Transcriber's notes

• A small number of obvious typos have been corrected.
• The spelling and punctuation of the book have not been changed.
• The footnotes have been renumbered from 1 to 1,560 and placed at the end of the text.
• It is clear from the context that some Hebrew letters are missing from Page 82 of the book. These letters, enclosed in square brackets, have been restored.
• The HTML file contains 40 external links to other volumes of The Expositor's Bible on the Gutenberg site. If you are reading the HTML file on a computer connected to the internet then you can follow these links. These external links, however, are NOT supported in the Epub and Mobi files even though they may appear as links in some e-book readers.

THE EXPOSITOR’S BIBLE

EDITED BY THE REV.

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.

Editor of “The Expositor”

THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE PROPHETS

VOL. II.—ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH,
HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.—VIII., “MALACHI,” JOEL,
“ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. AND JONAH

BY

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.

NEW YORK

A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON

51 EAST TENTH STREET
1898

THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE

Crown 8vo, cloth, price $1.50 each vol.

FIRST SERIES, 1887–8.

Colossians.

By A. MACLAREN, D.D.

St. Mark.

By Very Rev. the Bishop of Derry.

Genesis.

By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.

1 Samuel.

By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.

2 Samuel.

By the same Author.

Hebrews.

By Principal T. C. EDWARDS, D.D.

SECOND SERIES, 1888–9.

Galatians.

By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.

The Pastoral Epistles.

By Rev A. PLUMMER, D.D.

Isaiah I.—XXXIX.

By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Vol. I.

The Book of Revelation.

By Prof. W. MILLIGAN, D.D.

1 Corinthians

By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.

The Epistles of St. John.

By Most Rev. the Archbishop of Armagh.

THIRD SERIES, 1889–90.

Judges and Ruth.

By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.

Jeremiah.

By Rev. C. J. BALL, M.A.

Isaiah XL.—LXVI.

By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Vol. II.

St. Matthew.

By Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.

Exodus.

By Right Rev. the Bishop of Derry.

St. Luke.

By Rev. H. BURTON, M.A.

FOURTH SERIES, 1890–91.

Ecclesiastes.

By Rev. SAMUEL Cox, D.D.

St. James and St. Jude.

By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.

Proverbs.

By Rev. R. F. HORTON, D.D.

Leviticus.

By Rev. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D.

The Gospel of St. John.

By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. I.

The Acts of the Apostles.

By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. I.

FIFTH SERIES, 1891–2.

The Psalms.

By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. I.

1 and 2 Thessalonians.

By JAMES DENNEY, D.D.

The Book of Job.

By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.

Ephesians.

By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.

The Gospel of St. John.

By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. II.

The Acts of the Apostles.

By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. II.

SIXTH SERIES, 1892–3.

1 Kings.

By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.

Philippians.

By Principal RAINY, D.D.

Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.

By Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.

Joshua.

By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.

The Psalms.

By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. II.

The Epistles of St. Peter.

By Prof. RAWSON LUMBY, D.D.

SEVENTH SERIES, 1893–4.

2 Kings.

By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.

Romans.

By H. C. G. MOULE, M.A., D.D.

The Books of Chronicles.

By Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.

2 Corinthians.

By JAMES DENNEY, D.D.

Numbers.

By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.

The Psalms.

By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. III.

EIGHTH SERIES, 1895–6.

Daniel.

By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.

The Book of Jeremiah.

By Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.

Deuteronomy.

By Prof. ANDREW HARPER, B.D.

The Song of Solomon and Lamentations.

By Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.

Ezekiel.

By Prof. JOHN SKINNER, M.A.

The Book of the Twelve Prophets.

By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Two Vols

THE BOOK
OF
THE TWELVE PROPHETS

COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR

BY

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS
FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.—ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH,
HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.—VIII., “MALACHI,” JOEL,
“ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. AND JONAH

WITH HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS

NEW YORK

A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON

51 EAST TENTH STREET
1898

PREFACE

The first volume on the Twelve Prophets dealt with the three who belonged to the Eighth Century: Amos, Hosea and Micah. This second volume includes the other nine books arranged in chronological order: Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, of the Seventh Century; Obadiah, of the Exile; Haggai, Zechariah i.—viii., “Malachi” and Joel, of the Persian Period, 538—331; “Zechariah” ix.—xiv. and the Book of Jonah, of the Greek Period, which began in 332, the date of Alexander’s Syrian campaign.

The same plan has been followed as in Volume I. A historical introduction is offered to each period. To each prophet are given, first a chapter of critical introduction, and then one or more chapters of exposition. A complete translation has been furnished, with critical and explanatory notes. All questions of date and of text, and nearly all of interpretation, have been confined to the introductions and the notes, so that those who consult the volume only for expository purposes will find the exposition unencumbered by the discussion of technical points.

The necessity of including within one volume so many prophets, scattered over more than three centuries, and each of them requiring a separate introduction, has reduced the space available for the practical application of their teaching to modern life. But this is the less to be regretted, that the contents of the nine books before us are not so applicable to our own day, as we have found their greater predecessors to be. On the other hand, however, they form a more varied introduction to Old Testament Criticism, while, by the long range of time which they cover, and the many stages of religion to which they belong, they afford a wider view of the development of prophecy. Let us look for a little at these two points.

1. To Old Testament Criticism these books furnish valuable introduction—some of them, like Obadiah, Joel and “Zechariah” ix.—xiv., by the great variety of opinion that has prevailed as to their dates or their relation to other prophets with whom they have passages in common; some, like Zechariah and “Malachi,” by their relation to the Law, in the light of modern theories of the origin of the latter; and some, like Joel and Jonah, by the question whether we are to read them as history, or as allegories of history, or as apocalypse. That is to say, these nine books raise, besides the usual questions of genuineness and integrity, every other possible problem of Old Testament Criticism. It has, therefore, been necessary to make the critical introductions full and detailed. The enormous differences of opinion as to the dates of some must start the suspicion of arbitrariness, unless there be included in each case a history of the development of criticism, so as to exhibit to the English reader the principles and the evidence of fact upon which that criticism is based. I am convinced that what is chiefly required just now by the devout student of the Bible is the opportunity to judge for himself how far Old Testament Criticism is an adult science; with what amount of reasonableness it has been prosecuted; how gradually its conclusions have been reached, how jealously they have been contested; and how far, amid the many varieties of opinion which must always exist with reference to facts so ancient and questions so obscure, there has been progress towards agreement upon the leading problems. But, besides the accounts of past criticism given in this volume, the reader will find in each case an independent attempt to arrive at a conclusion. This has not always been successful. A number of points have been left in doubt; and even where results have been stated with some degree of positiveness, the reader need scarcely be warned (after what was said in the Preface to Vol. I.) that many of these must necessarily be provisional. But, in looking back from the close of this work upon the discussions which it contains, I am more than ever convinced of the extreme probability of most of the conclusions. Among these are the following: that the correct interpretation of Habakkuk is to be found in the direction of the position to which Budde’s ingenious proposal has been carried on pages 123 ff. with reference to Egypt; that the most of Obadiah is to be dated from the sixth century; that “Malachi” is an anonymous work from the eve of Ezra’s reforms; that Joel follows “Malachi”; and that “Zechariah” ix.—xiv. has been rightly assigned by Stade to the early years of the Greek Period. I have ventured to contest Kosters’ theory that there was no return of Jewish exiles under Cyrus, and am the more disposed to believe his strong argument inconclusive, not only upon a review of the reasons I have stated in Chap. XVI., but on this ground also, that many of its chief adherents in this country and Germany have so modified it as virtually to give up its main contention. I think, too, there can be little doubt as to the substantial authenticity of Zephaniah ii. (except the verses on Moab and Ammon) and iii. 1–13, of Habakkuk ii. 5 ff., and of the whole of Haggai; or as to the ungenuine character of the lyric piece in Zechariah ii. and the intrusion of “Malachi” ii. 11–13a. On these and smaller points the reader will find full discussion at the proper places. [I may here add a word or two upon some of the critical conclusions reached in Vol. I., which have been recently contested. The student will find strong grounds offered by Canon Driver in his Joel and Amos[1] for the authenticity of those passages in Amos which, following other critics, I regarded or suspected as not authentic. It makes one diffident in one’s opinions when Canon Driver supports Professors Kuenen and Robertson Smith on the other side. But on a survey of the case I am unable to feel that even they have removed what they admit to be “forcible” objections to the authorship by Amos of the passages in question. They seem to me to have established not more than a possibility that the passages are authentic; and on the whole I still feel that the probability is in the other direction. If I am right, then I think that the date of the apostrophes to Jehovah’s creative power which occur in the Book of Amos, and the reference to astral deities in chap. v. 27, may be that which I have suggested on pages 8 and 9 of this volume. Some critics have charged me with inconsistency in denying the authenticity of the epilogue to Amos while defending that of the epilogue to Hosea. The two cases, as my arguments proved, are entirely different. Nor do I see any reason to change the conclusions of Vol. I. upon the questions of the authenticity of various parts of Micah.]

The text of the nine prophets treated in this volume has presented even more difficulties than that of the three treated in Vol. I. And these difficulties must be my apology for the delay of this volume.

