PART III.
Chapter I.—THE JEWS TO THE TIME OF THE EMPEROR ADRIAN.
The history of those chosen by the Lord to be His peculiar people, has now been traced for more than two thousand years, from the Call of Abraham, b.c. 1921. For the two centuries immediately following that event, we have the history of Abraham's descendants, Isaac, Jacob or Israel, and the twelve sons of Israel, or Patriarchs, as they are called, from being the fathers of all the tribes of Israel. Israel and his sons and grand-children, to the number of sixty-six persons, went down, b.c. 1706, into Egypt, where Joseph then was, having been sold as a slave about twenty years before.
During the next 300 years, the descendants of Israel multiplied so wonderfully that, in b.c. 1491, 600,000 men, besides women and children, went out of Egypt under the guidance of Moses.
The giving of the Law, Ceremonial and Political, as well as Moral, established the chosen people of God, as a Church and Nation.
Forty years of wandering in the wilderness brought the Children of Israel to the eastern banks of the Jordan, b.c. 1451. The Bible then relates how, under the command of Joshua, the Jordan was crossed, and the heathen wonderfully driven out of the land, which the Lord had promised to give to Abraham and his descendants, for a possession.
For forty-six years, the Children of Israel were ruled by Joshua and the elders who outlived him. For the next 300 years, they were governed by Judges, raised up by the Almighty at different times, as they were needed. In b.c. 1095 the Children of Israel were bent upon having a king, and Saul was accordingly crowned, and reigned for forty years. During the next eighty years, the kingdom flourished under David and his son Solomon; the latter of whom built the glorious Temple, dedicated to the service of the Lord with much ceremony, b.c. 1004. It had taken eight years to build.
The division of the country into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel, under Solomon's son Rehoboam, took place b.c. 975. One king succeeded another more or less quickly, until the sins of kings and people led to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, b.c. 721; and to the burning of Jerusalem and of the Temple, b.c. 587, when Nebuchadnezzar carried the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah into a long captivity in Babylon. Some years before, in b.c. 606, this same Nebuchadnezzar had carried away many of the children of Judah; and from this date the Captivity, which lasted seventy years, is reckoned to have begun. The seventy years expired in b.c. 536; and Cyrus, king of Medea and Persia, having conquered the Babylonian Empire, gave the children of Judah leave to go back into their own land, showing them much kindness upon the occasion. The Jews, as they were now called, returned in great numbers to Judæa; though many of them still, by their own choice, remained in the land where they had been born and bred.