invited to it; most of these, however, ridiculed the whole affair,1 and only a few attended. After this festival had been held with every solemnity, the false sanctuaries, it is added, were destroyed throughout the country; and in conclusion, the first fruits, tithes, and other sacred gifts, were paid in this year with the greatest diligence.2 This was, as it were, the last respite afforded for the expiation and correction of national sins; and the issue of this period of preparation in the first year of Hezekiah enables us to understand how the northern kingdom could perish without deliverance, while the southern was capable of being redeemed. The description of the details of festal customs and religious usages is in this case one of the main objects of this narrator; and this confers upon the whole of this long passage an important significance even for the rigid truth of history.

Thus elevated by his age, king Hezekiah continued to be regarded as a man so rare and memorable that it is easy to explain how later generations could begin to raise him to a far higher position than is done even in the Chronicles, and to link whole books to his name. The vestiges of a later book of this kind may still be traced with sufficient clearness.3

D. DEVELOPMENT OF ART, PHILOSOPHY, AND LITERATURE. Such was the resistance offered in the course of these centuries by the better spirit of Israel, assuming many forms and exerting all its power, against the ruin of the kingdom and the nationality; and still, in the midst of the advancing overthrow of all its temporal supports which finally became inevitable, it attained much fresh energy and renovated vigour. If ever there flashed through some deep-seeing souls the presentiment of the necessary fall of the continued temporal existence of the ancient kingdom of God, yet the saddened gaze regained its cheerfulness in the ever-recurring certainty of the impossibility that the eternal element of Israel's greatness could ever actually perish. So manifold and so profound was the experience of the immortality which from the commencement inhered in the true community, so numerous were the new truths attained upon

1 Like the Sodomites on a similar opportunity of purification, Gen. xix. 14. This little trait of the representation 2 Chron. xxx. 10 exhibits most clearly the spirit of the whole; cf., also, the transition xxxii. 1.

2 2 Chron. xxix.-xxxi.

3 The brief account of him in the Baraita M. D'ND, iv. 9, can only be understood, so far as it is not clearly drawn from the

Old Testament, as derived from the poetic inventions of some late book of this kind. It was there narrated, for example, that he had buried his father upon a mean bier, constructed only of cords; had declared apocryphal a book on the art of medicine, &c. This last is probably a mere inference from Is. xxxviii. 21.-See further what is narrated, evidently from an apocryphon, in 2 Bar. lxiii. lxiv.

this basis, that the anticipation of the great and spiritual universal destiny of Israel was already arising clear and familiar in its midst; and in spite of the ruin which threatened, or had in part already arrived, the hope of an eternal spiritual perpetuity grew stronger day by day.

The truest picture of this elevated spirit of the ancient community which for so long struggled with the happiest results against external ruin, is reflected in the rich literature to which the life of those centuries gave birth. Round the existence of an ancient although much diminished kingdom of famous memory there still revolved the deepest endeavours of all the noblest minds in the nation; and still, upon the national soil of a religion as lofty as it was incomplete, new and difficult problems of life pressed for a solution. The literature of those times, therefore, comes before us as the noblest and clearest manifestation of the ideas and aspirations which moved the age. It is often, it is true, full of lamentation and complaint over the spreading corruption, or of yearning for the improvement and perfection that are to come; but yet it flows mainly from the healthiest and most vigorous life of an uncurbed present, and is the most glorious interpreter of ideas, the grasp of which is only equalled by their truth and perpetuity. The literature of the ancient people was only now capable of producing its greatest work, while the noble old spirit of true religion which lived in Israel exerted itself to the utmost to save the sinking edifice of its ancient and venerable house; and men's thoughts, occupied by the pressing needs of the present, had at the same time to defend a great past, and gazed freely into a veiled but assuredly still greater future. Neither the ages of despair nor of complete self-satisfaction are the noblest in literature, or marked by the most elevated and lasting literary efforts; these are to be found in periods which have already much to protect and to sustain, in the midst of the necessity and joy of achieving yet greater triumphs.

