4 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
Jewish hope was coloured by Zoroastrianism: Mithraism, in any case, was in great part ultimately derived from Persia. Why, then, was a doctrine of Last Judgement so prominent in the one religion and not in the other?
Here we come, in a very real sense, to the heart of our subject. I believe the main peculiarities, the main differentia, of post-Alexandrian Judaism to arise directly from the actual history of the Jews, in a word, to be the result of the great struggle between Judaism and Hellenism.
It is during the two centuries and a half that extend from the Maccabean Rising to the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, from 170 b.c. to 70 a.d., that the world in general is confronted with the Jewish Nation. Before the Captivity its history had been simply that of one among many petty nationalities of Palestine. The annals of Sargon or of Sennacherib betray no consciousness that the subjects of the King of Jerusalem were different in thought or customs from other people. After the Return the Jews had lived unnoticed in quiet. After the Destruction of Jerusalem, again, the direct political power of Judaism is gone; the Jews become a Church, an international Society, rather than a Nation in the ordinary sense of the word. But in the interval Judaism had played a truly national part; it became during those two-and-a-half centuries a kingdom of this world, an alternative to Civilization as then understood, actually before the eyes of men.
It is a curious fact that the parts of Israelite history with which most of us are familiar are concerned with the preparation of the Jews for their peculiar rôle rather than with the part they actually played in general history. The kingdom over which the princes of the House of David ruled made very little mark on the ancient world, and when the hill-fortress of Jerusalem stood in the way of the great empire of Babylonia it fell, and the kingdom of Judah fell with it. The Jewish State collapsed, and there was nothing to indicate to an outsider that any part of the social organisation would survive. As a matter of fact, as we all know, the religion of the Jews—or at least of a part of them—had undergone a strange and unique development, the result of which was that it did not die with its mother the old Jewish State. Two generations later, when there is a change of Empires, some of the heads of the Jewish communities in Babylon are still Jews, and they return to set the life in their old home going once more, and to worship the God of their fathers as aforetime.
The history of the age of Ezra is full of unsolved historical
