12, section 4) says it occurred while his army and officers were absent at the siege of Gibbethon.

    As Baasha conspired against his master Nadab, so Zimri against Baasha’s son; Zimri in his turn was slain by Omri. Thus retributive justice pays transgressors in kind. 2. Father of Hoshea, last king of Israel ( 2 Kings 15:30; 17:1). 3. Duke of Edom ( Genesis 36:41); compare Elath on the Red Sea. 4. Father of Shimei, Solomon’s commissariat officer in Benjamin ( Kings 4:18). 5. Son of Caleb ( 1 Chronicles 4:15). 6. Uzzi’s son, a chief of Benjamin ( 1 Chronicles 9:8).

    ELAH, VALLEY OF i.e. “valley of the terebinth.” in which Israel encamped when David killed Goliath ( 1 Samuel 17:2,19; compare 1 Samuel 21:9). Near Shocoh of Judah and Azekah; Ekron was the nearest Philistine town. Shocoh is now Suweikeh, 14 miles S.W. of Jerusalem on the road to Gaza, near where the western hills of Judah slope toward the Philistine plain; on the S. slopes of “the valley of acacias”: wady es Sumt, which joining two other wadies below Suweikeh forms an open plain a mile wide, with a torrent bed full of round pebbles, such as David slew Goliath with. This open space is probably the valley of Elah or terebinths, of which one of the largest in Palestine stands near. A mile down the valley is Tell Zakariyeh, probably Azekah. Ekron is 17 miles and Bethlehem 12 from Shocoh. The Philistines were on the hill on the S. side, Israel on the hill on the N. side of “the ravine” (hagay , 1 Samuel 17:3, the deeper cutting made in the broad valley by the winter torrent, distinct from ‘eemeq , “valley,” Samuel 17:2). [See EPHES-DAMMIM .] ELAM 1. Son of Shem ( Genesis 10:22). The name is Semitic. The Elamites gave their name to Elymais, the region on the left or E. bank of the Tigris, opposite Babylonia, between it on the W. and Persia proper on the E., and S.W. of Media. The region is also named Susiana or Susis from its capital Susa, called Shushah in Daniel 8:2, where Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 1:1) waited on king Artaxerxes, and where Ahasuerus (Xerxes) held his court in Esther’s ( Esther 1:2; 2:5) time. Daniel mentions the river Ulai near, i.e. the Greek Euloeus. From Darius Hystaspes’ time to Alexander the Great it was the Persian king’s court residence. see CHEDORLAOMER who invaded Palestine in Abraham’s time (Genesis 14) was king of Elam, and then lord paramount over Amraphel, king of Shinar (Babylonia) on its confines. This Elamitic supremacy was of short duration. The Kissinns or Cossaeans (Cushites?) subsequently to the Elamites subjugated Elam and called it Kissia (Herodotus, 3:91; 5:49). The Greek traditions of Memnon and his Ethiopian bands rest on this subjugation, the Kissians of Elam being connected with the Cushite inhabitants of the upper valley of the Nile. The two races remained separate to the time Of Strabo (compare Ezra 4:9). Discoveries in Elam prove Susa one of the oldest cities in the East and its monarchs quasiindependent, while acknowledging Assyria’s and Babylon’s successive supremacy. Occasionally, for a time, it maintained its complete independence. It was a province of Babylonia from Nebuchadnezzar’s time ( Daniel 8:2). Its conquest by him is probably foretold in Jeremiah 49:30-34, Ezekiel 32:24,25. It had helped him against Judaea; hence God dealt retributively its punishment by him with whom it bad transgressed. Its bowmen were famed ( Isaiah 22:6); so God says, “I will break the bow of Elam.”

    After scattering them God saith, “in the latter days I will bring again the captivity of Elam,” namely, in the coming restitution of all things by Messiah, an earnest of which was given in that Elamites were on Pentecost among the first who heard and accepted the gospel ( Acts 2:9).

    Elam took part in destroying Babylon, on Cyrus’ advance probably joining him in the assault ( Isaiah 21:2). Elam became a satrapy of the Persian empire, furnishing 300 talents as annual tribute (Herodotus, 3:91). Susa, its capital, became capital of the empire and the court residence. Nevertheless it was the scene of the Magian revolution, and twice revolted under Darius Hystaspes (Behistun Inscription). 2. A Korhite Levite, one of the sons of Asaph in David’s time ( Chronicles 26:3). 3. A Benjamite chief, one of Shashak’s sons ( 1 Chronicles 8:24). 4. Children of Elam, 1,254, returned with Zerubbabel from Babylon ( Ezra 2:7; Nehemiah 7:12). Seventy-one more accompanied Ezra and the second caravan ( Ezra 8:7). Shechaniah, one of them, seconded Ezra’s confession of sin, especially as to marriages with aliens, pleaded the people’s guilt, and proposed a covenant to put away those wives; six of the sons of Elam accordingly did so ( Ezra 10:2,26). 5. Another Elam, of whose sons also the same number returned, is mentioned ( Ezra 2:31; Nehemiah 7:34). 6. A priest who accompanied Nehemiah in dedicating the wall ( Nehemiah 12:42).

    ELASAH 1. Ezra 10:22. 2. Son of Shaphan, one of the two sent by king Zedekiah to Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon (by whose permission alone be reigned) after the first deportation. He took charge of Jeremiah’s letter to the captives ( Jeremiah 29:3).

    ELATH In Edom, on the Red Sea, near Ezion Geber ( Deuteronomy 2:8). Now in Arabic Eyleh, at the point of the eastern horn of the Red Sea. Both town and gulf are named Akaba. No doubt included in David’s conquest of Edom ( 2 Samuel 8:14). Solomon’s navy rode at sea near Ezion Geber, beside Eloth ( 1 Kings 9:26; 2 Chronicles 8:17). From Elath the Elanitic gulf, the eastern arm of the Red Sea, takes its name. It means “trees,” and a grove of palm trees is still at Akaba. Edom revolted in the Israelite king Joram’s days; Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah “built Elath and restored it to Judah” ( 2 Kings 8:20; 14:22). Rezin of Syria recovered it and drove out the Jews ( 2 Kings 16:6). The Eyleh district was originally occupied by a tribe of the Amalekites (the Sameyda). Amalek, according to Arab historians, passed from the Persian gulf through the Arabian peninsula to Arabia Petraea. Herodotus makes the Phoenicians come from the Red Sea; if they were Cushites, their maritime propensities would accord with the characteristics of that race.

    ELDAAH Genesis 25:4; 1 Chronicles 1:33.

    ELDAD (“loved of God”) and Medad. Two of the 70 elders to whom the Spirit was imparted, in order to share. Moses’ burden of responsibility. Though “they were of them that were written” in Moses’ list (implying that the 70 were permanently appointed) they did not go with the rest to the tabernacle, but prophesied in the camp ( Numbers 11:26). Forster however trans. “they were among the inscriptions,” i.e. occupied in directing the records of the exode at Sarbut el Khadem at the entrance to Wady Maghara and Mokatteb. The context favors KJV When “the (so Hebrew for a) young man” reported it at the tabernacle, and Joshua begged Moses to forbid them, he refused saying, “enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets,” etc. So, Jesus’ disciples were jealous for His honor, but were reproved by Moses’ Antitype ( Mark 9:38,39), For “and did not cease,” Numbers 11:25, trans. wilo’ yasphu “and did not add,” as Septuagint, i.e. they did not continue prophesying. Not that the Spirit departed from them, but having given this palpable sample to the nation of their Spirit-attested mission, they for the time ceased to give further spiritual demonstrations, their office being executive administration not prophecy. Not foretelling the future is meant, but ecstatic impulse by the Spirit, giving them wisdom and utterance; as the disciples on Pentecost received the gift of tongues and of prophecy, i.e. the power of inspired speaking. They probably declared God’s will in extempore hymns of praise; so Saul, 1 Samuel 10:11. The Jews’ tradition was that all prophetic inspiration emanated from Moses originally. In the sense only that Moses’ Pentateuch is the basis of all subsequent prophecy, the psalms and the prophets, it is true. It was “of the Spirit that was upon Moses” that “God gave unto the 70 elders.” The diffusion of the spirit of prophecy, no longer limited to Moses, and its separation from the tabernacle service, led to the establishment of the “schools of the prophets.” Moses, like the true “servant” of God (Hebrews 3), not seeking his own but God’s glory, and the extension of His kingdom, rejoiced at what provoked the jealousy of his followers. The 70 elders appointed by Jethro’s advice at Sinai (Exodus 18) to help Moses in judging are distinct from the 70 here endowed with the Spirit to help hint as his executive court, to govern the rebellious people, and establish his authority, shaken by the people’s murmurings against Jehovah and himself because of the want of flesh. The number symbolically represented the elect nation, the sacred number for perfection,7, being raised to tens, the world number. Accordingly, it was our Lord’s number for the disciples sent two by two before His face ( Luke 10:1).

    ELDER Age is the standard of dignity in a patriarchal system. Hence, the office of elder was the basis of government; as in our “alderman,” the Arab sheikh = “old man” ( Joshua 24:31; 1 Kings 12:6). The institution existed when Moses first opened his divine commission to Israel. Even in their Egyptian bondage they retained their national organization and government by elders, who represented the people ( Exodus 3:16; 4:29; Joshua 24:1,2). After the settlement in Canaan they were named “elders of Israel” or “of the land” ( 1 Samuel 4:3; 1 Kings 20:7) or “of the tribes” ( Deuteronomy 31:28) or “of the city,” ( Deuteronomy 19:12, compare Deuteronomy 16:18; Ruth 4:9,11). They retained their position under the judges ( Judges 2:7), the kings ( 2 Samuel 17:4), in the captivity ( Jeremiah 29:1), and on the return ( Ezra 5:5); and in New Testament times as one of the classes from which the. Sanhedrin members were chosen, and are associated with the chief priests and scribes ( Matthew 16:21l 21:23; 26:59; Luke 22:66), “the presbytery of the people” (Greek).

    Ecclesiastical elders or presbyters (from whence “priest” is contracted) of the Christian church were a class of church governors borrowed naturally from the see SYNAGOGUE ; especially as cases occurred of whole synagogues and their officers embracing Christianity. [See BISHOP and see DEACON and see CHURCH .] Paul ordained them on his first missionary journey (cf. Acts 14:23).

    The four and twenty elders (Revelation 4) represent the combined heads of the Old and New Testament congregations, the twelve patriarchs and twelve apostles; answering to the typical 24 courses of priests, “governors of the sanctuary and governors of God” ( 1 Chronicles 24:5; 25:31).

    ELEAD 1 Chronicles 7:21.

    ELEALEH E. of Jordan, in the portion of Reuben ( Numbers 32:3,37).

    Appropriated by Moab, and named as a Moabite town by Isaiah ( Isaiah 15:4; 16:9; Jeremiah 48:34) along with Heshbon. Now El-A’al, “the high,” a mile N. of Heshbon, commanding a wide view of the plain and southern Belka.

    ELEASAH 1. 1 Chronicles 2:39. 2. 1 Chronicles 8:37; 9:43.

    ELEAZAR 1. Aaron’s third son by Elisheba, Amininadab’s daughter, descended from Judah through Pharez ( Exodus 6:23,25; 28:1; Genesis 38:29; 46:12; Ruth 4:18,20). On the death of Nadab and Abihu without children ( Leviticus 10:1; Numbers 3:4) Eleazar had the oversight of the chief Levites, who kept the charge of the sanctuary ( Numbers 3:32). With Ithamar his brother he ministered as a priest in his father’s lifetime, and was invested in Aaron’s highpriestly garments as his successor, on mount Her, just before his death ( Numbers 20:25-28). With Moses he superintended the census ( Numbers 26:3), inaugurated Joshua whom Moses set before him (for Joshua was in this inferior to Moses, who had direct intercourse with God; Joshua must ask divine counsel through the high priest), and divided the Midianite spoil ( Numbers 27:22; 31:21).

    He took part in dividing Canaan ( Joshua 14:1). He was buried in “the hill of Phinehas his son, ... mount Ephraim” ( Joshua 24:33). The high priesthood passed to Ithamar’s line in the person of Eli, but for the sin of Eli’s sons reverted to Eleazar’s line in the person of Zadok ( 1 Samuel 2:27; 1 Chronicles 6:8; 24:3; 1 Kings 2:27). 2. Abinadab’s son, of the “hill” of Kirjath Jearim; appointed by its inhabitants to take care of the ark on its return from the Philistines ( <090701> Samuel 7:1). 3. Dodo the Ahohite’s son, one of the three chief strongmen of David; perhaps descended from Ahoah of Benjamin ( 1 Chronicles 8:4; Samuel 23:9; 1 Chronicles 11:12). 4. A Merarite Levite, son of Mahli, having daughters married to their “brethren” (cousins) ( 1 Chronicles 23:21,22; 24:28). 5. A priest at Nehemiah’s feast of dedication ( Nehemiah 12:42). 6. Son of Parosh, who married arid put away an alien wife ( Ezra 10:25). 7. Phinehas’ son, a Levite ( Ezra 8:33). 8. Eliud’s son, three generations above Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary ( Matthew 1:15). The name means “helped by God,” and is the same as Lazarus ( Luke 16:19-25).

    ELECT [ELECTION: see PREDESTINATION .] (1) Chosen to office ( Acts 9:15; John 6:70; 1 Samuel 10:24). ELECTION (2) of Israel in the Old Testament as a nation, and of the visible Christian church, to spiritual privileges ( Isaiah 45:4; 44:1; 2 John 1:3; <600501> Peter 5:18). (3) Of Israel to temporal blessings in their own land, both formerly ( Deuteronomy 7:6) and hereafter ( Isaiah 65:9-22). (4) Of saints, individually and personally, ( Matthew 20:16; John 6:44; Acts 22:14) before the foundation of the world: to adoption ( Ephesians 1:5); salvation, not without faith and holiness, but “through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth,” for He who chose the end chose also the means ( 2 Thessalonians 2:13); conformity to Christ ( Romans 8:29); good works ( Ephesians 2:10); spiritual warfare ( 2 Timothy 2:4); eternal glory ( Romans 9:23). He chooses not merely character’s, but individuals to whom He gives the needful characteristics, faith and obedience ( Acts 5:31; Ephesians 2:8), and writes them in the book of life ( Luke 10:20; Philippians 4:3; John 6:37,40). Believers may know it ( 1 Thessalonians 1:4).

    Exemplified in Isaac ( Genesis 21:12); Abraham ( Nehemiah 9:7; Haggai 2:23); the apostles ( John 13:18; 15:16,19); Jacob ( Romans 9:12,13); Paul ( Galatians 1:15). God’s “grace was given in Christ Jesus (to the elect) before the world began” ( 2 Timothy 1:9). Its source is God’s grace, independent of any goodness foreseen in the saved ( Ephesians 1:4,5; Romans 9:11,18; 11:5). The analogy of God’s providence in this life choosing all our circumstances and final destination, and numbering the very hairs of our heads, illustrates the same method in His moral government (compare John 17:24; Acts 13:48; Romans 8:28-30; 1 Thessalonians 5:9; 2 Timothy 2:10; Peter 1:2). The election being entirely of grace, not for our foreseen works ( Romans 11:6), the glory all redounds to God. The elect are given by the Father to Jesus as the fruit of His obedience unto death ( Isaiah 53:10), that obedience itself being a grand part of the foreordained plan.

    Such a truth realized fills the heart with love and gratitude to God, humbling self, and “drawing up the mind to high and heavenly things” (Church of England, Article 17). Yet men are throughout Scripture treated as responsible, capable of will and choice. Christ died sufficiently for all, efficiently for the elect ( 1 Timothy 4:10; 1 John 2:2). The lost will lay all the blame of their perdition on themselves because “they would not come to Jesus that they might have life”; the saved will ascribe all the praise of their salvation to God alone ( Revelation 1:5; Matthew 22:12).

    EL-ELOHE-ISRAEL “The mighty God of Israel,” who had just shown His infinite might in saving Jacob (whose name was by God changed to Israel, because by prayer he had might with this mighty God and had prevailed) from Esau his deadly foe. Jacob so called the altar he built on the spot before Shechem, already consecrated by Abram ( Genesis 12:7; 33:19,20). By it he implied that Jehovah, who was Abram’s God, is also his God, as He had shown by bringing him safe back to Canaan as his inheritance.

    ELEMENTS ( Galatians 4:9): “weak and beggarly” rudiments; the elementary symbols of the law, powerless to justify, in contrast to the justifying power of faith ( Galatians 3:24; Hebrews 7:18); beggarly, in contrast with the riches of the believer’s inheritance in Christ ( Ephesians 1:18). The child ( Galatians 4:1-3) under the law is “weak,” not having attained manhood. “beggarly,” not having attained the inheritance.

    ELEPH (“ox”). A town of Benjamin, whose inhabitants followed pastoral life ( Joshua 18:28).

    ELHANAN 1. Son of see JAARE-OREGIM , or Jair, the Bethlehemitc. Slew Lahmi, brother of Goliath the Gittite ( 2 Samuel 21:19; 1 Chronicles 20:5).

    The ‘oregim seems to have crept into the first line from the second, where it means “weavers.” “The Bethlehemite” is an alteration of eth Lahmi, a confusion being made with 2. Elhanan son of Dodo of Bethlehem; first of “the thirty” of David’s guard ( 2 Samuel 23:24; 1 Chronicles 11:26).

    ELI Sprung from Ithamar, Aaron’s younger surviving son ( Leviticus 10:1,2,12). Compare see ABIATHAR ( 1 Kings 2:26,27; 1 Chronicles 24:3; 2 Samuel 8:17). Compare Eleazar’s genealogy, wherein Eli and Abiathar do not appear ( 1 Chronicles 6:4-15; Ezra 7:1-5). No high priest of Ithamar’s line is mentioned before Eli, whose appointment was of God ( 1 Samuel 2:30). His grandson Ahitub succeeded ( 1 Samuel 14:3). Abiathar. Ahitub’s grandson, was thrust out by Solomon for his share in Adonijah’s rebellion and the high priesthood reverted to Eleazar’s line in Zadok ( 1 Kings 2:35). The transfer was foretold to Eli by the unnamed man of God first, and by the child Samuel next ( 1 Samuel 2:3): a punishment from God, because though Eli reproved his wicked sons Hophni and Phinehas in word he did not in act, put forth his authority as a judge to punish, coerce, and depose them, “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.” Another part of the curse, “I will cut off the arm of thy father’s house that. there shall not be an old man in thine house,” was being fulfilled in David’s days, when “there were more chief men found of the sons of Eleazar (16) than of the sons of Ithamar” (8) ( 1 Chronicles 24:4). Eli’s grace shone in the meekness with which he bowed to the Lord’s sentence, “It is the Lord, let Him do what, seemeth Him good.” His patriotism and piety especially appear in his intense anxiety for the safety of the ark; “his heart trembled for the ark of God.” The announcement after the battle, of the slaughter of the people and even of his sons did not so much overwhelm him as that of the ark of God: instantly “he fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck broke and he died; for he was old and heavy.” The Hebrew Scriptures make his term of office as judge 40 years; the Greek Septuagint 20 years.

    Some reconcile the two by making him co-judge with Samson for 20 years, and sole judge for 20 more years. He was 98 years of age at his death. His failing and its penalty are a warning to all parents, even religious ones, and all in authority, to guard against laxity in ruling children and subordinates in the fear of the Lord, punishing strictly, though in love, all sin, jealous for God’s honor even at the cost of offending man and of painting natural parental feeling. Condoning sin is cruel to children as well as dishonoring to God. Children will respect most the parent who respects God. Perhaps Eli clung to office too long, when through age he was no longer able vigorously to fulfill it. He who cannot rule his own house is unfit to rule the house of God ( 1 Timothy 3:5).

    ELIAB 1. Numbers 1:9; 2:7; 7:24,29; 10:16. 2. Numbers 26:8,9; 16:1,12; Deuteronomy 11:6. 3. David’s oldest brother ( 1 Chronicles 2:13; 1 Samuel 16:6; 17:13,28). Abihail his daughter (granddaughter?) married her second cousin Rehoboam, and bore him three children ( 2 Chronicles 11:18).

    Eliab betrayed anger without a cause toward David, when seeking his brethren’s welfare (“Why camest thou down hither, and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the wilderness?”); also “pride and naughtiness of heart,” the very sins he charged David with (“I know thy pride,” etc.; he knew himself still less than he did David); uncharitable surmising instead of the love that thinketh no evil (“thou art come down that thou mightest see the battle”). David meekly replied, “Is there not a cause?” (see Matthew 5:22; 1 Corinthians 13:4-7.) 4. A Levite porter and musician on the psaltery ( 1 Chronicles 15:18,20; 16:5). 5. A Gadite leader who joined David in the wilderness in his flight from Saul ( 1 Chronicles 12:9). 6. Ancestor of Samuel, a Kohathite Levite, son of Nahath ( 1 Chronicles 6:27). Called Elihu 1 Samuel 1:1, also Eliel 1 Chronicles 6:34.

    ELIADA 1. Youngest one of David’s sons, born after his establishment in Jerusalem ( 2 Samuel 5:16; 1 Chronicles 3:8). Called Beelida 1 Chronicles 14:7; Baal being substituted for El (God), why we can only conjecture; possibly he apostatized. 2. 2 Chronicles 17:17. 3. 1 Kings 11:23.

    ELIAH 1. 1 Chronicles 7:27. 2. “Of Israel,” i.e. a layman ( Ezra 10:26).

    ELIAHBA 2 Samuel 23:32.

    ELIAKIM 1. Hilkiah’s son, over Hezekiah’s household ( Isaiah 36:3). As Joseph over Pharaoh’s palace, Azrikam “governor of Ahaz’ house” ( Chronicles 28:7); chamberlain, treasurer, prefect of the palace ( Genesis 41:40), chief minister. Successor of Shebna, whose deposition for his pride was foretold ( Isaiah 22:15-20). Elevated at the time of the Assyrian invasion as the one most adapted to meet such a crisis. Same as Azariah son of Hilkiah ( 1 Chronicles 6:13); the same man often bearing two names (Kimchi). God calls him “My servant”: a pious patriot (compare 2 Kings 18:37; 19:1-5). A “father to (counseling, befriending, and defending) the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the inhabitants of Judah.”

    Type of Messiah: “the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder (the key hung from the kerchief on the shoulder as emblem of his office, or figuratively for sustaining the government on his shoulder); so he shall open and none shall shut:, and he shall shut and none shall open;” i.e., all access to the royal house shall be through him. Antitypically, “the government shall be upon Messiah’s shoulder” ( Isaiah 9:6; 22:22); He shuts or opens at will the access to the heavenly mansion ( Revelation 3:7), He has the keys also of hell (the grave) and death ( Revelation 1:18). As Eliakim supplanted Shebna, so Christ the Heir of David’s throne shall supplant all the stewards who abuse their trust in God’s spiritual house, the church and the world (hereafter to become coextensive with the church): Hebrews 3:2-6. For the rest of Isaiah’s imagery as to Eliakim, see NAIL . see SHEBNA , when degraded, was “scribe” (i.e. secretary, remembrancer, keeping the king informed on important facts, historiographer) under Eliakim ( 2 Kings 18:37), who became “treasurer,” or as Hebrew coken ( Isaiah 22:15) from caakan , “to dwell” means, intimate friend of the king, dwelling on familiar terms, and “steward of the provisions” (compare 1 Chronicles 27:33). 2. KingJEHOIAKIM’ S original name. 3. Nehemiah 12:41. 4. Luke 3:26; Matthew 1:13. 5. Luke 3:30,31.

    ELIAM (“God is my people”) ( 2 Samuel 23:34). Son of see AHITHOPHEL and father of see BATHSHEBA (see both) ( 2 Samuel 11:3). Ammiel (by transposition) in 1 Chronicles 3:5, and Bathshua, non-Israelite names.

    Uriah was a Hittite ( Genesis 38:2,12; 1 Chronicles 2:3).

    ELIAS Elijah. Matthew 11:14, and in New Testament elsewhere. In Romans 11:2 margin “the Scripture saith in Elias,” i.e. in the Scripture portion that treats of Elijah.

    ELIASAPH 1. Numbers 1:14; 2:14; 7:42,47; 10:20. 2. Numbers 3:24.

    ELIASHIB 1. 1 Chronicles 24:12. 2. 1 Chronicles 3:24. 3. High priest when Nehemiah rebuilt the walls ( Nehemiah 3:1,20,21).

    Energetic in building the sheepgate, sanctifying and setting up its doors; but relationship to Tobiah the Ammonite outweighed regard for the sanctity of the temple. Nehemiah was angry with him for preparing a room therein for his pagan connection ( Nehemiah 13:4-7), in opposition to God’s prohibition ( Deuteronomy 23:3,4). His grandson too had married the pagan Horonite Sanballat’s daughter ( Nehemiah 13:28). Ungodly alliances are a snare to religious professors ( 2 Corinthians 6:14-18; Matthew 10:37). “Therefore (says Nehemiah) I chased him from me.

    Remember them, O my God, because they have defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood.” His genealogy is given ( Nehemiah 12:10,22), see Ezra 10:6. 4. Ezra 10:24. 5. Ezra 10:27. 6. Ezra 10:36.

    ELIATHAH 1 Chronicles 25:4,27.

    ELIDAD Son of Chislon; represented Benjamin in dividing Canaan ( Numbers 34:21.).

    ELIEL 1. 1 Chronicles 5:24. 2. 1 Chronicles 6:34. (See ELIAB 6, see ELIHU 2, probably the same). 3. 1 Chronicles 8:20,21. 4. 1 Chronicles 8:22. 5. 1 Chronicles 11:46. 6. 1 Chronicles 11:47. 7. 1 Chronicles 12:8,11. 8. 1 Chronicles 15:9-11. 9. 2 Chronicles 31:13.

    ELIENAI 1 Chronicles 8:20.

    ELIEZER (“my God a help”). 1. Genesis 15:2, “the steward of Abram’s house, E. of Damascus,” literally, “the son of the business,” or possession (i.e. heir) of my house.

    Entering Canaan by Damascus, Abram took thence his chief retainer, and adopted him in the absence of a son and heir. He was not “born in Abram’s house” as Genesis 15:3 of KJV represents in contradiction to Genesis 15:2 (unless it was while Abram was in Damascus); but, as Hebrew expresses, was “son of his house,” i.e. adopted as such, according to the paternal relations then subsisting between patriarchs and their servants. Thus, he discharged with fidelity, prayerful trust in Providence, and tact, the delicate commission of choosing a wife from his master’s connections for his master’s son Isaac. Justin (36:2) and Josephus (Ant. 1:7, sec. 2), from Nicholaus of Damascus, assert that Abraham reigned in Damascus. Eliezer’s prayer, “O Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray Thee send me good speed today, and show kindness unto my master;” his looking for a providential token to guide him; God’s gracious answer in fact; and his thanksgiving, “Blessed be the Lord God of my ... who has not left destitute my master of His mercy and His truth, I being in the way, the Lord led me:” are a sample of God’s special care for His people’s temporal concerns, and of the way to secure it (Genesis 24). 2. Moses and Zipporah’s second son; so-called “because, said Moses, the God of my father was my help ... from the sword of Pharaoh” ( Exodus 18:4; 1 Chronicles 23:15,17). Remained with Jethro his grandfather when Moses returned to Egypt. Zipporah after going part of the way with him was sent back by Moses ( Exodus 4:18,24-26; 18:2, etc.). Jethro took Zipporah and Gershom and Eliezer to Moses in the wilderness, upon hearing of the exodus. Had one son, Rehabiah, to whom were born very many sons ( 1 Chronicles 23:17; 26:25,26). see SHELOMITH was his descendant. 3. 1 Chronicles 7:8. 4. 1 Chronicles 15:24. 5. 1 Chronicles 27:16. 6. Dodavah’s son, of Mareshah in Judah ( 2 Chronicles 20:35-37).

    Prophesied against Jehoshaphat that “the Lord had broken (at Ezion Geber) his works” (i.e. his ships of Tarshish designed to go to Ophir for gold) for joining himself with Ahaziah king of Israel “who did very wickedly” ( 1 Kings 22:49). On Ahaziah’s proposing a second joint expedition, Jehoshaphat taught by bitter experience ( 2 Corinthians 6:14-18; Revelation 18:4) refused. The names suggest that possibly he was sprung from Eleazer son of Dodo ( 2 Samuel 23:9), one of David’s three mighties. 7. A “chief” and “man of understanding” whom Ezra sent to Iddo at Casiphia in order to bring the Nethinim, as minister for the house of God ( Ezra 8:16). 8. Ezra 10:18,23,31. 9. Luke 3:29.

    ELIHOENAI Ezra 8:4.

    ELIHOREPH 1 Kings 4:3.

    ELIHU (“God is Jehovah”). 1. Son of Barachel (= “God blesses”; the names indicating the piety of the family and their separation from idolatry) the Buzite (Buz being a region of Arabia Deserta, Jeremiah 25:23, called from Buz son of Nahor, Abraham’s brother), of the kindred of Ram (probably Aram, nephew of Buz): Job 32:2. He is the main human solver of the problem of the book, which ultimately is resolved, by Jehovah’s appearance, into a question of His absolute sovereignty that cannot err. Elihu’s reasoning is not condemned, as is that of the three elder friends and previous speakers, for whom and not for Elihu Job is directed to sacrifice and intercede [see JOB ]. 2. Son of Tohu, ancestor of Samuel ( 1 Samuel 1:1);ELIEL in Chronicles 6:34;ELIAB 1 Chronicles 6:27. 3. A captain of the thousands of Manasseh ( 1 Chronicles 12:20).

    Followed David to Ziklag after he left the Philistines before the battle of Gilboa, and aided him against the plundering Amalekites ( 1 Samuel 30:1,9,10; 1 Chronicles 12:20,21). 4. A Korhite Levite in David’s time, door-keeper of the house of Jehovah, son of Shemaiah, of Obed-Edom’s family ( 1 Chronicles 26:6-8), men of strength for service.

    ELIJAH (“God-Jehovah”) ( 1 Kings 17:1, etc.). “The Tishbite, of the inhabitants of Gilead.” No town of the name has been discovered; some explain it as “Converter.” His name and designation mark his one grand mission, to bring his apostate people back to Jehovah as THE true God; compare Kings 18:39 with Malachi 4:5,6. In contrast to the detailed genealogy of Samuel, Elisha, and other prophets, Elijah abruptly appears, like Melchizedek in the patriarchal dispensation, without father or mother named, his exact locality unknown; in order that attention should be wholly fixed on his errand from heaven to overthrow Baal and Asherah (the licentious Venus) worship in Israel. This idolatry had been introduced by see AHAB and his idolatrous wife, Ethbaal’s daughter Jezebel (in violation of the first, commandment), as if the past sin of Israel were not enough, and as if it were “a light thing to walk in the sins of Jeroboam,” namely, the worship of Jehovah under the symbol of a calf [see AARON ], in violation of the second commandment. Ahab and his party represented Baal and Jehovah as essentially the same God, in order to reconcile the people to this further and extreme step in idolatry; compare 1 Kings 18:21; Hosea 2:16.

    Elijah’s work was to confound these sophisms and vindicate Jehovah’s claim to be God ALONE, to the exclusion of all idols. Therefore, he suddenly comes forth before Ahab, the apostate king, announcing in Jehovah’s name “As the Lord God of Israel liveth (as contrasted with the dead idols which Israel worshipped) before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” The shutting up of heaven at the prophet’s word was, Jehovah’s vindication of His sole Godhead; for Baal (though professedly the god of the sky)and his prophets could not open heaven and give showers ( Jeremiah 14:22). The socalled god of nature shall be shown to have no power over nature: Jehovah is its SOLE Lord. Elijah’s “effectual” prayer, not recorded in 1 Kings but in James 5:17, was what moved God to withhold rain for three years and a half; doubtless, Elijah’s reason for the prayer was jealousy for the Lord God ( 1 Kings 19:10,14), in order that Jehovah’s chastening might lead the people to repentance. In “standing before the Lord” he assumed the position of a Levitical priest ( Deuteronomy 10:8), for in Israel the Levitical priesthood retained in Judah had been set aside, and the prophets were raised up to minister in their stead, and witness by word and deed before Jehovah against the prevailing apostasy. His departure was as sudden as his appearance. Partaking of the ruggedness of his half civilized native Gilead bordering on the desert, and in uncouth rough attire, “hairy ( 2 Kings 1:8, Hebrew: “lord of hair”) and with a girdle of leather about his loins,” he comes and goes with the suddenness of the modern Bedouin of the same region. His “mantle,” ‘adereth , of sheepskin, was assumed by Elisha his successor, and gave the pattern for the “hairy” cloak which afterwards became a prophet’s conventional garb ( Zechariah 13:4, “rough garment”). His powers of endurance were such as the highlands of Gilead would train, and proved of service to him in his after life of hardship ( 1 Kings 18:46). His burning zeal, bluntness of address, fearlessness of man, were nurtured in lonely communion with God, away from the polluting court, amidst his native wilds.

    After delivering his bold message to Ahab, by God’s warning, he fled to his hiding place at see CHERITH , a torrent bed E. of Jordan (or else, as many think, the wady Kelt near Jericho), beyond Ahab’s reach, where the ravens miraculously fed him with “bread and flesh in the morning ... bread and flesh in the evening.” Carnivorous birds themselves, they lose their ravenous nature to minister to God’s servant, for God can make the most unlikely instruments minister to His saints. It was probably at this time that Jezebel, foiled in her deadly purpose against Elijah, “cut off Jehovah’s prophets” ( 1 Kings 18:4; 19:2). The brook having dried up after a year’s stay he retreated next to Zarephath or Sarepta, between Tyre and Sidon, where least of all, in Jezebel’s native region, his enemies would have suspected him to lie hid. But apostates, as Israel, are more bigoted than original idolaters as the Phoenicians. From Joshua 19:28 we learn Zarephath belonged to Asher; and in Deuteronomy 33:24 Moses saith, “let Asher dip his foot in oil.” At the end of a three and a half years of famine, if oil was to be found anywhere, it would be here, an undesigned coincidence and mark of genuineness. At God’s command, in the confidence of faith, he moves for relief to this unpromising quarter. Here he was the first “apostle” to the Gentiles ( Luke 4:26); a poor widow, the most unlikely to give relief, at his bidding making a cake for him with her last handful of meal and a little oil, her all, and a few gathered sticks for fuel; like the widow in the New Testament giving her two mites, not reserving even one,: nor thinking, what shall I have for my next meal? ( Luke 21:2.) So making God’s will her first concern, her own necessary food was “added” to her ( Matthew 6:33; Isaiah 33:16; Psalm 37:19; Jeremiah 37:21); “the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the oil fail until the day that the Lord sent rain upon the earth.” Blessed in that she believed, she by her example strengthened Elijah’s faith in God as able to fulfill His word, where all seemed hopeless to man’s eye. Her strong faith, as is God’s way; He further tried more severely. Her son fell sick, and “his sickness was so sore that no breath was left in him.” Her trial brought her sins up before her, and she regarded herself punished as unworthy of so holy a man’s presence with her. But he restored her son by stretching himself upon the child thrice (as though his body were the medium for God’s power to enter the dead child), and crying to the Lord; hereby new spiritual life also was imparted to herself, as she said, “by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.”

    Toward the close of the three and a half years of famine, when it attacked Samaria the capital, Ahab directed his governor of the palace, the Godfearing Obadiah who had saved and fed a hundred prophets in a cave, to go in one direction and seek some grass to save if possible the horses and mules, while he himself went in the opposite direction for the same purpose. Matters must have come to a crisis, when the king set out in person on such an errand. It was at this juncture, after upward of two years’ sojourn at Zarephath, Elijah by God’s command goes to show himself to Ahab. Overcoming the awestruck Obadiah’s fear, lest, when he should tell the king, Behold Elijah is here, meanwhile the Spirit should carry him away, Elijah, whom Ahab’s servants had been seeking everywhere in vain for three years, now suddenly stands before Ahab with stern dignity. He hurls back on the king himself the charge of being, like another Achan, the troubler of Israel; “I have not, troubled Israel, but thou and thy father’s house, in that ye have spoken the commandments of Jehovah, and thou hast followed Baalim.” On see CARMEL the issue was tried between Jehovah and Baal, there being on one side Baal’s prophets with the 400 of Asherah (see ASHTORETH , “the groves”), who ate at Jezebel’s table under the queen’s special patronage; on the other side Jehovah’s sole representative, in his startling costume, but with dignified mien. Amidst Elijah’s ironical jeers they cried, and gashed themselves, in vain repetitions praying from morning until noon for fire from their god Baal, the sun god and god of fire (!), and leaped upon (or up and down at) the altar. Repairing Jehovah’s ruined altar (the former sanctity of which was seemingly the reason for his choice of Carmel) with 12 stones to represent the tribes of all Israel, and calling upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to let it be known that He is the Lord God, he brought down by prayer fire from heaven consuming the sacrifice, wood, stones, and dust, and licking up the water in the trench. The idolatrous prophets were slain at the Brook Kishon, idolatry being visited according to the law with the penalty of high treason against God the king of the national theocracy ( Deuteronomy 13:9-11,15; 18:20). Then upon the nation’s penitent confession of God follows God’s removal of the national judgment. The rain, beginning with the small hand-like cloud, and increasing until the whole sky became black ( Luke 12:54; 13:19), returned as it had gone, in answer to Elijah’s effectual prayer, which teaches us to not only pray but also wait ( James 5:17,18; 1 Kings 18:41-45). Ahab rides in his chariot across the plain 16 miles to Jezreel, in haste lest the rainflood of the Kishon should make the Esdraelon or Jezreel plain impassable with mud; Elijah, with Spirit-imparted strength from “the hand of the Lord upon” him, running before, but no further than the entrance of the city, for he shrank from the contamination of the court and its luxuries.

    Jezebel’s fury upon hearing of the slaughter of her favorite prophets knew no bounds: “so let the gods do to me and more also, if I make not. thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow” ( 1 Kings 19:2). Elijah fled for his life to Beersheba of Judah, with one attendant, and leaving him there went a day’s journey into the wilderness. His not having heretofore moved to the neighboring land of godly Jehoshaphat, and his now fleeing to its most southerly town, farthest from Ahab’s dominion, and thence into the desert, at first sight seems strange. But upon closer search into Scripture it is an undesigned propriety that he avoids the land of the king whose one grand error was his marrying his son Jehoram to Athaliah, Ahab’s and Jezebel’s daughter, at least as early as the sixth or seventh year of Jehoshaphat and the tenth or eleventh of Ahab (Blunt’s Undesigned Coincidences); thereby he became so closely allied to the ungodly Ahab that at the Ramoth Gilead expedition he said to the latter, “I am as thou art, my people as thy people” ( 1 Kings 22:4). In this flight Elijah’s spirit of faith temporarily gave way. After the excitement of the victory over the Baal priests, and the nervous tension which under God’s mighty hand sustained him in running to Jezreel, there ensued a reaction physically and an overwhelming depression of mind; for the hope which had seemed so bright at Carmel, of a national repentance and return to God, the one ruling desire of his soul, was apparently blighted; his labors seemed lost; the throne of iniquity unshaken; and hope deferred made his heart sick. Sitting under a juniper (retem , rather broom) he cried in deep despondency: “It, is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” God, with tender considerateness, first relieved his physical needs, by sending to his exhausted frame “tired nature’s kind restorer, balmy sleep,” and then, by His angel, food; and only when nature was refreshed proceeds to teach him spiritually the lesson he needed. By God’s command, “in the strength of that meat” (the supernatural being based on the natural groundwork) he went, Moses like, 40 days and 40 nights unto a cave at Horeb where he “lodged” for the night (Hebrew lun ). It was the same wilderness which received Moses fleeing from Pharaoh, and Elijah now fleeing from Ahab, and lastly Paul escaping from the Judaic bondage of ritualism. The lonely wilderness and awful rocks of Sinai were best fitted to draw the spirit off from the depressing influences of man’s world and to raise it up to near communion with God. “He sought the ancient sanctuary connected with the holiest, grandest memories of mankind, that his spiritual longings might be gratified, that he might have the deepest sense of the greatness and nearness of God. He wished to be brought down from the soft luxuriant secondary formations of human religion [the halting between two opinions, between the luxurious Baal worship and the uncompromising holy worship of Jehovah] to the primary stratification of God’s religion ... to the naked, rugged, unyielding granite of the law” (Macmillan, The Garden and City).

    Jehovah there said, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” thou whose name implies thy calling to witness for God Jehovah, away from the court and people whom thou wast called to reprove! Elijah pleads his “jealousy for Jehovah God of hosts,” and that with all his zeal he is left. the sole worshipper of Jehovah, and that even his life they seek to take away. God directs him to “go forth and stand upon the mountain before the Lord,” as Moses did when “the Lord passed by.” There by the grand voice of nature, the strong wind rending the rocks, the earthquake, and the fire, (in none of which, though emanating from God, did He reveal Himself to Elijah,) and lastly by “a still small voice,” God taught the impatient and desponding prophet that it is not by astounding miracles such as the fire that consumed the sacrifice, nor by the wind and earthquake wherewith God might have swept away the guilty nation, but by the still small voice of God’s Spirit in the conscience, that Jehovah savingly reveals Himself, and a revival of true religion is to be expected. Those astounding phenomena prepared the way for this, God’s immediate revelation to the heart. Miracles sound the great bell of nature to call attention; but the Spirit is God’s voice to the soul.

    Sternness hardens; love alone melts. A John the Baptist, Elijah’s antitype, the last representative of the Sinaitic law, must be followed by the Messiah and His Spirit speaking in the winning tones of Matthew 11:29. The still small voice constrained Elijah to wrap his face in his mantle; compare Moses, Exodus 3:6; Isaiah 6:2. A second time to the same question he gives the same reply, but in a meeker spirit. Jehovah therefore cheers him amidst despondency, by giving him work still to do for His name, a sure token that He is pleased with his past work: “Go, return ... to the wilderness of Damascus, and anoint Hazael king over Syria, Jehu ... over Israel, and Elisha ... prophet in thy room. Yet (adds the Lord to cure his depression by showing him his witness for God was not lost, but had strengthened in faith many a secret worshipper) I have left Me 7,000 in Israel who have not bowed unto Baal,” etc. Elisha he first sought out and found in Abel Meholah in the valley of the Jordan on his way northward, for spiritual companionship was his first object of yearning. Casting his mantle on him as the sign of a call, he was followed by see ELISHA , who thenceforth became his minister, and who executed subsequently the former two commands.

    Apostasy from God begets injustice toward man. Puffed up with the success of his war with Syria, and forgetting the Lord who had given him victory (1 Kings 20), Ahab by Jezebel’s wicked hardihood, after vainly trying to get from see NABOTH the inheritance of his fathers, had him and his sons ( 2 Kings 9:26, compare Joshua 7:24) slain for falsely alleged blasphemy, and seized his property as that of a criminal forfeited to the crown; the elders of Jezreel lending themselves to be Jezebel’s ready instruments. With Jehu and Bidkar his retinue riding behind, he proceeded to take possession of the coveted vineyard on the following day (compare “yesterday,” ‘emesh , “yesternight,” the mock trial and murder of Naboth having taken place the day before); but, like a terrible apparition, the first person he meets there is the enemy of his wickedness, whom his conscience quails before, more than before all other foes. “Hast thou found me (compare Numbers 32:23) O mine enemy? .... I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself (as a captive slave bound) to work evil,” etc.

    The dogs should lick his blood “in the place” where they licked Naboth’s (fulfilled on his son Jehoram, Ahab’s repentance causing judgment to be deferred); Jezebel and Ahab’s posterity should be (what Orientals regard with especial horror) the food of dogs and birds ( 1 Kings 21:19-24).

