SHALLUM AND HIS DAUGHTERS
I cannot close these meditations on
Old Testament parents and their children, without a glace at Shallum. It was
perhaps some thirty years later than Mordecai and Esther that Nehemiah, the
King’s Cupbearer, went up to Jerusalem to build the wall. The temple had been
completed quite a few years before, but the wall was still in utter ruins, and
Nehemiah makes himself sick with sorrow of heart over the matter, so that he
endangers his head to the king. But Nehemiah was a man of prayer, and God not
only delivers him, but gives him his heart’s desire, that he might go to
Jerusalem to build the wall. I will not stop to tell the story, which I am sure
you all know, and I hope love. The noble spirit of Nehemiah stirred the hearts
of the people, and they came together to the work. The minute details that the
Holy Spirit records, of some who built two pieces, some who “did not put their
necks to the work of their Lord” (Nehemiah 3:5), all are of the keenest
interest. But it is of Shallum, the ruler of the half part of Jerusalem, and of
his daughters, that I was to think for a moment. Probably he was a wealthy man,
being ruler of half of Jerusalem. These girls were probably brought up in a
nice home, with servants to do the work. It is very possible that their hands
were white and soft, and quite unused to hard labor; but at the call to build
the wall of Jerusalem, Shallum goes forth himself, not with his servants, not
with experienced hired masons, but with his own daughters, (perhaps he had no
sons), and these girls, I doubt not, willingly put on their old clothes, and
carried away the rubbish, and gathered the stones, and brought the mortar; and
the Lord looked on, and recorded it to the eternal ages that the daughters of
Shallum were ready to help their father in work that men should have been
doing. Brave, good girls! May your daughters be just such as they! And I have
no doubt at all that their hands got sore and blistered and cut and bruised,
and they just kept right on building the wall. Brave, good girls! I love the
daughters of Shallum. I knew a young man who had a number of excellent
recommendations, but the one of which he was most proud, was very short: “He is
not afraid of getting his hands dirty.” Shallum’s daughters could have had the
same recommendation.
As far as I know these girls are the
last children with their parents, that we see in the history of the Old
Testament, unless we think of the children whose mothers were heathen, and who
could not speak the language of Canaan properly; and I have no heart to speak
of them; and it seems to me that the picture of these girls, laboring with
their father in work for the Lord, is about the most beautiful and most
suitable picture we could possible have for a close to our meditations. It is
what I have coveted, not for my daughters only, but also for my sons, that
together, with one spirit and one mind we may strive together for the faith of
the Gospel. (Philippians 1:27.) May God grant it to me; and may He grant it to
you!
“Ye know the proof of him, that, AS A SON WITH THE FATHER, he hath served with me in the Gospel.” Philippians 2:22