THE SILENCES OF SCRIPTURE. 



95 



David Anderson-Berry, Esq., M.D. : — In the discussion 

 following the reading of this excellent and interesting paper on the 

 Silences of Scripture, may I bring to your notice an illustration 

 connected with chronology. In 1 Kings vi, we find the time between 

 the leaving of Egypt by Israel and the building of the Temple by 

 Solomon ending in the fourth year of his reign measured as 480 years. 



Now the same period as measured by the times given by the Apostle 

 Paul in Acts xiii, is 574 years, or nearly one hundred years longer. 

 Much has been made by some of this mistake " in the Bible, 

 and commentators are hard put to it to explain the discrepancy, 

 none of their explanations being satisfying. However, when we 

 study the Book of Judges and note the exact periods given there 

 when Israel was under subjection to the nations that knew not 

 God we find that their total amounts exactly to the difference 

 between the two grand totals. Hence there is no mistake but a 

 chronological illustration of 2 John 8, " Look to yourselves that 

 ye lose not the things which ye have wrought, but that ye receive 

 a full reward." In connection with the Temple, the service and 

 worship of God, the years are not counted that are not spent in the 

 service of God. 



Israel is God's earthly people, and as the sun-dial marks not the 

 hours during which the sun does not shine, so the Bible is silent 

 when God's people are not in fellowship with Him. When a child 

 it puzzled me much to discover the continuation of the Book of 

 Acts. The history clearly did not finish. It was like a magazine 

 story with "to be continued." " What had become of Paul, and 

 what of Peter ? " 



I saw not that as Israel's rejection of their Messiah began with 

 the martyrdom of Stephen at Jerusalem, so it ended with Israel's 

 rejection of Him at Eome. Until the Divine hieroglyphics in which 

 the Book of Revelation is written record the return of Israel to 

 the land and the rebuilding of the Temple, the pen of the Divine 

 Historian is silent. 



Mr. W. Hoste calls attention to a significant fact passed over 

 in silence in the Matthoean genealogy, that, of the 700 wives of 

 Solomon, the one chosen to hand on the royal seed in the Messianic 

 line was an Ammonitess (2 Chron. xii, 13). This marks still farther 

 the inclusive character of Divine grace, to which Mr. Finn refers, 

 as witnessed in that genealogy. 



TI 