    Twenty years later Jehu remembered the very words of the curse, so terrible was the impression made by the scene, and fulfilled his part of it ( 2 Kings 9:7-10,25,26,33-37).

    Three years later, part of the judgment foretold came to pass upon Ahab, whose blood, after his fall in the battle of Ramoth Gilead, the dogs licked up while his chariot was being washed in the pool of Samaria. His successor Ahaziah after a two years reign, during which Moab rebelled, fell from a lattice and lay sick. Sending to consult concerning his recovery the Philistine oracle of Baalzebub at Ekron, he learned from his messengers that a man met them saying, “Is it not because there is not a God in Israel that thou sendest to inquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? therefore thou shalt not come down, .... but shalt surely die” ( 2 Kings 1:6). As usual, Elijah’s appearance was sudden and startling, and he stands forth as vindicating Jehovah’s honor’ before the elect nation. Ahaziah, with his mother’s idol-mad vindictiveness, sent a captain with fifty to arrest this “lord of hair” (Hebrew text: 2 Kings 1:8) whom he at once guessed to be Elijah. Emerging from some recess of Carmel and taking his seat on “the hill” or “mount” (Hebrew), he thence met the captain’s demand, “Man of God, the king saith, come down,” with “If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty.” So it came to pass.

    Again the same occurred. The third, however, escaped by begging him to hold his life precious and to spare him. Elijah went down, under God’s promised protection, and spoke the same message of death to the king in person as he had previously spoken to the king’s messenger. This was his last interview with the house of Ahab, and his last witness against Baal worship.

    The severity of the judgment by fire is due to the greatness of the guilt of the Israelite king and his minions who strove against God Himself in the person of His prophet, and hardened themselves in idolatry, which was high treason against God and incurred the penalty of death under the theocracy. It is true the Lord Jesus reproved the fiery zeal of James and John, “the sons of thunder,” as ignorant of the true spirit of His disciples, when they wished like Elias to call down fire to consume the Samaritans who would not receive Him. But the cases are distinct. He was not yet revealed to the half-pagan Samaritans as clearly as Jehovah had been through Elijah to Israel, the elect nation. His life was not sought by the Samaritans as Elijah’s was by Israel’s king and his minions. Moreover, the temporal penalties of the theocracy, ordained by God for the time, were in our Lord’s days giving place to the antitypes which are abiding.

    Shortly afterward Elijah wrote a letter (miqtab ) which came subsequently “to Joram,” son of the pious Jehoshaphat: “Thus saith the Lord God of David thy father (of whom thou art proving thyself so unworthy a successor), because thou hast not walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat thy father, nor... of Asa, king of Judah, but hast walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and hast made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to go a whoring like ... the house of Ahab, and hast slain (Elijah writes foreseeing the murder, for his translation was before Jehoshaphat’s death, 2 Kings 3:11, after which was the murder) the brethren of thy father’s house which were better than thyself, behold with a great plague will the Lord smite thy people, thy children, thy wives, and all thy goods, and thou shalt have great sickness ... until thy bowels fall out” (2 Chronicles 21). Already in Elijah’s lifetime Joram had begun to reign jointly with his father Jehoshaphat ( Kings 8:16,18) and had betrayed his evil spirit which was fostered by Athaliah his wife, Ahab’s daughter. Jehoshaphat in his lifetime, with worldly prudence, while giving the throne to Joram, gave Joram’s brethren “great gifts and fenced cities.” But Elijah discerned in Joram the covetous and murderous spirit which would frustrate all Jehoshaphat’s forethought, the fatal result of the latter’s carnal policy in forming marriage alliance with wicked Ahab. Therefore, as Elijah had committed to Elisha the duty laid on himself by God of foretelling to Hazael his elevation to the Syrian throne (Elisha being Elijah revived in spirit), so Elijah committed to him the writing which would come after Elijah’s translation to Joram with all the solemnity of a message from Elijah in the unseen world to condemn the murder when perpetrated which Elijah foresaw he would perpetrate. The style is peculiarly Elijah’s, and distinct from the narrative context. So Isaiah foretold concerning Cyrus’ future kingdom (Isaiah 44--45); and Ahijah concerning Josiah ( 1 Kings 13:2). Fairbairn makes it be called “a letter from Elijah” because he was ideal head of the school of prophecy from which it emanated, and his spirit still rested upon Elisha. But the language, 2 Chronicles 21:12, implies in some stricter sense it was Elijah’s writing delivered by Elisha, his successor, to Joram. But see Lord A. C. Hervey’s view [JEHORAM].

    Elijah’s ministry was now drawing to its close. Symptoms appear of his work beginning to act on the nation, in the increased boldness of other prophets to the king’s face, besides Elijah himself: e.g. 1 Kings 20:35,36; again, Micaiah, 1 Kings 22. Hence, we find not less than fifty called “sons of strength” at Elijah’s translation ( 2 Kings 2:3,7); and these settled at Bethel, one of the two head quarters of idolatry. To these sons of the prophets, as well as to Elisha, it was revealed that their master Elijah was about to be caught up front them. Elijah sought that privacy which he felt most suitable to the coming solemn scene; but Elisha would not leave him. To Gilgal (the one on the W. border of the Ephraimite hills), Bethel, and Jericho successively, by the Lord’s mission, Elijah went, giving probably parting counsels to the prophets’ schools in those places. Finally, after parting asunder the Jordan with his mantle, he gave Elisha leave to ask what he would, and having promised that he should have a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, a chariot and horses of fire parted the two, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. The “hardness” of Elisha’s request, and its granting being dependent on his seeing Elijah ascend, imply that it is to be got from God not ( Matthew 19:26) man; that therefore he must look up to Him who was about to translate Elijah, not to Elijah himself. The “double portion” is not “double” what Elijah had, for Elisha had not tidal; but, as the firstborn son and heir received two portions, and the other children but one, of the father’s goods ( Deuteronomy 21:17), so Elisha, as Elijah’s adopted son, begs a preeminent portion of Elijah’s spirit, of which all the other “sons of the prophets” should have their share (Grotius); compare Deuteronomy 21:15. But the comparison in the context is not with other prophets but with Elijah. Double, literally, “a mouth of two,” is probably used generally for the spirit in large or increased measure, the spirit of prophecy and of miracles. Elisha performed double as many miracles, namely, 16 as compared with Elijah’s eight; and the miracles of a like kind to Elijah’s; compare 1 Kings 17:17-24 with 2 Kings 4:29-37; 1 Kings 17:16 with 2 Kings 4:1-7. Elisha, when getting his choice, asked not for gains, honors, or pleasures, but for spiritual gifts, with a view, not to his own glory, but to the glory of God and the edification of the church. Seeing that the national evils were so crying, he sought the only remedy, an increased measure of the Spirit, whose power had already began somewhat to improve the state of the nation. As Elijah’s ascension was the forerunner of Elisha’s possessing an influence such as Elijah had not, Elisha becoming the honored adviser of kings whereas Elijah had been their terror, Elisha on his deathbed being recognized as “the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof” by king Joash just as Elijah had been by Elisha, so Christ’s ascension was the means of obtaining for the church the Holy Spirit in full measure, whereby more souls were gathered in than by Jesus’ bodily presence ( John 16:6-15; Ephesians 4:8-14).

    When the Old Testament canon was being closed, Malachi, its last prophet, threw a ray over the dark period of 400 years that intervened until the New Testament return of revelation, by announcing, “Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Our Lord declares that John the Baptist was the Elias to come ( Matthew 11:14; 17:12). This is explained in Luke 1:11,17, which refers to Malachi 4:5,6; “he shall go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers (Jacob, Levi, Moses, Elijah, Malachi 1:2; 2:4,6; 3:3,4; 4:4, who had been alienated as it were by their children’s apostasy) to the children (made penitent through John’s ministry), and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.” John was an Elijah, but not the Elijah, from whence to the query ( John 1:21), “Art thou Elias?” he answered, “I am not.” “Art thou that prophet?” “No.”

    Elijah is called by Malachi “the prophet,” not the Tishbite, as he here represents the whole series of prophets culminating in the greatest, John (though he performed no miracles as Elijah). The Jews always understood a literal Elijah, and said, “Messiah must be anointed by Elijah.” As there is a second consummating advent of Messiah, so also of His forerunner (possibly in person as at the transfiguration, Matthew 17:3, even after which He said ( Matthew 17:11), “Elias shall first come and restore all things,” namely, at “the times of restitution of all things”), possibly a prophet clothed with Elijah’s miraculous power of inflicting judgments, which John had not. The miracles foretold of the two witnesses ( Revelation 11:4,5, “fire out of their mouth,” i.e. at, their word; <111701> Kings 17:1; 2 Kings 1:10; “power to shut heaven that it rain not,” James 5:17; Luke 4:25; and “to turn the waters to blood and smite the earth with all plagues “) are the very ones characteristic of Moses and Elijah. The forerunning “the great and dreadful day of Jehovah” can only exhaustively refer to Messiah’s second coming, preceded by a fuller manifestation of Elijah than that of John before Messiah’s first coming.

    Moses and Elijah’s appearance at the transfiguration in glorified bodies is a sample of the coming transfiguration (Moses, buried by the Lord, of the sleeping saints; and Elijah, translated without death, of living saints) and of their reign with Christ over the earth in glorified bodies, as Peter, James, and John are a sample of the nations in the flesh about to be reigned over.

    The subject of Moses’ and Elijah’s discourse with Jesus on the mount was His decease, for this is the grand center to which the law as represented by Moses, and the prophets represented by Elijah, converge. Elijah’s translation was God’s witness for His faithful servant to the apostate postdiluvial world, as Enoch’s to the antediluvial, against their unbelief. God’s voice, “This is My beloved Son, hear Him,” attests that the servants must bow to the Son for whose coming they prepared the way (compare Revelation 19:10 end). Rome’s barefooted Carmelites have many absurd traditions as to the derivation of their order from Elijah himself, and as to the “cloud out of the sea” typifying the Virgin Mary, to whom a chapel is dedicated on the imaginary site of Elijah’s seeing the cloud!

    ELIKA 2 Samuel 23:25.

    ELIM (“strong trees”). Probably the lovely valley of Gharandel. In the rainy season a torrent flows through to the Red Sea. The water is in most seasons good, and even the best on the journey from Cairo to Sinai. Israel found at Elim 12 wells (i.e. natural springs) and 70 palmtrees, and encamped by the waters; their stage next after Marah, now Huwara. A few palms still remain, dwarfs and trunkless, gnarled tamarisks and acacias, the sole relics of the grove that once flourished on this oasis of the W. side of the peninsula. Israel stayed here a long time; for they did not reach the wilderness until two and a half months after leaving Suez, finding water and pasture abundant in the intermediate district. Laborde makes wady Useit to be Elim, the second wady which Israel going from N.W. to S.E. along the coast would reach after Gharandel. Lepsius makes the fourth wady, reached by Israel, namely, wady Shubeikeh, in its lower part Taiyibeh, to be Elim ( Exodus 15:27; Numbers 33:9.)

    ELIMELECH (“my God is king”). Of the family of Hezron of Judah, kinsman of Boaz, residing in Bethlehem Ephratah under the judges. In a famine he and his wife Naomi, with their two sons, went to Moab [see BOAZ , see RUTH ], where he and his sons died, and from whence see NAOMI returned a childless widow with Ruth.

    ELIOENAI (“toward Jehovah my eyes are turned”). 1. 1 Chronicles 7:8. 2. 1 Chronicles 4:36. 3. 1 Chronicles 26:3. 4. In the seventh generation from Zerubbabel, contemporary with Alexander the Great, but the Hebrew ( 1 Chronicles 3:23,24) is probably an error, and Shemaiah, grandfather of Elioenai and father of Neariah, Elioenai’s father, is probably Shimei, Zerubbabel’s brother. 5. Ezra. 10:22; compare Nehemiah 12:41. 6. Ezra 10:27; Nehemiah 7:13; 10:14.

    ELIPHAL 1 Chronicles 11:35,ELIPHELET 2 Samuel 23.

    ELIPHALET The last of David’s thirteen sons, after his settlement at Jerusalem ( Samuel 5:16; 1 Chronicles 14:5-7,ELIPHELET 1 Chronicles 3:8 =\parELPALET,PHALTIEL.

    ELIPHAZ (“God for strength”). 1. Esau’s son by Adah; Teman’s father ( Genesis 36:4; 1 Chronicles 1:35,36). 2. First of Job’s three friends, the “Temanite,” sprung from the former Eliphaz Teman answers to Edom ( Jeremiah 49:20), part of Arabia Petraea. Calmer and less vehement against Job than Bildad and Zophar, but condemned at the end for the same error, in spite. of the facts of daily life, that God’s retributions here are complete, and that severe trial proved Job’s past piety to be but hypocrisy. God’s unapproachable majesty and purity are well get forth by him (Job 4; 15:14-16).

    ELIPHELEH Porter, rather gatekeeper ( 1 Chronicles 15:18,21).

    ELIPHELET [See ELIPHALET .] 1. 2 Samuel 23:34. 2. 1 Chronicles 8:39. 3. 1 Chronicles 8:13. 4. 1 Chronicles 10:33.

    ELISABETH Hebrew:ELISHEBA (Aaron’s wife) = swearing by God ( Exodus 6:23).

    Zaeharias’ wife; John the Baptist’s mother. Of the daughters of Aaron; related (“cousin”) to the Virgin Mary ( Luke 1:5,36). The first to bless Mary as “the mother of her Lord” ( Luke 1:40-45). Thus, our Lord, though not of the priestly tribe, was related to it; He fulfilled it, in His distinct priesthood of the Melchizedek order. Like her husband, Elisabeth was “righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.”

    ELISHA (God for salvation).ELISEUS in New Testament. Shaphat’s son, of Abel Meholah = “meadow of the dance,” in the Jordan valley. [See his call: ELIJAH.] He was engaged at field work,12 yoke before him, i.e. himself with the 12th while the other 11 were in other parts of the field; or, as land was measured by “yokes of oxen,” he had plowed land to the extent of nearly 12 yokes, and was finishing the 12th: either view marks his being a man of substance. Hengstenberg regards the twelve as marking him the prophet of the whole covenant nation, not merely of the ten tribes.

    Whether formally “anointed” with oil or not, he was really anointed with the Spirit, and duly called by his predecessor to the prophetic office by Elijah’s crossing over, and hastily throwing upon him the rough mantle, the token of investiture, and then going as quickly as he came. Elisha was one to act at once on God’s first call, at all costs. So bidding farewell to father and mother (contrast Matthew 8:21,22: “suffer me first to go and (tend my father until his death, and then) bury my father”; and Luke 9:61,62, where the “bidding farewell” involved in that particular case a division of heart between home relations and Christ, Luke 14:26; Matthew 10:37; Philippians 3:13), and slaying a yoke of oxen and boiling the flesh with the wooden instruments (compare 2 Samuel 24:22), a token of giving up all for the Lord’s sake, he ministered to Elijah henceforth as Joshua did to Moses. His ministry is once described, “Elisha who poured water on the hands of Elijah.” He was subordinate; so the sons of the prophets represent it: “Jehovah will take away thy master (Elijah) from thy head” ( 2 Kings 2:3). Yet his ministry made an advance upon that of his master. The mission of Eli-jah, as his name implied, was to bring Israel to confess that Jehovah alone is God (‘Eel ); Elisha further taught them, as his name implies, that Jehovah if so confessed would prove the salvation of His people. Hence, Elisha’s work is that of quiet beneficence; Elijah’s that of judicial sternness upon all rebels against Jehovah. Contrast 1 Kings 18:40 with 2 Kings 5:18,19. Elisha, the healer, fitly comes after Elijah, the destroyer. The latter presents himself with the announcement, “as Jehovah God of Israel liveth ... there shall not be dew nor rain these years”: the first miracle of the former is, “thus saith Jehovah, I have healed these waters (by casting in salt, the symbol of grace and incorruption), there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land.” The large spring N.W. of the present town of Jericho is the traditional object of the cure (Ain-es- Sultan). Elijah, like a Bedouin, delighted in the desert, the heights of Carmel, and the caves of Horeb, and avoided cities. Elisha on the contrary frequented the haunts of civilization, Jericho ( 2 Kings 2:18), Samaria ( 2 Kings 2:25), and Dothan ( 2 Kings 6:13), where he had a house with “doors” and “windows” 2 Kings 4:3,9,24; 6:32; 13:17). He wore the ordinary Israelite garment, and instead of being shunned by kings for sternness, he possessed considerable influence with the king and the “captain of the host” ( 2 Kings 4:13).

    At times he could be as fiery in indignation against the apostate kings of Israel as was his predecessor ( 2 Kings 3:13,14), but even then he yields himself to the soothing strains of a minstrel for the godly Jehoshaphat’s sake, and foretells that the ditches which he directs to be made should be filled with water (the want of which was then being sorely felt), coming by the way of Edom; this took place at the S.E. end of the Dead Sea. the route of the confederates Judah. Israel, and Edom, in order to invade the rebelling Moabite king Mesha from the eastern side, since he was (according to the Moabite stone) carrying all before him in the N.W. Like Elijah, he conquered the idols on their own ground, performing without fee the cures for which Beelzebub of Ekron was sought in vain.

    At Bethel, on his way from Jericho to Carmel ( 2 Kings 2:23), where he had been with Elijah ( 2 Kings 2:2), he was met by “young men” (narim , not “little children”), idolaters or infidels, who, probably at the prompting of Baal’s prophets in that stronghold of his worship sneered at the report of Elijah’s ascension: “Go up” like thy master, said they, “thou bald head” (qereach , i.e., with hair short at the back of the head, in contrast with Elijah’s shaggy locks flowing over his shoulders; gibeach is the term for bald in front). Keil understands, however, “small boys” to have mocked his natural baldness at the back of his head (not with old age, for he lived until 50 years later, 2 Kings 13:14). The God-hating spirit which prevailed at calf-worshipping Bethel betrayed itself in these boys, who insulted the prophet of Jehovah knowingly. The profanity of the parents, whose guilt the profane children filled the measure of, was punished in the latter, that the death of the sons might constrain the fathers to fear the Lord since they would not love Him, and to feel the fatal effects recoiling on themselves of instigating their children to blaspheme ( Exodus 20:5). Elisha, not in personal revenge but as Jehovah’s minister, by God’s inspiration, pronounced their doom. Two Syrian she-bears (corresponding to the Arctic bear of northern Europe) “tare forty-two of them” (compare and contrast Luke 9:54,55).

    A widow (Obadiah’s widow, according to Josephus), when the creditor threatened to take her sons as bondmen, cried to Elisha for help on the ground of her deceased husband’s piety. Elisha directed her to borrow empty vessels, and from her one remaining pot of oil to fill them all, shutting the door upon herself and her sons who brought her the vessels.

    Only when there was no vessel left to fill was the miraculous supply of oil stayed. A type of prayer, with “shut doors” ( Matthew 6:6), which brings down supplies of grace so long as we and ours have hearts open to receive it ( Psalm 81:10; Ephesians 3:20). Only when Abraham ceased to ask did God cease to grant (Genesis 18).

    On his way from Gilgal (not the one which was near Jericho, but N. of Lydda, now Jiljilieh) to Carmel, Elisha stayed at Shunem in Issachar, now Solam, three miles N. of Jezreel, on the southern slopes of Jebel ed Duhy, the little Hermon. “A great woman” (in every sense: means, largeness of heart, humility, contentment) was his hostess, and with her husband’s consent provided for him a little chamber with bed, table, stool, and candlestick, so that he might in passing always “turn in there.” In reward he offered to use his interest for her with the king or the captain of the host; with true magnanimity which seeks not great things for self ( Jeremiah 45:5), she replied, “I dwell among mine own people.” At Gehazi’s suggestion without her solicitation, Elisha promises from God that she should have what was the greatest joy to an Israelite wife, a son. When he was old enough to go out with his father, a sunstroke in the harvest field caused his death. The mother, inferring from God’s extraordinary and unsought gift of the child to her, that it could not be God’s design to snatch him from her for ever, and remembering that Elijah had restored the widow’s son at Zarephath, mounted her she-ass (hathon , esteemed swifter than the he-ass), and having left her son on the bed of the man of God, without telling her husband of the death, rode 15 miles, four hours ride, to Carmel. There Elisha was wont to see her regularly at his services on the “new moon and sabbath.” Seeing her now approaching from a distance, Elisha sent Gehazi to meet her and ask, “Is it well with thee? ... with thy husband? ... with the child?” Her faith, hope, and resignation prompted the reply, “It is well.” Gehazi, like Jesus’ disciples ( Matthew 15:23; 19:13), would have thrust her away when she clasped Elisha’s feet (compare Matthew 28:9; Luke 7:38), but Elisha with sympathetic insight said, “Let her alone, for her soul is vexed within her, and Jehovah hath hid it from me.” A word from her was enough to reveal the child’s death, which with natural absence of mind amidst her grief she did not explicitly men. lion, “Did I desire a son from my lord?” Elisha sends on Gehazi with his staff; Gehazi is to salute none on the way, ‘like Jesus’ 70 sent before His face, but lays Elisha’s staff on the child’s face without effect. (So the law could not raise the dead in sins ( Romans 8:3; Galatians 3:21); Jesus Himself must come to do that.) Elisha, entering the room, shuts to the door ( Matthew 6:6), and there stretching himself twice on the child, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, and hands to hands (compare Acts 20:10; antitypically the dead stoner must come into contact with the living Jesus,1 John 1), after Elijah’s pattern, and praying to Jehovah, proved the omnipotence of prayer to quicken the dead; then he delivered the resuscitated son to the happy mother.

    In a time of dearth ( 2 Kings 4:38), perhaps the same as that in <120801> Kings 8:1,2, one of the sons of the prophets brought in a lap full of gourds or wild cucumbers, off a plant like a wild vine, the only food to be had; the effect in eating was such that one exclaimed, “There is death in the pot.”

    Elisha counteracted the effect by casting in meal. Next, a man of Baal Shalisha brings firstfruits (paid to the prophets in the absence of the lawful priests: Numbers 18:8,12; Deuteronomy 18:3,4), namely, 20 small loaves of new barley, and full green ears of grain roasted, esteemed a delicacy ( Leviticus 2:14; 23:14), in his garment (margin) or bag. In reply to his servitor’s unbelieving objection,” What, should I set this before an hundred men?” Elisha replied, “Give the people ... for thus saith Jehovah, They shall eat, and leave thereof”: a forerunner of Christ’s miracle of feeding more men with fewer loaves, preceded by like want of faith on the disciples’ part ( Luke 9:18-17; John 6:9-13), and followed by a like leaving of abundance, after the multitude were fed.

    Naaman’s cure follows. His leprosy was of the white kind, the most malignant ( 2 Kings 5:27). In Syria it did not, as in Israel, exclude from intercourse; and Naaman was “great” in the presence of his master, and honored as “a mighty man in valor,” because of being Jehovah’s instrument in giving Syria victory. But withal (as all human greatness has some drawback) he was a leper. A “little maid” of Israel, carried captive to Syria in a foray, and brought to wait on Naaman’s wife (so marvelously does God’s providence overrule evil to good, and make humble and small agents effect great good) was the honored instrument of informing Naaman of the prophet of God. A lesson to us that none should plead ( Matthew 25:24-30) inability to serve God and man in some form or another. Benhadad, with oriental absolutism, wrote as though the Israelite king could at will (compare Matthew 8:9) command Elisha’s services. At the same time he sent much gold, silver, and the rich raiments (lebush , robe of ceremony) of Damascus; as though “God’s gift may be purchased with money” ( Acts 8:20). Joram showed no less want of faith, than Benhadad showed want of religious knowledge. Had he believed as did the little maid his former subject, he would have felt that, though he was “not God to, kill and to make alive,” yet there was in the midst of the people one by whom God had both killed and made alive ( Deuteronomy 32:39). Elisha rectifies his error, sending a dignified message of reproof to the king, and desiring him to let Naaman come, and he should know “there is a prophet in Israel.” Naaman came with horses and chariots, not yet perceiving that true greatness lies not in earthly pomp and, wealth ( 2 Kings 5:1,9,11).

    Elisha, to teach him humility as the first step to any favor from God, sent a messenger, instead of coming in person to the door: “Go, wash in Jordan seven times.” But, like men offended at the simplicity of the gospel message of salvation, Naaman having expected a more ceremonial mode of cure, and despising Jordan in comparison with the magnificent waters of his own Damascus, went off in a rage. His slaves, however, suggested the reasonableness of obeying so easy a command, since had it been a “great” one he would have complied. The mode of cure was wisely designed to teach him to unlearn his false ideas of greatness. He dipped seven times as he was told, “and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child”; typifying the spiritual new birth through washing in the “fountain opened for uncleanness” ( Job 33:25; Zechariah 13:1; John 3:5). Elisha by refusing his presents shows that the minister of God is not influenced by filthy lucre ( 1 Timothy 3:3), as Naaman’s master had supposed ( Kings 5:5, compare Genesis 14:28). Naaman desires to take away two mules burden of earth, wherewith to make an altar to Jehovah of the holy land, a sensible memorial to remind him perpetually in his pagan country of Jehovah’ s past favor bestowed on him in Israel (compare Joshua 4:20,21, and the mediaeval campo santos). He further asked God’s pardon if, when in attendance on the Syrian king, he bowed in Rimmon’s temple as a mark of respect to his master’s religious feeling, not to the idol. Elisha, without sanctioning this compromise, but tacitly leaving his religious convictions to expand gradually, and in due time to east off the remains of idolatry still cleaving to him, bade him farewell with the customary “Go in peace.” So the Lord Jesus “spoke the word as they were able to hear it” ( Mark 4:33, compare Mark 8:23-25; John 16:12). Nothing is precipitately forced; principles planted in germ are left to their own silent development in due course.

    Gehazi’s covetousness stands in sad contrast to Elisha’s disinterestedness.

    The man of God’s servant is as faithless as the pagan Naaman’s servants were faithful; the highly privileged often fall far below the practice of those with scarcely any spiritual privileges whatever. He even makes it a merit not to “spare” a pagan, “this Syrian,” and dares to invoke God: “my master hath spared this Syrian ... but, as Jehovah liveth, I will take somewhat of him.” By lying he gains two talents and two changes of raiment from Naaman; but lying is of no avail before Elisha: “went not my heart with thee, when the man turned again from his chariot to meet thee? is it a time to receive money?” etc.; compare 1 Peter 4:3. If Gehazi must have Naaman’s money he shall have also Naaman’s leprosy, and that for ever. In this miracle too Elisha foreran the Lord Jesus, the cure of leprosy being exclusively God’s work. This must have been at least seven years after raising the Shunammite’s son ( 2 Kings 8:1-4).

    During Elisha’s residence at Jericho, the numbers of the sons of the prophets increasing, the place became “too strait” for them. So they removed to the Jordan, and there felled the trees densely growing on its banks. The iron axe-head, a borrowed one, fell into the water. By a stick cast in, Elisha raised the iron to swim. God teaches His children to trust Him in small as in greater difficulties. He who numbers our very hairs regards nothing as too small to be brought under His notice; “God can as easily make our hard, heavy hearts, sunk down in the world’s mud, to float upon life’s stream and see heaven again” (Trapp).

    Benhadad, while Elisha resided at Dothan, half-way between Samaria and Jezreel, tried to surprise Israel from different points, but was foiled by Elisha warning the Israelite king, “beware that thou pass not such a place.”

    Benhadad suspecting treachery was informed (probably by one who had witnessed Elisha’s cure of Naaman),” the prophet in Israel telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber” ( 2 Kings 6:12); compare Christ’s ministers, Luke 12:3. The Syrian king therefore sent horses and chariots to compass Dothan by night. Elisha’s ministering servant (not Gehazi) rising early was terrified at the sight; “alas, my master! how shall we do?” Elisha replies, “they that be with us are more than they with him” ( 2 Chronicles 32:7; Psalm 55:18; Romans 8:31), and prays, “Lord, open his eyes”; then he saw “the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” ( Psalm 34:7; Zechariah 9:8.) Thus the same heavenly retinue attended Elisha as his master ( 2 Kings 2:11). At Elisha’s prayer the investing host was smitten with blindness (mental, Keil, Genesis 19:11), and Elisha went out to meet them as they came down from their encampment on the hill E. of Dothan, and led them into Samaria. There Jehovah opened their eyes; and when the king of Israel would have smitten them, Elisha on the contrary caused him to “prepare great provision for them, and send them away.”

    Compare Romans 12:2.).

    Untaught by this lesson, Benhadad, in disregard of gratitude and prudence, tried, instead of the previous marauding forays, a regular siege of Samaria.

    Israel was reduced to the last extremities of famine, unparalleled until the Roman siege of Jerusalem, a woman eating her own son, fulfilling the curse ( Leviticus 26:29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57). Joram, in language identical with his mother Jezebel’s threat against Elijah ( 1 Kings 19:2; 2 Kings 6:31), makes Elisha the scapegoat of the national calamity, as though his late act in leading the blinded Syrians to Samaria and glorifying Jehovah above Baal were the cause, or suspecting it was by Elisha’s word of prayer, as it was by Elijah’s formerly (1 Kings 17), that the famine came [see JEHORAM ]: “God do so and more also to me, if the head of Elisha shall stand on him this day.” Seeing the executioner’s approach Elisha said to the elders sitting with him to receive consolation and counsel, “this son of a murderer (i.e. of Ahab and Jezebel, 1 Kings 18:4,21) hath sent to take away my head”; “hold the messenger fast at the door,” “his master’s feet (are) behind him,” namely, hastening to revoke his hasty order for Elisha’s execution. “Behold,” said the king, “this evil is of Jehovah; what, should I wait for Jehovah any longer?” (as thou exhortest me, Psalm 27:14.) Compare Malachi 3:14; Proverbs 19:3. Elisha replies that as “this evil (the famine) is of Jehovah,” so the suddenness of its removal by the morrow at “the word of Jehovah” would prove it not to be futile, as Joram said, to “wait for Jehovah.” The Lord will not allow Joram’s perversity to stop the current of divine mercy. A lord on whose hand the king leaned answered that this could only be “if Jehovah would make windows in heaven.” His sentence was according to his unbelief; “thou shalt see it ... but shalt not eat thereof.” Tantalus like, his seeing should only aggravate the bitterness of his exclusion from the blessing. A panic at a fancied sound of Hittite and Egyptian foes, by God’s appointment, caused the Syrians to leave theft’ camp and all its contents, and flee for their life. Four lepers discovered the fact, and at first hid their spoil ( Matthew 13:44; 25:25); afterward fearing mischief from selfishness ( Proverbs 11:24), they held their peace no longer, but, feeling it a day of good tidings, told it to the king’s household. Compare spiritually as to the gospel Isaiah 52:7; 62:6,7; Matthew 28:19; Romans 13:12.

    The thronging crowd trode down the unbelieving lord who had charge of the gate.

    By Elisha’s advice the Shunammite woman had gone to sojourn in the grain-growing seacoast plain of the Philistines during the seven years famine already alluded to ( 2 Kings 4:38). In her absence her house and field had been appropriated, and she on her return appealed with loud cry to the king. He at the very time, by God’s providence, had been inquiring from Gehazi (long before his leprosy, 2 Kings 5; 2 Kings 8, a proof that the incidents of Elisha’s life are not recorded in chronological sequence, but in their spiritual connection) concerning Elisha’s miracles, and was hearing of her son’s resuscitation when she herself appeared. Her land, and all she had lost, were restored.

    Elisha, when Joram and Israel failed to be reformed by God’s mercies, proceeded to Damascus to execute Elijah’s commission ( 1 Kings 19:15,16). Benhadad respectfully inquired by Hazael, who brought a kingly present, 40 camels laden with every good thing of Damascus, “thy son (regarding Elisha as a father and lord) saith, Shall I recover of this disease?” “Then mayest certainly (i.e. in the natural course): howbeit Jehovah showed me he shall surely die.” Elisha, intensely gazing at Hazael’s countenance, discerned his unscrupulous cruelty, and wept at the thought of the evil he would do to Israel. Hazael in the common view repudiated the possibility of being capable of such atrocities, “is thy servant a dog that he should do this great thing?” But the Hebrew requires “what” to be the predicate, and “the dog” connected with “thy servant” the subject. “What is thy servant (the dog as he is) that he should do this great thing?” Not the atrocity, but the greatness of it, is what startles him as something beyond his ability to accomplish, “dog (i.e. low, not cruel) as he is.” “Dog” is the eastern phrase for meanness, not cruelty. Hazael, in the common view, murdered Benhadad with a wet cloth, whether “the bath mattress” (Ewald) or the thick woolen quilt or mosquito net. Others, from “Hazael” being named at the end of 2 Kings 8:15 as if distinct from the previous “he,” think Benhadad placed it wet on himself to cool the fever, and died of the sudden chill.

    Elisha next proceeded to Ramoth Gilead in the hills east of Jordan, which Hazael had tried to occupy ( 2 Kings 8:28). Joram was wounded, but the fortress still resisted Syria. There Elisha anointed Jehu, by the hand of one of the children of the prophets, to take vengeance on Ahab’s guilty seed, having been witness of that monarch’s wicked seizure of Naboth’s vineyard and of Elijah’s awful sentence on him ( 2 Kings 9:26).

    Elisha’s last recorded act was when Jehu’s grandson, Joash, wept over his deathbed in the words which Elisha had used of the departing Elijah: “my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof,” i.e., in losing thee Israel loses its main defense. Elisha, putting his hands on the king’s (for God’s hand must strengthen ours if we are to prosper, Genesis 49:24), bade Joash shoot toward the hostile land, saying, “the arrow of Jehovah’s deliverance ... thou shalt smite the Syrians in Aphek.” Joash’s half heartedness deprived him of complete triumph; for when told to smite the ground, he smote but thrice, instead of five or six times. Spiritually, if we fainted not in shooting the arrow of prayer ( Psalm 5:3), we should smite down our spiritual foes more completely ( Isaiah 43:22).

    Even when dead and buried, Elisha’s body was made by God the means of revivifying a dead body cast hastily sideways into his sepulchral cell, upon a sudden inroad of the Moabite bands; a type of the vivifying power of Christ’s dead body ( Isaiah 26:19). Other antitypical resemblances are (1) Christ’s solemn inauguration at the Jordan. (2) His dividing death’s flood for us: Isaiah 51:15. (3) By his “covenant of salt” healing the “naught water” and “barren ground” of the condemning law and of afflictive chastisements: Isaiah 35:1,6. (4) His making the barren church mother of spiritual children: Isaiah 55:1. (5) Multiplying the oil of grace: Isaiah 61:3. (6) Reviving the spiritually and the naturally dead: John 5:25-29. (7) Curing those bodily and those spiritually lepers. (8) Feeding multitudes with bread for the body, and the bread of life for the soul. (9) Being the church’s “chariots and horsemen,” “always causing us to triumph”: 2 Corinthians 2:14. (10) Setting the captives free: Isaiah 61:1. (11) Inflicting judgments on mockers. Acts 13:41; and on lucre-loving Gehazi-like ministers, as Judas; giving up to judicial blindness the willfully blind, John 9:39-41; and to seeing without tasting bliss those who disbelieve the gospel promise of the heavenly feast; so the rich man in hell saw Lazarus afar off in Abraham’s bosom, an impassable gulf excluding himself ( Luke 16:23-26). The gentle features of his character attracted the poor and the simple to him in their troubles, whereas sternness characterized Elijah. In Herod and Herodias Ahab and Jezebel are reproduced, as in John the Baptist Elijah is reproduced; as Elijah, the representative of the law, foreruns the gentler Elisha, so John the greatest prophet of the law foreruns Jesus the gracious Savior.

    ELISHAH Javan’s oldest son ( Genesis 10:4). Ezekiel 27:7: “purple from the isles of Elishah.” As Javan represents the Ionian Greeks; so Elishah the Aeolians, whose favorite resort was to maritime situations, in Greece, Thessaly, and Asia Minor, and Lesbos and Tenedos. Hellas (Greece) and Elis in the Peloponnese are kindred Bathes.

    ELISHAMA 1. Numbers 1:10; 2:18; 7:48; 10:22; 1 Chronicles 7:26,27. 2. 2 Samuel 5:15,16; 1 Chronicles 3:6,8; 14:7. 3. 1 Chronicles 2:41. According to tradition, father of Nethaniah and grandfather of Ishmael, “of the seed royal” at the captivity ( 2 Kings 25:25; Jeremiah 41:1). 4. Jeremiah 36:12,20,21. 5. 2 Chronicles 17:8.

    ELISHAPHAT Son of Zichri, whom Jehoiada employed to assemble the Levites to Jerusalem to restore Joash to the throne ( 2 Chronicles 23:1).

    ELISHEBA Amminadab’s daughter; sister of Nahshon, captain of Judah ( Numbers 2:3). By marrying Aaron ( Exodus 6:23) she connected the royal and priestly tribes.

    ELISHUA ELISHAMA.

    ELIUD (“God of the Jews”). Matthew 1:15.

    ELIZAPHAN 1. Numbers 3:30; his descendants took a lead in religion under David and Hezekiah ( 1 Chronicles 15:8; 2 Chronicles 29:13). 2. Prince of Zebulun, appointed by Moses to take part in apportioning Canaan ( Numbers 34:25).

    ELIZUR Numbers 1:5; 2:10.

    ELKANAH 1. Son of Korah, son of Izhar, son of Kohath, son of Levi ( Exodus 6:24); compare 1 Chronicles 6:22,23, where an Elkanah is mentioned, grandson of Korah. “The children of Korah died not” when he was consumed ( Numbers 26:11). 2. A descendant of the previous Elkanah, in the line of Ahimoth or Mahath ( 1 Chronicles 6:26,35). 3. Another Kohathite in Heman’s line, father of Samuel by Hannah ( Chronicles 6:27,34; 1 Samuel 1--2). Lived at Ramathaim Zophim, or Ramah, in mount Ephraim. Piously repaired yearly to Shiloh to sacrifice at the tabernacle. His costly offering of three bullocks at Samuel’s dedication, and the “portions” of offerings which he gave to his family, indicate wealth.

    David first established the Levitical and priestly courses in the temple; hence Elkanah does not appear to have performed any sacred function as a Levite. 4. A Levite ( 1 Chronicles 9:16). 5. A Korhite who joined David at Ziklag ( 1 Chronicles 12:6, compare 1 Chronicles 15:23). 6. King Ahaz’ officer next to himself, slain by Zichri, a mighty Ephraimite, at Pekah’s invasion ( 2 Chronicles 28:7).

    ELKOSH Nahum’s birthplace. Elkesi, a village of Galilee, pointed out to Jerome, with traces of ancient buildings. The Elkosh E. of Tigris, and N. of Mosul, believed by Jewish pilgrims to be Nahum’s birthplace and burial place, is less probable, as his prophecies show only a general acquaintance with Assyria but a particular knowledge of Palestine ( Nahum 1:4; 2:4-6; 3:2,3).

    ELLASAR The invader Arioch’s kingdom ( Genesis 14:1). The Chaldeaan Larsa, Greek [Larissa], a town of lower Babylon, half way between Ur (Mugheir) and Erech (Warka) on the left bank of the Euphrates. Now Senkereh. The inscriptions prove it a primitive capital, probably older than Babylon.

    ELMODAM or Almodad. Luke 3:28; Genesis 10:26.

    ELNAAM 1 Chronicles 11:46.

    ELNATHAN Elnathan: of Jerusalem. Jehoiachin’s maternal grandfather ( 2 Kings 24:8). Son of Achbor. Jehoiakim’s ready tool for evil, in fetching the prophet Urijah out of Egypt to be killed ( Jeremiah 26:22,23); one of the king’s council when Jeremiah’s roll was burned ( Jeremiah 36:12,25); he interceded with the king not to burn it. Compare for three others Ezra 8:16.

    ELON 1. A Hittite, whose daughter Esau married ( Genesis 26:34; 36:2). [See BASHEMATH ] 2. Genesis 46:14. 3. The judge who judged Israel ten years: buried in Aijalon (= Elon) in Zebulun ( Judges 12:11,12).

    ELON BETH HANAN (“oak of the house of grace”). A commissariat district of Solomon ( Kings 4:9).

    ELPAAL A Benjamite. Hushim’s son; Ahitub’s brother. His descendants lived near Lod or Lydda, on the Benjamite hills bordering on Dan, at Ajalon (Yalo).

    Hushim was the name of a Danite family, so that the two tribes must have intermarried ( 1 Chronicles 8:11-18).

    ELTEKEH A city on Dan’s border, allotted to the Kohaihites ( Joshua 19:44; 21:23).

    ELTEKON A town in Judah’s mountains ( Joshua 15:59).

    ELTOLAD A city in S. Judah allotted to Simeon ( Joshua 15:30; 19:4; Chronicles 4:29TOLAD).

    ELUZAI 1 Chronicles 12:5.

    ELYMAS Arabic (alim, “wise,” related to “ulema”) for Barjesus, the Jew sorcerer associated with Sergius Paulus. proconsul of Cyprus at Paul’s visit ( Acts 13:6, etc.). Struck blind for “seeking to turn away the deputy (proconsul) from the faith.” As he opposed the gospel light, in significant retribution he lost the natural light. Contrast Paul’s simultaneously receiving sight and the Holy Spirit ( Acts 9:17). As belief in religion declined under the Roman empire, belief in eastern magic increased.

    ELZABAD 1. 1 Chronicles 12:8. 2. 1 Chronicles 26:7.

    ELZAPHAN Exodus 6:22. Moses’ cousin. Assisted Mishael his brother in carrying Nadab and Abihu, in their priestly coats, out of the camp ( Leviticus 10:4; compare Acts 5:6,9).

    EMBALM “Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father (Jacob). And 40 days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed; and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days.” Joseph himself also at death was embalmed, “and was put in a coffin in Egypt” ( Genesis 50:2,3,25,26). The rest of Jacob’s twelve sons were probably also embalmed, for their bodies “were carried over into Sychem and laid in the sepulchre” there ( Acts 7:16). Herodotus (3:1,129) records that “every distinct distemper in Egypt had its own physician who confined himself to the study of it alone, so that all Egypt was crowded with physicians.” This accounts for Joseph having in his retinue a number of physicians. Embalmers were usually a distinct class; but Jacob not being an Egyptian, his body was not embalmed by the ordinary embalmers. Diodorus long subsequently mentions 30 days as the time of embalming, and the mourning for a king 72 days. This nearly agrees with the 40 and 70 of Genesis; but of course the processes would vary between the early age of Genesis and the later ages of Herodotus and Diodorus. Herodotus mentions the custom of “covering the body in natron (salt) 70 days.” The dearest process (that used in Jacob’s and Joseph’s case) cost a silver talent (250 British pounds). The brain and the intestines, with a probe and a sharp Etiopian black flint or agate to make an incision in the side, were extracted, and spices, myrrh, and cassia introduced; the body, washed and wrapped in fine linen was plastered in side with gum, was then laid in a mummy case shaped as a man, generally of sycamore, as is that of king Mycerinus found in the third pyramid of Memphis. A second process with oil of cedar, costing 60 pounds, and a third cheaper process with syrmoea, were used for the less wealthy. The dearest process was said by the Egyptian priests to belong to Osiris, the judge of the dead, who however was not to be named. The mummy was placed erect against the sepulchral wall. Chemical analysis has detected three modes. 1. With asphaltum, funeral gum. 2. With asphaltum and liquor from cedar. 3. With this mixture and resinous aromatics.

