B.C. 459.

August.

was destined to fight, not against a cruel oppressor or an
immoral worship, but against the sanctities of domestic
union with their neighbour tribes-dangerous, possibly, in
their consequences, but innocent in themselves.
We are
called upon to bestow an admiration, genuine, but limited,
on a zeal which reminds us of Dunstan and Hildebrand
rather than of the Primitive or the Reforming Church.

It is Ezra himself who places before us the scene with a vividness which shows us that, if the spirit of the ancient days is altered, their style still retains its inimitable vigour; and, though he did not compose1 the narrative till many years afterwards, the consciousness of the importance of the event burnished the recollection of it with the freshness as of yesterday.

The festival was already closed, in which the new vessels had been duly received and weighed, the twelve oxen and twelve goats for the twelve tribes with the attendant flocks of sheep been slaughtered, the commissions to the Persian' governors delivered, and Ezra' was established as the chief judge over the whole community. This was on the fourth day of the fifth month; the sixth, the seventh, the eighth month rolled away, and nothing had occurred to ruffle the tranquil tenor of the restoration of the Temple arrangements. But on the sixteenth day of the ninth month came a sudden December. storm. The copies of the Law which Ezra had brought from Chaldæa must have become in the interval known to the settlement in Palestine, and those copies, whatever their date, must have contained the prohibitions of mixed marriages which, it would seem, had been wholly unknown or ignored down to that time, and overruled by the practice of centuries. Suddenly the chiefs of the community appeared before Ezra as he stood in the Temple court and confessed that such

1 Ezra viii. 1; ix. 1.

2 Ezra vii. 25. The quasi-independent jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople under the

Sublime Porte well illustrates this position, as well as that of the later High Priests.

usages had penetrated into every class of their society. In the stricter practices of his Babylonian countrymen he had seen nothing like it. The shock was in proportion to the surprise: he tore his outer cloak from top to bottom; he tore his inner garment no less; he plucked off the long tresses of his sacerdotal locks, the long flakes of his sacerdotal beard, and thus, with dishevelled head and half-clothed limbs, he sank on the ground, crouched like one thunderstruck, through the whole of that day. Round him were drawn those whom sympathy for the same cause filled with a like sentiment, and he and they sate silent till the sunset called for the evening sacrifice, and the Temple courts began once more to be crowded with promiscuous worshippers. Then Ezra rose

from his sitting posture, and all tattered and torn as were his priestly garments, he fell on his bended knees (that attitude of devotion so unusual in Eastern countries) and stretched forth his open hands, with the gesture common to the whole ancient world (now lost everywhere except amongst the Mussulmans), and poured forth his agonised prayer to the God whose law had thus been offended.1 As he prayed his emotion increased, and with his articulate words were mingled his passionate tears; and by the time that he had concluded, a sympathetic thrill had run through the whole. community.2

Crowds came streaming into the Temple court and gathered round him, and they too joined their cries and tears with his. Full-grown men and women were there, and youths; and under the excitement of the moment, led by one whose name was deemed worthy of special praise as having given the first signal, Shechaniah, the son of Elam, they placed themselves under Ezra's orders; Arise, for this ' matter belongeth unto thee; we will also be with thee; be ' of good courage and do it.' At once the prostrate, weeping

B.C. 459.

The constitution.

mourner sprang to his feet, and exacted the oath from all pre-
sent, that they would assist his efforts; and, having done this,
he disappeared, and withdrew into the chamber of the High
Priest's son, in one of the upper storeys of the Temple, and
there remained in complete abstinence, even from bread and
water, for the three days which were to elapse before a solemn
assembly could be convened to ascertain the national sentiment.
It is interesting at this point to indicate the form of the
Jewish constitution, so far as it can be dimly discerned at
this period. The Persian' satrap who ruled over the whole
country west of the Euphrates was the supreme authority.
Under him were the various governors or Pashas' in the chief
Syrian towns. The Persian garrison was in the central
fortress of Samaria. But within their general jurisdiction
the Jewish community possessed an organisation of its own.
The princely dignity of the Anointed House of David had
died with Zerubbabel. The High Priesthood, perhaps from
the unworthy character of its occupants, lapsed, during
almost the whole period of the Persian dominion, into
political and social insignificance. The ordinary government
was in the hands of the Elders' or 6 Chiefs,' who were
themselves subordinate or co-ordinate to the Inspectors
of the various districts; two offices which had existed in
germ at the time of the Return-even entering in an ideal-
ised form into the visions of the Evangelical Prophet-two
offices whose names as rendered into Greek, 'presbyter' and
'bishop'--under circumstances how different, and with a fate
how little foreseen!-passed into the Christian Church, to be

