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Thus Mordecai deserves both appellations, the Benjamite and the Judean, for he owed his existence not only to his actual Benjamite forebears on his father's side, but also to the Judean David, who kept his ancestor Shimei alive. Shimei's distinction as the ancestor of Israel's redeemer was due to the merits of his wife.
There is no such distinction there. What God permits is as equally His will as what He appoints. Joseph tells his brethren that it was not they who sent him to Egypt, but God. David listens meekly to Shimei's shameful words, because he felt that God allowed them to be spoken.
Our ignorance and our vices are our own, but the form they take in action, and the effects they produce, are God's. Shimei's wickedness was his own, but it was God that caused it to show itself in throwing stones at David. All our trials are, in truth, from God, and it would be well for us to regard them in that light.
God employed the wickedness of Shimei, to try and punish David. Wesley has embodied the sentiment in one of his hymns, as follows: "Lord, I adore Thy gracious will; Through every instrument of ill My Father's goodness see: Accept the complicated wrong Of Shimei's hand, and Shimei's tongue, As kind rebukes from Thee." Joseph said, God had sent him down to Egypt to save many souls alive.
The preacher's view of the character of Shimei, and of his behaviour to David, is hardly that, perhaps, of a competent historical critic, and in treating of the Benjamite's insults to the King of Israel he appears to take no account of the blood-feud between the house of David and the clan to which the railer belonged; just as in commenting on Shimei's subsequent and most abject submission to the victorious monarch, Sterne lays altogether too much stress upon conduct which is indicative, not so much of any exceptional meanness of disposition, as of the ordinary suppleness of the Oriental put in fear of his life.
When, after Shimei's death, Solomon took her to wife, the archangel Gabriel descended from heaven, and inserted a reed in the sea. About this reed more and more earth was gradually deposited, and, on the day on which Jeroboam erected the golden calves, a little hut was built upon the island. This was the first of the dwelling-places of Rome.
I had been reading all the morning in the Psalms, and his history in Samuel and Kings. "Bring thou down Shimei's hoar head to the grave with blood," are the last words of the dying monarch as recorded by the history. What they call the tomb is now a crumbling old mosque; from which Jew and Christian are excluded alike.
The approach of the Gibeonites to the camp of Israel in their mock-beggarly costume might be mentioned. Shimei's cursing David has always seemed to us to border on the ludicrous. But to leave these matters and return to the general thread of thought. Dramas have been formed on the Bible.
Look not into the Court Calendar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, though not to Shimei? No matter. The worst officer of the law shall not be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must rise up as one man to reproach it? When it lost everything, did it lose the right to pity too?
Shimei is the barometer of every man's fortune; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the simile will admit of. Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs over Shimei's brow! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the captain of the host without success?
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