at least they were one, that never again was their Temple to be profaned by image of a god. As their hate of the Greek intensified, so did their pride increase in this distinctive article of their faith. And in this they carried with them many of the thinkers of the old world. God was a spirit, and it was impious to try and give Him form or substance. Then we are to follow its fortunes when Herod so beautifies, enlarges, and rebuilds it as to make it almost a new, or third temple. But this change is the work of love. Not till A.D. 64, many years after his death, was it completed, and then some six short years more and in A.D. 70, when Jerusalem was taken by Titus, it was destroyed, and with it the Jews as a nation also ceased to exist. 12. But to return: we have now to follow the fortunes of the Jews both in Jerusalem and in Babylon. In Jerusalem their prosperity is of a somewhat humdrum nature, but in Babylon their story is one of steady and brilliant success. Essentially they were people who could be relied upon. They were both straight and able, and they commanded the confidence of their masters. We have an example of this in Nineveh. Here we see Achiacharus, the nephew of Tobit, the keeper of the signet, cupbearer and chief minister of Esarhaddon. So the new empire has many posts to be filled, and the king delights to do them honour. In Daniel we see the jealousy of the Persians at their advancement, but ability and integrity will not be denied. Thus no post is too great for their merit. Daniel was next to the king; Ezra, later on, we see in high favour with Artaxerxes; Whilst Nehemiah was his cupbearer. Before this Esther had been made queen to his predecessor, and we read her fortunes and those of her people in one of the prettiest love tales of the world. As a work of art it is exquisitely told, but this, surely, is no sufficinet reason for dismissing it as all fable. It fits into its niche as an historical fact far too well to be all imagination. To consolidate the heterogeneous elements of the empire into a solid whole against the now dangerous Greek seems most obvious of policy, and this relation of the Jews to it is to last until it succumbs to Alexander. Then there is to be a change. With the Jew and Persian there was always an undercurrent of kindly feeling; but it was otherwise with him and the Greek. More than mere personal jealousy underlay the animosity of Haman the Agagite," i.e. the Macedonian, to Mordecai the Jew. It was the racial cleavage of two peoples representing two distinct veins of world thought. As the Greek advanced and Babylon waned in importance, the hopes of the Jews began once more to centre round Jerusalem, and though a colony remained there for many centuries, its pre-eminence steadily declined. The First Epistle of Peter, judging from its close, seems to have been written from there"The church that is at Babylon elected together with you, saluteth you." But it seems to have played no further part of any importance in their history. Returning to Jerusalem itself, we find very much what we should expect. The great enthusiasm of the first days of the return has somewhat cooled, and they have begun to settle down to their old simple peasant lives. Probably they regret the fertile plains of the Euphrates and find their daily task more toilsome than before. On their arrival on the wave of royal favour the old inhabitants of the land had been anxious to join with them in the rebuilding of the Temple. Some of them claimed to be of the same ancestry and made much of their common kinship. But their offer of help was contemptuously refused. In revenge they used every petty art to hinder and delay the work. Fortunately a strong overlord in the Persian prevented actual war, and their machinations had mostly to be kept to tale-bearing alone. However, they succeeded. in stopping the building of the Temple until the second year of the reign of Darius. Probably the returned exiles themselves were not altogether unwilling to stay the work. From the flaming invective of Haggai this would rather seem to have been the case. Zechariah was as urgent, but encouraged them with promise of its coming glory. Meantime, they are wholly given up to worldly thoughts, and these of no high order. We know that they had not "The Law." This, as Ezra afterwards tells us, had been burnt, and they had made no effort to supply the deficiency. But evidently for the time being there was a revival of religious fervour. Darius is petitioned, and he proves favourable to them. Accordingly the Temple is recommenced, and in the year B.C. 516, i.e. some four years later, it is completed. And now again they settle down to their simple life, but the new feature is that they are living harmoniously with their neighbours. They mix together, trade together, and they intermarry. And in particular reasons of high policy suggest alliances between the ruling families. The grandson of Eliashib, the High Priest, marries the daughter of Sanballat the Horonite (Sinmuballet