In spite of this unpleasant suspicion, there was no open rupture between the King and the Priestly order so long as his benefactor Jehoiada lived. Their joint rule, almost as of father and son, must have resembled the one parallel in the Christian church, when Michael Romanoff as Czar, and his father Philaret as Patriarch of Moscow, ruled the church and state of Russia. Jehoiada lived to a great old age, and Death of on his death his services, as preserver of the royal dynasty Jehoiada. and as restorer of the Temple worship, were esteemed so highly, that he received an honour allowed to no other subject in the Jewish monarchy. He was buried in state within the walls of Jerusalem,2 in the royal sepulchres. The reign of Joash, which had been lit up by so romantic a beginning, was darkened by a tragical end. Though only told in the Chronicles, it agrees so well with human nature, and with the circumstances of the case, that it deserves close consideration. On Jehoiada's death, the Jewish aristocracy, who perhaps had never been free from the licentious and idolatrous taint introduced by Rehoboam, and confirmed by Athaliah, and who may well have been galled by the new rise of the Priestly order, presented themselves before Joash, and offered him the same obsequious homage that had been paid by the young nobles to Rehoboam. He, irritated, it may be, by the ambiguous conduct of the Priests in the affair of the restoration of the Temple, and feeling himself released from personal obligations by the death of his adopted father, threw himself into their hands. Athaliah was avenged almost on the spot where she had been first seized by her enemies. That fierce blood which she had inherited from her parents ran in the veins of her grandson :- For the difficulties attending the age of Jehoiada, stated, in 2 Chr. xxiv. 15, to be 130, see Lord Arthur Hervey's Genealogies, p. 113. II. D D Indocile à ton joug, fatigué de ta loi, So Athaliah is well conceived as predicting the future of Joash on the day of her first encounter with him. Once more the degrading worship of Baal and Astarte appeared in Judah. Against this apostacy Prophetic warnings 2 were raised, now more common in Judah than a century before. One of these came from a quarter which, from the King at least, ought to have commanded respect. With Joash, when a child in the Temple, had been brought up the sons of Jehoiada. One of these, Zechariah,3 had succeeded his father in the office of High Priest. On him, as he stood high above the worshippers in the Temple, the Prophetic spirit descended; and he broke out into a vehement remonstrance Murder of against the desertion of the God of their fathers. At the command of the King, when he heard of this—it may be, at his hasty words, like those of our Henry II.-the nobles or the people rushed upon Zechariah, and with stones-probably from the Temple repairs-stoned him to death. His last words were remembered-JEHOVAH, look upon it, and require it.' The spot where he fell was traditionally shown in the sacred space between the great porch of the Temple and the brazen altar. The act produced a profound impression. It was a later Jewish tradition, but one which marks the popular feeling, that this crowning crime of the house of Judah took place on the Sabbath-day, on the great Day of Atonement, and that its marks were never to be effaced. It was believed that when the Babylonian general entered the Zechariah. 1 Racine, Athalie, Act v. sc. 6. 2 Chr. xxiv. 20 (LXX. Azariah); and see 1 Chr. vi. 11. Ibid. 22; Matt. xxii. 35. 2 Temple on the day of its capture: he saw blood bubbling up from the pavement, and on being told that it was the blood of calves, rams, and lambs, he slew an animal of each kind on the spot. Their blood bubbled not, but that still bubbled on. They then told him that it was a Prophet, Priest, and Judge, who had foretold all that they had suffered from him, and who had been murdered by them. Nebuzaradan then slew on the place, by thousands, the rabbis, school-children, and young priests, yet still it was not quiet. Then he said, ‘0 Zechariah, Zechariah, thou hast destroyed the best of thy people, wouldst thou have me destroy all?' Then it ceased to bubble. The sacredness of the person and of the place, the concurrent guilt of the whole nation-king, nobles, and people the ingratitude of the chief instigator, the culmination of the long tragedy of the house of Omri, the position which the story held in the Jewish canon, as the last great murder in the last 3 book of the Old Testament, all conspired to give it the peculiar significance with which it is recorded in the Gospels as closing the catalogue of unrighteous deaths from the blood of righteous Abel to the 'blood of Zachariah... who was slain between the Temple and the altar.' It is a striking instance of the high tone. even of the most sacerdotal of the sacred books, that the judgment which fell on Joash was believed to have descended, not because he had murdered a High Priest, but because he had broken one of the eternal laws of natural affection — 6 ' he remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada his father ' had done to him, but slew his son.'5 The formidable Syrian king, Hazael, not content with his 'Talmud, Taanith, quoted by Lightfoot on Matt. xxiii. 