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According to the first book of Kings, Solomon's half-brother, Adonijah, after the defeat of an alleged effort to recover the throne of which he had been defrauded, submitted himself to Solomon. He had become enamored of the virgin who had been brought to the aged King David to try to revive some vitality in him; and he came to Bathsheba asking her to request her son the king to give him this damsel as his wife. Bathsheba proffered this "small petition" for Adonijah, but Solomon was enraged, and ironically suggested that she should ask the kingdom itself for Adonijah, whom he straightway ordered to execution. The immediate context indicates that Solomon suspected in this petition a plot against his throne. A royal father's harem was inherited by a royal son, and its possession is supposed to have involved certain rights of succession: this is the only interpretation I have ever heard of the extreme violence of Solomon. But I have never been satisfied with this explanation. Would Adonijah have requested, or Bathsheba asked as a "small" thing, a favor touching the king's tenure?

The story as told in the Book of Kings appears diplomatic, and several details suggest that in some earlier legend the strife between the half-brothers had a more romantic relation to "Abishag the Shunammite," who is described as "very fair."

Abishag is interpreted as meaning "father of error," and though that translation is of doubtful accuracy, its persistence indicates the place occupied by her in early tradition. According to Yalkut Reubeni the soul of Eve transmigrated into her. She caused trouble between the brothers, whose Jahvist names, Adonijah and Jedidiah,--strength of Jah, and love of Jah,--seem to have been at some time related. However this may be, the fair Shunammite, as represented in the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, fills pretty closely the outlines set forth in the famous epithalamium which all critics, I believe, refer to Solomon's marriage with a bride brought from some far country. I quote the late Professor Newman's translation, in which it will be seen that several lines are applicable to the Shunammite, whose humble position is alluded to, separated from her "people," and her "father's house":

"My heart boils up with goodly matter. I ponder; and my verse concerns the King. Let my tongue be a ready writer's pen.

"Fairer art thou than all the sons of men. Over thy lips delightsomeness is poured: Therefore hath God forever blessed thee.

"Gird at thy hip thy hero sword, Thy glory and thy majesty: And forth victorious ride majestic, For truth and meekness, righteously; And let thy right hand teach the wondrous deeds. Beneath thy feet the peoples fall; For in the heart of the king's enemies Sharp are thy arrows.

"Thy throne, O God, ever and always stands; A righteous sceptre is thy royal sceptre. Thou lovest right and hatest evil; Therefore, O God, thy God hath anointed thee With oil of joy above thy fellow-kings. Myrrh, aloes, cassia, all thy raiment is. From ivory palaces the viols gladden thee. King's daughters count among thy favorites; And at thy right hand stands the Queen In Gold of Ophir.

"O daughter, hark! behold and bend thy ear: Forget thy people and thy father's house. Win thou the King thy beauty to desire; He is thy lord; do homage unto him. So Tyrus's daughter and the sons of wealth With gifts shall court thee.

"Right glorious is the royal damsel; Wrought of gold is her apparel. In broidered tissues to the King she is led: Her maiden-friends, behind, are brought to thee. They come with joy and gladness, They enter the royal palace.

"Thy fathers by their sons shall be replaced; As princes o'er the land shalt thou exalt them. So will I publish to all times thy name; So shall the nations praise thee, now and always."

In this epithalamium the name of Jahveh does not occur, and Solomon himself is twice addressed as God . This lack of anticipation was avenged by Jahvism when it arrived; the Song was put among the Psalms and transmitted to British Jahvism, which has headed it: "The majesty and grace of Christ's kingdom. The duty of the Church and the benefits thereof." Such is the chapter-heading to a song of bridesmaids,--described in the original as "a song of loves" and "set to lilies" .

There are no indications in the Solomon legend, apart from some mistranslations, until the time of Ecclesiasticus , that Solomon was a sensualist, or that there were any moral objections to the extent of his harem, which indeed is expanded by his historians with evident pride.

As to this, our own monogamic ideas are quite inapplicable to a period when personal affection had nothing to do with marriage, when women had no means of independent subsistence, and the size of a man's harem was the measure of his benevolence. Probably there was then no place more enviable for a woman than Solomon's seraglio.

