Part 8 (1/2)
Nebuchadnezzar did in fact besiege Tyre for thirteen years (585-572 B.C.), and doubtless inflicted upon it great losses; but the island city, with its command of the sea, he could not take. Ezekiel himself, in a remarkable pa.s.sage which is perhaps his latest word in the book, admits that his predictions of the capture of Tyre (xxvi. 7-14) had not been fulfilled--Nebuchadnezzar had had to raise the long and ineffectual siege--but he promises that Jehovah will reward him for these fruitless labours in the Lord's service by giving him Egypt instead (xxix. 17-21). The animosity against Egypt which finds expression in the predictions of the Babylonian subjugation of that country is more easily explained. Egypt had been the evil genius of Judah, instigating rebellion against the Babylonian suzerainty, and promising armed aid which always failed in the decisive hour; it was meet that it should taste the cup of humiliation itself. In c. 32 the descent of Egypt to the h.e.l.l of fallen nations is vividly depicted; a similar picture of the descent of the Babylonian king in Isa. 14 has already been noted. Not improbably Babylonian notions of the nether world may have influenced the imagery of both, as a myth of paradise seems to have suggested the imagery of Tyre in Eden (xxviii. 12 ff.).
Outside this group is an oracle against Edom (c. 35), and the great prophecy of the irruption of Gog and his hordes and their fate (cc.
38 f.).
A conspicuous feature of the Book of Ezekiel are the extended visions and the elaborated symbolical actions. In the inaugural vision (Ezek.
i.-iii. 15), for instance, G.o.d appears, a veritable _deus ex machina_, on a high seat in a curious motor car made up of animated wheels and winged monsters. In a later vision (c. 10) he sees G.o.d leave the doomed temple in Jerusalem and mount this cherubim car, in which he is whirled away through the air to the east; and in the great vision of the new temple in the golden age G.o.d returns to his abode in the same conveyance (c. 43). Striking examples of symbolical actions may be found in Ezek. 4, and in xii. 1-20. They are of such an extraordinary character as to raise the question whether they were really enacted before the eyes of the people or only described in discourse.
Ezekiel's visions are sometimes ecstatic states, in which he is instantaneously translated from place to place. At the end of the inaugural vision, ”the spirit” lifted him up and took him away, setting him down in amazement among the colonists at Tell-Abib. In viii. 1 ff., as he sat in his own house in the midst of a company of the elders of Judah, the spirit, which is described as a strange luminous creature, took him up by the hair of his head and wafted him ”in the visions of G.o.d” to Jerusalem, where his conductor showed him all the idolatrous cults and the abominable mysteries that were practised in the temple under the very eyes of ”the glory of the G.o.d of Israel” (c. 8); after seeing G.o.d take his flight from the desecrated sanctuary, the prophet is translated by the spirit to Chaldaea again. Another such vision in ecstasy is the famous scene in the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37). In such cases it is impossible to say how much is actually the experience of the visionary, how much literary form.
In the great vision of the restoration, cc. 40-48, which also is introduced as an ecstasy with the translation of the prophet to Palestine, we may be pretty sure that the element of conscious composition predominates. The chapters contain a programme for the coming age when all the twelve tribes, gathered together from exile and dispersion, shall reoccupy the holy land, with a new, geometrical division of the territory, with a new plan for the city of Jerusalem, a new const.i.tution for the state, a new temple after the old model, a reorganized ministry of religion, and a reformed wors.h.i.+p. The ruling idea which runs through all is to make impossible those sins against the holiness of G.o.d, his land, his house, his people, which had been the cause of former ruin.
The Book of Ezekiel seems to have been arranged and published by the author, and though some derangements and repet.i.tions may be observed, it has not been much meddled with by later editors, and, to whatever reason it may be attributed, exhibits none of the phenomena of compilation and amplification which we have found in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Hebrew text, however, has suffered more than most books in transmission, and has reached us in an unusually corrupt state. The author has a style of his own, which can rise to eloquence (as in the oracles against Tyre), but is generally pedestrian and sometimes clumsy. He has plenty of imagination, not always regulated by taste or restrained by decency. His drastic figures of the unfaithfulness of Israel and Judah are often unfit to translate.
