name of man.

Moses died while this spirit was yet

alive amongst his people.

46

Seven years after his death, the promises of many centuries were fulfilled, and there failed not aught of any good thing which the Lord had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass.47 Joshua, to whom the charge of the people was committed by Moses in his last days, led them to their conquests and their habitations, as he had been commanded; but the power of the prophet does not appear to have descended to the warrior. One of the early narratives, following the invasion of Canaan, describes Joshua in consultation with princes, and, as he grew old, he called all Israel together to hear his counsels.49 Active service against their enemies might naturally give the people, without their demanding it, an ampler portion in the management of their common interests. With any other nation, the change from wanderers in the desert to conquerors of an abundant land would have been too great to be consistent with the character or even with the safety of their earlier institutions; but such had been the providence of Moses in

46 See the last two chapters of Deuteronomy. Josephus professes to record the dying instructions of Moses to his countrymen :- "May you be a laborious people, and exercise yourselves in virtuous actions, and thereby possess and inherit the land without wars, while neither any foreigners make war upon it, and so afflict you, nor any internal sedition seize upon it, whereby you

may do things that are contrary to your fathers, and so lose the laws which they have established." Ant., IV. 8. 41, Whiston's translation.

47 Joshua, XXI. 43 – 45.

48 Joshua, IX. 15 et seq., XXIII. 2, XXIV. 1. Jahn calls this assembly the "Comitia Generalia." Arch. Bibl., 216, 218.

relation to the trials and the destinies of his race, that their years of warfare and settlement were passed without departure from their still sovereign laws. The fullest directions, even, had been prepared concerning the conduct of the battles into which the Lord their God would go with them against their enemies; 19 and when the fields, flowing with milk and honey, were overrun, and the towns, defended by spears and slings, were smitten or burned, the law was still active in appointing the rules by which the twelve Tribes should divide the long desired territory.

All that such a people could desire was theirs. The country in which they dwelt was beautiful; the air they breathed, serene; and the soil so exuberant, that every one could have his home with vines and fig-trees. Each week ended with the rest of the Sabbath; each period of the year was hallowed by its festival about the holy tabernacle. In spring, the Passover preserved the memory of the national deliverance from bondage; in early summer, the ripened harvest was acknowledged in the thanksgivings of Pentecost, the memorial, also, of the laws from Sinai, their harvest of every day as well as every year; and once again, in autumn, at the feast of the Tabernacles, the booths raised round the tabernacle for seven days brought back the times when their fathers were in the wilderness. In the midst of rejoicing,

49 Deut., XX. 4. See the chapter itself for the principles it contains of warfare. Cf., for some of

the horrors, Numbers, XXXI. 9– 18; Deut., VII. 2; Joshua, VI. 21, X. 39, 40.

order, and union throughout a peaceful land, the eyes of Joshua were closed, and the century which well may bear the name of Moses was ended.

A new age of longer duration and more varied character succeeded, in which both the religion and the liberty of the Jews seem to have followed the same general course of culmination and decline that we have observed amongst other ancient nations. It is apparent without a word of explanation, that a people, thrown in, as it were, amongst the struggling and the idolatrous races of the ancient world, requir ed some sort of separation from the rest, in order that the truth of which it was the casket should be unscathed by the burning sins to whose contact it was necessarily exposed. It is not so apparent, but equally true, that the isolation of heart which became a duty with the Jews, clenching against the stranger and the bondman the hand that was opened wide to the brother, would impair at last the only superstructure possible to the laws of fear and justice. These, indeed, were too narrow foundations, compared with those that have since been laid, to be still further reduced by misconceptions of their design, and yet be able to bear the weight of years. Another consequence, stranger still, ensued; and the

people, who began by excluding other nations from the pale of their own privileges and sympathies, went on to imitate the vices of life and the falsehoods of religion by which they chose, as it were, because they never sought to remove them, to be environed. The institutions that had recourse at first to exclusiveness for protection were found, in after years, to have lost their hold upon the very nation to which they had been delivered.

51

The conquest of Canaan was not completed without calamities. Defeats would happen as well as victories, and the cornfields, newly won, would be often wasted by the armies of the ejected or the neighbouring people. Separate tribes engaged in separate hostilities; and it more than once occurred, that one or two of them yielded, for a time, to the arms, or, what was worse, to the idolatries, of their enemies. The nation was largely reduced in numbers,52 and greatly embittered, of course, in spirit; but the worst marks upon their character were those of which they were susceptible to an extreme degree, as a stubborn and passionate race themselves. War began to be sought for love of land or blood; and the wildest fanaticism displaced the calmer, or at least the more

dogged, faith in which their fathers, even if they wavered, had died. The glimpse of Boaz and his reapers 53 is a solitary picture of the labor and the simplicity that might yet survive in the midst of warfare.

54

A truer representative, however, of the rude and dissolute habits of the generations following Joshua would be found in the hero Samson, whose exploits seem to have been unusual, only because of the gigantic strength by which they were achieved. He was one of the Deliverers, or Judges, appointed from time to time to lead the nation or the tribe in battle, rather than to exercise the civil authority consistent with the second name they bore. Unless the judge, indeed, were also a priest, he had no power to interpret the law; and there are long intervals during which none appear at all, until some alarm of sedition or invasion required the appointment of a champion to do the work of deliverance. Throughout these rugged and perilous times, authority was generally in the hands of the elders, the princes, and especially the priests, according to the classifications previously enumerated. The people, or the chiefs among them, were of course relieved from much supervision by the departure of such a man as Joshua, much more by that of Moses; still it does not appear that any change in their rights or privileges politically oc

53Boaz came and said unto the

reapers, The Lord be with you! And they answered him, The Lord bless thee!" Ruth, II. 4.

54 Judges, II. 16, III. 9.

55

55 See the account of the assembly, Judges, XX. 1-11.