of the Chaldeans, though they were probably behind them in many
civilized arts and crafts. They were famous for their truthfulness and
valour. The Greeks[14] confessed the Persians to be their equals in
"boldness and warlike spirit"--AEschylus[15] calls them "a
valiant-minded people"--while they are lavish in praise of the Persian
veracity, a virtue in which they themselves were notably deficient. To
the Persians God was "the Father of all truth;" to lie was shameful
and irreligious. They disliked traffic because of its haggling,
equivocation, and dishonest shifts. "Their chief faults," and even
these were not developed till they became masters of the world, "were
an addiction to self-indulgence and luxury, a passionate _abandon_ to
the feeling of the hour whatever it might be, and a tameness and
subservience in all their relations toward their princes which seem to
moderns incompatible with self-respect and manliness." Patriotism came
to mean mere loyalty to the monarch; the habit of unquestioning
submission to his will, and even to his caprice, became a second
nature to them. The despotic humour natural in "a ruling person" was
thus nourished till it ran to the wildest excess. "He was their lord
and master, absolute disposer of their lives, liberties, and property,
the sole fountain of law and right, incapable himself of doing wrong,
irresponsible, irresistible--a sort of God upon earth; one whose
favour was happiness, at whose frown men trembled, before whom all
bowed themselves down with the lowest and humblest obeisance." No
subject could enter his presence save by special permission, or
without a prostration like that of worship. To come unbidden was to be
cut down by the royal guards, unless, as a sign of grace, he extended
his golden sceptre to the culprit. To tread on the king's carpet was a
grave offence; to sit, even unwittingly, on his seat a capital crime.
So slavish was the submission both of nobles and of people that we are
required on good authority to accredit such stories as these: wretches
bastinadoed by the king's order declared themselves delighted that his
majesty had condescended to remember them; a father, whose innocent
son was shot by the despot in pure wantonness, had to crush down his
natural indignation and grief, and to compliment the royal archer on
the accuracy of his aim.
[14] _Herodotus_, ix. 62.
[15] AEschyl., _Pers._, 94.
Despising trade and commerce as menial and degrading, the ruling caste
of a vast empire, with a monopoly of office and boundless means of
wealth at their command, accustomed to lord it over subject races, of
a high spirit and a faith comparatively pure, their very prosperity
was their ruin, as it has been that of many a great nation. In their
earlier times, they were noted for their sobriety and temperance.
Content with simple diet, their only drink was water from the pure
mountain streams; their garb was plain, their habits homely and hardy.
But their temperance soon gave place to an immoderate luxury.[16] They
acquired the Babylonian vices, and adopted at least the licence of the
Babylonian rites. They filled their harems with wives and concubines.
From the time of Xerxes onwards they grew nice and curious of
appetite, eager for pleasure, effeminate, dissolute.
[16] "There is no nation which so readily adopts foreign customs as
the Persians.... As soon as they hear of any luxury they instantly
make it their own.... Each of them has several wives, and a still
larger number of concubines."--(_Herodotus_ book i., chap. 135).
With the growth of luxury on the part of the nobles and the people,
the fear of the despot, at whose mercy all their acquisitions stood,
grew more intense, more harassing, more degrading. Xerxes and his
successors were utterly reckless in their exercise of the absolute
power conceded to them, and delegated it to favourites as reckless as
themselves. No noble however eminent, no servant of the State however
faithful or distinguished, could be sure that he might not at any
moment incur a displeasure which would strip him of all he possessed,
even if it did not also condemn him to a cruel and lingering death.
Out of mere sport and wantonness, to relieve the tedium of a weary
hour, the despot might slay him with his own hand. For the crime, or
assumed crime, of one person a whole family, or class, or race might
be cut off unheard. Of the lengths to which this cruelty and caprice
might go we have a sufficient example in the Book of Esther. The
Ahasuerus of that singular narrative was, there can hardly be any
doubt, the Xerxes of secular history--the very names, unlike as they
sound, are the same name differently pronounced by two different
races.[17] And all that the Book of Esther relates of the despot who
repudiates a wife because she will not expose herself to the drunken
admiration of a crowd of revellers, who raises a servant to the
highest honours one day and hangs him the next, who commands the
massacre of an entire race and then bids them inflict a horrible
carnage on those who execute his decree, exactly accords with the
Greek narratives which depict him as scourging the sea for having
broken down his bridge over the Hellespont, beheading the engineers
whose work was swept away by a storm, wantonly putting to death the
sons of Pythias, his oldest friend, before their father's eyes; as
first giving to his mistress the splendid robe presented to him by his
queen, and then giving up to the queen's barbarous vengeance the
mother of his mistress; as shamefully misusing the body of the heroic
Leonidas, and, after his defeat by the Greeks, giving himself up to a
criminal voluptuousness and offering a reward to the inventor of any
new pleasure.