    Asa was “laid in the bed filled with sweet odorous and divers spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art” ( 2 Chronicles 16:14). The Lord’s body was by Nicodemus wrapped in “a mixture of myrrh and aloes an hundred pounds weight, ... as the manner of the Jews is to bury” ( John 19:39,40). But this is quite distinct from embalming. The Egyptian belief in the transmigration of souls tended to perpetuate the practice, the body being embalmed so as to be ready to receive the soul again when the appointed cycle of thousands of years should elapse. Their burying in the sand impregnated with salts and natron, which preserved the body, first suggested the process. Drugs and bitumen were not generally used before the 18th dynasty.

    EMBROIDER shaabats ( Exodus 28:39). Rather “weave in diaper work,” the tissue of threads of one color being diapered in checkers (tesselated cavities) or small figures; but “the girdle of needlework” (“work of the embroiderer”).

    The embroiderer worked with a needle his design in stitches of colored thread, or in colored pieces of cloth sewn upon the groundwork. In Exodus 26:1, “the tabernacle curtains with cherubims of cunning work,” rather “of the work of the skilled weaver”; chosheeb , one who thinks and counts. The figures of cherubim were to be worked in the loom as in tapestry work, but the hangings or entrance curtains for the tent were to be embroidered with the needle ( Exodus 26:36), “wrought with needlework”; roqem , “the needleworker,” “the work of the embroiderer” ( Exodus 35:35; 38:23). Smith’s Bible Dictionary makes the riqmah woven texture without gold thread, and therefore without figures; chosheb that with gold thread, which was employed to delineate figures as the cherubim; chosheb involving the idea of designing patterns ( Exodus 27:16; 36:8,35,37; 38:18; 39:2,5,8,29). He makes needlework embroidery a later invention of Phrygia (so Pliny, 8:48). But Septuagint favor KJV Pliny’s authority weighs nothing against many proofs that, embroidery was known in Egypt and there learned by many Israelites ( Exodus 35:30-35; 1 Chronicles 4:21). Babylon was early famed for garments of varied color attracting the eye, such as Achan coveted ( Joshua 7:21). In Egypt the very sails were so ornamented (Wilkinson, 3:210; Ezekiel 27:7,23,24). Assyria too was famed for such embroidery.

    EMERALD First in the second row on the high priest’s breastplate ( Exodus 28:18). Nophek , “the glowing stone,” the carbuncle according to Kalisch ( Exodus 39:11). Tyre imported it from Syria ( Ezekiel 27:16). One of New Jerusalem’s foundations ( Revelation 21:19). Image of the rainbow round the throne ( Revelation 4:3).

    EMERODS (hemorrhoids, or bleeding tumors in the intestinal rectum, frequent in Syria still, owing to lack of exercise producing constipation). The images made of them mean images of the part affected ( 1 Samuel 5:6-12; 6:4-11; Deuteronomy 28:27).

    EMIM A giant war-like race, which occupied the region E. of the Dead Sea, in which the Moabites succeeded them ( Genesis 14:5; Deuteronomy 2:10). Perhaps related to “Amu” the Egyptian word in the hieroglyphics for nomadic Shemites. The Hebrew means “terrible ones.” The Rephaim were on the N.E. of Jordan, the Zuzim next, then the Emim, then the Horim on the S.E.; all gigantic.

    EMMAUS The village (60 stadia or furlongs, i.e. seven and a half miles, from Jerusalem) to which two disciples were walking on the day of Jesus’ resurrection when He joined them unrecognized. The Greek Church place it at Kuriet el Enab (Abu Ghosh). The old name now reappears in Ainwas.

    But Conder (Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement, October, 1876, p. 173) identifies it with Khamasa (a form of the Hebrew Hammath), a ruin close to the modern village wady Fukin, about eight miles from Jerusalem, near the Roman road from Jerusalem, passing Solomon’s pools, to Beit Jibrin.

    ENAM A city of the shephelah or lowland of Judah ( Joshua 15:34). In Genesis 38:14,21, read as margin “in the gate (phathach ) of Enaim,” instead of “in an open place.” It lay on the road from Judah’s dwelling place to Timnath. Aben Ezra less probably trans. “at the breaking forth of two fountains.” Conder identifies it with Allin, a ruin close to Thamna, now Tibneh, three miles to the E. on an ancient road from Adullam, the very road by which Judah would have come from Adullain to Timnah. The fellahin dialect changes “n” into “l”.

    ENAN Father of Ahira, prince of Naphtali ( Numbers 1:15).

    ENCAMPMENT Below is represented the Israelite order of march and encampment (Numbers 2). This would be varied according to local requirements; but the ideal was reproduced in the square court with which the temple was surrounded, and in the heavenly city of Ezekiel 48:20; Revelation 21:16; 20:9. The earthly camp exhibited the perfect symmetry of the church; the tabernacle in the middle denoted the dependence of all on Jehovah and the access of all to Him.

    The area of the camp was about three square miles. Living in families they did not occupy so much room as the same number of soldiers would occupy. The “standard” (degel , a glittering emblem on a pole) marked the division or camp, the “ensign” (‘ot ) the family. Thus there were four standards, one for each “camp” of three tribes: according to tradition the four cherubic forms, the lion (Judah, Genesis 49:9; Revelation 5:5), the ox (Ephraim, Deuteronomy 33:17), the man, and the eagle ( Ezekiel 1:26; 10:1; Revelation 4:4, etc.). Judah had the post of honor in front of the curtain of the tabernacle, along with Issachar and Zebulun, all three Leah’s children, and led the van on march. Reuben, Leah’s oldest son, with Simeon, Leah’s second, and Gad, oldest of Leah’s handmaid Zilpah’s sous, formed the second camp. Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin, Rachel’s descendants, formed the third camp. Dan, oldest of the handmaids’ children, with Asher and Naphtali, handmaids’ children, formed the fourth camp. In coincidence with this arrangement, Numbers 10:14, etc., represents Judah taking the lead in the march out of the wilderness of Sinai, Reuben was next, Ephraim was next, and Dan was rearward. The signal for march was given by a blast of two silver trumpets. The sanctity of the camp was maintained even in time of war. Among other nations ordinary rules of morality and propriety were then relaxed, as Lucan x. 407, observes: “no faith or regard for religion exists among men in camp” (nulla fides pietasque viris qui castra sequuntur). But in war especially Israel was to “keep from every wicked thing,” and even from any breach of decorum or cleanliness, “for the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give up thine enemies before thee, therefore shall thy camp be holy, that He see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from thee” ( Deuteronomy 23:9-14). All refuse was to be carried outside the camp. There the dead were to be buried ( Leviticus 10:4,6:11).

    Contact with the dead, until purification, and leprosy excluded from it ( Numbers 5:2; 31:19). Ashes from the sacrifices were poured out in an appointed place outside the camp, where the entrails, skin, and horns, and all that was not offered in sacrifice, were burnt ( Leviticus 4:11,12; 6:11; 8:17; 24:14). There criminals were executed, and the sin offering bullock was burnt. (compare as to the antitype John 19:17,20; Hebrews 13:12). So late as Hezekiah the temple was called “the tents of Jehovah” ( 2 Chronicles 31:2; Psalm 78:28; compare “a great host like the host of God” applied to David’s adherents, 1 Chronicles 12:22). The military camp was generally fixed on a hill and near water ( 1 Samuel 13:2,3,16,23; 17:3; 28:4; 29:1). The baggage wagons or else an earthwork formed a barrier round the camp. The machineh were movable camps as distinguished from the matsab , or netsib , standing camps ( 2 Chronicles 17:2).

    ENCHANTMENT [See DIVINATION .] ENDOR (“the spring of Dor”). In Issachar, yet Manasseh’s possession. Here it was that Sisera and Jabin perished ( Psalm 83:9,10). Endor is not mentioned in Judges 4 as the scene of the Canaanites’ overthrow; but Taanach and Megiddo are mentioned with Endor in Joshua 17:11, and in Judges they are represented as the scene of the battle with Sisera’s host. Endor being near would naturally be the scene of many “perishing”; an undesigned coincidence between the psalm and the independent history, and so confirming both. The good omen associated with the place may have lured Saul to his fatal visit to the witch ( 1 Samuel 28:7). Endur is still a village on the slope of a mountain to the N. of jebel Duhy, “the little Hermon.” Caves abound there, in one of which probably the incantation took place; eight miles, over rugged ground, from the Gilboa heights; so that Saul must have passed the Philistine camp on his way from his own army to the witch, and the way the unhappy king crept round in the darkness may be traced step by step.

    EN-EGLAIM (“spring of two calves”). Ezekiel 47:10. On the confines of Moab, over against Engedi, near where Jordan enters the Dead Sea ( Isaiah 15:8).

    The two limits, Engedi and En-eglaim, comprise the whole Dead Sea.

    ENGANNIM (“spring of gardens”). 1. In the lowland of Judah ( Joshua 15:34). 2. On the border of Issachar ( Joshua 19:21). Allotted to the Gershonites ( Leviticus 21:29). The “Ginaia” of Josephus. Now Jenim, the first village in ascending from Esdraelon plain into the central hills. The “gardens” and “spring” still characterize the place. In this quarter was “the garden house” (Beth-haggan) by way of which Ahaziah fled from Jehu ( 2 Kings 9:27). Avoiding the ascent as too steep for his chariot, he fled by the level to Megiddo and died there. ANEM in 1 Chronicles 6.

    ENGEDI (“fountain of the kid or goat”). A town W. of the Dead Sea ( Ezekiel 47:10), in the wilderness of Judah ( Joshua 15:62). “The wilderness of Engedi” is explained as” the rocks of the wild goats” ( 1 Samuel 24:4).

    Abounding in caves on the road to Jerusalem where David found Saul.

    Originally Hazazon Tamar, “the felling of the palm,” palm groves being then around though now none remain ( 2 Chronicles 20:2). About the middle of the western side of the sea. The fountain Ain Jidy is about 500 ft. above the plain and Dead Sea, and 1500 ft. below the top of the cliffs, bursting from the limestone rock down the deep descent amidst banks of acacia, mimosa, and lotus. The temperature at the spring head on a cool day Conder found 83 Fahr. (Palestine Exploration, August, 1875.) When full it crosses the plain direct to the sea; but most of the year it is absorbed in the dry soil. The four kings of whom Chedorlaomer was chief attacked the Amorites here, and were in turn attacked by the five kings of Canaan in the adjoining vale of Siddim. The route of the Moabites and Ammonites invading Jehoshaphat was by Engedi, and still the marauding hordes from Moab pass round the S. of the Dead Sea along the western shore to Ain Jidy, and then westward wherever hope of plunder presents itself. The Song of Solomon (Song 1:14) celebrates Engedi’s vineyards and clusters of “camphire,” i.e. hennah flowers, white and yellow softly blended, wherewith Jewish maidens decked themselves.

    ENGINES Military, “invented by cunning men” under Uzziah ( 2 Chronicles 26:15); propelling missiles, stones, and arrows. The monuments of Egyptian and Assyrian warfare have no representations of such engines.

    Thus Scripture is confirmed, that the invention was in Judah under Uzziah.

    Pliny (7:56) assigns it to Syria. Ezekiel ( Ezekiel 26:9) alludes to battering rams, mehhi qaballo , “ a striking of that which is in front,” whether with a battering ram, or balista, or catapult; “he shall set an apparatus for striking against thy walls”; also Ezekiel 21:22; 4:2, karim , translated “captains” in Ezekiel 21:22, where see margin.

    ENGRAVER In Exodus 35:35 rather “artificer” in wood, stone, or metal; so Exodus 10:#23 28:23,” artificer” in weaving, etc. Bezaleel’s workmanship was in gold, silver, brass, stone, wood ( Exodus 31:4,5), Aboliab’s in embroidery and weaving. Strict engraving of stones is mentioned in Exodus 28:9-21 in the case of the two onyx stones having six each of the 12 tribes’ names, on the high priest’s shoulders, and the 12 breastplate stones with the 12 tribes’ names engraven. Seal engraving the Israelites learned in Egypt; it existed in Mesopotamia from about 2000 B.C. The “ouches” of gold are the setting wreathed-like filagree round the stones, which were oval like the Egyptian kartouches containing hieroglyphic names. In Zechariah 3:9 “one stone ... I will engrave the graying (literally open the opening) thereof,” i.e. I (God) will prepare for Him (Messiah) an exquisitely wrought body, a suitable temple for the Godhead ( John 2:21). lie is the “stone cut out of the mountain without hands” ( Daniel 2:45). Paul ( Hebrews 10:5) explains Psalm 40:6,” Mine ears hast Thou opened” (graven) by “a body hast Thou prepared Me.”

    ENHADDAH A town on the border of Issachar ( Joshua 19:21).

    ENHAKKORE (“fount of him who cried”). [See LEHI ] It burst out at Samson’s, cry, when athirst after slaying a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone ( Judges 15:19; Psalm 34:6). As the rocky precipice was named Lehi, “the jawbone,” so the hollow place in the rock was named Maktesh, “the tooth hollow.” Samson cried to Jehovah (God of grace), and Elohim (God of nature) split the hollow place at Lehi, so that water came out of it, as at Horeb and Kadesh ( Exodus 17:6; Numbers 20:8,11), and the fountain was called “the fount of him who cried in Lehi.”

    EN-HAZOR (“fount of the village”). A fenced city in the territory of Naphtali ( Joshua 19:37).

    ENMISHPAT (“fount of judgment”). [See KADESH .] Genesis 14:7.

    ENOCH (“consecrated”). 1. Cain’s oldest son; and the city (probably a village of rude huts) which he built and named after him ( Genesis 4:17,18). The similarity of names in Cain’s line and Seth’s line is no proof of the persons being identical, for many of the seemingly like names are from distract roots. Moreover, the fewness of names at that early time, and the relationship and occasional intercourse between the families, account for the similarity or identity of the other names. Details are given especially as to Lamech and Enoch, marking the utter distinctness of those so named in the two lines. 2. Son of Jared; father of Methuselah. Seventh from Adam (seven indicating divine completeness, Enoch typifying perfected humanity). As angels fell to the earth by transgression, so this man was raised to heaven by pleasing God (Irenaeus, 4:15, sec. 2). Of Noah and Enoch alone it is written that they “walked with God” ( Genesis 5:24; 6:9); others “walked before God” ( Genesis 17:1). But walking with God is a relic of the first paradise when man talked and walked with God in holy familiarity, and an anticipation of the second ( Revelation 21:3; 22:3,4). The secret spring of his walk with God was “faith”; faith was the ground of his” pleasing God” (which answers to “walking with God” in Genesis 5, compare Amos 3:3); his “pleasing God” was the ground of his being “translated that he should not see death” ( Hebrews 11:5,6). “Translation” implies a sudden removal from mortality to immortality without death, such as shall pass over the living saints at Christ’s coming ( 1 Corinthians 15:51,52), of whom Enoch is a type. After the monotonous repetition of the same record of patriarchs, “lived” so many years, “begat sons and daughters, ... and he died,” the account of Enoch’s walk with God and translation without death stands forth in brighter relief.

    His years, 365 (the number of days in one year), were fewer, than his predecessors’; but in his fewer years there was that to record which was not in their immensely lengthened years, he moreover begat sons and daughters, and yet found family ties no hindrance to his walking with God as a family man. Nay, it was not until “after he begat Methuselah” that it is written “Enoch walked with God.” God’s gift of children awakened in him a new love to God and a deeper sense of responsibility. Enoch in the antediluvian generation, and Elijah in the postdiluvian, witnessed before Christ in their own persons to the truth of the resurrection of the body and its existence in heaven. The fathers mostly made them the two witnesses slain by the beast, but afterward raised to heaven (Revelation 11). This view, if true, would be one answer to the objection against their translation, that “it is appointed unto men once to die” ( Hebrews 9:27), and that “death passed upon all men for that all have sinned” ( Romans 5:12). Enoch’s translation was an appropriate testimony to the truth he announced, “Behold the Lord cometh ... to execute judgment” in the face of a mocking, infidel world. Jude 1:14 stamps with inspired sanction the currentTRADITION of the Jews as to Enoch’s prophecies. The language “Enoch prophesied, saying,” favors tradition rather than the Book of Enoch being the source from whence Jude drew. So Paul mentions Jannes and Jambres the Egyptian magicians, names drawn from tradition, not from Scripture ( 2 Timothy 3:8). Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and others allude to the Book of Enoch Bruce the Abyssinian traveler brought home three Ethiopic copies from Alexandria, which Lawrence translated in 1821. The Ethiopic was translated from the Greek, the Greek from the Hebrew. The Apostolic Constitutions, Origen (contra Celsus), Jerome, and Augustine deny its canonicity. It vindicates God’s government of the world, spiritual and natural, recognizes the Trinity, also Messiah “the Son of man” (the name “Jesus” never occurs), “the Elect One” from eternity, before whom “all kings shall fall down, and on whom they shall fix their hopes,” the supreme Judge, who shall punish eternally the wicked and reward the just.

    If the book belong to the period just before our Lord’s coming, it gives an interesting view of believing Jews’ opinions concerning Messiah at that time. No sure proof establishes its existence before the Christian era. 3. Third son of Midian, Abraham’s son by Keturah ( Genesis 25:4). 4. Reuben’s oldest son, head of the family of Hanochites ( Genesis 46:9; Numbers 26:5). See HANOCH for a fourth Enoch, so the KJV has it.

    ENRIMMON Reinhabited by the Jews who returned from Babylon ( Nehemiah 11:29).

    Ain and Rimmen ( Joshua 15:32; 19:7; 1 Chronicles 4:32).

    ENROGEL (“fountain of feet”). So called because fullers trod their cloth with the feet here. On the border between Benjamin and Judah ( Joshua 15:7; 18:16).

    At a lower level than Jerusalem, as “descended” implies. At the southern extremity of the valley of Hinnom near its junction with the valley of Jehoshaphat. Here Jonathan and Ahimaaz remained to receive intelligence for David from within the walls ( 2 Samuel 17:17). Here also by the stone Zoheleth Adonijah held his feast preparatory to claiming the throne ( 1 Kings 1:9). The site is by many thought to be that now called “the well of Nehemiah,” and by the natives” the well of Job,” Bir-eyub. The spot is one of the most fertile round Jerusalem. The well is 125 ft. deep, and in winter usually full; it is walled up and arched above. But Behar (Land of Promise) argues for Ain Umm ed daraj, “spring of the mother of steps,” namely, the steps by which the reservoir is reached; “the Fountain of the Virgin,” the only real spring near Jerusalem (Bir-eyub is a well, not a spring); which if not meant will be (what is not likely) unmentioned in the Bible. This spring suits better, as being nearer Jerusalem than Bir-eyub, which is too far for 2 Samuel 17:17, and altogether away from the direct road over Olivet to Jordan, and too much in full view of the city for Jonathan’s and Ahimaaz’ secret purpose. Daraj and Rogelare related names. The Fount of the Virgin is still the women’s place of resort for washing and treading clothes; and it is above the king’s gardens and so suitable for irrigation, which Bir-eyub is not. Ganneau found the stone of Zoheleth in the village of Siloam under the name Zehweile. This identifies Enrogel with the Fountain of the Virgin.

    ENSHEMESH (fount of the sun). A spring on the border between Judah and Benjamin, N. of Judah, S. of Benjamin ( Joshua 15:7; 18:17). Between “the going up to Adummim” (i.e. the road leading up from the Jordan valley) and the spring of Enrogel. E. of Jerusalem and of the mount of Olives. Now Ain Haud or Chot, “the well of the apostles,” a mile below Bethany on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. The sun’s rays are on it all day.

    ENTAPPUAH “Spring of apple” or “citron.” [See TAPPUAH .] ( Joshua 17:7.)

    EPAENETUS A Christian at Rome greeted by Paul as “my well beloved, who is the firstfruits of Achaia (Asia in the Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus manuscripts) unto Christ” ( Romans 16:5). “Asia” is used in the restricted sense, Mysia, Lydia, and Curia.

    EPAPHRAS Paul’s “dear fellow servant, who is for you (the Colossian Christians, Colossians 1:7) a faithful minister of Christ,” perhaps implying Epaphras was the founder of the Colossian church. In Philemon 1:23, “my fellow prisoner.” Apprehended possibly for his zealous labors in Asia Minor; literally, “fellow captive” (sunaichmalootos ), taken in the Christian warfare ( Philippians 2:25), or else more probably designated so as Paul’s faithful companion in imprisonment. He had been sent by the Colossians to inquire after and minister to Paul. Aristarchus is designated Paul’s “fellow prisoner” in Colossians 4:10, and his “fellow laborer” in Philemon 1:24 (both epistles were sent at the same time). But, vice versa, Epaphras in the Epistle to Philemon is” his fellow prisoner,” and in the Epistle to the Colossians “his fellow laborer.” In Colossians 4:12 Paul thus commends him, “Epaphras who is one of you (a native or resident of Colosse), a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always laboring fervently (agoonizomenos , ‘striving as in the agony of a contest’) for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”

    EPAPHRODITUS Epaphroditus: of which Epaphras is a contraction. But Epaphroditus of the Philippian church is probably distinct from Epaphras of the Colossian church. Probably a presbyter at Philippi. After Tychicus and Onesimus had departed from Rome carrying the epistles to Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, Paul was cheered by the arrival of Epaphroditus with the Philippian contribution. But that faithful “brother, companion in labor, and fellow soldier,” being probably in delicate health in setting out, had brought on himself a dangerous sickness by the fatigues of the journey to Rome ( Philippians 2:25,26,30; 4:18). On recovery he “longed” to return to his Philippian flock, and in person relieve their anxiety on his behalf. So Paul “supposed it necessary to send Epaphroditus” to them, being “their messenger” (apostle, i.e. one of the “apostles” or “messengers of the churches “ as distinct from the twelve and Paul commissioned by Christ: Romans 16:7; 2 Corinthians 8:23). Paul charges them, “Receive him in the Lord with all gladness; and hold such in reputation, because for the work of Christ he was nigh unto death, not regarding his life, to supply your lack of service toward me” (their lack having been not of the will but of the opportunity, Philippians 4:10). From the marked exhortations to “receive Epaphroditus with all gladness,” etc., Alford conjectures that the “heaviness” of Epaphroditus was not solely owing to his strong affection, but that there must have been something behind respecting him.

    EPHAH [See WEIGHTS AND MEASURES .] 1. The first of Midian’s sons, grandson of Abraham ( Genesis 25:4; Chronicles 1:33; Isaiah 60:6), “the dromedaries of Ephah” E. of the Dead Sea. Midian abounded in camels to carry their merchandise ( Judges 6:5); the camel is the ship of the desert. 2. A concubine of Caleb of Judah ( 1 Chronicles 2:46). 3. Son of Jahdai ( 1 Chronicles 2:47) of Judah.

    EPHAI OPHAI in the Ketib or original text ( Jeremiah 40:8,13). Ishmael kille these “captains of the forces” left in Judah with Gedaliah, the governor appointed by the Babylonians ( Jeremiah 41:3).

    EPHER 1. Genesis 25:4; 1 Chronicles 1:33. 2. 1 Chronicles 4:17. 3. E. of Jordan ( 1 Chronicles 5:24). Related to Ophrah, Gideon’s native place in Manasseh W. of Jordan.

    EPHESDAMMIM (“boundary of blood”); so-called from being the scene of bloody battles between Israel and the Philistines [see ELAH ], i.e. the valley of the terebinth; contracted intoPAS-DAMMIM ( 1 Chronicles 11:13). Between Shochoh and Azekah, in Judah, the Philistine encampment when David slew Goliath ( 1 Samuel 17:1). The valley of Elah rises close to Hebron, and runs as a rocky ravine northward. Among the towns on its flank was\parKEILAH on a steep, terraced, bore hill. Beyond this point the valley widens, and on its W. side is Adullam. A mile further N. the valley turns W. Here crowning the left bank was Socoh. Farther W. on the valley’s S. side is Shaaraim (Tel Zakeriyeh). Then the valley opens into the Philistine plain, and here is situated on a white cliff Gath, commanding the valley. Thus, the valley of Elah was the highway from the plain up to the hilly country, and terebinths still grow in it as of old. The site of Saul’s battle with the Philistines and Goliath was at the bend of the valley, where the Jerusalem road down which probably Saul came crosses the valley, at Ephesdammim, between Socoh (Shuweikeh) and Azekah (El-Azek). Here still a ruin exists, having a similar meaning, Belt Fused, “house of bloodshed.”

    Two Hebrew terms occur in the narrative: ‘emeq the “broad valley”; gay the narrow deep channel in the middle of the creek, dug out by the winter torrent and separating the two hosts. The steep banks are studded with smooth white pebbles, such as David slung at Goliath.

    EPHESIANS, EPISTLE TO By Paul, as Ephesians 1:1; 3:1 prove. So Irenaeus, Haer. 5:2,3; 1:8,5; Clemens Alex., Strom. 4:65, Paed. 1:8; Origen, Celsus 4:211. Quoted by Valentinus A.D. 120, Ephesians 3:14-18, as we know from Hippolytus, Refut. Haeres., p. 193. Polycarp, Epistle to Phil., 12, witnesses to its canonicity. So Tertullian, Adv. Marcion, 5:17, Ignatius, Ephesians 12, refers to Paul’s affectionate mention of the Christian privileges of the Ephesians in his epistle.

    Paul, in Colossians 4:16, charges the Colossians to read his epistle to the Laodiceans, and to cause his epistle to the Colossians to be read in the church of Laodicea, whereby he can hardly mean his Epistle to the Ephesians, for the resemblance between the two epistles, Ephesians and Colossians, would render such interchange of reading almost unnecessary.

    His greetings sent through the Colossians to the Laodiceans are incompatible with the idea that he wrote an epistle to the Laodiceans at the same time and by the same bearer, Tychicus (the bearer of both epistles, Ephesians and Colossians), for the apostle would then have sent the greetings directly in the letter to the party saluted, instead of indirectly in his letter to the Colossians. The epistle to Laodicea was evidently before that to Colosse.

    Ussher supposed that the Epistle to the Ephesians was an encyclical letter, headed as in manuscripts of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, “To the saints that are ... and to the faithful,” the name of each church being inserted in the copy sent to it; and that its being sent to Ephesus first occasioned its being entitled the Epistle to the Ephesians. But the words “at Ephesus” ( Ephesians 1:1) occur in the very ancient Alexandrinus manuscript and the Vulgate version. The omission was subsequently made when read to other churches in order to generalize its character. Its internal spirit aims at one set of persons, coexisting in one place, as one body, and under the same circumstances. Moreover, there is no intimation, as in 2 Corinthians and Galatians, that it is encyclical and comprising all the churches of that region. After having spent so long time in Ephesus, Paul would hardly fail to write an epistle especially applying to the church there. For personal matters he refers the Ephesians to Tychicus its bearer ( Ephesians 6:21,22); his engrossing theme being the interests and privileges and duties of Christ’s universal church, with particular reference to the Ephesians.

    This accounts for the absence of personal greetings; so in Galatians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and 1 Timothy. The better he knows the parties addressed, and the more general and solemn the subject, the less he gives of individual notices.

    His first visit to Ephesus is recorded in Acts 18:19-21. Some seeds of Christianity may have been sown in the men of Asia present at the grand Pentecost ( Acts 2:9). The work begun formally by Paul’s disputations with the Jews during his short visit was carried on by Apollos ( Acts 18:24-26), Aquila, and Priscilla. At his second visit after his journey to Jerusalem, and thence to the eastern regions of Asia Minor, he encountered John’s disciples, and taught them the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and remained at Ephesus three years ( Acts 19:10; 20:31), so that this church occupied an unusually large portion of his time and care. His self denying and unwearied labors here are alluded to in Acts 20:34. This epistle accordingly shows a warmth of feeling and a union in spiritual privileges and hopes with them ( Ephesians 1:3, etc.), such as are natural from one so long and so intimately associated with those addressed. On his last journey he sailed past Ephesus, and summoned the Ephesian elders to Miletus, where he delivered to them his farewell charge ( Acts 20:18-35).

    The Epistle to the Colossians, which contains much the same theme, seems to have been earlier, as the Epistle to the Ephesians expands the same truths. It, is an undesigned coincidence and proof of genuineness that the two epistles, written about the same date and under the same circumstances, bear closer resemblance than those written at distant dates and under different circumstances. [See for instances of resemblance, see COLOSSIANS .] Tychicus bore both epistles, and Onesimus his companion bore that to his former master Philemon at Colosse. The date was probably before Paul’s imprisonment at Rome became so severe as it was when writing the Epistle to the Philippians, about A.D. 62, four years after his charge at Miletus. In Philippians 6:19,20 he implies he had some freedom for preaching, such as Acts 28:23-31 represents. His imprisonment, beginning February A.D. 61, lasted at least “two whole years.”

    The epistle addresses a church constituted of Jewish and Gentile converts, and such was that of Ephesus ( Ephesians 2:14-22, compare Acts 19:8-10). Diana’s (Artemis) temple there, burned down by Herostratus on the night of the birth of Alexander the Great (355 B.C.), was rebuilt at enormous cost, and was one of the wonders of the world. [See DIANA .] Hence the appropriateness of comparing the church to a temple, containing the true inner beauty, which the idol temple with all its outward splendor was utterly lacking in. In Ephesians 4:17; 5:1-13, Paul alludes to the notorious profligacy of the pagan Ephesians. Moreover, an undesigned coincidence, confirming the genuineness of both this epistle and the independent history, is the correspondence of expressions between the epistle and Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders ( Ephesians 1:6,7; 2:7; compare Acts 20:24,32). Alford designates this “the epistle of the grace of God.” As to his bonds, Ephesians 3:1; 4:1, with Acts 20:22,23.

    As to “the counsel of God,” Ephesians 1:11 with Acts 20:27. As to “the redemption of the purchased possession,” Ephesians 1:14 with Acts 20:28. As to “building up” and the “inheritance,” Ephesians 1:14,18; 2:20; 5:5, with Acts 20:32. THE OBJECT is “to set forth the foundation, the course, and the end of the church of the faithful in Christ. He speaks to the Ephesians as a sample of the church universal. In the larger and smaller divisions alike the foundation of the church is in the will of the Father; the course of the church is by the satisfaction of the Son; the end of the church is the life in the Holy Spirit” (Alford). Compare as to the three, Ephesians 1:11; 2:5; 3:16. Throughout “the church” is spoken of as one whole, in the singular, not the plural. The doctrinal part closes with the sublime doxology ( Ephesians 3:14-21). Upon the doctrine rest the succeeding practical exhortations; here too the church is represented as founded on the counsel of “God the Father who is above all, through all, and in all,” reared by the “one Lord” Jesus Christ, through the “one Spirit” ( Ephesians 4:4-6, etc.), who give their respective graces to the members. These therefore should exercise all these graces in their several relationships, as husbands, wives, servants, children, etc.; for this end, finally, we must “put on the whole armor of God” ( Ephesians 6:13).

    The STYLE like the subject, is sublime to a degree exceeding that of Paul’s other epistles. The sublimity produces the difficulty and peculiarity of some expressions. The theme was suited to Christians long grounded, as the Ephesians were, in the faith as it is in Jesus.

    EPHESUS Chief city of the Ionian confederacy and capital of the Roman province “Asia” (Mysia, Lydia, Caria), on the S. side of the plain of Cayster, and partly on the heights of Prion and Coressus, opposite the island of Samos.

    A leading scene of Paul’s ministry (Acts 18; 19; 20); also one of the seven churches addressed in the Apocalypse ( Revelation 1:11; 2:1), and the center from from whence John superintended the adjoining churches (Eusebius, 3:23). Ephesus, though she was commended for patient labors for Christ’s name’s sake, is reproved for having “left her first love.”

    The port was called Panormus. Commodious roads connected this great emporium of Asia with the interior (“the upper coasts,” i.e. the Phrygian table lands, Acts 19:1); also one on the N. to Smyrna, another on the S. to Miletus, whereby the Ephesian elders traveled when summoned by Paul to the latter city. On a N.E. hill stands the church Ayasaluk, corrupted from hagios theologos , “the holy divine,” John, Timothy, and the Virgin Mary who was committed by the Lord to John ( John 19:26), were said to have been buried there. It was the port where Paul sailed from Corinth, on his way to Syria ( Acts 18:19-22). Thence too he probably sailed on a short visit to Corinth [see 1 CORINTHIANS ]; also thence to Macedonia ( Acts 19:21,27; 20:1; compare 1 Timothy 1:3; 2 Timothy 4:12,20).

    Originally colonized by the hardy Atticans under Androclus, son of Codrus, it subsequently fell through the enervation of its people under Lydian and Persian domination successively; then under Alexander the Great, and finally under the Romans when these formed their province of Asia (129 B.C.). A proconsul or “deputy” ruled Asia. In Acts 19:38 the plural is for the singular. He was on circuit, holding the assizes then in Ephesus; as is implied, “the law is open,” margin “the court days are (now being) kept.” Besides a senate there was a popular assembly such as met in the theater, the largest perhaps in the world, traceable still on mount Prion ( Acts 19:29). The “town clerk” had charge of the public records, opened state letters, and took notes of the proceedings in the assembly. His appeal, quieting the people, notices that Paul was “not a blasphemer of the Ephesian goddess,” a testimony to Paul’s tact and wisdom in preaching Christ. The friendly warning of the see ASIARCHS to Paul, not to venture into the theater, implies how great an influence the apostle had gained at Ephesus.

    Besides being famed as the birthplace of the two painters Apelles and Parrhasius, and the philosopher Heraclitus, Ephesus was notorious for its magical arts and amulets of parchment with inscribed incantations (Ephesia grammata), valued at enormous prices (50,000 pieces of silver), yet freely given up to the flame when their possessors received a living faith ( Acts 19:19). In undesigned coincidence with Acts, Paul writing to Timothy ( 2 Timothy 3:13) says “seducers (goeetees , conjurors) shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.” The “special miracles” which God wrought by the hands of Paul were exactly suited to conquer the magicians on their own ground: handkerchiefs and aprons from his body brought as a cure to the sick; evil spirits cast out by him; and when exorcists imitated him, the evil spirits turning on them and rending them.

    The Diana of Ephesus, instead of the graceful Grecian goddess of the chase, was a mummy-shaped body with many breasts, ending in a point, and with the head of a female with mural crown, and hands with a bar of metal in each; underneath was a rude block. An aerolite probably gave the idea “the image that fell from heaven.” After frequent burnings, the last building of her temple took 220 years. [See DIANA .] Some read Pliny’s statement, “the columns were 120, seven of them the gifts of kings”; the diameter of each is six feet, the height 60 feet, according to Ward’s measurement. The external pillars according to Wood’s arrangement are 88; the whole number, internal and external, 120. The glory of Ephesus was to be “a worshipper of the great goddess” (see margin), literally, a caretaker, warden, or apparitor of the temple (neokoros ), and the silversmiths had a flourishing trade in selling portable models of the shrine.

    Perhaps Alexander the “coppersmith” had a similar business. The “craftsmen” were the designers, the “workmen” ordinary laborers ( Acts 19:24,25). The imagery of a temple naturally occurs in 1 Corinthians 3:9-17 written here, also in 1 Timothy 3:15; 6:19; 2 Timothy 2:19,20, written to Ephesus; compare also Acts 20:32. Demetrius would be especially sensitive at that time when Diana’s sacred month of May was just about to attract the greatest crowds to her, for Corinthians 16:8 shows Paul was there about that time, and it is probable the uproar took place then; hence we find the Asiarchs present at this time ( Acts 19:31). Existing ancient coins illustrate the terms found in Acts, “deputy,” “town clerk,” “worshipper of Diana.” The address at Miletus shows that the Ephesian church had then its bishop presbyters. Paul’s companions, Trophimus certainly and Tychicus possibly, were natives of Ephesus ( Acts 20:4; 21:29; 2 Timothy 4:12.) Also Onesiphorus ( 2 Timothy 1:16-18; 4:19), Hymeneus and Alexander, Hermogenes and Phygellus, of Ephesus, were among Paul’s opponents ( 1 Timothy 1:20; 2 Timothy 1:15; 4:14).

    EPHLAL 1 Chronicles 2:37.

    EPHOD 1. The high priest’s vestment, with the breastplate and Urim and Thrumhim (some material objects in the bag of the breastplate, used for consulting Jehovah by casting lots: Speaker’s Commentary; but see HIGH PRIEST ) in it. This Abiathar carried off from the tabernacle at Nob, and David consulted ( 1 Samuel 21:9; 23:6,9; 30:7). The breastplate, with its twelve precious stones, gave an importance to the ephod which led to its adoption in the idolatries of Gideon and Micah ( Judges 8:27; 17:5; 18:14). The large amount of gold used by Gideon on his ephod was not the material of it, but the means wherewith he completed it; including the breastplate (choshen ), the 12 precious stones, and the two for the shoulders, the gold thread throughout, and gold braid, and gold twist chains fastening the breastplate upon the ephod, and lastly the price of the labor ( Exodus 28:6-30). [See GIDEON .] His aim was by wearing it to have a vehicle for inquiring the will of Jehovah, through the Urim and Thummim, the holy lot, and breastplate. The ephod was also used, but without the breastplate, by the ordinary priests, as their characteristic robe ( 1 Samuel 2:28; 14:3; 22:18; Hosea 3:4). David’s ephod, in bringing the ark to Jerusalem, differed from the priests’ in being of ordinary linen (baad ), whereas theirs was of fine linen (sheesh ). 2. Father of Hanniel, head of Manasseh, assisted Joshua and Eleazar in apportioning Canaan ( Numbers 34:23).

    EPHRAIM (1) (“doubly fruitful”). Joseph’s second son by Asenath, named so, “for,” said Joseph, “God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.”

    Born during the seven plenteous years; the “doubly fruitful” may refer to both the fruitfulness vouchsafed to Joseph and the plenty of the season. As regards Ephraim himself, he was doubly blessed: (1) in being made, as well as Manasseh, a patriarchal head of a tribe, like Jacob’s immediate sons ( Genesis 48:5); as Judah received the primary birthright (Reuben losing it by incest, Simeon and Levi by cruelty), and became the royal tribe from whence king David and the Divine Son of David sprang, so Ephraim received a secondary birthright and became ancestor of the royal tribe among the ten tribes of Israel ( Genesis 49:3- 10,22-26). (2) Ephraim the younger was preferred to Manasseh the elder, just as Jacob himself was preferred before the elder Esau. Jacob wittingly guided his hands so as to lay his right on Ephraim and his left on Manasseh, notwithstanding Joseph’s remonstrance; saying, “Manasseh shall be great, but his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.” Jacob called to mind God’s promise at Luz, “I will make thee fruitful,” a Hebrew word related to Ephraim and to Ephrath, the scene of the death of his darling wife, Ephraim’s grandmother ( Genesis 35:11,16; 48:4,7,13-19). Ephraim was about 21 when Jacob blessed him, for he was born before the seven years’ famine, and Jacob came to Egypt toward its closing years, and lived 17 years afterward ( Genesis 47:28).

    Before Joseph’s death Ephraim’s family had reached the third generation ( Genesis 50:23).

    The last notice we have of him is his mourning for his sons killed in the foray by the men of Gath, and naming his new-born son see BERIAH from the calamity, unconscious that that son would be the progenitor of the most remarkable of all his descendants, Joshua ( 1 Chronicles 7:20-23). Psalm 78:9 is referred in Smith’s Bible Dictionary to this time; but the phrase is rather figurative for spiritual apostasy; “the children of Ephraim ... carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle.” Ephraim’s numbers in the wilderness of Sinai census were 40,500, Manasseh’s 32,200. But at the eve of entering Canaan Ephraim had decreased to 32,500, while Manasseh had increased to 52,700; and at the conquest Ephraim was fewest in numbers after Simeon (22,200). Still in Moses’ blessing Ephraim stands pre-eminent over Manasseh; and he and Manasseh are compared to the two horns of the reem (not unicorn but the gigantic wild ox, now extinct, or urus); “with them he (Joseph) shall push the people together to the ends of the earth, and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim and they are the thousands of Manasseh.” Moreover Joseph’s land is “blessed of the Lord for the precious things of heaven ... the dew ... the deep beneath ... the precious fruits brought forth by the sun and ... put forth by the moon ... the chief things of the ancient mountains and ... of the lasting hills ... of the earth and its fullness, and the good will of Him that dwelt in the bush”: a glorious issue to the afflictions “of him that was separated from his brethren” ( Deuteronomy 33:17). “His glory (is like) the firstling of his bullock,” rather “the firstling of his (Joseph’s) bullock (i.e. Ephraim made by Jacob in privileges the firstborn of Joseph’s offspring; the singular ‘bullock’ being used collectively for all Joseph’s offspring, and expressing their strength) is his glory.” Whereas Jacob dwelt on Joseph’s trials, and prophetically the severe wars of his descendants, in which God would strengthen them as He had strengthened Joseph, Moses looks onward to their final triumph and peaceful enjoyment of all precious things in their land.

    The tribe Ephraim’s territory. -- The two great tribes of Judah and Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh) took their inheritance first. The boundaries of Ephraim are traced from W. to E. in Joshua 16:1-10. Ataroth Adar and upper Bethheron lay on the center of the southern border of Ephraim. The border on the N. side went out westward, i.e. seaward, to Michmethah, which was in front (W. or N.W.) of Shechem (Nablus), the latter being in Ephraim. From Michmethah the border went round to the E. at the back of mount Ebal, then S.E. toward Janohah (Yanun). It passed Taanath Shiloh (probably Salim). From Janohah it touched Ataroth on the wady Fasail; then passing Naarath or Naaran ( 1 Chronicles 7:28) on the E. of Bethel, called Neara by Josephus, abounding in water, and so likely to be near Ras el Ain (five miles N. of Jericho), which pours a full stream into the wady Nawayimeh. From Naarath Ephraim’s boundary reached Jericho, and struck into the line that forms the S. baseline of the tribe, running to the Jordan. From En Tappuah (Ain Abuz, five miles and a half S. of Shechem) Ephraim’s boundary ran S.W. into the brook Kanah, which still retains its ancient name; thence the boundary ran out to the sea. The boundary between Ephraim and his brother Manasseh is not exactly defined; compare Joshua 17:14-18. Generally, Ephraim lay to the S., Manasseh to the N.

    But Manasseh, instead of crossing the country from E. to W. as it is often represented, occupied only half that space, and lay along the sea to the W., bounded on the E. by mount Carmel. The territory of the twofold “house of Joseph” was 55 miles from E. to W. by 70 from N to S. The northern half of central Palestine was “mount Ephraim,” hills of limestone material, intersected by wide plains with streams of running water, and therefore, clothed with vegetation. Travelers attest the increasing beauty of the country in going N. from Jerusalem. The “precious things of the earth,” “flowers,” “olive valleys,” and “vines” are assigned to Ephraim ( Isaiah 28:1-4; Hosea 10:1). He is compared to a “heifer,” whereas Dan, Judah, and Benjamin among their comparatively barren rocks are compared to lions and wolves. Ephraim lay near the highways from Egypt and Philistia to Galilee and from Jordan to the sea. Ephraim did not extend to the sea, but had separate cities assigned to it in Manasseh on the coast. In it were Shechem, Jacob’s original settlement, “his parcel of ground” and well; Ebal and Gerizim, the mounts of cursing and blessing; and Shiloh, the seat of the sanctuary until the time of Eli. Here too was the great Joshua’s tomb, as also his patrimony. Jealous sensitiveness as to any exploit achieved without Ephraim’s sharing in it betrayed at once their tribal self importance and their recognized high standing among the tribes. So toward Gideon, Jephthah and David ( Judges 8:1; 12:1; 2 Samuel 19:41-43).

