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THE CULTURE OF
*
ANCIENT ISRAEL
BY
CARL HEINRICH CORNILL
PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF HALLE
CHICAGO LONDON
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
1914
COPYRIGHT BY
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
I94
ZtVB
0.
UJ
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Rise of the People of Israel (Translated by A. H. Gun-
logsen) . . 1
Moses, the Founder of Monotheistic Religion (Translated
by Lydia G. Robinson) 38
The Education of Children in Ancient Israel (Translated
by W. H. Carruth) 68
Music in the Old Testament (Translated by Lydia G.
Robinson) 101
The Psalms in Universal Literature (Translated by W. H.
Carruth) 133
Index . . 163
m
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL.
A^Y one wishing to speak upon the history of
the people of Israel must regard himself as
particularly favored, from the very nature of the
subject itself. To all of us Abraham and Moses,
Saul and David, and the others of whatever name,
are like dear old acquaintances. These, in fact, are
among the first impressions which the susceptible
minds of children receive, and the unique magic of
religious poetry that clings to these legends always
deeply and ineffaceably impresses itself upon their
youthful hearts; and even he who has long since
forgotten to look upon the Bible with the eyes of
faith, nevertheless will not be able to wipe out alto-
gether those tender youthful memories.
Accordingly, I may anticipate a general interest
in and, at least in its broad outlines, assume a certain
general knowledge of the subject to be treated.
Still, on the other hand, this knowledge is not so
complete that I may not hope to be able to show
those old and well-known forms in a new light, and
through the accumulation of various details and the
revelation of a grand historical inward connection,
2 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
to work them into well-colored and realistic histor-
ical pictures.
Indeed, what an astonishing wealth and variety
of separate material is here ready at hand! The
history of the people of Israel, in fact, shares with
the common and many-sided life of humanity the
eminent quality of being interesting at whatever
point we may touch it. We may turn our attention
to characters more particularly belonging to political
history and we shall behold Saul, David, Ahab; or
to the heroes of the soul, and we shall encounter
Moses, Samuel, Elijah. We behold the ruin of the
people as a political nation through Babylonian con-
quest, and the resurrection of the people as a relig-
ious sect through Ezra and Nehemiah. The ideal
heroical figures of the early Maccabees justly awaken
our admiration, and even their degenerate descend-
ants, during the period of the people's decadence,
are themselves not altogether destitute of a certain
attraction. The truculent grandeur of a King Herod,
and the appalling extermination of the nation by the
Roman sword the most heartrending catastrophe,
perhaps, that history ever has witnessed fitly close
this grand historical panorama, in which on every
side and at all times we are confronted by entrancing
phenomena, arousing all our interest.
From out of this superabundant wealth of ac-
cumulated materials I shall select particularly the
rise of the people of Israel and of its national or-
ganization ; and as legitimate ground for this prefer-
ence of mine I may remark that it accords perfectly
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 3
with the predominant trait of our century and of its
science, to investigate precisely the origins of organ-
isms, and to explain all the most hidden processes
in the life and action of nature; for the nations of
the earth may likewise be regarded as organisms.
Still, my principal motive in choosing this part of
the subject was the hope of being able to contribute
results regarding this very epoch which are least
known. In fact, since the grand work of Heinrich
Ewald, signalizing an epoch in these researches,
science has not achieved more for any era of the
history of the people of Israel than for the history
of its primitive existence. Our present subject, ac-
cordingly, expressed in popular language, will em-
brace the period from Abraham to David, as related
in the Pentateuch and in the books of Joshua, Judges
and Samuel.
The usual exposition is to the effect that Abraham
went forth from the land of Haran into Canaan in
order to settle there. In the fourth generation after
him his descendants migrated to Egypt. In the lat-
ter country for a long period they led a quiet and
peaceful life until the unbearable oppression of the
Egyptians drove them out of the country. Their
leader, Moses, by birth a Hebrew yet thoroughly
imbued with Egyptian culture, led them through the
desert and across the peninsula of Sinai, back to
the land of their fathers. Moses conquered the land
to the east of the Jordan, Joshua the land to the west
of that river ; the latter almost entirely exterminated
the Canaanite population and allotted the land as un-
4 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
tenanted possessions to the Israelites. Thereupon
twelve judges in succession wielded supreme power
over the people, until finally the national kingdom
arose in the person of the Benjamite Saul, and in
the person of his successor, David, was transferred
to the house of Judah.
It cannot be denied that this was the prevailing
idea as early as the time of the Babylonian exile,
when the historical books of the Old Testament were
for the first time subjected to a comprehensive re-
vision ; and in fact to-day, upon the whole, the books
of Judges, Samuel, and Kings lie before us in this
shape.
This version is a relatively recent one, having
arisen at a period when living historical tradition
no longer afforded information. The oldest written
sources, having by a fortunate chance been only
slightly digested and thus preserved in all substantial
features, were incorporated in the great historical
collection and give a widely different picture of the
earliest history of the people of Israel.
At this point there arises the unavoidable question
whether, generally speaking, we are permitted to re-
gard these oldest traditions of the people of Israel
as history in the strict sense of the word. Not be-
fore the exodus from Egypt can we speak in a strict
sense of a history of the people of Israel. All that
lies before this point of time may be characterized
as prehistoric or primeval. Only in the first book
of Moses, the book of Genesis, is information to be
had of this prehistoric or primeval era.
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 5
Even if we regard Moses as the author of the five
books that bear his name, yet concerning this remote
epoch, separated from his own by a series of cen-
turies, Moses himself would have had to resort to
oral hearsay and tradition. It was impossible for
him to report these things as an eye-witness. But
it is now generally conceded that Moses cannot pos-
sibly be the author of the books ascribed to him.
These books have rather originated from the com-
prehensive digestion of a whole series of indepen-
dent written sources, of which the oldest cannot be
older than King Solomon, nor yet much later, and
which consequently were written between 900 and
850. Thus between them and Moses there is an
interval of several centuries. Only a few scattered
sections in the books of Judges and Samuel, and a
few poetical fragments from the Pentateuch might
be older. No comprehensive and coherent historical
work earlier than 900 can be proved.
The memory of the past, accordingly, has been
handed down substantially through the medium of
oral tradition. The Israelitic nation itself is the
author of these historical narrations, to which the
biblical narrator, in giving them a permanent written
form, has only imparted a finer psychological char-
acter and the magic of his unsurpassed art of pres-
entation. The material contents, the ingredients of
these narrations, must be regarded from the point
of view of popular tradition, of legend.
What is legend ? Its main characteristic, of course,
is popularity. Legend is a natural product unaf-
6 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
fected by tendencies, an unconscious poetry; and
moreover it is characteristic of legend that it does
not invent its material but embellishes extant tradi-
tion with poetic imagery. Legend winds itself like
ivy about cold matters of fact, often resistlessly
overpowering them and flourishing in rank luxuri-
ance, yet not able to thrive without them and un-
supported by them.
Legend and history, therefore, are not contradic-
tions, but advance together in brotherly harmony;
legend from its very nature presupposing an histor-
ical substratum. Only traditions that are attached
to some definite locality, some definite monument or
name, are to be regarded as exceptions to the truth
of these remarks. Traditions of the latter kind ad-
here exclusively to the locality, monument, or name
that they are intended to explain. Instead of an
historical substratum they here have a material one,
but even in these instances they still have a substra-
tum. The legend always stands with firm, marrowy
frame upon solid and durable ground, and not with
uncertain foothold touching the stars, a sport for
wind and wave. On this ground, precisely, in my
opinion, we are altogether wrong in looking upon
legend with an exaggerated skepticism.
Legend bears a resemblance to the youthful mem-
ories of man. The child will not retain everything,
but only distinct events, and not always the most
important; but what it does retain it retains firmly.
' And above all the child will never be mistaken as to
the total character of its childhood. A man who
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 7
has spent a cheerless youth will never imagine that
he has been a merry, happy child; a man who has
been raised in a village or among the mountains will
never believe that he was born in a large city or on
the plain. The youthful reminiscences of nations
must also be judged according to this same analogy.
The ready-made, artistically complete, and finished
shape that these reminiscences have assumed on the
lips of the people, or of any great poet, is not to be
called legend and as such the result of unintentional
poetic creation; but, on the contrary, its historical
substratum and the basic character of the whole
must be regarded as authentic tradition.
It shall be my endeavor to sketch in brief outline
the character of the historical substratum underlying
the oldest traditions of the people of Israel, and to
show how upon this basis may be erected the true
course of the early history of this remarkable people.
According to established tradition the people of
Israel were not native in the land that afterwards
became their home, but had immigrated from the
northeast of Mesopotamia. This tradition is all
the more striking in view of the fact that the lan-
guage spoken by the people of Israel could only
have originated in Canaan itself. This linguistic
difficulty was felt even in biblical times, as the re-
markable forty-seventh verse in the thirty-first chap-
ter of Genesis testffies. In this verse, which is
plainly the product of a later learned interpretation,
"Laban the Aramaean" calls the stone-wall which
8 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Jacob in the Hebrew language had called Galeed,
"Jegar-Sahadutha," a correct Aramaean expression. 1
According to the familiar tradition of the He-
brews themselves their primitive home was in the
mountainous tract extending between the left bank
of the Tigris and Lake Van, which separates Meso-
potamia from Armenia, and by the Greek geog-
raphers is called Arrhapachitis. (Arphaxad, son of
Shem, is the ancestor of the Hebrew people Gen.
x. 22-25 ; xi. 10). From the above-mentioned high-
lands there descended an emigration of tribes into
the fertile plain of Mesopotamia. (Salah, Arpha-
xad's son, denotes "emigration," "emission." See
Gen. x. 24; xi. 12.) They crossed (Eber, Salah's
son, is "crossing," "passage"; Gen. x. 24; xi. 14)
the Tigris, and then they separated, (Peleg, Eber's
son, is "separation," "division." See Gen. x. 25;
xi. 16). The main body advanced through the heart
of the region and finally settled in and around the
Haran, the Karrhae of the ancients, in the north-
western part of Mesopotamia. A smaller band, in-
cluding the ancestors of Israel, struck out in the
opposite direction toward the extreme southeast, and
at Ur in Southern Babylonia (Gen. xi. 28, 31) en-
deavored to obtain possession of permanent settle-
ments; still in the end they preferred to follow the
main body of their kinsmen to Haran (Gen. xi. 31).
Here their migratory instincts awoke once more.
Following the direction of the common highroad of
*A11 Hebrew words and names are given according to the
spelling of the King James Bible.
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 9
the ancient world between Egypt and Babylonia
they journeyed still further toward the southwest
(Gen. xii. 4, 5). The great leader of this tribal
migration was Abraham.
The most careful and impartial weighing of all
adverse arguments and difficulties has not as yet
been able to shake my faith in the genuine historical
authenticity of Abraham. I regard Abraham as
an historical personality in the strictest sense of the
word, as really so as Alaric, the king of the Visi-
goths, or Rurik, the prince of the Varangians.
Egypt, perhaps, was the original ultimate goal of
this Abrahamic migration, that same Egypt which
time out of mind had exerted a kind of magic at-
traction upon all Semitic tribes, and which probably
even during the very centuries of the Abrahamic
emigration had on repeated occasions, and not al-
ways willingly, received and harbored Semitic guests
on its fruitful soil. Still, the story purporting to be
an account of Abraham's expedition into Egypt
(Gen. xii. 10-20), is altogether a recent one and
purely a luxuriant outgrowth from the stem of the
original tradition. As a matter of fact the Abra-
hamic migration remained in Canaan. One division
of this migration, the one personified in Lot, moved
toward the eastern bank of the Jordan (Gen. xiii.
7-12), where comparatively early both nationally
and politically it became consolidated as Moab and
Ammon (Gen. xix. 37-38). Abraham himself set-
tled in the west Jordan region, Canaan proper ( Gen.
xiii. 12).
10 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Abraham and his tribal kinsmen were nomads,
wandering shepherds, roaming peacefully about the
country, whereas the aboriginal inhabitants of the
land had long before attained the higher culture of
city life. The immigrants borrowed their language
from the latter, but at the same time guarded as be-
fore the primitive purity of their pastoral life, and
their healthy, simple natural sense revolted above
all against the religion of the Canaanites.
The religious character of the Canaanites particu-
larly displayed two characteristic manifestations,
namely, religious obscenity, and infant sacrifice.
Abraham held aloof from both. In the touching
and deeply poetical story of the intended sacrifice
of Isaac for whom ultimately a ram was substituted,
tradition has recorded Abraham's positive rejection
of infant sacrifice (Gen. xxii).
In describing this predominant feature and in
characterizing Abraham as a religious hero, tradi-
tion has, further, correctly interpreted the true state
of things. The work of Moses was not absolutely
new; it is linked to a popular initiative of the past,
and there is no reason for entertaining a doubt,
when tradition even in this most specific manifesta-
tion of the Israelitic popular spirit makes Abraham
the patriarch of his race; although very naturally
we now are unable to prove and correctly expound
in all its details this "faith of Abraham."
The descendants of Abraham in the region west
of Jordan, true to the usage and customs of their
fathers, continued to be wandering nomads. Being
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 11
unable to wrest lands from the superior power of
the Canaanites, they turned their eyes southward
to the highlands about Mount Seir, where the primi-
tive tribes of the Horites stood far below the Ca-
naanites both in power and culture. The main
body of the descendants of Abraham, accordingly,
pushed forward toward the south, conquered the
Horites, and settled down permanently on Mount
Seir as Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 1 ; Deut. ii. 12-22) and
soon effected their national and political consolida-
tion. Edom thereupon remained in undisputed pos-
session of the aforesaid territory.
The remnants of the descendants of Abraham,
who had remained behind on the west side of the
Jordan, would perhaps have been absorbed by the
Canaanites, or would have been compelled to seek
connection with one of the kindred tribes, if a new
and considerable immigration from the common
ancestral home of Haran had not brought them
aid and reinforcements. This was the Jacobite mi-
gration, represented in the person of Jacob.
It is the merit of Ewald with subtle insight to
have detected in Jacob the "after-comer," the "loit-
erer."
Jacob appears as the father of twelve sons. These
are the twelve tribes into which in historical times
the people of Israel were divided. The twelve tribes
again became subdivided into four groups, by legend
personified in four mothers, two legitimate wives
and two concubines of the patriarch : a Leah-group,
a Rachel-group, a Bilhah-group, and a Zilpah-group.
12 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Leah and Rachel were the more considerable, Bil-
hah and Zilpah the inferior groups. The Leah-
group surpassed all the others in number and im-
portance, and the Zilpah division was connected
with it; yet the Rachel-group was hardly inferior in
power and nobility, and the Bilhah-group closely
adhered to the latter.
The legend states that Jacob brought along with
him his eleven sons but of Haran ; only the youngest,
Benjamin, was born in Canaan. Might we also from
this draw certain historical conclusions ? As regards
the rise and growth of the tribes, we are confronted
with the most obscure problems of the prehistoric
period of the people of Israel, which perhaps will
never be perfectly cleared up. Tradition is only in
so far incontrovertibly right as it relegates the be-
ginnings of tribal growth to pre-Egyptian times,
while weighty reasons corroborate the truth of this
fact ; and we have likewise to regard as correct that
the tribe of Benjamin branched off from that of
Joseph at a comparatively late period. But nothing
more definite than this can be asserted.
Ewald has given expression to a clear hypothesis,
which, in fact, possesses a high degree of probabil-
ity. He believes that in the Leah-group he can dis-
cern the remnants of the Abrahamic group that re-
mained in Canaan ; in the Rachel-group the auxiliary
reinforcement from Haran, that is, the Jacobite mi-
gration a statement that asserts much. At all
events, the Jacobite migration certainly did join the
remnants of the Abrahamic migration that had re-
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 13
mained in Canaan, and henceforth becomes the rep-
resentative of the entire national and historical de-
velopment. The Jacobite migration, however, en-
tered not only externally but also spiritually upon
the inheritance of Abraham. The faith of Abraham
passed to Jacob and was perpetuated in him as the
father's noblest legacy.
Yet at an early time there must have arisen con-
tentions among the kindred tribes. Joseph, from
whom Benjamin perhaps had not as yet branched
off, boasting his power and noble pedigree, claimed
the supreme hegemony, but was forced to yield to
a coalition of the other tribes and went into Egypt,
where the rich pasturages of the Asiatic borderland
had been since remote antiquity the playground of
Semitic nomads. The Leah-tribes at this juncture
seem to have attempted to draw the Bilhah-tribes,
Dan and Naphtali, into the sphere of their power,
the latter subtribes having been deprived of their
old support ; and Reuben, particularly, seems to have
intended to do them violence (Gen. xxxv. 22). But
both those vigorous and valiant tribes were able to
maintain their independence, and Reuben himself
came out of this contention so severely damaged
that henceforth and for all time to come he lost his
"primogeniture," his old power and tribal prestige
(Gen. xlix. 4).
Later there occurred events that forced them all
to emigrate; but we are, of course, utterly unable
to give a precise account of these events. On this
occasion Joseph wreaked a noble vengeance, hos-
14 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
pitably receiving his brothers in the district in which
he had settled, oblivious of former injuries and only
mindful of the old relationship. And in this manner
the sons of Jacob became inhabitants of the land of
Egypt.
At first the Egyptian government seems to have
assumed a well-meaning attitude of neutrality toward
the strangers; but soon the situation became com-
pletely altered. The Pharaoh Ramses II happened,
at the time, to be involved in a severe conflict with
the populations and kingdoms of western Asia;
Palestine, partly at least, being the theater of the
struggle. The contest, as regards Egypt, ended,
indeed, not in open defeat nor yet in victory; the
ultimate result being a peace which nevertheless
failed to warrant complete security to either side.
The consequence was that henceforward Ramses
naturally began to look with distrust upon the for-
eign population of alien blood that had settled on
the Asiatic border, while at the same time he hap-
pened to be in need of laborers for his numerous
public works. He, accordingly, resorted to the ex-
pedient of pressing into the service of the state all
the Semites who were settled on the eastern border
of Egypt on the isthmus of Suez, and under strict
military supervision compelled them to perform toil-
some villein-service.
In this manner, the Israelites had been turned
from free nomads into Egyptian socage-serfs. So
long as Ramses, one of the most warlike of the
Pharaohs, wielded his iron scepter in Egypt with a
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 15
strong hand, the oppressed Israelites seem reluc-
tantly to have borne up with their hard fate. But
even chains of servitude availed not to break the
stubborn, independent heart of these proud Bedou-
ins. When the turbulent Ramses was succeeded by
a son very unlike his father, the people of Israel
again took heart. There only lacked a resolute
leader who should guide the latent ferment to a
definite goal ; this leader was soon found.
Moses, a Hebrew of the tribe of Levi, had through
a fortunate chance been received into the ruling
caste of Egypt and thus found an opportunity thor-
oughly to acquire Egyptian training and culture;
but the natural impulse of his heart drew him toward
his own people. He preferred to be the brother of
these despised serfs rather than live in the enjoy-
ment of Egyptian splendor and magnificence. His
keen insight soon discerned that the only way to free-
dom from the iron encompassment of Egyptian for-
tresses and military garrisons lay across the sea
into the heart of the desert. It was a desperate
undertaking. He obtained precise information con-
cerning the topography and the political situation of
the neighboring country, allied himself with kindred
Bedouin tribes of the Arabian desert, and when
dreadful scourges and visitations were terrifying the
Egyptians, and had paralyzed their efforts, Moses
thought the right moment had at last arrived. His
fellow countrymen with many other kindred national
elements in their train (Ex. xii. 38; Num. xi. 4)
16 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
assembled, and forthwith marched out from the
land of bondage.
By well-devised marches and maneuvers they were
able to deceive the Egyptian guards on the frontier ;
they soon reached the Isthmus of Suez, but there
they were overtaken by a flying corps of Egyptian
cavalry. Before them the raging sea, behind them
their pursuers, panting for revenge. It was a mo-
ment of supreme anxiety ! A violent northeast wind
drove the shallow waters from the channel, and they
marched through on the dry bottom of the sea into
the desert, to freedom. The pursuing Egyptians
were overwhelmed by the retreating flood ; but Israel
was safe.
The entire highway leading to Canaan being in
undisputed possession of the Egyptians, and the
latter by treaties with the neighboring kingdoms hav-
ing stipulated the mutual extradition of all fugitives,
Moses accordingly led his people into the narrow
defiles of Mount Sinai, which were accessible indeed
to a band of wandering nomads but could not be
approached by a large army. Israel tarried for a
long time in the region of Mount Sinai, and in this
grandly impressive mountainous scenery tradition
has located the scene of Moses's greatest work, his
religious reorganization of the people. The entire
tradition is agreed to the effect that Moses was the
initiator, pioneer, and creator of that unique spirit
which belonged peculiarly to the people of Israel
and through which it most radically differed from
other tribes related by speech and descent. There.
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 17
upon Mount Sinai, Moses gave to Israel its national
God Yahveh 2 (this is the original and correct pro-
nunciation, instead of Jehovah), thereby making
Israel a nation as the people of Yahveh. The name
of Yahveh, in fact, cannot be explained from the
Hebrew tongue, but seems to have been borrowed
from Sinai ; and, indeed, according to Israelitic tra-
dition, Moses's adviser and assistant, his father-in-
law Jethro, was a priest of Sinai (Ex. xviii).
Still, it remains utterly impossible to state pre-
cisely and positively of what the work of Moses
really consisted, since however unwelcome the
truth may be not even the ten commandments can
be regarded as having been actually formulated by
Moses; we have here only an inverted conclusion
from effect to cause. Israel is the only people known
to us that never had a mythology, not even making
the easy step, by way of complement, of associating
a female divinity with the highest divine being.
Yahveh's unique nature must accordingly be a Mo-
saic idea. Yahveh alone is the God of Israel and
this Yahveh is the origin and source of all divine
and human law. This must be a thought peculiarly
Mosaic. A lofty spiritualization of the divine idea
and, as a direct result of this, a lofty spiritualization
"The word Yahveh, according to the traditional etymology,
is derived from the verb hajah, "to live, to exist, to be," and
signifies "the being, the living, the eternal one." So it is ex-
plained in The Idea of God, pp. 7 and 8. Professor Cornill
in a private letter to the publishers, writes: "My reason for
not considering Yahveh an original Hebrew word is founded
upon the fact that hajah, in the sense of "to be," is not Hebrew.
In a word originally Hebrew the change of v into / would be
difficult to account for." Tr.
18 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of the Ethos are to be regarded the prominent fea-
tures of the Mosaic Yahveh faith. We have, more-
over, to attribute to Moses the creation of, at least,
a very simple worship, since a religion without wor-
ship would be, with primitive nations, inconceivable.
The institution, also, of a priesthood as the only
legitimate mediator between Yahveh and Israel must
be Mosaic; but the tradition that Moses entrusted
his brother Aaron with this high office has not been
found as yet among the oldest sources.
Sinai, however, was only a station and not the
final goal of the migration. Soon after, the multi-
tudes, strengthened by their rest, moved onward;
this time to Kadesh-Barnea in the desert south of
Canaan (Num. xiii. 27; xx. 1, 14; Deut. i. 19, 46;
Judges xi. 16, 17). This locality, at least, seemed
sufficiently adapted to receive the permanent coloni-
zation of frugal shepherds; it lay beyond the reach
of the Egyptian arms, and yet on the very threshold
of the coveted land itself. Here they might quietly
await the development of things. According to all
traces the sojourn in Kadesh must have been a
rather long one. Moses probably died there. Tra-
dition is constant in regard to the point that he never
personally entered the land of promise; in fact,
neither he nor any other of the emigrants that left
Egypt. And this constant tradition is all the weightier
if we recall to mind that here there is the question of
a distance that under normal circumstances it would
be easy to complete within a fortnight.
An external event finally brought Israel to the
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 19
goal of its wishes. The Canaanites, here called
Amorites, under a king called Sihon, made an ad-
vance upon the eastern bank of the Jordan, drove
the Moabites and Ammonites out of the most fertile
parts of their territory and founded a new Amorite
kingdom with the capital at Hesbon (Num. xxi. 26).
Then Moab and Ammon remembered their kinsmen
in the desert at Kadesh, and themselves, perhaps,
on this occasion invoked the aid of Israel. At all
events they were welcome allies, and the youthful
and well-husbanded natural strength of Israel was
able to achieve the proposed task. They destroyed
the kingdom of Sihon of Hesbon, and Israel re-
mained settled in the fruitful region, and kept for
itself the prize of war and victory.
Yet soon the fertile valleys and meadows could
not contain the ever-increasing number of men and
flocks; they were urged resistlessly to cross the
Jordan. There seemed to exist every possibility
of settling down across the river. According to all
accounts the Canaanites were scattered in numerous
small isolated territories without internal connec-
tions or mutual sympathy. Moreover their energy
had been relaxed by luxurious habits, and in valor
they could not match the impetuous sons of the
desert.
Judah was the first to advance (Judges i. 1-20;
Gen. xxxviii. 1). They crossed the Jordan and turned
toward the south where the mountain range that
later bore the name of Judah, with its fruitful slopes,
excited their covetousness. Judah doubtless sue-
20 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
ceeded in gaining a permanent foothold in this re-
gion, but only at the cost of severe losses which
were made good by the amalgamation of Canaanite,
Edomite, and Arabic elements ; but after a hard and
long struggle "the interloper" (Pharez) became the
master of "the first begotten" (Zarah) (Genesis
xxxviii. 27-30). In the time of David, when Judah
stands in the broad daylight of history, the Israelitic
part of the population is undisputed master of the
country, and the latter throughout felt as Israelitic.
The tribes of Simeon and Levi made the second
attempt, which turned out a complete failure. By
means of treason they obtained possession of the
Canaanite city of Shechem, commanding Mt. Eph-
raim; but Israel turned shuddering away from the
nefarious deed, and Simeon and Levi were van-
quished by the revenge of the Canaanites (Gen.
xxxiv. 25-30; xlix. 5-7). Levi as a tribe was en-
tirely exterminated, yet later through a most re-
markable metamorphosis awoke to a new life as a
sacerdotal caste, and the remnants of Simeon hid
with the kindred tribe of Judah (Judges i. 3) by
which they were absorbed.
The house of Joseph undertook the third and
most successful expedition. Only Reuben and Gad
continued to dwell in the district east of Jordan.
The other seven tribes under the leadership of the
Ephraimite Joshua combined in a common cam-
paign against Middle and Northern Palestine. They
gained a firm foothold in Gilgal on the other side
of the Jordan (Josh. iv. and v.) and from that po-
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 21
sition they were able to conquer Jericho (Josh, vi.),
Ai (Josh, viii.), and Bethel (Judges i. 22-25). Then
at last the Canaanites were aroused into a deter-
mined and general resistance, but at Gibeon they
were another time defeated by Joshua (Josh, x.)
and thus Israel became the master of all Middle
Palestine. In the north they were again confronted
by a coalition of Canaanites under King Jabin of
Hazor; but at Lake Merom this coalition also was
vanquished by Joshua.
It would be erroneous to suppose that the whole
land of Palestine, directly upon occupation, became
the undisputed possession of the Israelites. In the
first chapter of the Book of Judges one of the
most important and valuable historical documents
extant we possess a detailed enumeration of all
the Canaanites whom Israel "did not drive out."
