128

Objections stated.

[LECT. speaks, when it is said-" And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will." Nor are the subsequent fortunes of that kingdom less clearly delineated, as I endeavoured on a former occasion to shew2, in the verse immediately following, which describes the breaking up of his kingdom, and its division toward the four winds of heaven.

To the application, however, of the foregoing description to Alexander and his empire, it has been objected, "that "the mighty king' is not said to be a Grecian potentate;" that "for aught that appears to the contrary, he may be a fifth king of Persia; and " that “the opinion which seeks to identify him with Alexander rests altogether on the supposed analogy between this prophecy and the vision of the ram and goat, where the power symbolized by the great horn of the goat, is expressly said to be the first king of Grecia." We are told still further, that “the unbiassed reader would naturally infer from the words of the prophecy, if we are to date its commencement from the period at which it was delivered, that between Cyrus and the 'mighty king,' who is supposed to be Alexander the Great, four kings only were to sit upon the Persian throne;" whereas "the murder of Xerxes, the fourth of the successors of Cyrus, took place more than a century before the accession of Alexander to the throne of Macedon; and in this interval there reigned in Persia no less than nine sovereigns, the last of whom, one hundred and thirty years after the death of Xerxes, was conquered by Alexander "."

v.]

Objections examined.

129

In reply to these arguments I would observe, that the identity of object, at this point, between the prophecy before us and the vision of the ram and hegoat seems to be established, beyond controversy, by the general correspondence, which we before already traced, between them:-"the mighty king" here spoken of would appear clearly to be the same with the first king of Grecia, represented there by the great horn of the goat. It is to be observed, moreover, that in the passage before us there is nothing to lead us to suppose, that the "mighty king" who was to "stand up" and "rule with great dominion," was to succeed immediately to the fourth king of Persia, the invader of Greece; and the silence of the inspired record on this point is the more observable as contrasted with the definite marking of the place which that king was to occupy in the line of the successors of Cyrus'. Again, the description of the mighty king's dominion, viewed by the light of the history, would certainly, I think, rather suggest the idea of a distinct empire; and when we consider that "Xerxes," as Bp. Newton observes, "was the principal author of the long wars and inveterate hatred between the Greeks and Persians," and that "his expedition was the most memorable on the one side, as Alexander's was on the other," the Macedonian turning back upon Asia the tide of war which in the Persian invasion had set in upon the shores of Greece,—we shall see how the Spirit of prophecy would easily pass from the one to the other; and this by what in human language would be fitly styled a masterly outline, a

130

Kings of the north and the south.

[LECT.

philosophical view of events, throwing into the shade those which are unimportant, seizing the main features of the history, and exhibiting the great links which connect it together as a whole. St. Jerome long ago remarked upon the omission in question, observing "that the prophetic Spirit did not care to follow minutely the order of the history, but to touch all the remarkable events 5." And indeed in those nine reigns of the later kings of Persia, how few readers of history are there who could point to any important occurrences as recorded by profane historians! The Spirit of prophecy has sketched perfectly the great outline of the history.

The application to Alexander's empire of the prophetic description of the division of the great king's dominion toward the four winds of heaven, I endeavoured on a former occasion to establish. The prophecy goes on to trace the fortunes of two only of these kingdoms,—namely, of "the king of the south" and "the king of the north "—that is, as has been generally understood, the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. "These two," says Bp. Newton, "were by far the greatest and most considerable and these two, at one time, were in a manner the only remaining kingdoms of the four; the kingdom of Macedon having been conquered by Lysimachus, and annexed to Thrace; and Lysimachus again having been conquered by Seleucus, and the kingdoms of Macedon and Thrace annexed to Syria. These two likewise," the Bishop observes, "continued distinct kingdoms, after the others were

v.]

Objections to received interpretation.

131

swallowed up by the power of the Romans. But there is a more proper and peculiar reason," he adds, "for enlarging upon these two particularly; because Judea, lying between them, was sometimes in the possession of the kings of Egypt, and sometimes of the kings of Syria; and it is the purpose of holy Scripture to interweave only so much of foreign affairs, as hath some relation to the Jews; and it is in respect of their situation to Judea, that the kings of Egypt and Syria are called the kings of the 'south' and the north.'"

But here it is objected that, since commentators "acknowledge that a division towards the four winds of heaven' must mean a division into north and south, east and west;" and accordingly tell us that "Cassander reigned in Greece and the west, Lysimachus in Thrace and the north, Ptolemy in Egypt and the south, and Seleucus in Syria and the east";" and since they "admit also that 'the king of the south' in the prophecy denotes the king of Egypt, or of the southern division;" it is inconsistent to "maintain that by the king of the north' the prophet meant, not the king of Thrace, the northern section of the empire, but the king of the eastern section, or Syria." And again, if the titles of the two kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, as the kingdoms of the south and the north, be interpreted with reference to the land of Palestine, “Palestine," it is argued, "should have been made the centre from which the four winds of heaven' were also estimated as north, south, east, and west".'

This latter argument, surely, savours somewhat of the spirit of a too minute criticism; though, in one 7 Todd, p. 179.

6 66

'Newton, Diss. xvi. Faber, Sacred Calendar, vol. ii. p. 191."

132

Language of the prophecy.

[LECT. sense, indeed, criticism cannot be too minute as applied to Scripture; and its effect will constantly be, to bring to light the wonderful accuracy of Scripture language, amid all the vividness of its imagery, and the breadth and vastness of its scenes. But it is a precision alike unpoetical and unphilosophical which would require that if, in describing the breaking up of Alexander's empire, it is spoken of as "divided toward the four winds of heaven," and the historian can point to so many kingdoms as having risen out of the ruins of that empire, toward the four points of the compass, the prophet may not place himself, as it were, at a different centre, when, with his eye fixed, at a subsequent period of the history, on the destiny of the Jewish people,-for this was declared to be the main subject of the prophecy, he speaks of the kingdom of the north, and the kingdom of the south, with special reference to the country which lay between them. For it was this peculiar position which made the circumstances of the chosen people in "the latter days" of their history to be full of more than ordinary interest and danger. "On the death of Alexander," says a modern historian of the Jews, writing with no view to prove or illustrate the fulfilment of prophecy", "Judea came into the possession of Laomedon, one of his generals. On his defeat, Ptolemy, the king of Egypt, attempted to seize the whole of Syria. He advanced against Jerusalem, assaulted it on the Sabbath, and met