The Expositor's Bible Part 36

The true worship of Jehovah is exactly that form of religion which man finds it least easy to render to Him--the religion of pure morality.

Services, rites, functions, look like religious diligence, and readily secure a reverent outward devotion. Even self-maceration, fasts, and flagellation are a cheap way of escaping the "endless torments" which always loom so hugely in terrifying superst.i.tion.

Such superst.i.tions are children of the fear and faithlessness which hath torment. They are the corruptions with which every form of false religion, and with which also a corrupt and perverted Christianity, are always tainted. And they demand the easy expiation of physical ritual.

But all the best and most spiritual teachers of Scripture--alike the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles--are at one with the Lord Christ in perpetual insistence on the truth that "mercy is better than sacrifice," and that true religion consists in that good mind and good life which are the sole proof of genuine sincerity.

If Jehovah would but be contented with gifts, men would gladly offer Him thousands of rams and tens of thousands of rivers of oil. But the prophets taught that He was above all mean bribes, and that such offerings never could be anything to One whose were all the beasts of the forests and the cattle upon a thousand hills. It was not easy, then, to bribe such a G.o.d, or to make Him a respecter of persons.

How easy, again, would it be, if He would even accept human sacrifices! A child was but a child. How easy to kill a child, and place it in the brazen arms which sloped over the fiery cistern!

Moloch and Chemosh were supremely to be won by such holocausts; and surely Moloch and Chemosh must be lords of power! But here again the prophets of Jehovah stepped in, and said that it was of no avail with the High, the Holy, the Merciful, to give even our firstborn for our transgressions, or the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul.

Asceticism, then--occasional fasting, severe self-deprivations--surely the G.o.ds would accept these? And they were as nothing compared to the burden of sin and the agony of conscience! Baal and Asherah could command agonised devotees, and could approve of them. By Jehovah and His prophets such bodily service is discouraged and forbidden.

Pleasure, then?--the consecration of the natural impulses, the devotion in religious cultus of the pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes of the flesh--why should that be so abhorrent to Jehovah? Other deities exulted in licentiousness. Was not the temple of Astarte full of her women-worshippers and of her eunuchs? Was there no fascination in the voluptuous allurements, the orgiastic dances, the stolen waters, the bread eaten in secret, when not only was the conscience lulled by the removal therefrom of all sense of guilt and degradation, but such orgies were even crowned with merit, as part of an acceptable worship?

After all, there was "a fascination of corruption" in these idols of gold and jewels, of l.u.s.t and blood!

How stern, how cold, how bare, by comparison, was the moral law which only said, "Thou shalt not," and emphasised its prohibition with the unalterable sanctions, "This do, and thou shalt live"; "Do it not, and thou shalt die"! What could they make of a religion which was so eloquently silent as to the meritoriousness of ritual?

And how chill and simple and dreary was that which--according to Micah--Jehovah had shown to be good, and which He required of every man,--which was nothing more than to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with G.o.d!

And what right had the prophets--so asked these apostates--to lord it over G.o.d's heritage in this way? Solomon was the greatest king of Israel and Judah; and Solomon had never been so exclusive in his religionism, though he had built the Temple of the Lord; nor Rehoboam; nor the great Phnician Queen Athaliah; nor the cultivated and aesthetic Ahaz; nor, in the kingdom of Israel, the lordly warrior Ahab; nor the splendid and long-lived victor Jeroboam II. Had not Mana.s.seh plenty of examples of religious syncretism, to which he might appeal in the joy of his youthful age?

Not impossibly there lay in the background another reason why the young king might be inclined to listen to these evil counsellors.

Micah may still have been living; but of Isaiah we hear no more.

Probably he was dead. It is not recorded that he delivered any prophecy during the reign of Mana.s.seh, nor is it certain that he outlived the former king. Tradition, indeed, in later days, a.s.serted that he had confronted Mana.s.seh, and been doomed to death; that he had taken refuge in a cedar tree, and in that cedar had been sawn asunder; but the tradition is wholly without a vestige of authority. One of Micah's sternest oracles was perhaps uttered in the days of Mana.s.seh.[628] But Micah was only a provincial prophet of Moresheth-Gath. He never moved in the midst of princes as Isaiah had done, or possessed a t.i.the of the authority which had rested for so many years on the shoulders of his mighty contemporary.

