The Church of Redeemed

to Babylon. Zerubbabel, the son of Salathiel, the son of Jehoiachin, the fifth in direct descent from king Josiah, and consequently a prince of the house of David, was appointed by Cyrus to be the governor of the returning colony, under the Persian title of Tirshathah, a name expressive in that language of stern severity. The high priest Jesus, or Joshua, was the grandson of that Seraiah who was put to death by order of Nebuchadnezzar. Under their guidance, the whole congregation, amounting to 42,360 souls, set out on their journey, and took possession of the waste and deserted cities of their forefathers. Beside their servants, which were less than one to six, and their beasts of burthen, which hardly exceeded one to five, they carried with them in money 61,000 golden daries, 5000 manim or 300,000 shekels of silver, and only 100 sacerdotal garments, when the number of priests of the four families which returned amounted to 4289. All these particulars show clearly that the wealthier Jews chose to remain in Babylon. The whole of the gold and silver did not amount to half a million of dollars; 33 and of this sum, a portion must have been contributed by those who remained, according to the king's decree.34

Some months were occupied in settling themselves in their habitations; so that it was not until the seventh month, which began that year on Thursday, the 20th of September, that the whole people assembled to worship at Jerusalem.35 Their first operation was to rear again the great altar of sacrifice on the same spot which it had occupied in the court of Solomon's temple. As it was built, by divine command, of unhewn stones,36 those which had been originally employed were thrown down, but not removed, and were therefore again collected and arranged, with little trouble or delay. The brazen altar was set upon its stone base, and the daily offer

Estimating the daric, as Prideaux and others do, at 17. 5s. sterling, and the maneh at $25.0935. Robinson's Calmet, p. 989.

34 Ezra. i. 4.

35 Ezra. iii. 1.

36 Exod. xx. 25, 26.

ings began on the feast of Trumpets, the 20th of September. The fast of Kippoor, or the great day of atonement, occurred on the 29th of that month. On the very same day did it occur five hundred and sixty years later, when, as I have elsewhere shown,37 St. John the Baptist began his ministry, as the forerunner of Christ. The feast of Tabernacles occurred, in both years, on the 4th of October.

A. J. P. 4179.

535.

It was not till the second month of the second year of their coming into the house of God, at B. V. Jerusalem, that Zerubbabel and Joshua, with the priests, levites and people, laid the foundation of the second temple. Let the reader now turn back to the narrative of the building of Solomon's temple, and he will see that its foundation was laid in the same month, and probably on the same day of the month, exactly 490 years, or seventy weeks of years, intervening between the two events. We shall hereafter see that the second temple was destroyed by fire on the self-same day of the same Jewish month on which the first was burned. But how different were the circumstances of these two foundations! The one was laid by the greatest and richest monarch of his age; the other, by his lineal descendant, released from captivity, but acting and ruling as the vassal of a foreign prince. The same arrangement of the levites was made "from twenty years old and upwards, to set forward the work of the house of the Lord," but their numbers in the former case were 24,000, and in the latter only 74! Of the twenty-four courses of the priests, four only returned from the captivity, the second, third, fifth, and sixteenth.40 Their number amounted to 4289; and these, in imitation of the regulations of king David, were subdivided each into six courses, assuming the names of the

37 Chron. Introd. p. 465. The Jews, on their return from captivity, celebrated the great day of atonement, A. J. P. 4178, Sept. 29. St. John began his mission on the great day of atonement, A. J. P. 4738, Sept. 29. The space of time between was, to a day, 560 years.

38 Ezra iii. 8.

39 See p. 158.

40 Comp. i. Chron. xxiv. 7-18, with Ezra ii. 36–39. In. v. 38, Pashur is substituted for Malchijah, his father. See 1 Chron. ix. 12.

original twenty-four. Instead of the four thousand singers appointed by David," there were now but two hundred singing men and singing women. 12 Yet the same ritual for the daily service of God was now reëstablished which had formerly existed; "and when the builders laid the foundation of the second" temple of Jehovah, they set the priests in their apparel with trumpets, and the levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise Jehovah after the ordinance. of David, king of Israel. And they sang together by course, in praising and giving thanks unto Jehovah, in the words of the 118th and the 136th Psalms, because he is good, for his mercy endureth forever towards Israel." The people,

filled with joy, shouted with a great shout, when they thus praised Jehovah; but many of the priests, and levites, and chief of the fathers, who, in their childhood, had seen the glories of the first temple, wept as they thus celebrated the foundation of the second.43

IV.

The immense substructions which still exist seem to have been the work of Solomon. So late as in 1840, an intelligent and judicious traveller gives the following as the result of his personal observation: "I was surprised, as I advanced along this towering bulwark," (the wall of the haram,) "to observe the immense blocks of stone which compose its foundations, and rise many yards above the surface of the earth. I measured some of them, which were nineteen feet long by three and a half in thickness. From the south-east angle of the city, they extend northward, continuously, a distance of seventy paces, and are, in one place, sixteen courses, more than fifty feet, in height. I could not doubt for a moment that these were remains of the ancient temple, and probably the work of Solomon. They are wholly unlike the walls of the city in other places, known to have been built by the

41 1 Chron. xxiii. 5.
42 Ezra ii. 65.

43 Ezra iii. 8-13.

258

Saracens and Turks. The higher portions of the wall have been rebuilt, in their peculiar style, with stones only one or two feet square. Indeed, there is nothing, in all that I have seen of their architecture, in Egypt or elsewhere, which has any resemblance to these massive remains of what, I doubt not, was the workmanship of the ancient Jews. I was no less surprised than delighted at the sight, as I had supposed, to that moment, that the destruction of the ancient walls, and especially that of the temple, had been complete."44

Two English architects, Mr. Scoles and Mr. Catherwood, seem to have been the first who noticed the incipient spandril of an arch, springing from these massive substructions, toward Mount Zion. It is evidently of the same style and date as the rest; and, indeed, so springs out of them as to show that it formed a part of the original design. The description of Solomon's house shows that the foundation of that was also of similar great and costly stones, of eight and ten cubits in length, which, in modern measurement, would exceed from fifteen to nineteen feet;45 so that the arch in question may have been part of the construction of Solomon's private entrance into the temple. stones are now to be seen beneath it, rising altogether about Three courses of these massive fifteen feet. According to Dr. Robinson, "one of the stones is twenty and a half feet long, another twenty-four and a half feet, and the rest in like proportion." But from the evident remains of this arch, and from the fact that other arches exist supporting the area, which is now called the haram, and was once the area of Solomon's temple, it has been assumed that these substructions are the work of Herod, rather than of Solomon. That this could not have been the fact, but that they were really and properly the work of Solomon, seems evident from the admissions of Mr. Catherwood, the only Christian, and the only scientific architect, who has had the

44 Dr. Olin's Travels. N. Y. 1843. vol. ii. p. 121.

45 1 Kings vii. 8—12.

46 Bib. Researches, vol. i. p. 425.

PLANS OF THE AREA OF SOLOMON'S TEMPLE, ACCORDING TO CATHERWOOD.