    In one instance they nobly interposed to clothe, feed, and restore in freedom their captive brethren of Judah ( 2 Chronicles 28:9-15). Psalm 78 was designed to soothe their tribal soreness at the transference of the religious capital from Shiloh to Jerusalem ( Psalm 78:60-70). They attached themselves to David after Ishbosheth’s fall; 20,800 warriors of them “coming with a perfect heart to Hebron, to make David king over all Israel.” Among his state officers there was more than one Ephraimite ( Chronicles 27:10-14); and after Absalom’s rebellion they were probably foremost among the men of Israel in expressing jealousy of Judah in respect to the latter’s greater share in promoting David’s return. From the time of the severance of the ten tribes from Judah, brought about by Rehoboam’s infatuation and Jeroboam’s (“ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph”) rousing Ephraim’s innate self-elation, Ephraim became the representative and main portion of the northern kingdom; for the surrounding pagan, the luxurious Phoenicians, the marauding Midianites, the Syrians and Assyrians from the N., and the Egyptians from the S., left to Israel little which was permanently, exclusively, and distinctively its own, beyond the secure territory of Ephraim with its hilly fastnesses. The plain of Esdraelon, to the N. beyond Ephraim, was the natural battlefield for Egyptian forces advancing along the seacoast plain from the S. and Syrians and Assyrians from the N. to operate in; but Ephraim could only be reached through precipitous ascents and narrow passes, where invaders could be easily repelled. But her continually increasing moral degeneracy and religious apostasy rendered all her natural advantages unavailing. No temporary revival, as in Judah’s case, relieves the gloomy picture, until the cup of her iniquity was full; and God, though His amazing love long forbore to judge her, at last swept her away permanently from her home and her abused privileges and opportunities. (Hosea 5; Hosea 6; Hosea 7; Hosea 9; Hosea 10; Hosea 11:1-8; Hosea 12; Hosea 13; Ezekiel 23; Kings 17).

    EPHRAIM (2) Beside which was Absalom’s sheep farm, where took place Amnon’s murder (2 Samuel 13). Our Lord, when the chief priests plotted to kill Him, retired to “a city called Ephraim ... a country near to the wilderness” ( John 11:54). “The wilderness” means the hill country N.E. of Jerusalem, between the central towns and the Jordan valley. Thus, Ophrah of Benjamin probably is identical with Ephraim ( 1 Samuel 13:17.) Now Et-Taiyibeh, a village on a conical hill commanding the view of the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea.

    EPHRAIM, WOOD OF The battlefield where Absalom fell, the entanglement of the wood occasioning large slaughter of the Ephraimites, from whence perhaps the wood was named. From 2 Samuel 17:24,26; 18:3, it is certain that it was E. of Jordan, not W. where the tribe Ephraim was settled. Mahanaim was the “city out of” which David’s army looked for “succour” from him.

    Grotius thinks, less probably, that the name was derived from the slaughter of Ephraim at the Jordan fords by Jephthah ( Judges 12:1-5); the city Mahanaim and wood of Ephraim were miles off from the Jordan.

    EPHRAIN A city of Israel which, with its dependent villages, Abijah and the men of Judah took from Jeroboam ( 2 Chronicles 13:19). Possibly = Ephraim city above; also = EPHRON, MOUNT, on the northern bound of Judah ( Joshua 15:9).

    EPHRATAH; EPHRATH 1. Second wife of Caleb, Hezron’s son; mother of Hur; grandmother of Caleb the spy ( 1 Chronicles 2:19,(24),50; 4:4). 2. The name of Bethlehem Judah in Jacob’s time ( Genesis 35:16,19; 48:7). Whence probably Ephraim the mother of Hur took her name, being a native and owner of the town and district; which accounts for his being called “the father of Bethlehem.” In Micah 5:2 it is called Bethlehem Ephraim. As Bethlehem means “house of bread,” so Ephraim “fruitful,” the region abounding in grain. In <19D206> Psalm 132:6 the sense is: “we (being) in Ephraim (i.e. while David was still a youth at Bethlehem) heard of it,” namely, the ark, as a mere matter of hearsay, so neglected was the ark then while in the forest town of Kirjath Jearim.

    EPHRON Zohar’s son, a Hittite; owner of the field facing Mature or Hebron, and the cave in the field. Abraham bought it from Ephron for 400 shekels of silver (Genesis 23; 25; 49).

    EPICUREANS Disciples of Epicurus, the Athenian philosopher, whose “garden” was the resort of numbers. There he taught that the aim of philosophy should be happiness and pleasure, not absolute truth; experience (the perceptions, general notions, and passions or affections), not reason, the test. Physics he studied, to explain phenomena and dispel superstitious fears; ethics he regarded as man’s proper study, since they conduce to supreme and lasting pleasure. two opposite schools of philosophy prevalent in Athens at Paul’s visit ( Acts 17:18). Materialism and sensual selfishness was the ultimate tendency of Epicurus’ teaching; but his bold criticism of pagan polytheism, the claims of the body, and individual freedom, were the better elements in it. Stoicism taught an absolute fate and the spiritual nature of the soul, which it made part of the general soul of the world. Paul directs against Epicureanism the declaration of creation ( Acts 17:24), providence ( Acts 17:26), inspiration ( Acts 17:28), the resurrection and judgment ( Acts 17:31). Sadduceeism was its Jewish representative.

    Diogenes Laertius (10) preserves some of Epicurus’ letters, and a list of his writings. See also Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, translated by Creech.

    EPISTLE The first mentioned in the Old Testament is that of David to Joab, sent by Uriah ( 2 Samuel 11:14); a usage perhaps borrowed from the Phoenicians, with whose king Hiram he was intimate. The king’s seal was usually attached in token of authority, and to guard against anyone but the person addressed reading it ( 1 Kings 21:8,9). The seal was of clay impressed while moist ( 1 Kings 21:8,9; Job 38:14). “A writing came to Jehoram from Elijah” ( 2 Chronicles 21:12). Originally messages were sent orally ( Genesis 32:3; Numbers 22:5,7,16; 24:12; Judges 11:12,13; 1 Samuel 11:7,9). Hezekiah had a system of couriers or posts to transmit his letters in various quarters; the plan especially prevalent in Persia ( 2 Chronicles 30:6,10; Esther 8:10,14). We read of his “spreading before the Lord” Sennacherib’s letter ( 2 Kings 19:14).

    Sanballat’s “open letter” was an infraction of the etiquette of the Persian court ( Nehemiah 6:5). Jeremiah wrote to the captives in Babylon ( Jeremiah 29:1-3).

    In the New Testament Luke begins both his “Gospel” and “Acts” in the form of a letter to Theophilus; but in substance both books are rather histories than epistles. Our Lord wrote no epistle, as that to Abgarus king of Edessa is most probably not authentic (Eusebius H. E., 1:13). His office was to enact the facts, and to fulfill the personal ministry, upon which the church was to be founded. The epistles are the inspired commentaries unfolding the truths in the histories, the Gospels, and Acts; just as the prophets interpret the spiritual lessons designed by God to be drawn from the Old Testament histories. Twenty-one of the 27 New Testament books are strictly epistles. Three more are so in form: Luke, Acts, and Revelation addressed to the seven churches. Matthew, Mark, and John alone are not epistolary either in form or substance. Fourteen, including Hebrews, are by Paul; three by John; two by Peter; one by James; one by Jude. Paul dictated his to an amanuensis, authenticating them with his autograph at the close, wherewith be wrote the salutation “grace be with thee,” or “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” etc. But, in order to show his regard to the Galatians, whom Judaizers tried to estrange, he wrote all that epistle himself in large characters, for so Galatians 6:11,12 ought to be translated, “ye see in how large letters I have written.” The largeness of letters was probably owing to his weakness of sight ( Galatians 4:15).

    The words “I have written” (“wrote,” egrapsa ) distinguished this epistle as written by himself from 2 Thessalonians 3:17, “I write,” where he only writes the closing salutation. Philemon 1:19 shows that that epistle also was all written by Paul as a special compliment to Philemon; whereas the accompanying epistle to the Colossians ( Colossians 4:18) has only “the salutation” so written, as also 1 Corinthians 16:21. In Romans 16:22 his amanuensis, Tertius, salutes in his own name. Peter’s closing salutation is “peace be with you”; as Paul’s is “grace,” etc. John after Paul’s death takes up his closing benediction, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,” at the end of Revelation. In the beginning of most of Paul’s epistles “grace and peace” are his opening greeting; in the pastoral epistles concerning ministers “mercy” is added, “grace, mercy, and peace” (1 and Timothy and Titus), for ministers of all men most need mercy ( Corinthians 7:25; 2 Corinthians 7:1). All the epistles besides Paul’s are called “universal” or “general.” This designation holds good in a general and not strict sense; for the 2 and 3 John are addressed to specific persons in form, though in substance they are general. The epistolary form of inspiration gives scope for free expression of personal affection, and conveys divine truth, progressively unfolded to us, as to Christian faith, worship and polity with a freshness, point, and communion of heart with heart, such as could hardly be attained by formal, didactic treatises.

    ER (“watchful”). 1. Firstborn of Judah, by Bathshua, a Canaanite; the marriage with this daughter of a corrupt race producing sin and sorrow. Tamar was his wife but bore him no son; for “Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord slew him,” his sin being probably some abomination connected with the impure Canaanite idolatry ( Genesis 38:3-7). 2. 1 Chronicles 4:21. 3. Genesis 46:16. 4. Luke 3:28.

    ERAN Eranites. Numbers 26:36.

    ERASTUS “Chamberlain,” i.e. city steward and treasurer of Corinth ( Romans 16:23). The conversion of so prominent a man marks the great success of Paul’s labors there. He ministered to Paul, accompanying him on his last journey to his second imprisonment at Rome; but “abode at Corinth,” going no further, as Paul notes ( 2 Timothy 4:20) to depict his utter desertion by man. Erastus the missionary is perhaps distinct, as a chamberlain’s office would hardly admit of continued missionary journeys ( Acts 19:22).

    ERECH “The beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar.” Orchoe, 82 miles S., 43 E. of Babylon, now Warka; in the land of Shinar. Apparently the necropolis of the Assyrian kings, judging from the brick and coffins and mounds all round. Some bricks bear the monogram “the moon,” corresponding to Hebrew yareach , from whence perhaps Erech is derived. The inhabitants were among those settled in Samaria by Asnapper ( Ezra 4:9,10). [See BABYLON .] ESARHADDON Sennacherib’s younger son, Sargon’s grandson ( 2 Kings 19:37). [See ASSYRIA .] After the murder of his father by his two sons, Esarhaddon the oldest surviving son succeeded, 680 B.C. The Assyrian inscriptions state that for some months after his accession he warred with his half brothers (Rawlinson, Ant. Monarchies, 2:186). The Greek Abydenus states the same. The Scripture is thus confirmed; for naturally Esarhaddon would seek to avenge his father’s murder, and they would seek the throne. The Armenian records state that the two assassins, having escaped from the scene of conflict, took refuge in Armenia, where the king gave them lands which long continued in possession of their posterity (Mos. Choren., Hist.

    Arm., 1:22). Esarhaddon is famed for his expedition into Arabia. an undertaking with few parallels in history; for few conquerors have ventured to pass the barrier of Arabian deserts. Esarhaddon was perhaps the most potent of the Assyrian kings, warring in the far East, according to the monuments, with Median tribes “of which his father had never heard the name”; extending his power W. to Cilicia and Cyprus, ten kings of which submitted to him. Southward he claimed authority over Egypt and Ethiopia; having driven the Ethiopian Tirhakah out of Egypt. Having conquered Merodach Baladan’s sons, Esarhaddon made Babylon directly subject to the Assyrian crown, instead of being governed by viceroys, and as king of each of the two empires resided by turns at Nineveh and Babylon. He is the only Assyrian king who reigned at Babylon; the bricks of the palace he built there still bearing his name. A tablet also bears the date of his reign. Manasseh king of Judah is mentioned among his tributaries. Scripture by a striking minute coincidence with truth represents Manasseh as carried to Babylon, not to the Assyrian capital Nineveh; which would seem inexplicable but for the above fact, revealed by the monuments. Esarhaddon’s Babylonian reign lasted from 680 to 667 B.C., the very period when Manasseh was brought up by the Assyrian king’s captains to Babylon on a charge of rebellion ( 2 Chronicles 33:11-19).

    By an unusual clemency on the part of an oriental king, Manasseh was restored to his throne, a marvelous proof of the power of prayer. The monuments tell us of a similar act of Esarhaddon whereby he gave a territory on the Persian gulf to Merodach Baladan’s son, on his submission as a refugee at his court.

    Esarhaddon built three other palaces and 30 temples,” shining with silver and gold,” in different parts of his dominions. His S.W. palace at Nimrud, excavated by Layard, corresponds in plan to Solomon’s temple but is larger, namely, the hall being 220 by 100 ft. and the antechamber 160 by 60. Unfortunately the sculptured stones and alabaster have been materially injured by fire. He boasts of his S.W. palace of Nimrud that it was a building “such as the kings his fathers before him had never made.”

    Ptolemy’s canon shows he reigned 13 years in Babylon, and probably reigned in all 20 years, dying about 660 B.C. Assur-bani-pal, or Sardanapalus II, for whom Esarhaddon built a palace, succeeded, and caused the tablets to be collected which furnish us with such information; comparative vocabularies, lists of deities, records of astronomical observations, histories, scientific works. Saracus his son was attacked by the Scythians, then by the Medes and Cyaxares, and Nabopolassar his own general. Saracus burnt himself in his palace, and Nineveh was taken. [See ASSYRIA .] Esarhaddon (as G. Smith reads an inscription) about 672 B.C., marching from Asshur (Kileh Sherghat) to Tyre, besieged Bahal its king who was in league with Tirhakah, thence he marched to Aphek at the foot of Lebanon, then to Raphia S.W. of Judah, thence from Lower Egypt which was in his hands to Miruha or Meroe. Though distressed on the way by want of water, he at last drove Tirhakah out of Egypt.

    ESAU (“hairy, rough”); for at birth he “came out red (from whence his name\parEDOM), all over like an hairy garment” ( Genesis 25:25). The animal appearance marked his sensual, self willed, untamed nature, in which the moral, spiritual elements were low. Secar , “hairy,” may have also originated the designation of his territory, mount Sier, i.e.” thickly wooded,” as he was in person “hairy.” Jacob took hold of his twin brother in the womb when the latter was coming out first, from whence he got his name = supplanter ( Hosea 12:3). Esau like Nimrod was “a cunning (skillful) hunter,” “a man of the field” or “desert,” wild, restless, and selfindulgent, instead of following his fathers’ peaceful pastoral life, “dwelling in tents.”

    Isaac, with the caprice of affection whereby the quiet, parent loves the opposite to his own character, “loved Esau because he did eat of his venison,” his selfishness herein bringing its own punishment. “Rebekah loved Jacob” as “a plain man,” i.e. upright, steady, and domestic; but her love too was wanting in regard to high principle. Reckless of the lawfulness of the means, provided she gained her end, she brought sorrow on both. From before the birth of both it was foretold her, “the elder shall serve the younger.” Esau’s recklessness of spiritual and future privileges, and care only for the indulgence of the moment, caused him to sell his birthright for Jacob’s red pottage, made of lentils or small beans, still esteemed a delicacy in the East. The color was what most took his fancy; “feed me with that red, that red.” “The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye” were his snare. He can hardly have been “at the point, to die” with hunger; rather his impatience to gratify his appetite made his headstrong will feel as if his life depended on it; I shall die if I don’t get it, then “what profit shall this birthright do to me!” Nay, but “what is a man profiled if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” ( Matthew 16:26.) Jacob took an ungenerous and selfish advantage, which the Scripture does not sanction, and distrusting Esau’s levity required of him art oath. Yet his characteristic faith appears in his looking on to the unseen future privileges attached to, the birthright (the priesthood of the family ( Numbers 8:17-19) and the progenitorship of Messiah independently of temporal advantages. Genesis 48:22; 49:3,4) as heir of the everlasting promises to Abraham’s seed ( Romans 9:5,8). “Profane Esau for one morsel sold,” and so “despised, his birthright.” The smallness of the inducement aggravates the guilt of casting away eternity for a morsel. Unbelieving levity must have all its good things now ( 1 Corinthians 15:32); faith says with Jacob “I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord” ( Genesis 49:18; compare Luke 16:25). The nickname Edom,” red,” was consequently given Esau as the reproach of his sensual folly, a name mostly confined to his land and his posterity.

    By feigning to be Esau, Jacob, at his mother’s suggestion, stole the father’s blessing which God would have secured to him without guile and its retributive punishment, had he waited in simple faith. Isaac too erred through carnal partiality, which he sought to stimulate by eating his favorite’s venison, determining to give to Esau the blessing in spite of the original divine intimation, “the elder shall serve the younger,” and in spite of Esau’s actual sale of the birthright to Jacob, and though Esau had shown his unworthiness of it by taking when he was forty years of age two Hittite wives from among the corrupt Canaanites, to his father’s and mother’s grief. Too late, when “afterward Esau would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears” ( Hebrews 12:16,17). There is an “afterward” coming when the unbeliever shall look back on his past joys and the believer on his past griefs, in a very different light from now. Contrast Hebrews 12:11 with Hebrews 12:17; so Genesis 3:6,8, “the cool of the day “; Matthew 25:11,12, “the foolish virgins.” Esau found the truth of the homely proverb, “he that will not when he may, when he will shall have nay” ( Proverbs 1:24-30; Luke 13:28,34,35; 19:42,44).

    What Esau found not was “place for repentance” of the kind which he sought, namely, such as would regain the lost blessing. Had Esau sought rear repentance he would have found it ( Matthew 7:7). He did not find it because this was not what he sought. His “tears” were no proof of true repentance, for immediately after being foiled in his desire he resolved to murder Jacob! He wept not for his sin, but for its penalty. “Before, he might have had the blessing without tears; afterward, however many he shed, he was rejected” (Bengel). Tears are shed at times by the most hardened; failing to repent when so softened for the moment, they hardly ever do so afterward ( 1 Samuel 24:16,17, Saul: contrast David, Psalm 56:8).

    Rebekah, hearing of the vengeful design of Esau against her favorite son, by recalling to Isaac’s remembrance Esau’s ill judged marriage secured the father’s consent to Jacob’s departure from the neighborhood of the daughters of Heth to that of his own kindred, and at the same time the confirmation of the blessing ( Genesis 27:46; 28:1). Esau then tried by marrying his cousin Mahalath, Ishmael’s daughter, to conciliate his parents ( Genesis 28:8,9). Thus he became connected with the Ishmaelite tribes beyond the Arabah valley. Soon after he began to drive the Horites out of mount Seir; and by the return of Jacob 29 years after, Esau was there with armed retainers and abundant wealth. It was not however until after his father’s death that he permanently left Canaan, according to Isaac’s blessing, to Jacob, his wives and family then first accompanying him ( Genesis 35:29; 36:6).

    Esau was moved by God in answer to Jacob’s wrestling prayer to lay aside revenge and meet his brother with embraces, kisses, and tears ( Proverbs 16:7). Love, and gifts in token of it, drove after drove, melted the violent but impulsive spirit of Esau. Jacob however, wisely fearing any collision which might revive the old grudge, declined accompanying Esau, but expressed a hope one day to visit mount Seir; his words,” I will lead on softly ... until I come unto my lord unto Seir,” cannot mean he then intended going there, for he was avowedly going toward Succoth and Shechem (Genesis 32--33). The death of their father Isaac more than years afterward was probably the next and last occasion of the brothers meeting. They united in paying him the last sad offices ( Genesis 35:29).

    Then Esau, by this time seeing that Jacob’s was the birthright blessing and the promised land, withdrew permanently to his appointed lot, mount Seir ( Genesis 32:3; Deuteronomy 2:5-12). He carried away all his substance from Canaan there, to take full possession of Seir and drive out its original inhabitants. “Living by his sword” too, he felt Edom’s rocky fastnesses better suited for his purpose than S. Palestine with its open plains. [See EDOM , see AHOLIBAMAH , see BASHEMATH .] The prophecy of Isaac,” Thou shalt serve thy brother, and ... when thou shalt have the dominion thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck,” was fulfilled to the letter. At first Esau prospered more, dukes being in Edom before any king reigned in Israel ( Genesis 36:31), and while Israel was in bondage in Egypt Edom was independent. But Saul and David conquered the Edomites ( 1 Samuel 14:47; 2 Samuel 8:14), and they were, excepting revolts, subject to Judah until Ahaz’ reign; then they threw off the yoke ( 2 Kings 16:6; 2 Chronicles 28:7). Judas Maccabeus defeated, and his nephew Hyrcanus conquered, and compelled them to be circumcised and incorporated with the Jews; but an Idamean dynasty, Antipater and the Herod’s, ruled down to the final destruction of Jerusalem.

    ESDRAELON [See JEZREEL .] ESEK (“calumny, wrong”). A well dug by Isaac’s men, but abandoned when the men of Gerar strove for it ( Genesis 26:20).

    ESH-BAAL (“Baal’s man”). Saul’s youngest son ( 1 Chronicles 8:33, 9:39); Bosheth (“shame”) being substituted for Baal through the believing Israelites’ contempt of idols, Ishbosheth is its equivalent ( Isaiah 44:9, etc.; Hosea 9:10), ESHBAN Genesis 36:26.

    ESHCOL (“cluster”). 1. An Amorite chief, Mamre’s brother, ally to Abram in his expedition against Chedorlaomer ( Genesis 14:13,24). 2. Valley or Eshcol. A wady in southern Canaan, somewhere in the vinebearing district (miles of hill sides and valleys covered with small stone heaps for training vines) between Hebron ( Genesis 13:18; 14:13) and Kadesh, but nearer Kadesh (Ain-el-Gadis) on the northern frontier of the peninsula, the Negeb or the “south.” From Kadesh the spies went and returned with grapes of Eshcol, which cannot be near Hebron, for grapes could not well be brought such a distance as that between Hebron and Kadesh, and the spies would court secrecy and haste ( Numbers 13:24).

    The Amorite chief’s name originated the designation of the valley Eshcol, which Israel afterward interpreted in the suitable sense cluster. Most identify Eshcol with the rich valley N. of Hebron, described by Robinson as producing the largest grapes in Palestine, where a fount is still called Ain Eskaly (Van de Velde).

    ESHEAN A city of Judah in the hilly country ( Joshua 15:52).

    ESHEK 1 Chronicles 8:39,40.

    ESHTAOL A town in the shephelah or low country of Judah ( Joshua 15:33; 19:41), allotted to Daniel On the Philistine border between Azotus and Askelon.

    Here Samson spent his boyhood, and hither his remains were finally carried to the burying ground of Manoah his father ( Judges 13:25; 16:31; 18:2,8,11,12). Between the Danite towns Zorah and Eshtaol and behind Kirjath Jearim was Mahaneh-Dan, the standing camp of the little host exposed to constant warfare with the Philistines; a neighborhood well calculated to train Samson for his after encounters with that race. As Kirjath Jearim is now Kuriet-el-Enab, and Zorah is Suz’ah, seven miles S.W. of it, Eshtaol is Kustul, a conical hill an hour’s journey S.E. from Kuriet-el-Enab toward Jerusalem. This fulfills the requisite condition that Kirjath Jearim should lie between Eshtaol and Zorah. E. Wilton (Imperial Bible Dictionary) identifies Eshtaol with Um Eshteiyeh, 12 Roman miles from Beit Jibrin (Eleutheropolis), agreeing with Eusebius’ statement that it is ten miles distant. Jerome says Jarmuth was near, which agrees with the fact that Yarmak is near Eshtaol; Zanua (Zanoah) is also near. Black (Palestine Exploration) identifies Eshtaol with Eshu’a.

    ESHTEMOA Eshtemoh ( Joshua 15:50). Allotted with its suburbs to the priests ( Joshua 21:14; 1 Chronicles 6:57; compare 1 Chronicles 4:17).

    Frequented by David during his wanderings. Accordingly, to his friends there he sent presents of the Amalekite spoil ( 1 Samuel 30:28,31). Now Semu’a, seven miles S. of Hebron. Eshtemoa was son of Ishbah; Mered was husband of Jehudijah (the Jewess), by whose descendants, Gedor, Socho, and Zanoah, near Eshtemoa, were founded. The town Eshtemoa was founded by the descendants of see BITHIAH , Pharaoh’s daughter, the Egyptian wife of Mered. A large stone (Hajr-el-Sakhain) stands on the N. road to the village Semu’a at a distance of 3,000 cubits, the Levitical extent of suburbs and the boundary of the village possessions to this day (Palestine Exploration). How the Holy Land confirms the Holy Book!

    ESHTON 1 Chronicles 4:11,12.

    ESLI Luke 3:25.

    ESROM Matthew 1:3; Luke 3:33.

    ESSENES A sect of the Jews who practiced a strict ceremonial asceticism, discouraging marriage, having community of goods, temperate, industrious, charitable, opposed to all oaths, slavery, and war, like the modern Society of Friends, and also, unlike t temple of the soul, tinged their deep veneration for Moses’ laws, which in every way favor marriage.

    Shrinking from communion with other worshippers whose contact they regarded as polluting, they avoided the temple and sacrificed in their own dwellings. Engedi, the western shores of the Dead Sea, and like solitary places, were their favorite haunts. They arose 110 years B.C. (Judas being the earliest mentioned), but are never noticed in New Testament, the reason doubtless being their isolation from general society. The name is akin to choshen , the high priest’s mystic breastplate, and other Hebrew words meaning “the silent, the mysterious.” The Egyptian ascetic mystics, the Therapeutae, resemble them. In zeal for the law, except where their peculiarities were concerned, sabbatarianism and rigorous exercises, they resembled the Pharisees, with whom they were popularly confounded. See Josephus, B. J. 2:8, sec. 7,11; Ant. 13:5, sec. 9; 15:10, sec. 4; 18:1, sec. 2; Pliny, Nat. Hist., 5:15. They were the forerunners of monkish celibacy and anchorite asceticism. The novitiate was for a year, and then a two years probation before membership, which, on oath of an awful kind (the only oath permitted), bound them to piety, justice, obedience, honesty, and secrecy as to the books of the sect and the names of the angels. Purity and divine communion were their aim. A good aim, but to be best attained in God’s way of the daily life’s discipline rather than in self imposed austerity and isolation.

    We need not bid, for cloistered cell, Our neighbor and our work farewell, Nor try to wind ourselves too high For mortal man beneath the sky.

    The trivial round, the common task, Should furnish all we ought to ask, Room to deny ourselves, a road To bring us daily nearer God. -- Keble See John 17:15; Colossians 2:18-23.

    ESTHER A Jewess of Benjamin, descendant of the captivity carried to Babylon with Jeconiah, 599 or 597 B.C.; born abroad, of a family which chose to remain instead of returning to Jerusalem. Kish, the ancestor of Mordecai ( Esther 2:5-7,15), had been carried away with Jeconiah; thus Mordecai was contemporary with Xerxes, which harmonizes with the view that see AHASUERUS is Xerxes. Mordecai and his uncle Abihail’s daughter (his own adopted ward) lived at Shushan, the Persian royal city. Mordecai probably held some office in “the palace” ( Esther 2:5,21-23). Her original name Hadassah means “myrtle.” Her Persian name Esther means and is akin to “star,” implying like Venus good fortune. Vashti the queen having been divorced for refusing to show the people and the princes her beauty, Esther was chosen out of the fairest virgins collected out of all the provinces, as her successor. Ahasuerus, unaware of her race, granted leave to Haman his favorite, who was offended with Mordecai for not doing him reverence, to destroy the whole people to which Mordecai belonged.

    Esther, at the risk of her own life, uninvited entered the king’s presence, and obtained a virtual reversal of the decree against the Jews. Haman was hung on the gallows designed by him for Mordecai ( Psalm 7:16). The Jews defended themselves so effectually on the day appointed by Haman for their slaughter that in Shushan the palace alone they slew 500 and Haman’s ten sons on one day, and, by Esther’s request granted by the king, slew 300 at Shushan; and the Jews in the provinces, “standing for their lives,” slew 75,000, “but on the spoil laid they not their hand.” So thenceforward the feast Purlin (lots) on the 14th and 15th of the month Adar (February and March) was kept by the Jews as “a day of gladness and of sending portions to one another, and gifts to the poor.” “Esther the queen wrote with all authority to confirm this second letter of Purim” ( Esther 8:7-14; 9:20,29-32); “her decree confirmed these matters of Purlin.” The continuance of this feast by the Jews to our day confirms the history. It is also confirmed by the casual way in which 2 Macc. 15:36 alludes to the feast (“Mardochaeus’ day”) as kept by the Jews in Nicanor’s time.

    In the 3rd year of Xerxes ( Esther 1:3,4) the disastrous expedition against Greece (foretold in Daniel 11:2, “by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia”) was determined on in an assembly at Susa (Herodotus vii. 8). The Book of Esther describes in the same year, the 3rd, the lavish feasting during which Vashti was deposed, 488 B.C. In his 7th year the battles of Plataea and Mycale, according to secular history, drove Xerxes in fright from Sardis to Susa.

    So, in Scripture, it was not until the tenth month of this 7th year that Esther was made queen. The long delay between Vashti’s deposal and Esther’s accession is satisfactorily accounted for by the Greek expedition which intervened. On returning from it Xerxes tried to bury his disgrace in the pleasures of the seraglio (Herodotus vii. 35,114); as indeed he had begun it and, according to Herodotus, at intervals continued it with feastings.

    Possibly Vashti answers to the Amestris of secular history, who was queen consort from the beginning to the end of his reign, and was queen mother under his son and successor Artaxerxes. Esther cannot be Amestris, since the latter was daughter of a Persian noble, Otanes; if Vashti be Amestris, then her disgrace was only temporary. Or else Vashti and Esther were both only “secondary wives” with the title “queen.” A young “secondary wife” might for a time eclipse the queen consort in the favor of the king; but the latter would ultimately maintain her due position. Esther’s influence lasted at least from Ahasuerus: 7th to the 12th year and beyond, but how far beyond we know not ( Esther 3:7,10). His marriage to a Jewess was in contravention of the law that he must marry a wife belonging to one of the seven great Persian families. But Xerxes herein, as previously in requiring the Queen Vashti to appear unveiled before revelers (such an outrage on oriental decorum that she refused to come), set at nought Persian law and prejudice. The massacre of 75,000 by Jews ( Esther 9:16) would be unlikely, if they were Persians; but they were not, they were the Jews’ enemies in the provinces, idolaters, naturally hating the spiritual monotheism of the Jews, whereas the Persians sympathized with it. The Persians in the provinces would be only the officials, whose orders from court were not to take part against the Jews. The persons slain were subject races, whose lives as such Xerxes made little account of.

    The Book of Esther supplies the gap between Ezra 6 and Ezra 7. Xerxes, or the Ahasuerus of Esther, intervenes between Darius and Artaxerxes.

    The “feast unto all his princes,” etc., for “an hundred and fourscore days” ( Esther 1:3,4) was protracted thus long in order that. all the princes in their turn might partake of it; for all could not, consistently with their duties in the provinces, have been present all that time.

    The Book of Esther describes the stare of the exiled people of God in Persia, and thus complements the narratives by Ezra and Nehemiah of what took place in the Holy Land. Possibly Mordecai was the author; for the minute details of the banquet, of the names of the chamberlains and eunuchs, of Haman’s wife and sons, and of the usages of the palace, imply such an intimate acquaintance with all that concerned Esther as best fits Mordecai himself. Similarly, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, who held official posts in the Persian court, wrote under inspiration the books which bear their names, and which describe the relations of the Jews to the pagan world power. This view accords with Esther 9:20,23,32; 10. Ezra and the men of the great synagogue at Jerusalem probably edited and added it to the canon, having previously received it, and the book of Daniel, while at the Persian court. The last of the great synagogue was Simon the Just, high priest 310-291 B.C. The canon contained it at latest by that time, and how long earlier is unknown. “The chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia” ( Esther 10:2) were at the time of the writer accessible, and the very order whereby Media is put before Persia implies it cannot have been much later than the time of the events recorded, the former and middle part of Xerxes’ reign, before Artabanus became Xerxes’ favorite, and Mordecai’s (perhaps = Matacas the eunuch) influence waned.

    The Book of Esther was placed by the Jews among the Kethubim (hagiographa), in the portion called the five volumes, Megilloth.

    Maimonides says that in Messiah’s days the prophets and hagiographa shall pass away, except “Esther,” which will remain with the Pentateuch. It is read through in the synagogues during Purim. The scribes wrote the names of Haman’s ten sons in three perpendicular columns of three, three, four, hanging upon three parallel cords, three upon each, one above another, representing the hanging of Haman’s sons.

    The absence of the name of GOD is unique to this book; the Song of Solomon similarly has no express mention of GOD. The design apparently was, in the absence of the visible theocracy while God’s people were under the pagan world power, that the historic facts should speak for themselves with expressive silence (just as the book of nature does: Psalm 19; Romans 1:20), attesting God’s providence even when God hid His name and verbal manifestation. When God is invisible He is not the less active. The very absence of the name sets believers about inquiring why? and then they discover that God works no less by His providence in the world where He is veiled than by His grace in the church wherein He is revealed. The hand of Providence is to be traced palpably in the overruling of the king’s reckless feastings and wanton deposing of Vashti because she shrank from violating her own self respect, to laying the train for His appointed instrument, Esther’s elevation; in Mordecai’s saving the king’s life from the two would-be assassins, and the recording of the fact in the royal chronicles, preparing the way for his receiving the royal honors which his enemy designed for himself; in Haman’s casting Pur, the lot, for an auspicious day for destroying the Jews, and the result being, by God’s providence which counterworked his appeal to chance, that the feast of Purlin is perpetually kept to commemorate the Jews’ preservation and his destruction; in Esther’s patriotic venture before the king after previous fasting three days, and God’s interposing to incline the king’s heart to hold out to her the golden scepter, ensuring to her at once life and her request ( Proverbs 21:1); in Haman’s pride at being invited to the queen’s banquet and his preparing the gallows for Haman, and Providence, the very night before it, withdrawing sleep from the king so that the chronicles were read for his pleasure, and Mordecai’s service was thus brought to his remembrance, so that when Haman came to solicit that Mordecai should be hanged the king met him with the question, “What shall be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honor?” Then, in Haman supposing himself to be the object of honor, and suggesting the highest royal honors (such as Joseph had from the Egyptian king, Genesis 41:43), and thus unwittingly being constrained with his own voice and hand to glorify him whom he had meant to destroy; then in the denouement at the queen’s banquet, and Haman’s execution on the very gallows he erected for Haman ( Psalm 7:14-16); and the consequent preservation from extinction of the holy race of whom Messiah must spring according to prophecy, and of whom Isaiah ( Isaiah 54:17) writes, “no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against thee thou shalt condemn.” Compare Isaiah 6:13; 65:8; Jeremiah 30:10,11; Zechariah 2:8,9.

    The Septuagint, at, a much later date, interpolated copiously the name of GOD and other apocryphal additions. The purity of the Hebrew canon stands out in striking contrast with the laxity of the Alexandrian Greek version. The style of the Hebrew in Esther is like that of the contemporary Ezra and Chronicles, with just such a mixture of Persian and Chaldee words as we should expect in a work of the age and country to which Esther professes to belong. Jerome (Proleg. Gal.) mentions the book by name. So Augustine, De Civit. Dei; and Origen (in Eusebius, Hist.

    Ecclesiastes, 6:25).

    Haman the Agagite ( Esther 3:1; Numbers 24:7,20), as being of the blood royal of Amalek, was doomed to destruction with that accursed nation ( Exodus 17:14-16). His wife and all his friends shared his guilt ( Esther 5:14), and therefore by a retributive providence shared his punishment (Esther 9).

    Esther’s own character is in the main attractive: dutiful to her adoptive father, and regardful of his counsels though a queen; having faith in the high destiny of her nation, and believing with Mordecai that even “if she held her peace at the crisis deliverance would arise to the Jews from another place,” and that providentially she had “come to the kingdom for such a time as this” ( Esther 4:14); brave, yet not foolhardy, but fully conscious of her peril, not having received the king’s call for 30 days, with pious preparation seeking aid from above in her patriotic venture; “obtaining favor in the sight of all them that looked upon her “( Esther 2:15). At the same time Scripture does not hide from us the fact of her not being above the vindictiveness of the age and the country, in her requesting that Haman’s ten sons should be hanged, and a second day given the Jews to take vengeance on the enemies who had sought to kill them.

    ETAM 1. A village in the S. of Simeon ( 1 Chronicles 4:32). 2. In Judah, garrisoned by Rehoboam ( 2 Chronicles 11:6); near Bethlehem and Tekoah. Etam was one of Judah’s descendants ( Chronicles 4:3). 3. ETAM THE ROCK. Now Beit ‘Arab, a steep, stony, bore knoll, standing amidst the winding, narrow valleys, without a blade of grain on its sides, but olive groves at its feet and three abundant springs. This answers to Etam, which was large enough for 3,000 men of Judah to go up to its top.

    It is not far from Manoah’s patrimony from whence Samson “went down” to it. Lower than Eshu’a (Eshtaol) toward the S., yet conspicuous from more than one side (Courier). Into a cleft of it Samson retired after slaying the Philistines for burning the Timnite woman who was to have been his wife ( Judges 15:8,11-19). In Judah, with Lehi or En-hak-kore at its foot. Probably near the city Etam (2): distant enough from Tinmath to seem a safe retreat for Samson from the Philistines’ revenge, yet not too far for them to reach in searching after him; The many springs and rocky eminences round Urtas seem the likely site where to find the rock of Etam and the En-hak-kore. Conder identifying Etam with Beit ‘Atab says that Etam, meaning in Hebrew “cleft,” answers to the singular rock tunnel, roughly hewn in the stone, and running from the midst of the village eastward to the chief spring. This cavern, which is called “the place of refuge,” is 250 ft. long, and from 5 to 8 ft. high, and 18 ft. wide. Here Samson could hide without any one lighting, except by accident, on the entrance of the tunnel. Its lowness compared with the main ridge of the watershed accounts for the “came down.” Josephus (Ant. 8:7, sec. 3) mentions an Etham 50 furlongs from Jerusalem, where were the sources from which Solomon’s pleasure grounds were watered, and Bethlehem and the temple supplied. Williams (Holy City, 2:500) says there is a wady Etam still on the way from Jerusalem to Hebron. A spring exists a few hundred yards S.E. of El-Burak (Solomon’s Pools) called Ain Atan, answering to the Hebrew for Etam (Tyrwhitt Drake, Palestine Exploration) ETHAM An early stage in Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, not far from the Red Sea ( Numbers 33:6-8). Etham is probably Pithom, the frontier city toward the wilderness. At this point the Israelites were told to change their direction of march and go southward, to the W. of the Bitter Lakes which separated them from the desert (Speaker’s Commentary, Exodus 14:2).

    Had Etham been half way between Mukfar and Ajrud (Robinson, Chart), Pharaoh could not have overtaken them, whether he was at Zoan or Rameses, which was two days journey from Etham. The journey from Etham to see PIHAHIROTH , generally identified with Ajrud, would occupy two or three days. E-tham, like Pi-thom, means “the house” or “temple of Turn.”

    ETHAN 1. The Ezrahite, one of Mahol’s (but Zerah’s, of Judah, in 1 Chronicles 2:6 [see DARDA ]; these Levites being associated with the house of Zerah of Judah by residence or citizenship, compare Judges 18:7; 1 Samuel 1:1) four sons, whose wisdom Solomon’s surpassed ( 1 Kings 4:31); title of Psalm 89:2. Son of Kishi or Kushaiah; head of the Merarite Levites in David’s time; a “singer” ( 1 Chronicles 6:33,44); with Heman and Asaph, the heads of the other two Levite families, Ethan was to sound with cymbals ( 1 Chronicles 15:17,19). The three names are given in 1 Chronicles 16:37-41; 25:6; 2 Chronicles 5:12, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun. “Heman the Ezrahite” (i.e. of the house of Zerah) also appears in the title of Psalm 88, of which Psalm 89, is the complement. Thus it is probable that Jeduthun is another form of Ethan, and that “Ethan the Ezrahite” is the same as “Ethan the singer,” though we can only guess as to why he is differently designated in different places. [See MAHOL .] ETHBAAL (“with Baal”), namely, for his patron god. Ithobalus (= Baal with him) in Menander (Josephus, Apion 1:18), king of Sidon, see JEZEBEL ’S father ( 1 Kings 16:31). Priest of Astarte. Murdered Pheles, 50 years after Hiram’s death, and usurped the throne of Tyre for 32 years, 940-908 B.C.

    ETHER A city in the shephelah or low country of Judah; allotted to Simeon ( Joshua 15:42; 19:7).JOCHEN in 1 Chronicles 4:32. In the wilderness country below Hebron, E. of Beersheba. Tel Athar now, according to Van de Velde.

    ETHIOPIA Hebrew see CUSH [see BABYLON ], Isaiah 11:11. S. of Egypt. Now Nubia, Sennaar, Kordofan, and N. Abyssinia. In a stricter sense the kingdom of Meroe from the junction of the Blue and the White Nile to the border of Egypt. Syene on the N. marked the boundary from Egypt ( Ezekiel 29:10; 30:6). The Red Sea was on the Ethiopia, the Libyan desert on the W. The native name was Ethaush; the Greek “Ethiopia” means the land of the sunburnt. Compare Jeremiah 13:23, “can the Ethiopian change his skin?” “The rivers of Ethiopia” ( Zephaniah 3:10) are the two branches of the Nile and the Astabbras (Tacazze). The Nile forms a series of cataracts here. The dispersed Israelites shall be brought as an offering by the nations to the Lord ( Zephaniah 3:8,9; Isaiah 66:20; 60:9), from both the African and the Babylonian Cush, where the ten tribes were scattered in Peter’s time ( 1 Peter 1:1; 5:13; Isaiah 11:11, “from Cush and from Shinar”). The Falashas of Abyssinia are probably of the ten tribes.

    In Isaiah 18:1, “the land shadowing with wings” is Ethiopia shadowing (protecting) with its two wings (Egyptian and Ethiopian forces) the Jews, “a nation scattered and peeled” (loaded with indignity, made bald) though once “terrible” when God put a terror of them into surrounding nations ( Exodus 23:27; Joshua 2:9), “a nation meted out and trodden down whose land the (Assyrian) rivers (i.e. armies, Isaiah 8:7,8) have spoiled”; the Jews, not the Ethiopians. Ethiopia had sent her ambassadors to Jerusalem where they now were ( Isaiah 18:2), Tirhakah their king shortly afterward being the ally whose diversion in that city’s favor saved it from Sennacherib ( Isaiah 36:37). Isaiah announces Sennacherib’s coming overthrow to the Ethiopian ambassadors and desires them to carry the tidings to their own land (compare Isaiah 17:12-14; not “woe” but “ho,” calling attention ( Isaiah 18:1,2); go, take back the tidings of what God is about, to do against Assyria, the common foe of both Ethiopia and Judah. Queen Candace reigned in this Nile-formed is land region; the name is the official designation of a female dynasty shortly before our Lord’s time ( Acts 8:27). The “vessels of bulrushes” or papyrus boats are peculiarly suited to the Upper Nile, as being capable of carriage on the shoulders at the rocks and cataracts. Ethiopia” is often used when Upper Egypt and Ethiopia are meant. It is the Thebaid or Upper Egypt, not Ethiopia by itself, that was peopled and cultivated, when most of Lower Egypt was a marsh. Thus Ethiopia and Egypt are said ( Nahum 3:9) to be the “strength” of “populous No” or Thebes. Zerah the Ethiopian who attacked Asa at Mareshah on the S. of Palestine, and Tirhakah the Ethiopian who advanced toward Judah against Sennacherib, were doubtless rulers of Upper Egypt and Ethiopia combined. Tirhakah’s name is found only on a Theban temple, and his connection with Ethiopia is marked by several monuments there being ascribed to him. An Azerch- Amen reigned in Ethiopia, we know from the monuments; perhaps = Zerah (Rawlinson). Hincks identifies him with Osorkon I, king of Egypt, second of the 22nd dynasty [see ASA ] ( 2 Chronicles 14:9). Tirhakah was third of the 25th dynasty of Egypt, an Ethiopian dynasty. So or Sevechus or Sabacho was another of this dynasty; the ally of Hoshea king of Israel against Shalmaneser ( 2 Kings 17:3,4).

