with the heathens which they now found was always inevitable, must have sharpened the sting of this contempt a thousand-fold for those who were most immediately exposed to it. Individuals, therefore, had but two alternatives before them. On the one hand, they must conform more and more to the practices of the victorious heathens-a course to which there were now inducements and temptations so numerous and powerful that in every country (as we know from many indications) numbers were actually content to sink into heathenism. On the other, they must resist all these thousand-fold allurements yet more decisively and boldly, in which case they had nothing to expect but still more bitter scorn, rising even to fierce persecution which did not stop short of extreme indignities and the sharpest chastisement or even of death. Thus we have certain knowledge that no small number must have drained the cup of suffering to the dregs. Some endured confinement in gloomy holes, insults of the most degrading nature, and death itself; while all who were true to their religion, without exception, had constantly to bear, or at least to dread, the bitterest contumely and derision.3 We can no longer trace the historical details, but we are safe in drawing the general conclusion that the sufferings of the exile were thus rendered continually greater and heavier until at last universal despair may well have seemed ready to overpower the whole people, so far as, represented by its nobler members, it still survived in the dispersion. 2 It is true that they were in many respects lightened by the very continuance of the new state of things. No prohibition was laid on those who desired quietly to cultivate the land, or to pursue any other vocation within the limits assigned to them, and in many cases this laborious toil bore the most blessed fruit even in the midst of silent misery. Again, the heavy weight of a despotic will often breaks down of itself, as time goes on, at many points; and since those who have no real fatherland are glad to earn their living by submissive intercourse 1 Long before the destruction of Jerusalem, when first the people were scattered in great numbers into foreign lands, Jeremiah had uttered an earnest warning against the danger of sinking into absolute heathenism which then threatened them, Jer. x. But we can recognise with sufficient certainty how many fell off or became wavering in spite of those warnings from Jer. xliv., Ezek. xiv. 3 sq., Is. lviii., lxv., and other more isolated passages. 2 This is fully substantiated by the allusions in Is. xxi. 10, xiv. 3, 17, xli. 14, / 3 Pss. cxxiii. 4, cxxxvii. 1-3. The natural reaction of a contempt for Babylon and the Chaldeans, only too well justified, followed upon this as soon as the state of things showed even distant signs of changing: see such passages as Ps. xiv. (liii.), Is. xiv. 4-23, xli., xlvi. with the settled inhabitants, by trading, and by diligently drawing together the largest possible quantity of movable property, the necessary permission seems to have been granted at an early period to many of the more skilful and active. Indeed, the direction of their energies to this mode of gaining their living was henceforth developed among the Judeans resident in foreign countries,' and to this extent Israel was fain to step into the place of that very Canaan which it had formerly so deeply despised. Moreover the skill, the penetration, and surely the pious life also of many of the members of this singular people, must gradually have gained the recognition even of the sovereigns of the time. There were many individual Judeans, it would seem, even at an early stage of the exile, who were favourites at court, and were employed on royal commissions, like Nehemiah at a later period. The termination of the exile itself gives the clearest general proof of these positions; for we shall see hereafter how great an amount of portable property many of the exiles were able to bring together at a moment's notice on that occasion. But as long as the general decrees of the king concerning Israel were unrepealed, all these exceptions could avail little, since even the most distinguished and the most prosperous were constantly exposed to the blows of every changing caprice of their masters, and indeed had more to fear from them than others. The sufferings of the people, then, remained, on the whole, unchanged. 2. The Age and its Hopes. But yet, even while whirled through the eddies of such deep despair, the scattered members of this community, which was destroyed only in outward appearance, were never without a protecting rock of sure salvation, and from the darkest hours of that long night the rays of an eternal hope often flashed forth with all the greater brightness. If this great destruction and dispersion, to which external appearances would point as the final extinction of a people and a community of Israel, had really coincided with the completion of that mysterious spiritual fabric which had so long been woven on this This is assumed even for the Assyrian exile, according to Tob. i. 13. That many of the Judeans in the dispersion themselves became masters of slaves again, as a result of their gains, follows, for instance, from Is. lviii. 3-6 and Ezr. ii. 65. But it is clear from Jos. Bell. Jud. vii. 11, 1, and Ant. xviii. 9. 1. Acts xviii. 3, &c., that very many supported themselves by severe personal labour. 2 This is everywhere taken for granted not only in Dan. i.-vi., but also in Tob. i. 21 sq.; and no such examples could have been selected in these books unless historical reminiscences had permitted it. earthly loom, and whose thread could only be broken when it was completed, no genuine rescue from the depth of national misery would have been possible; and every hope directed to that object must have remained as fruitless in result as it was idle in conception, and could only have served to embitter still further the sufferings of the age. But the texture of the great divine work which (as already explained) had now been centred in Israel for a thousand years, had only become more and more tangled during the last centuries, without ever seeing itself completed. Its inner genius, therefore, had already been directed with increasing force towards extricating itself from these embarrassments, and had gained a clear perception of the manner in which the knots must be untied and the commencement of a genuine progress secured. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel, as constituted and developed in Canaan, and the total dispersion of the people, which through the whole period of the monarchy had wandered further and further from its higher calling, had for centuries been proclaimed by the true prophets, with ever-increasing severity, as a necessity before God; but the same seers had always foretold, at the same time, that Israel was only to be purified by this divine chastisement in order that the great and eternal work of God, starting from a fresh and pure commencement, might be the more sure of being completed in it. The first or threatening half of these prophecies was now fully realised; and even if the sufferers of the time as yet bore with them no distinct consciousness of the nature or spirit of the divine work which had now been broken off in an unfinished state, at least the light of the second branch of the prediction, giving assurance of its consummation, must have shone before them; and the certainty of the fulfilment of the first would guarantee that of the second. And so this ever progressive work of God itself, since it was still far from its completion, could not suffer the scattered members of the nation to rest. They themselves were not willing to be estranged from it; and in the midst of the deep gloom of the age it flashed upon their souls with fresh glory the brightest visions of its own accomplishment, which should surely come. It is true that the desolation of this period echoes to the lament, amongst a thousand others, over the decay of prophetic activity and the cessation of divine teaching; but in general nothing further is meant by this than the heavy blow which the powers of prophecy and instruction, in common with all other national 1 Lam. ii. 9, cf. 20; Ezek. vii. 26. developments, must certainly have felt with great violence. The host of prophets and teachers which had often swept through the kingdom with such tumultuous vehemence in the last days of Jerusalem,' had suddenly vanished; and the prophetic activity was entirely shut out from the field in which it had hitherto worked with the greatest force, viz. the complete publicity of popular life. The circumstances of the time were such that the fundamental power of the ancient community could only rise under the heaviest burdens and the deepest sorrow of heart. Nevertheless it did rise once more; and even when the people of Jahveh, and with them every oracle and lesson from their God, seemed to have perished from off the earth, its deep spring, incapable of exhaustion, never quite ceased to flow, but rather rose up with a strength proportioned to the pressure which it had to resist. Moreover, at a time when all public discourse and instruction had become impracticable, the high perfection which had long been reached (as has been frequently explained) by the peculiar genius of the literature of Israel, came to the assistance of the impulse of prophetic communication; and, indeed, literature had never before possessed such profound significance for Israel, or rendered such immediate service, as at this juncture. In the midst, then, of the heavy oppression and the severe chastening of these decades, the fundamental power of the ancient community rose once more with increased force and purity by its own inextinguishable genius, and became necessarily the true and all-efficient instrument of that spiritual renovation and inner conversion without which the community could never have rallied from its extreme desolation and distress and risen to the beginning of a useful external life. Here, therefore, we meet with the most striking repetition of that phenomenon which we have so often been enabled to recognise in the course of this history. At every great crisis of the history of Israel it was prophecy, as the original and fundamental power of the community, which had brought on the decisive moment, and, whether quite alone or in alliance with some other dominant power, had given beforehand the new direction to affairs. Whenever the result had been healthy, one or more great prophets had invariably been at work, and had also left traces of their spirit in immortal writings or in renowned successors; and where the result had been Vol. iv. p. 245 sqq. purest and most salutary, there too in every instance the prophetic spirit at work had been purest and most divine. This is also the case with the last great phase. Sighing, indeed, most deeply under the darkness and the burdens of the day, the prophetic power is still the first to wake into renewed activity the spirit which the times required, and it was this which, with inexhaustible energy, conducted its work through every stage, in spite of every oppression, until the new order of things issued victoriously from the dreadful struggle. This is the last occasion on which the ancient community offers the spectacle of the true religion, still pure and free from all foreign admixture, exerting its utmost possible strength in the effort to reach its goal; and it would be strange if the Old Testament itself did not still contain the most significant and distinctive monuments of the exalted spectacle, since this victory and transition to the last great phase must be placed among the most important and permanently instructive passages of Old Testament history. Such monuments do, however, as a fact exist in sufficient number and clearness, although it is not always easy to recognise them at first sight. 3 For the first ten or twelve, perhaps, of these years of disaster, the hoary prophet Jeremiah,' who has been previously described,2 still survived from the midst of the preceding period, with his stern sentence on all the past and present, with his deep sorrow, with his lofty confidence as he looked upon Israel's eternal destiny and on the promise of a new covenant, with his unwearied zeal even under the heaviest blows of that heavy time, and his wise counsels under the grave difficulties of the new situation. We have already seen how his constant and impartial care embraced both near and distant members of the community, and how he endeavoured to warn them against the snares of heathenism, which were now far more dangerous than before; but his prudence was too great, and his insight into the future too penetrating, to permit him ever to recommend to the existing generation any other course than quiet resignation to the divine destiny and tranquil obedience to the Chaldean supremacy. This truth had long taken the shape in The orthography Jeremjah, which partly follows the Hellenists, is the only correct one, unless we get still nearer the original by following the Masôra in reading Jirmejah. It is the same with Hezegiel, except that this is a somewhat different formation from the simple combination of words (God's strength) instead of the fuller pin (God is strong). But the orthography 'LeCeKÍNλos gives an inadmissible mixture of the two forms, and yet it has become the most common with the Hellenists. 2 See vol. iv. 3 P. 7, note 1. |