[17] Their common root is the Sanscrit _Kshatra_, a king; in the
Persepolitan inscriptions this word appears as Ksershe, and from this
both the Hebrew _Achashuerash_ (Ahasuerus) and the Greek _Xerxes_
would easily be formed.
* * * * *
The Book Ecclesiastes was written certainly not before the reign of
Xerxes (B.C. 486-465), and probably many years after it, a period in
which, bad as were the conditions of his time, the times grew ever
more lawless, the despotism more intolerable, the violence and
licentiousness of the subordinate officials more unblushing. But at
whatever period within these limits we may place it, all we have
learned of the Babylonians and the Persians during the later years of
the Captivity and the earlier years of the Exile (during which the
Jews were still under the Persian rule) is in entire correspondence
with the social and political state depicted by the Preacher. The
abler and more kindly despots--as Cyrus, Darius, Artaxerxes--showed a
singular favour to the Jews. Cyrus published a decree authorizing them
to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, and enjoining the
officials of the empire to further them in their enterprise; Darius
confirmed that decree, despite the malignant misrepresentations of the
Samaritan colonists; Artaxerxes held Ezra and Nehemiah in high esteem,
and sent them to restore order and prosperity to the city of their
fathers and its inhabitants. But a large number, apparently even a
large majority, of the Jews, unable or disinclined to return, remained
in the various provinces of the great empire, and were of course
subject to the violence and injustice from which the Persians
themselves were not exempt. "Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities,
all is vanity!" cries the Preacher till we grow weary of the mournful
refrain. Might he not well take that tone in a time so out of joint,
so lowering, so dark?
The Book is full of allusions to the Persian luxury, to the Persian
forms of administration, above all, to the corruptions of the later
years of the Persian empire, and the miseries they bred. Coheleth's
elaborate description (ii. 4-8) of the infinite variety of means by
which he sought to allure his heart unto mirth--his palaces,
vineyards, paradises, with their reservoirs and fountains, crowds of
attendants, treasures of gold and silver, the harem full of beauties
of all races--seems taken direct from the ample state of some
luxurious Persian grandee. His picture of the public administration
(v. 8, 9), in which "superior watcheth over superior, and superiors
again watch over them," is a graphic sketch of the satrapial system,
with its official hierarchy rising grade above grade, which was the
work of Darius.[18] When the animating and controlling spirit of that
system was taken away, when weak foolish despots sat on the throne,
and despots just as foolish and weak ruled in every provincial divan,
there ensued precisely that political state to which Coheleth
perpetually refers.[19] Iniquity sat in the place of judgment, and in
the place of equity there was iniquity (iii. 16); kings grew childish,
and princes spent their days in revelry (x. 16); fools were lifted to
high place, while nobles were degraded; and slaves rode on horses,
while their quondam masters tramped through the mire (x. 6, 7). There
was no fair reward for faithful service (ix. 11). Death brooded in the
air, and might fall suddenly and unforeseen on any head, however high
(ix. 12). To correct a public abuse was like pulling down a wall: some
of the stones were sure to fall on the reformer's feet, from some
cranny a serpent was sure to start out and bite him (x. 8, 9). To
breathe a word against a ruler, even in the strictest privacy, was to
run the hazard of destruction (x. 20). A resentful gesture, much more
a rebellious word, in the divan was enough to ensure outrage. In
short, the whole political fabric was fast falling into disrepair and
decay, the rain leaking through the rotting roof, while the miserable
people were ground down with ruinous exactions, in order that their
rulers might revel on undisturbed (x. 18, 19). It is under such a
pernicious and ominous maladministration of public affairs, and the
appalling miseries it breeds, that there springs up in the hearts of
men that fatalistic and hopeless temper to which Coheleth gives
frequent expression. Better never to have been born than to live a
life so cramped and thwarted, so full of perils and fears! Better to
snatch at every pleasure, however poor and brief, than seek, by
self-denial, by virtue, by integrity, to accumulate a store which the
first petty tyrant who gets wind of it will sweep off, or a reputation
for wisdom and goodness which will be no protection from, which will
be only too likely to provoke, the despotic humours of men "dressed in
a little brief authority."