The sin was not in the size of the seraglio but in its foreign and idolatrous wives. Before a religious notion can get itself fixed as law it is apt to be enforced by an extra amount of odium. Solomon's mother had married a Hittite, and presumably he would have imbibed liberal ideas on such subjects. The round number of a thousand ladies in his harem is unhistorical, but that the chief princesses were of Gentile origin and religion is clear. The second writer in the first Book of Kings begins with this gravamen:

"Now King Solomon loved many foreign women besides the daughter of Pharaoh,--Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Zidonian, and Hittite women, nations concerning which Jahveh said to the children of Israel, Ye shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave to these in love."

The wisest of men could hardly attend to rules which an unconceived Jahveh would lay down for an unborn nation centuries later. We must, however, as we are not on racial problems, consent to a few anachronisms in names if we are to discover any credible traditions in the Biblical books relating to Solomon. As Mr. Flinders Petrie has discovered something like the word "Israel" in ancient Egypt, it may be as well to use that word tentatively for the tribe we are considering. No Israelite, then, is mentioned among Solomon's wives, and one can hardly imagine such a man finding a bride among devotees of an altar of unhewn stones piled in a tent.

As our cosmopolitan prince had to send abroad for workmen of skill, he may also have had to seek abroad for ladies accomplished enough to be his princesses. That, however, does not explain the number and variety of the countries from which the wives seem to have come. The theory of many scholars that this Prince of Peace substituted alliances by marriage for military conquests is confirmed in at least one instance. The mother of his only son, Rehoboam, was Naamah the Ammonitess , and the Septuagint preserves an addition to this verse that she was the "daughter of Ana, the son of Nahash,"--a king with whom David had waged furious war. The reference in the epithalamium to "Tyrus's daughter," in connexion with 1 Kings v. 12, "there was peace between Hiram and Solomon," suggests that there also marriage was the peacemaker.

The phrase in 1 Kings iii. 1, "Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh and took Pharaoh's daughter" suggests, though less clearly, that some feud may have been settled in that case also. That Solomon should have espoused as his first and pre-eminent queen the daughter of a Pharaoh is very picturesque if set beside the legend of the "Land of Bondage," but the narrative could hardly have been given without any allusion to bygones had the story in Exodus been known. Yet the words "made affinity" may refer to a racial feud in that direction. This princess brought as her dowry the important frontier city of Gezer, and her palace appears to have been the first fine edifice erected in Jerusalem.

The commercial r?gime established by Solomon could hardly have been possible but for his intermarriages. Perhaps if the Christian ban had not been fixed against polygamy, and European princes had been permitted to marry in several countries, there might have been fewer wars, as well as fewer illicit connexions. The intermarriages of the large English royal family with most of the reigning houses of Europe, have been for many years a security of peace, and it is not improbable that our industrial and democratic age, wherein the working man's welfare depends on peace, may find in the undemocratic institution of royalty a certain utility in its power to be prolific in such ties of peace.

SOLOMON'S IDOLATRY.

Bathsheba's function at Solomon's marriage is celebrated in the Song of Songs:

"Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon, With the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals."

Bathsheba, as we have seen, was said to have written Proverbs xxxi. as an admonition or reproof to her son on his betrothal with the daughter of Pharaoh. The words of David, "Send me Uriah the Hittite" , and the emphasis laid on Uriah's being a Hittite might have been meant as some legal excuse for David's conduct. He rescued Bathsheba, Hebraised , from unlawful wedlock, it might be said, and her exaltation in Talmudic tradition may have been meant to guard the purity of David's lineage. But the ascription to Bathsheba of especial opposition to her son's marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh indicates that the gravamen in Solomon's posthumous offence lay less in his intermarriage with foreigners than in building for them shrines of their several deities,--Istar, Chemosh, Milcom, and the rest. Against Pharaoh's daughter the Talmud manifests a special animus: she is said to have introduced to Solomon a thousand musical instruments, and taught him chants to the various idols.