Moreover--so the heathen party might suggest--had not Isaiah's prophecies been falsified by the result? Had he not distinctly promised and pledged his credit to two things? and had not both turned out to be unworthy of reliance?

i. Surely he had prophesied the utter downfall of the a.s.syrians. And it was true that after his disaster on the confines of Egypt, Sennacherib had fled in haste to Nineveh, and his occupations with rebels on his own frontiers had left Judah unmolested, and he had been murdered by his sons. But, on the other hand, in no sense of the word had a.s.syria fallen. On the contrary, she had never been more powerful. Not one of his predecessors had seemed more irresistible than Esarhaddon. He was undisputed king of Babylon and of Nineveh. There would be no more emba.s.sies from Merodach-Baladan, or any revolted viceroy! And rumour would early begin to narrate that Esarhaddon had not forgotten the catastrophe at Pelusium, but intended to avenge it, and to teach Egypt the forgotten lessons of Raphia (B.C. 720) and Altaqu (B.C. 701).

ii. And as for Judah, where was the golden Messianic age which Isaiah had promised? Where did they see the Divine Prince whom he had foretold, or the lion lying down with the lamb, and the child laying his hand on the c.o.c.katrice's den?

All this, they would argue, had greatly shaken Isaiah's prophetic authority. Judah was a mere va.s.sal--safe only in so far as she remained a va.s.sal, and did not join Tyre or any other rebellious power, but abode safe under the shadow of a.s.syria's mighty wings.

Was it not, then, as well to look facts in the face? to accept things as they were? And--so they would argue, with false plausibility--since the triumph, after all, had remained with the G.o.ds of the nations, might it not be as well to dethrone Jehovah from His exclusive dominion, and at least to propitiate the potent and less-exacting deities, the charming _Di faciles_ who smiled at lewd aberrations, and even flung over them the glamour of devotion?

With these bolder renegades would be the whole body of the priests of the _bamoth_. Those old sanctuaries had been repressed by Hezekiah without any compensation; for in those days life-interests were little, or not at all, regarded. Mult.i.tudes of priests and Levites must have been flung out of employment and reduced to poverty by the recent religious revolution. It is not likely that they bore without a murmur the obliteration of forms of worship sanctioned by immemorial custom, or that they made no efforts to procure the re-establishment of what the people loved.

Thus a vast weight of evil influence was brought to bear upon the boy-king; and it was also the more powerful because repeated indications exist that, while the king was nominally a despot, and was surrounded with external observance, the real control of affairs was, to a large extent, in the hands of an aristocracy of priests and princes, except when the king was a man of great personal force.

Mana.s.seh went over to these retrogressionists heart and soul, and he contentedly remained a tributary of a.s.syria. Even when Esarhaddon's forces marched to the chastis.e.m.e.nt of Egypt, he felt secure in his allegiance to the dominant tyrant of Babylon and Nineveh, whose interest it would be not to disturb a faithful subject.

There followed a reaction, an absolute rebound from the old monotheistic strictness and righteousness. The nation emanc.i.p.ated itself from the moral law as with a shout of relief, and plunged into superst.i.tion and licentiousness. The reign of Mana.s.seh resembled at once the recrudescence of Popery in the reign of Mary Tudor, with its rekindling of the fires of Smithfield, and the foul orgies of debauchery at the Restoration of 1660, when human nature, loving degraded licence better than strenuous liberty, flung away the n.o.ble freedom of Puritanism for the loathly mysteries of Cotytto. The age of Mana.s.seh resembled that of Charles II., in the famous description of Lord Macaulay. "Then came days never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty, and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave.

In every high place worship was paid to Belial and Moloch, and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children." Sensuous intoxication is in all cases closely connected with fiendish cruelty, and the introducer of voluptuous idolatries naturally became the first persecutor of the true religion.

