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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 2

Author: George Adam Smith

Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll

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THE EXPOSITOR’S BIBLE

EDITED BY THE REV.

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
Editor of “The Expositor”

THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE PROPHETS
VOL. II.—ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH,
HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.—VIII., “MALACHI,” JOEL,
“ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. AND JONAH
BY

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.

NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
51 EAST TENTH STREET
1898

THE EXPOSITOR'S
BIBLE
Crown 8vo, cloth, price $1.50 each vol.
FIRST SERIES, 1887–8.
Colossians.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D.
St. Mark.
By Very Rev. the Bishop of Derry.
Genesis.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
1 Samuel.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
2 Samuel.
By the same Author.
Hebrews.
By Principal T. C. EDWARDS, D.D.
SECOND SERIES, 1888–9.
Galatians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Pastoral Epistles.
By Rev A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Isaiah I.—XXXIX.
By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Vol. I.
The Book of Revelation.
By Prof. W. MILLIGAN, D.D.
1 Corinthians
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
The Epistles of St. John.
By Most Rev. the Archbishop of Armagh.

THIRD SERIES, 1889–90.
Judges and Ruth.
By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.
Jeremiah.
By Rev. C. J. BALL, M.A.
Isaiah XL.—LXVI.
By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Vol. II.

St. Matthew.
By Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.
Exodus.
By Right Rev. the Bishop of Derry.
St. Luke.
By Rev. H. BURTON, M.A.
FOURTH SERIES, 1890–91.
Ecclesiastes.
By Rev. SAMUEL Cox, D.D.
St. James and St. Jude.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Proverbs.
By Rev. R. F. HORTON, D.D.
Leviticus.
By Rev. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D.
The Gospel of St. John.
By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. I.
The Acts of the Apostles.
By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. I.
FIFTH SERIES, 1891–2.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. I.
1 and 2 Thessalonians.
By JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
The Book of Job.
By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.
Ephesians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Gospel of St. John.
By Prof. M. DODS, D.D. Vol. II.
The Acts of the Apostles.
By Prof. STOKES, D.D. Vol. II.

SIXTH SERIES, 1892–3.
1 Kings.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.
Philippians.
By Principal RAINY, D.D.
Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.

By Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.
Joshua.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. II.
The Epistles of St. Peter.
By Prof. RAWSON LUMBY, D.D.
SEVENTH SERIES, 1893–4.
2 Kings.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.
Romans.
By H. C. G. MOULE, M.A., D.D.
The Books of Chronicles.
By Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.
2 Corinthians.
By JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
Numbers.
By R. A. WATSON, M.A., D.D.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. III.
EIGHTH SERIES, 1895–6.
Daniel.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury.
The Book of Jeremiah.
By Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.
Deuteronomy.
By Prof. ANDREW HARPER, B.D.
The Song of Solomon and Lamentations.
By Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.
Ezekiel.
By Prof. JOHN SKINNER, M.A.
The Book of the Twelve Prophets.
By Prof. G. A. SMITH, D.D. Two Vols

THE BOOK

OF

THE TWELVE PROPHETS
COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR

BY

GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS
FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.—ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH,
HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.—VIII., “MALACHI,” JOEL,
“ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. AND JONAH

WITH HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS

NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
51 EAST TENTH STREET
1898

PREFACE

The first volume on the Twelve Prophets dealt with the three who belonged
to the Eighth Century: Amos, Hosea and Micah. This second volume
includes the other nine books arranged in chronological order: Zephaniah,
Nahum and Habakkuk, of the Seventh Century; Obadiah, of the Exile;
Haggai, Zechariah i.—viii., “Malachi” and Joel, of the Persian Period, 538
—331; “Zechariah” ix.—xiv. and the Book of Jonah, of the Greek Period,
which began in 332, the date of Alexander’s Syrian campaign.
The same plan has been followed as in Volume I. A historical
introduction is offered to each period. To each prophet are given, first a
chapter of critical introduction, and then one or more chapters of exposition.
A complete translation has been furnished, with critical and explanatory
notes. All questions of date and of text, and nearly all of interpretation, have
been confined to the introductions and the notes, so that those who consult
the volume only for expository purposes will find the exposition
unencumbered by the discussion of technical points.
The necessity of including within one volume so many prophets,
scattered over more than three centuries, and each of them requiring a
separate introduction, has reduced the space available for the practical
application of their teaching to modern life. But this is the less to be
regretted, that the contents of the nine books before us are not so applicable
to our own day, as we have found their greater predecessors to be. On the
other hand, however, they form a more varied introduction to Old
Testament Criticism, while, by the long range of time which they cover, and
the many stages of religion to which they belong, they afford a wider view
of the development of prophecy. Let us look for a little at these two points.
1. To Old Testament Criticism these books furnish valuable introduction
—some of them, like Obadiah, Joel and “Zechariah” ix.—xiv., by the great

variety of opinion that has prevailed as to their dates or their relation to
other prophets with whom they have passages in common; some, like
Zechariah and “Malachi,” by their relation to the Law, in the light of
modern theories of the origin of the latter; and some, like Joel and Jonah, by
the question whether we are to read them as history, or as allegories of
history, or as apocalypse. That is to say, these nine books raise, besides the
usual questions of genuineness and integrity, every other possible problem
of Old Testament Criticism. It has, therefore, been necessary to make the
critical introductions full and detailed. The enormous differences of opinion
as to the dates of some must start the suspicion of arbitrariness, unless there
be included in each case a history of the development of criticism, so as to
exhibit to the English reader the principles and the evidence of fact upon
which that criticism is based. I am convinced that what is chiefly required
just now by the devout student of the Bible is the opportunity to judge for
himself how far Old Testament Criticism is an adult science; with what
amount of reasonableness it has been prosecuted; how gradually its
conclusions have been reached, how jealously they have been contested;
and how far, amid the many varieties of opinion which must always exist
with reference to facts so ancient and questions so obscure, there has been
progress towards agreement upon the leading problems. But, besides the
accounts of past criticism given in this volume, the reader will find in each
case an independent attempt to arrive at a conclusion. This has not always
been successful. A number of points have been left in doubt; and even
where results have been stated with some degree of positiveness, the reader
need scarcely be warned (after what was said in the Preface to Vol. I.) that
many of these must necessarily be provisional. But, in looking back from
the close of this work upon the discussions which it contains, I am more
than ever convinced of the extreme probability of most of the conclusions.
Among these are the following: that the correct interpretation of Habakkuk

is to be found in the direction of the position to which Budde’s ingenious
proposal has been carried on pages 123 ff. with reference to Egypt; that the
most of Obadiah is to be dated from the sixth century; that “Malachi” is an
anonymous work from the eve of Ezra’s reforms; that Joel follows
“Malachi”; and that “Zechariah” ix.—xiv. has been rightly assigned by
Stade to the early years of the Greek Period. I have ventured to contest
Kosters’ theory that there was no return of Jewish exiles under Cyrus, and
am the more disposed to believe his strong argument inconclusive, not only
upon a review of the reasons I have stated in Chap. XVI., but on this ground
also, that many of its chief adherents in this country and Germany have so
modified it as virtually to give up its main contention. I think, too, there can
be little doubt as to the substantial authenticity of Zephaniah ii. (except the
verses on Moab and Ammon) and iii. 1–13, of Habakkuk ii. 5 ff., and of the
whole of Haggai; or as to the ungenuine character of the lyric piece in
Zechariah ii. and the intrusion of “Malachi” ii. 11–13a. On these and
smaller points the reader will find full discussion at the proper places. [I
may here add a word or two upon some of the critical conclusions reached
in Vol. I., which have been recently contested. The student will find strong
grounds offered by Canon Driver in his Joel and Amos[1] for the
authenticity of those passages in Amos which, following other critics, I
regarded or suspected as not authentic. It makes one diffident in one’s
opinions when Canon Driver supports Professors Kuenen and Robertson
Smith on the other side. But on a survey of the case I am unable to feel that
even they have removed what they admit to be “forcible” objections to the
authorship by Amos of the passages in question. They seem to me to have
established not more than a possibility that the passages are authentic; and
on the whole I still feel that the probability is in the other direction. If I am
right, then I think that the date of the apostrophes to Jehovah’s creative
power which occur in the Book of Amos, and the reference to astral deities

in chap. v. 27, may be that which I have suggested on pages 8 and 9 of this
volume. Some critics have charged me with inconsistency in denying the
authenticity of the epilogue to Amos while defending that of the epilogue to
Hosea. The two cases, as my arguments proved, are entirely different. Nor
do I see any reason to change the conclusions of Vol. I. upon the questions
of the authenticity of various parts of Micah.]
The text of the nine prophets treated in this volume has presented even
more difficulties than that of the three treated in Vol. I. And these
difficulties must be my apology for the delay of this volume.
2. But the critical and textual value of our nine books is far exceeded by
the historical. Each exhibits a development of Hebrew prophecy of the
greatest interest. From this point of view, indeed, the volume might be
entitled “The Passing of the Prophet.” For throughout our nine books we
see the spirit and the style of the classic prophecy of Israel gradually
dissolving into other forms of religious thought and feeling. The clear start
from the facts of the prophet’s day, the ancient truths about Jehovah and
Israel, and the direct appeal to the conscience of the prophet’s
contemporaries, are not always given, or when given are mingled, coloured
and warped by other religious interests, both present and future, which are
even powerful enough to shake the ethical absolutism of the older prophets.
With Nahum and Obadiah the ethical is entirely missed in the presence of
the claims—and we cannot deny that they were natural claims—of the long-
suffering nation’s hour of revenge upon her heathen tyrants. With
Zephaniah prophecy, still austerely ethical, passes under the shadow of
apocalypse; and the future is solved, not upon purely historical lines, but by
the intervention of “supernatural” elements. With Habakkuk the ideals of
the older prophets encounter the shock of the facts of experience: we have
the prophet as sceptic. Upon the other margin of the Exile, Haggai and
Zechariah (i.—viii.), although they are as practical as any of their

predecessors, exhibit the influence of the exilic developments of ritual,
angelology and apocalypse. God appears further off from Zechariah than
from the prophets of the eighth century, and in need of mediators, human
and superhuman. With Zechariah the priest has displaced the prophet, and it
is very remarkable that no place is found for the latter beside the two sons of
oil, the political and priestly heads of the community, who, according to the
Fifth Vision, stand in the presence of God and between them feed the
religious life of Israel. Nearly sixty years later “Malachi” exhibits the
working of Prophecy within the Law, and begins to employ the didactic
style of the later Rabbinism. Joel starts, like any older prophet, from the
facts of his own day, but these hurry him at once into apocalypse; he calls,
as thoroughly as any of his predecessors, to repentance, but under the
imminence of the Day of the Lord, with its “supernatural” terrors, he
mentions no special sin and enforces no single virtue. The civic and
personal ethics of the earlier prophets are absent. In the Greek Period, the
oracles now numbered from the ninth to the fourteenth chapters of the Book
of Zechariah repeat to aggravation the exulting revenge of Nahum and
Obadiah, without the strong style or the hold upon history which the former
exhibits, and show us prophecy still further enwrapped in apocalypse. But
in the Book of Jonah, though it is parable and not history, we see a great
recovery and expansion of the best elements of prophecy. God’s character
and Israel’s true mission to the world are revealed in the spirit of Hosea and
of the Seer of the Exile, with much of the tenderness, the insight, the
analysis of character and even the humour of classic prophecy. These
qualities raise the Book of Jonah, though it is probably the latest of our
Twelve, to the highest rank among them. No book is more worthy to stand
by the side of Isaiah xl.—lv.; none is nearer in spirit to the New Testament.
All this gives unity to the study of prophets so far separate in time, and
so very distinct in character, from each other. From Zephaniah to Jonah, or

over a period of three centuries, they illustrate the dissolution of Prophecy
and its passage into other forms of religion.
The scholars, to whom every worker in this field is indebted, are named
throughout the volume. I regret that Nowack’s recent commentary on the
Minor Prophets (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) reached me too late
for use (except in footnotes) upon the earlier of the nine prophets.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

PAGE

Preface v

Chronological Tables
[These Tables are in Volume I.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE SEVENTH CENTURY

CHAP.

I. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE 3
CHRIST
1. REACTION UNDER MANASSEH AND
AMON (695?—639).
2. THE EARLY YEARS OF JOSIAH (639
—625): JEREMIAH AND
ZEPHANIAH
3. THE REST OF THE CENTURY (625—
586): THE FALL OF
NINIVEH; NAHUM AND
HABAKKUK.

ZEPHANIAH

II. THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH 35

III. THE PROPHET AND THE 46
REFORMERS
ZEPHANIAH i.—ii. 3.

IV. NINIVE DELENDA 61
ZEPHANIAH ii. 4–15.

V. SO AS BY FIRE 67
ZEPHANIAH iii.

NAHUM

VI. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 77
1. THE POSITION OF ELḲÔSH.
2. THE AUTHENTICITY OF CHAP. i.

3. THE DATE OF CHAPS. ii. AND iii

VII. THE VENGEANGE OF THE LORD 90
NAHUM i.

VIII. THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH 96
NAHUM ii. AND iii.

HABAḲḲUḲ

IX. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 115
1. CHAP. i. 2—ii. 4 (OR 8).
2. CHAP. ii. 5–20.
3. CHAP. iii.

X. THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 129
HABBAKKUK i.—ii. 4.

XI. TYRANNY IS SUICIDE 143
HABBAKKUK ii. 5–20.

XII. “IN THE MIDST OF THE YEARS” 149
HABBAKKUK iii.

OBADIAH

XIII. THE BOOK OF OBADIAH 163

XIV. EDOM AND ISRAEL 177
OBADIAH 1–21.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE PERSIAN PERIOD
(539—331 B.C.)

XV. ISRAEL UNDER THE PERSIANS 187

XVI. FROM THE RETURN FROM 198
BABYLON TO THE
BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE (536
—516 B.C.)
WITH A DISCUSSION OF PROFESSOR
KOSTERS' THEORY.

HAGGAI

XVII. THE BOOK OF HAGGAI 225

XVIII. HAGGAI AND THE BUILDING OF 234
THE TEMPLE
HAGGAI. i., ii.
1. THE CALL TO BUILD (CHAP. i.).

2. COURAGE, ZERUBBABEL! COURAGE,
JEHOSHUA
AND ALL THE PEOPLE! (CHAP. ii.
1–9).
3. THE POWER OF THE UNCLEAN (Chap.
ii. 10–19).
4. THE REINVESTMENT OF ISRAEL'S
HOPE (CHAP. ii. 20–23).

ZECHARIAH
(I.—VIII.)

XIX. THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH (I.— 255
VIII.)

XX. ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET 264
ZECHARIAH i. 1–6, ETC.; EZRA v. 1, vi.
14.

XXI. THE VISIONS OF ZECHARIAH 273
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi.

1. THE INFLUENCES WHICH MOULDED
THE VISIONS.

2. GENERAL FEATURES OF THE
VISIONS.
3. EXPOSITION OF THE SEVERAL
VISIONS:
THE FIRST: THE ANGEL-HORSEMEN (i.
7–17).
THE SECOND: THE FOUR HORNS AND
THE FOUR SMITHS
(i. 18–21 ENG.).
THE THIRD: THE CITY OF PEACE (ii. 1–
5 ENG).
THE FOURTH: THE HIGH PRIEST AND
THE SATAN (iii. ).

THE FIFTH: THE TEMPLE CANDLESTICK
AND THE TWO OLIVE-TREES (iv.

).
THE SIXTH: THE WINGED VOLUME (v.
1–4 ).
THE SEVENTH: THE WOMAN IN THE
BARREL (v. 5–11).
THE EIGHTH: THE CHARIOTS OF THE
FOUR WINDS (vi. 1–8).
THE RESULT OF THE VISIONS (vi. 9–
15).

XXII. THE ANGELS OF THE VISIONS 310
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi. 8.

XXIII. “THE SEED OF PEACE” 320
ZECHARIAH vii., viii.

“MALACHI”

XXIV. THE BOOK OF “MALACHI” 331

XXV. FROM ZECHARIAH TO “MALACHI” 341

XXVI. PROPHECY WITHIN THE LAW 348
“MALACHI” i.—iv. (ENG.)
1. GOD'S LOVE FOR ISRAEL AND
HATRED OF EDOM (i. 2–5).
2. “HONOUR THY FATHER” (i. 6–14).

3. THE PRIESTHOD OF KNOWLEDGE (ii.
1–9).
4. THE CRUELTY OF DIVORCE (ii. 10–
16).
5. “WHERE IS THE GOD OF
JUDGMENT?” (ii. 17—iii. 5).
6. REPENTANCE BY TITHES (iii. 6–12).

7. THE JUDGMENT TO COME (iii. 13—
iv. 2 ENG.).
8. THE RETURN OF ELIJAH (iv. 3–5
ENG.).

JOEL

XXVII. THE BOOK OF JOEL 375
1. THE DATE OF THE BOOK.
2. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BOOK.

3. STATE OF THE TEXT AND THE STYLE
OF THE BOOK.

XXVIII. THE LOCUSTS AND THE DAY OF 398
THE LORD.
JOEL i.—ii. 17.

XXIX. PROSPERITY AND THE SPIRIT 418
JOEL ii. 18–32 (ENG.)
1. THE RETURN OF PROSPERITY (ii.
19–27).

2. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT (ii.
28–32).

XXX. THE JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN 431
JOEL iii (ENG.).

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE GRECIAN PERIOD
(FROM 331 ONWARDS)

XXXI. ISRAEL AND THE GREEKS 439

“ZECHARIAH”
(IX.—XIV.)

XXXII. “ZECHARIAH” IX.—XIV. 449

XXXIII. THE CONTENTS OF “ZECHARIAH” 463
IX.—XIV.
1. THE COMING OF THE GREEKS (ix.
1–8).
2. THE PRINCE OF PEACE (ix. 9–12).
3. THE SLAUGHTER OF THE GREEKS
(ix. 13–17).
4. AGAINST THE TERAPHIM AND
SORCERERS (x. 1, 2).
5. AGAINST EVIL SHEPHERDS (x. 3–
12).

6. WAR UPON THE SYRIAN TYRANTS
(xi. 1–3).
7. THE REJECTION AND MURDER OF
THE GOOD SHEPHERD (xi. 4–17,
xiii. 7–9).
8. JUDAH versus JERUSALEM (xii. 1–7).
9. FOUR RESULTS OF JERUSALEM'S
DELIVERANCE (xii. 8—xiii. 6).
10. JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN AND
SANCTIFICATION
OF JERUSALEM (xiv.).

JONAH

XXXIV. THE BOOK OF JONAH 493
1. THE DATE OF THE BOOK.
2. THE CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
3. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.

4. OUR LORD'S USE OF THE BOOK.
5. THE UNITY OF THE BOOK.

XXXV. THE GREAT REFUSAL 514
JONAH i.

XXXVI. THE GREAT FISH AND WHAT IT 523
MEANS—THE PSALM
JONAH ii.

XXXVII. THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY 529
JONAH iii.

XXXVIII. ISRAEL'S JEALOUSY OF JEHOVAH 536
JONAH iv.

INDEX OF PROPHETS 543

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE SEVENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST

The three prophets who were treated in the first volume of this work
belonged to the eighth century before Christ: if Micah lived into the seventh
his labours were over by 675. The next group of our twelve, also three in
number, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, did not appear till after 630. To
make our study continuous[2] we must now sketch the course of Israel’s
history between.
In another volume of this series,[3] some account was given of the
religious progress of Israel from Isaiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem in
701 to Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem in 587. Isaiah’s strength was bent
upon establishing the inviolableness of Zion. Zion, he said, should not be
taken, and the people, though cut to their roots, should remain planted in
their own land, the stock of a noble nation in the latter days. But Jeremiah
predicted the ruin both of City and Temple, summoned Jerusalem’s enemies
against her in the name of Jehovah, and counselled his people to submit to
them. This reversal of the prophetic ideal had a twofold reason. In the first
place the moral condition of Israel was worse in 600 B.C. than it had been in
700; another century had shown how much the nation needed the penalty
and purgation of exile. But secondly, however the inviolableness of
Jerusalem had been required in the interests of pure religion in 701, religion
had now to show that it was independent even of Zion and of Israel’s
political survival. Our three prophets of the eighth century (as well as Isaiah
himself) had indeed preached a gospel which implied this, but it was
reserved to Jeremiah to prove that the existence of state and temple was not
indispensable to faith in God, and to explain the ruin of Jerusalem, not

merely as a well-merited penance, but as the condition of a more spiritual
intercourse between Jehovah and His people.
It is our duty to trace the course of events through the seventh century,
which led to this change of the standpoint of prophecy, and which moulded
the messages especially of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, Zephaniah, Nahum
and Habakkuk. We may divide the century into three periods: First, that of
the Reaction and Persecution under Manasseh and Amon, from 695 or 690
to 639, during which prophecy was silent or anonymous; Second, that of the
Early Years of Josiah, 639 to 625, near the end of which we meet with the
young Jeremiah and Zephaniah; Third, the Rest of the Century, 625 to 600,
covering the Decline and Fall of Niniveh, and the prophets Nahum and
Habakkuk, with an addition carrying on the history to the Fall of Jerusalem
in 587—6.

1. REACTION UNDER MANASSEH AND AMON (695?—639).
Jerusalem was delivered in 701, and the Assyrians kept away from
Palestine for twenty-three years.[4] Judah had peace, and Hezekiah was free
to devote his latter days to the work of purifying the worship of his people.
What he exactly achieved is uncertain. The historian imputes to him the
removal of the high places, the destruction of all Maççeboth and Asheras,
and of the brazen serpent.[5] That his measures were drastic is probable
from the opinions of Isaiah, who was their inspiration, and proved by the
reaction which they provoked when Hezekiah died. The removal of the high
places and the concentration of the national worship within the Temple
would be the more easy that the provincial sanctuaries had been devastated
by the Assyrian invasion, and that the shrine of Jehovah was glorified by
the raising of the siege of 701.
While the first of Isaiah’s great postulates for the future, the
inviolableness of Zion, had been fulfilled, the second, the reign of a

righteous prince in Israel, seemed doomed to disappointment. Hezekiah
died early in the seventh century,[6] and was succeeded by his son
Manasseh, a boy of twelve, who appears to have been captured by the party
whom his father had opposed. The few years’ peace—peace in Israel was
always dangerous to the health of the higher religion—the interests of those
who had suffered from the reforms, the inevitable reaction which a rigorous
puritanism provokes—these swiftly reversed the religious fortunes of Israel.
Isaiah’s and Micah’s predictions of the final overthrow of Assyria seemed
falsified, when in 681 the more vigorous Asarhaddon succeeded
Sennacherib, and in 678 swept the long absent armies back upon Syria.
Sidon was destroyed, and twenty-two princes of Palestine immediately
yielded their tribute to the conqueror. Manasseh was one of them, and his
political homage may have brought him, as it brought Ahaz, within the
infection of foreign idolatries.[7] Everything, in short, worked for the revival
of that eclectic paganism which Hezekiah had striven to stamp out. The
high places were rebuilt; altars were erected to Baal, with the sacred pole of
Asherah, as in the time of Ahab;[8] shrines to the host of heaven defiled the
courts of Jehovah’s house; there was a recrudescence of soothsaying,
divination and traffic with the dead.
But it was all very different from the secure and sunny temper which
Amos had encountered in Northern Israel.[9] The terrible Assyrian invasions
had come between. Life could never again feel so stable. Still more
destructive had been the social poisons which our prophets described as
sapping the constitution of Israel for nearly three generations. The rural
simplicity was corrupted by those economic changes which Micah bewails.
With the ousting of the old families from the soil, a thousand traditions,
memories and habits must have been broken, which had preserved the
people’s presence of mind in days of sudden disaster, and had carried them,
for instance, through so long a trial as the Syrian wars. Nor could the blood

of Israel have run so pure after the luxury and licentiousness described by
Hosea and Isaiah. The novel obligations of commerce, the greed to be rich,
the increasing distress among the poor, had strained the joyous temper of
that nation of peasants’ sons, whom we met with Amos, and shattered the
nerves of their rulers. There is no word of fighting in Manasseh’s days, no
word of revolt against the tyrant. Perhaps also the intervening puritanism,
which had failed to give the people a permanent faith, had at least
awakened within them a new conscience.
At all events there is now no more ease in Zion, but a restless fear,
driving the people to excesses of religious zeal. We do not read of the happy
country festivals of the previous century, nor of the careless pride of that
sudden wealth which built vast palaces and loaded the altar of Jehovah with
hecatombs. The full-blooded patriotism, which at least kept ritual in touch
with clean national issues, has vanished. The popular religion is sullen and
exasperated. It takes the form of sacrifices of frenzied cruelty and lust.
Children are passed through the fire to Moloch, and the Temple is defiled
by the orgies of those who abuse their bodies to propitiate a foreign and a
brutal god.[10]
But the most certain consequence of a religion whose nerves are on
edge is persecution, and this raged all the earlier years of Manasseh. The
adherents of the purer faith were slaughtered, and Jerusalem drenched[11]
with innocent blood. Her own sword, says Jeremiah, devoured the prophets
like a destroying lion.[12]
It is significant that all that has come down to us from this “killing
time” is anonymous;[13] we do not meet with our next group of public
prophets till Manasseh and his like-minded son have passed away. Yet
prophecy was not wholly stifled. Voices were raised to predict the exile and
destruction of the nation. Jehovah spake by His servants;[14] while others
wove into the prophecies of an Amos, a Hosea or an Isaiah some

application of the old principles to the new circumstances. It is probable, for
instance, that the extremely doubtful passage in the Book of Amos, v. 26 f.,
which imputes to Israel as a whole the worship of astral deities from
Assyria, is to be assigned to the reign of Manasseh. In its present position it
looks very like an intrusion: nowhere else does Amos charge his generation
with serving foreign gods; and certainly in all the history of Israel we could
not find a more suitable period for so specific a charge than the days when
into the central sanctuary of the national worship images were introduced of
the host of heaven, and the nation was, in consequence, threatened with
exile.[15]
In times of persecution the documents of the suffering faith have ever
been reverenced and guarded with especial zeal. It is not improbable that
the prophets, driven from public life, gave themselves to the arrangement of
the national scriptures; and some critics date from Manasseh’s reign the
weaving of the two earliest documents of the Pentateuch into one
continuous book of history.[16] The Book of Deuteronomy forms a problem
by itself. The legislation which composes the bulk of it[17] appears to have
been found among the Temple archives at the end of our period, and
presented to Josiah as an old and forgotten work.[18] There is no reason to
charge with fraud those who made the presentation by affirming that they
really invented the book. They were priests of Jerusalem, but the book is
written by members of the prophetic party, and ostensibly in the interests of
the priests of the country. It betrays no tremor of the awful persecutions of
Manasseh’s reign; it does not hint at the distinction, then for the first time
apparent, between a false and a true Israel. But it does draw another
distinction, familiar to the eighth century, between the true and the false
prophets. The political and spiritual premisses of the doctrine of the book
were all present by the end of the reign of Hezekiah, and it is extremely
improbable that his reforms, which were in the main those of Deuteronomy,

were not accompanied by some code, or by some appeal to the fountain of
all law in Israel.
But whether the Book of Deuteronomy now existed or not, there were
those in the nation who through all the dark days between Hezekiah and
Josiah laid up its truth in their hearts and were ready to assist the latter
monarch in his public enforcement of it.
While these things happened within Judah, very great events were
taking place beyond her borders. Asarhaddon of Assyria (681—668) was a
monarch of long purposes and thorough plans. Before he invaded Egypt, he
spent a year (675) in subduing the restless tribes of Northern Arabia, and
another (674) in conquering the peninsula of Sinai, an ancient appanage of
Egypt. Tyre upon her island baffled his assaults, but the rest of Palestine
remained subject to him. He received his reward in carrying the Assyrian
arms farther into Egypt than any of his predecessors, and about 670 took
Memphis from the Ethiopian Pharaoh Taharka. Then he died. Assurbanipal,
who succeeded, lost Egypt for a few years, but about 665, with the help of
his tributaries in Palestine, he overthrew Taharka, took Thebes, and
established along the Nile a series of vassal states. He quelled a revolt there
in 663 and overthrew Memphis for a second time. The fall of the Egyptian
capital resounds through the rest of the century; we shall hear its echoes in
Nahum. Tyre fell at last with Arvad in 662. But the Assyrian empire had
grown too vast for human hands to grasp, and in 652 a general revolt took
place in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Elam, Babylon and Asia Minor. In 649
Assurbanipal reduced Elam and Babylon; and by two further campaigns
(647 and 645) Hauran, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Nabatea and all the northern
Arabs. On his return from these he crossed Western Palestine to the sea and
punished Usu and Akko. It is very remarkable that, while Assurbanipal,
who thus fought the neighbours of Judah, makes no mention of her, nor
numbers Manasseh among the rebels whom he chastised, the Book of

Chronicles should contain the statement that Jehovah sent upon Manasseh
the captains of the host of the king of Assyria, who bound him with fetters
and carried him to Babylon.[19] What grounds the Chronicler had for such a
statement are quite unknown to us. He introduces Manasseh’s captivity as
the consequence of idolatry, and asserts that on his restoration Manasseh
abolished in Judah all worship save that of Jehovah, but if this happened
(and the Book of Kings has no trace of it) it was without result. Amon, son
of Manasseh, continued to sacrifice to all the images which his father had
introduced.

2. THE EARLY YEARS OF JOSIAH (639—625): JEREMIAH AND ZEPHANIAH.
Amon had not reigned for two years when his servants conspired
against him, and he was slain in his own house.[20] But the people of the
land rose against the court, slew the conspirators, and secured the throne for
Amon’s son, Josiah, a child of eight. It is difficult to know what we ought to
understand by these movements. Amon, who was slain, was an idolater; the
popular party, who slew his slayers, put his son on the throne, and that son,
unlike both his father and grandfather, bore a name compounded with the
name of Jehovah. Was Amon then slain for personal reasons? Did the
people, in their rising, have a zeal for Jehovah? Was the crisis purely
political, but usurped by some school or party of Jehovah who had been
gathering strength through the later years of Manasseh, and waiting for
some such unsettlement of affairs as now occurred? The meagre records of
the Bible give us no help, and for suggestions towards an answer we must
turn to the wider politics of the time.
Assurbanipal’s campaigns of 647 and 645 were the last appearances of
Assyria in Palestine. He had not attempted to reconquer Egypt,[21] and her
king, Psamtik I., began to push his arms northward. Progress must have
been slow, for the siege of Ashdod, which Psamtik probably began after

645, is said to have occupied him twenty-nine years. Still, he must have
made his influence to be felt in Palestine, and in all probability there was
once more, as in the days of Isaiah, an Egyptian party in Jerusalem. As the
power of Assyria receded over the northern horizon, the fascination of her
idolatries, which Manasseh had established in Judah, must have waned. The
priests of Jehovah’s house, jostled by their pagan rivals, would be inclined
to make common cause with the prophets under a persecution which both
had suffered. With the loosening of the Assyrian yoke the national spirit
would revive, and it is easy to imagine prophets, priests and people working
together in the movement which placed the child Josiah on the throne. At
his tender age, he must have been wholly in the care of the women of the
royal house; and among these the influence of the prophets may have found
adherents more readily than among the counsellors of an adult prince. Not
only did the new monarch carry the name of Jehovah in his own; this was
the case also with his mother’s father.[22] In the revolt, therefore, which
raised this unconscious child to the throne and in the circumstances which
moulded his character, we may infer that there already existed the germs of
the great work of reform which his manhood achieved.
For some time little change would be possible, but from the first facts
were working for great issues. The Book of Kings, which places the
destruction of the idols after the discovery of the law-book in the eighteenth
year of Josiah’s reign, records a previous cleansing and restoration of the
house of Jehovah.[23] This points to the growing ascendency of the
prophetic party during the first fifteen years of Josiah’s reign. Of the first
ten years we know nothing, except that the prestige of Assyria was waning;
but this fact, along with the preaching of the prophets, who had neither a
native tyrant nor the exigencies of a foreign alliance to silence them, must
have weaned the people from the worship of the Assyrian idols. Unless
these had been discredited, the repair of Jehovah’s house could hardly have

been attempted; and that this progressed means that part of Josiah’s
destruction of the heathen images took place before the discovery of the
Book of the Law, which happened in consequence of the cleansing of the
Temple.
But just as under the good Hezekiah the social condition of the people,
and especially the behaviour of the upper classes, continued to be bad, so it
was again in the early years of Josiah. There was a remnant of Baal[24] in
the land. The shrines of the host of heaven might have been swept from the
Temple, but they were still worshipped from the housetops.[25] Men swore
by the Queen of Heaven, and by Moloch, the King. Some turned back from
Jehovah; some, grown up in idolatry, had not yet sought Him. Idolatry may
have been disestablished from the national sanctuary: its practices still
lingered (how intelligibly to us!) in social and commercial life. Foreign
fashions were affected by the court and nobility; trade, as always, was
combined with the acknowledgment of foreign gods.[26] Moreover, the rich
were fraudulent and cruel. The ministers of justice, and the great in the land,
ravened among the poor. Jerusalem was full of oppression. These were the
same disorders as Amos and Hosea exposed in Northern Israel, and as
Micah exposed in Jerusalem. But one new trait of evil was added. In the
eighth century, with all their ignorance of Jehovah’s true character, men had
yet believed in Him, gloried in His energy, and expected Him to act—were
it only in accordance with their low ideals. They had been alive and
bubbling with religion. But now they had thickened on their lees. They had
grown sceptical, dull, indifferent; they said in their hearts, Jehovah will not
do good, neither will He do evil!
Now, just as in the eighth century there had risen, contemporaneous
with Israel’s social corruption, a cloud in the north, black and pregnant with
destruction, so was it once more. But the cloud was not Assyria. From the
hidden world beyond her, from the regions over Caucasus, vast, nameless

hordes of men arose, and, sweeping past her unchecked, poured upon
Palestine. This was the great Scythian invasion recorded by Herodotus.[27]
We have almost no other report than his few paragraphs, but we can realise
the event from our knowledge of the Mongol and Tartar invasions which in
later centuries pursued the same path southwards. Living in the saddle, and
(it would seem) with no infantry nor chariots to delay them, these Centaurs
swept on with a speed of invasion hitherto unknown. In 630 they had
crossed the Caucasus, by 626 they were on the borders of Egypt. Psamtik I.
succeeded in purchasing their retreat,[28] and they swept back again as
swiftly as they came. They must have followed the old Assyrian war-paths
of the eighth century, and, without foot-soldiers, had probably kept even
more closely to the plains. In Palestine their way would lie, like Assyria’s,
across Hauran, through the plain of Esdraelon, and down the Philistine
coast, and in fact it is only on this line that there exists any possible trace of
them.[29] But they shook the whole of Palestine into consternation. Though
Judah among her hills escaped them, as she escaped the earlier campaigns
of Assyria, they showed her the penal resources of her offended God. Once
again the dark, sacred North was seen to be full of the possibilities of doom.
Behold, therefore, exactly the two conditions, ethical and political,
which, as we saw, called forth the sudden prophets of the eighth century,
and made them so sure of their message of judgment: on the one side Judah,
her sins calling aloud for punishment; on the other side the forces of
punishment swiftly drawing on. It was precisely at this juncture that
prophecy again arose, and as Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah appeared in
the end of the eighth century, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum and Jeremiah
appeared in the end of the seventh. The coincidence is exact, and a
remarkable confirmation of the truth which we deduced from the
experience of Amos, that the assurance of the prophet in Israel arose from
the coincidence of his conscience with his political observation. The justice

of Jehovah demands His people’s chastisement, but see—the forces of
chastisement are already upon the horizon. Zephaniah uses the same phrase
as Amos: the Day of Jehovah, he says, is drawing near.
We are now in touch with Zephaniah, the first of our prophets, but,
before listening to him, it will be well to complete our survey of those
remaining years of the century in which he and his immediate successors
laboured.

3.THE REST OF THE CENTURY (625—586): THE FALL OF
NINIVEH; NAHUM AND HABAKKUK.
Although the Scythians had vanished from the horizon of Palestine and
the Assyrians came over it no more, the fateful North still lowered dark and
turbulent. Yet the keen eyes of the watchmen in Palestine perceived that, for
a time at least, the storm must break where it had gathered. It is upon
Niniveh, not upon Jerusalem, that the prophetic passion of Nahum and
Habakkuk is concentrated; the new day of the Lord is filled with the fate,
not of Israel, but of Assyria.
For nearly two centuries Niniveh had been the capital and cynosure of
Western Asia; for more than one she had set the fashions, the art, and even,
to some extent, the religion of all the Semitic nations. Of late years, too, she
had drawn to herself the world’s trade. Great roads from Egypt, from Persia
and from the Ægean converged upon her, till like Imperial Rome she was
filled with a vast motley of peoples, and men went forth from her to the
ends of the earth. Under Assurbanipal travel and research had increased,
and the city acquired renown as the centre of the world’s wisdom. Thus her
size and glory, with all her details of rampart and tower, street, palace and
temple, grew everywhere familiar. But the peoples gazed at her as those
who had been bled to build her. The most remote of them had seen face to
face on their own fields, trampling, stripping, burning, the warriors who

manned her walls. She had dashed their little ones against the rocks. Their
kings had been dragged from them and hung in cages about her gates. Their
gods had lined the temples of her gods. Year by year they sent her their
heavy tribute, and the bearers came back with fresh tales of her rapacious
insolence. So she stood, bitterly clear to all men, in her glory and her
cruelty! Their hate haunted her every pinnacle; and at last, when about 625
the news came that her frontier fortresses had fallen and the great city
herself was being besieged, we can understand how her victims gloated on
each possible stage of her fall, and saw her yield to one after another of the
cruelties of battle, siege and storm, which for two hundred years she had
inflicted on themselves. To such a vision the prophet Nahum gives voice,
not on behalf of Israel alone, but of all the nations whom Niniveh had
crushed.
It was obvious that the vengeance which Western Asia thus hailed upon
Assyria must come from one or other of two groups of peoples, standing
respectively to the north and to the south of her.
To the north, or north-east, between Mesopotamia and the Caspian,
there were gathered a congeries of restless tribes known to the Assyrians as
the Madai or Matai, the Medes. They are mentioned first by Shalmaneser II.
in 840, and few of his successors do not record campaigns against them.
The earliest notice of them in the Old Testament is in connection with the
captives of Samaria, some of whom in 720 were settled among them.[30]
These Medes were probably of Turanian stock, but by the end of the eighth
century, if we are to judge from the names of some of their chiefs,[31] their
most easterly tribes had already fallen under Aryan influence, spreading
westward from Persia.[32] So led, they became united and formidable to
Assyria. Herodotus relates that their King Phraortes, or Fravartis, actually
attempted the siege of Niniveh, probably on the death of Assurbanipal in
625, but was slain.[33] His son Kyaxares, Kastarit or Uvakshathra, was

forced by a Scythian invasion of his own country to withdraw his troops
from Assyria; but having either bought off or assimilated the Scythian
invaders, he returned in 608, with forces sufficient to overthrow the
northern Assyrian fortresses and to invest Niniveh herself.
The other and southern group of peoples which threatened Assyria were
Semitic. At their head were the Kasdim or Chaldeans.[34] This name appears
for the first time in the Assyrian annals a little earlier than that of the
Medes,[35] and from the middle of the ninth century onwards the people
designated by it frequently engage the Assyrian arms. They were, to begin
with, a few half-savage tribes to the south of Babylon, in the neighbourhood
of the Persian Gulf; but they proved their vigour by the repeated lordship of
all Babylonia and by inveterate rebellion against the monarchs of Niniveh.
Before the end of the seventh century we find their names used by the
prophets for the Babylonians as a whole. Assurbanipal, who was a patron of
Babylonian culture, kept the country quiet during the last years of his reign,
but his son Asshur-itil-ilani, upon his accession in 625, had to grant the
viceroyalty to Nabopolassar the Chaldean with a considerable degree of
independence. Asshur-itil-ilani was succeeded in a few years[36] by
Sinsuriskin, the Sarakos of the Greeks, who preserved at least a nominal
sovereignty over Babylon,[37] but Nabopolassar must already have
cherished ambitions of succeeding the Assyrian in the empire of the world.
He enjoyed sufficient freedom to organise his forces to that end.
These were the two powers which from north and south watched with
impatience the decay of Assyria. That they made no attempt upon her
between 625 and 608 was probably due to several causes: their jealousy of
each other, the Medes’ trouble with the Scythians, Nabopolassar’s genius
for waiting till his forces were ready, and above all the still considerable
vigour of the Assyrian himself. The Lion, though old,[38] was not broken.
His power may have relaxed in the distant provinces of his empire, though,

if Budde be right about the date of Habakkuk,[39] the peoples of Syria still
groaned under the thought of it; but his own land—his lair, as the prophets
call it—was still terrible. It is true that, as Nahum perceives, the capital was
no longer native and patriotic as it had been; the trade fostered by
Assurbanipal had filled Niniveh with a vast and mercenary population,
ready to break and disperse at the first breach in her walls. Yet Assyria
proper was covered with fortresses, and the tradition had long fastened
upon the peoples that Niniveh was impregnable. Hence the tension of those
years. The peoples of Western Asia looked eagerly for their revenge; but the
two powers which alone could accomplish this stood waiting—afraid of
each other perhaps, but more afraid of the object of their common ambition.
It is said that Kyaxares and Nabopolassar at last came to an agreement;
[40]
but more probably the crisis was hastened by the appearance of another
claimant for the coveted spoil. In 608 Pharaoh Necho went up against the
king of Assyria towards the river Euphrates.[41] This Egyptian advance may
have forced the hand of Kyaxares, who appears to have begun his
investment of Niniveh a little after Necho defeated Josiah at Megiddo[42].
The siege is said to have lasted two years. Whether this included the delays
necessary for the reduction of fortresses upon the great roads of approach to
the Assyrian capital we do not know; but Niniveh’s own position,
fortifications and resources may well account for the whole of the time.
Colonel Billerbeck, a military expert, has suggested[43] that the Medes
found it possible to invest the city only upon the northern and eastern sides.
Down the west flows the Tigris, and across this the besieged may have been
able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the fertile country
beyond. Herodotus affirms that the Medes effected the capture of Niniveh
by themselves,[44] and for this some recent evidence has been found,[45] so
that another tradition that the Chaldeans were also actively engaged,[46]
which has nothing to support it, may be regarded as false. Nabopolassar

may still have been in name an Assyrian viceroy; yet, as Colonel Billerbeck
points out, he had it in his power to make Kyaxares’ victory possible by
holding the southern roads to Niniveh, detaching other viceroys of her
provinces and so shutting her up to her own resources. But among other
reasons which kept him away from the siege may have been the necessity of
guarding against Egyptian designs on the moribund empire. Pharaoh Necho,
as we know, was making for the Euphrates as early as 608. Now if
Nabopolassar and Kyaxares had arranged to divide Assyria between them,
then it is likely that they agreed also to share the work of making their
inheritance sure, so that while Kyaxares overthrew Niniveh, Nabopolassar,
or rather his son Nebuchadrezzar,[47] waited for and overthrew Pharaoh by
Carchemish on the Euphrates. Consequently Assyria was divided between
the Medes and the Chaldeans; the latter as her heirs in the south took over
her title to Syria and Palestine.
The two prophets with whom we have to deal at this time are almost
entirely engrossed with the fall of Assyria. Nahum exults in the destruction
of Niniveh; Habakkuk sees in the Chaldeans nothing but the avengers of the
peoples whom Assyria[48] had oppressed. For both these events are the close
of an epoch: neither prophet looks beyond this. Nahum (not on behalf of
Israel alone) gives expression to the epoch’s long thirst for vengeance on
the tyrant; Habakkuk (if Budde’s reading of him be right[49]) states the
problems with which its victorious cruelties had filled the pious mind—
states the problem and beholds the solution in the Chaldeans. And, surely,
the vengeance was so just and so ample, the solution so drastic and for the
time complete, that we can well understand how two prophets should
exhaust their office in describing such things, and feel no motive to look
either deep into the moral condition of Israel, or far out into the future
which God was preparing for His people. It might, of course, be said that
the prophets’ silence on the latter subjects was due to their positions

immediately after the great Reform of 621, when the nation, having been
roused to an honest striving after righteousness, did not require prophetic
rebuke, and when the success of so godly a prince as Josiah left no spiritual
ambitions unsatisfied. But this (even if the dates of the two prophets were
certain) is hardly probable; and the other explanation is sufficient. Who can
doubt this who has realised the long epoch which then reached a crisis, or
has been thrilled by the crash of the crisis itself? The fall of Niniveh was
deafening enough to drown for the moment, as it does in Nahum, even a
Hebrew’s clamant conscience of his country’s sin. The problems, which the
long success of Assyrian cruelty had started, were old and formidable
enough to demand statement and answer before either the hopes or the
responsibilities of the future could find voice. The past also requires its
prophets. Feeling has to be satisfied, and experience balanced, before the
heart is willing to turn the leaf and read the page of the future.
Yet, through all this time of Assyria’s decline, Israel had her own sins,
fears and convictions of judgment to come. The disappearance of the
Scythians did not leave Zephaniah’s predictions of doom without means of
fulfilment; nor did the great Reform of 621 remove the necessity of that
doom. In the deepest hearts the assurance that Israel must be punished was
by these things only confirmed. The prophetess Huldah, the first to speak in
the name of the Lord after the Book of the Law was discovered, emphasised
not the reforms which it enjoined but the judgments which it predicted.
Josiah’s righteousness could at most ensure for himself a peaceful death: his
people were incorrigible and doomed.[50] The reforms indeed proceeded,
there was public and widespread penitence, idolatry was abolished. But
those were only shallow pedants who put their trust in the possession of a
revealed Law and purged Temple,[51] and who boasted that therefore Israel
was secure. Jeremiah repeated the gloomy forecasts of Zephaniah and
Huldah, and even before the wickedness of Jehoiakim’s reign proved the

obduracy of Israel’s heart, he affirmed the imminence of the evil out of the
north and the great destruction.[52] Of our three prophets in this period
Zephaniah, though the earliest, had therefore the last word. While Nahum
and Habakkuk were almost wholly absorbed with the epoch that is closing,
he had a vision of the future. Is this why his book has been ranged among
our Twelve after those of his slightly later contemporaries?
The precise course of events in Israel was this—and we must follow
them, for among them we have to seek exact dates for Nahum and
Habakkuk. In 621 the Book of the Law was discovered, and Josiah applied
himself with thoroughness to the reforms which he had already begun. For
thirteen years he seems to have had peace to carry them through. The
heathen altars were thrown down, with all the high places in Judah and even
some in Samaria. Images were abolished. The heathen priests were
exterminated, with the wizards and soothsayers. The Levites, except the
sons of Zadok, who alone were allowed to minister in the Temple,
henceforth the only place of sacrifice, were debarred from priestly duties. A
great passover was celebrated.[53] The king did justice and was the friend of
the poor;[54] it went well with him and the people.[55] He extended his
influence into Samaria; it is probable that he ventured to carry out the
injunctions of Deuteronomy with regard to the neighbouring heathen.[56]
Literature flourished: though critics have not combined upon the works to
be assigned to this reign, they agree that a great many were produced in it.
Wealth must have accumulated: certainly the nation entered the troubles of
the next reign with an arrogant confidence that argues under Josiah the
rapid growth of prosperity in every direction. Then of a sudden came the
fatal year of 608. Pharaoh Necho appeared in Palestine[57] with an army
destined for the Euphrates, and Josiah went up to meet him at Megiddo. His
tactics are plain—it is the first strait on the land-road from Egypt to the
Euphrates—but his motives are obscure. Assyria can hardly have been

strong enough at this time to fling him as her vassal across the path of her
ancient foe. He must have gone of himself. “His dream was probably to
bring back the scattered remains of the northern kingdom to a pure worship,
and to unite the whole people of Israel under the sceptre of the house of
David; and he was not inclined to allow Egypt to cross his aspirations, and
rob him of the inheritance which was falling to him from the dead hand of
Assyria.”[58]
Josiah fell, and with him not only the liberty of his people, but the chief
support of their faith. That the righteous king was cut down in the midst of
his days and in defence of the Holy Land—what could this mean? Was it,
then, vain to serve the Lord? Could He not defend His own? With some the
disaster was a cause of sore complaint, and with others, perhaps, of open
desertion from Jehovah.
But the extraordinary thing is, how little effect Josiah’s death seems to
have had upon the people’s self-confidence at large, or upon their adherence
to Jehovah. They immediately placed Josiah’s second son on the throne; but
Necho, having got him by some means to his camp at Riblah between the
Lebanons, sent him in fetters to Egypt, where he died, and established in his
place Eliakim, his elder brother. On his accession Eliakim changed his
name to Jehoiakim, a proof that Jehovah was still regarded as the sufficient
patron of Israel; and the same blind belief that, for the sake of His Temple
and of His Law, Jehovah would keep His people in security, continued to
persevere in spite of Megiddo. It was a most immoral ease, and filled with
injustice. Necho subjected the land to a fine. This was not heavy, but
Jehoiakim, instead of paying it out of the royal treasures, exacted it from the
people of the land,[59] and then employed the peace which it purchased in
erecting a costly palace for himself by the forced labour of his subjects.[60]
He was covetous, unjust and violently cruel. Like prince like people: social
oppression prevailed, and there was a recrudescence of the idolatries of

Manasseh’s time,[61] especially (it may be inferred) after Necho’s defeat at
Carchemish in 605. That all this should exist along with a fanatic trust in
Jehovah need not surprise us who remember the very similar state of the
public mind in North Israel under Amos and Hosea. Jeremiah attacked it as
they had done. Though Assyria was fallen, and Egypt was promising
protection, Jeremiah predicted destruction from the north on Egypt and
Israel alike. When at last the Egyptian defeat at Carchemish stirred some
vague fears in the people’s hearts, Jeremiah’s conviction broke out into
clear flame. For three-and-twenty years he had brought God’s word in vain
to his countrymen. Now God Himself would act: Nebuchadrezzar was but
His servant to lead Israel into captivity.[62]
The same year, 605 or 604, Jeremiah wrote all these things in a volume;
[63]
and a few months later, at a national fast, occasioned perhaps by the fear
of the Chaldeans, Baruch, his secretary, read them in the house of the Lord,
in the ears of all the people. The king was informed, the roll was brought to
him, and as it was read, with his own hands he cut it up and burned it, three
or four columns at a time. Jeremiah answered by calling down on Jehoiakim
an ignominious death, and repeated the doom already uttered on the land.
Another prophet, Urijah, had recently been executed for the same truth; but
Jeremiah and Baruch escaped into hiding.
This was probably in 603, and for a little time Jehoiakim and the
populace were restored to their false security by the delay of the Chaldeans
to come south. Nebuchadrezzar was occupied in Babylon, securing his
succession to his father. At last, either in 602 or more probably in 600, he
marched into Syria, and Jehoiakim became his servant for three years.[64] In
such a condition the Jewish state might have survived for at least another
generation,[65] but in 599 or 597 Jehoiakim, with the madness of the
doomed, held back his tribute. The revolt was probably instigated by Egypt,
which, however, did not dare to support it. As in Isaiah’s time against

Assyria, so now against Babylon, Egypt was a blusterer who blustered and
sat still. She still helped in vain and to no purpose.[66] Nor could Judah
count on the help of the other states of Palestine. They had joined Hezekiah
against Sennacherib, but remembering perhaps how Manasseh had failed to
help them against Assurbanipal, and that Josiah had carried things with a
high hand towards them,[67] they obeyed Nebuchadrezzar’s command and
raided Judah till he himself should have time to arrive.[68] Amid these raids
the senseless Jehoiakim seems to have perished,[69] for when
Nebuchadrezzar appeared before Jerusalem in 597, his son Jehoiachin, a
youth of eighteen, had succeeded to the throne. The innocent reaped the
harvest sown by the guilty. In the attempt (it would appear) to save his
people from destruction,[70] Jehoiachin capitulated. But Nebuchadrezzar
was not content with the person of the king: he deported to Babylon the
court, a large number of influential persons, the mighty men of the land or
what must have been nearly all the fighting men, with the necessary
military artificers and swordsmiths. Priests also went, Ezekiel among them,
and probably representatives of other classes not mentioned by the annalist.
All these were the flower of the nation. Over what was left Nebuchadrezzar
placed a son of Josiah on the throne who took the name of Zedekiah. Again
with a little common-sense, the state might have survived; but it was a short
respite. The new court began intrigues with Egypt, and Zedekiah, with the
Ammonites and Tyre, ventured a revolt in 589. Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew
it was in vain. Nebuchadrezzar marched on Jerusalem, and though for a
time he had to raise the siege in order to defeat a force sent by Pharaoh
Hophra, the Chaldean armies closed in again upon the doomed city. Her
defence was stubborn; but famine and pestilence sapped it, and numbers fell
away to the enemy. About the eighteenth month, the besiegers took the
northern suburb and stormed the middle gate. Zedekiah and the army broke
their lines only to be captured at Jericho. In a few weeks more the city was

taken and given over to fire. Zedekiah was blinded, and with a large number
of his people carried to Babylon. It was the end, for although a small
community of Jews was left at Mizpeh under a Jewish viceroy and with
Jeremiah to guide them, they were soon broken up and fled to Egypt. Judah
had perished. Her savage neighbours, who had gathered with glee to the day
of Jerusalem’s calamity, assisted the Chaldeans in capturing the fugitives,
and Edomites came up from the south on the desolate land.

