XXV.—JUDAS MACCABÆUS, THE HEBREW
WILLIAM TELL.
1. The kingdom of Judah escaped destruction at the hands of Sennacherib, but its respite was short. Soon afterward Babylon, closely related to Assyria, and the heir of its dominion, swept into captivity in distant Mesopotamia nearly all that were left of Hebrew stock. For a time, the nation seemed to have been wiped from the face of the earth. The ten tribes of Israel that had been first dragged forth never returned to Judea, and their ultimate fate, after the destruction of Nineveh, whose splendor they had in their servitude done so much to enhance, was that of homeless wanderers. The harp of Judah, silent upon the devastated banks of the Jordan, was hung upon the Babylonian willows, for how could the exiles sing the Lord's song in a strange land! But the cry went forth at length that Babylon had fallen in her turn, just as destruction had before overtaken Nineveh. In the middle of the sixth century B. C., Cyrus the Mede made a beginning of restoring the exiles, who straightway built anew the Temple walls.
2. In David's time, the population of Palestine must have numbered several millions, and it largely increased during the succeeding reigns. Multitudes, however, had perished by the sword, and other multitudes were retained in strange lands. Scarcely fifty thousand found their way back in the time of Cyrus to the desolate site of Jerusalem, but, one hundred years later, the number was increased by a re-enforcement under Ezra. From this nucleus, with astonishing vitality, a new Israel was presently developed. With weapons always at hand to repel the freebooters of the desert, they constructed once more the walls of Jerusalem. Through all their harsh experience their feelings of nationality had not been at all abated; their blood was untouched by foreign admixture, though some Gentile ideas had entered into the substance of their faith. The conviction that they were the chosen people of God was as unshaken as in the ancient time. With pride as indomitable as ever, intrenched within their little corner of Syria, they confronted the hostile world.
3. But a new contact was at hand, far more memorable even than that with the nations of Mesopotamia—a contact whose consequences affect at the present hour the condition of the greater part of the human race. In the year 332 B. C., the high-priest, Jaddua, at Jerusalem, was in an agony, not knowing how he should meet certain new invaders of the land, before whom Tyre, and Gaza, the old Philistine stronghold, had fallen, and who were now marching upon the city of David. But God warned him in a dream that he should take courage, adorn the city, and open the gates; that the people should appear in white garments of peace, but that he and the priests should meet the strangers in the robes of their office. At length, at the head of a sumptuous train of generals and tributary princes, a young man of twenty-four, upon a beautiful steed, rode forward from the way going down to the sea to the spot which may still be seen, called, anciently, Scopus, the prospect, because from that point one approaching could behold, for the first time, Jerusalem crowned by the Temple rising fair upon the heights of Zion and Moriah.
4. The youth possessed a beauty of a type in those regions hitherto little known. As compared with the swarthy Syrians in his suite, his skin was white; his features were stamped with the impress of command, his eyes filled with an intellectual light. With perfect horsemanship he guided the motions of his charger. A fine grace marked his figure, set off with a cloak, helmet, and gleaming arms, as he expressed with animated gestures his exultation over the spectacle before him. But now, down from the heights came the procession of the priests and the people. The multitude proceeded in their robes of white; the priests stood clothed in fine linen; while the high-priest, in attire of purple and scarlet, upon his breast the great breastplate of judgment with its jewels, upon his head the mitre marked with the plate of gold whereon was engraved the name of God, led the train with venerable dignity.
5. Now, says the historian, when the Phœnicians and Chaldeans that followed Alexander thought that they should have liberty to plunder the city, and torment the high-priest to death, the very reverse happened; for the young leader, when he saw the multitude in the distance, and the figure of the high-priest before, approached him by himself, saluted him, and adored the name, which was graven upon the plate of the mitre. Then a captain, named Parmino, asked him how it came to pass that, when all others adored him, he should adore the high-priest of the Jews. To whom the leader replied: "I do not adore him, but that God who hath honored him with his high-priesthood; for I saw this very person in a dream, in this very habit, when I was at Dios in Macedonia, who, when I was considering how I might obtain the dominion of Asia, exhorted me to make no delay, but boldly to pass over the sea thither, for that he would conduct my army, and could give me the dominion over the Persians." Then, when Alexander had given the high-priest his right hand, the priests ran along by him and he came into the city, and he offered sacrifice to God in the Temple, according to the high-priest's direction, and magnificently treated both the high-priest and the priests. He granted all the multitude desired; and when he said to them that if any of them would enlist themselves in his army on this condition, that they should continue under the laws of their forefathers, he was willing to take them with him, many were ready to accompany him in his wars.
6. But this Aryan troop that went southward is less interesting to us than companies that departed westward, for in these westward marching bands went the primeval forefathers from whose venerable loins we ourselves have proceeded. They passed into Western Asia, and from Asia into Europe—each migrating multitude impelled by a new swarm sent forth from the parent hive behind. At the head of the Adriatic Sea an Aryan troop had divided, sending down into the eastern peninsula the ancestors of the Greeks, and into the western peninsula the train destined to establish upon the seven hills the power of Rome. Already the Aryan pioneers, the Celts, on the outmost rocks of the western coast of Europe, were fretting against the barrier of storm and sea, across which they were not to find their way for many ages. Already Phœnician merchants, trading for amber in the far-off Baltic, had become aware of the wild Aryan tribes pressing to the northwest—the Teutons and Goths. Already, perhaps, upon the outlying spur of the Ural range, still other Aryans had fixed their hold, the progenitors of the Sclav. The aboriginal savage of Europe was already nearly extinct. His lance of flint had fallen harmless from the Aryan buckler; his rude altars had become displaced by the shrines of the new gods. In the Mediterranean Sea each sunny isle and pleasant promontory had long been in Aryan hands, and now in the wintry forests to the northward the resistless multitudes had more recently fixed their seats.
7. In the Macedonians, the Aryans, having established their dominion in Europe, march back upon the track which their forefathers long before had followed westward; and now it is that the Hebrews become involved with the race that from that day to this has been the master-race of the world. It was a contact taking place under circumstances, it would seem, the most auspicious—the venerable old man and the beautiful Greek youth clasping hands, the ruthless followers of the conqueror baffled in their hopes of booty, the multitudes of Jerusalem, in their robes of peace, filling the air with acclamations, as Alexander rode from the place of prospect, upon the heights of Zion, into the solemn precincts of the Temple.
8. The successors of Alexander the Great made the Jews a link between the Hellenic populations that had become widely scattered throughout the East by the Macedonian conquests, and the great barbarian races among whom the Greeks had placed themselves. The dispersion of the Jews, which had already taken place to such an extent through the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, went forward now more vigorously. Throughout Western Asia they were found everywhere, but it was in Egypt that they attained the highest prosperity and honor. The one city, Alexandria alone, is said to have contained at length a million Jews, whom the Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, preferred in every way to the native population. Elsewhere, too, they were favored, and hence they were everywhere hated; and the hatred assumed a deeper bitterness from the fact that the Jew always remained a Jew, marked in garb, in feature, in religious faith, always scornfully asserting the claim that he was the chosen of the Lord. Palestine became incorporated with the empire of the Seleucidæ, the Macedonian princes to whom had fallen Western Asia. Oppression at last succeeded the earlier favor, the defenses of Jerusalem were demolished, and the Temple defiled with pagan ceremonies; and now it is that we reach some of the finest figures in Hebrew history, the great high-priests, the Maccabees.