There is a bit of Solomonic folklore according to which the Devil tempted him with a taunt that he would be but an ordinary person but for his magic ring, in which lay all his wisdom. Solomon being piqued into a denial, was challenged to remove his ring, but no sooner had he done so than the Devil seized it, and, having by its might metamorphosed the king beyond recognition, himself assumed the appearance of Solomon and for some time resided in the royal seraglio. The more familiar legend is that Solomon was cajoled into parting with his signet ring by a promise of the demon to reveal to him the secret of demonic superiority over man in power. Having transformed Solomon and transported him four hundred miles away, the demon threw the ring into the sea. Solomon, after long vagrancy, became the cook of the king of Ammon , with whose daughter, Naamah, he eloped. One day in dressing a fish for dinner Naamah found in it the signet ring which Asmodeus had thrown into the sea, and Solomon thus recovered his palace and harem from the demon.

The connexion of this fish-and-ring legend,--known in several versions, from the Ring of Polycrates to the heraldic legend of Glasgow,--with the Solomonic demonology, looks as if it may once have been part of a theory that the idolatrous shrines were built for the princesses while the Devil was personating their lord. In truth, however, all of these animadversions belong to a comparatively late period. Many struggles had to precede even the recognition of the idolatrous character of the shrines, and to the last the Jews were generally proud of the "graven images" in their temple,--including brazen reproductions of the terrible Golden Calf. At the same time there were no doubt some old priests and soothsayers to whom these new-fangled things were injurious and odious, and superstitious people enough to cling to their ancient unhewn altar rather than to the brilliant cherubim, just as in Catholic countries the devotees cannot be drawn from their age-blackened Madonnas and time-stained crucifixes by the most attractive works of modern art.

Although there is no evidence that the God of Israel was known under the name of either Jah or Jahveh in Solomon's time, there is little doubt that the rudimentary forces of Jahvism were felt in the Solomonic age. The furious prophetic denunciations of the wise and learned which echoed on through the centuries, and made the burden of St. Paul, indicate that there was from the first much superstition among the peasantry, which might easily in times of distress be fanned into fanaticism. The special denunciation of Solomon by Jahveh, and his suppression during the prophetic age, could hardly have been possible but for some extreme defiance on his part of the primitive priesthood and the soothsayers. The temple was dedicated by the king himself without the help of any priest, and the monopoly of the prophet was taken away by the establishment of an oracle in the temple. And the worst was that these things indicated a genuine liberation of the king, intellectually, from the superstitions out of which Jahvism grew. This was especially proved by his disregard of the sanctuary claimed by the murderer Joab, who had laid hold of the horns of the altar. The altar was the precinct of deity, and beyond the jurisdiction of civil or military authority; yet when the "man of blood" refused to leave the altar our royal forerunner of Erastus compelled the reluctant executioner to slay him at the altar,--even the sacred altar of unhewn stone. As no thunderbolt fell from heaven on the king for this sacrilege, the act could not fail to be a thunderbolt from earth striking the phantasmal heaven of the priest. The Judgment Day for settlement of such accounts was not yet invented, and injuries of the gods were left to the vengeance of their priests and prophets.

There is an unconscious humour in the solemn reading by English clergymen of Jahvist rebukes of Solomon for his tolerance towards idolatry, at a time when the Queen of England and Empress of India is protecting temples and idols throughout her realm, and has just rebuilt the ancient temple of Buddha at G?ya; while the sacred laws of Brahman, Buddhist, Parsee, Moslem, are used in English courts of justice. If any modern Josiah should insult a shrine of Vishnu, or of any Hindu deity, he would have to study his exemplar inside a British prison.

SOLOMON AND THE SATANS.

When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem must have been a wretched place, without any art or architecture, with a swarming mongrel population, mainly of paupers. The holy ark was kept in a tent, and the altar of unhewn stone accurately symbolised the rude condition of the people, among whom Solomon could find no workmen of skill enough to build a temple. It is not easy to forgive him for compelling a good many of them into the public works; but it was probably no more than a national conscription of the unemployed paupers in Jerusalem, chiefly on fortifications for their own defence. There was apparently no slave-mart, and it seems rather better to conscript people for public industries than, in our modern way, for cutting their neighbors' throats. Most of them were the remnants of tribes that once occupied the region, much despised by the Israelites, and probably they looked on Solomon's plan of building Jerusalem into a city of magnificence, giving everybody employment and support, as a grand socialistic movement. An Ephraimite, Jeroboam, who tried to get up a revolt in Jerusalem does not seem to have found any adherents. The only people who complained of any yoke--and their complaint is only heard of after some centuries--were the priest-ridden and prophet-ridden Israelites who had become fanatically excited about the strange shrines built for the king's foreign wives, and the splendid carvings and forms in the temple itself. Probably the first two commandments in the decalogue were put there with special reference to some Solomonic cult with an aesthetic taste for graven images and foreign shrines.

