^''^ -^ SEP rCi 1921 UvMoti 'BS4S THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE EDITED BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.LX Editor of " The Expositor" THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE PROPHETS VOL. II.-ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM. HABAKKUK, OBADIAH, HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.-VIII., "MALACHI," JOEL„ "ZECHARIAH" IX.— XIV, AND JONAH GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D. NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 51 EAST TENTH STREET 1898 ^ THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE Crown 8w, cloth, price $i"5o each vol. First Series, 1887-8. Colossians. By A. Maclaren, D.D. St. Mark. By Very Rev. the Bishop of Derry. Genesis. By Prof. Marcus Dods, D.D. 1 Samuel. By Prof. W. G. Blaikie, D.D. 2 Samuel, Bj' the same Author. Hebrews. By Principal T. C. Edwards, D.D. Second Series, 1888-9. Galatians. By Prof. G. G. Findlay, B.A. The Pastoral Epistles. By Rev A. Plummsr, D.D. Isaiah i. — xxxix. ByProf. G. A. Smith, D.D. Vol. I. The Book of Revelation. By Prof. W. Milligan, D.D. 1 Corinthians By Prof. Marcus Dods, D.D. The Epistles of St. John. By Most Rev. the Archbishop of Armagh. Third Series, 1889-90. Judges and Ruth. By R. A. Watson, M.A., D.D. Jeremiah. By Rev. C. J. Ball, M.A. Isaiah xl.— lxvi. By Prof. G. A. Smith, D.D, Vol. II, St. Matthew. By Rev. J. Monro Gibson, D.D. Exodus. By Right Rev. the Bishop of Derry. St. Luke. By Rev. H, Burton, M.A. Fourth Series, 1890-91. Ecclesiastes. By Rev. Samuel Cox, D.D. St. James and St, Jude. By Rev. A. Plummer, D.D. Proverbs, By Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. Leviticus. By Rev. S. H. Kellogg, D.D. The Gospel of St. John. By Prof. M. Dods, D.D. Vol. I. The Acts of the Apostles. By Prof. Stokes, D.D. Vol. I. Fifth Series, 1891-2. The Psalms. By A. Maclaren, D.D. Vol. I. 1 and 2 Thessalonians. By James Dennbv, D.D. The Book of Job. By R. A. Watson, M.A., D.D. Ephesians. By Prof. G. G, Findlay, B.A, The Gospel of St. John. By Prof. M. Dods, D.D. Vol. II. The Acts of the Apostles. By Prof. Stokes, D.D. Vol. II. Sixth Series, 1892-3. 1 Kings. By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury. Philippians, By Principal Rainy, D.D. Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. By Prof. W. F, Adeney, M.A. Joshua. By Prof. W. G. Blaikie, D.D. The Psalms. By A. Maclaren, D.D. Vol. II. The Epistles of St. Peter. By Prof. Rawson Lumby, D.D. Seventh Series, 1893-4. 2 Kings. By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury. Romans. By H. C, G, Moule, M.A., D.D. The Books of Chronicles. By Prof. W, H. Bennett, M.A. 2 Corinthians. By James Denney, D.D, Numbers. By R. A, Watson, M.A., D.D. The Psalms. By A, Maclaren, D.D. Vol. III. Eighth Series, 1895-6. Daniel. By Very Rev. the Dean of Canterbury. The Book of Jeremiah. By Prof, W. H. Bennett, M.A. Deuteronomy. By Prof. Andrew Harper, B.D. The Song of Solomon and Lamentations. By Prof. W. F. Adeney, M.A. Ezekiel. By Prof. John Skinner, M.A, The Book of the Twelve Prophets. ByProf. G.A.Smith, D.D. Two Vols ^i^^mc?^ THE BOOK rai9'^'' THE TWELVE PROPHETS COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D. PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW 1100 IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II.— ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH, HAGGAI, ZECHARIAH I.— VIII., "MALACHI," JOEL, "ZECHARIAH " IX.-XIV. AND JONAH WITH HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 51 EAST TENTH STREET PREFACE THE first volume on the Twelve Prophets dealt with the three who belonged to the Eighth Century : Amos, Hosea and Micah. This second volume includes the other nine books arranged in chronological order : Zephaniah, Nahum and Habak- kuk, of the Seventh Century ; Obadiah, of the Exile ; Haggai, Zechariah i. — viii., " Malachi " and Joel, of the Persian Period, 538 — 331 ; ''Zechariah" ix. — xiv. and the Book of Jonah, of the Greek Period, which began in 332, the date of Alexander's Syrian campaign. The same plan has been followed as in Volume I. A historical introduction is offered to each period. To each prophet are given, first a chapter of critical introduction, and then one or more chapters of ex- position. A complete translation has been furnished, with critical and explanatory notes. All questions of date and of text, and nearly all of interpretation, have been confined to the introductions and the notes, so that those who consult the volume only for expository purposes will find the exposition un- encumbered by the discussion of technical points. b PREFACE The necessity of including within one volume so many prophets, scattered over more than three centuries, and each of them requiring a separate introduction, has reduced the space available for the practical application of their teaching to modern life. But this is the less to be regretted, that the contents of the nine books before us are not so applicable to our own day, as we have found their greater predecessors to be. On the other hand, however, they form a more varied introduction to Old Testament Criticism, while, by the long range of time which they cover, and the many stages of religion to which they belong, they afford a wider view of the development of prophecy. Let us look for a little at these two points. I. To Old Testament Criticism these books furnish valuable introduction — some of them, like Obadiah, Joel and '' Zechariah " ix. — xiv., by the great variety of opinion that has prevailed as to their dates or their relation to other prophets with whom they have pas- sages in common ; some, like Zechariah and " Malachi," by their relation to the Law, in the light of modern theories of the origin of the latter ; and some, like Joel and Jonah, by the question whether we are to read them as history, or as allegories of history, or as apocalypse. That is to say, these nine books raise, besides the usual questions of genuineness and integrity, every other possible problem of Old PREFACE vii Testament Criticism. It has, therefore, been neces- sary to make the critical introductions full and detailed. The enormous differences of opinion as to the dates of some must start the suspicion of arbitrariness, unless there be included in each case a history of the develop- ment of criticism, so as to exhibit to the English reader the principles and the evidence of fact upon which that criticism is based, I am convinced that what is chiefly required just now by the devout student of the Bible is the opportunity to judge for himself how far. Old Testament Criticism is an adult science; with what amount of reasonableness it has been prosecuted ; how gradually its conclusions have been reached, how jealously they have been contested ; and how far, amid the many varieties of opinion which must always exist with reference to facts so ancient and questions so obscure, there has been progress towards agreement upon the leading problems. But, besides the accounts of past criticism given in this volume, the reader will find in each case an independent attempt to arrive at a conclusion. This has not always been successful. A number of points have been left in doubt ; and even where results have been stated with some degree of positiveness, the reader need scarcely be warned (after what was said in the Pre- face to Vol. I.) that many of these must necessarily be provisional. But, in looking back from the close of this work upon the discussions which it contains. viii PREFACE I am more than ever convinced of the extreme pro- babiHty of most of the conclusions. Among these are the following : that the correct interpretation of Habakkuk is to be found in the direction of the posi- tion to which Budde's ingenious proposal has been carried on pages 123 ff. with reference to Egypt; that the most of Obadiah is to be dated from the sixth century ; that *^ Malachi " is an anonymous work from the eve of Ezra's reforms ; that Joel follows " Malachi " ; and that " Zechariah " ix. — xiv. has been rightly assigned by Stade to the early years of the Greek Period. 1 have ventured to contest Kosters* theory that there was no return of Jewish exiles under Cyrus, and am the more disposed to believe his strong argument inconclusive, not only upon a review of the reasons I have stated in Chap. XVI., but on this ground also, that many of its chief adherents in this country and Germany have so modified it as virtually to give up its main contention. I think, too, there can be little doubt as to the substantial authenticity of Zephaniah ii. (except the verses on Moab and Ammon) and iii. 1-13, of Habakkuk ii. 5 ff., and of the whole of Haggai ; or as to the ungenuine character of the lyric piece in Zechariah ii. and the intrusion of "Malachi" ii. 11-13^. On these and smaller points the reader will find full discussion at the proper places. . [I may here add a word or two upon some of the critical conclusions reached in Vol. I., which have PREFACE ix been recently contested. The student will find strong grounds offered by Canon Driver in his Joel and Amos ^ for the authenticity of those passages in Amos which, following other critics, I regarded or suspected aj» not authentic. It makes one diffident in one's opinions when Canon Driver supports Professors Kuenen and Robertson Smith on the other side. But on a survey of the case I am unable to feel that even they have removed what they admit to be *^ forcible " objections to the authorship by Amos of the passages in question. They seem to me to have established not more than a possibility that the passages are authentic ; and on the whole I still feel that the probability is in the other direction. If I am right, then I think that the date of the apostrophes to Jehovah's creative power which occur in the Book of Amos, and the reference to astral deities in chap. V. 27, may be that which I have suggested on pages 8 and 9 of this volume. Some critics have charged me with inconsistency in denying the authen- ticity of the epilogue to Amos while defending that of the epilogue to Hosea. The two cases, as my arguments proved, are entirely different. Nor do I see any reason to change the conclusions of Vol. I. upon the questions of the authenticity of various parts of Micah.] The text of the nine prophets treated in this volume * Cambridge Bible for Schools, 1897 X PREFACE has presented even more difficulties than that of the three treated in Vol. I. And these difficulties must be my apology for the delay of this volume. 2. But the critical and textual value of our nine books is far exceeded by the historical. Each exhibits a development of Hebrew prophecy of the greatest interest. From this point of view, indeed, the volume might be entitled ^' The Passing of the Prophet." For throughout our nine books we see the spirit and the style of the classic prophecy of Israel gradually dissolving into other forms of religious thought and feeling. The clear start from the facts of the prophet's day, the ancient truths about Jehovah and Israel, and the direct appeal to the conscience of the prophet's contemporaries, are not always given, or when given are mingled, coloured and warped by other religious interests, both present and future, which are even powerful enough to shake the ethical absolutism of the older prophets. With Nahum and Obadiah the ethical is entirely missed in the presence of the claims — and we cannot deny that they were natural claims — of the long-suffering nation's hour of revenge upon her heathen tyrants. With Zephaniah prophecy, still austerely ethical, passes under the shadow of apocalypse ; and the future is solved, not upon purely historical lines, but by the intervention of "supernatural" elements. With Habakkuk the ideals of the older prophets encounter PREFACE the shock of the facts of experience : we have the prophet as sceptic. Upon the other margin of the Exile, Haggai and Zechariah (i.— viii.), although they are as practical as any of their predecessors, exhibit the influence of the exilic developments of ritual, angelology and apocalypse. God appears further off from Zechariah than from the prophets of the eighth century, and in need of mediators, human and super- human. With Zechariah the priest has displaced the prophet, and it is very remarkable that no place is found for the. latter beside the two sons of oil, the political and priestly heads of the community, who, according to the Fifth Vision, stand in the presence of God and between them feed the religious life of Israel. Nearly sixty years later " Malachi " ex- hibits the working of Prophecy within the Law, and begins to employ the didactic style of the later Rab- binism. Joel starts, like any older prophet, from the facts of his own day, but these hurry him at once into apocalypse; he calls, as thoroughly as any of his predecessors, to repentance, but under the immi- nence of the Day of the Lord, with its ''supernatural" terrors, he mentions no special sin and enforces no single virtue. The civic and personal ethics of the earlier prophets are absent. In the Greek Period, the oracles now numbered from the ninth to the fourteenth chapters of the Book of Zechariah repeat to aggravation the exulting revenge of Nahum and xii PREFACE Obadiah, without the strong style or the hold upon history which the former exhibits, and show us prophecy still further enwrapped in apocalypse. But in the Book of Jonah, though it is parable and not history, we see a great recovery and expansion of the best elements of prophecy. God's character and Israel's true mission to the world are revealed in the spirit of Hosea and of the Seer of the Exile, with much of the tenderness, the insight, the analysis of character and even the humour of classic prophecy. These qualities raise the Book of Jonah, though it is probably the latest of our Twelve, to the highest rank among them. No book is more worthy to stand by the side of Isaiah xl. — Iv. ; none is nearer in spirit to the New Testament. All this gives unity to the study of prophets so far separate in time, and so very distinct in character, from each other. From Zephaniah to Jonah, or over a period of three centuries, they illustrate the dissolution of Prophecy and its passage into other forms of religion. The scholars, to whom every worker in this field is indebted, are named throughout the volume. I regret that Nowack's recent commentary on the Minor Prophets (Gottingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) reached me too late for use (except in footnotes) upon the earlier of the nine prophets. GEORGE ADAM SMITH. CONTENTS OF VOL. II. PAGE Preface v Chronological Tables .... Facing p, j INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY CHAP. L THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST . . 3 1. Reaction under Manasseh and Amon (695? — 639). 2. The Early Years of Josiah (639 — 625) : Jeremiah and Zephaniah. 3. The Rest of the Century (625 — 586) : The Fall of Niniveh ; Nahum and Habakkuk. ZEPHANIAH 11, THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH 35 III. THE PROPHET AND THE REFORMERS . . .46 Zephaniah i. — ii. 3. IV. NINIVE DELENDA 6 1 Zephaniah ii. 4-15. V. SO AS BY FIRE 67 Zephaniah iii, xiii CONTENTS NAHUM CHAP. PAGE VI. THE BOOK OF NAHUM . . . . -77 1. The Position of Elkosh. 2. The Authenticity of Chap, i, 3. The Date of Chaps, ii. and iii. VII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD . . . .90 Nahum i. VIII. THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH . . .96 Nahum ii. and iii. HABAKKUK IX. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 1x5 1. Chap. i. 2 — ii. 4 (or 8). 2. Chap. ii. 5-20. 3. Chap. iii. X. THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 1 29 Habakkuk i. — ii. 4. XI. TYRANNY IS SUICIDE 1 43 Habakkuk ii. 5-20. XII. "in THE MIDST OF THE YEARS " . . . 149 Habakkuk iii, OBADIAH XIII. THE BOOK OF OBADIAH 1 63 XIV. EDOM AND ISRAEL 177 Obadiah I -2 1. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF THE PERSIAN PERIOD (539—331 B-C.) CHAP. PAGE XV. ISRAEL UNDER THE PERSIANS . . . . 187 XVI. FROM THE RETURN FROM BABYLON TO THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE (53^— S^^ B.C.) . 19S With a Discussion of Professor Kosters' Theory. HAGGAI XVII. THE BOOK OF HAGGAI 225 XVIII. HAGGAI AND THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE . 234 Haggai i., ii. 1. The Call to Build (Chap. i.). 2. Courage, Zerubbabel ! Courage, Jehoshua and ALL the Peopi,e ! (Chap. ii. 1-9). 3. The Power of the Unclean (Chap. ii. 10-19). 4. The Reinvestment of Israel's Hope (Chap. ii. 20-23). ZECHARIAH il.-VIII.) XIX. THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH (l. — VIII.) . . 255 XX. ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET . . . .264 ZECHARIAH i. 1-6, ETC. ; EzRA V. I, vi. 14. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XXI. THE VISIONS OF ZECHARIAH .... 273 Zechariah i. 7 — vi. 1. The Influences which Moulded the Visions. 2. General Features of the Visions. 3. Exposition of the Several Visions: The First: The Angel- Horsemen (i. 7-17). The Second : The Four Horns and the Four Smiths (i. 18-21 Eng.). The Third : The City of Peace (ii. 1-5 Eng.). The Fourth : The High Priest and the Satan (iii.). The Fifth : The Temple Candlestick and the Two Olive-Trees (iv.). The Sixth: The Winged Volume (v, 1-4). The Seventh : The Woman in the Barrel (v. 5-1 i). The Eighth : The Chariots of the Four Winds (vi. 1-8). The Result of the Visions (vi. 9-15). XXII. THE ANGELS OF THE VISIONS . . • 310 Zechariah i. 7 — vi. 8. XXIII. "the SEED OF PEACE" .... 32O Zechariah vii., viii. ''MALACHI" XXIV. THE BOOK OF " MALACHI " . . . . 33 1 XXV. FROM ZECHARIAH TO " MALACHI " . . . 34I XXVI. PROPHECY WITHIN THE LAW .... 348 " Malachi " i. — iv. (Eng.). I. God's Love for Israel and Hatred of Edom (i. 2-5). CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE. 2. "Honour Thy Father " (i. 6-14). 3. The Priesthood of Knowledge (ii. 1-9), 4. The Cruelty of Divorce (ii. 10-16). 5. '* Where is the God of Judgment?" (ii. 17 — iii, 5). 6. Repentance by Tithes (iii. 6-12). 7. The Judgment to Come (iii. 13 — iv. 2 Eng.). 8. The Return of Elijah (iv. 3-5 Eng.). JOEL XXVII. THE BOOK OF JOEL 375 1. The Date of the Book 2. The Interpretation of the Book. 3. State of the Text and the Style of the Book. XXVIII. THE LOCUSTS AND THE DAY OF THE LORD . 39^ Joel i. — ii. 17. XXIX. PROSPERITY AND THE SPIRIT . . . . 41S Joel ii. 18-32 (Eng.). 1. The Return of Prosperity (ii. 19-27). 2. The Outpouring of the Spirit (ii. 28-32). XXX. THE JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN . . ♦431 Joel iii. (Eng.). INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF THE GRECIAN PERIOD (From 331 Onwards) XXXI. ISRAEL AND THE GREEKS .... 439 CONTENTS ZECHARIAW {IX.-XIV.) CHAP. XXXII. " ZECHARIAH " IX. — XIV. PAGE • 449 XXXIII. THE CONTENTS OF " ZECHARIAH " IX. — XIV. . 463 1. The Coming of the Greeks (ix. 1-8). 2. The Prince of Peace (ix. 9-12). 3. The Slaughter of the Greeks (ix. 13-17). 4. Against the Teraphim and Sorcerers (x. i, 2). 5. Against Evil Shepherds (x. 3-12). 6. War upon the Syrian Tyrants (xi. 1-3). 7. The Rejection and Murder of the Good Shepherd (xi. 4-17, xiii. 7-9). 8. Judah versus Jerusalem (xii. 1-7). 9. Four Results of Jerusalem's Deliverance (xii. 8 — xiii. 6). 10. Judgment of the Heathen and Sanctifi cation of Jerusalem (xiv.). JONAH XXXIV. THE BOOK OF JONAH 493 1. The Date of the Book. 2. The Character of the Book. 3. The Purpose of the Book. 4. Our Lord's Use of the Book. 5. The Unity of the Book. XXXV. THE GREAT REFUSAL 514 Jonah i. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XXXVI. THE GREAT FISH AND WHAT IT MEANS — THE PSALM . . . . . .523 Jonah ii. XXXVII. THE REPENTANCE OF THE CITY . . . 529 Jonah iii. XXXVIII. Israel's jealousy of jehovah . . . 536 Jonah iv. INDEX OF PROPHETS 543 INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY VOL. II, CHAPTER I THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST THE three prophets who were treated in the first volume of this work belonged to the eighth century before Christ : if Micah lived into the seventh his labours were over by 675. The next group of our twelve, also three in number, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, did not appear till after 630. To make our study continuous ^ we must now sketch the course of Israel's history between. In another volume of this series,^ some account was given of the religious progress of Israel from Isaiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem in 701 to Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem in 587. Isaiah's strength was bent upon establishing the inviolableness of Zion. Zion, he said, should not be taken, and the people, though cut to their roots, should remain planted in their own land, the stock of a noble nation in the latter days. But Jeremiah predicted the ruin both of City and Temple, summoned Jerusalem's enemies against her in the name of Jehovah, and counselled his people to submit to them. This reversal of the prophetic ideal had a twofold reason. In the first place the moral condition of Israel was worse in 600 b.c. than it had been in 700 ; another century had shown how much the nation needed the penalty and purgation of ' See Vol. I., p. viii. ^ Expositor's Bible, Isaiah xl. — Ixvi., Chap. II. 3 THE TWELVE PROPHETS exile. But secondly, however the inviolableness of Jerusalem had been required in the interests of pure religion in 701, religion had now to show that it was independent even of Zion and of Israel's political survival. Our three prophets of the eighth century (as well as Isaiah himself) had indeed preached a gospel which implied this, but it was reserved to Jeremiah to prove that the existence of state and temple was not indispensable to faith in God, and to explain the ruin of Jerusalem, not merely as a well-merited penance, but as the condition of a more spiritual intercourse between Jehovah and His people. It is our duty to trace the course of events through the seventh century, which led to this change of the standpoint of prophecy, and which moulded the messages especially of Jeremiah's contemporaries, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk. We may divide the century into three periods : First, that of the Reaction and Persecution under Manasseh and Amon, from 695 or 690 to 639, during which prophecy was silent or anonymous ; Second, that of the Early Years of Josiah, 639 to 625, near the end of which we meet with the young Jeremiah and Zephaniah ; Third^ the Rest of the Century, 625 to 600, covering the Decline and Fall of Niniveh, and the prophets Nahum and Habakkuk, with an addition carrying on the history to the Fall of Jerusalem in 587-6. I. Reaction under Manasseh and Amon (695 ? — 639). Jerusalem was delivered in 701, and the Assyrians kept away from Palestine for twenty-three years. ^ * It is uncertain whether Hezekiah was an Assyrian vassal during these years, as his successor Manasseh is recorded to have been in 676. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 5 Judah had peace, and Hezekiah was free to devote his latter days to the work of purifying the worship of his people. What he exactly achieved is uncertain. The historian imputes to him the removal of the high places, the destruction of all Maggeboth and Asheras, and of the brazen serpent.^ That his measures were drastic is probable from the opinions of Isaiah, who was their inspiration, and proved by the reaction which they pro- voked when Hezekiah died. The removal of the high places and the concentration of the national worship within the Temple would be the more easy that the provincial sanctuaries had been devastated by the Assyrian invasion, and that the shrine of Jehovah was glorified by the raising of the siege of 701. While the first of Isaiah's great postulates for the future, the inviolableness of Zion, had been fulfilled, the second, the reign of a righteous prince in Israel, seemed doomed to disappointment. Hezekiah died early in the seventh century,^ and was succeeded by his son Manasseh, a boy of twelve, who appears to have been captured by the party whom his father had opposed. The few years' peace — peace in Israel was always dangerous to the health of the higher religion — the in- terests of those who had suffered from the reforms, the inevitable reaction which a rigorous puritanism provokes — these swiftly reversed the religious fortunes of Israel. Isaiah's and Micah's predictions of the final overthrow of Assyria seemed falsified, when in 681 the more vigorous Asarhaddon succeeded Sennacherib, and in 6yZ swept the long absent armies back upon Syria. 1 2 Kings xviii. 4. 2 The exact date is quite uncertain; 695 is suggested on the chronological table prefixed to this volume, but it may have been 690 or 685. THE TWELVE PROPHETS Sidon was destroyed, and twenty-two princes of Palestine immediately yielded their tribute to the con- queror. Manasseh was one of them, and his political homage may have brought him, as it brought Ahaz, within the infection of foreign idolatries.^ Everything, in short, worked for the revival of that eclectic paganism which Hezekiah had striven to stamp out. The high places were rebuilt ; altars were erected to Baal, with the sacred pole of Asherah, as in the time of Ahab ; ^ shrines to the host of heaven defiled the courts of Jehovah's house ; there was a recrudescence of sooth- saying, divination and traffic with the dead. But it was all very different from the secure and sunny temper which Amos had encountered in Northern Israel.^ The terrible Assyrian invasions had come between. Life could never again feel so stable. Still more destructive had been the social poisons which our prophets described as sapping the constitution of Israel for nearly three generations. The rural sim- plicity was corrupted by those economic changes which ' Cf. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments, § 799. ^ Stade {Gesch. des Volkes Israel, I., pp. 627 f.) denies to Manasseh the reconstruction of the high places, the Baal altars and the Asheras, for he does not believe that Hezekiah had succeeded in destroying these. He takes 2 Kings xxi. 3, which describes these reconstructions, as a late interpolation rendered necessary to reconcile the tradition that Hezekiah's reforms had been quite in the spirit of Deuteronomy, with the fact that there were still high places in the land when Josiah began his reforms. Further, Stade takes the rest of 2 Kings xxi. 25-7 as also an interpolation, but unlike verse 3 an accurate account of Manasseh's idolatrous institutions, because it is corrobo- rated by the account of Josiah's reforms, 2 Kings xxiii. Stade also discusses this passage in Z.A.T.W., 1886, pp. 186 ff. ' See Vol. I., p. 41. In addition to the reasons of the change given above, we must remember that we are now treating, not of Northern Israel, but of the more stern and sullen Judaeans. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 7 Micah bewails. With the ousting of the old families from the soil, a thousand traditions, memories and habits must have been broken, which had preserved the people's presence of mind in days of sudden disaster, and had carried them, for instance, through so long a trial as the Syrian wars. Nor could the blood of Israel have run so pure after the luxury and licentiousness described by Hosea and Isaiah. The novel obligations of commerce, the greed to be rich, the increasing distress among the poor, had strained the joyous temper of that nation of peasants' sons, whom we met with Amos, and shattered the nerves of their rulers. There is no word of fighting in Manasseh's days, no word of revolt against the tyrant. Perhaps also the intervening puritanism, which had failed to give the people a permanent faith, had at least awakened within them a new conscience. At all events there is now no more ease in Zion^ but a restless fear, driving the people to excesses of religious zeal. We do not read of the happy country festivals of the previous century, nor of the careless pride of that sudden wealth which built vast palaces and loaded the altar of Jehovah with hecatombs. The full-blooded patriotism, which at least kept ritual in touch with clean national issues, has vanished. The popular religion is sullen and exasperated. It takes the form of sacrifices of frenzied cruelty and lust. Children are passed through the fire to Moloch, and the Temple is defiled by the orgies of those who abuse their bodies to propitiate a foreign and a brutal god.^ But the most certain consequence of a religion whose nerves are on edge is persecution, and this raged all ' 2 Kings xxi., xxiii. THE TWELVE PROPHETS the earlier years of Manasseh. The adherents of the purer faith were slaughtered, and Jerusalem drenched ^ with innocent blood. Her own sword, says Jeremiah, devoured the prophets like a destroying lion? It is significant that all that has come down to us from this " killing time " is anonymous ; ^ we do not meet with our next group of public prophets till Manasseh and his like-minded son have passed away. Yet prophecy was not wholly stifled. Voices were raised to predict the exile and destruction of the nation. Jehovah spake by His servants ; * while others wove into the prophecies of an Amos, a Hosea or an Isaiah some application of the old principles to the new circumstances. It is probable, for instance, that the extremely doubtful passage in the Book of Amos, V. 26 f., which imputes to Israel as a whole the worship of astral deities from Assyria, is to be assigned to the reign of Manasseh. In its present position it looks very like an intrusion : nowhere else does Amos charge his generation with serving foreign gods ; and certainly in all the history of Israel we could not find a more suitable period for so specific a charge than the days when into the central sanctuary of the national worship images were introduced of the host of heaven, and the nation was, in consequence, threatened with exile.