1. The first step of the king, and probably the one which the people welcomed most, was the restoration of the chapelries under the trees and on the hills, which, more strenuously than any of his predecessors, Hezekiah had at least attempted to put down. For this step Mana.s.seh might have pleaded the sanction of ages to which the Book of Deuteronomy had either been wholly unknown, or during which its laws had become as utterly forgotten as though they had never existed. To many worshippers these old shrines had become extremely precious. They felt it to be either an actual impossibility, or at the best intolerably burdensome, to make their way by long, dreary, and difficult journeys to Jerusalem, when they desired to pay the most ordinary rites of worship. They knew no reason, and had never known of any reason, why Jehovah should be worshipped in one Temple only. All their religious instincts led them the other way. They could point to the example of all the highly honoured saints who had worshipped G.o.d at Gilgal, Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, Beersheba, Kedesh, Gibeah, and many another shrine; and of all the saintly kings who had not dreamt of interfering with such free worship. Why should Jerusalem monopolise all sanct.i.ty? It might be a politic view for kings to maintain, and highly profitable for priests to establish; but none of their great prophets, not even the princely Isaiah, had said one syllable against the innocent high places of Jehovah. In those days there were no synagogues. The extinction of the high places doubtless seemed to many of the people an extinction of religion in daily life, and they were more than half disposed to agree with the Rabshakeh that Jehovah was offended by what they regarded as a burdensome, unwise, and sweeping innovation.--If it be necessary to answer arguments which might have seemed natural, against a custom which might have seemed innocent, it must suffice to say that it was the chief mission of Israel to keep alive among the nations of the world the knowledge of the One True G.o.d, and that, amid the constant temptations to accept the G.o.ds of the heathen as they were adored in groves and on high places, the faith of Israel could no longer be kept pure except by the Deuteronomic inst.i.tution of one central and exclusive shrine.

2. But Mana.s.seh did far worse than rehabilitate the worship at the high places which his father had discouraged. "He reared up altars for Baal,[629] and made an Asherah, as did Ahab, King of Israel." This was the first bad element of the new cosmopolitan eclecticism. It involved the acceptance of the Phnician nature-worship with its manifold abominations. The people had grown familiar with it under Athaliah (2 Kings xi. 18), and under Ahaz (2 Chron. xxviii. 2); but Mana.s.seh, as we infer from the account given of Josiah's reformation, had gone further than either. He had actually ventured to introduce the image of Baal into the Temple, and to set up the Asherah-pillar in front of it (2 Kings xxiii. 4). Worse even than this, he had erected in the very Temple (_id._ 7) houses devoted to the execrable _Qedeshim_ (Vulg., _effeminati_), in which also the women wove broidered hangings to adorn the shrines of the idol image, as in the worship of the a.s.syrian Mylitta.[630] He, at the same time, displaced the altar and removed the Ark. To the latter circ.u.mstances is perhaps due the Rabbinic legend that Hezekiah hid the Ark till the coming of the Messiah.

3. To this Phnician worship he added Sabaism, the worship of the stars, "all the host of heaven, whom he served." This was an entirely new phase of idolatry, unknown to the Hebrews till they came in contact with a.s.syria.[631] It came rapidly into vogue, and exercised over their imaginations the spell of a seductive novelty, as we see from the strong testimony of the prophet Jeremiah.[632] This is why it is so emphatically forbidden in the Book of Deuteronomy.[633] The king built altars to the stars of the Zodiac (_Mazzaroth_), both in the outer court of the Temple, and in the court of the priests, and on these altars incense or victims were continually burned. He also introduced or encouraged the introduction into the Temple precincts of the horses and chariots dedicated to the sun.[634]

When we read of the actual invasion of the Temple-precincts in this as in preceding and subsequent reigns, we cannot but ask, Were these atrocities committed with the sanction or with the connivance of the priests? We are not told. Yet how can it have been otherwise? If the high priest Azariah could muster eighty priests to oppose King Uzziah, when he merely wished to burn incense in the Temple, as Solomon had done before him, and as Ahaz did after him--if Jehoiada could, according to the Chronicler, muster a perfect army of priests and Levites to dethrone Athaliah, and could so stir up the people that they rose _en ma.s.se_ to tear down the temple of Baal, and slay Mattan, his high priest,--how was it possible for Mana.s.seh to perpetrate these flagrant acts of idolatrous apostasy, if the priests were all ranged in opposition to his power? Was their authority suddenly paralysed?

