58 BABYLONIA. BOOK I. perhaps the only channel through which the influence of Grecian opinions would penetrate into Palestine ; ° and of the Alexandrian notions of the Messiah, we shall hereafter adduce two competent representatives, the author of the Book of Wisdom and Philo. But the East no doubt made a more early, profound, and lasting impression on the popular mind of the Jews. Unfortunately in no part does history present us with so melancholy a blank, as in that of the great Babylonia. Babylonian settlement of the people of Israel. Yet its importance in the religious, and even in the civil, affairs of the nation cannot but have been very considerable. It was only a small part of the nation which returned with the successive remigrations under Ezra and Nehemiah to their native land; and, though probably many of the poorer classes had remained behind at the period of the Captivity, and many more returned singly or in small bodies, yet on the other hand it is probable, that the tide of emigration, which at a later time was perpetually flowing from the valleys of Palestine into Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and even more remote regions, would often take the course of the Euphrates, and swell the numbers of the Mesopotamian colony. In the great contest between Alexander and the Persian monarchy, excepting from some rather suspicious stories in Josephus, we hear less than we might expect of this race of Jews. But as we approach the • Even as early as the reign of Antiochus the Great, certain Jews had attempted to introduce Grecian manners, and had built a Grecian school or gymnasium at Jerusalem. 1 Macc. i. 11, 16; 2 Macc. ii. 4, 11, 12. P I have examined this question much more at length, with the aid of some recent Jewish writers, in the new edition of the History of the Jews. There may be truth in the observation of St. Croix: "Les Grecs et les Romains avoient tant de haine et de CHAP. II. JEWS OF BABYLONIA. *59 era of Christianity, and somewhat later, they emerge rather more into notice. While the Jews were spreading in the West, and no doubt successfully disseminating their Monotheism in many quarters, in Babylonia their proselytes were kings; and the later Jewish Temple beheld an Eastern queen (by a singular coincidence, of the same name with the celebrated mother of Constantine, the patroness of Christian Jerusalem) lavishing her wealth on the structure on Mount Moriah, and in the most munificent charity to the poorer inhabitants of the city. The name of Helena, queen of the Adiabeni, was long dear to the memory of the Jews; and her tomb was one of the most remarkable monuments near the walls of the city. Philo not only asserts that Babylon and other Eastern satrapies were full of his countrymen, but intimates that the apprehension of their taking up arms in behalf of their outraged religion and marching upon Palestine, weighed upon the mind of Petronius, when commanded, at all hazards, to place the statue of Caligula in the Temple. It appears from some hints of Josephus, that during the last war, the r mépris pour le peuple Juif, qu'ils affectoient n'en pas parler dans leurs écrits." (Historiens d'Alex. p. 555.) This, however, would apply only to the later writers, which are all we now possess; but if in the cotemporary historians there had been much more, it would probably, at least if to the credit of his countrymen, have been gleaned by Josephus. See on the numbers of the Jews in the Asiatic provinces, particularly Armenia, at a later period (the conquest of Armenia by Sapor, A. D. 367), St. Martin's additions to Le Beau's S Hist. du Bas Empire. The death of this valuable writer, it is to be feared, will deprive the learned world of his promised work on the History of the Birth and Death of Jesus Christ, which was to contain circumstantial accounts of the Jews beyond the Euphrates. Of the different races of Jews mentioned in the Acts, as present in Jerusalem, four are from this quarter:Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia. Leg. ad Caium, vol. ii. p. 578, Edit. Mangey. 60 INFLUENCE OF BABYLONIAN JEWS. t BOOK I. revolted party entertained great hopes of succour from that quarter; and there is good ground for supposing that the final insurrection in the time of Hadrian was connected with a rising in Mesopotamia." At the same period the influence of this race of Jews on the religious character of the people is no less manifest. Here was a chief scene of the preaching of the great apostle:* and we cannot but think, that its importance in early Christian history, which has usually been traced almost exclusively in the West, has been much underrated. Hence came the mystic Cabala of the Jews, the chief parent of those gnostic opinions, out of which grew the heresies of the early Church: here the Jews, under the Prince of the Captivity, held their most famous schools, where learning was embodied in the Babylonian Talmud; and here the most influential heresiarch, Manes, Dion (or Xiphilin) asserts that they received considerable succours from the East. L. lxvi. c. 4. u Hist. of Jews, ii. 422, &c. Nothing but the stubborn obstinacy of controversy could have thrown a doubt on the plain date in the first Epistle of St. Peter (v. 13). Philo in two places (ii. p. 578, 587), Josephus in one (Ant. xviii. 