before in so far as the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Israel, while in the kingdom of Judah which survived it the religious cultus had greater importance attached to it than political affairs, and also inasmuch as in point of fact the practical issue of the prophetic reformation sketched in Deuteronomy had been to make the temple the national centre still more than formerly.  The hierocracy towards which Ezekiel had already opened the way was simply inevitable.  It took the form of a monarchy of the high priest, he having stepped into the place formerly occupied by the theocratic king.  As his peers and at his side stood the members of his clan, the Levites of the old Jerusalem, who traced their descent from Zadok (Sadduk); the common Levites held a much lower rank, so far as they had maintained their priestly rank at all and had not been degraded, in accordance with Ezekiel’s law (chapter xliv.), to the position of mere temple servitors.  “Levite,” once the title of honour bestowed on all priests, became more and more confined to members of the second order of the clergy.

Meanwhile no improvement was taking place in the condition of the Jewish colonists.  They were poor; they had incurred the hostility of their neighbours by their exclusiveness; the Persian Government was suspicious; the incipient decline of the great kingdom was accompanied with specially unpleasant consequences so far as Palestine was concerned (Megabyzus).  All this naturally tended to produce in the community a certain laxity and depression.  To what purpose (it was asked) all this religious strictness, which led to so much that was unpleasant?  Why all this zeal for Jehovah, who refused to be mollified by it?  It is a significant fact that the upper ranks of the priesthood were least of all concerned to counteract this tendency.  Their priesthood was less to them than the predominance which was based upon it; they looked upon the neighbouring ethnarchs as their equals, and maintained relations of friendship with them.  The general community was only following their example when it also began to mingle with the Amme haarec.

The danger of Judaism merging into heathenism was imminent.  But it was averted by a new accession from without.  In the year 458 Ezra the scribe, with a great number of his compatriots, set out from Babylon, for the purpose of reinforcing the Jewish element in Palestine.  The Jews of Babylon were more happily situated than their Palestinian brethren, and it was comparatively easy for them to take up a separatist attitude, because they were surrounded by heathenism not partial but entire.  They were no great losers from the circumstance that they were precluded from participating directly in the life of the ecclesiastical community; the Torah had long ago become separated from the people, and was now an independent abstraction following a career of its own.  Babylonia was the place where a further codification of the law had been placed alongside