50. § 2. The New Colony on the Jordan to the Completion of the Building of the Temple; ...

§ 2. The New Colony on the Jordan to the Completion of the Building of the Temple; Or, Zerubbabel and Joshua The principal source for this period is the first part of the book of Ezra, Ezra 1-6. This, however, does not contain a complete history; but the author, whose object it is to write sacred history, limits himself to that which is at this time its sole object,—the proper theme which had been given to him, viz. the restoration of the temple. While the book of Ezra gives us a statement of the facts which occurred during this period, the writings of the prophets whose activity belongs to it—of Haggai and Zechariah—give us a clear representation of the mind of the Israelites and their spiritual condition. In the latter respect, great importance is also due to a number of psalms which were composed for use in the restored worship of God. Of these, Psalms 107 deserves special mention. It celebrates the gathering of Israel from the four ends of the earth, and, according to Psalms 107:22 and Psalms 107:32, was sung at a great thanksgiving feast of the nation, probably at the first celebration of the feast of tabernacles after the return, on which occasion all Israel flocked to Jerusalem, and sacrifices were offered up to the Lord on the newly-erected altar; comp. Ezra 3:1 ff. And again, Psalms 111-119, a cycle of psalms sung with the preceding Davidic trilogy on laying the foundation-stone of the new temple. Also the ten anonymous psalms in the collection of pilgrim-songs in Psalms 120-134, which collectively refer to the melancholy circumstances in which Israel was involved by the machinations of the Samaritans. Finally, the group Psalms 135-146, sung after the successful completion of the temple, and probably at the time of its consecration, consisting of three new psalms at the beginning, and one at the end, with eight Davidic psalms between. All the psalms from Psalms 107 to Psalms 146, therefore, serve as a source for this period, only excepting those which have been inserted in the various cycles and applied to the relations of that time, which bear the name of David in the superscription. The company of those who returned found the land empty on their arrival. The last Jewish inhabitants had fled to Egypt on the murder of Gedaliah, and none of the surrounding heathen nations had ventured to anticipate the occupation of the trans-Euphratic rulers by taking possession of it; for they still expected that the conquerors would send a colony into the land, just as the land of the ten tribes had only been colonized a considerable time after the inhabitants had been led away into captivity. And these nations had the less inducement to make the attempt, since they themselves had been very much weakened by the campaigns of Nebuchadnezzar, and were quite satisfied with their dwellings. It is not improbable that they roamed through the land, and employed it as pasture for cattle; but when they heard of the command of Cyrus, they at once retreated in fear. Bertheau, in his treatises on the History of the Israelites, p. 382 ff., has indeed laid down the hypothesis that a great number of the Judaites remained behind in the land, the deportation being only partial. But this assumption has no foundation. The desolation and depopulation of the country is everywhere represented as total; for example, in Jeremiah 44:6, Jeremiah 44:22, 2 Chronicles 36. How earnest the Chaldees were in carrying away all Judah, appears from the notice in Jeremiah 52:30, according to which Nebuzaradan carried away 745 Jews into captivity in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar, such, no doubt, as had by degrees reassembled in the land. The returning exiles find a country completely desolate and uncultivated (comp., for example, Psalms 107), and not the smallest trace appears of their finding any inhabitants there. The book of Ezra everywhere proceeds on the assumption that those who returned were the sole inhabitants of the land.

