ELI * OC.
THE HIBBERT LECTURES,
1892.
THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1892.
LECTURES
ON THE
ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF RELIGION
AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE RELIGION OF THE
ANCIENT HEBKEWS.
C, G. MONTEFIORE.
SECOND EDITION.
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON;
And 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
1893.
[All Rights reserved.]
173
l ??3
LONDON :
PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SOH,
178, STRAND.
T. G. M.
Born October 27, 1864. Died June 10, 1889.
(To % ^Temorn; of fjer,
BY WHOSE ADVICE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
THE OFFER TO PREPARE THESE LECTURES WAS ACCEPTED,
THEY ARE NOW
YERY HUMBLY AND REVERENTLY
DEDICATED.
Mr) e'lKrj irepl twv /xey Itninv crvjx^aX(xiix(.6a. — HeraCLITUS (Bel. xlviii.,
ed. Bywater).
And so in all religions : the consideration of their morality comes
first, afterwards the truth of the documents in which they are recorded,
or of the events natural or supernatural which are told of them. But
in modern times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than in
Catholic, we have been too much inclined to identify the historical
with the moral ; and some have refused to believe in religion at all,
unless a superhuman accuracy was discernible in every part of the
record. The facts of an ancient or religious history are amongst the
most important of all facts ; but they are frequently uncertain, and wo
only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when we
place ourselves above them. — Jowett's Dialogues of Plato, 3rd edition,
VoL JJT. p. xxxvii,
PREFACE.
My purpose in these Lectures is to give a short history,
as clear as I can make it, of the Keligion of the Old
Testament. By this I mean that I have endeavoured to
group the religious material contained in that book in
chronological order, and to trace the historical develop-
ment, which then becomes visible, from its beginning to
its end. This beginning has been but lightly touched
upon, partly because of its extreme obscurity and partly
because of my own insufficient equipment to deal ade-
quately with so complex a problem ; but more space has
thus been won for the delineation of that phase of the
Jewish religion in which it stood at the close of the Old
Testament period, and on the lines of which it was
destined to develop for many subsequent centuries.
I have also found it necessary either entirely to omit
or to dismiss with bare allusion many topics which, though
connected with the main subject, were of subsidiary
importance for my special purpose as here defined. Thus
I have said nothing about Alexandrian or Hellenistic
Judaism, because, while that phase of religion was of
Vlll PREFACE.
great interest in itself, and of great importance for the
history of Christianity, it lay aloof from and outside the
main course of religious development both in the Old
Testament itself and in the Kabbinical literature.
The early or Biblical history of the Jewish religion, as
of the Jewish people, is still in many important respects
shrouded with obscurity. Some four years ago, in a
review of Stade's " History of Israel," Prof. Kamphausen
said that in the then existing condition of our knowledge
he for one would not have ventured to undertake the
task. That I should have dared to grapple with a sub-
ject from which such a scholar as Kamphausen shrinks,
may indeed seem to indicate the rashness of ignorance or
conceit. My partial excuse is that the subject was allotted
to me and not chosen by myself. The rare liberality of
the Hibbert Trustees led them to think that it might be
interesting to have the story of the Old Testament reli-
gion put forward from a point of view little known to or
hitherto considered by the general public. Hence it was
that, at the close of 1888, 1 received the honourable, but
very responsible, offer of which the present book is the
result. Whether in accepting that offer I sufficiently
weighed the difficulty of the work or my own incapacity,
is, I admit, very doubtful. I am painfully conscious
that lack of time and of preliminary knowledge has pre-
vented me from giving to many a disputed question that
"discipline of hard and minute investigation," without
PREFACE. IX
which, as Prof. Cheyne has recently said, a man's opinions
on Biblical criticism, as on any other department of
human science, are not worth having. How far the some-
what novel point of view, which, I hope, has yet always
been compatible with impartiality, may have compen-
sated for these various deficiencies, I must leave others
to decide. But the dogmatic appearance of many of my
statements is assuredly only due either to the exigencies
of space or to a necessary avoidance of that constant itera-
tion of qualification and uncertainty which tends to put
too heavy a burden upon the patience of the reader.
Following M. Eenan in the Preface to his "Histoire
d'Israel," I would say, Be pleased to think that a legion
of "possibly's" and "probably's" is scattered over the
pages of my book.
It is unnecessary to point out in detail what I owe to
previous writers in the same field. But I cannot forbear
to mention the names of some distinguished scholars, on
the results of whose labours my own small work is chiefly
based, and to whom I owe the most both for direct infor-
mation and for suggestive stimulus. From Germany,
then, I must single out Stade and Wellhausen ; from
Holland, Kuenen ; and from England, Prof. Cheyne and
Mr. Schechter. Of these five, Xuenen is no longer with
us. May I add here that this great scholar, in my single
interview with him at Leiden in 1889, showed the
most kindly interest in my work, and afterwards more
X PEEP ACE.
than once wrote me valuable (and touchingly modest )
letters in answer to permitted inquiries on difficult points?
It is a pleasure to be able to associate my book even in
this small way with the man who was at his death the
acknowledged chief and master of the subject with which
it deals. To Mr. Schechter I owe more than I can ade-
quately express here. My whole conception of the Law
and of its place in Jewish religion and life is largely the
fruit of his teaching and inspiration, while almost all the
Eabbinic material upon which that conception rests was
put before my notice and explained to me by him.
To several other friends I desire here to offer my
grateful thanks : to Mr. Estlin Carpenter, Vice-Principal
of Manchester New College, Oxford, who read through
the Lectures in proof, and made many valuable sugges-
tions and corrections ; to Mr. Israel Abrahams, who per-
formed the same tiresome office, and also helped me con-
siderably at an earlier stage ; and, above all, to my old
teacher and friend, Mr. Arnold Page, Eector of Tendring,
Essex, who read the Lectures in a type- written form and
made innumerable verbal corrections. Any measure of
clearness and simplicity which I may have reached is
largely owing to him.
To Mr. Ashton, the Chairman, and to the Hibbert
Trustees generally, I beg herewith to express my very
grateful acknowledgments, not only for their great libe-
rality in entrusting me with this task, but also for allow-
PREFACE. XI
ing me to extend the length of the course beyond what
was originally intended, and for much sympathy and
encouragement shown to me in the delivery of the
Lectures.
That this book, in spite of all the help which I have
received, will contain many errors, is certain. The last
and not the least of the German commentators upon
Isaiah ends his Preface with these memorable words:
" If one might not believe that even errors, when they
are the outcome of honest work, may have good results,
no one would venture to write about religion or the Bible
at all." To this I would fain add the hope that I have
approached this solemn subject in the spirit of one to
whom in matters of religion I owe more than to any
other living man. Had not a higher and holier duty
constrained, I should have asked his permission to dedi-
cate my book to him ; as it is, he has allowed me to use
as a kind of motto a quotation from his printed words.
They are simple words doubtless, and some may think
their warning obvious ; but how much would the world
have gained if the investigation of religion and of the
Bible had been always conducted from the point of view
and in the spirit enjoined upon us by the Master of
Balliol!
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Lecture I.
ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF THE HEBREW
RELIGION.
PAGE
Subject of the Lectures ... ... ... ... ... ... 1
Point of view here adopted : criticism and tradition ... ... 2
Results of Old Testament criticism ... ... ... ... 4
Authorities : the Old Testament ... ... ... ... ... 5
No indisputably authentic and homogeneous writings older than
the eighth century B.C. ... ... ... ... ... 6
Results of this limitation ... ... ... .. ... ... 7
The eighth-century prophets and their religion ... ... ... 8
Origin of their religion : origin of Hebrew "monolatry" ... 10
Three periods of Hebrew history up to eighth century ... ... 11
(a) The age of the patriarchs : a pre-historic period ... 12
(b) The Mosaic age : beginnings of history ... ... ... II
(c) The pre-prophetic age : from Moses to the eighth century 15
Whether monolatry dates from the third period ... ... ... 16
Traditional view of this period and its origin ... .., ... 17
Monolatry known in the third period, but not its creation ... 19
Whether it was the custom of the pre-historic age : nature of
Semitic religion generally ... ... ... ... ... 22
The nearest kinsmen of the Hebrews ... ... ... ... 27
Edom, Ammon and Moab, and their religions ... ... ... 2S
Arguments to prove that origin of monolatry must be sought for
in the creative doctrine of Moses ... ... ... ... 31
XIV
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Character of Mosaic monolatry
To be partially inferred from character of pre-prophetic monolatry
Existence of other gods recognized in pre-prophetic period, but
their worship in Israel forbidden
Yahveh's character : his connection with fire
Yahveh's wrath and its results
His nature
His worship under material forms
The bull images and the ephods ...
Yahveh the God of justice : the priestly Torah
Inference as to the Mosaic conception of Yahveh and his character
Origin of Mosaic monolatry : an obscure and perhaps insoluble
question. Two main hypotheses
Historic period of Israel's religion still to be dated from Moses ...
32
34
35
37
38
41
42
43
44
46
50
54
Lecture II.
THE HISTOKY OF THE HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
THE MOSAIC AGE AND THE EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.
From Moses to Samuel
Unhistorical view of period by editor of Book of Judges
Canaanite religion : its chief divinities ...
Influence of Canaanite on Hebrew religion
Yahveh the God of Israel
The priesthood : its origin and functions...
The sacred lot: the priest as teacher and judge
Hosea's view of the priestly office
The seers : Samuel
The prophets, their origin and early history : Gad and Nathan
The Nazirites
David and Solomon
Jeroboam's revolt and its results ...
The early kings of Judah and Israel
Ahab and the worship of the Tyrian Baal
55
57
59
62
64
65
68
70
72
76
80
81
84
86
90
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV
PAGE
Elijah, Elisha and Micaiah 91
Jehu and the suppression of Baal worship ... ... ... 95
Athaliah and Jehoiada ... ... ... ... ... ... 96
The Syrian wars and their effects... ... ... ... ... 97
The religious progress of the ninth century ... ... ... 99
General character and estimate of pre-prophetic religion... ... 100
Lecture III.
THE PROPHETS OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.
The prophets of the eighth century ... .... ... ... 106
External history of Israel and Judah in the eighth century ... 107
The end of the northern monarchy ... ... ... ... 109
Deportations to Assyria and their result ... ... ... ... 110
Hezekiah and Sennacherib ... ... ... ... ...Ill
Moral and religious condition of the two kingdoms in the eighth
century ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...112
" Prophetic " narratives of the Pentateuch ... ... ... 113
Religious and moral decay... ... ... ... ... ... 114
Coincident advance ... ... ... ... ... .. 116
The priests and their legislative codes ... ... ... ...117
The four prophets of the eighth century : Amos, Hosea, Isaiah
and Micah 119
Characteristics common to their prophecies ... ... ... 120
Their teaching: Yahveh's character and his relation to Israel ... 122
Israel's duty to Yahveh ... ... ... ... ... ... 125
Moral ideals of the prophets ... ... ... ... ... 126
The true worship of Yahveh ... ... ... ... ... 127
Hosea's polemic against images ... ... ... ... ... 128
The place of sacrifices : form versus substance ... ... ... 130
Assyria and its office ... ... ... ... ... ... 133
The prophetic advance towards monotheism ... ... ... 134
The gods of the nations ... ... ... ... ... ... 136
The conception of the judgment ... ... ... ... ... 137
XVI
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Isaiah's predictions of punishment and retrieval ...
The Messianic age and the Messianic king-
Judgment on Assyria
Origin and first stages of prophetic universalism...
Disputed passages in Isaiah: the nineteenth chapter
General estimate of prophetic teaching ...
Political views of the prophets
Prophets as social reformers
Prophets as religious teachers
Wellhausen's conception of prophecy
The effect of the prophetic teaching
Difficulties produced by it...
Its essential uniqueness and nobility
PAGE
139
142
144
146
147
150
151
152
153
154
156
157
159
Lecture IV.
THE SEVENTH CENTURY: DEUTERONOMY AND
JEREMIAH (700—586 B.C.).
Judah after the retreat of Sennacherib ...
Hezekiah's reform ...
The growing importance of Jerusalem and its temple
The reign of Manasseh : religious reaction
Assyrian idolatries and the worship of Moloch . . .
Active persecution of the prophetical party
Accession of Josiah
The invasion of the Scythians
Zephaniah and Jeremiah...
The early prophecies of Jeremiah and their present form
Convergence of prophets and priests
Increasing prevalence of idolatry : the party of reform
The idea of a single sanctuary for all Judah
A new law-book and its origin
The Book of the Law brought to Josiah ...
Josiah's reform
161
163
165
167
168
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
L78
179
180
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XVH
PAGE
The abolition of the " high places " 182
The Book of Deuteronomy and its general character ... ... 184
The attack on idolatry and its symbols ... ... ... ... 185
The single sanctuary ... ... ... ... ... ... 186
Prophetic and priestly elements in Deuteronomy ... ... 188
The introductory chapters .. . ... ... ... ... ... 189
A new commandment: the love of God ... ... ... ... 190
Whether the authors of Deuteronomy were hopeful of success ... 192
The Deuteronomic school and its work ... ... ... ... 193
Condition of Judah after the proclamation of Deuteronomy, and
Jeremiah's attitude towards it ... ... ... ... ... 194
Death of Josiah and its effects ... ... ... ... ...196
Disappointment and reaction ... ... ... ... ... 197
The lower nationalism: " Yahveh will protect his own " ... 198
The advance of Babylon: the battle of Carchemish: Jehoiakim
the vassal of Nebuchadrezzar ... ... ... ... ... 199
Jeremiah under Jehoiakim and his teaching ... ... ... 200
Jehoiakim's revolt : the first deportation (5S 7) ... ... ,, 201
Eeligious condition under Zedekiah ... ... ... ... 205
Habakkuk and Hananiah . . . ... ... ... ... ... 206
Jeremiah and the exiles in Babylonia ... ... ... ... 207
The fall of Jerusalem and the second deportation (586) ... ... 208
Jeremiah in Egypt 209
Eeligious progress in the seventh century ... ... ...210
The Book of Lamentations ... ... ... ... ... 211
Eeligious literature of the seventh century ... ... ...213
Monotheistic advance : Jeremiah's conception of Yahveh ... 215
Growth of religious individualism ... ... ... ...216
Jeremiah's view of the relation of the individual to God ... 218
The new covenant and its meaning ... ... ... ... 220
XV111 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Lecture V.
THE BABYLONIAN EXILE : EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND
ISAIAH.
PAGE
The Jewish exiles in Babylonia ... ... ... ... ... 222
Keligious ideas current among them ... ... ... ... 224
Effects of the fall of Jerusalem ... ... ... ... ... 225
The two main results of the exile .. . ... ... ... ... 228
The Sabbath in the exile 229
The worship of Yahveh 230
Editing of the historical books: views of the editors ... ... 231
Codification of priestly laws ... ... ... ... ... 234
The law of holiness ... ... ... ... ... ... 236
Prophecy in the exile ... ... ... ... ... ... 237
Ezekiel : his general position ... ... ... ... ... 238
His early history and prophetic call ... ... ... ... 240
His visions .. . ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 242
Character of his book and work ... ... ... ... ... 244
His conception of God ... ... ... ... ... ... 246
The glory of Yahveh 248
Yahveh's relation to Israel and its results ... ... ... 250
Ezekiel's individualism ... ... ... ... ... ... 251
The sins of Israel ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 254
Ceremonial and morality ... ... ... ... ... ... 255
Ezekiel's legalism ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 257
Cyrus and his victories ... ... ... ... ... ... 260
Their effect upon the Jewish exiles ... ... ... ...261
The new prophecy... ... ... ... ... ... ... 262
The second Isaiah ... ... ... ,.. ... ... ... 264
Character of his teaching ... ... ... ... ... ... 265
His absolute monotheism ... ... ... ... ... ... 26S
Yahveh the Creator and only God 270
The polemic against idolatry ... ... ... ... ... 271
Cyrus and the nations ... ... ... ... ... ... 273
The mission of Israel and its purposes 274
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XIX
PAGE
The conception of the Servant ... ... ... 276
Universalism ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 277
The fifty-third chapter 279
The new Jerusalem ... ... ... ... ... ... 281
Cyrus in Babylon : the Jewish exiles permitted to return home ... 283
Lecture VI.
THE RESTORATION AND THE PRIESTLY LAW.
Priests and Levites ... ... ... ... ... ... 286
Sheshbazzar, Zerubbabel and Joshua ... ... ... ... 289
Attitude of returned exiles to descendants of old population and
to their northern neighbours ... ... ... ... ... 291
Delay in rebuilding the temple and its causes ... ... ... 294
The interval between 536 and 520 295
Haggai and Zechariah : character of their teaching ... ... 297
Contents of their prophecies ... ... ... ... ... 299
The temple rebuilt and consecrated (516 B.C.) ... ... ... 301
From 516 to 458: a gloomy interval ... ... ... ... 302
Help from Babylon : Priests and Levites and their work ... 304
Ezra the priest and scribe : his mission to Jerusalem and its
objects 306
Ezra at Jerusalem : the mixed marriages ... ... ... ... 309
Failure of Ezra's plans ... ... ... ... ... ... 310
Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem ... 311
Introduction of a new Law-book ... ... ... ... ... 314
Origin and character of this book : the sections of the Pentateuch
which belong to it ... .... ... ... ... ... 315
Its religious conceptions ... ... ... ... ... ... 318
Its fusion of priestly and prophetic ideas ... ... ... 320
The sanctuary God's dwelling-place ... ... ... ... 321
The conception of holiness ... ... ... ... ... 324
Sin and atonement ... ... ... ... ... ... 327
Sacrifices and sin-offerings ... ... ... ... ... 330
XX
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
The Day of Atonement
The Sabbath and its observance ...
The relation of Israel and Yahveh to the outer world . . .
Criticisms on the priestly code and their accuracy
The reading of the Law and its immediate results
Departure of Neheiniah from Jerusalem : the Law neglected and
disobeyed ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 349
Neherniah's second visit to Jerusalem ... ... ... ... 350
The foundation of the Samaritan community and its results ... 352
PAGE
. 333
. 338
340
, 342
345
Lectitke VII.
FROM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES : EXTERNAL
INFLUENCES AND INTERNAL ORGANIZATION.
No Old Testament history but much Old Testament literature
Nehemiah
Persian and Greek periods
Method and object of last three Lectures
Survey of Persian period ...
Artaxerxes III. Ochus and the Syrian revolt
Story of Bagoses ...
Alexander the Great and the Jews
Judsea from Alexander to Antiochus Epiphanes
Joseph the son of Tobias ...
Relation of the Jews to the outer world ...
Opposition to heathenism ...
Proselytizing tendencies ...
Ruth and Jonah ...
Universalist fragments in the Book of Isaiah
Influence of Persian rule upon Judaism ...
Influence of Hellenism
The Hellenistic party
The party of vigorous opposition ...
Moderate Hellenism
after
355
356
357
359
3G0
361
362
363
366
367
368
369
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
XXI
PAGE
The Book of Ecclesiastes ... ... ... ... ... ... 379
The introductory chapters of Proverbs (i. — ix.) 380
Sirach or Ecclesiasticus ... ... ... ... ... ... 381
Effect of the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes ... ... 382
The Temple and its worship ... ... ... ... ... 383
The Book of Chronicles 384
The Temple and the Psalter 385
The Psalter and post-exilic piety .. . ... ... ... ... 386
Religious effect of the Temple and its ceremonial ... ... 387
The Scriptures 389
The synagogue and its services ... ... ... ... ... 390
The priesthood and the Levites ... ... ... ... ... 392
The Scribes and their origin ... ... ... ... ... 394
Literary products of the early Scribes in the Old Testament : the
Book of Proverbs ... ... ... ... ... ... 396
The conception of Wisdom ... ... ... ... ... 398
The Law and the teaching which it fostered ... ... ... 400
The final redaction of the Pentateuch ... ... ... ... 402
How far the editors are to blame ... ... ... ... ... 404
Eedaction of the Prophets : additions and interpolations ... 405
Their general character and purpose ... ... ... ... 406
Jonah and Daniel ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 408
Religious activity and variety in the post-exilic period ... ... 409
Causes of this variety ... ... ... ... ... ... 410
Religious fervour of post-exilic period ... ... ... ...413
Lecture VIII.
FROM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES : GOD AND
ISRAEL.
The post-exilic religion
Point of view from which it is here regarded
Classification of the material and its dangers
Undogmatic character of early Judaism . . .
... 415
... 416
... 417
... 418
XX11 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Eeligion the only spiritual interest ... ... ... ...419
The three factors of religious life : God, Israel and the Law ... 420
Conception of Deity : Yahveh identical with God, but God still
Yahveh 421
The divine transcendence .. . ... ... ... ... ... 423
Its supposed evil effects ... ... ... ... ... ... 424
God of heaven 425
God's relation to Nature ... ... ... ... ... ... 426
His relation to the Israelite : God's " nearness" and how the sense
of it was won ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 427
Angels and their function ... ... ... ... ... 429
The divine Spirit .,. ... ... ... ... ... ... 431
God's relation to Israel and its effects ... ... ... ... 432
His presence in the temple ... ... ... ... ... 433
The object of God's special relation to Israel ... ... ... 434
The divine honour ... ... ... ... ... ... 436
The Messianic hope ... ... ... ... ... ... 437
Eeligious effects upon the individual of the belief in God's special
love of Israel ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 439
Humility a Jewish virtue .. . ... ... ... ... ... 440
The conception of the divine character ... ... ... ... 442
God's rule and its methods : theory of divine retribution ... 444
The past history of Israel : the Book of Chronicles ... ... 447
Doubts and theodicies ... ... ... ... ... ... 449
Explanations of suffering ... ... ... ... ... ... 450
Outward good and outward misfortune ... ... ... ... 452
Evil angels: Satan ... ... ... ... ... ... 453
Origin and growth of the belief in a future life ... ... ... 454
Influence of Zoroastrianism ... ... ... ... ... 456
Eesurrection of the body ... ... ... ... ... ... 457
Eeferences to a future life in the Psalter .. . ... ... ... 458
Eeligious effects of belief in future life ... ... ... ... 460
Justice and goodness of God : the Divine Fatherhood 462
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XX111
Lecture IX.
FROM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES: THE LAW
AND ITS INFLUENCE.
PAGE
The Torah : its meaning and place in post-exilic religion ... 465
Ethics and religion dominated by the law ... ... ... 468
The effects of religion as law, and of the Jewish law in particular 470
Main contents of the ceremonial law ... ... ... ... 472
Dietary laws ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 473
Agrarian laws, and laws of clean and unclean ... ,.. ... 474
The rigorists on "clean and unclean" ... ... ... ... 477
The effect of the law upon men's conception of goodness... ... 479
Supposed evil results ... ... ... ... ... ... 480
Humility and confidence ... ... ... ... ... ... 481
The "heart" recognized as the source and seat of good and evil... 483
General character of Jewish morality ... ... ... ... 484
Enemies of Israel and enemies of the individual Israelite ... 486
Enthusiasm of Eabbinic religion and morality ... ... ... 488
Modification of the penal law ... ... ... ... ... 489
Tendency towards monogamy : the praise of chastity .. ... 491
Evil influence of the ceremonial law ... ... ... ... 492
Supposed false "intellectualism" of a legal religion: how far a
true indictment of post-exilic and Eabbinic religion ... ... 493
The 'Am ha-Arets : their origin and decline ... ... ... 497
Gradual penetration of the law through all layers of society ; its
fulfilment a religious satisfaction ... ... ... ... 502
The theory that the law was a burden entirely mistaken ... 503
The Sabbath and prayer : two crucial examples ... ... ...504
Mr. Schechter on the "burden of the law" ... ... ... 506
Tendency towards diminution in evil results of ceremonial law
when obeyed by all ... ... ... ... ... ... 508
The distinction between the ceremonial and the moral never for-
gotten; case of fasting as illustration ... ... ... ... 509
Effect of the law upon the conception of sin and sinfulness ... 512
National self-righteousness and individual humility ... ... 514
XXIV TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
The sense of individual sinfulness sometimes obscured through
the law ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 516
Human free-will and divine grace ... ... ... ... 518
Atonement and forgiveness : fusion of prophetic and priestly doc-
trine 521
Eepentance the condition of forgiveness ... ... ... ... 523
Tendency towards doctrines of "good works" and "merit" ... 525
The potency of almsgiving ... ... ... ... ... 526
The motives of the observance of the law ... ... ... 529
"Wrong emphasis usually given to utilitarian or mercenary motive 530
Prof. Schultz and Prof. Schiirer ... ... ... ... ... 532
The mercenary or euda?nionistic motive strongest in Deuteronomy
and weakest with the Rabbis ... ... ... ... ... 533
The law obeyed from purely religious motives: the love of the law 534
How a belief in reward and a disinterested love of the law and of
its Giver are quite compatible with each other ... ... 536
How through the law the Jew felt himself to be God's child and
God to be his Father ... ... ... ... ... ... 539
General estimate of post-exilic religion: "Wellhausen and St. Paul 541
Undogmatic and unsystematized character of post-exilic religion,
its causes and its effects ... ... ... ... ... 543
Legalism and its ethical and religious results ... ... ... 547
The future of Judaism ... ... ... ... ... ... 550
APPENDIX.
I. The Date of the Decalogue ... ... ... ... 553
II. Legal Evasions of the Law ... ... ... ... 557
Additions and Corrections ... ... ... ... ... 564
Lecture I.
ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF THE HEBREW
RELIGION.
These Lectures have for their subject the Origin and
Growth of the Religion of the Hebrews. Whatever view
may be held as to the natural or supernatural derivation
of that religion, its history has a higher and more imme-
diate interest for us than the history of any other religion
of antiquity. For, while it would be unjust exclusively
to identify the history of the Hebrew religion with the his-
tory of Monotheism, inasmuch as the monotheistic con-
ception was attained by chosen individuals of other races
independently, that form of monotheism which Europe
and its colonies have adopted is based upon, and is
descended from, the ancient Hebrew faith. Thus our
attitude towards the old Hebrew religion is different
from our attitude towards other religions, such as those
of Egypt or Assyria or Mexico, which have formed the
subject of Hibbert Lectures in previous years. There
are many million souls to whom the sacred books of the
old Hebrews are sacred still ; sacred, either because they
are believed to be inspired in higher measure than the
sacred literature of other races, or else because of that
ethical ^anctity which attaches to the written origins of
the greatest spiritual possessions of civilized mankind.
B
2 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
Upon any one, therefore, who deals with Israel's reli-
gion, there rests a peculiar responsibility. No one can
be more conscious of this than I am, or better aware of
the difficulties of the task which has been entrusted to
my care.
It is, perhaps, hardly necessary for a Hibbert Lecturer
to say anything of the point of view from which he
intends to treat his subject, even though that subject is
the religion of Israel. He has only to take care that no
personal opinions of his own shall obscure or prejudice
the story he has to tell. That story must be told in the
spirit and method of criticism as distinguished from the
spirit and method of tradition. Tradition has been accus-
tomed to regard the fundamental religious teaching of
the entire Old Testament as one and the same through-
out. Abraham and Moses and David and Isaiah and
Ezra were assumed to have been, one and all of them,
monotheists of the same pure type. Tradition has taken
for granted the accuracy of the Biblical narratives, and,
speaking very generally, has regarded each book of
the Old Testament as a contemporary record of the age
with which it dealt. In this view the chronological
order of the different books is predetermined. The reli-
gious institutions of the Israelites and their system of
sacred law become coincident in time with the beginnings
of their national life. Criticism, on the other hand, makes
the discovery that the Laws of the Pentateuch arc not
always consistent with one another : Deuteronomy con-
tradicts Leviticus, and Exodus contradicts itself. The
David of the Books of Samuel is very different from the
supposed David of the Psalms, and both are different
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 6
from the David of Chronicles. The religious institutions
of the monarchy are often flagrantly opposed to Penta-
teuchal ordinances ; and the older prophets, who, upon
the traditional hypothesis, must have regarded the Mosaic
writings as the basis of their religious ideas, maintain
complete silence about them.
Criticism finds, in fact, that the Old Testament is
neither homogeneous in doctrine nor consistent in standard
of practice, and it attempts to establish some sort of
relation between such divergences as these and differ-
ences of date : it seeks to arrange them in some order,
and to show, if possible, their logical connection one with
another, and the historical development of the later out
of the earlier stage. We may ultimately find that an
unbroken chronological development from the most im-
mature doctrines and practices which are discoverable in
the Biblical books to the noblest and most mature, is
unhistorical. There may be a period of decline inter-
vening between two periods of progress. The general
tendency of Biblical criticism has been to emphasize the
originality and importance of the Prophets, and to place
the Law and the Poetical Books in a new relation to
them in the chronological order. The dates assigned by
tradition to Amos, Hosea and Isaiah, are not affected ;
but whereas, according to tradition, the Psalms and the
Proverbs were earlier than these Prophets, according to
criticism they are later ; and the legal portion of the
Pentateuch, all of which tradition would fain believe
anterior to the Prophets, stands almost in its entirety
after them.
As to the " growth" or " development"' of the ancient
b2
4 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
Hebraic religion, criticism lias readied many results
which may be regarded as well ascertained and sure, or
which, at any rate, are winning their way more and
more decisively to general acceptance, and changing
from hypothesis into fact. Such conclusions we may
gladly receive with that cautious readiness which should
welcome the results of scientific investigation, and with
the reverence which the subject to be illustrated demands.
But as to the "origin" of this religion, criticism
still sjoeaks with no certain voice. In the main, its
verdict is chiefly negative : it has shown the inadequacy
of traditional views, but replaced them with no unques-
tionable construction of its own : it has revealed where
legend was masquerading in the dress of history, but
it has not yet been able to substitute for the unmasked
legends a positive narrative of truth. The rule that all
origins are obscure is nowhere more true than in the
religious history of Israel. And yet the origin of Israel's
religion must be the subject of this initial Lecture. It
is thus inevitable — and this point needs emphatic insist-
ance — that the results to be obtained are purely inferen-
tial and argumentative. Out of a variety of conflicting
hypotheses, one will be adopted and defended as the
most probable. Now the probability of any hypothesis
upon the origin of the Hebrew religion is in proportion
to the extent with which it squares with the facts of the
subsequent historic period, and best explains how these
facts may have come to be.
It is necessary to indicate the causes of this deep
obscurity which rests over the beginnings of our subject.
And here I may premise that a certain familiarity with
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 0
the contents of the Old Testament, and with the course
of the history which it embodies, will be throughout
assumed.
The material from which an investigation into "the
origin and development" of the Hebrew religion must
be built up, is twofold in character. There is, in the
first place, the evidence won from the religions of other
kindred or neighbouring peoples — the evidence, in other
words, of comparative religion, and more particularly
of that portion of it which deals with the Semitic races.
This evidence is obviously indirect: it may explain a
fact or suggest an hypothesis ; the facts themselves must
come from another source. That source is the Old Tes-
tament itself. In the absence of religious inscriptions
and works of art, we possess no other first-hand and
immediate authority. What the Old Testament has to
tell us of the origin and development of its religion may
be illustrated, emended or rejected, both by the compara-
tive evidence of other races and by historical criticism ;
there is no fresh and external material upon which to
construct a new account independent of the old.
It is true that the religion of Israel is professedly an
historical religion, and possesses documents which claim
to give an historical account of its origin and fortunes.
But the earliest portions of these documents, like the
sacred traditions of other races, embody not history but
legend, the unhistoric character of which, in the light of
comparative religion, is pretty easily determined. Where
legend passes into history, the difficulties are not over-
come, for the history is narrated to us by writers who
lived many centuries after the events which they describe,
6 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
and who habitually allow the past to speak in the lan-
guage of their own age.
"We possess no unquestionably authentic and homoge-
neous contemporary writings older than the second half
of the eighth century B.C. It is important to realize
definitely the bearing of this statement. Let us assume
that upon Israelite history, as distinct from Israelite
legend, the curtain rises at the moment when the Hebrew
clans, under the guidance of a common leader, are about
to leave their settlements upon the borders of Egypt and
to seek a new home in Canaan. The date of this move-
ment was perhaps somewhere about 1250 B.C. The
fortunes of the tribes from the exodus from Egypt till
the age of Isaiah, in other words till the eighth century,
are in their outline familiar to us all. These five hun-
dred years include the settlement of the tribes in Canaan,
the period of the Judges, the establishment of the mo-
narchy under Saul and its transference to David, the
disruption of the kingdom on the death of Solomon, and
then a series of rulers in the two monarchies during the
two hundred years that lie between Solomon and Jero-
boam the Second. Many great names are familiar to us
in the course of this period. First and foremost come
Moses himself, his brother Aaron, and his successor
Joshua ; then, in the time of the Judges, Deborah and
Barak, Gideon and Abimelech, Jephthah and Eli. We
pass on to Samuel, whose figure is prominent in the his-
tory of the early monarchy; to Nathan and Gad, the seers
who were bold enough to censure the wrong-doings of
their master and king; to the prophet Ahijah, who fore-
told to Solomon the insurrection of Jeroboam ; and, some
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 7
hundred years later, to the majestic figures of Elijah and
Elisha, who lived and taught about a century before
Amos and Hosea.
And now let us recall to mind that from all these
centuries, with their long roll of great events and great
names, there remains not one homogeneous and complete
literary work. Once more let us look at the same fact
from another point of view. When we open an English
Bible we find the writings of the Old Testament arranged
upon a certain plan. First come historical books, then
poetical books, then prophetical books. JSTow the poetical
books are one and all, in the light of a criticism which
I believe to be assured, later than the eighth century.
Of the prophetical books, Hosea, Amos, and certain por-
tions of Isaiah and Micah, are authentic documents of
the eighth century ; the rest are all later. There remain
the historical books. Exclude Euth, Chronicles, Ezra,
Nehemiah, Esther, which are all subsequent to the eighth
century, and we are left with the Pentateuch and the
books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Now the
word "book" is here misleading. "We think of a book
as written by a single person within a limited time ; but
not one of these books was written by a single person,
or even within the limits of a single century. They
contain isolated documents, such as the Song of Deborah
and the Blessing of Jacob, which are comparatively
ancient j but in their present form, and even in much
of their matter, they are later than the eighth century.
Their earlier portions may belong to the ninth, a very
small element to the tenth century. They are derived
from many sources, and these sources had themselves a
b I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
history, during which they did not retain their original
shape, but, in the process by which they were fused
together to form each of these so-called books, underwent
many modifications. We shall presently see the reason
why the fact that these books have undergone repeated
revisions, and that they incorporate increments from
different centuries, compels us to use their evidence as
to the origin and early growth of the religion of Israel
with the utmost caution.
Be it granted, then, that the earliest authentic and
homogeneous writings of the Old Testament belong to
the eighth century B.C. They belong, therefore, to a
period which had left the first formative stages of religion
a long way behind. And secondly, they are the writings
of men whose religious standpoint was an ethical mono-
theism, if not theoretically absolute, yet already practi-
cally master of the field. Thus here, where for the first
time we reach an unyielding foothold, we find the religion
whose growth and origin we investigate, in some of its
main principles almost full-grown. The men whose writ-
ings I refer to are the four prophets of the eighth cen-
tury— Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah.
To their teaching I shall naturally have to direct your
attention later on in some detail; but I wish here to
summarize its heads, in order that we may see what the
religion of our first authentic witnesses actually was.
For it is from their words that, following the example of
Prof. Kucnen, we must begin our investigation into the
origin of the religion of Israel. From what is certain we
must trace our steps back to the uncertain, and, starting
from the known faith of Amos and Isaiah, attempt to
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 9
determine its origin and development in doubtful and
disputed sources.
The religious faith of these great teachers was on
the border-land which separates monolatry from mono-
theism. For practical purposes it was, however, distinctly
monotheistic, and as such it may be now regarded.
Yet their monotheism strikes us at once as different
from our own in one important point, which was, how-
ever, essentially connected both with its religious and
with its popular character. Their Deity is the God
of their race, and is addressed by a proper name. For
us, the unity of God is as much a necessity of our thought
as the unity of the world. A distinctive appellation for
Deity is as absurd as a distinctive appellation for the
universe : it is not necessary to distinguish them from
other members of the same categories, for each is co-ex-
tensive with its class. God exhausts deity, and the uni-
verse exhausts the world. But for our eighth-century
prophets monotheism meant something different : its
meaning was, that one particular God, with one particular
name, the God of their own particular nation, had driven
all other gods out of the field. Yahveh — for that is his
name — is still the God of the Israelites, though he be also
the Creator of heaven and earth. Practically, indeed, he
has become the only God, for his power and his interest
are not limited to Israel ; other divine agencies, even
if they exist, are beside him of no account. But his
personality is so marked that he is more familiar to the
prophets under the name Yahveh than as simply God.
In spite of this limitation, as well as in spite of the
10 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
fact that to the prophets Yahveh is far more closely
related to, and interested in, one particular race than we
can conceive it possible for God to be, there are yet
essential features of their doctrine in which, after seven-
and-twenty centuries of progress, we are still largely
at one with them. "What Yahveh's exact nature is,
they do not tell us, beyond implying that, like the
angels whose Lord he is, it is spirit and not flesh.1 But
of his character they speak clearly. He is wise and just
and good. The duties which he imposes upon his wor-
shippers are civic righteousness, purity and compassion.
For himself he claims only a rigid abstention from the
worship or acknowledgment of " other gods." Cere-
monial worship, in antiquity equivalent to sacrifice, is
indifferent to Yahveh; but where united with injustice
and unchastity, it becomes a moral abomination. Sacred
images and material representations of the Godhead in
any human or animal form are abhorrent to the prophets :
their religion is almost wholly free from the superstitious
elements which disfigured other religions of antiquity.
Sorcery and witchcraft are hateful to their God. His
will is made known by special revelations which he gave
and gives to chosen individuals. The form and manner
of these revelations are not clearly defined, but there is
no adequate evidence to show that the prophets shared
the belief of antiquity, and of their contemporaries, in
the possibility of ascertaining the Divine will by the
casting of a sacred lot.
The object, then, of the present Lecture is to find a
1 Isaiah xxxi. 3.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 11
working hypothesis as to the origin of this religion, —
the historic origin, if that be still possible, of that phase
of monotheism which the prophets of Israel and Judah
taught publicly in the eighth century B.C. And as we
can see that this monotheism is still young and immature,
and must clearly have sprung from a monolatry out of
■which it has scarcely become emancipated, the problem
may at once be pushed one stage farther back, and
resolved into the question as to the origin of the mono-
latry which preceded the nascent monotheism of the
prophets. Monolatry must be here understood to imply
a faith, the primal law of which is, that only one par-
ticular god must be worshipped by its adherents, but
which does not deny the existence of other gods beyond
its own pale. Monolatry is the worship of one god;
monotheism, of the one and only God.
Now the history of the Hebrew people and of its
religion up to the era of the eighth-century prophets may
be divided into three periods of very unequal length, to
any one of which the origin of Hebrew monolatry may
be, and has been, assigned. The first period is tradi-
tionally known as the age of the Patriarchs, and is sup-
posed to stretch from Abraham to Joseph. It is described
in the Book of Genesis, and comprises the history of four
generations. But from the narratives in Genesis we can
make no safe or cogent deductions as to the religious
condition and opinions of the Hebrews in the pre-
Mosaic era.
The Patriarchal age of the Hebrews corresponds with
the heroic age in Greece. As they are presented to us
in Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? and Jacob's
12 I. OEIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
twelve sons, are not historical personalities, but legendary
heroes.1 This is freely admitted even by so cautions a
critic as Dillmann. He asserts: " At the present day it
is self-evident that all the stories about the Patriarchs
belong to the domain of legend, not to that of rigorous
history. It must be unreservedly allowed that of no
people on earth are its actual ancestors historically trace-
1 It is impossible here to attempt any proof of this apparently startling
statement. But before the "general reader" argues that it has been
rashly made on inadequate evidence, let him first read the authorities
referred to in this note. As Kuenen said in 1870, it is in the
abstract possible that such persons as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob should
have existed ; but the question at issue is, " whether the progenitors
of Israel and of the neighbouring nations who are represented in
Genesis, are historical personages. It is this question which we answer
in the negative." Since Kuenen wrote, the discovery of the two Pales-
tinian localities, Yaqbal = Jacob-el, and Ishpal = Joseph-el, in theKarnak
list of places conquered by Thothmes III. (16th century) of Egypt,
shows that Jacob and Joseph were names of tribes, and then, perhaps,
of the places where they dwelt, long before they became the names of
individualized heroes ejpongmi. Cf. Meyer, Z.A. W., 188G, pp. 1 — 16;
1888, pp. 42—46; GroS,Revue egijptologique,1885,Yol. IV. pp. 95—101,
146 — 151 ; Eenan, Histoire du peuple d' 'Israel, Vol. I. pp. 107, 112;
Records of the Past, N.S., Vol. V. pp. 48, 51. It is another question
whether Abraham, Sarah, &c, were originally divinities. Noldeke
still maintains this view ; cf. his article on the Hebrew Patriarchs in
Ira neuen Reich, 1871, pp. 497—511, and Z.D.M.G., 1888, p. 484;
and generally for the legendary or mythical character of the Patriarchs,
Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Vol. I. pp. 108 — 115; De stamvaders van
het Israelitische volk: TJieol. Tijdschrift, 1871, p. 255, &c. ; Review
of Popper's JJrsprung des Monothcismus, ditto, 1880, p. 461, &c. ;
Matthes' Eeview of Goldziher, D<>r Mijthus lei den Hebrdern, ditto,
1877, p. 188, &c, p. 241, &c. ; Stade, Geschichte des Volks Israel,
Vol. I. pp. 126—129; Z.A. W., 1881, pp. 112—116, pp. 347—350 ;
Eenan, Revue des etudes juives, 18S2, p. 162; Wellhausen, History
of Israel, p. 318, &c. ; Piepenring, La livre de la Genese: Revue de
Vhistoire des religions, 1890, pp. 1 — 62.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 13
able. For a nation is not formed like a family, but grows
together out of a variety of heterogeneous materials.
The Biblical representation of all the Hebrew tribes as
descended from twelve sons of one father docs not imply
the historic result of an actual blood relationship or of
natural consanguinity : it wras rather the product of arti-
fice and purpose, and depended on geographical, political,
and even religious considerations. The personifications
of nations, tribes, territories and periods, universally
acknowledged for the stories contained in the first eleven
chapters of Genesis, do not suddenly cease with chapter
twelve. They still recur, and not only in the mere genea-
logies of nations. And now that we have a wide know-
ledge of the legendary poetry of the most various peoples,
it is no longer necessary to prove that the life-like indi-
viduality of the Genesis stories is in itself no evidence of
their historic truth, but, on the contrary, is a character-
istic peculiarity of legend."1 For the earliest history
of the Hebrew religion, the only positive conclusion
to be drawn from the stories of the Patriarchs is purely
inferential. Our estimate of the Mosaic period may
induce us to believe that even before Moses, and partially
explaining both his teaching and its success, there existed
among the Hebrew clans an inner circle of purer religious
faith, which, as Dillmann plaintively pleads, if it was in
any sense a reality, must almost necessarily have been
realized and carried forward by certain special, or even
exceptional, individuals. But this is no more than sha-
dowy hypothesis, and our first period therefore remains
a pre-historic age, in which, so far as direct evidence
2 Dillmann, Die Genesis, 5 th cd., 1886, p. 215.
14 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
goes, the outward events and the inward spiritual cleve*
lopment are alike unknown.
Between the first and second period — between Genesis
and Exodus — the family of Abraham has become the
people of Israel. The second period is the age of Moses
and Joshua, of the exodus from Egypt, and of the settle-
ment in Canaan. It is described by the sacred history
of the Pentateuch as the age in which the true national
life was begun, and the national religion established, by
special and novel revelations of the national God to
Moses, his servant. Moses is the traditional founder of
the national religion, and with this estimate of tradition
the prophets of the eighth century substantially agree.
Criticism regards this period as a mixture of legend and
of fact, in which legend predominates. Yet the depar-
ture of the Hebrew clans from Egypt marks the moment
in which the semi-historical, as contrasted with the purely
legendary, epoch of both the political and religious life
of Israel may be considered to begin, and criticism has
accepted, and still accepts, the exodus itself and the
personality of Moses as assured historical realities.
But why, it will be asked, does criticism regard Moses
so differently from the Patriarchs ? Why are Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, legendary heroes, but Moses, on the
contrary, a figure of history ? Must he not also be
assigned a place among that dim band of sacred founders
and legislators whose personality has faded away under
the fierce light of an inexorable science ? Is not his
history one uninterrupted sequence of miracles and impos-
sibilities ? The answers to these questions are manifold.
The historic reality of Moses is mainly a matter of
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 15
inference. Yet any one can see that there is a real
difference between the narratives of Genesis, and those of
the remaining books of the Pentateuch. In the former
we deal with individuals; in the latter, with a people
and its leaders. The strong and uniform tradition that
Israel's religious and national life began with the deliver-
ance from Egypt and the entry into Canaan, accepted and
emphasized by the eighth-century prophets as well as by
the authors of the Pentateuch, is not to be lightly set
aside. It would, indeed, have to be rejected if the course
of the subsequent history appeared resolutely to contradict
it. But this is not so. As we shall see, the course of
religious development and its explanation supjDort tradi-
tion to this extent, that they posit and demand a higher
and purer religious belief for the Hebrews than for the
Canaanites. And if this be so, there is nothing in the
way of accepting tradition in the further step of connect-
ing the origin and inculcation of this higher religious
faith with the person and the work of Moses.
The third period extends from the end of the Mosaic
age to the eighth-century prophets — an interval of some
five hundred years. In one of the earliest stories related
to us from this third period — though two centuries may
perhaps have already elapsed since the first settlements
in Canaan — we pass out of the legendary epoch, and are
presented with a piece of contemporary evidence — the
Song of Deborah, the oldest fragment, in all probabilit}r,
preserved to us in the Hebrew Scriptures. And, from
Deborah onwards, allowing for certain gaps, the story
of Israel can be recounted in a continuous and historic
1G I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
narrative.1 There are still occasional legends, and the
documents from which such a narrative is drawn are of
composite material and in their preponderating bulk of
later date than the events which they describe, but the
course of the outward history, at least, can be sufficiently
ascertained.
In which, then, of these three periods did the law and
practice of monolatry take their rise ? Was monolatry
the gradual acquisition of the third or historic period;
was it the novel teaching of Moses; or, lastly, is its origin
to be relegated, as an immemorial custom rather than a
conscious enactment, to the earliest and pre-historic age ?
If the first appearance of monolatry, either as custom
or law, be denied not only to the pre-historic but also to
the Mosaic age, such a decision runs counter to the narra-
tives of the Pentateuch, to the editors of the historical
books, and, above all, to the prophets of the eighth century.
Tor, while the prophets are wholly ignorant of any com-
prehensive Mosaic Law, regulating alike the social life
of the people and the ceremonial worship of Yahveh, so
that the Pentateuch, as we now possess it, was indis-
putably unknown to them, they allude to Moses as a
prophet, though not as a lawgiver. While they are in
marked and strenuous opposition to the popular religion
of their day, they throughout represent themselves as
restorers rather than as innovators. Theirs is the legiti-
mate religion of Israel ; and more than once the exodus
from Egypt is referred to as the epoch which witnessed
1 Deborah's date may perhaps be assigned to the eleventh cen-
tury B.C.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 17
the establishment of that true national faith which is
also their own.1
The editors of the historical books — Judges, Samuel
and Kings — -who arranged, manipulated and annotated
material of very various dates, put forward a view of
Israel's religious history between the age of Moses and
that of the prophets which has become traditional, and
with which we are all familiar. They agree with the
prophets in their estimate of the Mosaic age, but they
represent the history of Israel from the first settlement
in Canaan as a long record of perpetually recurrent apos-
tasy. Monolatry was, indeed, the law, but it was broken
again and again.
Thus they tell us that "the people of Israel served
Yahveh all the days of Joshua and all the days of the
elders that outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great
works of Yahveh which he did for Israel," but that after
their deaths "the children of Israel did evil in the sicrht
of Yahveh and served the Baals and Ashtoreths."2 This
idolatrous impulse was never suppressed till the Israelites
were driven from their land into exile ; its action was,
however, interrupted by spasmodic intervals of repentance
and reform, during which the false gods were abandoned,
and Yahveh was served alone.
Criticism is unable to accept this interpretation of the
religious history of Israel in the period between Joshua
and the eighth -century prophets. But while scholars
are agreed in its rejection, there are opposing theories
1 Amos ii. 10, iii. 1, v. 25, ix. 7 ; Hosea xi. 1, xii. 13, xiii. 4; cf. also
Micah vi. 4 (1 7 th. century); Jer. vii. 22, xv. 1, ii. 2.
\ Judges ii. 7, 13.
C
18 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
which they would substitute in its place. According to
the one theory, the law of monolatry would be ascribed
to, and have originated in, our third or post -Mosaic
period; according to the other, to which I myself adhere,
it would be relegated to one of the two periods preceding.
In the short presentment and discussion of these theo-
ries, it will be necessary to allude to some matters which
will have to be treated of again in their proper place
when we have reached a probable, if only hypothetical,
starting-point for our narrative, and can deal with the
religious history of Israel progressively in chronological
sequence. That starting-point of our whole subject is
the quest of the present Lecture : we shall find it — let
me add by anticipation — in the teaching of Moses.
The question in dispute is really twofold, being con-
cerned with a fact and with the fact's interpretation.
The fact to discover is, whether between Joshua and the
eighth century there was in truth so much actual idolatry
as the editors of the histories aver ; the interpretation to
be formed is, whether, if such idolatry existed, it was
natural and innocent, or a conscious infraction of a known
monolatrous law. How far was the commandment, "Thou
shalt have no other gods but Yahveh," observed by the
men of the post-Mosaic period; and if it was broken,
was it, at any rate, known ? The material with which
to ascertain the fact is contained in the documents which
form the substratum of the histories, and are easily to be
detached from the editorial nexus.
The first theory accepts the view of the editors that
there was much idolatry between Joshua and Amos, and
holds that there is in the earlier documents sufficient
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 19
proof and basis for that opinion. Yahveh was the chief
divinity; bnt the law claiming for him an exclusive wor-
ship was a very gradual growth, which did not ripen fully
till the age of Ahab and Elijah. A modification of this
theory was put forward some twenty years ago by Prof.
Kuenen in his famous book, "The Eeligion of Israel."
While it was there admitted that Moses had proclaimed
the law, "No God but Yahveh," it was argued that this
principle of monolatry was neither accepted nor under-
stood by the great majority of his contemporaries. After
his death it was lost sight of altogether, partly through
the seductive influence of Canaanite polytheism, partly
by the recrudescence of primitive Hebrew paganism.
The mistake of the historical editors consists in regarding
the idolatry of that time as a conscious abandonment of
Yahveh, or as a wilful breach of his law. For the wor-
ship of other local (i.e. Canaanite) or neighbouring divi-
nities was not supposed to be inconsistent with the pious
service of Yahveh as the chief or tutelary God.
The second and opposing theory, of which Prof. Stade
is one of the ablest exponents, denies, not only the edi-
torial interpretation, but also, to a considerable extent,
the existence of the supposed facts upon which the inter-
pretation is imposed.
According to this theory, which, so far as I can see, is
nearer to the facts, there is no such amount of idolatry
recorded in the period between Joshua and Amos, which
is not consistent with an acknowledged law of monolatry,
put forward, let us provisionally assume, by Moses, and
never forgotten or wholly ignored since the founder's
death. It is true that when the Israelites entered Canaan,
c2
20 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
lived among, and largely assimilated to themselves, the
native population, and gradually exchanged a pastoral for
an agricultural life, their religious practices and views
underwent considerable modification. It is generally
believed that their subsequent forms of worship — their
feasts and sacrificial rites, their altars upon high places
and under green trees — were borrowed from the Canaan-
ites. Many may also have borrowed the deities to whom
the rites were originally devoted. " The apostasy to
Baal," the chief deity of the Canaanites, says Professor
Wellhausen, " upon the part of the first generation which
had quitted the wilderness and adopted a settled agri-
cultural life, is attested alike by historical and prophetical
tradition." l By degrees, however, Baal came to be
identified, rather than merely co-ordinated, with Yahveh,
whose worship, and, in the minds of some, whose charac-
ter, approximated more and more closely to the worship
and character of his rival.
But as a set-off to this partial infiltration of Canaanite
belief, there is very much to be said upon the other side.
Our oldest prophetic sources, imbedded in the historical
books, say and imply nothing of general and constant
fluctuations from idolatry to monolatry, and from mono-
latry to idolatry. The eighth-century prophets, whose
evidence is unimpeachable, though they do accuse the
people of idolatrous practices, show so marked a tendency
to identify a corrupt and material worship of Yahveh with
the service of other gods, that it becomes a grave question
whether the idolatry with which they charge their con-
1 Abriss der Geschichte Israels und Judas, in Erstes Heft der Skizzen
tend Vorarbeiten, 1884, p. 18.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 21
temporaries ought not usually to be interpreted as equi-
valent to the irregular and unauthorized service, after
heathen fashion, of the same God whom accusers and
accused alike acknowledged. The national leaders, both
martial and spiritual, from Deborah to David, were all
worshippers of Yahveh. It stands out as a prominent
and incontrovertible fact, that down to the reign of Ahab,
by whom there is a distinct attempt to introduce the
worship of a foreign god, no prominent man in Israel,
with the doubtful exception of Solomon, known by name
and held up for condemnation, worshipped any other god
but Yahveh. In every national and tribal crisis, in all
times of danger and of war, it is Yahveh, and Yahveh
alone, who is invoked to give victory and deliverance.
Hence, since that which the Canaanites gave to the
Israelites was idolatrous in texture, and certainly not
the monolatrous worship of Yahveh, we may infer that
monolatry was the recognized rule, the concurrent wor-
ship of other gods the irregular exception, in the post-
Mosaic and pre-prophetic Israel. In other words, the
origin of the Hebrew monolatry of which we are in
search, must fall behind the limits of our third period,
and be due either to the second or the first.1
1 It should in fairness be stated that one objection, though not to
my mind a convincing one, against this line of argument is, that
whereas proper names compounded of Yahveh or Yah are frequent
after Saul, they are rare in the earlier periods. Thus Xbldeke uses
this fact to the following effect. The names of which Yahveh or Yah
forms part, " entscheiden schon fast allein dafiir dass mindestens seit
der Theilung des Reichs Jahvo allgemein als Hauptgott, wenn nicht
als einziger Gott des Volkes angesehen ward. In alterer Zeit treten
dagegen solche Namen hochstens vereinzelt auf. Von den Namen der
Stiimme unci Geschlechter, die doch zum grossen Theil wohl erst nach
22 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
Does it, then, belong to the first period — the pro-his-
toric age? If so, monolatry would have begun as a
custom centuries before it was transmitted into a law.
But is this not within the limits of probability ? Have
we not been told by a distinguished scholar of a Semitic
instinct towards monotheism; and may not, therefore,
monolatry, at any rate, have been the wonted practice of
at least some Semitic tribes, of whom the Israelites were
one?
It thus becomes necessary to glance at some illustrative
features of Semitic religion in general, and at the place
of the Israelites in the aggregate of the Semitic races.
A full discussion into the origin and development of
Israelite monotheism should, indeed, include an adequate
estimate of Semitic religion, and also, if this were pos-
sible, of the religions of that section of the Semitic family
to which the Hebrews more immediately belonged. Yet
such an estimate, it need scarcely be said, is beyond
the limits of a course of Lectures such as these, as it is
also wholly beyond the powers of the lecturer.
The problem most germane to our own inquiry would
be the question already alluded to, whether there existed
der Ansiedlung in Kanaan enstanden sind, enthiilt keiner ")rp. Die
Mutter Mose's "Q3Y» mag fiir historisch halten, wer will. Der Heros
der Ephraimiten der die Eroberung leitet, heisst zwar gewbhnlieh
3?tt>ln\ aber eigentlicb 3?tEHn, Num. xiii. 16. Gideon's Vater IPNV
und sein Solln nnv konnen nach TTMl^ genannt sein, aber diese
Namen lassen auch andre Ableitungen zu. Erst init der Griindung
des Kb'nigthums werden solche Namen haufig. Das deutet darauf, dass
dieser Gottesname verhiiltnissmassig neu ist, und sich erst allmahlich
verbreitet hat, und was vom Namen gilt, wird doch auch einigermassen
von dem dadurch ausgedriickten Begriff gelten." — Z. D. 31. G., 1888,
p. 477.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 23
among the Semitic races generally anything approaching
to a tendency or instinct for monotheism. It is well
known how frequently this question has been debated
hither and thither in recent years. To the course of its
history since M. Renan started his famous theory of the
monotheistic instinct of the Semitic races, it is unnecessary
to allude. Although in the form proposed by him nearly
forty years ago, and still maintained in his "History of
Israel," it has not won general approbation, because it is
unsupported by facts, modifications of it are still occa-
sionally put forward and defended by eminent scholars.
Where the Semitic races have been least subject to
external influence, and have apparently preserved their
individuality most strongly, certain general religious
characteristics are observable which can be interpreted
in a monotheistic direction. An exuberant mythology is
markedly wanting in the religion of such purely Semitic
races. Many names of Semitic deities are merely titular
or descriptive. "Baal" or Master, "Moloch" or King,
"Adonis" or Lord, would seem to be divinities of races
who not only distinguished God from nature, but had not
even created him out of it. Then, again, several Semitic
races possessed one chief or tribal god, to whom worship
was, if not exclusively, at all events mainly, paid ; and
with others there seems some evidence that a plurality of
gods had resulted from the amalgamation of independent
clans into a single nation.1
1 Assyrian religion had better be put on one side, because of the
adoption by the Semitic invaders of the older Accadian divinities. On
the religion of other Semitic races, cf. Tiele, Histoire comparee des
aitciennes religions de VEgypte et des peuples Semitiqties, 1882; Baeth-
24 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
A partially monotheistic view of the oldest Semitic
religion has lately been again put forward by Profes-
sor Baethgen. He believes that the Semites started,
not indeed with monotheism, but with what he calls
"monism;" they worshipped El or God, and the word
indicated, not the totality of the separate gods, but the
undivided and impersonal divine essence. There are,
however, many objections to such hypotheses, if they
imply that the earlier or pre-historic faith of the Semites
was higher and purer than the faiths which succeeded it.
~No single theory has yet been able to explain all the
phenomena of Semitic religions. Besides the Semitic
deities whose names indicate dominion or power, there
are others which are clearly nature-gods whose names
explain their origin.1 A nature-myth peeps out at least
of one story in the Old Testament, the appearance of
which cannot with any certainty be ascribed to a non-
Semitic influence.2 Just as the origin of all religion is
gen, Deitrdge zur scmitischen Religionsgeschichte, 18S8; TVellhausen,
Reste arabischen Heidentumes, 1887; Pietsclimann, GescMchte der
Phonizier, 1889, pp. 152—237; Nbldeke, Z. D. M. G., 1887 and 1888,
in reviews of Baethgen and Wellhausen ; Meyer, GescMchte des Alter-
thums, 1884, Vol. I. pp. 210 — 212; Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch
der Religionsgeschichte, 1887, Vol. I. pp. 214 — 223 : Die semitische
Familie (many other references are there given) ; Robertson Smith,
Religion of Semites, 18S9, especially pp. 66 — 69, 92 — 94.
1 Der Satz, dass die Semiten im Gegensatz zu den Indereuropaern
keine eigentliche Naturvergbtterung gekannt batten, ist wenigotens in
der Schroffheit ganz unrichtig. Wo Sonne Mond und Venusstern
verehrt werden, da ist es spitzfindig den einfachen Xaturdienst zu
leugnen. Nbldeke, Z.D.M. G., 1888, p. 485.
2 The story of Samson : but Prof. Wilken has lately thrown doubt
upon this. See his interesting essay, De Simsonsage in the Gids of
March, 1868.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 25
due to more than one source, ancestor-worship, spirit-
worship, and nature-worship, all contributing to its pro-
duction and development, so in the formation of Semitic
religions must there have been more than one operating
cause. Analogy does not lead us to believe that if we
were to go further and further back into pre-historic
times we should find a higher or purer religion, but
rather one vaguer, meaner and more trivial. It may
be true we should reach a stage in which the divine
powers would have received no name and no marked
personality; but this would not be because they were
higher or more universal, but because they were incohe-
rent, characterless and chaotic. Xameless divine powers
may have composed the contents of the earliest chapters
of Semitic religion, rather than one nameless but single
Being of unlimited might and range. Or if we assume
that the tendency of the earliest Semitic clans was to
worship one divinity only as the protector of their flocks
and herds, this deity was in no sense conceived as a
supreme God, but only as the tribal or tutelary spirit.
If there was any original monolatry, it did not rise above
the level of spirit- worship, for nameless deities are not
gods in the personalized sense of the word at all, but
merely energies with power to harm or help, and without
character or individuality. When the spirits pass into
gods and receive names, a more polytheistic tendency
begins, for then sexual differentiation steps in, and to
the patron god there is often added a goddess of similar
nature, but separate personality. Then, too, the other
sources of religion create other deities, so that, as the
26 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
historic period opens, we have no certain evidence of any
Semitic tribe worshipping only a single god.
On the other hand, the worship of a chief divinity is
undoubtedly a characteristic feature of Semitic religion.
Pietschmann, the latest historian of Phoenicia, thinks
there must have been a time when the common ancestors
of the Canaanites and Phoenicians worshipped, each in
their own small clan, one single deity only.1 Here, per-
haps, will lie the crucial point. If they ever did so,
that single clan deity must have been one of very small
capacity, and rather, as I have ventured to maintain, of
the nature of a spirit than of a god. If the appellatives,
Euler, Lord, and King, were the titles of the clan deities
from the beginning, this only shows how vague in out-
line and indefinite in character these local and tribal gods
must necessarily have been. The personal God of the
Hebrews had a name, the meaning of which must have
been already lost in very early times. Yahveh could
even be addressed as Baal without relinquishing his own
proper and peculiar name. But the many Baals of the
different Canaanite localities in all probability never
received any more definite nomenclature.
There is no complete evidence or adequate proof that
within the historical period any Semitic tribe worshipped
one deity only with a peculiar proper name of his own.
It is, however, necessary to look for a few moments more
narrowly at the particular group of tribes of which the
Israelites were one.
It would seem that the Israelite people was formed by
1 Gesckichte der Phonizier, 18S9, p. 170.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 27
the gradual closer cohesion of various clans belonging to
the family of the "Hebrews."1 From Mesopotamia to
the north-cast of Palestine, nomad Semitic tribes had
journeyed west and south, and this, the first wave of
migration, crossed the Jordan and established an agricul-
tural and city life. Thus were constituted the " Canaan-
ites," a people closely allied to Israel both in blood and
speech. Another wave moved in a more southerly direc-
tion, and formed the conglomerate of tribes which we
now know as the Arabians. Between these waves there
was a third, consisting of tribes which in their aggregate
included Israel and its nearest kinsfolk, Edom, Moab
and Amnion. The Israelite clans appear to have lived a
wandering nomad life on the eastern shores of Jordan.
Then, from whatever causes, they proceeded southwards,
and, settling upon portions of Egyptian territory, became
subject to and oppressed by their Egyptian overlords.
When, with Moses for their leader, they escaped from
servitude, and journeyed once more towards Palestine,
they subsequently not only acquired settlements on the
east of the Jordan, but gradually made themselves
masters of much of the land upon the west which lies
between Carmel northwards and the steppes of Judrea
towards the south. Their relations to and dealings with
the Canaanites will come before us hereafter. Yet it
may here be noted that in the long period which elapsed
1 " Hebrews " means " the men of the other side," i. e. beyond
Jordan. They were so called by the inhabitants of Canaan before
their own occupation of the land. That the word " Hebrews" had ever
a wider connotation than the Israelites, which is implied, chiefly on
Stade and Wellhausen's authority, in the above sentence, is denied by
Meyer, Z.A. W:, 1886, p. 11.
28 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
before the various loosely connected tribes had become
one people — a period of some three hundred years,
reaching from Moses to David — many clans of alien,
though Semitic, blood were absorbed into fellowship with
them, and adopted their religion. With the Ivenitcs
there existed even into historical times a close and
peculiar relationship, so that it has been suggested that
the distinctive religion of Moses was of Kenite and not
of Israelite origin. Kenites and Midianites belonged to
the Arab nomads of the south ; though akin, they were
not so near in blood to the Israelites as were the men of
Edom, Moab and Amnion. Of the subsidiary evidence
to be drawn from comparative religion to illustrate or
explain the religion of the Israelites, the most important
chapter would unquestionably deal with the religions of
these three kindred and neighbouring tribes. For if
their religions were monolatrous, the argument from
analogy would lead us to surmise that Israelite monolatry,
like the monolatry of its neighbours, must be referred
to the pre-historic age. "We should need no Moses to
account for its appearance, and our task would rather
be to seek out and find, if that were feasible, the causes
and circumstances which changed the monolatry of imme-
morial custom into the monolatry of conscious principle
and national law.
Unfortunately, we know very little about the religions
of Edom, Amnion and Moab. As regards the first,
Eacthgen has shown that, fragmentary as our knowledge
is, it goes to establish the polytheistic character of the
Edomite religion, rather than the contrary. It is not
absolutely certain that the Edomites had even reached
THE HEBEEW RELIGION. 29
the stage of a chief divinity for all their clans. The case,
however, is markedly different with Amnion and Moab.
In the Book of Kings, reference is made in two or
three places to Milcom, the god of the Ammonites ; and
Baethgen is compelled to -acknowledge that, beside Mil-
com, there is no certain record of the worship of any
other god. While he considers that this absence of evi-
dence is solely due to the scantiness of our sources, it
is open to scholars who start from different premises,
and are not, like Baethgen, intent upon defending a
particular hypothesis — the uniqueness of Hebrew mono-
theism, and its origin in revelation — to draw a different,
and not merely negative, inference even from such frag-
mentary notices as we possess.1 As regards Moab, we
are fortunate enough to possess in the Moabite stone a
first-hand authority. The chief god of the Moabites was
Chemosh, and he undoubtedly stood to Moab in a relation
very similar to that in which Yahveh stood to Israel.
This fact we can even deduce from the Old Testament,
in which Moab is called the people of Chemosh. On the
Moabite stone, king Mesa speaks of Chemosh much as an
early Israelite king would speak of Yahveh. At the
bidding of Chemosh, the king fights against Israel, and
by his help he wins the victory. But this very stone of
Mesa seems to show that Chemosh was not the only deity
acknowledged in Moab. The king speaks of having
devoted the town of Nebo to Ashtor-Chemosh, a com-
pound deity clearly distinct from the simple god. Here,
then, we have evidence of a (probably female) deity
who was worshipped alongside of Chemosh, and so
1 Cf. Kuenen, Theol Tijd., 1888, pp. 570—588.
30 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
closely connected with him that the two in their union
were regarded as a new and single divinity. Chemosh
is, therefore, no exclusive god like Yahvch ; he admits
a female associate, and from their alliance a third divinity
is compounded. Whether the Baal or Lord of Peor is
identical with Chemosh, or, as is more probable, a dis-
tinct and separate deity, may be left undecided.1 The
Moabite stone is sufficient to show that in historical times
the principle of monolatry was unacknowledged in Moab.
Thus two out of the three nations nearest akin to. Israel
were certainly not monolatrous in the same sense as
Israel. While the character of their neighbours' reli-
gions would lead us to expect among the Hebrews the
worship of a chief divinity, it is not sufficient to make
us prepared for a law of monolatry, or to explain to us
its origin upon the simple method of analogy.
If the three nearest kinsmen are thus unable to esta-
blish the existence of a Semitic monolatry beyond the
pale of Israel, it ma}*- be safely asserted that no other
Semitic tribe less closely related to Israel — and certainly
not any tribe or city of the Canaanites — can be shown to
have practised monolatry, whether as custom or as law.
Now the light thrown by the Old Testament itself upon
the pre-historic age — our first period — is conflicting, but
it cannot with any propriety be used to substantiate the
hypothesis of a pre-Mosaic and customary monolatry.
We are, therefore, pushed forward to our second period ;
and we must now ask whether there is not good reason
to follow the Pcntateuchal narratives and the cighth-cen-
1 Numbers xxv. 3. Cf. Stade, Geschichte Israels, Vol. I. p. 114,
2nd ed.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 31
tury prophets to the extent of connecting the foundation
of the national faith, the origin of its monolatry, with
the person and teaching of Moses.
Let me here sum up the evidence in favour of thus
assigning the origin of monolatry to the creative doctrine
of Moses. The post-Mosaic ages were substantially mono-
latrous, but their monolatry was neither their own dis-
covery nor a new inspiration. It reaches back beyond the
opening, with Deborah, of the third period. Secondly,
there is no likelihood that monolatry preceded Moses r
the Old Testament, critically examined, is itself scarcely
favourable to such a supposition, and the analogy of other
races contradicts it. With the combined force of these
two arguments, Ave have, thirdly, no sufficient justification
to reject the allusions of the prophets and the statements
of the Pentateuchal narratives so utterly as not to ascribe
a commanding religious position to the person of Moses.
And, lastly, we have the great implication involved in the
conquest of Canaan. When the Israelite tribes made their
gradual entry into Canaan, they must have been at a low
level of material civilization. The indigenous population
was admittedly their superior in general culture. The
Canaanites were tillers of the soil and dwellers in cities ;
the new-comers were shepherds and nomads. And yet
how strange was the result of the intermixture of the two
races ! So far from the Canaanites absorbing the Israel-
ites, it was the Israelites who began to absorb the Canaan-
ites, the few who overcame the many. And as in the
historical age Hebrew patriotism centres in religion, as
the Israelite esprit de corps is bound up and identified
with the name and cause of Yahveha we are entitled to
32 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
infer that the victory of semi-barbarous Israel over the
arts and culture of Canaan could only have been due to
the religion of Yahveh. And if the religion of Yahveh
triumphed over Baal and Astarte and the whole Canaan-
ite pantheon, this was just because, while they were
many, Yahveh was one, who demanded as an acknow-
ledged right the undivided allegiance of his worshippers.
Monolatry as law, not as custom, will alone explain the
supremacy of Yahveh's religion in the midst of Canaanite
environment. Monolatry, it is true, implies more than the
abstract assertion of the worship of a single God. Nor
is it in ignorance of this wider implication that we are
now led to infer that in the principle of monolatry lay
the essential feature and excellence of the Mosaic faith.
"Thou shalt have no other god besides me:" if any
Pentateuchal law, in substance though not in words,
represent the Mosaic religion at all, it must be the
opening injunction of the Decalogue.1
With this conclusion, significant as it is, we can,
nevertheless, in no wise remain content. Two questions
immediately present themselves. The first is, What was
the character of the Mosaic monolatry ? the second, How
was it obtained, and what kind of religion preceded it ?
A religious law of monolatry, imposed by one man
upon a people who had not known it hitherto, implies
definite and peculiar characteristics in the rounder's con-
ception of the Deity, whose single worship he has induced
his nation to accept. If it was borne in upon Moses that
Yahveh demanded an undivided worship, so novel a con-
1 Cf. the analogous arguments of Stade, Geschichte, Vol. I. pp.
439 and 516.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 33
ception could only have arisen in his mind because
Yahveh seemed to him different in quality from all the
other gods, who had never yet required so exclusive an
allegiance. This difference in quality could be of two
kinds. A law of monolatry might have been conceived by
Moses either because his god was regarded as jealous to
an extreme degree of any attention paid to another deity
but himself, and both able and likely to punish such
parallel worship with extremest violence; or, again, it
might have been conceived by him as the necessary and
consistent consequence of the ethical superiority of the
one chosen and accepted deity over all his rivals.
How are we to discover which of these two possibilities
conditioned the monolatry of Moses, since we cannot with
confidence assume that any single portion of the Penta-
teuch reflects back to us the true character of the Mosaic
religion ?
Eecurring once more to the sure foothold and starting
ground of our eighth-century prophets, it will be remem-
bered that their monotheism or monolatry was distinctly
ethical. To them the single worship of Yahveh is inse-
parable from his unique character. Can we trace this
character of Yahveh back from them to the mind of
Moses ? Or is there a distinct cleavage and wide differ-
ence between their opinions and those of former genera-
tions ? The literary material from which any answer to
these questions must be attempted is primarily contained
in the oldest sections of the Pentateuch and of the his-
torical books. There is also the evidence of the prophets
themselves, who often contrast, directly or indirectly,
their own religious conceptions with those of their con-
temporaries.
D
34 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
Thus the next stage in our inquiry would seem to be
an estimate of the pre-prophetic monolatry. Important
peculiarities appear to distinguish it from the monolatry
of the prophets. Several and even crucial passages, how-
ever, on which many historians and theologians rely to
prove the contrast between the Yahveh of the prophets
and the Yahveh of the pre-prophetic age, are themselves
as late as the prophetic period ; and it has been strongly
urged that such passages cannot fitly be used to show
that higher conceptions of the Godhead were not the pos-
session of a Mosaic minority throughout the pre-prophetic
era.1 The supposed contrast or difference may be, not
between period and period, but between popular super-
stition and Mosaic doctrine. But this objection will, I
think, only hold if there were clear and positive evidence
of specifically prophetic conceptions having been held by
such a Mosaic minority before the eighth century and
upwards. And this we shall not find to be the case. If
the prophetic teaching was in many respects novel or
progressive, it is clear that it could not have been imme-
diately apprehended and adopted to the full by every
writer or historian. There must have been a considerable
period of overlapping, in which old and new ideas would
co-exist in the same mind, and both be expressed in
words. It is therefore, I think, legitimate to use even
those passages which are subsequent to Amos and Isaiah
as evidence of lower and more restricted views about
God in the pre-prophetic period, unless there be special
reason to suppose that they represent either primitive
1 Davidson, " The Prophet Dehorah :" Expositor, 3rd Series, Vol. V.
p. 49, n. 1. Kobertson, Early Religion of Israel, 1892, p. 303, and
jxissim.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 35
survivals, or a graft of foreign superstition upon the
genuine line of religious development. A deterioration
of the Founder's teaching through Canaanite influence,
imperfect apprehension or a recrudescence of pre-M osaic
idolatry, must not indeed by any means be overlooked ;
but if we would not place Moses in too violent a contrast,
not only to his contemporaries, but also to his successors,
such arguments must not be pushed too far.
In the first place, then, the prophets of the eighth
century seem to have made a distinct advance in the
direction of monotheism. Before their time, men appear
to have more fully recognized the existence of other
independent divinities outside and beyond Israel. The
very fact that Israel's God was addressed by a proper
name shows that he was thereby contra-distinguished
from the gods of other peoples and lands. It is not said
in the Decalogue, There is no God but Yahveh, but,
Beside Yahveh there shall be for the Israelite no other
God. As Israel is the people of Yahveh, so is Moab the
people of Chemosh,1 and this parallelism must have at
least arisen and been established while some considerable
measure of reality was ascribed to the Moabite god. A
corrupt passage in the Second Book of Kings would
appear to imply that the power of Chemosh in his own
land was the cause of a signal Israelite defeat.2 Pales-
tine is frequently called the "inheritance of Yahveh;"
and in two famous passages, which are repeatedly quoted
and emphasized in this connection, it would seem as if
the habitual rule and interest of Yahveh were conceived
as coterminous with his own land. Both of them, how-
1 Numbers xxi. 29.
2 2 Kings iii. 27; cf. Stade, Geschichte, Vol. I. p. 431.
d2
36 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
ever, are probably as late as the eighth, and one may-
even belong to the seventh century. The first is where
David curses those "who have driven him out from
abiding in the inheritance of Yahveh, saying, Go, serve
ether gods." The second is a sentence in Jephthah's
message to the king of Amnion, reproaching him for his
attack upon Israel. "Is it not thus? That which
Chemosh thy god gives thee, thou takest in possession ;
and whatsoever Yahveh our God has dispossessed before
us, that take we iu possession."1 If we are justified in
making any use of this comparatively late passage for
our estimate of the pre-prophetic religion, it would cer-
tainly seem as if the older conception of Yahveh had not
advanced very far beyond monolatry to monotheism.
But if in the pre-prophetic period Israelites believed
frankly in the existence and power of other gods besides
their own, the supremacy of Yahveh was as unquestioned
by them as the supremacy of Chemosh was doubtless un-
questioned by the Moabites. !N"or was a belief in the
mere existence of other gods, and of their power in their
own lands, at all incompatible with the full acknowledg-
ment that Yahveh was the one and only object of worship
to be tolerated in Israel.
1 1 Sam. xxvi. 19; Judges xi. 24 (Variorum Eeference Bible). For
the date of the former passage, cf. Kittel, Geschichte der Hebraer,
Vol. II. p. 38; Kuenen, Onderzoek, 2nd ed., Vol. I. p. 385: for that
of the latter, Kittel, Vol. II. p. SO; Kuenen, Vol. I. p. 349; Well-
hausen, Composition, p. 22S (Bleek's Einleitung, p. 195). Both Well-
hausen and Stade use the passages as illustrations of pre-prophetic
thought. For the same purpose, 2 Kings v. 17 is often made use of,
which seems to contrast oddly with verse 15, and 2 Kings i. 6, which,
however, is again not pre-prophetic in date. Cf. Kittel, Vol. IL
p. 184.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 37
The next point of difference is more important. It
relates to the inferior character of the pre-prophetic
deity, and to the imperfect nature of his worship.
If we compare Yahveh as represented in the oldest
sections of the historical books with what we know of
other Semitic deities, we are struck by certain likenesses
as well as by certain differences. Though he is a person,
there is no mythology connected with him ; he has no
relative— above all, no goddess — either beneath him or
beside him.1 Sexual licentiousness was never connected,
so far as we know, with his native and uncorrupted
worship. If he be allied to any of the Semitic gods, it
is rather to those severer deities whose natural affinities
are with the lightning and the storm.
Thus it is that fire and thunder are the concurrent
signs of a theophany. Within the burning bush lurks
Yahveh himself. Fire is the symbol of his presence,
and the instrument of his wrath.2 It consumes the
murmurers in Israel who have aroused his anger. In a
pillar of fire and cloud he leads his peopl e through the
wilderness. It is only gradually that an effort is made
to distinguish these natural phenomena from the divine
nature, and to picture Yahveh as present rather in the
still, small voice than in the earthquake and the fire.3
1 Our existing Hebrew vocabulary possesses no separate word for
goddess.
2 Exod. iii. 4; 2 Kings i. 10; Judges xiii. 20; Gen. xix. 24, &c.
3 1 Kings xix. 11, 12. In one of his somewhat mocking moods,
Wellhausen (Bleek's Eirdeitung, 4th ed. p. 246, n. 1) has warned us
against the senthnentale Ausdeutung of this sequence of storm, earth-
quake, fire, and still, small voice. But cf. also Kuenen, Nieuw en Oady
38 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
With the eighth-century prophets the wrath of Yahveh
is a moral wrath, though even in their writings it is repre-
sented as manifesting itself upon a scale and with an
intensity which are hardly consonant with our notions of
divine justice and self -containment. But in the pre-
prophetic period it appears occasionally as disconnected
with moral motives, resembling ratber the insensate
violence of angered nature, than the reasonable indig-
nation of a moralized personality. Yahveh — to borrow
Wellhausen's phrase — had unaccountable moods. The
holiness of Yahveh meant nothing more than an awful
inviolability; he shared that common quality of the gods
which makes it dangerous for man to approach them too
closely, or to meddle with what belongs to them. He
was not always invisible to mortal eye, but the sight of
him was fraught with peril.1 Any infringement of his
rights, any trespass upon ground which was hallowed by
his localized presence, was visited with extreme punish-
ment. Thus, when the sons of Jechoniah among the
men of Eeth-Shemesh gaze too curiously upon the Ark of
Yahveh, he kills seventy of them for their presumption.2
When Uzzah ventures to support the Ark upon the cart,
he too is killed, although his motive is good.3 At Mount
Sinai, God bids Moses caution the people against drawing
too near to the mountain, lest God should break forth
upon them to their destruction.4 The priests must sanc-
1864, p. 141 (De Project Elia), reprinted now in the collected edition
of the Schetsen uit de geschiedenis van Israel.
1 Cf., e.g., Judges xiii. 22, &c.
- 1 Sam. vi. 19. For the text, see Driver's Samuel, ad. loe,
3 2 Sam. vi. 6—8. * Exod. xix. 21—24.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 39
tify themselves, otherwise, when they come near, the
same fate will befal them. The wrath that follows upon
sacrilege seems to be regarded by Yahveh himself as
almost a mechanical reaction. Again, while the early
Israelite was accustomed to attribute any strange or un-
toward event to the direct agency of Yahveh, he did not
always regard calamity as retribution for sin. This is
another indication that Yahveh' s character was as yet
imperfectly moralized. A frequently quoted instance of
this defect is the suggestion of David that Saul's unde-
served enmity may be owing either to the accusation of
man or to the motiveless incitement of God.1 In another
instance, the anger of Yahveh is said to have been kindled
against Israel, like the anger of Chemosh against Moab
in the stone of Mesa, without any cause for indignation
which the historian can discern; for, seemingly, it is
mere wantonness which prompts Yahveh to move David
to take the census, in order that he may punish the people
thereafter for the sin which he himself had instigated.2
In harmony with these wrathful and fiery elements in
Yahveh' s character is his proclivity for battle and war.
u Yahveh is a man of war, Yahveh is his name" — such
is the triumphant outburst of an old song of victory.3
"The Wars of Yahveh" was the title of a lost book in
which the battles of Israel were described.4 The spirit
of Yahveh in the oldest sections of the Book of Judges
1 1 Sam. xxvi. 19.
2 2 Sam. xxiv. 1; cf. 1 Chron. xxi. 1.
3 Exodus xv. 3. Date of song is uncertain, but it is clearly post-
Mosaic (ver. 13).
4 Numbers xxi. 14.
40 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OP
drives on the leaders of the people to martial exploits.1
Enemies of Yahveh can expect no mercy from him ; utter
destruction is their lot. When a city was devoted to him,
every living thing within it was given to the sword. The
ban properly included the cattle and even the inanimate
spoil, though these were sometimes specially exempted
from the general destruction. Its victims were sacro-
sanct, and the withdrawal of any of them from their pre-
scribed doom was an unpardonable offence. The stories
of Achan and Agag are instances in point. It does not
surprise us that a deity to whom the votive offering of an
entire community could be agreeable, should be propi-
tiated in exceptional circumstances with human sacrifices.
Unsuccessful efforts have been made to explain away the
few instances of these sacrifices in the historical books.
The most obvious is that of Jephthah's daughter; but
there are others which, if not sacrifices in the technical
sense, are yet, as the offering of human lives to appease
the wrath of God, of practically equivalent nature. Such
is the hanging up of Saul's seven sons before Yahveh
in Gibeon, or, again, the execution of the leaders of the
people in Shittim, who are "hung up unto Yahveh against
the sun that his fierce wrath might be turned away from
Israel."2
The actual nature of the Godhead was conceived, as
1 E.g. Judges xiv. 19.
2 Numbers xxv. 4. Whether the sacrifice of first-born sons was an
ancient custom in the religion of Yahveh, revived in the eighth and
seventh centuries, is a disputed point. That it was so has been lately
re-argued with much ability in a dissertation by B. D. Eerdman
Melekdienst en rereering van liemellichamen in Israel's Assyrische
periode, 1891.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 41
we should expect, upon lines parallel to the general esti-
mate of his character. While the prophets were begin-
ning to spiritualize the nature of Yahveh, so that their
anthropomorphic phrases and elaborate theophanies are
probably little more than poetic symbolism or meta-
phor, by the people generally Yahveh was conceived as
existing under conditions of space like ourselves ; he
resided in a definite locality, and moved, if necessity
required, from place to place. In the oldest period his
dwelling appears to have been Mount Sinai;1 but when
the Israelites settled in Canaan, it was identified with
their own. Originally, men probably believed that God's
shape was the same as man's. When Closes, Aaron,
Nadab, Abihu and the seventy elders, go up "unto
Yahveh," they apparently see, not merely a manifestation
of God, but Yahveh himself visibly present.2 This story
represents an earlier phase of thought than the verse in
a subsequent chapter, " There can no man see me and
live," although, in that story too, it is assumed that God
really possesses hand, face and back parts ; it was, there-
fore, easy for a popular imagination to picture God as
walking in a garden, or appearing to Abraham as a guest
in human form. Such stories are the links between the
manifestation of Yahveh himself and the manifestation
of his angel, who is closely connected and even frequently
identified with Yahveh, but whose appearance in one
place would not, I imagine, have precluded in the popular
idea his appearance at the same time in another place.
For, although Yahveh is present in his angel, the very
1 Cf. Exod. xix. 4 (iii. 1 — 5) ; Judges v. 5.
2 Exod. xxiv. 10.
42 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
fact that it is the angel, and not the nnmediated God,
shows that the whole Yahveh is not exhausted in a single
manifestation. As the dwelling-place of Yahveh was
shifted afterwards from earth and mountain-tops to the
sky above, this change had an influence upon men's con-
ceptions of his bodily form. Yahveh can march above
the mulberry-trees, or travel in a moving pillar of cloud
and fire.1 That the human form could not have been
habitually regarded as his permanent shape, is also appa-
rent from his mysterious relation to the Ark. It is not
certain whether this sacred palladium was empty, or con-
tained certain sacred stones in which an earlier age had
believed a spirit to reside. The story of the Ark's con-
struction to receive the tablets of the Decalogue is late
and unhistorical. But the close connection of the Ark
with Yahveh we have already witnessed in those appal-
ling punishments which were supposed to have visited its
unauthorized handling or inspection. In some places in
the narrative of Samuel, the Ark is almost identified with
Yahveh.2
"Where such conceptions of God are still prevalent, it
is not surprising that little reluctance is shown to worship
the Deity under material forms. The most prevalent
symbol, borrowed from the Canaanites, was that of the
bull. In the historical books of the Old Testament, such
a representation of Yahveh is always described by the
later editors as gross idolatry. It is, however, clear that
in early times it was not regarded as open to objection
even by fervent worshippers of Yahveh. Jeroboam's
1 2 Sam. v. 24; Exod. xiii. 21.
2 1 Sara. iv. 7, 8, vi. 9.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 43
famous bulls were not an unheard-of innovation, but the
outcome of a calculated, conservative movement. Even
prophets like Elijah and Elisha, and practical reformers
like Jehu, raise no objection to the bull- worship at Bethel
and at Dan. In the southern kingdom this idolatrous
symbolizing of God does not appear to have taken such
firm root. In the central temple at Jerusalem, at any
rate, we never hear of any certain image of Yahveh.
It has been conjectured that the Ark, the possession of
which was a kind of fetish even in Jeremiah's age, sup-
plied the place of any material image.1 It is also possible
that the purest Mosaic tradition was hostile to image-
worship, and that this tradition was handed down by the
priests, first at Shiloh, and then at Jerusalem. Image-
worship, however, existed in many other places besides
Dan, Bethel and Samaria. There was an image, the
form of which is still unascertained, called an Ephod.
The verb from which the noun is derived means to cover,
or overlay ; and we can thus infer that the Ephod image
was overlaid with a coating of some precious metal. We
hear of these Ephods several times. Gideon sets one up
out of the spoils of his victory in the sanctuary at Ophrah.
Micah, the Ephraimite, possesses one in his own private
chapel. There is another Ephod in the sanctuary of Nob,
which Abiathar takes with him in his flight as a valuable
piece of priestly property.2 From the use subsequently
made by David of this Ephod, we learn that the image
was used in throwing the sacred lot. There must also
have been many other images of Yahveh in existence
1 Stade, Geschichte, Vol. I. p. 465.
2 Judges viii. 27, xvii. 5 ; 1 Sam. xxi. 10, xxiii. 6, 9.
44 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
during the eighth century, some in local sanctuaries and
some in the possession of private individuals. The Tera-
phim, which were of human form, were not symbols of
Yahveh ; their meaning as well as their connection with
the Ephod and the lot are obscure ; but it has been con-
jectured that they were images of household divinities,
antagonistic to the exclusive religion of Yahveh, but yet
admitted even by such a man as David into his own
house. In addition to them, the prophets allude to other
images which most probably were symbols of Yahveh
himself; thus we find Isaiah complaining that "Judah
has become full of idols, so that men do homage to the
work of their hands." In the good time coming, "they
will defile the covering of their silver graven images,
and overlaying of their golden molten images, and scatter
them as loathsomeness."1 Some of these idols may have
been images of other and foreign divinities, but the
majority were probably images of the national God.
From the foregoing summary of some elements in the
character and worship of the pre-prophetic Yahveh, it
would appear as if the motive of the Mosaic monolatry
could only be sought in the first of the two suggested
causes — in the power, jealousy and vindictive wrath of
the Deity whom the founder chose for his own and for
his people's God. But there is something to be said
•upon the other side, which, although incapable of much
illustration and instance, is yet highly significant and
suggestive.
Yahveh was the God of justice. His severity did not
merely vindicate his own outraged honour ; it was also
1 Isaiah ii. 8, 20, xxx. 22.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 45
the guardian of morality. It is true that the clear dis-
tinction between ritual and religion inculcated by the
eighth -century prophets is unparalleled in any earlier
narrative of the histories or of the Pentateuch. Yet
the belief in Yahveh's retributive action, and in his con-
sistent refusal to allow breaches of the people's moral
customs to remain ignored or unavenged, was vividly
present to the national consciousness.1 Most signal and
characteristic was the moral influence of Yahveh in the
domain of law. Yahveh, to the Israelite, was emphatically
the God of Eight. This conception, though here indi-
cated so briefly — in the next Lecture it will again come
before us — was of enormous importance.
From the earliest times onward, Yahveh's sanctuary
was the depository of law, and the priest was his spokes-
man. The oracle of Yahveh, of which the priests were
the interpreters, decided suits and quarrels, and probably
gave guidance and advice in questions of social difficulty.
The Torah — or teaching — of the priests, half -judicial,
half-pedagogic, was a deep moral influence; and there
was no element in the religion which was at once more
genuinely Hebrew and more closely identified with the
national God. There is good reason to suppose that this
priestly Torah is the one religious institution which can
be correctly attributed to Moses. If that be so, then
not only did the pre-prophetic religion itself include an
important ethical element, but this very element was
part and parcel of the original Mosaic teaching, so that
1 E.g. Judges ix. 5Q, 57; cf. Wellhausen, History of Israel, E.T.
p. 393.
46 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
a spiritual feature becomes a constituent portion of the
Mosaic monolatry.
So far the result of our inquiry has been to prove that
there was a fusion of good and evil elements in the
character and worship of the pre-prophetic God. Both.
in all probability, reach back to the Mosaic age. Violent
severity and easily-excited wrath seem no less native to
the original conception of him than a guardianship of social
morality and a zealousness for right. It is something
more, however, than the leaven of early affections which
leads me to suggest that the motive for the Mosaic
monolatry, though not without its modicum of the lower
cause, was yet mainly stimulated by the higher — the
ethical superiority of his chosen God.
For that successful resistance to Canaanite polytheism
on which we laid so much stress when ascribing the
origin of monolatry to the Mosaic age, would surely not
have been possible unless the Yahveh whom Moses
taught differed from the Canaanite deities, not only in
his numerical uniqueness, but in his higher and more
consistent ethical character. The violent elements in
Yahveh's character he shared with Moloch and Baal,
and many another divinity of the neighbouring Semitic
tribes ; but in no single case did this corresponding
violence produce a corresponding monolatry. "We are
therefore entitled to doubt whether the exclusive worship
of the national God would ever have been ordained, had
there not lain in the original conception of Yahveh the
"promise and potency" of the monotheism of Amos and
Isaiah. To quote the earlier words of Professor Ivuenen,
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 47
" the great merit of Moses lies in the fact of his connec-
tion of the religions idea with the moral life."1 The
exclusive worship of Yahveh on the one hand, God's
moral character and the moral duty of man upon the
other hand, must have acted reciprocally in the produc-
tion of the Mosaic teaching as a whole. The first element,
to which Stade would confine the creative originality of
the Founder, would hardly have arisen without the second,
and could scarcely have produced those historic results
of which we seek the cause. One of the most sober and
trustworthy of Old Testament critics, Professor Kamp-
hausen, maintains the same argument. " I recognize,'7
he says, "in the fact that the small number of the
Israelites was not absorbed by the Canaanites, who were
by far their superiors in all matters of external culture,
a convincing proof of the ethical power of the Yahvistie
religion. But this superiority consisted in the nature of
that Yahveh whom Moses proclaimed, not in a dogmatic
assertion of Semitic exclusiveness." 2
Yet it is not necessary, whatever views we may hold
as to the natural or supernatural origin of the Founder's
religion, to place the religious teaching of Moses upon a
level with that of Amos or Isaiah. We must endeavour
to assess it neither too low nor too high. If too low, it
becomes well nigh impossible to account for the continued
existence of Yahveh- worship, for the comparatively suc-
cessful absorption of the Canaanites, and for the share of
the national faith in the establishment of the monarchy,
two hundred years after the death of Moses. If, on the
1 Religion of Israel, Vol. I. p. 282 (1870).
2 Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1890, p. 201, n. 1.
48 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
contrary, we assess it too high, it is hard to understand
how so many superstitions could have crept in, or rather
how almost the whole outward embodiment of the reli-
gion was modelled upon Canaanite lines. We could not
explain how eager Yahveh-worshippers, such as David,
could countenance practices and make use of expressions
little removed from the level of heathenism. While the
great merit of Moses lies in the fact that he connected
the religious idea with the moral life, it does not neces-
sarily follow that he possessed a refined or matured con-
ception of either religion or morality. His Yahveh had
many features which we should regard as incompatible
with a moralized notion of deity. A belief in the fierce-
ness of Yahveh' s wrath, and the violence of the punish-
ment he inflicts upon those who have incurred it, might
easily co-exist in the soul of Moses with the conviction
that Yahveh was a just God who required the establish-
ment and maintenance of justice among his people. One
must not forget the number of inconsistent and incon-
gruous ideas which can all find storage in the recesses of
the same human mind. Directly the contrariety is per-
ceived, the old combination seems impossible.
Summing up, then, all that we may legitimately infer
of the Mosaic religion, it cannot with any measure of
certainty be said to have included more than that Yahveh
was a God of justice, as well as a God of power ; that no
God but Yahveh was to be worshipped in all the tribes
of Israel ; and that he would not only lead the hosts of
Israel to victory, but, through his ministers and inter-
preters, become Israel's lawgiver and judge. At the
sanctuary of Yahveh, where the God was invisibly pre-
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 40
sent among his peoj^le, were the fountain of justice and
the judgment-seat. The priests, whose judicial and
didactic fuuetions were in early days the most important
part of their office, traced, as we have already learnt,
their origin to Moses, who, in Yahveh's name, was not
only his people's leader, but their supreme judge. " If
Moses did anything at all," says Wellhausen, "he cer-
tainly founded the Sanctuary of Kadesh, and the Torah
there, which the priests of the Ark carried on after him." l
We may, then, reasonably infer that Moses taught his
contemporaries, not theoretically but practicall}r, as occa-
sion demanded, and as part and parcel of Yahveh's reli-
gion, the fundamental elements of social morality. He
taught them that Yahveh, if a stern and often a wrathful
Deity, was also a God of justice and purity. Linking
the moral life to the religious idea, he may have taught
them, too, that murder and theft, adultery and false wit-
ness, were abhorred and forbidden by their God.2
There is, however, no sufficient evidence to exclude
the Decalogue from the general verdict that the laws of
the Pentateuch in their written form are one and all
subsequent to the Founder.3 We can abandon the Mosaic
authorship of the Ten Words with less reluctance, if we
arc justified in the conclusion that the morality which
1 History 0/ Israel, E. T. p. 397, n. 1; cf. p. 438.
2 I have only recently read the analogous arguments of Piepenring
on Moses and his religion in his essay, " Moses et le Jahvisme :" Revue
de Vhistoire des religions, Vol. XIX. 1889, pp. 312—332.
3 See Recent Criticism on Moses and the Date of the Decalogue:
Jewish Quarterly Review, January, 1891, and Appendix I.
E
50 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
they teach not unfairly represents the character of the
Mosaic faith.
Having thns arrived at certain definite, if necessarily
hypothetical, conclusions as to the quality of the Mosaic
monolatry, the second question — far harder, far less solu-
ble— still remains : "Whence was this monolatry obtained,
and what kind of religion preceded its adoption? As
this question is wrapped in darkest obscurity — for of
the pre-Mosaic religion we know practically nothing —
and as all the hypothetical answers are compatible with
our estimate of the Mosaic monolatry itself, it will be
needless to do more than indicate in barest outline the
nature of the solutions which have hitherto been pro-
posed.
There are two main hypotheses. The first is that the
name and worship of Yahveh were utterly unknown to
the Israelites before their introduction by Moses. In
that case, as it is unlikely that Moses invented the name
himself, we must suppose that he borrowed it from an
outside source. Yahveh would be the God of some alien
nation. That the name is Egyptian is a theory now
almost universally abandoned.1 But two great scholars,
Profs. Tiele and Stade, have sought Yahveh's original
home, not in Egypt, but in Midian.2 Upon the basis of
various superstitious observances, still prevalent in Israel
even in historic times, Stade essays to prove the existence
1 Not, however, by Noldeke, Z. D. M. G., 1888, p. 483.
2 Tielc, Histoira comparee des anciennes religions, 1882, p. 350;
Stade, Geschiclite, pp. 131, 132, and divers passages in his seventh
book, pp. 358—518.
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 51
of a very low religious level in the pre-Mosaic age, and
more particularly of a system of ancestor and spirit-
worship, which, in other nations usually preceding poly-
theism, in Israel preceded monolatry.1 The Old Testament
itself alludes in a few passages to a pre-Mosaic period of
idolatry.2 Now tradition ascribes to Moses before his
assumption of leadership a prolonged residence in the
wilderness of Sinai; he married there a daughter of
Jethro, a priest of Midian. In an old chapter of the
Book of Judges, the relatives and descendants of Moses'
father-in-law are called, not Midianites, but Kenites, and
are in close alliance with Judah.3 In the rebellion of
Jehu, the usurper receives assistance from Jonadab the
son of Eechab, who shows himself an active adherent of
Yahveh. We learn from Jeremiah that the Eechabites
were a family who had preserved the simple customs
of nomads as a kind of family tradition, and from the
Book of Chronicles we gather that the Eechabites were
originally Kenites.4 It has, therefore, been conjectured
that Yahveh was originally a God of the Kenites, and
borrowed by Moses from his Kenite (or Midianite) hosts.
It by no means follows that the Mosaic conception of
1 My space being limited, I have purposely omitted any description
of these various superstitions, as also of the evidence of early stone
and tree worship, both in the pre-Mosaic and post-Mosaic periods.
Besides Stade, loc. cit., cf. for convenient summary, Piepenring, La
Religion primitive des Hebreux: Revue de Vhistoire des religions,
Vol. XIX. 1889, p. 179, &c.
2 Josh. xxiv. 2 — 14 (Gen. xxxi. 19, xxxv. 4); Ezek. xxiii. 3, xx. 7.
3 Judges i. 16; cf. iv. 11; Xumbers x. 29 — 32 (see Dillmann);
1 Sam. xv. 6, xxvii. 10, xxx. 29.
4 2 Kings x. 15 ; Jer. xxxv. 2 — 11; 1 Chron. ii. 55.
E2
52 I. ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF
Yahveh was not different from and higher than the
conception of him among the Kenites ; still less that
the Kenites knew and worshipped no other God than
Yahveh. The Old Testament gives this further sup-
port to the hypothesis that one of the two earlier Pen-
tateuchal narratives denies that the name of Yahveh
was known before Moses, and ascribes its origin to a
special revelation vouchsafed to the Founder by the God
of the patriarchs, who had hitherto refrained from com-
municating to man his special and peculiar name. But
as the date of this narrative is probably not earlier than
the eighth century, its evidence is counterbalanced by
the other, probably older, chronicle which relegates the
first employment of the name to the period before the
Flood. Kor have philologians yet been able to discover
with certainty the precise signification of the word. The
etymology put forward in the famous story in Exodus,
whereby it is connected with the verb "to be," is by no
means above suspicion.
The second hypothesis assumes that Yahveh was
already known to the Israelites as one God out of many,
or even as the chief and common Deity of all their clans.
To this hypothesis, in its turn, the Old Testament gives
the support that Moses is represented as charged by
Yahveh to accredit himself to the children of Israel as
the emissary of their fathers' God. There is also this
further argument, that it is difficult to imagine the
Israelites rallying round the leadership of one who spoke
to them in the name, and urged them to adopt the wor-
ship, of a foreign and hitherto unknown divinity.1 More-
1 Kittel, Geschichte der Hcbraer, Vol. I. p. 157 (1SS3).
THE HEBREW RELIGION. 53
over, as Dill inarm urges, the higher religion of Moses
must surely have had its points of connection with pre-
existing beliefs within his people or tribe. This argument
gives to a form of the second hypothesis, once briefly
indicated by Wellhausen, a certain degree of superior
probability. Yahveh, according to that great scholar,
"is to be regarded as having originally been a family or
tribal God, either of the family to which Moses belonged
or of the tribe of Joseph, in the possession of which we
find the Ark of Yahveh, and within which occurs the
earliest certain instance of a composite proper name with
the word Yahveh for one of its elements (Jeho-shua,
Joshua).' ' 1 But why, it may be asked, upon this assump-
tion is Yahveh's earliest residence upon the mountain of
Sinai? Does not this fact, if it be such, go rather
to substantiate the hypothesis of Stade, which would
place in the Sinaitic peninsula, and not in Palestine or
Canaan, the home and origin of Yahveh? On Well-
hausen's theory, we must then apparently make the addi-
tional hypothesis that the Israelites had heard of this
mountain God in their wanderings before the settlement
in Goshen, that he had been included in their pantheon,
and in the family of Moses or in the tribe of Joseph had
obtained the place of honour. By the force of the Mosaic
teaching, and by the great event which proved the power
and favour of Yahveh, the combined Israelite tribes
accepted the God of Moses as their own. Eeligion
welded them together. In the name of Yahveh they
achieved their earliest victories, and their common
patriotism became identified with their common religion.
