THE OX. 69 



aratecTfrom all offensive matters, and adapted to their tastes. But, 

 among the Jews, this animal fed most luxuriously when employed 

 in treading out the corn ; for the divine law, in many of whose pre- 

 cepts the benevolence of Deity conspicuously shines, forbade to 

 muzzle him, and by consequence, to prevent him from eating, even 



to satiety, of the grain which he was employed to separate from the 

 husk. This allusion is involved in the prophet's address to the 

 tribes, in which he warns them, that the abundance and tranquillity 

 which they had so long enjoyed, should not exempt them from the 

 punishments due to their multiplied ; crimes. Despising the frugal 

 and laborious life of their ancestors, they had become slothful and 

 voluptuous, like an ox that declines to bend his neck any longer to 

 the yoke, and loves the easier employment of treading out the com,, 

 where he riots without restraint in the accumulated bounties of 

 Heaven: 'Ephraim is a heifer that is taught (or has become nice 

 and delicate,) and loveth to tread out the corn : but I passed over 

 upon her fair neck,' Hos. x. 11. 



Men of every age arid country have been much indebted to the 

 labors of this animal ; he was the first that resigned his neck to the 

 plough, that extended the prospects, and multiplied or enlarged the 

 comforts of the rising nations. So early as the days of Job, who 

 was probably the contemporary of Isaac, ' the oxen were ploughing, 

 and the asses feeding beside them, when the Sabeans fell upon them 

 and took them away,' Job i. 14, In times long posterior, when 

 Elijah was commissioned to anoint Elisha the son of Shaphat pro- 

 phet in his stead, he found him ploughing with twelve yoke of o-x~ 

 en, 1 Kings xix. 19. For many ages the hopes of Oriental husband- 

 men depended entirely on their labors ; this was so much the case 



