[384] _Ibid._ xxiii. 19, 20. Cf. Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, p. 760. The poor in these early times were, in all the lands advancing in civilization, literally devoured by the money lenders. [385] Deut. xxiv. 19. [386] Ruth ii. 4–17. [387] Deut. v. 14, 15. [388] _Ibid._ xv. 12. [389] _Ibid._ xv. 13, 14. [390] All these regulations respecting slaves, however, lack universalism. It is compassion for the slave not as a man, but as a Hebrew, that moves the legislator. The laws are in general for the benefit of Hebrew slaves alone. Gentiles or foreigners are not included in these humane provisions. See Lev. xxv and Ex. xxi. 2. [391] See Is. xl-lxvi. [392] “Deutero-Isaiah was the first to emphasize and make use of this plenary and unconditional monotheism.”--MONTEFIORI, _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion_ (1892), p. 269. [393] Is. xliii. 10. [394] _Ibid._ xliv. 6. [395] _Ibid._ xliv. 24. [396] _Ibid._ xlv. 5. [397] _Ibid._ xlvi. 9. [398] There is a repetition of this in the _Koran_, where the Prophet of Arabia speaks as one to whom the idea of the unity of deity had come as a new thought. [399] W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_ (1894), p. 81. [400] See above, pp. 18–20. [401] “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”--Deut. v. 9. [402] Ezek. xviii. 2. [403] _Ibid._ xviii. 3. [404] Ezek. xviii. 20. The entire chapter is devoted to this single subject. This truer view had dawned upon the compilers of the Deuteronomic code. Cf. Deut. xxiv. 16 and Jer. xxxi. 29, 30. [405] See below, p. 364. [406] See lii. 13-liii. 12. [407] Cf. Bennett, _The Religion of the Post-Exilic Prophets_ (1907), pp. 326 ff. [408] In the year 539 B.C. Cyrus, king of Persia, having captured Babylon, issued a decree giving the Jewish exiles in Babylonia permission to return to their own land and to rebuild the Temple destroyed fifty years before by Nebuchadnezzar. A band returned and set themselves to the task of restoring their houses and rebuilding the Temple. After many interruptions and long delay the building was finished and dedicated anew to the worship of Yahweh (516 B.C.). [409] “The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law, after Ezra’s reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth in post-Reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of salvation, and particularly the tendency to formalize and almost to deify the literal inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.”--NEWMAN SMYTH, _Christian Ethics_ (1892), p. 95. [410] For life under the law consult Schürer, _History of the Jewish People_, division ii, vol. ii, pp. 90 ff. [411] Matt. xxiii. 23.