the ancient faith rose up in resistance with all its might, and availed itself of Elijah's fiery zeal and Jehu's sword with such effect that none of the princes of the northern kingdom ever ventured afterwards to dislodge it openly. Even in Judah, in spite of all his partiality for heathenism, Ahaz was willing to leave the true religion in outward honour.' And now in this very Judah, the only state still erect which it could claim as its own, the most open animosity is displayed against the objects of its greatest sanctity by the king himself, and that, too, in a kingdom which had learned, wholly unlike the kingdom of the Ten Tribes, to reverence the royal power, and never to encounter it with wild revolt! There were of course very many who bowed beneath the iron rod with which Manasseh ruled. The atmosphere of the age was poisoned from above; and the leaders of the people of every class, whose moral decline had already become a subject of lament in the preceding century, sank into an almost incredible degeneracy. The prophets, who ought ever to have been the most loyal guardians of the truth, were for the most part like dumb and greedy dogs; many of the priests allowed themselves to be seduced into offering heathen sacrifices; the judges and nobles paid little heed to the eternal right. Equivocation and hypocrisy spread amongst those who ought to have ministered most austerely to public truthfulness of life: while those who were engaged in commerce and trade sank into the hardest indifference to every higher aim, and thought only of the acquisition and enjoyment of wealth. So terrible was the demoralisation which set in under this reign, that those who remained faithful to the ancient religion were either scoffed at as fools," or allowed to perish in cold contempt without any effort being made to save them, and were even derided after their death.9 All the pious and faithful confessors of Jahveh who formed the best and most conscientious portion of the nation, found themselves involved by the majority of their fellow-countrymen in an interminable struggle; carried on at one time by secret wiles, at another by open violence, it poisoned all the relations of life, extended itself through city and country, and in the long run inevitably became more and more disadvantageous to 1 P. 171. 2 Cf. the picture in Is. lvi. 9-12 with similar descriptions in Zeph. iii. 4, Jer. ii. 26 sq., v. 13 sq., xxxi. 6, 13 sqq. 3 Zeph. and Jer. ibid. 4 Prov. xxiv. 11, Zeph. i. 8 sq., iii. 1-3, Jer. v. 26 sqq., Ps. lv. 10-16 [9-15], Xxxv. 11 sqq. Zeph. i. 5, Mic. vii. 1–6. 7 Is. lvii. 4, Ps. xxxv. 16-25. 9 Is. liii. 9. So the helpless faithful, who often preferred endurance to revenge.1 When such a condition as this began to acquire permanence, even the better minds might despond and despair altogether, and actually become terribly confused about Jahveh's justice. severe a blow had never been inflicted in Judah on the inmost heart of the ancient religion as the present. Since the victorious days of Moses and Joshua it had been the growing belief of Israel that loyal perseverance in the true religion would bring with it security and prosperity in this life, even for children, and children's children. Although it had sometimes wavered, this trust had always regained its strength, and seemed to have received marvellous confirmation under Hezekiah. And now, soon after, it is shaken to its deepest roots, and the shock comes in the only existing kingdom of Jahveh, and from the king and the great ones of the realm! Yet if in this time of trial, severer than any since the days of Egypt, there were many who were in evil plight, there were some who passed through it all and came out unspotted, and in the midst of outward ruin offered brilliant examples of divine victory. Manasseh, says our present book of Kings with great brevity, shed very much innocent blood; so that he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to another.3 It is involved in the nature of the case, and is plentifully confirmed by ancient testimony, that it was the faithful prophets and judges especially whose blood was shed in the frenzy of unsparing persecution as though by the sword of some mysterious divine wrath. But the steadfast death of one innocent martyr soon imparted to hundreds, as a sublime description enables us clearly to perceive," the power of overcoming their own fear 1 Ps. x. 1–11, cxl.-cxlii., lv., xvii., and many similar ones. Prov. i. 11-19, ii. 12-15, iv. 14-17, xxiv. 15, 21 sq. 2 Job, Ps. x. 1; cf. lxxiii. 1-14. Further, Prov. iii. 31, xxiii. 