The Talmud, that vast treasury of speculation on divine things, had its origin about this period. Recent researches into that wilderness of thought reveal wonders and beauties that were never till recently divulged. The deepest insights, the most bewildering fancies, exist there side by side. The intellectual powers of a race exhausted themselves in efforts to penetrate the mysteries of faith. The fragments of national literature that had been rescued from oblivion, were pondered over, scrutinized, arranged, classified, with a superstitious veneration that would not be satisfied till all the possibilities of interpretation had been tried. The command to "search the scriptures" for in them were the words of eternal life, was accepted and faithfully obeyed. "The Talmud" says Emanuel Deutsch, "is more than a book of laws, it is a microcosm, embracing, even as does the Bible, heaven and earth. It is as if all the prose and poetry, the science, the faith and speculation of the old world were, though only in faint reflections, bound up in it in nuce." The theme of discussion, conjecture, speculation, allegory was, from first to last, the same,—the relation between Jehovah and his people, the nature and conditions of salvation, the purport of the law, the bearing of the promises. The entire field of investigation was open, reaching all the way from the number of words in the Bible to the secret of infinite being. No passage was left unexposed with all the keenness that faith aided by culture could supply; and when reason reached the end of its tether, fancy took up the work and threaded with unwearied industry the mazes of allegory.
Among the problems that challenged solution was the one touching the Messiah, his attributes and offices, his nature and his kingdom. This theme had inexhaustible capacities and infinite attraction, for it was but another form of the theme of national deliverance which was uppermost in the Hebrew mind.
The history of the Messianic idea is involved in the obscurity that clouds the early history of Israel; and this again is embarrassed with the extreme difficulty of deciding the antiquity of the Hebrew scriptures. At what moment was Israel fully persuaded of its providential destiny? That is the question. For the germs of the Messianic idea were contained in the bosom of that persuasion. That the idea was slow in forming must be conceded under any estimate of its antiquity; for its development depended on the experiences of the nation, and these experiences underwent in history numerous and violent fluctuations. The hope of a deliverer came with the felt need of deliverance, and the consciousness of this need grew with the soreness of the calamity under which the nation groaned, as the character of it was determined by the character of the calamity. The national expectation was necessarily vague at first. It rested originally on the tradition of a general promise given to Abraham that his descendants should be a great and happy nation, blessing and redeeming the nations of the earth; that their power should be world-wide, their wealth inexhaustible, their peace undisturbed, their moral supremacy gladly acknowledged. "The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face; they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways. The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thy hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord, and walk in his ways; and all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord."
As a promise made by Jehovah must be kept, the anticipation of its fulfilment became strong as the prospect of it grew dim. The days of disaster were the days of expectation. The prophets laid stress on the condition, charged the delay upon lukewarmness, and urged the necessity of stricter conformity with the divine will; but the people, oblivious of duty, held to the pledge and cherished the anticipation. When the national hope assumed the concrete form of faith in the advent of an individual, when the conception of the individual became clothed in supernatural attributes, is uncertain. Probably the looked-for deliverer was from the first regarded as more than human. It could hardly be otherwise, as he was to be the representative and agent of Jehovah, an incarnation of his truth and righteousness. The Hebrews easily confounding the human with the super-human, were always tempted to ascribe supernatural qualities to their political and spiritual leaders, believing that they were divinely commissioned, attested and furthered; and the person who was to accomplish what none of them had so much as hopefully undertaken, would naturally be clothed by an enthusiastic imagination, with attributes more than mortal. The poets depicted the stories of the future restoration in language of extraordinary splendor. Joel, some say eight hundred years before Jesus, two hundred years before the first captivity, foreshadows the restoration, but without any portraiture of the victorious Prince. A century and a half later we will suppose, the first Isaiah speaks of the providential child of the nation, on whose shoulder the government shall rest, whose name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty Potentate, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace; whose dominion shall be great, who shall fix and establish the throne and kingdom of David, through justice and equity for ever, and in peace without end; a lineal descendant from David, a sprout from his root.
"The spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him,
"The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
"The spirit of counsel and might,
"The spirit of knowledge and fear of Jehovah.
"Righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins,
"And faithfulness the girdle of his reins;
"To him shall the nation repair,
"And his dwelling place shall be glorious."
The second Isaiah, supposed to have written during the exile and not long before its termination, associates the hope of restoration and return with king Cyrus, on whose clemency the Jews built great expectations, intimating even that he might be the promised deliverer. "He saith of Cyrus: 'He is my shepherd; he shall perform all my pleasure.' He saith of Jerusalem: 'She shall be built;' and of the temple: 'Her foundation shall be laid.'"
