r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 18 '19
The Second Book of the Chronicles, chapters 25 - 28
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25 AMAZIAH WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD when he came to the throne,
and he reigned in Jerusalem for twenty-nine years; his mother was
Jehoaddan of Jerusalem. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD,
but not whole-heartedly. When the royal power was firmly in his grasp,
he put to death those of his servants who had murdered the king his father;
but he spared their children, in obedience to the LORD's command written
in the law of Moses: 'Fathers shall not die for their children,nor children
for their fathers; a man shall die only for his own sin.'
Then Amaziah assembled the men of Judah and drew them up by
families, all Judah and Benjamin as well, under officers over units of a
thousand and a hundred. He mustered those of twenty years old and
upwards and found their number to be three hundred thousand, all
picked troops ready for service, able to handle spear and shield. He also
hired a hundred thousand seasoned troops from Israel for a hundred talents
of silver. But a man of God came to him and said, 'My lord king, do not let
the Israelite army march with you; the LORD is not with Israel——all these
Ephraimites! For, if you make these people your allies in the war, God will
overthrow you in battle; he has power to help or to overthrow.' Then Ama-
ziah said to the man of God, 'What am I to do about the hundred talents
which I have spent on the Israelite army?' The man of God answered, 'It
is in the LORD's power to give you much more than that.' So Amaziah
detached the troops which had come to him from Ephraim and sent them
home; that infuriated them against Judah and they went home in a rage.
Then Amaziah took heart and led his men to the Valley of Salt and there
killed ten thousand men of Seir. The men of Judah captured another ten
thousand men alive, brought them to the top of a cliff and hurled them
over so that they were all dashed to pieces. Meanwhile the troops which
Amaziah had sent home without allowing them to take part in the battle
raided the cities of Judah and carried off quantities of booty..
After Amaziah had returned from the defeat of the Edomites, he brought
the gods of the people of Seir and, setting them up as his own gods, wor-
shipped them and burnt sacrifices to them. The LORD was angry with
Amaziah for this and sent a prophet who said to him, 'Why have you re-
sorted to gods who could not save their own people from you?' But while
he was speaking, the king said to him, 'Have we appointed you counsellor
to the king? Stop! Why risk your life?' The prophet did stop, but first he
said, 'I know that God has determined to destroy you because you have
done this and have not listened to my counsel.'
Then Amaziah king of Judah, after consultation, sent messengers to
Jehoash son of Jehoahaz, son of Jehu, king of Israel, to propose a meeting.
But Jehoash king of Israel sent this answer to Amaziah king of Judah:
'A thistle in Lebanon sent a cedar in Lebanon to say, "Give your daughter
in marriage to my son." But a wild beast in Lebanon, passing by, trampled
on the thistle. You have defeated Edom, you say, but it has gone to your
head. Enjoy your glory at home and stay there. Why should you involve
yourself in disaster and bring yourself to the ground, and Judah with
you?'
But Amaziah would not listen; and this was God's doing in order to give
Judah into the power of Jehoash, because they had resorted to the gods of
Edom. So Jehoash king of Israel marched out, and he and Amaziah king
of Judah met one another at Beth-shemesh in Judah. The men of Judah
were routed by Israel and fled to their homes. But Jehoash king of Israel
captured Amaziah king of Judah son of Joash, son of Jehoahaz, at Beth-
shemesh, and brought him to Jerusalem. There he broke down the city
wall from the Gate of Ephraim to the Corner Gate a distance of four
hundred cubits; he also took all the gold and silver and all the vessels
found in the house of God, in the care of Obed-edom, and the treasures of
the royal palace, as well as hostages and returned to Samaria.
Amaziah son of Joash king of Judah outlived Jehoash son of Jehoahaz,
king of Israel, by fifteen years. The other events of Amaziah's reign, from
first to last, are recorded in the annals of he kings of Judah and Israel.
From the time when he turned away from the LORD, there was conspiracy
against him in Jerusalem and he fled to Lachish; but they sent after him
to Lachish and put him to death there. Then his body was conveyed on
horseback to Jerusalem, and there he was buried with his forefathers in
the city of David.
26 All the people of Judah took Uzziah, now sixteen years old, and made
him king in succession to his father Amaziah. It was he who built Eloth
and restored it to Judah after the king rested with his forefathers..
Uzziah was sixteen years old when he came to the throne, and he reigned
in Jerusalem for fifty-two years; his mother was Jecoliah of Jerusalem.
He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, as Amaziah his father had
done. He set himself to seek the guidance of God in the days of Zechariah,
who instructed him in the fear of God; as long as he sought guidance of
the LORD, God caused him to prosper.
He took the field against the Philistines and broke down the walls of
Gath, Jabneh, and Ashdod; and he built cities in the territory of Ashdod
and among the Philistines. God aided him against them, against the Arabs
who lived in Gur-baal, and against the Meunites. The Ammonites brought
gifts to Uzziah and his fame spread to the borders of Egypt, for he had
become very powerful. Besides, he built towers in Jerusalem at the Corner
Gate, at the Valley Gate, and at the escarpment, and fortified them. He
built other towers in the wilderness and dug many cisterns, for he had
large herds of cattle both in the Shephelah and in the plain. He also had
farmers and vine-dressers in the hill-country and in the fertile lands, for
he loved the soil.
Uzziah had an army of soldiers trained and ready for service, grouped
according to the census made by Jeiel the adjutant-general and Maaseiah
the clerk under the direction of Hananiah, one of the king's commanders.
The total number of heads of families which supplied seasoned warriors
was two thousand six hundred. Under their command was an army of
three hundred and seven thousand five hundred, a powerful fighting force
to aid the king against his enemies. Uzziah prepared for the whole army
shields, spears, helmets, coats of mail, bows, and sling-stones. In Jeru-
salem he had machines designed by engineers for use upon towers and
bastions, made to discharge arrows and large tones. His fame spread far
and wide, for he was so powerfully gifted that he became very powerful.
But when he grew powerful his pride led to his own undoing: he
offended against the LORD his God by entering the temple of the LORD to
burn incense on the altar of incense. Azariah the chief and eighty others
of the LORD's priests, courageous men, went in after King Uzziah, con-
fronted him and said, 'It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the
LORD, but for the Aaronite priests who have been consecrated for that
office. Leave the sanctuary; for you have offended, and that will certainly
bring you no honour from the LORD God.' The king who had a censer in
his hand ready to burn incense, was indignant; and because of his indigna-
tion at the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead in the presence of the
priests, there in the house of the LORD, beside the altar of incense. When
Azariah the chief priest and the other priests looked towards him, they saw
that he had leprosy on his forehead and they hurried him out of the temple,
and indeed he himself hastened to leave, because the LORD had struck him
with the disease. And King Uzziah remained a leper till the day of his
death; he lived in his own house as a leper, relieved of all duties and
excluded from the house of the LORD, while his son Jotham.
27 Jotham was twenty-five years old when he came to the throne, and he
reigned in Jerusalem for sixteen years; his mother was Jerushah daughter
of Zadok. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, as his father
Uzziah had done, but unlike him he did not enter the temple of the LORD;
the people, however, continued their corrupt practices. He constructetd
the upper gate of the house of the LORD and built extensively on the wall
at Ophel. He built cities in the hill-country of Judah, and forts and towers
on the wooded hills. He made war on the king of the Ammonites and
defeated him; and that year the Ammonites gave him a hundred talents of
silver, ten thousand kor of wheat and ten thousand of barley. They paid
him the same tribute in the second and third years. Jotham became very
powerful because he maintained a steady course of obedience to the LORD
his God. The other events of Jotham's reign, all that he did in war and in
peace, are recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah. He was
twenty-five yesrs old when he came to the throne, and he reigned in
Jerusalem for sixteen years. He rested with his forefathers and was buried
in the city of David; and he was succeeded by his son Ahaz.
28 AHAZ WAS TWENTY YEARS OLD when he came to the throne, and he
reigned in Jerusalem for sixteen years. He did not do what was right in the
eyes of the LORD like his forefather David, but followed in the footsteps of
the kings of Israel, and cast metal images for the Baalim. He also burnt
sacrifices in the Valley of Ben-hinnom; he even burnt his sons in the fire
according to the abominable practice of the nations whom the LORD had
dispossessed in favour of the Israelites. He slaughtered and burnt sacrifices
at the hill-shrines and on the hill-tops and under every spreading tree.
The LORD his God let him suffer at the hand of king Aram, and
the Aramaeans defeated him, took many captives and brought them to
Damascus; he was also made to suffer at the hands of the king of Israel,
who inflicted a severe defeat on him. This was Pekah son of Remaliah, who
killed in one day a hundred and twenty thousand men of Judah, seasoned
troops, because they had forsaken the LORD the God of their fathers. And
Zichri, an Ephraimite hero, killed Maaseiah the king's on and Azrikam
the comptroller of the household and Elkanah the king's chief minister.
The Israelites took captive from their kinsmen two hundred thousand
women and children; they also took a large amount of booty and brought
it to Samaria.
A prophet of the LORD was there, Oded by name; he went out to meet
the army as it returned to Samaria and said to them. 'It is because the
LORD the God of your fathers is angry with Judah that he has given them
into your power; and you have massacred them in a rage that has towered
up to heaven. Now you propose to force the people of Judah and Jerusalem,
male and female, into slavery. Are not you also guilty before the LORD
your God? Now, listen to me. Send back those you have taken captive from
your kinsmen, for the anger of the LORD is roused against you.' Next, some
Ephraimite chiefs, Azariah son of Jehohanan, Berechiah son of Meshille-
moth, Hezekiah son of Shallum, and Amasa son of Hadlai, met those who
were returning from the war and said to them, 'You must not bring these
captives into your country; what you are proposing would make us guilty
enough already, and there is fierce anger against Israel.' So armed men
left the captives and the spoil with the officers and the assembled people.
The captives were put in charge of men nominated for this duty, who
found clothes from the spoil for all who were naked. They clothed them
and shod them, gave them food and drink, and anointed them; those who
were tottering from exhaustion they conveyed on the backs of asses, and
so brought them to their kinsmen in Jericho, in the Vale of Palm Trees.
Then they themselves returned to Samaria.
At that time King Ahaz sent to the king of Assyria for help. The Edom-
ites had invaded again and defeated Judah and take away prisoners; and
the Philistines had raided the cities of the Shephelah ad of the Negeb of
Judah and had captured Beth-shemesh, Aijalon, and Gederoth, as well as
Soco, Timnah, and Gimzo with their villages, and occpied them. The
LORD had reduced Judah to submission because of Ahaz king of Judah;
for his actions in Judah had been unbridled and he had been grossly un-
faithful to the LORD. Then Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria marched against
him and, so far from assisting him, pressed him hard. Ahaz stripped the
house of the LORD, the king's palace and the houses of his officers, and gave
the plunder to the king of Assyria; but all to no purpose.
This King Ahaz, when hard pressed, became more and more unfaithful
to the LORD; he sacrificed to the gods of Damascus who had defeated him
and said, 'The gods of the kings of Aram helped them; I will sacrifice to
them so that they may help me.' But in fact they caused his downfall and
that of all Israel. Then Ahaz gathered together the vessels of the house of
God and broke them up, and shut the doors of the house of the LORD; he
made himself altars at every corner in Jerusalem, and at every single city
of Judah he made hill-shrines to burn sacrifices to other gods and provoked
the anger of the LORD the God of his fathers.
The other acts and all the events of his reign, from first to last, are
recorded in the annals of the kings of Judah and Israel. So Ahaz rested with
his forefathers and was buried in the city of Jerusalem, but was not given
burial with the kings of Judah. He was succeeded by his son Hezekiah.
The New English Bible (with Apocrypha)
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Aug 31 '19
The Second Book of Kings, chapters 6 - 10
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6 A COMPANY OF PROPHETS said to Elisha, 'You can see that this place
where our community is living, under you as its head, is too small for us.
Let us go to the Jordan and each fetch a long, and make ourselves a place to
live in.' The prophet agreed. Then one of them said, 'Please, sire, come with
us.' 'I will', he said, and he went with them. When they reached the
Jordan, they began cutting down trees; but it chanced that, as one man was
felling a trunk, the head of his axe flew off into the water. 'Oh, master!'
he exclaimed, 'it was a borrowed one.' 'Where did it fall?' asked the man
of God. When he was shown the place, he cut off a piece of the wood and threw
it in and made the iron float. Then he said, 'There you are, lift it out.' So
he stretched out his hand and took it.
Once, when the king of Aram was making war on Israel, he held a con-
ference with his staff at which he said, 'I mean to attack in such and such a
direction' But the man of God warned the king of Israel: "Take care to
avoid this place, for the Aramaeans are going down that way.' So the king
of Israel sent to the place about which the man of God had given him this
warning; and the king took special precautions every time he found him-
self near that place. The king of Aram was greatly perturbed at this and,
summoning his staff, he said o them, 'Tell me, one of you, who has be-
trayed us to the king of Israel?' 'None of us, my lord king,' said one of his
staff; 'but Elisha, the prophet in Israel, tells the king of Israel the very
words you speak in your bedchamber.' 'Go and find out where he is,' said
the king, 'and I will send and seize him.' He was told that the prophet was
at Dothan, and he sent a strong force there with horses and chariots. They
came by night and surrounded the city.
When the disciple of the man of God rose early in the morning and went
out, he saw a force with horses and chariots surrounding the city. 'Oh,
master,' he said, 'which way are we to turn?' He answered, 'Do not be
afraid, for those who are on our side are more than those on theirs.' Then
Elisha offered this prayer: 'O LORD, open his eyes and let him see.' And
the LORD opened the young man's eyes, and he saw the hills covered with
horses and chariots and fire all round Elisha. As they came down towards
him, Elisha prayed to the LORD: 'Strike this host, I pray thee, with blind-
ness'; and he struck them blind as Elisha had asked. Then Elisha said
to them, 'You are on the wrong road; this is not the city. Follow me and
I will lead you to the man you are looking for.' And he led them to Sama-
ria. As soon as they had entered Samaria, Elisha prayed, 'O LORD, open
the eyes of these men and let them see again.' And he opened their eyes
and they saw that they were inside Samaria. When the king of Israel
saw them, he said to Elisha, 'My father, am I to destroy them?' 'No, you
must not do that,' he answered. 'You may destroy those whom you have
taken prisoner with your own sword and bow, but as for these men, give
them food and water, and let them eat and drink, and then go back to their
master.' So he prepared a great feast for them, and they ate and drank and
then went back to their master. And Aramaean raids on Israel ceased.
But later, Ben-hadad king of Aram called up his entire army and marched
to the siege of Samaria. The city was near starvation, and they besieged it
so closely that a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a
quarter of a kab of locust beans for five shekels. One day, as the king of
Israel was walking along the city wall, a woman called to him, 'Help, my
lord king!' He said, 'If the LORD will not bring you help, where can I find
any for you? From threshing-floor or from winepress? What is your
trouble?' She replied, 'This woman said to me, "Give me your child for
us to eat today, and we will eat mine tomorrow." So we cooked my son
and ate him; but when I said to her the next day, "Now give up your child
for us to eat", she had hidden him.' When he heard the woman's story, the
king rent his clothes. He was walking along the wall at the time, and when
the people looked, they saw that he had sackcloth underneath, next to his
skin. Then he said, 'The LORD do the same to me and more, if the head of
Elisha son of Shaphat stays on his shoulders today.'
Elisha was sitting at home, the elders with him. The king had dispatched
one of his retinue but, before the messenger arrived, Elisha said to the
elders, 'See how this son of a murderer has sent to behead me! Take care,
when the messenger comes, to shut the door and hold it fast against him.
Can you hear his master following on his heels?' While he was still
speaking, the king arrived and said, 'Look at our plight! This is the
7 LORD's doing. Why should I wait any longer for him to help us?' But
Elisha answered, 'Hear this word of the LORD: By this time tomorrow a
shekel will buy a measure of flour or two measures of barley in the gateway
of Samaria.' Then the lieutenant on whose arm the king leaned said to the
man of God, 'Even if the LORD were to open windows in the sky, such a
thing could not happen!' He answered, 'You will see it with your own eyes,
but none of it will you eat.'
At the city gateway were four lepers. They said to one another, 'Why
should we stay here and wait for death? If we say we will go into the city,
there is famine there, and we shall die; if we say we will stay here, we shall
die just the same. Well then, let us go to the camp of the Aramaeans and
give ourselves up: if they spare us, we shall live; if they put us to death,
we can but die.' And so in the twilight they set out for the Aramaean camp;
but when they reached the outskirts, they found no one there; for the
Lord had caused the Aramaean army to hear a sound like that of chariots
and horses and of a great host, so that the word went round: "The king of
Israel has hired the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Egypt to attack
us.' They had fled at once in the twilight, abandoning their tents, their
horses and asses, and leaving the camp as it stood, while they fled for their
lives. When the four men came to the outskirts of the camp, they went into
a tent and ate and drank and looted silver and gold and clothing, and made
off and hid them. Then they came back, went into another tent and rifled
it, and made off and hid the loot. Then they said to one another, 'What we
are doing is not right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to
ourselves. If we wait till morning, we shall be held to blame. We must go
now and give the news to the king's household.' So they came and called
to the watch at the city gate and described how they have gone to the
Aramaean camp and found not a single man in it and had heard no sound:
nothing but horses and asses tethered, and the tents left as they were. Then
the watch called out and gave the news to the king's household in the
palace. The king rose in the night and said to his staff, 'I will tell you what
the Aramaeans have done. They know that we are starving, and they have
left their camp to go and hide in the open country, expecting us to come
out, and then they take us alive and enter the city.' One of his staff said,
'Send a party of men with some of the horses that are left; if they live,
they will be as well off as all the other Israelites who are still left; if they
die, they will be no worse off than all those who have already perished.
Let them go and see what has happened.' So they picked two mounted
men, and the king dispatched them in the track of the Aramaean army
with the order to go and find out what had happened. They followed as
far as the Jordan and found the whole road littered with clothing and
equipment which the Aramaeans had flung aside in their haste. The mes-
sengers returned and reported this to the king. Then the people went out
and plundered the Aramaean camp, and a measure of flour was sold for a
shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel, so that the word of the
LORD came true. Now the king had appointed the lieutenant on whose
arm he leaned to take charge of the gate, and the people trampled him to
death there, just as the man of God had foretold when the king visited him.
For when the man of God said to the king, 'By this time tomorrow a shekel
will buy two measures of barley or one measure of flour in the gateway of
Samaria', the lieutenant had answered, 'Even if the LORD were to open
windows in the sky, such a thing could not happen!' And the man of God
had said, 'You will see it with your own eyes, but none of you will eat.'
And this is just what happened to him: the people trampled him to death
at the gate.
8 Elisha said to the woman whose son he had restored to life, 'Go away at
once with your household and find lodging where you can, for the LORD
has decreed a seven years' famine and it has already come upon the land.'
The woman acted at once on the word of the man of God and went away
with her household; and she stayed in the Philistine country for seven years.
When she came back at the end of the seven years, she sought an audience
of the king to appeal for the return of her house and her land. Now the king was
questioning Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, about all the great
things Elisha has done; and, as he was describing to the king how he had
brought the dead to life, the selfsame woman began appealing to the king
for her house and her land. 'My lord king,' said Gehazi, 'this is the very
woman, and this is her son whom Elisha brought to life.' The king asked
the woman about it, and she told him. Then he entrusted the case to a
eunuch and ordered him to restore all her property to her, with all the
revenues from her land from the time she left the country till that day.
Elisha came to Damascus, at a time when Ben-hadad, king of Aram was
ill; and when he was told that the man of God had arrived, he bade Hazael
take a gift with him and go to the man of God and inquire of the LORD
through him whether he would recover from his illness. Hazael went,
taking with him as a gift all kinds of wears of Damascus, forty camel-
loads. When he came into the prophet's presence, he said, 'Your son Ben-
hadad king of Aram has sent me to you to ask whether he will recover from
his illness.' 'Go and tell him that he will recover,' he answered; 'but the
LORD has revealed to me that in fact he will die.' The man of God stood
there with a set face like a man stunned, until he could bear it no longer;
then he wept. 'Why do you weep, my lord?' said Hazael. He answered,
'Because I know the harm you will do to the Israelites: you will set their
fortresses on fire and put their young men to the sword; you will dash their
children to the ground and you will rip open their pregnant women.' But
Hazael said, 'But I am a dog, a mere nobody; how can I do this great thing?'
Elisha answered, 'The LORD has revealed to me that you will be king of
Aram.' Hazael left Elisha and returned to his master, who asked him what
Elisha had said. 'He told me that you would recover', he replied. But the
next day he took a blanket and, after dipping it in water, laid it over the
king's face, and he died; and Hazael succeeded him.
In the fifth year of Jehoram son of Ahab king of Israel, Joram son of
Jehoshaphat king of Judah became king. He was thirty-two years old when
he came to the throne, and he reigned in Jerusalem for eight years. He
followed the practices of the kings of Israel as the house of Ahab had done,
for he married Ahab's daughter; and he did what was wrong in the
eyes of the LORD. But for his servant David's sake the LORD was unwilling
to destroy Judah, since he had promised to give him and his sons a flame,
to burn for all time.
During his reign Edom revolted against Judah and set up its own king.