It has been necessary to follow so far the course of events, because of
our prophets Zephaniah is placed in each of the three sections of Josiah’s
reign, and by some even in Jehoiakim’s; Nahum has been assigned to
different points between the eve of the first and the eve of the second siege
of Niniveh; and Habakkuk has been placed by different critics in almost
every year from 621 to the reign of Jehoiachin; while Obadiah, whom we
shall find reasons for dating during the Exile, describes the behaviour of
Edom at the final siege of Jerusalem. The next of the Twelve, Haggai, may
have been born before the Exile, but did not prophesy till 520. Zechariah
appeared the same year, Malachi not for half a century after. These three are
prophets of the Persian period. With the approach of the Greeks Joel
appears, then comes the prophecy which we find in the end of Zechariah’s
book, and last of all the Book of Jonah. To all these post-exilic prophets we
shall provide later on the necessary historical introductions.

ZEPHANIAH

Dies Iræ, Dies Illa!—ZEPH. i. 15.

“His book is the first tinging of prophecy with
apocalypse: that is the moment which it supplies in the
history of Israel’s religion.”

CHAPTER II

THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH

The Book of Zephaniah is one of the most difficult in the prophetic canon.
The title is very generally accepted; the period from which chap. i. dates is
recognised by practically all critics to be the reign of Josiah, or at least the
last third of the seventh century. But after that doubts start, and we find
present nearly every other problem of introduction.
To begin with, the text is very damaged. In some passages we may be
quite sure that we have not the true text;[71] in others we cannot be sure that
we have it,[72] and there are several glosses.[73]The bulk of the second
chapter was written in the Qinah, or elegiac measure, but as it now stands
the rhythm is very much broken. It is difficult to say whether this is due to
the dilapidation of the original text or to wilful insertion of glosses and
other later passages. The Greek version of Zephaniah possesses the same
general features as that of other difficult prophets. Occasionally it enables
us to correct the text; but by the time it was made the text must already have
contained the same corruptions which we encounter, and the translators
were ignorant besides of the meaning of some phrases which to us are plain.
[74]

The difficulties of textual criticism as well as of translation are
aggravated by the large number of words, grammatical forms and phrases
which either happen very seldom in the Old Testament,[75] or nowhere else
in it at all.[76] Of the rare words and phrases, a very few (as will be seen
from the appended notes) are found in earlier writings. Indeed all that are
found are from the authentic prophecies of Isaiah, with whose style and
doctrine Zephaniah’s own exhibit most affinity. All the other rarities of
vocabulary and grammar are shared only by later writers; and as a whole

the language of Zephaniah exhibits symptoms which separate it by many
years from the language of the prophets of the eighth century, and range it
with that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Second Isaiah and still later literature. It
may be useful to the student to collect in a note the most striking of these
symptoms of the comparative lateness of Zephaniah’s dialect.[77]
We now come to the question of date, and we take, to begin with, the
First Chapter. It was said above that critics agree as to the general period—
between 639, when Josiah began to reign, and 600. But this period was
divided into three very different sections, and each of these has received
considerable support from modern criticism. The great majority of critics
place the chapter in the early years of Josiah, before the enforcement of
Deuteronomy and the great Reform in 621.[78] Others have argued for the
later years of Josiah, 621—608, on the ground that the chapter implies that
the great Reform has already taken place, and otherwise shows knowledge
of Deuteronomy;[79] while some prefer the days of reaction under
Jehoiakim, 608 ff.,[80] and assume that the phrase in the title, in the days of
Josiah, is a late and erroneous inference from i. 4.
The evidence for the argument consists of the title and the condition of
Judah reflected in the body of the chapter. The latter is a definite piece of
oratory. Under the alarm of an immediate and general war, Zephaniah
proclaims a vast destruction upon the earth. Judah must fall beneath it: the
worshippers of Baal, of the host of heaven and of Milcom, the apostates
from Jehovah, the princes and house of the king, the imitators of foreign
fashions, and the forceful and fraudulent, shall be cut off in a great
slaughter. Those who have grown sceptical and indifferent to Jehovah shall
be unsettled by invasion and war. This shall be the Day of Jehovah, near
and immediate, a day of battle and disaster on the whole land.
The conditions reflected are thus twofold—the idolatrous and sceptical
state of the people, and an impending invasion. But these suit, more or less

exactly, each of the three sections of our period. For Jeremiah distinctly
states that he had to attack idolatry in Judah for twenty-three years, 627 to
604;[81] he inveighs against the falseness and impurity of the people alike
before the great Reform, and after it while Josiah was still alive, and still
more fiercely under Jehoiakim. And, while before 621 the great Scythian
invasion was sweeping upon Palestine from the north, after 621, and
especially after 604, the Babylonians from the same quarter were visibly
threatening the land. But when looked at more closely, the chapter shows
several features which suit the second section of our period less than they
do the other two. The worship of the host of heaven, probably introduced
under Manasseh, was put down by Josiah in 621; it revived under
Jehoiakim,[82] but during the latter years of Josiah it cannot possibly have
been so public as Zephaniah describes.[83] Other reasons which have been
given for those years are inconclusive[84]—the chapter, for instance, makes
no indubitable reference to Deuteronomy or the Covenant of 621—and on
the whole we may leave the end of Josiah’s reign out of account. Turning to
the third section, Jehoiakim’s reign, we find one feature of the prophecy
which suits it admirably. The temper described in ver. 12—men who are
settled on their lees, who say in their heart, Jehovah doeth neither good nor
evil—is the kind of temper likely to have been produced among the less
earnest adherents of Jehovah by the failure of the great Reform in 621 to
effect either the purity or the prosperity of the nation. But this is more than
counterbalanced by the significant exception of the king from the
condemnation which ver. 8 passes on the princes and the sons of the king.
Such an exception could not have been made when Jehoiakim was on the
throne; it points almost conclusively to the reign of the good Josiah. And
with this agrees the title of the chapter—in the days of Josiah.[85] We are,
therefore, driven back to the years of Josiah before 621. In these we find no
discrepancy either with the chapter itself, or with its title. The southward

march of the Scythians,[86] between 630 and 625, accounts for Zephaniah’s
alarm of a general war, including the invasion of Judah; the idolatrous
practices which he describes may well have been those surviving from the
days of Manasseh,[87] and not yet reached by the drastic measures of 621;
the temper of scepticism and hopelessness condemned by ver. 12 was
possible among those adherents of Jehovah who had hoped greater things
from the overthrow of Amon than the slow and small reforms of the first
fifteen years of Josiah’s reign. Nor is a date before 621 made at all difficult
by the genealogy of Zephaniah in the title. If, as is probable,[88] the
Hezekiah given as his great-great-grandfather be Hezekiah the king, and if
he died about 695, and Manasseh, his successor, who was then twelve, was
his eldest son, then by 630 Zephaniah cannot have been much more than
twenty years of age, and not more than twenty-five by the time the Scythian
invasion had passed away.[89] It is therefore by no means impossible to
suppose that he prophesied before 625; and besides, the data of the
genealogy in the title are too precarious to make them valid, as against an
inference from the contents of the chapter itself.
The date, therefore, of the first chapter of Zephaniah may be given as
about 625 B.C., and probably rather before than after that year, as the tide of
Scythian invasion has apparently not yet ebbed.
The other two chapters have within recent years been almost wholly
denied to Zephaniah. Kuenen doubted chap. iii. 9–20. Stade makes all chap.
iii. post-exilic, and suspects ii. 1–3, 11. A very thorough examination of
them has led Schwally[90] to assign to exilic or post-exilic times the whole
of the little sections comprising them, with the possible exception of chap.
iii. 1–7, which “may be” Zephaniah’s. His essay has been subjected to a
searching and generally hostile criticism by a number of leading scholars;
[91] and he has admitted the inconclusiveness of some of his reasons.[92]

Chap. ii. 1–4 is assigned by Schwally to a date later than Zephaniah’s,
principally because of the term meekness (ver. 3), which is a favourite one
with post-exilic writers. He has been sufficiently answered;[93] and the close
connection of vv. 1–3 with chap. i. has been clearly proved.[94] Chap. ii. 4–
15 is the passage in elegiac measure but broken, an argument for the theory
that insertions have been made in it. The subject is a series of foreign
nations—Philistia (5–7), Moab and Ammon (8–10), Egypt (11) and Assyria
(13–15). The passage has given rise to many doubts; every one must admit
the difficulty of coming to a conclusion as to its authenticity. On the one
hand, the destruction just predicted is so universal that, as Professor
Davidson says, we should expect Zephaniah to mention other nations than
Judah.[95] The concluding oracle on Niniveh must have been published
before 608, and even Schwally admits that it may be Zephaniah’s own. But
if this be so, then we may infer that the first of the oracles on Philistia is
also Zephaniah’s, for both it and the oracle on Assyria are in the elegiac
measure, a fact which makes it probable that the whole passage, however
broken and intruded upon, was originally a unity. Nor is there anything in
the oracle on Philistia incompatible with Zephaniah’s date. Philistia lay on
the path of the Scythian invasion; the phrase in ver. 7, shall turn their
captivity, is not necessarily exilic. As Cornill, too, points out, the expression
in ver. 13, He will stretch out His hand to the north, implies that the
prophecy has already looked in other directions. There remains the passage
between the oracles on Philistia and Assyria. This is not in the elegiac
measure. Its subject is Moab and Ammon, who were not on the line of the
Scythian invasion, and Wellhausen further objects to it, because the attitude
to Israel of the two peoples whom it describes is that which is attributed to
them only just before the Exile and surprises us in Josiah’s reign. Dr.
Davidson meets this objection by pointing out that, just as in Deuteronomy,
so here, Moab and Ammon are denounced, while Edom, which in

Deuteronomy is spoken of with kindness, is here not denounced at all. A
stronger objection to the passage is that ver. 11 predicts the conversion of
the nations, while ver. 12 makes them the prey of Jehovah’s sword, and in
this ver. 12 follows on naturally to ver. 7. On this ground as well as on the
absence of the elegiac measure the oracle on Moab and Ammon is strongly
to be suspected.
On the whole, then, the most probable conclusion is that chap. ii. 4–15
was originally an authentic oracle of Zephaniah’s in the elegiac metre,
uttered at the same date as chap. i.—ii. 3, the period of the Scythian
invasion, though from a different standpoint; and that it has suffered
considerable dilapidation (witness especially vv. 6 and 14), and probably
one great intrusion, vv. 8–10.
There remains the Third Chapter. The authenticity has been denied by
Schwally, who transfers the whole till after the Exile. But the chapter is not
a unity.[96] In the first place, it falls into two sections, vv. 1–13 and 14–20.
There is no reason to take away the bulk of the first section from
Zephaniah. As Schwally admits, the argument here is parallel to that of
chap. i.—ii. 3. It could hardly have been applied to Jerusalem during or
after the Exile, but suits her conditions before her fall. Schwally’s linguistic
objections to a pre-exilic date have been answered by Budde.[97] He holds
ver. 6 to be out of place and puts it after ver. 8, and this may be. But as it
stands it appeals to the impenitent Jews of ver. 5 with the picture of the
judgment God has already completed upon the nations, and contrasts with
ver. 7, in which God says that He trusts Israel will repent. Vv. 9 and 10 are,
we shall see, obviously an intrusion, as Budde maintains and Davidson
admits to be possible.[98]
We reach more certainty when we come to the second section of the
chapter, vv. 14–20. Since Kuenen it has been recognised by the majority of
critics that we have here a prophecy from the end of the Exile or after the

Return. The temper has changed. Instead of the austere and sombre outlook
of chap. i.—ii. 3 and chap. iii. 1–13, in which the sinful Israel is to be saved
indeed, but only as by fire, we have a triumphant prophecy of her recovery
from all affliction (nothing is said of her sin) and of her glory among the
nations of the world. To put it otherwise, while the genuine prophecies of
Zephaniah almost grudgingly allow a door of escape to a few righteous and
humble Israelites from a judgment which is to fall alike on Israel and the
Gentiles, chap. iii. 14–20 predicts Israel’s deliverance from her Gentile
oppressors, her return from captivity and the establishment of her renown
over the earth. The language, too, has many resemblances to that of Second
Isaiah.[99] Obviously therefore we have here, added to the severe prophecies
of Zephaniah, such a more hopeful, peaceful epilogue as we saw was added,
during the Exile or immediately after it, to the despairing prophecies of
Amos.

CHAPTER III

THE PROPHET AND THE REFORMERS
ZEPHANIAH i.—ii. 3

Towards the year 625, when King Josiah had passed out of his minority,[100]
and was making his first efforts at religious reform, prophecy, long
slumbering, awoke again in Israel.
Like the king himself, its first heralds were men in their early youth. In
627 Jeremiah calls himself but a boy, and Zephaniah can hardly have been
out of his teens.[101] For the sudden outbreak of these young lives there
must have been a large reservoir of patience and hope gathered in the
generation behind them. So Scripture itself testifies. To Jeremiah it was
said: Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest
forth out of the womb I consecrated thee.[102] In an age when names were
bestowed only because of their significance,[103] both prophets bore that of
Jehovah in their own. So did Jeremiah’s father, who was of the priests of
Anathoth. Zephaniah’s “forbears” are given for four generations, and with
one exception they also are called after Jehovah: The Word of Jehovah
which came to Ṣephanyah, son of Kushi, son of Gedhalyah, son of Amaryah,
son of Hizḳiyah, in the days of Joshiyahu,[104] Amon’s son, king of Judah.
Zephaniah’s great-great-grandfather Hezekiah was in all probability the
king.[105] His father’s name Kushi, or Ethiop, is curious. If we are right, that
Zephaniah was a young man towards 625, then Kushi must have been born
towards 663, about the time of the conflicts between Assyria and Egypt, and
it is possible that, as Manasseh and the predominant party in Judah so
closely hung upon and imitated Assyria, the adherents of Jehovah put their
hope in Egypt, whereof, it may be, this name Kushi is a token.[106] The

name Zephaniah itself, meaning Jehovah hath hidden, suggests the
prophet’s birth in the “killing-time” of Manasseh. There was at least one
other contemporary of the same name—a priest executed by
Nebuchadrezzar.[107]
Of the adherents of Jehovah, then, and probably of royal descent,
Zephaniah lived in Jerusalem. We descry him against her, almost as clearly
as we descry Isaiah. In the glare and smoke of the conflagration which his
vision sweeps across the world, only her features stand out definite and
particular: the flat roofs with men and women bowing in the twilight to the
host of heaven, the crowds of priests, the nobles and their foreign fashions;
the Fishgate, the New or Second Town, where the rich lived, the Heights to
which building had at last spread, and between them the hollow Mortar,
with its markets, Phœnician merchants and money-dealers. In the first few
verses of Zephaniah we see almost as much of Jerusalem as in the whole
book either of Isaiah or Jeremiah.
For so young a man the vision of Zephaniah may seem strangely dark
and final. Yet not otherwise was Isaiah’s inaugural vision, and as a rule it is
the young and not the old whose indignation is ardent and unsparing.
Zephaniah carries this temper to the extreme. There is no great hope in his
book, hardly any tenderness and never a glimpse of beauty. A townsman,
Zephaniah has no eye for nature; not only is no fair prospect described by
him, he has not even a single metaphor drawn from nature’s loveliness or
peace. He is pitilessly true to his great keynotes: I will sweep, sweep from
the face of the ground; He will burn, burn up everything. No hotter book
lies in all the Old Testament. Neither dew nor grass nor tree nor any
blossom lives in it, but it is everywhere fire, smoke and darkness, drifting
chaff, ruins, nettles, saltpits, and owls and ravens looking from the windows
of desolate palaces. Nor does Zephaniah foretell the restoration of nature in
the end of the days. There is no prospect of a redeemed and fruitful land,

but only of a group of battered and hardly saved characters: a few meek and
righteous are hidden from the fire and creep forth when it is over. Israel is
left a poor and humble folk. No prophet is more true to the doctrine of the
remnant, or more resolutely refuses to modify it. Perhaps he died young.
The full truth, however, is that Zephaniah, though he found his material
in the events of his own day, tears himself loose from history altogether. To
the earlier prophets the Day of the Lord, the crisis of the world, is a definite
point in history: full of terrible, divine events, yet “natural” ones—battle,
siege, famine, massacre and captivity. After it history is still to flow on,
common days come back and Israel pursue their way as a nation. But to
Zephaniah the Day of the Lord begins to assume what we call the
“supernatural.” The grim colours are still woven of war and siege, but
mixed with vague and solemn terrors from another sphere, by which history
appears to be swallowed up, and it is only with an effort that the prophet
thinks of a rally of Israel beyond. In short, with Zephaniah the Day of the
Lord tends to become the Last Day. His book is the first tinging of prophecy
with apocalypse: that is the moment which it supplies in the history of
Israel’s religion. And, therefore, it was with a true instinct that the great
Christian singer of the Last Day took from Zephaniah his keynote. The
“Dies Iræ, Dies Illa” of Thomas of Celano is but the Vulgate translation of
Zephaniah’s A day of wrath is that day.[108]
Nevertheless, though the first of apocalyptic writers, Zephaniah does
not allow himself the license of apocalypse. As he refuses to imagine great
glory for the righteous, so he does not dwell on the terrors of the wicked.
He is sober and restrained, a matter-of-fact man, yet with power of
imagination, who, amidst the vague horrors he summons, delights in giving
a sharp realistic impression. The Day of the Lord, he says, what is it? A
strong man—there!—crying bitterly.[109]

It is to the fierce ardour, and to the elemental interests of the book, that
we owe the absence of two features of prophecy which are so constant in
the prophets of the eighth century. Firstly, Zephaniah betrays no interest in
the practical reforms which (if we are right about the date) the young king,
his contemporary, had already started.[110] There was a party of reform, the
party had a programme, the programme was drawn from the main
principles of prophecy and was designed to put these into practice. And
Zephaniah was a prophet—and ignored them. This forms the dramatic
interest of his book. Here was a man of the same faith which kings, priests
and statesmen were striving to realise in public life, in the assured hope—as
is plain from the temper of Deuteronomy—that the nation as a whole would
be reformed and become a very great nation, righteous and victorious. All
this he ignored, and gave his own vision of the future: Israel is a brand
plucked from the burning; a very few meek and righteous are saved from
the conflagration of a whole world. Why? Because for Zephaniah the
elements were loose, and when the elements were loose what was the use of
talking about reforms? The Scythians were sweeping down upon Palestine,
with enough of God’s wrath in them to destroy a people still so full of
idolatry as Israel was; and if not the Scythians, then some other power in
that dark, rumbling North which had ever been so full of doom. Let Josiah
try to reform Israel, but it was neither Josiah’s nor Israel’s day that was
falling. It was the Day of the Lord, and when He came it was neither to
reform nor to build up Israel, but to make visitation and to punish in His
wrath for the unbelief and wickedness of which the nation was still full.
An analogy to this dramatic opposition between prophet and reformer
may be found in our own century. At its crisis, in 1848, there were many
righteous men rich in hope and energy. The political institutions of Europe
were being rebuilt. In our own land there were great measures for the relief
of labouring children and women, the organisation of labour and the just

distribution of wealth. But Carlyle that year held apart from them all, and,
though a personal friend of many of the reformers, counted their work
hopeless: society was too corrupt, the rudest forces were loose, “Niagara”
was near. Carlyle was proved wrong and the reformers right, but in the
analogous situation of Israel the reformers were wrong and the prophet
right. Josiah’s hope and daring were overthrown at Megiddo, and, though
the Scythians passed away, Zephaniah’s conviction of the sin and doom of
Israel was fulfilled, not forty years later, in the fall of Jerusalem and the
great Exile.
Again, to the same elemental interests, as we may call them, is due the
absence from Zephaniah’s pages of all the social and individual studies
which form the charm of other prophets. With one exception, there is no
analysis of character, no portrait, no satire. But the exception is worth
dwelling upon: it describes the temper equally abhorred by both prophet
and reformer—that of the indifferent and stagnant man. Here we have a
subtle and memorable picture of character, which is not without its
warnings for our own time.
Zephaniah heard God say: And it shall be at that time that I will search
out Jerusalem with lights, and I will make visitation upon the men who are
become stagnant upon their lees, who say in their hearts, Jehovah doeth no
good and doeth no evil.[111] The metaphor is clear. New wine was left upon
its lees only long enough to fix its colour and body.[112] If not then drawn
off it grew thick and syrupy—sweeter indeed than the strained wine, and to
the taste of some more pleasant, but feeble and ready to decay. “To settle
upon one’s lees” became a proverb for sloth, indifference and the muddy
mind. Moab hath been at ease from his youth and hath settled upon his lees,
and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel; therefore his taste stands
in him and his scent is not changed.[113] The characters stigmatised by
Zephaniah are also obvious. They were a precipitate from the ferment of

fifteen years back. Through the cruel days of Manasseh and Amon hope had
been stirred and strained, emptied from vessel to vessel, and so had sprung
sparkling and keen into the new days of Josiah. But no miracle came, only
ten years of waiting for the king’s majority and five more of small, tentative
reforms. Nothing divine happened. There were but the ambiguous successes
of a small party who had secured the king for their principles. The court
was still full of foreign fashions, and idolatry was rank upon the housetops.
Of course disappointment ensued—disappointment and listlessness. The
new security of life became a temptation; persecution ceased, and religious
men lived again at ease. So numbers of eager and sparkling souls, who had
been in the front of the movement, fell away into a selfish and idle
obscurity. The prophet hears God say, I must search Jerusalem with lights in
order to find them. They had “fallen from the van and the freemen”; they
had “sunk to the rear and the slaves,” where they wallowed in the excuse
that Jehovah Himself would do nothing—neither good, therefore it is
useless to attempt reform like Josiah and his party, nor evil, therefore
Zephaniah’s prophecy of destruction is also vain. Exactly the same temper
was encountered by Mazzini in the second stage of his career. Many of
those, who with him had eagerly dreamt of a free Italy, fell away when the
first revolt failed—fell away not merely into weariness and fear, but, as he
emphasises, into the very two tempers which are described by Zephaniah,
scepticism and self-indulgence.
All this starts questions for ourselves. Here is evidently the same public
temper, which at all periods provokes alike the despair of the reformer and
the indignation of the prophet: the criminal apathy of the well-to-do classes
sunk in ease and religious indifference. We have to-day the same mass of
obscure, nameless persons, who oppose their almost unconquerable inertia
to every movement of reform, and are the drag upon all vital and
progressive religion. The great causes of God and Humanity are not

defeated by the hot assaults of the Devil but by the slow, crushing, glacier-
like mass of thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. God’s causes
are never destroyed by being blown up, but by being sat upon. It is not the
violent and anarchical whom we have to fear in the war for human progress,
but the slow, the staid, the respectable. And the danger of these does not lie
in their stupidity. Notwithstanding all their religious profession, it lies in
their real scepticism. Respectability may be the precipitate of unbelief. Nay,
it is that, however religious its mask, wherever it is mere comfort,
decorousness and conventionality; where, though it would abhor
articulately confessing that God does nothing, it virtually means so—says
so (as Zephaniah puts it) in its heart, by refusing to share manifest
opportunities of serving Him, and covers its sloth and its fear by sneering
that God is not with the great crusades for freedom and purity to which it is
summoned. In these ways, Respectability is the precipitate which unbelief
naturally forms in the selfish ease and stillness of so much of our middle-
class life. And that is what makes mere respectability so dangerous. Like
the unshaken, unstrained wine to which the prophet compares its obscure
and muddy comfort, it tends to decay. To some extent our respectable
classes are just the dregs and lees of our national life; like all dregs, they are
subject to corruption. A great sermon could be preached on the putrescence
of respectability—how the ignoble comfort of our respectable classes and
their indifference to holy causes lead to sensuality, and poison the very
institutions of the Home and the Family, on which they pride themselves. A
large amount of the licentiousness of the present day is not that of outlaw
and disordered lives, but is bred from the settled ease and indifference of
many of our middle-class families.
It is perhaps the chief part of the sin of the obscure units, which form
these great masses of indifference, that they think they escape notice and
cover their individual responsibility. At all times many have sought

obscurity, not because they are humble, but because they are slothful,
cowardly or indifferent. Obviously it is this temper which is met by the
words, I will search out Jerusalem with lights. None of us shall escape
because we have said, “I will go with the crowd,” or “I am a common man
and have no right to thrust myself forward.” We shall be followed and
judged, each of us for his and her personal attitude to the great movements
of our time. These things are not too high for us: they are our duty; and we
cannot escape our duty by slinking into the shadow.
For all this wickedness and indifference Zephaniah sees prepared the
Day of the Lord—near, hastening and very terrible. It sweeps at first in
vague desolation and ruin of all things, but then takes the outlines of a
solemn slaughter-feast for which Jehovah has consecrated the guests, the
dim unnamed armies from the north. Judah shall be invaded, and they that
are at ease, who say Jehovah does nothing, shall be unsettled and routed.
One vivid trait comes in like a screech upon the hearts of a people
unaccustomed for years to war. Hark, Jehovah’s Day! cries the prophet. A
strong man—there!—crying bitterly. From this flash upon the concrete, he
returns to a great vague terror, in which earthly armies merge in heavenly;
battle, siege, storm and darkness are mingled, and destruction is spread
abroad upon the whole earth. The first shades of Apocalypse are upon us.
We may now take the full text of this strong and significant prophecy.
We have already given the title. Textual emendations and other points are
explained in footnotes.

I will sweep, sweep away everything from the face of the ground—
oracle of Jehovah—sweep man and beast, sweep the fowl of the heaven and
the fish of the sea, and I will bring to ruin[114] the wicked and cut off the
men of wickedness from the ground—oracle of Jehovah. And I will stretch
forth My hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I

will cut off from this place the remnant[115] of the Baal,[116] the names[117]
of the priestlings with the priests, and them who upon the housetops bow
themselves to the host of heaven, and them who...[118] swear by their
Melech,[119] and them who have turned from following Jehovah, and who
do not seek Jehovah nor have inquired of Him.
Silence for the Lord Jehovah! For near is Jehovah’s Day. Jehovah has
prepared a[120] slaughter, He has consecrated His guests.
And it shall be in Jehovah’s day of slaughter that I will make visitation
upon the princes and the house[121] of the king, and upon all who array
themselves in foreign raiment; and I will make visitation upon all who leap
over the threshold[122] on that day, who fill their lord’s house full of
violence and fraud.
And on that day—oracle of Jehovah—there shall be a noise of crying
from the Fishgate, and wailing from the Mishneh,[123] and great havoc on
the Heights. Howl, O dwellers in the Mortar,[124] for undone are all the
merchant folk,[125] cut off are all the money-dealers.[126]
And in that time it shall be, that I will search Jerusalem with lanterns,
and make visitation upon the men who are become stagnant upon their lees,
who in their hearts say, Jehovah doeth no good and doeth no evil.[127] Their
substance shall be for spoil, and their houses for wasting … . [128]
Near is the great Day of Jehovah, near and very speedy.[129] Hark, the
Day of Jehovah! A strong man—there!—crying bitterly!
A day of wrath is that Day![130] Day of siege and blockade, day of stress
and distress,[131] day of darkness and murk, day of cloud and heavy mist,
day of the war-horn and battle-roar, up against the fenced cities and against
the highest turrets! And I will beleaguer men, and they shall walk like the
blind, for they have sinned against Jehovah; and poured out shall their
blood be like dust, and the flesh of them like dung. Even their silver, even
their gold shall not avail to save them in the day of Jehovah’s wrath,[132]

and in the fire of His zeal shall all the earth be devoured, for destruction,
yea,[133] sudden collapse shall He make of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Upon this vision of absolute doom there follows[134] a qualification for
the few meek and righteous. They may be hidden on the day of the Lord’s
anger; but even for them escape is only a possibility. Note the absence of all
mention of the Divine mercy as the cause of deliverance. Zephaniah has no
gospel of that kind. The conditions of escape are sternly ethical—meekness,
the doing of justice and righteousness. So austere is our prophet.
… ,[135] O people unabashed![136] before that ye become as the drifting
chaff, before the anger of Jehovah come upon you,[137] before there come
upon you the day of Jehovah’s wrath;[138] seek Jehovah, all ye meek of the
land who do His ordinance,[139] seek righteousness, seek meekness,
peradventure ye may hide yourselves in the day of Jehovah’s wrath.

CHAPTER IV

NINIVE DELENDA
ZEPHANIAH ii. 4–15

There now come a series of oracles on foreign nations, connected with the
previous prophecy by the conjunction for, and detailing the worldwide
judgment which it had proclaimed. But though dated from the same period
as that prophecy, circa 626, these oracles are best treated by themselves.[140]
These oracles originally formed one passage in the well-known Qinah
or elegiac measure; but this has suffered sadly both by dilapidation and
rebuilding. How mangled the text is may be seen especially from vv. 6 and
14, where the Greek gives us some help in restoring it. The verses (8–11)
upon Moab and Ammon cannot be reduced to the metre which both
precedes and follows them. Probably, therefore, they are a later addition:
nor did Moab and Ammon lie upon the way of the Scythians, who are
presumably the invaders pictured by the prophet.[141]
The poem begins with Philistia and the sea-coast, the very path of the
Scythian raid.[142] Evidently the latter is imminent, the Philistine cities are
shortly to be taken and the whole land reduced to grass. Across the emptied
strip the long hope of Israel springs sea-ward; but—mark!—not yet with a
vision of the isles beyond. The prophet is satisfied with reaching the edge of
the Promised Land: by the sea shall they feed[143] their flocks.

For Gaza forsaken shall be,
Ashḳ’lôn a desert.
Ashdod—by noon shall they rout her,
And Eḳron be torn up![144]

Ah! woe, dwellers of the sea-shore,
Folk of Kerēthim.
The word of Jehovah against thee, Kĕna‘an,[145]
Land of the Philistines!
And I destroy thee to the last inhabitant,[146]
And Kereth shall become shepherds’ cots,[147]
And folds for flocks.
And the coast[148] for the remnant of Judah’s house;
By the sea[149] shall they feed.
In Ashḳelon’s houses at even shall they couch;
. . . . . .[150]
For Jehovah their God shall visit them,
And turn their captivity.[151]

There comes now an oracle upon Moab and Ammon (vv. 8–11). As
already said, it is not in the elegiac measure which precedes and follows it,
while other features cast a doubt upon its authenticity. Like other oracles on
the same peoples, this denounces the loud-mouthed arrogance of the sons of
Moab and Ammon.
I have heard[152] the reviling of Moab and the insults of the sons of
Ammon, who have reviled My people and vaunted themselves upon
their[153] border. Wherefore as I live, saith Jehovah of Hosts, God of Israel,
Moab shall become as Sodom, and Ammon’s sons as Gomorrah—the
possession[154] of nettles, and saltpits,[155] and a desolation for ever; the

remnant of My people shall spoil them, and the rest of My nation possess
them. This to them for their arrogance, because they reviled, and vaunted
themselves against, the people of[156] Jehovah of Hosts. Jehovah showeth
Himself terrible[157] against them, for He hath made lean[158] all gods of
earth, that all the coasts of the nations may worship Him, every man from
his own place.[159]

The next oracle is a very short one (ver. 12) upon Egypt, which after its
long subjection to Ethiopic dynasties is called, not Miṣraim, but Kush, or
Ethiopia. The verse follows on naturally to ver. 7, but is not reducible to the
elegiac measure.
Also ye, O Kushites, are the slain of My sword.[160]
The elegiac measure is now renewed[161] in an oracle against Assyria,
the climax and front of heathendom (vv. 13–15). It must have been written
before 608: there is no reason to doubt that it is Zephaniah’s.

And may He stretch out His hand against the North,
And destroy Asshur;
And may He turn Niniveh to desolation,
Dry as the desert.
And herds shall couch in her midst.
Every beast of .… .[162]
Yea, pelican and bittern[163] shall roost on the capitals;
The owl shall hoot in the window,
The raven on the doorstep.

. . . . .[164]

Such is the City, the Jubilant,
She that sitteth at ease,
She that saith in her heart, I am
And there is none else!
How hath she become desolation!
A lair of beasts.
Every one passing by her hisses,
Shakes his hand.

The essence of these oracles is their clear confidence in the fall of
Niniveh. From 652, when Egypt revolted from Assyria, and, Assurbanipal
notwithstanding, began to push northward, men must have felt, throughout
all Western Asia, that the great empire upon the Tigris was beginning to
totter. This feeling was strengthened by the Scythian invasion, and after 625
it became a moral certainty that Niniveh would fall[165]—which happened
in 607—6. These are the feelings, 625 to 608, which Zephaniah’s oracles
reflect. We can hardly over-estimate what they meant. Not a man was then

alive who had ever known anything else than the greatness and the glory of
Assyria. It was two hundred and thirty years since Israel first felt the weight
of her arms.[166] It was more than a hundred since her hosts had swept
through Palestine,[167] and for at least fifty her supremacy had been
accepted by Judah. Now the colossus began to totter. As she had menaced,
so she was menaced. The ruins with which for nigh three centuries she had
strewn Western Asia—to these were to be reduced her own impregnable and
ancient glory. It was the close of an epoch.

CHAPTER V

SO AS BY FIRE
ZEPHANIAH iii.

The third chapter of the Book of Zephaniah consists[168] of two sections, of
which only the first, vv. 1–13, is a genuine work of the prophet; while the
second, vv. 14–20, is a later epilogue such as we found added to the genuine
prophecies of Amos. It is written in the large hope and brilliant temper of
the Second Isaiah, saying no word of Judah’s sin or judgment, but
predicting her triumphant deliverance out of all her afflictions.
In a second address to his City (vv. 1–13) Zephaniah strikes the same
notes as he did in his first. He spares the king, but denounces the ruling and
teaching classes. Jerusalem’s princes are lions, her judges wolves, her
prophets braggarts, her priests pervert the law, her wicked have no shame.
He repeats the proclamation of a universal doom. But the time is perhaps
later. Judah has disregarded the many threats. She will not accept the Lord’s
discipline; and while in chap. i.—ii. 3 Zephaniah had said that the meek and
righteous might escape the doom, he now emphatically affirms that all
proud and impenitent men shall be removed from Jerusalem, and a humble
people be left to her, righteous and secure. There is the same moral
earnestness as before, the same absence of all other elements of prophecy
than the ethical. Before we ask the reason and emphasise the beauty of this
austere gospel, let us see the exact words of the address. There are the usual
marks of poetic diction in it—elliptic phrases, the frequent absence of the
definite article, archaic forms and an order of the syntax different from that
which obtains in prose. But the measure is difficult to determine, and must
be printed as prose. The echo of the elegiac rhythm in the opening is more
apparent than real: it is not sustained beyond the first verse. Verses 9 and 10

are relegated to a footnote, as very probably an intrusion, and disturbance of
the argument.
Woe, rebel and unclean, city of oppression![169] She listens to no voice,
she accepts no discipline, in Jehovah she trusts not, nor has drawn near to
her God.
Her princes in her midst are roaring lions; her judges evening wolves,
[170]
they ...[171] not till morning; her prophets are braggarts and traitors;
her priests have profaned what is holy and done violence to the Law.[172]
Jehovah is righteous in the midst of her, He does no wrong. Morning by
morning He brings His judgment to light: He does not let Himself fail[173]—
but the wicked man knows no shame. I have cut off nations, their turrets are
ruined; I have laid waste their broad streets, till no one passes upon them;
destroyed are their cities, without a man, without a dweller.[174] I said,
Surely she will fear Me, she will accept punishment,[175] and all that I have
visited upon her[176] shall never vanish from her eyes.[177] But only the
more zealously have they corrupted all their doings.[178]
Wherefore wait ye for Me—oracle of Jehovah—wait for the day of My
rising to testify, for ’tis My fixed purpose[179] to sweep nations together, to
collect kingdoms, to pour upon them ...[180] all the heat of My wrath— yea,
with the fire of My jealousy shall the whole earth be consumed.[181]
In that day thou shalt not be ashamed[182] of all thy deeds, by which
thou hast rebelled against Me: for then will I turn out of the midst of thee
all who exult with that arrogance of thine,[183] and thou wilt not again
vaunt thyself upon the Mount of My Holiness. But I will leave in thy midst a
people humble and poor, and they shall trust in the name of Jehovah. The
Remnant of Israel shall do no evil, and shall not speak falsehood, and no
fraud shall be found in their mouth, but they shall pasture and they shall
couch, with none to make them afraid.

Such is the simple and austere gospel of Zephaniah. It is not to be
overlooked amid the lavish and gorgeous promises which other prophets
have poured around it, and by ourselves, too, it is needed in our often
unscrupulous enjoyment of the riches of grace that are in Christ Jesus. A
thorough purgation, the removal of the wicked, the sparing of the honest
and the meek; insistence only upon the rudiments of morality and religion;
faith in its simplest form of trust in a righteous God, and character in its
basal elements of meekness and truth,—these and these alone survive the
judgment. Why does Zephaniah never talk of the Love of God, of the
Divine Patience, of the Grace that has spared and will spare wicked hearts if
only it can touch them to penitence? Why has he no call to repent, no appeal
to the wicked to turn from the evil of their ways? We have already seen part
of the answer. Zephaniah stands too near to judgment and the last things.
Character is fixed, the time for pleading is past; there remains only the
separation of bad men from good. It is the same standpoint (at least
ethically) as that of Christ’s visions of the Judgment. Perhaps also an
austere gospel was required by the fashionable temper of the day. The
generation was loud and arrogant; it gilded the future to excess, and knew
no shame.[184] The true prophet was forced to reticence; he must make his
age feel the desperate earnestness of life, and that salvation is by fire. For
the gorgeous future of its unsanctified hopes he must give it this severe,
almost mean, picture of a poor and humble folk, hardly saved but at last at
peace.
The permanent value of such a message is proved by the thirst which we
feel even to-day for the clear, cold water of its simple promises. Where a
glaring optimism prevails, and the future is preached with a loud assurance,
where many find their only religious enthusiasm in the resurrection of
mediæval ritual or the singing of stirring and gorgeous hymns of second-
hand imagery, how needful to be recalled to the earnestness and severity of

life, to the simplicity of the conditions of salvation, and to their ethical, not
emotional, character! Where sensationalism has so invaded religion, how
good to hear the sober insistence upon God’s daily commonplaces—
morning by morning He bringeth forth His judgment to light—and to know
that the acceptance of discipline is what prevails with Him. Where national
reform is vaunted and the progress of education, how well to go back to a
prophet who ignored all the great reforms of his day that he might impress
his people with the indispensableness of humility and faith. Where
Churches have such large ambitions for themselves, how necessary to hear
that the future is destined for a poor folk, the meek and the honest. Where
men boast that their religion—Bible, Creed or Church—has undertaken to
save them, vaunting themselves on the Mount of My Holiness, how needful
to hear salvation placed upon character and a very simple trust in God.
But, on the other hand, is any one in despair at the darkness and cruelty
of this life, let him hear how Zephaniah proclaims that, though all else be
fraud, the Lord is righteous in the midst of us, He doth not let Himself fail,
that the resigned heart and the humble, the just and the pure heart, is
imperishable, and in the end there is at least peace.

EPILOGUE.
VERSES 14–20.

Zephaniah’s prophecy was fulfilled. The Day of the Lord came, and the
people met their judgment. The Remnant survived—a folk poor and
humble. To them, in the new estate and temper of their life, came a new
song from God—perhaps it was nearly a hundred years after Zephaniah had
spoken—and they added it to his prophecies. It came in with wonderful
fitness, for it was the song of the redeemed, whom he had foreseen, and it
tuned his book, severe and simple, to the full harmony of prophecy, so that
his book might take a place in the great choir of Israel—the diapason of that

full salvation which no one man, but only the experience of centuries, could
achieve.
Sing out, O daughter of Zion! shout aloud, O Israel! Rejoice and be
jubilant with all thy[185] heart, daughter of Jerusalem! Jehovah hath set
aside thy judgments,[186] He hath turned thy foes. King of Israel, Jehovah is
in thy midst; thou shalt not see[187] evil any more.
In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Fear not. O Zion, let not thy
hands droop! Jehovah, thy God, in the midst of thee is mighty;[188] He will
save, He will rejoice over thee with joy, He will make new[189] His love, He
will exult over thee with singing.
The scattered of thy congregation[190] have I gathered—thine[191] are
they, ...[192] reproach upon her. Behold, I am about to do all for thy sake at
that time,[193] and I will rescue the lame and the outcast will I bring in,[194]
and I will make them for renown and fame whose shame is in the whole
earth.[195] In that time I will bring you in,[196] even in the time that I gather
you.[197] For I will set you for fame and renown among all the peoples of
the earth, when I turn again your captivity before your eyes, saith Jehovah.
[198]

NAHUM

Woe to the City of Blood,
All of her guile, robbery-full, ceaseless rapine!
Hark the whip,
And the rumbling of wheels!
Horses at the gallop,
And the rattling dance of the chariot!
Cavalry at the charge,
Flash of sabres, and lightning of lances!

CHAPTER VI

THE BOOK OF NAHUM

The Book of Nahum consists of a double title and three odes. The title runs
Oracle of Niniveh: Book of the Vision of Nahum the Elḳôshite. The three
odes, eager and passionate pieces, are all of them apparently vibrant to the
impending fall of Assyria. The first, chap. i. with the possible inclusion of
chap. ii. 2,[199] is general and theological, affirming God’s power of
vengeance and the certainty of the overthrow of His enemies. The second,
chap. ii. with the omission of ver. 2,[200] and the third, chap, iii., can hardly
be disjoined; they both present a vivid picture of the siege, the storm and
the spoiling of Niniveh.
The introductory questions, which title and contents start, are in the
main three: 1. The position of Elḳôsh, to which the title assigns the prophet;
2. The authenticity of chap. i.; 3. The date of chaps, ii., iii.: to which siege
of Niniveh do they refer?

