In the old story of Saul and Samuel (1 Sam. 9 f.) Samuel is named "the seer," that is, a man endowed with what we call second sight, and a note by an editor explains that what in his time was called a prophet used to be called a seer. Samuel was, indeed, in the apprehension of later times, a prophet, but the story itself makes a clear distinction between the two. The band of prophets whom Saul meets coming down from the high place, working up by music an enthusiasm, or possession, which makes them beside themselves, raving in the prophetic fury (raving and prophesying, in such connections, is the same word in Hebrew), an enthusiasm which Saul catches, to the surprise and scandal of his townsmen, are evidently something quitedifferent from the village seer; they must have been outwardly very much like modern Moslem dervishes.
In the ninth century of the Syrian wars, these gregarious prophets appear in many places; especially in the stories of Elisha they are organized societies of devotees, living by themselves in colonies of huts or cells under a superior—again very much like a dervish order—and sometimes turning their religious zeal into political channels, as when they incite Jehu to the revolt which overthrew the house of Omri.
Beside them are others who also bear the name prophet, but stand apart from the order and often in opposition to it. Such a figure is Micaiah son of Imlah, confronting the four hundred prophets whom Ahab got together, and declaring their unanimity of inspiration to be the work of a lying spirit sent from God to lure the king to his doom (1 Kings 22). Such a figure, above all as we have already seen, is Elijah, who, solitary, champions Jehovah's right to the undivided allegiance of Israel, or thunders the doom of the dynasty at the authors of Naboth's judicial murder. It is in such men as these, rather than in the common herd of prophets by profession, that the ethical prophets of the eighth century have their forerunners.
The moral conception of God had its roots far down in the religion of Israel, as may be seen in the older (certainly preprophetic)strata in Samuel, and better still in the patriarchal legends, which received their present form in the same age; but after the establishment of the kingdom it was crossed by the national idea. It was not till the eighth century that the men came who thought through what the moral idea of God involves, and had the courage to proclaim its consequences, fatal though they might be to both state and church. These prophets, beginning with Amos, not only preached a new doctrine, they employed a new method. The message which they spoke to the heedless, incredulous, or hostile ears of their contemporaries, they also recorded, whether in the hope to reach through the written page a larger audience, or to perpetuate their words to generations following. Thus there begins a prophetic literature which is one of the most characteristic features of the Old Testament. Four prophets of the second half of the eighth century have given their names to such prophetic books, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Then, in the latter part of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth, follow the little books of Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habbakuk, and the great one of Jeremiah, whose younger contemporary in Babylonia is Ezekiel. Haggai and Zechariah were instrumental in the rebuilding of the temple in the reign of Darius I. In the discussion of these books we shall not attempt a chronological disposition, but follow the order of the English Bible.
The first of the prophetic books bears the name of Isaiah, a Judæan prophet, who dates his call "in the year that king Uzziah died," a year which cannot be fixed with certainty, but was at all events not very long before 734B.C., and whose latest dated utterances are from the time of Sennacherib's invasion in the year 701. His prophecies thus range over a period of not far from forty years. He witnessed the humbling of Israel by Tiglath-Pileser in 734, the fall of Samaria in 721, the Assyrian campaigns in the west in 720 and 711, and the condign punishment Sennacherib inflicted on Judah in 701; and all these events (of which we have historical knowledge from both Assyrian and Jewish sources) are reflected in his prophecies.
The book contains, however, much besides the prophecies of Isaiah in the different periods of his long career. It has already been noted that Isa. 36-39 are found also, with some variations, in 2 Kings 18-20, where they are an integral part of the narrative. That this extract from Kings was copied into the Book of Isaiah is explained by the fact that the prophet is a prominent figure in the story. It does not stand in immediate connection with the prophecies of Isaiahduring the campaign of Sennacherib in cc. 28-33, from which it is separated by several oracles of different character and date; and the natural presumption is that this historical appendix was added at the end of a roll, just as Jer. 52, also an extract from Kings (2 Kings xxiv. 18-xxv. 21), is appended at the end of the roll of Jeremiah.
In the present Book of Isaiah, cc. 36-39 are followed by another prophetic book of considerable length (Isa. 40-66), which has no title, and in which, from first to last, no prophet's name appears. The theme which is announced in the first verses of this book and runs through a large part of it is the approaching deliverance of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, their return to their own land, and the restoration of Zion.
In Isa. 1-35 certain larger divisions are at once apparent; cc. 1-12, a collection of prophecies, chiefly, as appears from dates and other indications, from the earlier years of Isaiah's ministry; cc. 13 to 23, a collection of oracles mainly against foreign nations; cc. 24-27, previsions of a great judgment, in a peculiarly mysterious tone; cc. 28-33, chiefly from the time of Sennacherib, followed by c. 34, in which God's fury is poured out on Edom, and c. 35, a prophecy of restoration akin to cc. 40 ff. It is thus evident that the present book is made up from several older collections of prophecies gathered by different hands; the peculiar titles in cc. 13-23, forinstance, are most probably to be attributed to the editor of an independent book of prophecies against the heathen.
The same phenomenon appears on a smaller scale in Isa. 1-12. That these chapters, at one stage in the history of the collections, formed a roll by themselves is probable from the fact that they begin with a grand overture (c. 1), in which the leading motives of Isaiah's prophecy are heard, and close (c. 12) with a psalm of praise for the messianic deliverance which is the subject of c. 11. But the order of the prophecies is not chronological: the inaugural vision and Isaiah's call to be a prophet stands, not at the beginning, as in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but in c. 6 (dated in the year of King Uzziah's death), while the chapters that precede it (cc. 2 f.; 5), with what was once an initial title (ii. 1), may confidently be assigned, on internal grounds, to the reigns of Uzziah's successors. Chapters 7 and 8 (dated under Ahaz) seem to have originally followed close on c. 6, as they do now. Whatever may be the reason for this singular arrangement, it seems evident that the compiler had several smaller groups or loose leaves of oracles, which he put together for better preservation, rather, perhaps, by affinity of subject than in order of time.
This must have taken place at a comparatively late time, for not only does his roll begin with a prophecy (Isa. i. 2-9) which vividly depicts the devastation of Judah and the isolationof Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 (perhaps the latest oracle of Isaiah preserved in the book), but it contains passages (e.g. xi. 11-16) which bear all the marks of a time several centuries after Isaiah's death; the psalm in c. 12 is perhaps later still. Another indication that the collection was made at a date remote from the age of the prophet is the fragmentary character of several of the oracles in cc. 2-5. The refrain verses here afford a certain clue; they show that prophecies originally composed with much art in balanced strophes with closing refrains came into the compiler's hands mutilated and dislocated. Thus, v. 25 has the refrain of ix. 8-21; x. 4, while x. 1-3 is a "woe" which has strayed away from v. 18 ff., and the refrain ii. 9, 11, 17 recurs in v. 15.