95

lated exactors,' in Greek OKÓROUS, and as such applied by Clement of Rome (i. 42) to 'Bishops'-altering, however, ἀρχόντας into διακόνους, το suit the purpose of his argument. For the whole question of the constitution at this time see Herzfeld, i. 253–260.

the material of controversies which would have lost half their bitterness and half their meaning had the homely origin of the titles when they first appeared been recognised.

assembly

But it would seem that there was still on great emergencies the power or the necessity of a 'provocatio ad 'populum—an appeal to the whole people. Accordingly, The the scene which followed is a striking instance, on the one or Echand, of the deference paid to such a spontaneous and de- clesia. liberate act of the popular voice; on the other hand of the powerful impression which the community received from the character and demeanour of a single individual. The summons convoked, as one man, all the outlying inhabitants of the hills of Judah and Benjamin. They congregated in the open square in front of the Temple gate. And here again we stumble on the first distinct notice of that popular element which, deriving, in later times, its Grecian name from the Athenian assemblies, passed into the early Christian community under the title of Ecclesia, and thus became the of that idea of the Church' in which the voice of germ the people or laity had supreme control over the teachers and rulers of the society-an idea preserved in the first century in its integrity, retained in some occasional instances down to the eleventh century, then almost entirely superseded by the mediæval schemes of ecclesiastical polity, until it reappeared, although in modified and disjointed forms, in the sixteenth and following centuries.

6

It was now the twentieth day of the ninth month, in December. the depth of the Syrian winter: the cold rain fell in torrents; and the people, trembling under the remonstrance of their consecrated chief, and shivering in the raw, ungenial weather, confirmed the appointment of a commission of enquiry, which should investigate every case of unlawful marriage, and compel the husbands to part with their wives and Ezra x. 9 (Heb.) Comp. Jos. B. J. ii. 17, 2.

2 Ezra x. 9-14.

B.C. 459,

Nehemiah,
B.C. 445.

even with their children. By the beginning of the new year the list was drawn up, including four of the priestly family, and about fifty more. All of these had' taken strange wives, and some of them had wives by whom they had children.' With these dry words Ezra winds up the narrative of the signal victory which he had attained over the natural affections of the whole community; a victory doubtless which had its share in keeping alive the spirit of exclusive patriotism and of uncompromising zeal that was to play at times so brilliant and at times so dark a part in the coming period of Jewish history, but which, in its total absence of human tenderness, presents a dismal contrast to that pathetic passage of the primitive records of their race which tells us how when their first father drove out the foreign handmaid with her son into the desert, it was very grievous in his sight,' and 'he rose up early in 'the morning and took bread, and a waterskin, putting it on her shoulder and the child;' and how God heard the voice 'of the lad, and the angel of God called to Hagar out of 'heaven.'2

It can hardly be doubted that this acknowledged supremacy of Ezra's personal force was felt to the extremities of the nation, and awakened a new sense of energy wherever it extended; but it is fourteen years before we again catch a glimpse of its penetrating influence, and here we have the rare fortune of another character and career described by the man himself.

In the season when the Court of Persia was at its winter residence of Susa a young Jew was in attendance on the king as cup-bearer. According to the later tradition, it was as he was walking outside the capital that he saw a band 3 of wayworn travellers entering the city and heard them speaking to each other in his own Hebrew tongue. On finding that they were from Judæa, he asked them for tidings of his city and

1 Ezra x. 44.

2 Genesis xxi. 11, 14, 17.

8 Jos. Ant. xi. 5, 6.