1. THE POSITION OF ELḲÔSH.
The title calls Nahum the Elḳôshite—that is, native or citizen of Elḳôsh.
[201]
Three positions have been claimed for this place, which is not
mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.
The first we take is the modern Al-Ḳûsh, a town still flourishing about
twenty-four miles to the north of the site of Niniveh,[202] with “no
fragments of antiquity” about it, but possessing a “simple plaster box,”
which Jews, Christians and Mohammedans alike reverence as the tomb of
Nahum.[203] There is no evidence that Al-Ḳûsh, a name of Arabic form, is
older than the Arab period, while the tradition which locates the tomb there
is not found before the sixteenth century of our era, but on the contrary

Nahum’s grave was pointed out to Benjamin of Tudela in 1165 at ‘Ain
Japhata, on the south of Babylon.[204] The tradition that the prophet lived
and died at Al-Ḳûsh is therefore due to the similarity of the name to that of
Nahum’s Elḳôsh, as well as to the fact that Niniveh was the subject of his
prophesying.[205] In his book there is no trace of proof for the assertion that
Nahum was a descendant of the ten tribes exiled in 721 to the region to the
north of Al-Ḳûsh. He prophesies for Judah alone. Nor does he show any
more knowledge of Niniveh than her ancient fame must have scattered to
the limits of the world. [206] We might as well argue from chap. iii. 8–10
that Nahum had visited Thebes of Egypt.
The second tradition of the position of Elḳôsh is older. In his
commentary on Nahum Jerome says that in his day it still existed, a petty
village of Galilee, under the name of Helkesei,[207] or Elkese, and
apparently with an established reputation as the town of Nahum.[208] But
the book itself bears no symptom of its author’s connection with Galilee,
and although it was quite possible for a prophet of that period to have lived
there, it is not very probable.[209]
A third tradition places Elḳôsh in the south of Judah. A Syriac version of
the accounts of the prophets, which are ascribed to Epiphanius,[210]
describes Nahum as “of Elḳôsh beyond Bêt Gabrê, of the tribe of Simeon”;
[211] and it may be noted that Cyril of Alexandria says[212] that Elkese was a

village in the country of the Jews. This tradition is superior to the first in
that there is no apparent motive for its fabrication, and to the second in so
far as Judah was at the time of Nahum a much more probable home for a
prophet than Galilee; nor does the book give any references except such as
might be made by a Judæan.[213] No modern place-name, however, can be
suggested with any certainty as the echo of Elḳôsh. Umm Lâḳis, which has
been proved not to be Lachish, contains the same radicals, and some six and

a quarter miles east from Beit-Jibrin at the upper end of the Wady es Sur
there is an ancient well with the name Bir el Ḳûs.[214]

2. THE AUTHENTICITY OF CHAP. I.
Till recently no one doubted that the three chapters formed a unity.
“Nahum’s prophecy,” said Kuenen in 1889, “is a whole.” In 1891[215]
Cornill affirmed that no questions of authenticity arose in regard to the
book; and in 1892 Wellhausen saw in chap. i. an introduction leading “in no
awkward way to the proper subject of the prophecy.”
Meantime, however, Bickell,[216] discovering what he thought to be the
remains of an alphabetic Psalm in chap. i. 1–7, attempted to reconstruct
throughout chap. i.—ii. 3 twenty-two verses, each beginning with a
successive letter of the alphabet. And, following this, Gunkel in 1893
produced a more full and plausible reconstruction of the same scheme.[217]
By radical emendations of the text, by excision of what he believes to be
glosses and by altering the order of many of the verses, Gunkel seeks to
produce twenty-three distichs, twenty of which begin with the successive
letters of the alphabet, two are wanting, while in the first three letters of the
twenty-third, [‫]ׁשבי‬, he finds very probable the name of the author, Shobai
or Shobi.[218] He takes this ode, therefore, to be an eschatological Psalm of
the later Judaism, which from its theological bearing has been thought
suitable as an introduction to Nahum’s genuine prophecies.
The text of chap. i.—ii. 4 has been badly mauled and is clamant for
reconstruction of some kind. As it lies, there are traces of an alphabetical
arrangement as far as the beginning of ver. 9,[219] and so far Gunkel’s
changes are comparatively simple. Many of his emendations are in
themselves and apart from the alphabetic scheme desirable. They get rid of
difficulties and improve the poetry of the passage.[220] His reconstruction is

always clever and as a whole forms a wonderfully spirited poem. But to
have produced good or poetical Hebrew is not conclusive proof of having
recovered the original, and there are obvious objections to the process.
Several of the proposed changes are unnatural in themselves and
unsupported by anything except the exigencies of the scheme; for example,
2b and 3a are dismissed as a gloss only because, if they be retained, the
Aleph verse is two bars too long. The gloss, Gunkel thinks, was introduced
to mitigate the absoluteness of the declaration that Jehovah is a God of
wrath and vengeance; but this is not obvious and would hardly have been
alleged apart from the needs of the alphabetic scheme. In order to find a
Daleth, it is quite arbitrary to say that the first ‫ אמלל‬in 4b is redundant in
face of the second, and that a word beginning with Daleth originally filled
its place, but was removed because it was a rare or difficult word! The re-
arrangement of 7 and 8a is very clever, and reads as if it were right; but the
next effort, to get a verse beginning with Lamed, is of the kind by which
anything might be proved. These, however, are nothing to the difficulties
which vv. 9–14 and chap. ii. 1, 3, present to an alphabetic scheme, or to the
means which Gunkel takes to surmount them. He has to re-arrange the order
of the verses,[221] and of the words within the verses. The distichs beginning
with Nun and Ḳoph are wanting, or at least undecipherable. To provide one
with initial Resh the interjection has to be removed from the opening of
chap. ii. 1, and the verse made to begin with ‫ רגלי‬and to run thus: the feet
of him that bringeth good news on the mountains; behold him that
publisheth peace. Other unlikely changes will be noticed when we come to
the translation. Here we may ask the question: if the passage was originally
alphabetic, that is, furnished with so fixed and easily recognised a frame,
why has it so fallen to pieces? And again, if it has so fallen to pieces, is it
possible that it can be restored? The many arbitrarinesses of Gunkel’s able
essay would seem to imply that it is not. Dr. Davidson says: “Even if it

should be assumed that an alphabetical poem lurks under chap. i., the
attempt to restore it, just as in Psalm x., can never be more than an
academic exercise.”
Little is to be learned from the language. Wellhausen, who makes no
objection to the genuineness of the passage, thinks that about ver. 7 we
begin to catch the familiar dialect of the Psalms. Gunkel finds a want of
originality in the language, with many touches that betray connection not
only with the Psalms but with late eschatological literature. But when we
take one by one the clauses of chap, i., we discover very few parallels with
the Psalms, which are not at the same time parallels with Jeremiah’s or
some earlier writings. That the prophecy is vague, and with much of the air
of the later eschatology about it, is no reason for removing it from an age in
which we have already seen prophecy beginning to show the same
apocalyptic temper.[222] Gunkel denies any reference in ver. 9b to the
approaching fall of Niniveh, although that is seen by Kuenen, Wellhausen,
König and others, and he omits ver. 11a, in which most read an allusion to
Sennacherib.
Therefore, while it is possible that a later poem has been prefixed to the
genuine prophecies of Nahum, and the first chapter supplies many
provocations to belief in such a theory, this has not been proved, and the
able essays of proof have much against them. The question is open.[223]

3. THE DATE OF CHAPS. II. AND III.
We turn now to the date of the Book apart from this prologue. It was
written after a great overthrow of the Egyptian Thebes[224] and when the
overthrow of Niniveh was imminent. Now Thebes had been devastated by
Assurbanipal about 664 (we know of no later overthrow), and Niniveh fell
finally about 607. Nahum flourished, then, somewhere between 664 and
607.[225] Some critics, feeling in his description of the fall of Thebes the

force of a recent impression, have placed his prophesying immediately after
that, or about 660.[226] But this is too far away from the fall of Niniveh. In
660 the power of Assyria was unthreatened. Nor is 652, the year of the
revolt of Babylon, Egypt and the princes of Palestine, a more likely date.
[227]
For although in that year Assyrian supremacy ebbed from Egypt never
to return, Assurbanipal quickly reduced Elam, Babylon and all Syria.
Nahum, on the other hand, represents the very centre of the empire as
threatened. The land of Assyria is apparently already invaded (iii. 13, etc.).
Niniveh, if not invested, must immediately be so, and that by forces too
great for resistance. Her mixed populace already show signs of breaking up.
Within, as without, her doom is sealed. All this implies not only the advance
of an enormous force upon Niniveh, but the reduction of her people to the
last stage of hopelessness. Now, as we have seen,[228] Assyria proper was
thrice overrun. The Scythians poured across her about 626, but there is no
proof that they threatened Niniveh.[229] A little after Assurbanipal’s death in
625, the Medes under King Phraortes invaded Assyria, but Phraortes was
slain and his son Kyaxares called away by an invasion of his own country.
Herodotus says that this was after he had defeated the Assyrians in a battle
and had begun the siege of Niniveh,[230] but before he had succeeded in
reducing the city. After a time he subdued or assimilated the Medes, and
then investing Niniveh once more, about 607, in two years he took and
destroyed her.
To which of these two sieges by Kyaxares are we to assign the Book of
Nahum? Hitzig, Kuenen, Cornill and others incline to the first on the
ground that Nahum speaks of the yoke of Assyria as still heavy on Judah,
though about to be lifted. They argue that by 608, when King Josiah had
already felt himself free enough to extend his reforms into Northern Israel,
and dared to dispute Necho’s passage across Esdraelon, the Jews must have
been conscious that they had nothing more to fear from Assyria, and Nahum

could hardly have written as he does in i. 13, I will break his yoke from off
thee and burst thy bonds in sunder.[231] But this is not conclusive, for first,
as we have seen, it is not certain that i. 13 is from Nahum himself, and
second, if it be from himself, he might as well have written it about 608 as
about 625, for he speaks not from the feelings of any single year, but with
the impression upon him of the whole epoch of Assyrian servitude then
drawing to a close. The eve of the later siege as a date for the book is, as
Davidson remarks,[232] “well within the verge of possibility,” and some
critics prefer it because in their opinion Nahum’s descriptions thereby
acquire greater reality and naturalness. But this is not convincing, for if
Kyaxares actually began the siege of Niniveh about 625, Nahum’s sense of
the imminence of her fall is perfectly natural. Wellhausen indeed denies that
earlier siege. “Apart from Herodotus,” he says, “it would never have
occurred to anybody to doubt that Nahum’s prophecy coincided with the
fall of Niniveh.”[233] This is true, for it is to Herodotus alone that we owe
the tradition of the earlier siege. But what if we believe Herodotus? In that
case, it is impossible to come to a decision as between the two sieges. With
our present scanty knowledge of both, the prophecy of Nahum suits either
equally well.[234]
Fortunately it is not necessary to come to a decision. Nahum, we cannot
too often insist, expresses the feelings neither of this nor of that decade in
the reign of Josiah, but the whole volume of hope, wrath and just passion of
vengeance which had been gathering for more than a century and which at
last broke into exultation when it became certain that Niniveh was falling.
That suits the eve of either siege by Kyaxares. Till we learn a little more
about the first siege and how far it proceeded towards a successful result,
perhaps we ought to prefer the second. And of course those who feel that
Nahum writes not in the future but the present tense of the details of
Niniveh’s overthrow, must prefer the second.

That the form as well as the spirit of the Book of Nahum is poetical is
proved by the familiar marks of poetic measure—the unusual syntax, the
frequent absence of the article and particles, the presence of elliptic forms
and archaic and sonorous ones. In the two chapters on the siege of Niniveh
the lines are short and quick, in harmony with the dashing action they echo.
As we have seen, the text of chap. i. is very uncertain. The subject of the
other two chapters involves the use of a number of technical and some
foreign terms, of the meaning of most of which we are ignorant.[235] There
are apparently some glosses; here and there the text is obviously disordered.
We get the usual help, and find the usual faults, in the Septuagint; they will
be noticed in the course of the translation.

CHAPTER VII

THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD
NAHUM i

The prophet Nahum, as we have seen,[236] arose probably in Judah, if not
about the same time as Zephaniah and Jeremiah, then a few years later.
Whether he prophesied before or after the great Reform of 621 we have no
means of deciding. His book does not reflect the inner history, character or
merits of his generation. His sole interest is the fate of Niniveh. Zephaniah
had also doomed the Assyrian capital, yet he was much more concerned
with Israel’s unworthiness of the opportunity presented to them. The yoke
of Asshur, he saw, was to be broken, but the same cloud which was bursting
from the north upon Niniveh must overwhelm the incorrigible people of
Jehovah. For this Nahum has no thought. His heart, for all its bigness, holds
room only for the bitter memories, the baffled hopes, the unappeased
hatreds of a hundred years. And that is why we need not be anxious to fix
his date upon one or other of the shifting phases of Israel’s history during
that last quarter of the seventh century. For he represents no single
movement of his fickle people’s progress, but the passion of the whole
epoch then drawing to a close. Nahum’s book is one great At Last!
And, therefore, while Nahum is a worse prophet than Zephaniah, with
less conscience and less insight, he is a greater poet, pouring forth the
exultation of a people long enslaved, who see their tyrant ready for
destruction. His language is strong and brilliant; his rhythm rumbles and
rolls, leaps and flashes, like the horsemen and chariots he describes. It is a
great pity the text is so corrupt. If the original lay before us, and that full
knowledge of the times which the excavation of ancient Assyria may still
yield to us, we might judge Nahum to be an even greater poet than we do.

We have seen that there are some reasons for doubting whether he wrote
the first chapter of the book,[237] but no one questions its fitness as an
introduction to the exultation over Niniveh’s fall in chapters ii. and iii. The
chapter is theological, affirming those general principles of Divine
Providence, by which the overthrow of the tyrant is certain and God’s own
people are assured of deliverance. Let us place ourselves among the people,
who for so long a time had been thwarted, crushed and demoralised by the
most brutal empire which was ever suffered to roll its force across the
world, and we shall sympathise with the author, who for the moment will
feel nothing about his God, save that He is a God of vengeance. Like the
grief of a bereaved man, the vengeance of an enslaved people has hours
sacred to itself. And this people had such a God! Jehovah must punish the
tyrant, else were He untrue. He had been patient, and patient, as a verse
seems to hint,[238] just because He was omnipotent, but in the end He must
rise to judgment. He was God of heaven and earth, and it is the old physical
proofs of His power, so often appealed to by the peoples of the East, for
they feel them as we cannot, which this hymn calls up as Jehovah sweeps to
the overthrow of the oppressor. Before such power of wrath who may
stand? What think ye of Jehovah? The God who works with such ruthless,
absolute force in nature will not relax in the fate He is preparing for
Niniveh. He is one who maketh utter destruction, not needing to raise up
His forces a second time, and as stubble before fire so His foes go down
before Him. No half-measures are His, Whose are the storm, the drought
and the earthquake.
Such is the sheer religion of the Proem to the Book of Nahum—
thoroughly Oriental in its sense of God’s method and resources of
destruction; very Jewish, and very natural to that age of Jewish history, in
the bursting of its long pent hopes of revenge. We of the West might express
these hopes differently. We should not attribute so much personal passion to

the Avenger. With our keener sense of law, we should emphasise the
slowness of the process, and select for its illustration the forces of decay
rather than those of sudden ruin. But we must remember the crashing times
in which the Jews lived. The world was breaking up. The elements were
loose, and all that God’s own people could hope for was the bursting of
their yoke, with a little shelter in the day of trouble. The elements were
loose, but amidst the blind crash the little people knew that Jehovah knew
them.

A God jealous and avenging is Jehovah;
Jehovah is avenger and lord of wrath;
Vengeful is Jehovah towards His enemies,
And implacable He to His foes.

Jehovah is long-suffering and great in might, [239]
Yet He will not absolve.
Jehovah! His way is in storm and in hurricane,
And clouds are the dust of His feet.[240]
He curbeth the sea, and drieth it up;
All the streams hath He parched.
Withered[241] be Bashan and Carmel;
The bloom of Lebānon is withered.
Mountains have quaked before Him,
And the hills have rolled down.
Earth heaved at His presence,
The world and all its inhabitants.
Before His rage who may stand,
Or who abide in the glow of His anger?
His wrath pours forth like fire,
And rocks are rent before Him.

Good is Jehovah to them that wait upon Him in the day of trouble,[242]
And He knoweth them that trust Him.
With an overwhelming flood He makes an end of His rebels,
And His foes He comes down on[243] with darkness.
What think ye of Jehovah?
He is one that makes utter destruction;
Not twice need trouble arise.
For though they be like plaited thorns

For though they be like plaited thorns,
And sodden as … ,[244]
They shall be consumed like dry stubble.

Came there not[245] out of thee one to plan evil against Jehovah,
A counsellor of mischief?[246]

Thus saith Jehovah, … many waters,[247] yet shall they be cut off and
pass away, and I will so humble thee that I need humble thee[248] no more;
[249]
and Jehovah hath ordered concerning thee, that no more of thy seed be
sown: from the house of thy God, I will cut off graven and molten image. I
will make thy sepulchre … [250]

Disentangled from the above verses are three which plainly refer not to
Assyria but to Judah. How they came to be woven among the others we
cannot tell. Some of them appear applicable to the days of Josiah after the
great Reform.

And now will I break his yoke from upon thee,
And burst thy bonds asunder.
Lo, upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth
good tidings,
That publisheth peace!
Keep thy feasts, O Judah,
Fulfil thy vows:
For no more shall the wicked attempt to pass through thee;
Cut off is the whole of him.[251]
For Jehovah hath turned the pride of Jacob,
Like to the pride of Isrāel:[252]
For the plunderers plundered them,
And destroyed their vine branches.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH
NAHUM ii., iii

The scene now changes from the presence and awful arsenal of the
Almighty to the historical consummation of His vengeance. Nahum
foresees the siege of Niniveh. Probably the Medes have already overrun
Assyria.[253] The Old Lion has withdrawn to his inner den, and is making
his last stand. The suburbs are full of the enemy, and the great walls which
made the inner city one vast fortress are invested. Nahum describes the
details of the assault. Let us try, before we follow him through them, to
form some picture of Assyria and her capital at this time.[254]
As we have seen,[255] the Assyrian Empire began about 625 to shrink to
the limits of Assyria proper, or Upper Mesopotamia, within the Euphrates
on the south-west, the mountain-range of Kurdistan on the north-east, the
river Chabor on the north-west and the Lesser Zab on the south-east.[256]
This is a territory of nearly a hundred and fifty miles from north to south,
and rather more than two hundred and fifty from east to west. To the south
of it the Viceroy of Babylon, Nabopolassar, held practically independent
sway over Lower Mesopotamia, if he did not command as well a large part
of the Upper Euphrates Valley. On the north the Medes were urgent, holding
at least the farther ends of the passes through the Kurdish mountains, if they
had not already penetrated these to their southern issues.
The kernel of the Assyrian territory was the triangle, two of whose sides
are represented by the Tigris and the Greater Zab, the third by the foot of
the Kurdistan mountains. It is a fertile plain, with some low hills. To-day
the level parts of it are covered by a large number of villages and well-
cultivated fields. The more frequent mounds of ruin attest in ancient times a

still greater population. At the period of which we are treating, the plains
must have been covered by an almost continuous series of towns. At either
end lay a group of fortresses. The southern was the ancient capital of
Assyria, Kalchu, now Nimrud, about six miles to the north of the
confluence of the Greater Zab and the Tigris. The northern, close by the
present town of Khorsabad, was the great fortress and palace of Sargon,
Dur-Sargina:[257] it covered the roads upon Niniveh from the north, and
standing upon the upper reaches of the Choser protected Niniveh’s water
supply. But besides these there were scattered upon all the main roads and
round the frontiers of the territory a number of other forts, towers and posts,
the ruins of many of which are still considerable, but others have perished
without leaving any visible traces. The roads thus protected drew in upon
Niniveh from all directions. The chief of those, along which the Medes and
their allies would advance from the east and north, crossed the Greater Zab,
or came down through the Kurdistan mountains upon the citadel of Sargon.
Two of them were distant enough from the latter to relieve the invaders
from the necessity of taking it, and Kalchu lay far to the south of all of
them. The brunt of the first defence of the land would therefore fall upon
the smaller fortresses.
Niniveh itself lay upon the Tigris between Kalchu and Sargon’s city, just
where the Tigris is met by the Choser. Low hills descend from the north
upon the very site of the fortress, and then curve east and south, bow-
shaped, to draw west again upon the Tigris at the south end of the city. To
the east of the latter they leave a level plain, some two and a half miles by
one and a half. These hills appear to have been covered by several forts.
The city itself was four-sided, lying lengthwise to the Tigris and cut across
its breadth by the Choser. The circumference was about seven and a half
miles, enclosing the largest fortified space in Western Asia, and capable of
holding a population of three hundred thousand. The western wall, rather

over two and a half miles long, touched the Tigris at either end, but between
there lay a broad, bow-shaped stretch of land, probably in ancient times, as
now, free of buildings. The north-western wall ran up from the Tigris for a
mile and a quarter to the low ridge which entered the city at its northern
corner. From this the eastern wall, with a curve upon it, ran down in face of
the eastern plain for a little more than three miles, and was joined to the
western by the short southern wall of not quite half a mile. The ruins of the
western wall stand from ten to twenty, those of the others from twenty-five
to sixty, feet above the natural surface, with here and there the still higher
remains of towers. There were several gates, of which the chief were one in
the northern and two in the eastern wall. Round all the walls except the
western ran moats about a hundred and fifty feet broad—not close up to the
foot of the walls, but at a distance of some sixty feet. Water was supplied by
the Choser to all the moats south of it; those to the north were fed from a
canal which entered the city near its northern corner. At these and other
points one can still trace the remains of huge dams, batardeaux and sluices;
and the moats might be emptied by opening at either end of the western
wall other dams, which kept back the waters from the bed of the Tigris.
Beyond its moat, the eastern wall was protected north of the Choser by a
large outwork covering its gate, and south of the Choser by another
outwork, in shape the segment of a circle, and consisting of a double line of
fortification more than five hundred yards long, of which the inner wall was
almost as high as the great wall itself, but the outer considerably lower.
Again, in front of this and in face of the eastern plain was a third line of
fortification, consisting of a low inner wall and a colossal outer wall still
rising to a height of fifty feet, with a moat one hundred and fifty feet broad
between them. On the south this third line was closed by a large fortress.
Upon the trebly fortified city the Medes drew in from east and north, far
away from Kalchu and able to avoid even Dur-Sargina. The other fortresses

on the frontier and the approaches fell into their hands, says Nahum, like
ripe fruit.[258] He cries to Niniveh to prepare for the siege.[259] Military
authorities[260] suppose that the Medes directed their main attack upon the
northern corner of the city. Here they would be upon a level with its highest
point, and would command the waterworks by which most of the moats
were fed. Their flank, too, would be protected by the ravines of the Choser.
Nahum describes fighting in the suburbs before the assault of the walls, and
it was just here, according to some authorities,[261] that the famous suburbs
of Niniveh lay, out upon the canal and the road to Khorsabad. All the open
fighting which Nahum foresees would take place in these outplaces and
broad streets[262]—the mustering of the red ranks,[263] the prancing
horses[264] and rattling chariots[265] and cavalry at the charge.[266] Beaten
there the Assyrians would retire to the great walls, and the waterworks
would fall into the hands of the besiegers. They would not immediately
destroy these, but in order to bring their engines and battering-rams against
the walls they would have to lay strong dams across the moats; the eastern
moat has actually been found filled with rubbish in face of a great breach at
the north end of its wall. This breach may have been effected not only by
the rams but by directing upon the wall the waters of the canal; or farther
south the Choser itself, in its spring floods, may have been confined by the
besiegers and swept in upon the sluices which regulate its passage through
the eastern wall into the city. To this means tradition has assigned the
capture of Niniveh,[267] and Nahum perhaps foresees the possibility of it:
the gates of the rivers are opened, the palace is dissolved.[268]
Now of all this probable progress of the siege Nahum, of course, does
not give us a narrative, for he is writing upon the eve of it, and probably, as
we have seen, in Judah, with only such knowledge of the position and
strength of Niniveh as her fame had scattered across the world. The military
details, the muster, the fighting in the open, the investment, the assault, he

did not need to go to Assyria or to wait for the fall of Niniveh to describe as
he has done. Assyria herself (and herein lies much of the pathos of the
poem) had made all Western Asia familiar with their horrors for the last two
centuries. As we learn from the prophets and now still more from herself,
Assyria was the great Besieger of Men. It is siege, siege, siege, which
Amos, Hosea and Isaiah tell their people they shall feel: siege and
blockade, and that right round the land! It is siege, irresistible and full of
cruelty, which Assyria records as her own glory. Miles of sculpture are
covered with masses of troops marching upon some Syrian or Median
fortress. Scaling ladders and enormous engines are pushed forward to the
walls under cover of a shower of arrows. There are assaults and breaches,
panic-stricken and suppliant defenders. Streets and places are strewn with
corpses, men are impaled, women led away weeping, children dashed
against the stones. The Jews had seen, had felt these horrors for a hundred
years, and it is out of their experience of them that Nahum weaves his
exultant predictions. The Besieger of the world is at last besieged; every
cruelty he has inflicted upon men is now to be turned upon himself. Again
and again does Nahum return to the vivid details,—he hears the very whips
crack beneath the walls, and the rattle of the leaping chariots; the end is
slaughter, dispersion and a dead waste.[269]
Two other points remain to be emphasised.
There is a striking absence from both chapters of any reference to Israel.
[270] Jehovah of Hosts is mentioned twice in the same formula,[271] but

otherwise the author does not obtrude his nationality. It is not in Judah’s
name he exults, but in that of all the peoples of Western Asia. Niniveh has
sold peoples by her harlotries and races by her witchcraft; it is peoples that
shall gaze upon her nakedness and kingdoms upon her shame. Nahum gives
voice to no national passions, but to the outraged conscience of mankind.
We see here another proof, not only of the large, human heart of prophecy,

but of that which in the introduction to these Twelve Prophets we ventured
to assign as one of its causes. By crushing all peoples to a common level of
despair, by the universal pity which her cruelties excited, Assyria
contributed to the development in Israel of the idea of a common humanity.
[272]

The other thing to be noticed is Nahum’s feeling of the incoherence and
mercenariness of the vast population of Niniveh. Niniveh’s command of the
world had turned her into a great trading power. Under Assurbanipal the
lines of ancient commerce had been diverted so as to pass through her. The
immediate result was an enormous increase of population, such as the world
had never before seen within the limits of one city. But this had come out of
all races and was held together only by the greed of gain. What had once
been a firm and vigorous nation of warriors, irresistible in their united
impact upon the world, was now a loose aggregate of many peoples,
without patriotism, discipline or sense of honour. Nahum likens it to a
reservoir of waters,[273] which as soon as it is breached must scatter, and
leave the city bare. The Second Isaiah said the same of Babylon, to which
the bulk of Niniveh’s mercenary populace must have fled:—

Thus are they grown to thee, they who did weary thee,
Traders of thine from thy youth up;
Each as he could escape have they fled;
None is thy helper.[274]

The prophets saw the truth about both cities. Their vastness and their
splendour were artificial. Neither of them, and Niniveh still less than
Babylon, was a natural centre for the world’s commerce. When their
political power fell, the great lines of trade, which had been twisted to their
feet, drew back to more natural courses, and Niniveh in especial became
deserted. This is the explanation of the absolute collapse of that mighty city.

Nahum’s foresight, and the very metaphor in which he expressed it, were
thoroughly sound. The population vanished like water. The site bears little
trace of any disturbance since the ruin by the Medes, except such as has
been inflicted by the weather and the wandering tribes around. Mosul,
Niniveh’s representative to-day, is not built upon it, and is but a provincial
town. The district was never meant for anything else.
The swift decay of these ancient empires from the climax of their
commercial glory is often employed as a warning to ourselves. But the
parallel, as the previous paragraphs suggest, is very far from exact. If we
can lay aside for the moment the greatest difference of all, in religion and
morals, there remain others almost of cardinal importance. Assyria and
Babylonia were not filled, like Great Britain, with reproductive races, able
to colonise distant lands, and carry everywhere the spirit which had made
them strong at home. Still more, they did not continue at home to be
homogeneous. Their native forces were exhausted by long and unceasing
wars. Their populations, especially in their capitals, were very largely alien
and distraught, with nothing to hold them together save their commercial
interests. They were bound to break up at the first disaster. It is true that we
are not without some risks of their peril. No patriot among us can observe
without misgiving the large and growing proportion of foreigners in that
department of our life from which the strength of our defence is largely
drawn—our merchant navy. But such a fact is very far from bringing our
empire and its chief cities into the fatal condition of Niniveh and Babylon.
Our capitals, our commerce, our life as a whole are still British to the core.
If we only be true to our ideals of righteousness and religion, if our
patriotism continue moral and sincere, we shall have the power to absorb
the foreign elements that throng to us in commerce, and stamp them with
our own spirit.

We are now ready to follow Nahum’s two great poems delivered on the
eve of the Fall of Niniveh. Probably, as we have said, the first of them has
lost its original opening. It wants some notice at the outset of the object to
which it is addressed: this is indicated only by the second personal pronoun.
Other needful comments will be given in footnotes.

1.
. . . . .

The Hammer[275] is come up to thy face!
Hold the rampart![276]Keep watch on the way!
Brace the loins![277] Pull thyself firmly together![278]
The shields[279] of his heroes are red,
The warriors are in scarlet;[280]
Like[281] fire are the ...[282]of the chariots in the day
of his muster,
And the horsemen[283] are prancing.
Through the markets rage chariots,
They tear across the squares;[284]
The look of them is like torches,
Like lightnings they dart to and fro.[285]
He musters his nobles....[286]
They rush to the wall and the mantlet[287] is fixed!
The river-gates[288] burst open, the palace dissolves.[289]
And Huṣṣab[290] is stripped, is brought forth,
With her maids sobbing like doves,
Beating their breasts.
And Niniveh! she was like a reservoir of waters,
Her waters ...[291]
And now they flee. “Stand, stand!” but there is
none to rally.
Plunder silver, plunder gold!
Infinite treasures, mass of all precious things!
Void and devoid and desolate[292] is she.
Melting hearts and shaking knees,
And anguish in all loins,
And nothing but faces full of black fear.[293]

Where is the Lion’s den,
And the young lions’ feeding ground[294]?
Whither the Lion retreated,[295]
The whelps of the Lion, with none to affray:
The Lion, who tore enough for his whelps,
And strangled for his lionesses.
And he filled his pits with prey,
And his dens with rapine.

Lo, I am at thee (oracle of Jehovah of Hosts):
I will put up thy ...[296] in flames,
The sword shall devour thy young lions;
I will cut off from the earth thy rapine,
And the noise of thine envoys shall no more be heard.

2.

Woe to the City of Blood,
All of her guile, robbery-full, ceaseless rapine!

Hark the whip,
And the rumbling of the wheel,
And horses galloping,
And the rattling dance of the chariot![297]
Cavalry at the charge,[298] and flash of sabres,
And lightning of lances,
Mass of slain and weight of corpses,
Endless dead bodies—
They stumble on their dead!
—For the manifold harlotries of the Harlot,
The well-favoured, mistress of charms,
She who sold nations with her harlotries
And races by her witchcrafts!

Lo, I am at thee (oracle of Jehovah of Hosts):
I will uncover thy skirts to thy face;[299]
Give nations to look on thy nakedness,
And kingdoms upon thy shame;
Will have thee pelted with filth, and disgrace thee,
And set thee for a gazingstock;
So that every one seeing thee shall shrink from thee
and say,
“Shattered is Niniveh—who will pity her?
Whence shall I seek for comforters to thee?”

Shalt thou be better than No-Amon,[300]
Which sat upon the Nile streams[301]—waters were

p
round her—
Whose rampart was the sea,[302] and waters her wall?[303]
Kush was her strength and Miṣraim without end;
Phut and the Lybians were there to assist her.[304]
Even she was for exile, she went to captivity:
Even her children were dashed on every street
corner;
For her nobles they cast lots,
And all her great men were fastened with fetters.

Thou too shalt stagger,[305] shalt grow faint;
Thou too shalt seek help from[306] the foe!
All thy fortresses are fig-trees with figs early-ripe:
Be they shaken they fall on the mouth of the eater.
Lo, thy folk are but women in thy midst:[307]
To thy foes the gates of thy land fly open;
Fire has devoured thy bars.

Draw thee water for siege, strengthen thy forts!
Get thee down to the mud, and tramp in the clay!
Grip fast the brick-mould!
There fire consumes thee, the sword cuts thee off.[308]
Make thyself many as a locust swarm,
Many as grasshoppers,
Multiply thy traders more than heaven’s stars,
—The locusts break off[309] and fly away.
Thy ...[310] are as locusts and thy ... as grasshoppers,
That hive in the hedges in the cold of the day:[311]
The sun is risen, they are fled,
And one knows not the place where they be.

d o e ows ot t e p ace w e e t ey be.
Asleep are thy shepherds, O king of Assyria,
Thy nobles do slumber;[312]
Thy people are strewn on the mountains,
Without any to gather.
There is no healing of thy wreck,
Fatal thy wound!
All who hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hand
at thee,
For upon whom hath not thy cruelty passed without
ceasing?

CHAPTER IX

THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK

As it has reached us, the Book of Habakkuk, under the title The Oracle
which Habakkuk the prophet received by vision, consists of three chapters,
which fall into three sections. First: chap. i. 2—ii. 4 (or 8), a piece in
dramatic form; the prophet lifts his voice to God against the wrong and
violence of which his whole horizon is full, and God sends him answer.
Second: chap. ii. 5 (or 9)-20, a taunt-song in a series of Woes upon the
wrong-doer. Third: chap. iii., part psalm, part prayer, descriptive of a
Theophany and expressive of Israel’s faith in their God. Of these three
sections no one doubts the authenticity of the first; opinion is divided about
the second; about the third there is a growing agreement that it is not a
genuine work of Habakkuk, but a poem from a period after the Exile.

1. CHAP. I. 2—II. 4 (OR 8).

Yet it is the first piece which raises the most difficult questions. All[313]
admit that it is to be dated somewhere along the line of Jeremiah’s long
career, c. 627—586. There is no doubt about the general trend of the
argument: it is a plaint to God on the sufferings of the righteous under
tyranny, with God’s answer. But the order and connection of the paragraphs
of the argument are not clear. There is also difference of opinion as to who
the tyrant is—native, Assyrian or Chaldee; and this leads to a difference, of
course, about the date, which ranges from the early years of Josiah to the
end of Jehoiakim’s reign, or from about 630 to 597.
As the verses lie, their argument is this. In chap. i. 2–4 Habakkuk asks
the Lord how long the wicked are to oppress the righteous, to the paralysing
of the Torah, or Revelation of His Law, and the making futile of judgment.

For answer the Lord tells him, vv. 5–11, to look round among the heathen:
He is about to raise up the Chaldees to do His work, a people swift, self-
reliant, irresistible. Upon which Habakkuk resumes his question, vv. 12–17,
how long will God suffer a tyrant who sweeps up the peoples into his net
like fish? Is he to go on with this for ever? In ii. 1 Habakkuk prepares for an
answer, which comes in ii. 2, 3, 4: let the prophet wait for the vision though
it tarries; the proud oppressor cannot last, but the righteous shall live by his
constancy, or faithfulness.
The difficulties are these. Who are the wicked oppressors in chap. i. 2–
4? Are they Jews, or some heathen nation? And what is the connection
between vv. 1–4 and vv. 5–11? Are the Chaldees, who are described in the
latter, raised up to punish the tyrant complained against in the former? To
these questions three different sets of answers have been given.
First: the great majority of critics take the wrong complained of in vv.
2–4 to be wrong done by unjust and cruel Jews to their countrymen, that is,
civic disorder and violence, and believe that in vv. 5–11 Jehovah is
represented as raising up the Chaldees to punish the sin of Judah—a
message which is pretty much the same as Jeremiah’s. But Habakkuk goes
further: the Chaldees themselves with their cruelties aggravate his problem,
how God can suffer wrong, and he appeals again to God, vv. 12–17. Are the
Chaldees to be allowed to devastate for ever? The answer is given, as
above, in chap. ii. 1–4. Such is practically the view of Pusey, Delitzsch,
Kleinert, Kuenen, Sinker,[314] Driver, Orelli, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and
Davidson, a formidable league, and Davidson says “this is the most natural
sense of the verses and of the words used in them.” But these scholars differ
as to the date. Pusey, Delitzsch and Volck take the whole passage from i. 5
as prediction, and date it from before the rise of the Chaldee power in 625,
attributing the internal wrongs of Judah described in vv. 2–4 to Manasseh’s
reign or the early years of Josiah.[315] But the rest, on the grounds that the

prophet shows some experience of the Chaldean methods of warfare, and
that the account of the internal disorder in Judah does not suit Josiah’s
reign, bring the passage down to the reign of Jehoiakim, 608—598, or of
Jehoiachin, 597. Kleinert and Von Orelli date it before the battle of
Carchemish, 506, in which the Chaldean Nebuchadrezzar wrested from
Egypt the Empire of the Western Asia, on the ground that after that
Habakkuk could not have called a Chaldean invasion of Judah incredible (i.
5). But Kuenen, Driver, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson date it after
Carchemish. To Driver it must be immediately after, and before Judah
became alarmed at the consequences to herself. To Davidson the description
of the Chaldeans “is scarcely conceivable before the battle,” “hardly one
would think before the deportation of the people under Jehoiachin.”[316]
This also is Kuenen’s view, who thinks that Judah must have suffered at
least the first Chaldean raids, and he explains the use of an undoubted
future in chap. i. 5, Lo, I am about to raise up the Chaldeans, as due to the
prophet’s predilection for a dramatic style. “He sets himself in the past, and
represents the already experienced chastisement [of Judah] as having been
then announced by Jehovah. His contemporaries could not have mistaken
his meaning.”
Second: others, however, deny that chap. i. 2–4 refers to the internal
disorder of Judah, except as the effect of foreign tyranny. The righteous
mentioned there are Israel as a whole, the wicked their heathen oppressors.
So Hitzig, Ewald, König and practically Smend. Ewald is so clear that
Habakkuk ascribes no sin to Judah, that he says we might be led by this to
assign the prophecy to the reign of the righteous Josiah; but he prefers,
because of the vivid sense which the prophet betrays of actual experience of
the Chaldees, to date the passage from the reign of Jehoiakim, and to
explain Habakkuk’s silence about his people’s sinfulness as due to his
overwhelming impression of Chaldean cruelty. König[317] takes vv. 2–4 as a

general complaint of the violence that fills the prophet’s day, and vv. 5–11
as a detailed description of the Chaldeans, the instruments of this violence.
Vv. 5–11, therefore, give not the judgment upon the wrongs described in vv.
2–4, but the explanation of them. Lebanon is already wasted by the
Chaldeans (ii. 17); therefore the whole prophecy must be assigned to the
days of Jehoiakim. Giesebrecht[318] and Wellhausen adhere to the view that
no sins of Judah are mentioned, but that the righteous and wicked of chap. i.
4 are the same as in ver. 13, viz. Israel and a heathen tyrant. But this leads
them to dispute that the present order of the paragraphs of the prophecy is
the right one. In chap. i. 5 the Chaldeans are represented as about to be
raised up for the first time, although their violence has already been
described in vv. 1–4, and in vv. 12–17 these are already in full career.
Moreover ver. 12 follows on naturally to ver. 4. Accordingly these critics
would remove the section vv. 5–11. Giesebrecht prefixes it to ver. 1, and
dates the whole passage from the Exile. Wellhausen calls 5–11 an older
passage than the rest of the prophecy, and removes it altogether as not
Habakkuk’s. To the latter he assigns what remains, i. 1–4, 12–17, ii. 1–5,
and dates it from the reign of Jehoiakim.[319]
Third: from each of these groups of critics Budde of Strasburg borrows
something, but so as to construct an arrangement of the verses, and to reach
a date, for the whole, from which both differ.[320] With Hitzig, Ewald,
König, Smend, Giesebrecht and Wellhausen he agrees that the violence
complained of in i. 2–4 is that inflicted by a heathen oppressor, the wicked,
on the Jewish nation, the righteous. But with Kuenen and others he holds
that the Chaldeans are raised up, according to i. 5–11, to punish the violence
complained of in i. 2–4 and again in i. 12–17. In these verses it is the
ravages of another heathen power than the Chaldeans which Budde
descries. The Chaldeans are still to come, and cannot be the same as the
devastator whose long continued tyranny is described in i. 12–17. They are

rather the power which is to punish him. He can only be the Assyrian. But if
that be so, the proper place for the passage, i. 5–11, which describes the rise
of the Chaldeans must be after the description of the Assyrian ravages in i.
12–17, and in the body of God’s answer to the prophet which we find in ii.
2 ff. Budde, therefore, places i. 5–11 after ii. 2–4. But if the Chaldeans are
still to come, and Budde thinks that they are described vaguely and with a
good deal of imagination, the prophecy thus arranged must fall somewhere
between 625, when Nabopolassar the Chaldean made himself independent
of Assyria and King of Babylon, and 607, when Assyria fell. That the
prophet calls Judah righteous is proof that he wrote after the great Reform
of 621; hence, too, his reference to Torah and Mishpat (i. 4), and his
complaint of the obstacles which Assyrian supremacy presented to their free
course. As the Assyrian yoke appears not to have been felt anywhere in
Judah by 608, Budde would fix the exact date of Habakkuk’s prophecy
about 615. To these conclusions of Budde Cornill, who in 1891 had very
confidently assigned the prophecy of Habakkuk to the reign of Jehoiakim,
gave his adherence in 1896.[321]
Budde’s very able and ingenious argument has been subjected to a
searching criticism by Professor Davidson, who emphasises first the
difficulty of accounting for the transposition of chap. i. 5–11 from what
Budde alleges to have been its original place after ii. 4 to its present
position in chap. i.[322] He points out that if chap. i. 2–4 and 12–17 and ii. 5
ff. refer to the Assyrian, it is strange the latter is not once mentioned. Again,
by 615 we may infer (though we know little of Assyrian history at this time)
that the Assyrian’s hold on Judah was already too relaxed for the prophet to
impute to him power to hinder the Law, especially as Josiah had begun to
carry his reforms into the northern kingdom; and the knowledge of the
Chaldeans displayed in i. 5–11 is too fresh and detailed[323] to suit so early a
date: it was possible only after the battle of Carchemish. And again, it is

improbable that we have two different nations, as Budde thinks, described
by the very similar phrases in i. 11, his own power becomes his god, and in
i. 16, he sacrifices to his net. Again, chap. i. 5–11 would not read quite
naturally after chap. ii. 4. And in the woes pronounced on the oppressor it is
not one nation, the Chaldeans, which are to spoil him, but all the remnant of
the peoples (ii. 7, 8).
These objections are not inconsiderable. But are they conclusive? And if
not, is any of the other theories of the prophecy less beset with difficulties?
The objections are scarcely conclusive. We have no proof that the power
of Assyria was altogether removed from Judah by 615; on the contrary,
even in 608 Assyria was still the power with which Egypt went forth to
contend for the empire of the world. Seven years earlier her hand may well
have been strong upon Palestine. Again, by 615 the Chaldeans, a people
famous in Western Asia for a long time, had been ten years independent:
men in Palestine may have been familiar with their methods of warfare; at
least it is impossible to say they were not.[324] There is more weight in the
objection drawn from the absence of the name of Assyria from all of the
passages which Budde alleges describe it; nor do we get over all difficulties
of text by inserting i. 5–11 between ii. 4 and 5. Besides, how does Budde
explain i. 12b on the theory that it means Assyria? Is the clause not
premature at that point? Does he propose to elide it, like Wellhausen? And
in any case an erroneous transposition of the original is impossible to prove
and difficult to account for.[325]
But have not the other theories of the Book of Habakkuk equally great
difficulties? Surely, we cannot say that the righteous and the wicked in i. 4
mean something different from what they do in i. 13? But if this is
impossible the construction of the book supported by the great majority of
critics[326] falls to the ground. Professor Davidson justly says that it has
“something artificial in it” and “puts a strain on the natural sense.”[327] How

can the Chaldeans be described in i. 5 as just about to be raised up, and in
14–17 as already for a long time the devastators of earth? Ewald’s, Hitzig’s
and König’s views[328] are equally beset by these difficulties; König’s
exposition also “strains the natural sense.” Everything, in fact, points to i.
5–11 being out of its proper place; it is no wonder that Giesebrecht,
Wellhausen and Budde independently arrived at this conclusion.[329]
Whether Budde be right in inserting i. 5–11 after ii. 4, there can be little
doubt of the correctness of his views that i. 12–17 describe a heathen
oppressor who is not the Chaldeans. Budde says this oppressor is Assyria.
Can he be any one else? From 608 to 605 Judah was sorely beset by Egypt,
who had overrun all Syria up to the Euphrates. The Egyptians killed Josiah,
deposed his successor, and put their own vassal under a very heavy tribute;
gold and silver were exacted of the people of the land: the picture of distress
in i. 1–4 might easily be that of Judah in these three terrible years. And if
we assigned the prophecy to them, we should certainly give it a date at
which the knowledge of the Chaldeans expressed in i. 5–11 was more
probable than at Budde’s date of 615. But then does the description in chap,
i. 14–17 suit Egypt so well as it does Assyria? We can hardly affirm this,
until we know more of what Egypt did in those days, but it is very probable.
Therefore, the theory supported by the majority of critics being
unnatural, we are, with our present meagre knowledge of the time, flung
back upon Budde’s interpretation that the prophet in i. 2—ii. 4 appeals from
oppression by a heathen power, which is not the Chaldean, but upon which
the Chaldean shall bring the just vengeance of God. The tyrant is either
Assyria up to about 615 or Egypt from 608 to 605, and there is not a little to
be said for the latter date.
In arriving at so uncertain a conclusion about i.—ii. 4, we have but
these consolations, that no other is possible in our present knowledge, and

that the uncertainty will not hamper us much in our appreciation of
Habakkuk’s spiritual attitude and poetic gifts.[330]

2. CHAP. II. 5–20.
The dramatic piece i. 2—ii. 4 is succeeded by a series of fine taunt-
songs, starting after an introduction from 6b, then 9, 11, 15 and (18) 19, and
each opening with Woe! Their subject is, if we take Budde’s interpretation
of the dramatic piece, the Assyrian and not the Chaldean[331] tyrant. The
text, as we shall see when we come to it, is corrupt. Some words are
manifestly wrong, and the rhythm must have suffered beyond restoration. In
all probability these fine lyric Woes, or at least as many of them as are
authentic—for there is doubt about one or two—were of equal length.
Whether they all originally had the refrain now attached to two is more
doubtful.
Hitzig suspected the authenticity of some parts of this series of songs.
Stade[332] and Kuenen have gone further and denied the genuineness of vv.
9–20. But this is with little reason. As Budde says, a series of Woes was to
be expected here by a prophet who follows so much the example of Isaiah.
[333]
In spite of Kuenen’s objection, vv. 9–11 would not be strange of the
Chaldean, but they suit the Assyrian better. Vv. 12–14 are doubtful: 12
recalls Micah iii. 10; 13 is a repetition of Jer. li. 58; 14 is a variant of Isa. xi.
9. Very likely Jer. li. 58, a late passage, is borrowed from this passage; yet
the addition used here, Are not these things[334] from the Lord of Hosts?
looks as if it noted a citation. Vv. 15–17 are very suitable to the Assyrian;
there is no reason to take them from Habakkuk.[335] The final song, vv. 18
and 19, has its Woe at the beginning of its second verse, and closely
resembles the language of later prophets.[336] Moreover the refrain forms a
suitable close at the end of ver. 17. ver. 20 is a quotation from Zephaniah,
[337] perhaps another sign of the composite character of the end of this

chapter. Some take it to have been inserted as an introduction to the
theophany in chap. iii.
Smend has drawn up a defence[338] of the whole passage, ii. 9–20,
which he deems not only to stand in a natural relation to vv. 4–8, but to be
indispensable to them. That the passage quotes from other prophets, he
holds to be no proof against its authenticity. If we break off with ver. 8, he
thinks that we must impute to Habakkuk the opinion that the wrongs of the
world are chiefly avenged by human means—a conclusion which is not to
be expected after chap. i.—ii. 1 ff.

3. CHAP. III.
The third chapter, an Ode or Rhapsody, is ascribed to Habakkuk by its
title. This, however, does not prove its authenticity: the title is too like those
assigned to the Psalms in the period of the Second Temple.[339] On the
contrary, the title itself, the occurrence of the musical sign Selah in the
contents, and the colophon suggest for the chapter a liturgical origin after
the Exile.[340] That this is more probable than the alternative opinion, that,
being a genuine work of Habakkuk, the chapter was afterwards arranged as
a Psalm for public worship, is confirmed by the fact that no other work of
the prophets has been treated in the same way. Nor do the contents support
the authorship by Habakkuk. They reflect no definite historical situation
like the preceding chapters. The style and temper are different. While in
them the prophet speaks for himself, here it is the nation or congregation of
Israel that addresses God. The language is not, as some have maintained,
late;[341] but the designation of the people as Thine anointed, a term which
before the Exile was applied to the king, undoubtedly points to a post-exilic
date. The figures, the theophany itself, are not necessarily archaic, but are
more probably moulded on archaic models. There are many affinities with
Psalms of a late date.

At the same time a number of critics[342] maintain the genuineness of
the chapter, and they have some grounds for this. Habakkuk was, as we can
see from chaps. i. and ii., a real poet. There was no need why a man of his
temper should be bound down to reflecting only his own day. If so practical
a prophet as Hosea, and one who has so closely identified himself with his
times, was wont to escape from them to a retrospect of the dealings of God
with Israel from of old, why should not the same be natural for a prophet
who was much less practical and more literary and artistic? There are also
many phrases in the Psalm which may be interpreted as reflecting the same
situation as chaps. i., ii. All this, however, only proves possibility.
The Psalm has been adapted in Psalm lxxvii. 17–20.

FURTHER NOTE ON CHAP. I.—II. 4.

Since this chapter was in print Nowack’s Die Kleinen Propheten in the “Handkommentar z. A.
T.” has been published. He recognises emphatically that the disputed passage about the Chaldeans,
chap. i. 5–11, is out of place where it lies (this against Kuenen and the other authorities cited above,
p. 117), and admits that it follows on, with a natural connection, to chap. ii. 4, to which Budde
proposes to attach it. Nevertheless, for other reasons, which he does not state, he regards Budde’s
proposal as untenable; and reckons the disputed passage to be by another hand than Habakkuk’s, and
intruded into the latter’s argument. Habakkuk’s argument he assigns to after 605; perhaps 590. The
tyrant complained against would therefore be the Chaldean.—Driver in the 6th ed. of his Introduction
(1897) deems Budde’s argument “too ingenious,” and holds by the older and most numerously
supported argument (above, pp. 116 ff.).—On a review of the case in the light of these two
discussions, the present writer holds to his opinion that Budde’s rearrangement, which he has
adopted, offers the fewest difficulties.

CHAPTER X

THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC
HABAKKUK i.—ii. 4

Of the prophet Habakkuk we know nothing that is personal save his name
—to our ears his somewhat odd name. It is the intensive form of a root
which means to caress or embrace. More probably it was given to him as a
child, than afterwards assumed as a symbol of his clinging to God.[343]
Tradition says that Habakkuk was a priest, the son of Joshua, of the
tribe of Levi, but this is only an inference from the late liturgical notes to
the Psalm which has been appended to his prophecy.[344] All that we know
for certain is that he was a contemporary of Jeremiah, with a sensitiveness
under wrong and impulses to question God which remind us of Jeremiah;
but with a literary power which is quite his own. We may emphasise the
latter, even though we recognise upon his writing the influence of Isaiah’s.
Habakkuk’s originality, however, is deeper than style. He is the earliest
who is known to us of a new school of religion in Israel. He is called
prophet, but at first he does not adopt the attitude which is characteristic of
the prophets. His face is set in an opposite direction to theirs. They address
the nation Israel, on behalf of God: he rather speaks to God on behalf of
Israel. Their task was Israel’s sin, the proclamation of God’s doom and the
offer of His grace to their penitence. Habakkuk’s task is God Himself, the
effort to find out what He means by permitting tyranny and wrong. They
attack the sins, he is the first to state the problems, of life. To him the
prophetic revelation, the Torah, is complete: it has been codified in
Deuteronomy and enforced by Josiah. Habakkuk’s business is not to add to
it but to ask why it does not work. Why does God suffer wrong to triumph,
so that the Torah is paralysed, and Mishpat, the prophetic justice or

judgment, comes to nought? The prophets travailed for Israel’s character—
to get the people to love justice till justice prevailed among them:
Habakkuk feels justice cannot prevail in Israel, because of the great
disorder which God permits to fill the world. It is true that he arrives at a
prophetic attitude, and before the end authoritatively declares God’s will;
but he begins by searching for the latter, with an appreciation of the great
obscurity cast over it by the facts of life. He complains to God, asks
questions and expostulates. This is the beginning of speculation in Israel. It
does not go far: it is satisfied with stating questions to God; it does not,
directly at least, state questions against Him. But Habakkuk at least feels
that revelation is baffled by experience, that the facts of life bewilder a man
who believes in the God whom the prophets have declared to Israel. As in
Zephaniah prophecy begins to exhibit traces of apocalypse, so in Habakkuk
we find it developing the first impulses of speculation.
We have seen that the course of events which troubles Habakkuk and
renders the Torah ineffectual is somewhat obscure. On one interpretation of
these two chapters, that which takes the present order of their verses as the
original, Habakkuk asks why God is silent in face of the injustice which
fills the whole horizon (chap. i. 1–4), is told to look round among the
heathen and see how God is raising up the Chaldeans (i. 5–11), presumably
to punish this injustice (if it be Israel’s own) or to overthrow it (if vv. 1–4
mean that it is inflicted on Israel by a foreign power). But the Chaldeans
only aggravate the prophet’s problem; they themselves are a wicked and
oppressive people: how can God suffer them? (i. 12–17). Then come the
prophet’s waiting for an answer (ii. 1) and the answer itself (ii. 2 ff.).
Another interpretation takes the passage about the Chaldeans (i. 5–11) to be
out of place where it now lies, removes it to after chap. ii. 4 as a part of
God’s answer to the prophet’s problem, and leaves the remainder of chap. i.
as the description of the Assyrian oppression of Israel, baffling the Torah

and perplexing the prophet’s faith in a Holy and Just God.[345] Of these two
views the former is, we have seen, somewhat artificial, and though the latter
is by no means proved, the arguments for it are sufficient to justify us in re-
arranging the verses chap. i.—ii. 4 in accordance with its proposals.

