2 Kings 7:7

), not by might or power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts, striking terror upon the spirits of the besiegers. Here was not a sword drawn against them, not a drop of blood shed, it was not by thunder or hailstones that they were discomfited, nor were they slain, as Sennacherib's army before Jerusalem, by a destroying angel; but, 1.

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — leading-punctuation+unbalanced-parens

And this was indeed worthy of a double behold, to shew what mischief the famine had done both upon men and beasts, and to what a low ebb the king of Israel was come, that all his troops of horses, to which he had trusted, were shrunk to so small a number.

Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight,....

THE story of four leprous men inserted in the Book of the Kings of Israel—is it not amazing? No, it is not amazing for the Bible. If you were to take out of the Scriptures all the stories that have to do with poor afflicted men and women, what a very small book the Bible would become, especially if together with the stories, you removed all the Psalms of the sorrowful, all the promises for the distressed and all the passages which belong to the children of grief! This Book, indeed, for the most part is made up of the annals of the poor and despised! Think for a minute what space is occupied with the life of the man who was separated from his brothers, sold for a slave and put in prison in Egypt! What a large part of the Bible is occupied by the writings of one who was a babe exposed on the Nile and afterwards kept a flock for 40 years in the wilderness! We could not part with the account of the man who lost all his property and children in one day—and sat among the ashes, covered with sore boils. We could not spare the story of the two widows who came together empty-handed from the land of Moab, one of whom went to glean in the fields of Boaz. Nor the history of that woman of a sorrowful spirit and her little boy, around whom the hope of Israel gathered in the dark days of Eli's feeble rule. Page after page of Holy Writ is enriched with the experience of that youth who was taken from tending the flock to become the champion of his country and was afterwards hunted like a partridge upon the mountain by the envious king. We could not give up the history of the Prophet of sorrow, nor of the fugitive who was cast into the sea, nor even the minor incidents of the widow of Sarepta and her barrel of meal—and the Prophet's widow whose creditor was about to seize her children for her husband's debts. Nor do lepers fall behind.

THE story of four leprous men inserted in the Book of the Kings of Israel—is it not amazing? No, it is not amazing for the Bible. If you were to take out of the Scriptures all the stories that have to do with poor afflicted men and women, what a very small book the Bible would become, especially if together with the stories, you removed all the Psalms of the sorrowful, all the promises for the distressed and all the passages which belong to the children of grief!