Immediately after their arrival in the land, which had now lain waste for more than half a century, the returning exiles distributed themselves in the various cities, according to their tribes and families, and began to rebuild their houses and to cultivate again their pieces of ground. It was necessary, owing to the small number of those who returned, to choose only a limited number of cities at first to settle in, the preference being given to such as lay in the vicinity of Jerusalem, the centre,—a circumstance from which Ewald has falsely inferred that only these cities were ceded to the Jews in the edict of Cyrus. But the first consideration was to restore the service of God, of which they had so long and so painfully been deprived. They erected a new temporary altar for burnt-offering in the ruins of the temple at Jerusalem, in the same place where the old one had stood. On this provisional altar, and in the temporarily-erected sanctuary, the daily offerings prescribed in the law were offered up. It was consecrated on the first celebration of the feast of tabernacles. Psalms 107, which was sung at that celebration, enables us to realize the mind of the Israelites at that time: everything in it breathes a spirit of joy, of thankfulness for the glorious mercy of the Lord. We see that the people are celebrating their feast of restoration. They began at once to make every preparation for the rebuilding of the temple. In these preparations the first year passed away. In the second month of the second year they laid the foundation amid great solemnities. But the old men who had seen the first temple lamented, and their loud weeping mingled with the rejoicings of the youth; comp. Ezra 3:12-13. Everything seemed to them so small and poor—not a trace of the former glory; and this difference affected them the more painfully, since they looked upon it as a sign that the grace of God had not fully returned to them, and felt themselves still in a state of partial exile. We also gain some clue to the disposition of Israel at that time, by the psalms which were sung on the laying of the foundation-stone of the temple. It is one of soft and quiet melancholy, finding comfort in God. On the one hand we find exultation on account of the help already vouchsafed by the Lord; but on the other hand a striving against sorrow and anxiety is perceptible, caused by a recollection of the misery which still remains, of the small number of the people of God (Psalms 119:86-87), of the oppression of the mighty heathen world under which they sighed (Psalms 119:51), and of the ignominy which rested upon them. By these things the people are impelled to cling more closely to their God, and to form a vivid conception of His former deeds and His glorious promises (comp. Psalms 111-114), to resolve by true observance of the command of the Lord to prepare the way for His salvation. The strange mixture of jubilee and mourning, which, according to the book of Ezra, took place at the consecration of the temple, meets us in these psalms. But even their joy on account of the weak beginnings of the restoration of divine grace was soon disturbed. When they had begun to rebuild the temple, the Samaritans turned to the rulers of the people with the proposal, “Let us build with you: for we seek your God as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto Him since the days of Esar-haddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.” And when the chiefs sent them the answer, “Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us,” they were embittered by it, and did all that they could to hinder the building of the temple, and for a length of time were successful. In order to understand this event, and the whole subsequent relation of the Jews and Samaritans, we must here necessarily enter into the question of the origin of the Samaritans. On this subject there are two opposite views. According to one, the Samaritans were originally a purely heathen nation, who at first included Jehovah in the number of their gods, because they looked upon Him as the national deity, and worshipped Him together with the gods which they had brought with them, but by degrees, specially under the influence of their relations to the Jews, came to worship Him alone, renouncing their other gods. The other view, on the contrary, makes the Samaritans a mixed nation, consisting not only of a heathen element, but also of a very strong; Israelitish element, members of the former kingdom of the ten tribes,—part of them having remained in the country at the time of the Assyrian destruction, while the remainder had returned to it by degrees out of banishment. The former of these views is undoubtedly the correct one. In favour of the latter we have only the assertion of the later Samaritans themselves, who maintain that they are descended from Israel,—an assumption, however, which has no weight, because it is met by a recognition on the part of the older Samaritans of their purely heathen origin; comp. Ezra 4:9-10, where they call themselves “the nations whom the great and noble Asnapper brought over and set in the cities of Samaria;” and again, Ezra 4:2, where the Samaritans make no attempt to found their demand for participation in the building of the temple on their Israelitish origin. Moreover, they acknowledged their purely heathen origin at a later time, when it became their advantage to do so; comp. Josephus, Ant. ix. 14, § 3, xi. 8, § 6, xii. 5, § 5. Hence it follows that the pretension to Israelitish extraction is only one of the many lies by which the later Samaritans tried to make themselves of equal birth with the Jews; while the latter made the purely heathen origin of the former the basis of their assertion, that notwithstanding their worship of