The Oracle which Habakkuk the Prophet
Received by Vision.[346]

How long, O Jehovah, have I called and Thou
hearest not?
I cry to Thee, Wrong! and Thou sendest no help.
Why make me look upon sorrow,
And fill mine eyes with trouble?
Violence and wrong are before me,
Strife comes and quarrel arises.[347]
So the Law is benumbed, and judgment never
gets forth:[348]
For the wicked beleaguers the righteous,
So judgment comes forth perverted.

* * * * *[349]

Art not Thou of old, Jehovah, my God, my Holy
One?...[350]
Purer of eyes than to behold evil,
And that canst not gaze upon trouble!
Why gazest Thou upon traitors,[351]
Art dumb when the wicked swallows him that is
more righteous than he?[352]
Thou hast let men be made[353] like fish of the sea,
Like worms that have no ruler![354]
He lifts the whole of it with his angle;
Draws it in with his net, sweeps it in his drag-net:
So rejoices and exults.
So he sacrifices to his net, and offers incense
to his drag-net;
For by them is his portion fat, and his food rich.
Shall he for ever draw his sword,[355]
And ceaselessly, ruthlessly massacre nations?[356]

Upon my watch-tower I will stand,
And take my post on the rampart.[357]
I will watch to see what He will say to me,
And what answer I[358] get back to my plea.

And Jehovah answered me and said:
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets,
That he may run who reads it.
For[359] the vision is for a time yet to be fixed,
Yet it hurries[360] to the end, and shall not fail:
Though it linger, wait thou for it;

Coming it shall come, and shall not be behind.[361]
Lo! swollen,[362] not level is his[363] soul within him;
But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.[364]

* * * * *

Look[365] round among the heathen, and
look well,
Shudder and be shocked;[366]
For I am[367] about to do a work in your days,
Ye shall not believe it when told.
For, lo, I am about to raise up the Kasdim,[368]
A people the most bitter and the most hasty,
That traverse the breadths of the earth,
To possess dwelling-places not their own.
Awful and terrible are they;
From themselves[369] start their purpose and rising.
Fleeter than leopards their steeds,
Swifter than night-wolves.
Their horsemen leap[370] from afar;
They swoop like the eagle a-haste to devour.
All for wrong do they[371] come;
The set of their faces is forward,[372]
And they sweep up captives like sand.
They—at kings do they scoff,
And princes are sport to them.
They—they laugh at each fortress,
Heap dust up and take it!
Then the wind shifts,[373] and they pass!
But doomed are those whose own strength is
their god![374]

The difficulty of deciding between the various arrangements of the two
chapters of Habakkuk does not, fortunately, prevent us from appreciating

his argument. What he feels throughout (this is obvious, however you
arrange his verses) is the tyranny of a great heathen power,[375] be it
Assyrian, Egyptian or Chaldean. The prophet’s horizon is filled with wrong:
[376]
Israel thrown into disorder, revelation paralysed, justice perverted.[377]
But, like Nahum, Habakkuk feels not for Israel alone. The Tyrant has
outraged humanity.[378] He sweeps peoples into his net, and as soon as he
empties this, he fills it again ceaselessly, as if there were no just God above.
He exults in his vast cruelty, and has success so unbroken that he worships
the very means of it. In itself such impiety is gross enough, but to a heart
that believes in God it is a problem of exquisite pain. Habakkuk’s is the
burden of the finest faith. He illustrates the great commonplace of religious
doubt, that problems arise and become rigorous in proportion to the purity
and tenderness of a man’s conception of God. It is not the coarsest but the
finest temperaments which are exposed to scepticism. Every advance in
assurance of God or in appreciation of His character develops new
perplexities in face of the facts of experience, and faith becomes her own
most cruel troubler. Habakkuk’s questions are not due to any cooling of the
religious temper in Israel, but are begotten of the very heat and ardour of
prophecy in its encounter with experience. His tremulousness, for instance,
is impossible without the high knowledge of God’s purity and faithfulness,
which older prophets had achieved in Israel:—

Art not Thou of old, O LORD, my God, my Holy One,
Purer of eyes than to behold evil,
And incapable of looking upon wrong?

His despair is that which comes only from eager and persevering habits of
prayer:—

How long, O LORD, have I called and Thou hearest not!
I cry to Thee of wrong and Thou givest no help!

His questions, too, are bold with that sense of God’s absolute power, which
flashed so bright in Israel as to blind men’s eyes to all secondary and
intermediate causes. Thou, he says,—

Thou hast made men like fishes of the sea,
Like worms that have no ruler,

boldly charging the Almighty, in almost the temper of Job himself, with
being the cause of the cruelty inflicted by the unchecked tyrant upon the
nations; for shall evil happen, and Jehovah not have done it?[379] Thus all
through we perceive that Habakkuk’s trouble springs from the central
founts of prophecy. This scepticism—if we may venture to give the name to
the first motions in Israel’s mind of that temper which undoubtedly became
scepticism—this scepticism was the inevitable heritage of prophecy: the
stress and pain to which prophecy was forced by its own strong convictions
in face of the facts of experience. Habakkuk, the prophet, as he is called,
stood in the direct line of his order, but just because of that he was the father
also of Israel’s religious doubt.
But a discontent springing from sources so pure was surely the
preparation of its own healing. In a verse of exquisite beauty the prophet
describes the temper in which he trusted for an answer to all his doubts:—

On my watch-tower will I stand,
And take up my post on the rampart;
I will watch to see what He says to me,
And what answer I get back to my plea.

This verse is not to be passed over, as if its metaphors were merely of
literary effect. They express rather the moral temper in which the prophet
carries his doubt, or, to use New Testament language, the good conscience,
which some having put away, concerning faith have made shipwreck. Nor is
this temper patience only and a certain elevation of mind, nor only a fixed
attention and sincere willingness to be answered. Through the chosen words
there breathes a noble sense of responsibility. The prophet feels he has a
post to hold, a rampart to guard. He knows the heritage of truth, won by the
great minds of the past; and in a world seething with disorder, he will take
his stand upon that and see what more his God will send him. At the very
least, he will not indolently drift, but feel that he has a standpoint, however
narrow, and bravely hold it. Such has ever been the attitude of the greatest
sceptics—not only, let us repeat, earnestness and sincerity, but the
recognition of duty towards the truth: the conviction that even the most
tossed and troubled minds have somewhere a ποῦ στῶ appointed of God,
and upon it interests human and divine to defend. Without such a
conscience, scepticism, however intellectually gifted, will avail nothing.
Men who drift never discover, never grasp aught. They are only dazzled by
shifting gleams of the truth, only fretted and broken by experience.
Taking then his stand within the patient temper, but especially upon the
conscience of his great order, the prophet waits for his answer and the
healing of his trouble. The answer comes to him in the promise of a Vision,
which, though it seem to linger, will not be later than the time fixed by God.
A Vision is something realised, experienced—something that will be as
actual and present to the waiting prophet as the cruelty which now fills his
sight. Obviously some series of historical events is meant, by which, in the
course of time, the unjust oppressor of the nations shall be overthrown and
the righteous vindicated. Upon the re-arrangement of the text proposed by
Budde,[380] this series of events is the rise of the Chaldeans, and it is an

argument in favour of his proposal that the promise of a Vision requires
some such historical picture to follow it as we find in the description of the
Chaldeans—chap. i. 5–11. This, too, is explicitly introduced by terms of
vision: See among the nations and look round.... Yea, behold I am about to
raise up the Kasdim. But before this Vision is given,[381] and for the
uncertain interval of waiting ere the facts come to pass, the Lord enforces
upon His watching servant the great moral principle that arrogance and
tyranny cannot, from the nature of them, last, and that if the righteous be
only patient he will survive them:—

Lo, swollen, not level, is his soul within him;
But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.

We have already seen[382] that the text of the first line of this couplet is
uncertain. Yet the meaning is obvious, partly in the words themselves, and
partly by their implied contrast with the second line. The soul of the wicked
is a radically morbid thing: inflated, swollen (unless we should read
perverted, which more plainly means the same thing[383]), not level, not
natural and normal. In the nature of things it cannot endure. But the
righteous shall live by his faithfulness. This word, wrongly translated faith
by the Greek and other versions, is concentrated by Paul in his repeated
quotation from the Greek[384] upon that single act of faith by which the
sinner secures forgiveness and justification. With Habakkuk it is a wider
term. ’Emunah,[385] from a verb meaning originally to be firm, is used in
the Old Testament in the physical sense of steadfastness. So it is applied to
the arms of Moses held up by Aaron and Hur over the battle with Amalek:
they were steadiness till the going down of the sun.[386] It is also used of the
faithful discharge of public office,[387] and of fidelity as between man and
wife.[388] It is also faithful testimony,[389] equity in judgment,[390] truth in

speech,[391] and sincerity or honest dealing.[392] Of course it has faith in
God as its secret—the verb from which it is derived is the regular Hebrew
term to believe—but it is rather the temper which faith produces of
endurance, steadfastness, integrity. Let the righteous, however baffled his
faith be by experience, hold on in loyalty to God and duty, and he shall live.
Though St. Paul, as we have said, used the Greek rendering of faith for the
enforcement of trust in God’s mercy through Jesus Christ as the secret of
forgiveness and life, it is rather to Habakkuk’s wider intention of patience
and fidelity that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews returns in his fuller
quotation of the verse: For yet a little while and He that shall come will
come and will not tarry; now the just shall live by faith, but if he draw back
My soul shall have no pleasure in him.[393]
Such then is the tenor of the passage. In face of experience that baffles
faith, the duty of Israel is patience in loyalty to God. In this the nascent
scepticism of Israel received its first great commandment, and this it never
forsook. Intellectual questions arose, of which Habakkuk’s were but the
faintest foreboding—questions concerning not only the mission and destiny
of the nation, but the very foundation of justice and the character of God
Himself. Yet did no sceptic, however bold and however provoked, forsake
his faithfulness. Even Job, when most audaciously arraigning the God of his
experience, turned from Him to God as in his heart of hearts he believed He
must be, experience notwithstanding. Even the Preacher, amid the aimless
flux and drift which he finds in the universe, holds to the conclusion of the
whole matter in a command, which better than any other defines the
contents of the faithfulness enforced by Habakkuk: Fear God and keep His
commandments, for this is the whole of man. It has been the same with the
great mass of the race. Repeatedly disappointed of their hopes, and crushed
for ages beneath an intolerable tyranny, have they not exhibited the same
heroic temper with which their first great questioner was endowed?

Endurance—this above all others has been the quality of Israel: though He
slay me, yet will I trust Him. And, therefore, as Paul’s adaptation, The just
shall live by faith, has become the motto of evangelical Christianity, so we
may say that Habakkuk’s original of it has been the motto and the fame of
Judaism: The righteous shall live by his faithfulness.

CHAPTER XI

TYRANNY IS SUICIDE
HABAKKUK ii. 5–20

In the style of his master Isaiah, Habakkuk follows up his Vision with a
series of lyrics on the same subject: chap. ii. 5–20. They are taunt-songs, the
most of them beginning with Woe unto, addressed to the heathen oppressor.
Perhaps they were all at first of equal length, and it has been suggested that
the striking refrain in which two of them close—

For men’s blood, and earth’s waste,
Cities and their inhabitants—

was once attached to each of the others as well. But the text has been
too much altered, besides suffering several interpolations,[394] to permit of
its restoration, and we can only reproduce these taunts as they now run in
the Hebrew text. There are several quotations (not necessarily an argument
against Habakkuk’s authorship); but, as a whole, the expression is original,
and there are some lines of especial force and freshness. Verses 5–6a are
properly an introduction, the first Woe commencing with 6b.
The belief which inspires these songs is very simple. Tyranny is
intolerable. In the nature of things it cannot endure, but works out its own
penalties. By oppressing so many nations, the tyrant is preparing the
instruments of his own destruction. As he treats them, so in time shall they
treat him. He is like a debtor who increases the number of his creditors.
Some day they shall rise up and exact from him the last penny. So that in
cutting off others he is but forfeiting his own life. The very violence done to
nature, the deforesting of Lebanon for instance, and the vast hunting of wild

beasts, shall recoil on him. This line of thought is exceedingly interesting.
We have already seen in prophecy, and especially in Isaiah, the beginnings
of Hebrew Wisdom—the attempt to uncover the moral processes of life and
express a philosophy of history. But hardly anywhere have we found so
complete an absence of all reference to the direct interference of God
Himself in the punishment of the tyrant; for the cup of Jehovah’s right hand
in ver. 16 is simply the survival of an ancient metaphor. These proverbs or
taunt-songs, in conformity with the proverbs of the later Wisdom, dwell
only upon the inherent tendency to decay of all injustice. Tyranny, they
assert, and history ever since has affirmed their truthfulness—tyranny is
suicide.
The last of the taunt-songs, which treats of the different subject of
idolatry, is probably, as we have seen, not from Habakkuk’s hand, but of a
later date.[395]

INTRODUCTION TO THE TAUNT-SONGS (ii. 5–6a).

For ...[396] treacherous,
An arrogant fellow, and is not ...[397]
Who opens his desire wide as Sheol;
He is like death, unsatisfied;
And hath swept to himself all the nations,
And gathered to him all peoples.
Shall not these, all of them, take up a proverb
upon him,
And a taunt-song against him? and say:—

FIRST TAUNT-SONG (ii. 6b–8).

Woe unto him who multiplies what is not his own,
—How long?—
And loads him with debts![398]
Shall not thy creditors[399] rise up,
And thy troublers awake,
And thou be for spoil[400] to them?
Because thou hast spoiled many nations,
All the rest of the peoples shall spoil thee.
For men’s blood, and earth’s waste,
Cities and all their inhabitants.[401]

SECOND TAUNT-SONG (ii. 9–11).

Woe unto him that gains evil gain for his house,[402]
To set high his nest, to save him from the grasp
of calamity!
Thou hast planned shame for thy house;
Thou hast cut off[403] many people,
While forfeiting thine own life.[404]
For the stone shall cry out from the wall,
And the lath[405] from the timber answer it.

THIRD TAUNT-SONG (ii. 12–14).

Woe unto him that builds a city in blood,[406]
And stablishes a town in iniquity![407]
Lo, is it not from Jehovah of hosts,
That the nations shall toil for smoke,[408]
And the peoples wear themselves out for nought?
But earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the
glory of Jehovah,[409]
Like the waters that cover the sea.

FOURTH TAUNT-SONG (ii. 15–17).

Woe unto him that gives his neighbour to drink,
From the cup of his wrath[410] till he be drunken,
That he may gloat on his[411] nakedness!
Thou art sated with shame—not with glory;
Drink also thou, and stagger.[412]
Comes round to thee the cup of Jehovah’s right hand,
And foul shame[413] on thy glory.
For the violence to Lebānon shall cover thee,
The destruction of the beasts shall affray thee.[414]
For men’s blood, and earth’s waste,
Cities and all their inhabitants.[415]

FIFTH TAUNT-SONG (ii. 18–20).

What boots an image, when its artist has graven it,
A cast-image and lie-oracle, that its moulder has
trusted upon it,
Making dumb idols?
Woe to him that saith to a block, Awake!
To a dumb stone, Arise!
Can it teach?
Lo, it ...[416] with gold and silver;
There is no breath at all in the heart of it.
But Jehovah is in His Holy Temple:
Silence before Him, all the earth!

CHAPTER XII

“IN THE MIDST OF THE YEARS”
HABAKKUK iii.

We have seen the impossibility of deciding the age of the ode which is
attributed to Habakkuk in the third chapter of his book.[417] But this is only
one of the many problems raised by that brilliant poem. Much of its text is
corrupt, and the meaning of many single words is uncertain. As in most
Hebrew poems of description, the tenses of the verbs puzzle us; we cannot
always determine whether the poet is singing of that which is past or
present or future, and this difficulty is increased by his subject, a revelation
of God in nature for the deliverance of Israel. Is this the deliverance from
Egypt, with the terrible tempests which accompanied it? Or have the
features of the Exodus been borrowed to describe some other deliverance,
or to sum up the constant manifestation of Jehovah for His people’s help?
The introduction, in ver. 2, is clear. The singer has heard what is to be
heard of Jehovah, and His great deeds in the past. He prays for a revival of
these in the midst of the years. The times are full of trouble and turmoil.
Would that God, in the present confusion of baffled hopes and broken
issues, made Himself manifest by power and brilliance, as of old! In turmoil
remember mercy! To render turmoil by wrath, as if it were God’s anger
against which the singer’s heart appealed, is not true to the original word
itself,[418] affords no parallel to the midst of the years, and misses the
situation. Israel cries from a state of life in which the obscure years are
huddled together and full of turmoil. We need not wish to fix the date more
precisely than the writer himself does, but may leave it with him in the
midst of the years.

There follows the description of the Great Theophany, of which, in his
own poor times, the singer has heard. It is probable that he has in his
memory the events of the Exodus and Sinai. On this point his few
geographical allusions agree with his descriptions of nature. He draws all
the latter from the desert, or Arabian, side of Israel’s history. He introduces
none of the sea-monsters, or imputations of arrogance and rebellion to the
sea itself, which the influence of Babylonian mythology so thickly scattered
through the later sea-poetry of the Hebrews. The Theophany takes place in a
violent tempest of thunder and rain, the only process of nature upon which
the desert poets of Arabia dwell with any detail. In harmony with this, God
appears from the southern desert, from Teman and Paran, as in the
theophanies in Deuteronomy xxxiii. and in the Song of Deborah;[419] a few
lines recall the Song of the Exodus,[420] and there are many resemblances to
the phraseology of the Sixty-Eighth Psalm. The poet sees under trouble the
tents of Kushan and of Midian, tribes of Sinai. And though the Theophany
is with floods of rain and lightning, and foaming of great waters, it is not
with hills, rivers or sea that God is angry, but with the nations, the
oppressors of His poor people, and in order that He may deliver the latter.
All this, taken with the fact that no mention is made of Egypt, proves that,
while the singer draws chiefly upon the marvellous events of the Exodus
and Sinai for his description, he celebrates not them alone but all the
ancient triumphs of God over the heathen oppressors of Israel. Compare the
obscure line—these be His goings of old.
The report of it all fills the poet with trembling (ver. 16 returns upon
ver. 26), and although his language is too obscure to permit us to follow
with certainty the course of his feeling, he appears to await in confidence
the issue of Israel’s present troubles. His argument seems to be, that such a
God may be trusted still, in face of approaching invasion (ver. 16).

The next verse, however, does not express the experience of trouble
from human foes; but figuring the extreme affliction of drought, barrenness
and poverty, the poet speaking in the name of Israel declares that, in spite of
them, he will still rejoice in the God of their salvation (ver. 17). So sudden
is this change from human foes to natural plagues, that some scholars have
here felt a passage to another poem describing a different situation. But the
last lines with their confidence in the God of salvation, a term always used
of deliverance from enemies, and the boast, borrowed from the Eighteenth
Psalm, He maketh my feet like to hinds’ feet, and gives me to march on my
heights, reflect the same circumstances as the bulk of the Psalm, and offer
no grounds to doubt the unity of the whole.[421]

PSALM[422] OF HABAKKUK THE PROPHET.

LORD, I have heard the report of Thee;
I stand in awe![423]
LORD, revive Thy work in the midst of the years,
In the midst of the years make Thee known;[424]
In turmoil[425] remember mercy!

God comes from Teman,[426]
The Holy from Mount Paran.[427]
He covers the heavens with His glory,
And filled with His praise is the earth.
The flash is like lightning;
He has rays from each hand of Him,
Therein[428] is the ambush of His might.

Pestilence travels before Him,
The plague-fire breaks forth at His feet.
He stands and earth shakes,[429]
He looks and drives nations asunder;
And the ancient mountains are cloven,
The hills everlasting sink down.
These be His ways from of old.[430]

Under trouble I see the tents of Kûshān,[431]
The curtains of Midian’s land are quivering.
Is it with hills[432] Jehovah is wroth?
Is Thine anger with rivers?
Or against the sea is Thy wrath,
That Thou ridest it with horses,
Thy chariots of victory?
Thy bow is stripped bare;[433]

Thy bow is stripped bare;[ 33]
Thou gluttest (?) Thy shafts.[434]
Into rivers Thou cleavest the earth;[435]
Mountains see Thee and writhe;
The rainstorm sweeps on:[436]
The Deep utters his voice,
He lifts up his roar upon high.[437]
Sun and moon stand still in their dwelling,
At the flash of Thy shafts as they speed,
At the sheen of the lightning, Thy lance.
In wrath Thou stridest the earth,
In anger Thou threshest the nations!
Thou art forth to the help of Thy people,
To save Thine anointed.[438]
Thou hast shattered the head from the house of
the wicked,
Laying bare from ...[439] to the neck.
Thou hast pierced with Thy spears the head of
his princes.[440]
They stormed forth to crush me;
Their triumph was as to devour the poor in
secret.[441]
Thou hast marched on the sea with Thy horses;
Foamed[442] the great waters.

I have heard, and my heart[443] shakes;
At the sound my lips tremble,[444]
Rottenness enters my bones,[445]
My steps shake under me.[446]
I will ...[447] for the day of trouble

f y f
That pours in on the people.[448]

Though the fig-tree do not blossom,[449]
And no fruit be on the vines,
Fail the produce of the olive,
And the fields yield no meat,
Cut off[450] be the flock from the fold,
And no cattle in the stalls,
Yet in the LORD will I exult,
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
Jehovah, the Lord, is my might;
He hath made my feet like the hinds’,
And on my heights He gives me to march.

This Psalm, whose musical signs prove it to have been employed in the
liturgy of the Jewish Temple, has also largely entered into the use of the
Christian Church. The vivid style, the sweep of vision, the exultation in the
extreme of adversity with which it closes, have made it a frequent theme of
preachers and of poets. St. Augustine’s exposition of the Septuagint version
spiritualises almost every clause into a description of the first and second
advents of Christ.[451] Calvin’s more sober and accurate learning interpreted
it of God’s guidance of Israel from the time of the Egyptian plagues to the
days of Joshua and Gideon, and made it enforce the lesson that He who so
wonderfully delivered His people in their youth will not forsake them in the
midway of their career.[452] The closing verses have been torn from the rest
to form the essence of a large number of hymns in many languages.
For ourselves it is perhaps most useful to fasten upon the poet’s
description of his own position in the midst of the years, and like him to
take heart, amid our very similar circumstances, from the glorious story of
God’s ancient revelation, in the faith that He is still the same in might and

in purpose of grace to His people. We, too, live among the nameless years.
We feel them about us, undistinguished by the manifest workings of God,
slow and petty, or, at the most, full of inarticulate turmoil. At this very
moment we suffer from the frustration of a great cause, on which believing
men had set their hearts as God’s cause; Christendom has received from the
infidel no greater reverse since the days of the Crusades. Or, lifting our eyes
to a larger horizon, we are tempted to see about us a wide, flat waste of
years. It is nearly nineteen centuries since the great revelation of God in
Christ, the redemption of mankind, and all the wonders of the Early Church.
We are far, far away from that, and unstirred by the expectation of any crisis
in the near future. We stand in the midst of the years, equally distant from
beginning and from end. It is the situation which Jesus Himself likened to
the long double watch in the middle of the night—if he come in the second
watch or in the third watch—against whose dulness He warned His
disciples. How much need is there at such a time to recall, like this poet,
what God has done—how often He has shaken the world and overturned
the nations, for the sake of His people and the Divine causes they represent.
His ways are everlasting. As He then worked, so He will work now for the
same ends of redemption. Our prayer for a revival of His work will be
answered before it is spoken.
It is probable that much of our sense of the staleness of the years comes
from their prosperity. The dull feeling that time is mere routine is fastened
upon our hearts by nothing more firmly than by the constant round of
fruitful seasons—that fortification of comfort, that regularity of material
supplies, which modern life assures to so many. Adversity would brace us
to a new expectation of the near and strong action of our God. This is
perhaps the meaning of the sudden mention of natural plagues in the
seventeenth verse of our Psalm. Not in spite of the extremes of misfortune,
but just because of them, should we exult in the God of our salvation; and

realise that it is by discipline He makes His Church to feel that she is not
marching over the dreary levels of nameless years, but on our high places
He makes us to march.
“Grant, Almighty God, as the dulness and hardness of our flesh is so
great that it is needful for us to be in various ways afflicted—oh grant that
we patiently bear Thy chastisement, and under a deep feeling of sorrow flee
to Thy mercy displayed to us in Christ, so that we depend not on the earthly
blessings of this perishable life, but relying on Thy word go forward in the
course of our calling, until at length we be gathered to that blessed rest
which is laid up for us in heaven, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”[453]

OBADIAH

And Saviours shall come up on Mount Zion to judge
Mount Esau, and the kingdom shall be Jehovah’s.

CHAPTER XIII

THE BOOK OF OBADIAH

The Book of Obadiah is the smallest among the prophets, and the smallest
in all the Old Testament. Yet there is none which better illustrates many of
the main problems of Old Testament criticism. It raises, indeed, no doctrinal
issue nor any question of historical accuracy. All that it claims to be is The
Vision of Obadiah;[454] and this vague name, with no date or dwelling-place
to challenge comparison with the contents of the book, introduces us
without prejudice to the criticism of the latter. Nor is the book involved in
the central controversy of Old Testament scholarship, the date of the Law. It
has no reference to the Law. Nor is it made use of in the New Testament.
The more freely, therefore, may we study the literary and historical
questions started by the twenty-one verses which compose the book. Their
brief course is broken by differences of style, and by sudden changes of
outlook from the past to the future. Some of them present a close parallel to
another passage of prophecy, a feature which when present offers a difficult
problem to the critic. Hardly any of the historical allusions are free from
ambiguity, for although the book refers throughout to a single nation—and
so vividly that even if Edom were not named we might still discern the
character and crimes of that bitter brother of Israel—yet the conflict of
Israel and Edom was so prolonged and so monotonous in its cruelties, that
there are few of its many centuries to which some scholar has not felt
himself able to assign, in part or whole, Obadiah’s indignant oration. The
little book has been tossed out of one century into another by successive
critics, till there exists in their estimates of its date a difference of nearly six
hundred years.[455] Such a fact seems, at first sight, to convict criticism
either of arbitrariness or helplessness;[456] yet a little consideration of

details is enough to lead us to an appreciation of the reasonable methods of
Old Testament criticism, and of its indubitable progress towards certainty,
in spite of our ignorance of large stretches of the history of Israel. To the
student of the Old Testament nothing could be more profitable than to
master the historical and literary questions raised by the Book of Obadiah,
before following them out among the more complicated problems which are
started by other prophetical books in their relation to the Law of Israel, or to
their own titles, or to claims made for them in the New Testament.

The Book of Obadiah contains a number of verbal parallels to another
prophecy against Edom which appears in Jeremiah xlix. 7–22. Most critics
have regarded this prophecy of Jeremiah as genuine, and have assigned it to
the year 604 B.C. The question is whether Obadiah or Jeremiah is the earlier.
Hitzig and Vatke[457] answered in favour of Jeremiah; and as the Book of
Obadiah also contains a description of Edom’s conduct in the day of
Jerusalem’s overthrow by Nebuchadrezzar, in 586, they brought the whole
book down to post-exilic times. Very forcible arguments, however, have
been offered for Obadiah’s priority.[458] Upon this priority, as well as on the
facts that Joel, whom they take to be early, quotes from Obadiah, and that
Obadiah’s book occurs among the first six—presumably the pre-exilic
members—of the Twelve, a number of scholars have assigned all of it to an
early period in Israel’s history. Some fix upon the reign of Jehoshaphat,
when Judah was invaded by Edom and his allies Moab and Ammon, but
saved from disaster through Moab and Ammon turning upon the Edomites
and slaughtering them.[459] To this they refer the phrase in Obadiah 9, the
men of thy covenant have betrayed thee. Others place the whole book in the
reign of Joram of Judah (849—842 B.C.), when, according to the Chronicles,
[460] Judah was invaded and Jerusalem partly sacked by Philistines and

Arabs.[461] But in the story of this invasion, there is no mention of

Edomites, and the argument which is drawn from Joel’s quotation of
Obadiah fails if Joel, as we shall see, be of late date. With greater prudence
Pusey declines to fix a period.
The supporters of a pre-exilic origin for the whole Book of Obadiah
have to explain vv. 11–14, which appear to reflect Edom’s conduct at the
sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar in 586, and they do so in two ways.
Pusey takes the verses as predictive of Nebuchadrezzar’s siege. Orelli and
others believe that they suit better the conquest and plunder of the city in
the time of Jehoram. But, as Calvin has said, “they seem to be mistaken
who think that Obadiah lived before the time of Isaiah.”
The question, however, very early arose, whether it was possible to take
Obadiah as a unity. Vv. 1–9 are more vigorous and firm than vv. 10–21. In
vv. 1–9 Edom is destroyed by nations who are its allies; in vv. 10–21 it is
still to fall along with other Gentiles in the general judgment of the Lord.
[462]
Vv. 10–21 admittedly describe the conduct of the Edomites at the
overthrow of Jerusalem in 586; but vv. 1–9 probably reflect earlier events;
and it is significant that in them alone occur the parallels to Jeremiah’s
prophecy against Edom in 604. On some of these grounds Ewald regarded
the little book as consisting of two pieces, both of which refer to Edom, but
the first of which was written before Jeremiah, and the second is post-exilic.
As Jeremiah’s prophecy has some features more original than Obadiah’s,
[463] he traced both prophecies to an original oracle against Edom, of which

Obadiah on the whole renders an exact version. He fixed the date of this
oracle in the earlier days of Isaiah, when Rezin of Syria enabled Edom to
assert again its independence of Judah, and Edom won back Elath, which
Uzziah had taken.[464] Driver, Wildeboer and Cornill[465] adopt this theory,
with the exception of the period to which Ewald refers the original oracle.
According to them, the Book of Obadiah consists of two pieces, vv. 1–9

pre-exilic, and vv. 10–21 post-exilic and descriptive in 11–14 of
Nebuchadrezzar’s sack of Jerusalem.
This latter point need not be contested.[466] But is it clear that 1–9 are so
different from 10–21 that they must be assigned to another period? Are they
necessarily pre-exilic? Wellhausen thinks not, and has constructed still
another theory of the origin of the book, which, like Vatke’s, brings it all
down to the period after the Exile.
There is no mention in the book either of Assyria or of Babylonia.[467]
The allies who have betrayed Edom (ver. 7) are therefore probably those
Arabian tribes who surrounded it and were its frequent confederates.[468]
They are described as sending Edom to the border (ib.). Wellhausen thinks
that this can only refer to the great northward movement of Arabs which
began to press upon the fertile lands to the south-east of Israel during the
time of the Captivity. Ezekiel[469] prophesies that Ammon and Moab will
disappear before the Arabs, and we know that by the year 312 the latter
were firmly settled in the territories of Edom.[470] Shortly before this the
Hagarenes appear in Chronicles, and Se’ir is called by the Arabic name
Gebal,[471] while as early as the fifth century “Malachi”[472] records the
desolation of Edom’s territory by the jackals of the wilderness, and the
expulsion of the Edomites, who will not return. The Edomites were pushed
up into the Negeb of Israel, and occupied the territory round, and to the
south of, Hebron till their conquest by John Hyrcanus about 130; even after
that it was called Idumæa.[473] Wellhausen would assign Obadiah 1–7 to the
same stage of this movement as is reflected in “Malachi” i. 1–5; and, apart
from certain parentheses, would therefore take the whole of Obadiah as a
unity from the end of the fifth century before Christ. In that case
Giesebrecht argues that the parallel prophecy, Jeremiah xlix. 7–22, must be
reckoned as one of the passages of the Book of Jeremiah in which post-
exilic additions have been inserted.[474]

Our criticism of this theory may start from the seventh verse of
Obadiah: To the border they have sent thee, all the men of thy covenant
have betrayed thee, they have overpowered thee, the men of thy peace. On
our present knowledge of the history of Edom it is impossible to assign the
first of these clauses to any period before the Exile. No doubt in earlier days
Edom was more than once subjected to Arab razzias. But up to the Jewish
Exile the Edomites were still in possession of their own land. So the
Deuteronomist[475] implies, and so Ezekiel[476] and perhaps the author of
Lamentations.[477] Wellhausen’s claim, therefore, that the seventh verse of
Obadiah refers to the expulsion of Edomites by Arabs in the sixth or fifth
century B.C. may be granted.[478] But does this mean that verses 1–6 belong,
as he maintains, to the same period? A negative answer seems required by
the following facts. To begin with, the seventh verse is not found in the
parallel prophecy in Jeremiah. There is no reason why it should not have
been used there, if that prophecy had been compiled at a time when the
expulsion of the Edomites was already an accomplished fact. But both by
this omission and by all its other features, that prophecy suits the time of
Jeremiah, and we may leave it, therefore, where it was left till the
appearance of Wellhausen’s theory—namely, with Jeremiah himself.[479]
Moreover Jeremiah xlix. 9 seems to have been adapted in Obadiah 5 in
order to suit verse 6. But again, Obadiah 1–6, which contains so many
parallels to Jeremiah’s prophecy, also seems to imply that the Edomites are
still in possession of their land. The nations (we may understand by this the
Arab tribes) are risen against Edom, and Edom is already despicable in face
of them (vv. 1, 2); but he has not yet fallen, any more than, to the writer of
Isaiah xlv.—xlvii., who uses analogous language, Babylon is already fallen.
Edom is weak and cannot resist the Arab razzias. But he still makes his
eyrie on high and says: Who will bring me down? To which challenge
Jehovah replies, not ‘I have brought thee down,’ but I will bring thee down.

The post-exilic portion of Obadiah, then, I take to begin with verse 7; and
the author of this prophecy has begun by incorporating in vv. 1–6 a pre-
exilic prophecy against Edom, which had been already, and with more
freedom, used by Jeremiah. Verses 8–9 form a difficulty. They return to the
future tense, as if the Edomites were still to be cut off from Mount Esau.
But verse 10, as Wellhausen points out, follows on naturally to verse 7, and,
with its successors, clearly points to a period subsequent to
Nebuchadrezzar’s overthrow of Jerusalem. The change from the past tense
in vv. 10–11 to the imperatives of 12–14 need cause, in spite of what Pusey
says, no difficulty, but may be accounted for by the excited feelings of the
prophet. The suggestion has been made, and it is plausible, that Obadiah
speaks as an eye-witness of that awful time. Certainly there is nothing in the
rest of the prophecy (vv. 15–21) to lead us to bring it further down than the
years following the destruction of Jerusalem. Everything points to the Jews
being still in exile. The verbs which describe the inviolateness of Jerusalem
(17), and the reinstatement of Israel in their heritage (17, 19), and their
conquest of Edom (18), are all in the future. The prophet himself appears to
write in exile (20). The captivity of Jerusalem is in Sepharad (ib.) and the
saviours have to come up to Mount Zion; that is to say, they are still beyond
the Holy Land (21).[480]
The one difficulty in assigning this date to the prophecy is that nothing
is said in the Hebrew of ver. 19 about the re-occupation of the hill-country
of Judæa itself, but here the Greek may help us.[481] Certainly every other
feature suits the early days of the Exile.
The result of our inquiry is that the Book of Obadiah was written at that
time by a prophet in exile, who was filled by the same hatred of Edom as
filled another exile, who in Babylon wrote Psalm cxxxvii.; and that, like so
many of the exilic writers, he started from an earlier prophecy against
Edom, already used by Jeremiah.[482] [Nowack (Comm., 1897) takes vv. 1–

14 (with additions in vv. 1, 5, 6, 8f. and 12) to be from a date not long after
the Fall of Jerusalem, alluded to in vv. 11–14; and vv. 15–21 to belong to a
later period, which it is impossible to fix exactly.]
There is nothing in the language of the book to disturb this conclusion.
The Hebrew of Obadiah is pure; unlike its neighbour, the Book of Jonah, it
contains neither Aramaisms nor other symptoms of decadence. The text is
very sound. The Septuagint Version enables us to correct vv. 7 and 17,
offers the true division between vv. 9 and 10, but makes an omission which
leaves no sense in ver. 17.[483] It will be best to give all the twenty-one
verses together before commenting on their spirit.

THE VISION OF OBADIAH.

Thus hath the Lord Jehovah spoken concerning Edom.[484]
“A report have we heard from Jehovah, and a messenger has been sent
through the nations, ‘Up and let us rise against her to battle.’ Lo, I have
made thee small among the nations, thou art very despised! The arrogance
of thy heart hath misled thee, dweller in clefts of the Rock[485]; the height is
his dwelling, that saith in his heart ‘Who shall bring me down to earth!’
Though thou build high as the eagle, though between the stars thou set thy
nest, thence will I bring thee down—oracle of Jehovah. If thieves had come
into thee by night (how art thou humbled!),[486] would they not steal just
what they wanted? If vine-croppers had come into thee, would they not
leave some gleanings? (How searched out is Esau, how rifled his
treasures!)” But now to thy very border have they sent thee, all the men of
thy covenant[487] have betrayed thee, the men of thy peace have
overpowered thee[488]; they kept setting traps for thee—there is no
understanding in him! “[489]Shall it not be in that day—oracle of Jehovah—
that I will cause the wise men to perish from Edom, and understanding from
Mount Esau? And thy heroes, O Teman, shall be dismayed, till[490] every

man be cut off from Mount Esau.” For the slaughter,[491] for the outraging
of thy brother Jacob, shame doth cover thee, and thou art cut off for ever. In
the day of thy standing aloof,[492] in the day when strangers took captive his
substance, and aliens came into his gates,[493] and they cast lots on
Jerusalem, even thou wert as one of them! Ah, gloat not[494] upon the day
of thy brother,[495] the day of his misfortune[496]; exult not over the sons of
Judah in the day of their destruction, and make not thy mouth large[497] in
the day of distress. Come not up into the gate of My people in the day of
their disaster. Gloat not thou, yea thou, upon his ills, in the day of his
disaster, nor put forth thy hand to his substance in the day of his disaster,
nor stand at the parting[498] of the ways (?) to cut off his fugitives; nor
arrest his escaped ones in the day of distress.
For near is the day of Jehovah, upon all the nations— as thou hast
done, so shall it be done to thee: thy deed shall come back on thine own
head.[499]
For as ye[500] have drunk on my holy mount, all the nations shall drink
continuously, drink and reel, and be as though they had not been.[501] But
on Mount Zion shall be refuge, and it shall be inviolate, and the house of
Jacob shall inherit those who have disinherited them.[502] For the house of
Jacob shall be fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, but the house of Esau
shall become stubble, and they shall kindle upon them and devour them,
and there shall not one escape of the house of Esau—for Jehovah hath
spoken.
And the Negeb shall possess Mount Esau, and the Shephelah the
Philistines,[503] and the Mountain[504] shall possess Ephraim and the field
of Samaria,[505] and Benjamin shall possess Gilead. And the exiles of this
host[506] of the children of Israel shall possess(?) the land[507] of the
Canaanites unto Sarephath, and the exiles of Jerusalem who are in
Sepharad[508] shall inherit the cities of the Negeb. And saviours shall come

up on Mount Zion to judge Mount Esau, and the kingdom shall be
Jehovah’s.

CHAPTER XIV

EDOM AND ISRAEL
OBADIAH 1–21

If the Book of Obadiah presents us with some of the most difficult
questions of criticism, it raises besides one of the hardest ethical problems
in all the vexed history of Israel.
Israel’s fate has been to work out their calling in the world through
antipathies rather than by sympathies, but of all the antipathies which the
nation experienced none was more bitter and more constant than that
towards Edom. The rest of Israel’s enemies rose and fell like waves:
Canaanites were succeeded by Philistines, Philistines by Syrians, Syrians by
Greeks. Tyrant relinquished his grasp of God’s people to tyrant: Egyptian,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian; the Seleucids, the Ptolemies. But Edom was
always there, and fretted his anger for ever.[509] From that far back day
when their ancestors wrestled in the womb of Rebekah to the very eve of
the Christian era, when a Jewish king[510] dragged the Idumeans beneath the
yoke of the Law, the two peoples scorned, hated and scourged each other,
with a relentlessness that finds no analogy, between kindred and neighbour
nations, anywhere else in history. About 1030 David, about 130 the
Hasmoneans, were equally at war with Edom; and few are the prophets
between those distant dates who do not cry for vengeance against him or
exult in his overthrow. The Book of Obadiah is singular in this, that it
contains nothing else than such feelings and such cries. It brings no spiritual
message. It speaks no word of sin, or of righteousness, or of mercy, but only
doom upon Edom in bitter resentment at his cruelties, and in exultation that,
as he has helped to disinherit Israel, Israel shall disinherit him. Such a book
among the prophets surprises us. It seems but a dark surge staining the

stream of revelation, as if to exhibit through what a muddy channel these
sacred waters have been poured upon the world. Is the book only an
outbreak of Israel’s selfish patriotism? This is the question we have to
discuss in the present chapter.
Reasons for the hostility of Edom and Israel are not far to seek. The two
nations were neighbours with bitter memories and rival interests. Each of
them was possessed by a strong sense of distinction from the rest of
mankind, which goes far to justify the story of their common descent. But
while in Israel this pride was chiefly due to the consciousness of a peculiar
destiny not yet realised—a pride painful and hungry—in Edom it took the
complacent form of satisfaction in a territory of remarkable isolation and
self-sufficiency, in large stores of wealth, and in a reputation for worldly
wisdom—a fulness that recked little of the future, and felt no need of the
Divine.
The purple mountains, into which the wild sons of Esau clambered, run
out from Syria upon the desert, some hundred miles by twenty of porphyry
and red sandstone. They are said to be the finest rock scenery in the world.
“Salvator Rosa never conceived so savage and so suitable a haunt for
banditti.”[511] From Mount Hor, which is their summit, you look down upon
a maze of mountains, cliffs, chasms, rocky shelves and strips of valley. On
the east the range is but the crested edge of a high, cold plateau, covered for
the most part by stones, but with stretches of corn land and scattered woods.
The western walls, on the contrary, spring steep and bare, black and red,
from the yellow of the desert ‘Arabah. The interior is reached by defiles, so
narrow that two horsemen may scarcely ride abreast, and the sun is shut out
by the overhanging rocks. Eagles, hawks and other mountain birds fly
screaming round the traveller. Little else than wild-fowls’ nests are the
villages; human eyries perched on high shelves or hidden away in caves at
the ends of the deep gorges. There is abundance of water. The gorges are

filled with tamarisks, oleanders and wild figs. Besides the wheat lands on
the eastern plateau, the wider defiles hold fertile fields and terraces for the
vine. Mount Esau is, therefore, no mere citadel with supplies for a limited
siege, but a well-stocked, well-watered country, full of food and lusty men,
yet lifted so high, and locked so fast by precipice and slippery mountain,
that it calls for little trouble of defence. Dweller in the clefts of the rock, the
height is his habitation, that saith in his heart: Who shall bring me down to
earth?[512]
On this rich fortress-land the Edomites enjoyed a civilisation far above
that of the tribes who swarmed upon the surrounding deserts; and at the
same time they were cut off from the lands of those Syrian nations who
were their equals in culture and descent. When Edom looked out of himself,
he looked down and across—down upon the Arabs, whom his position
enabled him to rule with a loose, rough hand, and across at his brothers in
Palestine, forced by their more open territories to make alliances with and
against each other, from all of which he could afford to hold himself free.
That alone was bound to exasperate them. In Edom himself it appears to
have bred a want of sympathy, a habit of keeping to himself and ignoring
the claims both of pity and of kinship—with which he is charged by all the
prophets. He corrupted his natural feelings, and watched his passion for
ever.[513] Thou stoodest aloof![514]
This self-sufficiency was aggravated by the position of the country
among several of the main routes of ancient trade. The masters of Mount
Se’ir held the harbours of ‘Akaba, into which the gold ships came from
Ophir. They intercepted the Arabian caravans and cut the roads to Gaza and
Damascus. Petra, in the very heart of Edom, was in later times the capital of
the Nabatean kingdom, whose commerce rivalled that of Phœnicia,
scattering its inscriptions from Teyma in Central Arabia up to the very gates
of Rome.[515] The earlier Edomites were also traders, middlemen between

Arabia and the Phœnicians; and they filled their caverns with the wealth
both of East and West.[516] There can be little doubt that it was this which
first drew the envious hand of Israel upon a land so cut off from their own
and so difficult of invasion. Hear the exultation of the ancient prophet
whose words Obadiah has borrowed: How searched out is Esau, and his
hidden treasures rifled![517] But the same is clear from the history.
Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Amaziah, Uzziah and other Jewish invaders of
Edom were all ambitious to command the Eastern trade through Elath and
Ezion-geber. For this it was necessary to subdue Edom; and the frequent
reduction of the country to a vassal state, with the revolts in which it broke
free, were accompanied by terrible cruelties upon both sides.[518] Every
century increased the tale of bitter memories between the brothers, and
added the horrors of a war of revenge to those of a war for gold.
The deepest springs of their hate, however, bubbled in their blood. In
genius, temper and ambition, the two peoples were of opposite extremes. It
is very singular that we never hear in the Old Testament of the Edomite
gods. Israel fell under the fascination of every neighbouring idolatry, but
does not even mention that Edom had a religion. Such a silence cannot be
accidental, and the inference which it suggests is confirmed by the picture
drawn of Esau himself. Esau is a profane person[519]; with no conscience of
a birthright, no faith in the future, no capacity for visions; dead to the
unseen, and clamouring only for the satisfaction of his appetites. The same
was probably the character of his descendants; who had, of course, their
own gods, like every other people in that Semitic world,[520] but were
essentially irreligious, living for food, spoil and vengeance, with no national
conscience or ideals—a kind of people who deserved even more than the
Philistines to have their name descend to our times as a symbol of hardness
and obscurantism. It is no contradiction to all this that the one intellectual
quality imputed to the Edomites should be that of shrewdness and a wisdom

which was obviously worldly. The wise men of Edom, the cleverness of
Mount Esau[521] were notorious. It is the race which has given to history
only the Herods—clever, scheming, ruthless statesmen, as able as they were
false and bitter, as shrewd in policy as they were destitute of ideals. That
fox, cried Christ, and crying stamped the race.
But of such a national character Israel was in all points, save that of
cunning, essentially the reverse. Who had such a passion for the ideal? Who
such a hunger for the future, such hopes or such visions? Never more than
in the day of their prostration, when Jerusalem and the sanctuary fell in
ruins, did they feel and hate the hardness of the brother, who stood aloof
and made large his mouth.[522]
It is, therefore, no mere passion for revenge, which inspires these few,
hot verses of Obadiah. No doubt, bitter memories rankle in his heart. He
eagerly repeats[523] the voices of a day when Israel matched Edom in
cruelty and was cruel for the sake of gold, when Judah’s kings coveted
Esau’s treasures and were foiled. No doubt there is exultation in the news
he hears, that these treasures have been rifled by others; that all the
cleverness of this proud people has not availed against its treacherous allies;
and that it has been sent packing to its borders.[524] But beneath such savage
tempers, there beats the heart which has fought and suffered for the highest
things, and now in its martyrdom sees them baffled and mocked by a people
without vision and without feeling. Justice, mercy and truth; the education
of humanity in the law of God, the establishment of His will upon earth—
these things, it is true, are not mentioned in the Book of Obadiah, but it is
for the sake of some dim instinct of them that its wrath is poured upon foes
whose treachery and malice seek to make them impossible by destroying
the one people on earth who then believed and lived for them. Consider the
situation. It was the darkest hour of Israel’s history. City and Temple had
fallen, the people had been carried away. Up over the empty land the waves

of mocking heathen had flowed, there was none to beat them back. A Jew
who had lived through these things, who had seen[525] the day of
Jerusalem’s fall and passed from her ruins under the mocking of her foes,
dared to cry back into the large mouths they made: Our day is not spent; we
shall return with the things we live for; the land shall yet be ours, and the
kingdom our God’s.
Brave, hot heart! It shall be as thou sayest; it shall be for a brief season.
But in exile thy people and thou have first to learn many more things about
the heathen than you can now feel. Mix with them on that far-off coast,
from which thou criest. Learn what the world is, and that more beautiful
and more possible than the narrow rule which thou hast promised to Israel
over her neighbours shall be that worldwide service of man, of which, in
fifty years, all the best of thy people shall be dreaming.
The Book of Obadiah at the beginning of the Exile, and the great
prophecy of the Servant at the end of it—how true was his word who said:
He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless
come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

The subsequent history of Israel and Edom may be quickly traced.
When the Jews returned from exile they found the Edomites in possession
of all the Negeb, and of the Mountain of Judah far north of Hebron. The old
warfare was resumed, and not till 130 B.C. (as has been already said) did a
Jewish king bring the old enemies of his people beneath the Law of
Jehovah. The Jewish scribes transferred the name of Edom to Rome, as if it
were the perpetual symbol of that hostility of the heathen world, against
which Israel had to work out her calling as the peculiar people of God. Yet
Israel had not done with the Edomites themselves. Never did she encounter
foes more dangerous to her higher interests than in her Idumean dynasty of
the Herods; while the savage relentlessness of certain Edomites in the last

struggles against Rome proved that the fire which had scorched her borders
for a thousand years, now burned a still more fatal flame within her. More
than anything else, this Edomite fanaticism provoked the splendid suicide
of Israel, which beginning in Galilee was consummated upon the rocks of
Masada, half-way between Jerusalem and Mount Esau.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF
THE PERSIAN PERIOD

(539—331 B.C.)

“The exiles returned from Babylon to found not a
kingdom but a church.”
KIRKPATRICK.

“Israel is no longer a kingdom, but a colony” (p. 189).

CHAPTER XV

ISRAEL UNDER THE PERSIANS (539—331 B.C.)