1 "Wellhausen, History of Israel, p. 433, n. 1.
54 I. ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW RELIGION.
Beyond suggestions such as these, criticism will pro-
bably never be competent to advance. Why the pre-
Mosaic religion and the origin of Yahveh must continue
in the main unknown, we have already learnt. For
behind Moses there stretches back the dark and limitless
pre-historic age. But with Moses the historic period
begins. Of the history of Israel's religion he constitutes
the first chapter.
Through the thick veil which hangs over its former
phases we cannot hope to penetrate. Let us be satisfied
if we may still believe that at the fountain-head of
Israel's religion there stood a man of high inspiration
or exalted genius, whose new and spiritual teaching,
accepted, though ill-understood, by his people in the
flush of a new-born enthusiasm, was destined to break
forth, after a long period of danger and decay, into wider
and more glorious developments.
Lecture II.
THE HISTOEY OF THE HEBEEW EELIGION
BETWEEN THE MOSAIC AGE AND THE
EIGHTH CENTUEY B.C.
Our task in this Lecture is to trace the course of
religious history in Israel from the death of Moses in the
thirteenth, to the teaching of Amos in the eighth century
before Christ, a period of some five hundred years.
In the last Lecture we arrived at the conclusion that
the evidence to be derived from the prophets and the
general history of the Israelites is most judiciously
explained upon the supposition that the traditions and
legends of the Mosaic age contain a certain residuum of
historical fact, and that the story of Israel's religion
opens with the work of a great personality, who taught
his people to worship one God only, a severe but just
deity, demanding from the tribes which acknowledged
his dominion the practice of the simplest rules of civic
morality. We must not be surprised if the ideas of Moses
were ill-understood by his contemporaries and successors.
He did not leave behind him elaborate institutions capable
of preserving and developing his fundamental concep-
tions ; he did not compose, as tradition represents, a code
of written laws both moral and ceremonial. The Hebrew
56 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
festivals are all later than the Mosaic age, for they imply
a settled agricultural life ; originally borrowed from the
Canaanites, they were only afterwards connected with
incidents in the national history. The Sabbath, even if
Moses enjoined its observance, was of no considerable
religious importance till a far later period. The one means
by which the higher teaching of Moses could be main-
tained and handed down was the agency of the priests.
To gain an accurate conception of the early priesthood,
one must put entirely aside the picture of an organized
hierarchy which the latest elements of the Pentateuch
attribute to the Founder ; for, in the period between
Moses and Samuel, there was no operative inter-tribal
organization either in the political or in the religious
sphere.
The tribes only gradually became masters of the land
beyond Jordan. In their struggles with the Canaanites
they fought in comparative isolation, each for its own
hand. The Canaanites were not extirpated, but either
lived on in cities of which the Israelites were unable to
dispossess them, or were gradually absorbed by, and
assimilated to, the new-comers who spoke a kindred lan-
guage and belonged to the same race. Yet resistance
upon a more extensive scale was sufficient to draw the
tribes together for a common end, and the recognition
of a common God was the rallying -point of national
feeling. Yahveh, as the God of all the Israelite tribes,
was chiefly realized in war, for the battles of Israel were
the battles of their God. The Song of Deborah mentions
all the tribes with the exception of Levi and Simeon,
who apparently had disappeared before her time, and of
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 57
Judali, whose clans, largely mixed with alien blood, were
for a long time only loosely connected with the main
Israelite community.
The picture of the course of history from the death of
Joshua to the establishment of the monarchy, drawn by
the latest editor of the Book of Judges, is unhistori-
cal. He imagines a kind of irregular kingship appearing
at intervals between Joshua and Samuel. This idea is
part of his equally unhistorical conception of the religious
history. According to him, the Israelites fall away,
again and again, from the pure worship of Yahveh, who
suffers them, by way of punishment, to be defeated and
oppressed by their enemies. Then follow repentance and
prayers for rescue. A deliverer intervenes, who, after
freeing the people from their foes, "judges" them until
his death, when the same round of apostasy, punishment,
contrition and deliverance, re-commences anew. As a
matter of fact, this wholesale apostasy and repentance
are alike imaginary. Equally imaginary is the idea of
a. judge with a jurisdiction over all Israel. The sup-
posed "judges" were mere tribal captains, exercising,
after the successful repulse of hostile invasions, a purely
local authority, which, except in one instance, they were
unable to hand down to their sons. Gideon was, indeed,
succeeded by his son Abimelech; but his dominion, which
came to an untimely end, was nearly limited to Manasseh.
Samuel was not a political ruler at all.
Between Joshua and Samuel there lies an interval of
some two to three hundred years. It was an epoch of
high importance in the history of the Israelite religion,
58 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
although we can but dimly guess at the religious forces
which then acted and re-acted upon each other. While
we abandon the unfavourable view which the editor of
the Book of Judges has made familiar to posterity, it is
also clear that this period was by no means one of un-
chequered advance. The larger patriotism born at the
exodus from Egypt, and raised to a high pitch of ardour
by the genius or inspiration of the great leader, sank down
again after his death to a lower level. But, at the same
time, the knowledge that they were all branches of one
tree must have gradually, though quietly, spread among
the tribes; for a monarchy such as that of Saul, still more
such as that of David, would scarcely have been possible
under Barak and Gideon, even although the Philistine
oppression had been anticipated by a hundred years.
The same partial decay and partial advance must also be
postulated in the sphere of religion. There, too, the
enthusiasm which Moses had inspired for a time, and
among some sections of the people, grew cold and feeble;
but there, too, the religion of the highest spirits at the
close of this period and the opening of the next shows
that, in spite of partial corruption, there must also have
existed a coincident advance.
As the Canaanites were by no means annihilated, but
either lived on side by side with, or were assimilated by,
the Israelites, it was only natural that they should have
exercised a considerable influence upon the uncultivated
though martial Hebrews, whose religion was far too un-
stable and immature to be unaffected by the long esta-
blished religion of the older population. It becomes,
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 59
therefore, of importance to obtain some faint idea of
what that Canaanite religion actually was.1
Out of the small material from which an estimate
of them can be deduced, we gather that the chief
deities of Canaan were personifications of natural forces,
and more especially of the sun. Very early in their
history the Canaanites seem to have perceived in the
divine powers a twofold aspect, the one beneficent, the
other destructive ; and, like the Hebrews, they generally
ascribed both qualities to one and the same deity. As
the essence of divine beneficence, or at all events its
most mysterious feature, seems to lie in generation and
reproduction, this idea, with other and lower causes,
may have contributed to the frequent co-ordination of
goddess with god in Canaanite religion. Seeing that the
sexual and religious instincts are so strangely connected,
it is not surprising that sensuality should have become
a leading feature of Canaanite worship. It would appear
as if, at the period when the Israelites were settling
down in their new homes, the native gods and goddesses
had received no more than the vaguest and most inade-
quate moralization. When we speak of God's goodness,
we mean by it the essential quality of his uniform and
permanent character. The goodness of Baal meant some-
thing very different : it merely expressed in a pictorial
and personal form the fact that the sun produces the
harvest, that the rain causes fertility, that long life,
numerous flocks and a large family, are incidents that
1 Cf., for the succeeding few paragraphs, Baudissin's articles upon
Canaanite deities, in Herzog Plitt's Encyklopddie, 2nd ed.; Baethgen's
Beitraerje ; Pietschmann's History of Phoenicia, &c.
60 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
befall the more fortunate children of humanity. The
principles of Phoenician and Canaanite worship seem to
oscillate between the idea that the prosperities and joys
of life are almost automatic functions of particular deities,
and the idea that they are only to be wrung from the
gods by servility, bribery, or craft.
It was thus an undeveloped polytheism with which
the Israelites were brought into close and daily contact.
Not only were the local Baals, though varieties of the
same god, regarded as separate and distinct divinities,
but, whatever may have been their primordial faith, the
Canaanites during the period of the Judges worshipped
many gods and goddesses with a goodly variety of names.
The three Canaanite divinities most frequently men-
tioned in the Old Testament are Baal, Astarte and
Moloch. The word Baal means "lord" or " owner;"
and the god Baal, like Adonis, Moloch, and others,
belongs to a class of deities whose appellations denote
power and mastery, whether over nature or over man.
Baal is the supreme Phoenician and Canaanite god, so
that the Greeks identified him with Zeus. A variety
of evidence points to his solar origin ; his sacred pillars
are called C/iammam'm, and Chamma in the Old Tes-
tament is a poetical synonym for the sun. But Baal
never became a regular proper name, like Zeus among
the Greeks, or like Yahveh among the Hebrews. Each
separate community could, and often did, possess its own
Baal or chief divinity ; hence we get the plural Baalim,
so frequent in the Old Testament, primarily indicating,
not images of Baal, but the many local varieties of the
god, which, as I have already said, were regarded as
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 61
separate personalities. Melkart, the chief god of Tyre,
is also called its Baal. Baal was also distinguished from
the sun, and worshipped as the Lord of Heaven. In
accordance with the general principles of Canaanite reli-
gion, his character was conceived as both beneficent and
hurtful, as the sun is the cause both of fertility and of
drought. To the Baal of Carthage human sacrifices were
offered, and it is supposed that when Grecian authors
speak of children being sacrified among the Phoenicians
to Cronos, this Hellenic deity must be identified with
Baal. Astarte, the Babylonian Ishtar, is the female
revelation or complement of Baal. In one inscription
she is called the name of Baal, as the goddess Taanith
is called his face : she is the moon-goddess, and it is
to her probably, under the title of Queen of Heaven,
that the Israelite women burnt their incense and baked
their cakes in the days of Jeremiah. Like Baal, she had
a dual character, both amiable and fierce ; it is with her
worship that the sensual and licentious elements in the
Canaanite religion were mainly connected. The sacrifice
most consonant with her nature was the sacrifice of her
votaries' chastity.
Moloch, more properly Melech or Milk, was not only
the chief god of the Ammonites, but also a divinity of
Canaan. He is merely the same sun-god under a dif-
ferent name. As the god of Tyre, he was known by
the special name of Melkart, king of the city. Though
the darker features of the Canaanite gods and of their
worship seem to have clustered around Moloch, he is
not, according to Baudissin, to be regarded as a purely
malignant deity, just as Baal is not purely beneficent.
62 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
The sacrifice of children formed an element of his wor-
ship at Tyre ; and the adoption of this horrible rite at a
later age by Ahaz, king of Judah, marks the beginning of
a period of gross idolatry in the history of the southern
monarchy.
Canaanite worship was mainly carried on, as in all
the ancient world, by sacrifices and offerings. We can
infer with tolerable certainty that the Israelites borrowed
from the Canaanites their habit of building altars upon
the tops of hills and under the shade of trees. To the
Canaanites was also familiar the practice of erecting
sacred pillars at consecrated spots, as well as of placing
wooden poles with a sensual connotation near the altars
of the gods. Their festivals were mainly agricultural,
connected, like those of the Israelites, with the first-
fruits, the harvests, the wool-shearing and the vintage.
Licentious usages were part and parcel of their worship.
Sacred prostitution of both sexes was one of the ways
b}r which the sensual elements in their faith found its
most corrupt and terrible expression. Human sacrifices,
culminating, as we have seen, in the offerings of first-
born children, cannot have been uncommon.
That diverse elements of this religion should have
been adopted by the new-comers was not unnatural. In
entering Canaan, the Hebrews did not conceive them-
selves as entering a country which was destitute of divine
protectors. For the monolatry of Moses was itself very
different from monotheism, while the monolatry of his
people was less advanced than his own. Even if they
had accepted the principle, " "No God but Yahveh," while
the Founder was among them, and while the memories of
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 63
the great deliverance were fresh, in their minds, it was
not probable that they would all maintain monolatry in
Canaan, where the deities of the land and their attractive
worship were constant and impressive realities. But the
open and concurrent service of Baal and Astarte was less
widely spread, as well as less lasting, than the influence
of these deities upon the worship of Yahveh. For in
WeUhausen's words, " It was not to be expected that
the divinity of the land should permanently be different
from the God of the dominant people. In proportion as
Israel identified itself with the conquered territory, the
divinities also were identified. Hence arose a certain
syncretism between Baal and Yahveh which had not
been got over even in the time of the prophet Hosea."1
The nature of the Canaanite influence upon the reli-
gion of Moses must mainly be sought in matters of sacred
worship and external form. But the partial co-ordination
of Baal with the Israelite God, and the subsequent syn-
cretism to which Wellhausen has alluded, could not but
leave their mark upon the conception of Yahveh. This is
illustrated by the fact that no objection was felt to the
use of Baal as an appellation of the national God. It must
have tended to dilute the moral elements in Yahveh' s cha-
racter, and to make his connection with his people more
mechanical, or even physical, than it had appeared to
Moses. The idea of a covenant between God and Israel
lay beyond the Mosaic horizon; but yet for Moses, novel
as his teaching was, there must have been something of
free choice on the part of Yahveh towards Israel, and of
response from Israel to Yahveh. To the Israelite of the
1 Abrlss, pp. 18, 19.
64 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
pre-prophetic period, Yahveh was as naturally the God
of Israel, and Israel as naturally his people, as a cloud
drops rain or as the sun gives light. This dual relation-
ship, like that which existed between the Canaanites
and their gods, was neither begun by mutual treaty, nor
was it the effect of divine grace ; it was part of the
scheme of things, accepted without question as an inevi-
table and indissoluble bond.
It is, however, a signal evidence of the grip which the
Mosaic religion had won upon the national consciousness
that the apostasy to Baal and Astarte Avas not far more
overwhelming. It shows also, as we were led to infer in
the previous Lecture, the comparative purity of the con-
ception of Yahveh's character formed by the higher minds
among the people, as well as his ethical superiority to Baal
even in that early and pre-prophetic age. Yahveh never
gave place to any other deity in his power over the
popular patriotism. Baal may have been worshipped in
times of peace in isolated localities ; it Avas Yahveh, and
Yahveh alone, in whose name the battles of Israel were
fought, and by whose help the victories were Avon. In
peace it was the sanctuary of Yahveh which was connected
with the giving of judicial decisions, the utterance of
oracles, the ascertainment of the divine will by oral
teaching or the lot's decree. This side of Yahveh's
religion brings us back again to the priesthood.
Though Moses was not the author of the written law,
he was unquestionably the founder of that oral teaching,
or Torak, which preceded, and became the basis of, the
codes of the Pentateuch. Thus the false and late tradi-
tion which ascribes the whole Pentateuchal legislation to
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 65
Moses is not entirely wanting in a small substratum of
truth. His Torah was a direct consequence of his con-
nection of religion with morality. The sanctuary of
Yahveh was more than the place at which sacrifices were
offered and vows discharged. To the tent of meeting,
which was the Mosaic sanctuary, whether originally
associated with the Ark or not, tradition asserts that
every one who sought Yahveh. made his way. It was
before the tent of meeting that Moses is probably con-
ceived as sitting to judge the people when they came to
him to inquire of God.1 Thus justice and the equitable
settlement of disputes between man and man became
associated with religion. The influence of the sanctuary
bad, however, a still wider range. Moses and his suc-
cessors would give advice and help to those who sought
their counsel in matters of difficulty or importance. By
means of the sacred lot the future was inquired into, and
predictions were uttered.2 In all religious problems the
priests of the local sanctuaries were the expounders of
Yahveh' s will.
To understand the position of the priests in old Israel-
ite society, it has to be remembered that the performance
of sacrificial rites was neither their most important nor
their most characteristic function. The power to sacrifice
was not limited to a priest : kings like Saul and David,
prophets like Elijah, private persons like Gideon and
Manoah, freely sacrificed with their own hands.3 Nor
1 Exod. xxxii. 7, 8, xviii. 15.
2 1 Sam. xxiii. 9, xxx. 7, &c.
3 E.g. 1 Sam. xiv. 34, 35; 2 Sam. vi. 17, 18; 1 Kings xviii.; Judges
vi. 24—26, xiii. 19.
F
6G II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
was the priesthood in the earlier pre-prophetic period
exclusively recruited from a single tribe. In the eighth
and seventh centuries, Levite and Priest are synonymous
terms ; but this had not always been the case, and the
story of the coalescence is one of the most obscure and
disputed chapters in Israelite religion — too obscure and
disputed to be touched upon here.1
We may, however, surmise that Moses, himself a Levite,
entrusted the guardianship of Yahvch's sanctuary and
the casting of the sacred lot, with the pronouncement of
legal decisions and divine oracles, to the members of his
own clan. Though we hear of no priest of note between
the Founder's age and that of Samuel, the importance of
the priesthood during this long period must not be under-
estimated. After the settlement in Canaan, a number of
local sanctuaries sprang naturally into existence ; but the
best Mosaic tradition would centre round the Ark of
Yahveh, and it would be at the sanctuary in which this
Ark was placed that the spirit of the Mosaic teaching
would be maintained most purely. That wandering
priest from Bethlehem in the strange story of Micah the
Ephraimite, in the 17th and 18th chapters of Judges,
would represent a lower level of the order. But upon
the whole the work of the priesthood cannot have been
of insignificant worth, although it was silently carried
on and has left no record. It must, indeed, be assumed,
to account for subsequent developments.
The first priest of note mentioned by name in the
1 See Baudissin, Gesclnchte ties alttestamentliclien Prie&terilmmst
1889; art. "Levi," by Kautzsch, in Erseh unci Grubcr s Encylrfojpadie,
1889, and the references there given.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. G7
post -Mosaic era is Eli. He is the head functionary of
the central sanctuary at Shiloh, where the Ark had been
placed after the settlement in Canaan. When the story
of Samuel opens, Eli is already an old man, and his two
sons, priests like their father, officiate at Yahveh's altar.
Their greed in these sacred ministrations is a matter of
common notoriety and a grief to Eli.1 In the reigns of
Saul and David we hear a good deal of the priests in
their capacity of soothsayers. At Nob, a town not far
from Jerusalem, there was a sanctuary at which Achime-
lech, the grandson of Eli, was the chief priest. Together
with him, there were eighty-five other priests belonging
to the same sanctuary. That this large number was
unusual is clearly shown by Nob being called specifically
the City of the Priests.2 Abiathar, who escapes when
the city is destroyed by Saul, takes with him the Ephod,
and by means of it serves David with divine oracles.
He and Zadok become tke king's chief priests, and their
position gives them political as well as liturgical impor-
tance ; they are high officers of state.3
From the meagre evidence which we possess, and by
the analogy of kindred phenomena in other religions, it
would therefore seem that in the manipulation of the
sacred lot lay the most potent function of the earlier
priest. Whether as teacher, soothsayer or judge, he was
in each case the interpreter of Yahveh's will, the human
1 I Sam. ii. 12 — 25. 2 1 Sara. xxi. xxii.
3 1 Sam. xxiii. G — 12, xxx. 7 ; 2 Sam. viii. 17. It should also be
noted that David seems to have appointed some of his sons to the
priestly office : 2 Sam. viii. 18.
f2
68 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
mouthpiece of a supernatural revelation.1 But the man
who could peer into futurity and ascertain the divine
counsel or monition by magical processes, in the truth of
which he himself believed, would acquire concurrently a
moral influence over his contemporaries. lie would be
consulted upon matters which did not directly require
the casting of the lot, and quietly and gradually his
functions as teacher and judge would become emanci-
pated from magical adjuncts. Stade has pointed out
that the exponents of Yahveh's oracle enjoyed a moral
authority to which all society in old Israel bowed down.2
It is true that it was only the chief priest at the various
sanctuaries who manipulated the lot, but every priest
was at least capable of doing so, and the whole body
was thus invested with a similar authority, and regarded
with equal awe.
In his capacity of judge the priest maintained the
Mosaic connection of morality with religion. Tradition
speaks of a Well of Judgment at Xadesh, where the
Mosaic sanctuary was perhaps first established.3 At
Marah, " Moses made for the people law and judg-
ment, and there he proved them ;" in other words, he
judicially settled their disputes.4 In the oldest Penta-
1 I cannot enter here into the question as to the etymology of the
word " Torah." See Kb'nig, Offenbarungsbegriff des alien Testamentes,
1882, Vol. II. p. 343, with his references; Wellhausen, History of
Israel, p. 394, and Reste arabischen Heidenthums, 1887, p. 167; and
Stade and Siegfried's New Hebrew Dictionary, s, v. 7VV.
2 Gesclrichte, Vol. I. p. 474.
3 Genesis xiv. 7; cf. Wellhausen, History of Israel, p. 343.
4 Exod. xv. 25.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 69
tcuchal legislation the sanctuary is the scene of all legal
operations.1
Questions of ceremonial and of purity fell naturally
within the priests' province, and their answers were
regarded as the judgment of God. But in all these
departments of their activity there is no proof that they
judged or taught upon the basis of a written law. Their
Torah was purely oral, even where it was not given
through the lot. It was, however, natural that, at the
main sanctuaries in both Israel and Judaea, there should
grow up a kind of consuetudinary law in matters which
were of continual recurrence. The priests who regarded
themselves as successors of Moses attributed their Torah
to him as its founder ; but there is no sufficient evidence
that attempts were made to codify and write down these
laws before the middle of the ninth century B.C.
Between the period of the Judges and that of the
first canonical prophets, the priesthood must gradually
have risen in moral dignity and spiritual power. Of the
Ephod and the manipulation of the lot we hear no more
after the reign of David. This was, doubtless, partly
due to the rise of the prophets, and to their being con-
sulted upon important occasions instead of the priests ;
but it was also due to the religion gradually freeing
itself from its heathen associations. The essential ideas
of the Mosaic religion were incompatible with supersti-
tious practices, and as these ideas became more recog-
nized and developed, the superstitions fell naturally into
the background, the Torah becoming less oracular and
more ethical. The Blessing of Moses reflects the highest
1 Exod. xxii. 8, &c.
70 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
point in religious development which Israel had reached
before the eighth-century prophets. Though its author
alludes to the Urim and Thummim as belonging by right
of inheritance to the Levites, he assigns to the priests a
larger duty than the casting of the lot.1 "They shall
teach Jacob thy judgments and Israel thy instruction" —
here the juridic and teaching office ascribed to them
is surely independent of, or at least supplementary to,
the lot.
The older prophets, and more especially Hosea, regard
the priest's office as a very high one. They attack the
priests for being false to their charge, and for having
forgotten the Torah of their God. Hosea complains in
God's name: " My people are destroyed for lack of know-
ledge. Because thou, the priest, hast rejected knowledge,
I will also reject thee, so that thou shalt be my priest no
longer. As thou hast forgotten the Torah of thy God,
I will also forget thy children. The more they increased,
the more they sinned against me ; they exchanged their
Glory for dishonour."2 The Torah of the priests is here
clearly conceived as a moral agency, which depends for its
proper ministration upon the knowledge of God. Professor
Stade, while emphasizing, as it appears to me, too one-
sidedly the connection of the priesthood with casting the
lot, yet clearly recognizes its importance for religion and
morality. In a passage that merits quotation as sum-
ming-up the priestly influence with power and precision,
he says: "No one in old Israel was more capable of
1 Deut. xxxiii. 10.
2 Hosea iv. 6, 7. For the slight correction of the text, see Cheyne's
Hosea, ad loc.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 71
protecting the unfortunate from oppression, of punishing
the injustice of the mighty, and thus of strengthening
the moral conscience, softening public manners, and edu-
cating society, than the priests. As in ancient Greece,
they are the spiritual leaders of the clans and localities
in which their sphere of office lies, the true representa-
tives of the religious and national idea. Their import-
ance for the development of religion, justice and public
morality, cannot be too highly estimated. No other insti-
tution makes an impression of being so purely Israelite
as the priesthood and its Torah. It is with good reason
that they are referred back to Moses as their founder."1
Throughout the period of the "Judges," the priests
remained the only official exponents of Yahveh's will and
the teachers of his religion. The last deliverer mentioned
in Judges, though himself a legendary or even mythical
character, connects that book in one important respect
with the Books of Samuel. For Samson fights against
the Philistines, and when the Book of Samuel opens, this
struggle is still being carried on. Its result is given in
the very ancient story of the battle of Eben-ha-Ezer, in
which Israel succumbs to the Philistines, and the Ark of
Yahveh is captured.2 The Philistines appear to have fol-
lowed up their victory by the destruction of the sanctuary
at Shiloh and the gradual establishment of their supre-
macy over all Israel. To put an end to Philistine sub-
jection was the true occasion and object of the Israelite
monarchy. As in other crises of Israelite history, the
establishment of the monarchy was accompanied and
partly brought about by a new religious development.
1 GcscMchte, Vol. I. p. 474. - 1 Sam. iv.
72 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
It is now that prophecy makes its first appearance. The
age of Samuel and David seems one of transition from
old to new, and important religious personalities of every
class come upon the stage. In Samuel we have the seer,
who is perhaps also a Nazirite ; in Eli, Abiathar and
Zadok, priests of the first rank ; in Gad and Nathan,
representatives of the new order of prophets.
Unfortunately, our records do not speak with the
clearness we could desire as to the exact mutual relations
of these different religious orders. The Book of Samuel
contains, as is well known, two diametrically opposed
accounts of the origin of the monarchy. In the older
version, Samuel is called a seer ; in a later narrative, a
prophet.1 A note of an early editor explains this variety
of usage in the following way : "Beforctime in Israel,
when a man went to inquire of God, he spoke thus :
1 Come and let us go to the Seer,' for he that is now called
a Prophet was beforetime called a Seer."2 According to
this note, the seer and the prophet are identical persons ;
ilie difference is one of nomenclature only — as one might
say that he that is now called a Conservative was before-
time called a Tory. The accuracy of this explanation is
doubtful. Originally, seer and prophet appear to have
been distinct, though cognate, personalities, and in the
history of the Hebrew religion the former precedes the
latter. The seer, as his name implies, is one who pos-
sesses an insight into the unknown, and reveals it to
ordinary men. His name did not originally refer to the
faculty of seeing visions, though it afterwards acquired a
connotation of this kind. Primarily the seer is a soothsayer.
1 1 Sam. ix., iii. 20. 2 1 Sara. ix. 9.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 73
As to the method of the seer's divination, we know
nothing. The priests, as we have seen, made use of a
sacred lot in pronouncing their oracles. It would rather
seem as if the seer employed no implements of this kindy
but spoke in virtue of his own direct inspiration.1 His
utterances were delivered in the name of Yahveh, and
it was from Yahveh that he believed his supernatural
knowledge to be derived. Soothsaying by the invocation
of spirits was hostile to the principle of the Mosaic com-
mand, "Thou shalt have no other god beside me;" and
it is consistent with the religious revival of the time of
Samuel that Saul, not perhaps without Samuel's instiga-
gation, should have "put away those that had familiar
spirits and the wizards out of the land."2 We may
therefore conclude that the seers spoke exclusively in
Yahveh's name, and were free from heathen accessories
of sorcery or witchcraft.
As Samuel is the first seer whose name is recorded,
the inference seems to be that the earlier seers did not
play any leading part in the religious history of Israel.3
They were probably consulted by private individuals on
private concerns, and seldom came forward as commis-
sioned messengers of Yahveh on public or national affairs.
The way in which Samuel is introduced to us in the
oldest narrative is very significant. Saul's servant repre-
1 Cf. Tiele, Vergetijkende geschicdenis van de Egyptische en Meso-
jJotamischc Godsdienstcn, 1872, p. G03; Histoirc comparee, p. 378.
2 1 Sam. xxviii. 3.
3 But Deborah would form an exception. She is called a prophetess
(= seer) in Judges iv. 4. This chapter is later than the song of
chapter v. Stade, Geschichte, 2nd ed., Vol. I. pp. 178, 179.
74 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
sents to his master that there is in the city of the land
of Znph a man of God of great repnte : all that he says
comes surely to pass. Saul determines to consult this
seer about some strayed asses, whither he should direct
his way to find them. Other points in the story are also
worthy of notice. It is assumed to be necessary that
the seer should receive payment for his services, and the
servant lends Saul the fourth part of a shekel of silver
to give to the man of God. In those days, therefore, it
was no disgrace for the seers to divine for money. We
can also observe the close relation in which Samuel the
seer stood to the priesthood : yet he is not described as a
regular priest, and it does not follow that that version of
Samuel's history whereby he was dedicated from his birth
to the priesthood, and brought up as an acolyte in the
temple of Shiloh, was known to, or adopted by, this older
narrator.1 But though not identified with the priest-
hood, Samuel fulfils priestly functions. Saul happens to
approach the city just while a solemn sacrifice is being
offered upon the " high place." " Lo, he is before you,"
say the young maidens who answer Saul's inquiry as to
the whereabouts of Samuel ; " for at this very time he is
now come to the city, for there is a sacrifice of the people
to-day in the high place." Saul meets Samuel just as
he is returning to the city from the high place to eat,
u for the people will not eat until he come, because he
blesses the sacrifice."2 Apparently, therefore, a seer of
1 For the critical analysis of the Books of Samuel, cf. Cheyne's
Aids to the Devout Study of Criticism (1892), chapter i., with the
references given on p. 15.
2 1 Sam. ix. 6—14.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 75
great repute like Samuel was wont to go about from
place to place within a certain circumscribed locality,
and lend to the city festivities a special solemnity and
grace. He is not necessarily to be regarded as a priest
because he takes a chief part in the sacrifice, and a com-
plete identification of seers with priests is very precarious
and doubtful. Connected they undoubtedly were, and
many a seer may have been originally a priest ; but even
in the oldest period there is no reason to assume that it
was not possible to be a seer without being a priest at
the same time.
Samuel himself, though ready to be consulted by indi-
viduals, like others of his order, was yet intent upon
higher things. His power of insight into the unknown
was directed to the good of his nation, and his patriotism
heightened the religious value of his office. If Deborah
was a seer, that would be another indication how the
patriotic feeling tended to elevate religion ; for in a time
of danger and distress she inspired Barak with confi-
dence, and revived the drooping faith of the tribes in
the power of their God. Religion and patriotism in old
Israel re-act upon and stimulate each other. There must
clearly have been some basis for the part which Samuel
is made to play in the establishment of the monarchy,
though in the oldest narratives it is not quite certain
what that part actually was. The campaign against the
Ammonites is not ascribed to Samuel, but to Saul's own
ardour and enthusiasm ; and it was his victory on that
occasion which secured for him the kingdom. Yet it is
quite possible that Samuel may have marked him out as
the one man capable of saving the people from subjection
76 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
to the Philistines, and urged him in Yahveh's name to
attempt the task. And his overthrow of the Ammonites
was but the prelude to the attack upon the Philistines.
The same narrative which gives us our main informa-
tion respecting Samuel the seer, also introduces us to
the prophets. Samuel foretells to Saul certain things
which will befall him upon his journey homewards, as a
sign of the truth of his prediction respecting the kingdom.
The third of these events is to be that, when Saul reaches
Gibeah where the Philistine garrison or viceroy resides,
he will meet "a company of prophets coming down from
the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe,
and a harp, and they will be prophesying ; and the spirit
of Yahveh will come upon him, and he will prophesy with
them and be turned into another man." The prediction
is fulfilled. Saul meets the prophets, and prophesies
among them, to the astonishment of his acquaintances at
Gibeah. They say one to another, " What is this that
has come unto the son of Kish; is Saul also among the
prophets?"1 In this narrative it is clear that Samuel
the seer is not himself regarded as one of the prophets.
His calm sobriety contrasts with their excited emotional-
ism. It is, moreover, difficult to conceive what the nar-
rator would have us understand by the "prophesying"
of these enthusiasts. It was probably neither rebuke nor
prediction, but more likely some form of sacred song,
improvised under the impulse of the moment.
How are we to account for the rise of this new order ?
The most probable theory is that prophecy is of Canaanite
origin, and was borrowed or imitated from the Canaanites
1 1 Sam. x. 5—11.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 77
by the Hebrews.1 This would account for its compara-
tively late appearance in the history of Israel, and for its
earliest characteristics. The writer of the note which I
have already quoted, that " those who are now called
prophets were beforetime called seers," is aware that the
word seer is older than the word prophet, although he
wrongly imagines that the two names stand for identical
personalities. We have, on the contrary, observed that,
though Samuel may have had certain relations with the
prophets, he was not himself one of their number; there is
nothing excited or dervish-like about his action and speech.
Nor, as far as we know, could Deborah have resembled the
prophets in her ministrations or manners. Seeing that
the company of singing and playing enthusiasts who met
Saul upon the road to Gibeah is scarcely in keeping with
what we conceive to be the purest and most characteristic
elements in the old religion of Yahveh, the presumption
increases that the word and the thing were alike borrowed
from the Canaanites. When we recollect that Baal, too,
had his prophets, and call to mind their strange behaviour
in the contest with Elijah upon the slopes of Carmel, the
presumption is changed into probability.
We thus surmise that Hebrew prophecy had a two-
fold origin in the old Hebrew "seers" and in the Canaanite
"prophets." The two orders, the one native, the other
foreign, coalesced with results unique in character and
importance. But the stages of the coalescence are hard
to trace. What we should like to know is, how far the
grafting of Canaanite prophecy upon the old stock of
Hebrew seers may have helped to produce the typical
1 See Kuenen, Onderzoeh, Vol. II., 2nd ed., p. 6, and n. 10.
78 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
prophets of the eighth century. Its influence one may
imagine to have been in the direction of making the
seers less concerned with individuals and more concerned
with the nation at large. The prophetical movement
imitated from the Canaanites received its first impulse
from the Philistine supremacy. The prophets were stimu-
lated by political as well as by religious enthusiasm,
and the two motives were so closely connected as to be
indistinguishable in their own minds. They began to
give up their lives to the work of prophesying. While
that work was by no means of an elevated order, it yet
presented the spectacle of bodies of men living together
for religious purposes. Higher minds, to whom the
merely physical aspects of the earlier prophesying were
by no means so repugnant or unnatural as they are to our-
selves, were not unlikely to be influenced by, or attracted
to, such associations, seeing that their object was the
glorification and service of the national God. Samuel the
seer may have countenanced and supported them ; other
seers may have regularly joined their ranks. They would
not spend their whole time in ecstatic excitement, but
would occupy part of it in the study and recital of the
national songs and traditions, all of which would tend
to that religious and national revival upon which the
prophets were bent.
In some such manner we may conjecture that the
coalescence of prophet and seer was gradually brought
about. With the troops of prophets the isolated seers
became incorporated, receiving back from the prophets
something of their national enthusiasm and their detach-
ment from narrower interests; and, on the other hand,
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 79
providing the prophets in many cases with calmer and
more intelligent leaders, who might teach them to modify
or to avoid the wilder excesses of a purely physical
exaltation. From the historical books of the Old Testa-
ment we can, unfortunately, gather but very little in
support of this conjecture. The bands of prophets men-
tioned for the first time in the two narratives about Saul
and Samuel are heard of no more till the period of Elijah,
an interval of a hundred and fifty years.
On Samuel there follow quickly the two prophets,
Nathan and Gad. What connection these two men bore
to the prophetical associations we cannot discover. The
stories told about them have clearly been adapted by
writers of a later age, who were probably familiar with
the more developed prophecy of the eighth century. If,
however, these stories contain a considerable basis of his-
torical truth, Gael and Nathan aptly represent a transi-
tional period in the prophetical history. They are closely
connected with the court. David appears to have made it
part of his policy to conciliate and win over to his own
side the distinguished religious personalities of his day.
Saul's ill-timed vengeance upon the priests of Nob secured
for him the hostility of the priesthood. Zadok and Abi-
athar are the devoted servants of David. "With the quick
intuition of a born leader of men, he probably recognized
the growing importance of the prophetical order, and
attached two of its most prominent members to his own
person. Gad is called David's seer, and Nathan takes
an active part with Bathsheba in the court intrigue
against Adonijah.1 But, on the other hand, both Nathan
1 2 Sam. xxiv. 11; 1 Kings i.
80 IT. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
and Gad, upon two critical occasions, reprove their king
in Yahveh's name and in no measured strain. Samuel,
according to a story the date of which seems later than
that of his first meeting Avith Saul, but which in its main
outlines is probably authentic, had already paved the
way.1
Moreover, one of these occasions displays the prophet
in a novel character of supreme significance, as a preacher
of social morality. Though limited to a single individual
and to a particular incident and time, Nathan's condem-
nation of David in the matter of Uriah and Bathsheba
seems to mark the true beginning of that great move-
ment which was to culminate in Amos and Hosea.
Besides the prophet and the priest, there existed in
the early monarchy a third class of holy men, whose
exact measure of influence it is difficult to estimate with
accuracy. These were the Nazirites. Unlike the Nazi-
rites of the Pentateuch, the older Nazirites appear to
have observed their rules of abstinence for life. The two
main features of Nazirite asceticism were abstention
from wine and from cutting the hair. Of any im-
portant Naziritcs we know nothing; for the figure of
Samson is too legendary to enable us to assign him a
place in the history of Israel, and Samuel, in the oldest
accounts we have of him, is not clearly represented as
a Nazirite. It has been suggested that the class of
Nazirites represented a protest against the luxury and
sensuality of Canaanite life, a practical demonstration in
favour of the old purity and stern simplicity of the most
ancient Yahvistic religion. The Rechabites, who com-
1 2 Sam. xii. (Bathsheba), xxiv. (the Census); 1 Sam. xv. (Agag).
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 81
bincd abstinence from wine with an aversion to agricul-
tural life, must have been closely allied to the Nazirites,
and have owed their origin to a similar cause.
Priest, Seer, Prophet and Nazirite : these, then, are
the four classes of holy men who furthered the progress
of Israel's religion from Samuel to Elijah. But the
political influences themselves were also of the greatest
importance, and even in a sketch of the religious history
they cannot be passed over in complete silence.
David (1010—978 B.C.) for a short time made the
kingdom of Israel a first-rate power. It was natural
that the dignity of his own position should be reflected
back upon the national God. Nor is Abigail merely
using the language of politeness, when she prophesies
that Yahveh will make David a sure house because he
fights the battles of Yahveh.1 It was not only that the
glory of Israel was equivalent to the glory of Israel's
God, but that David, as we have already seen, made it
part of his policy to identify his cause with the cause of
religion, and to secure its leading representatives upon
his own side. David may well have been ardently and
sincerely attached to the national faith; with all the
intensity of his impulsive nature he may have fully
believed that his own advancement was synonymous
with the glory of his God. In a sense other than he
knew, this was the fact. The prophets of the eighth
century could not have attained to the height of their
argument, unless Israel had been lifted out of the petty
political condition in which it had remained during the
period of the Judges.
1 1 Sam. xxv. 28.
G
82 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
With David, too, the centre of gravity shifted south-
wards to Juda?a and Jerusalem. By his removal of the
Ark to his newly-captured capital, he laid the foundation
of that fresh development in the external organization of
the religion which was to culminate some four hundred
years later in the law of the single sanctuary and the
Book of Deuteronomy.1 Solomon so far followed up his
father's policy as to build a royal temple in Jerusalem,
which, by the splendour of its services, its close connec-
tion with the court and its possession of the Ark of
Yahveh, soon became the chief house of God in the
entire realm. But all the other "high places" or local
sanctuaries retained their recognized position, and there
was no idea that the temple of Jerusalem would or should
dispossess them of their functions and legality. Yet it
was only natural that the chief and royal sanctuary
within the capital should attract to its services the most
cultivated and enlightened ministers, and, as the Ark
of Yahveh never appears to have been associated with
material images, the worship at the temple of Jerusalem
was comparatively the purest in all the land.
The important political movements in the reigns of
David and Solomon, though affecting religious worship
and ceremonial, do not seem to have been accompanied
by an immediate elevation of religious doctrine. Of
Solomon's faith we know even less than of David's;
yet in one important respect he seems to have differed
1 " Little could David have guessed the issues which hung on this
important stop, but it is to him that the world is historically indebted
for the streams of spiritual life which have proceeded from Jerusalem."
Cheync, Aids, &c, p. 56.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. S3
from his father. David was an enthusiastic, if not
an elevated, worshipper of Yahveh ; of Solomon we
are told that on the hill that is east of Jerusalem
he built " a high place for Chemosh. the abomina-
tion of Moab, and for Molech, the abomination of the
children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his
strange wives, who burnt incense and sacrificed unto
their gods."1 These altars for foreign divinities seem to
have been suggested originally by motives of policy, but
they remained untouched until the reign of Josiah, and
familiarizing the men of Judah with idolatrous rites,
tempted them to participate in the forbidden worship of
other gods. But the very fact that they continued un-
destroyed till the great reformation of the seventh cen-
tury, shoAVS that they may well have been erected, not in
ignorance, but in despite, of the Mosaic command, "Thou
shalt have no other gods but Yahveh." Though the
rigorists may have disapproved of their existence, they
were powerless to suppress them, for political advantages
would outweigh all other considerations. But, with this
exception, there is no reason to suppose that much idolatry
was prevalent in the days of David and Solomon. Yahveh
had shown his might and grace too significantly to make
men inclined to traverse his command, and to seek for
favour from other divinities more distant and less
powerful.
While the death of Solomon was once more the begin-
ning of a new epoch, Jeroboam's revolt can no longer be
estimated as in the pro-critical age. The men of Israel
did not regard their kingdom as apostate, or believe
1 1 Kings xi. 7, 8.
g2
84 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
that its rulers lacked divine sanction and approval. So
religious a writer as the author of the " Blessing of
Moses" can yet utter the prayer, "Hear, Yahveh, the
voice of Judah, and bring him back unto his people." l
If Jeroboam was instigated to revolt by a northern pro-
phet, Ahijah the Shilonite, it is far from probable that
Ahijah viewed the formation of the new monarchy merely
in the light of a divine punishment upon the errors of
Solomon. Ahijah, like many another patriot, may well
have sympathized with the discontent of the northern
tribes at the oppressive government of Solomon, and
yearned to free his people from the harsh Judoean yoke.
It is just possible that the Israelite prophets were un-
favourable to Solomon's attempt to make the new temple
at Jerusalem overshadow the other and older sanctuaries
of the realm, and that the revolt partook, therefore, to
some extent, of a religious character. If there was any
such element in the movement, it sprang from religious
conservatism. The measures taken by Jeroboam to
increase the attractiveness of the northern temples would
appear to substantiate such an hypothesis. These mea-
sures constitute the sin of Jeroboam in the eyes of the
Deutcronomistic redactor of the Books of Kings. In no
other point does that writer more thoroughly misinterpret
the spirit of the older age. The sin of Jeroboam is to
him the central motive and cause of the entire tragedy
which ended in the ruin of Israel. But in the eyes of
Jeroboam and his contemporaries there was no sin and
no idolatry. The bare facts of the case are, that Jeroboam
made two new golden bulls, of which one was set up in
1 Deut. xxxiii. 7.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 85
Bethel and the other in Dan ; these bulls, images of
Yahveh,1 were certainly no innovation, for such images
were customary, and Jeroboam would clearly have been
more inclined to appeal to the old conservative instincts
of his subjects than to create a religious novelty just
after the establishment of his rule. If he won his
throne by the help of the prophets, it is unlikely that
his bulls can have met with the hot opposition of men
whose favour he had every reason to court.
Jeroboam's bulls were a kind of counterblast to Solo-
mon's temple. But whereas the absence of image wor-
ship from the Judsean sanctuary enabled it to retain the
affection of the more advanced prophets, and its priests
to participate in a religious reform, the royal bulls,
erected by the ruler's own orders, permanently fixed the
worship of the northern kingdom at the same low level,
and stamped it with the sanction and authority of the king.
The higher prophetical movement of the eighth century
.could acquiesce in the temple of Jerusalem ; it was
brought into open and violent hostility with the sanc-
tuaries of Israel. But for some considerable period these
more indirect effects of Jeroboam's action did not declare
themselves. To suppose that the northern kingdom was
for the most part hopelessly given up to idolatry, and
that the pure religion of Yahveh was almost exclusively
maintained in the kingdom of Judah, rests upon mis-
understanding and a too ready acceptance of the bias
of later historians and editors against Israel and its
kings. At first the religious condition of the two
kingdoms was closely similar. It even happened, as
1 1 Kings xii. 2G— 33.
86 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
we shall see, that a forward movement in the history
of prophecy began, not in Jndah, but in Israel. But
the instability of the throne in Israel, the number of
revolutions and the frequent external wars hindered
the gradual growth of a slow but thorough religious
advance. By exaggerated opposition to the old tradition,
some historians of the critical school are now inclined to
forget the effect of these political troubles upon the reli-
gious condition of Israel.1 Still the essential superiority
of Judah must be abandoned, and if the Assyrian empire
at the close of the eighth century had overthrown, not
merely Israel, but also Judah, it is probable that the
southern as well as the northern Hebrews would have
lost their religious identity. More than three hundred
years were still needed before the religion of Yahveh
could become even temporarily independent of its temple
and its land.
Jeroboam left the kingdom of Israel to his son Nadabr
but he was soon slain by Baasha, " who reigned in his
stead." Baasha's son Elah, after a year's rule, was mur-
dered by Zimri, "his servant," who, after a short seven
days' experience of regal power, was succeeded by Omri
in the year 890.2 Thus, omitting Zimri, we have three
dynasties in less than fifty years. Omri was a powerful
monarch, as we learn, not from the Book of Kings, but
from the stone of Mesa and the Assyrian inscriptions.
For it was he who once more brought Moab under the
government of Israel, and his land became known in
1 Kg. Stade in his Gcsclnclde. He heads his account of Jeroboam's
revolt thus : " Der Abfall Judas vom Reiche."
2 1 Kings xv. 25 — xvi. 28.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 87
Assyria as the "kingdom of Omri." The redactor of
Kings tells us that in his twelve years' reign he wrought
evil in Yahveh's eyes, and did worse than all who were
before him ; but he does not inform us wherein this
special wickedness consisted, and it is possibly an inven-
tion of the historian to blacken the memory of Ahab's
father and predecessor. The accession of Ahab took
place about 878, sixty years after the death of Solomon.
The kingdom of Judah during this period was pos-
sessed by three monarchs only, Eehoboam, Abijam and
Asa. Of its religious condition during these sixty j^ears
we know very little. Eehoboam and Abijam incur the
historian's reprobation. In the days of the former,
"Judah did evil in the sight of Yahveh, and they
provoked him to jealousy with the sins which they
committed above all that their fathers had done. For
they also built them high places and pillars and Asherahs
on every high hill and under every green tree. And
there were also sodomites in the land, and they did
according to all the abominations of the nations which
Yahveh had cast out before the children of Israel."1
These charges, it will be noticed, refer exclusively to
matters of cultus, and do not deal directly with the wor-
ship of other gods. As to the high places and the pillars,
no one before the seventh centuiy and the reform of
Deuteronomy imagined that they were displeasing to
Yahveh ; and of the Asherahs, the sacred poles of Canaan-
ite origin, the same may probably be said. Prostitution
as a form of divine service, which is the meaning of the
second count in the historian's indictment, was a vice
1 1 Kings xiv. 22—24.
83 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
clearly borrowed from the Canaanites, in whose religion
it held an acknowledged and honourable place. This
horrible custom must have been widely imitated by the
Israelites, for in the story of Judah and Tamar the words
" harlot" and " Ivedesha" are used as synonymous terms ;
but there is no evidence that it was at any period accepted
by the better minds, in either the northern or the southern
kingdom, as an integral part of their religion.1
The third king of Judah, Abijam's son Asa (917 — 877),
is characterized very differently by the historian from
either his father or his grandfather. He and his son
Jehoshaphat, Ahab's contemporary and ally, did that
which was right in the eyes of Yahveh, as did David, their
ancestor. The measures by which Asa won this golden
opinion are said to have been that he took away the
sodomites out of the land, and removed the idols of his
father; moreover, that he destroyed the " horrible thing"
which his mother had made for Asherah and burnt it in
the brook Ividron.2 This statement about Asa is of extreme
interest and importance : its authenticity is unquestion-
able; for the historian had no interest or motive to exempt
Asa and Jehoshaphat from a general censure, unless their
conduct had really differed from that of their immediate
predecessors. We thus have to deal with a religious
reform at the end of the tenth century. Saul's persecu-
tion of the witches and sorcerers we have already ascribed
to the influence of Samuel. May not Eenan be right
in ascribing the reform of Asa to the growing influence
of the prophets ? 3 Its details, however, are not entirely
1 Genesis xxxviii. 21 (R.V.). 2 1 Kings xv. 12, 13.
3 Mstoire, Vol. II. pp. 240—249.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 89
clear. "Whereas the offences ascribed to his predecessors
were Canaanite accretions upon the worship of Yahvch,
Asa seems to have destroyed the symbols of absolute
idolatiy. For the idols which he removed can scarcely
have been images of Yahvch, unless we assume that in
Judah, owing to the imageless worship in the temple, the
prophets forbade the material representation of Yahveh
earlier than in the northern kingdom. At any rate, the
"horrible thing" which the queen-mother had erected
for Asherah was probably a sacred pole set up in honour
of Astarte, the two words being here, as in several other
places, confused by the historian. He ought to have said
that Maachah made an Asherah for Astarte; in which case
the objection would not have been to the Asherah as such,
but to the fact that it was an Asherah raised to the honour,
not of Yahveh, but of Astarte. If this interpretation be
correct, the inference follows that the Mosaic command
of monolatry was thoroughly recognized by Asa, who
sought to give effect to it by active measures of liturgical
reform.
The reigns of Asa and Jehoshaphat extend over a period
of sixty-five years (917 — 852). Under these powerful
monarchs the dignity of the royal temple and of its wor-
ship gradually increased. Prophets and priests may have
formed the beginnings of that alliance, the outcome of
which can be traced in Isaiah and Deuteronomy. The
seeds of much which we find in fresh growth or ripe
maturity in the ninth and eighth centuries must have
been sown in this tenth century, of which wre would
gladly know so much, of which we do know so little.
Higher and lower elements of religion were gradually
90 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
being parted off and differentiated from each other. Cor-
responding representatives of either element in the two
orders of priesthood and prophecy embodied the growing
contrast. But no great teacher, so far as we know, arose
to carry forward the Founder's work. In the last por-
tion of the century and in the first quarter of the next
there was a religious calm. In the north, things were
not very different under Omri from what they had been
under Jeroboam and Solomon. In the south, while the
reforms of Asa had been an augury of future deve-
lopments, they can scarcely have been widely felt, or,
perhaps, even widely known beyond the capital. But if
calm there was, it was the calm before the storm. When
a sufficient impetus from without gave signal and oppor-
tunity, the silent religious advance, implying also the
growing religious conflict and contrast, was to declare
itself openly upon the historic stage. The great men,
never wanting in noble races at supreme moments of
spiritual or national crisis, were also to be at hand.
Ahab, king of Israel, succeeded to the throne about
the year 878 B.C. To secure himself the better against
the enmity of the Syrians, or Aramasans, as they
should properly be called, he appears to have entered
into an alliance with Ethbaal, the king of Sidon, whose
daughter Jezebel he took to wife. In his willingness to
secure for his consort the full exercise of her religion,
he went further than Solomon. He built a temple for
Baal in his capital, and upon its altar he himself, toge-
ther with his wife, paid worship to the Sidonian god.1
The example of the king found many imitators; but
1 1 Kings xvi. 31.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 91
whether other altars than that in Samaria were erected
to Baal, and how far the Baal cultus spread through
Israel generally, it is impossible to say. In any case,
Ahab and his followers did enough to rouse the growing
prophetical power to vigorous resistance. The soul of
the Yahvistic opposition was Elijah the Tishbite. Of this
great prophet we have, unfortunately, but little informa-
tion which is free from legendary exaggeration and mis-
statement. With his usual concise eloquence, "Wellhausen,
in his inimitable sketch, characterizes the position of
Elijah in Israel's religious history. " In solitary gran-
deur did this prophet tower over his time. Legend, and
not history, could alone preserve the memory of his
figure. One has rather the vague impression that with
him one enters upon a new stage in the history of reli-
gion, than any precise data by which it can be ascertained
wherein lay the contrast between the old and the new."1
The main stories respecting him seem borrowed from a
separate work dealing with his life and doings. Though
it must have been drawn up within about half-a-century
after the prophet's death, it is, nevertheless, legendary
in character, and decidedly misinterprets or exaggerates
the historical situations, to magnify the importance and
lonely uniqueness of its hero. It is clear that both of
Elijah, as well as of his disciple and follower Elisha,
there must have been a large number of popular tales in
circulation, only a few of which have been incorporated
into the Books of Kings. Those which we possess are
not by any means always consistent with each other, and
1 Abriss, p. 33.
92 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
the same miracles are freely reported both of Elijah and
Elisha.1
In the story of the famous challenge which Elijah
threw down to Ahab and the prophets of Baal upon
Mount Carmel, the author alludes to a systematic perse-
cution of the more rigid adherents of Yahveh by Jezebel
and the followers of Baal among the party of the court.
Yahveh's altars are thrown down, and of all his prophets
Elijah only is left. The inroads of Baal- worship have
gone so far that there are only seven thousand in Israel
who have not bowed the knee to Baal or kissed his
image with their mouths. But these statements are exag-
gerated. Xot only do Ahab's children bear names of
which that of the national God forms part, but Jehu,
even if we accept the stories of his violent reform as
literally accurate, is able to exterminate all the worship-
pers of Baal by a single stratagem. Independently, more-
over, of the Elijah stories, we possess a most valuable
record of another great prophet of Yahveh, who carried
the torch of religion forward in the reign of Ahab. This
was Micaiah, the son of Imlah.2 The long feud between
Israel and Judah was brought to a close by Ahab and
Jehoslmphat. The two monarchs formed an alliance,
cemented by the marriage of Ahab's daughter, Athaliah,
to Jehoshaphat's son, and they arranged a joint expedi-
tion against the Syrians to recover Bama in Gilead for
1 The last German bit of work on Elijah is, T believe, an essay by
Rb'sch, in Theol. Studien unci Kritiken, 1892, pp. 551 — 572. It is
very negative in its results.
2 1 Kings xxii.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 93
the realm of Israel. Before leaving Samaria, Jehosliaphat
desired to consult Yahveh as to the prospects of the
undertaking. Ahab accordingly collected the prophets
of Yahveh together to the number of about four hundred
men. This story runs directly counter to the Elijah
episode, in which all the prophets have been persecuted
and murdered by Ahab. Here, on the contrary, they
come forward in willing obedience to the royal will.
They prophesy success: "Yahveh will deliver Rania
into the hands of the king." But Jehosliaphat is not
satisfied. He suspects that this unhesitating unanimity
can scarcely be genuine, and he therefore asks whether
there is not yet another prophet of Yahveh, that they
may inquire of him. Ahab answers, that "there is yet
one man, Micaiah, the son of Imlah, by whom we may
inquire of Yahveh ; but I hate him, for he does not pro-
phesy good concerning me, but evil." Jehoshaphat urges
that Micaiah should nevertheless be summoned. Ahab
consents, and Micaiah is sent for. After obviously
mimicking the four hundred prophets in their predictions
of success, he is urged by Ahab himself to speak the
truth only in the name of Yahveh. Micaiah then utters
a short oracle of menace and foreboding, and proceeds
to explain how it is that the true prophets of Yahveh
predicted the success of the expedition. Their prophetic
gift was perverted by the will of Yahveh himself, who
by their means was luring Ahab on to his inevitable
doom.
In this story we have the first indication of a wide
ethical and religious cleavage in the ranks of the Yahveh
prophets themselves, and the fact is sufficiently novel to
94 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
call forth a special and supernatural explanation. The
very type or model of the canonical prophets is already
revealed in Micaiah. As Jeremiah stands alone in predict-
ing ruin, while Hananiah and his followers foretell smooth
and pleasant things — unable, perchance, to realize how
Yahveh can show himself most supreme amid the disas-
ters and downfall of his people — so, two centuries and a
half earlier, did Micaiah withstand Zedekiah and the
compliant four hundred before the gates of Samaria. One
of the stories about Elijah is another harbinger of coming
events. After Ahab's judicial murder of Naboth the
Jezreelite, Elijah confronts Ahab, as Nathan had con-
fronted David for the murder of Uriah. No mention is
made of the apostasy to Baal ; the punishment is to fall
upon Ahab and his house because of the moral wrong
which had been wrought in Jezreel. For the rest, the
whole bulk of the narratives respecting the prophets of
this period presents a fusion between old and new. The
Yahveh of Elijah and Elisha was little softened from the
Yahveh of Samuel.1 In Yahveh's name Elijah slaughters
the prophets of Baal at the brook of Kidron, and an un-
named prophet sternly reproves Ahab for sparing his
enemy Ben-IIadad, who had fallen under the ban of
Yahveh. Elisha curses the little children who laugh at
his strange appearance, and two bears, the instruments
of Yahveh's wrath, destroy forty-two of them. On the
other hand, Elisha forbids the king of Israel to slay the
Syrians who, smitten with sudden blindness, had followed
him into Samaria. There are contrasts, too, in the manner
1 1 Kings xix. 12 must not bo pressed too far, when one remembers
that it is followed by verso 17.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 95
of prophecy. Elisha, on one occasion, needs the impulse
of music before he can reveal the oracle of Yahveh;
and the four hundred prophets, who prophesy by Ahab
and Jehoshaphat's request at the gates of Samaria, must
clearly be conceived as in a condition of unnatural ex-
citement and exaltation. Yet Elijah and Micaiah (and
Elisha, too, upon other occasions) speak, like Isaiah and
Jeremiah, from the pressure of momentary inspiration
and without artificial stimulus.
The attempted addition of the Sidonian Baal as
partner, if not as rival to Yahveh, ended in disastrous
failure and bloody revolt. Elisha instigated Jehu to
rebel against Jehoram, Ahab's son and younger brother of
Ahaziah, his immediate predecessor. The rebellion took
place in 843, thirty-five years after Ahab's accession to
the throne. But the Baal movement was already slack-
ening. Jehoram, according to the historian's own verdict,
"wrought evil in the sight of Yahveh, but not like his
father and like his mother, for he put away the pillar of
Baal which his father had made."1 Jehu, however, in
exterminating the race of Omri, posed as an instrument
of divine vengeance, and apparently slew, besides the
royal family, many of the worshippers of Baal. In this
bloody purgation, and in the destruction of Baal's images
and temple, he was assisted by Jehonadab the Becha-
bite, who, himself of Kenite origin, had preserved the
purest and simplest traditions of the oldest forms of
Yahvistic faith. How far Jehu's violent zeal and blood-
shed won him the approval of Elisha we do not know ; a
century later the prophet Hosea foretold the destruction
1 2 Kings iii. 1.
96 IT. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
of the northern kingdom because of the bloodshed at
Jezreel.
The experiment of introducing Baal-worship and the
failure of the attempt were both repeated upon a smaller
scale in the kingdom of Judah. Keen follower of Yahveh
as Jehoshaphat was, he did not scruple to enter into close
alliance with Ahab, and his son Jehoram was married to
Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab, and probably, therefore, a
daughter of Jezebel as well. Both Jehoram and his son
Ahaziah (who had reigned only one year before he fell a
victim to Jehu at Jezreel) are reported to have " walked
in the way of the house of Ahab." A temple of Baal,
with images and altars, was erected at Jerusalem. Priests
were consecrated to his service. Athaliah, after her
murder of the seed-royal, upon the news of Ahaziah's
death reaching Jerusalem, followed naturally, so far as
the worship of Baal was concerned, in the footsteps of
her father. Nor do we hear of any opposition from the
prophets; and when, after a lapse of six years (857),
the idolatrous queen Athaliah is dethroned and slain,
and Joash, Ahaziah's son (who had been saved by his
aunt from his grandmother's clutches), is proclaimed
king, it is Jehoiada, the chief priest of the temple, who
is the ringleader of the revolt, and the destroyer of the
worship of Baal.1 "Why the prophets take no part in
the struggle is very obscure. Were the seers of Judah
at that time more compliant and more courtly than those
of Israel ? Or is the omission of their co-operation with
Jehoiada a mere accident ? The argument from silence
is proverbially dangerous.
1 2 Kin^s xi.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 97
Between the accession of Ahab and the revolt of Jehu,
there is an interval of thirty-six years. These years
were signalized, not only by the conflict between Baal
and Yahveh, but also by the beginning of the Syrian
wars. In Jehu's reign the Syrian king Hazael ravaged
Israel with fire and sword. The victories of Ahab were
not repeated by the destroyer of Ahab's house. Under
Jehoahaz (814 — 796) things went from bad to worse,
and it was not till the reign of his son Joash, and his
grandson Jeroboam the Second, that the Syrian foe was
finally vanquished, and Israel's power for one last brief
period restored. The introduction and collapse of the
worship of Baal, the prophetic opposition and its success,
and the subsequent calamities at the hands of the national
foe, cannot but have had a considerable effect upon reli-
gious development. It was not out of harmony with the
religious ideas of those days that the punishment of the
guilt incurred by the apostasy to Baal should appear to
be visited upon subsequent generations. Nor was Judah
exempt from trouble. A predicted invasion of Hazael
was bought off at great expense by Jehoash; but Amaziah,
his son, though he did that which was right in the eyes
of Yahveh, was compelled to witness Joash of Israel break
down the wall of Jerusalem, and enter into the capital
with all the insolence of a foreign conqueror.1 It is,
therefore, not improbable, as Kuenen has suggested, that
these external calamities, following closely upon the in-
ternal religious dissensions, suggested to the faithful that
there was a causal connection between the two orders of
events.2 Kor was it possible for Elijah to resist the
1 2 Kings xiv. 13. 2 Religion of Israel, Vol. I. p. 367.
H
98 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
Baal- worship of Ahab, without his conception of Yahveh
being raised by the very process and strength of his
opposition. In proportion as Yahveh' s cause was held
high by Elijah's party — fought for, perhaps even died
for, through Jezebel's hostility — the contrast between
Yahveh and Baal would grow larger and more distinct.
As the one became holier, purer, greater, the other
became viler, more impotent and less real. Professor
Schultz has asserted that this supposed result of the
events under the reign of Ahab and his immediate suc-
cessors has no foundation in fact. "Kuenen's opinion
that the persecution of the worship of Yahveh under
Ahab gave occasion to a higher and more monotheistic
conception of God, is nowhere supported by the original
authorities." 1 But the opinion of Kuenen is an inter-
pretation of the facts, not another fact beyond them.
"We know that the measures of Ahab awoke men like
Elijah and Micaiah to active resistance, and that in the
course of that resistance they displayed a moral power
and reached a religious height above the previous level
of the prophetic body. Now for the sixty years which
lie between Elisha and Amos, we have no record of the
religious condition of either Israel or Judah. In the latter
kingdom Jehoash's two successors, Amaziah and Azariah,
are both described as sincere followers of Yahveh. In
Israel, Joash and Jeroboam II. continue the policy of
Jehu; no change, in other words, is made in the cus-
tomary worship, and the golden calves are still revered as
the symbols of Yahveh. Then suddenly, amid the com-
parative prosperity of Jeroboam's reign, there sounds the
^ Alttestamentliche Theologie, 4th ed., 1889, p. 144.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 99
warning voice of Amos, the shepherd -prophet. He stands
as high above Elijah, as Elijah, in all probability, stood
above Samuel. The hypothesis of Kuenen is meant to
account for the possibility of his advent and of his teach-
ing. The religion of Yahveh was stirred to its depths
by the policy of Ahab : the reaction which ensued, if it
showed itself in acts of violence and ferocious vengeance,
showed itself also in the noble figures of Elijah, Elisha,
and Micaiah, and, after an interval of national calamity,
which may have also helped to purify the religious con-
ceptions of the higher minds, in the more developed
teaching of the canonical prophets.
But the religious progress of the ninth century is only
to be understood as a development ; in no wise as a crea-
tion ex nihilo. The exclusive worship of Yahveh and the
moral elements of his character were, as we have seen
in the last Lecture, co-ordinated and causally connected
from the very first. It is not without significance that
the same Elijah who withstands Ahab as the introducer
of a foreign cult, withstands him also as the murderer of
Naboth. Had not Baal and Yahveh been alien deities
from the first, there could have been no Elijah to fight
till death for the worship of Yahveh. The religion of
Moses only very gradually unfolded the promise which
it contained, and it even seems to have occasionally sunk
down close to the level of its Canaanite surroundings.
But if external circumstances helped its ethical develop-
ment, they would have been powerless to do so unless
there had been ab initio something ethical to develop.
Nor does an impartial estimate of the pre-prophetic reli-
gion as a whole point in a contrary direction. Standing
h2
100 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
as we do now on the confines of old and new, it is well
to collect together some general characteristics of the
religion at the average level it had reached before the
prophetic advance.
The nature of the pre-prophetic religion was deter-
mined by the character of its God. As Yahveh was
conceived, so, in a great measure, was the religion of his
worshippers. Let us, then, briefly recall to mind some
central features of Yahvelr s character. Yahveh is a person
like ourselves, only wiser and more powerful. Even in the
pre-prophetic stage, he is well marked off from the forces
of nature which he controls, and thus ready to receive a
uniform and self-consistent character. lie already pos-
sesses many ethical attributes, and their possession points
the way to the future development of an harmonious union
of these qualities in a complete ethical ideal. But though
Yahveh is a person, his life and doings are withdrawn
from mortal ken, except in his relations to humanity.
The taint of mythology is wanting. Yahveh has no
associate or relative. Then, secondly, the religious cus-
tom, or, for the higher or more thoughtful minds, the
religious law, of Israel was monolatry. Yahveh was a
jealous God who did not tolerate the worship of other
gods in his own land. The consequence was that the
whole accumulation of supernatural agencies and effects
was centred upon Yahveh ; and as the conception of his
character advanced in moral firmness and consistency, it
became easier to arrange all religious phenomena upon a
moral basis and to regard them from a moral point of view.
As all fortunes of the national life, its calamities no less
than its successes, were the ordered effects of one God's
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 101
rule, every incident could only be explained in conso-
nance with the character of that single divinity. It was
not a malignant deity who had sent a famine, a benefi-
cent deity who had brought the rain ; it was one and
the same Yahveh who had done all these things. As
Yahveh's actions were more and more regarded, not as
the inexplicable expressions of wayward and inconstant
moods, but as the reasoned and justifiable display of a
settled and unique character, the way was paved for the
prophetic conception that national adversity could only
betoken national sin, and finally that the ruin of the
people might be compatible with the triumph of their
God.
It is true that the moralization of Yahveh's character
was by no means completed at the close of the pre-pro-
phetic period. There was much left for the prophets
to do. He still retained many aspects of the nature-gods
out of whom he was derived, some of which still clung
to him in the Mosaic teaching, while others may have
been adopted from qualities of the Canaanite divinities.
These lower aspects, however, mainly resolve themselves
into one, Yahveh's wrath. That he should show no
mercy to Israel's foes, who are identical with his own, is
no more than natural, and but slightly affects the concep-
tion of him for an ordinary citizen in times of peace.
But his wrath is not limited to the enemies of his people.
"We have seen that it bursts forth with equal vehemence
against his own nation, where any violation, however un-
intentional, of his honour and sanctity may be involved.
And this wrath, as it often arose from unethical causes,
must be appeased by savage and unethical means. On the
102 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
other side there is the fact that Yahveh's religion, ever
since the Mosaic period, had linked religion and morality
together both theoretically and practically. Every Israel-
ite knew that injustice and adultery and violence were
hateful to his God, and in every-day life the disputes of
man with man were settled by the arbitrament of Yahveh.
The priesthood judged and taught as Yahveh's interpre-
ters, and in ordinary times the Israelites would be more
frequently reminded of Yahveh's maintenance of, and
desire for, social morality than of his jealousy and wrath.
"With these considerations the evidence coheres which
points to the religion of Israel being, on the whole, a
source of happiness and satisfaction. The Israelites could
exult in their God, who usually directed his divine capa-
cities to the advancement and well-being of his people.
But both the blessings and the difficulties of religion were
very different to the old Israelites from what they became,
let us say, to the authors of the Psalter. In many respects
their religious views were closely similar to those of other
nations of antiquity. So far as we can gather from our
scanty records, the blessings of religion were conceived
as material — a numerous progeny, fruitful harvest and
long life. It was only on earth that one could hope to
taste of Yahveh's bounties ; after death there was one
cheerless lot alike for all, whether rich or poor, evil or
good. The Biblical Sheol, the home of the Shades, is
the counterpart of the Homeric Hades, and the famous
expostulation of Achilles would have found an echo in
every Hebrew heart. At the close of the Old Testament
period, doctrines of immortality gradually became the
means of reconciling the just rule of God with the painful
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 103
problems of human life ; but to the old Israelites these
problems had scarcely begun to appear above the furthest
horizon of their thought. They did not perceive in the
misfortunes of individuals anything inconsistent with the
providence of Yahveh, for their God was mainly con-
cerned with Israel as a whole, and not with the individual
Israelite. It needed, therefore, we may imagine, some
special calamity to awaken religious alarm, and then
the explanation would be probably found in the idea of
an unknown offence by which the wrath of Yahveh had
unwittingly been aroused. For unintentional error would
be as liable to incur divine punishment as the most
voluntary crime, if it infringed the tolerably wide pro-
vince in which the right or sanctity of Yahveh was
involved. Personality was not sharply conceived in
ancient society. The Israelites, therefore, saw no injustice
in a deliberate chastisement of unintentional offences, in
the sins of fathers being visited upon their children, or
in the merited calamity of one bringing with it the un-
deserved ruin of many. Their religion wras far more
often a source of genial satisfaction than of painful per-
plexities. There was much in the ordinary rural life of
those days to remind the people of their religion and
their God. Enough indications remain to show that an
altar of Yahveh was a necessary and usual feature in
every larger village, and that here, on every sabbath and
new moon, sacrifices and prayers were offered up to the
national God. Besides the three great annual festivals
of Passover, First-fruits and Ingathering, when every-
body was expected to provide for and take part in
the general rejoicing, the different families and clans
104 II. HEBREW RELIGION BETWEEN
had also their own yearly sacrifices,1 and individuals
upon special occasions could come before Yahveh and
seek his favour with votive offering or free-will gift.
Bound the larger and more famous of these local sanc-
tuaries, legendary stories grew up of their supposed
foundation by the patriarchs before the departure of the
people's progenitors to the land of Goshen. Some of
these stories we can still read in the two oldest pre-pro-
phetic sources of the Pentateuch, which must have been
compiled at least as early as the beginning of the eighth
century. The local sanctuaries were in so far a danger
to the progress of spiritual religion as they helped to
maintain the view that " to the ordinary man it was not
moral but liturgical acts which seemed to be truly reli-
gious,"2 and they were that part of Yahveh's faith which
was most susceptible to, and received most of, Canaanite
corruption.
Yet the religion of old Israel was simple, and compa-
ratively free from degrading superstition. And though
the view was widely prevalent that sacrifice could ap-
pease God's wrath or win his favour, it was not thought
that Yahveh was compelled to change his mood, or hear
his suppliant's prayer, by any human means. The reli-
gion of Yahveh was not tainted by sorcery. Moreover^
the Yahveh of the priest was also the Yahveh of the
layman. There is no trace of any esoteric priestly doc-
trine kept back from society at large. The business of
Israel's teachers is to communicate their knowledge of
Yahveh to his people : neither they nor the prophets are
familiar with the idea that the highest conceptions of
1 1 Sam. xx. 29. 2 YVellhausen, History of Israel, p. 468.
THE MOSAIC AGE AND EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 10-5
Yalivcli and his religion need be limited to the possession
of a few. Perhaps that is also the reason why, in all
the various phases of Old Testament religion, we find no
vestige of Pantheism.
The Israelite was proud of his religion and of his God.
How enthusiastic are the words of the author of the
"Blessing of Moses," presumably written shortly before
the opening of the newer prophetical movement in the
eighth century ! " There is none like unto the God of
Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven for thy help, and
in his glory on the sky. Happy art thou, 0 Israel ! who
is like unto thee, 0 people saved by Yahveh, the shield
of thy help, the sword of thy glory !" But proud as he
is of Yahveh's help, and of the unique power of his God,
the old Israelite has no knowledge of his nation's peculiar
position or destiny. The idea of a theocracy is wanting.
Israel is not marked off from other nations as the pos-
sessor of the one and only true religion. Israel hates its
enemies as the other nations of antiquity hate theirs;
but there is a world-wide difference between this natural
hostility and that peculiar religious hatred of the heathen
which was produced by far later developments. There
is no thought of the religion of Yahveh being extended
beyond the borders of Israel, or of supernatural ven-
geance being inflicted upon a heathen world for its oppo-
sition to the chosen people of the Supreme God. The
light and shade of the prophetic religion are, in these
respects, wholly wanting. Monolatry had not yet begun
to pass into monotheism. The course of that transition,
which corresponds with the teaching of the prophets,
will come before us in the next Lecture.
Lecture III,
THE PEOPHETS OF THE EIGHTH CE1STTUEY B.C.
We have now reached a turning-point in our history.
For the prophets of the eighth century are our subject,
the men whose teaching, upon the basis of the founder's
work, sufficed to make their people's religion unique
among the religions of the world, just as their writings
constitute a unique chapter in the annals of universal
literature. We have already traced the origin and early
development of the prophetical movement ; we now ap-
proach the stage of its maturity, in which unrecorded
speech was supplemented, or even replaced, by written
words, and the value of the message was confirmed by
the greater permanency of its form.1
Four prophets of the eighth century are known to us
by their writings ; already we have more than once had
occasion to use these writings as indirect evidence in
dealing with the earlier religious history of Israel ; we
1 "Written prophecy corresponds with a change in, prophecy's pur-
port. The message of the eighth-century prophets was no longer
directed to momentary needs or particular individuals, but dealt with
the people as a whole and with subjects of lasting significance. It was
therefore possible to teach by writing as well as by speaking, just as it
was advisable to record the teaching as a witness of the present and a
lesson for the future.
III. PROPHETS OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 107
have now to study them for their own sakes, and obtain,
if we can, a clear picture of their character and teaching.
For this purpose it will be necessary to take a glance
at the external history of Israel and of Judah in the last
sixty years of the eighth century.1
Jeroboam II. (781 — 741), the most powerful monarch
of the house of Jehu, was reigning in Israel at the begin-
ning of this period; Uzziah or Azariah (777 — 73G), in
Judah. The twofold fact that the Assyrian monarchy,
having first greatly weakened the kingdom of Damas-
cus, was itself about this time in partial and temporaiy
eclipse, enabled Joash and Jeroboam to wage successful
war against the Syrians, and to restore, unchecked by the
greater power, the ancient borders of Israel towards the
east and north.2 But the recovered dignity of Israel was
not long maintained. Within twenty years of the death
of Jeroboam it was again lost. These two decades were
crowded with trouble and horror for the inhabitants of
the northern kingdom. Zechariah, the son of Jeroboam,
was dethroned and killed after a six-months' reign, and
with him ended the royal house of Jehu. Zechariah's
murderer, Shallum, reigned for a month only, falling in
his turn a victim to Menahem, "who slew him and
reigned in his stead."3 Meanwhile, an abler warrior
had ascended the throne of Assyria, Pul or Tiglath-
pilesar II. (745 — 728).4 In a great battle at Arpad
1 The dates in Lectures II. — IV. are taken from Kamphausen's
Die Chroriologie der liebraisclien KiJnige, 1883.
2 Tiele, Babylonisch-assyrische Geschichte, pp. 206 — 209 ; 2 Kings
xiii. 25, xiv. 25—28.
3 2 Kings xv. U. * 2 Kings xv. 19.
108 III. THE PEOPHETS OF THE
(743) he destroyed the armies of northern Syria. Subse-
quent revolts were easily quelled, and by 738 all resist-
ance was at an end. In that same year Menahem paid
tribute to Tiglath-pilesar, and was confirmed, as Assyrian
vassal, in the kingdom of Samaria. After a brief reign,
Menahem was succeeded by his son Pekahiah, who, two
years later, was slain by Pekah, his shield-bearer, who
usurped the throne. Thus, since Jeroboam's death, four
kings had rapidly come and gone, of whom three had
died by the hands of their successors.
Pekahiah's death and Pekah's accession bring us to
the year 736. In Judah, the reigns of Uzziah and
Jotham (777 — 735) had, upon the whole, been fortunate
and peaceful. Both monarchs are commended by the
redactor of the Books of the Kings, and credited with
doing "that which was right in the sight of Yahveh."1
It is otherwise with Jothain's son Ahaz, under whom the
history of Judah becomes again connected with the his-
tory of Israel. For in the last year of Jotham's reign,
and the first year of Ahaz', a war broke out between
Judah and the confederated forces of Pekah, king of
Israel, and Eezin, the king of Damascus. Ahaz, fearful
for his capital, sent a present of silver and gold, taken
from his own and the temple treasures, to Tiglath-pilesar,
thus formally becoming the vassal of the Assyrian mo-
narch, and besought his aid against the kings of Israel
and Damascus. Tiglath-pilesar thereupon entered Syria,
and shut up Eezin in his capital. The Assyrian invasion
appears to have occasioned another conspiracy in Israel,
as a result of which "Hoshea, the son of Elah, smote and
1 2 Kings xv. 3, 34.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 109
slew Pekah, the son of Rcmaliah, and reigned in his
stead."1 Hoshea became the creature of Assyria; but
Tiglath-pilesar punished the independence of Pekah and
his war against the newly accepted Assyrian vassal, by
incorporating the Israelite territories east of Jordan and
north of Mount Ephraim in his own empire, and trans-
porting a portion of their inhabitants into Assyria. This
was the beginning of the end. Tiglath-pilesar's death in
727, and the accession of a new monarch (Shalmancsar
IV., 727 — 723), appear to have been the occasion for
Hoshea (and for Elulaios, king of Tyre) to revolt. A
fresh Assyrian invasion brought Hoshea to speedy sub-
mission. But soon afterwards he formed an alliance with
Shabako, king of Egypt, and once more refused to pay
tribute to his Assyrian lord.2 Shalmanesar penetrated
into Israel and took Hoshea captive, whether after a
pitched battle or by voluntary submission is uncertain.
But Samaria, the capital, refused to surrender, and offered
a desperate resistance. For three years the city held out,
till famine probably compelled capitulation. The date of
its fall is 722, about 215 years after the death of Solomon
and the foundation of the northern kingdom by Jeroboam
the First. Shalmanesar died in the same year, and was
succeeded by Sargon II. (722 — 705).
The capture of Samaria was followed by the customary
deportations. Sargon speaks of having carried away
27,280 inhabitants into Assyria. This was sufficient to
arrest and stifle the entire national life. The most edu-
cated and cultivated sections of the people were exiled
from their land, and new colonists were gradually intro-
1 2 Kings xv. 30. 2 Tiele, Geschlchlc, p. 223.
110 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
duced from other quarters of the Assyrian empire. A
passing revolt of Samaria in 720, as well as more impor-
tant movements in Hamath and Damascus, was easily
put down, and the combined armies of Egypt and Gaza,
on whose assistance the rebels had relied, suffered a
crushing defeat at Eaphia. The kingdom of Israel became
a province of Assyria, and with the extinction of its
national independence, its religious development ceased.
For although the majority of its inhabitants remained in
their old homes, even after the further deportations which
may have followed the revolt of 720, the religion of
Yahveh had not attained sufficient purity and vigour to
survive the loss of political freedom. The higher pro-
phecy had not had time to attract a large circle of disci-
ples. Hosea, as a witness of the troubles which succeeded
the reign of Zechariah, speaks in despairing tones of the
religious corruption around him. Moreover, the intro-
duction of foreign colonists and the deportation of the
flower of the native population, including, as it would
seem, the entire priesthood,1 exposed the national religion,
corrupt as it was, to manifold dangers. The new-comers,
though they brought their idols with them, adopted also
the God of the land. A process of fusion set in. Yahveh
may have remained the chief, and afterwards have again
become the only, God of the old Israelite provinces, so
that upon the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon,
the descendants of the "ten tribes" claimed religious
partnership with Jerusalem ; but henceforward northern
Israel contributed nothing to religious development, and
the interest of the story wholly centres in Judah. From
1 2 Kinss xviii. 27.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. Ill
the strange incident recorded in the Book of Kings con-
cerning the lions which were sent by Yaliveh, and slew
some of the new colonists because they knew not the
religion of the God of the land, we learn something of the
superstitions elements which formed part of the popular
faith at the close of the eighth century.1 From a mixed
population, out of which the more educated members
had been removed to make room for heathen settlers, a
religious advance was not to be expected. But even the
27,000 exiles from Samaria were unable to maintain their
religion apart from their nation and their land. After
their deportation to Assyria we hear of them no more.
"Would not a similar religious collapse have befallen
the southern kingdom, had it also been incorporated into
the Assyrian empire ? Most probably. The different reli-
gious issue of the Babylonian captivity was doubtless due
to the maintenance of the State, and, with the State, to
the continuance of prophetical teaching for another hun-
dred years. Meanwhile, during the troubles which cul-
minated in the fall of Samaria, Ahaz remained faithful to
his Assyrian lord, and even paid homage to Tiglath-pilesar
at Damascus after its capture in 732. Hezekiah, Ahaz'
son, probably succeeded him about the year 714. The
first ten years of his reign were undisturbed by rebellion
or war. Sargon had died in 705 ; his successor was
Sennacherib. But about the year 703 a coalition was
formed against Assyria, led by Egypt, and comprising the
states of Tyre, Ashkelon, Ekron and Judah. "With
Sennacherib's invasion of Judah, and the remarkable
preservation of Jerusalem from capture and spoliation,
1 2 Kiri£S xviii. 25 — 41.
112 HI. THE PROPHETS OF THE
several of Isaiah's prophecies are closely concerned. The
details of the campaign remain obscure, in spite of the
Assyrian inscriptions ; the upshot, however, was that
though Hezekiah, after Sennacherib's hasty retreat from
Palestine, remained the vassal of Assyria, his position
was improved both in material power and comparative
independence, and Jerusalem's escape from the fate of
Samaria, which at one time seemed impossible, took shape
in the mind of Isaiah, and indeed of all Judah, as a
special divine deliverance. Hezekiah's reign was sub-
sequently undisturbed. He died in 686.1
To complete the picture of the circumstances amid
which the prophets spoke and wrote, it would be neces-
sary to supplement our skeleton outline of the external
history with a description of the internal moral and reli-
gious condition of the two kingdoms during the same
period. But for an adequate description there is insuffi-
cient material, seeing that we are mainly confined to the
prophetical writings themselves, and to such portions of
the earlier Pentateuchal strata as we may be able, with
any measure of certainty, to assign to the eighth century.
If we could use it with greater confidence, the second of
these two sources might enable us to correct, or counter-
balance to the right degree, the sombre sketch which,
like censores morum in all ages, the prophets have drawn
for us of the society in which they lived.
The strata of the Pentateuch referred to are the two
1 For Sennacherib's campaign in Judah (2 Kings xviii. 13 — xix. 37)
see Tiele, Ge&chiclde, pp. 291—295, 315—318; Stade, Z. A. W., 188G,
pp. 172—183; Kuenen, Onderzoek; 2nd ed., Vol. I. pp. 414—417;
Cheyne's Isaiah, Historical Introduction to xxxvi. — xxxix., &c.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 113
so-called "prophetical" narratives, with the short legis-
lative pieces connected with or contained in them. Un-
fortunately, scholars are still in some disagreement as to
the date of these narratives, which, moreover — a feature
seriously adding to the complexity of the problem — show
many traces of revision and amplification. Though now
so closely woven together that in our present Pentateuch
we are often unable to disentangle the two threads, they
were originally of independent origin. One of the narra-
tives was compiled in northern Israel, the other in Judah.
They contain an account, drawn partly from oral tradi-
tion and partly from earlier documents now lost, of the
origin and early history of Israel, reaching back, in one
of them, to the creation of the world by Yahveh, and
brought down by both to the death of Joshua and the
conquest of Canaan, It is also very possible that the
earlier historical books are partly composed of materials
that once formed the unbroken continuation of these
same two narratives.1 This question is, however, not
yet fully decided.
The hypothesis as to their date, to which I would
myself incline, essays to prove that at least the larger
portion of both narratives, as well as of the legislation
which belongs to them, was already in existence before
Amos, Without expressing any opinion upon their rela-
tive ages, we may follow the hypothesis which assigns
their compilation to the close of the ninth or the begin-
ning of the eighth century. The religious material to
be elicited from them is of a conflicting nature, repre-
senting partly the dual character of the pre-prophetic
1 Budde, Die Backer Richter unci Samuel, 1890.
I
114 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
religion in general, and partly the special period of
transition in which they were composed. But in view
of the uncertainty still prevailing as to their date, and
of the extent to which a plurality of recensions may have
caused the existing differences in tone and teaching, we
must use them but sparingly in our estimate of the moral
and religious condition of the prophetic age, and, while
remembering its obvious one-sidedness, rely in the main
upon the evidence of the prophets themselves.1
Both decline and progress would seem to have been
characteristics of the age which preceded, and of the
age which witnessed, the coming of the prophets. Society
in the Assyrian period was passing through an epoch of
corruption and decay. Public morality was at a low
ebb. The prophets bring the gravest charges against
the officials and aristocracy of either kingdom. We
hear much of the violation of justice, the venality of
priests and judges, the land-hunger of the large pro-
prietors, the oppressive cruelty of the rich and the
monstrous luxury of their wives. Old social bonds
were being broken up, and the process was accompanied,
especially in the north, by rapine and even bloodshed.2
The moral iniquity of the ruling classes was sometimes
associated with a religious scepticism, which, in times of
danger and distress, was converted into hopeless despair
or grovelling superstition.3 Forbidden practices, hostile
1 Kuenen's Hezateuch gives the references to the literature on this
subject up to 1885. See also Kittel, Geseldchte cler Hdircier, Vol. I.
1888, &c.
2 E.g. Amos ii. 7, iii. 10, vii. 12, viii. 4—6; Hosea iv. 2, 8, v. 2,
vi. 9; Isaiah iii. 16—23, v. 8—22, x. 1— 3; Micah ii. 2, iii. 1—3, 11.
3 Isaiah v. 18 — 21, xxii. 12, xxxi. 1.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 115
to the religion of Yahveh, such as the consultation of
spirits, and various forms of sorcery and witchcraft, were
also prevalent.1 While the worship of Yahveh in mate-
rial forms was not, as we already know, an erring inno-
vation of the eighth century, it would yet seem as if the
outward popular religion underwent debasement in the
prophetic age. More than ever the attempt was made
to purchase God's favour and appease his wrath by costly
and varied sacrifices ; while in the northern kingdom, at
any rate, the worship of Yahveh was too frequently asso-
ciated with a gross licentiousness, imitated from the rites
of Astarte. Direct idolatry — the worship of other gods —
was a not unknown offence in either kingdom.2
Exponents of religion suffered in the general decline.
The "prophets of the school" sank lower and lower.
Prophecy became more and more a convenient trade,
securing a certain amount of popular admiration, and an
easily acquired, if not luxurious, competency. Many
members of the priesthood must have deserved the casti-
gation which our four prophets often mete out to them.3
But while so much must justly be said upon the side
of corruption and decay, there is also another side to
the picture which cannot be neglected. For parallel
with decline there must have been a coincident spiritual
advance.
In the two oldest Pentateuchal narratives we find a
1 Hosea iv. 12; Isaiah ii. 6, 8, viii. 19.
2 Amos ii. 7, 8; Hosea iii. 1, iv. 13, 14; Isaiah i. 29, xvii. 10,
xxx. 33; Micah i. 7, 13.
3 Amos vii. 14; Hosea iv. 5, 6, vi. 9; Isaiah iii. 2, xxviii. 7; Micah
ii. 11, iii. 5, 7.
i2
11G III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
fairly developed religious and ethical ideal. Though
both show sincere attachment to the local sanctuaries,
the syncretistic worship at which excited the indignation
of our four prophets, neither alludes to a customary and
approved worship of Yahveh under material forms.1
Antagonism to this aberration may possibly have begun
to show itself between Elijah and Amos. Again, this
intervening period, while it witnessed a partial degene-
racy in the dual orders of prophecy and priesthood, must
also have produced a corresponding elevation. Here and
there, whether within the prophetic guilds or outside
them, were prophets in whom the fire of Elijah was
not quenched, and who formed the necessary connection
between the prophet of Gilead and Amos of Tekoa.
Our primary eighth-century authorities allude to good
prophets as well as to bad.2 In at least one instance,
Isaiah incorporates a passage from an earlier prophet into
his own writings,3 and he, as well as Amos and Hosea,
bears witness to an upward development in prophecy
beyond and above Elijah. For the seers, who according
to Isaiah were bidden by his people, " Prophesy not unto
us right things, but speak unto us smooth things, prophesy
deceits," were clearly men of his own stamp, preachers
of social rectitude as well as of religious purity.
Nor can the priesthood have been wholly corrupt. We
may well remember the delineation of the priestly cha-
racter and duties in the "Blessing of Moses," which was
1 The date of Genesis xxxv. 2 (E) is uncertain.
2 Amos ii. 11, iii. 7; Hosea xii. 11, 14, vi. 5 ; Isaiah xxx. 10, 20;
Micah ii. 6.
3 Isaiah xv. xvi. 1 — 12 : ii. 1 — 4, is a possibly post-exilic insertion.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 117
probably written shortly before Amos. The removal of
Baal-worship in Judah during the rule of Athaliah was
the work of the priest Jehoiada, and it is noteworthy
that Jehoash (S3G — 797) is recorded to have done "that
whicli was right in the sight of Yahveh, according as
Jehoiada the priest had instructed him."1 Among the
chosen friends of Isaiah, whom he is bidden to take as
witnesses to his " large tablet," is Uriah the priest.2
In Judah, at any rate, there had been one effort at reli-
gious reform even before Jehoash, and the contrast which
Isaiah draws between the days of Ahaz and those earlier
times when Jerusalem was still called the faithful city,
is not without its significance, though it may easily be
pressed too far.3
To priests who lived before Amos may also be assigned
the compilation of those legislative chapters of the Penta-
teuch which are now embodied in the two so-called pro-
phetical narratives, but have all of them probably an
independent origin. These chapters include the "Book
of the Covenant" or "First Legislation" of Exodus
xxi. — xxiii., and the Decalogue of Exodus xx. in its
shorter and more original form. It is true that many
of the "judgments" in the former seem to us harsh and
immature ; but considered in the light of age and place,
apparent cruelty frequently assumes the aspect of reli-
gious progress and enlightenment. Nor must we forget
that the Book of the Covenant contains laws which
breathe a pure spirit of rectitude and humanity. " Thou
shalt not raise a false report ; thou shalt not countenance
1 2 Kings xii. 2. 2 Isaiah viii. 2.
■ 1 Kings xv. 12, 13; Isaiah i. 26, with Dillmann's notes.
118 III. THE PROPHETS OP THE
a rich man or a poor man in his cause; thou shalt take
no gift; thou shalt not oppress a stranger;" these and
other enactments of similar strain help to show us that
the religion of Israel in the beginning of the eighth
century, if characterized by much corruption and immo-
rality, also contained elements which paved the way for,
and even pointed forward to, the teaching of the pro-
phets.1 How far these codes were known beyond the
limits of the sanctuary, where we may presumably place
their compilation, is very uncertain. Yet Hosea appears
to imply that, even in his age, there was a "law" recog-
nized as God's and wrongly neglected by the people.
" Though I write for him the words of my law, they are
accounted a strange thing."2 In other references of the
eighth-century prophets to Yahveh's law (Torah) and to
his ordinances, it is, more probably, the oral instruction
of priests and prophets to which allusion is made. For in
their teaching the eighth- century prophets do not appeal
to any acknowledged standard of religion embodied in a
legal code — the Law of Moses is a factor unknown to
them — but to the general religious and moral conscious-
ness of the people of Yahveh. To that teaching we can
now advert. But, by way of final introduction, a few
words must yet be said as to the life, personality and
method of the four teachers.
1 Cf. Kuenen, Hexateucli, p. 245, § 13, n. 23; and also Baentsch,
Das Bundeshuch, 1892, who is inclined to think that the finest pas-
sages in the code are the latest, and due to prophetic influence and
teaching.
2 Hosea viii. 12. The emendation on which the translation is based
was suggested by Graetz, Gesckichte der Juden, Vol. II. i. p. 4G9. Cf.
Kuenen, Hexateucli, § 10, n. 4, p. 178.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 119
Amos is the oldest. He prophesied towards the end
of the reign of Jeroboam II. (781 — 741). Ilosea comes
next ; for while the earliest of his prophecies were written
in the lifetime of that monarch, most of them were com-
posed in the short and troubled reigns of his four imme-
diate successors (741 — 736). Isaiah's prophetic career
extended over some forty years, including the entire
reign of Ahaz and more than half Hezekiah's (73C —
700 ?). Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, though proba-
bly younger in years, only prophesied, so far as we
know, in the reign of Hezekiah.
Of these four prophets, three were natives of Judah,
only one, Ilosea, belonging to the north. But Amos,
though resident in Judah, received the divine call to
prophesy against Israel, and travelled northwards from
the pastures of Tekoa to deliver his message of denun-
ciation and woe at Bethel, the sanctuary of the king.1
It is not likely that any one of them belonged to the
prophetic order. They were men of various social con-
ditions and circumstances. Amos was a herdman, and
began to prophesy in virtue of an inward call. "The
lion roars, who will not fear ? the Lord Yahveh speaks,
who can but prophesy ?" When Amaziah, the priest of
Bethel, protested against his minatory predictions, and
bade him "flee away into the land of Judah and there
eat bread and prophesy there," he urged that he was no
prophet and no prophet's son, but a herdman and a
1 Some scholars maintain that Amos was himself an Israelite, not
a Judcean. On this question, see Kuenen, Onderzoelc, Vol. II. pp. 355,
356, -with the further reference in the added page of " Yerheteringen
en toevoegsels;" and, lastly, Oort in Theol Ttjrf., 1891, pp. 121—124.
120 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
dresser of fig-trees. "And Yahveh took me as I followed
the flock, and Yahveh said unto me, Go, prophesy unto
my people Israel." This appeal is significant. The "true"
prophets, those who realized Yahveh's character and will
most truly, and whose lives answered to their teaching,
arose more and more rarely in the prophetic guilds.
Of Hosea, beyond that he was a native of the north,
we know nothing. He was possibly a priest, and pro-
bably, unlike Amos, belonged to the higher rather than
to the lower sections of Israelite society.
Such a contrast in social rank is pretty certain as
regards the two Judeean prophets, Isaiah and Micah.
Micah was "a native of Moresheth, a small town in the
maritime plain near Gath," and probably belonged to
the class of the peasantiy.1 Isaiah, though we know
nothing positive as to his family or connections, was
unquestionably a native of the capital and familiar with
its leading citizens. Though a great prophet was no
longer, as in the days of David, the seer of the court,
Isaiah was ready to advise, as well as to denounce, the
kings of Judak, and occupied an acknowledged position
of authority in the state.
Thus the higher prophetic movement of the eighth
century extended to both kingdoms, and found its spokes-
men in all classes of society. But in the method of
their teaching and in the manner of their speech, all our
four prophets show common characteristics. Their com-
bined usage both of the spoken and of the written word
distinguishes them from the earlier prophets on the one
hand, and from the later, more apocalyptic, prophets upon
1 Cheyne, Micah, p. 9.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 121
the other. Again, while the older type was marked by
an access of physical exaltation (a lower concomitant of
prophecy which was not, indeed, unknown throughout
the prc-exilic period), our four canonical prophets appear
never to have delivered even their spoken message in a
state of ecstasy or excitement. The literary form of
their prophecies, which is often artistically elaborate,
could only have been the product of a perfectly calm
mind, reflecting upon the spoken word, and emending it
to suit the requirements of written discourse. Similarly,
in the writings of all four prophets, visions occupy a very
secondary place, or even become mere artifices of expres-
sion. Thus the visions of Amos are figurative and
allegorical ; Ilosea and Micah are without them ; while
Isaiah only records one, and that in a highly developed
literary form, written down long after the occasion of the
original vision, which had seemed to accompany his
inward call to the prophetic office. So, too, the strange
symbolic actions of either older or less ethical prophets
are almost wholly wanting. In Amos and Micah they
are altogether absent; in Ilosea, a lamentable incident
in his past life is described post eventum as a divine
command. The one symbolic action mentioned in Isaiah,
which it is difficult to regard as a mere figure of rhetoric,
forms an isolated exception.1 Upon the whole, then, we
have to deal with the teaching of men who, while firmly
convinced of their divine mission, and assured that the
word they spoke or wrote was the expression of Yahveh's
will, were yet sober, as they were accurate, observers of
the events and conditions of their time.
1 Isaiah xx. 2.
122 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
The conception of Yahveh's character and of his rela-
tion to Israel is the first point in their teaching to
Avhich our attention must be directed. For all others
are essentially dependent upon this.
The moral element in the divine nature which, as I
have endeavoured to show, was the novel but specific
feature in the Mosaic teaching, was all-pervading in the
prophets of the eighth century. To them, Yahveh's
moral attributes were co-extensive with his nature, so
that there remained behind no non-ethical residuum.
He was the God of Eighteousness, not merely of justice
in a purely juridic sense, but of Eighteousness in the
more extended connotation of ordinary modern usage.
Eighteousness is the fundamental virtue of the prophetic
Yahveh. Not only can his dealings with man, and more
especially with Israel, never be inconsistent with this
sovereign quality, they must always be its direct out-
come and issue. The consequence is, that he cannot
leave the sins of Israel unrequited and unpunished.
Ephraim and Judah are both sinful — sinful civilly, pub-
licly, politically; therefore the punishment that must
befall them is also outward and general. The main
business of the prophets is to denounce iniquity, and
foretell the judgment. They call to repentance, but
without belief in the efficacy of their warning; the
judgment of God must cause amendment ; therefore they
are prophets of trouble — "of war and of evil and of
pestilence."1 On the other hand, while these sins of
Israel must inevitably call forth Israel's punishment, so
that the triumph of the national foe is nothing more
1 Jeremiah xxviii. 8.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 123
than the fulfilment of divine purpose, Yahveh's anger is
now no longer a merely fitful outburst, unrelated to
Israel's own wrong-doing. It is an essential element of
his righteousness, and, however seemingly passionate, it
is always ethically pure.
But Yahveh's righteousness, which, to the prophets,
was in the main necessarily manifested in retribution —
for Israel was sinful — was tempered by other and gentler
qualities, depending not upon the partiality of favour-
itism, but upon fidelity to a covenant promise and to
persistency in a chosen purpose. Both sides of the divine
character are expressed in the terms of the second be-
trothal, which, according to Hosea, Yahveh will contract
with Israel after the purification of the judgment: "I
will betroth thee unto me in righteousness and in justice,
and in loving-kindness and in mercy."1 God was not
yet conceived as a " lover of souls" generally ; his loving-
kindness was not yet "philanthropy;"2 but it was his
love for Israel which ultimately generated his love for
man.
We remember the popular view of Yahveh's relation
to Israel. He was still in many respects the patron
Deity. To the prophets, Yahveh is as much as he ever
was the God of Israel ; but his love for Israel is a thou-
sand times deeper, as it is a thousand times purer, than
the partiality of the popular God. Just because he stands
in a nearer or closer relation to one people than to any
other, the fulness of his being, the totality of his qualities
and powers is brought to bear upon Israel. And as the
essence of the divine character is its righteousness, the
1 Hosea ii. 21. 2 Wisdom of Solomon xi. 26; Titus iii. 4.
124 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
punishment of Israel, to be executed by Assyria, is the
direct consequence of Israel's relationship to its God.
This thought is most sharply expressed by Amos : " You
only have I known of all the families of the earth;
therefore will I visit you for all your iniquities."1 This
terrible "therefore" must have been as a bolt from the
blue to the popular religious consciousness in the days
of king Jeroboam.
Israel is Yahveh's people ; but it had not achieved this
position through its own merit. Its relation to its God is
the result of Yahveh's unfettered choice, a free exercise
of his sovereign will. Yahveh's election of Israel is most
clearly brought out by Amos and Hosea. The beginning
of the relationship is assigned to the exodus from Egypt :
"When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called
my son out of Egypt." " I am Yahveh thy God from the
land of Egypt." So writes Hosea.2 Amos alludes to the
exodus in a similar strain, but he is at pains to add that
the mere fact that Yahveh brought up the Israelites from
Egypt was no unexampled manifestation of his interfer-
ence in, or management of, the affairs of men. He is not
bound to them because of the deliverance from Egypt
by any tie beyond his own free will. If he brought up
the Israelites from Egypt, he equally "brought up" the
Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir.3
Yahveh as the moral God, and Yahveh as the ruler of
the world (an aspect in which we have yet to regard him),
can only have become connected with Israel upon the
basis of an agreement, entered into by God for a purpose
of his own. The idea of a covenant between Israel and
1 Amos iii. 2. \ Hosea xi. 1, xiii. 4. 3 Amos ii. 10, ix. 7.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 125
Yahveh was more fully developed by the writers of the
seventh century. But the germs of it are already trace-
able in Hosea, just as a contract between God and Israel
in the Mosaic age upon the tenure of a fixed code had
been described even before Hosea in the two earlier
narratives of the Pentateuch.
Yet as to the nature of the purpose for which Israel
was chosen, the prophets imply more than they say.
Abstract theological meditation was alien to their nature,
and inconsistent with the practical character of their
work. They seem, however, already to have roughly
conceived the idea, subsequently to be elaborated, that
Yahveh was training up out of Israel a holy nation, who,
by undivided allegiance to their God, and by the practice
of social morality, should sanctify his name. The goal
will not be reached, according to Isaiah, until "through
the judgment blast every one that is left in Zion shall
be called holy"1 From this object of Israel's election,
an object primarily confined to Israel's own spiritual
glory and God's sanctification through Israel's means,
there grew the fuller and larger conception of a conver-
sion of the heathen nations to the true religion.
