Transcriber’s notes
This e-text includes Greek characters, Hebrew characters, uncommon
diacritics, and punctuation that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode)
text readers: e.g. Μαλαχιας, מלאכיה, “malĕ’akhi”. If any of these
characters do not display properly, make sure that your text reader’s
“character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may
also need to change the default font.
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. Each footnote can
be found at the end of the chapter in which it is flagged.
It is clear from the context that some Hebrew letters are missing from
Section 2 of Chapter VI of the book. These letters, enclosed in square
brackets, have been restored.
An expression such as A^{B} is used in this text to represent A
followed by B as a superscript. For example, Xⁿ could be represented by
X^{n}. (The only letters that can be used as superscripts in UTF-8 are
lower-case i and n.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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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.
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The Acts of the Apostles.
By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. I.
FIFTH SERIES, 1891-2.
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1 and 2 Thessalonians.
By JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
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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. 11-13_a_. 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cambridge Bible for Schools, 1897
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
PAGE
PREFACE v
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES _Facing p. 1_ in Volume I
_INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE SEVENTH CENTURY_
CHAP.
I. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 3
1. REACTION UNDER MANASSEH AND AMON (695?—639).
2. THE EARLY YEARS OF JOSIAH (639—625): JEREMIAH
AND ZEPHANIAH.
3. THE REST OF THE CENTURY (625—586): THE
FALL OF NINIVEH; NAHUM AND HABAKKUK.
_ZEPHANIAH_
II. THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH 35
III. THE PROPHET AND THE REFORMERS 46
ZEPHANIAH i.—ii. 3.
IV. NINIVE DELENDA 61
ZEPHANIAH ii. 4-15.
V. SO AS BY FIRE 67
ZEPHANIAH iii.
_NAHUM_
VI. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 77
1. THE POSITION OF ELḲÔSH.
2. THE AUTHENTICITY OF CHAP. i.
3. THE DATE OF CHAPS. ii. AND iii.
VII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD 90
NAHUM i.
VIII. THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH 96
NAHUM ii. AND iii.
_HABAḲḲUḲ_
IX. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 115
1. CHAP. i. 2—ii. 4 (OR 8).
2. CHAP. ii. 5-20.
3. CHAP. iii.
X. THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 129
HABAKKUK i.—ii. 4.
XI. TYRANNY IS SUICIDE 143
HABAKKUK ii. 5-20.
XII. “IN THE MIDST OF THE YEARS” 149
HABAKKUK iii.
_OBADIAH_
XIII. THE BOOK OF OBADIAH 163
XIV. EDOM AND ISRAEL 177
OBADIAH 1-21.
_INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE PERSIAN PERIOD_
(539—331 B.C.)
XV. ISRAEL UNDER THE PERSIANS 187
XVI. FROM THE RETURN FROM BABYLON TO THE
BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE (536—516 B.C.) 198
WITH A DISCUSSION OF PROFESSOR KOSTERS’ THEORY.
_HAGGAI_
XVII. THE BOOK OF HAGGAI 225
XVIII. HAGGAI AND THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE 234
Haggai i., ii.
1. THE CALL TO BUILD (CHAP. i.).
2. COURAGE, ZERUBBABEL! COURAGE, JEHOSHUA AND
ALL THE PEOPLE! (CHAP. ii. 1-9).
3. THE POWER OF THE UNCLEAN (CHAP. ii. 10-19).
4. THE REINVESTMENT OF ISRAEL’S HOPE (CHAP. ii.
20-23).
_ZECHARIAH_
(_I.—VIII._)
XIX. THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH (I.—VIII.) 255
XX. ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET 264
ZECHARIAH i. 1-6, ETC.; EZRA v. 1, vi. 14.
XXI. THE VISIONS OF ZECHARIAH 273
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi.
1. THE INFLUENCES WHICH MOULDED THE VISIONS.
2. GENERAL FEATURES OF THE VISIONS.
3. EXPOSITION OF THE SEVERAL VISIONS:
THE FIRST: THE ANGEL-HORSEMEN (i. 7-17).