    Osirtasin I (Sesostris, Herodotus, 2:110), of the 12th dynasty, was the first Egyptian king who ruled Ethiopia. While the shepherd kings ruled Lower Egypt the 13th native dynasty retired to the Ethiopian capital Napara.

    Shishak’s army was largely composed of Ethiopians ( 2 Chronicles 12:3). The monuments confirm Isaiah 20:4; Nahum 3:5,8,9, by representing Sargon as warring with Egypt and making the Pharaoh tributary; they also make Ethiopia closely united to Egypt. Probably he was provoked by the help which So had given to his rebel tributary Hoshea.

    The inscriptions tell us Sargon destroyed No-Amon or Thebes in part, which was the capital of Upper Egypt, with which Ethiopia was joined.

    Esarhaddon, according to the monuments, conquered Egypt and Ethiopia Meroe was the emporium where the produce of the distant S. was gathered for transport either by the Nile or by caravans to northern Africa; compare Isaiah 45:14.

    ETHNAN 1 Chronicles 4:7.

    ETHNI 1 Chronicles 6:41.

    EUBULUS A Christian at Rome whose greeting Paul sends ( 2 Timothy 4:21).

    Some identify him with Aristobulus, the traditional first evangelist of Britain. Associated with see PUDENS and see CLAUDIA .

    EUERGETES (“benefactor,” a title of honor often voted by Greek states to public men).

    Ptolemy III and Ptolemy VII were called so. Our Lord alludes to the title, Luke 22:25, “they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors.”

    EUNICE Timothy’s mother. “In her unfeigned faith made its dwelling” (enookesen ); a believing Jewess, but wedded to Timothy’s father a Greek, i.e. a pagan ( Acts 16:1). It is an undesigned coincidence, and so a mark of truth, that in the history just as in the epistle the faith of the mother alone is mentioned, no notice is taken of the father. Probably converted at Paul’s first visit to Lystra ( Acts 14:6,7). The one parent’s faith sanctified the child ( 1 Corinthians 7:14). The Scriptures were her chief teaching to Timothy from childhood ( 2 Timothy 3:15). Lois, her pious mother and Timothy’s grandmother, had doubtless taught herself in them: hereditary piety.

    EUNUCH (bedkeeper). Generally used of those emasculated in order to satisfy the jealousy of masters who committed to them the charge of wives, concubines, and the female apartments. Sometimes implying the high office of “chamberlain,” without such emasculation ( 1 Chronicles 28:1). Even the kings of Israel and Judah had eunuchs, probably foreigners ( 2 Kings 9:32; Jeremiah 38:7). Ethiopians were then, as Nubians now, often so employed. The chief of Pharaoh’s cupbearers, and the chief of his cooks, were eunuchs; Potiphar was an “eunuch” (so Hebrew of “officer”) of Pharaoh’s ( Genesis 37:36,41). So the Assyrian Rabsaris, or chief eunuch ( 2 Kings 18:17). So in the Persian court there were eunuchs as “keepers of the women,” through whom the king gave commands to the women, and kept men at a distance ( Esther 1:10,12,15,16; 2:3,8,14).

    Daniel and his companions were, possibly, mutilated so as to become eunuchs to the Babylonian king ( 2 Kings 20:17,18; Daniel 1:3-7). In Matthew 19:12 our Lord uses the term figuratively for those who are naturally, or who artificially, or by self restraint, have become divested of sexual passion ( 1 Corinthians 7:26,32,34). Our Lord permits, but does not command or recommend, celibacy as superior in sanctity to wedlock; “he that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

    EUODIAS rather, Euodia. A Christian woman, perhaps a deaconess or one of influence at Philippi ( Acts 17:12). See Philippians 4:2,3, “I beseech Euodia, and beseech Syntyche (he beseeches each separately], that they be of the same mind in the Lord. And (‘yea’ in the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus manuscripts) I entreat thee also, true yokefellow, help them (i.e. cooperate with, or as Alford, help toward the reconciliation of, Euodia and Syntyche) inasmuch as they labored with me in the gospel.” At Philippi women were the first hearers of the gospel, and Lydia the first convert.

    The coincidence marks genuineness, that in the Epistle to the Philippians alone instructions are given to women who labored with Paul in the gospel, not without danger ( Acts 16:13,19,20; Philippians 1:28). Euodia and Syntyche were two of “the women who resorted to the river side, where prayer was wont to be made.” Being early converted, they would naturally take a leading part in teaching the gospel to other women, in a private sphere of labor ( 1 Timothy 2:11,12).

    EUPHRATES Eu, Sanskrit su, denotes “good”; the second syllable denotes “abundant.”

    Hebrew Prath , now Frat. [See EDEN , wherein it is mentioned as one of the four, rivers.] The bound to which God promised the land given to Abraham’s seed should extend. Called “the river,” “the great river,” as being the largest with which Israel was acquainted, in contrast to the soon drying up torrents of Palestine ( Isaiah 8:7; Genesis 15:18; Deuteronomy 1:7). The largest and longest of the rivers of western Asia. It has two sources in the Armenian mountains, one at Domli, miles N.E. of Erzeroum, the other N. of the mountain range Ala Tagh, not far from Ararat; the two branches meet at Kebban Maden, the one having run 400 the other 270 miles. The united river runs S.W. and S. through the Taurus and Antitaurus ranges toward the Mediterranean; but the ranges N. of Lebanon preventing its reaching that sea, it turns S.E. 1,000 miles to the Persian gulf. N. of Sumeisat (Samosata) the stream runs in a narrow valley between mountains. From Sumeisat to Hit it runs amidst a more open but hilly country. From Hit downwards it runs through a low, flat, alluvial plain. The whole course is 1,750 miles, 650 more than the Tigris and only 200 short of the Indus; for 1,200 it is navigable for boats and small steamers. Its greatest width is 700 or 800 miles from the mouth, namely, 400 yards across, from its junction with the Khabour (Chebar) at Carchemish, to Werai, a village. Below the Khabour it has no tributaries, and so its depth and width decrease. At Babylon its width has decreased to 200 yards, with a depth of 15 ft. Farther down 120 wide, 12 deep.

    Moreover, its water here and lower down is much employed in irrigation; and it has a tendency to expend itself in vast marshes. But 40 miles below Lamlum it increases to 200 yards wide, and when joined by the Tigris it is half a mile wide The yearly inundation in May is clue to the melting of the snows in the Armenian mountains. Nebuchadnezzar (Abyden., Fr. 8) controlled the inundation by turning the water through sluices into channels for distribution over the whole country. Boats of wicker work, coated with bitumen and covered with skins, are still to be seen on the river, as more than two thousand years ago in Herodotus’ time. By this river the East and West carried on mutual commerce during the successive periods of Babylonian and Persian rule.

    As Babylon represents mystically the apostate church, so the waters of Euphrates, “where the whore sitteth” (in impious parody of Jehovah who “sitteth upon the flood”), represent the “peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues,” which were her main support ( Revelation 17:15,16). The drying up of Babylon’s waters answers to the ten kings’ stripping, eating, and burning the whore, which is now being enacted in many European countries ( Revelation 16:12). “The kings of the Euphrates” (compare Revelation 1:6) are the saints of Israel and the Gentiles accompanying the king of Israel in “glory returning from the way of the East” ( Ezekiel 43:2; Matthew 24:27). The obstacles which stood in the way of Israel and her king returning, namely, the apostate church (both Rome and the Greek apostasy) and her multitudinous peoples, shall be dried up, her resources being drained off, just as Cyrus marched into Babylon through the dry channel of the Euphrates.

    The promise to Abraham that his seed’s inheritance should reach the Euphrates ( Genesis 15:18; Deuteronomy 1:7; Joshua 1:4) received a very partial fulfillment in Reuben’s pastoral possessions ( Chronicles 5:9,10) (the Hagarites here encountered them, the inscriptions confirming scripture as to their appearance upon the middle Euphrates in the later empire); a fuller accomplishment under David and Solomon, when an annual tribute was paid from subject petty kingdoms in that quarter, as Hadadezer king of Zobah, etc. ( 1 Chronicles 18:3; 2 Samuel 8:3-8; 1 Kings 4:21; 2 Chronicles 9:26.) The full accomplishment awaits Messiah’s coming again. [See CANAAN .] The Euphrates was the boundary between Assyria and the Hittite country, after Solomon’s times, according to inscriptions. But Assyria at last drove back the Hittites from the right bank. [See CARCHEMISH .] EUROCLYDON Acts 27:14. The Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus manuscripts read Euraquilon, i.e. the E.N.E. wind, just the wind best suited to the facts.

    It came down from the island of Crete, S. of which Paul was sailing. It was “typhoon like” (tufonikos , KJV “tempestuous”), such gales in the Levant being often accompanied by terrific squalls from the mountains. The “S. wind” ( Acts 27:13) too is the one that often changes suddenly to a violent N. wind. The long continuance of the gale (“the fourteenth night,” Acts 27:27), the beclouding of sun and stars for days ( Acts 27:20), and the heavy “rain” after the storm ( Acts 28:2), are characteristic of this wind in the Mediterranean in the present day. The vessel being driven from the coast to Clauda isle ( Acts 27:16), and the fear lest she should be driven S.W. to the African Syrtis ( Acts 27:17), favor this reading.

    EUTYCHUS Acts 20:9. A youth who sat in a window and, falling asleep during Paul’s long and late discourse, fell from the third story, and was restored to life by the apostle, who fell on the dead body and embraced it, as Elijah of old ( 1 Kings 17:21), and Elisha ( 2 Kings 4:34).

    EVANGELIST An order of ministers, “given” among other church officers by Christ, as one of the fruits of His ascension, to His church on and after Pentecost.

    Not only the office, but the men, were a divine gift: “He gave some to be apostles, and some to be prophets (inspired forth-tellers, not fore-tellers), and some to be evangelists,” i.e. itinerant missionary preachers, whereas “pastors and teachers” were stationary (Ephesians 4). The evangelist founded the church; the teacher built it up in the faith. The ministry of gifts preceded the ministry of orders. The irregular “evangelist” prepared the way for the regular “pastor.” Apostles ( Acts 8:25; 14:7; Corinthians 1:17) or vicars apostolic, as Timothy ( 2 Timothy 4:2-5), might “preach (herald, keerussein ) the word,” and so “do the work of an evangelist.” Philip had been set apart as one of the seven (Acts 7; 8; 21) by the laying on of the apostles’ hands. Christ gave him to the church, additionally, in the capacity of an “evangelist” now in one city, now in another. So others scattered by persecution ( Acts 8:4) “went everywhere evangelistically preaching (euangelizomenoi ) the word.” The “pastors” taught and exhorted; the “evangelists” preached the glad news which prepared the way for the pastorate. It was therefore a work rather than an order. The evangelist was not necessarily an apostle, bishop-elder, or deacon, but might be any of these. Evangelist, in the sense “inspired writer of one of the four Gospels,” was a later usage. Eusebius (H. E., 3:37) in the third century says: “men do the work of evangelists, leaving their homes to preach Christ, and deliver the written Gospels to those who were ignorant of the faith.” The transition step appears in 2 Corinthians 8:18,19, “the brother, whose praise is in the gospel throughout all the churches,” probably Luke, well known throughout the churches as Paul’s companion in evangelistic work, and at that time with Paul ( Acts 20:6).

    Of all Paul’s “companions in travel” ( Acts 19:29), Luke was the most prominent, having been his companion in preaching at his first entrance into Europe ( Acts 16:10). Paul probably helped Luke in writing his Gospel, as Peter helped Mark. This accounts for the remarkable similarity between Paul’s account of the institution of the Lord’s supper ( Corinthians 11:23) and Luke’s account, an undesigned coincidence and mark of genuineness. So in 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul says, “the Scripture saith, The laborer is worthy of his reward,” quoted from Luke 10:7; but Matthew 10:10 has “his meat;” whereby he recognizes the Gospel according to Luke as inspired “Scripture,” and naturally quotes that one of the Gospels which was written by his own evangelistic helper. Luke’s Gospel had then been about eight or nine years in circulation. Our home and foreign missionaries correspond to the primary “evangelists”; they traveled about freely where their services were needed, either to propagate the gospel or to inspect and strengthen congregations already formed.

    Timothy was such a missionary bishop or vicar apostolic at Ephesus ( Timothy 1:3; 2 Timothy 4:5).

    EVE (“life”). [See ADAM .] Man’s “help meet,” i.e. a helper suited to and matching him. Formed from “one of Adam’s ribs,” taken by God from Adam in a deep sleep; type of the church formed from the opened side of her Heavenly Bridegroom (from whence flowed blood and water) in the death sleep, so as by faith in His atoning blood, and by the cleansing water of His Holy Spirit, to be “bone of His bone, and flesh of His flesh” ( Ephesians 5:25-32; 1 John 5:6). SEe Genesis 2:21,22, “the rib built (the usual Hebrew word for founding a family: Genesis 16:2; 30:3 margin) He up into a woman”; not as Speaker’s Commentary, “the side He built up,” etc. For God “took one of then,” therefore “side” (tseelah ), “sides,” must be used for rib, ribs. So the ancient versions. “Woman was not made out of his head to top him, not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved. He was first formed, then Eve ( 1 Timothy 2:13), of the man and for the man ( 1 Corinthians 11:7-9); teaching the subjection and reverence which wives owe their husbands.

    Yet Eve’s being made after Adam, and out of him, makes her ‘the glory of the man.’ If man is the head, she is the crown; a crown to her husband, the crown of the visible creation” (Henry). Her finer susceptibilities and more delicate organization are implied by her being formed, not out of dust as Adam, but of flesh already formed. The oneness of flesh is the foundation of the inseparable marriage union of one man with one woman ( Malachi 2:15; Matthew 19:5). She was made from Adam’s rib, to mark her oneness with him. Their unity is at once corporeal and spiritual of the profoundest kind, of heart as well as of body. “This is now (Hebrew this time, as contrasted with the creatures heretofore formed besides Adam) bone of my bones,” he exclaims in joyful surprise; and, with the intuitive knowledge wherewith he had named the other creatures according to the? natures, he names her “woman” (‘ishah ) as being taken out of “man” (‘ish ). She was the complement of man, of one nature, and in free and willing dependence on him. Thus, marriage is the holy appointment of God, based on the relations by creation between man and woman. Celibacy is not a higher, holier state ( Hebrews 13:4).

    Eve’s greater weakness and susceptibility to temptation appears in Genesis 3 and 2 Corinthians 11:3. Her first error was in harboring mentally for a moment the possibility insinuated by the serpent, of God not having her truest interests at heart (“hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree?”), and of the “other” professing friend being more concerned for her good than God. In her reply to Satan she attenuates God’s gracious permission (“of every tree of the garden thou mayest FREELY eat”; “we may eat of every tree”), she exaggerates the one simple prohibition (“thou shalt not eat of it,” and “thou shalt surely (she leaves out the “surely”) die “; “ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die”), and omits the certainty of the penalty. Unbelief toward God, credulity towards Satan.

    Easily deceived, she easily deceives. Last in being, first in sin. Satan began with “the weaker vessel.” She yielded to his deceits; Adam yielded to conjugal love. So, the woman is sentenced next after Satan, and Adam is sentenced last. In Romans 5:12 Adam is made the transgressor; but there Eve is included, he representing the sinning race as its head. “She shall be saved (though) with childbearing,” i.e. though suffering her part of the primal curse in childbearing; just as man shall be saved though having to bear his part, the sweat of the brow. Yea, the very curse will be a condition favorable to her salvation, by her faithfully (“if they ... the women ... shall continue in faith and charity”) performing her part, childbearing and home duties, her sphere, as man’s is public teaching and public duties ( 1 Timothy 3:11-15). [See ABEL , see CAIN , see SETH .] Her name Chawah , life, implies both her being mother of all living and her being mother of the promised “Seed of the woman” who should give LIFE to the human race now subjected to death. Adam as a believer fitly gives her this name directly after God’s promise of life through “the Seed of the woman.” Otherwise her name ought to have implied death, which she had caused, not life.

    EVI One of the five kings of Midian slain by Israel. His land was allotted to Reuben (Numbers 25; 31:8; Joshua 13:21).

    EVIL MERODACH Son and successor of Nebuchadnezzar. During the latter’s exclusion from men among beasts, Evil Merodach administered the government. On Nebuchadnezzar’s resuming it at the end of seven years, he heard of his son’s misconduct and that Evil Merodach had exulted in his father’s calamity. He therefore cast Evil Merodach into prison, where the prince met Jehoiachin or Jeconiah, and became his friend. When Evil Merodach mounted the throne therefore he brought him out of prison, changed his prison garments, and set his throne above the throne of the kings with him in Babylon, and “Jehoiachin did continually eat bread before him all the days of his life” ( Jeremiah 52:31-34). After a two-year reign, 561-559 B.C., he was murdered by Neriglissar (Nergal Sharezer), a Babylonian noble (married to his sister), who seized the crown. Evil Merodach was guilty of lawless government, according to Berosus, possibly because of his showing greater lenity than his father.

    EXCOMMUNICATION As the church is a society constituted for maintaining certain doctrines and corresponding morals, it plainly has the right to exclude from communion such as flagrantly violate its doctrinal and moral code. The Jews had three forms of excommunication, alluded to in Luke 6:22 by our Lord, “blessed are ye when men shall separate you from their company (the Jewish niddui , for 30 days), and shall reproach you (the second form, cherem , for 90 days [see ANATHEMA ], Judges 5:23), and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake” (the third form, shammatha , perpetual cutting off): John 9:34,35 margin; compare Exodus 30:33,38; also John 12:42; 16:2.

    Christian excommunication is commanded by Christ ( Matthew 18:15-18); so 1 Timothy 1:20; 1 Corinthians 5:11; Titus 3:10; “delivering unto Satan” means casting out of the church, Christ’s kingdom of light, into the world that lieth in the wicked one, the kingdom of Satan and darkness ( Colossians 1:13; Ephesians 6:12; Acts 26:18; John 5:19). The apostles besides, under divine inspiration, inflicted bodily sicknesses and death on some (e.g. Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira; Acts 13:10, Elymas). For other cases of virtual, if not formal, exclusion from communion, though in a brotherly not proud spirit, see 2 Thessalonians 3:14; Romans 16:17; Galatians 5:12; 1 Timothy 6:3; 2 John 1:10; 3 John 1:10; Revelation 2:20; Galatians 1:8,9. Paul’s practice proves that excommunication is a spiritual penalty, the temporal penalty inflicted by the apostles in exceptional cases being evidently of extraordinary and divine appointment and no model to us; it consisted in exclusion from the church; the object was the good of the offender ( Corinthians 5:5) and the safeguard of the sound members ( 2 Timothy 2:17); its subjects were those guilty of heresy and great immorality ( Timothy 1:20); it was inflicted by the church ( Matthew 18:18) and its representative ministers ( Titus 3:10; 1 Corinthians 5:1,3,4). Paul’s infallible authority when inspired is no warrant for uninspired ministers claiming the same right to direct the church to excommunicate as they will ( 2 Corinthians 2:7-9). Penitence is the condition of restoration.

    Temporary affliction often leads to permanent salvation ( Psalm 83:16); Satan’s temporary triumph is overruled “to. destroy the flesh that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” ( Luke 22:31).

    EXECUTIONER An officer of high rank in the East; commander of the bodyguard who executed the king’s sentence. So Potiphar ( Genesis 37:36 margin, Genesis 40:3); his official residence was at the public jail. So Nebuzaradan ( Jeremiah 39:9), and Arioch ( Daniel 2:14; Mark 6:27). “The king (Herod) sent an executioner,” literally, one of his bodyguard; speculator, a military watch or scout, from the vigilance the office required.

    EXODUS, THE (the departure of Israel from Egypt), 1652 B.C. [See CHRONOLOGY .] A grand epoch in the history of man’s redemption. The patriarchal dispensation ends and the law begins here. God by His providential preparations having wonderfully led the Hebrews to sojourn in Egypt, and there to unlearn their nomadic habits and to learn agriculture and the arts of a settled life, now by equally wonderful interpositions leads them out of Egypt into the wilderness. Joseph’s high position had secured their settlement in the best of the land, apart from the Egyptians, yet in a position favorable to their learning much of that people’s advanced civilization, favorable also to their multiplication and to their preserving their nationality. Many causes concurred to prevent their imbibing Egypt’s notorious idolatry and corruption. As shepherds they were “an abomination to the Egyptians” from the first; they sacrificed the very animal the Egyptians worshipped (compare Exodus 8:26); blood in sacrifices too was an offense to the Egyptians. Jacob and Joseph on their deathbeds had charged that their bodies should be buried in Canaan (Genesis 1.), thereby impressing on their descendants that Egypt was only a place of sojourn, that they should look forward to Canaan as their inheritance and home.

    The new Pharaoh that knew not Moses was Aahmes I, 1706 B.C., about the same date as Levi’s death, the last of Joseph’s generation, mentioned in connection with the rise of the new king. The exodus occurred early in the reign of Thothmes II (Cook, in Speaker’s Commentary) [See EGYPT ]. The persecution that followed on their foretold multiplication, shortly before Moses’ birth (no such difficulty attended Aaron’s preservation just three years previously, Exodus 7:7), was divinely overruled toward weaning them from Egypt and binding them together as one people. The ready supply of their bodily wants in Egypt ( Numbers 11:5) and the rich valley of the Nile rendered this corrective discipline the more needful, in order to rouse them to realize their high destiny and to be willing to depart.

    Even Moses, who had been so marvelously trained to be their leader, failed at first to awaken them; both he and they needed a further severe discipline of 40 years. At its close he was hailed as their leader. But the Pharaoh of that day rejected with scorn Moses and Aaron’s application for leave to depart; “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I know not Jehovah, neither will I let Israel go” ( Exodus 5:2). Then followed the ten plagues [see EGYPT ] on the idols, as well as on the property and persons of Pharaoh and his people, culminating in the slaying of the firstborn and his own (Thothmes II) [see EGYPT ] destruction at the Red Sea.

    Moses’ first proposal to Pharaoh had been for a journey into the wilderness adjoining Goshen, not beyond the frontier, three days in all going and, returning, in order to sacrifice. Pharaoh’s refusal of this reasonable request ( Exodus 3:18) ended in Moses’ demand for their absolute manumission and departure (Exodus 11; 12:31-33). Israel set forth from see RAMESES ( Genesis 47:11; Aahmes I had a son,RAMSS, distinct from Ramessu two centuries later) at early morn of the 15th day of the first month ( Numbers 33:3). They reached the Red Sea in three journeys. Here, while they passed safely through, Pharaoh perished in the waters ( <19D615> Psalm 136:15). Natural causes alone will not explain the facts of the case, especially if they are taken in connection with God’s prophecy of them through Moses. The fact of the exodus of an unwarlike people in the face of their warlike masters requires to be accounted for. No account can be given so satisfactory as that in the Pentateuch, that it was by God’s miraculous interposition. The growing severity of the plagues accords with God’s judicial character in dealing with a sinner who more and more hardens himself, until he is destroyed without remedy ( Psalm 7:11-13; Proverbs 29:1). Both Israel and the Egyptians were made experimentally to know Jehovah ( Exodus 6:7; 7:5). The result was, the latter were so anxious for Israel’s departure that these “asked” (not “borrowed,” shaal ) and the Egyptians freely “complied with the request by giving” (not “lent,” hishil ) raiment and jewels ( Exodus 12:35,36). An earnest of the church’s and Israel’s final triumph over the persecuting world, “they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them” ( Exodus 39:10; Zechariah 14:14).

    Israel’s own national conviction of the truthfulness of the narrative, its geographical accuracy and local coloring, the plain evidences that it is the account of an eyewitness, and lastly the record being of what is anything but to the credit of Israel, all these circumstances are consistent only with fact, not fiction. The desert of their wanderings was better supplied with pasture and water then than now, and doubtless they spread themselves widen over it. At the exodus both the Hebrews and Egyptians had a contemporary literature, which is inconsistent with the theory of the story being mythical. Instead of the direct way to Canaan by Philistia on the S., God led Israel through the wilderness of the Red Sea, lest encountering the warlike Philistines they should repent when they saw war ( Exodus 13:17,18). They “went up marshaled in orderly array,” “five in a rank” margin (but Gesenius “eager for battle,” which hardly accords with their past state as serfs), for so the Hebrew for “harnessed” means; but not yet inured to hardship or trained sufficiently for war, as subsequently. As Moses’ 40 years sojourn in the wilderness trained him for being their leader there, so their 40 years in it trained them for the conflicts in Canaan.

    The first two days’ march brought Israel from Rameses (the general name of the district, and the city built by Israel on the canal from the Nile to lake Timsah) by way of Succoth, to Etham or Pithom, the frontier city of Egypt (Heroopolis) near the S. end of lake Timsah, on the edge of the wilderness, and the route to Palestine. Thence by God’s direction they turned S. on the W. side of the Bitter Lakes to Pihahiroth (Ajrud, a two or three days march) over against Baalzephon. The Red Sea at that time extended to the Bitter Lakes, which lay at its northern end. The agency whereby the passage was effected was natural, overruled by God to subserve His purpose of redeeming His people; in this lies its supernatura1 element; “the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided” ( <19B403> Psalm 114:3). To the N. the water covered the whole district; to the S. was the Red Sea. The Israelites crossed the sea at Suez, four leagues distant from the elevation above Pihahiroth, and made their first station on the E. side of the sea at the oasis of Ayun Musa (eight or nine miles below Suez) where water was abundant. Passing by Marah, they encamped under the palmtrees of Elim (wady Gharandel) by the waters. Thence to Ras Selima or Zenimeh, a headland on the Red Sea ( Numbers 33:10): Next the wilderness of Sin (Debbet er Ramleh) between Elim and Sinai. There they remained some days, suffering at first from want of food (not of water) but supplied with quails anti then manna. Thence they encamped first at Dophkah, then at Alush. Thence to Rephidim, where God gave them water from the rock of Horeb; there Amalek attacked them. Next the wilderness of Sinai. Fifteen days elapsed between the encampment in the wilderness of Sin and their arrival at Sinai mount ( Exodus 16:1; compare Exodus 19:1). The Debbet er Ramleh probably is the wilderness of Sin, bore and desolate; debbet and sin alike meaning “sand level, raised, and extended through the surface of the district.” Wady Nasb, the first station on this route, affords water abundant, answering to the “wilderness of Sin” encampment, where they made no complaint of want of water; the water supply accounts for their halting some days here. The route passes Sarabit el Khadim, where are ruins and inscriptions proving its occupation by an Egyptian colony before Moses’ time, so that the road would be sure to be kept in order and the watersprings kept open. A small colony would neither be disposed, nor able, to attack such a host as Israel. Dophkah was in wady Sih, both names meaning “flowing waters.” Alush is probably wady el Esh; wady es Sheikh is a two hours journey from this. The wady er Rahah is the “wilderness of Sinai,” where the assembled people heard the law proclaimed from Ras Sufsafeh, a bold granite cliff 2,000 ft. high, the N. point of the Sinai range.

    The surveyors of the wilderness of Sinai, Captain Wilson and Captain Palmer, accompanied by F. W. Holland, regard the route S. of the above N.E. route the true one, namely, by El Markha along the shore from Ras Selima, and then E. by wady Feiran, meeting the N.E. route at wady es Sheikh. Their reasons are coincidence with Scripture notices of topography, superior facilities for travel, the unlikelihood that Moses would have brought Israel down to the coast and then taken them back to pursue a more difficult road than that lying open before him. But there are no springs by their route, and Israel’s march was slow (Cook). They make the battle with Amalek at the ancient city of Feiran, but this would make” the mount of God” to be mount Serbal, which is rather one of the Sinai range; and the palmgroves of Feiran could hardly be called a “wilderness.”

    Rephidim is probably at the pass el Watiyeh, shut in by perpendicular rocks, to Amalek a capital point for attack on Israel, commanding the entrance to the wadies surrounding the central Sinai. But the Ordnance Survey of Sinai by Captain Palmer and Captain Wilson identifies Rephidim with the part of wady Feiran N. of Serbal; then the battle would be at wady Aleyat. On the N. is a large plain without water, where Israel encamped. A bore cliff N. of the pass commanding the battle. field was such a rock as Moses may have struck with his rod. On the S. is a plain with water supply near, where Amalek might encamp.

    The absence of any level plain immediately below, or S.E. in the wady Sebayeh within sight of the summit of jebel Musa (the loftiest and grandest summit of all), the S. point of the Sinai range, excludes it from being the summit from which the law was proclaimed. But on the N. end of the Sinai range Ras Sufsafeh has the wady ed Deir to the N.E., meeting the wady es Sheikh (close by Rephidim), and in front the wider plain er Rahah, acres, abundantly large enough for the Israelite host. Every part of these two wadies commands the full view of the granite rocks of Ras Sufsafeh. “No spot in the world combines in a greater degree commanding height and a plain from whence the two million of Israel could see and hear all that is narrated. The awful and lengthened approach as to some natural sanctuary, the plain not shut in but presenting a long retiring sweep against which the people could remove and stand afar off; the cliff rising suddenly and steeply so that it could easily be marked off by ‘bounds’ like a huge altar in front of the whole congregation, and visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, the very image of the ‘mount that might be touched,’ and from which the ‘voice of God’ might be heard far and wide over the stillness of the plain below, widened at that point to the utmost extent by the confluence of all the contiguous valleys; the adytum (shrine) withdrawn as if in the end of the world from all the stir and confusion of earthly things” (Stanley, in Cook’s essay, vol. I, Speaker’s Commentary). The physical formation favors the acoustic properties of this vast theater, which are intensified by the stillness and the clearness of the air. Ras Sufsafeh fulfills the conditions of Scripture, a mount easy of approach, with large open space before it for all to hear the law, prominent and rising abruptly so that the people “stood under the mountain which could be touched” ( Exodus 19:12-17; Deuteronomy 4:2); and water and pasturage in abundance were near. A small height at the entrance of the convent valley is named as the spot from whence Aaron witnessed the feast of the golden calf. Joshua in descending with Moses, hears the shout of the feasters without seeing the cause. The sight breaks on Moses suddenly only when near the camp, and he breaks the tables “beneath the mount.” This would be exactly the case with one descending the mountain path by which Ras Sufsafeh is approached through oblique gullies (three quarters of an hour to a mountaineer). He would hear the sounds rising in the still air from the plain, but not see the plain until he emerged from the wady right under the steep rock of Sufsafeh. The brook is probably that flowing through the Seil Leja. The Israelites passed a whole year encamped “before the mount,” and the pasturage and water supply at Ras Sufsafeh are much greater than those at Serbal, or in any other part of the peninsula. Within a radius of six miles there is an area of 1,200 acres in plains and wadies commanding the view of Ras Sufsafeh, and formerly the rain supply and fertility were greater when there were more trees; the wadies had dams put across to restrain the waters; the mountains were terraced with gardens. On the N.W. of Ras Sufsafeh is a rampart of cliffs 3,000 ft. high, 14 miles long, pierced by only two defiles.

    This peculiar feature afforded Israel the needful security during their long stay at Sinai. At Erweis el Ebeirig, not far from the wady el Hudherah (Hazeroth), remains are found which are probably Israelite, and mark the site of the camp Kibroth Hattaavah. About 300 yds. from the base of Ras Sufsafeh there runs across the plain a low semicircular mound, forming a natural theater; further off, on either side of the plain, the slopes of the enclosing mountains would seat great hosts. Not far off, a recess one mile and a half long, three quarters broad, would form an additional camping ground.

    EXODUS, THE BOOK OF The history of Israel (1) enslaved, (2) redeemed, (3) consecrated religiously and politically to God. There are two distinct parts: (1) Exodus 1--19, the history of Israel’s deliverance from the beginning of their Egyptian bondage to their arrival at Sinai; (2) Exodus 20--40, the giving of the law and Israel’s organization as “a kingdom of priests and an holy nation.” The two parts, though differing in style as in subject matter, are closely intertwined, the institutions of the law in the second part resting on the historical facts recorded in the former part. The term Exodus, “the going forth,” is drawn from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Alexandrian Jews settled in the same country from whence Israel had “gone forth.” The Palestinian Jews called the book from its first two Hebrew words, ‘elleh shemot ; “these are the names.” Its separation from Genesis is marked by the different circumstances under which it presents Israel at its commencement as compared with the close of Genesis. The first seven verses are the introduction briefly recapitulating previous events and stating the existing condition of affairs. Its close is marked by the completion of the tabernacle. Its several sections were probably written on separate papyri or parchments (according to an inscription of Thothmes III his campaigns were written on parchment and hung up in the temple of Ammon). The breaks in the narrative, and the repetitions, accord with the theory that there were distinct sections, composed separately by Moses as the events transpired, and read publicly at successive times. All would be united in one work toward the close of his life, with but a few additions and explanations.

    The feature which is inexplicable if anyone else were the author is this, the writer’s evident unconsciousness of the personal greatness of the chief actor. The Egyptians recognized his greatness ( Exodus 11:3); but the writer, while recognizing the greatness of Moses’ mission, dwells especially on his want of natural gifts, his deficiencies of character and the hindrances thereby caused to his mission, and the penalties he incurred; his hasty intervention between the Israelite and Egyptian, the manslaughter, and the Israelites’ rejection of him as a ruler, and his exile for the prime years of his manhood. Then his unbelieving hesitancy at the divine call and pertinacious allegation of personal incapacity in spite of the miracles which might have convinced him of God’s power to qualify him ( Exodus 3:10-13). Then the Lord’s visitation on him (probably sudden and dangerous sickness) for neglecting to circumcise his son ( Exodus 4:24-26). [See CIRCUMCISION .] Then his passionate reproach of Jehovah for the failure of his first appeal to Pharaoh, which only brought more bitter hardship on Israel ( Exodus 5:20-23). His courageous boldness before Pharaoh is never praised. Not his wisdom or foresight, but God’s guidance, is prominent throughout. The first battle fought is under Joshua’s lead. The only step attributed to human sagacity, the organizing of a body of assistant judges (Exodus 18), is attributed to Jethro not Moses. The same feature appears in subsequent books of the Pentateuch, his shrinking from self-vindication when assailed by Miriam and Aaron (Numbers 12); his impetuous temper at the water of Meribah Kadesh, smiting the rock irreverently and hence excluded by God from the promised land. This all is what we might expect if Moses was the author; but no later writer would be so silent as to the sublime greatness of his character. Contrast the three closing verses of Deuteronomy, added by a reviser in order to record his death.

    Again, Exodus was evidently written by one minutely acquainted at once with Egypt and the Sinaitic peninsula. The route from Egypt to Horeb is traced with the local coloring and specific accuracy of an eyewitness No eyewitness of Israel’s journeyings possessed such means of observation as Moses. The miracles severally suit the place, the time, and the circumstances under which they are stated to have been wrought; the plagues are essentially Egyptian; the supply of Israel’s wants in the wilderness is in harmony with the national characteristics of the country.

    Cook (Speaker’s Commentary) truly says, “we find nature everywhere, but nature in its Master’s hand.”

    The nine plagues stand in three groups, each increasing in severity. Then the tenth is threatened and the failure of the other nine declared. “Jehovah hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let Israel go.” The delay answered a double purpose. To Pharaoh it was the longsuffering appeal of God, who is slow to anger, and who tries the milder chastisements to bring the sinner if possible to repentance before resorting to the more severe. To Israel it afforded ample time for preparation for the exodus. Two months elapsed between Moses’ first and second interviews with Pharaoh; the former in April, when the Israelites were scattered throughout all Egypt gathering the stubble of the harvest just reaped (the reapers leaving the stalks standing and cut close to the ears), the latter in June at the time of the Nile’s yearly overflow when “the king went out unto the water” to offer his devotions to Apis, whose embodiment the river was ( Exodus 5:12; 7:15). Israel’s “scattering” tended to uproot them from their long settlement in Goshen and to train them for their approaching wilderness life. The Nile, the center of Egypt’s national and religious life, was smitten, assuring Israel of Jehovah’s interposition. Three months elapsed before the next plague, giving them time to look about them for the means of escape from present wrongs. The plague of frogs attacked the Egyptian worship of nature under that revolting form (Heka, a female deity with a frog’s head, the symbol of regeneration, wife of Chnum, the god of the inundation; Seti, father of Rameses II, is represented offering wine to an enshrined frog, with the legend “the sovereign lady of both worlds”); this was in September, when the inundation is at its height and the frogs (dofda, usually appea). Of the third plague no warning was given; so the third is marked in each of the other two groups of plagues. The lice or mosquitoes (kinnim ) penetrating into the nostrils and ears, or rather the tick (the size of a grain of sand, which when filled with blood swells to the size of a hazel nut), came soon after the frogs, early in October. So closed the first group, none of the three causing great calamity; but enough to warn the Egyptians and to give hope to Israel.

    The second group began with the ‘arob , dog flies (whose bite inflames severely, and particularly the eyelid), or else beetles (worshipped by the Egyptians as the symbol of creative and reproductive power; the sun god was represented as a beetle; thus their god was fittingly made the instrument of their punishment, inflicting a painful bite, and consuming various articles). This plague, exceeding the former in severity, came in November at the critical time to Egyptian agriculture when the Nile’s inundation has subsided. Then first Goshen was severed from Egypt and spared the plague. Pharaoh shows the first signs of yielding, but when the plague ceased would not let Israel go. Then came the cattle murrain or mortality, striking at the resources of Egypt; a contagious epidemic which broke out in Egypt often after the annual inundation had subsided. The cattle tire in the fields from December to April, the change from the stalls to the open air and to fresh pastures predisposing them to it. Israel’s separation of their cattle from the contagion would be a step in their preparations for the exodus. The boils (burning carbuncles) were the third and closing plague of the second group, sent without previous notice, and warning the Egyptians during its three months continuance that their bodies would suffer if Pharaoh should still resist God.

    The third group began with the hail, which as in the present day prevailed from the middle of February to the beginning of March. Moses for the first time warned Pharaoh to bring all cattle out of the field, on pain of their destruction. Many of the Egyptians feared Jehovah’s word and obeyed, while the rest suffered for their disregard. In Goshen alone was no hail, so Isaiah 32:18,19. Pharaoh for the first time cried, “I have sinned this time, Jehovah is righteous, I and my people are wicked” ( Exodus 9:27).

    The flax being “boiled,” i.e. in blossom, marks the time as the middle of February, when also the “barley” is “in the ear.” Wheat and rye (rather spelt or doora are not ready until April, and so escaped. Israel received leave to go, and now knew they had sympathizers even among Pharaoh’s servants. The locusts followed on Pharaoh’s retracting leave. Vegetation was then at its full in the middle of March. The dread of such a scourge made Pharaoh’s servants intercede to “let the men go” lest “Egypt should be destroyed.” Pharaoh consented, but on hearing Moses’ demand that young and old, sons and daughters, flocks and herds, should go, refused peremptorily, saying “evil is before you,” i.e., your intentions are evil. The E. wind upon Moses’ stretching his rod over Egypt by Jehovah’s command brought up the locusts. They oftener come from the western deserts, but sometimes from the E. and S.E. On Pharaoh’s confession of sin and entreaty Moses besought the Lord and they disappeared as quickly as they came, before a wind from the sea (Hebrew), i.e. N.W, wind, sweeping transversely all Egypt and casting them into the Red Sea. The third of the third group followed, as in the close of the former two groups, without warning; the three days “darkness which might be felt” (probably owing to the S.W. wind from the desert after the spring equinox filling the air densely with fine sand, so that none during it rise from their place, men and beasts hide, this darkness could literally be “felt”). This preceded by but a few days the slaying of the firstborn, the plague which stands by itself, alone bringing death into every Egyptian family and ensuring Israel’s deliverance.

    Thus, the plagues have a genuine Egyptian coloring, and at, the same time the requisite adaptation to Israel’s position, awakening their expectations and securing to them time for organization, without which they would have been an undisciplined mob in their march. None but, one thoroughly acquainted with Egypt could have written the account. Pharaoh and his people rightly regarded the successive visitations as natural to Egypt, yet so overruled in their intensity, in their coming and going at Moses’ call to Jehovah, and in their gradual heightening when the divine will continued to be resisted, as to be supernatural and palpably sent from above. The divine aim was to vindicate Jehovah’s lordship, not merely over the enslaved Hebrews but over Egypt and its king, the representative of the pagan world powers with whom God’s controversy is, “to the end that thou mayest know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth” ( Exodus 8:22). The most appropriate way to effect this was not to send strange terrors but to show, by intensifying and controlling at will the visitations ordinarily felt in Egypt and falsely attributed by them to particular idols, that all these visitations are at Jehovah’s absolute disposal to inflict, increase, or wholly withdraw, subserving His purposes of wrath to His adversaries, of mercy to His people, and of the setting forth of His own glory to the whole world ( Exodus 9:16); compare Psalm 78:43-49, “sending evil angels among them”; the plagues are figuratively His messengers (“angels”) in the hands of heavenly angels, of whom the destroying angel was in closest communion with Jehovah ( Psalm 78:51); compare Exodus 12:18,23,29; Hebrews 11:28, for God sends good angels to punish the bad, and bad angels to chastise the good. The plagues were so mutually connected as not to leave any place for any considerable interpolations.

    None could be omitted without breaking the moral and natural order which is so clearly indicated though not formally expressed. Nor could they have been so harmoniously, and at the same time so artlessly, woven together from documents of different ages. Cook, whose remarks are here epitomized, gives a list of words found only in Exodus, or in the pentateuch, derived from roots common to Hebrew and Egyptian, or found only in Egyptian; and these occur indiscriminately in the so-called Jehovistic and Elohistic passages. No Hebrew born and brought up in Palestine from the exodus down to Solomon would have had the knowledge of the Egyptian tongue apparent in Exodus; and no author would have given the Egyptian words without explanation, had he not known that his readers would be equally familiar with them.

    None but one in Moses’ circumstances could have described the wanderings in the wilderness of Sinai with such a peculiarly local coloring.

    At the same time the very objections to some of his details, on the ground of the different state of the peninsula now in some respects, only confirm the antiquity and genuineness of his record. The desert now would be utterly incapable of sustaining such a host, nor is it a sufficient answer to this objection to say that Providence interposed to feed them. For these providential interpositions were restricted to particular occasions.

    Ordinarily, according to God’s usual way of dealing with His children, they depended on natural supplies. Inscriptions both in Egypt and in the peninsula, as early as Snefru of the third dynasty and of the three following dynasties, and of Hatasu, widow of Thothmes II (drowned in the Red Sea), describe victories over the Mentu, the mountaineers of the peninsula, and other native tribes. These prove the existence then of a population so considerable that they resisted large Egyptian armies. The Egyptians succeeded in working copper mines at Sarbet el Khadim and Mughard, where there are many inscriptions. The springs and wells were then carefully preserved, in order to keep open their communication with these settlements. The inscription as to the gold mines near Dakkeh mentions a well 180 ft. deep, dug by order of Seti I and Rameses II. The trees were religiously preserved and fresh plantations made. But since Egypt’s power has gone the Arabs have for ages cut away the trees on which the rain, and so the fertility of the district, chiefly depend. The following undesigned coincidences between the present state of the peninsula and the accounts in Exodus confirm the accurate truth and genuineness of the book. Exodus describes water as wanting where none now is found, abundance where springs still exist and traces of a far greater supply anciently, tracts at the same distances where food would not be found, a natural manna in the rainy season especially, but not adequate in quantity and nutriment without supernatural modification; nomadic hordes attack Israel just where and when the attack, judging from present appearances of the locality, might well be expected. The unvarying tradition of the Jews, to whom Exodus was addressed, confirms the impression of genuineness which the internal innumerable coincidences produce on the mind.

