"not," that is, they considered not, and therefore acted as if they had not known, the wonders which God had wrought for Israel. The temptations to intermarry with their neighbours, and adopt their manners and worship, were too powerful for their unsteady and carnal minds. The beauty of the women of Canaan; the pomp and gaiety of their festivals; the voluptuousness of their impure rites: the hope of gratifying their curiosity for prying into futurity, by idolatrous divinations; the overpowering fears impressed on their souls by idolatrous superstition; their anxiety to conciliate the favour of those divinities, who were represented to them as the peculiar guardian gods of the country which they were newly settled in; these and other similar motives, adapted, if I may so speak, to childish understandings, childish feelings, and childish appetites, demanded an immediate and strict discipline to counteract their influence, and preserve, amidst this backsliding and unstable people, the main principles of religion and morality, notwithstanding their continual propensity to corrupt the purity of both. And we evidently perceive, that the system of divine government exercised over the Jews, under their judges, was exactly adapted to their situation and their moral character. For the sacred history relates,* that "the children of Israel dwelt "amongst the Canaanites, and took their daughters to be their "wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served "their gods, and did evil in the sight of the Lord. And the "anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he sold "them into the hands of their enemies, as the Lord had said "and as he had sworn unto them and they were greatly dis"tressed. And when they cried unto the Lord, he raised up "judges; and then the Lord was with the judge, and delivered "them out of the hands of their enemies all the days of the judge. And it came to pass when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their "fathers; and ceased not from their own doings, nor from "their stubborn way.' That the government of the Israelites required this occasional interposition of God, in appointing the supreme magistrate, appears as well from the tenor of the sacred history, as the testimony of Josephus ;† who remarks, "That as they got large tributes from the Canaanites, and were indisposed for taking pains, by their luxury, they suffered their Joseph. Antiq. Book. V. sect. vii. 66 66 66 *Judges ii. iii. : proce "aristocracy to be corrupted also; and did not ordain them"selves a senate, nor any other such magistrates as their laws "had formerly required." Here then either the Divinity must have incessantly interposed, never suffering a moment to pass without placing at the head of the Jews a vicegerent supported by all the terrors of the divine power, to restrain them forcibly from yielding to their idolatrous and vicious propensities, thus counteracting their whole moral character;-a mode of dure altogether unexampled in God's government, and indeed it should seem inconsistent with the very idea of a moral governor-or, he must altogether have abandoned them to the influence of those propensities, which would have speedily plunged them irretrievably in idolatry and vice with the rest of the world, and defeated the entire purpose of the divine economy; or, lastly, he must have taken that course which the sacred history declares he did, appointing occasionally vicegerents, as circumstances called for their interposition; and supporting the authority of his law, by thus visibly controlling the nation, and proportioning their prosperity and adversity to the degree of obedience which they voluntarily yielded to that law; and habituating them to look up immediately to his protection, without interposing any permanent human authority on which they might be too apt exclusively to depend, and thus forget their God. Such was the system of divine administration over the Jews under their Judges. Thus the chosen people, who were, as it should seem (like all the nations of that period) mere children in religion and morality, were treated as children, kept in a state of tutelage under the constant guardianship and occasional correction of their heavenly Father; taught to feel experimentally their total dependence upon his protection; taught to feel that none of their chiefs or elders possessed power or wisdom to govern and defend them, except as they were raised to the supreme authority, and maintained in it by God himself. That this system was as effectual in securing the obedience of the Jews to the divine law, as from their situation and character we could reasonably expect, may appear, when we recollect, that of* four hundred and fifty years which elapsed from the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan by *It is not easy to be accurate in the statement of these periods of prosperity and good conduct, adversity and punishment; because that sometimes part of the Joshua, to the first election of a king in the person of Saul, when taken together, distinct from the intervals of occasional relapses into idolatry, above three hundred and fifty seem to have passed under the government of the various judges, whom God raised up at different periods, to recall his people from their errors, and retain them in the observance of his Law. And children of Israel transgressed the divine Law, and were punished distinct from the rest. Thus it is recorded, Judges, x. 7. 8. "That the Lord delivered Israel into "the hands of the children of Ammon, and they oppressed them eighteen years, all "the children of Israel which were on the other side Jordan, in the land of the "Amorites." Something similar to this appears to have been the case in the `deliverance wrought by Shamgar, Judges iii. 31; and even the servitude to Jabin, king of Canaan, Judges iv. 2, does not appear to have been universal, though it is said he mightily oppressed the children of Israel; for it is said "Deborah judged Israel at that time." But the following periods appear to have been clearly periods of tranquillity, during which the Israelites lived under their own law. From the time when Joshua took the whole land, and the land rested from war, Joshua, ch. xi. 23, about 1445 years before Christ, to the time when God delivered them into the hands of the king of Mesopotamia, about the year A. C. 1410 Judges, iii. 11-the land had peace under Othniel iii. 30-under Ehud and his successors v. 31-under Deborah and Barak, and their successors -viii. 28-under Gideon 35 years. 