It is hard for us to see that this was wrong, for these people probably became worshipers of Jehovah, like Ruth the Moabitess in the beautiful story in the Bible, who said to her Jewish mother-in-law, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”  The exiles from Babylon, however, including so good and wise a man as Nehemiah, fought with all their might against all intermarriages.  Without doubt the motive, which was to protect the Hebrews from idolatry, was good, but the matter is certainly open to criticism, especially in the light of our truer knowledge of God.  We read that at one time, even under the leadership of Ezra, one of the returned exiles, a large number of the wives from other nations were cruelly divorced and sent away weeping to their own people.  All this helped to give the Jews a wrong and unreasonable pride in their own race and a silly and unkind contempt for other races.

=The hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans.=—­About the time of Nehemiah there was also started a bitter feud between the Jews and the Samaritans.  There had always been a good deal of jealousy between the people of Judah in the South, and the Hebrews of the central and northern parts of Canaan.  Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom, which had split off from the kingdom of David and Solomon.  This old jealousy flamed up again after Nehemiah.  The Samaritans had intermarried with their heathen neighbors, perhaps more than the Jews in Judaea.  So the Jews claimed that the Samaritans had no right to call themselves true Hebrews.

The Samaritans, on the other hand, claimed that they were true children of Abraham, and they built a temple of their own on Mount Gerizim as a rival to the temple of Jerusalem.  This jealousy and hate grew more and more bitter until, in the time of Jesus, the Jews looked upon Samaritans with even more contempt than any Gentiles.

=The growing prejudice against the Jews among other peoples.=—­Those who call names generally hear themselves taunted and ridiculed in turn.  The very fact that the Jews would not work on the Sabbath marked them as peculiar and helped to make them unpopular.  Their laws about foods, clean and unclean, were also different from those of other nations.  For example, they would not eat pork.  Moreover, as time went on many of the Jews in Babylon and in other foreign lands grew prosperous.  They were industrious and they had brains and a special gift for trade.  Before long they had money to lend, and they often demanded unjust rates of interest.  This too made them unpopular.  So the more proudly and contemptuously they held aloof from Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, and all other foreigners the more frequently they heard themselves called “Jewish dogs” and other hard names.

THE COMING OF THE GREEKS