Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Culture of Ancient Israel
Indeed, what an astonishing wealth and variety of separate material is here ready at hand! The history of the people of Israel, in fact, shares with the common and many-sided life of humanity the eminent quality of being interesting at whatever point we may touch it. We may turn our attention to characters more particularly belonging to political history and we shall behold Saul, David, Ahab; or to the heroes of the soul, and we shall encounter Moses, Samuel, Elijah. We behold the ruin of the people as a political nation through Babylonian conquest, and the resurrection of the people as a religious sect through Ezra and Nehemiah. The ideal heroical figures of the early Maccabees justly awaken our admiration, and even their degenerate descendants, during the period of the people's decadence, are themselves not altogether destitute of a certain attraction. The truculent grandeur of a King Herod, and the appalling extermination of the nation by the Roman sword - the most heartrending catastrophe, perhaps, that history ever has witnessed - fitly close this grand historical panorama, in which on every side and at all times we are confronted by entrancing phenomena, arousing all our interest.
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