violence to the law.

The Lord in the midst of her is righteous;
He will not do iniquity;
Every morning doth he bring his judgment to light,
He faileth not;
But the unjust knoweth no shame.

{384}

IV

SING, O DAUGHTER OF ZION

Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel;
Be glad and rejoice with the heart, O daughter of Jerusalem.
The Lord hath taken away thy judgments,
He hath cast out thine enemy:
The king of Israel, even the Lord, is in the midst of thee:
Thou shalt not fear evil any more.
In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, "Fear thou not:
O Zion, let not thine hands be slack.
The Lord thy God is in the midst of thee,
A mighty one who will save:
He will rejoice over thee with joy, he will rest in his love,
He will joy over thee with singing."

{385}

NAHUM

(Nineveh was the capital city of the great empire of Assyria. It was,
to the Hebrews, the expression of all the power and cruelty and
bloodthirstiness of that mighty and oppressive empire. The story of
the barbaric savagery of this empire almost passes belief. The
monuments of Assyria are its own strongest accusing witnesses. They
show pictures of captives of war whose eyes are being put out, who are
being skinned alive, who are suffering all the tortures that a savage
imagination can invent. Any such torture might come to any Hebrew
taken in war. Is it any wonder that the people not only dreaded, but
bitterly hated this city? Is it strange that they thought Jehovah
would certainly overthrow it? Nahum, in a poetic prophecy of great
vigor and vividness, pictures the overthrow, and exults in the fall of
the great, rich, cruel city. That fall came, at the hands of the Medes
and Babylonians, in about 608 B. C. Since that time, Nineveh has
remained in ruins, and is to-day buried under the sand hills of the
desert.)

I

THE GOODNESS AND THE GREATNESS OF THE LORD

The Lord is a jealous God and avengeth; the Lord avengeth and is full
of wrath; the Lord taketh vengeance on his adversaries, and he
reserveth wrath for his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger, and great
in power, and will by no means clear the guilty: the Lord hath his way
in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of
{386} his feet. He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up
all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of
Lebanon languisheth. The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt;
and