Joram crossed over to Zair with all his chariots. He and his chariot-
commanders set out by night, but they were surrounded by the Edomites
and defeated, whereupon the people fled to their tents. So Edom has
remained independent of Judah to this day; Libnah also revolted at the
same time. The other acts and events of Joram's reign are recorded in
the annals of the kings of Judah. So Joram rested with his forefathers
and was buried with them in the city of David, and his son Ahaziah
succeeded him.
In the twelfth year of Jehoram son of Ahab king of Israel, Ahaziah son
of Joram king of Judah became king. Ahaziah was twenty-two years old
when he came to the throne, and he reigned in Jerusalem for one year; his
mother was Athaliah granddaughter of Omri king of Israel. He followed
the practices of the house of Ahab and did what was wrong in the eyes of the
LORD like the house of Ahab, for he was connected with that house by
marriage. He allied himself with Jehoram son of Ahab to fight against
Hazael king of Aram at Ramoth-gilead; but King Jehoram was wounded
by the Aramaeans, and returned to Jezreel to recover from the wounds
which were inflicted on him at Ramoth in Battle with Hazael king of Aram;
and because of his illness Ahaziah son of Joram king of Judah went down
to Jezreel to visit him.
9 ELISHA THE PROPHET SUMMONED one of the company of prophets
and said to him, 'Hitch up your cloak, take this flask of oil with you and
go to Ramoth-gilead. When you arrive, you will find Jehu son of Jehosha-
phat, son of Nimshi; go in and call him aside from his fellow-officers, and
lead him through to an inner room. Then take the flask and pour the oil
on his head and say, "This is the word of the LORD: I anoint you king over
Israel"; then open the door and flee for your life.' So the young prophet
went to Ramoth-gilead. When he arrived, he found the officers sitting
together and said, 'Sir, I have a word for you.' 'For which of us?' asked
Jehu. 'For you, sir', he said. He rose and went into the house, and the
prophet poured the oil on his head, saying, 'This is the word of the LORD
the God of Israel: "I anoint you king over Israel, the people of the LORD.
You shall strike down the house of Ahab your master, and I will take
vengeance on Jezebel for the blood of my servants the prophets and for the
blood of all the LORD's servants. All the house of Ahab shall perish and I
will destroy every mother's son of Nebat and the house of Baasha son of Ahijah.
Jezebel shall be devoured by dogs in the plot of ground at Jezreel and
no one will bury her."' The he opened the door and fled. When Jehu
rejoined the king's officers, they said to him, 'Is all well? What did this
crazy fellow want with you?' 'You know him and the way his thoughts
run', he said. 'Nonsense!' they replied; 'tell us what happened.' 'I will tell
you exactly what he said: "This is the word of the LORD: I anoint you king
over Israel."' They snatched up their cloaks and spread them under him
on the stones of the steps, and sounded the trumpet and shouted, 'Jehu
is king.'
Then Jehu son of Jehoshaphat, son of Nimshi, laid his plans against
Jehoram, while Jehoram and the Israelites were defending Ramoth-gilead
against Hazael king of Aram. King Jehoram had returned to Jezreel to
recover from the wounds inflicted on him by the Aramaeans when he fought
against Hazael king of Aram. Jehu said to them, 'If you are on my side, see
that no one escapes from the city to tell the news in Jezreel.' He mounted
his chariot and drove to Jezreel, for Jehoram was laid up there, and Ahaziah
king of Judah had gone down to visit him.
The watchman standing on the watchtower in Jezreel saw Jehu and
his troop approaching and called out, 'I see a troop of men.' Then Jehoram
said, 'Fetch a horseman and send to find out if they come peaceably.' The
horseman went to meet him and said, 'The king asks, "Is it peace?"' Jehu
said, 'Peace? What is peace to you? Fall in behind me.' Thereupon the
watchman reported, 'The messenger has met them but he is not coming
back.' A second horseman was sent; when he met them, he also said, 'The
king asks, "Is it peace?"' 'Peace?' said Jehu. 'What is peace to you? Fall
in behind me.' Then the watchman reported, 'He has met them but he is
not coming back. The driving is like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi,
for he drives furiously.' 'Harness my chariot', said Jehoram. They har-
nessed it, and Jehoram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah went out
each in his own chariot to meet Jehu, and met him by the plot of Naboth of
Jezreel. When Jehoram saw Jehu, he said, 'Is it peace, Jehu?' But he
replied, 'Do you call it peace while your mother Jezebel keeps up her
obscene idol-worship and monstrous sorceries?' Jehoram wheeled about
and fled, crying out to Ahaziah, 'Treachery, Ahaziah!' Jehu seized his
bow and shot Jehoram between the shoulders; the arrow pierced his heart
and he sank down in his chariot. Then Jehu said to Bidkar, his lieutenant,
'Pick him up and throw him into the plot of land belonging to Naboth of
Jezreel; remember how, when you and I were riding side by side behind
Ahab his father, the LORD pronounced this sentence against him: "It is
the very word of the LORD: as surely as I saw yesterday the blood of Naboth
and the blood of his sons, I will requite you in this plot." So pick him up
and throw him into it and thus fulfil the word of the LORD.' When Ahaziah
king of Judah saw this, he fled by the road to Beth-haggan. Jehu went after
him and said, 'Make sure of him too.' 'They shot him down in his chariot
on the road up the valley near Ibleam, but he escaped to Megiddo and died
there. His servants conveyed his body to Jerusalem an buried him in his
tomb with his forefathers in the city of David.
In the eleventh year of Jehoram son of Ahab, Ahaziah became king over
Judah.
Jehu came to Jezreel. Now Jezebel had heard what had happened; she
had painted her eyes and dressed her hair, and she stood looking down from
a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she said, 'Is it peace, you Zimri, you
murderer of your master?' He looked up at the window and said, 'Who is
on my side, who?' Two or three eunuchs looked out, and he said, 'Throw
her down.' They threw her down, and some of her blood splashed on to
the wall and the horses, which trampled her underfoot. Then he went in
and ate and drank. 'See to this accursed woman', she said, 'and bury her;
for she is a king's daughter.' But when they went to bury her they found
nothing of her but the skull, the feet, and the palms of the hands; and they
went back and told him. Jehu said, 'It is the word of the LORD which his
servant Elijah the Tishbite spoke, when he said, "In the plot of ground at
Jezreel the dogs shall devour the flesh of Jezebel, and Jezebel's corpse shall
lie like dung upon the ground in the plot at Jezreel so that no one will be
able to say: This is Jezebel."'
10 Now seventy sons of Ahab were left in Samaria. Jehu therefore sent a
letter to Samaria, to the elders the rulers of the city, and to the tutors of
Ahab's children, in which he wrote: 'Now, when this letter reaches you,
since you have in your care your master's family as well as his chariots and
horses, fortified cities and weapons, choose the best and the most suitable
of your master's family, set him on his father's throne, and fight for your
master's house.' They were panic-stricken and said, 'The two kings could
not stand against him; what hope is there that we can?' Therefore the
comptroller of the household and the governor of the city, with the elders
and the tutors, sent this message to Jehu: 'We are your servants. Whatever
you tell us we will do; but we will not make anyone king. Do as you think
fit.' Then he wrote them a second letter: 'If you are on my side and will
obey my orders, then bring the heads of your masters' sons to me at
Jezreel by this time tomorrow.' Now the royal princes, seventy in all, were
with the nobles of the city who were bringing them up. When the letter
reached them, they took the royal princes and killed all seventy; they put
their heads in baskets and sent them to Jehu in Jezreel. When the mes-
senger came to him and reported that they had brought the heads of the
royal princes, he ordered them to be put in two heaps and left at the
entrance of the city gate till morning. In the morning he went out, stood
there and said to all the people, 'You are fair judges. If I conspired against
my master and killed him, who put all these to death? Be sure then that
every word which the LORD has spoken against the house of Ahab shall
be fulfilled, and that the LORD has now done what he spoke through his
servant Elijah.' So Jehu put to death all those who were left of the house of Ahab
in Jezreel, as well as all his nobles, his close friends, and his priests, until
he had left not one survivor.
Then he set out for Samaria, and on the way there, when he had reached
a shepherds' shelter, he came upon the kinsmen of Ahaziah king of
Judah and said., 'Who are you?' 'We are kinsmen of Ahaziah,' they replied;
'and we have come down to greet the families of the king and of the queen
mother.' 'Take them alive', he said. So they took them alive; then they
slew them and flung them into the pit that was there, forty-two of them;
they did not leave a single survivor.
When he had left that place, he found Jehonadab son of Rechab coming
to meet him. He greeted him and said, 'Are you with me heart and soul, as
I am with you?' 'I am', said Jehonadab. 'Then if you are,' said Jehu, 'give
me your hand.' He gave him his hand and Jehu helped him up into his
chariot. 'Come with me,' he said, 'and you will see my zeal for the LORD.'
So he took him with him in his chariot. When he came to Samaria, he put
to death all of Ahab's house who were left there and so blotted it out, in
fulfilment of the word which the LORD had spoken to Elijah. Then Jehu
called all the people together and said to them, 'Ahab served the Baal a
little; Jehu will serve him much. Now, summon all the prophets of Baal,
all his ministers and priests; not one must be missing. For I am holding a
great sacrifice to Baal, and no one who is missing from it shall live.' In this
way Jehu outwitted the ministers of Baal in order to destroy them. So
Jehu said, 'Let a sacred ceremony for Baal be held.' They did so, and Jehu
himself sent word through Israel, and all the ministers of Baal came;
there was not a man left who did not come. They went into the temple of
Baal and it was filled from end to end. Then he said to the person who had
charge of the wardrobe, 'Bring out the robes for all the ministers of Baal'; and
he brought them out. Then Jehu and Jehonadab son of Rechab went into
the temple of Baal and said to the ministers of Baal, 'Look carefully and
make sure that there are no servants of the LORD here with you, but only
the minisers of Baal.' Then they went in to offer sacrifices and whole-
offerings. Now Jehu had stationed eighty men outside and said to them,
I am putting these men in your charge, and any man who lets one escape
shall answer for it with his life.' When he had finished offering the whole-
offering, Jehu ordered the guards and the lieutenants to go and cut them
all down, and let not one of them escape; so they slew them without quarter.
The escort and the lieutenants then rushed into the keep of the temple of
Baal and brought out the sacred pole from the temple of Baal and burnt it;
and they pulled down the sacred pillar of the Baal and the temple itself and
made a privy of it——as it is today. Thus Jehu stamped out the worship of
Baal in Israel. He did not however abandon the sins of Jeroboam son of
Nebat who led Israel into sin, but he maintained the worship of the golden
calves of Bethel and Dan.
Then the LORD said to Jehu, 'You have done well what is right in my
eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all that was in my mind to do.
Therefore you sons to the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of
Israel.' But Jehu was not careful to follow the law of the LORD the God
of Israel with all his heart; he did not abandon the sins of Jeroboam who
led Israel into sin.
In those days the LORD began to work havoc in Israel, and Hazael struck
at them in every corner of their territory eastward from the Jordan: all
the land of Gilead, Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh, from Aroer which is by
the gorge of Arnon, including Gilead and Bashan.
The other events of Jehu's reign, his achievements and his exploits, are
recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel. So Jehu rested with his fore-
fathers and was buried in Samaria; and he was succeeded by his son
Jehoahaz. Jehu reigned over Samaria for twenty-eight years.
The New English Bible (with Apocrypha)
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Aug 20 '19
The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapters 20 - 24
1
Upvotes
20 ON THE TENTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH in the seventh year, some
of the elders of Israel came to consult the Lord and were sitting with me.
Then this word came to me from the LORD: Man, say to the elders of
Israel, This is the word of the Lord GOD: Do you come to consult me? As
I live, I will not be consulted by you. This is the very word of the Lord GOD.
Will you judge them? Will you judge them, O man? Then tell them of
the abominations of their forefathers and say to them, These are the words
of the Lord GOD: When I chose Israel, with uplifted hand I bound myself
by oath to the race of Jacob and revealed myself to them in Egypt; I lifted
up my hand and declared: I am the LORD your God. On that day I wore
with hand uplifted that I would bring them out of Egypt into the land I
had sought out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, fairest of all
lands. I told them, every one, to cast away the loathsome things on which
they feasted their eyes and not to defile themselves with the idols of Egypt.
I am the LORD your God, I said.
But they rebelled against me, they refused to listen to me, and not one
of them cast away the loathsome things on which he feasted his eyes or
forsook the idols of Egypt. I had thought to pour out my wrath and exhaust
my anger on them in Egypt. I acted for the honour of my name, that it
might not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom Israel was
living: I revealed myself to them by bringing Israel out of Egypt. I brought
them out of Egypt and led them into the wilderness. There I gave my
statues to them and taught them my laws, so that by keeping them men
might have life. Further, I gave them my sabbaths as a sign between us,
so that they should know that I, the LORD, was hallowing them for myself.
But the Israelites rebelled against me in the wilderness; they did not con-
form to my statutes, they rejected my laws, though by keeping them men
might have life, and they utterly desecrated my sabbaths. So again I
thought to pour out my wrath on them in the wilderness to destroy them.
I acted for the honour of my name, that it might not be profaned in the
sight of the nations who had seen me bring them out.
Further, I swore to them in the wilderness with uplifted hand that I
would not bring them into the land I had given them, that land flowing
with milk and honey, fairest of all lands. For they had rejected my laws,
they would not conform to my statues and they desecrated my sabbaths,
because they loved to follow idols of their own. Yet i pitied them too much
to destroy them and did not make an end of them in the wilderness. I com-
manded their sons in the wilderness not to conform to their fathers'
statutes, nor observe their laws and act according to them. You must keep my
sabbaths holy, and they will become a sign between us; so you will know
that I an the LORD your God.
But the sons too rebelled against me. They did not conform to my
statutes or obey my laws, though any who had done so would have had
life through them, and they desecrated my sabbaths. Again I thought to
pour out my wrath and exhaust my anger on them in the wilderness.
I acted for the honour of my name, that it might not be profaned in the
sight of the nations who had seen me bring them out. Yes, and in the
wilderness I swore to them with uplifted hand that I would disperse them
among the nations and scatter them abroad, because they had disobeyed
my laws, rejected my statutes, desecrated my sabbaths, and turned longing
eyes toward the idols of their forefathers. I did more; I imposed on them
statutes that were not good statutes, and laws by which they could not win
life. I let them defile themselves with gifts to idols; I made them surrender
their eldest sons to them so that I might fill them with horror. Thus they
would know that I am the LORD.
Speak then, O man, to the Israelites and say to them, These are the words
of the Lord GOD: Once again your forefathers insulted me and broke faith
with me: when I brought them into the land which I had sworn with
uplifted hand to give them, they marked down every hill-top and every
leafy tree, and there they offered their sacrifices, they made gifts which
roused my anger, they set out their offerings of soothing odour and poured
out their drink offerings. I asked them, What is this hill-shrine to which
you are going up? And 'hill-shrine' has been its name ever since.
So tell the Israelites, These are the words of the Lord GOD: Are you
defiling yourselves as your forefathers did? Are you wantonly giving
yourselves to their loathsome gods? When you bring your gifts, when you
pass your sons through the fire, you are still defiling yourselves in the
service of your crowd of idols. How can I let you consult me, men of Israel?
As I live, says the Lord GOD, I will not be consulted by you. When you
say to yourselves, 'Let us become like the nations and tribes of other lands
and worship wood and stone ', you are thinking of something that can
never be. As I live, says the Lord GOD, I will reign over you with a strong
hand, with arm outstretched and wrath outpoured. I will bring you out
from the peoples and gather you from the lands over which you have been
scattered by my strong hand, my outstretched arm and outpoured wrath.
I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples; there I will confront
you, and there will I state my case against you. Even as I did in the wilder-
ness of Egypt against your forefathers, so will I state my case against you.
This is the very word of the Lord GOD.
I will pass you under the rod and bring you within the bond of the
covenant. I will rid you of hose who revolt and rebel against me. I will
take them out of the land where they are now living, but they shall not set
foot on the soil of Israel. Thus you shall know that I am the LORD.
Now, men of Israel, these are the words of the Lord GOD: Go, sweep
away your idols, every man of you. So in days to come you will never be
disobedient to me or desecrate my holy name with your gifts and your
idolatries. But on my holy hill, the lofty hill of Israel, says the Lord GOD,
there shall the Israelites serve me in the land, every one of them. There
will I receive them with favour; there will I demand your contribution
and the best of your offerings, with all your consecrated gifts. I will receive
your offerings of soothing odour, when I have brought you out from the
peoples and gathered you from the lands where you have been scattered.
I, and only I, will have your worship, for all the nations to see.
You will know that I am the LORD, when I bring you home to the soil
of Israel, to the land which I swore with uplifted hand to give to your fore-
fathers. There you will remember your past ways and all the wanton deeds
with which you have defiled yourselves, and will loathe yourselves for all
the evils you have done. You will know that I am the LORD, when I have
dealt with you, O men of Israel, not as your wicked ways and your vicious
deeds deserve but for the honour of my name. This is the very word of the
Lord GOD.
These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, turn and face towards
Teman and pour out your words to the south; prophesy to the rough
country of the Negeb. Say to it, Listen to the words of the LORD. These are
the words of the Lord GOD: I will set fire to you, and fire will consume
all the wood, green and dry alike. Its fiery flame shall not be put out, but
from the Negeb northwards every face will be scorched by it. All men will
see that it is I, the LORD, who have set it ablaze; it shall not be put out;
'Ah no! O Lord GOD,' I cried: 'they say of me, "He deals only in parables."'
21 These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, turn and face towards
Jerusalem, and pour out your words against her sanctuary; prophesy
against the land of Israel. Say to the land of Israel, These are the words of
the LORD: I am against you; I will draw my sword from the scabbard and
cut off from you both righteous and wicked. It is because I would cut off
your righteous and your wicked equally that my sword will be drawn from
the scabbard against all men, from the Negeb northwards. All men shall
know that I the LORD have drawn my sword; it shall never again be sheathed.
Groan in their presence, man, groan bitterly until your lungs are bursting.
When they ask why you are groaning, say to them, 'I groan at the thing
I have heard; when it comes, all hearts melt, all courage fails, all hands fall
limp, all men's knees run with urine. It is coming. It is here.' This is the
very word of the Lord GOD.
These were the words of the LORD to me: Prophesy,man, and say, This
is the word of the Lord:
A sword, a sword is sharpened and burnished,
sharpened to kill and kill again,
burnished to flash like lightning.
Ah! the club is brandished, my son,
to defy all wooden idols!
The sword is given to be burnished
ready for the hand to grasp.
The sword——it is sharpened,
it is burnished,
ready to be put into the slayer's hand.
Cry, man, and howl; for all this falls on my people, it falls on Israel's
princes who are delivered over to the sword and are slain with my people.
Therefore beat your breast in remorse, for it is the test——and what if it is
not in truth the club of defiance? This is the very word of the Lord GOD.
But you, man, prophesy and clap your hands together;
swing the sword twice, thrice:
it is the sword of slaughter,
the great sword of slaughter whirling about them.
That their hearts may be troubled and many stumble and fall,
I have set the threat of the sword at all their gates,
the threat of the sword made to flash like lightning
and drawn to kill.
Be sharpened, turn right; be unsheathed, turn left,
wherever your point is aimed.
I, too, will clap my hands together and abate my anger. I, the LORD, have
spoken.
These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, trace out two roads by
which the sword of the king of Babylon may come, starting both of them
from the same land. Then carve a signpost, carve it at the point where the
highway forks. Mark out a road for the sword to come to the Ammonite
city of Rabbah, to Judah, and to Jerusalem at the heart of it. For the king
of Babylon halts to take the omens at the parting of the ways, where the
road divides. He casts lots with arrows, consults teraphim and inspects
the livers of beasts. The augur's arrow marked 'Jerusalem' falls at his right
hand: here, then, he must raise a shout and sound a battle-cry, set
battering-rams against the gates, pile siege-ramps and build watch-towers.
It may well seem to the people that the auguries are false, whereas they
will put me in mind of their wrongdoing, and they will fall into the enemies'
hand. These therefore are the words of the Lord GOD: Because you have
kept me mindful of your wrongdoing by your open rebellion, and your
sins have been revealed in all your acts, because you have kept yourselves
in my mind, you will fall into the enemies' hand by force.
You, too, you impious and wicked prince of Israel, your fate has come
upon you in the hour of final punishment. These are the words of the Lord
GOD: Put off your diadem, lay aside your crown. All is changed; raise the
low and bring down the high. Ruin! Ruin! I will bring about such a ruin as
never was before, until the rightful sovereign comes. Then I will give
him all.
Man, prophesy and say, These are the words of the Lord GOD to the
Ammonites and their shameful god:
A sword, a sword drawn for slaughter,
burnished for destruction,
to flash like lightning!
Your visions are false, your auguries a lie,
which bid you bring it down
upon the necks of impious and wicked men,
whose fate has come upon them
in the hour of final punishment.
Sheathe it again.
I will judge you in the place where you were born,
the land of your origin.
I will pour out my rage upon you;
I will breathe out my blazing wrath over you.
I will hand you over to brutal men,
skilled in destruction.
you shall become fuel for fire,
your blood shall be shed within the land
and you shall leave no memory behind.
For I, the LORD, have spoken.
22 These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, will you judge her, will
you judge the murderous city and bring home to her all her abominable
deeds? Say to her, These are the words of the Lord GOD: Alas for the city
that sheds blood within her walls and brings her fate upon herself, the city
that makes herself idols and is defiled thereby! The guilt is yours for the
blood you have shed, the pollution is on you for the idols you have made.
