Alexandrian Syrinx. The name by which Ezra is known, "the scribe" (hassôphêr), and the intermixture of Aramaic with Hebrew in his language, indicate the age of verbal criticism and the redaction of the canon—the Alexandrian period of Hebrew literature.
Still the exiles at Babylon learned to spiritualise Hebrew sentiments and to expand their range beyond the circle of Hebrew associations—learned, in fact, the two great lessons of personal responsibility and universal sympathy taught in India about this time by the famous Gautama Buddha (543 B.C.). In the Book of Daniel, with its international tone and mystic forecast of the world's history, that book which, for its perception of successive epochs in human development, has been called the first attempt at a philosophy of history, "the first forerunner of Herder, Lessing, and Hegel," we have this expanded Hebræism displaying itself in literature as late as 168–164 B.C. Other influences, however, triumphed, and the "murmurs and scents of the infinite sea," which the night-wind of Babylonian conquest had for a moment swept into the narrow channels of Hebrew literature, died away on the stagnant shallows of a verbal criticism more deadly than those of Alexandria herself.
§ 73. But Alexandria and Greek intellect were to be much more closely connected with the Hebrew spirit than by way of parallel decadence; and in this living connection we find united those two streams of Hebrew feeling we have observed in Ezekiel—the social, typified by his national picture of clan life, and the personal, marked by his repudiation of communal morality. While exiles and returned captives were spiritualising the ritual of Israel; while the worship of the synagogue was growing up and prayer taking the place of sacrifice; while, later on, the scribes were by their traditions "making a hedge