Fragmentary as many of these prophecies are, enough remains to show that Isaiah had poetical genius as well as unequalled mastery of the peculiar literary form of the Hebrew oracle. The parable of the vineyard (Isa. v. 1-7), or the picture of the swift, resistless advance of the Assyrian (v. 26-30), or the description of devastated Judah (i. 2-8), or the oracle against Samaria (ix. 8-21), in the authorized English Version illustrate in different ways the art with which Isaiah handles this traditional form.
The earlier prophecies of Isaiah, whether directed against Israel and its allies or against Judah, are unsparing in their condemnation ofthe political and social evils of the time, and predict the imminent and irremediable ruin of both nations. This is revealed to Isaiah in the vision which made him a prophet, in terms so drastic that the closing words were piously erased by some late editor (so in the Greek Bible), and a meaningless phrase put in their place in the curtailed sentence by a still later hand (our Hebrew text). With this the tenor of his utterances in cc. ii. 5-iii. 26; v. 1-30; ix. 8-x. 4, wholly agrees. These unrelieved forebodings of doom led in later times not only to excisions such as we have noted in vi. 13, but to interpolations; hopeful pendants were attached to the prophet's gloomy pictures, sometimes written for the purpose—a particularly instructive example is iv. 2-6, after iii. 16-iv. 1—sometimes borrowed from other prophetic contexts. To the latter class belongs the famous messianic oracle, ix. 1-7, which is very imperfectly connected (by changes in viii. 22) with the preceding climactic denunciation of doom, the end of which is missing. If Isa. ix. 1-7 is a prophecy by Isaiah, it can only belong to his latest years.
One other feature of Isaiah's message must be signalized. His God indignantly rejects the sacrifices and all the pompous worship which are offered him in his temple in Jerusalem (Isa. i. 10-17). Men think they can thus gain the favour of God and persuade him to overlook or condone their sins against theirfellows! Such worship is an insult to God. So Amos a few years before had condemned the worship at Bethel (Amos v. 21-25). So their successors repeat in no uncertain terms (see Mic. vi. 6-8; Jer. 7, especially vss. 21-23). It is the fundamental doctrine of prophecy: the will of God is wholly moral. For worship he cares nothing at all; for justice, fairness, and goodness between man and man he cares everything. Such a God is capable of destroying the nation for the wrongs men do their fellow men; he is not capable of being bribed by offerings, or flattered with psalms, or wheedled with prayers. He will listen to no intercession (Jer. xv. 1 ff., after c. 14); nothing but complete reformation and reparation will he call repentance—and there comes a pass where repentance is impossible.
The book of prophecies against the heathen (Isa. 13-23) begins with two remarkable chapters (xiii. 1-xiv. 23) declaring the imminent destruction of Babylon by the Medes, whom the prophet sees already in motion against the doomed city, and exulting over the descent of the king of Babylon to hell, greeted by the taunts of the mighty of the earth who were before him there. The two prophecies are connected by a prediction of the deliverance of captive Israel, which will be restored to its own land and rule over its oppressors (xiv. 1-4a). The situation is not that of Isaiah's time, in which Babylon was a province of the Assyrian empire, and when,under Merodach Baladan, it for a while reasserted its independence, seems to have sought an alliance with Hezekiah against their common oppressor, Assyria (Isa. 39 = 2 Kings xx. 12 ff.). The Medes had been in league with the Babylonians against Assyria until its fall in 606B.C.; it was not until the time of Cyrus that the Medes became a menace to Babylonia, and only after Cyrus's conquest of Lydia (546B.C.) that the turn of Babylon was visibly come. On the other hand, the sack and ruin of Babylon, pictured with vengeful satisfaction in Isa. 13, did not come to pass at that time. The Persian armies, after a decisive battle in northern Babylonia, entered the city in the autumn of 538 without resistance. Babylonian inscriptions acclaim Cyrus as a deliverer, and Babylon became one of the capitals of his great empire. On these grounds the prophecy is generally thought to fall between 546 and 538B.C.
It is immediately followed by a short oracle (Isa. xiv. 24-27) against the Assyrians, quite in the tone of the prophecies of Isaiah in the time of Sennacherib (701B.C.), and by an enigmatical warning to the inhabitants of the Philistine cities, said in the title to have come "in the year that King Ahaz died." Another prophecy concerned with the inhabitants of these cities, bearing Isaiah's name and definitely dated (711B.C.), is Isa. 20. Chapter 17, entitled "The Burden of Damascus," is in fact chiefly against the kingdom of Israel,and falls in line with prophecies of Isaiah in the time of the alliance of the two kingdoms against Judah (ca. 736B.C.); compare Isa. 7. In Isa. xxii. 15-25 is a prophecy of Isaiah singular in the fact that it is launched at an individual, the major domo of King Hezekiah.
Besides these, the collection contains oracles against Moab (Isa. 15 f.), Nubia (c. 18), Egypt (c. 19), another vision of the fall of Babylon before the armies of Elam and Media (xxi. 1-10), but in a different spirit from cc. 13-14, the Arabs (xxi. 11 f., 13-17), Tyre (c. 23), and one with the mysterious (editorial) title "Burden of the Valley of Vision" (xxii. 1-14). The last-named, in the form of a vision, depicts a crisis in the history of Jerusalem, and condemns the frivolous behaviour of its inhabitants on the eve of a siege or, as some think, during the respite given by a temporary raising of a siege. It was probably uttered by Isaiah at an early stage in Hezekiah's revolt against Sennacherib (704 or 703B.C.), before the actual appearance of the Assyrian army. The oracle against Tyre (Isa. xxiii. 1-14—what follows is a later supplement) seems more appropriate to the thirteen years' siege by Nebuchadnezzar than to the operations of Shalmanezer or of Sennacherib in Isaiah's days.
Thus Isa. 13-23, like cc. 1-12, contains prophecies of Isaiah from both the earliest and the latest period of his activity, intermingled with others having a totally different historical horizon and dating from a muchlater time, and to both additions have been made by editors or scribes. A very interesting example of the latter phenomenon is Isa. xix. 18 ff. The passage is, in all probability, from the time of the Greek kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, the name of the city in the Greek Bible, "City of Righteousness," referring to Leontopolis, where a Jewish temple was erected about 170B.C., with high priests of the legitimate line exiled from Jerusalem. "City of Destruction" (heres) in the Hebrew text is a hostile perversion, possibly by way of another reading "City of the Sun" (heres).