CHAPTER XIX
DANIEL
In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Daniel stands, not as in our Bible among the Prophets, after Ezekiel, but among the miscellaneous books in the third division, the ”Scriptures.” Various reasons have been suggested for this, but by far the most probable is that at the time when Daniel became current, in the second century B.C., the Prophets were already a definite group of writings with a traditional use in the readings of the Synagogue, to which a new book could not well be added.
The Book of Daniel consists of two parts, stories about Daniel and his three comrades (cc. 1-6), and visions of Daniel (cc. 7-12); in the latter Daniel reports his visions in the first person as Ezekiel habitually does, and it was only natural that he should be taken for the author of the book.
According to the introduction to the first story, Daniel and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, were Jewish youths of high birth who were carried captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in the first deportation (which is erroneously dated in the third year of Jehoiakim). One story (Dan. 1) tells how these youths contrived to avoid all danger of eating unclean food, and how G.o.d blessed them in body and mind for their scrupulousness in observance of the dietary laws; another (c. 3), how the three were saved from Nebuchadnezzar's overheated furnace, into which they were thrown for refusing to wors.h.i.+p the idol; a third (c. 6), how Daniel was cast into the lions'
den for praying to his G.o.d despite the edict of Darius. These miraculous deliverances constrain the heathen kings publicly to acknowledge that the G.o.d of the Jews is the greatest of G.o.ds. The same acknowledgment is drawn from Nebuchadnezzar when Daniel recalls his forgotten dream and interprets it, after all the diviners of Babylon had failed (c. 2); he alone is able to decipher and explain for Belshazzar the handwriting on the wall (c. 5). The stories of Nebuchadnezzar's madness (c. 2) and of Belshazzar's feast (c. 5) teach also how G.o.d punishes kings who in their pride of power exalt themselves before him, or in their arrogance profane his holy things.
All of them thus magnify the G.o.d of the Jews as in power and wisdom above all other G.o.ds, and two of the most striking of them have for their theme the deliverance from mortal peril of men who stood faithful to their religion against the king's commandment. These obvious motives, as we shall presently see, have a bearing on the age of the stories.
In the second part of the book are four visions, or revelations, which stand in chronological order (according to the author's chronology): c. 7 in the first year of Belshazzar; c. 8 in his third year; c. 9 in the first year of ”Darius son of Xerxes, of the race of the Medes”--not properly a vision, but a revelation by Gabriel; and cc.
10-12 in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia. By the side of these must be put Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Dan. ii. 28-45 (second year of Nebuchadnezzar), which, in its four-empire scheme, corresponds to Daniel's vision in c. 7. The interpretations which Daniel gives to Nebuchadnezzar or the angel gives to Daniel, though sometimes surrounded with an impressive air of mystery, give all the necessary clues to the understanding of the visions, and obscure allusions are often made plain by a more explicit parallel.
Under fantastic and varied imagery, they unroll the history of the empires which succeed one another in the dominion of the world, from the Babylonian (Dan. 2 and 7), or the Medo-Persian (c. 8), or Persian (cc. 10-12)--that is from the a.s.sumed standpoint of Daniel--through the dominion of Alexander and the kingdoms into which his empire was broken up, ending always with the reign of Antiochus IV. (175-164 B.C.). The goal in them all is the destruction of the heathen power and the establishment of the eternal kingdom of the holy people of the Most High, otherwise, the Jews.
The simplest form of this scheme is Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Dan. 2.
The image with head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bra.s.s, legs of iron, and feet part of iron and part of clay, stands for four empires in a scale of deterioration, like the four ages of Hesiod, beginning with the Babylonian, represented by Nebuchadnezzar himself. This is followed by an inferior kingdom, and that by a third universal empire; the destructive strength of the fourth is figured by iron which shatters all that it smites; the feet and toes signify a divided kingdom, in part strong as iron, in part brittle as pottery. The stone which smote the image on the feet and broke them to pieces, whereupon the whole image collapsed into dust and was whirled away by the wind, while the stone grew to a great mountain and filled all the earth, is the kingdom which the G.o.d of heaven shall establish in those days, ”which shall never be destroyed, nor shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people, but it shall break in pieces and annihilate all those empires, and it shall stand forever.”
