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whom he brought them out of all their distresses, without any internal change in their national constitution. During this period, there seems to have been a cessation of prophecy, if we except the song of Deborah and that song has been deemed prophetic, more, perhaps, on account of a parallelism of expression in one clause of it, with a passage in the sixty-eighth Psalm, than because of any actual prediction contained in it.

V. The next period of the history of Israel, was marked by a great and national change the introduction and establishment of the regal government. I pass over the anointing of Saul to be king, which was done by special directions from God to Samuel, without what can properly be called a prophecy. The same may be said of the call of David to the throne: but after his appointment, the settlement of the crown in his family became the subject of clear and copious prediction. The first king of the nation had been of the tribe of Benjamin; the second was of the tribe of Judah; and there was nothing in the existing state of affairs, independent of prophecy, to give satisfaction to the people, on the subject of the succession to the throne of David, or the establishment of the royal dynasty. Prophecy supplied this want, accurately defining and limiting the succession of the crown in David's family. (2 Sam. vii. 12—17. 1 Chron. xvii. 11—27.) It is scarcely possible to comment upon this pro

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phecy, without adverting to what has been well called, the double sense; as it is scarcely possible to read it (comparing it with Heb. i. 5) without perceiving that a greater than Solomon is here. But it is the primary and temporal sense alone, to which we are now to advert, and that for the single purpose of marking its strictly literal fulfilment. The prophecy declares an eternity of dominion to be enjoyed by the seed of David: "Thine house, and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee thy throne shall be established for ever." The fulfilment of this declaration, in the full and absolute meaning of the terms, is reserved (as I

• "Scripture prophecy is so framed in some of its predictions, as to bear a sense directed to two objects; of which structure the predictions concerning the kingdom of David furnish a conspicuous example; and, I should say, an unquestionable one, if the whole principle of that kind of interpretation had not been by some disputed and denied. But the principle has met with this ill acceptance, for no better reason, it should seem, than because it has been injudiciously applied in cases where it had no proper place; or has been suspected, if not mistaken, in its constituent character, as to what it really is. The double sense of prophecy, however, is of all things the most remote from fraud or equivocation, and has its ground of reason perfectly clear. For what is it? Not the convenient latitude of two unconnected senses, wide of each other, and giving room to a fallacious ambiguity; but the combination of two related, analogous and harmonizing, though disparate subjects, each clear and definite in itself; implying a twofold truth in the prescience, and creating an aggravated difficulty, and thereby an accumulated proof, in the completion."-Davison, pp. 210, 211.

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shall endeavour to prove in its proper place) for that king of the Jews, who was born of the house of David, according to the flesh; and concerning whom, the angel Gabriel proclaimed at his birth, "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." But in its application to the typical kingdom of David, and his successors; the expression for ever conveys, according to an acknowledged principle of scriptural criticism, the idea of an age or dispensation; an unbroken perpetuity for a given time; holding on through a period or system of things, to which a reference is understood to be made. Here, the system of things to which reference is made, is the regal government of Judah. So long as kings shall reign in Jerusalem, the throne shall be filled by a man of the house and lineage of David.

The prophecy thus understood was fulfilled to the letter. Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, &c., son after father in regular succession, occupied the throne of David in Jerusalem; till the kingdom was overturned, the city destroyed, and the nation carried captive into Babylon. The common adjunct to the history of the death of a king of Judah, from David to Coniah, is, and his son reigned in his stead. If our object were to See page 140, and note.

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prove the inspiration of the prophecy, this might be strikingly contrasted with the kingdom of Israel; in which, during a part of the same period, one dynasty after another was cut off, and the crown transferred from family to family. This might naturally have excited, in the people of Judah, some apprehensions of similar disasters in their kingdom. And when they beheld the great wickedness of some of their kings; when they heard of insurrection, and conspiracy, and domestic treason in the state, and of confederated invasion from without, for the avowed purpose of setting up another king in Jerusalem; their only security against the success of such attempts, lay in their reliance on the faithfulness of the prophecy literally interpreted. It is manifest that any swerving from the simply literal interpretation would, in this case, have totally defeated the main object of the prophecy; or, in other words, that if any relaxed interpretation of the terms of the prediction had been admitted, the nation might as well have been left without any prediction at all. belongs to our present subject.

This is what strictly
During the whole

of the period in question, we have, in the history of the kingdom of Judah, a continuous fulfilment of the prophecy of Nathan, literally interpreted; and any interpretation, other than the literal, would not accord with the facts of the case.

VI. In the reigns of the last of the kings of

Judah, Jeremiah predicted the destruction of the kingdom, the captivity of the people in Babylon for seventy years, and their restoration to their own land, at the expiration of that period. The terms of these predictions are briefly these: "This whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Ba

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bylon seventy years.. After seventy years be accomplished at Babylon, I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place." (See Jer. xxv. 8-14; and xxix. 10.) In these prophecies, three things are plainly asserted, and a fourth very obviously implied. It is asserted-1. That the nation of Judah should be carried captive to Babylon, leaving their own land desolate. 2. That their captivity would last seventy years. 3. That at the termination of those years they would be restored to their own land and city; and by these assertions, it is obviously implied, 4. That during their captivity they would be preserved a separate people: for if amalgamated with the Babylonians, how could they be again separated, and brought back as a nation to the possession of their fathers?

We have only to advert to the plain terms of the subsequent history, to see how accurately all this was fulfilled, in the obviously literal meaning of the language of the prophet. For the captivity of Judah, and desolation of her land, see 2 Chron. xxxvi. 17-21. For the fact of their providential

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