THE RESTORATION OF THE JEWS.
B.C. 608
The Jewish captivity.--Jeremiah and the book of Chronicles.--Incursions
of Nebuchadnezzar.--Denunciations of Jeremiah.--Predictions of
Jeremiah.--Exasperation of the priests and people.--Defense of
Jeremiah.--He is liberated.--Symbolic method of teaching.--The wooden
yoke and the iron yoke.--The title deeds of Jeremiah's estate.--The
deeds deposited.--Baruch writes Jeremiah's prophecies.--He reads them
to the people.--Baruch summoned before the council.--The roll sent
to the king.--The roll destroyed.--Jeremiah attempts to leave the
city.--The king sends for Jeremiah.--He is imprisoned.--Jeremiah cast
into a dungeon.--The king orders him to be taken up.--Jerusalem
besieged by the Babylonians.--Capture of the king.--Captivity of the
Jews.--The prophet Daniel.--Cyrus takes possession of Babylon, and
allows the Jews to return.--Assembling of the Jews.--The number
that returned.--Arrival of the caravan at Jerusalem.--Building the
Temple.--Emotions of the old men.--Rejoicings of the young men.
The period of the invasion of Babylonia by Cyrus, and the taking of
the city, was during the time while the Jews were in captivity there.
Cyrus was their deliverer. It results from this circumstance that the
name of Cyrus is connected with sacred history more than that of any
other great conqueror of ancient times.
It was a common custom in the early ages of the world for powerful
sovereigns to take the people of a conquered country captive, and make
them slaves. They employed them, to some extent, as personal household
servants, but more generally as agricultural laborers, to till the
lands.
An account of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon is given briefly
in the closing chapters of the second book of Chronicles, though many
of the attendant circumstances are more fully detailed in the book
of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet who lived in the time of the
captivity. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, made repeated
incursions into the land of Judea, sometimes carrying away the
reigning monarch, sometimes deposing him and appointing another
sovereign in his stead, sometimes assessing a tax or tribute upon the
land, and sometimes plundering the city, and carrying away all the
gold and silver that he could find. Thus the kings and the people were
kept in a continual state of anxiety and terror for many years,
exposed incessantly to the inroads of this nation of robbers and
plunderers, that had, so unfortunately for them, found their way
across their frontiers. King Zedekiah was the last of this oppressed
and unhappy line of Jewish kings.
The prophet Jeremiah was accustomed to denounce the sins of the Jewish
nation, by which these terrible calamities had been brought upon them,
with great courage, and with an eloquence solemn and sublime. He
declared that the miseries which the people suffered were the special
judgments of Heaven, and he proclaimed repeatedly and openly, and in
the most public places of the city, still heavier calamities which he
said were impending. The people were troubled and distressed at these
prophetic warnings, and some of them were deeply incensed against
Jeremiah for uttering them. Finally, on one occasion, he took his
stand in one of the public courts of the Temple, and, addressing the
concourse of priests and people that were there, he declared that,
unless the nation repented of their sins and turned to God, the whole
city should be overwhelmed. Even the Temple itself, the sacred house
of God, should be destroyed, and the very site abandoned.
The priests and the people who heard this denunciation were greatly
exasperated. They seized Jeremiah, and brought him before a great
judicial assembly for trial. The judges asked him why he uttered such
predictions, declaring that by doing so he acted like an enemy to his
country and a traitor, and that he deserved to die. The excitement was
very great against him, and the populace could hardly be restrained
from open violence. In the midst of this scene Jeremiah was calm and
unmoved, and replied to their accusations as follows:
"Every thing which I have said against this city and this house, I
have said by the direction of the Lord Jehovah. Instead of resenting
it, and being angry with me for delivering my message, it becomes you
to look at your sins, and repent of them, and forsake them. It may be
that by so doing God will have mercy upon you, and will avert the
calamities which otherwise will most certainly come. As for myself,
here I am in your hands. Yon can deal with me just as you think best.
Yon can kill me if you will, but you may be assured that if you do so,
you will bring the guilt and the consequences of shedding innocent
blood upon yourselves and upon this city. I have said nothing and
foretold nothing but by commandment of the Lord."[C]
[Footnote C: Jeremiah, xxvi., 12-15.]
