WALLS OF JERUSALEM REBUILT.

233

ful resistance to Haman's atrocious designs was kept as a solemn festival in the church of the temple.

B. C. 444. The victory which Ahasuerus had gained over the Egyptians was followed by a treaty of peace with Athens; one article of which stipulated that all Greek cities in Asia minor should be governed by their own laws. To guard against the infraction of this, it was arranged that no Persian army should advance within three days' march of the coast, nor any Persian ship of war navigate in the narrow channel between Greece and the Asiatic main. Now stipulations like these gave to Jerusalem and to Judea generally, a factitious importance in connection with the Persian empire. The former, besides being but three days' journey from the coast, lay in the direct route from Persia to Egypt, and was therefore well calculated to serve, in case of need, as a place of arms to the Persian monarch. Wherefore he, who up to this date had resisted the rebuilding of its walls, now gave his hearty assent to the suggestions of his wife Esther on the subject. Accordingly Zerubbabel the governor being dead, one Nehemiah, a person of good descent and exemplary piety, received instructions to set about the work. He quitted the palace, where he had acted as the king's cupbearer, and threw himself heartily into the business. Neither the ridicule nor the threatened violence of the Moabites and Samaritans stood in his way. The first he treated with contempt; against the last he took proper precautions; and in due time Jerusalem stood once more within a circle of walls, which, according to the tactics of the day, deserved to be accounted as more than respectable.

The place being thus secured against danger from abroad, Nehemiah, assisted by the excellent Ezra,

Y

set himself to remedy the religious and social defects under which the land still laboured. He restored to their ancient force the laws against usury, as well as the jubilee; while he gave back to its original possessors lands which their poverty might have forced them to alienate. He caused all impure marriages to be dissolved, and the festivals of the church to be observed. But the most remarkable event in his government was the completion, at this time, of the canon of the Old Testament, and its public reading in the ears of the people. For many a long day Ezra had busied himself in collecting and comparing as many copies of the law and of the other sacred books as could be found; and by putting them together, and connecting them where they seemed to require connection, by short sentences and explanatory notes, he produced that volume which has ever since been accepted, both by Jews and Christians, as a genuine memorial of God's dealings with the people of old.

B. C. 433.—It is impossible to overrate the advantages, in a moral point of view, of these reforms. The Jews became in spirit as well as in letter a religious people; and probably there would have been no falling away had Nehemiah's commission continued to him the chief authority for life. But it expired at the end of three years; and when Nehemiah went back to Babylon, Eliashib the high priest, on whom the government devolved, lacked either the will or the power to govern strictly. Abuses again crept in; not such as used to prevail when kings became idolatrous and led their subjects after them, for idolatry seems to have been by this time entirely renounced, but alliances were winked at which the law had forbidden, and with them came the vices of sensuality and indif

RETURN OF NEHEMIAH.

235

ference to form. But Esther heard of this, and through her interest Nehemiah received a fresh commission and went back. He showed mercy to no transgressor. They who had married wives from among the forbidden nations were compelled either to separate from them or to depart; and so rigid was the governor, that the son of the high priest himself was not spared. This man, whose name was Manasseh, had taken to wife the daughter of Sanballat, a Cushite governor of Samaria, and rather than submit to be separated from her, abandoned his country. And a temple being built for him on Mount Gerizim after the pattern of that in Jerusalem, he there continued to worship and offer sacrifices to Jehovah all his days. Among other institutions which Judea owed to Nehemiah was that of the synagogue. Heretofore if good men, unable to travel as far as Jerusalem, desired to read the law together and to worship, they did so either in their own private houses, or in the open air. Nehemiah encouraged the building of synagogues, or houses of prayer, in all the outlying towns and villages, and they became in time very numerous. They were so constructed that the windows of each looked towards Jerusalem; probably in commemoration of the custom of which the Psalmist speaks, when he describes himself always as "worshipping towards God's holy temple.'

There lived under Nehemiah, and wrote, the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. They as well as Ezra were eminent for their piety and holiness, and with their writings and those of Nehemiah himself the canon of the Old Testament closes.

CHAP. XL.

APOCRYPHAL BOOKS, AND GENERAL
HISTORY.

GOVERNMENT BY THE HIGH PRIESTS. KINGS OF THE ASMONEAN LINE.

B. C. 422.-ON the death of Nehemiah, the government of Judea devolved upon the high priest, and it continued to be conducted by that functionary for many years. The consequence was, that an

office established in the time of Moses for the maintenance of true religion only, acquired a political character, and ambitious men soon began to seek it by the same arts which they would have used to win a throne. Many a grievous calamity resulted from this arrangement, bringing discredit on the faith, and confusion into the polity of Judea. But as these were all intimately connected with the revolutions which went on in other states, it will be necessary to take a rapid glance at the progress of events, which brought about the accomplishment of all Daniel's most remarkable prophecies, and prepared the way for the coming of Christ into the world.

For about a hundred years from the date of Nehemiah's second administration, the empire of which Palestine formed a part underwent many revolutions. The death of Ahasuerus in B. C. 423, was followed by quarrels in the royal family, out of which arose the murder of the king's two legitimate sons, and the seizure of the crown by a third who was illegitimate. From this prince, whose

REIGN OF ARTAXERXES.

237

name was Ochus, Egypt revolted, and during the nineteen years that he filled the throne, the affairs of Greece were a constant source of trouble and anxiety to him. For he, adhering to the ambitious schemes of his predecessors, supported the Lacedæmonians in their war with Athens, and looked forward to the time when, weakened by their intestine struggles, not these two states alone, but the whole of Greece, would pass under the dominion of Persia. He miscalculated in this the characters and resources both of Greece and of Persia. A result the very opposite of that to which he looked, arose in course of time out of his policy, and Greece, instead of receiving the law from Persia, gave it.

Artaxerxes, the son of Ochus, mounted the throne in B. C. 404. He placed his brother Cyrus at the head of the province of Lydia, and soon had reason to repent it. For Cyrus was an ambitious and unstable man; so he raised an army of ten or twelve thousand Greeks, chiefly among the cities or settlements of Asia Minor, marched into the heart of the Persian empire, and strove to win the crown from his brother. Cyrus was killed, and the object of his expedition failed. But the perfect ease with which these ten thousand Greeks traversed a large portion of Asia, and defeated every attempt of the Persians to destroy them, taught a lesson to both parties which neither could readily forget. For a while, indeed, nothing seemed to come of it. Artaxerxes bribed the Greek governments largely, and kept them in constant strife one against another. But if he averted danger to his dominions from one side, he failed to restore order on another. Egypt, which he found in revolt at his accession, continued unsubdued during the whole of his reign, and he died at a very advanced