rugs and mantles and other beautiful articles sailed up the rivers, or out to sea toward India.  Many Hebrews, or Jews (that is, Hebrews from Judaea), became merchants.  In their own land they had been chiefly a nation of farmers.  The reputation of the Jews for cleverness in trade began with these experiences in Babylon when hundreds of Jewish boys obtained positions in great Babylonian stores or banks, and by and by set up for themselves as merchants.  Among the Babylonian contracts on clay tablets coming down to us from this period are many Jewish names.

THE TEMPTATION TO FORSAKE JEHOVAH

These young Hebrew merchants found themselves in a net-work of foreign religious customs.  When a customer signed a contract it was proposed that he offer a sacrifice to the god Marduk, that the enterprise might prosper.  There were religious processions and feast days in which everyone joined, just as we hang out flags on the Fourth of July.  Foreigners from other lands joined in these rites and thought nothing of it.  Furthermore, some of these captive Jews thought that their Hebrew God, Jehovah, had not protected them from these mighty Babylonians.  Surely, the Babylonian gods were the stronger, and one should pay them due reverence.

=Memories of the prophets.=—­On the other hand, even the dullest of the Jews must have begun to understand that the religion of their prophets was a different kind of religion altogether—­not a religion, but true religion; and that Jehovah was not like the bargaining, jealous gods of the other nations, but was God, with a capital G, the one righteous Creator and Ruler of the world.

Moreover, the prophets who had taught them to think of Jehovah in this way had again and again declared that just this calamity of exile would come upon them if they as a nation continued to disobey Jehovah’s just laws; and what they had foretold had come to pass.  The prophets must have been right.  Their teaching must be true.

=Hebrews in other foreign lands.=—­There were probably almost as many Hebrews in Egypt at this time as in Babylonia.  Indeed, even before the destruction of Jerusalem the constant wars on Canaan had compelled great numbers of them to seek for peace and comfort for themselves and their wives and children in Egypt, in Damascus, and even in far-away Carthage and Greece.  The Jews to-day are scattered all over the world.  This began to be true of them from the time of the destruction of Jerusalem.

These Jews who permanently made their homes in foreign countries were called Jews of the Dispersion.  And they all faced the same temptations as the exiles in Babylonia.  Their problem was how to be loyal to their nation and their religion.  Great numbers of them, like Daniel and his friends in the stories related in the book of Daniel, did refuse to sacrifice to heathen gods and held fast to the nobler faith