Each of the three large prophetic books has such a group of oracles about gentile nations, Isa. 13-23; Jer. 46-51; Ezek. 25-32. They are in part levelled at the immediate neighbours of Judah, in part against the great powers, Babylon and Egypt. Many of them are in such general terms—or, if they refer to specific events and situations, our knowledge of the history is so incomplete—that it is peculiarly difficult to fix their age. It was also a kind of prophecy which peculiarly invited imitation. Under the foreign yoke the Jews wore for so many centuries, it must often have been a relief of soul to repeat what God was going to do to the heathen; the spirit of the author of Jonah was not for everybody. Moreover, if there is any place in the Old Testament where it would be easier than another for oracles of the "false prophets"to slip in and be preserved, it is in these collections; about the doom of the enemies of Israel they were as orthodox and as emphatic as the best. It is not strange, therefore, that there should be more than usual uncertainty about the origin of these anathemas on the gentiles.
Isaiah 24-27 contains a series of prophecies of judgment to come which differ from others in the book in having no particular address. The vision seems to widen to a judgment of the world, in which the earth itself reels and sinks under the weight of men's sin, and the celestial powers (the heavenly bodies, which are the tutelary deities of the heathen) and the kings of the earth are cast into the pit and shut up in prison, while the Lord of Hosts reigns gloriously in Zion. In another passage God, with his great sword, punishes the leviathan, the swift and winding serpent, and slays the great dragon in the sea. The mythological eschatology of Judaism made much of such imagery, which is itself doubtless of mythical ancestry.
The diction and style of these chapters alone would suffice to acquit Isaiah of responsibility for them; anything more unlike his writing could not be imagined. The author, whosoever he was, riots in plays on words, many of them, as is the fate of laborious punsters, forced or far-fetched. As to the age of the chapters, apart from the language, prophecy is here plainly making the transitionto apocalypse with those visionary revelations of the last judgment in which Jewish invention was so fertile. This of itself points to a late time in the post-exilic period. The historical allusions which have been scented out in the chapters are too uncertain to reckon with; only, as in c. 19, the way in which Egypt and Assyria (or Syria) are conjoined seems plainly to point to the divisions of Alexander's empire.
In chapters 28-33 are brought together a number of oracles of Isaiah from the years of Hezekiah's revolt and Sennacherib's punitive expedition. These oracles are generally brief and pointed; they agree in form and spirit with his prophecies in cc. 1-12 quite as closely as the writing of an aging man ordinarily resembles that of his youth. In xxviii. 1-4, indeed, an early prophecy against Samaria is made to serve as text for a counterpart addressed to Jerusalem.
Mingled with these is a series of passages which foretell the destruction of the foe and the miraculous escape of Judah from imminent ruin, or, taking higher flight, picture the golden age to come. To the former class belong, for example, xxx. 27-33; xxxi. 4-9; to the latter, xxix. 18-24; xxx. 18-26; xxxii. 1-8, 16-20; while c. 33 partakes of both characters. That Isaiah predicted the deliverance of Jerusalem in the last extremity is reported also in Kings, and need not be questioned (see also Isa. x. 5-14; xiv. 24-27).Most of the prophecies of the golden age are, however, alien to their context, and the unmediated transition from the unsparing predictions of judgment to these messianic idylls makes them suspicious. It is not to be believed that the prophet thus took the sting out of his most pungent oracles, but the position of the passages in question can have no other intention. If, then, these are utterances of Isaiah at all, they cannot have been spoken in their present connection. Some of them, at least, are much more likely by other hands. This is true most evidently of c. 33, which was probably once the end of this little book of prophecies from the time of Sennacherib (Isa. 28-33).
Isaiah 34 is a prophecy against all the nations, which at once concentrates itself upon Edom, and is remarkable for its rancour, in which, as in other respects, it resembles cc. 13 f. The supernatural features of the judgment remind us also of Isa. 27: it is too little that the people are annihilated, its very land is turned into an uninhabitable waste, and, as by some prodigious volcanic convulsion, its dust becomes brimstone and its soil burning pitch. This is the Lord's vengeance for the wrong of Zion. The cause of this unusual passion is known from other prophets (see Obad. vss. 10-12; Ezek. xxv. 12-14; c. 35): in the life and death struggle against Nebuchadnezzar, the Edomites, Judah's next neighbours and near kin, had been on the side of the Babylonians,and were the chief gainers by the ruin of Judah, occupying permanently the whole south of the country to a line north of Hebron, making good in this way the part of their own old territory which had been taken by the Nabatæans. The injury was lasting and the hatred durable, but the flaming passion of Isa. 34 would incline us to think that it was written while the grief was still fresh. The pendant to this, Isa. 35, a prophecy of the return of the dispersion and restoration of Zion, is quite in the manner of Isa. 40 ff., and not improbably by the same author.
Of Isa. 36-39 (2 Kings 18-20) account has already been given (see above, pp. 112 f.).
There remains the anonymous prophetic book, Isa. 40-66, which not only has no title, but in which—in striking contrast to the frequency with which Isaiah's name occurs in the earlier chapters of the book—no prophet's name appears.
It begins with the announcement that the Jews have now been sufficiently punished for their sins; their guilt has been expiated by suffering. The hour of national restoration is at hand. God has already called the deliverer, who will bring low the pride of Babylon and set free captive Israel; by his edict Jerusalem shall be rebuilt and the temple restored. The Jews, not only from Babylonia but from the wide and distant lands of their dispersion, shall flock back to their own country, the cities of Judah shall be repeopled, and Zionshall be too strait for its inhabitants. The deliverer is Cyrus (Isa. xliv. 28; xlv. 1), who is called God's friend, his anointed one (messiah); the victories he has already gained have been won in the might of Jehovah, who, all unknown to him, girds him for the battle, and will go before him to new conquests.
The prophet's prediction was met with incredulity; the power of Babylon seemed invincible, the resurrection of the dead nation impossible. Impossible, maybe, to men, but not to the Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, the sovereign ruler of the nations! As surely as the words of former prophets have come true, so signally shall these foretellings be fulfilled. For history is the unfolding of God's plan from the beginning, which he reveals by chapters to his servants the prophets.
That this prophecy was delivered by Isaiah of Jerusalem, a century before the fall of Judah and a century and a half before the time of Cyrus, would never have entered anybody's head had these chapters not been appended to a roll which bore at its beginning the name of Isaiah and contained many oracles of the eighth-century prophet. But this physical fact, which may be due to no intention more profound than a desire to economize writing material, cannot count against the conclusive internal evidence; background and foreground in Isa. 40 ff. are not merely totally different from those of the prophecies ofIsaiah and his contemporaries, they are alike inconceivable in his age. Nor is the fact that the Jews in New Testament times, including the New Testament writers, quoted these chapters as Isaiah and believed him the author of them, prove anything except that such was the opinion of the Jews in that age.