    Finally, the form, structure, and materials of the tabernacle belong to the wilderness. The shittim or acacia, its material, was the wood of the desert; cedar took its place in Solomon’s temple. The skins, its covering, belong to the same locality [see BADGER ]. The bronze (“copper”), silver, and gold Israel brought from Egypt; and probably they had not mine workings until they were long settled in their inheritance. The names of many of the materials, implements, furniture, dress, and ornaments of the priests were Egyptian. The arts necessary in constructing the tabernacle were precisely those which Israelite artisans, as Bezaleel and Aholiab, would have acquired from dwelling in Egypt, the mistress of those arts; the embroidery of curtains, carving of cherubs, capitals, ornaments in imitation of natural objects. In Palestine, on the contrary, such arts were little practiced, as being often associated with idolatry in the surrounding nations; even Solomon had to call in artists from Tyre to do work for the temple which natives apparently could not.

    Two distinct accounts are given of the rearing of the tabernacle; in the first Moses recites his instructions, in the second the execution of them. A later history would never have given such a double recital. Moses wrote each at the time and on the occasion to which it refers; first the instructions, that the people might know the materials and the work required of them; secondly, when the work was completed, an account of the details, in order to take away all suspicion of malappropriation of their offerings, and also to show that the divine instructions bad been duly fulfilled. In the two accounts the order is reversed; in the instructions the inner and essential objects stand first, as being those on which the people should fix chief attention, the ark, mercy-seat, cherubs, table of shewbread, golden candlesticks; then the accessories of the tabernacle, and lastly the dress of the priests. But in the account of the work executed the tabernacle comes first, being that which would naturally be begun first, then the ark, etc.

    EXORCISM [See DEVIL and see DIVINATION .] Practiced with spells, as the name of Solomon, magic charms, and incantations among the Jews. Acts 19:13-16: the profane use of Jesus’ name as a mere spell was punished by the demon turning on the would be exorcists; these “vagabond Jews” were pretenders. But our Lord implies that some Jews actually cast out demons ( Matthew 12:27), probably by demoniacal help; others in the name of Jesus, without saving faith in Him ( Matthew 7:22; Mark 9:38). He gave the power to the twelve, the seventy, and to other disciples after His ascension ( Matthew 10:8, Luke 10:17-19; Mark 16:17; Acts 16:18). The term “exorcise” is never up. plied in Scripture to the Christian casting out of demons. In the end of the 3rd century “exorcists” were made an order in the Christian church, much to the fostering of superstition, especially in connection with baptism.

    EYES, PAINTING OF As Jezebel did ( 2 Kings 9:30 margin; Jeremiah 4:30), “thou rentest (distendest, triest to make appear large or laceratest) thy eyes (margin) with painting.” Oriental women puncture and paint the eyelids with antimony or kohl (a black powder made of the smoke black by burning frankincense) to make them look full and sparkling, the blackened margin contrasting with the white of the eye ( Ezekiel 23:40). Compare see KEREN-HAPPUCH .

    EZBAI 1 Chronicles 11:37.

    EZBON 1. Genesis 46:16; Numbers 26:16 Ozni , a corruption by omitting the “b”. 2. Son of Bela, son of Benjamin ( 1 Chronicles 7:7). From his association with Iri, a Gadite name, Lord A. Hervey conjectures that both were Gadite families, incorporated into Benjamin after the slaughter (Judges 20), or from Jabesh Gilead ( Judges 21:12-14).

    EZEKIEL “God will strengthen,” Hebrew, Yehezqel . Son of Buzi ( Ezekiel 1:3), a priest. Probably exercised the priestly office at Jerusalem before his departure in the captivity or transmigration (galut ) of Jehoiachin, which took place 11 years before the city fell ( 2 Kings 24:15). His priestly character gave him much weight with his Hebrew fellow exiles. His priestly service was as real in the spiritual temple in Chaldaea as it had been in the visible temple at Jerusalem (Ezekiel 11; 40--48; 4:13,14; 20:12,13). The priestly tone appears throughout his book, so that he is the priest among the prophets. Called to prophesy in the fifth year of Jehoiachin’s captivity (595 B.C.) “in the 30th year in the fourth month.” i.e. the 30th from the era of Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar’s father (525 B.C.), an era he naturally uses writing in Babylonia (Farrar). But elsewhere he dates from Jehoiachin’s captivity alone. This fact, and his expressly calling himself “the priest” ( Ezekiel 1:3), favor the view that his mention of the 30th fear of his own age is in order to mark his entering on a priestly ministry to his exiled countrymen (that being the usual age, Numbers 4:23,30: “the heavens being opened” to him, as they were to his Antitype in beginning His ministry in His 30th year at Jordan, Luke 3:21-23). Thus, he would be 25 when carried away.

    The best of the people were apparently the first carried away ( Ezekiel 11:16; Jeremiah 24:2-7,8,10). Believing the prophets they obeyed Nebuchadnezzar’s first summons to surrender, as the only path of safety.

    But the unbelieving were willing to do anything to remain in their native land; and despised their exiled brethren as having no share in the temple sacrifices. Thus, Ezekiel’s sphere of ministry was less impeded by his countrymen than Jeremiah’s at home. Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29) sent a letter to the exiles to warn them against the flattering promises of false prophets that they should soon return, for that the captivity would last 70 years. This was in the fourth year of Zedekiah or of Jehoiachin’s captivity; and one of the captives, Shemaiah, so far from believing, wrote back that Jeremiah should be imprisoned. Ezekiel began his ministry the next or fifth year, confirming Jeremiah’s words. The first scene of his prophecies was near the river Chebar (identified by some with Khabour, but rather the nahr Malcha or royal canal of Nebuchadnezzar) [see BABEL , see BABYLON ].

    Telabib (Thelaba) was his “house,” where the elders came to inquire of him God’s communications ( Ezekiel 3:15; 8:1). They were eager to return to Jerusalem, but Ezekiel taught that they must first return to their God. He was married, but lost his wife by a sudden stroke ( Ezekiel 24:18). His prophesying continued for 22 years at least, down to the 27th year of the captivity ( Ezekiel 29:17).

    On comparing Ezekiel 13 with Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11; 23:9,10,16,26; and Ezekiel 34, with Jeremiah 23:4,5,33, we see the inner harmony between the two prophets, though Ezekiel did not receive his commission until toward the close of Jeremiah’s prophesying; the latter having prophesied 34 years before Ezekiel, and continuing to prophesy six or seven years after him. Ezekiel began prophesying the year after the communication of Jeremiah’s predictions to Babylon ( Jeremiah 51:59-64); Ezekiel’s prophecies form a sequel to them ( Ezekiel 1:2). Yet in natural character they widely differ: Jeremiah plaintive, sensitive to a fault, and tender; Ezekiel abrupt, unbending, firmly unflinching, with priestly zeal against gainsayers.

    He was contemporary also with Daniel, whose ministry was then in the Babylonian court whereas Ezekiel was among the Jews. Daniel’s prophecies were later than those of Ezekiel, but his fame for piety and wisdom was already established ( Ezekiel 14:14,16: 28:3); and the Jews in their low state naturally prided themselves on one who reflected such glory on their nation at the pagan capital (Daniel 1--2). Ezekiel and Daniel have a mutual resemblance in the visions and images in their prophecies. It is an undesigned proof of genuineness that, while prophesying against the enemies of the covenant people, he directs none against Babylon, whereas Jeremiah utters against her terrible denunciations. Ezekiel gave no needless offense to the government under which he lived, Jeremiah on the other hand was still in Judaea.

    The improved character of the people toward the close of the captivity, their renunciation of idolatry thenceforth and return to the law under Ezra, were primarily under God due in a great measure to Ezekiel’s labors. “His word fell like a hammer upon all the pleasant dreams in which the captives indulged, and ground them to powder, a gigantic nature fitted to struggle against the Babylonian spirit of the age, which reveled in things gigantic and grotesque” (Hengstenberg). Realizing energy is his characteristic, adapting him to confront the “rebellious house,” “of stubborn front and hard heart.” He zealously upheld the ceremonies of the law ( Ezekiel 4:14; 22:8, etc.); keeping them before the national mind, in the absence of the visible framework, against the time of the restoration of the national polity and temple. His self sacrificing patriotism, ready for any suffering if only he may benefit his countrymen spiritually, appears in his conduct when she who was “the desire of his eyes” was snatched from him at a stroke ( Deuteronomy 33:9). The phrase shows how tenderly he loved her; yet with priestly prostration of every affection before God’s will he puts on no mourning, in order to convey a prophetical lesson to his people ( Ezekiel 24:15-25). His style is colored by the pentateuch and by Jeremiah. It is simple, the conceptions definite, the details even in the enigmatical symbols minute and vivid, magnificent in imagery, but austere. The fondness for particulars appears in contrasting his prophecy concerning Tyre (Ezekiel 28) with Isaiah’s (Isaiah 23). The obscurity lies in the subject matter, not in the form or manner of his communications. He delights to linger about the temple and to use its symbolical forms, with which his priestly sympathies were so bound up, as the imagery to express his instructions. This was divinely ordered to satisfy the spiritual want and instinctive craving felt by the people in the absence of the national temple and the sacrifices. Thus, Ezekiel molded their minds to the conviction that the essence of the law could be maintained where many of its forms could not be observed, a new phase in the kingdom of God; the synagogal worship which he maintained, consisting of prayer and the word, preparing the way for the gospel wherein God who is a spirit is worshipped acceptably by the spiritual wherever they be. His frequent repetitions give weight and force to his pictures; poetical parallelism is found only in Ezekiel 7; Ezekiel 21; Ezekiel 27; Ezekiel 28--30.

    His mysterious symbols presented in plain words, like our Lord’s parables, were designed to stimulate the people’s dormant minds. The superficial, volatile, and willfully unbelieving were thereby left to judicial blindness ( Isaiah 6:10; Matthew 13:11-13, etc.), while the better disposed were awakened to a deeper search into the things of God by the very obscurity of the symbols. In observance of this divine purpose has led the Jews to place his book among the “treasures” (genazin ), which, like the early chapters of Genesis and Song of Solomon, are not to be read until the age of 30 (Jerome’s Ep. ad Eustoch.).

    Ecclesiasticus 49:8 refers to Ezekiel. So Josephus (Ant. 10:5, section 1), Melito’s catalogue (Eusebius, H. E., 4:26), Origen, Jerome, and the Talmud mention it as part of the canon. The oneness of tone throughout, and the recurrence of favorite phrases (“son of man,” “they shall know that I am the Lord, ... the hand of the Lord was upon me,” “set thy face against,” etc.), exclude the idea of interpolation of sections. The earlier part, treating mainly of sin and judgment (Ezekiel 1--32), is a key to the latter part, which holds out a glorious hope in the last days when the judgments shall have had their designed effect. Thus, unity and orderly progress characterize the whole. The fall of Jerusalem is the central point.

    Previously, he calls to repentance, and rebukes blind trust in Egypt or in man ( Ezekiel 17:15-17; compare Jeremiah 37:7). Afterward he consoles the captives by promising future and final restoration. His prophecies against seven (the number for completeness) foreign nations stand between these two divisions, and were uttered in the interval between the knowledge of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege ( Ezekiel 24:2, etc.) and the news that Jerusalem was taken ( Ezekiel 33:21), yet uttered with the prophetic certainty of its capture, so that it is taken as a past fact ( Ezekiel 26:2). One however of this series ( Ezekiel 29:17) belongs to the 27th year of the captivity, and is therefore later than the temple series ( Ezekiel 40:1), which was in the 25th.

    There are nine sections: (1) Ezekiel’s call: Ezekiel 1--3; 15. (2) Symbolical prophecies of Jerusalem’s fall: Ezekiel 3:16--7. (3) A year and two months later a vision of the temple polluted by Tammuz or Adonis worship; God’s consequent scattering of fire over the city, and forsaking the temple to reveal Himself to an inquiring people in exile; purer, happier times follow: Ezekiel 8--11. (4) Sins of the several classes, priests, prophets, and princes: Ezekiel 12-- 19. (5) A year later the warning of judgment for national guilt repeated more distinctly as the time drew nearer: Ezekiel 20--23. (6) Two years and five months later, the very day on which Ezekiel speaks, is announced as that of beginning the siege; Jerusalem shall fall: Ezekiel 24. (7) Predictions against foreign nations during Ezekiel’s silence regarding his own people; since judgment begins at the house of God it will visit the pagan world: Ezekiel 25--32; some of these were uttered later than others, but all began to be given (Havernick) after the fall of Jerusalem. (8) In the 12th year of the captivity, when the fugitives from Jerusalem ( Ezekiel 33:21) had reached Chaldaea, he foretells better times, Israel’s restoration, God’s kingdom triumphant over Seir, the pagan world powers, and Gog: Ezekiel 33--39. (9) After 13 years, the last vision, the order and beauty of the restored kingdom: Ezekiel 40--48.

    The fullness of details as to the temple and its offerings favors the view of a literal (in the main) interpretation rather than a purely symbolical one. The prophecy has certainly not yet been fulfilled; the fulfillment will make all dear. There are details physically so improbable as to preclude a purely literal explanation. The main truth is dear. As Israel served the nations for their rejection of Messiah, so shall they serve Israel in the person of Messiah when Israel shall acknowledge Messiah ( Isaiah 60:12; Zechariah 14:16-19; Psalm 72:11). The ideal temple exhibits under Old Testament forms the essential character of Messiah’s worship as it shall be when He shall reign in Jerusalem among His own people the Jews, and thence to the ends of the earth ( Jeremiah 3:17,18).

    The square of the temple area is three miles and a half, i.e. larger than all the former Jerusalem. The city is three or four thousand square miles, including the holy portion for the prince, priests, and Levites, i.e., nearly as large as all Judaea W. of Jordan. Again, the half of the holy portion extends 30 miles S. of Jerusalem, i.e., covering nearly the whole southern territory.

    Without great physical changes (and the boundaries are given the same as under Moses) no adequate room is left for the five tribes whose inheritance is beyond the holy portion ( Ezekiel 47:19; 48:23-38). The literal sacrifices seem to oppose Hebrews 9:10; 10:14,18, and to give a handle to Rome’s worst error, the sacrifice of the mass. In Ezekiel’s temple holiness pervades the whole, and there is no distinction of parts as to relative holiness, as in the Old Testament temple.

    But all the difficulties may be only apparent. Faith waits God’s time and God’s way; the ideal of the theocratic temple will then first be realized.

    Israel will show in the temple rites the essential unity between the law and the gospel, which now seem to be opposed ( Romans 10:4,8). We do not yet see how to harmonize a return to sacrifices with the Epistle to the Hebrews, but two considerations lessen the difficulty: (1) The Jews as a nation stand to God in a peculiar relation, distinct from that of us Christians of the present elect church gathered out of Jews and Gentiles indiscriminately. That shall be the period of public liturgy, or perfect outward worship of the great congregation on earth, as the present time is one of gathering out the spiritual worshippers one by one, who shall reign in glorified bodies with Christ over Israel and the nations in the flesh.

    Besides Israel’s spiritual relation to Christ as her Savior, she will perform a perfect outward service of sacrifice, (retrospectively referring to Christ’s one propitiatory offering, lest this should be lost sight of in the glory of His kingdom), prayer, and praise as a nation to her then manifested King reigning in the midst of her; and all nations shall join in that service, recognizing His divine kingship over themselves also. Christ’s word shall be fulfilled, “till heaven and earth pass one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law until all be fulfilled” ( Matthew 5:18). The antitypical perfection of the old temple service, which seemed a cumbrous yoke unintelligible to the worshippers, shall then be understood fully and become a delightful service of love.

    Ezekiel was the only prophet, strictly, at Babylon. For Daniel was rather a seer, unveiling the future in the pagan court, but not discharging the prophetical office as Ezekiel among the covenant people; therefore his book was not classed with the prophets but with the hagiographa. Striking instances of seeming contradictions, which when understood become strong confirmations of genuineness, are Ezekiel 12:13, “I will bring him (Zedekiah) to Babylon ... yet shall he not see it though he shall die there”; because he was blinded by Nebuchadnezzar before arriving there ( Jeremiah 52:11). Also Ezekiel 18:20, “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”; not really contradicting Exodus 20:5, “visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me”; the children hating God as their fathers did, the sin with cumulative force descends from parent to child; so Deuteronomy 24:16 expressly “the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither the children for the fathers.”

    EZEL (“the stone”). Near Saul’s house, the scene of David and Jonathan’s parting ( 1 Samuel 20:19). At 1 Samuel 20:41 instead of “out of a place toward the S.” Smith’s Bible Dictionary reads, “David arose from close to the stone heap” (‘argob for negeb ; so Septuagint). But KJV is better, from the side of the S., in relation to Jonathan’s position; accordingly David next flees southward, to Nob.

    EZEM A town of Simeon ( 1 Chronicles 4:29). In Joshua 19:3AZEM.

    EZER 1. Son of Ephraim, slain by the ancient men of Gath in a foray on their cattle ( 1 Chronicles 7:21), during Israel’s stay in Egypt. 2. Nehemiah 12:42. 3. 1 Chronicles 4:4.

    EZION GEBER (the giant’s backbone). A town on the eastern arm of the Red Sea. The last stage in Israel’s march before the wilderness of Zin or Kadesh. The station of Solomon’s navy “beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom.” The timber was probably brought to Ezion Geber from Tyre to build the ships ( 2 Chronicles 8:17,18). There Jehoshaphat’s fleet was broken on the jagged rocks on each side ( 1 Kings 9:26; 22:48). Now wady Ghadyan (another form of Ezion), a valley running E. into the Arabah, some miles N. of the present head of the Elanitic gulf. A salt marsh marks where the sea anciently reached. A tidal haven was here, at the head of which the city of Ezion Geber stood. On the haven’s eastern side lay Elath (now Akaba), from whence the Elanitic gulf took its name, meaning trees; a palm grove is still there; on the W. lay Ebronah ( Numbers 33:35,36).

    EZNITE Designation of Adino, one of David’s chief captains ( 2 Samuel 23:8).

    But in 1 Chronicles 11:11see JASHOBEAM an Hachmonite,” for which 2 Samuel has Josheb-bas-shebeth, “that sat in the seat.” Doubtless the words “the same (was) Adino the Eznite” are a corruption for the Hebrew “he lifted up his spear,” which words appear in the parallel Chronicles but not in 2 Samuel; compare verse 18.

    EZRA (“the helper,” as Nehemiah = “the comforter”). 1. A “ready scribe in the law of Moses” ( Ezra 7:6,11,12); “a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord and of His statutes to Israel”; “a scribe of the law of the God of heaven”; “priest”; a worthy descendant of Hilkiah the priest under Josiah, who “found the book of the law in the house of the Lord” ( 2 Chronicles 34:14,15); son or descendant of Seraiah (not the high priest. Seraiah, Ezra 7:1). See Ezra 7--10; also Nehemiah 8; 12:26. Resided in Babylon under Artaxerxes Longimanus. His qualification for his work was “he had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.” By the king’s leave, in the seventh year of his reign, he took to Jerusalem 1,754 persons, including Israelites, priests, Levites, singers, porters, and Nethinim ( Ezra 7:7; Ezra 8). The journey occupied four months. They brought free will offerings, gold, silver, and vessels, from the king and his counselors, as well as from the Jews abroad. Artaxerxes empowered him also to draw upon the royal treasurers beyond the river for further supplies if necessary; also the decree added. “thou Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges which may judge all the people that are beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach ye them that know them not.” He committed for safety the charge of the gold and silver to 12 priests and 12 Levites ( Ezra 8:24 translated “I separated 12 of the chief priests in addition to Sherebiah, Hashabiah, and ten of their brethren with them”: compare Ezra 8:18,19). These delivered them up “to the chief of the priests, Levites. and fathers at Jerusalem, in the chambers of the house of the Lord.” His Guard was God, sought and found at the river Ahava, by fasting and prayer, that He might give “a right way for us, and for our little ones. and for all our substance” ( Ezra 8:21). So jealous was he for the honor of God that he declares, “I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers ... to help us against the enemy in the way, because we had spoken unto the king, The hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek Him, but His power and His wrath is against all them that forsake Him.” At the same time he uses all worldly prudence and firmness, while faith in God was his main stay.

    His great aim, as Malachi, his and Nehemiah’s helper, expresses it, was “Remember ye the law of Moses My servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.” In six months after his arrival he effected the purification of the holy nation from foreign admixture by causing 17 priests,10 Levites, and 86 of other tribes, to put away alien wives. The largeness of the number proves the wide extent of the evil, and the depth of spiritual earnestness which prompted such a severe sacrifice. Ezra’s book closes abruptly here, as probably the odium connected with this self denying ordinance made him judge it expedient to withdraw to Babylon for the present. The relapse of the Jews into their former disorders, such as Nehemiah describes, could not have occurred had Ezra been there continually. In Nehemiah 8, Ezra “the priest, the scribe,” 13 years later reappears in charge of the spiritual interests of the people, as Nehemiah, the tirshatha or governor, of their political interests, the two acting in harmonious cooperation ( Nehemiah 12:26). He probably did not return with Nehemiah, but a little later, to Jerusalem; for he is not mentioned until after the completion of the wall. Ezra read and interpreted Moses’ law to the people during the eight days of the feast of tabernacles, prayed, and assisted at the dedication of the wall.

    As Ezra is not mentioned after Nehemiah’s departure for Babylon in Artaxerxes’ 32nd year, and the Jews relapsed into irregularity during Nehemiah’s absence (Nehemiah 13), it is likely Ezra died or returned to Babylon shortly after Nehemiah’s departure. Benjamin of Tudela says that Ezra died at Nehar-Samorah on the lower Tigris on the Persian frontier, when going from Jerusalem to Artaxerxes, and that his sepulchre was there.

    The institution of the great synagogue is attributed to him, and he certainly left the pattern of synagogue worship, with its “pulpit” and reading and expounding the law. He and Malachi probably settled the inspired canon of Scripture, comprising the three, “the law, the prophets, and the hagiographa”; the division of verses, the vowel pointings, and the keri or margin readings, and the Chaldee characters instead of the old Hebrew or Samaritan, are also attributed to him. He probably compiled see CHRONICLES . Psalm 119, of which the theme throughout is the law or word of God, as the palladium of Israel’s national and individual salvation, is in its present form probably the production of Ezra, “the priest, and ready scribe in the law of Moses.” The features of the psalm suit the Jews’ position on their return from Babylon. Israel is the speaker throughout whom the psalmist represents, and whose calling it was to testify for the word of truth before the pagan world powers (compare <19B923> Psalm 119:23,46). 2. Nehemiah 12:2. One of the priests who returned with Zerubbabel. 3. A man of Judah ( 1 Chronicles 4:17).

    EZRA, BOOK OF Hilary of Poitiers calls Ezra a continuation of Chronicles. The first part of Ezra (Ezra 1--6) describes the return from the captivity under Joshua and Zerubbabel, and the building of the temple; the enemy’s obstructions; its advance through the prophets Haggai and Zechariah ( Ezra 5:1,2; 6:14), and its completion in Darius Hystaspes’ sixth year, 516 B.C. ( Ezra 6:15.) A long interval follows; and the second part of the book (Ezra 7-- 10) passes to Ezra’s journey from Persia to Jerusalem in Artaxerxes Longimanus’ seventh year, 458-457 B.C. ( Ezra 7:1,7); the details are given in Ezra 7; 8. Ezra’s numerous caravan bringing fresh strength to the weak colony (Ezra 8). And his work in Ezra 9--10, restoring the theocratic nationality and removing foreign wives. The book ends with the names of those who had married them.

    The second part combined with Nehemiah is a complete historical picture.

    But the distinct title to Nehemiah shows it is a separate book. ESTHER fills up the interval between Ezra 6 and Ezra 7. The first part (Ezra 1--6) period (536--516 B.C.) is the time of prince Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua aided by Haggai and Zechariah. The second (Ezra 7--10) is that of the priest Ezra and the governor Nehemiah, aided by the prophet Malachi.

    In both royal, priestly, and prophetical men lead God’s people. The first is the period of building the temple, a religious restoration; the second that of restoring the people and rebuilding the city, a political combined with a religious restoration. The things of God first, then the things of men. Only 50,000 settled with Joshua and Zerubbabel ( Ezra 2:64, etc.); and these intermingled with the pagan, and were in “affliction and reproach” ( Ezra 9:6-15; Nehemiah 1:3). Hence the need of restoring the holy nationality, as well as the temple, under Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra the priest took charge of the inner restoration, by purging out paganism and bringing back the law; Nehemiah the governor did the outer work, restoring the city and its polity. Ezra is therefore rightly accounted by the Jews as a second Moses.

    Ezra received permission to go to Jerusalem in the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longimanus ( Ezra 7:6-10,11-26); Nehemiah in the 20th year ( Nehemiah 2:1). Ezra is supposed by some to have used the Babylonian era, Nehemiah the Persian. The 70 weeks (490 years) of Daniel 9:24,25 probably date from this seventh year of Artaxerxes, when Ezra received leave to restore the temple and the people and the holy city (457 B.C.), because the re-establishment of the theocracy then began, though the actual rebuilding was not until 13 years later under Nehemiah.

    Ezra’s placing of Daniel in the canon immediately before his own book and Nehemiah’s implies that his commission began the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy; Christ’s 30th year in beginning His ministry would be A.D. 26- 27 (the A.D. dates three or four years later than Christ’s actual birth), and His crucifixion A.D. 30. So that “He was cut off” and “caused the sacrifice to cease in the midst of the week,” the last week beginning with His ministry to the Jews, A.D. 26-27, and ending with that exclusive ministry to them for three and a half years after His crucifixion, ceasing through their own rejection of Him when preached by the apostles and evangelists (Acts 7--8). Thus the 490 years or 70 weeks consist of (1) seven weeks (49 years) of revelation, from 457 to 407 B.C., the probable date of Malachi’s prophecy and Nehemiah’s work, which the prophet supported, ending; then (2) 62 weeks (434 years) of no revelation; then seven years of special and brightest revelation to Israel, first by Messiah in person, then by His still more powerful presence by the Holy Spirit, in the middle of which week His one sacrifice supersedes all other sacrifices.

    The succession of Persian monarchs in Ezra is Cyrus, Ahasuerus (the Cam byses of secular history), Artaxerxes (Pseudo-Smerdis, the Magian, an usurper), Darius (the Ahasuerus of Esther or Xerxes of secular history comes in here, in the interval between Ezra 6 and 7), Artaxerxes. Ezra’s account of see CYRUS accords with his character, celebrated for clemency. A Zoroastrian, a worshipper of Ormuzd, the great God, he hated idolatry and the shameless licentiousness of the Babylonian worship, and so was disposed to patronize the Jews, whose religion so much resembled his own. Hence his edicts for restoring the Jews, though an act unparalleled in history, harmonize with the facts concerning him in the Bible and in secular history ( Ezra 1:2-4; 6:3-5). He identifies “the Lord God of heaven” with the Jehovah of the Jews. His restoring them in his first year immediately ( Ezra 1:1), and his words “the Lord God of heaven has charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem,” plainly show he bad heard of God’s words by Isaiah ( Isaiah 44:28), “Cyrus is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem, thou shalt be built, and to the temple, thy foundation shall be laid.” Daniel would necessarily, as just made “third ruler in the kingdom,” and having foretold its transfer to “the Medes and Persians” ( Daniel 5:28,29), come under Cyrus’ notice immediately on the capture of Babylon; moreover, it is stated “he prospered in the reign of Cyrus the Persian” ( Daniel 6:28), he would therefore be sure to mention to Cyrus Isaiah’s prophecy. Cyrus’ pious confession that he received all his dominions from Him accords with the spirit of the old Persian religion. His returning the golden vessels ( Ezra 1:7-11; 6:5), his allowing the whole expense of rebuilding from the royal revenue ( Ezra 6:4), his directing all Persians to help with silver, etc. ( Ezra 1:4), agree with his known munificence.

    An undesigned coincidence, and therefore mark of genuineness, is that when Ezra wrote, a century later than Cyrus, the Persian kings usually lived at Susa or Babylon, where the archives were kept, and there Ezra would naturally have placed Cyrus’ roll had he been forging. But Ezra says Cyrus’ decree was found at Achmetha (Ecbatana), Ezra 6:2. Herodotus (i. 153) and Ctesias (Exc. Per., 2-4) confirm this by mentioning that Cyrus held his court permanently at Ecbatana, and so would have his archives there. see ARTAXERXES ( Ezra 4:7) or Smerdis, as a Magian, whose worship was antagonistic to Zoroastrianism (compare Herodotus iii. 61, Ctes. Exc.

    Pers., 10, Justin, 1:9, and Darius’ inscription at Behistun, as to Smerdis’ special portion), would naturally reverse the policy of Cyrus and Ahasuerus (Cambyses, who did not act on the accusation of the Jews’ enemies: Ezra 4:6); accordingly, his harsh edict expresses no faith in the supreme God, whom Cyrus’ edict honored ( Ezra 4:17-22).

    Darius, a zealous Zoroastrian, succeeded; his Behistun inscription tells us he “rebuilt the temples the Magian had destroyed, and restored the chants and worship he had abolished.” This explains the strange boldness of the Jews ( Ezra 5:1,2) in treating Smerdis’ edict as void, and without waiting for Darius’ warrant resuming the work under Zerubbabel and Jeshua, with Zechariah and Haggai. Their enemies, hoping Smerdis had destroyed Cyrus’ edict, wrote to king Darius ( Ezra 5:6) that they were building again on the plea of Cyrus’ edict, and that search should be made at Babylon whether there were any such edict of Cyrus. Their mention of Babylon was either to mislead the king as to the real repository of the decree, or more probably from ignorance of Cyrus’ habit of living at Ecbatana, which ignorance Providence overruled to save the roll from their destroying hands under Smerdis. The language of Darius’ edict on finding it accords with his character and circumstances. The Jewish temple he calls “the house of God,” and Jehovah “the God of heaven”; he approves as a Zoroastrian of sacrifices to the Supreme Being, desires their prayers for himself and “his sons” (Herodotus i. 132, confirms Ezra that Darius had “sons” already, though he had but just ascended the throne), mentions the “tribute” ( Ezra 6:8) which (Herodotus, 3:89) he was the first to impose on the provinces, and threatens the refractory with impaling, his usual mode of punishment (ver. 11; Behistun inscription; Herodotus, 3:159).

    The three books Ezra, see CHRONICLES , probably compiled by Ezra, and Nehemiah have many phrases in common, peculiar to them, and that mixture of Chaldee and Hebrew which we should expect if the three were written at the new epoch in Jewish literature, when its writers were men brought up in Babylon and restored to Judaea. All three abound in genealogies, which were then needed in order to restore the old system as to property, families, and national purity of blood free from alien admixture. Details as to the priests and Levites characterize all three; for these were essential to the restoration of the theocracy, which was the primary object. After Ezra had carried through the extreme but needful measure of divorcing all alien wives, which probably caused him some loss of popularity, he gave place to a new agent of God, Nehemiah, the nation’s political restorer as Ezra was its religious reformer. Ezra still cooperated with Nehemiah (Nehemiah 8) in ministering the word of God. Nehemiah marks his book as distinct from Ezra by the opening.

    Two portions of Ezra are in Chaldee ( Ezra 4:8--6:18; 7:12-26), for in those portions he embodies extracts from state documents m that language; of course he would be as fluent in Chaldee, the language of his captivity, as in Hebrew, the language of his nation. The variation from the third person elsewhere to the first person in Ezra 7:27--9:15 is thus to be explained.

    The first six chapters refer to the time before Ezra in which he is not mentioned. Ezra 7, continuing the historic style down to Artaxerxes’ decree, in naming him for the first time, uses the third person. But after that decree Ezra, in returning from its Chaldee to his own Hebrew, uses the first person in praising “the Lord God of our fathers” for having disposed the king’s heart to beautify the Lord’s house, and for having “extended mercy unto me before the king,” etc. He continues the first person to Ezra 10, where the third person is resumed, to mark the narrative as a national not merely a personal history. The undoubted writing of Ezra ( Ezra 7:27--9:15) would be an unmeaning fragment unless prefaced by Ezra 7:1-11, and followed by Ezra 10. The transitions of first to third persons, and vice versa, are found in Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah; so Moses of old uses the third person of himself in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, but in the recapitulation in Deuteronomy the first.

    The lists of those who returned with Zerubbabel to Jerusalem in Ezra 2, also in Nehemiah 7:5, Ezra drew from existing documents. So the letters and royal decrees in the first Chaldee portion, Ezra 4:8--6:18; and Artaxerxes’ edict, the second Chaldee portion, Ezra 7:12-26. In Ezra 7:27 Ezra recognizes the oneness of Artaxerxes’ policy in helping “to beautify the Lord’s house” with that of Cyrus and Darius long before.

    So in Ezra 9:9 “to give us a wall ... in Jerusalem” alludes to that part of Artaxerxes’ decree which remained yet to be done, namely, the building of the wall by Nehemiah; this was implied virtually in his commission to Ezra, but expressed in his commission to Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 2:5-8). The anxiety of the earlier returning exiles to keep the priesthood pure from alien blood, in Ezra 2, corresponds in spirit to the removal of alien wives in the closing part. The unity of plan lies in its passing over periods of time and history not appropriate to the main aim (these very transitions giving the fragmentary appearance alleged against the unity of the book), and dwelling only on the epochs which bring out features essential to the Israelite church’s history ( Ezra 2:70; 3:1 with Nehemiah 7:5,73; 8:1; 12:1,26,47). The king of Persia is called “king of Assyria” in Ezra 6:22, just as the king of Babylon is called so in 2 Kings 23:29, as having succeeded to the world-dominion formerly held by the king of Assyria.

    The order is chronological, though not continuous (the 31 closing years of Darius, the whole 21 of Xerxes, and the seven first of Artaxerxes, about in all, being passed over between Ezra 6 and Ezra 7); the ministry of Ezra in restoring the theocracy being the main subject, the former work of Zerubbabel and Joshua being its precursory analogue.

    Lord A. Hervey conjectures Daniel was author of Ezra 1, which would supply the omission of Cyrus’ decree in Daniel’s own book ( Daniel 1:21; 9; 10), where we might naturally have expected to find it. Ezra 1:1 refers to Jeremiah’s prophecy, just as Daniel 9:2. The formula “in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia” answers to Daniel 1:1; 2:1; 10:1.

    The narrator (Ezra 1) evidently wrote in Babylon not in Jerusalem; and Ezra might think the portion at the close of 2 Chronicles and beginning of Ezra more suitably placed there than in Daniel. But all this is conjecture. A close connection of Ezra with Daniel is probable, and that Ezra wrote or compiled the former part of his book in Babylon. Ezra 2 is identical with Nehemiah 7:6-73, evidently drawn by both from a common document or list of the captives returning with Zerubbabel. Ezra 3:2--6:22 is drawn from some contemporary of Zerubbabel and eyewitness of his setting up the altar, etc.: possibly Haggai who supported him, for the title “the prophet” ( Ezra 5:1; 6:14) is the one found also Haggai 1:1,3,12; 2:1,10; so whereas Zechariah names Zerubbabel and Jeshua separately and without addition, the formula in Ezra 3:2,8; 5:2, as in Haggai 1:1,12,14; 2:2,4,23, is “Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak”; compare also Ezra 5:1,2, with Haggai 1, also the older people’s sorrowful regrets for the former temple in seeing the new one ( Ezra 3:12; Haggai 2:3); both mark dates by the year of “Darius the king” ( Ezra 4:24; 6:15; Haggai 1:1,15; 2:10); also the phrase “Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the remnant of their brethren” ( Ezra 3:8; Haggai 1:12,14); also Ezra 6:16 with Haggai 2:2; also “the work of the house of the Lord” ( Ezra 3:8,9; Haggai 1:14); “the foundation of the temple was laid” ( Ezra 3:6,10-12; Haggai 2:18); “the house of the Lord” 25 times to six wherein Ezra uses “the temple of the Lord”; Haggai “the house” seven times to “the temple” twice.

    EZRAHITE Ethan and Heman are called so; i.e., sons of Zerah ( 1 Kings 4:31; Psalm 88; Psalm 89; 1 Chronicles 2:6).

    EZRI 1 Chronicles 27:26.

    F FABLE It represents man’s relations to his fellow man; but thePARABLE rises higher, it represents the relations between man and God. The parable’s framework is drawn from the dealings of men with one another; or if from the natural world, not a grotesque parody of it, but real analogies. The fable rests on what man has in common with the lower creatures; the parable on the fact that man is made in the image of God, and that the natural world reflects outwardly the unseen realities of the spiritual world.

    TheMYTH is distinct from both in being the spontaneous symbolic expression of some religious notion of the apostate natural mind. In the fable qualities of men are attributed to brutes. In the parable the lower sphere is kept distinct from the higher which it illustrates; the lower beings follow the law of their nature, but herein represent the acts of the higher beings; the relations of brutes to each other are not used, as these would be inappropriate to represent man’s relation to God.

    Two fables occur in Scripture: (1) Jotham’s sarcastic fable to the men of Shechem, the trees choosing their king ( Judges 9:8-15). (2) Joash’s sarcastic answer to Amaziah’s challenge, by a fable, the sarcasm being the sharper for the covert form it assumes, namely, the cedar of Lebanon and the thistle ( 2 Kings 14:9). Ezekiel 17:1-10 differs from the fable in not attributing human attributes to lower creatures, and in symbolizing allegorically prophetical truths concerning the world monarchies; it is called chidah , “a riddle,” from chaadad to be sharp, as requiring acumen to solve the continued enigmatical allegory. The fable of Jotham (1209 B.C.) is the oldest in existence; the Hebrew mind had a special power of perceiving analogies to man in the lower world; this power is a relic of the primeval intuition given to Adam by God who “brought every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, unto Adam to see what he would call them.” Other nations were much later in this style of thought, the earliest prose fables in Greece being those of the legendary Aesop, about 550 B.C.

    Many of the proverbs are “condensed fables” ( Proverbs 26:11; 30:15,25,28). The analogies in the lower creatures are to man’s lower virtues or defects, his worldly prudence, or his pride, indolence, cunning (compare Matthew 10:16). “Fables” mean falsehoods in 1 Timothy 1:4; 4:7, “old wives’ fables”; Titus 1:14, “Jewish fables,” the transition stage to gnosticism; 2 Peter 1:16, “cunningly devised (Greek text: sophisticated) fables,” devised by man’s wisdom, not what the Holy Spirit teacheth ( 1 Corinthians 2:13); incipient gnostic legends about the genealogies, origin, and propagation of angels ( Colossians 2:18-23).

    FACE “Many will entreat the face (Hebrew text: the favor) of the prince” ( Proverbs 19:6). “The face of God” means His manifested presence and favor. Jacob saw God’s face, and called the place Periel, “God’s face” ( Genesis 32:30), i.e. veiled in human form, in anticipation of the incarnation. The full radiancy of His glory man could not bear to see ( Exodus 33:20).

    FAIR HAVENS A harbor on the S. of Crete; connected with the city Lasea; five miles E. of cape Matala. The ship in Paul’s voyage stopped short of doubling this cape, for the coast W. of it suddenly turns to the N., and so the ship would have been still exposed to the prevailing N.W. wind. But afterward on consultation the centurion and master of the ship determined against Paul’s advice to leave Fair Havens as incommodious to winter in, and go on to Phoenice, induced by a deceptive S. wind which arose for a time: the result was wreck (Acts 27; compare Ecclesiastes 9:15). The place still bears the Greek name for “Fair Havens.”

    FAIRS Ezekiel 27:12, “traded in thy fairs”; Hebrew ‘izbonaik , referring to exports; paid for thy wares, made thy exchanges; in Ezekiel 27:33 its true meaning is given, “thy wares.” The marab , “market” ( Ezekiel 27:13,17,19), rather merchandise, refers to the imports. Tarshish did not visit Tyre, but Tyre exported her wares to Tarshish, and “Tarshish paid for thy wares with silver,” etc.

    FAITH Hebrews 11:1, “the substance of things hoped for (i.e., it substantiates God’s promises, the fulfillment of which we hope, it makes them present realities), the evidence (elengchos , the ‘convincing proof’ or ‘demonstration’) of things not seen.” Faith accepts the truths revealed on the testimony of God (not merely on their intrinsic reasonableness), that testimony being to us given in Holy Scripture. Where sight is, there faith ceases ( John 20:29; 1 Peter 1:8). We are justified (i.e. counted just before God) judicially by God ( Romans 8:33), meritoriously by Christ ( Isaiah 53:11; Romans 5:19), mediately or instrumentally by faith ( Romans 5:1), evidentially by works. Loving trust. James 2:14-26, “though a man say he hath faith, and have not works, can (such a) faith save him?” the emphasis is on “say,” it will be a mere saying, and can no more save the soul than saying to a “naked and destitute brother, be warmed and filled” would warm and fill him. “Yea, a man (holding right views) may say, Thou hast faith and I have works, show (exhibit to) me (if thou canst, but it is impossible) thy (alleged) faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works.” Abraham believed, and was justified before God on the ground of believing ( Genesis 15:6). Forty years afterward, when God did” tempt,” i.e. put him to the test, his justification was demonstrated before the world by his offering Isaac (Genesis 22). “As the body apart from (chooris ) the spirit is dead, so faith without the works (which ought to evidence it) is dead also.” We might have expected faith to answer to the spirit, works to the body. As James reverses this, he must mean by “faith” here the FORM of faith, by “works” the working reality.

    Living faith does not derive its life from works, as the body does from its animating spirit. But faith, apart from the spirit of faith, which is LOVE (whose evidence is works), is dead, as the body is dead without the spirit; thus James exactly agrees with Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:2, “though I have all faith ... and have not charity (love), I am nothing.”

    In its barest primary form, faith is simply crediting or accepting God’s testimony ( 1 John 5:9-13). Not to credit it is to make God a “liar”! a consequence which unbelievers may well start back from. The necessary consequence of crediting God’s testimony (pisteuoo THeoo ) is believing in (pisteuoo eis ton huion , i.e. trusting in) the Son of God; for He, and salvation in Him alone, form the grand subject of God’s testimony. The Holy Spirit alone enables any man to accept God’s testimony and accept Jesus Christ, as his divine Savior, and so to “have the witness in himself” ( 1 Corinthians 12:3). Faith is receptive of God’s gratuitous gift of eternal life in Christ. Faith is also an obedience to God’s command to believe ( 1 John 3:23); from whence it is called the “obedience of faith” ( Romans 1:5; 16:26; Acts 6:7), the highest obedience, without which works seemingly good are disobediences to God ( Hebrews 11:6).

    Faith justifies not by its own merit, but by the merit of Him in whom we believe ( Romans 4:3; Galatians 3:6). Faith makes the interchange, whereby our sin is imputed to Him and His righteousness is imputed to us ( 2 Corinthians 5:19,21; Jeremiah 23:6; 1 Corinthians 1:30). “Such are we in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God Himself” (Hooker) ( 2 Peter 1:1; Romans 3:22; 4:6; 10:4; Isaiah 42:21; 45:21,24,25).

    FALLOW DEER Septuagint, Alexandrinus manuscript, [boubalos], the Antilope bubalis.

