Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.

In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

Asaph's lament for Israel is :—

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,

Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock;

Thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth.

Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh

Stir up thy strength, and come and save us.

Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine;

And we shall be saved.

O LORD God of hosts,

How long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people?

Thou feedest them with the bread of tears;

And givest them tears to drink in great measure.

Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours:

And our enemies laugh among themselves.

Turn us again, O God of hosts, and cause thy face to shine;
And we shall be saved.

Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt:

Thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.

Thou preparedst room before it,

And didst cause it to take deep root,

And it filled the land.

The hills were covered with the shadow of it,

And the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars.
She sent out her boughs unto the sea,

And her branches unto the river.

Why hast thou then broken down her hedges,

So that all they which pass by the way do pluck her?
The boar out of the wood doth waste it,

And the wild beast of the field doth devour it.

Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts:

Look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine;
And the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted,
And the branch that thou madest strong for thyself.

It is burned with fire, it is cut down :

They perish at the rebuke of thy countenance.

Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand :

Upon the son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself.
So will not we go back from thee:

Quicken us, and we will call upon thy name.

Turn us again, O LORD God of hosts, cause thy face to shine;
And we shall be saved.

COMMENT. It does sometimes happen that just when a country has sinned so far as to be about to suffer a terrible punishment, God stirs up the good to bring about something of a change for the better, as if for the saving of the souls of those who must suffer for the sins of their country. Thus the Israelites who returned home after Hezekiah's passover broke their idols and began to worship God more according to the law.

Meantime Tiglath-pileser had died, and this gave hopes to Samaria of shaking itself free of the Assyrians. Ethiopians had conquered Egypt, and there was a powerful king called So, Sethi, or Sethos, and both the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were strongly tempted to ally themselves with him against the dangerous Assyrian power. Isaiah, however, strongly warned Hezekiah against so doing, and he dutifully obeyed, even though he broke from the Assyrian dominion and ceased to pay tribute. But Hoshea of Samaria did trust to Egypt, and thus brought down on himself the fury of the new king of Nineveh, Shalmaneser VII., who three times overran Israel, and at last, in Hezekiah's fourth year, only three years later than that glorious passover, the trembling and pitying men of Judah and Benjamin looked down from their mountains on the plains covered with Assyrians, and Samaria blockaded by their armies. The siege lasted three years, and in the course of it Shalmaneser died, and his young son was set aside by a general called Sargon, who finished the siege and put Hoshea to death.

Sargon thus records his victory :—“ I defeated the King Elam (a confusion with Elah, Hoshea's father); I besieged, took, and captured the town of Samaria, and carried into captivity the 27,260 persons who lived in it. I put aside the old established rulers of the land, and put my lieutenants in their place!" His sculptures show the sad procession, the men chained together, the women on foot, with their little ones, or sometimes in carts, with small bundles of property. It was the Assyrian fashion of securing their conquests by changing the inhabitants of one district for another, and these Israelites were taken up into the hills of Media, and there settled. Probably these sufferers were chiefly of the central tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Issachar. Those beyond Jordan and the northern Danites had gone already, and the mountaineers of Tee do not seem to have suffered so much; but these tribes lost

their lovely home for ever! There has been no return as a nation for them. Some straggled back under the name of Jews, and some of the mountain Jews of Persia are probably their descendants; but the kingdom of Samaria, which had for its whole duration of 250 years steadily resisted God, in spite of all His pleadings, was overthrown, and for ever.

* And there is every reason to accept the Eightieth Psalm as the good Levite Asaph's prayer and lament over them. He goes back to the old blessing of Jacob-of Joseph as the fruitful bough, the vine by the well; and recollecting the words "from thence is the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel," he calls on that true Shepherd to have pity on the tribes of Joseph, joining Benjamin once again with his brother's sons, though they had so long been separated, and at each pause in his song entreating God to renew the blessing wherewith the High Priest had dismissed them after their happy Passover :

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:

The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. (NUMB. vi. 24—26.)

His mind is full of Isaiah's fresh prophecy of the vineyard that brought forth wild grapes, as he piteously describes the former beauty and present desolateness of the vine, trodden down as it now was by the Assyrian wild beast; and then from prayer he rises to prophecy. It does not follow that he understood it himself. Probably, yearning over the old days, he sung the wonderful verse

Let Thy Hand be on the Man of Thy Right Hand,

And on the Branch that Thou madest so strong for Thyself:

thinking only of Jacob's names for Rachel's sons,—the Son of my Right Hand, and the wounded but fruitful bough beside a well. But he was guided verily to make a prophecy that the Vine should be redeemed by the Hand of God pressing sore on the Man of His Right Hand, His only-begotten Son, the Branch who grew out of the old vine of Israel, and became the true Vine, whereof His

*Not for the younger ones.

members are the branches. Observe, it is the first time the Messiah is called by His name of the Branch, one that will often come again in prophecy. He was the Branch, and His being so called was, as St. Matthew points out, literally fulfilled when He was spoken of as the Nazarene; since that word signifies "a green bough."

LESSON LXXIII.*

THE ROD OF JESSE.

ABOUT B.C. 716.-ISAIAH X. 24-34; xi. 1-12.

Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD of hosts,

O my people that dwellest in Zion,

Be not afraid of the Assyrian :

He shall smite thee with a rod,

And shall lift up his staff against thee, after the manner of Egypt.
For yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease,

And mine anger in their destruction.

And the LORD of hosts shall stir up a scourge for him

According to the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb;
And as his rod was upon the sea,

So shall he lift it up after the manner of Egypt.

And it shall come to pass in that day,

That his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder,
And his yoke from off thy neck,

And the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing.
He is come to Aiath, he is passed to Migron ;‡

At Michmash he hath laid up his carriages:

They are gone over the passage:

They have taken up their lodging at Geba;
Ramah is afraid; Gibeah of Saul is fled.

Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim:

Cause it to be heard unto Laish, O poor Anathoth.
Madmenah is removed;

The inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves to flee.

As yet shall he remain at Nob that day :

He shall shake his hand against the mount of the daughter of Zion,

The hill of Jerusalem.

Behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts,

Shall lop the bough with terror :

And the high ones of stature shall be hewn down,

*Not for the younger ones.

† Ai.

The precipice.

And the haughty shall be humbled.

And he shall cut down the thickets of the forest with iron,
And Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,
And a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,

The spirit of wisdom and understanding,

The spirit of counsel and might,

The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD;

And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the

LORD:

And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,

Neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:
But with righteousness shall he judge the poor,

And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth:
And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,
And with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,
And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,

And the leopard shall lie down with the kid ;

And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed;

Their young ones shall lie down together :

And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp,

*

And the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain :

For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the

waters cover the sea.

And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse,

Which shall stand for an ensign of the people;

To it shall the Gentiles seek and his rest shall be glorious.

:

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

COMMENT.-The sight of their brethren of Israel carried off as captives must have been very dreadful to the men of Judah. They had now only their little mountain spot, lying between the two

* A serpent.