of Josedek, the High Priest who had been carried into exile with Zedekiah, and shared his imprisonment. Next to them in rank and elder in years was Seraiah the priest, son of Hilkiah. But of the ancient fourand-twenty sacerdotal courses, four only joined in the procession; it may be from the havoc of the priestly caste in the desperate struggle at the time of the capture of the Temple; it may be from the attachment of the others to their Babylonian homes. Still the number of priests (4,000) was large in proportion to the people, yet larger in proportion to the Levites, who numbered only 74 besides the 128 singers of the family of Asaph, and the 1392 descendants of those stalwart gatekeepers the sacerdotal soldiery or police, that had guarded the whole circuit of the Temple walls, and were believed to have rendered the state such important service on the day that Jahoiada 3 planned the overthrow of Athaliah.* Along with them were the 392 representatives of the ancient Canaanite bondmen, whose ancestral names indicated their foreign origin, the Nethinim," or "conse"crated giftsmen" bound over to the honored work of the Temple service-or "the children of Solomon's "slaves" - that is, doubtless, of those Phoenician artists whom the great king had employed in the construction of his splendid works. So the names stood in a register which a century afterward was found by an inquiring antiquary in the Archives of Jerusalem, and its accuracy was tested by the additional record that there was a B. C. 536. 8 1 Compare Neh. xi. 11, with Ezra ii. 2. 6 4 See Lecture XXXV. 2 Ezra ii. 41-42; Neh. vii. 43-44; Bible. 1 Chron. ix. 17-21. See "Nethinim" in Dict. of 6 Neh. vii. 6-73; Ezra ii. 1-70; 1 * According to 2 Chron. xxiii. 2, Esdras v. 1-46; comp. 1 Chron. ix. rigid scrutiny on the departure from Babylon to exclude from this favored community those who could not prove their descent. Such was a body of unknown applicants from the villages in the jungles or salt marshes near the Persian Gulf. Such was another band, claiming to be of priestly origin, and justifying their pretensions, but in vain, by appealing to an ancestor who had married a daughter and taken the name of the renowned old Gileadite chief Barzillai.2 In the front or centre of this caravan, borne probably by the Nethinim in place of the ark that had formed the rallying point of the earlier wanderings were the carefully collected vessels of the Temple, the Palladium to which the hopes of the nation had been attached, which had been the badges of contention between Jeremiah and his opponents before the Captivity; which had been carried off in triumph by Nebuchadnezzar and lodged in the most magnificent of all receptacles, the Temple of Bel; which had adorned the banquet of Belshazzar; and which now, by special permission of Cyrus, were taken out of the Babylonian treasury, according, as one tradition said, to a special vow made by the King in his earlier days.* There they were borne aloft, each article of plate was carefully named in lists three times recorded, the thousand cups of original gold, the thousand cups of silver, which marked the double stage of the Captivity, with all the lesser vessels, even the nine and twenty knives, amounting in all, as was carefully noted, to 5,499. 1 Ezra ii. 59. * Ezra ii. 59–61; Neh. vii. 61, 62; and the confused text of 1 Esdras v. 36-38. • Ezra i. 7; vi. 14; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 10, 13; Jer. xxvii. 16-22; xxviii. 2, 3; Dan. v. See Lectures XL. XLI. XLII. 4 1 Esdras v. 44. It was like the procession of the Vestal Virgins, with the sacred fire in their hands, in their retreat from Rome; like Æneas with his household gods from Troy. Homely as they were, grates, knives, spoons, basins, recalling alike the glory of the time of Solomon, in their original gold, the decline of the last days of Jerusalem in the silver substitutes of Zedekiah, they were the links which seemed to weave a continuous chain across the gulf which parted the old and the new era of Israelite history. Forth from the gates of Babylon they rode on camels, mules, asses, and (now for the first The journey. time in their history) on horses, to the sound of joyous music-a band of horsemen1 playing on Autes and tabrets, accompanied by their own two hundred minstrel slaves, and one hundred and twenty-eight singers of the temple, responding to the Prophet's voice, as they quitted the shade of the gigantic walls and found themselves in the open desert beyond. "Go ye out of Babylon. Flee from the Chaldæans, "with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter it "even to the end of the earth; say ye, The Eternal "hath redeemed his servant Jacob." 