The speech produced, as might have been expected, a great division
among the hearers. Some were more angry than ever, and were eager to
put the prophet to death. Others defended him, and insisted that he
should not die. The latter, for the time, prevailed. Jeremiah was set
at liberty, and continued his earnest expostulations with the people
on account of their sins, and his terrible annunciations of the
impending ruin of the city just as before.
These unwelcome truths being so painful for the people to hear, other
prophets soon began to appear to utter contrary predictions, for the
sake, doubtless, of the popularity which they should themselves
acquire by their promises of returning peace and prosperity. The name
of one of these false prophets was Hananiah. On one occasion,
Jeremiah, in order to present and enforce what he had to say more
effectually on the minds of the people by means of a visible symbol,
made a small wooden yoke, by divine direction, and placed it upon
his neck, as a token of the bondage which his predictions were
threatening. Hananiah took this yoke from his neck and broke it,
saying that, as he had thus broken Jeremiah's wooden yoke, so God
would break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar from all nations within two
years; and then, even those of the Jews who had already been taken
captive to Babylon should return again in peace. Jeremiah replied that
Hananiah's predictions were false, and that, though the wooden yoke
was broken, God would make for Nebuchadnezzar a yoke of iron, with
which he should bend the Jewish nation in a bondage more cruel than
ever. Still, Jeremiah himself predicted that after seventy years from
the time when the last great captivity should come, the Jews should
all be restored again to their native land.
He expressed this certain restoration of the Jews, on one occasion, by
a sort of symbol, by means of which he made a much stronger impression
on the minds of the people than could have been done by simple words.
There was a piece of land in the country of Benjamin, one of the
provinces of Judea, which belonged to the family of Jeremiah, and
it was held in such a way that, by paying a certain sum of money,
Jeremiah himself might possess it, the right of redemption being in
him. Jeremiah was in prison at this time. His uncle's son came into
the court of the prison, and proposed to him to purchase the land.
Jeremiah did so in the most public and formal manner. The title deeds
were drawn up and subscribed, witnesses were summoned, the money
weighed and paid over, the whole transaction being regularly completed
according to the forms and usages then common for the conveyance of
landed property. When all was finished, Jeremiah gave the papers into
the hands of his scribe, directing him to put them safely away and
preserve them with care, for after a certain period the country of
Judea would again be restored to the peaceable possession of the Jews,
and such titles to land would possess once more their full and
original value.
On one occasion, when Jeremiah's personal liberty was restricted so
that he could not utter publicly, himself, his prophetical warnings,
he employed Baruch, his scribe, to write them from his dictation, with
a view of reading them to the people from some public and frequented
part of the city. The prophecy thus dictated was inscribed upon a roll
of parchment. Baruch waited, when he had completed the writing, until
a favorable opportunity occurred for reading it, which was on the
occasion of a great festival that was held at Jerusalem, and which
brought the inhabitants of the land together from all parts of Judea.
On the day of the festival, Baruch took the roll in his hand, and
stationed himself at a very public place, at the entrance of one of
the great courts of the Temple; there, calling upon the people to hear
him, he began to read. A great concourse gathered around him, and all
listened to him with profound attention. One of the by-standers,
however, went down immediately into the city, to the king's palace,
and reported to the king's council, who were then assembled there,
that a great concourse was convened in one of the courts of the
Temple, and that Baruch was there reading to them a discourse or
prophecy which had been written by Jeremiah. The members of the
council sent a summons to Baruch to come immediately to them, and
to bring his writing with him.
When Baruch arrived, they directed him to read what he had written.
Baruch accordingly read it. They asked him when and how that discourse
was written. Baruch replied that he had written it, word by word, from
the dictation of Jeremiah. The officers informed him that they should
be obliged to report the circumstances to the king, and they counseled
Baruch to go to Jeremiah and recommend to him to conceal himself, lest
the king, in his anger, should do him some sudden and violent
injury.[D]
[Footnote D: See the account of these transactions in the 36th chapter
of Jeremiah.]
The officers then, leaving the roll in one of their own apartments,
went to the king, and reported the facts to him. He sent one of his
attendants, named Jehudi, to bring the roll. When it came, the king
directed Jehudi to read it. Jehudi did so, standing by a fire which had
been made in the apartment, for it was bitter cold.