Solomon may not indeed have written these and the many similar maxims ascribed to him, but they are among the most ancient sentences in the Bible, and they would not have been attributed to any man who had not left among the people a tradition of humanity and benevolence. Had the royal "idolator" or his wives stained their shrines with human blood the prophets would have been eager to declare it. Two acts of cruelty are ascribed to Solomon's youth, in the book of Kings: one of these, the execution of Shimei, carried out his father's order, but only after Shimei had been given fair warning with means of escape; while the other, the execution of Adonijah , if true, is too much wrapped up in obscurity to enable us to judge its motives; but it cannot be regarded as historical.

The second historiographer of Kings, setting out to record Jahveh's anger about Solomon's foreign wives and shrines says, with unconscious humour, that Jahveh raised Satan against him,--two Satans. One of these was Hadad, an Edomite, the other Rezon, a Syrian. The writer says that this was when Solomon was old, his wives having then turned away his heart after other gods. Fortunately, however, this writer has embodied in his record some items, evidently borrowed, which contradict his Jahvistic legend. One of these tells us that Hadad had been carried away from Edom to Egypt, when David and his Captain Joab massacred all the males in Edom; that he there married the sister of Pharaoh; and that he returned to his own country on hearing of the death of David and Joab. When this occurred, Solomon, so far from being old, was about eighteen. The Septuagint says that Hadad "reigned in the land of Edom." We may conclude then that on the return of this heir to the throne Edom declared its independence, nor is there any indication that Solomon tried to prevent this. Another contradiction of this writer is a note inserted about Rezon the Syrian,--"He was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon." Not, therefore, a Satan raised up by Jahveh against Solomon when in old age he had turned to other gods. Rezon "reigned over Syria," and there is no indication of any expedition against him sent out by Solomon. Bishop Colenso , in referring to these points remarks that we do not read of a single warlike expedition undertaken by Solomon.

The remark about the Satans set against Solomon is more applicable to the Shiloh traitors, Ahijah and Jeroboam. Jeroboam,--a servant whom Solomon had raised to high office,--was instigated by Ahijah, a "prophet" neglected by Solomon, to his ungrateful treason. Ahijah pretended that he had a divine revelation that he was to succeed Solomon on account of the king's shrines to Istar, Chemosh, and Milcom. If the narrative were really historic nothing could be more "Satanic" than the lies and treacheries related of those self-seekers. Were the story true, the failure of these divinely appointed "Satans" to overthrow the kingdom of Solomon, who did not arm against them, must have been due to his popularity. In after times this impunity of the glorious "idolator" would have to be explained; consequently we find Jahveh telling Solomon that, offended as he was by the shrines, he would spare him for his father's sake, but would rend the kingdom, save one tribe, from his son. That this should be immediately followed by the raising up of "Satans" to harass Solomon and Israel, Jahveh having just said the trouble should be postponed till after the king's death, suggests that the whole account of these quarrels is a late interpolation. Up to that point the old record is unbroken. "He had peace on all sides round about him. And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon" .

