themselves any s trictly priestly functions, least of all that about to be mentioned.

The holiest service of the Temple was when the incense was offered on the golden altar within the

Holy Place. It symbolized the offering of Israel's worship by the great High Priest. Regardless of

the express Divine ordinance (Exodus 30:7, 27; Numbers 18:1-7), Uzziah penetrated into the Holy

Place to arrogate to himself this holy function. In vain Azariah, "the chief priest" (2 Chronicles

26:17, 18), and with him eighty other brave men, n o doubt priests of "the course" then on service,

sought to arrest the king. Their remonstrance, really their warning, that the issue would be other

than his pride had anticipated, only served to incite the wrath of the king. Such utter

misunderstanding and perversion alike of the priestly functions in their deepest meaning, and of

the royal office in its higher object - and that from motives of pride - must bring instant and signal

judgment. While yet the censer with its burning coals was in his hand, and looks and words of

wrath on his face and on his lips, in sight of the priesthood, he was smitten with what was

regarded as pre -eminently and directly the stroke of God's own Hand (comp. Numbers 12:9, 10; 2

Kings 5:27). There, "beside the altar of incense," the plague-spot of leprosy appeared on his

Hastily the assembled priests thrust him, whom God had so visibly smitten, from the Holy Place,

lest the presence of the leper should defile the sanctuary. Nay himself, terror-stricken, hastened

thence. So the king, whose heart had been lifted up to the utter forgetfulness of the help hitherto

given him by Jehovah until he dared the uttermost sacrilege, descended living into the grave in the

very moment of his greatest pride. Till death released him he was a leper, dwelling outside the

city, separated - "in a house of sickness " - or, as others have rendered the expression, with

perhaps greater probability, in "a house of separation" (comp. Leviticus 13:46; Numbers 5:2; 2

Kings 7:3) Cut off from access t o the house of the Lord, where he had impiously sought to

command, and debarred from all intercourse with men, the kingdom was administered by Jotham,

his son - for how long a period before the death of Uzziah it is impossible to determine. His

punishment followed him even into the grave. For, although he was "buried with his fathers," it

was "in the field of the burial which belonged to the kings," probably the burying ground of the

members of the royal family; he was not laid in the sepulcher where the kings of Judah rested; "for

they said, He is a leper."*

* The view here taken is that of Rashi and other Rabbinical commentators.

Of the record of his deeds by Isaiah, to which the sacred text refers (2 Chronicles 26:2), no portion

has been preserved. Alt hough the activity of the prophet began during the reign of Uzziah (Isaiah

1:1; 6:1), yet, considering that it extended into that of Hezekiah, Isaiah must have been still

young,* when the leprous king died. Jewish legend has fabled much about the stroke that

descended on the sacrilegious king. In his clumsy manner of attempting to account for the directly

Divine by natural causes, Josephus** connects the sudden leprosy of the king with that earthquake

(Amos 1:1) of which the terrible memory so lingered in t he popular memory as almost to form an

era in their history (Zechariah 14:4, 5).

* Some critics have suggested that he was then only about twenty years of age.

** Ant. 9. 10, 4.

In that earthquake, which Josephus describes, he tells us: "a rent was ma de in the Temple, and the

bright rays of the sun shone through it, and fell upon the king's face, insomuch that the leprosy

seized upon him immediately." Other Jewish writers strangely identify the death of Uzziah

referred to in Isaiah 6:1, with the living death of his leprosy, and the earthquake with the solemn

scene there pictured. Yet this application of theirs is certainly true when they rank Uzziah with

those "who attained not what they sought, and from whom was taken that which they had" (Ber. R.