But Israel's election, while it conferred a privilege,
imposed a duty. That duty we already know to have
consisted in moral goodness and in the pure worship of
Yahveh. Israel must seek Yahveh, and to seek Yahveh
is equivalent to seeking goodness.2 Israel is Yahveh's
vineyard, and the fruits which it should have borne to
its husbandman were justice and righteousness.3 But
very different fruits were yielded. "God hoped for
1 Isaiah iv. 3. \ Amos v. 6, 14. 3 Isaiah v. 1 — 7.
126 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
justice, but behold bloodshed; for righteousness, but
behold a cry." Thus the purpose of Israel's calling was
defeated by its own sinfulness, and a judgment had
become necessary in order that Israel might fulfil in
good earnest its divinely appointed mission. The judg-
ment process would combine punishment of the wicked
with purification for the good: it would put an end to
existing iniquity and oppression, in order to substitute
for them a perfect state of civic righteousness and of
inward and outward well-being.
The moral ideals of the prophets corresponded to the
sins which they denounced. " As to the contents of their
conception of righteousness," says Wellhausen, with his
wonted conciseness and power, "it was not righteous-
ness in the sense of the gospel. They do not so much
demand a pure heart as just institutions: they think less
of the individual than of the state and society, showing
the while a remarkable sympathy with the lower classes,
which even exercised a permanent effect upon the reli-
gious terminology."1 We are reminded of the pro-
phetical manner by the sermons of Savanarola, and, to a
•certain degree, by the denunciations of Carlyle. As
public men, they dealt with public affairs. They were
preachers to a whole nation, inveighing against national
sins. It wTas the nation of Israel which was chosen by
Yahveh, and it was the nation which had transgressed
against him, and which would meet with punishment. To
the Hebrew prophets, as to the Greek philosophers, the
state possessed a moral unity of its own. God's instru-
ment of wrath, the power of Assyria, was a scourge of
1 Wellhausen, Abriss, p. 52.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 127
nations, not of individuals. The writing of God must
first be traced writ large in the fortunes of kingdoms,
before it can also be discerned upon the tablets of every
human heart.
To the mind of the prophets, Israel had neglected the
second portion of its duty as wofully as it had neglected
the first. It was as deficient in the pure worship of
Yahveh as in the practice of morality. In their eyes,
the people's religious and moral delinquencies were inti-
mately connected, for either element of Israel's duty
towards its God was complementary to the other. In
Hosea's writings, denunciation of moral iniquity occupies
a less primary place than a constant lament over the
false worship of Yahveh, of which moral wrong-doing is
the natural and necessary result.
What would have been the character of that pure
worship of Yahveh desiderated by the prophets ? We
are able to tell what it would not have been, rather than
what it would. For on this subject we find much polemic
against what was, but little explanation as to that which
ought to be. Why this is so will shortly be apparent.
Negatively, the worship of Yahveh must possess two
chief characteristics, both of which were violated, the
one occasionally, the other habitually, in the Israel of
the eighth century. It must be rendered to Yahveh
alone, and it must be performed without the help of
material representations of deity. More briefly, it must
be monolatrous and imageless.
The first requirement was no novelty. It was an
obvious and necessary demand from the successors of
Moses and Elijah. How far the worship of other gods
128 III. THE PROrHETS OF THE
was practised in the latter half of the eighth century is
not wholly easy to ascertain. There is, however, a sig-
nificant allusion in Amos to a form of Assyrian star-wor-
ship, which was being introduced into Palestine in the
eighth century and became prevalent in the seventh.
Hosea seems to imply that the Canaanite god Baal
received separate adoration, and Isaiah, in two or three
passages, refers with his peculiar irony to the service of
foreign gods in Judah and Jerusalem.1 As the prophets
so habitually regard a material worship of Yahveh as
equivalent to a breach of the law of monolatry, it often
becomes difficult to determine to which kind of idolatry
they are alluding.
As regards the second requirement, it was previously
noticed that an imageless cultus of Yahveh is apparently
presupposed in the two earlier Pentateuchal narratives,
and the conjecture was hazarded that a silent antagonism
to material representations of the national God may have
begun in certain select circles between Elijah and Amos.
But in the literature of the Old Testament a direct polemic
against idols starts from the prophets of the eighth cen-
tury, and more especially from Hosea In Amos there
is only one sarcastic allusion to the bulls of Samaria.2
But Hosea is never weary of denouncing the bull-images
of Yahveh, and herein lies the most important, as it is
undoubtedly the central, element of his teaching. Iden-
1 Amos v. 26; Hosea ix. 10, xi. 2; Isaiah i. 29, ii. 18, 20(?), xvii.
10, xxx. 33.
2 Amos viii. 14. This seems more probable than the view advocated
by Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 140. See Gunning, God-
spraken van Amos, p. 179 (1885),
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 129
tifying this degraded worship of Yahveh with the Canaan-
ite worship of Baal, he does not hesitate to call the idols
of the national god Baalim, and the service thus rendered
to Yahveh, Baal service.1 This identification was the
more intelligible because of the still prevalent usage of
addressing Yahveh as Baal. If, in some passages, Hosea
charges his contemporaries with the direct worship of
other gods, including the actual Canaanite Baal, it is
still significant that, whether he is referring to the de-
based service of Yahveh or to the worship of alien divi-
nities, it is in cither case the image-worship as such
against which his chief indignation is directed.
It is useful to mark the stage of development at which
Hosea has arrived in the purification of religious thought
in this important matter. He plainly recognizes that
an image is a mere combination of wood and gold, and
therefore lifeless and undivine; but he does not defi-
nitely say either that the idol was an image of Yahveh,
or that it is impious and idle to represent or symbolize
Yahveh in material forms. Hence we may infer that,
although it was originally Yahveh who was worshipped
by the populace under the guise of a bull, the idol was
widely confused or even identified with the God which
it was fashioned to represent. Thus the true Yahveh
was lost in the symbol: the bull became the god.2 The
prophet is consequently rather concerned to rebuke the
worship of the idol as such, than to censure the prin-
1 See, e.g., Cheyne on Hosea ii. 13 (E.V.).
2 Cf. Exodus xxxii. 4, 8, in the story of the golden calf: "This
is thy god, 0 Israel, which has brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt."
K
130 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
ciple which led to the representation of a God like Yahveh
in so coarse and puerile a form.
In reviewing the condition, and censuring the sins, of
Judah, Isaiah does not make its idolatry, in either sense
of the word, a principal count of his indictment. When
he alludes to images, he does so sarcastically, and without
that embittered wrath in which he censures the oppres-
sion of the poor. He couples the idols with divination
and sorcery, and with the luxury which, in the early
period of his ministry, after the prosperous reign of
Uzziah, had become prevalent in Judah. "The land,"
he says, " has become full of idols ; to the work of their
hands men do homage, to that which their fingers have
made." x The word he uses for " idols" — in most places,
images of Yahveh are probably intended — is novel, and
has a theological significance. It is a term apparently
coined by himself; its meaning is literally "things of
naught" or " nonentities." Its employment in one place
to designate the deities of Egypt is clearly charged with
a special intention.2
Upon the positive side, the prophets' conception of a
pure worship of Yahveh was never elaborately defined.
Such details lay outside their charge. It was their busi-
ness to attack that mistaken and immoral importance
assigned by their contemporaries to outward religion,
and to demonstrate its worthlessness as a substitute for
that moral service of God which is manifested in civic
1 ii. 6—8.
2 xix. 1. But in Siegfried and Stade's new dictionary, this etymo-
logy is rejected, and the word is derived from El (God), and not con-
nected with <EhT (nothingness, Hosea xiii. 4; Zech. xi. 17).
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 131
rectitude and social well-doing. It must not be supposed
that, in their polemic against sacrifices, the prophets start
from the modern point of view that the slaughter of
animals is an absurd and superstitious method of propi-
tiating deity. To them, sacrifices were as much the
ordinary expression of worship as church-going is with
us. Nor did their hostility to sacrifices proceed from
any objection to the high places or local sanctuaries, as
contrasted with, or opposed to, the temple at Jerusalem.
The law which made every sanctuary outside Jerusalem
schismatic, was neither known nor written till the seventh
century. It was the false importance assigned to sacri-
fices, and the false estimate attributed to their effect,
which provoked the prophetic indignation. In this
respect all the prophets are at one. Sacrifices, according
to them, were never specifically enjoined by Yahveh as a
portion of Israel's duty to its God. They were no equi-
valent for righteousness, just as no number of burnt-offer-
ings could turn Yahveh from his purpose or atone for sin.
Never has the eternal antagonism of spirit to letter,
substance to shadow, been more magnificently declared.
Amos, the first of our four, is not the least emphatic.
" I hate, I despise your feast-days, and I will smell no
savour in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me
burnt- offerings and meat-offerings, I will not accept
them ; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your
fat beasts. But let judgment run down like water, and
righteousness as an ever-flowing stream. Did ye offer
unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty
years, 0 house of Israel?"1
1 Amos v. 21—25.
k2
132 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
In Hosea we find the famous verse: "I delight in
loving-kindness and not in sacrifice ; and in the know-
ledge of God more than in burnt-offerings."1
More majestic still are the stately phrases of Isaiah :
" Of what use is the multitude of your sacrifices to me ?
saith Yahveh ; I am satiated with the burnt- offerings of
rams, and the fat of fed beasts, and in the blood of
bullocks and lambs and he-goats I have no pleasure.
When ye come to see my face, who has required this at
your hands — to trample my courts? Bring no more
false offerings : a sweet smoke is an abomination to me ;
the new moon and the sabbath, the calling of a convo-
cation .... I cannot bear wickedness together with a
solemn assembly."2
Prayer itself is hateful from the lips of sinners :
"Even if you make many prayers, I will not hear: your
hands are full of blood. "Wash you, make you clean,
take away the evil of your works from before mine eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek out justice, righten
the violent man, do justice to the orphan, plead for the
widow." 3
In the northern kingdom, at any rate, there was ano-
ther reason of grave ethical import which compelled the
prophets to take up an attitude of uncompromising hos-
tility to the popular worship at the local sanctuaries.
1 Hosea vi. 6.
2 Prof. Cheyne's translation. I have borrowed from his translation
in most of my quotations from Isaiah.
3 Isaiah i. 11 — 17. "Kighten the violent man" is doubtful. For
an ingenious emendation, cf. Hoffmann, Ueber einige phoeniklsche
[nschriften, p. 26, n. 2.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 133
They were too frequently the scenes of debauchery and
licentiousness ; and among the rites there practised was
often included the vile custom of sacred prostitution,
borrowed from the worship of Astarte.
Upon some fundamental questions of religion and mo-
rality the teaching of the prophets was thus partly attained
through a keen opposition to the actual moral and reli-
gious condition of the society around them. But the
particular form in which their prophecies were generally
cast — a prediction of the judgment and its results — was
suggested to them by the outward history of the time,
or, more accurately, by the conquests of Assyria. A
corrupt society within, and the scourge of nations without,
stimulated their utterance and determined its manner.
For that mighty Assyrian power, which in its career
of victory was drawing nearer and nearer to Israel,
shaped itself in the prophets' thought as Yahveh' s chosen
instrument wherewith to punish the sins of their own
people and of the neighbouring political communities.
It was a strange and novel explanation. For Assyria's
triumphs, when they received a religious interpretation
from the inhabitants of the conquered kingdoms, were
commonly thought to imply either the anger of the gods
of the vanquished states, or their inferiority to the gods
of the Assyrians.
But Yahveh, from the days of Moses onwards, had
been different from the gods of other lands, and the pro-
phets, with their heightened ethical conception of deity
and their intense belief in the moral future of Israel,
interpreted the victorious advance of Assyria in a manner
peculiar to themselves. Yahveh was just, Israel was sin-
134 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
fill ; but Yaliveh's relationship to Israel was everlasting,
and his object — the creation of a holy people to sanctify
his name — unchanging and irresistible. But, as without
the purifying fires of calamity a sin-polluted people could
not become holy, the punishment of Israel assumed the
form of a logical and ethical necessity, while the instru-
ment of Yahveh's righteous wrath could be no other
than the armies of Assyria. The temporary triumph of
Assyria was the vindication of God's justice, the evidence
of his will.
Postponing for the moment a closer examination into
the prophetic conception of the judgment and its results
upon Israel and the outer world, it is advisable to here con-
sider what influence the ethical conception of Yahveh, and
the inclusion of Assyria in the range of Yahveh's activity
and control, exercised upon the monolatrous idea, which
the prophets had received as an heritage of the past,
and from which their own religious advance began. How
far did the prophets of the eighth century transform
monolatry into monotheism ?
It may appear strange that my estimate of the entire
prophetic teaching did not begin with this subject, instead
of its being introduced, as it were, incidentally or by a
side wind. But the truth is, that the prophetic advance
beyond the monolatry of a previous age was only a silent
consequence of fundamental axioms already arrived at.
It was not from the side of Yahveh's power that the
development began. When the national God of Israel,
already numerically single, came to be regarded as equally
unique in character and will, then his perfect justice and
his indestructible purpose in regard to his chosen people,
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 135
associated as they were with an admitted ascendancy
over nature and over man, issued in the deduction, im-
plied rather than stated, that Yahveh was the only true
and living God in heaven and upon earth. In the elo-
quent words of Professor Kuenen, which I cannot forbear
to quote, so admirably do they sum up the exact history
of the Israelite monotheism, "When in the consciousness
of the prophets, the central place was taken, not by the
might, but by the holiness of Yahveh, the conception of
God was carried up into another and a higher sphere.
From that moment it ceased to be a question of 'more'
or 'less' between Yahveh and the other gods, for he
stood not only above them, but in very distinct opposi-
tion to them. If Yahveh, the Holy One, was God, if he
was God as the Holy One, then the others were not. In
a word, the belief that Yahveh was the only God sprang
out of the ethical conception of his being. Monotheism was
the gradual, not the sudden, result of this conception."1
Prof. Kuenen proceeds to state that monotheism in
explicit terms was not taught till the last quarter of the
seventh century in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, but that
implicitly it is to be found with unmistakable distinct-
ness in the writings of our eighth-century prophets.
This statement is quite borne out by the facts. The
monotheism of our prophets shows itself in two direc-
tions, but in either rather by implication than by pro-
nounced assertion. Direct references to other gods in
Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, are exceedingly scanty.
Count Baudissin has been able to collect very few of
them in his exhaustive essay on the Old Testament views
1 Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p. 119.
136 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
respecting the gods of paganism. The number is still
further reduced if it be the case that several passages
which he supposes to refer to foreign gods really refer
to images of Yahveh. Only once, in the 19th chapter
of Isaiah, is there a distinct allusion to foreign gods in
their relation to their own lands, and not as imported
objects of idol- worship in Israel. It is significant that
Isaiah uses for the gods or idols of Egypt the same word
which he had coined for the images of Yahveh that
defiled the kingdom of Judah. In highly pictorial lan-
guage he represents Yahveh as riding upon a swift cloud
to Egypt, causing the not-gocls of Egypt to shake before
him, and the heart of the land to tremble. It is with no
result that the people in their fear resort to the not-gods
and to the sorcerers and the wizards.1 Nothing is defi-
nitely said as to the unreality of the Egyptian gods, yet
their association with the wizards and sorcerers in utter
powerlessness to prevent the coming doom, seems suffi-
cient evidence of the prophet's meaning. So, too, the
uniqueness of Yahveh is strongly emphasized by sarcastic
implication in the argument put into the Assyrian king's
mouth to prove the ease with which he will add Judah
to the number of his other conquests. "Is not Calno
as Carchemish ? or is not Hamath as Arpad ? or is not
Samaria as Damascus ? As my hand has reached to these
kingdoms, and their images exceeded those of Jerusalem
— can I not as I have done to Samaria and her idols
so do to Jerusalem and her images?"2 The point
1 xix. 1—3.
? Isaiah x. 9 — 11. For the slight emendation, cf. Giesebrecht,
Beitrage zur Jcsaiakritik, 1890, p. 72, n. 1.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 137
of this sarcasm is clearly monotheistic. It is, however,
noticeable that in his prophecies against Assyria, there
is no allusion made to the Assyrian gods. They are
simply ignored. Moreover, to Isaiah as well as to Hosea,
the image and the god appear identified. As, then, the
image was clearly considered lifeless, so we may presume
were the deities they represented, or whose names they
bore, considered lifeless too.
Another way by which the prophets were carried for-
ward towards monotheism was the conception of the
judgment. Both in its incidence and its results it became
extended beyond Israel, and it gradually took the form
of a universal transformation-scene. Of this enlargement
the eighth-century prophets show only earlier phases,
and their universalism is still occasional and tentative.
For the inclusion of the nations in Yahveh's providence is
only partly for their own benefit : it is mainly for Israel's
advancement and for the divine glory. Yet in either case
Yahveh assumes the solitary grandeur of universal rule.
We are thus by another route brought back again to
the judgment, and may now briefly consider the manner
of its onset, and the tenour of its effects upon Israel and
the world.
For Israel (as I have already indicated) the judgment
is partly punitive and partly educational. Yahveh pun-
ishes his people with an object beyond the direct satis-
faction of outraged morality : he punishes to amend, he
destroys to create anew. Thus it is that in the prophetical
teaching there is always a combination, often very close, of
two elements — the one denunciation, the other promise.1
1 But cf. Giesebrecht, Beiirarje, pp. 187 — 220.
138 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
Our four prophets do not precisely agree as to the
details of the judgment process, or in their representation
of its results. Nor are they always clear in their own
language, or wholly consistent with themselves.
To Amos the judgment upon Israel involves exile in
a foreign land : before or during this exile all the sinners
of the people shall die by the sword. "Whether captivity
is to be the lot of Judah as well as of Israel, Amos does
not say. It is clear that he contemplates the return of
Israel from the captivity, though his attitude towards
the separate northern kingdom is scarcely to be stated
with any degree of certainty. In the renewed kingdom,
or kingdoms, the old frontiers of David's monarchy will
be restored. The Israelites will possess the remnant of
Edoni, and of all the nations which at any previous time
had been conquered or controlled by Yahveh's people.
There is no mention of any specially endowed or favoured
king, and no hint of the knowledge of Yahveh extending
bej^ond the borders of Israel's empire. The tokens of
Yahveh's favour are the increased fertility of the land
and the happy security of its inhabitants. How soon
the renovated Israel shall return to its own land, and
begin an uninterrupted era of outward and inward pros-
perity, is not stated or implied. But the judgment itself
— nor was he mistaken — Amos evidently expects in the
near future.1
Hosea, while also ignoring any claim of the heathen
1 This paragraph assumes the authenticity of Amos ix. 11 — 15. But
it must not be denied that weighty arguments can be brought to prove
that they, or, at any rate, 11, 12, 13, are a later interpolation. Cf.
Schwall, Das Buck Ssefanjd, Z.A.W., 1890, p. 22G.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 139
world to the glories of the "Messianic" age, is a little
more distinct and explicit upon the method of the judg-
ment than his predecessor. An Ephraimite himself, he
yet seems to regard the separate northern kingdom as
apostate. As the cause of that apostasy was Yahveh's
wrath, so destruction will be its sequel. The men of
Israel will go into exile, but in exile they will turn to
Yahveh, and Yahveh will gather them from the land of
their captivity. Eestored to their own homes, they will
be united with the men of Judah — whose punishment,
according to the prophet, is apparently not to extend
to exile — under a common Davidic king.1 The ideal
monarchy of the future is painted in more peaceful and
tender colours in Hosea than in Amos. "What the
interval will be between judgment and repentance, and
between repentance and restoration, Hosea does not
declare.
Isaiah's references to the judgment process and its
effects are numerous and complicated. In considering
them, one has to remember that his prophecies extended
both to Israel and to Judah, and that in the middle of
his ministry occurred the fall of Samaria and the exile
of Israel's foremost citizens. Isaiah's earliest discourses
are prior to the war of Pekah against Ahaz, and therefore
before the vassalage of Judah to Assyria. Between this
early period and the revolt of Hezekiah against Senna-
cherib, Isaiah frequently predicted the infliction of severe
chastisement upon both Israel and Judah. Of the former
state he speaks, as is natural, less frequently and more
1 This view still seems to me to be the more probable, in spite of
Oort's arguments in his essay on Hosea in TJieol. Tyd, 1890.
140 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
incidentally than of the latter ; but it seems strange that
in his prophecies after 722 he did not make more repeated
nse of, and allusion to, the fall of Samaria. The order
and the date of Isaiah's prophecies are to a large extent
still in dispute, and the subject has recently become more
delicate and complicated because it has been shown,
with tolerable certainty, that Isaiah must have been in
the habit either of revising his utterances before they
appeared in writing — and in this revision taking advan-
tage of any intervening change of circumstance — or of
re-issuing the written prophecies in a form accommodated
to new events.1 We know from one celebrated instance
in the life of Jeremiah that the prophets, if occasion
arose for re-publishing, or, as in Jeremiah's case, for re-
writing their prophecies, saw no objection to modifying
the pronouncements they had previously made.2 Neither
they nor their contemporaries appear to have thought
that the guarantee of their inspiration consisted in an
exact fulfilment of such of their statements as touched
upon the issues of the future.
In his earlier period, Isaiah did not predict a sharper
and more irrevocable catastrophe for Israel than for
Judah. He did not contemplate the deportation of either
kingdom from Canaan, or identify the chastened and
purified remnant, in which he so ardently believed, with
a band of exiles brought back from captivity. Assyria
was to bring wide-spread desolation and ruin : in some
1 See especially Giesebrecht, Beitriige, &c. ; Cheyne, " Critical Ana-
lysis of the first Part of Isaiah," Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. IV.
p. 5G2, seq.
2 Jer. xxxvi. 32.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 141
of his prophecies before the invasion of Sennacherib,
Isaiah apparently imagines an almost utter destruction
of the kingdom ; but the purified remainder, the tenth of
the tenth, the new shoot from the stock of the felled
tree, is always conceived as nearly, if not immediately,
consequent upon the judgment process, the remnant left
in the land after the withdrawal of the foe.1 When the
Assyrian invasion had actually begun, the emphasis of
Isaiah's utterance was laid upon the coming deliverance.
The nearer the judgment drew, the less was he inclined
to insist upon its terrors. He was anxious to encourage
as many as would to turn to Yahveh and be saved.2
He predicted that the capital, Yahveh's dwelling-place,
would be miraculously preserved, and the event justified
his confidence.3
Amos had already spoken of Yahveh as roaring from
Zion and uttering his voice from Jerusalem. Isaiah,
himself a citizen of the capital, shared the growing pride
of its inhabitants in their metropolis, the dwelling-place
of Yahveh. For Yahveh's earthly seat, which had been
formerly diffused over Palestine and manifested at every
local sanctuary, was now confined to Jerusalem. In
some respects this was, as we shall subsequently see, a
perilous change, for it interfered with the wider con-
ception of Yahveh as God of heaven and earth, and, still
more, as God unlimited in space. Yahveh's residence
1 Isaiah vi. 11—13, vii. 21, iv. 4.
2 Cf. the more hopeful tone in xxix. xxx. xxxi.
3 It is pleasant that Kuenen, as against Stade, has energetically
maintained the authenticity of Isaiah xxxvii. 22 — 32. Oaderzoek,
2nd ed., Vol. I. p. 417.
142 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
at Jerusalem, contrasted with his omnipresence in the
world, typifies the painful dilemma in which post-exilic
Judaism was involved between Yahveh as the God of
the Jews, and Yahveh as the One and Only God of all
races and lands. But in Isaiah's age these difficulties
were still distant, and for the immediate present the
exceptional importance assigned to Jerusalem was bene-
ficial, conducing as it did to the great religious reform of
the succeeding century.
Meanwhile, from the Jerusalem thus divinely delivered
from imminent desolation, the new salvation of Judah
was to proceed. Sinners, indeed, would be destroyed :
but the negligent and indifferent would return to their
God, while the poor and needy would rejoice in Yahveh,
their saviour alike from native oppressor and foreign foe.1
In a few of his prophecies, Isaiah associated the good
time of prosperity and righteousness, which was in store
for Judah after its purgation by Assyria, with a scion of
the Davidic house, who should inaugurate a new and
golden era.2 The eleventh chapter of the present book,
of which the date is still disputed, and the authenticity
not above suspicion, contains the fullest picture of this
ideal king. It is, however, clear that Isaiah can have
attached no such importance to this conception as it
subsequently acquired in both Jewish and Christian
theology; for he not infrequently depicts the happy
future after deliverance from Assyria without any allu-
sion to the ideal king. Some scholars hold that the
two or three passages in which he predicts the individual
1 Isaiah xxviii. 19 — 24.
I vii. 14(?), ix. 6, 7, xi. 1.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 143
Messiah, all belong to the early period before the acces-
sion of Hezekiah.
The Messiah's relation to the reigning house is not
exactly defined. His birth is announced in the ninth
chapter — "For a child is born to us, a son is given unto
us, and the government resteth upon his back, and his
name is called, Wondrous Counsellor, Divine Hero, Ever-
lasting Father, Prince of Peace." It is not certain when
Isaiah anticipated that this child would be bom, but an
identification with Hezekiah is decidedly erroneous. The
prophet probably imagined that his advent would not
be long delayed; he may even have supposed that he
was already living at the time when the prophecy was
uttered. However this may be, he did not regard him
as the deliverer from the Assyrian foe, but rather as the
ideal monarch in whom the subsequent glories of the
new era should culminate and centre. Yet the "Mes-
siah," as such, adds scarcely anything to the prophetic
ideal of the regenerate Israel. It makes little difference
whether there is to be one kingly judge who "with
righteousness shall judge the helpless and arbitrate with
equity for the humble in the land," or whether, as in
other places, the faithful counsellors and rulers are spoken
of in the plural number. The essence of the ideal — an
earthly polity based upon justice and loving -kindness,
humility, righteousness and peace — remains in either
case the same.1
Neither in its operation nor in its issue was the judg-
ment, as we have already learnt, to be limited to Israel.
For to the minds of the prophets, Yahveh, without
1 Cf. Cheyne, Origin of the Psalter, p. 340.
144 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
renouncing or forfeiting his peculiar position as God of
Israel, exercised control over other nations, and shaped
their destinies according to his will. Not only were the
heathen gods becoming lifeless and unreal, but all neces-
sity for them was fast disappearing. Yahveh had usurped
their province ; he had driven them out of the field.
That Assyria was conceived as a tool in Yahveh' s
hand necessarily implied that the range of Yahveh's
influence was not limited to Israel. In Amos and Isaiah,
this implication assumes a more general aspect. Amos
connects the coming judgment upon Israel with a con-
temporaneous judgment upon six neighbouring nations.
Of these six, five are to be punished for wrongs done to
Israel, but one, the kingdom of Moab, because of a cruel
indignity inflicted upon the dead body of the ruler of
Edom.1
Isaiah also addressed prophecies against neighbouring
nations and predicted their castigation by Assyria. But
though Assyria is the instrument, the moving power is
Yahveh. "Who hath devised this against Tyre, the
giver of crowns, whose merchants were princes?" And
the answer is: "Yahveh of Hosts hath devised it."2
Elsewhere Isaiah denounces Assyria for not recognizing
its function as the instrument of Yahveh's wrath, and
for seeking to overstep, in the insolence of success, the
limits which had been assigned to its chastisements.
" Woe to Asshur, the rod of mine anger, in whose hand
as a staff is mine indignation."3 Not, as he thinks,
through the strength of his hand and by his own wisdom
have his triumphs been achieved, but through the pur-
1 Amos L 3— ii. 3. \ xxiii. 8, 9. 8 x. 5—15.
EIGHTH CE2vTUHY B.C. 145
pose of Yahveh. And therefore when the work of
Assyria is concluded, and judgment upon Zion and
Judah meted out, Yahveh will hold visitation on the
arrogance of his tool. " No longer shall the axe vaunt
itself against him who heweth with it, or the saw bray
against him who moveth it to and fro."
The judgment of the nations is thus only partially
brought about by their own wrong-doing, and even when
that is the cause, the people which is to suffer is not
necessarily conscious of its supposed sin. Assyria is to
be punished because it was blind to its position as the
rod of Yahveh's anger, and had exceeded the limits of
its commission. But Assyria was clearly innocent of
any knowledge whether of its office or its delinquency#
Moreover, the national basis of the prophetic teaching
constantly makes itself felt. However disguised or
explained, Yahveh's partiality towards Israel is still
perceptible. In other words, the prophets cannot wholly
overcome the so-called "particularism" inherent in the
popular faith, which was the starting-point of their own.
Five of the six nations whom Amos threatens with
divine punishment had incurred Yahveh's wrath for the
sake of Israel, while Isaiah's denunciations of Assyria
are mainly due to the cruel injuries which it had inflicted
upon Yahveh's people.1
In the main, then, the universalist effect of the
nascent monotheism of our four prophets showed itself
1 Possibly there must be included as a subsidiary cause the common
prophetic conception of Yahveh's antagonism to everything proud and
haughty in humanity— a conception which may be compared with the
Greek ideas of the Godhead's envy.
146 III. THE PROPHETS OP THE
by an extension of the area of the judgment beyond the
limits of Israel. But at least one of them seems to
have advanced a further stage in universalism, and
allowed to the two typical and leading nations of his
time a full share in the blessings of the golden age.
It is true that here also we tread upon debated ground.
But thus much seems clear : in the eighth century
Yahveh, to a few chosen minds, without losing his spe-
cific personality and his peculiar name as God of Israel,
begins not only, for his own glory, to assert his sove-
reignty over other nations, but to take a qualified interest
in them for their own sakes. Amos ascribes the migra-
tions of other peoples besides Israel to the world-wide
rule of Yahveh, and protesting against Israel's reliance
upon the favouritism of its God, he even asks, though
we must not press his words too far, "Are ye not as the
children of the Ethiopians unto me, 0 children of Israel?"
But it is only in Isaiah and Micah that we can find a few
passages which allude to the religion of Yahveh, with its
attendant blessings, as spreading, or to be spread, beyond
the pale of Israel, and the authenticity of these passages
is unfortunately by no means above suspicion.
The growth of the universalist conception is a puzzling
problem and difficult to trace. The initial step would
seem to have been a desire that other nations should
recognize the power and divinity of Yahveh, and the
unreality of their own gods. At first this recognition
is conceived merely as an outward fact, and not as an
inward blessing; its aim is the increase of Yahveh' s
reputation and Israel's, not yet the diffusion of truth or
the spiritual welfare of humanity. An example of the
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 147
idea in this stage of its development is Isaiah's prophecy
concerning the Ethiopians. After the judgment upon
Assyria has been accomplished, they are to " bring a
present to Yahveh of Hosts to the place of his name,
even unto Zion."1 It is also noteworthy that this
tribute to Yahveh's sovereignty, though scarcely equiva-
lent to a religious conversion, is not wrung from the
Ethiopians by calamity : it is, on the contrary, a willing
gift of gratitude for deliverance from Assyria.
Complete universalism is only then attained when
the nations are conceived as converted to Israel's God
for their own benefit and edification. The interval from
the former stages to this further and fuller conception
seems also, at least once, to have been traversed by
Isaiah. At the close of his long ministry he appears to
have framed the idea of a true knowledge of Yahveh
and his religion diffused permanently among Israel's two
great enemies of the near and of the distant past, Assyria
and Egypt. I do not venture to adduce here the cele-
brated fragment, found both in Isaiah and Micah, of the
nations journeying to Jerusalem, to learn Yahveh's ways
and to walk in his paths.2 Its pre-exilic origin is, per-
haps, not sufficiently assured. But we are still entitled
to assign the noble end of the nineteenth chapter to Isaiah
himself ; and if the two greatest nations within his geo-
graphical horizon are there pictured as glad converts to
Yahveh, it would surely seem as if the idea of an ultimate
abolition of all idolatry, and of the establishment of the
world-wide empire of Yahveh, had shed at least a passing
glory upon his visions of the coming age. If this be so,
1 xviii. 7. 2 Isaiah ii. 2—4; Micah iv. 1 — 4.
l2
148 III. THE PROPHETS OE THE
it is very striking that even after the deliverance from
Assyria, when the Messianic age still delayed to dawn
upon an unrepentant and unbelieving world, Isaiah did
not lose his hope in a great spiritual future, and that he
took leave of the world in a splendid prophecy of uni-
versalism, in which the two typical enemies of Israel are
to be united with him in common service of a common
God, and recognized by that God as his worshippers
and children.
" In that day there shall be an altar to Yahveh in the
midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar by its border to
Yahveh, and it shall be for a sign and a witness to
Yahveh of Hosts in the land of Egypt : when they shall
cry unto Yahveh because of oppressors, he shall send
them a deliverer and an advocate, and shall rescue them.
And Yahveh shall make himself known to Egypt, and
the Egyptians shall know Yahveh in that day, and shall
serve with sacrifice and offering, and shall vow a vow
unto Yahveh, and shall perform it. And Yahveh shall
smite Egypt, smiting and healing; and when they return
unto Yahveh, he shall receive their supplications, and
shall heal them. In that day there shall be a highway
from Egypt to Assyria ; Assyria shall come into Egypt,
and Egypt into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve
with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be a third
to Egypt and to Assyria, even a blessing within the
earth, for as much as Yahveh of Hosts hath blessed him,
saying, Blessed is my people Egypt, and the work of my
hands Assyria, and mine inheritance Israel."1
If this passage be really authentic, as there still seems
1 xix. 19 — 25. Prof. Chevne's translation.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 149
good reason to believe, it represents the high-water mark
of eighth-century prophecy.1 What a contrast to the
thought that expulsion from Palestine involved the en-
forced worship of other gods, or that Israel and Amnion
should each be content with the territories which their
respective deities had given them ! Truly the Bible is
a strange book, with strange diversity of voices, and it
is stranger still that for so many ages this diversity was
neglected or unfelt.
Such are the main teachings of the four great prophets
of the eighth century, teachings which, in the main,
were common to them all, and which were possibly set
forth also by other prophets now unknown. Indeed, the
Old Testament itself probably contains citations from
one or more of them. Isaiah certainly quotes an earlier
prophet's utterance against Moab ; and many authorities,
including Kuenen, think that both he and Micah were
indebted to a great contemporary or predecessor for that
magnificent portraiture of the Messianic age and of the
conversion of the nations which is now incorporated in
their own prophecies. It is even by no means impos-
sible that a part of Zechariah ix. — xii. is also the work
of a prophet of the eighth century. But, for our present
purpose, it is unnecessary to enter into this debated
question. For our picture of the prophetic teaching
would scarcely gain through its inclusion a single addi-
tional trait.
1 Kuenen and Stade both accept it as Isaiah's. Kuenen also main-
tains the pre-exilic origin of Isaiah ii. 2 — 4, assigning it to an older
contemporary of Isaiah. Cheyne, however, denies the authenticity of
xix. 18 — 25 {Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter, p. 170),
and refers it to the time of Ptolemy Lagi. Cf. also Expositor, March.
1892, p. 212.
150 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
Let us now try to estimate more generally the place
of the prophets in the history of Israel and in the
development of its religion. So unique a phenomenon
as Israelite prophecy has not unnaturally been inter-
preted and illustrated in many different ways. We have
advanced beyond the] antiquated view which, neglecting
the human elements in prophecy almost entirely, regarded
the prophets as mere foretellers of the future, entrusted
with a fixed, precise and pre-arranged message from
God, and repeating without change or flaw a lesson which
had been verbally dictated to them by an automatic
inspiration. But even though this view has been aban-
doned, yet, when the stress is laid upon any one particular
side of the prophetical work, different interpretations of
it as a whole are the result.
The prophets, for example, have sometimes been
described as practical statesmen. But, in truth, their
work as politicians was only an incident in their religious
teaching. Of the four prophets with whom we are still
immediately concerned, only Isaiah was consulted by
the king and took a prominent part in affairs of state.
And, though the genius of the prophets enabled them to
cast a piercing glance into political affairs, and to show
greater perspicacity than the mass of their contemporaries
in interpreting the movements of Assyria and in recog-
nizing the weakness of the neighbouring states, the
political advice which they gave was suggested and con-
trolled by their fundamental religious convictions. Pro-
fessor Robertson Smith has clearly pointed out a marked
difference between the older prophecy in which Elisha,
during the period of the Syrian wars, "was the very
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 151
soul of the struggle for independence," and the doctrine
of Amos and Hosea, who "broke through the ancient
faith in the unity of Jehovah's will with the immediate
political interests of the nation," and taught that, " as the
God of righteousness, Jehovah had nothing but chastise-
ment to offer to an unrighteous nation." But when
Isaiah bids Ahaz show no fear at the invasion of Eesin
of Damascus and Pekah of Israel, and make no alliance
with Assyria, Prof. E. Smith regards " the delivery of
this divine message" as an epoch in the work of Isaiah
and in the history of Old Testament prophecy, because
in it Isaiah, " no longer speaking of sin, judgment and
deliverance in broad, general terms," appears "as a
practical statesman, approaching the rulers of the state
with a precise direction as to the course they should hold
in a particular political juncture."1 Yet when we reflect
upon the character of this direction, and how entirely,
although justified by the event, it corresponded with the
general prophetical point of view in matters political, it
would appear as if the term "practical statesman" were
an appellation to which even Isaiah himself, the most
political of the prophets, could lay no claim.
While Ephraim and Judah were yet free from entangle-
ment in the meshes of the Assyrian net, the burden of
the prophetical teaching in the domain of statescraft
was, " Trust in Yahveh only ; enter into no alliance with
foreign powers." Israel, to the prophets, should be
" the people which dwells alone, and is not reckoned
among the nations." 2 Thus Isaiah was against any Assy-
rian, as he was against any Egyptian, alliance. When,
1 Prophets of Israel, p. 254. l Numbers xxiii. 9.
152 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
however, the false step had once been taken, and Judah
had become the vassal of Assyria, Isaiah, who recognized
in Assyria the rod of Yahveh's wrath, acquiesced in the
fait accompli^ and protested against the hopelessness of
rebellion. Lastly, when the revolt had been effected
without his cognizance, Isaiah could but menace the
infatuated rulers with divine punishment ; but clinging,
as he did, to the belief that when the night is darkest
the dawn is nearest, he counselled resistance at the point
when submission was apparently to signify the ruin of
the national life. Again he was justified by the event,
but the justification must be regarded either as purely
accidental or as divinely controlled; it was certainly
not an example of political prescience, for the chance
that Judah would escape the forces of Sennacherib was
infinitesimally small.1
By others, again, the prophets have sometimes been
classified among social reformers. Their intense sym-
pathy with the wrongs of the poorer classes has suggested
the appellation "tribunes of the people," or "publicistes
radicaux et journalistes intransigeants," as M. Kenan
calls them.2 But it is scarcely advisable to apply such
epithets to the prophets of the eighth or seventh century,
even though the application be guarded by careful con-
trast between the prophetical oratory and that of the
popular demagogue. For the prophets were in no sense
popular leaders. In their frequent opposition to the
patriotism of the day and to the favourite cult, they
1 Cf. Driver's Isaiah, 1888, chapters vi. and vii., for the prophet's
attitude during the rebellion and the invasion of Sennacherib.
I Renan, Hlstoire dn peuple d'Israel, Vol. II. p. 425, and elsewhere.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 153
provoked rather anger than sympathy. Their religious
eagerness for social morality led them to denounce the
oppression of the poor, because it was the most flagrant
public iniquity of the age. Their invectives against
luxury and debauchery were due to the fact that these
were often co-ordinated with cruelty and vice, or seemed
the consequence of that cold indifference to spiritual and
divine agencies, or of that reckless and material tempera-
ment, which to Isaiah, and the prophets generally, was
the completest type of enmity to Yahveh and his religion.
It is for this reason that the judgment must fall with
especial vehemence upon the class of rich oppressors
and boastful scoffers, so that the day might dawn, " when
the humble shall obtain fresh joy in Yahveh, and the
poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel."1
We are thus driven back, more and more exclusively,
upon a purely religious interpretation of the prophetical
work. We must regard the prophets as they regarded
themselves — as religious teachers, as messengers of
Yahveh, commissioned to explain to their people the
immediate purposes and mandates of their God. In the
discharge of this, their embassy, they now warned, now
threatened, and now comforted. They read the gradual
fulfilment of Yahveh' s will in the events of their age, set
forth the history and interpreted the lesson. But the
less they were prophets by habit and by profession, the
more were their utterances stimulated by special crises.
They prophesied because, and when, they had a definite
message to deliver. Yet it may well be surmised that
1 Isaiah xxix. 19; cf. Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the
•Tarnish Church, 2nd ed., 1892, p. 348.
154 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
in the intervals between these higher moments, their lives
were devoted as religious teachers, in a modern sense of
the word, to the more constant and normal duty of a
gradual religious enlightenment. Isaiah gathered round
him disciples,1 and the very fact that the prophets of the
eighth century began to publish and circulate their
utterances, shows that they no longer confined themselves
to the exigencies of the moment, but attempted a more
continuous method of teaching, and a steadier and less
fitful influence. Prof. "Wellhausen, indeed, has taken a
more restricted view of the prophetical office, and his
words, short and incisive as usual, are capable, as they
are deserving, of literal citation. " The newer prophets,"
he says, of whom Amos was the first, "resemble the
former ones, not merely in the general form of their
appearance and in the style of their speech, but also in
that, like their predecessors, they are not preachers, but
seers. It is not the sins of their people which cause them
to speak, but the circumstance that Yahveh is about to
do something, that great events are imminent. In quiet
times, be they never so sinful, the prophets are silent —
as, for example, in the long reign of king Manasseh — but
immediately raise their voices when a fresh movement
begins. They appear as storm messengers when an
historic tempest is at hand ; they are called "watchers,
because from their high roof they look forth and tell
when anything suspicious shows itself upon the horizon."2
Much of truth as this estimate by the great historian
and critic contains, it is scarcely the whole truth nor is
it devoid of exaggeration. Wellhausen himself ascribes
1 viii. 16. 2 Abriss, p. 50,
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 155
the last two chapters of Micah (with the exception of
the exilic verses at the close) to a writer of Manasseh's
age. Restraint and persecution may have forced the
prophets of that time into conrparative silence. But
though their public work may have been interrupted, their
more private work in the construction of a corps d"1 elite,
a chosen few from out of the corrupt many, by means of
patient and continuous teaching, must have been carried
on notwithstanding. A considerable measure of activity
must be assumed in order to account at once for Manas-
seh's persecution and for Josiah's reform. The definition
of the prophets as religious teachers, whose highest and
most impressive work was reserved for special needs and
particular occasions, remains unaffected.
Though the previous history of Israel had prepared
the way, the appearance of the prophets is none the less
a striking and mysterious phenomenon Its suddenness
is so extraordinary. Amos, the first example of the new
order in prophecy, was, in many respects, as Wellhausen
has observed, its purest exponent. Within thirty years
he was followed by Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, whose
united contributions to the store of prophetic teaching
left in some fundamental points little for the next cen-
tury to supplement or improve. "We are reminded of
the sudden rise of tragedy in Athens. iEschylus had his
predecessors, but they were of a totally different stamp,
and Sophocles, his younger contemporary, was the greatest
of the tragedians. In loftiness of style and perhaps in
fulness of inspiration, Jeremiah already represents a
prophetic decline, and in this respect, as in others, there
is a parallel between him, as compared with Isaiah, and
156 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
Euripides, the human, as compared with the author of
the (Edipus.
It was the prophets, men few in number, but great in
power, who gave to the religion of Israel its specific
character and direction. The seed was sown by ]\Ioses,
the Founder; the ground was watered by Samuel, by
jSathan and Gad, by Elijah and Micaiah; but the harvest
was gathered, or rather it was ripened, by the prophets
of the eighth century. It was they who definitely con-
nected the worship of Yahveh with the practice of moral-
ity, and conceived the idea of a holy nation, divinely
chosen and divinely trained. They were the first to
show how the triumph of a nation's God — his veritable
"day" of glory — might be signalized by his people's
punishment and defeat. It was the prophets who puri-
fied the conception of Yahveh as a God of righteousness
and naught besides, and who began the transformation
of the only God of a single nation into the only God
of the entire world. And, lastly, it was the prophets of
the eighth century who began to teach the doctrine — so
strange to antiquity — that a single God of one people
might become the One God of all. Thus the prophets
point forward on the one hand to the Law, which sought
by definite enactment and discipline to help on the
schooling of the holy nation, living apart and consecrate
to God, and on the other hand to the Apostle of Tarsus,
who carried the universalist idea so nearly to its final and
practical conclusion.
It was inevitable that the prophets should leave some
room for future development. Their teaching contained
the seeds of many subsequent antinomies. Their atti-
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 157
tudc towards the outward embodiment of religion was
left vague and undefined. They had attacked the cultus,
but they had suggested nothing in its place ; they had
inveighed against forms, but they had not given the
people any vehicle of ceremonial expression for religious
life : they had only said, " Seek God, seek goodness,"
counsels too elevated or too abstract for their generation
to apply. Moreover, in spite of their denunciation of
present abuses, they had been all too optimistic as to the
not distant future. They had threatened a sinful society
with summary punishment; but anticipating a speedy
recovery from disaster, they had predicted a renovated
community, chastened by suffering and purged of guilt.
They contracted the progressive drama of history into a
single scene.
All kinds of puzzling problems arose out of their
teaching. The punishment and the deliverance came,
but the Messianic age did not follow. Was sin still
uneradicated, or were the children suffering for the ini-
quities of their fathers? Again, the prophetical unit
was the nation and not the individual, and national well-
being was characterized in outward and material terms.
Sin brought adversity, but reform and penitence would
bring welfare and content. Prosperity was the test of
goodness and its reward. Even for nations this doctrine
has its dangers ; apply it, as later teachers did, to the
individual, and you find yourself hopelessly at variance
with fact. And lastly, although the prophets began to
emancipate the religion of Israel from its tribalism — to
turn Yahveh into God — they helped at the same time
to produce a particularism narrower and more fatal than
153 III. THE PROPHETS OF THE
that which they had destroyed. For Yahveh, though
the Only God, remained the God of Israel, and the
nations were not solely regarded as independent creations
of the One Creator — ends in themselves, as we should
now say — but also, and sometimes mainly, as instruments
to promote God's purposes in the training of his chosen
people. For, as Wellhausen has finely said, " the present
which was passing before the prophets became to them,
as it were, the plot of a divine drama which they watched
with an intelligence that anticipated the denouement.
Everywhere the same goal of the development, every-
where the same laws. The nations are the dramatis
personce, Israel the hero, Yahveh the author of the
tragedy."1 But in this tragedy, of which Israel is the
hero, the nations only too readily assumed the villain's
part. The eighth- century prophets did not yet so cha-
racterize the players, and the universalism of Isaiah
enabled him to change Assyria, the rod of Yahveh's
anger, into Assyria, the work of Yahveh's hands. But
already in Ezekiel the nations are naturally and essen-
tially the wicked enemies of Israel and of God, and
the same identification was repeated again and again,
though not without excuse, by subsequent writers after
the captivity in Babylon. This, as we shall see, was the
problem which the Judaism of Ezra and his successors,
in spite of a never-forgotten and never-renounced idea of
universalism, failed to solve. Only modern Judaism,
upon the moral side at least, has effected a solution.
But these blemishes and imperfections of their teaching
were as nothing to the greatness of the work which was
1 Abrias, p. 49.
EIGHTH CENTURY B.C. 159
accomplished by the prophets for their own age and for
posterity. Parallels to many of their noblest sayings
can pretty easily be collected from other religious litera-
tures both of the East and of the West. Deeper apprecia-
tion and fuller discussion of the dark problems of human
destiny are to be found among the thinkers of India,
and, here and there, among the thinkers of Greece.
Ignorant as the prophets were of any bodily resurrection
upon earth, still more of any spiritual life beyond the
grave, a whole province of religious aspiration was cut
off from them ; and with that loss, the light which such
beliefs alone can shed upon many important questions,
such as sin and retribution, the transfiguration which
they alone can effect upon the conception of earthly joys
and earthly sorrows, could not be seen or anticipated.
The very manner and occasion of their utterance are
partly cause and partly result of the complete lack in all
the prophetic writings of that mystic element in religion
which hovers between the highest truth and the wildest
vagary.
But no other teaching of the ancient world can show
a similar grasp upon the essentials of true religion, with
a like absence of refuse and of dross. Doubtless, this
peculiar excellence was partly due to the comparatively
severe and simple monolatry upon which the prophetic
religion was based. "While the God of the prophets
possessed adequate personality, so as to enable their
teaching to be generally understood, he was not disfigured
by mythological taint. Separate and distinguished from
the forces of nature, Yahveh, by the word of his chosen
messengers, could denounce any intrusion of sexual
ICO HI. THE PEOPHETS OF THE
impurity or symbolism into religious ceremonial. Chas-
tity was no less specific a mark of the prophetic religion
than its direct and close alliance with social morality.
To free the conception of God from the errors which
still clung to the popular idea of him, it was not
necessary to abandon Yahveh, but only to purify his
attributes and to moralize his relation to Israel. Mono-
latry could be changed into monotheism ; there was no
need of the smallest pantheistic admixture. The pro-
phetic teaching could thus maintain a close connection
with its popular basis ; it could become the religion of
the many, and not a theology for the few. And here
we can readily perceive one of its most characteristic and
important features. There was nothing esoteric about it,
no inner mysteiy which only the initiated might learn.
If the doctrine, "Seek Yahveh, seek goodness," is ele-
vated, it is also direct : it may be general, but all can
understand it. Hence it is to the religion of these men,
free at once from superstition on the one hand, and from
mystery on the other, that the monotheism of the modern
world owes its origin and its form. It is on this ground
that the prophets can justly be regarded as the true
founders of that phase of Theism which teaches a God
who, while infinite, is yet self-conscious, who is both
the Kuler of humanity and the Object of its prayer.
Their business, as we have learnt, was with the nation
and not with the individual. But it was their doctrine
which supplied the indispensable basis of that Theism
which discerns the purest efflorescence of religion in the
relation and communion of the individual soul with the
divine " Lover of souls," the Father who is in heaven.
Lectuhe IV.
THE SEVENTH CENTURY : DEUTERONOMY
AND JEREMIAH (700—586 B.C.)
In the present Lecture we have to deal with the history
and development of the religion of Israel from the close
of the eighth century to the fall of Jerusalem. Between
the retreat of Sennacherib's army and the capture of the
capital by Nebuchadrezzar there was an interval of little
more than a century, yet meanwhile, upon the basis of the
prophetical teaching, the foundations of Judaism were
laid. Inveighing against the sins of the people and pre-
dicting their punishment, the prophets had elevated the
conception of Yahveh, and changed monolatry into mono-
theism. While they bewailed the national deflection
from an acknowledged standard of righteousness, they
were half -unconsciously creating a new ideal of their
people's function and destiny among the other peoples of
the world. But in attempting to interpret the concrete
incidents of their age by the light of abstract theories,
they laid themselves open to discredit if their anticipa-
tions of the future were not fulfilled. One and all, as
we have seen, foretold a judgment, and one and all
believed that the effects of that judgment would be ade-
quate and lasting. The Assyrian wars, or the captivity
consequent upon them, would be the sure forerunners of
M
162 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY '.
the " Messianic" age. The crisis of their own country
was conceived to be the crisis of the world, and the broad
expanse of human history contracted into the narrow
span of a few generations.
Amos and Hosea, who were mainly concerned with
the kingdom of Samaria, had foretold Israel's exile as
the condition precedent of future glory. Although
they assigned no definite limit to the period of exile,
their language indicates no clear anticipation that it
would be more than sufficient for the extirpation of
hardened sinners and for the growth of a real repentance.
But the prophets of the north were unable to arrest the
corruption of Samarian and Israelite society; and the
hopes which they held out of pardon and return did not
prevent the absorption of the exiles among the native
population of Assyria, or effect any immediate religious
improvement among those who were suffered to remain
upon ancestral soil. In the south, Isaiah with emphasis
and precision had proclaimed the inviolability of Jerusa-
lem, and connected the advent of an ideal age with the
end of the judgment process and with deliverance from
the Assyrian foe.
The first part of Isaiah's prediction was literally ful-
filled. Judah was delivered from the Assyrian army:
the dawn of the ideal age was presumably at hand. Yet
the actual result was only the first of a long series of
experiences in which prophetical expectations were falsi-
fied by events.
The new era was to have included political inde-
pendence as well as moral regeneration. But though
Sennacherib had retreated from Palestine, Judah still
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 163
remained the vassal of Assyria. The empire of Assyria
was scarcely affected by the event which was to change
the face of the world, and for more than half-a-century its
power was undiminished and supreme. Yet, as regards
the internal condition of Judah, the great deliverance
was the occasion of a reform which at first may well
have made Isaiah's heart beat high. It is clear that the
prophet did not suppose that religious and moral rege-
neration would be brought about by purely supernatural
means. By his own continuous teaching he had himself
attempted to transform society, and we may also surmise
that he gathered round him an inner circle of special
and devoted disciples, who might be expected to be-
come a leaven of purity, and to disseminate that teaching
throughout the land.1 Influential as he was at the
court and with the king, and with reputation enormously
enhanced by the fulfilment of his promise of deliverance,
he probably urged and prompted Hezekiah to the execu-
tion of a religious reform.
The meagre verse in the Book of Kings which describes
this reform is both inaccurate and misplaced.2 There is
no hint in the authentic writings of Isaiah or Micah that
any religious innovations had been attempted before the
Assyrian war.3 It was the startling issue of Sennacherib's
invasion which afforded the opportunity and suggested
the idea. Moreover, wider changes are attributed to
1 This is inferred from Isaiah viii. 16.
2 2 Kings xviii. 4 ; see Stade, GescMchte, Vol. I. p. 607 ff ; Z.A. W.,
1886, pp. 172—182.
3 Isaiah xxxvi. 7 (2 Kings xviii. 22) is not hy Isaiah; cf. Kuenen,
Onderzoek, 2nd ed., Vol. I. p. 414, seq. ; Cornill, Einlcitung, p. 145.
m2
164 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY!
Hezekiah than he can actually have effected. He is
reported to have " removed the high places and broken
the pillars, and cut down the Asherah (or sacred pole),
and broken in pieces the brazen serpent which Moses had
made, and to which the people still burnt incense, calling
it Nehushtan." There is, however, no clear indication
that Hezekiah's reform corresponded so closely with the
subsequent reform of Josiah ; Isaiah and Micah do not
appear to have impugned the sacred poles and pillars, or
the legality of the high places ; they confined themselves
to an attack upon the worship of other gods, and more
especially to a polemic against images. But so sweeping
a reform can hardly be credited upon such slender autho-
rity, unless it were the natural result of prophetic teach-
ing. Thus the residuum of fact contained in the 18 th
chapter of the Second Book of Kings must be probably
limited to the destruction of the Nehushtan, or brazen
serpent, that mysterious image in which the contem-
poraries of Hczekiab, whatever may have been its original
signification, doubtless recognized a symbol of Yahveh.
Yet indirect evidence would incline us to believe that
Hezekiah's reform involved more than the annihilation
of a single idol ; it is more probably to be regarded as
an attempt at a general abolition of images, as well as a
suppression of the new Assyrian star-worship and of
the "Moloch" sacrifices which had been introduced into
Judah in the reign of Ahaz.
Whether this material iconoclasm betokened or gene-
rated any wide moral reformation is more than doubtful.
It is unfortunate that we possess no certainly authentic
prophecies of Isaiah bearing upon the condition of Judah
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 165
after the year of deliverance. Some scholars, indeed, hold
that the 22nd chapter was written after the retreat of Sen-
nacherib.1 In that case, the effect of Hezekiah's reforms
must have disappointed Isaiah as cruelly as the effect of
Josiah's disappointed Jeremiah. The date and meaning
of this chapter are, however, not sufficiently clear to
enable us to make with confidence so important a deduc-
tion. Yet if the 19th chapter be all Isaiah's, it must
have been written down at a considerable interval after
Sennacherib's departure from Palestine, and in it we see
that Isaiah's expectations of an ultimate ideal future
were not less sanguine than in the old days of the
struggle with Assyria, while they were also wider in
their scope.
But the prophecies of Isaiah had further influences,
different from anything he could have foreseen or even
desired. His predictions impressed the popular mind,
and paved the way for serious issues. The reign of
Manasseh, Hezekiah's son and successor, will show us
some of these results ; the reign of Josiah will show us
others. Under particular circumstances and for a par-
ticular purpose, Isaiah had laid stress upon the inde-
structibility of Jerusalem, the mother-city of Judah, the
dwelling-place of Yahveh.2 This special prediction
relating to a special occasion was much to the popular
mind, and when the prediction had been fulfilled, was
soon magnified into a permanent religious dogma. In
natural consequence, the temple of Jerusalem grew
1 So Kuenen, Onderzoel; 2nd ed., Vol. II. p. 63. But see Dillmann
for objections to this view.
2 Isaiah xxxvii. 22 — 32, xxx. 19, xxxi. 4 — 9,
166 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY!
rapidly in dignity and importance. Again, Isaiah had
regarded the Assyrian invasion as the divine judgment
which was to herald the Messianic age, and a certain
measure of reform had followed hard upon deliverance.
What more likely than that many honest, if narrow-
minded, worshippers of Yahveh, who confounded external
reform with spiritual regeneration, should be bitterly
disappointed when the promised independence and glory
were indefinitely postponed ? If they still believed in
Yahveh's omnipotence and fidelity, they would suppose
that the predicted golden age was only delayed for a
time, not that any fresh judgment was necessary over
and above the trial which they had only recently passed
through ; if, on the contrary, they were inclined to ascribe
the non-fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy to the insuffi-
ciency of Yahveh's power, they would be tempted to
have recourse once more to Assyrian idolatries, seeing
that the Assyrian gods were still supreme throughout
the western Asiatic world. Or, perhaps, still believing
in Yahveh's ability to exalt Israel above Assyria, some
may have imagined that the sins of the past were not yet
wholly atoned ; grievously misunderstanding the teach-
ing of the prophets, they may have thought that larger,
more potent sacrifices were required before the wrath of
God could be finally appeased.
Hezekiah's reign extended for about fourteen years
after the deliverance of Jerusalem in 701. To the early
part of this, its second division, the religious reforma-
tion must be assigned. A successful campaign against
the Philistines, alluded to in the Book of Kings, pro-
bably fell within the same period. Beyond this, we
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 167
know nothing, though we would gladly know much,
of these fourteen concluding years of an eventful reign.
In 686 Hezekiah died, and was succeeded by his son
Manasseh, who occupied the throne for forty-five years
(686 — 641).1 The Book of Kings does not record a
single external incident throughout his long reign. It
must have been a time of profound peace and of com-
parative prosperity. Manasseh remained the vassal of
Assyria, and the Assyrian inscriptions speak of him as
paying tribute to the two kings, Esarhaddon (681 — ■
669), Sennacherib's successor, and Asurbanipal (669 —
626), till whose death the supremacy of Assyria in
Palestine was wholly undisputed. Uneventful as Ma-
nasseh's reign was in foreign politics, it was all the
more important in its internal and religious history.
In it, and in the short reign of Amon, who main-
tained the policy of his father, there set in a period of
strong religious reaction, extending over nearly half-a-
century (686 — 638). Manasseh is singled out by the
historian for special and repeated reprobation. In the
eyes of the exilic redactor, his iniquities were the imme-
diate cause of the destruction of the national life. Not
even Josiah's reformation could turn Yahveh "from the
fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger was
kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations
that Manasseh had provoked him withal."2 Jeremiah
had said the same. Exile and dispersion are to come
"because of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, king of
Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem."3 It is not
1 2 Kings xxi. 1 — 18. 2 2 Kings xxiii. 2G.
6 Jeremiah xv. 4.
168 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
open to doubt but that the character of the Book of
Deuteronomy, the product of Josiah's reign and the
occasion of his reform, was coloured, in its fundamental
attitude of uncompromising hostility to idolatry, by that
which occurred under Manasseh. And the later editors
of the Books of Kings, seeing in the state of religion and
religious observances during that reign the crown and
pinnacle of national iniquity, were thereby often induced
to set the earlier history of Israel in a false light, and to
identify vice with idolatry far more closely than the
prophets of the eighth century.
What were the sins of Manasseh ?
It has already been indicated that the Assyrians made
their influence felt, not only in politics, but also in reli-
gion. It was the old Babylonian worship of the lumi-
naries of heaven which was introduced into Judah in
the eighth century, and which, after receiving a short
check during the reign of Hezekiah, became very widely
prevalent under his son. Altars were erected "and
incense was burnt to the sun, and to the moon, and to
all the host of heaven."1 Manasseh, like a devoted
vassal of Assyria, even polluted the temple of Yahveh
with the worship of these foreign divinities ; for we are
told that "he built altars for all the host of heaven in
the two courts of the house of Yahveh."2 It appears
that this form of idolatry rapidly acquired a great popu-
larity, especially with women.3 But together with this
novel star-worship, there was also a recrudescence both
of Canaanite idolatry and of old Israelite superstitions.
1 2 Kings xxiii. 5. 2_ 2 Kings xxi. 5.
3 Jeremiah vii. 18, xliv. 15.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 169
As regards the latter, we are told of Manasseh, that " he
used soothsayings aud divinations, and appointed workers
with familiar spirits and wizards."1 The special instance
of the former was the adoption, or, as some would say,
the revival, of the appalling rite of sacrificing children,
especially the first-born son. Why this odious form of
worship began to be practised in Judah in the eighth
and seventh centuries is not wholly clear. Ahaz is the
first king to whom it is attributed.2 That it was still
exceptional in the eighth century, we may infer from
the silence of the prophets. Once only in a single pas-
sage in Isaiah is there any allusion to this worship ; yet
there, however, the language used seems to imply that it
had already received a recognized locality for its perform-
ance in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem.3 While both
the authors of the Book of Kings and the prophets regard
the barbarous offering as rendered to the Canaanite god
Melech, or "the king," the actual saerificers probably
fused the two deities together, and devoted their children
to Yahveh under the name of Melech. For the appel-
lation "king" could be applied to Yahveh as it was
to divers other neighbouring or kindred divinities. In
addition to this syncretistic usage, there might also be
co-ordinated a definite worship and acknowledgment of
Melech or Moloch himself; such idolatry would be the
more natural, inasmuch as Solomon's altar to Milcom,
the Ammonite deity, who was only another form of the
Canaanite "Moloch," was still in existence. Manasseh,
like Ahaz, sacrificed his son, and many another durin^
1 2 Kings xxi. 6. 2 2 Kings xvi. 3.
3 Isaiah xxx. 33.
170 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY I
his reign must have followed the example of the
court.1
There are many tokens in the literature of the seventh
century that the idolatrous reaction of Manasseh pene-
trated deep, making many converts. But the prophetic
teaching of the preceding century had not fallen upon
wholly barren soil, and the tendencies of Manasseh
served to accentuate the distinction between the two
sections of idolaters and monolatrists. For the very
opposition which they encountered enabled Isaiah's doc-
trines, though not always in a shape which entirely con-
formed with the spirit of their author, to take firm root
among those who were hostile to the religious innovations
of the age. Manasseh would apparently brook no opposi-
tion to the idolatrous proclivities of his court ; he met the
indignation of Isaiah's disciples and of the prophetical
party by open and relentless persecution.2 Very probably
the priests of the temple, or at any rate an important sec-
tion of them, actively resented its pollution. The older
historian of the Book of Kings speaks of "Manasseh shed-
ding innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem
from one end to another." This innocent blood must
have mainly flowed from those who opposed his idolatrous
tendencies. Jeremiah appears to allude to this perse-
cution when he tells the men of Judah that their own
1 The relation of Milcom, the Ammonite god, to the supposed Milk
or Moloch of the Canaanites is, however, disputed. See Eerdman's
Melekdi'enst, p. 112; and, on the wider question of the existence of a
separate god whose proper name was Melech, Cheyne, Jeremiah, p. 45,
n. 1 and 2, with the authorities there quoted, and Baethgen, pp.
37—40. &c.
2 2 Kings xxi. 16, xxiv. 4.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 171
sword had devoured their prophets like a destroying
lion. If some great critics are right in assigning the
sixth and opening verses of the seventh chapters of Micah
to a nameless prophet under Manasseh, they give us a
vivid and painful picture of the moral corruption of the
age.1 And they show us also that Yahveh's favour
was still solicited by sacrifices of immense size and cost,
and that the crying abomination of " Moloch" worship
had been successfully grafted upon the worship of the
national God. But they also prove that the prophetical
teaching of the eighth-century prophets was being con-
tinued in spite of opposition and enmity in the seventh,
and not only continued, but advanced. One of the best
examples of prophetical religion has been preserved to
us out of the violence and injustice of the age : " Will
Yahveh be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten
thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my first-born for
my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul ? He has showed thee, 0 man, what is good ; and
what doth Yahveh require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God."2
From the accession of Manasseh to the death of Amon
(686 — 638), a period of forty-eight years, this internal
conflict continued; and in it, as always, the blood of
martyrs was the seed of the Church. In 638, Amon
was succeeded by his son Josiah, then only eight years
old. It is possible that his accession brought about some
amelioration in the condition of the prophetical party,
1 So, e.g., Cheyne, Kuenen and Wellhausen, for vi. and vii. 1 — 7.
2 Micah vi. 6—8; cf. Isaiah lvii. 5; Ezekiel xvi. 20, 21, xxiii. 37,
xx. 25 — 31, &c. ; Jer. xix. &c.
172 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
and that active persecution ceased. But the synergistic
and idolatrous worship was still maintained for another
eighteen years, though those years are passed over with-
out any notice in the Book of Kings. They were, how-
ever, years of great importance in the history of Asia,
for they witnessed the break-up of the Assyrian empire,
and the inroads of the Scythians. The collapse of
Assyria followed hard upon the death of Asurbanipal in
626 : Babylon revolted, the northern and north-western
provinces of the empire fell into the hands of the Medes,
and the authority of Assyria over the vassal kingdoms
of the west was gradually weakened. We shall soon
find Josiah venturing upon an independent expedition
of his own into northern Israel, an integral portion at
that time of the Assyrian empire. The Scythians are
stated by Herodotus to have been rulers of "Asia" for
twenty-eight years, but it is probable that he has over-
estimated the period during which the Asiatic peoples
were subject to this awful scourge. But what chiefly
interests us to know is that the Scythians, penetrating
into Palestine, pursued their march of rapine and desola-
tion along the coast as far as the Egyptian border. Here,
according to Herodotus, they were met by Psammetichus,
king of Egypt, who, "by gifts and entreaties," prevailed
upon them to return.1 They seem, then, to have left
Palestine by the same route by which they entered it,
and neither in coming nor in going to have set foot in
the kingdom of Judah. These events may be roughly
assigned to the years 626 — 623. But though the
Scythian invasion is unrecorded in the Book of Kings,
1 Herod, i. 105.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 173
and though Judah was unaffected by it directly, it left
its mark upon Hebrew prophecy, and probably gave the
impetus for plans of reformation which were matured
and ready for execution not more than two years after
the enemy's departure from Palestine.
Two prophets began their career at this period, and
in striking accordance with "Wellhausen's theory men-
tioned at the close of the last Lecture, it would seem as
if for both of them it was the prospect of Scythian devas-
tation which made them conscious of the divine call.
The two prophets are Zephaniah, and his far more famous
and important contemporary, Jeremiah. In the opening
chapter of his book, Jeremiah tells us that " the word
of Yahveh first came to him while still young, in the
thirteenth year of king Josiah's reign." This would be
about 626. The prophecies which were spoken by
Jeremiah during the five earliest years of his ministry —
that is, between his call in 626 and the reformation of
621 — are professedly collected in the first six chapters of
his book ; but as, in their present form, they were written
down far later, it is more than probable that they under-
went considerable modification. Both Jeremiah and
Zephaniah draw a very black picture of Judah's moral
and religious condition in the days of Josiah ; even if
the king himself, according to Prof. Cheyne's opinion,1
must be assumed to have come already for many years
before the reformation under the influence of such men
as Hilkiah the priest, there was as yet no general desist-
ence either from idolatry or from those moral iniquities
against which the older prophets had been wont to pro-
1 Chcyne, Jeremiah: Ids Life and Times, pp. 16 — 20.
174 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTUEY :
test so loudly. Both prophets saw in the approaching
Scythians the instruments of God's righteous anger, and
called upon the better-disposed to seek Yahveh in humi-
lity and justice, so that they might perchance be hid in
the day of Yahveh' s vengeance.
There are some faint indications that, while the danger
was imminent, the national consciousness was stirred to
fear, if not to repentance, by the invectives and menaces
of Jeremiah, but that when it had passed away and the
prophetic threats of judgment remained unfulfilled, idola-
trous tendencies asserted themselves again with the aug-
mented strength of a natural reaction. But the prophetic
party was still undaunted by the recent failure. They
did not believe the less in Yahveh because, in Prof.
Cheyne's phrase, " God's dealings with his people were
gentler than his threatenings."1 Something must be
done to check the downward progress of the nation into
idolatry and corruption. What should that something be ?
In the present form of Jeremiah's early prophecies, he
speaks as if the true prophetic spirit was scarcely repre-
sented by any one but himself.2 He attacks priests and
prophets no less than rulers and judges. But this is the
language of exaggeration, and reflects a later and more
unanimous opposition in succeeding reigns. At this
period, there must have been many priests who were not
only opposed to the worship of foreign gods, but also
keenly desirous for a purification of native ritual, so that
the ceremonial religion of Yahveh might correspond the
better with the spiritual teaching of the prophets. There
was not necessarily any wide divergence in religious
1 Jeremiah, p. 33. % Jer. v. 1.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 175
"belief between prophet and priest, although naturally
the latter would not take the same depreciatory view of
all external observances which was customary with the
former. Uriah, the chief priest of the Jerusalem temple
under Hezekiah, had been Isaiah's chosen friend, and
several of the prophet's disciples may have been drawn
from the priesthood. Jeremiah himself belonged to a
priestly family. Prophets and priests were now drawn
into a closer alliance by a common danger. In Hezekiah'1 s
days, Yahveh himself, by the "judgment" of the Assy-
rians, had occasioned a partial reform : under Josiah the
expected scourge had been withdrawn, and the people
could afford to laugh at the prophets' miscalculation,
and to neglect their teaching with a light heart. Even
some, whom the retreat of the Scythians did not confirm
in their idolatries, were tempted to become indifferent to
the cause of religion. They would join the ranks of
those who were " settled on their lees," and whose belief
was limited to the atheistic doctrine : " Yahveh will
not do good, neither will he do evil."1 A reformation
must now be attempted by human means, while the
incitement to it must be effected by human effort, and be
independent of external hazard.
More and more distinctly in the eyes of both prophet
and priest did the evil condition of society appear to pro-
ceed from the corrupt worship of Yahveh and the idola-
trous worship of other gods. The prophecies of Jeremiah
show a marked contrast with those of Isaiah in this respect.
They approach far more closely to the model of Hosea.
Isaiah, as we saw, is mainly concerned with the moral
1 Zephaniah 112.
176 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
offences of his contemporaries. To actual idolatry (the
worship of other gods) he scarcely alludes at all ; to the
material representation of Yahveh, only occasionally in
sarcastic contempt. But the incursion of new, and the
recrudescence of old idolatries during the reign of Manas-
seh seemed a renewal of the Baal- worship of Ahab and
Athaliah. Jeremiah accordingly places the apostasy from
Yahveh in the head and front of Judah's offending.
How was this increasing prevalence of idolatry to be
overcome ? Isaiah, and Hosea before him, had protested
against image- worship ; but to the would-be reformers
under Josiah it appeared that the attack must include
more than the images, and that the work of destruction
should take a wider sweep. It seemed to them necessary
that the worship of Yahveh should be divested of all such
material appurtenances as were common to it and to the
worship of other gods. Free hitherto from prophetic
censure, the sacred pillars and poles were in their eyes
no longer innocuous. This ascription of illegitimacy to
symbols, hitherto alike familiar and allowed, was, how-
ever, only a detail, and it was thrown into the shade by
a gigantic innovation which was now apparently for the
first time contemplated, and, as we shall soon see, was
speedily carried into full effect. This innovation was
nothing less than the abolition of all sanctuaries of
Yahveh throughout the length and breadth of Judah,
except the single temple at Jerusalem.
There were several reasons for an attempt of this kind.
The difference between the country sanctuaries and the
central sanctuary of the capital had gradually become
marked and significant. Whereas originally, and for
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 177
many generations after its foundation, Solomon's temple,
in spite of its possession of Yakveh's Ark, was only first
among its peers, it had now, partly through Isaiah's
teaching and partly through the issue of the Assyrian
wars, become identified with Yahveh's habitual dwelling-
place. Here, and not elsewhere, was his nearer presence
to be found, and hence it was (so many among the
reformers would imagine) that Jerusalem had escaped
destruction at the invasion of Sennacherib. Moreover,
although the idolatrous reaction under Manasseh had
penetrated within the temple precincts, so that the
emblems of the host of heaven had been set up in close
proximity to Yahveh's altar, yet upon the whole the
temple ceremonial was purer than that of the country
sanctuaries, and was administered by a more educated
priesthood. If a successful reform movement were to
throw the direction of public worship into the hands of
its promoters, and if all worship of Yahveh were strictly
prohibited except at a single sanctuary controlled by
themselves, it would be far less difficult to prevent any
revival of idolatry.
If these were the ideas which were ripening in the
reformers' minds during the opening years of Josiah's
reign, and more especially after the retreat of the Scy-
thians from Palestine, the further question would arise,
how they were to be translated into action, and how the
king could be won over to accept and enforce them.
The reformers, or, as perhaps it would be more accu-
rate to say, a small section of them, hit upon a method,
which has been variously estimated by different histo-
rians. They determined to draw up a book of exhortation
N
178 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
and law, suitable to the needs of the time, but set in a
framework of fictitious antiquity. It was to be a book
which the Founder himself might well have published,
and would certainly have sanctioned, had he witnessed
the condition of state and society under Josiah. It
should begin with, and be based upon, the Decalogue,
then regarded by one and all as of Mosaic origin, and it
should include (with the modifications and improvements
which changed circumstances and advanced religious
ideas had rendered necessary) the substance of those
older collections of laws (such as the Book of the Cove-
nant) which perhaps had also acquired the stamp of
Mosaic authenticity. The whole book, therefore, should
be in thorough accordance with the spirit of the Mosaic
religion ; for we must remember that the purest concep-
tions of the seventh century would not have appeared to
the reformers as new creations of their own or the preced-
ing age, but as true expressions of the Founder's faith.
In their eyes there would be no immoral deceit in placing
the new code-book as a whole in the mouth of Moses.
One more step was wanting, even after the book itself
bad been completed. It was needful to have it publicly
acknowledged by king and people as the law of the land.
The older collections had never been widely known ; in
Prof. Cheyne's words, "There is no proof that they
enjoyed any public, that is, national recognition, and
their circulation was probably limited to the priests (if
the collection was a ritualistic one), and to the few edu-
cated people among the laity (if the collection related to
social duties)." l But now a bold effort was to be made to
1 Jeremiah: his Life and Times, p. 61.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEEEMIAH. 179
sweep the idolatries and immoralities of the age entirely
away : hence the laws compiled to effect this great end
must he publicly accepted and recognized throughout the
kingdom as the binding Book of the Covenant ordained
of God by the hands of Moses.
In some such manner as this we may imaginatively
re-construct the course of events which preceded the
scenes recorded in the Book of Kings for the eighteenth
year of Josiah' s reign. Among the prophets and priests
responsible for the production of the new Book of the
Covenant, if not among its actual writers, was Hilkiah,
the chief priest of the Jerusalem temple, and to him was
entrusted the duty of devising a favourable opportunity
for submitting it to the notice of the youthful king.
Hilkiah seems to have thought well to give the appear-
ance of accident to a long preconcerted design. Josiah
had sent Shaphan, his scribe or chancellor, to Hilkiah, with
certain instructions relative to some repairs in the temple
which were then being carried on. After Shaphan has
delivered his message, Hilkiah informs him that he has
found "the Book of the Law" — more accurately, "the
Book of Teaching" — in the house of Yahveh. Shaphan,
who, presumably, though known to be inclined to the
reformers' views, was not himself a party to their scheme,
reads the book, and returns with it to the king. After
disposing of the business for which he has been sent to
the temple, Shaphan adds: " Hilkiah the priest has given
me a book." It is obvious that Shaphan must have in-
formed Josiah what this book contained and from whom
it was supposed to proceed. "We are, however, merely
told by the historian that " Shaphan read it before the
n2
180 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY :
king, and that when the king had heard the words of the
book of the law, he rent his clothes."1 Josiah (unlike
Jehoiakim) was clearly susceptible to prophetic influences,
and already inclined to follow, could he but see his way,
in the footsteps of his grandfather.
Our general survey does not permit us to trace in
detail from this point the stages of the reformation.
It suffices to say that, confirmed by prophetic advice,
the king summoned a national assembly, and in the
court of the temple read before all the contents of the
new code. Josiah was evidently convinced that the
book was of genuine antiquity, and could thus affirm
without difficulty that its provisions had been wilfully
neglected by all previous generations. The men of
Judah and Jerusalem, and all the elders, priests and
prophets, who had not been previously admitted to the
secret of its composition, would be under the same illusion.
It is not, therefore, surprising that a considerable impres-
sion was produced. But the effect of its public recitation
is only fully understood when we call to mind that, with
the omission of certain chapters at the beginning and at
the end, the new code was no other than our present
Book of Deuteronomy. No wonder that the promises
and threats of that remarkable book should have deeply
moved the strange assembly collected together in the
temple court. The immediate result is set forth in a
single verse of the 23rd chapter of the Book of Kings :
"And the king stood on the platform, and he made the
covenant before Yahveh, to walk after Tahveh, and to
keep his commandments and his testimonies and his
1 2 Kin^s xxii. 11.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 181
statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform
the words of this covenant that are written in this book.
And all the people entered into the covenant."1
After Deuteronomy had thus, in a moment of exalta-
tion and excitement, been accepted by the people as the
law of the land, Josiah proceeded to give practical effect
to that acceptance by a series of active and sometimes
violent reforms throughout the length and breadth of
his kingdom. He began with the temple. In accord-
ance with the provisions of the code, it was thoroughly
purged of all idolatrous accretions, whether associated
with the worship of other gods or with the worship of
Yahveh. The sacred pole or Asherah was removed and
burnt. The king "broke down" the houses in which,
by the assimilation of Yahveh's worship to the most
loathsome form of Canaanite idolatry, a kind of sacred
prostitution was carried on within the very precincts of
the temple. All the emblems of Assyrian star-worship,
and all the instruments or vessels used in connection
with it, were destroyed. Then the range of reform was
advanced beyond the temple limits. The Topheth in
which children were offered up to Moloch, or to Yahveh
under the appellation of Moloch, was defiled, and the
same fate befel those high places which Solomon had
erected to the deities of Tyre, Moab and Ammon.
But the most trenchant and difficult reform was still
to come. To obey the new Code, it was necessary to
eradicate every sanctuary of Yahveh beside the one and
1 Cf. the important remarks of Cheyne on the date of Deuteronomy,
and the manner of its composition and introduction to Josiah, in the
Expositor, 1892, February, pp. 94—104.
182 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTUEY :
single temple of Jerusalem. It mattered not whether
these sanctuaries were dear and holy to the inhabi-
tants of the towns and villages which possessed them,
whether they were hallowed by pious memories or local
traditions, or whether, having escaped the general idola-
trous tendencies of the age, they were consecrate to
Yahveh and to him alone : all were swept away.
We are not told, but we can well imagine, that the
execution of this provision of the new code caused
poignant distress and met with bitter opposition. Its
results could not have been realized in the assembly at
Jerusalem, which would, moreover, be mainly confined
to the inhabitants of the capital. The Levitical priests
of the local sanctuaries were mostly removed to Jeru-
salem, where they were suffered to occupy an inferior
position as servitors and assistants to the official priest-
hood of the temple.1 The authors of Deuteronomy had
not been unmindful of the cruel effect which the destruc-
tion of the sanctuaries would have upon their ministering
priests, and they had generously intended that such priests
should be admitted to equal rights with the priesthood of
the central temple.2 But as the temple of Jerusalem was
already in all probability supplied with a full complement
of priests, this humane injunction could not be, or was
not, observed, and the two grades of priests hereby
called into existence became the foundation of later
legal developments. A far worse fate was reserved for
illegitimate priests of alien divinities worshipped by
Yahveh' s side. These, apparently, were put to the
1 2 Kings xxiii. 8, 9.
2 Deut. xviii. 6 — 8.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 183
sword.1 Death, too, seems to have been the penalty of
all professional sorcerers, wizards and spirit - mongers.
The decay of the Assyrian empire after the death of
Asurbanipal enabled Josiah to extend his reforms beyond
the borders of Judah, and we are told that he overthrew
the "high places" in the cities of Samaria and slew the
priests who appertained to them. By this iconoclastic
campaign he probably also intended to make good his
claim to include the old northern kingdom of Israel
within his own realm.
Before we attempt to trace the effects of Josiah's re-
formation upon the religious history of his people, it is
necessary to take some notice of the book upon which
his policy had been based. That book was unquestion-
ably a portion of our present Book of Deuteronomy, and
may have extended, apart from certain later interpola-
tions, from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the
twenty-eighth chapter.
Deuteronomy was the product of an alliance between
prophet and priest. It is probable that it was drawn up
by more than one writer, and that at least one represen-
tative of either order had a share in its compilation. It
represents itself to be the code of laws given by God to
Moses upon Mount Horeb, and repeated by him to the
people upon the borders of the promised land. Its object
— hardly concealed under the mask of antiquity — was to
transform the Judah of king Josiah's day into a peculiar
people, holy and just, loving God and following God's
law. Such was also the ideal of the prophets; and
though Deuteronomy contains a fusion of prophetic and
1 2 Kings xxiii. 5; but cf. Stade, Z.A. W., 1885, p. 292.
184 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
of priestly spirit, it is the spirit of the prophets which
upon the whole prevails. But if, of the four eighth-cen-
tury prophets, it is asked to whose teaching Deuteronomy
most closely conforms, the answer is, to Hosea's. Hosea
traced back the moral sins of his people to their aban-
donment of Yahveh : the entire iniquity of the nation was
implied in the worship of Baal. The events of Manasseh's
reign had tended to impress the same idea upon the best
prophetical minds of the seventh century. It was the
key-note of Jeremiah's teaching, and it is the alpha and
omega of Deuteronomy. Scarcely can we now fairly and
fully discern how far the idea was justified by the reality.
But we do know that the idolatrous rites of the times
rested upon, or included, much that was foul and immoral;
witness the bloody Tophet and the houses of the sacred
prostitutes which were denied or destroyed by Josiah.
The men who, in the past, had been most zealous for the
pure and unalloyed worship of Yahveh, had also been
most zealous for social morality, for justice, kindliness
and truth ; and those times of which report said that
they were purest as regards religion, had also been those
in which righteousness and justice had " made their lodg-
ing in the land." l The authors of Deuteronomy believed
that right religion (as they conceived it) coloured the
whole of human character : with the love of Yahveh and
the desire "to walk in all his ways," to serve him with
"all the heart and with all the soul," a good life, in the
strictly moral sense of the word, must inevitably be
combined.
Since the fundamental aim of Deuteronomy was the
1 Isaiah i. 21.
DEUTERONOMY AXD JEREMIAH. 1S5
eradication of all trace or chance of idolatry, whether as
involving the service of other gods, or only that false
worship of Yahveh which, to the reformers, appeared
equally abominable, it was natural that the main bulk
of its exhortations and ordinances should centre upon
this one great object and desire. The severity of Josiah's
reforms faithfully reflects the code from which they
sprang. There must be no tampering with, and no
pardon for, idolatry. Many of the ordinances of Deute-
ronomy are in this respect purely dramatic ; the destruc-
tion of the Canaanites, for instance, was no longer within
the range of practical politics ; but doubtless the authors
of the book would have desired the wholesale annihilation
of any city of Judah which, after the acceptance of the
code, should have re-instituted idolatry.1 Prophetism
never laid aside the touch of savage zeal which charac-
terized its earliest manifestations. For the idolater no
less, but rather more, than for the murderer, death was
the only befitting sentence, and the conception of civic
solidarity, as familiar to the Hebrews as to the Greeks,
sufficiently explains why the guilt of some would neces-
sarily involve the punishment of all.
To purify the worship of Yahveh from every taint of
idolatry, the authors of Deuteronomy not only waged
war upon all material excrescences, such as sacred pillars
and poles as well as teraphim and images, which
were either unworthy of the monotheistic conception of
Yahveh, or common to, and hence inducive of, the wor-
ship of other gods, but, as we have seen, conceived the
remarkable idea of stamping with the brand of idolatry
1 Deut. xiii. 12—18.
186 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTUKY :
every sanctuary of Yahveh outside the capital. It was
a project of extraordinary boldness both in conception
and execution ; but the authors of Deuteronomy were
clearly neither conscious of its full magnitude, nor of
the difficulties which were bound to follow upon its
adoption.
The practical difficulty which arose in dealing with
the ousted local priests has already been alluded to.
Far more serious was the prospective influence of reli-
gious centralization upon the population at large. Until
the reign of Josiah, every slaughter of cattle had partaken
of the character of a sacrifice, and the local altars were
centres of religious feeling — not always of an elevated
kind, but yet genuine so far as it went — in every town
and village. But now there was to be no common
worship of Yahveh except in the capital. Thither
every one must journey who desired to make offering or
supplication to God, and thither, whether it pleased them
or not, were all to wend their way on the three great
yearly festivals. The feasts of Passover, of First Fruits
and of Harvest, were to be no more the occasions of
merry thanksgiving and feasting in every city and hamlet
throughout Judsea; men were to rejoice according to
the provisions of a written law, away from their homes
and from all those scenes and associations which had
been, perchance, the best elements in those feasts of
former times, now branded as idolatrous and illegal.
While the legislators were extremely anxious to main-
tain the joyous character of the three great festivals,
and to encourage the common rejoicing of all the house-
hold before Yahveh, it was not likely that the majority
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 187
of the population would be able to do more than fulfil
the strict letter of the law in its new application : " Three
times a year shall all thy males appear before Yahveh
thy God." Yet though the reformers had scarcely calcu-
lated the gain and loss, history has fully vindicated their
action. For the abolition of the local sanctuaries was
the first step in the substitution of the synagogue for
the temple, of prayer for sacrifice. Nothing was more
opposed to prophetical teaching than the thought that
God's favour could be won, or his wrath averted, by
any multiplication of offerings. And in Deuteronomy
sacrifices have the character of thank-offerings or tri-
butes : sin-offerings are ignored. Since the magical
element is eliminated, the evil effects of sacrifices are
reduced to a minimum.
The single sanctuary, as "Wellhausen finely observes,
was also the natural sequitur of the monotheistic idea.1
For the one God there could be but one abiding earthly
seat. So far as ceremonial worship has a definite object
in Deuteronomy, it is intended to subserve the idea of
Yahveh's historic and peculiar relation to his people.
Moreover, the secularization of animal slaughter was
really a considerable gain. Though it may have left a
temporary gap in the social life of Judaea, it paved the
way for the introduction of a deeper sanctification of
every-day life within the home itself by the fulfilment
of a wider and more comprehensive law. But this is to
anticipate.
If Deuteronomy was prophetist in its comparative
depreciation of sacrifices, it was no less so in the large
1 Abriss, p. 70.
188 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
and prominent place which it assigned to laws of justice
and humanity. In this respect, as in others, it repeats
the provisions of the older Book of the Covenant, and
amplifies them. Justice and kindness between man and
man are as much the ideal of Deuteronomy as the pure
worship of Yahveh. Upon both equally the prosperity
of Israel is declared to depend. And a higher motive,
peculiar to this book, is repeatedly added: "Because
thou wast a bondman in Egypt, therefore art thou com-
manded to do this thing." Even beyond the too fre-
quently oppressed classes of the foreign settler, the
widow, the orphan and the slave, the legislators' tender-
ness and compassion extend to the cattle at the plough
and to the birds among the trees.
But the influence of the priest is distinctly felt in
another branch of the Deuteronomic code, which was
intended to cover the whole life of a citizen, both on its
religious and on its secular side. All law was to the
Israelite religious law, and as such it remained to the
end. Prophets as well as priests would desire that Israel
should be a holy nation, entirely devoted to its God,
blameless in its relations towards him. Isaiah twice
uses the word "holy" as characteristic of the regenerate
Israel. As a condition of "holiness" — that is, of real
dedication and consecration to Yahveh — Isaiah would
certainly .have insisted upon the absence of every idola-
trous taint; but we can hardly imagine him attaching
to the holiness which he demanded injunctions as to
food and drink, or basing such commands upon a spiritual
conception. To the priest, matters of ritual were natu-
rally of high importance. In the old Book of the Cove-
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 189
nant (if the passage be not a later insertion), the law is
found: "Ye shall be holy men unto me; and flesh in
the field, that is torn of beasts, ye shall not eat."1 This
priestly idea of holiness is echoed in Deuteronomy. It
is connected with the desire to exclude from Israel's
life everything which savours of idolatry. Israel's devo-
tion to God must be ceremonially indicated by dif-
ference of rite and custom from the rites and customs of
other races. For in antiquity, be it remembered, there
was scarcely a rite or a custom which was not more
or less closely and consciously connected with religion.
Anxiety that Israel should avoid everything heathen and
idolatrous, and anxiety that Israel should fulfil the tradi-
tional priestly ordinances of (material) holiness, are co-
ordinate objects of Deuteronomy's ceremonial legislation,
and doubtless in the minds of its authors they were
scarcely distinguishable from one another.
It is natural that to the modern reader the most
attractive portion of the original Book of Deuteronomy
should be its introductory setting, from chapter v. to
the end of chapter xi. Many scholars believe that the
book "found" in the temple and read before Josiah did
not include these preliminary chapters. For myself, I
follow Kuenen and others in still adhering to the con-
trary view. But even if not written at the same time
as chapters xii. — xxvi., they were certainly not added
very long afterwards ; and whether or not written by the
same hands as those which drew up the more directly
legislative chapters, they breathe the same spirit, and
look at religion from the same point of view. An intense
1 Exodus xxii. 31.
190 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
and eager earnestness pervades them. With frequent
iteration, their author implores his people to choose the
true way, and to walk in it without swerving to the right
hand or to the left. The requirements of Yahveh, to be
set forth in the code, are not difficult to understand or
to carry out. They may be easily fulfilled when once
the fundamental principle of true religion has been
realized and accepted, " To fear Yahveh, and to love him
with all the heart and all the soul."
Love of God is the peculiar and novel feature of the
introduction to Deuteronomy. Enthusiastic himself about
God, the writer expects a similar enthusiasm from Israel.
Who is Israel's God ? The God of the Deuteronomist
is the God of the eighth-century prophets, the God
before whose awful and all-embracing majesty the divine
powers of other lands have faded utterly away. He is a
single and self-consistent Deity, the one Yahveh, " God
of gods and Lord of lords," to whom belong "the heaven
and the heaven of heavens, the earth also with all that
is therein."1 And this supreme God has chosen to adopt
one people as his own, and upon condition of its single-
hearted devotion to himself and to his laws, to cover it
with benefits which it has not deserved. Should not
such an extraordinary position, so amazing a privilege,
suffice to ensure a moral superiority over other nations ?
Should not Israel respond to the gracious blessings of its
God with humility and gratitude? Should it not be
transformed into a holy community, intent upon the
service of God, and dedicating to that end all its strength
and zeal — transformed, in more modern phrase, from a
1 vi. 4, x. 17.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. .191
people to a church ? To realize such a transformation
is the purpose, as it is the ideal, of Deuteronomy.
On one point, however, the book does not reflect the
highest conceptions of the prophets. It aimed at pro-
ducing a holy people, worthy of its peculiar destiny as
God's chosen. But here its purpose stops. There is
no thought for the world beyond. There is, indeed,
no vehement particularism such as we find in Ezekiel
and in some of the later post-exilic literature; while
the Moabite and Ammonite are excluded from the con-
gregation of Yahveh "even to the tenth generation,"
the Edomite and Egyptian, on the contrary, may enter into
it in the third generation ; they must not be " abhorred"
by the Israelites, the one because he is their brother,
the other because they were strangers in his land.1
But though Yahveh is the God of the whole earth, it
does not appear to have occurred to the authors of
Deuteronomy that it was the duty of Yahveh's people
to spread the knowledge of him beyond the borders of
Israel, or that this extended recognition, whether to be
effected by Israel or not, was the ultimate justification
and aim of Israel's election and privilege. Hinted at
by the eighth-century prophets, this highest and only
moral view of Israel's peculiar position among the nations
of the world was to be taken up and worked out, some
eighty years after Deuteronomy, by a great prophet of
the exile.
"Were the authors of the new code confident of success ?
Prof. Cheyne has spoken of the hopefulness of Deute-
ronomy which penetrates its every page.2 I am myself
1 xxiii. 3, 7. 2 Jeremiah, p. 75.
11)2 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
inclined to doubt whether this apparent hopefulness is
not for the most part assumed. There seems to be more
of the authors' own feelings in their frequent complaints
against the national obstinacy. "Kot for thy righteous-
ness does Yahveh give thee this good land to possess it ;
for thou art a stiff-necked people." Emphatic is the
appeal : " Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart,
and be no more stiff-necked." It was rather a lack of
hopefulness which prompted the reiterated assurance that
the following of Yahveh's commands and the walking in
his ways would alone, but would unfailingly, bring happi-
ness and prosperity. This, again, is prophetic teaching,
but it is insisted on with an intensity which brings out
its perilous one-sidedness. It was not yet possible to get
at the people, or to secure their willing allegiance to
Yahveh's law, except by promises of material well-being
or by threats of material distress. At the same time,
these promises and threats were no make-believe on the
part of their authors : ineradicable in the Israelite heart
was the conviction that piety and prosperity, wickedness
and adversity, respectively are, and ever must be, insepa-
rable allies. But Deuteronomy had not yet reached the
position, so often neglected or misunderstood, of the later
Judaism. It promised happiness as the result of obedi-
ence to its laws ; it declared such obedience to be easy
and compatible with a joyous and gladsome life : it did
not yet assert, as Judaism afterwards asserted, that obe-
dience itself, be external circumstances what they may,
involves and secures the highest happiness conceivable
by man.
Such was the Book of Covenant which king Josiah
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 193
and his people accepted as the law of the state. The
mere acceptance of a binding and universally acknow-
ledged religious law was fraught with results which were,
to some extent, independent of the actual enactments
which it contained. It has often been pointed out that
Deuteronomy tended to exalt the power of the priest-
hood, and to undermine and render superfluous the office
of the prophet. It contemplates, indeed, a continual suc-
cession of prophets to be obeyed like Moses; but in
ordinary circumstances the guide of life is clearly to be
the law, and its interpreters the priests of Jerusalem.
Through the abolition of the local sanctuaries, the public
worship of Yahveh, the outward manifestation of religion,
is conducted at the capital alone, by a corps d1 elite among
the sons of Levi ; it was inevitable that the importance
of this select body should gradually but surely increase
both in its own eyes and in those of the people at large.
It is not possible in this place to pursue the literary
development and completion of the Deuteronomic code.
It must suffice to say that, shortly before or after the fall
of the state in 58G, there was added a further historical
introduction, consisting of the first four chapters of our
present book.1 These chapters are written in the general
spirit and style of Deuteronomy; and there seems, indeed,
to have quickly formed itself a regular school of writers
upon the Deuteronomic pattern, who looked at history and
religion from the Deuteronomic point of view. During
the exile these writers added some chapters at the close,
and perhaps interpolated a few sections in the body of
1 Their precise date is uncertain, nor are they -wholly "aus einern
Guss." Cf. Corn ill, Einleitung in das alte Testament.
194 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
the main work. They also edited the historical records
of the Monarchy and of the Judges, and supplied them
with the framework and the criticisms which were for
long accepted by posterity as of equal authority with the
documents themselves.
The new Code was promulgated in 621, and Josiah's
reign continued for some seventeen years. "We have
no record of the religious condition of Judah imme-
diately after the great reformation. No complete pro-
phecy of Jeremiah can be assigned to them ; we have
only the prophet's estimate of Josiah himself, as of one
who did justice and judged the cause of the needy and
the poor — a panegyric which we may with probability
infer to have been specially applicable to the later period
of his reign after the great reform.1 Jeremiah, though
not one of its authors, was certainly an admirer and
advocate of Deuteronomy. The 11th chapter of his book,
which as a whole reflects the condition of things in the
reign of Jehoiakim, opens with the recitation of a divine
command to repeat the words of "this Covenant" in the
cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, and to
urge men to fulfil them. It has been conjectured that
"this Covenant" was no other than Deuteronomy, and
that "Jeremiah undertook an itinerating mission to the
people of Judah, beginning with the capital, in order to
set forth the main objects of Deuteronomy, and to
persuade men to live in accordance with its precepts."2
How far the prophet was satisfied with the results of his
mission, we do not know. It is, however, only too
probable that the reformation, suddenly and violently
1 Jer. xxii. 16. 2 Cheyne, Jeremiah, p. 56.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 195
effected, was for the majority merely skin-deep. It
dealt with externals, and was not the genuine expression
of a wide-felt need or of a spiritual movement. And yet
it was more than well able to produce one result, which
in the sequel shocked the moral nature of Jeremiah to
its profoundest depths. The symbols of idolatry were
destroyed or hidden away ; the temple — the only sanc-
tuary of Yahveh — stood out cleansed and purified of its
heathen and defiling accretions ; as head of the state
there ruled a man who had made Yahveh's law his own,
and sought to discharge his office with integrity and zeal.
Might it not be assumed that the favour of Yahveh was
now permanently secured ? A perilous assumption both
morally and politically ! In morality, it led to indifference
and corruption ; in politics, to arrogance and clef eat.
"With the death of Asurbanipal, the Assyrian empire,
as we have already seen, entered upon its final period of
dissolution. Babylon revolted ; and an Assyrian general
of Babylonian birth who had been sent to quell the
insurrection, put himself at its head and became the
founder of a new dynasty. The Medes penetrated further
and further into Assyria. Nahum, a prophet of Judah,
predicted the speedy fall of the national foe. Before
long, Cyaxares, king of Media, advanced to the Assyrian
capital and besieged it. The invasion of Media by the
Scythians compelled him temporarily to raise the siege,
but about the year 609 he was once more before the
walls of jSmeveh. The moment seemed opportune for
Necho II;, the son of Psammetichus II., king of Egypt,
to seize a portion of the Assyrian empire which now lay
unprotected. He invaded Palestine, with the possible
o2
196 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
ulterior thought of extending once more the limits of the
old Egyptian empire to the banks of the Euphrates. But
Josiah was not willing to have escaped one vassalage
only to fall into another. Though Necho had not entered
Judoean territory, he was invading Israelite land over
which Josiah was attempting to assert and extend his
sovereignty. With the full confidence that he was under
the protection of Yahveh, and that he was vindicating
his rights, he set out against the Egyptian king. The
two armies met at Megiddo, in the plain of Jezreel. The
men of Judah were defeated : their monarch was slain.
Meanwhile the Egyptian victor continued his march.
Laconically and without explanation, the historian records
that Jehoahaz, Josiah's son, after a three months' reign
at Jerusalem, was put in chains by Necho at Eiblah, in
the land of Hamath ; while his brother Eliakim, under
the name of Jehoiakim, was set up as the vassal ruler of
Judah by its new over-lord, the Egyptian king. A fine
of two hundred talents of silver and ten of gold was
imposed by Necho, and exacted from his subjects by
Jehoiakim.1
What was the feeling in Judah ? A bitter shock of
disappointment thrilled through the land. Were the pro-
mises of Deuteronomy delusory ? Reformers lost heart ;
their cause was discredited. Reaction and idolatry were
«oon in the ascendant. Even a three months' reign was
sufficient, according to the Book of Kings, for Jehoahaz
to show leanings towards the old ways. Jehoiakim, his
brother, son of Josiah though he was, followed the same
policy. With him, the idolatrous tendency was combined
1 2 Kinss xxiii. 29—35.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 197
with an oppressive despotism, which showed itself in a
passion for palace-building, though the means to pay the
enforced labourers were wanting. In addition to this
specific accusation, Jeremiah gives him a very bad cha-
racter : " Thine eyes and thine heart are not but for thy
covetousness, and for to shed innocent blood, and for
oppression and for violence, to do it."1 Thus once again
was a great prophet of the age able to draw the inference
and teach it, that idolatry and moral obliquity go hand
in hand.
Deuteronomy was not formally abrogated ; it was
ignored. The local sanctuaries, with their syncretistio
worship, sprang again into existence. Still worse was
the effect of Josiah's death upon the reformers them-
selves. We have seen that, to men who had but imper-
fectly assimilated the moral teaching of the prophets,
the loyal acceptance of Deuteronomy might only confirm
them in the belief that religion was concerned with ritual
rather than with morality. In this error they were
encouraged by the defeat at Megiddo. Their conception
of Yahveh's character tended to become lower ; their con-
fidence in the inviolability of Jerusalem, more obstinate
and material. Of two things, one : either Yahveh was
not the omnipotent God, as Isaiah and Micah had pro-
claimed, or the Egyptian hegemony was but a temporary
misfortune, from which deliverance would soon be granted.