40 ditto. 80 ditto. 40 ditto. 40 ditto. 23 ditto. 22 ditto. 7 ditto. 7 ditto. 10 ditto. 8 ditto. 25 ditto. 337 Total Without taking into the amount the forty years during which Eli had judged Israel, 1 Sam. iv. 18, during which the worship of the true God, and the observance of the law, had been in a great measure preserved, though not perfectly; this would make the period during which the law of Moses was the regular established religion of Israel, 377 years out of the 450 under the Judges; and it must be recollected, that it was always the religion of probably a great multitude of the people, though the public idolatry of others brought down the judgments of God and above all, let it not be forgotten, that those idolators did not renounce the worship of Jehovah, but only added to it the worship of idols. They corrupted, but never entirely forsook, their national religion; and such corruption never implied any doubt of its divine original, or any positive disbelief of the Mosaic miracles. If with Usher in his Chronology, and others, we suppose the periods of tranquillity above to have been only partial, we must also admit the idolatries through the entire period of the Judges to have been also partial, and the argument will be unaffected. that during the lives of each of these judges, there was no material apostasy from the national religion, and no material interruption of the public tranquility and prosperity by these punishments, which always attended such apostasy. It is peculiarly necessary to notice this circumstance, because, by a superficial reader of the sacred history, the whole period under the judges may be easily mistaken as one uninterrupted series of idolatries and crimes; from his not observing that the lapses which incurred punishment, and the divine deliverances which attended repentance, are related so fully and distinctly as to occupy almost the entire narrative; while very long periods, when, under the government of their judges, "the people followed "God, and the land enjoyed peace," are passed over in a single verse, as productive of no occurrence which required a particular detail. The situation of the Jewish nation, during the government of its judges, seems calculated to promote the efficacy of that system of discipline under which it was placed, by the very circumstance which at first view appears most repugnant to it, the want of a close union and common interest between the different tribes. If, on the one side, this prevented them from regularly uniting under a common leader, except when such a one was pointed out by some clear manifestation of the divine will in his appointment, and divine aid in his support, and thus left them both as tribes and individuals, to do what was "right in their own eyes,”* without any immediate visible and regular control; this very circumstance on the other hand, enabled the Deity to exhibit more conspicuously the operation of that particular providence, which he had declared should distribute temporal prosperity and calamity according to the degree of obedience or disobedience to the Mosaic Law; and which not only the people collectively, but each distinct tribe and family should manifest; and thus gradually to imprint more deeply on the whole nation the necessity of obedience to the divine will, by examples within their immediate observance, and the full force of which they could distinctly comprehend. Now the exercise of such a particular providence over a numerous and widely-extended nation, where one supreme government from the very first had uniformly controlled the entire, and rendered each tribe and family less obviously the masters * Judges, xvii. 6. of their own conduct, must have been more gradual and extended in its operation, and less plainly discriminative and observable, than in the situation of the Jews under their judges. This circumstance though not noticed (as far as I can recollect) by writers on this subject, appears to me to have been the most decided effect, and therefore to supply the most satisfactory explanation of this part of the divine economy. And be it observed, that this mode of exhibiting the particular providence of God in the distribution of temporal blessings, was the more necessary, as the Jewish people was the only one which acknowledged the authority of Jehovah, or expected any such administration of providence. All the surrounding nations looked up to their own idols as their guardian gods; and the general superiority of Jehovah over these had been sufficiently displayed in the circumstances attending the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, and their settlement in Canaan. But it was still requisite that it should be proved, that merely belonging to the chosen people, and acknowledging the general authority of Jehovah, would be insufficient to secure his protection, except to this was added an humble and vigilant obedience to that law which God had promulgated, and by the observance of which alone the purposes of the divine economy could be completely fulfilled. That this plan was pursued under the judges, in distributing prosperity or calamity to the different tribes, according to their good or ill conduct, we have many instances. Thus we are told that* Judah and Simeon went to attack and dispossess the Canaanites who were remaining in the territory allotted for their inheritance; and that the Lord was with them, and gave their arms success as far as they continued their confidence in the divine aid. A similar observation is made with regard to the tribe of Joseph. While five other tribes are enumerated, who, indulging their own indolence, or destitute of sufficient faith in the divine aid, would not drive out the Canaanites, but were satisfied with making them tributaries. And the subsequent history shows, that this was the cause of the severest calamities to these tribes. For these nations soon became "thorns in their "sides," the instruments of the divine chastisement, merited by this disobedience, and the subsequent idolatries to which it led. * Judges, ch. i. nineteen first verses. Ibid. i. 21, 27, 29, 30, 33. + Ibid. i. 22. |