LECTURE XLII. THE FALL OF BABYLON. Primæval THE moment of the Jewish history which we have now reached coincides with one of the most stronglymarked epochs in the history of the world. As far as the course of human progress is concerned there have been three vast periods, of which two have already passed away. They may be called, in general terms, Primæval History, Classical History, and Modern History. Each of these periods has its beginning, middle, and end its ancient and modern stage but the whole of each is marked by its own general chraracteristics. In the Primæval History we must include all that series of events which begins with the first The end of dawn of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. History. It is a period of which the Semitic races (taking that word in its most extended sense) were the predominant elements of power and genius-the Assyrians at Nineveh, the Phoenicians in Tyre and Sidon and their distant colonies, the Israelites in Palestine, the Egyptians, though with infusion of other races, in the valley of the Nile, the Chaldæans, though with a like heterogeneous infusion, on the banks of the Euphrates. Of these nations, with the single exception of the Israelites, we have, properly speaking, no history. Their manners and customs, their religion, the succession of their sovereigns are known to us. But we have no con tinuous series of events; although the knowledge of them is fuller, through the investigations of the last fifty years, than in former times, yet it is still shadowy, fragmentary, mythical. They are like the figures seen Beginning in the dreams of Sardanapalus, as depicted by History. the modern poet; here a mighty hunter or conqueror like Nimrod, or Sesostris, or Sennacherib, there a fierce and voluptuous queen like Semiramis-yet All along of Classical B. C. 566. B. C. 572. Of various aspects, but of one expression." 1 But the time was now arrived when this giant age was to come to an end. It is the epoch in the Eastern World when we begin to discern the lineaments and traits of the first teachers of farther 2 Asia, whose careers are distinctly known to us, and whose influence still lives Tarquinius Superbus. down to our own time. In the Western World it is the date, almost to a year, when Grecian literature begins to throw its light far and wide on everything that it touches. Even in Egypt, Amasis is the first king of whose personal character we have any knowledge as distinct from the public acts, or the length of the reigns, of the other Pharaohs. In the same generation, even in the very same year, we meet the accession of two great potentates in Greece and in the Grecian colonies of Asia Minor Pisistratus at Athens, Croesus at Sardis. The same date brings us into the midst of the first authentic characters of Roman history in the reign of the Tarquins. From this time forward the classical world of Greece and Italy occupies the whole horizon of our thoughts, till its own days are numbered by the fall of Rome and the inva 1 Byron's Sardanapalus, act iv., scene 1. 8 2 See Lecture XLV. sion of the German tribes, which was to usher in the period of Modern History in Europe. With a like catastrophe did the earlier epoch come to its conclusion, but in the continent which had been its chief seat - in Asia. And it is exactly this momentous juncture of secular history, this critical pause between the middle and the final epoch of Jewish history, at which we are now arrived. The fall of Jerusalem coincides with the fall, or the beginning of the fall, of those ancient monarchies and nations which had occupied the attention of civilized men down to this time. We have already seen how the chorus of the Jewish Prophets at the close of the monarchy prepared the way for the final overthrow of the oldest historic world, much as the Christian Fathers heralded the overthrow of the Greco-Roman world. We have seen how1 Ezekiel sat over against the grave of the nations, into which tribe after tribe, kingdom after kingdom, even the stately ship of Tyre, the cedar of Assyria, the venerable Egypt, went plunging down to the dark abyss where "the bloody " of the past, corpses 66 yet but green in earth, Lay festering in their shrouds. But now the oldest, the grandest of all was about to descend into the same sepulchral vault which had received all its successors and rivals. The event when it came to the Israelite captives could have been no surprise. It had been long foreseen by those who sang by the water-side. They were told how, even before the Captivity, on occasion of a 1 Ezek. xxiv.-xxxii. See Lecture 2 Psalm cxxxvii. 3. visit of homage which the Jewish King Zedekiah paid to Nebuchadnezzar in the early part of his reign, Jeremiah had recorded his detailed prediction of the overthrow of Babylon in a scroll, which he confided to Seraiah, brother of Baruch, himself a high officer in the Judæan Court. Not till he reached the quays of the Euphrates was Seraiah to open and read the fatal record, with the warning that "Babylon shall sink, and "shall not rise again from the face of the evils that "shall come upon her."2 Deep in its bed the mighty river was believed to have of the approaching doom. events now began to disclose. kept its secret as a pledge What that doom was the It will be our object to indicate the impression left by it on the Israelite spectators, the only spectators who by means of these thrilling utterances, remain, as it were, the living witnesses of the whole transaction; confirmed on the whole by the broken and scattered notices preserved in later Chaldæan annals, or gathered together by the Greeks who penetrated during the next century into Central Asia. It might have been thought difficult to imagine from what quarter the destroyer should come. The chief rivals of Babylon were gone. The dominions that had with it played their part on the battlefield of the nations had passed away, and the Empire of Nebuchadnezzar was left, as it seemed, in solitary and unassailable majesty. "I have made completely strong the "defences of Babylon," said Nebuchadnezzar in his great inscription; "may it last for ever! "3 1 Jer. li. 59. A. V., "a quiet "prince"-probably the "officer "of the king's bed-chamber," and therefore indispensable on the journey. 2 Jer. li. 61-64; xxix. 10. * Standard Inscription in Rawlinson's Herodotus, ii. 586. Persian Not so. The prescient eye of the Hebrew Prophets was clearly fixed on that point of the horizon whence the storm would issue. There was a mightier The wall even than the walls of Babylon, with gates Invasion which could not be opened and shut at the B. c. 539. command of Princes, that runs across the centre of the whole Ancient World; the backbone alike of Europe and Asia. It begins in the far East with the Himalayas; it attaches itself to the range of the diverging lines of the Zagros and Elburz ranges; it unites them in the Imaus, the Caucasus, and the Taurus; it reappears after a slight interruption in the range of Hæmus; it melts into the Carpathian and Styrian Mountains; it rises again in the Alps; it reaches its western buttress in the Pyrenees. On the southern side, on the sunny slopes of this gigantic barrier grew up the civilized nations of antiquity, the ancient monumental religions and politics of India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as afterwards farther west, the delicate yet powerful commonwealths of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. On the northern or darker side, behind its mighty screen, were restrained and nurtured the fierce tribes which have from time to time descended to scourge or regenerate the civilization of the South. Such in later days have been the Gauls, the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns, the Tartars; such, more nearly within the view of the age of which we are now speaking, the1 Scythians; and such was now, although in a somewhat milder form, the enemy on whom, as Tacitus in the day of Trajan already fixed his gaze with mingled fear and admiration on the tribes of Germany, so the Israelite Prophets looked for the development of the new crisis of the world. Already the 1 See Lectures XXXIX. and XL. |