To rest at last in the ground, to be buried in the sepulchre of their fathers, was accounted by the Jews as the greatest honour and happiness, and throughout the Old Testament the expression for death is sleeping, implying lying tranquil and undisturbed. Thus David, Azariah, and Jotham “slept with their fathers, and were buried in the city of David”--“for so He giveth His beloved sleep.”[1] On the other hand, to die an unnatural or violent death, to be cast out of the grave like an abominable branch, to be as a carcass exposed in the sight of the sun, or trodden under foot, and not to be joined with their fathers in burial, was ever esteemed a note of infamy, and a kind of curse. “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God); that thy land be not defiled.”[2] So Jehoiakim was threatened with the want of even ordinary burial, and to be cast out like carrion into some remote and sordid place. It was a severe sentence, “He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[3] Again, Jeremiah foretelling the desolation of the Jews, “Their carcasses will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth,”[4] “and no man shall fray them away;”[5] and in another place we are told that their bones shall be “spread before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, ... they shall not be gathered, nor be buried.”[6] In the denunciation of Jehoiakim, in that picturesque and striking scene, when the king burnt the roll of Baruch, it is recorded against him: “His dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.”[7] So great, indeed, was the dread among the ancient Jews that the dead body should be treated with derision or contumely, that the Preacher expressed and summed up the general sentiment in these words: “If a man ... have no burial, I say that an untimely birth is better than he.”[8] As with the Jews so it was with the Egyptians. They refused burial to executed criminals and gave their bodies to the birds and beasts. For instance, Joseph said to the chief baker, “Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee.”[9] And so it came to pass. We may gather, again, from the short and touching story of the long watches of Rizpah, how deep was the solicitude that the dead should not be polluted by birds and beasts,[10] or from the ghastly fate of Amasa, whose mangled corpse was covered with a cloth by a mere bystander--one of Joab’s men[11]--in order that the people might not be shocked by looking upon it--how strong was the feeling in those days against the wanton exposure of the divine image.