The image thus represents the rule of the heathen as one world-empire, the dominion being exercised successively by four kingdoms and by the divisions of the fourth; in the destruction of these last the heathen world-empire is forever annihilated, and the eternal kingdom of G.o.d subdues and rules the whole earth. What is said about the second and third kingdoms is too general to identify them; the iron strength and destructiveness of the fourth, and its divisions with their mingled strength and weakness, naturally suggest Alexander and his successors, and this impression is strengthened by the one specific trait in the whole picture; the vain effort to make iron and wet clay combine signifies, we are told, an equally futile attempt to bind the divided kingdoms together by intermarriages (Dan. ii. 43). We know from the historians that attempts to ally the kingdoms of the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria by dynastic marriages were repeatedly made in vain, and the author of Daniel himself, in c. 11, refers to these alliances and their disastrous failure in plain terms.
The vision of Daniel in c. 7 brings in the four empires under the symbol of four monstrous beasts. The fourth, more terrible and more destructive than the others, has ten horns (”out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise,” vs. 24); another horn, ”with the eyes of a man and a boastful mouth,” arises which roots out three of the ten. Daniel sees how he makes war on the ”holy men” (i.e. the Jews) and prevails over them (vs. 21); the interpreting angel describes in more detail the crimes of the last king: he will utter speeches against the Highest, and wear out the holy men of the Most High, and try to change (religious) seasons and law (religion). G.o.d's people will be delivered into his power till the expiration of three and a half years (cf. xii.
7). Then the proud king and his kingdom will be annihilated and the universal and eternal empire of the Jews established.
Still more definite is the description of the doings of the ”little horn” which springs up on the head of the great he-goat in the vision of c. 8. Here the interpreter becomes explicit: the he-goat is by name the Macedonian empire. The little horn is a king who shall arise in the latter time of the divided kingdoms of Alexander's successors.
This king magnifies himself against the chief of the heavenly host, casts down his sanctuary, takes away his daily burnt-offerings, and destroys the holy people; and is then himself suddenly ”broken without hand.” In the further explanation given to Daniel in ix. 26 ff., the cessation of the daily sacrifice is to last half a week (of years), i.e. three and a half years; the profanation of the sanctuary and suppression of the sacrifices and the persecution of the Jews occur again in xi. 31 ff. (cf. xii. 5-12). In connection with this we hear of setting up of a ”desolating (or appalling) abomination,” in the temple. The common use of ”abomination” (loathsome thing) for idols or other objects of heathen wors.h.i.+p leaves no doubt that some such object is meant here: the king not only stopped the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d of the Jews in his own temple, but established in its place a heathen cult.
It is, indeed, not improbable that the words translated ”appalling abomination” are an intentional distortion of the proper name of the heathen G.o.d Baal Shamaim, i.e. Jupiter.
The definiteness of all this proves that the author is not creating an imaginary monster in whom all the sins of the heathen rulers against the G.o.d of Heaven and his people are acc.u.mulated, but describing a historical figure. Nor is there the smallest room for question whose portrait he is painting: every feature of it belongs to Antiochus IV., Epiphanes (Manifest G.o.d, the t.i.tle means, which Antiochian wits perverted to Epimanes, Manifest Madman), who in 168 B.C. took possession of the temple in Jerusalem, suppressed the wors.h.i.+p of its G.o.d, erected an altar of Jupiter on the great altar of burnt offering, and inaugurated heathen sacrifices. Not only that, but he forbade circ.u.mcision, the observance of the sabbath, and the possession of copies of the scriptures, and commanded that Jews should certify their abjuration of their own religion by sacrificing to his G.o.ds. Those who ignored or defied his decrees were persecuted; many of them put to death. This attempt to extirpate the Jewish religion and forcibly heathenize the people provoked a revolt led by Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, who three years later recovered the temple, purged it, and restored the sacrifices.