wards it was dedicated to God with the utmost solemnity by the king and the assembled people of Israel. The Lord testified his acceptance of the building thus consecrated to him by filling it with his glory: "The cloud filled the House of the Lord; so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the House of the Lord." * And afterwards God appeared unto Solomon, and declared that if the kings and the people of Israel would continue faithful in their obedience, his eyes and his heart should be on that Temple perpetually but that otherwise it should be utterly destroyed. From that time the altar in the court of the Temple became, conformably to the Divine command given unto Moses †, the established and only lawful place for offering burnt sacrifices unto God. : Notwithstanding the signal marks of Divine favour which Solomon had enjoyed, in his declining years he was seduced by his foreign wives into idolatry. And although there is great reason to believe that he afterwards repented; and in the season of his grief and remorse composed the book of Ecclesiastes, in which he feelingly proclaims the vanity of every thing except holiness: he was punished with the information that the sovereignty over ten of the tribes of Israel should be taken from his family, and given to Jeroboam, one of his officers. Immediately after the death of Solomon, the rash and intemperate answer of his son Rehoboam to the Israelites, who requested to be delivered from the burdens imposed upon them by the deceased monarch, in the latter part of his reign, was the incident employed by the hand of Providence to + Deut. xii. 11. * 1 Kings, viii. 10, 11. E effect the predicted revolution. The ten tribes revolted from the House of David: and Jeroboam became their king. Their capital, during about fifty years, was Tirzah; until the city of Samaria was built and made the royal residence of Omri. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained under the government of Rehoboam; and were joined by the sacerdotal tribe of Levi. From that time the two kingdoms, discriminated by the appellations of Israel and Judah, continued distinct: and were progressively alienated the one from the other by constant jealousies or by open hostility. This separation of the kingdoms took place about nine hundred and seventy-five years before Christ. The men of Israel were bound, pursuant to the Mosaic law, to present themselves three times in a year in solemn assembly before the Lord * at Jerusalem. But Jeroboam, fearing lest they should thus be led to return to the dominion of their former master, would not trust his power in the hands of God who had bestowed it. He "took counsel" with the irreligious politicians of his court; and received such advice as men of that description commonly give. Professing that the distance of Jerusalem rendered the attendance of his subjects there inconvenient to them, he erected two golden calves, one at Dan, the other at Bethel, two places at the opposite extremities of his dominions; and commanded his people to resort thither to offer sacrifices and to worship. Unawed by the Divine judgements denounced against him, and by those which he miraculously experienced†, he determinately persevered in the establishment of idolatry. Hence he is distinguished in subsequent parts of Holy *Deut. xvi. 16. t 1 Kings, xiii. 1. to the end. Writ by the aweful appellation of "Jeroboam, who did sin, and made Israel to sin*:" the man who deliberately renounced his allegiance to his God, and established the worship of idols among his own subjects, and was thus the author of its continuance, through many generations, until it effected the total ruin of the ten tribes. During eighteen successive reigns the throne of Jeroboam passing, chiefly by conspiracies and usurpations, into eight new families, was occupied by princes like himself; princes differing one from another in degrees of depravity, but alike resolute in adhering to the idolatrous worship of the golden calves. In vain did the Lord send prophet after prophet, and among them Elijah and Elisha, armed with the power of working stupendous miracles; and commissioned these his messengers to call the nation to repentance, and to predict the vengeance ready to fall on them if they should continue in their sins. In vain were the territories of Israel cut short and laid waste, by potent enemies raised up from time to time as ministers of the Divine vengeance. At length, in the ninth year of the reign of Hoshea, about thirty years after the foundation of Rome by Romulus, and about seven hundred and twenty-one years before Christ, the Supreme Being poured forth the fulness of his indignation on a people, whom neither chastisements nor mercies could reclaim. Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria, took the capital city Samaria, after a siege of three years; and became completely master of the whole kingdom. It was in those days a maxim of policy among eastern conquerors to remove vanquished nations to settlements far distant from their native * 1 Kings, xiv. 16. xv. 30, &c. &c. country that, all hopes of returning thither being precluded, and all local incitements calculated to stimulate the desire of independence and render slavery less tolerable being removed, the wretched captives might remain less prone to insurrection and revolt. The depopulated territories were usually replenished with colonies of inhabitants transplanted from a remote part of the dominions of the victor. Conformably to this cruel practice Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, having conquered, about twenty years before, the countries of the Gadites, the Reubenites, and the Manassites, eastward of the Jordan, together with Galilee, occupied by the tribe of Nephthali, had carried away the inhabitants into Assyria; and had placed them "in Halah, and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes." To the same cities Shalmaneser now carried the remainder of the ten tribes; and "brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof."* Of the subsequent fate of the ten tribes, thus carried into captivity, little is known unto the present hour. Many individuals of each tribe appear to have returned about two hundred years afterwards in company with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. And it is probable, that still larger numbers silently revisited Palestine in gradual succession during the continuance of the Grecian and the the Roman empires. But the great mass of the ten tribes has continued in obscurity to this day yet in that obscurity preserved, as we believe from the sure word of prophecy, against that * 1 Chron. v. 26. 1 Kings, xv. 20. 2 Kings, xvii. 6. 24. appointed period, when all Israel shall be re-united, and restored to their own land. Let us now return to the kingdom of Judah. There the sceptre invariably remained, according to the promise of God, in the hands of the family of David. The successors of Rehoboam, who, like the kings of Israel after Jeroboam during a much shorter period, were eighteen in number, were of extremely various characters. Some of them, as Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah, were bright examples of piety. Others, among whom Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Manasseh, are conspicuous, notwithstanding the denunciations of prophets and the judicial infliction of national calamities, abandoned themselves to idolatry. Manasseh, in particular, not only "built up again the high places, which Hezekiah, his father, had destroyed, and reared up altars for Baal, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them; but, as it were in defiance of the true God, "built altars in the House of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, In Jerusalem will I put my name: And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the House of the Lord; - and he set a graven image of the grove that he had made, in the House." * His conduct during this period was throughout consistent in wickedness. "He made his son to pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards;" and seduced his subjects "to do more evil than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel;- and shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another." + The Supreme Being, therefore, declared that the crimes of Judah * 2 Kings, xxi. 3—7. † 2 Kings, xxi. 6. 9. 16. |