20 
ISRAEL. 
B.C. 
931. 
the Lord, As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an 
ear; so shall the children of Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria.” 1 
The principle is sustained throughout the history; the deeper emergency only calls forth 
the more powerful warning. 
Within half a century from the Division, the guilt of Israel fearfully exemplified the 
natural consequence of all deviations from the purity of the Divine worship. The homage 
to the golden calves of Dan and Bethel had been introduced only as a partial and popular 
mixture of the Egyptian ceremonial with the Jewish; a royal expedient to bend religion to 
the policy of the throne. But, the result was inevitable. The worship fell continually into 
deeper corruption, until, at length, it sank into the darkest depths of paganism. 2 —Aliab, by 
his marriage with Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, King of Sidon, established the Sidonian 
idolatry. Persecution instantly followed; the church disappeared; the “ Schools of the 
Prophets ” were put to the sword, or fled to caverns and forests; and the people plunged 
headlong into the sanguinary and polluting worship of Baal. To arrest this ruin, a man of 
the most unrivalled gifts Avas now called from obscurity, Elijah the Tishbite; the second 
Moses; if inferior to the illustrious leader through the wilderness, in the magnitude of his 
task and the length of his services; yet superior in the space which he Avas to fill in the eye 
of the future; the type of the Baptist; the glorified witness, with Moses, of the trans¬ 
figuration ; the destined restorer of the chosen people; and the herald of the consummation 
of all things. 
Unlike the prophets of his time, his first miracle exhibited the poAvers of the Mosaic 
age; it extended over the whole nation. Boldly entering the royal presence, he pronounced 
— that a drought Avas at hand, in which neither dew nor rain should fall, until it was his 
AA’ill to withdraw the curse from Israel. 
Of the three great scriptural scourges, war, pestilence, and famine, the last is palpably 
the most fitted to enforce on a people the necessity of a moral change. War is a whirlwind 
of all the fiercer passions, a tumult of fear and flight, of hot re\ T enge and mad exultation, a 
fever and a frenzy of the land. Pestilence SAveeps the soil with such tremendous rapidity, 
that it .leaves no room for thought, or no thought but of terror; or even generates in the 
survivors a reckless licentiousness from mere despair; “ Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
Ave die.” But Famine, sIoav, searching, and terrible, while it wrings every sense, gives the 
heart time to feel. 
When the land had been thus smitten for three years, Elijah again appeared before the 
king, publicly arraigned his guilt as the source of the national calamity, and challenged the 
whole idolatrous priesthood, the “ four hundred prophets of the groves and the four hundred 
and fifty prophets of Baal,” to meet him alone, and decide, in the presence of the nation 
Avhether Jehovah or Baal Avere the true God of earth and heaven. 
The scene of this great trial Avas palpably chosen to give the most complete openness to 
Amos, iii. 1, &c. 
2 1 Kings, xvi. 31, 32. 
