gence to the heathen was the chief source of Israel's national misfortunes, they framed a law the impracticable rigour of which may well be justified by the ardent zeal of patriotism.a For at no time did the Hebrews abandon the most soaring hopes. When they were languishing in exile, and saw no more than the first faint rays of possible deliverance gleaming in the distance, they were at once. and strongly roused to their old political aspirations and pretensions. They listened with raptures to the promise of the 'great unknown' prophet, The sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister to thee;' and they fervidly applauded him when he declared, 'The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee, shall perish, yea those nations shall be utterly annihilated;' or when he confidently predicted, 'Thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited; and they beheld in their minds a glorious time when large hosts of the heathen would accompany them to their restored homes, and when 'the house of Israel would possess the strangers in the land of the Lord for servants and handmaids; when they would take those captive whose captives they were, and would rule over their oppressors.' So little had they been humbled by misfortune, and so deeply rooted were the feelings of revenge and retaliation.d eat the riches of the Gentiles,' etc.); Jerem. x. 25; xlviii. 10; Malachi i. 3, 4; Ps. xlvii. 4; lxxix. 6, 7, 12; cxxxvii. 7-9; Lam.iv. 64-66; Bar. iii. 25, 31-36; etc. Such political exultation and imprecation are distinct from the frequent outbursts of personal vengeance; as Jer. x. 15; xvii. 18; xviii. 21-23; Ps. xxxv. 1-8, 22-26; xl. 15, 16; lviii. 11; lxiii. 10, 11; lxix. 23-29; lxx. 3, 4; lxxi. 13; cix. 6-20, etc. These sentiments are perhaps nowhere so strongly or so painfully apparent as in a peculiar work written towards the end of this period-the Book of Esther— the right of which to form a part of the holy Canon has at all times been seriously questioned by those who, it may be unjustly, judged its narrowness by the high standard of the old prophets. That Book combines the strangest contradictions. For the pious Mordecai, so scrupulously strict that he refuses to the mighty Haman, on the peril of his life, a common mark of respect which he interprets as an offence to his God, still does not prevent his ward and relative, whom he forbids to disclose her nationality, from marrying a heathen, and he even hints that this unlawful alliance might possibly have been intended, in the plans of Providence, to serve as a means for the deliverance of the Jews. Again, Esther, though readily accommodating herself to all pagan usages, is yet filled with a hatred of the heathen so deep and fierce that, without the least necessity for the safety of her co-religionists, she demands of the king a second day of murder, so that, in the provinces alone, seventyfive thousand persons were slaughtered. And lastly, in spite of this hostility and aversion, it is mentioned as a proud triumph that large numbers of the people of the land became Jews,' that is, submitted to the sign of the personal covenant,d because the terror of the Jews had fallen upon them.'e It is likely that even in the earlier periods of the Persian dominion to which the narrative of the Book of Esther refers, the mutual antipathies were so strong that an adversary of the Jews might say of them with some appearance of probability: "There is a certain people scattered abroad a Esth. iii. 2-4. b Esth. iv. 14, 'Who knows whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this'? c Esth. ix. 1-16; comp. viii. 11, 13. d Esth. viii. 17, ''; Sept. περιετέμνοντο καὶ ἰουδάϊζον. e ix. 2, 3; comp. Exod. xv. 16; Deut. xi. 25, etc. and dispersed among the nations . . . and their laws are different from all people, nor do they keep the king's laws;'a yet those antipathies had not yet risen to their extreme pitch. They were considerably advanced towards this deplorable end by the aid of a new auxilary cherished by the particularists with the most eager predilection-viz. by the dietary laws. In the Book of Esther, these precepts are still neglected, as the Jewess freely shares her repasts with the king and Haman; but, worked out in the Levitical Law with the utmost consistency, and marked as another criterion of the 'holy people,' they ultimately proved one of the most effectual barriers between Jews and Gentiles. This important point has elsewhere been so fully examined that we need not again discuss it in this place.c Let it suffice to advert to the conspicuous contrast presented in that respect between