large space in Hebrew thought and literature; that it should be the
theme of many of the Psalms and of many of the prophetic "burdens", as
well as of the Books Ecclesiastes and Job. For the Mosaic revelation
did teach that virtue and vice would meet suitable rewards now, in
this present time. At the giving of the Law Jehovah announced that He
would show mercy to the thousands of those who kept his commandments,
and that He would visit the iniquities of the disobedient upon them.
The Law that came by Moses is crowded with promises of temporal good
to the righteous, and with threatenings of temporal evil to the
unrighteous. The fulfilment of these threatenings and promises is
carefully marked in the Hebrew chronicles; it is the supplication
which breathes through the recorded prayers of the Hebrew race, and
the theme of their noblest songs; it is their hope and consolation
under the heaviest calamities. What, then, could be more bewildering
to a godly and reflective Jew than to discover that this fundamental
article of his faith was questionable, nay, that it was contradicted
by the commonest facts of human life as life grew more complex and
involved? When he saw the righteous driven before the blasts of
adversity like a withered leaf, while the wicked lived out all their
days in mirth and affluence; when he saw the only nation that
attempted obedience to the Law groaning under the miseries of a
captivity embittered by the cruel caprices of rulers who could not
even rule themselves, and unrelieved by any hope of deliverance, while
heathen races revelled in the lusts of sense and power unrebuked: when
_this_ seemed to be the rule of providence, the _law_ of the Divine
administration, and not that better rule revealed in his Scriptures,
is it any wonder that, forgetting all corrective and balancing facts,
he was racked with torments of perplexity; that, while some of his
fellows plunged into the base relief of sensualism, he should be
plagued with doubts and fears, and search eagerly through all avenues
of thought for some solution of the mystery?
Nor, indeed, is this problem without interest for us; for we as
persistently misinterpret the New Testament as the Hebrews did the
Old. We read that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap;"
we read that "the meek shall inherit the earth;" we read that for
every act of service done to Christ we shall receive "a hundredfold
now, in this present time;" and we are very prompt with the gross,
careless interpretation which makes such passages mean that if we are
good we shall have the good things of this life, while its evil things
shall be reserved for the evil. Indeed, we are trained--or, perhaps I
should say, until recently we _were_ trained--in this interpretation
from our earliest years. Our very spelling-books are full of it, and
are framed on the model of "Johnny was a good boy, and he got
plum-cake; but Tommy was a bad boy, and he got the stick." Nearly all
our story-books have a similar moral: it is always, or almost always,
the good young man who gets the beautiful wife and large estate, while
the bad young man comes to a bad end. Our proverbs are full of it, and
axioms such as "Honesty is the best policy," a pernicious half-truth,
are for ever on our lips. Our art, in so far as it is _ours_, is in
the same conspiracy. In Hogarth, for instance, as Thackeray has
pointed out, it is always Francis Goodchild who comes to be Lord Mayor
and poor Jem Scapegrace who comes to the gallows. And when, as life
passes on, we discover that it is the bad boy who often gets the
plum-cake, and the good boy who goes to the rod; that bad men often
have beautiful wives and large estates, while good men fail of both;
when we find the knave rising to place and authority, and honest
Goodchild in the workhouse or the _Gazette_, then there rise up in our
hearts the very doubts and perplexities and eager painful questions
which of old time troubled the Psalmist and the Prophet. We cry out
with Job--
"It is all one--therefore will I say it,
The guilty and the guiltless He treateth alike;
The deceiver and the deceived both are his;"
or we say with the Preacher,--
"This is the greatest evil of all that is done under the sun
That there is one fate for all;
The same fate befalleth to the righteous and to the wicked,
To the good and pure and to the impure,
To him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not:
As is the good so is the sinner,
And he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath."
And it is well for us if, like the Hebrew poet, we can resist this
cruel temptation, and hold fast the integrity of our faith; if we can
rest in the assurance that, after all and when all is done, "the
little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many
wicked;" that God has something better than wealth and lucky haps for
the good, and merciful correctives of a more sovereign potency than
penury and mishaps for the wicked. If we have this faith, our study of
Ecclesiastes can hardly fail to deepen and confirm it; if we are not
so happy as to have it, Coheleth will give us sound reasons for
embracing it.