2. But the critical and textual value of our nine books is far exceeded by the historical. Each exhibits a development of Hebrew prophecy of the greatest interest. From this point of view, indeed, the volume might be entitled “The Passing of the Prophet.” For throughout our nine books we see the spirit and the style of the classic prophecy of Israel gradually dissolving into other forms of religious thought and feeling. The clear start from the facts of the prophet’s day, the ancient truths about Jehovah and Israel, and the direct appeal to the conscience of the prophet’s contemporaries, are not always given, or when given are mingled, coloured and warped by other religious interests, both present and future, which are even powerful enough to shake the ethical absolutism of the older prophets. With Nahum and Obadiah the ethical is entirely missed in the presence of the claims—and we cannot deny that they were natural claims—of the long-suffering nation’s hour of revenge upon her heathen tyrants. With Zephaniah prophecy, still austerely ethical, passes under the shadow of apocalypse; and the future is solved, not upon purely historical lines, but by the intervention of “supernatural” elements. With Habakkuk the ideals of the older prophets encounter the shock of the facts of experience: we have the prophet as sceptic. Upon the other margin of the Exile, Haggai and Zechariah (i.—viii.), although they are as practical as any of their predecessors, exhibit the influence of the exilic developments of ritual, angelology and apocalypse. God appears further off from Zechariah than from the prophets of the eighth century, and in need of mediators, human and superhuman. With Zechariah the priest has displaced the prophet, and it is very remarkable that no place is found for the latter beside the two sons of oil, the political and priestly heads of the community, who, according to the Fifth Vision, stand in the presence of God and between them feed the religious life of Israel. Nearly sixty years later “Malachi” exhibits the working of Prophecy within the Law, and begins to employ the didactic style of the later Rabbinism. Joel starts, like any older prophet, from the facts of his own day, but these hurry him at once into apocalypse; he calls, as thoroughly as any of his predecessors, to repentance, but under the imminence of the Day of the Lord, with its “supernatural” terrors, he mentions no special sin and enforces no single virtue. The civic and personal ethics of the earlier prophets are absent. In the Greek Period, the oracles now numbered from the ninth to the fourteenth chapters of the Book of Zechariah repeat to aggravation the exulting revenge of Nahum and Obadiah, without the strong style or the hold upon history which the former exhibits, and show us prophecy still further enwrapped in apocalypse. But in the Book of Jonah, though it is parable and not history, we see a great recovery and expansion of the best elements of prophecy. God’s character and Israel’s true mission to the world are revealed in the spirit of Hosea and of the Seer of the Exile, with much of the tenderness, the insight, the analysis of character and even the humour of classic prophecy. These qualities raise the Book of Jonah, though it is probably the latest of our Twelve, to the highest rank among them. No book is more worthy to stand by the side of Isaiah xl.—lv.; none is nearer in spirit to the New Testament.

All this gives unity to the study of prophets so far separate in time, and so very distinct in character, from each other. From Zephaniah to Jonah, or over a period of three centuries, they illustrate the dissolution of Prophecy and its passage into other forms of religion.

The scholars, to whom every worker in this field is indebted, are named throughout the volume. I regret that Nowack’s recent commentary on the Minor Prophets (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) reached me too late for use (except in footnotes) upon the earlier of the nine prophets.

GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE SEVENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST

The three prophets who were treated in the first volume of this work belonged to the eighth century before Christ: if Micah lived into the seventh his labours were over by 675. The next group of our twelve, also three in number, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, did not appear till after 630. To make our study continuous[2] we must now sketch the course of Israel’s history between.

In another volume of this series,[3] some account was given of the religious progress of Israel from Isaiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem in 701 to Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem in 587. Isaiah’s strength was bent upon establishing the inviolableness of Zion. Zion, he said, should not be taken, and the people, though cut to their roots, should remain planted in their own land, the stock of a noble nation in the latter days. But Jeremiah predicted the ruin both of City and Temple, summoned Jerusalem’s enemies against her in the name of Jehovah, and counselled his people to submit to them. This reversal of the prophetic ideal had a twofold reason. In the first place the moral condition of Israel was worse in 600 B.C. than it had been in 700; another century had shown how much the nation needed the penalty and purgation of exile. But secondly, however the inviolableness of Jerusalem had been required in the interests of pure religion in 701, religion had now to show that it was independent even of Zion and of Israel’s political survival. Our three prophets of the eighth century (as well as Isaiah himself) had indeed preached a gospel which implied this, but it was reserved to Jeremiah to prove that the existence of state and temple was not indispensable to faith in God, and to explain the ruin of Jerusalem, not merely as a well-merited penance, but as the condition of a more spiritual intercourse between Jehovah and His people.

It is our duty to trace the course of events through the seventh century, which led to this change of the standpoint of prophecy, and which moulded the messages especially of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk. We may divide the century into three periods: First, that of the Reaction and Persecution under Manasseh and Amon, from 695 or 690 to 639, during which prophecy was silent or anonymous; Second, that of the Early Years of Josiah, 639 to 625, near the end of which we meet with the young Jeremiah and Zephaniah; Third, the Rest of the Century, 625 to 600, covering the Decline and Fall of Niniveh, and the prophets Nahum and Habakkuk, with an addition carrying on the history to the Fall of Jerusalem in 587—6.

1. REACTION UNDER MANASSEH AND AMON (695?—639).

Jerusalem was delivered in 701, and the Assyrians kept away from Palestine for twenty-three years.[4] Judah had peace, and Hezekiah was free to devote his latter days to the work of purifying the worship of his people. What he exactly achieved is uncertain. The historian imputes to him the removal of the high places, the destruction of all Maççeboth and Asheras, and of the brazen serpent.[5] That his measures were drastic is probable from the opinions of Isaiah, who was their inspiration, and proved by the reaction which they provoked when Hezekiah died. The removal of the high places and the concentration of the national worship within the Temple would be the more easy that the provincial sanctuaries had been devastated by the Assyrian invasion, and that the shrine of Jehovah was glorified by the raising of the siege of 701.

While the first of Isaiah’s great postulates for the future, the inviolableness of Zion, had been fulfilled, the second, the reign of a righteous prince in Israel, seemed doomed to disappointment. Hezekiah died early in the seventh century,[6] and was succeeded by his son Manasseh, a boy of twelve, who appears to have been captured by the party whom his father had opposed. The few years’ peace—peace in Israel was always dangerous to the health of the higher religion—the interests of those who had suffered from the reforms, the inevitable reaction which a rigorous puritanism provokes—these swiftly reversed the religious fortunes of Israel. Isaiah’s and Micah’s predictions of the final overthrow of Assyria seemed falsified, when in 681 the more vigorous Asarhaddon succeeded Sennacherib, and in 678 swept the long absent armies back upon Syria. Sidon was destroyed, and twenty-two princes of Palestine immediately yielded their tribute to the conqueror. Manasseh was one of them, and his political homage may have brought him, as it brought Ahaz, within the infection of foreign idolatries.[7] Everything, in short, worked for the revival of that eclectic paganism which Hezekiah had striven to stamp out. The high places were rebuilt; altars were erected to Baal, with the sacred pole of Asherah, as in the time of Ahab;[8] shrines to the host of heaven defiled the courts of Jehovah’s house; there was a recrudescence of soothsaying, divination and traffic with the dead.

But it was all very different from the secure and sunny temper which Amos had encountered in Northern Israel.[9] The terrible Assyrian invasions had come between. Life could never again feel so stable. Still more destructive had been the social poisons which our prophets described as sapping the constitution of Israel for nearly three generations. The rural simplicity was corrupted by those economic changes which Micah bewails. With the ousting of the old families from the soil, a thousand traditions, memories and habits must have been broken, which had preserved the people’s presence of mind in days of sudden disaster, and had carried them, for instance, through so long a trial as the Syrian wars. Nor could the blood of Israel have run so pure after the luxury and licentiousness described by Hosea and Isaiah. The novel obligations of commerce, the greed to be rich, the increasing distress among the poor, had strained the joyous temper of that nation of peasants’ sons, whom we met with Amos, and shattered the nerves of their rulers. There is no word of fighting in Manasseh’s days, no word of revolt against the tyrant. Perhaps also the intervening puritanism, which had failed to give the people a permanent faith, had at least awakened within them a new conscience.

At all events there is now no more ease in Zion, but a restless fear, driving the people to excesses of religious zeal. We do not read of the happy country festivals of the previous century, nor of the careless pride of that sudden wealth which built vast palaces and loaded the altar of Jehovah with hecatombs. The full-blooded patriotism, which at least kept ritual in touch with clean national issues, has vanished. The popular religion is sullen and exasperated. It takes the form of sacrifices of frenzied cruelty and lust. Children are passed through the fire to Moloch, and the Temple is defiled by the orgies of those who abuse their bodies to propitiate a foreign and a brutal god.[10]

But the most certain consequence of a religion whose nerves are on edge is persecution, and this raged all the earlier years of Manasseh. The adherents of the purer faith were slaughtered, and Jerusalem drenched[11] with innocent blood. Her own sword, says Jeremiah, devoured the prophets like a destroying lion.[12]

It is significant that all that has come down to us from this “killing time” is anonymous;[13] we do not meet with our next group of public prophets till Manasseh and his like-minded son have passed away. Yet prophecy was not wholly stifled. Voices were raised to predict the exile and destruction of the nation. Jehovah spake by His servants;[14] while others wove into the prophecies of an Amos, a Hosea or an Isaiah some application of the old principles to the new circumstances. It is probable, for instance, that the extremely doubtful passage in the Book of Amos, v. 26 f., which imputes to Israel as a whole the worship of astral deities from Assyria, is to be assigned to the reign of Manasseh. In its present position it looks very like an intrusion: nowhere else does Amos charge his generation with serving foreign gods; and certainly in all the history of Israel we could not find a more suitable period for so specific a charge than the days when into the central sanctuary of the national worship images were introduced of the host of heaven, and the nation was, in consequence, threatened with exile.[15]

In times of persecution the documents of the suffering faith have ever been reverenced and guarded with especial zeal. It is not improbable that the prophets, driven from public life, gave themselves to the arrangement of the national scriptures; and some critics date from Manasseh’s reign the weaving of the two earliest documents of the Pentateuch into one continuous book of history.[16] The Book of Deuteronomy forms a problem by itself. The legislation which composes the bulk of it[17] appears to have been found among the Temple archives at the end of our period, and presented to Josiah as an old and forgotten work.[18] There is no reason to charge with fraud those who made the presentation by affirming that they really invented the book. They were priests of Jerusalem, but the book is written by members of the prophetic party, and ostensibly in the interests of the priests of the country. It betrays no tremor of the awful persecutions of Manasseh’s reign; it does not hint at the distinction, then for the first time apparent, between a false and a true Israel. But it does draw another distinction, familiar to the eighth century, between the true and the false prophets. The political and spiritual premisses of the doctrine of the book were all present by the end of the reign of Hezekiah, and it is extremely improbable that his reforms, which were in the main those of Deuteronomy, were not accompanied by some code, or by some appeal to the fountain of all law in Israel.