The paths of literary composition had been long ago levelled by the splendid beginnings of earlier ages; and the number of writings certainly increased now to an extraordinary extent, with, if possible, still greater rapidity than before; thus much, at any rate, we may securely recognise from the extremely varied rills of that great stream of literature which have flowed down to us. We now observe the preparation and circulation of manuscripts carried on by a sort of guild.' Moreover, the

According to the short expression, 1 Chron. ii. 55, comp. with iv. 21, and, further,

with Ps. xlv. 2 [1], Is. xxix. 11 sq.; cf., also, above p. 79, and my Alterthümer, p. 296.

higher art to which so strong an impulse was given by Solomon tended, if with less rapid leaps yet still successfully, to combine with literature and to transfigure it, and in all the lower arts, crafts, and dexterities of life the nation had long stood by this time second to none; in the great works under Hezekiah,1 there was certainly no need, as there had been under Solomon, to call in professional help from other quarters. Some knowledge of the art of mining, also, cannot at this time have been strange to the ancient people, although we can only conjecture that they then occupied themselves with it partly in the Sinaitic peninsula, partly on Lebanon.2

3

The extent to which this whole period was penetrated by the effort to attain knowledge and enjoy its fruits, an effort which even ran into exaggeration and tended to produce decline, has been already intimated; 3 for it contributed powerfully to determine the whole form and direction of the age. We ought not, however, to omit to notice the fact that all the nations which bordered on Israel were evidently at that time seized by a similar aspiration after the higher knowledge, and were able to enter into a sort of rivalry for it with Israel. If we only now possessed more evidence about the independent life of these nations, our insight into details would of course be much clearer; but a single instance may still prove very instructive. At first sight nothing can be more surprising than that the Idumeans, who always appear as hard as their own rock, with the roughness and inflexibleness of a warlike people, should also be celebrated for their wise men ; yet this is the case. In vivacity and energy of mind these nearest of Israel's 'brothers' are far more distinguished during that period than the Moabites and Ammonites, now almost decayed; and their history, could we only follow it more closely and connectedly, could not fail to be very instructive. instructive. We have already observed on how many occasions, since the time of David and Solomon, Edom again and again raised itself out of subjection with indomitable love of freedom. Many traces, however, show that in these, and

1 P. 175.

2 The description in Job xxviii. 1-11, to judge by the general circumstances of the author, might refer to mining in the Sinaitic peninsula (cf. the book of Aristeas, p. 114 sq.), or elsewhere in the southern districts; Deut. viii. 9, cf. xxxiii. 19, 25, appears to refer also to the Lebanon. Allusions to the operations of mining are frequent. -In the later Roman times the mines at Paid were celebrated. This is the Idumean ' of the Old Testament, where the

It

still more in the subsequent centuries, this nation must repeatedly have gained great accessions of strength from newlyadvancing Arab populations, and must have understood the art of blending itself with them, with by no means the worst results. That it learned by these opportunities to participate actively in the arts of commerce and trade has been already stated. It will, therefore, no longer appear quite so surprising that it was not behindhand in the aspiration after knowledge, and that the fame of its wisdom reached even to Israel.2 has, however, been often remarked already that all the kingdoms from the Tigris to the Nile stood at that time in relations of the closest and most varied nature; and as the ancient power of Israel was already broken, it was less and less capable of protecting itself from the forcible intrusion of foreign opinions, customs, and arts. Hence the rivalry in wisdom and in the effort to attain it, which had arisen between Israel and other nations in the days of Solomon,3 could not fail to be developed with increasing activity.