Jahveh, in his personal interview with Solomon , said, "I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant." That is, as explained by the "prophet" Ahijah, to Jeroboam. As a retribution and check on idolatry the selection, besides violating Jahveh's promise to David , was not successful: after the sundering of Israel and Judah into internecine kingdoms, Jeroboam, King of Israel, established idolatry more actively than either Solomon or his son Rehoboam. On Jeroboam, his selected Nemesis, Jahveh inflicted his characteristic punishment of visiting the sins of the fathers on the children; as David was left the seduced wife whose husband he had murdered, while his son was executed; as Solomon was left in peaceful enjoyment of his kingdom and none of the sinful shrines destroyed, while his son bore the penalty; so now Jeroboam, elect of Jahveh, built golden calves, surpassed Solomon's offences, and vengeance was taken on his son Abijah, who died. This Abijah left a son, Baasha, who, undeterred by these fatalities, continued the "idolatries" with impunity for the twenty-four years of his reign, the punishment falling on his son Elah, who was slain after only two years' reign by his military servant, Zimri. And this Zimri, who thus carried on Jahveh's decree against idolatry, himself continued "in the ways of Jeroboam," the shrines and idols themselves being meanwhile unvisited by any executioner or iconoclast until some centuries later.

In Josiah there arrived a king, of the line of David, who might seem by his fury against idolatry to be another "man after God's own heart." He pulverised the images and the shrines, he "sacrificed the priests on their own altars," he even dug up the bones of those who had ministered at such altars and burnt them. He trusted Jahveh absolutely. He went to the prophetess, Hulda, who told him that he should be "gathered to his grave in peace." He was slain miserably, by the King of Egypt, to whom the country then became subject.

Josephus ascribed the act of Josiah, in hurling himself against an army that was not attacking him, to fate. The fate was that Josiah, having exterminated the wizards and fortune-tellers, repaired to the only dangerous one among them, because she pretended to be a "prophetess," inspired by Jahveh. Her assurances led him to believe himself invulnerable, personally, and that in his life-time Jerusalem would not suffer the woes she predicted. Josiah, "of the house of David," seems to have thought that his zeal in destroying the shrines which his ancestor Solomon had introduced, mainly Egyptian, would be so grandly consummated if he could destroy a Pharaoh, that he insisted on a combat. Pharaoh-Necho sent an embassy to say that he was not his enemy, but on his way to fight the Assyrian: "God commanded me to hasten; forbear thou from opposing God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not." Here, however, was the fanatic's opportunity for an Armageddon: Pharaoh had appealed to what Solomon would have regarded as their common deity, but which to Josiah meant a chance to pit Jahveh against the God of Egypt. On Jahveh's invisible forces he must have depended for victory. So perished Josiah, and with him the independence of his country.

Solomon, the Prince of Peace, had made the house of Pharaoh the ally of his country. Josiah carries his people back under Egyptian bondage. Solomon had built the metropolitan Temple, whose shrines, symbols, works of art, represented a catholicity to all races and religions,--peace on earth, good will to man. Josiah, panic-stricken about a holy book purporting to have been found in the Temple, concerning which the king by his counsellors consulted a female fortune-teller, makes a holocaust of all that Solomon had built up.

SOLOMON IN THE HEXATEUCH.

"And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of Jahveh, Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jahveh." The Chronicler adds to the earlier account the words "given by Moses," which looks as if the authenticity of the book had not been without question. The finding of the Book is set forth in a sort of picture, wherein are grouped the priest, the theologian, the phantom prophet, the deity, the temple, and the contribution-box. Every part of the ecclesiastical machine is present.

One is irresistibly reminded of the finding of the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, although it would be unfair to ascribe Deuteronomist atrocities to the revelations of the American phantom, Mormon. Nor is this a mere coincidence. There are lists of the early Mormons which show a large proportion of them to have borne Old Testament names, derived from Puritan ancestors. When Solomon set up his philosophic throne at Harvard University, and the parishes of the Pilgrims became Unitarian, and Boston became artistic, literary, and worldly, the Jahvists began to migrate, carrying with them their Sabbatarian Ark, in which so many frontier communities are imprisoned "unto this day." Some of them have become conquerors of Hawaiian "Canaanites," appropriating their lands. But the Vermont Hilkiah, Joseph Smith, discerned that a new Deuteronomy was needed to deal with the many American sects, and was guided by an Angel of the Lord to a spot in Ontario County, New York, where the Book was found , which he was enabled to translate by the aid of his "Urim and Thummim" spectacles, found beside the Book. In the Book were discussed the principles of all the sects, though not by name, as in Deuteronomy Moses is made to deal with the conditions which had arisen since the time of Solomon. Unfortunately for these American Jahvists, they had left the New English brains behind, with Channing and Emerson, and had not carried with them enough to produce a western Jeremiah to save their movement from ridicule and popular hatred.

