of submerging him as in a shower of dew, or of dragging the fortress in which he may have been intrenched, stone by stone, into the valley. Absalom gave way to the false counsellor, and Hushai immediately sent off his emissaries to David. Near, if not close underneath the eastern walls of Jerusalem, was a spring, known as the fullers' spring,"1 where the two sons of Zadok and Abiathar lay ensconced, waiting for their orders for the King. Thither, like the women at Jerusalem now, came, probably as if to wash or to draw water, the female slave of their fathers' house, with the secret tidings which they were to convey, urging the King to immediate flight. They crossed as fast as their swift feet could carry them over Mount Olivet. Absalom had already caught scent of them, and his runners were hard upon their track. Aside, even into the village of Bahurim, the hostile village of Shimei and Phaltiel, they darted. In it was a friendly house which they sought. In its court, they climbed down a well, over the mouth of which their host's wife spread a cloth with a heap of corn, and with an equivocal reply turned aside the pursuers. The youths hasted on down the pass, woke up the King from his sleep, called upon him to cross 'the water,' and before the break of day, the whole party were in safety on the farther side. It has been conjectured with much probability that as the first sleep of that evening was commemorated in the 4th Psalm, so in the 3rd is expressed the feeling of David's thankfulness at the final close of those twenty-four hours of which every detail has been handed down, as if with the consciousness of their importance at the time. He had 'laid him down in peace' that night and slept;' for in that great defection of man, 'the Lord alone had caused him to 1 En-rogel, either the present 'well of Joab,' or more probably the 'Spring of the Virgin.' See EN-ROGEL, in Dictionary of the Bible. 2 So the river is apparently called, both in xvii. 20 and 21. Death of Ahithophel. 'dwell in safety. He had laid down and slept and awaked, for the Lord had sustained him.' The tradition of the Septuagint ascribes the 143rd Psalm to the time when his 'son was pursuing him.' Some at least of its contents might well belong to that night. Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.'Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul ' unto thee.' 1 6 3 There is another group of Psalms-the 41st, the 55th, the 69th, and the 109th, in which a long popular belief has seen an amplification of David's bitter cry, 'O Lord, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.' Many of the circumstances agree. The dreadful imprecations in those Psalms-unequalled for vehemence in any other part of the sacred writings-correspond with the passion of David's own expressions. The greatness, too, of Ahithophel himself in the history is worthy of the importance ascribed to the object of those awful maledictions. That oracular wisdom, which made his house a kind of shrine, seems to move the spirit of the sacred writer with an involuntary admiration. Everywhere he is treated with a touch of awful reverence. When he dies, the interest of the plot ceases, and his death is given with a stately grandeur, quite unlike the mixture of the terrible and the contemptible which has sometimes gathered round the end of those whom the religious sentiment of mankind has placed under its ban. "When he saw 'that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass'the ass, on which he, like all the magnates of Israel except the royal family, made his journeys, he mounted the southern hills, in which his native city lay, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried,' 1 Ps. cxliii. 2, 8. 2 2 Sam. xv. 31. Ibid. xvi. 23. not like an excommunicated outcast, but like a venerable Patriarch, in the sepulchre of his father.' With the close of that eventful day, a cloud rests on the subsequent history of the rebellion. For three months longer it seems to have lasted. Absalom was formally anointed King. Amasa-his cousin, but by his father's side of wild 3 Arabian blood-took the command of the army, which, according to Hushai's counsel, had been raised from the whole country, and with this he crossed the Jordan in pursuit of the King. 5 Maha David meantime was secure in the fortress of Mahanaim, David at the ancient Trans-Jordanic sanctuary, which had formerly naim. sheltered the rival house of Saul. Three potentates of that pastoral district came forward at once to his support. Shobi, the son of David's ancient friend Nahash, king of Ammon, perhaps put by David in his brother Hanun's place; Machir, the son of Ammiel, the former protector of Mephibosheth; Barzillai, an aged chief of vast wealth and influence, perhaps the father of Adriel, the husband of Merab. Their connexion with David's enemies, whether of the house of Saul or of Ammon, was overbalanced by earlier alliances with David, or by their respect for himself personally. They brought, with the profuse liberality of Arabs, the butter, cheese, wheat, barley, flour, parched corn, beans, lentiles, pulse, honey, sheep, with which the forests and pastures of Gilead abounded, and on which the historian dwells as if he had been himself one of the hungry and weary and thirsty' who had revelled in the delightful stores thus placed thus placed before them. 