1

It was also a violation of the sanctity of the sepulchre almost without precedent in the Jewish history The disinterment of the Kings of Israel by hostile dynasties had occurred in the fury of revolutions, and by characters odious even in their own times for fierceness and violence. But a Jewish Prophet 2 had already denounced the savage practice in a neighboring kingdom, as "a hatred" (if we may use the words in which a Christian commentator has finely amplified the Prophetic warning) "carried beyond the grave, which the "heathen too held to be unnatural in its implacableness "and uncharitableness- a hatred which is a sort of "impotent grasping at eternal vengeance hatred "which, having no power to work any real vengeance, "has no object but to show its hatred." A condemnation too strong, indeed, for the imperfect and mixed acts of those of old time, like the Kings of Moab and of Judah, but not too strong for the deed as seen in the light of a Christian and civilized age.

ets of the

But, in spite of all this effort, the kingdom of Judah was doomed. Perhaps the very vehemence of The Prophthe attempt carried with it its own inefficacy. time. Even the traditions which invested Josiah with a blaze of preternatural glory, maintained that in his day the sacred oil was forever lost. Too late is written on the pages even which describe this momentary revival. It did not reach the deeply seated, wide-spread corruption which tainted rich and poor alike. Large as is the

1 Josiah's solemn desecration of the graves of Prophets and Priests long ago departed was pleaded by Justinian and Theodora in the synod of Menas, and in the Fifth General Council, as a sanction for anathematizing the dead, who down to that time had been thought by their re

moval from this world to be protected from any further ecclesiastical cen

sure.

2 The crowning crime of the King of Moab was that "he burned the bones of the King of Edom." Amos ii. 1. See Dr. Pusey's note.

space occupied by it in the historical books, by the contemporary Prophets it is never mentioned at all.

Of these, the most peculiar to this period is Zepha

Zephaniah.

niah, remarkable as belonging to an illustrious

family tracing back its descent for four generations, possibly to the King Hezekiah.1 He is the first distinct herald of the great catastrophe which, step by step, he saw advancing. He looks out, according to the full meaning of his name," the Watchman of Jehovah," over the wide and awful prospect, in which nation after nation passes in review before him; not without hope that out of the very absorption of the little kingdom of Judah into the surrounding nations, the element of good which it contains may spread and strengthen it self; that, like the strange companions whom misery makes one, they may all be led to call on the name of Jehovah, and to serve Him with one accord, "shoulder to shoulder." But still his prevailing and peculiar mission is as the Prophet of the Judgment. From him, the Apocalyptic vision of the New Testament and the sublime Hymn of the Christian Church have borrowed their most striking words and imagery:

2

Against the fenced cities,

Against the lofty towers.1

The InvaScythians. 631-632.

sion of the

B. C.

Of this great day, however delayed for a time, twc calamities, in the reign of Josiah, were the immediate precursors. The first was the invasion of the Scythians. It was the earliest recorded of those movements of the northern populations, hid behind the long mountain barrier, which, under the name of Himalaya, Caucasus, Taurus, Hamus, and the Alps, has been reared by nature between the civilized and uncivilized races of the old world. Suddenly, above this boundary, appeared those strange, uncouth, fur-clad forms, hardly to be distinguished from their horses and their wagons, fierce as their own wolves or bears, sweeping towards the southern regions which seemed to them their natural prey. The successive invasions of Parthians, Turks, Mongols in Asia, of Gauls, Goths, Vandals, Huns in Europe, "have," it is well said, "illustrated the law and made us familiar "with its operations. But there was a time in history "before it had come into force, and when its very "existence must have been unsuspected. Even since "it began to operate, it has so often undergone prolonged suspension, that the wisest may be excused "if they cease to bear it in mind, and are as much "startled when a fresh illustration of it occurs, as if "the like had never happened before." No wonder that now, when the veil was the first time rent asunder, all the ancient monarchies of the south - Assyria, Babylon, Media, Egypt, even Greece and Asia Minorstood aghast at the spectacle of these savage hordes

66

1 Zeph. i. 7, 14-18; ii. 1, 2. The Vulgate translation of i. 15 has sup

plied the first words of the hymn Dies Ira, Dies illa.

2 Rawlinson's Anc. Mon. ii, 508,

It

rushing down on the seats of luxury and power. must have been about the middle of Josiah's reign that one division of them broke into Syria. They penetrated, on their way to Egypt, as far as the southern frontier of Palestine, and were then bought off by Psammetichus, and retired, after sacking the temple' of Astarte at Ascalon. One permanent trace of their passage they left as they scoured through the plain of Esdraelon. The old Canaanitish city of Bethshan, at the eastern extremity of that plain, from them received the name which it bore throughout the Roman empire in the mouths of the Greeks, Scythopolis, "the city of the Scythians."

The total omission of this formidable apparition in the Books of Kings and Chronicles is a remarkable proof of the attenuation, apparently increasing as it approaches the end, of the historical narrative of this closing period. But from the Prophets we catch glimpses of the inroad of some nomadic horde, which can hardly be explained but by the knowledge acquired from other sources, of these strange intruders. Habakkuk perhaps saw them from his watch-tower of speculation, galloping on their horses, terrible as themselves - both terrible as leopards or wolves. Zephaniah saw them, as they prowled round the sanctuary of Ascalon and through the cities of Philistia. "The sea-coast "shall be for pastures and cisterns for shepherds, and "folds for flocks." Jeremiah from the first moment of his call had seen in the emblem of a seething caldron in the north the sign of the quarter whence the fiery 1 Herod. ii. 103-105; Strabo, i. 3, v. 10, § 14. See Rawlinson, ii. 16; Justin, ii. 3. See Ewald, iii. 516.

693.

2 Judith iii. 10; 2 Macc. xif. 29. Comp. Judg. i. 27 (LXX.); Polyb.

3 Hab. i. 6-10, if the Chaldæans and Scythians were blended together 4 Zeph. ii. 4-6.

flood of desolation' would issue, and had raised the warning cry to announce the coming of the shepherds from the North to pitch their tents around Jerusalem, - a wild host on horses of war, with bow and spear, and shout like that of a roaring sea. Already long before, and also long after, there floated on the prophetic horizon the dark cloud beyond the Caucasus, big with the fate of the future destinies of the world. It was a storm always ready to burst, with its discharge of horses and horsemen, of swords and shields, of bows and arrows, of staves and spears, and innumerable bands, horde succeeding horde; a convulsion which should send a universal shudder through all living creatures, and shake down the mountains and lay level alike cliff and fortress; an enemy which could only be repelled by the combined forces of man and nature, by an overthrow which would pile up the glens of the Dead Sea with mountains of human graves, and would furnish out a sacrificial feast to all the vultures and wild beasts of the mountains of Israel, such as they had never known before, from the carcasses of chiefs and warriors. In these tremendous forms, not without a Prophetic sense of their vast importance, was hailed the first apparition of the future fathers of the coming Northern world. Gog and Magog are the primeval names which, now first introduced, were revived in the Apocalypse as representatives of the vast barbarian tribes which threatened the empire of Rome, as that of Assyria had been

1 Jer. 1. 13-15; vi. 2-5. Ewald supposes that their actual appearance before the walls of Jerusalem is described in Psalm lix., which he ascribes to Josiah.

2 Ezek. xxxviii. 17, 20.

3 Ibid. xxxviii. 1–16; xxxix. 1, 9 4 Rev. xx. 8.