After Jehudi had read a few pages from the roll, finding that it
contained a repetition of the same denunciations and warnings by which
the king had often been displeased before, he took a knife and began
to cut the parchment into pieces, and to throw it on the fire. Some
other persons who were standing by interfered, and earnestly begged
the king not to allow the roll to be burned. But the king did not
interfere. He permitted Jehudi to destroy the parchment altogether,
and then sent officers to take Jeremiah and Baruch, and bring them to
him but they were nowhere to be found.
The prophet, on one occasion, was reduced to extreme distress by the
persecutions which his faithfulness, and the incessant urgency of his
warnings and expostulations had brought upon him. It was at a time
when the Chaldean armies had been driven away from Jerusalem for a
short period by the Egyptians, as one vulture drives away another from
its prey. Jeremiah determined to avail himself of the opportunity to
go to the province of Benjamin, to visit his friends and family there.
He was intercepted, however, at one of the gates, on his way, and
accused of a design to make his escape from the city, and go over to
the Chaldeans. The prophet earnestly denied this charge. They paid no
regard to his declarations, but sent him back to Jerusalem, to the
officers of the king's government, who confined him in a house which
they used as a prison.
After he had remained in this place of confinement for several days,
the king sent and took him from it, and brought him to the palace. The
king inquired whether he had any prophecy to utter from the Lord.
Jeremiah replied that the word of the Lord was, that the Chaldeans
should certainly return again, and that Zedekiah himself should fall
into their hands, and be carried captive to Babylon. While he thus
persisted so strenuously in the declarations which he had made so
often before, he demanded of the king that he should not be sent back
again to the house of imprisonment from which he had been rescued. The
king said he would not send him back, and he accordingly directed,
instead, that he should be taken to the court of the public prison,
where his confinement would be less rigorous, and there he was to be
supplied daily with food, so long, as the king expressed it, as there
should be any food remaining in the city.
But Jeremiah's enemies were not at rest. They came again, after a
time, to the king, and represented to him that the prophet, by his
gloomy and terrible predictions, discouraged and depressed the hearts
of the people, and weakened their hands; that he ought, accordingly,
to be regarded as a public enemy; and they begged the king to proceed
decidedly against him. The king replied that he would give him into
their hands, and they might do with him what they pleased.
There was a dungeon in the prison, the only access to which was from
above. Prisoners were let down into it with ropes, and left there to
die of hunger. The bottom of it was wet and miry, and the prophet,
when let down into its gloomy depths, sank into the deep mire. Here he
would soon have died of hunger and misery; but the king, feeling some
misgivings in regard to what he had done, lest it might really be a
true prophet of God that he had thus delivered into the hands of his
enemies, inquired what the people had done with their prisoner; and
when he learned that he had been thus, as it were, buried alive, he
immediately sent officers with orders to take him out of the dungeon.
The officers went to the dungeon. They opened the mouth of it. They
had brought ropes with them, to be used for drawing the unhappy
prisoner up, and cloths, also, which he was to fold together and place
under his arms, where the ropes were to pass. These ropes and cloths
they let down into the dungeon, and called upon Jeremiah to place them
properly around his body. Thus they drew him safely up out of the
dismal den.
These cruel persecutions of the faithful prophet were all unavailing
either to silence his voice or to avert the calamities which his
warnings portended. At the appointed time, the judgments which had
been so long predicted came in all their terrible reality. The
Babylonians invaded the land in great force, and encamped about the
city. The siege continued for two years. At the end of that time the
famine became insupportable. Zedekiah, the king, determined to make a
sortie, with as strong a force as he could command, secretly, at
night, in hopes to escape with his own life, and intending to leave
the city to its fate. He succeeded in passing out through the city
gates with his band of followers, and in actually passing the
Babylonian lines; but he had not gone far before his escape was
discovered. He was pursued and taken. The city was then stormed, and,
as usual in such cases, it was given up to plunder and destruction.
Vast numbers of the inhabitants were killed; many more were taken
captive; the principal buildings, both public and private, were
burned; the walls were broken down, and all the public treasures of
the Jews, the gold and silver vessels of the Temple, and a vast
quantity of private plunder, were carried away to Babylon by the
conquerors. All this was seventy years before the conquest of Babylon
by Cyrus.
[Illustration: RAISING JEREMIAH FROM THE DUNGEON.]