The next group of the Twelve Prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi and
perhaps Joel—fall within the period of the Persian Empire. The Persian
Empire was founded on the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 539 B.C., and
it fell in the defeat of Darius III. by Alexander the Great at the battle of
Gaugamela, or Arbela, in 331. The period is thus one of a little more than
two centuries.
During all this time Israel were the subjects of the Persian monarchs,
and bound to them and their civilisation by the closest of ties. They owed
them their liberty and revival as a separate community upon its own land.
The Jewish State—if we may give that title to what is perhaps more truly
described as a Congregation or Commune—was part of an empire which
stretched from the Ægean to the Indus, and the provinces of which were
held in close intercourse by the first system of roads and posts that ever
brought different races together. Jews were scattered almost everywhere
across this empire. A vast number still remained in Babylon, and there were
many at Susa and Ecbatana, two of the royal capitals. Most of these were
subject to the full influence of Aryan manners and religion; some were even
members of the Persian Court and had access to the Royal Presence. In the
Delta of Egypt there were Jewish settlements, and Jews were found also
throughout Syria and along the coasts, at least, of Asia Minor. Here they
touched another civilisation, destined to impress them in the future even
more deeply than the Persian. It is the period of the struggle between Asia
and Europe, between Persia and Greece: the period of Marathon and
Thermopylæ, of Salamis and Platæa, of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand.

Greek fleets occupied Cyprus and visited the Delta. Greek armies—in the
pay of Persia—trod for the first time the soil of Syria.[526]
In such a world, dominated for the first time by the Aryan, Jews
returned from exile, rebuilt their Temple and resumed its ritual, revived
Prophecy and codified the Law: in short, restored and organised Israel as
the people of God, and developed their religion to those ultimate forms in
which it has accomplished its supreme service to the world.
In this period Prophecy does not maintain that lofty position which it
has hitherto held in the life of Israel, and the reasons for its decline are
obvious. To begin with, the national life, from which it springs, is of a far
poorer quality. Israel is no longer a kingdom, but a colony. The state is not
independent: there is virtually no state. The community is poor and feeble,
cut off from all the habit and prestige of their past, and beginning the
rudiments of life again in hard struggle with nature and hostile tribes. To
this level Prophecy has to descend, and occupy itself with these rudiments.
We miss the civic atmosphere, the great spaces of public life, the large
ethical issues. Instead we have tearful questions, raised by a grudging soil
and bad seasons, with all the petty selfishness of hunger-bitten peasants.
The religious duties of the colony are mainly ecclesiastical: the building of
a temple, the arrangement of ritual, and the ceremonial discipline of the
people in separation from their heathen neighbours. We miss, too, the clear
outlook of the earlier prophets upon the history of the world, and their calm,
rational grasp of its forces. The world is still seen, and even to further
distances than before. The people abate no whit of their ideal to be the
teachers of mankind. But it is all through another medium. The lurid air of
Apocalypse envelops the future, and in their weakness to grapple either
politically or philosophically with the problems which history offers, the
prophets resort to the expectation of physical catastrophes and of the
intervention of supernatural armies. Such an atmosphere is not the native air

of Prophecy, and Prophecy yields its supreme office in Israel to other forms
of religious development. On one side the ecclesiastic comes to the front—
the legalist, the organiser of ritual, the priest; on another, the teacher, the
moralist, the thinker and the speculator. At the same time personal religion
is perhaps more deeply cultivated than at any other stage of the people’s
history. A large number of lyrical pieces bear proof to the existence of a
very genuine and beautiful piety throughout the period.

Unfortunately the Jewish records for this time are both fragmentary and
confused; they touch the general history of the world only at intervals, and
give rise to a number of difficult questions, some of which are insoluble.
The clearest and only consecutive line of data through the period is the list
of the Persian monarchs. The Persian Empire, 539—331, was sustained
through eleven reigns and two usurpations, of which the following is a
chronological table:—

Cyrus (Kurush) the Great 539—529
Cambyses (Kambujiya) 529—522
Pseudo-Smerdis, or Baradis 522
Darius (Darayahush) I., Hystaspis 521—485
Xerxes (Kshayarsha) I. 485—464
Artaxerxes (Artakshathra) I., Longimanus 464—424
Xerxes II. 424—423
Sogdianus 423
Darius II., Nothus 423—404
Artaxerxes II., Mnenon 404—358
Artaxerxes III., Ochus 358—338
Arses 338—335
Darius III., Codomanus 335—331

Of these royal names, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes (Ahasuerus) and
Artaxerxes are given among the Biblical data; but the fact that there are
three Darius’, two Xerxes’ and three Artaxerxes’ makes possible more than
one set of identifications, and has suggested different chronological
schemes of Jewish history during this period. The simplest and most
generally accepted identification of the Darius, Xerxes (Ahasuerus) and
Artaxerxes of the Biblical history,[527] is that they were the first Persian
monarchs of these names; and after needful rearrangement of the somewhat
confused order of events in the narrative of the Book of Ezra, it was held as
settled that, while the exiles returned under Cyrus about 537, Haggai and
Zechariah prophesied and the Temple was built under Darius I. between the
second and the sixth year of his reign, or from 520 to 516; that attempts
were made to build the walls of Jerusalem under Xerxes I. (485—464), but
especially under Artaxerxes I. (464—424), under whom first Ezra in 458
and then Nehemiah in 445 arrived at Jerusalem, promulgated the Law and
reorganised Israel.
But this has by no means satisfied all modern critics. Some in the
interests of the authenticity and correct order of the Book of Ezra, and some
for other reasons, argue that the Darius under whom the Temple was built
was Darius II., or Nothus, 423—404, and thus bring down the building of
the Temple and the prophets Haggai and Zechariah a whole century later
than the accepted theory;[528] and that therefore the Artaxerxes, under whom
Ezra and Nehemiah laboured, was not the first Artaxerxes, or Longimanus
(464—424), but the second, or Mnemon (404—358).[529] This arrangement
of the history finds some support in the data, and especially in the order of
the data, furnished by the Book of Ezra, which describes the building of the
Temple under Darius after its record of events under Xerxes I. (Ahasuerus)
and Artaxerxes I.[530] But, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Compiler
of the Book of Ezra has seen fit, for some reason, to violate the

chronological order of the data at his disposal, and nothing reliable can be
built upon his arrangement. Unravel his somewhat confused history, take
the contemporary data supplied in Haggai and Zechariah, add to them the
historical probabilities of the time, and you will find, as the three Dutch
scholars Kuenen, Van Hoonacker and Kosters have done,[531] that the
rebuilding of the Temple cannot possibly be dated so late as the reign of the
second Darius (423—404), but must be left, according to the usual
acceptation, under Darius I. (521—485). Haggai, for instance, plainly
implies that among those who saw the Temple rising were men who had
seen its predecessor destroyed in 586,[532] and Zechariah declares that
God’s wrath on Jerusalem has just lasted seventy years.[533] Nor (however
much his confusion may give grounds to the contrary) can the Compiler of
the Book of Ezra have meant any other reign for the building of the Temple
than that of Darius I. He mentions that nothing was done to the Temple all
the days of Cyrus and up to the reign of Darius:[534] by this he cannot
intend to pass over the first Darius and leap on three more reigns, or a
century, to Darius II. He mentions Zerubbabel and Jeshua both as at the
head of the exiles who returned under Cyrus, and as presiding at the
building of the Temple under Darius.[535] If alive in 536, they may well
have been alive in 521, but cannot have survived till 423.[536] These data are
fully supported by the historical probabilities. It is inconceivable that the
Jews should have delayed the building of the Temple for more than a
century from the time of Cyrus. That the Temple was built by Zerubbabel
and Jeshua in the beginning of the reign of Darius I. may be considered as
one of the unquestionable data of our period.
But if this be so, then there falls away a great part of the argument for
placing the building of the walls of Jerusalem and the labours of Ezra and
Nehemiah under Artaxerxes II. (404—358) instead of Artaxerxes I. It is true
that some who accept the building of the Temple under Darius I.

nevertheless put Ezra and Nehemiah under Artaxerxes II. The weakness of
their case, however, has been clearly exposed by Kuenen,[537] who proves
that Nehemiah’s mission to Jerusalem must have fallen in the twentieth year
of Artaxerxes I., or 445.[538] “On this fact there can be no further difference
of opinion.”[539]
These two dates then are fixed: the beginning of the Temple in 520 by
Zerubbabel and Jeshua, and the arrival of Nehemiah at Jerusalem in 445.
Other points are more difficult to establish, and in particular there rests a
great obscurity on the date of the two visits of Ezra to Jerusalem. According
to the Book of Ezra,[540] he went there first in the seventh year of
Artaxerxes I., or 458 B.C., thirteen years before the arrival of Nehemiah. He
found many Jews married to heathen wives, laid it to heart, and called a
general assembly of the people to drive the latter out of the community.
Then we hear no more of him: neither in the negotiations with Artaxerxes
about the building of the walls, nor upon the arrival of Nehemiah, nor in
Nehemiah’s treatment of the mixed marriages. He is absent from
everything, till suddenly he appears again at the dedication of the walls by
Nehemiah and at the reading of the Law.[541] This “eclipse of Ezra,” as
Kuenen well calls it, taken with the mixed character of all the records left of
him, has moved some to deny to him and his reforms and his promulgation
of the Law any historical reality whatever;[542] while others, with a more
sober and rational criticism, have sought to solve the difficulties by another
arrangement of the events than that usually accepted. Van Hoonacker makes
Ezra’s first appearance in Jerusalem to be at the dedication of the walls and
promulgation of the Law in 445, and refers his arrival described in Ezra vii.
and his attempts to abolish the mixed marriages to a second visit to
Jerusalem in the twentieth year, not of Artaxerxes I., but of Artaxerxes II.,
or 398 B.C. Kuenen has exposed the extreme unlikelihood, if not
impossibility, of so late a date for Ezra, and in this Kosters holds with him.

[543]
But Kosters agrees with Van Hoonacker in placing Ezra’s activity
subsequent to Nehemiah’s and to the dedication of the walls.
These questions about Ezra have little bearing on our present study of
the prophets, and it is not our duty to discuss them. But Kuenen, in answer
to Van Hoonacker, has shown very strong reasons[544] for holding in the
main to the generally accepted theory of Ezra’s arrival in Jerusalem in 458,
the seventh year of Artaxerxes I.; and though there are great difficulties
about the narrative which follows, and especially about Ezra’s sudden
disappearance from the scene till after Nehemiah’s arrival, reasons may be
found for this.[545]
We are therefore justified in holding, in the meantime, to the traditional
arrangement of the great events in Israel in the fifth century before Christ.
We may divide the whole Persian period by the two points we have found to
be certain, the beginning of the Temple under Darius I. in 520 and the
mission of Nehemiah to Jerusalem in 445, and by the other that we have
found to be probable, Ezra’s arrival in 458.
On these data the Persian period may be arranged under the following
four sections, among which we place those prophets who respectively
belong to them:—
1. From the Taking of Babylon by Cyrus to the Completion of the
Temple in the sixth year of Darius I., 538—516: Haggai and Zechariah in
520 ff.
2. From the Completion of the Temple under Darius I. to the arrival of
Ezra in the seventh year of Artaxerxes I., 516—458: sometimes called the
period of silence, but probably yielding the Book of “Malachi.”
3. The Work of Ezra and Nehemiah under Artaxerxes I., Longimanus,
458—425.
4. The Rest of the Period, Xerxes II. to Darius III., 425—331: the
prophet Joel and perhaps several other anonymous fragments of prophecy.

Of these four sections we must now examine the first, for it forms the
necessary introduction to our study of Haggai and Zechariah, and above all
it raises a question almost greater than any of those we have just been
discussing. The fact recorded by the Book of Ezra, and till a few years ago
accepted without doubt by tradition and modern criticism, the first Return
of Exiles from Babylon under Cyrus, has lately been altogether denied; and
the builders of the Temple in 520 have been asserted to be, not returned
exiles, but the remnant of Jews left in Judah by Nebuchadrezzar in 586. The
importance of this for our interpretation of Haggai and Zechariah, who
instigated the building of the Temple, is obvious: we must discuss the
question in detail.

CHAPTER XVI

FROM THE RETURN FROM BABYLON TO THE BUILDING OF
THE TEMPLE
(536—516 B.C.)

Cyrus the Great took Babylon and the Babylonian Empire in 539. Upon the
eve of his conquest the Second Isaiah had hailed him as the Liberator of the
people of God and the builder of their Temple. The Return of the Exiles and
the Restoration both of Temple and City were predicted by the Second
Isaiah for the immediate future; and a Jewish historian, the Compiler of the
Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, who lived about 300 B.C., has taken up the
story of how these events came to pass from the very first year of Cyrus
onward. Before discussing the dates and proper order of these events, it will
be well to have this Chronicler’s narrative before us. It lies in the first and
following chapters of our Book of Ezra.
According to this, Cyrus, soon after his conquest of Babylon, gave
permission to the Jewish exiles to return to Palestine, and between forty and
fifty thousand[546] did so return, bearing the vessels of Jehovah’s house
which the Chaldeans had taken away in 586. These Cyrus delivered to
Sheshbazzar, prince of Judah[547] (who is further described in an Aramaic
document incorporated by the Compiler of the Book of Ezra as “Peḥah,” or
provincial governor,[548] and as laying the foundation of the Temple[549]),
and there is also mentioned in command of the people a Tirshatha, probably
the Persian Tarsâta,[550] which also means provincial governor. Upon their
arrival at Jerusalem, the date of which will be immediately discussed, the
people are said to be under Jeshu’a ben Jōṣadak[551] and Zerubbabel ben
She’altî’el,[552] who had already been mentioned as the head of the

returning exiles,[553] and who is called by his contemporary Haggai Peḥah,
or governor, of Judah.[554] Are we to understand by Sheshbazzar and
Zerubbabel one and the same person? Most critics have answered in the
affirmative, believing that Sheshbazzar is but the Babylonian or Persian
name by which the Jew Zerubbabel was known at court;[555] and this view
is supported by the facts that Zerubbabel was of the house of David and is
called Peḥah by Haggai, and by the argument that the command given by
the Tirshatha to the Jews to abstain from eating the most holy things[556]
could only have been given by a native Jew.[557] But others, arguing that
Ezra v. 1, compared with vv. 14 and 16, implies that Zerubbabel and
Sheshbazzar were two different persons, take the former to have been the
most prominent of the Jews themselves, but the latter an official, Persian or
Babylonian, appointed by Cyrus to carry out such business in connection
with the Return as could only be discharged by an imperial officer.[558] This
is, on the whole, the more probable theory.
If it is right, Sheshbazzar, who superintended the Return, had
disappeared from Jerusalem by 521, when Haggai commenced to prophesy,
and had been succeeded as Peḥah, or governor, by Zerubbabel. But in that
case the Compiler has been in error in calling Sheshbazzar a prince of
Judah.[559]
The next point to fix is what the Compiler considers to have been the
date of the Return. He names no year, but he recounts that the same people,
whom he has just described as receiving the command of Cyrus to return,
did immediately leave Babylon,[560] and he says that they arrived at
Jerusalem in the seventh month, but again without stating a year.[561] In any
case, he obviously intends to imply that the Return followed immediately
on reception of the permission to return, and that this was given by Cyrus
very soon after his occupation of Babylon in 539—8. We may take it that
the Compiler understood the year to be that we know as 537 B.C. He adds

that, on the arrival of the caravans from Babylon, the Jews set up the altar
on its old site and restored the morning and evening sacrifices; that they
kept also the Feast of Tabernacles, and thereafter all the rest of the feasts of
Jehovah; and further, that they engaged masons and carpenters for building
the Temple, and Phœnicians to bring them cedar-wood from Lebanon.[562]
Another section from the Compiler’s hand states that the returned Jews
set to work upon the Temple in the second month of the second year of their
Return, presumably 536 B.C., laying the foundation-stone with due pomp,
and amid the excitement of the whole people.[563] Whereupon certain
adversaries, by whom the Compiler means Samaritans, demanded a share
in the building of the Temple, and when Jeshua and Zerubbabel refused this,
the people of the land frustrated the building of the Temple even until the
reign of Darius, 521 ff.
This—the second year of Darius—is the point to which contemporary
documents, the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah, assign the beginning
of new measures to build the Temple. Of these the Compiler of the Book of
Ezra says in the meantime nothing, but after barely mentioning the reign of
Darius leaps at once[564] to further Samaritan obstructions—though not of
the building of the Temple (be it noted), but of the building of the city walls
—in the reigns of Ahasuerus, that is Xerxes, presumably Xerxes I., the
successor of Darius, 485—464, and of his successor Artaxerxes I., 464—
424;[565] the account of the latter of which he gives not in his own language
but in that of an Aramaic document, Ezra iv. 8 ff. And this document, after
recounting how Artaxerxes empowered the Samaritans to stop the building
of the walls of Jerusalem, records[566] that the building ceased till the
second year of the reign of Darius, when the prophets Haggai and
Zechariah stirred up Zerubbabel and Jeshua to rebuild, not the city walls, be
it observed, but the Temple, and with the permission of Darius this building
was at last completed in his sixth year.[567] That is to say, this Aramaic

document brings us back, with the frustrated building of the walls under
Xerxes I. and Artaxerxes I. (485—424), to the same date under their
predecessor Darius I., viz. 520, to which the Compiler had brought down
the frustrated building of the Temple! The most reasonable explanation of
this confusion, not only of chronology, but of two distinct processes—the
erection of the Temple and the fortification of the city—is that the Compiler
was misled by his desire to give as strong an impression as possible of the
Samaritan obstructions by placing them all together. Attempts to harmonise
the order of his narrative with the ascertained sequence of the Persian reigns
have failed.[568]
Such then is the character of the compilation known to us as the Book
of Ezra. If we add that in its present form it cannot be of earlier date than
300 B.C., or two hundred and thirty-six years after the Return, and that the
Aramaic document which it incorporates is probably not earlier than 430, or
one hundred years after the Return, while the List of Exiles which it gives
(in chap. ii.) also contains elements that cannot be earlier than 430, we shall
not wonder that grave doubts should have been raised concerning its
trustworthiness as a narrative.
These doubts affect, with one exception, all the great facts which it
professes to record. The exception is the building of the Temple between the
second and sixth years of Darius I., 520—516, which we have already seen
to be past doubt.[569] But all that the Book of Ezra relates before this has
been called in question, and it has been successively alleged: (1) that there
was no such attempt as the book describes to build the Temple before 520,
(2) that there was no Return of Exiles at all under Cyrus, and that the
Temple was not built by Jews who had come from Babylon, but by Jews
who had never left Judah.
These conclusions, if justified, would have the most important bearing
upon our interpretation of Haggai and Zechariah. It is therefore necessary to

examine them with care. They were reached by critics in the order just
stated, but as the second is the more sweeping and to some extent involves
the other, we may take it first.
1. Is the Book of Ezra, then, right or wrong in asserting that there was a
great return of Jews, headed by Zerubbabel and Jeshua, about the year 536,
and that it was they who in 520—516 rebuilt the Temple?
The argument that in recounting these events the Book of Ezra is
unhistorical has been fully stated by Professor Kosters of Leiden.[570] He
reaches his conclusion along three lines of evidence: the Books of Haggai
and Zechariah, the sources from which he believes the Aramaic narrative
Ezra v. 1—vi. 18 to have been compiled, and the list of names in Ezra ii. In
the Books of Haggai and Zechariah, he points out that the inhabitants of
Jerusalem whom the prophets summon to build the Temple are not called by
any name which implies that they are returned exiles; that nothing in the
description of them would lead us to suppose this; that God’s anger against
Israel is represented as still unbroken; that neither prophet speaks of a
Return as past, but that Zechariah seems to look for it as still to come.[571]
The second line of evidence is an analysis of the Aramaic document, Ezra v.
6 ff., into two sources, neither of which implies a Return under Cyrus. But
these two lines of proof cannot avail against the List of Returned Exiles
offered us in Ezra ii. and Nehemiah vii., if the latter be genuine. On his
third line of evidence, Dr. Kosters, therefore, disputes the genuineness of
this List, and further denies that it even gives itself out as a List of Exiles
returned under Cyrus. So he arrives at the conclusion that there was no
Return from Babylon under Cyrus, nor any before the Temple was built in
520 ff., but that the builders were people of the land, Jews who had never
gone into exile.
The evidence which Dr. Kosters draws from the Book of Ezra least
concerns us. Both because of this and because it is the weakest part of his

case, we may take it first.
Dr. Kosters analyses the bulk of the Aramaic document, Ezra v.—vi. 18,
into two constituents. His arguments for this are very precarious.[572] The
first document, which he takes to consist of chap. v. 1–5 and 10, with
perhaps vi. 6–15 (except a few phrases), relates that Thathnai, Satrap of the
West of the Euphrates, asked Darius whether he might allow the Jews to
proceed with the building of the Temple, and received command not only to
allow but to help them, on the ground that Cyrus had already given them
permission. The second, chap. v. 11–17, vi. 1–3, affirms that the building
had actually begun under Cyrus, who had sent Sheshbazzar, the Satrap, to
see it carried out. Neither of these documents says a word about any order
from Cyrus to the Jews to return; and the implication of the second, that the
building had gone on uninterruptedly from the time of Cyrus’ order to the
second year of Darius,[573] is not in harmony with the evidence of the
Compiler of the Book of Ezra, who, as we have seen,[574] states that
Samaritan obstruction stayed the building till the second year of Darius.
But suppose we accept Kosters’ premisses and agree that these two
documents really exist within Ezra v.—vi. 18. Their evidence is not
irreconcilable. Both imply that Cyrus gave command to rebuild the Temple:
if they were originally independent that would but strengthen the tradition
of such a command, and render a little weaker Dr. Kosters’ contention that
the tradition arose merely from a desire to find a fulfilment of the Second
Isaiah’s predictions[575] that Cyrus would be the Temple’s builder. That
neither of the supposed documents mentions the Return itself is very
natural, because both are concerned with the building of the Temple. For the
Compiler of the Book of Ezra, who on Kosters’ argument put them together,
the interest of the Return is over; he has already sufficiently dealt with it.
But more—Kosters’ second document, which ascribes the building of the
Temple to Cyrus, surely by that very statement implies a Return of Exiles

during his reign. For is it at all probable that Cyrus would have committed
the rebuilding of the Temple to a Persian magnate like Sheshbazzar, without
sending with him a large number of those Babylonian Jews who must have
instigated the king to give his order for rebuilding? We may conclude then
that Ezra v.—vi. 18, whatever be its value and its date, contains no
evidence, positive or negative, against a Return of the Jews under Cyrus,
but, on the contrary, takes this for granted.
We turn now to Dr. Kosters’ treatment of the so-called List of the
Returned Exiles. He holds this List to have been, not only borrowed for its
place in Ezra ii. from Nehemiah vii.,[576] but even interpolated in the latter.
His reasons for this latter conclusion are very improbable, as will be seen
from the appended note, and really weaken his otherwise strong case.[577]
As to the contents of the List, there are, it is true, many elements which date
from Nehemiah’s own time and even later. But these are not sufficient to
prove that the List was not originally a List of Exiles returned under Cyrus.
The verses in which this is asserted—Ezra ii. 1, 2; Nehemiah vii. 6, 7—
plainly intimate that those Jews who came up out of the Exile were the
same who built the Temple under Darius. Dr. Kosters endeavours to destroy
the force of this statement (if true so destructive of his theory) by pointing
to the number of the leaders which the List assigns to the returning exiles.
In fixing this number as twelve, the author, Kosters maintains, intended to
make the leaders representative of the twelve tribes and the body of
returned exiles as equivalent to All-Israel. But, he argues, neither Haggai
nor Zechariah considers the builders of the Temple to be equivalent to All-
Israel, nor was this conception realised in Judah till after the arrival of Ezra
with his bands. The force of this argument is greatly weakened by
remembering how natural it would have been for men, who felt the Return
under Cyrus, however small, to be the fulfilment of the Second Isaiah’s
glorious predictions of a restoration of All-Israel, to appoint twelve leaders,

and so make them representative of the nation as a whole. Kosters’
argument against the naturalness of such an appointment in 537, and
therefore against the truth of the statement of the List about it, falls to the
ground.
But in the Books of Haggai and Zechariah Dr. Kosters finds much more
formidable witnesses for his thesis that there was no Return of exiles from
Babylon before the building of the Temple under Darius. These books
nowhere speak of a Return under Cyrus, nor do they call the community
who built the Temple by the names of Gôlah or B’ne ha-Gôlah, Captivity or
Sons of the Captivity, which are given after the Return of Ezra’s bands; but
they simply name them this people[578] or remnant of the people,[579] people
of the land,[580] Judah or House of Judah,[581] names perfectly suitable to
Jews who had never left the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Even if we except
from this list the phrase the remnant of the people, as intended by Haggai
and Zechariah in the numerical sense of the rest or all the others,[582] we
have still to deal with the other titles, with the absence from them of any
symptom descriptive of return from exile, and with the whole silence of our
two prophets concerning such a return. These are very striking phenomena,
and they undoubtedly afford considerable evidence for Dr. Kosters’ thesis.
[583]
But it cannot escape notice that the evidence they afford is mainly
negative, and this raises two questions: (1) Can the phenomena in Haggai
and Zechariah be accounted for? and (2) whether accounted for or not, can
they be held to prevail against the mass of positive evidence in favour of a
Return under Cyrus?
An explanation of the absence of all allusion in Haggai and Zechariah to
the Return is certainly possible.
No one can fail to be struck with the spirituality of the teaching of
Haggai and Zechariah. Their one ambition is to put courage from God into
the poor hearts before them, that these out of their own resources may

rebuild their Temple. As Zechariah puts it, Not by might, nor by power, but
by My Spirit, saith Jehovah of Hosts.[584] It is obvious why men of this
temper should refrain from appealing to the Return, or to the royal power of
Persia by which it had been achieved. We can understand why, while the
annals employed in the Book of Ezra record the appeal of the political
leaders of the Jews to Darius upon the strength of the edict of Cyrus, the
prophets, in their effort to encourage the people to make the most of what
they themselves were and to enforce the omnipotence of God’s Spirit apart
from all human aids, should be silent about the latter. We must also
remember that Haggai and Zechariah were addressing a people to whom
(whatever view we take of the transactions under Cyrus) the favour of
Cyrus had been one vast disillusion in the light of the predictions of Second
Isaiah.[585] The Persian magnate Sheshbazzar himself, invested with full
power, had been unable to build the Temple for them, and had apparently
disappeared from Judah, leaving his powers as Peḥah, or governor, to
Zerubbabel. Was it not, then, as suitable to these circumstances, as it was
essential to the prophets’ own religious temper, that Haggai and Zechariah
should refrain from alluding to any of the political advantages, to which
their countrymen had hitherto trusted in vain?[586]
Another fact should be marked. If Haggai is silent about any return from
exile in the past, he is equally silent about any in the future. If for him no
return had yet taken place, would he not have been likely to predict it as
certain to happen?[587] At least his silence on the subject proves how
absolutely he confined his thoughts to the circumstances before him, and to
the needs of his people at the moment he addressed them. Kosters, indeed,
alleges that Zechariah describes the Return from Exile as still future—viz.
in the lyric piece appended to his Third Vision.[588] But, as we shall see
when we come to it, this lyric piece is most probably an intrusion among
the Visions, and is not to be assigned to Zechariah himself. Even, however,

if it were from the same date and author as the Visions, it would not prove
that no return from Babylon had taken place, but only that numbers of Jews
still remained in Babylon.
But we may now take a further step. If there were these natural reasons
for the silence of Haggai and Zechariah about a return of exiles under
Cyrus, can that silence be allowed to prevail against the mass of testimony
which we have that such a return took place? It is true that, while the Books
of Haggai and Zechariah are contemporary with the period in question,
some of the evidence for the Return, Ezra i. and iii.—iv. 7, is at least two
centuries later, and upon the date of the rest, the List in Ezra ii. and the
Aramaic document in Ezra iv. 8 ff., we have no certain information. But
that the List is from a date very soon after Cyrus is allowed by a large
number of the most advanced critics,[589] and even if we ignore it, we still
have the Aramaic document, which agrees with Haggai and Zechariah in
assigning the real, effectual beginning of the Temple-building to the second
year of Darius and to the leadership of Zerubbabel and Jeshua at the
instigation of the two prophets. May we not trust the same document in its
relation of the main facts concerning Cyrus? Again, in his memoirs
Ezra[590] speaks of the transgressions of the Gôlah or B’ne ha-Gôlah in
effecting marriages with the mixed people of the land, in a way which
shows that he means by the name, not the Jews who had just come up with
himself from Babylon, but the older community whom he found in Judah,
and who had had time, as his own bands had not, to scatter over the land
and enter into social relations with the heathen.
But, as Kuenen points out,[591] we have yet further evidence for the
probability of a Return under Cyrus, in the explicit predictions of the
Second Isaiah that Cyrus would be the builder of Jerusalem and the Temple.
“If they express the expectation, nourished by the prophet and his
contemporaries, then it is clear from their preservation for future

generations that Cyrus did not disappoint the hope of the exiles, from whose
midst this voice pealed forth to him.” And this leads to other considerations.
Whether was it more probable for the poverty-stricken people of the land,
the dregs which Nebuchadrezzar had left behind, or for the body and flower
of Israel in Babylon, to rebuild the Temple? Surely for the latter.[592] Among
them had risen, as Cyrus drew near to Babylon, the hopes and the motives,
nay, the glorious assurance of the Return and the Rebuilding; and with them
was all the material for the latter. Is it credible that they took no advantage
of their opportunity under Cyrus? Is it credible that they waited nearly a
century before seeking to return to Jerusalem, and that the building of the
Temple was left to people who were half-heathen, and, in the eyes of the
exiles, despicable and unholy? This would be credible only upon one
condition, that Cyrus and his immediate successors disappointed the
predictions of the Second Isaiah and refused to allow the exiles to leave
Babylon. But the little we know of these Persian monarchs points all the
other way: nothing is more probable, for nothing is more in harmony with
Persian policy, than that Cyrus should permit the captives of the Babylon
which he conquered to return to their own lands.[593]
Moreover, we have another, and to the mind of the present writer an
almost conclusive argument, that the Jews addressed by Haggai and
Zechariah were Jews returned from Babylon. Neither prophet ever charges
his people with idolatry; neither prophet so much as mentions idols. This is
natural if the congregation addressed was composed of such pious and
ardent adherents of Jehovah, as His word had brought back to Judah, when
His servant Cyrus opened the way. But had Haggai and Zechariah been
addressing the people of the land, who had never left the land, they could
not have helped speaking of idolatry.
Such considerations may very justly be used against an argument which
seeks to prove that the narratives of a Return under Cyrus were due to the

pious invention of a Jewish writer who wished to record that the predictions
of the Second Isaiah were fulfilled by Cyrus, their designated trustee.[594]
They certainly possess a far higher degree of probability than that argument
does.
Finally there is this consideration. If there was no return from Babylon
under Cyrus, and the Temple, as Dr. Kosters alleges, was built by the poor
people of the land, is it likely that the latter should have been regarded with
such contempt as they were by the exiles who returned under Ezra and
Nehemiah? Theirs would then have been the glory of reconstituting Israel,
and their position very different from what we find it.
On all these grounds, therefore, we must hold that the attempt to
discredit the tradition of an important return of exiles under Cyrus has not
been successful; that such a return remains the more probable solution of an
obscure and difficult problem; and that therefore the Jews who with
Zerubbabel and Jeshua are represented in Haggai and Zechariah as building
the Temple in the second year of Darius, 520, had come up from Babylon
about 537.[595] Such a conclusion, of course, need not commit us to the
various data offered by the Chronicler in his story of the Return, such as the
Edict of Cyrus, nor to all of his details.
2. Many, however, who grant the correctness of the tradition that a large
number of Jewish exiles returned under Cyrus to Jerusalem, deny the
statement of the Compiler of the Book of Ezra that the returned exiles
immediately prepared to build the Temple and laid the foundation-stone
with solemn festival, but were hindered from proceeding with the building
till the second year of Darius.[596] They maintain that this late narrative is
contradicted by the contemporary statements of Haggai and Zechariah,
who, according to them, imply that no foundation-stone was laid till 520
B.C.[597] For the interpretation of our prophets this is not a question of
cardinal importance. But for clearness’ sake we do well to lay it open.

We may at once concede that in Haggai and Zechariah there is nothing
which necessarily implies that the Jews had made any beginning to build
the Temple before the start recorded by Haggai in the year 520. The one
passage, Haggai ii. 18, which is cited to prove this[598] is at the best
ambiguous, and many scholars claim it as a fixture of that date for the
twenty-fourth day of the ninth month of 520.[599] At the same time, and
even granting that the latter interpretation of Haggai ii. 18 is correct, there is
nothing in either Haggai or Zechariah to make it impossible that a
foundation-stone had been laid some years before, but abandoned in
consequence of the Samaritan obstruction, as alleged in Ezra iii. 8–11. If we
keep in mind Haggai’s and Zechariah’s silence about the Return from
Babylon, and their very natural concentration upon their own
circumstances,[600] we shall not be able to reckon their silence about
previous attempts to build the Temple as a conclusive proof that these
attempts never took place. Moreover the Aramaic document, which agrees
with our two prophets in assigning the only effective start of the work on
the Temple to 520,[601] does not deem it inconsistent with this to record that
the Persian Satrap of the West of the Euphrates[602] reported to Darius that,
when he asked the Jews why they were rebuilding the Temple, they replied
not only that a decree of Cyrus had granted them permission,[603] but that
his legate Sheshbazzar had actually laid the foundation-stone upon his
arrival at Jerusalem, and that the building had gone on without interruption
from that time to 520.[604] This last assertion, which of course was false,
may have been due either to a misunderstanding of the Jewish elders by the
reporting Satrap, or else to the Jews themselves, anxious to make their case
as strong as possible. The latter is the more probable alternative. As even
Stade admits, it was a very natural assertion for the Jews to make, and so
conceal that their effort of 520 was due to the instigation of their own
prophets. But in any case the Aramaic document corroborates the statement

of the Compiler that there was a foundation-stone laid in the early years of
Cyrus, and does not conceive this to be inconsistent with its own narrative
of a stone being laid in 520, and an effective start at last made upon the
Temple works. So much does Stade feel the force of this, that he concedes
not only that Sheshbazzar may have started some preparation for building
the Temple, but that he may even have laid the stone with ceremony.[605]
And indeed, is it not in itself very probable that some early attempt was
made by the exiles returned under Cyrus to rebuild the house of Jehovah?
Cyrus had been predicted by the Second Isaiah not only as the redeemer of
God’s people, but with equal explicitness as the builder of the Temple; and
all the argument which Kuenen draws from the Second Isaiah for the fact of
the Return from Babylon[606] tells with almost equal force for the fact of
some efforts to raise the fallen sanctuary of Israel immediately after the
Return. Among the returned were many priests, and many no doubt of the
most sanguine spirits in Israel. They came straight from the heart of Jewry,
though that heart was in Babylon; they came with the impetus and
obligation of the great Deliverance upon them; they were the
representatives of a community which we know to have been comparatively
wealthy. Is it credible that they should not have begun the Temple at the
earliest possible moment?
Nor is the story of their frustration by the Samaritans any less natural.
[607] It is true that there were not any adversaries likely to dispute with the

colonists the land in the immediate neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The
Edomites had overrun the fruitful country about Hebron, and part of the
Shephelah. The Samaritans held the rich valleys of Ephraim, and probably
the plain of Ajalon. But if any peasants struggled with the stony plateaus of
Benjamin and Northern Judah, such must have been of the remnants of the
Jewish population who were left behind by Nebuchadrezzar, and who clung
to the sacred soil from habit or from motives of religion. Jerusalem was

never a site to attract men, either for agriculture, or, now that its shrine was
desolate and its population scattered, for the command of trade.[608] The
returned exiles must have been at first undisturbed by the envy of their
neighbours. The tale is, therefore, probable which attributes the hostility of
the latter to purely religious causes—the refusal of the Jews to allow the
half-heathen Samaritans to share in the construction of the Temple.[609]
Now the Samaritans could prevent the building. While stones were to be
had by the builders in profusion from the ruins of the city and the great
quarry to the north of it, ordinary timber did not grow in their
neighbourhood, and though the story be true that a contract was already
made with Phœnicians to bring cedar to Joppa, it had to be carried thence
for thirty-six miles. Here, then, was the opportunity of the Samaritans. They
could obstruct the carriage both of the ordinary timber and of the cedar. To
this state of affairs the present writer found an analogy in 1891 among the
Circassian colonies settled by the Turkish Government a few years earlier in
the vicinity of Gerasa and Rabbath-Ammon. The colonists had built their
houses from the numerous ruins of these cities, but at Rabbath-Ammon they
said their great difficulty had been about timber. And we could well
understand how the Beduin, who resented the settlement of Circassians on
lands they had used for ages, and with whom the Circassians were nearly
always at variance,[610] did what they could to make the carriage of timber
impossible. Similarly with the Jews and their Samaritan adversaries. The
site might be cleared and the stone of the Temple laid, but if the timber was
stopped there was little use in raising the walls, and the Jews, further
discouraged by the failure of their impetuous hopes of what the Return
would bring them, found cause for desisting from their efforts. Bad seasons
followed, the labours for their own sustenance exhausted their strength, and
in the sordid toil their hearts grew hard to higher interests. Cyrus died in
529, and his legate Sheshbazzar, having done nothing but lay the stone,

appears to have left Judæa.[611] Cambyses marched more than once through
Palestine, and his army garrisoned Gaza, but he was not a monarch to have
any consideration for Jewish ambitions. Therefore—although Samaritan
opposition ceased on the stoppage of the Temple works and the Jews
procured timber enough for their private dwellings[612]—is it wonderful that
the site of the Temple should be neglected and the stone laid by
Sheshbazzar forgotten, or that the disappointed Jews should seek to explain
the disillusions of the Return, by arguing that God’s time for the restoration
of His house had not yet come?
The death of a cruel monarch is always in the East an occasion for the
revival of shattered hopes, and the events which accompanied the suicide of
Cambyses in 522 were particularly fraught with the possibilities of political
change. Cambyses’ throne had been usurped by one Gaumata, who
pretended to be Smerdis or Barada, a son of Cyrus. In a few months
Gaumata was slain by a conspiracy of seven Persian nobles, of whom
Darius, the son of Hystaspes, both by virtue of his royal descent and by his
own great ability, was raised to the throne in 521. The empire had been too
profoundly shocked by the revolt of Gaumata to settle at once under the
new king, and Darius found himself engaged by insurrections in all his
provinces except Syria and Asia Minor.[613] The colonists in Jerusalem, like
all their Syrian neighbours, remained loyal to the new king; so loyal that
their Peḥah or Satrap was allowed to be one of themselves—Zerubbabel,
son of She’altî’el,[614] a son of their royal house. Yet though they were
quiet, the nations were rising against each other and the world was shaken.
It was just such a crisis as had often before in Israel rewakened prophecy.
Nor did it fail now; and when prophecy was roused what duty lay more
clamant for its inspiration than the duty of building the Temple?
We are in touch with the first of our post-exilic prophets, Haggai and
Zechariah.

HAGGAI

Go up into the mountain, and fetch wood, and build the
House.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BOOK OF HAGGAI

The Book of Haggai contains thirty-eight verses, which have been divided
between two chapters.[615] The text is, for the prophets, a comparatively
sound one. The Greek version affords a number of corrections, but has also
the usual amount of misunderstandings, and, as in the case of other
prophets, a few additions to the Hebrew text.[616] These and the variations
in the other ancient versions will be noted in the translation below.[617]
The book consists of four sections, each recounting a message from
Jehovah to the Jews in Jerusalem in 520 B.C., the second year of Darius
(Hystaspis), by the hand of the prophet Haggai.
The first, chap. i., dated the first day of the sixth month, during our
September, reproves the Jews for building their own cieled houses, while
they say that the time for building Jehovah’s house has not yet come;
affirms that this is the reason of their poverty and of a great drought which
has afflicted them. A piece of narrative is added recounting how Zerubbabel
and Jeshua, the heads of the community, were stirred by this word to lead
the people to begin work on the Temple, on the twenty-fourth day of the
same month.
The second section, chap. ii. 1–9, contains a message, dated the twenty-
first day of the seventh month, during our October, in which the builders are
encouraged for their work. Jehovah is about to shake all nations, these shall
contribute of their wealth, and the latter glory of the Temple be greater than
the former.
The third section, chap. ii. 10–19, contains a word of Jehovah which
came to Haggai on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, during our
December. It is in the form of a parable based on certain ceremonial laws,

according to which the touch of a holy thing does not sanctify so much as
the touch of an unholy pollutes. Thus is the people polluted, and thus every
work of their hands. Their sacrifices avail nought, and adversity has
persisted: small increase of fruits, blasting, mildew and hail. But from this
day God will bless.
The fourth section, chap. ii. 20–23, is a second word from the Lord to
Haggai on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month. It is for Zerubbabel,
and declares that God will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and destroy
the forces of many of the Gentiles by war. In that day Zerubbabel, the
Lord’s elect servant, shall be as a signet to the Lord.
The authenticity of all these four sections was doubted by no one,[618]
till ten years ago W. Böhme, besides pointing out some useless repetitions
of single words and phrases, cast suspicion on chap. i. 13, and questioned
the whole of the fourth section, chap. ii. 20–23.[619] With regard to chap. i.
13, it is indeed curious that Haggai should be described as the messenger of
Jehovah; while the message itself, I am with you, seems superfluous here,
and if the verse be omitted, ver. 14 runs on naturally to ver. 12.[620]
Böhme’s reasons for disputing the authenticity of chap. ii. 20–23 are much
less sufficient. He thinks he sees the hand of an editor in the phrase for a
second time in ver. 20; notes the omission of the title “prophet”[621] after
Haggai’s name, and the difference of the formula the word came to Haggai
from that employed in the previous sections, by the hand of Haggai, and the
repetition of ver. 6b in ver. 21; and otherwise concludes that the section is
an insertion from a later hand. But the formula the word came to Haggai
occurs also in ii. 10:[622] the other points are trivial, and while it was most
natural for Haggai the contemporary of Zerubbabel to entertain of the latter
such hopes as the passage expresses, it is inconceivable that a later writer,
who knew how they had not been fulfilled in Zerubbabel, should have
invented them.[623]

Recently M. Tony Andrée, privat-docent in the University of Geneva,
has issued a large work on Haggai,[624] in which he has sought to prove that
the third section of the book, chap. ii. (10) 11–19, is from the hand of
another writer than the rest. He admits[625] that in neither form, nor style,
nor language is there anything to prove this distinction, and that the ideas of
all the sections suit perfectly the condition of the Jews in the time soon after
the Return. But he considers that chap. ii. (10) 11–19 interrupts the
connection between the sections upon either side of it; that the author is a
legalist or casuist, while the author of the other sections is a man whose
only ecclesiastical interest is the rebuilding of the Temple; that there are
obvious contradictions between chap. ii. (10) 11–19 and the rest of the
book; and that there is a difference of vocabulary. Let us consider each of
these reasons.
The first, that chap. ii. (10) 11–19 interrupts the connection between the
sections on either side of it, is true only in so far as it has a different subject
from that which the latter have more or less in common. But the second of
the latter, chap. ii. 20–23, treats only of a corollary of the first, chap. ii. 1–9,
and that corollary may well have formed the subject of a separate oracle.
Besides, as we shall see, chap. ii. 10–19 is a natural development of chap. i.
[626]
The contradictions alleged by M. Andrée are two. He points out that
while chap. i. speaks only of a drought,[627] chap. ii. (10) 11–19
mentions[628] as the plagues on the crops shiddāphôn and yērākôn, generally
rendered blasting and mildew in our English Bible, and bārād, or hail; and
these he reckons to be plagues due not to drought but to excessive moisture.
But shiddāphôn and yērākôn, which are always connected in the Old
Testament and are words of doubtful meaning, are not referred to damp in
any of the passages in which they occur, but, on the contrary, appear to be
the consequences of drought.[629] The other contradiction alleged refers to
the ambiguous verse ii. 18, on which we have already seen it difficult to

base any conclusion, and which will be treated when we come to it in the
course of translation.[630] Finally, the differences in language which M.
Andrée cites are largely imaginary, and it is hard to understand how a
responsible critic has come to cite, far more to emphasise them, as he has
done. We may relegate the discussion of them to a note,[631] and need here
only remark that there is among them but one of any significance: while the
rest of the book calls the Temple the House or the House of Jehovah (or of
Jehovah of Hosts), chap. ii. (10) 11–19 styles it palace, or temple, of
Jehovah.[632] On such a difference between two comparatively brief
passages it would be unreasonable to decide for a distinction of authorship.
There is, therefore, no reason to disagree with the consensus of all other
critics in the integrity of the Book of Haggai. The four sections are either
from himself or from a contemporary of his. They probably represent,[633]
not the full addresses given by him on the occasions stated, but abstracts or
summaries of these. “It is never an easy task to persuade a whole population
to make pecuniary sacrifices, or to postpone private to public interests; and
the probability is, that in these brief remains of the prophet Haggai we have
but one or two specimens of a ceaseless diligence and persistent
determination, which upheld and animated the whole people till the work
was accomplished.”[634] At the same time it must be noticed that the style of
the book is not wholly of the bare, jejune prose which it is sometimes
described to be. The passages of Haggai’s own exhortation are in the well-
known parallel rhythm of prophetic discourse: see especially chap. i., ver. 6.
The only other matter of Introduction to the prophet Haggai is his name.
The precise form[635] is not elsewhere found in the Old Testament; but one
of the clans of the tribe of Gad is called Haggi,[636] and the letters H G I
occur as the consonants of a name on a Phœnician inscription.[637]
Some[638] have taken Haggai to be a contraction of Haggiyah, the name of a
Levitical family,[639] but although the final yod of some proper names

stands for Jehovah, we cannot certainly conclude that it is so in this case.
Others[640] see in Haggai a probable contraction for Hagariah,[641] as
Zaccai, the original of Zacchæus, is a contraction of Zechariah.[642] A more
general opinion[643] takes the termination as adjectival,[644] and the root to
be “hag,” feast or festival.[645] In that case Haggai would mean festal, and it
has been supposed that the name would be given to him from his birth on
the day of some feast. It is impossible to decide with certainty among these
alternatives. M. Andrée,[646] who accepts the meaning festal, ventures the
hypothesis that, like “Malachi,” Haggai is a symbolic title given by a later
hand to the anonymous writer of the book, because of the coincidence of his
various prophecies with solemn festivals.[647] But the name is too often and
too naturally introduced into the book to present any analogy to that of
“Malachi”; and the hypothesis may be dismissed as improbable and
unnatural.
Nothing more is known of Haggai than his name and the facts given in
his book. But as with the other prophets whom we have treated, so with this
one, Jewish and Christian legends have been very busy. Other functions
have been ascribed to him; a sketch of his biography has been invented.
According to the Rabbis he was one of the men of the Great Synagogue,
and with Zechariah and “Malachi” transmitted to that mythical body the
tradition of the older prophets.[648] He was the author of several ceremonial
regulations, and with Zechariah and “Malachi” introduced into the alphabet
the terminal forms of the five elongated letters.[649] The Christian Fathers
narrate that he was of the tribe of Levi,[650] that with Zechariah he
prophesied in exile of the Return,[651] and was still young when he arrived
in Jerusalem,[652] where he died and was buried. A strange legend, founded
on the doubtful verse which styles him the messenger of Jehovah, gave out
that Haggai, as well as for similar reasons “Malachi” and John the Baptist,
were not men, but angels in human shape.[653] With Zechariah Haggai

appears on the titles of Psalms cxxxvii., cxlv.-cxlviii. in the Septuagint; cxi.,
cxlv., cxlvi. in the Vulgate; and cxxv., cxxvi. and cxlv.-cxlviii. in the
Peshitto.[654] “In the Temple at Jerusalem he was the first who chanted the
Hallelujah, ... wherefore we say: Hallelujah, which is the hymn of Haggai
and Zechariah.”[655] All these testimonies are, of course, devoid of value.
Finally, the modern inference from chap. ii. 3, that Haggai in his youth
had seen the former Temple, had gone into exile, and was now returned a
very old man,[656] may be probable, but is not certain. We are quite ignorant
of his age at the time the word of Jehovah came to him.

CHAPTER XVIII

HAGGAI AND THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE
HAGGAI i., ii.

We have seen that the most probable solution of the problems presented to
us by the inadequate and confused records of the time is that a considerable
number of Jewish exiles returned from Jerusalem to Babylon about 537,
upon the permission of Cyrus, and that the Satrap whom he sent with them
not only allowed them to raise the altar on its ancient site, but himself laid
for them the foundation-stone of the Temple.[657]
We have seen, too, why this attempt led to nothing, and we have
followed the Samaritan obstructions, the failure of the Persian patronage,
the drought and bad harvests, and all the disillusion of the fifteen years
which succeeded the Return.[658] The hostility of the Samaritans was
entirely due to the refusal of the Jews to give them a share in the
construction of the Temple, and its virulence, probably shown by preventing
the Jews from procuring timber, seems to have ceased when the Temple
works were stopped. At least we find no mention of it in our prophets; and
the Jews are furnished with enough of timber to panel and ciel their own
houses.[659] But the Jews must have feared a renewal of Samaritan attacks if
they resumed work on the Temple, and for the rest they were too sodden
with adversity, and too weighted with the care of their own sustenance, to
spring at higher interests. What immediately precedes our prophets is a
miserable story of barren seasons and little income, money leaking fast
away, and every man’s sordid heart engrossed with his own household.
Little wonder that critics have been led to deny the great Return of sixteen
years back, with its grand ambitions for the Temple and glorious future of
Israel. But the like collapse has often been experienced in history when

bands of religious men, going forth, as they thought, to freedom and the
immediate erection of a holy commonwealth, have found their unity
wrecked and their enthusiasm dissipated by a few inclement seasons on a
barren and a hostile shore. Nature and their barbarous fellow-men have
frustrated what God had promised. Themselves, accustomed from a high
stage of civilisation to plan still higher social structures, are suddenly
reduced to the primitive necessities of tillage and defence against a savage
foe. Statesmen, poets and idealists of sorts have to hoe the ground, quarry
stones and stay up of nights to watch as sentinels. Destitute of the comforts
and resources with which they have grown up, they live in constant battle
with their bare and unsympathetic environs. It is a familiar tale in history,
and we read it with ease in the case of Israel. The Jews enjoyed this
advantage, that they came not to a strange land, but to one crowded with
inspiring memories, and they had behind them the most glorious impetus of
prophecy which ever sent a people forward to the future. Yet the very
ardours of this hurried them past a due appreciation of the difficulties they
would have to encounter, and when they found themselves on the stony soil
of Judah, which they had been idealising for fifty years, and were further
afflicted by barren seasons, their hearts must have suffered an even more
bitter disillusion than has so frequently fallen to the lot of religious
emigrants to an absolutely new coast.

