The representative men of the Bible

Front matter

THE GIFT OF

Alfred on. Barnes.

Cornell University Library BS571 .M42 1902 V 2 Representative men of tlie 8'|;,!?,,/|,|fty||,9*° olin

Preface

In this second instaltneot it !s perhaps expedient that I should repeat so much of my original Preface as is descriptive of the plan I have adopted in delineating the Bible Characters.

By 'The Representative Men of the Bible' I mean the men of the Bible who represent phases of humanity irrespective of place and time ; and I consider them only in those incidents in which they are thus representative. These studies are not historical ; they are not critical ; they are an analysis of the Portraits as we see them — without any attempt to inquire how or when they came. I have imagined myself in a studio, looking at the forms as delineated, and simply asking the question, What did the artist mean ? Personally, I have no doubt as to the historical basis vi THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN

for the patriarchal life — not to speak of lives further down the stream. But I have been actuated in the meantime by the desire to find ground that is neutral to the two extremes — the Higher Criticism on the one hand and the Old Orthodoxy on the other. That common ground is the fact that the figures are now before us, and that, if there be a Revelation, it is through them, in the last result, that the Revelation must come. Here, for the present, hands may be joined, here, for the time, views may be united ; and those who differ as to dates and origins can meet in the recognition of a spiritual beauty. I have sought to give the book a semi-devotional tone by closing each chapter with a short invocation or prayer.

I offered the former series of studies as an experiment. I promised that if it met with acceptance I would issue another series of Bible Portraits covering nearly the same period but representing distinct qualities. I am glad that a rapid reception on the part of the public and a favourable recognition by the

PREFACE vii

press has enabled me to fulfil this design. I

call this a second series rather than a second

volume. Any one who has not read the first

may, if he will, begin with the second. Here

and there I have made a reference to the

previous series ; but in every case it is passing

and fugitive, and does not for a moment

interrupt the context. The sequence of the

volumes is of the less consequence because I

do not think that either in this or the previous

series I have ever struck the same note twice.

The selection of Representative Characters has

been in my own hands, and it has been made

on the principle that each personality shall

exhibit a phase of human nature which has

not been exhibited in the Portraits that have

preceded it The strength of the Bible Gallery

lies not in the number but in the variety of

its representations, and its highest artistic

claim must ever be, that on the canvas of

human life it has succeeded in delineating

' the manifold wisdom of God.'

G. M.

Edinbukgh, 1903.

Chapter I Pagb

;SHMAEL THE OUTCAST, I

CHAPTER H LOT THE LINGERER, . . . . t . 22

CHAPTER 111 MELCHISEDEK THE UNCANONICAL, ... 43

CHAPTER IV BALAAM THE INCONSISTENT, .... 62

CHAPTER V

It

THE RErRESENTATIVE MEN

CHAJ'TER VI

t ?AGB

CALEB THE EXPLORER, Io6

CHAPTER VII BOAZ THE KIND, ....

CHAPTER VIII GIDEON THE HUMBLE, . . . . I^O

CHAPTER IX JONATHAN THE GENEROUS 172

CHAPTER X MEPHIBOSHETH THE DEFORMED, . , , 195

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII HEZEKIAH THE DEVOUT 2^2

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER XIII

PAGE

ISAIAH THE PHILANTHROf'lST, .... 265

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER I

In the lands of the Western world there is a type that has always been greatly admired — the unconventional man. The West is the atmosphere of freedom. It is the home of progress, the nursery of the new. To step from the line of routine, to initiate a fresh idea, to be recognised as in some sense out of the common, has been in the West a prevalent object of ambition. But in the lands of the East it has been otherwise. Here, the greatest glory is to be time-worn, antiquated, unrepaired. Enter any national gallery of the old world, you will find many noble qualities represented. But there is one type of man whom you will not find represented — the man who diverges from the traditions of the past. All the figures of these galleries repudiate VOL. II. A independence. None wishes to be deem< original, none wants to be thought an inn vator on former days. Confucius tells you 1 is merely a restorer. L&o-tsze tells you he following the old ' fixed way.' Buddha td you he is but one of many incarnations. Chii worships her ancestors, India reverences h caste ; and with both the reason is the samethe sense that the old is better than the ne and that the path of wisdom must ever 1 upon the lines traced by our fathers.

