the image of their god. Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the Persian victory to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into Apocalypse (Deutero-Isaiah,[1] Ezekiel, Zechariah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan, of archangels, of the seven heavens, of the last judgment, are Persian presentations of the common world-feeling. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great composer of Deutero-Isaiah draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian disciple? Is it possible that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the inward relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that both shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed a common hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of unbelievers generally, which they did not feel towards one another.
We must not, however, forget to look at the "return from captivity" also from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race-force, was in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land-aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings under a prince of their own, the Resh Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea.[2] Those who returned "home" were the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny with Jewry as a whole[3] must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all following events. The little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life, and the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blossomed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still have the masterpiece, the Book of Job — a work in character Islamic and decidedly un-Jewish[4] — while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as Judith, Tobit, Achikar,[5] are spread as motives over all the literatures of the "Arabian" world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C to A.D. 200 the Tannaim ("Teachers") expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract
- ↑ Isaiah xl-lxvi. For the critical questions arising on Deutero-Isaiah see Dr. T. K. Cheyne's article "Isaiah" in the Encyclopædia Biblica, the same scholar's summary in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Isaiah," or G. Moore's summary, Literature of the Old Testament, Ch. XVI. — Tr.
- ↑ This "King of the Banishment" (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous and politically important figure in the Persian Empire. He was only removed by Islam.
- ↑ As Christian and Jewish theology both do — the only difference between these is in their respective interpretations of the later development of Israelite literature (recast in Judea as the literature of Judaism), the one inflecting it towards Evangelism, the others towards Talmudism.
- ↑ Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaize it by interpolating chs. xxxii-xxxvii.
- ↑ See the articles "Tobit," etc., in Jewish Encyclopædia and Ency. Biblica. — Tr.