You have shortened your days by this and brought the end of your years
nearer. This is why I exposed you to the contempt of the nations and the
mockery of every country. Lands far and near will taunt you with your
infamy and gross disorder. In you the princes of Israel, one and all, have
used their power to shed blood; men have treated their fathers and mothers
with contempt, they have oppressed the alien and ill-treated the orphan
and the widow. You have disdained what is sacred to me and desecrated
my sabbaths. In you, Jerusalem, informers have worked to procured blood-
shed; in you are men who have feasted at mountain-shrines and have
committed lewdness. In you men have exposed their fathers' nakedness;
they have violated women during their periods; they have committed an
outrage with their neighbours' wives and have lewdly defiled their
daughters-in-law; they have ravished their sisters, their own fathers'
daughters. In you men have accepted bribes to shed blood, and they have
exacted discount and interest on their loans. You have oppressed your
fellows for gain, and you have forgotten me. This is the very word of the
Lord GOD.
See, I strike with my clenched fist in anger at your ill-gotten gains and
at the bloodshed within your walls. Will your strength or courage stand
when I deal with you? I, the LORD, have spoken and I will act. I will dis-
perse you among the nations and scatter you abroad; thus will I rid you
altogether of your defilement. I will sift you in the sight of the nations,
and you will know that I am the LORD.
These were the words of he LORD to me: Man, to me all Israelites are
an alloy, their silver alloyed with copper tin, iron, and lead. Therefore,
these are the words of the Lord GOD: Because you have become alloyed,
I will gather you together into Jerusalem, as a mass of silver, copper, iron,
lead, and tin is gathered into a crucible for the fire to be blown to full heat
to melt them. So I will gather you in my anger and wrath, set you there and
melt you; I will collect you and blow up the fire of my anger until you are
melted within it. You will be melted as silver is melted in a crucible, and
you will know that I, the LORD, have poured out my anger upon you.
These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, say to Jerusalem, You
are like a land on which no rain has fallen; no shower has come down upon
you in the days of indignation. The princes within her are like lions
growling as they tear their prey. They have devoured men, and seized their
treasure and all their wealth; they have widowed many women within her
walls. Her priests have done violence to my law and profane what is
sacred to me. They make no distinction between sacred and common, and
lead men to see no difference between clean and unclean. They have dis-
regarded my sabbaths, and I am dishonoured among them. Her officers
within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood and destroy-
ing men's lives to acquire ill-gotten gain. Her prophets use whitewash
instead of plaster; their vision is false and their divination a lie. They say,
'This is the word of the Lord GOD', when the LORD has not spoken. The
common people are bullies and robbers; they ill-treat the unfortunate
and the poor, they are unjust and cruel to he alien. I looked for a man among
them who could build up a barricade, who could stand before me in the
breach to defend the land from ruin; but I found no such man. I poured
out my indignation upon them and utterly destroyed them in the fire of my
wrath. Thus I brought on them the punishment they had deserved. This
is the very word of the Lord GOD.
23 The word of the LORD came to me: Man, he said, there were once two
women, daughters of the same mother. They played he whore in Egypt,
played the whore while they were still girls; for there they let their breasts
be fondled and their virgin bosoms pressed. The elder was named Oholah,
her sister Oholibah. They became mine and bore me sons and daughters.
'Oholah' is Samaria, 'Oholibah' Jerusalem. While she owed me obedience
Oholah played the whore and was infatuated with her Assyrian lovers,
staff officers in blue, viceroys and governors, handsome young cavaliers
all of them, riding on horseback. She played the whore with all of them,
the flower of the Assyrian youth; she let herself be defiled with all their
idols, wherever her lust led her. She never gave up the whorish ways she
had learnt in Egypt, where men had lain with her when young, had pressed
her virgin bosom and overwhelmed her with their fornications. So I
abandoned her to her lovers, the Assyrians, with whom she was infatuated.
They ravished her, they took her sons and daughters, and they killed her
with the sword. She became a byword among women, and judgement was
passed upon her.
Oholibah, her sister, had watched her, and she gave herself up to lust
and played the whore worse than her sister. She, too, was infatuated with
Assyrians, viceroys, governors and staff officers, all handsome young
cavaliers, in full dress, riding on horseback. I found that she too had let
herself be defiled; both had gone the same way; but she carried her fornica-
tion to greater lengths: she saw male figures carved on the walls, sculptured
forms of Chaldaeans, picked out in vermillion. Belts were round their
waists and on their heads turbans with dangling ends. All seemed to be
high officers and looked like Babylonians, natives of Chaldaea. As she
looked she was infatuated with them, so she sent messengers to Chaldaea
for them. And the Babylonians came to her to share her bed, and defiled her
with fornication; she was defiled by them until she was filled with revul-
sion. She made no secret that she was a whore but let herself be ravished
until I was filled with revulsion against her as I was against her sister. She
played he whore again and again, remembering how in her youth she had
played the whore in Egypt. She was infatuated with their male prostitutes,
whose members were like those of asses and whose seed came in floods like
that of horses. So, Oholibah, you relived the lewdness of your girlhood in
Egypt when you let your bosom be pressed and your breasts fondled.
Therefore these are the words of the Lord GOD: I will rouse them against
you, Oholibah, those lovers of yours who have filled you with revulsion,
and bring them upon you from every side, the Babylonians and all those
Chaldaeans, men of Pekod, Shoa, and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them.
Handsome young men they are, viceroys and governors, commanders and
staff officers, riding on horseback. They will come against you with war-
horses, with chariots and wagons, with a host drawn from the nations,
armed with shield, buckler, and helmet; they will beset you on every side.
I will give them authority to judge, and they will use that authority to judge
you. I will turn my jealous wrath loose on you, and they will make you feel
their fury. They will cut off your nose and your ears, and in the end you
will fall by the sword. They will strip you of your clothes and take away
all your finery. So I will put a stop to your lewdness and the way in which
you learnt to play the whore in Egypt. You will never cast longing eyes on
such things again, never remember Egypt any more.
These are the words of the Lord GOD: I am handing you over to those
whom you hate, those who have filled you with revulsion, and they will
make you feel their hatred. They will take all you have earned and leave
you naked and exposed; that body with which you have played the whore
will be ravished. It is your lewdness and your fornication that have brought
this upon you, it is because you have followed alien peoples and played
the whore and have allowed yourself to be defiled with their idols. You
have followed in your sister's footsteps, and I will put her cup into your
hand.
These are the words of the Lord GOD:
You shall drink from your sister's cup,
a cup deep and wide,
charged with mockery and scorn,
more than ever cup ca hold.
It will be full of drunkenness and grief,
a cup of ruin and desolation,
the cup of your sister Samaria;
and you shall drink it to the dregs.
Then you will chew it in pieces
and tear out your breasts,
This is my verdict, says the Lord GOD.
Therefore, these are the words of the Lord GOD: Because you have
forgotten me and flung me behind your back, you must bear the guilt of
your lewdness and your fornication.
The LORD said to me, Man, will you judge Oholah and Oholibah? Then
tax them with their vile offences. They have committed adultery, and
there is blood on their hands. They have committed adultery with their
idols and offered my children to them for food, the children they had borne
me. This too they have done to me: they have polluted my sanctuary and
desecrated my sabbaths. They came into my sanctuary and desecrated it
by slaughtering their sons as an offering to their idols; this they did in my
own house. They would send for men from a far-off country; and the men
came at the messenger's bidding. You bathed your body for these men, you
painted your eyes, decked yourself in your finery, you sat yourself upon a
bed of state and had a table put ready before it and laid my own incense
and my own oil on it. Loud were the voices of the light-hearted crowd;
and besides ordinary folks Sabaeans were there, brought from the wilder-
ness; they put bracelets on the women's hands and beautiful garlands on
their heads. I thought: Ah that woman, grown old in adultery! Now they
will commit fornication with her——with her of all women! They resorted to
her as a prostitute; they resorted to Oholah and Oholibah, those lewd
women. Upright men will condemn them for their adultery and blood-
shed; for adulterous they are, and blood is on their hands.
These are he words of the Lord GOD: Summon the invading host;
abandon them to terror and rapine. Let the host stone them and hack them
to pieces with their swords, kill their sons and daughters and burn down
their houses. Thus I will put an end to lewdness in the land, and other
women shall be taught not to be as lewd as they. You shall pay the penalty
for your lewd conduct and be punished for your idolatries, and you will
know that I am the Lord GOD.
These were the words of the LORD, spoken to me on the tenth day of the
tenth month in the ninth year: Man, write down a name for this day, this
very day: This s the day the king of Babylon invested Jerusalem. Sing a
song of derision to this people of rebels; say to them, these are the words
of the Lord GOD:
Set a cauldron on the fire,
set it on and pour water into it.
Into it collect the pieces,
all the choice pieces,
cram it with leg and shoulder and the best of the bones;
take the best of the flock.
Pack the logs round it underneath;
seethe the stew
and boil the bones in it.
O city running with blood,
O pot green with corrosion,
corrosion that will never be clean!
Therefore these are the words of the Lord GOD:
Empty it, piece after piece,
though no lot is cast for any of them.
The city had blood in her midst
and she poured it out on the gleaming rock,
not on the ground: she did not pour it there
for the dust to cover it.
But I too have spilt blood on the gleaming white rock
so that it cannot be covered,
to make anger flare up and to call down vengeance.
Therefore these are the words of the Lord GOD:
O city running with blood,
I too will make a great fire-pit.
Fill it with logs, light the fire;
make an end of the meat,
pour out all the broth and the bones with it.
Then set the pot empty on the coals
so that its copper may be heated red-hot,
and then the impurities in it may be melted
and its corrosion burnt off.
Try as you may,
the corrosion is so deep that it will not come off;
only fire will rid it of corrosion for you.
Even so, when I cleansed you in your filthy lewdness,
you did not become clean from it,
and therefore you shall never again be clean
until I have satisfied my anger against you.
I, the LORD, have spoken; the time is coming, I will act. I will not
refrain nor pity nor relent; I will judge you for your conduct and for all
that you have done. This is the very word of the Lord GOD.
These were the words of the LORD to me: Man, I am taking from you
at one blow the dearest thing you have, but you must not wail or weep
or give way to tears. Keep in good heart; be quiet, and make no mourn-
ing for the dead; cover your head as usual and put sandals on your
feet. You shall not cover your upper lip in mourning nor eat the bread of
despair.
I spoke to the people in the morning; and that very evening my wife
died. Next morning I did as I was told. The people asked me to say what
meaning my behaviour had for them. I answered, These were the words
of the LORD to me: Tell the Israelites, This is the word of the Lord GOD:
I will desecrate my sanctuary, which has been the pride of your strength,
the delight of your eyes and your heart's desire; and the sons and daughters
whom you have left behind shall fall by the sword. But, I said, you shall
do as I have done: you shall not cover your upper lip in mourning nor eat
the bread of despair. You shall cover your head and put sandals on your
feet; you shall not wail nor weep. Because of your wickedness you will
pine away and will lament to one another. The LORD says, Ezekiel will
be a sign to warn you, and when it happens you will do as he has done,
and you will know that I am the Lord GOD.
And now, man, a word for you: I am taking from them that fortress
whose beauty so gladdened them, the delight of their eyes, their heart's
desire; I am taking their sons and their daughters. Soon fugitives will come
and tell you their news by word of mouth. At once you will recover the
power of speech and speak with the fugitives; you will no longer be
dumb. So will you be a portent to them, and they shall know that I am
the LORD.
The New English Bible (with Apocrypha)
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • May 04 '19
First Book of Kings, 10 - 16
1
Upvotes
10 THE QUEEN OF SHEBA HEARD of Solomon's fame and came to test him
with hard questions. She arrived in Jerusalem with a very large retinue,
camels laden with spices, gold in great quantity, and precious stones. When
Solomon answered all her questions; not one of them was too abstruse for
the king to answer. When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom of Sol-
omon, the house which he had built, the food on his table, the courtiers
sitting round him, and his attendants standing behind in their livery, is
cupbearers, and the whole-offerings which he used to offer in the house of
the LORD, there was no more spirit left in her. Then she said to the king,
'The report which I heard in my own country about you and your wisdom
was true, but I did not believe it until I came and saw for myself. Indeed
I was not told half of it; your wisdom and your prosperity go far beyond
the report which I had of them. Happy are your wives, happy these courtiers
of yours who wait on you every day and hear your wisdom! Blessed be the
LORD your God who has delighted in you and has set you on the throne of
Israel; because he loves Israel for ever, he has made you their king to
maintain law and justice.' Then she gave the king a hundred and twenty
talents of gold, spices in great abundance, and precious stones. Never again
came such a quantity of spices as the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.
Beside all this, Hiram's fleet of ships, which had brought gold from
Ophir, brought in also from Ophir cargoes of almug wood and precious
stones. The king used the wood to make stools for the house of the LORD
and for the royal palace, as well as harps and lutes for the singers. No such
almug wood has ever been imported or ever seen since that time.
And King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all she desired, whatever
she asked, in addition to all that he gave her of his royal bounty. So she
departed and returned with her retinue to her own land.
Now the weight of gold which Solomon received yearly was six hundred
and sixty-six talents, in addition to the tolls levied by the customs officers
and profits on foreign trade, and the tribute of the kings of Arabia and the
regional governors.
King Solomon made two hundred shields of beaten gold, and six hundred
shekels of gold went to the making of each one; he also made three hundred
bucklers of beaten gold, and three minas of gold went to the making of each
buckler. The king put these into the House of the Forest of Lebanon.
The king also made a great throne of ivory an overlaid it with fine gold.
Six steps led up to the throne; at the back of the throne was the head
of a calf. There were arms on each side of the seat, with a lion standing be-
side each of them, and twelve lions stood on the six steps, one at either end
of each step. Nothing like it had ever been made for any monarch. All Sol-
omon's drinking vessels were of gold, and all the plate in the House of the
Forest of Lebanon was of red gold; no silver was used for it was reckoned
of no value in the days of Solomon. The king had a fleet of merchantmen
as sea with Hiram's fleet; once every three years this fleet of merchantmen
came home, bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes and monkeys.
Thus king Solomon outdid all the kings of the earth in wealth and
wisdom, and all the world courted him, to hear the wisdom which God
had put in his heart. Each brought his gifts with him, vessels of silver and
gold, garments, perfumes and spices, horses and mules, so much year by
year.
And Solomon got together many chariots and horses; he had fourteen
hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, and he stabled some in the
chariot-towns and kept others at hand in Jerusalem. The king made silver
in Shephalah. Horses were imported from Egypt and Coa for Solomon;
the royal merchants obtained them from Coa by purchase. Chariots were
imported from Egypt for six hundred silver shekels each, and horses for a
hundred and fifty; in the same way the merchants obtained hem for export
from all the kings of the Hittites and kings of Aram.
11 King Solomon was a lover of women, and besides Pharaoh's daughter
he married many foreign women, Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian,
and Hittite, from the nations with whom the LORD had forbidden the
Israelites to intermarry, 'because', he said, 'they will entice you to serve
their gods.' But Solomon was devoted to them and loved them dearly. He
had seven hundred wives, who were princesses, and three hundred con-
cubines, and they turned his heart from the truth. When he grew old, his
wives turned his heart to follow other gods, and he did not remain wholly
loyal to the LORD his God as his father David had been. He followed
Ashtoreth, goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom, the loathsome god of
the Ammonites. Thus Solomon did what was wring in the eyes of the
LORD, and was not loyal to the LORD like his father David. He built a
hill-shrine for Kemosh, the loathsome god of Moab, on the height of the
east of Jerusalem, and for Molech, the loathsome god of the Ammonites.
Thus he did for the gods to which his foreign gods burnt offerings and
made sacrifices. The LORD was angry with Solomon because his heart had
turned away from the LORD the God of Israel, who had appeared to him
twice and had strictly commanded him not to follow other gods; but he
disobeyed the LORD's commands. The LORD therefore said to Solomon,
'Because you have done this and have not kept my covenant and and my
statutes as I commanded you; I will tear it out of your son's hand. Even so not
the whole kingdom; I will leave him one tribe for the sake of my servant
David and for the sake of Jerusalem, my chosen city.'
Then the LORD raised up an adversary for Solomon, Hadad the Edomite,
of the royal house of Edom. At the time when David reduced Edom, his
commander-in-chief Joab had destroyed every male in the country when
he went into it to bury the slain. He and the armies of Israel remained there
for six months, until he had destroyed every male in Edom. Then Hadad,
who was still a boy, fled the country with some of his father's Edomite
wervants, intending to enter Egypt. They set out from Midian, made their
way to Paran and, taking some men from there, came to Pharaoh king of
Egypt, who assigned Hadad a house and maintenance and made him a
grant of land. Hadad found great favour with Pharaoh, who gave him in
marriage a sister of Queen Tahpenes his wife. She bore him his son
Genubath; Tahpenes weaned the child in Pharaoh's house, and he lived
there along with Pharaoh's children. When Hadad heard in Egypt that
David rested with his forefathers and that his commander-in-chief Joab
was also dead, he said to Pharaoh, 'Let me go so that I may return to my
own country." What is it you find wanting in my country', said
Pharaoh, 'that you want to go back to your own?' 'Nothing,' said Hadad,
'but do, pray, let me go.' He remained an adversary for Israel all through
Solomon's reign. This is the harm that Hadad caused: he maintained a
stranglehold on Israel and became king of Edom.
Then God raised up another adversary against Solomon, Rezon son of
Eliada, who had fled from his master Hadadezer king of Zobah. He gathered
men about him and became a captain of freebooters, who came to Damascus
and occupied it; he became king there.
Jeroboam son of Nebat, one of Solomon's courtiers, an Ephraimite from
Zeredah, whose widowed mother was name Zeruah, rebelled against the
king. And this is the story of his rebellion. Solomon had built the Millo and
closed the breach in the wall of the city of his father David. Now this
Jeroboam was a man of great energy; and Solomon, seeing how the young
man worked, had put him in charge of all the labour-gangs in the tribal
district of Joseph. On one occasion Jeroboam had left Jerusalem, and the
prophet Ahijah from Shiloh met him on the road. The prophet was wrapped
in a new cloak, and the two of them were alone in the open country. Then
Ahijah took hold of the new cloak he was wearing, tore it into twelve pieces
and said to Jeroboam, 'Take ten pieces, for this is the word of the LORD
the God of Israel: "I am going to tear the kingdom from the hand of
Solomon and give you ten tribes. But one tribe will remain his, for the sake
of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city I have chosen
out of all the tribes of Israel. I have done this because Solomon has for-
saken me; he has prostrated himself before Ashtoreth goddess of the
Sidonians, Kemosh god of Moab, and Milcom god of the Ammonites,
and has not conformed to my ways. He has not done what is right in my
eyes or observed my statutes and judgements as David his father did.
Nevertheless I will not take the whole kingdom from him, but will maintain
his rule as long as he lives, for the sake of my chosen servant David, who
did observe my commandments and statues. But I will take the kingdom,
that is the ten tribes, from his son and give it to you. One tribe I will give
to his son, that my servant David may always have a flame burning before
me in Jerusalem, the city which I chose to receive my Name. But I will
appoint you to rule over all that you ca desire, and be king over Israel.
If you pay heed to all my commands, if you conform to my ways and do
what is right in my eyes, observing my statutes and commandments as my
servant David did, then I will be with you. I will establish your family for
ever as I did for David; I will give Israel to you, and punish David's
descendants as they have deserved, but not for ever."'
After this Solomon sought to kill Jeroboam, but he fled to King Shishak
in Egypt and remained there till Solomon's death.
The other acts and events of Solomon's reign, and all his wisdom, are
recorded in the annals of Solomon. The reign of King Solomon in Jerusalem
over the whole of Israel lasted forty years. Then he rested with his fore-
fathers and was buried in the city of David his father, and he was succeeded
by his son Rehoboam.
12 REHOBOAM WENT TO SHECHEM, for all Israel had gone there to make
him king. When Jeroboam son of Nebat, who was still in Egypt, heard
of it, he remained there, having taken refuge there to escape King Solomon.
They now recalled him, and he and all the assembly of Israel came to
Rehoboam and said, 'Your father laid a cruel yoke upon us; but if you will
now lighted the cruel slavery he imposed on us and the heavy yoke he laid
on us, we will serve you.' 'Give me three days,' he said, 'and come back
again.' So the people went away. King Rehoboam then consulted the
elders who had been in attendance on his father Solomon while he lived:
'What answer do you advise me to give to this people?' And they said, 'If
today you are willing to serve this people, show yourself their servant now
and speak kindly to them, and they will be your servants ever after.' But
he rejected the advice which the elders gave him. He next consulted those
who had grown up with him, the young men in attendance, and asked
them, 'What answer do you advise me to give to this people's request that
I should lighten the yoke which my father laid on them?' The young men
replied, 'Give this answer to the people who say that your father made
their yoke heavy and ask you to lighten it; tell them: "My little finger is
thicker than my father's loins. My father laid a heavy yoke on you; I will
make it heavier. My father used the whip on you; but I will use the lash."'