From this enumeration it appears that the best and
most fertile parts of the country, and above all the
majority of the cities with their strong fortifica-
tions, at all times impregnable to the rude military
art of the Israelites remained in the possession
of the Canaanites. Only the forest-covered moun-
tain ranges of Middle and Northern Palestine were
occupied by Israel; and a very long and obstinate
work had still to be performed before the Canaanite
population was finally subjugated ; a task partly ac-
complished by force of arms and the imposition of
tributes, and partly by peaceable conquest and ab-
sorption with the people of Israel.
It must be admitted that Israel was indebted to
22 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Moses and his work for the power with which
through ages it struggled victoriously in full con-
sciousness of the high aim that was to be attained.
Moses had given to the people a nationality and
therewith an inalienable palladium, which, purified
and strengthened by the power of religion, could
not submit to oppression, but marched conquering
onward. It was owing to Moses alone that in Canaan
Israel did not become Canaanites, but, on the con-
trary, that the Canaanites were transformed into
Israel.
Indeed, the actual outcome of the protracted con-
flict between these two peoples and different na-
tionalities, had not, to human calculations, by any
means been absolutely certain. In Canaan Israel
passed from a nomadic to an agricultural life, and
might not such a radical change of life and of its
conditions easily have brought about a transforma-
tion of national character? Irrespective of the
superior culture and number of the Canaanites, Is-
rael certainly harbored within itself a very danger-
ous foe, and a living germ of disorganization ;
namely, the stubborn, stiffnecked feeling of inde-
pendence and the strong family instincts, peculiar
to nomads, that still clung to the national character
after the people had abandoned nomadic ways of
life. Even after the common effort under Joshua
had partly laid the foundations of national organi-
zation, the people were once again broken up into
families and tribes, who without concerted action,
without discipline or plan, aimlessly sought local-
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 23
ities in which to settle. Tradition, also, has ex-
pressly handed down a number of peculiar features
of this tribal and family history.
One fraction of the tribe of Manasseh, the fam-
ilies of Jair and Machir conquered the region to
the east of Lake Galilee (Num. xxxii. 39-41 ; Deut.
iii. 14-15; Judg. x. 3-5) a fact of the greatest im-
portance, because thereby there was reestablished a
connection between the West-Jordan country and
Gilead, as the Israelites called the East- Jordan re-
gion. The tribe of Dan in its struggle against the
powerful and warlike Philistines, had failed to se-
cure a permanent settlement in the fertile plain
along the coast of the Mediterranean; but Dan
thereupon conquered the city of Laish in the far-off
north on the slopes of Mt. Hermon, and changed
its name into that of Dan (Judg. xvii. and xviii. ;
compare also i. 34) . Shamir, on Mt. Ephraim, was
settled by the family of Tola of the tribe Issachar
(Judg. x. 1-2) ; Pirathon, in the same locality, by
the family of Abdon (Judg. xii. 13-15); Aijalon
by the Zebulonite family of Elon (Judges xii. 11-
12). This dispersion might have proved injurious
and even ruinous, if over all of them, each family
and each tribe, there had not reigned supreme one
common idea ; namely, Yahveh, the God of Israel.
Yahveh was the only national principle, the only
bond that bound together all Israelites; in fact, as
Yahveh's own people they were a nation. Only ex-
treme emergency had been able to effect a national
24 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
union, and that not a general, but merely a transient
one.
After Joshua's victories, the Canaanites, through
the concentration and straining of all their resources,
seem to have made but one single effort to overcome
the invaders. Under the leadership of Sisera there
was effected a powerful coalition of Canaanite kings,
who undertook a war of extermination against Is-
rael. This extermination threatened to be realized
to the fullest extent. The Israelites were forced
to seek hiding-places in the woods and in the moun-
tains where they stayed until Yahveh finally brought
assistance. At this critical moment a divinely in-
spired woman, the prophetess Deborah, aroused the
discouraged Israelites. Under the leadership of
Barak, of the tribe of Issachar, 40,000 Israelites
of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, Benjamin, Zeb-
ulun, Issachar, and Naphtali assembled together,
and now the power of the Canaanites was unable
to resist the ardent impetuosity of that great host,
fighting for Yahveh. At Taanak, on the River
Kishon, the Canaanite army was defeated and dis-
persed, and Sisera himself in his flight was slain
by a woman (Judg. iv. and v.). After this battle
we never again hear of resistance on the part of
Canaanites.
Israel at last enjoyed rest from the Canaanites;
but now there threatened still another foe. Kindred
tribes looked with envy upon the success of Israel,
and naturally coveted their own share of the Ca-
naanite prey. Thus Moab even advanced across the
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 25
Jordan, and at Jericho, its king, Eglon, received
the homage and tribute of the tribe of Benjamin,
until the Benjamite Ehud stabbed Eglon and freed
his people from the foreign yoke (Judg. iii. 12-30).
Likewise Ammon advanced toward the Jordan, and
the hard-pressed tribe of Gad was only saved
through Jephthah's valor (Judg. xi.). At the very
time when in Canaan Israel was becoming an agri-
cultural people, the nation constantly suffered from
the hostility and rapine of the sons of the desert.
Amalekites, Midianites, Ishmaelites, all of them
sought to enrich themselves at the expense of the
Israelite husbandman, and to rob him of the fruits
of his labor.
The fact that bands of Midianites advanced, kill-
ing and plundering, as far as Mt. Tabor, far in the
north, in the vicinity of Lake Galilee in the West-
Jordan region, is in itself a telling proof of how
defenceless Israel remained through its unfortunate
disunion against these predatory sons of the desert.
This invasion of Midianites, moreover, had cer-
tain important consequences. From sheer arrogance
and wantonness the Midianites had on Mt. Tabor
butchered a number of prisoners belonging to the
noble Manassite family of Abiezer. Then Gideon
or Jerubbaal, the head of the family, took to arms
to wreak vengeance of blood on the murderers. He
assembled his own household and retainers, to the
number of 300, and with these went in pursuit of
the departed Midianites, overtaking them far beyond
the Jordan. He succeeded in dividing the forces
26 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of the enemy, and took prisoners the two Midianite
kings, Zebah and Zalmunna, whom he ordered exe-
cuted to expiate the murder of his brothers. He
thereupon punished the inhabitants of Succoth and
Penuel, who had scornfully refused him their assis-
tance in this expedition of revenge (Judg. viii.).
The conclusion of the narrative concerning Gid-
eon has, unfortunately, been mutilated. It must
have related that Gideon actually founded a tribal
kingdom, erected in his ancestral city of Ophrah
a golden image of Yahveh and held a regular court,
with a number of female retainers.
Thus from the house of Joseph proceeded the
first attempt at political concentration the foun-
dation of a dynastic kingdom; and perhaps from
this dynastic kingdom there might have been de-
veloped a folkkingship but the time for this had
not yet arrived.
During his lifetime Gideon remained in undis-
puted possession of power over Joseph; but after
his death the harem-regiment that constant curse
of all oriental dynasties likewise effected the ruin
of his house. Abimelech, the son of a woman of
noble birth from the city of Shechem, which was
at the time a thoroughly Canaanite city, with the
aid of his Shechemite retainers, seized the supreme
power, attacked Ophrah and slew his brothers
according to tradition, threescore and ten in number
upon one stone ; only the youngest escaped. This
event, naturally, was not of a kind to cause king-
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 27
ship to strike deep roots in the heart of the people
of Israel.
Abimelech enjoyed the usurped power for only
three years, when he became involved in difficulties
with the men of Shechem. He also played the part
of an Israelite king to the city of Shechem, which
scarcely proved agreeable to the proud Canaanite
nobles. They openly revolted against him, in con-
sequence of which event he conquered Shechem and
razed it to the ground. But fate overtook him at
Thebez, upon which city he had wished to bring the
same ruin. In the act of setting fire to a tower into
which the inhabitants of Thebez had fled for shelter,
a woman from the roof of the structure hurled a
mill-stone upon his head, and he was killed (Judg.
ix.). Thus the first attempt to found an Israelitic
kingdom ended in murder and conflagration.
Again the old anarchy prevailed, the old lack of
cohesion, which the Book of Judges describes in the
following words : "In those days there was no king
in Israel, but every man did that which was right in
his own eyes" (Judg. xvii. 6; xxi. 25).
Incidentally, it may be observed that it is simply
impossible to give even an approximate chrono-
logical statement and arrangement of the events be-
tween the exodus from Egypt and the reign of Saul.
If Merenptah was the Pharaoh of the exodus, we
may place them in the interval between 1300 to
about 1030; the year 1017 as the year of Saul's
death seems tolerably certain.
The kingship of Gideon had vanished from sight
28 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
like a will-o'-the-wisp, and was followed by utter
darkness over the land of Israel. This darkness is
only cleared up by the subsequent events that brought
about the solid foundation of the national kingdom.
The national kingdom had become an absolute ne-
cessity. An orderly government, popular feeling,
and nationality could only be preserved through the
concentration in some strong hand of all the scat-
tered and, consequently, weakened national energies.
The notion that the creation of a purely human
kingship would be a grievous sin, because an apos-
tasy from Yahveh, the only legitimate king of Is-
rael, is but a later assumption of Hebrew theolog-
ical schools, and discoverable for the first time, with
certainty, in the prophet Hosea. This idea was en-
tirely unknown to the olden time. The oldest sources
relate all these events with a rejoicing and thankful
spirit. In the rise of the national kingdom they
justly behold a signal proof of the grace of Yahveh,
a direct, divine interposition of Yahveh for the re-
demption of his people.
On the present occasion, the troubles arose from
a different direction, and were by far more serious
than any former one had been. To the southwest
of Mt. Ephraim, toward the Mediterranean, there
dwelt the warlike and valiant race of the Philistines
the hereditary foe of Israel. Profiting by the
helplessness of Israel the Philistines advanced
toward the mountain and invaded the fertile plain
of Jezreel. The first collision between the bellig-
erents, at Ebenezer, proved calamitous to Israel.
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 29
Then Israel, in order to secure the assistance of
Yahveh, brought out of the temple at Shiloh the Ark
of the Covenant, the ancient and sacred war-symbol
of the house of Joseph ; but the second battle turned
out even more disastrous. Thirty thousand Israel-
ites covered the field of battle, the Ark of the Cov-
enant was captured, and the power of Joseph was
utterly broken ( 1 Sam. iv. ) . The Philistines dragged
the Ark of the Covenant as a trophy of war into
their own country, burned and destroyed the temple
at Shiloh, and conquered the whole land of Israel to
the bank of the Jordan; the people were disarmed
and held in awe by Philistine viceroys and Philistine
strongholds. Thus Dagon had triumphed over
Yahveh.
But Yahveh had not forsaken his people. Through
the trying fire of extreme need and suffering he
wished to weld it together to a strong and united
nation. An aged seer, Samuel by name, had dis-
covered in the Benjamite Saul the man of the period,
and had kindled in his heroic soul a spark of patri-
otic enthusiasm. Just at this time also the Am-
monites insolently insulted Israel, and threatened the
city of Jabesh in Gilead. Then Saul slaughtered
a yoke of oxen and sent the bleeding pieces through-
out Israel with the following message : "Whosoever
cometh not forth after Saul, so shall it be done unto
his oxen !" A desperate host then assembled around
the bold leader. The enemies were taken by surprise
and scattered to the winds.
The people, exultant over this first victory after
30 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
long servitude and shame, bore the fortunate general
in triumph to the ancient sacred spot of Gilgal,
there to place upon his head the royal diadem (1
Sam. ix.-xi.).
Saul owed his crown to his sword, and his whole
reign was one uninterrupted strife; for the main
point was to become master in his own land and
to secure it against determined enemies and over-
weening neighbors. Saul at once addressed himself
to the more difficult and important task of throw-
ing off the yoke of the Philistines. His son, Jona-
than, slew the Philistine governor, who held his
court at Gibeah, and at this signal of revolt the
Philistine armies again poured into the insurgent
land of Israel. Saul could only muster 600 men
who had remained with him ; but the lofty conscious-
ness of fighting for home and hearth, for freedom
and honor, imparted heroic courage to the men of
Israel. Jonathan, above all, performed wonders of
bravery, and, after a hot contest, victory declared
itself for the desperate little band (1 Sam. xiii.-
xiv. ) .
Yet this success was only a transient one. Saul
regarded it his main task to keep in constant readi-
ness the fighting strength of his people, and to this
end he assembled about his person a small standing
army made up of 3000 of his boldest subjects. Thus
the star of King Saul arose at the beginning, bright
and brilliant, but very soon it was overcast by dark
clouds.
An "evil spirit from God" suddenly saddened
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 31
the heart of the king. His attendants called to his
side the Judean David from Bethlehem, a man of
tried courage, a skilled performer on the harp, a
knight and troubadour in one, who by his pleasant
art was expected to dispel the melancholy of the
king. This new actor on the stage of Israelitic
history is, next to Moses, the greatest personage
of ancient Israel. For him was reserved the glory
of completing the work of Moses. What Saul be-
gan, David executed to its fullest extent ; outwardly
he made Israel free and independent, and inwardly
united. The political and national consolidation of /
the people of Israel is the work of David.
David was one of those divinely endowed natures
that win the hearts of all a born ruler, to whom
all willingly submit, and serve with alacrity. He
appears before the king as a highly attractive figure,
graced with every ornament of mind and body
radiant with youth, beauty and strength, and by
his bewitching amiability commanding the love of
all. At first everything went well. Saul, too, could
not resist the magnetism of his person; he made
him his armor-bearer, his squire or "aide," and
while David became devotedly attached to Saul's
son, the king gave him his daughter in marriage.
This state of harmony, however, was not destined
to last long. The Philistines again invaded the land,
and during the war that ensued David distinguished
himself to such an eminent degree that even the
glory of the king was overshadowed. At that time
of history kings had also to be the bravest of their
32 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
nation, and we therefore easily understand that
gloomy jealousy now began to devour the melan-
choly heart of the suspicious monarch. Once in
a fit of sullen dejection he even hurled a javelin at
his son-in-law, and the latter fled from his pres-
ence. From that instant Saul's good genius forsook
him forever, and the close of his reign exhibits a
sad picture of civil strife and external troubles.
Despite the critical condition of his kingdom,
Saul with an armed retinue pursued the fleeing
David, and finally drove him out of the country.
The hounded fugitive was at last compelled to seek
refuge among the Philistines the enemies of Israel.
Within a year and four months from that time, fate
had overtaken the Israelitic king. The Philistine
host again combined against Israel. A decisive
battle was fought on Mt. Gilboa, in which Israel
was utterly routed. Saul, beholding the death of
his three sons, fell upon his own sword in a fit of
despair. Such was the untoward end of the first
king of Israel.
Saul is a truly tragical figure. Although en-
dowed with a grand and noble disposition, chival-
rous and heroic, fired with ardent zeal, yet after
all he had achieved next to nothing. At his death
the condition of things had again become the same
as at the time of his accession. Israel lay prostrate,
and the power of the Philistines was greater and
firmer than ever before. Saul's failures must be
attributed mainly to his moral disposition. He was
more of a soldier than a ruler. He lacked the com-
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 33
manding personality, the inborn power of leader-
ship, and still more the versatile, statesmanlike tal-
ent that David possessed. Saul had performed his
kingly duties honestly. When attacked, he returned
blow for blow with telling vigor, but he was far
from being a creative, organizing genius. Above all
he lacked to a deplorable extent all sense and appre-
ciation of the essential character and national raison
d'etre of the people of Israel. In this latter respect,
tradition has handed down a clearly drawn portrait
of Israel's king.
Saul was well on the way toward changing Israel
into a secular, military state, and thus turning the
nation from its true historical mission. A conquer-
ing kingdom of this world, perhaps, might have
boasted a brief period of transient splendor and
prosperity; but it would have disappeared, without
leaving a trace of its existence, like Egypt and As-
syria, Babylonia and Persia, Media and Lydia. King
Saul is certainly entitled to our deepest compassion
and heart-felt sympathy, but the fall of his dynasty
was fortunate for Israel.
Yet not unavenged was Saul's blood shed on the
heights of Gilboa. His avenger and the genuine
performer of his life-work arose in the Judean
whom he had attacked and persecuted. Cautious
conduct was now necessary on David's part. It would
have been worse than foolhardy with only 600 Ju-
deans to open war with the Philistines. Above all
David wished to save what still might be saved.
He therefore caused himself to be anointed heredi-
34 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
tary king of Judah, under Philistine suzerainty;
while Abner, Saul's general, assembled the scattered
remnants of Saul's power in the East-Jordan coun-
try, and at Mahanaim made young Ishbosheth king,
who was Saul's only surviving son, and probably
not yet of age.
David resided seven years in Hebron, and Ish-
bosheth likewise seven in Mahanaim. Abner made
an effort to subject David to the scepter of Ishbo-
sheth, but in this attempt he was completely foiled
by the bravery of David's Judeans. Shortly after-
wards Abner, the only support of the house of Saul,
was murdered and Ishbosheth himself fell a victim
to the vengeance of blood. At this juncture the
northern tribes agreed to confer upon David the
government of the lands of Saul.
Even the first measure enacted by David as suze-
rain of Israel bears witness to his high statesmanlike
genius. The city of Jebus remained still in the hands
of the Canaanites; David conquered this city and
made it the political capital of the new kingdom.
Jebus was strongly fortified by its natural sur-
roundings, situated rather toward the center of the
kingdom, and being independent of any of the tribes
and raised above and beyond their petty rivalries,
it was better adapted for the purpose intended than
any other city. As a characteristic contrast to this
policy, Saul, even as king, had quietly continued to
reside in his native village. The founding of Jeru-
salem, as David called his new "city of David," was
a fact of the greatest historical importance when we
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 35
bear in mind what Jerusalem became to the people
of Israel and later through Israel to humanity.
Next at last the eyes of the Philistines were
opened at their former loyal vassal, and they en-
deavored to choke at its very birth the rising power
of David but in vain. The task upon which Saul
had been wrecked was accomplished by David, and
indeed definitely. David for all coming ages made
the return of the Philistines an impossibility, yet,
on the other hand, he did not molest them in their
own country; he did not rob them of a single inch
of land or take a single stone from their fortresses.
David figures as the greatest warrior of ancient
Israel. Victory ever remained faithful to him. He
humbled all the neighboring nations or conquered
them, but we must particularly lay stress upon the
fact that David waged all his brilliant wars only in
order to repel unprovoked attacks and in defense
of the most vital interests of his people. It cannot
be proved, or even made to seem probable, that any
of his wars were begun by himself personally. David
was no greedy robber, no vulgar swashbuckler.
Yet even all these heroic deeds do not display the
grandest trait of his character. What he achieved
in the inner moral sphere is of infinitely greater
importance. Above all, his heart beat high in unison
with the national soul of Israel. As a true Israelite
he was a faithful servant and worshiper of Yahveh,
for whose sole glory and trusting in whose aid he
wielded the sword. He wisely understood that a
king of Israel must not only be a brave warrior,
36 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
but that in the Israelitic state there must also be
a place for Yahveh. In conformity with this view
David wished within the political center of his king-
dom to create also an ideal, religious center. While
Saul characteristically had allowed the Ark of the
Covenant, the people's old-time halidom, to perish
from oblivious neglect, David's earliest concern was
to bring it back from the little village where it re-
mained forgotten into the new political capital where
it would occupy a more worthy station, just as
Gideon once had inaugurated his tribal dynasty by
the erection of a sanctuary in his native city of
Ophra. David himself never undertook any im-
portant action without first consulting Yahveh
through the priest.
The portrait of David is not wanting in human
traits of the worse sort, and the books of Samuel
with inexorable love of truth have not in the least
tried to hide or mince the matter. Still, the fact
remains that David stands forth as the most lumi-
nous figure and gifted personality in the whole his-
tory of Israel, in greatness surpassed only by the
prophet of Sinai, by Moses, "the man of God."
What David achieved for Israel cannot be rated
too high. Israel as a people, as a political factor,
as a concrete power in the world's history, as a na-
tion in the highest sense, is exclusively the work
of David ; and, although the kingdom which he built
up through the struggles and anxieties of a long
and active life, soon collapsed; although Israel itself,
even a few generations after his death, was again
RISE OF THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL. 37
divided into two halves still, the ideal unity long
survived the division that had really taken place.
The past grandeur of the Davidian epoch still be-
came the haunting dream of the future days of Is-
rael; and it is not through a mere chance that the
wistful longing, and even the consolation of Israel,
should reappear in the form of a returning ideal
David, who should combine all the virtues and excel-
lencies of the historical David without his foibles.
With David the people of Israel had once for all
reached the acme of its national existence; his like
never appeared again. After David, the history of
the people of Israel changes into a continuous trag-
edy, pointedly illustrating the words of the Apostle
Paul, that the misfortune of Israel enriched the
world. The pearl is a disease of the shell, and kills
that which creates it, and thus, also, the costly legacy
bequeathed by Israel to the world, gushed forth
from a well of tears. The worldly grandeur of
Israel collapsed stone by stone, inch by inch, into
utter decay; but the smaller it might appear out-
wardly the greater it became inwardly. In the down-
fall of Israel Yahveh triumphed, and on the ruins of
Jerusalem, Jeremiah proclaimed the New Covenant.
Israel died as a political nation, but arose again
as a religious sect, as a community of the pious, the
Godfearing, who alone would be privileged and
able from out of their midst to send forth another
son of David, according to the flesh, and spiritually
the performer of the work of Moses; greater than
David, greater even than Moses.
MOSES, THE FOUNDER OF MONOTHE-
ISTIC RELIGION.
AJL, that is great and significant in humanity is
accomplished by great and significant per-
sonalities. To be sure we have been warned against
exaggerated personality worship or hero worship,
and have been told that the so-called great men are
nothing but exponents of mighty currents and ten-
dencies of their time. In this thought lies a certain
truth, in so far as great men do not fall from heaven
but require some connecting links : the time must be
ripe for them, must to some extent have need of
them, and on closer inspection we will usually dis-
cover that the currents and tendencies of their con-
temporaries have met them half way. But that
these currents attained their aim, that these tenden-
cies were actualized, is due solely and simply to the
merit of the great men themselves, and therefore
has earned for them the gratitude of humanity and
of history which associates these events with their
names.
What is thus true in general of all great men and
significant human affairs is also very especially true
of religion. For religion is life, the most personal
MOSES. 39
life. It lives only in personalities and through per-
sonalities. All great and important events in the
history of religion are ineradicably connected with
the names of particularly favored personages who
appeared to their contemporaries as prophets and
apostles of God, who had himself taken possession
of them and had become a living power within
them.
Among these the founders of religion naturally
stand in the first rank. They created something en-
tirely new and consciously strove to lead their con-
temporaries on new religious paths and to bring
them a divine truth which had previously been hid-
den from them. And as founders of world religions,
Moses, Buddha, Mohammed and Jesus stand in the
first rank.
The earliest of these is Moses. To him we stand
in a very different relation from that in which we
stand to Buddha or Mohammed. The latter men
do not concern us directly and at best can have for
us only a scientific objective interest. We are much
more likely to see in them enemies and opponents of
our Christian religion, its most dangerous rivals in
the competition for the spiritual dominion of the
world, while Moses and Jesus are in our minds in-
separably connected. In Moses we see a direct pred-
ecessor of Jesus, the point of departure of the great
religious movement which has found its historical
conclusion and spiritual perfection in Jesus. Suffi-
cient reason to devote to this man our particular
attention, and indeed our task of sketching him
40 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
and his work is an especially fascinating and allur-
ing one which will yield a rich reward.
Unfortunately, however, the undertaking is at the
same time a very difficult one, and I must express
myself with regard to it openly and without reser-
vation. The difficulty lies in the nature of the
sources at our command. Buddha and Mohammed
stand before us in the full light of history in spite
of the great amount of legendary material which
attaches to their personalities. We can not say the
same of Moses. But have we not the five books of
Moses? Could we wish more or better material?
It is only the German Bible that knows anything
of the "Five Books of Moses." The Hebrew, Greek,
Latin and even the English Bibles do not ascribe
these books expressly and directly to Moses. And
in the last century and a half, science has worked
so vigorously and persistently on just this so-called
Pentateuch, that we are justified in speaking here of
positive results.
The Pentateuch originated from the combination
of various documents, the oldest of which is perhaps
half a millennium later than Moses, so that accord-
ingly the earliest narratives of Moses and accounts
of his work which have come down to us are further
removed from him in time than we to-day are from
Luther. But the Pentateuch, to be sure, contains
not only narratives, but laws as well. Is it not
possible that one or another of these legal constitu-
ents proceeded from Moses himself? In historical
tradition he is, of course, the law-giver par excel-
MOSES. 41
lence\ When it comes to an estimate of Moses's
value for the history of religion, I must express
myself frankly and honestly and must also substan-
tiate statements which will probably seem most sur-
prising to many of my readers.
It is my firm conviction that the science of Old
Testament criticism of the last generation not only
asserts but proves proves positively that the
great coherent priestly code of the Pentateuch as it
has found its characteristic stamp in the code of the
tabernacle and in the so-called third book of Moses
(Leviticus), is quite late, and does not belong at
the beginning of the development as its foundation,
but at the end as its culmination. That the coherent
code presented in the so-called fifth book of Moses
(Deuteronomy) originated in the seventh century
was proved by De Wette as early as 1805, and this
knowledge has become the common property of Old
Testament science. We may leave out of considera-
tion the three poetical pieces ascribed to Moses, his
Song (Deut. xxxii. 1-43), his Blessing (Deut.
xxxiii), and his Prayer (Psalm xc). Hence there
are only a few pieces of legal import which come
seriously into question. These are the so-called
Book of the Covenant (Ex. xxi-xxiii) and the Deca-
logue, or Decalogues, and both are to be found in
the earliest original documents.
The Book of the Covenant is old beyond any
doubt. It is the earliest attempt in Israel at a de-
tailed formulation of law, and it has acquired a
particular significance by the fact that it is this very
42 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
code which shows most striking parallels to the fa-
mous codex, found in 1902, of the Babylonian king
Hammurabi who dates back almost a thousand years
earlier than Moses. But each closer investigation
of the book of the Covenant makes it more im-
possible to assume that Moses himself was its author.
The work and legislation of Moses were intended
for nomadic hordes which were yet to become a
nation for the first time, and in whom we may not
assume a settled state of civilization founded on
agriculture. The whole legislation of the Cov-
enant, however, is calculated for a settled agri-
cultural population, to some extent also engaged in
commerce and living under a sort of juridical ad-
ministration. In the first place, the very detailed
regulations about goring cattle are significant. In
the Semitic Orient, cattle never and nowhere be-
long to nomad tribes but are exclusively domestic
and farm animals ; Semitic nomads raise only sheep
and goats. Laws like those regarding injuries to field
and vineyards from unrestrained cattle or the rav-
ages of fire, or requiring that fields, vineyards and
olive groves should not be tilled the seventh year
but should be left to the poor, have not Sinai for a
background or the deserts of Kadesh, but the fertile
land of Palestine. Then, too, when a regulation re-
quires that the doer of a bodily injury which does
not prove fatal must pay the injured one for the
time he is bedridden, and also the cost of his re-
covery, we have a condition of society in which the
daily wage can be calculated in money, and in which
MOSES. 43
professional physicians practise for money, which
could never be the social condition of a nomad people
even if it were no longer purely nomad but had al-
ready advanced to the most primitive agricultural
stages. The book of the Covenant was certainly
drawn up at a comparatively early date. In it we
can see the codification of customs in practice in
the time of the earliest kings in the manner of the
oldest German W 'eisthumer ; but Moses can not have
given his contemporaries such a legislation.