The historical situation in Isa. 40 ff. would of itself be conclusive against Isaiah's authorship; but it is not the only proof of the contrary. The author of these chapters has not inappropriately been called the theologian among the prophets. His idea of God is conspicuously more advanced than that of the prophets of the eighth century; it lies in the same line with the monotheism of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, but lies beyond them. And it is characteristic that, in contrast to the older prophets, this one reasons about it. He argues the omnipotence of God in history from his omnipotence in creation, and makes large use of the evidence from the fulfilment of prophecy to prove that Jehovah is the only God; he can predict because he foreordains and brings to pass. With him begins the polemic, not against the worship of heathen gods, but against their existence. What the heathen bow down to are naught but helpless, senseless idols, the work of their own hands. He is fond of inviting his readers to an image-maker's shop to see how a god is made (see, e.g., Isa. xliv. 9-20). Such are the impotent gods that the Babylonians expectto save them out of the hands of the creator of the world!
The style of Isa. 40 ff. is not less decisive. Translation necessarily in large measure effaces the differences, but even in translation a comparison of two passages on similar themes such as Isa. x. 5-19 and Isa. 47 may perhaps give some impression of them. The style of Isaiah and his contemporaries—Amos, Hosea, Micah—is concise and pregnant, the sentences are short and have often an oracular ring. The author of Isa. 40 ff. writes with a freer pen in flowing periods; he develops his thought and his figures more at large; if he is obscure, it is seldom from compression. Here again, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, the whole literature of the seventh century, is an intermediate stage. The later author is a poet, as Isaiah is, but with other themes and in other forms; compare, e.g., Isa. 5 with Isa. xlii. 1-9. In short, each has a highly characteristic style, and the two are totally different.
The historical situation, as it has been defined above, appears most distinctly in Isa. 40-55. In the following chapters two passages were long ago seen not to correspond to that situation, viz. lvi. 9-lvii. 13 and c. 65 (especially vss. 1-16), in which the vehement attack on idolatrous and abominable rites practised by Jews under the prophet's eyes was thought to indicate a pre-exilic origin. It was a serious error, however, to conceivethat the so-called exile cured all the Jews once and for all of every inclination to heathenism; the history of the Seleucid period sufficiently proves the contrary. There is nothing in the chapters inconsistent with the view, now generally entertained, that these flaming denunciations were delivered in Palestine in the Persian or the Greek period; and there is no warrant for assuming that they were specifically addressed to the half-heathen population of the old territory of Israel, still less to the so-called Samaritan sect, that is, the worshippers at the rival temple on Gerizim.
Other chapters (Isa. lvii. 14-21; 60; 61 f.) resemble in spirit and manner the prophecies in Isa. 40-55, but are more probably by later writers under the influence of those prophecies than by their author. Their optimism contrasts with the depressed tone of lviii. 1-lix. 15a, in which the sense of sin is borne in on the community by the delay in the coming of the good times. In lix. 15b-21, and lxiii. 1-6 God's fury is poured out on foreign nations, in the latter specifically on Edom; lxiii. 7-lxiv. 12 is a cry for God's intervention in dire distress (see lxiii. 18; lxiv. 10 f., devastation of Judah, burning of the temple); c. 66 contains diverse elements, consolation to Jerusalem of the school of Isa. 40-45, and censures of abominable rites (lxvi. 3 f., 17 ff.).
Isaiah 56-66 is, therefore, generally regardedas an appendix to the book of consolation, cc. 40-55, containing very diverse elements.
It would be nothing strange if alien prophecies and editorial expansions were found in Isa. 40-55 also, and displacements are probably in more than one passage. The question of authorship is of peculiar interest in the case of three prophecies which have for their subject the mission and suffering of the "Servant of Jehovah," Isa. xlii. 1-9; xlix. 1-13; lii. 13-liii. 12, which are thought by some to be taken wholly or in part from an older prophet, by others to be later insertions. The reasons for ascribing the "Servant" passages to a different author do not seem decisive.
The Book of Isaiah is thus a great collection of prophecies of various ages, from the middle of the eighth century B.C. down perhaps to the third, with some minor additions of even later date.
Jeremiah dates his call to the arduous mission of prophet in the thirteenth year of King Josiah (626B.C.), and he lived till after the fall of Jerusalem in 586B.C., so that, like his predecessor Isaiah a century earlier, his career spans a period of about forty years in a timeof great events. Only five years after he began to prophesy, Josiah reformed religion in Judah on the new model of the law-book discovered by Hilkiah (Deuteronomy; see above, pp. 62 f.). Jeremiah, scion of a priestly family native in Anathoth, a few miles north of Jerusalem, which very likely traced its descent from Abiathar, David's priest, whom Solomon deposed in favour of Zadok, was therefore one of those priests of the high places who were hit hardest by the suppression of the local sanctuaries. That his townsmen of Anathoth sought his life (Jer. xi. 18 ff.) has been attributed to their indignation that Jeremiah should dare to preach Josiah's "covenant" to them (see Jer. xi. 1-17). Whatever hopes he may have entertained at first, Jeremiah was not long in seeing that the reform had cleaned only the outside of the cup and the platter, while men fortified their consciences behind the "covenant" against an investigation of the inside. In 608B.C.Josiah fell in battle at Megiddo against the Egyptian king Necho. After a brief vassalage to Egypt, Judah came under the Babylonian yoke. Jeremiah saw all this; saw, too, Jerusalem twice taken by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar (597, 586B.C.), the temple burned and the walls razed; and was at last forced to accompany the refugees to Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah.
Early in the reign of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah delivered himself of a fulminant oracle in thegate of the temple (Jer. vii. 1-15, cf. c. 26), in which he declared that the Jews' faith in the temple as the palladium of the city was a delusion; unless they altogether amended their ways, God would make the temple a ruin like the ancient sanctuary at Shiloh. Priests, prophets, and people clamoured with one voice for the blasphemer's death, but he hurled back at them a reiteration of his warning. The intervention of some of the magnates saved his life; but another prophet who lacked such influential protection was extradited from Egypt and put to death.
