REVIEW OF BOOKS. The History of the Jews. Three Pocket Volumes. 15s. Murray. A JEW! 'tis a word of ominous import every where-designating the extremes of selfishness and patriotism-of pride and meanness -standing as a synonyme for something venerable and yet despicable-a union of profaneness bordering upon infidelity, with a religiosity the most scrupulous and inflexible. Every man competent to pronounce an opinion upon the subject must admit, that they are the most wonderful people under the sun. Whether they are contemplated nationally or individually, in their past history, their present condition, or their future prospects, they present many subjects of marvellous interest to every reflecting mind. Here the historian, the philosopher, and the antiquary may alike find matter for the most profound researches; while poets, statesmen, and divines, may gratefully sit at the feet of Hebrew sages, legislators, and prophets. Their history is the most interesting of any nation, Greece and Rome not excepted. It runs into the remotest antiquity, is characterized by the strictest verity, and partakes of the most romantic adventure. The Jews possess poetry of the very first order, and a theory of religion the most sublime and elevated, the origination of which, in a semi-barbarous age, and amidst universal idolatry, defies philosophic exposition. They present the singular phenomenon of having maintained inviolate the pure theism of their religion from the days of their founder, in defiance of innumerable attempts to break it down, and mingle with it the gross elements, or the more ensnaring refinements of Gentile superstition. They have N. S. NO. 64. passed through the greatest vicissitudes of fortune without changing their religion; and whatever have been the circumstances of their own land, or their circumstances in other lands, they have maintained an undeviating, though, perhaps, often a blind attachment to their sacred institutions; and it may be doubted whether any other religion ever took so tenacious a hold of its votaries, and has been dishonoured by so few apostates! They have suffered all manner of national losses, without losing a single fraction of their nationality. From innumerable overthrows they have arisen with a phonix-like vitality, unassailable by all the powers of destruction. They have revived and come forth with the freshness of youth from the grave in which their enemies had deemed them totally and for ever buried. They have been vanquished, impoverished, and dispersed; but have continued distinct from all other people, and as firmly united as if they had remained in their original seat, and retained their national greatness. An invisible wall, impervious to all assaults, and more impregnable than that of China, has kept them as distinct from the other tribes of mankind, as though they had been marked by some indelible feature, or cut off from all intercommunity by impassable barriers. Singular as the statement may seem, yet still it is true, that notwithstanding this strong line of demarcation, this wall of separation from all other nations, they may be said to have exerted a most powerful and commanding influence upon the condition and the destinies of the world—an influence greater and more import ant than that which has come 2 D down to us from Grecian literature, or Roman civilization. Their nation was the cradle, their founder and their prophets, the harbingers and heralds of that sublime system of theology and morals, which will alone effectually meliorate the condition of all nations; and which is rapidly advancing to the universality designated by the emphatic benediction pronounced on the father of the Hebrews-all nations shall be blessed in thee, and shall call thy name blessed. It may occur to the reader, that the Chinese present an instance, in many respects, parallel to the case of the Jews. But though the Chinese exhibit many exceptions to the ordinary lot of nations, and many striking peculiarities of history and character, yet they present no features so in scrutable, no facts so inexplicable, as do the Jews. The Chinese are indeed the only nation who have remained distinct for a period at all comparable with the date of the Jews. But then they have retained one strong seat of empire, upon which no material inroad could ever be made; and, after all, they are rather a strong confederation of distinct, though connatural kingdoms, under a supreme head, than one compact and homogeneous empire. But the Jews have always been a comparatively small nation; and, while locally established, possessing but an inconsiderable territory, and that in the immediate neighbourhood of the mightiest empires that have ever flourished, among whom the religion and polity of the Jews excited a constant spirit of rancorous hostility. The Chinese were always idolaters. Their religion never cast a frown of deadly hate, nor uttered a curse of extermination against the superstitions of their neighbours. There has been nothing in them to awaken malignant jealousy, and arm every proud monarch, and every ambitious republic, in the enterprize of their overthrow. They have been shut up as a garrison within walls, and have neither admitted strangers, nor intermeddled with the affairs of other nations. They have neither communicated, nor borrowed improvements; but have maintained against themselves a sort of national outlawry from the other members of the human family. They have imparted no light in morals, in philosophy, or in history. They have not even told their own tale with decency and credibility; and though possessed of unrivalled advantages for the cultivation of their kind, they have preserved no veritable records of high antiquity, and to this day both their language and their manners bespeak a people but half-way emerged from barbarism. The Jews, on the other hand, have at no period of their history been so totally isolated from the other nations. They have been citizens of the world in all respects but their religion. They have been distinguished for industry, enterprize, and commerce. While they retained a political