1. THE CALL TO BUILD (Chap. i.).
It was to this situation, upon an autumn day, when the colonists felt
another year of beggarly effort behind them and their wretched harvest had
been brought home, that the prophet Haggai addressed himself. With rare
sense he confined his efforts to the practical needs of the moment. The
sneers of modern writers have not been spared upon a style that is crabbed
and jejune, and they have esteemed this to be a collapse of the prophetic

spirit, in which Haggai ignored all the achievements of prophecy and
interpreted the word of God as only a call to hew wood and lay stone upon
stone. But the man felt what the moment needed, and that is the supreme
mark of the prophet. Set a prophet there, and what else could a prophet have
done? It would have been futile to rewaken those most splendid voices of
the past, which had in part been the reason of the people’s disappointment,
and equally futile to interpret the mission of the great world powers towards
God’s people. What God’s people themselves could do for themselves—that
was what needed telling at the moment; and if Haggai told it with a meagre
and starved style, this also was in harmony with the occasion. One does not
expect it otherwise when hungry men speak to each other of their duty.
Nor does Haggai deserve blame that he interpreted the duty as the
material building of the Temple. This was no mere ecclesiastical function.
Without the Temple the continuity of Israel’s religion could not be
maintained. An independent state, with the full courses of civic life, was
then impossible. The ethical spirit, the regard for each other and God, could
prevail over their material interests in no other way than by common
devotion to the worship of the God of their fathers. In urging them to build
the Temple from their own unaided resources, in abstaining from all hopes
of imperial patronage, in making the business one, not of sentiment nor of
comfortable assurance derived from the past promises of God, but of plain
and hard duty—Haggai illustrated at once the sanity and the spiritual
essence of prophecy in Israel.
Professor Robertson Smith has contrasted the central importance which
Haggai attached to the Temple with the attitude of Isaiah and Jeremiah, to
whom “the religion of Israel and the holiness of Jerusalem have little to do
with the edifice of the Temple. The city is holy because it is the seat of
Jehovah’s sovereignty on earth, exerted in His dealings with and for the
state of Judah and the kingdom of David.”[660] At the same time it ought to

be pointed out that even to Isaiah the Temple was the dwelling-place of
Jehovah, and if it had been lying in ruins at his feet, as it was at Haggai’s,
there is little doubt he would have been as earnest as Haggai in urging its
reconstruction. Nor did the Second Isaiah, who has as lofty an idea of the
spiritual destiny of the people as any other prophet, lay less emphasis upon
the cardinal importance of the Temple to their life, and upon the certainty of
its future glory.
In the second year of Darius[661] the king, in the sixth month and the
first day of the month—that is, on the feast of the new moon—the word of
Jehovah came by[662] Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el,
[663]
Satrap of Judah, and to Jehoshua‛, son of Jehoṣadaḳ,[664] the high
priest—the civil and religious heads of the community—as follows[665]:—
Thus hath Jehovah of Hosts spoken, saying: This people have said, Not
yet[666] is come the time for the building of Jehovah’s House. Therefore
Jehovah’s word is come by Haggai the prophet, saying: Is it a time for you
—you[667]—to be dwelling in houses cieled with planks,[668] while this
House is waste? And now thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Lay to heart how
things have gone with you.[669] Ye sowed much but had little income, ate
and were not satisfied, drank and were not full, put on clothing and there
was no warmth, while he that earned wages has earned them into a bag
with holes.
Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts:[670] Go up into the mountain—the hill-
country of Judah—and bring in timber, and build the House, that I may take
pleasure in it, and show My glory, saith Jehovah. Ye looked for much and it
has turned out little,[671] and what ye brought home I puffed at. On account
of what?—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts—on account of My House which is
waste, while ye are hurrying every man after his own house. Therefore[672]
hath heaven shut off the dew,[673] and earth shut off her increase. And I
have called drought upon the earth, both upon the mountains,[674] and upon

the corn, and upon the wine, and upon the oil, and upon what the ground
brings forth, and upon man, and upon beast, and upon all the labour of the
hands.
For ourselves, Haggai’s appeal to the barren seasons and poverty of the
people as proof of God’s anger with their selfishness must raise questions.
But we have already seen, not only that natural calamities were by the
ancient world interpreted as the penal instruments of the Deity, but that all
through history they have had a wonderful influence on the spirits of men,
forcing them to search their own hearts and to believe that Providence is
conducted for other ends than those of our physical prosperity. “Have not
those who have believed as Amos believed ever been the strong spirits of
our race, making the very disasters which crushed them to the earth the
tokens that God has great views about them?”[675] Haggai, therefore, takes
no sordid view of Providence when he interprets the seasons, from which
his countrymen had suffered, as God’s anger upon their selfishness and
delay in building His House.
The straight appeal to the conscience of the Jews had an immediate
effect. Within three weeks they began work on the Temple.
And Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el, and Jehoshua’, son of Jehoṣadaḳ,
the high priest, and all the rest of the people, hearkened to the voice of
Jehovah their God, and to the words of Haggai the prophet, as Jehovah
their God had sent him; and the people feared before the face of Jehovah.
[And Haggai, the messenger of Jehovah, in Jehovah’s mission to the people,
spake, saying, I am with you—oracle of Jehovah.][676] And Jehovah stirred
the spirit of Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el, Satrap of Judah, and the spirit
of Jehoshua’, son of Jehoṣadaḳ, the high priest, and the spirit of all the rest
of the people; and they went and did work in the House of Jehovah of
Hosts, their God, on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month, in the second
year of Darius the king.[677]

Note how the narrative emphasises that the new energy was, as it could
not but be from Haggai’s unflattering words, a purely spiritual result. It was
the spirit of Zerubbabel, and the spirit of Jehoshua, and the spirit of all the
rest of the people, which was stirred—their conscience and radical force of
character. Not in vain had the people suffered their great disillusion under
Cyrus, if now their history was to start again from sources so inward and so
pure.

2. COURAGE, ZERUBBABEL! COURAGE, JEHOSHUA AND
ALL THE PEOPLE! (Chap. ii. 1–9).

The second occasion on which Haggai spoke to the people was another
feast the same autumn, the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles,[678] the
twenty-first of the seventh month. For nearly four weeks the work on the
Temple had proceeded. Some progress must have been made, for
comparisons became possible between the old Temple and the state of this
one. Probably the outline and size of the building were visible. In any case
it was enough to discourage the builders with their efforts and the means at
their disposal. Haggai’s new word is a very simple one of encouragement.
The people’s conscience had been stirred by his first; they needed now
some hope. Consequently he appeals to what he had ignored before, the
political possibilities which the present state of the world afforded—always
a source of prophetic promise. But again he makes his former call upon
their own courage and resources. The Hebrew text contains a reference to
the Exodus which would be appropriate to a discourse delivered during the
Feast of Tabernacles, but it is not found in the Septuagint, and is so
impossible to construe that it has been justly suspected as a gloss, inserted
by some later hand, only because the passage had to do with the Feast of
Tabernacles.

In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of
Jehovah came by[679] Haggai the prophet, saying:—
Speak now to Zerubbabel, son of She’altî’el, Satrap of Judah, and to
Jehoshua’, son of Jehoṣadaḳ, the high priest, and to the rest of the people,
saying: Who among you is left that saw this House in its former glory, and
how do ye see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes?[680] And now
courage,[681] O Zerubbabel—oracle of Jehovah—and courage, Jehoshua‛,
son of Jehoṣadaḳ, O high priest;[682] and courage, all people of the land!—
oracle of Jehovah; and get to work, for I am with you—oracle of Jehovah of
Hosts[683]—and My Spirit is standing in your midst. Fear not! For thus
saith Jehovah of Hosts: It is but a little while, and I will shake the heavens,
and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, and
the costly things[684] of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this House
with glory, saith Jehovah of Hosts. Mine is the silver and Mine the gold—
oracle of Jehovah of Hosts. Greater shall the latter glory of this House be
than the former, saith Jehovah of Hosts, and in this place will I give
peace[685]—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts.
From the earliest times this passage, by the majority of the Christian
Church, has been interpreted of the coming of Christ. The Vulgate renders
ver. 7b, Et veniet Desideratus cunctis gentibus, and so a large number of the
Latin Fathers, who are followed by Luther, Der Trost aller Heiden, and by
our own Authorised Version, And the Desire of all nations shall come. This
was not contrary to Jewish tradition, for Rabbi Akiba had defined the clause
of the Messiah, and Jerome received the interpretation from his Jewish
instructors. In itself the noun, as pointed in the Massoretic text, means
longing or object of longing.[686] But the verb which goes with it is in the
plural, and by a change of points the noun itself may be read as a plural.[687]
That this was the original reading is made extremely probable by the fact
that it lay before the translators of the Septuagint, who render: the picked, or

chosen, things of the nations.[688] So the old Italic version: Et venient omnia
electa gentium.[689] Moreover this meaning suits the context, as the other
does not. The next verse mentions silver and gold. “We may understand
what he says,” writes Calvin, “of Christ; we indeed know that Christ was
the expectation of the whole world; ... but as it immediately follows, Mine
is the silver and Mine is the gold, the more simple meaning is that which I
first stated: that the nations would come, bringing with them all their riches,
that they might offer themselves and all their possessions a sacrifice to
God.”[690]

3. THE POWER OF THE UNCLEAN (Chap. ii. 10–19).
Haggai’s third address to the people is based on a deliverance which he
seeks from the priests. The Book of Deuteronomy had provided that, in all
difficult cases not settled by its own code, the people shall seek a
deliverance or Torah from the priests, and shall observe to do according to
the deliverance which the priests deliver to thee.[691] Both noun and verb,
which may be thus literally translated, are also used for the completed and
canonical Law in Israel, and they signify that in the time of the composition
of the Book of Deuteronomy that Law was still regarded as in process of
growth. So it is also in the time of Haggai: he does not consult a code of
laws, nor asks the priests what the canon says, as, for instance, our Lord
does with the question, how readest thou? But he begs them to give him a
Torah or deliverance,[692] based of course upon existing custom, but not yet
committed to writing.[693] For the history of the Law in Israel this is,
therefore, a passage of great interest.
On the twenty-fourth of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius,
the word of Jehovah came to[694] Haggai the prophet, saying: Thus saith
Jehovah of Hosts, Ask, I pray, of the priests a deliverance,[695] saying:—

If a man be carrying flesh that is holy in the skirt of his robe, and with
his skirt touch bread or pottage or wine or oil or any food, shall the latter
become holy? And the priests gave answer and said, No! And Haggai said,
If one unclean by a corpse[696] touch any of these, shall the latter become
unclean? And the priests gave answer and said, It shall. That is to say,
holiness which passed from the source to an object immediately in touch
with the latter did not spread further; but pollution infected not only the
person who came into contact with it, but whatever he touched.[697] “The
flesh of the sacrifice hallowed whatever it should touch, but not further;[698]
but the human being who was defiled by touching a dead body, defiled all
he might touch.”[699] And Haggai answered and said: So is this people, and
so is this nation before Me—oracle of Jehovah—and so is all the work of
their hands, and what they offer there—at the altar erected on its old site—
is unclean.[700] That is to say, while the Jews had expected their restored
ritual to make them holy to the Lord, this had not been effective, while, on
the contrary, their contact with sources of pollution had thoroughly polluted
both themselves and their labour and their sacrifices. What these sources of
pollution are is not explicitly stated, but Haggai, from his other messages,
can only mean, either the people’s want of energy in building the Temple, or
the unbuilt Temple itself. Andrée goes so far as to compare the latter with
the corpse, whose touch, according to the priests, spreads infection through
more than one degree. In any case Haggai means to illustrate and enforce
the building of the Temple without delay; and meantime he takes one
instance of the effect he has already spoken of, the work of their hands, and
shows how it has been spoilt by their neglect and delay. And now, I pray, set
your hearts backward from to-day,[701] before stone was laid upon stone in
the Temple of Jehovah: ...[702] when one came to a heap of grain of twenty
measures, and it had become ten, or went to the winevat to draw fifty
measures,[703] and it had become twenty. I smote you with blasting and with

withering,[704] and with hail all the work of your hands, and ...[705]—oracle
of Jehovah. Lay now your hearts on the time before to-day[706] (the twenty-
fourth day of the ninth month[707]), before the day of the foundation of the
Temple of Jehovah[708]—lay your hearts to that time! Is there yet any seed
in the barn[709]? And as yet[710] the vine, the fig-tree, the pomegranate and
the olive have not borne fruit. From this day I will bless thee.
This then is the substance of the whole message. On the twenty-fourth
day of the ninth month, somewhere in our December, the Jews had been
discouraged that their attempts to build the Temple, begun three months
before,[711] had not turned the tide of their misfortunes and produced
prosperity in their agriculture. Haggai tells them, there is not yet time for
the change to work. If contact with a holy thing has only a slight effect, but
contact with an unclean thing has a much greater effect (verses 11–13), then
their attempts to build the Temple must have less good influence upon their
condition than the bad influence of all their past devotion to themselves and
their secular labours. That is why adversity still continues, but courage!
from this day on God will bless. The whole message is, therefore,
opportune to the date at which it was delivered, and comes naturally on the
back of Haggai’s previous oracles. Andrée’s reason for assigning it to
another writer, on the ground of its breaking the connection, does not exist.
[712]

These poor colonists, in their hope deferred, were learning the old
lesson, which humanity finds so hard to understand, that repentance and
new-born zeal do not immediately work a change upon our material
condition; but the natural consequences of sin often outweigh the influence
of conversion, and though devoted to God and very industrious we may still
be punished for a sinful past. Evil has an infectious power greater than that
of holiness. Its effects are more extensive and lasting.[713] It was no bit of
casuistry which Haggai sought to illustrate by his appeal to the priests on

the ceremonial law, but an ethical truth deeply embedded in human
experience.

4.THE REINVESTMENT OF ISRAEL’S HOPE (Chap. ii. 20–23).
On the same day Haggai published another oracle, in which he put the
climax to his own message by re-investing in Zerubbabel the ancient hopes
of his people. When the monarchy fell the Messianic hopes were naturally
no longer concentrated in the person of a king; and the great evangelist of
the Exile found the elect and anointed Servant of Jehovah in the people as a
whole, or in at least the pious part of them, with functions not of political
government but of moral influence and instruction towards all the peoples
of the earth. Yet in the Exile Ezekiel still predicted an individual Messiah, a
son of the house of David; only it is significant that, in his latest prophecies
delivered after the overthrow of Jerusalem, Ezekiel calls him not king[714]
any more, but prince.[715]
After the return of Sheshbazzar to Babylon this position was virtually
filled by Zerubbabel, a grandson of Jehoiakin, the second last king of Judah,
and appointed by the Persian king Peḥah or Satrap of Judah. Him Haggai
now formally names the elect servant of Jehovah. In that overturning of the
kingdoms of the world which Haggai had predicted two months before, and
which he now explains as their mutual destruction by war, Jehovah of Hosts
will make Zerubbabel His signet-ring, inseparable from Himself and the
symbol of His authority.
And the word of Jehovah came a second time to[716] Haggai on the
twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, saying: Speak to Zerubbabel, Satrap
of Judah, saying: I am about to shake the heavens and the earth,[717] and I
will overturn the thrones[718] of kingdoms, and will shatter the power of the
kingdoms of the Gentiles, and will overturn chariots[719] and their riders,
and horses and their riders will come down, every man by the sword of his

brother. In that day—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts—I will take Zerubbabel,
son of She’altî’el, My servant—oracle of Jehovah—and will make him like
a signet-ring; for thee have I chosen—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts.
The wars and mutual destruction of the Gentiles, of which Haggai
speaks, are doubtless those revolts of races and provinces, which threatened
to disrupt the Persian Empire upon the accession of Darius in 521. Persians,
Babylonians, Medes, Armenians, the Sacæ and others rose together or in
succession. In four years Darius quelled them all, and reorganised his
empire before the Jews finished their Temple. Like all the Syrian governors,
Zerubbabel remained his poor lieutenant and submissive tributary. History
rolled westward into Europe. Greek and Persian began their struggle for the
control of its future, and the Jews fell into an obscurity and oblivion
unbroken for centuries. The signet-ring of Jehovah was not acknowledged
by the world—does not seem even to have challenged its briefest attention.
But Haggai had at least succeeded in asserting the Messianic hope of Israel,
always baffled, never quenched, in this re-opening of her life. He had
delivered the ancient heritage of Israel to the care of the new Judaism.

Haggai’s place in the succession of prophecy ought now to be clear to
us. The meagreness of his words and their crabbed style, his occupation
with the construction of the Temple, his unfulfilled hope in Zerubbabel, his
silence on the great inheritance of truth delivered by his predecessors, and
the absence from his prophesying of all visions of God’s character and all
emphasis upon the ethical elements of religion—these have moved some to
depress his value as a prophet almost to the vanishing point. Nothing could
be more unjust. In his opening message Haggai evinced the first
indispensable power of the prophet: to speak to the situation of the moment,
and to succeed in getting men to take up the duty at their feet; in another
message he announced a great ethical principle; in his last he conserved the

Messianic traditions of his religion, and though not less disappointed than
Isaiah in the personality to whom he looked for their fulfilment, he
succeeded in passing on their hope undiminished to future ages.

ZECHARIAH
(I.—VIII.)

Not by might, and not by force, but by My Spirit, saith
Jehovah of Hosts.
Be not afraid, strengthen your hands! Speak truth, every
man to his neighbour; truth and wholesome judgment judge
ye in your gates, and in your hearts plan no evil for each
other, nor take pleasure in false swearing, for all these
things do I hate—oracle of Jehovah.

CHAPTER XIX

THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH (I.—VIII.)

The Book of Zechariah, consisting of fourteen chapters, falls clearly into
two divisions: First, chaps. i.—viii., ascribed to Zechariah himself and full
of evidence for their authenticity; Second, chaps. ix.—xiv., which are not
ascribed to Zechariah, and deal with conditions different from those upon
which he worked. The full discussion of the date and character of this
second section we shall reserve till we reach the period at which we believe
it to have been written. Here an introduction is necessary only to chaps. i.—
viii.
These chapters may be divided into five sections.
I. Chap. i. 1–6.—A Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah in the eighth month of the second
year of Darius, that is in November 520 B.C., or between the second and the third oracles of Haggai.
[720] In this the prophet’s place is affirmed in the succession of the prophets of Israel. The ancient

prophets are gone, but their predictions have been fulfilled in the calamities of the Exile, and God’s
Word abides for ever.
II. Chap. i. 7—vi. 9.—A Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah on the twenty-fourth of the
eleventh month of the same year, that is January or February 519, and which he reproduces in the
form of eight Visions by night. (1) The Vision of the Four Horsemen: God’s new mercies to
Jerusalem (chap. i. 7–17). (2) The Vision of the Four Horns, or Powers of the World, and the Four
Smiths, who smite them down (ii. 1–4 Heb., but in the Septuagint and in the English Version i. 18–
21). (3) The Vision of the Man with the Measuring Rope: Jerusalem shall be rebuilt, no longer as a
narrow fortress, but spread abroad for the multitude of her population (chap. ii. 5–9 Heb., ii. 1–5
LXX. and Eng.). To this Vision is appended a lyric piece of probably older date calling upon the Jews
in Babylon to return, and celebrating the joining of many peoples to Jehovah, now that He takes up
again His habitation in Jerusalem (chap. ii. 10–17 Heb., ii. 6–13 LXX. and Eng.). (4) The Vision of
Joshua, the High Priest, and the Satan or Accuser: the Satan is rebuked, and Joshua is cleansed from
his foul garments and clothed with a new turban and festal apparel; the land is purged and secure
(chap. iii.). (5) The Vision of the Seven-Branched Lamp and the Two Olive-Trees (chap. iv. 1–6a,
10b-14): into the centre of this has been inserted a Word of Jehovah to Zerubbabel (vv. 6b-10a),
which interrupts the Vision and ought probably to come at the close of it. (6) The Vision of the Flying
Book: it is the curse of the land, which is being removed, but after destroying the houses of the

wicked (chap. v. 1–4). (7) The Vision of the Bushel and the Woman: that is the guilt of the land and
its wickedness; they are carried off and planted in the land of Shinar (v. 5–11). (8) The Vision of the
Four Chariots: they go forth from the Lord of all the earth, to traverse the earth and bring His Spirit,
or anger, to bear on the North country (chap. vi. 1–8).
III. Chap. vi. 9–15.—A Word of Jehovah, undated (unless it is to be taken as of the same date as
the Visions to which it is attached), giving directions as to the gifts sent to the community at
Jerusalem from the Babylonian Jews. A crown is to be made from the silver and gold, and, according
to the text, placed upon the head of Joshua. But, as we shall see,[721] the text gives evident signs of
having been altered in the interest of the High Priest; and probably the crown was meant for
Zerubbabel, at whose right hand the priest is to stand, and there shall be a counsel of peace between
the two of them. The far-away shall come and assist at the building of the Temple. This section
breaks off in the middle of a sentence.
IV. Chap. vii.—The Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah on the fourth of the ninth month
of the fourth year of Darius, that is nearly two years after the date of the Visions. The Temple was
approaching completion; and an inquiry was addressed to the priests who were in it and to the
prophets concerning the Fasts, which had been maintained during the Exile, while the Temple lay
desolate (chap. vii. 1–3). This inquiry drew from Zechariah a historical explanation of how the Fasts
arose (chap. vii. 4–14).
V. Chap. viii.—Ten short undated oracles, each introduced by the same formula, Thus saith
Jehovah of Hosts, and summarising all Zechariah’s teaching since before the Temple began up to the
question of the cessation of the Fasts upon its completion—with promises for the future. (1) A Word
affirming Jehovah’s new zeal for Jerusalem and His Return to her (vv. 1, 2). (2) Another of the same
(ver. 3). (3) A Word promising fulness of old folk and children in her streets (vv. 4, 5). (4) A Word
affirming that nothing is too wonderful for Jehovah (ver. 6). (5) A Word promising the return of the
people from east and west (vv. 7, 8). (6 and 7) Two Words contrasting, in terms similar to Haggai i.,
the poverty of the people before the foundation of the Temple with their new prosperity: from a curse
Israel shall become a blessing. This is due to God’s anger having changed into a purpose of grace to
Jerusalem. But the people themselves must do truth and justice, ceasing from perjury and thoughts of
evil against each other (vv. 9–17). (8) A Word which recurs to the question of Fasting, and commands
that the four great Fasts, instituted to commemorate the siege and overthrow of Jerusalem, and the
murder of Gedaliah, be changed to joy and gladness (vv. 18, 19). (9) A Word predicting the coming
of the Gentiles to the worship of Jehovah at Jerusalem (vv. 20–22). (10) Another of the same
(ver. 23).

There can be little doubt that, apart from the few interpolations noted,
these eight chapters are genuine prophecies of Zechariah, who is mentioned
in the Book of Ezra as the colleague of Haggai, and contemporary of
Zerubbabel and Joshua at the time of the rebuilding of the Temple.[722] Like

the oracles of Haggai, these prophecies are dated according to the years of
Darius the king, from his second year to his fourth. Although they may
contain some of the exhortations to build the Temple, which the Book of
Ezra informs us that Zechariah made along with Haggai, the most of them
presuppose progress in the work, and seek to assist it by historical
retrospect and by glowing hopes of the Messianic effects of its completion.
Their allusions suit exactly the years to which they are assigned. Darius is
king. The Exile has lasted about seventy years.[723] Numbers of Jews
remain in Babylon,[724] and are scattered over the rest of the world.[725] The
community at Jerusalem is small and weak: it is the mere colony of young
men and men in middle life who came to it from Babylon; there are few
children and old folk.[726] Joshua and Zerubbabel are the heads of the
community, and the pledges for its future.[727] The exact conditions are
recalled as recent which Haggai spoke of a few years before.[728] Moreover,
there is a steady and orderly progress throughout the prophecies, in
harmony with the successive dates at which they were delivered. In
November 520 they begin with a cry to repentance and lessons drawn from
the past of prophecy.[729] In January 519 Temple and City are still to be
built.[730] Zerubbabel has laid the foundation; the completion is yet future.
[731]
The prophet’s duty is to quiet the people’s apprehensions about the
state of the world,[732] to provoke their zeal,[733] give them confidence in
their great men,[734] and, above all, assure them that God is returned to
them[735] and their sin pardoned.[736] But in December 518 the Temple is so
far built that the priests are said to belong to it;[737] there is no occasion for
continuing the fasts of the Exile,[738] the future has opened and the horizon
is bright with the Messianic hopes.[739] Most of all, it is felt that the hard
struggle with the forces of nature is over, and the people are exhorted to the

virtues of the civic life.[740] They have time to lift their eyes from their work
and see the nations coming from afar to Jerusalem.[741]
These features leave no room for doubt that the great bulk of the first
eight chapters of the Book of Zechariah are by the prophet himself, and
from the years to which he assigns them, November 520 to December 518.
The point requires no argument.
There are, however, three passages which provoke further examination
—two of them because of the signs they bear of an earlier date, and one
because of the alteration it has suffered in the interests of a later day in
Israel’s history.
The lyric passage which is appended to the Second Vision (chap. ii 10–
17 Heb., 6–13 LXX. and Eng.) suggests questions by its singularity: there is
no other such among the Visions. But in addition to this it speaks not only
of the Return from Babylon as still future[742]—this might still be said after
the First Return of the exiles in 536[743]—but it differs from the language of
all the Visions proper in describing the return of Jehovah Himself to Zion as
still future. The whole, too, has the ring of the great odes in Isaiah xl.—lv.,
and seems to reflect the same situation, upon the eve of Cyrus’ conquest of
Babylon. There can be little doubt that we have here inserted in Zechariah’s
Visions a song of twenty years earlier, but we must confess inability to
decide whether it was adopted by Zechariah himself or added by a later
hand.[744]
Again, there are the two passages called the Word of Jehovah to
Zerubbabel, chap. iv. 6b-10a; and the Word of Jehovah concerning the gifts
which came to Jerusalem from the Jews in Babylon, chap. vi. 9–15. The
first, as Wellhausen has shown,[745] is clearly out of place; it disturbs the
narrative of the Vision, and is to be put at the end of the latter. The second is
undated, and separate from the Visions. The second plainly affirms that the
building of the Temple is still future. The man whose name is Branch or

Shoot is designated: and he shall build the Temple of Jehovah. The first is in
the same temper as the first two oracles of Haggai. It is possible then that
these two passages are not, like the Visions with which they are taken, to be
dated from 519, but represent that still earlier prophesying of Zechariah
with which we are told he assisted Haggai in instigating the people to begin
to build the Temple.

The style of the prophet Zechariah betrays special features almost only
in the narrative of the Visions. Outside these his language is simple, direct
and pure, as it could not but be, considering how much of it is drawn from,
or modelled upon, the older prophets,[746] and chiefly Hosea and Jeremiah.
Only one or two lapses into a careless and degenerate dialect show us how
the prophet might have written, had he not been sustained by the music of
the classical periods of the language.[747]
This directness and pith is not shared by the language in which the
Visions are narrated.[748] Here the style is involved and redundant. The
syntax is loose; there is a frequent omission of the copula, and of other
means by which, in better Hebrew, connection and conciseness are
sustained. The formulas, thus saith and saying, are repeated to weariness. At
the same time it is fair to ask, how much of this redundancy was due to
Zechariah himself? Take the Septuagint version. The Hebrew text, which it
followed, not only included a number of repetitions of the formulas, and of
the designations of the personages introduced into the Visions, which do not
occur in the Massoretic text,[749] but omitted some which are found in the
Massoretic text.[750] These two sets of phenomena prove that from an early
date the copiers of the original text of Zechariah must have been busy in
increasing its redundancies. Further, there are still earlier intrusions and
expansions, for these are shared by both the Hebrew and the Greek texts:
some of them very natural efforts to clear up the personages and

conversations recorded in the dreams,[751] some of them stupid mistakes in
understanding the drift of the argument.[752] There must of course have been
a certain amount of redundancy in the original to provoke such aggravations
of it, and of obscurity or tortuousness of style to cause them to be deemed
necessary. But it would be very unjust to charge all the faults of our present
text to Zechariah himself, especially when we find such force and
simplicity in the passages outside the Visions. Of course the involved and
misty subjects of the latter naturally forced upon the description of them a
laboriousness of art, to which there was no provocation in directly
exhorting the people to a pure life, or in straightforward predictions of the
Messianic era.
Beyond the corruptions due to these causes, the text of Zechariah i.—
viii. has not suffered more than that of our other prophets. There are one or
two clerical errors;[753] an occasional preposition or person of a verb needs
to be amended. Here and there the text has been disarranged;[754] and as
already noticed, there has been one serious alteration of the original.[755]
From the foregoing paragraphs it must be apparent what help and
hindrance in the reconstruction of the text is furnished by the Septuagint. A
list of its variant readings and of its mistranslations is appended.[756]

CHAPTER XX

ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET
ZECHARIAH i. 1–6, etc.; EZRA v. 1, vi. 14

Zechariah is one of the prophets whose personality as distinguished from
their message exerts some degree of fascination on the student. This is not
due, however, as in the case of Hosea or Jeremiah, to the facts of his life,
for of these we know extremely little; but to certain conflicting symptoms
of character which appear through his prophecies.
His name was a very common one in Israel, Zekher-Yah, Jehovah
remembers.[757] In his own book he is described as the son of Berekh-Yah,
the son of Iddo,[758] and in the Aramaic document of the Book of Ezra as
the son of Iddo.[759] Some have explained this difference by supposing that
Berekhyah was the actual father of the prophet, but that either he died early,
leaving Zechariah to the care of the grandfather, or else that he was a man
of no note, and Iddo was more naturally mentioned as the head of the
family. There are several instances in the Old Testament of men being
called the sons of their grandfathers:[760] as in these cases the grandfather
was the reputed founder of the house, so in that of Zechariah Iddo was the
head of his family when it came out of Babylon and was anew planted in
Jerusalem. Others, however, have contested the genuineness of the words
son of Berekh-Yah, and have traced their insertion to a confusion of the
prophet with Zechariah son of Yĕbherekh-Yahu, the contemporary of
Isaiah.[761] This is precarious, while the other hypothesis is a very natural
one.[762] Whichever be correct, the prophet Zechariah was a member of the
priestly family of Iddo, that came up to Jerusalem from Babylon under
Cyrus.[763] The Book of Nehemiah adds that in the high-priesthood of

Yoyakim, the son of Joshua, the head of the house of Iddo was a Zechariah.
[764]
If this be our prophet, then he was probably a young man in 520,[765]
and had come up as a child in the caravans from Babylon. The Aramaic
document of the Book of Ezra[766] assigns to Zechariah a share with Haggai
in the work of instigating Zerubbabel and Jeshua to begin the Temple. None
of his oracles is dated previous to the beginning of the work in August 520,
but we have seen[767] that among those undated there are one or two which
by referring to the building of the Temple as still future may contain some
relics of that first stage of his ministry. From November 520 we have the
first of his dated oracles; his Visions followed in January 519, and his last
recorded prophesying in December 518.[768]
These are all the certain events of Zechariah’s history. But in the well-
attested prophecies he has left we discover, besides some obvious traits of
character, certain problems of style and expression which suggest a
personality of more than usual interest. Loyalty to the great voices of old,
the temper which appeals to the experience, rather than to the dogmas, of
the past, the gift of plain speech to his own times, a wistful anxiety about
his reception as a prophet[769] combined with the absence of all ambition to
be original or anything but the clear voice of the lessons of the past and of
the conscience of to-day—these are the qualities which characterise
Zechariah’s orations to the people. But how to reconcile them with the
strained art and obscure truths of the Visions—it is this which invests with
interest the study of his personality. We have proved that the obscurity and
redundancy of the Visions cannot all have been due to himself. Later hands
have exaggerated the repetitions and ravelled the processes of the original.
But these gradual blemishes have not grown from nothing: the original style
must have been sufficiently involved to provoke the interpolations of the
scribes, and it certainly contained all the weird and shifting apparitions
which we find so hard to make clear to ourselves. The problem, therefore,

remains—how one who had gift of speech, so straight and clear, came to
torture and tangle his style; how one who presented with all plainness the
main issues of his people’s history found it laid upon him to invent, for the
further expression of these, symbols so laboured and intricate.
We begin with the oracle, which opens his book and illustrates those
simple characteristics of the man that contrast so sharply with the temper of
his Visions.
In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of Jehovah
came to the prophet Zechariah, son of Berekhyah, son of Iddo,[770] saying:
Jehovah was very wroth[771] with your fathers. And thou shalt say unto
them: Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Turn ye to Me—oracle of Jehovah of
Hosts—that I may turn to you, saith Jehovah of Hosts! Be not like your
fathers, to whom the former prophets preached, saying: “Thus saith
Jehovah of Hosts, Turn now from your evil ways and from[772] your evil
deeds,” but they hearkened not, and paid no attention to Me—oracle of
Jehovah. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live for
ever? But[773] My words and My statutes, with which I charged My servants
the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? till these turned and said,
As Jehovah of Hosts did purpose to do unto us, according to our deeds and
according to our ways, so hath He dealt with us.
It is a sign of the new age which we have reached, that its prophet
should appeal to the older prophets with as much solemnity as they did to
Moses himself. The history which led to the Exile has become to Israel as
classic and sacred as her great days of deliverance from Egypt and of
conquest in Canaan. But still more significant is what Zechariah seeks from
that past; this we must carefully discover, if we would appreciate with
exactness his rank as a prophet.
The development of religion may be said to consist of a struggle
between two tempers, both of which indeed appeal to the past, but from

very opposite motives. The one proves its devotion to the older prophets by
adopting the exact formulas of their doctrine, counts these sacred to the
letter, and would enforce them in detail upon the minds and circumstances
of the new generation. It conceives that truth has been promulgated once for
all in forms as enduring as the principles they contain. It fences ancient
rites, cherishes old customs and institutions, and when these are questioned
it becomes alarmed and even savage. The other temper is no whit behind
this one in its devotion to the past, but it seeks the ancient prophets not so
much for what they have said as for what they have been, not for what they
enforced but for what they encountered, suffered and confessed. It asks not
for dogmas but for experience and testimony. He who can thus read the past
and interpret it to his own day—he is the prophet. In his reading he finds
nothing so clear, nothing so tragic, nothing so convincing as the working of
the Word of God. He beholds how this came to men, haunted them and was
entreated by them. He sees that it was their great opportunity, which being
rejected became their judgment. He finds abused justice vindicated, proud
wrong punished, and all God’s neglected commonplaces achieving in time
their triumph. He reads how men came to see this, and to confess their guilt.
He is haunted by the remorse of generations who know how they might
have obeyed the Divine call, but wilfully did not. And though they have
perished, and the prophets have died and their formulas are no more
applicable, the victorious Word itself still lives and cries to men with the
terrible emphasis of their fathers’ experience. All this is the vision of the
true prophet, and it was the vision of Zechariah.
His generation was one whose chief temptation was to adopt towards
the past the other attitude we have described. In their feebleness what could
the poor remnant of Israel do but cling servilely to the former greatness?
The vindication of the Exile had stamped the Divine authority of the earlier
prophets. The habits, which the life in Babylon had perfected, of arranging

and codifying the literature of the past, and of employing it, in place of altar
and ritual, in the stated service of God, had canonised Scripture and
provoked men to the worship of its very letter. Had the real prophet not
again been raised, these habits might have too early produced the belief that
the Word of God was exhausted, and must have fastened upon the feeble
life of Israel that mass of stiff and stark dogmas, the literal application of
which Christ afterwards found crushing the liberty and the force of religion.
Zechariah prevented this—for a time. He himself was mighty in the
Scriptures of the past: no man in Israel makes larger use of them. But he
employs them as witnesses, not as dogmas; he finds in them not authority,
but experience.[774] He reads their testimony to the ever-living presence of
God’s Word with men. And seeing that, though the old forms and figures
have perished with the hearts which shaped them, the Word itself in its bare
truth has vindicated its life by fulfilment in history, he knows that it lives
still, and hurls it upon his people, not in the forms published by this or that
prophet of long ago, but in its essence and direct from God Himself, as His
Word for to-day and now. The fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do
they live for ever? But My words and My statutes, with which I charged My
servants the prophets, have they not overtaken your fathers? Thus saith
Jehovah of Hosts, Be ye not like your fathers, but turn ye to Me that I may
turn to you.
The argument of this oracle might very naturally have been narrowed
into a credential for the prophet himself as sent from God. About his
reception as Jehovah’s messenger Zechariah shows a repeated anxiety. Four
times he concludes a prediction with the words, And ye shall know that
Jehovah hath sent me,[775] as if after his first utterances he had encountered
that suspicion and unbelief which a prophet never failed to suffer from his
contemporaries. But in this oracle there is no trace of such personal anxiety.
The oracle is pervaded only with the desire to prove the ancient Word of

God as still alive, and to drive it home in its own sheer force. Like the
greatest of his order, Zechariah appears with the call to repent: Turn ye to
Me—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts—that I may turn to you. This is the pivot
on which history has turned, the one condition on which God has been able
to help men. Wherever it is read as the conclusion of all the past, wherever
it is proclaimed as the conscience of the present, there the true prophet is
found and the Word of God has been spoken.
The same possession by the ethical spirit reappears, as we shall see, in
Zechariah’s orations to the people after the anxieties of building are over
and the completion of the Temple is in sight. In these he affirms again that
the whole essence of God’s Word by the older prophets has been moral—to
judge true judgment, to practise mercy, to defend the widow and orphan, the
stranger and poor, and to think no evil of one another. For the sad fasts of
the Exile Zechariah enjoins gladness, with the duty of truth and the hope of
peace. Again and again he enforces sincerity and the love without
dissimulation. His ideals for Jerusalem are very high, including the
conversion of the nations to her God. But warlike ambitions have vanished
from them, and his pictures of her future condition are homely and
practical. Jerusalem shall be no more a fortress, but spread village-wise
without walls.[776] Full families, unlike the present colony with its few
children and its men worn out in middle life by harassing warfare with
enemies and a sullen nature; streets rife with children playing and old folk
sitting in the sun; the return of the exiles; happy harvests and springtimes of
peace; solid gain of labour for every man, with no raiding neighbours to
harass, nor the mutual envies of peasants in their selfish struggle with
famine.
It is a simple, hearty, practical man whom such prophesying reveals, the
spirit of him bent on justice and love, and yearning for the unharassed
labour of the field and for happy homes. No prophet has more beautiful

sympathies, a more direct word of righteousness, or a braver heart. Fast not,
but love truth and peace. Truth and wholesome justice set ye up in your
gates. Be not afraid; strengthen your hands! Old men and women shall yet
sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand for the fulness of their
years; the city’s streets shall be rife with boys and girls at play.

CHAPTER XXI

THE VISIONS OF ZECHARIAH
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi.

The Visions of Zechariah do not lack those large and simple views of
religion which we have just seen to be the charm of his other prophecies.
Indeed it is among the Visions that we find the most spiritual of all his
utterances:[777] Not by might, and not by force, but by My Spirit, saith
Jehovah of Hosts. The Visions express the need of the Divine forgiveness,
emphasise the reality of sin, as a principle deeper than the civic crimes in
which it is manifested, and declare the power of God to banish it from His
people. The Visions also contain the remarkable prospect of Jerusalem as
the City of Peace, her only wall the Lord Himself.[778] The overthrow of the
heathen empires is predicted by the Lord’s own hand, and from all the
Visions there are absent both the turmoil and the glory of war.
We must also be struck by the absence of another element, which is a
cause of complexity in the writings of many prophets—the polemic against
idolatry. Zechariah nowhere mentions the idols. We have already seen what
proof this silence bears for the fact that the community to which he spoke
was not that half-heathen remnant of Israel which had remained in the land,
but was composed of worshippers of Jehovah who at His word had returned
from Babylon.[779] Here we have only to do with the bearing of the fact
upon Zechariah’s style. That bewildering confusion of the heathen pantheon
and its rites, which forms so much of our difficulty in interpreting some of
the prophecies of Ezekiel and the closing chapters of the Book of Isaiah, is
not to blame for any of the complexity of Zechariah’s Visions.
Nor can we attribute the latter to the fact that the Visions are dreams,
and therefore bound to be more involved and obscure than the words of

Jehovah which came to Zechariah in the open daylight of his people’s
public life. In chaps. i. 7—vi. we have not the narrative of actual dreams,
but a series of conscious and artistic allegories—the deliberate translation
into a carefully constructed symbolism of the Divine truths with which the
prophet was entrusted by his God. Yet this only increases our problem—
why a man with such gifts of direct speech, and such clear views of his
people’s character and history, should choose to express the latter by an
imagery so artificial and involved? In his orations Zechariah is very like the
prophets whom we have known before the Exile, thoroughly ethical and
intent upon the public conscience of his time. He appreciates what they
were, feels himself standing in their succession, and is endowed both with
their spirit and their style. But none of them constructs the elaborate
allegories which he does, or insists upon the religious symbolism which he
enforces as indispensable to the standing of Israel with God. Not only are
their visions few and simple, but they look down upon the visionary temper
as a rude stage of prophecy and inferior to their own, in which the Word of
God is received by personal communion with Himself, and conveyed to His
people by straight and plain words. Some of the earlier prophets even
condemn all priesthood and ritual; none of them regards these as
indispensable to Israel’s right relations with Jehovah; and none employs
those superhuman mediators of the Divine truth, by whom Zechariah is
instructed in his Visions.

1.THE INFLUENCES WHICH MOULDED THE VISIONS.
The explanation of this change that has come over prophecy must be
sought for in certain habits which the people formed in exile. During the
Exile several causes conspired to develop among Hebrew writers the
tempers both of symbolism and apocalypse. The chief of these was their
separation from the realities of civic life, with the opportunity their political

leisure afforded them of brooding and dreaming. Facts and Divine
promises, which had previously to be dealt with by the conscience of the
moment, were left to be worked out by the imagination. The exiles were not
responsible citizens or statesmen, but dreamers. They were inspired by
mighty hopes for the future, and not fettered by the practical necessities of a
definite historical situation upon which these hopes had to be immediately
realised. They had a far-off horizon to build upon, and they occupied the
whole breadth of it. They had a long time to build, and they elaborated the
minutest details of their architecture. Consequently their construction of the
future of Israel, and their description of the processes by which it was to be
reached, became colossal, ornate and lavishly symbolic. Nor could the
exiles fail to receive stimulus for all this from the rich imagery of
Babylonian art by which they were surrounded.
Under these influences there were three strong developments in Israel.
One was that development of Apocalypse the first beginnings of which we
traced in Zephaniah—the representation of God’s providence of the world
and of His people, not by the ordinary political and military processes of
history, but by awful convulsions and catastrophes, both in nature and in
politics, in which God Himself appeared, either alone in sudden glory or by
the mediation of heavenly armies. The second—and it was but a part of the
first—was the development of a belief in Angels: superhuman beings who
had not only a part to play in the apocalyptic wars and revolutions; but, in
the growing sense, which characterises the period, of God’s distance and
awfulness, were believed to act as His agents in the communication of His
Word to men. And, thirdly, there was the development of the Ritual. To
some minds this may appear the strangest of all the effects of the Exile. The
fall of the Temple, its hierarchy and sacrifices, might be supposed to
enforce more spiritual conceptions of God and of His communion with His
people. And no doubt it did. The impossibility of the legal sacrifices in exile

opened the mind of Israel to the belief that God was satisfied with the
sacrifices of the broken heart, and drew near, without mediation, to all who
were humble and pure of heart. But no one in Israel therefore understood
that these sacrifices were for ever abolished. Their interruption was
regarded as merely temporary even by the most spiritual of Jewish writers.
The Fifty-First Psalm, for instance, which declares that the sacrifices of
God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, Thou wilt
not despise, immediately follows this declaration by the assurance that
when God builds again the walls of Jerusalem, He will once more take
delight in the legal sacrifices: burnt offering and whole burnt offering, the
oblation of bullocks upon Thine altar.[780] For men of such views the ruin
of the Temple was not its abolition with the whole dispensation which it
represented, but rather the occasion for its reconstruction upon wider lines
and a more detailed system, for the planning of which the nation’s exile
afforded the leisure and the carefulness of art described above. The ancient
liturgy, too, was insufficient for the stronger convictions of guilt and need
of purgation, which sore punishment had impressed upon the people. Then,
scattered among the heathen as they were, they learned to require stricter
laws and more drastic ceremonies to restore and preserve their holiness.
Their ritual, therefore, had to be expanded and detailed to a degree far
beyond what we find in Israel’s earlier systems of worship. With the fall of
the monarchy and the absence of civic life the importance of the priesthood
was proportionately enhanced; and the growing sense of God’s aloofness
from the world, already alluded to, made the more indispensable human, as
well as superhuman, mediators between Himself and His people. Consider
these things, and it will be clear why prophecy, which with Amos had begun
a war against all ritual, and with Jeremiah had achieved a religion
absolutely independent of priesthood and Temple, should reappear after the
Exile, insistent upon the building of the Temple, enforcing the need both of

priesthood and sacrifice, and while it proclaimed the Messianic King and
the High Priest as the great feeders of the national life and worship, finding
no place beside them for the Prophet himself.[781]
The force of these developments of Apocalypse, Angelology and the
Ritual appears both in Ezekiel and in the exilic codification of the ritual
which forms so large a part of the Pentateuch. Ezekiel carries Apocalypse
far beyond the beginnings started by Zephaniah. He introduces, though not
under the name of angels, superhuman mediators between himself and God.
The Priestly Code does not mention angels, and has no Apocalypse; but like
Ezekiel it develops, to an extraordinary degree, the ritual of Israel. Both its
author and Ezekiel base on the older forms, but build as men who are not
confined by the lines of an actually existing system. The changes they
make, the innovations they introduce, are too numerous to mention here. To
illustrate their influence upon Zechariah, it is enough to emphasise the large
place they give in the ritual to the processes of propitiation and cleansing
from sin, and the increased authority with which they invest the priesthood.
In Ezekiel Israel has still a Prince, though he is not called King. He arranges
the cultus,[782] and sacrifices are offered for him and the people,[783] but the
priests teach and judge the people.[784] In the Priestly Code[785] the
priesthood is more rigorously fenced than by Ezekiel from the laity, and
more regularly graded. At its head appears a High Priest (as he does not in
Ezekiel), and by his side the civil rulers are portrayed in lesser dignity and
power. Sacrifices are made, no longer as with Ezekiel for Prince and
People, but for Aaron and the Congregation; and throughout the narrative of
ancient history, into the form of which this Code projects its legislation, the
High Priest stands above the captain of the host, even when the latter is
Joshua himself. God’s enemies are defeated not so much by the wisdom and
valour of the secular powers, as by the miracles of Jehovah Himself,
mediated through the priesthood. Ezekiel and the Priestly Code both

elaborate the sacrifices of atonement and sanctification beyond all the
earlier uses.