17, xxiv. 1, 19, Ps. xxxvii. sqq. 32 Kings xxi. 16, xxiv. 3 sq. According to a story of the later Jews, Manasseh had Isaiah cruelly executed in his extreme old age by being sawn asunder; but even if there should be an allusion to this in Hebr. xi. 37, at any rate Josephus says nothing about it. So far as we can see at present, all later statements about it rest upon the apocryphal works on the Martyr-death and Ascension of Isaiah, which have been made known in modern times from ancient versions chiefly by Lawrence and Gieseler. The work makes use of no ancient authorities, yet the question may fairly be asked, whence the author derived such names as that in ii. 5. 4 Jer. ii. 30, Ps. cxli. 6. The last passage seems to show that several nobles of the party of the true believers attempted a resistance, but came to a dreadful end. 5 The description appears in Is. liii., worked up in its present form by some later prophet, and applied to another purpose. The original meaning of it, however, obliges us to suppose that it was occasioned by the bloody death of a prophet in the time of Manasseh, and gives utterance to the feelings of the survivors, which could be expressed in the subsequent change of affairs for the better. The application of it made in the present prophetic book of Isaiah lii. 13 sq., lays hold simply of the truth of the thought; the whole of Israel has in like manner suffered even to death, and following his example. All the young men of deeper feeling soon made up their minds to encounter the dangers attending the service and confession of Jahveh rather than yield to the allurements of the ruling power. They preferred listening to the rough words of exhortation and chastisement uttered by the mature confessors of Jahveh, to enjoying the dainties of light-minded potentates. The songs of this age contain the utterance of its mingled feelings; on the one hand the heart of the faithful, deeply bowed beneath the burden of its afflictions, sighs grievously to heaven, and seeks its only relief in prayers for help; and on the other, there rises with growing freedom and boldness the confidence of purer faith, grandly displayed in the midst of suffering; a faith which in the book of Job unites with the profoundest art to set forth nobly the higher truth. No literary composition, however, can have expressed more deeply and truly the feelings which agitated the heart of the pious in these times, than the crown of all the prophetic utterances we possess; which was originally occasioned, there is every reason to believe, by this long period of suffering.2 This age of suffering, therefore, under Manasseh produced results wholly different from those of that age of blood in the kingdom of the Ten Tribes which had witnessed the struggle of Elijah against Ahab. In that case the prophets triumphed, but the new truth which finally germinated there was alien to their own genius.3 Here they succumbed without ever again acquiring a position of importance in the kingdom; but the truths which their speech and their silence, their life and their death alike proclaimed, were victorious; and these truths were of eternal significance, and could never lose their force. It was here that that ennobled insight was attained into the meaning of human suffering and the justice of God, which the book of Job exhibits with a beauty that can never fade, and which from that time sank with deeper and deeper power into all hearts in the community of Israel. And it was here that the soul learned at length from its inmost needs boldly to overcome all the terrors of death, and rise in freedom to the belief of its own divine immortality. The force with which events and must, if the will of God requires it, continue to suffer; but, in recompense therefor, it is to be doubly glorified when the survivors receive the justification at tained by these sufferings. 1 Ps. cxli. 3-7; for the correct explanation of these difficult words, see what is said in my work on the Psalms, 3rd ed. 4 EFFECTS OF THE PERSECUTION UNDER MANASSEH. 213 taught in the sight of all men, even of the enemy, the lesson of the immortality of the pure spirit and its resurrection in ever nobler forms in spite of all devices for its destruction, was only equalled by the power which the belief in that lesson alone possessed, of imparting true strength for steadfast suffering to those to whom escape was impossible from the poignant sting of this bitter time. And thus an entrance was effected into the circle of the ancient religion for truths which had never belonged to it from the time of its foundation, and which now supplemented its original deficiencies.1 The numerous Israelites who were at that time obliged to live under heathen princes, many of them exiled from the kingdom of the Ten Tribes, many of them dispersed still more widely from Judah, may well have had to undergo similar sufferings and trials, if they desired to remain true to their religion; and there are indeed several songs which clearly favour this supposition. Yet they at any rate could look to the kingdom of