The Maccabaean

It is to the prophetic writings and the psalmody of Israel that we must look for the Zionistic literature. To one who has not become tolerably familiar therewith the discovery of the extent and explicitness of it must come as a great surprise; but such discovery is hardly possible without a guide who has given much time to this study. There really is nothing in the great literatures of the world quite worthy of comparison with it. We have here most painstakingly but somewhat haphazardly and disjointedly presented, what some of late have been wont to allude to as a Hebrew Utopia, so extensive and minute is it. In reality we have what touches us more closely than any elaborately wrought scheme could do. We have the words addressed to the Jews in foreign parts, the golah, which were designed to lure them home and induce them to once more establish themselves in the land of their fathers. This accounts for the warmth of this literature, a characteristic of it which must necessarily stir all readers of its impassioned lines. That it served its purpose anciently we must believe; but that it has yet exhausted itself, that it has no longer a mission, we need not believe. Though to it more than to any other agency the return from the captivity may be traced, though to it more than anything else the Maccabaean and other late and glorious eras in Jewish history may have been due, we must feel that if American Zionism is to have its hopes kept alive and its zeal augmented it must be through constant meditation upon these old oracles. Out of years of special study has grown this and similar papers of the writer. While it is far from exhaustive as a study it does aim to

present the salient features of the wonderful pictures. So far as known to him this has never before been done in America, although an English scholar seems to have attempted something of the kind a few years ago. Such a study ought to have interest far beyond the members of the Zionistic Federation and its immediate friends; it should appeal to all who have any love for the world's Utopian dreams and socialistic schemes. And it should the more rather than the less because so many of the passages here freshly translated or sugges- tively referred to have rare literary charms. The subtitle of this paper may serve to remind the reader that it has to do with the land in the new day. Else- were the writer proposes to dwell upon the people, upon the City, or Zion, and upon the King in the coming time. The general subject is so large and the literature having to do with it is so vast that more than is here undertaken could not be presented in one paper without sacrificing some of the more salient features of the picture.

In examining carefully, as we purpose to do, the prophetic conception of the ideal or Zionistic state which the literary prophets of Israel thought of as finding its centre and home in Canaan in the coming time, it is necessary to look first at their picture of the land. Agriculture and the pastoral pursuits are fundamental to the prosperity of a nation, at least in the early stages of its civilization when the people in order to live must be self-sufficing. Unless a nation's land be favorably located and be well-watered and fertile, the people cannot long prosper. They may for a time enrich themselves through war with neighboring peoples, or through traffic with them; but