Woman in Sacred History

ity of the rebuke and punishment which fell upon Miriam seems at first sight excessive. But we shall notice, in the whole line of the traditions with respect to the prophetic office, the most complete unselfishness is absolutely required. To use the prophetic gift in any manner for personal ambition or aggrandizement, was sacrilege. The prophet must be totally, absolutely without self. His divine gifts must never be used for any personal and individual purpose, even for the relief of utmost want. Thus the great prophets, Elijah and Elisha, gifted with miraculous power, wandered hungry in the desert, and waited to be fed by God. Thus Jesus, the Head of all the Proph­ets, when after wandering forty days he was an hungered, re­fused the suggestion to feed himself by his own miraculous power, and also the suggestion to glorify himself by a public display of that power.

One thing in respect to the sacred and prophetic women of the Jewish race is peculiar. They were uniformly, so far as ap­pears, married women and mothers of families, and not like the vestal virgins of antiquity, set apart from the usual fam­ily duties of women. Josephus mentions familiarly the hus­band of Miriam as being Hur, the well-known companion and assistant of Moses on a certain public occasion. He also re­fers to Bezaleel, one of the architects who assisted in the erec­tion of the tabernacle, as her grandson. We shall find, by sub­sequent examination of the lives of prophetic women who were called to be leaders in Israel, that they came from the bo­som of the family, and were literally, as well as metaphorically, mothers in Israel. In the same year that Miriam died, Aaron, her brother, was also laid to rest, and, of the three, Moses re­mained alone.

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which were shown her, and which held the nation as mourn­ers for thirty days, were ordered and conducted by Moses, who thus expressed his love and veneration for the sister who watched his infancy and shared his labors. The national rever­ence for Miriam is shown in the Rabbinic tradition, that, on account of her courage and devotion in saving her brother’s life at the Nile, a spring of living water, of which the people drank, always followed her footsteps through her wander­ings in the wilderness. On her death the spring became dry. No more touching proof of a nation’s affectionate memory can be given than a legend like this. Is it not in a measure true of every noble, motherly woman?

The Book of Judges is the record of a period which may be called the Dark Ages of the Jewish Church, even as the mediæval days were called the Dark Ages of Christianity. In both cases, a new system of purity and righteousness, whol­ly in advance of anything the world had ever before known, had been inaugurated by the visible power of God, — the sys­tem of Moses, and the system of Christ. But these pure systems seem, in each case, to have been allowed to struggle their own way through the mass of human ignorance and sin. The ideal policy of Moses was that of an ultra-democratic community, so arranged that perforce there must be liberty, fraternity, and equality. There was no chance for overgrown riches or abject poverty. Landed property was equally divided in the outset, and a homestead allowed to each family. Real estate could not be alienated from a family for more than a generation; after that period, it returned again to its original possessor. The supreme law of the land was love. Love, first, to the God and Father, the invisible head of all; and secondly, towards the neighbor, whether a Jewish brother or a foreigner and stranger. The poor, the weak, the enslaved, the old, the deaf, the blind, were pro­tected by solemn and specific enactments. The person of

The history of the Jewish nation, in the Book of Judges, presents a succession of these periods of oppression, and of deliverance by a series of divinely inspired leaders, sent in