But whether the Book of Deuteronomy now existed or not, there were those in the nation who through all the dark days between Hezekiah and Josiah laid up its truth in their hearts and were ready to assist the latter monarch in his public enforcement of it.

While these things happened within Judah, very great events were taking place beyond her borders. Asarhaddon of Assyria (681—668) was a monarch of long purposes and thorough plans. Before he invaded Egypt, he spent a year (675) in subduing the restless tribes of Northern Arabia, and another (674) in conquering the peninsula of Sinai, an ancient appanage of Egypt. Tyre upon her island baffled his assaults, but the rest of Palestine remained subject to him. He received his reward in carrying the Assyrian arms farther into Egypt than any of his predecessors, and about 670 took Memphis from the Ethiopian Pharaoh Taharka. Then he died. Assurbanipal, who succeeded, lost Egypt for a few years, but about 665, with the help of his tributaries in Palestine, he overthrew Taharka, took Thebes, and established along the Nile a series of vassal states. He quelled a revolt there in 663 and overthrew Memphis for a second time. The fall of the Egyptian capital resounds through the rest of the century; we shall hear its echoes in Nahum. Tyre fell at last with Arvad in 662. But the Assyrian empire had grown too vast for human hands to grasp, and in 652 a general revolt took place in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Elam, Babylon and Asia Minor. In 649 Assurbanipal reduced Elam and Babylon; and by two further campaigns (647 and 645) Hauran, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Nabatea and all the northern Arabs. On his return from these he crossed Western Palestine to the sea and punished Usu and Akko. It is very remarkable that, while Assurbanipal, who thus fought the neighbours of Judah, makes no mention of her, nor numbers Manasseh among the rebels whom he chastised, the Book of Chronicles should contain the statement that Jehovah sent upon Manasseh the captains of the host of the king of Assyria, who bound him with fetters and carried him to Babylon.[19] What grounds the Chronicler had for such a statement are quite unknown to us. He introduces Manasseh’s captivity as the consequence of idolatry, and asserts that on his restoration Manasseh abolished in Judah all worship save that of Jehovah, but if this happened (and the Book of Kings has no trace of it) it was without result. Amon, son of Manasseh, continued to sacrifice to all the images which his father had introduced.

2. THE EARLY YEARS OF JOSIAH (639—625): JEREMIAH AND ZEPHANIAH.

Amon had not reigned for two years when his servants conspired against him, and he was slain in his own house.[20] But the people of the land rose against the court, slew the conspirators, and secured the throne for Amon’s son, Josiah, a child of eight. It is difficult to know what we ought to understand by these movements. Amon, who was slain, was an idolater; the popular party, who slew his slayers, put his son on the throne, and that son, unlike both his father and grandfather, bore a name compounded with the name of Jehovah. Was Amon then slain for personal reasons? Did the people, in their rising, have a zeal for Jehovah? Was the crisis purely political, but usurped by some school or party of Jehovah who had been gathering strength through the later years of Manasseh, and waiting for some such unsettlement of affairs as now occurred? The meagre records of the Bible give us no help, and for suggestions towards an answer we must turn to the wider politics of the time.

Assurbanipal’s campaigns of 647 and 645 were the last appearances of Assyria in Palestine. He had not attempted to reconquer Egypt,[21] and her king, Psamtik I., began to push his arms northward. Progress must have been slow, for the siege of Ashdod, which Psamtik probably began after 645, is said to have occupied him twenty-nine years. Still, he must have made his influence to be felt in Palestine, and in all probability there was once more, as in the days of Isaiah, an Egyptian party in Jerusalem. As the power of Assyria receded over the northern horizon, the fascination of her idolatries, which Manasseh had established in Judah, must have waned. The priests of Jehovah’s house, jostled by their pagan rivals, would be inclined to make common cause with the prophets under a persecution which both had suffered. With the loosening of the Assyrian yoke the national spirit would revive, and it is easy to imagine prophets, priests and people working together in the movement which placed the child Josiah on the throne. At his tender age, he must have been wholly in the care of the women of the royal house; and among these the influence of the prophets may have found adherents more readily than among the counsellors of an adult prince. Not only did the new monarch carry the name of Jehovah in his own; this was the case also with his mother’s father.[22] In the revolt, therefore, which raised this unconscious child to the throne and in the circumstances which moulded his character, we may infer that there already existed the germs of the great work of reform which his manhood achieved.

For some time little change would be possible, but from the first facts were working for great issues. The Book of Kings, which places the destruction of the idols after the discovery of the law-book in the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, records a previous cleansing and restoration of the house of Jehovah.[23] This points to the growing ascendency of the prophetic party during the first fifteen years of Josiah’s reign. Of the first ten years we know nothing, except that the prestige of Assyria was waning; but this fact, along with the preaching of the prophets, who had neither a native tyrant nor the exigencies of a foreign alliance to silence them, must have weaned the people from the worship of the Assyrian idols. Unless these had been discredited, the repair of Jehovah’s house could hardly have been attempted; and that this progressed means that part of Josiah’s destruction of the heathen images took place before the discovery of the Book of the Law, which happened in consequence of the cleansing of the Temple.

But just as under the good Hezekiah the social condition of the people, and especially the behaviour of the upper classes, continued to be bad, so it was again in the early years of Josiah. There was a remnant of Baal[24] in the land. The shrines of the host of heaven might have been swept from the Temple, but they were still worshipped from the housetops.[25] Men swore by the Queen of Heaven, and by Moloch, the King. Some turned back from Jehovah; some, grown up in idolatry, had not yet sought Him. Idolatry may have been disestablished from the national sanctuary: its practices still lingered (how intelligibly to us!) in social and commercial life. Foreign fashions were affected by the court and nobility; trade, as always, was combined with the acknowledgment of foreign gods.[26] Moreover, the rich were fraudulent and cruel. The ministers of justice, and the great in the land, ravened among the poor. Jerusalem was full of oppression. These were the same disorders as Amos and Hosea exposed in Northern Israel, and as Micah exposed in Jerusalem. But one new trait of evil was added. In the eighth century, with all their ignorance of Jehovah’s true character, men had yet believed in Him, gloried in His energy, and expected Him to act—were it only in accordance with their low ideals. They had been alive and bubbling with religion. But now they had thickened on their lees. They had grown sceptical, dull, indifferent; they said in their hearts, Jehovah will not do good, neither will He do evil!

Now, just as in the eighth century there had risen, contemporaneous with Israel’s social corruption, a cloud in the north, black and pregnant with destruction, so was it once more. But the cloud was not Assyria. From the hidden world beyond her, from the regions over Caucasus, vast, nameless hordes of men arose, and, sweeping past her unchecked, poured upon Palestine. This was the great Scythian invasion recorded by Herodotus.[27] We have almost no other report than his few paragraphs, but we can realise the event from our knowledge of the Mongol and Tartar invasions which in later centuries pursued the same path southwards. Living in the saddle, and (it would seem) with no infantry nor chariots to delay them, these Centaurs swept on with a speed of invasion hitherto unknown. In 630 they had crossed the Caucasus, by 626 they were on the borders of Egypt. Psamtik I. succeeded in purchasing their retreat,[28] and they swept back again as swiftly as they came. They must have followed the old Assyrian war-paths of the eighth century, and, without foot-soldiers, had probably kept even more closely to the plains. In Palestine their way would lie, like Assyria’s, across Hauran, through the plain of Esdraelon, and down the Philistine coast, and in fact it is only on this line that there exists any possible trace of them.[29] But they shook the whole of Palestine into consternation. Though Judah among her hills escaped them, as she escaped the earlier campaigns of Assyria, they showed her the penal resources of her offended God. Once again the dark, sacred North was seen to be full of the possibilities of doom.

Behold, therefore, exactly the two conditions, ethical and political, which, as we saw, called forth the sudden prophets of the eighth century, and made them so sure of their message of judgment: on the one side Judah, her sins calling aloud for punishment; on the other side the forces of punishment swiftly drawing on. It was precisely at this juncture that prophecy again arose, and as Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah appeared in the end of the eighth century, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum and Jeremiah appeared in the end of the seventh. The coincidence is exact, and a remarkable confirmation of the truth which we deduced from the experience of Amos, that the assurance of the prophet in Israel arose from the coincidence of his conscience with his political observation. The justice of Jehovah demands His people’s chastisement, but see—the forces of chastisement are already upon the horizon. Zephaniah uses the same phrase as Amos: the Day of Jehovah, he says, is drawing near.

We are now in touch with Zephaniah, the first of our prophets, but, before listening to him, it will be well to complete our survey of those remaining years of the century in which he and his immediate successors laboured.

3.THE REST OF THE CENTURY (625—586): THE FALL OF
NINIVEH; NAHUM AND HABAKKUK.

