“The man that consumed us, and that devised against us that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the coasts of Israel,

“Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us, and we will hang them up unto the Lord in Gibeon of Saul.  And the king said, I will give them.”

Dreadful days of blood!  Fearful fiat! which though needful and just, yet invaded the sanctuary of home so gloomily.  Sad world! in which the innocent so often bear the sins of the guilty,—­when will thy groans, ever ascending into the ears of Almighty love, be heard and bring release?

The sentence was executed.  Two sons of Saul by Rizpah, his inferior wife, and five of Merab his eldest daughter, whom Michal had, for some reason, educated, were delivered up and hung by the Gibeonites.

Who can imagine, much less portray, the mother’s anguish when her noble sons were torn from her for such a doom!  We do not know whether Merab was living to see that day of horror, but Rizpah felt the full force of the blow which blasted all her hopes.  Her husband, the father of her sons, had been suddenly slain in battle; her days of happiness and security had departed with his life, and now, all that remained of comfort, her precious children, must be put to a cruel death to satisfy the vengeance due to crimes not hers nor theirs.  Wretched mother! a bitter lot indeed was thine!  But the Lord had spoken, and there was no reprieve.  To the very town where they had all dwelt under their father’s roof, were these hapless ones dragged and their bodies ignominiously exposed upon the wall until they should waste away—­a custom utterly abhorrent to all humanity, and especially to the Hebrews, whose strongest desire might be expressed in the words of the aged Barzillai, “Let me die in mine own city, and be buried by the grave of my father and mother.”

Behold now that lone and heart-broken mother, on the spot where day and night, week after week, and month after month, she may be found.  Neither heat nor cold—­distressing days nor fearful nights—­the entreaties of friends, nor the weariness of watching, nor the horrifying exhibition of decaying humanity, could drive her from her post.  Upon the sackcloth which she had spread for herself upon the rock she remained “from the beginning of the harvest until the rain dropped upon them out of heaven,” and suffered neither the birds of the air by day, nor the beasts of the field by night to molest those precious remains.  O mother’s heart! of what heroism art thou capable!  Before a scene like this the bravest exploits of earth’s proudest heroes fade into dim insignificance.  At this picture we can only gaze.  Words wholly fail when we would comment on it.  Of the agonies it reveals we cannot speak.  There are lessons to be learned from it, and upon them we can ponder.

The value which the Lord our God sets upon truth is here displayed.  He will have no swerving from the straight path of perfect fidelity to all engagements and covenants.  Severe and awful appears his character as thus presented to us, and yet it is upon this very attribute that all our hopes rely.  “He is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent.”  If he thus defends those who love him not, how safe and happy may his children rest.