Details concerning the Return from the captivity are preserved in the books denominated after Ezra and Nehemiah ; and in the prophecies of two con temporaries, Haggai and Zechariah. The first great event is the decree of Cyrus, B.C. 536, in consequence of which 42,360 Jews of Babylon re turned under Sheshbazzar, with 7337 slaves, be sides cattle. This ended in their building the altar, and laying the foundation of the second temple, 53 years after the destruction of the first. The pro gress of the work was, however, almost imme diately stopped : for Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest, abruptly refused all help from the half-heathen inhabitants of Samaria, and soon felt the effects of the enmity thus induced. That the mind of Cyrus was changed by their intrigues, we are not in formed ; but he was probably absent in distant parts, through continual war. (There is a diffi culty in Ezra iv. as to the names Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes ; yet the general facts are clear.)— When Darius (Hystaspis), an able and generous monarch, ascended the throne, the Jews soon ob tained his favour. At this crisis, Zerubbabel was in chief authority (Sheshbazzar perhaps being dead), and under him the temple was begun in the second and ended in the sixth year of Darius, B.C. 520. 516. Although this must be reckoned an era in the history, it is not said to have been accompanied with any new immigration of Jews. We pass on to the seventh year of king Artaxerxes' (Longi manus), Ezra vii. 7, that is, B.c. 458, when Ezra comes up from Babylon to Jerusalem, with the king's commendatory letters, accompanied by a large body of his nation. The enumeration in Ezra viii. makes them under males, with their families ; perhaps amounting to 5000 persons, young and old : of whom 113 are recounted as having heathen wives (Ezra x. 18-43). In the twentieth year of the same king, or B.c. 445, Nehemiah, his cupbearer, gains his permission to restore his fathers' sepulchres,' and the walls of his native city ; and is sent to Jerusalem with large powers. This is the crisis which decided the na. tional restoration of the Jewish people ; for before their city was fortified, they had no defence against the now confirmed enmity of their Samaritan neighbours ; and, in fact, before the walls could be built, several princes around were able to offer great opposition [SANBALLAT]. The Jewish popu lation was overwhelmed with debt, and had gene rally mortgaged their little estates to the rich ; but Nehemiah's influence succeeded in bringing about a general forfeiture of debts, or at least of the interest ; after which we may regard the new order of things to have been finally established in Judma [NEHEntrAx]. From this time forth it is probable that numerous families returned in small parties, as to a secure home, until all the waste land in the neighbourhood was re-occupied.
There has been great difference of opinion as to how the 70 years of captivity spoken of by Jere miah (xxv. 12 ; xxix. to) are to be estimated. A plausible opinion would make them last from the destruction of the first temple, B.C. 588, to the finishing of the second, B.C. 516 ; but the words of the text so specify 'the punishing of the king of Babylon' as the end of the 70 years—which gives us the date B.C. 538—that many, with Jahn, cling to the belief that a first captivity took place in the third year of Jehoiakim, B.c. 605. Winer, on the contrary, suspects that a desire to make out the 70 years in this way, has generated the story in Daniel, so irreconcilable with the books of Kings and of Jeremiah. But, in fact, if we read Jeremiah himself, it may appear that in ch. xxv. lie intends to compute the 70 years from the time at which he speaks (ver. 1, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim,' i.e. B.C. 604) ; and that in xxix. to the number seventy years' is still kept up, in re membrane of the former prophecy, although the language there used is very lax.
The great mass of the Israelitish race neverthe less remained in dispersion. Previous to the cap tivity, many Israelites had settled in Egypt (Zech.
x. 6-1 ; Is. xix. i8), and many Jews afterwards fled thither from Nebuzaradan ( Jer. xli. t 7). Others appear to have established themselves in Sheba (see Jost's Gen-Halite, etc.), where Jewish influence became very powerful (SHEBA).
It is maintained by Von Bohlen (Genesis, p. cxvi. ) that the ten tribes intermarried so freely with the surrounding population as to have become com pletely absorbed ; and it appears to be a universal opinion that no one now knows where their de scendants are. But it is a harsh assumption that such intermarriages were commoner with the ten tribes than with the two ; and certainly, in the apostolic days, the twelve tribes are referred to as a well-known people, sharply defined from the heathen (James i. 1; Acts xxvi. 7). Not a trace appears that any repulsive principle existed at that time between the Ten and the Two. Ephraim no longer envied Judah, nor Judah vexed Eph raim ;' but they had become ' one nation ;' though only partially on the mountains of Israel' (Is.
xi. 13 ; Ezek. xxxvii. 22). It would seem, there fore, that one result of the captivity was to blend all the tribes together, and produce a national union which had never been effected in their own land. If ever there was a difference between them as to the books counted sacred, that differ ence entirely vanished ; at least no evidence ap pears of the contrary fact. When, moreover, the laws of landed inheritance no longer enforced the maintenance of separate tribes and put a difficulty in the way of their intermarriage, an almost in evitable result in course of time was the entire obliteration of this distinction ; and as a fact, no modern Jews know to what tribe they belong, although vanity always makes them choose to say that they are of the two or three, and not of the ten tribes. That all Jews now living have in them the blood of all the twelve tribes, ought (it seems) to be believed, until some better reason than mere assertion is advanced against it.
