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the words of the description. It was a release to that province, which must have been dear, above all others, to the heart of the queen. It is another coincidence, that when Nehemiah succeeds in his prayer to the king, it is remarked that the queen was sitting by. No other queen of Persia, but Vashti and Esther, is named or alluded to in Scripture; and when we combine this passage with those just compared, the conclusion is little short of direct and absolute demonstration. And indeed every part of the book of Esther should be enough to shew that the rule of Babylon, and hence the seventy years Babylonish captivity, had now passed away. Not one reader in a thousand, reading Scripture alone, would ever dream of adopting any other view.

A third argument is drawn from the sealing under Zerubbabel and Nehemiah. The names of the chiefs in most of the twentyfour priestly courses are given us in each case, Neh. xii. 1-7, x. 1-8. On the usual chronology the interval is just ninety years. But, out of twenty-two names, fourteen are the same. Hence it is reasoned that they must be the same persons in each instance; and that the interval was much shorter, or according to his Grace's hypothesis, only about fifty years.

Here we have certainly an objection which appears very formidable, and his Grace has developed it with skill and ingenuity. Yet, on a closer and more exact research, it will change sides, and become a proof of the chronology it is supposed to overthrow. We feel it of double importance to make this plain, since the difficulty is internal to Scripture itself, and therefore is apt to make the deeper impression.

And first, the argument proves too much. It rests entirely on the supposition that the names in the two lists must be those of the same persons. This is doubtless the notion we should be disposed to adopt at first sight; but let us trace its consequence, even on the amended system. From the first of Cyrus to the fourth of Darius, when the temple was built, is eighteen years, deduced from Scripture alone. The hypothesis requires this to be Darius Nothus, who is known to have reigned nineteen years. The sealing of Nehemiah was not earlier than the 20th of Artaxerxes. The whole interval will thus be 18+15+20, or 53 years. The table in "The Times of Daniel" would extend it to 59 years. Now the priests, who signed under Zerubbabel were clearly heads or chiefs of their several families, and we may therefore safely assume them to be each at least forty years old. Now if we inquire, on any reasonable hypothesis, the likelihood that, out of twenty-two persons, not less than forty years of age, fourteen shall be found alive after fifty-three years, the chance will be some mil

So that the

lions of millions to one against such an occurrence. difference between the rejected and favoured system amounts simply to the following. On one hypothesis it is quite impossible that the same names in the two lists denote the same persons; and on the other, it is so nearly impossible, that the probability against it is millions of millions to one. For every practical purpose of reasoning or argument, the difference is insensible, and the inference, that the persons are not the same, would be certain on this ground alone.

Next, we have a third list of the chiefs of the courses, in the time of David, 500 years before Zerubbabel. 1 Chron. xxiv. 7— 18. Yet, at this interval of five centuries, and of six centuries from Nehemiah, nine names are found the same in the first and second lists, and seven in the first and third. Here sameness of persons is entirely out of the question. But if nine names out of twenty-two were the same after 400 years, why should not fourteen be the same at the interval of a century? This one fact is enough to disprove every argument by which the same names are made to prove identity of person.

But the disproof of this fancied sameness is still more complete. Those who sealed with Zerubbabel were heads of the courses when Joshua was high priest, and Eliashib was high priest on the sealing of Nehemiah. The high priesthood of Joiakim, the son of Joshua, intervened. Now the list of the heads of the courses, during his priesthood, is actually given (Neh. x.) and contains only two or three names which occur in either the previous or the following list. The conclusion is self-evident, that the persons in the two covenants were not the same. And thus we have really an argument for the longer chronology. No instance occurs in Scripture where a son has the name of his own father, but several where the grandson is named from the grandfather. This was even of proverbial frequency among the Greeks, as in the line of the comic poet, "Hipponicus, son of Callias, and again Callias of Hipponicus.' Thus the sameness of so many names becomes a strong argument that at least two generations had intervened from Cyrus and Nehemiah.