is a great name in the adjacent kingdom. of Babylonia*), exactly as, a hundred years later, we find Manasseh, the son of the High Priest of his day marrying the daughter of another Sanballat probably a family name of the Governor of Samaria. These seem to have been the principal incidents in their uneventful story until the coming of Ezra from Babylon in the year B.C. 458. Eighty years have passed since the first return of the exiles; some three generations of Babylonian Jews, or more, have now found Jerusalem their home; they have fused with their kinsmen who preceded them, and it is once more beginning to revive as a city, though maybe a humble one. 13. In contrast we return to Babylon. The oldest of cities, hoary with age when Athens was but young, we know it in more detail and with greater accuracy than many a mushroom town that our own times have seen rise and pass away. Its recovery from the past *The Hammurabi Code, R., col. V is one of the marvels of the spade, of erudition and archaeological science. In the glowing pages of the Bible we see it in all its dreamy and poetical beauty and grandeur. Probably the description there found conjures up after the manner of the impressionist a better concept of this mighty city than when made out in metes and bounds by modern discoveries. Herodotus fills in the drawing with more circumstance and gathers in his pages, as is his wont, all the interesting folk lore, traditions, and nursery stories which make his account so picturesque and satisfactory. And now it is given to us to see that most amazing centre of civilization in a perfection of completeness which the Bible never attempts to suggest, and which to Herodotus was a sealed book. But all are wanted for the full picture. In our discoveries we analytically examine a dead past; in Herodotus we have the description of a great student; but in the Bible it is the very city itself in which we live. It requires no great effort to fill in its scenes with the details more recently acquired. We still see it in its huge extent, with its mighty tower of Belus, with its higher and lower Temples, bidding defiance, as it were, to the very clouds. Then we almost hear the clang of their chariots on the tremendous walls some 350 units in height, and we see the gardens that Nebuchadnezzar built to please an exigent wife, that were one of the seven wonders of the world. Then we see its broad roads, its brazen gates, and its dividing river, and we hear the busy hum of its people, the cries of its merchants, the roar of its traffic. Then in every grade society meets the eye. Here is the stately noble, the full-robed priest, the proud soldier; there the humble trader, the patient worker, or a servile rabble miserable captives and slaves. And every people is to be seen there-Phoenician, Arabian, Persian, and of *What the unit is we do not know, but the walls, vast as they were, could not have exceeded the tower-156 (?) units -in height. Mede, with strangers from Greece itself, and over all the cruel Assyrian race. And in particular, ground in the mire, is the wretched Jew, whom in especial his master hated, even if he did not despise him. And we follow them into deeper realms of thought. We take down our George Smith and we revel in their wondrous poetry, its glowing imagery, its fervid imagination. Here we find the germ of all subsequent epic and wonder-story that have delighted mankind, and in their telling is the beginning of our religious and intellectual life. And it is not without a certain gratification that our thoughts pass to the genius of our countryman, which enabled him to read the riddle of those mysterious clay tablets, the treasure of our British Museum. Tablets !-it almost stuns the imagination-tablets upon some of which Abraham himself might have looked. The majority are copies by later Assyrian kings of originals which had then to be sought in Babylon; but one or two of the very originals are supposed to find place in the collection. And now we turn to the more prosaic duller realms of law, and we study their amazing code of Hammurabi. As a code it is unsurpassed to this day. This it owes to being the embodiment of the customary law of the period as evidently found in the decisions of actual cases. Underlying the whole is a shrewd, sound, commonsense and a very practical conception of justice itself. On the whole it reflects a high humantarian standard as well. The penalties no doubt are extreme, but probably, as with our enactments, represent the maximum punishment to be imposed. One pleasing feature is that whilst slavery is recognized, yet at the same time there is no great difference made in the damages to be paid for the accidental killing of a free citizen or the humbler servant. And this code was nearly two thousand years old at the time the Jewish exiles were in Babylon, and it was evidently founded on a prior code then in existence. Its provisions give us an insight into their social and domestic relations as only skilfully epito |