Under these circumstances Jeremiah took another way of reaching the public (see Jer. 36). He dictated to Baruch the prophecies which he had uttered from the beginning of his mission to that time, and sent Baruch to read the roll in the temple at the fast in the ninth month in the fifth year of Jehoiakim (603B.C.). Some of the nobles had Baruch give them a private reading, and then carried the book to the king, first giving Baruch the friendly advice to put himself and Jeremiah out of harm's way. The king, as he read the roll, cut off the pages, and burned them on the brazier in his chamber. Jeremiah thereupon dictated to the faithful Baruch another roll containing all the prophecies that were in the first, "and there were added besides unto them many like words." We may be sure that the second edition would have been even less agreeable reading to Jehoiakimthan the first. One of the additional words is indeed preserved in Jer. xxxvi. 29-31. The chapter is of peculiar interest, because it is an account—the only one in the Old Testament—of the origin of a prophetic book. We see the prophet reproducing, doubtless from memory, the content of oracles uttered in the course of the preceding twenty years or more, and enlarging the collection for a second edition. It is a fair conjecture that this second roll furnished to our Book of Jeremiah most, if not all, the prophecies prior to the fifth year of Jehoiakim; but it is certain that the roll itself is not incorporated as such in the present book. There are also several prophecies from later years of Jehoiakim, and many from the reign of the last king, Zedekiah, especially from the time of his revolt and the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
A distinctive feature of the Book of Jeremiah is the presence of passages of considerable extent derived from a biographical source. From this comes the account of the making and reading of the collected volume of prophecies in the fourth and fifth years of Jehoiakim of which we have already spoken (Jer. 36), and particularly the narrative of Jeremiah's fortunes during the last siege of Jerusalem and afterward, including the flight to Egypt and his experiences with the refugees there, covering thus three or four years beginning with 588 (Jer. 37-44). To the same source it is natural to ascribe c. 26,relating to the circumstances and consequences of the prophecy delivered in the temple at the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign (c. 7); c. 28 (collision with the "false prophet" Hananiah, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah); c. 29 (letter to the Jews in Babylonia, about the same time); and parts of cc. 32, 34, and 35.
There is good reason to believe that the author of this biography was Baruch, who not only stood in intimate relations with Jeremiah before the fall of Jerusalem, but accompanied him to Egypt (Jer. xliii. 6). It is consequently a historical source of the best possible kind. For the first half of Jeremiah's career this source fails us; and, as we have seen, it is continuous only from the last years of Zedekiah. It is possible that Baruch's association with Jeremiah began in the time of Jehoiakim, and his narrative may have commenced there.
Unfortunately this life of Jeremiah has not been preserved complete or intact. The prophecies contained in it led later compilers to introduce other oracles which seemed appropriate to the context, and to supplement the words of Jeremiah by edifying compositions of their own. Their aim, it must constantly be borne in mind, was not to produce a critical edition of the prophecies of Jeremiah, but to make a book effective to impress the truths and motives of religion on their own contemporaries, and with changing times and situations to keep the book, so to speak, upto date. If the words of an old prophet suggested to them a good moral, they wrote it out for him, without dreaming that they were doing either him or morality a wrong, or thinking how much trouble they were making for future historical students. It is exactly the same procedure and the same motive which meets us in innumerable places in the Pentateuch and Historical Books. To stigmatize such interpolations as literary fraud is absurd. These additions are often recognizable by their prosaic preachiness or by their composite imitativeness.
Of one kind of prediction the Jews of later centuries could not have enough, the prophecies of deliverance from the foreign yoke and the better time to follow. They not only cherished the hopeful words of former prophets and wrote variations on their themes, but gave expression to their faith and their ideals in their own way. That they often took their inspiration from Isa. 40 ff. is natural. In Jeremiah such promises of a happier future are accumulated in cc. 30-33, which contain, with some oracles of Jeremiah, pieces of various authorship and age, some of them such pendants to gloomy pictures as we have found numerous in Isaiah (e.g. Jer. xxx. 1 ff. to vss. 12-15), others more independent compositions.
These stand interspersed among the extracts from Baruch's life of Jeremiah. In the first half of the book (Jer. 1-25) there is no suchhistory for a framework. It will be observed here that the prophet commonly introduces his message in personal form, "The word of Jehovah came to me, saying," or "Then Jehovah said to me," or the like. Sometimes an oracle begins, as in c. 18, "The words which came to Jeremiah," as a kind of title, while in the sequel the prophet speaks in the first person. Dates are infrequent in this part of the book, and if a chronological order was observed in Baruch's roll, it has been broken up in the present arrangement. Internal evidence does not always suffice to fix the age of the utterances, the less because some of the early oracles have obviously been adapted to a later situation. This is peculiarly evident in cc. 1-6. In these chapters are several prophecies from the years when the wild horsemen from the Scythian steppes were overrunning western Asia and striking terror into the stoutest hearts by their barbarous appearance and fierce manners. Jeremiah saw in them the scourge of God (see e.g. Jer. iv. 5-8, 27-31), the day of doom was come! It was, indeed, such a vision of doom that first met his gaze, when God made him a prophet (Jer. i. 13 ff.). But in the present shape of these chapters the enemy out of the north which menaces ruin is not the wild Scythian hordes, but the serried armies of Babylon. It is not at all improbable that this change of horizon was made by Jeremiah himself, when at the beginning of Jehoiakim'sreign the Scythian flood had run off, and, by the overthrow of Nineveh and Nebuchadnezzar's defeat of Pharaoh Necho on the Euphrates, the new Babylonian empire had become the impending fate of Syria and Palestine.
Among the prophecies of Jeremiah in this part of the book also are introduced pieces, larger or smaller, which are the product of later generations; two conspicuous examples are Jer. ix. 23-34; x. 1-16 (x. 17 is the immediate continuation of ix. 22), and xvii. 19-27.
Jeremiah's experience in the pursuit of his calling was a hard one. His Cassandra forebodings gained him the enmity of all, and hostility grew to bitter hatred as the dire fulfilment stared them in the face. His countrymen in Anathoth plotted his death; the prophecy in the temple all but cost him his life, and was an end, for the time at least, of public appearances; the coming of his collected oracles into Jehoiakim's hands drove him and the scribe into hiding. During the last siege, he first was kept in arrest in a private house, then cast into an empty cistern, where he would have perished but for the friendliness of a negro eunuch; then confined in the court of the guard till the taking of the city; released by the Babylonians, his counsel to the refugees not to flee to Egypt was badly received, and he was constrained to accompany them. In Egypt, again denouncing and predicting ill, he disappears; Jewishlegend says, killed by his exasperated countrymen.
