his mind of a settled anticipation that the exile of Israel would last seventy years—that is, a complete generation.' It was, then, only to a distant future, and to an Israel thoroughly regenerated by the fiery chastisement of long years of suffering, that this last of the great prophets looked for salvation. Yet, even when the fate of the moment was the most terrible, he clung with the firmest trust to the expectation of this future salvation, and the completion of the divine work which had been begun in Israel; and as a citizen of his day he brought all the actions and decisions of his life, which, coming from him, readily assumed a higher or prophetic significance, into entire accordance with this faith. Thus by the example of his own conduct and the power of his tranquil confidence, he conducted the whole better consciousness of the nation, with the most salutary results, from the former period to the new one, and in extreme old age, though placed between two very different epochs, continued to be a stay and exemplar of Israel even in the second. Yet that distant future to which he looked forward in spirit with such yearning love, owed still more to his profound declaration that an entirely new covenant must be entered into, in which the divine commands must no longer be engraved, as in the ancient narrative, on simple wood or stone, and stand over against mankind as an instrument of external compulsion, but must be written on the very heart of man, redeemed from the power of sins which had waxed strong in the course of history, and must ever work from the free impulse of the heart itself. This brief utterance draws to a focus at once the highest result of all Israel's previous history, and the highest problem to be solved by the great future which was now unfolding itself. Henceforth all the profounder minds of the community make their deepest aspirations and most decisive objects and efforts depend upon it; and, in its glorious truth, with a claim which cannot be escaped, it maintains itself in living power through every subsequent age, until at the end of this whole epoch it is at length fulfilled. 4 Ezekiel, the younger contemporary and successor of Jeremiah, is a complete example of a prophet of the captivity. Since he had already begun his prophetic ministry among the 1 Jer. xxv. 11 sq., xxix., 10; cf. xxvii. 7, and more below. 2 Jer. xxxii. sq., and many other passages. Vol. iv. p. 290 sqq. Not only does Ezekiel repeat it on every suitable occasion and explain it elaborately, xi. 19 sq., xviii. 31, xxxvi. 25– 28; cf. xvi. 60, xxxvii. 26; but the great Unknown also returns essentially to it as to the loftiest and final utterance, Is. xlii. 1-4, liv. 9-lv. 13. exiles seven years before the destruction of Jerusalem, he experienced most acutely, even in this his dearest and holiest occupation, the full pressure of the burden of those days which was ever growing more intolerable; and he felt his action more and more cramped and clouded by the rising unbelief and increasing despair of the majority of his fellow-exiles, as well as by the fearful issue of public affairs, and even by domestic affliction. He is, moreover, far from hurrying the scattered members of his nation into any vain expectation as to the present or any insurrection against the Chaldeans. But the glorious and eternal hope of Israel ever burns in his soul with the same brightness, and after each disturbance and interruption in his prophetic activity he turns to it again with yet greater zeal, and finds means enough to cherish and to heighten the glow of the true fire in the hearts of others too, if no longer by public discourse, at all events by private communication and pre-eminently by his writings. And although in the deepest and most decisive truths he only follows his great predecessor Jeremiah, there is yet a great deal about him which strikes us with the most original force and clearness. As the most indefatigable prophet of the first and severest half of the exile he occupies a unique position in the development of this age of transition. By the very fact of his first rising as a prophet during the exile, he fitted himself in the best possible manner to become a true labourer in the thorny field of prophetic activity for the whole of this new period. In fact, although he shows less originality and depth than Jeremiah, yet there is more even tranquillity and assiduity both in his literary method and artistic arrangement and (as far as it falls within our knowledge) his life also. Seven years had already elapsed since the commencement of his prophetic activity when Jerusalem was completely destroyed, and while from that time his fate required more and more patient endurance, it was with the greater calm (though his zeal burned highest in the deepest calm) that his contemplative spirit directed itself to the task of setting forth the manner in which the future Israel, purified and ennobled, should rise again with genuine life and undergo a new development. Even