Sec. 2. _ON THE HISTORY OF THE CAPTIVITY._
If we may now assume the Book Ecclesiastes to have been written, not
in the time of Solomon, but during, or soon after, the Babylonian
Captivity, our next duty is to learn what we can of the social,
political, and religious conditions of the two races among whom the
Jews were thrown when they were carried away from the land of their
fathers. That they learned much, as well as suffered much, while they
sat by the waters of Babylon; that they emerged from their long exile
with a profound attachment to the Word of God, such as their fathers
had never known, and with many precious additions to that Word, is
beyond a doubt. As plants grow fastest by night, so men make their
most rapid growth in knowledge and in faith when times are dark and
troubled. And all students of this period are at one in affirming that
during the Captivity a radical and most happy change passed upon the
Hebrew mind. They came out of it with a hatred of idolatry, a faith in
the life beyond the grave, a pride in their national Law, a hope in
the advent of the great Deliverer and Redeemer, with which the elder
Psalmists and Prophets had failed to inspire them, but which
henceforth they never wholly relinquished. With the religious there
was blended an intellectual advance. Books and teachers were sought
and honoured as never heretofore. Schools and synagogues grew up in
every town and village in which they dwelt. "Of making of many books
there was no end." Education was compulsory. Study was regarded as
more meritorious than sacrifice, a scholar as greater than a prophet,
a teacher as greater than a king, if at least we may trust proverbs
which were current among them. Before the Captivity one of the least
literate of nations--noble as their national literature was, at its
close the Jews were distinguished by their zeal for culture and
education.
To trace the progress of this marvellous revival of letters and
religion--a renaissance and a reformation in one--would be a most
welcome task, had we the materials for it and the skill to use them.
But even the scanty materials that exist lie scattered through the
historical and literary remains of many different races--in the
cylinders, sculptures, paintings, inscriptions, tombs, shrines of
Nineveh, Babylon, Behistun, and Persepolis, in the Zendavesta, in the
pages of Herodotus and the earlier Greek historians, in Josephus, in
the Apocrypha, in the Talmud, and in at least a dozen of the Old
Testament books; and some of these "sources" are very far as yet from
having been explored and mastered. Hence the history of this period
still remains to be written, and will probably be largely conjectural
whenever, if ever, it is written. Yet what period is of graver
interest to the student of the Bible? If we could recover its history,
it would throw a new and most welcome light on well-nigh one-half of
the Old Testament Scriptures, if not on all.
Happily, a brief sketch of it, such as is well within any man's reach,
will suffice to show how, from their contact with the Babylonian and
Persian races, the Jews received literary and religious impulses which
go far to account for the marvellous changes which swept over them,
and enable us to read the Preacher intelligently, and see how his
social and political allusions exactly correspond with what we know
of the time.[10]
[10] For this sketch I am largely indebted to Rawlinson's _Five Great
Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World_, and his commentary on
_Herodotus_.
* * * * *
About a hundred and twenty years after the destruction of the kingdom
of Israel by Shalmaneser, King of Assyria (B.C. 719), the kingdom of
Judah fell before Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (B.C. 598-596). The
city, palace, and temple of Jerusalem were levelled in a common ruin;
the nobles, priests, merchants, and skilled artisans, all the pith and
manhood of Judah, were carried away captive; only a few of the most
abject of the people were left to mourn and starve amid the ravaged
fields. Nothing could present a more striking contrast to their native
land than the region to which the Jews were deported. Instead of a
small picturesque mountain-country, with its little cities set on
hills or on the brink of precipitous ravines, they entered on a vast
plain, fertile beyond all precedent indeed, and abounding in streams,
but with nothing to break the monotony of level flats save the high
walls and lofty towers of one enormous city. For Babylonia proper was
simply an immense plain, lying between the Arabian Desert and the
Tigris, and of an extent somewhat under that of Ireland. But though
of a limited area as compared with the vast empire of which it was the
centre, by its amazing fertility it was capable of sustaining a
crowded population. It was watered not only by the great rivers Tigris
and Euphrates, but by their numerous affluents, many of which were
themselves considerable streams; it was "a land of brooks and
fountains." On this rich alluvial plain, amply supplied with water,
and under the fierce heat of the sun, wheat and barley, with all kinds
of grain, yielded a return far beyond all modern parallel. The capital
city of this fertile province was the largest and the most magnificent
of the ancient world, standing on both sides of the Euphrates, as
London stands on both sides of the Thames, and covering at least a
hundred square miles.
