There was now a standing army, a large staff of civil officers, and a vast number of menial servants in the country. Besides the ass, the horse and the mule were now introduced as beasts of burden; chariots and splendid equipages were set up; and many persons assumed the style and bearing of princes. Private dwellings underwent a corresponding change, and all the luxuries of Egypt and Nineveh became familiar to the Hebrews. But was all this for good? It appears as if the nation, or its leaders, now struck out a new path for themselves, in which God rather followed than preceded them, giving them, indeed, at first, a large measure of prosperity, but leaving them more to their own ways and to the fruits of these ways than before. This, at least, was plainly the case under Solomon. The vast wealth circulated in his time over the country did not bring any proportional addition, either to the material comfort, or to the moral beauty, or to the spiritual riches of the nation. There can be no doubt that “haste to be rich” brought all the evils and sins which always flow from it in an age of progress toward worldly show and magnificence. It appears from the Proverbs that many new vices were introduced. Many of the counsels of that book would have been quite inapplicable to a simple, patriarchal, agricultural people; but they were eminently adapted to a people surrounded by the snares of wealth and the temptations of commerce, and very liable to forget or despise the good old ways and counsels of their fathers. The Proverbs will be read with far greater interest, if it be borne in mind that this change had just taken place among the Hebrews, and that, as Solomon had been instrumental in giving the nation its wealth, so, perhaps, he was led by the Spirit to write this book, and that of Ecclesiastes, to guard against the fatal abuse of his own gift. The practice of soothsaying, or fortune-telling, was common among the Jews at the beginning of this period. The prevalence of such a practice indicates a low standard of intellectual attainment. It seems to have had its headquarters among the Philistines (Isa. ii:6); and very probably, when Saul drove all who practised it from the land, he did so more from enmity to the Philistines than from dislike to the practice itself. It continued, as Saul himself knew, to lurk in the country, even after all the royal efforts to exterminate it. (I Sam. xxviii:7.) Probably it never altogether died out. In New Testament times it was evidently a flourishing trade. (Acts viii:9; xiii:6.) All over the East it was practised to a large extent, and the Jewish sorcerers had the reputation of being the most skillful of any. It was the counterfeit of that wonderful privilege of knowing God’s mind and will, which the Jew enjoyed through the Urim and Thummim of the high-priest. Those who would not seek, or could not obtain, the genuine coin, resorted to the counterfeit.