The one deduction was made and acted upon by the
party of idolatry : the other, by those who would doubt-
less call themselves the national party, and who professed
their unalterable allegiance to the national God. They
1 Jer. xxii. 13—19.
198 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY!
would explain the calamities of the time either, in the
old and pre-prophetic manner, upon the pitiful hypothesis
that the anger of Yahveh was occasionally unmotived, or
upon the less irreligious supposition that the defeat at
Megiddo was a trial of their faith.1 Both explanations
would suggest the counsel of paying court to Yahveh
by costlier and more frequent sacrifices, either to win
back his favour or else to assure him of their own fide-
lity. To this party, which may easily have included
several grades both morally and religiously, a majority
of contemporary prophets and priests belonged. They
preached an easy doctrine of comfort and consolation :
Yahveh would protect his own; the temple was the
guarantee of his favour. The call to repentance was either
thought to be no longer necessary, or it was forgotten
and ignored. In Isaiah's time too there had been pro-
phets willing (did not their livelihood depend upon it ?)
to comply with the current demand for "smooth things
and deceits"; the same teaching was put forward again
with greater parade of orthodoxy and with more fanatical
assurance. But the true voice of prophecy was not long
silent. If the moral reformation, desired by the eighth-
century prophets and by Jeremiah, their successor and
disciple, had kept pace with the ceremonial reformation
effected by Josiah — if no moral complaint of moment
could have been truthfully alleged against the people
whose army had been defeated at Megiddo — then, indeed,
we may surmise that even the faith of Jeremiah would
have received a shock not easily to be repaired or with-
stood. But inasmuch as the moral and spiritual results
1 Stade, GescMchte, Vol. I. p. 672.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 199
of Josiah's reformation had not answered to the prophet's
early anticipations, it was possible for him to recover or
maintain the wonted prophetic attitude, and to become
once more the preacher of repentance and judgment. In
this role we find him active during the reign of Jehoiakim.
It would seem that, with a very small minority of
other prophets, of whom the name of one only has come
down to us, he assumed from the beginning of the new
reign a position of open and strenuous opposition to the
moral condition of Judah and to the religious policy of
the king. He foretold the fall of the State, unless speedy
repentance should intervene; but as yet he did not
definitely declare the name of the enemy who should be
God's instrument of destruction. Judah was the vassal
of Necho, but it was not to Egypt that the prophet
looked for a further and more comprehensive judgment.
Jeremiah was right. The Egyptian supremacy was
not of long duration. Nineveh fell to Cyaxares in 607.
Nabopolagsar of Babylon, having secured himself towards
the east and north by a close alliance with the Medes
(his son Nebuchadrezzar was married to Amy lis, daughter
of Cyaxares), determined to secure for his own kingdom
the Assyrian dominions of the west. He sent Nebu-
chadrezzar with an army against the Egyptians. Necho
advanced to the Euphrates, and the battle which decided
the fate of Palestine was fought out at Carchemish in
605.. The Egyptians suffered a decisive defeat, and fled.
Nebuchadrezzar was, however, compelled to defer an
immediate advance. His father had died, and he hurried
to Babylon to secure the throne. Returning to his army
the following year (G04 — 603), he gradually made his
200 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
way through Syria, clearing the country as he went of
all Egyptian garrisons which may have been left behind
by Necho in his retreat from Carchemish. In the year
600 Nebuchadrezzar was master of all Palestine as far
as the " stream of Egypt," and Jehoiakim, king of Judah,
became his vassal.
It is possible that, even before Carchemish, Jeremiah
had heard much of the growing power of Nabopolassar,
and realized that the Babylonians were to be the instru-
ments of doom ; or he may — a very interesting possibility
— have been compelled by the fervour of his faith to
assume that some judgment would infallibly come, though
ignorant of the quarter whence it should fall. "In the
beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim," and thus probably
before Carchemish, he received the divine call to proclaim
the impending judgment in the most open manner and
the most definite terms. He was to speak in the temple
court before the assembled multitude, and at a time
(perhaps on some day of festival) when many would
come to worship from all the cities of Judah. The pro-
phecy then uttered is preserved to us in a double form,
shortened in the 26th chapter, which gives the scene
and its result, expanded and interpolated in the 7th, and
possibly also in the 8th and 9th chapters. Jeremiah
here comes forward, not merely preaching war to the
knife against idolatry and immorality, but re-asserting
in the strongest possible form the old prophetic doctrine
of the vanity of ceremonial worship and outward religion.
The temple of the north had fallen through Israel's sin,
and now, unless there was thorough amendment, the
temple of the south, in which deluded prophets encou-
DEUTERONOMY AND JEEEMIAH. 201
raged the people to put their trust, should be done to as
was done to Shiloh. Stones are powerless to save ; sacri-
fices are idle. "Thus saith Yahveh of Hosts, the God
of Israel : Put your burnt- offerings unto your sacrifices,
and eat the flesh. For I spake not unto your fathers,,
nor commanded them in the day that I brought them
out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offerings or
sacrifices; but this thing commanded I them, saying,
Obey my voice and I will be your God, and ye shall be
my people, and walk ye in all the ways that I have
commanded you, that it may be well unto you."1 What
does God's voice say, and what are his ways ? To Jere-
miah the answer was so certain as to need no telling. It
is the old burden of the prophets : negatively, no idol-
atry ; positively, "Do justice, love kindness, and walk
humbly before God." But this was not the current
teaching among Jeremiah's adversaries, whether prophets
or priests, nor was it (it must be confessed) in strict
accordance with the teaching of Deuteronomy. Had
Jeremiah's estimate of that book been affected by his-
disappointment at its failure ? In one passage in this
very prophecy there is an angry and mocking allusion
to a supposed law or teaching of Yahveh, by the pos-
session of which his opponents lay claim to a superior
wisdom, but it is not certain that any direct reference to
Deuteronomy was intended. " How do ye say, We are
wise, and the teaching of Yahveh is with us? Yea,,
1 Jer. vii. 21 — 23. Even the burnt-offerings, which were usually
wholly consumed by fire, i.e. given to Yahveh, can be eaten as if they
were "mere flesh." God will have none of them. The permission or
command is, of course, contemptuous and sarcastic.
202 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
behold, for a lie has it wrought, the lying pen of the
scribes."1 At any rate, we have Jeremiah in the begin-
ning of Jehoiakim's reign preaching the doctrine of the
older prophets in its barest and most unequivocal form,
and vehemently opposing any sort of compromise between
the true religion of Yahveh and that popular religion of
ceremonialism and superstition, to which many a priest
and prophet, by a misreading of Deuteronomy, had yielded
too ready an adhesion. We see him also rejecting the
doctrine, developed from Isaiah, of the inviolability of
Jerusalem, and, like Micah, proclaiming for city and for
land ruin and desolation. He names no place, but he
already anticipates captivity. If Jeremiah foretold a
judgment before Carchemish, his convictions were all
the stronger after the news of the battle had reached
Jerusalem. He was not deceived by the temporary halt
of the Babylonians upon Nabopolassar's death. The
necessary instruments of God's righteous wrath could be
no other than they; a judgment was imminent for Judah,
and Nebuchadrezzar, under Yahveh, must be the man
predestined to inflict it.
Before the year of Carchemish had passed, he foretold
the coming doom, not only of Judah, but of the neigh-
bouring states. It was not surprising that he incurred
hatred and hostility. A summary such as this does not
permit the reproduction of those two dramatic occasions,
one before and one after Carchemish, in which Jeremiah
went near to paying the penalty of his boldness with his
life.2 Urijah, who prophesied in a similar strain, was
less fortunate. When he fled for shelter into Egypt,
1 Jer. viii. 8. - Jer. xxvi. xxxvi.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 203
Jehoiakim, at that time still the vassal of Necho, was
able to procure his extradition and " slew him with the
sword."' Prof. Cheyne has suggested that when, in
601, Nebuchadrezzar advanced into Judsea, Jehoiakim' s
instant submission may have been partly due to the
influence of Jeremiah's prophecy.1
For three years Jehoiakim remained the " servant" of
the king of Babylon (G01 — 59S); "then he turned and
rebelled against him." "We know little about Jeremiah's
teaching in these three years of calm. For after the
momentous occasion on which Baruch had read the roll
of his prophecies "in the ears of all the people," and
Jehudi the Ethiopian had read the same roll before the
princes and the king, Jeremiah had been compelled to
lead a life of concealment. The date of this reading is
in the Hebrew text assigned to the year after Carchernish
(604); but Graetz and Cheyne, following the Septuagint
text, place it in 601, the year of Nebuchadrezzar's inva-
sion of Judah, and the eighth of Jehoiakim's reign.2
After the revolt the prophet seems to have been able, if
not to appear in public, at any rate to issue written pre-
dictions of the inevitable and impending doom. It was
doubtless at the instigation of Necho that Jehoiakim
rebelled. The neighbouring states remained faithful to
Babylon; and before Nebuchadrezzar himself appeared
upon the scene to inflict a summary chastisement upon
his rebellious vassal, bands of Syrians, Aloabites and
Ammonites, in conjunction with a small army of Baby-
lonians drawn from the garrisous in Palestine, invaded
1 Jeremiah, p. 146.
2 Jer. xxxvi. 9; cf. Cheyne, in his Commentary on Jeremiah, ad. loc.
204 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY :
and ravaged Judah.1 In the midst of this preliminary
campaign Jehoiakim died (597), and was succeeded by
his son Jehoiachin. Before three months were gone,
Nebuchadrezzar's army had arrived before Jerusalem
and commenced the siege. When the king joined his
forces before the city, Jehoiachin, feeling that further
resistance was hopeless, capitulated without conditions.
It was the beginning of the end. A deportation upon a
large scale was immediately set about. Seven thousand
" men of might," one thousand craftsmen, together with
the court, the officers of state and the king himself, were
carried captive to Babylonia. But in addition to these
and their families, there must have been many repre-
sentatives of other classes, and neither the order of
priests nor prophets was wanting among the exiles.
As regards the capital, at any rate, the flower of its
inhabitants both in wealth and education was thus
removed. Over those that remained, in Jerusalem or
elsewhere, Nebuchadrezzar appointed another vassal king
in the person of Mattaniah, a younger son of Josiah
and uncle of Jehoiachin. His name was changed to
Zedekiah.
Even now the national spirit was still unbroken, and
there was no disposition to live quietly, as Jeremiah
advised, under the supremacy of Babylon. Nor was the
religious and moral condition of the kingdom improved
by the deportations of 597 ; and Zedekiah, a youth of
twenty-one, had not the weight of character to check
the rising flood of insubordination, injustice and corrup-
tion. Still some seven or eight years passed before the
1 2 Kin"s xxiv. 2.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 205
inevitable rebellion was actually begun. Of the internal
condition of Judah during these years we have valuable
information from two contemporary sources, from Jere-
miah in Jerusalem, and from Ezekiel in Babylonia. There
seem to have been frequent communications between the
two sections of Jews at home and abroad, and each section
was well aware of the circumstances and feelings of the
other.1
Though we may make some deduction for the exagge-
ration which was perhaps inevitable in prophetic oratory,
the social morality of Judah appears to have been appal-
lingly bad. The new rulers abused the offices they
held; injustice, oppression and cruelty were rampant
and unpunished. Religiously, the evil precedents of
Jehoiakim's reign were still followed and even enlarged
under Zedekiah. Idolatry steadily increased ; to many,
the capture of Jerusalem in 597, and the exile of king
and nobles, could only signify the impotence of Yahveh.
On the other side were the mass of those who hugged
the delusion that Yahveh's righteous anger was satisfied
by the judgment which had already been executed, and
that deliverance from the Babylonian yoke and the
return of the exiles were near at hand. To this party,
as we already know, the bulk of the priestly and pro-
phetic orders belonged. Doubtless they called themselves
patriots, and there is no reason to deny them the title,
even though their greatest opponent was in truth a
truer patriot than they. These prophets were not all
of them either vicious or deceitful. Perhaps now-a-days
the tendency is to rehabilitate these so-called " false
1 Jer. xxix. ; Ezekiel viii., &c.
206 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
prophets" too easily, for the evidence of Ezekiel and
Jeremiah cannot be lightly put aside. But there were
clearly wide gradations of character among them, from
the hypocritical charlatan to the honest if deluded enthu-
siast.
A specimen of the "false prophet" at his very best
we still possess in Habakkuk, whose prophecies, though
theybelong chronologically to the reign of Jehoiakim, may
be used to illustrate the subject before us.1 Habakkuk,
writing most probably between the revolt of Jehoiakim
and the investment of Jerusalem, while acknowledging
that the ravages of the enemy are the just punishment
of Judah's sin, yet contrasts the guilt of the heathen foe
with the relative " righteousness " of Judah, and con-
fidently appeals to God for the chastisement and expul-
sion of the invader.2
A much lower type of nationalism in prophecy was
represented by Hananiah, and yet he may well have been
as sincere and as sure of his inspiration as Jeremiah
himself. In the fourth year of Zedekiah's reign he
openly predicted that within two years the Babylonian
yoke would be broken, and Jehoiachin, "with all the
captives of Judah," brought back again to Jerusalem.
In the ears of the populace was it not natural that the
message which seemed to breathe " the keener patriotism
should sound the more sacred"?3 Jeremiah himself
(like Ezekiel) never doubted of the issue. Though
always ready to allow that a further and more extreme
1 I do not think this too strong a statement, in spite of Kuenen's
warning, OndcrzocJc, Vol. II., 2nd ed., pp. 342, 393.
2 Habakkuk i. 13—17. 3 Jer. xxviii.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 207
judgment might be averted, it was only upon two con-
ditions : moral reformation, and thorough- going submis-
sion to Babylon. But the one condition he saw day by
day unfulfilled, while in the maintenance of the other
he did not believe. His hopes were fixed upon the
exiles in Babylonia. They are " the good figs" to whom
shall be given a heart to know Yahveh, and who will
return unto him with their whole heart. They of Judah
are the "very naughty figs," and among them shall be
sent "the sword and the famine and the pestilence, till
they be consumed from off the land."1 He bids the
exiles possess their souls in patience; for the time of
restoration, though it will come surely, will not come
soon. With remarkable sagacity he entreats them to
put aside all thoughts of rebellion or of vengeance ; let
them settle down in the lands assigned to them; let
them build houses and dwell in them, plant gardens and
eat their fruit ; let them seek the welfare of the cities in
which they live, for in that welfare their own is involved.2
It reflects a good deal of light upon the popular religion
of the time that the men of Judah were inclined to look
down upon the exiles, and say of them: "Ye are far
from Yahveh ; unto us is Yahveh's land given in posses-
sion."3 Ezekiel, from whom we learn this, shares the
opinion of Jeremiah : the new Israel shall be born from
the captivity.
The story of Zedekiah's revolt, the siege and fall of
Jerusalem in the year 58G, cannot be related here. Nor
can we follow the fortunes of Jeremiah during this ter-
rible period, while he clung, in spite of persecution and
1 Jer. xxiv. 2 Jer. xxix. 3 Ezekiel xi. 15.
208 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY I
imprisonment, to his old counsel of unconditional sub-
mission. This time there were no half-measures. The
walls of Jerusalem were razed ; the temple burnt ; the
sacred vessels taken away to Babylon. The kingdom
was abolished ; over a sparse and needy population, pea-
sants rather than townsmen, " the poor of the land,"
Gedaliah, the son of that Ahikam who, at a critical
moment, had helped to save the life of Jeremiah, and
himself in all probability a supporter of Jeremiah's
policy, was appointed ruler, with his seat of government,
not at Jerusalem, but at Mizpah. We do not know the
exact number of those who were sent to join the earlier
band of exiles in Babylon — perhaps of men alone not
less than ten thousand.
The fortunes of those over whom Gedaliah ruled form
an interesting episode, on which, however, I cannot
linger here. The attempt to revive, under sadly altered
conditions, the national life, was doomed to failure : the
murder of Gedaliah put an end to hopes which during
his brief rule had still been cherished by some. Jeremiah,
indeed, refused to abandon all hope even then, and after
the rescue effected by Johanan the son of Kareah and
his bands of freebooters, urged the people to "abide in
the land," and to await in confidence a better time, which
Yahveh the God of Israel would surely bring. Eeaders
of Jeremiah will remember that his advice was rejected,
and that the entire troop, including all the "remnant"
which had been collected together at Mizpah, with the
soldiers of Johanan and his brother captains, took refuge
in Egypt. There, amid mournful surroundings of obsti-
nate idolatry, his teaching spurned and misunderstood,
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 209
his country waste and desolate, the curtain falls upon the
great prophet's life in darkness and isolation. Neither
those Jews who fled to Egypt, nor those who, after all
ravages and deportations, still remained in Judah, con-
tributed anything further to the development of their
religion.1
Though four of our five Lamentations over the fall of
Jerusalem were possibly written in Judah, and may serve
as evidence "that the educated class was to some extent
represented"2 among those who were not carried into
exile, the general level of religion must gradually have
degenerated. The neighbouring tribes were not slow to
make their way into the depopulated country, and to
some extent to mix with the remaining Jews. The
leaders of religious thought and the expounders of the
religious literature had been deported to Babylon. To
the exiles in Babylon, as Jeremiah arid Ezekiel felt, the
fortunes of their religion as well as their race were now
entrusted.
The scene of the next Lecture will thus be laid in
Babylonia. But before we take up the thread of history
among the exiles, something must be said as to the
degree of development which the religion had reached
before the national life was thus violently interrupted.
It appeared likely that had Sennacherib captured
Jerusalem in 701, and treated Judah as his father had
treated Israel, the effects of national overthrow would
have been the same in both cases. What had been the
kind and degree of religious improvement in the hundred
1 2 Kings xxiv. 10 — 26; Jer. xxxix.— xliv.
2_ Cheyne, Jeremiah, p. 177.
P
210 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY I
and fifteen years which, had elapsed between the fulfil-
ment of Isaiah's prediction and the fulfilment of Jere-
miah's? Upon the whole we may answer that it was
not so much that there was any great advance upon the
religious teaching of the eighth century, as that this
teaching had been meanwhile widely enough accepted to
consolidate and maintain the religious individuality of
an exiled people. For although Jeremiah seems to have
taught in isolation, it is to be borne in mind that he
presented the prophetic doctrine in a peculiarly unattrac-
tive form. It was only a very few spiritual enthusiasts
like himself or like Urijah who could digest more of that
teaching than is reflected in Deuteronomy. But it was
being more and more borne in upon widening circles of
the people at large that Yahveh, Israel's God, was dif-
ferent in capacity and character from the gods of the
heathen world, and that Israel in rank and destiny was
other and higher than the surrounding nations.1
Of the religious level to which the best minds outside
the prophetic circle had risen at the beginning of the sixth
century, or, more precisely, after and through the religious
awakening which followed upon the fall of Jerusalem,
the Book of Lamentations (of which the third chapter,
as a later addition, must be excluded) gives us a certain
measure of insight.2 Its writers are overwhelmed with
1 Cf. Ezekiel xxv. 8.
2 It is possible that the Lamentations were written in Babylon some
while after the fall of Jerusalem. As Prof. Cheyne (Expositor, April,
1892, p. 258) has said, Lam. v. 20 "points rather to the end than to
the beginning of the exile," and there are parallels between some verses
in Lam. ii. and the Book of Ezekiel : cf. Cornill's EinJeltung. But
the general tone of the Lamentations seems to me to reflect no later
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 211
grief at their nation's fall : they lament the fate of
" Yahveli's anointed, the breath of our nostrils," of the
priests and prophets who were slain in Yahveh's sanc-
tuary, for whose persons the fierce foe had no respect.
Worst of all is the ruin of the temple, dishonoured by
heathen spoilers whom Yahveh had forbidden to enter
into his congregation, abhorred now by Yahveh himself.
But throughout there runs the consciousness that the
oalamrty has been sent because of transgression, for the
sins of prophets and priests, who have shed the blood of
the just in the midst of Jerusalem. "Yahveh is right-
eous ; for I have rebelled against his commandments."
These confessions are interspersed with wild cries of
vengeance against the enemy, and especially against the
neighbouring nations who exulted over Judah's fall and
showed even more cruelty than the Babylonians them-
selves. Surely the anger of God must now be satisfied
— the old thought of Jehoiakim's day and Zedekiah's.
And another not unfamiliar voice is also heard, which
we shall hear again in Babylonia : if Yahveh is wrathful
still, it must be for iniquities of the past generations, for
the sins, perhaps, of Manasseh's reign, even yet unatoned.
" Our fathers have sinned and are not, and we have borne
their iniquities."
Thus the Lamentations display many elements of the
prophetic teaching, though in forms less pure than in the
prophetical writings themselves, and mingled with alien
teaching than Jeremiah's, and I have therefore noticed them in this
place: cf. also Lb'hr, Die Klagelieder des Jeremias, 1891, pp. 26, 27;
Dyserinck, " De klaagliederen uit het Hebreeuwsch opnieuw vertaald,"
Theol Tijd., 1892, p. 359, &c.
p2
212 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
and lower ideas. Not as yet is the whole of what the
prophets have taught incorporated in the national con-
sciousness. Most conspicuous by their absence, though
this absence is sufficiently accounted for by the circum-
stances of the time, are allusions to the prophetic univer-
salism and to the advent of a golden or " Messianic" age.
The darkness of the present is not lit up by any steady
ray of hope for the future.
There were two further reasons why the exile of 586
produced a religious result different from that which
would have followed upon an exile in 700. In the first
place, it was of considerable importance that the deporta-
tions did not take place all at once, but that the first
colony of exiles had ten years in which to grow habi-
tuated to its anomalous religious position, before temple
and state were finally destroyed. Secondly, the f>eople
took with them into their exile a considerable religious
literature, in the study, development, editing and ex-
pounding of which there lay a rich store of condensation
for sacrifice and temple ceremonial. Eeligious teachers
were better equipped in 586 than they would have been
in 700. The priests, in spite of the bitter accusations
brought against them by Jeremiah, were many of them
very different from the priests of Hosea : if they still
clung to temple-worship and to much outward cere-
monialism, they had also imbibed the doctrines of the
one and single Yahveh and of civic morality. The exiles
of Judah had thus ampler and better spiritual fare to
sustain them in the foreign land than the exiles of Israel.
Hence it is that some of the noblest chapters of the Old
Testament were written upon alien soil.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 213
It is a more doubtful and delicate question whether
the seventh century witnessed any progress in the reli-
gion itself ; whether Jeremiah taught a fuller and purer
faith than Isaiah. A generation ago it was supposed
that a considerable quantity of Biblical material was
to be assigned to the seventh century; Job, the noble
introduction to Proverbs, and many of the finest Psalms,
were usually regarded as contemporary with Jeremiah.
But a later criticism, which I believe to be more
accurate, has relegated Job, Proverbs and the Psalter,
to the post-exilic era. For seventh-century literature
there remain only Deuteronomy, Nahum, Zephaniah,
Habakkuk and Jeremiah. Nor are we even yet free
from further limitation. By far the greatest of the
seventh -century writers is Jeremiah; but his book,
because of its very popularity, has been undoubtedly
subjected to accretions and revisions, the exact number
and extent of which it would be hard to estimate with
certainty. The result is that it is difficult to ascertain
with accuracy every element of Jeremiah's teaching,
while many of the usual test and illustrative passages
are of disputed authenticity. A single instance will
make my meaning clear. In a most valuable, if too
doctrinaire, monograph upon the theology of the Pro-
phets, published in 187-3, Prof. Duhm gives a sketch
of the religious teaching of each prophet individually.
He finds the central point of Jeremiah's religion in
the spiritual communion (sittlich-religidse Gcmeinschaft)
of the individual soul with God. But almost all the
passages upon which Duhm relies for the proof or elabo-
ration of his opinion are included among those which
214 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
Prof. Stade, in his "History of Israel," has noted as
secondary and unauthentic I1
There seem, however, to be two points in which some
religious advance was made. In the first place, it would
appear that at the close of the seventh century or at the
opening of the sixth the monotheistic position had been
finally achieved. "Without in any way relinquishing his
special function as God of Israel, Yahveh became the only
divine power for earth and heaven. Jewish monotheism
had passed beyoud the stage of monolatry. But it was not
till the end of the exile that emphasized religious use was
made of the larger doctrine. Monolatry passed into mono-
theism gradually and half -unconsciously ; other more pre-
sent and pressing subjects were before the minds of the
seventh-century prophets and lawgivers, to the exclu-
sion of such a theoretical question as the impotence and
unreality of other gods, not only for Israel (which had
been urged before and was now urged again), but also-
for the heathen nations themselves. Yet as the dates of
great achievements, whether in material discovery or
spiritual revelation, have a peculiar interest, it is worth
remarking that the prophecies of Jeremiah and the writ-
ings of the later Deuteronomists scarcely admit of any
other interpretation than that their writers had reached,
though they may not have fully realized, the pure mono-
theistic conception.
It is hardly justifiable, with Prof. Stade, to discount
the evidence of such monotheistic passages either by
excising them as secondary, or by explaining away their
seemingly obvious meaning. Most critics suppose that
1 Geschichte, Vol. I. p. 646, n. 2.
DELTER0X0MY AND JEREMIAH. 215
the Song of Moses was written before the fall of Jeru-
salem, and its language upon the point at issue is clear
and decisive : "I, yea I, am He (i.e. the God), and there
is no God beside me." 1 And in a famous verse in the
fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, compiled probably at
the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth
century, the latent or practical monotheism of the eighth-
century prophets has passed into a monotheism which
is conscious and theoretic, and is pressed home to its
full conclusion: "Know, therefore, this day, and con-
sider it in thine heart, that Yahveh he is the God, in
heaven above and upon the earth beneath ; there is none
else."2 In this one fundamental dogma of its faith, the
unity of God, nascent Judaism has here reached its goal.
From that statement in the fourth chapter of Deutero-
nomy there was not, and there needed not to be, either
advance or development.3
Even in Jeremiah we notice the growing identification
of the heathen god with his image, which is so marked
in Deutero-Isaiah. The heathen "gods" cannot "pro-
fit;" the apostasy of Israel is contrasted with the fidelity
of the heathen to their idols, and yet these deities are
no gods at all : " Hath any nation changed their gods,
which yet are no gods? but my people have changed
their glory for that which does not profit."4
Yahveh is the fountain of living waters; the idols
1 Deut. xxxii. 39. 2 Deut. iv. 39.
3 Most scholars consider the Song of Moses to be prior to the Baby-
lonian captivity. Zunz, and following him Cornill, assign it, however,
to the exile ; and Cornill does the like for Deut. iv. 39, pp. 38, 71.
* xi. 11.
216 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
are cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
Unequivocal is the impassioned exclamation of the pro-
phet at the end of the sixteenth chapter : " 0 Yahveh,
my strength and my fortress, and my refuge in the day
of affliction, nations shall come unto thee from the ends
of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers inherited
lies, vanity and things wherein there is no profit."
Yahveh, as the only God, is the ruler and disposer
of all the earth. This is indicated again and again in
Jeremiah's prophecies. But, owing possibly to the exi-
gencies of the age, the storm-and-stress period under
which the prophet lived and wrote, we find but small
space allotted to universalist hopes and predictions. They
are not wanting, but they are neither prominent not*
numerous. The development of a national religion into
a religion nearly universal was reserved for the great
prophet of the exile.
A second point of possible religious advance is more
problematical. We saw that the prophets of the eighth
century were concerned with the state as a whole rather
than with the individual. They were not preachers to
the individual conscience, but preachers to the nation ;
they tried to purge the body politic of sin, to transform
it from bad to good, to eradicate public vices such as
cruelty, injustice, licentiousness ; their business did not
lie with the souls of individual sinners, nor were they
at pains to point out to every erring man how he might
be freed from the bondage and oppression of sin. They
assumed that man's will was free, and that repentance
was within his power. Being evil, he could yet choose
to be good. Thus Isaiah says : " Wash you, make you
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 217
clean ; cease to do evil, learn to do well." Prof. Cheyne
speaks of the "imperfect moral conceptions of Isaiah"
in this passage, implying that the prophet was ignorant
that the necessary complement to every appeal to repent-
ance is a prayer for God's grace whereby the desired
repentance may be realized.1 And this grace of God is
conceived as operative by the help of the indwelling
divine spirit within each individual soul. Such doc-
trines can only be formulated when religion is conceived
individually, when the two terms of the reciprocal rela-
tion are God and man, and no longer God and the nation.
In these matters it is above all things necessary to avoid
exaggeration. One runs a danger of becoming the slave
of words, and of applying abstractions to explain the
manifold and multiform tendencies which are concurrent
in every epoch. Are we to believe that disciples of
Hosea and Isaiah in the eighth century did not pray to
Yahveh that he might pardon their sins ? Did they not
feel personal joy in their relation as Israelites to him,
and mortification at their private and individual short-
comings ? Did Hosea, in his own chamber, not because
he was unselfishly absorbed in the welfare of his people,
but because "he had no conception of the relation of
Yahveh to the individual soul apart from the nation,"2
never commune in prayer with his God? Was not
Isaiah able to discern a difference between " the righteous
and the wicked in Zion," and to promise to the former
salvation, and to threaten the latter with the judgment ?s
Doubtless, however, the solidarity of society was a con-
1 Jeremiah, p. 39. 2 Cheyne, Hosea, p. 31.
3 Isaiah xxix. 19, 20, viii. 16.
218 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
ception which had great influence upon religious ideas.
Men not merely believed that they suffered because of
their fathers' sins, or from the sins of a majority among
their own contemporaries, but they seem also to have
themselves felt personally sinful for the same reason.
And similarly, when the nation accepted a new religious
code, or when public reforms were made in national
observance, individuals appear to have felt themselves
"justified" by the national act, as if they too had expe-
rienced a personal share in the righteousness of the
popular movement. There was thus both room and need
for a growth of individualism in religion, and it would
seem (although Prof. Stade denies it) that in the seventh
century the highest minds did make some real progress
in this direction. Kuenen believes that the thirty-second
and thirty-third chapters of Isaiah may be assigned to
this epoch, in which "the national representation of
Yahvism gradually gave way to a more individual con-
ception."1
Jeremiah himself is, however, the safest evidence of
the change. His isolated position and the perpetual
struggle which was going on within his own soul be-
tween fidelity to his divine calling and his natural sym-
pathies and weaknesses, compelled him, in "Wellhausen's
words, to reflect almost more upon his own relation to
Yahveh than upon Israel's, so that his peculiar circum-
stances became the means enabling him to consider
more generally the relation of the individual man to
God. Feeling, as he did, that his own difficult part
1 OnderzoeJc, 2nd ed., Vol. II. p. 87. They are more probably post
exilic. So Stade and Cheyne.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 219
in life was not only ordered, but rendered possible
by God, so that he was not merely driven to foretell
his people's ruin, but was sustained in doing so by
divine power, he was possibly led on to note God's
function and operation in the process of repentance as
applied to individuals. Thus we meet with exclamations
such as, "Heal me, 0 Yahveh, and I shall be healed;
save me, and I shall be saved." And, again, there is
the prayer put into Ephraim's mouth : " Turn thou me,
and I shall return, for thou art Yahveh my God."1 The
prophet (unlike Isaiah) does not believe that the judg-
ment will be enough to ensure a new heart to the people
which have so long walked in stubbornness. The new
heart must be the gift of God. " I will give them an
heart to know me that I am Yahveh;" "I will give
them one heart and one way that they may fear me for
ever; I will put my fear in their hearts."2 God will
meet half-way the penitents who " seek for him with all
their hearts." Thus in that ideal age which Jeremiah,
in the midst of the tumult of the nation's fall, no less
confidently predicted than the prophets of the preceding
century, if iniquity be still found in the regenerated
community, its consequences shall not reach beyond the
limits of the sinner. " In those days they shall say no
more," runs the famous passage in the 31st chapter —
relegated by Stade to a nameless prophet of the exile,
but retained as Jeremiah's by Kuenen; — "the fathers
have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set
on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity :
1 Jer. xvii. 14, xxxi. 18; cf. Lam. v. 21.
2 Jer. xxxii. 39, 40, xxiv. 7.
220 IV. THE SEVENTH CENTURY:
every man that eateth sour grapes, his teeth shall be set
on edge."1 Thus the law of individual responsibility,
which had been already laid down in Deuteronomy as a
principle of human punishment, is to be extended in the
Messianic age to the sphere of religion. Jeremiah implies
that men in his own time were unable to shake off the
bondage of religious solidarity; even he had not entirely
risen above the idea which we meet with in the Book of
Kings, that the sins of Manasseh were not fully expiated
before the exile. But in the good time coming men
would no longer be held responsible for their fathers'
iniquities. The longer Jeremiah contemplated the bright
vision of the ideal Israel of the future, the more glowing
became the terms in which he described it. Yahveh
will make a new covenant with Israel which will be in
its very nature indissoluble. When he brought the
Israelites out of Egypt, he bade them obey his voice
and walk in his ways, so that they might be his people
and he might be their God; but the commandment,
though often repeated by prophet after prophet, was
unheeded : that covenant was broken. In the new cove-
nant, the same teaching which was then imposed from
without and disregarded, will be written in the heart.
This divine teaching will make the human teacher unne-
cessary. All former sins of the community will be for-
gotten ; it will start afresh with the knowledge of God
common to all, from the least to the greatest ; and the
purpose of the old covenant will be fulfilled in the new,
for Israel will be Yahveh's people, and Yahveh will be
Israel's God.2
1 xxxi. 29, 30. 2 xxxi. 31—34.
DEUTERONOMY AND JEREMIAH. 221
Such is Jeremiah's vision of the Messianic age. But
no wide conclusions may be justly inferred from it as to
the prophet's conception of the function of law in reli-
gion, or of the value of Deuteronomy. The new covenant
does not " consciously and emphatically exclude law
from the idea of the perfect religion."1 ~No attack upon
law in the abstract, or upon Deuteronomy in the con-
crete, entered here into the prophet's mind. All that he
implies is that an external law would become unneces-
sary if its contents were written beforehand in the heart.
For though the subject-matter of religion, under the new
covenant as under the old, might be capable of expression
in legal terms, the teaching of it would become needless,
because it would be universally known. What, however,
this famous passage does definitely indicate is, that its
author predicted for a future — ideal, it is true, but in
his belief neither impossible nor remote — the direct
relation of Yahveh to every individual Israelite, "from
the greatest unto the least," and a permanent divine aid
by which each one might be spiritually re-born to a holy
life in the knowledge of God.1
Of such a kind was the advance of the seventh cen-
tury. It was, however, by no uniform and equable body
of religious doctrine that the exiles were to maintain
their separateness in foreign homes. There was still an
imperfect fusion of higher and lower elements, both of
which were accentuated and developed during the years
of exile. Yet before the end of our journey is reached,
it will be partly seen how either element contributed its
quota to the gradual formation of a more coherent and
articulate faith.
1 Dulim, p. 242. 2 cf Cheyne, Jeremiah, p. 157.
Lecture Y.
THE BABYLONIAN EXILE : EZEKIEL AND
THE SECOND ISAIAH.
The history of the Hebrew religion during the exile
in Babylon is the subject of this Lecture ; a period
lies before us unique in the world's records and issuing
in unique results. A small fragment of a small people,
transplanted by force from its own to an enemy's land,
after remaining there for half-a-century without disinte-
gration or coalescence with its environment, is then able
to return to its own soil and resume its political life, with
national and religious identity emphasized by fifty years
of trial and suspense. This striking issue of the fall of
the Judsean monarchy was due to the joint operation of
many concurrent causes. We saw in the last Lecture
that the earlier deportation took place in the year 597,
eleven years before the final siege and sack of Jerusalem.
Thus during the eleven years in which the central poli-
tical life was still continued, the first exiles, who, if not
the more numerous, were certainly the more important
section of the community, had an incentive to maintain
their national and religious distinctiveness — an incentive
which was all the stronger, in so much as it was fortified
by hopes of speedy restoration.
V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE. 223
When the rebellion of Zedekiah forced Nebuchadrezzar
to put an end to the turbulent little monarchy which
would not recognize the political facts of the age, the
chance, such as it was, of the maintenance of Israel's
religion depended wholly upon the steadfastness of the
exiles. To the second deportation were probably assigned
lands at some distance from those allotted to the first;
indeed, there were most likely several colonies of Jews
dotted about the province of Babylon. Of their circum-
stances we know little, for the evidence is limited to a few
allusions in Ezekiel and in those fragments of anonymous
prophecy which date from the close of the exile. It
would seem, however, that the conditions of life were
upon the whole peaceful and even prosperous : the exiles
owned lands and houses, and the same social organization
which existed in Judsea was maintained in Babylonia.
The Jewish colonies were left pretty much to themselves,
and, with certain restrictions, internal autonomy was pro-
bably allowed to them. Thus the elders and judges of
Judaea were also the judges and elders in Babylonia, and
the social differences of rich and poor, high-born and low-
born, were as familiar as at home. The old families and
clans seem mostly to have lived together on their own
lands.1
Such circumstances were, upon the whole, favourable
to a rapid integration of the exiles into the body of
the Babylonian empire. That the issue was so widely
different was mainly due to the religion which the exiles
carried with them from Judaea, and it indicates a fuller
popular acceptance of prophetic teaching than might
1 Cf. Stade, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 3—6.
224 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
have been inferred from the apparent isolation of Jere-
miah, • Yet the Book of Ezekiel sufficiently shows us the
chaos of conflicting religious ideas current among the
exiles. It is amazing how the short space of some fifty
or sixty years was enough to bring into tolerable order
and consistency this incoherent mass of old and new, of
popular superstitions and prophetic doctrine. Both in
thought and production the period of the exile was one
of great religious activity, and the impulses then begun
continued after the restoration both in Judeea and in
Babylonia.
We saw in the last Lecture how the first deportation
under Jehoiachin had not sufficed to dissipate certain
deep-seated religious convictions either among the exiles
or among those who remained behind, and how even the
final blow did not by any means immediately avail to win
over the majority to the religion of Jeremiah. For the
prophets' conception of God and the religion which they
taught required and presupposed a larger measure of ethi-
cal capacity than the majority possessed, and not even an
event of such significance as the fall of Jerusalem, esta-
blishing though it did the truth of Jeremiah's predictions
and the moral supremacy of the God in whose name he
uttered them, was able to precipitate an ethical trans-
formation.
There were many other interpretations of the fall of
Jerusalem besides the interpretation of Jeremiah, and
even that interpretation suggested new problems. To the
idolatrous section of the community, for whom Yahveh
was little other or more than Chemosh or Moloch, the
sack of Yahveh's temple and the deportation of his.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 225
people could only signify the impotence of a Deity who
had so signally failed to protect his own. A transfer
of allegiance to the gods of the conqueror would seem
the most logical and prudent consequence. Moreover,
even of those whose loyalty to Yahveh had been least
hesitating, it was only a select few who had advanced
beyond monolatry into monotheism. To most of them,
convinced, as we have seen, that the temple at Jerusalem
was the dwelling-place of Yahveh, its destruction must
have given a paralyzing shock. Yahveh, as God of the
land, could be worshipped, according to old ideas, within
the land only; and though religion had greatly deve-
loped since David, the inviolability which Isaiah had so
triumphantly claimed for Zion, and the Deuteronomic
reform under Josiah, had both of them done something
to revive in another form this waning superstition. For
if Yahveh dwelt in Zion, where was he now that the
temple had fallen ? And even before it fell, how could he
be worshipped in Babylon ? Did not the Law itself forbid
the sacrificial worship of Yahveh except in the sanctuary
of Jerusalem ? How was the religion of Yahveh to be
maintained in the foreign land without its external em-
bodiment? There was a natural temptation to satisfy
the religious instinct either by worshipping Yahveh in
forbidden ways or by worshipping Babylonian gods.
For between Josiah's reform and the exile, even the
inhabitants of the more distant country villages had not
been so utterly cut off from the worship of God and
from the practice of religious rites as were the exiles
in Babvlonia. Juda?a was Yahveh's land, even though
some could visit his temple but seldom ; first-fruits and
226 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE!
tithes could at any rate be sent to Jerusalem, and the
produce of the soil was sanctified by that religious ser-
vice. But the strange land and its produce were alike
unclean, and the uncleanness would seem to attach itself
to those who now perforce were driven into it. Although
the Deuteronomic reform had made men accustomed to
eat flesh without a sacrifice, we learn from Ezekiel that
idolatry, by which he apparently means, not only the wor-
ship of other gods, but the irregular worship of Yahveh,
with images and sacrifices (sometimes even human sacri-
fices), was not without its votaries among the exiles of
the first deportation.1
Thus there was a choice of difficulties : driven out of
Yahveh's land, men might think that the God of the
vanquished nation had been vanquished too, and draw
the legitimate conclusion that to such a God it was use-
less to maintain allegiance ; or, if they wished to continue
loyal to the God of their old home, they were unable to
do him service, unable to translate their beliefs into acts
of outward and visible ceremonial. Nor was this all.
Even if Yahveh was the author of their misfortune, con-
fusion was still rife as to his motives, and the conse-
quences of the exile were still doubtful. A lack of moral
perception, and an inadequate or partial appropriation of
prophetic teaching, conduced to these perplexities.
In the first deportation, the spiritual descendants of
those who in Manasseh's reign had interpreted Josiah's
defeat and death as the result of Yahveh's incalculable
and purposeless anger were now ready to suppose that
1 Ezekiel xx. 31, 32 ; but cf. now Prof. Davidson's Commentary,
pp. xxi, xxii (1892).
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 227
the divine indignation must have spent its force, and that
Yahveh's people would soon be restored to Yahveh's land.
Perhaps this belief was not wholly abandoned even after
the destruction of the capital. Or, again, the conception
of national and hereditary solidarity was darkened by
a hitherto unheard-of terror. The "rebellious house,"
unable to recognize the moral canker in its own heart,
was willing to admit that defeat and exile were the
punishment of sin ; but the sin was their fathers' and not
their own. Had not even Jeremiah, the great prophet
and preacher of repentance, himself declared that because
of Manasseh, king of Judah, and for that which he did
in Jerusalem, Yahveh would make his "people to be a
shuddering unto all the kingdoms of the earth" ?J The
visitation of the sins of fathers upon children was a
method of divine punishment perhaps consistent in iso-
lated cases with divine justice : when, however, it was
thought that a whole race was paying so great a penalty
for the guilt of a past generation, there was an instinctive
protest, suggested all the more readily by the repeated,
declaration of the prophets that Yahveh's justice was
absolute. " Our fathers have sinned and are not," men
said; "and as for us, we bear their iniquities."2 The
proverb, " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge," may erewhile have
been framed to illustrate a fact which did not clash with
old Israelite conceptions of Yahveh's justice ; but now,
after the ruin of the entire nation, it was quoted bitterly
from mouth to mouth, and flung in Ezekiel's teeth when
he proclaimed the righteousness of God.3
1 Jer. xv. 4. 2 Lam. v. 7; cf. Lev. xxvi. 39. 3 Ezekiel xviii. 2.
q2
228 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE \
Lastly, if the prophetic verdict was accepted, if some
were ready to believe that the exile was the legitimate
result not only of ancestral, but also of present and per-
sonal iniquity, the moral drawn too often overshot the
mark. The prophets had said, Eepent ! but repentance,
as some would hold, was now too late. The vital sap
was gone from Israel; "the bones were dry, the hope
was lost."1 Men turned impatiently away, whether the
prophet threatened or comforted. So great a calamity,
indicating and implying so great a burden of sin, could
not be recompensed or undone. Their transgressions lay
heavy upon them, they said ; they pined away in their
iniquities. 2 A national resurrection was impossible :
helpless despair was the only alternative to rebellious
murmur and idolatrous apostasy.
Such were the diverse fragments of religious thought
which the higher teachers of the exile had to cope with
and correct. In the sixty years between the first depor-
tation and the return, many tendencies of the pre-exilic
religion were not only largely developed, but gradually
converged towards each other so as to form a compara-
tively harmonious whole. And yet the harmony was at
bottom rather apparent than real. It was during the
exile that the two conflicting elements of later Judaism,
■its pure and absolute monotheism, and its intense and
peculiar particularism, were both securely founded in the
popular consciousness.
The fall of Jerusalem was the triumph of prophecy.
From Amos to Jeremiah, the prophets had shown a
marked indifference or hostility to ceremonial worship.
1 Ezekiel xxxvii. 11. 2 Ezekiel xxxiii. 10.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 229
An anonymous prophet of Manasseh's reign had gone
still further, and contemptuously coupled the offering of
calves and rams with, the sacrifice of first-born sons.1 It
might have been expected, therefore, that the develop-
ment of religion in the exile would have proceeded along
the same lines, and that a restored Juda^an common-
wealth would have attached less, rather than more, impor-
tance to an exact regulation of sacrificial worship and
outward rite than was attached to it in the code of
Deuteronomy. The contrary happened. We have, then,
to regard the exile as a preparation both for the later
Judaism, which could live religiously without sacrificial
worship, and for the earlier Judaism of the second temple,
in which that worship was apparently its most essential
feature.
In the exile faithful worshippers of Yahveh had per-
force to learn how to maintain their religious separateness
without distinctive ceremonial. As a consequence, such
rites as were not dependent upon the temple, and could
be observed outside Judaea, acquired gradually a novel
importance. Circumcision, which hitherto had been a
custom, taken for granted, but without pronouncedly
Yahvistic colour, and consequently ignored in Deutero-
nomy, came now to be regarded as a special divine
ordinance distinguishing the sons of Abraham from other
races of the world.
Of equal or greater importance is the new emphasis
placed upon the Sabbath. Though its observance as a
day of rest had been included among the ordinances of
the Decalogue, there is no evidence that the violation
1 Micah vi. 6, 7.
230 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
of it was wont to meet with special prophetic rebuke
before the exile.1 Even to Ezekiel, in whose book
we find the first authentic reference in the prophetic
literature to its "pollution," the Sabbath is a matter
of temple ceremonial rather than of religious law extend-
ing beyond the sanctuary and Judsea.2 But while it
is not included in the catalogue of duties obligatory upon
the individual, it is declared to have been instituted as a
sign between Yahveh and the children of Israel that
Yahveh was their God. Upon the Sabbath, in the time
of the exile, it is not impossible that the first informal
meetings were held for common prayer and for the reci-
tation of older prophecies, histories and laws, which were
afterwards systematized into the glorious institution of the
synagogue. Feeble substitutes these irregular gatherings
must have seemed to all who took part in them, and
especially to the priests who may have organized and
directed them, for the solemn and effective ritual of the
temple. And yet the feeble substitutes were destined to
destroy for ever the charm and potency of that gross
worship of God, which in the view of even the best
among the exiles was but temporarily suspended.
For the worship of Yahveh in his own chosen sanc-
tuary was a precious memory to the faithful. Its value
was magnified in their eyes because the chief sin of
Judah and the primary cause of the exile had been the
false worship of Yahveh and its association with the
worship of other gods. Jeremiah had himself enunciated
1 Jeremiah xvi. 19 — 27 is not authentic; cf. Kuerten, Onderzoek%
ad loc. Amos viii. 5 is scarcely in point.
I Ezekiel xx. 12, &c.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 231
this view with emphatic vehemence. But whereas he
was able to unite a belief that the false and idolatrous
worship had provoked Yahveh's utmost anger with a
depreciation of outward worship in general, most of those
who explained Yahveh's anger on the same lines set
a very different value upon ritual observances. To
them, the enormity of the false worship as measured
by its punishment implied and proved the importance of
the true. Priests would naturally be the foremost to
draw this inference. The code of Deuteronomy stood
midway between the position of Jeremiah and that of
the faithful priesthood in the exile. For while it laid
greater stress upon the elimination of false worship, it
contained some regulations for the conduct of the true,
and these regulations were now part and parcel of an
acknowledged and accepted law.
An intense conviction that a false worship of Yahveh
and an idolatrous worship of other gods had been the
capital offence of Israel made itself felt in every depart-
ment of religious activity during the exile period. And
in this conviction there was thus almost necessarily
involved a concurrent exaltation of the true worship as
an integral and important element in the religion of
Yahveh.
"We may trace both these tendencies in the editings
of the older historical records. That long chronicle of
Israelite history which is contained in the books of
Judges, Samuel and Kings, was reduced to its present
shape by writers of the Deuteronomic school. Part of
their work was done between Josiah's death and the fall
232 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE!
of the monarchy, but it was carried on and almost com-
pleted during the exile. It is unnecessary for our pre-
sent purpose to distinguish the pre-exilic from the exilic
additions, inasmuch as the same spirit pervades them all.
These books did not indeed escape further additions and
interpretations in the post-exilic period ; but their main
character, the framework in which the facts are arranged
and the uniform lesson they are made to teach, were the
product of the periods immediately before, and either
during, or soon after, the exile.
The most noteworthy feature in these writers' con-
ception of their nation's past is its pessimism. From the
death of Joshua to the exile of Jehoiachin, the history of
Israel has been one long scene of apostasy and ingrati-
tude.1 The sweeping judgment of Hosea and Jeremiah on
their people's past is systematized and even exaggerated
by the historical editors. From them is derived that im-
pression of perpetually recurring idolatry, interspersed by
intervals of repentance after chastisement and deliver-
ance, which the whole period from Joshua's death to the
foundation of the monarchy is made to present. From
them proceeds that emphasized insistance that the desire
for a king was equivalent to the rejection of Yahveh.2
For Israel was no longer a nation as other nations were,
it was a religious community with a religious mission
to fulfil. The moral which the history, thus interpreted
and coloured, is intended to convey is that God had
always been just and gracious, Israel always disobedient
1 Judges ii. 11 — 19, x. 6 — 16, &c; 2 Kings xvii. 7, &c.
2 1 Sam. viii. 7.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 265
and intractable. After the establishment of the monarchy,
David for a short period realized the ideal. There was
no idolatry ; the worship of Yahveh was centralized at
Jerusalem. The law of Moses was thus at last obeyed,
for the reign of David had now become, both popularly
and religiously, the standard in accordance with which
all men prayed that God would fulfil his promises :
political power, religious purity, both integral elements
of the Messianic hope, were then for one brief period
united together. At David's death the descent began.
The ingrained desire for idolatry and idolatrous worship
showed itself anew ; and this, the distinctive sin of Israel
and Judah, continuing with fitful intermissions from age
to age, compelled Yahveh to root them up out 'of the
land which they had defiled.
Thus the judgment passed upon Israel is always
dominated by a single tendency. "Whereas the prophets
had combined the charge of idolatry with the charge of
immorality, the historians dwelt exclusively upon the
former. Even Hosea, however much he puts Baal- wor-
ship at the head and front of Israel's offending, makes
God declare that he will avenge the blood of Jezreel
upon the house of Jehu. The historian, on the contrary,
at the end of the narrative of Jehu's bloody purgation,
makes God promise to the destroyer of Baal the posses-
sion of the throne for four generations, because "he had
been zealous in doing that which was right in the eyes
of Yahveh."1 This is the point of view of Deuteronomy
pushed to a one-sided extreme. And thus Ave see how,
1 Hosea i. 4; 2 Kings x. 30.
234 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
in the exile, when the external worship of Yahveh was
at an end, its importance grew with the very fact of its
cessation.1
As it was with the writers or adapters of history, so it
was with the collectors of laws. Whether the historical
editors were priests or laymen, we cannot tell : the code-
makers of the exile undoubtedly belonged to priestly
circles. We do not know whether the priests of Jeru-
salem already possessed written rules for the temple ser-
vice and the ceremonial rites connected with their office.
It is, however, improbable that these existed in any con-
siderable number. The teaching of the priesthood was
oral and traditional, maintained by custom and practice.
In the exile, however, the need would arise for the pre-
servation by written record of the true priestly tradition.
When the promise of restoration should be fulfilled, and
the temple rebuilt, it could be only from a written code
that the priests of that brighter age would learn to serve
Yahveh's altar correctly, or teach the layman his ritual
duties.
Thus the priests began to codify the traditions of their
order, and these rules were destined to become part of
an accepted divine law, with an authority equal to that
of Deuteronomy. For many customs of the temple were
of unknown antiquity, and it was implied in Deutero-
1 Cf. Chavannes, La Religion dans la Bible, Vol. I. p. 273. His
attack upon the Deuteronornistic school seems, however, to be some-
what exaggerated. Can we assume that these writers had no interest
in morality 1 Did not the true worship of Yahveh involve civic justice
and neighbourly compassion 1
EZEKIEL AXD THE SECOND ISAIAH. 235
nomy, though it was denied by Jeremiah, that such
customs were as ancient and as authoritative as the moral
ordinances of the Decalogue and the Book of the Cove-
nant. Ezekiel accepts this point of view and enforces it,
and it is not subsequently contested. Eemains of such
earlier codifications of pre-exilic practice are preserved
to us as portions of a larger whole which, though its
birthplace was Babylonia, was not composed till after
the return from the exile, and cannot, therefore, come
before us till the next Lecture. But this larger whole
borrowed most of these remnants at second-hand from
a minor code, which was itself the product of separate
collections. Though the language of this code, especi-
ally in one famous chapter, resembles that of Ezekiel,
from whom some of its ideas are borrowed, its general
conceptions are parallel rather than imitative, and it
may, therefore, though somewhat out of the chrono-
logical order, be noticed by us here.
Originally it is supposed to have included consider-
able portions of Leviticus xvii. — xxvi., together possibly
with some other of the older priestly sections in Levi-
ticus and ^Numbers. It was put, like Deuteronomy, into
the mouth of Moses ; for the colophon to the code, ap-
pended to the concluding exhortation in Leviticus xxvi.,
boldly states: "These are the statutes and judgments
and laws, which Yahveh made between him and the
children of Israel in mount Sinai by the hand of Moses."
The perilous example of Deuteronomy was thus literally
followed. As the compiler of this code lays great and
repeated stress upon the kindred ideas of purity and
sanctity, defilement and profanation, it has received
236 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE*.
from Prof. Klostermann the commonly accepted surname
of the Law of Holiness.1
It is characteristic of the priest that the conception of
sanctity extends both to ceremonial worship and moral
integrity, and is applied equally to persons and to
things. The Law of Holiness includes that short collec-
tion of moral ordinances which culminates in the famous
injunction, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."2
Yet the love of neighbour and stranger, and the honour-
ing of mother and father, are no more and no less ele-
ments of holiness than the smallest ceremonial observ-
ance. Israel, as Yahveh's people, must keep itself free
from uncleanness of every kind, that the land may not be
defiled and Yahveh's name profaned. Sin is impurity;
it is thus regarded less as the guilt of the individual,
the secret taint of his own heart, than as the pollution
which affects the land and community of Yahveh.3 This
priestly conception is also strongly emphasized by the
prophet Ezekiel, though he unites with it a marked
individualism. Its close connection with ceremonial
worship, and the importance which it implicitly assigns
to that worship, are both indubitable.
Thus in two directions of exilic activity there is a
growing attention paid to the ritual service of Yahveh,
in spite, or rather because, of the absence of temple-
worship. We have now to trace it in a third direction
of greater interest and peculiarity, because it is com-
bined with elements which had hitherto been free from
1 For the Law of Holiness, cf. the Introductions to the 0. T., by
Cornill, Driver and Kuenen.
2 Lev. xix. IS. 3 Cf. Lev. xviii. 25, xx. 3, 7.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 237
priestly influences, and is expressed for us in the
writings of an extraordinary man. "We have seen in
the Book of Deuteronomy the effects of a priestly and
prophetic alliance ; we have now in the Book of Ezekiel
to observe the seer who, unlike his elder contemporary
Jeremiah, when he became a prophet, remained a priest,
But Ezekiel is too great a teacher, and occupies too im-
portant a place in the history of Israelite religion, to be
used to illustrate a single tendency. That must only
appear in its proper time and place in the general survey
of his doctrine.
Though the fall of Jerusalem and of the monarchy was
the triumph of prophecy, it was also in a certain sense its
dissolution. Prophecy had grown up as a religious factor
of Israelite life in close conjunction with the state. Its
message had been directed to the people ; its import was
national. The main burden of that message was national
judgment for national guilt. It is true that with the
announcement of the judgment there was ever associated
the promise of restoration. But this concerned the future
and not the present ; while it was the necessary comple-
ment of Yahveh's righteousness, it was the threat, and
not the promise, which the prophets' contemporaries had
to receive as Yahveh's message to themselves. But
when the threat had been fulfilled, when the temple lay
in ruins, and the people were exiled, the prophet's occu-
pation was gone. Changed circumstances demanded a
different quality of teaching. What was necessary now
was so to transform the character of the exiles, that
the promised restoration, the advent of the golden age,
might not be too long delayed. The judgment had come ;
238 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
men lived in it. The work before religious teachers
now was to help Yahveh to the earlier fulfilment of his
word. That side of the prophets' teaching which had
before, as it were, filled up the gaps and intervals of
their more public and definitive utterances — their labour
as religious teachers, in the more modern sense of the
word — came now prominently to the front. But since
the office of teacher could be discharged by the priest as
well as by the layman, and seeing that there now existed
many priests who had absorbed and adopted some funda-
mental doctrines of the prophets, priests could resume their
old place as the natural instructors of the community.
There was also another reason which helped to bring
about the decay of prophecy. That reason was the
law of Deuteronomy, now being supplemented by the
priestly codifications. The teaching of Yahveh was
becoming fixed in written codes; it was no longer
the business of the teacher to listen in his own heart
for the fresh inspiration of God, and to proclaim it
before the world as Yahveh's message and bidding ; his
duty was to apply his spiritual insight and capacity to
the ancient and authentic law of God, which in its
origin and its fixity stood above the individual and
determined his words.
Till the close of the exile, when the imminent deliver-
ance once more let loose the spirit of prophecy, though
of a prophecy very different from that of the monarchy,
we hear of no other prophet but Ezekiel. There lived,
indeed, among the exiles prophets who were to Ezekiel
as Hananiah was to Jeremiah, but of the true line Ezekiel
is the only known representative. It is, moreover, to be
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 239
noticed that his prophetic call took place before the final
siege and capture of Jerusalem, and that a main feature
of his distinctly prophetic work was to predict the fall of
the capital and the ruin of the monarchy.
Ezekiel resembles the prophets of the pre-exilic period
in that his utterances included the same object as theirs —
the announcement of a judgment. And he is still so domi-
nated by this fundamental prophetic idea, that against
the sinners among the exiles he can only fulminate the
old threats, though in what the judgment upon them is
to consist he does not indicate, and cannot have been
himself aware.
The commanding figure of Ezekiel stands thus on the
border-land between old and new, and unites the triple
functions of prophet, priest and lawgiver. For the
codes to which reference has just been made proceeded
from circles in which Ezekiel had been the moving
spirit, and their authors were perhaps stirred, or at least
influenced, by his example. Many a point in the teach-
ing of post-exilic Judaism may be traced back to Ezekiel
as to its fountain-source. This may explain why Ezekiel
has come in for so much of that vigorous and hostile
criticism meted out by Christian scholars to Judaism.
The full extreme of depreciation to which this criticism
can extend is best instanced in Prof. Duhm's interesting
book on the Theology of the Prophets.
To Duhm, Ezekiel is a dogmatic supernaturalist, in
whom human sympathy and original inspiration are alike
wanting. In his book there is not from end to end one
single new idea of religious or ethical value. He mate-
rialized the prophetic conception of holiness ; he changed
240 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE !
the ideals of the prophets into laws and dogmas. His
God imposes upon men an infinite series of isolated com-
mands, which strangle all moral liberty. Adopting for
his lower ends the language of the prophets, he speaks
of a "new spirit" and a "heart of flesh;" but what is
meant is a rigid and mechanical obedience to external
enactments, not any inward freedom from sin in the true
and Christian sense. In Ezekiel's new Jerusalem we
have no longer anything to do with prophetical religion ;
we already breathe the air of Judaism and the Talmud.1
"We saw how at the first exile, in the reign of Jehoia-
chin in the year 597, the elite of the Jewish state in
all its orders was deported to Babylonia. Among the
ministers of the Jerusalem temple, the aristocracy of the
priesthood, the sons of Zadok, was Ezekiel. He was
probably old enough at the time of the exile to have
already officiated at Yahveh's altar, and he may have
remembered as a boy the last years of Josiah's reign, in
which the reform of Deuteronomy was in full effect, and
the worship at the central sanctuary undefiled by sem-
blance of idolatry. Ezekiel was a priest in the fullest
sense of the word. Pure of heart, passionately attached
to his God, and to his God's service, he probably lived
and moved in the ideas and habits of his order. His
zeal and affection for temple ceremonial and the altar
of Yahveh are found reflected, in softer moods and
phases, in many a hymn among the Psalter. But to
Ezekiel, brought up in the priestly division of the Deu-
teronomic school, and clinging with all his might to that
half-prophetic and half-priestly conception of Israel's sin
1 Dulim, Theologie der Propheten, pp. 252—263.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 241
ami Israel's duty which has already come before us, this
affection, upon Josiah's death, would soon be transformed
into sombre passion. The past and the future of his
people may already have been food for solemn reflection
to the young man's mind, when he was taken from his
chosen home and work, and transported with his fellow-
exiles to "Tel-abib, by the river Chebar, in the land
of the Chaldreans." There, without losing his special
priestly proclivities, he was yet free to take a less narrow
survey of his people's needs. In the leisure of the exile
he could study and consider the teachings of the pro-
phets, as well as those of his friends and kinsmen, the
priests. He was drawn to replace his interrupted work
at the altar by work for his God and for his people of
another and a higher kind.
The same sins which had caused the captivity were
still prevalent among the community at Tel-abib, and
both at home and abroad the wrath of Yahveh was yet,
and rightly, unappeased. False hopes were rife among
the exiles ; nor would they be able to give heed to the
exhortations of their teachers till a doom, similar to, but
more terrible than that which had befallen the Judah of
Jehoiachin, befell the Judah of Zedekiah. Till Jeru-
salem had succumbed, there could be no prospect of
repentance and restoration. By thoughts such as these
we may imagine Ezekiel to have been drawn towards the
office of teacher and prophet. In the fifth year of the
exile, B.C. 592, six years before the final capture of
Jerusalem, he felt able to begin his task, and " the word
of Yahveh came unto him, and the hand of Yahveh was
upon him." How long he lived afterwards is not pre-
242 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
cisely known ; his vision of the new Jerusalem is dated
in the twenty-fifth year of the exile, that is B.C. 572,
and a note appended to one of the earlier prophecies
is dated two years subsequently. Ezekiel must there-
fore have outlived the fall of the Judsean kingdom by
at least fifteen years. From a literary point of view,
the book of his prophecies stands alone in the Old Testa-
ment. It consists of an ordered series of discourses
collected and arranged in their present form by the
prophet himself. Though the text has been very badly
preserved, and in the later chapters occasionally tam-
pered with, there are no such interpolations or appended
chapters of a later age as we meet with in Isaiah and
Jeremiah ; Ezekiel wrote and, as it would seem, arranged
his own book from its beginning to its end.
Like Isaiah and Jeremiah before him, Ezekiel repre-
sents his call to the prophetic office as having been
accompanied by a vision. But Ezekiel's visions are more
frequent than those of the two older prophets, as well as
more specialized and prolonged. Besides the inaugural
vision by the river Chebar, there are three others, in
two of which the locale is Jerusalem, whither Ezekiel is
carried by the spirit, or the hand, of Yahveh.1 It is
very difficult to make out — nor is the inquiry of much
profit — how far there was, or was meant to be, any actual
spiritual experience of the prophet corresponding, even
roughly, to the literary form as written down by him
subsequent to the event. It is clear that whatever
Ezekiel may have believed himself to have heard and
seen in the visions must have been smaller and vaguer
1 viii, — xi., xl.— xlviii., xxxvii.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 243
than their detailed and elaborate reproduction in the pre-
sent book of his prophecies. For the entire scheme of
the new Jerusalem, the exact measurements of temple,
city and land, the prescriptions for priests, Levites and
prince, are all represented as having been supernaturally
repeated to, or witnessed by, Ezekiel in the course of a
single vision. Similarly, the description of the sins of
the old Jerusalem before its destruction is set in the
framework of a vision, in which historic personages are
actually introduced, of whom one is said to have sud-
denly expired during Ezekiel's recitation of a prescribed
prediction of the coming judgment.1 Lastly, the inau-
gural vision contains that minute description of a strange
theophany, in which Yahveh is represented in human
shape upon a chariot formed of mysterious "living crea-
tures"— the whole suggested to the prophet's imagination
by a mixture of old memories of Phoenician symbolism
in the Jerusalem temple with Babylonian sculpture per-
haps before his eyes at Tel-abib. Parallel, too, with this
tendency to give visionary setting to thoughts which he
believed were sent to him by Yahveh, are the symbolic
actions, more frequent in Ezekiel than in any other pro-
phet. These, far more certainly than the visions, may
be regarded as pictorial illustrations or metaphorical aids
to the more vivid realization of his meaning.2
Ezekiel's book, as he apparently arranged it, is divided
into two parts, of which the first deals with Judah's
present and past, the second with its future and the
1 xi. 13.
2 Cf. Kuenen, OnderzoeJc, Vol. II., 2nd ed., p. 271 (with notes 11,
12, 13) and p. 282.
R2
244 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
future of its neighbours. By far the greater portion of
the first part consists of prophecies of the fall of Jeru-
salem. That fall was a necessary antecedent, in Ezekiel's
eyes, to repentance and restoration. Indirectly, there-
fore, these prophecies concern the exiles, but their direct
subject is the Judah of Palestine, and not the community
in Babylonia. Similar in kind to the contemporary pre-
dictions of Jeremiah, they place the false worship of
Yahveh and the various idolatries before the reader with
a more ceaseless iteration and less frequent reference to
moral obliquity. As in the case of Jeremiah, the earlier
prophecies of Ezekiel, when they were collected after
the fall of Jerusalem, received here and there the stamp
and revision of fulfilment. But no more than Jeremiah's
are they to be regarded as mere vaticinia post eventum.
While Ezekiel in comparatively few passages deals
directly with his fellow-exiles of Tel-abib, we know from
his own mouth that his prophetic mission was specially
for them. The reason of this curious divergence between
the space allotted to the Judah at home and to the Judah
abroad, his own peculiar charge, is found in the fact
that his unwritten and unrecorded labour was devoted
to the "saving of souls" among the exiles. Eor there
are several indications that a good deal of Ezekiel's most
important work among the exiles in Babylonia lay out-
side the set and formal prophecies which are now col-
lected in his book, resembling rather the duties of a
religious teacher in modern times, and not capable of
being expressed or elaborated in written words. He was
appointed as a watchman to the house of Israel, to warn
the wicked of the consequences of his wickedness, and
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 245
the righteous who turned from his righteousness of the
consequences of his backsliding. Such is the brief sum-
mary of his mission in the third chapter, but we cannot
rightly understand it or measure its range without taking
some other passages, as well as the general religious con-
dition of the exiles, into our consideration.
We saw that there existed two extremes of religious
opinion among the exiled Jews. There was, on the one
hand, much complaint of Yahveh's injustice towards his
own people, the still unshaken belief either that Israel
had a claim on its God through its own merits, or that
it was now suffering for the old and outworn sins of
bygone generations ; on the other hand, there was the
willing confession of national iniquity, but accompanied
by moral lethargy and religious despair. Ezekiel's duty,
therefore, as a preacher of penitence and conversion, was
to inspire both contrition and confidence. His business
was to create a true religious hopefulness in the mercy
of God, and a true religious humility as to the merits of
man. This dual doctrine does not indeed appear in dog-
matic or complete shape in Ezekiel's pages ; while empha-
sizing one side of it, he often seems to ignore the other,
and both sides need expansion and correction. But at
the same time the deeply religious doctrine of humility
combined with hope, which has played so great a part in
one form or another both in Judaism and Christianity,
owes its origin to Ezekiel.
Before we see how he applies it, it is necessary to
point out that to Ezekiel this doctrine of humility and
hope is but the converse of another doctrine of equal, if
not greater, importance to the prophet's mind — the justi-
246 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE:
fication of God. Ezekiel conceived himself as sent with a
religious mission to the house of Israel, hut that he so
conceived himself was due to his consuming jealousy for
Israel's God. Like Elijah of old, he was very jealous
for Tahveh, the God of Hosts, and was filled with the
idea that God's honour was involved in the fortunes of
Israel. Ezekiel regarded himself as Yahveh's champion.
Hence his tremendous earnestness, and his power, far
greater than Jeremiah's, of almost entirely suppressing
his own personality in the discharge of his office.
It is commonly said that the Yahveh of Ezekiel repre-
sents a religious retrogression from the Yahveh of Isaiah
or Jeremiah. Yahveh, to Ezekiel, is a Deity august,
majestic and terrible. An infinite distance separates
him from man. He is just to the very letter, but he is
without tenderness and compassion. The God of Deute-
ronomy is loved : the God of Ezekiel is feared. Ezekiel's
Yahveh is the prototype of the Allah of Islam.
If we impartially examine Ezekiel's conception of God,
we shall find it to be a fusion of new and old. The pro-
phet seems to share, or at least freely uses, the old and
strange idea that God actually dwelt in the temple of
Jerusalem, and in the restored community of the golden
age would dwell there again for ever. Yet his defined
earthly residence did not prevent Yahveh from having
complete cognizance of what was passing in other places
and in all human hearts. Together, moreover, with this cir-
cumscribed and semi-pagan conception, Ezekiel's Yahveh
was also very properly separated from man by all that
difference which must and does distinguish the human
from the divine. The prophet is addressed by Yahveh
EZEKIEL AXD THE SECOND ISAIAH. 247
as " son of man : " the creature must recognize his frailty
and his dependence upon God. In special divine mani-
festations Ezekiel employs angels instead of, or together
with, Yalrveh as the interpreters of God's will. But all
this exaltation of God's infinitude is of real religious
value, and expresses one true aspect of the relation be-
tween Deity and man. It did not lead to any obscura-
tion, either in Ezekiel or in the later Judaism — for every
charge which is made against the Yahveh of Ezekiel is
repeated with interest against the God of Judaism — of
the other side of this relation, that, in spite of difference
in kind and in degree, there can be real communion
between man and God.
Yahveh is not more difficult to serve for Ezekiel than
for Isaiah : he makes no greater demands upon his wor-
shippers than the Yahveh of Jeremiah. The endless
series of isolated commands exists only in Prof. Duhm's
imagination. For Ezekiel, God is not farther off in his
dealings with Israel than for any of his predecessors.
"Within the hearts of the regenerate Israelites the divine
spirit is the bond of union and communion between them
and God. Ezekiel's fear of God is the reverence of the
freeman, not the terror of the slave. That this reverence
need not degenerate into terror, is one of the prophet's
most fundamental teachings. " I delight not in the
death of the wicked; I have no pleasure in the death
of him that dieth." The really unsatisfactory feature
about Ezekiel's conception of God — though that, too,
contains an important religious truth, and is re-echoed
by many another teacher — is his one-sided insistance
upon Yahveh's honour.
248 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
Solicitude for God's honour seems at first sight, and
in some respects really is, vainly officious; it betokens
an idle anxiety not to run counter to the designs of
Providence. To Ezekiel, Israel and Yahveh are insepa-
rables. When Israel through its sinfulness compelled
Yahveh to leave his earthly dwelling-place and expel his
people from its land, it disturbed a relation which for
Ood's sake, as well as for Israel's, must ultimately be
restored. The world exists for the glory of Yahveh,
and the goal of history is not reached till, in Ezekiel' s
favourite words, it is known and understood of Gentile
as well as Jew, though in a very different sense and
with very different results by one than by the other,
that " I am Yahveh." We can understand how the
blessedness of man may be regarded as the glory of
God, and how in man's labour for his fellow-man he
may be stimulated to do his best by the idea that he
is working for God's cause ; but it is a false loyalty
when, as in Ezekiel, the object of God's own manage-
ment of human history, as regards the great majority of
his creatures, is not that they may be reconciled to him —
converted from their evil ways to lead a life of goodness
and content — but that he may have the empty satisfac-
tion of their acknowledgment, in the midst and by the
means of desolation and carnage, that he is indeed a very
mighty and powerful God.1 It is remarkable that the
great judgment upon the nations is not to accompany,
but to succeed, the re-establishment of Israel in its own
1 Prof. Davidson is inclined to give a larger and better interpretation
to the " knowledge of Yahveh " as acquired by the nations. See his
Commentary, p. xxxviii.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 249
land. Its sole object, therefore, is the further and com-
plete vindication of Yahveh's honour. At the cost of
innumerable lives, the heathen are to learn that the
catastrophe of Israel's exile was wholly due to Israel's
sin. So only can Yahveh's omnipotence be brought home
to them. It is Yahveh who stirs up Gog and his huge
army to slay them with supernatural horrors upon Israelite
soil. After their destruction the " Messianic" age con-
tinues undisturbed : " from that day and forward" Israel
and the nations will both know Yahveh as in his relations
to either he respectively is, the one as omnipotent and
compassionate, the other as omnipotent and malign.1 In
later Apocalyptic developments, Ezekiel's fantastic idea
of Gog's invasion after the Israelite restoration was
expanded into a universal or last judgment, which was
to form the end of temporal or even earthly history and
the introduction to a new era.
A more detailed consideration of the judgment upon
Gog and his confederates may here be neglected. For
Ezekiel is far more attractive and valuable in his own
special mission as a preacher of repentance — grounded
on and conditioned by humility and hope — than as a
theologian mapping out the purposes of God in the
history of man. His justification of God's dealings
with Israel only interests us now as the theoretic back-
ground for his doctrine of Israel's relation and duty
towards Yahveh in the present and the future. As such
only I would consider it here.
Like the Deuteronomistic editors of the historical re-
cords, Ezekiel has nothing but condemnation for Israel's
1 xxxix. 22; cf. the whole of xxxviii. and xxxix.
250 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
past. He even extends the series of its apostasies still
further hack, and asserts that as the Israelites were given
up to Egyptian idolatries when God made himself known
to them as Yahveh, so did they perpetually rehel against
him and follow their abominations from that time on-
wards.1 "Why this idolatrous and rebellious nation was
chosen by Yahveh to be his human bride, is not defi-
nitely explained. But the choice and covenant once
made, God's holy name was bound up with the history
of Israel. Hence arose a terrible dilemma. Though
Israel's sin was Yahveh's dishonour, the destruction of
Israel would be a greater dishonour still, an open profana-
tion before all the world, who knew that Israel was the
people of Yahveh. No punishment short of ruin and
divorce would be adequate for Israel's persistent guilt ;
but over against the Scylla of unsatisfied vengeance there
stood the Charybdis of violated honour. Israel enjoys the
benefit of this divine antinomy. God himself must make
them capable of being pardoned and restored ; he him-
self must free them from the sin, out of which they are
unwilling or unable to emancipate themselves ; he must
give them a new heart, and put a new spirit within
them, that they may walk in God's statutes and execute
his will.2
This is Ezekiel's theodicy. The nation has nothing
to complain of; it owed everything to God in the past,
and will owe everything to him in the future. Wholly
unmerited were the past benefits; wholly justified was
the present punishment; wholly undeserved would be
the future restoration. The theodicy seems framed to
1 xvi., xxiii. 2 xxxvi. 21 — 37.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 251
suit the needs of those who heard it. For its human
moral consists in shame and hope, in contrition and humi-
lity. And these contrasted qualities in their combination
are equivalent to repentance. Thus Ezekiel's theodicy
fits into and connects itself with his religious doctrine
upon its directly human side, as expressed in his work
as a shepherd of souls among the exiles at Tel-abib.
Both led him on to his marked and even exaggerated
individualism.
In the fall of the state a common calamity, whether
banishment or death, had befallen alike good and bad.1
It was only prophetic exaggeration which could assert
that among the exiles in the first deportation there were
not many faithful worshippers of Yahveh devoted to the
law of Deuteronomy. What other explanation of their
present misfortune could be found than that they suffered
for their fathers' sins ? It was not merely an undiscern-
ing wilfulness which might employ the adage of the
"sour grapes:" a reasoned despair might do the same.
In traversing the truth of this proverb, Ezekiel makes
no attempt to deny its applicability to former events.
That perhaps was impossible. He deals with the present
and the future, and carefully ignores the past. God's
message now is that the soul which sins shall die. By
this is meant that the " judgment " of God shall overtake
the sinner, while the righteous shall escape. Or, put
reversely, there shall be a certain retribution for the
wicked, and for the righteous assured " life." Not accor-
ding to the proverb of the sour grapes, in which past
1 "With momentary inconsistency, Ezekiel in one solitary passage
admits and even emphasizes the fact, xxi. 8, 9 (Heb.), E.V, 3, 4.
252 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
generations had seen no injustice, but against which the
generation of the exiles, while still believing it, protested,
is the method of God's retributive relation with man.
God's ways are equal. " The son shall not bear the
iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the
iniquity of the son : the righteousness of the righteous
shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked
shall be upon him."1 Individualism is pushed even fur-
ther. Experience shows that the man who is "righteous"
to-day is not always righteous on the morrow. Nor,
again, is there any reason why the sinner should not
repent and become righteous. The descent from righ-
teousness to sin, and the ascent from sin to righteousness,
are alike possible within the limits of a single life. In
these cases the law of retribution is modified to meet the
altered circumstances : the sinner, who was once righ-
teous, shall be punished ; the righteous, who was once
sinful, shall "live."
Ezekiel does not clearly define his meaning, and pro-
bably there were two somewhat inconsistent notions
concurrently in his mind : on the one hand, the simple
moral idea that "it is never too late to mend" (there
being always pardon for the repentant sinner); on the
other, the more theological idea that in any general
divine judgment, the verdict upon every man would be
determined according to his moral condition at the mo-
ment, no matter what had been his previous history.
It is evident that Ezekiel's individualistic doctrine is
still very inadequate. Men are not either entirely righ-
teous or entirely sinful : nor do they pass at a bound
1 xviii. 20.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 253
from the one condition to the other. A more developed
theory would perhaps point out that the new heart and
the new spirit, which Ezekiel here urges the exiles to
"make" unto themselves, and elsewhere alleges to he
the gift of God, must be in truth both God's gift and
man's achievement.1 Again, judged by experience, the
doctrine — for Ezekiel is limited to an earthly life — is
untrue ; it is a mere transference of the doctrine of retri-
bution from nations and communities to isolated and
individual men. It assumes that as God judges and
deals with nations, so he judges and deals with indi-
viduals— an assumption which is not borne out by facts.
But it was a step of enormous value in the direction
of personal religion, and towards a better theory of the
relation of man to God. For though it is true that the
son does bear the iniquity of his father, it is not true
that he so bears it as a direct punishment from God.
The denial of the fact was a necessary preliminary to the
formulation of a doctrine which should admit the fact,
and yet find room for it in the justice of God. Ezekiel
broke for ever with the false notion of divine vengeance
transmitted from generation to generation, and from the
equally false and despairing idea that repentance is be-
yond human power. There was no need, so Ezekiel told
his fellow-exiles, that they should "pine away in their
iniquities : " " Cast away from you all your transgres-
sions, whereby ye have transgressed : and make you a
new heart and a new spirit : for why will ye die, 0 house
of Israel. For I have no pleasure in the death of him
1 Cf. xviii. 31, with xi. 19, xxxvi. 26.
254 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE:
that dieth, saith the Lord Yahveh : wherefore turn your-
selves and live."1
Jeremiah has already made us familiar with the sins
which Ezekiel lays to the charge of his contemporaries
"both in Judtea and Babylonia. The exilic prophet, to
whose heart, as we have seen, the pure worship of the
one Yahveh was very near and dear, lays greater stress
on liturgical delinquencies than Jeremiah, and far more
than Isaiah. Yet he by no means ignores offences against
morality, and in the "catalogue of sins in Jerusalem,"2
the old iniquities, against which the eighth-century
prophets so repeatedly protested, re-appear one by one.
Each section of the population is charged with those par-
ticular vices which are the exact opposite of the virtues
properly belonging to it: the princes, with bloodshed,
injustice and blackmailing ; the prophets, with deceitful
and lying messages from Yahveh; the priests, with making
and teaching no distinction between holy and profane,
the unclean and the clean. Among the sins with which
he reproaches the city generally, are unchastity, bribery,
usury and contempt of parents; while its guilt on the
moral and the ceremonial side is summed up in the two
typical crimes, bloodshed and image-making.3
Ezckiel's best German commentator says of him that
"he as markedly makes the right cultus the main and
most important factor in religion, as the real prophets
found its essence in the moral commands of Yahveh."4
1 xviii. 31, 32.
2 The heading of the Authorized Version in chapter xxii.
3 xxii. 6—12, 25—29. 4 Smend's Ezekiel, p. 308 (1880).
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 255
This statement seems to confuse Ezekiel's conception of
religion for the individual with his picture of the restored
Jerusalem. It is deduced from the fact that in the last
nine chapters of Ezekiel's book, in which he lays down
his scheme of the new Judah and its capital with minute
regulations for temple and worship, there is scarcely com-
prised a single moral injunction. But it would be very
surprising if ethical mandates were found in such an
incongruous connection. From a priestly point of view,
and with a love for temple ceremonial not shared by
Isaiah or Amos, Ezekiel is here sketching out a plan by
which, in the Israel of the golden age, every semblance
of idolatry may be avoided, and Yahveh may dwell once
more within his chosen home. The temple is to be the
visible emblem of Yahveh' s presence, the centre of the
commonwealth and its salient glory. Only once, in fixing
the possession of the prince in the newly-appointed terri-
tory, and his duties as temporal guardian of the temple,
does Ezekiel's angry recollection of the unworthy past
turn him from his subject, and induce him to insert a
parenthetical and irrelevant reference to the maintenance
of " justice and judgment " in the princely office.1 Are
these nine chapters too much to devote to the external
organization of temple and land ? The old customs and
laws had been inadequate to prevent pollution and defile-
ment: Ezekiel would provide against their recurrence,
and suggest the means for the permanent display of the
divine presence in all its glory. Did he therefore imagine
that every individual in Israel would merely concern
himself with temple ceremonial, and have no other duties
1 xlv. 9.
250 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
in life but those of worship and ritual purity? Is it
true that for Ezekiel the whole life of the people in the
"Messianic" age is to be merged in the service of the
temple? Those who affirm this can only do so by an
arbitrary separation of the last nine chapters from the
rest of Ezekiel's book. For what are the duties of the
individual as given twice over in two prominent chapters,
which from another point of view have already come
before us ? What are those statutes of life, the doing of
which would be the mark of that new heart and spirit
which repentance and God's grace should win for Israel
at the last ? They include the avoidance of idolatry ;
but otherwise they are exclusively ethical. Even the
Sabbath is not mentioned. What must I do to be saved ?
Ezekiel answers : Serve Yahveh only ; be just, be pitiful,
be chaste. Is this a low and external inventory of the
statutes of life ? Is it mere formalism and outward cere-
monial? In what does it differ, except by the great
addition of chastity, from the old prophetic requirement,
"to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly
before God"? Yes, say Ezekiel's critics; it differs in
one important particular, and this difference alters the
character of the whole. Ezekiel is the father of Judaism,
and the destroyer of the prophetic religion precisely in
this, that he is a legalist. That is no true morality
which is an affair of " statutes and judgments." If you
are just and chaste and pitiful, because God's statutes
and judgments bid you be so, then your pity, chastity
and justice are, as it would seem, of small account.
This is not the place to consider the accuracy of an
opinion which, in a more generalized form, will come
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 257
before us hereafter. The author of Deuteronomy was
able to couple the requirement to fear Yahveh and to
love him with all the heart and with all the soul, with
the requirement to keep Yahveh's commandments and
statutes. Jeremiah, who foretells a new covenant under
which God will write his law in the hearts of Israel, is
also able to think of this "law" as consisting of "sta-
tutes and testimonies." But it is perfectly true that
Ezekiel more habitually conceives the will of God as
expressed for man in "statutes and judgments," by which
phrase he was doubtless alluding partly to the law of
Deuteronomy, and partly to his own oral teaching and
to that of former exponents of Yahveh's religion. In so
far he is a legalist, and in this, as in other things, main-
tains his place and vindicates his importance as a bridge
between old and new.
It may be noted, however, that in two significant
respects he differs from the maturer legalism of the
Eabbis. The catalogue of "statutes and judgments,"
"which if a man do he shall live by them," is exclu-
sively moral : it is the teaching of the prophets expressed
in legal terms. In so far the later legalism would appear
to fall below the level of Ezekiel. But in another respect
it was, as we shall hereafter see, greatly superior. To
Ezekiel, the aim of the community is the glory of Yahveh ;
but this aim is not effected through the individual, but
by a complicated system of temple ceremonial, a magical
process of purifications and sacrifices, which, in their
purpose and result, stand over and above the people for
whose sakes they are nominally undertaken. Yahveh's
honour on the one hand, old and heathen conceptions of
258 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
the priesthood on the other, combine to produce this
isolation of outward and public religion from the religion
of the individual. In the later Judaism this chasm is
bridged over. Eites and ceremonies become absorbed in
the law of the layman, and the sanctification of Yahveh's
name, while still an end in itself, is effected by the lives
of his worshippers. Though externalities become part
and parcel of the law of God, they spring from a motive,.
to be disclosed hereafter, which greatly modifies their
character and lessens their capability for harm.
Yet in his legalism as in his individualism Ezekiel
points the way. He was also more than a finger-
post, more than a mere expression of tendencies in the
air. Though partly the product of his environment, his
originality cannot be questioned.1 At a critical moment
he gathered together the still serviceable, but isolated,
elements of religious thought which were current in his
day, and wove them into something like an ordered and
articulated whole. Not that Ezekiel is by any means
always consistent. He is too much concerned with actual
life for that — too busy with his practical mission. He
is no dogmatic theologian of the school, but a man
who, with a few firmly cherished theological principles
at his command, was above all things intent upon
1 One side of his premonitory work I have heen compelled to leave
untouched. His temple vision is a forerunner of the priestly legisla-
tion now emhodied in the Pentateuch. Ezekiel's last nine chapters
have been said to supply the key to the great Pentateuchal puzzle.
When dealing with the priestly code, it may be necessary to refer to
one or two points in Ezekiel's scheme (such as his distinction between
Zadokites and Levites in the service of the altar) which may help to
explain the later legislation.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 259
the actual needs of the community among which he
worked. And so he broke their false pride and showed
them where their true hope lay ; he admonished and he
comforted, rebuked and consoled, by turns. Old ideals
and old explanations had crumbled or were crumbling
away : Ezekiel transformed them. Into old doctrine he
infused a new vitality, and the result was a doctrine
which was both old and new. Prophet as he was, he
yet paved the way for the legalism and individualism of
the later Judaism ; and thus — what is more surprising
still — priest though he was, and priestly as were his aims,
he paved the way for a religion in which the priest was
superseded.
The latest date mentioned by Ezekiel brings us down
to 570, sixteen years after the fall of Jerusalem. No-
thing had occurred to break the peace of the Babylonian
empire. As year followed year, the Jewish exiles would
gradually settle down to their altered life, and a new
generation grow up which had never seen or could not
remember its forefathers' home. The various parties
would maintain their differences, or even increase them,
and new parties would perhaps also arise. Not all who
worshipped Yahveh faithfully would still be yearning for
a return to Palestine ; some would abandon the expecta-
tion, or, like modern orthodox Jews, regard it as a pious
aspiration unrelated to their own lives. Prayer was
gradually becoming a valuable substitute for sacrifice.
But in other circles, and especially among the exiled
priests, the lost worship was still passionately desired;
and doubtless for the majority, who had not yet iden-
tified ideals with illusions, a change in the political sky
260 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
would wake again the dormant longing for the fulfilment
of the old promises.
Meanwhile, for some years after the voice of the great
prophet-priest had ceased, there was no movement or
likelihood of change. Nebuchadrezzar died in 562, but
the strength of the empire was not visibly diminished
during the reigns of his two successors, Evil-Merodach
and Keriglossor. In 06Q, thirty years after the fall of
Jerusalem, the throne of Babylon was seized by a leader
or figure-head of a successful conspiracy, Nabonnedos,
who was not a member of the founder's race. Two years
before, his future conqueror and successor, Cyrus the
Achaemenid, had ascended the throne of Ansan (Elam)
and of Persia. Persia had been wont to recognize the
supremacy of Media. Cyrus was soon strong enough to
assume an independent attitude, and Astyages was power-
less to prevent it. His soldiers revolted, and Cyrus, in
549, became master of Media. It was now evident that
a new candidate had arisen for the sovereignty of Asia.
But since the death of Nebuchadrezzar, the reins of
government in Babylonia had fallen into feeble hands.
Nabonnedos, a pious antiquarian, was no soldier. The
danger was soon recognized. In 547, an alliance was
formed between Babylon, Egypt, Lydia and Sparta,
against the growing menace of Cyrus' power. It is un-
necessary to follow the victorious course of the Persian
king in detail. It is enough to recall how Cyrus, turn-
ing first against Lydia, soon made himself master of
Sardis and the kingdom of Croesus. A breathing space
of seven years was neglected by Nabonnedos. His
religious policy and vacillation had made him widely
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 261
unpopular, and when Cyrus opened the campaign in 539!,
a single battle sufficed to decide the issue. One city-
after another opened its gates, and Babylon itself fol-
lowed suit. In 538, Cyrus entered the capital in triumph,
and received, as it would appear, on all hands an enthu-
siastic welcome. The Persian king was greeted by the
ministers of the native gods themselves as the monarch
of Babylon. It was a great and bloodless victory.
The patriotic feeling of the Jewish exiles had already
been aroused by the report of Cyrus' conquest of Media.
Old hopes revived ; and as patriotism and religion were
still inseparable, these hopes were quickly clothed in
religious vesture, and re-acted upon religious impulses.
Prophecy had slumbered since Ezekiel. There was no
important message from Yahveh. There were no signs
of the time needing interpretation. But now a new
period had begun. Since the onset of the Assyrians,
the Israelites had been accustomed to hear from their
teachers that the great movements and conquests of the
ruling Asiatic nations intimately concerned themselves,
and were even providentially ordered or supervised by
Yahveh for the sake of Israel. But hitherto, although
Assyrians, Scythians, Chaldasans might have been stirred
up to their invasions for Israel's sake, the result to be
produced was uniformly punitive and calamitous. Now,
however, the worst had happened; the judgment had
fallen ; Israel and Judah were exiles from their land.
And yet Yahveh's promise was that the judgment should
prove but a temporary purgation, not permanent ruin.
Now that Asia was once more in trepidation, and the
hurly-burly of change had begun anew, the tumult, if it
262 Y. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE!
had any bearing upon the fortunes of Judah, could only
betoken redemption and deliverance. If the early suc-
cesses of Cyrus foreshadowed the fall of Babylon, that
fall must be the herald of Israel's restoration, a prelude
to the golden age.
Prophecy, then, awoke from its lethargy ; but it was
a prophecy inevitably different from that of Isaiah or
even of Ezekiel. It was, as a rule, coarser-fibred, more
ordinarily patriotic, less ethical, and consequently, in the
higher sense, less religious. The men who anticipated
and foretold the future in the pre-exilic age had an-
nounced a coming judgment upon national depravity :
religious faith was raised to a sublime pitch to recognize
in the triumph of the invader the overruling providence
of God. Now it was otherwise. Faith was still needed.
The conquest of Lydia was quite different from the con-
quest of Babylon ; nor was there any apparent likelihood,
even if Babylon should succumb, that a new master would
rehabilitate the exiles' fortunes, or allow the re-establish-
ment of their commonwealth in Judoea. During the seven
years' pause after the capture of Sardis in 546, the hopes
of many would begin to flag, and the visions of deliver-
ance be pronounced rash and premature. Before 539
faith was necessary to recognize in Cyrus the certain
destroyer of Babylon and the deliverer of Judah. Yet
it was a faith very different from that which made
Jeremiah recognize in Nebuchadrezzar the instrument of
Yahveh's "wrath. It was the faith of patriotism raised
to a white heat by religion. Ethical elements might
easily be wanting in it ; fierce revenge, the hate of the
captive for his captor, would form a prominent part.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 263
Though in general the lot of the exiles cannot have been
hard, there must have been individual cases of oppres-
sion and cruelty. Thus the hope of national deliverance
would be merged in a vision of triumph over the fallen
foe.
It would not have been prudent for any eager exile to
speak too publicly of the events which, as their shadow
fell before them, the eye of faith enabled him to foresee.
But many a whisper would pass from mouth to mouth,
and many a broadsheet of prophecy would circulate from
hand to hand. Such fragments of prediction must pro-
bably have been composed in considerable numbers be-
tween 546 and 539 ; even after the restoration the type
was by no means exhausted, for the glowing anticipations,
whether for their own nation or for their oppressors,
were far from being fulfilled by the events which imme-
diately preceded and succeeded the fall of Babylon.
In the collection of prophecies now preserved to us
in the Old Testament, we have, however, only two inde-
pendent fragments of this kind which can with certainty
be attributed to this period. They are now comprised in
the first half of Isaiah xxi., and in the thirteenth and
fourteenth chapters (xxi. 1 — 10, xiii. 2 — xiv. 1 — 23).
The second includes that splendid song of triumph over
fallen Babylon, with the description of its monarch's
reception in Hades, the Authorized Version's rendering
of which contains the famous hexameter, " How art thou
fallen from heaven, 0 Lucifer, son of the morning!"1 It
is full of the spirit of mockery and revenge. Babylon is
the type of wickedness and pride ; the day of Yahveh is
1 xiv. 12.
264 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE:
at hand, the hour of retribution and of doom. The fall
and punishment of Babylon occupies almost the entire
space: only three verses out of forty-four deal with
Israel and its restoration. In them, although a higher
note is touched, the predominant feeling is markedly
particularism The peoples shall bring back Israel to its
own land, "and the house of Israel shall possess them
in Yahveh's land for bondmen and for bondmaids : they
shall take them captives whose captives they were, and
they shall rule over their oppressors." It is true the
thought was not without excuse :
" Who shall blame,
"When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
The oppressor triumph for evermore ! "
But the religious genius of Israel was not limited to
visions such as these. In one master-mind, at any rate,
the approach of Cyrus gave the impulse to a wider doc-
trine and a grander theodicy. Like Ezekiel, though for
other reasons, this prophet stands on another plane from
the prophets of the monarchy. He exercised a wide
influence upon both contemporaries and posterity. Dis-
ciples imitated his thought and method so closely, that
it is not easy to distinguish their writings from his;
while, what is of far deeper significance, some of his
doctrines sank deep into the national consciousness,
fashioning and moulding the religious ideas of men who,
in many other respects, held opinions different from his
own. The fusion was not always happy ; its result not
always homogeneous or consistent. But this was not
the fault of the exilic teacher.
The name of this prophet is unknown. His writings,
EZEKIEL AND TIIE SECOND ISAIAH. 265
or perhaps one should more correctly say some of his
writings, are preserved among the last twenty-seven
chapters of the Book of Isaiah. Since the beginning of
this century, when it was first noticed that these chapters
have nothing to do with the Isaiah of the eighth century,
it has been commonly supposed that they all date from
the close of the exile and proceed from a single hand.
Eecent criticism, however, has thrown grave doubts upon
this unity of authorship and plan. To me, following
Prof. Cheyne's lead, it seems hardly safe to attribute to
the unknown writer — called, for convenience' sake, the
Second or Deutero-Isaiah — more than nineteen out of
the twenty-seven chapters. These nineteen are chapters
xl. — lv. and chapters lx. — lxii.1
Like the other and lower " prophets" who, after the
early successes of Cyrus, began to predict the approach-
ing annihilation of Babylon, Deutero-Isaiah is primarily
concerned with promise and not with judgment. He
begins where the pre-exilic prophets left off. They
closed their threats with a word of consolation : he opens
his work with the famous apostrophe, " Comfort ye, com-
fort ye." God's righteousness, which erewhile could only
be made manifest in judgment, must now be expressed
in salvation. The fall of Babylon, not the fall of Jeru-
salem, is to be the seal of Yahveh's truth, the signal
token of his fidelity to his own nature and to his own
1 See art. "Isaiah," by Prof. Cheyne, in Eneyc. Britt., 9th ed., 1881 ;
and " Critical Problems of the Second Part of Isaiah," Jewish Quar-
terly Review, July and October, 1891. Cf. also Kuenen's Onderzoeh,
Vol. II., 2nd ed.; and Marti, Der Prophet Sacharja, 1892, p. 40, n. 1.
[To these references must now be added the very important new com-
mentary on the whole book of Isaiah by Prof. Duhm, 1892.]
266 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
word. Yet Deutero-Isaiah shows notable differences
from those of his contemporaries whose main thought
was revenge. Though the fall of Babylon is the con-
dition precedent, the prophet is far more deeply con-
cerned with its results. The deliverance of Israel and
the world-wide issues of that deliverance are his proper
theme. For since Israel's restoration was to be a far
bigger thing than the mere re-establishment of a single
people in its own land, Deutero-Isaiah combined with
his message of redemption a great amount of distinctive
doctrine, explanatory of the Author, the meaning and the
consequences of those great events which were shortly to
come to pass. Nor, again, was Deutero-Isaiah so carried
away by patriotic exaltation as not to realize that Israel
by no means deserved the possession of that wealth of
external and internal prosperity which, for God's own
purposes, was yet to be its share. Though the spiritual
change must now be brought about by other causes than
judgment, change was still needed, for there still was
much in Israel to deplore and reprehend. But in his
statement of that which required change and merited
reprehension, Deutero-Isaiah once more shows his ori-
ginality.
The pre-exilic prophets, together with Ezekiel, were
never weary of protesting against those national delin-
quencies which consisted in idolatry and the violation of
the moral law. Deutero-Isaiah declaims against idolatry,
which was still, after fifty years of exile, not wholly eradi-
cated; but he is conspicuously silent about the moral law.
He summons his contemporaries, not to repentance, but
to faith. He chides them for their unbelief, for their
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 267
•weakness of capacity to recognize either the nature or
the power of God. Ezekiel, in his labours as shepherd
of souls among the exiles at Tel-Abib, attempted to help
the regeneration, which God alone could ultimately effect
in the mass, by urging men forward on the path of
virtue and good works : Deutero-Isaiah, in ascribing, like
Ezekiel, the completed work of spiritual regeneration to
God, seeks to help and hasten the divine operation by
stimulating faith. A man who believes in Yahveh, upon
this prophet's lines, is necessarily regenerate. In a highly
suggestive passage, Prof. Duhm has for this reason com-
pared Deutero-Isaiah to St. Paul.1
This great teacher of the exile is thus intensely theo-
logical. He moves in the region of the ideal, and his
language, even when dealing with actualities, present or
to be, is liable to shade away into metaphor and symbol.
He is often argumentative in his manner ; theories and
ratiocinations abound; his style is literary, and both
matter and form indicate that his work was from the
first addressed to the reader, and was not intended for
oral delivery. The nineteen chapters, assigned to him
by Prof. Cheyne, were, hoAvever, not necessarily written
at one time or as a complete whole. While all of them
were probably written between Cyrus' conquest of Lydia
in 546 and his advance into Babylonia in 539, the first
nine, which have many marks in common, were probably
composed before the remaining ten. But this latter
section, unlike xl. — xlviii., has no unity, and may be the
aggregate product of three or four separate broad-sheets.
The primary object of Deutero-Isaiah was to foretell
1 Theologie der Propheten, p. 291.
268 Y. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
the sure deliverance of the exiles after the fall of Babylon
by the agency of Cyrus. In the first nine chapters
Cyrus is almost as important a figure in the prophetic
landscape as Israel. In the Persian king's achievements
could be discerned the finger of God himself, while
their completion would synchronize with the full reve-
lation of the divine glory.
That revelation was to form the theological correlative
of Israel's deliverance from Babylon, and it may thus be
regarded as the second object of the prophet's message.
Both objects imply or presume, as a third element in a
manifold whole, the conversion of the heathen nations to
the knowledge and worship of the true God. These are
the three constituents of the coming time of which the
early victories of Cyrus were the earnest.
We may fairly assume that the prophet was not him-
self led by the advent of C}Trus to reach that lofty con-
ception of Yahveh which he asks his reader to gather
from the onset of the Persian king. Deutero-Isaiah, we
may infer, was a monotheist before he heard of Cyrus,
and thus it is that in his rhetorical fashion he combines
in a twofold manner his conception of Deity with the
news of Cyrus' successes. There is the thought that
Yahveh, who caused all other things, also wrought this ;
and there is the opposite reflection that Yahveh, who
wrought this, must be the cause of all other things.
Deutero-Isaiah cannot justly be regarded as the first
exponent of that unqualified and absolute monotheism
which from his time became and remained the funda-
mental dogma of Judaism. In the last Lecture we saw
how an earlier writer had proclaimed the doctrine that
EZEKTEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 269
"Yahveh is God in heaven above and upon the earth
beneath; there is none else." But Deutero-Isaiah was
the first to emphasize and make use of this plenary and
unconditional monotheism. And as an integral portion,
or as the inevitable consequence, of his monotheistic
doctrine, he adopts a novel attitude towards idolatry.
Yahveh is the only God. Israelite and Gentile must
both acknowledge this truth. Deutero-Isaiah writes for
the former, but in his theoretic passages he frequently
has the latter also in his mind. The prophet speaks
usually in Yahveh's name.1 "I, Yahveh, am the first,
and with the last I am he; before me no God was
formed, neither after me shall there be ; I, I am Yahveh,
and beside me there is no deliverer ; I am Yahveh, and
there is none else; beside me there is no God." In
proving his thesis of God's unity and uniqueness, the
prophet employs two main arguments, one of them taken
from the world of nature, the other from the history of
man. The argument from nature is based upon the idea,
now first put forward as a religious dogma, that Yahveh
is the Creator of the universe. It cannot be said that
Isaiah or Jeremiah did not believe in the world's creation
by Yahveh, but they made no religious use of the belief,
and in so far it was not consciously apprehended and
realized. Deutero-Isaiah, on the contrary, applies the
argument habitually. Yahveh is the uncreated Creator :
such only can be the Maker of the visible world. Identi-
fying the heathen gods with their idols, the argument
from creation pleads the impossibility of that, which is
itself the product of a product, having been the Author
1 xli. 4, xlviii. 12, xliii. 10, 11, xliv. 6.
270 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE!
of all the universe of things. Some divine power must
have made the world: who, if not Yahveh? "Lift up
your eyes on high, and see. "Who has created these?