existence, they were always upon a par with the surrounding nations in arts, manufactures, and wealth; and in the best periods of their history, had the start of all their neighbours; and frequently supplied the chief states of the East with their prime ministers, their treasurers, and generals. In war they have been uniformly a great and courageous people. Their history is full of heroism. But it was always a defensive heroism. They were restrained from conquest and aggression, or they might, at certain periods, have overrun all the East. The magnanimity of Greece, and the military valour of Rome, have both been surpassed in the history of this extraordinary people. But, unfortunately for their fame, they have had no literature distinct from their religion, and no annalists but their inspired prophets and legislators. There was no scope for the exercise of human genius, either in religion, legislation, or foreign politics. And yet they have been, in the main, a flourishing and happy people. Skilful in all arts, abounding in national wealth, and rather giving than borrowing, they have been envied, besieged, enslaved, by all the great monarchies of the East, and republics of the West, which have successively risen into existence; and yet they have survived all these monarchies and republics. Their land has been a prize, and a rich one, for all the royal or military adventurers who have had power to grasp it; and yet none have been able to keep it. The Jews have been exiled, proscribed, and disfranchised; but no one else has been domiciliated in their land. It is still felt to be alienated property. They have been hated, plundered, and massacred wholesale by every great nation of Asia and Europe, and yet they have suffered scarcely any numerical alteration. The soil of every civi lized kingdom of the world, for more than two thousand years, has been defiled with their blood. Their own land has been drenched with it again and again, and yet they survive. They have even hated and destroyed each other the most efficient of all causes of national destruction. Their animosities among themselves have been greater, and more malignant, than any they have had to sustain from their foes; and yet they continue to this day, perhaps nearly numerous as at any period of their history. No inroad is made upon their national and an as cestral feeling. No symptoms appear of their mingling or melting away among the nations, and becoming eventually absorbed, as has been the case with all other dispersed tribes. They betray no disposition to abandon the religion of their forefathers, or desert the hope which, for so many centuries, has made them a na. tion of heroes and of martyrs. They have not yet answered the purposes for which they were constituted a nation. "Through what varieties of untried being," they may yet have to pass, who can say? Their fate is, doubtless, implicated with that of the other nations upon earth, and the period for their abjuration of Moses will, most probably, be the signal for the universal triumph of that religion, which was foretold by their great progenitor, promulgated first in their land, and in which their own was consummated. Then, as they emerged at the divine call from the Gentile stock, they will probably be mingled with it again, when their religion and its characteristic sign are superseded, and the whole earth shall be one family. That they are destined yet to act some conspicuous part in reference to the moral aspects of human affairs, and the triumphs of Christianity, there can be no doubt. But whether this is to be effected by their political restoration, or by their conversion to Christianity in their scattered state, we will not presume to determine. It does not appear that they could be restored to Palestine while they remain uubelievers in Christ-this would be the strongest confirmation of their unbelief, and the most formidable impediment to their subsequent conversion; and it is less likely that they should be restored after their conversion, because it could then answer no important end in reference either to themselves or other nations; they would instantly become naturalized in the various lands of their nativity, and their testimony to the truth of Christianity would be a thousand-fold more efficient in their dispersion than in their return to Judea. But we are now verging upon the theology of our subject, which we cannot at present pursue. We revert to the subject of this article. It is not a little remarkable that our language should contain no native work of any extent or value upon Jewish history, before the appearance of the one before us. lt to follow him. As to Secker and Tillotson, Mr. Milman is surely quite mistaken in thinking, that they would have sanctioned the school in which he has studied. The authority of "the present eminently learned Bishop of London," is also pleaded by the author, in vindication of the lax mode of understanding the Jewish records. But we see nothing in the citation he has given that can be fairly construed into an approval of the method which the German philosophers are pursuing, of abstracting as far as possible the air of miracle from Old Testament narratives, and of resolving not a few things into tradition and hearsay. Upon the principle of these interpreters, inspiration is excluded altogether, and the records of the Jews dwindle into mere common documents of history. There may be errors of transcription, mutilations and dislocations of the Hebrew writings, but these would never sanction the principles of interpretation laid down by the German schools. They are fundamentally at variance even with the exercise of a divine superintendance over the Jewish legislator-to say nothing of plenary inspiration. The "more rational latitude of exposition," for which the author pleads, may indeed remove difficulties and objections, and its feasible object is to make infidels believers; but then the rub is, it first makes believers infidels. says little for the state of our literature, that no skilful pen should have treated the whole subject. Launcelot Addison's