ever, Jephthah was not a Levite, and therefore his daughter could bear no part even in that service, nor hath nunnery any countenance, either in the Jewish or Christian law; and to suppose, therefore, that Jephthah devoted his daughter to perpetual virginity, is to suppose him acting as contrary to the law of God, as if he had sacrificed her.

2dly. What could he expect to come out of the door of his house to meet him, but a human person? Can we think that Jephthah had his dog in his thoughts when he made this vow,—a creature that was particularly excepted from being in any sense sanctified and devoted to God, as any clean beast might be? Lev. xxvii. 9. 11, compared with Deut. xxiii. 18.

3dly. If he had intended no more than the sacrifice of a bullock, or a ram, what need was there of such a solemn vow? If he had meant a brutal sacrifice, he would surely have vowed to sacrifice hecatombs, rather than a single animal, on so great an occasion; or, like Jacob, he would have vowed to give the "tenth of all his substance unto the Lord;" Gen. xxviii. 22.

4thly. We read, that it was a "custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah.;" Judges xi. 39, 40. Now the Hebrew word pr chok, which we render custom, signifies a statute or ordinance of lasting obligation. Thus it is peculiarly applied to the law which God gave by Moses in the following passage: "Behold I have taught you statutes (Dp chukkim) and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep, therefore, and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations which shall hear all these statutes," op-col-hachukkim, Deut. iv. 6, and so in many other places. This custom, therefore, of the daughters of Israel, seems to be intended for an annual rite in perpetuum, and not that they went yearly to talk with her as long as she lived.

It is highly probable, that Homer grounded his fable of Agamemnon's sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia on some tradition of Jephthah's sacrifice. And indeed the name Iphigenia seems to be a corruption of Jephthigenia, the daughter of Jephthah. Ovid, who has dressed up the story in his way, makes Diana put a stag in her room, and seems, therefore, to have blended the tradition of Abraham's sacrifice with that of

Jephthah.* But to return to the consideration of the Hebrew government.

We have distinguished the time in which God exercised a special authority over the people of Israel into four periods, and are now upon the second of them, namely, from their entrance into Canaan to the captivity. We have gone through the government of the judges. We proceed now to the reign of the kings.

This continued, saith Godwin, from Saul to the captivity of Babylon, about 530 years. But as, in the course of this work, we shall have a chapter by itself concerning the Jewish kings, I shall only for the present observe, that they were of two sorts, those that reigned over the whole Hebrew nation, who were only three, Saul, David, and Solomon, and those that reigned over some of the tribes only.

And these were,

1st. The kings of the house of David, who were twenty in number, if you reckon Athaliah the queen, who usurped the throne for six years, after the death of her son Ahaziah; 2 Kings xi. These kings reigned over the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, until Nebuchadnezzar carried Zedekiah, the last of them, captive unto Babylon. They took their title from the larger tribe, and were called kings of Judah.

2dly. The kings of Israel, who reigned over the other ten tribes, from the time of their rebellion against Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, to the Assyrian captivity. These kings were of several different families, and were in all nineteen, from Jeroboam, the first, to Hosea, the last.

We now proceed to the third period, which takes in the time of the captivity, and concludes with the end of it.

As the Hebrew nation was divided into two distinct kingdoms, so each kingdom suffered a distinct captivity; the one is called the Assyrian, the other the Babylonish.

The Assyrian captivity was that of the ten tribes, which was begun in the reign of Pekah, king of Israel, when TiglathPileser, king of Assyria, conquered a part of his country, and carried away the people captive to Assyria; 2 Kings xv. 29. It was afterward completed by Salmanassar, who took Sa

+ Vid. Capelli Diatrab. de voto Jephth. per totum; apud criticos sacros in Jud. xi., and Mr. Hallet's note on Íleb. ix. 32.

maria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel, after three years' siege, and went up through the land, and carried away the residue of the people captive into Assyria; 2 Kings xvii. 5, 6.

The people of the kingdom of Israel had greatly corrupted the worship of God, and had been very much given to idolatry, ever since their separation from the kingdom of Judah. It is said, that "they walked in the statutes of the heathen, and served idols;" ver. 8. 12. And it is no wonder, therefore, that, when they were removed into Assyria, multitudes of them fell in with the idolatrous worship and customs of that country, becoming mixed with the Assyrians, and in time losing the very name of Jews and Israelites, insomuch that the greater part of the ten tribes, as a peculiar people and visible church of God, were quite lost in that captivity.