We now come to the Decalogue, the Ten Com-
mandments, in which we see the work which belongs
peculiarly to Moses, and which occurs first to our
minds when the name of Moses is mentioned. Be-
cause of the importance of the matter, I must here
enter more into detail. It is first of all noteworthy
that this Decalogue has left behind no traces what-
ever in the early and oldest literature. The earliest
passage to be taken into account is in Hosea who
says of his contemporaries that they swear, lie,
kill, steal and commit adultery (Hosea iv. 2). But
the prophet uses other words than those in the Deca-
logue, and furthermore the order of the sins is en-
tirely different, so that this passage at least need
not have reference to the Decalogue.
Moreover, it is well known that the Decalogue
occurs twice in the Pentateuch in different forms
(Exodus xx and Deut. v). The first, for instance,
alleges as a reason for resting on the Sabbath, the
rest of God on the seventh day after the six days
employed in creating the world ; the other, consid-
44 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
eration for servants, in order that thy manservant
and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou (Deut.
v. 14). Of course this difficulty is not insurmount-
able, for on two stone tablets we must think of the
ten commandments as formulated in lapidary brief-
ness, perhaps as follows :
"Thou shalt have none other gods before me.
"Thou shalt not make thee any image or any
likeness.
"Thou shalt not misuse the name of God.
"Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy.
"Thou shalt honor father and mother."
But the gravest essential considerations arise
against the possibility that even such a nucleus has
come down directly from Moses. The Sabbath
command and the image prohibition contain insur-
mountable difficulties. The biblical celebration of
the Sabbath consists everywhere in rest and cessa-
tion from labor. It has therefore been designated
as a rest offering. But as a matter of fact, such a
cessation from work is actually possible only for
agriculturists and never for nomads; for the work
which the nomad has to perform can not be set aside
at will. The flocks must be fed and watered, gath-
ered together and milked on Sunday or holiday as
well as on a workday. To attest this fact I will call
no less a witness than Jesus, who says in the Gospel
of Luke (xiii. 15) : "Thou hypocrite, doth not each
one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass
from the stall, and lead him away to watering?" in
which the impossibility of carrying out the Sabbath
MOSES. 45
command for the stock raiser is directly admitted.
It is indirectly admitted in the fact that Moham-
med, who otherwise borrowed everything from Ju-
daism, did not adopt the Sabbath, because, oppor-
tunist as he was, he said to himself that the insti-
tution was not suited to his Arabians. In its biblical
sense the Sabbath command is absolutely impossible
as a fundamental law of a nomadic people. At the
most Moses may have arranged some sort of a re-
ligious celebration for every seventh day. The sug-
gestion which has been lately raised that the Sab-
bath in ancient Israel did not mean the seventh day
and a rest day for every week, but the full moon in
opposition to the new moon would overcome this
objection, but its foundation is very insecure and its
maintenance would develop immense difficulties.
In the same way, facts undeniable historical
facts make it impossible to adhere to the image
prohibition as Mosaic and as a fundamental com-
mand of the religion of Israel. In Dan, where calf
worship was carried on officially as in Bethel, which
the prophets later struggled against and denounced,
a race of priests officiated which were descended
from a grandson of the founder Moses; hence a
direct descendant of Moses became the official priest
of the Golden Calf! How could that be possible
when every child of Israel (modernly speaking)
in the Sunday school must know that Moses pro-
nounced as his second commandment for Israel,
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
or any likeness"? Yes, a notorious idol has even
46 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
been traced back in all naivete to Moses himself. In
the temple at Jerusalem at the time of the prophet
Isaiah there was still a brazen serpent to which the
Children of Israel offered sacrifices. Therefore it
was not merely an historical relic from the years in
the wilderness, but a representation of deity, which
Moses was said to have wrought, and which King
Hezekiah caused to be broken in pieces (2 Kings
xviii. 4). These are undeniable facts reported in
the Old Testament itself.
Further we must consider that we have no po-
lemic from Elijah and Elisha against the calves of
Dan and Bethel. If they showed zeal for the God
of Israel against the Tyrian Baal, they also showed
zeal for the golden calves as the official form at
that time of the worship of God in the kingdom of
Israel. Even the prophet Amos who appeared in
the midst of Bethel and occupied himself in great
detail with the cult there, finds no word of complaint
for the Golden Calf there. Hosea who stigmatized
that ancient and revered symbol by the disrespectful
expression, "calf," was the first to engage in polem-
ics against this and every image and symbolical kind
of worship, but simply from reasons of good sense,
and without any implication that it was a great sin
which Moses had already forbidden. All of this
would be absolutely impossible if the Decalogue of
Exodus xx had been known to every Israelite as
a fundamental command of the religion of Moses
and was generally current as such. But if two of
MOSES. 47
the ten commandments are essentially untenable then
the whole becomes untenable.
And to make the question still more involved, we
have a second Decalogue in Exodus, an entirely
different one which likewise was given to Moses on
Sinai and reads as follows: (Ex. xxxiv. 14-26) :
"Thou shalt worship no other god ....
"Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
"The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep....
"Every firstling is mine. . . .
"Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks ....
"Thou shalt observe the feast of ingathering. . . .
"Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice
with leaven;
"The fat of my sacrifice shall not remain until
the morning.
"The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt
bring. . . .
"Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's
milk."
These are the ten commandments on the basis
of which, according to the oldest narrators, the so-
called Yahvists, the covenant on Sinai was con-
firmed. In spite of the fact that the two first com-
mandments are essentially identical, it is quite im-
possible to refer both Decalogues to one original
form. This Decalogue of the Yahvist redaction
characteristically contains no ethical prescriptions
whatever except such as pertain to the religious
service; and accordingly it finds the essence of re-
ligion in worship. Our own familiar Decalogue
48 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
bears the relation to this one that Amos bears to his
contemporaries.
We must also grant that the tradition that Moses
had made the covenant of Sinai on the basis of ten
commandments is very old, but the commandments
themselves are missing; for even the Decalogue of
Exodus xxxiv can not have been formulated by
Moses since it also rests upon the assumption of
agriculture and festivals founded upon agricultural
customs, and if we are honest Moses loses nothing
by our refusing to ascribe to him this Decalogue.
If he had actually established the religion of Israel
upon this foundation he would not belong to the
greatest religious heroes of mankind.
Accordingly, then, the result of our investigation,
which may perhaps seem destructive, is that we have
no documents or authentic sayings of Moses, like-
wise no accounts of him which are even approxi-
mately contemporary. Under such circumstances
can we dare after all to give a history of Moses and
his work? But softly! If we have no historical
documents in the usual sense we still have docu-
ments from Moses in a higher sense, not written on
crumbling stone or moldering parchment, but in liv-
ing men, as we might say with the Apostle Paul
(2 Cor. iii. 3), "Not with ink, but with the Spirit
of the living God ; not in tables of stone but in fleshy
tables of the heart."
Upon the character and history of the people of
Israel the work of Moses has left such lasting and
unmistakable traces, and tradition has retained for
MOSES. 49
us such a great number of highly significant un-
impeachable facts that we need be in no doubt. To
be sure, documents of this kind, not written with
ink, are not always easy to read, and I shall surely
not be misunderstood if I often express myself with
a certain hesitation ; but we shall and can enter upon
our task comforted, yes, I flatter myself, that my
readers will feel even especial confidence in a repre-
sentation of the work of Moses given from a stand-
point which they will probably consider very radical,
because they have the impression that the author
has carefully guarded himself from every incidental
illusion and has avoided every possible source of
error in every way practicable.
There is an additional point which lightens our
task with regard to Moses. This is the peculiar
double position which he shares with Mohammed
only of all the great founders of religions : namely,
that his is a personality belonging to profane history
as well as to the history of religion. He not only
founded the Israelitic religion but he also created
the Israelitic nation. In his own mind the two
sides of his work could not be separated, for in the
role of prophet he exercised his political activity,
as we would call it, in the name of his God, as His
representative with a definite mission. Of this
fact tradition leaves us in no doubt, and in this
particular it has certainly drawn his likeness with
great accuracy. But we can consider historical facts
apart from their religious character and motives,
and it is easier to gain a picture of historical than
50 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of religious facts. For instance, we can establish
the historical facts of the crusades without regard
to the religious character and the religious roots of
the movement. If we do so we shall obtain only
a one-sided picture of them, nor can we have a
complete and accurate picture until we have estab-
lished these historical facts objectively. According
to my firm conviction it is also possible to establish
the historical facts of the life and work of Moses
objectively, and this must be our first task.
In the pages of profane history Moses stands be-
fore our eyes as the liberator of his people from
Egyptian bondage, arid as their leader and ruler in
peace and war. The biblical accounts with regard
to the fate of the fathers of Israel in pre-Mosaic
times permit of the sharpest critique and become the
more brilliantly verified according as they are the
more exactly investigated and observed. I consider
it as proven that Ramses II, the Sesostris of the
Greeks, whose mummy was found a number of
years ago, was the Pharaoh of the oppression, and
his son and successor, Merenptah, the Pharaoh of
the exodus. In Moses, the hero and leader of this
expedition, tradition sees a Hebrew of the tribe of
Levi. And just this fact is unquestionable because
it alone offers us the key to one of the must puzzling
phenomena in the history of Israel.
It is remarkable that the tribe of Levi appears in
two forms which have nothing in common except the
name. The earliest tradition describes it as a ruth-
less and violent secular tribe, who were cursed and
MOSES. 51
condemned to destruction by the patriarch because
of a bloody crime, and were actually destroyed.
In the later tradition the Levites appear as a purely
spiritual race of priests, who from the beginning
were set aside for the service of God. The event
which resulted in the overthrow of the secular tribe
of Levi can have taken place only when Israel came
into possession of Palestine, that is to say, in the
time after Moses. This event was the treacherous
and barbarous capture of the city of Shechem,
which brought no blessing to the wicked tribe and
its accomplice, Simeon. They succumbed to the
revenge of the Canaanites when Israel solemnly
separated from them and left them to expiate their
burden of sin alone. That tradition should of its
own accord have made Moses out to be a member
of this cursed tribe is simply unthinkable, whereas
if he were really a Levite the riddle is easily solved.
Those portions of the tribe of Levi which belonged
to the family of Moses and which were very closely
connected with him and had placed themselves at
his disposal, took of course no part in the criminal
undertaking of the rest and so were not entangled in
the catastrophe in which it resulted. Thus it hap-
pened in fact that only the priestly families re-
mained, and these could hardly have the ambition
to reestablish themselves as a secular tribe.
This Hebrew of the tribe of Levi, however, found
access by a happy chance to the civilization and
culture of Egypt, and was educated entirely as
an Egyptian. It is certain that his name cannot be
52 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
accounted for by Semitic derivation, whereas in the
form Mesu it was a purely Egyptian name, which
can be authentically proved to have been generally
current at that time. Then too, Pinehas, a tradi-
tional name in the family of Moses, which we can
not trace back to any Semitic root, is a purely Egyp-
tian Penehesu which likewise may be authentically
proved. According to the biblical narrative, Pha-
raoh's daughter found the child Moses in the Nile
under circumstances familiar to us all, and adopted
him as her son. The non-biblical accounts give her
name as Termuthis, or Merris, and in fact we can
point out the two names Tmer-en-mut and Meri
among the the female members of the family of
Ramses II.
The biblical account touches but lightly on the
childhood and youth of Moses. It presents him to
us at the first as a man and the champion of his
people. This deficiency too has been supplied for
us by non-biblical literature. According to Josephus
the Egyptian priests demanded his death when he
was first brought before Pharaoh, because a proph-
ecy said that this boy would one day bring great
evil to Egypt; but his foster mother protected him
and bestowed upon him a careful education.
When Moses grew up, Egypt was invaded by the
Ethiopians, whom no one had been able to with-
stand. Then according to the instruction of an
oracle Moses was placed at the head of an Egyptian
army and performed his task with wonderful intelli-
gence and power, won victory after victory, and
MOSES. 53
finally besieged the Ethiopians in their capital city,
Meroe. There the Ethiopian princess, Tharbis, fell
in love with him and on his promise to marry her
surrendered to him the capital of the enemy, where-
upon he returned in triumph to Egypt. We smile
over such stories, but the fact remains authentically
established that at the end of the reign of Ramses
II and at the beginning of that of Merenptah a
certain Mesu was the Egyptian viceroy of Ethiopia,
"Prince of Kush," as he was officially styled. Even
in the Bible itself we have a very remarkable and
puzzling passage where Miriam and Aaron make
accusations against Moses on account of an Ethio-
pian wife he had taken (Num. xii. 1). In any
case the peculiar double position of Moses, Hebrew
by birth but Egyptian by education, is to be looked
upon as historical, and in this respect we are invol-
untarily reminded of Arminius, the Teutonic Her-
mann the Cheruscan, who likewise entered into
Roman service and arose to the dignity of a Roman
knight, but only in order to learn from the Romans
how he might free his people from their yoke. The
inclination of his heart led Moses likewise to his
people; he would rather be the brother of these
despised slaves than live in the enjoyment of Egyp-
tian luxury and splendor.
If Moses had been born an Egyptian what could
have induced him to place himself at the head of the
Israelites with whom he could not even make him-
self understood because of the essential difference
between their languages? Perhaps pity for the op-
54 THE CULTURE OF ANCINT ISRAEL.
pressed, who according to the Egyptian view were
no better than the cattle which they herded? Or
injured ambition because he did not rise rapidly
enough in his career and so would rather be the first
among the despised foreigners than to be second
among the Egyptians? Neither can Moses have
been a member of the Semitic tribes who led a
nomad life around Sinai and with whom tradition
has brought him in closest connection. The desert
is egoistic. To but few does it give a scanty sus-
tenance, so that every tribe would think well before
inviting strangers to the table at which they them-
selves could hardly be satisfied even if they would
have won additional strength and influence by such
an increase in their numbers. In this point too the
tradition holds its own and every attempt to depart
from it causes only entanglement in unsolvable diffi-
culties.
But Moses was above all a founder of religion,
and therefore it becomes of very particular interest
and the highest possible value for us to familiarize
ourselves with the religious environment in which he
developed. That the careful Egyptian education
which fell to his lot was also a religious education,
may be taken for granted. And the esoteric religion
at least of the Egypt of that day stood upon a very
high plane. Its belief was centered in a life be-
yond. The most important witness of the religious
literature of Egypt is the so-called Book of the
Dead which treats of the fate of the soul after
death. When the soul escapes the fetters of the
MOSES. 55
body it comes before the judgment of the dead
where forty-two judges examine its conduct, each
with regard to some one particular sin. If these
judges declare the soul to be pure it enters into the
realm of light, it becomes God once more and re-
turns to God from whom it came. Especially have
the mysteries of Osiris this cycle for their object,
and we know definitely that in the bosom of the
Egyptian priesthood monotheistic speculations were
customary, or those with a tendency towards mono-
theism. To be sure these speculations never led to
a practical religious monotheism but at most to a
philosophical pantheism. Heliopolis, the biblical On,
had always been one of the main centers of the mys-
teries of Osiris; and yet it must arouse our atten-
tion when an Egyptian tradition, handed down to
us from Manethos, says that Moses came from the
circle of the Heliopolitan priesthood of Osiris, and
when biblical tradition places Joseph in direct con-
nection with them, since Pharaoh gives him to wife
Asenath, the daughter of Poti-phera priest of On
(Gen. xli. 45).
The attempt had even been made in Egypt once
before to establish monotheism practically not
through the priests, it must be noted, but on the part
of the state. Amenhotep IV, the last direct scion
of the renowned 18th dynasty, the so-called "heretic
king," undertook to establish by the power of gov-
ernment the worship of one God whom he saw
incarnate in the solar disk aten, hence a solar mono-
theism, beside which all other cults were to be pro-
56 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
hibited. That this remarkable man (who also took
a fancy to have himself and his family portrayed in
a repulsively ugly fashion), did not attain his pur-
pose, and that the heresy of the heretic king died
with him, may be taken for granted. Posterity has
condemned him to non-existence, and his name was
effaced from all inscriptions, but his attempt re-
mains noteworthy for the history of religion, and
there is no doubt that Moses knew of these things
which took place perhaps a hundred years before
his time. Thus by no means did he lack religious
stimulation in Egypt.
Furthermore his must have been a pronouncedly
religious nature, an innate religious genius, and with
regard to this we must take into consideration cer-
tain influences of his own people. According to
biblical tradition the work of Moses did not fall
from heaven but had its point of contact in his own
nation and found a prepared ground; neither did
the religious history of Israel originate with Moses,
but had its beginnings in an earlier time, closely
connected with the person of the patriarch Abra-
ham. In this important point too, it is my firm
conviction that the biblical tradition is perfectly
correct ; namely, that we must assume the patriarchs
of the people of Israel to have had before Moses
a pronounced religious character which raised them
above related tribes and which was a spiritual power
ever against the Egyptians.
The decisive moment in Moses's entire life was
during his sojourn among the Midianites in the wil-
MOSES. 57
derness of Sinai. There he had become the son-in-
law of a Midianite priest to whom even the Israelitic
tradition assigns a certain share in the work of
Moses. Even the natives of this Sinai neighbor-
hood we must not imagine as entirely, or even
half, wild bushmen. On the contrary, Arabia was
the center of an ancient and high civilization, al-
though whether it really reached back to the times
of Moses may well be questioned. But at least the
Arabian borderlands were under the influence of
Egyptian and Babylonian civilization and religious
movements, since it is well known that Sinai bears
the name of the ancient Babylonian moon-god, Sin.
Accordingly here the religious soil is not fallow land.
The biblical tradition itself says distinctly that the
new name Yahveh, by which Moses designated the
God of their fathers, originated from Sinai and was
derived from there, that even before Moses a god
Yahveh was worshiped on Sinai.
Here on Sinai took place the event which was
for Moses what John's baptism in the Jordan was
for Jesus, and the day of Damascus for the Apostle
Paul ; the biblical account describes it as the theoph-
any of the burning bush (Ex. iii.). We can not ex-
plain or analyze it but must accept it as a fact as the
phenomena of the religious life do not upon the whole
admit of demonstration and mock every rational
explanation, but nevertheless are realities. Here
God himself laid hold upon him and took possession
of him. From this moment he knew himself to be
called of God as the saviour of his people and that
58 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
he must plan his entire future life in the service of
this God. He hastened to Egypt in order to call his
people to freedom in the name of the God of their
fathers who had appeared to him on Sinai. And
here too the religious motive glimmers plainly
through the oldest account, for they are to travel
in the wilderness in order to celebrate there a great
festival for their God. And the bold enterprise suc-
ceeded. Even in the most supreme extremity and in
the greatest dangers in the face of the despairing
and discouraged people Moses clung to the God
who had called him, and his faith was not to be
shaken. There, as the biblical account states briefly
and strikingly, Israel saw the powerful hand of
Yahveh which he had shown to the Egyptians.
Then the people feared the Lord and believed the
Lord and his servant Moses (Ex. xiv. 31). This
triumphant moment made Israel into a nation and
Israel never forgot it. Here Israel recognized the
God of their fathers who with a strong hand and an
outstretched arm had delivered his people and had
led them forth out of the house of bondage, out
of the land of Egypt. Here too we have a matter
of fact to recognize ; the deliverance from Egyptian
bondage must have been effected by an extraordi-
nary event in which those who experienced it could
see nothing but the direct personal intervention of
God himself.
At this point, very involved questions begin to
arise for the historian which I will at least indicate
briefly. It is well known that the mountain where
MOSES. 59
the law was given to Moses is sometimes called
Sinai and sometimes Horeb. Are these only two
different names or do they indicate two different
mountains? And where may this Sinai, or Horeb,
be found ? Besides it is still maintained on reasons
not to be despised, that the oldest narrative makes
no mention whatever of this digression by way of
Sinai, but had the people of Israel from the be-
ginning wander directly to Kadesh. These are ques-
tions which may never be answered with certainty
and which need not occupy us here any further.
With Kadesh, surnamed Kadesh Barnea in distinc-
tion from other places of the same name and to-day
the oasis Ain Qudes at the southwest extremity of
the Plateau of Azazime, we have absolutely firm
ground beneath our feet. Kadesh is pointed out by
tradition so consistently and so positively as the
stopping-place of Israel after the exodus and as the
scene of Moses's organizing and administrative ac-
tivity, that any doubt of this fact would only draw
a smile from a methodically trained historian. Now
we shall advance to the investigation of his work.
However, there are two methodological consid-
erations to be disposed of first. The man who
wishes to influence his times and to direct them into
new paths, must stand above them. Therefore even
when we have become acquainted with the religious
plane of his time we have not yet familiarized our-
selves with his personal religious consciousness, for
genius is an absolutely incommensurable quantity,
and so likewise is religious genius. Furthermore it
60 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
is a matter of experience that after religious move-
ments have entered into life they usually forfeit
their original freshness and purity so that they be-
come secularized and ossified. Supposing that we
did not have the four gospels, or that Luther's
writings were lost, who would be able to construct
the Gospel of Jesus in its entire purity and splendor
from the faith and life of the Christian communi-
ties of the middle of the fifth century ? Or who, by
considering the condition of the Lutheran church
at the time of the Protestant scholasticism or the
writings of Calovius and Quenstedt, could imagine
that Luther had composed such a precious booklet
as his "Freedom of the Christian" ? This privilege,
however, we must grant also to Moses, and the more
since we possess actually no documents by him or
about him. Yes, even the fact that we can not
positively prove the existence of definite laws or
even positively prove their non-existence proves
nothing against Moses. As Jesus said to his dis-
ciples (John xvi. 12) : "I have yet many things to
say unto you, but you can not bear them now," so
Moses too may have thought, and I am firmly con-
vinced that such is the fact. I might make the
statement that Moses shows himself to be a genius
in pedagogy since he would not take the second step
before the first, and promoted his work most em-
phatically by that which he did not give his people.
He gave them no superfluous ballast but only what
they could grasp and what they needed ; not philo-
MOSES. 61
sophical speculations, nor dogmatic instruction, but
life, the most vital life, religious life, moral life.
I will select two important points for the ex-
planation of what I mean by the two methodological
considerations. It may have offended many of my
readers when I was obliged to declare that Moses
could not have enacted a law prohibiting images
and have made it a foundation stone of his religion ;
but does this prove, or do I mean by it to say, that
Moses was a worshiper of images and thought it
right and praiseworthy to worship God in images?
The only object relating to worship which we can
refer back to him with certainty is the holy Ark,
a pure symbol which never misled the people to any
idolatrous misuse; and at the same time the tribes
and races in the midst of which Israel lived at the
time of Moses were not idol worshipers in this
sense, but they too had only religious symbols; so
that Moses had no practical occasion for such a com-
mand, whereas he himself acted according to this
knowledge, and his work lay entirely in this direc-
tion.
Now for the chief central question with regard to
monotheism. That Israel did not possess a pure,
clearly conceived monotheism for centuries after
Moses, that in the eyes of Israel Yahveh was not the
one God in heaven and upon earth, but that they saw
realities also in the other gods, is absolutely certain.
But what does this prove in regard to Moses? Can
not Moses personally have held to a pure mono-
theism ? Who will decide a priori the point beyond
62 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
which genius may not pass ? Must Moses have con-
fessed a religious perception inferior to that of the
author of the ancient narrative of paradise and the
fall of man, whose monotheism indeed leaves noth-
ing to be desired? Could not Moses be content
with what he actually accomplished, to bid Israel
to worship its own God only and to forbid it to
serve any other gods besides? If Israel was actually
convinced that it had only its one God to serve, who
laid claim upon it as his possession alone, and wished
to be everything to it, that would be practically much
more valuable than any theoretical doctrine about
the nature of God, and Moses could confidently
leave the rest to God and time.
So much is made nowadays of monotheistic cur-
rents in the religions of ancient civilizations. But
however great we may assume the influence of the
Egyptian esoteric doctrine upon Moses to have been,
even if a pure monotheism was taught in these
mysteries, still to Moses belongs the enormous merit
that what was whispered about among the initiated
in Egypt was now preached from the house tops
and made more useful to humanity, and especially
that he had drawn the religious consequences there-
from. These same Egyptian priests who in their
esoteric teachings gave themselves up to the most
profound speculations, prayed in public with the
most earnest air of solemnity to cats and ibises,
crocodiles and the "holy ox" as Theodore Momm-
sen translates the "Apis," and rendered to them di-
vine honors; but a purely theoretical monotheism
MOSES. 63
which exists in a brotherly fashion side by side with
the grossest practical idolatry, is religiously not
worth a farthing. In this respect Moses accom-
plished a sweeping reform and performed a com-
plete task: such a double entry method of book-
keeping was impossible in the religion of Moses.
In all religions there have been monotheistic tenden-
cies, currents and attempts, but only in the religion
of Israel had monotheism become a power, and
indeed a power determining the entire religion ; and
this is the work and merit of Moses. Nor did he
hesitate to shed blood, as is shown by that remark-
able story attested by the oldest tradition, in which
he enlisted the tribe of Levi to aid in putting down
a religious rebellion (Ex. xxxii. 26 fr*., compare
Deut. xxxiii. 8 f . ) . When Saul caused all the wiz-
ards and those who had familiar spirits to be hunted
out and executed (1 Sam. xxviii. 3 and 9), he pro-
ceeded entirely in the spirit of the zealous God of
Moses who permitted none other to rule beside him-
self. And this enormous energy which supplanted
all rivals making it impossible for them to exist
side by side with himself, the God of Moses mani-
fested also in the spiritual realm. Israel is the only
nation of which we have knowledge, that has never
had a mythology, that never differentiated divinity
according to sex the concept "goddess" is so ab-
solutely inconceivable to the Israelites that the He-
brew language never attempted to form the word
"goddess." This is a miracle performed by Moses
which is greater and more incomprehensible than
64 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
the greatest and most incomprehensible which tra-
dition has ascribed to him. A man who has exer-
cised such an enormous influence on the entire
thought and sensibility of his people and has mod-
elled it so completely according to his own personal
higher knowledge, such a one truly belongs to the
greatest spiritual heroes of humanity.
We have repeatedly called attention to the fact
that Moses aimed first of all to awaken religious life.
Especially significant for this and of definitive im-
portance for all later time is the form of his religious
foundation. Yahveh alone Israel's God, and Israel
Yahveh's people, this is perhaps the shortest for-
mula to which we can reduce the fundamental idea
of Moses. But how came this relation to exist?
All tradition united in agreeing that in its form
the peculiar establishment of the religion of Israel
consisted of a covenant between Yahveh and Israel,
made through the intervention of Moses. By this
means alone was this relation lifted out of the realm
of nature into that of the moral decision of the will.
This covenant was grounded upon experience of the
power of Yahveh. He had made real that which
appeared impossible, had freed Israel from the bond-
age of Egypt, had therefore shown himself more
mighty than even powerful Egypt with all its many
gods, and had also given further proof of his
power to help. So the God to whom Israel in this
covenant had vowed herself by a free act of will,
was not an abstraction, not an unyielding destiny
but the personal living God of history; the relation
MOSES. 65
to him was a personal ethical relation which as it
was entered upon voluntarily could also voluntarily
be broken. Whether Moses himself had already
drawn this conclusion, and had it in mind, we know
not. Later it gave the prophets a basis for their
ethical preaching and their deepening of the relig-
ious relation.
