Chapter 3: returns to condemnation, which turns at last on the heads of

the rulers "who build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity," and ends with the prediction of the total destruction of the city which has already been quoted.

Then the unexpected follows, in the prophecy that Jerusalem shall become the religious centre of the earth, to which all nations flow, and the law of God the universal arbiter in an age of universal peace (Mic. iv. 1-5). Verses 1-3 are found also, in no more suitable context, in Isa. ii. 2-4. They belong to neither Isaiah nor Micah. For the rest, Mic. 4-5 and cc. 6-7 contain a number of pieces of diverse age and origin. Chapters iv. 6-v. 1 are as a whole of good omen, yet after the promise of restoration in iv. 8, Jerusalem is suddenly in desperate straits; exile awaits its people, and only beyond the exile (the words "thou shalt come even unto Babylon" may be a gloss, but the meaning is not essentially changed) redemption waits (iv. 9 f.). In iv. 11-13, again, many nations gather against Zion, but it crushes them like sheaves on the threshing floor. There follows (v. 2-9, 10-15) a messianic prophecy, in which an allusion to Isa. vii. 14 appears.

No less strangely assorted are the oracles in Mic. 6-7, of which there are four: vi. 1-8; vi. 9-16; vii. 1-6; vii. 7-20. The first of these contains the quintessence of the prophetic conception of religion: God does not demand holocausts and costly offerings in expiation of sin; nor the supreme expiation which the prophets and the laws of the seventh century so often reject and condemn: "Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man. What is good and what doth God require of thee, but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?"

Trenchant condemnations of the sins of the times fill vi. 9-16 and vii. 1-6, the former of which, at least, is pre-exilic; while the book closes in the situation and spirit of Isa. 40 ff. Thus the Book of Micah, like that of his contemporary Isaiah, has been a depository for prophecies differing in age by several centuries. Perhaps the book once stood at the end of a roll, and was therefore the natural place to add stray and nameless pieces, as happened later to the Book of Zechariah at the end of the volume of the Minor Prophets.

NAHUM.--In the three larger prophetic books we have found groups of oracles against foreign nations, some relatively old, many late and literary variations on given motives--it was evidently a grateful theme. In Nahum we have a whole book occupied with the impending fall of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire, which had so long and so brutally tyrannized over all western Asia. Now its hour has struck, and the prophet triumphs over the fate of the old lion, who "rent in pieces to satisfy his whelps and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his dens with prey and his lairs with ravin." His imagination revels in the terrors of the onslaught, the horrors of the sack, which he depicts with unsurpassed vividness and great poetic power. It is the judgment of the Lord, long deferred, but sure and final (Nah. 1).

In Nah. iii. 8-10 the fate of the Egyptian Thebes is adduced as an historic example: all her power could not save her, and it shall fare no better with Nineveh. The reference is probably to the capture of Thebes by Assurbanipal in 661 B.C. Nineveh itself fell about 606 B.C. under an attack of enemies from the north (Medes or Scythians), and was destroyed never to be restored. With it the Assyrians disappear from history. The prophecy of Nahum was probably delivered shortly before this event, though a date twenty years earlier, when, according to Herodotus, Nineveh barely escaped from a similar onset by Cyaxares, is not strictly impossible.

It is thought by many scholars that the first chapter (with which ii. 2 must go) is a later composition, a poem, much deranged, originally in acrostic form.

HABAKKUK.--The Book of Habakkuk predicts that Jehovah is about to raise up the fierce Chaldæan nation, which marches through the breadth of the earth to occupy habitations not belonging to it, which scoffs at kings and has dynasts in derision, laughing at all fortresses, against which it casts up a mound and takes them (Hab. i. 5-11). Such a prophecy would be timely in the last years of the seventh century: the Chaldæan, or New Babylonian, kingdom dates its independence from 625, and is hardly likely to have attracted much attention in the West before the fall of Nineveh in 606 B.C. and the defeat of Pharaoh Necho on the Euphrates in 605 B.C.

The prophecy, which does not specifically threaten Judah, intrudes between i. 4 and i. 12 ff., where the plaint of vss. 2-4 is continued, so that vss. 5-11 are at least misplaced. This complaint is of the oppression of "the righteous" (Judah) by "the wicked" (heathen, i. 13-17). From his watch tower the prophet sees a vision of a distant time, which he is bidden record, and of whose ultimate fulfilment he is assured (ii. 1-3). What follows is a series of invectives which the nations he has gathered under his robber rule shall heap upon the fallen oppressor, "the man who was greedy as hell, insatiable as death."

