66 A.M. 2972. irresolution on hearing of this transaction, is almost unaccountable; B.C. 1032. certainly it paved the way to future extended mischiefs in his house. We are told he was very wroth," and some writers have imagined that he was deterred from pronouncing judgment by there being no law strictly applicable to the offence.18 However this may be, Absalom, after retaining his revengeful purpose "two full years unexecuted, and impelled by other motives than those of justice, or even, perhaps, of resentment, for this particular crime, entrapped Amnon (his elder brother,) to a feast at his sheep-shearing, despatched him and fled. Amnon's death and Absalom's flight. David now indulged an unavailing grief which gradually centred itself in the loss of Absalom, until Joab employed a woman of considerable address to induce him to give orders for his return. A.M. 2974. She appeared before the king with a well-constructed tale of a B.C. 1030. calamity similar to his own, and representing the demands of justice upon the life of one of her sons for the murder of his brother, with all a mother's feelings, she softened him to the purpose of her Absalom's employer; who first procured a permission for Absalom to return to Jerusalem, and after two further years of penance, to the presence of his unhappy father. return and plans. A.M. 2981. Within about four years after this period, the true character of B.C. 1023. Absalom was finally developed. Availing himself of the now advancing age of David, and of the certainty of finding individual murmurers amongst the claimants for public justice, this ambitious prince could devote the revenue assigned him by his father to the purpose of producing disaffection in the hearts of his subjects. He appeared in splendid equipages, he soothed the discontented, and inflamed the clamorous, until "the conspiracy was strong," and a message came to David that the hearts of the men of Israel were with Absalom. David now seems fully to have anticipated the baseness of which this favourite child was capable; he was driven from his capital, and after a pious remonstrance with Zadok, the priest, who wished the ark of God to partake in his banishment, he went up by the ascent of Mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered and he went barefoot;" halting a little beyond the hill, to understand the extent of the treason, and make proper dispositions for receiving tidings of its progress. His rebellion. Ahithophel, one of his chief statesmen, had joined the standard of revolt; David again commits himself to a wisdom rarely sought by statesmen: and keeping his eye firmly on the master-point of the enemy's strength, (as that wisdom alone could enable him to do,) he seems to embark his whole cause and crown on the issue of his memorable prayer, 66 That JEHOVAH would turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness." He was not disappointed. After enduring the shameful curses and personal violence of Shimei, who 18 See the peculiar provision made Deut. xxii. 23, 24. stigmatized him as a bloody man and an usurper, and, in the spirit a.m. 2981. of his best days, forbidding Abishai to resent them ;-after hearing B.C. 1023. of the violation of his wives by the counsel of Ahithophel, as predicted by Nathan, when he had outraged the honour of that statesman's own family;-after the very counsel had been given to Absalom which would have effected the final ruin of David; that counsel was overruled by a specious declamation of the secret friend of David, Hushai, who had joined himself to the advisers of Absalom; and the indignant Ahithophel hung himself! The king had now passed the Jordan, and encamped at Mahanaim, whither he summoned all his troops, and placing them under the joint command of Joab, Abishai, Ittai, and himself, prepared to go forth with them to the contest. Absalom in the interim had conferred the command of his forces upon Amasa, and had followed his father to the wood of Ephraim. The adherents of David remonstrating with him, on the needless exposure of his person which might ensue in a general engagement, he finally agreed to wait with a reserved force in the town of Mahanaim; and the day of this most unnatural strife approached. Peculiar imbecility would appear to have attended all the measures of Absalom; we read scarcely of any orderly resistance which his forces made; "the battle was scattered over all the face of the country," 20,000 of his followers fell, and "the wood devoured more people that day than the sword." In the sequel this aspiring prince himself was found suspended by his hair in an oak, which had thus entangled him in his flight, and Joab receiving the intelligence, came up and despatched His death. him there. Against this catastrophe David had so far expressly provided as to enjoin upon all his followers to spare the prince; and received the tidings of his death with heartfelt agony. O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom my son, my son! were the bitter strains which he repeated'; and until roused by the unfeeling threats of Joab, seemed hardly sensible that he had regained a kingdom, and had still the arduous task of ruling it. Returning to Jerusalem over the Jordan, he was now met by the abject Shimei, suing for his life, which David promised him; by the grateful Mephibosheth, who came to refute the calumny with which Ziba had met David on his retreat; and by Barzillai, a Gadite, who had munificently supplied him with provisions at Mahanaim. But an unhappy jealousy arose between the men of a.m. 2982. Judah and the other tribes. The former had been most active in B.c. 1022. bringing back the king, and their brethren were angry that they were not specially invited to join them. An artful political incendiary, Sheba, availed himself of this inflamed state of the popular Sheba's mind; and the king had scarcely seated himself at Jerusalem when the great body of the tribes again revolted from him. Amasa, the former general of Absalom, who on his defeat had been peculiarly revolt. A.M. 2982. active in securing the tribe of Judah to the king, was now called B.C. 1022. upon to head the army; but being somewhat dilatory in his measures, A.M. 2983. a reinforcement was sent out, including the troops under the immediate command of Joab. This powerful chief once more becomes an assassin. Jealous of Amasa's present distinction, he stabbed him in a friendly embrace, and to silence the anticipated resentment of the king, proceeds after Sheba, and quickly brings back his head. A famine now occurred throughout the whole of the dominions of David for three successive years. Inquiring the cause, he was answered by the divine oracle, that it was for Saul and his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites; a people, it will be recollected, whom Joshua, the ancient commander of the tribes, swore to spare from the general fate of the Canaanites. By the same authority he seems to have been directed to order the