That this relation of Israel to Yahveh was not
purely theoretical but also manifested itself in a
practical manner may be taken for granted. Its
official manifestation, so to speak, was to be found
in the religious worship. That Moses had regulated
the religious service and standards for the worship
of Yahveh is a matter of course. To be sure we
can not reconstruct exactly this Mosaic order of
service in detail, but we must assume that Moses
inspired a new spirit into the worship which made
it possible for it to keep the most important heathen
abominations at a distance. Among the nations in
the vicinity of Israel the customs of infant sacrifice
and religious unchastity prevailed. These were pro-
scribed by the religion of Israel and wherever they
crept in were recognized at once as poison drops
foreign to its blood.
Furthermore, the relation of Israel to Yahveh
manifested itself in a moral life, according to the
requirements of this God. Here we have the pecu-
liar center of the activity of Moses whom tradition
describes before all as the judge and organizer of
his people. And right here has the consequence of
his activity been visible and significant. In fact
66 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Israel stood far higher morally than the neighboring
peoples. It must have had a particularly pronounced
notion of right and wrong, and the sphere of morals
in a most special sense was peculiarly Israel's honor
and renown. From the beginning Israel had ab-
horred unchastity in a manner that we do not find
to be the case with other Semites. All of this is
due to Moses, who silently and unobtrusively or-
ganized his people in Kadesh, moralizing, guiding,
and sowing noble seeds, and who educated them
religiously in the sense and spirit of the Decalogue,
even if he did not himself formulate it, and so made
it possible for them to become the nation of religion
and in time to bring forth the greatest of all.
It is most probable that Moses also died in Ka-
desh. According to all indications Israel's stop
there must have been a pretty long one, and it is
an essential feature of the Israelitic tradition that
neither Moses nor any of those who came out of
Egypt was permitted to tread the promised land;
and this is of greater significance if we consider
that we are dealing with a distance which under nor-
mal conditions could have been easily passed in a
fortnight. Of special importance for this question,
however, is the explicit statement that nobody knows
where Moses's grave is "unto this day" (Deut.
xxxiv. 6). When we consider what an important
part the grave, and especially the grave of a hero,
played in the conception of ancient Israel, we must
declare it to be absolutely unthinkable that the grave
of Moses should have remained unknown if he had
MOSES. 67
died and had found his last resting place in a spot
which Israel considered as belonging to its domain.
But we must look upon this circumstance too as
providential, for if the grave of Moses had been
known, there is no doubt but a personal cult would
have been connected with it which might have had
evil consequences for the religion he founded. This
was not to be. He was to live on only in his work.
There is a beautiful Jewish legend about the death
of Moses. It is possible to translate the fifth verse
in the last chapter of Deuteronomy relating to his
death, "So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died
there at the mouth of Yahveh." Therefore the
Jewish legend tells how in the last hour of Moses's
life God fulfilled his ardent wish to behold His
face, which in life He was obliged to refuse him
(Ex. xxxiii. 18-23) and so Moses died at the mouth
of God who by a kiss took to Himself the soul of
his faithful and trusted servant. A deep meaning
lies in this story, for verily did Moses receive the
consecration kiss of deity. Whoso recognizes in
Jesus Christ the end and turning point in the history
of humanity must also confess that before him no
greater mortal trod this earth, and that to no second
mortal does humanity owe more than to Moses, the
man of God. The foundation of what in Jesus
Christ has found its conclusion and its perfection,
was laid by Moses, since he was the first to give to
the world clearly and consciously as the foundation
and basic principle of all religious life, the faith in
the one, living, personal, holy God.
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN AN-
CIENT ISRAEL.
FROM the point of view of race psychology
there is scarcely a more interesting or more
profitable study than the examination of the way
in which the various nations educate their children.
Since education aims at the development of children
into useful and independent members of human
society and at giving them whatever they may some-
time need in order to fill their place in life and to
meet its demands, we can derive from the nature of
their system of education perfectly reliable infer-
ences regarding the views of life cherished by the
educators and the ideal of man that hovered before
them. And so from the beginning special interest
is assured for the question, what a people of such
importance for mankind as ancient Israel thought
about the education of children and how they ap-
plied it.
True, what the Old Testament has to say directly
about education is very scanty, but the subject itself
is enough to spur us to further investigation. For
in order to understand rightly and to estimate prop-
erly those scant direct utterances about children and
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 69
education, one must needs have a clear conception
of the views of ancient Israel regarding the family
and family life, and accordingly we must include
also the main points of this latter important subject
within the scope of our immediate consideration.
In this study I shall restrict myself to the canonical
books of the Old Testament, claiming outside that
sphere only the right to be permitted to examine
and use Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus). For although
the Jews never included Jesus Sirach among the
canonical books for reasons which it would lead
too far to explain: not indeed from lack of appre-
ciation or because it was considered unworthy of
such an honor yet it belongs in the period of the
Old Testament literature. It was composed fully a
generation earlier than the book of Daniel, which
has been accepted into the canon, and is for us the
most classic witness concerning the opinions of
Judaism in the year 200 B. C. I shall also take
the liberty of referring on occasion to the book of
Tobias, which was written about the same time as
the book of Esther.
Matrimony and family life are regarded in an-
cient Israel as unqualifiedly the normal, divinely
established and prescribed state. On the other hand,
to estimate voluntary abstinence from matrimony as
an especial merit, and to ascribe to it a higher degree
of divine perfection and even of holiness, was far
from the thought of any one in ancient Israel. The
saying : "The Israelite who does not take a wife is not
to be regarded as a man," is indeed found only in
70 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
the Talmud, but certainly expresses the views of
ancient Israel. "He who has found a wife has
found a treasure and won favor from God," and
"House and havings are inherited from one's par-
ents, but a loving wife comes from God," are two
among the Proverbs of Solomon, xviii. 22; xix. 14.
Since matrimony is instituted in Paradise by God
himself, it assumes a decidedly religious value.
"God himself was the witness of the vows between
thee and the wife of thy youth," says the prophet
Malachi with touching beauty, ii. 14; and the faith-
less wife is branded, according to Proverbs ii. 17,
as one who has "forgotten her vow to the Lord."
In the Proverbs of Rabbi Eliezer this thought is
expressed very ingeniously and drastically in that
fashion so popular with Orientals, a play upon words
and letters. Man is in Hebrew E^N (w/&), while
woman is HEX (ishshdh). Now these two words
have two consonants in common x and v, to which
there is added in the word for man a , and in the
word for woman a n; but these two letters taken
together jv constitute the shortest form of the
most holy name of God which it was forbidden to
utter, while the two common consonants written
and read together give the word rx (esh), meaning
fire. Now the Proverbs of Rabbi Eliezer have it:
God himself has placed his name in the midst of
the names of man and wife; if they hold fast to
him he will himself dwell in the midst of them, but
if they lose his most holy name there is left only fire ;
that is, a marriage where God is a party to the union
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 71
is heaven on earth, but a marriage where God is not,
which is not entered upon in his name and has not the
religious basis, is a hell on earth. One can scarcely
imagine a more poetical and winning characteriza-
tion of such a marriage formed with the blessing
of God than that given in the 128th Psalm : "Blessed
is every man that feareth the Lord, that walketh in
his ways. Thou shalt eat from the labor of thine
hands. Happy shalt thou be and it shall be well
with thee ! Thy wife shall be a fruitful vine in the
innermost parts of thine house; they children like
young olive plants round about thy table. Behold,
thus shall the man be blest that feareth the Lord !"
(Ps. cxxviii. 1-4.)
Let us now consider how such a marriage was
brought about in ancient Israel. First of all we
have to prove that opportunity was given the young
people to get acquainted and to found a union upon
personal attraction and mutual love, for even girls
moved with freedom in public life. Indeed they
were entrusted with all sorts of tasks which neces-
sarily brought them into contact with young men:
they had to fetch water, pasture the herds, and
guard the vineyards; furthermore it is known that
they went out to meet the returning victors in war
and welcomed them with dance and song.
As to the circle from which the Israelite selected
his life's companion nothing is definitely prescribed.
In the older times at least the choice is regarded as
unrestricted. Esau brings home to his parents highly
unwelcome daughters-in-law from a foreign race,
72 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
and when Samson proposes to marry a Philistine
woman his parents are not exactly pleased with the
plan, but they do not regard it as anything wrong
and they themselves conduct the suit for the hand of
their son's chosen bride when they find that he in-
sists on his desire. But this was not indeed the
rule; on the contrary, a man sought his wife by
preference in his immediate circle, that is, in his
own family. Thus Laban says plainly to his nephew
Jacob, when the latter asks for Rachel to wife : "It
is better that I give her to thee than to a stranger/'
Gen. xxix. 19. And when Samson wishes to marry
the Philistine woman, his father says to him: "Is
there forsooth among the daughters of our kin folk
and in our own family no woman, that thou wilt
take the Philistine woman to wife?" (Judg. xiv. 3).
Cousins of opposite sex seem especially to have
been regarded as predestined to betrothal, since the
language calls them expressly "lover" and "sweet-
heart," TH and nm
This is based upon the old notions which regarded
the family distinctly as an ecclesiastical and legal
unit, especially in matters of the law of property.
From this point of view, therefore, the contraction
of the marriage bond was not the establishment of
a new family, but the expansion and perpetuation
of the family of the father, for which reason it was
the rule that the married son remained in the house-
hold of his father. If a young man had deter-
mined to enter into matrimony and made his choice
either at the dictate of his affections or in accord-
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 73
ance with the wish of his father, or on some one's
recommendation, then his father or some confiden-
tial friend sued for the maiden at the hand of her
father or her brother : it was not customary for the
wooer to conduct his suit in person.
And here we must admit that of the various forms
of marriage contract enumerated and classified by
ethnographists there existed in ancient Israel only
the form of the so-called marriage sale. If the
father of the maiden had given his general con-
sent, it then became necessary to agree on the pur-
chase price which was known by the distinctive
name mohar ; we have no direct account of the maxi-
mum value of this mohar, but from a comparison
of Deuteronomy xxii. 29 and Exodus xxii. 15 we
can infer that in the time of Deuteronomy, that is,
toward the close of the kingdom of Judah, the
average amount of the mohar was 50 shekels of
silver. Since we have shekels still preserved, we
can at least fix precisely the value of the metal in
the same. The shekel of ancient Israel weighed 14.5
gr. : according to the present standard value of sil-
ver 14.5 gr. of pure silver would be worth $0.635,
and accordingly the normal price for a wife would
have been $31 . 75. And from the moment when the
mohar was paid down and accepted, the marriage
was regarded as legally concluded even when it was
not yet accomplished in fact. But it is clearly to
be inferred from the very vivid account of Eliezer's
suit for the hand of Rebecca (Gen. xxiv.) that the
maiden was not bartered like an article of com-
74 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
merce, but that her consent was necessary, and like-
wise that the father on the other hand could refuse
to give his consent to a union. The first mention
of the composition of a written marriage contract is
found in Tobias vii. 13, and here the circumstance
is involved of sending the daughter far away from
home to a foreign country.
Legally considered, the wife was the property of
her husband. The husband indeed bears the very
name of "owner," ba'al, and the married woman is
called ish-shdh be'ulath ba'al, "a woman who has
become the property of an owner." But the ulti-
mate reason for this phenomenon we have not to
seek in the fact that the woman was regarded as
merely a thing, but in olden times the whole house-
work and all the domestic industries rested upon
the shoulders of the feminine members of the fam-
ily. A daughter, therefore, was a valuable laboring-
factor in the father's house, of which he was de-
prived, and accordingly it was proper that he should
be recompensed and that the family of the bride-
groom should pay something in return for the new
additional laborer. Accordingly the mohar is not
much higher than the average price of a slave,
which was, according to Exodus xxi. 32, about $19.
And thus also we explain the fact that the bridegroom
can offer his own personal services instead of the
mohar. If he is unable to raise the amount of the
mohar, he becomes the slave of his father-in-law
and thus works it out. Thus, as is well known,
Jacob, who as an orphan and a fugitive was of
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 75
course unable to offer a mohar, served his father-
in-law seven years for his wife, and I must not
neglect to note expressly, if we propose to regard
the marriage contract as really a commercial affair,
that it was solely the labor of the bride which was
the object of purchase. Marriage was never a spec-
ulation in ancient Israel, and there was no such thing
as marriage for money, for the bridegroom had
not only the mohar to pay, but had also to meet the
entire expense of the wedding festivities from his
own means. The bride received no money, neither
a dowry for her matrimonial estate nor any outlook
for the inheritance after the death of the parents,
for according to the notions of ancient Israel the
woman is never a claimant of rights but only the
object of legal claims, and has accordingly no right
of inheritance. What is regarded as a matter of
course among us, that the widow shall be the heir
of her husband and that the estate of the parents
shall be divided equally between the sons and the
daughters, the Israelite of old would not have under-
stood at all, but would simply have regarded as
demented any one who said and claimed such things.
Neither the widows nor the daughters received any-
thing, but on the death of the father the estate was
divided among his sons, the first-born receiving
double the share of the others, but to offset this he
had to assume the obligation of caring for and sup-
porting his mother and his sisters.
Hence the Israelite maiden never had ground
for suspecting, when she entered upon matrimony.
76 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
that she was being married on account of her money,
as a perhaps unwelcome appendage to her property,
and thus one of the chief causes of unhappy mar-
riages was removed.
But the question will be asked: What if there
were no sons, but only daughters, or perhaps no
children at all, and only a widow? In such cases,
indeed, the widow and the daughters received the
estate, but in this case they had not the free disposal
of their own hand. The widow had to marry the
brother or the nearest elder kinsman of her de-
ceased husband, and the daughter some member of
the father's family, so that the property always re-
mained with his line.
Now, if the negotiations had reached a successful
termination, so that nothing more stood in the way
of the union of the couple, the marriage feast was
celebrated. And here again a very surprising but
unquestionable fact is to be recorded. Despite the
thoroughly religious character of ancient Israel, de-
spite all the recognition of the religious character
and the religious foundation of matrimony, the Old
Testament does not contain a hint of any religious
consecration of the matrimonial tie, or in modern
phraseology, of any ecclesiastical ceremony. And
so at the time of the establishment of the civil
statutes when the clerical party especially protested
so vigorously against the recognition of civil mar-
riage, while the Catholic church even to this day re-
fuses to recognize the civil wedding alone as a valid
marriage, they have the direct testimony of at least
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 77
the older portion of the Bible against them. Ancient
Israel recognized only the civil marriage, and in-
deed, strictly speaking, not even this; for the state,
so far as we may speak at all of a state within the
borders of ancient Israel, paid absolutely no atten-
tion to the matrimonial relations of its subjects. The
marriage contract was purely a family affair, in-
volving only private rights. Corresponding to the
decisive factor from the point of view of private
rights that the bride was transferred from the fam-
ily of her father to that of the bridegroom, the
essential part of the marriage ceremony was the
fetching and the solemn home-bringing of the bride
from the house of her father to that of her future
husband. This home-bringing was accompanied by
songs and ceremonies of all sorts, but by nothing in
the nature of religious rites. The wedding festiv-
ities lasted seven days and were at the expense of
the bridegroom : in the book of Tobias the wedding
celebration at the house of the father-in-law in
Ecbatana lasts fourteen days (viii. 18), and after
the arrival of the young couple in Nineveh a further
celebration of seven days takes place in the house of
the father (xi. 17).
To have children was regarded among the ancient
Israelites as the greatest good fortune that God can
grant to men ; this view is probably expressed most
concisely in the beautiful saying, "Behold, sons are
a gift of God, and children are the reward of grace"
(Psalms cxxvii. 3). On the other hand, childless-
ness was regarded as a punishment from God, and
78 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
a reproach in the eyes of men. There is no indica-
tion in the Old Testament that any sort of symbol-
ical ceremony was necessary on the part of the
father whereby he recognized and accepted the new-
born child as his own, as we know to have been the
fact among the Romans and the early Germans,
not even in Job iii. 12.
If the wife herself is regarded in law as the prop-
erty of her husband, the same is still more the case
with the children. In law the relation of wife and
children to the husband and father is the same as
that of slaves, and accordingly the apostle Paul is
thinking and speaking in strictly Israelitic spirit
when he says in the familiar passage of Galatians
(iv. 1) : "So long as the heir is a child, he differeth
nothing from a bondservant, although he shall one
day be the master of all." So the father had the
right to sell the children, under the single limitation
that it be not to tribal aliens. And so also he had
the right to dispose at will of the right of primo-
geniture, that is, to divert the right of the first-born
to one who was not actually the first-born; at least
this prerogative is expressly abolished by Deuteron-
omy xxi. 15-17. Indeed the father had the right
of life and death in connection with the child, that
is, he could punish the child, and under certain
circumstances (Gen. xxxviii. 24) the daughter-in-
law, with death, of course in cases prescribed by
custom.
The way in which the book of Deuteronomy
disposes of these paternal rights is very character-
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 79
istic. We read there (xxi. 18-21) : "If a man have
a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the
voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and
will not hearken unto them though they chasten
him; then shall his father and his mother lay hold
on him, and bring him out unto the gate of his
place to the elders of his city, and shall say to them :
This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not
obey our voice, he is a riotous liver and a drunkard.
And all the men of the city shall stone him to death ;
so shalt thou put away evil from the midst of thee ;
and all hear it and fear." We do not find that the
parents first accuse the son, and that afterwards the
elders investigate the case and then punish him.
No, the parents are both accusers and judges : only
the execution is withheld from them. At their re-
quest and upon their simple notification the inhabi-
tants of the city must execute the penalty of death
against the rebellious son. This is a consistent de-
velopment of paternal authority similar to that which
we see executed by Roman law.
The first care of the new-born child seems not,
or at least not always, to have been performed by
the parents. But as the Greeks had a paidagogos,
that is exactly, a children's guide, a slave who was
charged with the special attendance and care of the
child, so in ancient Israel we hear of something
similar. Here too we are told repeatedly of atten-
dants and nurses, male or female as the case may
be, who looked after the care of the child. They
carried the child especially in their bosom, that is
80 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
in the folds of the garment over the breast and
above the girdle, and later probably taught the child
to walk. In the case of royal children they probably
remained about the young princes as tutors (2 Kings
x. i ff. ) . Thus in a familiar passage Moses says to
God : "Am I then the mother of this whole people,
that thou sayest to me, Bear it in thy bosom, as a
nursing father bears his nurseling, into the land
which thou hast promised unto their fathers !" (Num.
xi. 12.) And in the book of Isaiah, the future glory
of the people of Israel is depicted in the words:
"And kings shall be thy nursing-fathers" (xlix. 23).
And so, when the son of Jonathan was made lame
by the carelessness of his nurse, who at the news
of the defeat in battle at Mt. Gilboa, let the five-year-
old boy fall in her hasty flight (2 Sam. xlix. 23),
as well as in the book of Ruth, which is so full of
charming and poetic touches, where we read that
Ruth's mother-in-law, Naomi, nursed the son of her
daughter and Boaz (iv. 16). And on the subject
of learning to walk also we have a picturesque verse.
In one of the most touching passages of the book
of the prophet Hosea we read : "When Israel was
a child, then I loved him and called my son out of
Egypt. Yet I taught Ephraim to go; I took them
on my arms" (xi. 1-3).
But in order to enjoy children as a gift of God,
they must turn out well and be well trained. "A
wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is
the heaviness of his mother;" "The father of the
righteous may greatly rejoice, and he that hath a
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 81
wise child may have joy of him;" "He that hath a
fool for a son, the same hath sorrow, and the
father of a fool hath no joy;" "A foolish son is a
grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bare
him," thus speak the Proverbs of Solomon, x. 1 ;
xxiii. 24; xvii. 21 and 25. And: "A reproach to a
father is an ill-bred son, and such a daughter is to
him a great evil" ; "Cherish no longing for a multi-
tude of useless children, and take no pleasure in
godless sons; for one is better than a thousand,
and better it is to die childless than to have impious
sons," says Jesus Sirach, xxii. 3; xvi. 1-3. From
such utterances we may fairly conclude that the
training of children was regarded as something very
important in Israel and that great value was laid
upon it. It was expected to begin at a very early
age, for "What's bred in youth is done in age" was
surely a principle known in ancient Israel as well as
elsewhere. "Train the child at the very beginning
of his ways, and when he is old he will not depart
therefrom," we read in Proverbs, xxiii. 6, and "If
thou hast children then train them from their in-
fancy," says Jesus Sirach, vii. 23.
Now the first thing that was demanded of the
child was absolute respect for its parents. "Honor
thy father and thy mother," appears already in the
Ten Commandments, and in Leviticus, xix. 3, and
xx. 9 : "Ye shall fear every man his mother and his
father, for I am the Lord your God ;" and "Every
one that curseth his father or his mother shall be put
to death." The Prophet Malachi says : "A son hon-
82 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
oreth his father, and a slave his master" (i. 6). "Be
obedient to thy father and despise not thy mother
when they have become old"; "A generation that
curseth its father and blesseth not its mother,
an eye that mocketh at its father and that despiseth
to obey its mother, the ravens by the brook shall
pick it out and the young eagles shall eat it," are
utterances of Proverbs, xxiii. 22; and xxx. 11 and
17. And on this very point there are some beautiful
passages in Jesus Sirach: "Honor thy father with
thy whole heart, and never forget what thy mother
had to suffer for thee. Forget not that thou owest to
them thy life, and how canst thou repay them for
what they have done for thee?" (vii. 27-28). "Hear,
O children, the commandments of your father, and
walk therein, that ye may prosper. For the Lord
has made honor of the father a duty of the chil-
dren, and the commandments of the mother hath
he made a law for her sons. He who honoreth his
father maketh atonement for sins, and he who hon-
oreth his mother gathereth a good treasure. He
who honoreth his father will have joy of his own
children, and when he prays his prayers will be
heard. He who esteemeth his father will enjoy long
life, and he who obeyed the Lord will be a comfort
to his mother. He who feareth the Lord will honor
his father and will serve his parents as though they
were rulers. Honor thy father both in word and in
deed, that a blessing may come upon thee from
them. For the father's blessing buildeth houses for
the children, but the curse of the mother destroveth
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 83
them. Seek not thy glory in the dishonor of thy
father, for his dishonor can never be a glory to
thee. For the glory of a man is the honor of his
father, and a mother dishonored is a reproach to
her children. My son, care for thy father in his
age, and grieve him not so long as he liveth. And
though he become childish, have consideration for
him and despise him not when thou art in thy full
strength. For compassion upon thy father will
not be forgotten, and instead of the punishment of
sins thou buildest thine house. In the day of need
thou shalt not be forgotten, and like ice before the
sun thy sins shall melt away. He who leaveth his
father in need is no better than a blasphemer, and
he who grieveth his mother is accursed of God"
(iii. 1-16).
One particular sort of respect is especially com-
mended. It seems to have been customary among
the ancient Israelites also that the parents withdrew
to the old folks' apartments and lived on an allow-
ance. Jesus Sirach gives a most energetic warning
against this : "Give not to thy son, thy wife, thy
brother or thy friend power over thee so long as
thou livest. As long as a breath of life is in thee
leave not thy place to another and surrender not thy
money to another, lest thou be compelled to beg for
it of another. For it is better that the children beg
of thee than that thou be compelled to look into the
hand of thy son" (xxx. 28-30). In the same cat-
egory belong two sayings in Proverbs : "He that
wasteth his father and chaseth away his mother, is
84 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
a son that causeth shame and bringeth reproach"
(xix. 26), and "Whoso robbeth his father and his
mother, and saith, It is no transgression, the same
is among the worst criminals" (xxviii. 24). As a
matter of course, along with respect for parents the
child was trained to all other moral obligations and
virtues.
And what sort of pedagogical principles did they
have in ancient Israel ? That can be told in a single
word : the rod. Discipline was indeed very severe.
to our modern humanitarian views absolutely
tyrannical. The foremost demand of our theory,
that the individuality of the child must be allowed
to develop, would have been as incomprehensible to
the ancient Israelite as would have been the claim
of woman to be an agent of the law. Obedience was
the end and all. And since this is not apt to come
of itself, it was necessary to resort to drastic meas-
ures. When we hear the proverb, "My son, despise
not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary
of his reproof; for whom the Lord loveth he re-
proveth, he chasteneth the son in whom he hath
delight" (iii. 11-12), we need not wonder if the
earthly father also lays ungentle hands upon his
child for his own good. For "he that hath been
delicately brought up from childhood will become
a servant and end in misery," say Proverbs xxix. 21.
(Such is probably the sense of the corrupt and diffi-
cult passage.) On this particular point the book
of Proverbs and Jesus Sirach express themselves
with all desirable distinctness. "He that spareth
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 85
the rod hateth his son ; but he that loveth him chas-
teneth him betimes." "Foolishness is bound up in
the heart of a child ; but the rod of correction shall
drive it far from him." "The rod and reproof give
wisdom; but a child left to himself causeth shame
to his mother." "Correct thy son and he shall give
thee rest; yea, he shall give delight unto thy soul"
(Prov. xiii. 24; xxii. 15; xxix. 15, 17). "As is
music in the midst of mourning so is a reproof out
of place; but chastisements are always proper in
discipline" (Jesus Sirach xxii. 6). But here again
the most characteristic expression is an extended
disquisition in Jesus Sirach: "He who loveth his
son letteth him taste the rod continually that he may
have pleasure in his conduct thereafter. He who
chasteneth his son will have pleasure in him, neither
will he be ashamed of him before his friends. He
who instructeth his son, giveth offence to his enemy,
and will rejoice over him in the presence of his
friends. And if his father die, it is as though he
had not died, for he leaveth his like behind him in
his place. So long as he liveth he has his pleasure
in him, and when he cometh to die he is untroubled.
He leaveth behind him an avenger against his ene-
mies, and to his friends one who will remember their
kindnesses. But he will spoil his son who takes
every blow to heart and who is distressed whenever
he weepeth. As an untamed horse is rebellious, so
a spoiled son is uncurbed. Treat thy son with
delicacy and thou wilt afterwards fear him; play
with him and he will afterwards grieve thee. Jest
86 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
with him and he will cause thee trouble and thou
shalt be called to account for his evil deeds. Give
him not much freedom in his youth and excuse not
his follies. Bend his neck the while he is young
and bruise his back while he is small, that he may
not become stubborn and disobedient to thee and
thou have sorrow because of him. Bring up thy
son to labor, lest he give offence and become a dis-
grace to thee" (xxx. 1-13).
But the strongest, and absolutely shocking for our
present feeling, are two sayings from the Book of
Proverbs, which for this reason I have saved to the
last: "Chasten thy son, seeing there is hope; thou
wilt not beat him quite to death" (xix. 18), and
"Withhold not correction from the child ; for though
thou beat him with the rod yet will he not die of it.