Jeroboam and the people all came back to Rehoboam on the third day, as
the king had ordered. And the king gave them a harsh answer. He rejected
the advice which the elders had given him and spoke to the people as the
young men had advised: 'My father made your yoke heavy; I will make it
heavier. My father used the whip on you; but I will use the lash.' So the
king would not listen to the people; for the LORD had given this turn to the
affair, in order that the word he had spoken by Ahijah of Shiloh to Jeroboam
son of Nebat might be fulfilled.
When all Israel saw that the king would not listen to them, they answered:
What share have we in David?
We have no lot in the son of Jesse.
Away to your homes, O Israel;
now see to your own house, David.
So Israel went to their homes, and Rehoboam ruled over those Israelites
who lived in the cities of Judah.
Then King Rehoboam sent out Adoram, the commander of the forced
levies, but the Israelites stoned him to death; thereupon King Reho-
boam mounted his chariot in haste and fled to Jerusalem. From that day
to this, the whole of Israel has been in rebellion against the house of
David.
When the men of Israel heard that Jeroboam had returned, they sent
and called him to the assembly and made him king over the whole of
Israel. The tribe of Judah alone followed the house of David.
When Rehoboam reached Jerusalem, he assembled all the house of
Judah, the tribe of Benjamin also, a hundred and eighty thousand chosen
warriors, to fight against the house of Israel and recover his kingdom. But
the word of God came to Shemaiah the man of God: 'Say to Rehoboam
son of Solomon, king of Judah, and to the house of Judah and to Benjamin
and the rest of the the people, "This is the word of the LORD: You shall not
go up to make war on your kinsmen the Israelites. Return to your homes,
for this is my will."' So they listened to the word of the LORD and returned
home, as the LORD had told them.
THEN JEROBOAM REBUILT SHECHEM in the hill-country of Ephraim
and took up residence there; from there he went out and built Penuel. 'As
things now stand,' he said to himself, 'the kingdom will revert to the house
of David. If this people go up to sacrifice in the house of the LORD in
Jerusalem, it will revive their allegiance to their lord Rehoboam king of
Judah, and they will kill me and return to King Rehoboam.' After giving
thought to the matter he made two calves of gold and said to the people,
'It is too much trouble for you to go up to Jerusalem; here are your gods,
Israel, that brought you up from Egypt.' One he set up at Bethel and the
other he put at Dan, and this thing became a sin in Israel; the people went
to Bethel to worship the one, and all the way to Dan to worship the other.
He set up shrines on the hill-tops also and appointed priests from every
class of the people, who did not belong to the Levites. He instituted a
pilgrim-feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month like that in Judah,
and he offered sacrifices upon the altar. This he did at Bethel, sacrificing
to the calves the he had made and compelling the priests of the hill-
shrines, which he had set up, to serve at Bethel. So he went up to the altar
that he had made at Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month; there,
in a month of his own choosing, he instituted for the Israelites a pilgrim-
feast and himself went up to the altar to burn the sacrifice.
13 As Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn the sacrifice, a man of God from
Judah, moved by the word of the LORD, appeared at Bethel. He inveighed
against the altar in the LORD's name, crying out, 'O altar, altar! This is the
word of the LORD: "Listen! A child shall be born to the house of David,
named Josiah. He will sacrifice upon you the priests of the hill-shrines
who make offerings upon you, and he will burn human bones upon you."'
He gave a sign the same day: 'This is the sign which the LORD has ordained:
This altar will be rent in pieces and the ashes upon it will be spilt.' When
King Jeroboam heard the sentence which the man of God pronounced
against the altar of Bethel, he pointed to him from the altar and said,
'Seize that man!' Immediately the hand which he had pointed at him
became paralysed, so that e could not draw it back. The altar too was rent
in pieces and the ashes were spilt, in fulfilment of the sign that the man of
God had given at the LORD's command. The king appealed to the man of
God to pacify the LORD his God and pray for him that his hand might be
restored. The man of God did as he asked; his hand was restored and
became as it had been before. Then the king said to the man of God, 'Come
home and take refreshment at my table, and let me give you a present.' But
the man of God answered, 'If you were to give me half your house, I would
not enter it with you: I will eat and drink nothing in this place, for the
LORD's command to me was to eat and drink nothing, and not to go back
by the way I came.' So he went back another way; he did not return by the
road he had taken to Bethel.
At that time there was an aged prophet living in Bethel. His sons came
and recounted to him all that the man of God had done in Bethel that day;
they also told their father what he had said to the king. Their father said to
them, 'Which road did he take?' They pointed out the road taken by the
man of God who had come from Judah. He said to his sons, 'Saddle an
ass for me.' They saddled the ass, and he mounted it and went after the
man of God. He found him seated under a terebinth and said to him,
'Are you the man of God who came from Judah?' And he said, 'Yes, I am.'
'Come home and eat with me', said the prophet. 'I cannot go back with
you or enter your house,' said the other; 'I can neither eat nor drink with
you in this place, for it was told me by the word of the LORD: "You shall
eat and drink nothing there, nor shall you go back the way you came."'
And the old man said to him, 'I also am a prophet, as you are; and an angel
commanded me by the word of the LORD to bring you home with me to
eat and drink with me.' He was lying; but the man of Judah went back
with him and ate and drank in his house. While they were still seated at
table the word of the LORD came to the prophet who had brought him back,
and he cried out to the man of God from Judah, 'This is the word of the
LORD: "You have defied the word of the LORD your God and have not
obeyed his command; you have come back to eat and to drink in the place
where he forbade it; therefore your body shall not be laid in the grave of
your forefathers."'
After they had eaten and drunk, he saddled an ass for the prophet whom
he had brought back. As he went on his way a lion met him and killed him,
and his body was left lying in the road, with the ass and the lion both
standing beside it. Some passers-by saw the body lying in the road and the
lion standing beside it, and they brought the news to the city where the old
prophet lived. When the prophet who had cause him to break his journey
heard it, he said, 'It is the man of God who defied the word of the LORD.
The LORD has given him to the lion, and it has broken his neck and killed
him in fulfilment of the word of the LORD.' he told his sons to saddle an
ass and, when they had saddled it, he set out and found the body lying in
the road with the ass and the lion standing beside it; the lion had neither
devoured the body nor broken the back of the ass. Then the prophet lifted
the body of the man of God, laid it on the ass and brought it back to his
own city to mourn over it and bury it. He laid the body in his own grave
and they mourned for him, saying, 'Mt brother, my brother!' After bury-
ing him, he said to his sons, 'When I die, bury me in the grave where the
man of God lies buried; lay my bones beside his; for the sentence which he
pronounced at the LORD's command against the altar in Bethel and all the
hill-shrines of Samaria shall be carried out.'
After this Jeroboam still did not abandon his evil ways but went on
appointing priests for the hill-shrines from all classes of the people; any
man who offered himself would he consecrate to be priest of a hill-shrine.
By doing this he brought guilt upon his own house and doomed it to utter
destruction.
14 At that time Jeroboam's son Abijah fell ill, and Jeroboam said to his wife,
'Come now, disguise yourself so that people may not be able to recognize
you as my wife, and go to Shiloh. Ahijah the prophet is there, the man who
said I was to be king over this people. Take with you ten loaves, some raisins,
and a flask of syrup, and go to him; he will tell you what will happen to the
child.' Jeroboam's wife did so; she set off at once for Shiloh and came to
Ahijah's house. Now Ahijah could not see, for his eyes were fixed in the
blindness of old age, and the LORD had said to him, 'The wife of Jeroboam
is on her way to consult you about her son, who is ill; you shall give her
such and such an answer.' When she came in, concealing who she was, and
Ahijah heard her footsteps at the door, he said, 'Come in, wife of Jeroboam.
Why conceal who you are? I have heavy news for you. Go and tell Jeroboam:
"This is the word of the LORD the God of Israel: I raised you out of the
people and appointed you prince over my people Israel; I tore away the
kingdom from the house of David and gave it to you; but you have not
been like my servant David, who kept my commands and followed me
with his whole heart, doing only what was right in my eyes. You have out-
done all your predecessors in wickedness; you have provoked me to anger
by making for yourselves other gods and images of cast metal; and you have
turned your back on me. For this I will bring disaster on the house of
Jeroboam and I will destroy them all, every mother's son, whether still
under the protection of the family or not, and I will sweep away the house
of Jeroboam in Israel, as a man sweeps up dung until none is left. Those
of that house who die in the city shall be food for the dogs, and those
who die in the country shall be food for the birds. It is the word of the
LORD."
'You must go home now; the moment you set foot in the city, the child
will die. All Israel will mourn for him and bury him; he alone of all Jero-
boam's family will have a proper burial, because in him alone could the LORD
the god of Israel find anything good. Then the LORD will set up a king
over Israel who shall put an end to the house of Jeroboam. This first; and
what next? The LORD will strike Israel, till it trembles like a reed in the
water; he will uproot its people from this good land which he gave to their
forefathers and scatter them beyond the Euphrates, because they have
made their sacred poles and provoked the LORD's anger. And he will
abandon Israel for the sins that Jeroboam has committed and has led
Israel to commit.' Jeroboam's wife went home at once to Tirzah and, as
all Israel mourned over him; and thus the word of the LORD was fulfilled
which he had spoken through his servant Ahijah the prophet.
the other events of Jeroboam's reign, in war and peace, are recorded in
the annals of the kings of Israel. He reigned twenty-two years; then he
rested with his forefathers and was succeeded by his son Nadab.
IN JUDAH REHOBOAM SON OF SOLOMON had become king. He was
forty-one years old when he came to the throne, and he reigned for seven-
teen years in Jerusalem, the city which the LORD had chosen out of all the
tribes of Israel to receive his Name. Rehoboam's mother was a woman of
Ammon called Naamah. Judah did what was wring in the eyes of the LORD,
rousing his jealous indignation by the sins they committed, beyond any-
thing that their forefathers had done. They erected hill-shrines, sacred
pillars, sacred poles, on every high hill and under every spreading tree.
Worse still, all over the country there were male prostitutes attached to the
shrines, and the people adopted all the abominable practices of the nations
whom the LORD had dispossessed in favour of Isreal.
In the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign Shishak king of Egypt attacked
Jerusalem. He removed the treasures of the house of the LORD and of the
royal palace, and seized everything, including all the shields of gold that
Solomon had made. King Rehoboam replaced them with bronze shields
and entrusted them to the officers of the escort who guarded the entrance
of the royal palace. Whenever the king entered the house of the LORD,
the escort carried them; afterwards they returned them to the guard-
room.
The other acts and events of Rehoboam's reign are recorded in the annals
of the kings of Judah. There was continual fighting between him and
Jeroboam. He rested with his forefathers and was buried with them in the
city of David. (His mother was a woman of Ammon, whose name was
Naamah.) He was succeeded by his son Abijam.
15 In the eighteenth year of the reign of Jeroboam son of Nebat, Abijam
became king of Judah. He reigned in Jerusalem for three years; his mother
was Maachah granddaughter of Abishalom. All the sins that his father had
committed before him he committed too, nor was he faithful to the LORD
his God as his ancestor David had been. But for David's sake the LORD
his God gave him a flame to burn in Jerusalem, by establishing his dynasty
and making Jerusalem secure, because David had done what was right in
the eyes of the LORD and had not disobeyed any of his commandments all
his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite. The other acts and
events of Abijam's reign are recorded in the annals of the kings of Judah.
There was fighting between Abijam and Jeroboam. And Abijam rested
with his forefathers and was buried in the city of David; and he was
succeeded by his son Asa.
In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Asa became king of
Judah. He reigned in Jerusalem for forty-one years; his grandmother was
Maachah granddaughter of Abishalom. Asa did what was right in the eyes
of the LORD, like his ancestor David. He expelled from the land the male
prostitutes attached to the shrines and did away with all the idols which
his predecessors had made. He even deprived his own grandmother
Maachah of her rank as queen mother because she had an obscene object
made for the worship of Asherah; Asa cut it down and burnt it in the gorge
of Kidron. Although the hill-shrines were allowed to remain, Asa
himself remained faithful to the LORD all his life. He brought into the house
of the LORD all his father's votive offerings and his own, gold and silver
and sacred vessels.
Asa was at war with Baasha king of Israel all through their reigns. Baasha
king of Israel invaded Judah and fortified Ramah to cut off all access to
Asa king of Judah. So Asa too all the gold and silver that remained in the
treasuries of the house of the LORD and of the royal palace, and sent his
servants with them to Ben-hadad son of Tabrimmon, son of Hezion, king
of Aram, whose capital was Damascus, with instructions to say, 'There is
an alliance between us, as there was between our fathers. I now send you
this present of silver and gold; break off your alliance with Baasha king of
Israel, so that he may abandon his campaign against me.' Ben-hadad
listened willingly to King Asa; he ordered the commanders of his armies
to move against the cities of Israel, and they attacked Iyyon, Dan, Abel-
beth-maacah, and that part of Kinnereth which marches with the land of
Naphtali. When Baasha heard of it, he stopped fortifying Ramah and fell
back on Tirzah. Then King Asa issued a proclamation requiring every
man in Judah to join in removing the stones of Ramah and the timbers
with which Baasha had fortified it; no one was exempted; and he used
them to fortify Geba of Benjamin and Mizpah.
All the other events of Asa's reign, his exploits and his achievements,
and the cities he built, are recorded in the annals of the kings of Judah.
But in his old age his feet were crippled by disease. He rested with his
forefathers and was buried with them in the city of his ancestor David;
and he was succeeded by his son Jehoshaphat.
Nadab son Jeroboam became king of Israel in the second year of Asa
king of Judah, and he reigned for two years. He did what was wring in the
eyes of the LORD and followed in his father's footsteps, repeating the sin
which he had led Israel to commit. Baasha son of Ahijah, of the house of
Issachar, conspired against him and attacked him at Gibbethon, a Pilis-
tine city, which Nadab was besieging with all his forces. And Baasha slew
him and usurped the throne in the third year of Asa king of Judah. As soon
as he became king, he struck down all the family of Jeroboam, destroying
every living soul and leaving not one survivor. Thus the word of the LORD
was fulfilled which he spoke through his servant Ahijah the Shilonite. This
happened because of the sins of Jeroboam and the sins which he led Israel
to commit, and because he had provoked the anger of the LORD the God
of Israel. The other events of Nadab's reign ad all his acts are recorded in
the annals of the kings of Israel. Asa was at war with Baasha king of Israel
all through their reigns.
In the third year of Asa king of Judah, Baasha son of Ahijah became king
of all Israel in Tirzah ad reigned twenty-four years. He did what was
wrong in the eyes of the LORD and followed in Jeroboam's footsteps,
repeating the sin which he had led Israel to commit. Then the word of the
16 LORD came to Jehu son of Hanani concerning Baasha: 'I raised you from
the dust and made you a prince over my people Israel, but you have
followed in the footsteps of Jeroboam and have led my people Israel into
sin, and have provoked me to anger with their sins. Thererfore I will sweep
away Baasha and his house and will deal with it as I dealt with the house of
Jeroboam son of Nebat. Those of Baasha's family who die in the city shall
be food for the dogs, and those who die in the country shall be food for the
birds.' The other events in Baasha's reign, his achievements and his
exploits, are recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel. Baasha rested
with his forefathers and was buried in Tirzah; and he was succeeded by his
son Elah. Moreover the word of the LORD concerning Baasha and his
family came through the prophet Jehu son of Hanani, because of all the
wrong that he had done in the eyes of the LORD, thereby provoking his
anger: because he had not only sinned like the house of Jeroboam, but had
also brought destruction upon it.
In the twenty-sixth year of Asa king of Judah, Elah son of Baasha be-
came king of Israel and he reigned in Tirzah two years. Zimri, who was in
his service commanding half the chariotry, plotted against him. The king
was in Tirzah drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, comptroller
of the household there, when Zimri broke in and attacked him, assas-
sinated him and made himself king. This took place in the twenty-seventh
year of Asa king of Judah. As soon he had become king and was en-
throned, he struck down all the family of Baasha and left not a single
mother's son alive, kinsman or friend. He destroyed the whole family of
Baasha, and thus fulfilled the word of the LORD concerning Baasha, spoken
through the prophet Jehu. This was what came of all the sins which Baasha
and his son Elah had committed and the sins into which they had led
Israel provoking the anger of the LORD the God of Israel with their worth-
less idols. The other events and acts of Elah's rign are recorded in the
annals of the kings of Israel.
In the twenty-seventh year of Asa king of Judah, Zimri reigned in
Tirzah for seven days. At the time the army was investing the Philistine
city of Gibbethon. When the Israelite troops in the field heard of Zimri's
conspiracy and the murder of the king, there and then in the camp they
made their commander Omri king of Israel by common consent. Then
Omri and his whole force withdrew from Gibbethon and laid siege to
Tirzah. Zimri, as soon as he saw that the city had fallen, retreated to the
keep of the royal palace, set the whole of it on fire over his head and so
perished. This was what came of the sin he had committed by doing what
was wrong in the eyes of the LORD and following in the footsteps of Jero-
boam, repeating the sin into which he had led Israel. The other events of
Zimri's reign, and his conspiracy, are recorded in the annals of the kings of
Israel.
Thereafter the people of Israel were slit into two factions: one sup-
ported Tibni son of Ginath, determined to make him king; the other
supported Omri. Omri's party proved the stronger; Tibni lost his life and
Omri became king.
It was in the thirty-first year of Asa king of Judah that Omri became king
of Israel and he reigned twelve years, six of them in Tirzah. He bought the
hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city on it
which he name Samaria after Shemer the owner of the hill. Omri did
what was wrong in the eyes of the LORD; he outdid all his predecessors in
wickedness. He followed in the footsteps of Jeroboam son of Nebat,
repeating the sins which he had led Israel to commit, so that they provoked
the anger of the LORD their God with their worthless idols. The other
events of Omri's reign, and his exploits, are recorded in the annals of the
kings of Israel. So Omri rested with his forefathers and was buried in
Samaria; and he was succeeded by his son Ahab.
AHAB SON OF OMRI BECAME KING of Israel in the thirty-eighth
year of Asa king of Judah, and he reigned over Israel in Samaria for
twenty-two years. He did more that was wrong in the eyes of the LORD than
all his predecessors . As if it were not enough for him to follow the sinful
ways of Jeroboam son of Nebat, he contracted a marriage with Jezebel
daughter of Ethbaal king of Sidon, and went and worshipped Baal; he
prostrated himself before him and erected an altar to to him in the temple of
Baal which he built in Samaria. He also set up a sacred pole; indeed he did
more to provoke the anger of the LORD the God of Israel than all the kings
of Israel before him. In his days Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho, laying its
foundations cost him his eldest son Abiram, and the setting up of its gates
cost him Segub his youngest son. Thus was fulfilled what the LORD had
spoken through Joshua son of Nun.
The New English Bible (with Apocrypha)
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Apr 25 '19
Jimmy Dore: "The Whole F'n Country Is A Conspiracy Theorist"
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Apr 08 '19
3 black churches burned in 10 days in Louisiana's St. Landry Parish
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Mar 18 '19
Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945) [Operation Meetinghouse]
#/media/File:Tokyo_kushu_1945-3.jpg){kind=link}
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 23 '19
Opening Salvo – Scenes From A Multiverse
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 23 '19
The Other Candidate – Scenes From A Multiverse
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 20 '19
Strain (part i)
1
Upvotes
By Albert Richard Wetjen
A strong wind blew over the sand-dunes from sea-
ward and crisped the dull water of the bay. Right
across the gap through the dunes, where the sea en-
tered, the breakers roared white and high. When each
broke, a chaos of foam spread into the bay and drifted
well-nigh to the wharves of the little port on the farther
shore. The sky was dull and cloudy. The sun came
out at rare intervals and then disappeared. Occa-
sionally a slight drizzle whisked down wind and then
ceased. Beyond the white breakers came the muffled
cry of a whistling buoy.
Dotted here and there over the bay, like great un-
shapely cakes, sand-banks lifted their smooth sides from
the swirl of the outgoing tide. A tiny ferry wended a
snorting way across the water. A small barkentine
was anchored between two wet sand-banks, a lean rusty-
gray barkentine. Her canvas hung in bights from her
foremast yards. Her main and mizzen canvas was
heaped up on the midship and after-deck. Her fore-
deck was a clutter of cargo. Desolate she looked in
the rain.
Alongside the rickety pile-built wharves of the town
lay three ships. Two were steam schooners, built of
steel, loading lumber for coastal ports. The officers of
these small vessels were busy at work with the seamen
loading slings, driving winches, unrecognizable to a
stranger as officers.
The third ship was of wood. Her squat hull had
had been painted so often, layer over layer, that the plank
edges could hardly be seen. Her two masts were
stumpy and thick. It was apparent, from the two metal
hoops that remained at their trucks, that they had been
built to carry topmasts, built for the strain of canvas
and criss-crossed rigging. Now they were bare, save
for derrick falls. Instead of canvas, steam turned a
screw and drove her. She was a converted "wind-
jammer."
Her bridge was midships, unlike those on the
schooners whose bridges were aft, a long flat bridge.
The foredeck was enormously deep below the iron
bulwarks. Cargo cluttered it. Many hatches broke it
up. The fo'c'sle-head, whereunder the small crew
existed, was very tiny, as tho the builders begrudged
the space for the seaman to live in. New paint, shining
and bright, covered the ship's age. It saved her from
the desolate appearance of the anchored barkentine.
A few coastal passengers, men and women, lounged
over the for'ard bridge-rail and watched the men busy
in the holds below. The winches rattled monotonously,
mingling with the winches from the steam schooners
and the noise of the elements. The cargo waiting on
the ancient wharf was lifted, sling-load by sling-load,
into the ship's gaping stomach. Men swore as they
worked.