Jehovah, they had no part in Him and in His kingdom. On the other hand, the assumption of the purely heathen origin of the Samaritans has the strongest arguments in its favour, besides the earlier utterances of the nation itself. In 2 Kings 17 the heathen colonists appear as the sole inhabitants of the land. According to 2 Kings 17:26 ff., they besought the king of Assyria to give them an Israelitish priest, because they had nobody in their land who could give them even the rudest conception of the way in which the God of the country was to be worshipped. Those prophets who lived after the destruction of the kingdom of the ten tribes universally represent its members as having been completely carried away, only to be brought back at a future time; comp. Jeremiah 31:5 ff.; Zechariah 10. In Matthew 10:5-6, our Lord places the Samaritans on a level with the heathen, and together contrasts them with the Jews. In John 4:22 He characterizes their religion as subjective throughout, and their piety as self-invented—an ἐθελοθρησκεία: they know not what they worship, i.e. they have no essential knowledge of the object of the religion of God, no participation in His revelation, from which alone such knowledge can spring; in short, they are ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ no less than the heathen. The Saviour would never have denied all essential knowledge of God to the ten tribes, nor have excluded them from participation in the kingdom of God. To these arguments we might readily add a number of others, but regard it as unnecessary. The latest defenders of the view that the Samaritans were a mixed nation—Kalkar in Pelt’s Theological Researches, iii. 3, and Keil in the Commentary on the Books of the Kings, on 2 Kings 17—have quoted in their own favour the passage 2 Chronicles 34:9, according to which there was at Joshua’s time still a remnant of Israel in the cities of Manasseh and Ephraim, from whom the Levites collected money for the restoration of the temple. But this passage proves the very contrary from what it is intended to prove. It shows that the remnant of Israel, which no doubt existed, strove against intermixture with the heathen colonists, binding themselves closely to the temple at Jerusalem, and entirely giving up the separation. Probably they afterwards went over completely to Judah,—an hypothesis which would serve to explain the passages already quoted, presupposing the total evacuation of the land by its former inhabitants. Or if this were not the case, they must at least have been so unimportant that they could be entirely overlooked. In any case they prove nothing in favour of a mixed nation.

If what we have advanced with respect to the Samaritans hold good, we must regard the position which Zerubbabel and the rulers of the Jews assumed towards them as fully justified, without our finding it necessary to appeal to arguments such as that recently revived by Ewald, that they were at that time partially addicted to idolatry, and that union with them would therefore have been fraught with great danger to the Jews. If Samaritan individuals as such had asked to be received into the community of Israel, their request would certainly have been granted without hesitation. But here the case was very different. The Samaritans demanded that the Jews should recognise them as the second division of the nation of God: they thought it was enough to serve Jehovah in order to be His people. They had no idea that it was necessary before all to be chosen and called of God, and to have His revelation in the midst of those who were chosen and called. If the Jews had not opposed this pretension, they would have shown that their own piety was an ἐθελοθρησκεία, that their own religion was subjective. Our Lord’s statement in John respecting the nature of the Samaritan worship of God, already cited, forms the best apology for the conduct of the Jewish rulers, which Ewald has very superficially attributed to a narrow scrupulousness. If the Samaritan religion were such as it was there described, the Jews could not do otherwise than deny them all part in the building of the temple. The reverse would have been an injurious anticipation of the times of the New Testament, in which the narrow limits of the revelation of God were removed, and the revelation was extended to all the nations of the earth.

Just as the correct view of the origin of the Samaritans throws light upon this separate fact, so also upon their whole subsequent relation to Judaism. From this time the most bitter enmity existed between the Jews and Samaritans, occasioned by this event. On the side of the Jews, we find the cause of it in the unfounded claim made by the Samaritans to belong to the people of God, and, on the side of the Samaritans, in the fact that the Jews would not recognise this claim. The attempt to prove and justify their pretensions, to make themselves of equal birth with the Jews, gradually became the fundamental principle of the nation. In favour of it they banished all idolatry from their midst; they obtained the Jewish law, and followed even its most burdensome ordinances,—for example, those with respect to the sabbatical year; they built a temple on Gerizim, and invented a multitude of lies in order to place it on a par with that at Jerusalem; they received every Jewish priest who fled to them for refuge with the greatest joy,—first of all the priest Manasseh, to whom they assigned the highest priestly dignity. The machinations of the Samaritans against the Jews must have been the more dangerous to the latter, since the Samaritans, as native heathen, would be more fully trusted by the Persian court, and moreover the Persian officers in Samaria had from the beginning been invested with a kind of supremacy over the Jews.

