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the dregs of the nation. Nebuchadnezzar required citizens; Jehovah sought a people purified by expatriation." 1

This motive of Nebuchadnezzar's conquests was very different from what had actuated the Assyrian kings, Sargon and Sennacherib (722 and 701 B. C.), when the northern kingdom fell and the cities of Judah were ravaged. Their motive had been pillage and lust of military glory, and their aim was to break the spirit of the nations they conquered. Nebuchadnezzar's motive was to a greater extent civilizing and upbuilding. If his deported subjects were tractable they were treated in such a way as not to forfeit their selfrespect or liberty of opinion and worship. They were in fact more like a transplanted citizenry than like despised slaves. As intimated above, they went, so to say, in relays. It was in 604 B. C. that the seventy years' term of exile (cf. Jer. xxv, II, 12; Dan. ix, 2) virtually besive Relays gan; when Nebuchadnezzar, in the fourth year of Captivity of King Jehoiakim (2 Kings xxiv, 1), appeared before Jerusalem and, forcing the weak Judean monarch to transfer allegiance from Pharaoh Necho of Egypt to him, took away vessels from the Temple and several youths of the seed royal as hostages, the latter to be trained for responsible positions at his court. Among these was a lad of about fourteen years old named Daniel (Dan. i, 1–4).2

The Succes

Again in 597 B.C., when Jehoiachin, or Jeconiah, the son of Jehoiakim, had been king only three months, Nebuchadnezzar appeared before Jerusalem, the young king surrendered his whole court to him without fighting, and all the best elements of the nation, from princes and men of might down to craftsmen and smiths, were carried to Babylon, leaving behind only the poorest sort of the people of the land (2 Kings xxiv, 10-16). It was to this

Hunter, "The Story of Daniel,” p. 28..

2 The author of the Book of Daniel, writing many years later, seems to have got his date ("third year ") a year or so early.

company of exiles, likening them to "good figs," that Jere miah gave his message of hope (Jer. xxiv, 4-7); to them also that some years after he wrote his friendly and reassuring letter (Jer. xxix, 1-14).1 Arrived in Babylon, the captives, apparently without the infliction of special indignities, were distributed to their allotted places. The body of them was taken to Tel-Abib near the present Nippur, about fifty miles from Babylon, on the great irrigating canal Chebar; where as a community they were to make a home, cultivate their fields, adapt their old customs to new conditions, and become citizens of this strange crowded land. It was apparently here, or in some such place as this, that they received Jeremiah's letter of good advice.

Jehoiachin the king, in Babylon, became the royal prisoner of Judah; and we lose sight and direct report of him for thirty-seven years.

Zedekiah, the uncle of Jehoiachin, whom Nebuchadnezzar had installed as regent in Jerusalem on oath of good behavior, after an uneasy and vacillating reign of eleven years, drew the wrath of the Babylonian monarch again upon Jerusalem; and the city was besieged and taken, the Temple destroyed, and Zedekiah was caught trying to escape, his sons slain before his eyes, and he, his eyes put out, was carried in chains to Babylon, where he died. Thus the Judean state was broken up in untold horrors of siege and battle, and the people were scattered, some to Egypt, some to surrounding lands, and some to Babylon. This, the last relay of captivity, was in 586 B.C. It was the event commemorated in the Book of Lamentations, a disaster sharing with the final destruction of the Jewish state in the mourning observed at the Jews' Wailing Place in Jerusalem.

From the elements thus transplanted at different times to Babylon we are to get an idea of literary and cultural influences available in their new conditions and allegiance.

1 See above, p. 243.

I. LITERARY ACTIVITIES IN CHALDEA

The Jewish people were now in the center of the greatest empire of the earth, surrounded by all the splendors of a wealthy and idolatrous civilization, in contact with the busy activities of a prosperous monarchy, witnesses of and doubtless participators in its enterprises of husbandry, building, and commerce, and on the whole much more comfortably situated than they had been in their rugged land of Judah. With the keen worldly genius so characteristic of this race, the temptation would be stronger and subtler than ever to merge their national identity with that of their captors, and doubtless many yielded. But the stamina and resiliency of a people educated in the school of Jehovah was here meeting its supreme test. Out of this sequestered life, with its sense of common social and religious interests, and with the instinctively felt duty of maintaining racial loyalty and integrity, grew the literary fruits of the Chaldean exile.