The Babylonish captivity was that of the kingdom of Judah, or of the two tribes who adhered to the house of David. It was begun by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, in the reign of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadnezzar "bound in fetters, to carry him to Babylon. And he also carried away some of the vessels belonging to the house of the Lord, to furnish his own temple in Babylon ;" 2 Chron. xxxvi. 6, 7. From hence begun the period of the seventy years' captivity. The people, buoyed up by their false prophets, were induced to believe, that these sacred vessels should be shortly brought again from Babylon; but Jeremiah assured them of the contrary, and that all the remaining vessels should be carried after them; Jer. xxvii. 16, 17.21,22. Accordingly, about nine years afterward, in the reign of Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar made a second descent against Judah, and "besieged Jerusalem, and took it, and carried away the king, and all the nobles, and the great men, and officers, and ten thousand captives, to Babylon, with all the treasure of the house of the Lord, and the treasure of the king's house; and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon had made for the temple;” 2 Kings xxiv. 10-16. But the word typu vaikatzetz is not well rendered "cut in pieces," since it appears, by a passage in Daniel, that these vessels were preserved entire, for “Belshazzar, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank wine in them;" Dan. v. 2. The verb pyp katzatz signifies "to cut off;" as in the following passage of the second book of Samuel,

"David commanded his young men, and they slew them, that is, Rechab and Baanah, the murderers of Ishbosheth, and cut off, p" vaikatzetzu, their hands and their feet," &c., 2 Sam. iv. 12;* where it is used in the same form as it is in the passage before us, in which, therefore, it can mean no more than the vessels being cut off from their stands or bases, and taken away from the temple.

Again, eleven years after this, in the reign of Zedekiah, Nebuzar-adan, the Babylonian general, came and sacked and burnt Jerusalem, and the temple, and carried away the remainder of the sacred vessels, together with all the Jews who remained in the country (except some poor people, whom he left to till the land), captives into Babylon; 2 Kings xxv. 8. &c.

Four years after this, which was the twenty-third of the seventy, or from the beginning of the Babylonish captivity, Nebuzar-adan again invaded the land of Israel, and seized upon all the Jews he could meet with, and sent them captive to Babylon; Jer. lii. 30. This was done probably in revenge for the murder of Gedaliah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had made governor of the land, but whom Ishmael killed; Jer. xli. 2. Upon the murder of Gedaliah, Johanan, the son of Kareah, and many of the people that were left, fled into Egypt for fear of the king of Babylon: ver. 16-18; chap. xliii. 4—7. So that all the Jews that Nebuzar-adan now found, and made captive, amounted to no more than seven hundred and fifty persons. Thus was the captivity of Judah completed, and the land was made desolate, none of its former inhabitants being now left in it.

But though the captivity of Israel and of Judah had different beginnings, the former commencing a hundred years before the latter; yet they ended together, when Cyrus, the king of Persia, having conquered both the Chaldeans and Assyrians, and obtained universal monarchy, issued out a decree for restoring the Jews to their own land, and for rebuilding Jerusalem and the temple; Ezra i. 1-3. This is that famous Cyrus, who, one hundred and forty years before the temple was destroyed, and two hundred years before he was

So also, 2 Kings xvi. 17, Ahaz " cut off" the borders of the bases, &c.; and, chap. xviii. 16, Hezekiah "cut off" the gold from the doors, &c. Hallet's Notes and Discourses, vol. i. p. 1.

born, was mentioned by name, in the prophecy of Isaiah, as designed by God for restoring his people: Isa. xliv. 28; xlv. 1-4. It is not improbable, that prophecy might have been shown to Cyrus by some captive Jews, perhaps by Daniel, which might be a means of moving him to accomplish it. This appears to have been the opinion of the Jews in the time of Josephus, which they had probably received by tradition. For he makes Cyrus say, in his decree, "Because the supreme God hath apparently made me king of the world, I believe him to be he, whom the people of Israel adore; for he predicted my name by his prophets, and that I should build his temple at Jerusalem in the land of Judea."*

Upon this decree, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin assembled out of the several provinces of the kingdom of Babylon, and put themselves under the conduct of Zerubbabel, the grandson of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, who was made their governor, and of Joshua the high-priest, to the number of forty-nine thousand six hundred and ninety-seven persons, and returned to their own land; Ezra ii. And though the ten tribes, in their national capacity, were never restored, but the most part continue in their dispersion to this day, insomuch that the Assyrian captivity put a final period to the kingdom of Israel; yet, as the decree of Cyrus extended to all the Jews, several persons belonging to the ten tribes now joined themselves to Judah and Benjamin, and returned with them to their own land. We read, therefore, that among the sacrifices offered at the feast of the dedication of the temple, on its being rebuilt, there were "twelve he-goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel;" Ezra vi. 17. Again, we read of "twelve bullocks" being sacrificed "for all Israel;" Ezra viii. 35. From whence it is highly probable, that some of all the ten tribes were now returned; though still it appears, that great numbers of the Jews, probably most part of the ten tribes, who still adhered to the old religion, remained among the heathen in the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus; whom Dr. Prideaux takes to be the Ahasuerus mentioned in the book of Esther, and for which opinion he offers substantial reasons. This, therefore, must have been near eighty years

Antiq. lib. xi. cap. i. sect. i. edit. Haverc.