One further remark seems here needed, since the noble author insists strongly on other coincidents of name, and argues that the same Mordecai and Nehemiah must plainly be meant, in Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. "Such extraordinary coincidence," he observes," is not to be set aside lightly. If the names were so common they would cease to distinguish, they would be no longer designations. Nor is it in accordance with other examples in Scripture. How rarely do we find in different pedigrees the more proper names repeated."

Now we venture to affirm the direct opposite, that nothing is more common, and especially in these books of Ezra and Nehemiah, than to find the same proper names repeated. We do not mean repetitions which are matters of doubtful reference, but those which are undeniable. For instance we have a list of 120 names in Ezra x. 18-44, of those who had taken strange wives, and there are 58 duplicates or triplicates in the number. If we extended the comparison of these with the other names in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, we doubt whether there are more than twenty, out of one hundred and twenty, which could not be proved to belong to two persons. How slippery and deceitful, then, must be an argument resting on such a foundation! Even the author himself, after arguing in the text that the same Mordecai and Nehemiah must be meant in the different passages, is compelled to admit, in a foot-note, that two Nehemiahs are clearly mentioned.

Our space forbids us to enter largely on a fourth argument, which consists in conjectures drawn from the writings of Ferdousi and Merkhond, and the Persian legends, long after the Christian era. A very brief view will be enough to prove that these are the worst materials conceivable for establishing an emended chronology.

The list of the two dynasties, the Pishdadian and Kaianian, includes twenty kings in succession: Kai Omers, Houshong, Tehmuras, Jemsheed, Zohak, Feridoon, Minuchecher or Ferouz, Nawder, Afrasiab, Zaub and Gurshstasp; Kai Kobad, Kai Ka'oos, Kai Kosrau, Lohorasp, Gushtasp, Behmen or the Long-handed, Humai or Khance, Darab, son of Behmen, and Darab the less. The reign of Kai Omers is made 40 years, of Ferouz 120, and of Kai Kobad, Kai Ka'oos, and Kai Kosrau, 100, 150, and 60 years respectively. To Lohorasp, Gushtasp, and Behmen are assigned 120, 120, and 112 years. The whole period of the two dynasties amounts to 259+712971 years.

The steps of the proposed restitution are these: Jemsheed the fourth, and Nawzer the eighth Pishdadian king, and Kai Ka'oos, the second Kaianian, are all made the same person, the Nebuchadnezzar II. of Scripture, and Cambyses of the Greek historians. According to his Grace, he would be contemporary with Herodotus for forty years, and conquering about the time when that historian travelled in the East. Yet we are to reject the testimony of Herodotus about him, and to restore his chronology by the help of Merkhond, who places him, under the name of Jemsheed, about 700 years, and thirteen generations, before the birth of that his

torian.

The lengths of the reigns being first rejected, the continuous and single list is thus broken up into three parallel series. Twenty

generations, by these conjectures, are reduced to about eleven. The fourth, eighth, and thirteenth kings in the traditional series are made the same person. Thus at length we obtain the following series of names and reigns in succession.

1. Kai Kobad-Nebuchadnezzar the First the true Cyrus the Great.

2. Jemsheed-Nebuchadnezzar the Second-Nawser-Kai Ka'oos=Cambyses, or Cumbukht.

3. Kai Kosrau Cyrus of Herodotus, confounded with the true Cyrus.
4. Lohorasp Zaub-Darius the Mede-Darius Hystaspes.
5. Gushstasp Gurstasf, or Kishtasp=Xerxes=Ahasuerus.

