We turn now to Dr. Kosters’ treatment of the so-called List of the Returned Exiles. He holds this List to have been, not only borrowed for its place in Ezra ii. from Nehemiah vii.,[576] but even interpolated in the latter. His reasons for this latter conclusion are very improbable, as will be seen from the appended note, and really weaken his otherwise strong case.[577] As to the contents of the List, there are, it is true, many elements which date from Nehemiah’s own time and even later. But these are not sufficient to prove that the List was not originally a List of Exiles returned under Cyrus. The verses in which this is asserted—Ezra ii. 1, 2; Nehemiah vii. 6, 7—plainly intimate that those Jews who came up out of the Exile were the same who built the Temple under Darius. Dr. Kosters endeavours to destroy the force of this statement (if true so destructive of his theory) by pointing to the number of the leaders which the List assigns to the returning exiles. In fixing this number as twelve, the author, Kosters maintains, intended to make the leaders representative of the twelve tribes and the body of returned exiles as equivalent to All-Israel. But, he argues, neither Haggai nor Zechariah considers the builders of the Temple to be equivalent to All-Israel, nor was this conception realised in Judah till after the arrival of Ezra with his bands. The force of this argument is greatly weakened by remembering how natural it would have been for men, who felt the Return under Cyrus, however small, to be the fulfilment of the Second Isaiah’s glorious predictions of a restoration of All-Israel, to appoint twelve leaders, and so make them representative of the nation as a whole. Kosters’ argument against the naturalness of such an appointment in 537, and therefore against the truth of the statement of the List about it, falls to the ground.
But in the Books of Haggai and Zechariah Dr. Kosters finds much more formidable witnesses for his thesis that there was no Return of exiles from Babylon before the building of the Temple under Darius. These books nowhere speak of a Return under Cyrus, nor do they call the community who built the Temple by the names of Gôlah or B’ne ha-Gôlah, _Captivity_ or _Sons of the Captivity_, which are given after the Return of Ezra’s bands; but they simply name them _this people_[578] or _remnant of the people_,[579] _people of the land_,[580] _Judah_ or _House of Judah_,[581] names perfectly suitable to Jews who had never left the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Even if we except from this list the phrase _the remnant of the people_, as intended by Haggai and Zechariah in the numerical sense of _the rest_ or _all the others_,[582] we have still to deal with the other titles, with the absence from them of any symptom descriptive of return from exile, and with the whole silence of our two prophets concerning such a return. These are very striking phenomena, and they undoubtedly afford considerable evidence for Dr. Kosters’ thesis.[583] But it cannot escape notice that the evidence they afford is mainly negative, and this raises two questions: (1) Can the phenomena in Haggai and Zechariah be accounted for? and (2) whether accounted for or not, can they be held to prevail against the mass of positive evidence in favour of a Return under Cyrus?
An explanation of the absence of all allusion in Haggai and Zechariah to the Return is certainly possible.
No one can fail to be struck with the spirituality of the teaching of Haggai and Zechariah. Their one ambition is to put courage from God into the poor hearts before them, that these out of their own resources may rebuild their Temple. As Zechariah puts it, _Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith Jehovah of Hosts_.[584] It is obvious why men of this temper should refrain from appealing to the Return, or to the royal power of Persia by which it had been achieved. We can understand why, while the annals employed in the Book of Ezra record the appeal of the political leaders of the Jews to Darius upon the strength of the edict of Cyrus, the prophets, in their effort to encourage the people to make the most of what they themselves were and to enforce the omnipotence of God’s Spirit apart from all human aids, should be silent about the latter. We must also remember that Haggai and Zechariah were addressing a people to whom (whatever view we take of the transactions under Cyrus) the favour of Cyrus had been one vast disillusion in the light of the predictions of Second Isaiah.[585] The Persian magnate Sheshbazzar himself, invested with full power, had been unable to build the Temple for them, and had apparently disappeared from Judah, leaving his powers as Peḥah, or governor, to Zerubbabel. Was it not, then, as suitable to these circumstances, as it was essential to the prophets’ own religious temper, that Haggai and Zechariah should refrain from alluding to any of the political advantages, to which their countrymen had hitherto trusted in vain?[586]