The Historians' History of the World 02

It is true, the possibility must be allowed for, that the Arabians were but the helpers of the (true) Babylonians in their destructive operations, and that captives were carried away, partly to Babylon, partly into northern Arabia. It is at any rate difficult to believe that no captives of Judah at all went to Babylon. It is stated by the late Babylonian historian Berosus (if we may trust Josephus) that Nebuchadrezzar, who succeeded his father Nabopolassar after the destruction of Nineveh, conquered Egypt, Syria, Phœnicia and Arabia, from which countries he carried away captives. Egypt, however, Nebuchadrezzar cannot, apparently, be shown to have conquered, and the statement made by Berosus in another quotation of Josephus relative to the destruction of Jerusalem may not contain the whole truth. Inscriptions of Nebuchadrezzar are urgently wanted. At any rate, so far as we can learn from the evidence producible by criticism from the Hebrew writings, the bulk of the captives went into northern Arabia, and the oppression of the Jews in Judah, wherever this is referred to, appears to have proceeded from Arabians.

FALL OF JUDAH; RISE OF A NEW JEWISH PEOPLE

The events of the following period, however, are only known in a legendary form. The disciples of Jeremiah appear to have remembered that a Judahite was the first governor set up in the land of Judah, by which is probably meant the cities occupied by Judahites in the Negeb. Also that numerous fugitives escaped for a time into the land still known as Mizrim. Ezekiel was hardly in Babylonia, but in a northern Arabian territory; the text of Ezekiel which refers to “the land of Chaldea” has been manipulated. This prophet was one of the heroes of the monotheistic movement, but he did not confine himself, like Jeremiah, to denouncing the corrupt popular religion; he saw that only by a strict organisation of the ritual could the people be trained to a pure worship of the one true God. His successors, nameless but influential men, carried on his work, the description of which, however, belongs rather to a history of the literature of Judaism than to a history of the Jews.

The facts relating to the revival of the Jewish people in their own land are difficult to ascertain. Our most trustworthy records are the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah (i.-viii.). From these we learn that Zerubbabel (this form of the name is hardly original), the civil head of the Judahite community, laid the foundation of the temple, and with him we hear of the high priest Jeshua as stirring up the people to the work of rebuilding. There are also traces of ambitious hopes of the recovery of the national independence through Zerubbabel. Whether the chronological statements of these books in their present forms can be relied upon is more doubtful, while to restore to some extent the original forms of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah requires a keen criticism such as has only lately been begun. So much, however, is plain that our ideas of this period require not a little reconstruction. The chief opponents of the Jews in Judah were not “Samaritans,” but Shimronites (i.e., the mixed population of the Negeb) and Arabians, and there is reason to suspect that the historical and geographical framework of both books was originally such as we should expect from the prominence of the northern Arabians in the destruction of Jerusalem.

CYRUS; AND THE LIBERATION

That the liberator of the Jewish captives was Cyrus, is at first sight plausible, but no mention occurs in the extant inscriptions of Cyrus of any restoration of exiles to their native land, nor do the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah appear to presuppose any such restoration on a large scale. It is very possible, however, that some Jewish exiles had returned from northern Arabia before the surrender of Babylon to Cyrus, and, indeed, that Haggai and Zechariah exercised their ministry before that event. Ezekiel (vi. 4) expects the captivity of Judah to last only forty years, and part of his book is occupied by a kind of programme for the restored theocracy. There is also a tradition (2 Kings xxv. 27) that a Babelite (Jerahmeelite) king signalised his accession by releasing Jehoiachin from prison in the thirty-seventh year of his captivity.