    Hebrew yachmur , from chamar “red.” A clean animal ( Deuteronomy 14:5). Used at Solomon’s table ( 1 Kings 4:23). The Cervus dama, of a reddish color (as its name yachmur implies), shedding its horns yearly (Oedmann). Gosse makes it the Addax antelope, a beast of chase represented in the old Egyptian sculptures. Coarse, and approaching to the bovine race, of reddish head and neck, white across the face, the forehead and throat with black hair, the rest of the body of whitish gray. Smith’s Bible Dictionary Append. (as Septuagint), the wild ox (bekker el wash) of N. Africa, the Alkelaphus bubalis, an antelope resembling the calf and the stag, the size of the latter. Sir V. Brooke, however, has decided that a specimen sent him of the Bedouin yahmur, from Carmel, is the Cervus capreolus or ordinary roebuck (Palestine Exploration Quarterly Statement, July, 1876).

    FAMINE Often sent as visitations from God for sin. 2 Kings 8:1: “the Lord hath called for a famine” ( <19A516> Psalm 105:16), as a master calls for a servant ready to do his bidding. Compare Matthew 8:8,9; contrast Ezekiel 36:29. So associated with pestilence and the sword (2 Samuel 21; 1 Kings 17). The famine in Ruth 1:1 was probably owing to the Midianite devastation of the land (Judges 6), so severe in the Holy Land that Elimelech had to emigrate to Moab, and Naomi his widow returned not until ten years had elapsed. Isaiah 51:19; Jeremiah 14:15; 15:2; Ezekiel 5:12. Defects in agriculture, in means of transit, and in freedom of commerce through despotism, were among the natural causes of frequent famines anciently. Failure of the heavy rains in November and December in Palestine ( Genesis 12:10; 26:1,2), and of the due overflow of the Nile, along with E. and S. winds (the N. wind on the contrary brings rains, and retards the too rapid current) in Egypt, the ancient granary of the world, often brought famines ( Genesis 41:25-36,42). Abraham’s faith was tried by the famine which visited the land promised as his inheritance immediately after his entering it; yet though going down to Egypt for food, it was only “to sojourn,” not to live there, for his faith in the promise remained unshaken. A record of famine for seven years in the 18th century B.C. has been found in China, which agrees with the time of Joseph’s seven years of famine in Egypt.

    FAN A long-handled wooden spade, a “winnowing shovel,” used in the East to throw up grain in the air so that the chaff may be separated from the wheat ( Matthew 3:12).

    FARTHING Representing two Greek words: kodrantes (Latin: quadrans, Matthew 5:26; Mark 12:42), and assarion (Latin: as, Matthew 10:29; Luke 12:6; the “two assaria” constituted probably one coin). The quadrans was originally the fourth of an as, i.e. three ounces. In Christ’s time the quadrans equaled two Greek lepta , “mites.” Among the Roman copper coins current then in Palestine there was none smaller than the as or assarich; among the Greek imperial coins there was the quadrans (quarter of the as) and lepton , “mite,” one-eighth of an as and half of a quadrans.

    The as was one and three-fourths of a farthing; the quadrans thus less than half a farthing. But either the as the lowest Roman coin, or the quadrans, the lowest Greek imperial coin, is sufficiently expressed by the term “farthing,” as being our lowest coin.

    FASTING The word (tsum ) never occurs in the Pentateuch. The Mosaic law, though directing minutely the foods to be eaten and to be shunned, never enjoins fasting. The false asceticism so common in the East was carefully avoided.

    On the yearly day of atonement, the 10th day of the 7th month, Israelites were directed to “afflict the soul” ( Leviticus 16:29-31; 23:27; Numbers 30:13). This significant term implies that the essence of scriptural “fasting” lies in self humiliation and penitence, and that the precise mode of subduing the flesh to the spirit, and of expressing sorrow for sin, is left to the conscientious discretion of each person. In Acts 27:9 the yearly day of atonement is popularly designated “the fast.” But God, while not discountenancing outward acts of sorrow expressive of inward penitence, declares, “is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal the bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest thy naked that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?” ( Isaiah 58:4-7.) Compare similar warnings against mistaking outward fasting as meritorious before God: Malachi 3:14; Matthew 6:16.

    The only other periodical fasts in the Old Testament were those connected with the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar: the fast of the 4th month commemorated its capture ( Jeremiah 39:2; 52:6,7); that of the 5th month the burning of the temple and the chief houses ( Jeremiah 52:12-14); that of the 7th the murder of Gedaliah ( Jeremiah 41:1-3); that of the 10th the beginning of the siege ( Zechariah 7:3-5; 8:19). Jeremiah 52:4, “did ye at all fast unto ME, even to ME?” Nay, it was to gratify yourselves in hypocritical will worship. If it had been to Me, ye would have separated yourselves not merely from food but from your sins.

    Once that the principle is acted on, “he that eateth eateth to the Lord, and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not” ( Romans 14:6), and “meat commendeth us not to God, for neither if we eat are we the better, neither if we eat not are we the worse” ( 1 Corinthians 8:8), fasting and eating are put in their true place, as means not ends.

    There are now 28 yearly fasts in the Jewish calendar. Daniel’s ( Daniel 10:3) mode of fasting was, “I ate no pleasant bread,” i.e. “I ate unleavened bread, even the bread of affliction” ( Deuteronomy 16:3), “neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth.” In Matthew 9:14 “fast” is explained by “mourn” in Matthew 9:15, so that fasting was but an outward expression of mourning ( Psalm 69:10), not meritorious, nor sanctifying in itself. A mark of the apostasy is “commanding to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving” ( 1 Timothy 4:3). The “neglecting (not sparing) of the body,” while seeming to deny self, really tends “to the satisfying of (satiating to repletion) the flesh.”

    Ordinances of “will worship” gratify the flesh (self) while seeming to mortify it; for “self crowned with thorns in the cloister is as selfish as self crowned with ivy in the revel” ( Colossians 2:18-23).

    Instances of special fasts of individuals and of the people in the Old Testament, either in mourning and humiliation or in prayer, occur in Judges 20:26; 1 Samuel 1:7; 20:34; 31:13; 2 Samuel 1:12; 12:21; 3:35; 1 Kings 21:9-12; Ezra 8:21-23; 10:6; Esther 4:16; Nehemiah 1:4. National fasts are alluded to in 1 Samuel 7:6 (wherein the drawing of water and pouring it out before Jehovah expressed their confession of powerlessness and utter prostration: Psalm 22:14; 58:7; 2 Samuel 14:14); 2 Chronicles 20:3; Jeremiah 36:6-10; Nehemiah 9:1; Joel 1:14; 2:15. In New Testament times the strict Jews fasted twice a week ( Luke 18:12), namely, on the second and fifth days. While Christ is with His people either in body or in spirit, fasting is unseasonable, for joy alone can be where He is; but when His presence is withdrawn, sorrow comes to the believer and fasting is one mode of expressing his sorrowing after the Lord. This is Christ’s teaching, Matthew 9:15. As to the texts quoted for fasting as a mean of spiritual power, the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts omit Matthew 17:21; they omit also “and fasting,” Mark 9:29. They and Alexandrinus manuscript omit “fasting and,” 1 Corinthians 7:5. Evidently the growing tendency to asceticism in post apostolic times accounts for these interpolations. The apostles “prayed with fasting” in ordaining elders ( Acts 13:3; 14:23). But this continuance of the existing Jewish usage never divinely ordered does not make it obligatory on us, except in so far as we severally, by experience, find it conducive to prayer. Moses’, Elijah’s, and Christ’s (the great Antitype) 40 days’ foodlessness was exceptional and miraculous. Forty is significant of punishment for sin, confession, or affliction. Christ, the true Israel, denied Himself for 40 days, as Israel indulged the flesh 40 years. They tempted God that time; He overcame the tempter all the 40 days ( Genesis 7:4,12; Numbers 14:33; 32:13,14; Psalm 95:10; Deuteronomy 25:3; 2 Corinthians 11:24; Ezekiel 29:11; 4:6; Jonah 3:4).

    FAT Closely associated with the blood in sacrifices, and as being the richest part, appropriated peculiarly to God ( Leviticus 3:16,17); i.e. the internal fat, the “sweet fat” or suet , chelev ; the fat of the kidneys, the sign of the animal’s excellence and vigor. As of all produce the first-fruits were offered to Jehovah, so of sacrifices the blood and the fat. Hence the choicest are expressed by “the fat of the earth,” “the fat of the wheat,” etc., “the fat of the mighty” ( Genesis 45:18; Deuteronomy 32:14; Numbers 18:12 margin; 2 Samuel 1:22). The fat mixed with lean, mishman or shameen ( Numbers 13:20; Psalm 78:31; Isaiah 10:16), was lawful to eat; so also the peder or fat of the burnt offering, burned along with the flesh. The proper development of fat in the animal marked its perfection, it being the source of nutriment of which the animal economy avails itself in emergency; hence, its appropriateness as the offering to Jehovah. “The whole fat tail was taken off hard by the backbone” where the pad of fat begins ( Leviticus 3:9), for an offering by fire to Jehovah. The broad-tailed sheep of the East has an apron of marrowy fat as wide as the hind quarters, and trailing on the ground unless when artificially supported by a small truck (Herod., 3:113). The choicest of all that we have and are is to be presented to God ( Romans 12:1; Philippians 4:18).

    Fat, i.e. vat. Hebrew gath is the upper receptacle or “press” in which the grapes were trod. The yeqeb or “vat” was on a lower level, into it the juice flowed from above. The root means to hollow; for the winepress and vat were dug out of the rocks of the hills whereon were the vineyards.

    Compare Mark 12:1; Isaiah 5:2, margin.

    FATHER Chaldaic ‘abba . Christ’s endearing filial mode of addressing God; so believers ( Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15); from [‘aabah], “to show kindness.” God’s fatherhood is the ground and pattern for human fatherhood. Abraham was “father of nations,” both by natural descent from him and by spiritual fellowship in his faith ( Genesis 18:18,19; Romans 4:17). The godly father’s blessing brought great good, his curse great evil ( Genesis 9:25-27); the undutifulness of Ham entailing a curse on his race, the dutifulness of Shem and Japhet a blessing on their races ( Genesis 27:27-40; 48:15-20; 49). The fifth commandment, “honor thy father and mother,” is the first with special promise ( Ephesians 6:2). Love descends rather than ascends; hence this commandment is more needed than one concerning parents’ duties to children, but this is added ( Ephesians 6:4; Colossians 3:21).

    Dishonoring parents is one of the worst sins ( Exodus 21:15-17; Timothy 1:9; Malachi 1:6; Isaiah 45:10). Still the parent was not to inflict death, but to bring the refractory child before the city elders in the gate or place of justice ( Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

    Any ancestor is called “father” or “mother” ( Isaiah 51:2; Jeremiah 35:16-18, the sons of Jonadab son of Rechab, a striking instance of the blessing on obedience to parents; Daniel 5:2; 2 Chronicles 15:16 margin). “Father” is used also for protector, patron ( Job 29:16; Psalm 68:5; Deuteronomy 32:6). “Fathers” mean elders ( Acts 7:2; 22:1). The pupils of a spiritual master are called “sons” ( 2 Kings 2:3; 4:1). “Father” expresses one worshipped or reverenced ( Jeremiah 2:27; Kings 2:12; 5:13; 6:21). The inventor of any art is called “father” of it or of its practicers ( Genesis 4:20,21; John 8:44; Job 38:28; 17:14). So the source ( 2 Corinthians 1:3) or instrument of spiritual blessings, as “mercy,” regeneration. 1 Corinthians 4:15: “though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.”

    The father’s great duty was to teach God’s laws continually to his children; “speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children ... as the days of heaven upon the earth” ( Deuteronomy 11:18-21).

    FEASTS Hag (from a root, to dance) is the Hebrew applied to the Passover, and still more to the feast of tabernacles, as both were celebrated with rejoicings and participation of food ( Exodus 12:14; Leviticus 23:39; Numbers 29:12; Deuteronomy 16:39). But moed is the general term for all sacred assemblies convoked on stated anniversaries; God’s people by His appointment meeting before Him in brotherly fellowship for worship. Their communion was primarily with God, then with one another.

    These national feasts tended to join all in one brotherhood. Hence, arose Jeroboam’s measures to counteract the effect on his people ( 1 Kings 12:26,27). Hezekiah made the revival of the national Passover a primary step in his efforts for a reformation ( 2 Chronicles 30:1). The Roman government felt the feast a time when especial danger of rebellion existed ( Matthew 26:5; Luke 13:1). The “congregations,” “calling of assemblies,” “solemn meetings” ( Isaiah 1:13; Psalm 81:3), both on the convocation days of the three great feasts, passover, Pentecost, and tabernacles, and also on the sabbaths, imply assemblies for worship, the forerunners of the synagogue (compare 2 Kings 4:23).

    The septenary number prevails in the great feasts. Pentecost was seven weeks (sevens) after Passover; passover and the feast of tabernacles lasted seven days each; the days of holy convocation were seven in the year, two at Passover, one at pentecost, one at the feast of trumpets, one on the day of atonement (the first day or new moon of the seventh month), and two at the feast of tabernacles. The last two solemn days were in the seventh month, and the cycle of feasts is seven months, from Nisan to Tisri. There was also the sabbatical year, and the year of jubilee. The continued observance of the three feasts commemorative of the great facts of Israelite history make it incredible that the belief of those facts could have been introduced at any period subsequent to the supposed time of their occurrence if they never took place. The day, the month, and every incident of Israel’s deliverance out of Egypt are embalmed in the anniversary passover.

    On the three great feasts each Israelite was bound to “appear before the Lord,” i.e., attend in the court of the tabernacle or temple and make his offering with gladness (Leviticus 23; Deuteronomy 27:7). Pious women often went up to the Passover: as Luke 2:41, Mary; 1 Samuel 1:7; 2:19, Hannah. Those men who might happen to be unable to attend at the proper time kept the feast the same day in the succeeding month ( Numbers 9:10,11). On the days of holy convocation all ordinary work was suspended ( Leviticus 23:21-35).

    The three great feasts had a threefold bearing.

    I. They marked the three points of time as to the fruits of the earth.

    II. They marked three epochs in Israel’s past history.

    III. They pointed prophetically to three grand antitypical events of the gospel kingdom.

    I. (1) At the Passover in spring, in the month Abib, the first green ears of barley were cut, and were a favorite food, prepared as parched grain, but first of all a handful of green ears was presented to the Lord. (2) Fifty days (as Pentecost means) after Passover came the feast of weeks, i.e. a week of weeks after Passover. The now ripe wheat, before being cut, was sanctified by its firstfruits, namely two loaves of fine flour, being offered to Jehovah. (3) At the feast of tabernacles, in the end of the common year and the seventh month of the religious year, there was a feast of ingathering when all the fruits of the field had been gathered in. There was no offering of consecration, for the offerings for sanctifying the whole had been presented long before. It was not a consecration of what was begun, but a joyful thanksgiving for what was completed. See for the spiritual lesson Proverbs 3:9; <19B815> Psalm 118:15.

    II. Each of the three marked a step in theHISTORICAL progress of Israel. (1) The Passover commemorated the deliverance out of Egypt when Jehovah passed over Israel, protecting them from the destroying angel and sparing them, and so achieving for them the first step of independent national life as God’s covenant people. (2) Pentecost marked the giving of the law on Sinai, the second grand era in the history of the elect nation. God solemnly covenanted, “If ye will obey My voice indeed and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people, and ye shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” ( Exodus 19:5). (3) All the nation now wanted was a home. The feast of tabernacles commemorates the establishment of God’s people in the land of promise, their pleasant and peaceful home, after the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, living in shifting tents. They took boughs of palm and willows of the brook, and made temporary huts of branches and sat under the booths. So in their fixed home and land of rest their enjoyment was enhanced by the thankful and holy remembrance of past wanderings without a fixed dwelling. Joshua especially observed this feast after the settlement in Canaan (as incidentally comes out in Nehemiah 8:17).

    Solomon (appropriately to his name, which means king of peace) also did so, for his reign was preeminently the period of peaceful possession when every man dwelt under his own vine and figtree ( 1 Kings 4:25); immediately after that the last relic of wilderness life was abolished by the ark being taken from under curtains and deposited in the magnificent temple of stone in the seventh month ( 2 Chronicles 5:3), the feast of tabernacles was celebrated on the 15th day, and on the 23rd Solomon sent the great congregation away glad in heart for the goodness that the Lord had showed unto David, Solomon, and Israel His people. The third celebration especially recorded was after the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews were re-established in their home under Ezra and Nehemiah, and all gathered themselves together as one man on the first day of the seventh month, the feast of trumpets. Then followed the reading of the law and renewal of the covenant. Then finding in the law directions as to the feast of tabernacles, they brought branches of olive, pine, myrtle, and palm, and thick trees, and made booths on their roofs and in their courts, and in the courts of God’s house, and sat under them with “great gladness” (Nehemiah 8).

    III. Prophetically and typically. (1) The Passover points to the Lord Jesus, the true paschal Lamb sacrificed for us, whose sacrifice brings to us a perpetual feast ( 1 Corinthians 5:7). (2) Pentecost points to our Whitsuntide (Acts 2) when the Holy Spirit descending on Christ’s disciples confirms Christ’s covenant of grace in the heart more effectually than the law of Sinai written on stone ( Corinthians 3:3-18). (3) Two great steps have already been taken toward establishing the kingdom of God. Christ has risen from death as “the firstfruits of them that slept” ( 1 Corinthians 15:20), even as the green ears of barley were offered as firstfruits at Passover. Secondly, the Holy Spirit has not merely once descended but still abides in the church as His temple, giving us a perpetual Whitsun feast, One step more is needed; we have received redemption, also the Holy Spirit; we wait still for our inheritance and abiding home. The feast of tabernacles points on to the antitypical Canaan, the everlasting inheritance, of which the Holy Spirit is the “earnest” ( Ephesians 1:13,14; Hebrews 4:8,9). The antitypical feast of tabernacles shall be under the antitypical Joshua, Jesus the Captain of our salvation, the antitypical Solomon, the Prince of peace ( Isaiah 9:6; Revelation 7:9-17). The zest of the heavenly joy of the palmbearing multitude (antitypical to the palmbearers at the feast of tabernacles), redeemed out of all nations, shall be the remembrance of their tribulations in this wilderness world forever past; for repose is sweetest after toil, and difficulties surmounted add to the delight of triumph.

    Salvation was the prominent topic at the feast. In later times they used to draw water from the pool of Siloam, repeating from Isaiah 12 “with joy shall ye draw water from the wells of salvation,” referred to by Jesus ( John 7:2,37,39). So Christ shall appear the “second time without sin unto salvation” ( Hebrews 9:28). The palm-bearing multitude accompanying Jesus at His triumphant entry into His royal capital cried “Hosanna,” i.e. Save us we beseech Thee. So the prophetical <19B825> Psalm 118:25,26, implies that Israel shall say when in penitent faith she shall turn to her returning Lord ( Matthew 23:39). So the thanksgiving song of eternity shall be, “Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb.” Meanwhile on earth Israel, long finding no ease or rest for the sole of the foot, but having “trembling of heart, failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind” ( Deuteronomy 28:65), shall at length rest in her own land under Messiah reigning at Jerusalem as His holy capital and over the whole earth, and “everyone that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles” ( Zechariah 14:9,16; Revelation 7). That feast shall remind Israel of hardships now past, and of salvation and peace now realized on earth, so that “the voice of rejoicing and salvation shall be in the tabernacles of the righteous” ( <19B815> Psalm 118:15). There was in the Three Feasts a clear prefigurement of the Three Persons; the Father, in the work of creation, especially adored in the feast of tabernacles; the Son in the Passover sacrifice; the Spirit in the Pentecostal feast.

    The times of the feasts were those least interfering with the people’s industry; the Passover just before harvest; Pentecost at its conclusion and before the vintage; tabernacles after all fruits were gathered in.

    The feast ofPURIM (see ESTHER ) commemorated the baffling of Haman’s plot for the Jews’ destruction; the feast of see DEDICATION the purification of the temple by the Maccabees, after its defilement by Antiochus Epiphanes.

    In the New Testament Jude ( Jude 1:12, “feasts of charity”; also Peter 2:13, see LORD’S SUPPER ) mentions the Christian lovefeasts which often preceded the Lord’s supper (1 Corinthians 11 end) just as the Passover preceded it in Christ’s institution. They ate and; drank together earthly, then heavenly food, in token of unity for time and eternity. The fervent love and fellowship which characterized the first disciples originated these feasts ( Acts 2:45,46; 4:35; 6:1). Each brought his portion, as to a club feast; and the rich brought extra portions for the poor.

    From it the bread and wine were taken for the Eucharist. In it the excesses took place which Paul censures, and which made a true and reverent celebration of the Lord’s supper during or after it impossible. Hence the lovefeasts were afterward separated from the Lord’s supper, and in the fourth century forbidden by the Council of Laodicea A.D. 320, and that of Carthage A.D. 391, as excesses crept in, the rulers of the church receiving double portions (Tertullian, De Jejun., 17), and the rich courting the praise of liberality. Pliny, in his famous letter to Trajan, says the Christians met and exchanged sacramental pledges against all immorality, then separated, and met again to partake of an entertainment.

    FELIX Antonius (Tacitus, Hist. 5:9) Claudius (Suidas), Roman procurator of Judaea, appointed by the emperor Claudius, whose freedman he was, to succeed Ventidius Cumanus, who was banished A.D. 53. Tacitus (Ann., 12:54) makes F. procurator of Samaria while Cumanus had Galilee.

    Josephus (Ant. 20:6, section 2, 7, section 1) makes him succeed Cumanus.

    Tacitus writes of Felix, “he exercised the authority of a king with the disposition of a slave in all cruelty and lust.” He and Cumanus were tried before Quadratus for winking at robbery and violence and enriching themselves with bribes, according to Tacitus, and Felix was acquitted and reinstated. Having the powerful support of his brother Pallas, Claudius’ freedman and favorite, he thought he could do what he liked with impunity.

    Pallas’ influence continuing, Felix remained procurator under Nero. Felix crushed the Jewish zealots under the name of “robbers,” and crucified hundreds. He put down false Messiahs and the followers of an Egyptian magician (Josephus, Ant. 20:8, section 5, 6; Acts 21:88) and riots, but he once employed the zealot assassins (Sicarii) to murder the high priest Jonathan. “By unseasonable remedies he only aggravated” the evils of Judaea (Tacitus, Annals 12:54). These were the “very worthy deeds done by Felix’s providence,” which gave the nation “great quietness” according to the lying flatterer Tertullus’ set oration against Paul ( Acts 24:2, etc.).

    Claudius Lysias, the chief captain, sent Paul for judgment to Felix at Caesarea. There Paul had two hearings before Felix. After the first hearing, Felix deferred the Jews until Lysias the chief captain should come. At the second Paul, before Felix and Drusilla, Felix’s Jewish wife, who was curious to “hear him concerning the faith of Christ,” so reasoned of “righteousness and temperance (both of which Felix outraged as a governor and a man, having seduced see DRUSILLA from her husband) and judgment to come” that Felix “trembled” before his prisoner, but deferred repentance, saying, “when I have a convenient season I will call for thee.” Greed of gain supplanted conscience, so that instead of repenting of his shameful life he would not even do common justice to Paul, but left him a prisoner because he got no bribe to set him free. Felix could hardly have hoped for money from so poor looking a prisoner as Paul (which is implied in Lysias’ surprise, presuming Paul had like himself bought Roman citizenship, Acts 22:27,28), had he not heard Paul stating in the former interview, “after many years I came to bring alms to my nation and offerings.” This accounts for Felix “letting Paul have liberty and forbidding none of his acquaintance to minister or come unto him.” He doubtless hoped they would supply the money wherewith to buy his deliverance, an undesigned coincidence and so a mark of the truth of the history. After two years Porcius Festus succeeded, and Felix was accused by the Jews of Caesarea, at Rome, but escaped through Pallas’ influence with the emperor Nero, A.D. 60.

    FENCED CITIES The distinction between a “city” and a “village” in the Bible is, the former had walls. The village had sometimes a watchman’s tower, where the villagers repaired when in danger. Such towers Uzziah built in the desert for the protection of husbandmen and cattle from marauding tribes ( Chronicles 26:10). David too had “castles” ( 1 Chronicles 27:25). see ARGOB in Bashan, Og’s kingdom, E. of Jordan, had “three-score cities fenced with high walls, gates and bars, beside unwalled towns a great many” ( Deuteronomy 3:4,5); all which Israel took. Villages in the Hauran sometimes consist of houses joined together and the entrance closed by a gate for security against Arab marauders. “Build” often means “fortify” ( 2 Chronicles 11:5-10; 16:6; 1 Kings 15:17). The defenses consisted of one or more walls with battlemented parapets and towers at intervals ( 2 Chronicles 32:5; Jeremiah 31:38), whereon were war engines, also a citadel or tower, the last resource of the defenders ( Judges 9:46,51; 2 Kings 9:17; 2 Chronicles 26:9,15). Ninety towers crowned the oldest of Jerusalem’s three walls, fourteen the second, sixty the third (B. J., 5:4, section 2). The tower of Hananeel is mentioned Jeremiah 31:38; Zechariah 14:10; Nehemiah 3:1, where also is mentioned “the tower of Meah,” “the tower of the furnaces” ( Nehemiah 3:11), “the great tower that lieth out even unto the wall of Ophel” ( Nehemiah 3:27). An out-work is meant by the “ditch” or “trench,” possibly a wall lining the ditch ( 1 Kings 21:23; 2 Samuel 20:15). “The castle” of Antonia was the citadel of Jerusalem in our Lord’s time; it served also to overawe the town, the Roman soldiers occupying it ( Acts 21:34). Canaan’s “cities fenced up to heaven” were leading causes of the spies’ and Israel’s unbelieving panic ( Numbers 13:28; Deuteronomy 1:28; 9:1,2). These the Israelites “rebuilt,” i.e. refortified ( Numbers 32:17,34-42). So fenced was “the stronghold of Zion” that it remained in the Jebusites’ hands until David’s time ( 2 Samuel 5:6,7). Samaria yielded to the mighty hosts of Assyria only after a three years’ siege ( Kings 17:5; 18:10).

    FERRET Hebrew ‘anaqah , from ‘aanaq “to groan.” Gosse refers it to the house mouse, from its squeak. Rather the gecko, which croaks as a frog and has feet so formed as to walk on the ceilings of houses which it enters (Leviticus 29:30, Speaker’s Commentary). It is enumerated with unclean creeping things, which favors the view that some lizard is meant.

    FESTUS, PORCIUS Sent by Nero to succeed Felix as procurator of Judaea, probably in the autumn A.D. 60. To ingratiate himself with the Jews he asked Paul would he go up to Jerusalem for judgment there P But Paul, knowing there was little hope of an impartial trial there, as a Roman citizen appealed to Caesar (Acts 25--26). A few weeks afterward he gave Paul’s case a hearing before Herod Agrippa II and Bernice his sister. Paul, spoke with such holy zeal that Festus exclaimed with a loud voice “Paul, thou art beside thyself, much learning doth make thee mad” (compare the same charge against Paul’s Master, John 10:20; also 2 Corinthians 5:13,14); Paul replied, “I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak forth the words of truth and soberness.” Then he appealed to Agrippa, “Believest thou the prophets? I know that thou believest.” Agrippa replied, “Almost (or as Wordsworth, ‘on a short notice,’ literally, ‘in a short’ time; but measure may be understood, which gives the KJV sense) thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” Paul answered, “I would to God that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day (including Festus) were both almost (in a small measure) and altogether (in a great measure) such as I am, except these bonds” (mark his refined courtesy in the exception). Had Agrippa yielded himself “altogether” to the convictions of conscience then, what an eternal blessing would have ensued to himself, what a reflex blessing probably to Festus! Compare in Caesar’s palace at Rome, Philippians 1:12-14. Both certainly were touched; and Festus, forgetting that it was his own proposal to try Paul at Jerusalem, the place where already Paul’s life had been conspired against (Acts 23), and virtually to deliver him up to the Jews ( Acts 25:11), that drove Paul in self defense to appeal to Rome, said, “This man doeth nothing worthy of death and bonds” (why then had he not released him?); and Agrippa, in compliment to Festus, laid the blame of his detention on Paul himself instead of on Festus, “This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Caesar.” A picture of the world’s insincerity.

    Festus put down forcibly the Sicarii (assassin zealots), robbers, and magicians. Festus sided with Agrippa against the Jews as to the high wall they built to prevent Agrippa seeing from his dining room in the palace into the temple court, for it hindered the Roman guard also from seeing the temple from the castle of Antonia during the great feasts. The Roman emperor under the influence of Poppaea, a proselyte, decided on appeal in favor of the Jews. Festus after a procuratorship of less than two years died in the summer of A.D. 62.

    FIELD Sadeh in Hebrew implies cultivated land (as field is derived from felling trees), but unenclosed; whereas the English “field” implies enclosure. In contrast to the adjoining wilderness ( Genesis 33:19; 36:35). The [sadeh] is contrasted with what is enclosed, as a vineyard ( Numbers 22:23,24) or a city ( Deuteronomy 28:3,16). Unwalled villages were counted by the law as “the fields of the country” ( Leviticus 25:31). “Field” means the open country, apart from habitations, in Genesis 25:27; 37:15. Stones marked off separate plots; to remove these landmarks entailed the curse ( Deuteronomy 27:17). The lack of fences exposed the fields to straying cattle ( Exodus 22:5) or fire ( 2 Samuel 14:30).

    Hence, the need of watchers, now named nator . The rye or spelled was placed “in its (the field’s) border” ( Isaiah 28:25). The wheat was put in the middle, the best and safest place, and the several other grains in their own place. The tallest and strongest grain outside formed a kind of fence. “A town in the country (field)” is a provincial town, as distinguished from the royal city ( 1 Samuel 27:5). “Fruitful field” is a distinct word, see CARMEL . Another term, mareh , “meadows,” is a naked treeless region ( Judges 20:33); “the liers in wait came from the open plains of Gibeah”; not that their ambush was there, but the men of Benjamin had been previously enticed away from the city ( Judges 20:31), so the liers in wait came to the city from the thus exposed plain.

    FIG tenah , from ta’an “to stretch out” its branches. The Ficus Carica (Carla being famed for figs) of Linnaeus. Under its appropriate covert Nathanael found that solitude and shade which suited his earnest communion with God ( John 1:48). Adam and Eve used its leaves to cover their shame and nakedness; Nathanael to lay bore his soul “without guile” before God.

    Mount Olivet is still famed for its figtrees as of old. “To sit under one’s own vine and figtree” was the proverb for peace and prosperity; so under Solomon ( 1 Kings 4:25); type of the true Solomon, Prince of peace, and of His coming millennial reign ( Micah 4:4; Zechariah 3:10); men will be safe in the open field as in the house. The early ripe fig is “the hasty fruit” ( Isaiah 28:4), Hebrew bikurah , Spanish bokkore. Figs usually ripened in August; earlier ones in June. Esteemed a delicacy ( Jeremiah 24:2; Hosea 9:10; Micah 7:1): “when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand, he eateth it up”; it looks so tempting he instantly swallows it; so the Assyrian conqueror Shalmaneser shall not merely conquer, but with impatient avidity destroy Samaria. The unripe fig (pag ) hangs through the winter and ripens in the spring about Easter (Song 2:13). Beth-phage, “house of green figs,” is derived from it. Figs were compressed into the form of round cakes for keeping ( 1 Samuel 25:18), debeelim . They were used as a plaster for boils ( Isaiah 38:21); God can make the most ordinary means effectual.

    The difficulty in Mark 11:12 is solved thus: the leaves on the “one” figtree, when all others were bore, caught Jesus’ eye “afar off”; as the fruit precedes the leaves, naturally He might have expected, for satisfying His hunger, figs from a tree with such a precocious show of leaf, even though the season of figs was not yet come. It was the unseasonable display of leaves which led Him to come and see “if haply (if as might naturally be expected) He might find anything thereon.” Similarly the Jews (for it was an acted parable) had the show of religion before the. general time of religious privileges; but that was all, the fruit of real love which ought to precede the profession was wanting. The “for” expresses the unseasonableness of the leaves. “He found nothing but leaves [i.e. He found no figs]; FOR the time of figs was not yet.” Mark states why no fruit was found, “for,” etc. The reason why it ought to have had fruit is left for us to infer, namely, its abnormal precocious leaves, which Christ had a right to expect would be accompanied with abnormal fruit, for the fig fruit precedes the leaf. Christ cursed it, not because it was fruitless, (for the season of figs was not yet, and if it had been leafless He would not have sought fruit on it,) but because it was false to its high pretensions.

    Thomson (The Land and the Book) says that in a sheltered spot figs of an early kind may occasionally be found ripe as soon as the beginning of April, the time of Christ’s cursing the fig tree. In Matthew 21:19 it is “one fig tree,” standing out an exception to all the rest. The Jews’ sin was, they were singled out by God from all nations ( Amos 3:2), and had the Tower to bring forth the leaves of precocious profession but not the will to bring forth the fruit of faith and love. The sheltering hillside of Olivet had protected it, the sunlight had cherished it, and the dews of heaven watered it; but precocious leaves were the only result. Compare Isaiah 5 as to God’s care of Israel; the only result was not merely unfruitfulness but deceptiveness, “the rustling leaves of a religious profession, barren traditions of the Pharisees, and vain exuberance of words without the good fruit of works” (Wordsworth); ostentatious promise of antedating the Gentile church in fruit, without performance; pretentious show and hypocrisy. Fig trees overhanging the road from Jerusalem to Bethany still grow out of the rocks of the mountain which, the Lord said, faith could remove to the distant sea ( Matthew 21:21). On Olivet too was spoken the parable of the budding fig tree, the sign of coming summer ( Luke 21:29,30). The August figs are the sweetest and best.

    FIR Berosh (from barash , to cut up into planks) and beroth : including the Scotch fir, Pinus silvestris; the lurch, the cypress: all found in Lebanon, according to the Imperial Dictionary. Used for musical instruments, for its softness of grain and sonorous property ( 2 Samuel 6:5), doors ( Kings 6:34), ceilings ( 2 Chronicles 3:5), decks of ships ( Ezekiel 27:5). But Smith’s Bible Dictionary Appendix (from Septuagint [arkeuthos ] and [kedros ]) identifies berowsh with the tall fragrant juniper of Lebanon, and denies that the lurch and Scotch fir exist in Syria or Palestine.

    FIRE Ever burning on the altar, first kindled, according to Jewish tradition, from heaven ( Leviticus 6:9,13; 9:24). But Scripture represents the altar fire as lighted naturally before this. Knobel observes the rule Leviticus 1:7, “the sons of Aaron shall put fire upon the altar, and lay the wood in order upon the fire,” must refer to the first burnt offering; the rule afterwards was to be that in Leviticus 6:13; Exodus 40:29; Leviticus 8:16,21,28; 9:10,13,14,17,20. The heavenly fire in Leviticus 9:24 did not kindle the fuel but consumed the victim. So God testified His accepting sacrifices ( Judges 6:21; 13:19,20; 1 Kings 18:38; 1 Chronicles 21:26; 2 Chronicles 7:1; probably Genesis 4:4). Hence, the Hebrew for “accept” is “turn to ashes” ( Psalm 20:3 margin). The ever burning fire symbolized Jehovah’s ever continuing sacrificial worship; so in the New Testament, Hebrews 13:15; 1 Thessalonians 5:17. This distinguishes it from the pagan idol Vesta’s fire, the Magian fire, that of the Parsees, etc. The fires of Moloch and the sun god were nature worship, into which Sabeanism declined from the one God over all; the Jews often fell into this apostasy ( Isaiah 27:9; 2 Kings 23:11,12).

    The “strange fire” ( Leviticus 10:1) is generally explained common fire, not taken from the holy fire of the altar. But no express law forbade burning incense by ordinary fire, except the incense burned by the high priest in entering the holiest place on the day of atonement ( Leviticus 16:12), and probably the rule was hence taken as to the daily incense offering. They presented an incense offering not commanded in the law, apart from the morning and evening sacrifice. Being an act of “will worship” it was “strange fire.” Nadab and Abihu probably intended to accompany the people’s shouts with an incense offering to the praise of God. The time and the manner of their offering were “strange” and selfwilled.

    So, the fire of the holy God ( Exodus 19:18), which had just sanctified Aaron’s service, consumed his two oldest sons. So the gospel that saves the humble seals death to the presumptuous ( 2 Corinthians 2:16; Colossians 2:23). [See AARON .] Fire by its pure, penetrating, all consuming agency, symbolizes the holiness of God which consumes sin as a thing that cannot abide in His presence ( Hebrews 10:27; 12:29). The risen Lord’s “eyes are like a flame of fire” ( Revelation 2:18,23) “searching the reins and hearts.” He shall come “in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that, know not God and obey not the gospel” ( 2 Thessalonians 1:8). The flaming fire marked His manifestation in the bush ( Exodus 3:2). Again the same symbol appeared in the pillar of cloud and fire ( Exodus 13:21,22), in His giving the law on Sinai ( Exodus 19:18); so at His second advent ( Daniel 7:9,10; Malachi 3:2; 4:1; 2 Peter 3:7,10). John the Baptist, as the last and greatest prophet of the Old Testament dispensation, declared of the Messiah, “He shall baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire,” referring to His judicial aspect, “burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire” ( Matthew 3:11,12).

    Fire also symbolizes the purifying of believers by testing dealings ( Malachi 3:2), also the holy zeal kindled in them as at Pentecost (Acts 2; Isaiah 4:4). The same Holy Spirit. who sanctifies believers by the fire of affliction dooms unbelievers to the fire of perdition. In 1 Corinthians 3:13-15, “every man’s work ... the (judgment) day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is ... if any man’s work shall be burnt, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” As the “gold,” “hay,” etc., are figurative, so the fire. Not purgatorial, i.e. purificatory and punitive, but probatory; not restricted, as Rome teaches, to those dying in “venial sin,” the supposed intermediate class between those entering heaven at once and those dying in mortal sin and doomed to hell; but universal, testing the godly and ungodly alike ( 2 Corinthians 5:10; Mark 9:49). This fire is not until the last day, the supposed fire of purgatory is at death. The fire of Paul is to try the works, the fire of purgatory the persons, of men. Paul’s fire causes loss to the sufferers, Rome’s fire the supposed gain of heaven at last to those purged by fire. A Christian worker, if he builds converts on Christ alone, besides being saved himself, shall have them as his crown and special reward ( 2 Corinthians 1:14; 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 2 John 1:8). But if his work be of unscriptural materials, that the fire will destroy, he shall lose the special “reward” of the work so lost, but himself shall be saved because in Christ, “yet so as by fire,” i.e. having a narrow ESCAPE ( Zechariah 3:2; Amos 4:11; Jude 1:23).

    FIRMAMENT Raqi’ah , “the expanse stretched out as a curtain” over the earth ( Isaiah 40:22; <19A402> Psalm 104:2), resting on the mountains as its pillars (the language is phenomenal, as indeed necessarily is that of even men of science often): Job 26:11. It was the reservoir of rain and snow, which poured through its opened “windows” or “doors” ( Genesis 7:11; Isaiah 24:18; Psalm 78:23). It includes the atmosphere immediately round the earth, in which the birds fly, and which bears up the clouds ( Genesis 1:6,7,20; in Genesis 1:14 it also comprises the region in which the sun, moon, and stars are seen). “Firmament” (from the Vulgate: firmamentum; Septuagint: stereooma ) is derived from firmness; but the Hebrew expresses no such notion, as if Moses thought the sky a hard firm vault, in which the heavenly bodies were fixed. The sky in Job 37:18 is termed “strong, as a molten looking glass,” namely, a polished copper mirror. But it is not the solidity, but the transparent clearness and the smiling brightness, which is the point of comparison. Otherwise, how could birds fly in a solid? The language is figurative and phenomenal. In Ezekiel 1:26 the throne is seen above the “firmament,” therefore the firmament must be transparent.

    FIRSTBORN [See BIRTHRIGHT .] Primogeniture gave princedom and priesthood in patriarchal times. So Esau and Jacob ( Genesis 25:23-33; Hebrews 12:16), Reuben ( Genesis 49:3; 1 Chronicles 5:1). The oldest son in all Israelite families was regarded as sacred to God, because Israel’s firstborn were exempted from the stroke which destroyed all the firstborn of Egypt on the first Passover night. The firstborn represented the whole people; Jehovah said to Pharaoh, “Israel is My son, My firstborn, and I say unto thee, Let My son go, that he may serve He; and if thou refuse to let him go, behold I will slay thy son, thy firstborn” ( Exodus 4:22,23).

    Israel, as Jehovah’s firstborn, was designed to be a” kingdom of priests and an holy nation” ( Exodus 19:6). It shall hereafter realize this high Calling in a degree that it has not yet realized it, standing as “the firstborn among many brethren” (like the antitypical Israel, Messiah, Romans 8:29; Hebrews 2:12), and priest among all nations, which in subordination to Jerusalem, the spiritual metropolis, shall be the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ, then manifested ( Isaiah 61:6; 66:21; Revelation 11:15; Zechariah 14:16; Jeremiah 3:17).

    The tribe of Levi was substituted for all Israel’s firstborn to minister to the Lord ( Numbers 3:12,45,50). There being 273 more of the firstborn in Israel than the males in Levi, the 273 were redeemed at five shekels apiece.

    Still, to mark the consecration of Israel to Jehovah, the redemption money was exacted for every firstborn ( Numbers 18:15). But the firstlings of cattle were to be offered to the Lord. An donkey was however redeemed with a lamb, or else killed ( Exodus 13:13).

    Christ is the First-begotten. As such, He has the rights of primogeniture; for, as Hebrews 1:6 is in the Greek, “when God shall bring in again the First. begotten into the world, the shall be deemed worthy of not less honor, for] He saith ( Psalm 97:7), Let all the angels of God worship Him.” His being “brought into the world” (oikoumenee , the inhabited world), as the theater of His power, mainly applies to His second advent.

    In ( Colossians 1:16, “the Firstborn of every creature”; implying priority and superlative dignity. Psalm 89:27, “My Firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth,” David’s antitype, the Messiah. See Colossians 1:16 (proototokos pasees ktiseoos , as John 1:15,30; 15:18, prootos mou , “long before Me”), “begotten long before every creature”; the reason why He is so designated follows, “for He is before all things.” “First-begotten” marks at once His eternal priority and His condescending to brotherhood with us ( Romans 8:29). “Only begotten” marks His relation to the Father by generation from everlasting. Since He is “long before every creature,” He cannot be a creature Himself but the Creator. And as He is the first begotten, originating the natural creation, so He is “the firstborn (proototokos , ‘first begotten,’ Revelation 1:5) from (out of, ek ) the dead,” and therefore “the Beginning” ( Colossians 1:18) of “the church of the firstborn” ( Hebrews 12:23), the originating Agent of the new creation. He was “begotten” of the Father to a new life at His resurrection (the day when the Father fulfilled Psalm 2:7 according to Acts 13:33; Romans 1:4) which is His “regeneration”; so He is “the Princeleader (archeegos ) of life.” “Regeneration,” begun in the soul now, will extend to the body at the resurrection of the saints; and to nature, now groaning under the curse ( Matthew 19:28; Luke 20:36; 1 John 3:2; Romans 8:11,19,23). As He is “the firstborn” in relation to the election church, so it is “the church of the firstborn,” “a kind of first-fruits of His creatures” ( James 1:18), in relation to the millennial church, and to the hereafter to be regenerated natural creation. As Christ is “the firstfruits,” earnest and pledge of the coming resurrection, so believers are “a kind of first-fruits,” a pledge and earnest of the ultimate regeneration of creation. As He is first begotten by generation from everlasting, so believers by adoptions, “begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible,” etc. ( 1 Peter 1:3.) As Israel, on the ground of being God’s “firstborn,” was a king-priestly nation, so believers ( Revelation 1:6).