Did their influence with the people shrivel into nothing when Hezekiah had been carried to his tomb? Or did these priests follow the easy and profitable course which they seem to have followed throughout the whole history of the kings without an exception?--did they simply answer the kings according to their idols?

4. Another, and the most hideous, element of the new mixture of cults was the reintroduction of the ancient Canaanite worship of Moloch with its human sacrifices. Mana.s.seh, like Ahaz, made his son or, according to the Chronicler and the Septuagint, "his sons"--pa.s.s through the fire to this grim Ammonite idol in Tophet of the Valley of Hinnom, so as to leave no chance untried. And herein he was far more inexcusable than his grandfather; for Ahaz had at least been driven by desperate extremity to this last expedient, but Mana.s.seh was living, if not in prosperity, at least in unbroken peace. Moreover, he not only did this himself, but did his utmost to make a popular inst.i.tution of children-sacrifice, so that many practised it in the dreadful valley and amid the rocks outside Jerusalem.[635]

5. Even this did not suffice him. To these a.s.syrian, Phnician, and Canaanite elements of idolatry he added Babylonian novelties. He practised augury, and used enchantments, and he dealt with familiar spirits and wizards, as though without Egyptian necromancy and Mesopotamian shamanism his eclectic worship would be incomplete.[636]

6. Thus "he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger." He placed a graven image of his Asherah inside the Temple, and utterly profaned the sacred house, and seduced his people "to do more evil than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel."

Whatever was the conduct of the priests, the prophets were not silent.

They denounced Mana.s.seh for having done worse than even the ancient Amorites, and declared that, in consequence of his crimes, G.o.d would bring upon Jerusalem such evil as would cause both the ears of him that heard it to tingle;[637] that he would stretch over Jerusalem for ruin the line and the level of Ahab;[638] that He would cast off even the remnant, and deliver them to their enemies; that He would wipe out Jerusalem "as a man wipeth a dish, wiping and turning it upside down."[639]

The finest oracles of Micah (vi. 1-vii. 7) were probably uttered in the reign of Mana.s.seh, and give the simplest and purest expression to the supremacy of morality as the one true end and test of religion. Micah is as indifferent as the Decalogue to all claims of rites, ceremonies, and outward worship. "Jehovah demands nothing for Himself; all that He asks is for man: this is the fundamental law of the theocracy."

The apostasies of the king and the denunciation of the prophets thus came into fierce collision, and led naturally to persecution and bloodshed. Perhaps in Mic. vii. 1-7 we catch the echoes of the Reign of Terror. The king resorted to violence, using, no doubt, the tyrant's devilish plea of necessity. He made blood run like water in the streets of Jerusalem from end to end,[640] and in the exaggerated phrase of Josephus, was _daily_ slaying the prophets.[641] It was during this persecution, according to Rabbinic tradition, that Isaiah received the martyr's crown.[642]

And no miracles were wrought to save the martyrs. Elijah and Elisha had been surrounded with a blaze of miracles, but in Judah no prophet arose who could so wield the power of Heaven.