But there is one exception to this rule of t! ancient world. It occurs in that one galle:

ISHMAEL THE UUTCAST 3

it has recorded the names of its rejected portraits; it lies in the fact that it has admitted portraits which have been rejected elsewhere. It has made room for those diverging forms which the artists of neighbouring lands have cast as rubbish to the void. To drop all metaphor, Israel has from the very outset provided a place for the pariah — has opened a door of entrance to the man whom she has herself turned out. We speak of Israel as a 'peculiar' nation. So she is; and the most peculiar thing about her is just her tolerance of peculiarities not her own. We are apt to think of this as an exclusive attribute of Gospel times. It is not ; the Gospel is its flower, but you will find this tolerance at the root. Christianity was not a revolution ; it was a culmination, a climax. It brought to the surface what had long been slumbering underground. It was to Judaism what the autumn is to the spring — a manifestor, a discloser. You will see its germs in Genesis, its examples in Exodus, its precepts in the Prophets. Not without reason in the plan of Providence was the land of Judah chosen as the theatre of that Gospel whose province it is to gather the waifs and strays of humanity. No other soil was so prepared for such a seed.

As the representative of this outlawed class, I have selected a very early portrait — the portrait of Ishmael. He is the Great Gallery's first pariah, its first outcast from society, Cain was not an outcast from society ; there was no society in his day ; his banishment was from the presence of the Lord. But Ishmael was born in an age of culture, in a scene of culture. He came into the world when the world — the Hebrew world, at least — had begun to be social. Brotherhood was in the air, family life was in the air. A section of mankind had formed the bold and grand design of transforming the idea of empire into the idea of a household. They had begun to call the king their ' father.' That is the root idea of patriarchal government — that the names of sovereign and subject should be replaced by the names of father and son. To be banished from such a society was ostracism indeed.

To any man who had breathed the patriarchal atmosphere the expulsion from that atmosphere was death in the desert. It was to exchange the home for the highway, the brotherhood of man for the breath of misanthropy. No modern condition of exile can represent the exile of a man put out of the patriarchal caste. Modern exile is a change of land, but it need not be a loss of the old country's sympathy. Expulsion from the patriarchal fold was not necessarily a change of land at all; the outcast could live within sight of his former home — is it not written of Ishmael himself, ' He shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.' But the sting lay in the fact that the brotherhood itself was broken. The banishment was not one of space ; it was one of spirit. It was a separation from sympathy, an isolation from interest. The man might live in the presence of his brethren, but he must live as a stranger to them. He had become a mere individual. He had no family tie, no blood of kinship. He was divided from his comrades of the past by something more impassable than any wall — a thought of the mind.

What brought Ishmael into this exile ? What has given him the distinction of being in the Great Gallery the first portrait of a pariah? As in nearly all cases of social ostracism, he owes it partly to his misfortune and partly to his fault. For one thing, he had the misfortune — for an Eastern^of being an unconventional man. He is described under the simile of a wild ass. In colloquial English that would be a term of contempt ; in literary Hebrew it is a term of admiration. The idea is that of impetuous brilliancy. It depicts a man of noble impulses unable to restrain these impulses, rushing to realise his goal with wonderful, majestic, but unreasoning speed. He has nothing but his individual convictions to support him. The spirit of the age is at variance with kis spirit. His views are not the common views. His opinions are deemed eccentric ; they place him in an isolated position, in a position of general antagonism, which the narrative indicates by the prophecy

' His hand shall be against every man and every man's hand against him.' But to that position he adheres. In an age when private judgment brought ostracism, and when ostracism meant banishment from ail sympathy, he bravely faced the storm. He raised his testimony against the united testimony. He set up the authority of his individual conscience in opposition to the use and wont of the whole community. His figure in the Gallery is the figure of a man in fight with all the world — outnpmbered but unsubdued, proscribed but protesting still.

