CONTINUATION OF THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS TO THE REIGN TRANSLATED FROM BASNAGE. BY CALVIN E. STOWE, A. M., OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, ANDOVER. LONDON: THOMAS WARD AND CO. PATERNOSTER ROW. PREFACE. learning, may be mentioned with approbation, particularly the latter, are so copious, and contain so much irrelevant, not to say uninteresting, great toil, and with little fruit of his labour. Other books are of a popular form, and ill adapted to the wants of a critical inquirer. Of all nations that have yet existed in our world | Shuckford and Prideaux, which, in respect to the Jews are the most singular and interesting. History gives no knowledge of any people who have preserved a separate and distinct existence for so long a period, and at the same time main-matter, that the student goes through them with tained, for substance, most of their religious rites and customs. Their present existence, as a separate and distinct nation in many respects, and yet scattered over the whole earth, may justly be considered as a kind of standing miracle in attestation of the facts concerning them which are recorded in their Sacred Books. What reason can be given, that all other nations, however peculiar in their religion and laws, have been swallowed up in the vortex of time, or have been so commingled with foreigners by conquest or emigration, that no traces of them as a living and distinct people are any more to be found, while the Jews remain what they were three thousand years ago? The history contained in the Old Testament, and this only, gives an adequate and satisfactory answer to this question. The Christian religion is built upon the Jewish. The Christian Scriptures are intimately connected with the Jewish Sacred Books, and they cannot be understood and explained, except by means of them. The words of the New Testament are Greek; but its idioms, its costume, its manner of thought and reasoning, its allusions; in short, the tout ensemble of it, is Jewish; nor can these ever be duly understood by any person who is ignorant of the Jewish nation, its laws, customs, and history. The design of the principal part of the present volume is, to impart a succinct and critically arranged history of the Hebrews, from their first rise in Abraham, down to the destruction of Jerusalem, when their proper national existence may be said to have been suspended. We have no book, in our language, which does this in such a manner as to satisfy the wants of a critical student at the present time. The works of Jahn has bestowed great pains and labour on the following work. None of his numerous publications give higher evidence of this than the present. The labour bestowed on harmonizing the various accounts of persons and occurrences contained in the Old Testament is in itself great and useful; and that bestowed on the prophecies contained in the sacred volume, in order to exhibit the fulfilment of them, the student will find to be valuable. For Besides a regular and continuous history of the Jews, Jahn has also given a succinct account of all the other nations connected with them; so that the student may regard the present book as containing an epitome of the ancient history of Western Asia and of Eastern Europe. example,—the history of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, the Greeks in Europe and Asia, and of the Romans, besides many other short historical sketches, is here briefly presented to the reader, with all its substantial features. In addition to this, references are everywhere made to the sources from which the information is drawn ; so that the student has before him a kind of general directory for an extensive course of reading, in regard to all these topics. I know of no book in our language so well adapted as this volume to accompany the Archæology of Jahn, which has already found so much approbation with our religious public. It bears manifest impressions of the same diligence, care, sound judgment, and unwearied effort. If all the conclusions in this work should not |