In the book of Daniel, by some supposed to have been written during the captivity, by others as late as Antiochus Epiphanes (B. C., 175), the restoration is described in tremendous language, and the Messiah is portrayed as a supernatural personage, in close relation with Jehovah himself. He is spoken of as a man, yet with such epithets as only a Jewish imagination could use in describing a human being. Heinrich Ewald, in the fifth volume of his history of the people of Israel, devotes twenty-three pages to an account of the development of the national expectation of a Messiah, which he calls "the second preparatory condition of the consummation in Jesus." After alluding to Joel's fervent anticipation, and Isaiah's description of the glory that was to come through the King, in whom the spirit of pure divinity penetrated, animated and glorified everything, so that his human nature was exalted to the God-like power, whose actions, speech, breath even attested deity, he says: "It is not to be questioned that this most exalted form of the conception of the anticipated Messiah appeared in the midst of the latter period of this history, when before the great victory of the Maccabees, the eternal hopes of Israel were disturbed in their foundations along with its political prospects, and the advent of a King of David's line seemed wholly impossible. At this time the deathless hope became more interior and imperishable in this new, glorious, celestial idea, and the Messiah presented himself before prophetic vision as existing from all eternity, along with the indestructible prerogatives of Israel, which were thought of as existing in an ideal realm, ready to manifest themselves visibly when the hour of destiny should come. And we are able, on historical grounds, to assume that the deep-souled author of the book of Daniel, was the man who first sketched the splendid shape of the Messiah, and the superb outline of his kingdom, in his far-reaching, keen, suggestive, luminous phrases; while immediately after him the first composer of our book of Enoch developed the traits furnished him, with an equal warmth of language and a spiritual insight, not deeper perhaps, but quieter and more comprehensive." Ewald supposes the book of Enoch to have been written at various intervals between 144 and 120 (B. C.) and to have been completed in its present form in the first half of the century that preceeded the coming of Christ. The book was regarded as of authority by Tertullian, though Origen and Augustine classed it with apocryphal writings. In it the figure of the Messiah is invested with super-human attributes. He is called "The Son of God," "whose name was spoken before the sun was made;" "who existed from the beginning in the presence of God," that is, was pre-existent. At the same time his human characteristics are insisted on. He is called "Son of Man," even "Son of Woman," "The Anointed," "The Elect," "The Righteous One," after the style of earlier Hebrew anticipation. The doctrines of angelic orders and administrations, of Satan and his legions, of resurrection and the final judgment, though definitely shaped, perhaps by association with Persian mythologies, lay concealed in possibility within the original thought of ultimate supremacy which worked so long and so actively, though so obscurely, in the mind of the Jewish race.
The books of Maccabees, belonging, according to Ewald, to the last half century before Christ, contain significant hints of the future beliefs of Israel. In the second chapter of II. Maccabees, verses 4-9, we read: "It is also found in the records that Jeremy the prophet, being warned of God, commanded the tabernacle and the ark to go with him, as he went forth into the mountain where Moses climbed up and saw the heritage of God. And when Jeremy came thither he found a hollow cave wherein he laid the tabernacle and the ark and the altar of incense, and then stopped the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way, but they could not find it; which, when Jeremy perceived, he blamed them, saying: As for that place it shall be unknown until the time that God gather his people again together, and receive them unto mercy. Then shall the Lord show them these things, and the glory of the Lord shall appear, and the cloud also, as it was showed unto Moses." Is it a stretch of conjecture on the tenuous thread of fancy to find this reappearance described in Revelations XI., 19, in these words: "And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in the temple the ark of his covenant; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail?" In the twenty-first chapter the seer describes himself as "carried away in the spirit to a great and high mountain" and shown "that great city the Holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, from God." And he heard a great voice out of heaven, saying: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men; He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God himself shall be with them, their God." The heavenly Jerusalem that came from the clouds is the heavenly city, the germ whereof was carried up and hidden in the cloud by Jeremy, the prophet. The apocryphal books of the Old Testament lodge the ancient Hebraic idea in the very heart of the New.
The earliest phases of the Messianic hope were the most exalted in spirituality. As the fortunes of the people became entangled with those of other states, and the heavy hand of foreign oppression was laid upon them, the anticipation lost its religious and assumed a political character. The Messiah assumed the aspect of a temporal prince, no other conception of him meeting the requirements of the time. The dark days had come again, and were more threatening than ever. Sixty-three years before the birth of Jesus, Pompey the Great, returning from the East, flushed with victory, approached Jerusalem. The city shut its gates against him, but the resistance, though stubborn, was overcome at last, and Judæa was, with the rest of the world, swept into the mass of the Roman empire. The conqueror, proud but magnanimous, spared the people the last humiliation. He respected no national scruples, perhaps made a point of disregarding them; he even penetrated into the Holy of Holies, a piece of sacrilegious audacity that no Gentile had ventured on before him; but he was considerate of the national spirit in other respects, and left the State, in semblance at least, existing. He quelled the factions that distracted the country, repaired the ruin caused in the city by the siege, restored the injured temple, and departed leaving the country in the hands of native rulers, the Empire being thrown into the background. In the background, however, it lurked, a vast power, holding Judæa dependent and tributary. The Jewish state was closely bounded and sharply defined; a portion of its wealth was absorbed in taxes. An iron arm repressed the insurgent fanaticism that ever and anon broke out in zeal for Jehovah. The loyalty that was kept alive by religious traditions and was only another name for religious enthusiasm, was not allowed expression. Still the even pressure of imperial power was not cruelly felt, and by the better portion of the people was preferred to ceaseless discord and anarchy. The lower orders, easily roused to fanaticism, provoked the Roman rule to more evident and stringent dominion. Julius Cæsar, passing by on his way to Egypt, paused, saw the situation, and increased the authority of Antipater, his representative, whom he raised to the dignity of Procurator of Judæa. The rule of Antipater was, in the main, just, and commended itself to the rational friends of the Jewish State. He rebuilt the wall which the assaults of war had thrown down, pacified the country, and earned by his general moderation the praise of the patriotic. But Antipater, besides being the representative of a Gentile despotism, was of foreign race, an Idumæan, of the abhorred stock of Edom. Spiritual acquiescence in the rule of such a prince was not to be expected.
Antipater was the founder of the Herodian dynasty. Whatever may have been the ulterior designs which the princes of this dynasty had at heart, whether they meditated an Eastern Empire centering in Palestine, Jerusalem being the great metropolis, a purpose kept secret in their breasts till such time as events might justify them in throwing off the dominion of Rome which they had used as an assistance in their period of weakness; or whether they hoped to combine Church and State in Judæa in such a way that each might support the other; or whether, in their passion for splendor, they plotted the subversion of religion by the pomp of pagan civilization; the practical result of their dominion was the exasperation of the Hebrew spirit.