In this country and city (for "Babylon" stands for both in the Bible),
so unlike the sunny cliffs and scattered villages of their native
home, the Jews, who, like all hill-races, cherished a passionate
affection for the land of their fathers, spent many bitter years. On
the broad featureless plain they pined for "the mountains" of Judea
(Ezekiel xxxvi.; Psalm cxxxvii.); they sat down by the waters and wept
as they remembered "the hill of the Lord." They do not seem, however,
to have been handled with exceptional harshness by their captors. They
were treated as colonists rather than as slaves. They were allowed to
live together in considerable numbers, and to observe their own
religious rites. They took the advice of the prophet Jeremiah (xxix.
4-7), who had warned them that their exile would extend over many
years, and built houses, planted gardens, married wives, and brought
up children; they "sought the peace of the city" in which they were
captives, "and prayed for it," knowing that in its peace they would
have peace. If many of them had to labour gratuitously on the great
public works--and this labour was exacted of most of the conquered
races--many rose, by fidelity, thrift, diligence, to places of trust,
and amassed considerable wealth. Among those who filled high posts in
the household or administration of the successive monarchs of Babylon
were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; Zerubbabel, Ezra,
Nehemiah, and Mordecai; Tobit--if indeed Tobit be a real and not a
fictitious person--and his nephew Achiacharus.
But who were the people, and what were the social and political
conditions of the people, among whom the Hebrew captives lived? The
two leading races with whom they were brought in contact were the
Babylonians--an offshoot from the ancient Chaldean stock--and the
Persians. The history of the Captivity divides itself into two main
periods, therefore, the Persian and the Babylonian, at each of which
we must glance.
1. _The Babylonian Period._--For more than fifty years after they were
carried away captive, the Jews served a Chaldean race, and were
governed by Assyrian despots, of whom Nebuchadnezzar[11] was by far
the greatest whether in peace or war. It is hardly too much to say
that but for him the Babylonians would have had no place in history. A
great soldier, a great statesman, a great builder and engineer, he
knew how to consolidate and adorn his vast empire, an empire which is
said to have "extended from the Atlantic to the Caspian, and from
Caucasus to the Great Sahara." We owe our best conception of the
personal character and public life of this great despot to the Book of
Daniel. Daniel, although a Jew and a captive, was the vizier of the
Babylonian monarch, and retained his post until the Persian conquest,
when he became the first of "the three presidents" of the new empire.
He therefore paints Nebuchadnezzar from the life. And in his Book we
see the great King at the head of a magnificent court, surrounded by
"princes, governors, and captains, judges, treasurers, councillors,
and sheriffs," waited on by "well-favoured" eunuchs, attended by a
crowd of astrologers and "wise men" who interpret to him the will of
Heaven. He wields an absolute power, and disposes with a word of the
lives and fortunes of his subjects, even the highest and most
princely. All offices are in his gift. He can raise a slave to the
second place in his kingdom (Daniel, to wit), and impose a foreigner
(again, Daniel) on the priestly college as its head. Of so enormous a
wealth that he makes an image of pure gold ninety feet high and nine
feet broad, he lavishes it on public works--on temples, gardens,
canals, fortifications--rather than on personal indulgence. Religious
after a fashion, he wavers between "the God of the Jews" and the deity
after whom he was named and whom he calls _his_ god. In temper he is
hasty and violent, but not obstinate; he suddenly repents of his
sudden resolves; he is capable of bursts of gratitude and devotion no
less than of fierce accesses of fury, and displays at times a piety
and self-abasement astonishing in an Oriental despot. His
successors--Evil-Merodach, Neriglissar, Laborosoarchod, Nabonadius,
and Belshazzar--need not detain us. Little is known of them, and, with
one exception, their reigns were very short; and their main task seems
to have been the erection of vast and sumptuous structures such as
Nebuchadnezzar had been wont to rear. Probably none of the Babylonian
monarchs save Nebuchadnezzar made any deep impression on the Hebrew
mind.
