II.

National Apostasy.

"And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”—1 KINGS XVii. 1.

"THROUGH THE WRATH OF THE LORD OF HOSTS IS THE LAND DARKENED, AND THE PEOPLE SHALL BE AS THE FUEL OF THE FIRE."-ISAIAH IX. 19.

"AND THE THIRD ANGEL SOUNDED, AND THERE FELL A GREAT STAR FROM HEAVEN, BURNING AS IT WERE A LAMP, AND IT FELL UPON THE THIRD PART OF THE RIVERS, AND UPON THE FOUNTAINS OF WATERS." "-REVELATION VIII. 10.

NATIONAL APOSTASY.

AHAB was at this time on the throne of Israel;—his residenco was at Jezreel, and the windows of his ivory palace looked along the vast plain of Esdraelon, one of the most fertile and exuberant portions of Palestine. His was a gloomy reign. His predecessor, Jeroboam, by setting up golden calves at Dan and Bethel, had paved the way for the shameless idolatry which now disgraced the land and provoked the Divine judgments. Compared with Ahab's apostasy, however, that of Jeroboam was a trivial and modified departure from the true worship. The latter may be regarded rather as a desperate, and, in the circumstances, a world-wise stroke of state policy. On the revolt of the ten tribes and their formation into a northern kingdom, the first sovereign was naturally jealous of the effect which attendance at the old festal gatherings in Jerusalem might have on his new subjects. These might revive, in the separated tribes, the ancient love of unity, and attachment to the time-honoured capital. “Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord."* If he is to perpetuate his dynasty and save the dismemberment of his infant kingdom, he too must meet the religious wants

*Ps. cxxii. 3-4.
B

and aspirations of his people, by having a "city" or "cities of solemnities; "he must have sacred shrines and sacred rites to vie in splendour with the ceremonies of Mount Zion. For this purpose he made selection of the two extreme border towns -Dan in the north, and Bethel in the south. Both were already invested with sacred recollections in connexion with the earlier history of the chosen race, and in them he erected two temples, with rites of corresponding magnificence. "His long stay in Egypt had familiarised him with the outward forms under which the Divinity was there represented; and now, for the first time since the Exodus, was an Egyptian element introduced into the national worship of Palestine. A golden figure of Mnevis, the sacred calf of Heliopolis, was set up at each sanctuary, with the address, 'Behold thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt.'"*

Guilty as Jeroboam was in introducing so flagrant a violation of the Divine command,-erecting “a similitude like to a calf which eateth hay," he seems to have had no intention of superseding the national religion by pagan worship. It was different, however, with his weak and servile successor. Ahab's "abominable idolatries" owed, if not their origin, at all events their chief instigation, to a guilty matrimonial alliance he had formed with Jezebel, daughter of Athbaal, King of Tyre. Little could be expected from the antecedents of this Tyrian princess; her own father having himself originally been a heathen priest, and having afterwards mounted the throne of his brother as a usurper. Greatly Ahab's intellectual superior-crafty, bold, designing, unscrupulous, cruel,—she wielded from the first a fatal influ*Neh. ix. 18. Smith's Dictionary, in loco.

ence over her weak and pliant partner.

He soon forgot

the solemn inheritance that had been transmitted to him in that sacred land. Shrines and temples sacred to Baal and Astarte, the tutelary deities of Phoenicia, covered the hilltops and valleys, "marked by the grove of olive or ilex round the sacred rock or stone on which the altar was erected."

This false worship, indeed, was no novelty in Hebrew history. We find it had struck its roots deep-even so early as the time of the Judges. Gideon's thrashing-floor at Ophrah, was close by a rock, surmounted by a spreading Terebinth, and under its branches the altar and image of Baal. One part of his mission, as his new name of Jerubbaal imported, was to overthrow the worship of the Phoenician idol, and reassert the supremacy of the God of Israel. The Angel of the Lord appeared to him, at his wine-press, with a message of "peace." That same night of the Divine appearance, he cut down the consecrated grove on the rock, and converted the long-defiled altar into a place of sacrifice for Jehovah, using the felled trees as fuel for his burnt-offering. The citizens of the little town, enraged at the sacrilege, demanded of Joash to give up his son to instant death. Joash, however, the Gamaliel of his age, stood on his defence by appealing to the reason of his hearers, and boldly asserting, that if Baal were indeed a god, he needed no puny human arm to vindicate his sovereignty, or inflict his vengeance. "Will ye plead for Baal? Will ye save him? If he be a God, let him plead for himself."* Who knows but the remembrance of this advice of the old Abiezrite may have suggested and shaped

✦ Judges vi. 31.