Although the Scythians had vanished from the horizon of Palestine and the Assyrians came over it no more, the fateful North still lowered dark and turbulent. Yet the keen eyes of the watchmen in Palestine perceived that, for a time at least, the storm must break where it had gathered. It is upon Niniveh, not upon Jerusalem, that the prophetic passion of Nahum and Habakkuk is concentrated; the new day of the Lord is filled with the fate, not of Israel, but of Assyria.

For nearly two centuries Niniveh had been the capital and cynosure of Western Asia; for more than one she had set the fashions, the art, and even, to some extent, the religion of all the Semitic nations. Of late years, too, she had drawn to herself the world’s trade. Great roads from Egypt, from Persia and from the Ægean converged upon her, till like Imperial Rome she was filled with a vast motley of peoples, and men went forth from her to the ends of the earth. Under Assurbanipal travel and research had increased, and the city acquired renown as the centre of the world’s wisdom. Thus her size and glory, with all her details of rampart and tower, street, palace and temple, grew everywhere familiar. But the peoples gazed at her as those who had been bled to build her. The most remote of them had seen face to face on their own fields, trampling, stripping, burning, the warriors who manned her walls. She had dashed their little ones against the rocks. Their kings had been dragged from them and hung in cages about her gates. Their gods had lined the temples of her gods. Year by year they sent her their heavy tribute, and the bearers came back with fresh tales of her rapacious insolence. So she stood, bitterly clear to all men, in her glory and her cruelty! Their hate haunted her every pinnacle; and at last, when about 625 the news came that her frontier fortresses had fallen and the great city herself was being besieged, we can understand how her victims gloated on each possible stage of her fall, and saw her yield to one after another of the cruelties of battle, siege and storm, which for two hundred years she had inflicted on themselves. To such a vision the prophet Nahum gives voice, not on behalf of Israel alone, but of all the nations whom Niniveh had crushed.

It was obvious that the vengeance which Western Asia thus hailed upon Assyria must come from one or other of two groups of peoples, standing respectively to the north and to the south of her.

To the north, or north-east, between Mesopotamia and the Caspian, there were gathered a congeries of restless tribes known to the Assyrians as the Madai or Matai, the Medes. They are mentioned first by Shalmaneser II. in 840, and few of his successors do not record campaigns against them. The earliest notice of them in the Old Testament is in connection with the captives of Samaria, some of whom in 720 were settled among them.[30] These Medes were probably of Turanian stock, but by the end of the eighth century, if we are to judge from the names of some of their chiefs,[31] their most easterly tribes had already fallen under Aryan influence, spreading westward from Persia.[32] So led, they became united and formidable to Assyria. Herodotus relates that their King Phraortes, or Fravartis, actually attempted the siege of Niniveh, probably on the death of Assurbanipal in 625, but was slain.[33] His son Kyaxares, Kastarit or Uvakshathra, was forced by a Scythian invasion of his own country to withdraw his troops from Assyria; but having either bought off or assimilated the Scythian invaders, he returned in 608, with forces sufficient to overthrow the northern Assyrian fortresses and to invest Niniveh herself.

The other and southern group of peoples which threatened Assyria were Semitic. At their head were the Kasdim or Chaldeans.[34] This name appears for the first time in the Assyrian annals a little earlier than that of the Medes,[35] and from the middle of the ninth century onwards the people designated by it frequently engage the Assyrian arms. They were, to begin with, a few half-savage tribes to the south of Babylon, in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf; but they proved their vigour by the repeated lordship of all Babylonia and by inveterate rebellion against the monarchs of Niniveh. Before the end of the seventh century we find their names used by the prophets for the Babylonians as a whole. Assurbanipal, who was a patron of Babylonian culture, kept the country quiet during the last years of his reign, but his son Asshur-itil-ilani, upon his accession in 625, had to grant the viceroyalty to Nabopolassar the Chaldean with a considerable degree of independence. Asshur-itil-ilani was succeeded in a few years[36] by Sinsuriskin, the Sarakos of the Greeks, who preserved at least a nominal sovereignty over Babylon,[37] but Nabopolassar must already have cherished ambitions of succeeding the Assyrian in the empire of the world. He enjoyed sufficient freedom to organise his forces to that end.

These were the two powers which from north and south watched with impatience the decay of Assyria. That they made no attempt upon her between 625 and 608 was probably due to several causes: their jealousy of each other, the Medes’ trouble with the Scythians, Nabopolassar’s genius for waiting till his forces were ready, and above all the still considerable vigour of the Assyrian himself. The Lion, though old,[38] was not broken. His power may have relaxed in the distant provinces of his empire, though, if Budde be right about the date of Habakkuk,[39] the peoples of Syria still groaned under the thought of it; but his own land—his lair, as the prophets call it—was still terrible. It is true that, as Nahum perceives, the capital was no longer native and patriotic as it had been; the trade fostered by Assurbanipal had filled Niniveh with a vast and mercenary population, ready to break and disperse at the first breach in her walls. Yet Assyria proper was covered with fortresses, and the tradition had long fastened upon the peoples that Niniveh was impregnable. Hence the tension of those years. The peoples of Western Asia looked eagerly for their revenge; but the two powers which alone could accomplish this stood waiting—afraid of each other perhaps, but more afraid of the object of their common ambition.

It is said that Kyaxares and Nabopolassar at last came to an agreement;[40] but more probably the crisis was hastened by the appearance of another claimant for the coveted spoil. In 608 Pharaoh Necho went up against the king of Assyria towards the river Euphrates.[41] This Egyptian advance may have forced the hand of Kyaxares, who appears to have begun his investment of Niniveh a little after Necho defeated Josiah at Megiddo[42]. The siege is said to have lasted two years. Whether this included the delays necessary for the reduction of fortresses upon the great roads of approach to the Assyrian capital we do not know; but Niniveh’s own position, fortifications and resources may well account for the whole of the time. Colonel Billerbeck, a military expert, has suggested[43] that the Medes found it possible to invest the city only upon the northern and eastern sides. Down the west flows the Tigris, and across this the besieged may have been able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the fertile country beyond. Herodotus affirms that the Medes effected the capture of Niniveh by themselves,[44] and for this some recent evidence has been found,[45] so that another tradition that the Chaldeans were also actively engaged,[46] which has nothing to support it, may be regarded as false. Nabopolassar may still have been in name an Assyrian viceroy; yet, as Colonel Billerbeck points out, he had it in his power to make Kyaxares’ victory possible by holding the southern roads to Niniveh, detaching other viceroys of her provinces and so shutting her up to her own resources. But among other reasons which kept him away from the siege may have been the necessity of guarding against Egyptian designs on the moribund empire. Pharaoh Necho, as we know, was making for the Euphrates as early as 608. Now if Nabopolassar and Kyaxares had arranged to divide Assyria between them, then it is likely that they agreed also to share the work of making their inheritance sure, so that while Kyaxares overthrew Niniveh, Nabopolassar, or rather his son Nebuchadrezzar,[47] waited for and overthrew Pharaoh by Carchemish on the Euphrates. Consequently Assyria was divided between the Medes and the Chaldeans; the latter as her heirs in the south took over her title to Syria and Palestine.

The two prophets with whom we have to deal at this time are almost entirely engrossed with the fall of Assyria. Nahum exults in the destruction of Niniveh; Habakkuk sees in the Chaldeans nothing but the avengers of the peoples whom Assyria[48] had oppressed. For both these events are the close of an epoch: neither prophet looks beyond this. Nahum (not on behalf of Israel alone) gives expression to the epoch’s long thirst for vengeance on the tyrant; Habakkuk (if Budde’s reading of him be right[49]) states the problems with which its victorious cruelties had filled the pious mind—states the problem and beholds the solution in the Chaldeans. And, surely, the vengeance was so just and so ample, the solution so drastic and for the time complete, that we can well understand how two prophets should exhaust their office in describing such things, and feel no motive to look either deep into the moral condition of Israel, or far out into the future which God was preparing for His people. It might, of course, be said that the prophets’ silence on the latter subjects was due to their positions immediately after the great Reform of 621, when the nation, having been roused to an honest striving after righteousness, did not require prophetic rebuke, and when the success of so godly a prince as Josiah left no spiritual ambitions unsatisfied. But this (even if the dates of the two prophets were certain) is hardly probable; and the other explanation is sufficient. Who can doubt this who has realised the long epoch which then reached a crisis, or has been thrilled by the crash of the crisis itself? The fall of Niniveh was deafening enough to drown for the moment, as it does in Nahum, even a Hebrew’s clamant conscience of his country’s sin. The problems, which the long success of Assyrian cruelty had started, were old and formidable enough to demand statement and answer before either the hopes or the responsibilities of the future could find voice. The past also requires its prophets. Feeling has to be satisfied, and experience balanced, before the heart is willing to turn the leaf and read the page of the future.

Yet, through all this time of Assyria’s decline, Israel had her own sins, fears and convictions of judgment to come. The disappearance of the Scythians did not leave Zephaniah’s predictions of doom without means of fulfilment; nor did the great Reform of 621 remove the necessity of that doom. In the deepest hearts the assurance that Israel must be punished was by these things only confirmed. The prophetess Huldah, the first to speak in the name of the Lord after the Book of the Law was discovered, emphasised not the reforms which it enjoined but the judgments which it predicted. Josiah’s righteousness could at most ensure for himself a peaceful death: his people were incorrigible and doomed.[50] The reforms indeed proceeded, there was public and widespread penitence, idolatry was abolished. But those were only shallow pedants who put their trust in the possession of a revealed Law and purged Temple,[51] and who boasted that therefore Israel was secure. Jeremiah repeated the gloomy forecasts of Zephaniah and Huldah, and even before the wickedness of Jehoiakim’s reign proved the obduracy of Israel’s heart, he affirmed the imminence of the evil out of the north and the great destruction.[52] Of our three prophets in this period Zephaniah, though the earliest, had therefore the last word. While Nahum and Habakkuk were almost wholly absorbed with the epoch that is closing, he had a vision of the future. Is this why his book has been ranged among our Twelve after those of his slightly later contemporaries?