He who brings out their host by number, and calls them
all by name." Yahveh is the God who "created the
heavens, and stretched them forth, that spread forth the
earth with the things that spring out of it, that gives
breath to the people upon it and spirit to them that walk
through it," "Yahveh the Maker of all things."1
The argument from human history would be more
correctly termed the argument from Israelite history,
were it not that, even more than the doctrine of creation,
it was intended to convince and confound not only hesi-
tating Israel, but the whole ignorant Gentile world.
Yahveh, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, is as
much the God of Israel as he was to Amos and Isaiah.
He chose Israel for his own purposes, and through all
the changing fortunes of its history, Yahveh' s will has
been the one determining cause in punishment and bless-
ing. The signs of his rule have been the messages of
the prophets.
It is in full harmony with his marked theological
tendency that the element in prophecy which strikes
Deutero-Isaiah most vividly, and of which he makes the
greatest use, is the element of prediction. The personal
and ethical features disappear. To Jeremiah, the most
essential function of the prophets, who, since the day
on which Israel came out of Egypt, have been sent
by Yahveh continually, was to bid men "turn them
from their evil way and from the evil of their doings."
1 xl. 26, xlii. 5, xliv. 24.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 271
To Deutero-Isaiah, the essential point is the conformity
of their predictions with the historic issues which they
foretold. The captivity had been predicted ; could the
votaries of any heathen god furnish a parallel? But
besides the captivity, there had been predicted also
a subsequent event, greater and more wonderful still
— big with vital consequences to all humanity — and
this greater event was now being accomplished before
the eyes of all. The prophets had spoken of Israel's
restoration from the land of its exile, and Cyrus was
the chosen instrument of Yahveh to justify that crown-
ing feat and consummation of prophecy. In one sense,,
therefore, Cyrus was foretold; in another, inasmuch
as the method and scope of the deliverance had not
previously been revealed, he forms an element of that
new evangel which Deutero-Isaiah is commissioned to
deliver. In so far as the fall of Babylon was foretold,
and since Cyrus is to bring about its fall, the Persian
king makes Yahveh manifest to those who are as yet
ignorant of the true God. The victories of Cyrus con-
found the idolators.1
To appreciate Deutero-Isaiah' s polemic against idolatry
aright, we have to remember the country in which he
wrote, and the scenes which were passing before his eyes.
Babylon, city and land, was the home of magnificent
idolatry, and nowhere was there a wider popular identi-
fication of the image with the god. Our prophet may
have witnessed the in-bringing of the Accadian idols to
Babylon to protect the capital from the imminent cata-
1 Cf. xl. 2—29, xliii. 8—19, xliv. 6—9, xlv. 6, 21—25, &c. &c.
272 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
strophe.1 Though this strange event happened after the
publication of his first prophetic pamphlet, it is suffi-
ciently suggestive of the temper of the population and of
the time, and it indicates that his sarcastic descriptions of
idol manufacture may well have been drawn from life.
This complete identification of the material idol with the
worshipped god is as novel as the prophet's doctrine of
creation. To Deutero-Isaiah, idolatry is not merely sin-
ful for the Israelite as a transgression of the command,
"Thou shalt have no other gods beside Me;" it is also
theoretically and intrinsically absurd — absurd for the
Gentile as for the Jew. A log of wood of which part is
used for fuel, and part is wrought into a god — what sort
of deity is this that a man should bow down to it and
say, " Eescue me, for thou art my god " ? The folly is
so transparent that the prophet can only regard it as an
inexplicable self-delusion. "A deceived heart has led
him astray, so that he cannot rescue himself and say, Is
there not a lie in my right hand ? "2
Idolatry is therefore absurd, and with the coming
of Cyrus its days are numbered. For the victories of
Cyrus and the redemption of Israel are to fulfil the word
which has gone forth from Yahveh, the oath which by
himself he has sworn, that unto him every knee shall
bow.3 This final denotement of the world's drama is to be
partly brought about by the agency of Israel. To under-
stand it, the prophet's conception of Israel and of its
mission must first itself be understood. That conception
is not always the same or wholly self-consistent. Its
1 Cf. Tiele, Babylonisch-Assyrisclie Geschichte, p. 475.
2 xliv. 9—20. 3 xlv. 23.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 273
highest features are the most important in the history
of our subject, as they are also the newest and most
characteristic.
To Yahveh's omnipotence in the world of external
nature corresponds his omnipotence in the world of man,
and his emergence from the limitations of the patron
deity was impressed upon the prophet's mind no less by
the one than by the other. All history is Yahveh's
province : the whole habitable world — for the earth was
created for man to dwell in it — the theatre of his con-
scious and rational dominion. The universalist tendencies
of the eighth- century prophecy were taken up and en-
larged by this nameless prophet of the exile. To him in
his noblest mood — in this widely differing from the par-
ticularist Ezekiel — the nations are ends in themselves and
have an independent value of their own. They are not
mere foils to set off the higher glory of Israel and of
Yahveh. There is comparatively but little triumph over
the fall of Babylon ; there is only one doubtful allusion
to any violent judgment to be inflicted upon the nations
generally before the full establishment of the Messianic
age.1
In consonance with this wider view of God's provi-
dence is the prophet's attitude towards Cyrus. It is
true that he was called and crowned with victory for the
sake of Israel, Yahveh's elect, and in so far he is a tool
in God's hands, like Nebuchadrezzar to Jeremiah, who
entitled that monarch also "the servant of Yahveh."
But in reality a far higher position is assigned to Cyrus
by the later writer. That the reason of this was due
1 xlv. 20.
T
274 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
to Cyrus' religion is very doubtful. Of that, whether
monotheistic or not, the prophet was probably in igno-
rance. It is rather that Cyrus is at once the instrument
and the symbol of the conversion of humanity to the
worship of the true God. He is Yahveh's anointed and
friend, even his beloved one, who has been sent forth on
his career of victory, that he and all men after him may
know and acknowledge that "from the rising of the sun
unto the setting thereof " there is none but Yahveh.1 It
was not wonderful that the prediction of so exalted a
position entrusted to a heathen king aroused arrogant
disbelief among Jews who were eager that the deliverer
should be miraculously raised up from among their own
ranks.
Yet in spite of this increased toleration for the Gentile
world, Yahveh is still primarily the God of Israel. To
Israel were sent the prophets of old time : to Israel is
addressed Yahveh's message now. Israel shares in the
exaltation of its God : Yahveh's government embraces
the world, but its centre is Jerusalem.
To Ezekiel, as we have seen, the main object of Israel's
and the whole purpose of the heathen nations' existence
were to subserve and express the earthly glory of Yahveh.
As regards Israel, this conception was partly due to
Ezekiel' s pessimistic estimate of both its past and its
present, so that its deliverance from captivity could only
be accomplished because it was necessary for God's own
private and personal ends. Deutero-Isaiah does not lose
sight of this motive altogether ; as a whole, Israel is not
worthy of the coming salvation, and the exile — the fur-
1 xlv. 1, xliv. 2S (Kuenen, Hibb. Lectures,^. 132), xlviii. 14, xlv. 6.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 275
nace of affliction — has not produced the purgation which
might reasonably have been looked for. It is still true :
" For mine own sake, for mine own sake, will I do it, for
else how would my name be desecrated ? and my glory
I will not give to another."1 Yet the human motive for
God's redemptive action is even more prominent, partly
for the sake of Israel and partly for the Gentiles'.
The estimate of Israel is less pessimistic than in
Ezekiel. There have been in the past, and there were
in the present, pious and faithful Israelites, worthy of
Yahveh's love. It was God's love for Israel, a love
unextinguishable and everlasting, which induced him to
choose it for his people. Israel has a threefold mission —
to itself, to the world, and to God. But the three aspects
belong to one whole : God glorifies himself by means of
Israel, but Israel is glorified with God.2
How can Israel have a mission to itself? "With all
its sins in the past, and all its sins — of misdeed and mis-
belief— in the present, Israel, as a whole, is incapable of
fulfilling the work for which it has been " called." And
yet that work is upon the eve of its accomplishment.
Ezekiel avoids the dilemma by his prediction of a new
spirit. Deutero-Isaiah, too, teaches a similar doctrine.
"I, even I, blot out thy rebellions for mine own sake,
and thy sins I will not remember."3 But by his less
pessimistic estimate of his ancestors and contemporaries,
he is able to suggest another solution of the problem.
The better elements in Israel have preserved it in the
past and preserve it still. Without the faithfulness of
the few, the many would have utterly deserted Yahveh,
1 xlviii. 11. 2 xliv. 23, xlv. 25, lx. 9. 3 xliii. 25.
276 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE :
and Israel's name been blotted out. Nor is their work
yet over. They must leaven the mass, and fulfil the
mission of Israel to the world at large. This thought
supplies the key to the conception of the Servant. The
name is sometimes applied to Israel as a whole, and some-
times to an ideal Israel, distinguished from, and even
opposed to, the Israel of the present and of the flesh.
Primarily, Israel is Yahveh's servant, loved of Yahveh
with a peculiar love.1 The partiality of the patron deity
is still not entirely superseded. Even in Deutero-Isaiah
Yahveh gives nations for Israel's ransom, peoples in its
stead.2 Before God and the world, Israel as a whole
is still the privileged servant, but as regards its proper
function and peculiar work, Israel as a whole has become
incapable of discharging them. It is only by the ideal
Israel that Israel's mission can be successfully carried
out. The Servant in this sense is a conception arrived at
by selecting all the noblest traits in the best spirits of
Israel's past history and in some of the prophet's own
contemporaries, and uniting them together in a typical
and highly idealized personification.3
The actual Israel is the opposite of the ideal Israel.
Yet through the ministry of the Servant the ideal and
actual Israel will ultimately become one. The actual
Israel is blind to God's work and deaf to God's word,
while the function of the ideal Israel is to spread abroad
3 xli. 8, 9, xliv. 1, 2, xlix. 3. 2 xliii, 3, 4.
3 In Prof. Duhm's new Commentary a new and divergent interpre-
tation is given of the Servant passages, the chief of which, i.e. xlii.
l_4s xlix. l_6, 1. 4—9, lii. 13— liii. 12, are supposed to have an
independent origin, and to have heen written, not by Deutero-Isaiah,
but by a later and post-exilic author.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 277
the knowledge of God. One picture of the ideal Servant
is too characteristic to be omitted even in a rapid sketch
like the present, and although it is so familiar to us all :
u Behold ! my servant, whom I uphold, mine elect, in
whom my soul is well pleased; I have put my spirit
upon him ; he shall cause religion (literally " law ") to go
forth to the nations. He shall not cry nor clamour, nor
•cause his voice to be heard in the street ; a crushed reed
he shall not break, and a dimly burning wick he shall
not quench; truthfully shall he cause religion to go
forth. He shall not burn dimly, neither shall his spirit
be crushed, till he have set religion in the earth, and
for his teaching the countries wait." For Yahveh has
appointed him " for a light of the nations ; to open blind
eyes, and to bring out captives from the prison," that
God's " salvation may reach unto the end of the earth."1
Here, and in one other corresponding passage, the
prophet rises to the conception of an Israel chosen for
the nations' sake, and preaching the great doctrine of the
one and only God to all the world. By this conception
Israel's election loses its particularist sting, and becomes
a means to an universalist end. Israel's special endow-
ment is the religious truth which has been revealed to
it ; but now, in the fulness of time, that truth, through
Israel, is to be shared with the Gentile. The coast lands
and isles — for such appears to be the fuller connotation
of the word translated "countries" by Prof. Cheyne,
and "islands" in the Authorized Version — are already
waiting for Israel's teaching. By a strange flight of
poetic imagination, the prophet conceives the distant
1 xlii. 1—7 ; cf. xlix. 1—9.
278 Y. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE |
coasts and islands of Asia Minor, which, the news of
Cyrus' Lydian war may have brought within his ken, as-
weary of their ineffectual idolatries, and longing — like
the shiver of nature before the dawn — for the light which
was soon to irradiate their darkness.
In other passages Deutero-Isaiah represents the con-
version of the nations as the direct work of Yahveh, or
as a deduction drawn by themselves from the facts of
Israel's deliverance and restoration. The striking con-
ception of Israel as the chosen instrument and mediator
of that conversion only occurs twice; but, from the solemn
emphasis of the language, it can have been no random
night of thought, although obviously there did not yet
exist even the vaguest surmise how this doctrine, now
first formed and taught, should be realized in fact.
Indeed, the prophet is perfectly conscious of the seem-
ing absurdity of his prediction. Israel is now despised
by all, abject and abhorred. Those who are the truest
Israelites, who come nearest to the ideal, are despised
the most — despised and ill-treated. It is likely enough
that any fitful Babylonian persecution fell most heavily
upon the more patriotic section of the Israelite exiles.
Oppression, forced labour, imprisonment and even death,
may occasionally have been their lot. But these faithful
ones would not only be specially subject to the insults
of the foreigner, but also to the disregard and contempt
of many among their own people. After the final victory
of Babylon, Gentile and Jew will alike recognize their
error. The latter will perceive that it has been the
neglected few who, through their fidelity to Yahvehr
have made the national redemption a moral possibility.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 279
Upon the basis of these facts and expectations, the
prophet, in the memorable fifty-third chapter, which,
with the possible help of older material, was perhaps
inserted in its present somewhat incongruous position
"as an after-thought," has suggested a new theodicy
and a novel rationale of the imminent deliverance.1 He
had opened his message with the statement that the
punishment already received had adequately atoned for
the sins of the past ; he had also enunciated the theory
that any iniquity of the present which still constituted
a bar to redemption must be wiped away by God's grace;
and now, in addition to these hypotheses, he goes on to
teach that the greater and yet undeserved sufferings of
the few may have been endured by them and accepted
by God in full satisfaction for the sins of the nation
as a whole. By the stripes and death of the Servant,
Israel was preserved ; to this ageucy a regenerate people
would ascribe alike its temporal and spiritual redemp-
tion. As with the theory of "the new spirit" in Jere-
miah and Ezekiel, this teaching is not put forward as a
general truth ; it holds good only for a particular class
of people under particular circumstances. It was left for
other and later teachers to show that both the one doc-
trine and the other — God's share in the conquest of sin,
and the conception of suffering as " a conscious volun-
tary sacrifice " — were truths of universal validity.
As regards the second doctrine, Deutero-Isaiah lays
the main stress, not on the Servant's voluntary endur-
ance of suffering for the sake of the nation, but upon
God's acceptance of it in lieu of a further punishment
1 Cheyne, Tlie Prophecies of Isaiah, 4th ed., 1886, Vol. II. p. 53.
280 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
of the whole people. This is a remnant of a sacrificial
theory which the teaching of the prophets themselves
had already been sufficient to explode, and from which
later Judaism has made itself satisfactorily free.1
By the character of the Servant's work in the past —
m other words, and without idealization, by the fidelity
of a zealous minority in every age — he has been prepared
for the work which lies before him in the future. But
that work he will then carry out under very different
conditions — at one with his own people, and sharing with
them in their glory. After Babylon has fallen, he will
no longer be despised, but triumphant — no longer dis-
regarded, but acknowledged by all as the appointed
servant of God. Then "kings shall see and rise up;
princes, they shall bow down; because of Yahveh, in
that he is faithful, and of the Holy One of Israel, in that
he chose thee."2 And finally, after the deliverance has
been effected, and the exiles have settled in their own
land, Israel and the Servant become one and the same.
Tor the redemption of which Cyrus is the instrument
will be spiritual as well as material. God by his grace
helps on to a victorious issue the Servant's work. Thus
the prophet bids the exiles seek God, because in that
very hour he is near, and will let himself be found.3
1 In reading over and correcting the proof-sheets of the present
Lecture, Mr. Carpenter pencilled to the above paragraph the following
aote, which I have ventured to transcribe : " No doubt this idea is
present : but it always seems to rne tbat 'the main stress' is on the
purifying effect which the Servant's sufferings — when really under-
stood— will have upon his own countrymen. The key to the meaning
of liii. 4 — 6 lies surely in verse 11."
2 xlix. 7. 3 lv. 6.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 281
Ezekiel had urged his listeners to make them a new
heart, and he had also promised this "new heart" as
the gift of God. Deutero-Isaiah combines demand with
promise, declaring, " Seek ye a new heart, and it shall
be given you."
It is, therefore, a regenerate Israel which is to be
restored to its ancient home. How does the prophet
conceive the new Jerusalem which is to rise up out of
the ashes of the old ? No plan is formulated, such as
Ezekiel's, for its religious organization. Nothing is said
of the details of worship, though an altar and sacrifices
are implied, just as churches or synagogues might be
implied as necessary features of a religious society in
any prophetic writer of our own time. But as the
false worship of the pre-exilic period is forgotten or
ignored by Deutero-Isaiah in the pressure of the present
and in the greatness of his tidings, so in depicting the
glories of the new Jerusalem he has nothing to say about
safeguards against the violation of Yahveh's holiness, in
the elaboration of which the priestly spirit of Ezekiel
saw such value and found such pleasure. There is a
significant silence about the law, whether of Deutero-
nomy or of the priests. Israel is not rigidly separated,
as in Ezekiel, from the profane world, but the Gentiles
partake freely of the spiritual nourishment which is dis-
pensed at Jerusalem. But the old particularism still par-
tially remains. For in the chapters which deal with the
redeemed community — it is scarcely a nation any more,
nor is there any allusion to an earthly king — the Gentiles
are regarded mainly from the point of view of increasing
the wealth and glory of Israel by the services and
2S2 Y. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE I
tribute which they willingly pay to it.1 Yet Israel is
the world's centre, not through any merit of its own, but
because of the religious truth which has been committed
to it. Jerusalem is the world's capital because YaliYeh
dwells there.
In spite of his monotheism, the prophet does not hesi-
tate to retain the old conception of Deity inhabiting a
particular place, and revealing himself there in visible
effulgence of supernatural light. God is not, as in
Ezekiel, located absolutely within the temple ; Deutero-
Isaiah's idea apparently was that he would be poised
in a cloud of radiant light above Jerusalem. Yet how
far all this is pure metaphor and symbolism, and how far
literal, it is very difficult to determine, and perhaps the
prophet himself could scarcely have told us. There is
no other writer in the Hebrew Scriptures whose language
so frequently passes and re-passes from the material to
the spiritual, or who hovers so habitually upon the con-
fines of either.
The full range of the prophet's vivid imagination is
employed to depict both the spiritual and material beati-
tudes of Israel's future. Its population is increased ; its
land is extended ; its riches are multiplied a thousand-
fold. And this good fortune is to continue for ever.
Compared with the eternity of the golden age, God's
wrath was but for a moment; the new covenant of peacer
which is sealed in the hour of deliverance, will be abso-
lute and everlasting. For there will be no further need
of judgment. Internal regeneration will correspond to
external magnificence. "All thy children shall be dis-
1 lx.— lxii.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 283
ciples of Yahveh, and great shall be their peace." "I
will make peace thy government, and righteousness thy
magistrates. Violence shall no more be heard of in thy
land, desolation nor destruction in thy boarders : and
thou shalt call thy walls Salvation and thy gates Eenown.
The sun shall be no more thy light by day ; neither for
brightness shall the moon give light unto thee : but
Yahveh shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy
God thy glory."1
Soon after these glowing words were written, Cyrus,
the friend and anointed of Yahveh, took the first step
towards their accomplishment.
Cyrus entered Babylon in the year 53S, forty-eight
years after the capture of Jerusalem. He was welcomed,
as I have already mentioned, by both priests and nobles.
Contrary to the anticipations of the other Jewish pro-
phets and of Deutero-Isaiah himself, no punishment was
inflicted upon the conquered people ; the capital was not
plundered. Cyrus, far from putting an end to heathen-
ism, gave himself out as protector of the native religion,
"publicly ascribing his successes to the favour of the
gods of Babylon, offering daily sacrifices on their altars,
and restoring and embellishing their thrones." 2 This was
part of his policy of general conciliation : another instance
of it was his permission to the Jewish exiles to return to
their own land. How this was secured we cannot ex-
actly tell. The Jews, at any rate, according to Cyrus'
own words, were not the only body of exiles upon whom
a similar favour was conferred. To whatever quarter
1 liv. 13, lx. 17—19.
2 Hay Hunter, After the Exile, Vol. I. p. 30.
284 V. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE:
of his empire such exiles returned, they would form an
important bulwark of Persian rule, and help to strengthen
the stability of his dominions. It is very doubtful whe-
ther any other grounds than those of state-craft need
be assumed for the favour of Cyrus towards the exiled
Jews.1
Arrangements for the departure occupied a year. In
537, 42,360 exiles, including men, women and children,
started for Palestine. The sacred vessels of the temple,
which Nebuchadrezzar had removed to Babylon, were
given back to them. Those who stayed behind were pro-
bably more numerous than those who went. A more
complete restoration would doubtless have presented in-
superable difficulties.
The selection of those who should go and of those who
should stay does not seem to have been left to individual
choice. It was certainly not only the zealous who went,
or only the indifferent who stayed. The selection was a
national concern, and it is probable that representatives
of every family among the exiles were now sent back to
Judrea. Within each separate family there may have
been some opportunities for individual choice, though
even here the determining motives would not have been
only indifference or zeal. This dual aspect of the com-
position of the first settlement, that it was supposed to
represent the entire Israelite nation, and at the same
time was in close connection with those who remained
behind in Babylon, is partly indicated by the fact that
1 The edict of Cyrus in Ezra i. 1 — 4 is unauthentic. Cf. Stade,
Geschichte, Vol, II. pp. 93, 99; and for the inscriptions of Cyrus,
Cheyne, Itaiah, Vol. I. pp. 301—306, Vol. II. pp. 288—294.
EZEKIEL AND THE SECOND ISAIAH. 285
they who formed it now called themselves "the men of
the people of Israel," and now the Gola, "the men of
the captivity."
For nearly a hundred years after the return, a true
history of Judaism would have not more to do with the
life of the settlers in Palestine than with those who
remained loyal to religion and race even in their Baby-
lonian homes. The Judaism of the future did not receive
some of its most distinctive features until the union of
these two streams of Jewish life in the days of Ezra and
Xehemiah.
Lecture YL
THE EESTOEATION AND THE PEIESTLY
LAW.
With eager outlook into the future the Jewish exiles
set forth from Babylon upon their homeward journey.
Not less hopefully, and with no feebler interest, did the
mass of those who perforce remained behind watch for
news of the restored Jerusalem. Some forty-two thousand
souls were charged with the inspiring duty of renovation
and retrieval. In them and through them prophecy must
be fulfilled. They, " the sons of the captivity," are also
athe people of Israel," now at last proudly conscious of
their peculiar status and mission.1
The classes of which the troop of home-comers was
composed need examination. A list drawn up not very
long after the re-settlement in Judsea has fortunately been
incorporated in more than one later history, and in the
absence of other contemporary and authentic evidence
for the first seventeen years of restoration, it constitutes
a record of great importance, meriting the patient care
which divers scholars have bestowed on it.2
In this list there are enumerated, first the lay, and
1 E.g. Ezra vi. 16.
2 Ezra ii. ; Nehemiah vii. ; cf. Srneud, Die Listen der Biicher Ezra
wid Nehemia, 1881.
VI. THE RESTORATION AND THE PRIESTLY LAW. 287
then the sacerdotal elements, and in it, for the first
time in an historical document, there is made that dis-
tinction between Priest and Levite which was wholly
unknown to the authors of Deuteronomy. For in
Deuteronomy "Levite" and "Priest" are interchange-
able terms, and the full designation of the ministrants
at the altar is that of "Levitical priests." The origin
of the distinction, which is full-blown in the list of
the home-comers from Babylon, has already come under
notice. It was half-practical, half-theoretical. Josiah's
reformation had resulted in establishing a wide difference
between the legitimate Levitical priests of Jerusalem,
descendants in the main, either really or by repute, of
Zadok, the priest of David, and the irregular Levitical
priests of the high-places, now rigorously interdicted
and demolished by the high-handed enthusiasm of the
young king. This result the authors of Deuteronomy had
foreseen, and they had attempted to provide against it.
But they were unable to secure for the discredited priests
of the high-places equal recognition with the priests of
the Jerusalem temple, the dignity and importance of
which their own code had so enormously enhanced. Such
rustic priests as were brought, or migrated, to Jeru-
salem could only attain to the position of servitors to the
Zadokites. This relative inferiority was subsequently
legalized in the priestly code and based upon Mosaic
authority, but it was arrived at as an outcome of the
hard logic of facts between Josiah's reformation and the
downfall of the state. Indeed, the elaborated hierarchy
of the later code might never have found its place there,
had not the great prophet of the early exile adopted and
288 VI. THE EESTOEATION AKD
even accentuated the actual condition of things in the
temple services as he himself, before the first crash came,
had known and loved them. In his ideal temple of the
Messianic age, his own order, the Zadokites, are to be the
only priests ; the Levites who " went astray from Yahveh
after their idols" should "be keepers of the charge of
the house," but should not draw nigh unto God " to do
the office of a priest."1
Though Ezekiel made too marked a distinction be-
tween the purity of the priests of the capital and the
idolatry of the priests of the "high-places," his par-
tiality had important issues. But his desires were not
completely realized. What conflicts and negotiations
took place from the time of Ezekiel to the triumph of
Cyrus it is impossible to say, but the upshot was that
some Levites who were not Zadokites, priests of the high-
places and not of Jerusalem, were admitted into the legi-
timate priesthood. There is reason to believe that this
compromise, which of course did not satisfy the claims of
those Levites who were still excluded, had been arrived
at before, possibly only shortly before, the return of the
first colony of settlers in 537. The number of priests,
according to each recension of the list, amounts to the
same large total, 4289. So high a figure — unless reck-
lessly exaggerated — even if it include women and chil-
dren, seems best accounted for upon the hypothesis that
other Levites had already been admitted to the priest-
hood in addition to the so-called sons of Zadok. That
the remaining Levites were far from acquiescing in the
prospect offered to them may be inferred from the very
1 Ezekiel xliv. 10 — 14.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 289
small number who took part in the homeward journey.
To the 4289 priests the 74 Levites offer a marked and
significant contrast. The singers, porters and Nethinim,
are not yet incorporated among the Levites ; in the list
they follow as separate classes of temple servitors.1
Thus some " Priests" and many " Levites" remained
in Babylonia; and it is important to bear this fact in
mind, inasmuch as the reformation of 444 was organ-
ized and brought about by new sacerdotal and legal
influences fresh from the land of exile. When that
period is reached, it will be seen how great a change had
taken place in the character of the " Levites," from what
it must have been in the age of Ezekiel, perhaps even
from what it was in the age of Zerubbabel.
It was a first disappointment in a long series which
was to come, that over the homeward-bound exiles an
alien govenor was appointed. In one of his latest essays
Kuenen has accepted Stade's view that the Sheshbazzar,
who is described in the Book of Ezra as the first governor
of Judsea, is not Zerubbabel under a Persian disguise, but
must be regarded as an independent Persian functionary,
who was specially nominated by Cyrus for adjusting
and supervising so delicate a matter as the re-settlement
of the exiles in lands by no means destitute of inhabit-
ants.2 Under him there seems to have been a council
1 Cf. Stade, GeschicJite, Vol. II. p. 106, &c; Kuenen, De gesclne-
denis der priesten van Jaliwe en de ouderdom der priesterlijke wet
(TJteol. Tijd., 1890, pp. 1 — 42); Vogelstein, Der Kumpf zwischen
Friesfern und Leviten sett den Tagen Ezechiels, 1S89.
2 Stade, GeschicJite, Vol. II. pp. 100, 101 ; Kuenen, De chronologie
van het perzlsche tijdvak der Juodsche geschiedenis, 1890, p. 11 (2S3).
U
290 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
of twelve Judaeans, of whom the most important were
Zerubbabel, the grandson of Jehoiachin, the representa-
tive of the royal house and of many a Messianic hope,
and Joshua, grandson of Seraiah, "the chief-priest" of
the Jerusalem temple in Zedekiak's day, who had been
slain by Nebuchadrezzar " at Eiblah in the land of
Hamath."1
Before long, Joshua exchanged his old title of " chief-
priest," which naturally accrued to him, for that of high
or great priest, under which name his successors for six
centuries were destined to be known. Whether the
change of name betokened an immediate increase of
dignity and power is not certain. It is perhaps going
too far to say that the very office of high-priest was
created — for reasons which are still hypothetical — in the
interval between the return in 537 and the exhortations
of the two prophets Haggai and Zechariah in 520. For
the pre-exilic " chief -priest " must also have been a per-
sonage of distinction and importance. The increased
influence of the high-priest depended upon more general
considerations, the change of appellation pointing rather
to augmented power in the future, than indicating a
radical and immediate aggrandizement.
What proportion of the former kingdom of Judaea
was occupied by the restored exiles at the first settlement
is a difficult question, which happily does not directly
concern us here. A far more important point, if only
we could get definite information about it, is the relation
of the home-comers to the inhabitants whom they found
in possession, as well as to their nearest neighbours —
1 2 Kings xxv. 18—21.
THE PEIESTLY LAW. 291
people, moreover (and here lay the difficulty), of whom
some were kindred, some alien and some mixed.
Can we guess at the attitude which the returning
exiles would be likely to assume ? Only vaguely. The
two great prophets of the captivity, Ezekiel and Deutero-
Isaiah, would clearly have ranged themselves upon oppo-
site sides. Ezekiel would have denounced semi-heathen
associations ; Deutero-Isaiah would have hailed in closer
relations with the remnant of Judah and Israel, and with
the half-pagan, half- converted foreigners, a first practical
realization of his universalistic dreams. Whether the
latter prophet was still alive we do not know; but
the list seems to indicate that even in Babylon the
priestly spirit of Ezekiel was paramount in the counsels
of the exiles.1 There must have been some among the
exiles who had more or less perfectly absorbed Deutero-
Isaiah's teachings — not only his higher monotheism, but
his wider conception of Israel's mission to the Gentile
world. Echoes of his teaching may still be heard in
subsequent prophetical and lyrical literature. But the
historical records — such as they are — of the first hundred
years after the return (before the curtain falls for a time
upon external Jewish history) were drawn up by men of
different views, so that it is impossible to learn from
them what was the real strength and influence of their
opponents. Or, rather, it is impossible to discern whether,
besides the baser opponents, whom they stigmatize with
not unjustifiable scorn, there were many others whose
opposition proceeded from purer motives and rested upon
a nobler basis of prophetic universalism.
1 Ezra ii. 59, 62, 63.
u2
292 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
Nor must we forget that it was far easier for Deute-
ro- Isaiah and his disciples to contemplate in Babylonia
a mission of Israel to the Gentiles and a close alliance
with converted heathens, than for anything of the sort
to be enacted upon Judoean soil. The advocates of
separatism and exclusiveness had many arguments upon
their side. Ritual strictness was beginning to be asso-
ciated with religious purity — so much had been effected
by the union of the two streams of prophecy and sacer-
dotalism in the person and teaching of Ezekiel ; nor is
there any reason to doubt that with religious purity
there was very frequently associated a fairly high degree
<of moral earnestness and integrity. Before the settle-
ment in Judeea had lasted many years, it also became
evident that universalism might prove an open door to
religious laxity and easy-going indifference. The more
difficult cause was the cause of particularism, and the
difficulty of a cause tends to increase its apparent probity
and disinterestedness.
The peoj)le with whom a modus vivendl of one kind or
another had to be effected were, as has been said, partly
kindred and partly alien. In Judrea itself there were
living descendants of the old native population which
had been left behind by Nebuchadrezzar in 586 and
subsequently had not joined in the migration into Egypt
after the murder of Gedaliah. Some of these may have
been admitted into the ranks of the " sons of the cap-
tivity," but many had probably intermarried with
heathen intruders ; while the majority, not having passed
through the purgation of the exile, were on a lower
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 293
level of moral and religious development. Idolatrous
tendencies were possibly prevalent among them.
Were the home-comers to lose their hard- won freedom
from idolatry by association and intermarriage with
such as these ? Northwards there lay a larger problem.
Here, again, the population was mixed, and included
descendants of the "ten tribes," and of the foreign
settlers introduced by the Assyrian conquerors. Whether
these two elements were clearly separate or separable, so
that either could be distinguished from a third element
arising from intermarriages between them, may well be
doubted.
Though the men subsequently called "Samaritans,"
and composed partly of Israelite and partly of alien
blood, worshipped Yahveh as their national God, they
worshipped him in all probability less purely and with
less understanding than the returned exiles. It is easily
intelligible that the latter should not have desired to
sully their religious purity by too close an alliance ; and
such apprehensions, which subsequent events proved to
be by no means unjustified, must be allowed their full
weight in an attempted judgment upon the action of the
restored community, while it must at the same time be
fully remembered that lower jealousies and petty exclu-
siveness may also have come into play.
So far, then, as we can gather, the leaders of the com-
munity observed at first a repellent or negative attitude
towards their neighbours. As soon as the exiles had
arrived at Jerusalem, a treasury for the temple was esta-
blished and offerings to it were freely made.1 The next
1 Ezra ii. 68, 69.
294 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
thing would naturally have been to set to work upon the
rebuilding of the sanctuary. An altar for sacrifices was,
indeed, erected ; but the author of Chronicles, who was
also the compiler and editor of the Books of Ezra and
jNTehemiah and wrote more than two centuries after Cyrus,
appears to have been in error when he describes the
temple building as having been begun "in the second
year of their coming unto the house of God at Jeru-
salem." Sheshbazzar, the Persian governor, may have
formally laid the foundation-stone, but, if so, the work
was not further carried on, and for some sixteen years it
remained in abeyance.1
What caused this delay ? There was probably a con-
currence both of external and internal reasons. The
Chronicler attributes the suspension of the work to the
aroused hostility of the northern neighbours. They (the
adversaries of Judah and Benjamin, as he proleptically
calls them) "came to Zerubbabel, and to the heads of
the fathers' houses, and said unto them, Let us build
with you : for we seek your God as ye do ; and we do
sacrifice unto him since the days of Esar-Haddon, king
of Assur, who brought us up hither. But Zerubbabel
and Jeshua and the rest of the heads of the fathers'
houses, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us
to build an house unto our God," thus refusing them any
share in the work.2 Stade disbelieves this statement :
the more cautious Kuenen, however, thinks we may
accept it as substantially accurate.3 If so, it would
1 Ezra iii. ; Haggai i. ; cf. Stade, GescMchte, Vol. II. pp. 115 — 117;
Kuenen, Onderzoek, Vol I. p. 501, &c.
2 Ezra iv. 1 — 5. 3 Kuenen, Onderzoek, Vol. I. p. 505.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 295
supply an adequate explanation for the strange delay.
To the enmity and opposition of the neighbours thus
early aroused, and used for the hindrance of an under-
taking in which they were not allowed to share, there
may also be added some internal reasons to which
Schrader and Stade have drawn attention.1 A natural
desire to secure their own individual possessions and to
spend leisure and money upon these, combined with bad
harvests and comparative poverty, may have helped to
make men think that for the present an altar of sacrifice
was sufficient for their religious needs. If Cyrus had
really promised to rebuild the temple at his own expense,
the promise had not been fulfilled. Perhaps, too, the
very fact that outward circumstance was still sordid and
insecure may have helped to confirm the hesitation. Both
indifference and scrupulosity might strengthen the feel-
ing that the time for building Yahveh's house had not
arrived, seeing that his wrath was still not wholly over-
come.2
Thus there is no bright picture to be given of that
restoration, the coming and character of which had been
portrayed in such glowing colours. And now upon a
community, disappointed and ill at ease, the curtain falls
for some sixteen years, to rise again in the second year
of king Darius, 520 B.C.
That interval was not calculated to raise the hopes or
fire the enthusiasm of those who had already begun to
contrast their own experience with the anticipations of
1 Schrader, Ueber die Dauer des ziveiten Tempelbaus (TJieul. Studien
und Kritikm, 1867, p. 460, &c).
2 Stade, Vol. II. pp. 120, 121.
296 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
the exilic prophets. Of all that Deutero-Isaiah or even
Ezekiel had predicted, nothing had yet been realized.
How was this to be accounted for ? Had God cancelled
his promise or forgotten his word ? Similar disappoint-
ments in the pre-exilic period, both after Hezekiah's
reform and at the death of Josiah, had been tolerably
intelligible. Not long after the deliverance from Assyria
and Hezekiah's reform, Manasseh had begun his reign of
idolatrous reaction ; and even when .Josiah died, it might
be said that his people were still tainted with vestiges of
idolatry, and that the sins of Manasseh were unatoned.
But now it had been distinctly stated by one prophet at
the beginning of the exile, and by another prophet at its-
close, that past sin was pardoned, and that a new heart
would be granted by the grace of God. On the return
from Babylon, an era which should redound to Yahveh's
glory no less than to his people's prosperity would infal-
libly begin. Apart even from the promise of the new
heart, there were no great sins to explain a deferment of
the predicted glories. There was no open and public
idolatry as in the pre-exilic period ; and yet it could not
be said that the impoverished and dependent community
did credit to the glory of its God.
This analysis of current difficulties indicates at the
same time the insufficiencies of the religious point of
view. A solution was to be effected, and a higher reli-
gious level attained, mainly — though this will seem a
paradox to many — by the agency of the Law. As yet
there was but little religious individualism — little joy in
the Law for its own sake and without reference to conse-
quences. Eeligious teachers could not yet urge men to
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 297
find their own personal satisfaction in the service of God,
because religion was still too much bound up with the
community as a whole. Above all, there was as yet no
clear conception of a future life, nor even of a bodily
resurrection, with which to explain and to endure the
trials and perplexities of earth.
Meanwhile the course of Persian history had not run
smoothly since the death of Cyrus in 529. The levies of
men and supplies for Cambyses' Egyptian expedition
must have caused distress in Judaea. Then came the
revolt of Pseudo-Smerdis, and the confusions and rebel-
lions which ensued before Darius was seated firmly on
the throne were scarcely over in the second year of his
reign. Was it the excitement caused by these events,
the hope of independence to which they naturally gave
rise, which brought about a revival of the old prophet-
ism ? For our next contemporary sources are the writings
of the two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah. These men
renewed for the last time the form of prophecy to which
we have been used in the pre-exilic period : their names
and personalities, and the circumstances under which they
wrote, are exactly known. In this respect they join on
to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, whereas Deutero-Isaiah, with
all his greatness, belongs to the class of anonymous
writers represented afterwards by the apocalyptic theo-
logians who try to hide their own lack of conscious inspi-
ration under a mask of assumed antiquity.
Critics have often noticed a decay of freshness and
originality in the writings of Haggai and Zechariah.
Contrasted with Amos and Hosea they show a falling-off
in creative power. But true though this may be, we
298 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
must beware of attributing it to the inferior religious
capacity of the post-exilic period. One form of religious
expression was to be exchanged for others. Circum-
stances were no longer favourable to prophecy ; the pro-
phet, as we know him before the exile, needed for his
sphere of action a corrupt community, and an intense
antithesis between the evil many and the faithful few.
The lessons of prophecy had been well-nigh exhausted
by the teachers of the Assyrian and pre-exilic age. They
were preserved in writing, and could be referred to by
new teachers. Such a reference is actually made by
Zechariah.1
One difference — and that a great one — had certainly
resulted from the introduction of the Deuteronomic code.
"When the older prophets had drawn their accustomed
antitheses between the spirit and the letter, or between
ethical and ceremonial religion, they had denounced a
ritual which was half -idolatrous in character, and which,
though the outgrowth of sacred custom, was sanctioned
by no recognized and authoritative law. Such antitheses
were no longer permissible : the public and outward ser-
vice of Yahveh had been purged of idolatrous elements,
and the manner in which it was carried on was regulated
more and more by rules and prescripts accepted on all
hands as the "Word of God. Again, in the olden times,
after every allowance has been made for exaggeration,
there evidently existed a frequent and glaring association
of moral laxity with ceremonial exactitude : in the days
of Zerubbabel and Joshua, on the other hand, as in the
days of Ezra and Nehemiah, moral and ceremonial strict-
1 Zech. i. 4, 6, vii. 7.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 299
ness must often have gone hand-in-hand.1 A problem
of the post-exilic period was to create new vehicles of
expression for the religious spirit : we shall subsequently
see in what various ways the problem was solved.
The prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah both date from
the year 520. Changes had taken place since the early
days of restoration. Joshua was now high-priest. Zerub-
babel, royal prince though he was, had been entrusted
with the position of governor — a bid, perhaps, for the
loyalty of the Jewish community, which in the troubled
days of the Persian empire was not without its value.2
Haggai is mainly concerned with the rebuilding of the
temple. Untouched as the work still was sixteen years
after the return, that was now the sin which prevented
the coming of the Messianic age. The prophet's denun-
ciations took effect: the work was begun. And now
Haggai's tone changed from threat to promise, from
rebuke to encouragement. He ventured upon a perilous
time-prediction. "It is but a little while," and the
house which was then rising from its ruins should be
filled with glory ; from the day on which its foundations
were laid, God would bless his people. Yet more : poli-
tical independence and the overthrow of Persian rule
were at hand: "the strength of the kingdoms of the
nations " shall be destroyed, and Zerubbabel, Yahveh's
servant, shall be as a signet-ring upon Yahveh's hand —
an allusion, as clear as the prophet dared to make it, to
the re-establishment of the monarchy.3
1 Of course not always ; cf. for the earlier period Zech. vii. and
viii., and for a later (1 Nehemian) period, Isaiah lviii.
2 Haggai i. 1. \ Haggai ii. 6—23; Stade, Vol. II. pp. 124—127.
300 VI. THE RESTORATION AXD
Just as the work of rebuilding was begun, Zechariah
entered upon his prophetical career. In addition to the
peculiar form of his prophecies — the visions and inter-
preting angels, of which more in the sequel — there are
some other points in the eight chapters of his book worthy
of immediate notice. For although in the main his pro-
phecies run parallel to those of Haggai, he has special
characteristics of his own, and in one important feature
resembles the pre-exilic type more closely than his con-
temporary.
Like Haggai, he is persuaded that the Hessianic age
is near. But he attributes its delay to other causes
besides the neglect of the temple. The moral condition
of the restored exiles was not what might have been
expected from those who could remember the fate, and
the reasons for the fate, which had overtaken their ances-
tors : there was still need to plead the cause of justice,
honesty and compassion. As in Ezekiel, we find in Zecha-
riah the two correlative aspects of spiritual reformation ;
it is enforced as the bounden duty of man ; it is promised
as the free gift of God.1
In depicting the Messianic age, Zechariah shows
greater freedom and variety than Haggai. Joshua, the
high-priest, occupies a more exalted place. Zerubbabel
is to finish the temple and to sit upon his fathers' throne,
Joshua the priest will stand at his right hand, and the
counsel of peace will be between them.2 Jerusalem will
be filled with outward glory and spiritual blessedness ; for
1 viii. 16, 17, iii. 4, v. 5 — 11.
2 vi. 13, partly according to the LXX. Cf. Cheync, Origin of the
Pmtter, pp. 21 and 36; Stade, Vol. II. p. 126, n. 1.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 301
God shall dwell once more in her midst, and she shall be
called a city of truth and the holy mountain of Yahveh.
The universalist hopes of older prophets are not forgotten.
A judgment upon the heathen there will surely be, but
nevertheless — so the prophet concludes his collected utter-
ances— "It shall yet come to pass that there shall come
peoples, and the inhabitants of many cities : and the in-
habitants of one city shall go to another, saying, Let us
go speedily to entreat the favour of Yahveh, and to seek
Yahveh of Hosts : I will go also. Yea, many peoples
and strong nations shall come to seek Yahveh of Hosts in
Jerusalem, and to entreat the favour of Yahveh. Thus
saith Yahveh of Hosts : In those days it shall come to
pass that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages
of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him
that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have
heard that God is with you."1
In this prophecy of a time when many nations shall
"join themselves to Yahveh and be to him for a people,"
as in his noble contrast between fasting and morality,
Zechariah breathes the spirit, if he does not echo the
words, of the Babylonian Isaiah. Not unworthily is
the list of historical prophets closed with him.
A difficulty — perhaps instigated by the hostile neigh-
bours— occurred in the early stages of the rebuilding of
the temple. The governor of the West Euphratic pro-
vinces inquired as to the authority under which the
Jews had ventured to commence the work. Appeal was
made to Darius, when the original permit of Cyrus was
happily discovered at Ekbatana, and the order given that
1 viii. 20—23.
302 VI. THE EESTOEATION AND
the building should be suffered to continue. In four
years, that is, in 516, the sanctuary was finished, and
the dedication was celebrated "with joy."1
Perhaps some of the earliest hymns included in our
existing Psalter were written to celebrate its completion ;
for the glorious Accession psalms, which tell of "the
enthronement upon Zion of the Divine King," — songs
which are a lyrical echo of Deutero-Isaiah's prophecies, —
are possibly to be ascribed to this period. Yahveh has
now entered upon his world-wide Kingship, and the
nations are bidden to ascribe to him who is their Judge
and King, as well as Israel's, the glory which is his due.
Nature and humanity are alike to bring their tribute
of praise and thankfulness.2 But once more the high
anticipations of prophets and poets were doomed to dis-
appointment. Darius secured for the Persian empire
a new lease of prosperous existence : there was no ques-
tion of Zerubbabel ascending the throne of his ancestors ;
and, so far as we know, the experiment of a Davidic
governor was not repeated.
The consequence was that, as Yahveh showed no dis-
position to help his people, the leaders of the community
turned again to the advancement of their own interests
and to purely secular aims. In the uncertainty which
still hangs over the date of Malachi — whether, namely,
that little book precedes or succeeds Ezra — the main
feature of the time about which we can speak with con-
fidence was the prevalence of mixed marriages. Several
causes contributed to these alliances, but the main cause
1 Ezra v. 6 — vi. 16.
2 Cf. Cheyne, Origin of Psalter, p. 71.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 303
was doubtless social and political : the semi-Israelites of
the north, and the half-Judoean, half-alien settlers else-
where, were many of them rich and prosperous, and a
closer union with them would confer, from a secular
point of view, considerable advantages.
At the same time it must be remembered that the
memoirs and chronicles of the time were composed by
fierce opponents of the mixed marriages. A genuine
desire on the part of the half-breeds to become full
members of Tahveh's communion, and a genuine desire
on the part of some Jews to put the universalist aspira-
tions of the prophets into practice, may also have been
coincident motives in the attempted amalgamation. But
modern historians are right in pointing out that even if
many of these marriages were contracted from nobler
motives than the opposite party allowed or even under-
stood, they were nevertheless a great danger to the com-
munity as a whole, and likely, if suffered to continue
unchecked, to bring back the religious condition of the
people to a pre-exilic level. For neither the inward nor
the outward religion of that time was firmly enough
established to assimilate, without debasement or retro-
gression, a large influx of elements from a lower religious
plane.
In this doubtful and difficult position the community
remained for nearly sixty years after the completion of
the temple. Historic accounts of this period there are
none : whether any Biblical writings are to be ascribed
to it is very doubtful. What has just been said is,
therefore, deduced from the records of the following
period, and more especially from the memoirs of the man
304 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
who was to inaugurate a new era. For the curtain rises
upon the opening of a new reformation, more decisive
and more lasting than the reformation of Deuteronomy.
It comes from Babylon. Here, for the eighty years
which had elapsed since the restoration under Cyrus, a
large Jewish colony had continued to live and thrive
under conditions and circumstances very different from
those which their brethren were experiencing in Judrea.
They, too, must have felt some disappointment in the
perpetual postponement of the Messianic age ; but they
had gradually grown more accustomed to a lack of
national and political independence, and could more
naturally let their Jewish feelings find vent in purely
religious directions. From their vantage-ground of dis-
tance they were keen critics, doubtless, of the faults
displayed by the community in Palestine, and thus they
may have been more easily able to attribute the failure
of the prophecies to the errors and shortcomings of their
kindred rather than to the anger, neglect or incapacity
of the national God. They were not exposed to the
same disintegrating influences which surrounded the
settlers in Judoea ; but though they had no temptation
to intermarry and coalesce with the native populations
of Babylonia and Persia, they were not uninfluenced by
their associations. Eighty more years of life in or near
the chief cities of a great empire made them keener and
better educated.1 At the same time they had become
not less, but more, attached to their peculiar tenets and
distinctive rites, for they had learned to realize their
value and significance. General conceptions such as
1 SmenJ, Listen, p. 5, n. 2.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 305
those of holiness, and of Israel's abnormal position in
the world at large, were more vividly realized, and even
shed a strange and purifying light upon ceremonies of
older date and of unknown origin.
We have especially to notice the legal work of Priests
and Levites, who became, as it would seem, more and
more exclusively, the spiritual leaders of the commu-
nity in Babylonia during the eighty years between
the restoration under Zerubbabel and the reformation
under Ezra. Of prophets we hear nothing. It was indi-
cated above that a very small proportion of Levites took
part in the first settlement. Yet it would appear as if
the Levites in Babylon, wholly forgetting the semi-idola-
trous associations and memories of the past, became, as
much as the Zadokite priests, students of the legal tradi-
tions of Yahveh's worship, and no less keen than they
for strictness of ceremonial observance. Attempts at
reconciliation were forthcoming, and these were ulti-
mately to be successful. For without abandoning the
vantage-ground of superiority which Josiah's reformation
and Ezekiel's teaching had given them, the Zadokites
were content to represent the position of the Levites, not
as a punishment, but as a privilege of Mosaic ordinance.
This further compromise — over and above the inclusion
of "Ithamarite" Levites as fully qualified priests — was
embodied in the law-book which Ezra, as we shall shortly
see, brought with him from Babylonia to Jerusalem.
Ezra's mission and his fortunes in Jerusalem were
recorded by him in memoirs, of which, unhappily, only
fragments have been preserved to us. Thus there is a
good deal in his history and in the reformation which
x
306 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
■was ultimately effected by the co-operation of Nehemiah,
which must remain doubtful. Some things upon indu-
bitable evidence we know; but much more, which would
be needed to make the picture complete and intelligible
in all its parts, must remain unknown.
Ezra set out on his journey to Jerusalem in the seventh
year of Artaxerxes I., 458 B.C. Who then was Ezra,
and what precisely were his objects and intentions ? He
was a Zadokite, closely related to the high-priest's family.
But by later historians he is given another name than
priest. Not only by the Chronicler, but also by an
earlier writer, he is called indifferently Ezra the priest
and Ezra the scribe or sopher. Here the word "scribe" has
already its later religious significance, which it scarcely
possessed in the days of Ezra himself: the Chronicler
expands it into "a scribe skilful in the law of Moses;"
while Artaxerxes' commissory letter — itself, however, of
uncertain authenticity and date — speaks of Ezra as " the
priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven." l That
Ezra brought a book of law with him is certain. He
was not the author of that book, though he may possibly
have had some share in its revision and enlargement.
In his day there could scarcely have been a clear distinc-
tion between priest and scribe : that is to say, there
were as yet probably no scribes who were not either
priests or Levites. It was not till the letter of the Law
was thoroughly fixed, and existed as a supreme and autho-
ritative religious power, that an order of scribes could
grow up dissociated from, and even antagonistic to, the
priesthood.
1 Ezra x. 10, 16; Neh. viii. 1, 2, 4, 9, xiii. 13; Ezra vii. 6, 21.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 307
Whether Ezra had received any summons from friends
of his own line of thought in Jerusalem is doubtful.
Seeing that communications passed not infrequently
between the two sections of the community, it would
a priori have seemed probable that Ezra's journey was
induced by news of the mournful condition of affairs in
the home country. But the precise point which was
most bitter and hateful to Ezra and the men of his school
— the prevalence of mixed marriages — seems to have
come upon him soon after his arrival as an unheard-of
and appalling novelty. In the rescript of Artaxerxes,
Ezra is described as sent by the king and his counsellors
" to inquire concerning Judah and Jerusalem according
to the law of thy God which is in thine hand," and valu-
able subsidies are given him for the better provision of
the temple services, as well as important privileges for
its priests and servitors.1 This letter of Artaxerxes is,
however, clearly coloured from the Jewish point of view.
It is even doubtful whether its compiler had ever seen
the original decree.
But in the stress which it lays upon the temple services
the letter seems accurately to reflect the truth. Eor the
main object of Ezra's coming with the law of God in
his hand is plainly indicated at the outset of his own
memoirs : " Blessed be Yahveh, God of our fathers, who
has put such a thing as this in the king's heart, to beau-
tify the house of Yahveh ivhich is in Jerusalem." 2 Ezra's
further action was prompted by the condition of things
which he found existing in the capital. His original aim
1 Ezra vii. H— 25. 2 vii. 27.
x2
308 VI. THE EESTOEATION AND
was a thorough re-organization of the entire ceremonial
worship upon the basis of a new code.
Ezra took with him a considerable band of associates.
Exclusive of women and children, 1068 persons were
counted up at the place of departure. But in spite of
the compromises, both practical and theoretical, between
Zaclokites and Levites, none of the latter had volunteered
to take part in the fortunes of the new colony. Zadokite
though he was, this abstention of the Levites grieved
Ezra keenly ; and when, after special effort and entreaty,
thirty- eight Levites were persuaded to undertake the
journey, he regarded their consent as a special indication
of the divine favour. And now follows a curious inci-
dent. Ezra was unwilling to ask the king for any escort
for himself and his fellow-travellers; he had used the
customary phrases of religious piety in speaking to Arta-
xerxes of the power and benevolence of his God, and he
was unwilling that the effect should be weakened, or an
obvious retort put into the Persian courtiers' mouths, by
any confession of fear. Yet the perils of the road were
many. So Ezra proclaimed a fast, and God was earnestly
besought to grant a prosperous journey. When Jeru-
salem was reached without let or hindrance upon the
road, not a man in all the company but would believe
that the supplication had been heard. Their courage was
raised for the execution of the ritual reform which they
had set out from Babylon to accomplish. The treasure
was weighed out and deposited in the temple ; a large
sacrifice was offered up. Then the king's commission
was delivered to certain Persian officials, and their help
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 309
•was sought and obtained for the support of the commu-
nity and of the "house of God."1
But all further progress in the " beautifying " of the
temple, or in the introduction of the more developed
priestly law, was stopped by the news of the mixed
marriages. Ezra's horror on learning that the -whole
community, from its temporal and spiritual chiefs down-
wards, was tainted with this pollution, knew no bouuds.
He broke forth into open lamentation. It is noticeable
that the peculiar character of the mixed marriages did
not pass muster even as an extenuating circumstance.
They are described as purely heathen ; and the fact that
many of the " strange wives " must have been of semi-
Israelite descent and had very possibly worshipped from
infancy the God of Israel, is studiously ignored. At the
close of Ezra's prayer his memoirs are broken off, and
from a later authority which now takes their place we
have only a fragment remaining, so that much obscurity
hangs over the issues of these deplorable disclosures.2
Ezra and his associates, together with the stricter party
in Jerusalem, were enabled to carry the people with them.
A proclamation was issued summoning the whole man-
hood of Judah to a solemn convocation at the capital.
On the twentieth day of the ninth month — that is, in
December — this strange assembly actually met. All the
people sat in the " open space before the temple, trem-
bling because of this matter and for the great rain." It
must have been an extraordinary spectacle. No miracle
was expected : no royal compulsion had driven them to
the spot : it was a spontaneous expression of the hold
1 Ezra viii. 1 — 36 2 Ezra ix. (close of the memoirs).
310 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
which religion had obtained over their minds. The full
measure of the difference between Israel before and after
the captivity is revealed to us in this gathering. Ezra
urged an immediate expulsion of the foreign wives. But
a more prudent course was adopted. A commission of
investigation was appointed to draw up a list of the
transgressors. This work occupied the commission, of
which Ezra was naturally the head, for three months,
and the narrative breaks off with what is, presumably, a
copy of the list which was then submitted to the people
and its rulers. Yet this list only contains 113 names,
made up of 17 priests, 10 Levites, and 8G laymen. Are
we to suppose that it only enumerates the notable fami-
lies who had intermarried with the "peoples of the
land " ? Would so much indignation and dismay have
been evoked if the mixed marriages had been confined
to so small a number ?l
Meanwhile a misplaced chapter of Ezra gives the clue
to the sudden suspension of the narrative. Things went
badly with the reforming party between the attempted
dissolution of the mixed marriages and the arrival of
Nehemiah. Popular enthusiasm had jDerhaps infected a
certain number of the supposed transgressors. From
pressure or conviction, some of the tabooed marriages
were annulled and the "strange" wives expelled. In
other cases, doubtless, the husbands followed their wives
into exile, and helped to kindle a flame of anger and
revenge among the neighbouring communities, whose
daughters had been exposed to indignity.
Both within and without Jerusalem there was opposi-
1 Ezra X.; cf. Kuenen, De Chronologie, &c, p. 45, &c.
TIIE PRIESTLY LAW. 311
tion to the new reform. Ezra, consequently, seems to
have thought the further development of his plans im-
practicable until he had secured Jerusalem from hostile
attack. He attempted, therefore, to rebuild its walls
and to make it a fortified city as of old. But he had
reckoned without his hosts. Once more the Persian
officials were induced to take up the enemies' cause, and
this time with better effect. The fortification of the
city, although not devised with insidious intent, might
easily be regarded as a step towards rebellion. Arta-
xerxes accordingly gave orders that the work should be
stopped, and with the help and to the satisfaction of the
hostile neighbours, the walls were broken down, so that
the outward condition of the capital was more miserable
than before. Ezra's influence was destroyed, and very
possibly several of the men who had followed their wives
into exile may now have returned with them to Jeru-
salem.1
After twelve or thirteen years' interval of suspense
and degradation, Ezra's party received unexpected aid
from Persia. The reformation which the priest had been
unable to complete was taken up and brought to a per-
manent and victorious issue by a distinguished layman.
Kehemiah, the cup-bearer of Artaxerxes, is reasonably
coupled with Ezra as the joint restorer of the enfeebled
community and the joint founder of Judaism. His story
must be read in detail in his own memoirs, of which
a large part has been happily preserved for us, as well
as in the modern histories of Israel. There is a vein of
egotism in his character, but on the whole he deserves
1 Ezra iv. 6—23; cf. Stade, Vol. II. pp. 158—162.
312 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
admiration for his devoted zeal and integrity. He was a
courtier of high rank, but he was nevertheless with all
his heart and soul a Jew, and in theory and practice an
adherent of the strict separatist party, the best spirits in
which were also men of that civic integrity inculcated
by the prophets.
The first motive of his expedition was the rebuilding
of the walls of Jerusalem — the removal of the " affliction
and reproach " under which the community was labour-
ing, with the ramparts of its capital broken down and
the " gates thereof burned with fire." How, appointed
by Artaxerxes governor of Jerusalem, he fulfilled his
main mission, in spite of intense and often treacherous
opposition from enemies both without and within the
city, cannot be repeated here, but two points must not be
passed over. Firstly, the particularist policy of Ezra
was ratified and confirmed by the new governor. The
Jews are the servants of the God of heaven : as for the
outsiders, they have " no portion, nor right, nor memorial
in Jerusalem."1 Secondly, the prophets of the time were
opposed to Nehemiah, and apparently in league with the
hostile neighbours.2
While the party which had baffled Ezra was not strong
enough to resist the force and prestige of a governor
appointed by the great king, active and insidious corre-
spondence was carried on between Nehemiah's enemies
within and without Jerusalem. But the new governor
was not to be turned from his purpose, nor entrapped by
clumsily managed plots. He reminds us of the Maccabees
in his fine combination of unshaken confidence in God
1 Nek ii. 20. 2 vi. 7—14.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 313
with a wary promptitude for the successful execution
of his plans. His language, when an armed attack was
expected, is thoroughly Maccabean : "Be ye not afraid
of them," he urged the builders; "remember Yahveh
who is great and revered, and fight for your brethren,
your sons and your daughters, your wives and your
houses."1 This is something better than the "sword of
Yahveh and of Gideon." It implies, even as the fierce-
ness of the covenanters implied, the inspiring conscious-
ness of a holy cause.
After fifty-two days of unremitting labour, during
great part of which Nehemiah and his immediate fol-
lowers never left their posts nor put off their clothes, the
work was finished : the walls were built and the gates
set up. The successful conclusion of Nehemiah's primary
object was immediately celebrated by a joyful dedication,
in which Ezra, who now suddenly re-appears upon the
scene, is recorded to have taken part.2
But the ceremony of dedicating the walls was to be
quickly followed by a ceremony of far deeper import.
"We know nothing of what must have passed between
Nehemiah and Ezra after the arrival of the former at
Jerusalem ; yet we know that Nehemiah would be heart
and soul with Ezra in the desire to establish the temple
ceremonial and the whole outward worship of Yahveh
upon a more adequate and honourable basis. They would
think alike, too, in desiring to prevent the pollution of
Yahveh's name and service by lax observance, or by any
1 iv. 14 (iv. 8, Heb.).
2 Cf. Stade, Vol. II. pp. 173—175; Kuenen, Onderzoek, Vol. I.
p. 498 ; De Chronologic, p. 30.
314 VI. THE EESTOKATION AND
want of ritual purity. Seeing that these two connected
objects were to be attained, according to Ezra's judgment,
by the introduction of that new law (in addition to the
already acknowledged law of Deuteronomy) which he
had brought with him from Babylonia, the sympathizing
governor must have been willing and anxious to put all
facilities in Ezra's way for making that yet unpublished
code known to, and accepted by, the community. There
could be no better opportunity for this delicate and diffi-
cult task than a day immediately after the dedication of
the walls, when the people were already raised to a high
pitch of religious enthusiasm, and when a large number
of the country population was still present at Jerusalem.
Thus it would seem that the ceremony of dedication fol-
lowed at once on the conclusion of the building, upon
the 25th day of Elul, and that the introduction of the law
was arranged for the first day of the following month —
Tishri, 444 B.C.1
Neither from Ezra's nor Nehemiah's memoirs are we
allowed to hear the story. In the ill-arranged Book of
Nehemiah, we are suddenly brought, as it were, face to
face with the imposing scene, in the following words
from the hand of a later historian : " And all the people
gathered themselves together as one man into the broad
space that was before the water-gate ; and they spake
unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of
Moses, which Yahveh had commanded to Israel." Then
Ezra brought the law and read therein.2
But before we follow further the story of this reading
and of its effects, it is necessary to consider what manner
1 Cf. Stade, VoL II. p. 176. 2 Neh. viii. 1—4.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 315
of book it was which was thus openly set forth to the
people, and what may yet be learnt of its history and
origin.
The greater portion of it is undoubtedly still preserved
to us in large sections of the Pentateuch and Joshua.
Speaking very roughly, and including additions made
subsequently to the proclamation under Ezra in 444, it
embraces some eleven chapters in Genesis, some nineteen
in Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, and twenty-eight
chapters of Numbers.1 If you were to print these eighty-
five chapters together, they would not make a continuous,
whole, neither would they form a " book" in the ordinary
acceptation of the word. The reasons are manifold. The
Pentateuch, as we now possess it, is a fusion of these
eighty-five chapters with the two far older narratives
of the pre-prophetic or early prophetic period, and with
the law of Deuteronomy. That fusion was effected in
the generations succeeding Ezra. But when the eighty-
five priestly chapters were dovetailed with the other
sixty-eight (omitting Deuteronomy), neither portion of
the conglomerate was unimpaired by the process. But
this is only one reason out of three for the fragmentary
appearance of the eighty -five chapters if printed by
themselves. Another is, that additions were made to
1 For the Book of Genesis the English reader will find the Priestly
and Prophetic portions most easily and conveniently distinguished in
Mr. Fripp's excellent little volume, The Composition of the Book of
Genesis (London : Nutt, 1892), of which the small size must not lead
any one to ignore the immense amount of patient lahour and detailed
investigation which has been given by the author to what most people
would consider somewhat tedious and unattractive work.
310 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
the "book" subsequently to Ezra. And the third and
most important is, that in the form in which Ezra read
it aloud to that famous assembly at Jerusalem, it was
already an interpolated book, without any claim to
artistic unity.
In spite of this double series of interpolations, these
eighty-five chapters of the Pentateuch and the corre-
sponding fragments in Joshua have a unity of another
kind — a unity of character. All of them, whether
historical or legal, are written from a sacerdotal point
of view, and reflect the characteristic conceptions of the
priest. The writers are Israelites ; still more, they are
Israelites who have absorbed some main elements of
prophetic teaching, and who start from the platform of
monotheism. But the prevailing instincts of the priest
all the ancient world over are also theirs: they corre-
spond clearly to their type. In this respect it will have
to be observed how the aims, and still more the ideas, of
the authors of the priestly code differed from the later
legalists, who yet were in the unfortunate predicament
of having to accept a law, full of priestly narrownesses
and survivals, as the pure and undiluted word of God.
The interpolations which had been introduced into
the central portion of our eighty-five chapters are mainly
earlier than that central portion itself. They consist of
those codifications of pre-exilic laws and customs of
which mention was made in the last Lecture. These
collections, however, of which the most important is the
law of holiness in Leviticus xvii. — xxvi., appear in our
present Pentateuch in an enlarged and edited form, and
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 317
it is a moot question how far these editings may be the
work of the author of the " central portion," or of another
but kindred mind.
Meanwhile, the central portion, which thus stands
between the earlier codifications and the later post-
Xehemian additions, is that part of the whole on which
our attention may be chiefly fixed, for it, as it were,
determined the tone of all the subsequent accretions.
Wherever these do not clearly differ from its general
spirit, they can be quoted in illustration.
This central portion, then, which perhaps originally
did not include much more than half of the present
eighty-five priestly chapters in the first four Pentateuchal
books, was not a lengthy work and was not intended
for specialists.1 It may have been written about 500
B.C.; but whatever the exact date, its origin lies between
Zechariah and Ezra (520 — 458). Its object was to pre-
sent a picture of Israel's sacred institutions as they should
be, and as the author doubtless hoped that by means of
his book they would become. On the precedent of older
models, this desired ideal is represented as having been
originally prescribed by God through Moses and realized
in the distant past. It is cast in the form of a history
extending from the creation of the world to the Israelite
settlement in Canaan. Besides his general priestly pro-
clivities, the author has a special and peculiar delight in
dry genealogies, exact dates and precise measurements.
How far these details have any sort of traditional basis
is very doubtful.
1 Cf. Wurster, Zur CharaJcteristik unci Geschichte des Priestercodex
und HeiligJceilsgesetzes, Z.A. W., 1884, pp. 112 — 133.
318 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
Israel's sacred institutions centre round the temple
and its service, and the main portion of the book is thus
devoted to the relation how that service of the temple,
which, for the Mosaic age, has to be modified into a
moveable tabernacle, was organized and established. What
ought to and was to be is described under the disguise
of an inauguration of a supposed Mosaic original, while
almost every recorded incident in the history has its
ceremonial or institutional bearing.
A full analysis of the book and of its supplements
must naturally be sought elsewhere. Here it is only
proper and needful to dwell upon its general character,
and upon the nature of its more salient religious con-
ceptions.
It may at once be noticed that, both in its original
form and as introduced by Ezra, the book primarily
concerns the community and not the individual. Ulti-
mately the Law became a means of religious satisfaction,
and a veritable link between God and man, so that the
multiplicity of its enactments was regarded as a privilege,
leading those who were fortunate enough to know and
follow them to a higher religious level and to their tem-
poral and eternal bliss. This, however, is a later point
of view; it is the legalist's conception and not the
priest's. The business of the priest is to make a holy
community, among whom God may dwell. We have
already met this strange idea in Ezekiel ; it is the cen-
tral conception of the priestly code. The laws are not
primarily intended to secure man's happiness, but God's
satisfaction. Human prosperity is not, as in Deutero-
nomy, either the bribe or the goal ; the prevailing motive
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 319
is the glory of God. Extravagant as the conception is,
there is something grand and spiritual about it. To the
community is assigned a purely religious end : political
aims are ignored, for the people lives for God's sake and
not for its own. Push the conception one stage further
back, and with a revival of far earlier ideas, the land as
Yahveh's dwelling-place becomes more important than
the people which inhabit it : the necessity, for example,
of exacting blood for blood lies in the fact that the stain
of blood which denies the land can only be wiped out
by the blood of him that shed it, while the mischief of
defilement is the pollution of the chosen residence of
Yahveh.1
In Babylon the Jewish priests seem to have lost touch
with the political aspirations of their people. Dreams
of world-wide rule under a beneficent king harmonized
rather with prophetic modes of thought than with priestly
visions. The priest's Messianic age is one in which the
holiness of Israel is preserved inviolate, and God dwells
secure in a sanctuary, officered and directed according to
his will. Nothing is said in the priestly code of a possible
king ; the pre-exilic monarchy was a thing of the remote
past, and the hopes which in Judsea had been associated
with Zerubbabel seem to have found no echo in Babylonia.
Above the high-priest no lay ruler is indicated : indeed,
the hierarchy, which the author of the " central portion"
contemplates, scarcely admits, as it wholly ignores, any
secular officers by its side. With the general life of the
community the priest who has no aim beyond holiness has
nothing to do. Perhaps it did not even interest him.
1 Numbers xxxv. 33, 34.
320 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
His business is purely religious, and the centre of his
thoughts is Yahveh. Priestly as his conception is both
of God and of religion, it must be allowed that in his
own way God and religion are both very near and dear
to him. As with Ezekiel, so also with the authors of
the priestly code, the charge has been brought against
them that their conception of God is distant and tran-
scendental. But this charge labours under the same
inaccuracy. Because their God was a different Deity
from the God of the prophets, or from the God of Jesus,
or from the God of modern Jews and Christians, he was
not therefore necessarily a God less near and dear to
them. He was perpetually in their thoughts, and they
conceived him as dwelling in their temple : the life of
the community was consecrated to his service for his
sake as much as, if not more than for its own.
There is certainly a fusion in their conception of God
between old heathen notions and prophetic ideas : this
fusion is characteristic of the entire priestly law. Gross
anthropomorphisms are carefully avoided, but God still
comes down from heaven to earth, talks with Moses face
to face, and is revealed in theophanies of cloud and fire.1
God's wrath is still aroused — albeit no longer from
unknown causes — by accidental or trivial violations of
his sanctity ; and the priestly writers, apparently in all
good faith, really believed that there might still be an
almost mechanical explosion of divine anger on account
of offences wholly removed from the sphere of morality,
but trenching upon the maintenance of Yahveh's honour/2
1 E.g. Genesis xvii. 3, 22 ; Exod. xxxiv. 31 ; Lev. ix. 23, &c.
2 Kg. Lev. x. 1— G ; Exod. xxx. 33 ; Numbers i. 53.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 321
For the service of the sanctuary, as it is the chief end of
the national existence, so is it invested also with peculiar
dangers, and any deviation from the laws laid down for
its regulation would be followed by terrible results.
Why Israel has been chosen by God is not clearly
stated. It is an ultimate fact of religion, to be accepted
without explanation. "Ye shall be holy unto me : for
I, Yahveh your God, am holy, and have severed you
from other peoples that ye should be mine."1 But as
through Israel Yahveh is glorified to all mankind, the
acknowledgment of Yahveh's glory may be said to be
the final cause both of Israel's election and of the world's
history. In this point priestdom and prophecy are at
one; yet it may well be questioned whether the con-
stituent elements of Yahveh's glory would have seemed
the same to Isaiah as to the authors of the priestly
code. Meanwhile, in Israel, God has appointed a certain
method by which he will be served, and certain rites by
which he will be approached and propitiated. It must
be remembered that the Yahveh of the exilic priest is
the God of the spirits of all flesh, and the Creator, by
divine fiat, of heaven and earth. And yet this sole and
unique God is to be domiciled in some mysterious way
or other — for what the exact conception was can never
be precisely recalled — within a human shrine.
No wonder, then, that the absurd disproportion of the
two terms, the God and his dwelling-place, should tend
in some degree to exaggerate the old priestly fears of
the result of divine contact with earthly things and
beings. Hence a large proportion of the rites and cere-
1 Lev. xx. 26.
Y
322 VI. THE RESTORATION AXD
monies in the priestly code is directly concerned with
the removal of all possible sins and defilements which
may either be inconsistent with the presence of God
within his sanctuary, or convert it into an occasion of
appalling consequences to his chosen people. They do
not carry their efficacy in themselves, but owe it to the
divine decree. All of them — including sacrifices — are
supposed to have started into existence together, perfect
and ready-made. Before the Mosaic legislation, for
example, nobody had ever dreamed of such a thing as
sacrifice, at least none of the well-regulated ancestors
of the Israelites from Noah and Abraham downwards.
But the rites and ceremonies which God does choose are
naturally those which lay ready to the author's hand
in tradition and pre -exilic practice. Some of them
embody superstitious ideas of extremest antiquity, and
are strangely pagan in their very form and enactment,
yet out of all the heathen sting is removed through their
adoption and promulgation by Yahveh.1 That marriage
of heathen practice to monotheistic use is one of the
oddest and saddest features of the whole priestly code.
God, then, to the main author of the priestly legislation,
should live in the very centre of Israel. A single sanc-
tuary needs no longer to be fought for as in the days of
Josiah : it is everywhere assumed. The divine majesty
at the centre is hedged round by a double ring of ser-
vitors, and the Israelites themselves, as the third ring,
make the distance yet wider between the centre and the
profane world without.
In the matter of priests and Levites the new code
1 E.g. Lev. xiv. 53; ^Numbers v. 17, &c, xix. 2.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 323
suggests a compromise. The priests are no longer to be
identified with the Zadokites, as in Ezekiel : they are
the sons of Aaron. Besides those who fell victims to the
divine wrath, Aaron had two other sons, Eleazar and
Ithamar.1 Eleazar is the ancestor of Zadok : all other
Levitical priests who could manage to pass the magic
circle might be enrolled as sons of Ithamar. The other
descendants of Levi, outside the family of Aaron, are not
admitted to the rights and privileges of the priesthood ;
yet their lower position is no longer represented, as in
Ezekiel, as due to any fault of their own, but as a divine
arrangement from the beginning. The Levite, as the
second-grade servitor of the sanctuary, is also a privi-
leged person, of superior holiness to the common Israelite ;
nor is the law, which is careful to secure a good revenue
to the priest, neglectful of the material interests of the
Levite.2
Since the priest's heart is bound up with his sanctuary,
almost all his code is directly or indirectly concerned
with it. " To the author of the priestly legislation, the
interests of the altar and of its ministers are the chief
matters of moment — not religion and morality. Purity of
skin and of dishes is more important than purity of heart."3
Such is the verdict of a most distinguished scholar to
whom all Biblical students are deeply indebted ; but it is,
nevertheless, inaccurate and one-sided. Morality was not
indifferent to our legislating priests ; but it was not, if
1 Numbers iii. 1 — 4.
2 Numbers iii. 6, &c, xviii. 21 — 24, &c.
3 Eeuss, Die Geschichte der heiligen Schrlften alien Testamentes,
§ 379, p. 489 (2nd ed., 1S90).
Y2
324 VI. THE RESTOKATION AND
one may say so, upon their agenda-paper. Their busi-
ness was the regulation of the cultus. That was suscep-
tible of, as it required, minute direction and enactment :
the laws of morality were simpler, and had been suffi-
ciently laid down in earlier codes. If it be asked
whether the priestly conception of holiness did not
include morality, or whether an outrage on morality
was not also conceived as an outrage upon sanctity, the
answer would certainly be affirmative ; but it has to be
borne in mind that a violation of morality could but
seldom be even partially atoned for by sacrifice, and that
it therefore fell outside the priestly sphere. Touches here
and there show us, however, that our priests were not
indifferent to morality. Virtue and vice were antecedent
to sacrifice and ritual. T^oah was righteous, and walked
with God when all the world was filled with violence.
The maxim for Abraham's conduct is not unworthy of a
prophet : " Walk before me, and be thou perfect."1
But the thorough priestliness of our authors makes
them naturally full of conceptions which are very alien
to ourselves. A localization of Deity carried with it
grave risk of materialism. It gave a new lease of life
to the old heathen idea that a man could be nearer to
God in one place than in another; and that this idea
was now associated with a single and supreme Deity
made it but the more incongruous. And it also fur-
bished up and strengthened the strange, unprophetic
notion — which was to lead to far-reaching and extra-
ordinary consequences — that one class of men might be
"nearer" to God than another, or that the Deity could
1 Gen. vi. 9—11, xvii. 1.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 325
only be approached by some external mediator or inter-
cessor.
That famous command of the earlier code of sanctity,
" Ye shall be holy, for I, Yahveh, your God am holy,"
may be taken as watchword and key-note for one whole
side of the priestly legislation. That God may dwell in
the chosen sanctuary and radiate his glory unobscured,
everything in Israel from circumference to centre must
be holy ; and the nearer to the centre (the nearer, in
other words, to God), the higher must be the degree of
holiness required, the more elaborate the rules and pre-
cautions in order to realize and maintain it.
Xow the conception of holiness familiar to an Israelite
priest of even the sixth or fifth century retained many
characteristics of its original connotation in primitive
religions. What those characteristics were, and how
they arose and came to be, anybody can now learn by
reading Professor Robertson Smith's delightful book,
The Religion of the Semites.1 "Holy" may be roughly
regarded as a general term to describe the peculiar con-
dition of a person or thing, as it is or as it should be,
which has any relation to or connection with deity. It
has primarily "nothing to do with morality and purity
of life." Even when the term had become partially
moralized, the old ideas still maintained themselves among
the priesthood. Thus holiness to the Israelite priest was
outward as well as inward, physical as well as spiritual,
material as well as moral. Moreover, in his actual legis-
lation, that portion of holiness which he could specially
deal with by precept and rule was the material, the phy-
1 Cf. especially pp. 132—149 (Lecture IV.), and pp. 427—437.
32 b' VI. THE RESTORATION AND
sical and the outward. In the command, "Ye shall be
holy, for I, Yahveh, your God am holy," the idea of
ethical sanctity is included, but it was only the violation
of physical sanctity which could be fully rectified by
ceremonial ordinance, and which therefore lay entirely
within the reach and compass of the code. If, then, to
touch a dead mouse impairs a man's holiness, and God's
desire is that all Israel should be holy (each class in its
own degree), it is, in the first place, clear that that which
injures the holiness of the community, be it done volun-
tarily or involuntarily, be it moral transgression or ritual
mishap, is in all cases alike an offence against Deity.
Thus sin (in our sense of the word) tends to be looked
at, not from the prophetic point of view as a social and
public obliquity, nor from the later point of view of
some sages and psalmists as a pollution of the indivi-
dual soul, but in harmony with the general aim and
object of the priestly authors, as a breach of purity, a
disturbance of that undefiled condition of the land and
its inhabitants under which alone God can continue to
dwell among his peoj)le and in his sanctuary. The code
is, indeed, more concerned with involuntary than with
voluntary offences, for — with some small exceptions — it
is only the first class of which the pollution can be over-
come by ceremonial means.
In this respect we see clearly to what large extent
the priest, while maintaining many of his own peculiar
points of view, had yet shared in and absorbed the
higher religious teaching of the prophets. There is no
longer any idea of influencing God by sacrifice beyond
and above the range of its influence as divinely decreed.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 327
A deliberate moral iniquity is not to be obliterated by
sacrifices. It must be punished under the penal law or
forgiven by repentance, and for the individual there is
no other means of atonement. It is the blot upon the
community entailed by individual guilt which is other-
wise provided for. Under the atoning efficacy of sin
and trespass-offering there fall for the individual only
involuntary offences, whether moral or ritual, and such
voluntary offences of either class which are (1) not done
with deliberate intent to insult the majesty of God, or
(2), being confessed by the doer, are not punishable
under the ordinary civic law. In certain cases where
restitution is possible, it must precede the atoning sacri-
fice.1
While, however, a distinction is carefully drawn be-
tween intentional and unintentional wrong-doing, between
intentional transgression of ritual or moral commands
there is none. The laws of God are all on the same
level : he who, by malice aforethought and with delibe-
rate intent, gathers sticks upon the sabbath, is no less
worthy of the gravest punishment, and has committed
no less a sin, than he who robs his neighbour or commits
adultery. We have evidence here, on the one hand, of
the intense danger of ascribing any merely ceremonial
practice to the commandment of God, and, on the other
hand, of the equal danger of dragging God down into
the sphere and conditions of man. Directly the platform
of the older prophets is abandoned — that nothing but
the moral law is the law of God — you run the risk of
setting up a whole series of acts utterly unconnected
1 Cf. Dillmann's Commentary on Lev. iv. — vi.
328 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
with morality upon the same level as itself. So, too,
with the other mistake committed in the priestly code.
Since God is conceived as dwelling in a human sanctuary,
his own holiness, as well as the sanctity which he requires
from man, becomes materialized, and can be violated by
acts outside that moral law in the breach of which alone
any insult to the divine majesty can properly be supposed
to consist.
Again, if many elements in the priestly conception of
"holiness" have their roots deep down in a distant past
when religion and morality were but imperfectly allied,
and superstitious fear was closely connected with reli-
gious ceremonial, this is still more the case with the
conception of "uncleanness." Here, also, what unclean-
ness originally meant, and how it gradually became
separated off from the idea of holiness, may be profitably
studied in Prof. E. Smith's book. In the priestly legis-
lation, as God enjoins holiness and forbids uncleanness,
that which is unclean, be it person or thing, is in a con-
dition more or less offensive to God, and if to him offen-
sive, then sinful. Where, perhaps, to our modern eyes,
this conception of uncleanness produces in the priestly
code the strangest use of the term " sin," is that, in
accordance with ancient and once widely prevalent super-
stitions, certain purely natural processes or accidents are
regarded as polluting, and consequently as sinful.1 Thus
1 Would that tlie Judsean priests could have risen to the discrimi-
uating judgment shown in the great saying attributed to Theano, most
frequently called the wife, sometimes the daughter, of Pythagoras-
(Zeller, PhUosophie der Griechen, Vol. I. 4th ed., p. 288, n. 1): Geavw
iptdTiiOzicra 7rocrToua yvvi) air (ivSpis KaOapevei, Atto pev tov iSlov, tiTret
Trapa^pyjia' oltto 81 tov dWoTpiov, ov8i—OT£. Stob. FlOT. 74, 53 >
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 329
if you touch a human corpse, you must be "purged
from sin."1 Leprosy, which seemed a divine plague,
and such maladies and contingencies as are related to the
mysterious powers and functions of life and generation,
entail a sin-offering after their cessation or cure. A
woman after child-birth must bring the same. Strangest
of all is the rite to be used if " leprosy" breaks out upon
the walls of a house. Here the house has to be atoned
for by animal blood, just as if it were a human being.
The externalization of holiness may be said in this rite
to reach its climax.2
At the basis of the enactments concerning public cere-
monial lie the same fundamental conceptions of holiness
and sin. All is looked at from God's point of view
rather than man's ; the individual is more than ever sunk
in the community. And the community is no longer a
people, but a church : the function of Israel is the glori-
fication of God. Thus the institution of sacrifice in the
Diogenes Laertius, viii. 1, 43. I am indebted for the reference to
L. Schmidt's charming book, Die Ethik der alten Cfriechen, Vol. I.
p. 133 (1882).
1 Numbers xix. 12. On the method and original meaning of such
purifications, cf. Religion of the Semites, pp. 404 — 407.
2 Lev. xii. 6, xiv. 18, 33—53, xv. 15 — 30. For the last passage in
Leviticus, cf. Frazer, The Golden Bough, VoL II. pp. 238—243; and
generally, E. Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 427 — 437 ; and from
a particular point of view, Schwally, Das Leben nach dem Tode (1892),
p. 85. I have purposely omitted from these necessarily very brief and
fragmentary remarks that phase of " uncleanness" which results, as it
were, from an excess of holiness, or from having had to do with specially
holy things. In such cases, the common origin of both uncleanness and
holiness in " taboo" seems particularly clear: cf. Religion of the Semites,
pp. 332, 405, 431, 432; Golden Bough, VoL I. pp. 167—171.
330 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
priestly code becomes something very different from
the aspect which it wore in the old pre-exilic days, or
even in Deuteronomy. That difference can easily be
interpreted entirely to the disadvantage of the new code ;
but great care must be taken in such comparisons and
antitheses, else one might find it hard to explain the
passionate and spiritual attachment to the temple and
its services in the post-Nehemian period. If the spon-
taneous aud natural character of the old pre-exilic wor-
ship seems to have given way to a fixed and mechanical
system of sacrificial exercises, one must remember that
these exercises were not necessarily or usually regarded
as a burden, but, like the law itself, as a glorious
manifestation of Yahveh's intimate relations with Israel,
and as the chosen means of man's communion with God.
Higher religious feelings soon began to clothe and vivify
the sacrificial system of the priestly code than were ever
suggested or aroused by the sacrifices before the exile,
whether at Jerusalem or in all the high places of Judoea.
In the pre-exilic period the most frequent and charac-
teristic offerings were those which kept closest to their
ancient form — namely, the sacrificial meal. We have
seen how, originally, the slaughtering and eating of
flesh was always accompanied by, or rather was iden-
tical with, sacrifice. The most familiar sacrifices were
those in which the offerer himself shared in their con-
sumption. Such offerings, whether they were casual or
connected with the three yearly festivals, were in either
case expressions of joy and festivity, and belonged to
that portion of religious ceremonial which was common
to the religion of Yahveh with other cognate religions.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 331
Deuteronomy had neither modified the character of
the sacrifices, nor regulated them minutely: the great
change which it introduced — its complete break with
the past — was the secularization of slaughter, and the
prohibition of all sacrifices except at the central sanc-
tuary. But it was this change which paved the way
for the arrangements and conceptions of the priestly
code. Here the individual is not exactly left out in the
cold; the manner of his sacrifice is, indeed, minutely
regulated ; but the real interest of the code lies in the
public offerings of the whole community. So long as
the individual makes his sin-offering whenever it is
required, and thus, so far as in him lies, prevents any
pollution resting upon Israel, the priestly legislators do
not appear to be further concerned about him. Apart
from the whole, he is a mere fragment of that collective
religious entity which absorbs the life of its constituent
atoms.
After the exile the temple of Jerusalem effectually
became what Deuteronomy had first sought to make it,
the sole place of worship for the whole nation. But it
became much more. It was the place in which the reli-
gion of Yahveh was outwardly expressed. Such a visible
symbolism could not be left to the varying taste of
individual worshippers ; it needed distinct and defined
regulation, independent of chance and permanent in
form. Collective or public sacrifices were not unknown
in the pre-exilic period. In the later monarchy, at any
rate, daily sacrifices were offered up in the temple, and
paid for by the king. But the temple of Jerusalem,
even after Deuteronomy, was still in great measure the
332 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
sanctuary, not of the nation, but of the capital and the
king. Ezekiel had first suggested its local severance
from, the palace, and by the time when the priestly code
was written, the connection of the temple with the
monarchy had faded away. The code desired to make
it, what in fact it had partly become, the centre of the
national life, just as its highest officer was to be the fore-
most man in Israel.
God, for whose sake Israel exists, has ordered a certain
manner of divine worship. This worship, therefore,
forms the most important feature in Israel's life, and
the expense of it becomes a national charge. The two
main kinds of communal sacrifices are the burnt- offering
and the sin-offering.1 Burnt- offerings, given in their
entirety to God, were the fit sacrifices for a people as a
whole ; they were also the most solemn and mysterious,
and not without peculiar propitiatory force.2 Upon new
moons and the three annual feasts national sin-offerings
were added, and to these sacrifices was sj>ecially devoted
a new festival, or rather a new fast-day, which gradually
acquired enormous importance and celebrity. The priestly
legislation maintained the three old yearly festivals of
Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, although it modi-
fied their character and the method of their celebration.
Among them, however, it somewhat strangely inter-
calated two new days of "holy convocation" and absten-
tion from labour — in this, as in other innovations, owing
the general conception to Ezekiel.
1 On the origin, growth and meaning of these two forms of sacrifice,
cf. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 219, 220, 329—333, 382, &e.
2 Cf. e.g. Lev. i. 4.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 333
The first day of the seventh mouth — the old New
Year of the pro-exilic period — is to be specially hallowed
over and above the new moons of other months, while
upon its tenth day " whatsoever soul shall not be afflicted
shall be cut off from among his people."1 The rites to
be observed at the sanctuary upon this Atonement-day
are elaborately described in the sixteenth chapter of
Leviticus. For our purposes the unity of that chapter
need not be questioned, though it would seem that it is
a conglomerate of two or more independent elements,
and that the atonement of the people and the atonement
of the sanctuary were not originally part and parcel of
the same law.2
The atonement of the sanctuary is a curious example
of the confusion in the priestly authors' minds upon the
subject of sin. It assumes that sin, under the form of
impurity, can propagate itself from person to things,
which things, if devoted to sacred uses, need all the
more urgently a ritual purification.3 Since it is God who
1 Lev. xxii. 23—32.
^ See Stade, Gcschichte, Vol. II. p. 258 ; Benzinger, Das Gesetz iiber
den grossen Versohnungstag (Z.A. W., 1889, pp. 65 — 89); Schmoller,
Das Wesen JerSiihne in tier alttestamentlichen Opfertora (Theol. Studien
und Kritiken), 1891, pp. 205—288.
3 Cf. Religion of the Semites, p. 389. The language used above is,
I think, accurate. In the sprinkling of the blood on the day of Atone-
ment, which " cleanses the altar, and makes it holy from all the un-
cleanness of the children of Israel," Prof. Ii. Smith tells us that " an
older and merely physical conception of the ritual breaks through,
which has nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin ; for uncleanness
in the Levitical ritual is not an ethical conception." But nevertheless
it would really seem as if the material sanctuary could be made
"unclean" through all offences alike, whether physical or moral, so
334 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
orders the ritual and chooses that it shall produce the
required effect, the process, which would otherwise savour
of magic, is rendered harmless.
More important for us is the atonement of the people.
It is unnecessary to consider closely the curious rite
of sending a goat into the wilderness to Azazel, an evil
spirit or demon, strange and unexampled as it is that
a superstition of this uumonotheistic kind should have
been incorporated into so late a code. More germane to
our central purpose is the effect of the whole ceremonial :
11 On that day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse
you : ye shall be clean from all your sins before Yahveh."
"It shall be an everlasting statute for you, that atone-
ment shall be made for the children of Israel for all their
sins once a year." Here the cleansing power, which
Ezekiel himself had attributed in symbolical language to
the redeeming Spirit of God acting in the heart of man,
is apparently ascribed to a solemn yearly ceremonial.
There is no doubt that this institution was likely to lead,
and did lead, to many fresh superstitions. By the letter
of the law it was seemingly implied that the guilt of all
sins, of what kind soever, be they ritual or moral, volun-
tary or involuntary, would be wiped out and atoned for
by the ceremony of the Atonement-day.1
that one is justified in speaking of a " confusion in the priestly authors'
minds upon the subject of sin.'' For the atonement of the holy place
is made (Lev. xvi. 16) "because of the uncleannesses of the children
of Israel, and because of their transgressions, even all their sins."
The expression "all their sins" throws together, I imagine, both cere-
monial and moral wrongdoing into a single, undistinguished heap.
1 To avoid misunderstanding, it should perhaps be noted here that
the official Rabbinic teaching restricted the atoning virtue of the day
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 335
By a process of ingenious combination, some scholars
have argued that only unintentional sins were included
in this annual forgiveness.1 Xothing in the sixteenth
chapter of Leviticus, however, would warrant such a dis-
tinction. "All sins," without exception, and including,
therefore, those which are committed with " a high
hand " presumptuously, are to be atoned for in the great
tenth day of the seventh month.2 The truer explanation
to sins committed against God. Sins committed against man, which
are of course also an offence against God, can only be forgiven on and
by the Atonement-day, after the sinner has made his peace with, or
given satisfaction to, the man against whom he has sinned. To him,
moreover, who says, " I will sin and the Day will bring me atonement,
the Day brings no atonement:" Yoma, viii. 9. I may be permitted
to add here that Prof. R. Smith is in error when he says, that " even
in the theology of the Rabbins penitence atones only for light offences,
all grave offences demanding also a material prestation" (Religion of
the Semites, p. 413). The passage in the Mishnah (Yoma, viii. 8) to-
which he refers, says, " Repentance atones for light offences then and
there" (i.e. God pardons them immediately) ; " with regard to heavy
offences, repentance makes them hang in the balance until the Day
comes and atones for them." Here, first of all, nothing is said of
"material prestations." The atoning efficacy lies in the Day itself, the
functions of which continue the same even after the destruction of the
Temple and the complete cessation of sacrifices. Secondly, no more is
implied than that there is a formal suspension of forgiveness between
the repentance and the Day. Practically, forgiveness is assured by
repentance; formally, it is suspended till the actual Day arrives. Other-
wise, what would there be left for the Day to do 1 No teachers, as we
shall subsequently learn, exalted the place and power of repentance
more than the Rabbis. There was no sin for which in their eyes a
true repentance could not obtain forgiveness from God.
1 Cf. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Vol. II. p. 272.
2 Nor do I think that the " Mishnic interpretation," adopted appa-
rently by Prof. R. Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 388), can have
been in the mind of the author or authors of Lev. xvi. It is neither
33G VI. THE RESTORATION AND
of this seemingly immoral arrangement must rather, I
imagine, be sought for in those fundamental character-
istics of the priestly code which have already come before
us. The Atonement-day is instituted for the community,
not for the individual. And it is instituted because
Yahveh dwells, and that he may continue to dwell,
within the land of Israel. All sins, whether moral or
ritual, whether intentional or involuntary, even if legally
punished or ritually atoned for, may be supposed to leave
behind them within the community a certain sediment of
impurity. But a far graver taint would be entailed by
"sins" which had escaped notice, or by those for which
no propitiation had been made. In the first case, while
the individuals would be morally guiltless, the error com-
mitted must yet be supposed to have its natural and neces-
sary effect in a slight, but yet real, impairment of the
national sanctity ; in the other, while the secret doom of
divine excommunication would yet hang heavy over the
individual offender, the propitiatory rites of the Atone-
ment-day would suffice to clear the "congregation" as a
whole. Such an annual ceremony, then, may have seemed
necessary in order to reduce the defilements of Israel to a
minimum, and to prevent Yahveh' s wrath breaking forth
with the violent reaction of outraged holiness upon a
comparatively innocent people. For God's localization
in Jerusalem, which ought to be Israel's dearest privilege,
would then become its most menacing danger. Thus,
said nor implied that the Atonement-day is only intended to " purge
away the guilt of all sins, committed during the year, that had not
been already expiated by pe nitence, or by the special piacula appointed
for particular offences."
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 337
for God's sake — for his own purpose of glorification
through Israel — as well as for his people's, it was advis-
able that all possible means should be taken to enable
the close relationship between Deity and man to continue
undisturbed. The logical circle — that the atoning cere-
monies were ordered by God to produce their effect upon
himself — was necessarily unperceived by the priestly
mind.
Public worship and its belongings exhaust by far the
greater part of the priestly legislation. This limitation is,
as we have seen, only natural, considering the aims and
ideals of the legislators. It is curious, however, that their
code, together with the older code of Deuteronomy, should
have formed a law which was to be independent of temple
and of land, and which proved capable of being preserved
and maintained in wholly alien and even adverse con-
ditions. Three of the main causes which brought about
this result were strengthened by, though they did not
originate in, the priestly code. The three ordinances
which could be, and had been, observed outside Palestine
were those concerned with food, the sabbath and cir-
cumcision. A prohibition of many "unclean" animals
and birds had been included in Deuteronomy, and was
repeated in the later code : it was of essentially priestly
character, and fell within the compass of that personal
and individual holiness which was required from every
unit in order that the whole people might be the fitting
instrument of the divine glory. Circumcision, ignored,
perhaps studiously, in Deuteronomy, is in the priestly
code referred back to Abraham for its date of institution,
and is described as an everlasting covenant. It is the
z
338 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
passport of admission to the Passover service, which
without it is forbidden to the foreigner. In its concep-
tion and treatment of the sabbath, the priestly code
shows the influence of Ezekiel and the exile. For Ezekiel
had been the first teacher to include a violation of the
sabbath among Israel's sins, while the exile had neces-
sarily tended to augment the religious importance of a
ceremony which could be observed abroad as well as at
home. The priests' sabbath is very different from the
sabbath of the Book of the Covenant or Deuteronomy.
There the sabbath was instituted for man's sake : here — ■
and this is the true opposition — it is instituted for God's
sake. It is connected with the creation ; God himself,
after fashioning the universe in six days, rests upon and
sanctifies the seventh. In its desire to link every reli-
gious observance directly with its divine source, the
code falls into an unwonted anthropomorphism. The
sabbaths are Yahveh's sabbaths, and their observance is
the observance of a perpetual sign that "ye may know
that I am Yahveh that doth sanctify you."1 Thus the
social character of the sabbath is ignored : it becomes
purely religious. Meanwhile the severity of its observ-
ance was greatly increased; for the more rigorous the
injunction — the more absolute the rest — the more visible
becomes the sign, and the more perfect the sanctification.
Let no stick be gathered, or no light be lit, that the
purity of the divine day may suffer no defilement from
the hand of man.2
When the law of the priest became the law of the
1 Exodus xxxi. 13.
2 Numbers xv. 32 — 3G; Exodus xxxv. 3.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 339
scribe, the observance of the sabbath was not relaxed,
but, on the contrary, more and more rigidly maintained
and strengthened ; and by critics generally the obvious
crudities of the priests' sabbath are laid to the charge
of, and made to characterize, the sabbath of the Phari-
sees. It certainly would seem as if the priestly code
had crushed out the human and joyous elements which
must have predominated in the sabbath of the pre-exilic
period and of the Deuteronomic law. And yet, whether it
square with certain theological and preconceived opinions
or not, the fact remains that the severe and law-sur-
rounded sabbath of the priests, passing over in these
respects unchanged into the religion of the Scribes and
Pharisees, was from the earliest Eabbinic age down to
the present hour a day of the keenest and purest joy — a
■day beloved and hailed by rich and poor, old and young
alike — a day, finally, of high religious satisfaction and
of true communion with God.
It has been said that the main object of the priestly
code was to provide for the visible expression of God's
glory through the worship of a people divinely chosen
for that peculiar end. Yet the God who elected Israel,
so that he might dwell within Israel's sanctuary, is the
only God and the Creator of all. One is, therefore,
induced to ask, what, according to the priestly legisla-
tion, is the relation of Israel and Israel's God to the
peoples of the outer world ?
At the first blush the universalism of Deutero-Isaiah
seems wholly absent. In its concern for God's glory and
the proper ministration of his sanctuary, the priestly
code forgets God's creatures outside Israel, and ignores
z2
340 VI. THE RESTORATION AXD
their claims upon his care. Yet it is not inspired by any
fanatical hatred of the heathen, such as was born of
struggle and persecution in the Maccabean era : and it is
equally free from any irreligious pride in Israel's pecu-
liar position and privilege as the possessor of the divine
sanctuary. On the one hand, Israel must keep clear of
all alliances with the heathen which might jeopardize its
religious purity. This feeling is indicated in the stories
of the patriarchs. Again, where any foreign tribe has
injured, or is likely to injure, that necessary purity of
Israel's religious practice and faith, the letter of the
priestly law seems to require that such an offending
nation must be exterminated; human blood is of less
consequence than the holiness of Israel, for the holiness
of Israel is a condition precedent to the glory of God.
The " paper " slaughter of the Midianites shows the
relentless consistency of the priestly mind.1 And yet, on
the other hand, the priestly code incorporates the older
laws for the just and tender treatment of the foreign
settler ; and some sections of it emphatically insist upon
a single ordinance both for Israel and for the stranger,
^so hindrance was to be put in the way of the " stranger "
being incorporated by the rite of circumcision into the
very body of Israel, and, as it would seem, such new
members were to have all the privileges of Israelites by
blood. Distinctions drawn by Deuteronomy between
different nations, and as to the particular generation at
which their descendants might be received into the com-
munity, do not re-appear in the priestly code.
Possibly these more generous regulations have also
1 Numb. xxxi. 1 — 24.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 341
another meaning. There seems to shine through them
the fundamental object of the whole legislation. For
good or for evil the strangers were permanent elements
in the commonwealth, and had as such to be reckoned
with in any legal code which was to be practically
enforced. The problem was, therefore, how they might
least impair the holiness of the community and the glory
of God. By enabling the foreigner to join the Israelite
community and to participate in its worship, or by de-
manding from him, if he remained outside, the observance
of certain fundamental rites, that object would best be
gained.1 There is thus a mixture of motives ; but in the
result the position of the non-Israelite according to the
new law is very favourable ; perfect equality is, more-
over, easily attained. It cannot be denied that the code,
partly for his own sake and partly for God's, held out
under certain fundamental conditions the right hand of
fellowship to any stranger who might choose to grasp it :
in this respect its authors may be said to have advanced
beyond Deuteronomy, and to have partially translated
into their own language and practice the universalist
ideas of the Babylonian Isaiah.
" We cannot but own" — to use Prof. Kuenems words
— " that they were grand and beautiful designs which the
lawgiver (of the priestly code) had in view. He formed
broadly the idea of a holy people dedicated to Yahveh,
and tried to realize it on a large scale."2 To him, and
to the men of his school, religion was the one absorbing
1 He probably had to observe the sabbath and to abstain from incest
and idolatry and from drinking blood.
2 Religion of Israel, Vol. II. p. 285.
342 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
interest of life which had driven all other interests out
of the field. From one point of view, there can be
nothing higher than a whole community giving up its
life to the glory of God. But the danger and the mis-
take of the priestly code arose when it mapped out the
sphere wherein that service of God was to be rendered.
The service of man is the only safe practical expression
of the service of God. Any other expression of it leads
to evils, be it the evil of asceticism, of ritualism, or of
selfish pride. The code devised a field for religion out-
side the field of morality, and destroyed that close union
between them which had been taught by the Prophets.
