Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/143

 THE HEBREW WOMAN.

monarch insisted upon enforcing his de- crees, which the Jews obstinately resisted,

,and day after day the most horrible

scenes were enacted. A mother and her seven sons were called upon to eat un- lawful meat, and having indi nantly re- fused to obey were brought cfore An- tiochus. The mother, we are told, was “ marvellous above all, and worthy of hon- ourable memory." As one of her sons after another was subjected to tortures, varied with ﬁendish ingenuity, each was upheld in his last moments of agony by

the heroic woman, until the youngest J

alone survived. Antiochus, thinking it a disgrace to be thus battled, promised the youth honour and riches if he would fore- swcar the Jewish faith, and bade the mother counsel her son to yield to his persuasion. But the lion-hearted woman lauvrhed the tyrant to scorn, and bursting fort: in her own Hebrew tongue, said to her son, “ Fear not this tormentor, but being worthy of thy brothers, take thy death, that I may receive thee again in mercy.” Bereft of all her children, the mother at last, without a murmur, herself suffered death for her faith.

This same heroic spirit, ready to en- counter pain and death, reappears again and again in succeeding ages, and the long annals of inhuman persecution are like- wise the records of barbarous superhuman courage, and of beautiful, all-sustaining faith.

Perhaps one of the most signiﬁcant facts concerning the women of the Bible is that they were not debarred from the prophetic oﬂice. “Women as well as men were seized with the gift,” says Stanle ; and he instances “ Miriam, Deborah, uldah, Anna, and the four dau hters of Philip.” Miriam seems to have ieen inspired by the first breath of freedom which she drew upon the shores of the Red Sea, whilst Deborah burst forth in her jubilant song after victory had been gained over the op- pressors of her people. We read also of prophetesses at a later date,—Huldah, who lived within the College of Jerusalem, and to whom King Hilkiah and the high priest himself repaired when they sought counsel upon weighty matters. There is mention made also in the Old Testament of false prophetesses as well as false prophets; for Ezekiel, in denouncing the false prophets \vho deceived the people by lyin words, says, “Thou son of man, set thy ace against the dang/rl2r.r of thy peo- ple, which prophesy out of their own heart.” (Ezek. xiii. 17.)

Another peculiarity of the women of

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the Bible is, that neither prophetesses, teachers, nor heroines were severed from the ordinary ties of domestic life. Deb- orah was the wife of Lapedoth; Judith was the widow of Manasses, whom she had mourned for three ears; Hannah was the devoted mother o Samull; Ruth the loving daughter-in-law of Naémi; and the Maccabean woman is only known as the mother of the seven sons. Monkish celibacy, with its train of attendant evils, never—except partially among the Es- senes—had any place in the ethics of udaisrn.

Numberless are the traits of tender domestic aﬁfection to be found, like wild ﬂowers in the wilderness, inexpressibly cheering in the midst of those sandy wastes, which we come across in some of the historical books of the Old Testament. Who does not recall that exquisite little touch of pathos relatin how Isaac refused to be comforted after is mother’s death, until the younv wife Rebekah comes to live in that mofher’s tent? \Vhat can sur- pass among either Greek or Roman idylls the story of Jacob and Rachel? Such tender, enduring, and constant love as Jacob evinced, from the very first moment of courtship until the last sad scene of Bethlehem ——love which could give wings to time, which could keep strong and true in spite of a detestable fraud, which proved unalterable during the blight of childless- ness (considered as a curse in the Orient) «such love gives us one of the greatest and best of proofs that woman's position amon the Hebrews was full of dignity, and tiat her life was not untouched by that spirit of romance which we sometimes imagne to be only the fruit of modern life and sentiment. The story of Hannah, with its undercurrent of tender feeling, is another instance of the most devoted con- jugal affection. Do we not all remember how Elkanah redoubles his devotion to cheer the sad woman, when he appeals to her with the loving words -4‘ Why is thy heart grieved? Am 1 not better to thee than ten sons ? ”

No wonder, then, that so many of the pithy sayings of the Book of Proverbs should relate to conjugal happiness or the reverse, such as--

“ Whoso ﬁndeth a wife, ﬁndeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord " (chap. xviii. 22).

“A virtuous wuinan is a crown to her husband, but she that maketh himashamed is as rottenness to his bones” (chap. xii.

"‘ It is better to dwell in the corner of a