"Thy words were found and I did eat them," says Jeremiah . Whether, as some scholars think, Jeremiah had any part in the composition of the Book "found," or not, his rage attests the existence at the time of an important Solomonic School. "How say you, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Behold the lying pen of the scribes has turned it to a fiction." "They are grown strong in the land but not for the faith." "Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might."

The Deuteronomist especially aims at suppression of the Solomonic cult and r?gime. The law, not found in Exodus, against marriage with foreigners is especially turned against Solomon's example by the addition that such a marriage will "turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods." The wife, or other member of a man's family, who entices him to serve other gods, is to be stoned to death. Moses is represented as anticipating the setting up of kings, and even the particular events of Solomon's reign. Solomon's "forty thousand stalls of horses" , his horses brought out of Egypt , his wives, his silver and gold, are all foreseen by the ancient lawgiver, who provides that: "He shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply horses ... neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away; neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold."

This Deuteronomist Moses foresaw, too, that some check on the divine appointments to the throne would be needed. "Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee whom thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set over thee: thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee." As all of these commandments were received by Moses from Jahveh himself , it is worthy of remark that there should be no trace of that anger with which Jahveh met the proposal for a monarchy: "they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them." In 1776 Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, used this scriptural denunciation of kings with much effect, and it no doubt contributed much to overthrow British monarchy in America.

"The sun is known in the heavens, But Jahveh said that he would dwell in thick darkness. I have built up a house of habitation for thee, A place for thee to dwell in forever. Lo, is it not written in the book of Jasher?"

This suppression of the opening line of the Dedication, at cost of a grand poetic antithesis, reveals the hand of mere bigoted ignorance. How many other fine things have been eliminated, how many reduced to commonplaces, we know not, but the additions and interpolations in the Old Testament have been nearly all traced. Many of these are novelettes more prurient than the tales forbidden in families when found in the pages of Boccaccio and Balzac, and it is a notable evidence of the mere fetish that the Bible has become to most sects, that a chorus of abuse instead of welcome still meets the scholars who prove the quasi-spurious character of the most odious stories in Genesis.

Bishop Colenso seems to have found in such tales only the work of a Jahvist with a taste for obscene details, but too little attention has been paid to the investigations of Bernstein, who discovers in many of these legends a late Ephraimic effort to blacken the character of the whole house and line of Judah. Bernstein does not deal with the story of Adonijah and Jedidiah , whose relative antiquity is shown, I think, in the fact that no shameful action is ascribed to the elder brother to account for the deprivation of his primogenitive right. After Solomon's accession, however, Adonijah proposed to marry the maiden Abishag, who technically belonged to his father's harem, and probably this tradition gave a cue to the inventor of the story of Absalom's having gone to his father's concubines in order to base on the act a claim to the kingdom while his father was yet alive.

Absalom's shameful action is supposed to be a fulfilment of the sentence pronounced against David because of his crime against Uriah. A close examination of that passage must suggest doubts about verses 11, 12, but at any rate the sentence is not fulfilled by Absalom's alleged act: David's "wives" were not taken away "before his eyes," and given "unto his neighbor," but some of his concubines were appropriated by his son. Absalom's act and that of David's consigning the concubines to perpetual isolation or imprisonment are not alluded to in David's mourning for Absalom, nor in Joab's rebuke of this grief. In these strange incoherent items one seems to find the debris, so to say, of some masterly work, picturing a sort of Nemesis pursuing David and his family for the crime against Uriah. Ahithophel, who is described as "the word of God," was the grandfather of Bathsheba and the chief friend and counsellor of David, yet it was he who suddenly becomes a traitor to the King, foreshadowing Judas--as his sinister name implies--even to the extent of hanging himself. It was Bathsheba's grandfather who moved Absalom to dishonor his father's concubines. But were they only concubines in the original story, or were they David's wives, as predicted in the verses 11, 12 which seem misplaced and unfulfilled? It may have been that some of the details of the story were too gross for preservation, or too disgraceful to David, but I cannot think that we possess in its original form the tragedy suggested by the presence of an ancestor of seduced Bathsheba,--the sinister "word of God" Ahithophel,--and the death of the child of that adultery, the deflowering of Tamar, David's daughter, the disgrace and violent death of Amnon, Absalom, apparently of Daniel also, and finally of Adonijah. What became of the eight wives of David? Was that prediction ascribed to Nathan, of their defilement, without any corresponding narrative?