THE SECOND: THE FOUR HORNS AND THE FOUR
SMITHS (i. 18-21 ENG.).
THE THIRD: THE CITY OF PEACE (ii. 1-5 ENG.).
THE FOURTH: THE HIGH PRIEST AND THE SATAN (iii.).
THE FIFTH: THE TEMPLE CANDLESTICK AND THE
TWO OLIVE-TREES (iv.).
THE SIXTH: THE WINGED VOLUME (v. 1-4).
THE SEVENTH: THE WOMAN IN THE BARREL (v. 5-11).
THE EIGHTH: THE CHARIOTS OF THE FOUR WINDS (vi. 1-8).
THE RESULT OF THE VISIONS (vi. 9-15).
XXII. THE ANGELS OF THE VISIONS 310
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi. 8.
XXIII. “THE SEED OF PEACE” 320
ZECHARIAH vii., viii.
“_MALACHI_”
XXIV. THE BOOK OF “MALACHI” 331
XXV. FROM ZECHARIAH TO “MALACHI” 341
XXVI. PROPHECY WITHIN THE LAW 348
“MALACHI” i.—iv. (ENG.).
1. GOD’S LOVE FOR ISRAEL AND HATRED OF EDOM (i. 2-5).
2. “HONOUR THY FATHER” (i. 6-14).
3. THE PRIESTHOOD OF KNOWLEDGE (ii. 1-9).
4. THE CRUELTY OF DIVORCE (ii. 10-16).
5. “WHERE IS THE GOD OF JUDGMENT?” (ii. 17—iii. 5).
6. REPENTANCE BY TITHES (iii. 6-12).
7. THE JUDGMENT TO COME (iii. 13—iv. 2 ENG.).
8. THE RETURN OF ELIJAH (iv. 3-5 ENG.).
_JOEL_
XXVII. THE BOOK OF JOEL 375
1. THE DATE OF THE BOOK.
2. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BOOK.
3. STATE OF THE TEXT AND THE STYLE OF THE BOOK.
XXVIII. THE LOCUSTS AND THE DAY OF THE LORD 398
JOEL i.—ii. 17.
XXIX. PROSPERITY AND THE SPIRIT 418
JOEL ii. 18-32 (ENG.).
1. THE RETURN OF PROSPERITY (ii. 19-27).
2. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT (ii. 28-32).
XXX. THE JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN 431
JOEL iii. (ENG.).
_INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE GRECIAN PERIOD_
(FROM 331 ONWARDS)
XXXI. ISRAEL AND THE GREEKS 439
“_ZECHARIAH_”
(_IX.—XIV._)
XXXII. “ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. 449
XXXIII. THE CONTENTS OF “ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. 463
1. THE COMING OF THE GREEKS (ix. 1-8).
2. THE PRINCE OF PEACE (ix. 9-12).
3. THE SLAUGHTER OF THE GREEKS (ix. 13-17).
4. AGAINST THE TERAPHIM AND SORCERERS (x. 1, 2).
5. AGAINST EVIL SHEPHERDS (x. 3-12).
6. WAR UPON THE SYRIAN TYRANTS (xi. 1-3).
7. THE REJECTION AND MURDER OF THE GOOD
SHEPHERD (xi. 4-17, xiii. 7-9).
8. JUDAH _versus_ JERUSALEM (xii. 1-7).
9. FOUR RESULTS OF JERUSALEM’S DELIVERANCE
(xii. 8—xiii. 6).
10. JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN AND SANCTIFICATION
OF JERUSALEM (xiv.).
_JONAH_
XXXIV. THE BOOK OF JONAH 493
1. THE DATE OF THE BOOK.
2. THE CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
3. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.
4. OUR LORD’S USE OF THE BOOK.
5. THE UNITY OF THE BOOK.
XXXV. THE GREAT REFUSAL 514
JONAH i.
XXXVI. THE GREAT FISH AND WHAT IT MEANS—THE PSALM 523
JONAH ii.
XXXVII. THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY 529
JONAH iii.