under the iron heel of the Chaldean supremacy he already foresaw with lofty assurance the final victory of the future Jerusalem.' While the Temple with the holy city and all the kingdom lay in ruins, this prophet strove to delineate with the utmost vivid 1 Ezek. xxxviii. sq. ness and down to each detail the true type of everything which was to be restored again at the right time, and so to represent by anticipation the perfected state of the kingdom of God which should surely come, that nothing more than the actual hand should be needed to give it a corresponding existence in reality at the favourable moment.' It was more than thirteen years after the destruction of Jerusalem when he sketched this prophetic design for the future kingdom and sanctuary, and exercised his mind, with most glowing zeal, on that which his hand yearned soon to carry into active execution; and how easily does the hand carry out at the auspicious hour what the spirit has thus realised in its inmost consciousness and planned with celestial clearness even to the details! Two years later (B.c. 570) Ezekiel wrote down the last lines of his Book which we possess from his hand. We have no further trustworthy knowledge of his later life, and he may have succumbed soon afterwards to the severity of the times. It is true that from the Middle Ages downwards a sepulchre and sanctuary, still much visited, have been pointed out as his in southern Babylonia in the neighbourhood of Kufa; but the very name of the sanctuary makes it scarcely possible to regard it as his.3 Nor again is the late tradition any more credible, that he was one of those who returned from the captivity. His great work must have attracted a number of readers by the very 4 1 Ezek. xl.-xlviii. 2 Ezek. xxix. 17–21; for further treatment of this subject see the Propheten des Alten Bundes, vol. ii. p. 322 sqq. This sanctuary is called after el-Kefil, as though this name signified Ezekiel. It was already pointed out in the Middle Ages (see the very detailed description by Benjamin of Tudela in Early Trav, in Pal., Lond. 1848, p. 101 sq., according to whom, however, the graves of Nahum and King Jechoniah were also pointed out in the neighbourhood; Carmoly's Itinéraires, pp. 459, 495 sq.), and has been accurately described since Niebuhr by Fresnel in the Journ. As. 1855, vol. ii. p. 544; Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, p. 500 sq.; Loftus' Travels in Chaldea and Susiana, pp. 33-36 (where a representation of the monument may also be found); Revue de l'Instruction publique, 1863, Mai, p. 142. The name -el Kefil (that is, The Double One)-is probably identical with the ancient saint-Dulkift (that is, Double-man)--mentioned in the Koran (Sur. xxi. 85, xxxviii. 48); but the expounders of the Koran and the Islamite historians (e.g. Abulf. Ann. Anteisl., p. 28) give only the strangest guesses as to who is to be understood under this name. If the name is formed like the -Fishman (that is, Jonah)—of ill the Koran, we might think of Elisha, since he might pass for Elijah's double, according to a common interpretation of the words in 2 Kings ii. 9 (where the LXX have dirλa); but in that case we must strike out the j-and-from Sur. xxxviii. 48, where the name actually stands after Elisha. Perhaps, however, the name might also signify the Double-goer, i.c. the bail or substitute, and we might then suppose that Ezekiel was really meant by it, in accordance with Ezek. iv. 4 sqq. But this seems far-fetched. Thus we have as yet no strict proof that el-Kefil was originally Ezekiel, still less that the latter died in southern Babylonia.-The case of Daniel's grave (on which more below) is similar. of two books of Ezekiel as early as the When Josephus, Ant. x. 5, 1, speaks time of Josiah's death, he can hardly be referring to the present book divided into novelty and extraordinary splendour of its style of composition,' but it seems never to have been so widely circulated and so generally read in those times as the work of Jeremiah. Nevertheless it was of great value in fanning the sacred flame during these days of coldness at least in many quarters, and in keeping the fire on the altar of the eternal sanctuary bright, when it had already vanished completely from the eye of sense, and it is the most important monument we now possess of the first half of the period of exile. That many other prophets were engaged in similar labours throughout the wide extent of the dispersion we may consider certain. In the first place, the hope of a future restoration of the higher right, and of the fresh victory of Israel over the heathen nations, was upheld in his own neighbourhood by the prophet who worked up a fragment of the older prophet Obadiah2 against Edom. This was probably only a short time after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the righteous indignation aroused by the unworthy conduct of Edom and other neighbouring peoples at the time of its fall 3 was still fresh and burning. Fragments of the larger work of