JEWISH HISTORY AND

POLITICS

IN THE TIMES OF SARGON AND

SENNACHERIB

An Enquiry

INTO THE HISTORICAL MEANING AND PURPOSE OF THE PROPHECIES
OF ISAIAH

Their orators thou then extoll'st, as those
The top of eloquence; statists indeed,
And lovers of their country, as may seem;
But herein to our Prophets far beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of civil government
In their majestic, unaffected style,

Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so,
What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat;
These only with our Law best form a king.

Paradise Regained, iv. 353.

PREFACE.

It is now many years ago that, by the advice of my friend Mr. MAURICE, I proposed to myself to make the science of Politics my study. In order to give Jewish History and Politics their proper place in that study I chose the period of which this Volume treats; and the reader is here offered the results of my inquiry.

has been revised throughout, and have been made to it.

The present edition considerable additions

This period-the last half of the eighth century B.C.— is of characteristic importance in the history of the Jewish nation, which had now reached its highest point of civilization, and was come into contact with the Assyrian Power, which was overwhelming the Eastern world. Its social and religious condition, and its politics, home and foreign, are known to us through the contemporary discourses of the Prophets, the political and religious advisers of the kings and people. A new and interesting light is thrown upon it by the Assyrian Inscriptions, which show us, as facts, many events and circumstances of which, without them, we could only infer the existence. And the genius of Isaiah, the greatest of the prophets of that or any time, has called out a series of learned and thoughtful commentaries on his writings, such as are hardly available for the student of any other book.

Taking then each of Isaiah's prophecies in succession, I have brought it into connection with all that we know, from itself, or from other sources, of the events to which it refers, as well as of the internal state of the nation, and of its relations with other countries. And thus I have endeavoured, in a manner which should not be the less complete because it is gradual and somewhat informal, to take in the whole subject proposed in my title-page.

In thus reading the Book of Isaiah I have, to the best of my ability, handled it by the method of our modern historians of Greece and Rome, and treated it as they— with thorough freedom and thorough reverence-treat the classical books. Wherever the method led I have followed; and if I have found differences as well as resemblances between the Jewish and the classical literatures, this is not the consequence of a difference of method, but of facts. Thus, I have recognized, for I should think it unscientific criticism not to recognize, the fact that, while no one now worships the national gods of Greece or Rome, a large part of the most educated and most thoughtful men in modern Europe still believe in, and worship the national God of the Jews. And again :-the Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman histories all tell us of national growth and national decay. The patriots and the philosophers of Greece and Rome could find no remedy for the decay they admitted at last that there was nothing left for the state but military despotism, and nothing in religion but an organized superstition without faithwhich indeed would do nothing towards restoring the life of the nation, but might make its inevitable death more gradual, or less convulsive, than if they continued to try successive forms of anarchy in the hope of regaining freedom. But the Jewish teachers maintained that there was a law of national life powerful enough to control and