Separation of the Jewish Tribes, The, after the death of Solomon, accounted for, and applied to the present day, in a Sermon preached before the General Court.
The First Official Oration
In Celebration Of American Independence
Text Based On Jewish History
[Judaica]. Gordon, William. The Separation of the Jewish Tribes, After the Death of Solomon, Accounted For, and Applied to the Present Day, in a Sermon Preached before the General Court, on Friday, July the 4th, 1777. Being the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independency. Boston: J. Gill, 1777.
Slim 8vo.; 37 pages; complete with half-title; lightly foxed; contemporary ownership signature; wrappers, sewn. In a specially made cardboard folder.
First edition of Gordon’s commemorative lecture, the first oration in celebration of the 4th of July. Evans 15317. Rosenbach 69, illustration. With a Rhode Island Library Society 1882 stamp to the cover and title page.
English-born, William Gordon (1728-1807) maintained a parish in Ipswich, England for 12 years, where his colonial sympathies caused enough friction to drive him to Southwark in 1764. He remained there only four years, during which he carried on correspondence with several colonists before emigrating to the States in 1770. After preaching for a year in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Gordon was named pastor of his Church, though he devoted much of his time to political causes, publishing a Plan of a Society for Making Provision for Widows (Boston, 1772) in favor of old age pensions. In 1775 he accepted a position as Chaplain of both houses of Watertown’s Provincial Congress, where the Massachusetts legislature reconvened after the British occupied Boston, and received from them a horse and access to prisoners of war.
That same year he accepted Massachusetts’s invitation to present the election sermon in front of the General Court, and in 1777, delivered this address on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, aptly drawing parallels between the separation of the 10 tribes of Israel from the tyranny of Rehoboam and the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. Both these lectures were published and “widely circulated,” but are rarely encountered in good condition. Our copy has been emended slightly on three pages (pp. 20, 30, 32) by the owner. Gordon’s relationship with the Congress ended on a sour note when, coming out in loud opposition to Article V of the proposed state Constitution, he was dismissed from both houses. Given the vehement patriotism expressed in this lecture, it was surely a bitter departure.
Gordon’s lecture is a meditation on the first book of Kings, chapter 12, verse 15: “Wherefore the king hearkened not unto the people: for the cause was from the Lord.” His thesis is that in the cases of both the Israelite tribes and the American colonies the people’s petitions went unheard because God wished them to effect not an amelioration of present conditions, but a complete separation; Gordon accounts for their victories in this to the will of God, citing as evidence both this verse from 1 Kings as well as several instances of unexpected failure of the crown which led to American success.
Gordon begins by establishing the history of the 10 tribes, and the causes which led them to seek a separation from Rehoboam, son of Solomon. The tribes had petitioned Rehoboam to lessen the burden imposed on them by his father—though the exact nature of that burden was unknown to Gordon—and clearly desired to remain loyal to a just leader rather than to rebel. Rehoboam, however, added to their trials, which Gordon describes in language which appropriate to the relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain:
…[Rehoboam] thought the ten tribes were of too much consequence to be lost, tho’ before being far from the seat of government, they might have been slighted, and been spoken of in diminutive terms by the courtiers; and he determined upon reducing them to obedience by arms….What horrid scenes were now likely to commence! Countrymen, brethren in blood, brethren in religion, falling upon and slaughtering eac
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