Jeremiah had denied that sacrifices were an integral
portion of God's law, but they formed the chief sub-
ject of the new legislation. Eeligion was manifested
in ritual, and therefore ritual assumed an exaggerated
importance. In this sense the law was distinctly anti-
prophetic. God's vengeance was threatened for the most
trivial ritual offences; because directly ritual becomes the
expression of religion, there is no difference of value
between one ordinance and another. The sense of pro-
portion becomes wholly lost. No better example can be
found of the extraordinary distortion of judgment that
results from making ritual, equally with or even more
than morality, the manifestation of religion, than the
legend of the campaign against Midian. By the express
command of God, all the captives, except the virgins
reserved as concubines and slaves, are put to the sword ;
adults and children are treated alike. But while all this
is done in obedience to a divine mandate, contact with
the corpses defiles ; and thus all who have been engaged
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 343
in the massacre must purge themselves from sin before
they may enter the camp wherein is the sanctuary and
presence of Yahveh.1 While the painful incongruity
between this moral callousness to bloodshed and this
intense zeal for ritual purity forces itself at once upon
the attention of the modern reader, it was clearly unper-
ceived by and imperceptible to the narrator. In the calm
judicial tone of the story we have to deal with no living
national hatred; its origin and tenour lie simply in a
distorted religious vision.
There was the further danger that the authors of the
code would defeat their own ends by excess of detail.
A frequent repetition of the sin-offering was likely to
bring the ordinance into disrepute, if not into actual
contempt. It lost its effect by repetition. "The law-
giver," as Prof. Kuenen remarks, " has overshot his
mark." Where the sin-offering was offered without any
consciousness of sin, the rite would tend to degenerate
"into a mechanical, spiritless act."2 Again, certain
ritual offences, such as eating the flesh of animals which
had died a natural death, were probably known to be of
not infrequent occurrence J while others, as for example,
touching the carcase of such animals, could scarcely be
avoided. The code enacts that whoever does these things
shall wash his clothes and be unclean until the evening.3
Thus, as Prof. Kuenen points out, there seems to be no
reason why the offence should not be committed, if men
were willing to put up with temporary uncleanness and
perform subsequent ablutions. By its "minute precepts
1 Numbers xxxi. 1 — 24. 2 Religion of Israel, Vol. II. p. 269.
3 Lev. xi. 39, 40, xvii. 15.
344 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
and distinctions," the priestly law " weakened the subli-
mity of the precept, ' Be holy, for I, Yahveh, am holy ; '
it threatened to weaken the fear of pollution by multi-
plying the cases in which uncleanness results."1
How far these effects were actually produced, and
how far they were successfully avoided, it will partly
fall within our province to consider in a subsequent
Lecture. It will then be seen that when the law of
the priests became the law of the scribes, its character
was gradually modified. It then became a law, not
merely for the community, but also for the individual,
and religion was once more, as in the old pre-exilic
days — but in a far higher and nobler manner — a per-
sonal affair, which could bring to every one who lived
within its range and fell under its influence a keen,
spiritual satisfaction.
Meanwhile it is easy, and even tempting, to contrast
the spontaneity of the older cultus with the statutory
character of religion in the priestly Oode. No one has
portrayed, because nobody could portray, this contrast
more incisively than Wellhausen; and even his own
foot-note of qualification does not remove the impression
from the reader's mind that the religion of the new code
was less religious than was the popular religion of the
pre-legal periods. Its whole cultus, he says, "is nothing
more than an exercise in piety ( Gottseligkeit), which has
simply been so enjoined once for all without its being to
any one's advantage." 2 Yet as an exercise in piety the
1 Religion of Israel, Vol. II. p. 270.
2 Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, p. 82, n. 1 (History of Israel,
E. T., pp. 78, 79, n. 1), and 497, 499.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 345
cultus was the indispensable stepping-stone to the law
as personal joy. The "monotonous seriousness " of the
priestly code does not seem to have been felt by those
who practised its enactments and witnessed its worship.
The " ascetic religious exercises " led to a religion which
is markedly unascetic; the "shell" of cultus which the
priestly code displayed was in real life soon filled with a
new "soul," more pure, more religious and scarcely less
joyous than the old "soul," which, according to Well-
hausen, had fled when spontaneity and nature were suc-
ceeded by statute and technique. For somehow or other,
as we may gather for a certainty from the Psalter, statute
and technique, while they effectually did away with
lawless licence, foul sensuality, or the unrestrained and
secular jollity of feasts — half-sacrifices, half-picnics —
made free passage and play for the exercise of emotions
more unequivocally religious. Even the cultus of the
priestly code, apart from the law as a whole, provided food
for the religious spirit, however hard the fact may be for
us to comprehend. Many a pious worshipper would have
spoken of its " high service " with solemn rapture. Many
in the post-Nehemian age would have said that it " dis-
solved them into ecstasies, and brought all heaven before
their eyes."
Of such a mixed nature, then, in itself, and pregnant
with results both good and bad beyond anything that its
authors could have desired or thought of, was the code
which from his raised platform Ezra the priest read
out before the people upon that memorable September
day. From early morning until noon was occupied with
the reading, which was interpreted by a running com-
346 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
mentary or homiletic paraphrase from certain Levites
appointed for the task.1 It is noticeable that the Levites
take so prominent a part in the introduction of the law :
the rigour of the reforming party was objected to by a
considerable section of the Jerusalem priesthood, how-
ever much the interests of their order were safeguarded
by the new code.
And now there is a repetition of the same religious
emotion which was evoked by the great assembly thirteen
years previously. When the law has thus been publicly
recited and explained, and when the people recognized
that so much of what could but seem to them the authen-
tic words of Moses and the direct command of God had
been hitherto a dead letter, neglected and disobeyed,
they broke forth into weeping and lamentation. We
hear nothing of such an outbreak in the otherwise closely
parallel story of Josiah's reform in 62 1, and of the read-
ing of the Deuteronomic code. What an immense reli-
gious development lay between the two ceremonies ! To
these weeping men and women, religion is, after all, a
real thing and no mere external rule. The way in
which Nehemiah and his colleagues check this outburst
of genuine repentance is also significant, and points for-
ward to later characteristics. "This day," they argue,
"is holy unto Yahveh; eat, drink, be merry, and send
portions unto the poor."2 For cheerfulness and charity
were two main qualities which sprang from the possession
of the law.
That holy rejoicing in which the first reading culmr-
1 Neh. viii. 7 (see Variorum Reference Bible).
2 Neh. viii. 9, 10.
/
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 347
nated was continued at the Feast of Tabernacles, cele-
brated according to the new prescriptions of the priestly
code for eight days instead of seven. For the twenty-
fourth day of the month a special fast was appointed.
After the people had assembled, "with fasting and sack-
cloth and earth upon their heads," there seems to have
taken place a fresh purgation of foreign elements from
the holy community. Eepeated reading from the law
follows, and the Levites are again prominent.1 Ezra
then makes a long speech, in which he gives an his-
toric retrospect of Israel's past, confessing that it has
been one long story of rebellion and ingratitude.2 If
the sins of the past are not even yet atoned for, neither
is the present free from its own iniquity.3 Hence the
yoke of the foreigner still presses heavily. In this con-
fession the old ideas of solidarity re-appear in a modi-
fied form. Israel, both of the past and of the present,
constitutes a single whole, and the generations which
compose it are linked one with another in a common
guilt. The past merges into the present, and is inex-
tricably commingled with it. And throughout the ages
this attitude has been maintained by Judaism : martyrs
and saints have, century after century, repeated the me-
morable words: "Thou art just in all that has befallen
us : for thou hast acted faithfully, but we have acted
wickedly."
It was thought desirable to close the fast by drawing
up a covenant, sealed and signed by the chief laymen,
priests and Levites, pledging the community to the
1 Xeh. ix. 1—5. 2 Neb. ix. 6 (LXX.).
3 Xeh. ix. 32—37.
348 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
maintenance of the law.1 An indication of future trouble
was the significant absence of the high-priest's name.
In this written document, besides the general promise to
'.'walk in God's law which was given by Moses, God's
servant," two special points of great importance were
included. Of these, one was that the purity of the race
should be rigorously maintained. The priestly code had
only indirectly alluded to this delicate subject ; it was,
therefore, specifically added in the covenant that "they
would not give their daughters unto the peoples of the
land," nor take the daughters of the latter for their sons.
The second point concerned the due observance of the
sabbath, the festivals and the sabbatical year. As we
can gather from Nehemiah's expressions upon his second
visit to Jerusalem, the strict observance of the sabbath
was not enforced without much opposition and difficulty ;
a presentiment of this, and a sense of the contrast between
the sabbath as then observed and the sabbath as the
priestly code depicted it, may have suggested the expe-
diency of some special mention of this fundamental law.
Over and above the formal covenant, various by-
laws were drawn up and agreed to for the due main-
tenance of the temple services, and the people pledged
themselves to an accurate fulfilment of the prescriptions
of the code as to first-fruits, firstlings and tithes.2
At this point our record suddenly fails us ; we are left
to guess how far Nehemiah in the remainder of his
governorship was able to enforce the terms of the cove-
nant and the by-laws, and what was the exact measure
and nature of the opposition which he encountered. It
1 Neh. ix. 38, x. 31. 2 Neh. x. 32- 39.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 349
is, however, sufficiently clear that the new reform and
the new code were not accepted without a struggle.
The governors strong hand was needed to impress mur-
muringSj and to prevent dislike of the new regime passing
into open disregard. Twelve years after his arrival in
Jerusalem (433), Nehemiah was compelled to return to
his post at the court of Artaxerxes. After a period of
unknown duration, he obtained fresh leave of absence,
and revisited Jerusalem (whether as governor is uncer-
tain, but at all events invested with considerable powers),
only to find that the great reform was in a fair way
towards general dissolution.
In one scanty but yet precious chapter — a fragment
clearly of Nehemiah's fuller memoirs — is contained all
that the chronicler, or an earlier compiler, has allowed
us to hear of Nehemiah's second visit.1 On the evils
which he was then straightway called upon to combat,
we may, perhaps, find some supplementary light thrown
in the anonymous pamphlet which passes as the Book of
Malachi, and which may possibly belong to the interval
between Nehemiah's first and second visit to Jerusalem.
There were two main sources of opposition. The
neighbouring communities had still their friends within
Jerusalem, and especially among the priests. It would
seem as if mixed marriages had again become frequent,
and even led to the divorce of native Judgean wives.2
Connected with this growing laxity was an indisposition
to observe the sabbath with the strictness required by
the law.
But, secondly, there was special trouble from the
1 Xeh. xiii. 4—31. 2 Malachi ii. 11—16.
350 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
priesthood. The old quarrel between priests and Levites
was unappeased, and the former seem to have regarded
the new code as too favourable to the latter. The richer
priests were less dependent on the temple dues, and
neglected the services. Laymen made their profit out of
these quarrels, and no longer paid into the sanctuary
their tithes and heave-offerings. In spite of the intro-
duction of the law, the yoke of the foreigner was still
unbroken, and men once more began to say, "It is vain
to serve God."1
There must also have been a small third party which
was discontented with the religion of the law and with
its particularist tendencies from nobler motives than
those of personal ease or religious indifference. Echoes
from the voices of this party, who held that Ezra's code
was an insufficient realization of prophetic aspirations, are
still to be detected in the Bible. It is, however, safer to
consider these fragments of universalism hereafter, and
not to fix them too definitely to the interval between the
proclamation of the law and Nehemiah's second visit.
Nevertheless we may infer from them with comparative
certainty that the hired and degenerate prophets who
attempted, in conjunction with Tobiah and Sanballat, to
wreck the work of Xehemiah even in its early stages,
were not his only opponents, but that these included
others whose motives and purposes were disinterested
and of high religious value.
Meanwhile Nehemiah upon his return to Jerusalem
acted with his usual vigour. He took effective measures
to secure that " the portions of the Levites" should be
1 Malachi i. 13, iii. 8, H.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 351
faithfully paid over to them, and the desecration of the
sabbath summarily discontinued.
Of momentous importance for the future of Judaism
was his action towards the priesthood. Corruption, from
Nehemiah's point of view, had infected the high-priestly
family itself. Eliashib, the high-priest, now allied by
marriage to Nehemiah's old enemy Tobiah, had allotted
him a large apartment within the precincts of the temple.
A grandson of Eliashib had married the daughter of
Sanballat the Horonite, and was living with her in Jeru-
salem. Kehemiah acted with a high hand : his brief
record speaks of no opposition ; but opposition, and that a
violent one, there must have been. Supported by all the
rigorists, and armed with the authority of Artaxerxes,
Xehemiah carried the day, and expelled his chief enemies
from Jerusalem. His words are significant, and when
taken in conjunction with a statement of a later author,
imply far more than explicitly they say. Out of Tobiah's
chamber Xehemiah "cast forth all the household stuff,"
and ordered a general purification of all the chambers in
the temple-courts. As to the grandson of Eliashib — to
quote Nehemiah's own words — " I chased him from me."
And then there follows a prayer in which the use of
the plural pronoun lets us guess that the expulsion then
effected was not limited to Eliashib's grandson: "Ke-
member them, 0 my God, for their defilement of the
priesthood, and of the covenant of the priesthood and of
the Levites. And I purified the people (literally, "them")
of all foreigners." 1
Now Josephus, in relating the foundation of the Sama-
( 1 Neh. xiii. 28, 29, 30.
352 VI. THE RESTORATION AND
ritan schism and of the rival sanctuary upon Mount
Gerizim, tells a story which bears a strong resemblance
to this passage in the authentic memoirs of Nehemiah.
In spite of the difference of date, for which Josephus is
responsible, we are able definitely to connect the two
narratives. Eliashib's grandson may be identified with
the Manasseh of Josephus, while the name of his wife,
Sanballat's daughter, was Nicaso. From Josephus we
learn the important fact that there was at this time — that
is, on the expulsion of Manasseh from Jerusalem — " a great
disturbance among the people, because many of the priests
and Levites were entangled in such (i.e. foreign) mar-
riages. All these revolted to Manasseh;" while, by the
help of Sanballat, a new temple was erected near Shechem,
upon Mount Gerizim.1 Hither probably flocked many
laymen as well as priests to whom the reforms of Nehe-
miah were distasteful, and who found their position in
the capital insecure. By enforced expulsion and volun-
tary secession, Judtea was thus purged of the more dan-
gerous opponents to the new reformation.
Its more disinterested opponents remained : these would
not have been willing to go the length of setting up a
rival temple under foreign protection. Their voices were
not wholly silenced ; rather were they able, by accepting
the law, to help to preserve the universalist aspirations
of the older prophets. When the law ceased to be chal-
lenged, nascent Judaism was able to make some advances
in the way which Deutero-Isaiah had pointed out. The
final victory of Nehemiah opened up the era of post-exilic
1 Josophus, Antiquities, xi. 7, 2, and 8, 2 — 4; cf. Stade, Geschlcltte,
Vol. II. pp. 188—191.
THE PRIESTLY LAW. 353
progress : proselytism began and spread, till fresh dangers
from without checked its diffusion. Together with the
law, other spiritual manifestations took their rise and
nourished. The priest as a factor in religion becomes of
less importance: beside and overshadowing him i' ere
step upon the stage the figures of the Psalmist, the "Wise
man and the Scribe.
Specifically Jewish history in the long interval between
Nehemiah (430 — 176) and the Maccabean era, so far as
outward events are concerned, is almost wholly wanting.
Judoea is but one province out of many, whether of the
Persian empire or of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid king-
doms. But the internal history can still be roughly
traced. Thus while there is no record of outward events
in the Old Testament after the second visit of Nehemiah,
the prophetic and poetical books contain the products of
at least three centuries of internal religious movement,
sometimes advancing, sometimes receding. It is for this
reason that our history of the Hebrew religion as recorded
in the Old Testament cannot terminate with the victory
of Kehemiah, but must classify and arrange the various
religious voices, and the different steps and stages of
development, which the literature of the three succeeding
centuries may still enable us to recognize and distinguish.
To this work the three final Lectures of this series will
be devoted.
It may be convenient to add here the Priestly Sections of our pre-
sent Pentateuch, in the sense defined upon p. 315, according to Prof.
2 A
354 VI. THE RESTORATION AND THE PRIESTLY LAW.
Driver's analysis (Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament,
4th ed., 1892, p. 150):
Genesis: i. 1— ii. 4a; v. 1— 28, 30—32; vi. 9—22; vii. 6, 7—9
(in parts), 11, 13— 16 a, 18—21, 24; viii. 1— 2 a, 3 7? — 5, 13 a, 14—
19; ix. 1—17, 28—29; x. 1—7, 20, 22—23, 31—32; xi. 10—27,
31—32; xii. 4 6— 5; xiii. 6, 116— 12a; xvi. la, 3, 15—16; xvii.;
xix. 29; xxi. 16, 2 6— 5 ; xxiii.; xxv. 7— 11a, 12—17, 19—20, 266;
xxvi. 34, 35; xxvii. 46 — xxviii. 9; xxix. 24, 29; xxxi. IS 6; xxxiii.
18a; xxxiv. 1— 2a, 4, 6, 8—10, 13—18, 20, 24, 25 (partly), 27—
29; xxxv. 9—13, 15, 22 6— 29; xxxvi. (in the main) ; xxxvii. 1— 2a;
xli. 4 6; xlvi. 6—27; xlvii. 5— 6a (LXX.), 7—11, 27 6—28; xlviii.
3—6, 7?; xlix. la, 28 6—33; 1. 12—13.
Exodus: i. 1—7, 13—14; ii. 23 6—25; vi. 2— vii. 13, 19— 20",
216—22; viii. 5—7, 15 6—19; ix. 8—12; xii. 1—20, 28, 37 a,
40—51; xiii. 1—2, 20; xiv. 1—4, 8—9, 15—18, 21a, 21c— 23,
26— 27a, 28a, 29 : xvi. 1—3, 6—24, 31—36 ; xvii. la; xix. 1— 2a;
xxiv. 15 — 18 a; xxv. 1 — xxxi. 18 a; xxxiv. 29 — 35; xxxv. — xl.
Leviticus : i. — xvi. (xvii. — xxvi.) xxvii.
Numbers: i. 1 — x. 28; xiii. 1 — 17a, 21, 25 — 26a (to Parrot),
32 a ; xiv. 1 — 2 (in the main), 5 — 7, 10, 26 — 38 (in the main); xv.;
xvi. la, 2 6— 7a (7 6—11) (16—17), 18—24, 27a, 32 6, 35(36—40),
41—50; xvii.— xix. ; xx. la (to month), 2, 3 6, 6, 12—13, 22—29;
xxi. 4a (to Hor), 10- — 11; xxii. 1; xxv. 6 — 18; xxvi. — xxxi.; xxxii.
18—19, 28—32 (traces in 1—17, 20—27); xxxiii.— xxxvi.
Deuteronomy: xxxii. 48 — 52; xxxiv. la, S — 9.
Lecture VII.
FBOM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES:
EXTEENAL INFLUENCES AND INTEENAL
OEGANIZATION.
Old Testament history closes with the age of Nehe-
miah. But Old Testament literature flourishes for three
hundred years more. In other words, while the Bible
tells us nothing directly of the external events which
happened, and of the men who were conspicuous in the
Jewish community after the second visit of Nehemiah to
Jerusalem, a considerable portion of its literature must
be assigned to the three centuries which elapsed between
the times of Nehemiah and the times of the Maccabees.
Nor is this inconvenient disparity between the bareness
of outward history and the largeness of literary material
— material, be it also remembered, which is wholly
anonymous — compensated by any records outside the
Old Testament itself. Josephus and the classical his-
torians help us, indeed, to some extent ; but, in compa-
rison with what we still desiderate, their help is small.
The consequence is, that from Nehemiah to the uprising
of the Maccabees — a period of some 270 years — the
lives and even the names of but very few men are known
to us who influenced the course of religious development.
2 a2
356 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
Moreover, the whole external history of the Jews between
these two dates is almost blank. Judrea, as a province
of Palestine and Ccele-Syria, shared the fortunes of the
larger wholes of which it formed a part. It was involved
in the general stream of history, but had no independent
political life before the persecutions of Antiochus Epi-
phanes. Till the Persian kingdom was overthrown, the
Jews remained its subjects : incorporated then in Alex-
ander's empire, their land after his death became a sub-
ject of contention between the Egyptian Ptolemies and
the Syrian Seleucids.
The Persian period lasted for about a hundred years
beyond the age of Nehemiah (432 — 332), and a further
century and a half elapsed between Alexander and the
accession of Antiochus Epiphanes (332 — 176). But the
particular dates of the post-exilic literature are not yet
so satisfactorily ascertained as to enable us to distinguish
accurately between the products of the Persian and of
the Greek periods. Although, therefore, the two cen-
turies and a half between jSehemiah and the Maccabean
revolt naturally separate into those two divisions, it is
not possible to devote this Lecture to the age of the
Persian domination, and the next to the age of Hellenism.
The steps on the road we have to traverse are hard to
trace. An average pious Jew of the year 176 B.C. was
in a different stage of religious development from an
average pious Jew of the year 432 ; but it is not easy to
say precisely in what the religious difference consisted,
and it is excessively difficult to say by what degrees
and stages the development was brought about.
The date of the latest book now included in the Old
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 357
Testament cannot be fixed with certainty. But we may
make our way forwards upon the hypothesis that the
whole of the present canon was in existence by about
the year 130 before the Christian era. The object of
the last three Lectures of the present series is to carry the
story of Israel's religious development down to about the
same period. It is obvious that ending there we shall
end in medlis rebus, and it may seem as if the story ought
to be pursued at least 130 years further. For to most
people the history of Judaism as a religion ends when its
mission, as it would seem, was taken up and enlarged by
Christianity. From this point of view, what is chiefly
needed is an exact picture of every side and phase of the
Jewish religion in the days of Jesus and of Paul, so as to
explain, partly as simple development, partly as opposi-
tion and revolt, and partly as new departure, the better
religion which superseded it.
Simple and valuable as this method is, it can neverthe-
less for many reasons not be followed here. In the first
place, the religious history of the century and a half
between the first Maccabees and the birth of Christ is so
important and complicated, that its adequate presentation
would need a series of Lectures to itself.
But, secondly, from the Jewish point of view, and
possibly from the point of view of an historian neither
Jew nor Christian, the religious development of Juda-
ism was as unfinished at the age of Christ as it was
in the age of Judas the Maccabee. Judaism was then
advancing towards the full establishment of that phase
of its history which is known as Eabbinism. But both
for good or for evil, and probably for the former more
358 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
than for the latter, the Eabbinic phase of Judaism was
not fully established till at least two hundred years
after Christ. To judge Eabbinism by the religious con-
dition of the Jews at the time of Christ is historically
inaccurate.
A Jew, moreover, to whatever section of modern
Judaism he may belong, is clearly unable to treat the
post-exilic religion of Israel in the light of Christian
teleology. That is why, according to Prof. H. Schultz,
none but Christians can ever understand the Old Testa-
ment.1 A judge of perfect impartiality would possibly
deny this capacity to both Jew and Christian alike. At
any rate, the effect of viewing post-exilic religious history
in the light of this particular teleology is not purely
explanatory. As we shall see in the sequel, it colours
facts and distorts them. For Christian theologians still
too habitually look at the later Judaism through Pauline
spectacles. And no one who estimates Eabbinism in its
earlier phases from the point of view of its greatest anta-
gonist can ever estimate it correctly.
In abandoning a Christian teleology, no attempt must
be made to substitute another in its place. To estimate
the post-exilic religion of Israel from Nehemiah to the
Maccabees from the point of view of modern Judaism,
would be not less open to objection than to look at it as
a preparation for Christianity. And from a wider point
of view, as Christianity and Judaism are both living forces,
changing their character from age to age, all teleologies
alike become increasingly inadequate. The absolute
religion is a figment of the philosopher or the partizan.
1 Alttcstamentliche Theologie, 4th ed., p. 54.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 359
Our course in this Lecture, after a sketch of the
outward events of the Persian and Greek period, and
an indication of the Biblical literature which probably
belongs to each, will be first of all to point out the
general position of Judaism with reference to the outer
world. The influence of Persia and of Hellenism will
then be considered — the former quite briefly, for reasons
to be then assigned ; the latter, as more general and
diffused, at greater length. To the influences from with-
out may succeed the internal framework. That frame-
work consisted in the main of two heterogeneous elements,
a building and a book, the Sanctuary and the Scriptures.
The temple with its priests, the holy writings with their
scribes and students, will occupy onr attention for the
remainder of the Lecture.
First, then, we have to prelude the religious history
of the time with a very short survey of the historical
events of the Persian and Greek periods from the days of
Nehemiah to the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes.
The reign of Artaxerxes I. Longimanus (465 — 425)
and that of Darius II. Ochus (424 — 405) seem to have
comprised no events of special importance for Judaea.
Egypt was able, in the latter years of Darius' reign, to
secure its independence, and Persia apparently did not
attempt to re-conquer it till after his death. Egyptian
wars were always troublesome for the Jews : some of
them were compelled to serve in the Persian army, and
their land was subject to the forced contributions and
painful experiences of a border country, through which
detachments of Persian soldiery would march towards
3 GO VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
their Egj-ptian campaigns.1 Darius was succeeded by
his son Artaxerxes II. Mnemon (405 — 359), upon whom
there followed Artaxerxes III. Ochus (359 — 338). In
the reigns of the second and third Artaxerxes, Persian
rule seems to have changed for the worse; growing
severity and growing weakness went hand - in - hand.
Artaxerxes II. established or extended the worship of
the goddess Anaitis under material forms in various parts
of the empire, and not only thereby " compromised the
purity of Mazda-worship," but possibly also showed some
religious persecution towards those who refused to accept
a new divinity at the king's decree.2 Berosus, from
whom we hear of this development of Anaitis worship,
mentions Damascus as one of the places where her image
was set up and ordered to be adored.3 The danger,
therefore, was brought near to Judaea. Wars with Egypt
continued ; and, according to Diodorus, the year 365 B. C.
was signalized by a wide insurrection of the " inhabitants
of the sea-coasts of Asia " against the Persians. It was
headed by Ariobarzanes, the satrap of Phrygia, and the
confederates included " the Syrians and Phoenicians and
almost all that bordered upon the sea."4 Did the Jews,
willingly or under compulsion, join this revolt? It is
by no means impossible, and at any rate they must have
suffered in its suppression and in the general agitation
1 Even in Ezra's time, cf. Neh. ix. 37.
2 Cheyne, Origin of the Psalter, p. 293.
3 The passage is quoted by Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, Vol. II. ii.
p. 413.
4 Diodorus Siculus, xv. 90, 3.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 361
of the time. A second revolt against Artaxerxes Oclms
was more serious. The Jews took part in it, and paid
dearly for their temerity. Ochus was a vigorous ruler,
who attempted, although in vain, to stem the gradual
dissolution of his empire. The revolt began about the
year 358, and was not finally quelled till 350. Diodorus
alludes to the insurrection of the Phoenicians, and de-
scribes at length the dramatic conquest of Sidon.1 From
some late, but apparently well-informed authorities, we
gather that Ochus, in the same campaign in which
Phoenicia and Egypt were subdued, captured Jerusalem
and deported many Jews, " some to Hyrcania by the
Caspian Sea, others to Babylonia." This event was great
enough, Prof. Cheyne thinks, to be rightly called " the
third of Israel's great captivities."2
Between this unsuccessful insurrection and the inva-
sion of Alexander, we know nothing of what happened to
Judoea. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions one
solitary and painful incident for the whole period of
Persian rule after the age of Nehemiah. It appears that
after the death of Joiada the high-priest,3 his younger
son Joshua, relying upon the friendship and promises of
Bagoses, the general of " another Artaxerxes," attempted
to secure for himself the high-priestly dignity to the
exclusion of the legitimate claims of the elder brother,
Jochanan. In the course of a quarrel, Jochanan slew
1 Diodorus, xvi. 40, 4 to 45, 6.
2 Cheyne, Psalter, pp. 53, 61; and Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. IV.
pp. 107 — 110; Graetz, Geschichte, Vol. II. ii. p. 309; and J.Q.R,
Vol. III. pp. 208—219.
3 Xeh. xii. 10, xiii. 28.
362 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
Joshua within the very precincts of the temple. Bagoses
was not slow to use his opportunity. He is said to have
laid upon the Jews, as a punishment, a special tax of
fifty drachma3 for every sacrificed lamb. This oppression
continued, according to Josephus, for seven years.1
Empty as these hundred years thus are of great
names and deeds, considerable portions of Old Testament
literature must nevertheless be assigned to them. Half
the Psalter, large sections of the Book of Proverbs, the
idyll of Euth, and — of the prophetical writings — the
Books of Joel and Jonah, with several chapters now
embedded in the Books of Isaiah and Zechariah, were all
perhaps the product of the Persian period.
It is impossible to enter here upon the stories con-
nected with Alexander and the Jews. That he showed
them favour and granted them peculiar privileges is,
however, certain.2 At his death in 323, Laomedon became
satrap of Syria, but only retained it for three years ; for
in 320, Ptolemy Lagi, the satrap of Egypt, invaded and
conquered Syria. The Jews remained faithful to Lao-
medon, and Ptolemy, who captured Jerusalem by an
attack upon the Sabbath when no opposition was offered
to the enemy, deported a number of them to Egypt.3
Here, however, his enmity ceased. The Jews settled in
Alexandria were treated with marked favour; and as
regards Judaea itself, Ptolemy, like the majority of his
1 Josephus, Antiquities, xi. 7, 1.
2 Cf. Graetz, Gescliichte, Vol. II. ii. pp. 224, 225; H. Bois, Alex-
andre le grand et les juifs, in Revue de theologie et de philosophic,
1890, pp. 557—580; 1891, pp. 78—98.
3 Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 1.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 3G3
successors and of the Syrian kings, appears to have
followed the policy of Alexander. By this calculated
capture of Jerusalem on the Sabbath, as compared with
the violation of the sacred day witnessed by Nehemiah,
we can measure the advance which the strict observance
of the law had made in the life and hearts of the people.
The year 320 marks also the beginning of a troublous
period, during which Syria, including Palestine, was the
convenient cause of constant strife between the Ptolemies,
Antigonus or his son Demetrius, and the Seleucids.
Judoea remained in the hands of Ptolemy for five
years, when Antigonus, upon the death of Eumenes and
the formation of the new coalition against himself, in-
vaded and conquered Syria in 315. The victory of Gaza
in 312 brought the province once more under Egyptian
control ; but after the battle of Myus, in which Demetrius
retrieved the disaster of Gaza, it was evacuated by Ptolemy,
and the peace of 311 left it for nine years in the undis-
turbed possession of Antigonus. Graetz has shown it to
be probable that Ptolemy, in his retreat from Syria in 312,
included Jerusalem among the cities the fortifications of
which he then destroyed.1
A complicated series of events, in which the position
of Jerusalem and Judeea is not clearly defined, opens
with the year 302. The campaign, which ended at
Ipsus with the death of Antigonus, had been pre-
ceded by a short incursion of Ptolemy into southern
Syria. He reduced its cities ; but upon a false rumour
that Antigonus had overthrown the confederate army of
Lysimachus and Seleucus, retired upon his own kin0--
1 Graetz, Geschichte, Vol. II. ii. p. 230, u. 1 ; Diodorus, xix. 93. 7.
364 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
dom, leaving garrisons in the "cities which he had
taken in Ccele-Syria."1 Thus in 302 Jerusalem appears
for the third time to have fallen into the hands of
Ptolemy. If it did so, however, it must probably within
the next few years have been re-captured by the enter-
prising and indomitable Demetrius. For a casual notice
of Eusebius alludes to his destruction of the city of
Samaria in the year 297 or 296, and Droysen argues
that his occupation of Samaria would necessarily imply
the possession of Coele-Syria.2 Within two years that
province, including Judsea, was to have yet another
master in the person of Seleucus, whose renewed conflicts
with Demetrius, after the temporary peace of 299, ended
in the acquisition of Coele-Syria about the year 294. 3
Seleucus vied with Ptolemy in friendship towards the
Jews. He induced (or compelled) a number of them to
settle in his new capital, Antioch, and in other cities of
his foundation, where considerable privileges were granted
them.4 These privileges, we may assume, consisted for
the most part in the establishment of their own tribunals,
the free exercise of their religious customs, and in the
suspension or alteration of any local law which interfered
with or ran counter to them. "Whether, either in Syria
or in Egypt, it included a citizenship equal to that of
the Macedonian conquerors, is disputed.
Eor fourteen years Judaea continued, with the rest of
Coele-Syria, as a province of the kingdom of Seleucus.
1 Diodorus, xx. 113, 1.
2 Droysen, Geschichte des Hettenismus, 2nd ed., Vol. II. ii. p. 243.
3 Droysen, Vol. II. ii. p. 255, n. 2, p. 258, n. 2.
* Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 3, 1 ; Cuntra Apionem, Vol. II. 4.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 365
Then, in 280, Ptolemy II. Philadelphus " took advan-
tage of the confusion caused by Seleucus' murder to seize
Ccele-Syria and Phoenicia."1 For over seventy years
afterwards Judaea appears to have enjoyed a profound
peace. Graetz has shown it to be most improbable that
it was affected by the invasion of Antiochus III. in
220.2 It did not fall into his hands till the next
war with Egypt, which began in 204. A Syrian party,
for reasons which are not wholly clear, had formed
itself in Jerusalem, and the city appears to have been
acquired by Antiochus without difficulty.3 Meanwhile,
about 202, Scopas, the iEtolian, was sent by the ministers
of the young king Ptolemy Epiphanes to recover Coele-
Syria : he occupied Jerusalem and left a garrison in the
citadel. But after the battle of Panion (200), in which
Scopas was utterly routed by Antiochus, Jerusalem once
more fell into the hands of the latter. Josephus ex-
pressly notes that the Jews of their own accord went
over to him, received him willingly into Jerusalem, and
helped him to subdue the citadel.4 Antiochus rewarded
the Jews with special gifts and privileges. Judaea hence-
forth, till the time of the Maccabean revolt, remained a
province of Syria. Its condition was tolerably prosperous,
and at least undisturbed by external foes or rival poten-
tates during the remainder of Antiochus' reign, as well
1 Mahatfy, Alexander's Empire, p. 120.
2 Graetz, Gesr.hiclde, Vol. II. ii. p. 250.
3 Daniel xi. 14; Ewald, History of Israel (E. T.), Vol. V. p. 283,
n. 6 ; Graetz, Vol. II. ii. p. 262, n. 2.
4 Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 3, 3.
366 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
as during that of his son and successor, Seleucus Philo-
pator (187—176).
Of the internal history till the close of Philopator's
reign, we know hardly anything. The one incident which
Josephus records is the story of Joseph, son of Tobias,
and of his son Hyrkanus.1 The names of the high-priests
are also preserved; and Josephus, combined with some
passages in Sirach and the second Book of Maccabees,
and with a few early Eabbinical fragments, helps to
make two or three of them something like distinct per-
sonalities. Joseph, as we shall see, represents the evil
effects of Hellenism on the Jewish character. His long
administration as tax-gatherer of southern Syria had a
great influence upon Judaea generally. He brought the
Jews, says Josephus, "out of poverty and insignificance
to a relatively high pitch of prosperity." The twenty-
two years in which he farmed the taxes are assigned by
Prof. Graetz to B.C. 230—208. Josephus speaks of
"seditions" among the people after his death "because
of his sons." The opposition between the elder ones and
Hyrkanus had apparently a deeper cause than a mere
family quarrel. It was connected with the rival parties
who either favoured the existing Egyptian domination,
or desired its overthrow in the interests of Antiochus.
If Hyrkanus was for Egypt, his brothers were for
Syria ; they belonged moreover to the Hellenistic party
which was rapidly forming itself in Jerusalem. The
high-priest Onias III., who succeeded Simon II. shortly
after the incorporation of Judsea into the Seleucid king-
1 Antiquities, xii. 4.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 3G7
dom, was opposed to the Hellenists ; and the movement
which began with the journey of Simon, the temple
overseer, to Apollonius, the Syrian governor of Coele-
Syria, and with the subsequent despatch of Heliodorus
to the temple of Jerusalem upon his unsuccessful mission
of plunder, culminated in the events which were partly
the cause for the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes.1
With that persecution a new era begins.
To the one hundred and fifty-six years which lie
between the conquest of Syria by Alexander and the
accession of Antiochus Epiphanes, the varied literature
which was subsequently to form the canon of the Old
Testament owes something, though perhaps less than to
the Persian period which preceded them. The Book of
Chronicles was then compiled, and the Psalter enriched
with many of its most beautiful hymns of prayer and
praise. Not improbably also the earlier chapters of Pro-
verbs and the Book of Job must also be brought down as
late as the opening years of the Grecian period.2 Eccle-
siastes, third and saddest of the " Wisdom " writings of
the Old Testament, almost unquestionably belongs to it.
There were two opposite forces at work in the Judaism
of the post-Nehemian age — an impulse to separation and
particularism, and an impulse to inclusion and absorption.
The Jews were placed in a peculiar religious relation to
the outer world. They had reached the stage of absolute
monotheism, and reached it, not by the gradual diffusion
of philosophic thought among the cultivated classes, but
by the purification and development of their own national
1 2 Maccabees iii. 4 — 40.
2 Cf. Cornill, Euileitiuig in das Alte Testament, 1891.
368 TIL EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
religion. For Yahveh as the only God was Yaliveh
still; in a peculiar and partial sense, God of the Jews.
His glory was bound up with Israel's ; so that even if the
Jews did not deserve, it was necessary for Yahveh' s
honour that in the end they should receive, a better fate
than other peoples. But even apart from this, and from
all lower religious promptings, there was another obstacle
to the diffusion of universalism. It was well-nigh impos-
sible for the Jews to regard the gods of other nations as
manifestations or expressions of the one and undivided
Divine Essence.1 They saw no incongruity between
national worship and monotheistic dogma, such as a
philosophic Hellene could perceive between his own per-
sonal belief and the popular cultus of Zeus. Their own
popular cultus was true and divinely ordained, and con-
sequently the possible service of other gods was for them
an intolerable profanation. It was based upon the wor-
ship of the divine in material forms ; and too often there
were connected with it rites which the unsophisticated
Jew, with his growing hold upon the virtue of chastity, re-
garded as a scarcely less flagrant abomination. And just
in proportion as religion, in the guise of ceremonial, per-
vaded all life and all its daily occurrences, so did inter-
course with the Gentile become difficult and polluting to
the Jew. To the cultured Greek, such an attitude could
only be construed as evidence of folly or misanthropy.
The monotheistic basis of Judaism would generally escape
him : he would only see in it one more national cult, no
better and less attractive than all the rest. A radical
1 It is to my mind still doubtful whether even Malachi i. 11 can
properly be so interpreted.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 369
opposition between one worship and another seemed to
the Greek of the Hellenistic era an absurdity. All were
in one sense almost equally false, and in another sense
almost equally true. To this tolerant syncretism, the
Jew, unprepared as he was to appreciate its philosophic
basis, could only offer unwavering opposition. He was
bound to maintain his distinctiveness amid an idolatrous
and unbelieving world.
But with this impulse towards separatism and isolation,
there went an opposite impulse towards inclusion and
absorption. This must have been equally unintelligible
both to the ordinary heathen and to the cultivated
Hellene. Yahveh, though God of the Jews, was also
God of the world, and if his glory was bound up with
Israel's, it also required for its fullest earthly diffusion
that he should be acknowledged as only God by all
mankind. The ideals of Deutero-Isaiah were not wholly
forgotten. In the interests of Yahveh the heathen must
be won over to his service. This theocratic impulse
towards enlargement had been, and still was, represented,
both in prophecy and apocalypse, as the Gentile acknow-
ledgment of Yahveh after the vengeance of the judgment-
day. But in ordinary times, when the judgment-day
sank into the background, it became apparent that human
means must be taken for the accomplishment of the
desired end. For its own renown, let Israel labour to
spread the knowledge of their Deity and their Law.
It was motives such as these which produced the
proselytizing tendency of the later Judaism. That ten-
dency became, as it would seem, clearly marked towards
the close of the Persian period. Exclusiveness had been
2b
370 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
the policy of Nehenriah and Ezra — exclusiveness even
towards men who, of semi-Israelite birth themselves,
genuinely desired a religious union. Xo sooner, how-
ever, was the Law securely established than efforts
were made to bring over to official Judaism the descend-
ants of the very people who had been rejected before.
Psalmist, scribe and historian all bear witness to this
new impulse. It met naturally with some opposition,
and questions arose as to the relation of the new-comers
to the Jews of pure blood, which were answered now
in a larger and now in a narrower sense; but it is
incorrect to represent the strict adherents of the Law as
always opposed to the proselytizing tendency. It was
only through a misgiving lest a large influx of proselytes
should lead to religious laxity that some of the later
Eabbis discouraged their reception; what the general
feeling of the earlier scribes was, is well indicated in the
derisive rebuke of Jesus, which, however exaggerated,
has surely its element of truth.1 In following the traces
of the proselytizing tendency in the pre-Maccabean era
within the Old Testament itself, while the age of the
Diadochoi was undoubtedly the more favourable to prose-
lytism, it is impossible to draw a clear line of cleavage
between the Persian and the Greek periods.
Prof. Stade is of opinion that the author of Chro-
nicles (about 250 B.C.), throwing the events of his
own days into antiquity and giving them an historical
setting, alludes to some ineffectual efforts which were
made to win back to Judaism the now self-sufficient
and fully organized community of the Samaritans. But
1 Matt, xxiii. 15.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 371
further north, the mixed inhabitants of Galilee were
gradually and successfully won over to Judaism ; while
even at an earlier date, Israelites or half-breeds who
dwelt within Judeean territory, or who had immigrated
thither from the north, were readily accepted as prose-
lytes.1 They are described as having separated them-
selves from the uncleanness of the peoples of the land to
seek Yahveh, the God of Israel.2 In the latest portions
of the priestly code, inserted after iNehemiah, the legal
equality of native and stranger is strongly emphasized.
The exquisite idyll of Ruth was possibly written as a
polemical pamphlet in the days of Ezra. Its object
is to show that marriages even with foreigners of full
blood need have no evil influence upon religion, seeing
that the alien woman may soon learn to be as Jewish
as native Jewesses themselves. I am more inclined
to place its date somewhat later, at a time when such
arguments could be more coolly stated than in the heated
antagonisms of Ezra's age. Does the story of Jonah
typify Israel's unwillingness to cause the light to shine
unto the Gentiles ? At any rate, its obvious tendency is
to show that Yahveh's interest is not limited to Israel,
and that the nations are to feel, not only his retributive
justice, but also his complementary qualities of pity and
loving-kindness. Universalist passages were also inserted
in older prophecies. Such probably is the beautiful frag-
ment which now constitutes the opening of Isaiah's
1 Stade, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 198, 199; 2 Chron. xv. 9, xxx.
5—25.
I Ezra, vi 21; Neh. x. 29.
2b2
372 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
second, and of Micah's fourth chapter.1 Such, too, is a
noble passage in Isaiah lvi. Here the stranger, who has
joined himself to Yahveh, is yet introduced complaining,
"Yahveh has utterly separated me from his people."
This seems to imply that, in spite of the letter of the
Law, certain legal differences were being suggested or
had even been established between proselytes and Jews.
The author of the prophecy comforts the new-comers
with the assurance : " The sons of the stranger that join
themselves to Yahveh to minister to him and to love his
name, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the
sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my cove-
nant ; even them will I bring to my holy mountain and
make them joyful in my house of prayer : their burnt-
offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine
altar ; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer
for all the peoples."2 That same combination of real
universalism with marked affection for Jerusalem and
its temple is also found in several passages of the Psalter.
1 Isaiah ii. 2 — 4; Micah iv. 1 — 4. This prophecy is usually
regarded as a quotation from an older contemporary or predecessor of
Isaiah and Micah. It is more probably a post-exilic interpolation.
Cf. for a high appreciation of its doctrine, Steinthal, Zu Bibel und
Religionsphilosophie (1890), p. 77. " Hbheres als jenes Fragment
gibt's auf Erden nicht."
2 Cf. Cheyne, Psalter, p. 294, and Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. III.
p. 602 ; Duhm, Isaiah, ad loc, who characteristically belittles the passage,
its author and das Judenthum in general. As to their exact date, it is
quite possible that these eight verses, which surely have no connection
with what precedes or follows them, may be contemporary with Ezra.
But the writer is opposed to Ezra's particularism, not, as Duhtu thinks,
in der Hauptsache mil ihm einverstanden.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 373
Some of these date probably from the opening of the
Grecian era. Others perhaps are earlier.1
The Persian government does not appear to have pressed
heavily upon Judeea, though things changed for the worse
with the reign of Artaxerxes Mnemon and the revolt of
365. To measure the influence of Persia upon the internal
development of Judaism is difficult, and leads at once to
questions still debated and unsettled. There was no
spiritual unity pervading the different portions of the
Persian empire, such as Alexander sought to create in
his own kingdom through the medium of a common
culture. It is, however, acknowledged that some speci-
fically Zoroastrian beliefs ultimately filtered into Judaism,
and were gradually assimilated. Many Jews still lived
in Babylonia, where they would be more directly sub-
ject to Persian influences. The frequent communica-
tions which passed and re-passed between Judsea and the
various settlements of the Diaspora could carry fructify-
ing germs of Zoroastrian doctrine from east to west, and
secure for them a final acceptance in the official religion
of Jerusalem. Zoroastrian influences towards the growth
of angelology, and also, as it would seem, towards the
doctrine of a future life, will be noticed in the next
Lecture. More generally, however, one would like to
know whether the pure religion of Zoroaster had any
wider result in making the Jews discern that God's light
had shone upon mankind through other windows than
theirs, or whether it tended in any degree to lessen the
religious gulf which seemed to mark them off from
the heathen world beyond. But such questions, fascina-
1 Cf. Psalms lxxxvii., Ixvii., lxvi. 5, xxii. 28, lxv. 3.
374 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
ting as they are, must, in all probability, remain for ever
unanswered.
Of the general influence of Hellenism, not only in
Egypt but also in Palestine, we can know far more ; but
even here it is of the two extremes of attraction and
repulsion that we know the most, and we must trust
chiefly to inference for an estimate of that fusion of
Hellenism and Judaism which was gradually gaining
strength and making way among a large middle party
during the hundred and fifty years between the overthrow
of the Persian empire and the accession of Antiochus
Epiphanes.
Alexander the Great's policy of treating the Jews with
marked toleration was pursued by the Diadochoi. It was
both useful and easy to secure their loyalty. As political
independence grew more and more inconceivable, reli-
gious autonomy became the practicable prize, the full
guarantee of which was sufficient to win their gratitude.
Thus in the intervals during which the land was spared
from the soldiery of the Ptolemies or the Seleucids,
Judsea enjoyed periods of repose, in which religious
thought was not driven to harp perpetually on enemies
and misfortunes, but could also make some quiet pro-
gress in depth and many-sidedness. Juda?a was soon
surrounded by a fringe of Hellenistic cities, and in many
of them Jews resided who were in constant communica-
tion with Jerusalem. The knowledge of Greek language
and Greek customs grew apace ; and with it probably,
at least among a few, the knowledge of some elements of
Greek thought and philosophy.
To extremists at either end, Hellenism was chiefly
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 375
attractive or repellent through those of its elements which
were in themselves unseemly and in their effects dis-
integrating and injurious. For if on its higher side it
soared to the purest heights of philosophy, on the lower
side it opened the door to wantonness and debauchery.
There was a phase of later Hellenism which was loose in
sexual relations and supple in deceit. It cannot be for-
gotten that even the highest Greek culture tolerated that
nameless vice which was no less loathsome to the Jews of
Alexander's age than to ourselves. And, lastly, even the
philosophic thought of Hellenism made no protest against
the popular polytheistic idolatry, but used its terms and
practised its rites. To many a simple and pious Jew,
Hellenism could only have seemed to be one polytheism
the more — a polytheism more dangerous and more im-
moral than those with which Israel had previously been
confronted.
Upon men of feeble religion and nerveless morality, or
on those who, for whatever reason, found the life of the
Law tiresome and unattractive, Hellenism laid powerful
and corruptive hold. Its moral influence may be gathered
from the story of Joseph the son of Tobias, in whom and
whose family, Holtzmann, somewhat unfairly, discovers
"the first historic example of that bad type of Judaism
which makes this blessed people of God in the eyes of
many people, not without reason, contemptible to the
present day."1 For if the sons of Tobias are the first
historic instances of this hateful type, it is because in
them Hellenistic veneer had spoilt Judsean simplicity.
Other examples of the type may also have been due to
1 Stade, Geschichte, Vol. II. p. 287.
376 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
the too rapid absorption of the evil elements in an alien
civilization.
The growth of the Hellenistic party, with its aping of
Greek customs in direct violation of the law, is indicated
in the opening chapter of the first Book of Maccabees. It
culminated in the establishment of a Greek gymnasium at
Jerusalem, and in an attempted obscuration of the physical
mark of difference between Gentile and Jew. Concur-
rently with these revolutionary Hellenizers, who probably
consisted for the most part of the more aristocratic sections
of the people, there grew up naturally a party of vigorous
reaction. The antagonism between the two came gra-
dually to a head, and the persecution of Antiochus was
heralded, and partly caused, by increasing internal dis-
sensions in Jerusalem and Judsea. Of the conservative
opposition, the leaders of which were known as the
C/iassidim, the pious or devoted ones par excellence,1 we
find evidence in the Psalter. In the 1st and 119th
Psalms, which pretty certainly belong to this period, the
Hellenizers are described as "transgressors," "sinners,"
"scoffers" and men of "pride."2 With them are con-
trasted the righteous, whose delight is in the law of
Yahveh. Along with the wealth introduced, according
to Josephus, by the successful machinations of Joseph
the son of Tobias, there came luxury, and with luxury
there followed debauchery and sexual license. May not
then the "strange woman" of the opening chapters of
Proverbs, against whose seductions the Wise Man so
repeatedly warns his disciples, be in all probability a
product of the Grecian age ? It is, however, noticeable
1 1 Mace. ii. 42. 2 Cheyne, Psalter, pp. 51, 241, &c.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 377
that there is no evidence in the pre-Maccabean era of any
direct idolatry. Monotheism was too deeply rooted. It
was on the social side only that Hellenism proved attrac-
tive. Even marked Hellenizers drew the line at sacri-
ficing to a heathen god.1
In the presence of moral and religious dangers like
these, strict upholders of the national religion became
stricter still. It would seem probable that the concep-
tion of a hedge to the law — the erection of an outer
circle of legal fortifications to make the inner citadel of
the written law more secure — may owe its origin to the
Greek period, in which the spirit of Hellenism, not yet
developed into persecution, had nevertheless already
become an active religious danger.
But before things had reached this pass, Hellenism
had exercised, even upon Palestinian Judaism, a modi-
fying influence, without directly interfering either with
men's attachment to their native religion, or even, except
incidentally, with the sovereignty of the Law. " In
addition to Hellenizers of pronounced anti-national and
heathen disposition, such as Jason, Menelaus and Alkimus,
the age also produced men who, in spite of their know-
ledge of Grecian literature and their pleasure in Grecian
studies, were yet attached with immovable fidelity to their
people and their faith."2 Although this phase of Pales-
tinian Judaism was transient, it is necessary to mark its
traces, because these are not wanting even in the Old
Testament itself. Hellenistic environment suggested or
stimulated the impulse to expansion and universalism.
1 2 Mace. iv. 19.
2 Freudenthal, Hdhnistische Studien, p. 128.
378 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
11 A persuasive presentation of true religion," says Prof.
Cheyne, "only became possible in the Hellenistic age."1
Some Jews perhaps entered also into the Hellenistic
dream of a single culture for all the world, but with the
knowledge of Yahveh for its foundation and its crown.
Might not Israel even yet " blossom and bud and fill the
face of the world with fruit " ?2
It has already been observed that of the universal-
istic passages in post-exilic writings, some of the most
marked belong to the Hellenistic period. A more direct
influence of Hellenism may probably be traced in the
Wisdom literature. There is no reason why a reflective
or even speculative mood as to religious doctrines should
not have naturally ensued on the final overthrow of
idolatry and the general acceptance of a single official
religion in theory and practice. But it has been cogently
suggested that such a tendency, though it may have
begun in the Persian period, would have been furthered
and stimulated in an Hellenistic atmosphere. The Old
Testament contains no clear evidence that any specific
doctrines or forms of Greek philosophy were known to
Jewish writers in Palestine ; nor do the remains of Pales-
tinian Greek literature of the pre-Maccabean or Macca-
bean era prove conclusively that any fusion, such as was
even then going on in Egypt between Greek and Hebrew
thought, was being attempted in Judsea. The allegorical
method which explained away various crudities or diffi-
culties in the sacred histories, as it explained away the
immoralities of Homer, was a product of Alexandria, and
1 Cheyne, Psalter, p. 295.
2 Isaiah xxv. 11 (early Greek period).
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 379
there are no instances of its having been used on Judsean
soil.
Yet the Essenes of a later age may "warn us not to be
too sure that between the unthinking Hellenizers on the
one hand and the rigid conservatives upon the other, a
syncretistic process was not going on even in Judsea.
Hellenism must have tended to detach a certain section
of the scribes or wise men from the study of the written
law to more general teaching in religion and ethics. At
the extreme wing of such a section would stand the
lonely figure of Ecclesiastes. His date is probably about
200 B. C. The loosening of the religious bond, the
wider outlook, the critical awakening, the falling-off in
attractiveness and satisfying power of the old doctrines
and practices, which Hellenistic influences effected, led
in him to no aping of foreign customs, but to a mournful
Epicureanism which the additions of his editors have not
been able to disguise.1 He has lost his interest in reli-
gion : for it fails to satisfy the wants of the human heart
or to still its questionings, which, again and again re-
peated, are always left without an answer. He still
believes in God, and he would still counsel men to get
wisdom and practise it; but the object of wisdom is
personal happiness, and sensual pleasure is a part of it.
Ecclesiastes, however, is within the Bible a wholly iso-
lated thinker. Attractive as his book may be, it stands
outside the line of religious development.
But this is not the case with the author, if he falls
2 Cf. the paragraph on Ecclesiastes in Schwally, Das Leben nach
clem Tode (1892), pp. 104 — 106, and especially p. 106, n. 1, with the
reference to Paul Haupt's most ingenious essay.
380 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
within this period, of the nine introductory chapters of
Proverbs. He too, it has been urged, had felt the influ-
ence of Hellenistic thought, of which we can trace the
product in his work. Later on I shall attempt to show
that the function of Wisdom in the Proverbs generally,
and its implicit identification with goodness and religion,
are not necessarily to be regarded as even the indirect
creation of Hellenism. But when, in the eighth chapter,
Wisdom is described as the artist or master-workman
who, fashioned by God before the world, was ever by
him in his creative work, "his daily delight, sporting
before him continually," it is fair to argue that we can
hardly refuse to admit the intrusion of distinctively Greek
ideas.1 But touched though he be by an alien culture,
the writer's Judaism is still real and ardent. His religion
gives him moral stability as well as spiritual satisfaction.
And the incipient philosopher has not lost his hold upon
orthodoxy. He still can say : " Honour Yahveh with
thy substance, and with the first-fruits of all thine
increase."2 And as he, elsewhere so seemingly detached
from all specifically national and ceremonial elements, is
still obviously a Jew, so on the other hand is Sirach, who
repeatedly enforces the claims of the Law and identifies
it with Wisdom, able to accept and assimilate for his
ideal sage a variety of general culture which was certainly
not without a tincture of Hellenism.
1 viii. 30, 31. This contention has been well put by Holtzmann in
Stade, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 296, 297; cf. also Reuss, Die Geschichte
der heiligen Schriften alien Testaments, §403, p. 521; and Cornill,
Einleitung, p. 225.
2 Prov. iii. 9.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 381
His book, written about twenty years before the acces-
sion of AntiochuSj and therefore within the Old Testament
period, stands at a parting of the ways. He is concerned
to warn his readers against a wisdom which is contrary
to religion : " Inquire not into the things too hard for
thee, and what is above thy strength examine not. Con-
sider that which has been commanded thee, for thou hast
no need of the secret things."1 He believes that "many
have been led astray by their own imaginings ; " days of
visitation are at hand in which the wise man will beware
of transgression.2 Some were clearly inclined to taste
forbidden fruit under the plea of gathering experience.
Sirach replies : " The knowledge of wickedness is not
wisdom," for "in all wisdom there is observance of the
Law." He even ventures on the statement, obvious to
us, but unusual in the whole course of scribe-teaching
from Proverbs to the Eabbis : " He that has small under-
standing and fears God is better than one that has much
wisdom and transgresses the Law." For there is a
spurious wisdom which is an "abomination."3 But at
the same time the picture of the ideal wise man drawn
by Sirach shows that, while the Law was the foundation
of his wisdom, it was by no means its only source.
Hellenistic is Sirach's emphasis upon leisure as the con-
dition of wisdom. "The wisdom of a scribe comes
by opportunity of leisure: he that has little business
1 iii. 20, 21, ed. Fritzsche (A.V. iii. 21, 22); cf. Psalm cxxxi.
2 iii. 23 (A.V. 24), xviii. 26 (A.V. 27) ; cf. Mr. Ball's note on this
second passage in the new " Variorum Reference " edition of the
Apocrypha (1892).
3 xix. 18—22 (A. V. 20-24).
i
382 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
can become wise."1 For the wise man has much to
do before he attains his goal. "He that gives his mind
to the law of the most High will seek the wisdom of all
the ancients, and be occupied with the prophecies. He
will give heed to the sayings of renowned men; and
where subtle parables are, he will be there also. He will
seek out the secret things of similitudes, and be occupied
with riddling parables. He will stand among great men,
and appear before princes ; he will travel through strange
countries ; for he will make trial of good and evil among
men."2 While, therefore, the ideal sage of Sirach is
faithful to the Law, his intellectual horizon is not limited
by his native Scriptures. Though the new culture has
its peculiar dangers, it is not of necessity an evil.
What would have been the final outcome of all these
streams of tendency if the violence of Antiochus Epi-
phanes had not supervened, we can hardly say. Hekatoeus
of Abdera, in a passage where the Greek historian seems
to speak and not the Jewish interpolater, asserts that
through the long period in which they were subject
to foreign princes, especially during the Persian and
Macedonian supremacies, the Jews were so much min-
gled with other races that the hold which many of
their national usages had upon them was considerably
weakened.3 Hekatseus was a contemporary of the first
Ptolemy, and may have written his history about 300 — at
an early phase, therefore, of the Hellenistic movement.
1 xxxviii. 24. 2 xxxix. 1 — 5; cf. xxxi. 10, 11.
3 Muller, Fragmenta Hist. Grobcorum, Vol. IL p. 393 (Diodorus
Siculus, ed. Muller, Vol. II. p. 580); cf. Schurer, Oesehichte, Vol. II.
p. 818 (E. T. Div. ii. Vol. III. p. 305).
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 383
Prof. Schiirer thinks (and who is better qualified to offer
an opinion than he ?) that " had the Hellenizing process
been allowed to take its course in quiet, Palestinian
Judaism would also probably have gradually acquired a
form in which it would have been hardly recognizable. It
would have become even much more syncretistic than the
Judaism of Philo." For the events which preceded the
Maccabean revolt make it, as he thinks, probable that
the Hellenizing party had already obtained the upper
hand. The Chassidim would have dwindled down into a
sect. But the persecution of Antiochus broke the spell,
and Judaism was saved. "For not only the rigid
Chassidim, but the great mass of the people, stood up in
battle for their ancient faith." Hellenism was overcome,
and as an influence on the regular development of Judaism,
was, in Judaea at any rate, of no further account.1
Having said thus much of external influences, it is
time to turn now to the internal framework, the Temple
and the Scriptures.
The introduction of Ezra's law had mainly been
brought about for the sake of the better and more per-
manent establishment of the public worship, and of such
subsidiary ceremonials as were dependent on it. Ezra's
interests were bound up with those of the temple.
Though a scribe, he was also a priest, and his work as
scribe was conditioned by his ideals as priest. The law
which he introduced had grown up in the school of
1 Schiirer, Geschichte, Vol. I. p. 147 (E. T. Diy. i. Vol. I. p. 198).
The Hellenistic development of Judaism outside Judaea, of which the
chief seat was Alexandria, falls beyond the scope and purpose of the
present Lectures.
384 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
Ezekiel, and its object, as we know, was more collective
than individual. To the priests the cultus was the fixed
expression of Yahveh's will, the token of his presence
within the community of Israel. It was emphatically an
end in itself: as the false and idolatrous worship of the
monarchy had caused the punishment of exile, so the
perpetual maintenance of true worship would secure for
a faithful people the favour of its God. Both for Israel
and for the world, the relation of God to his chosen
people — nay, his very existence and reality — were sym-
bolized and evidenced in the temple service and in that
which appertained to it. It was performed for God's
glory as much as for Israel's safety. Like the Eoman
Catholic Mass, it was a perpetual divine manifestation.
A literary expression of this conception of the temple
and its worship is the Book of Chronicles, including the
editorial portions of Ezra and Nehemiah.1 "Written about
300 or 250 B.C., its object was to give a fresh narrative
of the history of the Judoean monarchy in the light of
the author's own religious opinions. These by no means
tally exactly with the general religious opinions of his
time. By Hellenism the writer was entirely unaffected-
He was a Levite, and a main purpose of his narrative
was the glorification of the temple and its worship. In
re-writing the pre-exilic history, he supposes that the
priestly law must have always been the authoritative
code of nation and king. Thus David is made to organ-
ize the entire temple service as so pious a monarch
ought to have organized it if the Pentateuch had been
his guide, and as, therefore, the author of Chronicles
1 Cf. Kuenen, Onderzoek, 2nd ed., Vol. I. pp. 515, &C.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 385
doubtless sincerely believed that it actually was organized
in the Davidic age. The temple is the centre of Israel's
life and the object of its existence.
This Levitical conception of national purpose and
temple ceremonial was not only opposed by a few chosen
spirits who revived the old antagonism of the prophets
between substance and form, but was also largely modified
by various movements of religious thought. Judaism
had really, though unconsciously, passed beyond the
priestly limit, and was transforming the mere outward
cultus into something purer and more spiritual. With
the animal sacrifices, ordained by the letter of the law,
praise and prayer became closely associated, and the
theory of God's presence within the temple helped to
evoke some of the noblest religious sentiments out of
apparently most unpromising material.1 Spiritual com-
munion with God and the pure joy of a felt nearness to
him were born from participation in the temple service.
To go to Jerusalem became a high religious satisfaction ;
to take part in statutory ceremonial evoked feelings which
could not be created by statute. The literary evidence
of these facts, which seem so curious for us to-day, is
to be found in the Psalter, now commonly described
as the religious hymn-booK of the second temple. Its
exact relation to the fixed temple psalmody is not easy
to ascertain. We know that the position of the temple
singers increased in importance during the Persian period.
In Nehemiah's time they were not included among the
Levites, and were probably reckoned low in the social
scale. But by the age of the Chronicler — at the opening
1 Cf. Wellhausen, Afo-iss, p. 89.
2c
386 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
of the Grecian period — they were already an integral
portion of the Levites, of whose duties sacred song
formed no unimportant part. Some of the psalms in our
present collection may have been composed by them ;
others, by hymn-writers outside their ranks, but for
temple use ; while others again, though written indepen-
dently, were perhaps adopted by the Levites for the same
purpose. But however this may be, the fact remains
that some of our noblest and most spiritual psalms owe
their origin to the temple and its worship.
Yet close as is the connection between psalter and
sanctuary, a few psalms show a marked antagonism to
the sacrificial system, and join on, in this respect, not to
the Torah of the priests, but to the preaching of the
prophets.1 Others accentuate, not the beauty of the
temple, but the all-sufficiency of the written Word. The
psalmist's religion may be truly said to have been wider
than that of priest or sage. He was less a specialist
than either of these, and is thus our best authority for
the post-exilic religion. For the psalmist, if one may so
individualize the many authors of the Psalter, is the
spokesman of the national piety in its noblest and purest
form. His book marks the religious level up to which
prophet, priest and sage had educated the national con-
sciousness. It is the reflection of all these in turn, but
of all with a special nuance, and often with a spiritual
development or application, peculiarly its own. By their
patriotic devotion to their people, in whose name they
so often speak, and by their frequent combination of
prophetic principles with warm attachment to the puri-
l C£ Psalms xl., L, li.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 387
fied forms in "which religion was outwardly clothed, the
psalmists represent a certain fusion between prophet and
priest, as well as between prophet and scribe.
Various elements of religion, such as the conception of
God and of man's communion with him, the ideas of sin
and atonement, were all affected by the temple. That
its influence did not become more powerful still was due
to the counter influence of the law. For when the law
became an end in itself, as distinct from the temple, for
the sake of which so much of it had originally been
introduced — when the scribe became a separate person-
ality from the priest, with whom he had been originally
identical — the ceremonial of the temple was subordinated
to the overmastering conception of the law. The cultus
was henceforth but a portion of the law, to be minutely
maintained no doubt, but maintained because the law
ordained it. God's glory and Israel's were realized, not
in the temple-worship, but in the fulfilment of the law
of which that worship was but a part. Because the
majesty of the law overshadowed the temple, Judaism
was able to survive when the temple had been destroyed.
Yet throughout the Persian and Greek period the
temple-worship retained outwardly its dignity and im-
portance. The temple was the only material possession
of unquestioned value of which the Jewish nation could
boast ; it was the one thing for which Jucltea was famous
in the outside world.1 Its renown was reflected on its
people. In post-exilic times it was a really national
place of worship. Before the exile its services and sacri-
fices had been maintained by the king ; now it was a
2 Cf. the fragment in Polybius, xvi. 39.
2c2
388 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
national concern, and, as it would seem, the people wil-
lingly paid the heavy taxes in money and kind which
the establishment of the temple necessitated. The insti-
tution of the twenty- four watches (3fishmaroth)} which
falls within Old Testament times, shows how it was
attempted to give to the temple services a thoroughly
representative character. Like priests and Levites the
entire people was divided into twenty-four classes, of
which one was supposed to be present each week in
Jerusalem at the daily sacrifice. As a matter of fact, as
it was clearly not possible for a whole class to muster at
the temple, it appears to have been customary for a small
selection of them to go to Jerusalem, while for the
remainder there were special services in their own syna-
gogues. In this way the temple ceremonial was linked
on to that new institution of the synagogue which was
ultimately to supply its place.1
The book of Ecclesiasticus, written some fifteen or
twenty years before the accession of Antiochus Epi-
phanes, shows the impression made upon the mind of a
representative Jew of that period by the magnificence of
the temple ritual.2 At the same time, while bidding the
reader to "fear Yahveh and honour his priest; to love
him that made thee with all thy strength, and to forsake
not his ministers,"3 Sirach is easily able to appropriate
and retain the prophetic teaching : " lie that shows
gratitude brings an offering, and he that gives alms
sacrifices a thank-offering." The preceding verse shows
1 Scliiirer, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 225, 226 (E. T. Div. ii. Vol. I.
p. 175).
2 1. 1—24. 3 vii. 30, 31.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 389
how lie came to say this : the law had put sacrifice into
its proper place. For "he that keeps the law brings
many offerings ; he that takes heed to the commandments
offers a thank-offering."1 Yet man must not appear
empty before God; for, whatever may seem to be the
inutility of sacrifice, " all these things are to he done because
of the commandment" Here is the influence of the law
fully dominant over the influence of the priest.
But the written law, though incomparably the most
important, was yet only a portion of that collection of
sacred Scriptures which constituted the second great
factor in the religion of the post-exilic period. These
Scriptures consisted first and foremost of the Pentateuch ;
next, of the histories of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and
Kings ; and lastly, of a collection of prophetic literature
still in a more or less floating condition, and capable
therefore of editorial expansion, but already possessed
of a definitely sacred character. The Judaism of the
second temple became gradually the religion of a book.
More especially the influence of the law constantly
tended to transform and overcome the hierarchic and
priestly character which, in the days of Ezra, the religion
seemed destined to assume. Through the law and its
teachers was created a religious individualism, the
growth of which is a feature to be borne in mind in the
history of post-exilic piety. On the theoretic side this
result was partly achieved by making the fulfilment of
the law an end in itself for every individual ; on the prac-
tical side, by those re-unions for Scripture reading and
prayer which became the better substitute for the beloved
1 xxxii. 1—5 (A.V. xxxv. 1—5); cf. xxxi. 18—20.
390 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
local sanctuaries of pre-exilic days, and which were
destined to supersede the material worship of the temple.
We cannot trace the origin of the synagogue. It is
possible, as we have already seen, that even in the exile
there were meetings on sabbaths and fast-days for reli-
gious teaching and exhortation. But in the form in
which they occur in Josephus and the New Testament,
the synagogues can only have been a consequence of the
law, so that they were probably instituted and gradually
developed after the age of Ezra. Two concurrent objects
were achieved by them. In the first place, they were
places of assembly for the recitation and exposition of
the law and the prophets ; secondly, they were places for
communal and public prayer, in which religious unity
and self-consciousness could be expressed and maintained
apart from the temple. By the Maccabean age they had
become numerous, so that the Syrian enemy aiming at
the total destruction of Judaism not only profanes the
sanctuary, but "burns up all the synagogues of God in
the land."1
The synagogal service in those early pre-Maccabean
days cannot be precisely determined, but it probably
already included a practical confession of faith in God and
his word — contained in the Shema and in two appended
passages2 — a section from the law continuous from week
to week, so that the whole was read through in a cycle
of three years ; a reading from the prophets — not fixed,
1 Ps. lxxiv. 8.
2 Deut. vi. 4—9, xi. 13—22; Numb. xv. 37—41. Mr. Schechter
informs me that the two last passages were perhaps added at a later
period.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 391
"but left to tlie choice of the individual and only custom-
ary on sabbaths; together with a few short prayers.
This last portion was expanded afterwards into the well-
known eighteen benedictions, called either Tefillah, as the
prayer par excellence, or Amidah, because the congrega-
tion stood during their recitation. It is generally assumed
that the three first and the three last of these benedic-
tions, in a somewhat simpler and shorter form than that
in which they are found in Jewish prayer-books to-day,
were already in existence before the Maccabean era.1
It is not difficult to see that an institution such as the
synagogue must have had an enormous effect npon reli-
gious life. It actively helped to individualize religion,
and to bring it home to the hearts and understanding of
all. Through the influence of the law and the synagogue,
religion was gradually emancipated from the narrow in-
terests to which the hierarchy was inclined to limit it;
without losing its particularism, it yet became more
human, less fixed to a single locality, less riveted to
temple and state. This effect of the law was also helped
forward by the exigencies of circumstance : the wide
Jewish diaspora was compelled to shape for itself a daily
religion independent of Palestine. The law supplied a
noticeable defect in the religion of Nehemiah's day by
creating a new spiritual satisfaction, and consequently a
new spiritual motive. It was here aided by the novel
doctrine of a future life and a bodily resurrection, the
growth of which must be traced in the next Lecture.
And the two together suggested a fresh theodicy.
1 Cf. Schurer, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 376—386 (E. T. Div. ii.
Vol. II. pp. 75—89).
392 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
Temple and law imply for their maintenance priest
and scribe. In these two personalities the religious and
political organization of the Jewish people in the post-
exilic period is practically comprised. Already in the
age of Zechariah the high-priest occupied a position of
nearly equal importance with Zerubbabel, the represen-
tative of the Davidic line. In the age of Nehemiah the
high-priest and his family showed, in the eyes of the
rigorists, a deplorable religious laxity. After the intro-
duction of the law the general tendency remained as
before. The high-priest was as much chief officer of
state as official representative of the national religion.
Such a position was peculiarly liable to moral corruption.
Even for the Persian period the odious story of Bagoses
shows how mean intrigue and open violence were not
unknown in the high-priest's family. But as the office
was hereditary, it acquired stability and influence, while
the family of David sank into the background and into
comparative insignificance. Together with the richer
laymen, the upper priesthood formed an aristocratic body
of conservative instincts, likely to look at religious mat-
ters from a semi-political point of view. Their leader,
the high-priest, stood at the head of a senate, first
authenticated for the age of Antiochus III., and com-
posed partly of priests and partly of laymen.1 In the
late Maccabean period, when the scribes had become a
powerful party in the state, they too won places upon
this council or Synedrion.
The numbers of the priests are not easy to determine.
Whereas the lists in Ezra and Nehemiah mention 4289
1 Josephus, Antiquities, xii. 3, 3.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 393
for the return under Zcrubbabel, Pseudo-Hekatoeus, as
quoted by Joscphus, states that in his time their numbers
•were only 1 500. l As only comparatively few were wealthy
and influential, this difference between the rich priests of
the capital and the poorer priests who lived mainly in the
country may perhaps partly account for the origin and
development of the scribe. ~Not to be neglected also
in the history of this difficult process are the Levites.
Prof. Schurcr has conjectured that the small numbers
who returned with Zerubbabel and Ezra were substan-
tially increased by descendants of other old Levitical, or
in the pre-exilic sense priestly, families who had not
been deported to Babylon.2 However this may be, we
may fairly assume that their numbers at the opening of
the Hellenistic period exceeded a thousand. It was
noticed in the last Lecture how prominent a position
was assigned to certain Levites at the first reading of
the law at the reform of Ezra and Nehemiah. There
are traces that this special predilection was continued,3
and many Levites may have found in the teaching of the
law a nobler recompence for their inferior position in
the sanctuary.
In the ranks of the hierarchy we thus find two main
divisions. There was an upper class, who were men of
politics as well as of religion, and associated with them
there must have been many, both among priests and
Levites, who found employment in the routine business
of the temple and sufficient satisfaction in its discharge.
1 Contra Apionem, i. 22.
2 Geschichte, Vol. II. p. 189 (E. T. Div. ii. Vol. I. p. 227).
3 Cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 3, xvii. 7; 1 Chron. xxiii. 4.
394 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
But over and above these, though separated from them
by no hard and fast line, were others who were seldom
occupied at Jerusalem, or who, for one reason or another,
found the material duties of the temple insufficient for
their religious needs. Such persons, possessed of adequate
leisure, because free from the necessity of devoting all
their time to the satisfaction of bodily wants, were well
fitted for the posts of teachers, interpreters and students
of the law and the sacred Scriptures generally. Can the
growth of this class and of the various forms which it
assumed, until one particular form predominated, be
traced back to its beginnings ?
Unfortunately not. The Pharisees of the later Macca-
bean era, progenitors of the Scribes and Eabbis of the
New Testament, appear in the field of history on a
sudden, but how they emerged from the priesthood of
Ezra and jN"ehemiah history has left unrecorded. We
start with a code introduced by priests, and in accordance
with priestly ideals. Of this code they were the authors,
custodians and interpreters. By the time of John
Hyrkanus (135 — 105), the stories in Josephus respecting
his conflicts with the Pharisees, whose leaders were the
men known later as Scribes and Eabbis, show that the
law was taught, interpreted and developed no longer by
priests, but by men outside their ranks and often opposed
to them in religious practice and belief.1 This great
change, fraught with momentous consequences for Juda-
ism, had resulted partly from the growing worldliness of
the upper sections of the priesthood, and partly from the
growing affection of the people for the law itself. Priestly
1 Antiquities, xiii. 10.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 395
as so much of it seems and is, it yet sank deeper and
deeper into the hearts of the people. Soon after Ezra,
as we shall shortly learn, its two main portions, the
priestly code and the Book of Deuteronomy, to which
the older histories of the patriarchal and Mosaic age had
been attached, were welded together into a single whole.
Discrepancies between different parts of the law, or
between the law and other portions of sacred Scripture,
were almost completely overlooked. Prophets and histo-
rians seemed only to interpret and accentuate it. For the
final advent of the Messianic age, the fulfilment of the
law appeared more and more assuredly to be the prepa-
ration decreed by the will of God and indicated in his
sacred Word.
Thus the need of teachers in the law and the Scriptures
arose quite naturally out of their increasing popularity.
And as the law, both in the wider and the narrower
sense, passed out of priestly control, because the com-
munity as a whole had gradually become more unselfishly
interested in it than the official hierarchy, the people
began to raise up teachers out of its own ranks. To such
purely lay teachers must be added those priests and
Levites (chiefly at the lower end of the social scale) who,
as compared with the upper priesthood of the capital,
belonged by birth rather than by sentiment to their
respective orders. For there was never any rigid separa-
tion, or fixed wall of partition, between priest and scribe.
Even in later times a priest might be a scribe, and at
least one high-priest is famous as a lover of the law.
In the Persian period, the scribe as such, apart from
the priest, is scarcely known by name. Prof. Schurer's
396 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
opinion is that "in the first centuries after the exile till
well down into the Greek period, the priests maintained
their superiority." And again : " At the time of Ezra,
priest and scribe are practically identical. From the
beginning of the Greek period they become more and
more distinct."1
Within the Old Testament itself there are still many
remains of the literary activity of the earlier scribes.
Many will be surprised to learn that the products of one
branch of this activity must be sought for in the Wisdom
literature, and more especially in the Book of Proverbs.
The post- exilic origin of Proverbs and Job, while still
largely disputed, is gradually gaining ground.2 Yet if
insuperable difficulties seem to prevent our assigning
these books to the period of the monarchy, or even of
the exile, it might seem that the difficulties are scarcely
diminished by dating them after Nehemiah. For if the
lay scribes owed their origin to an independent study
of law and Scriptures, how can the Book of Proverbs,
which appears to be the outcome of a merely general
1 Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 175, 320 (E. T. Div. ii. Vol. I. p. 208,
Vol. II. p. 9).
2 See, for example, Cornill, Einleitung in das alte Testament;
Cheyne, in Expositor, 1892, pp. 244 — 251. I would also venture to
refer to my own article, " Notes upon the Date and Religious Value of
the Proverbs," in Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. II. pp. 430 — 453.
It should, as Mr. Carpenter has pointed out to me, have been more
distinctly stated that while the general religious tone of the whole,
and most of the specifically religious adages individually, must be set
down to the credit of the post-exilic period, many " of the maxims of
social and personal experience may really be of very high antiquity."
The various separate collections, which we can partly still distinguish
in x.— xxxi., may undoubtedly "have taken up elements of great age."'
INIERNAL ORGANIZATION. 397
teaching, almost more ethical than religious, be rightly-
assigned to them ? In Proverbs there is scarcely a single
reference to specific enactments of the law ; and it is not
only the priest, but also Israel itself, with all its hopes
and aspirations, which is conspicuous by its absence.
The history of the past and the ideals of the future — the
warnings and anticipations of the prophets — are all
equally ignored.
Two explanations have been put forward of these
curious phenomena. The first is that the whole Book
of Proverbs, as well as the Book of Job, must be assigned
to the Greek period, more especially to that era of com-
parative prosperity and calm under the rule of the
Ptolemaean kings (280 — 200). The peculiar character-
istics of Proverbs, above referred to, will then be partly
due to an epoch the tokens of which have been described
as the " reconciliation and commingling of Judaism and
Hellenism with one another."1 But as it seems scarcely
safe to put more than the nine introductory chapters as
late as Alexander or the Ptolemies, another explanation
must be attempted.
The compilation and editing of the larger portion of
Proverbs might be retained for the Persian period on
the hypothesis that the book represents only a single
phase of the early scribe teaching, and that the study
of the Scriptures made itself felt in more directions
than one. We do not sufficiently bear in mind the
great variety and many-sided development of the post-
exilic religion before the time of the Maccabean per-
secution. That event was a turning-point in the history
* Stade, Gescluchte, Vol. II. p. 296.
398 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
of Judaism. Till then, at any rate, life under the
law did not necessarily produce that narrowness of
mind and mood, that absorbing interest in ceremonial-
ism and legal observance, and that rigid and over-
mastering particularism, which it is too customary to
ascribe to it. If Proverbs and Job, to say nothing
of the Psalter, are all post-exilic, critics will have to
unlearn the usual assumption that the law in itself
necessarily tended to stifle every wide and liberal reli-
gious impulse, and to drive all who paid it allegiance
into the narrow groove of letter-worship and formalism.
But further we have to ask, How are we to account for
that conception of religion and morality under the form
of Wisdom, which such books as Proverbs and Ecclesi-
asticus show to have become common and customary in
the Persian and Hellenistic periods ? It was, I think, a
by-product of the law which, regarded as a thing to be
learned, naturally implied the possession of wisdom in
him who had learned it. Human wisdom, the wisdom of
adages and proverbs, had been as familiar to the Jews as
to other eastern nations. It was the wisdom of Edom.1
It was the wisdom of king Solomon, in which he excelled
"the children of the East-country and all the wisdom of
Egypt."2 But before the exile this secular wisdom had
not been much thought of by the religious teachers of
Israel. Too often the wise men had taken up an anta-
gonistic attitude to prophetic doctrine. Too often they
were but wise in their own conceit, and their wisdom
was of no avail in the hour of need. But the law of
Deuteronomy was to give Israel a material for wisdom
1 Jer. xlix. 9; Ob. 8. I 1 Kings v. 10 (E.Y. iv. 30).
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 399
which should surpass the wisdom of the nations. In a
late chapter of Deuteronomy the claim is put forward
that true wisdom is the prerogative of religious faith.
The "judgments and statutes," given through Moses to
Israel, constitute Israel's wisdom and understanding in
the sight of the nations. They, therefore, and the
"things which thine eyes have seen" — in other words,
the records of the past — must be taught from generation
to generation.1
But there had also been a semi-intellectual element in
the religious vocabulary of the prophets : they had ex-
pressed religious excellences intellectually. Thus Hosea's
formula for the highest religious desideratum is " the
knowledge of God." In the ideal age depicted by Jere-
miah teaching becomes unnecessary, for all will " know "
their God : Deutero-Isaiah, speaking of the same f uturer
which seemed to him so near, and addressing Jerusalem,
declares that a all thy children shall be disciples of
Yahveh." A prophecy usually attributed to Isaiah, but
just possibly of the Persian period, specializes the spirit
of Yahveh which shall rest upon the coming Messiah,
"as the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit
of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and fear of
Yahveh." The fool, even in the oldest Israelite termi-
nology, is identified with the wicked.2
What sort of "teaching" went on in the exile, and
what relation it bore to the study of the law in priestly
circles, we hardly know. That deputation which Ezra
sent to the Levites to urge them to join him in the
1 Deut. iv. 6, 7.
2 Hosea iv. 6, iv. 1, 6; Jer. xxxi. 24; Isaiah liv. 13, xi. 2.
400 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
expedition to Judaea, consisted of nine " chief men "
and two " teachers."1 In the public reading of the law
some fourteen years later, thirteen Levites explain the
wording and "give the sense."2 When we pass to the
time of the Chronicler, at the opening of the Hellenistic
age, we find him attributing to Jehoshaphat a commis-
sion of divers persons "to teach the people in all the
cities of Judah." This commission consists of five nobles
(the object of whose presence does not seem apparent),
nine Levites, and two priests. With them they have
the book of the law of Yahveh. Thus here again we
find the Levites prominent as teachers. In another
passage the Chronicler speaks of the Levites as those
" who taught all Israel."3
This teaching which the law required and fostered
could clearly not have been limited to ceremomial. The
ethical elements of the law needed equal or even greater
attention. When once the idea was reached that the
total sum of religious truth and doctrine — the teaching
of the prophets as well as of the law — constituted Israel's
peculiar wisdom, it was natural that the early scribes
and students of the Scriptures should apply these truths
in detail, according to the old manner of gnomic teach-
ing, to the life of their own time. " Wisdom " assumed
a religious form ; and in place of the old sages of the
opposition, we have now orthodox sages of the law, who,
teaching on the basis of the religion both of prophet and
priest, incline now to one side and now to another, but
are unconscious of any bygone conflict between the two.
1 Ezraviii. 16. 2 Neh. viii. 7.
3 2 Chron. xvii. 7, xxxv. 3.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 401
Circumstances, moreover, were favourable to such,
quiet, general instruction. The post-Nehemian age, till
the time when Hellenism became first a seductive danger
and then a tyrannical persecution, was one of comparative
calm in the history of Judaism. Idolatry was overcome :
the law was accepted as the basis of outward worship :
the Persian and early Greek rule, if not without its
occasional troubles, was yet free upon the whole from
conflict and persecution. Hence the possibility for
reflectiveness and even for speculation. It was a fit
opportunity for systematic teaching — not for the spas-
modic and semi-political teaching of the prophets, but for
the ethical and individualistic teaching of the sage. That
teaching, of which much of our present Book of Proverbs
may well be a partial product, rests on the basis both of
the prophets and of the law, though it seldom alludes to
either. It reflects in some measure the doctrine both of
lawgiver and prophet, though it is in itself non-prophetic
and non-priestly. It treats morality as a matter of dis-
cipline, instruction and rule — and in this respect it fol-
lows the law ; it sets morality above ritual, and finds the
content of religion in the fear of God and a good life —
and in this respect it follows the prophets. Thus the
Wisdom literature lay, as it were, between law and
prophecy, but on either side of it there were going on at
the same time two other activities of Scripture students.
On the one hand, there was the priest-scribe who ex-
panded and edited the law ; on the other, there was the
prophet-scribe who expanded and edited the prophets.
Of the priest-scribe's work, the greater part falls pro-
bably in the half-century immediately after Ezra. Addi-
2d
402 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
tions were made in the first instance to Ezra's own codey
which, as we saw, was already a conglomerate when
Ezra introduced it. Some of these additions were made
in order to give sanction and authority to the ritual
changes and developments of the day ; of these, the two
most obvious and interesting are the law of the extra
evening burnt-offering, and the law of the yearly poll-
tax of half-a-shekel, neither of which can have existed
in Ezra's code.1 Sometimes the additions are little more
than repetition or amplification, of which the most re-
markable is found in the last six chapters of Exodus.
Here " a very short original account of the execution of
the commands (respecting the erection of the Tabernacle)
of Exodus xxv. sqq. was gradually elaborated, till at
last it was brought into the form of the instructions
themselves."2 Sometimes, too, additions were made to
the narratives; of these, a famous one, which is rather
modification than addition, was made in the interest of
the priests and to the detriment of the Levites, thus
showing that the quarrel between the two orders con-
tinued for some time beyond the age of Ezra.3 Of the
priestly chapters in our present Pentateuch, about a
quarter may perhaps be considered as later than the
original "priestly code." It is hardly possible to say
how much of this quarter was already in existence before
Ezra's time, and how much was added afterwards. A
more important work of the priest-scribe was the com-
bination of the priestly law with Deuteronomy and the
1 Cf. Ivuenen, Hexateuch, p. 307, &c. 2 Ibid. p. 73.
3 Ibid. pp. 95, 334. Vogelstein, Der Kampf z>cischen Priestern und
Levitcn, 1889, pp. 48 — 55.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 403
older sacred history of the patriarchal and Mosaic ages.
This combination, with the subsequent or contempora-
neous separation of the chapters we now call Joshua from
the law itself, formed the final stage in the history of
the Pentateuch. In this last redaction, the priestly code
— itself half-narrative, half-legal — was used as basis, so
that but little of it was probably lost. And although
some of the older narratives had to be shortened or
omitted, inasmuch as the same events could not as a
rule be related twice, it is probable that we still possess
the larger portion of the earlier documents. When the
Chronicler speaks of the Book of the Law of Yahveh;
there can be little doubt that he means the Pentateuch
in its present form. For when he wrote, in the first
century of the Grecian period, the long work of redac-
tion was drawing to its close. But even after the Greek
translation of the Pentateuch, about the middle of the
third century, some few short glosses were added in the
Hebrew text ; and with regard especially to the last six
chapters of Exodus, the Hebrew text of which differs so
widely from the Septuagint, we cannot be sure that they
existed in their present form in all authorized copies
before about 200 B.C.
This long -continued editorial manipulation of the
Pentateuchal texts was only possible because of the great
scarcity of copies : in the Persian period, at any rate, the
mass of the people knew the law by oral teaching and
recitation rather than by having read it themselves.
The authorized copies of the law would be those which
were held or issued by the priests and scribes of the
capital. Any interpolation would be regarded by those
2d2
404 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
who heard it for the first time as a piece of ancient
Torah, hitherto passed over, perhaps hitherto unrecorded.
It seems impossible to acquit the interpolators of the
post-Nehemian age of all blame, but the different ideas
about books and their integrity and authorship then
prevailing must never be lost sight of. The men who
added to Ezra's law, and combined it with the older
records, probably believed those records to be documents
of great antiquity, and, for the most part, of Mosaic
origin ; but it does not seem to have occurred to them
that there was any objection to incorporating the new
laws of their own time in the older code. To strengthen
didactic effect they saw nothing wrong in adding a trait
or a touch here and there, in expanding a narrative, or
even in inserting an extra story. The law, in the long
period of its oral growth and transmission, had been
gradually increased and modified from age to age ; yet
each accretion had been good Torah in its turn, and
found its place in the swelling store of legal tradition.
When the oral Torah gave place to the written code, the
same custom for a time prevailed, the same tendency
towards expansion and addition as time and circumstance
might demand. Editorial necessities, too, made them-
selves felt ; narratives from different sources had to be
dovetailed into each other ; laws from various collections
incorporated into a single whole. The authority of the
code as a fixed and immutable body of law, given at one
definite point of time in the past, and standing above
and outside all subsequent tradition, could only begin to
assert itself when the dovetailing process was finished,
and the number of written copies had immensely multi-
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 405
plied. Then, as the knowledge of its very words was more
widely diffused, the divinity of the law became gradually
a hard-and-fast dogma, culminating at last in the belief
that every letter had its own meaning, and the whole
book its pre-existence in heaven.
A similar liberty of treatment was applied to the text
of the Prophets. By the time of Ezra there already
existed a considerable mass of generally accredited pro-
phetical Scripture, most of which was of known authorship.
Nevertheless, even these prophecies were undoubtedly
pruned and added to, though the exact extent of these
processes, which have been of late emphasized by Prof.
Stade, it will be scarcely possible to discover. The
Septuagint enables us to put our finger on one instance
in which the text was changed because the event foretold
had not come to pass.1 It is probable that this is not
the only case. The additions are somewhat easier to
determine. They are of several kinds and of different
lengths, consisting sometimes only of a few verses, some-
times of an entire paragraph. Or, again, independent
" prophecies," written on some special occasion and cir-
culated, like Deutero-Isaiah's, as separate broad-sheets,
were afterwards inserted in larger collections, such as
the scrolls of Isaiah or Zechariah, and invested thereby
with the authority and durability of the older writings
into which they were incorporated. Or, lastly, such
separate prophecies may have been inserted ab initio in
the older prophet's scroll, and never intended for inde-
jDendent circulation. This expansion and editing of the
1 Zech. vi. 11 — 13, with the commentators and Stade, Gcscldchte,
Vol. II. p. 126.
406 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
prophetical records extended probably into the Grecian
period.
Its authors were prompted by various motives, but in
almost all cases they were not the same motives as those
which animated either the prophets of the pre-exilic
periods, or even Haggai and Zechariah. The older pro-
phets had been teachers ; their editors were not. Teach-
ing was conducted by the law and by that regular
instruction of the scribes which has already come before
us. The transition from genuine prophecy to editorial
expansion is not therefore to be regarded as a mark of
religious deterioration or sterility, as is so often and so
strongly urged. Eeligious and ethical teaching, as well as
religious spontaneity, found their vent in other channels.
Such passages as Isaiah lviii., the famous homily on the
distinction between the outward and the spiritual fast,
are exceptional. In only one instance, moreover, do we
find a separate post-exilic prophecy by a man whose
name is given, and whose work is in consequence inde-
pendently preserved. All other additions, with that
exception — the Book of Joel — are anonymous.
The main object of these additions — both of the
shorter interpolations and of the inserted or appended
chapters — is to foretell and to depict the Messianic age
in one or other of the various forms in which it was then
conceived. A few of these additions are universalist,
like the fragment in the second chapter of Isaiah, treating
of Jerusalem as the world's spiritual metropolis ; but the
tendency of the great majority of them is national. Israel
is by no means free from sin ; but as compared with the
heathen overlord and oppressor, Israel is righteous, its
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 407
-enemies wicked. Most of these expansions of prophecy —
Isaiah xi. 10 — 16, xxiv. — xxvii., xxxii., xxxiii., lxiii. —
lxvi. ; Jeremiah 1., li.; Zechariah xii. — xiv., to instance
some of the longer passages— were designed for comfort,
and not for reproof. If sin was acknowledged, it was
either the sin of a particular party within the community,
or a somewhat vague and indefinite sinfulness in which
the writer felt himself equally involved. In both cases
the real object was, not to rebuke sin, but to announce
its disappearance either by a miraculous dispensation of
divine grace or through a judgment-process which, as
the immediate harbinger of the Messianic age, should be
partial for Israel, but wider for its foes. What provoked
these semi-prophetic utterances was, as of old, some
external event, foreboding change ; but in the movement
was seen, not judgment upon guilty Israel, but judgment
upon the guiltier nations. That is why these expansions,
ending as they did in the apocalyptic literature, lie rather
outside the general religious life, and were not relatively
anything like so important as their present place in the
canon might suggest.1 When the Syrian revolt began
under Ochus, when Alexander destroyed the empire of
Persia, when the Diadochoi fought against each other
and Judoea was often visited by war and distress, national
kopes revived, and men wondered whether the time of
deliverance, the golden age of peace and plenty predicted
by the seers of old, was not at hand. Such were the
times in which these late pieces of prophecy were com-
posed.
1 Cf. a few, but very important words of Kuenen in Theol. Tijd.,
1891, p. 508.
408 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
One book now included in the twelve minor Prophets
hardly falls within the same category as the accretions
to Isaiah and Zechariah or as the prophecy of Joel.
This is the Book of Jonah, which is rather a romance
with a moral than an ordinary prophecy. It links the
work of the prophet-scribe with the work of Scripture
students in other fields. It used an historic figure of
olden times, but from the first, in all probability, was
not meant to be accepted as a record of antiquity. Allied
to it are the book of Ruth, which we have already seen
to be a story with a purpose of the early post-Nehemian
period, and among the Apocryphal writings the books of
Judith and Tobit. The use of the traditional figure of
Job, and the historic figure of Solomon, in the books of
Job and Ecclesiastes, is closely similar. And this same
artifice of fictitious antiquity, applied for very various
purposes to the above-mentioned works, was in the book
of Daniel applied differently again. Here in the midst
of the Maccabean uprising and the persecutions of
Antiochus, an unknown writer seeks to comfort his dis-
tressed fellow-countrymen by throwing his picture of the
past and the present and his hopes for the future into
the form of predictions uttered by a prophet of the
captivity. "With these predictions he combines a variety
of romantic incidents and marvels, all tending to quicken
the constancy and strengthen the faith of the perse-
cuted and struggling Jews. He thus follows the prece-
dents of Jonah and Ruth, but expands or improves upon
his models in a manner which afterwards found wide
imitation and development.
In these different literary productions of the post-exilic
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 409
period, we sec that the long interval between Ezra and
Judas the AEaccabee was full of religious fervour and
vitality. The spirit of religion expressed itself in a
variety of ways. What manifold thought and activity
there must have been in an age which edited the Law
and expanded the Prophets, which produced the Psalter
and the Proverbs, the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, Joel
on the one hand, Jonah on the other, Chronicles and Path 1
"What fresh inspiration and true religious zeal in an age
which created the synagogue and its early ritual to serve
as a complement to, and afterwards to take the place of,
temple and sacrifice ! And all this, be it remembered, in
an age when ancient prophecy had ceased, when the letter
of the law had succeeded to the free spirit which mocks at
forms. How many the prejudices which should be cor-
rected in this newer, more critical and more truthful
view of the post-exilic age ! We used to be told that
the rule of the law, which began with Ezra, inaugurated
a period of gradual sterilization and decay. More and
more the legal yoke was supposed to crush out inspira-
tion and originality ; a mediocre and depressing uni-
formity was believed to take the place of the fresh and
breezy variety of pre-exilic days, when, amid much wild
disorder and many strange aberrations, there was yet
room and opportunity for an Amos and a Jeremiah;
instead of prophecy, there is the letter which kills; a
chilling external legality causes the level of true religion
to sink lower and lower, till the measure of its worthlcss-
ness becomes full, and the time for the new teaching is
at hand.
It is now no longer possible to represent the post-
410 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
exilic period in such a light as this. But prejudices die
hard ; and the antagonism to the Law and to its reli-
gion, which still reigns supreme in the greater number
of Christian theologians, is trying to find a way out of
an obvious difficulty. The imperfections of the post-
exilic literature and religion are explained as direct
results of the Law ; its excellences are a dying protest
against its stifling dominion. Thus the Psalter, albeit it
has been the beloved possession of Judaism ever since
the clays of the Maccabees, is yet a reaction of old
Israelite piety against Judaism, a proof that the religious
genius of Israel could not be quenched even by Ezra
and the Pharisees ! That old Israelite piety, which
was expressed erewhile in superstition and idolatry, is
awakened once more, and lo ! its outcome is the Psalter.1
In the last Lecture I shall consider the truth of this
supposed divorce between the Law and true religion.
Meanwhile it remains to point out a general explanation
for the great variety of religious thoughts and impulses
which characterizes the post- exilic period.
The religion of Ezra and his succecsors was an uncon-
scious combination of two incompatibles. Though the
two ingredients were blended in very various propor-
tions— hence the diversity in the effects produced —
neither was ever wholly wanting. Uncompromising
monotheism on the one hand ; a single nation and a
national ceremonial upon the other; the incongruity is
apparent. The conception of Deity did not square with
the religious cultus ; the idea had outgrown its embodi-
ment. Or, again, it might be said that idea and embo-
1 So Cornill, Einleitung, p. 214.
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 411
diment sprang from different sources. The first was
prophetic and original, peculiar to the genius or inspi-
ration of the highest spirits in Israel ; the second was
popular, customary, heathen. But it was inevitable that
idea and embodiment should re-act upon each other, the
idea sometimes transfiguring the embodiment, the embo-
diment sometimes detracting from the purity of the idea.
It was the embodiment which enabled lower beliefs, such
as the peculiar relation of God to a particular place, to
live on side by side with higher doctrine by which they
had in principle been overcome. Hence the prophetic
conception of a single spiritual God, Creator of heaven
and earth, and the living self-conscious ideal of righteous-
ness and beneficence, was wedded to a religious practice
which implied that abstention from certain foods or the
exercise of ablutory purifications could bring men nearer
to the holy God.
But another reason why the idea was unable to dis-
pense with the old embodiment, or to create a new one
better fitted to itself, was the fact that the idea, original
as it was, was built up upon the basis of a popular reli-
gion. From an historical point of view this connection
was necessary for the ultimate result. For if the pro-
phets had spoken of the one God, and not of the one
Yahveh, then, as in Greece, they might have given us a
monotheistic philosophy, but not that wider and more
potent good, a monotheistic religion.
In the Hellenistic period, the two main elements in the
Jewish religion were being severally developed in anta-
gonism with each other. The attraction of Hellenism
tended to soften down or eliminate the national forms :
412 VII. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND
the repulsion against Hellenism tended to accentuate
them. It is not possible to enter into the details, whether
external or internal, of the Syrian persecution and the
Maccabean revolt. "With them began a new era, of which
the mixed issues lie outside Old Testament limits. Not
that the literature of the Old Testament fails us even
now. For some forty years at least after the accession
of Antiochus it still continues. More than one psalm
yet preserved to us was written during the days of per-
secution and conflict, and some, too, echo the clays of
victory and triumph. When the darkness was deepest,
the Book of Daniel was written to cheer the Maccabean
warriors ; while the fierce passions evoked by the struggle
are revealed to us in the Book of Esther. But the new
religious parties and tendencies produced by the revolt
and its consequences belong to the history of Babbinism
or to the origins of Christianity, not to the history of the
Old Testament.
Yet one point, in conclusion, before we turn to examine
the religious content of the post-exilic literature of the
Bible. The Maccabean revolt drove out Hellenism, and
prepared the way for the full development of Babbinism.
It left the Law triumphant and supreme. After Antiochus'
ill-starred persecution, we no longer find that rich variety
of religious literature and tendency which marks the
rjcriod between Ezra and the Maccabees. The worship
of the Law and the domination of Scripture set their seals
upon all forms of literary productiveness, and thus in
certain respects there is a family likeness in them all.
Nationalism, particularism, legalism, are now all-power-
ful, and their influence is all-pervading. All this would
INTERNAL ORGANIZATION. 413
seem to indicate retrogression, and in one direction it
actually docs so. Let no one, however, suppose that it
indicates stagnation, sterility or decay. Above all, let no
one suppose that it indicates a lower level of personal
religion in the heart of each individual believer. For
the religious fervour which marks much of the literature
of the pre-Maccabean period was no less, but even more,
a characteristic of the Judaism which succeeded it. Reli-
gion has never been a purer joy and a deeper satisfaction,
God has never been more truly loved and more nobly
served, than among those who followed the full-blown
particularism of the Eabbis. Under the influence of
Hellenism and in the waning of the national idea, God, to
the author of Ecclesiastes, had become distant. It was
the Law and the national idea which brought God near.
In orthodox Judaism the Law supplied the place of the
person of Christ in orthodox Christianity. It was the
almost living link between the human and the divine.
Lecture VIII.
FKOM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES
GOD AND ISRAEL.
In roughest outline I sought to sketch out iu the last
Lecture the environment and organization of the Jewish
religion during the three hundred years between Nehe-
miah and Simon the Maccabee. I attempted to gauge the
successive influences of Persian and Hellenistic supre-
macy, and of Hellenistic if not of Persian thought, upon
the development of Palestinian Judaism. Internally, the
Temple and the Law were shown to be the two great facts
round which so much of the religious life clustered, and
by which it was so markedly determined. The temple
and its priests, with all their variety of priestly ideas and
regulations ; the law and its wise men and scribes, with
all their wide diffusion of teaching and precept — these
were the two constituent, though heterogeneous elements,
which may be regarded either as the sheath and casing
of the religion, or more accurately as the sources from
which its life was drawn. It was pointed out also that
law and temple were not antithetic, but that, unfortu-
nately, the greater portion of the law to the study of
which the scribes consecrated their lives, and for which
Till. GOD AND ISRAEL. 415
they sought the undivided allegiance of their race, was
priestly in its thought and priestly in the rites which it
enjoined.
