Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

the hands of Ochus, and 'when the Sidonians saw that the enemy had entered, they shut themselves up, with their wives and their children, in their houses, and set them on fire, and so were all consumed together. Over 40,000 persons, it is said, perished in the flames. After more than one campaign against Egypt, Ochus succeeded in reconquering it. The Egyptians were severely treated; the walls of their most important towns were demolished; their temples were plundered; their sacred animals were killed. We are therefore the more ready to believe a stray notice of a late historian, who tells us that Ochus dealt cruelly with the Jews.

Either soon after the fall of Sidon, or during a later and final campaign against Egypt, or possibly on both occasions, the Persian army ravaged Judæa and captured Jerusalem. Many Jews were transported, so we are told, to Hyrcania, on the Caspian Sea, and to Babylonia. Moreover, from certain passages in the Book of Isaiah (and, as some would add, from certain passages in the Psalter), taken in conjunction with a certain passage in the historian Josephus, it would seem that Ochus or his general Bagoas treated the temple of Jerusalem even as he had treated the temples of Egypt. It is possible that the Judæan temple was not only plundered and desecrated, but even destroyed and burnt. The date for this terrible event, of which some scholars suppose that echoes have survived to us in mournful prayer and song, would be about 350 B.C.

§3. A poem of the Persian period.-Let us listen to a passage from the Book of Isaiah (it is not a prophecy but an invocation) which has been attributed to this period. It is rendered and arranged according to the translation and metrical analysis of the distinguished Hebrew scholar, Professor Duhm. The dots, as used here, signify lines or parts of lines, which, on metrical and other grounds, have, in Duhm's opinion, fallen out from the difficult and often corrupt Hebrew text.

I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the Lord,
And his famous deeds,

According to all that he hath wrought for us,

The Lord great in goodness,

What he hath wrought for us according to his mercies, And according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. For he said, Surely they are my people,

Children that will not lie;

So he became their saviour
From all their affliction.

A SONG OF PRAYER

5

No angel and no messenger,-
His presence saved them;

In his love and in his pity

He redeemed them,

And he bare them and carried them

All the days of old.

But they rebelled and grieved

His holy spirit;

Therefore he was turned to be their enemy,
He fought against them.

[Israel] remembereth the days of old,

Where is he that brought up out of the sea
The shepherd of his flock?

Where is he that put within their midst
His holy spirit?

Who made to go at the right hand of Moses
His glorious arm:

Who divided the waters before them,

To make himself a name:

Who made them pass through the deeps,
As the horse in the prairie,

So that they did not stumble, like the oxen
Which go down into the valley?

The Spirit of the Lord

Brought them to their rest

So didst thou lead thy people,

to make thyself

A glorious name.

Look down from heaven, and behold
From thy holy habitation:
Where is thy zeal and thy strength,
The crying of thy heart?
Do not restrain thy mercy,
For thou art our father,
For Abraham is ignorant of us,

And Israel knoweth us not;

Thou, O Lord, art our father,

Our redeemer from of old thy name!

O Lord, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways,
And hardened our heart from thy fear?

Return for thy servants' sake,

The tribes of thine inheritance.

But for a short time have we possessed thy holy city;
Our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary.

We are become like those over whom thou hast never ruled,
Over whom thy name hath not been called.

Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, and come down, That the mountains might shake at thy presence,

As fire kindleth brushwood,

Or as fire causeth water to boil,

To make thy name known to thine adversaries,
That nations might tremble before thee,

While thou didst terrible things which we looked not for,
And of which from of old men have not known.

Ear hath not heard,

Eye hath not seen,

A god beside thee

Who saveth them that wait for him.

Thou meetest them that work righteousness,
That remember thy ways:

Behold, thou wast wroth, and we sinned,

[blocks in formation]

And we all became like the unclean,

And all our righteousness like filthy rags; We all faded away like the leaf,

Our iniquities, like the wind, bore us away. And there is none that calleth on thy name, That stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: For thou hast hid thy face from us,

And had consumed us, because of our iniquities.

