tasy to Baalim and Ashtaroth by eight years of bondage, "the Spirit of the Lord came upon him; and he judged Israel and went out to war; and the Lord delivered Chushan-rishathaim into his hand" (Jud. iii. 8—11). The chosen "deliverer" of the people, specially inspired to do the work at once of a ruler and a general, was the Kenezite who, because, like his brother, he had "followed Jehovah wholly," was thought worthy of so high a calling. We cannot wonder that the descendants of one so famous should long have been held in honour. It is interesting to find that, as far down in the history as the period represented by the Book of Judith (the time of Nebuchadnezzar, if we look to the events which it relates-probably of the Maccabees, if we look to the date of its composition), the name of Othniel, under the Grecised form of Gothoniel (Judith vi. 15), should be found among the governors of Bethulia.

The distinct history of the two Kenezites closes with the death of Othniel; but it is clear, as I have already stated, that their posterity exercised a lasting influence on the fortunes of the tribe of Judah, and that they were connected in some way with its chief cities. And when the time came when the other chief house of the tribe of Judah was to rise to a new power, and the rod out of the stem of Jesse first became a great tree, so that the tribes of Israel lodged under the shadow of its branches, it is significant that the first city which David, guided by the high priest's oracular answer (2 Sam. ii. 1), chose as the capital of his kingdom was Hebron, the city of the Kenezites, the city of the priests. His own city Bethlehem was clearly connected by some close ties

with the house of Caleb (1 Chron. ii. 52). So also was Kirjath-jearim, the city where the ark found shelter under the reverent care of Abinadab and Eleazar (1 Sam. vii. 1; 1 Chron. ii. 51). So too were the "scribes that dwelt at Jabez," connected, probably, as the names that follow seems to indicate, with the worship of the Temple. So, lastly, were the Kenites of the house of Rechab (1 Chron. ii. 53-55).

Two inferences seem to be suggested by the result of this inquiry:

1. We learn to form a truer estimate of the earlier stages in the history of the people who were to be the religious teachers of mankind. We see how, from the first, instead of being narrow and exclusive, it opened its arms to those who would receive its faith; how the Lord whom they worshipped gave even then to the "sons of the stranger" who were faithful, a place in his inheritance higher than that of the sons of Abraham according to the flesh. The history of Israel thus became, so to speak, a confluent history, gathering together the traditions and the influences of those who followed the great father of the faithful in his witness against the polytheism and idolatry of the nations round them. There were multiplied, in this way, points of contact through which, while still remaining a separate people, they were able to exercise some influence on their immediate neighbours. A gate was thrown open by this admission of the first proselyte to the full prerogatives of Israel, which no man afterwards could shut,

So in the Vulgate rendering the verse is rendered "the families of the scribes that dwell in Jabesh, that sing and play on instruments of music, and dwell in tabernacles.' Comp. the article "Rechabites," in the "Dictionary of the Bible," vol. ii.

which was, in the order of God's providence, to be thrown open more and more widely. Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, remote as the connection may at first appear, is the spiritual ancestor of Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian, and of Cornelius the centurion.

2. I do not wish to lay any undue stress on a single point of evidence, where there is so much that is cumulative in its nature, so much indirect testimony, so many undesigned coincidences. But it will have been felt, if I mistake not, that the consistency of these scattered notices of a family, not of the race of Israel by birth, found as they are in different portions of the Pentateuch and the Books of Joshua and Judges—a consistency in facts so much below the surface as itself to have escaped the notice of most commentators, while others have refused to admit their true significance, leaves an impression that the books in which they are found cannot be altogether the invention of a later age. Whatever changes of form and structure they may have undergone in the process of what we should call editorship, these notices, and the history in which they are imbedded, are clearly fragments from a remote past. Nothing would have been more unlikely than for the scribes of the time of Samuel, or David, or Hezekiah, or Ezra, to dwell upon the past glories of the families of the Kenezites. But that history, the story of Caleb's faithfulness and its reward, is bound up inseparably, if not with the present form of the Pentateuch, at all events with the substance of its history, with the facts of the Exodus, with the wanderings in the wilderness, with the victories over Canaan. Over and above the ethical lessons which it teaches —and they are deep and fruitful enough to reward

those who take them to their hearts—the history of Caleb the son of Jephunneh may serve to deepen the foundations of the faith of which he was an example, by leaving with us the conviction that here also we have not followed any "cunningly devised fables."

VI.

THE REVOLT OF ABSALOM.*

HE broad outlines of this dark episode in the life of David are familiar enough to most of us. We trace the righteous

retribution by which sin was made the punishment of sin. We see the long, sad procession as it winds up Olivet, the grey, discrowned king weeping as he went. We hear the bitter cry of the father who refuses to be comforted, from whose lips there comes only the long, wailing cry, "O Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son! The history deserves, however, a closer study. In its causes, its progress, its results, the motives of the chief actors in it, the plots and counterplots which it involved, it brings before us a revolution half

* It has not been thought necessary in this paper to give references to the chapters (2 Sam. xiii.-xix.) upon which the narrative is based. To do so would have been to encumber the page with them at almost every sentence. They have been given, however, where other passages of Scripture help to explain or illustrate. To another book, for a like reason, it is more convenient to make a general reference at the outset, than to acknowledge step by step the many obligations which I owe to it. What is here attempted is little more than a combination in one narrative of what may be found under the names of persons and places in Dr. Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," and I can desire nothing better than that the readers of this paper should refer to the articles, chiefly by Dean Stanley and Mr. Grove, to measure for themselves the amount of what I owe to them. A like general acknowledgment must be made to the "Scriptural Coincidences" of the late Professor Blunt.