8 The prospect of crossing that vast desert, which intervened between Chaldæa and Palestine, was one which had filled the minds of the exiles with all manner of terrors. It seemed like a second wandering in the desert of Sinai. It was a journey of nearly four months at the slow rate at which such caravans then travelled. Unlike the wilderness of Sinai, it was diversified by no towering mountains, no delicious palm 11 Esdras v. 1-8 transfers to Darius what belongs to Cyrus. 2 Ezra ii. 41-65. 8 Isa. xlviii. 20, 21. ♦ Ezra vii. 8, 9. The journey now takes ordinarily about two months. B. C. 536. groves, no gushing springs. A hard, gravel plain from the moment they left the banks of the Euphrates till they reached the northern extremity of Syria; with no solace except the occasional wells1 and walled stations; or, if their passage was in the spring, the natural herbage and flowers which clothed the arid soil. Ferocious hordes of Bedouin robbers then, as now, swept the whole tract. This dreary prospect preoccupied with overwhelming prominence the Evangelical Prophet. But he would not hear of fear. It was in his visions not a perilous enterprise but a march of triumph: "There"fore the redeemed of the Eternal shall return, and "come with singing unto Zion, and everlasting joy "shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness "and joy, and sorrow and mourning shall flee away." As before some Royal potentate, there would go before them an invisible Protector, who should remove the hard stones from the bare feet of those that ran beside the camels, and cast them up in piles on either side to mark the broad track seen for long miles across the desert. It should be as if Moses were again at their head, and the wonders of the Red Sea and Sinai re-enacted. The heat of the scorching sun shall be softened; they shall be led to every spring and pool of water if water is not there, their invisible Guide shall, as of old, bring it out of the cloven rock. Even the wild animals of the desert,5 the ostrich and the jackal, shall be startled at its unexpected rush. Even the isles of palms which cheered the ancient Israelites 1 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 535. 2 Ezra viii. 31. Isa. li. 10; lxiii. 11. 3 4 Isa. xli. 6; xlviii. 20, 21; xliv. 19; xlix. 11. 5 Isa. xliii. 20. 6 Isa. xli. 18, 19. in Arabia shall not be sufficient. Cedar as well as acacia, olive and myrtle, pine and cypress, all that is most unlike to the vegetation of the desert shall spring up along these fountains. It is a curious instance of the prosaic temper which has led many modern commentators to expect a literal fulfilment of the poetic expressions of the Hebrew Prophets, that the Jewish rabbis of later times supposed all these wonders to have actually occurred, and were surprised to find no mention of them in the narrative of the contemporary' chronicler. But the spirit of these high-wrought strains is the same as that expressed in the simpler language yet similar faith of the songs of the "ascents," some of which we can hardly doubt to have been chanted by the minstrels of the caravan during their long ascending journey up the weary slope which reached from the level plains of Babylon to their own rocky fortress of Judæa. They lifted up their eyes to the distant mountains of Syria, and when they thought of the long interval yet to traverse they asked whence was to come their help? Their answer was, that they looked to the eternal, unsleeping watchfulness of the Guardian of Israel, who by night and day should guard them, stand as their shade on their southern side against the noonday sun, and at last guard their entrance into Palestine, as He had guarded their Exodus from Babylon.2 The high, snowclad ridge of Hermon would be the 1 Kimchi, quoted by Gesenius on Isa. xlviii. 20, 21. 2 Psalm cxx.-cxxxiv., especially Psalm cxxi. 1-8. The route which I have described appears both from the ancient and modern practice to have been the one that must have been taken. "The only traveller "that is known to have passed 66 'through it in ancient times was "Nebuchadnezzar, who, on hearing "of his father's death struck straight "across the desert from Palestine to "Babylon." Berosus, in Josephus, Ant., x. 11, 1 (Upham, p. 31). |