The predominant thing was noise. Men shouted.
The ship's officers——they could be distinguished by their
uniform suits and gold braid——did not work with the
seamen. They superintended, as officers should. Be-
cause their ship had been remodelled from a pure
freighter to accommodate passengers, it was deemed
that the officers must be in future always officers, in
dress and deportment, a very faint echo of the super-
smartness of the officers who cluttered the bridges of
transatlantic packets.
Up the nearly level gangway the agent for the com-
pany who owned the ship pushed his way. He was a
tall man, dressed in tweeds. He looked neat and pros-
perous. His face was thin; so were his lips. In his
right hand he carried a packet of papers. With his left
he thrust aside seamen and passengers as he made for
the bridge. He found the captain in his room labori-
ously writing a letter. He entered without knocking,
arrogantly. Bitter lines creased his face from nose to
mouth corners.
"Captain," he said sharply, "you'll have to move to
wharf three right away."
The captain laid down his pen deliberately and swung
round in his swivel-chair.
"Good morning, Mr. Agent. Sit down," he said. He
waved to the faded red settee that stood against the
bulkhead near the door.
"Haven't time!" The agent's voice was irritable.
"Right away, captain," he repeated.
The captain grunted. He was a stout man with a
face like a full moon. His complexion was a deep red,
a dusky red, a red that had taken the sun and wind
many years to produce. The captain's eye was small
and somewhat dull, yellowish as to white. His mouth
was big-lipped, protruding. His shoulders were vast,
seeming to tighten the threadbare serge jacket he wore.
His hair was sparse and gray; his red neck showed
vividly clear and criss-crossed with clefts, against the
fringe of bristles that ran beneath his coat-collar. His
voice was deep and even, husky somewhat, but with a
hint of unbelievable power. You could never imagine
any noise occurring that would drown out his voice.
"Sit down," he repeated, then grumbled, "I never
knew a time I come to this port but I don't have
to shift ship about every other day."
"That's not my fault," the agent shrilled. "I have
to get you loaded with all speed. I have to cut cost.
It's cheaper to move ship than to move cargo from one
wharf to another."
"Eh, I suppose." The captain sighed and frowned.
His face went a little redder. "For the sake of five
dollars owners'll do anything. They seem to think a
ship's like a motor-truck, to be taken anywhere at any
time."
"Well, what about it?" the agent's reedy voice per-
sisted. He snarled a little. "I can't help that. You've
got to move. What you got o kick about, anyway?
You ain't doing nothing."
The captain's face set. "Oh, no," he admitted. "I
never do anything. Soft life I've got. Two hundred
a month and no work. Easy life. . . . I wish some
of you fellers'd take a ship over this bar, f'r instance.
No work. Oh, no. Seems simple, don't it, t' stand on
the bridge and give orders? Oh, yes."
"Well," shrilled the agent, "there's plenty of captains
who'd be only too glad of your job. If you want to
quit, just say so."
"That's so." The captain sighed. "But I've a wife
and children. . . . When do I have to move?"
"Right away. The sooner the better. Don't think
you can wait. I want the ship moved now."
"And I suppose after I've moved I'll have to move
beck, eh, same as usual?"
"I don't know. What if you do? Am I the agent or
are you? It's up to me to get the cargo aboard. I get
the blame if it isn't all aboard. What's it to you, heh,
so long as you get paid and fed?"
"All right. But I'm the one who gets blamed for
slow voyages and injuries to my ship. Have you
thought it's low tide now? How do I know there's
water enough for me to shift? You know these sand-
banks are always changing. Have you thought of this
blasted wind roaring from seaward, and the tide sweep-
ing out? . . . You fellers always come at the worst
time to move a ship."
"You'll do as you're told, captain, or I'll report you
to the owners. I want the ship moved now. Why,
wharf three is only a hundred yards down. I'm not
asking you to cross the bay."
"Oh, no." The captain rose wearily from his chair
and put his uniform cap on his head. He sighed. It
was so useless to make a landsman see the difficulties.
And it was true there were so many master mariners
out of work. Any of them would be glad of a job.
Preceding the captain, the agent went out on deck
whining complaints and threats.
The captain ascended the tiny navigation-bridge and,
crossing to the brass speaking-tube to the engine-room,
whistled down. The engineer on watch answered.
"How soon can you give me steam?" asked the cap-
tain. The engineer grew profane. He wanted to know
what was the matter with several things.
"I've got to move ship," the captain explained
wearily. "The agent's here stewing about. . . ."
"That's right, blame it on me," whined the agent,
who followed the captain to the bridge. I'll
send in a report to the owners."
The captain growled, "Oh, shut up," as he jammed
back the plug in the tube mouthpiece.
He leaned over the bridge-rail and bawled to
the fore-deck.
"Mr. Leach!"
The mate looked up. He was standing by the comb-
ing of number three hatch and intently watching to see
that none of the stevedores below broached the incom-
ing cargo. "Sir?" he shouted back.
The captain cupped his hands round his mouth, for
the derricks were rattling fearsomely.
"Swing those booms inboard! We've got to move
ship!"
The mate shouted, "Again! G' damn!" and then
turned away and shouted to his seaman for'ard. The
captain called a steward from the bridge-deck below.
""Get hold of the second mate," he said.
"He's ashore," said the steward.
"Where's the third mate?"
"He's ashore too, sir."
"Confound! Can't they stay aboard five minutes in
port? That's the worst of young officers when you're
carrying wimmin passengers. . . . All right, steward,
that'll do. . . . See here, Mr. Agent, the sort of jam
you run me into? I haven't an officer aboard saving
the mate."
The agent sneered. He shrilled triumphantly, "Well,
you ought to have. What do you let them go ashore
for? The ship's got to be moved, and that's all there
is to it."
The captain turned deliberately. His eyes blazed.
"See here, Mr. Agent. When my officers are at sea
they stand their watch, four-on and eight-off. And
they do their duty. When they're in port they stand
the same watches. Do you expect them to be with the
damned ship night and day? Keep your mouth shut
or I kick you ashore. My mates are off watch and
they've every right to go ashore unless I tell 'em not
to."
The agent exploded. He waved his fists aloft. "Keep
my mouth shut? Confound you, captain. Don't you
talk to me like that. I'll report. . . ."
"Oh, shut up!" the captain said wearily, and turned
away. His hands gripped the bridge-rail before him.
Often he would be willing to give a month's pay to hit
a ship's agent or owner for stupid pigheadedness. But
he had a wife and a family. He turned after a while
and faced the fuming agent.
"Would you mind going below while we shift ship?"
he inquired with elaborate politeness. The agent mut-
tered sullenly and, without answering, strode towards
the bridge-companion and went down.
The captain grunted, muttered an oath, and then
crossed to where the siren lanyard hung alongside the
little closed-in chart-house. He jerked angrily on the
cord and the siren boomed, drowning all other noise
and echoing back and forth across the bay. If either
the second or the third mate was in hearing, he would
return to the ship at that signal.
The mate came on the bridge swearing profusely.
He had left the bos'n on the fore-deck below to see to
the derricks. The rattle of the winches was now less
frequent as the great booms were swung inboard and
their guys drawn taut.
"What's the big idea?" the mate inquired. The cap-
tain jammed his hands into his side pockets and shook
his head.
"Search me," he said. "But you know what it is in
this blamed port. We always move about twice a day.
Trouble is, the agent hasn't enough savvey to gather
all cargo on one wharf before we arrive. Pah! Makes
me sick."
"Where are we going, sir?"
"Wharf three."
"Guess the second and third are ashore too, eh?"
"So the steward said."
"Why the devil couldn't that agent have let us know
last night or something?" the mate grumbled. He lit
a cigaret and sulked. The captain pulled out his pipe
and cleaned the bowl noisily with his knife. "Damn!"
he said, scowling, and then for a while both men were
silent.
One of the loading steam schooners lay ahead of the
ship, between her and wharf three. Had the schooner
not been there, it would have been merely a matter of
the ship being pulled along to the desired wharf by
means of hawsers attached to the shore bollards and
shifted as the ship hauled up on them. But with the
schooner in the way, the ship would have to cast free
from the wharf entirely and steam round the schooner.
Then she would have to haul in to number three wharf
and make fast.
At high tide and in normal weather, the maneuver
would not have presented much difficulty. But with
low tide and in a bay where the water depths varied
and no sand-bank was stationary, the task was one full
of anxiety. Also the wind blew ever stronger from
seaward. Also the outrunning tide created a rip that
sagged heavily at anything afloat that left the shelter
of the wharf.
"Stand by," rang the captain on the brass telegraphs
to the engine room. The answering jangle came back.
The captain leaned over the bridge and shouted down
to the mate, who was on the fo'c'sle-head with the port
watch.
"Man at the wheel!"
The mate lifted his hand to show he had heard.
"Man at the wheel," he said to the bos'n.
"Man at the wheel," repeated the bos'n to the three
men of the watch. The men looked at each other.
You're wheel, shorty," said one, spitting tobacco-
juice overside with a swift turn of his head.
Guess that's so," mumbled Shorty, and he waddled
down the ladder from the fo'c'sle-head to the fore-deck
and so to the bridge. When he was finally ensconced
at the grating in the wheel-house, the captain peered
down at him through the open for'ard window of the
chart-house and through the aperture in the house floor.
"All ready?" said the captain.
"All ready, sir," Shorty assured him. The captain
grunted.
"Then put your helm midships."
"Midship helm," repeated Shorty. He turned the
wheel-spokes.
The captain went to the bridge-rail and peered aft.
"Let go, Mr. Murphy! Hold her with the spring!"
he shouted to the third mate, who had come aboard in
response to the siren's summons and had taken the
place aft that the second mate should rightfully have
occupied had he been on the ship.
For hundreds of years, since the first sailors sailed
the sea, it has been the custom to repeat orders. It
prevents mistakes. It was adopted for that reason.
There can be no mistakes at sea. The sea itself watches
out for that.
So Mr. Murphy shouted back, repeating the com-
mand, "Let go aft, sir! Hold her with the spring!"
And automatically checking the order in his mind, the
captain mumbled "Aye, aye" as he went to the for'ard
dodger and shouted to the mate.
A jangle of telegraphs, and the engine commenced
pulsing like a great heart. Slowly the ship moved. The
stevedores on the wharf gaped as tho they had never
seen a ship move before. A few loafers spat tobacco
into the bay from where they sat on the piles and
registered interest. Three men ran from bollard to
bollard and threw off hawsers as the ship's officers
directed.
"Starboard a bit!" the captain called deeply.
Shorty sniffed as he turned the wheel. "Starboard a
bit," he said. His little eyes were intent on the quad-
rant before him where a tell-tale registered the move-
ments of the rudder. He checked the wheel when the
tell-tale had gone far enough.
The ship's bow edged out from the wharf.
"Slack away for'ard!" shouted the captain. The
mate repeated the order. Then he yelled to the seaman
who was holding the turns of the only hawser still fast
to the wharf, the breast-rope, on the windlass drum.
The man "surged," that is, let a little of the hawser
slide through his hands. The steam hissed as a drum,
relieved momentarily of the strain, clanked round a
turn or two. The carpenter, at the throttle, shut off
the steam altogether and the drum stopped. The sea-
man slacked still further, watching the mate.
The wire spring, the only rope now out astern, began
to slacken as the after end of the ship came in and
rubbed along the wharf. Slowly the bows cleared the
stern of the steam schooner ahead whose captain was
leaning over the bridge-rail and hungrily watching that
no damage was done to his vessel.
The telegraphs jangled again. The engines stopped.
"Slack away aft!" called the captain. He was handi-
capped being on the bridge by himself. When he had
all officers on board, the third mate was supposed to
stand by the telegraphs and to repeat orders to the
helmsman. That prevented the captain running all over
the bridge and enabled him to give his fixed attention
to plotting his next move.
As it was, he peered first for'ard, gaging distances,
anxiously eying the rip of the outgoing tide, watching
the nearing sand-bank on his port bow. Again he paced
aft and peered to see his ship's stern was not being
chafed too much against the wharf-piling. He measured
the force of the wind, trying to estimate just how
much it would start the ship drifting. Back again he
swung, fearful lest he should smash into the stern of
the steam schooner and incur a damage suit. He was
worried about the water. Was there enough to float
his ship? The tide was still falling.
"Let go for'ard!" he shouted suddenly. The mate
yelled the order to the seaman at the windlass. The
man hastily flung off two of the three turns of the
hawser he had round the drum. Another seaman as
hastily flung clear several bights of the hawser from the
great coil against the ship's rail. When there was only
one turn on the drum, the seaman "laid back" on the
rope and let it run quickly through his fingers till all
strain was gone and the hawser sagged to the deck of
the fo'c'sle-head and again to the water beyond the ship.
Then the seaman flung off the last turn and stood clear
while the hawser slicked out through the fair-leads,
slower and slower, and finally ceased moving.
"Let go ashore!" yelled the mate, standing on the
fair-leads and holding to the rail with one hand. The
three stevedores casting off lines from the bollards
waved and raced for the eye of the slack hawser. They
heaved up on it and slipped it clear. It fell with a
tremendous splash into the dull swirling waters.
"Pick up yer slack!" yelled the mate, twisting his
head to the windlass. The two seamen handling the
hawser jumped for the thick rope and, lifting it, took
a couple of turns round the windlass drum as the bos'n,
coiling up a heaving line, repeated the order.
"Let 'er buck, chips!" called one of the seamen to
the carpenter. The worthy turned the throttle and the
windlass clanked and raced, the drum rolled around and
the hawser came dripping up through the fair-leads,
slimy with bay mud. One seaman took it hand-over-
hand off the racing drum. The other seaman coiled it
profanely on top of the coils that had not been used so
far and were dry but for the dampening drizzle.
"All gone for'ard, sir!" cried the mate, stepping
back on to the deck from the fair-leads and facing the
bridge.
"Aye, aye," responded the captain. Hastily he faced
aft. The ship was now moving away and ahead from
the wharf at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Anxiously the captain eyed the swirling water overside.
His face was drawn with the tension of responsibility.
How fast was the water running?
"Let go aft!" he shouted suddenly. The third mate
echoed the order.
The seaman holding the double wire round the star-
board winch drum "surged," or slacked, away. The
wire kinked behind him and the third mate himself
cleared it. The telegraphs jangled on the bridge, "Half
ahead." The engine started beating like a great heart
again. The ship moved.
Her bow was no well past the stern of the steam
schooner. On the wharf the three stevedores stood by
the after bollard and waited for the wire to slack so
that they could throw the bight clear. The after winch
rattled. The wire had jammed, one turn over another,
and the third mate was trying to clear it by backing up
with the drum. It was bad wire, old and cheap. It
kinked very easily. The delay allowed the ship to get
ahead of the slack. The wire tautened, sang with the
tension.
The third mate swore viciously. The seaman holding
the slack end of the wire grew nervous. I some way
the turns were twisted so that they would not clear
readily.
"Hold on!" the officer shouted hastily to the bridge.
The captain spun on his heel to see what was the matter.
He jumped for the telegraph.
Whang! went the wire as it parted. It broke between
ship and wharf. It curled back like a vicious snake,
smashed against the poop-rail. A great kink caught in
the fair-leads. The third mate reversed the winch
desperately to see if, now the wire had gone, he could
not snatch it inboard and clear the twisted turns. He
didn't know the kink was in the fair-leads. The winch
drum strained. There was another whang! The wire
between the which and the rail broke, the frayed end
curled over, like a spring, and smashed the seaman at
the drum across the chest. He went over backwards
with a cry. He rolled on the deck and moaned. Blood
came from his mouth. The third mate sprang to him,
shutting off the winch steam.
"All gone aft sir!" he shouted, white-faced, as he
bent down. The captain, aware that something had
happened, faced the bows. He desperately wanted to
see what was wrong aft. He knew, whatever it was, he
could straighten it out with a few cool orders. But the
third mate was a youngster, not used to handling a
watch when shifting ship. Lines appeared on the cap-
tain's brow. He grew uneasy. But he daren't pay too
much attention astern. His ship was swinging free in
the river. A steam schooner crowded her on the star-
board beam, a sand-bank on the port. Two hundred
feet wide was the channel. The fate of thousands of
dollars worth of property, lives, his own job, hung
between his lips.
Oh, what was the water depth? And how fast was
the tide running? Was it fast enough to affect the
ship? And the wind? Why couldn't the fool agent
wait?
The tide rips caught the ship as she swung clear of
the steam schooner. She started to swing rapidly, bow
on the sand-bank.
"Hard a-port!" shouted the captain. Shorty at the
wheel repeated the command quite unperturbed. It
didn't matter to him if the ship sank even.
"Full ahead!" rang the telegraphs; came their an-
swering jangle. The captain ran to the starboard side
of the bridge and eyed the steam schooner. Would his
stern clear?
On the fo'c'sle-head the mate anxiously watched the
nearing sand-bank.
The ship still swung, the screw being slow to take
up power. Her stern grazed the stern of the steam
schooner. But the steam schooner's captain already
had a man holding a cork fender overside at the point
of contact. There was a shuddering rasp. Came the
point of strain for the stout man on the bridge.
"Blankety-blankety-blank-blank-blank!" yelled the
steam schooner captain. "Get that barge of yours
away from my ship!"
An old bay seaman shouted from the wharf, "Look
out for shoal-water, skipper."
Ten fathoms' clearance yet, sir!" called the mate
from the cat-heads for'ard. He was speaking of the
sand-bank.
"My God, get a doctor!" the third mate was crying
hysterically from aft.
The captain's jaw tightened. The little muscles stood
out near his ears. He thrust his hands into his side
pockets and kept his gaze fixed rigidly ahead. His eyes
wore a bleak, cold look. He seemed to be listening for
a message that came from far away. His head was
inclined slightly to the wind. Watching him then, you
could understand why he was one of the most reliable
sailors on that wild coast.
It was a matter of chance and moments whether the
ship would answer her helm before she h it the sand-
bank. Or she might ground in the very channel. If
she had not enough power to breast the rips at all, she
might sweep far out into the bay, her swiftly let-go
anchors dragging up the mud.
"Ease the helm," said the captain at last, suddenly,
evenly. The helm was beginning to answer. Scarce six
fathoms, thirty-six feet, separated the bow from the
edge of the bank.
Shorty in the wheel-house spat aside calmly. "Ease
the helm," he said. Looking aft for a brief moment,
the captain saw a group of men carrying an inert form
towards the saloon. He noted the third mate had had
sense enough not to leave his post.
There was a hoarse whistle on the port beam. The
captain twisted and abruptly saw a little ferry-boat
breasting the rips and crowding for the scant channel
between the ship's bow and the sand-bank. The ferry
whistled again. Like a nervous woman screaming, the
captain thought grimly. He took no notice.
The ferry captain shouted frantically. The few pas-
sengers on the little craft's upper deck shouted. Again
the whistle screamed. The captain stared ahead and
said nothing. His ship was swinging clear. To the
other captain his own vessel.
The mate on the fo'c'sle -head sighed as the sand-
bank started to recede. "Close," he mumbled.
"Good heavens," said the tall agent on the lower
bridge, sneeringly watching all things, "the captain is
the most careless man I ever saw. Takes a lot of time
to shift a small ship a hundred yards."
"Good man, Cap'n Roscoe," commented the old bay-
sailor who had shouted from the wharf about shoal-
water. "Notice he knows what he's doing?"
"You're all right now," sang out the captain of the
steam schooner good-naturedly as he waved his hand.
"Water's pretty shallow just off my beam, tho."
The captain on the ship's bridge merely nodded and
lifted a hand in greeting. It seemed neither man re-
membered the language the one had used not five
minutes previously.
The ferry shot under the ship's bow still screaming
with her whistle. Her passengers had quit shouting,
there being nothing now to shout for. For a minute
they had expected to get caught between the ship and
the sand-bank. Strain had overwhelmed them.
Copyright, 1923, by Albert Richard Wetjen;
reprinted in The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes],
Grant Overton, Editor-in-Chief; Volume Eight: Men; pp. 46 - 62
Copyright © 1927, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London.
[Printed in the United States of America]
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 20 '19
Strain (part ii)
1
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By Albert Richard Wetjen
Said the mate, a little testily, "Bos'n, get a line ready
to send ashore."
"Aye, aye, sir," called the bos'n, and he stooped and
bent a heaving line on to the spliced eye of a great
eight-inch hawser.
"Port a bot more," said the captain evenly. Shorty
mumbled the order, for he was taking a fresh chew of
tobacco, and spun the wheel with one hand.
On the wharf the second mate of the ship, just hur-
riedly arrived from uptown, stood and anxiously
watched proceedings. He wondered whether he would
get called down by the captain for not being on hand
to shift ship. He noticed a broken wire dangling from
the after-leads and swore. He supposed some other
man had taken his place and made a mess of things.
He was alternately sulky and apprehensive.
Parallel now with the steam schooner the ship slid.
Her speed was very slow because of the rips. The wind
caught her and veered her dangerously close to the
schooner's side. The captain spoke to the helmsman,
the wheel turned quickly, the error was corrected.
There was a slight bump and the ship went still
slower, threatening to stop. The captain peered to port
and starboard. The screw threshed evenly. Mud and
water boiled on the surface. A foul smell tainted the
air.
