A neglected era, from the Old Testament to the New

Preface

Several years ago, when I attempted to lead a group of women in the study of the period between the Testaments, we found ourselves handicapped by the want of an adequate textbook. The interest of the class was enthusiastic and the study seemed so well worth time and effort that at the request of the members of the class and other friends, I have ventured to assemble in one volume the information which made the period interesting and illuminating to us, and have dared to hope that it might be of use to other teachers and other classes.

History, legend, and comment gleaned from the pages of the following works proved invaluable assistance and I am much indebted to their authors : I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness to Rev. Paul D. Moody without whose encouragement and friendly criticism the book would never have been completed.

History of the People of Israel,

Carl Heinrich Cornill, Ph.D., D. D.

PREFACE

History of Israel,

History of the Jewish Church, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D.

Dean of Westminster

The Jewish People in the Time of Christ. Emil Schurer.

Historical Connection Between the Old and New Testaments, Principal J. Skinner, M. A., D. D.

Life and Times of the Messiah, Alfred Edersheim, Ph.D., D. D.

Hours with the Bible,

John Cunningham Geikie, D. D., L.L.D.

Life of Christ,

The Modern Reader's Bible,

Richard G. Moulton, M. A., Ph.D.

A Brief History of Our English Bible, Rev. Paul D. Moody.

The Prophets as Statesmen and Preachers, Henry T. Fowler, Ph.D.

Dictionary of the Bible, James Hastings, D. D.

A Commentary on The Holy Bible, Rev. J. R. Dummelow, M. A.

Contents

PACT

Historical Introduction . i

Part I. The Persian Period Ohaptie

I. Ezra and Nehemiah 9

The reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. The foundation of legalism and exclusiveness.

PART II. THE GREEK PERIOD 333-i6o b. c

II. The Origin of Hellenism .... 25 Alexander the Great's Conquest of Syria. First traces of Hellenism. Life and philosophy of Socrates.

III. The Rule of the Ptolemies .... 37

Jews in Alexandria. The synagogue and the yearly tribute. Power and character of the high priest. Literary activity of the period.

IV. The Persecution 50

Palestine tributary to the Seleucids. Antiochus Epiphanes. The persecution and the revolt under Mattathias Maccabeus.

V. Judas Maccabeus 66

His remarkable victories. His rededication of the temple. His defeat and death. His treaty with Rome.

Part III. The Roman Period

VI. Judea an Independent Kingdom under

THE ASMONEAN MONARCHS .... 89 Jonathan and Simon Maccabeus. Treaty with Rome

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOl

renewed. John Hyrcanus. The Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Jews and the Samaritans. The decadence of the Asmonean monarch.

VII. The Rival Claimants for the Jewish

Throne 108

Civil war between Hyrcanus and Aristobulus. The intervention of Pompey. Loss of Jewish independence.

VIII. Herod the Great 123

His early life. His appointment as King of the Jews by the Roman Senate. His marriage. Execution of his wife and children. Policy of his reign. His public works. The temple of Herod.

Part IV. Developments Of The Era

IX. The Old Testament Canon and the

Talmud 153

X. School and Synagogue 165

XL The Absurdities of Legalism . . .180 XII. The Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees AND THE ESSENES . . . . 1 96

XIII. Hellenism and Judaism . . . . .213

Hellenism in Palestine. Judaism in Alexandria. Aristobulus and Philo.

XIV. The Jews and the Romans .... 230 The sons of Herod the Great. Judea under Roman procurators. The war with Rome. The siege and destruction of Jerusalem.

MAPS

Palestine during the Greek and Roman

Periods Frontispiece

Jerusalem in the Roman Period . Facing Page 89

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

When narrating his spiritual adventures in Grace Abounding, John Bunyan describes the mingled sensations of anxiety and peace brought to his orthodox soul by the perusal of lines for which he vainly sought between the covers of his Bible. "Look at the generations of old and see; did any ever trust in the Lord, and was confounded?" "Then I continued," he says, "above a year and could not find the place; but at last, casting my eyes upon the Apocrypha books, I found it in the tenth verse of the second chapter of Ecclesiasticus. This at first did somewhat daunt me because it was not in those texts which we call holy or canonical. Yet as this sentence was the sum and substance of many of the promises, it was my duty to take comfort of it, and I bless God for that word, for it was of good to me. That word doth still oft-times shine before my face."

