THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES
If you will take a look on the map at all this country of Palestine
and Syria you will see how it is cut up by mountains, the Lebanon
range and others running down along it. One result of this must have
been to make it difficult for the tribes that were settled there to
unite and come together to resist the attacks of enemies from without.
In order to understand this great story properly you must bear in
mind all through how much of it happened as it did because of the
geographical position--that is to say, because the rivers ran just
where they did run and because the deserts and the seas and the
mountains lay just as they did lie round about the richer and more
pleasant land. Between the mountains lay plains and valleys where
the flocks might pasture. Canaan, you know, in the Bible is
described as a land "flowing with milk and honey." Those are words
meant to give you the idea of a rich, pleasant land, generally; but
perhaps they mean a little more besides. "Flowing with milk"
suggests a land where cows for milking would do well, and as for
honey, we are told by people who have gone hunting there that the
dogs often come out of the grass and the wild flowers quite yellow
with pollen--the pollen that the bees carry home with them on their
thighs. It is a great country for bees and honey.
{100}
But it was also, when the Hebrews first made their way into it, a
great country for Philistines. They were not pleasant neighbours.
The early chapters of the story of the Hebrews in Canaan are very
much taken up with fights against the Philistines. The duel between
David and Goliath is almost the best of the chapters; but the Samson
story is very good reading too. At one moment the Philistines very
nearly got the better of the Hebrews altogether; but then it seems as
if the danger made Samuel, the greatest of the Judges, realise that
if the people were to be successful against their Philistine enemies
they must be united under one head. It was very largely by Samuel's
act that Saul was appointed, and anointed with the sacred oil, as
king--the first king of the now united tribes.
You know the rest of that story, very likely: how they gradually got
the better of these strong enemies, how Saul slew his thousands and
David his tens of thousands, and how, under David's son, Solomon,
they came to the highest point of splendour and riches and power that
they ever reached. The capital city was Jerusalem in Judæa, the more
southern part of the kingdom. It is not to be supposed that in the
fulness of its power this united kingdom had anything to fear from
fortress cities of enemies in their midst. We may imagine all of
them wiped out, because we know that Solomon's ships went freely to
the coasts of Phœnicia, that cedar wood was brought from the
splendid cedar forests on Mount Lebanon, that the wealth of Africa,
in gold, ivory, apes and peacocks came to him by caravan through
Egypt or by sea.
Nevertheless the union lasted only a very short while. Under
Solomon's sons the kingdom was divided. {101} Rehoboam sitting on
his father's throne in Jerusalem and Jeroboam reigning over the
kingdom of Israel in the north. We begin, about this time, to be
tolerably sure about the dates, and the date of this division into
the two kingdoms is given as 937 B.C.
[Sidenote: The divided kingdom]
So there they were--Israel, bounded by Syria on the north, and with
Assyria pressing on from the west and coming now to the height of its
power; Judah nearer to Egypt and with the Assyrian power threatening
it scarcely less than Israel in the west. The first trouble from the
big empires between which they lay fell on Judah, from the Egyptian
side. Shishak, the Pharaoh of Egypt, made Judah pay tribute to him,
after coming with a conquering army, and apparently some of the
Israelite tribes had to pay tribute also. But Israel as a whole did
not come under his power.
As the story goes on we find the two kingdoms engaged in small wars
both with each other and with the neighbouring small nations. There
was continual fighting between the northern kingdom and Syria farther
to the north again. The moment of Israel's greatest strength was in
the reign of Omri, who founded its capital, Samaria. But Syria was a
more numerous and powerful nation than Israel without the aid of
Judah; and Ahab, the Israelitish king, was a vassal of Benhadad, king
of Syria, whose capital city was Damascus. Ahab aided Benhadad in
defending Syria from the attack of Shalmaneser II. of Assyria, but
the allies were badly beaten, and Israel had to pay tribute to
Assyria. She won back her independence for a short time, when
Assyria had other business to attend to, but just so soon as Assyria
had leisure to deal seriously with Israel and Syria again, Samaria
was taken. The Assyrians left them no opportunity for further
revolt. {102} As a nation, Israel disappears out of the story from
the year of the fall of Samaria, 722 B.C.
Assyria was now in the full tide of her power. Once the vassal of
Babylon, she had now made Babylon a vassal of hers. Judah had
escaped the fate of Israel by prudently taking sides with Assyria.
[Illustration: SENNACHERIB IN HIS CHARIOT.]
Egypt was not likely to be very pleased with this interference on the
part of Assyria with people whom she looked on as her tributaries.
Judah and the neighbouring small states must have been terribly
perplexed to know which was their wisest line to take--submission to
Assyria or to Egypt. Egypt, at the moment, was under a powerful
dynasty of Ethiopian, or what we should call negro, race. She began
to move against the aggressive Assyrians, and under Hezekiah Judah
decided to take the Egyptian side. A powerful combination was formed
against Assyria, which her {103} vassal Babylon joined, as well as
some of the peoples along the Mediterranean coast, the Philistines
and Phœnicians. But as yet Assyria was too strong or too clever
in her fighting methods for them all. The Egyptian army, with the
various allied forces, was seriously beaten, and Jerusalem was saved
only by the payment of a very heavy tribute to Sennacherib, the
Assyrian king.
