'The word of God came unto Shemaiah, the man of God, saying, Speak unto Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, king of Judah, and unto all the house of Judah and Benjamin, and to the remnant of the people.'

The Simeonites must have been included among this 'remnant of the people.' Their name, in fact, is not once mentioned in the books of Samuel and Kings, though it occurs in the books of Chronicles, 1Ch.iv.42,vi.65,xii.25,xxvii.16, 2Ch.xv.9,xxxiv.6; and in one of these places, 1Ch.xii.25, they are spoken of as bringing help to David :

'Of the children of Simeon, mighty men of valour for the war, seven thousand one hundred.'

But this statement must, like so many other of the Chronicler's data, be rejected as untrustworthy.*

818. D.xxxiii.7.

'Hear, Jehovah, the voice of JUDAH,

And bring him unto his people;

Let his hands be sufficient for him,

And be Thou an help to him from his enemies,' v.7.

:

Very remarkable is the difference in tone between this prayer, almost a cry of anguish, and the grand words which are spoken of Judah in the Blessing of Jacob,' G.xlix.8-12 :—

6

'Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise;

Thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies;
Thy father's children shall bow down before thee.

* Here, of those who supported David, there are numbered only 6,800 of David's own tribe of Judah, and 3,000 of Benjamin; whereas the Levites (including the Aaronites) were, according to the Chronicler, 8,300, and the Simeonites 7,100, and of Ephraim there were 28,000, of Western Manasseh, 18,000, of Zebulon, 50,000, of Naphtali, 1,000 captains, with 37,000 men, of Dan, 28,600, of Asher, 40,000, of Issachar, 200 men, 'that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do,' v.32, with all their brethren at their command, of the trans-Jordanic tribes, 120,000, [44,760 only, 1Ch.v.18-? in whose reign,] making altogether 348,000 -five times as large as Wellington's whole force at Waterloo, ALISON,xix.401 --of which Judah supplied only 6,800! and Simeon, 7,100! and all these men of war, that could keep rank, came with a perfect heart to Hebron, to make David king over all Israel; and all the rest also of Israel were of one heart to make David king. And there they were with David three days, eating and drinking; for their brethren had prepared for them. 1Ch.xii.38,39.

men

Judah is a lion's whelp:

From the prey, my son, thou art gone up;

He stooped down, he couched as a lion,

And as an old lion-who shall rouse him up?

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,

Nor a lawgiver from between his feet,

Until he come to Shiloh, [E.V. ‘Until Shiloh come'];

And unto him shall the gathering of the people be.
Binding his foal unto the vine,

And his ass's colt unto the choice vine;

He washed his garments in wine,

And his clothes in the blood of grapes.

819. KNOBEL, from his point of view, explains the meaning of v.7, as follows, Deut.p.344:

‘Hear, Jehovah, the voice of Judah, and bring him to his people,' i.c. (say some), 'give to him, as the royal tribe, the people which belongs to him,' (others) 'allow him, after driving out the Canaanites, to take possession of his territory,' (others) 'conduct him successful out of war back again to his own.' The last is as contradictory to the Text as the others; the words cannot say this. The person meant is manifestly separated and removed far from his people, and the entreaty of the men of Judah is that he may return to his people. The reference to those carried captive with Jehoiachin would suit, perhaps, if the poem did not belong to a much earlier time, and if the singular pronoun did not point to something else. So, too, it can hardly be thought to refer to the reunion of the kingdom of Judah with the kingdom of Israel. For Judah had not severed itself from Israel, but Israel from Judah; and the longing and expectation in the time of the two kingdoms did not go towards Judah's being attached to Israel, but to the return of all the tribes to the royal house of Judah—and this even in Israel itself, Hos.iii,5, [Jer.xxx.4,9.] Besides, there is nothing said here about the kingdom of Judah, but at most about the tribe. This tribe, after Saul's death, chose David as king, formed for itself a kingdom, and for seven years and a half maintained a separate position, while the other tribes abode by the house of Saul, 2S.ii.4,10,11. The writer may have had this in his eye. However, the expression 'bring him unto his people' will not suit that either, and the Jews, who had chosen their tribesman David as king, and had voluntarily separated themselves, certainly did not then beseech to be attached to the other tribes, which was quite open to them, but wished for the subjection of the tribes under the divinely-chosen David, which also followed in course of time. The passage can only apply to David in his flight before Saul, when he had to live in a foreign land, and felt this painfully. There was then no greater petition for Judah than that David should return, attain the sovereignty, and elevate his tribe to a royal tribe.

