1. The Rebuilding of the Temple.—The first task of the exiles when they arrived at Jerusalem was to set about the rebuilding of the temple. The ruins were cleared away, and early in the second year of their return, amid great rejoicings, the foundation-stone of the second temple was laid. There were some very old people in the crowd, who had worshipped in the first beautiful temple, and to them the scene could not have been one of unmixed joy. The Bible says, ‘The old men wept.’ But men old enough to remember and to weep over their memories could not have been many, and hope and rejoicing were the chief feelings on the occasion.
2. The Samaritans.—Very soon the work, so gladly begun, was interrupted, and by home foes instead of foreign ones. Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, nearly two hundred years before, had conquered Hoshea, the last king of Israel, and had carried off many of Hoshea’s subjects into captivity. Samaria had fallen after a three years’ siege, and in place of those Israelites who had been killed, and of those who had been made prisoners of war, the king of Assyria brought some of his own subjects from Babylon and Cuthea, into the desolated land of Israel. These new settlers were, of course, heathens, but they adopted, after a time, some of the rites of the Israelites among whom they lived. The old inhabitants who had been left in Samaria, and the newwho had been brought thither, all came to be called Samaritans. Their religious belief was naturally a little mixed. There was much that was heathen and idolatrous, but a great deal, too, of what was distinctly Jewish in their thoughts and practice. When Jerusalem was again in the hands of Jews, and the temple about to be rebuilt, the Samaritans, at any rate, thought themselves quite Jewish enough to offer to help in the work. The exiles did not agree with them. The fifty years’ captivity had made a great change in their way of looking at things. Their Judaism was of a stronger and a sterner sort than it used to be. They meant the service in their new temple to be purely Jewish, and it seemed to them that if they let the Samaritans help in the building of the temple, it would lead to the introduction of idolatrous rites into Divine worship. Perhaps they felt, in an illogical sort of way, that the building itself would be profaned if any part of the work was done by such half-and-half Jews as were the Samaritans. No one likes to be pronounced not good enough for any work he himself proposes to do, and the Samaritans were extremely indignant at the rejection of their offer. They were mean enough to take revenge by speaking against the Jews at the Persian court. They were so far successful, that the work in which they were not allowed to share was presently put a stop to by order of Cyrus. But some fifteen years later his successor Darius, the Darius who was defeated at Marathon, gave permission and help too, and, in spite of the Samaritans, the temple was finished and dedicated,twenty years after the foundation-stone had been laid. The Samaritans, partly in imitation, partly in anger, and partly, it may be hoped, from religious feeling, later on built a little temple for themselves on Mount Gerizim.
3. The Feast of Purim.—The next great event comes with an interval of nearly fifty years. The meek Jewish maiden who, to serve her people, became a queen, and who, in her palace, ‘did the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she was brought up with him,’ is believed to have married king Xerxes, the Xerxes who, at Thermopylæ, desired the Spartans to give up their arms, and to whom Leonidas sent back the famous retort to ‘come and take them,’ All the romantic facts, which are told in the Book of Esther, and which led to the institution of Purim, history seems to show, took place during that monarch’s reign.
4. Ezra the Scribe.—The influence of good Jews remained strong at the Persian court and among the Persian people. The next king, Artaxerxes, had a Jew for his cup-bearer, and showed himself, throughout his reign, most kindly disposed towards his Jewish subjects. He let them appoint their own judges, and readily gave permission to Ezra to lead another colony from Babylon to join the settlement in Judea; and he made Nehemiah, who was his cup-bearer, governor of Palestine. Ezra—the Scribe, as he is called—was a fine character, strong-handed and strong-hearted too, a many-sided man. He seems to have got his name of scribe ([a]סוֹפֵר]) from his literary powers, which he chiefly used intranscribing the Pentateuch from old Hebrew characters to those in use at the present day. The name became by degrees applied to a whole class. The Sopherim, or scribes, were in turn skilful writers and careful expounders and patient students of the law.They were the ‘men of the Book,’[1] the lawyers of the Pentateuch. Malachi, the last of the prophets, lived at this period, and the scribes to some extent grew, in time, to take the place of the prophets in the religious life of the Jewish nation. The [a]נָבִיא], the servant of the Most High, had spoken His message—the [a]סוֹפֵר], with patient enthusiasm, was at hand to transcribe it. Their love for the Law and their knowledge of the Law gave the scribes spiritual power, and by-and-by political power also. For as the Law became by degrees the only national possession left to the Jews, those most learned in it naturally came to the front. The wisest and most skilled in interpreting the Law were called on to administer it, and to take part in the government of the dispossessed people. Ezra the Scribe was the first, chief and representative of the great body of students and teachers who, successively under the names of Sopherim, Tanaim, and Amoraim, became a power in Palestine.