But these outward perils and pains were not all he had to bear for being a prophet. In anguish of soul he suffered twice the tragedy of his people, in foresight and in fact—suffered as only a man of sensitive spirit and unflinching will can suffer. That needs no commentary; but there is another element we do not so easily conceive: Jeremiah believed that the word of God he had to utter was not merely a prediction, but the effectual cause, of the ruin of Judah (see Jer. i. 9 f.). It is not strange that the task God had laid on him seemed too heavy to be borne. He feels himself a man of contention to the whole earth. He remonstrates, he reproaches God for having misled him, he resolves never again to speak in the name of the Lord; but there is within him as it were a burning fire shut up in his bones, he cannot hold in (Jer. xx. 7-18; see also xv. 10 f., 15-18; xii. 1-6). These "confessions," as they have been called, are of the greatest interest; they are a revelation of the prophet's soul such as has no counterpart in the Old Testament, and, with Baruch's simple story, bring him as a man nearer to us than any of the other prophets.
In the Hebrew (and therefore in the English) Bible, the last chapters of the book (Jer. 46-51) contain a collection of prophecies against foreign nations, to which is appended (c. 52) an extract from the Book of Kings(2 Kings xxiv. 18-xxv. 21), describing the taking of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586B.C.In the Greek Bible the oracles against the foreign nations come in between Jer. xxv. 13 and vs. 15, but in an altogether different order. They evidently formed a little book by themselves, which in one recension of the Book of Jeremiah were appended to the volume of his prophecies, in another were inserted in the middle of it as the corresponding collections of foreign oracles are placed in Ezek. 25-32 and Isa. 13-23. The question of the original place and disposition of these prophecies is of importance only for the relation of the two forms of the book to each other, and need not be pursued here.
It is very doubtful whether Jeremiah had any hand whatever in these chapters. The prolix prophecy against Babylon (Jer. 50-51) is a purely literary exercise, for which contributions have been levied right and left, and was written at a time when Babylon had long ceased to be of historical importance. Others of the prophecies borrow from earlier prophets generously. An examination, by the aid of the marginal references in the Revised Version (Oxford and Cambridge edition, 1898), of the appropriations and reminiscences will give a profitable notion of this literary imitation of prophecy.
The different order of the prophecies is not the only, nor the most important, difference between the Hebrew and the Greek Jeremiah.Besides a great number of variant readings of the ordinary kind, the oldest Greek version is much shorter than the Hebrew; it has been reckoned that in the neighbourhood of 2700 words in the latter have nothing corresponding to them in the translation. Some part of this may be due to abridgment by the translators, to which the repetitions in parts of Jeremiah—chiefly secondary parts—invited; but when all allowance is made for this, it remains that the Hebrew copies from which the translation was made had a much briefer text than the Palestinian Hebrew in our hands, and it is probable that the greater part of this difference, which is chiefly in comparative verbosity, is due to padding with stock phrases and turns of thought in the Palestinian text. In some instances oracles or tags to oracles which on other grounds are recognized as late additions to our text had not got into that of the Greek translators.
Ezekiel was one of the priests of Jerusalem who was carried off to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in the deportation of 597B.C.Those who were thus deported were the upper classes, including, of course, the royal familyand the court and the aristocracy of the priesthood, and skilled artisans, particularly the smiths (armorers). Having thus removed the natural leaders of the rebellious people, Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah, an uncle of Jehoiachin, king in his stead and gave Judah another trial. The eight or ten thousand Jews with their families who were removed to Babylonia were colonized at different points, Ezekiel repeatedly mentions the river Chebar, that is, probably, the grand canal in the vicinity of Nippur. The patricians in exile thought very poorly of the new lords who had stepped into their shoes in Jerusalem, and they flattered themselves that events would soon take such a turn that they would return to Judæa and to power. They had prophets and diviners among them who encouraged them in this expectation. When Zedekiah revolted and the Babylonian armies a second time besieged Jerusalem, their faith in the inviolability of Zion, confirmed, rather than shaken, by the outcome of things in 597 B.C., when Jehoiachin surrendered and the holy city took no harm, made them refuse hearing to Ezekiel's prediction of ruin; they may even have dreamed that Nebuchadnezzar would find out his mistake and restore to Judah its legitimate rulers, chastened by experience, and pack Zedekiah and his advisers into exile in their place.
Against this vain and superstitious optimism Ezekiel had to contend until the disastrousissue made a rude end of all their dreams and threw the exiles into the depths of hopelessness: Bel had triumphed over Jehovah, and it was all over with the nation. Thenceforth Ezekiel's task was to save them from despair by the assurance that God still had a purpose to fulfil with them, and that, in his own time, when they had been thoroughly purged from their old sins and filled with a new spirit, he would restore them to their own land and bring to life again the dead nation.
These two periods of the prophet's mission sharply divide the Book of Ezekiel. To the day when the word came to him that the Babylonian armies had invested Jerusalem (Ezek. 24) he combats delusion; from the arrival of the tidings of the fall of the city (xxxiii. 21 ff.) he combats despair. The first part is all menace, the second is full of promise. Numerous dated oracles serve as landmarks, especially in the first part.
Between the two, in the two years of suspense, when about his own people the prophet is dumb, is placed the group of prophecies against foreign nations (cc. 25-32), beginning with oracles against the neighbours of Judah who held true to Nebuchadnezzar in this crisis and had their reward at Judah's cost—Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines. These are followed by long predictions of the ruin of Tyre, over whose calamity the prophet exults more loudly than the grievanceof Jerusalem (Ezek. xxvi. 2) seems to justify. Nebuchadnezzar did in fact besiege Tyre for thirteen years (585-572B.C.), and doubtless inflicted upon it great losses; but the island city, with its command of the sea, he could not take. Ezekiel himself, in a remarkable passage which is perhaps his latest word in the book, admits that his predictions of the capture of Tyre (xxvi. 7-14) had not been fulfilled—Nebuchadnezzar had had to raise the long and ineffectual siege—but he promises that Jehovah will reward him for these fruitless labours in the Lord's service by giving him Egypt instead (xxix. 17-21). The animosity against Egypt which finds expression in the predictions of the Babylonian subjugation of that country is more easily explained. Egypt had been the evil genius of Judah, instigating rebellion against the Babylonian suzerainty, and promising armed aid which always failed in the decisive hour; it was meet that it should taste the cup of humiliation itself. In c. 32 the descent of Egypt to the hell of fallen nations is vividly depicted; a similar picture of the descent of the Babylonian king in Isa. 14 has already been noted. Not improbably Babylonian notions of the nether world may have influenced the imagery of both, as a myth of paradise seems to have suggested the imagery of Tyre in Eden (xxviii. 12 ff.). Outside this group is an oracle against Edom (c. 35), and the great prophecy of the irruptionof Gog and his hordes and their fate (cc. 38 f.).
