Their lineal descendants are no strangers on the exchanges, or in the churches of London or New York.  They were not only outwardly scrupulous and inwardly weary of religious observances, but when they did get to ‘business,’ they gave short measure and took a long price, and knew how to turn the scales always in their own favour.  It was the expedient of rude beginners in the sacred art of getting the best of a bargain, to put a false bottom in the ephah, and to stick a piece of lead below the shekel weight, which the purchaser had to make go up in the scale with his silver.  There are much neater ways of doing the same thing now; and no doubt some very estimable gentlemen in high repute as Christians, who give respectability to any church or denomination, could have taught these early practitioners a lesson or two.

They were as cruel as they were greedy.  They bought their brethren as slaves, and if a poor man had run into their debt for even a pair of shoes, they would sell him up in a very literal sense.  Avarice, unbridled by the fear of God, leads by a short cut to harshness and disregard of the claims of others.  There are more ways of buying the needy for a pair of shoes than these people practised.

The last touch in the picture is meanness, which turned everything into money.  Even what fell through the sieve when wheat was winnowed, which ought to have been given to anybody, was carefully scraped up, and, dirty as it was, sold.  Is not ‘nothing for nothing’ an approved maxim to-day?  Are not people held up as shining lights of commerce, who have the faculty of turning everything into saleable articles?  Some serious reflections ought to be driven home to us who live in great commercial communities, and are in manifold ways tempted to ’learn their ways, and so get a snare unto our souls,’ by this gibbeting of tempers and customs, very common among ourselves, as the very head and front of the sin of Israel, which determined its ripeness for destruction.

The catalogue of sins is left incomplete (compare with chapter ii.), as if holy indignation turned for relief to the thought of the certain judgment.  That certainly is strongly affirmed by the representation of the oath of Jehovah.  ‘He can swear by no other,’ therefore He ’swears by Himself’; and the ‘excellency of Jacob’ cannot with propriety mean anything else than Him who is, or ought to be, the sole ground of confidence and occasion of ‘boasting’ to the nation (Hos. v. 5).  He gives His own being as the guarantee that judgment shall fall.  As surely as God is God, injustice and avarice will ruin a nation.  We talk now about necessary consequences and natural laws rendering penalties inevitable.  The Bible suggests a deeper foundation for their certain incidence—­even the very nature of God Himself.  As long as He is what He is, covetousness and its child, harshness to the needy, will be sin against Him, and be avenged sooner or later.  God has a long and a wide memory, and the sins which He ‘remembers’ are those which He has not forgiven, and will punish.