[11] Instead of _Nebuchadnezzar_ Jeremiah and Ezekiel use the form
_Nebuchadrezzar_, which is nearer to the original _Nabu-Kuduri-utzur_,
_i.e._ "Nebo is the protector against misfortune."
And, indeed, the people of Babylon were much more likely than their
despots to influence the Hebrew captives; for with them they would be
brought into daily contact. Now the Babylonians were marked by a
singular intellectual ability. Keen to know, patient to observe, exact
and laborious in their researches, they could hardly fail to teach
much to subject races, and to inspire them with some desire for
knowledge. They had carried the sciences of mathematics and astronomy
to a high pitch of perfection. They are said to have determined,
within two seconds, the exact length of the solar year, and not to
have been far wrong in the distances at which they computed the sun,
moon and planets from the earth; and they compiled a serviceable
catalogue of the fixed stars. The Hebrew prophets often refer to their
"wisdom and learning." They excelled in architecture. Two of their
vast works, the walls of Babylon, and the hanging gardens, were
reckoned among "the seven wonders" of the ancient world. Their skill
in manufacturing and arranging enamelled bricks has never yet been
equalled.[12] In all mechanical arts, indeed, such as cutting stones
and gems, casting gold and silver, blowing glass, modelling vases and
ware, weaving carpets and muslins and linen, they take a very high
place among the nations of antiquity. With manufacturing and artistic
skill they combined the spirit of enterprise and adventure which leads
to commerce. They were addicted to maritime pursuits; the "cry," or
joy, "of the Chaldeans is in their ships," says Isaiah (xliii. 14);
and Ezekiel (xvii. 4) calls Babylonia "a land of traffic," and its
chief city "a city of merchants."
[12] There is a curious allusion to these enamelled bricks, and the
admiration the Jews conceived for them, in Ezekiel xxiii. 14-16.
But a larger, and probably the largest, class of the people must have
busied themselves with the toils of agriculture; the broad Chaldean
plain being famous, from the time of the Patriarchs to the present
day, for an amazing and almost incredible fertility. Wheat, barley,
millet, and sesame, all flourished with astonishing luxuriance, the
ground commonly yielding a hundredfold, two hundredfold, and even
ampler rewards for the toil of the husbandman.
With these abundant sources of wealth at their command, the people
naturally grew luxurious and dissolute. "The daughter of the
Chaldeans," says Isaiah (xlvii. 1-8), "is tender and delicate," given
to pleasures, apt to live carelessly; her young men, says Ezekiel
(xxiii. 15), are dandies, "exceeding in dyed attire," painting their
faces, and wearing earrings. Chastity, in our modern sense of the
term, was unknown.[13] The pleasures of the table and of the couch were
carried to excess. Yet, like many other Eastern races, the Babylonians
hid under their soft luxurious exterior a fierceness very formidable to
their foes. The Hebrew Prophets (Hab. i. 6-8; Isaiah xiv. 16) describe
them as "a bitter and hasty," a "terrible and dreadful" people, "fiercer
than the evening wolves," a people whose tramp "made the earth tremble,
and did shake kingdoms;" and all the historians of the time charge them
with a thirst for blood which often took the most savage and inhuman
forms.
[13] See _Herodotus_, book i., chap. 199; _Strabo_, xvi., p. 1058;
and the _Book of Baruch_, vi. 43.
Of the horrible licence and cruelty of the worship of Bel, Merodach,
and Nebo, which did much to foster the fierce and cruel temper of the
people, it is not necessary, it is hardly possible, to speak. Roughly
taken, it was the service of the great forces of Nature by a wanton
indulgence of the worst passions of man. It is enough to know that in
Babylon idolatry took forms which made all forms of idolatry
henceforth intolerable to the Jews; that now, once for all, they
renounced that worship of strange gods to which they and their fathers
had always hitherto been prone. This of itself was an immense advance,
a great gain. Nor was it their only gain; for if by contact with the
idolatrous Babylonians the Jews were driven back on their own Law and
Scripture, their intercourse with a people of so active an intellect
and a learning so deep and wide led them to study the Word of Jehovah
in a new and more intelligent spirit.