And, instead of Let his hands be sufficient for him,' KNOBEL translates, With his hands has he contended for it (the people),' -thereby, however, destroying the parallelism in the two members of v.7.

820. According to our view, the words, bring him unto his people,' express a prayer that the tribe of Judah might again be restored to its old sovereignty, by the return of the Ten Tribes, at no very distant day, as it seems to have been already in some measure, 2K.xxiii.15-20, by the gathering of the scattered fragments of them still remaining in the land, (and these, probably, far more numerous than is generally supposed,) under the sceptre of the sons of David. We have seen (782) that the Deuteronomist did, apparently, entertain such a fond hope for the restoration of Israel; and Jeremiah breathes it in his prophecies, xxx.3-9:

'For, lo, the days come, saith Jehovah, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith Jehovah, and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. . . . For it shall come to pass in that day, saith Jehovah of Hosts, that I will break his yoke from off thy neck, and will burst thy bonds, and strangers shall no more serve themselves of him. But they shall serve Jehovah their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up unto them.'

And see also the glorious prophecies in Jer.xxxi,xxxiii, where we read,

"There shall be a day that the watchmen upon the Mount Ephraim shall cry, Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion, unto Jehovah our God,' xxxi.6;

'For thus saith Jehovah, If my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth, then will I cast away the seed of Jacob and David my servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the house of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; for I will cause their Captivity to return, and have mercy upon them,' xxxiii.25,26.

821. In point of fact, the deportation of the Ten Tribes into Captivity seems to have been by no means so great and so universal as is generally supposed. After Shalmaneser had 'carried Israel away into Assyria,' 2K.xvii.6, we are told that Hezekiah wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh,' to beg them to come and keep the Passover;

Q Q

'but they laughed them to scorn, and mocked them; nevertheless, divers of Asher and Manasseh and Zebulun humbled themselves, and came to Jerusalem,' 2Ch.xxx.10,11.

This, however, depends on the unsupported testimony of the Chronicler.

But Josiah's authority evidently extended over Samaria as well as Judah; since he destroyed the altar which was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam had made;

'both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the Ashera [E.V. grove]. . . And all the houses also of the high places, that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke Jehovah to anger, Josiah took away, and did to them according to all the acts that he had done in Bethel. . . . And he slew all the priests of the high places, that were there, upon the altars, and burned men's bones upon them, and returned to Jerusalem.' 2K.xxiii.15-20.

...

It is possible, also, that in this phrase, bring him unto his people,' there may be a reference to the words spoken of Judah in Jacob's blessing, G.xlix.10, 'Unto him shall the gathering of the people be.'

583

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BLESSING OF MOSES, DEUT.XXXIII.8-12.

822. D.xxxiii.8-11.

'And of LEVI he said,

Let Thy Thummim and Thy Urim be with Thy holy one,

Whom Thou didst prove at Massah,

Whom Thou didst right (, terivehu, E.V. 'strive with,' but see Is.i.17, p 1, rivu almanah, '[strive for=] right the widow,') at the waters of Meribah ;

Who said of his father and his mother, I saw him not;

Neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children;

For they have observed Thy word, and kept Thy covenant.

They shall teach Jacob Thy judgments,

And Israel thy Law;

They shall put incense before Thee,

And whole burnt sacrifice upon Thine Altar.

Bless, O Jehovah, his substance,

And accept the work of his hands;

Smite through the loins of them that rise against him,
And of them that hate him, that they rise not again.'

Still more surprising, than even that which we have observed in the case of Judah, is the contrast between the strong language of praise here addressed to Levi, and the sentence of censure in G.xlix.5-7:

'SIMEON and LEVI are brethren;

Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations.

O my soul, come not thou into their secret;

Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united;

For in their anger they slew a man,

And in their selfwill they digged down a wall,

Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce,—

And their wrath, for it was cruel;

I will divide them in Jacob,

And scatter them in Israel.'