Verse 19. Psalm 103, v. 8. 'The Lord is slow to anger,' yet 50,070 people slain in an instant for a mere act of indiscretion. 'Bethshemesh was a village belonging to God's people, situated, according to commentators, two miles north of Jerusalem. 'The Phoenicians having in Samuel's time beaten the Jews and taken from them their ark of allegiance in the battle in which they killed thirty thousand of their men, were severely punished for it by the Lord: '"He struck them in the most secret part of the buttocks; and the fields and the farm houses were troubled.... and there sprung up mice; and there was a great confusion of death in the city." 'The prophets of the Phoenicians or Philistines having informed them that they could deliver themselves from the scourge only by-giving to the Lord five golden mice and five golden emerods, and sending him back the Jewish ark, they fulfilled this order, and according to the express command of their prophets, sent back the ark with the mice and emerods on a waggon drawn by two cows, with each a sucking calf, and without a driver. 'These two cows, of themselves, took the ark straight to Bethshemesh. The men of Bethshemesh approached the ark in order to look at it; which liberty was punished yet more severely than the profanation by the Phoenicians had been. The Lord struck with sudden death seventy men of the people and fifty thousand of the populace. 'The Reverend Doctor Kennicott, an Irishman, printed in 1768 a French commentary on this occurrence, and dedicated it to the Bishop of Oxford. At the head of this commentary he entitles himself Doctor of Divinity, Member, of the Royal Society of London, of the Palatine Academy, of the Academy of Gottingen, and of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. All that I know of the matter is, that he is not of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. Perhaps he is one of its correspondents. His vast erudition may have deceived him; but titles are distinct from things. 'In this pamphlet he pretends to prove that the Scripture text has been corrupted. Here we must be permitted to differ with him. Nearly all Bibles agree in these expressions: seventy men of the people, and fifty thousand of the populace. {129} 'The Reverend Doctor Kennicott says to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Oxford, that formerly there were strong prejudices in favour of the Hebrew text; but that for seventeen years his lordship and himself have been freed from their prejudices, after the deliberate and attentive perusal of this chapter. 'In this we differ from Dr. Kennicott; and the more we read this chapter the more we reverence the ways of the Lord, which are not our ways. It is impossible (says Kennicott) for the candid reader not to feel astonished and affected at the contemplation of fifty thousand men destroyed in one village--men, too, employed in gathering the harvest.