What was that individual conviction for which Ishmael strove ? In the abstract, I think, it was something which was right. He had been born to great possessions — Messianic possessions. His mother Hagar was an Egyptian slave who had fled to the tent of Abraham and had become the handmaid to his wife Sarah. Sarah was childless, but she retained unbroken her empire over the heart of Abraham. Abraham was eager to have an heir, but he never dreamed of repudiating his first marriage tie. He had preferred to contract an additional marriage. At the suggestion of Sarah herself he had espoused the slave Hagar ; and the fruit of their union was Ishmael. But here came the sting of the position. Hagar, though a wife, was still a slave. He had not wed her to set her free, but to make her the medium in bringing an heir to Sarah. Ishmael was not to stand for her son, but for Sarah's son. Abraham was never more loyal to Sarah than in his union with Hagar. It was for Sarah he formed the union ; it was for Sarati he desired posterity. When Ishmael was born he was made, officially, the child of Sarah. His real mother was denied all right to her maternity. She was only an instrument for the transmission of the kingdom. She must go back from her marriage to her drudgery, to her slavery. She must resume her menial duties to Sarah. Her seeming elevation to dignity had made it all the more needful that she should be reminded of her continued lowliness. The prospective destiny of her son Ishmael might mislead her, might tend to make her forget that she was still a bondwoman. That fact must be recalled to her remembrance. Ishmael could only be the heir of Sarah on the supposition that Hagar was nobody — a creature without rights, a thing of goods and chattels. By word and deed the fact of her nothingness must daily, hourly, be brought home to the heart of this Egyptian.

In this atmosphere the boy Ishmael grew. He was the heir to a kingdom ; and in the court of his future kingdom his mother was a down-trodden domestic slave. Was it conceivable that the heart of the boy should not burn with indignation 1 Measured by contemporaneous law, there was nothing unjust in the incongruity. But the unconventional man never measures anything by what is contemporaneous ; he judges everything by the end of the world and how it will look then. Ishmael saw his actual mother in the position of a menial to his adopted mother. He saw her subjected to daily indignities. He heard in private her vehement complaints. He listened to her assertions of a right to be lo THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN

equal to Sarah, of her claim to be treated as the wife of Abraham. Is it surprising that in his deepest soul he should have uttered a protest against the spirit of his age ! He was a youth of noble impulses ; the proof is, that he had won the heart of his father Abraham — the most chivalrous of men. Can we wonder that the depths of his nature should have risen up in antagonism to the customs of his land and the usages of his time !

By and by something happened — the unexpected happened. A real heir was born to Sarah — the child Isaac appeared. And now Ishmael was supplanted ; all his hopes were withered. I do not think these hopes had all been selfish ; I doubt not the youth had said to himself, 'When I become head of the state, I will set my mother free.' So far as he was concerned, that prospect was gone now. He should have considered, however, that, with the birth of the real heir, Sarah had no longer the same motive for keeping Hagar a slave ; he should have remembered the native generosity of Abraham. He did not remember it; and

ISHMAEL THE OUTCAST ii

this, I think, was the fault added to his misfortune. He seems to have thrown off" the mask which had hitherto concealed his irritation. His tone became mocking, satirical. What form his satire took, I cannot tell. Perhaps he sneered at the puny, delicate child on whom was to devolve the kingdom — for I have elsewhere expressed the opinion that the Isaac of the Gallery is an invalid. Perhaps he suggested that the birth was an imposture — that the child was not that of Sarah. Whatever he said was said recklessly, publicly. He used no prudence ; he made no effort to hide his feelings. He selected the most prominent occasions for his invectives ; he spoke where he would be overheard. I think he spoke with a view to be overheard. I believe he was tired of his equivocal position, of his mother's equivocal position ; he felt humiliated by eating as a dependant the bread of which he had been born to be the dispenser. He preferred a life of independent poverty to a life of luxurious vassalage ;- he panted to be free. And he got his desire. Th° wrath of Sarah was kindled. She had borne acts of disobedience, she had overlooked disregard of her authority , but she could not condone a slight upon her son. She clamoured for the dismissal of the Egyptian and her boy ; she bore down the unwillingness of her husband. Woman as she was, she was the ruling power in the house of Abraham. Abraham might sway the clan, but Sarah swayed him. In striking contrast to the other women of the East, this woman rises to our view as the dominant power in church and state — for church and state were then one. She rises to our view as the arbiter of national destinies, as the tribunal from which there can be no appeal. Abraham sinks before her, Mesopotamia sinks before her ; her will is law. She waves her hand and says, ' Go !' and Hagar and Ishmael issue forth from the patriarchal home, to return no more. All that Abraham can do is to make secret provision for their wanderings. Silently he provides the bread and the water and sends out mother and son from the heat of Sarah's wrath into the heat of Beersheba's desert