The date of the prophecy depends on the identification of this tyrant of the nations. If it is Babylon, the oracle must be considered later than i. 5-11, which greets the rise of the Babylonian power to execute God's judgment on the world. An ingenious solution of the difficulty has been proposed, viz., to transfer i. 5-11 from c. 1 to a place after ii. 4, and see in it the contents of the vision spoken of in ii. 3: the Babylonians would then be the ministers of God's avenging justice on the Assyrian robbers of the world, and the whole might have been uttered about 615 B.C. All parts of these chapters abound in reminiscences of the eighth-century prophets; the resemblances to Jeremiah may be explained by the contemporaneousness of the authors.

Habakkuk 3, entitled "A Prayer by Habakkuk the Prophet," with a musical direction following, as in the Psalms, is in fact a psalm, and the presence of the musical directions, implying liturgical use, suggests that it once stood in a hymn book like the Psalter. It is a fine ode, by an author well read in the classic literature of his nation. The theophany (iii. 2 ff.) is indebted to Exod. xxxiii. 2 ff. and Judg. v. 4 ff. The ode belongs with the Psalms of the Persian period. It is imitated in Ps. 77. The title ascribing it to Habakkuk the prophet is of no greater authority than the ascription Pss. 146-148 in the Greek Bible to Haggai and Zechariah.

ZEPHANIAH.--The pedigree of Zephaniah is carried back to his great-great-grandfather, Hezekiah. As such genealogical proper names have seldom more than three terms, it has been conjectured that the particular reason for adducing two extra generations here was that the prophet boasted royal blood--Hezekiah was the king of that name. The thing is possible, though the generations are somewhat rapid; the parallel royal line counts four. It would be a romantic touch if the prophet was a great-grand-nephew of Manasseh, and a second cousin of Josiah, of the manners and morals of whose courts he has so bad an opinion.

The title says that he prophesied in the reign of Josiah, and with this the tenor of a large part of the book agrees. Like the earliest prophecies of Jeremiah (Jer. 1-6) Zephaniah's Day of the Lord is inspired by the irruption of the Scythian hordes which threatened to engulf the civilized nations of western Asia in a common ruin, as the Mongol and Turkish hordes, pouring out of the same cradle of the commissioned races, the scourges of God, did successively in later ages. For Judah it is the day of reckoning for the sins which made the reign of Manasseh a by-word with prophets and historians, and which went on unrestrained through the short years of his successor and the minority of Josiah down to the reforms of his eighteenth year. Nowhere is the state of things in that three quarters of a century more clearly exposed than in the first oracle of Zephaniah.

The second chapter holds out the possibility that repentance may still save Judah; the wave of invasion has taken, as we know from historical sources it did, the way by the coast, bringing calamity on the Philistine cities. It surged on to the very frontier of Egypt, where it was stayed, more likely by the payment of a great indemnity than by force of arms, and rolled back whence it came. Zephaniah sees the storm break over Assyria, and predicts the total destruction of the proud city of Nineveh which had so long said in her heart, "I, and none beside me." Several verses in this chapter are suspected of being later amplifications, viz. ii. 7^a (Judah profits by the ruin of the Philistine plain; vs. 7^b connects directly with vs. 6), and especially the oracles against Moab and Ammon, which accuse them of their enmity to Judah in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, a generation after Zephaniah.

The first oracle in Zeph. 3 is incomplete; the original conclusion, a sentence of doom upon Judah, the only imaginable sequel to vss. 1-7, is supplanted by the inconsequent pouring out of God's fury on the nations, whereupon the heathen are converted, the dispersion returns, and, purified and chastened the remnant of Judah enjoys a modest golden age (iii. 8-13). The book closes in a more jubilant salutation of the good time coming (iii. 14-20).

Thus in Zephaniah, as in so many other prophetic books, all turns out well in the end; but as in most of the others, the happy endings are an afterthought of later generations for whom the judgment was in the past but the golden age had not yet come.

HAGGAI.--Haggai dates his first revelation to the very day of the month--a new fashion which he and his contemporary Zechariah have--the first day of the sixth month (of the Jewish calendar) in the second year of Darius (Hystaspis), that is, 520 B.C. He has the word of the Lord for Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah, and Joshua, the chief priest, that it is high time to rebuild the temple; the lean years they have been having are due to God's displeasure that he is thus neglected. The civil and religious heads of the community stir up the people and the work begins; again the exact date is given.

Three other oracles follow, all in the same year. The first of these (ii. 1-9) encourages Zerubbabel and the people to more zeal by the prediction that the great crisis of history is at hand: yet a little while and the Lord will shake the heavens and the earth; he will shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations shall flow to his temple (cf. Isa. lx. 9 ff.), and God will fill the house with his glory. The third (ii. 20-23), to Zerubbabel, foretells the overthrow and destruction of the kingdoms of the nations; and, in prudently veiled phrase--since such great expectations might have ill consequences if they reached Persian ears--the restoration of Zerubbabel to the throne of his fathers, fulfilling the messianic predictions of earlier prophets. The intervening oracle (ii. 10-19) is another spur to zeal in rebuilding the temple.

