The famous parallel case in Matt. xxvii. 9 will at once suggest itself. There the evangelist quotes a passage from the book of Zechariah, but attributes it to Jeremiah: "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was priced, whom certain of the children of Israel did price; and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me." How is it that there comes once in St. Matthew, and now, apparently, a second time, an error so palpable and gross? Can it be due to a mere slip of memory? Were the evangelist an Englishman, this might be the true solution; but, surely, when he shows himself to have been a Jew, and a Jew thoroughly conversant with Hebrew customs and modes of thought, such an answer to the difficulty is only a cry of despair. May I venture to suggest another? It is this: that just as there were, with but little doubt, summaries of legal maxims current in our Lord's time which He did not scruple to use (Matt. v. 21, 33, 43), so, rather later, there were current in Hebrew-Christian circles well-known sets of quotations from the Old Testament which were not expressly divided one from another (Rom. iii. 10-18), and which were referred to under the name of the author of the best-known passage. In this way we may suppose that Zechariah's mention of the potter (Zech. xi. 13) was placed in connection with Jeremiah's visit to the potter, and with his warning of the possible rejection of Israel by God (Jer. xviii. 1-6; cf. xix. 1, 11), and was so subordinated to it that the words of Zechariah could be actually quoted under the name of Jeremiah (Matt. xxvii. 9). Something of the same kind, then, may have happened in the case of the passage under consideration. The Psalmist's call to Israel to hear the lessons derived from their ancestors' behaviour (Ps. lxxviii. 2, or perhaps 1-3) was connected with the warning given to Israel by Isaiah (vi. 9, 10) of punishment for their blindness and deafness, and was so subordinated to the latter as for purposes of quotation to be considered one with it (cf. our present verses with ver. 14 of this chapter). It is interesting to notice that one indubitable example of such connexion and subordination occurs in Mark i. 2, 3, where the promise in Malachi (iii. 1) that God would send His messenger before Messiah's face is closely joined to the promise of the Voice in the wilderness found in Isaiah xl. 3, and the two passages are quoted under the name of Isaiah alone. Observe that if St. Mark had used his source (ex hypothesi) as far as the end of the quotation from Malachi, and then for some reason omitted the next quotation, he might very easily have still retained the name of "Isaiah," with which he introduces his double quotation. Had he done so, we should have had another parallel to our present verses and chap, xxvii. 9, and we should have had critics wondering at another extraordinary slip of memory on the part of an evangelist. The real reason, however, would be not a slip of memory, but the fact that the evangelist did not care to continue the combined quotation which he had begun. STUDIES IN THE MINOR PROPHETS. BY REV. J. T. L. MAGGS, B.A. HOSEA, CHAPTERS i.-iii. HOSEA is a master in the art of condensation. Commentator after commentator has quoted Jerome's verdict upon the prophet's style, and sought to put anew the matter in his own words. Hosea is a writer whose language is so terse, forming the unclothed skeleton of his thought, that it requires the reader to ponder and to expand his words. The expressions he uses are scattered upon the page as seeds endowed with vital power, ready to germinate before the eye of the attentive student in fact, and figure, and circumstance. If in many writers we must read between the lines in order to enter fully into their meaning, we need in Hosea to read between the words. Ever and again he uses some expression which outlines for us the political, social, or religious life of his time. Hosea would have been more easily understood had the book bearing his name been distinctly divided into two parts. Twofold the book certainly is. The section ending with chap. iii. is in many respects different to that embracing the latter chapters. It was almost certainly written before the fall of Jehu's dynasty, and during the magnificent prosperity which the northern kingdom enjoyed under Jereboam II. The second part points to the stormy days, full of political and social disorder, which preceded and preluded the siege and capture of Samaria and the destruction of the Ephraimite sovereignty. This latter part is full of half-concealed incident, is rich in descriptions of social customs, of the morals of courts and temples, of political cunning and commercial custom; it is the wreck of a finished mosaic of prophetic utterance, the separate tessare of which to the student are suggestive of the life of that bygone day. But, on the other hand, the former book, if it is a more finished and complete work, is sorrowful in its spirit; it is the picture of a man pained in his deepest heart, and is sombre of hue. It is comparatively void of these touches which express the social condition of the kingdom; the few which exist only telling the story of prosperity ungratefully