[405] See below, p. 364.
[406] See lii. 13-liii. 12.
[407] Cf. Bennett, The Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets (1907), pp. 326 ff.
[408] In the year 539 B.C. Cyrus, king of Persia, having captured Babylon, issued a decree giving the Jewish exiles in Babylonia permission to return to their own land and to rebuild the Temple destroyed fifty years before by Nebuchadnezzar. A band returned and set themselves to the task of restoring their houses and rebuilding the Temple. After many interruptions and long delay the building was finished and dedicated anew to the worship of Yahweh (516 B.C.).
[409] “The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law, after Ezra’s reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth in post-Reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of salvation, and particularly the tendency to formalize and almost to deify the literal inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.”—Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 95.
[410] For life under the law consult Schürer, History of the Jewish People, division ii, vol. ii, pp. 90 ff.
[411] Matt. xxiii. 23.
[412] Ibid. xv. 11, 20. “The identification of morality with ritual in his [Jesus’] day had confused the issue before human life much as that issue is now confused by the identification of morality with opinion” (Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 62).
[413] Ps. cxxxvii. 9; see Ps. cix.
[414] On this subject see Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), pp. 246 ff.