35. In Mussulman traditions he is coupled not only with Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, but with John himself (Jelaladdin, 292). 'The Chronicles, which stand last in the Jewish Canon. Luke xi. 51; Matt. xxiii. 35. 'Jehoiada' was read in the Nazarene Gospel. Barachiah was probably substituted to accommodate it to the murder in Joseph. B. J. iv. 6, §8, 52 Chr. xxiv. 22, ravages of the northern kingdom, made a sudden descent on the south. Not Jerusalem itself, but its Philistine dependency Gath was his first object. In this he succeeded, and then turned towards Jerusalem. A disgraceful defeat ensued. A large army of Jews fled before a small army of Syrians. Many of the aristocracy perished, or were taken prisoners. The conqueror was only bought off from Jerusalem by the surrender of all the sacred treasures which had been accumulated since the last confiscation of them for a like object by Asa.1 The King sank into the languor of complicated disease, and, whilst he was in this state, he was attacked on his bed, in the fortress of Millo, by two of his guards, whose names are variously given-of Ammonite and Moabite extraction to avenge the blood of Zechariah. It was not 3 till his son Amaziah was firmly seated on the throne that the murderers were punished; and then (with a mercy shown apparently for the first time in the Hebrew annals) their children were spared. Joash himself, according to the more favourable version, was buried in the royal sepulchres: according to the darker view of his reign, he was excluded from them, though his corpse was allowed to remain within the walls of the city of David. So ended the last remains of the great struggle of the House of Omri for power. So was preserved the House of David through the fiercest struggles, inward and outward, that it witnessed till its final overthrow. So was confirmed the establishment of the Priesthood in the heart of the monarchy. 405 LECTURE XXXVI. THE JEWISH PRIESTHOOD. THE character and history of the Prophetic office has been already described. The time is now reached when another and very different institution comes into view, not for the first time, but with the first direct demand upon our attention, as a ruling power in the State and Church of Judah. Of all the ordinances of sacred antiquity, the Priesthood is perhaps the one in which the faculty of seeing differences' is the most needed. The use of the same 2 name in most See Lectures XIX., XX. The Hebrew word Cohen (of which the exact meaning is unknown) corresponds, though with some important differences, to the Greek Hiereus and the Latin sacerdos. But in English, German, Italian, Spanish, and ordinary French, these words are rendered by Priest, or the cognate words derived from the Greek Presbyter, elder'— which designates an office both in the Old and New Testament, quite different from that of the Cohen, and which in common Greek has no connection at all with religious functions. This confusion has further been increased by the application of the word 'Priest' in most modern languages, not only to the Jewish Cohen, but to the second of the three orders of the Christian clergy. It is true that in the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland and Germany, the word is not applied to their own ministers. But even by them it is applied to the clergy of the Greek and Roman Catholic Church, who apply it also to themselves. The English Protestant version has avoided this confusion by using the word elder' as the translation of Presbyter, and the word Priest' only as the translation of Hiereus. But the English Roman Catholic version (Douay), whilst it occasionally translated Presbyter by 'ancient,' has often translated it by 'Priest,' the same word that it employs for the translation of Hiereus. In the French Protestant version, the use of sacrificateur for Hiereus and Cohen has avoided this confusion, though they have complicated the translation of Presbyter by making it sometimes pasteur and sometimes ancien. This word sacrificateur is misleading only from its implying as a constant act what only belongs to a portion of the history of the office. For the whole |