Thou shalt beat him with the rod and thus deliver
his soul from hell" (xxiii. 13-14). For easily con-
ceivable reasons the attempt has been made to elim-
inate this unmerciful beating from the text by in-
genious interpretation of the death as a spiritual
death : Chastise thy son, seeing there is hope, lest
thou be guilty of his death, inasmuch as he would
become the prey of death if he grow up without
virtue ; or again : Withhold not correction from the
child; if thou strike it with the rod it will not die
but through severe discipline will become a pious
man who will escape the judgment for sin. But
this seems to me to be wholly contrary to the sense
and spirit of the book of Proverbs. In fact, that
which Luther so aptly translated from Jesus Sirach
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 87
as "beat his back blue" is literally : "break his ribs."
The Oriental is fond of drastic and hyperbolical ex-
pressions, which of course must not be glossed over.
That the Old Testament does not regard the father
exclusively as the tyrannical administrator of chas-
tisement is sufficiently proven by the familiar pas-
sage of Psalms : "Like as a father pitieth his chil-
dren, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him" (ciii.
13), and that the rod was only the last resort, and
that they could get along very well without it, is
sufficiently shown by the Proverb: "A rebuke en-
tereth deeper into one that hath understanding than
a hundred stripes into a fool" (xvii. 10). But all
the preceding evidence shows us clearly this: That
the family according to ancient Israelitic notions
was an absolute monarchy, with the father as ab-
solute monarch at the head. Authority and obe-
dience are its foundation-stones.
But while what we have thus far been considering
constitutes what may be called moral education, we
must now proceed to inquire regarding intellectual
education. What did the child have to learn in
ancient Israel? Jesus Sirach speaks, xxx. 3, of in-
struction given to the son : what may have been the
topics of this instruction ? Here too the Old Testa-
ment leaves no room for doubt on the point that
the first and most important thing that the father
had to teach his son was religion, that religious in-
struction was the basis and the starting-point of
education. "Abraham will command his children
and his household after him that they may keep
88 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment,
that the blessing may come upon them" (Gen. xviii.
19). "They shall learn to fear me all the days
that they live upon the earth, and that they may
also, teach it to their children" (Deut. iv. 10). "And
these words which I command thee this day, thou
shalt take to heart, and thou shalt teach them dili-
gently to thy children" (Deut. vi. 6-7). The father
is directed to use every opportunity in order to give
his son religious instruction. On the occasion of
the feasts especially the opportunity presented itself
as a matter of course. "And when at the feast of
the Passover thy son shall ask thee, What mean ye
by this service? ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of
the Lord's Passover, who passed over the houses of
the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the
Egyptians, and delivered our houses. And thou
shalt tell thy son in that day: Thus did the Lord
deal with me when I came up out of Egypt" (Exod.
xii. 26-27, xiii. 8). The same directions are given
in connection with the pillars of stone that were
set up at Gilgal in memory of the miraculous pas-
sage of the Jordan. "When your children shall ask
their fathers in time to come, What mean these
stones? then ye shall let your children know, say-
ing, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land"
(Josh iv. 21-22).
A classic testimonial of this religious chain of in-
struction as the center of all domestic training and
instruction in Israel is the beginning of the 78th
Psalm : "I will proclaim to you the mysteries of old,
V* /
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 89^ /
,\
which we have heard and learned, and what our 6
fathers have told us. Their children did not hide
it, but told to the generations to come the great
deeds of Yahveh and the wonders that he did for
Israel; how he commanded our fathers to instruct
their children in the same, that the generation to
come might know it, even the children which were
yet to be born and these in turn be zealous to tell
it to their children, that they might set their trust
in God and not forget the mighty deeds of the
Lord" (Ixxviii. 2-7). It is the first and most essen-
tial element of the instruction to train the children
to be pious, orthodox and well-grounded Israelites,
and to this end is employed first of all instruction
in Bible history. According to a familiar passage
in the "Sayings of the Patriarchs" the instruction
in Bible history was to begin in the child's fifth
year.
But what was the status of the proper topics of
education? Writing, reading, and arithmetic are
things which do not impart themselves, and yet they
are indispensable in daily life. Now we have defi-
nite evidence that reading and writing were widely
known in Israel even in the earliest times. Gideon
wishes to punish the elders of the city of Succoth
for their unpatriotic conduct. "And he caught a
young man," so the book of Judges tells us, "of
the men of Succoth, and he was compelled to write
down for him the chiefs and the elders of the city,
seventy and seven men" (viii. 14). This narrative
gives us, to be sure, no evidence regarding the time
90 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of Gideon, but it does for the time when it was
written : it is a part of the oldest historical tradition
of Israel, and in this it is taken as a matter of course
that the first comer picked up from the field can
write. Or, to take another case, David's captain
Joab was by no means what we would call an edu-
cated man, but yet he knew how to read and write,
as is shown clearly enough in the incident of the all
too famous Uriah letter (2 Sam. xi. 14). The same
is true in the time of Isaiah, as indicated in the pas-
sage, speaking of the condition of Assyria after the
divine judgment, "And the remnant of the glory of
Assyria shall be small, that a little child might record
it" (x. 19), that is, make a list, an inventory of it.
And the fact that the judicial procedure at the time
of this great prophet was documentary, as is the
case in the Orient at the present day, is proved by
the circumstance that Isaiah characterizes unjust
judges as "writers that write perverseness" (x. 1).
At a peculiarly important crisis of his prophetic
activity he is required to take a tablet before wit-
nesses, on which he is to write "with human pencil,"
that is, in the common cursive hand, the mysterious
words "The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth." And
along with this, the oldest monument of Hebrew
writing known to us, the Mesa stone of Dibon,
erected by a contemporary of the prophet Elijah,
exhibits so distinctly and perfectly the characteris-
tics of cursive script as to demonstrate the existence
in Israel of a long-practiced art of writing.
But the Old Testament nowhere gives the slightest
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 91
hint of public schools or of professional teachers.
The attempt has been made to find in a very obscure
passage of Isaiah, xxviii. 9-13, an allusion to in-
struction in reading of written characters imparted
by a teacher. The defiant and conceited princes of
Jerusalem are not willing to be treated like school-
boys by Isaiah, as we would express the idea, but
Isaiah has nothing to say of a public school and of
methodical instruction in the reading of manuscript
imparted there. Hence we must assume, since the
art of writing was widely cultivated, that writing
reading, and reckoning were taught in ancient Israel
at home and by the father alone, that no school
interposed its disturbing and hostile influence be-
tween the child and its parental house; nevertheless
they thrived excellently without it, and it is easy to
imagine how such a close association of children
and parents, to whom the parental house was every-
thing, must needs bring to family life a warmth and
to the feeling of solidarity a permanence, of which
we people of modern times have as yet no notion,
for the dominant tendency of our time is to reduce
the sphere of home and family bit by bit and to
make of man nothing but a mere figure in the census
reports and the tax rolls.
And now I must give answers to two questions
which have perhaps been busying the attention of my
readers, and especially the ladies, for some time:
What of the mother and what of the daughters?
Hitherto only son and father have been spoken of.
What position in the education of the children and
92 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
what influence upon it did Israel ascribe to the
mother ? And what did they think of the education
of girls? First of all we must frankly admit that
the mother appears in only a single, and that a very
obscure, passage as consciously participating in the
education of the children. In the Proverbs of Solo-
mon, there is to be found near the end of the book
a little collection of sayings, xxxi. 1-9, with the
special heading: The Words of Lemuel, the King
of Massa, Which his Mother Taught him. Other-
wise the mother is indeed mentioned along with the
father, but always in the second place. "Listen to
the commandment of thy father and despise not the
instruction of thy mother" (Prov. i. 8). And the
following passage in Proverbs is especially charac-
teristic : "When I was a son unto my father, tender
and only beloved in the charge of my mother, then
he taught me and said unto me" (iv. 3-4). Here, in
poetic parallelism, the mother is mentioned first, one
may say for propriety's sake, but after that she is
utterly ignored : it is the father alone who teaches and
educates. That this is nothing accidental is proved
by the comparison of two very similar poetical pas-
sages, one German, the other Israelitish. We have a
eulogy of the virtuous housewife in The Song of
the Bell, and we also have one in the Proverbs of
Solomon, xxxi. 10-31. Now in our Schiller we
find directly that
"She ruleth wisely
Her sphere of home,
The maidens training,
The boys restraining."
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 93
In the much longer biblical eulogy of the virtuous
housewife we find no word of this: she is depicted
as one who takes excellent care of her husband and
his household and keeps everything in the best con-
dition, but of the children and of her domestic con-
trol as mother, not a word! Toward the end, in-
deed, there is found the very beautiful expression:
"She opens her mouth with wisdom and under-
standeth kindly instruction" (xxxi. 26), but this is
put in very general terms and comes in quite acci-
dentally. We meet here an undeniable and very
surprising fact. Not, indeed, that the Old Testa-
ment is altogether lacking in appreciation of mother
love. When, for instance, we read in the First Book
of Samuel how Hannah, the mother of the prophet
Samuel, visits her son, who is dedicated to the sanc-
tuary, once a year at the time of the harvest festival
in the temple at Shiloh, and brings to him a suit of
clothing made by herself, it moves our heart to its
depths. To express the highest degree of sadness
the Psalmist says (xxxv. 14) : "Like one who is
mourning for his mother." Repeatedly the love of
God is compared with the love of a mother, and
perhaps nothing more beautiful and touching was
ever written than the word of the prophet: "As a
man whom his mother comforteth" (Isaiah Ixvi.
13). It is not, "As a son whom his mother com-
forteth," but "As a man" For even a man, proud
and conscious of his strength, has moments when
only a mother can restore and comfort him.
If then, despite this warm appreciation of mother-
94 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
love, the mother is slighted in comparison with the
father in the very realm which our modern notion
regards as her peculiar domain, we must assume
that it was a conscious purpose in Israel that placed
the education absolutely in the hands of the father,
and we can, moreover, recognize this purpose else-
where. It was desired that the training should be
serious and severe, not the coddling of a "mother's
pet," but a school for life, and this they felt could
be better given the child by the father who knew life
because he stood in the midst of it.
And certainly it would be very salutary for the
present day if fathers devoted themselves more to
their children and their children's education, and we
must surely hold to this as an ideal requirement. At
the same time we will not forget that such condi-
tions are possible only in a patriarchal state which
knows nothing of special callings and professional
work. It is a matter of course that we cannot de-
mand of a modern father who labors day after day
in his office or his counting-room all that was done
and could well be done by the father in ancient
Israel.
And what of the daughters? First of all I must
discuss some passages of Luther's Bible translation
where "daughters" are mentioned. In the so-called
Sayings of Jacob, Genesis xlix., where Luther trans-
lated in the sayings about Joseph, "His daughters go
about the management" (of the house?), ("Seine
Tochter treten einher im Regiment"), this is simply
a very queer misunderstanding of what is to be sure
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 95
a very difficult passage, which is speaking of grape-
vines and not of daughters. And in the famous
parable of the Prophet Nathan regarding the one
lamb of the poor man, where it is said, "It did eat
of his own morsel and drink of his own cup and
slept in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter"
(2 Sam. xii. 3), this gives us the impression that
it is intended to express a greater degree of tender-
ness than if it had said, "It was unto him as a son."
But the lamb is in Hebrew of the feminine gender :
the passage is strictly : "She was unto him," so that
there was nothing to do but to add, "a daughter."
For our sense of language the only correct transla-
tion would be, "And it was unto him as a child."
And when Luther translates in the eulogy of the
virtuous woman, Proverbs xxxi. 29, "Many daugh-
ters bring wealth," many a Bible reader with a wealth
of daughters may have shaken his head incredu-
lously over the passage and thought to himself : that
relentless realist Jesus Sirach certainly knew life
better. For in an exceedingly drastic disquisition,
much too drastic for our sensibilities, he shows
that a daughter is a very questionable treasure which
keeps the poor father awake of nights with anxiety
(xlii. 9-14). Now the passage in question in Prov-
erbs of the many daughters who bring wealth,
should read, "There are indeed many excellent
maidens."
As to the education of daughters, there is in the
entire Old Testament only a single utterance, and
that in Jesus Sirach, but a very striking one: "If
96 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
thou hast daughters, train them to walk virtuously,
and regard them not too tenderly. If thou dispose
of a daughter in marriage, thou hast done a good
work, but give her to a man of understanding" (vii.
24-25 1 ). That is all that we have on the subject.
Of course the religious instruction was given to the
daughters also, yet in addition they received in-
struction in domestic work, which of course was
taught by the mother.
But as for education in the special sense of the
word, viz., writing, reading and arithmetic, we have
neither direct nor indirect information on the sub-
ject. For even though Queen Jezebel in the familiar
account of Naboth writes a letter to the elders of
Jezreel and seals it with the seal of King Ahab
(1 Kings xxi. 9), we cannot conclude from this
alone that girls in general could read and write.
And we have a classic illustration of the view of the
later Orient on this subject. An exceedingly popu-
lar variety of literature is what is known as the
literature of apothegms, in which are collected max-
ims, opinions, sententious sayings of famous men,
chiefly Greek philosophers. These apothegms are
found throughout the entire Orient in translations
and the greatest variety of versions, so that we may
fairly regard their contents as typical. And among
these apothegms the following story is told of the phi-
losopher Diogenes : One day seeing some one teaching
a girl to write, he said, They are dipping her arrows
in poison! That means a vigorous and thorough-
1 In Luther's Bible verses 26-27.
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 97
going hostility to all feminine education, and this the
Oriental clearly regarded as wise and correct. For
the Oriental has never been able to rise to the recog-
nition of the equal rights of man and woman, or
even of an equal humanity in them. And in this
respect the Israelite is Oriental. In the Talmud we
find three times the saying: "Well for him whose
children are boys; woe to him whose children are
girls !" In the Old Testament there is indeed noth-
ing like this directly expressed, but without doubt
this is what the Israelite of old thought.
The Koran also furnishes instructive material on
this point. The heathen Arabs worshiped chiefly
three feminine divinities, who are called daughters
of Allah ; for they were fond of conceiving all
higher powers as feminine. Mohammed attacks
this habit of thought with the following drastic
argumentum ad hominem: "Is it not true that ye
wish to have sons ; and should God have daughters ?
And if the birth of a daughter is announced to one
of you, then his face is o'erclouded with trouble,
and he suppresses his desperation only with diffi-
culty, and hesitates to appear in public because of
the bad news that has come to him, and he is in
doubt whether to bring her up to his own disgrace
or rather to bury her in the earth!" (Surah 16,
verses 59-61 ). The exposure and murder of newly-
born girl children is of course a widespread custom,
of which the prophet Ezekiel must have known, for
in the famous sixteenth chapter of his book he
describes Jerusalem as a new-born, castaway Bed-
98 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
ouin girl, that lies moaning and weltering in her own
blood by the wayside, where God finds her and takes
her up, and then tends lovingly and rears to maturity.
Not that Ezekiel meant to ascribe such an abomin-
able practice to the ancient Israelites, for he also
says expressly, "Thy father was an Amorite and thy
mother a Hittite."
But in the passage cited, Mohammed speaks of
burying in the earth, and on this point our informa-
tion about the ancient Arabs furnishes us a horrible
illustration, for there was among them a custom
which is even not lacking in a certain grim humor
and probably presents in its unqualified brutality
the most peculiar of all solutions of the woman ques-
tion. If casting away in infancy did not accomplish
the desired result, and if there were still too many
girls in the community, then the fathers took the
unmarried daughters, decked them as brides and
buried them alive. That is the Oriental concep-
tion of the inferiority of women, who were really
regarded merely as a necessary evil. And in this
point Israel did not wholly break down the Oriental
barrier, and indeed it did not actually accept the
complete religious equality of men and women.
Attention has often been called to the fact that
in the priestly regulations of Leviticus the priest is
forbidden to defile himself by contact with the corpse
of his wife; that is, to perform the funeral lament
for her; at least, in the evidently very accurate list
of the persons for whom he may perform this service
the wife is lacking (Lev. xxi. 2-3). Judaism also
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN IN ISRAEL. 99
regarded the man as the sole bearer of religious
worship. The main space of the synagogue is used
exclusively by men, while the women, concealed in
the balconies are spectators rather than participants
in the worship. The obligation which rested upon
every mature male Israelite of reciting twice a day
the so-called schema, the elemental confession of
Judaism, is expressly designated as not valid for
women in a Mishnah of the treatise Berachoth, and
since the man thanks God expressly in the daily
prayer that he was created a man, of course man
and wife cannot even pray in concert. Hence we
need no longer be surprised if we find in the Old
Testament nothing of the education of girls.
Let me sum up. The ancient Israelite family
was an absolute monarchy based upon obedience,
and the father the absolute monarch in it. The
education of the children also lies entirely in his
hands. Training is strict, even harsh, the funda-
mental element of it being religion and its principal
aim the development of a religious personality. Even
the school instruction was given at home and by the
father ; whether the daughters received any share of
it we do not know.
These views precisely reverse everything that we
regard as natural and a matter of course. What
then shall we think of them? They are certainly
not the final word on the subject; the gospel of the
freedom of the children of God, in which there is
no distinction of male and female, is higher. But
let us not on that account despise them; for they
100 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
served their purpose, they stood the fiery test in a
very literal sense. If Israel has successfully out-
lived all its persecutions and all the blows of fate,
this has been possible only because every individual
household constituted a compact unit, which might
be destroyed but not broken up. And although much
about this institution, even perhaps the whole of it,
fails to secure our approval, yet I would like to call
attention to one very cogent fact. Our kindred
nation in distant South Africa, whose heroic strug-
gle for its freedom and existence for nearly three
years kept the whole world that has any heart in
a fever of hopeless hope, is a shining illustration
of the Old Testament sort of education. The Boers,
with their childlike trust in God and their naive
belief in the Bible, with their patriarchal conditions
and their old-fashioned institutions, are in the very
depths of their nature Old Testament people. And
what applies to the Boers holds good for Israel. The
Old Testament sort of education trained men and
heroes, perhaps not always lovable and sympathetic,
but whole men, armed for the battle of life and
steeled for martyrdom, greater heroes perhaps in
suffering and enduring than in action. An educa-
tion that can show such results and upon which the
blessing of God rested evidently for so many thou-
sand years, may certainly command our admiration.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.
MUSIC belongs to the inalienable rights of
man. It is the effort to make oneself in-
telligible to his fellow men by means of the stimu-
lation of sounds of all kinds. Music exists wher-
ever men are found upon the earth, and everywhere
they show a genuine refinement in the discovery
of means by which to originate sounds. There is
hardly anything which can not be brought into use
for its purposes.
We do not intend to lose ourselves here in specu-
lation upon the psychological reasons for this de-
monic impulse; we will be content simply to estab-
lish the fact and will not enter into it with regard
to humanity in general, but only in so far as the
people of Israel is concerned. Even with reference
to the Old Testament we will limit ourselves to what
the Old Testament itself can tell us about music and
musical things.
Many passages have proved very puzzling to
Bible readers. For instance when we read in the
heading of Psalm Ixxx, "To the chief Musician
upon Shoshannim-Eduth, A Psalm of Asaph"; or
in the heading of Psalm Ix, "To the chief Musician
upon Shushan-eduth, Michtam of David, to teach" ;
102 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
or in the heading of Psalm Ivi, "To the chief Musi-
cian upon Jonath-elem-rechokim, Michtam of Da-
vid" ; or when Psalms viii, Ixxxi, and Ixxxiv, bear
the inscription, "To the chief Musician upon Git-
tith"; or the three, xxxix, Ixii, and Ixxvii "to
Jeduthun"; we may certainly assume that we have
an explanation for these hieroglyphics in consider-
ing that they possess some kind of a musical char-
acter. 1 Accordingly it will be our task to gather to-
gether and to sift out the information given by the
Old Testament itself upon music and musical mat-
ters and then to see whether we can unite and com-
bine these scattered and isolated features into one
comprehensive picture or at least into a compara-
tively clear idea. It is only scattered and isolated
features which the Old Testament offers us and not
very much of them nor very abundantly. Not per-
haps because music had played a subordinate and
inconspicuous part in the life of ancient Israel, on
the contrary they must have been a people of an
unusually musical temperament whose daily nour-
ishment was song and sound. On this point the
Old Testament itself leaves little room for doubt.
1 Luther in his translation makes an attempt to translate
these "hieroglyphics," but the above quoted meaningless com-
binations of letters from the King James version hardly convey
less significance to the reader of to-day than his sentences:
"Ein Psalm Assaphs von den Spanrosen, vorzusingen" (Ixxx) ;
"Ein gulden Kletnod Davids, vorzusingen, von einem guldenen
Rosenspan zu lehren" (Ix) ; etc. Professor Cornill considers
the English translation "To the chief Musician" as preferable
to Luther's vorzusingen. The Polychrome Bible translates this
word "For the Liturgy," and interprets the succeeding clauses
as "the catch-word of an older song, to the tune whereof this
Psalm was to be sung." Tr.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 103
Everywhere and at all times were song and music
to be found in ancient Israel. Every festival occa-
sion, every climax of public or private life was cele-
brated with music and song. Just as Homer called
singing and string music "the consecration of the
meal," 2 so also in ancient Israel no ceremonial meal
could be thought of without its accompaniment of
either vocal or instrumental music. Marriage cere-
monies took place amid festive choruses with music
and dancing, and at the bier of the dead sounded
the wail of dirge and flute. The sheep were sheared
and the vintage gathered to songs of joy and dan-
cing and tambourine playing. The same was true
in public life. The election of a king or his corona-
tion or betrothal were celebrated with music; the
victorious warriors and generals were met upon
their return home by choruses of matrons and maid-
ens with dance and song. So Miriam spoke from
among the choruses of women who after the suc-
cessful passage through the Red Sea went out "with
timbrels and with dances" (Ex. xv. 20) ; in the
same way too, David was received by matrons and
maidens after his successful battle with the Philis-
tines (1 Sam. xviii. 6) ; and upon this custom is
founded the frightful tragedy of the story of Jeph-
thah, whose daughter hastened in the joy of her
heart to offer greeting and praise to her victorious
father, only to be met by death as the fulfilment of
his vow (Judges xi).
How great a place music occupied in the worship
datros.
104 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of ancient Israel is universally known. The entire
Psalter is nothing else than a collection of religious
songs which were sung in the temple worship where
the priests with their trumpets and the choruses of
music-making Levites stand before the eye of our
imagination. Especially by typical expressions do
we learn what a significance music had for the life
of the Israelitic nation. There is in Hebrew a
saying which characterizes what we would call be-
ing "common talk," "the object of gossip/' "on
everybody's tongue," in such a way as to indicate
ditties sung in ridicule. The Hebrew expression
neginah 3 means "string music," being derived from
the word nagan, 4 "to beat," "to touch," with special
reference to instruments, as in striking the chords.
In Psalm Ixix. 12, this word neginah is used in a
passage which literally reads : "I am the lute song
of drunkards." The Polychrome Bible translates
the passage: "I am the subject of wine bibbers'
ballads." In the same sense the word is used in
Job xxx. 9, with reference to the frightful fate that
had befallen him: "And now am I their song, yea
I am their byword." And in Lamentations we find
(iii. 14, 63), "I was a derision to all my people;
and their song all the day .... Behold their sitting
down, and their rising up; I am their music." Here
the word translated "song" and "music" is the
same in both instances. When Job's fortune changes
to evil he says (xxx. 31), "My harp also is turned
to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 105
that weep." The dreadful desolation of Jerusalem
after its destruction is described in Lamentations
with the words: "The elders have ceased from the
gate, the young men from their music" (v. 14).
Ancient Israel must have been recognized among
outside nations as well, as a particularly musical
people whose accomplishments in the art comprised
a definite profession. For this view we have two
extremely characteristic sources of evidence, one
from Assyrian monuments and one from the Old
Testament. In his account of the unsuccessful siege
of Jerusalem by the Assyrians in the year 701 B. C.
Sanherib tells us, according to the translation of
Hugo Winckler, that Hezekiah, king of Judah, be-
sides all kinds of valuable articles sent also his
daughters and the women of his palace together
with men and women singers to the great king at
Nineveh, while in the touching Psalm cxxxvii we
learn that the Babylonian tyrant demanded songs
of the Jewish exiles, to cheer them up : "Sing to us
your beautiful songs of Zion."
Jewish tradition has given expression to the fact
that music belongs to the earliest benefits and gifts
of the culture of mankind by establishing Jubal as
the inventor of music and father of musicians as
early as the seventh generation after the creation
(Gen. iv. 21). An important influence on the hu-
man heart was ascribed to music and it was em-
ployed to drive away the evil spirit of melancholy
when David played before the sick King Saul (1
Sam. xvi. 23). It was also used as a spiritual
106 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
stimulus by which to acquire prophetic inspiration.
In Samuel's time companies of prophets traversed
the land to the music of psalter and harp (1 Sam.
x. 5 ) , and so the Prophet Elisha to whom the Kings
Jehoshaphat and Jehoram applied for an oracle
from God, sent for a lute player, saying (2 Kings
iii. 15) : "But now bring me a minstrel. And it
came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the
hand of the Lord came upon him."
An art to which such a powerful influence was
attributed and to whose most famous masters the
greatest king of Israel belonged, must have been
zealously practised, and we will now undertake to
gain some idea of the cultivation of music in an-
cient Israel. To this end it will be most useful if
we will begin our investigation with what the Old
Testament says about musical instruments, of course
with express exception of the book of Daniel which
in its third chapter mentions a large number of
instruments, using their Greek names as naturalized
words; 5 for these prove absolutely nothing with
regard to ancient Hebrew music which at present is
our only consideration.
We may with equal propriety exclude singing
from our investigation. Song is such an especially
instinctive and spontaneous expression of the human
soul that its presence is established a priori. In
this connection the question might be raised with
regard to the construction of the tone system, but
this can not be answered without knowledge of the
8 ffvptyt, ffa/t/3i5/ci7, Kidapts, if/aXrripiov,
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 107
instruments employed. Only I will not neglect to
mention that as early as in the time of David pro-
fessional male and female singers provided music
during mealtime. David wished to take with him
to Jerusalem as a reward for fidelity the faithful old
Barzillai who had protected him at the time of Ab-
salom's rebellion. There he would be the daily
guest of the king; but Barzillai answered (2 Sam.
xix. 35), "I am this day fourscore years old; and
can I discern between good and evil? Can thy
servant taste what I eat or what I drink? Can I
hear any more the voice of singing men and singing-
women? Wherefore then should thy servant be
yet a burden unto my lord the king?" Solomon,
the Preacher, also delighted in "men singers and
women singers and the delights of the sons of men,
as musical instruments and that of all sorts" (Eccl.
ii. 8).
* * *
Musical instruments are usually divided into three
classes, percussive instruments, stringed instruments
and wind instruments, and we shall also follow this
division. Of these three classes the percussive in-
struments are the most primitive. They can not be
said to possess any properly articulated tones but
sounds only, and their single artistic element is
rhythm, which however is certainly the foundation
and characteristic of music according to the witty
utterance of Hans von Biilow, "In the beginning
was the rhythm."
Among percussive instruments the one most fre-
108 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
quently mentioned is the timbrel or tabret (in He-
brew toph 6 ) which corresponds exactly to our tam-
bourine. Often they were richly ornamented so
that they were frequently referred to as decorations.
