Judah had peace, and Hezekiah was free to devote his latter days to the work of purifying the worship of his people. What he exactly achieved is uncertain. The historian imputes to him the removal of the high places, the destruction of all Maççeboth and Asheras, and of the brazen serpent.1 That his measures were drastic is probable from the opinions of Isaiah, who was their inspiration, and proved by the reaction which they provoked when Hezekiah died. The removal of the high places and the concentration of the national worship within the Temple would be the more easy that the provincial sanctuaries had been devastated by the Assyrian invasion, and that the shrine of Jehovah was glorified by the raising of the siege of 701.

While the first of Isaiah's great postulates for the future, the inviolableness of Zion, had been fulfilled, the second, the reign of a righteous prince in Israel, seemed doomed to disappointment. Hezekiah died early in the seventh century, and was succeeded by his son Manasseh, a boy of twelve, who appears to have been captured by the party whom his father had opposed. The few years' peace-peace in Israel was always dangerous to the health of the higher religion—the interests of those who had suffered from the reforms, the inevitable reaction which a rigorous puritanism provokes -these swiftly reversed the religious fortunes of Israel. Isaiah's and Micah's predictions of the final overthrow of Assyria seemed falsified, when in 681 the more vigorous Asarhaddon succeeded Sennacherib, and in 678 swept the long absent armies back upon Syria.

12 Kings xviii. 4.

2 The exact date is quite uncertain; 695 is suggested on the chronological table prefixed to this volume, but it may have been 690 or 685.

Sidon was destroyed, and twenty-two princes of Palestine immediately yielded their tribute to the conqueror. Manasseh was one of them, and his political homage may have brought him, as it brought Ahaz, within the infection of foreign idolatries. Everything, in short, worked for the revival of that eclectic paganism which Hezekiah had striven to stamp out. The high places were rebuilt; altars were erected to Baal, with the sacred pole of Asherah, as in the time of Ahab;2 shrines to the host of heaven defiled the courts of Jehovah's house; there was a recrudescence of soothsaying, divination and traffic with the dead.

But it was all very different from the secure and sunny temper which Amos had encountered in Northern Israel. The terrible Assyrian invasions had come between. Life could never again feel so stable. Still more destructive had been the social poisons which our prophets described as sapping the constitution of Israel for nearly three generations. The rural simplicity was corrupted by those economic changes which

1 Cf. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments, § 799.

2 Stade (Gesch. des Volkes Israel, I., pp. 627 f.) denies to Manasseh the reconstruction of the high places, the Baal altars and the Asheras, for he does not believe that Hezekiah had succeeded in destroying these. He takes 2 Kings xxi. 3, which describes these reconstructions, as a late interpolation rendered necessary to reconcile the tradition that Hezekiah's reforms had been quite in the spirit of Deuteronomy, with the fact that there were still high places in the land when Josiah began his reforms. Further, Stade takes the rest of 2 Kings xxi. 26-7 as also an interpolation, but unlike verse 3 an accurate account of Manasseh's idolatrous institutions, because it is corroborated by the account of Josiah's reforms, 2 Kings xxiii. Stade also discusses this passage in Z.A.T.W., 1886, pp. 186 ff.

See Vol. I., p. 41. In addition to the reasons of the change given above, we must remember that we are now treating, not of Northern Israel, but of the more stern and sullen Judæans.

Micah bewails. With the ousting of the old families from the soil, a thousand traditions, memories and habits must have been broken, which had preserved the people's presence of mind in days of sudden. disaster, and had carried them, for instance, through so long a trial as the Syrian wars. Nor could the blood of Israel have run so pure after the luxury and licentiousness described by Hosea and Isaiah. The novel obligations of commerce, the greed to be rich, the increasing distress among the poor, had strained the joyous temper of that nation of peasants' sons, whom we met with Amos, and shattered the nerves of their rulers. There is no word of fighting in Manasseh's days, no word of revolt against the tyrant. Perhaps also the intervening puritanism, which had failed to give the people a permanent faith, had at least awakened within them a new conscience.