Of course, during the time of this captivity, a very considerable
portion of the inhabitants of Judea remained in their native land. The
deportation of a whole people to a foreign land is impossible. A vast
number, however, of the inhabitants of the country were carried away,
and they remained, for two generations, in a miserable bondage. Some
of them were employed as agricultural laborers in the rural districts
of Babylon; others remained in the city, and were engaged in servile
labors there. The prophet Daniel lived in the palaces of the king. He
was summoned, as the reader will recollect, to Belshazzar's feast, on
the night when Cyrus forced his way into the city, to interpret the
mysterious writing on the wall, by which the fall of the Babylonian
monarchy was announced in so terrible a manner.
One year after Cyrus had conquered Babylon, he issued an edict
authorizing the Jews to return to Jerusalem, and to rebuild the city
and the Temple. This event had been long before predicted by the
prophets, as the result which God had determined upon for purposes of
his own. We should not naturally have expected that such a conqueror
as Cyrus would feel any real and honest interest in promoting the
designs of God; but still, in the proclamation which he issued
authorizing the Jews to return, he acknowledged the supreme divinity
of Jehovah, and says that he was charged by him with the work of
rebuilding his Temple, and restoring his worship at its ancient seat
on Mount Zion. It has, however, been supposed by some scholars, who
have examined attentively all the circumstances connected with these
transactions, that so far as Cyrus was influenced by political
considerations in ordering the return of the Jews, his design was to
re-establish that nation as a barrier between his dominions and those
of the Egyptians. The Egyptians and the Chaldeans had long been deadly
enemies, and now that Cyrus had become master of the Chaldean realms,
he would, of course, in assuming their territories and their power, be
obliged to defend himself against their foes.
Whatever may have been the motives of Cyrus, he decided to allow
the Hebrew captives to return, and he issued a proclamation to that
effect. As seventy years had elapsed since the captivity commenced,
about two generations had passed away, and there could have been very
few then living who had ever seen the land of their fathers. The Jews
were, however, all eager to return. They collected in a vast assembly,
with all the treasures which they were allowed to take, and the stores
of provisions and baggage, and with horses, and mules, and other
beasts of burden to transport them. When assembled for the march, it
was found that the number, of which a very exact census was taken, was
forty-nine thousand six hundred and ninety-seven.
They had also with them seven or eight hundred horses, about two
hundred and fifty mules, and about five hundred camels. The chief
part, however, of their baggage and stores was borne by asses, of
which there were nearly seven thousand in the train. The march of
this peaceful multitude of families--men, women, and children
together--burdened as they went, not with arms and ammunition for
conquest and destruction, but with tools and implements for honest
industry, and stores of provisions and utensils for the peaceful
purposes of social life, as it was, in its bearings and results, one
of the grandest events of history, so it must have presented, in its
progress, one of the most extraordinary spectacles that the world has
ever seen.
The grand caravan pursued its long and toilsome march from Babylon
to Jerusalem without molestation. All arrived safely, and the people
immediately commenced the work of repairing the walls of the city and
rebuilding the Temple. When, at length, the foundations of the Temple
were laid, a great celebration was held to commemorate the event. This
celebration exhibited a remarkable scene of mingled rejoicing and
mourning. The younger part of the population, who had never seen
Jerusalem in its former grandeur, felt only exhilaration and joy at
their re-establishment in the city of their fathers. The work of
raising the edifice, whose foundations they had laid, was to them
simply a new enterprise, and they looked forward to the work of
carrying it on with pride and pleasure. The old men, however, who
remembered the former Temple, were filled with mournful recollections
of days of prosperity and peace in their childhood and of the
magnificence of the former Temple, which they could now never hope to
see realized again. It was customary in those days, to express sorrow
and grief by exclamations and outcries, as gladness and joy are
expressed audibly now. Accordingly, on this occasion, the cries of
grief and of bitter regret at the thought of losses which could now
never be retrieved, were mingled with the shouts of rejoicing and
triumph raised by the ardent and young, who knew nothing of the past,
but looked forward with hope and happiness to the future.
The Jews encountered various hinderances, and met with much opposition
in their attempts to reconstruct their ancient city, and to
re-establish the Mosaic ritual there. We must, however, now return to
the history of Cyrus, referring the reader for a narrative of the
circumstances connected with the rebuilding of Jerusalem to the very
minute account given in the sacred books of Ezra and Nehemiah.