A conspicuous feature of the Book of Ezekiel are the extended visions and the elaborated symbolical actions. In the inaugural vision (Ezek. i.-iii. 15), for instance, God appears, a veritabledeus ex machina, on a high seat in a curious motor car made up of animated wheels and winged monsters. In a later vision (c. 10) he sees God leave the doomed temple in Jerusalem and mount this cherubim car, in which he is whirled away through the air to the east; and in the great vision of the new temple in the golden age God returns to his abode in the same conveyance (c. 43). Striking examples of symbolical actions may be found in Ezek. 4, and in xii. 1-20. They are of such an extraordinary character as to raise the question whether they were really enacted before the eyes of the people or only described in discourse.
Ezekiel's visions are sometimes ecstatic states, in which he is instantaneously translated from place to place. At the end of the inaugural vision, "the spirit" lifted him up and took him away, setting him down in amazement among the colonists at Tell-Abib. In viii. 1 ff., as he sat in his own house in the midst of a company of the elders of Judah, the spirit, which is described as a strange luminous creature, took him up by the hair of his head and wafted him "in the visions of God" to Jerusalem, where his conductorshowed him all the idolatrous cults and the abominable mysteries that were practised in the temple under the very eyes of "the glory of the God of Israel" (c. 8); after seeing God take his flight from the desecrated sanctuary, the prophet is translated by the spirit to Chaldæa again. Another such vision in ecstasy is the famous scene in the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37). In such cases it is impossible to say how much is actually the experience of the visionary, how much literary form.
In the great vision of the restoration, cc. 40-48, which also is introduced as an ecstasy with the translation of the prophet to Palestine, we may be pretty sure that the element of conscious composition predominates. The chapters contain a programme for the coming age when all the twelve tribes, gathered together from exile and dispersion, shall reoccupy the holy land, with a new, geometrical division of the territory, with a new plan for the city of Jerusalem, a new constitution for the state, a new temple after the old model, a reorganized ministry of religion, and a reformed worship. The ruling idea which runs through all is to make impossible those sins against the holiness of God, his land, his house, his people, which had been the cause of former ruin.
The Book of Ezekiel seems to have been arranged and published by the author, and though some derangements and repetitions may be observed, it has not been much meddledwith by later editors, and, to whatever reason it may be attributed, exhibits none of the phenomena of compilation and amplification which we have found in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Hebrew text, however, has suffered more than most books in transmission, and has reached us in an unusually corrupt state. The author has a style of his own, which can rise to eloquence (as in the oracles against Tyre), but is generally pedestrian and sometimes clumsy. He has plenty of imagination, not always regulated by taste or restrained by decency. His drastic figures of the unfaithfulness of Israel and Judah are often unfit to translate.
In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Daniel stands, not as in our Bible among the Prophets, after Ezekiel, but among the miscellaneous books in the third division, the "Scriptures." Various reasons have been suggested for this, but by far the most probable is that at the time when Daniel became current, in the second centuryB.C., the Prophets were already a definite group of writings with a traditional use in the readings of the Synagogue, to which a new book could not well be added.
The Book of Daniel consists of two parts, stories about Daniel and his three comrades (cc. 1-6), and visions of Daniel (cc. 7-12); in the latter Daniel reports his visions in the first person as Ezekiel habitually does, and it was only natural that he should be taken for the author of the book.
According to the introduction to the first story, Daniel and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, were Jewish youths of high birth who were carried captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in the first deportation (which is erroneously dated in the third year of Jehoiakim). One story (Dan. 1) tells how these youths contrived to avoid all danger of eating unclean food, and how God blessed them in body and mind for their scrupulousness in observance of the dietary laws; another (c. 3), how the three were saved from Nebuchadnezzar's overheated furnace, into which they were thrown for refusing to worship the idol; a third (c. 6), how Daniel was cast into the lions' den for praying to his God despite the edict of Darius. These miraculous deliverances constrain the heathen kings publicly to acknowledge that the God of the Jews is the greatest of gods. The same acknowledgment is drawn from Nebuchadnezzar when Daniel recalls his forgotten dream and interprets it, after all the diviners of Babylon had failed (c. 2); he alone is able to decipher and explain for Belshazzar the handwriting on the wall (c. 5). The stories ofNebuchadnezzar's madness (c. 2) and of Belshazzar's feast (c. 5) teach also how God punishes kings who in their pride of power exalt themselves before him, or in their arrogance profane his holy things.
All of them thus magnify the God of the Jews as in power and wisdom above all other gods, and two of the most striking of them have for their theme the deliverance from mortal peril of men who stood faithful to their religion against the king's commandment. These obvious motives, as we shall presently see, have a bearing on the age of the stories.
In the second part of the book are four visions, or revelations, which stand in chronological order (according to the author's chronology): c. 7 in the first year of Belshazzar; c. 8 in his third year; c. 9 in the first year of "Darius son of Xerxes, of the race of the Medes"—not properly a vision, but a revelation by Gabriel; and cc. 10-12 in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia. By the side of these must be put Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Dan. ii. 28-45 (second year of Nebuchadnezzar), which, in its four-empire scheme, corresponds to Daniel's vision in c. 7. The interpretations which Daniel gives to Nebuchadnezzar or the angel gives to Daniel, though sometimes surrounded with an impressive air of mystery, give all the necessary clues to the understanding of the visions, and obscure allusions are often made plain by a more explicit parallel.
Under fantastic and varied imagery, they unroll the history of the empires which succeed one another in the dominion of the world, from the Babylonian (Dan. 2 and 7), or the Medo-Persian (c. 8), or Persian (cc. 10-12)—that is from the assumed standpoint of Daniel—through the dominion of Alexander and the kingdoms into which his empire was broken up, ending always with the reign of Antiochus IV. (175-164B.C.). The goal in them all is the destruction of the heathen power and the establishment of the eternal kingdom of the holy people of the Most High, otherwise, the Jews.
The simplest form of this scheme is Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Dan. 2. The image with head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron, and feet part of iron and part of clay, stands for four empires in a scale of deterioration, like the four ages of Hesiod, beginning with the Babylonian, represented by Nebuchadnezzar himself. This is followed by an inferior kingdom, and that by a third universal empire; the destructive strength of the fourth is figured by iron which shatters all that it smites; the feet and toes signify a divided kingdom, in part strong as iron, in part brittle as pottery. The stone which smote the image on the feet and broke them to pieces, whereupon the whole image collapsed into dust and was whirled away by the wind, while the stone grew to a great mountain and filled all the earth,is the kingdom which the God of heaven shall establish in those days, "which shall never be destroyed, nor shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people, but it shall break in pieces and annihilate all those empires, and it shall stand forever."