[18] "The political condition of the people which this Book
presupposes is that in which they are placed under satraps"
(Delitzsch).
[19] It would be possible to collect from the Psalms of this date
materials for a description of the wrongs and miseries inflicted on
the Jews, and of their keen sense of them, quite as graphic and
intense as that of the Preacher. Here are a few phrases hastily culled
from them. The oppressors of Israel are described as being "clothed
with cruelty as with a garment," as "returning evil for good, and
hatred for good-will."
"Lift up thyself, thou Judge of the earth;
Render to the proud their desert.
They prate, they speak arrogantly;
All the workers of iniquity boast themselves.
They break in pieces Thy people, O Lord,
And afflict Thine heritage.
They slay the widow and the stranger,
And murder the fatherless.
And they say, The Lord shall not see,
Neither shall the God of Jacob consider" (xciv.).
"I am bowed down and brought very low;
I go mourning all the day long:
Truly I am nigh unto falling,
And my heaviness is ever before me" (xxxviii.).
"My days consume away like smoke,
And my bones are burned up like as a firebrand;
My heart is smitten down and withered like grass,
So that I forget to eat my bread" (cii.).
"I am helpless and poor,
And my heart is wounded within me" (cix.).
Most of the "imprecatory" Psalms belong to this period; and the
terrible wrongs of the Captivity, though they may not justify, in
large measure explain and excuse, that desire for vengeance which has
given so much offence to some of our modern critics.
If even Shakespeare,[20] in an unrestful and despairing mood strangely
foreign to his serene temperament, beheld
"desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappy forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill;"
if, "tired with all these," he cried for "restful death," we can
hardly wonder that the Preacher, who had fallen on times so evil that,
compared with his, Shakespeare's were good, should prefer death to
life.
[20] Sonnets, LXVI.
* * * * *
But there is another side to this sad story of the Captivity, another
and a nobler side. If the Jews suffered much from Persian misrule,
they learned much and gained much from the Persian faith. In its
earlier form the religious creed whose documents Zoroaster afterwards
collected and enlarged in the Zendavesta was probably the purest of
the ancient heathen world; and even when it was corrupted by the baser
additions of later times, its purer form was still preserved in songs
(Gathas) and traditions. There can be no reasonable doubt that it
largely affected the subsequent faith of the Hebrews, not indeed
teaching them any truth they had not been taught before, but
constraining them to recognize truths in their Scriptures which
hitherto they had passed over or neglected.
In its inception the Persian creed and practice were a revolt against
the sensuous and sensual worship of the great forces of Nature into
which most Eastern religions, often pure enough, in their primitive
forms, had degenerated, and, in especial, from the base forms into
which the Hindus had degraded that primitive faith which is still to
be recovered from the Rig-Veda. It acknowledged persons, real
spiritual intelligences, in place of mere natural powers; and it drew
moral distinctions between them, dividing these ruling intelligences
into good and bad, pure and impure, benignant and malevolent,--an
immense advance on the mere admiration of whatever was strong. Nay, in
some sense, the Persian faith affirmed monotheism against polytheism;
for it asserted that one Great Intelligence ruled over all other
intelligences, and through them over the universe. This Supreme
Intelligence, which the Persians called Ahura-mazda (Ormazd), is the
true Creator, Preserver, Governor, of all spirits, all men, all
worlds. He is "good," "holy," "pure," "true," "the Father of all
truth," "the best Being of all," "the Master of Purity," "the Source
and Fountain of all good." On the righteous He bestows "the good mind"
and everlasting happiness; while He punishes and afflicts the evil.
His worshippers were to the last degree intolerant of idolatry. They
suffered no image to profane their temples; their earliest symbol of
Deity is almost as pure and abstract as a mathematical sign, a circle
with wings; the circle to denote the eternity of God, and the wings
his omnipresence. Under this Supreme Lord, "the God of heaven," they
admitted inferior beings, angels and archangels, whose names mark them
out as personified Divine attributes, or as faithful servants who
administer some province of the Divine empire.