In one of the most splendid passages of the prophet
Jeremiah we read : "Again I will build thee, and
thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel; thou shalt
again be adorned with thy tabrets, and shalt go
forth in the dances of them that make merry"
( Jer. xxxi. 4) . This passage is particularly character-
istic of the nature of the tabret in two respects ; first,
it usually appears in the hands of women (in all pas-
sages where tabret players are expressly mentioned
they are matrons and maidens) ; and secondly it
almost always appears in connection with the dance,
as being swung in the dance and marking its rhythm.
We can suppose it to have been undoubtedly played
by men only in connection with the music of the
companies of prophets in Samuel's time, for if we
read that these prophets came down from the sacred
highplace with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe,
and a harp before them (1 Sam. x. 5), we would
hardly think of the musicians who accompanied
these wild men and played the tabrets before them,
as women.
The second percussive instrument is the familiar
cymbal, which comes next to our mind in thinking
of the music of the Old Testament. With regard to
the nature and character of this instrument we can
gather all that is essential from the Bible itself. In
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 109
the first place the cymbal must have been constructed
of brass, for in the familiar passage, 1 Cor. xiii, 1,
the Apostle Paul writes according to the Greek text,
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not charity I am become as sound-
ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal." The Hebrew root
tsalal, 7 from which both words for cymbal are de-
rived, means "clatter," to give forth a sharp pene-
trating sound; and the word most frequently used,
metsiltayim* is in the dual form which is never used
in the Hebrew language in its purely grammatical
sense, but only in the logical sense of things which
occur in nature only in pairs. Now since a penetra-
ting and loud tone is repeatedly attributed to the
cymbals we may consider them as two metal plates
to be struck together (Fig. 4) ; that is to say, they
are the instruments which we know as cymbals and
which are known in German as Becken and in Ital-
ian as piatti, and which are most familiar to us in
military music in combination with a bass drum.
Two other percussive instruments are mentioned
of which one is still doubtful. The one which is
undoubtedly certain, mena'an'im 9 (2 Sam. vi. 5)
evidently comes from the root nua', 10 "to shake,"
and corresponds exactly to the Greek sistrum 11 con-
sisting of metal crossbars upon which hang metal
rings that are made to produce their tones by shak-
ing (Fig. 6). Accordingly in current language it
is the Turkish bell-tree, the cinelli, with which we
are familiar also through German military music.
10 yi:
110 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Then too an instrument called the shalish 12 is
mentioned in the hands of women together with
the tabret at the triumphal reception of David
upon his return from the conquest of the giant Go-
liath (1 Sam. xviii. 6). The word shalish being
derived from the same root as shalosh, the number
"three," we have been accustomed to identify it
with our modern triangle, but it is a question
whether we are justified in so doing. With this in-
strument we have exhausted the number of percus-
sive instruments mentioned in the Old Testament.
* * *
It might perhaps be more logical for us to follow
the percussive instruments at once with the wind
instruments, inasmuch as they are the most primi-
tive next to the percussive instruments because
horns of animals and reeds are nature's own gifts
to men, while strings made from catgut are a purely
artificial product. But as far as ancient Israel was
concerned the stringed instruments were by far the
most important. I will remind my readers once
more of the proverbial application of the word
string-music above mentioned.
Accordingly I will next consider the stringed
instruments, of which the Old Testament mentions
two, the kinnor, 13 and nebel. 14 That both were com-
posed of strings drawn across wood (Fig. 9) may
be proved, in so far as it needs proof, by the fact
that according to 1 Kings x. 12, Solomon ordered
certain instruments of this class intended for the
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. Ill
temple service to be made out of sandal wood, which
he had obtained during his famous visits to Ophir.
Of these two instrument the kinnor is the most im-
portant, but I will begin with the nebel because we
have the more definite tradition with regard to it.
When Jerome tells us that the nebel, whose name
became nabla 1 * and nablium in Greek and Latin,
possessed the form of a Greek Delta A, we thus
have the triangular harp indicated as plainly as
possible (Fig. 1). The only objection that can be
brought against this view, namely that we repeatedly
meet this instrument in the hands of dancers and
pilgrims, is not sound. In representations of ancient
Egypt, we also have harps so small that they could
easily be carried (Fig. 2), and the best commen-
taries have lately shown us Assyrian representa-
tions where pointed harps with the points at the
top and fastened with a band were likewise carried
in the hands of dancing processions (Fig. 10). If
the points of these Assyrian harps were regularly
at the top, this will explain to us better St. Jerome's
comparison with the Greek Delta which of course
has the point at the top.
Especially noteworthy among others is an Assy-
rian representation (Fig. 15) in which three pris-
oners are being led into exile by an Assyrian king,
and all three are playing four-stringed harps on the
march, but the harps are so turned that the broad
side is on top. It is quite possible that these figures
may represent captive Israelites.
112 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
There must have been several varieties of nebel
(e. g., Fig. 8). A harp of ten strings (dekachord)
is repeatedly mentioned 16 in clear distinction from
the usual ones which accordingly must have had
fewer than ten strings, perhaps four as in that As-
syrian sketch. An instrument of six strings is the
interpretation of many exegetists of the word shu-
shan 17 which Luther translates by Rosen in the
headings to Psalms xlv, Ix, Ixix and Ixxx. When
we read in Luther's Bible in the headings to Psalms
vi and xii, "to be rendered on eight strings," 18 this
is hardly an accurate translation of a musical term
with which we shall occupy ourselves later.
By far the most important stringed instrument,
on the other hand, is the kinnor. Its invention is
ascribed to Jubal, and we meet with it on every
hand in the most varied occasions. The exiles hung
them on the willows by the waters of Babylon (Ps.
cxxxvii. 2) and according to a passage in the book
of Isaiah, which to be sure comes from a much later
date, probably the Greek period, they are used by
harlots for the public allurement of men (Is. xxiii.
16).
For us the kinnor has indeed a conspicuous inter-
est and a particular significance in that it was the
instrument of King David, by which the son of
Jesse subdued the melancholy of King Saul, and
18 Ps. xxxiii. 2 ; xcii. 4 ; cxliv. 9.
"The Polychrome Bible here understands "in the eighth
[mode]" or key. The authorized version again resorts to a
transcription of the Hebrew, "On Neginoth upon Sheminith."
Dr. Cornill's view is given on page 123. Tr.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 113
which he played when dancing before the ark. We
are particularly fortunate in possessing an authentic
copy of this instrument on an Egyptian monument.
On the tomb of Chnumhotep, the Prince of Middle
Egypt at Beni Hassan in the time of Pharaoh Usur-
tesen II of the 12th dynasty, which can not be
placed later than 2300 B. C, a procession of Semitic
nomads is represented which Chnumhotep is leading
into the presence of Pharaoh in order to obtain the
royal permission for a dwelling place in Egypt. In
this procession a man who comes immediately be-
hind the women and children is carrying by a leather
thong an instrument which we can not fail to recog-
nize as the kinnor (Fig. 3, cf. also Fig. 5). It is
a board with four rounded corners and with a
sounding hole in the upper part over which eight
strings are stretched. The man picks the strings
with the fingers of his left hand while he strikes
them with a so-called plectrum, 19 a small stick held
in his right hand.
That the Israelites also played their stringed in-
struments partly with their fingers and partly by
means of such a plectrum we might conclude from
the two characteristically different expressions for
playing on strings : zamar 20 "to pluck," and nagan, 21
" to strike." All antiquity was unacquainted with
the use of bows to produce sound from stringed
instruments of any kind.
Hence the kinnor may first of all be compared
to our zither, except that it apparently had no hollow
114 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
space underneath and no special sounding board.
The stringed instruments as they are represented
in countless different varieties on Jewish coins
(Figs. 13 and 14) do not correspond either with
the nebel or the kinnor but much more closely re-
semble the Greek lyre 22 and therefore have little
value with reference to the Old Testament.
We might also consider the gittith a stringed in-
strument where the headings to Psalms viii, Ixxxi,
and Ixxxiv, read "upon Gittith." 23 But it is very
doubtful whether the word gittith 24 translates a
musical instrument and not rather a particular kind
of song or melody. In either case it will be better
not to confuse the temple orchestra of ancient Israel
with the gittith.
* # *
We have still to consider the wind instruments.
One of these whose invention is likewise ascribed to
Jubal is call the 'ugab. 25 Besides in Genesis iv. 21,
it is mentioned twice in the book of Job, and once
in Psalms cl, in which all instruments and every-
thing that hath breath are summoned to give praise
and thanksgiving to God (Ps. cl. 4; Job xxi. 12;
xxx. 31). This ( ugab has been regarded as a bag-
"Xfya.
"The Polychrome Bible comments: "We do not know
whether Gittith means 'belonging to the city of Gath/ which
probably had been destroyed before the Babylonian Exile, or
'belonging to a wine-press' (= Song for the Vintage?), or
whether it denotes a mode or key, or a musical instrument/'
Tr.
"rvro
25 DJiy It is translated in the authorized version by "organ,"
but in Ps. cl. 4, in the margin, as "pipe." Tr.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 115
pipe and we may be assured that it was a very primi-
tive instrument. It has been customary to translate
the word by "shawm"; Luther calls it "pipes"
(Pfeifen). But Mr. Phillips Barry 26 proves to my
satisfaction that the traditional rendering of 'ugab
as "bagpipe" rests upon an error. Just what the
'ugab is, however, Mr. Barry himself is not able
to say./
The j most important reed instrument, the flute,
we find referred to as khalilf 7 only in five passages :
with the" thundering music of the prophets (1 Sam.
x. 5) ; at the proclamation of Solomon as the suc-
cessor of David (1 Kings i. 40) ; twice in the book
of Isaiah, in connection with the dinner music of
the rich gluttons and winebibbers at Jerusalem (v.
12), and also "when one goeth with the pipe to
come into the mountain of the Lord" (xxx. 29) ;
and finally once in the book of Jeremiah as the in-
strument of mourning and lamentation, where we
read (xlviii. 36), "Therefore mine heart shall sound
for Moab like pipes." In this connection we are
reminded to some extent of the awakening of Jai-
rus's little daughter. When Jesus reached the house
of mourning he found there before him flute play-
ers and weeping women 28 (Matt. ix. 23; Mark v.
38).
38 See his brief article entitled "The Bagpipe not a Hebrew
Instrument" in The Monist, XIX, July, 1909, pp. 459-461.
27 ^5>n Translated in the authorized version by "pipe." Tr.
28 The English version speaks simply of "minstrels and the
people making a noise," without translating the kind of instru-
ment used. Tr.
116 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Of the construction of these flutes the Old Testa-
ment tells us nothing and leaves nothing to be in-
ferred, and yet we imagine that the khalil was not
a transverse flute but probably a sort of beaked
flute, thus corresponding much more closely to our
clarinet. We find the transverse flutes only in very
isolated cases on Egyptian monuments, while on the
other hand we find the beaked flutes regularly in an
overwhelming majority with the Assyrians, and in-
deed often composed of two tubes as was the com-
mon form among the Greeks ( Fig. 11). But nearer
than this we can not affirm anything with regard
to their use in ancient Israel.
We find animal horns mentioned twice among
wind instruments, as ram's horns, once indeed in
connection with the theophany of Sinai (Ex. xix.
13) and once at the capture of Jericho (Josh. vi. 5).
The term "horn," qeren, 29 for a musical instrument
comes under Greek influence again in the book of
Daniel. On the other hand in Old Testament times
only the two forms shofar 30 and hatsotserah 31 were
in common use. On the triumphal arch of Titus
(Figs. 16 and 17) and on two Jewish coins (Fig.
18) we have esthetic representations of the hatsot-
serah which was peculiarly the instrument of wor-
ship and was blown by the priests. According to
Num. x, two hatsotseroth (the word always occurs
in the plural in the Hebrew with one exception)
were to be fashioned out of silver by skilful handi-
work and there the priests made use of them to call
29 HP
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 117
together the people and to announce the feasts and
new moons. That these instruments in the ancient
temple were indeed of silver we learn also from an
incidental notice in 2 Kings xii. 13, in the reign
of King Joash. According to many pictures they
are rather long and slender and perfectly straight,
widening gradually in front into a bell mouth, hence
the very instruments which the pictures of ancient
art used to place in the hands of angels, and which
may best be compared with the so-called clarion of
ancient music, a kind of clarinet made of metal.
The wind instrument which is second in impor-
tance, the shofar, still plays a part in the worship
of the synagogue, but in the Old Testament, as far
as religious use is concerned it is far behind the
hatsotserah. According to Jerome the horn of the
shofar is bent backward in contrast to the straight
horn of the hatsotserah. It is especially the instru-
ment for sounding signals of alarm, for which pur-
pose it was widely used. According to law this
trumpet was to be sounded on the day of atonement
every forty-ninth year, the year of jubilee (Lev.
xxv. 9). There is a noteworthy passage in the book
of Isaiah where it says that on that day at the sound-
ing of the great trumpet (shofar) all the Jews scat-
tered and exiled throughout the whole world shall
come back to worship in the holy mount at Jerusa-
lem (Is. xxvii. 13) ; and this eschatological and
apocalytical passage has also become significant with
regard to the New Testament, for from it the Apos-
tle Paul takes the trump of the last judgment by
118 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
whose sound the dead will arise according to 1 Cor.
xv. 52, and 1 Thess. iv. 16. (Cf. also Matt. xxiv.
31.) According to the prophet Zechariah the Lord
of Sabaoth himself shall blow the trumpet (shofar)
at the last judgment (Zech. ix. 14).
Whether the ancient Israelites really played melo-
dies or signals in the natural tones of the bugle
or the signal trumpet we do not know. We have
only two characteristically different expressions for
the blowing on the shofar and hatsotserah, viz.,
"blow" 32 on the instruments and "howl" 33 on them.
By the first word is meant to make a noise by short
sharp blasts and by the last, by long drawn out ring-
ing notes. This is what we learn from the Old
Testament about musical instruments of ancient Is-
rael and their use.
* * *
The character of the music of ancient Israel we
must consider in general as merry and gay, almost
boisterous, so that it seemed advisable to refrain
from music in the presence of men who were ill-
tempered or moody. In the Proverbs of Solomon
xxv. 20, we have the expressive simile, "as vinegar
upon nitre so is he that singeth songs to an heavy
heart." Music served most conspicuously and was
of first importance in the joys of life as, for in-
stance, dinner music, dance music, and feast music,
so that the prophet Jeremiah speaks of it as the
voice of mirth and the voice of gladness (Jer. vii.
34; xvi. 9; xxv. 10; xxxiii. 11). Even ritual music
taka' * nn herfa
MUSIC IN THE OLD, TESTAMENT. 119
seems to have borne a worldly character in ancient
Israel, so that through the prophet Amos, God ad-
dresses the nation in words of wrath: "Take thou
away from me the noise of thy songs ; for I will not
hear the melody of thy viols" (v. 23). Amos uses
here exactly the same strong expression with which
Ezekiel (xxiii. 42) describes the singing of aban-
doned women in Bacchanalian orgies, and (xxvi.
13) the sound of harps in the luxurious commercial
center of Tyre.
Since in all ancient reports men and women sing-
ers are named together, it is therefore most prob-
able that women took part in the ritual service
of ancient Israel. A doubtful passage in Amos
should according to all probability be translated
"Then will the women singers in the temple howl"
(Amos viii. 3), and this circumstance may have es-
pecially aroused the anger of the puritanical and un-
taught herdsman of Tekoa. But that Amos may
have had a justifiable foundation for his repugnance
to the singing of women became clear to me when in
the spring of 1905 I attended the International Con-
gress of Orientalists at Algiers as official delegate
of the Prussian Government and had an opportunity
for the first time to hear modern Arabian music.
On the second evening of the Congress a lecture
was offered to us on "La musique arabe" illustrated
by concrete examples. At the left of the lecturer
was a group of male, and on the right a group of
female musicians, which at his signal performed
their corresponding parts. But since no provision
120 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
was made for reserved seats, then or at any other
session of the Congress, there ensued a battle of el-
bows in open competition, and the hall was much
too small for all the members of the Congress, which
seemed to be the chronic state of things in Algiers.
Hence with my particular gift always and every-
where to get the worst place, I was pressed against
the farthest wall, where it was necessary in this
instance to stand for two good hours wedged in a
fearfully crowded corner, and so, greatly to my
sorrow, many occurrences escaped me.
Still the impression of the whole was decidedly
striking, presumably because of the difference be-
tween male and female singing. Never did both
groups perform together in a mixed chorus (just
as Orientals do not recognize a dance between men
and women) but each group sang by itself. The
song and music of the men was very solemn and
dignified, in slow time without a distinct rhythm
or melodious cadence, but in a sort of recitative
(Sprechgesang) which is now in vogue in the latest
music. The music of the women was very different.
In their performance all was fire and life. They
sang in pronounced melody with sharply accentu-
ated rhythm in a passionate tempo, and they treated
the instruments upon which they accompanied their
singing with incredible expression. Not only throat
and fingers but the whole person in all its members
was engaged in making music. If we may imagine
the women who sang in ancient Israel entirely or
approximately like their modern feminine counter-
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 121
parts, it is easy to understand how a man like the
prophet Amos at the outbreak of such a band in the
temple at Bethel might have received the impression
of a "variety show" in church. And another thing
occurred to me in connection with the songs of those
women, that according to the language of music
they are all composed in minor, and indeed only in
the two scales of D Minor and A Minor, which with
their characteristic intervals in the case of the so-
called "church" keys have been named Doric and
Aeolic, so then we see that just as a deep meaning
often lies in the games of children, the familiar
German pun that the trumpets of the Israelites be-
fore the walls of Jericho were blown in the key of
D Minor (D moll) because they demolished those
walls, was not made entirely out of whole cloth.
This brings us quite naturally to the question
whether or not the music of ancient Israel had a
tone system and a definite scale. When even on the
earliest Egyptian and Assyrian monuments the
pointed harps have strings of constantly diminish-
ing length and the flutes have soundholes where the
players manipulate their fingers, it is absolutely
necessary for us to investigate this question, for
these pictorial illustrations testify to definite tones
of varying pitch and in that case a fixed scale must
have previously existed.
To be sure I must at the outset abandon one
means of determining this scale, and that is accent.
Besides the vowel signs our Hebrew texts have also
so-called accents which perform a threefold func-
122 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
tion; first as accent in its proper signification to
indicate the stress of voice, then as punctuation
marks, and finally as musical notation. This accent
also denotes a definite melisma, or a definite cadence
according to which the emphasized word in the in-
toned discourse of the synagogue (the so-called
niggun 34 ) was to be recited. The learned bishop
of the Moravian Brethren and counsellor of the
Brandenburg consistory, Daniel Ernst Jablonski, in
the preface to the Berlin edition of 1699 of the Old
Testament made under his patronage, undertook to
rewrite these accents according to the custom of the
Sefardim (that is, of the Spanish-Portuguese Jews)
in modern notes and has thus rewritten in notes one
long coherent passage in Genesis (xlviii. 15, 16),
which I sometimes have occasion to sing to my
students at college. But this niggun, as evidence
has lately been found to prove, is of Christian ori-
gin, an imitation of the so-called neumes, 35 used in
the Greco-Syrian communities of the Orient in re-
citing the Gospels, and accordingly has been handed
down from the church to the synagogue, and so for
ancient Israel and its music has no meaning; at
least directly, for the church was essentially under
Greek influence, and Greek music must not be identi-
fied with that of ancient Israel, nor must the latter
be constructed according to the former. The only
trace, although an uncertain one, in the Old Testa-
ment itself appears in the expression which I have
already mentioned, and which Luther translates "on
84 jj ** retf/uora.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 123
eight strings" (auf acht Saiten). But in Hebrew
the word is sheminith,* 6 meaning "ordinal number"
so that we must not translate "on eight" but "on
(or after) the eighth" Accordingly a musician
can hardly do otherwise than insert this "eighth"
in the familiar octave, the foundation of our tone-
system, and assume that the ancient Israelites also
had a scale of seven intervals so that the eighth
becomes the same note but placed an octave higher.
And this interpretation has also a support in the Old
Testament. Our principal source for the music of
ancient Israel is the biblical book of Chronicles
which has evidently been written by a specialist, a
Levitical musician of the temple, who offers us a
complete series of technical statements with regard
to ancient musical culture. So we read in one of
the most important passages (1 Chron. xv. 20, 21)
that a circle of temple musicians played upon the
nebel, the harp, al alamoth 37 literally translated
"after the manner of maidens," and another on the
kinnor, the lute, al hashsheminith, 3 * literally, "after
the eighth." By the designation "after the manner
of maidens" can only be meant the high clear voices
of women, that is to say soprano, and then it is of
course natural to see in the "eighth" the deeper
voices of the men an octave lower. If this combina-
tion is correct, and it is at least very promising, we
see clearly proven in it the existence of a scale of
seven intervals, even if we know nothing about the
particular intervals and their relation to each other.
124 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Another characteristic of the music of ancient
Israel is that it does not take into account pure in-
strumental music, the so-called absolute music, but
on the contrary regards instruments simply as ac-
companiment for singing. The usage of the lan-
guage is significant with regard to this point. The He-
brew calls instruments kele hashshir, 39 "instruments
of song" and calls musicians simply "singers"; for
it has long been observed that in the passages which
treat of singers in the proper sense a particular form
of the participle is always found, the so-called Kal, 4
while another participial form of the same root, the
so-called Polel, 41 designates musicians in general.
Accordingly Israel considers the essential nature and
the foundation of all music to be in song, in Melos.
And what an ingenious instinct, what an artistic
delicacy of feeling is given utterance in this desig-
nation! The end pursued by modern music is to
compress the living human voice into a dead in-
strument, while the great musicians of all times
have considered it their task rather to let the in-
struments sing, to put a living human soul into
the dead wood, metal, or sheepgut. Such was the
case with the people of Israel.
Likewise the music of ancient Israel knew noth-
ing of polyphony which is an abomination to Orien-
tals in general. And to be sure must not polyphony
be designated as a two-edged sword ? For counter-
point is commonly understood to come in exactly at
the point when the musician lacks melody and con-
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 125
ception. And what is even the most artistic poly-
phony of a Richard Strauss or a Max Reger com-
pared to the heavenly melody of the larghetto in
Mozart's clarinet quintet! What the chronicler
considers an ideal performance is stated in a charac-
teristic passage : "It came even to pass, as the trum-
peters and singers were as one, to make one sound
to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord"
(2 Chron. v. 13). Hence a single powerful unisono
is the ideal of the music of ancient Israel.
* * *
The passage of Chronicles above quoted, leads us
to the dedication of Solomon's temple. And since
Israel is the nation of religion, and as we are more-
over best informed by the chronicler just about
temple music, we shall in conclusion make an at-
tempt to sketch a picture of the temple music of
ancient Israel.
With regard to the orchestra of the temple, the
lack of wood-wind instruments is noteworthy. Even
the flute is mentioned only once in connection with
a procession of pilgrims (Is. xxx. 29 ), 42 but never
in connection with the worship proper.
Since the trumpets were reserved for the use of
the priests in giving signals at certain definite places
in the ritual, the temple orchestra consisted only of
stringed instruments, harps and lutes, so that the
42 The Polychrome Bible reads "Joy of heart like his who
sets forth to the flute to go to the mountain of Yahveh," but
in the authorized version the instrument is called "pipe" and
not "flute." Tr.
126 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
music of the temple is repeatedly called simply
"string-music," neginah. 43
And to these stringed instruments cymbals also
may be added. These three instruments, cymbals,
harps and lutes, are always mentioned in this order
as played by the Levites.
The Levites were again divided into three groups
after David's three singing masters, Asaph, Heman
and Jeduthun (sometimes Ethan). Since these
three names always occur in the same order we
are led to combine the corresponding systems and
to give to Asaph the cymbals, to Heman the harp,
and to Jeduthun the lute; and for the first and
third of these combinations we have corroborative
quotations : Once in 1 Chronicles xvi. 5, it is ex-
pressly mentioned as a function of Asaph, that he
"made a sound with cymbals"; and again in 1
Chronicles xxv. 3, Jeduthun is mentioned as he "who
prophesied with a lute." 44 This shows us how to
understand the heading of the three Psalms xxxix,
Ivii, and Ixxvii, "To Jeduthun." 45 These evidently
are to be accompanied only by Jeduthun with the
In the headings of Psalms iv, vi, liv, Iv, Ixi, Ixvii.
and Ixxvi. Cf. also Is. xxxviii. 20; and Hab. iii. 19.
44 The English version translates this also as "harp." Tr.
45 Wellhausen in his Notes to the Polychrome Edition of
The Book of Psalms thus explains the word which he trans-
lates as "for (or from) Jeduthun." Jeduthun like Korah
and Asaph, was the name of a post-Exilic guild of temple-
musicians. .. .Hence the Psalms may have been attributed to
them originally in just the same way that many German
hymns are attributed to the Moravian Brethren : they belonged
originally to a private collection, and subsequently found their
way into the common hymn-book." Tr.
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 127
lute, and this agrees with the grave and somber
character of the three psalms.
This indicates that even in the most primitive be-
ginnings there was an art of instrumentation which
took into consideration the timbre of the instru-
ments, and as a modern analogy we might point
out certain priestly passages in "The Magic Flute."
The wonderful effect of these passages rests on the
fact that Mozart neglected the common usage (which
would have combined two violins with a tenor and
bass viol in the string quartette) and left out the
violins, assigning the quartette exclusively to the
viols. But just here in this division of instruments
is a point expressly handed down by tradition,
which must appear strange to us: to Asaph who
is always mentioned in the first place and apparently
acts as the first orchestra leader, is assigned only
the ringing brass of the cymbals. But these cym-
bals apparently served the purpose of a baton in
the hand of a modern orchestra leader marking the
rhythm with their sharp penetrating tone and so
holding together the whole. The trumpets of the
priests were to serve the people as "a memorial
before God" (Numbers x. 9-10). Hence they are
in some measure a knocking at the door of God,
and apparently have the same function as the bell
at a Catholic mass in giving the people the signal
to fall upon their knees (2 Chron. xxix. 27-28).
The supposition has been expressed that the puzzling
selah in the Psalms, which undoubtedly had a mu-
sical liturgical sense and indicated an interruption
128 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of the singing by instruments, marked the places
where the priests blew their trumpets an assump-
tion which can be neither proved nor disproved.
What now is the case with regard to the temple
song which of course was the singing of psalms?
We learn from Chronicles that the later usage re-
moved women's voices from the service and recog-
nized only Levitical singers. In a remarkable pas-
sage (Ps. Ixviii. 25) which describes a procession
of the second temple the women still come into
prominence as "damsels playing with timbrels" but
ordinarily only male singers and lute players are
mentioned. But if Psalm xlvi, for instance, were
sung according to its inscription "after the manner
of maidens," 46 we must assume that the men sang
in falsetto, just as not so very long ago when
women's voices were in the same manner excluded
from the service of the Evangelical church, falsetto
was regularly practised and belonged to the art of
church music.
With regard to the melodies to which the Psalms
were sung, here again, as it seems, we have the same
process as in the German church songs. When we
find ascribed to the Psalms as melodies the words
"To the Tune of the Winepress," 47 Psalms viii,
Ixxxi, Ixxxiv; "To the Tune of Lilies," 48 Psalms
48 This part of the heading to Psalm xlvi, Luther translates,
"Von der Jugend, vorsusingen" ; the authorized English ver-
sion gives "a song upon Alamoth" ; and the Polychrome Bible
says "with Elamite instruments." Tr.