XXXVIII. ISRAEL’S JEALOUSY OF JEHOVAH 536
JONAH iv.
INDEX OF PROPHETS 543
_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.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] See Vol. I., p. viii.
[3] Expositor’s Bible, _Isaiah xl.—lxvi._, Chap. II.
[4] It is uncertain whether Hezekiah was an Assyrian vassal during
these years, as his successor Manasseh is recorded to have been in 676.
[5] 2 Kings xviii. 4.
[6] The exact date is quite uncertain; 695 is suggested on the
chronological table prefixed to this volume, but it may have been 690
or 685.
[7] Cf. McCurdy, _History, Prophecy and the Monuments_, § 799.
[8] Stade (_Gesch. des Volkes Israel_, I., pp. 627 f.) denies to
Manasseh the reconstruction of the high places, the Baal altars and
the Asheras, for he does not believe that Hezekiah had succeeded in
destroying these. He takes 2 Kings xxi. 3, which describes these
reconstructions, as a late interpolation rendered necessary to
reconcile the tradition that Hezekiah’s reforms had been quite in the
spirit of Deuteronomy, with the fact that there were still high places
in the land when Josiah began his reforms. Further, Stade takes the
rest of 2 Kings xxi. 2_b_-7 as also an interpolation, but unlike verse
3 an accurate account of Manasseh’s idolatrous institutions, because
it is corroborated by the account of Josiah’s reforms, 2 Kings xxiii.
Stade also discusses this passage in _Z.A.T.W._, 1886, pp. 186 ff.
[9] See Vol. I., p. 41. In addition to the reasons of the change given
above, we must remember that we are now treating, not of Northern
Israel, but of the more stern and sullen Judæans.
[10] 2 Kings xxi., xxiii.
[11] _Filled from mouth to mouth_ (2 Kings xxi. 16).
[12] Jer. ii. 30.
[13] We have already seen that there is no reason for that theory of so
many critics which assigns to this period Micah. See Vol. I., p. 370.
[14] 2 Kings xxi. 10 ff.
[15] Whether the parenthetical apostrophes to Jehovah as Maker of
the heavens, their hosts and all the powers of nature (Amos iv. 13,
v. 8, 9, ix. 5, 6), are also to be attributed to Manasseh’s reign is
more doubtful. Yet the following facts are to be observed: that these
passages are also (though to a less degree than v. 26 f.) parenthetic;
that their language seems of a later cast than that of the time of Amos
(see Vol. I., pp. 204, 205: though here evidence is adduced to show
that the late features are probably post-exilic); and that Jehovah
is expressly named as the _Maker_ of certain of the stars. Similarly
when Mohammed seeks to condemn the worship of the heavenly bodies, he
insists that God is their Maker. Koran, Sur. 41, 37: “To the signs of
His Omnipotence belong night and day, sun and moon; but do not pray to
sun or moon, for God hath created them.” Sur. 53, 50: “Because He is
the Lord of Sirius.” On the other side see Driver’s _Joel and Amos_
(Cambridge Bible for Schools Series), 1897, pp. 118 f., 189.
How deeply Manasseh had planted in Israel the worship of the heavenly
host may be seen from the survival of the latter through all the
reforms of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem (Jer. vii. 18,
viii., xliv.; Ezek. viii. Cf. Stade, _Gesch. des V. Israel_, I., pp.
629 ff.).
[16] The Jehovist and Elohist into the closely mortised JE. Stade
indeed assigns to the period of Manasseh Israel’s first acquaintance
with the Babylonian cosmogonies and myths which led to that
reconstruction of them in the spirit of her own religion which we find
in the Jehovistic portions of the beginning of Genesis (_Gesch. des V.
Isr._, I., pp. 630 ff.). But it may well be doubted (1) whether the
reign of Manasseh affords time for this assimilation, and (2) whether
it was likely that Assyrian and Babylonian theology could make so deep
and lasting impression upon the purer faith of Israel at a time when
the latter stood in such sharp hostility to all foreign influences and
was so bitterly persecuted by the parties in Israel who had succumbed
to these influences.
