ality remained, and rose to the point of enterprize.* It appears that even their religious observances must have been tolerated by the Persians, as among the returning exiles there are enumerated the "singers, the children of Asaph" (Ez. ii. 41). Their prophets also appear to have passed to and fro between the Holy Land and the places of exile, and to have exercised their mission freely in the latter.

The policy of the conquerors consisted, in all such cases, simply in removing from the conquered country those classes of its population which were most valuable as subjects nearer home, or most capable of insurrection in the province, and supplying their place by colonists of more reliable fidelity. Accordingly we read that Nebuchadnezzar, in the present instance, " carried away all Jerusalem, even all the princes and all the mighty

* "After so long an interval, very few of the original captives could be alive. The great body of the existing generation had been born and bred in Babylon, which was thus, in fact, their native country. As a body, they throve well there; and ceasing to take interest, unless in certain localities, in the culture of the soil, that change of habit and pursuit took place among them which has ever since been maintained, and they probably followed nearly the same vocations in the ancient as they do in the modern Babylon, and other cities of our own country,-and presented nearly the same aspect to the ancient Chaldeans as they do to the modern Britons, apart, however, from the special odium they have incurred among Christians on our Lord's account. They became then traders, pedlars, money-changers, money-lenders, jewellers, and possibly dealers in old clothes. Upon the whole, they were so comfortable and satisfied with their position, that, although unshaken in their attachment to Judaism, they felt but little disposition to forego their realized advantages and break up their homes, to encounter the perils of the wilderness, and to undergo the privations and trials to which a small settlement in a deserted country must expect to be exposed. The largest, the wealthiest, and the noblest portion of the nation, therefore, took no part in the movement except by their sympathies and by their bountiful contributions in furtherance of the object; and it has ever been the sentiment of the Jews, that the most illustrious part of their nation voluntarily remained in the land of their exile." (Kitto's Daily Bible Illustrations, Vol. IV. p. 464.)

men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land" (2 Kings xxiv. 14). In the interval between the Assyrian and the Babylonian captivities, the country of the ten tribes had been colonized by a mixed population from Assyria, whose descendants, mixed again with the remains of the Israelites, became the jealous opponents of the Jews when rebuilding the temple and city under Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah; and the old feud between Judah and Israel was renewed and perpetuated within the same local limits, down to the time of Christ, between the Jews and the Samaritans.

The multitude of Jews who never returned, became the seed of a pure Theism far and wide through the East, while those who did return presented themselves thenceforth to the world's view as a compact and devoted nation of worshipers of the One God, proof against the idolatries which had so often before been their sin and shame, and almost blindly devoted to the Law against which they had so often sinned in the palmier days of their monarchy.

There is no reason to doubt that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were written respectively by the men whose names they bear. Ezra was a priest and scribe, and has had the credit, among both Jewish and Christian writers, of producing or republishing many parts of the preceding books of Scripture. Doubtless there was great room for literary labours, of the latter kind especially; and he was probably the most competent and likely man to set them on foot. But to say, with the Jewish legend, that he was inspired to re-write the Pentateuch which had been burnt during the captivity, is to throw away recklessly all the interesting marks which it bears of far higher antiquity, and ignorantly

to invite the suspicion of the half-learned against its authenticity.

Ezra's history is only contemporaneous, of course, from the seventh chapter, where his own personal part in the transactions begins, and from which place he speaks indifferently in the third person and the first. "I gathered them together," " I proclaimed a fast," &c., are modes of expression not used in the first six chapters. In those six, he has prefixed an account of the first expedition under prince Zerubbabel, the lineal representative of the royal house of David; which expedition had taken place nearly eighty years before that conducted by Ezra himself.

NEHEMIAH headed a third detachment of returning exiles about twelve years after Ezra, whom he joined in Jerusalem, bearing with him authority, as Tirshatha or Governor, from king Artaxerxes to rebuild the city walls. The book called by his name is, we have no reason to doubt, what it professes to be,-his personal narrative of his own administration. In this narrative he inserts a register, given also in Ezra, of the "genealogies of them which came up at first," which he found ready to his hands, and also some other matter descriptive of what had been already done under Ezra ; which makes his own book repetitional and in some degree confused. This register begins vii. 5; and in chap. xii. the order of the narrative is again broken by the insertion of the names of the priests and levites who had gone up with Zerubbabel. The book ends with the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, the solemn reading of the Law, and the putting away of idolatrous wives, on perhaps an over-rigid interpretation of its meaning. (See before, p. 245.)

The prophets Haggai and Zechariah prophesied, in the time of Zerubbabel, to the returned captives, and

encouraged them in the work of rebuilding the temple (Ezra v. 1); and Malachi, probably in the time of Nehemiah, closed the list of those notable men.

These books, Ezra and Nehemiah, are generally regarded by the Jews as parts of one and the same work. Their historical sobriety and truthfulness contrast very strikingly with the inflated and marvel-loving style of the Apocryphal books, 1 and 2 Esdras, referring to the same period (to be mentioned hereafter in their place); which are in fact later recoctions of the history of this period, in the falsely exaggerated style of the Greek Alexandrian Jewish literature.

ESTHER.

THE book of Esther relates to the period when the Jews were gradually returning from Babylon; but at what time it was written is very doubtful. Probably it is one of the latest written books in the Hebrew Bible,— perhaps the very latest. It has always been a favourite book with the Jews. Pitiful consolation for the long exile of their race, that a Jewish maiden should have been made one of the wives of a Persian despot! It is the one only incident of the expiring captivity that the Jewish sacred historians have chronicled. The rest they would hush in silence; but of this, they and their nation are proud!

The historical event, in commemoration of which the Jewish feast of Purim has been held ever since the captivity, is very obscurely and unsatisfactorily recorded in this book. For some kind of deliverance from a projected or apprehended massacre of the Jews in Persia,

we cannot doubt that the feast of Purim is the true monumental voucher; but many of the details in the book of Esther are scarcely credible, and too horrible to be willingly accepted, if we can in any way mitigate them.

The king, Ahasuerus, to whose reign the story belongs, is generally thought to have been Xerxes. The mad despot who could scourge the Hellespont, might disgrace himself by insulting his queen, Vashti, before his courtiers, "when his heart was merry with wine," and might make himself ridiculous to his subjects, male and female, by his next ensuing decree, "that every man should rule in his own house;"-he might issue orders for the indiscriminate massacre of the Jews to please his favourite Haman, and on the intercession of Queen Esther might counterbalance them (as the decree was irrevocable) by permission to the Jews to stand on their defence. But Niebuhr takes this insane king to have been Cambyses, whose known character, as exhibited in his expedition against Egypt, these incidents may equally well suit. (See Niebuhr's Lect. on Anc. Hist., II. 180.) He is called Ahasuerus in the Hebrew Bible, but Artaxerxes in the Septuagint. There can be little doubt that the words are radically the same, and stand not for the individual name of either monarch, but as the general title of Royalty, like "Pharaoh " in Egyptian history.

An absurd paraphrastical addition to the book of Esther appears in the Greek Apocrypha, under the title, “The rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther which are found neither in the Hebrew nor in the Chaldee."

It has been observed by thoughtful readers that the tone of the book of Esther is very different from that of the Jewish Scriptures in general, in the total want of that religious spirit and those directly religious allusions, with which the history everywhere else abounds, more