received and wickedly abused. Unlike the latter chapters which tell of the national life, the former book is intensely personal; it is a fragment, brief and mysterious, of an autobiography, told not for its own sake, but as an illustration of a nation's life, as the type of a divine sorrow. Yet, while thus the story of the man becomes the setting of the history of the people, the personal element overpowers the merely artistic and descriptive. The first book tells the story of the sorrow that weighed down his early manly strength; in the latter, silent as to these things, because a hopeless sorrow denies the relief of utterance, he is the more free to set out the life of the people whose sins were typified in his own dark experience. For the story of the prophet's life, as here told, reveals a deep and terrible anguish of soul. However much expositors may have varied as to the explanation of the first part of Hosea's prophecy, there is now a movement towards a consensus of opinion. Men have felt that the indignant sorrow of Hosea is far too intense to be the product of the unsubstantial fabric of a vision. They have felt also that to take too literally the statements of the opening chapters involved moral difficulties which the text did not require, and which were really caused by judging the luxuriance of Oriental expression by the hard and inelastic measures of occidental thought. There had fallen upon the domestic life of Hosea a dark shadow, a destructive blight. The happy dreams which at one time captivated his imagination had wholly disappeared; sunshine was lost in blackest midnight; calm in fiercest storm. He had taken to him as wife "Gomer the daughter of Diblaim." To the very parentage of the woman there belonged the suggestion of evil, she was the child of the "pressed fig-cakes," one in whose heart the love of luxury was present as a "defect of blood"; in spirit she was "a wife of whoredoms"; in the more measured expressions of Western thought, a woman of unstable and unchaste disposition. We cannot suppose that when he wedded her Hosea understood the mystery of her parentage, the vice that was hereditary in the child of Diblaim. But ere long the fascination of home life lost its spell. It may be that the wanton rites of the bordering Phoenician tribes, or the revived celebration of the Asherah cultus1 which Jezebel had brought to the kingdom as an accursed dowry, exercised a fatal spell upon her too susceptible nature. It may be that pent-up fires of desire had caused the daughter of Diblaim, the child of the pressed grape-cakes, to become the victim of lawless men who flourished in days of successful war, and of quickly-gained commercial prosperity. Perhaps the stern sanctity of a prophet's home, or the required absence of her husband through his duties to the prophetic college or in the fulfilment of his vocation, instigated a rebellion of heart, for which the absences, moreover, gave the opportunity. Or, as the narrative at times suggests, the comparative poverty of a prophet's home could not compete with the richer gifts of her unlawful lovers. What was in his power Hosea had freely given to her; corn and wine for daily sustenance, wool and flax too, in which "working willingly with her hands," she might make for her seemly raiment. But she had loved the harlot's reward,3 had decked herself out with the gifts of an unholy affection, had used her husband's gifts as though they were the property of her lovers. So there came over her, perhaps slowly, yet surely, a change; there was an altered tone in her speech, a strange language upon her tongue. Hosea was no longer her husband; but in cold, and perhaps ironical, language, her lord. His very children he cannot claim with a father's pride or compassionate with a father's heart. Wider and deeper does this alienation grow, until at last, decked out in gaudy ornaments, she leaves the home to which in the glow of early married life Hosea had brought her." Lower and lower did she sink; the very lovers for whom she had forfeited 2 Prov. xxxi. 13. 3 Hosea ii. 12. 7 Ibid. ii. 5-13. 1 2 Kings xiii. 6. 5 Ibid. ii. 5. 6 Ibid. ii. 16. home now cast her off and avoid her,1 until at last Hosea finds her shorn of her former beauty, sold into slavery, with no pre-eminence above the crowd exposed in the market, to be redeemed by him at the value of a common serf, the current price of thirty shekels paid part in money and part in kind. Can we wonder then that his prophecy is one throbbing with emotion and burdened with sighs, impatient of the help and fetters of grammatical or rhetorical artifice? Had he not an equal, if not a better, right to the words with which his successor and analogue in southern Palestine described his burden: "Behold, see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger"? Now, to a man writing under the impulse of such intense anguish there is no taste, no tolerance, for trifles. The fire burning in his bones destroys all the flimsier properties that merely deck out the stage of his life's history. Stern agonizing realities are before his eyes. What has he to tell of, what can he care for the beauty of the maidenly form that cannot be recognized in the wretched