from the researches among the ruined heaps of those bygone capitals of the civilised world; but among the forms which art has traced, as they now issue again into light, who will search for the letters of that writing of God and find them? Who will not see, after a moment's thought, that the whole narration, insomuch as it endeavours to set before our eyes the purely divine purport of the events, can only be reinterpreted and grasped in the spirit from which it originally flowed ?--But this does not prevent us from adequately recognising the grounds in external history on which it is also based; and if on the one hand it is impossible to deny that in this later representation a great deal of the narrative is simply drawn from popular sources, on the other hand we have no reason to doubt that the designation Belshazzar here given to the last king of Babylon, elsewhere known by his ordinary name Nabunid, was his proper royal appellation.3

This is the origin, in particular, of the mention of Belshazzar as the son of Nabuchodrozzor. He was only his son in the sense of being one of his successors; although, however, according to the inscription of Behistun, he named his son Nabuchodrozzor again. According to the more accurate history, he had only been one of the Babylonian nobles, as Berosus tells us, in Jos. contr. Ap. i. 20; between the two came the reigns of the Evil-Merodach mentioned above, p. 18, Neriglissor (properly Nergal sarozzor) and the child Labosarodak; cf. also Megasthenes in Eus. Præp. Ev. ix. 11, 40 sq., and Chron. Arm. i. p. 62 sq. Yet even Herodotus, i. 188, relates that Labynetus had received both his name and his empire from his father, by whom he cannot mean anyone but Nabuchodrozzor. We see by this how early this became the usual representation in the ordinary narratives. In the same way it is only this narrative which speaks of Nabunid being slain on the same night; according to Berosus and Megasthenes, on the other hand, he was sent by Cyrus to Caramania, and did not die there till afterwards.

2 Berosus is twice confirmed on this point by the inscription of Behistun; Herodotus's Labynetus is evidently the same as Nabunid, a name which might easily be interchanged with the abbreviated Nabuchodrozzor.

"Whether Rawlinson (Athenæum, March 18, 1854), and subsequently Hincks in quite another way (Journal of Sacred Liter. Jan.

1862), are correct in discovering and interpreting the name Belshazzar in the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions, is indeed still doubtful, but it would be folly on that account to reject the historical character of the name itself. On a confusion of his name with that of EvilMerodach, see the Jahrbb. der Bibl. Wiss. ix. 129. The LXX call it BaλTaσáp, confounding it with Daniel's name, Dan i. 7.

The same Baltasar, with the same Hellenistic spelling, is also found in Baruch i. 11, as the only son and successor of Nabuchodrozzor. Now, if this book of Baruch was not written until after Daniel, and if this pronunciation, BaλTaσáp, which is evidently shortened from Βαλτσασάρ, had arisen from a simple confusion of the two names in the version of Daniel in the LXX, then no further evidence for the historical character of Belshazzar would have been furnished by this fact. But it will appear below that the book of Baruch is on the contrary older than that of Daniel; and in the same way the translation of the book of Baruch, as well as that of the book of Jeremiah, is older than that of the book of Daniel. The Hellenistic confusion of the two names may be older than the Greek book of Daniel, since a pronunciation like Baλroaoap is in itself impossible to the Greeks; or if the original pronunciation were BaλTaσaσáp, this too would easily be contracted into Βαλτασάρ, and fall imperceptibly into Baλoaσáp.

III. THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF THE NEW PERIOD.

1. The Hagiocracy.

1) As soon as the commonwealth of Israel was in a position to remodel itself in the ancient fatherland, there was an immediate rewakening of all the national pretensions and efforts which had formerly moved even the nobler heart of the people, inasmuch as they had become indissolubly connected with its knowledge of the true God, and its consciousness that this knowledge and with it the kingdom of this God must rule over all individuals and nations. During the general misery which accompanied the decline of the kingdom, both Jahveh's people, and with it the religion of the true God which it had hitherto supported, had fallen into deeper and deeper contempt with the great masses of every heathen nation; and this feeling was only strengthened after its final overthrow. Israel then bore the twofold guilt of having by its perversity made not itself alone but also the everlasting truths which had hitherto been entrusted to it an object of contempt and scorn in the eyes of the great world,-a point which Ezekiel brought out at the time with the utmost emphasis. Thus there rose most vividly in the minds of the new prophets who discoursed towards the end of the exile, the fresh conviction that Jahveh would now once more reveal to the world his unique power and truth in all their might. Too long already, as it were, in the turmoil of the world's great race, had he held silence and restrained himself, too long permitted his name to be despised and rejected amongst the nations of the earth. Now, however, he neither would nor could hold his peace any longer; with the thunder of his voice he would make the earth tremble from end to end, and step into the battle as the only true and eternal hero, to re-establish, even though by the profoundest perturbation which could no longer be avoided, and by the conflict of all the gravest forces of the earth, the eternal right that had been overthrown. With this he would restore his fear and the glory of his name, so that salvation, as the final object of all divine energy, might be accomplished. Thus had the great Unnamed been impelled in the fulness of inspiration to unveil the hidden purpose of the true God who ruled the age, in anthropomorphic images of unusual force, as a consequence of the great excitement of the age itself, but yet corresponding completely to the inner truth.2