2. GENERAL FEATURES OF THE VISIONS.
It was beneath these influences that Zechariah grew up, and to them we
may trace, not only numerous details of his Visions, but the whole of their
involved symbolism. He was himself a priest and the son of a priest, born
and bred in the very order to which we owe the codification of the ritual,
and the development of those ideas of guilt and uncleanness that led to its
expansion and specialisation. The Visions in which he deals with these are
the Third to the Seventh. As with Haggai there is a High Priest, in advance
upon Ezekiel and in agreement with the Priestly Code. As in the latter the
High Priest represents the people, and carries their guilt before God.[786] He
and his colleagues are pledges and portents of the coming Messiah. But the
civil power is not yet diminished before the sacerdotal, as in the Priestly
Code. We shall find indeed that a remarkable attempt has been made to alter
the original text of a prophecy appended to the Visions,[787] in order to
divert to the High Priest the coronation and Messianic rank there described.
But any one who reads the passage carefully can see for himself that the
crown (a single crown, as the verb which it governs proves[788]) which
Zechariah was ordered to make was designed for Another than the priest,
that the priest was but to stand at this Other’s right hand, and that there was
to be concord between the two of them. This Other can only have been the
Messianic King, Zerubbabel, as was already proclaimed by Haggai.[789] The
altered text is due to a later period, when the High Priest became the civil as
well as the religious head of the community. To Zechariah he was still only
the right hand of the monarch in government; but, as we have seen, the
religious life of the people was already gathered up and concentrated in
him. It is the priests, too, who by their perpetual service and holy life bring

on the Messianic era.[790] Men come to the Temple to propitiate Jehovah,
for which Zechariah uses the anthropomorphic expression to make smooth
or placid His face.[791] No more than this is made of the sacrificial system,
which was not in full course when the Visions were announced. But the
symbolism of the Fourth Vision is drawn from the furniture of the Temple.
It is interesting that the great candelabrum seen by the prophet should be
like, not the ten lights of the old Temple of Solomon, but the seven-
branched candlestick described in the Priestly Code. In the Sixth and
Seventh Visions, the strong convictions of guilt and uncleanness, which
were engendered in Israel by the Exile, are not removed by the sacrificial
means enforced in the Priestly Code, but by symbolic processes in the style
of the visions of Ezekiel.
The Visions in which Zechariah treats of the outer history of the world
are the first two and the last, and in these we notice the influence of the
Apocalypse developed during the Exile. In Zechariah’s day Israel had no
stage for their history save the site of Jerusalem and its immediate
neighbourhood. So long as he keeps to this Zechariah is as practical and
matter-of-fact as any of the prophets, but when he has to go beyond it to
describe the general overthrow of the heathen, he is unable to project that,
as Amos or Isaiah did, in terms of historic battle, and has to call in the
apocalyptic. A people such as that poor colony of exiles, with no issue upon
history, is forced to take refuge in Apocalypse, and carries with it even
those of its prophets whose conscience, like Zechariah’s, is most strongly
bent upon the practical present. Consequently these three historical Visions
are the most vague of the eight. They reveal the whole earth under the care
of Jehovah and the patrol of His angels. They definitely predict the
overthrow of the heathen empires. But, unlike Amos or Isaiah, the prophet
does not see by what political movements this is to be effected. The world
is still quiet and at peace.[792] The time is hidden in the Divine counsels; the

means, though clearly symbolised in four smiths who come forward to
smite the horns of the heathen,[793] and in a chariot which carries God’s
wrath to the North,[794] are obscure. The prophet appears to have intended,
not any definite individuals or political movements of the immediate future,
but God’s own supernatural forces. In other words, the Smiths and Chariots
are not an allegory of history, but powers apocalyptic. The forms of the
symbols were derived by Zechariah from different sources. Perhaps that of
the smiths who destroy the horns in the Second Vision was suggested by the
smiths of destruction threatened upon Ammon by Ezekiel.[795] In the
horsemen of the First Vision and the chariots of the Eighth, Ewald sees a
reflection of the couriers and posts which Darius organised throughout the
empire; they are more probably, as we shall see, a reflection of the military
bands and patrols of the Persians. But from whatever quarter Zechariah
derived the exact aspect of these Divine messengers, he found many
precedents for them in the native beliefs of Israel. They are, in short, angels,
incarnate as Hebrew angels always were, and in fashion like men. But this
brings up the whole subject of the angels, whom he also sees employed as
the mediators of God’s Word to him; and that is large enough to be left to a
chapter by itself.[796]
We have now before us all the influences which led Zechariah to the
main form and chief features of his Visions.

3. EXPOSITION OF THE SEVERAL VISIONS.
For all the Visions there is one date, in the twenty-fourth day of the
eleventh month, the month Shebat, in the second year of Darius, that is
January or February 519; and one Divine impulse, the Word of Jehovah
came to the prophet Zekharyah, son of Berekhyahu, son of Iddo, as follows.

THE FIRST VISION: THE ANGEL-HORSEMEN (i. 7–17).

The seventy years which Jeremiah had fixed for the duration of the
Babylonian servitude were drawing to a close. Four months had elapsed
since Haggai promised that in a little while God would shake all nations.
[797]
But the world was not shaken: there was no political movement which
promised to restore her glory to Jerusalem. A very natural disappointment
must have been the result among the Jews. In this situation of affairs the
Word came to Zechariah, and both situation and Word he expressed by his
First Vision.
It was one of the myrtle-covered glens in the neighbourhood of
Jerusalem:[798] Zechariah calls it the Glen or Valley-Bottom, either because
it was known under that name to the Jews, or because he was himself wont
to frequent it for prayer. He discovers in it what seems to be a rendezvous
of Persian cavalry-scouts,[799] the leader of the troop in front, and the rest
behind him, having just come in with their reports. Soon, however, he is
made aware that they are angels, and with that quick, dissolving change
both of function and figure, which marks all angelic apparitions,[800] they
explain to him their mission. Now it is an angel-interpreter at his side who
speaks, and now the angel on the front horse. They are scouts of God come
in from their survey of the whole earth. The world lies quiet. Whereupon
the angel of Jehovah asks Him how long His anger must rest on Jerusalem
and nothing be done to restore her; and the prophet hears a kind and
comforting answer. The nations have done more evil to Israel than God
empowered them to do. Their aggravations have changed His wrath against
her to pity, and in pity He is come back to her. She shall soon be rebuilt and
overflow with prosperity.
The only perplexity in all this is the angels’ report that the whole earth
lies quiet. How this could have been in 519 is difficult to understand. The
great revolts against Darius were then in active progress, the result was
uncertain and he took at least three more years to put them all down. They

were confined, it is true, to the east and north-east of the empire, but some
of them threatened Babylon, and we can hardly ascribe the report of the
angels to such a limitation of the Jews’ horizon at this time as shut out
Mesopotamia or the lands to the north of her. There remain two alternatives.
Either these far-away revolts made only more impressive the stagnancy of
the tribes of the rest of the empire, and the helplessness of the Jews and
their Syrian neighbours was convincingly shown by their inability to take
advantage even of the desperate straits to which Darius was reduced; or else
in that month of vision Darius had quelled one of the rebellions against him,
and for the moment there was quiet in the world.
By night I had a vision, and behold! a man riding a brown horse,[801]
and he was standing between the myrtles that are in the Glen;[802] and
behind him horses brown, bay[803] and white. And I said, What are these,
my lord? And the angel who talked with me said, I will show you what these
are. And the man who was standing among the myrtles answered and said,
These are they whom Jehovah hath sent to go to and fro through the earth.
And they answered the angel of Jehovah who stood among the myrtles,[804]
and said, We have gone up and down through the earth, and lo! the whole
earth is still and at peace.[805] And the angel of Jehovah answered and said,
Jehovah of Hosts, how long hast Thou no pity for Jerusalem and the cities
of Judah, with which[806] Thou hast been wroth these seventy years? And
Jehovah answered the angel who talked with me,[807] kind words and
comforting. And the angel who talked with me said to me, Proclaim now as
follows: Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts, I am zealous for Jerusalem and for
Zion, with a great zeal; but with great wrath am I wroth against the
arrogant Gentiles. For I was but a little angry with Israel, but they
aggravated the evil.[808] Therefore thus saith Jehovah, I am returned to
Jerusalem with mercies. My house shall be built in her—oracle of Jehovah
of Hosts—and the measuring line shall be drawn over Jerusalem. Proclaim

yet again, saying: Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts, My cities shall yet overflow
with prosperity, and Jehovah shall again comfort Zion, and again make
choice of Jerusalem.
Two things are to be noted in this oracle. No political movement is
indicated as the means of Jerusalem’s restoration: this is to be the effect of
God’s free grace in returning to dwell in Jerusalem, which is the reward of
the building of the Temple. And there is an interesting explanation of the
motive for God’s new grace: in executing His sentence upon Israel, the
heathen had far exceeded their commission, and now themselves deserved
punishment. That is to say, the restoration of Jerusalem and the resumption
of the worship are not enough for the future of Israel. The heathen must be
chastised. But Zechariah does not predict any overthrow of the world’s
power, either by earthly or by heavenly forces. This is entirely in harmony
with the insistence upon peace which distinguishes him from other
prophets.

THE SECOND VISION: THE FOUR HORNS AND THE
FOUR SMITHS (ii. 1–4 Heb., i. 18–21 Eng.).
The Second Vision supplies what is lacking in the First, the destruction
of the tyrants who have oppressed Israel. The prophet sees four horns,
which, he is told by his interpreting angel, are the powers that have
scattered Judah. The many attempts to identify these with four heathen
nations are ingenious but futile.
“Four horns were seen as representing the totality of Israel’s enemies—
her enemies from all quarters.”[809] And to destroy these horns four smiths
appear. Because in the Vision the horns are of iron, in Israel an old symbol
of power, the first verb used of the action can hardly be, as in the Hebrew
text, to terrify. The Greek reads sharpen, and probably some verb meaning
to cut or chisel stood in the original.[810]

And I lifted mine eyes and looked, and lo! four horns. And I said to the
angel who spoke with me, What are these? And he said to me, These are the
horns which have scattered Judah, Israel and Jerusalem.[811] And Jehovah
showed me four smiths. And I said, What are these coming to do? And He
spake, saying, These are the horns which scattered Judah, so that none
lifted up his head;[812] and these are come to ...[813] them, to strike down the
horns of the nations, that lifted the horn against the land of Judah to scatter
it.

THE THIRD VISION: THE CITY OF PEACE
(ii. 5–9 Heb., ii. 1–5 Eng.).
Like the Second Vision, the Third follows from the First, another, but a
still more significant, supplement. The First had promised the rebuilding of
Jerusalem, and now the prophet beholds a young man—by this term he
probably means a servant or apprentice—who is attempting to define the
limits of the new city. In the light of what this attempt encounters, there can
be little doubt that the prophet means to symbolise by it the intention of
building the walls upon the old lines, so as to make Jerusalem again the
mountain fortress she had previously been. Some have considered that the
young man goes forth only to see, or to show, the extent of the city in the
approaching future. But if this had been his motive, there would have been
no reason in interrupting him with other orders. The point is, that he has
narrow ideas of what the city should be, and is prepared to define it upon its
old lines of a fortress. For the interpreting angel who comes forward[814] is
told by another angel to run and tell the young man that in the future
Jerusalem shall be a large unwalled town, and this, not only because of the
multitude of its population, for even then it might still have been fortified
like Niniveh, but because Jehovah Himself shall be its wall. The young man
is prevented, not merely from making it small, but from making it a citadel.

And this is in conformity with all the singular absence of war from
Zechariah’s Visions, both of the future deliverance of Jehovah’s people and
of their future duties before Him. It is indeed remarkable how Zechariah not
only develops none of the warlike elements of earlier Messianic prophecies,
but tells us here of how God Himself actually prevented their repetition, and
insists again and again only on those elements of ancient prediction which
had filled the future of Israel with peace.
And I lifted mine eyes and looked, and lo! a man with a measuring rope
in his hand. So I said, Whither art thou going? And he said to me, To
measure Jerusalem: to see how much its breadth and how much its length
should be. And lo! the angel who talked with me came forward,[815] and
another angel came forward to meet him. And he said to him, Run and
speak to yonder young man thus: Like a number of open villages shall
Jerusalem remain, because of the multitude of men and cattle in the midst of
her. And I Myself will be to her—oracle of Jehovah—a wall of fire round
about, and for glory will I be in her midst.
In this Vision Zechariah gives us, with his prophecy, a lesson in the
interpretation of prophecy. His contemporaries believed God’s promise to
rebuild Jerusalem, but they defined its limits by the conditions of an older
and a narrower day. They brought forth their measuring rods, to measure the
future by the sacred attainments of the past. Such literal fulfilment of His
Word God prevented by that ministry of angels which Zechariah beheld. He
would not be bound by those forms which His Word had assumed in
suitableness to the needs of ruder generations. The ideal of many of the
returned exiles must have been that frowning citadel, those gates of
everlastingness,[816] which some of them celebrated in Psalms, and from
which the hosts of Sennacherib had been broken and swept back as the
angry sea is swept from the fixed line of Canaan’s coast.[817] What had been
enough for David and Isaiah was enough for them, especially as so many

prophets of the Lord had foretold a Messianic Jerusalem that should be a
counterpart of the historical. But God breaks the letter of His Word to give
its spirit a more glorious fulfilment. Jerusalem shall not be builded as a city
that is compact together,[818] but open and spread abroad village-wise upon
her high mountains, and God Himself her only wall.
The interest of this Vision is therefore not only historical. For ourselves
it has an abiding doctrinal value. It is a lesson in the method of applying
prophecy to the future. How much it is needed we must feel as we
remember the readiness of men among ourselves to construct the Church of
God upon the lines His own hand drew for our fathers, and to raise again
the bulwarks behind which they sufficiently sheltered His shrine. Whether
these ancient and sacred defences be dogmas or institutions, we have no
right, God tells us, to cramp behind them His powers for the future. And the
great men whom He raises to remind us of this, and to prevent by their
ministry the timid measurements of the zealous but servile spirits who
would confine everything to the exact letter of ancient Scripture—are they
any less His angels to us than those ministering spirits whom Zechariah
beheld preventing the narrow measures of the poor apprentice of his dream?
To the Third Vision there has been appended the only lyrical piece
which breaks the prose narrative of the Visions. We have already seen that it
is a piece of earlier date. Israel is addressed as still scattered to the four
winds of heaven, and still inhabiting Babylon. While in Zechariah’s own
oracles and visions Jehovah has returned to Jerusalem, His return according
to this piece is still future. There is nothing about the Temple: God’s holy
dwelling from which He has roused Himself is Heaven. The piece was
probably inserted by Zechariah himself: its lines are broken by what seems
to be a piece of prose, in which the prophet asserts his mission, in words he
twice uses elsewhere. But this is uncertain.

Ho, ho! Flee from the Land of the North
(oracle of Jehovah);
For as the four winds have I spread you abroad[819]
(oracle of Jehovah).
Ho! to Zion escape, thou inhabitress of Babel.[820]

For thus saith Jehovah of Hosts[821] to the nations that plunder you (for
he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye), that, lo! I am about to
wave My hand over them, and they shall be plunder to their own servants,
and ye shall know that Jehovah of Hosts hath sent me.

Sing out and rejoice, O daughter of Zion;
For, lo! I come, and will dwell in thy midst
(oracle of Jehovah).
And many nations shall join themselves to Jehovah
in that day,
And shall be to Him[822] a people.
And I will dwell in thy midst
(And thou shalt know that Jehovah of Hosts hath
sent me to thee).
And Jehovah will make Judah His heritage,
His portion shall be upon holy soil,
And make choice once more of Jerusalem.
Silence, all flesh, before Jehovah;[823]
For He hath roused Himself up from His holy
dwelling.

THE FOURTH VISION: THE HIGH PRIEST AND THE
SATAN (Chap. iii.).
The next Visions deal with the moral condition of Israel and their
standing before God. The Fourth is a judgment scene. The Angel of
Jehovah, who is not to be distinguished from Jehovah Himself,[824] stands
for judgment, and there appear before him Joshua the High Priest and the
Satan or Adversary who has come to accuse him. Now those who are
accused by the Satan—see next chapter of this volume upon the Angels of
the Visions—are, according to Jewish belief, those who have been
overtaken by misfortune. The people who are standing at God’s bar in the
person of their High Priest still suffer from the adversity in which Haggai
found them, and the continuance of which so disheartened them after the
Temple had begun. The evil seasons and poor harvests tormented their
hearts with the thought that the Satan still slandered them in the court of
God. But Zechariah comforts them with the vision of the Satan rebuked.
Israel has indeed been sorely beset by calamity, a brand much burned, but
now of God’s grace plucked from the fire. The Satan’s role is closed, and he
disappears from the Vision.[825] Yet something remains: Israel is rescued,
but not sanctified. The nation’s troubles are over: their uncleanness has still
to be removed. Zechariah sees that the High Priest is clothed in filthy
garments, while he stands before the Angel of Judgment. The Angel orders
his servants, those that stand before him,[826] to give him clean festal robes.
And the prophet, breaking out in sympathy with what he sees, for the first
time takes part in the Visions. Then I said, Let them also put a clean turban
on his head—the turban being the headdress, in Ezekiel of the Prince of
Israel, and in the Priestly Code of the High Priest.[827] This is done, and the
national effect of his cleansing is explained to the High Priest. If he remains
loyal to the law of Jehovah, he, the representative of Israel, shall have right
of entry to Jehovah’s presence among the angels who stand there. But more,

he and his colleagues the priests are a portent of the coming of the Messiah
—the Servant of Jehovah, the Branch, as he has been called by many
prophets.[828] A stone has already been set before Joshua, with seven eyes
upon it. God will engrave it with inscriptions, and on the same day take
away the guilt of the land. Then shall be the peace upon which Zechariah
loves to dwell.
And he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the Angel of
Jehovah, and the Satan[829] standing at his right hand to accuse him.[830]
And Jehovah[831] said to the Satan: Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan! Jehovah
who makes choice of Jerusalem rebuke thee! Is not this a brand saved from
the fire? But Joshua was clothed in foul garments while he stood before the
Angel. And he—the Angel—answered and said to those who stood in his
presence, Take the foul garments from off him (and he said to him, See, I
have made thy guilt to pass away from thee),[832] and clothe him[833] in
fresh clothing. And I said,[834] Let them put a clean turban[835] on his head.
And they put the clean turban upon his head, and clothed him with
garments, the Angel of Jehovah standing up the while.[836] And the Angel of
Jehovah certified unto Joshua, saying: Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts, If in
My ways thou walkest, and if My charges thou keepest in charge, then thou
also shall judge My house, and have charge of My courts, and I will give
thee entry[837] among these who stand in My presence. Hearken now, O
Joshua, high priest, thou and thy fellows who sit before thee are men of
omen, that, lo! I am about to bring My servant, Branch. For see the stone
which I have set before Joshua, one stone with seven eyes.[838] Lo, I will
etch the engraving upon it (oracle of Jehovah), and I will wash away the
guilt of that land in one day. In that day (oracle of Jehovah of Hosts) ye will
invite one another in under vine and under fig-tree.
The theological significance of the Vision is as clear as its consequences
in the subsequent theology and symbolism of Judaism. The uncleanness of

Israel which infests their representative before God is not defined.
Some[839] hold that it includes the guilt of Israel’s idolatry. But they have to
go back to Ezekiel for this, and we have seen that Zechariah nowhere
mentions or feels the presence of idols among his people. The Vision itself
supplies a better explanation. Joshua’s filthy garments are replaced by festal
and official robes. He is warned to walk in the whole law of the Lord, ruling
the Temple and guarding Jehovah’s court. The uncleanness was the opposite
of all this. It was not ethical failure: covetousness, greed, immorality. It
was, as Haggai protested, the neglect of the Temple, and of the whole
worship of Jehovah. If this be now removed, in all fidelity to the law, the
High Priest shall have access to God, and the Messiah will come. The High
Priest himself shall not be the Messiah—this dogma is left to a later age to
frame. But before God he will be as one of the angels, and himself and his
faithful priesthood omens of the Messiah. We need not linger on the
significance of this for the place of the priesthood in later Judaism. Note
how the High Priest is already the religious representative of his people:
their uncleanness is his; when he is pardoned and cleansed, the uncleanness
of the land is purged away. In such a High Priest Christian theology has
seen the prototype of Christ.
The stone is very difficult to explain. Some have thought of it as the
foundation-stone of the Temple, which had already been employed as a
symbol of the Messiah and which played so important a part in later Jewish
symbolism.[840] Others prefer the top-stone of the Temple, mentioned in
chap. iv. 7,[841] and others an altar or substitute for the ark.[842] Again, some
take it to be a jewel, either on the breastplate of the High Priest,[843] or upon
the crown afterwards prepared for Zerubbabel.[844] To all of these there are
objections. It is difficult to connect with the foundation-stone an engraving
still to be made; neither the top-stone of the Temple, nor a jewel on the
breastplate of the priest, nor a jewel on the king’s crown, could properly be

said to be set before the High Priest. We must rather suppose that the stone
is symbolic of the finished Temple.[845] The Temple is the full expression of
God’s providence and care—His seven eyes. Upon it shall His will be
engraved, and by its sacrifices the uncleanness of the land shall be taken
away.

THE FIFTH Vision: THE TEMPLE CANDLESTICK AND
THE TWO OLIVE-TREES (Chap. iv.).

As the Fourth Vision unfolded the dignity and significance of the High
Priest, so in the Fifth we find discovered the joint glory of himself and
Zerubbabel, the civil head of Israel. And to this is appended a Word for
Zerubbabel himself. In our present text this Word has become inserted in
the middle of the Vision, vv. 6b-10a; in the translation which follows it has
been removed to the end of the Vision, and the reasons for this will be
found in the notes.
The Vision is of the great golden lamp which stood in the Temple. In the
former Temple, light was supplied by ten several candlesticks.[846] But the
Levitical Code ordained one seven-branched lamp, and such appears to
have stood in the Temple built while Zechariah was prophesying.[847] The
lamp Zechariah sees has also seven branches, but differs in other respects,
and especially in some curious fantastic details only possible in dream and
symbol. Its seven lights were fed by seven pipes from a bowl or reservoir of
oil which stood higher than themselves, and this was fed, either directly
from two olive-trees which stood to the right and left of it, or, if ver. 12 be
genuine, by two tubes which brought the oil from the trees. The seven lights
are the seven eyes of Jehovah—if, as we ought, we run the second half of
ver. 10 on to the first half of ver. 6. The pipes and reservoir are given no
symbolic force; but the olive-trees which feed them are called the two sons
of oil which stand before the Lord of all the earth. These can only be the

two anointed heads of the community—Zerubbabel, the civil head, and
Joshua, the religious head. Theirs was the equal and co-ordinate duty of
sustaining the Temple, figured by the whole candelabrum, and ensuring the
brightness of the sevenfold revelation. The Temple, that is to say, is nothing
without the monarchy and the priesthood behind it; and these stand in the
immediate presence of God. Therefore this Vision, which to the superficial
eye might seem to be a glorification of the mere machinery of the Temple
and its ritual, is rather to prove that the latter derive all their power from the
national institutions which are behind them, from the two representatives of
the people who in their turn stand before God Himself. The Temple so near
completion will not of itself reveal God: let not the Jews put their trust in it,
but in the life behind it. And for ourselves the lesson of the Vision is that
which Christian theology has been so slow to learn, that God’s revelation
under the old covenant shone not directly through the material framework,
but was mediated by the national life, whose chief men stood and grew
fruitful in His presence.
One thing is very remarkable. The two sources of revelation are the
King and the Priest. The Prophet is not mentioned beside them. Nothing
could prove more emphatically the sense in Israel that prophecy was
exhausted.
The appointment of so responsible a position for Zerubbabel demanded
for him a special promise of grace. And therefore, as Joshua had his
promise in the Fourth Vision, we find Zerubbabel’s appended to the Fifth. It
is one of the great sayings of the Old Testament: there is none more spiritual
and more comforting. Zerubbabel shall complete the Temple, and those who
scoffed at its small beginnings in the day of small things shall frankly
rejoice when they see him set the top-stone by plummet in its place. As the
moral obstacles to the future were removed in the Fourth Vision by the
vindication of Joshua and by his cleansing, so the political obstacles, all the

hindrances described by the Book of Ezra in the building of the Temple,
shall disappear. Before Zerubbabel the great mountain shall become a plain.
And this, because he shall not work by his own strength, but the Spirit of
Jehovah of Hosts shall do everything. Again we find that absence of
expectation in human means, and that full trust in God’s own direct action,
which characterise all the prophesying of Zechariah.
Then the angel who talked with me returned and roused me like a man
roused out of his sleep. And he said to me, What seest thou? And I said, I
see, and lo! a candlestick all of gold, and its bowl upon the top of it, and its
seven lamps on it, and seven[848] pipes to the lamps which are upon it. And
two olive-trees stood over against it, one on the right of the bowl,[849] and
one on the left. And I began[850] and said to the angel who talked with me,
[851]
What be these, my lord? And the angel who talked with me answered
and said, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord! And he
answered and said to me,[852] These seven are the eyes of Jehovah, which
sweep through the whole earth. And I asked and said to him, What are these
two olive-trees on the right of the candlestick and on its left? And again I
asked and said to him, What are the two olive-branches which are beside
the two golden tubes that pour forth the oil[853] from them?[854] And he said
to me, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord! And he
said, These are the two sons of oil which stand before the Lord of all the
earth.
This is Jehovah’s Word to Zerubbabel, and it says:[855] Not by might,
and not by force, but by My Spirit, saith Jehovah of Hosts. What art thou, O
great mountain? Before Zerubbabel be thou level! And he[856] shall bring
forth the top-stone with shoutings, Grace, grace to it![857] And the Word of
Jehovah came to me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have founded this
house, and his hands shall complete it, and thou shall know that Jehovah of
Hosts hath sent me to you. For whoever hath despised the day of small

things, they shall rejoice when they see the plummet[858] in the hand of
Zerubbabel.

THE SIXTH VISION: THE WINGED VOLUME
(Chap. v. 1–4).
The religious and political obstacles being now removed from the future
of Israel, Zechariah in the next two Visions beholds the land purged of its
crime and wickedness. These Visions are very simple, if somewhat after the
ponderous fashion of Ezekiel.
The first of them is the Vision of the removal of the curse brought upon
the land by its civic criminals, especially thieves and perjurers—the two
forms which crime takes in a poor and rude community like the colony of
the returned exiles. The prophet tells us he beheld a roll flying. He uses the
ordinary Hebrew name for the rolls of skin or parchment upon which
writing was set down. But the proportions of its colossal size—twenty
cubits by ten—prove that it was not a cylindrical but an oblong shape which
he saw. It consisted, therefore, of sheets laid on each other like our books,
and as our word “volume,” which originally meant, like his own term, a
roll, means now an oblong article, we may use this in our translation. The
volume is the record of the crime of the land, and Zechariah sees it flying
from the land. But it is also the curse upon this crime, and so again he
beholds it entering every thief’s and perjurer’s house and destroying it.
Smend gives a possible explanation of this: “It appears that in ancient times
curses were written on pieces of paper and sent down the wind into the
houses”[859] of those against whom they were directed. But the figure seems
rather to be of birds of prey.
And I turned and lifted my eyes and looked, and lo! a volume[860] flying.
And he said unto me, What dost thou see? And I said, I see a volume flying,
its length twenty cubits and its breadth ten. And he said unto me, This is the

curse that is going out upon the face of all the land. For every thief is
hereby purged away from hence,[861] and every perjurer is hereby purged
away from hence. I have sent it forth—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts—and it
shall enter the thief’s house, and the house of him that hath sworn falsely by
My name, and it shall roost[862] in the midst of his house and consume it,
with its beams and its stones.[863]

THE SEVENTH VISION: THE WOMAN IN THE BARREL
(Chap. v. 5–11).
It is not enough that the curse fly from the land after destroying every
criminal. The living principle of sin, the power of temptation, must be
covered up and removed. This is the subject of the Seventh Vision.
The prophet sees an ephah, the largest vessel in use among the Jews, of
more than seven gallons capacity, and round[864] like a barrel. Presently the
leaden top is lifted, and the prophet sees a woman inside. This is
Wickedness, feminine because she figures the power of temptation. She is
thrust back into the barrel, the leaden lid is pushed down, and the whole
carried off by two other female figures, winged like the strong, far-flying
stork, into the land of Shin‛ar, “which at that time had the general
significance of the counterpart of the Holy Land,”[865] and was the proper
home of all that was evil.
And the angel of Jehovah who spake with me came forward[866] and
said to me, Lift now thine eyes and see what this is that comes forth. And I
said, What is it? And he said, This is a bushel coming forth. And he said,
This is their transgression[867] in all the land.[868] And behold! the round
leaden top was lifted up, and lo![869] a woman sitting inside the bushel. And
he said, This is the Wickedness, and he thrust her back into the bushel, and
thrust the leaden disc upon the mouth of it. And I lifted mine eyes and
looked, and lo! two women came forth with the wind in their wings, for they

had wings like storks’ wings, and they bore the bushel betwixt earth and
heaven. And I said to the angel that talked with me, Whither do they carry
the bushel? And he said to me, To build it a house in the land of Shin‛ar,
that it may be fixed and brought to rest there on a place of its own.[870]
We must not allow this curious imagery to hide from us its very spiritual
teaching. If Zechariah is weighted in these Visions by the ponderous fashion
of Ezekiel, he has also that prophet’s truly moral spirit. He is not contented
with the ritual atonement for sin, nor with the legal punishment of crime.
The living power of sin must be banished from Israel; and this cannot be
done by any efforts of men themselves, but by God’s action only, which is
thorough and effectual. If the figures by which this is illustrated appear to
us grotesque and heavy, let us remember how they would suit the
imagination of the prophet’s own day. Let us lay to heart their eternally
valid doctrine, that sin is not a formal curse, nor only expressed in certain
social crimes, nor exhausted by the punishment of these, but, as a power of
attraction and temptation to all men, it must be banished from the heart, and
can be banished only by God.

THE EIGHTH VISION: THE CHARIOTS OF THE FOUR
WINDS (Chap. vi. 1–8).
As the series of Visions opened with one of the universal providence of
God, so they close with another of the same. The First Vision had
postponed God’s overthrow of the nations till His own time, and this the
Last Vision now describes as begun, the religious and moral needs of Israel
having meanwhile been met by the Visions which come between, and every
obstacle to God’s action for the deliverance of His people being removed.
The prophet sees four chariots, with horses of different colour in each,
coming out from between two mountains of brass. The horsemen of the
First Vision were bringing in reports: these chariots are coming forth with

their commissions from the presence of the Lord of all the earth. They are
the four winds of heaven, servants of Him who maketh the winds His
angels. They are destined for different quarters of the world. The prophet
has not been admitted to the Presence, and does not know what exactly they
have been commissioned to do; that is to say, Zechariah is ignorant of the
actual political processes by which the nations are to be overthrown and
Israel glorified before them. But his Angel-interpreter tells him that the
black horses go north, the white west, and the dappled south, while the
horses of the fourth chariot, impatient because no direction is assigned to
them, are ordered to roam up and down through the earth. It is striking that
none are sent eastward.[871] This appears to mean that, in Zechariah’s day,
no power oppressed or threatened Israel from that direction; but in the north
there was the centre of the Persian Empire, to the south Egypt, still a
possible master of the world, and to the west the new forces of Europe that
in less than a generation were to prove themselves a match for Persia. The
horses of the fourth chariot are therefore given the charge to exercise
supervision upon the whole earth—unless in ver. 7 we should translate, not
earth, but land, and understand a commission to patrol the land of Israel.
The centre of the world’s power is in the north, and therefore the black
horses, which are dispatched in that direction, are explicitly described as
charged to bring God’s spirit, that is His anger or His power, to bear on that
quarter of the world.
And once more[872] I lifted mine eyes and looked, and lo! four chariots
coming forward from between two mountains, and the mountains were
mountains of brass. In the first chariot were brown horses, and in the
second chariot black horses, and in the third chariot white horses, and in
the fourth chariot dappled ...[873] horses. And I broke in and said to the
angel who talked with me, What are these, my lord? And the angel
answered and said to me, These be the four winds of heaven that come forth

from presenting themselves before the Lord of all the earth.[874] That with
the black horses goes forth to the land of the north, while the white go out
west[875] (?), and the dappled go to the land of the south. And the ...[876] go
forth and seek to go, to march up and down on the earth. And he said, Go,
march up and down on the earth; and they marched up and down on the
earth. And he called me and spake to me, saying, See they that go forth to
the land of the north have brought my spirit to bear[877] on the land of the
north.

THE RESULT OF THE VISIONS: THE CROWNING OF THE
KING OF ISRAEL (Chap. vi. 9–15).
The heathen being overthrown, Israel is free, and may have her king
again. Therefore Zechariah is ordered—it would appear on the same day as
that on which he received the Visions—to visit a certain deputation from the
captivity in Babylon, Heldai, Tobiyah and Yedayah, at the house of Josiah
the son of Zephaniah, where they have just arrived; and to select from the
gifts they have brought enough silver and gold to make circlets for a crown.
The present text assigns this crown to Joshua, the high priest, but as we
have already remarked, and will presently prove in the notes to the
translation, the original text assigned it to Zerubbabel, the civil head of the
community, and gave Joshua, the priest, a place at his right hand—the two
to act in perfect concord with each other. The text has suffered some other
injuries, which it is easy to amend; and the end of it has been broken off in
the middle of a sentence.
And the Word of Jehovah came to me, saying: Take from the Gôlah,[878]
from Heldai[879] and from Tobiyah and from Yeda‛yah; and do thou go on
the same day, yea, go thou to the house of Yosiyahu, son of Ṣephanyah,
whither they have arrived from Babylon.[880] And thou shall take silver and
gold, and make a crown, and set it on the head of....[881] And say to him:

Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts, Lo! a man called Branch; from his roots shall
a branch come, and he shall build the Temple of Jehovah. Yea, he shall
build Jehovah’s Temple,[882] and he shall wear the royal majesty and sit and
rule upon his throne, and Joshua[883] shall be priest on his right hand,[884]
and there will be a counsel of peace between the two of them.[885] And the
crown shall be for Heldai[886] and Tobiyah and Yeda‛yah, and for the
courtesy[887] of the son of Ṣephanyah, for a memorial in the Temple of
Jehovah. And the far-away shall come and build at the Temple of Jehovah,
and ye shall know that Jehovah of Hosts hath sent me to you; and it shall be
if ye hearken lo the voice of Jehovah your God …[888]

CHAPTER XXII

THE ANGELS OF THE VISIONS
ZECHARIAH i. 7—vi. 8

Among the influences of the Exile which contributed the material of
Zechariah’s Visions we included a considerable development of Israel’s
belief in Angels. The general subject is in itself so large, and the Angels
play so many parts in the Visions, that it is necessary to devote to them a
separate chapter.
From the earliest times the Hebrews had conceived their Divine King to
be surrounded by a court of ministers, who besides celebrating His glory
went forth from His presence to execute His will upon earth. In this latter
capacity they were called Messengers, Male’akim, which the Greeks
translated Angeloi, and so gave us our Angels. The origin of this conception
is wrapt in obscurity. It may have been partly due to a belief, shared by all
early peoples, in the existence of superhuman beings inferior to the gods,
[889]
but even without this it must have sprung up in the natural tendency to
provide the royal deity of a people with a court, an army and servants. In
the pious minds of early Israel there must have been a kind of necessity to
believe and develop this—a necessity imposed firstly by the belief in
Jehovah’s residence as confined to one spot, Sinai or Jerusalem, from which
He Himself went forth only upon great occasions to the deliverance of His
people as a whole; and secondly by the unwillingness to conceive of His
personal appearance in missions of a menial nature, or to represent Him in
the human form in which, according to primitive ideas, He could alone hold
converse with men.
It can easily be understood how a religion, which was above all a
religion of revelation, should accept such popular conceptions in its

constant record of the appearance of God and His Word in human life.
Accordingly, in the earliest documents of the Hebrews, we find angels who
bring to Israel the blessings, curses and commands of Jehovah.[890] Apart
from this duty and their human appearance, these beings are not conceived
to be endowed either with character or, if we may judge by their
namelessness,[891] with individuality. They are the Word of God
personified. Acting as God’s mouthpiece, they are merged in Him, and so
completely that they often speak of themselves by the Divine I.[892] “The
function of an Angel so overshadows his personality that the Old Testament
does not ask who or what this Angel is, but what he does. And the answer to
the last question is, that he represents God to man so directly and fully that
when he speaks or acts God Himself is felt to speak or act.”[893] Besides the
carriage of the Divine Word, angels bring back to their Lord report of all
that happens: kings are said, in popular language, to be as wise as the
wisdom of an angel of God, to know all the things that are in the earth.[894]
They are also employed in the deliverance and discipline of His people.[895]
By them come the pestilence,[896] and the restraint of those who set
themselves against God’s will.[897]
Now the prophets before the Exile had so spiritual a conception of God,
worked so immediately from His presence, and above all were so convinced
of His personal and practical interest in the affairs of His people, that they
felt no room for Angels between Him and their hearts, and they do not
employ Angels, except when Isaiah in his inaugural vision penetrates to the
heavenly palace and court of the Most High.[898] Even when Amos sees a
plummet laid to the walls of Jerusalem, it is by the hands of Jehovah
Himself,[899] and we have not encountered an Angel in the mediation of the
Word to any of the prophets whom we have already studied. But Angels
reappear, though not under the name, in the visions of Ezekiel, the first
prophet of the Exile. They are in human form, and he calls them Men. Some

execute God’s wrath upon Jerusalem,[900] and one, whose appearance is as
the appearance of brass, acts as the interpreter of God’s will to the prophet,
and instructs him in the details of the building of City and Temple.[901]
When the glory of Jehovah appears and Jehovah Himself speaks to the
prophet out of the Temple, this Man stands by the prophet,[902] distinct from
the Deity, and afterwards continues his work of explanation. “Therefore,” as
Dr. Davidson remarks, “it is not the sense of distance to which God is
removed that causes Ezekiel to create these intermediaries.” The necessity
for them rather arises from the same natural feeling, which we have
suggested as giving rise to the earliest conceptions of Angels: the
unwillingness, namely, to engage the Person of God Himself in the
subordinate task of explaining the details of the Temple. Note, too, how the
Divine Voice, which speaks to Ezekiel out of the Temple, blends and
becomes one with the Man standing at his side. Ezekiel’s Angel-interpreter
is simply one function of the Word of God.
Many of the features of Ezekiel’s Angels appear in those of Zechariah.
The four smiths or smiters of the four horns recall the six executioners of
the wicked in Jerusalem.[903] Like Ezekiel’s Interpreter, they are called
Men,[904] and like him one appears as Zechariah’s instructor and guide: he
who talked with me.[905] But while Zechariah calls these beings Men, he
also gives them the ancient name, which Ezekiel had not used, of
Male’akim, messengers, angels. The Instructor is the Angel who talked with
me. In the First Vision, the Man riding the brown horse, the Man that stood
among the myrtles, is the Angel of Jehovah that stood among the myrtles.
[906] The Interpreter is also called the Angel of Jehovah, and if our text of

the First Vision be correct, the two of them are curiously mingled, as if both
were functions of the same Word of God, and in personality not to be
distinguished from each other. The Reporting Angel among the myrtles
takes up the duty of the Interpreting Angel and explains the Vision to the

prophet. In the Fourth Vision this dissolving view is carried further, and the
Angel of Jehovah is interchangeable with Jehovah Himself;[907] just as in
the Vision of Ezekiel the Divine Voice from the Glory and the Man standing
beside the prophet are curiously mingled. Again in the Fourth Vision we
hear of those who stand in the presence of Jehovah,[908] and in the Eighth of
executant angels coming out from His presence with commissions upon the
whole earth.[909]
In the Visions of Zechariah, then, as in the earlier books, we see the
Lord of all the earth, surrounded by a court of angels, whom He sends forth
in human form to interpret His Word and execute His will, and in their
doing of this there is the same indistinctness of individuality, the same
predominance of function over personality. As with Ezekiel, one stands out
more clearly than the rest, to be the prophet’s interpreter, whom, as in the
earlier visions of angels, Zechariah calls my lord,[910] but even he melts into
the figures of the rest. These are the old and borrowed elements in
Zechariah’s doctrine of Angels. But he has added to them in several
important particulars, which make his Visions an intermediate stage
between the Book of Ezekiel and the very intricate angelology of later
Judaism.
In the first place, Zechariah is the earliest prophet who introduces orders
and ranks among the angels. In his Fourth Vision the Angel of Jehovah is
the Divine Judge before whom[911] Joshua appears with the Adversary. He
also has others standing before him[912] to execute his sentences. In the
Third Vision, again, the Interpreting Angel does not communicate directly
with Jehovah, but receives his words from another Angel who has come
forth.[913] All these are symptoms, that even with a prophet, who so keenly
felt as Zechariah did the ethical directness of God’s word and its
pervasiveness through public life, there had yet begun to increase those
feelings of God’s sublimity and awfulness, which in the later thought of

Israel lifted Him to so far a distance from men, and created so complex a
host of intermediaries, human and superhuman, between the worshipping
heart and the Throne of Grace. We can best estimate the difference in this
respect between Zechariah and the earlier prophets whom we have studied
by remarking that his characteristic phrase talked with me, literally spake in
or by me, which he uses of the Interpreting Angel, is used by Habakkuk of
God Himself.[914] To the same awful impressions of the Godhead is perhaps
due the first appearance of the Angel as intercessor. Amos, Isaiah and
Jeremiah themselves directly interceded with God for the people; but with
Zechariah it is the Interpreting Angel who intercedes, and who in return
receives the Divine comfort.[915] In this angelic function, the first of its kind
in Scripture, we see the small and explicable beginnings of a belief destined
to assume enormous dimensions in the development of the Church’s
worship. The supplication of Angels, the faith in their intercession and in
the prevailing prayers of the righteous dead, which has been so egregiously
multiplied in certain sections of Christendom, may be traced to the same
increasing sense of the distance and awfulness of God, but is to be corrected
by the faith Christ has taught us of the nearness of our Father in Heaven,
and of His immediate care of His every human child.
The intercession of the Angel in the First Vision is also a step towards
that identification of special Angels with different peoples which we find in
the Book of Daniel. This tells us of heavenly princes not only for Israel—
Michael, your prince, the great prince which standeth up for the children of
thy people[916]—but for the heathen nations, a conception the first
beginnings of which we see in a prophecy that was perhaps not far from
being contemporaneous with Zechariah.[917] Zechariah’s Vision of a
hierarchy among the angels was also destined to further development. The
head of the patrol among the myrtles, and the Judge-Angel before whom
Joshua appears, are the first Archangels. We know how these were further

specialised, and had even personalities and names given them by both
Jewish and Christian writers.[918]
Among the Angels described in the Old Testament, we have seen some
charged with powers of hindrance and destruction—a troop of angels of
evil.[919] They too are the servants of God, who is the author of all evil as
well as good,[920] and the instruments of His wrath. Providence. Where
wilful souls have to be misled, But the temptation of men is also part of His
the spirit who does so, as in Ahab’s case, comes from Jehovah’s presence.
[921]
All these spirits are just as devoid of character and personality as the
rest of the angelic host. They work evil as mere instruments: neither malice
nor falseness is attributed to themselves. They are not rebel nor fallen
angels, but obedient to Jehovah. Nay, like Ezekiel’s and Zechariah’s Angels
of the Word, the Angel who tempts David to number the people is
interchangeable with God Himself.[922] Kindred to the duty of tempting
men is that of discipline, in its forms both of restraining or accusing the
guilty, and of vexing the righteous in order to test them. For both of these
the same verb is used, “to satan,”[923] in the general sense of withstanding,
or antagonising. The Angel of Jehovah stood in Balaam’s way to satan him.
[924]
The noun, the Satan, is used repeatedly of a human foe.[925] But in two
passages, of which Zechariah’s Fourth Vision is one, and the other the
Prologue to Job,[926] the name is given to an Angel, one of the sons of
Elohim, or Divine powers who receive their commission from Jehovah. The
noun is not yet, what it afterwards became,[927] a proper name; but has the
definite article, the Adversary or Accuser—that is, the Angel to whom that
function was assigned. With Zechariah his business is the official one of
prosecutor in the supreme court of Jehovah, and when his work is done he
disappears. Yet, before he does so, we see for the first time in connection
with any angel a gleam of character. This is revealed by the Lord’s rebuke
of him. There is something blameworthy in the accusation of Joshua: not

indeed false witness, for Israel’s guilt is patent in the foul garments of their
High Priest, but hardness or malice, that would seek to prevent the Divine
grace. In the Book of Job the Satan is also a function, even here not a fallen
or rebel angel, but one of God’s court,[928] the instrument of discipline or
chastisement. Yet, in that he himself suggests his cruelties and is
represented as forward and officious in their infliction, a character is
imputed to him even more clearly than in Zechariah’s Vision. But the Satan
still shares that identification with his function which we have seen to
characterise all the angels of the Old Testament, and therefore he disappears
from the drama so soon as his place in its high argument is over.[929]
In this description of the development of Israel’s doctrine of Angels, and
of Zechariah’s contributions to it, we have not touched upon the question
whether the development was assisted by Israel’s contact with the Persian
religion and with the system of Angels which the latter contains. For several
reasons the question is a difficult one. But so far as present evidence goes, it
makes for a negative answer. Scholars, who are in no way prejudiced
against the theory of a large Persian influence upon Israel, declare that the
religion of Persia affected the Jewish doctrine of Angels “only in secondary
points,” such as their “number and personality, and the existence of demons
and evil spirits.”[930] Our own discussion has shown us that Zechariah’s
Angels, in spite of the new features they introduce, are in substance one
with the Angels of pre-exilic Israel. Even the Satan is primarily a function,
and one of the servants of God. If he has developed an immoral character,
this cannot be attributed to the influence of Persian belief in a Spirit of evil
opposed to the Spirit of good in the universe, but may be explained by the
native, or selfish, resentment of Israel against their prosecutor before the bar
of Jehovah. Nor can we fail to remark that this character of evil appears in
the Satan, not, as in the Persian religion, in general opposition to goodness,
but as thwarting that saving grace which was so peculiarly Jehovah’s own.

And Jehovah said to the Satan, Jehovah rebuke thee, O Satan, yea, Jehovah
who hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee! Is not this a brand plucked from
the burning?

CHAPTER XXIII

“ THE SEED OF PEACE”
ZECHARIAH vii., viii.

The Visions have revealed the removal of the guilt of the land, the
restoration of Israel to their standing before God, the revival of the great
national institutions, and God’s will to destroy the heathen forces of the
world. With the Temple built, Israel should be again in the position which
she enjoyed before the Exile. Zechariah, therefore, proceeds to exhort his
people to put away the fasts which the Exile had made necessary, and
address themselves, as of old, to the virtues and duties of the civic life. And
he introduces his orations to this end by a natural appeal to the experience
of the former days.
The occasion came to him when the Temple had been building for two
years, and when some of its services were probably resumed.[931] A
deputation of Jews appeared in Jerusalem and raised the question of the
continuance of the great Fasts of the Exile. Who the deputation were is not
certain: probably we ought to delete Bethel from the second verse, and read
either El-sar’eser sent Regem-Melekh and his men to the house of Jehovah
to propitiate Jehovah, or else the house of El-sar’eser sent Regem-Melekh
and his men to propitiate Jehovah. It has been thought that they came from
the Jews in Babylon: this would agree with their arrival in the ninth month
to inquire about a fast in the fifth month. But Zechariah’s answer is
addressed to Jews in Judæa. The deputation limited their inquiry to the fast
of the fifth month, which commemorated the burning of the Temple and the
City, now practically restored. But with a breadth of view which reveals the
prophet rather than the priest, Zechariah replies, in the following chapter,
upon all the fasts by which Israel for seventy years had bewailed her ruin

and exile. He instances two, that of the fifth month, and that of the seventh
month, the date of the murder of Gedaliah, when the last poor remnant of a
Jewish state was swept away.[932] With a boldness which recalls Amos to
the very letter, Zechariah asks his people whether in those fasts they fasted
at all to their God. Jehovah had not charged them, and in fasting they had
fasted for themselves, just as in eating and drinking they had eaten and
drunken to themselves. They should rather hearken to the words He really
sent them. In a passage, the meaning of which has been perverted by the
intrusion of the eighth verse, that therefore ought to be deleted, Zechariah
recalls what those words of Jehovah had been in the former times when the
land was inhabited and the national life in full course. They were not
ceremonial; they were ethical: they commanded justice, kindness, and the
care of the helpless and the poor. And it was in consequence of the people’s
disobedience to those words that all the ruin came upon them for which
they now annually mourned. The moral is obvious if unexpressed. Let them
drop their fasts, and practise the virtues the neglect of which had made their
fasts a necessity. It is a sane and practical word, and makes us feel how
much Zechariah has inherited of the temper of Amos and Isaiah. He rests, as
before, upon the letter of the ancient oracles, but only so as to bring out
their spirit. With such an example of the use of ancient Scripture, it is
deplorable that so many men, both among the Jews and the Christians,
should have devoted themselves to the letter at the expense of the spirit.
And it came to pass in the fourth year of Darius the king, that the Word
of Jehovah came to Zechariah on the fourth of the ninth month, Kislev. For
there sent to the house of Jehovah, El-sar’eser and Regem-Melekh and his
men,[933] to propitiate[934] Jehovah, to ask of the priests which were in the
house of Jehovah of Hosts and of the prophets as follows: Shall I weep in
the fifth month with fasting as I have now done so many years? And the
Word of Jehovah of Hosts came to me: Speak now to all the people of the

land, and to the priests, saying: When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth
and in the seventh month,[935] and this for seventy years, did ye fast at all to
Me? And when ye eat and when ye drink, are not ye the eaters and ye the
drinkers? Are not these[936] the words which Jehovah proclaimed by the
hand of the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and at peace,
with her cities round about her, and the Negeb and the Shephelah were
inhabited?
[937]
Thus spake Jehovah of Hosts: Judge true judgment, and practise
towards each other kindness and mercy; oppress neither widow nor orphan,
stranger nor poor, and think not evil in your hearts towards one another.
But they refused to hearken, and turned a rebellious shoulder,[938] and their
ears they dulled from listening. And their heart they made adamant, so as
not to hear the Torah and the words which Jehovah of Hosts sent through
His Spirit by the hand of the former prophets; and there was great wrath
from Jehovah of Hosts. And it came to pass that, as He had called and they
heard not, so they shall call and I will not hear, said Jehovah of Hosts, but I
will whirl[939] them away among nations whom they know not. And the land
was laid waste behind them, without any to pass to and fro, and they made
the pleasant land desolate.
There follow upon this deliverance ten other short oracles: chap. viii.
Whether all of this decalogue are to be dated from the same time as the
answer to the deputation about the fasts is uncertain. Some of them appear
rather to belong to an earlier date, for they reflect the situation, and even the
words, of Haggai’s oracles, and represent the advent of Jehovah to
Jerusalem as still future. But they return to the question of the fasts, treating
it still more comprehensively than before, and they close with a promise,
fitly spoken as the Temple grew to completion, of the coming of the heathen
to worship at Jerusalem.