When they reach that desert their supply of water is exhausted. Why had Abraham not foreseen this? I think he had foreseen it. If I read rightly the meaning of the Gallery, Abraham knew that in the wilderness of Beersheba there was a well of water — that, if once they arrived there, they would find supply without limit. Yet Hagar and Ishmael came and saw not the well. Why ? Simply because their nerves were unstrung. When our minds are disturbed, we miss the things that are lying at our feet. In all days, as in the days of the Gospel demoniacs, there is a blindness which comes from being possessed by violent passions. It had come to Hagar and Ishmael. Their minds were on fire with anger; their hearts were palpitating with excitement. They were too absorbed within, to see anything without. When the water in the bottle was spent, their strength was spent too ; they beheld nothing but the barren sand. The mother bore up better than the son ; here again the Gallery shows its respect for patriarchal womanhood ! Ishmael was not yet inured to fatigue like Hagar. He had been nurtured daintily, dandled luxuriously ; he took badly to the desert; at the prospect of death by thirst, he swooned away.

But Hagar betook herself to prayer — so I read the narrative. The Egyptian mind was peculiarly religious. It lived more in another world than in this. Its finest architecture was lavished on its tombs ; its finest literature is ' The Book of the Dead.' Hagar partook deeply of the spirit of her land. In her hour of emergency she retired within herself to commune with God. It was not the God of Israel she communed with ; it was her own God. But, says the narrative. He answered her. There is no finer proof of the cosmopolitan spirit of the patriarchal age — the prayer of an outcast from Israel is answered by the God of Egypt ! The answer comes, as all such answers come, in the form of an inward peace — a peace which passed understanding, which defied explanation, but which, just on that account, carried an assurance of succour. For the present, such a peace was all that was required. It sent no supernatural vision, because that was not needed. The means of refuge lay within the limits of the natural. The well was there, had always been there. What was wanted was a mental calm adequate to the recognition of it. The peace of Divine communion brought that. It enabled Hagar to see, to use her faculties of natural observation ; as the narrative finely puts it, ' God opened her eyes.' When she emerged from her communion, she found the old place changed. The old horror was gone — the horror of prospective thirst. She saw some vegetable product that indicated the presence of water. I do not know that she found water all at once ; Divine help does not dispense with searching. But the inward peace put her on the right track for searching. It let her see where to go. It led her to fountains of living water and wiped all tears from her eyes — or rather it wiped all tears from her eyes so that she saw the living fountains.

But the grand thing — to Hagar, to Ishmael, to ourselves, was the moral bearing of the fact.

It had a historical significance. It made the voice of God say, in effect, ' Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.' It declared that God had a place for the pariah — a place for the lands outside the line of Abraham. It proclaimed that the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac was still the God of Egypt and the God of Hagar. It announced that, while He had blessed the seed of the patriarch. He had also a blessing for the nations outside. The melting of that desert cloud from the eyes of Hagar was a beam of the infinite fatherhood, of the universal brotherhood — a premonition of the truth that God is larger than all our creeds and higher than all our theories. It was Hagar, not Ishmael, that had the vision — and there lies its significance. Ishmael had, after all, the blood of Abraham in his veins ; Hagar belonged to a foreign faith and a foreign soil. The God who communed with a woman not included in the orthodox line was already proclaiming to the world that ' He is not far from any one of us.'

And Jiere the narrative virtually takes leave of Ishmael — merely stating that he rose to be a mighty hunter, that he allied himself with a daughter of Egypt, and that he transmitted an empire to his posterity. He disappears from view as rapidly as one of the steeds of his own Arabian desert. Only once in the record of Genesis do we hear his name again. It is at the end of long years, when the autumn of his life has come. But it is on an occasion so memorable and so significant that it seems a fitting place to say farewell. It is at the funeral of Abraham. There Ishmael and Isaac meet hand to hand in the presence of death. It is a strange meeting. The pariah and the prince, the man who had lost his kingdom and the man who had supplanted him, the wild undomesticated huntsman and the life immersed in the cares of the home — these at last walk side by side in the fellowship of grief. From the heart of Ishmael all bitterness is gone. In the presence of death he forgets everything but the memories of love. He remembers Abraham as the father who had oved him — who had never ceased to love him ; VOL. II. B the hour of his expulsion from home is drowned in that bottle of water which was provided for his sustenance. He remembers Isaac as the little delicate child who had come in his way without knowing it and who ought not to have experienced his anger. Thus death softens all our asperities. It is one of those touches of universal nature which make the whole world kin. It reveals the common frailty, and there is nothing which unites us like a sense of the common frailty. Ishmael was divided from Isaac by the thought of the mountain ; they were joined again by the sight of the valley. They were constrained to walk together by the falling of the evening shadows.

