The Maccabaean

THE Hebrew prophets were not democrats; they rather were ardent imperialists. Their Zionistic State which the returning golah were to build upon the ruins of the old was to be a monarchy, not a republic. In the form of the government of their new state they had nothing novel to offer; for they apparently were not capable of anything original just here. It was upon the social, not upon the political side, that they were independent in their thought. There are reasons for believing that the early kings of Judah had been somewhat limited in their power, that not only in the choice of the son who should succeed the father, but in the general conduct of affairs the head of clans and of families had had voice. As, however, the country had passed to kingly prerogative, as the chronicles had looked back, had gained rather than lost lustre; so that it was upon the lines of the idealized pictures of the past that the prophets built up their conception of the new Davidic king. We can easily understand how to the literary prophets, looking forward, as they did, to a time when their people should be gathered from distant lands and brought back to dwell once more among the loved hills and vales of the land of Canaan, an earthly king, and one too far surpassing in power and glory, any who had reigned in the past in Jerusalem, appeared to be an absolute necessity. Their dreams of a Zionistic state could have had little reality for them and little meaning for their people, had they not conceived of their land in the new days as having such a head. Given a renovated and marvellously fertile country in which want should be unknown, a land capable of sustaining,

as they conceived of it, a vast population, such as they believed their God would lure thither, the prophets must also dream of any earthly ruler, a regal personage, whom wealth and power, in wisdom and glory, would form the apex of this splendid structure which they had imaginatively reared and which they most sincerely believed would be realized.

Because such a form of government was utterly foreign to their experience, it was not to be expected that the prophets would conceive of their people as living in their day under a man of their own choosing. Even though the history of early Rome and of democratic Greece, may have been known to them and may have furnished some hints of this, a republic form of government could not have appealed to these men of the East. The Aryans and the Semites belonged to different worlds; the latter, therefore, could have found little to admire in the free institutions of the former. The Semites were monarchists by birth, by instinct, and by culture; but monarchists who could the more easily submit to a king if he was kingly, and especially if he was possessed of wealth and power, wisdom and goodness. Such a one might lord it over them and might command and secure their homage and allegiance, if he could maintain himself among the great world-powers of his time. All that David and Solomon, at their highest, had ever conceived to be in these directions, their king must be. Though, curiously enough, naught is said of them in this connection, such mighty empirebuilders and world-rulers as Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon, Sennachcherib, Eserbaddon, Nebuchadrezzar, Cyrus, and perchance,