They first succeeded in frustrating the well-meaning designs of Cyrus towards the Jews, for they gained over his counsellors to their side. In this way the Jews missed the help which had been promised to them in building the temple. They were discouraged, and relinquished the work. Their zeal was not great enough to outweigh the continual hindrances and annoyances. That there was no absolute hindrance, appears from the fact that Haggai and Zechariah afterwards reproached them severely with their neglect in carrying on the building of the temple. The assumption that the Jews were prohibited from continuing to build the temple by a formal edict of the Persian king is based on a false presupposition. Ezra 4:4-5, contains the sole reference to the hindrances in building the temple: “Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah, and troubled them in building; and hired counsellors against them, to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.” Ezra 4:6-23 form a parenthesis, in which we are told how afterwards the Samaritans, under Ahasuerus, Xerxes, and Artaxarta, Artaxerxes, combined against the building of the city wall in a similar way. Ezra 4:24 returns Ezra 4:4-5. It was not until the second year of Darius, after Haggai had severely censured them for their neglect, that they recommenced the work with zeal, and this zeal was powerfully quickened by the encouraging and comforting predictions of Haggai and Zechariah. Haggai and Zechariah are the only prophets whose activity stands in connection with the building of the second temple. To them only is there a reference in the passage Zechariah 8:9, on which Ewald founds his false assumption that numerous prophets assembled about the sanctuary which was rising out of its ruins. In the third year of Darius there was a new interruption. The royal officers in Samaria commanded the Jews to cease for a time, until they would have laid the matter before the Persian court, and have received directions respecting it. These officers, however, quite unlike those who had probably been deposed, seem to have been men of a just spirit, who were satisfied with the mere duties of their office. They notified to the king that the Jews appealed to the edict of Cyrus, and begged that the archives might be examined whether there were really such an edict. This was done; the edict was found and ratified by Darius in the beginning of the fourth year of his reign, in so far that a part of the cost of the building was to be defrayed from the royal coffers, from the revenues of the territories in the cis-Euphratic lands, and at the same time the Jews were to receive means to enable them to carry on their worship: comp. Ezra 6:8-9, a passage which is perfectly clear in itself, and could only be used by Bertheau in favour of a totally unfounded hypothesis by forcible misinterpretation. The restoration of the temple stands in immediate connection with this edict of Darius, which appears the less strange, since we elsewhere find in him traces of that magnanimity towards prisoners and subordinates which characterized Cyrus. In consequence of this edict, the building of the temple made rapid progress, so that it was quite finished within a period of three years. It is remarkable that just as there were seventy years from the first occupation of Jerusalem by the Chaldees to the first year of Cyrus, so there were exactly seventy years from the destruction of the temple to the edict of Cyrus; just as there were eighteen years between the beginning of the destruction and its completion, so also between the beginning of the restoration and its completion. It is remarkable, also, that soon after that edict, in the fifth year of Darius, heavy punishment fell upon Babylon in consequence of its revolt, by which means it was brought considerably nearer to its complete overthrow. Judgment and mercy, which are placed in close connection by the prophets, especially by Jeremiah, Jeremiah 25:12-13, kept equal pace in history also. The end of the two periods of seventy years shows us m like manner both connected. The final completion of the temple, which in Ezra 6:17 is expressly characterized as the common sanctuary for Israel in all the twelve tribes, took place in the sixth year of Darius. The consecration was very solemn, the people gave themselves up to lively joy. But the newly-built temple was not only very inferior to Solomon’s externally, but was also deficient in very important things which the latter possessed. The following are mentioned as such by the Jews:—1. The Urim and Thummim. Externally, indeed, this was still present: the high priest wore the breastplate with the precious stones even under the second temple, but no divine answers were imparted through it. That the Urim and Thummim had really lost its significance under the second temple, is evident from Ezra 2:63, Nehemiah 7:65, where the determination of a difficult case is deferred to the time when a priest should again stand up with the Urim and Thummim. This loss, however, was not simultaneous with the destruction of the first temple. Already, after David’s time, the Urim and Thummim disappears completely out of the history; and there is