Some attempt must now be made to present, at least
in its main features, the actual content of that religion,
the framework of which has been thus, however imper-
fectly, described. It is mainly by the help of the Old
Testament that this must be accomplished. But though
we are confined within Old Testament limits, the literature
of that book, as we have seen, still continues for three cen-
turies after the reformation of Nehemiah. The classes
of post-exilic literature within the Old Testament, and
of the men who produced it, have been already indicated.
In our fragmentary sketch of the religious organization,
the figures of the Levitical historian, of the editors and
expanders of the prophetical books, of the apocalyptic
seers, of the psalmists and of the sages, branching off
into the Eabbi on the one side and the isolated philo-
sopher on the other, have already come before us. What
was the religion which all these various teachers,
thinkers, singers, were contributing to form ?
By putting the question in that shape, I indicate, at
the risk of some misinterpretation, the tendency and aim
of our inquiry. I indicate also the lines on which the
inquiry must be conducted. Time and opportunity are
wanting to delineate fully the separate " religions " of
the Psalter, of the Wisdom books, of the Apocalyptic
writings. It is obvious that each possesses its own dis-
tinctive peculiarity. But these varieties can only be
alluded to incidentally. The main object must be to
elicit what was common and generic to them all, and
416 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
was adopted and further developed in the subsequent
and post-biblical periods.
Moreover this necessary limitation determines the point
of view from which I approach the subject. It is not
the point of view from which the post-exilic period is
usually regarded, and it may well be argued that it is
not the point of view which meets the requirements of
universal history. Its comparative novelty may be its
best defence. To most people, the main interest of the
post-exilic period lies in the fact that it was the seed-bed
of Christianity. From that point of view, divers elements
in the body of religious doctrine receive an importance
which they neither possessed at the time nor acquired
afterwards in the history of Judaism. Thus the ques-
tion how far even Palestinian Judaism admitted any
distinctions in the different aspects of the Divine Being — ■
how far, for example, the divine spirit was hypostatized
— is clearly of great interest and value in tracing the
genesis of Christian doctrine ; but it was a very subor-
dinate matter both in the religion of the time and in
post-biblical Judaism. Again, while the whole influ
ence of the Law upon religious life and conceptions is
of universal importance, the Epistles of St. Paul and the
origins of Christianity are more picturesquely explained
by dwelling upon what was evil in that influence rather
than upon what was good. The Messianic idea was of
importance in the history both of Judaism and of Chris-
tianity, but of for greater importance for the latter than
for the former : the Messianic king, at anjT rate, as dis-
tinguished from the general and wider conception of the
Messianic age, was of comparative insignificance in the
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 417
Jewish religion both before the Maccabees and after
them.1
In the general sketch of post-exilic religion here to be
attempted, it will be advisable to keep two qualifications
of interest concurrently in view. In other words, the
chief stress and detail must be reserved for those points
which were of most importance in post-biblical Judaism,
or which are essential elements in an unsectarian Theism
of to-day.
In dealing with the religious material still preserved
to us in the extant literature of these three hundred
years, one is compelled to arrange and divide it in certain
categories and classes, and in doing so, to incur a con-
siderable risk. People are apt to forget the chronological
sequence, and the historic relation of one idea or doctrine
to another ; they are also apt to ignore the background
of life and circumstance, out of which the ideas, to some
extent at least, arose, by which they were nourished,
and with which they were in a hundred different ways
intermingled and entwined. The history of a religion
tends to be lost in a chapter of theology. Then, again,
the material itself is likely to be arranged upon some
modern plan; and this, too, may help to turn what
should be only a simple narrative into a delineation of
abstract dogmas and beliefs. These dangers of a method
which it yet seemed in this place impossible to avoid,
1 I do not of course mean that his figure disappears. As Mr.
Carpenter reminds me, " though absent from Daniel and only obscurely
present in Enoch, the Messianic king is prominent enough in the
Psalms of Solomon." Maimonides made the belief in his advent a
dogma of the synagogue ; but as compared with his position in Chris-
tianity, the statement in the text may, I think, be regarded as accurate.
2e
418 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
were briefly but luminously pointed out in one of the
latest of Professor Kuenen's essays.1 In the history of
no religion are they more real than in that of Judaism.
Perhaps if we recognize this beforehand, we may be the
better able to escape them.
Both in biblical and post-biblical times, Judaism was
far more deeply concerned with practice than with doc-
trine. Upon the theoretical side, religious imagination
exercised an unfettered play ; there was no crystalliza-
tion into dogma, no formal delimitation of creed. Judaism
remained for a long while very simple, and withal very
incoherent. Its doctrines were inarticulate, almost chao-
tic; its conception of God was full of contradictions.
It needed accommodation and re-adjustment as soon as
it came in contact with, and claimed to satisfy, a philo-
sophically trained intelligence. But it was fully able to
quicken and to satisfy the religious aspirations of ordi-
nary men. We can see now that one part of their
religion was inconsistent with another ; but unperceived
inconsistencies did not prevent their religious ideas from
becoming and producing for them all that less jarring
and incongruous doctrines can produce or become for
ourselves.
It was a childlike religion, and occasionally it tended
to become not merely childlike, but childish. But since
simplicity and inconsistency have their own peculiar
advantages, it proved itself a religion not only admirably
suited to the every-day moralities of common life, but
also pre-eminently capable of evoking that constancy and
1 " Voor en na de vestiging van het Christendom:" TJieol. TijJ.,
1891, pp. 509, 510.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 419
heroism which alone could have preserved its adherents
through so many weary centuries of suffering and per-
secution.
Was it mere defect or partly a merit that the religious
exponents of the second temple tended more and more
to empty Jewish life of all legitimate intellectual and
spiritual interests except the interests of religion ? On
the one hand, religion became all in all to the average
man : his habitual occupations were steeped in and sur-
rounded by religious precepts and reminders. But the
loss, on the other hand, was correspondingly, or more
than correspondingly, large. The typical Jew had no
interest in politics, in literature (other than the religious
literature of the past), in philosophy, or in art. He was
content to be governed from without, if the government
left him free to regulate his life and the life of his com-
munity according to the precepts of the law. Hellenism
had shown him a glimpse of a wide world beyond. But
when Hellenism became identified with apostasy and
persecution, the Jew shut himself up more uncompro-
misingly than ever within the narrow compass of his
law. This voluntary withdrawal from every other exer-
cise of the human spirit naturally produced an injurious
effect upon religion. It tended to make it small and
petty. Judaism lost all that invigorating influence which
accrues to religion from the general life of the world,
and from the reaction of politics, art and philosophy, upon
religious doctrine and practice. By a certain internal
tendency and natural inclination, as well as by the pres-
sure of external force, it became as it were a backwater
outside the broad stream of human development.
2e2
420 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
Is it possible to sum up in a few sentences, which
may serve as text for a following commentary, the
simple religion of an average pious Israelite in the post-
exilic period ? His faith clustered round three compre-
hensive words : God, Israel, and the Law. There is a
uniqueness about each : one Law, one People, one God.
The Jewish peasant was herein on a level with — nay, even
above the level of — the most educated Greek philosopher ;
he believed in one God, incorporeal, invisible, whose like-
ness it was ludicrous and impious to symbolize or typify
in any human form. Yet of God's nature he could hardly
have told you more than the prophets ; he believed him
to be good, just and holy — all- wise, all-knowing, all-
powerful — endowed with no more than a father's severity,
but with more than a father's love, towards Israel, his son.
Therefore our pious Israelite feared and loved the God
under whose protection and government he lived; he ob-
served gratefully the precepts of that perfect and divine
law which God had been pleased to bestow, as a privi-
lege and glory, upon Israel, the chosen people. He led
a quiet and industrious life, while ethically and socially
his religion tended to make him chaste, cheerful and
compassionate. But those upon whom he spent his
charity — a charity of service and sympathy, not merely
of almsgiving, the charity of equals among each other,
not merely of the richer to the poorer — were his fellow-
Israelites who observed God's law : outside them he
could not recognize brotherhood, but only unclean apos-
tates and oppressors, the enemies of Israel and of God.
Like the pious Christian of to-day, he also expected a
reward, if not in " heaven," then upon the earth at a day
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 421
of resurrection; but it would be as unjust to him as
to the modern Christian to say that the expectation or
desire of the reward was the motive of his well-doing
and of his observance of the law. To the idea of resur-
rection was closely attached the advent of the Messianic
age, implying the deliverance of Israel from the domina-
tion of the foreigner, with all the other excellences and
glories predicted by the prophets of old. This Messianic
hope was something more than a mere pious belief. It
had a certain influence on the individual's daily life ; for
he was one unit out of the many units which made up
Israel. He was a portion of the whole, and as such he
could help or hinder. Israel was benefited by his good
deeds and by his faithful and punctilious observance of
the holy law : it was injured by his sin. He, to however
small an extent, could hasten or could retard the coming
of the golden age.
It is a religion of this simple kind which has to be
here depicted. In this Lecture I shall deal with the
conception of God and his relation to Israel : in the con-
cluding Lecture, with the Law.
The impulse given by Moses had reached its goal.
The single but patron Deity of Israel had been developed
into the only divine Power in heaven or on earth.
Yahveh had become God. The people of Judsea was
practically as monotheistic as the people of England
to-day. Other celestial beings were supposed to exist,
but they were strictly subordinated to the one, true God.
In this respect the work of the prophets had been brought
to a final and triumphant conclusion.
But while Yahveh had become God, God still remained
422 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
Yahveh. Though he had become the unlimited and un-
controlled Euler of the universe, he still remained God
of Israel. Though the world was his creation, Israel
was still his peculiar people. Though heaven and earth
could not contain him, he dwelt in Zion. The post-
exilic religion was coloured and determined by these con-
trarieties— contrarieties to us so apparent, by the Jews
so unperceived. Let us notice in broad outlines at the
outset the good and bad results of thus retaining the
national Deity within the conception of the universal
God.
Its evil influence is tolerably obvious, and has repeat-
edly been emphasized. Eeligion, unable to emancipate
itself from national presumptions and embodiment, could
not attain to a working theory of the relation and nearness
of God to the individual man, unqualified by distinctions
of race. Its good influence is less generally recognized.
It seems strange that good should have sprung from
what was, after all, a narrow and prejudiced limitation.
Yet some of the most valuable and essential elements in
"personal" religion were secured and realized through the
fact that, to the individual Israelite, God was still Yahveh,
the God of the Jews. In the religion of every-day life,
that limitation brought God near to him ; it made him
feel the influence of God within his heart as well as in
the outer world; it made him certain that God was a
loving Father interested in the welfare — in the material
and spiritual welfare — of his Israelite sons.
The nature of God was not defined. An infiltration
of Greek philosophy was perhaps needed before the
statement could be directly made, " God is spirit." Yet
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 423
the opposition between the composite nature of man and
the pure spirituality of God was as familiar to the Jews
as to ourselves ; and to the average Jew it probably
implied pretty much the same as it implies to the average
Englishman. But while every material representation
of Deity was rigorously forbidden — and thus even the
popular imagination did not probably picture its God
in the likeness of man (in this, unlike and superior to
the popular imagination of mediaBval Europe) — the God
of the post-exilic period and of Judaism generally was
very "personal" and "transcendent." God was tran-
scendent, however, not as being distant and unapproach-
able, but because the conception of him was so very
simple and childlike ; partly also he remained transcen-
dent because of the mere weight and mass of scriptural
authority. In this point, as in several others, Judaism
was overburdened with the letter and the supposed literal
truth of a collection of holy writings, many ideas in
which it had entirely outgrown, but which, unfortunately?
were more and more regarded as infallibly accurate and
verbally inspired.
If the "transcendence" of Deity was not a result,
neither was it a cause of any distance or separation
between God and the world. But in the current esti-
mates of Judaism, God's transcendence is closely con-
nected with this supposed separation, while both are
combined with his exaggerated and limiting personality.
Let us seek to get these alleged defects clearly before us,
and then, from the actual facts of the case — from the
relation of God to nature, to Israel and to the individual
Israelite, as well as from the divine character as it was
424 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
generally conceived in post-exilic Judaism — we shall Lg
able to judge how much, or how little, the allegations
are justified by the reality.
While in the period after Ezra it is allowed that the
cruder anthropomorphisms of the pre-exilic religion have
been overcome, it is asserted that God remained as much
as ever a "magnified and non-natural" personality, on
the mere human model, with all its imperfections re-
moved and all its excellences indefinitely increased. He
ruled the world from without : his spirit was not con-
ceived as immanent either in nature or in man. In its
influence upon personal religion this is thought to have
resulted in a lack of inwardness and spirituality. A Dutch
theologian has recently declared that the absence of any
mystic element is a thoroughly characteristic feature of
the purest Judaism.1 Only an elect spirit here and there
could conceive of God as unlimited by conditions of
space, and yet as dwelling with the contrite and the
humble. For the many, with Yahveh's withdrawal from
Palestine to heaven — his habitual dwelling-place in the
post-exilic period — he had become estranged from the
hearts of men.
Elohim or God is still more remote and unapproachable
than Yahveh. "God is in heaven," says the Preacher;
" thou art upon earth : therefore let thy words be few."2
Such a doctrine is regarded as the legitimate outcome of
a purifying process unchecked by any counterbalancing
theory of God's revelation or immanence in man. God
can, indeed, help the human sufferer if he pleases; but
1 Chavannes, La Religion dans la Bible, Vol. I. p. 393.
2 Ecclesiastes v. 2.
Till. GOD AND ISRAEL. 425
his help is more and more believed to be evidenced in
miracle, rather than conditioned by that indwelling and
divine spirit which is the permanent link and source of
communion between Deity and man.
Xow let us pass from the theory to the facts upon
which it is based. It is true that God was usually con-
ceived as dwelling in heaven, although he was also
frequently supposed to be present in an undefined sense
in the temple at Jerusalem. He was often called the
"God of heaven." But this conception had no such
unfortunate consequences as might be logically deduced
from it. " Heaven " was gradually becoming emptied of
its purely local signification. Its religious usage was no
more prejudicial to the idea of God's nearness than it is
to ourselves. We, as well as the Jews of the post- exilic
period, address God by a common title, of which the
word " heaven " forms a part, but which seems rather to
link us with God than to separate us from him. " Our
Father which art in heaven" is not generally supposed,
at any rate, to be the formula of supplication to a distant
God. It is almost ludicrous when the mournful utter-
ances of a single and isolated pessimist like the author of
Ecclesiastes are taken as conclusive illustrations of the
post-exilic religion.
In his relation to nature, God was conceived not merely
as its creator but also as its constant sustainer. Such is
the evidence of the Psalter. It is true that a definite and
articulate theory of God's spiritual immanence in the
external world was never finally established, nor was
there more than an approach to the idea of change-
less laws of nature, themselves expressions of divine
426 Till. GOD AND ISRAEL.
"will. But nature was certainly not regarded as a
lifeless product turned once and for all out of the
craftsman's hands. Nature, animate and inanimate,
was the object of God's perpetual care, and testified
to his glory and his wisdom. Prof. Toy has rightly
noticed that God's close connection with nature is brought
out in a marked manner in the later literature. "He
watches over and controls the sustenance and life of all
plants and animals, and directs immediately all natural
phenomena." He points out also that "this ascription
of tenderness to the divine feeling for nature was the
result of belief in the universal divine providence, un-
checked by narrow national feeling. The Jews (clinging
to the old tribal feeling) found it hard to conceive of the
God of Israel as thinking kindly of Israel's enemies ; but
there was no such feeling of hostility towards beasts and
birds, mountains and seas, trees and flowers." 1
Just as the marked transcendence of God over nature
did not have the effect of separating nature from God,,
so also God's immediate rule and control over all natural
processes did not suggest any such metaphysical and
theological puzzles as were suggested by his government
in the affairs of man. Nature's waste and cruelty, its
apparent wilfulness and callousness, the nature " red in
in tooth and claw with ravine " which " shrieks " against
faith in a loving God — these aspects of the world without
do not seem to have occurred to the Jews of the post-
1 Toy, Judaism and Christianity, 1390, pp. 80, 81. This limitation
is of course not peculiarly Jewish. As Mr. Schechter has suggested
to me, while St. Francis spoke of his " brother wolf" and of his " little
sisters the doves," he would hardly have spoken of his brother Turk,
heretic or Jew.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 427
exilic period. Xor were they troubled by the problems
of dualism — an "infinite" God outside nature, an "infi-
nite " nature beyond God. Xone of the religious diffi-
culties which seem to us to flow so obviously from the
conception of an external God can be illustrated in them.
They obtained all the good results of an emphatic insist-
ance upon the divine personality, and practically none of
the evil.
The same happy inconsistency is apjxirent in their
ideas of God's relation to man. It is true that they had
no elaborate theory of the divine within the human^
which in one form or another constitutes the perennial
charm of mediaeval mysticism, whether Jewish, Christian
or Mohammedan. It needed the genius or inspiration of
St. Paul to make the triumphant assertion : "In him we
live and move and have our being ; " but the ordinary
religious uses and applications of the statement were
already familiar to the men who wrote the Proverbs and
the Psalms. For the theory of Paul, which with its
touch of mysticism is so attractive, is but the proof of his
previous statement that God is near to "every one of
us," and that he can be found by man. That he was
" near," if not to all mankind, at least to every Israelite,
the Jews were firmly convinced. It may be safely said
that, with the solitary exception of Ecclesiastes, no portion
of the post-exilic literature reveals or teaches a God who,
for the purposes and feelings of personal religion, is dis-
tant from the individual Israelite. For what does God's
nearness practically mean ? It means, I suppose, firstly,
that God knows and is cognizant of man's actions and
thoughts. He is not merely omniscient because he can-
428 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
not help knowing everything, but because he cares to
know all about his human children. It means, secondly,
that God enters into ethical relations with man, that
he helps those who seek goodness to find it. In the
Chronicler's words, God both tries the heart and has
pleasure in uprightness. If men seek him, he will be
found of them ; he will establish their hearts unto him-
self that they may keep his commandments.1 Or again,
in the sayings of the sages : " Sheol and Abaddon are
before Yahveh : how much more the hearts of the children
of men. God loves him that follows after righteousness.
Whom Yahveh loves, he chastens, even as a father the
son in whom he delights."2 God may be in heaven, but
"the prayer of the humble pierces the clouds."3 Thus
even the Wisdom literature knows no distant God.
Thirdly, God's nearness means that he is ready to for-
give the penitent, and that man can be conscious of a
real communion with him. God's nearness in this sense
is repeatedly illustrated in the Psalms. If, indeed, the
Psalter, that monument of post-exilic piety from Ezra to
the Maccabees, taught a distant God, eighteen centuries
of Christian piety would not have been able to use it as
a medium of religious edification. The truth seems to
lie between the ordinary Jewish view, which would deny
to Jesus and Paul any development or improvement of the
old Jewish conceptions of God, and the critical Christian
view, which delights to misuse the words of later Jewish
literature as a foil to the teaching of the Gospels and
1 1 Chron. xxviii. 9, xxix. 17, 18.
2 Prov. iii. 12, xv. 9, 11.
3 Sirach xxxii. 17 (ed. Fritzsche), A.V. xxxv. 17.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 429
the Epistles. For the real means — as we shall shortly
see more fully, and have already noticed incidentally —
by which later Judaism triumphed over the religious
dangers of a one-sided exaggeration of the divine tran-
scendence, while they were thoroughly effective, were yet
national and particularist. Jesus and Paul triumphed
over them by a more general method, by bringing into
more habitual and emphatic prominence the other and
complementary aspects of Deity, the immanence of the
divine spirit in the souls of men and the universal
fatherhood of God.
It has further been alleged that the greater promi-
nence of angels in the post- exilic literature is due to an
anxious and deistic tendency to keep God as much as
possible away from any direct intervention in human
affairs. There is no doubt that, from a variety of causes,
angels, both good and bad, play a greater part after the
return from Babylon than they had played hitherto.
Ignored in the religion of the prophets or external to
their essential teaching, the various divine agencies were
now, under the developed and yet popular monotheism of
the time, transformed into God's ministers and servants.
The gods of the nations, so far as they retained any
reality, went through the same change. The stars, to
the Jews no less than to the Greeks animate beings,
became a portion of the heavenly host which attended
Yahveh on high. Through the medium of the Persian
religion, Jewish angelology was greatly extended. Its
doctrine of evil angels will come before us again. Mean-
while it may be noted that in two late Psalms, in Mac-
cabean Daniel, and in a few other places, the idea is
430 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
expressed that God has assigned the direction of the
different nations of the world to patron angels.1 In one
passage in the Book of Daniel, Israel is also entrusted to a
guardian angel who fights for its cause, whereas elsewhere
we find the notion that Israel has been reserved by
Yahveh for his own direct control.2 A divine judgment
upon the angelic patrons of the heathen is occasionally
threatened ; while in Daniel and in Tobit a few angels
have already received proper names.3
Yet upon the whole the doctrine of angels had for a
long while but little influence upon actual religious life.
We find them frequently mentioned in the apocalyptic
literature, and even as early as the prophet Zechariah.
There was a natural disinclination to bring the Godhead
down into human conditions, and for supernatural con-
versations angels formed a convenient substitute for God.
Such a use was quite compatible with a full sense of
personal communion with God in every-day life. Though
the angels, once introduced and particularized, paved the
way for much foolish speculation and superstition, even
these, as the New Testament sufficiently shows, could
easily subsist with a high conception of Deity. In the
Psalms and the Wisdom literature, which reflect the
actual daily religion and religious teaching of the post-
exilic period from Ezra to the Maccabees, we hear very
little of angels, except as the ministrants and servitors of
1 Ps. lviii. and lxxxii. ; Dan. x. 13, 20; Ecclesiasticus xvii. 17;
Deut. xxxii. 8, LXX.
2 Dan. xii. 1, as against the passage in Eccles. and LXX. of Deut.
referred to in last note.
3 Is. xxiv. 21 ; Dan. viii. 16.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 431
God. But if they were derivatively connected with the
transcendence of God in its influence upon the religious
life, it is precisely here where we ought to find them
most prominently.
If angels were not needed to bridge the gulf between
man and God, what was the actual means of access from
the one to the other? It has been said that it was
reserved for Christianity to make fuller and more articu-
late use of the theory of the holy Spirit, both as dwelling
in man and as uniting him with God. In Talmudic
Judaism, while the omnipresence of God in nature and
man is emphatically asserted in the doctrine of the
Shechinah, the use of this term implied no definite
theory of relation between the several aspects of the
Divine Being, and seems to be little more than the chosen
appellation of God in his close connection with all created
existence and more especially with Israel. But though
the doctrine of the Spirit remained inchoate and indis-
tinct, it is not wholly wanting. The Spirit is occasion-
ally referred to in the Psalter as the vital principle to
which all things owe their being and their life. One
Psalmist links the goodness of God's Spirit to his prayer
that God may teach him to do his will, while another
asks that God's holy Spirit may not be taken from him.
The omnipresence of God in a third is identified with
the ubiquity of his Spirit.1 Man's spirit by its high
capacity is proved to be akin to God's. "It is a spirit
in man and the breath of the Almighty that gives under-
standing." For " the spirit of man is the lamp of
1 Ps. cxliii., li. and cxxxix.
432 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
Yahveh," a lamp which Yahveh has given. Through
God's light, man sees light too.1
Nevertheless, little use was made of such doctrines.
Instead of bringing God near to themselves, or proving
the communion between him and them by any theory
equally applicable to all mankind, Jewish teachers laid
stress upon the special relation of God to his chosen people
— upon that peculiar revelation of himself which had been
vouchsafed to Israel, and to Israel alone, in God's perfect
and immutable law. The tragedy of post-exilic Judaism,
if I may say so, is precisely this — that its tenderest
and most devotional elements were inseparably associated
with its emphasized nationalism. Its strength was con-
centrated upon its weakest side. Yet this paradoxical
and disconcerting contradiction must not lead us to think
that the higher elements were absent. We must not
under-estimate their value or misjudge their quality,
because the medium of their expression was unsympa-
thetic or inadequate.
This caution is very necessary in dealing with God's
relation to Israel. For what, from the outside, may
often seem pride or particularism, was from the inside
no less frequently a source of religious edification and
practical piety. In considering that relation, while its
injurious results must not be ignored, its good results
— especially in their bearing upon the divine "near-
ness " — must none the less be borne in mind.
On the theoretical side, the influence of God's close
relation to Israel in bringing him near to the individual
1 Job xxxii. 8 ; Pro v. xx. 27 ; Ps. xxxvi. 10.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 433
Israelite, is well illustrated by his supposed residence
within the temple.
In this belief, old pre-exilic notions still continue.
God's omnipresence is indeed occasionally alluded to;1
but the greater need for the Israelites was to be con-
vinced that he was near to them, and this was partially
achieved by associating his dwelling-place in heaven
with his dwelling-place in Israel. God's presence in the
temple is frequently asserted in the Psalter; and the
sanctuary was an unfailing resource for arousing or
heightening a keen religious ardour. The most pas-
sionate passages in the Psalter — those which show the
greatest craving after God and the deepest feeling of
close communion with him — are inseparably connected
with the material temple upon the hill of Zion. It was
absence from the temple which provoked the famous
outburst: "As the hart pants after the water-brooks, so
pants my soul after thee, 0 God." It was in the temple
that the author of the 73rd Psalm felt the riddles of the
world oppress him no longer, so that he soared to the
full heights of his mystic communion with God.
When the temple was destroyed, other and less mate-
rial links between Israel and God had already attained
sufficient recognition and strength to enable Judaism to
dispense with the sanctuary and its services without
religious loss. The law provided all that the temple
had provided, and more besides. It was the tangible
and yet spiritual guarantee of God's permanent covenant
with his people.
Meanwhile, over and above temple and law, the simple
1 In tlio Rabbinic literature, frequently.
2f
434 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
belief that God loved Israel, and stood committed to that
love both by his promises in the past and by the reve-
lation of his purpose in the course of history, amply
sufficed to determine his relation with the individual
Israelite as typified in that of father to son, rather than
in that either of master to slave, or of ruler to subject.
For it was God's relation to Israel, as applied to the
individual, which transformed a theoretic monotheism
into a practical and personal religion. Unfortunately, it
was God's covenant with Israel which mainly regulated
and determined his relation to the outer world. The
nearer he was to Israel, the further he was removed from
the foreigner. Thus when Israel as a whole was con-
trasted or compared with the heathen who knew not
Yahveh, its peculiar covenant with God became a prolific
source of religious prejudice and illusion.
For in God's relation to Israel the old conception of a
patron deity still survived, and being forced into false
harmon)T with the monotheistic point of view, became
infinitely more dangerous. God still ruled the world in
the interests of Israel, and religious thought had again
and again to consider how the facts of the present, which
perpetually came into conflict with this dogma, might
yet be explained upon the hypothesis of its truth. The
growth of the doctrine of a resurrection and of a future
life solved the difficulty here, as it solved a parallel dif-
ficulty in the life of the individual. At the day of resur-
rection the heathen enemies of Israel might either be
excluded from the new and more glorious existence, or
they might be condemned to terrific and supernatural
punishments. Never was there more absolute identifica-
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 435
lion between the cause of a nation and the cause of God :
never was the self-deception which partly caused, and
partly followed, the identification more thorough-going
and sincere.
The divine partiality for Israel was explained in various
ways. The nations were regarded as the conscious and
designed enemies of God. For the enemies of Israel
must be enemies of Israel's God. Israel, on the contrary,
was righteous, the beloved of Yahveh. This theory was
definitely and permanently established by the persecution
of Antiochus Epiphanes. Israel, indeed, was not sinless ;
but by the side of the ingrained godlessness of the heathen,
it might be so regarded. Thus God dealt on one method
with the heathen, on another with Israel. The present
sufferings of Israel were conceived as trials which puri-
fied and enlightened ; they were the chastisements of a
father, ever ready to welcome his repentant son with
forgiveness and affection. The future sufferings of the
heathen oppressors were to be punishments for punish-
ment's sake; their object was not improvement, but
vengeance.1 For the brighter the light which shone
upon Israel by its possession of the law, the deeper the
shadow which was spread over the godless world beyond.
But not only did Israel deserve and not only must
Israel therefore receive the divine favour, in the future
if not in the present, by reason of its superior righteous-
ness, its knowledge of the true God and its faithful
obedience to his Law, but God himself was pledged for
1 E.g. 2 Mace. vi. 12—16, vii. 32—34; Wisdom of Solomon, xi. 10
(but cf. also xii. 20—22).
2f2
436 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
his own sake to secure Israel's ultimate triumph and
prosperity. God's honour was at stake : God's glory
would be manifested in the glory of his chosen people.
In the Maccabean struggles, Israel felt that its heroic
fidelity to the law was offered up as a sacrifice to the
cause of God. " For thy sake, for thy sake," was the
passionate cry, "are we killed all the clay long."1 And
therefore for his own sake let God put an end to suffering
and persecution. If sins still prevent salvation, then,
" cancel our sins, for thy name's sake." Thus the prayer
in the Book of Daniel, which has been adopted into the
Jewish liturgy, closes with the urgent appeal : " 0
Yahveh, hear ; 0 Yahveh, forgive ; 0 Yahveh, hearken
and do : defer not for thine own sake, 0 my God : for
thy city and thy people are called by thy name."2 God
is sincerely besought to work deliverance, not for Israel's
glory, but for his own. " Not unto us, 0 Yahveh, not
unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy loving-
kindness and for thy truth's sake."3
In one sense the post-exilic writers knew that God
was self-sufficient. He needed from man no material
gift.4 Sacrifices were prescribed rites on prescribed occa-
sions. They were regarded no longer as in themselves
pleasant to, or operative upon, God. But God was never-
theless conceived as sympathetically interested in Israel.
As the exilic redactor of Judges had said that Yahveh's
"soul was grieved for the misery of Israel," so a pro-
phecy in Isaiah, belonging to the late Persian period,
1 Ps. xliv. 23. 2 Dan. ix. 19.
3 Ps. cxv. 1 (also Maccabean). 4 E.g. Ps. 1. 8—15.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 437
declares that in all their distresses "he was distressed."1
God loves Israel with all the emotion of a human love.
But his purpose in choosing Israel, both for his own
sake and for man's, was never again conceived with
the breadth and largeness of view which was the signal
characteristic of the Babylonian Isaiah. The goal of
history was the triumph of Israel, and in that triumph
the conversion of the nations occupied a limited and
secondary space. If after the struggles and judgments
which ushered in and accompanied the glories of the
Messianic age, the nations survived at all, they would
survive mainly for Israel's welfare as its servitors and
dependents, and for the enhancement of God's glory by
their acknowledgment of his exclusive divinity. They
would not be converted for their own sakes, but for
Israel's and for Yahveh's. This, at any rate, was the
more general and prevailing view, though instances of a
better universalism are, I believe, by no means wanting
within the wide compass of the Babbinical literature.
Into the details of the Messianic hope it is unnecessary
to enter. Its essential element on the material side was
the re-establishment of Israel's national independence,
1 Judges x. 16; Isaiah lxiii. 9. But the variant reading of the LXX.
in the latter passage makes it probable, as Prof. Duhni has ably shown,
that we should render with a slightly modified text, " No messenger,
no angel — his own countenance saved them," &c. The same emenda-
tion was made independently by Gratz (Emendationes in plerosque
mcroi scripiurce veteris testamenti libros, 1892, p. 35), and by Oort
(Theol. Tijd., "Kritische aanteekingen op Jezaja 40 — 66," 1891, p. 475).
But even if the Massoretic text rests on corruption or misunderstanding,
it has its own theological value, and the statement above may stand.
Th<^ idea which the text embodies was much dwelt upon and developed
in Rabbinical literature, e.g. Mechilta, 16 a.
438 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
coupled always with unalloyed prosperity and sometimes
with world-wide dominion. On the spiritual side it
implied the rule of righteousness and purity, the destruc-
tion of sin, the full triumph of the law and of the
law's religion, together with the more or less complete
incorporation of the heathen into the kingdom of God.
Whether as vassals or as allies, the survivors of every
nation would recognize no other God than Yahveh. The
Messianic king, who wins the victory over the final
efforts of the hostile heathen and inaugurates the golden
age, is not in himself its most important feature. He is
rather the emblem of the era, and sometimes, as in the
Book of Daniel, his figure is absent. Moreover, the
whole Messianic doctrine underwent far-reaching modi-
fications when embodied into, or confounded with, the
dogma of the resurrection and of a " world to come."
Of the growth of that dogma or belief something must
be said later on : here it may be noticed, first, that in
its earlier form, as in the Book of Daniel, resurrec-
tion and Messianic age synchronize with each other;
secondly, that the expectation of a personal share, by
means of a bodily revival, in the Messianic glories,
gave to the Messianic hope itself an added vitality, in-
fluencing the religious life of every day. Indeed, the
hope of a personal resurrection naturally became even
more powerful as a motive of religious action than the
re-establishment of the national kingdom. As a further
stage, this hope detached itself from the Messianic idea,
and developed into an independent religious solace and
stimulus of permanent and predominating power.
The general effect of God's favouritism towards Israel
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 439
was twofold. It conduced, as Professor Toy lias remarked,
"to religious vigour and to religious pride."1 On the
one hand, it made God very near and dear to every
individual Israelite. God's love was vouchsafed to him,
not as a man, but as a unit in Israel. He felt that the
divine "loving-kindness and truth" belonged through
the community to himself. If in many of the Psalms
the " I " who speaks is really the personified Israel, the
personification was natural and easy because the writer
felt himself one with his people — one, at any rate, with
that godly party among his people which alone embodied
and represented the veritable Israel. His joys and suffer-
ings were theirs ; and if Israel was a people near to God,
that nearness was appropriated and realized by the indi-
vidual believer. But, on the other hand, the contrast
between "righteous " Israel and the " ungodly " heathen
generated not merely a deep-seated particularism, but
also a marked sense of religious superiority. Though
this sense of superiority was only relative to the heathen,
it must occasionally have tended to produce even in the
individual a certain proud self-righteousness. On the
whole, however, it is a remarkable fact that the intense
conviction of God's nearness to Israel, as well as the
frank identification of the cause of Israel with the cause
of God, did not prevent a high average of true religious
humility within the community itself. That praise of
humility which is familiar to us in the Psalms, the
Proverbs and many prophetical passages, did not close
with the Old Testament. It is equally frequent and
1 Toy, Judaism and Christianity, p. 78.
440 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
emphatic in the Babbinical literature.1 Within the com
m unity it pervaded the religious atmosphere more and
more. It may be that the Hebrew word 'Anav, which
we usually render humble, should be more properly
translated by " submissive to God's will;" but it is certain
that the virtue which the adjective (together with its
cognates, "the broken heart," the "contrite and lowly
spirit") describes, came more and more fully to include
in its implications all that we ordinarily mean by religious
humility. Jesus simply enlarged on an announcement
of the Psalmist, and quoted his very words when he
said, "Blessed are the humble, for they shall inherit the
earth."2 Humility, by the Jews acquired, as one may
roughly say, during the Babylonian exile, was never
afterwards forgotten, but rather developed, strength-
ened and purified by subsequent experience. To this
fact I shall have to recur in the next Lecture. If Israel
was righteous in comparison with the heathen (and of
religious conceit in this national sense the Jews, like every
other religious body, were indubitably guilty), before God,
measured by an absolute standard as we should say,
Israel's righteousness was nought. Then the sense of
human frailty and sinfulness (of which more in the next
Lecture) was immediately felt. Nor was it a mock or
inadequate humility which suggested the words in that
very ancient prayer, still retained and daily recited in
the Jewish Morning Service: "What are we? what is
our life? what is our piety? what our righteousness?"
1 Cf. Aboth, iv. 4; Sotah, 4 b, 5 a and b ; Mechilta, 72 a, &c.
2 Fs. xxxvii. 11.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 441
Man's only justifiable vaunt lies in his capacity for the
conscious service of God.1
1 Cf. Rahlfs, 'Ani und'Anav in den Psalmcn, 1892; Authorized
Daily Prayer-book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British
Empire, pp. 7, 267; Steinthal's essay on Demut in his Zu Bibel nnd
Religionspliilosophie, 1890, pp. 166 — 179. It is true that Prof. Duhni,
in his comment on Isaiah lvii. 15, "I dwell with him also that is of a
contrite and humble spirit," says that these expressions denote prima-
rily the physical condition of the Jewish community before the com-
ing of Nehemiah ; and secondarily the spiritual depression which was
caused thereby, and which evoked among those who were faithful to
the law a zealous seeking after God by prayer and confession and
ascetic exercises, producing thus that humility which makes the 'ani
pious (lxvi. 2). "It is perfectly obvious that this temporal humility,"
continues Prof. Duhm, " this spiritual condition, which springs as
little from any real need of the heart as physical self-abasement is
the normal condition of those who are faithful to the law, has very
little indeed in common with Christian humility." I believe this
criticism is inexact and unfair even for the particular passage in Isaiah :
it would be certainly wholly inaccurate if it were meant to apply to
the "humility" of the nomistic Eabbis. And jet one cannot but
have an uncomfortable suspicion that such an extension of meaning
is more than half implied. Cf. the notes on Isaiah lix. 21 and
lxvi. 2. So far as I understand the matter, the humility which
Jesus accounted blissful in the first beatitude was both verbally and
essentially identical with the humility which was held in equal honour
in Jewish "legalism." In another note (on Isaiah xlix. 23), Prof.
Duhm speaks of der gottlose Hochmuth des spateren Judenthums.
Does Prof. Duhm forget, or does he purposely remember, that Judaism
is a living religion which numbers many millions of adherents 1 Surely
these sweeping and violent assertions are as injudicious as they are one-
sided. They lead to obvious recriminations, equally well-founded and
equally exaggerated. In view of the intolerant attitude of Christianity
towards those beyond its pale, and of one section of Christianity towards
another, a Jewish writer might easily speak of der gottlose Hochimrtk des
spateren Christenthums or Protestantismus, and easily justify the saying.
And yet there was such a thing as Christian humility, and so too there
was such a thing as jiidische Demut.
442 VIII. GOD AND ISKAEL.
In its conception of the divine character and attri-
butes, post-exilic Judaism absorbed and appropriated the
teachings of the prophets, and in applying them to
the individual, softened and refined them. To the pro-
phets of old, the most present attribute of the moralized
Deity was naturally his righteousness ; to the individual
Israelite of the second temple, the most present attribute
was as naturally his loving-kindness. As on the theoretic
side the epigrammatic summary of the Divine nature in
the simple words, " God is Spirit," is first found in the
work of a genius who united in himself some of the
highest thoughts of both Greece and Judaea, so on the
practical side the comprehensive and illuminating dictum,
"God is Love," is not found in any work of purely Hebrew
origin. Yet if the Jew did not say God is love, he felt
and said that God is loving,1 although in the word he
used there was an historic and often half-conscious refer-
ence to God's love for Israel as the basis and source of
his love for the individual Israelite.
The unreasoned and mysterious wrath of the pre-exilic
Yahveh was no longer an object of dread. For if the
calamitous condition of Israel sometimes seemed to show
that God's anger was roused against his people, his anger
was not conceived as causeless. It was because God had
set Israel's iniquities before him, its secret sins in the
light of his countenance. But even this gloomy mood
was only occasional, and rarer still was the conception
that God's wrath has driven his people deeper and deeper
into the slough of iniquity.2 For the permanent and
every-day religion of Judaism, no scriptural passage
1 kg. Ps. cxlv. 17. ' Ps. xc. 8; Is. Lxiv. 5—7.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 443
better illustrates the prevailing doctrine and belief about
God's character and his dealings with the individual
Israelite than the 103rd Psalm. There, to use our
modern phraseology, which is not that of the Psalmists,
God's mercy is described as exceeding his justice. Hence
it was that God could be conceived as man's Teacher,
Shepherd, Father ; his Eock and his Shelter, under whose
wings he can take refuge. Hence it was that God's
loving-kindness seemed better than life itself, and that
communion with him was fulness of joy. A one-sided
belief in a mere God of justice (in our sense of the word)
could never have produced the Psalter. It needed a God
who was conceived as "righteous in all his ways and
loving in all his works," "full of pity and compassion,
long-suffering and of great loving-kindness."
This divine beneficence was in quiet times capable of
being extended to mankind at large. " Yahveh is good
to all."1 In the Greek and pre-Maccabean period the
tendency undoubtedly existed to make God's providence
co-extensive with humanity. Even Sirach, who on the
whole is strongly nationalist, can say, " The loving-
kindness of man is towards his neighbour : the loving-
kindness of God is towards all flesh."2 The universal
charity of God is the moral of Jonah. But in the main
the more emotional aspects of the divine goodness seem
limited to Israel — partly because outsiders are regarded
either as Israel's enemies, or as an unclean multitude,
ignorant of the law — partly because the noblest and
gentlest attributes of God were originally suggested by
his peculiar relations to Israel.
1 Ps. cxlv. 9. 2 Ecclesiasticus xviii, 12.
444 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
God's dealings with man were never reduced to any
congruent system. The various ideas upon the subject
which we find expressed in the post-exilie literature —
often mutually self-contradictory — and the difficulties
and doubts to which these contradictions gave rise, are
due to the different sources from which the ideas origi-
nated. Deep-rooted in the Hebrew mind was the belief
that suffering was the divine retribution for sin. As
strongly held was the converse of the same proposition,
that God, being just, punishes sin and rewards goodness.
These maxims were fundamental principles of the pro-
phetic teaching, though by the prophets they had been
applied, not to individuals, but to communities. For
man's deserts, the prophets, speaking generally, knew no
higher law of God's dealing than that of measure for
measure. If this law was modified in the case of Israel,
the explanation was found less in God's mercy toward
Israel, but rather in God's fear that adequate punish-
ment might cross or hinder his own purposes and the
earthly diffusion of his glory. Taken over by post-exilic
teachers, these various views were then applied to
the individual. They were even emphasized and exag-
gerated. Correspondences were sought and discovered
between human action and the divine award. Such and
such calamities must be the result of such and such
sins. Of this unworthy method of explaining the vary-
ing fortunes of humanity there are several instances
in the Eabbinical literature.1 The law of the physical
1 Cf. Aboth, v. 11, 12 ; still worse is Sabbath, ii. 6. One wonders
how such a fantastic idea could have been framed, still more how the
passage which embodies it could have been incorporated in the Prayer-
book.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 445
world, that action and reaction are equal and opposite,
was supposed to be the law of the spiritual world, and a
one-sided enthusiasm of religious partizanship, whereby
the internal foe was as much God's enemy as the heathen
oppressor, strengthened men's belief in its validity. This
is the law, which, whatever its date, is clearly and
forcibly expressed in the 18th Psalm: "With the mer-
ciful thou showest thyself merciful ; with the upright
thou showest thyself upright ; with the pure thou showest
thyself pure ; and with the f roward thou showest thyself
perverse.''1
On the other hand, this doctrine of accurate corre-
spondence between retribution and desert was gradually
modified by four other conceptions, which were really
exclusive of it as an all-embracing dogma, though they
were not consciously so regarded. The first of these four
we have already noticed. It was the predominance of
the divine mercy over the measure -for -measure rule.
The second was the growth of the idea that suifering was
educational and disciplinary. The third was the dis-
covery, as an end in itself, parallel with and superior to
material prosperity, of spiritual satisfaction in commu-
nion with God and in the performance of his law. This
discovery secured to the individual a happiness which
was largely independent of circumstances, inasmuch as
the acts and feelings involved were their own reward.
The fourth, and most far-reaching of all, was the intro-
1 This Psalm is assigned by Cheyne (as a solitary exception) to the
pre-exilic period, to the age of Josiah. Stade, on the other hand,
thinks it may be even later than the Persian period : Gescliichtc,
Vol. II. p. 222.
446 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
duction of the belief in a resurrection and a future life.
This last conception took the sting out of earthly misfor-
tune, and diminished the importance assigned hitherto
to earthly prosperity.
Yet even with all these newer and modifying concep-
tions, the doctrine of divine retribution was still strongly
maintained. For Jewish thinkers did not recognize
any indirect influence of God in human affairs. God's
rule was direct and immediate.1 It was not that the
Jews saw no difference between material and spiritual
evil, or that they were unable to cozen their minds into
believing that apparent evils were mere blessings in dis-
guise. But the difficulty arose because an ethical expla-
nation was thought to be necessary and discoverable in
every individual instance. Deformity aud disease, for
example, are ills to which flesh is heir. If an innocent
child suffers from an incurable disease, what can the
explanation be ? We should not dare to say that such
a child was expiating his parents' sins, nor should we
1 Cf. the superb passage in Luria (Act v.):
" My own East !
How nearer God we were ! He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, bis soul o'er ours !
"We feel him, nor by painful reason know!
The everlasting minute of creation
Is felt there; now it is, as it was then;
All changes at his instantaneous will,
Not by the operation of a law
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work.
His hand is still engaged upon his world —
Man's praise can forward it, man's prayer suspend
For is not God all-mighty ?"
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 447
say that his calamity was a discipline specially sent by
God for his moral improvement ; but to the Hebrew,
with his immediate reference of all effects to the direct
causation of God, one of these explanations was almost
inevitable.1
But it was especially in the past history of Israel that
the finger of God was held to be discernible in every
incident. In the present, both for the individual and
the community, the general decision of the religious
spirit to bow in resignation before the inscrutable will
of God tended to overcome the desire for explanation of
God's decrees. But Israel's vicissitudes in the past were
intended for Israel's instruction in the future. In the
past, when prophets had warned and foretold, and when
God had interfered by miracle alike in blessing and in
punishment, the methods of God's rule must lie more
obviously open to the intelligence of men. Israel's histon'
was holy ; for the nearer the nation stood to its God, the
more direct must be his intervening providence for
punishment, discipline or reward.
The most uncompromising champion of the doctrine of
divine retribution as applied to the sacred history of the
past is the Levitical author of Chronicles. Everywhere we
discern God's hand directing the fortunes of his people
according to the strictest letter of a retributive law.
Consciously or unconsciously, he shapes the facts to suit
1 It may be noticed that in the famous passage, John ix. 1 — 7, of
which so much use is made, the explanation of the man's blindness is
purely relative to the occasion. The object and explanation of his
blindness were that Jesus might cure him of it, and thus make mani-
fest the works of God.
448 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
the theory.1 For the pre-exilic history of Israel was the
great lesson-book to the Jews of the second temple, and
the Chronicler knew no higher or better lesson than that
obedience to God's law ensured prosperity, while disobe-
dience ensured punishment and calamity. And not only
was the vivid illustration of this doctrine regarded as
of ethical and religious value for human conduct, but it
was used to justify the ways of God to man, and amid
the perplexities of the present, to prove by a method-
ized survey of the past that the justice of God had
been always triumphantly vindicated. The work of the
Chronicler is in truth a great historical theodicy, con-
ceived on wrong principles to our minds, and with
defective distinction between ritual form and moral
substance, but a theodicy notwithstanding, intended to
further and to strengthen a religious ideal as it had
shaped itself in the author's mind.
It must be carefully noted that this tendency of the
Chronicler was not the permanent and necessary outcome
of the Law. Christian historians have shown a similar
desire to read direct interventions of God into human
affairs. Thus M. Boissier says of Paul Orosius : "To
show clearly the excellent order which God has im-
planted in the world and the rigorous justice which he
exercises, every action, good or bad, must be immediately
rewarded or punished. Unfortunately, that is what does
not always happen. The facts frequently contradicted
the pious system of Orosius, but he has his explanations
ready, and thanks to his subtle arguments, whatever
1 Cf. Stade, Gescldclite, Vol. II. p. 22S; Driver, Introduction,
p. 494, &c. &c.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 449
turn events ma)* take, Providence seems always to come
off with flying colours." * Is the history of Orosius to
be regarded as the constant and necessary outcome of
Christianity ? As little must the Book of Chronicles be
used to illustrate more than a single tendeney in post-
exilic Judaism, which in the religion of every-day life
was held in check by those other tendencies which have
already been briefly named.
A perpetual reference of all incidents of national and
individual life to the direct causation of God — to a cau-
sation, moreover, which was supposed to work on such
simple lines as retribution and discipline, temptation or
reward — while it usually deepened the reality of reli-
gious faith and accentuated the fervour of religious life,
afforded at other times a stimulus to doubt. God's uni-
versal and ceaseless activity was not merely a joy, it
might be also a harrowing mystery. In seeking to ex-
plain life's riddles, the inquiring spirit, confined as it
was for the greater portion of the Biblical period to the
life on earth, often failed in its search.
Prosperity seems to have misled men less frequently
than calamity. Upon the whole, the Jews did not get so
very much of it. There is little evidence to show that
1 La Jin du paganisme, Vol. II. p. 462, St. Augustine, in the
twenty-first book of the De Civitaie Dei, in which he earnestly argues
that the fires of hell, to which the far greater portion of the human
race is irrevocably condemned, are eternal and material, is even anxious
to maintain the doctrine of proportionate retribution and the "justice"
of God among the everlasting torments of the damned. "Nequaquani
tamen negandum est, etiam ipsum aeternum ignem pro diversitate meri-
torum quarnvis malorum aliis leviorem, aliis futurum esse graviorem,
sive ipsius vis atque ardor pro poena digna cuj usque varietur, sive ipse
aequaliter ardeat, sed non a'quali molestia sentiatur" (xxi. 16).
2 G
450 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
prosperity was regarded as a sure token of righteousness,
however frequently calamity might be interpreted as the
implication of sin. Self-righteousness, as a sense of
communal innocence and only derivatively of individual
well-doing, was suggested by the contrast between Israel
and the heathen, or by the exact fulfilment of the law.
Individual prosperity did not suffice : gratitude for divine
beneficence was too sincere. Personal happiness was
rather attributed to the overflowing goodness of God
than to the merited excellence of man. On this side the
doctrine of measure-for-measure in the present and to the
individual was never logically applied.
Suffering and calamity — national trouble most of all —
exercised the religious thought of the time more sorely.
And to the individual the most significant sorrow was
that which came to him as a unit in Israel. It was this
suffering which seemed the strangest, or rather it was
this suffering which needed explanation (of whatever
kind) most urgently, as being most directly connected
with the big purposes, and as issuing immediately from
the holy will, of Israel's God. And in addition to the
sufferings of the righteous, there was the correlative
difficulty of the prosperity of the bad. The two together
constitute the problem of Job. Till late in the post-
exilic period, when the doctrine of a future life produced
a new theodicy, the old view that the bad would ulti-
mately be punished and have an evil end, while the good
would ultimately be rewarded, was still, in spite of all
its manifest crudities, obstinately maintained. We find
it repeated over and over again in the Psalter, in the
Proverbs and in Sirach. Contrariwise, grave calamities
VIII. GOD AND ISEAEL. 451
betokened grave offences. This position, which is that
of Job's friends, was never definitely abandoned for good
and all. Alongside it, however, the theory that suffering
was disciplinary for the good, while prosperity only
egged on the wicked to more overwhelming destruction,
was steadily developed. Suffering made the good better ;
prosperity made the wicked worse. Thus God's chastise-
ment should be submitted to as a merciful training. "No
man is wholly sinless: the growing seriousness of the
age saw in youth a time of light-hearted error, while in
the heavy trials of manhood it recognized a heaven-sent
opportunity for turning wholly to God. " It is good for
me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy
statutes."1 In that process of learning there was no
finality. In the midst of trouble the righteous would
" hold on his way, and he that has clean hands wax
stronger and stronger."2 The Talmudic saying, "Him
whom God loves he crushes with suffering," puts the
climax upon this direction of post-exilic thought.3
Or again, according to the main lesson of Job, it came
to be realized that the bestowal of weal or woe cannot be
explained in accordance with the ordinary methods of
retributive justice. Suffering might be regarded as a
means of increasing man's trust in God, a test of his
capacity to serve God for nought. "It is not in our
power," said E. Jannai, "to explain either the prosperity
of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous."4 No
feelings rooted themselves more deeply in Judaism than
1 Ps. cxix. 71. The national "I" does not exclude a personal
reference.
2 Job xvii. 9. 3 Berachoth, 5 a. i Aboth, iv. 19.
2g2
452 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
those of absolute faith in God and unconditional resigna-
tion to his will. The famous utterance of Job became
one of the main principles which enabled the Jews,
through a thousand martyrdoms and persecutions, to be
true to their religion in spite of every temptation to
abandon it : " Shall we receive good at the hand of God,
and shall we not receive evil ? "
As regards outward good and outward evil, Judaism
tended to steer a middle course. The official religion
never inclined towards asceticism, or to a depreciation of
external good fortune and a philosophic contempt for
external calamity. But the influence of the law made
itself felt in two directions. First, like such gnomic
poets of Greece as Solon and Theognis, its interpreters
laid great stress upon moderation and self-control. True
happiness was said to consist in a mean, whereby man
was removed alike from the temptations of poverty and
of wealth.1 But, secondly, the law suggested and gave
birth to inward and spiritual pleasures, which tended to
make outward joys and outward sorrows of only secondary
significance. The observance of the law was no longer,
as in the days of Deuteronomy, a means to an end; it
was its own end. Hence the temptation to secure increase
of pleasure or exemption from pain by transgressing it
was proportionally reduced. In times of persecution the
official religion had trained men to the temper of mind
indicated in the Book of Daniel : "If it please God, he
will deliver us ; but if not, then also we will not trans-
gress the law."2
The doctrine of evil angels or demons had little influ-
1 E.g. Prov. xxx. 8. 2 Dan. iii. 18.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 453
ence in the modification of any theory of divine retribu-
tion or in the development of a fixed theodicy. In
popular superstition the notion of demonic possession
became important outside the Biblical period, but it
scarcely affected seriously the higher and official reli-
gion. It was independent of the fundamental doctrines
of Judaism ; it was an ugly excrescence which did no
permanent injury to the essential faith. It could ulti-
mately pass away without leaving any serious traces
behind it upon the religion as a whole, and it may,
therefore, in this place be safely neglected. More im-
portant was the strange figure of Satan. His past history
and origin are disputed and obscure. Found thrice in
the Old Testament, he has been explained, now as an
adaptation of the Persian Ahriman or Angro-mainyus ;
now as a revival or resuscitation of an old Israelite
demon, akin to the satyrs of the desert mentioned in
Leviticus and the Book of Isaiah ; and quite recently as
an independent creation of the prophet Zechariah. Twice
his name is used with the article, and once without.
"With the article, " the Satan," in English about equiva-
lent to "the adversary," suggests at once an office and
function rather than a mere personal name. Whatever
his origin, his first appearance in literature is in the
Book of Zechariah, where the prophet in a literary vision
depicts him as opposing the heavenly purification of
Joshua, the high-priest. By this opposition, the Satan
is perhaps meant to personify the principle of uncom-
promising and sleepless justice, avouching that Israel's
sins were even yet inadequately atoned for. In accord-
454 Till. GOD AND ISRAEL.
ance with the higher principle of divine grace or forgive-
ness, he is rebuked into silence.
In the Book of Job the conception is extended.1 The
Satan is there represented as one of the angels or " sons
of God " who form the court of the divine king ; but in
his relation to man he not only remembers sin, but also
provokes it. Job's integrity irritates him ; by the per-
mitted infliction of suffering he tempts Job to renounce
God. In the Book of Chronicles, where Satan — and here
without the article, as if the descriptive appellation had
now become a proper name — appears for the third time,
he takes the place of God in the older narrative of
Samuel at the temptation of David to number the people.
The motiveless wrath of Yahveh, familiar to the pre-
prophetic age, had become ethically and religiously im-
possible. The Chronicler therefore substitutes Satan,
but no further use is made of him.2 So in Job, Satan is
merely brought into the pictorial introduction, but plays
no part in the dialogue.
Of infinitely more important effect, and of permanent
and far-reaching influence, upon the doctrine of retribu-
tion, and upon the estimate of earthly woe and earthly
bliss, was the growth of a doctrine of resurrection and of
personal immortality.
The origin and growth of this belief, which, in one
form or another, seems to us so inseparably connected
with a belief in God, are difficult to trace. In the age
1 Cf. Marti, in Tlieologische Studien unci Kritihen, 1892, pp. 207 — ■
245. He attempts to prove that Satan is the free creation of Zecha-
riah, and also, as I am glad to find, that Job is later than Zechariah.
2 1 Chron. xxi. 1 ; 2 Sam. xxiv. 1.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 455
of Ezra there is apparently no hint of it : in the age of
the Maccabees it is a common, though not even yet
universally accepted dogma. Its rise must thus be
referred to the three centuries which elapsed between
the composition of Ezra's memoirs and the composition
of the apocalyptic Daniel. It is wonderful that the
highest spirits in Israel were able for so many years to
place boundless confidence in God, uncheered by any
hope of happiness and fuller enlightenment beyond the
grave. A lack of individualism and a suppression of
self in the community accounts for something, but un-
daunted faith in God accounts for more. Standing upon
the confines of the wider hope, we may not improperly
recall, in the noble words of Delizsch, the grandeur
of that more limited faith of which the barriers were
now being removed. " This is just the heroic feature in
the faith of the Old Testament, that in the midst of the
riddles of this life, and face to face with the impenetrable
darkness resting on the life beyond, it throws itself
without reserve into the arms of God."1 But the words
" Old Testament " in this passage tend to produce a mis-
conception in the reader's mind. He might gather from
them that while the Old Testament outlook was limited
to the present life and was bounded by death, the belief
in resurrection and immortality was the creation of the
Isew. That supposition is false. Within the Old Testa-
ment period, and even within Old Testament literature,,
the gloom of Sheol begins to lighten ; while between the
Maccabean age and the birth of Christ, the " larger hope "
had become a permanent dogma of Judaism.
1 In his Commentary on Ps. xxxix. 8.
456 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
The appearance and establishment of this dogma in
the Jewish religion were probably due to a variety of
causes, partly native and partly foreign. The former
were mainly connected with the Messianic belief and
the growth of individualism. The metaphor of national
resurrection was not unfamiliar; as the desire waxed
stronger among the units of Israel that they too might
individually share in the glories of the coming age, the
parallel expectations of neighbouring nations and creeds
helped to transform this national metaphor into a literal
belief as applied to the righteous dead. This trans-
formation was the easier, inasmuch as death was never
believed to cause absolute annihilation : the self still
continued a joyless and shadowy existence in Sheol.
Again, as the problems of life pressed more and more
heavily upon the perplexed spirit of man, the sugges-
tion— encouraged by influences from without — might
gradually dawn upon the soul, whether possibly the un-
equal distribution of God's justice might not be remedied
in another life. These influences from without, of which
mention has parenthetically been made, can only have
been two — the influence of Persia and the influence of
Greece. Prof. Cheyne, with great learning and equal
skill, has lately expounded the view that for Palestinian
Judaism the outer influence was almost exclusively Per-
sian. The immortality of the soul, which is so important
an element in Platonic philosophy, was adopted by the
Hellenized Jews of Egypt; while the Palestinian Jews
were stimulated by the Zoroastrian doctrines of resurrec-
tion and judgment after death. Perhaps, however, the
influence of Greece should not be wholly excluded. For
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 457
while the author of Ecclcsiastes alludes to the doctrine of
spiritual immortality only to reject it, the very allusion
would seem to argue that the notion had already been
mooted in the Palestinian society of his day. But it is
certainly an exaggeration to maintain that the resurrec-
tion of the body was only the Jewish method of express-
ing the immortality of the soul.
The first, or at all events the first clear, conception of
any life after death for the individual, apart from and
beyond the worthless life of Sheol, was that of a bodily
resurrection at the Messianic era. Within the Old Testa-
ment the two instances of this conception are both found
in apocalyptic writings ; it would seem as if in this form
the hope had first suggested itself to the exalted and
pictorial imaginations of enthusiastic visionaries. In
those four grand but mysterious chapters in Isaiah,1 the
date of which has been assigned either to the late Persian,
or more probably to the Greek, though pre-Maccabean
period, an earthly immortality is predicted for the con-
temporaries of the approaching millennium; at that time
— already anticipated in the writer's imagination — God
would "swallow up death for ever." Moreover, the
departed believers, the pious dead of Israel, are conceived
as being allowed to share, by miraculous interposition of
God, in the Messianic glory : " Let thy dead men live :
let my dead bodies arise : awake and sing ye that dwell
in the dust ; for thy dew is the dew of lights, and earth
shall produce the shades."2 In Maccabean Daniel, while
the resurrection is also connected with the Messianic era,
and has earth for its scene, the idea is extended by the
1 xxiv. — xxvii. 2 xxv. 8, xxvi. 19.
458 YIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
conception of a wider judgment — wider at least for Israel
— upon good and bad alike. Both are raised out of
Sheol, to receive a recompence according to their works.
"Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall
awake, some to everlasting life, and some to disgrace and
everlasting abhorrence."1
At this stage the conception was widened again ; nor
does it seem impossible that there were two parallel lines
of thought even in Palestinian Judaism, which after-
wards were more or less successfully systematized and
harmonized with one another. The one line of thought
with its results in the Books of Isaiah and Daniel has
been indicated above ; is there any Old Testament evi-
dence of another ?
Prof. Cheyne has argued that there is in certain
mystical passages of the Psalter.2 In the rapture of their
communion with God, some Psalmists seem to forget or
to ignore death, which they regard only as the doom of
the wicked and the apostate. They seem to suggest that
this communion and nearness with God will be eternal,
unbroken by death, eluding the grasp of Sheol. Their
language is by no means clear, and admits of a narrower
and purely national interpretation ; but when we reflect
that these Psalms were written in the late Persian and
Greek periods, and that their authors were, therefore,
subject to the same influences as the authors of Daniel
and Isaiah xxiv. — xxvii., it does not seem unnatural to
assign to the passages in question the fuller and more
adequate meaning. In that case, the writers of these
Psalms hoped that, like Enoch and Elijah, they too
1 xii. 2. 2 Origin of the Psalter, pp. 3S1— 452.
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 459
might find their life with God on earth continued and
prolonged in a life yet nearer God in " heaven." " I
am continually with, thee ; thou hast taken hold of my
right hand. According to thy purpose thou wilt lead
me, and afterward receive me with glory." And again :
" I have set Yahveh before me continually : for with
him at my right hand I cannot be moved. Therefore my
heart is glad and my glory exults, my flesh also dwells
in safety. For thou wilt not give up my soul to Sheol,
neither wilt thou suffer thy loving one to see the pit ;
thou makest known to me the path of life ; near thy face
is fulness of joys ; all pleasant things are in thy right
hand for ever."1 While the Sages do not appear to have
taken to the idea of this more personal immortality — as
apart from the Messianic resurrection — so readily, we
yet find that even in Proverbs there is " a mysterious veil
thrown over the death of the righteous,"2 and a notice-
able indication of possible escape from Sheol by the dis-
cipline of "Wisdom."
Thus even within Old Testament limits, we seem to
find evidence of a twofold immortality — a resurrection
upon earth out of Sheol at the Messianic age, and an
immediate escape from Sheol at death in a continued life
of conscious blessedness in heaven. As a matter of
historic fact, these were the two elements out of which
all the ideas and imaginings in later Judaism upon this
high subject did actually arise. They became blended
with each other in all sorts of ways, and now the first,
now the second, assumed larger proportion and wider
1 Ps. Ixxiii. 23, 24, xvi. 8—11.
2 Oehler, Tlteologie des Alien Testamentes, 1882, p. 858.
460 Till. GOD AND ISRAEL.
significance* But to pursue their history further cannot
be attempted here.1
The religious effect of anticipations and beliefs such
as these can hardly be over-estimated. Earthly suffering
and earthly bliss were both transfigured. It was easier
to endure calamity and to retain a living faith in God,
if one might believe that there would be a personal re-
surrection to life eternal. Earthly suffering could be
complacently regarded as God's chosen method for the
education of Israel, so long as, in accordance with the
particularist tendencies of the post-Maccabean period,
the resurrection and its glories were almost exclusively
reserved for the chosen race. The fear of death was
lessened : the eagerness to fulfil the law was stimulated
by the vivid anticipation, not of mere vulgar reward,
but of closer and more permanent communion with God.
Again, the estimate set ou earthly felicity was changed
likewise. For it could not be but that the happiness'
both of the resurrection and of the heavenly life was
conceived more inwardly and spiritually than the ordi-
1 No one who is at all acquainted with Eabbinic literature will
understand on what basis Wellhausen has arbitrarily declared : " Of
a general judgment at the last day, or of heaven and hell in the Chris-
tian sense, the Jews know nothing * {History of Israel, E.T., p. 508;
Abriss, p. 97.) The Jewish conceptions of heaven and hell, with their
odd confusion between immediate immortality after death and the
postponed resurrection at the judgment, are in all respects completely
parallel to Christian conceptions on these subjects. It is equally
amazing that Schwally should lay himself open to the easiest of refu-
tations in saying : " Das Buch Hiob bezeichnet hinsichtlich der Escha-
tologie die hochste Stufe der Betrachtungsweise, nicht nur im Bereiche
<les alten Testamentes, sondern audi der gesammten ausserkanonischen
Literatur der Judenthums." (Das Lelen nach dem Tode, p. 112.)
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 4G1
nary external happiness of the life here and now. Earthly
pleasures were thus depreciated, just as they also tended
to be depreciated in contrast and comparison with the
spiritual bliss of studying and fulfilling the precepts of
the law. Earth's pleasures and earth's pains, alike tran-
sitory, were alike cheapened. The resurrection idea,
which had partly been discovered to account for the
burden of the one and the unequal distribution of the
other, tended to make both of less significance and mo-
ment. Hence a permanent phase of Jewish teaching and
thought is reflected in the famous saying of E. Jacob :
" This world is like a vestibule before the world to come ;
prepare thyself in the vestibule, that thou mayest enter
into the hall." That which is valuable in this world —
the spiritual side of it — is to constitute the sum and
substance of the happiness of the world to come. Hence,
too, the same Rabbi went on to enunciate the notable
paradox : " Better is one hour of repentance and good
deeds in this world than the whole life of the world to
come ; better is one hour of blissf ulness of spirit in the
world to come than the whole life of this world."1 And
thus, too, it was that the purest spiritual bliss which this
world can give was conceived as the constant occupation
of the world to come. And even as the God of Aris-
totle, for whom the happiest phase of earthly life is
realized in philosophic contemplation, is himself a philo-
sopher, if we may so personify the famous voV<? vorjo-eoo?
of the Metaphysics, so the God of the Eabbis, whose
highest notion of bliss is the study of the law, is himself
a student of his own divine creation. The heavenly life,
1 Aboth, iv. 23, 24.
462 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL,
or even the divine life itself, is but the reflection of the
highest and most spiritual moments in the life of earth.
In any more developed phase of religious thought, the
doctrine of a future life is an almost necessary comple-
ment of a belief in God. But in Judaism it was not a
theoretic atheism against which it was to serve as a bul-
wark, but the more terrible doubt of the divine goodness.
It is, however, noteworthy that the ingrained convic-
tion of God's ultimate justice was continually emerging,
even without reference to any life beyond the grave by
which to explain or justify its methods. Throughout
centuries of calamity, the Jewish community, unwilling
to throw the entire burden of equivalence upon the world
to come, and unable to deny that even in this world
there should be some ethical correspondence between
merit and reward, has always tended to emphasize its
own sinfulness in order to vindicate the goodness of God.
It has always tried to believe that its guilt deserved
a fuller meed of punishment than actually it received.
And with this belief, backed by the doctrine of the
future life and the disciplinary theory of suffering, it
has never swerved from teaching and confessing a loving
God, the God of the 103rd Psalm, who is "full of com-
passion and pity, long-suffering and plenteous in loving-
kindness," who does not requite according to iniquity,
but "as a father has compassion upon his sons, has com-
passion upon them that fear him."
This, then, was the God of Judaism — no hard and merci-
less taskmaster, but a loving and compassionate Father,
whose law, as we have yet to see, was given for Israel's
benefit and happiness. But the double limitation must
VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL. 463
not be forgotten. God's pitying Fatherhood extends
only to those "who fear him." Ontside that barrier are
the heathen nations and the wicked within Israel. The
latter may be roughly defined as those who were at vari-
ance with the principles upon which the Judaism of their
accusers was sincerely believed to depend. They were
those who made no honest and faithful effort to fulfil the
law. But this limitation of God's love did not change
or spoil its quality within the community towards which
it was believed to be directed. And so in general, men
think more often and more deeply of the included than
of the excluded — of God as loving them that fear him,
than of God as punishing their enemies or as hating the
wicked.
Thus for the Israelite who seeks, in spite of many
lapses, to conform to the dictates of the law, God is loving
and God is near. Such is not only the evidence of the
Psalter, it is also the evidence of the Wisdom books.
And such is not only the evidence of the Old Testament,
it is the evidence too of the Apocrypha and the Talmud.
Israel was a narrow field for the exercise of God's love,
when that God was no longer the patron Deity of a
people, but the sole God of earth and heaven. But
because the field was narrow, the love was not less real.
And in that love of God for Israel — a love, be it remem-
bered, which within Israel was an ethical love, demanding
righteousness and not detached from goodness — every
Israelite who desired to do God's will might claim his
share ; he was gladly conscious that God was cognizant
of all, and cared not only for his people in the mass, but
for every unit of which it was composed. The individual
464 VIII. GOD AND ISRAEL.
Israelite never ceased to give thanks to God because Ms
loving-kindness was everlasting : and, as he fulfilled the
law, he never ceased to feel that God was near him. By
his own religious experience there was borne in upon
him the deep propriety of that title which Eabbinic, no
less than Christian, piety has delighted to apply to God :
" Our Father who is in heaven."1
If, then, God was a father to Israel, and through Israel
to every Israelite, was not every Israelite his son ? Did
not the one term of the relation imply the other ? Did
not the fatherhood involve a sonship ? Or was God
Israel's father, but the Israelite God's slave ? So say
still several Christian theologians. u The Jew is God's
servant (Knecht), who labours to deserve eternal life by
his conformity to the law ; the Christian is God's child,
who already possesses eternal life, and lives in blissful
communion with the Father in time and eternity."2
To the truth or untruth of this antithesis, and to the
general moral and religious relation of the Israelite to
God, the final Lecture of this series must be devoted.
1 " Our Father," but no less the Father of individuals, and so felt
to be, than the Father of the community or the race. Cf. the indi-
vidualist use of the word in Sirach, xxiii. 1, 4; Aboth, v. 30 (ed.
Taylor).
2 TJieologische Literal urzeitung, December 26, 1891, p. 657.
Lecture IX.
FROM NEHEMIAH TO THE MACCABEES
THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
The key-note of this Lecture must be the Law.1 With
the Law for guide and goal, we have to examine into
the average Jew's moral standard and his religious rela-
tion to God.2 It would, perhaps, be both more accurate
and more convenient to substitute for the English word
Law the Hebrew word Torah. For the connotation of
Torah has just that elasticity and width of meaning
which are wanting to our English rendering. The Torah
is not always the Pentateuch alone, but often includes
the entire compass of the Sacred Scriptures. It embraces
the oral tradition as well as the written code : above all,
1 For many of the facts in Lecture IX. and for most of the L'abbinieal
references, I am indebted to the never-failing knowledge and kindness
of my friend Mr. Schechter, without whose teaching and help, indeed,
this part of my work could hardly have been written. But Mr.
Schechter is in no way responsible for any statement I make, still
less for any opinion I offer.
2 My terminus ad quern is limited by the Old Testament, and does
not therefore properly extend beyond the Maccabean era. But in
order to make the tendencies of that age clear, it will often be neces-
sary to speak of the more developed Rabbinical religion, and to quote
or allude to passages from Rabbinical literature.
2h
466 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
it is not merely a book or a collection of ordinances, but
is identical with religion.1
The literature of the Old Testament comes to a close
with the Law's final and determinative victory. Although
within its compass, except in two or three Psalms, there
seems to be but little of that rapturous glorification of
the law which is characteristic of the entire Eabbinical
period, it is not out of place or inaccurate to consider the
religion of the post-exilic period within the Old Testa-
ment from the legal point of view. It is true that if
Antiochus Epiphanes had never interfered in the internal
affairs of his Jewish province, the entire course of reli-
gious development might have been wholly different. It
is also true that there is some slight evidence of ten-
dencies in the post-Nehemian, but pre-Maccabean period,
which ran counter to the prevailing legalism of the
age, and which, in combination with a peaceful influx
of Hellenism, might, and perhaps would, have directed
the religion of Israel into a very different channel. In a
detailed history of post-exilic religion these tendencies
would have to be carefully noted ; but in a rapid sketch
like the present, they must, on the contrary, be almost
wholly passed over, unless it can be shown that here and
there they left their mark upon the final and historic
result. For the legal tendency was throughout predomi-
nant, and in the end victorious and all-embracing. If
the pre-Maccabean period be looked at as the prepara-
tion for the later Judaism, then the law may be justifi-
ably considered its most important spiritual factor.
As the canon of Scripture became fixed, the sacred
1 Cf. a fine passage in Cheyne, Origin of the Pscdicr, p. 349.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 467
writings tended to acquire a more exclusive and over-
whelming authority. The Scriptures were for the Jews
their all-in-all. From them they sought counsel, edifi-
cation, enlightenment and happiness ; out of them they
sharpened their wits and fed their imagination. Intellect
and phantasy, head and heart, drew their sustenance from
the Torah. Jurisprudence and morality, religious form
and religious substance, were all mingled together, for
they were all branches of the law, and the study of
Scripture was the basis of them all.
This sovereignty of the law in its operations and
results is only to be proved and illustrated by the
Rabbinical literature. But that literature, as it needs
for its intelligent employment one who has been steeped
in it from his youth, so does it lie outside the limits of
the present inquiry. It cannot be emphasized too strongly
that the books of the Old Testament show merely ten-
dencies to a religious development which was not fully
matured till considerably later, and that, both for evil
and for good, they can give no adequate picture of the
Judaism even of Hillel and Akiba. It must be remem-
bered, too, that the apocalyptic writings lie for the most
part outside the line of the purest Jewish development,
and often present but the fringe or excrescence, and
not the real substance of the dominating religious
thought. The fact that the originals of those which
were written in Hebrew or Aramaic are nearly all lost,
partly shows that they had no deep hold on the people,
or were off the beaten track of the official religion. It is
therefore less proper to characterize the Jewish religion
of the time of Christ out of such books as Esdras and
2h2
468 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
Enoch, than from Pirke Aboth and the Mechilta. And
yet these Eabbinical books were compiled at a later date.
An historian, even though his period closes with the Old
Testament, who has no complete mastery of the Eabbi-
nical literature, must be painfully conscious of his inade-
quate preparation and equipment for the full delineation
of the post-Nehemian era. And if he is not conscious
of them, his delineation of that era will in all probability
be so much the more inaccurate or misleading.
It will be obvious to the informed reader that these
remarks are partly directed against the methods and
descriptions of certain Christian theologians. It is ex-
cessively difficult to enter upon the discussion of the
law, and of its effect upon the whole area of religion or
morality, in the proper historic spirit of absolute impar-
tiality. Unceasing and one-sided attack on the one hand
has inevitably produced an equally unceasing and one-
sided defence upon the other. A good instance of this
attitude is the frequent employment of such a phrase as
11 it must be conceded" — on the one side to preface an
acknowledgment of a casual excellence, on the other of
a casual defect. But surely historical theology has
nothing to concede ; its business is to record.
Why is it true that the individual Jew's ethical and
religious relation to God and man was dominated by the
law ? For the following reasons : goodness was the
fulfilment of_ the law ; sin was its violation. Man's
duties to his neighbour and to God were contained in
the law either explicitly or implicitly, and to the Eabbi-
nical Jew this was a distinction without a difference.
Again, man's spiritual satisfaction and his communion
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 469
with God were found in and conditioned by the study
and the fulfilment of the law. The law was Israel's pre-
rogative and privilege, his duty and his happiness. It
was both means and end — pathway as well as goal. And
though Torah in the larger sense included the whole
compass of Scripture, in the narrower sense it meant the
precepts of the Pentateuch, together with their traditional
implications. So far as any generalization can go, it is
therefore quite true that in Judaism religion took the
aspect of law. Judaism is a legal religion. It began to
receivlTThis character on the introduction of Deutero-
nomy ; it was confirmed in it by the reformation of
Ezra ; while the final triumph of legalism was brought
about by the persecutions of Antiochus.
A coincidence of religion with law seems fatal for the
excellence of religion. It is very difficult to clear one's
mind of all Pauline prepossessions, and simply to observe
the results for good or ill, without any attempt to pre-
judge them by logic or philosophy. It surely is obvious,
one might suppose, that legalism in religion must logic-
ally produce certain definite and distressing results.
But deductive logic is a dangerous guide in the field
of historic theology. "In point of fact," says Prof.
Toy, the distinguished model of impartiality upon later
Judaism, when discussing a certain effect of the law
which logically should have been of a particular character,
"in point of fact, the result was different."1 The words
are significant ; somehow or other it will frequently be
found true — "in point of fact, the result was different."
1 Toy, Judaism and Christianity, p. 186.
470 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
There is no more illogical religion — is this an unmixed
evil ? — than Judaism.
A distinction must be made at starting. The Judaism
of the Maccabean period, with which the Old Testament
practically closes, is a legal religion, and hence there
may be discovered in it the qualities of legal religions
generally. But it is not only religion as law which has
to be considered. Judaism rests on a particular law — a
much more significant and influential fact. Supposed
effects of legal religion in the abstract must be distin-
guished from actual effects of the legal religion in par-
ticular. It will, I think, be found that the evil effects,
deducible logically on general principles, of legalism in
the abstract, are often "in point of fact" historically
non-existent ; while the evil effects of the particular
law were tangible and real. The particular law was a
combination of moral and ritual enactments; the main
weaknesses and defects of the Jewish religion resulted
from the existence in the law of ritual enactments which,
equally with the moral enactments, were regarded as
the direct command of God, and thus constantly tended
to be put on the same level. It is, however, possible
to conceive of a legal religion in which every command
would be purely moral, and the general results of legal-
ism as such would be more clearly apparent from it than
from Judaism. At any rate, the effects of religion as
law, and the effects of the particular law, with its un-
fortunate combination and co-ordination of moral and
ritual enactments, must be carefully and systematically
distinguished.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 471
Again, if the evil effects of religion as law — of in-
cluding the whole religious and moral life in the
sphere of jurisprudence — be reckoned up on the one
side, it is right to ask whether the same cause might
not produce good as well as evil. The effects of an
absence of law in religion and morality would have also
to be considered. Such an inquiry might be made both
historically and in the abstract. Eeligion in the form
of law might be reasonably supposed to stimulate to
moral earnestness and to the faithful and adequate dis-
charge of all those elements of morality which admit of
being represented by definite injunctions. Moral zeal
and a firm grip upon the actual and defined duties of
every-day life would be as obvious and logical a result
upon the one hand, as externalism and formalism upon
the other. And even though the law of the Pentateuch
embraces both moral and ceremonial enactments, it would
need very delicate investigation to determine whether,
during the two thousand years in which it has been the
basis of Jewish morality and religion, the evil effects of
its legalism have outweighed the good. For if an impar-
tial critic would assign to the Jews certain marked virtues
and excellences, as well as certain marked vices and
defects, it is only reasonable to suggest that the former
are as intimately connected with, and as directly due to,
the law as the latter. If religion as law has its good as
well as its evil issues, it will probably be fair to suppose
that the extremes of either are the exception and not the
rule. And in harmony with the conclusions of logic,
history will probably decide that, on the whole, the
virtues of the Jews in the long Eabbinic period exceeded
472 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
their vices. Where, finally, there is large agreement
as to the content of morality, it is probable that the
religious form in which it is cast will make no con-
siderable difference. If at the present day you were to
take ten thousand orthodox Jews who believe in the
doctrine of justification by works, and were to match
them with ten thousand orthodox Protestants who believe
in the doctrine of justification by faith, there would be a
fringe of peculiar excellence and peculiar viciousness in
either, each with its own nuance of good and evil ; but in
the main body of both there would probably be about
an equally large number of pious and moral citizens,
whose qualities of virtue would be practically indistin-
guishable.
Meanwhile, the actual law of Judaism was a hetero-
geneous mass of ethical, political and ceremonial elements.
It is necessary to form some conception of the character
and extent of the last and largest section, since for our
purposes the civil and penal code may be neglected,
although it formed an important part of the total Torah,
and one of the six divisions of the Mishnah is concerned
with it.
Our present object is rather to classify those provisions
of the ceremonial law which touched the average Jew's
daily experience, and entered practically, and even fre-
quently, into his religious life. In the second and first
centuries B.C., these sections would mainly be the laws
concerning sabbath and festivals, the agrarian laws, the
dietary laws, and the laws of clean and unclean. As to-
the first, it is probable that in the Maccabean period
the minutite of sabbatical observance were already for
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 473
the most part in vogue. It must, however, be under-
stood that these details filtered down gradually from the
discussions and determinations of the schools into the
actual life of the people. This explains why the rigid
observance of the sabbath became part and parcel of the
Jewish faith, and yet, though universally fulfilled, was
never — a point to which I shall recur — regarded as a
burden or a calamity. Of the various laws which are
noticed in the Rabbinical literature as having been trans-
gressed by a certain element of the population, to be
afterwards defined, the sabbath, the day of delight for
rich and poor alike, is never mentioned as one.
About the dietary laws there is a similar silence. These
laws included the Pentateuchal distinctions between per-
mitted and forbidden food, whether beast, bird or fish ;
secondly, the rules as to the proper slaughtering of cattle
and birds ; and thirdly, the purely Rabbinical prescrip-
tions by which milk and meat might not only never be
eaten together, but which even demanded that a certain
interval should elapse between the enjoyment of one and
the other, and that one set of utensils should be kept for
the preparation of all food made with meat, and another
for such as might be made with milk or any milky product.
"No doubt the Hellenistic party disobeyed these laws, but
we do not learn that they were objected to or markedly
transgressed by the lower or more uneducated portion of
the population, whose grievances against the ceremonial
law concerned the last two divisions of it, to be now
enumerated.
The agrarian laws affected the people in a wholly
different way: they touched a man's pocket. By far
474 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
the most important of them were the dues levied on
agricultural produce, for the maintenance of the Levites
and the priests.1 A two-per-cent. tax of the total in-
gathering had to be deducted for the priest, and of its
remainder ten-per-cent. for the Levite. Every third
year a further ten-per-cent. was allotted to the poor,
according to the law of Deuteronomy.2 Besides these
imposts, there were the first-fruits and the firstlings of
cattle, to which may be added the tax at the redemption
of first-born sons. But of all these various dues, the
yearly tithe seems to have been the one which pressed
most hardly upon the poorer cultivator, and which, there-
fore, was the most frequently neglected. On the other
hand, it was precisely this law upon which the strict
Pharisees and Babbis laid the greatest stress. Their
insistance led, as we shall see, to a cleavage in the com-
munity.
Last, but not least, come the laws of clean and unclean.
These, like the agrarian enactments, were clearly con-
nected with the priesthood and the sanctuary, and most
of them gradually fell into desuetude after the destruc-
tion of the temple. Distinctions of clean and unclean
are, as we know, thoroughly characteristic of priesthoods
all the ancient world over, and rest in their origin upon
a variety of primordial superstitions. Unfortunately, the
practices and ideas to which these superstitions gave
1 I have omitted the dues from cattle and from slaughtered animals.
2 xiv. 28, 29, xxvi. 12. I have omitted the extra tithe mentioned
in Deut. xiv. 22 — 27, and given four times in every cycle of six years,
because, though the tithe had to be eaten in Jerusalem, or its worth in
money spent there, it was the owner of the produce who enjoyed it.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 475
birth, survived centuries after the superstitions were past
and forgotten. In the Pentateuch, the laws about clean
and unclean belong almost wholly to the later code ; but
they contain, as we have already seen, a record of very
ancient priestly practice, and embody rites reaching back
ultimately to the pre-prophetic period.
In the post-exilic age, when the separation between
priest and scribe began, it might have been supposed
that purely priestly enactments, such as the rules about
clean and unclean, would have been lightly regarded
by the new and secular teachers of the law. This
may have been the case in the Persian period; but
the opposition to Hellenism probably quickened the
growth, and effected the predominance, of a precisely
opposite tendency. Some have thought that Zoroastrian
influences were also at work. However this may be, the
Scribes took up and worked out the laws of clean and
unclean with the greatest zeal and zest. They developed
them with extraordinary subtlety, and spent upon them
the full force of their hair-splitting and casuistical dia-
lectic. It would seem as if the ideal of the rigorists
among them in the age of Christ was, as it were, to
transform the layman into a priest, or even to transform
him, for his whole life, into the condition of a priest
when performing the functions of his sacred office.
It is well to point out precisely what a state of ritual
cleanness really implies. It means being in a condi-
tion to visit the temple, or, at a higher stage, to perform
some ceremonial or sacrificial act. The uncleanness of a
given object means that contact with it transfers its
impurity to the person. According to Pentateuchal ordi-
476 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
nances, uncleanness is produced in two main ways : first,
by certain sexual impurities and by the plague of leprosy;
secondly, by the corpses of human beings, of all animals
not permitted for food, and of those permitted animals
which have died a natural death or been killed by
wild beasts. An ordinary yeoman or artizan was not
greatly troubled by these laws. Certain usual unclean-
nesses he could easily remove by bathing.1 Towns and
"villages possessed apparently public baths for these pur-
poses.2 If somebody died in his house, a special purifi-
cation was necessary. This was effected by sprinkling
within the house some of the ashes of the consecrated
red heifer, according to the rite described in Numbers xix.
But though the Pentateuch enjoins this purification as
strictly incumbent upon all, it is very doubtful whether
any need was felt to observe the rite until the temple had
to be visited. The statutory limit of time was therefore,
we may infer, commonly neglected.3 The only obligation
binding upon all was to be ritually clean before enter-
ing the temple. A layman might contract uncleanness
without scruple ; the traditional law in this point even
modified the letter of the Pentateuch, interpreting, for
example, the enactment of Leviticus xi. 8 to apply only
to the priesthood or to the season of the festivals.4
1 Kg. Lev. xi. 24—28, xv. 16, xxii. 4—7. 2 Shekalim i. 1.
3 Numbers xix. 12, 13, 19, "on the seventh day."
4 Maimonides, Hilclwth "pb^lS nsmtt, xvi. 9 ; Torath Kahanim
(Sifra), 49 a; Eosh ha Shanah, 16 6. Mairaonides codifies the Tal-
nmdical rulings thus : " It is permitted to every one to touch an
unclean thing, and thereby to become unclean. For Scripture only
forbids priests and Nazarites from becoming unclean by touching a
dead body : hence it is inferred that everybody else may become
IX. TIIE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 477
For the priests, however, and for those laymen vvho
voluntarily elected to live as if they were priests them-
selves, the rules of clean and unclean were vastly more
rigorous and complicated. Fanatical rigorists, for exam-
ple, perhaps attempted to remember and observe all those
distinctions respecting the various capacities of different
utensils to contract uncleanness, over which Prof. Schiirer
makes merry in the second volume of his History, not
realizing, however, that these distinctions and rules did
not concern the layman, and are themselves merely the
written precipitate of the discussions of the schools, and
were probably unknown to nine-tenths of the pious and
observant Israelites in the age of Christ.1 Nevertheless,
unclean. And even the priests and Nazarites are only forbidden to
become unclean through a human corpse (i.e. they may, for example,
become unclean by touching a dead mouse). Every Israelite is enjoined
to be clean at the time of the festivals, in order that he may be able to
enter the temple, and eat holy food (i.e. sacrifices). And when it saj's,
'Their carcase ye shall not touch,' this means at the festivals only."
1 Schiirer says (Geschichte, Vol. II. p. 400, E. T. Div. ii. Vol. II.
p. 106) : " Far deeper was the influence upon daily life of the manifold
and far-reaching ordinances concerning cleanness and uncleanness, and
the removal of the latter, than that of the law of the Sabbath." I
hardly think that any one Avould guess from this language that the
laws about clean and unclean did not apply to the daily life of the
ordinary layman at all. In speaking of the priestly code, Kuenen says
(Religion of Israel, Vol. II. p. 270; see above, p. 344) : "If he (the
Israelite) was scrupulously pious, he always continued to regard un-
cleanness as a real calamity or as a heavy punishment, and considered
himself bound to avoid it as much as -possible. But this gave rise to
another danger. How could he then be free from uneasiness, and
petty, anxious precautions 1 Reflect that all sorts of clothes, household
furniture and food, were capable of becoming unclean, and of polluting,
in their turn, any one who touched them. What a life he must have
had who feared such pollution, and yet could hardly escape it !" But
478 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
the existence of a large priesthood who were bound to
follow out the rules of clean and unclean to the utmost
of their knowledge and capacity, and the existence of
an extreme section of Eabbis who even sought to outdo
these professional observers, were grave evils. These
puerile prescriptions not only interfered with social inter-
course, but tended to set up a false ideal of external sanc-
tity. Their baneful influence in helping to drive a certain
section of the community outside the recognized pale
and limits of the common religion will come before us
again.
Such, then, were the chief contents of a law, all parts
of which were accredited alike with divine authority.
It is clear that the drawback or misfortune of such a
code was its equal accentuation of the ceremonial and
the moral. More precisely, the evil lay in that mournful
relic of outworn paganism — the conception of external
holiness and pollution, of clean and unclean. The law
was far less a misfortune in virtue of its legalism than
because of its heterogeneous contents. Priestly regula-
tions were accepted and developed by the ingenuity of
the Scribes. In calmer moments, during the Persian and
early Grecian periods, the Scribes, as we have seen,
appear to have laid greater stress upon the ethical part
of the law than upon its ritual; but when Hellenism
became a danger, and still more when apostasy and per-
secution began, the prescriptions of clean and unclean,
the traditional or Rabbinic explanation of the Pentateuchal law had
obviated this danger, and for the great mass of pious Israelites tlio
supposed life of uneasiness never existed or could have existed at all.
One needs to be very cautious in writing about the Law.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 479
and all the ceremonialism which pertained to the indi-
vidual, became of the utmost value and importance in
accentuating the difference, as well as strengthening the
barrier, between the observing subjects of the law and
the polluted outer world of Jewish apostates and Gentile
foes. ]\^en died for the law's sake; and when all its
enactments were believed to have issued from the same
divine source, a single ceremonial injunction could easily
be regarded as a type or symbol of the entire code.
What, then, was the effect of the law upon morality
and religion? Always careful to avoid the imminent
danger of squeezing the undogmatic post-exilic religion
into modern categories of thought, we may endeavour to
note, first, the effect of the law upon men's conception of
goodness, and, secondly, upon the content of morality.
Next in order may come the capacity of right-doing, the
nature and removal of sin ; and lastly, the motives which
impelled to the observance of the law. Thus at the end
we shall be brought face to face with the problem mooted
at the close of the last Lecture : Was the relation of the
old Jews to God that of slave to master, or that of son to
father? Did they do his will in fear and for hope of
reward, or did they do it also and mainly for its own
sake, and for the love of the law and of its Giver ?
Duty, goodness, piety — all these are to the Jew equi-
ATalcnt terms. They are mere synonyms for the same
conception — the fulfilment of the law. A man, therefore,
is ^ood who knows the law and obeys it ; a man is wicked
who is ignorant of it and transgresses it. Apart from
the influence of the ceremonial element, the moral dangers
of this conception seem obvious and alarming. "Who
480 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
is the good man?" "We tend to give some answer which
implies that the stress in goodness must be laid upon
spirit rather than form, upon the motive rather than the
deed, upon being rather than doing. But the legal ten-
dency would be precisely the opposite. Let us assume
there are two hundred moral injunctions in the law, a
hundred negative and a hundred positive. The good
man would be he who, whenever occasion offers, fulfils
the positive commands, and by constant abstinence from
evil fulfils the negative commands. Thus even in the
Psalms the good man is more than once defined by a
catalogue of doings and refrainings. It would, then, seem
as if it were the mere letter of the law which needs
fulfilment: the spirit is indifferent. While morality
needs freedom, the law is a fixed, external standard,
which can only be obeyed as a servant obeys his master.
A man under the law will do a "good" action in the
same way and from the same motive as he pays his
taxes. More important still is the supposed effect of
legal morality upon the state of a man's soul. It is said
to lead either to bland self-righteousness or to irreligious
despair. If you are conscious that you have performed
the law, you are proud, and yet your heart is bad ; if you
are fearful that you unwittingly may have transgressed
it, you despair, and yet your heart is good. The real good
man is he who in full consciousness of human frailty
does his best and feels at peace with God ; but the legal
good man feels either satisfied when he should not be
satisfied, or ill at ease when he might trust in God.
Legalism oscillates between self-righteous pride on the
one hand, godless despair upon the other.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 481
" In point of fact, the result was different." Where
these evil results of legalism became discernible, they
were apparently due, not to the legalism as such, but to
the ceremonial law. Humility, not pride, was the mark
of post-exilic Judaism. "Where pride comes in, it is
owing, not to a consciousness of having individually ful-
filled the law, but to a comparison and contrast between
Jew and heathen, or between law-observer and law-
breaker. In the Psalter and the Proverbs, humility is
often either directly commended and enjoined, or by im-
plication extolled. The Ana vim, the humble and afflicted
ones, " became standing designations of the true Israel." J
" With the lowly is wisdom." 2 The same insistance on
humility is characteristic of Eabbinical teaching. Low-
liness of soul and humbleness of spirit were regarded as
the signs of the disciple of Abraham.3 Nor is there any
evidence that among the observers of the law there was
any frequent fear of unconscious transgression. It is
true that in the legal 19th Psalm the prayer is uttered,
"Clear thou me from secret or unknown faults;" and
Prof. Cheyne argues from this that the Psalmist's ev\dfieia9
or scrupulosity, passed the bounds of moderation, and
that the law had become a yoke.4 Of the entire yoke
theory, there will be more to say subsequently ; but it
may here be noted that the same man who seems to show
this anxious scrupulosity aud a nervous terror of uncon-
scious transgression, is the very man who has just said that
Yah veh's law " restores the soul " and rejoices the heart.
1 Cheyne, Psalter, p. 110; cf. p. 98. - Prov. xi. 2.
3 Aboth v. 28, 29 (ed. Taylor).
4 Origin of the Psalter, p. 365.
2i
482 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
It is true, again, that in a thousand-times-repeated story,
a certain distinguished Eabbi of the first century A. C.
is represented as weeping upon his death-bed, in fear of
the judgment of the divine king, before whom his death
would bring him ; but the very fact of this single story
having to serve so continuously is sufficient proof of its
exceptional character. Oddly enough, within a few pages
of it, there occurs in the Talmud another story with the
same framework and the very opposite teaching.1 If
anything, the__Jews were somewhat too confident of their
assured participation in the blessedness of eternal life ;
all Israelites, except very exceptional and determined
sinners, were believed to have their share in it. Yet
within their own community, the Jews, upon the whole,
preserved a happy mean between pride and despair:
righteous as compared with the heathen, they felt them-
selves sinners before God. If God, indeed, were to
bear transgressions in mind, no man could stand before
him, and religion would be impossible. Blithe, though
humble, is Israel's hope, because with God there is for-
giveness.2
This simple confidence accurately represents the atti-
tude of the legalist. He is not puffed up by the con-
sciousness of his own fidelity ; if he has learned or
practised much Torah, he claims no merit to himself, for
"thereunto was he created."3 His sins and inadver-
tences do not drive him to despair, for his God is
gracious and full of compassion. As we saw in the last
1 Berachoth, 5 b (Wiinsche, Der babylonische Talmud in seinen
haggadischen Bestandtheilen, Vol. I. p. 9).
2 Ps. cxxx. 3, 4. 3 Aboth ii. 9, with Taylor's note
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 4S3
Lecture, the doctrine of measure-for-measure retribution
was in practice and everyday-life overcome by the doc-
trine of God's mercy. And thus, though the Rabbis, like
the teachers of every other creed which accepts the dogma
of a future life, are continually insisting that man will be
judged according to his works, they never seem to infer
that the Israelite is in any danger of special retribution,
still less of eternal woe, because of occasional sins and
inadvertent offences, whether of omission or commission.
For these, if human means were needed, repentance was
ample atonement. Privation and suffering, which gra-
dually became recognized as the habitual and necessary
concomitants of Israel, tended to make the Eabbis more
and more accustomed to accept and accentuate the doc-
trine that earthly tribulations were the God-sent trials
and chastisements leading to the more certain and uni-
versal bestowal of immortal bliss.
If it were true that the later Judaism of the law laid
exclusive stress in its moral teaching upon the mere
outward act and not upon the spirit — upon doing rather
than being, as we might now-a-days express it — we
should scarcely find that constant harping upon the heart
as the source and seat of good and evil. What more
legal book than Chronicles? Yet it is there that we
find the earnest supplication for a heart directed towards
God.1 It is there that Hezekiah, on the occasion of a
ritual error, prays that "the good Yahveh may pardon
every one that directed his heart to seek God, though
he was not cleansed according to the purification of the
1 1 Chron. xxviii. 9, xxix. 18—19, xxii. 19; 2 Chron. xi. 16, xv. 12
xvi. 9.
484 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
sanctuary."1 And it was a Kabbi who, bidding his
disciples "go and see which is the good way that a
man should cleave to," approved the answer of him who
said, "A good heart," because his words included the
words of his companions.2 Few sayings are, I believe,
quoted and applied more frequently in the Eabbinical
literature than the adage which closes those tractates of
the Mishnah which deal with the sacrificial law: "He
that brings few offerings is as he that brings many ; let
but his heart be directed heavenward." 3 In other words :
" All service ranks the same with God."
The casuistic hair-splitting which characterized the legal
disputations on the ceremonial law, the penal code, or
the agrarian injunctions, does not seem to have entered
to any appreciable extent into the field of morality
proper. From that casuistry, at any rate, which is
popularly supposed to have degraded the morality of
the Jesuits, the Eabbis were wholly free. Apart from
the influence of the ceremonial law, their notions of good-
ness were exceedingly simple. They theorized little,
but they practised a great deal. Even the Wisdom
books of the Old Testament show a considerable range
of work-a-day virtues, and these were expanded and
refined in the Eabbinical period. Take the thirty-first
chapter of Job as an inventory of late Old Testament
morality. One main virtue is charity, practical kindness
to those in need. Charity became the virtue par excel-
lence to the Jewish mind. It is a synonym for goodness.
By none than the Eabbis have the grace and power
1 2 Chron. xxx. 19. 2 Abothii. 12.
3 La: t words of Mishnah Menachoth (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 4, p. 56).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 485
of charity been more subtly and eagerly extolled ;
they are, moreover, wont to distinguish, much as does
St. Paul, between mere almsgiving, and "the doing
of kindnesses," rating the latter far above the former.1
On three things, said Simon the Just, whose date is
disputed, but is at least pre-Maccabean, the world is
stayed, on the Torah and on the Worship and on Charity.2
Another emphasized virtue in Job's catalogue is that
of chastit}T, and this also became a prominent feature
in J ewisli ethics, to which fact the repulsiveness of
Hellenism to the orthodox Jew was at least partly due.
Monogamy without concubinage, as we may gather both
from Proverbs and Sirach, was gradually becoming the
rule in the post-exilic period.
Self-control and moderation were likewise prominent.
The spiritual joys of the law crowded out the material
joys of earth. What an enormous advance in the 119th
Psalm, the hymn of the law — a perfect^ exemplar of the
Eabbinic point of view — over the attitude of Deute-
ronomy ! The lovers of the law had other and better
things to rejoice about than that "their wealth was
great or that their hand had gotten much." God's
commandments were better unto them than thousands
of gold and silver. The attitude of Judaism towards
u external goods " was, upon the whole, sensible and
manly. They were neither over-valued nor despised.
Habbinical religion was far from asceticism, though its
followers were ready at a moment's notice to throw
all earthly pleasures to the winds for the sake of the
1 E.g. Succah, 49 b (Wunsche, Vol. I. p. 396).
2 Aboth i. 2.
4S6 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
law.1 Without splendid assertions on the nothingness of
earthly goods, they showed no tendency to accept them
above their proper rate, or to compare them with the
spiritual satisfactions of the law, and of prayer and com-
munion with God.
In his catalogue of sins, whose opposites imply a cata-
logue of virtues, Job enumerates the rejoicing over the
fall of enemies. Its attitude towards enemies is com-
monly supposed to be a weak spot in the ethics of
Judaism. Was it the fault of the law ? The truth is
that one must, as usual, distinguish between the private
enemy and the public enemy — between the foe of the
individual and the foe of Israel. Towards the second,
the particularist tendency begot all those cries of ven-
geance and cursing with which we are familiar in the
Psalter. But the enemy of Israel was often to be found
within Israel. The man who thought himself of the true
Israel prayed more eagerly and frequently for the fall
than for the conversion of those whom he considered God's
enemies as well as his own. The feeling of party, the
convinced assurance that there could be neither salvation
nor righteousness outside their own way of thinking and
doing, were never stronger than among the whole Phari-
saic and Eabbinic community. As against the heathen,
and as against the Israelite outside the legal fold, they
1 Put somewhat modernly, their general doctrine seems to have
"been that man's natural or fleshly desires should be subdued to the
service of God ; they should not be violently crushed or rooted out.
See, e.g., a very curious passage in the Jerusalem Talmud, Eerachoth,
1 4 b, the point of which is that it is a higher thing to make one's
desires subservient to goodness or God than to destroy them altogether.