5. The Work of Ezra and Nehemiah.—Both Ezra and Nehemiah were men of the best type of Jewish character. They loved the Lord ‘with all their heart and soul and might,’ which may be taken to mean using brain and heart and hands in the service. They willingly left the ease and comfort of court life for rough work of all kinds in Palestine. Theydesired to help their brethren in every possible way. They found plenty of preaching to be needed, and plenty, too, of work of a more practical sort. With equal energy they set about both. The walls of Jerusalem were in ruins. These, they wisely thought, ought to be repaired and rebuilt, for a people whose defences are weak are at the mercy of all. It was no light task; for the Samaritans, led by Sanballat, harassed and hindered the workers by every means in their power. They spoke against them and insulted them, and when they found evil words fail, they tried fighting. The Jewish leaders were equal to the occasion; they gave their men weapons as well as tools, and in the end courage and patience won. The walls were rebuilt and the governor’s house was fortified, and Nehemiah was able to go back for a while to his court duties. Meanwhile Ezra had been busy in another way. The defences of the religion as well as of the city had breaches and gaps in it. Many had married among the heathen, and were bringing up their children to a weak and most hurtful mixed belief. With a three days’ notice Ezra called the congregation together. Then, without any roundabout talk, he said to them, ‘You have sinned; put away your strange wives; do God’s pleasure.’ It was a hard bidding. God’s pleasure and man’s pleasure are often one and the same, but not always. To be good and to be happy is not uncommon, but occasionally if one wants to be good one has to be unhappy. There comes a conscious choosing between the doing of God’s pleasure and of our own pleasure, as to these Jews of old. Theymade the higher and the harder choice. From love of God, and in obedience to His law, they gave up their ‘strange,’ sweet, unlawful loves. With people in such a mood the rest of Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s reforms were comparatively easy. It was grand material to work upon. There was some resistance on the part of the more well-off families, who liked to be left alone, but the efforts of Ezra and Nehemiah for the good of the nation were not relaxed nor weakened thereby. They insisted on the proper observance of the Sabbath, they resettled the rights of property, and they restored the law of Moses to its place as an inspired code for constant reading and reference. Ezra has been called the second Moses, and the work he did was certainly of the same sort. Moses the lawgiver, with direct Divine help, made a tribe into a nation. Ezra the Scribe, with indirect Divine help, made of a dispossessed nation an undying people. The means employed was the same in both cases—God’s Law.
CHAPTER III.
LIFE IN PALESTINE.
1. Condition of the People.—After the stress and strain of the religious revival under Ezra and Nehemiah, things settled down for a long while into a quiet, uneventful course. It was the seed-time of national character, the season when growth is active though it does not show. The Persian conquerors, busy with their Greek wars, did not much trouble their Jewish subjects in Syria. Every now andagain another little band of exiles would join their friends in Judea, or would journey on to Egypt to form a new little Jewish community there. Even the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great made little difference to the Jews. Their personal government was in their own hands, and changes in political government made little outward sign in their lives. They were always law-abiding, and neither from Persian nor Greek did there come any startling or embarrassing demands on their loyalty. There is a story told of a dramatic meeting at the gates of Jerusalem between Alexander of Macedon and Jaddua the high priest, when the armed king, who came in anger, suddenly fell on his knees before the white-robed priest. But the anger, and the armour, and the robes, and the kiss of peace, and the meeting altogether, seem, with many another charming and somewhat shaky relic, to have been swept away by stiff new brooms into the lumber-room of history.
2. Literary Labours.—The quiet time was good for scholars. In the hundred years between the death of Nehemiah and the death of Alexander there was a good deal of literary activity in Palestine.To the Pentateuch which Ezra taught in schools, and read and expounded in synagogues, a second portion of Holy Scriptures[2]—the Prophets—was added; and a third portion, Holy Writings—followed.What is called the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures,[2] in the form and order of our Hebrew Bible, was definitely arranged yet a little later on. This work was almost all done in Hebrew, which wasstill the language of the people. Then a great store of wisdom, which had been the growth of ages, began at this period to be collected and sifted, and put into shape. There were proverbs and parables and wise sayings of all sorts, and quantities of long arguments and discussions, and some supplementary, and perhaps not always very accurate, history. It all began to be looked into. Partly in Aramaic, and partly in Greek, a good deal of it got gradually written down. Some of the wisdom and a great part of the history grew, in this and the next century, into what are called the apocryphal books. These, though they have not the value of inspired writings, have considerable merit of their own. The best, too, of the talks and the texts and the legendary lore was gathered together, and made a foundation for the Midrash, which had for its chief object the exposition of the Bible, and especially of the Pentateuch. And besides all these tasks, the energy and earnestness of the people found yet another channel. They set about formulating a ritual, that is a regular arrangement of prayer and service.
3. Alexandrian Jews.—In the time of Alexander of Macedon, Alexander the Great, as he is called, the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, was founded in his honour. A great many Jews joined the Greek and Egyptian colonists, and were among the early settlers in the city. By degrees these Alexandrian Jews grew to be a little less Jewish than the Judean Jews. They had exactly the same rights and privileges as the Macedonians. Greek culture, Greek habits of thought, were in the very air they breathed, and theybreathed it in more lustily, perhaps, than those to whom it was native. They spoke Greek, and after a while they neglected their national tongue, and were unable even to understand the Scriptures when read in synagogue. But though they let the language of their fathers grow strange to them, and were somewhat lax and unobservant, yet they never ceased to be Jews. Whether they were regular worshippers we do not know, but they certainly had a large and magnificent synagogue of their own; and in Heliopolis, another city of Egypt, there was a temple somewhat similar to the temple in Jerusalem. And it is further related in the Apocrypha that some 300 of these Egyptian Jews were once staunch enough to their faith to choose to be trampled to death by wild elephants rather than become converts. The sequel sounds a little legendary, as the elephants, it is added on the same authority, could not be induced to make martyrs of the Jews. They wisely turned aside, and trampled on the spectators instead of on the intended victims.