It is true that the gradual contraction of the whole life of the people of Israel after Solomon, and its special devotion to the maintenance and continuance of the true religion, were accompanied by the descent of the more refined art and literature from the elevation and extension in which they had moved in the age of Solomon; they sank deeper and deeper into that narrow circle of efforts with which all the more active spirits of the nation were then chiefly occupied, for the support of the true religion in the midst of the embarrassments and disasters of their time. All their literature, so far as it owes its special force to the impulse of this period, now became a literature consecrated specially to religion; even the further development of poetry, as well as of historical composition, is pressed the more devotedly into its service. But in the midst of these limitations in which literature finds itself more and more closely involved, its form, viewed from this one side, becomes the more decided, pure, and grand; so that under these

1 P. 159.

even the common people and their religion were in those countries deeply penetrated by definite efforts after knowledge, we learn from the laws explained in Diod. Hist. xix. 94–98.—It is remarkable that in later writings an Assyrian wise man,

2 Obadiah ver. 8 sq., where the words are still from the original prophet; the whole of the book of Job may be named in this connexion, since the chief wise man Eliphaz would certainly not have been assigned to the Idumean city Teman, had it not, at the time of the poet, long had the, is mentioned at the time of Senrepute of great wisdom. From an age nacherib's son Sarchadun (i.e. Esarhadsomewhat later come the additional testi- don); see Catal. Codd. Syr. Mus. Brit. monies, Jer. xlix. 7, Bar. iii. 22 sq.; cf. p. 111a. Jahrbb. der Bibl. Wiss. iv. p. 78. That VOL. IV.

Vol. iii. p. 271 sqq.

conditions literature attains a perfection to which antiquity can offer no parallel, and which, so far as religion is concerned, is still less approached by that of other nations, even at a distance.

2

It is in particular a problem of special difficulty to determine whether we still possess any literary remains of this period from the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. Something derived from this kingdom has certainly been preserved, as we have seen,' from the preceding period; and we have no reason to doubt that in this also literary composition was actively carried on.2 There is every appearance that the ancient portion of the oracle 3 on Moab, which Isaiah enlarged and adopted into his book,* really descended from an early prophet of the kingdom of the Ten Tribes." Hosea, again, is a literary prophet who was born in this kingdom, and consecrated to it his whole power; but the melancholy events of his life, already alluded to, typify the gloomy end which from day to day pressed more inexorably on all its higher efforts, and from the grasp of which, therefore, its literature could not hope to escape : and its final overthrow, from which it never really rose again, evidently precipitated into the abyss the great rich stream of literature which it had poured forth for a century and a half. Yet there are still, perhaps, preserved a few fragments from the last days of this kingdom, which was penitent too late. Some spirits at least there must have been besides Hosea, who strained every nerve, the nearer its doom approached, to raise the whole people to true repentance and power in God; and this is rendered the more credible since even this kingdom had never wished actually to abandon the ancient religion of Jahveh, and by law, at any rate, rested upon it alone.

6

But the limitations in which the life and literature of Israel were in both kingdoms confined under an increasing pressure, were not without some advantages.

1 P. 42 sq.

2 Cf. above, pp. 9, 124 note 1. 3 P. 145 note 1.

4 Is. xv. sq. 5 Just as, even before him, a prophet from Judah in Uzziah's time (p. 144 note 8) had added to it the words xvi. 1-6. The ancient prophet from the kingdom of the Ten Tribes was certainly also the author of the words Is. xxi. 11-14; which Isaiah merely augmented by adding vv. 15-17.

Namely, Ps. xc. and the prophetic song Deut. xxxii. These passages have many great peculiarities, and nothing in them points to their composition in Judah, while they must still both have been written relatively early. Ps. xc. is probably somewhat older than Deut. xxxii., concerning which see i. p. 124. That Deut. xxxii,

1 is later than Is. i. 2, and is modelled upon it, is obvious; but if Is. i. is to be assigned to the period described p. 176 note 1, the prophetic song Deut. xxxii. may very likely have been composed in the last three years before the destruction of Samaria.The book of Job, also, has many peculiarities of diction, and may with good reason be placed in the eighth century; but in an important point like that alluded to p. 116 note 1, it adheres to the linguistic usage of the great writers of Judah; and the words xiv. 11a are evidently derived from Is. xix. 5. This great work may, therefore, have been composed soon after the publication by Isaiah of the piece contained in c. xix.