Let us note and describe these, as connected with the personal factors with which they originate.

I

Ezekiel: Pastor and Reconstructor. While Jeremiah in Jerusalem, under the eleven years' reign of the substitute king Zedekiah, was still at his troublesome task of preparing the home people for their hapless doom (cf. Jer. xxiv, 8-10), a younger contemporary and disciple of his, Ezekiel, among the captives of the first deportation in Chaldea, was addressing himself to the strange new conditions of this foreign land and preparing his people for the nobler destiny ordained for them (cf. again Jer. xxiv, 4–7).

Of priestly lineage and calling, one of the higher class of captives carried away with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C., Ezekiel began his active career five years later (Ezek. i, 2), and thus for the six years intervening until the overthrow

of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. was collaborator with the older prophet in the same cause. As long as the work of the pair was contemporaneous, with free interchange and understanding between Chaldea and Jerusalem, his prophecy, like that of Jeremiah, took the predominant tone of severity and warning (iv–xxxiii); but after the city had fallen and the political suspense was over he set the remainder of his message (xxxiv-xlviii) in the higher key of hope and reconstruction. In this timely work of his, searching yet eminently creative, he must be reckoned as one of the greatest spiritual builders of all time, though like all deep-laid work its results must germinate and ripen unseen.

the Priest

The author of this prophecy is specifically distinguished at the outset as "Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi” (i, 3). The Mind of In him, it may be said, the priest's function and ministry become typical. Jeremiah also was of priestly stock; but apparently before he was of age to enter upon the ministrations of the Temple (cf. Jer. i, 6) he was designated to a duty which caused him long after to be esteemed the typical prophet (cf. Matt. xvi, 14). With the venal and time-serving prophetic order of his day he was in frequent collision, both in Jerusalem and in Chaldea (cf. Jer. v, 31; vi, 13; xxix, 15-23), and by his sound spiritual sense brought out the prophetic office, as it were, into true and reasonable light (cf. Jer. xxiii, 23-32). With the priestly office, in turn, which had become equally corrupt, it fell to Ezekiel's duty to deal; and this he must do as an expatriated man, in a land where he must be without altar or organized service, and while for several years the Temple at Jerusalem was still standing. It was as if he must develop the office on a new line. In other words, the priest, laying aside his formal rites and trappings, must become a pastor, a counselor, a neighbor; striving thus to keep the true function alive and adapt it to more intimate and individual relations. Accordingly, as soon as he was

1

thirty years old (i, 3), the age at which by ancient prescription he could enter upon his office (cf. Num. iv, 3), he received his first visions from Jehovah and his commission to be a "watchman unto the house of Israel" (iii, 17). It was doubtless from the influence of these pastoral ministrations of his that the Jewish religious services, which for the people at home were and continued to be centered in the Temple, came in time, for the Jews of the dispersion, to be distributed in the less elaborate observances of the Synagogue.

One can easily feel, throughout the Book of Ezekiel, that his was the distinctive mind of the priest, bent on making the conscience of the sanctuary prevail. The book is indeed suffused with the priestly atmosphere and feeling. He carries the sense of a responsibility as strong as life itself for the spiritual welfare of his people (iii, 16-21; xxxiii, 1-9); is scrupulous for cleanness of food in this unclean land (iv, 13, 14; cf. xxii, 26); has a holy man's dread of the insidious lure of idolatry (xiv, 1-5); and is reassured by the promise that Jehovah "will be to them a sanctuary for a little while in the countries where they are come" (xi, 16). More than this, his visions of Jehovah's. glory, vouchsafed while yet the city stands, deal with the outraged Temple service in Jerusalem (viii-xi); and after the downfall of the state his constructive care and planning are devoted to the reëstablishment of Temple and service for the captives on their return (xl-xlviii). All this is of the essential priestly consciousness and temperament, reflecting a mind that by hereditary tradition and training demands a pure and orderly system of worship. In the absence of liturgical apparatus, however, he must needs resort to more intimate and personal methods than at home; doing his work not by temple and altar but by neighborly conference

1 So I am disposed to interpret "the thirtieth year" (i, 1), though there are differences of opinion as to what this means.

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