At all events there is now no more ease in Zion, but a restless fear, driving the people to excesses of religious zeal. We do not read of the happy country festivals of the previous century, nor of the careless pride of that sudden wealth which built vast palaces and loaded the altar of Jehovah with hecatombs. The full-blooded patriotism, which at least kept ritual in touch with clean national issues, has vanished. The popular religion is sullen and exasperated. It takes the form of sacrifices of frenzied cruelty and lust. Children are passed through the fire to Moloch, and the Temple is defiled by the orgies of those who abuse their bodies to propitiate a foreign and a brutal god.1

But the most certain consequence of a religion whose nerves are on edge is persecution, and this raged all

2 Kings xxi., xxiji

1

the earlier years of Manasseh. The adherents of the purer faith were slaughtered, and Jerusalem drenched with innocent blood. Her own sword, says Jeremiah, devoured the prophets like a destroying lion.2

4

3

It is significant that all that has come down to us from this "killing time" is anonymous; we do not meet with our next group of public prophets till Manasseh and his like-minded son have passed away. Yet prophecy was not wholly stifled. Voices were raised to predict the exile and destruction of the nation. Jehovah spake by His servants; while others wove into the prophecies of an Amos, a Hosea or an Isaiah some application of the old principles to the new circumstances. It is probable, for instance, that the extremely doubtful passage in the Book of Amos, v. 26 f., which imputes to Israel as a whole the worship of astral deities from Assyria, is to be assigned to the reign of Manasseh. In its present position it looks very like an intrusion: nowhere else does Amos charge his generation with serving foreign gods; and certainly in all the history of Israel we could not find a more suitable period for so specific a charge than the days when into the central sanctuary of the national worship images were introduced of the host of heaven, and the nation was, in consequence, threatened with exile."

1 Filled from mouth to mouth (2 Kings xxi. 16).

2 Jer. ii. 30.

"We have already seen that there is no reason for that theory of so many critics which assigns to this period Micah. See Vol. I., p. 370. 12 Kings xxi. 10 ff.

Whether the parenthetical apostrophes to Jehovah as Maker of the heavens, their hosts and all the powers of nature (Amos iv. 13, v. 8, 9, ix. 5, 6), are also to be attributed to Manasseh's reign is more doubtful. Yet the following facts are to be observed: that

In times of persecution the documents of the suffering faith have ever been reverenced and guarded with especial zeal. It is not improbable that the prophets, driven from public life, gave themselves to the arrangement of the national scriptures; and some critics date from Manasseh's reign the weaving of the two earliest documents of the Pentateuch into one continuous book of history.1 The Book of Deuteronomy forms a problem by itself. The legislation which composes the bulk of it appears to have been found among the Temple

2

these passages are also (though to a less degree than v. 26 f.) parenthetic; that their language seems of a later cast than that of the time of Amos (see Vol. I., pp. 204, 205: though here evidence is adduced to show that the late features are probably post-exilic); and that Jehovah is expressly named as the Maker of certain of the stars. Similarly when Mohammed seeks to condemn the worship of the heavenly bodies, he insists that God is their Maker. Koran, Sur. 41, 37: "To the signs of His Omnipotence belong night and day, sun and moon; but do not pray to sun or moon, for God hath created them." Sur. 53, 50: "Because He is the Lord of Sirius." On the other side see Driver's Joel and Amos (Cambridge Bible for Schools Series), 1897, pp. 118 f., 189.

How deeply Manasseh had planted in Israel the worship of the heavenly host may be seen from the survival of the latter through all the reforms of Josiah and the destruction of Jerusalem (Jer. vii. 18, viii., xliv.; Ezek. viii. Cf. Stade, Gesch. des V. Israel, I., pp. 629 ff.).

The Jehovist and Elohist into the closely mortised JE. Stade indeed assigns to the period of Manasseh Israel's first acquaintance with the Babylonian cosmogonies and myths which led to that reconstruction of them in the spirit of her own religion which we find in the Jehovistic portions of the beginning of Genesis (Gesch. des V. Isr., I., pp. 630 ff.). But it may well be doubted (1) whether the reign of Manasseh affords time for this assimilation, and (2) whether it was likely that Assyrian and Babylonian theology could make so deep and lasting impression upon the purer faith of Israel at a time when the latter stood in such sharp hostility to all foreign influences and was so bitterly persecuted by the parties in Israel who had succumbed to these influences.

2 Chaps. v.-xxvi., xxviii.