The precise course of events in Israel was this—and we must follow them, for among them we have to seek exact dates for Nahum and Habakkuk. In 621 the Book of the Law was discovered, and Josiah applied himself with thoroughness to the reforms which he had already begun. For thirteen years he seems to have had peace to carry them through. The heathen altars were thrown down, with all the high places in Judah and even some in Samaria. Images were abolished. The heathen priests were exterminated, with the wizards and soothsayers. The Levites, except the sons of Zadok, who alone were allowed to minister in the Temple, henceforth the only place of sacrifice, were debarred from priestly duties. A great passover was celebrated.[53] The king did justice and was the friend of the poor;[54] it went well with him and the people.[55] He extended his influence into Samaria; it is probable that he ventured to carry out the injunctions of Deuteronomy with regard to the neighbouring heathen.[56] Literature flourished: though critics have not combined upon the works to be assigned to this reign, they agree that a great many were produced in it. Wealth must have accumulated: certainly the nation entered the troubles of the next reign with an arrogant confidence that argues under Josiah the rapid growth of prosperity in every direction. Then of a sudden came the fatal year of 608. Pharaoh Necho appeared in Palestine[57] with an army destined for the Euphrates, and Josiah went up to meet him at Megiddo. His tactics are plain—it is the first strait on the land-road from Egypt to the Euphrates—but his motives are obscure. Assyria can hardly have been strong enough at this time to fling him as her vassal across the path of her ancient foe. He must have gone of himself. “His dream was probably to bring back the scattered remains of the northern kingdom to a pure worship, and to unite the whole people of Israel under the sceptre of the house of David; and he was not inclined to allow Egypt to cross his aspirations, and rob him of the inheritance which was falling to him from the dead hand of Assyria.”[58]

Josiah fell, and with him not only the liberty of his people, but the chief support of their faith. That the righteous king was cut down in the midst of his days and in defence of the Holy Land—what could this mean? Was it, then, vain to serve the Lord? Could He not defend His own? With some the disaster was a cause of sore complaint, and with others, perhaps, of open desertion from Jehovah.

But the extraordinary thing is, how little effect Josiah’s death seems to have had upon the people’s self-confidence at large, or upon their adherence to Jehovah. They immediately placed Josiah’s second son on the throne; but Necho, having got him by some means to his camp at Riblah between the Lebanons, sent him in fetters to Egypt, where he died, and established in his place Eliakim, his elder brother. On his accession Eliakim changed his name to Jehoiakim, a proof that Jehovah was still regarded as the sufficient patron of Israel; and the same blind belief that, for the sake of His Temple and of His Law, Jehovah would keep His people in security, continued to persevere in spite of Megiddo. It was a most immoral ease, and filled with injustice. Necho subjected the land to a fine. This was not heavy, but Jehoiakim, instead of paying it out of the royal treasures, exacted it from the people of the land,[59] and then employed the peace which it purchased in erecting a costly palace for himself by the forced labour of his subjects.[60] He was covetous, unjust and violently cruel. Like prince like people: social oppression prevailed, and there was a recrudescence of the idolatries of Manasseh’s time,[61] especially (it may be inferred) after Necho’s defeat at Carchemish in 605. That all this should exist along with a fanatic trust in Jehovah need not surprise us who remember the very similar state of the public mind in North Israel under Amos and Hosea. Jeremiah attacked it as they had done. Though Assyria was fallen, and Egypt was promising protection, Jeremiah predicted destruction from the north on Egypt and Israel alike. When at last the Egyptian defeat at Carchemish stirred some vague fears in the people’s hearts, Jeremiah’s conviction broke out into clear flame. For three-and-twenty years he had brought God’s word in vain to his countrymen. Now God Himself would act: Nebuchadrezzar was but His servant to lead Israel into captivity.[62]

The same year, 605 or 604, Jeremiah wrote all these things in a volume;[63] and a few months later, at a national fast, occasioned perhaps by the fear of the Chaldeans, Baruch, his secretary, read them in the house of the Lord, in the ears of all the people. The king was informed, the roll was brought to him, and as it was read, with his own hands he cut it up and burned it, three or four columns at a time. Jeremiah answered by calling down on Jehoiakim an ignominious death, and repeated the doom already uttered on the land. Another prophet, Urijah, had recently been executed for the same truth; but Jeremiah and Baruch escaped into hiding.

This was probably in 603, and for a little time Jehoiakim and the populace were restored to their false security by the delay of the Chaldeans to come south. Nebuchadrezzar was occupied in Babylon, securing his succession to his father. At last, either in 602 or more probably in 600, he marched into Syria, and Jehoiakim became his servant for three years.[64] In such a condition the Jewish state might have survived for at least another generation,[65] but in 599 or 597 Jehoiakim, with the madness of the doomed, held back his tribute. The revolt was probably instigated by Egypt, which, however, did not dare to support it. As in Isaiah’s time against Assyria, so now against Babylon, Egypt was a blusterer who blustered and sat still. She still helped in vain and to no purpose.[66] Nor could Judah count on the help of the other states of Palestine. They had joined Hezekiah against Sennacherib, but remembering perhaps how Manasseh had failed to help them against Assurbanipal, and that Josiah had carried things with a high hand towards them,[67] they obeyed Nebuchadrezzar’s command and raided Judah till he himself should have time to arrive.[68] Amid these raids the senseless Jehoiakim seems to have perished,[69] for when Nebuchadrezzar appeared before Jerusalem in 597, his son Jehoiachin, a youth of eighteen, had succeeded to the throne. The innocent reaped the harvest sown by the guilty. In the attempt (it would appear) to save his people from destruction,[70] Jehoiachin capitulated. But Nebuchadrezzar was not content with the person of the king: he deported to Babylon the court, a large number of influential persons, the mighty men of the land or what must have been nearly all the fighting men, with the necessary military artificers and swordsmiths. Priests also went, Ezekiel among them, and probably representatives of other classes not mentioned by the annalist. All these were the flower of the nation. Over what was left Nebuchadrezzar placed a son of Josiah on the throne who took the name of Zedekiah. Again with a little common-sense, the state might have survived; but it was a short respite. The new court began intrigues with Egypt, and Zedekiah, with the Ammonites and Tyre, ventured a revolt in 589. Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew it was in vain. Nebuchadrezzar marched on Jerusalem, and though for a time he had to raise the siege in order to defeat a force sent by Pharaoh Hophra, the Chaldean armies closed in again upon the doomed city. Her defence was stubborn; but famine and pestilence sapped it, and numbers fell away to the enemy. About the eighteenth month, the besiegers took the northern suburb and stormed the middle gate. Zedekiah and the army broke their lines only to be captured at Jericho. In a few weeks more the city was taken and given over to fire. Zedekiah was blinded, and with a large number of his people carried to Babylon. It was the end, for although a small community of Jews was left at Mizpeh under a Jewish viceroy and with Jeremiah to guide them, they were soon broken up and fled to Egypt. Judah had perished. Her savage neighbours, who had gathered with glee to the day of Jerusalem’s calamity, assisted the Chaldeans in capturing the fugitives, and Edomites came up from the south on the desolate land.

It has been necessary to follow so far the course of events, because of our prophets Zephaniah is placed in each of the three sections of Josiah’s reign, and by some even in Jehoiakim’s; Nahum has been assigned to different points between the eve of the first and the eve of the second siege of Niniveh; and Habakkuk has been placed by different critics in almost every year from 621 to the reign of Jehoiachin; while Obadiah, whom we shall find reasons for dating during the Exile, describes the behaviour of Edom at the final siege of Jerusalem. The next of the Twelve, Haggai, may have been born before the Exile, but did not prophesy till 520. Zechariah appeared the same year, Malachi not for half a century after. These three are prophets of the Persian period. With the approach of the Greeks Joel appears, then comes the prophecy which we find in the end of Zechariah’s book, and last of all the Book of Jonah. To all these post-exilic prophets we shall provide later on the necessary historical introductions.

ZEPHANIAH

Dies Iræ, Dies Illa!—ZEPH. i. 15.

“His book is the first tinging of prophecy with apocalypse: that is the moment which it supplies in the history of Israel’s religion.”

CHAPTER II

THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH

The Book of Zephaniah is one of the most difficult in the prophetic canon. The title is very generally accepted; the period from which chap. i. dates is recognised by practically all critics to be the reign of Josiah, or at least the last third of the seventh century. But after that doubts start, and we find present nearly every other problem of introduction.

To begin with, the text is very damaged. In some passages we may be quite sure that we have not the true text;[71] in others we cannot be sure that we have it,[72] and there are several glosses.[73]The bulk of the second chapter was written in the Qinah, or elegiac measure, but as it now stands the rhythm is very much broken. It is difficult to say whether this is due to the dilapidation of the original text or to wilful insertion of glosses and other later passages. The Greek version of Zephaniah possesses the same general features as that of other difficult prophets. Occasionally it enables us to correct the text; but by the time it was made the text must already have contained the same corruptions which we encounter, and the translators were ignorant besides of the meaning of some phrases which to us are plain.[74]

The difficulties of textual criticism as well as of translation are aggravated by the large number of words, grammatical forms and phrases which either happen very seldom in the Old Testament,[75] or nowhere else in it at all.[76] Of the rare words and phrases, a very few (as will be seen from the appended notes) are found in earlier writings. Indeed all that are found are from the authentic prophecies of Isaiah, with whose style and doctrine Zephaniah’s own exhibit most affinity. All the other rarities of vocabulary and grammar are shared only by later writers; and as a whole the language of Zephaniah exhibits symptoms which separate it by many years from the language of the prophets of the eighth century, and range it with that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Second Isaiah and still later literature. It may be useful to the student to collect in a note the most striking of these symptoms of the comparative lateness of Zephaniah’s dialect.[77]

We now come to the question of date, and we take, to begin with, the First Chapter. It was said above that critics agree as to the general period—between 639, when Josiah began to reign, and 600. But this period was divided into three very different sections, and each of these has received considerable support from modern criticism. The great majority of critics place the chapter in the early years of Josiah, before the enforcement of Deuteronomy and the great Reform in 621.[78] Others have argued for the later years of Josiah, 621—608, on the ground that the chapter implies that the great Reform has already taken place, and otherwise shows knowledge of Deuteronomy;[79] while some prefer the days of reaction under Jehoiakim, 608 ff.,[80] and assume that the phrase in the title, in the days of Josiah, is a late and erroneous inference from i. 4.