little doubt that this is due to its cessation, and not to the mere fact of its not being mentioned. The cause is to be looked for in the fact that the immediate higher illumination, of which the answers through the Urim and Thummim were the result, withdrew more and more from the priests and confined itself to the prophets. The more powerfully the prophethood asserted itself as a special institution, the more completely the prophetic elements which had formerly characterized the priesthood disappeared from it; the priestly and the prophetic spirit gradually became purely antithetic. We can only attribute the loss to the time after the exile in so far as it then actually took place, partly because the priestly principle then universally acquired absolute supremacy, partly because, owing to the political position taken by the high priests in the new colony, spiritually-minded men were far less frequently found among their number than had been the case previous to the exile. According to the Jews, the second temple wanted (2) the ark of the covenant. There can be no doubt that this really was wanting. It does not appear on Titus’ arch of triumph, which is still in Rome. That which was by many for a long time supposed to be it, has since been unanimously recognised as the table of shewbread. Moreover, Josephus makes no mention of it in his description of the triumph, De Bell. Jud. l. 7, 17, in which it would necessarily have appeared if it had existed, since it was the first sanctuary of the nation. He, the eye-witness, speaks of three things which were carried before the conqueror—the table for shew-bread, the golden candlestick, and the law; he says explicitly that the holy of holies was quite empty. Those who maintain that the ark of the covenant was present even in the second temple, appeal mainly to the idea that it is inconceivable how the Jews should have erected a new altar for incense, a new table for shew-bread, and a new candlestick, in the place of that which had been destroyed, and not have made a new ark of the covenant. But this argument has no weight. With the ark of the covenant the case was quite different. Among all sanctuaries it was the only one whose preparation the Lord had not left entirely to the people. The writing on the tables of the law had a mysterious origin, according to the Pentateuch; and if it were impossible to procure such tables again, it would be useless to restore the ark which was destined to conceal them. Herein lay a definite indication that God would not have the ark restored. Again, it has been said that if the ark of the covenant were wanting, there would no longer have been any reason for separating the holy of holies from the holy place by a curtain; for this separation had no meaning except in relation to the ark of the covenant. But here the sign is confounded with the thing signified. The latter, God’s presence in the holy of holies, was still there, only its outward symbol was wanting. The loss of the ark must have been extremely painful to the nation. This alone justified the words spoken by Haggai in Haggai 2:3, that the second temple was as nothing in comparison with the first, which refer chiefly to external things. The author of the book of Cosri, in part ii. § 28, says very truly that the ark with the mercy-seat and the cherubim was the foundation, the root, the heart, and the seal of the whole temple and of the whole Levitical worship. The way in which everything holy under the Old Testament was connected with the ark of the covenant already proved that the ark of the covenant was made before everything else. ‘Area foederis,’ says Wits. Miscellanea Sacra, tom. i. p. 439, ‘veluti cor totius religionis Israeliticae primum omnium formata est.’ It was esteemed the most costly treasure of the nation. This, the place where God’s honour dwelt, Psalms 26:8, where He manifested Himself in His most glorious revelation, was called the glory of Israel; comp. 1 Samuel 4:21-22, Ps. 68:61. It is true that in a spiritual sense the ark of the covenant still existed under the second temple, as we have already intimated; to the eye of faith it was still visible in the empty holy of holies. If this had not been so, there could never have been any thought of building the second temple. The God of heaven and of earth was still in a special sense the God of Israel; the temple had still a numen praesens. But the visible pledge of this presence which He had formerly given to the nation was now wanting, the support which He had formerly vouchsafed to their weak faith was taken away; and hence it must have been far more difficult to rise to the consciousness of His mercy. If we inquire into the reasons of this withdrawal, we see that on the one side it was continued punishment for the sins of the nation. The non-restoration of the pledge of the presence of God in the nation showed the people that their repentance, and therefore their reconciliation with God, was incomplete, and threatened them with the total cessation of this presence, unless they became truly reconciled with the Lord. Hence it forms the link between the Chaldee and the Romish destructions. In this respect the loss of the ark of the covenant