REJECTION OF THE TRUE SHEPHERD 393
for keeping off wild beasts and thieves, and the other for feeding the flock is manifest from the reference so familiar to us in the 23rd Psalm: " Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me"
The names of the staves, like everything else in this symbolical transaction, were significant. One he called DV 3 , noam, which means " beauty," " pleasantness," " favour " and had reference, as we see from the loth verse, to the grace and loving-kindness of God in keeping off their enemies from destroying them ; and the other he called Dy3fy hobhlim, " bands," or literally " binders," and sym bolised, as we see from the I4th verse, that part of the shepherd s rule by which the sheep were kept united among themselves as one flock. " And so " (thus equipped), he says again at the end of the 7th verse, " I fed the flock."
There is, perhaps, not another scripture in the Old Testament which has been more variously interpreted than the first part of the 8th verse of this chapter: " And I cut off tJie three shepherds in one month Who are the three shepherds, and what are we to understand by the expression, " in one month " ?
The following are a few out of the many answers which have been given to these questions: (i) Von Hoffmann, Koehler, Keil, Dr. C. H. H. Wright, W. H. Lowe, and others understand by the three shepherds Gentile rulers, in whose power the Jews were, and who ought to have acted to them as " shepherds " ; but they differ as to who these rulers were, and also in their interpretation of the " one month." Thus, Von Hoffmann identifies the three shepherds with three empires, namely, the Babylonian, the Medo- Persian, and the Macedonian. According to him the " one month " signifies a prophetic period of thirty prophetic days, each of seven literal years duration. This would be equivalent to 2 i o years. The three empires named actually lasted 215 years, reckoning from the Babylonian Captivity to the death of Alexander the Great ; but the slight discrepancy of five years is considered of little consequence in reckoning sabbatic periods.