At this point the narrative of the historian about Mana.s.seh ends. If he shared the current opinion of his day, which connected individual and national prosperity with well-doing, and regarded length of days as a sign of the favour of Heaven, while, on the other hand, misfortune and misery invariably resulted from the wrath of Jehovah, he could not have been otherwise than surprised, and perhaps even pained, to have to relate that Mana.s.seh reigned fifty-five years. Not only was his reign longer than that of any other king of Israel or Judah; not only did he attain a greater age than any of them; but, further, no calamity seems to have marked his rule. A contented and protected va.s.sal of Esarhaddon, secure from his attacks, and also unmolested by the weakened and subjugated nations around him, he would seem, in the story of the Kings, to have enjoyed an enviable external lot, and to have presided over a people who were happy, in that, during his rule, they had no history. But whatever the writer may have felt, he tells us no more, and lets us see Mana.s.seh sink peacefully into his grave "in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzza," and leave to his son Amon a peaceful realm and an undisputed crown. Such a career would undoubtedly perplex and confound all the preconceived opinions of Jewish orthodoxy. The prosperity of Mana.s.seh would have presented as great a problem to them as the miseries of Job. They looked to temporal prosperity as the reward of righteousness, and to acute misery as the retribution of apostasy and sin. They had little or no conception of a future which should redress the balance of apparent earthly inequalities. Alike the sight of Mana.s.seh's long reign and Josiah's undeserved death in battle would give a powerful shock to their fixed convictions.

Far different is the end of the story in the Book of Chronicles. The records of Esarhaddon tell us that in 680 he made an expedition into Palestine to restore the shaken influence of his father,[643] and about 647 he mentions among his submissive tributaries the kings of Tyre, Edom, Moab, Gaza, Ekron, Askelon, Gebal, Ammon, Ashdod, and Mana.s.seh, King of Judah ("Minasi-sar-Yahudi"), as well as ten princes of Cyprus. Whether the King of Judah rebelled later on, and intrigued with Tirhakah, we do not know; but in 2 Chron. x.x.xiii. 11 we read that Esarhaddon sent his generals to Jerusalem, took Mana.s.seh by stratagem, drove rings through his lips, bound him in chains, and brought him to Babylon, where Esarhaddon was holding his court.[644] We find from the _Eponym Canon_ that Tyre revolted from a.s.syria in the tenth year of Esarhaddon, and Mana.s.seh may have been drawn away to join in the revolt; or he may have joined Shamash-shum-ukin, the Viceroy of Babylon, in his revolt against his brother a.s.surbanipal. As a rule, the lot of a conquered va.s.sal at the a.s.syrian Court was horrible, and in his utter misery Mana.s.seh repented, humbled himself, and prayed.[645] His prayer was heard. The despots of Nineveh were capricious alike in their insults and in their favours, and Esarhaddon not only pardoned Mana.s.seh, but sent him back to Jerusalem,[646] thinking that he would be more useful to him there than in a Babylonian dungeon. After this reprieve he lived like a penitent and a patriot. Esarhaddon was preparing for his expedition against Tirhakah, and would not attack a king who was now bound to him by grat.i.tude as well as fear. But the times were very troublous.

Mana.s.seh prepared for eventualities by building an outer wall on the west of the city of David, unto Gihon in the Valley, by surrounding Ophel with a high wall, and by garrisoning the fenced cities.[647] All this was necessary and patriotic work, considering that Judah might be attacked by other enemies as well as the a.s.syrians. She was like a grain of corn amid the grinding mills of the nations. Media and Lydia were rising into strong kingdoms. Babylon was becoming daily more formidable. Dim rumours reached the East of movements among vast hosts of Cimmerian and Scythian barbarians. Jerusalem had no human strength for war. She could only rely upon her battlements, on the natural strength of her position, and on the protection of her G.o.d. Almost in the last year of Mana.s.seh, the powerful Psammetichus I., king of a now united Egypt, made an a.s.sault on Ashdod; but he did not venture on the difficult task of besieging Jerusalem.

The religious reformation of Mana.s.seh attested the sincerity of his amendment. He flung out the Asherah from the Temple, put away the strange G.o.ds, destroyed the altars, burnt sacrifices to G.o.d, and used all his power to restore the worship of Jehovah. He did not, however, destroy the high places. For this story the Chronicler refers to "the words of Chozai,"[648] according to the present text, which some suppose to have meant "the story of the Seers." He also refers to a prayer of Mana.s.seh, which cannot of course be the Greek forgery of the second or third century which goes by that name in the Apocrypha.[649]

His repentance doubtless secured his own salvation. "Whoso saith 'Mana.s.seh hath no part in the world to come,'" said Rabbi Johanan, "discourageth the penitent";--but the partial reformation was too late to save his land.

