bellica! It was not only an adaptation, but a repetition, of the original feeling of David, when we ourselves heard the dirge of Abner, sung over the grave of the hero of our own age: 'The king himself followed the bier, and the king said ' unto his servants, Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?' Fitly has this special portion of the sacred narrative been made the foundation of those solemn strains of funeral music, which will for ever associate the Dead March of such celebrations with the name of Saul. And the probable mode of the preservation of David's elegy adds another stroke of pathos to the elegy itself. Jonathan was, as we have seen, distinguished as the mighty Archer of the Archer tribe. To introduce this favourite weapon of his friend into his own less apt tribe of Judah, was David's tribute to Jonathan's memory. 'He bade them teach the children of Judah the bow,' and whilst they were so taught, they sang (so we must infer from the context) 'the song of the bow'-'the bow which ' never turned back from the slain.' By those young soldiers of Judah, this song was handed on from generation to generation, till it landed safe at last in the sacred books, to be enshrined for ever as the monument of the friendship of David and Jonathan. Let us listen to it as it was then repeated by the archers of the Israelite army. The wild roe, O Israel, on thy high places is slain : How are the mighty fallen! Tell ye it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon, For there was the shield of the mighty vilely cast away— So David sang of the battle on Gilboa. Then came the lament over the two chiefs, as he knew them of old in their conflicts with their huge unwieldy foes: From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty,' The bow 2 of Jonathan turned not back, And the sword of Saul returned not empty. Then the stream of sorrow divides, and he speaks of each separately. First, he turns to the Israelite maidens, who of old had welcomed the king back from his victories, and bids them mourn over the depth of their loss. Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, 3 Than eagles they were swifter, than lions more 3 strong. Ye daughters of Israel weep for Saul, Who clothed you in scarlet, with delights, Who put ornaments of gold on your apparel 1— How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Then, as the climax of the whole, the national sorrow merges itself in the lament of the friend for his friend, of the heart pressed with grief for the death of more than a friend a brother; for the love that was almost miraculous," like a special work of God. O Jonathan, on thy high places thou wast slain! I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan. Pleasant hast thou been to me, exceedingly! Wonderful was thy love to me, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen! And perished the weapons of war! In the greatness and the reverse of the house of Saul, is the culmination and catastrophe of the tribe of Benjamin. The Christian Fathers used to dwell on the old prediction which 1 See Lecture XVI. p. 363, and Lecture XXII. p. 55. * See p. 16. 3 See ibid. • See This is the force of the word translated 'wonderful.' Saul of 1 describes the character of that tribe- Benjamin shall ravin " as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and in the evening he shall divide the spoil.' These words well sum up the strange union of fierceness and of gentleness, of sudden resolves for good and evil, which run, as hereditary qualities often do run, through the whole history of that frontier clan. Such were its wild adventures in the time of the Judges; such was Saul the first king; such was Shimei, of the house of Saul, in his bitterness and his repentance; such was the divided allegiance of the tribe to the rival houses of Judah and Ephraim; such was the union of tenderness and vindictiveness in the characters of Mordecai and Esther, if not actual descendants of Shimei and Kish, as they appear in the history of Saul, at least claiming to be of the same tribe, and reckoning amongst the list of their ancestors the same renowned names.2 3 And is it a mere fancy to trace with those same Christian writers the last faint likeness of this mixed history, when, after a lapse of many centuries, the tribe once more for a moment rises to our view-in the second Saul, also of the tribe of 3 Benjamin ?—Saul of Tarsus, who, like the first, was at one time moved by a zeal not according to knowledge, with a fury bordering almost on frenzy and who, like the first, startled all his contemporaries by appearing among the Prophets, the herald of the faith which once he destroyed; but, unlike the first, persevered in that faith to the end, the likeness in the Christian Church, not of what Saul was, but of what he might have been the true David, restorer and enlarger of the true kingdom of God upon earth. 1 Gen. xlix. 27. Esth. ii. 5. viii. 6, 7. Philippians iii. 5. DAVID. XXII. THE YOUTH OF DAVID XXIII. THE REIGN OF DAVID. XXIV. THE FALL OF DAVID. XXV. THE PSALTER OF DAVID. I. The original contemporary authorities: 1. The Davidic portion of the Psalms, including such fragments as are preserved to us from other sources, viz. 2 Sam. i. 19–27, iii. 33, 34, xxii. 1-51, xxiii. 1-7.1 2. The 'Chronicles' or 'State-papers' of David (1 Chr. xxvii. 24), and the original works of Samuel, Gad, and Nathan (1 Chr. xxix. 29). These are lost, but portions of them no doubt are preserved in II. The narrative of 1 Sam. xvi. to 1 Kings ii. 11; with the supplementary notices contained in 1 Chr. xi. 1 to xxix. 30. III. The two slight notices in the heathen historians, Nicolaus of Damascus in his Universal History (Josephus, Ant. vii. 5, §2), and Eupolemus in his History of the Kings of Judah (Eusebius, Praep. Ev. ix. 30). IV. David's apocryphal writings, contained in Fabricius, Codex Pseudepigraphus Vet. Test. 905, 1000-1005:-(1) Ps. cli., on his victory over Goliath. (2) Colloquies with God, (a) on madness, (b) on his temptation, and (c) on the building of the Temple. (3) A charm against fire. V. The Jewish traditions, which may be divided into three classes :— 1. Those embodied by Josephus, Ant. vi. 8 to vii. 15. 2. Those preserved in the Quæstiones Hebraica in Libros Regum et Paralipomenon, attributed to Jerome. 3. The Rabbinical traditions in the Seder Olam, chap. xiii., xiv., and in the comments thereon, collected by Meyer, 452–622; also those in Calmet's Dictionary, under 'David.' VI. The Mussulman traditions are contained in the Koran, ii. 250-252, xxi. 80, xxii. 15, xxxiv. 10, xxxviii. 16–24, and explained in Lane's Selections from the Kuran, 226-242; or amplified in Weil's Biblical Legends, Eng. Tr. 152-170. 1 The Davidic titles of the Psalms represent the Jewish tradition respecting them; they are affixed to Psalms iii.-ix., xi.-xxxii., xxxiv. -xli., li.-lxv., lxviii.-lxx., lxxii., lxxxvi., ci., ciii., cviii.-ex., cxxii., exxiv., cxxxi., cxxxiii., cxxxviii., cxlv. Those which Ewald (in the Dichter des alten Bundes) pronounces to be unquestionably David's, or of David's time, are Psalms ii., iii., iv., vii., viii., xi., xv., xviii., xix., xx., xxiv., xxix., xxxii., ci., cx. 2 Whether these are works by those prophets, or respecting them, is doubtful. See Mr. Twisleton's article on the Books of Samuel, in the Dictionary of the Bible. |