stands on a level with so many other signs of the incompleteness of the restoration of the grace of God, of the melancholy external condition of the nation, etc. This was what the want of the ark of the covenant testified to the mass of the people. For them it was an actual punishment and threat. But the circumstance had a different meaning for the ἐκλογὴ. In the kingdom of God there is no decay without compensation. The decay of the old forms a guarantee of the approach of the new and more glorious. In order to make the longing for this the more intense, the old was taken away considerably sooner, before the new was given; just as it was necessary for the Davidic race to lose the glory which it already possessed, before it could attain to its true and perfect glory. It must have been the more easy to recognise this meaning in the circumstance, since Jeremiah had already foretold that at a future time the Lord would manifest Himself in a far more real way than by the ark of the covenant, so that the loss of the most glorious thing that they possessed would seem to be their gain; comp. the remarkable prophecy, Jeremiah 3:16 : “And it shall come to pass, when ye be multiplied and increased in the land, in those days, saith the Lord, they shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the Lord; neither shall it come to mind, neither shall they remember it, neither shall they visit it, neither shall that be done any more.” The third thing which, according to Jewish writers, was wanting in the second temple was the Shekinah, the habitation of God,—a cloud of fire which, according to Jewish tradition, is said to have floated constantly in the space above the mercy-sent between the two cherubim. This visible presence of God ceased with the destruction of the temple of Solomon. But the theory of a constant visible presence of God in the tabernacle of the testimony, and in the first temple, proves, on nearer examination, to be a Jewish figment. It is only in so far true, that the presence of the Lord in the tabernacle of testimony and in the first temple, which was generally invisible, sometimes on extraordinary occasions manifested itself also in a visible way, as Vitringa rightly perceived, Obrs. S. T. p. 169. The principal passage, Leviticus 16:2, does not speak of a constant visible presence, but of isolated appearances; of these, however, it speaks most distinctly, so that only the most forced interpretation, such as Bähr has attempted, p. 396, can take this meaning out of it. And, moreover, in every other place where mention is made of a visible presence of the Lord, on the consecration of the tabernacle of testimony and of the temple of Solomon, it appears as something extraordinary and momentary. The defenders of the Shekinah—among whom Rau, Professor in Herborn, is the most learned and is the author of a whole book on the subject, de Nube super Arcam Foederis, Utrecht, 1760—appeal to the fact that Ezekiel saw the glory of the Lord above the cherubim rise out of the temple before the destruction, Ezekiel 11:22. But this argument has no weight. We have to do with a vision, which by its nature must necessarily drag the invisible into the sphere of the visible, and materialize the spiritual. If, therefore, the presence of the Lord had, as a rule, been spiritual even in the tabernacle of testimony, and under the first temple, it follows that in this respect there was no difference between the first temple and the second, for the same presence continued even under the second temple. The fourth blessing in which, according to the Jews, the second temple was deficient, is the spirit of prophecy. They believe that Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi only prophesied until the time of the completion of the temple, and then all three died in one year. With the completion of the temple prophecy entirely ceased. On the other hand, we must remember that Malachi did not appear until some time after Zechariah and Haggai, and was contemporary with Nehemiah. There are arguments of considerable weight for supposing that Ezra is concealed under the name of Malachi, which is taken from the prophecy itself. On the whole, however, there is no doubt with regard to the correctness of the Jewish opinion. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were plainly the only prophets of their time, and the last of the old covenant. They hold the same position with respect to the prophethood under the first temple, as the dominion of Zerubbabel to the earlier Davidic kingship. In their isolated appearance they are rather to be looked upon as suggestive of the prophethood, pointing to its absence and its future impending glorious restoration, than as representing the prophethood in themselves. This cessation of the prophethood, which continued till the time of the manifestation, is intelligible from the whole character of the post-exile time. It is characteristic of this period that Ezra, the scribe, plays so important a part in it. Scholarship now took the place of prophecy. The period bears throughout the character of dependence, of a leaning upon the former, which is perceptible even in the few prophets who still come forward.

