sion of the German tribes, which was to usher in the period of Modern History in Europe. With a like atastrophe did the earlier epoch come to its conclusi, but in the continent which had been its chief seat -in Asia. And it is exactly this momentous juncture of secular history, this critical pause between the middle and the final epoch of Jewish history, at which we are now arrived. The fall of Jerusalem coincides with the fall, or the beginning of the fall, of those ancient monarchies and nations which had occupied the attention of civilized men down to this time. We have already seen how the chorus of the Jewish Prophets at the close of the monarchy prepared the way for the final overthrow of the oldest historic world, much as the Christian Fathers heralded the overthrow of the Greco-Roman world. We have seen how1 Ezekiel sat over against the grave of the nations, into which tribe after tribe, kingdom after kingdom, even the stately ship of Tyre, the cedar of Assyria, the venerable Egypt, went plunging down to the dark abyss where "the bloody "corpses of the past, yet but green in earth, Lay festering in their shrouds. But now the oldest, the grandest of all was about to descend into the same sepulchral vault which had received all its predecessors and rivals. The event when it came to the Israelite captives ould have been no surprise. It had been long foreseen by those who sang by the water-side. They were told how, even before the Captivity, on occasion of a . Ezek. xxiv.-xxxii. See Lecture 2 Psalm cxxxvii. 3. visit of homage which the Jewish King Zedekiah paid to Nebuchadnezzar in the early part of his reign, Jeremiah had recorded his detailed prediction of the overthrow of Babylon in a scroll, which he confided to Seraiah, brother of Baruch, himself a high1 officer in the Judæan Court. Not till he reached the quays of the Euphrates was Seraiah to open and read the fatal record, with the warning that "Babylon shall sink, and "shall not rise again from the face of the evils that "shall come upon her."2 Deep in its bed the mighty river was believed to have kept its secret as a pledge of the approaching doom. What that doom was the events now began to disclose. It will be our object to indicate the impression left by it on the Israelite spectators, the only spectators who by means of these thrilling utterances, remain, as it were, the living witnesses of the whole transaction; confirmed on the whole by the broken and scattered notices preserved in later Chaldæan annals, or gathered together by the Greeks who penetrated during the next century into Central Asia. It might have been thought difficult to imagine from what quarter the destroyer should come. The chief rivals of Babylon were gone. The dominions that had with it played their part on the battlefield of the nations had passed away, and the Empire of Nebuchadnezzar was left, as it seemed, in solitary and unassailable majesty. "I have made completely strong 'he "defences of Babylon," said Nebuchadnezzar in his great inscription; "may it last for ever! "3 Persian Not so. The prescient eye of the Hebrew Prophets was clearly fixed on that point of the horizon whence the storm would issue. There was a mightier The wall even than the walls of Babylon, with gates Invasion which could not be opened and shut at the B. c. 539. command of Princes, that runs across the centre of the whole Ancient World; the backbone alike of Europe and Asia. It begins in the far East with the Himalayas; it attaches itself to the range of the diverging lines of the Zagros and Elburz ranges; it unites them in the Imaus, the Caucasus, and the Taurus; it reappears after a slight interruption in the range of Hamus; it melts into the Carpathian and Styrian Mountains; it rises again in the Alps; it reaches its western buttress in the Pyrenees. On the southern side, on the sunny slopes of this gigantic barrier grew up the civilized nations of antiquity, the ancient monumental religions and politics of India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as afterwards farther west, the delicate yet powerful commonwealths of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. On the northern or darker side, behind its mighty screen, were restrained and nurtured the fierce tribes which have from time to time descended to scourge or regenerate the civilization of the South. Such in later days have been the Gauls, the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns, the Tartars; such, more nearly within the view of the age of which we are now speaking, the1 Scythians; and such was now, although in a somewhat milder form, the enemy on whom, as Tacitus in the day of Trajan already fixed his gaze with mingled fear and admiration on the tribes of Germany, so the Israelite Prophets looked for the development of the new crisis of the world. Already the 1 See Lectures XXXIX. and XL. 2 Psalmist had seen that neither in the East nor West nor South, but in the North was the seat of future change. Already Ezekiel had been startled by the vision of the wild nomads pouring over the hills that had hitherto parted them from their destined prey. And now Jeremiah, and it may be some older Prophet, heard yet more distinctly the gathering of war-an assembly of great nations against Babylon from the north country, with the resistless weapons for which all those races were famous. 3 And now yet more nearly the Great Unnained points not only to the north, but to the eastern quarter of the north. Already on "the bare hill-top" a banner was raised and the call was gone forth; there was a rushing sound as of multitudes1 in the distant mountain valleys; the shriek of alarm went up from the plains; the faces of the terrified dwellers of Mesopotamia were lit up with a lurid glow of fear. It was the mighty race which occupied the table-land between the two mountain-ranges of Zagros and Elburz, of which we have just spoken -the Median and Persian tribes now just rising into importance. That nation whose special education was to ride on horses, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth,5 was now in full march against no less a prey than Babylon itself. Their bright "arrows were the arrows of a mighty 7 "expert man; the archers, the nation of archers, with 1 Psalm lxxv. 6. 2 See Lecture XL. 8 Jer. 1. 9. 6 4 Isa. xiii. 2, 3; ib. 4, 5. The question of the date of Isa. xiii. 1 — xiv. 23 and xxi. 1-10 stands on different grounds from that of the date of Isa. xl.-lxvi., and Ewald and Gesenius agree in regarding them as predictive and not merely descrip- "their bows all bent," were gathering to camp against the city. They hold their bows and lances, they bend their bows and shoot and spare1 no arrows. They are there with their splendid cavalry riding on horses in battle-array; they shout with their deafening war-cry. The force and energy with which their descent is described agrees with their significance in the history of the Eastern empires. "With the appearance of the Per"sians," says a brilliant French writer, "the movement "of history begins and humanity throws itself into that "restless march of progress which henceforth is never 66 to cease. A vague instinct pushes them forward to "the conquest of all around them. They throw them"selves headlong on the Semitic races. They are not "contented with Asia. The East under them seems to "migrate towards the West. They do not halt even "at the Hellespont, nor till they have reached the "shores of Salamis." 3 And not merely the nation, and the hour, but the very man was now in sight who should accomplish this great work. The fated hero had arisen, in the same eventful year of which we have already spoken, the year 560, twenty years after the beginning of the Jewish exile - Cyrus, or Koresh, or Khosroo, the King of the Persians. Already the Grecian colonies had felt his heavy hand already Media had been absorbed into his dominion. On him the expectation of the nations was fixed. Would he be, like the other chiefs and princes of the age, a mere transient conqueror, or would he indeed be the Deliverer who should inaugu 1 Jer. 1. 42. Jer. li. 14; l. 15. Cyrus. 8 A striking passage, though with some exaggeration, from Quinet, Génic des Religions, pp. 301, 302 |