'The fearfulness ' and trembling' which had been upon David were now over. He had fled on the wings of a dove far away into 'the wilderness,' and was at rest. His spirit revived Jerome (Qu. Heb. on 2 Sam. xvii. 27). 5 1 Sam. xviii. 19; 2 Sam. xxi. 8. Death of within him. He arranged his army into three divisions. Joab and Abishai commanded two. The third, where we might have expected to find Benaiah, was under the faithful Ittai. For a moment, the King wished to place himself at their head. But his life was worth ten thousand men,' and he accordingly remained behind in the fortress. The first battle took place in the forest of Ephraim.' The exact spot of the conflict, the origin of the 'name, so strange on the east of the Jordan, the details of the engagement, are alike unknown. We see only the close, which has evidently been preserved from the mournful interest which it awakened in the national mind. In the interlacing thickets, so unusual on the west of the Jordan, so abundant on the east, which the Ammonite wars had made familiar to David's veterans, the host of Absalom lost its way. Absalom riding at full speed on his royal mule suddenly met a detachment of David's army, and darting aside through the wood, was caught by the head-possibly entangled by his long hair -between the thick boughs of an overhanging tree, known by the name of The Great Terebinth,' swept off the animal, and there remained suspended. None of the ordinary soldiers ventured to attack the helpless Prince. Joab alone took upon himself the responsibility of breaking David's orders. He and his ten attendants formed a circle round the gigantic tree, enclosing its precious victim, and first by his three pikes, then by their swords, accomplished the bloody work. Hard by was a well-known ditch or pit, of vast dimensions. Into this the corpse was thrown, and covered by a huge mound of stones. Mussulman legends represent hell as yawning at the moment of his Unless it be connected with the strong fortress, apparently in the neighbourhood of Bethshean, which in the later history is called Ephron (1 Macc. v. 46; 2 Macc. xii. 27). The same transformation from Ephrain to Ephron actually exists in the Text of the Bible, in the case of a 2 Sam. xviii. 9 (Heb. and LXX. ). death beneath the feet of the unhappy Prince. The modern Jews,' as they pass the monument in the valley of the Kidron, to which they have given his name, have buried its sides deep in the stones which they throw against it in execration. Augustine dooms him to perdition, as a type of the Donatists. But the sacred writer is moved only to deep compassion. The thought of that sad death of the childless Prince, of the desolate cairn in the forest instead of the honoured grave that he had designed for himself in the King's dale,-probably beside his beloved sheep walks on the hills of Ephraim,-blots out the remembrance of the treason and rebellion, and every detail is given to enhance the pathos of the scene which follows. 2 The King sate waiting for tidings between the two gates which connected the double city of the Two Camps' of Mahanaim. In the tower above the gates, as afterwards at Jezreel, stood a watchman, to give notice of what he saw. Two messengers, each endeavouring to outstrip the other, were seen running from the forest. The first who arrived was Ahimaaz, the fleet son of Zadok, whose peculiar mode of running was known far and wide through the country. He had been instructed by Joab not to make himself the bearer of tidings so mournful, and eager as he had been to fulfil his character of a good messenger, and dexterously as he had outstripped his forerunner by the choice of his route3 -when it came to the point his heart failed, and he spoke only of the strange confusion in which he had left the army. At this moment the other messenger, a stranger-probably an Ethiopian slave, perhaps one of Joab's ten attendants — burst in, and abruptly revealed the fatal news. The passionate burst of grief which followed is one of the best 4 They represent the monument to have been erected between his capture and his death. (Jerome, Qu. Heb. ad loc.) 22 Sam. xviii. 27, and possibly 23 (Ewald, iii. 237). Ibid. 23, but the phrase is very obscure. The Cushite,' 2 Sam. xviii. 21, 22, 31, 32, 33 (Heb.). |