Forty years after the death of the king the tragical history of Gibeah closed, as it had commenced, in a scene of blood. For an offense, the history of which is neither recorded by sacred or profane writers, the Almighty sent a famine of three years’ continuance upon the land, and when David inquired of the Lord the cause, he was informed, “It is for Saul and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.”[446] Josephus supposes that Saul had violated the treaty which Joshua had made with the men of Gibeon, and had attempted to slay the entire population of the city. Wishing to relieve his kingdom from the miseries of a famine, David summoned the Gibeonites to his presence, to ascertain the nature of the redress they demanded. They demanded the surrender of seven of the descendants of Saul to be hung in Gibeah, and their request was granted. Five of the victims were the sons of Merab, whom Michal had brought up after her sister’s death, and the other two were the sons of Saul by his wife Rizpah.[447] On the same day the sons and grandsons of Israel’s first king were executed together, to expiate the offense of a father long since dead. Less fortunate than the offspring of Merab, the sons of Rizpah left a mother to mourn their untimely end. For tenderness of affection, for the depth of maternal grief, and for the lengthened period of watching and mourning, the story of Rizpah has no parallel in the literature of any nation. David’s sorrow for Absalom was sincere, keen, and overwhelming, but the grief of Rizpah was the sorrow of a mother. “And Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the fields by night.” Such was the mournful spectacle that that broken-hearted mother presented to all who passed by, sitting beside the bones of her dead sons all through the long Syrian summer, from April till October, neither permitting the vulture to prey upon them by day nor the hyena by night. Time had assuaged her grief, and David ordered that the bones of her sons should be interred with those of Saul and Jonathan, in the country of Zelah, in the sepulchre of Kish.[448]