The evidence for the argument consists of the title and the condition of Judah reflected in the body of the chapter. The latter is a definite piece of oratory. Under the alarm of an immediate and general war, Zephaniah proclaims a vast destruction upon the earth. Judah must fall beneath it: the worshippers of Baal, of the host of heaven and of Milcom, the apostates from Jehovah, the princes and house of the king, the imitators of foreign fashions, and the forceful and fraudulent, shall be cut off in a great slaughter. Those who have grown sceptical and indifferent to Jehovah shall be unsettled by invasion and war. This shall be the Day of Jehovah, near and immediate, a day of battle and disaster on the whole land.

The conditions reflected are thus twofold—the idolatrous and sceptical state of the people, and an impending invasion. But these suit, more or less exactly, each of the three sections of our period. For Jeremiah distinctly states that he had to attack idolatry in Judah for twenty-three years, 627 to 604;[81] he inveighs against the falseness and impurity of the people alike before the great Reform, and after it while Josiah was still alive, and still more fiercely under Jehoiakim. And, while before 621 the great Scythian invasion was sweeping upon Palestine from the north, after 621, and especially after 604, the Babylonians from the same quarter were visibly threatening the land. But when looked at more closely, the chapter shows several features which suit the second section of our period less than they do the other two. The worship of the host of heaven, probably introduced under Manasseh, was put down by Josiah in 621; it revived under Jehoiakim,[82] but during the latter years of Josiah it cannot possibly have been so public as Zephaniah describes.[83] Other reasons which have been given for those years are inconclusive[84]—the chapter, for instance, makes no indubitable reference to Deuteronomy or the Covenant of 621—and on the whole we may leave the end of Josiah’s reign out of account. Turning to the third section, Jehoiakim’s reign, we find one feature of the prophecy which suits it admirably. The temper described in ver. 12—men who are settled on their lees, who say in their heart, Jehovah doeth neither good nor evil—is the kind of temper likely to have been produced among the less earnest adherents of Jehovah by the failure of the great Reform in 621 to effect either the purity or the prosperity of the nation. But this is more than counterbalanced by the significant exception of the king from the condemnation which ver. 8 passes on the princes and the sons of the king. Such an exception could not have been made when Jehoiakim was on the throne; it points almost conclusively to the reign of the good Josiah. And with this agrees the title of the chapter—in the days of Josiah.[85] We are, therefore, driven back to the years of Josiah before 621. In these we find no discrepancy either with the chapter itself, or with its title. The southward march of the Scythians,[86] between 630 and 625, accounts for Zephaniah’s alarm of a general war, including the invasion of Judah; the idolatrous practices which he describes may well have been those surviving from the days of Manasseh,[87] and not yet reached by the drastic measures of 621; the temper of scepticism and hopelessness condemned by ver. 12 was possible among those adherents of Jehovah who had hoped greater things from the overthrow of Amon than the slow and small reforms of the first fifteen years of Josiah’s reign. Nor is a date before 621 made at all difficult by the genealogy of Zephaniah in the title. If, as is probable,[88] the Hezekiah given as his great-great-grandfather be Hezekiah the king, and if he died about 695, and Manasseh, his successor, who was then twelve, was his eldest son, then by 630 Zephaniah cannot have been much more than twenty years of age, and not more than twenty-five by the time the Scythian invasion had passed away.[89] It is therefore by no means impossible to suppose that he prophesied before 625; and besides, the data of the genealogy in the title are too precarious to make them valid, as against an inference from the contents of the chapter itself.

The date, therefore, of the first chapter of Zephaniah may be given as about 625 B.C., and probably rather before than after that year, as the tide of Scythian invasion has apparently not yet ebbed.

The other two chapters have within recent years been almost wholly denied to Zephaniah. Kuenen doubted chap. iii. 9–20. Stade makes all chap. iii. post-exilic, and suspects ii. 1–3, 11. A very thorough examination of them has led Schwally[90] to assign to exilic or post-exilic times the whole of the little sections comprising them, with the possible exception of chap. iii. 1–7, which “may be” Zephaniah’s. His essay has been subjected to a searching and generally hostile criticism by a number of leading scholars;[91] and he has admitted the inconclusiveness of some of his reasons.[92]

Chap. ii. 1–4 is assigned by Schwally to a date later than Zephaniah’s, principally because of the term meekness (ver. 3), which is a favourite one with post-exilic writers. He has been sufficiently answered;[93] and the close connection of vv. 1–3 with chap. i. has been clearly proved.[94] Chap. ii. 4–15 is the passage in elegiac measure but broken, an argument for the theory that insertions have been made in it. The subject is a series of foreign nations—Philistia (5–7), Moab and Ammon (8–10), Egypt (11) and Assyria (13–15). The passage has given rise to many doubts; every one must admit the difficulty of coming to a conclusion as to its authenticity. On the one hand, the destruction just predicted is so universal that, as Professor Davidson says, we should expect Zephaniah to mention other nations than Judah.[95] The concluding oracle on Niniveh must have been published before 608, and even Schwally admits that it may be Zephaniah’s own. But if this be so, then we may infer that the first of the oracles on Philistia is also Zephaniah’s, for both it and the oracle on Assyria are in the elegiac measure, a fact which makes it probable that the whole passage, however broken and intruded upon, was originally a unity. Nor is there anything in the oracle on Philistia incompatible with Zephaniah’s date. Philistia lay on the path of the Scythian invasion; the phrase in ver. 7, shall turn their captivity, is not necessarily exilic. As Cornill, too, points out, the expression in ver. 13, He will stretch out His hand to the north, implies that the prophecy has already looked in other directions. There remains the passage between the oracles on Philistia and Assyria. This is not in the elegiac measure. Its subject is Moab and Ammon, who were not on the line of the Scythian invasion, and Wellhausen further objects to it, because the attitude to Israel of the two peoples whom it describes is that which is attributed to them only just before the Exile and surprises us in Josiah’s reign. Dr. Davidson meets this objection by pointing out that, just as in Deuteronomy, so here, Moab and Ammon are denounced, while Edom, which in Deuteronomy is spoken of with kindness, is here not denounced at all. A stronger objection to the passage is that ver. 11 predicts the conversion of the nations, while ver. 12 makes them the prey of Jehovah’s sword, and in this ver. 12 follows on naturally to ver. 7. On this ground as well as on the absence of the elegiac measure the oracle on Moab and Ammon is strongly to be suspected.

On the whole, then, the most probable conclusion is that chap. ii. 4–15 was originally an authentic oracle of Zephaniah’s in the elegiac metre, uttered at the same date as chap. i.—ii. 3, the period of the Scythian invasion, though from a different standpoint; and that it has suffered considerable dilapidation (witness especially vv. 6 and 14), and probably one great intrusion, vv. 8–10.

There remains the Third Chapter. The authenticity has been denied by Schwally, who transfers the whole till after the Exile. But the chapter is not a unity.[96] In the first place, it falls into two sections, vv. 1–13 and 14–20. There is no reason to take away the bulk of the first section from Zephaniah. As Schwally admits, the argument here is parallel to that of chap. i.—ii. 3. It could hardly have been applied to Jerusalem during or after the Exile, but suits her conditions before her fall. Schwally’s linguistic objections to a pre-exilic date have been answered by Budde.[97] He holds ver. 6 to be out of place and puts it after ver. 8, and this may be. But as it stands it appeals to the impenitent Jews of ver. 5 with the picture of the judgment God has already completed upon the nations, and contrasts with ver. 7, in which God says that He trusts Israel will repent. Vv. 9 and 10 are, we shall see, obviously an intrusion, as Budde maintains and Davidson admits to be possible.[98]

We reach more certainty when we come to the second section of the chapter, vv. 14–20. Since Kuenen it has been recognised by the majority of critics that we have here a prophecy from the end of the Exile or after the Return. The temper has changed. Instead of the austere and sombre outlook of chap. i.—ii. 3 and chap. iii. 1–13, in which the sinful Israel is to be saved indeed, but only as by fire, we have a triumphant prophecy of her recovery from all affliction (nothing is said of her sin) and of her glory among the nations of the world. To put it otherwise, while the genuine prophecies of Zephaniah almost grudgingly allow a door of escape to a few righteous and humble Israelites from a judgment which is to fall alike on Israel and the Gentiles, chap. iii. 14–20 predicts Israel’s deliverance from her Gentile oppressors, her return from captivity and the establishment of her renown over the earth. The language, too, has many resemblances to that of Second Isaiah.[99] Obviously therefore we have here, added to the severe prophecies of Zephaniah, such a more hopeful, peaceful epilogue as we saw was added, during the Exile or immediately after it, to the despairing prophecies of Amos.

