Esther vi. 13, vii. 10, viii. 7, 11-17, ix. 1-22; and in
the apocryphal parts, ix. 10, 11, xiv. 13, and following, xvi. 20,
24.]

[Footnote 5: Eccl. i. 11, ii. 16, 18-24, iii. 19-22, iv. 8, 15, 16, v.
17, 18, vi. 3, 6, viii. 15, ix. 9, 10.]

A gigantic dream haunted for centuries the Jewish people, constantly
renewing its youth in its decrepitude. A stranger to the theory of
individual recompense, which Greece diffused under the name of the
immortality of the soul, Judea concentrated all its power of love and
desire upon the national future. She thought she possessed divine
promises of a boundless future; and as the bitter reality, from the
ninth century before our era, gave more and more the dominion of the
world to physical force, and brutally crushed these aspirations, she
took refuge in the union of the most impossible ideas, and attempted
the strangest gyrations. Before the captivity, when all the earthly
hopes of the nation had become weakened by the separation of the
northern tribes, they dreamt of the restoration of the house of David,
the reconciliation of the two divisions of the people, and the triumph
of theocracy and the worship of Jehovah over idolatry. At the epoch of
the captivity, a poet, full of harmony, saw the splendor of a future
Jerusalem, of which the peoples and the distant isles should be
tributaries, under colors so charming, that one might say a glimpse of
the visions of Jesus had reached him at a distance of six
centuries.[1]

[Footnote 1: Isaiah lx. &c.]

The victory of Cyrus seemed at one time to realize all that had been
hoped. The grave disciples of the Avesta and the adorers of Jehovah
believed themselves brothers. Persia had begun by banishing the
multiple _devas_, and by transforming them into demons (_divs_), to
draw from the old Arian imaginations (essentially naturalistic) a
species of Monotheism. The prophetic tone of many of the teachings of
Iran had much analogy with certain compositions of Hosea and Isaiah.
Israel reposed under the Achemenidae,[1] and under Xerxes (Ahasuerus)
made itself feared by the Iranians themselves. But the triumphal and
often cruel entry of Greek and Roman civilization into Asia, threw it
back upon its dreams. More than ever it invoked the Messiah as judge
and avenger of the people. A complete renovation, a revolution which
should shake the world to its very foundation, was necessary in order
to satisfy the enormous thirst of vengeance excited in it