Riz'pah (Ileb. Ritspah', ilSS"i, a live coal, as in Isa. vi, 6; Sept. 'Pfff0a V. r. 'Pf0^a5; Josephus/Pata^a [Ant. vii, 1, 4]), a concubine of king Saul, and mother of two of his sons, Armoni and Mejjhibosheth. B.C. cir. 1080. Like many others of the prominent female char- acters of the Old Test. — Ruth, Raliab, Jezebel, etc. — Kizpah would seem to have been a foreigner, a Hivite, descended from one of the ancient worthies of that na- tion, Ajah or Aiah, son of Zibeon, whose name and fame are preserved in the Ishraaelitish record of Gen. xxxvi. After the death of Saul and the occupation of the coun- try west of the Jordan by the Philistines, Rizpah ac- companied the other inmates of the royal family to their new residence at Mahanaim ; and it is here that her name is first introduced to us as the subject of an accu- sation levelled at Abner by Ishbosheth (2 Sam. iii, 7) — a piece of spite which led first to Abner's death through Joab's treachery, and ultimately to the murder of Ish- bosheth himself. The accusation, whether true or false — and from Abner's vehement denial we shoulil natural- ly conclude that it was false— involved more than meets the ear of a modern and English reader; for among the Israelites it was considered " as a step to the throne to have coiniection with the widow or the mistress of the deceased king" (see Michaelis, Z«ws of Moses, art. 54). We hear nothing more of Rizpah till the tragic story which has made her one of the most familiar ob- jects to young and old in the whole Bible (2 Sam. xxi, 8-11). Ever\' one can appreciate the love and endur- ance with which the mother watched over the bodies of her two sons and her five relatives, to save them from an indignitj' peculiarly painful to the whole of the ancient world (see Psa. Ixxix, 2 ; Homer, II, i, 4, 5, etc.). But it is questionable whether the ordinary con- ception of the scene is accurate. The seven victims were not, as the A. V. implies, "hung;" they were cruci- fied. The seven crosses were planted in the rock on the top of the sacred hill of Gibeah — the hill which, though not Saul's native place, was, through his long residence there, so identified with him as to retain his name to the latest existence of the Jewish nation (1 Sam. xi, 4, etc.; and see Josephus, War, v, 2, 1). The whole or part of this hill seems at the time of this occurrence to have been in some special manner dedicated to Jehovah, pos- sibly the s]iot on wliich Aliiah tlie priest had deposited the ark when he took refuge in Gibeah during the Phi- listine war (1 Sam. xiv, IH). The victims were sacrificed at the beginning of barley-harvest^the sacred and fes- tal time of the Passover — and in the full blaze of the summer sun they hung till the fall of the periodical rain in October. During the whole of that time Rizpah re- mained at the foot of the crosses on which the bodies of her sons were exposed — the mater dolorosa, if the ex- pression may be allowed, of the ancient dispensation. She had no tent to shelter her from the scorching sun which beats on that open spot all day, or from the drench- ing dews at night, but she spread on the rocky floor the thick mourning garment of black sackcloth which as a widow she wore, and crouching there she watched that neither vulture nor jackal should molest the bodies. — Smith.
Road occurs but once in the A. Y. of the Bible, viz. in 1 Sam. xxvii, 10, where it is used in the sense of "raid" or "inroad," the Hebrew word (-"^B) being elsewhere (e. g. ver. 8; xxiii, 27; xxx, 1, 14, etc.) ren- dered " invade" and " invasion." A road in the sense which we now attach to the term is expressed in the A. V. by " way" and " path," for which the most gener- al words in the original are ""i^, ooiic.
In the East, where travelling is performed mostly on some beast of burden, certain tracks were at a very ear-
ly period customarily pursued; and that the rather as from remote ages commerce and travelling went on by means of caravans, under a certain discipline, and af- fording mutual protection in their passage from city to city and from land to land. Now, wherever such a band of men and animals had once passed the)' would form a track, which, especially in countries where it is easy for the traveller to miss his way, subsequent cara- vans or individuals would naturallj' follow ; and the rather inasmuch as the original route was not taken ar- bitrarily, but because it led to the first cities in each particular district of country. Thus at a verj' early period were there marked out on the surface of the globe lines of intercommunication running from land to land, and in some sort binding distant nations to- gether. These, in the earliest times, lay in the direc- tion of east and west, that being the line, on which the trade and the civilization of the earth first ran. The purposes of war seem, however, to have furnished the first inducement to the formation of made, or artificial, roads. War, we know, afforded to the Romans the mo- tive under which they formed their roads; and doubt- less they formed them not only to facilitate conquest but also to insure the holding of the lands they had subdued ; and the remains of their roads show us with what skill they laid out a country and formed lines of communication.