^ ' Filled from mouth to mouth (2 Kings xxi. 16). ^ Jer. ii. 30. ^ We have already seen that there is no reason for that theory of so many critics which assigns to this period Micah. See Vol. I., p. 370. ^ 2 Kings xxi. 10 ff. ^ Whether the parenthetical apostrophes to Jehovah as Maker of the heavens, their hosts and all the powers of nature (Amos iv. 13, V. 8, 9, ix. 5, 6), are also to be attributed to Manasseh's reign is more doubtful. Yet the following facts are to be observed : that THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 9 In times of persecution the documents of the suffering faith have ever been reverenced and guarded with especial zeal. It is not improbable that the prophets, driven from public life, gave themselves to the arrange- ment of the national scriptures ; and some critics date from Manasseh's reign the weaving of the two earliest documents of the Pentateuch into one continuous book of history/ The Book of Deuteronomy forms a problem by itself. The legislation which composes the bulk of it ^ appears to have been found among the Temple these passages are also (though to a less degree than v. 26 f.) parenthetic; that their language seems of a later cast than that of the time of Amos (see Vol. I., pp. 204, 205 : though here evidence is adduced to show that the late features are probably post-exilic) ; and that Jehovah is expressly named as the Maker of certain of the stars. Similarly when Mohammed seeks to condemn the worship of the heavenly bodies, he insists that God is their Maker. Koran, Sur. 41, 37 : " To the signs of His Omnipotence belong night and day, sun and moon ; but do not pray to sun or moon, for God hath created them." Sur. 53, 50 : " Because He is the Lord of Sirius." On the other side see Driver's Joel and Amos (Cambridge Bible for Schools Series), 1897, pp. 118 f., 189. How deeply Manasseh had planted in Israel the worship of the heavenly host may be seen from the survival of the latter through all the reforms of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem (Jer. vii. 18, viii., xliv. ; Ezek. viii. Cf. Stade, Gesch. des V. Israel, I., pp. 629 ff.). ' The Jehovist and Elohist into the closely mortised JE. Stade indeed assigns to the period of Manasseh Israel's first acquaintance with the Babylonian cosmogonies and myths which led to that reconstruction of them in the spirit of her own rehgion which we find in the Jehovistic portions of the beginning of Genesis {Gesch. des V. Isr., I., pp. 630 if.). But it may well be doubted (i) whether the reign of Manasseh affords time for this assimilation, and (2) whether it was likely that Assyrian and Babylonian theology could make so deep and lasting impression upon the purer faith of Israel at a time when the latter stood in such sharp hostility to all foreign influences and was so bitterly persecuted by the parties in Israel who had succumbed to these influences. ^ Chaps, v.-xxvi., xxviii. 10 THE TWELVE PROPHETS archives at the end of our period, and presented to Josiah as an old and forgotten work.^ There is no reason to charge with fraud those who made the pre- sentation by affirming that they really invented the book. They were priests of Jerusalem, but the book is written by members of the prophetic party, and osten- sibly in the interests of the priests of the country. It betrays no tremor of the awful persecutions oi Manasseh's reign ; it does not hint at the distinction, then for the first time apparent, between a false and a true Israel. But it does draw another distinction, familiar to the eighth century, between the true and the false prophets. The political and spiritual premisses of the doctrine of the book were all present by the end of the reign of Hezekiah, and it is extremely improbable that his reforms, which were in the main those of Deuteronomy, were not accompanied by some code, or by some appeal to the fountain of all law in Israel. But whether the Book of Deuteronomy now existed or not, there were those in the nation who through all the dark days between Hezekiah and Josiah laid up its truth in their hearts and were ready to assist the latter monarch in his public enforcement of it. While these things happened within Judah, very great events were taking place beyond her borders. Asarhaddon of Assyria (68 1 — 668) was a monarch of long purposes and thorough plans. Before he invaded Egypt, he spent a year (675) in subduing the restless tribes of Northern Arabia, and another (674) in conquering the peninsula of Sinai, an ancient appanage of Egypt. Tyre upon her island baffled his assaults, ^ 621 B.C. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST ii but the rest of Palestine remained subject to him. He received his reward in carrying the Assyrian arms farther into Egypt than any of his predecessors, and about 670 took Memphis from the Ethiopian Pharaoh Taharka. Then he died. Assurbanipal, who suc- ceeded, lost Egypt for a few years, but about 665, with the help of his tributaries in Palestine, he over- threw Taharka, took Thebes, and established along the Nile a series of vassal states. He quelled a revolt there in 662, and overthrew Memphis for a second time. The fall of the Egyptian capital resounds through the rest of .the century ; we shall hear its echoes in Nahum. Tyre fell at last with Arvad in 662. But the Assyrian empire had grown too vast for human hands to grasp, and in 652 a general revolt took place in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Elam, Babylon and Asia Minor. In 649 Assurbanipal reduced Elam and Babylon ; and by two further campaigns (647 and 645) Hauran, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Nabatea and all the northern Arabs. On his return from these he crossed Western Palestine to the sea and punished Usu and Akko. It is very remarkable that, while Assurbanipal, who thus fought the neighbours of Judah, makes no mention of her, nor numbers Manasseh among the rebels whom he chastised, the Book of Chronicles should contain the statement that Jehovah sent upon Manasseh the captains of the host of the king of Assyria^ who bound him with fetters and carried him to Babylon} What grounds the Chronicler had for such a statement are quite unknown to us. He introduces Manasseh's captivity as the consequence of idolatry, and asserts that on his restoration Manasseh abolished in Judah ' 2 Chron. xxxiii. 1 1 ff. 12 THE TWELVE PROPHETS all worship save that of Jehovah, but if this happened (and the Book of Kings has no trace of it) it was without result. Amon, son of Manasseh, continued to sacrifice to all the images which his father had introduced. 2. The Early Years of Josiah (639 — 625) : Jeremiah and Zephaniah. Amon had not reigned for two years when his servants conspired against him^ and he was slain in his own house} But the people of the land rose against the court, slew the conspirators, and secured the throne for Amon's son, Josiah, a child of eight. It is difficult to know what we ought to understand by these move- ments. Amon, who was slain, was an idolater; the popular party, who slew his slayers, put his son on the throne, and that son, unlike both his father and grandfather, bore a name compounded with the name of Jehovah. Was Amon then slain for personal reasons ? Did the people, in their rising, have a zeal for Jehovah? Was the crisis purely poHtical, but usurped by some school or party of Jehovah who had been gathering strength through the later years of Manasseh, and waiting for some such unsettlement of affairs as now occurred ? The meagre records of the Bible give us no help, and for suggestions towards an answer we must turn to the wider politics of the time. Assurbanipal's campaigns of 647 and 645 were the last appearances of Assyria in Palestine. He had not attempted to reconquer Egypt,^ and her king, Psamtik I., ' 2 Kings xxi. 23. ^ But in his conquests of Hauran, Northern Arabia and the eastern neighbours of Judah, he had evidently sought to imitate the poHcy of THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 13 began to push his arms northward. Progress must have been slow, for the siege of Ashdod, which Psamtik probably began after 645, is said to have occupied him twenty-nine years. Still, he must have made his in- fluence to be felt in Palestine, and in all probability there was once more, as in the days of Isaiah, an Egyptian party in Jerusalem. As the power of Assyria receded over the northern horizon, the fascination of her idolatries, which Manasseh had established in Judah, must have waned. The priests of Jehovah's house, jostled by their pagan rivals, would be inclined to make common cause with the prophets under a persecution which both had suffered. With the loosening of the Assyrian yoke the national spirit would revive, and it is easy to imagine prophets, priests and people working together in the movement which placed the child Josiah on the throne. At his tender age, he must have been wholly in the care of the women of the royal house ; and among these the influence of the prophets may have found adherents more readily than among the counseflors of an adult prince. Not only did the new monarch carry the name of Jehovah in his own ; this was the case also with his mother's father.-^ In the revolt, therefore, which raised this unconscious child to the throne and in the circumstances which moulded his character, we may infer that there already existed the germs of the great work of reform which his manhood achieved. Asarhaddon in 675 f., and secure firm ground in Palestine and Arabia for a subsequent attack upon Egypt. That this never came shows more than anything else could Assyria's consciousness of growing weakness. ' The name of Josiah 's (•IH^K'N''') mother was Jedidah (iTin?) daughter of Adaiah (n^j^) of Boskath in the Shephelah of Judah. 14 THE TWELVE PROPHETS For some time little change would be possible, but from the first facts were working for great issues. The Book of Kings, which places the destruction of the idols after the discovery of the law-book in the eigh- teenth year of Josiah's reign, records a previous cleansing and restoration of the house of Jehovah.^ This points to the growing ascendency of the prophetic party during the first fifteen years of Josiah's reign. Of the first ten years we know nothing, except that the prestige of Assyria was waning; but this fact, along with the preaching of the prophets, who had neither a native tyrant nor the exigencies of a foreign alliance to silence them, must have weaned the people from the worship of the Assyrian idols. Unless these had been discredited, the repair of Jehovah's house could hardly have been attempted; and that this progressed means that part of Josiah's destruction of the heathen images took place before the discovery of the Book of the Law, which happened in consequence of the cleansing of the Temple. But just as under the good Hezekiah the social condition of the people, and especially the behaviour of the upper classes, continued to be bad, so it was again in the early years of Josiah. There was a remnant of Baal' in the land. The shrines of the host of heaven might have been swept from the Temple, but they were still worshipped from the housetops.^ Men swore by the Queen of Heaven, and by Moloch, the King. Some turned back from Jehovah ; some, grown up in idolatry, had not yet sought Him. Idolatry may have been disestablished from the national sanctuary: ' 2 Kings xxii., xxiii. ^ Zeph. i. 4 : the LXX. reads names of Baal. See below, p. 40, n. 3. 3 Ibid., 5. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 15 its practices still lingered (how intelligibly to us !) in social and commercial life. Foreign fashions were affected by the court and nobility ; trade, as always, was combined with the acknowledgment of foreign gods.-^ Moreover, the rich were fraudulent and cruel. The ministers of justice, and the great in the land, ravened among the poor. Jerusalem was full of oppres- sion. These were the same disorders as Amos and Hosea exposed in Northern Israel, and as Micah exposed in Jerusalem. But one new trait of evil was added. In the eighth century, with all their ignorance of Jehovah's true character, men had yet believed in Him, gloried in His energy, and expected Him to act — were it only in accordance with their low ideals. They had been alive and bubbling with religion. But now they had thickened on their lees. They had grown sceptical, dull, indifferent ; they said in their hearts, Jehovah will not do good, neither will He do evil ! Now, just as in the eighth century there had risen, contemporaneous with Israel's social corruption, a cloud in the north, black and pregnant with destruction, so was it once more. But the cloud was not Assyria. From the hidden world beyond her, from the regions over Caucasus, vast, nameless hordes of men arose, and, sweeping past her unchecked, poured upon Palestine. This was the great Scythian invasion recorded by Herodotus.^ We have almost no other report than his few paragraphs, but we can realise the event from our knowledge of the Mongol and Tartar invasions which in later centuries pursued the same path southwards. Living in the saddle, and (it would seem) with no infantry nor chariots to delay them, these Centaurs > Ibid., 8-12, 2 i_ 102 ff. 1 6 THE TWELVE PROPHETS swept on with a speed of invasion hitherto unknown. In 630 they had crossed the Caucasus, by 626 they were on the borders of Egypt. Psamtik I. succeeded in purchasing their retreat/ and they swept back again as swiftly as they came. They must have followed the old Assyrian war-paths of the eighth century, and, with- out foot-soldiers, had probably kept even more closely to the plains. In Palestine their way would lie, hke Assyria's, across Hauran, through the plain of Esdraelon, and down the Philistine coast, and in fact it is only on this line that there exists any possible trace of them.^ But they shook the whole of Palestine into consternation. Though Judah among her hills escaped them, as she escaped the earlier campaigns of Assyria, they showed her the penal resources of her offended God. Once again the dark, sacred North was seen to be full of the possibiHties of doom. Behold, therefore, exactly the two conditions, ethical and political, which, as we saw, called forth the sudden prophets of the eighth century, and made them so sure of their message of judgment : on the one side Judah, her sins calling aloud for punishment ; on the other side the forces of punishment swiftly drawing on. It was precisely at this juncture that prophecy again arose, and as Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah appeared in the end of the eighth century, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum and Jeremiah appeared in the end of the seventh. The coincidence is exact, and a remarkable confirmation of the truth which we deduced from the experience of Amos, that the assurance of the prophet 1 Herod., I. 105. 2 The new name of Bethshan in the mouth of Esdraelon, viz. Scythopolis, is said to be derived from them (but see Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land, pp. 363 f.) ; they conquered Askalon (Herod., 1. 105). THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 17 in Israel arose from the coincidence of his conscience with his political observation. The justice of Jehovah demands His people's chastisement, but see — the forces of chastisement are already upon the horizon. Zeph- aniah uses the same phrase as Amos : the Day of Fehovahf he says, is drawing near. We are now in touch with Zephaniah, the first of our prophets, but, before listening to him, it will be well to complete our survey of those remaining years of the century in which he and his immediate successors laboured. 3. The Rest of the Century (625 — 586) : the Fall of Niniveh ; Nahum and Habakkuk. Although the Scythians had vanished from the horizon of Palestine and the Assyrians came over it no more, the fateful North still lowered dark and turbulent. Yet the keen eyes of the watchmen in Palestine perceived that, for a time at least, the storm must break where it had gathered. It is upon Niniveh, not upon Jerusalem, that the prophetic passion of Nahum and Habakkuk is concentrated ; the new day of the Lord is filled with the fate, not of Israel, but of Assyria. For nearly two centuries Niniveh had been the capital and cynosure of Western Asia ; for more than one she had set the fashions, the art, and even, to some extent, the religion of all the Semitic nations. Of late years, too, she had drawn to herself the world's trade. Great roads from Egypt, from Persia and from the iEgean converged upon her, till like Imperial Rome she was filled with a vast motley of peoples, and men went forth from her to the ends of the earth. VOL. n. 2 1 8 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Under Assurbanipal travel and research had increased, and the city acquired renown as the centre of the world's wisdom. Thus her size and glory, with all her details of rampart and tower, street, palace and temple, grew everywhere familiar. But the peoples gazed at her as those who had been bled to build her. The most remote of them had seen face to face on their own fields, trampling, stripping, burning, the warriors who manned her walls. She had dashed their little ones against the rocks. Their kings had been dragged from them and hung in cages about her gates. Their gods had lined the temples of her gods. Year by year they sent her their heavy tribute, and the bearers came back with fresh tales of her rapacious insolence. So she stood, bitterly clear to all men, in her glory and her cruelty ! Their hate haunted her every pinnacle ; and at last, when about 625 the news came that her frontier fortresses had fallen and the great city herself was being besieged, we can understand how her victims gloated on each possible stage of her fall, and saw her yield to one after another of the cruelties of battle, siege and storm, which for two hundred years she had inflicted on themselves. To such a vision the prophet Nahum gives voice, not on behalf of Israel alone, but of all the nations whom Niniveh had crushed. It was obvious that the vengeance which Western Asia thus hailed upon Assyria must come from one or other of two groups of peoples, standing respect- ively to the north and to the south of her. To the north, or north-east, between Mesopotamia and the Caspian, there were gathered a congeries of restless tribes known to the Assyrians as the Madai or Matai, the Medes. They are mentioned first THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 19 by Shalmaneser II. in 840, and few of his successors do not record campaigns against them. The earhest notice of them in the Old Testament is in con- nection with the captives of Samaria, some of whom in 720 were settled among them.-* These Medes were probably of Turanian stock, but by the end of the eighth century, if we are to judge from the names of some of their chiefs,^ their most easterly tribes had already fallen under Aryan influence, spreading west- ward from Persia.^ So led, they became united and formidable to Assyria. Herodotus relates that their King Phraortes, or ' Fravartis, actually attempted the siege of Niniveh, probably on the death of Assur- banipal in 625, but was slain.* His son Kyaxares, Kastarit or Uvakshathra, was forced by a Scythian invasion of his own country to withdraw his troops from Assyria ; but having either bought off or assimi- lated the Scythian invaders, he returned in 608, with forces sufficient to overthrow the northern Assyrian fortresses and to invest Niniveh herself. The other and southern group of peoples which threatened Assyria were Semitic. At their head were the Kasdim or Chaldeans.^ This name appears for * 2 Kings xvii. 6 : and in the cities (LXX. mountains) of the Medes, The Heb. is HD, Madai. - Mentioned by Sargon. * Sayce, Empires of the East, 239 : cf. McCurdy, § 823 f. * Herod., I. 103. 5 Heb. Kasdim, DH^S ; LXX. XaXbaioi.', Assyr. Kaldaa, Kaldu The Hebrew form with s is regarded by many authorities as the original, from the Assyrian root kashadu, to conquer, and the Assyrian form with / to have arisen by the common change of sh through r into /. The form with s does not occur, however, in Assyrian, which also possesses the root kaladu, with the same meaning as kashadu. See Mr. Pinches' articles on Chaldea and the Chaldeans in the new edition of Vol. I. of Smith's Bible Dictionary. THE TWELVE PROPHETS the first time in the Assyrian annals a little earlier than that of the Medes/ and from the middle of the ninth century onwards the people designated by it frequently engage the Assyrian arms. They were, to begin with, a few half-savage tribes to the south of Babylon, in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf; but they proved their vigour by the repeated lordship of all Babylonia and by inveterate rebellion against the monarchs of Niniveh. Before the end of the seventh century we find their names used by the prophets for the Babylonians as a whole. Assurbanipal, who was a patron of Babylonian culture, kept the country quiet during the last years of his reign, but his son Asshur-itil-ilani, upon his accession in 625, had to grant the viceroyalty to Nabopolassar the Chaldean with a considerable degree of independence. Asshur-itil-ilani was suc- ceeded in a few years ^ by Sinsuriskin, the Sarakos of the Greeks, who preserved at least a nominal sove- reignty over Babylon,^ but Nabopolassar must already have cherished ambitions of succeeding the Assyrian in the empire of the world. He enjoyed sufficient freedom to organise his forces to that end. These were the two powers which from north and south watched with impatience the decay of Assyria. That they made no attempt upon her between 625 and 608 was probably due to several causes : their jealousy of each other, the Medes' trouble with the Scythians, Nabopolassar's genius for waiting till his forces were ' About 880 B.C. in the annals of Assurnatsirpal. See Chrono- logical Table to Vol. I. ^ No inscriptions of Asshur-itil-ilani have been found later than the first two years of his reign. ^ Billerbeck-Jeremias, " Der Untergang Niniveh's," in Delitzsch and Haupt's Bettrage sur Assyriologie, III., p. 113. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 21 ready, and above all the still considerable vigour of the Assyrian himself. The Lion, though old,^ was not broken. His power may have relaxed in the distant provinces of his empire, though, if Budde be right about the date of Habakkuk,''^ the peoples of Syria still groaned under the thought of it ; but his own land — his lair, as the prophets call it — was still terrible. It is true that, as Nahum perceives, the capital was no longer native and patriotic as it had been ; the trade fostered by Assurbanipal had filled Niniveh with a vast and mercenary population, ready to break and disperse at the first breach in her walls. Yet Assyria proper was covered with fortresses, and the tradition had long fastened upon the peoples that Niniveh was impregnable. Hence the tension of those years. The peoples of Western Asia looked eagerly for their revenge; but the two powers which alone could accomplish this stood waiting — afraid of each other perhaps, but more afraid of the object of their common ambition. It is said that Kyaxares and Nabopolassar at last came to an agreement ; ^ but more probably the crisis was hastened by the appearance of another claimant for the coveted spoil. In 608 Pharaoh Necho went up against the king of Assyria towards the river Euphrates} This Egyptian advance may have forced the hand of ' Nahum ii. ^ See below, p. 120. 3 Abydenus (apud Euseb., Chron., I. 9) reports a marriage between Nebuchadrezzar, Nabopolassar's son, and the daughter of the Median king. • 2 Kings xxiii, 29. The history is here very obscure. Necho, met at Megiddo by Josiah, and having slain him, appears to have spent a year or two in subjugating, and arranging for the government of, Syria (ibid., verses 33-35), and only reached the Euphrates in 605, when Nebuchadrezzar defeated him. THE TWELVE PROPHETS Kyaxares, who appears to have begun his investment of Niniveh a little after Necho defeated Josiah at Megiddo.^ The siege is said to have lasted two years. Whether this included the delays necessary for the reduction of fortresses upon the great roads of approach to the Assyrian capital we do not know ; but Niniveh's own position, fortifications and resources may well account for the whole of the time. Colonel Billerbeck, a military expert, has suggested^ that the Medes found it possible to invest the city only upon the northern and eastern sides. Down the west flows the Tigris, and across this the besieged may have been able to bring in supplies and reinforcements from the fertile country beyond. Herodotus affirms that the Medes effected the capture of Niniveh by themselves,^ and for this some recent evidence has been found,* so that another tradition that the Chaldeans were also actively ' The reverse view is taken by Wellhausen, who says {Israel u. Ji'td. Gesch., pp. 97 f.) : " Der Pharaoh scheint ausgezogen zu sein um sich seinen Teil an der Erbschaft Ninives vorwegzunehmen, wahrend die Meder und Chaldaer die Stadt belagerten." ^ See above, p. 20, n. 3. 3 I. 106. * A stele of Nabonidus discovered at Hilleh and now in the museum at Constantinople relates that in his third year, 553, the king restored at Harran the temple of Sin, the moon-god, which the Medes had destroyed fifty-four years before, i.e. 607. Whether the Medes did this before, during or after the siege of Niniveh is uncertain, but the approximate dateof the siege, 608— 606, is thus marvellously confirmed. The stele affirms that the Medes alone took Niniveh, but that they were called in by Marduk, the Babylonian god, to assist Nabopolassar and avenge the deportation of his image by Sennacherib to Niniveh. Messerschmidt {Mittheilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, I. 1896) argues that the Medes were summoned by the Babylonians while the latter were being sore pressed by the Assyrians. Winckler had already {Untersiich., pp. 124 ff., 1889) urged that the Babylonians would refrain from taking an active part in the overthrow of Niniveh, in THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 23 engaged/ which has nothing to support it, may be regarded as false. Nabopolassar may still have been in name an Assyrian viceroy; yet, as Colonel Billerbeck points out, he had it in his power to make Kyaxares' victory possible by holding the southern roads to Niniveh, detaching other viceroys of her provinces and so shutting her up to her own resources. But among other reasons which kept him away from the siege may have been the necessity of guarding against Egyptian designs on the moribund empire. Pharaoh Necho, as we know, was making for the Euphrates as early as 608. Now if Nabopolassar and Kyaxares had arranged to divide Assyria between them, then it is likely that they agreed also to share the work of making their inheritance sure, so that while Kyaxares overthrew Niniveh, Nabopolassar, or rather his son Nebuchadrezzar,^ waited for and overthrew Pharaoh by Carchemish on the Euphrates. Consequently Assyria was divided between the Medes and the Chaldeans ; the latter as her heirs in the south took over her title to Syria and Palestine. The two prophets with whom we have to deal at this time are almost entirely engrossed with the fall of fear of incurring the guilt of sacrilege. Neither Messerschmidt's paper, nor Scheil's (who describes the stele in the Recueil des Travatix, XVIII. 1896), being accessible to me, I have written this note on the information supplied by Rev. C. H. W. Johns, of Cambridge, in the Expository Times, 1896, and by Prof. A. B. Davidson in App. I. to Nah.^ Hub. and Zeph. ' Berosus and Abydenus in Eusebius. - This spelling (Jer, xlix. 28) is nearer the original than the alterna- tive Hebrew Nebuchadnezzar. But the LXX, liia^ovxodopdcrop, and the 'Na^ovKo8p6aopos of Abydenus and Megasthenes and Na/3o/co5/)6(ropos of Strabo, have preserved the more correct vocalisation; for the original is Nabu-kudurri-usur = Nebo, defend the crown ! 24 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Assyria. Nahum exults in the destruction of Niniveh ; Habakkuk sees in the Chaldeans nothing but the avengers of the peoples whom Assyria ^ had oppressed. For both these events are the close of an epoch : neither prophet looks beyond this. Nahum (not on behalf of Israel alone) gives expression to the epoch's long thirst for vengeance on the tyrant; Habakkuk (if Budde's reading of him be right ^ ) states the problems Ynih. which its victorious cruelties had filled the pious mind — states the problem and beholds the solution in the Chaldeans. And, surely, the vengeance was so just and so ample, the solution so drastic and for the time complete, that we can well understand how two prophets should exhaust their office in describing such things, and feel no motive to look either deep into the moral condition of Israel, or far out into the future which God was preparing for His people. It might, of course, be said that the prophets' silence on the latter subjects was due to their positions immediately after the great Reform of 621, when the nation, having been roused to an honest striving after righteousness, did not require prophetic rebuke, and w^hen the success of so godly a prince as Josiah left no spiritual ambitions unsatisfied. But this (even if the dates of the two prophets were certain) is hardly probable ; and the other explanation is sufficient. Who can doubt this who has realised the long epoch which then reached a crisis, or has been thrilled by the crash of the crisis itself? The fall of Niniveh was deafening enough to drown for the moment, as it does in Nahum, even a Hebrew's clamant conscience of his country's sin. The problems, which the long success of Assyrian cruelty had started, ' But see below, pp. 123 f. - Below, pp. 121 flf. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 25 were old and formidable enough to demand statement and answer before either the hopes or the responsibili- ties of the future could find voice. The past also requires its prophets. Feeling has to be satisfied, and experience balanced, before the heart is willing to turn the leaf and read the page of the future. Yet, through all this time of Assyria's decline, Israel had her own sins, fears and convictions of judgment to come. The disappearance of the Scythians did not leave Zephaniah's predictions of doom without means of fulfilment; nor did the great Reform of 621 re- move the necessity' of that doom. In the deepest hearts the assurance that Israel must be punished was by these things only confirmed. The prophetess Huldah, the first to speak in the name of the Lord after the Book of the Law was discovered, emphasised not the reforms which it enjoined but the judgments which it predicted. Josiah's righteousness could at most ensure for himself a peaceful death : his people were incorrigible and doomed.^ The reforms indeed proceeded, there was public and widespread penitence, idolatry was abolished. But those were only shallow pedants who put their trust in the possession of a revealed Law and purged Temple,^ and who boasted that therefore Israel was secure. Jeremiah repeated the gloomy forecasts of Zephaniah and Huldah, and even before the wickedness of Jehoiakim's reign proved the obduracy of Israel's heart, he affirmed the imminence of ^ 2 Kings xxii. 11-20. The genuineness of this passage is proved (as against Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, I.) by the promise which it gives to Josiah of a peaceful death. Had it been written after the battle of Megiddo, in which Josiah was slain, it could not have contained such a promise. ^ Jer. vii. 4, viii. 8. 26 THE TWELVE PROPHETS the evil out of the north and the great destruction} Of our three prophets in this period Zephaniah, though the earHest, had therefore the last word. While Nahum and Habakkuk were almost wholly absorbed with the epoch that is closing, he had a vision of the future. Is this why his book has been ranged among our Twelve after those of his slightly later contemporaries ? The precise course of events in Israel was this — and we must follow them, for among them we have to seek exact dates for Nahum and Habakkuk. In 621 the Book of the Law was discovered, and Josiah applied himself with thoroughness to the reforms which he had already begun. For thirteen years he seems to have had peace to carry them through. The heathen altars were thrown down, with all the high places in Judah and even some in Samaria. Images were abolished. The heathen priests were exter- minated, with the wizards and soothsayers. The Levites, except the sons of Zadok, who alone were allowed to minister in the Temple, henceforth the only place of sacrifice, were debarred from priestly duties. A great passover was celebrated.^ The king did justice and was the friend of the poor ; ^ it went well with him and the people.^ He extended his influence into Samaria ; it is probable that he ventured to carry out the injunctions of Deuteronomy with regard to the neighbouring heathen.'^ Literature flourished : though ' VI. I. ^ All these reforms in 2 Kings xxiii. ^ Jer. xxii. 15 f. * Ibid., ver. 16. ^ We have no record of this, but a prince who so rashly flung himself in the way of Egypt would not hesitate to claim authority over Moab and Ammon. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 27 critics have not combined upon the works to be assigned to this reign, they agree that a great many were produced in it. Wealth must have accumulated : certainly the nation entered the troubles of the next reign with an arrogant confidence that argues under Josiah the rapid growth of prosperity in every direction. Then of a sudden came the fatal year of 608. Pharaoh Necho appeared in Palestine^ with an army destined for the Euphrates, and Josiah went up to meet him at Megiddo. His tactics are plain — it is the first strait on the land-road from Egypt to the Euphrates — but his motives are obscure. Assyria can hardly have been strong enough at this time to fling him as her vassal across the path of her ancient foe. He must have gone of himself. " His dream was pro- bably to bring back the scattered remains of the northern kingdom to a pure worship, and to unite the whole people of Israel under the sceptre of the house of David ; and he was not inclined to allow Egypt to cross his aspirations, and rob him of the inheritance which was falling to him from the dead hand of Assyria." ^ Josiah fell, and with him not only the liberty of his * 2 Kings xxiii. 24. The question whether Necho came by land from Egypt or brought his troops in his fleet to Acre is hardly answered by the fact that Josiah went to Megiddo to meet him. But Megiddo on the whole tells more for the land than the sea. It is not on the path from Acre to the Euphrates ; it is the key of the land-road from Egypt to the Euphrates. Josiah could have no hope of stopping Pharaoh on the broad levels of Philistia ; but at Megiddo there was a narrow pass, and the only chance of arresting so large an army as it moved in detachments. Josiah's tactics were therefore analogous to those of Saul, who also left his own territory and marched north to Esdraelon, to meet his foe — and death. ^ A. B. Davidson, The Exile and the Restoration, p. 8 (Bible Class Primers, ed. by Salmond ; Edin., T. & T. Clark, 1897). 28 THE TWELVE PROPHETS people, but the chief support of their faith. That the righteous king was cut down in the midst of his days and in defence of the Holy Land — what could this mean ? Was it, then, vain to serve the Lord ? Could He not defend His own? With some the disaster was a cause of sore complaint, and with others, perhaps, of open desertion from Jehovah. But the extraordinary thing is, how Httle effect Josiah's death seems to have had upon the people's self-confidence at large, or upon their adherence to Jehovah. They immediately placed Josiah's second son on the throne ; but Necho, having got him by some means to his camp at Riblah between the Lebanons, sent him in fetters to Egypt, where he died, and established in his place Eliakim, his elder brother. On his accession Eliakim changed his name to Jehoiakim, a proof that Jehovah was still regarded as the sufficient patron of Israel ; and the same blind belief that, for the sake of His Temple and of His Law, Jehovah would keep His people in security, continued to per- severe in spite of Megiddo. It was a most immoral ease, and filled with injustice. Necho subjected the land to a fine. This was not heavy, but Jehoiakim, instead of paying it out of the royal treasures, exacted it from the people of the land^ and then employed the peace which it purchased in erecting a costly palace for himself by the forced labour of his subjects.^ He was covetous, unjust and violently cruel. Like prince like people : social oppression prevailed, and there was a recrudescence of the idolatries of Manasseh's time,^ especially (it may be inferred) after Necho's defeat at Carchemish in 605. That all this should ' 2 Kings xxiii. 33-35. ' Jer. xxii. 13-15. ^ Jer. xi. THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 29 exist along with a fanatic trust in Jehovah need not surprise us who remember the very similar state of the public mind in North Israel under Amos and Hosea. Jeremiah attacked it as they had done. Though Assyria was fallen, and Egypt was promising protection, Jeremiah predicted destruction from the north on Egypt and Israel alike. When at last the Egyptian defeat at Carchemish stirred some vague fears in the people's hearts, Jeremiah's conviction broke out into clear flame. For three-and-twenty years he had brought God's word in vain to his countrymen. Now God Himself would act: Nebuchadrezzar was but His servant to lead Israel into captivity.^ The same year, 605 or 604, Jeremiah wrote all these things in a volume ; ^ and a few months later, at a national fast, occasioned perhaps by the fear of the Chaldeans, Baruch, his secretary, read them in the house of the Lord, in the ears of all the people. The king was informed, the roll was brought to him, and as it was read, with his own hands he cut it up and burned it, three or four columns at a time. Jeremiah answered by calling down on Jehoiakim an ignominious death, and repeated the doom already uttered on the land. Another prophet, Urijah, had recently been executed for the same truth ; but Jeremiah and Baruch escaped into hiding. This was probably in 603, and for a little time Jehoiakim and the populace were restored to their false security by the delay of the Chaldeans to come south. Nebuchadrezzar was occupied in Babylon, securing his succession to his father. At last, either in 602 or more probably in 600, he marched into Syria, and 30 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Jehoiakim became his servant for three years} In such a condition the Jewish state might have survived for at least another generation,^ but in 599 or 597 Jehoiakim, with the madness of the doomed, held back his tribute. The revolt was probably instigated by Egypt, which, however, did not dare to support it. As in Isaiah's time against Assyria, so now against Babylon, Egypt was a blusterer who blustered and sat still. She still helped in vain and to no purpose.^ Nor could Judah count on the help of the other states of Palestine. They had joined Hezekiah against Sennacherib, but remembering perhaps how Manasseh had failed to help them against Assurbanipal, and that Josiah had carried things with a high hand towards them,'* they obeyed Nebuchadrezzar's command and raided Judah till he himself should have time to arrive.^ Amid these raids the senseless Jehoiakim seems to have perished,*^ for when Nebuchadrezzar appeared before Jerusalem in 597, his son Jehoiachin, a youth of eighteen, had succeeded to the throne. The innocent reaped the harvest sown by the guilty. In the attempt (it would appear) to save his people from destruction/ Jehoiachin capitulated. But Nebuchadrezzar was not content with * 2 Kings xxiv. I. In the chronological table appended to Kautzsch's Bibel this verse and Jehoiakim's submission are assigned to 602. But this allows too little time for Nebuchadrezzar to con- firm his throne in Babylon and march to Palestine, and it is not corroborated by the record in the Book of Jeremiah of events in Judah in 604 — 602. ^ Nebuchadrezzar did not die till 562. ^ See Isaiah i. — xxxix. (Expositor's Bible), pp. 223 f. ■• See above, p. 26, n. 5. * 2 Kings xxiv. 2. ® Jer. xxxvii. 30, but see 2 Kings xxiv. 6. '' SoJosephus puts it (X. Anh'q., vii. i). Jehoiachin was unusually THE SEVENTH CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST 31 the person of the king : he deported to Babylon the court, a large number of influential persons, the mighty men of the land or what must have been nearly all the fighting men, with the necessary military artificers and swordsmiths. Priests also went, Ezekiel among them, and probably representatives of other classes not mentioned by the annalist. All these were the flower of the nation. Over what was left Nebuchadrezzar placed a son of Josiah on the throne who took the name of Zedekiah. Again with a little common-sense, the state might have survived ; but it was a short respite. The new court began intrigues with Egypt, and Zedekiah, with the Ammonites and Tyre, ventured a revolt in 589. Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew it was in vain. Nebuchadrezzar marched on Jerusalem, and though for a time he had to raise the siege in order to defeat a force sent by Pharaoh Hophra, the Chaldean armies closed in again upon the doomed city. Her defence was stubborn; but famine and pestilence sapped it, and numbers fell away to the enemy. About the eighteenth month, the besiegers took the northern suburb and stormed the middle gate. Zedekiah and the army broke their lines only to be captured at Jericho. In a few weeks more the city was taken and given over to fire. Zedekiah was blinded, and with a large number of his people carried to Babylon. It was the end, for although a small community of Jews was left at Mizpeh under a Jewish viceroy and with Jeremiah to guide them, they were soon broken up and fled to Egypt. Judah had perished. Her savage neighbours, bewailed (Lam. iv. 20; Ezek. xvii. 22 ff.). He survived in captivity till the death of Nebuchadrezzar, whose successor Evil-Merodach in 561 took him from prison and gave him a place in his palace (2 Kings XXV. 27 ff.). 32 THE TWELVE PROPHETS who had gathered with glee to the day of Jerusalem's calamity, assisted the Chaldeans in capturing the fugitives, and Edomites came up from the south on the desolate land. It has been necessary to follow so far the course of events, because of our prophets Zephaniah is placed in each of the three sections of Josiah's reign, and by some even in Jehoiakim's ; Nahum has been assigned to different points between the eve of the first and the eve of the second siege of Niniveh ; and Habakkuk has been placed by different critics in almost every year from 62 1 to the reign of Jehoiachin ; while Obadiah, whom we shall find reasons for dating during the Exile, describes the behaviour of Edom at the final siege of Jerusalem. The next of the Twelve, Haggai, may have been born before the Exile, but did not prophesy till 520. Zechariah appeared the same year, Malachi not for half a century after. These three are prophets ot the Persian period. With the approach of the Greeks Joel appears, then comes the prophecy which we find in the end of Zechariah's book, and last of all the Book of Jonah. To all these post-exilic prophets we shall provide later on the necessary historical introductions. ZEPHANIAH VOL. II. 33 Dies Irce, Dies Ilia ! — Zeph. i. 15. " His book is the first tinging of prophecy with apocalypse : that is the moment which it suppUes in the history of Israel's religion." 34 CHAPTER II THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH THE Book of Zephaniah is one of the most difficult in the prophetic canon. The title is very gener- ally accepted ; the period from which chap. i. dates is recognised by practically all critics to be the reign of Josiah, or at least the last third of the seventh century. But after that doubts start, and we find present nearly every other problem of introduction. To begin with, the text is very damaged. In some passages we may be quite sure that we have not the true text ; ^ in others we cannot be sure that we have it,^ and there are several glosses.^ The bulk of the second chapter was written in the Qinah, or elegiac measure, but as it now stands the rhythm is very much broken. It is difficult to say whether this is due to the dilapidation of the original text or to wilful insertion of glosses and other later passages. The Greek version of Zephaniah possesses the same general features as that of other difficult prophets. Occasion- ally it enables us to correct the text ; but by the time it was made the text must already have contained the same corruptions which we encounter, and the ' i. 36, 56; ii. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 last word, l^b; iii. 18, 19a, 20. 2 i. 146; ii. I, 3; iii. I, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 17. 3 i. 36, 5*; ii.2, 6; iii. 5(?). 35 36 THE TWELVE PROPHETS translators were ignorant besides of the meaning of some phrases which to us are plain. ^ The difficulties of textual criticism as well as of translation are aggravated by the large number of words, grammatical forms and phrases which either happen very seldom in the Old Testament,^ or nowhere else in it at all.^ Of the rare words and phrases, a very few (as will be seen from the appended notes) are found in earlier writings. Indeed all that are found are from the authentic prophecies of Isaiah, with whose style and doctrine Zephaniah's own exhibit most affinity. All the other rarities of vocabulary and grammar are shared only by later writers ; and as a whole the language of Zephaniah exhibits symptoms which separate it by many years from the language of the prophets of the eighth century, and range it with that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Second Isaiah and still later literature. It may be useful to the student to collect in a note the most striking of these ' For details see translation below. 2 i. 3, ntbc^DO, only in Isa. iii. 6; 15, HNI^^D, only in Job xxx. 3, xxxviii. 27— cfl Psalms Ixxiii. 18, Ixxiv. 3 ; ii. 8, D''S1J, Isa. xliii. 28 — cf. li. 7'; 9, ?1"in, Prov. xxiv. 31, Job xxx. 7; 15, \^VpV^ Isa. xxii. 2, xxiii. 7, xxxii. 13 — cf. xiii. 3, xxiv. 8 ; iii. I, H/'NJJ, see next note but one; 3, ny ^DXT, Hab. i. 8; 11, iniN:i '\hv^ Isa. xiii. 3; 18, ^JIJ, Lam. i. 4, niilJ- ® i. II, ^riDDH as the name of a part of Jerusalem, otherwise only Jer. XV. 19 ; ^103 V''t3J ; 12, KDp in pt. Oal, and otherwise only Exod. XV. 8, Zech. xiv. 6, Job x. 10; 14, "IH^ (adj.), but the pointing may be wrong— cf. Maher-shalal-hash-baz, Isa. viii. i, 3 ; WTi in Qal, elsewhere only once in Hi. Isa. xiii. 13 ; 17, DIH? in sense of flesh, cf. Job XX. 23; 18, rhr^l':^ if a noun (?) ; ii. I, ^^\> in Qal and Hithpo, elsewhere only in Polel ; 9, pEJ'DD, m2D; ii, ntl, to make lean, otherwise only in Isa. xvii. 4, to be lean ; 14, nflj^ (?) ; iii. i, HN^O, pt. of n"lD ; niV, pt. Qal, in Jer. xlvi. 16, 1. 16, it may be a noun ; 4, mnn ^m^-, 6, M-fy, 9, nnx ddk'; 10, '•>;iD-nn nni;(?); 15, njs in sense to turn away ; i8, VH y^D (?). THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH yj symptoms of the comparative lateness of Zephaniah's dialect.^ We now come to the question of date, and we take, to begin with, the First Chapter. It was said above that critics agree as to the general period — between 639, when Josiah began to reign, and 600. But this period was divided into three very different sections, and each of these has received considerable support from modern criticism. The great majority of critics place the chapter in the early years of Josiah, before the enforce- ment of Deuteronomy and the great Reform in 621.^ Others have argued for the later years of Josiah, 621 — 608, on the ground that the chapter implies that the great Reform has already taken place, and other- wise shows knowledge of Deuteronomy ; ^ while some prefer the days of reaction under Jehoiakim, 608 ff.,* and assume that the phrase in tKe title, in the days of Josiah, is a late and erroneous inference from i. 4. The evidence for the argument consists of the title and the condition of Judah reflected in the body of the ' i. 8, etc, W Ipa, followed by person, but not by thing— cf. Jer. ix. 24, xxiii. 34, etc., Job xxxvi. 23, 2 Chron. xxxvi. 23, Ezek. i. 2; 13, HDE^D, only in Hab. ii. 7, Isa. xlii,, Jer. xxx. 16, 2 Kings xxi. 14; 17, "l^rij Hi. of "IIV, only in i Kings viii. 37, and Deut., 2 Chron., Jer., Neh.; ii."'"3, mji; ; 8, D^SHJ, Isa. xliii. 28, li. 7 (fem. pi.); 9, Plin, Prov. xxiv. 31, Job xxx. 7; iii. i, n7t13, Lam. i. 4 has niH-ll 2 So Hitzig, Ewald, Pusey, Kuenen, Robertson Smith {Encyc. Brit), Driver, Wellhausen, Kirkpatrick, Budde, von Orelli, Cornill, Schv^ally, Davidson. 3 So Delitzsch, Kleinert, and Schulz (jCofm^ientar uber den Proph. Zeph., 1892, p. 7, quoted by Konig). ^ So Konig. 38 THE TWELVE PROPHETS chapter. The latter is a definite piece of oratory. Under the alarm of an immediate and general war, Zephaniah proclaims a vast destruction upon the earth. Judah must fall beneath it : the worshippers of Baal, of the host of heaven and of Milcom, the apostates from Jehovah, the princes and house of the king, the imitators of foreign fashions, and the forceful and fraudulent, shall be cut off in a great slaughter. Those who have grown sceptical and indifferent to Jehovah shall be unsettled by invasion and war. This shall be the Day of Jehovah, near and immediate, a day of battle and disaster on the whole land. The conditions reflected are thus twofold — the idola- trous and sceptical state of the people, and an impending invasion. But these suit, more or less exactly, each of the three sections of our period. For Jeremiah distinctly states that he had to attack idolatry in Judah for twenty-three years, 627 to 604 ; ^ he inveighs against the falseness and impurity of the people alike before the great Reform, and after it while Josiah was still alive, and still more fiercely under Jehoiakim. And, while before 621 the great Scythian invasion was sweeping upon Palestine from the north, after 621, and especially after 604, the Babylonians from the same quarter were visibly threatening the land. But when looked at more closely, the chapter shows several features which suit the second section of our period less than they do the other two. The worship of the host ot heaven, probably introduced under Manasseh, was put down by Josiah in 621 ; it revived under Jehoiakim,^ but during the latter years of Josiah it cannot possibly have been so pubUc as Zephaniah describes.^ ' Jer. XXV. 2 Jer. vii. 18. ^ i. 3. THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH 39 Other reasons which have been given for those years are inconclusive ^ — the chapter, for instance, makes no indubitable reference to Deuteronomy or the Covenant of 621 — and on the whole we may leave the end of Josiah's reign out of account. Turning to the third section, Jehoiakim's reign, we find one feature of the prophecy which suits it admirably. The temper de- scribed in ver. 12 — men who are settled on their lees, who- say in their heart, Jehovah doeth neither good nor evil — is the kind of temper likely to have been produced among the less earnest adherents of Jehovah by the failure of the great Reform in 62 1 to effect either the purity or the prosperity of the nation. But this is more than counterbalanced by the significant exception of the king from the condemnation which ver. 8 passes ' Kleinert in his Commentary in Lange's Bibelwerk, and Delitzsch in his article in Herzog's Real-Encydopadie^, both offer a number of inconclusive arguments. These are drawn from the position of Zephaniah after Habakkuk, but, as we have seen, the order of the Twelve is not always chronological ; from the supposition that Zephaniah i. 7, Silence before the Lord Jehovah, quotes Habakkuk ii. 20, Keep silence before Him, all the earth, but the phrase common to both is too general to be decisive, and if borrowed by one or other may just as well have been Zephaniah's originally as Habakkuk's; from the phrase remnant of Baal (i. 4), as if this were appropriate only after the Reform of 621, but it was quite as appropriate after the beginnings of reform six years earlier ; from the condemnation of the sons of the king (i. 8), whom Delitzsch takes as Josiah's sons, who before the great Reform were too young to be condemned, while later their characters did develop badly and judgment fell upon all of them, but sojis of the king, even if that be the correct reading (LXX. house of the king), does not necessarily mean the reigning monarch's children ; and from the assertion that Deuteronomy is quoted in the first chapter of Zephaniah, and " so quoted as to show that the prophet needs only to put the people in mind of it as some- thing supposed to be known," but the verses cited in support of this (viz. 13, 15, 17 : cf Deut. xxviii. 30 and 29) are too general in their character to prove the assertion. See translation below. 40 THE TWELVE PROPHETS on the princes and the sons of the king. Such an ex- ception could not have been made when Jehoiakim was on the throne ; it points almost conclusively to the reign of the good Josiah. And with this agrees the title of the chapter — in the days of Josiah} We are, therefore, driven back to the years of Josiah before 621. In these we find no discrepancy either with the chapter itself, or with its title. The southward march of the Scythians," between 630 and 625, accounts for Zephaniah's alarm of a general war, including the invasion of Judah ; the idolatrous practices which he describes may well have been those surviving from the days of Manasseh,^ and not yet reached by the drastic measures of 62 1 ; the temper of scepticism and hopelessness condemned by ver. 1 2 was possible among those adherents of Jehovah who had hoped greater things from the overthrow of Amon than the slow and small reforms of the first fifteen years of Josiah's reign. Nor is a date before 621 made at all difficult by the genealogy of Zephaniah in the title. If, as is probable,^ the Hezekiah given as his great-great- grandfather be Hezekiah the king, and if he died about 695, and Manasseh, his successor, who was then twelve, was his eldest son, then by 630 Zephaniah cannot have been much more than twenty years of age, ^ Konig has to deny the authenticity of this in order to make his case for the reign of Jehoiakim. But nearly all critics take the phrase as genuine. ^ See above, p. 15. For inconclusive reasons Schwally, Z.A.T.W., 1890, pp. 215-217, prefers the Egyptians under Psamtik. See in answer Davidson, p. 98. ^ Not much stress can be laid upon the phrase / will cut off the remnant of Baal, ver. 4, for, if the reading be correct, it may only mean the destruction of Baal-worship, and not the uprooting of what has been left over. '• See below, p. 47, n. 2. THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH and not more than twenty-five by the time the Scythian invasion had passed away/ It is therefore by no means impossible to suppose that he prophesied before 625 ; and besides, the data of the genealogy in the title are too precarious to make them valid, as against an inference from the contents of the chapter itself. The date, therefore, of the first chapter of Zephaniah may be given as about 625 b.c, and probably rather before than after that year, as the tide of Scythian invasion has apparently not 3^et ebbed. The other two chapters have within recent years been almost wholly denied to Zephaniah. Kuenen doubted chap. iii. 9-20. Stade makes all chap. iii. post-exilic, and suspects ii. 1-3, ii. A very thorough examination of them has led Schwally ^ to assign to exilic or post- exilic times the whole of the little sections comprising them, with the possible exception of chap. iii. 1-7, which *' may be " Zephaniah's. His essay has been subjected to a searching and generally hostile criticism by a number of leading scholars ; ^ and he has admitted the inconclusiveness of some of his reasons.* Chap. ii. 1-4 is assigned by Schwally to a date later than Zephaniah's, principally because of the term meek- ness (ver. 3), which is a favourite one with post-exilic writers. He has been sufficiently answered ; ^ and the ' If 695 be the date of the accession of Manasseh, being then twelve, Amariah, Zephaniah's great-grandfather, cannot have been more than ten, that is, born in 705. His son Gedaliah was probably not born before 689, his son Kushi probably not before 672, and his son Zephaniah probably not before 650. - Z.A.T.W., 1890, Heft I. 3 Bacher, Z.A.T.W., 1891, 186; Cornill, Einleitung, 1891; Budde, Theol. Stud. u. Krit., 1893, 393 ff. ; Davidson, Nah., Hab. and Zeph., 100 ff. ^ Z.A.T.W., 1891, Heft 2. ^ By especially Bacher, Cornill and Budde as above. 42 THE TWELVE PROPHETS close connection of vv. 1-3 with chap. i. has been clearly proved.^ Chap. ii. 4-15 is the passage in elegiac measure but broken, an argument for the theory that insertions have been made in it. The subject is a series of foreign nations — Philistia (5-7), Moab and Ammon (8-10), Egypt (11) and Assyria (13-15). The passage has given rise to many doubts ; every one must admit the difficulty of coming to a conclusion as to its authenticity. On the one hand, the destruction just predicted is so universal that, as Professor Davidson says, we should expect Zephaniah to mention other nations than Judah.^ The concluding oracle on Niniveh must have been published before 608, and even Schwally admits that it may be Zephaniah's own. But if this be so, then we may infer that the first of the oracles on Philistia is also Zephaniah's, for both it and the oracle on Assyria are in the elegiac measure, a fact which makes it probable that the whole passage, however broken and intruded upon^ was originally a unity. Nor is there anything in the oracle on PhiUstia incompatible with Zephaniah's date. Philistia lay on the path of the Scythian invasion ; the phrase in ver. 7, shall turn their captivity, is not necessarily exilic. As Cornill, too, points out, the expression in ver. 13, //) -It^^'tprin. A.V. Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together (EJ^K^'lp is to gather straw or sticks— ci. Arab, kash, to sweep up — and Nithp. of the Aram, is to assemble). Orelli : Crowd and crouch down. Ewald compares Aram, kash, late Heb. K^^p, to grow old, which he believes originally meant to be withered, grey. Budde suggests W^^T\r[ ItJ^iD, but, as Davidson remarks, it is not easy to see how this, if once extant, was altered to the present reading. ^ P]DDp is usually thought to have as its root meaning to be pale or colourless, i.e. either white or black {Journal of Phil, 14, 125), whence P]p3, silver or the pale metal: hence in the Qal to long for, Job xiv. 15, Ps. xvii. 12 ; so Ni, Gen. xxxi. 30, Ps. Ixxxiv. 3 ; and here to be ashamed. But the derivation of the name for silver is quite imaginary, and the colour of shame is red rather than white : cf. the mod. Arab, saying, " They are a people that cannot blush ; they have no blood in their faces," i.e. shameless. Indeed Schwally says (in loco), " Die Bedeutung fahl, blass ist unerweislich." Hence (in spite of the meanings of the Aram. P]D3 both to lose colour and to be ashamed) a derivation for the Hebrew is more probably to be found in the root kasaf, to cut off. The Arab. < Q...C. which in the classic tongue 6o THE TWELVE PROPHETS the drifting chaff, before the anger of Jehovah come upon you^ before there come upon you the day of JehovaKs wrath ; ^ seek Jehovah, all ye meek of the land ivho do His ordinance,^ seek righteousness^ seek meekness, per- adventure ye may hide yourselves in the day of Jehovah's wrath. means to cut a thread or eclipse the sun, is in colloquial Arabic to give a rebuff, refuse a favour, disappoint, shame. In the forms inkasaf 3.nd itkasaf'\i means to receive a rebuff, be disappointed, then shy or timid, and ^«sm/ means shame, shyness (as well as eclipse of the sun). See Spiro's Arabic-English Vocabulary. In Ps. Ixxxiv. P|D2J is evidently used of unsatisfied longing (but see Cheyne), which is also the proper meaning of the parallel H'PD (cf other passages where nPD is used of still unfulfilled or rebuffed hopes : Job xix. 27, Ps. Ixix. 4, cxix. 81, cxliii. 7). So in Ps. xvii. 4 P)D2 is used of a lion who is longing for, i.e. still disappointed in, his prey, and so in Job xiv. 15. ^ LXX. -TTpo Tov yevecdai v/xois ws avdos (here in error reading |*2 for Y^) irapaTTopevdfJLevov, irpb rod eireKdeLV e Vfxds opyrjv Kvpiov (last clause omitted by t^*^'). According to this the Hebrew text, which is obviously disarranged, may be restored to "liy 1*^5 'Vnri'N? D^02 - This clause Wellhausen deletes. Cf. Hexaplar Syriac translation. ^ LXX. take this also as imperative, do jiidgiuent, and so co-ordinate to the other clauses. CHAPTER IV NINIVE DELENDA Zephaniah ii. 4-15 THERE now come, a series of oracles on foreign nations, connected with the previous prophecy by the conjunction for, and detaihng the worldwide judgment which it had proclaimed. But though dated from the same period as that prophecy, ciixa 626, these oracles are best treated by themselves.^ These oracles originally formed one passage in the well-known Qinah or elegiac measure ; but this has suffered sadly both by dilapidation and rebuilding. How mangled the text is may be seen especially from vv. 6 and 14, where the Greek gives us some help in restoring it. The verses (8-1 1) upon Moab and Ammon cannot be reduced to the metre which both precedes and follows them. Probably, there- fore, they are a later addition : nor did Moab and Ammon He upon the way of the Scythians, who are presumably the invaders pictured by the prophet.^ The poem begins with Philistia and the sea-coast, ' See above, pp. 41 flf. ^ Some, however, think the prophet is speaking in prospect of the Chaldean invasion of a few years later. This is not so likely, because he pictures the overthrow of Niniveh as subsequent to the invasion of Philistia, while the Chaldeans accomplished the latter only after Niniveh had fallen. 61 62 THE TWELVE PROPHETS the very path of the Scythian raid.^ Evidently the latter is imminent, the Philistine cities are shortly to be taken and the whole land reduced to grass. Across the emptied strip the long hope of Israel springs sea- ward ; but — mark ! — not yet with a vision of the isles beyond. The prophet is satisfied with reaching the edge of the Promised Land: by the sea shall they feed '^ their flocks. For Gaza forsaken shall be, Ashklon a desert. Ashdod — by noon shall they rout her, And Ekron be torn up ! ^ Ah! woe, dwellers of the sea-shore, Folk of Kerethim. The word of Jehovah against thee, Kena^an^ Land of the Philistines I ^ According to Herodotus. 2 Ver. 7, LXX. ^ The measure, as said above, is elegiac : alternate lines long with a rising, and short with a falling, cadence. There is a play upon the names, at least on the first and last — " Gazzah " or "'Azzah 'Azubah " — which in English we might reproduce by the use of Spenser's word for " dreary " : For Gaza ghastful shall be. "'Ekron teaker." LXX. 'AKKapup eKpi^ujdrjaeTai (B), iKpLcp-^aerai (A). In the second line we have a slighter assonance, 'Ashkelon lishemamah. In the third theverb is n-l^."}^^; Bacher (Z.A.T.IV., 1891, 185 ff.) points out that ^"li is not used of cities, but of their populations or of individual men, and suggests (from Abulwalid) HIJi'T''', shallpossess her, as " a plausible emendation." Schwally {ibid., 260) prefers to alter to T\W'y^), with the remark that this is not only a good parallel to ")prn, but suits the LXX. e/cpt^Tjtrerat. — On the expression by noon see Davidson, N. H. and Z., Appendix, Note 2, where he quotes a parallel expression, in the Senjerli inscription, of Asarhaddon : that he took Memphis by midday or in half a day (Schrader). This suits the use of the phrase in Jer. xv. 8, where it is parallel to suddenly. * Canaan omitted by Wellhausen, who reads "fPi; for DDvV. But as the metre requires a larger number of syllables in the first line of Zeph.ii.4-i5] NINIVE DELENDA 63 And I destroy thee to the last inhabitants^ And Kereth shall become shepherds^ cots^ And folds for flocks. And the coast^ for the remnant ofJudaKs house; By the sea * shall they feed. In Ashkelon^s houses at even shall they couch ; For fehovah their God shall visit them^ And turn their captivity.^ There comes now an oracle upon Moab and Ammon (vv. 8-1 1 ). As already .said, it is not in the elegiac measure which precedes and follows it, while other features cast a doubt upon its authenticity. Like other oracles on the same peoples, this denounces the loud- mouthed arrogance of the sons of Moab and Ammon. each couplet than in the second, Kena'an should probably remain. The difficulty is the use of Canaan as synonymous with Land of the Philistmes. Nowhere else in the Old Testament is it expressly applied to the coast south of Carmel, though it is so used in the Egyptian inscriptions, and even in the Old Testament in a sense which covers this as well as other lowlying parts of Palestine. ' An odd long line, either the remains of two, or perhaps we should take the two previous lines as one, omitting Canaan. "^ So LXX. : Hebrew text and the sea-coast shall become dwellings, cots (n"l3) of shepherds. But the pointing and meaning of mD are both conjectural, and the sea-coast has probably fallen by mistake into this verse from the next. On Kereth and Kerethim as names for Philistia and the Philistines see Hist. Geog., p. 171. ^ LXX. adds of the sea. So Wellhausen, but unnecessarily and im- probably for phonetic reasons, as sea has to be read in the next line. ^ So Wellhausen, reading for nrxhv, D^n'^i;. ^ Some words must have fallen out, for first a short line is required here by the metre, and second the LXX. have some additional words, which, however, give us no help to what the lost line was : dTro TrpoaJjirov viQv 'loijda. * As stated above, there is no conclusive reason against the pre- exilic date of this expression. 64 THE TWELVE PROPHETS I have heard^ the reviling of Moab and the insults of the sons of Ainmon, who have reviled My people and vaunted themselves upon their'"" border. Wherefore as I live, saith Jehovah of Hosts, God of Israel, Moab shall become as Sodom, and Ammon's sons as Gomorrah — the possession ^ of nettles, and saltpits,^ and a desolation for ever; the remnant of My people shall spoil them, and the rest of My nation possess them. This to them for their arrogance, because they reviled, and vaunted them- selves against, the people of'"" Jehovah of Hosts. Jehovah showeth Himself terrible^ against them, for He hath made lean ^ all gods of earth, that all the coasts of the nations may worship Him, every man from his own place.^ The next oracle is a very short one (ver. 12) upon Egypt, which after its long subjection to Ethiopia dynasties is called, not Misraim, but Kush, or Ethiopia. The verse follows on naturally to ver. 7, but is not reducible to the elegiac measure. Also ye, O Kushites, are the slain of My sword. ^ ' Cf. Isa. xvi. 6. - LXX. My. ^ Doubtful word, not occurring elsewhere. ' Heb. singular. ^ LXX. omits the people of. ^ LXX. niaketh Himself manifest, HXni for J^'Tll "' dira^ \eybfievov. The passive of the verb means to grow lean (Isa. xvii. 4). ^ DIpD has probably here the sense which it has in a few other passages of the Old Testament, and in Arabic, of sacred place. Many will share Schwally's doubts (p. 192) about the authenticity of ver. II ; nor, as Wellhausen points out, does its prediction of the conversion of the heathen agree with ver. 12, which devotes them to destruction. Ver. 12 follows naturally on to ver. 7. ^ Wellhausen reads His sword, to agree with the next verse. Perhaps ^3")n is an abbreviation for nilT' 3'in. Zeph.ii.4-i5] NINIVE DELENDA 65 The elegiac measure is now renewed ^ in an oracle against Assyria, the climax and front of heathendom (vv. 13-15). It must have been written before 608: there is no reason to doubt that it is Zephaniah's. And may He stretch out His hand against the Norths And destroy Asshur; And may He turn Niniveh to desolation y Dry as the desert. And herds shall couch in her midst ^ Every beast of . . . } Yea, pelican and bittern^ shall roost on the capitals; The owl shall hoot in the window, The raven on the doorstep. 4 Such is the City, the Jubilant, She that sitteth at ease, 1 See Budde, Z.A.T.W., 1882, 25. "^ Heb. reads a nation, and Wellhausen translates etn buntes Gemisch von Volk, LXX, beasts of the earth. * nt^p, a water-bird according to Deut. xiv. 17, Lev. xi. 18, mostly taken SiS pelican; so R.V. A,V. cormorant. *12|? has usually been taken from nQp, to draw together, therefore hedgehog or porcupine. But the other animals mentioned here are birds, and it is birds which would naturally roost on capitals. Therefore bittern is the better rendering (Hitzig, Cheyne). The name is onomatopoeic. Cf. Eng. butter-dump. LXX. translates chameleons and hedgehogs. * Heb. : a voice shall sing in the window, desolation on the threshold, for He shall uncover the cedar-work. LXX. /cat drjpia (pojurjaec iv tois diopiyiuLaaiv uvttjs, KopaKes eu Toh irvKQxnv avrris, Sioxi /ceSpos to avaar-nixa avTTJs : Wild beasts shall sound in her excavations, ravens in her porches, because (the) cedar is her height. For ?)p, voice, Wellhausen reads DD, owl, and with the LXX. 1"IV, rave7t, for 2in, desolation. The last two words are left untranslated above. npi< occurs only here and is usually taken to mean cedar-work; but it might be pointed her cedar. Hli;, he, or one, has stripped the cedar-work. VOL. II, 5 66 THE TWELVE PROPHETS She that saith in her heart, I am And there is none else ! How hath she become desolation ! A lair of beasts. Every one passing by her hisses, Shakes his hand. The essence of these oracles is their clear confidence in the fall of Niniveh. From 652, when Egypt revolted from Assyria, and, Assurbanipal notwithstanding, began to push northward, men must have felt, throughout all Western Asia, that the great empire upon the Tigris was beginning to totter. This feeling was strengthened by the Scythian invasion, and after 625 it became a moral certainty that Niniveh would fall ^ — which happened in 607-6. These are the feelings, 625 to 608, which Zephaniah's oracles reflect. We can hardly over-estimate what they meant. Not a man was then alive who had ever known anything else than the greatness and the glory of Assyria. It was two hundred and thirty years since Israel first felt the weight of her arms.^ It was more than a hundred since her hosts had swept through Palestine,^ and for at least fifty her supremacy had been accepted by Judah. Now the colossus began to totter. As she had menaced, so she was menaced. The ruins with which for nigh three centuries she had strewn Western Asia — to these were to be reduced her own impregnable and ancient glory. It was the close of an epoch. » See above, pp. 17, 18. ^ At the battle of Karkar, 854. =» Under Tiglath-Pileser in 734. CHAPTER V so AS BY FIRE Zephaniah iii THE third chapter of the Book of Zephaniah consists ^ of two sections, of which only the first, vv. I- 1 3, is a genuine work of the prophet; while the second, vv. 14-20, is a later epilogue such as we found added to the genuine prophecies of Amos. It is written in the large hope and brilliant temper of the Second Isaiah, saying no word of Judah's sin or judgment, but predicting her triumphant deliverance out of all her afflictions. In a second address to his City (vv. 1-13) Zeph- aniah strikes the same notes as he did in his first. He spares the king, but denounces the ruling and teaching classes. Jerusalem's princes are lions, her judges wolves, her prophets braggarts, her priests pervert the law, her wicked have no shame. He repeats the proclamation of a universal doom. But the time is perhaps later. Judah has disregarded the many threats. She will not accept the Lord's discipline ; and while in chap. i. — ii. 3 Zephaniah had said that the meek and righteous might escape the doom, he now emphatically affirms that all proud and impenitent men shall be removed from Jerusalem, and a humble ' See above, pp. 43-45. 67 68 THE TWELVE PROPHETS people be left to her, righteous and secure. There is the same moral earnestness as before, the same absence of all other elements of prophecy than the ethical. Before we ask the reason and emphasise the beauty of this austere gospel, let us see the exact words of the address. There are the usual marks of poetic diction in it — elliptic phrases, the frequent absence of the definite article, archaic forms and an order of the syntax different from that which obtains in prose. But the measure is difficult to determine, and must be printed as prose. The echo of the elegiac rhythm in the opening is more apparent than real : it is not sustained beyond the first verse. Verses 9 and 10 are relegated to a footnote, as very probably an intrusion, and disturbance of the argument. Woe, rebel and unclean^ city of oppression ! ^ She listens to no voice^ she accepts no discipline, in Jehovah she trusts not, nor has drawn near to her God. Her princes in her midst are roaring lions; her judges evening wolves^ they . . . ^ not till morning; her 1 Heb. the city the oppressor. The two participles in the first clause are not predicates to the noun and adjective of the second (Schwally), but vocatives, though without the article, after MH. ^ LXX. wolves of Arabia. ^ The verb left untranslated, ID'li, is quite uncertain in meaning. Din is a root common to the Semitic languages and seems to mean originally to cut off, while the noun D^lll is a bone. In Num. xxiv. 8 the Piel of the verb used with another word for bone means to gnaw, munch. (The only other passage where it is used, Ezek. xxiii. 34, is corrupt.) So some take it here : they do not gnaw bones till mornings i.e. devour all at once ; but this is awkward, and Schwally (198) has proposed to omit the negative, they do gnaw bones till morning, yet in that case surely the impf. and not the perf. tense would have been used. The LXX. render they do not leave over, and it has been attempted, though inconclusively, to derive this meaning from that of Zeph. iii.] SO AS BY FIRE 69 prophets are braggarts and traitors; her priests have profaned what is holy and done violence to the Law} Jehovah is righteous in the midst of her^ He does no wrong. Morning by morning He brings His judg- ment to light : He does not let Himself fail '^ — but the wicked man knows no shame. I have cut off nations, their turrets are ruined; I have laid waste their broad streets, till no one passes upon them; destroyed are their cities, without a man, without a dweller? I said. Surely she will fear Me, she will accept punishment,^ and all that I have visited upon her^ shall never vanish from her eyes? But only the more zealously have they corrupted all their doings? Wherefore wait ye for Me — oracle of Jehovah — wait for the day of My rising to testify, for 'tis My fixed purpose^ to sweep nations together, to collect kingdoms^ to pour upon them . . .^ all the heat of My wrath — cutting off, i.e. laying aside (the Arabic Form II. means, however, to leave behind). Another line of meaning perhaps promises more. In Aram, the verb means to be the cause of anything, to bring about, and perhaps contains the idea of deciding (Levy sub voce compares /cptVw, cerno) ; in Arab, it means, among other things, to commit a crime, be guilty, but in mod. Arabic to fine. Now it is to be noticed that here the expression is used oi judges, and it may be there is an intentional play upon the double possibility of meaning in the root. 1 Ezek. xxii. 26 : Her priests have done violence to My Law and have profaned My holy things ; they have put no difference between the holy and profane, between the clean and the unclean. Cf. Jer. ii. 8. ^ Schwally by altering the accents : morning by morning He giveth forth His judgment : no day does He fail. ^ On this ver. 6 see above, p. 44. It is doubtful. * Or discipline. ^ Wellhausen : that which I have commanded her. Cf. Job xxxvi. 23 ; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 23 ; Ezra i. 2. 6 So LXX., reading H^J^rKD for the Heb. Pl^fyp, her dwelling. '' A frequent phrase of Jeremiah's. « ^DQK^D, decree, ordinance, decision. ^ Heb. My anger. LXX. omits. 70 THE TWELVE PROPHETS yeay with the fire of My jealousy shall the whole earth be consumed} In that day thou shall not be ashamed''-' of all thy deedsy by which thou hast rebelled against Me: for then will I turn out of the midst of thee all who exult with that arrogance of thine^ and thou wilt not again vaunt thyself upon the Mount of My Holiness. But I will leave in thy midst a people humble and poor^ and they shall trust in the name of Jehovah. The Remnant of Israel shall do no evil, and shall not speak falsehood, and no fraud shall be found in their mouthy but they shall pasture and they shall couch, with none to make them afraid. Such is the simple and austere gospel of Zephaniah. ' That is to say, the prophet returns to that general judgment of the whole earth, with which in his first discourse he had already threatened Judah. He threatens her with it again in this eighth verse, because, as he has said in the preceding ones, all other warnings have failed. The eighth verse therefore follows naturally upon the seventh, just as naturally as in Amos iv. ver. 12, intro- duced by the same |5< as here, follows its predecessors. The next two verses of the text, however, describe an opposite result : instead of the destruction of the heathen, they picture their conversion, and it is only in the eleventh verse that we return to the main subject of the passage, Judah herself, who is represented (in harmony with the close of Zephaniah's first discourse) as reduced to a righteous and pious remnant. Vv. 9 and 10 are therefore obviously a later insertion, and we pass to the eleventh verse. Vv. 9 and 10 : For then (this has no meaning after ver. 8) will I give to the peoples a pure lip (elliptic phrase : turn to the peoples a pure lip — i.e. turn their evil lip into a pure lip : pure = picked out, select, excellent, cf. Isa. xlix. 2), that they may all of them call upon the name of the Lord, that they may serve Him with one consent (Heb. shoulder, hX.X-.yoke). From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia — there follows a very obscure phrase, ''V'"12"'^5 '^'^^V., sup- pliants (?) of the daughter of My dispersed, but Ewald of the daughter of Phut — they shall bring Mine offering. ^ Wellhausen despair. ^ Heb. the jubilant ones of thtne arrogance. Zeph.iii.] SO AS BY FIRE 71 It is not to be overlooked amid the lavish and gorgeous promises which other . prophets have poured around it, and by ourselves, too, it is needed in our often unscrupulous enjoyment of the riches of grace that are in Christ Jesus. A thorough purgation, the removal of the wicked, the sparing of the honest and the meek ; insistence only upon the rudiments of morality and religion ; faith in its simplest form of trust in a righteous God, and character in its basal elements of meekness and truth, — these and these alone survive the judgment. Why does Zephaniah never talk of the Love of God, of the Divine Patience, of the Grace that has spared and will spare wicked hearts if only it can touch them to penitence ? Why has he no call to repent, no appeal to the wicked to turn from the evil of their ways? We have already seen part of the answer. Zephaniah stands too near to judg- ment and the last things. Character is fixed, the time for pleading is past; there remains only the separation of bad men from good. It is the same standpoint (at least ethically) as that of Christ's visions of the Judgment. Perhaps also an austere gospel was required by the fashionable temper of the day. The generation was loud and arrogant ; it gilded the future to excess, and knew no shame.^ The true prophet was forced to reticence ; he must make his age feel the desperate earnestness of life, and that salvation is by fire. For the gorgeous future of its unsanctified hopes he must give it this severe, almost mean, picture of a poor and humble folk, hardly saved but at last at peace. The permanent value of such a message is proved 1 See vv. 4, 5, II. 72 THE TWELVE PROPHETS by the thirst which we feel even to-day for the clear, cold water of its simple promises. Where a glaring optimism prevails, and the future is preached with a loud assurance, where many find their only reli- gious enthusiasm in the resurrection of mediaeval ritual or the singing of stirring and gorgeous hymns of second-hand imagery, how needful to be recalled to the earnestness and severity of life, to the simplicity of the conditions of salvation, and to their ethical, not emotional, character ! Where sensationalism has so invaded religion, how good to hear the sober insistence upon God's daily commonplaces — morning by morning He bringeih forth His judgment to light — and to know that the acceptance of discipHne is what prevails with Him. Where national reform is vaunted and the pro- gress of education, how well to go back to a prophet who ignored all the great reforms of his day that he might impress his people with the indispensableness of humility and faith. Where Churches have such large ambitions for themselves, how necessary to hear that the future is destined for a poor folk, the meek and the honest. Where men boast that their religion — Bible, Creed or Church — has undertaken to save them, vaunting themselves on the Mount of My Holiness, how needful to hear salvation placed upon character and a very simple trust in God. But, on the other hand, is any one in despair at the darkness and cruelty of this life, let him hear how Zephaniah proclaims that, though all else be fraud, the Lord is righteous in the midst of us^ He doth not let Himself fail, that the resigned heart and the humble, the just and the pure heart, is imperishable, and in the end there is at least peace. Zeph.iii. I4-20] SO AS BY FIRE 73 Epilogue. Verses 14-20, Zephaniah's prophecy was fulfilled. The Day of the Lord came, and the people met their judgment. The Remnant survived — a folk poor and humble. To them, in the new estate and temper of their life, came a new song from God — perhaps it was nearly a hundred years after Zephaniah had spoken — and they added it to his prophecies. It came in with wonderful fitness, for it was the song of the redeemed, whom he had foreseen, and it tuned his book, severe and simple, to the full harmony of prophecy, so that his book might take a place in the great choir of Israel — the diapason of that full salvation which no one man, but only the experience of centuries, could achieve. Sing out, O daughter of Zion ! shout aloud, O Israel ! Rejoice and be jubilant with all thy ^ heart, daughter of Jerusalem ! Jehovah hath set aside thy judgments^ He hath turned thy foes. King of Israel, Jehovah is in thy midst; thou shall not see ^ evil any more. In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem^ Fear not. O Zion, let not thy hands droop ! Jehovah, thy God, in the midst of thee is mighty ; * He will save, He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will make new ^ His love, He will exult over thee with singing. ' Heb. the. 2 -q^^S^'p, But Wellhausen reads Tj^DSitJ'P, thine adversaries: cf. Job ix. 15. 3 Reading '•N"in (with LXX., Wellhausen and Schwally) for ''^5T];l of the Hebrew text, fear. * Lit. hero, mighty man. * Heb. will be silent in, ^'^yyi^ but not in harmony with the next clause. LXX. and Syr. render will make new, which translates K^nfl""^ a form that does not elsewhere occur, though that is no objection to 74 THE TWELVE PROPHETS The scattered of thy congregation ^ have I gathered — thine"^ are they, . . .^ reproach upon her. Behold, I am about to do all for thy sake at that time,^ and I will rescue the lame and the outcast will I bring in^ and I will make them for renown and fame whose shame is in the whole earth.^ In that time I will bring you in^ even in the time that I gather you^ For I will set you for fame and renown among all the peoples of the earth, when I turn again your captivity before your eyes, saith Jehovah^ finding it in Zephaniah, or tJ^lin^. Hitzig : He makes new things in His love. Buhl : He renews His love. Schwally suggests mn'', He rejoices in His love. ' LXX. hi the days of thy festival, which it takes with the previous verse. The Heb. construction is ungrammatical, though not unpre- cedented— the construct state before a preposition. Besides ''J13 is obscure in meaning. It is a Ni. pt. for 11313 from H J**, to be sad : cf. the Pi. in Lam. iii. 33. But the Hiphil n3in in 2 Sam. xx. 13, followed (as here) by |D, means to thrust away from, and" that is probably the sense here. ^ LXX. thine oppressed msicc. governed by the preceding verb, which in LXX. begins the verse. ^ The Heb., HNIE^D^ burden of, is unintelligible. Wellhausen pro- poses Dn''i?i( riNc^p. * This rendering is only a venture in the almost impossible task of restoring the text of the clause. As it stands the Heb. runs, Behold, I am about to do, or deal, with thine oppressors (which Hitzig and Ewald accept). Schwally points "?])3yp (active) as a passive, "^j.^ll^P, thine oppressed. LXX. has t'Soi) e7cb Trotw ev . NAHUM 75 IVoe to the City of Blood, All of her guile, robbery-full, ceaseless rapine ! Hark the whip, And the rumbling of wheels ! Horses at the gallop, And the rattling dance of the chariot ! Cavalry at the charge, Flash of sabres, and lightning of lances ! 16 CHAPTER VI THE BOOK OF NAHUM THE Book of Nahum consists of a double title and three odes. The title runs Oracle of Niniveh : Book of the Vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. The three odes, eager and passionate pieces, are all of them appar- ently vibrant to the impending fall of Assyria. The first, chap. i. with the possible inclusion of chap. ii. 2,^ is general and theological, affirming God's power of vengeance and the certainty of the overthrow of His enemies. The second, chap. ii. with the omission of ver. 2,^ and the third, chap, iii., can hardly be disjoined; they both present a vivid picture of the siege, the storm and the spoiling of Niniveh. The introductory questions, which title and contents start, are in the main three : i. The position of Elkosh, to which the title assigns the prophet ; 2. The authenticity of chap. i. ; 3. The date of chaps, ii., iii. : to which siege of Niniveh do they refer ? ^ In the English version, but in the Hebrew chap. ii. vv. i and 3 ; for the Hebrew text divides chap. i. from chap. ii. differently from the English, which follows the Greek. The Hebrew begins chap. ii. with what in the English and Greek is the fifteenth verse of chap. i. : Beholdy upon the mountains, etc. ^ In the English text, but in the Hebrew with the omission of w. I and 3 : see previous note, 77 78 THE TWELVE PROPHETS I. The Position of Elkosh. The title calls Nahum the Elkoshite — that is, native or citizen of Elkosh.-^ Three positions have been claimed for this place, which is not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. The first we take is the modern Al-Kush, a town still flourishing about twenty-four miles to the north of the site of Niniveh,^ with "no fragments of antiquity" about it, but possessing a " simple plaster box," which Jews, Christians and Mohammedans alike reverence as the tomb of Nahum.^ There is no evidence that Al-Kush, a name of Arabic form, is older than the Arab period, while the tradition which locates the tomb there is not found before the sixteenth century of our era, but on the contrary Nahum's grave was pointed out to Benjamin of Tudela in 1165 at 'Ain Japhata, on the south of Babylon.^ The tradition that the prophet lived and died at Al-Kush is therefore due to the similarity of the name to that of Nahum's Elkosh, as well as to the fact that Niniveh was the subject of his prophesying.'^ In his book there is j no trace of proof for the assertion that Nahum was a descendant of the ten tribes exiled in 721 to the region to the north of Al-Kush. He prophesies for Judah alone. Nor does he show any more knowledge of Niniveh than her ancient fame must have scattered 1 Other meanings have been suggested, but are impossible. - So it lies on Billerbeck's map in Delitzsch and Haupt's Beitrage zur Assyr.^ III. Smith's Bible Dictionary puts it at only 2 m. N. of Mosul. 8 Laj-ard, Niniveh and its Remains, I. 233, 3rd ed., 1 849. •* Bohn's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 102. ^ Just as they show Jonah's tomb at Niniveh itself. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 79 to the limits of the world. ^ We might as well argue from chap. iii. 8-10 that Nahum had visited Thebes of Egypt. The second tradition of the position of Elkosh is older. In his commentary on Nahum Jerome says that in his day it still existed, a petty village of Galilee, under the name of Helkesei,^ or Elkese, and apparently with an established reputation as the town of Nahum.^ But the book itself bears no symptom of its author's connection with Galilee, and although it was quite possible for a prophet of that period to have lived there, it is not very probable.* A third tradition places Elkosh in the south of Judah. A Syriac version of the accounts of the prophets, which are ascribed to Epiphanius,^ describes Nahum as "of Elkosh beyond Bet Gabre, of the tribe of Simeon " ; ^ and * See above, p. 18. ^ Just as in Micah's case Jerome calls his birthplace Moresheth by the adjective Morasthi, so with equal carelessness he calls Elkosh by the adjective with the article Ha-elkoshi, the Elkoshite. Jerome's words are : " Quum Elcese usque hodie in Galilea viculus sit, parvus quidem et vix ruinis veterum sedificiorum indicans vestigia, sed tamen notus Judaeis et mihi quoque a circumducente monstratus " (in Prol. ad Prophetiam Nachumi). In the Onomasticon Jerome gives the name as Elcese, Eusebius as 'EX/cecre, but without defining the position. ^ This Elkese has been identified, though not conclusively, with the modern El Kauze near Ramieh, some seven miles W. of Tibnin. * Cf. Kuenen, § 75, n, 5 ; Davidson, p. 12 (2). Capernaum, which the Textus Receptus gives as Kaireppao^/j,, but most authorities as Kacpapvaovjn and the Peshitto as Kaphar Nahum, obviously means Village of Nahum, and both Hitzig and Knobel looked for Elkosh in it. See Hi'sf. Geog., p. 456. Against the Galilean origin of Nahum it is usual to appeal to John vii. 52 : Search and see that out of Galilee ariseth no prophet ; but this is not decisive, for Jonah came out of Galilee. ^ Though perhaps falsely. ' This occurs in the Syriac translation of the Old Testament by Paul 8o THE TWELVE PROPHETS it may be noted that Cyril of Alexandria says ^ that Elkese was a village in the country of the Jews. This tradition is superior to the first in that there is no appar- ent motive for its fabrication, and to the second in so far as Judah was at the time of Nahum a much more probable home for a prophet than Galilee ; nor does the book give any references except such as might be made by a Judaean.^ No modern place-name, however, can be suggested with any certainty as the echo of Elkosh. Umm Lakis, which has been proved not to be Lachish, contains the same radicals, and some six and a quarter miles east from Beit-Jibrin at the upper end of the Wady es Sur there is an ancient well with the name Bir el Kus.^ of Telia, 617 A.D., in which the notices of Epiphanius (Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus a.d. 367) or Pseudepiphanius are attached to their respective prophets. It was first communicated to the Z.D.P.V., I. 122 ff., by Dr. Nestle : cf. Ht'si. Geog., p. 231, n. i. The previously known readings of the passage were either geographically impossible, as "He came from Elkesei beyond Jordan, towards Begabar of the tribe of Simeon " (so in Paris edition, 1622, of the works of St. Epiphanius, Vol. II., p. 147 : cf. Migne, Pair. Gr., XLIII. 409) ; or based on a misreading of the title of the book : " Nahum son of Elkesaios was of Jesbe of the tribe of Simeon " ; or indefinable : " Nahum was of Elkesem beyond Betabarem of the tribe of Simeon " ; these last two from recensions of Epiphanius published in 1855 by Tischendorf (quoted by Davidson, p. 13). In the I,Tixvp^f rwv IB' Upocp-OTiov Kal 'Iffaiov, attributed to Hesychius, Presbyter of Jerusalem, who died 428 oi* 433 (Migne, Patrologia Gr., XCIII. 1357), it is said that Nahum was airb 'KkKeaelv (Helcesin) trepav rod rriv^apelv cK (pvKrjs "Zvixeibv ; to which has been added a note from Theophylact, 'EXKacrat ir^pav rod 'lopddvov eis Biyaj3pl. > Ad Nahum i. I (Migne, Pair. Gr., LXXI. 780) : KJjfir) dk avrrj travTCOS ttov ttjs 'lovdaicov x^P^^' 2 The selection Bashan, Carmel and Lebanon (i. 4), does not prove northern authorship. ^ tJ'ippX may be (i) a theophoric name = Kosh is God; and Kosh might then be the Edomite deity Dtp whose name is spelt with THE BOOK OF NAHUM 8i 2. The Authenticity of Chap. I. Till recently no one doubted that the three chapters formed a unity. '' Nahum's prophecy," said Kuenen in 1889, "is a whole." In 1891 ^ Cornill affirmed that no questions of authenticity arose in regard to the book; and in 1892 Wellhausen saw in chap. i. an introduction leading "in no awkward way to the proper subject of the prophecy." Meantime, however, Bickell,^ discovering what he thought to be the remains of an alphabetic Psalm in chap. i. 1-7, attempted to reconstruct throughout chap. i. — ii. 3 twenty-two verses, each beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. And, following this, Gunkel in 1893 produced a more full and plausible a Shin on the Assyrian monuments (Baethgen, Beitriige z. Semit. Religionsgeschichte, p. ii; Schrader, K.A.T,'^, pp. 150, 613), and who is probably the same as the Arab deity Kais (Baethgen, id., p. 108) ; and this would suit a position in the south of Judah, in which region we find the majority of place-names compounded with ?i^. Or else (2) the i< is prosthetic, as in the place-names 2''T35< on the Phoenician coast, P)5i^DX in Southern Canaan, ^^K^^?, etc. In this case we might find its equivalent in the form S^lp? (cf. l^tDJ< 3''T3) • but no such form is now extant or recorded at any previous period. The form Lakis would not suit. On Bir el Kus see Robinson, B.R., III., p. 14, and Guenn,Judee, III., p. 341. Bir el Kus means Well of the Bow, or, according to Guerin, of the Arch, from ruins that stand by it. The position, east of Beit-Jibrin, is unsuitable ; for the early . Christian texts quoted in the previous note fix it beyond, presumably south or south-west of Beit-Jibrin, and in the tribe of Simeon. The error '* tribe of Simeon '' does not matter, for the same fathers place Bethzecharias, the alleged birthplace of Habakkuk, there. ' Einleitung, ist ed. - Who seems to have owed the hint to a quotation by Delitzsch on Psalm ix. from G. Frohnmeyer to the effect that there were traces of " alphabetic " verses in chap, i., at least in vv. 3-7. See Bickell's Beiirdge sur Semit, Metrik, Separatabdruck, Wien, 1894. VOL. II. 6 82 THE TWELVE PROPHETS reconstruction of the same scheme.^ By radical emen- dations of the text, by excision of what he beHeves to be glosses and by altering the order of many of the verses, Gunkel seeks to produce twenty-three distichs, twenty of which begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, two are wanting, while in the first three letters of the twenty-third, , he finds very probable the name of the author, Shobai or Shobi.^ He takes this ode, therefore, to be an eschatological Psalm of the later Judaism, which from its theological bearing has been thought suitable as an introduction to Nahum's genuine prophecies. The text of chap, i.— ii. 4 has been badly mauled and is clamant for reconstruction of some kind. As it lies, there are traces of an alphabetical arrangement as far as the beginning of ver. 9,^ and so far Gunkel's changes are comparatively simple. Many of his emen- dations are in themselves and apart from the alphabetic scheme desirable. They get rid of difficulties and improve the poetry of the passage.^ His reconstruction is always clever and as a whole forms a wonderfully spirited poem. But to have produced good or poetical Hebrew is not conclusive proof of having recovered the original, and there are obvious objections to the 1 Z.A.T.W., 1893, pp. 223 ff. 2 Cf. Ezra ii. 42 ; Neh. vii. 45 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 27. 3 Ver. I is title ; 2 begins with N ; 3 is found in nSIDD, 36; 3 in ")y"l)l, 4; 1 is wanting — Bickell proposes to substitute a New-Hebrew word p^^, Gunkel 1^1, for "p^DN, 4^; H in Dnn, 5«; 1 in NS^Tll, 56 ; T by removing ''JD*? of ver. 6a to the end of the clause (and reading it there VJS'?), and so leaving IDUT as the first word ; H in inDPI in 66; ID in lltD, ^a', > hy eliding 1 from yn>1, 76 ; 3 in n7D, 8 ; ^ is wanting, though Gunkel seeks to supply it by taking 9c, beginning vh, with 96, before 9a ; D begins 9«. ■* See below in the translation. THE BOOK OF NAHUM %s process. Several of the proposed changes are unnatural in themselves and unsupported by anything except the exigencies of the scheme ; for example, 2b and 3a are dismissed as a gloss only because, if they be retained, the Aleph verse is two bars too long. The gloss, Gunkel thinks, was introduced to mitigate the absoluteness of the declaration that Jehovah is a God of wrath and vengeance ; but this is not obvious and would hardly have been alleged apart from the needs of the alphabetic scheme. In order to find a Daleth, it is quite arbitrary to say that the first bb'O^ in 46 is redundant in face of the second, and that a word beginning with Daleth originally filled its place, but was removed because it was a rare or difficult word ! The re-arrangement of 7 and 8« is very clever, and reads as if it were right ; but the next effort, to get a verse beginning with Lamed^ is of the kind by which anything might be proved. These, however, are nothing to the difficulties which vv. 9-14 and chap. ii. i, 3, present to an alphabetic scheme, or to the means which Gunkel takes to surmount them. He has to re-arrange the order of the verses,^ and of the words within the verses. The distichs beginning with Nun and Koph are wanting, or at least undecipherable. To provide one with initial Resh the interjection has to be removed from the opening of chap. ii. I, and the verse made to begin with hlir\ and to run thus : the feet of him that bringeth good news on the mountains; behold him that publisheth peace. Other unlikely changes will be noticed when we come to the translation. Here we may ask the question : if the passage was originally alphabetic, that is, furnished with so fixed and easily recognised a frame, why has it so fallen to pieces ? And again, if it has so fallen * As thus: 9a, 116, 12 (but unintelligible), 10, 13, 14, ii. i, 3. 84 ' THE TWELVE PROPHETS to pieces, is it possible that it can be restored ? The many arbitrarinesses of Gunkel's able essay would seem to imply that it is not. Dr. Davidson says : " Even if it should be assumed that an alphabetical poem lurks under chap, i., the attempt to restore it, just as in Psalm X., can never be more than an academic exercise." Little is to be learned from the language. Well- hausen, who makes no objection to the genuineness of the passage, thinks that about ver. 7 we begin to catch the familiar dialect of the Psalms. Gunkel finds a want of originality in the language, with many touches that betray connection not only with the Psalms but with late eschatological literature. But when we take one by one the clauses of chap, i., we discover very few parallels with the Psalms, which are not at the same time parallels with Jeremiah's or some earlier writings. That the prophecy is vague, and with much of the air of the later eschatology about it, is no reason for removing it from an age in which we have already seen prophecy beginning to show the same apocalyptic temper.^ Gunkel denies any reference in ver. gb to the approaching fall of Niniveh, although that is seen by Kuenen, Wellhausen, Konig and others, and he omits ver. 11 a, in which most read an allusion to Sennacherib. Therefore, while it is possible that a later poem has been prefixed to the genuine prophecies of Nahum, and the first chapter supplies many provocations to belief in such a theory, this has not been proved, and the able essays of proof have much against them. The question is open.^ ^ See above on Zephaniah, pp. 49 ff. ^ Cornill, in the 2nd ed. of his Einleitung, has accepted Gunkel's and Bickell's main contentions. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 85 3. The Date of Chaps. II. and III. We turn now to the date of the Book apart from this prologue. It was written after a great overthrow of the Egyptian Thebes^ and when the overthrow of Niniveh was imminent. Now Thebes had been devas- tated by Assurbanipal about 664 (we know of no later overthrow), and Niniveh fell finally about 607. Nahum flourished, then, somewhere between 664 and 607." Some critics, feeling in his description of the fall of Thebes the force of a . recent impression, have placed his prophesying immediately after that, or about 660.^ But this is too far away from the fall of Niniveh. In 660 the power of Assyria was unthreatened. Nor is 652, the year of the revolt of Babylon, Egypt and the princes of Palestine, a more likely date.^ For although in that year Assyrian supremacy ebbed from Egypt never to return, Assurbanipal quickly reduced Elam, Babylon and all Syria. Nahum, on the other hand, represents the very centre of the empire as threatened. The land of Assyria is apparently already invaded (iii. 1 3, etc.). Niniveh, if not invested, must immediately be so, and that by forces too great for resistance. Her mixed populace already show signs of breaking up. Within, as without, her doom is sealed. All this implies not only the advance of an enormous force upon Niniveh, but the reduction of her people to the last stage of ' iii. 8-10. 2 The description of the fall of No-Amon precludes the older view almost universally held before the discovery of Assurbanipal's destruc- tion of Thebes, viz. that Nahum prophesied in the days of Hezekiah or in the earlier years of Manasseh (Lightfoot, Pusey, Nagelsbach, etc.). ^ So Schrader, Volck in Herz. Real. Enc, and others. * It is favoured by Winckler, A.T. Unterstteh., pp. 127 f. 86 THE TWELVE PROPHETS hopelessness. Now, as we have seen/ Assyria proper was thrice overrun. The Scythians poured across her about 626, but there is no proof that they threatened Niniveh.^ A httle after Assurbanipal's death in 625, the Medes under King Phraortes invaded Assyria, but Phraortes was slain and his son Kyaxares called away by an invasion of his own country. Herodotus says that this was after he had defeated the Assyrians in a battle and had begun the siege of Niniveh,^ but before he had succeeded in reducing the city. After a time he subdued or assimilated the Medes, and then invest- ing Niniveh once more, about 607, in two years he took and destroyed her. To which of these two sieges by Kyaxares are we to assign the Book of Nahum ? Hitzig, Kuenen, Cornill and others incline to the first on the ground that Nahum speaks of the yoke of Assyria as still heavy on Judah, though about to be lifted. They argue that by 608, when King Josiah had already felt himself free enough to extend his reforms into Northern Israel, and dared to dispute Necho's passage across Esdraelon, the Jews must have been conscious that they had nothing more to fear from Assyria, and Nahum could hardly have written as he does in i. 13, / will break his yoke from off thee and burst thy bonds in sunder} But this is not conclusive, » Above, pp. 15 f. ; 19, 22 flf. 2 This in answer to Jeremias in Delitzsch's and Haupt's Beitrage zur Assyriologie, III. 96. ^ I. 103. ^ Hitzig's other reason, that the besiegers of Niniveh are described by Nahum in ii. 3 ff. as single, which was true of the siege in 625 c, but not of that of 607-6, when the Chaldeans joined the Medes, is disposed of by the proof on p. 22 above, that even in 607-6 the Medes carried on the siege alone. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 87 for first, as we have seen, it is not certain that i. 13 is from Nahum himself, and second^ if it be from himself, he might as well have written it about 608 as about 625, for he speaks not from the feelings of any single year, but with the impression upon him of the whole epoch of Assyrian servitude then drawing to a close. The eve of the later siege as a date for the book is, as Davidson remarks/ "well within the verge of possi- bility," and some critics prefer it because in their opinion Nahum's descriptions thereby acquire greater reality and naturalness. But this is not convincing, for if Kyaxares actually began the siege of Niniveh about 625, Nahum's sense of the imminence of her fall is perfectly natural. Wellhausen indeed denies that earlier siege. " Apart from Herodotus," he says, " it would never have occurred to anybody to doubt that Nahum's prophecy coincided with the fall of Niniveh."'"^ This is true, for it is to Herodotus alone that we owe the tradition of the earlier siege. But what if we believe Herodotus ? In that case, it is impossible to come to a decision as between the two sieges. With our present scanty knowledge of both, the prophecy of Nahum suits either equally well.^ Fortunately it is not necessary to come to a decision. ' Page 17. ^ In commenting on chap, i. 9; p. 156 oi Kleine Propheten. ^'The phrase which is so often appealed to by both sides, i. 9, Jehovah niaketh a complete end, not twice shall trouble arise, is really inconclusive. Hitzig maintains that if Nahum had written this after the first and before the second siege of Niniveh he would have had to say, "not thrice shall trouble arise" This is not conclusive : the prophet is looking only at the future and thinking of it — not twice again shall trouble rise ; and if there were really two sieges of Niniveh, would the words not twice have been suffered to remain, if 88 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Nahum, we cannot too often insist, expresses the feelings neither of this nor of that decade in the reign of Josiah, but the whole volume of hope, wrath and just passion of vengeance which had been gathering for more than a century and which at last broke into exulta- tion when it became certain that Niniveh was falling. That suits the eve of either siege by Kyaxares. Till we learn a little more about the first siege and how far it proceeded towards a successful result, perhaps we ought to prefer the second. And of course those who feel that Nahum writes not in the future but the present tense of the details of Niniveh's overthrow, must prefer the second. That the form as well as the spirit of the Book of Nahum is poetical is proved by the familiar marks of poetic measure — the unusual syntax, the frequent absence of the article and particles, the presence of eUiptic forms and archaic and sonorous ones. In the two chapters on the siege of Niniveh the lines are short and quick, in harmony with the dashing action they echo. As we have seen, the text of chap. i. is very un- certain. The subject of the other two chapters involves the use of a number of technical and some foreign terms, of the meaning of most of which we are they had been a confident prediction before the first siege ? Besides, the meaning of the phrase is not certain ; it may be only a general statement corresponding to what seems a general statement in the first clause of the verse. Kuenen and others refer the trouble not to that which is about to afflict Assyria, but to the long slavery and slaughter which Judah has suffered at Assyria's hands. Davidson leaves it ambiguous. THE BOOK OF NAHUM 89 ignorant.^ There are apparently some glosses ; here and there the text is obviously disordered. We get the usual help, and find the usual faults, in the -Septuagint ; they will be noticed in the course of the translation. » Technical military terms : ii. 2, miVO ; 4, m^PS (?) ; 4, ibl^in ; 6, pDH; iii. 3, rhv^iiy Probably foreign terms: ii. 8, 3Vn ; lii. 17, intJD. Certainly foreign : iii. 17, T'lDSD. CHAPTER VII THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD Nahum i THE prophet Nahum, as we have seen/ arose pro- bably in Judah, if not about the same time as Zephaniah and Jeremiah, then a few years later. Whether he prophesied before or after the great Reform of 621 we have no means of deciding. His book does not reflect the inner history, character or merits of his generation. His sole interest is the fate of Niniveh. Zephaniah had also doomed the Assyrian capital, yet he was much more concerned with Israel's unworthiness of the opportunity presented to them. The yoke of Asshur, he saw, was to be broken, but the same cloud which was bursting from the north upon Niniveh must overwhelm the incorrigible people of Jehovah. For this Nahum has no thought. His heart, for all its bigness, holds room only for the bitter memories, the baffled hopes, the unappeased hatreds of a hundred years. And that is why we need not be anxious to fix his date upon one or other of the shifting phases of Israel's history during that last quarter of the seventh century. For he represents no single movement of his fickle people's progress, but > Above, pp. 78 ff,, 85 ff. 90 Nahumi.] THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD 91 the passion of the whole epoch then drawing to a close. Nahum's book is one great At Last ! And, therefore, while Nahum is a worse prophet than Zephaniah, with less conscience and less in- sight, he is a greater poet, pouring forth the exultation of a people long enslaved, who see their tyrant ready for destruction. His language is strong and brilliant ; his rhythm rumbles and rolls, leaps and flashes, Hke the horsemen and chariots he describes. It is a great pity the text is so corrupt. If the original lay before us, and that full knowledge of the times which the excavation of ancient Assyria may still yield to us, we might judge Nahum to be an even greater poet than we do. We have seen that there are some reasons for doubt- ing whether he wrote the first chapter of the book,^ but no one questions its fitness as an introduction to the exultation over Niniveh's fall in chapters ii. and iii. The chapter is theological, affirming those general principles of Divine Providence, by which the over- throw of the tyrant is certain and God's own people are assured of deliverance. Let us place ourselves among the people, who for so long a time had been thwarted, crushed and demorahsed by the most brutal empire which was ever suffered to roll its force across the world, and we shall sympathise with the author, who for the moment will feel nothing about his God, save that He is a God of vengeance. Like the grief of a bereaved man, the vengeance of an enslaved people has hours sacred to itself. And this people had such a God ! Jehovah must punish the tyrant, else were He untrue. He had been patient, and patient, as a verse 1 See above, pp. 81 flf. 92 THE TWELVE PROPHETS seems to hint/ just because He was omnipotent, but in the end He must rise to judgment. He was God of heaven and earth, and it is the old physical proofs of His power, so often appealed to by the peoples of the East, for they feel them as we cannot, which this hymn calls up as Jehovah sweeps to the overthrow of the oppressor. Before such power of wrath who may stand ? What think ye of Jehovah ? The God who works with such ruthless, absolute force in nature will not relax in the fate He is preparing for Niniveh. He is one who maketh titter destruction, not needing to raise up His forces a second time, and as stubble before fire so His foes go down before Him. No half- measures are His, Whose are the storm, the drought and the earthquake. Such is the sheer religion of the Proem to the Book of Nahum — thoroughly Oriental in its sense of God's method and resources of destruction ; very Jewish, and very natural to that age of Jewish history, in the bursting of its long pent hopes of revenge. We of the West might express these hopes differently. We should not attribute so much personal passion to the Avenger. With our keener sense of law, we should emphasise the slowness of the process, and select for its illustration the forces of decay rather than those of sudden ruin. But we must remember the crashing times in which the Jews lived. The world was break- ing up. The elements were loose, and all that God's own people could hope for was the bursting of their yoke, with a little shelter in the day of trouble. The elements were loose, but amidst the blind crash the little people knew that Jehovah knew them. ' Ver. 3, if the reading be correct. Nahumi.] THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD 93 A God jealous and avenging is Jehovah ; Jehovah is avenger and lord of wrath ; Vengeful is Jehovah towards His enemies, And implacable He to His foes. Jehovah is long-suffering and great in mighty Yet He will not absolve. Jehovah I His way is in storm and in hurricane, And clouds are the dust of His feet? He curbeth the sea, and drieth it up ; All the streams hath He parched. Withered^ be Bashan and Carmel ; The bloom of Lebanon is withered. Mountains have quaked before Him, And the hills have rolled down. Earth heaved at His presence, The world and all its inhabitants. Before His rage who may stand. Or who abide in the glow of His anger ? His wrath pours forth like fire, And rocks are rent before Him. Good is Jehovah to them that wait upon Him in the day of trouble,"^ And He knoweth them that trust Him. With an overwhelming flood He makes an end of His rebels. And His foes He comes down on ^ with darkness. ' Gunkel amends to in mercy to make the parallel exact. But see above, p. 82. - Gunkel's emendation is quite unnecessary here. 8 See above, p. 83. * So LXX. Heb. = for a stronghold in the day of trouble. ^ Thrusts into, Wellhausen, reading f]n3^ or S^T^ for P)^"l\ LXX. darkness shall pursue. 94 THE TWELVE PROPHETS ' What think ye of Jehovah ? He is one that makes utter destruction ; Not twice need trouble arise. For though they be like plaited thorns^ And sodden as ... ,^ They shall be consumed like dry stubble. Came there not ^ out of thee one to plan evil against Jehovah, A counsellor of mischief? ^ Thus saith Jehovah^ . . . many waters,"^ yet shall they be cut off and pass away, and I will so humble thee that I need humble thee ^ no more;^ and Jehovah hath ordered concerning thee, that no more of thy seed be sown : from the house of thy God, I will cut off graven and molten image. I will make thy sepulchre . . .^ ' Heb. and R.V. drenched as with their drink. LXX. like a tangled yew. The text is corrupt. ^ The superfluous word N7t0 at the end of ver. lo Wellhausen reads as N?!! at the beginning of ver. 1 1. ^ Usually taken as Sennacherib. * The Hebrew is given by the R.V. though they be in full strength and likewise many. LXX. Thus saith Jehovah ruling over many waters, reading D*"!"! D''D 7^'0 and omitting the first pi. Similarly Syr. Th^ts saith Jehovah of the heads of many waters, D''3'1 D"'JD vC'D /Xl. Wellhausen, substituting D''?0 for the first pi, translates, Let the great ivaters be ever so full, they will yet all . . .1 (misprint here) and vanish For 13y read VO.'ii with LXX., borrowing 1 from next word. * Lit. and I will afflict thee, I will not afflict thee again. This rendering implies that Niniveh is the object. The A.V., though I have afflicted thee I will afflict thee no more, refers to Israel. ^ Omit ver. 13 and run 14 on to 12. For the curious alternation now occurs : Assyria in one verse, Judah in the other. Assyria : i. 12, 14, ii. 2 (Heb.; Eng. ii. i), 48". Judah: i. 13, ii. i (Heb.; Eng. i. 15), 3 (Heb.; Eng. 2). Remove these latter, as Wellhausen does, and the verses on Assyria remain a connected and orderly whole. So in the text above. ■^ Syr. make it thy sepulchre. The Hebrew left untranslated above Nahumi.] THE VENGEANCE OF THE LORD 95 Disentangled from the above verses are three which plainly refer not to Assyria but to Judah. How they came to be woven among the others we cannot tell. Some of them appear applicable to the days of Josiah after the great Reform. And now will I break his yoke from upon thee, And burst thy bonds asunder. Lo, upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, That publisheth peace ! Keep, thy feasts, O Judah, Fulfil thy vows : For no more shall the wicked attempt to pass through Cut off is the whole of him. ^ For Jehovah hath turned the pride of Jacob, Like to the pride of Israel : ^ For the plunderers plundered them. And destroyed their vinebranches. might be rendered /o^ thou art vile, Bickell amends into dunghills. Lightfoot, Chron. Temp, et Ord. Text V.T. in Collected Works, I. 109, takes this as a prediction of Sennacherib's murder in the temple, an interpretation which demands a date for Nahum under either Hezekiah or Manasseh. So Pusey also, p. 357. • LXX. destruction, .1^3 for xb^. - Davidson : restoreth the excellency of Jacob, as the excellency of Israel, but when was the latter restored ? CHAPTER VIII THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH Nahum ii., iii THE scene now changes from the presence and awful arsenal of the Almighty to the historical consummation of His vengeance. Nahum foresees the siege of Niniveh. Probably the Medes have already overrun Assyria.^ The Old Lion has withdrawn to his inner den, and is making his last stand. The suburbs are full of the enemy, and the great walls which made the inner city one vast fortress are invested. Nahum describes the details of the assault. Let us try, before we follow him through them, to form some picture of Assyria and her capital at this time.^ ' See above, pp. 22 ff. * The authorities are very full. First there is M. Botta's huge work Monument de Ninive, Paris, 5 vols., 1845. Then must be mentioned the work of which we availed ourselves in describing Babylon in Isaiah xl. — Ixvi., Expositor's Bible, pp. 52 ff. : "Memoirs by Com- mander James Felix Jones, I.N.," in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, No. XLIII., New Series, 1857. It is good to find that the careful and able observations of Commander Jones, too much neglected in his own country, have had justice done them by the German Colonel Billerbeck in the work about to be cited. Then there is the invaluable Niniveh and its Remains, by Layard. There are also the works of Rawlinson and George Smith. And recently Colonel Billerbeck, founding on these and other works, has published an admirable monograph (lavishly illustrated by maps and pictures), 96 Kahumii.,iii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH gj As we have seen/ the Assyrian Empire began about 625 to shrink to the Hmits of Assyria proper, or Upper Mesopotamia, within the Euphrates on the south- west, the mountain-range of Kurdistan on the north- east, the river Chabor on the north-west and the Lesser Zab on the south-east.^ This is a territory of nearly a hundred and fifty miles from north to south, and rather more than two hundred and fifty from east to west. To the south of it the Viceroy of Babylon, Nabopolassar, held practically independent sway over Lower Mesopotamia, if he did not command as well a large part of the Upper Euphrates Valley. On the north the Medes were urgent, holding at least the farther ends of the passes through the Kurdish mountains, if they had not already penetrated these to their southern issues. The kernel of the Assyrian territory was the triangle, two of whose sides are represented by the Tigris and the Greater Zab, the third by the foot of the Kurdistan mountains. It is a fertile plain, with some low hills. To-day the level parts of it are covered by a large number of villages and well-cultivated fields. The more frequent mounds of ruin attest in ancient not only upon the military state of Assyria proper and of Niniveh at this period, but upon the whole subject of Assyrian fortification and art of besieging, as well as upon the course of the Median invasions. It forms the larger part of an article to which Dr. Alfred Jeremias contributes an introduction, and reconstruction with notes of chaps, ii. and iii. of the Book of Nahum : " Der Untergang Niniveh's und die Weissagungschrift des Nahum von Elkosh," in Vol. III. of Beitrdge zur Assyrtologie und Semitischen Sprachwissen- schaft, edited by Friedrich DeUtzsch and Paul Haupt, with the support of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, U.S.A. : Leipzig, 1895. ' Pages 20 f. 2 Colonel Billerbeck (p. 115) thinks that the south-east frontier at this time lay more to the north, near the Greater Zab, VOL. IL 7 98 THE TWELVE PROPHETS times a still greater population. At the period of which we are treating, the plains must have been covered by an almost continuous series of towns. At either end lay a group of fortresses. The southern was the ancient capital of Assyria, Kalchu, now Nimrud, about six miles to the north of the confluence of the Greater Zab and the Tigris. The northern, close by the present town of Khorsabad, was the great fortress and palace of Sargon, Dur-Sargina : ^ it covered the roads upon Niniveh from the north, and standing upon the upper reaches of the Choser protected Niniveh's water supply. But besides these there were scattered upon all the main roads and round the frontiers of the territory a number of other forts, towers and posts, the ruins of many of which are still considerable, but others have perished without leaving any visible traces. The roads thus protected drew in upon Niniveh from all directions. The chief of those, along which the Medes and their allies would advance from the east and north, crossed the Greater Zab, or came down through the Kurdistan mountains upon the citadel of Sargon. Two of them were distant enough from the latter to relieve the invaders from the necessity of taking it, and Kalchu lay far to the south of all of them. The brunt of the first defence of the land would therefore fall upon the smaller fortresses. Niniveh itself lay upon the Tigris between Kalchu and Sargon's city, just where the Tigris is met by the Choser. Low hills descend from the north upon the very site of the fortress, and then curve east and south, bow-shaped, to draw west again upon the Tigris at ^ First excavated by M. Botta, 1842— 1845. See also George Smith, Assyr. Disc, pp. 98 f. Nahum ii., lii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH 99 the south end of the city. To the east of the latter they leave a level plain, some two and a half miles by one and a half. These hills appear to have been covered by several forts. The city itself was four- sided, lying lengthwise to the Tigris and cut across its breadth by the Chosen The circumference was about seven and a half miles, enclosing the largest fortified space in Western Asia, and capable of holding a population of three hundred thousand. The western wall, rather over two and a half miles long, touched the Tigris at either end, but between there lay a broad, bow-shaped stretch of land, probably in ancient times, as now, free of buildings. The north-western wall ran up from the Tigris for a mile and a quarter to the low ridge which entered the city at its northern corner. From this the eastern wall, with a curve upon it, ran down in face of the eastern plain for a little more than three miles, and was joined to the western by the short southern wall of not quite half a mile. The ruins of the western wall stand from ten to twenty, those of the others from twenty-five to sixty, feet above the natural surface, with here and there the still higher remains of towers. There were several gates, of which the chief were one in the northern and two in the eastern wall. Round all the walls except the western ran moats about a hundred and fifty feet broad — not close up to the foot of the walls, but at a distance of some sixty feet. Water was supplied by the Choser to all the moats south of it ; those to the north were fed fi-om a canal which entered the city near its northern corner. At these and other points one can still trace the remains of huge dams, batardeaux and sluices ; and the moats might be emptied by opening at either end of the western wall other dams, which kept back the waters THE TWELVE PROPHETS from the bed of the Tigris. Beyond its moat, the eastern wall was protected north of the Choser by a large outwork covering its gate, and south of the Choser by another outwork, in shape the segment of a circle, and consisting of a double Hne of fortification more than five hundred yards long, of which the inner wall was almost as high as the great wall itself, but the outer considerably lower. Again, in front of this and in face of the eastern plain was a third line of fortification, consisting of a low inner wall and a colossal outer wall still rising to a height of fifty feet, with a moat one hundred and fifty feet broad between them. On the south this third line was closed by a large fortress. Upon the trebly fortified city the Medes drew in from east and north, far away from Kalchu and able to avoid even Dur-Sargina. The other fortresses on the frontier and the approaches fell into their hands, says Nahum, like ripe fniit} He cries to Niniveh to prepare for the siege. ^ Military authorities ^ suppose that the Medes directed their main attack upon the northern corner of the city. Here they would be upon a level with its highest point, and would command the water- works by which most of the moats were fed. Their flank, too, would be protected by the ravines of the Choser. Nahum describes fighting in the suburbs before the assault of the walls, and it was just here, according to some authorities,^ that the famous suburbs of Niniveh lay, out upon the canal and the road to Khorsabad. All the open fighting which Nahum ' 111. 12. 8 iii. 14. ' See Jones and Billerbeck. * Delitzsch places the num Ti; of Gen. x. II, the "ribit Nina" of the inscriptions, on the north-east of Niniveh. Nahum ii., iii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH loi foresees would take place in these outplaces and broad streets ^ — the mustering of the red ranks, ^ the prancing horses ^ and rattling chariots ^ and cavalry at the charge!" Beaten there the Assyrians would retire to the great walls, and the waterworks would fall into the hands of the besiegers. They would not immediately destroy these, but in order to bring their engines and battering-rams against the walls they would have to lay strong dams across the moats ; the eastern moat has actually been found filled with rubbish in face of a great breach at the north end of its wall. This breach may have been effected not only by the rams but by directing upon the wall the waters of the canal; or farther south the Choser itself, in its spring floods, may have been confined by the besiegers and swept in upon the sluices which regulate its passage through the eastern wall into the city. To this means tradition has assigned the capture of Niniveh,*^ and Nahum perhaps foresees the possibility of it : the gates of the rivers are opened, the palace is dissolved! Now of all this probable progress of the siege Nahum, of course, does not give us a narrative, for he is writing upon the eve of it, and probably, as we have seen, in Judah, with only such knowledge of the position and strength of Niniveh as her fame had scattered across the world. The military details, the muster, the fight- ing in the open, the investment, the assault, he did not need to go to Assyria or to wait for the fall of Niniveh » ii. 4 Eng., 5 Heb. =» Ibid. LXX. 2 ii. 3 Eng., 4 Heb. * iii. 2. = iii. 3. ® It is the waters of the Tigris that the tradition avers to have broken the wall ; but the Tigris itself runs in a bed too low for this : it can only have been the Choser, See both Jones and Billerbeck. ' ii. 6. THE TWELVE PROPHETS to describe as he has done. Assyria herself (and herein Hes much of the pathos of the poem) had made all Western Asia familiar with their horrors for the last two centuries. As we learn from the prophets and now still more from herself, Assyria was the great Besieger of Men. It is siege, siege, siege, which Amos, Hosea and Isaiah tell their people they shall feel : siege and blockade, and that right round the land ! It is siege, irresistible and full of cruelty, which Assyria records as her own glory. Miles of sculpture are covered with masses of troops marching upon some Syrian or Median fortress. Scaling ladders and enormous engines are pushed forward to the walls under cover of a shower of arrows. There are assaults and breaches, panic- stricken and suppliant defenders. Streets and places are strewn with corpses, men are impaled, women led away weeping, children dashed against the stones. The Jews had seen, had felt these horrors for a hundred years, and it is out of their experience of them that Nahum weaves his exultant predictions. The Besieger of the world is at last besieged ; every cruelty he has inflicted upon men is now to be turned upon himself Again and again does Nahum return to the vivid details, — he hears the very whips crack beneath the walls, and the rattle of the leaping chariots ; the end is slaughter, dispersion and a dead waste. ^ ' If the above conception of chaps, ii. and iii. be correct, then there is no need for such a re-arrangement of these verses as has been proposed by Jeremias and Billerbeck. In order to produce a continuous narrative of the progress of the siege, they bring forward iii. 12-15 (describing the fall of the fortresses and gates of the land and the call to the defence of the city), and place it immediately after ii. 2, 4 (the description of the invader) and ii. 5-1 1 (the appearance of chariots in the suburbs of the city, the opening of the floodgates, the flight and the spoiling of the city). But if they believe that the Nahum ii., iii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH 103 Two Other points remain to be emphasised. There is a striking absence from both chapters of any reference to Israel.^ Jehovah of Hosts is mentioned twice in the same formula,- but otherwise the author does not obtrude his nationaUty. It is not in Judah's name he exults, but in that of all the peoples of Western Asia. Niniveh has sold peoples by her harlotries and races by her witchcraft ; it is peoples that shall gaze upon her nakedness and kingdoms upon her shame. Nahum gives voice to no national passions, but to the outraged conscience of mankind. We see here another proof, not only of the large, human heart of prophecy, but of that which in the introduction to these Twelve Prophets we ventured to assign as one of its causes. By crushing all peoples to a common level of despair, by the universal pity which her cruelties excited, Assyria contributed to the development in Israel of the idea of a common humanity.' The other thing to be noticed is Nahum's feeling of the incoherence and mercenariness of the vast popula- tion of Niniveh. Niniveh's command of the world had turned her into a great trading power. Under Assur- banipal the lines of ancient commerce had been diverted so as to pass through her. The immediate result was original gave an orderly account of the progress of the siege, why do they not bring forward also iii. 2 f., which describe the arrival of the foe under the city walls ? The truth appears to be as stated above. We have really two poems against Niniveh, chap. ii. and chap. iii. They do not give an orderly description of the siege, but exult over Niniveh's imminent downfall, with gleams scattered here and there of how this is to happen. Of these "impressions" of the coming siege there are three, and in the order in which we now have them they occur very naturally : ii. 5 ff., iii. 2 f , and iii. 12 ff. ' ii. 2 goes with the previous chapter. See above, pp. 94 f. 2 ii. 13, iii. 5. ^ See above, Vol. I., Chap. IV., especially pp. 54 ff. 104 THE TWELVE PROPHETS an enormous increase of population, such as the world had never before seen within the Hmits of one city. But this had come out of all races and was held together only by the greed of gain. What had once been a firm and vigorous nation of warriors, irresistible in their united impact upon the world, was now a loose aggregate of many peoples, without patriotism, discipline or sense of honour. Nahum likens it to a reservoir of waters,^ which as soon as it is breached must scatter, and leave the city bare. The Second Isaiah said the same of Babylon, to which the bulk of Niniveh's mercenary populace must have fled : — Thus are they grown to thee, they who did weary thee^ Traders of thine from thy youth up ; Each as he could escape have they fled; None is thy helper? The prophets saw the truth about both cities. Their vastness and their splendour were artificial. Neither of them, and Niniveh still less than Babylon, was a natural centre for the world's commerce. When their political power fell, the great lines of trade, which had been twisted to their feet, drew back to more natural courses, and Niniveh in especial became deserted. This is the explanation of the absolute collapse of that mighty city. Nahum's foresight, and the very metaphor in which he expressed it, were thoroughly sound. The population vanished like water. The site bears Httle trace of any disturbance since the ruin by the Medes, except such as has been inflicted by the weather and the wandering tribes around. Mosul, Niniveh's Isaiah xl. — Ixvi, (Expositor's Bible), pp. 197 ff. Nahum ii., iii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH 105 representative to-day, is not built upon it, and is but a provincial town. The district was never meant for anything else. The swift decay of these ancient empires from the climax of their commercial glory is often employed as a warning to ourselves. But the parallel, as the previous paragraphs suggest, is very far from exact. If we can lay aside for the moment the greatest difference of all, in religion and morals, there remain others almost of cardinal importance. Assyria and Babylonia were not filled, like Great Britain, with reproductive races, able to colonise distant lands, and carry every- where the spirit which had made them strong at home. Still more, they did not continue at home to be homo- geneous. Their native forces were exhausted by long and unceasing wars. Their populations, especially in their capitals, were very largely alien and distraught, with nothing to hold them together save their com- mercial interests. They were bound to break up at the first disaster. It is true that we are not without some risks of their peril. No patriot among us can observe without misgiving the large and growing pro- portion of foreigners in that department of our life from which the strength of our defence is largely drawn — our merchant navy. But such a fact is very far from bringing our empire and its chief cities into the fatal condition of Niniveh and Babylon. Our capitals, our commerce, our life as a whole are still British to the core. If we only be true to our ideals of right- eousness and religion, if our patriotism continue moral and sincere, we shall have the power to absorb the foreign elements that throng to us in commerce, and stamp them with our own spirit. We are now ready to follow Nahum's two great io6 THE TWELVE PROPHETS poems delivered on the eve of the Fall of Niniveh. Probably, as we have said, the first of them has lost its original opening. It wants some notice at the outset of the object to which it is addressed : this is indicated only by the second personal pronoun. Other needful comments will be given in footnotes. I. The Hammer^ is come up to thy face ! Hold the rampart ! ^ Keep watch on the way ! Brace the loins ! ^ Pull thyself firmly together! * The shields^ of his heroes are red^ The warriors are in scarlet; ^ Like "' fire are the ... ^ of the chariots in the day of his muster, And the horsemen ^ are prancing. ' Read }*2^ with Wellhausen (cf. Siegfried-Stade's Worterbuclu sub |^-12) for }*'*S^, Breaker in pieces. In Jer. li. 20 Babylon is also called by Jehovah His |*SPj Hammer or Maid. " Keep watch, Wellhausen. ^ This may be a military call to attention, the converse of " Stand at ease ! " * Heb. literally : brace up thy power exceedingly. * Heb. singular. * Rev. ix. 17. Purple or red was the favourite colour of the Medes. The Assyrians also loved red. ' Read 2^Jn 1t>'{< '•0''D, from days she was. A.V. is of old. R.V. hath been of old, and Marg. /rof« the days that she hath been. LXX. her waters, T't'*)^'')^, On waters fleeing, cf. Ps. civ. 7. ^ Bukah, umebukah, umebullakah. Ewald : desert and desolation and devastation. The adj. are feminine. ' Literally: and the faces of all them gather lividtiess. * For ni;"lD Wellhausen reads HiyD, cave or hold. = LXX., reading Nui' for N'^D^. Nahumii.,iii.] THK SIEGE AND FALL OE NtNIVEH 109 And he filled his pits with prey^ And his dens with rapine. Lo, I am at thee {oracle of Jehovah of Hosts) : I will put up thy . . } inflames. The sword shall devour thy young lions; I will cut off from the earth thy rapine, And the noise of thine envoys shall no more be heard. 2. Woe to the City of Blood, All of her guile y robbery-full, ceaseless rapine! Hark the whip, And the rumbling of the wheel, And horses galloping. And the rattling dance of the chariot I "^ Cavalry at the charge,^ and flash of sabres. And lightning of lances, Mass of slain and weight of corpses, Endless dead bodies — They stumble on their dead ! — For the manifold harlotries of the Harlot, The well-favoured, mistress of charms. She who sold nations with her harlotries And races by her witchcrafts ! Lo, I am at thee (oracle of Jehovah of Hosts) : I will uncover thy skirts to thy face ; * ^ Heb. her chariots. LXX. and Syr. suggest thy mass or multitude, HDll. Davidson suggests thy lair, HDVll. * Literally and the chariot dancing, but the word, merakedah, has a rattle in it. 3 Doubtful, TOVip, LXX. ava^alvovros, * Jeremias (104) shows how the Assyrians did this to female captives. no THE TWELVE PROPHETS Give nations to look on thy nakedness^ And kingdoms upon thy shame; Will have thee pelted with filth, and disgrace thee, And set thee for a gazingstock ; So that every one seeing thee shall shrink from thee and say, '* Shattered is Niniveh — who will pity her? Whence shall I seek for comforters to thee ? " Shalt thou be better than No-Amon} Which sat upon the Nile streams'^ — waters were round her — Whose rampart was the sea^ and waters her wall ? * Kush was her strength and Misraim without end; Phut and the Lybians were there to assist her.^ Even she was for exile, she went to captivity : Even her children were dashed on every street corner; For her nobles they cast lots. And all her great men were fastened with fetters. Thou too shall stagger,^ shall grow faint ; Thou too shall seek help from ^ the foe ! ^ Jer. xlvi. 25: / will punish Anion at No. Ezek. xxx. 14-16: . . . judgments in No. . . . I will cut off No-Amort (Heb. and A.V. multitude 0/ No, reading ptDH ; so also LXX. t6 -n-XijOos for \)J2ii) . . . and No shall be broken up. It is Thebes, the Egyptian name of which was Nu-Amen. The god Amen had his temple there : Herod. I. 182, II. 42. Nahum refers to Assurbanipal's account of the fall of Thebes. See above, p. 11. 2 Dn^^^^. pi. of the word for Nile. ' Arabs still call the Nile the sea. * So LXX., reading Dp for Heb. D*p. 3 So LXX. ; Heb. thee. * Heb. be drunken. ' I.e. against, because of. Nahumii.,iii.] THE SIEGE AND FALL OF NINIVEH ii! All thy fortresses are fig-trees with figs early-ripe: Be they shaken they fall on the mouth of the eater. Lo, thy folk are but women in thy midst : ^ To thy foes the gates of thy land fly open; Fire has devoured thy bars. Draw thee water for siege, strengthen thy forts ! Get thee down to the mud, and tramp in the clay ! Grip fast the brick-mould I There fire consumes thee, the sword cuts thee ojf? Make thyself many as a locust swarm, Many as grasshoppers. Multiply thy traders more than heaven^s stars, — The locusts break off^ and fly away. Thy . . .* are as locusts and thy . . . as grass- hoppers, That hive in the hedges in the cold of the day : ^ The sun is risen, they are fled. And one knows not the place where they be. 1 Jer. 1. 37, li. 30. - Heb. and LXX. add devour thee like the locust, probably a gloss. ' Cf. Jer. ix, 33. Some take it of the locusts stripping the skin which confines their wings : Davidson. ■■ *]"*1TJD. A.V. thy crowned ones ; but perhaps like its neighbour an Aesyrian word, meaning we know not what. Wellhausen reads ']''"ltDD, LXX. 6 (TVfMfiiKTds a-oO (applied in Deut. xxiii. 3 and Zech. ix. 6 to the offspring of a mixed marriage between an Israelite and a Gentile), deine Mischlinge : a term of contempt for the floating foreign or semi-foreign population which filled Niniveh and was ready to fly at sight of danger. Similarly Wellhausen takes the second term, "IDQD. This, which occurs also in Jer. li. 27, appears to be some kind of official. In Assyrian dupsar is scribe, which may, like Heb. "IDK^, have been applied to any high official. See Schrader, K.A.T., Eng. Tr., I. 141, II. 118. See also Fried. Delitzsch, Wo lag Parad.y p. 142. The name and office were ancient. Such Babylonian officials are mentioned in the Tell el Amarna letters as present at the Egyptian court. ^ Heb. day of cold. ii2 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Asleep are thy shepherds j O king of Assyria, Thy nobles do slumber; ^ Thy people are strewn on the mountains, Without any to gather. There is no healing of thy wreck, Fatal thy wound ! All who hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hand at thee, For upon whom hath not thy cruelty passed without ceasing ? ' i:3K^\ divell, is the Heb. reading. But LXX. 13£^'^ iKoifMiaev. Sleep must be taken in the sense of death : cf. Jer. li. 39, 57 ; Isa. xiv. 18. HABAKKUK VOL. II. 113 Upon my watch-tower will I stand, And take up my post on the ramparf% I ivill watch to see what He will say to me, And ivhat answer I get back to my plea. The righteous shall live by his faithfulness. The beginning of speculation in Israel." 114 CHAPTER IX THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK AS it has reached us, the Book of Habakkuk, under the title The Oracle which Habakkuk the prophet received by vision^ consists of three chapters, which fall into three sections. First: chap. i. 2 — ii. 4 (or 8), a piece in dramatic form ; the prophet lifts his voice to God against the wrong and violence of which his whole horizon is full, and God sends him answer. Second: chap. ii. 5 (or 9) — 20, a taunt-song in a series of Woes upon the wrong-doer. Third: chap, iii., part psalm, part prayer, descriptive of a Theophany and expressive of Israel's faith in their God. Of these three sections no one doubts the authenticity of the first ; opinion is divided about the second] about the third there is a growing agreement that it is not a genuine work of Habakkuk, but a poem from a period after the Exile. I. Chap. I. 2— II. 4 (or 8). Yet it is the first piece which raises the most difficult questions. All ^ admit that it is to be dated somewhere along the line of Jeremiah's long career, c. 627 — 586. There is no doubt about the general trend of the argument: it is a plaint to God on the sufferings of > Except one or two critics who place it in Manasseh's reign. See below. "5 THE TWELVE PROPHETS the righteous under tyranny, with God's answer. But the order and connection of the paragraphs of the argument are not clear. There is also difference of opinion as to who the tyrant is — native, Assyrian or Chaldee ; and this leads to a difference, of course, about the date, which ranges from the early years of Josiah to the end of Jehoiakim's reign, or from about 630 to 597. As the verses he, their argument is this. In chap. i. 2-4 Habakkuk asks the Lord how long the wicked are to oppress the righteous, to the paralysing of the Torah, or Revelation of His Law, and the making futile of judgment. For answer the Lord tells him, vv. 5-1 1, to look round among the heathen : He is about to raise up the Chaldees to do His work, a people swift, self-reliant, irresistible. Upon which Habakkuk resumes his question, vv. 12-17, how long will God suffer a tyrant who sweeps up the peoples into his net like fish ? Is he to go on with this for ever ? In ii. I Habakkuk prepares for an answer, which comes in ii. 2, 3, 4: let the prophet wait for the vision though it tarries; the proud oppressor cannot last, but the righteous shall live by his constancy, or faithfulness. The difficulties are these. Who are the wicked oppressors in chap. i. 2-4 ? Are they Jews, or some heathen nation ? And what is the connection between vv. 1-4 and vv. 5-1 1? Are the Chaldees, who are described in the latter, raised up to punish the tyrant complained against in the former ? To these questions three different sets of answers have been given. First: the great majority of critics take the wrong complained of in vv. 2-4 to be wrong done by unjust and cruel Jews to their countrymen, that is, civic disorder and violence, and believe that in vv. 5-1 1 THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 117 Jehovah is represented as raising up the Chaldees to punish the sin of Judah — a message which is pretty much the same as Jeremiah's. But Habakkuk goes further : the Chaldees themselves with their cruelties aggravate his problem, how God can suffer wrong, and he appeals again to God, vv. 12-17. Are the Chaldees to be allowed to devastate for ever ? The answer is given, as above, in chap. ii. 1-4. Such is practically the view of Pusey, Delitzsch, Kleinert, Kuenen, Sinker,^ Driver, Orelli, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson, a formidable league, and Davidson says '* this is the most natural sense of the verses and of the words used in them." But these scholars differ as to the date. Pusey, Delitzsch and Volck take the whole passage from i. 5 as prediction, and date it from before the rise of the Chaldee power in 625, attributing the internal wrongs of Judah described in vv. 2-4 to Manasseh's reign or the early years of Josiah.^ But the rest, on the grounds that the prophet shows some experience of the Chaldean methods of warfare, and that the account of the internal disorder in Judah does not suit Josiah's reign, bring the passage down to the reign of Jehoiakim, 608 — 598, or of Jehoiachin, 597. Kleinert and Von ' See next note. ^ So Pusey. Delitzsch in his commentary on Habakkuk, 1843, preferred Josiah's reign, but in his O. T. Hist, of Redemption, 1881, p. 226, Manasseh's. Volck (in Herzog, Real Encyc.,"^ art. " Habakkuk," 1879), assuming that Habakkuk is quoted both by Zephaniah (see above, p. 39, n.) and Jeremiah, places him before these. Sinker {The Psalm of Habakkuk : see below, p. 127, n. 2) deems "the prophecy, taken as a whole," to bring "before us the threat of the Chaldean invasion, the horrors that follow in its train," etc., with a vision of the day "when the Chaldean host itself, its work done, falls beneath a mightier foe." He fixes the date either in the concluding years of Manasseh's reign, or the opening years of that of Josiah (Preface, 1-4). Ii8 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Orelli date it before the battle of Carchemish, 506, in which the Chaldean Nebuchadrezzar wrested from Egypt the Empire of the Western Asia, on the ground that after that Habakkuk could not have called a Chal- dean invasion of Judah incredible (i. 5). But Kuenen, Driver, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson date it after Carchemish. To Driver it must be immediately after, and before Judah became alarmed at the conse- quences to herself. To Davidson the description of the Chaldeans "is scarcely conceivable before the battle/' " hardly one would think before the deportation of the people under Jehoiachin." ^ This also is Kuenen's view, who thinks that Judah must have suffered at least the first Chaldean raids, and he explains the use of an undoubted future in chap. i. 5, Zo, I am about to raise up the Chaldeans, as due to the prophet's pre- dilection for a dramatic style. " He sets himself in the past, and represents the already experienced chastise- ment [of Judah] as having been then announced by Jehovah. His contemporaries could not have mistaken his meaning." Second: others, however, deny that chap. i. 2-4 refers to the internal disorder of Judah, except as the effect of foreign tyranny. The righteous mentioned there are Israel as a whole, the wicked their heathen oppres- sors. So Hitzig, Ewald, Konig and practically Smend. Ewald is so clear that Habakkuk ascribes no sin to Judah, that he says we might be led by this to assign the prophecy to the reign of the righteous Josiah ; but he prefers, because of the vivid sense which the prophet betrays of actual experience of the Chaldees, to date the ' Pages 53, 49. Kirkpatrick (Smith's Did. of the Bible^^ art. Habakkuk," 1893) P^ts it not later than the sixth year of Jehoiakim. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 119 passage from the reign of Jehoiakim, and to explain Habakkuk's silence about his people's sinfulness as due to his overwhelming impression of Chaldean cruelty. Konig^ takes vv. 2-4 as a general complaint of the violence that fills the prophet's day, and vv. 5-1 1 as a detailed description of the Chaldeans, the instru- ments of this violence. Vv. 5-1 1, therefore, give not the judgment upon the wrongs described in vv. 2-4, but the explanation of them. Lebanon is already wasted by the Chaldeans (ii. 17) ; therefore the whole prophecy must be assigned to the days of Jehoiakim. Giesebrecht ^ and Wellhausen adhere to the view that no sins of Judah are mentioned, but that the righteous and wicked of chap. i. 4 are the same as in ver. 13, viz. Israel and a heathen tyrant. But this leads them to dispute that the present order of the paragraphs of the prophecy is the right one. In chap. i. 5 the Chaldeans are represented as about to be raised up for the first time, although their violence has already been described in vv. 1-4, and in vv. 12-17 these are already in full career. Moreover ver. 12 follows on naturally to ver. 4. Accordingly these critics would remove the section vv. 5-1 1. Giesebrecht prefixes it to ver. I, and dates the whole passage from the Exile. Wellhausen calls 5-1 1 an older passage than the rest of the prophecy, and removes it altogether as not Habakkuk's. To the latter he assigns what remains, i. 1-4, 12-17, ii. 1-5, and dates it from the reign of Jehoiakim.^ Third: from each of these groups of critics Budde of Strasburg borrows something, but so as to construct an * Einl. in das A. T. - Beitrdge siir Jesaiakritik, 1890, pp. 197 f. ' See Further Note on p. 128, THE TWELVE PROPHETS arrangement of the verses, and to reach a date, for the whole, from which both differ.^ With Hitzig, Ewald, Konig, Smend, Giesebrecht and Wellhausen he agrees that the violence complained of in i. 2-4 is that in- flicted by a heathen oppressor, the wicked^ on the Jewish nation, the righteous. But with Kuenen and others he holds that the Chaldeans are raised up, according to i. 5-1 1, to punish the violence complained of in i. 2-4 and again in i. 12-17. In these verses it is the ravages of another heathen power than the Chaldeans which Budde descries. The Chaldeans are still to come, and cannot be the same as the devastator whose long continued tyranny is described in i. 12-17. They are rather the power which is to punish him. He can only be the Assyrian. But if that be so, the proper place for the passage, i. 5-1 1, which describes the rise of the Chaldeans must be after the description of the Assyrian ravages in i. 12-17, ^^<^ i^i the body of God's answer to the prophet which we find in ii. 2 ff. Budde, therefore, places i. 5-1 1 after ii. 2-4. But if the Chaldeans are still to come, and Budde thinks that they are described vaguely and with a good deal of imagination, the prophecy thus arranged must fall somewhere between 625, when Nabopolassar the Chaldean made himself independent of Assyria and King of Babylon, and 607, when Assyria fell. That the prophet calls Judah righteous is proof that he wrote after the great Reform of 62 1 ; hence, too, his reference to Torah and Mishpat (i. 4), and his complaint of the obstacles which Assyrian supremacy presented to their free course. As the Assyrian yoke appears not to have been felt anywhere in Judah by 608, Budde would Stttdien it. Kritiken for 1893. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK I2i fix the exact date of Habakkuk's prophecy about 615. To these conclusions of Budde Cornill, who in 189 1 had very confidently assigned the prophecy of Habakkuk to the reign of Jehoiakim, gave his adherence in 1896.^ Budde's very able and ingenious argument has been j ' . subjected to a searching criticism by Professor David- ( J, son, who emphasises first the difficulty of accounting for the transposition of chap. i. 5-1 1 from what Budde alleges to have been its original place after ii. 4 to its present position in chap, i." He points out that if chap. i. 2-4 and 12-17 and ii. 5 ff. refer to the Assyrian, it is strange the latter is not once mentioned. Again, by 615 we may infer (though we know little of Assyrian history at this time) that the Assyrian's hold on Judah was already too relaxed for the prophet to impute to him power to hinder the Law, especially as Josiah had begun to carry his reforms into the northern kingdom ; and the knowledge of the Chaldeans dis- played in i. 5-1 1 is too fresh and detailed^ to suit so early a date : it was possible only after the battle of Carchemish. And again, it is improbable that we have two different nations, as Budde thinks, described by the * Cf. the opening of § 30 in the first edition of his Einleitung with that of § 34 in the third and fourth editions. ^ Budde's explanation of this is, that to the later editors of the book, long after the Babylonian destruction of Jews, it was incredible that the Chaldean should be represented as the deliverer of Israel, and so the account of him was placed where, while his call to punish Israel for her sins was not emphasised, he should be pictured as destined to doom; and so the prophecy originally referring to the Assyrian was read of him. "This is possible," says Davidson, "if it be true criticism is not without its romance." ' This in opposition to Budde's statement that the description of the Chaldeans in i. 5-1 1 "ist eine phantastische Schilderung " (p. 387). THE TWELVE PROPHETS very similar phrases in i. ii, his own power becomes his god, and in i. i6, he sacrifices to his net. Again, chap. i. 5-1 1 would not read quite naturally after chap. ii. 4. And in the woes pronounced on the oppressor it is not one nation, the Chaldeans, which are to spoil him, but all the remnant of the peoples (ii. 7, 8). These objections are not inconsiderable. But are they conclusive ? And if not, is any of the other theories of the prophecy less beset with difficulties ? The objections are scarcely conclusive. We have no proof that the power of Assyria was altogether removed from Judah by 615 ; on the contrary, even in 608 Assyria was still the power with which Egypt went forth to contend for the empire of the world. Seven years earlier her hand may well have been strong upon Palestine. Again, by 615 the Chaldeans, a people famous in Western Asia for a long time, had been ten years independent : men in Palestine may have been familiar with their methods of warfare ; at least it is impossible to say they were not.^ There is more weight in the objection drawn from the absence of the name of Assyria from all of the passages which Budde alleges describe it ; nor do we get over all difficulties of text by inserting i. 5-1 1 between ii. 4 and 5. Besides, how does Budde explain i. 12b on the theory that it means Assyria ? Is the clause not premature at that point ? Does he propose to elide it, like Wellhausen ? And in any case an erroneous transposition of the ' It is, however, a serious question whether it would be possible in 615 to describe the Chaldeans as a nation that traversed the breadth of the earth to occupy dwelling-places that were not his oivn (i. 6). This suits better after the battle of Carchemish. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 123 original is impossible to prove and difficult to account for.i But have not the other theories of the Book of Habakkuk equally great difficulties ? Surely, we can- not say that the righteous and the wicked in i. 4 mean something different from what they do in i. 13? But if this is impossible the construction of the book supported by the great majority of critics^ falls to the ground. Professor Davidson justly says that it has " something artificial in it " and ** puts a strain on the nat^iral sei^se." ^ How can the Chaldeans be described in i. 5 diS just about to be raised up, and in 14-17 as already for a long time the devastators of earth ? Ewald's, Hitzig's and Konig's views * are equally beset by these difficulties ; Konig's exposition also " strains the natural sense." Everything, in fact, points to i. 5-1 1 being out of its proper place ; it is no wonder that Giesebrecht, Wellhausen and Budde independently arrived at this conclusion.^ Whether Budde be right in inserting i. 5-1 1 after ii. 4, there can be httle doubt of the correctness of his views that i. 12-17 describe a heathen oppressor who is not the Chaldeans. Budde says this oppressor is Assyria. Can he be any one else? From 608 to 605 Judah was sorely beset by Egypt, who had overrun all Syria up to the Euphrates. The Egyptians killed Josiah, deposed his successor, and put their own vassal under a very heavy tribute ; gold and silver were exacted of the people of the land: the picture of distress in i. 1-4 might easily be that of ' See above, p. 121, n. 2. ^ Pages 49 and 50. ^ See above, pp. 114 ff. * See above, pp. 118 f. ^ Wellhausen in 1873 (see p. 661); Giesebrecht in 1 890; Budde in 1892, before he had seen the opinions of either of the others (see Stud, tmd Krit., 1893, p. 386, n. 2). 124 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Judah in these three terrible years. And if we assigned the prophecy to them, we should certainly give it a date at which the knowledge of the Chaldeans ex- pressed in i. 5-1 1 was more probable than at Budde's date of 615. But then does the description in chap, i. 14-17 suit Egypt so well as it does Assyria? We can hardly affirm this, until we know more of what Egypt did in those days, but it is very probable. Therefore, the theory supported by the majority of critics being unnatural, we are, with our present meagre knowledge of the time, flung back upon Budde's interpretation that the prophet in i. 2 — ii. 4 appeals from oppression by a heathen power, which is not the Chaldean, but upon which the Chaldean shall bring the just vengeance of God. The tyrant is either Assyria up to about 615 or Egypt from 608 to 605, and there is not a little to be said for the latter date. In arriving at so uncertain a conclusion about i. — ii. 4, we have but these consolations, that no other is possible in our present knowledge, and that the un- certainty will not hamper us much in our appreciation of Habakkuk's spiritual attitude and poetic gifts.-^ 2. Chap. II. 5-20. The dramatic piece i. 2 — ii. 4 is succeeded by a series of fine taunt-songs, starting after an introduction from 6b, then 9, 11, 15 and (18) 19, and each opening with * Cornill quotes a rearrangement of chaps, i., ii., by Rothstein, who takes i. 2-4, 12 a, 13, ii. 1-3, 4, $ a, i. 6-10, 14, 15 a, ii. 6 6, 7, 9, \oab^, II, 15, 16, 19, 18, as an oracle against Jehoiakim and the godless in Israel about 605, which during the Exile was worked up into the present oracle against Babylon. Cornill esteems it " too complicated." Budde (Expositor, 1895, pp. 372 ff.) and Nowack hold it untenable. THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 125 Woe I Their subject is, if we take Budde's interpreta- tion of the dramatic piece, the Assyrian and not the Chaldean ^ tyrant. The text, as we shall see when we come to it, is corrupt. Some words are manifestly wrong, and the rhythm must have suffered beyond restoration. In all probability these fine lyric Woes, or at least as many of them as are authentic — for there is doubt about one or two — were of equal length. Whether they all originally had the refrain now attached to two is more doubtful. Hitzig suspected the authenticity of some parts of this series of songs. Stade ^ and Kuenen have gone further and denied the genuineness of vv. 9-20. But this is with little reason. As Budde says, a series of Woes was to be expected here by a prophet who follows so much the example of Isaiah.^ In spite of Kuenen's objection, vv. 9-1 1 would not be strange of the Chaldean, but they suit the Assyrian better. Vv. 12-14 ^^^ doubtful: 12 recalls Micah iii. 10; 13 is a repetition of Jer. li. 58; 14 is a variant of Isa. xi. 9. Very Hkely Jer. li. 58, a late passage, is borrowed from this passage ; yet the addition used here, Are not these things ^ from the Lord of Hosts ? looks as if it noted a citation. Vv. 15-17 are very suitable to the Assyrian ; there is no reason to take them from Habakkuk.^ The final song, vv. 18 and 19, has its Woe at the beginning of its second verse, and closely resembles the language of later prophets.^ * As of course was universally supposed according to either of the other two interpretations given above. 2 Z.A.T.W., 1884, p. 154. 3 Cf. Isa. V. SfF. (x. 1-4), etc. * So LXX. * Cf. Davidson, p. 56, and Budde, p. 391, who allows 9-1 1 and 15-17. ^ E.g. Isa. xl. 18 ff,, xliv. 9 ff., xlvi. 5 ff., etc. On this ground 126 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Moreover the refrain forms a suitable close at the end of ver. 17. Ver. 20 is a quotation from Zephaniah,^ perhaps another sign of the composite character of the end of this chapter. Some take it to have been inserted as an introduction to the theophany in chap. iii. Smend has drawn up a defence ^ of the whole passage, ii. 9-20, which he deems not only to stand in a natural relation to vv. 4-8, but to be indispensable to them. That the passage quotes from other prophets, he holds to be no proof against its authenticity. If we break off with ver. 8, he thinks that we must impute to Habakkuk the opinion that the wrongs of the world are chiefly avenged by human means — a conclusion which is not to be expected after chap. i. — ii. i ff. 3. Chap. III. The third chapter, an Ode or Rhapsody, is ascribed to Habakkuk by its title. This, however, does not prove its authenticity : the title is too like those assigned to the Psalms in the period of the Second Temple.^ On the contrary, the title itself, the occurrence of the musical sign Selah in the contents, and the colophon suggest for the chapter a liturgical origin after the Exile.* That this is more probable than the alternative it is condemned by Stade, Kuenen and Budde. Davidson finds this not a serious difficulty, for, he points out, Habakkuk anticipates several later lines of thought. 1 See above, p. 39, n. ^ A. T. Religionsgeschichte, p. 229, n. 2, ' Cf. the ascription by the LXX. of Psalms cxlvi. — cl. to the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. * Cf. Kuenen, who conceives it to have been taken from a post-exilic collection of Psalms. See also Cheyne, The Origin of the Psalter: " exilic or more probably post-exilic " (p. 125). "The most natural THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK 127 opinion, that, being a genuine work of Habakkuk, the chapter was afterwards arranged as a Psalm for public worship, is confirmed by the fact that no other work of the prophets has been treated in the same way. Nor do the contents support the authorship by Habakkuk. They reflect no definite historical situation like the pre- ceding chapters. The style and temper are different. While in them the prophet speaks for himself, here it is the nation or congregation of Israel that addresses God. The language is not, as some have maintained, late ; ^ but the designation of the people as Thine anointed^ a term which before the Exile was applied to the king, undoubtedly points to a post-exiHc date. The figures, the theophany itself, are not necessarily archaic, but are more probably moulded on archaic models. There are many affinities with Psalms of a late date. At the same time a number of critics ^ maintain the genuineness of the chapter, and they have some grounds for this. Habakkuk was, as we can see from chaps, i. and ii., a real poet. There was no need why a man of his temper should be bound down to reflecting only position for it is in the Persian period. It was doubtless appended to Habakkuk, for the same reason for which Isa. Ixiii. 7 — Ixiv. was attached to the great prophecy of Restoration, viz. that the earlier national troubles seemed to the Jewish Church to be typical of its own sore troubles after the Return. . . . The lovely closing verses of Hab. iii. are also in a tone congenial to the later religion " (p. 156). Much less certain is the assertion that the language is imitative and artificial {ibid.') ; while the statement that in ver. 3 — cf. with Deut. xxxiii. 2 — we have an instance of the effort to avoid the personal name of the Deity (p. 287) is disproved by the use of the latter in ver. 2 and other verses. ^ nX W*<, ver. 13, cannot be taken as a proof of lateness ; read probably HK r^K^IH. * Pusey, Ewald, KiJnig, Sinker {The Psalm of Habakkuk^ Cambridge, 1890), Kirkpatrick (Smith's Bible Diet, art. "Habakkuk "), Von Orelli 128 THE TWELVE PROPHETS his own day. If so practical a prophet as Hosea, and one who has so closely identified himself with his times, was wont to escape from them to a retrospect of the dealings of God with Israel from of old, why should not the same be natural for a prophet who was much less practical and more literary and artistic ? There are also many phrases in the Psalm which may be inter- preted as reflecting the same situation as chaps, i., ii. All this, however, only proves possibility. The Psalm has been adapted in Psalm Ixxvii. 17-20. Further Note on Chap. I.— II. 4. Since this chapter was in print Nowack's Die Kleinm Propheten in the " Handkommentar z. A. T." has been published. He recog- nises emphatically that the disputed passage about the Chaldeans, chap. i. 5-1 1 J is out of place where it lies (this against Kuenen and the other authorities cited above, p. 117), and admits that it follows on, with a natural connection, to chap. ii. 4, to which Budde pro- poses to attach it. Nevertheless, for other reasons, which he does not state, he regards Budde's proposal as untenable ; and reckons the disputed passage to be by another hand than Habakkuk's, and in- truded into the latter's argument. Habakkuk's argument he assigns to after 605 ; perhaps 590. The tyrant complained against would therefore be the Chaldean. — Driver in the 6th ed. of his Introduction (1897) deems Budde's argument "too ingenious," and holds by the older and most numerously supported argument (above, pp. ii6ff,). — On a review of the case in the light of these two discussions, the present Writer holds to his opinion that Budde's rearrangement, which he has adopted, offers the fewest difficulties. CHAPTER X THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC Habakkuk i. — ii. 4 OF the prophet Habakkuk we know nothing that t is personal save his name— to our ears his some- what odd name. It is the intensive form of a root which means to caress or embrace. More probably it was given to him as a child, than afterwards assumed as a symbol of his clinging to God.^ Tradition says that Habakkuk was a priest, the son of Joshua, of the tribe of Levi, but this is only an inference from the late liturgical notes to the Psalm which has been appended to his prophecy.^ All that we know for certain is that he was a contemporary \ ' p-lpnn (the Greek "Afi^aKovfx, LXX. version of the title of this book, and again the inscription to Bel and the Dragon, suggests the pointing p-"lp3n ; Epiph., De Vitis Proph.—see next note— spells it 'A/3j8aK0U)tt), from p2n, to embrace. Jerome : " He is called ' embrace ' either because of his love to the Lord, or because he wrestles with God." Luther: "Habakkuk means one who comforts and holds up his people as one embraces a weeping person." 2 See above, pp. 126 ff. The title to the Greek version of Bel and the Dragon bears that the latter was taken from the prophecy of Ham- bakoum, son of Jesus, of the tribe of Levi. Further details are offered in the De Vitis Prophetarum of (Pseud-) Epiphanius, Epiph. Opera, ed. Paris, 1622, Vol. II., p. 147, according to which Habakkuk be- longed to Be^fox77p, which is probably Be^^axaptaj of i Mace. vi. 32, the modern Beit-Zakaryeh, a little to the north of Hebron, and placed by this notice, as Nahum's Elkosh is placed, in the tribe of Simeon. His grave was shown in the neighbouring Keilah. The notice further VOL. II. 129 9 130 THE TWELVE PROPHETS of Jeremiah, with a sensitiveness under wrong and impulses to question God which remind us of Jeremiah ; but with a literary power which is quite his own. We may emphasise the latter, even though we recognise upon his writing the influence of Isaiah's. Habakkuk's originality, however, is deeper than style. He is the earliest who is known to us of a new school of religion in Israel. He is called prophet^ but at first he does not adopt the attitude which is characteristic of the prophets. His face is set in an opposite direction to theirs. They address the nation Israel, on behalf of God : he rather speaks i to God on behalf of Israel. Their task was Israel's sin, the proclamation of God's doom and the offer of His grace to their penitence. Habakkuk's task is God Himself, the effort to find out what He means by permitting tyranny and wrong. They attack the sins, he is the first to state the problems, of life. To him the prophetic revelation, the Torah, is complete : it has been codified in Deuteronomy and enforced by Josiah. Habakkuk's business is not to add to it but to ask why it does not work. Why does God suffer wrong to triumph, so that the Torah is paralysed, and Mishpat, the prophetic justice or judg- ment, comes to nought? The prophets travailed for Israel's character — to get the people to love justice till justice prevailed among them : Habakkuk feels justice cannot prevail in Israel, because of the great disorder alleges that when Nebuchadrezzar came up to Jerusalem Habakkuk fled to Ostracine, where he travelled in the country of the Ishmaelites ; but he returned after the fall of Jerusalem, and died in 538, two years before the return of the exiles. Bel and the Dragon tells an extra- ordinary story of his miraculous carriage of food to Daniel in the lions' den soon after Cyrus had taken Babylon. Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 131 which God permits to fill the world. It is true that he arrives at a prophetic attitude, and before the end authoritatively declares God's will; but he begins by searching for the latter, with an appreciation of the great obscurity cast over it by the facts of life. He complains to God, asks questions and expostulates. This is the beginning of speculation in Israel. It does not go far : it is satisfied with stating questions to God ; it does not, directly at least, state questions against Him. But Habakkuk at least feels that revela- tion is baffied by experience, that the facts of life bewilder a man who believes in the God whom the prophets have declared to Israel. As in Zephaniah prophecy begins to exhibit traces of apocalypse, so in Habakkuk we find it developing the first impulses of speculation. We have seen that the course of events which troubles Habakkuk and renders the Torah ineffectual is somewhat obscure. On one interpretation of these two chapters, that which takes the present order of their verses as the original, Habakkuk asks why God is silent in face of the injustice which fills the whole horizon (chap. i. 1-4), is told to look round among the heathen and see how God is raising up the Chaldeans (i. 5-1 1), presumably to punish this injustice (if it be Israel's own) or to overthrow it (if vv. 1-4 mean that it is inflicted on Israel by a foreign power). But the Chaldeans only aggravate the prophet's problem ; they themselves are a wicked and oppressive people : how can God suffer them? (i. 12-17). Then come the prophet's waiting for an answer (ii. i) and the answer itself (ii. 2 ff.). Another interpretation takes the passage about the Chaldeans (i. 5-1 1) to be out of place where it now lies, removes it to after chap. ii. 4 132 THE TWELVE PROPHETS as a part of God's answer to the prophet's problem, and leaves the remainder of chap. i. as the description of the Assyrian oppression of Israel, baffling the Torah and perplexing the prophet's faith in a Holy and Just God.^ Of these two views the former is, we have seen, somewhat artificial, and though the latter is by no means proved, the arguments for it are sufficient to justify us in re-arranging the verses chap. i. — ii. 4 in accordance with its proposals. The Oracle which Habakkuk the Prophet Received by Vision} How long, O Jehovah^ have I called and Thou hear est not ? I cry to Thee, Wrong ! and Thou sendest no help. Why make me look upon sorrow, And fill mine eyes with trouble ? Violence and wrong are before me, Strife comes and quarrel arises.^ So the Law is benumbed, and judgment never gets forth : * For the wicked beleaguers the righteous, So judgment comes forth perverted. ***** Art not Thou oj old, Jehovah, my God, my Holy One? . . .« ' See above, pp. 119 ff. - Heb. saw, 3 Text uncertain. Perhaps we should read, Why make me look upon sorrow and trouble ? why fill mine eyes with violence and wrong Strife is come before me, and quarrel arises. * Never gets away, to use a colloquial expression. ^ Here vv. 5-11 come in the original. ^ Ver. 126: We shall not die (many Jewish authorities read Thou shall not die). O Jehovah, for judgment hast Thou set him, and, O my Rock, for pimishment hast Thou appointed him. Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 133 Purer of eyes than to behold evil, And that canst not gaze upon trouble / Why gazest Thou upon traitors,^ Art dumb when the wicked swallows him that ts more righteous than he ? ^ Thou hast let men be made ^ like fish of the sea. Like worms that have no ruler ! * He lifts the whole of it with his angle; Draws it in with his net, sweeps it in his drag-net : So rejoices and exults. So he sacrifices to his net, and offers incense to his drag-net; For by them is his portion fat, and his food rich. Shall he for ever draw his sword, ^ And ceaselessly, ruthlessly massacre nations ? ° Upon my watch-tower I will stand, And take my post on the rampart J I will watch to see what He will say to me, And what answer P get back to my plea. And Jehovah answered me and said: Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, That he may run who reads it. ' Wellhausen : on the robbery of robbers. ^ LXX. devoureth the righteous. ^ Literally Thou hast made men. * Wellhausen : cf. Jer. xviii. i, xix. I. •^ So Giesebrecht (see above, p, 119, n. 2), reading 13"in pH^ D^WH for 1D"in p'''T' p'^rrii shall he therefore empty his net ? " Wellhausen, reading ^lin'' for iin? : shoidd he therefore be emptying his net continually, and slaughtering the nations without pity ? ' "IIVD. But Wellhausen takes it as from "IVJ and = ward or watch-tower. So Nowack. * So Heb. and LXX. ; but Syr. he : so Wellhausen, what answer He returns to my plea. 134 THE TWELVE PROPHETS For^ the vision is for a time yet to be fixed, Yet it hurries ^ to the end, and shall not fail: Though it linger, wait thou for it; Coming it shall come, and shall not be behind? Lo ! swollen,^ not level is his ^ soul within him ; But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.^ ***** Look ^ round among the heathen, and look well, Shudder and be shocked; ^ For I am ^ about to do a work in your days, Ye shall not believe it when told. For, lo, I am about to raise up the Kasdim^^ A people the most bitter and the most hasty. That traverse the breadths of the earth. To possess dwelling-places not their own. Awful and terrible are they ; From themselves ^^ start their purpose and rising. ' Bredenkamp {Stud. n. Krit, 1889, pp. 161 ff.) suggests that the writing on the tablets begins here and goes on to ver. 5a. Budde (Z.A.T.W., 1889, PP« 155 f-) takes the ""^ which opens it as simply equivalent to the Greek 8ti, introducing, Hke our marks of quotation, the writing itself. - na^) : cf. Psalm xxvii. 12. Bredenkamp emends to rrnQ^I. ' Not be late, or past its fixed time. * So literally the].Heb. nSsy, i.e. arrogant, false : cf. the colloquial expression swollen-head = conceit, as opposed to level-headed. Bredenkamp, 5^;/f/. ?/. p'/V., 1889, 121, reads f]^!?;.!! for rh^V Hlin. Wellhausen suggests 7)VT\ T\17\^ Lo, the sinner',' in contrast to pHV of next clause. Nowack prefers this. ^ LXX. wrongly my. ^ LXX. iriffTis, faith, and so in N. T. ' Chap. i. 5-1 1. ^ So to bring out the assonance, reading -inon-l •inonJOnn 9 So LXX. ' ' = = -=•• *" Or Chaldeans ; on the name and people see above, p. 19. " Heb. singular. Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 135 Fleeter than leopards their steeds^ Swifter than night-wolves. Their horsemen leap ^ from afar; They swoop like the eagle a-haste to devour. All for wrong do they'^ come ; The set of their faces is forward y^ And they sweep up captives like sand. They — at kings do they scoffs And princes are sport to them. They — they laugh at each fortress ^ Heap dust up and take it ! Then the wind shifts,'^ and they pass I But doomed are those whose own strength is their godl^ The difficulty of deciding between the various arrange- ments of the two chapters of Habakkuk does not, fortunately, prevent us from appreciating his argument. What he feels throughout (this is obvious, however you arrange his verses) is the tyranny of a great ' Omit VSJ'^DI (evidently a dittography) and the lame 1X1'' which is omitted by LXX. and was probably inserted to afford a verb for the second VJ^IQ. ^ Heb. sing., and so in all the clauses here except the next. ^ A problematical rendering. nD!lD is found only here, and probably means direction. Hitzig translates desire^ effort, striving. riDHp, to- wards the front or forward ; but elsewhere it means only eastward : DHp, the east wind. Cf. Judg. v. 21, \\^^p Snj D^DHp i>nj, a river of spates or rushes is the river Kishon (^Hist. Geog., p. 395). Perhaps we should change DNT'JQ to a singular suffix, as in the clauses before and after, and this would leave D to form with HOHp a participle from Dnpn (cf. Amos ix. 10). * Or their spirit changes, or they change like the wind (Wellhausen suggests nilD). Gratz reads n3 and f]vD!, ^^ renews his strength. ^ Von Orelli. For DK^X Wellhausen proposes D^^V and sets. 136 THE TWELVE PROPHETS heathen power/ be it Assyrian, Egyptian or Chaldean. I'he prophet's horizon is filled with wrong : ^ Israel thrown into disorder, revelation paralysed, justice per- verted.^ But, like Nahum, Habakkuk feels not for Israel alone. The Tyrant has outraged humanity.* He sweeps peoples into his net^ and as soon as he empties this, he fills it again ceaselessly^ as if there were no just God above. He exults in his vast cruelty, and has success so unbroken that he worships the very means of it. In itself such impiety is gross enough, but to a heart that believes in God it is a problem of exquisite pain. Habakkuk's is the burden of the finest faith. He illustrates the great commonplace of religious doubt, that problems arise and become rigorous in proportion to the purity and tenderness of a man's conception of God. It is not the coarsest but the finest \ temperaments which are exposed to scepticism. Every advance in assurance of God or in appreciation of His character develops new perplexities in face of the facts of experience, and faith becomes her own most cruel troubler. Habakkuk's questions are not due to any cooling of the religious temper in Israel, but are begotten of the very heat and ardour of prophecy in its encounter with experience. His tremulousness, for instance, is impossible without the high knowledge of God's purity and faithfulness, which older prophets had achieved in Israel : — Art not Thou of old^ O LORD, my God, my Holy One, 1 The wicked of chap. i. 4 must, as we have seen, be the same as the wicked of cha-p. i. 13 — a heathen oppressor of the righteous, i.e. the people of God. M.3. M.4. M. 13-17. Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 137 Purer of eyes than to behold evily And incapable of looking upon wrong? His despair is that which comes only from eager and persevering habits of prayer : — How long J O LORD, have I called and Thou hearest not! I cry to Thee of wrong and Thou givest no help ! His questions, too, are bold with that sense of God's absolute power, which, flashed so bright in Israel as to blind men's eyes to all secondary and intermediate causes. Thou, he says, — Thou hast made men like fishes of the sea, Tike worms that have no ruler, boldly charging the Almighty, in almost the temper of Job himself, with being the cause of the cruelty inflicted by the unchecked tyrant upon the nations; for shall evil happen, and Jehovah not have done it ? ^ Thus all through we perceive that Habakkuk's trouble springs from the central founts of prophecy. This scepticism — if we may venture to give the name to the first motions in Israel's mind of that temper which undoubtedly became scepticism — this scepticism was the inevitable heritage of prophecy : the stress and pain to which prophecy was forced by its own strong convictions in face of the facts of experience. Habakkuk, the prophet, as he is called, stood in the direct line of his order, but just because of that he was the father also of Israel's religious doubt. But a discontent springing from sources so pure ' Amos iii. 6. See Vol. I,, p. 90. 138 THE TWELVE PROPHETS was surely the preparation of its own healing. In a verse of exquisite beauty the prophet describes the temper in which he trusted for an answer to all his doubts : — On my watch-tower will I stand, And take up my post on the rampart; I will watch to see what He says to me. And what answer I get back to my plea. This verse is not to be passed over, as if its meta- phors were merely of literary effect. They express rather the moral temper in which the prophet carries his doubt, or, to use New Testament language, the good conscience, which some having put away, concerning faith Imve made shipwreck. Nor is this temper patience only and a certain elevation of mind, nor only a fixed attention and sincere willingness to be answered. Through the chosen words there breathes a noble sense of responsibility. The prophet feels he has a post to hold, a rampart to guard. He knows the heritage of truth, won by the great minds of the past ; and in a world seething with disorder, he will take his stand upon that and see what more his God will send him. At the very least, he will not indolently drift, but feel that he has a standpoint, however narrow, and bravely hold it. Such has ever been the attitude of the greatest sceptics — not only, let us repeat, earnest- ness and sincerity, but the recognition of duty towards the truth : the conviction that even the most tossed and troubled minds have somewhere a irov crrcS appointed of God, and upon it interests human and divine to defend. Without such a conscience, scepticism, however in- tellectually gifted, will avail nothing. Men who drift never discover, never grasp aught. They are only Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 139 dazzled by shifting gleams of the truth, only fretted and broken by experience. Taking then his stand within the patient temper, but especially upon the conscience of his great order, the prophet waits for his answer and the healing of his trouble. The answer comes to him in the promise of a Vision^ which, though it seem to linger, will not be later than the time fixed by God. A Vision is something realised, experienced — something that will be as actual and present to the waiting prophet as the cruelty which now fills his sight. Obviously some series of historical events is meant, by which, in the course of time, the unjust oppressor of the nations shall be overthrown and the righteous vindicated. Upon the re-arrangement of the t€xt proposed by Budde,^ this series of events is the rise of the Chaldeans, and it is an argument in favour of his proposal that the promise of a Vision requires some such historical picture to follow it as we find in the description of the Chaldeans— chap. i. 5-1 1. This, too, is exphcitly introduced by terms of vision : See among the nations and look round. . . . Yea, behold I am about to raise up the Kasdim. But before this Vision is given,^ and for the uncertain interval of waiting ere the facts come to pass, the Lord enforces upon His watching servant the great moral principle that arrogance and tyranny cannot, from the nature of them, last, and that if the righteous be only patient he will survive them : — Zo, swollen, not level, is his soul within him ; But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness. ^ See above, pp. II9 ff. ^ Its proper place in Budde's re-arrangement is after chap. ii. 4. 140 THE TWELVE PROPHETS We have already seen ^ that the text of the first line of this couplet is uncertain. Yet the meaning is obvious, partly in the words themselves, and partly by their implied contrast with the second line. The soul of the wicked is a radically morbid thing : inflated, swollen (unless we should read perverted, which more plainly means the same thing ^), not level, not natural and normal. In the nature of things it cannot endure. But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness. This word, wrongly translated faith by the Greek and ) other versions, is concentrated by Paul in his repeated quotation from the Greek ^ upon that single act of faith by which the sinner secures forgiveness and justification. With Habakkuk it is a wider term. I ^Emunahy^ from a verb meaning originally to be firm, is used in the Old Testament in the physical sense of \ steadfastness. So it is applied to the arms of Moses held up by Aaron and Hur over the battle with Amalek : they were steadiness till the going down of the sun.'' It is also used of the faithful discharge of public office,'^ and of fidelity as between man and wife.'^ It is also faithful testimony,^ equity in judgment,^ truth in speech,^^ and sincerity or honest dealing." Of course it has faith in God as its secret — the verb from which it is derived is the regular Hebrew term to believe — but it is rather the temper which faith produces of endurance, steadfastness, integrity. Let the righteous, however baffled his faith be by experience, hold on in ' Above, p. 134, n. 4. ^ Hosea ii. 22 (Heb.). 2 npipr instead of HPSi;. ^ pj-Qv. xiv. 5. 3 Rom. i. 17 ; Gal. iii. ii". » Isa. xi. 5. * n>1D^. '0 Prov. xii. 17 : cf. Jer. ix. 2. ^ Exod. xvii. 12. '1 Prov. xii. 22, xxviii. 30. 2 Chron. xix. 9. Hab.i.-ii.4] THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC 141 loyalty to God and duty, and he shall live. Though St. Paul, as we have said, used the Greek rendering of faith for the enforcement of trust in God's mercy through Jesus Christ as the secret of forgiveness and life, it is rather to Habakkuk's wider intention of patience and fidelity that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews returns in his fuller quotation of the verse : For yet a little while and He that shall come will come and will not tarry; now the just shall live by faithj but if he draw back My soul shall have no pleasure in him} Such then is the tenor of the passage. In face of experience that baffles faith, the duty of Israel is patience in loyalty to God. In this the nascent scepticism of Israel received its first great command- ment, and this it never forsook. Intellectual questions arose, of which Habakkuk's were but the faintest foreboding — questions concerning not only the mission and destiny of the nation, but the very foundation of justice and the character of God Himself. Yet did no sceptic, however bold and however provoked, forsake his faithfulness. Even Job, when most audaciously arraigning the God of his experience, turned from Him to God as in his heart of hearts he believed He must be, experience notwithstanding. Even the Preacher, amid the aimless flux and drift which he finds in the universe, holds to the conclusion of the whole matter in a command, which better than any other defines the contents of the faithfulness enforced by Habakkuk : Fear God and keep His commandments ^ for this is the whole of man. It has been the same with the great mass Heb. X. 37, 38. 142 THE TWELVE PROPHETS of the race. Repeatedly disappointed of their hopes, and crushed for ages beneath an intolerable tyranny, have they not exhibited the same heroic temper with which their first great questioner was endowed ? En- durance— this above all others has been the quality of Israel : though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. And, therefore, as Paul's adaptation, The just shall live by faith^ has become the motto of evangelical Chris- tianity, so we may say that Habakkuk's original of it has been the motto and the fame of Judaism : 77?^ righteous shall live by his faithfulness. CHAPTER XI TYRANNY IS SUICIDE Habakkuk ii. 5-20 IN the style of his master Isaiah, Habakkuk follows up his Vision with a series of lyrics on the same subject : chap. ii. 5-20. They are taunt-songs, the most of them beginning with Woe unto^ addressed to the heathen oppressor. Perhaps they were all at first of equal length, and it has been suggested that the strik- ing refrain in which two of them close — For meWs bloody and earth! s waste, Cities and their inhabitants — was once attached to each of the others as well. But the text has been too much altered, besides suffering several interpolations/ to permit of its restoration, and we can only reproduce these taunts as they now run in the Hebrew text. There are several quotations (not necessarily an argument against Habakkuk's authorship) ; but, as a whole, the expression is original, and there are some lines of especial force and fresh- ness. Verses ^-6a are properly an introduction, the first Woe commencing with 6b. The belief which inspires these songs is very simple. ^ See above, pp. 125 f. 143 144 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Tyranny is intolerable. In the nature of things it cannot endure, but works out its own penalties. By oppressing so many nations, the tyrant is preparing the instruments of his own destruction. As he treats them, so in time shall they treat him. He is like a debtor who increases the number of his creditors. Some day they shall rise up and exact from him the last penny. So that in cutting off others he is but forfeiting his own life. The very violence done to nature, the deforesting of Lebanon for instance, and the vast hunting of wild beasts, shall recoil on him. This line of thought is exceedingly interesting. We have already seen in prophecy, and especially in Isaiah, the beginnings of Hebrew Wisdom — the attempt to uncover the moral processes of life and express a philosophy of history. But hardly anywhere have we found so complete an absence of all reference to the direct interference of God Himself in the punishment of the tyrant ; for the cup of JehovaKs right hand in ver. 1 6 is simply the survival of an ancient metaphor. These proverbs or taunt-songs, in conformity with the proverbs of the later Wisdom, dwell only upon the inherent tendency to decay of all injustice. Tyranny, they assert, and history ever since has affirmed their truthfulness — tyranny is suicide. The last of the taunt-songs, which treats of the different subject of idolatry, is probably, as we have seen, not from Habakkuk's hand, but of a later date.^ ' See above, pp. 125 f. Nowack (1897) agrees that Cornill's and others' conclusion that vv. 9-20 are not Habakkuk's is too sweeping. He takes the first, second and fourth of the taunt-songs as authentic, but assigns the third (vv. 12-14) and the fifth (i8-2o) to another hand. He deems the refrain, 86 and 176, to be a gloss, and puts 19 before 18. Driver, Introd.y 6th ed., holds to the authenticity of all the verses. Hab. ii. 5-20] TYRANNY IS SUICIDE 14S Introduction to the Taunt-Songs (ii. 5-6^). For . . . ^ treacherous^ An arrogant fellow J and is not . . . ^ Who opens his desire wide as Sheol ; He is like death^ unsatisfied ; And hath swept to himself all the nations, And gathered to him all peoples. Shall not these, all of them, take up a proverb upon him. And a taunt-song against him ? and say : — First Taunt-Song (ii. 6b-%). Woe unto him who multiplies what is not his own^ — How long? — And loads him with debts ! ^ Shall not thy creditors ^ rise upy And thy troublers awake, • The text reads, For also wine is treacherous, under which we might be tempted to suspect some such original as, As wine is treacherous, so (next line) the proud fellow, etc. (or, as Davidson suggests, Like wine is the treacherous dealer'), were it not that the word wine appears neither in the Greek nor in the Syrian version. Wellhausen suggests that p^H, wine, is a corruption of ^IH, with which the verse, like vv. 66, 9, 12, 15, 19, may have originally begun, but according to 6a the taunt-songs, opening with '•in, start first in 66. Bredenkamp proposes P^!{^ 03X1. "^ The text is ni3\ a verb not elsewhere found in the Old Testament, and conjectured by our translators to mean keepeth at home, because the noun allied to it means horyiestead or resting-place. The Syriac gives is not satisfied, and Wellhausen proposes to read \\W with that sense. See Davidson's note on the verse. ' A.V. thick clay, which is reached by breaking up the word 13^D21^, pledge or debt, into 3^, thick cloud, and t3''D, clay. * Literally thy biters, ^^SSJ^J, but ^K^iJ, biting, is interest or usury, and the Hiphil of -,^j is to exact interest. VOL. II. 10 146 THE TWELVE PROPHETS And thou be for spoil^ to them ? Because thou hast spoiled many nations^ All the rest of the peoples shall spoil thee. For men's blood, and earth's waste. Cities and all their inhabitants} Second Taunt-Song (ii. 9-1 1). Woe unto him that gains evil gain for his housed To set high his nest, to save him from the grasp of calamity ! Thou hast planned shame for thy house; Thou hast cut off^ many people, While forfeiting thine own life!" For the stone shall cry out from the wall, And the lath ^ from the timber answer it. Third Taunt-Song (ii. 12-14). Woe unto him that builds a city in bloody And stablishes a town in iniquity !^ Lo, is it not from Jehovah of hosts. That the nations shall toil for smoke, ^ And the peoples wear themselves out for nought ? But earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Jehovah ^^ Like the waters that cover the sea. » LXX. sing., Heb. pi. ^ These words occur again in ver. 17. Wellhausen thinks they suit neither here nor there. But they suit all the taunt-songs, and some suppose that they formed the refrain to each of these. ^ Dynasty or people ? * So LXX. ; Heb. cutting off. ^ The grammatical construction is obscure, if the text be correct. There is no mistaking the meaning. ^ D''SD, not elsewhere found in the O.T., is in Rabbinic Hebrew both cross-beam and lath. ' Micah iii. 10. ^ Literally /r^. ^ Jer. xxii. 13. '" Jer. Ii. 58: which original? Hab.ii.5-20] TYRANNY IS SUICIDE 147 Fourth Taunt-Song (ii. 15-17). Woe unto him that gives his neighbour to drink^ From the cup of his wrath ^ //// he be drunken^ That he may gloat on his ^ nakedness ! Thou art sated with shame — not with glory; Drink also thou^ and stagger.^ Comes round to thee the cup of Jehovah! s right hand^ And foul shame * on thy glory. For the violence to Lebanon shall cover thee, The destruction of the beasts shall affray thee} For men's blood, and earth's waste. Cities and all their inhabitants,^ Fifth Taunt-Song (ii. 18-20). What boots an image, when its artist has graven it, A cast-image and lie-oracle, that its moulder has trusted upon it, "^ Making dumb idols ? Woe to him that saith to a block. Awake ! To a dumb stone. Arise I * After Wellhausen's suggestion to read "IflDn P\DD instead of the text "]nOn nSDD, adding, or mixing, thy wrath. 2 So LXX. Q. ; Heb. their. 3 Read h]3'\r\ (cf. Nahum ii. 4 ; Zech. xii. 2). The text is p-im, not found elsewhere, which has been conjectured to mean uncover the foreskin. And there is some ground for this, as parallel to his naked- ness in the previous clause. Wellhausen also removes the first clause to the end of the verse : Drink also thou and reel ; there comes to thee the cup in Jehovah's right hand, and thou wilt glut thyself with shame instead of honour. * So R.V. for P7p''p, which A.V. has taken as two words — ""p, for which cf. Jer. xxv. 27, where however the text is probably corrupt, and |1?p. With this confusion cf. above, ver. 6, tO''Diy. ^ Read with LXX. inn^ for jH^n^ of the text. ® See above, ver, 8, 148 THE TWELVE PROPHETS Can it teach ? Lo, it , . } with gold and silver ; There is no breath at all in the heart of it. But Jehovah is in His Holy Temple: Silence before Him^ all the earth ! CHAPTER XII "/TV THE MIDST OF THE YEARS" Habakkuk iii. WE have seen the impossibility of deciding the age of the ode which is attributed to Habakkuk in the third chapter of his book. But this is only one of the many problems raised by that brilliant poem. Much of its text is corrupt, and the meaning of many single words is uncertain. As in most Hebrew poems of description, the tenses of the verbs puzzle us; we cannot always determine whether the poet is singing of that which is past or present or future, and this difficulty is increased by his subject, a revelation of God in nature for the deliverance of Israel. Is this the deliverance from Egypt, with the terrible tempests which accompanied it ? Or have the features of the Exodus been borrowed to describe some other deliverance, or to sum up the constant manifestation of Jehovah for His people's help ? The introduction, in ver. 2, is clear. The singer has heard what is to be heard of Jehovah, and His great deeds in the past. He prays for a revival of these in the midst of the years. The times are full of trouble and turmoil. Would that God, in the present confusion of baffled hopes and broken issues, made * Above, pp. 126 ff 149 ISO THE TWELVE PROPHETS Himself manifest by power and brilliance, as of old I In turmoil remember mercy ! To render turmoil by wrathy as if it were God's anger against which the singer's heart appealed, is not true to the original word itself/ affords no parallel to the midst of the years, and misses the situation. Israel cries from a state of Hfe in which the obscure years are huddled together and full of turmoil. We need not wish to fix the date more precisely than the writer himself does, but may leave it with him in the midst of the years. There follows the description of the Great Theophany, of which, in his own poor times, the singer has heard. It is probable that he has in his memory the events of the Exodus and Sinai. On this point his few geographical allusions agree with his descriptions of nature. He draws all the latter from the desert, or Arabian, side of Israel's history. He introduces none of the sea-monsters, or imputations of arrogance and rebellion to the sea itself, which the influence of Babylonian mythology so thickly scattered through the later sea-poetry of the Hebrews. The Theophany takes place in a violent tempest of thunder and rain, the only process of nature upon which the desert poets of Arabia dwell with any detail. In harmony with this, God appears from the southern desert, from Teman and Paran, as in the theophanies in Deutero- nomy xxxiii. and in ^the Song of Deborah ; ^ a few 1 T:"1 nowhere in the Old Testament means wrath, but either roar and noise of thunder (Job xxxvii. 2) and of horsehoofs (xxxix. 24), or the raging of the wicked (iii. 17) or the commotion of fear (iii. 26; Isa. xiv. 3). ^ Jehovah from Sinai hath come, And risen from Seir npon them; He shone from Mount Paraii, Hab.iii.] "/TV THE MIDST OF THE YEARS" 151 lines recall the Song of the Exodus/ and there are many resemblances to the phraseology of the Sixty- Eighth Psalm. The poet sees under trouble the tents of Kushan and of Midian, tribes of Sinai. And though the Theophany is with floods of rain and lightning, and foaming of great waters, it is not with hills, rivers or sea that God is angry, but with the nations, the oppressors of His poor people, and in order that He may deliver the latter. All this, taken with the fact that no mention is made of Egypt, proves that, while the singer draws chiefly upon the marvellous events of the Exodus and Sinai for his description, he cele- brates not them alone but all the ancient triumphs of God over the heathen oppressors of Israel. Com- pare the obscure line — these be Hts goings of old. The report of it all fills the poet with trembHng (ver. 16 returns upon ver. 26), and although his language is too obscure to permit us to follow with certainty the course of his feeling, he appears to await in confidence the issue of Israel's present troubles. His argument seems to be, that such a God may be trusted still, in face of approaching invasion (ver. 16). And broke from Meribah of Kadesh : From the South fire . . . to them. Deut. xxxiii. 2, slightly altered after the LXX. South : some form of pD*" must be read to bring the line into parallel with the others ; IDTl, Teman, is from the same root. Jehovah, in Thy going forth from, Seir, In Thy marching from Edom's field, Earth shook, yea, heaven dropped, Yea, the clouds dropped water. Mountains flowed down before Jehovah, Yon Sinai at the face of the God of Israel. Judges V. 4, 5. ' Exod. XV. 152 THE TWELVE PROPHETS The next verse, however, does not express the ex- perience of trouble from human foes ; but figuring the extreme affliction of drought, barrenness and poverty, the poet speaking in the name of Israel declares that, in spite of them, he will still rejoice in the God of their salvation (ver. 17). So sudden is this change from human foes to natural plagues, that some scholars have here felt a passage to another poem describing a different situation. But the last lines with their confidence in the God of salvation, a term always used of deliverance from enemies, and the boast, borrowed from the Eighteenth Psalm, He maketh my feet like to hinds^ feetj and gives me to march on my heights, reflect the same circumstances as the bulk of the Psalm, and offer no grounds to doubt the unity of the whole/ Psalm ^ of Habakkuk the Prophet. LORD, I have heard the report of Thee; I stand in awe ! ^ LORD, revive Thy work in the midst of the years, In the midst of the years make Thee known; * In turmoil ^ remember mercy ! * In this case ver. 17 would be the only one that offered any reason for suspicion that it was an intrusion. - n^Dn, lit. Prayer, but used for Psalm : cf. Psalm cii. i. ^ Sinker takes with this the first two words of next line : / have trembled, O LORD, at Thy ivork. * nin, Imp. Niph., after LXX. yvwad-qarj. The Hebrew has yniD, Hi., tpiake known. The LXX. had a text of these verses which reduplicated them, and it has translated them very badly. ^ T31, turmoil, noise, as in Job : a meaning that offers a better parallel to in the midst of the years than wrath, which the word also means. Davidson, however, thinks it more natural to understand the wrath manifest at the coming of Jehovah to judgment. So Sinker. Hab.iii.] "IN THE MIDST OF THE YEARS'' 153 God comes from Teman^ The Holy from Mount Paran} He covers the heavens with His glory ^ And filled with His praise is the earth. The flash is like lightning; He has rays from each hand of Him y Therein ^ is the ambush of His might. Pestilence travels before Him^ The plague-fire breaks forth at His feet. He stands and earth shakes,^ He looks and drives nations asunder; And the ancient mountains are cloven, The hills everlasting sink down. These be His ways from of old. ^ Under trouble I see the tents of Kushan,^ ' Vulg. ab Austro, from the South. ^ LXX. adds KaraaKiov Sao-^oj, which seems the translation of a clause, perhaps a gloss, containing the name of Mount Se ir, as in the parallel descriptions of a theophany, Deut. xxiii. 2, Judg. v. 4. See Sinker, p. 45. ^ Wellhausen, reading D'5J^ for DtJ^, translates He made them, etc. * So LXX. Heb. and measures the earth. ^ This is the only way of rendering the verse so as not to make it seem superfluous : so rendered it sums up and clenches the theophany from ver. 3 onwards ; and a new strophe now begins. There is therefore no need to omit the verse, as Wellhausen does. ^ LXX. 'Aldioires ; but these are Kush, and the parallelism requires a tribe in Arabia. Calvin rejects the meaning Ethiopian on the same ground, but takes the reference as to King Kushan in Judg. iii. 8, 10, on account of the parallelism with Midian, The Midianite wife whom Moses married is called the Kushite (Num. xii. i). Hommel (Anc. Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments, p. 315 and n. i) appears to take Zerah the Kushite of 2 Chron. xiv. 9 ff, as a prince of Kush in Central Arabia. But the narrative which makes him deliver his invasion of Judah at Mareshah surely confirms the usual opinion that he and his host were Ethiopians coming up from Egypt. 154 I^HE TWELVE PROPHETS The curtains of Midlands land are quivering. Is it with hills ^Jehovah is wroth ? Is Thine anger with river's ? Or against the sea is Thy wrath, That Thou ridest it with horses, Thy chariots of victory ? Thy bow is stripped bare ; ^ Thou gluttest (?) Thy shafts.^ Into rivers Thou cleavest the earth ;^ Mountains see Thee and writhe; The rainstorm sweeps on : ^ The Deep utters his voice, ' For D''"inJ3n, is it ivith streams, read W'^n2r\, is tt ivith hills : because hills have already been mentioned, and rivers occur in the next clause, and are separated by the same disjunctive particle, DN, which separates the sea in the third clause from them. The whole phrase might be rendered, Is it tvith hills Thou art angry, O Jehovah ? ^ Questionable : the verb ll^ri, Ni. of a supposed 1-1^ does not elsewhere occur, and is only conjectured from the noun T\T\^_, naked- ness, and nny, stripping. LXX. has evrelvoiv ivireivas, and Well- hausen reads, after 2 Sam. xxiii. 1 8, "IITO "Tlli;^ Thou bringest into action Thy bow. 2 "1D5< nttSO nir^ti^j literally sivorn are staves or rods of speech. A.V. : according _ 2?o the oaths of the tribes, even Thy word. LXX. (omitting niUll?^ and adding mn^) iirl . * n-13t?. LXX. avairaiKXOjxaL, I will rest. A.V. : that I might rest in the day of trouble. Others : / will wait for. Wellhausen suggests DHSX (Isa. 1. 24), / ivill take comfort. Sinker takes "W^^ as the simple relative : / ivho luill ivait patiently for the day of doom. Von Orelli takes it as the conjunction because. ^ •IS'13^, it invades^ brings up troops on them, only in Gen. xlix. 19 and here. Wellhausen : ivhich invades us. Sinker : for the coming up against the people of him who shall assail it, " rriSn ; but LXX. msn, ov KapTro