_JOSIAH_
B.C. 639-608[665]
2 KINGS xii., xxiii
"Τὴν δὲ φύσιν αὐτὸς ἄριστος ὑπῆρχε καὶ πρὸς ἀρετὴν εὗ
γεγονώς."--Jos., _Antt._, iv. 1.
"In outline dim and vast
Their fearful shadows cast
The giant forms of Empires, on their way
To ruin: one by one
They tower, and they are gone."
KEBLE.
If we are to understand the reign of Josiah as a whole, we must preface
it by some allusion to the great epoch-marking circumstances of his age,
which explain the references of contemporary prophets, and which, in
great measure, determined the foreign policy of the pious king.
The three memorable events of this brief epoch were, (I.) the movement
of the Scythians, (II.) the rise of Babylon, and (III.) the
humiliation of Nineveh, followed by her total destruction.
I. Many of Jeremiah's earlier prophecies belong to this period, and we
see that both he and Zephaniah--who was probably a great-great-grandson
of King Hezekiah himself,[666] and prophesied in this reign[667]--are
greatly occupied with a danger from the North which seems to threaten
universal ruin.
So overwhelming is the peril that Zephaniah begins with the
tremendously sweeping menace, "_I will utterly consume all things off
the earth_, saith the Lord."
Then the curse rushes down specifically upon Judah and Jerusalem; and
the state of things which the prophet describes shows that, if Josiah
began himself to seek the Lord at eight years old, he did not
take--and was, perhaps, unable to take--any active steps towards the
extinction of idolatry till he was old enough to hold in his own hand
the reins of power.
For Zephaniah denounces the wrath of Jehovah on three classes of
idolaters--viz., (1) the remnant of Baal-worshippers with their
_chemarim_, or unlawful priests, and the syncretising priests
(_kohanim_) of Jehovah, who combine His worship with that of the stars,
to whom they burn incense upon the housetops; (2) the waverers, who
swear at once by Jehovah and by Malcham, their king; and (3) the open
despisers and apostates. For all these the day of Jehovah is near; He
has prepared them for sacrifice, and the sacrificers are at hand.[668]
Gaza, Ashdod, Askelon, Ekron, the Cherethites, Canaan, Philistia, are
all threatened by the same impending ruin, as well as Moab and Ammon,
who shall lose their lands. Ethiopia, too, and Assyria shall be smitten,
and Nineveh shall become so complete a desolation that "pelicans and
hedgehogs shall bivouac upon her chapiters, the owl shall hoot in her
windows, and the crow croak upon the threshold, 'Crushed! desolated!'
and all that pass by shall hiss and wag their hands."[669]
The pictures of the state of society drawn by Jeremiah do not, as we
have seen, differ from those drawn by his contemporary.[670] Jeremiah,
too, writing perhaps before Josiah's reformation, complains that God's
people have forsaken the fountains of living water, to hew out for
themselves broken cisterns. He complains of empty formalism in the place
of true righteousness, and even goes so far as to say that backsliding
Israel has shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah (iii.
1-11). He, too, prophesies speedy and terrific chastisement. Let Judah
gather herself into fenced cities, and save her goods by flight, for God
is bringing evil from the North, and a great destruction.[671]
"The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the
nations is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy
land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an
inhabitant. Behold, he cometh as clouds, and his chariots shall be as
the whirlwind." Besiegers come from a far country, and give out their
voice against the cities of Judah. The heart of the kings shall
perish, and the heart of the princes; and the priests shall be
astonished, and the prophets shall wonder.
"For thus hath the Lord said, The whole land shall be desolate; yet
will I not make a full end"--and, "O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from
wickedness, that thou mayest be saved!"[672]
"I will bring a nation upon you from far, O House of Israel, saith the
Lord: it is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose
language"--unlike that of the Assyrians--"thou knowest not, neither
understandest what they say. Their quiver is an open sepulchre, they
are all mighty men. They shall batter thy fenced cities, in which thou
trustest with weapons of war."[673]
"O ye children of Benjamin, save your goods by flight: for evil is
imminent from the North, and a great destruction. Behold, a people
cometh from the North Country, and a great nation shall be raised from
the farthest part of the earth. They lay hold on bow and spear; they are
cruel, and have no mercy; their voice roareth like the sea; and they
ride upon horses, set in array as men for war against thee, O daughter
of Zion. We have heard the fame thereof: our hands wax feeble."[674]
And the judgment is close at hand. The early blossoming bud of the
almond tree is the type of its imminence. The seething caldron, with
its front turned from the North, typifies an invasion which shall soon
boil over and flood the land.[675]
What was the fierce people thus vaguely indicated as coming from the
North? The foes indicated in these passages are not the long-familiar
Assyrians, but the Scythians and Cimmerians.[676]
As yet the Hebrews had only heard of them by dim and distant rumour.