CHAPTER III

THE PROPHET AND THE REFORMERS

ZEPHANIAH i.—ii. 3

Towards the year 625, when King Josiah had passed out of his minority,[100] and was making his first efforts at religious reform, prophecy, long slumbering, awoke again in Israel.

Like the king himself, its first heralds were men in their early youth. In 627 Jeremiah calls himself but a boy, and Zephaniah can hardly have been out of his teens.[101] For the sudden outbreak of these young lives there must have been a large reservoir of patience and hope gathered in the generation behind them. So Scripture itself testifies. To Jeremiah it was said: Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I consecrated thee.[102] In an age when names were bestowed only because of their significance,[103] both prophets bore that of Jehovah in their own. So did Jeremiah’s father, who was of the priests of Anathoth. Zephaniah’s “forbears” are given for four generations, and with one exception they also are called after Jehovah: The Word of Jehovah which came to Ṣephanyah, son of Kushi, son of Gedhalyah, son of Amaryah, son of Hizḳiyah, in the days of Joshiyahu,[104] Amon’s son, king of Judah. Zephaniah’s great-great-grandfather Hezekiah was in all probability the king.[105] His father’s name Kushi, or Ethiop, is curious. If we are right, that Zephaniah was a young man towards 625, then Kushi must have been born towards 663, about the time of the conflicts between Assyria and Egypt, and it is possible that, as Manasseh and the predominant party in Judah so closely hung upon and imitated Assyria, the adherents of Jehovah put their hope in Egypt, whereof, it may be, this name Kushi is a token.[106] The name Zephaniah itself, meaning Jehovah hath hidden, suggests the prophet’s birth in the “killing-time” of Manasseh. There was at least one other contemporary of the same name—a priest executed by Nebuchadrezzar.[107]

Of the adherents of Jehovah, then, and probably of royal descent, Zephaniah lived in Jerusalem. We descry him against her, almost as clearly as we descry Isaiah. In the glare and smoke of the conflagration which his vision sweeps across the world, only her features stand out definite and particular: the flat roofs with men and women bowing in the twilight to the host of heaven, the crowds of priests, the nobles and their foreign fashions; the Fishgate, the New or Second Town, where the rich lived, the Heights to which building had at last spread, and between them the hollow Mortar, with its markets, Phœnician merchants and money-dealers. In the first few verses of Zephaniah we see almost as much of Jerusalem as in the whole book either of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

For so young a man the vision of Zephaniah may seem strangely dark and final. Yet not otherwise was Isaiah’s inaugural vision, and as a rule it is the young and not the old whose indignation is ardent and unsparing. Zephaniah carries this temper to the extreme. There is no great hope in his book, hardly any tenderness and never a glimpse of beauty. A townsman, Zephaniah has no eye for nature; not only is no fair prospect described by him, he has not even a single metaphor drawn from nature’s loveliness or peace. He is pitilessly true to his great keynotes: I will sweep, sweep from the face of the ground; He will burn, burn up everything. No hotter book lies in all the Old Testament. Neither dew nor grass nor tree nor any blossom lives in it, but it is everywhere fire, smoke and darkness, drifting chaff, ruins, nettles, saltpits, and owls and ravens looking from the windows of desolate palaces. Nor does Zephaniah foretell the restoration of nature in the end of the days. There is no prospect of a redeemed and fruitful land, but only of a group of battered and hardly saved characters: a few meek and righteous are hidden from the fire and creep forth when it is over. Israel is left a poor and humble folk. No prophet is more true to the doctrine of the remnant, or more resolutely refuses to modify it. Perhaps he died young.

The full truth, however, is that Zephaniah, though he found his material in the events of his own day, tears himself loose from history altogether. To the earlier prophets the Day of the Lord, the crisis of the world, is a definite point in history: full of terrible, divine events, yet “natural” ones—battle, siege, famine, massacre and captivity. After it history is still to flow on, common days come back and Israel pursue their way as a nation. But to Zephaniah the Day of the Lord begins to assume what we call the “supernatural.” The grim colours are still woven of war and siege, but mixed with vague and solemn terrors from another sphere, by which history appears to be swallowed up, and it is only with an effort that the prophet thinks of a rally of Israel beyond. In short, with Zephaniah the Day of the Lord tends to become the Last Day. His book is the first tinging of prophecy with apocalypse: that is the moment which it supplies in the history of Israel’s religion. And, therefore, it was with a true instinct that the great Christian singer of the Last Day took from Zephaniah his keynote. The “Dies Iræ, Dies Illa” of Thomas of Celano is but the Vulgate translation of Zephaniah’s A day of wrath is that day.[108]

Nevertheless, though the first of apocalyptic writers, Zephaniah does not allow himself the license of apocalypse. As he refuses to imagine great glory for the righteous, so he does not dwell on the terrors of the wicked. He is sober and restrained, a matter-of-fact man, yet with power of imagination, who, amidst the vague horrors he summons, delights in giving a sharp realistic impression. The Day of the Lord, he says, what is it? A strong man—there!—crying bitterly.[109]

It is to the fierce ardour, and to the elemental interests of the book, that we owe the absence of two features of prophecy which are so constant in the prophets of the eighth century. Firstly, Zephaniah betrays no interest in the practical reforms which (if we are right about the date) the young king, his contemporary, had already started.[110] There was a party of reform, the party had a programme, the programme was drawn from the main principles of prophecy and was designed to put these into practice. And Zephaniah was a prophet—and ignored them. This forms the dramatic interest of his book. Here was a man of the same faith which kings, priests and statesmen were striving to realise in public life, in the assured hope—as is plain from the temper of Deuteronomy—that the nation as a whole would be reformed and become a very great nation, righteous and victorious. All this he ignored, and gave his own vision of the future: Israel is a brand plucked from the burning; a very few meek and righteous are saved from the conflagration of a whole world. Why? Because for Zephaniah the elements were loose, and when the elements were loose what was the use of talking about reforms? The Scythians were sweeping down upon Palestine, with enough of God’s wrath in them to destroy a people still so full of idolatry as Israel was; and if not the Scythians, then some other power in that dark, rumbling North which had ever been so full of doom. Let Josiah try to reform Israel, but it was neither Josiah’s nor Israel’s day that was falling. It was the Day of the Lord, and when He came it was neither to reform nor to build up Israel, but to make visitation and to punish in His wrath for the unbelief and wickedness of which the nation was still full.

An analogy to this dramatic opposition between prophet and reformer may be found in our own century. At its crisis, in 1848, there were many righteous men rich in hope and energy. The political institutions of Europe were being rebuilt. In our own land there were great measures for the relief of labouring children and women, the organisation of labour and the just distribution of wealth. But Carlyle that year held apart from them all, and, though a personal friend of many of the reformers, counted their work hopeless: society was too corrupt, the rudest forces were loose, “Niagara” was near. Carlyle was proved wrong and the reformers right, but in the analogous situation of Israel the reformers were wrong and the prophet right. Josiah’s hope and daring were overthrown at Megiddo, and, though the Scythians passed away, Zephaniah’s conviction of the sin and doom of Israel was fulfilled, not forty years later, in the fall of Jerusalem and the great Exile.

Again, to the same elemental interests, as we may call them, is due the absence from Zephaniah’s pages of all the social and individual studies which form the charm of other prophets. With one exception, there is no analysis of character, no portrait, no satire. But the exception is worth dwelling upon: it describes the temper equally abhorred by both prophet and reformer—that of the indifferent and stagnant man. Here we have a subtle and memorable picture of character, which is not without its warnings for our own time.

Zephaniah heard God say: And it shall be at that time that I will search out Jerusalem with lights, and I will make visitation upon the men who are become stagnant upon their lees, who say in their hearts, Jehovah doeth no good and doeth no evil.[111] The metaphor is clear. New wine was left upon its lees only long enough to fix its colour and body.[112] If not then drawn off it grew thick and syrupy—sweeter indeed than the strained wine, and to the taste of some more pleasant, but feeble and ready to decay. “To settle upon one’s lees” became a proverb for sloth, indifference and the muddy mind. Moab hath been at ease from his youth and hath settled upon his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel; therefore his taste stands in him and his scent is not changed.[113] The characters stigmatised by Zephaniah are also obvious. They were a precipitate from the ferment of fifteen years back. Through the cruel days of Manasseh and Amon hope had been stirred and strained, emptied from vessel to vessel, and so had sprung sparkling and keen into the new days of Josiah. But no miracle came, only ten years of waiting for the king’s majority and five more of small, tentative reforms. Nothing divine happened. There were but the ambiguous successes of a small party who had secured the king for their principles. The court was still full of foreign fashions, and idolatry was rank upon the housetops. Of course disappointment ensued—disappointment and listlessness. The new security of life became a temptation; persecution ceased, and religious men lived again at ease. So numbers of eager and sparkling souls, who had been in the front of the movement, fell away into a selfish and idle obscurity. The prophet hears God say, I must search Jerusalem with lights in order to find them. They had “fallen from the van and the freemen”; they had “sunk to the rear and the slaves,” where they wallowed in the excuse that Jehovah Himself would do nothing—neither good, therefore it is useless to attempt reform like Josiah and his party, nor evil, therefore Zephaniah’s prophecy of destruction is also vain. Exactly the same temper was encountered by Mazzini in the second stage of his career. Many of those, who with him had eagerly dreamt of a free Italy, fell away when the first revolt failed—fell away not merely into weariness and fear, but, as he emphasises, into the very two tempers which are described by Zephaniah, scepticism and self-indulgence.