6. Behmen, or the Long-handed=Artaxerxes Longimanus.

After such a list, it is not a little surprising that the noble writer should make it a decisive argument against the common view, that it requires us to suppose that Cambyses and Smerdis bore also the names Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes. For his own Ahasuerus has four other names, and his own Cambyses five others at least. Nor is this the only difficulty. After carving the Persian legends down into these moderate dimensions, from twenty generations to about twelve, and from nearly 1000 years to about 250, we have a result in which twenty-two names are combined upon six kings, and an order that does open violence to Scripture itself, and to Herodotus, even in the events of his own lifetime. We have two Nebuchadnezzars, and the Scripture gives no hint of the kind, but clear proofs that one king is always spoken of under that name. We have Cambyses made contemporary with Herodotus, and alive when his history was written, though the writer had been in Egypt, and places the death of that king forty years before his own birth. We have the Cyrus of Herodotus following Cambyses; in direct contradiction of that author, and perhaps of every other; nay, in direct contradiction of Scripture, which makes Evil Merodach succeed on the death of Nebuchadnezzar. We have Darius Hystaspes identified with the Mede, though he is declared by Herodotus, who was born at the close of his reign, to have slain a Median usurper and restored the dynasty of the Persians; and separated from Gushstasp, where the names are in almost literal agreement. Again, Lohorasp, who comes fifteenth in the original list, is made to precede by ten years Jemsheed, who comes the fourth in order; and Nebuchadnezzar, both the first and second, prove to be only viceroys of Darius the Mede, who took the kingdom when Belshazzar, the son or grandson of Nebuchadnezzar was overthrown. We are hardly prepared also, after the censure cast in the Preface on the supposition that "the first-mentioned Artaxerxes is Cambyses, for the word (Artaxerxes) signifies merely a great warrior;" to find that the noble author adopts the very same license, only transferring it from one name to the other,

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and says, p. 251, that Cambyses "was more probably a title than a name. He allows further that the Darius of Ctesias is an Artaxerxes, and that Artaxerxes Oarses is Arses, and that the Jews suppose the second Darius to be Artaxerxes also; that the Cyrus of Ctesias is the Nebuchadnezzar of Polyhistor; the Xerxes of Herodotus the Artaxerxes of Ctesias, and Evil Merodach in Scripture perhaps the same with Belshazzar; and that three Cyruses, really different, have been confounded into one, Kai Kobad, or Nebuchadnezzar the First; Kai Kosrau, or the Cyrus of Herodotus, who followed Cambyses, and the Coresch of Scripture, who was really a satrap under Behmen, or Artaxerxes the First, and whose "short and brilliant reign" was in the days of Herodotus and Thucydides, and of the classic writers of Greece, though none of them seemed ever to have suspected its occurrence. All this appears to us simply confusion worse confounded, and it requires a little space to recover our breath, and clear away the mental dizziness produced by the bare enumeration of such coincidences and identities as these. We are ready to say, with Archimedes, dos

T—for there is not a single fixed point left, and not a single law of evidence that is not, at least in our conviction, entirely overthrown. Herodotus, contemporary in part, on the author's view, with Jemsheed, Nawzer, Zaub, Gurshasf, Kai Ka'oos, Kai Kosrau, Gushstasp and Behmen; the fourth, eighth, tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth kings in the Persian list, is to be corrected by authorities who have placed the first of these fourteen reigns, seven hundred years earlier than the other. To specify one point-according to the new theory, Cambyses overthrew Apries A.c. 486, two years before Herodotus was born, and died a.c. 441, when the same historian was more than forty years old. He recited his history at the games at the age of twentyeight, and travelled, either before or soon after, into Egypt and as far as Babylon, to procure the best information. Must he not have been mad and blind at once, to place the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses eighty years distant, when it took place just when he himself was born; and to state that Apries was slain forty-four years earlier, when he was put to death by Cambyses; and to place the death of Cambyses at Ecbatana soon after, or about A.c. 520, when he was really living still at the time of his own visit, and perhaps ten years later? With the deepest respect for the noble writer, and for the various research and learning displayed in his work, every examination of the system only increases our surprize that it has ever been seriously maintained.

Instead, however, of enlarging the list of paradoxes which result from the proposed arrangement, or sifting one by one the minor

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