the crowd the same effect of nervous terror as had once before been called forth by the precepts and maledictions of Deuteronomy.  The people burst into tears, and so vehement were their manifestations of despair, that all the efforts of Ezra and his colleagues were needed to calm them.  Ezra took advantage of this state of fervour to demand the immediate application of the divine ordinances.  And first of all, it was “found written in the law, how that the Lord had commanded by Moses that the children of Israel should dwell in booths.”  For, seven days Jerusalem was decked with leaves; tabernacles of olive, myrtle, and palm branches rose up on all sides, on the roofs of houses, in courtyards, in the courts of the temple, at the gates of the city.  Then, on the 27th day of the same month, the people put on mourning in order to confess their own sins and the sins of their fathers.  Finally, to crown the whole, Ezra and his followers required the assembly to swear a solemn oath that they would respect “the law of Moses,” and regulate their conduct by it.* After the first enthusiasm was passed, a reaction speedily set in.  Many even among the priests thought that Ezra had gone too far in forbidding marriage with strangers, and that the increase of the tithes and sacrifices would lay too heavy a burden on the nation.  The Gentile women reappeared, the Sabbath was no longer observed either by the Israelites or aliens; Eliashib, son of the high priest Joiakim, did not even deprive Tobiah the Ammonite of the chamber in the temple which he had formerly prepared for him, and things were almost imperceptibly drifting back into the same state as before the reformation, when Nehemiah returned from Susa towards the close of the reign of Artaxerxes.  He lost no time in re-establishing respect for the law, and from henceforward opposition, if it did not entirely die out, ceased to manifest itself in Jerusalem.**

     * Neh. viii., ix., with an interpolation in ver. 9 of chap,
     viii., inserted in order to identify Nehemiah with the
     representative of the Persian government.

     ** Neh. xiii.

Elsewhere, however, among the Samaritans, Indumaeans, and Philistines, it continued as keen as ever, and the Jews themselves were imprudent enough to take part in the political revolutions that were happening around them in their corner of the empire.  Their traditions tell how they were mixed up in the rising of the Phoenician cities against Ochus, and suffered the penalty; when Sidon capitulated, they were punished with the other rebels, the more recalcitrant among them being deported into Hyrcania.