Stories of the Prophets Part 18

_When Samaria Fell._

A man who is a traitor to his country will, in all likelihood, prove traitorous to his avowed friends.

Hoshea, son of Elah, of Samaria, was such a man. Tilgath-Pileser, the a.s.syrian conqueror of Damascus a.s.sisted Hoshea to a.s.sa.s.sinate King Pekah, and appointed the a.s.sa.s.sin to rule in Pekah's stead, in the year 734 B. C. E., merely as a matter of expediency. It was an easier method of re-annexing the rebellious Kingdom of Israel to the a.s.syrian Empire without cost of life or treasure, and he stooped to it.

But when Tiglath-Pileser died and Shalmaneser IV succeeded him on the throne in Nineveh, Hoshea gave ear to the siren voice of Egypt, and rebelled.

It is related that Hoshea sent an emba.s.sy to King So, more correctly, Pharaoh Sabako, of Egypt, when that energetic Ethiopian prince became master over the whole of the ancient Nile country.

The new Pharaoh had ambitions northward. It was he who organized a coalition of a.s.syrian provinces in the Mediterranean country, with an eye to Nineveh. The traitor, Hoshea, proved the miserable stuff he was made of by joining actively in Sabako's ambitious schemes.

In answer to Sabako, Shalmaneser rushed his veteran troops toward Egypt. The Kingdom of Israel was the first rebellious province he had to deal with. Hoshea was prepared when, in 728, Samaria was besieged.

Samaria held out bravely enough for two years, waiting all the time for help from Egypt. But Sabako's promised armies and funds never came.

Shalmaneser died during this siege; but his successor, the great Sargon, came on with re-enforcements and finally, in 721, captured and reduced Samaria, before Hoshea's Egyptian ally had been heard from.

That was the end of the Kingdom of Israel, founded by Jeroboam ben Nebat, in the year 937, B. C. E., when he rebelled from Rehoboam, King Solomon's son. The Kingdom of Israel had lasted just 218 years.

Sargon sent away 27,290 captives, the youth and pride of Israel and Samaria, and had them scattered widely apart, in all his provinces.

The conqueror, himself, proceeded southward to meet and defeat Sabako, at Raphia, on the great Nile-delta-highway along the Mediterranean coast.

While the records do not show that these events made any impression upon the leaders of thought, such as Isaiah, in Jerusalem, they brought Micah his first opportunity to prohesy.

Living in Moresheth, on the highroad from Gaza to Jerusalem, Micah, who up to this time knew only of the corruption of the cla.s.ses and the oppression of the ma.s.ses of Judah, now had first-hand information of the political situation, as well.

Sargon's armies captured and pa.s.sed through Gaza on their march to Raphia. By way of Gaza, Micah learned that Samaria had not been razed to the ground. There was, therefore, hope for the city and for Israel.

Micah's hope, however, was not political. He, unlike Isaiah in Jerusalem, was not concerned with politics. His concern was with the social wrongs and economic outrages of which, as he had now learned, both Israel and Judah were victims.

There was this distinction, however, Israel had already collected the wages of its sins, had paid the price and had been chastised by the rod of a.s.syria. Judah might be recalled to its better self and escape a similar calamity.

So, before the dust of Sargon's victorious armies, pa.s.sing through Gaza, had settled in the roads, Micah went again to Jerusalem and launched forth earnestly and with vigor upon his prophetic mission.

In his very first public utterance he drew a deadly parallel between Israel and Judah:

"Hear, ye peoples, all of you; Hearken, O earth, and all that therein is: And let the Lord G.o.d be witness against you, The Lord from His holy temple.

For, behold, the Lord cometh forth out of His place.

And will come down, and tread upon the high places the earth.

And the mountains shall be molten under Him, And the valleys shall be cleft, As wax before the fire, As waters that are poured down a steep place.

For the transgression of Jacob is all this, And for the sins of the house of Israel.

What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?

And what are the high places of Judah?

Are they not Jerusalem?"

Fearlessly, with bold strokes, and in vivid pictures, he described the terrible conditions as he knew them:

"Hear, I pray you, ye chiefs of Jacob, And ye judges of the house of Israel!

You surely ought to know what is just!

Yet, you hate good and love evil; You who devour the flesh of my people, Flay their skin from off of them, And break their bones!"

It was possible for Judah to be saved, if the governing cla.s.ses, the judiciary, the great landowners and the wealthy merchants dealt justly and righteously with the common people, the poor, the peasant and the wage earner:

"For this will I lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like the jackals, And a lamentation like the ostriches."

Micah did more than merely preach and wail. Down in the Shefelah he set himself to help his fellow-peasants and to correct the injustices practiced upon them, wherever he could.

But the western foothills were not the whole of Judah; and the origin and source of the demoralizing wickedness lay not in the farm sections, but in the capital; and as to the capital, "her wounds are incurable." The cause of the downfall of Samaria and Israel

"Is come even to Judah; It reacheth unto the gate of my people, Even unto Jerusalem."

Therefore Micah, less hopeful than Isaiah, who was biding his time for a change of heart in the rulers and chiefs of the country, said of the coming of the day of reckoning:

"Then shall they cry unto the Lord, but He will not answer them: Yea, He will hide His face from them at that time, According as they have wrought evil in their doings."

CHAPTER IV.

_Judah Learns its Lesson._

King Hezekiah's preparation for rebellion against Sennacherib, in 715, shattered any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon the farming population.

Younger and readier to act than his older contemporary, Isaiah, he was not satisfied with a negative warning, such as the older prophet gave the leaders in Jerusalem when he walked about the city barefoot and in the garb of a slave.

Micah came up to the capital to stir it up; and he did set the people to talking and to thinking when, in a memorable speech, he differed fundamentally from Isaiah in his declaration that the Temple, the very House of G.o.d, as well as the city in which it was situated, could and would be destroyed:

"Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, And rulers of the house of Israel, That abhor justice and pervert all equity; That build up Zion with blood, And Jerusalem with iniquity.

The heads thereof judge for reward, And the priests thereof teach for hire, And the prophets thereof divine for money; Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, 'Is not the Lord in the midst of us?

No evil shall come to us.'

Therefore shall Zion, for your sake, be plowed as a field, And Jerusalem shall become heaps, And the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest."

Micah, naturally, received opposition from the same clique of false prophets that opposed Isaiah, and made his labors so difficult and, at first, unsuccessful; that misled king and people, "that bite with their teeth and cry, 'Peace,' to make my people to err." To these Micah gave as well as he received:

"The seers shall be put to shame, And the diviners confounded.

Yea, they shall all cover their lips, For there is no answer of G.o.d.

But as for me, I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord, And of judgment and of might, To declare unto Jacob his transgression And unto Israel his sin."

For years Micah kept at his task. He was indeed a tribune of the people, the champion of their rights against the vested interests, the great commoner of his day and time, fearlessly and courageously standing out against all opposition, trusting absolutely in G.o.d.

At last came the crisis of 704-1 and Hezekiah's memorable change of mind and heart. Micah played no mean part with Isaiah, in Hezekiah's reforms that followed.

Reforms were needed, however, not alone by "the heads of the house of Jacob" and "the rulers of the house of Israel," not alone in the courts of law and among the priests and prophets; they were needed as well in the religious beliefs and practices of the common people, whose cause was Micah's cause.

With the pa.s.sing of all political danger to the fatherland, Micah retired permanently to his farms in Moresheth. There he devoted the remainder of his peaceful, happy years to teaching the common people, "_my_ people," as he fondly refers to them, the religious, moral and ethical life that G.o.d demanded of them.