When Ezekiel prophesied they were still an object of terror, but he
foresees their defeat and annihilation. They should be gathered into
the confines of Israel, but only for their destruction.[677] The
prophet is bidden to set his face towards Gog, of the land of Magog,
the Prince of Rosh,[678] Meshech, and Tubal, and prophesy against him
that God would turn him about, and put hooks in his jaws, and drive
forth all his army of bucklered and sworded horsemen, the hordes of
the uttermost part of the North. They should come like a storm upon
the mountains of Israel, and spoil the defenceless villages; but they
should come simply for their own destruction by blood and by
pestilence. God should smite their bows out of their left hands, and
their arrows out of the right, and the ravenous birds of Israel should
feed upon the carcases of their warriors. There should be endless
bonfires of all the instruments of war, and the place of their burial
should be called "the valley of the multitude of Gog."
Much of this is doubtless an ideal picture, and Ezekiel may be
thinking of the fall of the Chaldæans. But the terms he uses remind us
of the dim Northern nomads, and the names Rosh and Meshech in
juxtaposition involuntarily recall those of Russia and Moscow.[679]
Our chief historical authority respecting this influx of Northern
barbarians is Herodotus.[680] He tells us that the nomad Scythians,
apparently a Turanian race, who may have been subjected to the pressure
of population, swarmed over the Caucasus, dispossessed the Cimmerians
(Gomer), and settled themselves in Saccasene, a province of Northern
Armenia. From this province the Scythians gained the name of the Saquî.
The name of Gog seems to be taken from Gugu, a Scythian prince, who was
taken captive by Assurbanipal from the land of the Saquî.[681] Magog is
perhaps Mat-gugu, "land of Gog." These rude, coarse warriors, like the
hordes of Attila, or Zenghis Khan, or Tamerlane--who were descended from
them--magnetised the imagination of civilised people, as the Huns did in
the fourth century.[682] They overthrew the kingdom of Urartis
(Armenia), and drove the all-but exterminated remnant of the Moschi and
Tabali to the mountain-fortresses by the Black Sea, turning them, as it
were, into a nation of ghosts in Sheol.[683] Then they burst like a
thunder-cloud on Mesopotamia, desolating the villages with their
arrow-flights, but too unskilled to take fenced towns. They swept down
the Shephelah of Palestine, and plundered the rich temple of Aphrodite
(Astarte Ourania) at Askelon, thereby incurring the curse of the goddess
in the form of a strange disease. But on the borders of Egypt they were
diplomatically met by Psammetichus (_d._ 611) with gifts and prayers.
Judah seems only to have suffered indirectly from this invasion. The
main army of Scyths poured down the maritime plain, and there was no
sufficient booty to tempt any but their straggling bands to the barren
hills of Judah.[684] It was the report of this over-flooding from the
North which probably evoked the alarming prophecies of Zephaniah and
Jeremiah, though they found their clearer fulfilment in the invasion of
the Chaldees.
II. This rush of wild nomads averted for a time the fate of Nineveh.
The Medes, an Aryan people, had settled south of the Caspian, B.C.
790; and in the same century one of these tribes--the Persians--had
settled south-east of Elam the northern coast of the Persian Gulf.
Cyaxares founded the Median Empire, and attacked Nineveh. The Scythian
invasion forced him to abandon the siege, and the Scythians burnt the
Assyrian palace and plundered the ruins. But Cyaxares succeeded in
intoxicating and murdering the Scythian leaders at a banquet, and
bribed the army to withdraw. Then Cyaxares, with the aid of the
Babylonians under Nabopolassar their rebel viceroy, besieged and took
Nineveh--probably about B.C. 608--while its last king and his captains
were revelling at a banquet.[685]
The fall of Nineveh was not astonishing. The empire had long been
"slowly bleeding to death" in consequence of its incessant wars. The
city deemed itself impregnable behind walls a hundred feet high, on
which three chariots could drive abreast, and mantled with twelve
hundred towers; but she perished, and all the nations--whom she had
known how to crush, but had with "her stupid and cruel tyranny" never
known how to govern--shouted for joy. That joy finds its triumphant
expression in more than one of the prophets, but specially in the
vivid pæan of Nahum. His date is approximately fixed at about B.C.
