The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown.
I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison with the great empires on either side of them, because all that happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of the very greatest importance in making the story of the world what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters, and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took those traditions and that religion everywhere.
The religion of the Jews
And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded. It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil," not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.
It was on the Jewish religion as its stock that the Christian religion was grafted, as a gardener grafts a new branch into an old stem and the new takes up the sap from the old. There was another branch later grafted on the Jewish religious stem, besides the Christian—a very different branch, the Mohammedan religion. When we consider what an immense effect Christianity in the first place, and Mohammedanism in the second, have had in the making of this world-story, we shall see, I think, that we are right in attributing a great importance to what happened to the Jews, from whom came these other religions, as well as their own, which they still hold now. What happened to them was thus much more important in the story than what far stronger powers did, such as the Hittites, who possessed all Asia Minor and threatened Egypt, or the Elamites; who nearly overthrew the Babylonians, or the Syrians, who at one time were far stronger than either Israel or Judah, or even both of them together.
The Bible
We know that the Jews won their intense faith in Jehovah, their national god, only with difficulty. They were of the same race as the tribes about them who worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth, and they were constantly inclined towards that pagan worship, as we know from the Bible. But in the end the higher religion won, and their religion was intensely real to the Jews. It was a very big thing in their lives. They believed that Jehovah punished them in this life for the wrong things that they did, such as oppression of the poor, or unjust dealing, and they believed that he punished the nation for wrong things that the nation did. They had not the belief of the Egyptians in reward and punishment in an after-life.
And they considered their god as an exacting, a "jealous" god. He would punish them if they worshipped in the so-called "groves," which were often posts or stones set up on the "high places" to the pagan gods, or if they were slack in his worship, or in making sacrifice to him.
All these peoples had, in common, a belief in winning the favour of the gods by sacrifice. The more precious to them the thing sacrificed, the more value they deemed it would have in the sight of the gods; and that is how it is that we see them at one time actually sacrificing their own children, as the most valuable offering that they could make. The instance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac will occur to your minds.
And wherever they went, into whatever land of exile they were carried by their conquerors, they would take with them those sacred writings, that record of their history, that story of the creation of the world, and that code of their laws and of their religious customs, which, with very much more that they had not got, we now mean when we speak of the Bible. Wherever they went they had this holy record assuring them that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. Among the influences which enabled them to keep so distinct from the nations into whose midst they came, we must surely place very high the influence of the Bible—that is to say, of so many of its books as had been written at that time.