    The figurative phrase, “the firstborn of death,” means the deadliest disease that death (personified) ever gendered ( Job 18:13). “The firstborn of the poor,” the poorest.

    FIRSTFRUITS [See FIRSTBORN .] The whole land’s produce was consecrated to God by the consecration of the first-fruits ( Romans 11:16); just as the whole nation by that of the firstborn. At the Passover, on the morrow after the sabbath, a sheaf of green barley (which is earlier than wheat), of the first fruits of the crop, was waved before the Lord. At Pentecost,50 days later, two loaves of wheaten bread (Leviticus 23). The feast of tabernacles, on the 15th day of the seventh month, was itself an acknowledgment of the fruits of the harvest. Besides these national offerings the law required that the first of all ripe fruits and liquors should be offered by individuals ( Exodus 22:29). A cake of the first dough baked was to be a heave offering ( Numbers 15:19,21). The first-fruits of the oil, wine, and wheat were to be offered to Jehovah, for the benefit of the priests as His representatives ( Numbers 18:11-13). The Talmud fixed on the 60th as the least to be given of the produce, a 30th or 40th as a liberal offering.

    The individual presentation of the first-fruits in a basket took place at the temple or tabernacle. The offerer said: “I profess this day unto the Lord thy God that I am come unto the country which the Lord sware unto our fathers to give us.” The priest took the basket and set it down before the altar of the Lord. The offerer added: “A Syrian (Jacob) ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt,” etc. (Deuteronomy 26). The Talmud adds that companies of 24 used to assemble at evening m a central station, and pass the night in the open air; the leader in the morning summoned them, “Let us arise and go up to mount Zion, the house of the Lord our God.” On the road to Jerusalem they recited Psalm 122; Psalm 150. Each party was preceded by a piper and a sacrificial bullock with horns gilt and crowned with olive. The priests met them, and the Levites singing Psalm 30. Each presented his basket, reciting the formula in Deuteronomy 26. King Agrippa, it is stated, once carried his basket as others.

    The offerings were either bichurim , raw produce, “first-fruits,” or tirumot , “offerings,” prepared produce. Times of apostasy brought a neglect of this duty; the restoration of the offering of both kinds was a leading point in the reformation under Hezekiah ( 2 Chronicles 31:5,11), and under Nehemiah ( Nehemiah 10:35,37; 12:44). The prophets insist on this duty ( Ezekiel 20:40; 44:30; 48:14; Malachi 3:8). Fruit trees were to be regarded as uncircumcised, i.e. profane, for three years. The produce of the fourth was devoted to God, and only in the fifth year the produce became the owner’s ( Leviticus 19:23-25).

    FISH dag , implying increase or fecundity. Fish without fins or scales were “unclean” ( Leviticus 11:9,10); aquatic mammalia, amphibia, and reptiles were hereby prohibited. This was the distinction between the good and the bad fish in Matthew 13:48. The “great fish” of Jonah ( Jonah 1:17) was, according to different views, the dogfish, the shark, whose cartilaginous skeleton adapts it for swallowing large animals, or the whale, in the cavity of whose throat there would be room for a man.

    The slaying of their fish was a heavy blow from Jehovah on the Egyptians, whose river, canals, and lakes so abounded in fish, and who lived so much on it ( Exodus 7:18-21; <19A529> Psalm 105:29; Numbers 11:5; Isaiah 19:8). The fish was worshipped as the emblem of fecundity; Dagon, among the Philistines, half man half fish; also in Assyria. Hence the worship is forbidden ( Deuteronomy 4:18). The “fishgate” at Jerusalem implies an adjoining fish market, supplied chiefly through Tyrian traders who imported it ( Nehemiah 13:16; 3:3; 12:39; 2 Chronicles 33:14). The fish of the Lake of Galilee are mainly identical with those especially found in the Nile. The casting net or the larger drag net was the chief instrument used for catching fish ( Habakkuk 1:15); the line and hook, and the “barbed iron” or spear, were also used ( Amos 4:2; Matthew 17:27; Job 41:7).

    Fishing is the image for taking souls in the gospel net, not to be destroyed but to be saved alive ( Ezekiel 47:10; Matthew 4:19; Luke 5:5-10). Night was thought the best time for net fishing. Fishing symbolizes also sudden destruction by invading enemies ( Jeremiah 16:16; Amos 4:2; Habakkuk 1:16; Ecclesiastes 9:12; Ezekiel 29:3-5).

    In Job 41:2, “canst thou put an hook (or ‘agmon , rope of rushes) into leviathan’s nose, or bore his jaw through with a thorn?” or hook by which fish were secured, when thrown into the water, to keep them alive. In John 21:11 the 153 fish taken were all “great fish,” whereas in the corresponding earlier miracle ( Luke 5:6) this is not said; the net broke in the earlier, not so in the miracle after the resurrection, the latter typifying the eternal safety of the finally elect, all accounted “great” before God.

    Christ’s sermon and parables (Matthew 13) were delivered from a fishing boat; so Luke 5:3. He fed the multitudes with fish as well as bread ( Matthew 14:19; 15:36). He paid the tribute with a stateer from a fish taken with a hook ( Matthew 17:27). He ate broiled fish after His resurrection ( Luke 24:42,43; again, John 21:9-13).

    FITCHES Hebrew qetsach , Septuagint [melanthion], Isaiah 28:25,27; of the order Ranunculaceos, and suborder Helleboreos, in southern Europe and northern Africa; the black poppy. Nigella sativa, “fennel,” with black seed like cummin, easily “beaten out with a staff”; used in sauces as condiment like pepper; aromatic and carminative. In Ezekiel 4:9 kussemeth , KJV “fitches,” is rather “spelt” or [dhourra], less suitably rendered “rye” Exodus 9:32; Isaiah 28:25, where the illustration from the husbandman shows that God also adapts His measures to the varying exigencies of the several cases and places, now mercy, now judgment, here punishing sooner there later (an answer to the scoff that His judgments were so slow that they would never come at all, Isaiah 5:19); His aim not being to destroy His people any more than the husbandman’s aim in threshing is to destroy his crop. He will not use the threshing instrument where, as in the case of the “fennel,” the “staff” will suffice. From the readiness with which the ripe capsules yield their tiny black seeds (the poor man’s pepper, poivrette), nothing could be so absurd as to use a threshing instrument. Even in the case of the “bread grain” which needs to be “bruised” or threshed with the grain drag or trodden out by cattle, “He will not always be threshing it”; for “because” translated “but” (compare 27:7,8). Spelt has a smooth slender ear (as it were shorn, kussemeth being from kaasam “to shear”), the grains of which are so firm in the husk that they need special devices to disengage them.

    FLAG Exodus 2:3. Cuwph Hebrew, the Egyptian tufi or sufi. An undesigned coincidence that so many Egyptian words should occur in Exodus, just what we should expect if it be, as it professes, Moses’ record; but no Hebrew reared in Palestine long after the exodus would have had the know]edge of the Egyptian tongue which the many plainly Hebraized Egyptian words in Exodus indicate that its author possessed; nor would the author have used these words with out explanation of their meaning, had he not known that his readers were equally familiar with them. This flag is a species of papyrus, distinct from and less than that commonly used in Egypt to construct light boats, namely, the “see BULRUSH papyrus (from whence comes our paper), of which Moses’ ark was made. The cuwph or secondary papyrus is again used in the case of Egypt, Isaiah 19:6. Also “the Red Sea,” the sea of suph ( Exodus 10:19). Gesenius explains “seaweed” or “rush”; a seaweed like wool is thrown in quantities on its shores. Jonah 2:5,6 uses it of “the seaweeds wrapped about his head,” for He was not swallowed by the fish at once, but sank to the bottom, where the seaweed was his grave-napkin; thence the fish swallowed him.

    Another Hebrew word, ‘achu , is translated “flag”, Job 8:11; in Genesis 41:2 “a meadow.” Jerome on Isaiah 19:7 says the Egyptians told him it meant “everything green growing in marshes”; the sedge, rank reed grass by the river’s side. An Egyptian word, akh-akh, “green,” occurs in a very old papyrus.

    FLAGON ‘ashishah . 2 Samuel 6:19. Rather (from ‘eesh , fire, i.e. dried by heat) “a cake of pressed dried grapes”; so 1 Chronicles 16:3; Song 2:5; Hosea 3:1 margin; such were offered to idols ( Jeremiah 7:18). Nobel is the Hebrew in Isaiah 22:24, “I will hang upon Eliakim (a type of the Messiah) all the glory of his father’s house ... all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons.” On Christ hang alike the small and the great “vessels unto honor in the Father’s house, sanctified and meet for the Master’s use” ( 2 Timothy 2:20,21); their capacities varying, but each to be filled to the brim hereafter with heavenly joy according to their several capacities ( Luke 19:16-19; Matthew 25:19-23).

    FLAX Exodus 9:31, “the flax was bolled,” i.e. in blossom; the boll, related to bowl and ball, being the pod. Marking the time, the end of February or beginning of March. Linen was exclusively used by the priests. Pliny, 19:1, notes four kinds in Egypt, and 24 mentions Tanis (Zoan) as famous for flax. In evenness of threads without knot or break Egyptian linen exceeded modern manufacture. (Wilkinson on Herod., 2:37, p. 54.) Solomon imported it from Egypt ( 1 Kings 10:28; Proverbs 7:16; Ezekiel 27:7). The processes of manufacture are represented on Egyptian tombs as at Benihassan. The microscope shows the doth on the mummies to be linen. It was grown m Canaan before Joshua’s ( Joshua 2:6) conquest; the stalks were dried on the flat roofs by exposure to the sun’s heat; later the drying was done in ovens. The combing is noticed in Isaiah 19:9, “they that work in combed (so seriguot means) flax.” The rich alone wore fine linen ( Luke 16:19). Wilkinson mentions Egyptian linen with (or 270 double) threads in one inch in the warp; most modern cambric has but 160 (Barnes). The corslet of Amasis king of Egypt was of linen threads, each having 360 strands or filaments (Herodotus). Its cultivation in northern Israel is alluded to, Hosea 2:5,9. “Fine linen, clean and white,” is the emblem of “the righteousness (distributively) of saints,” the bride’s attire for” the marriage of the Lamb,” Revelation 19:7,8 (each saint having for himself Christ’s righteousness imputed for justification, and imparted by the Spirit for sanctification). The tearing up of the flax from its native soil, its exposure to the scorching sun, its being torn by the comb’s long teeth, and sunk in the water with stones attached, so as ultimately to be transfigured into raiment white as snow, illustrate how the Christian is prepared for grace and glory through long and varied afflictions now. In Isaiah 42:3, “the smoking flax He shall not quench,” i.e. the flax wick of the lamp. The believer is the lamp (Greek, Matthew 5:15; John 5:35), his conscience enlightened by the Holy Spirit is the wick; “smoking “means dimly burning, smoldering, the flame not extinct; “bruised” in himself, but having some spark lighted from above, Christ will supply such a one with grace as with oil, and will not stifle the little flame. So the faint light of nature in the Gentiles, smoldering amidst the smoke of error, He not only does not quench, but clears away its mists, and superadds the light of revelation.

    FLEA 1 Samuel 24:14, 26:20). Translated “(thou pursuest) after one flea,” David implying his extreme insignificance, fleas in Palestine abounding in a degree not known with us.

    FLESH In an ethical sense opposed to “the spirit.” Genesis 6:3, “for that lie also (even the race of godly Seth) (is become) flesh (carnal).” When the salt of the church has lost its savor, the whole mass is corrupt and ripe for judgment. 1 Corinthians 1:26, “wise after the flesh,” i.e. with wisdom acquired by mere human study without the Spirit. Contrast Matthew 16:17; 26:41. Not the body, which is not in itself sinful; it was through thinking it so that Gnostic ascetics mortified it by austerities, while all the while their seeming neglecting of the body was pampering “the flesh” ( Colossians 2:21-23). “The flesh” is the natural man, including the unrenewed will and mind, moving in the world of self and sense only. Self imposed ordinances gratify the flesh (i.e. self) while seemingly mortifying it. “Trouble in the flesh” is in their outward state, namely, through the present distress ( 1 Corinthians 7:28). So John 6:63, “it is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and are life.” Not the outward flesh, but the word of Christ, is what gives life. So Peter understood Christ, as his reply shows: “Thou hast the words of eternal life.” “To know Christ after the flesh” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16) means to know Him in His mere outward worldly relations, with a view to “glorying” in them ( John 8:15; Philippians 3:3-10); as Judaizing Christians prided themselves on the fleshly advantage of belonging to Israel, the nation of Christ, or on having seen Him in the flesh, as a ground of superiority over others ( 2 Corinthians 11:18; 10:7). Contrasted with knowing Him spiritually as new creatures ( 2 Corinthians 5:12,15,17). Outward rebellions toward Him profit nothing ( Luke 8:19-21; John 16:7,22; Matthew 7:22,23). All outward distinctions are lost sight of in experiment, ally knowing Him in His new resurrection life ( Galatians 2:6,20; 3:28; Romans 6:9-11; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Peter 3:18; 4:1,2); disproving both Mariolatry and transubstantiation. In Romans 4:1, “what hath Abraham found, as pertaining to the flesh?” i.e. as respects carnal ordinances (circumcision). “All flesh,” i.e. all men ( Luke 3:2; John 17:2).

    FLOOD [See NOAH .] FLUTE Daniel 3:5,7,10,15. Used at the worship of Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image. A pipe or pipes, not blown transversely as our flute, but by mouthpieces at the ends as the flageolet.

    FLUX, BLOODY Dysentery, in the East mostly epidemic and infectious, and of the worst kind ( Acts 28:8). The protapsus aui, “the bowels falling out,” is a frequent consequence, as in Jehoram’s case ( 2 Chronicles 21:15,19).

    FLY [See EGYPT and see EXODUS on the plague of flies.] Psalm 78:45; 105:31. ‘Arob , Septuagint translated “dog flies”; their bites severely inflame the eyelids. However, an old Egyptian word retained in Coptic abeb, “a beetle,” seems related. The sun god in Egypt was represented in the form of a beetle; thus their sin would be made their instrument of punishment. But the “flies,” whether gnats, mosquitoes, or dog flies, literally “devour” ( Psalm 78:45), conveying the well-known ophthalmia from one to another, and by the larvae entering beneath the skin and intestines, and generating deadly disease. Found in swarms about the arms and canals of the Nile. Figure for troublesome and numerous foes, as Pharaoh Necho’s hosts who slew king Josiah at Megiddo ( 2 Kings 23:29,30). Isaiah 7:18, “the Lord shall hiss for (i.e. summon, as a beemaster whistles for bees) the fly (zibub ) in the rivers of Egypt.” Ecclesiastes 10:1, “dead flies (zibubim ) cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor,” i.e. “flies” small in appearance, answer to “a little folly” (sin); “the ointment” of the perfumer answers to the man’s “repudiation for wisdom and honor” ( Ecclesiastes 7:1; Genesis 34:30). The more delicate the perfume, the more easily a small corruption, as a dead fly, can spoil it; so the more excellent a character, the greater pity it is to allow a small inconsistency to mar it; e.g., David ( Samuel 12:14), Solomon (1 Kings 11), Jehoshaphat (2 Chronicles 18; 19:2), Josiah ( 2 Chronicles 35:21,22). A little sin, if unchecked, will undermine the whole character ( 1 Corinthians 5:6; Galatians 5:9).

    Beelzebub, the parent of sin, is (as the name means) “the prince of flies.”

    The dthebab of Egypt (Sir G. Wilkinson, Transact. Entom. Soc., 2:183), like our cleg in N. of England. It assails camels, and generates a disease which, if neglected, kills them; it attacks man too.

    FOOD Herbs and fruits were man’s permitted food at first ( Genesis 1:29). The early race lived in a warm and genial climate, where animal food was not a necessity. Even now many eastern nations live healthily on a vegetable diet.

    Not until after the flood ( Genesis 9:3) sheep and cattle, previously kept for their milk and wool, and for slaying in sacrifice [see ABEL ], from whence the distinction of “clean and unclean” ( Genesis 7:2) is noticed before the flood, were permitted to be eaten. The godless and violent antediluvians probably had anticipated this permission. Now it is given accompanied by a prohibition against eating flesh with the blood, which is the life, left in it. The cutting of flesh, with the blood, from the living animal (as has been practiced in Africa), and the eating of blood either apart from or in the flesh, were prohibited, because “the soul (nephesh ) of the flesh is in the blood, and I (Jehovah) have ordained it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood which makes atonement by means of the soul” ( Leviticus 17:11,12). The two grounds for forbidding blood as food thus are, first, its being the vital fluid; secondly, its significant use in sacrifice. The slaughtering was to be (1) as expeditious as possible, (2) with the least possible infliction of suffering, and (3) causing the blood to flow out in the quickest and most complete manner. Harvey says:” the blood is the fountain of life, the first to live, the last to die, and the primary seat of the animal soul; it lives and is nourished of itself, and by no other part of the human body.” John Hunter inferred it is the seat of life, for all parts of the frame are formed and nourished from it. Milne Edwards says: “if an animal be bled until it falls into syncope, muscular action ceases, respiration and the heart’s action are suspended; but if the blood of an animal of the same kind be injected into the veins the inanimate body returns to life, breathes freely, and recovers completely” (Speaker’s Commentary, Leviticus 17, note). In the first Christian churches, where Jew and Gentile were united, in order to avoid offending Jewish prejudice in things indifferent the council at Jerusalem ( Acts 15:29) ordained abstinence “from things strangled (wherein the blood would remain), and from blood.” Moreover, the pagan consumed blood in their sacrifices, in contrast to Jehovah’s law, which would make His people the more shrink from any seeing conformity to their ways. see FAT (see) when unmixed with lean was also forbidden food, being consecrated to Him.

    Christians were directed to abstain also from animal flesh of which a part had been offered to idols ( Acts 15:29; 21:25; 1 Corinthians 8). The portions of the victim not offered on the altar belonged partly to the priests, and partly to the offerers. They were eaten at feasts, not only in the temples but also in private houses, and were often sold in the markets, so that the temptation to Christians was continually recurring ( Numbers 25:2; <19A628> Psalm 106:28).

    The food of the Israelites and Egyptians was more of a vegetable than animal kind. Flesh meat was brought forth on special occasions, as sacrificial and hospitable feasts ( Genesis 18:7; 43:16; Exodus 16:3; Numbers 11:4,5; 1 Kings 1:9; 4:23; Matthew 22:4). Their ordinary diet contained a larger proportion of farinaceous and leguminous foods, with honey, butter, and cheese, than of animal ( 2 Samuel 17:28,29). Still an entirely vegetable diet was deemed a poor one ( Proverbs 15:17; Daniel 1:12). Some kinds of locusts were eaten by the poor, and formed part of John the Baptist’s simple diet ( Matthew 3:4; Leviticus 11:22). Condiments, as salt, mustard, anise, rue, cummin, almonds, were much used ( Isaiah 28:25, etc.; Matthew 23:23). The killing of a calf or sheep for a guest is as simple and expeditions in Modern Syria as it was in Abraham’s days. Bread, dibs (thickened grape juice) [possibly meant in Genesis 43:11; Ezekiel 27:17, honey dibash ], coagulated sour milk, leban, butter, rice, and a little mutton, are the food in winter; cheese and fruits are added in summer. The meat is cut up in little bits, and the company eat it without knives and forks out of basohs.

    Parched grain, roasted in a pan over the fire, was an ordinary diet, of laborers ( Leviticus 2:14; 23:14; Ruth 2:14). Sour wine (“vinegar”) was used to dip the bread in; or else the gravy, broth, or melted fat of flesh meat; this illustrates the “dipping the sop in the common dish” ( John 13:26, etc.). Pressed dry grape cakes and fig cakes were an article of ordinary consumption [see FLAGON ] ( 1 Samuel 30:12). Fruit cake dissolved in water affords a refreshing drink. Lettuces of a wild kind, according to Septuagint, were the “bitter herbs” eaten with the Passover lamb ( Exodus 12:8). Retem , or bitter root of the broom, was eaten by the poor. Job 30:4, “juniper,” rather “broom”; Job 6:6, for “egg” Gesenius translated “an insipid potherb,” possibly purslane. “Butter (curdled milk, the acid of which is grateful in the hot East) and honey” are more fluid in the East than with us, and are poured out of jars. Job 20:17, “brooks of honey and butter.” These were the ordinary food of children; Isaiah 7:15, so of the prophet’s child who typified Immanuel; the distress caused by the Syrian and Israelite kings not preventing the supply of spontaneously produced foods, the only abundant articles of diet then. Oil was chiefly used on festive occasions ( 1 Chronicles 12:40).

    The prohibition “thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” ( Exodus 23:19) is thought by Abarbauel to forbid a pagan harvest superstition designed to propitiate the gods; to which a Karaite Jew, quoted by Cudworth (Speaker’s Commentary), adds, it was usual when the crops were gathered in to sprinkle the fruit trees, fields, and gardens as a charm. In Exodus the previous context referring to Passover and Pentecost favors this reference to a usage at the feast of tabernacles or ingathering of fruits. In Deuteronomy 14:21 the context suggests an additional reason for the prohibition, namely, that Israel as being “holy unto the Lord” should not eat any food inconsistent with that consecration, for instance what “dieth of itself,” or a kid cooked in its mother’s milk, as indicating contempt of the natural relation which God sanctified between parent and offspring. Compare the same principle Leviticus 22:28; Deuteronomy 22:6. Arabs still cook lamb in sour milk to improve the flavor. Kid was a favorite food ( Genesis 27:9,14; Judges 6:19; 13:15; 1 Samuel 16:20). Fish was the usual food in our Lord’s time about the sea of Galilee ( Matthew 7:10; John 6:9; 21:9, etc.).

    FOOT Sandals covered only the soles, so that the feet needed washing when coming from a journey. In John 13:10 a distinct Greek word expresses bathing the whole person and washing the feet; “he that is bathed (leloumenos ) needeth not save to wash (nipsasthai ) his feet, but is clean every whir.” When one has been, as Peter, once for all wholly forgiven in regeneration, and so received the bathing of the whole man, i.e. justification through faith in Jesus, he needs no repetition of this as Peter requested; all he needs is cleansing from the soils that his feet contract in his daily life walk. Hence we daily pray, “give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as,” etc. ( 1 John 1:9.) So the priests in entering the house of God ( Exodus 30:19). It was an act of humble deference to guests to wash the feet ( Luke 7:38-44; 1 Timothy 5:10). Disciples, after Christ’s example, were to wash one another’s feet, “by love serving one another” ( Galatians 5:13).

    The sandals were taken off in entering a house, hence the command to Moses ( Exodus 3:5) and to Joshua ( Joshua 5:15); compare Ecclesiastes 5:1. To put them on was to prepare for active duty ( Ezekiel 24:17); whereas mourners went barefoot ( 2 Samuel 15:30).

    To “cover the feet” was the delicate expression for easing oneself, preparatory to which the loose garment was let fall to cover the person ( 1 Samuel 24:3; compare margin 2 Kings 18:27).

    Putting the feet on captives’ necks, as Joshua did ( Joshua 10:24), symbolizes complete mastery ( <19B001> Psalm 110:1; 1 Corinthians 15:25; Isaiah 60:14).

    FOOTMAN (1) Distinguished from the soldier on horseback or in a chariot. (2) The swift runners who attended the king; foretold by Samuel Samuel 8:11 ( 1 Kings 14:27 margin). Swift running was much valued in a warrior ( Psalm 19:5; Joel 2:7; Job 16:14). A characteristic of David, for which he praises God ( 1 Samuel 17:22,48,51; 20:6; Samuel 22:30; Psalm 18:29; compare 1 Chronicles 12:8 end).

    FOREHEAD As the women veiled their faces, not to do so was a mark of shamelessness; “thou hadst a whore’s forehead” ( Jeremiah 3:3). The forehead is made the seat of boldness of speech and act ( Ezekiel 3:7-9): “the house of Israel are stiff of forehead ... against their foreheads as an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead.” Votaries of idols branded themselves with the idol’s symbol. So Antiochus Epiphanes branded the Jews with the ivy leaf, Bacchus’ symbol (2 Macc. 6:7; 3 Macc. 2:29). God’s seal and name are in the foreheads of His servants, the conspicuous, noblest part of man’s body, the seat of the understanding, whereon the helmet, “the hope of salvation,” is worn ( Ezekiel 9:4). At the exodus the mark was on the houses, for then it was families; here it is on the foreheads, for it is individuals whose safety is guaranteed by the Lord’s mark.

    The mark on “the right hand and forehead” of the worshippers of the beast ( Revelation 13:16) implies prostration of body and intellect to him. “In the forehead for possession, in the hand for work and service.” God’s name shall be “in the saints’ foreheads.” Their sonship shall no longer be a personal secret between them and God ( Revelation 3:17), but shall be openly ( Revelation 22:4) visible to all citizens of New Jerusalem’s that the free flow of mutual love among Christ’s family will not be checked by suspicion as here. Upon the harlot’s (the apostate church) forehead was written “MYSTERY,BABYLON THE GREAT,THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” What a contrast to the inscription on the mitre on the high priest’s forehead, “HOLINESS TO THE LORD” ( Revelation 17:5; Exodus 28:36).

    In Ezekiel 16:12, “a jewel on thy forehead,” rather “a ring in thy nose” ( Isaiah 3:21). However, Persian and Egyptian women often wear jewels and strings of coins across the forehead.

    FOREST Palestine was more wooded very anciently than afterward; the celebrated oaks and terebinths here and there were perhaps relics of a primeval forest on the highlands. But in the Bible the woods appear in the valleys and defiles leading from the highlands to the lowlands, so they were not extensive. “The wood of Ephraim” clothed the sides of the hills which descend to the plain of Jezreel and the plain itself near Bethshah ( Joshua 17:15-18), and extended once to Tabor which still has many forest trees.

    That “of Bethel” lay in the ravine going down to the plain of Jericho. That “of Hareth” on the border of the Philistine plain in the S. of Judah ( Samuel 22:5). That “of Kirjath Jearim” ( 1 Samuel 8:2; <19D206> Psalm 132:6), meaning town of the woods, on the confines of Judah and Benjamin; “the fields of the wood” from which David brought up the ark to Zion mean this forest town. That “of Ziph-wilderness,” where David hid, S.E. of Hebron ( 1 Samuel 23:15, etc.). [See EPHRAIM WOOD , a portion of the region E. of Jordan near Mahanaim, where the battle with Absalom took place ( 2 Samuel 18:6,23), on the high lands, a little way from the valley of the Jordan.] “The house of the forest of Lebanon” ( 1 Kings 7:2) was so-called as being fitted up with cedar, and probably with forest-like rows of cedar pillars. “Forest” often symbolizes pride doomed to destruction; ( Isaiah 10:18; 32:19) the Assyrian host dense and lifted up as the trees of the forest; ( Isaiah 37:24) “the forest of his Carmel,” i.e., its most luxuriant forest, image for their proud army. Forest also symbolizes unfruitfulness as opposed to cultivated lands ( Isaiah 29:17; 32:15).

    Besides ya’ar , implying abundance of trees, there is another Hebrew term, choresh from a root” to cut down,” implying a wood diminished by cutting ( 1 Samuel 23:15; 2 Chronicles 27:4). In Isaiah 17:9 for “bough” translated “his strong cities shall be as the leavings of woods,” what the axeman leaves when he cuts down the grove ( Isaiah 17:6). In Ezekiel 31:3, “with a shadowing shroud,” explain with an overshadowing thicket.

    A third term is pardeec , related to paradise ( Nehemiah 2:8), “forest)” a park, a plantation under a “keeper.” The Persian kings preserved the forests throughout the empire with care, having wardens of the several forests, without whose sanction no tree could be felled.

    FORM ( Philippians 2:6-8.) “Who (Christ Jesus) subsisting (huparchoon ) in the form (the self manifesting characteristics shining forth from the essence) of God esteemed His being on an equality with God (to einai isa THeoo ) no robbery (harpagmon , not harpagma , which Ellicott’s translated, ‘a thing to be grasped at,’ would require), but took upon Him the form of a servant.”

    He never emptied Himself of His being on an equality with God in essence, but only of the form of God for the time of His humiliation. The antithesis is between His being in the form of God and His assuming the form of a servant. “Image” implies His being the exact essential inner likeness and perfect Representative of God. “Image” (eikoon ) supposes a prototype of which it is the exact counterpart, as the child is the living image of the parent. “Likeness” (homoiosis ), mere resemblance, is nowhere applied to the Son, as “image” is ( 1 Corinthians 11:7; John 1:18; 14:9; Corinthians 4:4; Hebrews 1:3; 1 Timothy 3:16; 6:16; Colossians 1:15), “the Image of the invisible God.” “Found (by His fellow men’s outward cognizance) in fashion, (scheema ) as a man” signifies His outward presentation, habit, style, manner, dress, action ( Philippians 2:8).

    FORNICATION Used for adultery ( Matthew 5:32). Also spiritual unfaithfulness to the Lord, Israel’s and the church’s husband (Ezekiel 16; Jeremiah 2; Hosea 1; Revelation 17:4).

    FORTUNATUS ( 1 Corinthians 16:17). Of Stephanas’ household probably Corinthians 1:16), which Paul himself baptized. At Ephesus with Stephanas and Achaicus when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians.

    FOUNTAIN ‘Ayin , or ‘eeyn , in many names, “the eye” of the landscape as distinguished from the artificially sunk and enclosed well. [See ENGEDI , see ENEGLAIM ] Also mayan, etc. The natural bursting of waters from the ground, which drank of the rain of heaven ( Deuteronomy 8:7; 11:11), would on Israel’s entrance into Canaan form a striking contrast to Egypt watered from below “with the foot,” i.e. either by treadwheels working pumps, or by artificial rills led in ducts from the Nile, the petty embankments being removed with the foot to let in the stream. Canaan as a mountainous country depended for its crops on the rain from above, without which in the late autumn to quicken the newly sown seed, and in the spring to swell the grain, the harvest would fail. The configuration of the country did not favor much irrigation. “The eyes of the Lord, Israel’s God, were always upon the land from the beginning of the year even unto the end,” so long as Israel was faithful ( Deuteronomy 11:11,12). Egypt symbolizes spiritually the world drawing all its resources, material, intellectual, and moral, from beneath. The Holy Land answers to the church, all whose supplies are continually from above ( Psalm 87:7; John 8:23). When the country was more wooded its brooks were more filled than now, and though short lived now are remarkable still for their beauty. Thus to Palestine peculiarly of eastern lauds the psalmist’s language is appropriate, “He sendeth the springs into the valleys which run among the hills” ( <19A410> Psalm 104:10). Deuteronomy 8:7: “a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.” Hot springs of volcanic origin are found near the sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Philip built Tiberias at the sulphureous hot springs S. of the sea of Galilee. Besides the main supply of cistern rain water Jerusalem had at least one perennial spring issuing by more than one outlet (Tacitus, Hist., 5:12, “fons perennis aquae”). Jerusalem evidently possessed public fountains ( Nehemiah 2:13,14), “the dragon well... the gate of the fountain” ( 2 Samuel 17:17), see ENROGEL .

    FOWL Used for birds of prey: ‘ayit ( Genesis 15:11; Job 28:7; Isaiah 18:6). The Assyrian host, type of the anti-Christian hosts ( Revelation 19:17,18, ta ornea ; Ezekiel 39:17-20), “shall be left to the fowls of the mountains ... and the fowls shall summer upon them.” In the sense “poultry,” see Nehemiah 5:18; 1 Kings 4:23; “fatted fowl,” barburim , from barar , “to be pure.” Gesenius translated “geese.” Birds in general (ta peteina ) ( Luke 12:24).

    FOX shuw’al , from sha’al “to burrow” ( Nehemiah 4:3; Lamentations 5:18; Matthew 8:20). In Hebrew including also the jackal which preys on unburied carcasses; “they shall be a portion for jackals” ( Psalm 63:9,10), fulfilled on “the seekers after David’s soul” ( 2 Samuel 18:7-17). So Samson’s 300 jackals (Judges 15); for jackals are gregarious, the fox is solitary. The Arab shikal, jackal, is related to the Hebrew shu’al .

    That jackals were common in Palestine appears from the names of places compounded with shual, as Hagar-shual, Shaalbim; (compare Foxhayes, etc., in our own land;) being gregarious they would naturally run in couples, tied together by a cord of two or three yards length; Samson probably had men to help him, and caught and let them loose from different places to consume the greater quantity of the Philistines’ grain. Fond of grapes; (Song 2:15) “take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines.” The bride after awaking from her past unwatchfulness is the more jealous of subtle (fox-like) sins ( <19D923> Psalm 139:23). In spiritual winter evil weeds as well as good plants are frozen up; in the spring of revivals these start up unperceived, crafty false teachers spiritual pride, uncharitableness ( Psalm 19:12; Matthew 13:26; Hebrews 12:15). Little sins beget the greatest ( Ecclesiastes 10:1; 1 Corinthians 5:6). Ezekiel 13:4: “thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts,” where the foxes from having nothing to eat become doubly ravenous and crafty to get food. So, in Israel, once a vineyard now a moral desert, the prophets whose duty was to guard the church from being spoiled themselves spoil it, through crafty greed of gain. So, Jesus calls Herod “that fox.” The Lord had withdrawn from His plotting foes in Judea to the retired region beyond Jordan, Peraea.

    The Pharisees came to expedite His departure by pretending “Herod was seeking to kill Him.” Herod was wishing Him to depart, feeling embarrassed how to treat Him whether to honor or persecute Him ( Luke 9:7-9; 13:32). It was the Pharisees themselves who wished to kill Him. But Herod lent himself to their design and so played the “fox.” Tell that fox that “today and tomorrow” I remain doing works of mercy in the borders of his province, “on the third day” I begin that journey which ends in My about to be consummated sacrifice. The common jackal of Palestine is the Canis aureus which may be heard nightly; also the Vulpes vulgaris.

    FRANKINCENSE lebonah , from laban “to be white.” A vegetable resin, brittle, glittering, bitter, used for fumigation at sacrifices ( Exodus 30:7,8,34-36), got by incisions in the bark of the Arbor thuris; the first flow is white and transparent, the after yield is yellowish. It was imported from Arabia ( Isaiah 60:6; Jeremiah 6:20). Arabian frankincense now is inferior to that of the Indian archipelago; the latter frankincense is yielded by the Boswellia serrata or thurifera, growing 40 ft. high in Amboyna and the mountains of India. Arabia may have anciently, as now, imported the best kind. The papyrifera grows on the E. of Africa. The Indian is called looban in Hindu temples, related to libanos and lebonah.

    Frankincense, with its sweet perfume, symbolizes prayer accepted before God ( <19E102> Psalm 141:2; Revelation 5:8; 8:3,4). The angel does not provide the incense; it is “given” to him by Christ, whose meritorious obedience and death and intercession are the incense rendering the saints’ prayers well pleasing to God. They do not pray to the angel; he is but the king’s messenger, and did not dare to appropriate what, is the king’s alone ( Malachi 1:11). The time of offering the incense, morning and evening, was the chosen time for prayer ( Luke 1:10). Frankincense was among the offerings of the wise men to the infant Savior ( Matthew 2:11).

    Song 3:6, “Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness, like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense?” Israel, with Jehovah’s pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, and smoke from the altars of incense and atonement, was the type. Jesus, ascending to heaven with the clouds while the question is asked “Who is this King of glory?” ( Psalm 24:8-10) is the antitype. So Isaiah 63:1,5, “Who is this?” etc. The bride too comes up with Him from the wilderness, exhaling frankincense-like graces, faith, love, joy, peace, prayer, praise; of her too it is asked, “Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her Beloved?” (Song 8:5; Revelation 7:13-17.)

    FRINGES zizith . Numbers 15:38 translated “that they add to the fringes of the borders (corners) a thread of blue, ... that ye may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them” ( Deuteronomy 22:12). The ordinary outer garment was a quadrangle of cloth, to the four corners of which a tassel was attached. Each tassel had a thread of deep blue, marking the heavenly origin of the commandments of which it was to remind them. The Pharisees “enlarged” the fringes to gain note for piety ( Matthew 23:5). Latterly the Jews have worn the fringed talith of a smaller size, as an under dress, especially at the synagogue morning prayer. The zizith on the sky-blue thread would be constantly before the Israelites’ eyes, in order that, reminded thereby continually of God’s commandments they might not turn their feet to the seductions of the world ( Proverbs 4:25,26; 3:3; Revelation 19:8). The woman with the issue of blood touched Christ’s hem, as the sacred part ( Matthew 9:20).

    FROGS [See EGYPT and see EXODUS ]. Zeparda’ : only found in Exodus and the psalms copied from it. The word is Egyptian; an undesigned coincidence confirming the authenticity of Exodus. The magicians, though permitted to increase the plague of frogs, could neither remove it or any of the other plagues.

    The three unclean spirits like frogs ( Revelation 16:13) symbolize (1) proud infidelity, opposing Christ and God, “out of the dragon’s mouth”; (2) the spirit of the world, whether lawless socialistic democracy or despotism, setting man above God, “out of the beast’s mouth”; (3) lying spiritualism, superseding the harlot and proceeding “out of the false prophet’s mouth.” Awful parody of the Trinity [As frogs croak by night in marshes, so already in our days these unclean spirits in dark error teach lies amidst the mire of filthy lusts. But though the frogs croak at the surface, it does not follow there are not many good. fish beneath, an elect remnant.

    FRONTLETS or Phylacteries. Thrice mentioned in Old Testament: totaphot ( Exodus 13:16; Deuteronomy 6:8; 11:18). What Moses meant figuratively and in a spiritual sense, “a memorial,” “that the Lord’s law may be in thy mouth,” the Hebrews (excepting the Karaites) take literally ( Exodus 13:9).

    Charms consisting of words written on papyrus folds, tightly sewed up in linen, were found at Thebes (Wilkinson). It is not likely God, by Moses, would sanction the Egyptian superstition of amulets. The key is in Proverbs 3:3; 6:20-22; 7:3; Song 8:6. The see FRINGES were merely mnemonics; the phylacteries (which the Jews now call tephillin , i.e. prayers, for they were worn at prayer to typify sincerity, but others explain ligaments) were parchment strips, inscribed with Exodus 13:2-10,11- 17; Deuteronomy 6:4-9,13-22 (by no means the most important passages in the Pentateuch, which fact is against the Jewish literalism), in prepared ink, rolled in a case of blackPHYLACTERY. calfskin, attached to a stiffer leather, having a thong one finger broad and one cubit and a half long. Placed at the bend of the left arm, and the thong after making a knot was wound about the arm in a spiral line, ending at the top of the middle finger. Those on the forehead were written on four cowhide parchment strips, and put into four little cells within a square one, on which the Hebrew letter shin (sh) was written. The square had two thongs passing round the head, and after a knot going over the breast.

    Phylactery is from a Greek root, to keep or guard; being professedly to keep them in continual remembrance of God’s law; practically it was used by many as an amulet to keep the wearer from misfortune. [See EARRINGS .] “They make broad their phylacteries” ( Matthew 23:5) refers not to the phylactery, which was of a prescribed size, but to its case, which the Pharisees made as ostentatious as possible. They wore them always, the common people only at prayers; and as Jehovah occurs in the tephillin 23 times, but on the high priest’s golden plate but once ( Exodus 28:36), the [tephillin ] were thought the more sacred. The Sadducees wore them on the palm, the Pharisees above the elbow. The Jews probably learned the use of such amulets from the Babylonians during the captivity, for no mention of the phylacteries occurs previously, nor indeed in the Old Testament at all. The carnal heart gladly substitutes an external formalism for an inward spiritual remembrance and observance of God’s law, such as God required, with the whole inner and outward man.

    The Karaites, women, and slaves alone did not wear them. Boys at years and one day become “sons of the commandments” and wear them.

    The rabbinical treatise Rosh Hashanah contains many of the puerile superstitions regarding them; compare Lightfoot, Hor. Hebrew: “they must be read standing in the morning, when blue can be distinguished from green, sitting in the evening from sunset; both hands must be used in writing them; the leather must have no hole; the wearer must not approach within four cubits of a cemetery,” etc., etc. Rabbis quoted Isaiah 49:16; 62:8; Deuteronomy 33:2, to prove that even God wore them! and Isaiah 38:16 to show that the wearer thereby prolonged his days, but he who did not wear them should go to perdition. Jerome remarks the same superstition virtually crept in among weak Christian women “with diminutive Gospels, pieces of wood in the form of a cross (women in our day should take warning), and things of that sort, showing a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.”

    FULLER kobes , from kabas “to tread.” The fuller’s chief work was cleansing and whitening garments for festive and religious occasions. The white garment typifies Christ’s spotless righteousness, put on the saints. Revelation 3:4,5,18; 6:11; 7:9,14; Ecclesiastes 9:8, “let thy garments be always white”; the present, even if gloomy, should never rob saints of the festive joyousness of spirit which faith bestows, in consciousness of peace with God now, and in the prospect of glory for ever. Fulling or cleansing cloth was effected by stamping on the garments with the feet or bats in tubs of water containing some alkaline dissolved. The alkaline substances mentioned are “soap” and “nitre” ( Proverbs 25:20; Jeremiah 2:22), a potash which mixed with oil was used as soap. Malachi 3:2, “fullers’ soap.” Job 9:30, “if I make my hands never so clean,” translated, “if I cleanse my hands with lye.” Carbonate of potash is obtained impure from burning plants, especially the kali (from whence, with the Arabic al the article, comes the word “alkali “) of Egypt and Arabia. “Nitre” is not used in our sense, namely, saltpeter, but native carbonate of soda. Natron is found abundant in the soda lakes of Egypt (Pliny, 31:10), in the valley Bahr-bela-ma (the waterless sea), 50 miles E. of Cairo, during the nine months of the year that the lakes are dry. The Mishna mentions also urine and chalk used in fullers’ cleansing. This may have suggested the indelicate filthy sneer of Rabshakeh to Hezekiah’s messengers in “the highway of the fullers’ field” ( 2 Kings 18:27). The trade was relegated to the outside of Jerusalem, to avoid the offensive smells [see ENROGEL ]. Chalk, or earth of some kind, was used to whiten garments.

    Christ’s garments at the transfiguration became “shining” white “as no fuller on earth could whiten them” ( Mark 9:3). Christ’s mission, including both the first and second advents, is compared to “fuller’s soap” in respect to the judicial process now secretly going on, hereafter to be publicly consummated at the second advent, whereby the unclean are separated from the clean.

    FULLERS’ FIELD Isaiah 7:3; 36:2. The “conduit of the upper pool was in the highway (the raised causeway) of the fullers’ field,” which would be in a position near water for washing, previous to drying and bleaching the cloth. The Assyrian army advanced on Jerusalem from the N. ( Isaiah 10:28-32), the only accessible side for a host; Enrogel was on the S.E. But Rabshakeh and his companions probably left the army, and advanced along the E. of mount Moriah to Enrogel, to a convenient place under the temple walls for speaking.

    FURNACE Nehemiah 3:11; 12:38, “the tower of the furnaces,” i.e. of the (bakers’) ovens. Hosea 7:7. There were also the smelting furnace, the refining furnace, the type of affliction and testing probation ( Deuteronomy 4:20; Proverbs 17:3; 27:21), the lime-kiln. The brick-kiln furnace had an opening at the top to cast in the materials, and a door at the bottom to extract the metal. The Babylonians used it to inflict their cruel capital punishments ( Daniel 3:22-26; Jeremiah 29:22).

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