Baasha of Israel

“ That the Philistines, who had been so utterly crushed by David and [Pg 310] who were an insignificant power, should have thus been able to assert themselves once more, is a proof of the weakness to which Israel had been reduced. While Nadab was thus occupied, an obscure conspirator, Baasha, son of Ahijah, of the tribe of Issachar, [508] actuated perhaps by tribal jealousy, or stirred up as Jeroboam had been before him and as Jehu was after him by some prophetic message, conspired against him, and slew him. ”

“ We do not know which Benhadad this was. It could not have been the grandson of Rezon, whom, fourteen years earlier, King Asa had bribed to attack Baasha in order to divert him from building Ramah. [711] It may have been his son or grandson bearing the same religious dynastic name. In any case the policy of attacking Israel was suicidal. If the kings had possessed the prescient glance of the prophets they could not have failed to see on the northern horizon the cloud of Assyrian power, which menaced [Pg 455] them all with cruel extinction at the hands of that atrocious people. ”

“ Go, break your treaty with Baasha king of Israel, that he may depart from me."
20 Ben Hadad listened to king Asa, and sent the captains of his armies against the cities of Israel, and struck Ijon, and Dan, and Abel Beth Maacah, and all Chinneroth, with all the land of Naphtali. 21 It happened, when Baasha heard of it, that he left off building Ramah, and lived in Tirzah. 22 Then king Asa made a proclamation to all Judah; none was exempted: and they carried away the stones of Ramah, and its timber, with which Baasha had built; and king Asa built therewith Geba of Benjamin, and Mizpah. ”

“ Baasha pressed forward resolutely his campaign against Judah. He seized Eamah and fortified it;* and Asa, feeling his incapacity to dislodge him unaided, sought to secure an ally. Egypt was too much occupied with its own internal dissensions to be able to render any effectual help, but a new power, which would profit quite as much as Judah by the overthrow of Israel, was beginning to assert itself in the north. Damascus had, so far, led an obscure and peaceful existence ”

“ OMRI, in the Bible, the first great king of Israel after the separation of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who flourished in the early part of the 9th century B.C. The dynasty of Jeroboam had been exterminated by Baasha (see Asa) at a revolt when the army was besieging the Philistines at Gibbethon, an unidentified Danite site. A quarter of a century later, Baasha's son Elah, after a reign of two years, was slain by Zimri, captain of the chariots, in a drinking bout, and again the royal family were put to the sword. ”

“ From the fall of this dynasty there was only the semblance of a state until the final destruction of Samaria, B. C. 721.
5. Its foreign relations. During the period of the Israelite kingdom we see lands struggling for the dominion of the East. The history of Israel is interwoven with that of Syria and Assyria, which may now be read from the monuments.
1.) There was a Period of Division (B. C. 975-929) . During the reign of the houses of Jeroboam and Baasha there were constant wars between Israel, Syria, and Judah; and as a result all were kept weak, and "a balance of power" was maintained. ”

“ Earnestly did the prophet-statesman expostulate with Ahaz, telling him that the king of Assyria would prove "a razor to shave but too clean his desolate land." The inspired advice was rejected; and the result of the alliance was that Judah, like Israel, fell to the rank of a subject nation, and became tributary to Assyria, and Ahaz, a mere vassal of Tiglath-pileser. The whole of Palestine became the border-land of the Assyrian empire, easy to be invaded and liable to be conquered. ”

“ And Boaz answered and said unto her, "It hath fully been showed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law since the death of thy husband; and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people that thou knewest not heretofore. The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to take refuge." ”

“ In the same way, Israel, scattered all over the world, was not reassembled in the Holy Land in the Christian cycle; but in the beginning of the cycle of Bahá’u’lláh this divine promise, as is clearly stated in all the Books of the Prophets, has begun to be manifest. You can see that from all the parts of the world tribes of Jews are coming to the Holy Land; they live in villages and lands which they make their own, and day by day they are increasing to such an extent that all Palestine will become their home. ”

“ Masanath gained her feet, crying out wildly:
"My servants! Where are they? Let me forth."
The Israelite put an assuring arm about her. "Thou wilt not dare to face the Nile again," she warned. "Stay with us."
"To starve! To perish of thirst! To die of pestilence! The gods have left us. We are undone!"
"Aye, the gods have left you," the voice continued harshly. "Ye are given over to the vengeance of the God of Abraham. Howl, Egypt! Rend thyself and cover thy head with ashes. Thy destruction is but begun. For a hundred years thou hast oppressed Israel. Now is the hour of the children of God!" ”

“ The United States fulfils the rôle of the Tribe of Manasseh. Therefore, to understand the prophecies, Providence, and the present movement of nations, as well as the future lot and destiny of each, we must read the Scriptures in this light. God has made the children of Israel and throne of David His executive, in time, on earth. They are His executive for civilisation, evangelisation, order, and conquest. Through them God will conquer the world to an universal peace. As Moses was to God, so is Israel. Moses being a Divine executor, was to the people a god—so is Israel to all mankind. ”

“ Amos looked out on foreign nations across a quiet Israel; his views of the world are wide and clear; but in the Book of Hosea the dust is up, and into what is happening beyond the frontier we get only glimpses. There is enough, however, to make visible another great change since the days of Jeroboam. Israel's self-reliance is gone. She is as fluttered as a startled bird: They call unto Egypt, they go unto Assyria. ”

“ And so the old limitations of Israel’s popular religion,—the same limitations that encumbered also the religions of all the neighbouring races that succumbed in turn to Assyria’s invincible progress,—now began to disappear. Therefore, while every other religion which was purely national was extinguished in the nation’s overthrow, the religion of Israel survived even amid exile and dispersion. For Amos and Isaiah were able to single out those loftier spiritual and ethical elements which lay implicit in Mosaism and to lift them into their due place of prominence. ”