660, by his reference to the atrocities inflicted by Assurbanipal on
the Egyptian city of No-Amon. "Art thou [Nineveh] better," he asks,
"than No-Amon, that was situate among the canals, that had the water
round about her, whose rampart was the Nile, and her wall was the
waters? Yet she went into captivity! Her young children were dashed to
pieces at the head of all the streets: they cast lots for her
honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains. Thou also
shalt be drunken: thou shalt faint away, thou shalt seek a stronghold
because of the enemy."[686]
All the details of her fall are dim; but Nineveh was, in the language
of the prophets, swept with the besom of destruction. Her ruins became
stones of emptiness, and the line of confusion was stretched over her.
Nahum ends with the cry,--
"There is no assuaging of thy hurt; thy wound is grievous:
All that hear the bruit of this, clap the hands over thee:
For upon whom hath thy wickedness not passed continually?"
In truth, Assyria, the ferocious foe of Israel, of Judah, and all the
world, vanished suddenly, like a dream when one awaketh;[687] and those
who passed over its ruins, like Xenophon and his Ten Thousand in B.C.
401, knew not what they were.[688] Her very name had become forgotten in
two centuries. "_Etiam periere ruinæ!_" The burnt relics and cracked
tablets of her former splendour began to be revealed to the world once
more in 1842, and it is only during the last quarter of a century that
the fragments of her history have been laboriously deciphered.
III. Such were the events witnessed in their germs or in their
completion by the contemporaries of Josiah and the prophets who
adorned his reign. It was during this period, also, that the power to
whom the ultimate ruin and captivity of Jerusalem was due sprang into
formidable proportions. The ultimate scourge of God to the guilty
people and the guilty city was not to be the Assyrian, nor the
Scythian, nor the Egyptian, nor any of the old Canaanite or Semitic
foes of Israel, nor the Phœnician, nor the Philistine. With all these
she had long contended, and held her own. It was before the Chaldee
that she was doomed to fall, and the Chaldee was a new phenomenon of
which the existence had hardly been recognised as a danger till the
warning prophecy of Isaiah to Hezekiah after the embassy of the rebel
viceroy Merodach-Baladan.[689]
It is to Habakkuk, in prophecies written very shortly after the death
of Josiah, that we must look for the impression of terror caused by
the Chaldees.
Nabopolassar,[690] sent by the successor of Assurbanipal to quell a
Chaldæan revolt, seized the viceroyalty of Babylon, and joined Cyaxares
in the overthrow of Nineveh. From that time Babylon became greater and
more terrible than Nineveh, whose power it inherited. Habakkuk (ii.
1-19) paints the rapacity, the selfishness, the inflated ambition, the
cruelty, the drunkenness, the idolatry of the Chaldæans. He calls them
(i. 5-11) a rough and restless nation, frightful and terrible, whose
horsemen were swifter than leopards, fiercer than evening wolves, flying
to gorge on prey like the vultures, mocking at kings and princes, and
flinging dust over strongholds. Nor has he the least comfort in looking
on their resistless fury, except the deeply significant oracle--an
oracle which contains the secret of their ultimate doom--
"Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright in him:
But the righteous man shall live by his fidelity."
The prophet places absolute reliance on the general principle that
"pride and violence dig their own grave."[691]
FOOTNOTES:
[665] Kamphausen (_Die Chronologie der hebräischer Könige_) makes
Josiah succeed to the throne in 638.
[666] Otherwise his genealogy would not be mentioned for four
generations (Hitzig).
[667] Zeph. i. 1. Jeremiah also was highly connected. He was a priest
and his father Hilkiah may be the high priest who found the book; "for
his uncle Shallum, father of his cousin Hanameel, was the husband of
Huldah the prophetess" (2 Kings xxii. 14; Jer. xxxii. 7). The fact
that Jeremiah's property was at Anathoth, where lived the descendants
of Ithamar (1 Kings ii. 26), whereas Hilkiah was of the family of
Eleazar (1 Chron. vi. 4-13), does not seem fatal to the view that his
father was the high priest.
[668] Zeph. ii. 4-7.
[669] Zeph. ii. 12-15.