The immediate restoration of Jewish nationality which Haggai and Zechariah so confidently foretold was not merely the expression of a general faith or the result of studies in their predecessors. For in reality God was shaking the nations; in particular the Persian empire, newly made master of the world, was shaken to its foundations by the usurpation of the pretended Smerdis, the death of Cambyses, the conspiracy of the nobles against Smerdis, and the elevation of Darius to the throne. In the years when the Jewish prophets were making their predictions, Darius was confronted by formidable rebellions in every quarter of the empire except the west. It might well appear to Haggai that the armies of the nations were falling every one by the sword of his fellow.

In the end Darius put down all opposition and welded the empire together more strongly than ever; the brief dream of Jewish independence under a Davidic prince and the brighter vision of the golden age faded.

ZECHARIAH.--Zechariah's first oracle is dated in the month after that in which Haggai's first was delivered. It is a brief exhortation to his countrymen to repent, and not neglect the warnings of the prophets as their fathers had done, to their sorrow when the predicted judgments overtook them (Zech. i. 1-6). Then follow, in i. 7-vi. 15, under the common date (second year of Darius, 11th month, 24th day), a series of eight visions, the meaning of which is interpreted to the prophet by an angel. They symbolize the shattering of the power of the nations; the rebuilding of the temple and city, and the golden age to follow; the removal of the sin of Judah; the recognition of the Messiah (Zerubbabel); the harmony of prince and priest.

At the end of this group of visions is a bit of history of high interest. A crown was made of gold and silver brought by some representatives of the Babylonian Jews, and set by the prophet on the head of Zerubbabel, who was saluted as "the Scion," i.e., the Messiah (Jer. xxiii. 5), with the prediction that he should rebuild the temple, assume majesty, and sit and rule upon his throne. The coronation, it need hardly be said, was in the secrecy of a private house, and is to be regarded as a symbolical act; the Babylonian envoys kept the crown as a memento. But its significance is unmistakable.

The prediction was not fulfilled. Whatever became of Zerubbabel--he disappears with this scene--he never wore a real crown nor sat upon the throne of his fathers. This has led to more than one change in the text, which, however, as in many other cases, were not sufficiently thorough-going to pass unnoticed. First, the crown is once made plural, "crowns," as though the intention was to crown both the prince and the priest; when it comes to the coronation, however, only Joshua, the high priest, receives the honour (vi. 11). But vss. 12, 13^a, which are left untouched, can refer only to Zerubbabel. Verse 13^b originally read, "and [Joshua] shall be priest _at his right hand_ (so the Greek Bible, instead of "on his throne"), and there shall be harmony between the two." In vs. 14 there is only one crown.

In Zech. 7 the question is asked of the prophet by some pilgrims from Bethel, whether, now that the temple was rebuilding, they should continue to keep the fast for the burning of the temple in the fifth month; his response, that what God wants of them is not fasting but justice, charity, compassion, that none should oppress his neighbour nor devise evil against him, is quite in the spirit of the earlier prophets to whom he appeals.

He goes on, in c. 8, to picture the coming golden age, when the fasts shall all be turned into cheerful feasts, a prophecy which is one of the finest of its kind in the Old Testament and a fitting crown to the book.

The prophecies of Zechariah (cc. 1-8) are definitely dated; they spring out of a definite historical and religious situation which is everywhere apparent and consistent. Not so the chapters which follow (cc. 9-14). The titles (ix. 1; xii. 1) have a different form ("Burdens"), the situations which give their background to the oracles are wholly unlike that which stands out so clearly in Haggai and Zechariah; the character of the prophecies, with their affected obscurity, easily penetrable, doubtless, to contemporaries, but impenetrable to us who have not the historical key, and their apocalyptic eschatology, are in strong contrast to the manner of Zechariah; the evidence of diction confirms that of situation and content.

It has, therefore, long been recognized that none of these prophecies can be by the author of Zech. 1-8: they are anonymous oracles which have been appended at the close of his book or of the Book of the Minor Prophets. They are not all by the same author: cc. 12-14 contain two pictures (xiii. 1-xiii. 6; xiv. 1-21) of the final onset of the heathen on Jerusalem, their destruction, and the golden age of pious prosperity that ensues, variations of Ezekiel's original in the great prophecy of Gog (Ezek. 38-39) which gave the scheme for all subsequent revelations on the last times. A notable difference between the two pictures is that in Zech. 12 the heathen are destroyed by the clans of Judah, who deliver Jerusalem; while in c. 14 Jerusalem is taken by the heathen and subjected to all the horrors of a sack, half of its inhabitants being carried into slavery, before Jehovah himself, descending on the Mount of Olives, fights against the nations and cleaves the mount itself in twain.

