SHILOH
681
SHILOH
of the earth be blessed." This is apart from any weight which the apostle teaches us to attach to the word in the singidar number: "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made; he saith not, And to seeds, as of many, but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ."
(2.) A very different objection of a most practical kind is that our interpretation is contradicted by facts, since the sceptre had departed from Judah /or centu- ries before Christ was born ; and the appeal is made to the end of the kingdom by the Babylonian captivity, to the continued subjection of the people to the Persian and the Greek governments, to the fact that even the Maccabajan princes did not spring from the tribe of Judah, and to the thoroughly foreign nature of the rule of Herod and his family.
In reply, we do not need to enter into a laborious discussion for the purpose of showing that something of Judah's sceptre still remained. Were we to grant all that is alleged, the very fact that Christ arose in due time is proof that the sceptre had not departed from Jmlah in the course of these reverses; precisely as a total eclipse is no proof that the day is at an end. The sceptre was long of appearing in .Judah; Israel had to wait for centuries in faith that kings would arise in the line of promise, although they had not been long of arising in the rejected line of Esau (Gen. xvii, 16; XXXV, 11; xxxvi, 31). The lapse of centuries before the sceptre appeared in Israel does not disturb our faith in this prophecy; neither need the lapse of centuries after it disappeared, if Judah was only kept together till the predicted rod should come forth of the slump of Jesse (Isa. xi, 1). At the worst, we rest in faith on Gabriel's words to Mary — " The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his king- dom there shall be no end" (Luke i, 32, 33). It is im- portant to observe that the facts which stumble some modern Christians were no stumbling-block to ancient Jews and Christians, to whom they were equally well known, and by whom translations and paraphrases were made in which Shlloh was, without hesitation, inter- preted to be the Messiah. They understood the true meaning of the prophecy — that it secured a kingdom substantially and truly perpetual, yet liable to interrup- tions which should seem to the world to be failures of God's word, because only his children understand that chastisements are a part of the blessings secured to them by covenant. At the time when the sceptre <Ud first appear in Judah the law of the kingdom on this point was laid down explicitly by Nathan (2 Sam. vii, 12-16), of which we have a more expanded statement throughout Psa. Ixxxix.
In a very important sense, however, the sceptre had not departed from Judah even during the Babylonian captivity and the Persian rule; for the national elders were always more or less recognised by these foreign powers, as the titles Resh gelnthn (prince of the cap- tivity) and alubarch (q. v.) evince in later times. See Captivity; Disperskd. The authority of Zerubba- bel as "governor of Judah" (Hag. ii, 2) evidently rest- ed upon a recognition of this traditional supremacy. Moreover, the Jewish people well understood that this foreign j'oke was imposed as a temporary penalty for their sins, and the prophecy obviously refers to a. final, as well as total, passing-away of civil power, wliich, it is demonstrable, did not occur till after the reduction of Judrea to a Roman province. The restoration of royalty in the persons of the Asmonajan line, therefore, served legitimately as a link to keep alive this grant; and its transfer to Herod, although but a Jew by adop- tion, was in like manner a renewal of the prerogative. After the coming of Christ, the Jews themselves ac- knowledged that ■' they had no king but Caisar" (John xix, 15). It would seem to have been Jehovah's orig- inal intention to tnake the Davidic dynasty absolutely perpetual in a political sense , but the condition of loy-
alty to him, which was never overlooked, having fail- ed, the promise was suspended, and at last tiually re- voked so far as the nationality was concerned. Yet the spiritual import of the grant remained in full force, and shall never be repealed. Clirist was the true Heir of David, and the supremacj-, whatever it may have orig- inally contemplated, took, in his person, the spiritual phase exclusively. It is this change in the aspect of the Judaic sceptre that justifies tlie peculiar term Shi- loh, the Peaceful, as characterizing tlie new "kingdom of heaven," in distinction from the vindictive and often sanguinary spirit of the older Judaism.
(3.) It is alleged that we take the word Shiloh in a sense elsewhere unknown, and here umiecessary. The necessity, however, seems to us to l)e (iroved by the im- possibility of resting satisfied with the other interpre- tation; and confessetll}' this necessity has been felt by the vast majority of interpreters of every age, and coun- try, and school of opinion, always excepting open un- believers. We have pointed out the real and intimate connection of the two names, that of the person and that of the city; nor is there anything unusual in this double use of a name, of which the book of Genesis gives other examples in Enoch and Shechem (iv, 17 ; xxxiii, 18, 19). If we think that the name of a city has been imagined erroneously here, this is no more than is now commonly supposed in regard to Shalem in ver. 18.