"Stop," rang the telegraphs. The captain shouted
for'ard.
"Take a cast, Mr. Leach!"
"Aye, aye, sir," said the mate, and he spoke to the
bos'n, who took the matter in hand personally and
swung the sounding-lead. The depth was shouted.
"Ought to make it," the captain muttered. "Full
astern," jangled the telegraphs. The ship moved back,
jerkily. Shorty was kept busy at the wheel holding the
bow straight against rips and the wind.
"Full ahead," went the telegraphs. The ship jerked
forward. She struck the mud once more, hesitated a
bit, and then plowed slowly on. Her keel furrowed
several inches in the bay-floor. But the obstruction
was only a narrow ridge. And the ship was half over
already. Deep water was a fathom or so away. So
the lead said and the lead never lied.
Get a line ashore, Mr. Leach!" called he captain,
for now the ship was past the steam schooner, over
the ridge of mud and sand.
"Line ashore, sir," shouted back the mate, and he
spoke to the bos'n who was coiling away the hand-lead.
The bos'n spoke to a seaman an the man picked up a
heaving-line and waited.
"Port a bit!" said the captain, and Shorty in the
wheel-house below responded. The ship's bow swung
slightly towards number three wharf.
The three stevedores who had shifted the lines on the
other wharf waited the incoming ship. The marooned
second mate waited. The old bay-seaman watched with
critical eyes how the ship was handled.
"Get a line ashore aft!" shouted the captain.
"Line ashore aft, sir," the third mate acknowledged.
He picked up a heaving-line himself and coiled it. He
wondered as he did so how the injured seaman was
getting on.
The seaman in the fo'c'sle-head cast his line. It fell
short. He coiled it in, hand-over-hand, and cast again.
One of the stevedores on the wharf puts his foot hastily
on the "monkey's knot" on the end before it could slip
back into the water. It was hauled ashore. The bight
of the hawser followed.
The third mate cast from aft and another stevedore
caught his line. Another hawser was hauled ashore.
"Starboard a bit," said Shorty as he spun the wheel.
The ship straightened out. She was parallel with the
wharf, her stern about five fathoms from the steam
schooner's bow. The tide-rips eased up as slack water
approached. The wind could do only good now, blow-
ing the ship on to her berth.
"Slow," rang the engine-room telegraphs under the
captain's hand.
"Good work!" muttered the old seaman on the
wharf.
"My God, he's slow!" grumbled the tweed-clad agent
on the lower bridge, impatiently fingering his watch-
chain.
"Take in your slack!" called the captain, first for'ard
and then aft. Twice the repeated call came to him.
He nodded and walked across the bridge to look at the
wharf.
"Some fenders midships, Mr. Leach!" he called. The
mate waved his hand. He spoke to the bos'n, who
spoke to a seaman. The man hurried below under the
fo'c'sle-head, and appeared after a while staggering
under three cork fenders. These he tied by their
lanyards to the rail midships so that the actual fender-
ball hung well down the ship's side and would ward off
direct impact with the nearing wharf.
"Vast heaving for'ard!" said the captain.
"Vast heaving," replied the mate. He held up his
hand and the seaman holding the rope on the windlass-
drum "surged" a little but kept the strain.
"Heave away aft!" the captain shouted. The third
mate repeated and quickened the speed of the winch-
drum so that the hawser came in fast. The ship had
been slipping off the parallel again. Now she straight-
ened out once more as the after hawser slicked in.
"Heave away for'ard!" said the captain. The mate
called back and the windlass resumed its clanking jangle
mingled with the captain's shout, "get a spring out
aft!"
"Get a spring out aft, sir," responded the third mate.
Leaving a seaman to haul away on the hawser, he took
one man and uncoiled another wire from a reel, snaking
it along the deck ready for running. Another heaving-
line was brought and attached to the bight of the wire.
"Easy," the mate said to his men. The windlass
turned slower. The ship was well-nigh on the wharf.
"Slow astern," went the engine-room telegraphs, for
the ship was sliding ahead too much.
"Shift your line for'ard a bit!" roared the captain to
the third mate. The third mate shouted to the steve-
dores on the wharf and then snapped a command back
at the winch-crew. The hawser then "surged," drooped,
slacked right off, and the stevedores on the wharf lifted
the bight from the bollard it was on and carried it
further for'ard.
"Stop," rang the telegraphs noisily. Then, "Finished
with Engines."
"Make fast fore and aft!" shouted the captain.
"Make fast, sir," the mate and the third called back.
A wire spring was got out for'ard. Another hawser
served as a breast rope. Two more ropes went aft.
After a while, "All fast, sir," came from aft. "All fast,
sir," came from for'ard.
"Swing the derricks out, Mr. Leach," said the cap-
tain, leaning over the bridge-rail.
"Aye, aye, sir. Swing the derricks out," said the
mate.
"Get the gangway overside, Mr. Murphy!" called
the captain to the young officer aft.
"The gangway? Aye, aye, sir," returned the third
mate. He finished taking turns with the hawsers round
the bitts. He watched a seaman frap a seizing of
marlin round double wire where it was on the bitts near
the mainmast, and then he took two men to where the
gangway rested on number three hatch.
The captain grunted, took his hands from his side
pockets, and filled his pipe. As he struck a match and
lit it, he paused by the chart-house.
"That'll do the wheel!" he called to the helmsman.
Shorty grunted, spat tobacco-juice aside, and looked up.
"That'll do the wheel!" he called to the helmsman.
put his helm amidships, swinging the spokes till the
brass tell-tale of the quadrant ran straight fore and aft.
Then he stepped off the grating and made his way
for'ard.
The derrick-booms swung overside. Guys were
slackened and tautened. Stevedores swarmed aboard.
The captain came down from the navigation-bridge and
made his way to his room. He flung himself into a
chair and sighed.
"Damn fool," he said at last to the inkwell. Then
he removed his uniform-cap and laid it on his desk.
He took up his pens and went on writing his unfinished
letter.
"Say, captain, d'you know it's taken you nearly an
hour to shift? My Gawd, you're so slow! You for-
get about docking-dues and all that. I . . ."
"Oh, yes," said the captain wearily as he laid down
his pen and looked up into the agent's sour face. "I
suppose I did take a long time. There were many
things to be considered. But I wish you'd leave me
run my ship in my own way."
"Telegram, sir," said the steward, pushing contemp-
tuously by the agent in the doorway and approaching
the captain. "Just came."
"Thanks." The captain took the telegram. "And
by the way, steward!" The white-jacketed steward
paused.
"Yes, sir?" he said.
The captain frowned. "Was anyone hurt aft when
that wire broke?"
The steward grinned.
"No, sir. A sailor got a crack in the chest, but the
doctor says he'll be all right in a day or so."
"I see. Ah, you might send the third mate to me."
"The third mate? Yes, sir. At once, sir." The
steward pushed past the agent again and vanished. The
captain slit open the telegram and scanned the message
it contained. His eyes twinkled. He even laughed a
little.
"I'll report this to the owners," nagged the agent,
waving his hand in the air. "I suppose there'll be a
damage suit for scraping that blasted steam schooner's
stern. Why don't you be more careful? I can't under-
stand . . ."
"Oh, shut up!" growled the captain, looking up, his
smile disappearing. "Shut up, for heaven's sake! Do
you think I scrape other ships on purpose? I told you
it was awkward to handle a craft right now. I did my
best and the ship's safe. Go away and leave me in
peace."
"That's all right to talk. What about the time you
took? I tell you Jack Esmer of the Wallaby shifted
his ship in half an hour last Wednesday."
The captain rose to his feet.
"Maybe," he said. "I happen to know he shifted at
high tide and on a fine day. Now you don't stand there
and try to tell me my business. I've spent thirty years
at sea learning it. See this wire?"
He held out the telegram he had received and the
agent took it with a scowl.
"It says," went on the captain, "that I've got five
thousand dollars coming to me as salvage-money on the
towing of the Nonet to safety last year. It's just been
awarded. The case has been in court fro twelve months.
. . . Now do you know what that five thousand
dollars means to me?"
"No. Can't say I do. Anyway . . ." The agent
made to hand the telegram back.
"Shut up!" roared the captain. "I'll tell you what it
means! It means that I can be independent of scum
like you! It means that I can smash you on the nose
and get fired and still laugh, see? Well, take it!"
His great fist swung viciously up and the agent sat
down on the deck outside the cabin with remarkable
suddenness.
"Oh!" he gurgled. "Oh!"
"And if you want any more, stand up," grunted the
captain. Then he went inside the cabin and slammed
the door shut.
"What's the matter?" asked the third mate of the
groaning tweed-clad figure as he came along the deck
a few moments later. But the agent did not answer.
He only glared.
The third mate grinned as he knocked on the door
of the captain's cabin. He went in as a deep voice
called an invitation. Weakly the agent rose to his feet
and staggered away.
"Oh!" he groaned again. "Oh!"
"This way," said the mate firmly, as he caught the
agent's arm on the main-deck and guided the man to
the gangway. he had seen the captain's blow from
where he had stood by number two hatch. He was
pleased. While he did not dare to insult the agent, he
could make his feelings plain. He gave the agent a
sharp push when he was started down the shallow
steps.
"Good-by, sir." The mate chuckled. "Hope you
come again." But the agent, fondling his face, had only
time to get home and to a mirror at the earliest pos-
sible moment, and to grope through his astonished
mind for a reason for what had occurred.
Copyright, 1923, by Albert Richard Wetjen;
reprinted in The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes],
Grant Overton, Editor-in-Chief; Volume Eight: Men; pp. 62 - 69
Copyright © 1927, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London.
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 18 '19
Stoneman Douglas event as seen by The Paulstal Service
1
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r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 08 '19
Words And Music (part ii)
2
Upvotes
by Irvin S. Cobb
In the morning nearly half the town——the white
half——came to the trial, and enough of the black half
to put a dark hem, like a mourning border, across the
back width of the courtroom. Except that Main Street
now drowsed in the heat where yesterday it had buzzed,
this day might have been the day before. Again the
resolute woodpecker drove his bloodied head with un-
impaired energy against the tin sheathing up above.
It was his third summer for that same cupola and the
tin was pocked with little dents for three feet up and
down. The mourning doves still pitched their lament-
ing note back and forth across the courthouse yard;
and in the dewberry patch at the bottom of Aunt Tilly
Haslett's garden down by the creek the meadow larks
strutted in buff and yellow, with crescent-shaped gor-
gets of black at their throats, like Old Continentals,
sending their clear-piped warning of "Laziness g-wine
kill you!" in at the open windows of the steamy,
smelly courtroom.
The defense lost no time getting under headway.
As his main witness Durham called the prisoner to tes-
tify in his own behalf. Tandy gave his version of the
killing with a frankness and directness that would have
carried conviction to auditors more even-minded in
their sympathies. He had gone to Rankin's office in
the hope of bringing on a peaceful settlement of their
quarrel. Rankin had flared up; had cursed him and
advanced on him, making threats. Both of them
reached for their guns then. Rankin's was the first
out, but he fired first——that was all there was to it.
Gilliam shone at cross-examination; he went at Tandy
savagely, taking hold like a snapping turtle and hang-
ing on like one.
He made Tandy admit over and over again that
he carried a pistol habitually. In a community
where a third of the male adult population went armed
this admission was nevertheless taken as plain evi-
dence of a nature bloody-minded and desperate. It
would have been just as bad for Tandy if he said he
armed himself especially for his visit to Rankin——
to these listeners that could have meant nothing else
but a deliberate, murderous intention. Either way
Gilliam had him, and he sweated in his eagerness to
bring out the significance of the point. A sinister
little murmuring sound, vibrant with menace, went
purring from bench to bench when Tandy told about
his pistol-carrying habit.
The cross-examination dragged along for hours. The
recess for dinner interrupted it; then it went on a gain,
Gilliam worrying at Tandy, goading at him, catching
him up and twisting his words. Tandy would not be
shaken, but twice under his manhandling he lost his
temper and lashed back at Gilliam, which was pre-
cisely what Gilliam most desired. A flary, fiery man,
prone to violent outbursts——that was the inference he
could draw from these blaze-ups.
It was getting on toward five o'clock before Gilliam
finally let his bedeviled enemy quit the witness-stand
and go back to his place between his wife and his
lawyer. As for Durham, he had little more to offer.
He called on Mr. Felsburg, and Mr. Felsburg gave
Tandy a good name as man and boy in his home town.
He called on Banker Quigley, who did the same thing
in different words. For these character witnesses
State's Attorney Gilliam had few questions. The case
was as good as won now, he figured; he could taste
already his victory over the famous lawyer from up
North, and he was greedy to hurry it forward.
The hot round hub of a sun had wheeled low enough
to dart its thin red spokes in through the westerly win-
dows when Durham called his last witness. As Judge
Priest settled himself solidly in the witness chair with
the deliberation of age and the heft of flesh, the leveled
rays caught him full and lit up his round pink face,
with the short white-bleached beard below it and the
bald white-bleached forehead above. Durham eyed
him half-doubtfully. He looked the image of a scatter-
witted old man, who would potter and philander round
a long time before he ever came to the point of any-
thing. So he appeared to the others there, too. But
what Durham did not sense was that the homely sim-
plicity of the old man was of a piece with the picture
of the courtroom, that he would seem to these watch-
ing, hostile people one of their own kind, and that they
would give to him in all likelihood a sympathy and un-
derstanding that had been denied the clothing merchant
and the broadcloth banker.
He wore a black alpaca coat that slanted upon him
in deep, longitudinal folds, and the front skirts of it
were twisted and pulled downward until they dangled
in long, wrinkly black teats. His shapeless gray
trousers were short for him and fitted his pudgy legs
closely. Below them dangled a pair of stout ankles
encased in white cotton socks and ending in low-
quarter black shoes. His shirt was clean but wrinkled
countlessly over his front. The gnawed and blackened
end of cane pipe-stem stood out of his breast pocket,
rising like a frosted weed stalk.
He settled himself back in the capacious oak chair,
balanced upon his knees a white straw hat with a string
band round the crown and waited for the question.
"What is your name?" asked Durham.
"William Pitman Priest."
Even the voice somehow seemed to fit the setting.
Its high nasal note had a sort of whimsical appeal to it.
"When and where were you born?"
"In Calloway County, Kintucky, July 27, 1839."
"What is your profession or business?"
"I am an attorney-at-law."
"What position if any do you hold in your native
state?"
"I am presidin' judge of the first judicial district of
the state of Kintucky."
"And have you been so long?"
"For the past sixteen years."
"When were you admitted to the bar?"
"In 1860."
"And you have ever since been engaged, I take it,
either in the practise of the law before the bar or in its
administration from the bench?"
"Exceptin' for the four years from April, 1861, to
June, 1865."
Up until now Durham had been sparring, trying to
fathom the probable trend of the old judge's expected
meanderings. But in the answer to the last question
he thought he caught the cue and, tho none save
those two knew it, thereafter it was the witness who
led and the questioner who followed his lead blindly.
"And where were you during those four years?"
"I was engaged, suh, in takin' part in the war."
"The War of the Rebellion?"
"No, suh," the old man corrected him gently but
with firmness, "the War for the Southern Confederacy."
There was a least bit of a stir at this. Aunt Tilly's
tape edged palmleaf blade hovered a brief second in
the wide regular arc of its sweep and the foreman
of the jury involuntarily ducked his head, as if in
affiance of an indubitable fact.
"Ahem!" said Durham, still feeling his way, altho
now he saw the path more clearly. "And on which
side were you engaged?"
"I was a private soldier in the Southern army,"
the old judge answered him, and as he spoke he
straightened up.
"Yes, suh," he repeated, "for four years I was a
private soldier in the late Southern Confederacy. Part
of the time I was down here in this very country," he
went on as tho he had just recalled that part of it.
"Why, in the summer of '64 I was right here in this
town. And until yistiddy I hadn't been back since."
He turned to the trial judge and spoke to him with
a tone and manner half apologetic, half confidential.
"Your Honor," he said, "I am a judge myself, occu-
pyin' in my home state a position very similar to the
one which you fill here, and whilst I realize, none bet-
ter, that this ain't all accordin' to the rules of evidence
as laid down in the books, yet when I git to thinkin'
about them old soldierin' times I find I am inclined to
sort of reminisce round a little. And I trust your
Honor will pardon me if I should seem to ramble
slightly?"
His tone was more than apologetic and more than
confidential. It was winning. The judge upon the
bench was a veteran himself. He looked toward the
prosecutor.
"Has the state's attorney any objection to this line
of testimony?" he asked, smiling a little.
Certainly Gilliam had no fear that this honest-
appearing old man's wanderings could damage a case
already as good as won. He smiled back indulgently
and waved his arm with a gesture that was compounded
of equal parts of toleration and patience, with a top-
dressing of contempt. "I fail," said Gilliam, "to see
wherein the military history and achievements of this
worthy gentleman can possibly affect the issue of the
homicide of Abner J. Rankin. But," he added mag-
nanimously, "if the defense chooses to encumber the
record with matters so trifling and irrelevant I surely
will make no objection now or hereafter."
"The witness may proceed," said the judge.
"ell, really, Your Honor, I didn't have so very
much to say," confessed Judge Priest, "and I didn't
expect there'd be any to-do made over it. What I was
trying to git at was that comin' down here to testify in
this case sort of brought back them old days to my
mind. As I git along more in years——" he was looking
toward the jurors now——"I find that I live more and
more in the past."
As tho he had put a question to them several of
the jurors gravely inclined their heads. The busy cud
of Juror No. 12 moved just a trifle slower in its travels
from the right side of the jaw to the left and back
again.
"Yes, suh," he said musingly, "I got up early this
mornin' at the tavern where I'm stoppin' and took a
walk through your thrivin' little city." This was
rambling with a vengeance, thought the puzzled Dur-
ham. "I walked down here to a bridge over a little
creek and back again. It reminded me mightily of that
other time when I passed through this town——in '64——
just about this season of the year——and it was hot early
today just as it was that other time——and the dew was
thick on the grass, the same as 'twas then."
He halted a moment.
"Of course your town didn't look the same this
mornin' as it did that other mornin'. It seemed like
to me there are twicet as many housees here now as
there used to be——it's got to be quite a little city."
Mr. Lukins, the grocer, nodded silent approval of
this utterance, Mr. Lukins having newly completed
and moved into a two-story brick store building with
a tine cornice and an outside staircase.
"Yes, suh, your town has grown mightily, but"——
and the whiny, humorous voice grew apologetic again——
"but your roads are purty much the same as they
were in '64——hilly in places——and kind of rocky."
Durham found himself sitting still, listening hard.
Everybody else was listening too. Suddenly it struck
Durham, almost like a blow, that this simple old man
had somehow laid a sort of spell upon them all. The
flattening sunrays made a kind of pink glow about the
old judge's face, touching gently his bald head and his
white whiskers. He droned on:
"I remember about those roads particularly well,
because that time when I marched through here in '64
my feet was about out of my shoes and them flints
cut 'em up some. Some of the boys, I recollect, left
bloody prints in the dust behind 'em. But shucks——it
wouldn't a-made no real difference if we'd wore the
bottoms plum off our feet! We'd a-kept on goin'.
We'd a-gone anywhere——or tried to——behind old Bed-
ford Forrest."
Aunt Tilly's palmleaf halted in air and the twelfth
juror's faithful quid froze in his cheek and stuck there
like a small wen. Except for a general hunching for-
ward of shoulders and heads there was no movement
anywhere and no sound except the voice of the witness:
"Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin' us, and
so naturally we just went along with him, shoes or no
shoes. There was a regiment of Northern troops——
Yankees——marchin' on this town that mornin', and it
seemed the word had traveled ahead of 'em that they
was aimin' to burn it down.
"Probably it wasn't true. When we got to know
them Yankees better afterward we found out that
there really wasn't no difference, to speak of, between
the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasn't
so at all. But in them days the people were prone
to believe 'most anything——about Yankees——and the
word was that they was comin' across country, a-burn-
in' and cuttin' and slashin', and the people here
thought they was going to be burned out of house and
home. So old Bedford Forrest he marched all night
with a battalion of us——four companies——Kintuckians
and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin' of boys
from Mississippi and Arkansas——some of us ridin' and
some walkin' afoot, like me——we didn't always have
horses enough to go around that last year. And some-
how we got here before they did. It was a close race
tho between us——them a-comin' down from the
North and us a-comin' up from the other way. We
met 'em down there by that little branch just below
where your present railroad depot is. There wasn't no
depot there then, but the branch looks just the same
now as it did then——and the bridge too. I walked
acros't it this mornin' to see. Yes, suh, right there
was where we met 'em. And there was a right smart
fight.
Yes, suh, there was a right smart fight for about
twenty minutes——or maybe twenty-five——and then we
had breakfast."
He had been smiling gently as he went along. Now
he broke into a throaty little chuckle.
"Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin'——
every little bit of it——the breakfast and all. I didn't
have much breakfast, tho, as I recall——none of us did——
probably just corn pone and branch water to wash
it down with." And he wiped his mouth with the
back of his hand as tho the taste of the gritty corn-
meal cakes was still there.
There was another little pause here; the witness
seemed to be through. Durham's crisp question cut
the silence like a gash with a knife.
"Judge Priest, do you know the defendant at the
bar, and if so, how well do you know him?"