[670] Jer. ii. 1-35. Considering the very great part played by
Jeremiah for nearly half a century of the last history of Judah, the
non-mention of his name in the Book of Kings is a circumstance far
from easy to explain.
[671] Jer. iv. 6, A. V., "retire, stay not." Comp. Isa. x. 24-31.
[672] Jer. iv. 7-27.
[673] Jer. v. 15-17.
[674] Jer. vi. 1, 22, 23, 24.
[675] The almond tree (_shâqâd_) "seems to be awake (_shâqâd_),
whatsoever trees are still sleeping in the torpor of winter" (Tristram
_Nat. Hist. of the Bible_, 332; Jer. i. 11-14).
[676] The name Kimmerii (on the Assyrian inscriptions Gimirrai) is
connected with Gomer. The Persians call them Sakai or Scyths. The
nomad Scyths had driven the Kimmerii from the Dniester while
Psammetichus was King of Egypt. For allusions to this see Jer. vi. 22
_seq._, viii. 16, ix. 10. The first notice of them is in an
inscription of Esarhaddon, B.C. 677, who says that he defeated
"Tiushpa, _the Gimirrai, a roving warrior_, whose own country was
remote." Zephaniah and Jeremiah were certainly thinking of the
Scythians (Eichhorn, Hitzig, Ewald; and more recently Kuenen,
_Onderzoek_, ii. 123; Wellhausen, _Skizzen_, 150). In B.C. 626 they
could not have consciously had the Chaldæans in view, though,
twenty-three years later, Jeremiah may have had.
[677] See Ezek. xxxviii., xxxix.
[678] Ezek. xxxviii. 2. So Gesenius, Hävernick, etc., and R.V.
[679] The form in the Vulgate and the Alexandrian MS. of the LXX. is
Mosech; in the Assyrian inscription, Muski. As far back as 1120
Tiglath-Pileser I. had overrun Tubal (the Tublai, Tabareni) and
Moschi, between the Black Sea and the Taurus. They were neither Aryans
nor Semites. In Gen. x. 2; 1 Chron. i. 5, Gog, Magog, Meshech, and
Gomer are sons of Japheth. They are referred to in Rev. xx. 8.
[680] Herod., i. 74, 103-106, iv. 1-22, vii. 64; Pliny, _H. N._, v.
16; Jos., _Antt._, I. vi. 1; Syncellus, _Chronogl._, i. 405.
[681] Sayce, _Ethnology of the Bible; Records of the Past_, ix. 40;
Schrader, _K. A. T._, 159. Some identify Gog with Gyges, King of
Lydia, who was killed in battle _against_ the Scythians, but whose
name stood for a geographical symbol of Asia Minor, sometimes called
Lud. It is said that in 665 Gyges (Gugu) sent two Scythian chiefs as a
present to Nineveh.
[682] Hence, in 2 Macc. iv. 47, 3 Macc. vii. 5, Scythian is used with
the modern connotation of "Barbarian."
[683] Ezek. xxxii. 26, 27; Cheyne, _Jeremiah_ ("Men of the Bible") p.
31.
[684] _Expositor_, 2nd series, iv. 263; Cheyne, _Jeremiah_, 31. Hitzig
and Ewald (erroneously?) refer Psalms lv., lix., to these events, and
it seems also to be an error to suppose that the later name of
Bethshan--Scythopolis--has anything to do with this incursion. Like
the names of Pella, Philadelphia, etc., it is later than the age of
Alexander the Great. See 2 Macc. xii. 30; Jos., _B. J._, II. xviii.,
_Vit._ vi. Perhaps Scythopolis is a corruption of Sikytopolis, the
city of Sikkuth; or Scythian may merely stand for "Barbarian," as in 3
Macc. vii. 5; Col. iii. 11 (Cheyne, _l.c._).
[685] Nah. i. 10, ii. 5, iii. 12; Diod. Sic., ii. 26.
[686] Nah. iii. 8-11.
[687] Strabo, xvi. 1, 3: ἠφανίσθη παοαχρῆμα.
[688] Xen., _Anab._, III. iv. 7.
[689] Chaldees, Kardim, Kasdim, Kurds.
[690] Nabu-pal-ussur, "Nebo protect the son" B.C. 625-7. Jos., _Antt._
X. xi. 1: comp. _Ap._, i. 19.
[691] Newman, _Hebrew Monarchy_, p. 315.