another prophet no longer known to us by name have been incorporated and preserved in a prophetic composition which is itself, perhaps, only one or two decades later. These fragments display a --- two portions (for instance, from cap. xxv. or xxxiii., or, better still, xl. onwards); at any rate we have no further traces of such a division, and it is in itself improbable. We must therefore suppose that Josephus had before him at the same time the Apocryphon of this prophet, which is nowhere else cited earlier than by the Fathers of the third century, and of which unfortunately we have only very small fragments left. But the words of Josephus as they now read (even with the omission of the ös) are still more extraordinary in themselves, since they contain the senseless assertion that Ezekiel wrote his two books earlier than Jeremiah wrote his. We might be tempted therefore to read pŵrov instead of paros, so that the meaning would be that Ezekiel first wrote two books about the destruction of Jerusalem, and then other books on some other matter. It is very possible that cc. i.-xxiv. were once considered the two first books of Ezekiel; the section, containing about cc. xxv.-xxxii., would then pass for the third, and so on. But neither here nor anywhere else does Josephus speak of any later books of Ezekiel; the expression therefore remains obscure, and that too, as far as we can now judge, solely through the fault of Josephus. The whole would sound more correct if the passage referred to Isaiah instead of Ezekiel. 1 More of this hereafter. 2 We may take it as quite certain that the name Obadiah, ver. 1, was preserved from the original document, and that the redactor desired that it should be so preserved. 3 Cf. vol. iv. p. 270. It has become clear to me, as the result of repeated investigations, that the author of Is. xl.-lxvi. incorporated into his work fragments of a prophet who preceded him only by a few decades, as well as those mentioned in vol. iv. p. 207, note 2, from a prophet of Manasseh's time. How deeply all that the great Unnamed himself writes bears the impress of his own heart and his own times, we can tell clearly enough from his first epistle, cc. xl.-xlviii. (whero nothing but xl. 1 sq. appears to be repeated from an earlier age); and even in the following cc. xlix.-lxvi. flashes of the same spirit shine forth so brightly as to enable us to ascertain with precision where the author has incorporated the words of earlier prophets into his work, or, as he wonderful depth of feeling and thought, and although here too it is only the cruel and treacherous brother-nation of Edom which appears as the immediate object as well as the type of the divine retribution which might be confidently expected,' yet the prophet's soul is already most genuinely absorbed in the contemplation of the great and continued impenitence of Israel itself, partly careless, partly stubborn, as the real cause of the continuance of the great sufferings of the people. Remembering all the long past and the eternal hope of the community of the true God, he strives with all his power once more to raise himself, and with himself all the true members of that community, out of the despair of the dark present to joyous trust in the divine grace. It seems then that this prophet wrote somewhat later, when Jerusalem had already lain in ruins for several decades, but while the full severity of the sufferings of the exile still continued-perhaps about the middle of the whole period. We see the people waiting long in the depths of sorrow, and sighing gloomily for deliverance; but the reason why that deliverance never came, and why, in fact, it never could come in the sense in which these malcontents desired and expected it, is declared by the prophet with the most striking truth. In the simple song, again, the inextinguishable hopes and all the better aspirations of the first period of the exile, as well as its deep grief, found utterance-a fact of which we still possess the most moving evidence in certain psalms. The bitter scorn entertained towards the unrighteous rulers of the time rises at an early period with genuine prophetic severity in many of the songs sung in the midst of the heathen. Yet none of the prophetic truths which strove to penetrate the age and raise it from its consuming sorrow to a glorified hope, has often done, repeated long passages 1 Is. lxiii. 1-6; on the other hand Edom is never mentioned in the earlier chapters, and especially not in cc. xl.-xlviii. 2 Is. lxiii. 18 sq. 3 As in Psalms lxix., Jxxi., and those related to them. See Die Psalmen, 2nd edition, p. 237 sqq. I now refer Ps. cii. to those times also, the words of ver. 17 sq. [16 sq.] being nothing more than a vivid prediction of the gratitude described in ver. 19 [v. 18]. Pss. lxxiii., lxxvii., xciv., may also be referred to the middle of the exile. See particularly Ps. lxxxii. comp. with Ezek. xxviii. 2-10; and in like manner Pss. lvi.-lviii., which, however, belong to an earlier period. |