'Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the
children of the captivity builded the temple unto the Lord God of
Israel; 2. Then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the
fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your
God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto Him since the days of
Esar-haddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither. 3. But
Zerubbabel, and Joshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of
Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an
house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord
God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us. 4.
Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah,
and troubled them in building, 5. And hired counsellors against them,
to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even
until the reign of Darius king of Persia.'--EZRA iv. 1-5.
Opposition began as soon as the foundations were laid, as is usually
the case with all great attempts to build God's house. It came from
the Samaritans, the mingled people who were partly descendants of the
ancient remnant of the northern kingdom, left behind after the removal
by deportation of the bulk of its population, and partly the
descendants of successive layers of immigrants, planted in the empty
territory by successive Assyrian and Babylonian kings. Esar-haddon was
the first who had sent colonists, about one hundred and thirty years
before the return. The writer calls the Samaritans 'the adversaries,'
though they began by offers of friendship and alliance. The name
implies that these offers were perfidious, and a move in the struggle.
One can easily understand that the Samaritans looked with suspicion on
the new arrivals, the ancient possessors of the land, coming under the
auspices of the new dynasty, and likely to interfere with their
position if not reduced to inferiority or neutralised somehow. The
proposal to unite in building the Temple was a political move; for, in
old-world ideas, co-operation in Temple-building was incorporation in
national unity. The calculation, no doubt, was that if the returning
exiles could be united with the much more numerous Samaritans, they
would soon be absorbed in them. The only chance for the smaller body
was to keep itself apart, and to run the risk of its isolation.
The insincere request was based on an untruth, for the Samaritans did
not worship Jehovah as the Jews, but along with their own gods (2
Kings xvii. 25-41). To divide His dominion with others was to dethrone
Him altogether. It therefore became an act of faithfulness to Jehovah
to reject the entangling alliance. To have accepted it would have been
tantamount to frustrating the very purpose of the return, and
consenting to be muzzled about the sin of idolatry. But the chief
lesson which exile had burned in on the Jewish mind was a loathing of
idolatry, which is in remarkable contrast to the inclination to it
that had marked their previous history. So one answer only was
possible, and it was given with unwelcome plainness of speech, which
might have been more courteous, and not less firm. It flatly denied
any common ground; it claimed exclusive relation to 'our God,' which
meant, 'not yours'; it underscored the claim by reiterating that
Jehovah was the 'God of Israel'; it put forward the decree of Cyrus,
as leaving no option but to confine the builders to the people whom it
had empowered to build.
Now, it is easy to represent this as a piece of impolitic narrowness,
and to say that its surly bigotry was rightly punished by the evils
that it brought down on the returning exiles. The temper of much
flaccid Christianity at present delights to expand in a lazy and
foolish 'liberality,' which will welcome anybody to come and take a
hand at the building, and accepts any profession of unity in worship.
But there is no surer way of taking the earnestness out of Christian
work and workers than drafting into it a mass of non-Christians,
whatever their motives may be. Cold water poured into a boiling pot
will soon stop its bubbling, and bring down its temperature. The
churches are clogged and impeded, and their whole tone lowered and
chilled, by a mass of worldly men and women. Nothing is gained, and
much is in danger of being lost, by obliterating the lines between the
church and the world. The Jew who thought little of the difference
between the Samaritan worship with its polytheism, and his own
monotheism, was in peril of dropping to the Samaritan level. The
Samaritan who was accepted as a true worshipper of Jehovah, though he
had a bevy of other gods in addition, would have been confirmed in his
belief that the differences were unimportant. So both would have been
harmed by what called itself 'liberality,' and was in reality
indifference.
No doubt, Zerubbabel had counted the cost of faithfulness, and he soon
had to pay it. The would-be friends threw off the mask, and, as they
could not hinder by pretending to help, took a plainer way to stop
progress. All the weapons that Eastern subtlety and intrigue could use
were persistently employed to 'weaken the hands' of the builders, and
the most potent of all methods, bribery to Persian officials, was
freely used. The opponents triumphed, and the little community began
to taste the bitterness of high hopes disappointed and noble
enterprises frustrated. How differently things had turned out from the
expectations with which the company had set forth from Babylon! The
rough awakening to realities disillusions us all when we come to turn
dreams into facts. The beginning of laying the Temple foundations is
put in 536 B.C.; the first year of Darius was 522. How soon after the
commencement of the work the Samaritan tricks succeeded we do not
know, but it must have been some time before the death of Cyrus in
529. For weary years then the sanguine band had to wait idly, and no
doubt enthusiasm died out: they had enough to do in keeping themselves
alive, and in holding their own amidst enemies. They needed, as we all
do, patience, and a willingness to wait for God's own time to fulfil
His own promise.