and Levi by cruelty; the good disposition of Judah was manifest in his intercession for Joseph, and self-devotion for Benjamin, when their safety was respectively menaced. The blessing of Jacob, which the better qualities of Judah had thus obtained him, passed to David as his lineal descendant; for he also proved himself not undeserving of the benediction, by his natural kindness and placability of nature. To him, as the first king of the tribe of Judah, the promise given to his forefathers was consequently renewed :— "God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne." *

To the descendants of Judah, thus constituted the royal tribe, the progeny of Benjamin united themselves; when the ten remaining tribes, acknowledging the supremacy of that of Ephraim, erected themselves into a separate kingdom. That tribe consequently shared the extension of the mercy, still vouchsafed to the remnant that escaped the penalty which the Israelites had incurred by protracted transgression. But, as the inspired historian informs us in the text, they too, in contempt of the means employed for their reformation, fell after their pernicious example. Also, Judah," as it expressly declares, “kept not the commandments of the Lord their God,

* Acts, ii. 30.

but walked in the statutes of Israel, which they made.” Or, according to the fuller detail of the inspired record, in which the nature of the punishment is specified with reference to the character of the offence :-" The Lord God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes and sending; because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place: But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his word, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy. Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees."*

I. Of the inspired persons, to whom this office was consigned, and whose prophecies supply matter suited to my present purpose, the most remarkable were Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The latter prophet, by whom the deportation of the Jews was precisely determined, eleven years before it was carried into effect, claims our immediate attention. He describes himself of the priestly order, and as among the Jewish captives who had been led away under king Jehoiachin ; who were settled near the river Chebar or Chaboras, in Gauzanitis of Mesopotamia. Here he declares his earliest visions were received; and, in particular, a prescience obtained of the limits prescribed to the existence of the kingdom of

2 Chron. xxxvi. 15, 16.

Judah. As he dates his prediction from "the fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity," which preceded the fall of Jerusalem by seven years, and the last deportation of the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, by eleven; his prophecy, which ranks among the most remarkable of those termed chronological, preceded the event at that distance of time, for which we can only account by referring it to inspiration.

But the determination of the date of the prediction, which its author has been thus at the pains to fix, is of still further importance; as contributing to illustrate the appositeness of the time chosen for its delivery. The character of this eventful period is delineated with force and vividness by the prophets, who wrote to avert the calamities, in which the whole nation whom they addressed were destined to be involved, when, as they declare, their “land was reduced to a desolation and astonishment." Among the enormities which drew down the divine visitation, and from which they sought to reclaim them, they not only charge them with a defection from the service of the true God, and a disregard of the menaces denounced by his messengers; but with a devotion to the profane supeitions which the heathen embra

the false propho

years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people. And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established."*

The periods thus accurately defined, are the twelve years of the reign of Ahaz to the accession of Hoshea, and the succeeding years to the ninth of this prince, in which this extraordinary prediction received a signal accomplishment. For, on appealing to the testimony of history, the best interpreter of prophecy, it appears, from that part of the sacred record in which the circumstances of the captivity are detailed, that, according to the precise term which had been fixed, the event proved answerable to the prediction.

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And the king of Assyria," it declares, “found conspiracy in Hoshea, for he had sent messengers to So, king of Egypt, and brought no tribute to the king of Assyria.... Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria and besieged it three years. And in the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor, by the river of Gozan; and in the cities of the Medes." †

In the singular manner in which these twenty

* Is. vii. 2-9.

+ 2 Kings, xvii. 4, 5 6.

one years to the captivity are distributed into two periods, of sixteen and five years; which has occasioned as singular a corruption of the text of the prophet; there is a propriety which imparts to the circumstances of the prediction even greater appositeness and precision. It is not merely observable, that these different periods mark the precise length of the reign of Ahaz, to whom it was delivered; and as much of the reign of his son Hezekiah, under whom it was fulfilled, as remained to the consummation of that great national crisis; but they contribute to mark the conterminous bounds of a great moral contrast, in the reigns of these monarchs, to which we are to look, for the proper ground of the distribution of the term, prescribed by the divine appointment, to the national existence of Israel.

In the earlier period of sixteen years, during which the throne had been occupied by Ahaz, the Jewish nation, encouraged by the example, and seduced by the influence, of that idolatrous prince, had arrived at an unprecedented degree of iniquity. After the secession of the Israelites under Jeroboam, the Jews had maintained their allegiance to the royal line of David; and under a succession of peculiar kings had received many signal deliverances. But under Ahaz occurred that apostacy of the house of Judah" which was the ruin of him and of all Israel."* This aban

* 2 Chron. xiii. 4.