United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'Rebellion is divination, And stubbornness is idols and teraphim. Then comes the stern sentence of rejection. Why was Saul thus irrevocably set aside? Was it not a harsh punishment for such a crime? As we have already remarked, Saul's act is not to be judged as an isolated deed, but as the outcome of a deep tendency in him, which meant revolt from God.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because thou hast rejected the word of Jehovah, he hath also rejected thee from being king." The dark picture of Saul's doings is here and there relieved by the unadulterated love of Jonathan and David, "which, like the glintings of the diamond in the night," takes away some of the deepest shadows.
The "teraphim," the etymology of which is unknown, were little portable idols which seem to have been the Lares of the ancient Hebrews. These evidences of polytheism and fetichism in the people of Israel destroy, in the mind of the Martian, the claim of these people to have been faithful from their earliest origin to a spiritual monotheism.
Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image: and they were in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest.
Whether these clay figurines, cones, and metallic statuettes were also placed by individuals in their dwellings, like the "plague" tablets, we cannot as yet definitely say, but it is more than likely that such was the case. The teraphim familiar to us from the references in the Old Testament, and evidently used as talismans, belong to the class of votive offerings under consideration.
Nor did the allegiance to Jehovah bar private usages of an idolatrous nature. The home of the average Israelite had its teraphim and other domestic divinities. The darker aspects of the popular religion still held their ground against the growing light.
The writer of the books of Samuel takes it quite as a matter of course that Michal, daughter of one royal Jahveh worshipper and wife of the servant of Jahveh par excellence, the pious David, should have her teraphim handy, in her and David's chamber, when she dresses them up in their bed into a simulation of her husband, for the purpose of deceiving her father's messengers.
"You would not take the Queen's rosary before," he said. "You must now, to save it. My father has smelt it out. He says it is teraphim! Micah Rachel, what not, are quoted against it. He would have smashed it into fragments, but that Martha Browning said it would be a pretty bracelet. I'd sooner see it smashed than on her red fist. To think of her giving in to such vanities!
The mysterious objects known as Teraphim, which are occasionally mentioned in Judges, Samuel, and elsewhere, however, can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as indications of the existence both of ancestor-worship and of image-worship in old Israel. The teraphim were certainly images of family gods, and, as such, in all probability represented deceased ancestors.
Further, the evidence proves that this belief was the basis of the Jahveh-worship to which Samuel and his followers were devoted; that there is strong reason for believing, and none for doubting, that idolatry, in the shape of the worship of the family gods or teraphim, was practised by sincere and devout Jahveh-worshippers; that the ark, with its protective tent or tabernacle, was regarded as a specially, but by no means exclusively, favoured sanctuary of Jahveh; that the ephod appears to have had a particular value for those who desired to divine by the help of Jahveh; and that divination by lots was practised before Jahveh.
Word Of The Day