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A

HARMONY

OF

THE KINGS AND PROPHETS;

OR,

AN ARRANGEMENT OF THE HISTORY CONTAINED IN THE BOOKS OF
KINGS AND CHRONICLES, TOGETHER WITH THE WRITINGS OF
THE

PROPHETS INTRODUCED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

AS THEY WERE DELIVERED, COMMENCING WITH THE
REVOLT OF THE TEN TRIBES, AND CLOSING WITH
THE PROPHECY OF MALACHI.

BY STEPHEN MERRILL,

Pastor of the 1st Congregational Church in Kittery, Maine.

REVISED BY THE PUBLISHING COMMITTEE.

BOSTON:

MASSACHUSETTS SABBATH SCHOOL SOCIETY.
Depository, No. 24, Cornhill.

1832.

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Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1832, BY CHRISTOPHER C. Dean,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.

E

PREFACE.

THE object of this Compilation of the Holy Scriptures, is to present a connected view of the Kings and the Prophets with reference to order of time which each occupied. Every attentive reader must have noticed that this order is very little regarded, either in the historical or prophetical part of this portion of the sacred volume. We are carried forward several years, and then, without any distinctly marked notice, we are brought back to the same period. This occasions inconvenience to the reader, and not unfrequently obscurity.

For persons in ordinary life to arrange, correctly, the chronology of these books, is more than we have a right to expect. Yet such arrangement not unfrequently gives peculiar force and beauty to the Scriptures. Take Hosea, xi. 8, for example. "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee, Israel? How shall I make thee as Admah? How shall I set thee as Zeboim? My heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together." The knowledge of the chronology of this inimitably pathetic address to the kingdom. of Israel, makes it but five years before the utter extinction of that kingdom; and thus presents to our view a scene, in which the great Jehovah is the actor, resembling that of the most affectionate parent pursuing his son in a last effort to save him from self-destruction.

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