the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel which was composed some centuries later, when the Levitical ordinances had been firmly established: Daniel, living at the Babylonian Court, 'determined in his heart that he would not defile himself (Nan) with the king's dainties nor with the wine which he drank,' and insisted upon eating nothing but permitted 'vegetables' and drinking only water; upon which the miracle happened that he and his Jewish associates who, like him, had subsisted on such meagre food, 'appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the young men who ate the king's a Esth. iii. 8; comp. Juven. xiv. 100-102, Romanas autem soliti contemere leges, Judaicum ediscunt et servant ac metuunt jus, Tradidit arcano quodcunque volumine Moses; Dion Cass. xxxvii. 17, κεχωρίδαται δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν λοιπῶν ἀν θρώπων ἔς τε τάλλα τὰ περὶ τὴν δίαιταν πάνθ' ὡς εἰπεῖν κ.τ.λ. b However, in the Additions to Esther iv. 14 (Engl. Apocr. xiv. 17), the Queen declares: ok payev ἡ δούλη σου ἐπὶ τῶν τραπεζῶν αὐτῶν ἅμα κ.τ.λ. According to Josephus (Ant. XI. viii. 7), offences against the dietary rules (Koopayia, comp. Acts x. 14, 15) were in Judaea prosecuted and rigorously punished, like offences against the sanctity of the Sabbath. c See Comm. on Lev. ii. 109 113. dainties. Thus then the triple wall of separation was completed: exclusive marriages, circumcision, and dietary laws. Each was, in subsequent periods, fortified and raised higher, but no new one of similar strength was added. The three combined were deemed and proved sufficient to accomplish their appointed purpose. IV. HELLENISM AND RABBINISM. WE have so far traversed three chief phases of Israel's history. In the first, extending to Solomon, we have witnessed a national and political life, fresh and buoyant, in which religion was subordinate to the state, and which struggled from barbarism to civilisation, from confusion to order and unity; the second stage, marked by the establishment of a central Sanctuary and worship, and reaching down to the exile, has exhibited to us state. and religion in the closest alliance as co-ordinate powers, and mutually supporting each other; while in the third, we find religion ruling the state and imparting to all political and civil institutions its own colouring. A fourth phase remained to be accomplished-the complete absorption of the state by religion in such a manner that religion was the sole element of nationality, to which every other principle was made to yield. This transformation was gradually achieved, from the fourth century B. C., through the long epochs of the dominion of the Syrians, the Maccabees, and Romans, and was then, in an infinite variety of modes and shapes, continued and consolidated during all later centuries down to our own time. Each of the three earlier periods, as we have pointed out, had a conspicuous representative in Hebrew literature -the first, 'the Book of the Covenant;' the second, the Book of Deuteronomy; and the third, the Levitical Legis a Dan. i. 8-16; comp. Judith xii. 1, 2; Tobit i. 10-12; Philo, In Flacc. c. 11; Jos. Ap. i. 22; lation and narrative in the middle Books of the Pentateuch; while the fourth epoch, which we are now approaching, is brought home to us by a vast and truly amazing number of works-the Book of Daniel and the Apocrypha, Philo and Josephus, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and an endless host of Rabbinical writings. We shall try so to group these materials as to show, with all possible distinctness, the singular development of the Jewish mind during these protracted ages; but in this attempt we shall of course be obliged to confine ourselves to leading points of view and salient principles. The first and most startling feature we meet in surveying the nine or ten centuries from Ezra and Nehemiah to the completion of the Talmud, is the constant fluctuation of the Jewish character in contrasts which often amount almost to contradictions, and which can only be comprehended in their connection with the contemporaneous events of general history. On the one hand, we see the proud self-consciousness of the Jews rise to an excess which, even after the marked beginnings of earlier times, might hardly be expected. The Hebrews are now not merely a 'righteous people,' but 'a people of saints' or 'the saints of the Most High,' to whom the government belongs for all eternity, and whom every empire is bound to obey; nay, being 'the hosts of God,' they are like the stars of heaven in sublimity and splendour.d They are dedicated to God 'as a kind of first-fruits of |