9, 8), expressly name Babylon as the habitation of the great Eastern settlement. It is not certain whether the city was then entirely destroyed (Gesenius on Isaiah, xiii. 22), but in fact the name was extended to the province or satrapy. But it was equally the object of the two great conflicting parties in Christianity to identify Rome with Babylon. This fact established, the Roman Catholic had an unanswerable argument to prove the contested point of St. Peter's residence in the Western metropolis; Babylon therefore was decided to mean pagan Rome. The Protestant at once concurred; for if Rome was Babylon, it was the mystic spiritual Babylon of the Apocalypse. The whole third chapter of the Second Epistle of St. Peter (assuming its authenticity, and my view rather favours that authenticity) appears to me full of Oriental allusions, and the example of Balaam seems peculiarly appropriate if written in that region. Lucan's "Cumque superba foret Babylon spolianda" may indeed be mere poetic licence, or may allude to Seleucia. Cabala is used here in its most extensive sense. See Chiarini, p. 97. In this sense it is used by Maimonides. See Hist. of Jews. attempted to fuse into one system the elements of Magianism, Cabalism, and Christianity. Having thus rapidly traced the fortunes of this great Jewish colony, we must reascend to the time of its first establishment. From a very early period the Jews seem to have possessed a Cabala, a traditionary comment or Cabala. interpretation of the sacred writings. Whether it existed before the Captivity, it is impossible to ascertain; it is certain that many of their books, even those written by distinguished prophets, Nathan, and Gad, and Iddo, were lost at that disastrous time. But whether they carried any accredited tradition to Babylonia, it seems evident, from the Oriental cast which it assumed, that they either brought it from thence on their return to their native land, or received it subsequently during their intercourse with their Eastern brethren. Down to the Captivity the Jews of Palestine had been in contact only with the religions of the neighbouring nations, which, however differently modified, appear to have been essentially the same, a sort of Nature-worship, in which the host of Heaven, especially the sun and moon, under different names, Baal and Moloch, Astarte Syrian and Mylitta, and probably as symbols or re- Religions. presentatives of the active and passive powers of nature, no doubt with some distinction of their attributes, were the predominant objects. These religions had long degenerated into cruel or licentious superstitions; and the Jews, in falling off to the idolatry of their neighbours, or introducing foreign rites into their own religious system, not merely offended against the great primal distinction of their faith, the Unity of the Godhead, but sunk from the pure, humane, and compara z Mosheim, De Rebus Christ. ii. 18. 62 Religion of RELIGION OF PERSIA. BOOK I. tively civilised institutes of their lawgiver, to the loose and sanguinary usages of barbarism. In the East, however, they encountered a religion of a far nobler and more regular structure: a religion which offered no temptation to idolatrous practices; for the Magian rejected, with the devout abhorrence of the followers of Moses, the exhibition of the Deity in the human form; though it possessed a rich store of mythological and symbolical figures, singularly analogous to those which may be considered the poetic machinery of the later Hebrew prophets. The religion of Persia seems to have held an intermediate rank between the Pantheism of India, where the whole universe emanated from the Deity, and was finally to be reabsorbed into the Deity, and the purer Theism of the Jews, which asserted the one omnific Jehovah, and seemed to place a wide and impassable interval between the nature of the Creator and that of the created being. In the Persian system, the Creation owed its existence to the conflicting powers of evil and good. These were subordinate to, or proceeding from, the Great Primal Cause (Zeruane Akerene), Time without bounds, which in a In Asia Persarum religionem cæteris esse nobiliorem. Mosheim, Inst. p. 58, and Grot. de Ver. ii. 10. b This, it may be observed, has no connexion whatever with the originality or authority of these predic tions. It should be borne in mind, that in these visions it is the moral or religious meaning alone which can be the object of faith, not the figures through which that meaning is conveyed. There is no reason why the images of Daniel and Ezekiel should not be derived from, or assimilate to, c the prevalent forms around them, as well as those of the rustic Amos be chiefly drawn from pastoral or rural life. See, e. g., Chiarini's curious theory about the chariot of Ezekiel. Preface to Talmud, p. 90 and 101. Compare Hist. of the Jews and the quotations in the notes. So translated by Du Perron and Kleuker. There is a learned dissertation of Foucher on this subject. Acad. des Ins. vol. xxix. According to Bohlen it is analogous to the Sanskrit Sarvam akaranam, the Uncreated |