“ What he rescued and published is enough to give us a more detailed and accurate account of the Falashas than we have hitherto possessed. He reports that they address their prayers to one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that they feel pride in belonging to the old, yet ever young tribe which has exercised dominant influence upon the fate of men; that love for the Holy Land fills their hearts; and that the memory of Israel's glorious past is their265 spiritual stay. One of the articles of their faith is the restoration of Jewish nationality. ”

“ But the eye of Balaam, the seer, which had been opened by the Spirit of God, beheld the nation of Israel encamped, according to its tribes, in the face of its foes, the nations of this world. They were endeavouring to destroy Israel; but according to the counsel of the Almighty God and Lord of the whole world, in their warfare against the nation that was blessed of Jehovah, they were to succumb one after the other, and be destroyed by the king that was to arise out of Israel. ”

“ All down their history it is wonderful to see how it was the conscience of this service, which in periods of progress was the real national genius in Israel, and in times of decay or of political dissolution upheld the assurance of the nation's survival. Whenever a ruler like Ahaz [Pg 244] forgot that Israel's imperishableness was bound up with their faithfulness to God's service, and sought to preserve his throne by alliances with the world-powers, then it was that Israel were most in danger of absorption into the world. ”

“ This is the immediate prospect after restoration to Palestine of the people who rebelled against the Most High, and rejected His Son, and always resisted the Holy Spirit—a furnace seven times heated, and anguish as acute as are the pangs of a woman in travail. Alas! poor Israel, who desire the day of the Lord, to what end is it for you? Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light, even very dark and no brightness in it? ”

“ To the latter the cigarette which the student coolly puffed on the Sabbath was desecration; the non-Jewish meals in which the student indulged daily were regarded with pious horror and indignation. Not for this had the other come to Basel, and the sad-eyed and silent delegate who tramped half-way across Europe on what he deemed a holy pilgrimage sighed and thought that Israel was in greater darkness in the centre of its new-born hope than in the unhappy land of persecution wherein he was suffered to exist. ”

“ As Edom in this case also represents the world in its hostility to God (see the comm. on Ezekiel 35:1-36:15) , the land of Israel also is not Palestine, but the kingdom of the Messiah, the boundaries of which extend from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the world (Psa 73:8 and Zec 9:10) . It is true that in the case of our prophet there is no express mention made of the spread of the kingdom of God over the lands, inasmuch as he is watchman over the house of Israel, and therefore, for the most part, principally speaks of the restoration of Israel ”

“ But as sure as there was a cross planted for Him on that Golgotha, outside the walls of Jerusalem, so surely, if the word and oath of our God stand for anything, is there yet to be a glorious throne for our Redeemer and Master on Mount Zion." The stone which the builders have rejected has become the headstone of the corner"; and, however marvellous and improbable in our eyes, Israel shall yet "serve Jehovah their God, and David their King," and deliberately elect Him, whom during centuries of unbelief they have despised and rejected, as their "Nassi" their freely chosen ruler and prince. ”

“ No; the word in the original translated "prince" in this passage, does not mean prince in an hereditary sense of the word. "Nassi," the term used, signifies one exalted, or elected by the free will of the people. What a glimpse we get here of the change that will come over Israel at the appearing of Jesus Christ! At His first coming, Israel, as a nation, deliberately rejected Him. "Not this man, but Barabbas!" they said: and as to Christ, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" "We will not have this man to reign over us," was their cry. ”

“ The root of this corruption lay in total ignorance of Yahweh, whose precepts were no longer taught by the priests, while in the national calf-worship, and in the local high places, this worship was confounded with the service of the Canaanite Baalim. Thus the whole religious constitution of Israel was undermined. And the political state of the realm was in Hosea’s eyes not more hopeful. The dynasty of Jehu, still great and powerful when the prophet’s labours began, is itself an incorporation of national sin. ”

“ During the reigns of Ahaz, Jotham and Uzziah, oppression, wickedness and idolatry existed everywhere. Ahaz made an alliance with Assyria, which finally brought destruction to Israel, but Hezekiah listened to Isaiah and made reforms, and God destroyed the Assyrian army before Jerusalem was destroyed. ”

“ The feeble attempts which Ahaz had made in the same direction were utterly [42] swept out of men's memory by the completeness of Manasseh's apostasy. With this degradation of the religious faith there also came, naturally, an intellectual degradation. Superstition, baser even than idolatry, seized upon the minds of men, and illegitimate efforts to pry into the future or to influence the destinies of men by magic and incantations became part of the popular fashion of the day. The old religion of Israel had sternly set itself against all such debasing practices. ”

“ And when one day another prisoner came from Tetuan with further tales of the Basha's tyranny, and of the people's shame at thought of how they had dealt by Israel, the prisoners led the man back to where Israel was standing in the accustomed act of dispensing bounty, that he might tell his story into the rightful ears.
“They're always crying for you,” said the Tetawani; “'Israel ben Oliel! Israel ben Oliel!' that's what you hear in the mosques and the streets everywhere.' Shame on us for casting him out, shame on us! He was our father!' Jews and Muslimeen, they're all saying so.” ”

“ The possession, or ascendancy of Britain in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Seba, will naturally lead to the colonization of Palestine by the Jews. Thus the proverb will be verified which saith, "The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous, and the transgressor for the upright." Though generations of the Jews have been stiff-necked and perverse," yet their nation is a "holy nation" which other nations are not, inasmuch as Israelis the only nation God has separated to Himself for a peculiar people. In view of what I have been presenting, Jehovah saith to them, "Fear not, O Israel ”