Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/187

Rh off. ... . And I will bring them again also out of the land of Egypt, and gather them out of Assyria; and I will bring them into the land of Gilead and Lebanon, and place shall not be found for them." Now as in this verse the mention of Egypt must refer to the migration of those who fled thither after the murder of Gedaliah, narrated in the last chapter of the 2nd book of Kings, ("And all the people, both small and great, and the captains and the armies, arose and came to Egypt, for they were afraid of the Chaldeans,") so the mention of Assyria must also refer to those captives taken away by the Assyrians, namely those of the ten tribes. The evident meaning is, that all should return, from the first of those who had gone away under the Assyrian subjugation to the last of those under the Babylonian, so that the predictions included them all.

If, however, there can be any doubt remaining on the subject, and if these passages be not sufficiently convincing as to the real intention of the prophetic declarations bearing on the events then in course of fulfilment, we have only to turn to the 9th chapter as conclusive, 12th verse: "Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope; even to-day do I declare that I will render double unto thee. When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man." Can there, we may repeat it, be any doubt as to these passages joining Judah and Ephraim together with Zion specifically against Greece by name, referring distinctly to the wars of the Maccabees especially, and to the other contests of the people of God with the successors of Alexander? Can there be any doubt that the former predictions were then fulfilled, which promised the children of Judah and the children of Israel should return together, and appoint to themselves one head, and be no more two nations, nor be divided into two kingdoms any more at all?

Such are the conclusions fairly deducible from the whole tenor of the prophetic declarations; but it is not upon them alone that we have to depend for the elucidation of this question. In the historical and other parts of the Scriptures, agreeing with the prophets, we have abundant evidences of the predictions having been fulfilled. In Ezra we have the circumstances of the return of the Israelites to the Holy Land historically detailed, and from it we learn that Cyrus, in the first year of his reign, 536 B.C., "made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying. Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, The Lord God of