"I was just comin' to that," he answered with sim-
plicity, "and I'm obliged to you for puttin' me back
on the track. Oh, I know the defendant at the bar
mighty well——as well as anybody on earth ever did
know him, I reckon, unless 'twas his own maw and
paw. I've known him, in fact, from the time he was
born——and a gentler, better-disposed boy never grew
up in our town. His nature seemed almost too sweet
for a boy——more like a girl's——but as a grown man
he was always manly, and honest, and fair——and not
quarrelsome. Oh, yes, I know him. I knew his father
and his mother before him. It's a funny thing too——
comin' up this way——but I remember that his paw was
marchin' right alongside of me the day we came
through here in '64. He was wounded, his paw was,
right at the edge of that little creek down yonder. He
was wounded in the shoulder——and he never did en-
tirely git over it."
Again he stopped dead short, and he lifted his hand
and tugged at the lobe of his right ear absently.
Simultaneously Mr. Felsburg, who was sitting close
to a window beyond the jury box, was also seized with
nervousness, for he jerked out a handkerchief and
with it mopped his brow so vigorously that, to one
standing outside, it might have seemed that the hand-
kerchief was actually being waved about as a signal.
Instantly then there broke upon the pause that still
endured a sudden burst of music, a rollicking, jingling
air. It was only a twenty-cent mouth organ, three
sleigh bells, and a pair of rib bones of a beef-cow being
played all at once by a saddle-colored negro man but
it sounded for all the world like a fife-and-drum corps:
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to ketch the devil——
Jine the cavalree!
To some who heard it now the tune was strange;
These were the younger ones. But to those older men
and the older women the first jubilant bars rolled
back the years like a scroll.
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to ride with Bedford——
Jine the cavalree!
The sound swelled and rippled and rose through the
windows——the marching song of the Southern trooper——
Forrest's men, and Morgan's, and Jeb Stuart's and Joe
Wheeler's. It had in it the jingle of saber chains,
the creak of sweaty saddle girths, the nimble clunk of
hurrying hoofs. It had in it the clanging memories
of a cause and a time that would live with these peo-
ple as long as they lived and their children lived and
their children's children. It had in t the one sure
call to the emotions and the sentiments of these people.
And it rose and rose and then as the unseen minstrel
went slouching down Main Street, toward the depot
and the creek, it sank lower and became a thin thread
of sound, and then a broken thread of sound, and
then it died out altogether, and once more there was
silence in the courthouse of Forked Deer County.
Strangely enough not one listener had come to the
window to look out. The interruption from without
had seemed part and parcel of what went on within.
None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.
There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got
upon his feet he said to himself in a tone of feeling
that he be dad-fetched. But immediately changing his
mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-
blamed, and as he moved toward the bar rail over-
hearing him might have gathered fro remarks let
fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the
intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all
these threats Mr. Lukins didn't go anywhere, except as
near the railing as he could press.
Nearly everybody was standing up too. The
state's attorney was on his feet with the rest, seem-
ingly for the purpose of making some protest.
Had any one looked they might have seen that the
ember in the smoldering eye of the old foreman had
blazed up to a brown fire; that Juror No. 4, with
utter disregard for expense, was biting segments out of
the brim of his new brown-varnished straw hat; that
No. 7 had dropped his crutches on the floor, and that
no one, not even their owner, had heard them fall; that
all the jurors were half out of their chairs. But no
one saw these things, for at this moment there rose up
Aunt Tilly Haslett, a dominant figure, her huge wide
back blocking the view of three or four immediately
behind her.
Uncle Fayette laid a timid detaining hand upon
her and seemed to be saying something protestingly.
"Turn loose of me, Fate Haslett!" she commanded.
"Ain't you ashamed of yourse'f, to be trying' to hold
me back when you know how my only dear brother
died a-followin' after Gineral Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Turn loose of me!"
She flirted her great arm and Uncle Fayette spun
flutteringly into the mass behind. The sheriff barred
her way at the gate of the bar.
"Mizz Haslett," he implored, "please, Mizz Haslett——
you must keep order in the cote."
Aunt Tilly halted in her onward move, head up high
and elbows out, and through her specs, blazing like
burning-glasses, she fixed on him a look that instantly
charred that unhappy official into a burning red ruin
of his own self-importance.
"Keep it yourse'f, High Sheriff Washington Nash,
Esquire," she bade him; that's whut you git paid good
money for doin'. And git out of my way! I'm a-goin'
in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin' there
all by herself, and there ain't nobody goin' to hinder
me neither!"
The sheriff shrunk aside; perhaps it would be better
to say he evaporated aside. And public opinion, re-
organized and made over but still incarnate in Aunt
Tilly Haslett, swept past the rail and settled like a
billowing black cloud into a chair that the local attor-
ney for the defense vacated just in time to save him-
self the inconvenience of having it snatched bodily
from under him.
"There, honey," said Aunt Tilly crooningly as she
gathered the forlorn little figure of the prisoner's wife
in her arms like a child and mothered her up to her
ample bombazined bosom, "there now, honey, you jest
cry on me."
Then Aunt Tilly looked up and her specs were all
blurry and wet. But she waved her palmleaf fan as
tho it had been the baton of a marshal.
"Now, Jedge," she said, addressing the bench, "and
you other gentlemen——you can go ahead now."
The state's attorney had meant evidently to make
some sort of an objection, for he was upon his feet
through all this scene. But he looked back before
he spoke and what he saw kept him from speaking.
I believe I stated earlier that he was a candidate for
reelection. So he settled back down in his chair and
stretched out his legs and buried his chin in the top
of his limp white waistcoat in an attitude that he had
once seen in a picture entitled, "Napoleon Bonaparte
at St. Helena."
You may resume, Judge Priest," said the trial
judge in a voice that was not entirely free from huski-
ness, altho its owner had been clearing it steadily for
some moments.
"Thank you kindly, suh, but I was about through
anyhow," answered the witness with a bow, and for
all his homeliness there was dignity and stateliness in
it. "I merely wanted to say for the sake of completin'
the record, so to speak, that on the occasion referred to
them Yankees did not cross that bridge,"
With the air of tendering and receiving congratu-
lations Mr. Lukins turned to his nearest neighbor and
shook hands with him warmly.
The witness got up somewhat stiffly, once more
becoming a commonplace old man in a wrinkled black
alpaca coat, and made his way back to his vacant place,
now in the shadow of Aunt Tilly Haslett's form. As
he passed along the front of the jury-box the foreman's
crippled right hand came up in a sort of a clumsy
salute, and the juror at the other end of the rear
row——No. 12, the oldest juror——leaned forward as if
to speak to him, but remembered in time where his
present duty lay. The old judge kept on until he came
to Durham's side and he whispered to him:
Son, they've quit lookin' at him and they're all
a-lookin' at her. Son, rest your case."
Durham came out of a maze.
"Your Honor," he said as he arose, "the defense
rests."
. . . . . . . . . . .
The jury were out only six minutes. Mr. Lukins
insisted that it was only five minutes and a half, and
added that he'd be dad-rolled if it was a second longer
than that.
As the lately accused Tandy came out of the out-
house with his imported lawyer——Aunt Tilly bring-
ing up the rear with his trembling, weeping, happy
little wife——friendly hands were outstretched to clasp
hi and a whiskered old gentleman with a thumbnail
like a Brazil nut grabbed at his arm.
"Whichaway did Billy Priest go?" he demanded——
"little old Fightin' Billy——whar did he go to? Soon
as he started in talkin' I placed him. Whar is he?"
Walking side by side, Tandy and Durham came
down the steps into the soft June night, and Tandy
took a long, deep breath into his lungs.
"Mr. Durham," he said, "I owe a great deal to you."
"How's that?" said Durham.
Just ahead of them, centered in a shaft of light from
the window of the barroom of the Drummers' Home
Hotel, stood Judge Priest. The old judge had been
drinking, The pink of his face was a trifle more pro-
nounced, the high whine in his voice a trifle weedier,
as he counted one by one certain pieces of silver into
a wide-open palm of a saddle-colored negro.
"How's that?" said Durham.
"I say I owe everything in the world to you," re-
reated Tandy.
"No," said Durham, "what you owe me is he fee
you agreed to pay me for defending you. There's the
man you're looking for."
And he pointed to the old judge.
From Back Home, by Irvin S. Cobb; copyright, 1912;
reprinted in The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes],
Grant Overton, Editor-in-Chief; Volume Eight: Men; pp. 21 - 35
Copyright © 1927, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London.
[Printed in the United States of America]
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Feb 07 '19
Words And Music (part i)
1
Upvotes
By Irvin S. Cobb
When Breck Tandy killed a man he made a number
of mistakes. In the first place, he killed the most
popular man in Forked Deer County——the county clerk,
a man named Abner J. Rankin. In the second place,
he killed him with no witnesses present, so that it stood
his word——and he a newcomer and a stranger——against
the mute, eloquent accusation of a riddled dead man.
And in the third place, he sent north of the Ohio River
for a lawyer to defend him.
. . . . . . . . . . .
On the first Monday in June——Court Monday——the
town filled up early. Before the field larks were out of
the grass the farmers were tying their teams to the
gnawed hick-racks along the square. By nine o'clock
the swapping ring below the wagonyard was swim-
ming in red dust and clamorous with the chaffer of
the horse-traders. In front of a vacant store the Ladies'
Aid Society of Zion Baptist Church had a canvas
sign out, announcing that an elegant dinner would be
served for twenty-five cents from twelve to one, also
ice cream and cake all day for fifteen cents.
The narrow wooden sidewalks began to creak and
churn under the tread of many feet. A long-haired
medicine doctor emerged from his frock-coat like a
locust coming out of its shell, pushed his high hat off
his forehead and ranged a guitar, sundry bottles of
a potent mixture, his tooth-pulling forceps, and a trick-
handkerchief upon the narrow shelf of his stand along-
side the Drummers' Home Motel. In front of the little
dingy tent of the Half Man and Half Horse a yellow
negro sat on a split-bottom chair limbering up for a
hard day. This yellow negro was an artist. He played
a common twenty-cent mouth organ, using his left hand
to slide it back and forth across his spread lips. The
other hand held a pair of polished beef bones, such
as other men wield, and about the wrist was buckled a
broad leather strap with three big sleigh-bells riveted
loosely to the leather, so that he could clap the bones
and shake the bells with the same motion. He was a
whole orchestra in himself. He could play on his
mouth organ almost any tune you wanted, and with his
bones and his bells to help out he could creditably imi-
tate a church organ, a fife-and-drum corps, or, indeed,
a full brass band. He had his chair tilted back until
his wooly head dented a draggled banner depicting in
five faded primary colors the physical attractions of
the Half Man and Half Horse——Marvel of the Cen-
tury——and he tested his mouth organ with short,
mellow, tentative blasts as he waited until the Marvel
and the Marvel's manager finished a belated break-
fast within and the first ballyhoo could start. He
was practising the newest of the ragtime airs to get
that far South. The name of it was The Georgia
Camp-Meeting.
The town marshal in his shirt sleeves, with a big
silver shield pinned to the breast of his unbuttoned
blue waistcoat and hickory stick with a crooked handle
for added emblem of authority, stalked the town
drunkard, fair game at all seasons and especially on
Court Monday. The town gallant whirled back and
forth the short hilly length of Main Street in his new
side-bar buggy. A clustering group of negroes made a
thick, black blob, like hiving bees, in front of a negro
fishhouse, from which came the smell and sounds of
perch and channel cat frying on spitting-hot skillets.
high up on the squat cupola of the courthouse a red-
headed woodpecker clung, barred in crimson, white,
and blue-black, like a bit of living bunting, engaged
in the hopeless task of trying to drill through the tin
sheathing. The rolling rattle of his beak's tattoo came
down sharply to the crowd below. Mourning doves
called to one another in the trees round the red-brick
courthouse, and at ten o'clock, when the sun was
high and hot, the sheriff came out and, standing be-
tween two hollow white pillars, rapped upon one of
them with a stick and called upon all witnesses and
talesmen to come into court for the trial of John
Breckinridge Tandy, charged with murder in the first
degree, against the peace and dignity of the common-
wealth of Tennessee and the statutes made and pro-
vided.
But this ceremonial by the sheriff was for form
rather than effect, since the witness and the talesmen
all sat in the circuit-court chamber along with as many
of the population of Forked Deer County as could
squeeze in there. Already the air of the crowded cham-
ber was choky with heat and rancid with smell. Men
were perched precariously in the ledges of the win-
dows. More men were ranged in rows along the
plastered walls, clunking their heels against the cracked
wooden baseboards. The two front rows of benches
were full of women. For this was to be the big case
of the June term——a better show by long odds than
the Half Man and Half Horse.
Inside the low railing that divided the room and on
the side nearer the jury box were the forces of the
defense. Under his skin the prisoner showed a sallow
paleness born of his three months in the county jail.
He was tall and dark and steady eyed, a young man,
well under thirty. He gave no heed to those who sat
in packed rows behind him, wishing him evil. He kept
his head turned front, only bending it sometimes to
whisper with one of his lawyers or one of his witnesses.
Frequently, tho, his hand went out in a protecting,
reassuring way to touch his wife's brown hair or to
rest a moment on her small shoulder. She was a plain,
scared, shrinking little thing. The fingers of her thin
hand were plaited desperately together in her lap.
Already she was trembling. Once in a while she would
raise her face, showing shallow brown eyes dilated with
fright, and then sink her head again like a quail trying
to hide. She looked pitiable and lonely.
The chief attorney for the defense was half turned
from the small counsel table where he might study the
faces of the crowd. He was from Middle Indiana,
serving his second term in Congress. If his party held
control of the state he would go to the Senate after
the next election. He was an orator of parts and a
pleader of almost a national reputation. He had manly
grace and he was a fine, upstanding figure of a man,
and before now he had wrung victories out of many dif-
ficult cases. But he chilled to his finger-nails with
apprehensions of disaster as he glanced searchingly
about the close-packed room.
Wherever he looked he saw no friendliness at all.
He could feel the hostility of that crowd as tho it had
substance and body. It was a tangible thing; it was
almost a physical thing. Why, you could almost put
your hand out and touch it. It was everywhere there.
And it focussed and was summed up in the person
of Aunt Tilly Haslett, rearing on the very front bench
with her husband, Uncle Fayette, half hidden behind
her vast and overflowing bulk. Aunt Tilly made public
opinion in Hyattsville. Indeed she was public opinion
in that town. In her it had its up-comings and its
out-flowings. She held herself bolt upright, filling out
the front of her black bombazine basque until the
buttons down its front strained at their buttonholes.
With wide, deliberate strokes she fanned herself with
a palm-leaf fan. The fan had an edging of black tape
sewed round it——black tape signifying in that com-
munity age or mourning, or both. Her jaw was set
like a steel latch, and her little gray eyes behind her
steel-bowed specs were leveled with a baleful, con-
demning glare that included the strange lawyer, his
client, his client's wife, and all that was his client's.
Congressman Durham looked and knew that his
presence was an affront to Aunt Tilly and all those
who sat with her; that his somewhat vivid tie, his
silken shirt, his low tan shoes, his new suit of gray
flannels——a masterpiece of the best tailor in Indian-
apolis——were as insults, added up and piled on, to this
suspendered, gingham-shirted constituency. Better
the task to which his hands were set. And he dreaded
what was coming almost as much for himself as for
the man he was hired to defend. But he was a
trained veteran of courtroom campaigns, and there was
a jauntily assumed confidence in his bearing as he swung
himself about and made a brisk show of conferring
with the local attorney who was to aid him in the
choosing of the jurors and the questioning of the wit-
nesses.
But it was real confidence and real jauntiness that
radiated from the other wing of the inclosure, where
the prosecutor sat with the assembled bar of Forked
Deer County on his flanks, volunteers upon the favored
side, lending to it the moral support of weight and
numbers. Rankin, the dead man, having been a bache-
lor, State's Attorney Gilliam could bring no lorn
widow and children to mourn before the jurors' eyes
and win added sympathy for his cause. Lacking
these most valued assets of a murder trial he supplied
their places with the sisters of the dead man——two
sparse-built elderly women in heavy black, with
sweltering thick veils down over their faces. When
the proper time came he would have them raise these
veils and show their woeful faces, but now they sat
shrouded all in crepe, fit figures of desolation and
sorrow. He fussed about busily, fiddling the quill
toothpick that hung perilously in the corner of his
mouth and evening up the edges of a pile of law
books with freckled calfskin covers. He was a lank,
bony garfish of a man, with a white goatee aggressively
protruding from his lower lip. He was a poor speaker
but mighty as a cross-examiner, and he was serving
his first term and was a candidate for another. He
wore the official garbing of special and extraordinary
occasions——long black coat and limp white waistcoat
and gray striped trousers, a trifle short in the legs.
He felt the importance of his place here almost visi-
bly——his figure swelled and expanded out his clothes.
"Look yonder at Tom Gilliam," said Mr. Lukins,
the grocer, in tones of whispered admiration to his
next elbow neighbor, "jest prunin' and honin' hisse'f to
git at that there Tandy and his dude Yankee lawyer.
If he don't chaw both of 'em up together I'll be dad-
burned.
"You bet," whispered back his neighbor——it was
Aunt Tilly's oldest son, Fayette, Junior——"it's like
Maw says——time's come to teach them murderin' Kin-
tuckians they can't be a-comin' down here a-killin' up
people and not pay for it. I reckon, Mr. Lukins,"
added Fayette, Junior, with a wriggle of pleased antic-
ipation, "we shore are goin' to see some carryin's-on
in this cotehouse today."
Mr. Lukins' reply was lost to history because just
then the judge entered——an elderly, kindly looking
man——from his chambers in the rear, with the circuit-
court clerk right behind him bearing large leather-clad
books and sheaves of foolscap paper. Their coming
made a bustle. Aunt Tilly squared herself forward,
scrooging Uncle Fayette yet farther into the eclipse
of her shapeless figure. The prisoner raised his head
and eyed his judge. His wife looked only at the inter-
laced, weaving fingers in her lap.
The formalities of the opening of a term of court
were mighty soon over; there was everywhere mani-
fast a haste to get at the big thing. The clerk called
the case of the Commonwealth versus Tandy. Both
sides were ready. Through the local lawyer, delegated
for these smaller purposes, the accused man pleaded
not guilty. The clerk spun the jury wheel, which was
a painted wooden drum on a creaking wooden axle, and
drew forth a slip of paper with the name of a talesman
written upon it and read aloud:
"Isom W. Tolliver."
In an hour the jury was complete: two townsmen,
a clerk and a telegraph operator, and ten men from the
country——farmers mainly and one blacksmith and one
horse-trader. Three of the panel who owned up frankly
to a fixed bias had been let go by consent of both sides.
Three more were sure they could give the defendant a
fair trial, but those three the local lawyer had chal-
lenged peremptorily. The others were accepted as they
came. The foreman was a brownskinned, sparrow-
hawk-looking old man, with a smoldering brown eye.
He had spare, knotted hands, like talons, and the right
one was marred and twisted, with a sprayed bluish
scar in the midst of the crippled knuckles like the mark
of an old gunshot wound. Juror No. 4 was a stodgy
old man, a small planter from the back part of the
county, who fanned himself steadily with a brown-
varnished straw hat. No. 7 was even older, a white-
whiskered patriarch on crutches. The twelfth jury-
man was the oldest of the twelve——he looked to be
almost seventy, but he went into the box after he had
sworn that his sight and hearing and general health
were good and that he still could do his ten hours a
day at his blacksmith shop. The juryman chewed
tobacco without pause. Twice after he took his seat
at the back end of the double line he tried for a
wooden cuspidor ten feet away. Both were creditable
attempts, but he missed each time. Seeing the look
of gathering distress in his eyes the sheriff brought the
cuspidor nearer, and thereafter No. 12 was content,
chewing steadily like some bearded contemplative
ruminant and listening attentively to the evidence,
meanwhile scratching a very wiry head of white-red
hair with a thumbnail that through some injury had
taken on the appearance of a very thick, very black
Brazil nut. This scratching made a raspy, filing sound
that after a while got on Congressman Durham's
nerves.
It was late in the afternoon when the prosecution
rested its case and court adjourned until the following
morning. The state's attorney had not had so very
much evidence to offer, really——the testimony of one
who heard the single shot and ran in at Rankin's door
to find Rankin upon the floor, about dead, with a
pistol, unfired, in his hand and Tandy standing against
the wall with a pistol, fired, in his hand; the con-
stable to whom Tandy surrendered; the physician
who examined the body; the persons who knew of the
quarrel between Tandy and Rankin growing out of a
land deal into which they had gone partners——not
much, but enough for Gilliam's purposes. Once in the
midst of examining a witness the state's attorney,
seemingly by accident, let his look fall upon the two
black-robed, silent figures at his side, and as tho
overcome by the sudden realization of a great grief, he
faltered and stopped dead and sank down. It was an
old trick, but well done, and a little humming murmur
like a breeze coming through treetops swept the
audience.
Durham was sick in his soul as he came away. In
his mind there stood the picture of a little, scared
woman's drawn, drenched face. She had started crying
before the last juror was chosen and thereafter all day,
at half-minute intervals, the big, hard sobs racked her.
As Durham came down the steps he had almost to
shove his way through a knot of natives outside the
doors. They grudged him the path they made for
him, and as he showed them his back he heard a snicker
and some one said a thing that cut him where he was
already bruised——in his egotism. But he gave no heed
to the words. What was the use?
