2. What was the origin of the Babylonians and Assyrians? Explain the course of empire.

3. To what extent did the Shemites succumb to the civilization of the conquered Turanians?

4. What, therefore, became the one great purpose of AssyrioBabylonian education?

5. Account for the extensive curriculum of this priestly system. If possible, study Davidson's masterly summing up.

6. Explain the educational methods of the Assyrio-Babylonians pretty fully.

7. What were the contributions of Assyrio-Babylonian education to material civilization? Why was their moral ideal so serious?

CHAPTER VI

EDUCATION OF THE ANCIENT HEBREWS

THE HEBREWS

The Phoenicians and Hebrews were of the same Shemitic stock as the Assyrio-Babylonians, both nations beginning in Shemitic migrations from the neighborhood of Babylon. The Phoenicians had already made that coast of the Mediterranean Sea which faces the Lebanon Mountains their habitat when Abraham arrived in the twenty-third century B. C. Their commercial and colonial history is well known, and could have been achieved only by a people of intelligence and indomitable energy; but apart from the fact that they gave the world the science of navigation and a phonetic alphabet, they have contributed nothing for which we owe them praise. On the contrary, the immorality of their ideals is abhorrent, and accounts not only for their fate at the hands of Rome, but also for their race oblivion.

The Hebrews, however, as we shall see, deserve our profoundest thought, and serve as a perpetual moral type for all the world. They are the descendants of Abraham, a Shemite from "Ur of the Chaldees," who, by divine injunction, migrated with his family to Canaan, now called Palestine, about 2300 B. C.

In Egypt.-After a brief nomadic sojourn in Canaan, his people as a whole sought a new habitat in the fertile land of Egypt. This was in the time of his grand

son Jacob, to whom and his sons a Hyksos king, also a Semite, assigned the pastureland of Goshen, where they flourished and were happy. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, a Hamite king, "who knew not Joseph," reduced the Hebrews to slavery. From this slavery God delivered his people by the hand of Moses, his servant. The stirring events of the exodus, or departure from Egypt, are familiar history. The exodus was the real beginning of nationality under theocracy for the chosen people. A period of forty years, destined to be passed in the wilderness, as means to ends in the religious and moral development of the social whole, punctuated by numerous moral crises of sin and grace, was ushered in by the institution of a priesthood in the person of Aaron, the brother of Moses, and by the Mosaic giving of the "Law." A new and hardier race emerged from the hardships and the lessons of the wilderness. Finally, after many tests of faith this unique people, led by Joshua, was permitted to reoccupy the "promised land," about thirteen or fourteen hundred years before Christ.

In the Promised Land.-This "promised land" was partitioned into twelve tribal provinces, to correspond with the number of the patriarch Jacob's sons. The threatening attitude of the Philistines, only partially conquered, taken in connection with their common relation to the true God, should have suggested the closest possible federation, but frequent dissensions defeated this end, and exposed the tribes separately to their powerful enemies. Under these circumstances local chiefs, or judges, raised up by God himself, sometimes attained to considerable intertribal recognition, but the conviction that only monarchy could

save them from conquest by the Philistines grew and grew until at last, about 1095 B. C., the chosen people begged God through Judge Samuel to grant them a king, and God gave them Saul.

Kings. King Saul, a Benjamite, was of giant stature and a born warrior, who soon reduced chaos to order. A strong feeling of nationality now began to take possession of the tribes. Through the "prophets," organized by Samuel into "schools," theocracy maintained the ascendancy over nationality for more than a century. When death deprived the king of Samuel's guidance, Saul gradually degenerated, and was succeeded, after a reign of forty years, by David, a Judahite. This warrior and poet did much during his reign of forty years that made for permanency of religious and political conditions. His brilliant son Solomon, also reigning forty years, produced a "golden age," but succumbed to the fatal seduction of commercial and political foreign relations. The accession of his weak and insolent son Rehoboam in 930 B. C., caused the ten northern tribes to revolt. Thus arose the separate kingdom of "Israel," with Samaria as the capital. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained loyal to the house of David, with Jerusalem as the capital.

Exile. This defection in nationality was a blow to the ideal of theocracy and eventually caused the downfall of both kingdoms. The "ten tribes" were carried away in 720 B. C., by the Assyrians, and became "the ten lost tribes." In 586 B. C. the Babylonians stormed Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and carried the people away captive into Babylon. The captivity was a wonderful discipline. It taught this remnant of the

chosen people the importance of returning to God. Such spiritual return became possible through a code of traditional rulings written down in the reign of Josiah, and called Thorah. In 536 B. C., as a fulfilment of prophecy, it is believed, Cyrus the Great, conqueror of Babylon, allowed the Jews, as they began to be called, to return to Jerusalem.

Restoration.-Perhaps this restoration of the chosen people was to be their last grand opportunity to perfect an ideal theocracy. Be that as it may, Ezra and Nehemiah produced another golden age. It was in this period that the scribes (Scripture scholars) composed the voluminous commentary on "Moses and the Prophets," known as the Talmud, a body of moral and religious prescription. But the sun of Jewish glory was soon to set again, the voice of prophecy was stilled, and the race settled into a moral stupor from which even the peril of subjugation by contending worldempires could not wake it. In 323 B. C., after Alexander's death, his general, Ptolemy, made the Holy Land a province of Macedonia. The Syrians were the next masters. The Maccabees (142-64 B. C.) set up a brief independency, but all-conquering Rome finally made Judea a province, and after a series of insurrections Jerusalem was captured and the temple destroyed by Titus in the year 70 A. D. Since then the chosen people have been the "wandering Jews," a race without a home an empire without a capital-destroyed, they still live! Taken in connection with the commission which called the nation into being, the unique nomadism to which the preceding pages call our attention, can mean only one thing, namely, that the Jew is a national envoy extraordinary of the true God.