In a previous chapter I have pointed out the improbability that the fatal wrath of Solomon against Adonijah could have been excited by his brother's proposal of honorable wedlock with the maiden Abishag, and conjectured that there may have been a story, now lost, of rivalry between the brothers for this "very fair" damsel. Whatever may have been the real history there is little doubt that there was substituted for it some real offence by Adonijah, perhaps such as that afterwards ascribed to Absalom. Bathsheba herself is here the Nemesis, as her grandfather is in the case of Absalom.

It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with the age which produced the thrilling story of Joseph and his brothers, and Potiphar's wife, and the contrast with his chastity represented in the profligacy of Judah. Indications have been left in Gen. xxxv. at the end of verse 22 of the suppression of a story of Reuben and Bilhah, and no doubt there were other suppressions. How very bad the story of Reuben was we may judge, as Bernstein points out, by the severity of his condemnation by Jacob and by the shocking things about Judah allowed to remain in the text. In the latter chapter Bernstein finds the same personages,--David, Bathsheba, Solomon,--acting in a similar drama to that presented in the Samuel fragments, and under their disguises may perhaps be discovered some of the details suppressed in the Davidic records. Bernstein says:

"In Genesis xxxviii. Judah, the fourth son of the patriarch, is shown in a light which is to lay bare the stain of his existence. Judah went to Adullam, where lived his friend 'Chirah.' He married a Canaanite, the daughter of Shuah. His eldest son was called Er. He was displeasing in the eyes of Jahveh, therefore Jahveh slew him. His second son was called Onan: he died in consequence of his sexual sins. The third son's name was Shelah, and, as it is mysteriously stated after his name, 'he was at Chezib when his mother bare him.' Chezib is certainly the name of a place, and the addition may therefore signify that the mother had named the boy Shelah because the father happened to be in Chezib at the time, absent from home. Chezib has, however, a second meaning.... Chezib means 'deception, lie,' and is used by the prophet Micah in this sense . Now as Shelah, in our narrative, serves to deceive Tamar's hopes, held out by Judah, the allusion to Chezib is appropriate. However this may be, Judah's sons are all represented as despicable. Even Judah himself fell into bad ways and was trapped into the snares laid by his daughter-in-law Tamar, who played the prostitute. Thus only did Judah found a generation, from which King David is said to descend, from a son of Judah called Paretz, meaning 'breaking through,' in which manner he is supposed to have behaved towards his brother at his birth.

"Veiled as the libel is here, it becomes apparent as soon as we cast a glance upon David's family. The picture which this libel draws of Judah hits David himself sharply. The 'Canaanite'--namely, whom Judah marries --is no other than the wife of Uriah the Hittite whom David himself married adulterously. This wife of Judah is said to have been the daughter of a man named Shuah. Therefore she is a Bath-shua, and is thus called . But Bathshua is also Bathsheba herself, as one may conclude from 1 Chron. iii. 5. The eldest son died, hateful in the sight of God, just like the first son of Bathsheba . The son of Judah is alleged to have been called Er; why? because reading it backwards it means 'bad,' 'wicked.' The second son is called Onan, and dies for sexual sins. He is no other than David's son Amnon, who meets his death on account of his sexual sins . The Tamar of Judah's story is the same as the Tamar dishonored by Amnon,--the daughter of David, who, in spite of her misfortune and her purity, is, to the entire ruin of her good name, humiliated to a person who plays the prostitute. And Shelah who does not die,--add to his name only the letter m, and you have Solomon."

If in the light of these facts, which reveal the mythical character of some of the worst things told of Judah and David, the blessings of Jacob be carefully read, the blessing on Judah will be found rather equivocal. Colenso translates:

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