Women of the Old Testament. By the Rev. Robert F.
Horton. (Service and Paton.)—Mr. Horton gives his readers in this volume a number of brilliant sketches. One of the best things in it is the defence of Jael. Mr. Horton urges with great force that she had been the unwilling witness of the outrage of Sisera, and that she was especially provoked by the unnatural alliance between her husband and Jabin. It was the tradition of the Kenites to be the friends of Israel. We cannot but think that the prose story of the slaying of Sisera is more probable than that which modern critics deduce from the song. But is it necessary to distinguish them ? "She put her hand to the nail and her right hand to the workman's hammer" suits the action of one about to drive the nail in. "She attacked him with the tent-pin and a workman's hammer" is scarcely intelligible. Why should not the tent-peg have been of iron, and so easily driven through the skull ? Heber was probably a smith. Mr. Horton's use of modern criticism is, on the whole, excellent. He so manages it as not to interfere with, but rather to heighten, the interest of the narratives. In the " Shulamite," a skilful exposition of the "Song of Solomon," we have an appropriate quotation from Virgil's Eclogues (Sepibus in nostris," 4^e.) Why is "alter ab undecimo tune me lam eeperat annus " translated by "I had but entered on my own thirteenth year " ? Why not twelfth ? We may mention among the other studies "Ruth," "Abigail,"" The Queen of Sheba," " Huldah." In "Ruth" the youth of the Moabite stranger is, it seems to us, exaggerated. Ruth and Orpah were not "girls." Both had been married for ten years, with an uncertain period of widowhood.
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