To win the favour of the God of heaven it was requisite to cultivate
the virtues of purity, truthfulness, industry, and a pious sense of
the Divine presence; and these virtues must spring from the heart, and
cover thought as well as word and deed. His worship consisted in the
frequent offering of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving; in the
reiteration of certain sacred hymns; in the occasional sacrifice of
animals which, after being presented before Ormazd, furnished forth a
feast for priest and worshipper; and in the performance of a mystic
ceremony (the _Soma_), the gist of which seems to have lain in a
grateful acknowledgment that the fruits of the earth, typified by the
intoxicating juice of the Homa plant, were to be received as the gift
of Heaven. A sentence or two from one of the hymns[21] of which there
are many in the Zendavesta, will show better than many words to how
high a pitch Divine worship was carried by the Persians: "We worship
Thee, Ahura-mazda, the pure, the master of purity. We praise all good
thoughts, all good words, all good deeds which are or shall be; and we
likewise keep clean and pure all that is good. O Ahura-mazda, thou
true happy Being! We strive to think, to speak, and to do only such
things as may be best fitted to promote the two lives" (_i.e._ the
life of the body and the life of the soul).
[21] Haug's _Essays_, pp. 162-3, quoted by Rawlinson.
In this course of well-doing the faithful were animated and confirmed
by a devout belief in the immortality of the soul and a conscious
future existence. They were taught that at death the souls of men,
both good and bad, travelled along an appointed path to a narrow
bridge which led to Paradise; over this bridge only pious souls could
pass, the wicked falling from it into an awful gulf in which they
received the due reward of their deeds. The happy souls of the good
were helped across the long narrow arch by an angel,[22] and as they
entered Paradise a great archangel rose from his throne to greet each
of them with the words, "How happy art thou, who hast come to us from
mortality to immortality!"
[22] This helpful angel is by no means peculiar to the Persian faith.
All the imaginative races of antiquity conceived of a being more
divine than man, though originally not equal to the gods, who guided
the departed soul on its lonely journey through the dark interspaces
of death. Theut conducted the released spirit of the Egyptian to the
judgment-seat. Hermes performed the same kind office for the Greeks,
Mercury for the Romans. Yama was the _nekropompos_ of the Hindus, and
the Persians retained the legend. The Rig-Veda represents him as the
first man who passed through death to immortality, and as therefore
the best guide of other men. Nor is it doubted that the Persians
derived their belief in a future life from the primitive Hindu creed.
If their faith was, as I have said, a revolt from the degenerate forms
of Hindu worship, it was also a return to its more ancient forms, as
religious reformations are apt to be. The fathers of the Aryan stock
had an unwavering assurance of a future life. In his Essay on the
_Funeral Rites of the Brahmans_, Max Mueller cites a sort of liturgy
with which the ancient Hindu used to bid farewell to his deceased
friend while the body lay on the funeral pyre, which is, surely, very
noble and pathetic: "Depart thou, depart thou by the ancient paths, to
the place whither our fathers have departed. Meet with the ancient
ones (the Pitrs); meet with the Lord of Death; obtain thy desires in
heaven. Throw off thine imperfections; go to thy home. Become united
with a body; clothe thyself in a shining form. Go ye; depart ye;
hasten ye from hence" (Rig-Veda x. 14).
To which, as choral responses, might be added, "Let him depart to
those for whom flow the rivers of nectar. Let him depart to those who
through meditation have obtained the victory, who by fixing their
thoughts on the unseen have gone to heaven.... Let him depart to the
mighty in battle, to the heroes who have laid down their lives for
others, to those who have bestowed their goods on the poor" (Rig-Veda
x. 154).
As the body was consumed on the pyre the friends of the dead chanted a
hymn in which, after having bidden his body return to the various
elements from which it sprang, they prayed, "As for his unborn part,
do Thou, Lord (Agni), quicken it with Thy heat; let Thy flame and Thy
brightness kindle it: convey it to the world of the righteous."
It was from this pure and lofty source that the Persians drew their
faith in the better life to be.
Max Mueller also quotes as the prayer of a dying Hindu woman, "Place
me, O Pure One, in that everlasting and unchanging world where light
and glory are found. Make me immortal in the world in which joys,
delights, and happiness abide, where the desires are obtained"
(Atharda Veda xii. 3, 17).
