CHAPTER I.

_DISPERSION OF THE JEWS――RISE OF SYNAGOGUES._

ARRIVED at the threshold of the Gospel History, it may not be amiss to survey some of the more prominent features of the period we have traversed, and to notice some of the changes which it had produced on the Jewish nation.

The influences under which the Jews had been brought since the Captivity were, as we have seen, of a very varied character. For two centuries after that event, they were subject to the dominion of Persia; for nearly a century and a half they were under Greek rulers; for a century they enjoyed independence under their native Asmonean princes; and for more than half a century, while nominally ruled by the family of Herod, were really in subjection to the power of Rome[136].

In the present Chapter we shall notice, (a) _The Wide Dispersion of the Jews_, (b) _The Change in their Vernacular Language_, and (c) _The rise of Synagogues_.

(a) _The Wide Dispersion of the Jews._

About the time of the building of Rome the ten tribes were carried away by the Assyrian monarchs, and 130 years after, this event was followed by the removal of their brethren of Judah and Benjamin to Babylon. The influential results of this earliest migration, it has been observed, “may be inferred from the fact, that about the time of the battles of Marathon (B.C. 490) and Salamis (B.C. 480), a Jew was the minister, another Jew the cupbearer, and a Jewess the consort, of a Persian monarch[137].” Once settled under the shadow of the Babylonian and Persian kings, the Jews were very loth to quit the country of their adoption, and comparatively few availed themselves of the permission of Cyrus to return to their native land. The important colony in Babylonia which afterwards exerted a very remarkable influence, threw off shoots which extended to the borders of the Caspian Sea and the confines of China.

Important, however, as were the results of this earliest dispersion, they were exceeded by those which attended the policy of Alexander and his successors. That great conqueror, as we have seen, removed a great number of Jews to his new city of Alexandria[138], and there conferred upon them many and important privileges, setting an example, which Ptolemy Soter and Philadelphus were alike not slow to follow[139]. To such an extent did the Egyptian Jews increase, that Philo estimates them in his time at little less than 1,000,000, and declares that two of the five districts of Alexandria derived their names from them. From Egypt they quickly spread along the coast of Africa to Cyrene (Acts