The Bible student approaches the study of the four centuries of Jewish history immediately preceding the birth of Jesus Christ with alternate feelings of doubt and confidence not un-

l like those which John Bunyan experienced when he found his favorite text upon the pages of the Apocrypha. He is assailed by doubt because the Hebrew literature of the period was rejected by the makers of the Old Testament Canon as inferior from both a literary and spiritual point of view, and, with the exception of Daniel, Ecclesiastes, and a few psalms, assigned by modern scholars to the Maccabean age, it has found no place in the Bible. This acknowledged inferiority of Apocryphal literature, an expression of the moral decadence of the age in which it was written, is not reassuring to the seeker for mental and spiritual food, and he cannot fail to question whether with a wide field of Bible literature open for exploration, his limited time should be spent in the study of a period when the voice of prophecy was silent and the Jewish people looked for God, not in the whispered warnings of the inner voice or the better impulses of the heart, but in the petty restrictions of an over-elaborated law and the wild and superstitious inventions of their Rabbis. Yet he may find restored confidence in the opinion of many wise men who believe that the criticism awakened by these "hidden" books might be applied with equal justice to certain portions of the accepted books of the Canon. Added reassurance comes with an examination of the neg-

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 3

lected literature, for even a desultory reading reveals the threads of gold which cross its soiled and blood-stained fabric; detached passages here and there of as fine a spiritual quality as that which shone upon John Bunyan's pathway, and stories of the wonderful faith and devotion of Jewish martyrs who lived and died for their religion.

But the chief benefit to be derived from the study of the Jewish history occurring between the Old and New Testament periods is the light which it sheds upon the conditions among which Christ lived and worked, and the Apocryphal books are valuable principally for the historical information which they contain concerning this period. During these intervening centuries, great changes took place in world-history. It witnessed events of no less importance than the fall of the Persian empire, the spread of Greek civilization in the Orient, and the subjugation of the great body of the nations by the Romans. Judaism could not emerge from four centuries of strife, persecution and contact with Greek and Roman civilization unchanged, and the Jews of the New Testament are in many respects a very different people from the Jews of the Old. Greek culture, with its double current of good and evil, entered the Orient with Alexander the Great, and in spite of the persecution and dreadful conflict occasioned by the intruder, Jewish civilization was permanently broadened and deepened by its pervasive influence. Roman despotism compressed to fanaticism the extravagant zeal of an already -bigoted people, and even the heavy hand of the mistress of the world could not prevent the disastrous outburst of their seething discontent. Greek philosophy and Roman law left their impress upon Jewish life and Jewish religion, but the most marked distinction between the peoples of the two periods was produced by no outside force, but was inherent in the Jewish religion itself. This change was produced by the growth of legalism and formalism. In the fifth century before Christ, the problem by which the leading men of the Jewish nation were confronted was : will Judaism have sufficient stamina to weather the disintegrating forces with which it must come in contact? With the future safety of their religion in mind, the Hebrew reformers of the period erected for its protection a cast-iron framework of law and form. So imposing and pretentious was the defence that it overshadowed and concealed the tender plant for whose protection it had been erected, and the nurture of that pure and spiritual religion preached by Isaiah and Jeremiah was neglected and forgotten, while the protecting framework became the object of most zeal-

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 5

ous care. Storms of opposition and persecution served only to prove its temper and strengthen its persistency. Each succeeding generation contributed reinforcements and grotesque additions of complicated detail until the structure attained a size so monstrous and a shape of such bewildering intricacy that it would never have been recognized by its originators as the outcome of their comparatively modest foundation. With the tendency to make the shell of prime importance rather than the kernel which it contained, came the inevitable result, the substitution of the letter for the spirit of the law, of ritual for righteousness. But, although externalism flourished and the religion of the changed heart became a dry and withered thing, the labors of those who built the artificial bulwark were not entirely vain, for beneath its shade in the time of Christ, there still survived the root from which Christianity was to spring. By this root, Christianity and Judaism were so closely affiliated that but for its existence, the whole course of divine revelation must have run in a different channel. Subjected to the blessed influence of Christ's life and work, it became the most vital force for good which the world has ever known, and we owe its survival to that observance of law and form which bound the Jews so closely to their past and to each other.