1 Ezek. xxxvi. 20 sq. Cf. xxii. 4; Jer. xxiii. 40, xxix, 81,

2 Is. xlii. 10-16, lii. 4-6 (with which the historical description, Jer. 1, 18 sq.,

The object of the deepest prophetic yearning was now at last realised, if not at once in all its extent, yet at least so far that a first beginning was assured. The community of the true God could again raise its head upon earth in independence, with external honour, and move freely; nay, in the first moments a clear future of an unique kind, and as yet without a cloud, spread out before it. The very nations which had hitherto poured out their bitter scoffs against Israel as Jahveh's people, now saw it set at liberty, and that too as if by the simple decree of the heavens above, without attempting itself, with all its spiritual activity, to take up the sword against its former destroyers. The conquerors of the age paid honour to it; and in accordance with the inseparable connection in which nationality stood to religion among the ancients, the great change in the national destiny of Israel must in itself have been the cause which enabled the religion entirely peculiar to it suddenly, and for the first time in the world's history, to attract in the furthest circles an attention and respect from the heathen proportionate to the somewhat more accurate knowledge of its character which now (for the first time also) spread far and wide among them. And therefore a thousand varied forms of such words as these

'Jahveh rules, the earth trembles,'

ring with a sacred joy never before experienced in so high a degree through the songs of the time; and a perfectly new and prouder consciousness henceforth runs through every vein of this people, reborn as it were from the dead. Since the first establishment of the community of Jahveh none of the nations of the earth, not even the most powerful, had been able to destroy it. All the more consistently and boldly, then, did it now rise up, with the innermost consciousness of its divine privileges and its eternal destiny, in opposition to them all, rejoicing in the victory of its ever true God, feeling its ultimate though as yet scantily acknowledged power over them all, and foreseeing that its universal dominion must finally be acknowledged, even externally. Once before, it is true, the community had quivered through and through with a similar joyful exultation and presentiment. It was almost two hundred years earlier, towards the close of Isaiah's life; but at that time Israel had not yet learned as it now had to survive the absolute collapse of its external empire and sanctuary, and so should be compared), and in other 2 Cf. Ps. cxviii. and many similar passages also.

Ps. xcvii. and many similar ones: see Die Psalmen, 2nd ed. p. 297 sqq.

ones.

3 Vol. iv. p. 184 sqq.

the kingdom soon afterwards fell once more into all the deeper confusion and calamities. But now the trust in God, which had been first kindled then, returned to the regenerated people, as it glanced far into the future, in all the greater purity and strength; nor was it ever again to vanish from its inmost heart. On the other hand, it was to become a firm foundation stone for the rising edifice of the next great period of its history.

2) But this 'sovereignty of Jahveh' in which Israel was now prepared to take a purer and serener joy than ever before, could never again be the same, in an external sense, as it had formerly been, prior to the destruction of the ancient kingdom, a fact which was necessarily taught soon enough by the development of the history. Every spiritual power which stirs within us necessarily strives to find a corresponding external representation and expression. The spiritual power, however, which moved in Israel, was from the first animated by the supreme desire to subdue all mankind to itself; and the strength of the opposition of the whole of the great world as it stood undivided and unmoved only increased the darkness but at the same time the boldness of its inextinguishable longing and hope to see all this heathen world subjected, even externally, to Jahveh's rule. But the new energy with which this hope and expectation now arose on Israel's side soon encountered, as it became bolder, a corresponding increase in the fixedness of the status quo. The conversion of the heathen in the mass would not come to pass. The community, when liberated from the Chaldean supremacy, was still subject to the same heathens who had released it; when the opportunity of returning was given, it became clear how many and what potent ties already bound the remnant of the ancient people to its home amid the heathen; and so, since an outward kingdom of Israel had of necessity none but the humblest and scantiest foundations on which to rebuild itself, the modest stem of a new Jerusalem long remained a shoot only too feeble. Thus, while ardent longing might behold a sovereignty of Jahveh over all the heathen realized even externally, yet meanwhile the ancient independence and power of this rule could not be re-established even in the holy land itself; and a contradiction between the pretensions and the actuality of this newly-restored community, to which all were keenly sensible but which none could remove, necessarily sank deeper and deeper into its heart. But this contradiction in the nature of the dominion which now presented itself, was in reality only the same that we have already observed' rising in another form in the far higher region of the

1 P. 37 sq.

eternal and the temporal destiny of Israel. These grave internal contrasts and obscure contradictions are brought to the front by every decided step forward in the great development of human history; for every advance of this kind at once becomes the vital germ of a general reorganisation, and this will be restrained by the principles and exigencies of the previous organisation until it has developed itself internally to such a degree as to enable it to rise in the right course above its predecessor.

It was, then, impossible to re-establish now a sovereignty of Jahveh' in the earlier sense, either as in the preceding period, under a human king of Israel, with prophets and priests at his side, nor yet without a monarch, while Israel formed a compact nationality and an earthly kingdom under the invisible King alone, as in the first period of all this history. Nevertheless the community could by no means bring itself absolutely to tolerate the supremacy of the heathen, however well disposed they might be. With irrepressible force there rose within it a loftier consciousness, causing it to feel that its destiny was rather to rule over the heathen element and dissolve it in its own power. The community, now forming itself anew, might learn to endure the heathen supremacy in all the outward circumstances of life, so long as this did not more directly touch its daily religion; just as the many individuals who remained behind among the heathen were compelled to learn obedience to their masters in what related merely to material possessions and actions. And in the lesson of peaceful obedience to the heathen supremacy on the part of the whole new community, as well as of the many scattered individuals, there lay, as has been already remarked,' one of the mightiest, and, at the present crisis, one of the most necessary instruments for developing the true religion. But the line between material things within the jurisdiction of the temporal power and the purely spiritual is in itself difficult to draw, and in those times had never been sufficiently clearly understood and sharply laid down; it is only the close of the whole of this history which is capable of teaching this lesson. For the present, then, the new community might certainly learn to tolerate the heathen supremacy so far as it went, simply to gain the new experience of the extent to which it might be permanently possible; but it could not possibly recognise it as perfectly satisfactory and final when it was further tried by the law of the true religion.

1 P. 19 sqq.