We have already noticed the tender charm and strong simplicity of these
prophecies,[940] and there is little now to add except the translation of them.
As with the older prophets, and especially the great Evangelist of the Exile,
they start from the glowing love of Jehovah for His people, to which
nothing is impossible;[941] they promise a complete return of the scattered
Jews to their land, and are not content except with the assurance of a world
converted to the faith of their God. With Haggai Zechariah promises the
speedy end of the poverty of the little colony; and he adds his own
characteristic notes of a reign of peace to be used for hearty labour, bringing
forth a great prosperity. Only let men be true and just and kind, thinking no
evil of each other, as in those hard days when hunger and the fierce rivalry
for sustenance made every one’s neighbour his enemy, and the petty life,
devoid of large interests for the commonweal, filled their hearts with envy
and malice. For ourselves the chief profit of these beautiful oracles is their
lesson that the remedy for the sordid tempers and cruel hatreds, engendered
by the fierce struggle for existence, is found in civic and religious hopes, in
a noble ideal for the national life, and in the assurance that God’s Love is at
the back of all, with nothing impossible to it. Amid these glories, however,
the heart will probably thank Zechariah most for his immortal picture of the
streets of the new Jerusalem: old men and women sitting in the sun, boys
and girls playing in all the open places. The motive of it, as we have seen,
was found in the circumstances of his own day. Like many another
emigration, for religion’s sake, from the heart of civilisation to a barren
coast, the poor colony of Jerusalem consisted chiefly of men, young and in
middle life. The barren years gave no encouragement to marriage. The
constant warfare with neighbouring tribes allowed few to reach grey hairs.
It was a rough and a hard society, unblessed by the two great benedictions
of life, childhood and old age. But this should all be changed, and
Jerusalem filled with placid old men and women, and with joyous boys and

girls. The oracle, we say, had its motive in Zechariah’s day. But what an
oracle for these times of ours! Whether in the large cities of the old world,
where so few of the workers may hope for a quiet old age, sitting in the sun,
and the children’s days of play are shortened by premature toil and
knowledge of evil; or in the newest fringes of the new world, where men’s
hardness and coarseness are, in the struggle for gold, unawed by reverence
for age and unsoftened by the fellowship of childhood,—Zechariah’s great
promise is equally needed. Even there shall it be fulfilled if men will
remember his conditions—that the first regard of a community, however
straitened in means, be the provision of religion, that truth and whole-
hearted justice abound in the gates, with love and loyalty in every heart
towards every other.
And the Word of Jehovah of Hosts came, saying:—
1. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: I am jealous for Zion with a great
jealousy, and with great anger am I jealous for her.
2. Thus saith Jehovah: I am returned to Zion, and I dwell in the midst of
Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the City of Troth,[942] and the
mountain of Jehovah of Hosts the Holy Mountain.
3. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Old men and old women shall yet sit in
the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand, for fulness of days; and the
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in her streets.
4. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Because it seems too wonderful to the
remnant of this people in those days, shall it also seem too wonderful to
Me?—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts.
5. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Lo! I am about to save My people out of
the land of the rising and out of the land of the setting of the sun; and I will
bring them home, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and they
shall be to Me for a people,[943] and I will be to them for God, in troth and
in righteousness.

6. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Strengthen your hands, O ye who have
heard in such days such words from the mouth of the prophets, since[944] the
day when the House of Jehovah of Hosts was founded: the sanctuary was to
be built! For before those days there was no gain for man,[945] and none to
be made by cattle; and neither for him that went out nor for him that came
in was there any peace from the adversary, and I set every man’s hand
against his neighbour. But not now as in the past days am I towards the
remnant of this people—oracle of Jehovah of Hosts. For I am sowing the
seed of peace.[946] The vine shall yield her fruit, and the land yield her
increase, and the heavens yield their dew, and I will give them all for a
heritage to the remnant of this people. And it shall come to pass, that as ye
have been a curse among the nations, O house of Judah and house of
Israel, so will I save you and ye shall be a blessing! Be not afraid,
strengthen your hands!
7. For thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: As I have planned to do evil to you,
for the provocation your fathers gave Me, saith Jehovah of Hosts, and did
not relent, so have I turned and planned in these days to do good to
Jerusalem and the house of Judah. Be not afraid! These are the things
which ye shall do: Speak truth to one another; truth and wholesome
judgment decree ye in your gates; and plan no evil to each other in your
hearts, nor take pleasure in false swearing: for it is all these that I hate—
oracle of Jehovah.
And the Word of Jehovah of Hosts came to me, saying:—
8. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: The fast of the fourth month, and the
fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall
become to the house of Judah joy and gladness and happy feasts.[947] But
love ye truth and peace.
9. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: There shall yet come peoples and
citizens of great cities; and the citizens of one city[948] will go to another

city, saying: “Let us go to propitiate Jehovah, and to seek Jehovah of
Hosts!” “I will go too!” And many peoples and strong nations shall come
to seek Jehovah of Hosts in Jerusalem and to propitiate Jehovah.
10. Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: In those days ten men, of all languages
of the nations, shall take hold of the skirt of a Jew and say, We will go with
you, for we have heard that God is with you.

“MALACHI”

Have we not all One Father? Why then are we unfaithful
to each other?
The lips of a Priest guard knowledge, and men seek
instruction from his mouth, for he is the Angel of Jehovah of
Hosts.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE BOOK OF “ MALACHI”

This book, the last in the arrangement of the prophetic canon, bears the title:
Burden or Oracle of the Word of Jehovah to Israel by the hand of malĕ’akhi.
Since at least the second century of our era the word has been understood as
a proper name, Malachi or Malachias. But there are strong objections to
this, as well as to the genuineness of the whole title, and critics now almost
universally agree that the book was originally anonymous.
It is true that neither in form nor in meaning is there any insuperable
obstacle to our understanding “malĕ’akhi” as the name of a person. If so,
however, it cannot have been, as some have suggested, an abbreviation of
Malĕ’akhiyah, for, according to the analogy of other names of such
formation, this could only express the impossible meaning Jehovah is
Angel.[949] But, as it stands, it might have meant My Angel or Messenger, or
it may be taken as an adjective, Angelicus[950]. Either of these meanings
would form a natural name for a Jewish child, and a very suitable one for a
prophet. There is evidence, however, that some of the earliest Jewish
interpreters did not think of the title as containing the name of a person. The
Septuagint read by the hand of His messenger,[951] “malĕ’akho”; and the
Targum of Jonathan, while retaining “malĕ’akhi,” rendered it My
messenger, adding that it was Ezra the Scribe who was thus designated.[952]
This opinion was adopted by Calvin.
Recent criticism has shown that, whether the word was originally
intended as a personal name or not, it was a purely artificial one borrowed
from chap. iii. 1, Behold, I send My messenger, “malĕ’akhi,” for the title,
which itself has been added by the editor of the Twelve Prophets in the form
in which we now have them. The peculiar words of the title, Burden or

Oracle of the Word of Jehovah, occur nowhere else than in the titles of the
two prophecies which have been appended to the Book of Zechariah, chap.
ix. 1 and chap. xii. 1, and immediately precede this Book of “Malachi.” In
chap. ix. 1 the Word of Jehovah belongs to the text; Burden or Oracle has
been inserted before it as a title; then the whole phrase has been inserted as
a title in chap. xii. 1. These two pieces are anonymous, and nothing is more
likely than that another anonymous prophecy should have received, when
attached to them, the same heading.[953] The argument is not final, but it is
the most probable explanation of the data, and agrees with the other facts.
The cumulative force of all that we have stated—the improbability of
malĕ’akhi being a personal name, the fact that the earliest versions do not
treat it as such, the obvious suggestion for its invention in the malĕ’akhi of
chap. iii. 1, the absence of a father’s name and place of residence, and the
character of the whole title—is enough for the opinion rapidly spreading
among critics that our book was, like so much more in the Old Testament,
originally anonymous.[954] The author attacks the religious authorities of his
day; he belongs to a pious remnant of his people, who are overborne and
perhaps oppressed by the majority.[955] In these facts, which are all we
know of his personality, he found sufficient reason for not attaching his
name to his prophecy.
The book is also undated, but it reflects its period almost as clearly as
do the dated Books of Haggai and Zechariah. The conquest of Edom by the
Nabateans, which took place during the Exile,[956] is already past.[957] The
Jews are under a Persian viceroy.[958] They are in touch with a heathen
power, which does not tyrannise over them, for this book is the first to
predict no judgment upon the heathen, and the first, moreover, to
acknowledge that among the heathen the true God is worshipped from the
rising to the setting of the sun.[959] The only judgment predicted is one upon
the false and disobedient portion of Israel, whose arrogance and success

have cast true Israelites into despair.[960] All this reveals a time when the
Jews were favourably treated by their Persian lords. The reign must be that
of Artaxerxes Longhand, 464—424.
The Temple has been finished,[961] and years enough have elapsed to
disappoint those fervid hopes with which about 518 Zechariah expected its
completion. The congregation has grown worldly and careless. In particular
the priests are corrupt and partial in the administration of the Law.[962]
There have been many marriages with the heathen women of the land;[963]
and the laity have failed to pay the tithes and other dues to the Temple.[964]
These are the evils against which we find strenuous measures directed by
Ezra, who returned from Babylon in 458,[965] and by Nehemiah, who
visited Jerusalem as its governor for the first time in 445 and for the second
time in 433. Besides, “the religious spirit of the book is that of the prayers
of Ezra and Nehemiah. A strong sense of the unique privileges of the
children of Jacob, the objects of electing love,[966] the children of the
Divine Father,[967] is combined with an equally strong assurance of
Jehovah’s righteousness amidst the many miseries that pressed on the
unhappy inhabitants of Judæa.... Obedience to the Law is the sure path to
blessedness.”[968] But the question still remains whether the Book of
“Malachi” prepared for, assisted or followed up the reforms of Ezra and
Nehemiah. An ancient tradition already alluded to[969] assigned the
authorship to Ezra himself.
Recent criticism has been divided among the years immediately before
Ezra’s arrival in 458, those immediately before Nehemiah’s first visit in
445, those between his first government and his second, and those after
Nehemiah’s disappearance from Jerusalem. But the years in which
Nehemiah held office may be excluded, because the Jews are represented as
bringing gifts to the governor, which Nehemiah tells us he did not allow to
be brought to him.[970] The whole question depends upon what Law was in

practice in Israel when the book was written. In 445 Ezra and Nehemiah, by
solemn covenant between the people and Jehovah, instituted the code which
we now know as the Priestly Code of the Pentateuch. Before that year the
ritual and social life of the Jews appear to have been directed by the
Deuteronomic Code. Now the Book of “Malachi” enforces a practice with
regard to the tithes, which agrees more closely with the Priestly Code than
it does with Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy commands that every third year
the whole tithe is to be given to the Levites and the poor who reside within
the gates of the giver, and is there to be eaten by them. “Malachi”
commands that the whole tithe be brought into the storehouse of the Temple
for the Levites in service there; and so does the Priestly Code.[971] On this
ground many date the Book of “Malachi” after 445.[972] But “Malachi’s”
divergence from Deuteronomy on this point may be explained by the fact
that in his time there were practically no Levites outside Jerusalem; and it is
to be noticed that he joins the tithe with the tĕrûmah or heave-offering
exactly as Deuteronomy does.[973] On other points of the Law he agrees
rather with Deuteronomy than with the Priestly Code. He follows
Deuteronomy in calling the priests sons of Levi,[974] while the Priestly Code
limits the priesthood to the sons of Aaron. He seems to quote Deuteronomy
when forbidding the oblation of blind, lame and sick beasts;[975] appears to
differ from the Priestly Code which allows the sacrificial beast to be male
or female, when he assumes that it is a male;[976] follows the expressions of
Deuteronomy and not those of the Priestly Code in detailing the sins of the
people;[977] and uses the Deuteronomic phrases the Law of Moses, My
servant Moses, statutes and judgments, and Horeb for the Mount of the
Law.[978] For the rest, he echoes or implies only Ezekiel and that part of the
Priestly Code[979] which is regarded as earlier than the rest, and probably
from the first years of exile. Moreover he describes the Torah as not yet
fully codified.[980] The priests still deliver it in a way improbable after 445.

The trouble of the heathen marriages with which he deals (if indeed the
verses on this subject be authentic and not a later intrusion[981]) was that
which engaged Ezra’s attention on his arrival in 458, but Ezra found that it
had already for some time been vexing the heads of the community. While,
therefore, we are obliged to date the Book of “Malachi” before 445 B.C., it is
uncertain whether it preceded or followed Ezra’s attempts at reform in 458.
Most critics now think that it preceded them.[982]
The Book of “Malachi” is an argument with the prophet’s
contemporaries, not only with the wicked among them, who in forgetfulness
of what Jehovah is corrupt the ritual, fail to give the Temple its dues, abuse
justice, marry foreign wives,[983] divorce their own, and commit various
other sins; but also with the pious, who, equally forgetful of God’s
character, are driven by the arrogance of the wicked to ask, whether He
loves Israel, whether He is a God of justice, and to murmur that it is vain to
serve Him. To these two classes of his contemporaries the prophet has the
following answers. God does love Israel. He is worshipped everywhere
among the heathen. He is the Father of all Israel. He will bless His people
when they put away all abuses from their midst and pay their religious dues;
and His Day of Judgment is coming, when the good shall be separated from
the wicked. But before it come, Elijah the prophet will be sent to attempt
the conversion of the wicked, or at least to call the nation to decide for
Jehovah. This argument is pursued in seven or perhaps eight paragraphs,
which do not show much consecutiveness, but are addressed, some to the
wicked, and some to the despairing adherents of Jehovah.
1. Chap. i. 2–5.—To those who ask how God loves Israel, the proof of Jehovah’s election of
Israel is shown in the fall of the Edomites.
2. Chap. i. 6–14.—Charge against the people of dishonouring their God, whom even the heathen
reverence.
3. Chap. ii. 1–9.—Charge against the priests, who have broken the covenant God made of old
with Levi, and debased their high office by not reverencing Jehovah, by misleading the people and by
perverting justice. A curse is therefore fallen on them—they are contemptible in the people’s eyes.

4. Chap. ii. 10–16.—A charge against the people for their treachery to each other; instanced in the
heathen marriages, if the two verses, 11 and 12, upon this be authentic, and in their divorce of their
wives.
5. Chap. ii. 17—iii. 5 or 6.—Against those who in the midst of such evils grow sceptical about
Jehovah. His Angel, or Himself, will come first to purge the priesthood and ritual that there may be
pure sacrifices, and second to rid the land of its criminals and sinners.
6. Chap. iii. 6 or 7–12.—A charge against the people of neglecting tithes. Let these be paid,
disasters shall cease and the land be blessed.
7. Chap. iii. 13–21 Heb., Chap. iii. 13—iv. 2 LXX. and Eng.—Another charge against the pious
for saying it is vain to serve God. God will rise to action and separate between the good and bad in
the terrible Day of His coming.
8. To this, Chap. iii. 22–24 Heb., Chap. iv. 3–5 Eng., adds a call to keep the Law, and a promise
that Elijah will be sent to see whether he may not convert the people before the Day of the Lord
comes upon them with its curse.

The authenticity of no part of the book has been till now in serious
question. Böhme,[984] indeed, took the last three verses for a later addition,
on account of their Deuteronomic character, but, as Kuenen points out, this
is in agreement with other parts of the book. Sufficient attention has not yet
been paid to the question of the integrity of the text. The Septuagint offers a
few emendations.[985] There are other passages obviously or probably
corrupt.[986] The text of the title, as we have seen, is uncertain, and probably
a later addition. Professor Robertson Smith has called attention to chap. ii.
16, where the Massoretic punctuation seems to have been determined with
the desire to support the rendering of the Targum “if thou hatest her put her
away,” and so pervert into a permission to divorce a passage which forbids
divorce almost as clearly as Christ Himself did. But in truth the whole of
this passage, chap. ii. 10–16, is in such a curious state that we can hardly
believe in its integrity. It opens with the statement that God is the Father of
all us Israelites, and with the challenge, why then are we faithless to each
other?—ver. 10. But vv. 11 and 12 do not give an instance of this: they
describe the marriages with the heathen women of the land, which is not a
proof of faithlessness between Israelites. Such a proof is furnished only by

vv. 13–16, with their condemnation of those who divorce the wives of their
youth. The verses, therefore, cannot lie in their proper order, and vv. 13–16
ought to follow immediately upon ver. 10. This raises the question of the
authenticity of vv. 11 and 12, against the heathen marriages. If they bear
such plain marks of having been intruded into their position, we can
understand the possibility of such an intrusion in subsequent days, when the
question of the heathen marriages came to the front with Ezra and
Nehemiah. Besides, these verses 11 and 12 lack the characteristic mark of
all the other oracles of the book: they do not state a general charge against
the people, and then introduce the people’s question as to the particulars of
the charge. On the whole, therefore, these verses are suspicious. If not a
later intrusion, they are at least out of place where they now lie. The
peculiar remark in ver. 13, and this secondly ye do, must have been added
by the editor to whom we owe the present arrangement.

CHAPTER XXV

FROM ZECHARIAH TO “ MALACHI”

Between the completion of the Temple in 516 and the arrival of Ezra in 458,
we have almost no record of the little colony round Mount Zion. The Jewish
chronicles devote to the period but a few verses of unsupported tradition.
[987]
After 517 we have nothing from Zechariah himself; and if any other
prophet appeared during the next half-century, his words have not survived.
We are left to infer what was the true condition of affairs, not less from this
ominous silence than from the hints which are given to us in the writings of
“Malachi,” Ezra and Nehemiah after the period was over. Beyond a partial
attempt to rebuild the walls of the city in the reign of Artaxerxes I.,[988]
there seems to have been nothing to record. It was a period of disillusion,
disheartening and decay. The completion of the Temple did not bring in the
Messianic era. Zerubbabel, whom Haggai and Zechariah had crowned as
the promised King of Israel, died without reaching higher rank than a minor
satrapy in the Persian Empire, and even in that he appears to have been
succeeded by a Persian official.[989] The re-migrations from Babylon and
elsewhere, which Zechariah predicted, did not take place. The small
population of Jerusalem were still harassed by the hostility, and their morale
sapped by the insidiousness, of their Samaritan neighbours: they were
denied the stimulus, the purgation, the glory of a great persecution. Their
Persian tyrants for the most part left them alone. The world left them alone.
Nothing stirred in Palestine except the Samaritan intrigues. History rolled
away westward, and destiny seemed to be settling on the Greeks. In 490
Miltiades defeated the Persians at Marathon. In 480 Thermopylæ was
fought and the Persian fleet broken at Salamis. In 479 a Persian army was
destroyed at Platæa, and Xerxes lost Europe and most of the Ionian coast. In

460 Athens sent an expedition to Egypt to assist the Egyptian revolt against
Persia, and in 457 “her slain fell in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phœnicia, at Haliæ,
in Ægina, and in Megara in the same year.”
Thus severely left to themselves and to the petty hostilities of their
neighbours, the Jews appear to have sunk into a careless and sordid manner
of life. They entered the period, it is true, with some sense of their
distinction.[990] In exile they had suffered God’s anger,[991] and had been
purged by it. But out of discipline often springs pride, and there is no
subtler temptation of the human heart. The returned Israel felt this to the
quick, and it sorely unfitted them for encountering the disappointment and
hardship which followed upon the completion of the Temple. The tide of
hope, which rose to flood with that consummation, ebbed rapidly away, and
left God’s people struggling, like any ordinary tribe of peasants, with bad
seasons and the cruelty of their envious neighbours. Their pride was set on
edge, and they fell, not as at other periods of disappointment into despair,
but into a bitter carelessness and a contempt of their duty to God. This was
a curious temper, and, so far as we know, new in Israel. It led them to
despise both His love and His holiness.[992] They neglected their Temple
dues, and impudently presented to their God polluted bread and blemished
beasts which they would not have dared to offer to their Persian governor.
[993] Like people like priest: the priesthood lost not reverence only, but

decency and all conscience of their office.[994] They despised the Table of
the Lord, ceased to instruct the people and grew partial in judgment. As a
consequence they became contemptible in the eyes of the community.
Immorality prevailed among all classes: every man dealt treacherously with
his brother.[995] Adultery, perjury, fraud and the oppression of the poor were
very rife.
One particular fashion, in which the people’s wounded pride spited
itself, was the custom of marriage which even the best families contracted

with the half-heathen people of the land. Across Judah there were scattered
the descendants of those Jews whom Nebuchadrezzar had not deemed
worth removing to Babylon. Whether regarded from a social or a religious
point of view, their fathers had been the dregs of the old community. Their
own religion, cut off as they were from the main body of Israel and
scattered among the old heathen shrines of the land, must have deteriorated
still further; but in all probability they had secured for themselves the best
portions of the vacant soil, and now enjoyed a comfort and a stability of
welfare far beyond that which was yet attainable by the majority of the
returned exiles. More numerous than these dregs of ancient Jewry were the
very mixed race of the Samaritans. They possessed a rich land, which they
had cultivated long enough for many of their families to be settled in
comparative wealth. With all these half-pagan Jews and Samaritans, the
families of the true Israel, as they regarded themselves, did not hesitate to
form alliances, for in the precarious position of the colony, such alliances
were the surest way both to wealth and to political influence. How much the
Jews were mastered by their desire for them is seen from the fact that, when
the relatives of their half-heathen brides made it a condition of the
marriages that they should first put away their old wives, they readily did
so. Divorce became very frequent, and great suffering was inflicted on the
native Jewish women.[996]
So the religious condition of Israel declined for nearly two generations,
and then about 460 the Word of God, after long silence, broke once more
through a prophet’s lips.
We call this prophet “Malachi,” following the error of an editor of his
book, who, finding it nameless, inferred or invented that name from its
description of the priest as the “Malĕ’ach,” or messenger, of the Lord of
Hosts.[997] But the prophet gave himself no name. Writing from the midst of
a poor and persecuted group of the people, and attacking the authorities

both of church and state, he preferred to publish his charge anonymously.
His name was in the Lord’s own book of remembrance.[998]
The unknown prophet addressed himself both to the sinners of his
people, and to those querulous adherents of Jehovah whom the success of
the sinners had tempted to despair in their service of God. His style shares
the practical directness of his predecessors among the returned exiles. He
takes up one point after another, and drives them home in a series of strong,
plain paragraphs of prose. But it is sixty years since Haggai and Zechariah,
and in the circumstances we have described, a prophet could no longer
come forward as a public inspirer of his nation. Prophecy seems to have
been driven from public life, from the sudden enforcement of truth in the
face of the people to the more deliberate and ordered argument which marks
the teacher who works in private. In the Book of “Malachi” there are many
of the principles and much of the enthusiasm of the ancient Hebrew seer.
But the discourse is broken up into formal paragraphs, each upon the same
academic model. First a truth is pronounced, or a charge made against the
people; then with the words but ye will say the prophet states some possible
objection of his hearers, proceeds to answer it by detailed evidence, and
only then drives home his truth, or his charge, in genuine prophetic fashion.
To the student of prophecy this peculiarity of the book is of the greatest
interest, for it is no merely personal idiosyncrasy. We rather feel that
prophecy is now assuming the temper of the teacher. The method is the
commencement of that which later on becomes the prevailing habit in
Jewish literature. Just as with Zephaniah we saw prophecy passing into
Apocalypse, and with Habakkuk into the speculation of the schools of
Wisdom, so now in “Malachi” we perceive its transformation into the
scholasticism of the Rabbis.
But the interest of this change of style must not prevent us from
appreciating the genuine prophetic spirit of our book. Far more fully than,

for instance, that of Haggai, to the style of which its practical simplicity is
so akin, it enumerates the prophetic principles: the everlasting Love of
Jehovah for Israel, the Fatherhood of Jehovah and His Holiness, His ancient
Ideals for Priesthood and People, the need of a Repentance proved by
deeds, the consequent Promise of Prosperity, the Day of the Lord, and
Judgment between the evil and the righteous. Upon the last of these the
book affords a striking proof of the delinquency of the people during the
last half-century, and in connection with it the prophet introduces certain
novel features. To Haggai and Zechariah the great Tribulation had closed
with the Exile and the rebuilding of the Temple: Israel stood on the margin
of the Messianic age. But the Book of “Malachi” proclaims the need of
another judgment as emphatically as the older prophets had predicted the
Babylonian doom. “Malachi” repeats their name for it, the great and
terrible Day of Jehovah. But he does not foresee it, as they did, in the shape
of a historical process. His description of it is pure Apocalypse—the fire of
the smelter and the fuller’s acid: the day that burns like a furnace, when all
wickedness is as stubble, and all evil men are devoured, but to the righteous
the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings, and they
shall tread the wicked under foot.[999] To this the prophet adds a novel
promise. God is so much the God of love,[1000] that before the Day comes
He will give His people an opportunity of conversion. He will send them
Elijah the prophet to change their hearts, that He may be prevented from
striking the land with His Ban.
In one other point the book is original, and that is in its attitude towards
the heathen. Among the heathen, it boldly says, Jehovah is held in higher
reverence than among His own people.[1001] In such a statement we can
hardly fail to feel the influence upon Israel of their contact, often close and
personal, with their wise and mild tyrants the Persians. We may emphasise
the verse as the first note of that recognition of the real religiousness of the

heathen, which we shall find swelling to such fulness and tenderness in the
Book of Jonah.
Such are in brief the style and the principles of the Book of “Malachi,”
whose separate prophecies we may now proceed to take up in detail.

CHAPTER XXVI

PROPHECY WITHIN THE LAW
“MALACHI” i.—iv.

Beneath this title we may gather all the eight sections of the Book of
“Malachi.” They contain many things of perennial interest and validity:
their truth is applicable, their music is still musical, to ourselves. But their
chief significance is historical. They illustrate the development of prophecy
within the Law. Not under the Law, be it observed. For if one thing be more
clear than another about “Malachi’s” teaching, it is that the spirit of
prophecy is not yet crushed by the legalism which finally killed it within
Israel. “Malachi” observes and enforces the demands of the Deuteronomic
law under which his people had lived since the Return from Exile. But he
traces each of these to some spiritual principle, to some essential of religion
in the character of Israel’s God, which is either doubted or neglected by his
contemporaries in their lax performance of the Law. That is why we may
entitle his book Prophecy within the Law.

The essential principles of the religion of Israel which had been shaken
or obscured by the delinquency of the people during the half-century after
the rebuilding of the Temple were three—the distinctive Love of Jehovah
for His people, His Holiness, and His Righteousness. The Book of
“Malachi” takes up each of these in turn, and proves or enforces it
according as the people have formally doubted it or in their carelessness
done it despite.

1. GOD’S LOVE FOR ISRAEL AND HATRED OF EDOM
(Chap. i. 2–5).

He begins with God’s Love, and in answer to the disappointed[1002]
people’s cry, Wherein hast Thou loved us? he does not, as the older prophets
did, sweep the whole history of Israel, and gather proofs of Jehovah’s grace
and unfailing guidance in all the great events from the deliverance from
Egypt to the deliverance from Babylon. But he confines himself to a
comparison of Israel with the Gentile nation, which was most akin to Israel
according to the flesh, their own brother Edom. It is possible, of course, to
see in this a proof of our prophet’s narrowness, as contrasted with Amos or
Hosea or the great Evangelist of the Exile. But we must remember that out
of all the history of Israel “Malachi” could not have chosen an instance
which would more strongly appeal to the heart of his contemporaries. We
have seen from the Book of Obadiah how ever since the beginning of the
Exile Edom had come to be regarded by Israel as their great antithesis.[1003]
If we needed further proof of this we should find it in many Psalms of the
Exile, which like the Book of Obadiah remember with bitterness the hostile
part that Edom played in the day of Israel’s calamity. The two nations were
utterly opposed in genius and character. Edom was a people of as
unspiritual and self-sufficient a temper as ever cursed any of God’s human
creatures. Like their ancestor they were profane,[1004] without repentance,
humility or ideals, and almost without religion. Apart, therefore, from the
long history of war between the two peoples, it was a true instinct which led
Israel to regard their brother as representative of that heathendom against
which they had to realise their destiny in the world as God’s own nation. In
choosing the contrast of Edom’s fate to illustrate Jehovah’s love for Israel,
“Malachi” was not only choosing what would appeal to the passions of his
contemporaries, but what is the most striking and constant antithesis in the
whole history of Israel: the absolutely diverse genius and destiny of these
two Semitic nations who were nearest neighbours and, according to their
traditions, twin-brethren after the flesh. If we keep this in mind we shall

understand Paul’s use of the antithesis in the passage in which he clenches it
by a quotation from “Malachi”: as it is written, Jacob have I loved, but
Esau have I hated.[1005] In these words the doctrine of the Divine election
of individuals appears to be expressed as absolutely as possible. But it
would be unfair to read the passage except in the light of Israel’s history. In
the Old Testament it is a matter of fact that the doctrine of the Divine
preference of Israel to Esau appeared only after the respective characters of
the nations were manifested in history, and that it grew more defined and
absolute only as history discovered more of the fundamental contrast
between the two in genius and destiny.[1006] In the Old Testament, therefore,
the doctrine is the result, not of an arbitrary belief in God’s bare fiat, but of
historical experience; although, of course, the distinction which experience
proves is traced back, with everything else of good or evil that happens, to
the sovereign will and purpose of God. Nor let us forget that the Old
Testament doctrine of election is of election to service only. That is to say,
the Divine intention in electing covers not the elect individual or nation
only, but the whole world and its needs of God and His truth.
The event to which “Malachi” appeals as evidence for God’s rejection
of Edom is the desolation of the latter’s ancient heritage, and the
abandonment of it to the jackals of the desert. Scholars used to think that
these vague phrases referred to some act of the Persian kings: some removal
of the Edomites from the lands of the Jews in order to make room for the
returned exiles.[1007] But “Malachi” says expressly that it was Edom’s own
heritage which was laid desolate. This can only be Mount Esau or Se’ir, and
the statement that it was delivered to the jackals of the desert proves that
the reference is to that same expulsion of Edom from their territory by the
Nabatean Arabs which we have already seen the Book of Obadiah relate
about the beginning of the Exile.[1008]

But it is now time to give in full the opening passage of “Malachi,” in
which he appeals to this important event as proof of God’s distinctive love
for Israel, and, “Malachi” adds, of His power beyond Israel’s border
(“Mal.” chap. i. 2–5).
I have loved you, saith Jehovah. But ye say, “Wherein hast Thou loved
us?” Is not Esau brother to Jacob?—oracle of Jehovah—and I have loved
Jacob and Esau have I hated. I have made his mountains desolate, and
given his heritage to the jackals of the desert. Should the people of Edom
say,[1009] “We are destroyed, but we will rebuild the waste places,” thus
saith Jehovah of Hosts, They may build, but I will pull down: men shall call
them “The Border of Wickedness” and “The People with whom Jehovah is
wroth for ever.” And your eyes shall see it, and yourselves shall say, “Great
is Jehovah beyond Israel’s border.”

2. “HONOUR THY FATHER” (Chap. i. 6–14).
From God’s Love, which Israel have doubted, the prophet passes to His
Majesty or Holiness, which they have wronged. Now it is very remarkable
that the relation of God to the Jews in which the prophet should see His
Majesty illustrated is not only His lordship over them but His Fatherhood: A
son honours a father, and a servant his lord; but if I be Father, where is My
honour? and if I be Lord, where is there reverence for Me? saith Jehovah of
Hosts.[1010] We are so accustomed to associate with the Divine Fatherhood
only ideas of love and pity that the use of the relation to illustrate not love
but Majesty, and the setting of it in parallel to the Divine Kingship, may
seem to us strange. Yet this was very natural to Israel. In the old Semitic
world, even to the human parent, honour was due before love. Honour thy
father and thy mother, said the Fifth Commandment; and when, after long
shyness to do so, Israel at last ventured to claim Jehovah as the Father of
His people, it was at first rather with the view of increasing their sense of

His authority and their duty of reverencing Him, than with the view of
bringing Him near to their hearts and assuring them of His tenderness. The
latter elements, it is true, were not absent from the conception. But even in
the Psalter, in which we find the most intimate and tender fellowship of the
believer with God, there is only one passage in which His love for His own
is compared to the love of a human father.[1011] And in the other very few
passages of the Old Testament where He is revealed or appealed to as the
Father of the nation, it is, with two exceptions,[1012] in order either to
emphasise His creation of Israel or His discipline. So in Jeremiah,[1013] and
in an anonymous prophet of the same period perhaps as “Malachi.”[1014]
This hesitation to ascribe to God the name of Father, and this severe
conception of what Fatherhood meant, was perhaps needful for Israel in
face of the sensuous ideas of the Divine Fatherhood cherished by their
heathen neighbours.[1015] But, however this may be, the infrequency and
austerity of Israel’s conception of God’s Fatherhood, in contrast with that of
Christianity, enables us to understand why “Malachi” should employ the
relation as proof, not of the Love, but of the Majesty and Holiness of
Jehovah.
This Majesty and this Holiness have been wronged, he says, by low
thoughts of God’s altar, and by offering upon it, with untroubled
conscience, cheap and blemished sacrifices. The people would have been
ashamed to present such to their Persian governor: how can God be pleased
with them? Better that sacrifice should cease than that such offerings should
be presented in such a spirit! Is there no one, cries the prophet, to close the
doors of the Temple altogether, so that the altar smoke not in vain?
The passage shows us what a change has passed over the spirit of Israel
since prophecy first attacked the sacrificial ritual. We remember how Amos
would have swept it all away as an abomination to God.[1016] So, too, Isaiah
and Jeremiah. But their reason for this was very different from “Malachi’s.”

Their contemporaries were assiduous and lavish in sacrificing, and were
devoted to the Temple and the ritual with a fanaticism which made them
forget that Jehovah’s demands upon His people were righteousness and the
service of the weak. But “Malachi” condemns his generation for
depreciating the Temple, and for being stingy and fraudulent in their
offerings. Certainly the post-exilic prophet assumes a different attitude to
the ritual from that of his predecessors in ancient Israel. They wished it all
abolished, and placed the chief duties of Israel towards God in civic justice
and mercy. But he emphasises it as the first duty of the people towards God,
and sees in their neglect the reason of their misfortunes and the cause of
their coming doom. In this change which has come over prophecy we must
admit the growing influence of the Law. From Ezekiel onwards the
prophets become more ecclesiastical and legal. And though at first they do
not become less ethical, yet the influence which was at work upon them
was of such a character as was bound in time to engross their interest, and
lead them to remit the ethical elements of their religion to a place secondary
to the ceremonial. We see symptoms of this even in “Malachi,” we shall
find more in Joel, and we know how aggravated these symptoms afterwards
became in all the leaders of Jewish religion. At the same time we ought to
remember that this change of emphasis, which many will think to be for the
worse, was largely rendered necessary by the change of temper in the
people to whom the prophets ministered. “Malachi” found among his
contemporaries a habit of religious performance which was not only
slovenly and indecent, but mean and fraudulent, and it became his first
practical duty to attack this. Moreover the neglect of the Temple was not
due to those spiritual conceptions of Jehovah and those moral duties He
demanded, in the interests of which the older prophets had condemned the
ritual. At bottom the neglect of the Temple was due to the very same
reasons as the superstitious zeal and fanaticism in sacrificing which the

older prophets had attacked—false ideas, namely, of God Himself, and of
what was due to Him from His people. And on these grounds, therefore, we
may say that “Malachi” was performing for his generation as needful and as
Divine a work as Amos and Isaiah had performed for theirs. Only, be it
admitted, the direction of “Malachi’s” emphasis was more dangerous for
religion than that of the emphasis of Amos or Isaiah. How liable the
practice he inculcated was to exaggeration and abuse is sadly proved in the
later history of his people: it was against that exaggeration, grown great and
obdurate through three centuries, that Jesus delivered His most unsparing
words.
A son honours a father, and a servant his lord. But if I am Father, where
is My honour? and if I am Lord, where is reverence for Me? saith Jehovah
of Hosts to you, O priests, who despise My Name. Ye say, “How then have
we despised Thy Name?” Ye are bringing polluted food to Mine Altar. Ye
say, “How have we polluted Thee?”[1017] By saying,[1018] “The Table of
Jehovah may be despised”; and when ye bring a blind beast to sacrifice,
“No harm!” or when ye bring a lame or sick one, “No harm!”[1019] Pray,
take it to thy Satrap: will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person?
saith Jehovah of Hosts. But now, propitiate[1020] God, that He may be
gracious to us. When things like this come from your hands, can He accept
your persons? saith Jehovah of Hosts. Who is there among you to close the
doors of the Temple altogether, that ye kindle not Mine Altar in vain? I have
no pleasure in you, saith Jehovah of Hosts, and I will not accept an offering
from your hands. For from the rising of the sun and to its setting My Name
is glorified[1021] among the nations; and in every sacred place[1022] incense
is offered to My Name, and a pure offering:[1023] for great is My Name
among the nations, saith Jehovah of Hosts. But ye are profaning it, in that
ye think[1024] that the Table of the Lord is polluted, and[1025] its food
contemptible. And ye say, What a weariness! and ye sniff at it,[1026] saith

Jehovah of Hosts. When ye bring what has been plundered,[1027] and the
lame and the diseased, yea, when ye so bring an offering, can I accept it
with grace from your hands? saith Jehovah. Cursed be the cheat in whose
flock is a male beast and he vows it,[1028] and slays for the Lord a miserable
beast.[1029] For a great King am I, saith Jehovah of Hosts, and My Name is
reverenced among the nations.
Before we pass from this passage we must notice in it one very
remarkable feature—perhaps the most original contribution which the Book
of “Malachi” makes to the development of prophecy. In contrast to the
irreverence of Israel and the wrong they do to Jehovah’s Holiness, He
Himself asserts that not only is His Name great and glorified among the
heathen, from the rising to the setting of the sun, but that in every sacred
place incense and a pure offering are offered to His Name. This is so novel
a statement, and, we may truly say, so startling, that it is not wonderful that
the attempt should have been made to interpret it, not of the prophet’s own
day, but of the Messianic age and the kingdom of Christ. So, many of the
Christian Fathers, from Justin and Irenæus to Theodoret and Augustine;
[1030]
so, our own Authorised Version, which boldly throws the verbs into
the future; and so, many modern interpreters like Pusey, who declares that
the style is “a vivid present such as is often used to describe the future; but
the things spoken of show it to be future.” All these take the passage to be
an anticipation of Christ’s parables declaring the rejection of the Jews and
ingathering of the Gentiles to the kingdom of heaven, and of the argument
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the bleeding and defective offerings of
the Jews were abrogated by the sacrifice of the Cross. But such an exegesis
is only possible by perverting the text and misreading the whole argument
of the prophet. Not only are the verbs of the original in the present tense—
so also in the early versions—but the prophet is obviously contrasting the
contempt of God’s own people for Himself and His institutions with the

reverence paid to His Name among the heathen. It is not the mere question
of there being righteous people in every nation, well-pleasing to Jehovah
because of their lives. The very sacrifices of the heathen are pure and
acceptable to Him. Never have we had in prophecy, even the most far-
seeing and evangelical, a statement so generous and so catholic as this. Why
it should appear only now in the history of prophecy is a question we are
unable to answer with certainty. Many have seen in it the result of Israel’s
intercourse with their tolerant and religious masters the Persians. None of
the Persian kings had up to this time persecuted the Jews, and numbers of
pious and large-minded Israelites must have had opportunity of
acquaintance with the very pure doctrines of the Persian religion, among
which it is said that there was already numbered the recognition of true
piety in men of all religions.[1031] If Paul derived from his Hellenic culture
the knowledge which made it possible for him to speak as he did in Athens
of the religiousness of the Gentiles, it was just as probable that Jews who
had come within the experience of a still purer Aryan faith should utter an
even more emphatic acknowledgment that the One True God had those who
served Him in spirit and in truth all over the world. But, whatever foreign
influences may have ripened such a faith in Israel, we must not forget that
its roots were struck deep in the native soil of their religion. From the first
they had known their God as a God of a grace so infinite that it was
impossible it should be exhausted on themselves. If His righteousness, as
Amos showed, was over all the Syrian states, and His pity and His power to
convert, as Isaiah showed, covered even the cities of Phœnicia, the great
Evangelist of the Exile could declare that He quenched not the smoking
wicks of the dim heathen faiths.
As interesting, however, as the origin of “Malachi’s” attitude to the
heathen, are two other points about it. In the first place, it is remarkable that
it should occur, especially in the form of emphasising the purity of heathen

sacrifices, in a book which lays such heavy stress upon the Jewish Temple
and ritual. This is a warning to us not to judge harshly the so-called legal
age of Jewish religion, nor to despise the prophets who have come under
the influence of the Law. And in the second place, we perceive in this
statement a step towards the fuller acknowledgment of Gentile religiousness
which we find in the Book of Jonah. It is strange that none of the post-exilic
Psalms strike the same note. They often predict the conversion of the
heathen; but they do not recognise their native reverence and piety. Perhaps
the reason is that in a body of song, collected for the national service, such a
feature would be out of place.

3. THE PRIESTHOOD OF KNOWLEDGE (Chap. ii. 1–9).
In the third section of his book “Malachi” addresses himself to the
priests. He charges them not only with irreverence and slovenliness in their
discharge of the Temple service—for this he appears to intend by the phrase
filth of your feasts—but with the neglect of their intellectual duties to the
people. The lips of a priest guard knowledge, and men seek instruction from
his mouth, for he is the Angel—the revealing Angel—of Jehovah of Hosts.
Once more, what a remarkable saying to come from the legal age of Israel’s
religion, and from a writer who so emphasises the ceremonial law! In all the
range of prophecy there is not any more in harmony with the prophetic
ideal. How needed it is in our own age!—needed against those two
extremes of religion from which we suffer, the limitation of the ideal of
priesthood to the communication of a magic grace, and its evaporation in a
vague religiosity from which the intellect is excluded as if it were perilous,
worldly and devilish.[1032] “Surrender of the intellect” indeed! This is the
burial of the talent in the napkin, and, as in the parable of Christ, it is still in
our day preached and practised by the men of one talent. Religion needs all
the brains we poor mortals can put into it. There is a priesthood of

knowledge, a priesthood of the intellect, says “Malachi,” and he makes this
a large part of God’s covenant with Levi. Every priest of God is a priest of
truth; and it is very largely by the Christian ministry’s neglect of their
intellectual duties that so much irreligion prevails. As in “Malachi’s” day, so
now, “the laity take hurt and hindrance by our negligence.”[1033] And just as
he points out, so with ourselves, the consequence is the growing
indifference with which large bodies of the Christian ministry are regarded
by the thoughtful portions both of our labouring and professional classes.
Were the ministers of all the Churches to awake to their ideal in this matter,
there would surely come a very great revival of religion among us.
And now this Charge for you, O priests: If ye hear not, and lay not to
heart to give glory to My Name, saith Jehovah of Hosts, I will send upon
you the curse, and will curse your blessings—yea, I have cursed them[1034]
—for none of you layeth it to heart. Behold, I ... you ...[1035] and I will
scatter filth in your faces, the filth of your feasts....[1036] And ye shall know
that I have sent to you this Charge, to be My covenant with Levi,[1037] saith
Jehovah of Hosts. My covenant was with him life and peace,[1038] and I
gave them to him, fear and he feared Me, and humbled himself before My
Name.[1039] The revelation of truth was in his mouth, and wickedness was
not found upon his lips. In whole-heartedness[1040] and integrity he walked
with Me, and turned many from iniquity. For the lips of a priest guard
knowledge, and men seek instruction[1041] from his mouth, for he is the
Angel of Jehovah of Hosts. But ye have turned from the way, ye have
tripped up many by the Torah, ye have spoiled the covenant of Levi, saith
Jehovah of Hosts. And I on My part[1042] have made you contemptible to all
the people, and abased in proportion as ye kept not My ways and had
respect of persons in delivering your Torah.

4. THE CRUELTY OF DIVORCE (Chap. ii. 10–17).

In his fourth section, upon his countrymen’s frequent divorce of their
native wives in order to marry into the influential families of their half-
heathen neighbours,[1043] “Malachi” makes another of those wide and
spiritual utterances which so distinguish his prophecy and redeem his age
from the charge of legalism that is so often brought against it. To him the
Fatherhood of God is not merely a relation of power and authority,
requiring reverence from the nation. It constitutes the members of the
nation one close brotherhood, and against this divorce is a crime and
unnatural cruelty. Jehovah makes the wife of a man’s youth his mate for life
and his wife by covenant. He hates divorce, and His altar is so wetted by the
tears of the wronged women of Israel that the gifts upon it are no more
acceptable in His sight. No higher word on marriage was spoken except by
Christ Himself. It breathes the spirit of our Lord’s utterance: if we were sure
of the text of ver. 15, we might almost say that it anticipated the letter.
Certain verses, 11–13a, which disturb the argument by bringing in the
marriages with heathen wives are omitted in the following translation, and
will be given separately.
Have we not all One Father? Hath not One God created us? Why then
are we unfaithful to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers?...
[1044]
Ye cover with tears the altar of Jehovah, with weeping and with
groaning, because respect is no longer had to the offering, and acceptable
gifts are not taken from your hands. And ye say, “Why?” Because Jehovah
has been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, with whom thou
hast broken faith, though she is thy mate[1045] and thy wife by covenant.
And ...[1046] And what is the one seeking? A Divine Seed. Take heed, then, to
your spirit, and be not unfaithful to the wife of thy youth.[1047] For I hate
divorce, saith Jehovah, God of Israel, and that a man cover his
clothing[1048] with cruelty, saith Jehovah of Hosts. So take heed to your
spirit, and deal not faithlessly.

The verses omitted in the above translation treat of the foreign
marriages, which led to this frequent divorce by the Jews of their native
wives. So far, of course, they are relevant to the subject of the passage. But
they obviously disturb its argument, as already pointed out.[1049] They have
nothing to do with the principle from which it starts that Jehovah is the
Father of the whole of Israel. Remove them and the awkward clause in
ver. 13a, by which some editor has tried to connect them with the rest of the
paragraph, and the latter runs smoothly. The motive of their later addition is
apparent, if not justifiable. Here they are by themselves:—
Judah was faithless, and abomination was practised in Israel[1050], and
in Jerusalem, for Judah hath defiled the sanctuary of Jehovah, which was
dear to Him, and hath married the daughter of a strange god. May Jehovah
cut off from the man, who doeth this, witness and champion[1051] from the
tents of Jacob, and offerer of sacrifices to Jehovah of Hosts.[1052]

5.“WHERE IS THE GOD OF JUDGMENT?”
(Chap. ii. 17—iii. 5).
In this section “Malachi” turns from the sinners of his people to those
who weary Jehovah with the complaint that sin is successful, or, as they put
it, Every one that does evil is good in the eyes of Jehovah, and He
delighteth in them; and again, Where is the God of Judgment? The answer
is, The Lord Himself shall come. His Angel shall prepare His way before
Him, and suddenly shall the Lord come to His Temple. His coming shall be
for judgment, terrible and searching. Its first object (note the order) shall be
the cleansing of the priesthood, that proper sacrifices may be established,
and its second the purging of the immorality of the people. Mark that
although the coming of the Angel is said to precede that of Jehovah
Himself, there is the same blending of the two as we have seen in previous
accounts of angels.[1053] It is uncertain whether this section closes with

ver. 5 or 6: the latter goes equally well with it and with the following
section.
Ye have wearied Jehovah with your words; and ye say, “In what have
we wearied Him ?” In that ye say, “Every one that does evil is good in the
eyes of Jehovah, and He delighteth in them”; or else, “Where is the God of
Judgment?” Behold, I will send My Angel, to prepare the way before Me,
and suddenly shall come to His Temple the Lord whom ye seek and the
Angel of the Covenant whom ye desire. Behold, He comes! saith Jehovah of
Hosts. But who may bear the day of His coming, and who stand when He
appears? For He is like the fire of the smelter and the acid of the fullers. He
takes His seat to smelt and to purge;[1054] and He will purge the sons of
Levi, and wash them out like gold or silver, and they shall be to Jehovah
bringers of an offering in righteousness. And the offering of Judah and
Jerusalem shall be pleasing to Jehovah, as in the days of old and as in long
past years. And I will come near you to judgment, and I will be a swift
witness against the sorcerers and the adulterers and the perjurers, and
against those who wrong the hireling in his wage, and the widow and the
orphan, and oppress the stranger, and fear not Me, saith Jehovah of Hosts.

6. REPENTANCE BY TITHES (Chap. iii. 6–12).
This section ought perhaps to follow on to the preceding. Those whom
it blames for not paying the Temple tithes may be the sceptics addressed in
the previous section, who have stopped their dues to Jehovah out of sheer
disappointment that He does nothing. And ver. 6, which goes well with
either section, may be the joint between the two. However this be, the new
section enforces the need of the people’s repentance and return to God, if
He is to return to them. And when they ask, how are they to return,
“Malachi” plainly answers, By the payment of the tithes they have not paid.
In withholding these they robbed God, and to this, their crime, are due the

locusts and bad seasons which have afflicted them. In our temptation to see
in this a purely legal spirit, let us remember that the neglect to pay the tithes
was due to a religious cause, unbelief in Jehovah, and that the return to
belief in Him could not therefore be shown in a more practical way than by
the payment of tithes. This is not prophecy subject to the Law, but prophecy
employing the means and vehicles of grace with which the Law at that time
provided the people.
For I Jehovah have not changed, but ye sons of Jacob have not done
with (?).[1055] In the days of your fathers ye turned from My statutes and did
not keep them. Return to Me, and I will return to you, saith Jehovah of
Hosts. But you say, “How then shall we return?” Can a man rob[1056] God?
yet ye are robbing Me. But ye say, “In what have we robbed Thee?” In the
tithe and the tribute.[1057] With the curse are ye cursed, and yet Me ye are
robbing, the whole people of you. Bring in the whole tithe to the storehouse,
that there may be provision[1058] in My House, and pray, prove Me in this,
saith Jehovah of Hosts—whether I will not open to you the windows of
heaven, and pour blessing upon you till there is no more need. And I will
check for you the devourer,[1059] and he shall not destroy for you the fruit of
the ground, nor the vine in the field miscarry, saith Jehovah of Hosts. And
all nations shall call you happy, for ye shall be a land of delight, saith
Jehovah of Hosts.

7. THE JUDGMENT TO COME
(Chap. iii. 13–21 Heb., iii. 13—iv. 2 Eng.).
This is another charge to the doubters among the pious remnant of
Israel, who, seeing the success of the wicked, said it is vain to serve God.
Deuteronomy was their Canon, and Deuteronomy said that if men sinned
they decayed, if they were righteous they prospered. How different were the
facts of experience! The evil men succeeded: the good won no gain by their