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habits and conduct; fifty-five years, during the jurisdiction of 

 Tolah and Jair, and some few at least after the death of the 

 latter, of fidelity and virtue, before their total apostacy, to- 

 gether with the period of Abimelech, and the long conti- 

 nued peace and tranquillity, during the life of Gideon; this 

 would be, indeed, an example of perseverance in fidelity, 

 obedience, and virtue, almost irreconcileable to the character, 

 and perhaps to the circumstances of this extraordinary and 

 infatuated people. It would almost certainly expose the 

 hypothesis which would support such an unprecedented 

 course of religious and practical perseverance, to just hesi- 

 tation and mistrust, from the whole analogy of history and 

 Scripture, if wc had been even left to analogy alone, to guide 

 or to govern us ; but happily, in this, as in many other in- 

 stances, the sense and expression of Scripture is equally clear 

 and decisive, in favour of our hypothesis. We are informed, 

 (Jud. 8. 27.) that all Israel were perverted to idolatry, by the 

 cphod " which Gideon had made and placed in Ophrah, 

 his own city;" and more particularly in the sequel, (v. 3S.) 

 " And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the 

 children of Israel turned again, and made Baal-berith their 

 God." The next chapter appears to confine this latter defec- 

 tion to the worship of Baal to the city of Shechem, and relates 

 the severe punishment which God inflicted on them by the 

 hand of Abimelech, whom they had aided in his usurpation. 

 But the idolatry of the ephod in Ophrah, and the worship 



of 