Millenniums have passed since that day, and the old order has given place to the new ; yet Ishmael and Isaac are walking together still. The revolving centuries have again brought them to evening-time. The empires which they founded have both been shattered. That Mohammedan power of which Ishmael was the progenitor has lost its political influence ;

that Jewish sceptre which claims its dawn in Isaac is wielded among the nations no more. Yet, in the shadows, in the common ebb of their fortunes, Ishmael and Isaac still walk side by side. Bereft alike of their political significance, stript alike of their physical glories, Islam and Israel are living still. They have both survived the death of their temporal power. The empire of the Saracen has passed away, the dominion of the Jew has ceased ; but the infiuence of the Saracen is a present and potent force, and the influence of the Jew is greater than ever before. In a new world these old forms remain — survivals of a culture which has lost its environment but which yet refuses to die. The child of the bondwoman and the child who received the inheritance of Abraham are still found walking hand-in-hand, contemplating that former glory which has been laid in the dust of death.

I

BLESS Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast a place for the outcast — for the man who zo THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN

has gone over the line. I thank Thee that he who Cometh unto Thee is in no wise cast out, even though he comes by an unwonted way. I praise Thee that Thou hast a revelation for the Hagars of the world — for those whom many have deemed in Egyptian darkness. Enable me to realise that even in their desert there are springs 1 I often speak of the wells of Baca — the wells for Thy covenanted people ; but I forget the wells of Beersheba which are prepared for the men of the wilderness. I forget that for them also Thou hast revealing messages, openings of the inner eye. Help me to remember it, O Lord ! Help me to remember that my dividing lines are not Thy dividing lines! Help me to remember that Thou hast a star which leads to Bethlehem those who have missed the morning sun I Help me to remember that Thou hast songs of Christian glory not included in the choir of the prophets ! Help me, above all, to remember that the springs which Thine angel discloses are often just in the places which I have pronounced dry parched land ! Increase

ISHMAEL THE OUTCAST ai

my hope for man, my sense of man's possibilities ! In the hour when I despair of my brother let me see what Thou seest, let me hear what Thou hearest — the rushing of underground waters, the promise of a life that shall make the desert glad ! The desert will to me be already glad when I learn that in Hagar's wilderness there are secret wells seen by Thee.

Chapter II

The figure of Lot has already met us in travelling through the life of Abraham. But in a book of representative men he cannot be dismissed with an accidental interview. To be seen fairly, a man should be seen by his own light. His portrait should be taken when he is standing alone. A face of average comeliness will look very plain when it is placed beside one of extreme beauty ; yet, when seen apart, it may have a charm of its own. Lot makes an excellent foil to Abraham. Abraham's is a face of extreme beauty, and any ordinary countenance will suffer if placed beside it. But it does not follow that Lot himself might not contrast favourably with many on his own plane. In point of fact he did exhibit a certain beauty of aspect when he was not in the presence of Abraham. When he stands in the midst of Sodom, he looks so remarkably well that his name has been handed down to posterity as one of the world's superior souls; he is called 'just Lot.' Let us consider, then, the man in himself. What is his place among representative men ? What class does he stand for amid the various orders of humanity ? That is the one question, the crucial question. Everything else about him is accidental ; but the point of Lot's contact with a common phase of human nature, the sphere in which he meets with an experience repeated in all time — this is the abiding thing, this is the permanent element in the man.

There are two words in the Bible narrative which seem to me to express in one brief sentence the place of Lot amid the phases of humanity — ' Lot lingered.' I would say his distinctive position is that of the man who falls behind in the march of civilisation. He does not go back ; he never could be classed among the lapsed masses. His characteristic is, that at a certain point of the road he stands still and allows his comrades to move in advance of him. Lord Macaulay, in one of his Essays, raises the problem, Why has the navy of Spain declined? He solves it by the answer that it has not declined, but that the increase of other navies has left it in the rear. Whether this be the solution as regards Spain, I cannot tell ; but it is the answer which may be given to all who put the same question regarding the tardiness of that ship of life which we call Lot. It is behind the others, not because it has lost speed, but because the others have gained speed. Lot is in many respects like the Chinese Empire ; he has not fallen back into barbarism, he has simply failed to keep pace with civilisation. He stands where he was. In a metaphorical sense he has become what his wife is said to have become in a physical sense — a pillar of salt. He has been crystallised into an inert mass which marks only one stage of a journey.