47 JVnafl ty if derived from f)3 winepress.
48 D wit? 5y
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 129
xlv, Ix, Ixix, Ixxx ; "To the Tune of The Hind of
the Dawn,"*> Psalm xxii; "To the Tune of The
Dove of Far-off Islands," 50 Psalm Ivi ; or according
to the somewhat doubtful interpretation, Psalm v,
"To the Tune of A Swarm of Bees/' 51 we can not
doubt that they originally were secular melodies,
folk-songs which found admittance into the wor-
ship of the people.
With regard to the arrangement of the temple or-
chestra the chronicler is again able to give us in-
formation. The singing Levites stood at the east end
of the bronze altar of burnt sacrifice (2 Chron.
v. 12) opposite the priests who sounded the trum-
pets (2 Chron. vii. 6) ; that is to say to the west of
them. This statement to be sure involves difficulties
since the whole temple was oriented from west to
east so that if the Levites stood before the altar
they must have obstructed the approach to its steps
and the priests were entirely concealed behind it.
But we must not on this account doubt the definite
statement of so competent an authority as the chron-
icler.
Of a musical liturgical service in the ancient tem-
ple we have two vivid descriptions : one from the
chronicler and one from Jesus Sirach. The chron-
icler gives us the following description of a Pass-
50 D^pm D$K njV y fa e D^>N being regarded as an error in
writing D^K
130 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
over in the first year of the reign of King Hezekiah
(2 Chron. xxix. 26-30) :
"And the Levites stood with the instruments of
David and the priests with the trumpets.
"And Hezekiah commanded to offer the burnt
offering upon the altar. And when the burnt offer-
ing began, the song of the Lord began also with the
trumpets, and with the instruments ordained by
David king of Israel.
"And all the congregation worshiped, and the
singers sang, and the trumpeters sounded : and all
this continued until the burnt offering was finished.
"And when they had made an end of offering, the
king and all that were present with him bowed
themselves, and worshiped.
"Moreover Hezekiah the king and the princes
commanded the Levites to sing praise unto the Lord
with the words of David, and of Asaph the seer.
And they sang praises with gladness, and they
bowed their heads and worshiped."
And Jesus Sirach says in describing the installa-
tion of Simon, a contemporary, as high priest,
(Ecclesiasticus 1. 15-21) :
"He stretched out his hand to the cup, and poured
of the blood of the grape, he poured out at the foot
of the altar a sweet-smelling savor unto the most
high King of all.
"Then shouted the sons of Aaron, and sounded
the silver trumpets, and made a great noise to be
heard, for a remembrance before the most High.
"Then all the people together hasted, and fell
MUSIC IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 131
down to the earth upon their faces to worship their
Lord God Almighty, the most High.
"The singers also sang praises with their voices,
with great variety of sounds was there made sweet
melody.
"And the people besought the Lord, the most
High, by prayer before him that is merciful, till the
solemnity of the Lord was ended, and they had
finished the service.
"Then he went down, and lifted up his hands
over the whole congregation of the children of
Israel, to give the blessing of the Lord with his lips,
and to rejoice in his name.
"And they bowed themselves down to worship the
second time, that they might receive a blessing from
the most High."
Here we see art inserted organically in the whole
of the service; music too, like the swallow, had
found a nest on the altar of the Lord of Hosts
(Psalm Ixxxiv. 3).
From such descriptions we comprehend the en-
thusiastic love and devotion of the Israelite for his
temple where everything that was beautiful in his
eyes was consecrated and illumined by religion,
where he "might behold the beautiful worship of
the Lord," as Luther translates Psalm xxvii. 4, in-
correctly to be sure, but most comfortingly; 52 and
music has contributed the richest share in making
this "beautiful worship of the Lord."
"The authorized version has simply "the beauty of the
Lord." Tr.
132 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Both the secular and temple music of ancient
Israel have long since died out in silence. Not one
tone has remained alive, not one note of her melo-
dies do we hear, but not in vain did it resound in
days of old. Without temple music there would
be no temple song; without temple song, no Psalms.
The Psalms belong to the most precious treasures
among the spiritual possessions of mankind; these
we owe to the music of ancient Israel, and in them
the temple music of ancient Israel continues to live
to-day and will endure for all time.
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERA-
TURE.
PSALMS and universal literature! 1 Two great
and significant expressions ! Two mighty and
heart-stirring facts! We Germans especially cannot
fail to feel pride and joy when we speak the phrase
"universal literature/' for the phrase and the idea
originated on German soil, are the fruit of the Ger-
man mind, j The phrase, as is known, comes from
Goethe, the most universal genius of Germany and
perhaps of mankind ; but the idea we owe to Herder.
Goethe himself frankly declared this in five fine stan-
zas composed in honor of Herder. I cannot forbear
quoting them because they are among the less fa-
miliar of Goethe's compositions, and because they
develop in a manner quite classic the idea of uni-
versal literature. In a masque for the 18th of De-
cember, 1818, the Ilm is represented as introducing
the four literary princes of Weimar : Wieland, Her-
der, Goethe, and Schiller, and characterizes Herder
as follows:
1 Weltliteratur. The translation is not quite adequate ; but
the German has the advantage of us with his beautiful words :
Weltgeschichte, Weltgerlcht, Weltliteratur.
134 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
A noble man, and eager to discover
How everywhere the human spirit grows,
Harks for the word or tone the wide world over
That in its songs from countless sources flows,
Through earlier and through later ages wending,
His ear to every region's voices lending.
And thus he hears from nation sung to nation
What has touched each man in his native air,
And hears repeated in naive relation
What grandsires gave to sires of good and fair,
Amusement and instruction both revealing
As though 'twere all but one man's act and feeling.
Whate'er casts down the soul, whate'er upraises,
Quickly confused and carelessly combined,
One thought for each, a thousand words and phrases
From Eden to the present have defined.
Thus chants the bard, saga and song renew it,
We feel it all as though we had lived through it.
If the black cliffs and overclouded heaven
To pictures here of gloomy woe constrain,
The sun-kissed vault by jubilant songs is riven
Of rapt souls yonder on the open main;
Their will was good, what everywhere should woo man
They too desired : the universal human. .
Where'er concealed, his was the art that found it,
In serious guise, or masked for lightsome game,
Humanity,* in loftiest sense to ground it
For future times be our eternal aim !
O would his spirit now might see them leave us,
Healed by humanity, the plagues that grieve us !
[Ein edler Mann, begierig, zu ergriinden,
Wie uberall des Menschen Sinn erspriesst,
Horcht in die Welt, so Ton als Wort zu finden,
Das tausendquellig durch die Lander fliesst;
Die altesten, die neusten Regionen
Durchwandelt er und lauscht in alien Zonen.
8 Menschlichkeit assumes here, of course, much of the second
sense of humanity, i. e., humaneness.
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 135
Und so von Volk zu Volke hort er singen,
Was Jeden in der Mutterlust geruhrt,
Er hort erzahlen, was von guten Dingen
Urvaters Wort dem Vater zugefiihrt.
Das Alles war Ergetzlichkeit und Lehre,
Gefuhl und That, als wenn es eines ware.
Was Leiden bringen mag und was Geniige,
Behend verwirrt und ungehofft vereint,
Das haben tausend Sprach- und Redezuge
Vom Paradies bis heute gleich gemeint.
So singt der Barde, spricht Legend' und Sage;
Wir fiihlen mit, als waren's unsre Tage.
Wenn schwarz der Fels, umhangen Atmosphare
Zu Traumgebilden diistrer Klage zwingt,
Dort heiterm Sonnenglanz im offnen Meere
Das hohe Lied entziickter Seele klingt:
Sie meinen's gut und fromm im Grund, sie wollten
Nur Menschliches, was Alle wollen sollten.
Wo sich's versteckte, wusst' er's aufzufinden,
Ernsthaft verhiillt, verkleidet leicht als Spiel,
Im hochsten Sinn der Zukunft zu begriinden :
Humanitdt sei unser ewig Ziel.
O, warum schaut er nicht in diesen Tagen
Durch Menschlichkeit geheilt die schwersten Plagen!]
Herder, you know, was an East Prussian, and
since I have become acquainted with East Prussia
through my own observation, I am inclined to re-
gard it as not a mere matter of chance that it was
an East Prussian mind that first developed the idea
of universal literature. For East Prussia has pecu-
liar ethnographic conditions such as are found no-
where else in Germany. Here, among and along
with the Germans, dwell two other races of distinctly
marked individuality and of great poetic endow-
136 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
ment, the Poles and the Lithuanians, and Herder's
native town, Mohrungen, is situated in close prox-
imity to the wholly Polish province of Ermland,
which in his day still belonged politically to the
kingdom of Poland. As a result of these early
impressions, and of the similar conditions in Riga,
where he spent the next five years after finishing
his studies at Konigsberg, his ear could not fail to
become sensitive to the peculiarities of national
tones, while his eye was opened to what was com-
mon in national characteristics, to the purely human.
Moreover, Herder had the gift of catching the
utterances of nations in their most individual and at
the same time most purely human manifestations, in
the spontaneous expressions of their racial peculiar-
ity. Herder has a marvelous eye and a unique sense
for racial peculiarities ; he is in truth the discoverer
of the race-soul. Whether dealing with Esthonians
or Persians, with Lithuanians or Spaniards, with
Scots or Israelites, with equal insight Herder recog-
nizes and understands their innermost emotions, and
finds in their popular literature their poetic echo
and their artistic self-revelation. All humankind is
to him a gigantic harp in the hand of God, each na-
tion constituting a string and producing a distinct
tone, and all together, when touched by the hand of
one divine master, joining in a jubilant accord of
everlasting harmonies; for the same God enables
them all to give utterance to their sorrows and their
joys. This is all that they say, each in the tone given
by God.
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 137
How Herder, through his way of looking at the
matter, made an epoch in the appreciation of the
sacred literature of Israel, I may assume to be gen-
erally known. While before it had been regarded
solely as the supernaturally revealed word of God,
the human factor wholly ignored, and while the
father of the historical treatment of the biblical
books, the aged Johann Salomon Semler in Halle,
could see in the Old Testament nothing but the un-
edifying literature of an untutored people, Herder
taught that it was the artistic product of the intellect
of the Hebrew nation and at the same time a relig-
ious monument, and thus in a certain sense he re-
discovered it for his contemporaries and for all suc-
ceeding generations and revealed its nobility. Who-
ever occupies himself to any extent with the sacred
literature of Israel, and whoever loves it, owes to no
one greater gratitude or sincerer admiration than
to Johann Gottfried Herder.
A providential dispensation brought this seer and
prophet into closest intimacy with Goethe at the
most critical and important period for the latter,
when the springtime of his life was expanding within
him, "and all the buds were swelling." As a matter
of course, in the case of Goethe's far richer and far
more comprehensive genius, such suggestions fell
upon fruitful ground. He could not fail to see in
the poetic activity of the various nations "a dance
of spheres, harmonious amid tumult," as he ex-
presses it in the poem entitled "Universal Litera-
ture." He found for the fact the expressive name
138 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
"Universal Literature" (W ' eltliteratur) . Whatever
beautiful and permanent work a man or a nation
has achieved has been wrought not solely for this
man or that nation, but for humanity, for the whole
world. Before the universal power of poetry and
beauty all national barriers fall, the bounds of its
influence extend as far as poetry and beauty reach,
that is to say, wherever human hearts beat.
But this phrase coined by Goethe is used in a
double sense, both as the confirmation of a fact and
as a critical judgment. It is true that all the imag-
inative productions of mankind together constitute
universal literature as the imaginative manifestation
of the human mind. This imaginative manifestation
is innate to it, is part of its very nature, blows
whither it listeth, being restricted to neither nation-
ality nor race. Yet only a small number of poetic
geniuses, indeed, only certain of their works, may
be said in a special sense to belong to universal lit-
erature.
And what do we mean when we pronounce such
a judgment?
We mean that these works not only have a sig-
nificance for their nation, but that they belong to
the world. Of course these are only the most prom-
inent productions of the individual literatures, the
most immortal creations, in which poetic genius has,
so to speak, excelled itself, just as in a mountain
panorama to one standing at a distance the lower
mountains combine and blend into a compact and
formless mass, while plastic and individual effects
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 139
are produced only by the highest peaks, which tower
like monarchs and in solitary majesty into the bright
blue of the ether, kissed by the very first breath of
the dawn while night still spreads her dusky pinions
over hill and valley, and flushed by the last rays of
the setting sun while deep twilight has already set-
tled upon the earth. That is what we mean when
we speak of universal literature, when we ascribe
to a poetic product a place in universal literature.
And what are the claims that support this posi-
tion?
That such works must be finished works of art is
so much a matter of course that it need scarcely be
said ; for in every art only the finished has any claim
to permanence. The essential qualifications for a place
in universal literature have been shown plainly and
clearly by Goethe in the already quoted poem to
Herder,
"what everywhere should woo man
They too desired, the universal human."
The content of such works must be universally hu-
man. They must arouse in us feelings which apper-
tain to every human being as such, no matter in
what zone or among what people he was born ; they
must be international in the preeminent sense of the
word. But Goethe mentions a second essential requi-
site in the words they sing,
"What has touched each man in his native air."
Such works must also be national in the pre-
eminent sense of the word, must be characteristic
140 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
of the nation which gave them birth, and must at
the same time be the highest and purest artistic self-
revelation of its special individuality.
There is scarcely anything on earth more sacred
and divine than the individuality of man or of na-
tion; it is the first and indispensable duty of either
to live out and develop it. Just as, in Ruckert's pro-
found saying, the rose adorns the garden by adorning
itself, even so with man. The individual and the
individual nation become valuable members of hu-
manity precisely in so far as they develop their own
distinct peculiarities, which could be developed in
just the same way by no other man and no other
people.
Accordingly the intellectual products that belong
to universal literature must be finished works of art,
representing in a specifically and distinctly national
form a purely and universal human content, so that
such a work could be produced in this manner only
by the very people from which it comes.
After thus surveying the ground let us approach
the treatment of our theme. This will develop in
two directions. We must ask (1) Do the Psalms
belong to universal literature at all in the preeminent
sense intended by us? And if we answer this ques-
tion affirmatively, then (2) What is the significance
of the Psalms in universal literature?
Pray do not consider it pedantry, or even quite
superfluous, if I ask first: Do the Psalms belong to
universal literature at all? Wide distribution alone
is no criterion. The Koran, for instance, can rival
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 141
the Bible in the matter of wide distribution, for it
is the bible of 200,000,000 human beings in Europe,
Asia, and Africa; yet for my part I would never
include the Koran in universal literature. True, it
is national in a preeminent sense, a most typical ex-
pression of the peculiar combination of dry, sober
reason and luxuriant, sensually glowing imagination
which constitutes the national character of the Arab.
But the Koran never got beyond the national, and
rises to the height neither of the purely human nor
of the finished work of art. The hopelessly dull
prose portions and the over-ornate poetic pieces are
unedifying to any but an Arab, unless he is con-
strained by religious considerations to regard this
book as a divine revelation.
But the case is different with the Psalms. True,
the one hundred and fifty different songs of which
the collection consists are not all of equal value and
significance. In the familiar expression of Horace,
even Homer sometimes nods, and thus a weak verse
or a dull episode creeps into his work. But we judge
and estimate a poet or a literature by its best, and
no competent critic who knows the Psalms will
deny that among them are a considerable number of
the finest and noblest things in all lyric poetry.
Moreover, almost any one will admit that the
Psalms are products of the specific Israelitic intel-
lect, and characteristic for the people of Israel. In
what other literature, indeed, have we anything like
them? True, poems have recently been found in
cuneiform literature which have an undeniable re-
142 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
semblance to the Psalms. They are constructed
with that peculiar parallelism of members, that
thought-rhythm, which we know in Israelitic poetry,
and even in the phraseology there is much that in-
voluntarily suggests the language of the Psalms.
But any one who should even remotely match these
Assyrian and Babylonian psalms with the Hebrew,
or undertake a serious comparison of the two, would
thereby testify to his own literary incompetence.
The very similarity of form and superficial features
make us doubly conscious of the entire difference
in spirit and content, just as one becomes fully
aware of the whole greatness, nobility and incom-
parableness of Goethe's "Hermann und Dorothea"
only by a comparison with Voss's "Luise."
But do the Psalms rise to the height of the purely
human ? Or must we not finally on the most impor-
tant point judge them as we did the Koran? The
Psalms are religious poems, the classical expression
of the religion of Israel, and the question is finally
reduced to the more important and vital one : Is the
religion of Israel merely one conditioned and lim-
ited by its nationality, or has it a significance for the
world, for mankind?
There are not a few, especially in our day, who
unqualifiedly deny it this importance, and propose
at the best to let it stand as a more or less interesting
curiosity which belongs entirely to the field of his-
tory. And they offer reasons for this view. The
sacred literature of Israel is said to contain un-
worthy conceptions of God. Certain it is that the
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 143
Old Testament speaks of God in a very human
fashion, when it tells how God walked at eventide
in the Garden of Eden, how he closed the door of
Noah's ark with his own hands, how he visited
Abraham under the oaks of Mamre, and showed
only his back to Moses, since the sight of his face
is fatal to man. It attributes to God human form
and human emotions, and in one passage of the
Psalms we even read the unparalleled figure : "Then
the Lord awakened like one out of sleep, like a
mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine."
(Psalms Ixxviii. 65.) But one who takes offence
at such expressions and regards them as demeaning
to God only proves thereby that he lacks apprecia-
tion for religion and poetry. What appears to our
local prejudice a defect in the Old Testament is in
truth its chief strength and its highest claim to fame ;
for this is only a consequence of the fact that the
religion of Israel took seriously the fundamental
requisite of all religion the requisite of a personal
God.
Religion is the most personal matter in the uni-
verse, the surrender of one's own self to a higher
being, not in order to lose oneself, but to find one-
self, in order to receive oneself again from this
higher being in the transfigured and more perfect
form which an inner voice tells us corresponds to
the deepest and truest essence of our self. Such a
reciprocal giving and receiving, such a mutual re-
lationship, is possible only between persons. We
can just as little enter into a personal relation with
144 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
a mere abstraction, a pure idea, as the feeling of love
in the highest sense, such as pervades a man with
irresistible power, lends wings to his soul and lifts
him out of himself, is conceivable toward a statue,
be it ever so true to life, or even much more beauti-
ful and noble than any earthly being of flesh and
blood. The famous phrase of the poet:
"And full of bliss or full of sorrow,
Each heart needs a companion heart,"
applies not only to the relation of man to man, but
also to that of man to God.
Religion requires a God with whom man can enter
into a personal, loving relation of heart to heart, to
whom he can pour out his heart, to whom he can
pray. It is not merely accidental but very signifi-
cant, that David Friedrich Strauss, in his Old and
New Faith, having once surrendered the personality
of God, answers the second question, "Have we
still a religion ?" no longer unconditionally, but with
"That depends on how you understand it." The
center and soul of all religion, the belief in a per-
sonal God, is the pillar of the religion of Israel.
And it fathomed this truth with incomparable and
triumphant energy, and expressed it with incom-
parable poetic power.
But how is one to describe a personality or speak
of it otherwise than in the forms and according to
the manner of the only personality known to us,
the human? It is the wonderful secret of the Old
Testament, that, speaking in such a human fashion
of God, it simply brings him nearer to us without
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 145
detracting in the least from his divinity. One may
apply here the words of the poet :
" 'Tis bliss in his demesne to dwell
And every heart near him doth swell,
But loftiness and dignity
Forbid familiarity."
Yes, 'tis bliss in his demesne to dwell, and every
heart swells. He appears to us as a dear saviour
and helper, as a trusted friend and counsellor; but
familiarity, all irreverent approach is excluded, for
even in this dear and intimate form he remains
God, enthroned above this earthly sphere, to whom
its inhabitants are as grasshoppers, to whom the
nations are esteemed as a drop in the bucket and as
the fine dust of the balance. Thence it comes ac-
cordingly for me one of the strongest proofs of
the divinity of the religion of Israel that all who
have broken with the belief in a personal God honor
the Old Testament with their especial dislike, for
the God of Israel is not to be mocked; there is no
treating and bargaining with this mighty personal-
ity; he cannot be dissolved in any philosophic aqua
fortis or vaporized in any pantheistic retort; he is
the great I Am, the same yesterday, to-day and
forever, who speaks and it is done, who commands
and it comes to pass, who made the heavens by his
word and all the hosts thereof by the breath of his
mouth, who looketh on the earth and it trembleth,
who toucheth the hills and they smoke, who with-
draweth his breath and they perish and return to the
dust of which they were made.
146 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
But does not the Old Testament represent its God
as too human ? Does it not ascribe to him unattrac-
tive human qualities ? For among them wrath plays
a part, and there has been a great deal said about the
wrathful God of the Jews, and this meets one con-
stantly where the purpose is to disparage and dis-
credit the religion and the sacred literature of Israel.
True, the Old Testament speaks much and often
and not infrequently in very strong terms of the
wrath of God. In one Psalm it is said :
"Then the earth shook and trembled, the foun-
dations also of the mountains moved and were
shaken because he was wroth. There went up
smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth
devoured : coals were kindled by it." (Psalms xviii.
7-8.)
This, to be sure, seems more like Moloch than
Yahveh. But let us look more closely. There is
nowhere such a multitude of errors as concerning
the wrath of God. What is wrath anyway? We
think we have an example of it when we see any one
scolding and ranting, railing and tearing, but such
a person is simply in a rage, and rage and wrath are
two different things. Genuine righteous wrath is
one of the divinest passions of which man is capable,
for it is the primal revolt of the divinity in man
against all that is low and mean, because in this it
perceives the degradation and desecration of his
true nature. It is well known that great and supe-
rior men never appear greater and more superior,
that their greatness and superiority never come more
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 147
directly in evidence than when they are wroth with
this genuine righteous wrath; how the figure seems
to tower, the eye flashes lightning to consume what
is mean with atoning and purifying flames, a spec-
tacle as grand and impressive as that of a thunder-
storm, in which man has always believed that he
heard most directly the voice of God. Wrath, in
fact, is one of the most essential qualities of the
divine image after which man was fashioned, and
can we expect it to be absent from the archetype?
The wrath of God is nothing else than the reaction
of the divine holiness against all that is unholy and
ungodly. For, as a passage of the Psalms has it:
"Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wicked-
ness; the evil man shall not sojourn with thee."
(Psalms v. 4.) A God lacking in this trait would
be like a man lacking in conscience. And to ascer-
tain the true opinion of the Old Testament of the
relation of this one trait to the complete conception
of God, we need only to consider the verse of the
Psalm (xxx. 5) : "For his anger is but for a moment.
His favor is for a lifetime; weeping may come in
to lodge at even, but joy cometh in the morning."
Those that are so stirred up over the wrathful
God of the Jews either do not know, or forget, that
the divine wrath is not only a Jewish but also a
Christian doctrine, so that all the stripes and kicks
bestowed upon the Old Testament on this account
fall equally upon the New Testament. And when
those that fancy themselves to have a monopoly
of Teutonic race consciousness, who hold up Sieg-
148 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
fried and Wotan against David and Yahveh, and,
impelled by their Teutonic race conscience and sen-
timent, testify against the wrathful God of the Jews,
we are really at a loss what to make of it. For the
wrath of God especially is a genuine and distinctly
Teutonic conception, for which the religion of the
Teutonic races coined a special word, calling the
wrath of the gods dsmodr (ass, a god, and modr,
wrath). The primitive Germans were far too keen
and vigorous in their feeling, too genuine and noble
children of nature not to conceive a militant and
triumphant idea of moral and ethical power.
When we read in the Edda how Thor, in order
to destroy the powers of darkness and give victory
to the good,
"When he saw the heavens with wickedness heavy,
Seldom he lingers when the like he looks on,"
now, as the Voluspa says, seizes his fearful ham-
mer in godlike wrath (dsmodi) and bravely smites
the terrible dragon, no one will deny that these are
similar views to those in Isaiah, where we read:
"And the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that
there was no judgment. And he saw that there
was no man, and wondered that there was none to
interpose : therefore his own arm brought salvation
unto him, and his righteousness, it upheld him. And
he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an
helmet of salvation upon his head; and he put on
garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad
with zeal as a cloak. According to their deeds
accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries,
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 149
recompense to his enemies .... So shall they fear
the name of the Lord in the west and his glory from
the rising of the sun." (Isaiah lix. 15-19.)
This too shows what a decided kinship there is
between the feeling of the Teutonic soul and that
of Israel, a fact that was first pointed out, so far
as I know, by a man whose name no one can men-
tion any longer in certain quarters without danger
of being stoned, I mean Heinrich Heine, who,
however, was right in this as in many other things.
And if in spite of all this the enemies of the Old
Testament should insist upon their case for with
unreason and unfairness the gods themselves con-
tend in vain and grow indignant still in their Teu-
tonic race temper at the wrathful God of the Jews,
well, then I profess myself on this point frankly
and unreservedly a Jew, and dwell in the serene
confidence that I am no worse a German and no
worse a Christian for all that.
ii.
But the contemners of the Old Testament dis-
cover in Hebrew literature, and especially in the
Psalms, not only theological defects but profound
ethical faults. On the one hand, where Israel is
concerned, an arrogant, impious self -righteousness
which approaches the Lord and demands reward of
him, on the other hand, where non-Israelites are
concerned, an inhuman, bloodthirsty temper which
knows only feelings of hatred and revenge, and
150 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
expects and even implores of God for this portion
of mankind only wrath and damnation.
First let me make a general prefatory remark:
that Israel also incurs the wrath of God and stands
in constant expectation of it, is expressed in the
Psalms themselves most clearly and most impres-
sively. And the judgments which the Psalmists hope
and expect are aimed in very considerable measure
not at the heathen, but at impious and apostate
Israelites. As for the undeniable expressions of
self -righteousness, if we are to judge justly we must
not forget that they are balanced by at least an
equal number of descriptions of the sinfulness and
corruption of the people, painted in the very highest
colors. So Israel did not flatter itself, nor try to
delude itself as to its own condition; indeed, we
cannot but admire its unsparing devotion to the
truth in this respect. And in this matter of self-
righteousness it should be observed further that
such expressions are not intended in a personal and
individual sense, but refer to Israel as a congrega-
tion, for the Psalms are the hymns of the congre-
gation, and the "I" which speaks in them is the
congregation. And was not Israel justified, when
it considered the night and darkness of the heathen-
ism round about it, in feeling a glad and grateful
consciousness of the gift of grace which it had re-
ceived in its revelation of God? Was it not ac-
tually justified, in view of the abominations of
heathendom, in speaking of its righteousness and
declaring that it had kept the commandments of the
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 151
Lord? Even the Christian church, in the so-called
Apostles' Creed, characterizes itself as the "Com-
munion of the Saints," and no Christian takes of-
fence at this, although he knows that this com-
munion by no means consists of saints alone, indeed
that there is not in it a single one who could be re-
garded as a saint when measured by the standard
of divine holiness.