[Sidenote: The fall of Assyria]
The power of Assyria was very great, and the Jews may well have
thought that they would find safety under her protection. Yet within
less than a hundred years, Assyria, as a great power, had ceased to
exist, and Judæa had once more to suffer for her alliance with the
beaten side. Sennacherib's victory over the Egyptians was in 701
B.C., and his son Ezar-haddon invaded and occupied Egypt and held it
for some ten years. But Assyria soon began to be pressed by a wild
and war-like people, the Scythians, coming from the north. Then the
Babylonians, allying themselves with the Medes, a nation whose
country lay on the north-west of Babylonia, attacked Assyria from the
south, and while all this confusion and fighting was going on in the
east, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt thought the moment good for trying to
get back the old Egyptian provinces of Palestine and Syria.
By the year 608 B.C. the Babylonians were besieging Nineveh, the
great capital city of the Assyrians, and Necho was marching up into
Palestine. Syria and Palestine, still faithful to the eastern
empire, opposed him, but were utterly defeated in a battle at
Megiddo. Once more Judah suffered by being on the losing side. In
607, a year later, Nineveh was taken and its fortifications razed to
the ground by the victorious Babylonians. The mighty Assyrian empire
was no more.
{104}
The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so
powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on
its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there
were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be
recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field
began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military
state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it
made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the
great power in the east. However that may have been, they were
still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the
hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more
years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt
that they lay.
Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear
to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may
well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for
extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen
how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced
victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a
column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much
farther.
And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up
victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle,
at the very same point--Carehemish.
If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was
that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice
already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish
{105} seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we
understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers,
mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first
place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong
cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after
these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the
inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it
came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There
begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a
less strong force against a stronger.
Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural
way--for it was the way that both traders and fighters went--would be
north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the
Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there
stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo
and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles.
[Sidenote: Nebuchadnezzar]
I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story,
was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C.,
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt.
For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time
forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little
question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was
Babylon.
While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho,
as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had
conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a
consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to
Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar {106} won his great
battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even
after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather
than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer
neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen
all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not
easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving
trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants,
including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.
But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem
again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the
great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the
business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely
defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the
end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief
buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of
the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after
being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels.
The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have
seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which
even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to
them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon
must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown.
I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although
they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison
with the great empires on either side of them, because all that
happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of
the very greatest importance in {107} making the story of the world
what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters,
and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they
were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and
holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity
which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took
those traditions and that religion everywhere.
[Sidenote: The religion of the Jews]
And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the
Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed
to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to
each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the
opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most
important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews
deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the
Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it
was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded.
It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who
had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians
were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up
in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil,"
not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew
prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.
It was on the Jewish religion as its stock that the Christian
religion was grafted, as a gardener grafts a new branch into an old
stem and the new takes up the sap from the old. There was another
branch later grafted on the Jewish religious stem, besides the
Christian--a very different branch, the Mohammedan {108} religion.
When we consider what an immense effect Christianity in the first
place, and Mohammedanism in the second, have had in the making of
this world-story, we shall see, I think, that we are right in
attributing a great importance to what happened to the Jews, from
whom came these other religions, as well as their own, which they
still hold now. What happened to them was thus much more important
in the story than what far stronger powers did, such as the Hittites,
who possessed all Asia Minor and threatened Egypt, or the Elamites;
who nearly overthrew the Babylonians, or the Syrians, who at one time
were far stronger than either Israel or Judah, or even both of them
together.
[Sidenote: The Bible]
We know that the Jews won their intense faith in Jehovah, their
national god, only with difficulty. They were of the same race as
the tribes about them who worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth, and they
were constantly inclined towards that pagan worship, as we know from
the Bible. But in the end the higher religion won, and their
religion was intensely real to the Jews. It was a very big thing in
their lives. They believed that Jehovah punished them in this life
for the wrong things that they did, such as oppression of the poor,
or unjust dealing, and they believed that he punished the nation for
wrong things that the nation did. They had not the belief of the
Egyptians in reward and punishment in an after-life.
And they considered their god as an exacting, a "jealous" god. He
would punish them if they worshipped in the so-called "groves," which
were often posts or stones set up on the "high places" to the pagan
gods, or if they were slack in his worship, or in making sacrifice to
him.
All these peoples had, in common, a belief in winning {109} the
favour of the gods by sacrifice. The more precious to them the thing
sacrificed, the more value they deemed it would have in the sight of
the gods; and that is how it is that we see them at one time actually
sacrificing their own children, as the most valuable offering that
they could make. The instance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice
Isaac will occur to your minds.
And wherever they went, into whatever land of exile they were carried
by their conquerors, they would take with them those sacred writings,
that record of their history, that story of the creation of the
world, and that code of their laws and of their religious customs,
which, with very much more that they had not got, we now mean when we
speak of the Bible. Wherever they went they had this holy record
assuring them that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. Among the
influences which enabled them to keep so distinct from the nations
into whose midst they came, we must surely place very high the
influence of the Bible--that is to say, of so many of its books as
had been written at that time.
The might of Babylon, as I have said, must have seemed so great to
the Jews, carried away into exile, that it never could be overthrown.
And yet, within less than fifty years from the siege and capture of
Jerusalem, Babylon itself was taken by a power of such overmastering
strength that the Babylonians only once afterwards, and to no effect,
attempted to regain independence.
This extraordinary "judgment," as the Jews regarded it, was executed
by the hand of the Persians under their great leader Cyrus.
{110}