Chapter I

Ezra and Nehemiah were the reformers who laid the corner-stone of legalism. Scripture tells us that Ezra was a priest of the house of Aaron and "a ready scribe in the law of Moses," that he had ''prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments," a description which combined with subsequent events, produces for us a mental picture of his early manhood, and we imagine him always poring over the sacred scrolls in the law school at Babylon, a stern and uncompromising figure, the sharp angles of his asceticism still untouched by the friction of a pleasure-loving world.

The narrative is silent concerning Nehemiah's parentage, and it is evident that his beauty and winning personality rather than his lineage had made him an inmate of the Persian court, where as the favorite of Artaxerxes and his queen, he had obtained the lucrative position of royal cup-bearer. Seldom have such unselfish consecration, fiery enthusiasm, tireless energy, and patriotic persistency as Nehemiah's been embodied in one man, and to the gifts bestowed on him by nature were added the worldly wisdom, the knowledge of men and affairs acquired in the Persian court.

Probably two men more distinctly different in character and ability could not have been found among the prominent Jews of the Babylonian colony, yet because deep in the heart of both rested the same love and hate, hope and fear, they were destined to tread the same path and together to lift a heavy load of indifference and doubt from the hearts of their countrymen at Jerusalem, a burden which the very diversity of their attainments fitted them to share.

Like all other Jewish patriots, they looked for that golden age long promised by their prophets, when the heathen nations by whom they had been persecuted and oppressed should bow in fear before them; but they had witnessed the dissolution of many small nations upon return from captivity, and they feared lest before the coming of that joyous day, the Jewish remnant, enfeebled by exile, might be utterly lost, merged in the ocean of heathendom by which it was tossed to and fro. The germ of Jewish individuality must be planted upon its native soil, nurtured, and above all, isolated and barricaded from entangling and destructive foreign influences. No sacrifices were too great or hardships too severe to be endured for the preservation of Jewish individuality and Jewish religion, but the worldwide love of humanity preached by the great prophet of the exile was unknown to these Jewish reformers. With every faculty alert for the spiritual welfare of their countrymen, they were wholly deaf and blind to their heathen neighbors* need of Jehovah and hated them as fervently as they loved their God and their religion.

Before Ezra and Nehemiah began their work, the discipline of the captivity had left its impress upon the Jewish people. Like children surfeited with sweets, they no longer cared for idolatry when they were constantly surrounded by it, and after seventy years of captivity, became for all time a monotheistic people. Daily contact with the strength of their conquerers had convinced them of their own weakness, and the futility of political ambition for themselves. They renounced all thought of political independence and were content to exist as a religious sect, their one hope faithfulness to the God who in return was to reward them with a great future.

In B. C. 537, when Cyrus, wishing to protect his kingdoms against the hostility of Egypt by establishing a friendly colony upon her northern border, had given the captive Jews permission to return to their native land, many of them had recovered from their first homesickness and preferred the ease and prosperity of Babylon to the perils of the long journey to Jerusalem and the hardships of recolonizing a deserted land. In Babylon, they formed a community by themselves, and wealth and comfort had led to the building up of a Jewish culture and learning which could not possibly have been developed in the struggling colony at Jerusalem. There, too, a school for the study of the Mosaic law had sprung into existence, the dynamo where a theoretical Judaism was generated, the revivifying influence of which the Babylonian Jews longed to share with the colony at Jerusalem.

