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The north and the south, thou hast created them:

Tabor and Hermon rejoice in thy name.

Thou hast a mighty arm;

Strong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand.1

Psalm 42 has commonly been interpreted as the sad cry of one of the exiles carried to Babylon in 597 or 586 B.C. Its bitter sorrow over the apparent helplessness of God to care for his people is in thought and expression identical with that which found utterance at the time of the great exile. On the other hand, the picture of deep calling unto deep at the noise of thy waterfalls has seemed strange in a poem, the occasion of which is the last glimpse of Palestine from a shoulder of Hermon. It may be that the nucleus of the poem was a song in honor of God manifest in the wonderful living spring at Dan that constitutes one of the Jordan's sources.2 This spring, no doubt, was the ancient natural sanctuary at which migrating Dan established the Levite as priest with image and ephod and which Jeroboam I selected as the northern sanctuary for his kingdom.

O my God, my soul is cast down within me:

Therefore do I remember thee from the land of the Jordan,

And the Hermons, from the hill Mizar.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterfalls:

All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.

Yet Jehovah will command his lovingkindness in the daytime;
And in the night his song shall be with me,

Even a prayer unto the God of my life.

I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? The opening verses of 46 suggest the same sacred spot.

God is our refuge and strength,

A very present help in trouble.

Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change,

And though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,

Though the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof.

1 Psalm 89 8-13.

2 For the sacred character of springs see Chapter II, p. 14.
3 Judges 17 and 18.

4 Psalm 42 -9.

It is an attractive suggestion that the Korahite collection goes back to the old temple at Dan and that the Korahite rebellion was really the Dan schism.1

The royal marriage hymn, Psalm 45, is a notable member of this collection, and one very commonly recognized as belonging to the period of the monarchy. In the earlier part of the poem, the praise is of the royal bridegroom, while the latter part is filled with praise and admiration for the bride and hope for the princely line.

My heart overfloweth with a goodly matter;

I speak the things which I have made touching the king:
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

Thou art fairer than the children of men;

Grace is poured into thy lips :

Therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.

Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one,

Thy glory and thy majesty.

And in thy majesty ride on prosperously,

Because of truth and meekness and righteousness:

And thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.
Thine arrows are sharp;

The peoples fall under thee;

They are in the heart of the king's enemies.

Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever:

A sceptre of equity is the sceptre of thy kingdom.
Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated wickedness:
Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee

With the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia;
Out of ivory palaces stringed instruments have made thee glad.
Kings' daughters are among thy honorable women:

At thy right hand doth stand the queen in gold of Ophir.
Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear;
Forget also thine own people, and thy father's house:
So will the king desire thy beauty;

For he is thy Lord; and reverence thou him.
And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift.
The rich among the people shall entreat thy favor.
The king's daughter within the palace is all glorious:

1 This, too, is the suggestion of Dr. Peters, made in the lectures referred to above.

Her clothing is inwrought with gold.

She shall be led unto the king in broidered work:

The virgins her companions that follow her

Shall be brought unto thee.

With gladness and rejoicing shall they be led:
They shall enter into the king's palace.
Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children,

Whom thou shalt make princes in all the earth.

I will make thy name to be remembered in all generations:
Therefore shall the peoples give thee thanks for ever and ever.

There is no more complex and difficult problem in the study of Israel's ancient literature than the history of the Psalter. The editorial headings of the individual psalms suggest that back of its present division into five books lie still earlier collections which were gathered together from time to time. The duplication of certain psalms and many other indications point in the same direction as indicating a slow and complex process of compilation. In the text itself, as well as the headings, editorial work is manifest, and there is perhaps no early psalm which has not suffered considerable emendation. It is only when the later stages of the development of this great treasury of Israel's song are reached that one can speak upon its history with any approach to definiteness. It is, however, probable that somewhere in the book there are many relics of the psalmody of Northern Israel, and the Korahite and Asaphite psalters may have been collections made in the kingdom ended in 722 B.C,

With the book of Hosea, the literature of Northern Israel comes to its climax and completion. Though the development of prose writing was later in Israel than in Judah, it reached great beauty and power in the Elijah stories and in Hosea. In 721 thousands of the inhabitants of Ephraim were carried exile to remote regions and settled in separate districts where they could never again unite for effective rebellion against the rule of Assyria. Pagan peoples from other conquered districts were moved into Israel's territory, and a mixed population was formed from these and the remnants of Israel. This composite population in time learned to worship Jehovah, who had now come to be regarded as the god of the land, and ultimately became the Samaritan people.

All that has been preserved of the literature of Northern Israel was taken over and handed down by Judah. Many passages in Hosea referring to Judah come awkwardly in their context and were probably added to give the writing application to the nation which preserved it. We may well imagine that faithful followers of Jehovah fled from the self-doomed nation of Israel during its later years of anarchy and apostasy and found a refuge in Judah, and that they brought with them their literary treasures. Thus, we may suppose, the lost histories of the northern kingdom and the Elijah and Elisha stories, from which the compiler of our books of Kings got his material for the events of the north, the great Ephraimite prophetic history of the earlier times, the book of Hosea, and, it may be, collections of psalms were preserved from the destruction which must have overtaken the large body of the literature of Northern Israel in the extinction of the nation. The literary history of Northern Israel terminated just when it had entered upon its great era of prose writing.

There is no cause for wonder that no more literature has been preserved from Israel. It is, rather, difficult to see how so much could have survived the extinction of the nation, except as we believe that the influence of a nation which had produced Deborah, Samuel, Elijah, and Hosea, and which could tell in such noble verse and prose the story of its leaders, could not perish.

CHAPTER X

BEGINNINGS OF JUDEAN PROPHETIC LITERATURE

ISAIAH

(737 to 701 B.C.)

It was about the time of Hosea's latest prophecies that Isaiah began his work in Jerusalem, where the life of Jehovah's people was henceforth to centre; the year that king Uzziah died, that is, the year that Menahem assassinated Shallum in Samaria, Isaiah became aware of his mission.

Uzziah, in his later years, had been a leper, and his son Jotham had served as regent. This son survived his father two years only. Before his death, there was an alarming coalition formed against him. Damascus, which had been prostrate since its terrible defeat by Assyria in 797, had begun to revive; its natural resources made this inevitable when it was not swept by devastating war. The king, Rezin, made confederacy with Pekah of Israel against Judah, and Jotham, dying, left his twenty year old son to face this crisis. It is almost certain that the cause of the union against Judah was refusal to unite in rebellion against Assyria. Two years earlier, just before the death of Uzziah, when Menahem was king of Israel, a coalition of nineteen states, including the region from the Euphrates to Judah, had been formed to check the advance of an aggressive king on the throne of Assyria, who sought to realize the dreams of earlier kings by extending his power to the Mediterranean. This confederation had proved fruitless in checking the advance of the mighty Tiglath-pileser who appears to have marched down the coast plain of Palestine and to have reached the farthermost limits of the confederate district, while both Menahem and Uzziah paid tribute. That, too, was the year that king Uzziah died.

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