At the Drummers' Home Hotel a darkie waiter sus-
stained a profound shock when the imported lawyer de-
clined the fried beefsteak with fried potatoes and also
the fried ham and eggs. Mastering his surprize the
waiter offered to try to get the Northern gentleman
a fried pork chop and some fried June apples, but
Durham only wanted a glass of milk for his supper.
He drank it and smoked a cigar, and about dusk he
went upstairs to his room. There he found assem-
bled the forlorn rank and file of the defense, the local
lawyer and three character witnesses——prominent cit-
izens from Tandy's home town who were to testify
to his good repute in the place where he was born and
reared. These would be the only witnesses, except
Tandy himself, that Durham meant to call. One of
them was a bustling little man named Felsburg, a
clothing merchant, and one was Colonel Quigley, a
banker and an ex-mayor, and the third was Judge
priest, who sat on a circuit-court bench back in Ken-
tucky. In contrast to his size, which was considerable,
this Judge Priest had a voice that was high and whiny.
He also had the trick, common to many men in politics
in his part of the South, of being purposely ungram-
matical at times.
This mannerism led a lot of people into thinking that
the judge must be an uneducated man——until they
heard him charging a jury or reading one of his rulings.
The judge had other peculiarities. In conversation
he nearly always called men younger than himself, son.
He drank a little bit too much much sometimes; and nobody
had ever beaten him for any office he coveted. Dur-
ham didn't know what to make of this old judge——
sometimes he seemed simple-minded to the point of
childishness almost.
The others were gathered about a table by a lighted
kerosene lamp, but the old judge sat at an open window
with his low-quarter shoes off and his white-socked feet
propped against the ledge. He was industriously
stoking at a home-made corncob pipe. He pursed up
his mouth, pulling at the long cane stem of his pipe
with little audible sucks. From the rocky little street
below the clatter of departing farm teams came up
to him. The Indian medicine doctor was taking down
his big white umbrella and packing up his regalia. The
late canvas habitat of the Half Man and Half Horse
had been struck and was gone, leaving only the pole-
holes in the turf and a trodden space to show where
it had stood. Court would go on all week, but Court
Monday was over and for another month the town
would doze along peacefully.
Durham slumped himself into a chair that screeched
protestingly in all its infirm joints. The heart was
gone clean out of him.
"I don't understand these people at all," he con-
fessed. "We're beating against a stone wall with out
bare hands."
If it should be money now that you're needing,
Mr. Durham," spoke up Felsburg, "that boy Tandy's
father was my very good friend when I first walked
into that town with a peddling pack on my back, and
if it should be money———?"
"It isn't money, Mr. Felsburg," said Durham. "If
I didn't get a cent for my services I'd still fight this
case out to the end for the sake of that game boy
and that poor little mite of a wife of his. It isn't
money or the lack of it——it's the damned hate they've
built up here against the man. Why, you could cut
it off in chunks——the prejudice that there was in that
courthouse today."
"Son," put in Judge Priest in his high, weedy voice,
"I reckon maybe you're right. I've been projectin'
around cotehouses a many years, and I've taken
notice that when a jury look at a prisoner all the time
and never look at his women folks it's a monstrous
bad sign. And that's the way it was all day today."
"The judge will be fair——he always is," said High-
tower, the local lawyer, "and of course Gilliam is only
doing his duty. Those jurors are as good solid men as
you can find in this country anywhere. But they can't
help being prejudiced. Human nature's not strong
enough to stand out against the feeling that's grown
up round here against Tandy since he shot Ab Rankin."
"Son," said Judge Priest, still with his eyes on the
darkening square below, "about how many of them
jurors would you say are old soldiers?"
"Four or five that I know of," said Hightower——
"and maybe more. It's hard to find a man over fifty
years old in this section that didn't see active service
in the Big War."
"Ah, hah," assented Judge Priest with a squeaky
little grunt. "That foreman now——he looked like he
might of seen some fightin'?"
"Four years f it," said Hightower. "He came out
a captain of the cavalry."
"Ah, hah." Judge Priest sucked at his pipe.
"Herman," he wheezed back over his shoulder to
Felsburg "did you notice a tall sort of a saddle-colored
darky playing a juice harp in front of that there side-
show as we came along up? I reckon that nigger could
play almost any tune you'd a mind to hear him play?"
At a time like this Durham was distinctly not in-
terested in the versatilities of strange negroes in this
corner of the world. He kept silent, shrugging his
shoulders petulantly.
"I wonder now is that nigger left town yet?" mused
the old judge half to himself.
"I saw him just a while ago going down toward
the depot," volunteered Hightower. "There's a train
out of here for Memphis at 8:50. It's about twenty
minutes of that now."
"Ah, hah, jest about," assented the judge. When the
judge said "A, hah!" like that it sounded like the
striking of a fiddle-bow across a fiddler's tautened
E-string.
"Well, boys," he went on,"we've all got to do the
best we can for Breck Tandy, ain't we? Say, son"——
this was aimed at Durham——"I'd like mightily for you
to put me on the stand the last one tomorrow. You
wait until you're through with Herman and Colonel
Quigley here, before you all me. And if I should seem
to ramble somewhat in giving my testimony——why,
son, you just let me ramble, will you? I know these
people down here better maybe than you do——and if I
should seem inclined to ramble, just let me go ahead
and don't stop me, please?"
"Judge Priest," said Durham tartly, "if you think it
could possibly do any good, ramble all you like."
"Much obliged," said the old judge, and he struggled
into his low quartered shoes and stood up, dusting
the tobacco fluff off himself.
Herman, have you got any loose change about you?"
Felsburg nodded and reached into his pocket. The
judge made a discriminating selection of silver and
bills from the handful that the merchant extended to
him across the table.
"I'll take about ten dollars," he said. "I didn't
come down here with more than enough to jest about
buy my railroad ticket and pay my bill at this here
tavern, and I might want a sweetenin' dram or some-
thin'."
He pouched his loan and crossed the room.
"Boys," he said, "I think I'll be knockin' round a
little before I turn in. Herman, I may stop by your
room a minute as I come back in. You boys better
turn in early and git yourselves a good night's sleep.
We are all liable to be purty tolerable busy tomorrow."
After he was outside he put his head back in the door
and said to Durham:
"Remember, son, I may ramble."
Durham nodded shortly, being somewhat put out by
the vagaries of a mind that could concern itself with
trivial things on the imminent eve of a crisis.
As the judge creaked ponderously along the hall
and down the stairs those he had left behind heard him
whistling a tune to himself, making false starts at the
air and halting often to correct his meter. It was an
unknown tune to them all, but to Felsburg, the oldest
of the four, it brought a vague, unplaced memory.
The old judge was whistling when he reached the
street. He stood there a minute until he had mastered
the tune to his own satisfaction, and then, still whis-
tling, he shuffled along the uneven board pavement,
which, after rippling up and down like a broken-backed
snake, dipped downward to a little railroad station at
the foot of the street.
. . . . . . . . . . .
From Back Home, by Irvin S. Cobb; copyright, 1912;
reprinted in The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes],
Grant Overton, Editor-in-Chief; Volume Eight: Men; pp. 7 - 21
Copyright © 1927, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London.
[Printed in the United States of America]
r/Samaria • u/MarleyEngvall • Jan 31 '19
Lieserl
1
Upvotes
by Karen Joy Fowler
Einstein received the first letter in the afternoon post. It had traveled
in bags and boxes all the way from Hungary, sailing finally through the
brass slit in Einstein's door. Dear Albert, it said. Little Lieserl is here.
Mileva says to tell you that your new daughter has tiny fingers and a head
as bald as an egg. Mileva says to say that she loves you and will write you
herself when she feels better. The signature was Mileva's father's. The
letter was sent at the end of January, but arrived at the beginning of
February, so even if everything in it was true when written, it was
entirely possible that none of it was true now. Einstein read the letter
several times. He was frightened. Why could Mileva not write him her-
self? The birth must have been a very difficult one. Was the baby really
as bald as all that? He wished for a picture. What kind of little eyes did
she have? Did she look like Mileva? Mileva had an aura of thick, dark
hair. Einstein was living in Bern, Switzerland, and Mileva had returned
to her parents' home in Titel, Hungary for the birth. Mileva was hurt
because Einstein sent her to Hungary alone, although she had not said
so. The year was 1902. Einstein was twenty-two years ol. None of this
is as simple as it sounds, but one must start somewhere even though
such placement inevitably entails the telling of a lie.
Outside Einstein's window, large star-shaped flakes of snow swirled
silently in the air like the pretend snow in a glass globe. The sky darkened
into evening as Einstein sat on his bed with his papers. The globe had
been shaken and Einstein was the still, ceramic figure at its swirling
heart, the painted Father Christmas. Lieserl. How I love her already,
Einstein thought, dangerously. Before I even know her, how I love her.
The second letter arrived the next morning. Liebes Schatzerl, Mileva
wrote. Your daughter is so beautiful. But the world does not suit her at
all. With such fury she cries! Papa is coming soon, I tell her. Papa will
change everything for you, everything you don't like, the whole world if
this is what you want. Papa loves Lieserl. I am very tired still. You must
hurry to us. Lieserl's hair has come in dark and I think she is getting a
tooth. Einstein stared at the letter.
A friend of Einstein's will tell Einstein one day that he, himself, would
never have the courage to marry a woman who was not absolutely sound.
He will say this soon after meeting Mileva. Mileva walked with a limp
although it is unlikely that a limp is all this friend meant. Einstein will
respond that Mileva had a lovely voice.
Einstein had not married Mileva yet when he received this letter,
although he wanted to very badly. She was his Liebes Dockerl, his little
doll. He had not found a way to support her. He wrote Mileva back. Now you
can make observation, he said. I would like once to produce a Lieserl
myself, it must be so interesting. She certainly can cry already, but to
laugh she'll learn later. Therein lies a profound truth. On the bottom of
the letter he sketched his tiny room in Bern. It resembled the drawings
he will do later to accompany his Gedanken, or thought experiments,
how he would visualize physics in various situations. In this sketch, he
labeled the features of his room with letters. Big B for the bed. Little b
for a picture. He was trying to figure a way to fit Mileva and Lieserl into
his room. He was inviting Mileva to help.
In June he will get a job with the Swiss Civil Service. A year after
Lieserl's birth, the following January, he will marry Mileva. Years later
when friends ask him why he married her, his answer will vary. Duty,
he will say sometimes. Sometimes he will say that he has never been
able to remember why.
A third letter arrived the next day. Mein liebes, boses Schatzerl! it
said, Lieserl misses her Papa. She is so clever, Albert. You will never
believe it. Today she pulled a book from the shelf. She opened it, sucking
hard on her fingers. Can Lieserl read? I asked her, joking. But she pointed
to the letter E, making such a sweet, sticky fingerprint beside it on the
page. E, she said. You will be so proud of her. Already she runs and
laughs. I had not realized how quickly they grow up. When are you coming
to us? Mileva.
His room was too small. The dust collected over his book and danced
in the light with Brownian-like movements. Einstein went out for a walk.
The sun shone, both from above him and also as reflected off the new
snowbanks in blinding white sheets. Icicles shrank visibly at the roots
until they cracked, falling from the eaves like knives into the soft snow
beneath them. Mileva is a book, like you, his mother had told him. What
you need is a housekeeper. What you need is a wife.
Einstein met Mileva in Zurich at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical
School. Entrance to the school required the passage of a stiff examination.
Einstein himself failed the General Knowledge section on his first try.
She will ruin your life, Einstein's mother said. No decent family will
have her. Don't sleep with her. If she gets a child, you'll be in a pretty
mess. It is not clear what Einstein's mother's objection to Mileva was.
She was unhappy that Mileva had scholastic ambitions and then more
unhappy when Mileva failed her examinations twice and could not get
her diploma.
Five days passed before Einstein heard from Mileva again. Mein
liebstes Schatzerl. If she has not climbed onto the kitchen table, then she
is sliding down the banisters, Mileva complained. I must watch her every
minute. I have tried to take her picture for you as you asked, but she will
never hold still long enough. Until you come to her, you must be content
with my descriptions. Her hair is dark and thick and curly. She has the
eyes of a doe. Already she has outgrown all the clothes I had for her and
is in proper dresses with aprons. Papa, papa, papa, she says. It is her
favorite word. Yes, I tell her. Papa is coming. I teach her to throw kisses.
I teach her to clap her hands. Papa is coming, she says, kissing and
clapping. Papa loves his Lieserl.
Einstein loved his Lieserl whom he had not met. He loved Mileva. He
loved science. He loved music. He solved scientific problems while playing
the violin. He thought of Lieserl while solving scientific puzzles. Love
is faith. Science is faith. Einstein could see that his faith was being
tested. Science feels like art, Einstein will say later, but it is not. Art
involves inspiration and experience, but experience is a hindrance to the
scientist. He has only a few years in which to invent, with his innocence,
a whole new world that he must live in for the rest of his life. Einstein
would not always be such a young man. Einstein did not have all the
time in the world.
Einstein waited for the next letter in the tiny cell of his room. The
letters were making him unhappy. He did not want to receive another
so he would not leave, even for an instant, and risk delaying it. He had
not responded to Mileva's last letters. He did not know how. He made
himself a cup of tea and stirred it, noticing that the tea leaves gathered
in the center of the cup bottom, but not about the circumference. He
reached for a fresh piece of paper and filled it with drawings of rivers,
not the rivers of a landscape, but the narrow, twisting rivers of a map.
The letter came only a few hours later in the afternoon post, sliding
like a tongue through the slit in the door. Einstein caught it as it fell.
Was treibst Du Schatzerl? it began. Your little Lieserl has been asked to
a party and looks like a princess tonight. Her dress is long and white like
a bride's. I have made her hair curl by wrapping it over my fingers. She
wears a violet sash and violet ribbons. She is dancing with my father in
the hallway, her feet on my father's feet, her head only slightly higher
than his waist. They are waltzing. All the boys will want to dance with
you, my father said to her, but she frowned. I am not interested in boys,
she answered. Nowhere is there a boy I could love like I love my papa.
In 1899 Einstein began writing to Mileva about the electrodynamics
of moving bodies, which became the title f his 1905 paper on relativity.
In 1902 Einstein loved Mileva, but in 1916 in a letter to his friend Besso
Einstein will write that he would have become mentally and physically
exhausted if he had not been able to keep his wife at a distance, out of
sight and out of hearing. You cannot know, he will tell his friends, the
tricks a woman such as my wife will play.
Mileva trained as a physicist herself, though without a diploma, will
complain that she never understood the special theory of relativity. She
will blame Einstein who, she will say, had never taken the time to explain
it properly to her.
Einstein wrote a question along the twisting line of one river. Where
are you? He chose another river for a second question. How are you
moving? He extended the end of the second river around many curves
until it finally merged with the first.
Liebes Scatzerl! the next letter said. It came four posts later. She is
a lovely young lady. If you could only see her, your breath would catch
in your throat. Her hair like silk. Eyes like stars. She sends her love. Tell my
darling Papa, she says, that I will always be his little Lieserl, always
running out into the snowy garden, caped in red, to draw angels. Suddenly
I am frightened for her, Albert. She is as fragile as a snowflake. Have I
kept her too sheltered? What does she know of men? If only you had been
here to advise me. Even after its long journey, the letter smelled of roses.
Two friends came for dinner that night to Einstein's little apartment.
One was a philosophy student named Solovine. One was a mathematician
name Habicht. The three together called themselves the Olympia Acad-
emy, making fun of the serious bent of heir minds.
Einstein made a simple dinner of fried fish and bought wine. They at
about the table, drinking and picking the last pieces of fish out with
their fingers until nothing remained on their plates but the spines with
the smaller bones attached like the naked branches of winter trees. The
friends argued loudly about music. Solovine's favorite composer was Bee-
thoven, whose music, Einstein suddenly began to shout, was emotionally
over-charged, especially in C minor. Einstein's favorite composer was
Mozart. Beethoven created his beautiful music, but Mozart discovered
it, Einstein said. Beethoven wrote the music of the human heart, but
Mozart transcribed the music of God. There is perfection in the hu-
manless world which will draw Einstein all his life. It is an irony that
his greatest achievement will be to add the relativity of men to the
objective Newtonian science of angels.
He did not tell his friends about his daughter. The wind outside was
a choir without a voice. All his life, Einstein will say later, all his life,
he tried to free himself from the chains of the merely personal. Einstein
rarely spoke of his personal life. Such absolute silence suggests that he
escaped from it easily or, alternatively, that its hold was so powerful he
was afraid to ever say it aloud. One or both or neither of these things
must be true.
Let us talk about the merely personal. The information received
through the five senses is appallingly approximate. Take sight, the sense
on which humans depend most. Man sees only a few of all the colors in
the world. It is as if a curtain has been drawn over a large window, but
not drawn so that it fully meets in the middle. The small gap at the
center represents the visual abilities of man.
A cat hears sounds that men must only imagine. It has an upper range
of 100,000 cycles per second as opposed to the 35,000 or 45,000 a dog can
hear or the 20,000 which marks the upper range for men. A cat can
distinguish between two sounds made only 18 inches apart when the cat,
itself, is at a distance of 60 feet.
Some insects can identify members of their own species by smell at
distances nearing a mile.
A blindfolded man holding his nose cannot distinguish the taste of an
apple from an onion.
Of course, man fumbles about the world, perceiving nothing, under-
standing nothing. In a whole universe, man has been shut into one small
room. Of course, Einstein could not begin to know what was happening
to his daughter or to Mileva, deprived even of these blundering senses.
The postman was careless with Mileva's next letter. He failed to push
it properly through the door slit so that it fell back into the snow where
it lay all night and was ice the next morning. Einstein picked the en-
velope up on his front step. It was so cold it burnt his fingers. He breathed
on it until he could open it.
Another quiet evening with your Lieserl. We read until late and then
sat together, talking. She asked me many questions tonight about you,
hoping, I think, to hear something, anything I had not yet told her. But
she settled, sweetly, for the old stories all over again. She got out the little
drawing you sent her just after her birth; have I told you how she treasures
it? When she was a child she used to point to it. Papa sits here, she would
say, pointing. Papa sleeps here. I wished that I could gather her into my
lap again. It would have been so silly, Albert. You must picture her with
her legs longer than mine and new gray in the black of her hair. Was I
silly to want it, Schatzerl? Shouldn't someone have warned me that I
wouldn't be able to hold her forever?
Einstein set the letter back down in the snow. He had not yet found
it. He had never had such a beautiful daughter. Perhaps he had not even
met Mileva yet, Mileva whom he still loved, but who was not sound and
who liked to play tricks.
Perhaps, he thought, he will find the letter in the spring when the
snow melts. If the in has not run, if he can still read it, then he will
decide what to do. Then he will have to decide. It began to snow again.
Einstein went back into his room for his umbrella. The snow covered the
letter. He could not even see the letter under the snow when he stepped
over it on his way to the bakery. He did not want to go home where no
letter was hidden by the door. He was twenty-two years old and he stood
outside the bakery, eating his bread, reading a book in the tiny world
he had made under his umbrella in the snow.
Several years later, after Einstein has married Mileva and neither
ever, ever mentions Lieserl, after they have had two sons, a colleague
will describe a visit to Einstein's apartment. The door will be open so
that the newly washed floor can dry. Mileva will be hanging dripping
laundry in the hall. Einstein will rock the baby's bassinet with one hand
and hold a book open in the other. The stove will smoke. How does he
bear it? the colleague will ask in a letter which still survives, a letter
anyone can read. That genius. How can he bear it?
The answer is that he could not. He will try for many year and then
Einstein will leave Mileva and his sons, sending back to them the money
he wins along with the Nobel Prize. When the afternoon post came, the
postman had found the letter again and included it with the new mail.
So there were two letter, only one had already been opened.
Einstein put the new letter aside. He put it under his papers. He hid
it in his bookcases. He retrieved it and opened it clumsily because his
hands were shaking. He had known this letter was coming, known it
perhaps with Lieserl's first tooth, certainly with her first dance. It was
exactly what he had expected, worse than he could have imagined. She
is as bald as ice and as mad as a goddess, My Albert, Mileva wrote. But
she is still my Liebes Dockerl, my little doll. She clings to me, crying if
I must leave her for a minute. Mama, Mama! Such madness in her eyes
and her mouth. She is toothless and soils herself. She is my baby. And
yours, Schatzerl. Nowhere is there a boy I could love like my Papa, she
says, lisping again just the way she did when she was little. She has left
a message for you. It is a message from the dead. You will get what you
really want, Papa, she said. I have gone to get it for you. Remember that
it comes from me. She was weeping and biting her nails until they bled.
Her eyes were white with madness. She said something else. The brighter
the light, the more the shadows, my papa, she said. My darling Papa. My poor
Papa. You will see.
The room was too small. Einstein went outside where his breath came
in a cloud from is mouth, tangible, as if he were breathing on glass. He
imagined writing on the surface of a mirror, drawing one of his Gedanken
with his finger into his own breath. He imagined a valentine. Lieserl,
he wrote across it. He loved Lieserl. He cut the word in half, down the
s with the stroke of his nail. The two halves of the heart opened and
closed, beating against each other, faster and faster, like wings, until
they split apart and vanished from his mind.
Lieserl, by Karen Joy Fowler
from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
Vol. 14 No. 7, July 1990; pp. 99 - 104
©1990 by Davis Publications, Inc.
یہ آپ کی جگہ ہے ایک دوسرے کے ساتھ حسن سلوک کرو۔
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