The exiles who had braved the difficulties of the return found a desolate and ruined city overrun by hostile heathen tribes. The great stones and charred timbers which blocked the streets of Jerusalem must be removed, homes must be built, a scanty subsistence must be wrested from the unproductive soil, and at the same time, the frequent attacks of hostile neighbors must be met and parried. The enthusiasm of the colonists was so impaired by poverty and the hard work to which they were unaccustomed, that seventeen years had passed before they attempted to rebuild their place of worship. Then under the leadership of Haggai and Zechariah, a plain temple with scanty furniture was erected to replace the costly building of Solomon. The city was partially rebuilt, and life gradually became more normal. Goldsmiths, money-changers, and dealers in spice set up their booths in the streets; Tyrian fishermen came thither to find a market for their fish; and corn and fruit were borne on the backs of mules through the city; but the leveled walls, burned gates and clusters of ruined houses on the hill-sides were still reminders of the former desolation. Jerusalem was still open and defenceless against attack, and the glorious prophecies of the return were still unfulfilled. The bright hopes by which the colonists had been inspired faded into vague illusions; their own poverty and the comparative prosperity of their Samaritan neighbors caused a disbelief in the justice and goodness of God, and skepticism and indifference bcame prevalent. The paying of tithes was neglected, blemished animals were offered as sacrifices, Jewish wives were divorced and heathen women were installed in their places.

The returned exiles were sadly in need of the restraint of a more stable government, and of the uplift and inspiration to be supplied by the coming of Ezra and Nehemiah.

A correspondence as frequent as the scanty means of communication would permit, was carried on between the two colonies, and in B. c. 458, Ezra, bearing many costly gifts and a letter from Artaxerxes which gave him full authority to reform conditions in Judea, set out with seven hundred and seventy-two Jewish families to bring the message of the law to the colony at Jerusalem. The journey was commenced in- April, but it was midsummer before the travellers reached their destination, where they were joyously received and sacrifices of thanksgiving were offered for their safe arrival.

Ezra had not been long in Jerusalem when he discovered that many of its most prominent citizens, including priests and Levites, had married heathen wives, and that these strangers were admitted to the intimacy of family worship and entrusted with the important task of rearing half-Jewish children. Such a transgression of the Mosaic law had been unknown in Babylon, where the Jews had little or no social intercourse with their heathen neighbors, and Ezra's grief and repugnance knew no bounds. He tore his hair and beard, rent his inner and outer garment, and sat motionless all day in the court of the temple. We can easily imagine the prestige of this wealthy Babylonian Jew among the povertystricken colonists of Jerusalem, and the tremendous influence exerted by his public display of horror at their wickedness. The people gathered about him weeping, and when evening came, he began a long wailing speech, half-prayer, half-address, in which he attributed all the misfortunes and hardships of the past to their sin, and demanded not only the observance of the Mosaic law which prohibits marriage with foreigners, but added to it a requirement of his own, the immediate divorcement of all heathen wives. These strangers and their innocent children were to be turned adrift like Hagar and Ishmael, but without the loaf and water-skin, or the blessing of their husbands and fathers. The excitement which prevailed has been compared by Professor Cornill to the intense, but short-lived enthusiasm of a Methodist revival meeting. The people acknowledged their guilt and promised with fear and trembling to do all that Ezra desired, but when an assembly gathered three months later to consider the matter, the affair had assumed a different aspect. The claims of natural affection had reasserted themselves, and the prominent Jews who had married the daughters of native heathen magnates and Persian officials hesitated to incur the consequence of obeying Ezra's demands. They made excuses to delay the issue, pleading the inclemency of the weather and the imprudence of deciding so important a matter in one day or two, and finally insisting that the whole affair be placed in the hands of a committee. The committee was appointed, but it is evident that it accomplished little beyond obtaining the long list of names with which Ezra's narrative ends, and that the annals of the next thirteen years were suppressed to conceal his chagrin an f d disappointment. He vanishes from the record, and we can only conjecture that he rebuilt the walls of the city and that his work was destroyed by the foreign potentates to whom hfe attempted reform had been most distasteful.

In B. c. 444, a band of Jewish travellers brought the sad news of the overthrown walls and frequent murders which occurred in the roads about Jerusalem to Nehemiah at the Persian court. Overcome with grief and anxiety, he obtained a twelve years' leave of absence from Artaxerxes, who also made him governor of Judea and gave him full authority to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. He set out at once with his "firman," his royal guard, and retinue of slaves, and only three or four days after his arrival at Jerusalem, began his work. Nehemiah evidently took the hearts of his countrymen by storm. They could no more withstand his enthusiasm and generosity than they could escape his thorough and systematic vigilance. Every class of society was obliged to take part in the work, and to each family was assigned the portion of the wall next its own dwelling. Thus every inhabitant might regard the part he had himself constructed as his own.

Obstacles only stimulated the energy and persistency of the new governor. When Sanballat, the Horonite, and* Tobiah, the Ammonite, who had regarded the new-comer with envy and suspicion since the first day of his arrival, annoyed the builders by their threats and cunning devices, Nehemiah bade each man wear a sword while he worked, and stationed a trumpeter at his own side that all might gather about him should the alarm sound to summon assistance. Many times the Samaritans endeavored to mislead and entrap the resourceful governor, and each time he escaped, responding to their wily invitations with courteous sarcasm, telling them he was engaged in a great work which he was unable to leave.

When the poor who had given up their daily means of subsistence that they might join in the work, were cheated and oppressed by the rich money lenders, Nehemiah put the usurers to shame by refusing to accept any salary, and kept open house, entertaining one hundred and fifty guests at his own table daily, regaling them with dishes so choice that he dwells upon their enumeration with evident satisfaction.

Every day the builders labored from the rising of the sun till the stars appeared, and day and night, Nehemiah superintended the work, never once removing his clothes from the day the wall was commenced until the day of its completion. In spite of all hindrances, the work was accomplished in fifty-two days, and its dedication was celebrated amidst great rejoicing. Two long processions including men, women and children marched to the sound of trumpet and song around the city on the top of the newly-made fortification, and "the joy of Jerusalem was heard even afar off."

Faith and hope had been reawakened by devotion and self-sacrifice; the time was now ripe for the work which Ezra had been compelled to drop; and, just here, when the services of an efficient scribe were indispensable to the progress of the reform, he reappears in the narrative. We do not know how his years of seclusion had been spent, but it is possible that he had been revising his code of laws to meet the needs of the colony at Jerusalem, and his severity had doubtless been softened by his recent failure. The people gathered by the water gate and begged him to read the commands of God from his sacred scrolls. It was early in the morning when he mounted the wooden pulpit which had been prepared for him there, and until noon a great congregation listened eagerly to his reading. In order that the law might be perfectly understood, Levites went to and fro among the assembled people, explaining each passage as soon as it had been read. When the members of the congregation wept because they had so often disobeyed the holy precepts, they were restrained by Ezra and Nehemiah, who told them it was not a time for mourning, but for rejoicing.

A few days later the feast of tabernacles was celebrated as the law prescribed, and each day of the feast, Ezra read to the people from the holy books. The twenty-fourth day of the same month was appointed as a day of general confession and repentance, and a vow to obey the law was signed and sealed by the heads of families. In a written covenant, they promised to abstain forevermore from marriages with foreigners, to observe the Sabbath and Sabbatical year, to pay tithes for the support of the temple worship, and to bring all the first fruits of their substance as an offering to the house of God.

The day on which this first "great assembly" was held has most appropriately been called the birthday of Judaism, and its far-reaching significance cannot be over-estimated, for it was then that the customs peculiar to the Jewish religion first became integral parts of Jewish life. The Shemoneh Esreh or eighteen benedictions, the prayer which at a later date every Jewish man, woman and child was compelled by the oral tradition to repeat three times a day, owed its origin to this first great assembly, and from the stress laid by Ezra and Nehemiah upon the importance of a thorough knowledge of the Mosaic law, sprang the synagogue, the "bearer and banner" of Judaism. The foundation for barriers far more effective than city walls was thus laid, and behind this solid wall of separation, the religion from which Christianity was to spring, was protected from dissolution.

At first there was frequent backsliding, and during Nehemiah's absence in Persia, the law was boldly broken by those who should have been its most loyal supporters. Eliashib, the high priest, prepared a chamber for the Samaritan Tobiah within the precincts of the temple itself; the house of God was forsaken by the Levites and singers because tithes were no longer paid for their support; the Sabbath was desecrated, and mixed marriages were again contracted. Nehemiah's vigorous reforms on his return led to a further weeding out of the ranks. Tobiah's household furniture was ejected with violence from the temple, and the chamber was cleansed from the pollution of his contaminating presence. The gates of the city were closed at sunset on Friday, and until the evening of the following

Saturday, no foreign merchant was allowed to bring his wares within or even to linger outside the walls. The offending husbands of foreign wives received drastic treatment from the energetic governor. He flew at them, cursed them, pulled their hair, and made them solemnly swear that their sons and daughters should not follow their example.*

Manasseh, the son of the high priest Eliashib, was driven from the city because he had married Sanballat's daughter Nicaso, and would not give her up. With other discontented priests, he established a Samaritan worship, which led to the building of a rival temple on Mt. Gerizim where all who did not wish to keep the law established by Ezra and Nehemiah might worship God in the old-fashioned way.

The record of Nehemiah's last reforms closes the account of his public works and, as his book marks the end of Old Testament History, we must now begin to grope our way through that period of darkness and obscurity which is lighted by the scanty records of the Apocrypha.

* Dr. A. B. Davidson's summary of Ezra and Nehemiah

characterizes the two men better than several pages of

analysis and commentary. "Ezra tore his own hair, but Nehemiah tore the other fellow's hair."

Chapter II

An uneventful century of subjection to Persian rule, scarcely mentioned in Jewish annals, followed the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. At its close, the calm was broken by a wave of excitement, and the eyes of not only the Jewish nation, but of all Syria and Egypt, were turned toward Alexander the Great as he played his brief but brilliant part in the drama of history. The picture engraved upon Jewish hearts and minds by Alexander's conquests in Syria is reflected in the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, who beheld the youthful Macedonian as an Ionian goat leaping swiftly eastward with feet that hardly touched the ground, smiting with his one 'notable' horn and trampling beneath his virile feet the two-horned ram, symbol of the united kingdom of the Medes and the Persians; thus establishing a kingdom "strong as iron, forasmuch iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things."

In B. c. 333, the Persian empire was shattered by the Greek victory of Issus, and Alexander marched down through Syria demanding the oath of allegiance from Persian provinces, subduing them sometimes by force, more often by the magic of his name. As Greek histories contain no record of his conquest in Judea, it is probable that the Jews passively accepted their transfer from Persian to Greek dominance; but Jewish tradition, unwilling to accept so prosaic a version of its country's part in the important crisis, repeats both in Josephus and in the Talmud a legendary account of the first meeting of Jew and Greek, which runs as follows:

When all Syria was lurid with the horrors of the siege of Tyre, Alexander sent messengers to Judea and Samaria to claim substantial proofs of their friendship, reinforcements and arms; and the Jews refused to comply with his demand, declaring that they would be faithful to the Persian king as long as he lived, but the servile Samaritans willingly accepted the conqueror as their sovereign and sent seven thousand soldiers to join his army. Angered by the disobedience of the Jews, Alexander marched with his army toward Jerusalem, guided by the eager Samaritans, who saw in the promised destruction of the holy city a long-sought revenge for Jewish insults. As they halted upon the heights of iMizpeh which overlook the city, a long procession, clad in white, issued from its gates. It was led by Jaddua, the high priest, dressed in the purple and scarlet robes of his office and wearing upon his head the miter bearing the gold plate upon which the name of Jehovah was engraved. The formal march continued all night to the sound of clashing cymbals before the procession reached the height upon which the Greek army was stationed. While his soldiers waited for the command to fall upon the long white line and destroy it, Alexander, to their amazement alighted from his chariot, advanced alone, and fell upon his knees before the Jewish leader. When asked why he, whom all men adored, bowed before the high priest, he replied that he worshipped not Jaddua, but the one true God, whose name was inscribed upon the priestly miter, explaining to Parmenio, his favorite general, alone, that years before in Dios of Macedonia, such a one in such a habit had appeared to him in a dream, foretelling his Persian and Egyptian victories, and urging him to cross the sea without delay.