Nor is it less obvious that in the social and political conditions of
the Babylonians we have a key to many of the allusions to public life
contained in Ecclesiastes. The great empire, indeed, presents
precisely those elements which, in degenerate times and under feebler
despots, must inevitably develop into the disorder, and misery, and
crime which Coheleth depicts.
* * * * *
2. _The Persian Period._--The conquest of Babylon by the Persians, led
by the heroic Cyrus, is, thanks to Daniel, one of the most familiar
incidents of ancient history, so familiar that I need not recount it.
By this conquest Cyrus--"the Shepherd, the Messiah, of the Lord," as
Isaiah (xliv. 28; xlv. 1) terms him--became the undisputed master of
well-nigh the whole known world of the time. Nor does he seem to have
been unworthy of his extraordinary position. Of all ancient Oriental
monarchs, out of the Hebrew pale, he bears the highest repute. Even
the Greek authors, for the most part, represent him as energetic and
patient, magnanimous and modest, and of a religious mind. AEschylus
calls him "kindly" or "generous." Xenophon selected him as a model
prince for all races. Plutarch says that "in wisdom, and virtue, and
greatness of soul he appears to have been in advance of all kings."
Diodorus makes one of his speakers say that Cyrus gained his
ascendency by his self-command and good-feeling and gentleness. Simple
in his habits, brave, and of a most just, humane, and clement spirit,
he hated the cruel and lascivious idols of the East, and worshipped
one only God, "the God of heaven." There is none like him in the
antique world, none at least among the kings and princes of that
world. And when, at the conquest of Babylon, he discovered in the
captive Jews a race that also hated idols, and served one Lord, and
knew a law of life as pure as his own, or even purer, we need feel no
surprise either that he broke their bands in sunder and set them free
to return to their native land, or that they saw in this pure and
noble nature, this virtuous and religious prince, "a servant of
Jehovah," and even a partial and shadowy resemblance to that Divine
Deliverer and Redeemer for whose advent they had been taught to look.
Cyrus was sixty years of age when he took Babylon (B.C. 539), and died
ten years after his conquest. He was succeeded by men utterly unlike
himself, so unlike that the Persian nobles revolted from them, and
placed Darius Hystaspes, the heir of an ancient dynasty, on the
throne. As Cyrus was the soldier of the Persians, so Darius was their
statesman. He it was who founded the "satrapial" form of
administration; _i.e._ instead of governing the various provinces of
his empire through native princes, he placed Persian satraps over
them, these satraps being charged with the collection of the public
revenue, the maintenance of order, and the administration of justice;
in fact, he governed the whole Eastern world very much as we govern
India. The internal organization of his vast unwieldy empire was the
great work of Darius through his long reign of six-and-thirty years;
but the event by which he is best remembered, and which proved to be
fruitful in the most disastrous results to the State, was the opening
of that fatal war with Greece, which at last, and under his feeble and
degenerate successors, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, and the rest, reached its
close in the downfall of the Persian empire. We need not linger over
the details of the story. It will be enough, for our purpose, to say
that from the accession of Xerxes down to the conquest of the Persian
empire by Alexander the Great--a stretch of a hundred and fifty
years--that empire was declining to its fall. Its history towards the
end was a mere succession of intrigues and insurrections, conspiracies
and revolts. "Battle, murder, and sudden death" are its staple. The
restraints of law and order grew ever weaker. The satraps were
practically supreme in their several provinces, and used their power
to extort enormous wealth from their miserable subjects. Eunuchs and
concubines ruled in the palace. Manliness died out; the Persians were
no longer taught "to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth;"
cunning and treachery took its place. The scene grows more and more
pitiful, till at last the welcome darkness rushes down, and hides the
ignoble agony of perhaps the vastest and wealthiest empire the world
has seen.
* * * * *
But we must turn from the despots and their adventures to form some
slight acquaintance with the people, the Persian people who, by the
conquest of Cyrus, became the ruling class in the empire, always
remembering, however, that the Babylonians must have remained by
myriads both in the capital and in the provinces, and would continue
to exert their influence on Hebrew thought and activity.