But, now, O Lord, thou art (still) our father,

[ocr errors]

We are the clay, and thou art our potter;

We are all the work of thy hand.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

7

Be not wroth over much, O Lord,
Neither remember iniquity for ever;
Behold, see, we beseech thee,

We are all thy people.

Thy holy cities are a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation.
Our holy and our beautiful house,
Where our fathers praised thee,
Is burned up with fire,

And all our pleasant things are laid waste.

Despite such things, wilt thou refrain thyself, O Lord?
Wilt thou hold thy peace and afflict us very sore?

The curious words, 'Why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear?' are partly to be explained by the old belief and illusion that suffering must necessarily indicate sin, and partly by an actual consciousness of wrongdoing, such as every community or individual must or ought to feel. Sometimes, however, the writers of this and subsequent periods maintain their innocence, or even their righteousness, by which we are to understand that, in comparison with their heathen oppressors, the Jews considered themselves on a higher plane both of religion and of morality. They were probably right in both respects, but the frequent sense of it engendered a good deal of religious pride and spiritual conceit which reacted with evil issues upon the national character and policy. Yet it also gave the Jews a certain lofty and ideal standard of conduct which has greatly mitigated the degrading influences of long continued persecutions. So strangely mixed in their results for good and evil are the partly true and partly false feelings of the human heart.

§ 4. The conquests of Alexander the Great.-It was not without a motive that, a few pages back, I made bare mention of some important events which happened in Greece during the Persian rule of Judæa. It is always interesting to bring the history of different races together in this way. To remember that Solon was a contemporary of Jeremiah, Peisistratus of the Second Isaiah, or Pericles of Nehemiah, is stimulating and suggestive to the historical imagination. But in the fourth century B.C. the history of Hellas becomes interconnected with the history of Palestine, and therefore the affairs of Greece are of direct importance for the historian of Judæa. That second of August, 338 B. C., which witnessed the battle of Chaeroneia, was a day of

fateful issues for Asia as well as for Greece. In the following year, while Philip of Macedon was making vast preparations for the invasion of Persia, Artaxerxes Ochus was murdered by the instigation of his general Bagoas. The youngest son of Ochus, Arses by name, was placed by Bagoas as a puppet king upon the throne. His reign was short, for in 335 he too shared his father's fate, and Bagoas then set up Darius Kodomannus, a nephew or grandnephew of Artaxerxes II, as the new king. He was the last Achaemenid, the last descendant of Cyrus, to occupy the throne of Persia.

Meanwhile in 336 Philip had fallen a victim to the assassin's knife, and his son Alexander, a youth of twenty, destined to print so imperishable an impress upon the world's history, became ruler of Macedon.

This is not the place to chronicle his story. After the battle of Issus in the year 333 B. C., Alexander marched southwards into Syria and Phoenicia. Only Tyre and Gaza offered a vain resistance, and by the close of the following year the young hero was undisputed master of Egypt and of Palestine.

Judæa shared the fate of every other Persian province. It would appear, however, that Alexander treated the Jews with considerable favour. It was part of his policy to conciliate the former subjects of Persia, and especially to respect the various religions of his huge and heterogeneous empire. The Egyptians no less than the Jews welcomed the change from Ochus to Alexander.

Professor Mahaffy believes that there was a special reason for the favour which Alexander is reported to have shown towards the Jews. The Jews outside Judæa were already no less, perhaps even more, numerous than the Jews at home. Their communities, scattered all over Mesopotamia and Media, constituted the so-called diaspora or dispersion (from the Greek verb diaspeirein, to scatter). Such Jews were, as Professor Mahaffy says, 'in frequent contact with Jerusalem, and made regular voyages to its temple. Finding the importance of friends, who spoke a common language, in every foreign city, they opened their eyes to the advantages of this scattered existence, and spread along coasts and islands, perhaps in the wake of the Phoenicians, so that in Alexander's day they were already a widely-known race. Hence to an invader of Asia, who had no maps, no full information as to the routes and resources for feeding his army, no organized system of interpreters, these Jews were the natural intelligence department.' (It is curious. that we find them playing the same part nearly two thousand years later for Cromwell.) They knew all the roads, stations,

[ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »