THE JEWS REFUSED TO LISTEN UNTIL A LONG PERIOD OF EXILE IN ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA BROUGHT THEM TO A REALISATION OF WHAT THEY HAD DONE AND WHAT THEY OUGHT TO HAVE DONE.FAR AWAY FROM THE OLD HOME,SCATTERED AMONG THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES OF THE VALLEY OF MESOPO-TAMIA,THEY BEGAN THAT CLOSE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT LAWS AND THE EARLY CHRONICLES WHICH IN DUE TIME WAS TO BRING THEM BACK TO A MORE SINCERE AND EAGER WORSHIP OF JEHOVAH
The new masters of the Jewish people belonged to a very remarkable race.Ever since the days of Hammurabi,their great law-giver,who lived and wrote a thousand years before Moses,the Babylonians had been regarded as the most civilised people of western Asia.
The capital of their vast empire was a mighty fortress.It was protected by a double row of high walls which surrounded almost a hundred square miles of houses,streets,gardens,temples and market-places.
The town had been laid out very regularly.The streets were both straight and wide.
The houses,built of brick,were spacious and sometimes two or three stories high.
The river Euphrates ran right through the middle of the town and offered direct connection with the Persian Gulf and India.
In the heart of the city,on a low artificial hill,stood the famous palace of Nebuchadnezzar.
With its many terraces,it created the impression of a large park,suspended in mid-air,and gave rise to the strange myth of the hanging gardens.
The town was as cosmopolitan as the modern city of New York.
The Babylonian merchants were excellent business men.They traded with Egypt and with far-away China.They had invented a system of writing,out of which the Phoenicians developed that handy alphabet which we use to-day.They were well versed in mathematics.They gave the world its first notions of scientific astronomy and divided the years into months,and the months into weeks,as we do.They devised that system of weights and measures upon which modern commerce is based.
And they first developed those moral laws which were afterwards incorporated by Moses in his Ten Commandments and which form the corner-stone of our own Church.
They were very efficient organisers and steadily and deliberately increased their domains.Their conquest of the land of Judah,however,was an accident and had nothing to do with their policy of expansion.
It happened that one of their rulers had gone forth to conquer Aram and Egypt.The little independent nation of the Judaeans happened to be situated upon the high-road from the north to the south and from the east to the west.
It was occupied as a matter of military precaution.
That was all.
We doubt greatly whether the Babylonians of the age of Nebuchadnezzar were ever conscious of the existence of the Jews.They probably regarded them as we regard the Pueblo Indians.We know that a tribe of aborigines maintains some sort of semi-independent life somewhere in the southwest.We do not know exactly where and we do not greatly care.We take it for granted that some one in the Bureau of Indian Affairs or in the Department of the Interior will look after their interests.But life is full of a number of things.We are busy with our own affairs and cannot bother about a small ethnological group which means nothing to us beyond a name and a few pictures of queer religious dances.
You must get this point clearly fixed in your mind if you wish to understand what is to follow.
There was not a single early indication of the important role which the descendants of Abraham and Isaac were to play eventually in the history of mankind.
The earliest authors of world-histories do not mention the Jews with a single word.Take the case of Herodotus.He tried to give a reliable account of everything that had happened since the days of the flood (the Greek flood,and not the flood of Noah,which is part of an ancient Babylonian myth).Like most Athenians,he was both tolerant and curious.He wanted to know everything of importance that his neighbours had ever said or thought or done,that he might put it into his books.
He had no racial prejudices and he travelled far and wide to obtain first-hand information.He tells us several important things about the Egyptians and the Babylonians and many other people of the Mediterranean seaboard,but he has never heard of the Jews and refers to the people of the Palestinian plains very vaguely as an unknown tribe which practiced certain curious hygienic precautions.
As for the Chaldean contemporaries of the Jews,they looked upon the poor exiles as we look upon a group of forlorn Russian or Armenian refugees who happen to cross our city bound for some unknown destination in the west.
Which leaves us the Old Testament as the main source of our information.
But the compilers of that great national history(as we have told you before)were not trained historians.They did not care how they spelled the names of their foreign masters.They were very hazy about their geography.Constantly they refer to places which no one has ever been able to identify with any degree of certainty.
Again,they often deliberately hid the real meaning of their words.They used strange symbols.They referred to a whale,which swallowed a shipwrecked mariner and after a few days,vomited him up again upon dry land,when they wished to tell how the big empire of Babylonia conquered the little kingdom of Judah and after half a century,had been obliged to release her hold upon her captives.This was,of course,quite understandable to the people of twenty-five hundred years ago,but it is not so clear to those of us who know Babylon merely as a deserted heap of stones and rubbish.
All the same,the last twenty books of the Old Testament make up in quantity for what they lack in accuracy,and it is possible to reconstruct the fifth,the fourth and the third centuries B.C.with a fair amount of accuracy.