execution of seven of Saul's surviving posterity, (indeed Josephus asserts it expressly,) and the famine ceased. Three years after this period there was a short war renewed with B.C. 1021. the Philistines, chiefly remarkable for the personal danger in which David was thrown by another of the Philistine giants, from whom he so narrowly escaped, that the people resolved he should go out personally to battle no more. Four other men of remarkable stature and strength, (all of them probably of the family of Goliath, and one of them expressly called his brother,) fell at this time by the hand of David's servants and generals. Numbering the people, and its consequences. David A.M. 2987. Another great public error produces a final public chastisement of B.C. 1017. David and his people. The most probable account of this appears to be that suggested by Delaney. The Israelites were commanded by the Mosaic law, whenever the people were numbered, to pay half-ashekel into the sanctuary for every man twenty years old. now seems to have ordered this census without paying the Mosaic ransom, and God immediately visited it as an act of pride and presumption. Of three evils, he was commanded to choose one; whether he would endure three years famine in the land, three days' pestilence, or flee three months before his enemies. He seems hardly to have chosen either in the general expression of his resignation to God's will, Let us fall now into the hand of the Lord for his mercies are great, and let me not fall into the hand of man; but he evidently inclined toward that judgment which came most immediately from God's hand-the pestilence. Accordingly a plague ensued which destroyed, in less than the short interval threatened, 70,000 men from Dan to Beersheba; a calamity without a parallel in history. To the deeply-penitent monarch a vision of appeased wrath was at last granted:-to an angel hovering between heaven and earth with a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem, he heard the welcome address go forth-IT IS ENOUGH!-and distinguished the spot by the purchase of the estate over which the awful messen ger was standing, and the sacrifice of numerous burnt-offerings to A.M. 2987. Jehovah; declaring, at the same time, that this must be the spot on B.C. 1017. which the future temple of God should be most acceptably erected. for the temple. Our limits will not permit us to dwell on the catalogue of materials Preparations for this building which David now reduced to order, or the actual preparations for that work which he commenced. Suffice it to observe, that the noiseless fabric which grew afterwards together, as a holy temple unto God, was begun full two years before his death; that a complete schedule of the necessary works, and all the means of accomplishing them, were handed over by this prince to Solomon; and that his dying charge to that monarch, (now declared his successor,) and to the assembled people, respected their grateful and careful use of them. charge to Solomon. The brief and indecorous attempts of Adonijah to disturb the arrangements of his dying father, as more properly belonging to the reign of Solomon, are given in a subsequent article. It remains but to notice some two or three personal particulars of the last charge of David's David to Solomon, which have been thought to exhibit a duplicity unworthy his character. That he should direct the speedy punishment of JOAB for the crimes he specifies, the murder of Abner and Amasa, can surely need no apology; or that he gratefully remembered the attentions of Barzillai. But a difficulty has been found in reconciling the instruction to Solomon respecting Shimei, with David's oath to that worthless person, that he should not die for his former crimes. We submit to the reader, that David himself very prominently names that oath in his charge to Solomon on this occasion, which there could have been no conceivable motive to do, had he meant that it should be violated; that he means to describe his true moral character, as it afterwards was fully confirmed, when he says, but "hold him not guiltless," which he certainly was not; that the appeal to Solomon's wisdom had been useless ("for now thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him,") had no discretion been left with him, nothing but a plain direction to punish; and that the construction of the whole, therefore, fairly is, that the particular observation of Solomon must be directed toward this quarter, in which David plainly saw he would find reason at last to inflict the vengeance which he did.19 David died in peace at Jerusalem, in the seventy-first year of his Death age, thirty-three of which he had reigned over the whole people of A.m. 2989. Israel, and seven over the united tribes of Judah and Benjamin, at B.C. 1015. his capital in Hebron. What shall we say of a character which the advocates of infidelity present with some new shade of deformity to every age? That it 19 Delaney contends, that the particle rendered, connectively in our received Version, should be translated disjunctively, as in Prov. xxx. 8, when the charge would run thus, "Now, therefore, neither S. H. hold him guiltless, (for thou art a wise A.M. 2989. has no shades of its own? There is no candid reader of this memoir B.C. 1015. of David that will suspect us of leaning to such a folly; for do the Scriptures either profess to give us more than ONE perfect model of human character, or spare any one that comes short of it? David was a poet of high natural genius, commanding a flexible and copious versification, in a comparatively barbarous age; the poets of all countries have borrowed from him, and the most distinguished of our own country have yielded him the highest praise. We first find his talents devoted to soothing the degrading and dangerous malady of a known rival; afterwards at numerous intervals they breathe forth God's praises in exile and in affliction, in defeat and in death. As the candidate for a throne to which he was divinely appointed, he spends the noon-tide warmth of life upon lessons of patience, moderation, and unparalleled forbearance; possessing the throne of Judah and Benjamin, the most powerful of all the tribes, and more than equal under his administration to the forces of all the rest, he waits from thirty years of age to forty for the full establishment of his kingdom after the death of Saul. Brave and skilful in war, the habit of his soul was peace; successful as a commander, he is most conspicuous for his pious dependence upon God; as a friend his attachment to Jonathan never was surpassed; as an enemy his conduct to Saul is matchless; born in obscurity, he left his son the richest prince of his age; nursed in adversity, his counsels were remembered and practised by the wisest and most prosperous of men. "In youth a hero," as Delaney finely closes his character, "in manhood a monarch; in age a saint! This is DAVID. What his revilers are their own revilings tell!" |