These, by the statement of the Jews, are the most important things in which the second temple was deficient. Let us now look once more at the mind and spirit of the nation during this period, which we recognise intuitively from Haggai and Zechariah. Those who returned were inspired with a universal and lively enthusiasm. The beginning of the salvation which had been foretold by the prophets before the exile, was now at hand; and since these prophets had made no separation between the beginning and the end, but rather, in accordance with the nature of prophecy, had depicted the salvation in its whole extent without temporal separation, the nation had no doubt that the accomplishment would soon follow, that the kingdom of God was on its way to glorification, while the power of the world was near its overthrow. But the reality by no means corresponded to this expectation,—it rather offered a direct contrast. Israel remained under the dominion of the heathen, a poor, wretched, despised nation; it was still without a capital; there could be no thought of restoring the walls of Jerusalem, for this would at once have aroused the suspicion of the heathen rulers,—it was an open village; the house of God, which they had begun to build, presented a very meagre appearance in comparison with the former splendid edifice, and even the completion of this tabernacle was for a long time prevented by the machinations of the enemy, so that the nation seemed to be partially deprived even of that which the Lord had given them through Cyrus. Heathenism, on the other hand, still continued in the bloom of its power, full of pride in its own might and that of its idols, scarcely deigning to bestow a glance on Israel and its God. In this state of things the thoughts of hearts were laid open. Two separate parties now appeared, which had formerly been undistinguishable, owing to the all-absorbing enthusiasm. The first consisted of those who truly feared God. These justly recognised in the state of things an actual declaration on the part of God that the repentance of the nation was still incomplete, that it was not yet ripe for a higher stage of redemption. But in thus directing their glance towards the sin, they were in danger of losing sight of the mercy; they thought the guilt and sinfulness of the nation were so great that the Lord could never again have mercy on them; they were almost in despair. The Lord comforts them by His servants; He gives them the assurance that all the glorious predictions of the prophets will at a future time be fulfilled; especially He directs their glance to the Redeemer, through whom the Lord will simultaneously put an end to the sins and the sorrows of His people. The Messianic prophecies of Zechariah are the most important, the clearest, and the most characteristic of all, next to those of Isaiah. This mission was given not only to the prophets, but also to a man who was singularly gifted in the department of sacred song, the author of the anonymous psalms of degrees, more correctly pilgrim-songs, Psalms 120 ff ., in which the burden is comfort to all. Among these psalms the reference to the time of the origin is most clearly stamped on the first, Psalms 120, which calls God to help against evil calumny (the machinations of the Samaritans) in confident expectation of His assistance. Again, the same object characterizes also the group of psalms which were sung at the dedication of the new temple, Psalms 135-146. The tendency to comfort and raise up the people of God is common to the whole group. Psalms 135-136 point to the glorious works of God in nature and history. Psalms 137 quickens the hope in the impending judgment on the enemy. Psalms 146 represents the Lord as the omnipotent and faithful helper of His suffering people. The interpolated psalms of David occupy themselves chiefly with the glorious David and the promise given to the nation of the eternal kingship of his race; they carry the Davidic race and the nation comfortingly through all the changes of the world which threaten to bring this promise to nought, and conclude with a solemn “We praise thee, O God, for the final glorious fulfilment of this promise.” The second party consisted of the hypocrites. These did not hesitate to seek the cause of the delay of the salvation in God, instead of in themselves. Ignorant of true righteousness, they thought that because the nation had renounced gross idolatry, all had been done on their side that could be required of them. They murmured and forgot even the slight external fear of God which they had still retained. For them also the prophets, especially Zechariah, describe the future blessings of God, in order by this means to give them an incentive to true repentance. But at the same time they make it distinctly understood that without this repentance they can have no part in the blessings; they recall the judgments which befell those who mocked the warning of the earlier prophets, and threaten new judgments, equally terrible. Here also the psalms of this time are closely connected with the prophets. In Psalms 125:4-5, we read, “Do good, O Lord, unto those that be good, and to them that are upright in their hearts. As for such as turn aside unto their crooked ways, the Lord shall lead them forth with the workers of iniquity: but peace shall be upon Israel.”