REBUILDING THE TEMPLE

EZRA 310-4: 5

"And all the people shouted with a great shout foundation of the house of the Lord was laid."

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And well they might shout, the whole company of them, forty and two thousand, whom Cyrus permitted to return to the land of their fathers. For they had not only escaped from bondage, but also from the thraldom of idolatry. The exile had done its work. Trained in the school of adversity, taught by fifty years of pain and sorrow, they longed for nothing so much as to "build the old waste places," and reestablish the worship of Jehovah. Their religion was the one thing which made the Jews superior to all other nations, and the Captivity enabled them to see this. Never had they set so high a value upon it as during the fifty years when the worship of Jehovah was suspended. It was in the home of idolatry that they learned to abhor idolatry. Close contact with it proved it to be an abomination. Carried into bondage by Nebuchadrezzar, and suffering the loss of all outward possessions, they were thrown back upon their religion as the one thing which still remained, and the best thing of all. They went into exile lightly esteeming their inheritance. They returned from the exile valuing it as beyond calculation, and regarding themselves as custodians of it for the future.

It was a picked band that returned, a new generation which had learned wisdom by the folly of their fathers. As the Israelites who entered Canaan under Joshua were the sons of those who died in the wilderness, so those who re

turned from the Exile were men who had never felt the curse of Jehovah. Each of them was tried and true; able moreover to "prove his Israelitish descent, and show his name inscribed in those family registers, those 'books of the generations' which had been carefully kept during the long years of the Captivity." No one else was allowed to go. An official list was made of the entire company. This contained the name of every man down to the last member of the 42,360, and constituted a roll of honor as highly esteemed by their descendants as we esteem the Pilgrims who sailed in the Mayflower.

This band of exiles had the grandson of a king, Zerubbabel, for its governor, and the grandson of the last high priest, Jeshua, for its chief priest, the office having come to him by inheritance. No less than four thousand of the priestly order accompanied them, one-tenth of the whole party. The striking thing was the scarcity of Levites, only seventy-four being enrolled among the forty thousand. The explanation of this, according to Hunter, is found in the writings of Ezekiel, the priest-prophet of the Exile, who, taught by the errors of the past, insisted that Jerusalem should be the only seat of sacrificial worship. As the sons of Zadok, the high priest in David's time, had been comparatively free from idolatry, he conferred upon that family the exclusive right of serving henceforth the altar of Jehovah. His aim was to guard against the revival of the worship of the high places by forever barring from the priesthood the descendants of those who had committed that offence. As the Levites had been guilty of this sin he was specially severe against them, forbidding them to "come near" to Jehovah, or to do the office of a priest. He assigned them the humbler duties of guarding the temple gates, slaying the animals for sacrifice and assisting the sons of Zadok. As the prospect was very uninviting to men who regarded themselves in every respect the equals of

their brethren, very few of them returned.

And Ezra later on had to make a special appeal for more. Their condition greatly improved with time, but the fact before us throws light upon the spirit which animated the company of returning exiles, and explains their refusal to let the Samaritans share in the rebuilding of the temple.

Judged by the standard of to-day, they were narrowminded and intolerant, not rising to the greatness of their opportunity, nor seeing in others the excellence which those others saw in them. The Samaritans came to them in good faith, earnestly desiring to share in the work. The refusal not only postponed the work for a generation, but brought about a schism which was never healed. Like the quarrel between Paul and Barnabas concerning Mark-whom Paul regarded as unworthy, but whom he afterwards found "useful for ministering," thus revising his opinion concerning him this disagreement had permanent results greatly to be deplored. Had Paul foreseen how he would come to feel with regard to Mark, these great leaders need not have separated, at least on this issue. But under the existing circumstances no other result was possible. Moreover, God overruled the quarrel for good, though not without inflicting the penalty of loss and suffering upon each. The same is true in the case before us. Had the Jews and Samaritans risen to the emergency and been equal to the opportunity, the former by trusting the latter, the latter by proving worthy of this confidence, by forsaking idolatry and cleaving wholly to Jehovah, great good would have resulted. Then the woman of Samaria would never have expressed surprise that Jesus should talk with her at the well. But when we look at the facts we see that the actual outcome was inevitable. Ideal results are achieved only by the action of ideal people. And the men who faced each other at this turning-point in Israel's history had not reached that altitude of excellence. Like oil and water, they were hard to mix.

In spite of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, large numbers of Israelites were left in the land. They intermarried with the races sent to Canaan by the Assyrian kings, for that was the Assyrian method of punishing revolt-removal of a population from one country to another. As the Jews were taken to Babylon, Chaldeans, Elamites, Arabians and many others were brought to Canaan, thus producing the "most extraordinary jumble of nationalities known to history." Three successive Assyrian kings did this, Sargon, Esar-haddon and Assur-bani-pal. When the Jews returned from Babylon, Sargon's colonists had inhabited Samaria one hundred and eighty years, and Assurbani-pal's about one hundred and thirty years. By intermarriage with the Jews these foreign colonists had learned something of the worship of Jehovah without being weaned from their own idolatries. Each nation had its own divinities and respected the divinities of its neighbor. This appears from the incident reported in 2 Kings 17: 25. "The foreign colonists newly settled in the land suffer from the ravages of wild beasts and at once conclude that the local divinity has taken offence at their neglect of his shrine. They petition the king of Assyria to send back from Nineveh a priest of Israel who shall teach them the 'manner of the God of the land.' The king complies, and sends them a priest who reestablishes at Bethel the ancient cult of the calf. This they call the worship of Jehovah, but along with it they carried on their native idolatries." As time passed and these new colonists became more and more assimilated, their religion approximated more closely to that of the Jews, though many degrees removed.

When the exiles returned from Babylon, rebuilt the altar and laid the foundations of the new temple, the people of the land were drawn toward them at once, and hailed their coming with delight-with the exception, of course, of those whom these Israelites dispossessed. The returning

exiles not only had titles to the land, which had been carefully preserved, but they bore the edict of Cyrus, which no one dared to resist. However unwelcome their arrival was to the few in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, their coming was looked upon with satisfaction by the many, who recognized it as a religious movement by which the people at large could hope to benefit. Now all men could know what the religion of Jehovah was and share in its blessings, especially if they might be allowed to assist in rebuilding the temple. Here, then, was Israel's great opportunity-to welcome the inhabitants of the land to a share in their enterprise, teaching them the religion of the fathers, in regard to which they so greatly needed instruction.

But the Jews were not equal to the emergency. They had neither the courage nor the catholicity of the prophets, who had foreseen the time when Jew and Gentile would be one, and who would have recognized in this request of the Samaritans the same appeal which certain Greeks made to Jesus five hundred years later, namely, the knocking of the Gentile world at the doors of the Jewish Church. Jesus did not repel them, but opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. What was the religion of Jehovah for if not for dissemination, first among the Jews, afterwards among the Gentiles? But these exiles who returned from the captivity were the last men in the world of whom such a service could be expected. They were zealots, devotees, purists. Of unmixed descent, they looked upon the Samaritans as mongrel in race and heretic in faith. To have kept themselves free from idolatry and have married only Jewish wives had begotten among these children of the Exile such a sense of superiority as to make fellowship with them impossible. It was not that they wanted their own way. They would gladly have received any number of men, of their own kind,, on an equal footing with themselves, even if outnumbered by them. But they could not endure the thought of being