The image thus represents the rule of the heathen as one world-empire, the dominion being exercised successively by four kingdoms and by the divisions of the fourth; in the destruction of these last the heathen world-empire is forever annihilated, and the eternal kingdom of God subdues and rules the whole earth. What is said about the second and third kingdoms is too general to identify them; the iron strength and destructiveness of the fourth, and its divisions with their mingled strength and weakness, naturally suggest Alexander and his successors, and this impression is strengthened by the one specific trait in the whole picture; the vain effort to make iron and wet clay combine signifies, we are told, an equally futile attempt to bind the divided kingdoms together by intermarriages (Dan. ii. 43). We know from the historians that attempts to ally the kingdoms of the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria by dynastic marriages were repeatedly made in vain, and the author of Daniel himself, in c. 11, refers to these alliances and their disastrous failure in plain terms.
The vision of Daniel in c. 7 brings in the four empires under the symbol of four monstrousbeasts. The fourth, more terrible and more destructive than the others, has ten horns ("out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise," vs. 24); another horn, "with the eyes of a man and a boastful mouth," arises which roots out three of the ten. Daniel sees how he makes war on the "holy men" (i.e. the Jews) and prevails over them (vs. 21); the interpreting angel describes in more detail the crimes of the last king: he will utter speeches against the Highest, and wear out the holy men of the Most High, and try to change (religious) seasons and law (religion). God's people will be delivered into his power till the expiration of three and a half years (cf. xii. 7). Then the proud king and his kingdom will be annihilated and the universal and eternal empire of the Jews established.
Still more definite is the description of the doings of the "little horn" which springs up on the head of the great he-goat in the vision of c. 8. Here the interpreter becomes explicit: the he-goat is by name the Macedonian empire. The little horn is a king who shall arise in the latter time of the divided kingdoms of Alexander's successors. This king magnifies himself against the chief of the heavenly host, casts down his sanctuary, takes away his daily burnt-offerings, and destroys the holy people; and is then himself suddenly "broken without hand." In the further explanation given to Daniel in ix. 26 ff., the cessation of the daily sacrifice is to last halfa week (of years), i.e. three and a half years; the profanation of the sanctuary and suppression of the sacrifices and the persecution of the Jews occur again in xi. 31 ff. (cf. xii. 5-12). In connection with this we hear of setting up of a "desolating (or appalling) abomination," in the temple. The common use of "abomination" (loathsome thing) for idols or other objects of heathen worship leaves no doubt that some such object is meant here: the king not only stopped the worship of the God of the Jews in his own temple, but established in its place a heathen cult. It is, indeed, not improbable that the words translated "appalling abomination" are an intentional distortion of the proper name of the heathen god Baal Shamaim, i.e. Jupiter.
The definiteness of all this proves that the author is not creating an imaginary monster in whom all the sins of the heathen rulers against the God of Heaven and his people are accumulated, but describing a historical figure. Nor is there the smallest room for question whose portrait he is painting: every feature of it belongs to Antiochus IV., Epiphanes (Manifest God, the title means, which Antiochian wits perverted to Epimanes, Manifest Madman), who in 168B.C.took possession of the temple in Jerusalem, suppressed the worship of its God, erected an altar of Jupiter on the great altar of burnt offering, and inaugurated heathen sacrifices. Not onlythat, but he forbade circumcision, the observance of the sabbath, and the possession of copies of the scriptures, and commanded that Jews should certify their abjuration of their own religion by sacrificing to his gods. Those who ignored or defied his decrees were persecuted; many of them put to death. This attempt to extirpate the Jewish religion and forcibly heathenize the people provoked a revolt led by Judas Maccabæus and his brothers, who three years later recovered the temple, purged it, and restored the sacrifices.
If there could be any doubt about the identification, it would be removed by Dan. 11, which, as was recognized by Porphyry in the third century of our era, contains a minute history of the relations of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, their intermarriages and their wars, with increasing detail, down to the Egyptian campaigns of Antiochus Epiphanes—mentioning, for instance, the rebuff he received from the Roman envoy (Popillius Laenas), and in the sequel of this his desecration of the temple in Jerusalem and persecution of the law-abiding Jews—and there the history ends.
All this is supposed to be revealed to Daniel in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and under later Babylonian and Median kings down to the first year of Cyrus, that is, according to the historical chronology, about three hundred and seventy-five years before the event. Such visionary panoramas form a recognized genus of Jewish literature, and they are regularlyunrolled to some man of God in the remote or remotest past. In the second and first centuries before our era a great variety of such visions were attributed to Enoch, others to Noah; revelations to Seth the son of Adam were once popular, and Adam himself had some. Another class, like Daniel, bore the names of men of the exile; Baruch is the putative father of several such revelations; one of the most notable of the kind is the apocalypse of Ezra, which stands in the Apocrypha in our Bible as Second Esdras.
The age of such apocalypses is determined, not by the date assigned to the imaginary seer, but by the actual standpoint of the author as disclosed in the visions. In Daniel the historical panorama is unrolled every time to the reign of Antiochus IV., and there stops. The writer had witnessed the desecration of the temple and the persecution of the Jews for their religion, he had seen the first small successes of the Maccabees, but the recovery of the temple and the restoration of sacrifice had not yet occurred. The death of Antiochus is circumstantially predicted, but in a place and manner very remote from the reality (Dan. xi. 45). The visions of Daniel fall, therefore, between December 168B.C., the date of the desecration of the temple, and December 165, the restoration. The motives of the stories also (see above, p. 178 f.) are most appropriate to the situation under Antiochus. It is possible that they areadaptations of older tales, but there is no reason to think that they are of high antiquity. The Greek Bible has three additional stories about Daniel (Susanna and the Elders, Bel, and the Dragon) which stand in our Bibles among the Apocrypha.
One peculiarity of the Book of Daniel remains for brief mention. Like Ezra, it is in two languages: Dan. i. 1-ii. 4 is in Hebrew, from ii. 4 b to the end of c. 7 in Aramaic, and from the beginning of c. 8 the rest is in Hebrew again. The Aramaic begins appropriately where the Chaldæans (diviners) are introduced speaking in what the author evidently conceives to be the language of the country; the text does not, however, revert to Hebrew when this conference is over, but holds on, not only through all the rest of the stories, but through the first vision (c. 7). A motive for just this distribution of the two tongues is not discoverable; in the chapter of accidents are various possibilities which offset one another. As in Ezra—though there are some differences between the two books—the Aramaic is of a kind which was vernacular in Palestine in the last centuries before our era.