Further there is absolutely no denying the ex-
pressions of unfriendliness toward others. For in-
stance, the sixty-ninth Psalm, and still more the
one hundred and ninth, contain a series of impreca-
tions upon the enemy which are surely not exem-
plary, and which we cannot wish to be the expres-
sions of the feelings of all men; and when at the
close of the one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm,
which begins so nobly and very impressively, the
wish is expressed that the enemy may seize the
children of the Babylonians and dash them to pieces
on the stones, we must see in this an animosity
which no one will venture to defend or excuse. I
would gladly have my right hand cut off if this one
verse were not in the Psalter. Later prophetic lit-
erature, too, furnishes disagreeable things in this
respect, and even the Jews themselves have justly
taken serious exception to the Book of Esther.
But here too it is after all but a matter of isolated
instances and tendencies which are offset by equally
strong ones of the opposite sort. How many Psalms
speak of the godless and the enemy with solemn
ethical earnestness, but without passion and ani-
152 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
mosity, wishing only that they may be confused
and brought to a recognition of their wickedness!
Indeed, can this unrighteous zeal for God be re-
buked better and more pointedly than in the precious
words of the thirty-seventh Psalm, which our glori-
ous Felix Mendelssohn used in his Elijah in order
to check the fiery zeal of Elijah by the mouth of an
angel : "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently
for him; and he shall give thee the desires of thy
heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also
in him and he shall bring it to pass. Cease from
anger and forsake wrath : fret not thyself, it tendeth
only to evil-doing"? (Psalms xxxvii. 7, 4, 5, 8.)
Indeed, even those undeniably offensive and painful
expressions, examined in the right light, are only
the defects of virtues, excesses and excrescences of
qualities in which the strength of the religion of
Israel consists. This staking of the whole person
for the cause of God, this complete surrender to it,
is the mighty power of the religious sentiment.
The Israelite sees his God persecuted, hated, op-
pressed, assailed, when he himself thus suffers, and
sees in the success of the wicked the failure of the
sacred cause of his God.
"Should not I hate them that hate Thee, O Lord?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them my
enemies," the language of the one hundred and
thirty-ninth Psalm, must be taken as the motto of
all this sort of expressions. It is never a matter of
personal hostility, but of the holy cause of God, in the
feelings of these singers, and even the evils which
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 153
they call down upon the enemy are only his own
sins which God is asked to let fall back as mis-
fortunes upon his head. Even where this judgment
of God appears in the form of the victorious wars
of Israel, it is never their own glory or their own
honor which they seek : "Not unto us, Lord, not
unto us, but unto thy holy name give the glory*"
(Psalms cxv. 1.) "I will not trust in my bow,
neither shall my sword save me; but Thou savest
us from our adversaries and puttest to shame them
that hate us." (Psalms xliv. 6, 7.) And what the
singers have to suffer they are conscious of suffering
for the sake of God and their faith : "For thy sake
are we killed all the day long; we are counted as
sheep for the slaughter," laments the singer of the
forty- fourth Psalm (verse 22), and in the much-
quoted Psalm of vengeance, the sixty-ninth, we
read : "O God, thou knowest my foolishness, and
my sins are not hid from thee. Let not them that
wait on thee be ashamed through me, O Lord God
of hosts : let not those that seek thee be brought to
dishonor through me, O God of Israel! Because
for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath
covered my face. For the zeal of thine house hath
eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that re-
proach thee are fallen upon me" (verses 5-9). Their
cause is also God's cause, and their honor God's
honor. Were the heathen, then, to be suffered to
shout continually in mockery, "Where is then your
God?" Often the singers express most touchingly
how difficult it is to restrain themselves and keep
154 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
still in the presence of this apparent defeat of the
cause of God, and amid the arrogant sneers of the
ungodly victors.
No, here too the root is not evil ; we have here only
the ferment of an unclarified vintage that has been
pressed from noble grapes. We all know that even
the sun has spots, and yet it is and always will be
to us the symbol of brightness and purity. So we
may admit that there are some dark spots in the
Psalms, and yet we may justly hold to their pre-
dominantly sunny quality; they offer us relatively
so much more that is purely and truly human that
even from this standpoint we need not feel com-
pelled to surrender their claim to a place in universal
literature.
But what, then, is their significance in universal
literature ?
They are for the world what they were for Israel,
the prayer-book and hymn-book. In fact we have
in the Psalms the purest expression of the religious
sentiment in the artistic form of the lyric, the crown
of sacred poetry. Their wealth, like life, is inex-
haustible; all the situations and events of life are
viewed in the light of godly meditation and con-
secrated and ennobled by piety, so that they are
transfigured into prayers and hymns. In them we
hear every chord struck, and all with equal purity
and strength : lamentation and mourning, confession
and penitence, prayer and praise, thanksgiving and
adoration. There is scarcely a situation or a mood
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 155
imaginable which has not found its classic expres-
sion in the Psalter.
John Calvin, probably the greatest of all commen-
tators upon the Psalms, calls the Psalter for this
reason an anatomy of the soul, saying that the
human soul knows no mood nor impulse that is not
mirrored in the Psalms. And Martin Luther, spir-
itually the most closely akin to the Psalmist, says in
his preface to the Psalter : "Thence too it comes that
the Psalter is the book of all the saints, and that
every one, whatever his business may be, finds in it
psalms and sayings which are adapted to his affairs
and fit him as if they had been composed expressly
on his account, such that he himself could neither
compose nor invent nor wish them better." Shall
we test this utterance of Luther? Certainly, for
after having said so much about the Psalms, we
surely shall wish to hear something from the Psalms
themselves.
Let us begin with pleasant pictures. "O taste
and see that the Lord is good" (Psalms xxxiv. 8),
thus the Psalmist himself invites us. "Oh how great
is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up for them
that fear thee, which thou hast wrought for them
that put their trust in thee before the sons of men !"
(Psalms xxxi. 19) thus another cries in adoration.
"The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage" (Psalms xvi. 6), we
hear a third one sing.
"Thy loving kindness, O Lord, is in the heavens ;
thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. Thy right-
156 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
eousness is like the mountains of God; thy judg-
ments are a great deep; Lord, thou preservest man
and beast. How precious is thy loving kindness,
O God ! And the children of men take refuge under
the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abun-
dantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and
thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleas-
ures. For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy
light shall we see light. O continue thy loving
kindness unto them that know thee, and thy right-
eousness to the upright in heart. (Psalms xxxvi.
5-10.) And this feeling has found its classic ex-
pression in the universally known twenty - third
Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want," and whenever the heart feels constrained to
offer its gratitude to the giver of all these good gifts,
how can it be done more briefly, more simply, and
yet more expressively than in the words of the
Psalm, "Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for he is
good, and his mercy endureth forever"? (Psalms
cxviii. 1.) And where is the sacred duty of thanks-
giving brought home to the heart of every man
more touchingly and more impressively than in the
words of the Psalm: "Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits"? (Psalms ciii. 1-2.)
And where is there a more forcible expression of
the feeling of security in the strong hand of God
and of his mighty protection, than in the words of
the Psalm : "The Lord is my light and my salvation ;
whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold
of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" (Psalms
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 157
xxvii. 1.) "The Lord of hosts is with us; the God
of Jacob is our refuge" (Psalms xlvi. 7) ; "God
grants that I praise his word ; in God have I put my
trust, I will not be afraid; what can flesh do unto
me?" And the repose and the peace which then
enter the heart are depicted in the saying : "My soul
waiteth in silence for God; from him cometh my
salvation. He is my rock and my salvation, he is
my high tower; I shall not be greatly moved."
(Psalms Ixii. 1-2.) And the mighty "Nevertheless"
of faith, which hopes even where it cannot see,
with what invincible power we hear it in the words :
"Nevertheless 3 God is good to Israel, even to such
as are pure in heart." For no one is disappointed
who waits upon God, and the faithfulness of God
is far above the faithfulness of the most faithful
men: "My father and my mother have forsaken
me, but the Lord will take me up." (Psalms xxvii.
10.) The sense of communion with God overcomes
all grief and sorrow; it outweighs a world, and
nothing can deprive us of this highest of possessions.
"If I have but thee I care for neither heaven nor
earth. Though my flesh and my heart fail, yet is
God the strength of my heart and my portion for-
ever." (Psalms Ixxiii. 25.) Where was ever the
longing for God expressed more powerfully and
more effectively than in the forty-second Psalm:
"As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so
panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth
for God, for the living God. When shall I come
8 The English version has here "Surely."
158 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
to appear before God?" (Psalms xlii. 1-2.) And
where shall we find expressed more concisely and
more movingly the anxious waiting upon God and
the longing watching for him amid feelings of tem-
porary desertion by him, than in that sighing as-
piration, only a breath as it were, of the sixth
Psalm : "My soul is sore vexed. And thou, O Lord,
how long?" or in the question filled with mortal
anguish, of the twenty-second Psalm: "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And just
here I must not fail to point out a characteristic
fact. It is well known that lamentation occupies
much space in the Psalter. But with the single ex-
ception of the eighty-eighth Psalm not one of these
hymns is all lamentation. They all overcome the
sorrow and grief and wrestle their way out to hope
and faith so that the lamentation finally ends with
praise and thanks. We find the most touching and
stirring example of this in the recurring verse of
the forty-second Psalm, where we can still see in
the confidently hopeful eye of the singer the gleam
of the tear which his grief has forced from him:
"Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art
thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God;
for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my
countenance and my God" (verse 5). That is the
manly and heroic trait in Israelitic piety, which is
one of its most precious treasures and a model to
the whole world, the "universal human, which every-
where should woo man."
And in the Psalter, too, as every one knows, we
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 159
find the profoundest and most heart-stirring tones
of sin and penitence, as well as the clearest and
most uplifting language of mercy and forgiveness.
"If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord,
who shall stand?" (Psalms cxxx. 3.) "Mine iniqui-
ties are more than the hairs of my head, and my
heart hath failed me." (Psalms xl. 12.) "Who
can discern his errors ? cleanse thou me from secret
faults." (Psalms xix. 12.) And then: "He deal-
eth not with us after our sins nor rewardeth us after
our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the
earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear
him. As far as the East is from the West so far
hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like
as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth
them that fear him." (Psalms ciii. 10-13.) And
lest in the light of the mercy of God the solemnity
of his holiness be forgotten, we read in the one
hundred and thirtieth Psalm the profound saying:
"For there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest
be feared" (verse 4).
And now a few sayings of the Psalms for human
relationships. Can peace and harmony be com-
mended more simply and more urgently than in the
language of the singer of the one hundred and
thirty-third Psalm : "Behold how good and pleasant
it is for brethren to dwell together in unity !" And
can domestic happiness and the blessings of family
life be depicted more delightfully and in a way that
goes more to our hearts than in the language of the
singer of the one hundred and twenty-eighth Psalm :
160 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
"Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord, that
walketh in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labor
of thine hands : happy shalt thou be, and it shall be
well with thee. Thy wife shall be a fruitful vine in
the innermost parts of thy house, thy sons like olive
plants around thy table. Behold, thus shall the man
be blessed that feareth the Lord."
And yet one more glance, this time at the nature
poetry in the Psalter, which was admired and praised
by no less a master than Alexander von Humboldt.
The earth is the Lord's and all that is therein, the
world and they that dwell thereon, and so the Is-
raelite sees God everywhere in nature; he does not
make nature God, but it is to him a revelation of
God. "Nature," says Humboldt, "is not described
as something existing independently and glorified
by its own beauty; it always presents itself to the
Hebrew singer as related to a higher, overruling
spiritual power. Nature is to him a work of orderly
creation, the living expression of the omnipresence
of God in the elements of the world of sense."
I will only refer to the splendid Psalm of thanks-
giving for harvest, the sixty-fifth : "Thou crownest
the year with thy goodness, and thy paths drop fat-
ness ;" to the magnificent twenty-ninth Psalm, which
depicts with sublime majesty the glory of God in the
thunder-storm, and above all to the one hundred and
fourth: "O Lord, how great and manifold are thy
works; in wisdom hast thou made them all: the
earth is full of thy goodness" a hymn which has
not its equal in all literature. "One is disposed to
THE PSALMS IN UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. 161
say," as Humboldt puts it, "that the picture of the
whole cosmos is presented in this one psalm, the
one hundred and fourth We marvel at seeing
the universe, heaven and earth, depicted in a lyric
composition of such slight compass with a few great
touches. Contrasted with the animated primal life
of nature, we have here the noiseless, toilsome la-
bors of man from the rising of the sun to the close
of his day's work in the evening." And where else
is man more profoundly comprehended and depicted
as but a tiny atom in nature, and yet in accordance
with his royal mastery in it, than in the eighth
Psalm ? Where is the whole creation as a thousand-
voiced proclamation of the glory of its creator better
depicted than in the nineteenth Psalm, in which the
heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth his handiwork, the sun rises as a bride-
groom cometh forth out of his chamber and re-
joiceth as a strong man to run a race !
And of still another sort of poetry, the didactic
aphorism, do we find in the Psalter matchless jewels.
A considerable number of the Psalms are like neck-
laces, where the most profound sentences, the most
glorious thoughts are strung pearl on pearl. Wher-
ever we turn our gaze, a rich canopy, star after
star, an inexhaustible treasury!
Permit me in closing to mention a recent personal
experience of mine, illustrating the manner in which
the Psalms give us the fitting word for every situa-
tion in life. One who for days and weeks has
watched in anguish over the life that is dearest to
162 THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
him on earth, when he has already prepared to sur-
render it, there comes a turn for the better, and the
angel of death who has already spread his dark
wings over the victim, departs, and life returns,
who could express what overwhelms his deeply
stirred heart in such a moment save in the words
of the Psalm: "God is unto us a God of deliver-
ances; and unto the Lord belongeth escape even
from death." (Psalms Ixviii. 20.)
The Psalms are the prayer-book and the hymn-
book of Israel ; and as Israel is preeminently the re-
ligious race, they are the prayer-book and the hymn-
book of the whole world, or at least deserve to be.
Of all the precious things which Israel has given
mankind they are perhaps the most precious. They
resound, and will continue to resound, as long as
there shall be men created in the image of God, in
whose hearts the sacred fire of religion shines and
glows; for they are religion itself put into speech.
To them applies what one of the noblest of them
says of the revelation of God in nature: "That is
neither speech nor language, the voice of which
would be unintelligible. Their line is gone out
through all the earth, and their words to the end
of the world." (Psalms xix. 4.)
Religion itself put into speech for all mankind,
that is the significance of the Psalms in universal
literature.
INDEX.
Aaron, 18.
Abimelech, 27.
Abraham, Migration of, 9; Re-
ligious history begins with, 56;
to David, Earliest tradition of,
3-4-
Accents in Hebrew, 121.
Agriculture, 22.
Algiers, 119-121.
Allah, Daughters of, 97.
Amenhotep IV, 55.
Amos, 46, 119.
Anarchy, 27-28.
Animosity in Psalms, 151.
Arminius, 53.
Asaph, 126, 130.
Assur Nasir-Pal, Plate XII.
Bagpipe, 115.
Barry, Phillips, 115.
Baton, 127.
Becken, 109.
Bell-tree, Turkish, 109.
Benjamin, Tribe of, 12.
Bilhah-tribes, 11-12, 13.
Blessing of Moses, 41.
Boers, 100.
Bows, 113.
Buddha, 40.
Bugle, 118.
Bulow, Hans von, 107.
Burying alive, 98.
Calvin, John, 155.
Canaan, Conquest of, 20-24.
Canaanites, Religion of, 10; trans-
formed into Israel, 22.
Childhood, 79.
Children, 77-79, 97; Education of,
68ff.
Chnumhotep, Tomb of, 1x3.
Chronicles written by a musical
Levite, 123.
Cinelli, 109.
Clarinet, 117.
Commandments, The ten, 17. See
also "Decalogue."
Counter-point, 124.
Covenant, Book of the, 41-43 .
Cymbalist, Assyrian, Plate II.
Cymbals, 108-109, 126.
Dagon, 29.
Dancing, 103.
Daniel, Instruments in the Book
of, 1 06.
Daughters in Israel, 94-97; of
Allah, 97-
David, 148; and Saul, 3of, 105, 112;
Character of, 31, 35-36; Polit-
ical consolidation due to, 31;
Reign of, 33-37; Singing mas-
ters of, 126.
Decalogue, 41, 43-48.
Deuteronomy, Date of, 41.
De Wette, 41.
Diogenes, 96.
Discipline, 84-87.
Education, Aim of, 68; of chil-
dren, 68ff; of girls, 92, 96-99;
Results of, 100.
Egypt, Israel in, 13-16; Mono-
theism in, 55, 62; Moses in,
52; Religion of, 54-56.
164
THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Eighth, The, 112, 123.
Elisha, 1 06.
Esau, Marriage of, 71.
Esther, Book of, 151.
Ethics of Israel, 66; of the Psalms,
149-154.
Ewald, Heinrich, 3, u, 12.
Exodus, The, 15-16.
Ezekiel, 119,
Falsetto, 128.
Family a unit, 99-100.
Father a monarch, 87, 99; a
teacher, 91, 94, 99-
Flute, 115, 121-125; players, As-
syrian, Plate VII.
Founders of religion, 39.
Genesis contains primitive tradi-
tion, 4.
Gideon, Kingship of, 25-26.
Girls, Education of, 92, 96-99; in
the Orient, 96-99.
Gittith, 114.
God-conception of Israel, 143-149.
Goethe, 133, 139, 142.
Greek music, xa*.
Hammurabi, Code of, 42.
Hannah, 93.
Harps, 104, 106, 121, 123; Egyp-
tian, Plates I, II; Eleven-
stringed, Plate IV; Four-
stringed, in, Plate IX; Human-
ity a, 136; -players, Assyrian,
xii, Plates V, VII; Ten-
stringed, 112; Triangular, in,
Plate I.
Hatsotserah, 116-118, Plate X.
Headings of Psalms, 101-102, 112,
114, 128.
Heman, 126.
Herder, 133-137.
Hezekiah, 46, 105, 130.
History, Legend and, 6; Moses in
profane, 50; Tribal, 23.
Home of Israel, Primitive, 8.
Homer, 103, 141.
Horace, 141.
Horeb and Sinai, 59.
Hosea, 28, 43, 46.
Housewife, Virtuous, 93.
Human relationships, Psalms in,
159-160.
Humboldt, Alexander von, 160-161.
Image prohibition, 44, 45-46, 61.
Infant sacrifice, xo, 65.
Inheritance of property, 75.
Instruction in religion, 87-89.
Instruments, as accompaniment
for singing, 124; Classes of mu-
sical, 107.
Isaac, Sacrifice of, xo.
Israel, Canaanites transformed into
22; Ethics of, 66; Spirit pecu-
liar to, 1 6.
Jablonski, Daniel Ernst, 122.
Jacob, and Rachel, 72; Migration
of, 11-13.
Jairus's daughter, 115.
Jeduthun, 126.
Tephthah's daughter, 103.
Jericho, 116, 121.
Jerome, Saint, in.
Jerusalem, 97; Founding of, 34;
Siege of, 105.
Jesus and Moses, 37, 39, 67.
Jezebel, Queen, 96.
Jonathan, Son of, 80.
Joseph, and Asenath, 55; Tribe
of, 12, 13, 26.
Josephus on Moses, 52.
Joshua, Campaign of, 20; Na-
tional organization of, 22.
Jubal, inventor of music, 105, 112,
114.
Kadesh Barnea, 59; Sojourn in
1 8.
Khalil, 1 1 6.
Kinnor, 112-114, 123, Plate II.
Koran, 140-141.
Language of Israel, 7.
Leah-tribes, 11-12, 13.
Legend defined, 5-7.
Levi, Tribe of, 50.
Levite, Chronicles written by a
musical, 123; Moses a, 15, 51.
INDEX.
165
Levites, Groups of, 126; Music of,
104; Singing, 129.
Leviticus, Date of, 41.
Lute, 123; -players, Assyrian,
Plate II.
Lutes on ancient coins, Plate
VIII.
Luther, 60, 155.
Lyres on ancient coins, Plate VIII.
Marriage ceremony, 76-77, 103;
contract, 73-76; of Esau, 71;
of Moses, 53, 57; of Samson,
72.
Matrimony in Israel, 69.
Melodies of Psalms, 128.
Mendelssohn, Felix, 152.
Merenptah, 50, 53.
Methodological considerations, 59-
61.
Midianites, Invasion of, as; Mo-
sea among the, 56.
Migration of Abraham, 9; of Ja-
cob, 11-13.
Miriam, 103.
Mohammed, 40, 45, 49, 98.
Moloch, 146.
Mommsen, Theodore, 62.
Monist, The, 115.
Monotheism in Egypt, 55, 62; of
Moses, 61-62.
Mosaic faith, 18.
Mother, Domestic control of, 93.
Moses a founder of religion, 16,
54; a genius in pedagogy, 60;
a Hebrew at heart, 15, 53; a
Levite, 15, 51; among the Mid-
ianites, 56; Death of, 18, 66-
67; in Egypt, 52; in profane
history, 50; Name of, 52; Na-
tional religion due to, 17; Na-
tional unity due to, 22; not the
author of Pentateuch, 5, 40;
Marriages of, 53, 57; No authen-
tic documents, of, 48; Our re-
lation to, 39; Religious organi-
zation under, 16; Work of, com-
pleted by David, 31; Writings
of, 41.
Mozart, 125, 127.
Music, Absolute, 124; Character
of, in Israel, 118-119; Definition
of, 10 1 ; Greek, 122; in life, 103-
105, 118; in worship, 103-105;
Jubal inventor of, 105; of Le-
vites, 104; of the temple, 125-
131; Modern Arabian, 119-121;
Unison the ideal of Hebrew,
125-
Mythology, Israel has no, 17, 63.
Naomi, 80.
Nathan's parable, 95.
National kingdom, Rise of the, a8;
organization under Joshua, 22;
principle, Yahveh, 23; religion
due to Moses, 17; unity due to
Moses, 22.
Nature in the Psalms, 160-161.
Nebel, 110-112, 114, 123.
Nomads, zo; Procession of, 113.
Nurses, 79.
Obedience, 84.
Obscenity, Religious, 10, 65.
Organ, ii4n.
Organization under Joshua, Na-
tional, 22; under Moses, Relig-
ious, 1 6.
Parents, Respect for, 81-84.
Pedagogical principles, 84.
Pedagogy, Moses a genius in, 60.
Penitence in the Psalms, 159.
Pentateuch, Authorship of, 5, 40.
Percussive instruments, 107-110.
Personality of God, 143-146.
Pharaoh of the Exodus, 50.
Pharaoh's daughter, 52.
Philistines, Conquered by, 28-29.
Piatti, 109.
Pipes, ii4n, 115, 12511.
Political consolidation due to Da-
vid, 31; leader, Moses a, 49.
Polychrome Bible, 102, 104, H4n,
i26n, i28n.
Polyphony, 124.
Prayer of Moses, 41.
Priesthood, Institution of, 18.
Priestly code, 41.
166
THE CULTURE OF ANCIENT ISRAEL.
Prussia, Ethnographic conditions
of East, 135.
Pealms, Authorship of, 126; Di-
dactic aphorisms in, 161; Ethics
of the, 149-154; Headings of,
xoif, 112, 114, 128; in human re-
lationships, 159-160; in univer-
sal literature ,i33ff ; Lyric beauty
of, 141; Nature in, 160-161;
Penitence in, 159; Pleasant pic-
tures in, 155-158; Significance
of, 154, 162; Without temple
music no, 132.
Race-soul, Herder the discoverer
of the, 136.
Rachel-tribes, 11-12.
Ramses II, 14, 50, 52, 53.
Reger, Max, 125.
Religion defined, 143; Founders of,
39; Instruction in, 87-89; Moses
a founder of, 16, 54; of Cana-
anites, 10; of Egypt, 54-56; of
Israel due to Moses, 17.
Religious history begins with
Abraham, 56.
Respect for parents, 81-84.
Rhythm, 107.
Ritual music, 118-119.
Ruckert, 140.
Sabbath, 43-45-
Saints, Communion of the, 151.
Samson, Marriage of, 72.
Samuel's time, Music in, 106.
Saul, David and, 30-31, 105, 112;
Reign of, 29-33.
Scale, Musical, 121-123.
Schiller, 92, 133.
Silah, 127.
Self-righteousness in Psalms, 150.
Semler, Johann Salomon, 137.
Serfdom in Egypt, 14.
Serpent, Brazen, 46.
Sesostris, 50.
Shawm, 115.
Shechem, 27; Capture of, 20, 51.
Shofar, 117.
Siegfried, 148.
Sihon, Kingdom of, 19.
Sinai, 16, 18; and Horeb, 59.
Singing, 106-107; Instruments as
accompaniment for, 124; of
psalms, 128; of women, 119, 123.
Sisera, 24.
Sistrum, 109, Plate III.
Solomon's temple, Dedication of,
125; Instruments for, iio-iu.
Song of Moses, 41; of Zion, 105.
Spirit peculiar to Israel, 16.
Strauss, David Friedrich, 144.
Strauss, Richard, 125.
String music, 104, no.
Stringed instruments, 110-114. 126.
Tabret, 108.
Tambourine, 103, 108.
Temple-musicians, Guild of, 126;
orchestra, 125; service, Descrip-
tion of, 129-131.
Theophany of the burning bush, 57.
Thor, 148.
Timbrels, 103, 108, 128.
Tone system, 121.
Triangle, no.
Trumpets, 104, 116-118, 125, Plates
X, XI.
Twelve tribes, n.
'Ugab, 114-115.
Universal literature, 137-138; The
Psalms in, 1335.
Usurtesen II, 113.
Voss, 142.
Wellhausen, i26n.
Wieland, 133.
Wife, Selection of a, 71.
Winckler, Hugo, 105.
Wind instruments, 114-118.
Winebibbers, 115; Ballads of, 114-
Women in worship, 99; Singing
of, 119, 123; Tabret played by,
108, no. See also "Daughters"
and "Girls."
Wood-wind instruments, 125.
Worship, Moses created a simple,
18, 65; Music in, 103-105;
Women in, 99.
INDEX.
167
Wotan, 148.
Wrath of God, 146-148, 150.
Writing, Knowledge of, 89-90.
Yahveh, 146; Relation of Israel
to, 64-65; The name, 17, 57; the
national principle, 23.
Yahvist redaction, Decalogue of,
47-
Zilpah-tribes, 11-12.
Zion, Songs of, 105.
Zither, 113.
PLATE I.
FIG. I. EGYPTIAN HARPS.
PLATE II.
FIG. 2. EGYPTIAN HARP CARRIED FIG. 3. EGYPTIAN PICTURE OF
IN PROCESSION. A BEDOUIN WITH KINNOR.
FIG. 4. AN ASSYRIAN CYMBALIST.
FIG. 5. ASSYRIAN LUTE
PLAYERS.
PLATE III.
PLATE IV.
FIG. 7. RELIEF FROM SENDSCHIRLI IN NORTHERN SYRIA.
FIG. 8. AN ELEVEN STRINGED HARP OF ANCIENT BABYLON.
PLATE V.
FIG. 9. ASSYRIAN HARPISTS.
(British Museum)
PLATE VI.
PLATE VII.
FIG. II. ASSYRIAN HARP AND FLUTE PLAYERS.
FIG. 12. ASSYRIAN QUARTETTE.
PLATE VIII.
C/2 w
- <u
H
PLATE IX.
PLATE X.
E?
PLATE XI.
FIG. 17. DETAIL FROM FIG. l6.
FIG. 1 8. TRUMPETS ON ANCIENT JEWISH COIN.
(After Madden)
' /a