All this starts questions for ourselves. Here is evidently the same public temper, which at all periods provokes alike the despair of the reformer and the indignation of the prophet: the criminal apathy of the well-to-do classes sunk in ease and religious indifference. We have to-day the same mass of obscure, nameless persons, who oppose their almost unconquerable inertia to every movement of reform, and are the drag upon all vital and progressive religion. The great causes of God and Humanity are not defeated by the hot assaults of the Devil but by the slow, crushing, glacier-like mass of thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. God’s causes are never destroyed by being blown up, but by being sat upon. It is not the violent and anarchical whom we have to fear in the war for human progress, but the slow, the staid, the respectable. And the danger of these does not lie in their stupidity. Notwithstanding all their religious profession, it lies in their real scepticism. Respectability may be the precipitate of unbelief. Nay, it is that, however religious its mask, wherever it is mere comfort, decorousness and conventionality; where, though it would abhor articulately confessing that God does nothing, it virtually means so—says so (as Zephaniah puts it) in its heart, by refusing to share manifest opportunities of serving Him, and covers its sloth and its fear by sneering that God is not with the great crusades for freedom and purity to which it is summoned. In these ways, Respectability is the precipitate which unbelief naturally forms in the selfish ease and stillness of so much of our middle-class life. And that is what makes mere respectability so dangerous. Like the unshaken, unstrained wine to which the prophet compares its obscure and muddy comfort, it tends to decay. To some extent our respectable classes are just the dregs and lees of our national life; like all dregs, they are subject to corruption. A great sermon could be preached on the putrescence of respectability—how the ignoble comfort of our respectable classes and their indifference to holy causes lead to sensuality, and poison the very institutions of the Home and the Family, on which they pride themselves. A large amount of the licentiousness of the present day is not that of outlaw and disordered lives, but is bred from the settled ease and indifference of many of our middle-class families.

It is perhaps the chief part of the sin of the obscure units, which form these great masses of indifference, that they think they escape notice and cover their individual responsibility. At all times many have sought obscurity, not because they are humble, but because they are slothful, cowardly or indifferent. Obviously it is this temper which is met by the words, I will search out Jerusalem with lights. None of us shall escape because we have said, “I will go with the crowd,” or “I am a common man and have no right to thrust myself forward.” We shall be followed and judged, each of us for his and her personal attitude to the great movements of our time. These things are not too high for us: they are our duty; and we cannot escape our duty by slinking into the shadow.

For all this wickedness and indifference Zephaniah sees prepared the Day of the Lord—near, hastening and very terrible. It sweeps at first in vague desolation and ruin of all things, but then takes the outlines of a solemn slaughter-feast for which Jehovah has consecrated the guests, the dim unnamed armies from the north. Judah shall be invaded, and they that are at ease, who say Jehovah does nothing, shall be unsettled and routed. One vivid trait comes in like a screech upon the hearts of a people unaccustomed for years to war. Hark, Jehovah’s Day! cries the prophet. A strong man—there!—crying bitterly. From this flash upon the concrete, he returns to a great vague terror, in which earthly armies merge in heavenly; battle, siege, storm and darkness are mingled, and destruction is spread abroad upon the whole earth. The first shades of Apocalypse are upon us.

We may now take the full text of this strong and significant prophecy. We have already given the title. Textual emendations and other points are explained in footnotes.

I will sweep, sweep away everything from the face of the ground—oracle of Jehovah—sweep man and beast, sweep the fowl of the heaven and the fish of the sea, and I will bring to ruin[114] the wicked and cut off the men of wickedness from the ground—oracle of Jehovah. And I will stretch forth My hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off from this place the remnant[115] of the Baal,[116] the names[117] of the priestlings with the priests, and them who upon the housetops bow themselves to the host of heaven, and them who...[118] swear by their Melech,[119] and them who have turned from following Jehovah, and who do not seek Jehovah nor have inquired of Him.

Silence for the Lord Jehovah! For near is Jehovah’s Day. Jehovah has prepared a[120] slaughter, He has consecrated His guests.

And it shall be in Jehovah’s day of slaughter that I will make visitation upon the princes and the house[121] of the king, and upon all who array themselves in foreign raiment; and I will make visitation upon all who leap over the threshold[122] on that day, who fill their lord’s house full of violence and fraud.

And on that day—oracle of Jehovah—there shall be a noise of crying from the Fishgate, and wailing from the Mishneh,[123] and great havoc on the Heights. Howl, O dwellers in the Mortar,[124] for undone are all the merchant folk,[125] cut off are all the money-dealers.[126]

And in that time it shall be, that I will search Jerusalem with lanterns, and make visitation upon the men who are become stagnant upon their lees, who in their hearts say, Jehovah doeth no good and doeth no evil.[127] Their substance shall be for spoil, and their houses for wasting … . [128]

Near is the great Day of Jehovah, near and very speedy.[129] Hark, the Day of Jehovah! A strong man—there!—crying bitterly!

A day of wrath is that Day![130] Day of siege and blockade, day of stress and distress,[131] day of darkness and murk, day of cloud and heavy mist, day of the war-horn and battle-roar, up against the fenced cities and against the highest turrets! And I will beleaguer men, and they shall walk like the blind, for they have sinned against Jehovah; and poured out shall their blood be like dust, and the flesh of them like dung. Even their silver, even their gold shall not avail to save them in the day of Jehovah’s wrath,[132] and in the fire of His zeal shall all the earth be devoured, for destruction, yea,[133] sudden collapse shall He make of all the inhabitants of the earth.

Upon this vision of absolute doom there follows[134] a qualification for the few meek and righteous. They may be hidden on the day of the Lord’s anger; but even for them escape is only a possibility. Note the absence of all mention of the Divine mercy as the cause of deliverance. Zephaniah has no gospel of that kind. The conditions of escape are sternly ethical—meekness, the doing of justice and righteousness. So austere is our prophet.

… ,[135] O people unabashed![136] before that ye become as the drifting chaff, before the anger of Jehovah come upon you,[137] before there come upon you the day of Jehovah’s wrath;[138] seek Jehovah, all ye meek of the land who do His ordinance,[139] seek righteousness, seek meekness, peradventure ye may hide yourselves in the day of Jehovah’s wrath.

CHAPTER IV

NINIVE DELENDA

ZEPHANIAH ii. 4–15

There now come a series of oracles on foreign nations, connected with the previous prophecy by the conjunction for, and detailing the worldwide judgment which it had proclaimed. But though dated from the same period as that prophecy, circa 626, these oracles are best treated by themselves.[140]

These oracles originally formed one passage in the well-known Qinah or elegiac measure; but this has suffered sadly both by dilapidation and rebuilding. How mangled the text is may be seen especially from vv. 6 and 14, where the Greek gives us some help in restoring it. The verses (8–11) upon Moab and Ammon cannot be reduced to the metre which both precedes and follows them. Probably, therefore, they are a later addition: nor did Moab and Ammon lie upon the way of the Scythians, who are presumably the invaders pictured by the prophet.[141]

The poem begins with Philistia and the sea-coast, the very path of the Scythian raid.[142] Evidently the latter is imminent, the Philistine cities are shortly to be taken and the whole land reduced to grass. Across the emptied strip the long hope of Israel springs sea-ward; but—mark!—not yet with a vision of the isles beyond. The prophet is satisfied with reaching the edge of the Promised Land: by the sea shall they feed[143] their flocks.

For Gaza forsaken shall be,

Ashḳ’lôn a desert.

Ashdod—by noon shall they rout her,

And Eḳron be torn up![144]

Ah! woe, dwellers of the sea-shore,

Folk of Kerēthim.

The word of Jehovah against thee, Kĕna‘an,[145]

Land of the Philistines!

And I destroy thee to the last inhabitant,[146]

And Kereth shall become shepherds’ cots,[147]

And folds for flocks.

And the coast[148] for the remnant of Judah’s house;

By the sea[149] shall they feed.

In Ashḳelon’s houses at even shall they couch;

. . . . . .[150]

For Jehovah their God shall visit them,

And turn their captivity.[151]

There comes now an oracle upon Moab and Ammon (vv. 8–11). As already said, it is not in the elegiac measure which precedes and follows it, while other features cast a doubt upon its authenticity. Like other oracles on the same peoples, this denounces the loud-mouthed arrogance of the sons of Moab and Ammon.

I have heard[152] the reviling of Moab and the insults of the sons of Ammon, who have reviled My people and vaunted themselves upon their[153] border. Wherefore as I live, saith Jehovah of Hosts, God of Israel, Moab shall become as Sodom, and Ammon’s sons as Gomorrah—the possession[154] of nettles, and saltpits,[155] and a desolation for ever; the remnant of My people shall spoil them, and the rest of My nation possess them. This to them for their arrogance, because they reviled, and vaunted themselves against, the people of[156] Jehovah of Hosts. Jehovah showeth Himself terrible[157] against them, for He hath made lean[158] all gods of earth, that all the coasts of the nations may worship Him, every man from his own place.[159]

The next oracle is a very short one (ver. 12) upon Egypt, which after its long subjection to Ethiopic dynasties is called, not Miṣraim, but Kush, or Ethiopia. The verse follows on naturally to ver. 7, but is not reducible to the elegiac measure.

Also ye, O Kushites, are the slain of My sword.[160]

The elegiac measure is now renewed[161] in an oracle against Assyria, the climax and front of heathendom (vv. 13–15). It must have been written before 608: there is no reason to doubt that it is Zephaniah’s.

And may He stretch out His hand against the North,

And destroy Asshur;

And may He turn Niniveh to desolation,

Dry as the desert.

And herds shall couch in her midst.

Every beast of .… .[162]

Yea, pelican and bittern[163] shall roost on the capitals;

The owl shall hoot in the window,

The raven on the doorstep.

. . . . .[164]

Such is the City, the Jubilant,

She that sitteth at ease,

She that saith in her heart, I am

And there is none else!

How hath she become desolation!

A lair of beasts.

Every one passing by her hisses,