[17] Chaps. v.—xxvi., xxviii.
[18] 621 B.C.
[19] 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11 ff.
[20] 2 Kings xxi. 23.
[21] But in his conquests of Hauran, Northern Arabia and the eastern
neighbours of Judah, he had evidently sought to imitate the policy of
Asarhaddon in 675 f., and secure firm ground in Palestine and Arabia
for a subsequent attack upon Egypt. That this never came shows more
than anything else could Assyria’s consciousness of growing weakness.
[22] The name of Josiah’s (יֹאשִׁיָּהוּ) mother was Jedidah (יְדִידָה),
daughter of Adaiah (עֲדָיָה) of Boṣḳath in the Shephelah of Judah.
[23] 2 Kings xxii., xxiii.
[24] Zeph. i. 4: the LXX. reads _names of Baal_. See below, p. 40, n. 87.
[25] _Ibid._, 5.
[26] _Ibid._, 8-12.
[27] I. 102 ff.
[28] Herod., I. 105.
[29] The new name of Bethshan in the mouth of Esdraelon, viz.
Scythopolis, is said to be derived from them (but see _Hist. Geog. of
the Holy Land_, pp. 363 f.); they conquered Askalon (Herod., I. 105).
[30] 2 Kings xvii. 6: _and in the cities_ (LXX. _mountains_) _of the
Medes_. The Heb. is מָדָי, Madai.
[31] Mentioned by Sargon.
[32] Sayce, _Empires of the East_, 239: cf. McCurdy, § 823 f.
[33] Herod., I. 103.
[34] Heb. Kasdim, כַּשְׂדִים; LXX. Χαλδαῖοι; Assyr. Kaldâa, Kaldu. The
Hebrew form with _s_ is regarded by many authorities as the original,
from the Assyrian root _kashadu_, to conquer, and the Assyrian form
with _l_ to have arisen by the common change of _sh_ through _r_ into
_l_. The form with _s_ does not occur, however, in Assyrian, which also
possesses the root _kaladu_, with the same meaning as _kashadu_. See
Mr. Pinches’ articles on Chaldea and the Chaldeans in the new edition
of Vol. I. of Smith’s _Bible Dictionary_.
[35] About 880 B.C. in the annals of Assurnatsirpal. See Chronological
Table to Vol. I.
[36] No inscriptions of Asshur-itil-ilani have been found later than
the first two years of his reign.
[37] Billerbeck-Jeremias, “Der Untergang Niniveh’s,” in Delitzsch and
Haupt’s _Beiträge zur Assyriologie_, III., p. 113.
[38] Nahum ii.
[39] See below, p. 120.
[40] Abydenus (apud Euseb., _Chron._, I. 9) reports a marriage between
Nebuchadrezzar, Nabopolassar’s son, and the daughter of the Median king.
[41] 2 Kings xxiii. 29. The history is here very obscure. Necho, met
at Megiddo by Josiah, and having slain him, appears to have spent a
year or two in subjugating, and arranging for the government of, Syria
(_ibid._, verses 33-35), and only reached the Euphrates in 605, when
Nebuchadrezzar defeated him.
[42] The reverse view is taken by Wellhausen, who says (_Israel u. Jüd.
Gesch._, pp. 97 f.): “Der Pharaoh scheint ausgezogen zu sein um sich
seinen Teil an der Erbschaft Ninives vorwegzunehmen, während die Meder
und Chaldäer die Stadt belagerten.”
[43] See above, p. 20, n. 37.
[44] I. 106.
[45] A stele of Nabonidus discovered at Hilleh and now in the museum
at Constantinople relates that in his third year, 553, the king
restored at Harran the temple of Sin, the moon-god, which the Medes had
destroyed fifty-four years before, _i.e._ 607. Whether the Medes did
this before, during or after the siege of Niniveh is uncertain, but the
approximate date of the siege, 608—606, is thus marvellously confirmed.
The stele affirms that the Medes alone took Niniveh, but that they
were called in by Marduk, the Babylonian god, to assist Nabopolassar
and avenge the deportation of his image by Sennacherib to Niniveh.