In cc. xii. 1-xiii. 6 concrete features of the author's time are probably discernible, in the fact, for instance, that Judah (that is the inhabitants of the other towns and the country) besieges Jerusalem in company with the neighbouring heathen peoples, and in the striking animosity displayed toward the prophets, who are in the same condemnation with the idols and arouse much intenser feeling (xii. 2-6). Our ignorance of the internal history of the Jewish community for two or three centuries is, however, so complete that these allusions furnish us no clue.

In Zech. 9-11 also there are two sections, viz. ix. 1-xi. 3 and xi. 4-17 + xiii. 7-9. The age of these can be fixed with greater confidence by the external historical situation. The heathen power the overthrow of which ushers in the golden age is named, in ix. 13, the Greeks. Egypt and Syria ("Assyria"), that is, the kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, shall be brought low (x. 11). "The land of Hadrach," to which the first oracle is directed, is in all probability the region of Antioch, the Seleucid capital. The bad "shepherds" of cc. 11; xiii. 7-9, who are over the flock of God, are very good likenesses of the Jewish high priests of the Greek time, though it is impossible to identify the concrete historical persons and events of c. 11. Taking all together, we shall not go amiss in ascribing these to the early part of the third century B.C.--say between the year 200, when Judæa came under Seleucid rule and the religious persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabæan revolt, to neither of which is there any allusion in the chapters. Chapters 12-14 may perhaps be put in the century before.

MALACHI.--A third appendix to the Book of Zechariah is the anonymous book which we call Malachi. The earliest title, "The Burden of the Word of the Lord against Israel," is word for word the same as that in Zech. xii. 1 (cf. ix. 1), and doubtless was prefixed by the same editor. Subsequently, perhaps to give the book an independent status and thus round out the number of the Minor Prophets to twelve, the words "by 'My Messenger'" (Heb. _malaki_; iii. 1 f.) were added. Jewish tradition in later times identified this messenger with Ezra. In the versions the word was naturally taken for a proper name.

The book consists of two parts, Mal. i. 2-ii. 9, which from i. 6 on is addressed to the priests, and ii. 10-iv. 3, to the people at large. The priests treat the worship in the temple with professional disrespect, under which lurks an equally professional scepticism. Any kind of blemished or diseased victim is good enough--the prophet invites them to make such a scurvy gift to the governor! The perpetual routine of sacred services they find tiresome. They are no less negligent in their other great function as the religious teachers and guides of the people. The _Tora_, that is, the revealed will of God, is committed to them, and they, degenerate successors of the faithful priests in the good old times, have not only themselves abandoned the right way, but have caused many to fall by their false instructions. They have earned the contempt in which men hold them. The curse of God is on them.

One of the most notable words in the Bible stands in this indignant denunciation (Mal. i. 11 f.). Jehovah's own priests in his own temple treat his worship with contempt; he refuses their offerings: "For from the rising of the sun to the setting, my name is great among the nations, and in every place pure sacrifices are burnt to my name among the nations, saith Jehovah of Hosts; but _ye_ profane it by thinking that the table of Jehovah may be polluted and his food despised." That the sacrifices of the heathen may be "pure" sacrifices, though not according to the Mosaic rite, because all true worship is the worship of the true God, is a conception quite unparalleled in the Old Testament. The author's polemic against the priests of Jerusalem has doubtless made him say more than he would have stood by as a dogmatic statement; more, indeed, than any church has ever been ready to acknowledge, but it was fitting that it should be said, for it is the final consequence of the ethical conception of religion of which the Hebrew prophets from Amos on are the exponents.

Of the remaining oracles, one (Mal. iii. 6-12) urges to the honest consecration of the tithes (dues to the temple); another (ii. 10-16), as commonly interpreted, condemns the marriages with heathen women which so disturbed the soul of Nehemiah and Ezra, and especially the divorce of native wives to take foreign ones; but the language should perhaps rather be taken as figurative for foreign worship. The two remaining prophecies (ii. 17-iii. 5; iii. 13-iv. 3) are addressed to such as thought that God did not trouble himself about men's affairs: the long threatened day of doom gave no sign of coming, nor was the promised reward of serving God bestowed. The prophet declares that the Day will come, sudden and terrible, and the ungodly will get their deserts. The last verses (iv. 4-6) are not improbably an addition by an editorial hand.