slave he must redeem at a price? What can it matter to him if in the vintage dances or at holy feasts hers was the gayest, lightest movement of the throng, if all that charm served but to lead her astray? What can it concern him that she possessed a wondrous grace and fascination before which he fell vanquished, if now he beholds that same fascination lavished only upon other men, to his sorrow, to her disgrace? What do outward beauties of form count for, when he sees that she has refused the good and pure, and chosen the false and foul, has proved unfaithful to her vow, plunged herself into an all but inexpiable sin, and him into an inexhaustible sorrow? And so of the early years, and grace, of the home life she had rejected, Hosea tells us but little. He has but few words wherein to describe her character, "" a woman of unchastenesses."3 He sketches a woman taking from her husband the common requisites of life, and treating them in act if not in speech-as though they were her lovers' gifts to be lavished on her lovers' pleasures. And then in the fewest words, leaving out all needless though perhaps picturesque detail which might have formed the material of a story, he tells of the deeper fall into abject misery, of her redemption thence, and of the stern but needful discipline to which he subjected her. Did the discipline prove successful? Hosea is silent concerning this; but the silence is ominous. Surely he had rejoiced over Gomer restored to purity and love and home; was it not rather in the silence of inconsolable sorrow that he saw another fall of one who was a type of the ever-unfaithful people of the Lord? But it is a volume lacking in the elements that build up a picturesque and many-sided record. Now, the story of Gomer's infidelity was but the parallel of Israel's apostasy from Jehovah. So like its human type, the Divine sorrow refuses to admit the minutiae of a historic picture or the recital of external circumstances. As Hosea could tell of nothing save his wife's unfaithfulness, so the 1 Hosea ii. 7. 2 Ibid. iii. 2 (cf. Exod. xxi. 32). $ Ibid. i. 2. Lord, speaking by the mouth of the prophet, mentions little save the nation's rebellion against and departure from their God. To fully understand the significance of this Divine silence, we must remember that Hosea's earlier prophecy coincided with the most magnificent epoch in the history of the northern kingdom.1 Never before had the fourth member of a dynasty ascended the throne to give the semblance of solidity to the disordered state. During the reign of Joash, the kingdom by his threefold victory over the Syrians had largely recovered from the blows which Ben-hadad had inflicted upon it in the time of Jehoahaz, the son and successor of Jeroboam I. He had become so strong, that accepting the foolish challenge of Amaziah, king of Judah, he defeated him, occupied Jerusalem as a conqueror, partially destroyed the fortifications, and carried away treasure and hostages and sacred vessels. His son, Jeroboam II., had obtained still greater successes. Northward as far as Hamath, in the south as far as the torrent of the Arabah, eastward into the kingdom of Damascus, he had carried his victorious arms, and had wrested and retained the conquered territory. But as to all this external prosperity the prophetic messenger is all but silent. Once the military parade is touched upon; but bow and sword, battle and horse and horsemen are named in terms that warn the nation from unduly trusting in the passing success of their warlike prowess.5 What matters it if the nation spreads its borders, since the people that God has betrothed to Himself proves unfaithful! There are, indeed, a few broad outlines of the internal prosperity of the realm. The vines and fig-trees gave their fruit in their season, the corn clothed the valleys in the appointed time, the olive presses ran with oil, the flax yielded its fibre to the dresser, the flocks their wool to the shearer, the varied fruits stored up made "drinks" (so margin A. V.) grateful to the palate. Even greater wealth than these merely pastoral and agricultural riches did Israel possess. The nation was one possessed of gold and silver, fashioned into nose-rings and pendants of delicate workmanship. Nor were the occasional rites of a merely outward religion wholly disregarded, there were feast days and new moons and sabbaths and solemn feasts. As at all times when religion loses the spirituality of her worship the more superstitious elements abound, so did they at this time in Israel; and one might see in her midst the sacred obelisk, the idolatrous image plated with gold, the domestic idols too, givers of good fortune, and oracles in times of doubt. With the very wealth which Jehovah bestowed, the apostate nation was maintaining the priests of Baal or fashioning it into images of Baal, the objects of an idolatrous and unchaste service.10 It is thus Hosea sketches in fewest words the condition of the people, but he does so to present the picture of their base ingratitude. Of the widespread conquest and dominion, of the merely commercial prosperity and outer culture of the nation in the acme of its grandeur he has little to say, he has nothing to boast |