When Cyrus gave permission to the Israelites to return to their own country, and restored their sacred vessels, it is not wonderful that few persons of the ten tribes were eager to take advantage of it. In two centuries they had become thoroughly naturalized in their eastern settlements ; nor had Jerusalem ever been the centre of proud aspirations to them. It is perhaps remarkable, that in Ezra ii.
2, 36 (see also x. 18, 25), the word Israel is used to signify what we might call the Laity as opposed to the priests and Levites ; which might seem as though the writer were anxious to avoid asserting that all the families belonged to the two tribes. (If this is not the meaning, it at least spews that all discriminating force in the words Israel andJudah was already lost. So, too, in the book of Esther, the twelve tribes through all parts of the Persian empire are called Jews.) Nevertheless, it was to be expected that only those would return to Jeru salem whose expatriation was very recent ; and principally those whose parents had dwelt in the Holy City or its immediate neighbourhood. The re-migrants doubtless consisted chiefly of the pious and the poor ; and as the latter proved docile to their teachers, a totally new spirit reigned in the restored nation. Whatever want of zeal the an xious Ezra might discern in his comrades, it is no slight matter that he could induce them to divorce their heathen wives—a measure of harshness which St. Paul would scarcely have (1 Cor. vii. 12) : and the century which followed was, on the whole, one of great religious activity and impor tant permanent results on the moral character of the nation. Even the prophetic spirit by no means disappeared for a century and a ]calf; although at length both the true and the false prophet were supplanted among them by the learned and diligent scribe, the anxious commentator, and the over literal or over-figurative critic. In place of a peo ple prone to go astray after sensible objects of adoration, and readily admitting heathen customs ; attached to monarchical power, hut inattentive to a hierarchy ; careless of a written law, and movable by alternate impulses of apostacy and repentance ; we henceforth find in them a deep and permanent reverence for Moses and the prophets, an aversion to foreigners and foreign customs, a profound hatred of idolatry, a great devotion to priestly and Levitical rank, and to all who had an exterior of piety ; in short, a slavish obedience both to the law and to its authorized expositors. Now first, as far as can be ascertained (observe the particu larity of detail in Neh. viii. 4, etc.), were the syna gogues and houses of prayer instituted, and the law periodically read aloud. Now began the close observance of the Passover, the Sabbath, and the Sabbatical year. Such was the change wrought in the guardians of the Sacred Books, that, whereas the pious king Josiah had sat eighteen years on the throne without knowing of the existence of the Book of the Law' (2 Kings xxii. 3, 8) ; in the later period, on the contrary, the text was watched over with a scrupulous and fantastic punctiliousness. From this era, the civil power was absorbed in that of the priesthood, and the Jewish people affords the singular spectacle of a nation in which the priestly rule came later in time than that of hereditary kings. Something analogous may per haps be seen in the priestly authority at Comana in Cappadocia under the Roman sway (Cicero, E p. ad Div. xv. 4, etc.) In their habits of life, also, the Jewish nation was permanently affected by the first captivity. The love of agriculture, which the institutions of Moses had so vigorously inspired, had necessarily declined in a foreign land ; and they returned with a taste for commerce, banking, and retail trade, which was probably kept up by constant inter course with their brethren who remained in dis persion. The same intercourse in turn propagated towards the rest the moral spirit which reigned at Jerusalem. The Egyptian Jews, it would seem, had gained little good from the contact of idolatry (Jer. xliv. those who had fallen in with the Persian religion, probably about the time of its great reform by Zoroaster, had been preserved from such temptations, and returned purer than they went. Thenceforward it was the honourable function of Jerusalem to act as a religious me tropolis to the whole dispersed nation ; and it can. not be doubted that the ten tribes, as well as the two, learned to be proud of the Holy City, as the great and free centre of their name and their faith. The same religious influences thus diffused them selves through all the twelve tribes of Israel.
Thus in Egypt and Arabia, in Babylonia, Assy.
ria, Media, masses of the nation were planted, who, living by traffic and by banking, were necessitated to spread in all directions as their numbers in creased. By this natural progress they moved westward, as well as eastward, and, in the time of St. Paul, were abundant in Asia Minor, Greece, and the chief cities of Italy.
The extermination suffered by the Jewish inhabi tants of Palestine, under the Romans, far better deserves the name of captivity : for after the mas sacre of countless thousands, the captives were reduced to a real bondage. According to Jose phus (De Bell. qua. vi. 9. 3), i, ioo,000 men fell in the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, and 97,00o were captured in the whole war. Of the latter number, the greatest part was distributed among the pro vinces to be butchered in the amphitheatres or cast there to wild beasts ; others were doomed to work as public slaves in Egypt : only those under the age of seventeen were sold into private bondage. An equally dreadful destruction fell upon the re mains of the nation, which had once more assem bled in Judaea, under the reign of Hadrian (A.D. 133), which Dion Cassius concisely relates ; and by these two savage wars, the Jewish population must have been effectually extirpated from the Holy Land itself—a result which did not follow from the Babylonian captivity. Afterwards a dreary period of fifteen hundred years' oppression crushed in Europe all who bore the name of Israel, and Christian nations have visited on their head a crime perpetrated by a few thousand inhabitants of Jeru salem, who were not the real forefathers of the European Jews. Nor in the East has their lot been much more cheering. [For an interesting and scientific calculation of the probable numbers taken away in the first captivity, see Question of the sup posed lost tribes of Israel, by James Kennedy, LL. B., 1855.]—F. W. N.