Messerschmidt (_Mittheilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft_, I.
1896) argues that the Medes were summoned by the Babylonians while the
latter were being sore pressed by the Assyrians. Winckler had already
(_Untersuch._, pp. 124 ff., 1889) urged that the Babylonians would
refrain from taking an active part in the overthrow of Niniveh, in fear
of incurring the guilt of sacrilege. Neither Messerschmidt’s paper,
nor Scheil’s (who describes the stele in the _Recueil des Travaux_,
XVIII. 1896), being accessible to me, I have written this note on the
information supplied by Rev. C. H. W. Johns, of Cambridge, in the
_Expository Times_, 1896, and by Prof. A. B. Davidson in App. I. to
_Nah., Hab. and Zeph._
[46] Berosus and Abydenus in Eusebius.
[47] This spelling (Jer. xlix. 28) is nearer the original than the
alternative Hebrew Nebuchad_n_ezzar. But the LXX. Ναβουχοδονόσορ, and
the Ναβουκοδρόσορος of Abydenus and Megasthenes and Ναβοκοδρόσορος of
Strabo, have preserved the more correct vocalisation; for the original
is Nabu-kudurri-uṣur = Nebo, defend the crown!
[48] But see below, pp. 123 f.
[49] Below, pp. 121 ff.
[50] 2 Kings xxii. 11-20. The genuineness of this passage is proved (as
against Stade, _Gesch. des Volkes Israel_, I.) by the promise which
it gives to Josiah of a peaceful death. Had it been written after
the battle of Megiddo, in which Josiah was slain, it could not have
contained such a promise.
[51] Jer. vii. 4, viii. 8.
[52] vi. 1.
[53] All these reforms in 2 Kings xxiii.
[54] Jer. xxii. 15 f.
[55] _Ibid._, ver. 16.
[56] We have no record of this, but a prince who so rashly flung
himself in the way of Egypt would not hesitate to claim authority over
Moab and Ammon.
[57] 2 Kings xxiii. 24. The question whether Necho came by land from
Egypt or brought his troops in his fleet to Acre is hardly answered by
the fact that Josiah went to Megiddo to meet him. But Megiddo on the
whole tells more for the land than the sea. It is not on the path from
Acre to the Euphrates; it is the key of the land-road from Egypt to the
Euphrates. Josiah could have no hope of stopping Pharaoh on the broad
levels of Philistia; but at Megiddo there was a narrow pass, and the
only chance of arresting so large an army as it moved in detachments.
Josiah’s tactics were therefore analogous to those of Saul, who also
left his own territory and marched north to Esdraelon, to meet his
foe—and death.
[58] A. B. Davidson, _The Exile and the Restoration_, p. 8 (Bible Class
Primers, ed. by Salmond; Edin., T. & T. Clark, 1897).
[59] 2 Kings xxiii. 33-35.
[60] Jer. xxii. 13-15.
[61] Jer. xi.
[62] xxv. 1 ff.
[63] xxxvi.
[64] 2 Kings xxiv. 1. In the chronological table appended to Kautzsch’s
_Bibel_ this verse and Jehoiakim’s submission are assigned to 602. But
this allows too little time for Nebuchadrezzar to confirm his throne
in Babylon and march to Palestine, and it is not corroborated by the
record in the Book of Jeremiah of events in Judah in 604—602.
[65] Nebuchadrezzar did not die till 562.
[66] See _Isaiah i.—xxxix._ (Expositor’s Bible), pp. 223 f.
[67] See above, p. 26, n. 56.
[68] 2 Kings xxiv. 2.
[69] Jer. xxxvii. 30, but see 2 Kings xxiv. 6.
[70] So Josephus puts it (X. _Antiq._, vii. 1). Jehoiachin was
unusually bewailed (Lam. iv. 20; Ezek. xvii. 22 ff.). He survived
in captivity till the death of Nebuchadrezzar, whose successor
Evil-Merodach in 561 took him from prison and gave him a place in his
palace (2 Kings xxv. 27 ff.).
_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.”