Different kinds of Service. 439 injured servant, it does not follow therefrom that the amount was paltry, or that the offer of it must have been insulting to the prophet. Note.-The Hebrew Ty and the Greek doûλos, like their similarly comprehensive representative, servant, in the English Bible, are applicable not only to the limited servitude permitted among the Jews (which was something very different from abject slavery), but also to free labour voluntarily rendered for hire, as well as to services of the highest and holiest and noblest kind-services which, being utterly incompatible with slavery, would make the word slave quite unsuitable for a translation of eithery or doûλos in an English version of the Scriptures. Specimen passages:— Nehemiah 1. 6, 11 Joel 3.2 (2.29)| Rom. 1. 1 Exodus 14. 31 32. 13 1 Kings 8. 23-30 2 Kings 5. 6 Ps. 119. 13 times Matt. 20. 27 6. 16 4. 29 Col. 4. 1, 7, 12 Although Exodus 21. 2-6 deals expressly with the case of Hebrew servants, it is sometimes maintained that verse 32 refers exclusively to foreign servants. Yet even if this interpretation were proved to be correct, it would not follow that the price was either insignificant or contemptible. In cases of actual slavery, where human beings are treated as the mere property of those who are acknowledged as their owners, the prices put upon able-bodied slaves are by no means inconsiderable. And it is plain from what is detailed in the last chapter of Leviticus, with reference to fifty, thirty, twenty, fifteen, ten, five, and three shekels respectively, that thirty shekels 440 Different quantities of Silver. of silver were not reckoned either ignominious in number or paltry in value. Sundry other passages supply superabundant evidence of the same fact. The silver prescribed in Exodus 30. 11-16 (with which 38. 25-26 may be compared), to be given as s את תרומת יהוה by rich and poor alike among them לכפר על נפשתיכם that were numbered from twenty years old and upwards, was half a shekel. Notwithstanding the moral and religious corruption disclosed in the narrative of Judges 17-18, Micah's offer of D yearly, with food and clothing, to the hireling Levite who, on these terms, became his priest, affords conclusive evidence of the groundlessness of the supposition that the offer of why to Zechariah, in response to his own request for , was an insult. This evidence is corroborated by the giving of a fourth part of a shekel of silver to Samuel (1 Samuel 9. 8) when Saul and the servant of Saul went to ask him to tell them their way. It was for seventeen shekels of silver that the prophet Jeremiah, in obedience to the word of Jehovah, bought a field in Anathoth from Hanameel his uncle's son. And it appears from the solemn stateliness with which the transaction and its concomitant formalities were carried out, that the purchase and the price were the opposite of contemptible. Jeremiah 32. 6-25. Note.-It is quite at variance with the series of events narrated in the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah, and with the value at which silver is estimated throughout the Scriptures, to depreciate Groundless Conjectures. 441 the of Zechariah 11. 12 as contemptible on account of the purposes to which it is conjectured, without a tittle of evidence, that the silver may have been appropriated. If, for instance, as is stated in the Handbook already quoted from in page 435, 'no piece of ground is so worthless, so much a place for shot rubbish, as a worked-out brickfield or potter's clay-hole,' then neither thirty nor even seventeen silverlings could have been the price of such a field. So likewise, if (as hereafter quoted in page 450, from the Bampton Lectures of 1878), 'the productions of a poor worker in clay were of so little value that when marred by any accident they could easily be replaced at a trifling expenditure of cost or toil,' then it could not have been for the purchase of יוצר to the שלשים כסף such productions that Zechariah cast the On the contrary, even in the present century, and much more in the days of Zechariah, would have been amply sufficient to purchase earthenware of considerable costliness. Now this simple fact directly refutes explanations like that of Koehler, who, as quoted by Keil, says, 'The amount is just large enough to pay a potter for the pitchers and pots that have been received from him, and which are thought of so little value, that men easily comfort themselves when one or the other is broken.' Another peculiarly interesting proof of the value of the reward given to the prophet Zechariah may be obtained from a comparison of Nehemiah 5. 15 with Malachi 1. 8. Here the Lord, through the prophet Malachi, complains of oblations which were worse than contemptible, and which accordingly, so far from being spoken of as the were by Zechariah in the words pn 778, are indignantly denounced on account of their baseness and profanity. And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And if ye offer the lame and the sick, is it not evil? Bring it now to thy governor :. Will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy face? saith Jehovah of hosts. 442 The alleged Irony disproved. Here the offering is tested, as to its character, by the manner in which the governor would treat it, if it were presented to him. Now it appears from Nehemiah 5. 15 that the governors who preceded Nehemiah, and who must therefore have ruled in Jerusalem about the very time when Zechariah prophesied there, exacted from the people 'bread and wine, besides forty shekels of silver.' This fact with reference to forty shekels, clearly indicates that the thirty pieces of silver weighed out to the prophet Zechariah cannot have been an insult, and that in II. 13, as elsewhere throughout his prophecies, he was speaking, not in irony, but in simple happy literal truthfulness, when he אדר היקר אשר יקרתי מעליהם characterised the gift as The Givers of the Silver. What is thus evident from these words, viewed in connection with the gift to which they refer, and illustrated by sundry passages where various quantities of silver are mentioned, is corroborated by the prophet's account of those who gave him the silver. They were the poor of the flock, who observed him, and saw that what he did was the word of Jehovah. This description is plainly incompatible with the alleged irony of the phrase אדר היקר Hence Keil maintains that D in verse 12 refers not to the Ny of the immediately preceding sentence, but to the whole flock; and the Bampton Lecturer, that the phrase " is itself a designation of the whole flock, and implies not merely affliction, but moral wretchedness on the part of those to whom it refers. Verse 12. (to them),' says Keil, 'so far as the grammatical construction is concerned, might be addressed to the wretched among the sheep, inasmuch as they were mentioned last. But when we bear in mind that the shepherd began to feed not only the wretched of the sheep, but the whole flock, and that he did not give up any one portion of the flock by breaking the staff Favour, we are forced to the conclusion that the words are addressed to the whole flock, . . .' 'The phrase which occurs in verse 7,' says the Bampton Lecturer, 'and again in verse 11, rendered in our A. V. by "the poor of the flock," is more correctly understood to mean "the most wretched sheep," or "the most miserable flock." It is a description not merely of a certain portion of the sheep, but of the flock in general. . . . Compare, on the superlative force of the expression, Jer. xlix. 20; l. 45; 2 Chron. xxi. 17. The " have been explained by others as a portion of the larger flock, either as part of the human race (von Hofmann), or the true children of God everywhere (Kliefoth), or the godly and pious in Israel, the ecclesia pressa. But the passages of Jeremiah referred to show that it is quite lawful to explain the expression of the whole of the people.' Such reasonings as these seem to be not only negatively inconclusive, but positively inconsistent with the scope and grammatical construction of the passage. In so far as the syntax is concerned, the construct phrase " is equivalent to a single word; and there is no grammatical principle in accordance with which, unlimited by "y, can be the antecedent On the אליהם in the composite word הם of the pronoun contrary must refer to the noun in the construct state as exclusively as if the text had contained the word "y instead of עניי הצאן the phrase in צעירי הצאן As the phrase The passages specified for comparison by the Bampton Lecturer refute his own interpretation. Jeremiah 49. 20 and 50. 45 denotes, not the smallest flock, but the small ones of the flock, and up in 2 Chronicles 21. 17 denotes, not his youngest sons, but the youngest one of his sons, " must denote, not the so likewise the analogous phrase poorest flock, but the poor of the flock, distinguished from the of ישבי הארץ which corresponds to the ,(הצאן) flock at large verse sixth. |