work is learned, sensible, and liberal, but it is brief, and relates exclusively to the existing state of the Jews, and that chiefly in Barbary. Of Mr. Milman's work, now before us, we feel constrained to offer a qualified opinion-yet an opinion, we must say, not so violently condemnatory as some of our contemporaries have pronounced. The plain statement of the case, we apprehend, is this:the author is evidently a disciple of the modern German school of theology, and this has led him occasionally into efforts to modify the miraculous narratives of the Old Testament into natural occurrences or possible coincidences. He endeavours to shelter himself, in a Preface to the third volume, under the authority of Tillotson, Secker, and Warburton. As to the latter of these names, it is indeed, he may think, a brazen ægis; and so it is, for the author of the Divine Legation had impudence enough for any thing-chaste execution. It presents a but we had supposed that no divine or historian in these days would have had imprudence enough Though we thus offer our opinion on the objectionable mode of treating Old Testament history, which Mr. M. has adopted, yet we must be allowed to say, in all other respects, the work is one of great excellence, of respectable learning, and of succinct, a pleasing, and a comprehensive outline of the whole stream of Hebrew history. It is indeed scarcely fit for the Family Library, being calculated to inspire young minds with a scepticism as to the strict veracity of the sacred history; but it is indispensable to the library of every theologian, and is a very valuable accession to our liturature. It is not easy to make extracts which can be advantageously read, and yet it is necessary to offer the reader some specimen of the author's style and manner. We had fixed our choice upon the whole narrative of the siege of Jotapata, by Vespasian; but, on reperusing it, we find it is too long, and we can only insert some portions. "Jotapata stood on the summit of a lofty hill, on three sides rising abruptly from the deep and impassable ravines which surround it. Looking down from the summit of the walls the eye could not discover the bottom of these frightful chasms. It was so embosomed in lofty mountains that it could not be seen till it was actually approached. It could only be entered on the north; where the end of the ridge sloped more gradually down; on this declivity the city was built; and Josephus had fortified this part with a very strong wall. Vespasian called a council of war. It was determined to raise an embankment (agger) against the most practicable part of the wall. The whole army was sent out to provide materials. The neighbouring mountains furnished vast quantities of stone and timber. In order to cover themselves from the javelins and arrows of the garrison, the assailants stretched a kind of roof, made with wattles of wicker work, over their palisades; under this penthouse they laboured securely at their embankment. They worked in three divisions, one bringing earth, the others stone, or wood. The Jews were not idle, they hurled down immense stones and every kind of missile upon the workmen, which, although they did not do much damage, came thundering down over their heads with appalling noise, and caused some interruption to their labours. "Vespasian brought out his military engines, of which he had 160, in order to clear the walls of these troublesome assailants. The catapults began to discharge their hissing javelins, the balistas heaved huge stones of enormous weight; and balls of fire and blazing arrows fell in showers. The Arab archers, the ja velin men, and the slingers, at the same time, plied their terrible weapons, so that a considerable space of the wall was entirely cleared: not a man dared approach the battlements. But the Jews, who could not fight from above, began to small bands, like robbers, came secretly attack from below. They stole out in on the workmen, pulled down their breastworks, and struck at them as they stood naked and without their armour, which they had pulled off to work with greater activity. If the besiegers fled, they instantly demolished the embankment, and set fire to the timbers and the wattles. Vespasian, perceiving that the intervals between the different breastwere labouring, facilitated the attack, works, under which the separate parties ordered one to be carried all round, and, uniting all the working parties, effectually prevented these destructive attacks. "The garrison at length beheld this vast embankment completed; it almost reached to the height of their battlements; it stood towering right opposite to them, as if another city had arisen beside their own, and from the equal heights of their respective walls they were to join in deadly conflict for the mastery. Josephus hastily summoned his workmen, and gave orders that the city walls should be raised to a much greater height. The workmen represented that it was impossible, as long as the wall was thus commanded by the enemy, to carry on their labour. Josephus was not baffled; he ordered tall stakes to be driven on the top of the wall, upon which he suspended hides of oxen newly killed. On this yielding curtain the stones fell dead; the other missiles glided off without damage; and even the fire-darts were quenched by the moisture. Under this covering his men worked night and day till they had raised the wall twenty cubits, thirtyfive feet. He likewise built a great number of towers on the wall, and surrounded the whole with a strong battlement. The Romans, who thought themselves already masters of the city, were not a little discouraged, and were astonished at the skill and enterprize of the defenders; but Vespasian was only the more enraged at the obstinacy of the garrison, and the subtlety of the commander. For the defenders become confident in the strength of their bulwarks, began to renew their former sallies; they fought in small bands, with the courage of regular troops, and all the tricks and cunning of robbers. Sometimes they crept out and carried off whatever they could lay their hands on; |