creator Jahveh, is another question. In other respects, too, the decree, as we now have it, is clothed in the language and style peculiar to the Chronicler alone. Again, any such decree, if it dealt with the help which was to be given to the people in their return, and in the building of their Temple, certainly contained a number of more detailed specifications on the subject.1 3 But if we turn our eyes away from the colouring of the language in which the determination of Cyrus has been handed down to us, from no earlier source than the Chronicler, we can entertain no manner of doubt as to the correctness of the fact itself. Many, it would seem, had already reassembled among the ruins of Jerusalem during the years immediately preceding the fall of Babylon, in some cases fleeing from the great city before it was too closely invested, and in some instances returning from foreign lands as the fall of the Babylonian power gradually became quite certain. Without permission from the new Persian ruler, however, the city could never be rebuilt even on a modest scale. We have no longer, it is true, any accurate knowledge of the way in which the movement fell into shape, nor of those who most exerted themselves with the conqueror of Babylon in order to obtain a favourable decree for the restoration of Jerusalem and the return of the exiles. But when, in the light of the facts which we have already established with certainty, we consider what intense spiritual activity reigned amongst the members of the ancient people during the years immediately preceding the fall of Babylon, and what kind of men, guided by the purest and the warmest zeal for the honour and the historic rights of Israel, still rose up from among the great masses of the dispersion and the exile, we cannot be surprised that the right moment for their liberation, when sent by heaven, was not suffered to pass them by unused. As the mighty destroyer of always put first in this connection. The earliest inscriptions of the sort which have as yet come to our knowledge are from Darius I.; but still, if Cyrus really 'had such long inscriptions made anywhere, he may already have expressed himself in a similar manner. All this is far from proving the verbal authenticity of the decree of Cyrus as we now read it in Ezra i., and it is of no use being determined to hide this fact from oneself and assert the contrary, as, for example, Windischmann does (see above, p. 41, note 1). The words of Is. xlii. 5, xliv. 24, sound more like an intentional variation on those Perso-Zarathustrian sacred words. 1 Yet the Aramean historian who at a tolerably early period composed the work from which passages have been preserved in Ezr. v. 14,-vi. 5, was evidently very closely acquainted with the circumstances. From the nature of the case the document concerning the restoration of the costly vessels of the temple would pertain to the royal treasury; and such a copy of the original decree, which was preserved in the castle of Ecbatana, actually existed in the royal treasury at Babylon. 2 A course to which they were urged by many a prophetic utterance, see p. 42, note 3, and p. 46 sq. the Babylonian empire, Cyrus was already called, without being stimulated by others, to bring freedom and restoration to all the peoples it had oppressed, and all the cities it had overthrown. In Israel he gave back to freedom a people which, in spite of its seeming insignificance at the time, nevertheless bore with it a more momentous future than that of any of the nations subjugated and crushed by the Chaldeans, and in which he really only restored free movement to an eternal community; in its liberation, therefore, he consciously or unconsciously served a purely divine purpose, which stood infinitely higher than himself. In the bosom of the community the belief was cherished from the first, as we saw from the Chronicles, that Cyrus had been moved by the spirit of the true God himself in setting Israel free; and, even before the liberation, the great Unnamed had declared, only still more distinctly than the other prophets of Israel, that the question of the fall of Babylon, and of the advancing power of Cyrus, was ultimately a simple question of the destinies of the true religion, and that Cyrus had been raised by the only true God to irresistible sovereignty for the primary purpose of delivering the people of God. Such thoughts may well appear too lofty, but yet they were supported by the strength of an inner truth, which the great course of history has fully confirmed. When that community which vividly realised that the true religion rested and sought to complete itself within it, had been set free, its liberation could ultimately be a source of thankfulness only to the power of the true God, which worked in Cyrus also, without its being ungrateful to Cyrus on that account; and amongst all the events produced by the victories of Cyrus, and especially by his overthrow of the Chaldean empire, no single one was in the long run, and with reference to the whole history of the world, so momentous as the restoration of Israel, insignificant as it might appear at the time. Of this the conclusion of this very history will supply the proof. That great prophet, then, did but form a true estimate of the work, purely divine in its ultimate significance and power, which must be completed in Israel, were the time short or long, and of the higher necessity which this immediately involved of the restoration of Israel as a nation; so that the most profound designs of Providence seemed to hinge on this unique and tremendous crisis in the history of the world. But among all the later reminiscences of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, one never to be forgotten feature always 1 See the passages quoted above, p. 44 sq. rises above the rest, viz. the amazing rapidity with which the victory was gained, and the way in which the whole Chaldean supremacy was shattered by it as at a single blow. It is true that no very ancient account of this has been preserved in the Old Testament; and what the Greeks tell us about it,' like everything else they have to say on the marvellous character and exploits of Cyrus, simply reflects those scattered, half-obscure traditions which Xenophon finally endeavoured to unite together and to bring into a clearer light in his 'Cyropædia;' a task which he accomplished indeed, but with little regard to history. Even in the later book of Daniel2 this reminiscence forms the most brilliant point in the whole Chaldean history; and if from the whole scope and aim of the work its author could only sketch the picture in the merest outline, yet this outline stands out all the more boldly from the dark background, and casts a fiery glow upon the whole narrative. The capture of Babylon by Cyrus in a single night, while the Babylonians were celebrating in careless ease a luxurious feast, is the fixed kernel of the tradition in all its forms. The later. Hebrew narrator, however, in retaining the equally old tradition of the sacred vessels of the Temple,3 which had been brought as it were by robbery to Babylon, and further vindicating the genuine truth of the eternal sentence inflicted by God on the pride of human sovereignty, sketches the wonderfully striking picture of the fall of the last Babylonian king. It was on that very night on which in insolent caprice he ordered these most sacred vessels to be brought to his luxurious feast. He falls, not indeed without warning from the clear voice of heaven; but the hand of God, whose brief and oracular writing not one of the Babylonian sages, but only a Daniel, could read and interpret, had nothing to write for him on the walls of his stately hall, in the midst of his wanton banquet, but the doom impending on his empire and himself." The walls of the royal halls of Nineveh and Babylon were covered with significant representations, as we know once more should Herod. i. 188 sqq.; Xenoph. Cyrop. upharsîn, in their purely literal sense are vii. 5, 3. to he understood. The 2 Dan. v. properly be punctuated from the root D; they divide, i.e. division is made; the shortening of the â may most probably be explained by the fact that 'Dat the same time affords a play upon lot or fate which is formed from it by contraction. 3 See more on these vessels below. In spite of its extreme brevity the Oracle falls quite correctly into two members, as is usual in more exalted style: for so Numbered, numbered! Weighed and-divided! 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 1 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 Nergalsarozzor) 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 Baλτασáp, 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, Baλracáp, 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 Βαλτασασάρ, 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 overall 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., |