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At Rome itself they first appeared in the train of captives led up by Pompeius to the Capitol, but their captivity was of no long duration, and under the protection of Julius Cæsar, who reproduced in the West the privileges they had enjoyed under the Ptolemies and Seleucidæ in the East, they quickly multiplied, and not only appropriated a whole quarter in the capital144, but spread into other towns of Italy. Thus the Nation, whose native land had for centuries been in the centre of the world’s power, civilization, and commerce, now, under the superintending Hand of Providence, was scattered everywhere, East and West, North and South, bearing about with them their peculiar customs and institutions, and diffusing a knowledge of the Law and the Prophets.

(b) Corresponding to this wide diffusion of the Elect Nation was the change which gradually grew up in their vernacular language.

i. The earliest dispersion in Babylonia produced a change in the older Hebrew of Judæa. The language spoken in the days of David and Solomon was gradually exchanged for the Chaldee or “Syrian tongue.” (Comp. 2 K. xviii.26; Isai. xxxvi.11; Dan. ii.4.) And those who returned from the Captivity and settled in Palestine and Syria, used Chaldee Targums or paraphrases for the interpretation of the Old Hebrew Scriptures, and spake kindred Aramæan dialects, and hence were known as the Aramæan Jews.