The return of Manasseh was at any rate followed by a new policy. The old faith of Israel was no longer persecuted. Foreign idolatries were no longer thrust, in all their foulness, into the sanctuarj' itself. The altar of the Lord was again restored, and peace-offerings and thank-offerings sacrificed to Jehovah (2 Chron. xxxiii, 15, IG). But beyond this the reformation did not go. The ark was not restored to its place. The book of the law of Jehovah remained in its concealment. Satisfied with the feeling that they were no longer worshipping the gods of other nations by name, they went on with a mode of worship essentially idolatrous. "The people did sacrifice still in the high places, but to Jehovah their God only" (ibid. ver. 17).
5. The other facts known of Manasseh's reign connect themselves with the state of the world round him. The Assyrian monarchy was tottering to its fall, and the king of Judah seems to have thought that it was still possible for him to rule as the head of a strong and in- dependent kingdom. If he had to content himself with a smaller territory, he might yet guard its capital against attack by a new waU defending what had been before its weak side (comp. Zeph. i, 10), " to the entering in of the fish-gate," and completing the tower of Ophel, which had been begun with a like purpose by Jotham (2 Chron. xxvii, 3). Nor were the preparations for de- fence limited to Jerusalem. " He put captains of war into all the fenced cities of Judah." There was, it must be remembered, a special reason for this attitude, over and above that afforded by the condition of Assyria. Egypt had emerged from the chaos of the Dodecarchy and the Ethiopian intruders, and again become strong and aggressive under Psammitichus. Pushing his arms northwards, he attacked the Philistines j and the twen- ty-nine years' siege of Azotiis must have fallen wholly or in part within the reign of Manasseh. So far his progress woidd not be unacceptable. It would be pleas- ant to see the old hereditary enemies of Israel, who had latel}' grown insolent and defiant, meet with their mas- ters. About this time, accordingly, we find the thought of an Egyptian alliance again beginning to gain favor. The prophets, and those who were guided by them, dreaded this more than anything, and entered their pro- ,test against it. Not the less, however, from this time forth, did it continue to be the favorite idea which took possession of the minds of the lay-party of the princes of Judah. The very name of j\Ianasseh"s son, Amon, barely admitting a possible Hebrew explanation, but identical in form and sound with that of the great sun- god of Egypt (so E\vald, Gesch. iii, 665), is probably an indication of the gladness with which the alliance of Psammitichus was welcomed. As one of its conse- quences, it probably involved the supply of troops from Judah to serve in the armies of the Egyptian king. Without adopting Ewald's hypothesis that tliis is re- ferred to in Dent, xxviii, 68, it is yet likely enough in itself, and Jer. ii, 14-16 seems to allude to some such state of things. In return for this, ]\Ianasseh, we may believe, received the help of the chariots aiid horses fo"r
which Egj'pt was always famous (Isa. xxxi, 1). (Comp. Aristeas, Epigt. ad Philocr. in Havercamp's Jusephuf:, ii, 104). If this was the close of Manasseh's reign, we can well understand how to the writer of the books of Kings it would seem hardly better than the begimiing, leaving the root-evil uncured, preparing the way for worse evils than itself. We can understand how it was that on his death he was buried as Ahaz had been, not with the burial of a king, in the sepulchres of the house of David, but in the garden of Uzza (2 Kings xxi, 26), and that, long afterwards, in spite of his repentance, the Jews held his name in abhorrence, as one of the three kings (the other two are Jeroboam and Ahab) who had no part in eternal life {San/iedr. xi, 1, quoted by Patrick on 2 Chron. xxxiii, 13).
Indeed, the evil was irreparable. The habits of a sensuous and debased worship had eaten into the life of the people; and though they might be repressed for a time by force, as in the reformation of Josiah, they burst out again, when the pressure was removed, with fresh violence, and rendered even the zeal of the best of the Jewish kings fruitfid chiefly in hypocrisy and unreality. The intellectual life of the people suffered in the same degree. The persecution cut off all who, trained in the schools of the prophets, were the thinkers and teachers of the people. The reign of Manasseh witnessed the close of the work of Isaiah and Habakkidv at its begin- ning, and the youth of Jeremiah and Zephaniah at its conclusion, but no prophetic writings illumine that dreary half-century of debasement. The most fearful symptom of all, when a prophet's voice was again heard during the minority of Josiah, was the atheism which, then as in other ages, followed on the confused adoption of a confluent polytheism (Zeph. i, 12). It is surely a strained, almost a fantastic hypothesis, to assign (as Ewald does) to such a period two such noble works as Deuteronomy and the book of Job. Nor was this dying out of a true faith the only eviL The systematic persecution of the worshippers of Jehovah accustomed the peopk to the horrors of a religious war ; and when they in their turn gained the ascendancy, the)- used the opportunity with a fiercer sternness than had been known before. Je- hoshaphat and Hezekiah in their reforms had been con- tent with restoring the true worship and destroying the instruments of the false. In that of Josiah, the destruc- tion extends to the priests of the high places, whom he sacrifices on their own altars (2 Kings xxiii, 20).