366 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH
And not only would they be preserved even in dis persion, and increase and multiply even as they did during the last days of their sojourn in Egypt, but in those " far countries " where they shall be found " they shall remember Me" saith Jehovah which is perhaps an inspired echo by Zechariah of the words of Ezekiel : "And they that escape of you shall remember Me among the nations whither they shall be carried captive, and they shall loathe themselves for the evil which they have committed in all their abominations. And they shall know that I am the Lord" x
The next sentence in the pth verse, " They shall live with their children, and turn again" must be connected with the words which immediately precede. Because they shall remember Jehovah " in the far countries " they shall live, Here we probably have an allusion (as Hengstenberg suggests) in one word (in the Hebrew) " to the figure which Ezekiel has so beautifully carried out in chap, xxxvii." They who, while dispersed among the nations, are seen by the prophet as dry bones scattered over the valley of vision, are to live again, for : " Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O
and massacres which they had to endure in the dark and middle ages is prob ably true. The historian Basnage, in his History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to the Present Time, calculated that in his time (end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century) there were three million Jews in the world. Since then, however, the growth of Jewry has been phenomenal. At the com mencement of the nineteenth century there were said to be five millions. Half a century later the numbers reached six or seven millions ; and at the end of another half a century in 1896 the greatest living authority on Jewish statistics gave their number as eleven millions. And now after this short interval it is officially established that there are over thirteen million Jews in the world. And the surprising feature of this latest calculation is the officially- authenticated fact that, in the country where they are most persecuted, and which during the past three decades has driven forth millions to seek an asylum in other countries, there are more Jews to-day than ever before ; and this in spite of pogroms, and baptisms, and overcrowding, and starvation, and the pursuance of a merciless policy of repression which led Pobiedonostsef to prog nosticate that, in the end, a third of Russia s Jews would emigrate, a third would die, and a third would join the dominant faith. The old story of Israel in Egypt renews itself to-day in Russia: "The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied." 1 Ezek. vi. 9.
