e evil spread until the final
corruption of Jerusalem was shown in vision to Ezekiel, "Seventy men of
the ancients"--that is the complete Sanhedrim--offered incense to
creeping things and abominable beasts; the women wept for Tammuz,
probably the sun-god in his decline to winter death; and deepest
apostasy of all, five and twenty men, the high-priest, and the chief
priests of the twenty-four courses, "with their backs toward the temple
of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the
sun toward the east." The entire nation, as represented in its chief
members in State, Society, and Church, was apostate, and its ruin
followed. Five years more and the temple was burned and Jerusalem
destroyed, and in captivity and exile the nation learned to abhor the
idolatry that had brought about its overthrow.

Four words are translated "sun" in our Authorized Version. Of these one,
used Job xxxi. 26, should really be "light," as in the margin--"If I
beheld the light when it shined,"--though the sun is obviously meant.
The second word is one used in poetry chiefly in conjunction with a
poetical word for the moon, and refers to the sun's warmth, as the other
does to the whiteness of the moon. Thus the Bride in the Song of Solomon
is described as "fair as the moon, clear as the sun." The third word
has given use to some ambiguity. In the eighth chapter of Judges in the
Authorized Version, it is stated that "Gideon, the son of Joash,
returned from the battle before the sun was up," but in the Revised
Version that he "returned from the battle from the ascent of Heres."
There was a mount [H.]eres, a mount of the sun, in the portion of the
Danites held by the Amorites, but that cannot have been the [H.]eres of
Gideon. Still the probability is that a mount sacred to the sun is meant
here as well as in the reference to the Danites; though _[h.]eres_ as
meaning the sun itself occurs in the story of Samson's riddle, for the
men of the city gave him the answer to it which they had extorted from
his wife, "before the sun (_[h.]eres_) went down." _Shemesh_, the
_Samas_ of the Babylonians, is the usual word for the sun; and we find
it in Beth-shemesh, the "house of the sun," a Levitical city within the
tribe of Judah, the scene of the return of the ark after its captivity
amongst the Philistines. There was another Beth-shemesh in Naphtali on
the borders of Issachar, and Jeremiah prophesies that Nebuchadnezzar
"shall break also