I command thee; because I am with thee."[1] And the wise Solomon, when only in the twelfth year of his age,[2] had wisdom to decide the important question concerning the children of the two women,[3] when it was unknown to whom these respectively belonged; so that the whole people were astonished at such wisdom in a child, and venerated him as being not a mere youth, but a full-grown man. And he solved the hard questions of the queen of the Ethiopians, which had profit in them as the streams of the Nile [have fertility], in such a manner that that woman, though herself so wise, was beyond measure astonished.[4]
Chap. iv.—The same subject continued.
Josiah also, beloved of God, when as yet he could scarcely speak articulately, convicts those who were possessed of a wicked spirit as being false in their speech, and deceivers of the people. He also reveals the deceit of the demons, and openly exposes those that are no gods; yea, while yet an infant he slays their priests, and overturns their altars, and defiles the places where sacrifices were offered with dead bodies, and throws down the temples, and cuts down the groves, and breaks in pieces the pillars, and breaks open the tombs of the ungodly, that not a relic of the wicked might any longer exist.[5] To such an extent did he display zeal in the cause of godliness, and prove himself a punisher of the ungodly, while he as yet faltered in speech like a child. David, too, who was at once a prophet and a king, and the root of our Saviour according to the flesh, while yet a youth is anointed by Samuel to be king.[6] For he himself says in a certain place, "I was small among my brethren, and the youngest in the house of my father."[7]
- ↑ Jer. i. 7.
- ↑ Comp. for similar statements to those here made, Epist. to the Magnesians (longer), chap. iii.
- ↑ Literally, "understood the great question of the ignorance of the women respecting their children."
- ↑ Literally, "out of herself."
- ↑ 2 Kings xxii. xxiii.
- ↑ 1 Sam. xvi.
- ↑ Ps. cl. 1 (in the Septuagint; not found at all in Hebrew).