Judah as still in existence, and could hope to be able to renew their strength once more in the temple at Jerusalem; so that, in spite of their enforced separation from their fatherland, they were still happier than those who, living close to the ancient sanctuary, and in the midst of the community not yet defunct, were compelled to endure such horrors. It seems as though the reason why the most faithful of the citizens of the ancient kingdom had to pass through so many and such bitter trials before its dissolution, was that at the proper time the highest truths might spring up which were capable of development in the ancient community, and without having attained which the protecting wall of a popular native monarchy could not easily have been torn down from the community itself. II. FRESH COMMENCEMENT OF THE DISSOLUTION OF THE KINGDOM. NEW SETTLEMENT IN SAMARIA. 1. After its rise in fresh power under Hezekiah, the kingdom must have been again materially weakened by the internal distractions already described. It lost its most effective strength for securing tranquil prosperity at home, as well as successful That the book of Job teaches the doctrine of immortality was proved by Ephrus Köstlin in his work entitled de Immortalitatis spe quae in libro Jobi apparere dicitur, Tub. 1846. I have discussed the question further in my work on the book of Job (last ed.), and in many passages of the Jahrbb. der Bibl. Wiss. 1 See ii. p. 133 sqq. 2 Especially Pss. xvi., xxii.; and perhaps somewhat earlier Pss. xxxvi., xxxvii., lxi., lxiii. resistance abroad. This, though at once obvious, is confirmed by the few traces of the history of the period which we are still able to discover. It is not without reason that Jeremiah, who lived in the next generation, traces the impossibility of reducing to order the disorders under the mischievous burden of which his age was sighing, chiefly to the faults of Manasseh.' The evil consequences abroad showed themselves still more rapidly. 2 The adjoining countries, which had belonged to Judah from the time of Uzziah, or at any rate in part since that of Hezekiah, ---Philistia, Edom, Moab, and Ammon,--appear again towards the end of this period of sixty years in complete possession of their independence, and are more daring and insolent than ever in their behaviour towards it; and there is good reason for supposing that their revolt from Judah took place in the early years of Manasseh's reign. Moreover, with the exception of a short period under Josiah, they remained independent till the destruction of Jerusalem.-After Sennacherib's death the Assyrian power also gradually entered on renewed activity in the south-western countries, and before its final fall made another attempt under a somewhat more vigorous king to regain as far as possible in every direction its former authority. Though our information is extremely scanty about the last Assyrian kings, it still appears clear that a king named Axerdis conquered Egypt and several portions of lower Syria-those, viz. on the coast. This Axerdis is certainly the same as the Asaridis of the Canon of Ptolemy, and the Asarhaddon of the Old Testament, which is the best form of the name. If his invasion 3 5 On comparing the very scanty and abrupt information which Eusebius, Chron. Arm. i. pp. 43, 53 sq., communicates from Alex. Polyhistor and Abydenus, with the Old Testament and Ptolemy's Canon, we arrive at the following result. Just as he was recovering his power towards the end of his reign, Sennacherib was murdered by his two sons (Alex. Polyhistor specified one only, Ardumusan); he had, however, about a year before, despatched his son Asarhaddon (Asordani in Polyhistor) against the rebellious governor of Babylon named Elib (more correctly in the Canon, Bilib, he remained in power four years). Asarhaddon, after taking possession of Babylon, marched against his brothers as parricides, drove them into the inaccessible ravines of Ararat, himself mounted the Assyrian throne and reigned in Nineveh fifteen years (see the chronological survey at the end of this vol.). In the Canon he is called Aparanadi, perhaps erroneously for Asaranadi, Asaradani, as Acherdon appears in another reading Sacherdon, Tobit i. 21 sq.; cf. above, p. 188. Under him Babylon was governed by Regebel and Mesesimordak as viceroys; the latter, however, soon allowed the province to fall away from his control. He was murdered by his son Adramel, who himself had to give way before his half-brother Axerdis. This Axerdis is the conqueror already mentioned. He governed Babylon for thirteen years, as the name Asaridis in the Canon appears to prove. The statement of Abydenus about the rise of this Asarhaddon is certainly in such close agreement with that about the son of Sennacherib, 2 Kings xix. 37, that it cannot fail to appear ex |