Is this a literal history, or an edifying Haggadah? The non-historical character of the story is maintained by De Wette, Graf, Noldeke, and many others. Both views have been taken. This we can, at any rate, a.s.sert--that there seems to be nothing in the story which is inconsistent with probability. The Chronicler may have derived it from genuine doc.u.ments or traditions, though it is difficult to account for the silence of the elder and more trustworthy historian. Nor is it only his silence for which we have to account; it is the continuance of his positive statements. It would be, in any case, a strange conception of history which, after narrating a man's crimes, omitted alike the retribution which befell him on account of them, the heartfelt penitence for the sake of which they were forgiven, and the seriously earnest endeavour to undo at least something of the evil which he had done. Not only does the historian make these omissions, but in no subsequent allusion to Mana.s.seh does he so much as indicate that he is aware of his amendment.[650] He says that Amon "did evil in the sight of the Lord, as his father Mana.s.seh did."[651] He speaks of the altars to the hosts of heaven which Mana.s.seh had made in the two courts of the Temple as still standing in the reign of Josiah, though the Chronicler tells us that Mana.s.seh had cast them all out of the city.[652] He says that, notwithstanding all that Josiah did, "the Lord turned not from the fierceness of His great wrath, because of all the provocations that Mana.s.seh had provoked Him withal,"[653] and that on this account G.o.d cast off Jerusalem. Never, even by the most distant allusions, does he refer to Mana.s.seh's captivity, his prayer, his penitence, or his counter-efforts. Had he been aware of these, his silence would have been neither generous nor just. Nay, he even leaves apparent facts at conflict with the Chronicler's story, for he makes Josiah do all that the Chronicler tells us that Mana.s.seh himself had done in the removal of his worst abominations.

Even now we have not exhausted the historic difficulties which surround the repentance of Mana.s.seh. During his reign Jeremiah received his call, and while still a young boy began his work. Neither he, nor Zephaniah, nor Habakkuk drop the slightest hint that the wicked, idolatrous king had ever turned over a new leaf. Jeremiah's silence is specially difficult to account for. He, too, records Jehovah's final and irrevocable decree, that He would give up Judah to death, to exile, and to famine, to the sword to slay, to the dogs to tear, to the fowls of the heaven and the beasts of the earth to devour and to destroy.[654] And the cause of the pitiless doom p.r.o.nounced by a Judge weary of repenting is "because of Mana.s.seh, the son of Hezekiah, King of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem."[655]

The judgment was not long delayed.

It was the vast movement of the Scythians in Media and Western Asia, and the rumours of it, which gave to Mana.s.seh and Amon such respite as they had; and even this respite was full of misery and fear.[656]

FOOTNOTES:

[624] One legend says that Hephzibah was a daughter of Isaiah. Not so Josephus (_Antt._, X. iii. 1).

[625] See Gen. xli. 51. His name may have referred to the new union between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Comp. 2 Chron. x.x.x. 6, x.x.xi. 1.

[626] Chron. x.x.xiv. 1-3.

[627] See Zeph. i. 8. Comp. 2 Chron. xxiv. 17; Isa. xxviii. 14; Jer.

v. 5, etc.

[628] Mic. vii. 1-20.

[629] LXX., t? ?a??. The feminine, however, does not imply that Baal was here worshipped as a female deity, but is probably due to the fact that later Jews always avoided using the _names_ of idols (from a misapprehension or too literal view of Exod. xxiii. 13), and therefore called Baal _Bosheth_ ("shame"), which is feminine. Hence the names Mephibosheth, Jerubbesheth, Ishbosheth. In Suidas (_s.v._ ?a?a.s.s??) he is charged with having set up in the Temple "a four-faced image of Zeus."