Cremation itself bore witness to the Hindu faith in immortality, since
they held that "the fire which set free the spiritual element from the
superincumbent clay, completed the third or heavenly birth," the
second birth having been achieved when men set themselves to a
faithful discharge of their religious duties.
This wonderfully pure creed was, however, in process of time,
corrupted in many ways. First of all, "the sad antithesis of human
life," the conflict between light and darkness, good and evil--the
standing puzzle of the world--led the votaries of Ormazd to _dualism_.
Ormazd loved and created only the good. The evil in man, and in the
world, must be the work of an enemy. This enemy, Ahriman
(Augro-maniyus), has been seeking from eternity to undo, to mar and
blast, the fair work of the God of heaven. He is the baleful author of
all evil, and under him are spirits as malignant as himself. Between
these good and evil powers there is incessant conflict, which extends
to every soul and every world. It will never cease until the great
Deliverer arise--for even of _Him_ the Persians had some dim
prevision--who shall conquer and destroy evil at its source, all
things then rounding to their final goal of good.
Another corrupting influence had its origin in a too literal
interpretation of the names given to the Divine Being, or the
qualities ascribed to Him, by the founders of the faith. Ormazd, for
example, had been described as "true, _lucid_, _shining_, the
originator of all the best things, of the spirit in nature and of the
growth in nature, _of the luminaries and of the self-shining
brightness which is in the luminaries_." From these epithets and
ascriptions there sprang in later days the worship of the sun, then of
fire, as a type of God--a worship still maintained by the disciples of
Zoroaster, the Ghebers and the Parsees. And from this point onward the
old sad story repeats itself; once more we have to trace a pure and
lofty primitive faith along the grades through which it declines to
the low, base level of a sensuous idolatry. The Magians, always the
bitter enemies of Zoroastrianism, held that the four elements--fire,
air, earth, and water--were the only proper objects of human
reverence. It was not difficult for them to persuade those who already
worshipped fire, and were beginning to forget of Whom fire was the
symbol, to include in their homage air, water, and earth. Divination,
incantations, the interpretation of dreams and omens soon followed,
with all the dark shadows which science and religion cast behind them.
And then came the lowest deep of all, that worship of the gods by
sensual indulgence to which idolatry gravitates, as by a law.
Nevertheless, we must remember that, even at their worst, the Persians
preserved the sacred records of their earlier faith, and that their
best men steadily refused to accept the base additions to it which the
Magians proposed. Corrupt as in many respects many of them became, the
conquest of Babylon was the death-blow to the sensual idol-worship
which had reigned for twenty centuries on the Chaldean plain; it never
wholly recovered from it, though it survived it for a time. From that
date it declined to its fall: "Bel bowed down; Nebo stooped; Merodach
was broken in pieces" (Isa. xlvi. 1; Jer. l. 2). The nobler monarchs
of Persia were true disciples of the primitive creed of their race. It
was similarity of creed which won their favour for the Hebrew
captives. In the decree which enfranchised them (Ezra i. 2, 3) Cyrus
expressly identifies Ormazd, "the God of heaven," with Jehovah, the
God of Israel; he says, "_The Lord God of heaven_ hath given me all
the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me to build _Him_ a
house at Jerusalem." Nor was this belief in one God, whose temple was
to be defiled by no image even of Himself, the only point in common
between the better Persians, such as Cyrus and Darius, and the better
Jews. There were many such points. Both believed in an evil spirit
tempting and accusing men; in myriads of angels, all the host of
heaven, who formed the armies of God and did his pleasure; in a tree
of life and a tree of knowledge, and a serpent the enemy of man; both
shared the hope of a coming Deliverer from evil, the belief in an
immortal and retributive life beyond the grave, and a happy Paradise
in which all righteous souls would find a home and see their Father's
face. These common faiths and hopes would all be points of sympathy
and attachment between the two races; and it is to this agreement in
religious doctrine and practice that we must ascribe the striking
facts that the Persians, ordinarily the most intolerant of men, never
persecuted the Jews; and that the Jews, ordinarily so impatient of
foreign domination, never made a single attempt to cast off the
Persian yoke, but stood by the declining empire even when the Greeks
were thundering at its gates.