Cf. also Genesis Rabba, ix. 6, "Wiinsche's translation, p. 38.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 487
emphatically were in the right. This conviction, with
its attendant ethical evils of pride and vindictiveness,
was indefinitely strengthened by, even though it was not
the direct creation of, the law. But within the observing
community, Proverbs, Sirach and the Eabbinical literature
show good evidence of a very different feeling. Towards
a private enemy the famous maxims of the older code were
extended and developed. Thus the same Sirach who
counts among the nine causes of happiness to Avitness
the fall of enemies, and who lays down the rule, " Give
to the pious, but help not the sinner, for God too hates
the sinner," is able in another passage in his book to
say : " Forgive thy neighbour the wrong he has done to
thee, so shall thy sins be forgiven when thou prayest.
One man retains hatred against another — does he ask
pardon from God? To a man who is like himself he
shows no pity — does he ask pardon for his own sins ? . . . .
Bemember the Commandments, and bear no malice
against thy neighbour ; remember the covenant with the
Highest, and overlook the injury."1 Professor Toy says
rightly, that while the Psalms, " profoundly religious "as
they are, "do not " (as a rule) " rise above the level of
the old prophetic morality," "in Proverbs, Wisdom of
Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and in the sayings of the great
lawyers, we find a distincter recognition of individual
social relations and of the law of kindness."2 It is
customary to make much of the prudential and eudcemon-
istic character of the morality taught in the Wisdom
literature, and to connect this lack of enthusiasm and
1 xxv, 7, xii. 4, xxviii. 1 — 7 (A.V.).
2 Judaism and Christianity, p. 293.
488 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
"altruism " with the legal standpoint. Of the eudasmon-
istic motive, something must be said later ; the pruden-
tial elements in Proverbs and Sirach, which undoubtedly
exist, seem, however, less due to the law than to the
general gnomic character of these collections. "When
righteousness becomes a phase of wisdom and vice a
phase of folly, it is natural to prove the excellence of
the one and the vileness of the other by pointing to their
practical issues. It is noteworthy that the later Eabbis
showed much greater warmth in their moral teaching
than the sages of the Bible or the Apocrypha. Many
illustrations could be drawn from their sayings of that
ardent religious enthusiasm — clear evidence of lofty moral
purpose and fervid willingness to self-sacrifice — which,
in its highest and purest form, is so characteristic a
feature in the teaching of Christ.1
1 Cf. the following adage from Sabbath, 88 b (Wiinsche, Vol. I.
p. 150), which sounds quite unlike anything in Proverbs or Sirach :
" Of thern who suffer humiliation but do not inflict it, who are reviled
but revile not, who do all from the love of God and rejoice at their
sufferings, the Scripture says, ' They that love him are as the sun,
when he goeth forth in his might.'" It is, therefore, very improper to
characterize the utilitarian and prudential elements in the teaching of
Sirach as specifically Jewish. That is merely using the adjective Jewish
as a convenient epithet of depreciation and abuse. I have elsewhere
called attention to the wide connotation given to the word in this direc-
tion. Cf. the calm remarks of Steinthal in his Einleitung in die Psycho-
logie und Spracliwissenschaft, 2nd ed., 1881, p. 217: "Die Herrschaft
der Monomanie (d. h. der Apperception jedes Gegebenen, mag es noch
so verschieden sein, durch dieselbige Vorstellungsgruppe) in derWissen-
schaft ist nicht geringer als im Leben ; und dann schrumpft freilich die
.Fulle der Gestaltungen zu den diirftigsten Kategorien zusammen ....
[Der eine] hat nur zwei Kategorien fur die Auffassung der Geschichte :
jiidisch und christlich; judisch heisst unfrei, reactionar, neidisch, zer-
btbrend; christlich heisst frei, revolutioniir, schopferisch."
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 489
The small extent of the post-exilic but pre-Christian
literature gives us little opportunity of obtaining any
extended idea of the moral ideas and practice of the
period. And much of the literature which we have,
including all the various apocalypses, is useless for the pur-
pose. We are still worse on0 for that social side of ethics,
which was nevertheless not uninfluenced by religion.
For the Talmudic period the sources would be far more
abundant ; and it may be hoped that a good scholar will
delineate for us one day a picture of " Social Life in Jew-
dom from Hillel to Saadia" on the model of Mahaffy's
delightful " Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menan-
der." From a general point of view, it may, I think,
in justice be maintained that the fulminations of the
Prophets concerning justice, kindness and chastity had
sunk deep into the national consciousness. Where apos-
tates and enemies are not concerned, the Semitic fierce-
ness of the old pre-exilic days had been greatly modified.
Of this change, a clear instance is the transformation —
for it amounted to no less — of the old penal law. This
transformation must have begun within our period,
though its consummation falls without its limits. In
violation of the letter of the law, the old lex talionis, eye
for eye, tooth for tooth, was explained awaylo signify a
monetary payment varying according to the severity of
the inflicted wrong. The offences for which the Penta-
teuch prescribes death as punishment remained the same
under the Rabbinic law ; but as a matter of fact we know
that the death penalty was frequently dispensed with,
and that imprisonment — a punishment unknown to the
Pentateuch — had been invented in the early Pharisaic or
490 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
Rabbinic period.1 Joseph us mentions that the Pharisees
". are not wont to be severe in punishments."2 Again,
while all the four methods of execution known to the
Pentateuch were still, I suppose, occasionally employed
by the authorities of the second and first centuries B. C,
the manner of their performance was mercifully modi-
fied.3 Most significant of all was the introduction of a
custom according to which the criminal before being led
to execution was given a drugged cup of wine, by which
he lost consciousness of what was being done to him.
The Talmud adds the probably accurate tradition that
the rich women of Jerusalem were wont to charge them-
selves with the preparation and expense of this particular
draught.4
The respect for human life had deepened. Even in
war, while we hear of wholesale slaughters according to
the custom of the age, we hear nothing of any refine-
ments of cruelty. Torture, so familiar to the cultivated
Greeks, was unknown to Hebrew law. There is no ex-
ample or instance of infanticide. In respect for old age,
decrepitude and helplessness, the Jewish religion from
the post-exilic period onwards has yielded to none.5
Slavery still existed; but the evidence of Eabbinical
literature tends to show that upon the whole the slaves
1 Cf. Sanhedrin, ix. 5. 2 Ant. xiii. 10, 6.
3 Sanhedrin, vi. and vii.
4 Sanhedrin, 43 a (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 3, p. 76).
6 As Mr. Abrahams has pointed out to me, I ought to have added
a few sentences about education in the Eabbinical period. Jewish
children were tended and trained with devoted care. There are several
monographs on this subject.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 491
of the Jews had a fairly comfortable time of it, and this
improvement in their lot was directly dne to the human-
izing influences of religion. Both as regards the educa-
tion of children and the treatment of slaves, Sirach shows
a rigour which is not characteristic of the Eabbis. The
slave- concubine, a combination obvious to the Penta-
teuch no less than to other ancient codes, was fast
becoming the exception, and not the rule.1 For con-
cubinage, no less than harlotry, was broken down by that
growing sense of the supreme importance of chastity
which is one of the noblest ethical elements in the Rab-
binical religion. Monogamy was not indeed the law,
but it was gradually becoming the practice. This is not
the place to say anything — nor have I the requisite
knowledge — of the position of women in the Rabbinic
religion ; but it falls within our period to note howJiirach,
if in accordance with his touch of peculiar harshness
he speaks with special virulence of the evils of the bad
woman, excels Proverbs in his deepened appreciation of
the noble wife. The excellence of the virtuous woman
of Proverbs lies, after all, mainly in her industry and
diligence. She is above all things the good housewife.
Sirach strikes a higher note. It is almost surprising,
from the old Jewish point of view, to find him not only
putting the companionship of a wife above the companion-
ship of a friend, but also above children. "Friends and
companions meet from time to time, but above both is
the wife with her husband. Children and the building
1 In Talmudic times the slave-concubine became an impossibility.
No Jewish woman could be sold into slavery after the age of puberty ;
and if she had been sold before, she then attained her freedom.
492 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
of a city make a man's name lasting, bnt a blameless
wife is prized above both."1
The concrete morality of the post-exilic and Rabbinic
religion — the actual bulk and content of its moral and
social practices — was indubitably of a high order. Here
the law had done well. It was its ceremonial elements
which constituted its chief religious and moral danger.
External cleanness is obviously much easier than clean-
ness of heart, and yet the law seemed to make an equi-
valence of value between the one and the other. Hence
the possibility of formalism and pride and hypocrisy and
self-righteousness and self-deceit — the evils against which
Jesus declaimed, and which do not go without censure
in the Talmud. The stricter the rule, the more ready
the contempt for those who were less exact, the more
violent the loathing of those who had altogether fallen
outside the average standard of observance. It was
very difficult, moreover, for the higher spirits to cor-
rect this evil. To the pre-exilic prophets the way
was easy. They knew nothing of a divinely - given
ceremonial law ; and when Hosea said that God desired
loving-kindness and not sacrifice, he was in the posi-
tion of a modern preacher who might say that God
desired goodness and not church-going. The preacher
does not want church-going to be abolished, but, on the
other hand, he does not believe that it has been ordered
by God. But the Eabbi, though quite conscious that
"the Most High is not pleased with the offerings of the
wicked, or ready to forgive sin by the multitude of sacri-
fices,"2 was nevertheless unable to deny that the cere-
1 xL 19, 23. 2 Sirach xxxiv. 19 (A.V.).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 493
monies wore divinely ordained. He could not say that
that which goeth into a man's mouth defileth not. The
strict observer of an elaborate, ceremonial law has a very
difficult task before him if he would combat the moral
evils arising from the fulfilment of a law which he, no
less than the immoral hypocrite whom he condemns, must
also rigorously maintain.
If the ceremonial law clearly led to a certain amount
of formalism, sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, because
of the very facility with which it could be fulfilled in
comparison with the moral law, it is also generally sup-
posed to have been a terrible burden, which only the
hope of reward could have induced men to observe. To
read the treatises of the Mishnah upon the sabbath and
upon clean and unclean produces the impression that such
minutise of ritual practice must have made of all life
an intolerable nuisance. It would seem as if you were
always in danger of transgression from forgetfulness,
ignorance or mishap.
This supposed evil result of the ceremonial injunctions
leads us on to another point, which, though distinct,
is so closely connected, that its consideration may fitly
be inserted here. As the ceremonial sections of the law
obviously constituted its bulkiest portion, so also did they
require the most learning. The ordinary elements of
every-day morality are tolerably simple, and known to
wise and foolish alike ; but to know the innumerable cases
of ritual uncleanness, or the infinite possibilities of trans-
gressing the sabbath, would seem to demand study and
opportunity. If to know them is wisdom, and if wisdom,
as the sages taught, is piety, then piety is beyond the
494 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
compass of the ignorant. Hence the law, it is argued,
produced a false and irreligious intellectualism ; it led to
a perverse glorification of a spurious kind of knowledge,
the absence of which separates from God. It is abso-
lutely true that the religious teachers of the post-exilic
period laid more and more stress upon the study of the
law, in which they included elaborate discussion and
careful knowledge of its ceremonial sections. Such a
study clearly demanded leisure ; and hence Sirach, just
like a Greek philosopher, declares that the wisdom of a
scribe comes by opportunity of leisure, and only he that
has little business can become wise.1 Although in his
depreciation of handicrafts Sirach was conspicuously at
variance with the Eabbis, who taught that the study of the
law should always be united to some worldly occupation,
a few of them tended to look down upon an uncultivated
piety, or rather to doubt the possibility of its existence.
But, on the whole, the good sense of the Eabbis enabled
them to see that great as might be the study of the law,
practical goodness was greater still. " He whose works
exceed his wisdom, his wisdom shall endure." That is
the dominant teaching. And again : " Whosesoever wis-
dom is in excess of his works, to what is he like ? To
a tree whose branches are abundant, and its roots scanty ;
and the wind comes, and uproots it and overturns it.
And whosesoever works are in excess of his wisdom, to
what is he like ? To a tree whose branches are scant}',
and its roots abundant; though all the winds come
upon it, they stir it not from its place."2 Unlike the
priests, the Eabbis made no profit from their calling as
1 xxxviii. 24 (A. V.). 2 Aboth iii. 27 (ed. Taylor).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 495
teachers, and indeed repudiated the sinful idea that the
law, as they expressed it, should be made a spade where-
with to dig.1 They were thus compelled to turn for their
subsistence to ordinary occupations and handicrafts. But
though doubtless the ideal was " to have little business
and be busied in Torah," Rabban Gamaliel, son of Judah
the prince, was wont to say : " Excellent is the study of
the law combined with some worldly occupation, for the
labour demanded by them both makes sin to be for-
gotten. All study of the Torah without work must in
the end be futile and become the cause of sin."2
Nevertheless, a strong dash. of intellectualism is a pro-
minent feature in the Rabbinic religion. Its highest
satisfaction is as much the study as the fulfilment of the
law. The learned Rabbi has ever been the subject of the
deepest veneration. To this day, among the orthodox
communities in the east of Europe, there is no reputation
so glorious as that given by knowledge of the law, and
every family in all ranks of society is proud to possess
some member who is learned in the Torah. To the Jew,
1 Aboth iv. 7 (Authorized Prayer-book, &c, p. 19G).
2 Aboth ii. 2, iv. 14. The following passage is worth quoting:
" E. Eleazar said, Which was the first blessing which Moses said over
the Torah 1 Blessed art thou, 0 Lord our God, King of the universe,
who hast chosen this Torah and sanctified it, and art well pleased with
them that follow it. He did not say with them that trouble them-
selves about it, or with them that meditate on it, but with them that
follow it, that fulfil its words. If a man say, I have learnt neither
wisdom nor Torah, what shall become of me 1 God says to Israel, All
wisdom and all Torah is a simple matter ; for he who fears me and
fulfils the words of the Torah, he has already all wisdom and all Torah
in his heart." Deuteronomy Rabba, xi. 6 ("Wiinsche's translation,
p. 110, with the necessary correction in the note on p. 137).
496 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
the law with its study has ever been the great spiritual
stimulus. It has saved him from sacerdotalism and priest-
craft. It supplied for him the place of every possible
sort of intellectual or artistic or even professional activ-
ity, from which his peculiar religion on the one hand,
and the intolerance of mediaeval society on the other,
kept him effectively away. It was the study as well as
the fulfilment of the law which prevented the Jews from
sinking in the scale of manhood, throughout the middle
ages, intellectually and even morally.1 Like every other
ideal, it had its evil side, and was capable of lamentable
perversions : ideally, the study of the law is equivalent
to the study of perfect truth : practically, it is often the
study of puerilities : the evolving of juridic hair-split-
tings upon the one hand, and fantastic and disordered
imaginings upon the other. In this capacity for perver-
sion and degeneration it shared the fate of other ideals,
some of which were even nobler than itself.
But how far had the legal spirit and the enthusiasm
for the law and its study won a firm hold upon all classes
in the Maccabean and post-Maccabean age ? It is im-
portant to bear in mind that the condition of Jewish
society then was in one crucial respect different from
what it became after the destruction of the temple. After
the final dispersion, the rule of Rabbinisin was not only
unquestioned, but its own special ideals may be practi-
cally said to have become the ideals of all. Everybody
1 Indeed, according to well-known sayings in the Mishnah, the true
study of the Law was only possible to men of noble character. See
the conditions and results of Torah study in the chapter " On the Acqui-
sition of Torah," Taylor, Aboth, pp. 113, 115, 116.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 497
observed the law, and to be learned in its lore was the
desire of rich and poor alike. Its study penetrated every
class, and its practice was a spiritual bond which knit
all classes to each other. But in the early period of the
law's domination this was not the case. Then, quite
apart from those who may have objected to the law from
a universalist or prophetic point of view — a diminishing
minority of persons, among whom the authors of the anti-
sacrificial Psalms may possibly be reckoned — and apart
from those who objected to the oral and traditional addi-
tions to the written Pentateuchal code, there apparently
existed a class who violated the law through ignorance
or indifference, and regarded its teachers with feelings
of hatred or contempt. The numerical relation of this
" outcast " class to the entire people it is impossible to
ascertain, but its existence seems vouched for both by
the New Testament and the Talmud. Its origin and
nature cannot be passed over here.
It would usually be said that in the Mishnah and the
Talmud the outcast fringe which neglected or despised
the law was known by the name of '■Am ha-Arets. Lite-
rally this expression means " people of the land ;" and in
the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah it is used to designate
the halKbreeds and aliens, whom the exiles on their
return from Babylon found settled on or near Judsean
territory. But in the Rabbinical literature it clearly
designates, not foreigners or even half-castes, but Jews.
It is, however, impossible to put together a single and
harmonious picture of the lAm ha-Arets from the dicta of
the Talmud. These often contradict each other. In the
Mishnah — the codified Rabbinic law of which the date is
2k
498 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
about 210 A.C.j though its contents are often much
older — the lAm ha-Arets is almost invariably opposed
to the Chaber, and the questions raised concerning him
relate to legal restrictions of social intercourse between
the two classes, on the basis of the agrarian laws
and the laws of clean and unclean. "Who was the
Chaber? Many scholars suppose that he was practi-
cally identical with the Pharisee ; l but this view is, in
all probability, a grave mistake. Neither all Pharisees
nor even all Eabbis were Chaberim. The Chaber was
rather a member of a special order, composed of the
extreme rigorists before alluded to. They, though lay-
men, determined to live as priests, and to observe the
laws of clean and unclean in their fullest possible deve-
lopment. In their eyes, any person about whom there
was a doubt whether he was sufficiently particular in
the observance of these laws, as well as in the exact ob-
servance of the law of tithe, was an lAm ha-Arets, with
whom social intercourse was greatly restricted, if not
wholly tabooed.2 It is not implied that the 'Am ha-Arets
generally neglected the law^or that he was an outcast
and a sinner. In the body of the Talmud, the date of
which is considerably later than the Mishnah, though it
preserves a mass of old traditions, a curious uncertainty
is evinced as to who the lAm ha-Arets actually was. He
had apparently become a creature of the past. Discus-
sions are reported on the question what were the par-
i So Schurer, Geschichte, Vol. II. pp. 319—334 (E.T., Div. ii.
Vol. II. pp. 8—25).
2 For the individualistic use of the word, cf. Schiirer, Geschiehie,
Vol. II. p. 331, n. 47 (E. T., Div. ii. Vol. II. p. 22>
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 499
ticular ceremonial delinquencies the commission of which
stamps a man as an lAm ha-Arets.1 A variety of answers
is given, and the entire argumentation wears a very
academic air. There is only one considerable passage in
the Talmud where virulent hatred is expressed against
the cAm ha-Arets, and where he is accused of gross
immorality and of the bitterest animosity to the Eabbis.2
It seems clear that in this passage, and in the very few
parallels to it elsewhere, a different class of persons is
alluded to from those whose intercourse with the rigorists
the Mishnah attempts to regulate and restrict. They
must, perhaps, rather be identified with the apostates and
informers of the later Eoman period, and, in that case,
they hardly concern us here.3
1 E.g. Berachoth, 47 b; Sotah, 22 a (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 1, p. 295);
Gittin, 61 a. The passage in Berachoth, 475, runs as follows : "There
is a tradition (a Boraitha) : ' Who is the 'Am ha-Arets ? Rabbi Meir
says, He who does not eat his ordinary food in a state of ritual clean-
ness (i.e. in a state in which he could eat holy food), but the Rabbis
saj', He who does not tithe his produce accurately.'. . . . The Rabbis
have taught : ' Who is an 'Am ha-Arets ? R. Eliezer says, He who does
not read the Shema evening and morning; R. Joshua says, He who
does not put on the phylacteries ; Ben Azzai says, He who does not
wear fringes on his garments (Numbers xv. 38); R. Nathan says, He
who has no Mezuzah on his door. R. Nathan ben Joseph says, He
who has children and does not educate them in the Torah ; others
say, Even if a man has read Scripture and Mishnah, but has not
associated with the learned, he is an 'Am ha-Arets."'
2 Pesachim, 49 & (Wiinsche, Vol. I. p. 216); cf. Baba Bathra, 8 a
(Wiinsche, Vol. II. 2, p. 120).
3 The whole question of the Chaber and the 'Am ha-Arets is very
difficult and intricate. Schiirer makes it seem too easy. Cf. also
Rosenthal, Vicr apokryphische Bilcher, 1885, pp. 25 — 29; Hamburger,
Real Encylopadie zu Bibel und Talmud, Vol. II. pp. 54 — 56, &c.
2x2
500 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
Thus the evidence of the Eabbinical literature gives
no real support to the view that there existed in Judaea a
deep social cleavage between a corps d ) elite of Scribes and
Pharisees who strictly obeyed the law, and a mass of
good, simple and ignorant people who, on its ceremonial
side, neglected and disobeved it. The Eabbis themselves
were mostly men of the people, who still pursued their
industrial or agricultural occupations. In its enactments
about reading the Shema, the Eabbinical law makes pro-
vision for the case of handicraftsmen and field-labourers.1
The institution of the translating Meturg email and of the
Chazan (reciter) in the synagogues was devised for the
sake of the unlearned.2 At Passover, Pentecost and
Tabernacles it is reported that the laws which might
have prevented the lAm ha-Arets from full participation
in the ceremonies and festivities at Jerusalem were wholly
suspended.3 We know from Josephus that the people
recoguized in the Pharisees or Scribes their own religious
leaders. The lAm ha-Arets is therefore not to be classed
with the " publicans and sinners" of the Gospel ; and the
famous verse in John, "This people who know not the
law are cursed," if "people" be interpreted in its ordi-
nary sense, and not explained to mean a small class of
1 Berachoth : Mishnah, ii. 4; Talmud, ib and 16 a; cf. also Rosh
ha Shanah, 35 a, ad Jin., where it is said that provision was made by
Babbi Gamaliel in regard to the New-year Service for the "people
in the fields," i.e. peasants and labourers.
2 Zunz Gottesdienstliche, Vortriige, 2nd ed., p. 9. For the Chazan,
cL Bosh ha Shanah, 34 b.
3 Chagigah, 26 a; Niddah, 34 a.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 501
complete outsiders, cannot be regarded as accurate or
historical.1
From the Mishnah and the older traditions of the
Talmud, it is, however, tolerably certain that the agrarian
laws and the laws of clean and unclean were, on the one
hand, looked upon with exaggerated and fanatical reve-
rence by the rigorists, and on the other hand, compara-
tively or occasionally neglected by some of the more
careless, ignorant or independent elements of the people.
The neglect of the law in one particular would lead to
the neglect of it in others ; and in addition to those who
fell far short of the rigorists' standard in those two sec-
tions, there were some others who dropped out of the
general mass of the law-abiding population. A few
there were, such as the tax-farmers, whose occupations
1 Passages also occur in which a less separative attitude is taken
towards the 'Am lia-Arets. "K. Jehuda said, Be careful with the
children of the 'Am ha-Arets, for from them Torah is wont to go forth"
(Sanhedrin, 96 a, Wtinsche, Vol. II. 3, p. 185; cf. Baba Mezia, 85 a,
Wtinsche, Vol. II. 2, p. 95). " R. Jehuda bar Hai said, A Eabbi's
unintentional sins are accounted (by God) as intentional, the inten-
tional sins of an 'Am ha-Arets are accounted as unintentional" {Baba
Mezia, 33 b, Wtinsche, Vol. II. 2, p. 65; cf. Chiilin, 92 a, Wtinsche,
Vol. II. 4, p. 108 ; Menachoth, 99 b, Wtinsche, Vol. II. i, p. 51). Inte-
resting is the following extract from the Aboth of Rabbi Nathan (ed.
Schechter, p. 64) : "A man should not say, I love the Rabbis but hate
their disciples, or I love the disciples but hate the 'Am ha-Arets, but
he should love them all, and should only hate the heretics and the
apostates and the informers, following David, who says, ' Those that
hate thee, 0 Lord, I hate.'" Worth quoting, perhaps, also is the bit
in Midrash, Shir ha-Shirim Rahbali, II. 4, Wiinsche's translation,
p. 50 : " An 'Am ha-Arets who in the Shema reads rQ^SI, ' thou
shalt hate,' instead of mnSI, thou shalt love,' of him God says
Even his error is dear to me.
502 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
made them hateful to the bulk of their fellow-citizens.
An outcast class of "sinners" exists in every state; and
Kabbinic religion was perhaps even less inclined than
other religions to show regard or compassion for those
who had put themselves quite outside the pale of religious
conformity. But the real ^Am ha-Arets was probably
the creation of the burdensome agrarian and purity laws.
Most of these enactments gradually became obsolete and
impracticable after the destruction of the temple.
Due thus to special causes, the '•Am ha-Arets slowly
disappeared after the second century of the Christian era.
Produced by the law, he was nevertheless no necessary
and constant product. Through all layers and sections
of society the law penetrated down, and all of them
found in the faithful fulfilment of it a veritable religious
satisfaction. And although the highest ideal even for
those who had no chance or opportunity to reach it, was
always a special knowledge of the law, it does not seem
as if the average Jewish farmer or artizan was plagued
by a gnawing sense of religious inferiority.1 The mere
performance of the law, both in its ceremonial and moral
elements, was a sufficient privilege, as it was the emblem
of a special love.2 If this be true, it follows that to a
growing number, and at last to practically the entire
bulk, of the Jewish community, the law, ceremonial as
well as moral, was not felt as an irksome burden to
which one had to cling from fear of punishment or hope
of reward, but as a spiritual satisfaction, a gracious gift
1 It must be remembered that most of the Rabbis were farmers or
artizans themselves.
2 Aboth iii. 23 (ed. Taylor).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 503
of God through which man might enjoy supreme felicity
both in this world and in the world to come.
This result seems paradoxical and outrageous. People
naturally tend to think of the law in the light of Christ's
contrast between his own easy yoke and the heavy burden
of the Pharisees, or in the light of Paul's Epistles, with
their intense moral recoil against a rejected creed, or in
the lio-ht of the mere technicalities of the Mishnah
and of the legal discussions in the Talmud. But the
Pauline attitude by which the ceremonial law was a
positive bar to moral progress and spiritual peace seems,
even in the age of Christ, to have been very exceptional.
To the great bulk of Jews the law was at once a privilege
and a pleasure. This fundamental truth of the later
post-exilic religion is continually cropping up in every
phase of the faith, and needs to be continually reiterated.
Prof. Schultz acknowledges the fact, at least for the
Old Testament period. He says: uTo the true son of
Israel the law is no heavy burden or hated compulsion.
It is, on the contrary, the most precious and beloved gift
of God's grace."1 Basing his statements on the first,
nineteenth and one hundred and nineteenth Psalms, he
adds that the Israelite found in the law " a treasure
more precious than gold, sweeter than honey, the centre
of his thought, whereon he meditates day and night, the
delight of his soul, towards which all his longing desires
are set." 2 And yet this is the very same law the command-
ments of which were " in a constantly increasing degree "
1 Alttestamcntliche Theologle, 4th ed., p. 475.
2 "Die Beweggriinde zum sittlichen Handeln in dem vorchristlichen
Israel," Theologische Studien und Kritihen, 1890, p. 42.
504 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
obeyed in an "anxious, servile manner."1 But if the
three legal Psalms reflect the point of view of the early-
Pharisees of the Grecian period, much better and more
accurately do they reflect the point of view of the entire
Jewish religion throughout the Kabbinic period. The
notion that the law was a heavy burden, only endured
from special motives outside itself, is radically false.
Except for a certain small class, which disappears after
the destruction of the temple, it has no historical validity
whatever.
But how then, it must be asked, about the burden-
some details of the oral law? How about the observance
of the Sabbath, with its thirty-nine heads of forbidden
occupations, and its subdivisions of these heads ad infi-
nitum^ How about the laws as to prayer, which with
their rulings of season and manner and degree, seem
effectively to quench every spark of spirituality ? Here
is one more of the curious antinomies of the Jewish
religion, and one more reason why the truth is so seldom
understood. Another difficulty in the way of Christian
theologians is that they are necessarily ignorant of the
internal life of such Jewish communities as still faithfully
believe and practise, with no tincture of modern culture
or scepticism, the undefiled religion of the Talmud. His-
torically the Sabbath has been a day of delight. The
injunctions for its observance rapidly became so well
known and so universally maintained, that they were no
longer felt as an irksome restriction upon liberty, any
more than are the social customs and conventionalities
of modern times. In the long nightmare of the Middle
1 Alttest anient J ich'i Tlieultxjie, 4th ed., p. 459.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 505
Ages, the sabbath, as the incomparable Heine has truly
said, was the day on which the cruel spell of bondage
and degradation was for a brief space broken.
" Er ist geheissen
Israel. Ihn hat verwandelt
Hcxenspruch in einen Hund.
Hund mit hiindischen Gedanken,
Kbtert er die ganze "Woche
Durch des Lebens Kot und Kehricht,
Gassenbuben zum Gespotte.
Aber jeden Freitag Abend,
In der Dammrungstunde, plbtzlich
Weicht der Zauber und der Hund
"Wird aufs neu' ein menschlich "Wesen."
Again, as regards prayer, Prof. Schiirer says : " When,
finally, prayer itself, the very centre of the religious
life, is confined in the fetters of a rigid mechanism,
then there could no longer be a possibility of living
piety. And this fateful step had been already taken by
Judaism in the age of Christ."1 He then goes on to
quote several Eabbinic ordinances about prayer, its legal
seasons, what sort of prayer is legally adequate, and so
on. Some of these determinations are as outward, formal
and childish as you could possibly desire. Is the Pro-
fessor's deduction a true one ? One thing is certain : for
eighteen centuries the Jews never retraced that fateful
step which, as Prof. Schiirer says, they had taken by
the time of Christ. Was there, then, no living piety
among them during all that long period ? Were they able
to endure the Crusades and the Inquisition without living
piety ? This would be a paradox even greater than the
1 Geschiclde, Vol. II. p. 408 (E. T., Div. ii. Vol. II. p. 115).
506
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
paradox of the existence of living piety in spite of the
immense variety of prescriptions. And this second para-
dox is the truth of which the Jewish liturgy is itself a
sufficient proof. Talmudical anthologies contain a number
of utterances, proving to the full that the essentials of
true prayer, however strange it may seem, were as well
known to the Rabbis as to ourselves.1 The same faults
which Jesus, with such inimitable magnificence of scorn,
chastises in the hypocritical Rabbis of his day (are there
not hypocrites in every church in every age?) are also
chastised in the Talmud.2 " Before a man prays let him
purify his heart."3 This sort of spiritual commonplace
was as familiar to the Rabbis as it is familiar to ourselves.
And there was surely never a religious community to
whom prayer was a more real satisfaction and comfort,
and who were, if I may say so, more happy and at home
in their houses of prayer, than the Jews.
Upon this most crucial question of the burdensome
quality of the law, Mr. Schechter has put the two con-
flicting views with admirable cogency and force.
" On the one side," he says, " we hear the opinions of
so many learned professors, proclaiming ex cathedra that
the law was a most terrible burden, and the life under it
the most unbearable slavery, deadening body and soul.
1 For a later period, cf. Steinthal's essay on Andacht in his Zu Bibel
und ReligionspMlosophie, where he shows that the word n21D, exactly
answering to the German Andacht, was the creation of mediaeval
Judaism.
2 Sotah, 226 (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 1, p. 297); Talmud of Jerusalem,
Berachoth, 146.
8 Exodus Kabbah, xxii. 3 (Wunsche's translation, p. 174).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 507
On the other side we have the testimony of a literature
extending over about twenty-five centuries, and includ-
ing all sorts and conditions of men — scholars, poets,
mystics, lawyers, casuists, schoolmen, tradesmen, work-
men, women, simpletons — who all, from the author of the
one hundred and nineteenth Psalm to the last pre-
Mendelssohnian writer — with a small exception which
does not even deserve the name of a vanishing minority —
give unanimous evidence in favour of this law, and of
the bliss and happiness of living and dying under it;
and this, the testimony of people who were actually
living under the law, not merely theorizing upon it.
and who experienced it in all its difficulties and incon-
veniences. The Sabbath will give a fair example. This
day is described by almost every modern writer in the
most gloomy colours, and long lists are given of the
minute observances connected with it, easily to be trans-
gressed, which would necessarily make of the Sabbath,
instead of a day of rest, a day of sorrow and anxiety,
almost worse than the Scotch Sunday as depicted by con-
tinental writers. But, on the other hand, the Sabbath is
celebrated by the very people who did observe it, in
Tiundreds-of hymns, which would fill volumes, as a day
of rest and joy, of pleasure and delight, a day in which
man enjoys some presentiment of the pure bliss and
happiness which are stored up for the righteous in the
world to come. To it such tender names were applied
as the 'Queen Sabbath,' the 'Bride Sabbath,' and the
'holy, dear, beloved Sabbath.' Somebody, either the
learned Professors or the millions of the Jewish people,
508 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
must be under an illusion. Which it is I leave to the
reader to decide."1
As the law tended, ever more successfully, to become
less and less a burden, as it became better known and
more universally acknowledged, so its diffusion and
acceptance tended, though naturally with less prevailing
success, to overcome the moral dangers of its ceremonial
elements. When the ceremonies were obeyed by all,
their distinguishing character within the community was
effaced. Though divine laws, they were also communal
customs. Where nobody dreamed of eating milk and
meat together, to refrain could hardly be regarded as a
merit. The differentiation of good and evil inclined once
more to become centred on morality. Moreover, the
tendency of the law was to deprive the ceremonial in-
junctions more and more completely of any meaning
except that of happening to be God's will. To the priest,
with all his old traditional and heathen superstitions,
external holiness had a real meaning : to the Eabbi, all
these things had to be done, as Sirach says about offer-
ings, just because they chance to be in the code. The
original meaning is lost. It was only the moral laws
which had worth in themselves as well as value from
their inclusion in the law. This distinction not only
tended to place the moral laws, such as those of charity
and beneficence, above the ceremonial laws, but also to
1 "The Law and Recent Criticism," Jewish Quarterly Beview,
Vol. III. p. 762. On the question of evasions of the law, which
figure so largely in certain books upon Rabbinical religion, I would
refer here to the valuable Appendix which Mr. Schechter has kindly
written for me upon this subject.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 509
make men more frequently fulfil the latter from a purely
spiritual motive, either from unquestioning obedience to
God's decree, or from love of his revealed will.
Strange, too, as it may seem, the Jewish legalists
themselves never wholly lost sight of the difference be-
tween the ceremonial and the moral, the shadow and the
substance. One must not forget that the larger Torah
included the prophets as well as the Pentateuch. If they
were precluded from saying, " Mercy and not sacrifice,"
they could at least say that charity outweighed all the
other injunctions of the code. And they did say it.1 Or,
again, take the case of fasting, It is notable that a con-
siderable stress is laid upon fasting in the post-exilic
literature. There is a solemn fast after Ezra's readme;
O
of the law. He himself had proclaimed a fast before he
left Babylon, "that we might humble ourselves before
God to seek of him a prosperous journey."2 Nehemiah,
on hearing the evil news of Jerusalem's degradation,
" sat down and wept and mourned certain days, jmcL
fasted and prayed before the God of heaven."3 Joel,
the post-exilic seer, although he bids his readers rend
their hearts and not their garments, couples externals
and essentials together, when he makes God urge the
people to turn unto him "with all their heart, and with
fasting and with weeping and with smiting of the
breast."4 Daniel sets his face unto the Lord God to
seek for prayer and supplications with fasting and sack-
1 Baba Bathra, 9 a (Wunsche, Vol. II. 2, p. 124); Succah, 49 6
(Wiinsche, Vol. I. p. 396).
2 Ezra viii. 21; Nell. ix. 1. 3 Nell. i. 4.
4 Joelii. 12, 13.
510 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
cloth and ashes.1 In the Apocrypha, we find Tobit urging
his son that prayer is good with fasting and almsgiving
and righteousness.2 Judith is held up as a model of
piety because all the days of her widowhood she put
sackcloth on her loins and fasted, except on sabbaths,
new moons and holidays.3 The predilection of the
Rabbis for fasting as an act of outward piety is fre-
quently alluded to in the Gospels and the Talmud. If
the autumn rains, for example, were late in falling,
public or general fasts were imposed. Some rigorists
fasted from sunrise to sunset on every Monday and
Thursday throughout the year.4
Yet with all this emphasis upon the externals of sup-
plication and repentance, it can hardly be said that the
Rabbis ignored the fact that there was no value in them
except as concomitants of inward resolve for improve-
ment or of practical manifestation of a better life, both
negatively in the relinquishment of sin and positively in
the doing of virtue. The ceremonial law had this evil
effect — it prevented men from seeing that sackcloth and
fasting had no value whatever; but upon the whole
it did not prevent them from seeing that the efficacy
of these adjuncts was gone if they stood alone and
without the support of morality.5 It is characteristic
of the Rabbis that they chose for the prophetic lesson
1 Daniel ix. 3. 2 Tobit xii. 8.
3 Judith viii. 5, 6.
4 Taanith: Mishnah, i. 4 — 7; Talmud, 12 a; cf. Schurer, Geschichte,
Vol. II. p. 411, n. 97.
6 E.g. Taanith: Mishnah, ii. 1; Talmud, IGa (Wuusche, Vol. II.
1, pp. 436, 437).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 511
upon the morning of the Atonement- day, the fast par
excellence of the entire year, the fifty-eighth chapter
of Isaiah, in which the true fast is declared to consist
exclusively in moral well-doing ; and upon the afternoon
the Book of Jonah, in which they were well able to point
out that God spared Nineveh, not because the people
fasted and covered them with sackcloth, but because they
turned from their evil way and from the violence that
was in their hands. Dr. Edersheim — no friend of the
law and the Eabbis — declares in his Commentary that
the sentiments of the following passage from Sirach
" seem almost to have become proverbial in Jewish theo-
logy:" — "He that washes himself because of a corpse and
touches it again, what avails him his washing ? So is it
with a man who fasts for his sins, and goes again and
does the same : who will hear his prayer, and what
avails him his humbling?"1
One other tendency of the ceremonial law must not be
lost sight of. The fact that there were so many religious
enactments in the perpetually recurrent occupations of
ordinary life — such, for example, as in eating and drink-
ing— tended to give a certain dignity and sanctity to
life as a whole, and to break down the distinction be-
tween holy and profane. Of course this result was only
a tendency which became marked in the exceptionally
good, just as the evil results became marked in the
exceptionally wicked. But as a really existent ten-
dency it deserves notice. The Jew was perpetually
reminded of his God. There was no arbitrary separation
1 xxxiv. 25, 26 (A.V.) ; xxxi. 25, 26 (ed. Fritzsche). Cf. a very
similar passage in Taanith, 16 a (Wunsche, Vol. II. 1, p. 438).
512 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
between week-day and sabbath in the sense that the
work-days lacked the sanctifying spirit of religion. And
if this close environment of the law could, on the one
hand, become a source of pride and sanctimoniousness or
a mere habit without particular effect one way or the
other, it could also, on the other hand, be the means of
illuminating a life of sorrow by the felt presence of
God in the glad fulfilment of his will, or of "gilding"
the pale and petty details of every-day existence with
the "heavenly alchemy" of religion.
Let us now turn to the question of the effect of the
law upon the conception of sin. In no point does the
fragmentary and untheoretic nature of the post-exilic
religion come out more clearly. There was not only no
theory as to the origin of sin, but not even a general
and fixed notion of its nature. As T have already indi-
cated, the tolerably certain and universal conviction of
individual human frailty was crossed, and to some extent
impaired, by the national sense of righteousness as com-
pared with the alien and unbelieving heathen. And
secondly, the happy feeling of the individual conscience,
not ignorant of error, but yet at peace with God, was
crossed and agitated by the national sense of corporate
solidarity, and of an accumulated and yet unatoned mass
of past and present communal iniquity. For the sense
of solidarity and of mutual responsibility with Israel
as a whole was never dissolved by the individualism of
Ezekiel and the sages. It constituted both the weakness
and the strength of the Jewish religion. It made God
near, it nerved to self-sacrifice, it prevented religious
egoism ; but it confused men's notions of sin and recon-
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 513
ciKation, .and of the absolutely separate relation of each
individual soul to its God.
" In God's sight shall no man living be justified."
""Who can say I have made my heart clean, I am pure
from my sin ?" " What is man that he should be clean ?
and he that is born of woman that he should be righ-
teous ?"! These quotations from late post-exilic writings
were taken up and enlarged upon by the Eabbis. Thus
the old prayer from which I quoted in the last Lecture
opens in the same strain : " Sovereign of all worlds ! not
because of our righteous acts do we lay our supplications
before thee, but because of thy abundant mercies. What
are we ? What is our life ? What is our piety ? What
our righteousness?" And again: "We know that we
have no good works of our own ; deal charitably with us
for thy name's sake." But the old ideas were never
fully shaken off; and in spite of a belief in immortality,
the sense of sin, reflected in such passages of the liturgy
and in the prayer of Daniel, was more often aroused by
the pressure of outward and public calamity than by
any inward assurance of the natural and innate infirmity
of every human soul.2 By way of compensation, the
1 Ps. cxliii. 3; Prov. xx. 9; Job xv. 14.
2 On the other side, however, one must not forget the doctrine oi
the evil Yetser, of which I have spoken later on. The two causes of
sinfulness are curiously combined in the supplication which Rabbi
Alexander was wont to add to the fixed prayers : " It is known before
thee that our will is to thy will ; and what hinders us 1 The leaven in
the dough ( = the evil Yetser or inclination) and our servitude to the
kingdoms. May it be thy will to save us out of their hands, that we
may again perform the statu'es of thy will with a perfect heart." Bera
2l
514 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
idea of original sin and of an historic fall never became
a dogma of the synagogue. Judaism was therefore saved
from those gloomy and fatalistic consequences so elabo-
rately worked out in Calvinistic theology.
As distinguished from the heathen and from apostates
within its own ranks, the true Israel is righteous. Hence
the sense of national or communal innocence so promi-
nent in the Psalter. And to that true Israel the writers
of these Psalms are fully conscious that they belong.
There is thus a sharp separation between good and bad ;
on the one side is righteous and upright Israel ; on the
other, the sinner or the persecutor. The one is God's
friend in spite of apparent forgetfulness and present
calamity ; the other is God's foe in spite of present
prosperity. In the Proverbs and "Wisdom literature the
same contrast and cleavage appear: the wise, on the one
hand, whose wisdom is identical with virtue ; the foolish,
on the other, whose folly is coincident with vice. And
doubtless the passage was neither distant nor difficult
between saying, " My nation and my party is in the
right," and feeling, "I individually am righteous." As
Prof. Toy has put it, "the sense of individual short-
comings " could easily have been " swallowed up in the
conviction of national innocence."1 This danger was
never overcome. It was fostered and kept alive by the
growing consciousness of privilege in the possession of
the law, just as, on the other hand, the sufferings of
choth, 17 a ( Wiinsche, Vol. I. 37). The prayers of the Rabbis in this
section of Berachoth are very beautiful and well worth reading.
1 Judaism and Christianity, p. 190.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 515
Israel suggested the idea that Israel's sins, more than
those of any other nation, are constantly "before the
Lord."1 Perhaps the two ideas together kept the moral
balance fairly even.
For even in the Psalter there is evidence that the
feeling of communal integrity as towards the outer world
was consistent and even coincident with a sense of
human frailty as towards God. "Against thee, thee
only, have I sinned." 2 Thus in one verse the author of
the forty-first Psalm can pray, " Yahveh, have pity on
me : heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee ; " in
another verse he can declare, " Thou upholdest me in my
blamelessness, and settest me before thy face for ever."
Or, again, in the thirty-first Psalm the author is not
separating himself from the true Israel, even if the
u I " is a personification, either when he affirms that his
strength breaks down because of his "guilt," or when
he invokes punishment upon the lying lips who speak
arrogantly against the " righteous." It is true that it is
frequently difficult to distinguish between the Psalmist's
sense of guilt because of his consciousness of sin, and his
sense of guilt as the consciousness of calamity. For the
same word was used by them to express both iniquity
and its penalty. Punishment, in their eyes too often a
synonym for suffering, was also the implication of
unknown or unrealized sin. When they and Israel were
afflicted, they tended to feel sinful ; when they and Israel
were prosperous, they tended — though in a less degree —
tc feel righteous and at ease. Yet with the fine instances
of the thirty-second and fifty-first Psalms, together with
1 Siracli xvii. 20 (A.Y.). 2 Ps. li. 6.
2 l 2
516 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
several touches and hints elsewhere, to support him, Prof.
Toy is probably right in saying that " it is hard to resist
the impression that we have in some of the Psalms a true
spiritual conception of sin as an impurity of soul which
, makes a barrier between it and God."1 In the Wisdom
books, although there is a lack of enthusiasm peculiar
to their species, it is clear that the sins referred to are of
a more private and personal nature, and not related to
the good or evil fortunes of Israel. Sin became more
and more identified with the violation of the law ; and
while from the national and priestly point of view
unconscious or secret transgressions were dreaded as
bringing pollution upon land and people, the legalist,
though he might pray to be delivered from both, was
yet well aware of the moral difference between voluntary
and involuntary offences. The true sin was the open and
conscious infraction of any commandment in the law.
Did, then, the legal development of post-exilic Judaism
in its accentuation of sins lose the sense of sinfulness ?
Was sin no more than the transgression of an elaborate
series of separate and isolated injunctions of equal value
and importance? Was the greatness of a man's sin
simply measurable by the number of commandments he
had overstepped or omitted ? Here no doubt was and is
the great religious danger of a nomistic religion, still
more of a nomistic religion a very large portion of the
laws of which is purely ceremonial. Man's sinfulness
varies by no means necessarily in direct ratio with the
number of his legal transgressions, even if all items in
the law are reckoned at the same rate. A man's heart
1 Judaism ami Christianity, p. 187.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 517
may bo deep-grained with egoism and selfishness, who
yet may have observed the ceremonial law in its entirety,
and conformed, outwardly at least, to the moral law.
Such a statement, as well as its converse, that an eager
and passionate nature may have incurred many lapses and
yet be morally superior to the conforming and negative
Philistine, is the merest commonplace to us, but to the
followers of the law its obviousness was obscured. With
regard, however, to the equivalence of moral and cere-
monial enactments, it must be observed that if you once
believed that God really gave an injunction such as,
"Thou shalt not wear a garment of mixed stun0 of
divers sorts," as directly and emphatically as its imme-
diate predecessor, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself," its high-handed and intentional violation could
hardly be represented to your own conscience otherwise
than as deliberate sin. But this very fact shows how
the religious element of sin tended in legal Judaism
to obscure its vital connection with morality, as well
as its deep-seated root within the soul. On the other
hand, the simplicity of the Jewish religion enabled
it to avoid in considerable measure the logical conse-
quences of its own legalism, and to escape from those
hurtful exaggerations of human sinfulness which have
so often been visible in Christianity.
We have already seen how the source of goodness was
sought in the heart. There also was known to be the
source of evil. This conception may be illustrated from
the Jewish ideas of man's capacity to fulfil the law and
of his tendency to infringe it, as well as of Grod's neces-
sary part in the overthrow of human sin.
518 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
Without ever formulating a theory, the teachers of
post-exilic Judaism were inclined to lay the greatest
stress upon man's unfettered choice between good and
evil, upon his unrestricted capacity to obey the law and
to transgress it. Man's will was free. This teaching is
nowhere expressed' more sharply than in Sirach : u Say
not thou, it is through the Lord that I transgressed, for
thou oughtest not to do what he hates. . . . He made
man at the beginning, and delivered him into the power
of his own inclination : if thou wilt, thou canst keep the
commandments. . . . Before man is life and death, and
whichever he pleases shall be given him."1 Here human
responsibility is strongly emphasized, while the attribu-
tion of Israel's sinfulness to God is but of rare and passing
occurrence. Happily also, the proneness of man to sin
was never formally and officially stiffened into a theory
of either devilish temptation or of personified sinful-
ness, as if there existed a force or principle of evil apart
from the sins and sinfulness of individuals. Satan always
belonged more to superstition and folk-lore fancy than
to the recognized creed of the leading Eabbis. Thus
what Holtzmann regards as the religious weakness of the
passage in Sirach, that " according to it sin can only be
conceived as the act of the individual, and not as a power
standing over the individual and enslaving him," seems
to me to constitute its merit and value.2 If it stood
alone, the teaching to be deduced from it would be, it
is true, one-sided. But it does not represent the whole
doctrine of Judaism. For though man's will was con-
ceived as free, and though there was no dogma of man's
1 xv. 11-17. 2 Stade, Geschkhte, Vol. II. p. 304.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 519
innate corruption, it was recognized that the human
tendency to evil is very potent, and that to overcome it
the help of God is a necessary factor.
Hence we get those frequent prayers to God that he
may direct the way and purify the heart, which runjike
a golden thread through the post-exilic literature. We
find them in Chronicles, in David's supplication that
God, who tries the heart and has pleasure in uprightness,
may give to Solomon a perfect heart to keep the divine
commandments, and may direct the heart of the people
unto their God.1 We find them in the Psalter : u Make
me to know thy ways, 0 Yahveh ; teach me thy paths ; "
" Teach me to do thy will, for thou art my God."2 This
supplication for God's needed help is constantly recur-
rent in the legal Psalm par excellence, the one hundred
and nineteenth, where the prayer, " Incline my heart
unto thy ordinances," is reiterated with almost weari-
some monotony. In the Wisdom literature, the same
Sirach who accentuates human responsibility can yet pray
to the Father and God of his life to keep him from
the sins of the flesh and from the evil desires of his
lower self.3 The very conception of wisdom, both in Pro-
verbs and Sirach, is that of a divine force which, if man
seek it, will help him to find it. Or, put less abstractly :
letra man meditate on God's commands and think conti-
nually upon his ordinances, and then God will make his
heart strong, and his desire of wisdom will be granted
him.4 In the Eabbinical literature the same thought is
also frequent. It appears in the liturgy in the twofold
1 1 Cliron. xxix. 18, 19. 2 Psalms xxv. 4, cxliii. 10, &c.
3 xxiii. 1 — 6. 4 E.£. Sirach vi. 37.
520 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
form of a prayer for understanding and a prayer for
purity of heart. " Give us understanding, 0 Lord our
God, to learn thy ways : circumcise our hearts to fear
thee." "Purify our hearts to serve thee in truth."
"Bring us not into the power of sin or of tempta-
tion ; let not the evil inclination have sway over us ; but
subdue our inclination, so that it may submit itself unto
thee." * Eepentance needs the same power of divine grace.
"Cause us to return, 0 our Father, unto thy law; draw
us near, 0 our King, unto thy service, and bring us back
in perfect repentance unto thy presence. Blessed art
thou, 0 Lord, who delightest in repentance."2
It is true that, as we have seen, the doctrine of God's
holy spirit remained inchoate, and that the nature of this
divine help towards goodness and repentance was not
explained to be the presence of the divine spirit within
the soul. The prayer of the fifty-first Psalm, "Take
not thy holy spirit from me," stands, as Professor Stade
has said, isolated in the Psalter. But the essence of the
matter was attained without the theory.
As the source of good and evil was sought in the
constitution of the will — both on its moral and intellec-
tual side — it is clear that sin was not looked upon as a
mere violation of single and separate injunctions. The
early Rabbinic prayer just quoted, "Let not the evil
inclination have sway over us," implies a religious psy-
1 Cf. the passage in the Grace after Meals in the Portuguese Ritual :
" May the most merciful plant his law and his love in our hearts that
Ave sin not." (Forms of Prayers according to the Custom of the Spanish
and Portuguese Jews, ed. Sola and Artoni, Vol. I. p. 169).
2 Authorized Prayer-book, pp. 7, 46, 55, 74, 139, &c.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 521
chology parallel to, though less dogmatically worked out
than, the Pauline doctrine of the inherent and natural
corruption of the human heart. It is the conception of
two impulses or inclinations within the soul, one evil and
the other good, which struggle for the mastery. A com-
plete and scientific delineation of the Talmudic doctrine
of the two inclinations — the evil Yetser and the good —
would not only be of great interest in itself, but would
also show how fully the Eabbis understood that the
outward violation of the law depended upon an inward
tendency.1
If, then, sin, proceeding ultimately from the evil ele-
ment in man's composite nature, is natural and necessary to
all, how may it be so far checked and removed that God
may pardon the transgressor on the one hand, and that
he may lead a better life upon the other? Post-exilic
Judaism had two main streams of teaching out of which
to form its doctrine of reconciliation and atonement.
There was, first of all, the simple prophetic teaching :
Eepent ; do good instead of evil, and God will forgive
your sin, and " wipe out " your transgressions. While
the earlier prophets never doubted that such repentance
and amendment were within the power of all, the exilic
teachers, and Ezekiel most prominently, though not omit-
ting the summons to repentance, yet often declared that
the new heart must be the gift of God. God's part in
human repentance was, as we have seen, recognized both
1 I may note in passing that Mr. Schechter informs me that in a
very large proportion of cases in which the evil inclination is spoken
of as soliciting to sin, the sin relates to some form of unchastity in
thought or deed.
522 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
in the later teaching of the Bible and by the Eabbis.
But the first element in any doctrine of divine forgive-
ness which lay ready to hand was that of practical amend-
ment— the deliberate abandonment of sin and the active
practice of virtue. Isaiah's explanation of repentance is
summed up in the words : " Cease to do evil, learn to do
well."
Parallel with this prophetic doctrine went the less
ethical teaching of the priestly law. Here the rules of
the sin-offering sprang from a totally different order of
conceptions, and were liable to lead to unspiritual and
unethical results. It is true that the sin-offering was
practically limited to unintentional offences, moral care-
lessness or slipshod flightiness of speech ; and it is also
true that a main element in the rite was not so much to
secure forgiveness for the individual, as the removal of
the pollution of his sin from the sanctuary and from the
community at large. Nevertheless, although even in
the Psalter voices are raised against the efficacy of
sacrifice, though the sages repeat the prophetic teaching
of the absolute worthlessness of the offerings of the
wicked, and Sirach even shows a certain tendency to
emphasize the point of view that sacrifices are to be
brought because they happen to be ordered in the law
and not because of their atoning efficacy, — yet, while the
temple existed, the mere continuance of the sacrificial
system must have had a certain unspiritual and super-
stitious effect. Vague ideas about the power of sacrifice
were current, which were not even sanctioned by the
letter of the code. Of these we may trace a specimen in
the prologue and epilogue to Job, where, in the first
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 523
place, Job is represented as offering a sacrifice after the
feastings of his sons, lest "they had sinned and de-
nounced God in their hearts ; " and afterwards God orders
Job's friends to bring a burnt-offering, while his servant
should pray for them to appease his wrath, lest he deal
with them after their folly.1
When the temple was destroyed, such superstitions
tended naturally to die from inanition. But the Day of
Atonement remained; and though in the Levitical legis-
lation this annual rite is clearly national and not indi-
vidual, a deep crust of superstition gradually surrounded
it when its celebration was, as it were, transferred from
the temple to the synagogue. It was supposed that God
went through an annual process of judging and forgiving,
and each individual was only too willing to apply to
himself the words of the Scripture, " On that day shall
he make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye
may be clean from all your sins before Yahveh." But,
happily for Judaism, the mere sacrificial element in the
Day-of- Atonement ritual as well as in the theory of the
sin-offering, took no deep hold. It was too purely priestly.
The consequence was that it was easy for the Eabbis to
teach that charity or repentance was an accepted substi-
tute or equivalent for sacrifice.2 For according to the
prophetic teaching, which was only dimmed but never
abrogated by the introduction of the priestly law, repent-
ance had all along been regarded as the true means of
reconcilement and forgiveness. While, on the one hand,
1 Job i. 5, xlii. 8.
2 E.g. Pesikta, ed. Buber, 158 a (Wunsche's translation, p. 227.
The whole 25th section on Repentance is very interesting).
524 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
it was an ethical and spiritual loss that the doctrine of
conscious self-sacrifice taught in Isaiah liii. was not more
widely developed and inculcated by the synagogue, the
loss was to some small extent obliterated by a compensa-
tory gain. For Judaism avoided all those ethical troubles
and difficulties involved in theories of vicarious atone-
ment and imputed righteousness which have so largely
followed from the teaching of Paul and of the Epistle
to the Hebrews.
The main doctrine of Judaism on the subject of atone-
ment is therefore comprised in the single word Repent-
ance. And under repentance was included and under-
stood amendment. It was not believed that there is ever
any radical impossibility to repent and to reform. It is
never too late to mend. The simple adage of the sage
sums up the developed teaching of the later Judaism,
which, on this side, had nothing to add to it : "He who
covers his sins shall not prosper, but whoso confesses and
forsakes them shall have mercy."1 Or, as Sirach has
phrased it: "To depart from wickedness is that which
pleases God ; to give up unrighteousness is atonement."2
It was exceedingly fortunate that the sages and
Eabbis had such a close grip upon true repentance. It
was well that they recognized its import both morally,
as indicative of a changed heart, and religiously, as the
condition precedent of divine forgiveness. For the legal-
ism of their religion incurred a considerable danger in
regard to this very matter, and there is undoubtedly
1 Proverbs xxviii. 13.
2 Sirach xxxv. 3 (A.V.), xxxii. 3 (Fritzsclic) ; cf. Pesikta, ed. Buber,
163 a and b (Wiinscbe's translation, pp. 234, 235).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 525
some evidence that the danger was not entirely overcome.
Goodness, to the legalist, is the performance of the law's
injunctions; wickedness or sin is their transgression.
Hence, first of all, there was the danger of thinking to
acquire credit by the performance of a multiplicity of
commands. God might be conceived as keeping an
account for and against every individual; every law
fulfilled was so much to the good; every law trans-
gressed, so much to the bad.1 The balance would decide
whether a man was good or bad, deserving of punish-
ment or of reward. There are certain indications that
from this mechanical externalism Jewish teaching was
not wholly free. Yet the peril was often avoided by
the continual insistance upon the emptiness of human
worth in the eyes of ideal righteousness. Examples
of this saving thought have already been quoted from
the Jewish liturgy. As an early instance of the false
doctrine of merit, the petition of Nekemiak — "Kemem-
ber this, 0 God, to my good," — in other words, "put
it to my credit," — has been repeatedly quoted by modern
theologians. But their censure had been anticipated
by a Eabbi of the Talmud who when asked, Why was
the book of Ezra not called by the name of Nehemiah ?
replied to the question, "Because he insisted upon his
merits."2 When the idea of merit is applied to the
forgiveness of sin, it would assume the form that man
might buy off his punishment by a number of virtuous
acts. Thus could the taint of sin within the soul be
forgotten, and the stress be laid upon the importance of
1 Cf. Aboth iii. 25.
2 Sanhedrin, 93 b (Wunsche, Vol. II. 3, p. 1G9).
526 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE,
escaping punishment by an amount of legal performance
which would outweigh the amount of preceding iniquity.
This is the doctrine of "good works" in its crudest and
most unspiritual form. Certain well-known passages from
Daniel, Sirach and Tobit are invariably quoted as evi-
dence that in the Maccabean period Judaism had fallen
a victim to this unethical and mechanical teaching.
It is twice said in the Book of Proverbs that while
riches profit not in the day of wrath, righteousness
delivers from death.1 It is probable that righteousness
in these passages is nearly identical with beneficence.
In later Hebrew the word TsedaJcah acquired a more
specific meaning, and is commonly translated "alms-
giving;" but if this translation be kept, it must be
understood that the word was often loosely used to con-
note not merely the giving of money, but all forms of
beneficence to the poor, the dependent and the oppressed.2
Although by the later Rabbis charity in the higher sense,
or the doing of kindnesses, as they called it, was distin-
guished from almsgiving and appraised above it, still the
letter of Scripture was sufficient to make them continually
reiterate the doctrine that almsgiving "delivers from
death." An immense importance was attached by all
Jewish teachers, from the Prophets onward, to the active
and friendly succouring of the poor and indigent. Thus
Daniel recommends Nebuchadrezzar to " break off, or
cancel, his sins by almsgiving, and his iniquities by
showing mercy to the poor;" and Tobit advises his son
1 Prov. x. 2, xi. 4.
2 Cf. Kethuboth, 50 a; Baba Eatlira, 8 a (Wiinsclie, Vol. II. 2,
p. 121).
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 527
to give alms rather than to lay up gold, " because alms
deliver from death and will purge away all sin." Sirach
teaches that "water will quench a naming fire, and alms
make an atonement for sins." Moreover, the same
writer puts another cardinal virtue upon the same level :
" Whoso honours his father, makes atonement for his sin ;
and he that honours his mother is as one that lays up
treasure. For compassion to thy father will not be
forgotten, and in spite of thy sins thou shalt again be
built up. In the day of thy trouble the Lord will
remember thee; as warm weather on ice, so shall thy
sins melt away."1
It is clear that doctrine of this kind was liable to
lead to-hypocrisy and superstition. It was perhaps the
greatest spiritual danger to which Judaism was exposed.
It tended to make the hatefulness of sin as a moral
disease forgotten and ignored, and to lay the misfortune
of it upon the possible evil consequences to the sinner.
It tended to make men think that so and so many sins
could be cancelled by so and so many meritorious acts,
and to attribute a magical effect to the mere external
performance of almsgiving. It tended to destroy the
unity of human character, as if it were nothing more
than a number of actions, law-breaking and law-fulfil-
ling. It tended to make men think that God also, in
his capacity of Judge, took the same mechanical view of
human nature, and that, keeping a register of every
man's acts, both good and evil, he would allow a number
of so-called "good deeds" to cancel the punishment,
which in another world was supposed to await the evil-
1 Daniel iv. 24 (Heb.); Tobit xii. 9; Sirach iii. 3, 4, U, 15, 30.
528 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
doer. We can see that superstitions such as these, from
which, if the written religious teaching of the Rabbis is
not entirely free, we may be certain that the religion of
the average worshipper was far less exempted, were
precisely similar to those Romanist doctrines against
which the fresh Pauline teachers of the Reformation so
loudly and so rightly protested.
That the slippery adage, " Almsgiving delivers from
death," had less evil effect in the course of Jewish
teaching than might have been expected was partly due
to the untheoretic nature of Judaism, on which funda-
mental characteristic it has been advisable to insist so
often. No fixed and formulated dogma of " good works "
was ever worked out and accepted by the synagogue ; and
far more frequent than any notion of striking a balance
upon the right side in the moral account with God is the
doctrine that human merits are as nothing in his sight,
and that man depends for his salvation upon God's mercy
and loving-kindness.
Nor must it be forgotten that the good works cited
in Sirach as efficacious for atonement are, at the worst,
moral actions and not ceremonial rites. No doubt the
particularizing is dangerous. But the original writers
would scarcely have allowed that a perfunctory alms-
giving, which was not the visible expression of a
" repentance in the heart," as Sirach terms it,1 would
have secured the desired atonement. And the Rabbis
taught the same. Their literature is full of adages and
stories about the glories and virtues of this sovereign
quality. Repentance, as in the doctrine of momentary
1 Sirach xxi. 0.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 529
conversion, can give immediate entrance to the king-
dom of heaven.1 It can accomplish in an hour what
the ordinary individual is not sure of achieving in a
lifetime.2 Where the penitents stand, the faultlessly
righteous stand not.3 " Better," said Eabbi Jacob, in the
first half of his famous paradox, " is one hour of repent-
ance and good works in this world than all the life of
the world to come."4
The effects of the law upon the Jewish conception
of righteousness and sin have been, though sketchily
and inadequately, yet not, as I hope, partially or unfairly,
set down in the foregoing paragraphs. To avoid one-
sidedness, to admit an inconsistent variety of teach-
ing, never to forget the undogmatic character of the
material before us, or the grave impropriety of forcing
it into certain preconceived categories at the risk of
misinterpretation and omission, will be as necessary and
as difficult when we now come to consider the motives
which induced the Jews of the second temple and the
long Rabbinical period to observe the law.
If a pious Jew of the Maccabean and post-Maccabean
period had been asked why he obeyed the law, he would
probably have failed to understand the question. To
obey the law was to him absolutely identical with the
fulfilment of God's certain will. To ask why he obeyed
God's will, would have seemed as meaningless and irre-
ligious a question as to ask an idealist, " Why are you
good." The law, in his eyes, was the best and noblest
1 Cf. Pesikta Eabbatbi, ed. Friedman, 185 a; Joraa, 86 a.
2 Cf. Abodah Zarah, 17 a; Genesis Kabba, Ixv. 22.
I Berachoth, 31 b. i Aboth iv. 24 (ed. Taylor).
2 M
•
530 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
and sweetest thing in all the world : it was the summum
boimm, the supreme good, and for the~en"6Mn itselftEere
is no accounting. Our pious Jew could, of course, have
explained to you what effects the observance of the law
had upon himself, upon Israel and upon God ; but if you
could have laid bare the recesses of his heart, you would
have found that the law's effects must not be identified,
off-hand, with the motives for its observance. Its effect
for God was the diffusion of his glory; its effect for
Israel was the possible advent of the Messianic age ; its
effects for the individual were the assurance of present
bliss, the possibility of present happiness, and the cer-
tainty of future " reward."1 By "reward," to the
developed Eabbinic Jew, must be understood the fuller
knowledge and the spiritual beatitudes of the life to
come, both immediately after death by the disembodied
spirit, and after the resurrection by the risen body once
more united with its vivifying soul.
Now several Christian theologians not only identify
the motives impelling to the observance of the law with
its effects, but they single out of the three effects the
egoistic effect alone, that, namely, of the law upon the
individual. Moreover, while that effect was explained
to consist in the assurance of present bliss, the possibility
of present happiness and the certainty of future reward,
they entirely omit from consideration the first clause, the
assurance of present bliss, and limit the effect — and tliero-
1 By " bliss," I understand the higher felicity which accompanied
the execution of God's commands, be external circumstances what they
might; by "happiness," the lower felicity which accompanied such
external circumstances if they were prosperous and fortunate.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 531
fore the motive — to the possibility of present happiness
and the certainty of future reward.
How far do such an identification and limitation inter-
pret or misinterpret the facts ?
The argument, " Obey the law because it will pay you
to do so/' constitutes unquestionably the fundamental
motive of Deuteronomy. Perhaps the authors of that
book thought it was the only way in which they could
get an idolatrous and recalcitrant population to accept
their various and startling innovations; but, however
this may be, the motive for observance is clear: "that
it may be well with thee " — that " thy days may be pro-
longed," as it says in the fifth Commandment, and so
on. Press this motive home, and you seem to deal a
death-blow to goodness and religion. Morals and piety
become nothing more than the wiser policy. Above all
— a crucial point — the law is no longer an end, but a
means, the means to one's own prosperity. Happiness
is the end. The more eager you are for prosperity, the
more likely will you be to obey the law : the more fear-
ful you are of punishment and of the God who will inflict
it, the less likely will you be to infringe the law, on the
one hand, but the more servile will be your obedience,
upon the other.
Now the Christian theologians appear to suppose, if I
rightly understand them, that this motive is the necessary
religious motive, when religion takes the aspect of law.
The more, therefore, the law in later times became the
very flesh and blood of the Jewish religion, and the more
its ceremonial enactments became regarded as equally
divine with its moral enactments, the more did this
2 m2
532 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
motive necessarily become the only possible religious
motive which induced the Jew to obey the law. Legal-
ism, they assert, brings slavishness and eudoemonism by
logical necessity in its train. It is not merely a general
conviction, Do God's will and you will prosper ; but since
a certain meed of punishment is expected for the trans-
gression, and a certain meed of reward is expected for
the fulfilment, of each separate legal injunction, in all
cases and circumstances the dual motive of fear and hope
is always and ever alone before the mind. Thus, after
pointing out that the laws of the priestly legislation are
almost exclusively ceremonial, Prof. Schultz continues
thus : " These laws simply demand obedience. The
motives for keeping them can therefore be nothing but
the fear of God and the anticipation of reward or pun-
ishment. Moreover, as each individual commandment
stands by itself and cannot be fitted into the uniform
and harmonious body of moral truths, eudsemonistic and
heteronomous considerations must come into play in each
individual case, and cannot merely form a general pre-
supposition to a man's habitual moral attitude. Hence
they become dangerous and enslaving, and tend to de-
grade the mind." 1 So too, Prof. Schiirer, while quoting
the famous saying of Antigonus of Socho, "Be not like
servants who minister to their masters upon the condition
of receiving a reward, but be like servants who minister
to their masters without the condition of receiving a
reward," goes on to say: "This adage is in nowise a
1 H. Schultz, " Die Beweggriinde zum sittlichen Handeln in dem
vorchristlichen Israel," Theologiscke Studien und Kritiken, 1890,
P-41.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 533
correct expression of the fundamental disposition of
Pharisaic Judaism. That Judaism in truth resembled
servants who serve for the sake of their reward."1
This statement is made with perfect good faith, but in
strange violation of the facts. It is curious that these
critics are apt to excuse the eudsemonistic and utilitarian
motive in Deuteronomy, while they emphasize it one-
sidedly in the Rabbis. They are at pains to show that
it is not the only motive to be found in Deuteronomy,
while they assure us that it constituted the sole motive
of Pharisaic Judaism. Whereas the truth is exactly
opposite. The eudgemonistic motive is strongest in Deu-
teronomy ; it is weakest with the Rabbis. It was the
only motive to which the founders of the legal develop-
ment could appeal : it was but one among many when
the development was completed.
This movement is historically traceable. The doctrine
of retribution is not ignored. As we have seen, in one
form or another, it is clung to with intense conviction ;
but to the lover of the law, the motive of his obedience
detaches itself with ever-increasing clearness from the
effect. In the priestly code we hear less of the motives of
hope and fear than in Deuteronomy. In it, the prevail-
ing motives are rather the honour and glory of God, and
in the background the bringing on of the Messianic age,
in the beatitudes of which, however, no resurrection would
enable the first observers of the law to join. In the
hymn of the law — the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm
— the hope of external reward and the fear of punish-
ment occupy a still smaller space ; and in the Rabbinical
1 Getchichte, Vol. II. p. 390 (E. T., Div. ii. Vol. II. p. 93).
534 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
literature the thought emerges triumphant that the
essence of observance lies in itself and not in its external
rewards. In other words, the motive became purer as
God and his law were loved more deeply, and as they
were more implicitly believed to be good.
The law was obeyed because it was the will of God,
and God was loved and conceived to be infinitely good
and gracious, seeking Israel's welfare and well-being,
and loving his people as a father loves his son. It is
impossible to deny that these beliefs were really held by
the post-exilic community, and through the entire Eab-
binical period. But if they were really held, is it not
clear that they must have become motives ? People say,
"What has a petty detail of ceremonial observance to do
with the reverence and love of God ? In our eyes, nothing.
But if you came to believe that the good and wise God
who loves you, and whom you love, had ordained a
certain ceremonial, would you not logically be impelled to
execute the rite, even although you knew nothing of
its reason — to execute it gladly, for God's sake, because
his revealed will must be wise and must be good ?
The law, as we have seen, was no burden to the true
believer. It was a high prerogative. It was therefore
obeyed for its own sake, because the observance of it was
an exceeding joy. " Thy law is my delight : thy com-
mandment is exceeding broad. Thy law do I love : great
peace have they which love it." l Now this loving enthu-
1 Psalm cxix. 96, 163, 165, &c. Mr. Schechter once wrote to me:
" I think that Ruskin felt his way to a conception of the law truer
than the expositions of all our theologians." See Frondes Agrestcs, ix.,
§76.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 535
siasm for the law is commonly allowed to the author of
the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm ; why is it denied
to the Eabbis who felt it a thousand times more keenly,
and proved it on a thousand scaffolds by the sacrifice of
their lives? But Prof. Schultz says, the main bulk of
the law is ceremonial, and the ceremonial law can only
be observed out of fear of punishment or hope of reward.1
Here we have the logic of theory at variance with the
logic of facts. Prof. Schultz cannot imagine how the
details of the ceremonial law can be anything else than a
sore burden — very tiresome and irksome annoyances, only
submitted to through lust for gain or fear of evil. But
it was precisely the ceremonial law which was most of
all performed for its own sake and for the love of God.
Clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and the end lies
partly in the subsequent effect; but say the sabbath
blessing, lay the Tefillin, or cleanse the house from leaven
before the Passover, and the end and the joy lie purely
in the acts themselves. A spiritual bliss was felt in the
execution of each divine command, a true religious rap-
ture in seemingly the most puerile of observances. The
law brought down heaven to earth, and made the presence
of God felt within the soul. The profusion of ceremonial
injunctions is the high privilege of Israel. As the recom-
pence of sin is sin, so the recompence of command is
command.2 According to E. Eleazar, the true felicity of
the man who delights in God's commandments is due to
this, that he delights in their performance, but does not
1 "Die Beweggrlinde," &c, pp. 40, 41.
2 Aboth iv. 5 (ed. Taylor).
53G IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
solicit their rewards whether in this world or in the
next.1
The still prevalent popular usage of the word Mitsvah
tells its own truthful tale. Mitsvah has, on the one
hand, acquired the meaning of a meritorious act. This
appears to substantiate the critical theory that the motive
of the observauce was to acquire a store of merit, and
therefore of merit's reward. It really only emphasizes the
fact that the effect of the observance was never lost sight
of, and that the doctrine of retribution was often mecha-
nically interpreted. On the other hand, Mitsvah has
acquired the meaning of privilege, and hence a cere-
monial detail connected with the law is often called a
Mitsvah, although it is not an ordinance or an act from
which any reward is anticipated. A stranger entering
an orthodox synagogue, is entrusted, as an honour and a
privilege, with some small ceremony in the bringing out
of the scroll of the law from the ark, or in its return.
Such an honour, though no legal injunction, is yet called
a Mitsvah.
The question presents itself, whether a full and even
exaggerated belief in retribution cannot co-exist with a
love of the law for its own sake ? Does it necessarily
make the lust for reward (Lohnsucht) the only motive
for the law's observance ? Prof. Schultz allows that the
law won the love of the Israelites (he does not directly
say " of the Pharisaic Jews "), and was adopted by
1 Abodah Zarah, 19 a. (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 3, p. 344) ; cf. Sifri, 79 b,
84 b ; Yalkut, i. § 862. Maimonides, on Sanhedrin xi. ; Schechter,
"Doctrine of Divine Retribution in the Kabbinical Literature," Jewish
Quarterly Review, Vol. III. p. 49.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 537
thorn with free resolve as the rule of their lives. But
because the law was mainly ceremonial, this love of the
law could produce, according to him, no truly ethical,
motive. It was at bottom " nothing but a purely reli-
gious resolve of free and unconditional obedience to the
divine will, arising from the admiration of the beauty
and wisdom of an ideal life, which God has introduced
into the world."1
Now a religious resolve of free and unconditional
obedience to the will of God would seem to be no bad
motive after all. For we know that the Jews believed
that God was loving, and that his will was wise and
good. Prof. Schultz himself, in the same essay from
which I have been quoting, had already said that a
religious motive can become truly ethical, if believing
in the love of God and in the identity of his will with
the good, you freely and inwardly give yourself up to
this will. Where, then, is the difference ? Prof. Schultz
obviously thinks that difference there is, for to the sen-
tence denning what the Jewish motive of loving the law
really amounted to, he adds, in brackets, the two bare
words : "national pride." Whether the martyrdom and
fidelity of centuries are adequately explained by "na-
tional pride " may be fairly doubted. It is a matter less
of formal debate than of subjective feeling. At any rate,
even national pride is something different from the lust
of reward. The real connection between the love of the
law and the hope of reward was rather that, as piety was
the result of the former, it was, and in the last resort
needs must be, conditioned by the latter. For Well-
1 "Die Beweggriinde," &c, p. 41.
538 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
hausen himself has acknowledged : " Piety cannot main-
tain itself if God makes no difference between the
godly and the wicked, and has nothing more to say to
the one than to the other; for piety is not content to
stretch out its hands to the empty air — it must meet an
arm descending from heaven. It needs a reward, not for
the reward's sake, but in order to be sure of its own
reality, in order to know that there is a communion of
God with man and a road by which to reach it."1
Surely these words explain the presence of the doctrine
of retribution in all theistic religions. As the reward is
deferred to a future life, so the eudeenionistic element
becomes more spiritual. This was equally the case both
with Judaism and Christianity. The teaching of Jesus
does not lack the doctrine of punishment and reward.
It is prominent even in the Beatitudes. "They that
mourn now will be comforted ; they that do hunger and
thirst after righteousness shall be filled. They that are
meek shall inherit the earth. They that are pure in
heart shall see God." Precisely similar to these utter-
ances is the teaching of the Kabbis. And both they and
Jesus, as men of religion and not as philosophers, declared,
" Do God's will , his will is good," rather than " Because
his will is good, therefore do it."
It is not unnatural that Jews should feel the charge
of interested motive somewhat sorely. History assures
them of its inaccuracy. Deep-seated particularism is a
true count in the indictment of Judaism : the puerility
of great sections of the ceremonial law is another. A
base motive is not a third. And if it is not accurate,
1 Abriss, p. 92 ; History of Israel, p. 504.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 539
it is insulting. For to say — and this is what the alle-
gation involves — that the faithfulness of centuries has
been mere hireling service ; that the blood of number-
less martyrs was poured out, and that the anguish of
myriads of forgotten souls was endured, for greed of gain
or for fear of penalties ; that the love of God and of his
law, which from the Maccabees of old to the Eussian
Jews of to-day has withstood a hundred persecutions,
and triumphed over nameless woes, was no love at all,
but a mere yearning for reward — outward, material
reward; that all this unselfishness was selfishness, all
this devotion, pride, and all this sacrifice a sham, — this is
surely one of the most cruel and virulent insults which
can be levelled at men created, as well as their maligners,
in the image of God.
If the law, then, is a blessed and blissful privilege
which God has given Israel because he loved him, did
this high privilege make God distant or bring him near ?
Did it constitute and produce a spiritual communion
between God and man, or render such communion un-
known and impossible ? Was the relation of the Pha-
risaic Jew to God — the Jew who loved God's law and
realized his highest bliss in its fulfilment — that of slave
to master, or that of child to father? We recall the
pointed antithesis which was quoted at the close of the
last Lecture. " The Jew is God's servant, who labours
to deserve eternal life by his conformity to the law ; the
Christian is God's child, who already possesses eternal
life and lives in blissful communion with the Father in
time and eternity." Have we not been able to see that
this crisp antithesis lacks the qualification of a real cor-
540 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
respondence with the facts? "Beloved are Israel, for
they are called children of God. Beloved are Israel, for
unto them was given the law.1'1 The Sonship and the
Fatherhood were both realized in the fulfilment of the
law. It is very strange that whereas some Protestant
theologians have laid it down that present communion
with God was made impossible by the law, the Rabbis
believed that it was veritably the law which made such
communion a full and actual possibility.2 "Was I not
justified in saying that the law, as the mediating link
between God and man, fulfilled something of the same
office as the person of Christ in the various phases of
Christianity ? Without ignoring the dangerous particu-
larism of the Jewish mediation, we must not be blind to
its spiritual effects within the borders of the community.
In the pictorial language of the Midrash, before the law
was given, heaven and earth were still separate and
apart ; but at the season of its bestowal, Moses went up
to heaven, and God came down upon the earth.3
"Beloved are Israel, for they are called children of
God." Did the Father love the children, but the chil-
dren tremble before the Father? Is the love of God
unknown to Judaism? It is an interesting fact that,
frequently as man's love to God is spoken of in Deute-
ronomy, it is rarely alluded to in the later books of the
Old Testament and in the Apocrypha.4 The fear of God,
on the other hand, is a predominating note in the Wisdom
1 Aboth iii. 22, 23.
2 Cf. Exodus Kabbah, xii. 3 ; Pesikta, ed. Buber, lb, 2 a.
3 Pesikta, ed. Buber, 105 a (ad init.); Wiinsche's translation, p. 134.
4 In the Rabbinical literature it reappears.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 541
literature, arid is also repeatedly mentioned in the Psalms
and elsewhere. But this fear was no longer what the
fear of Yahveh had been before the exile. It combines
reverence and devotion, and it rather includes love than
opposes it. The love of God may be known, even if it
be not specifically mentioned : who will say that the
Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels does not inculcate love to
God, and yet, except in his quotation from Deuteronomy,
he seems to name it definitely but once?1 Precisely the
same ethical issues are attributed to the fear of God as to
the love of God. Thus the Sage declares : " The fear of
Yahveh is the hatred of evil ; " and the Psalmist exclaims :
" Ye that love Yahveh, hate evil." And Sirach uses the
two expressions indiscriminately : " They that fear the
Lord will not disobey his word ; and they that love him
will keep his ways. They that fear the Lord will seek that
which is pleasing unto him ; and they that love him are
filled with the law."2 Thus the fear of God to the law-
loving Pharisaic Jew had practically driven out fear, and
through the spiritual joy of fulfilling God's will he lived
in blissful communion with the Father in time and
eternity.
To give a short and yet true characterization of the
post-exilic religion, as a whole, is overwhelmingly diffi-
cult. It is so easy to fix attention upon this side of it
or on that, and then, according to individual inclination,
to praise it or condemn. The danger is greatest for the
master of epigram. Hence the comparative failure, even
of so great a critic as Wellhausen, to characterize the
1 Luke xi. 42.
2 Prov. viii. 13; Ps. xcvii. 10; Sirach ii. 15, 10.
542 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
Pharisees. " The sum of the means became the end :
through the Torah God was forgotten." 1 How tellin^,
and how false ! An habitual lack of impartiality upon
the Christian side seems mainly due to the influence of
St. Paul. The Eabbinic religion is doomed because Paul
abjured it. But the verdict of Paul, one of the greatest
religious geniuses the world has ever known, cannot be
accepted without demur. "Wellhausen speaks of him
somewhere as the great pathologist of Judaism, who
understood and saw through the religion as never
another. If this be so, then clearly Judaism is a
worthless religion, the followers of which for eighteen
hundred years have been puffed up with self-righteous-
ness or crushed with despair. They can never have
known what it is to love God in purity and truth.
For if you estimate the Judaism of the first century
according to Paul's judgment, you estimate at the same
value the Judaism of eighteen hundred years ! But
to accept Paul as a correct critic of Judaism is a fal-
lacy. Do you consider that a convert from Liberalism
to Toryism is the most adequate and impartial judge of
the political system which he has abandoned ? Is a
convert from evangelical Protestantism to Eoman Catho-
licism the best judge and critic of evangelical theology ?
Would you accept his evidence without cavil, and say
that just because he abandoned the religion of his fathers
for possibly a greater and fuller faith7 he was the best
possible critic and pathologist of the religion he has
forsaken ?
The post-exilic religion may be looked at with some
1 Die Phar idler unci die Sadducaer, 1874, p 19.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 543
advantage and comprehensiveness from two general
points of view : first, from that of the undogmatic and
nntheoretic nature of its various beliefs; and secondly,
from that of its all-embracins; legalism.
A main cause of the chaotic character of its religious
beliefs was the heavy burden of a sacred Scripture
whereof every sentence was necessarily true. The Babel
of different doctrines in the Canon of the Old Testament
was regarded as equally accurate and divine throughout.
jSTotions of sin and of retribution, conceptions of God's
nature and character, which at the close of the Canon had
been essentially outgrown, hung yet as a confusing and
darkening sediment in the wine-cup of religious truth.
For as the Bible was practically the total literature of
the Jews, and its study their only spiritual and intel-
lectual interest, the loading teachers knew the whole
book — which, after all, is not a very large one — by heart,
and were weighed clown by its authority. Some things,
of course, were explained away ; but many more were
simply accepted as they stood, and the unperceived con-
trarieties lay all juxtaposed and unharmonized within the
believer's mind. But, secondly, the lack of system and
precision in religious dogma was a relief to the super-
abundance of them in religious practice. As the Christian
schoolmen argued about subtleties of belief, so the Jewish
Babbis argued about subtleties of practice. Their imagi-
nation was given full rein outside the borders of the law.
Both good and evil effects, as we have already per-
ceived, arose from this want of articulation and ordered
sequence in the field of religious theory. On the one
hand, Judaism was spared the evils which ensue when
544 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
doctrines, true up to a certain point, but with their own
admixture of falsehood, are stiffened into dogmas and
pushed to a wild extreme. To this fluidity of teaching,
it was partly due that the frequent adage, " Almsgiving
delivers from death," was never developed into a hard-
and-fast dogma of good works, leading to wide-spread
moral corruption. Hence, too, Judaism was spared the
moral and religious evils which have resulted from a
one-sided exaggeration of such dogmas as those of pre-
destination or justification by faith. It was able to
include and find room for various sides of truths, which
are perhaps too complex and difficult to be ever harmo-
niously realized, without defect or excess, by the mind
of man.
A typical Jew could pray that God might forgive him
his sins or teach him the statutes of life, and yet, in the
same breath, he could avouch his unqualified fidelity to
the law. He could believe that God leaves no sin un-
punished ; he could believe that with God is forgiveness.
He could fulfil the law and feel at peace with God ; he
could realize that there is no man who has not yielded
to sin. He could pray to a Father who is in heaven,
and could assert that God is unconfined by space. He
could hope by his own well-doing to merit a place in the
world to come ; he could aver with pious sincerity that
it was only by divine "grace" that he would attain it.
He could appreciate Leviticus, and he could appreciate
Isaiah. For the prophetic lesson upon the greatest fast-
day in the year, he could choose a chapter which asserts
the idle inutility of all outward forms. He could welcome
the joys of material prosperity ; he could despise them in
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 545
comparison with a single commandment of the law. He
conld proclaim that man alone is responsible for his
deeds ; he could urge the necessity of God's help in the
triumph over evil. He could loudly asseverate the inno-
cency of Israel ; he could earnestly exclaim that Israel is
destitute of righteousness. He could believe that calamity
betokens sin ; he could be convinced that suffering is the
gift of love.
For every mood of the human spirit he had a doctrine
and a verse to suit. Jewish legalism was systematized
by St. Paul, and misinterpreted. An orthodox Jew
would have entirely failed to grasp the gist of Paul's
diatribes against the law. The doctrine of "the law as
the strength of sin" would have had no meaning for
him. In its very combination of opposites, Judaism was
an admirable religion for the shifting requirements of
every-day life.
On the other hand, the dead weight of Scripture and
a lack of intellectual interest in the precision of dogma
led to many unfortunate results. Some of the old, out-
worn ideas were never frankly cast off; some of the
better ideas never advanced to a clear and unquestioned
primacy. Unchecked religious imagination gave birth
to many wild absurdities. Numberless superstitions
crept in as the centuries rolled on. jSTo great genius
arose on native soil, and as a servant of the law.
Such minds as Philo, Maimonides, Spinoza, receive
their inspiration from the foreigner, and the greatest
of them all emancipates himself from Judaism and the
law even more thoroughly than St. Paul. No master-
mind in post-exilic Judaism set forth with commanding
2 N
54G IX. THE IAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
and authoritative utterance a comprehensive doctrine
of man's relations to God and to society. Its litera-
ture contains an abundant quantity of noble, though
conflicting, sayings on morals and religion, but little
more. Systematic study was only devoted to religious
jurisprudence, and thus it comes to pass that the Eab-
binic writings teem with all sorts of heterogeneous ideas
upon moral and religious subjects, which are yet only
the chance and casual expressions of a myriad different
minds. Unity is wanting.
To some extent, indeed, the missing unity of lofty
doctrine was supplied by the idealism of the law. Jewish
legalism was provocative of a high standard of work-a-
day morality, of that morality which is the real salt and
substance of human life. We have already seen that the
sanctimonious and immoral Pharisee is a ridiculous figure
to set up as the proper and necessary product of Jewish
legalism. That is the judgment of the Philistine, who
can see no good thing outside his own circle. The bad
Pharisee of the New Testament is the perversion of
legalism ; just as the antinomian, on the one hand, or the
sanctimonious hypocrite, on the other, who believes his
own sect saved and the world damned, is the perversion
of St. Paul. It must not be forgotten that the age of
Jesus was one of religious ferment and fanaticism. It
was an age of violent oppositions, unlike the long Eabbi-
nical period, inaugurated by the downfall of the temple.
Sadducee and Pharisee and Zealot, Essene and Outcast,
all figure upon the religious stage. The defects of all
parties show themselves strongly in fierce antagonism
and morbid exaggeration.
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 547
Babbinic morality was simple and pure. Legalism
sanctified the homo, and refused to accept a divorce
between religion and life. The law transfigured ordinary
life ; it did not create a sphere of special piety outside it.
Yet, earnest as life was, it was nevertheless cheerful.
The temple festivities were modified, but not discouraged,
by the law.1 Cheerfulness is, indeed, a marked feature
of post-exilic religion. Judaism looks forward, not
backward : its golden age is in the future, not in the
past: so that man's progress, rather than his mythical
fall, has become a dogma of its creed.2 Its very con-
trarieties of mood towards outward prosperity produced
a happy and satisfactory issue; morality penetrated
through Jewish society, and was a potent link or bridge
between class and class. It was real, practical and to
the point. Men were fitted to the simple duties of every-
day life, but also to the sublimest self-sacrifice for the
cause of God. The sweet charities which transform exist-
ence have perhaps nowhere been more conspicuously or
1 Cf. Delitzsch, Iris, Studies in Colour and Talks about Flowers,
in the excellent essay, "Dancing and the Criticism of the Pentateuch."
He shows conclusively, as against the too systematizing Wellhausen,
that the law by no means crushed out joy and merriment in the various
festivals of the temple.
2 The Jews were not only optimists as to the future of their com-
munity, but their religion taught them to believe that life for each
individual was, or ought to be, a good thing, a blessing of God. You
could not write of the melancholy of the Jews as Prof. Butcher writes
of the melancholy of the Greeks. Quite un-Jewish, I imagine, and
unparelleled in their literature, except in Ecclesiastes, would be the
conduct of the Trausian Thracians who, when a child was born, made
lamentation for all the evils of which he must fulfil the measure
(Herod, v. 4).
2n2
648 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
genuinely practised than in the mediaeval Jewish com-
munities. To the ethical dangers of legalism I have
already called attention. There was the danger of law
in itself, and there was the danger of the particular law
as mainly ceremonial. But we saw how the first danger
was less real than the second, and how the second
was partially neutralized, so far as the internal morality
of Judaism was concerned, by the acceptance and di (Fu-
sion of the ceremonial law throughout the entire com-
munity.
On the religious side, the chief and permanent defect
of legalism was its emphasized nationalism. Orthodox
Judaism can never utterly overcome this defect ; for
though it has ceased to teach that God loves the Jews
more than he loves the Gentiles, or deals with them
according to a different measure, its law, the embodiment
of its religion, the medium of its communion with God,
and the source of its highest bliss, remains — and must
remain — purely national or sectarian. And yet, for critics
of every school, there is no getting over the fact that
some of the highest possibilities of religion have been
evoked and conditioned by the law. It has been said that
the religion of Judaism was a soulless deism. It is a
false charge, but false because of the law. It was the
law which made God near ; it was the law which brought
him home ; it was the law by which his sanctifying pre-
sence was felt within the heart. It was the law which
cleansed the religious motive of sordidness and egoism.
It was the law under and through which that potent goal
of human purpose was devised, the sanctifieation of God,
for the sake of which torture and death were preferable
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 549
to welfare and dishonour.1 It was the law which created
a spiritual beatitude, independent of circumstance, a
beatitude which involved in a single consciousness the
doing of God's will and the sense of communion with
him. It was the law which destroyed eudcemonism. It
called into being an inner life, which, as it hinged on an
ideal conception, was unaffected by the ebb and flow of
earthly prosperity and adversity. " 0 Israel, happy are
we, for the things which please God are known to us!"2
" Happy are we, how goodly is our portion, how pleasant
is our lot, how beautiful our heritage ! " 3 Happy, pleasant,
beautiful — wherefore ? Because of outward fortune and
material success ? Not so. Because early and late, morn-
ing and evening, we declare : " Hear, 0 Israel : the
Lord our God, the Lord is One." The community prays:
" "We beseech thee, 0 Lord our God, to make the words
of thy law pleasant in our mouths and in the mouths of
thy people, the house of Israel ; so that we, our offspring,
and the offspring of our offspring, may all know thy
name and learn thy law for its own sake."4
The law for its otvn sake. The hope of retribution was
not forgotten ; but just as to the Christian the love of
Christ is its own reward, though he also believes in the
1 Etrrr W)ip. 2 Baruch iv. 4.
3 Authorized Prayer-book, p. 8.
4 Forms of Prayers accordin'i to the Custom of the Spanish and
Portuguese Jews, Vol. I. p. 8. The idea of disinterested love of God,
of serving or learning the law/w its own sake (nEtPb) is of very fre-
quent occurrence and very interesting. Rabbi Saphra was wont to
pray, " May it be thy will that all who occupy themselves with the
law not for its own sake may ultimately come to occupy themselves
with it for its own sake." Berachoth, 17 a.
550 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
recompence of "heaven," so also did the Jew believe
that the blessedness of " heaven " was, as it were, ante-
dated or anticipated by the blessedness of the law on
earth. The body of religious teaching was, as we know,
fragmentary and inconsistent, but the love of the law
linked the fragments together, and they shone trans-
figured in an ideal light. In the law, the various ele-
ments— by themselves heterogeneous and contrary —
found their union and their harmony.
It is only now that this amazing idealization of the law
is slowly breaking down, when the Pentateuch is being
estimated at its actual historic worth, and subjected to the
scalpel of a criticism which disintegrates its unity and
bereaves it of its supernatural glamour, that Judaism willT
I think, gradually begin to feel the. want of a dominant
and consistent doctrine, adequate and comprehensive, soul-
satisfying and rational, which can set forth and illumine
in its entire compass the relation of the individual to
society and to God. I am myself inclined to believe that,
from the words attributed in the Gospels to Jesus, impor-
tant elements towards the formation of such a congruous
body of doctrine could well be chosen out, elements which
would harmonize, develop and bring together the highest
religious teaching in the Old Testament and the early
Rabbinical literature, and which a prophetic, though not
a legal, Judaism, with full consistency and much advan-
tage, might adopt and cherish as its own. Doctrines and
sayings such as, " He who loses his life shall find it ; "
"Not that which goes into, but that which comes out of?
the mouth defiles a man;" " Not my will, but thine ;"
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE. 551
— can only, I venture to think, be disregarded with some
spiritual detriment to the religion which believes itself
compelled to pass them by.1 Some of the sayings ascribed
to Jesus have sunk too deep into the human heart, or,
shall I say, into the spiritual consciousness of civilized
mankind, to make it probable that any religion which
ignores or omits them will exercise a considerable influ-
ence outside its own borders. If, then, Judaism be still
destined to play a prominent and fruitful part in the
religious history of the world, it may, perhaps, be that
this new stage in its development will only ensue when
it has harmoniously assimilated to itself such of the
Gospel teachings as are not antagonistic, but complemen-
tary, to its own fundamental dogmas, and has freely and
frankly acknowledged the greatness, while maintaining
the limitations, of the illustrious Jew from whose mouth
they are reported to have come.
But is any permanent reform of Judaism within the
limits of possibility? Can Judaism burst the bonds of
legalism and particularism and remain Judaism still ?
That is a question which it is for the future to answer,
and for the future alone. It may be that those who
dream of a prophetic Judaism, which shall be as spiritual
as the religion of Jesus, and even more universal than
the religion of Paul, are the victims of delusion. But,
1 I do not mean to imply that even to these sovereign adages
parallels in the Eabbinical literature might not he found. " Not my
will, but thine," can, e.g., be imperfectly paralleled in Aboth ii. 4, and
more adequately perhaps in Berachoth, 17 a, quoted above. But in
the Gospels they are more clearly and closely brought together, their
supreme importance more fully established, and they are less clogged
with inferior matter.
552 IX. THE LAW AND ITS INFLUENCE.
at any rate, the labour which they may give, and the
fidelity which they may show, to this delusion, cannot
be thrown awa}\ They will not be the only men who
have worked for a delusion, and have yet benefited the
world. For their devotion to the cause of an imaginary
Judaism remains devotion to the cause of God. They
are the champions of Monotheism, herald-soldiers of a
world-wide Theism which, while raising no mortal to the
level of the divine, can yet proclaim the truth of man's
kinship and communion with the Father of all. To that
religion let the future give what name it will. But
among those who, marching under different banners,
shall help to fashion and to diffuse it, may they, too, be
found enrolled, the story of whose religious aneestry I
have sought to tell, with many and obvious imperfec-
tions, but in loyalty, as I hope and would fain believe;
to the spirit of all-prevailing truth.
APPENDIX.
THE DATE OF THE DECALOGUE.
I cannot enter here into the question of the extremely com-
plicated critical analysis of Exodus xix., xx., xxiv., xxxiv. Foi
the study of it, I can only refer the reader to the books of Dill-
mann, Kittel and Driver, upon the one hand, and to those of
Kuenen (in the Onderzoeh or Bexaleuch), Cornill, Wellhausen,
Itobertson Smith (O.T. in the Jewish Church, 2nd ed., pp. 332 —
337), upon the other. The second class of scholars, together
with Stade, Oort and others (we may now add Mr. Addis in The
Documents of the Hcxcdeuch, 1892), has abandoned the Mosaic
authorship. To show that this view is the more probable is my
only object here : the exact date of the Decalogue, its original
place and function in the Elohistic narrative, and its relation to
the so-called " Book of the Covenant" (Exodus xx. 23 — xxiii. 19)
and the "Words of the Covenant" (Exodus xxxiv. 12 — 27), I
must leave undetermined.
That the Ten Words in the form in which they now appear in
Exodus cannot be Mosaic in their origin, is obvious and almost
undisputed. If they were so, the reason for observing the
Sabbath in Deuteronomy's version of the Words would not
have differed from that now given in Exodus. In fact, the
Exodus text of the fourth Word has been enlarged and edited
by more than one hand (i.e. both by a " Deuteronomistic " and a
" Priestly " editor). As Mr. Addis says : " The ' Words ' were
originally short precepts like those in the ' Book of the Cove-
nant,' and thus the disproportion in bulk between the precepts
of the first and second table disappears " (p. 140). But even if
554 APPENDIX.
we omit the additions, and suppose that the second "Word ran
originally, " Thou shalt make thee no graven images ; " the third,
"Thou shalt not take Yahveh thy God's name in vain;" the
fourth, " Remember the Sabbath-day to sanctify it ; " the fifth,
" Honour thy father and thy mother ; " and the tenth, " Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbour's house," — grave difficulties remain
in coupling these Words with the name of Moses. Could Moses
have forbidden image-worship, when we know that the repre-
sentation of Yahveh under the form of a bull wao a common
and scarcely reprehended custom down to the age of Amos ? To
avoid the difficulty by the assumption that the command was
neglected, forgotten or ignored, seems precarious. It is, indeed,
true that we do not definitely hear of any animal-symbolizing of
Yahveh in the sanctuaries of Shiloh and Jerusalem ; but the
more I consider the subject, the more I am inclined to think
that we must not build too much upon this perhaps accidental
omission. It is also doubtful whether the ark was intended to
serve as a material substitute for an image of Yahveh. Nor does
it seem probable that we may omit the prohibition against
image-making altogether, and yet retain the number ten by
making the exordium, " I am Yahveh thy God," constitute the
first Word. There is another difficulty relative to the fourth
Word, " Remember the Sabbath-day to sanctify it." Does not
this command, it may well be asked, imply the amplifications
which follow it, and thus rest upon conditions of agricultural
life unlike those under which Moses could have conceived and
promulgated any legislative code ? Mr. Addis says, with regard
to both the fourth and the tenth Words : The Decalogue " must
have arisen long after the Israelites had passed from a nomad to
a settled life. It is the house, and not, as in Arabic, the tent,
which stands for a man's familia or household, and the Sabbath
implies the settled life of agriculture. An agriculturist needs
rest, and can rest from tillage. A nomad's life is usually so idle
that no day of rest is needed ; while, on the other hand, such
work as the nomad does, driving cattle, milking them, &c, can-
not be remitted on one day recurring every week."
Even if, however, it were assumed that Moses might have
AITEXDIX. ODD
prohibited the making of images and ordered the observance of
the Sabbath (and that a sacred seventh day in each week should
have been known to the Israelites ever since their migration
from Mesopotamia seems a not improbable hypothesis, partially
confirmed by parallel Assyrian observances), we are still far
from the positive conclusion that Moses did write the Ten Com-
mandments.
I do not lay very much stress upon the fact that no allusion
is made to the Decalogue by the prophets. But unless there
were some valid outside testimony, it is hard to see why we
should except the Ten Words from the general conclusion that
Moses did not write or devise the laws which in the Pentateuch
are put forward in his name. The story of the Decalogue with
which from childhood we are familiar rests almost entirely upon
the Book of Deuteronomy. It is only in Deuteronomy that we
are told that the ark was constructed for the reception of the
two tables on which the Decalogue was inscribed. In the his-
torical books the sanctity of the ark depends upon quite another
cause — upon the presence of the Deity. If the ark contained
any stones at all, they were probably sacred in themselves, and
not in virtue of any writing graven upon them — perhaps sur-
vivals of a pre-Mosaic superstition, according to which certain
stones were regarded as the dwelling-places of spirits and gods.
(1 Kings viii. 9 is notoriously a Deuteronomistic interpolation.)
Moreover, in the Book of Exodus as we now possess it — omitting
one very doubtful passage, xxxiv. 28 — it is not definitely stated
that the Decalogue of xx. 2 — 17 was written upon the tables, or
that the tables were two in number, or that the Words were
ten. In our present text of Exodus the Decalogue is not the
basis of the Covenant : it is not certain that it ever was so. It
is also probable that xx. 18 — 21 once stood after xix. 19, and
that therefore, in the original Elohistic narrative, the people
were not supposed to hear the proclamation of the Decalogue,
any more than they hear the giving of the " Book of the Cove-
nant."
It is true that in Exodus xxxiv. 28 we read : "And he wrote
upon the tables the Words of the Covenant, the ten Words ;"
556 APPENDIX.
but round this verse, as round the chapter in which it occurs,
there rages controversy violent and perhaps unappeasable. As-
suming that the verse is to be interpreted along the old
lines, that Yahveh is the subject of " he wrote," and therefore
that the Words written refer to Exodus xx. 2 — 17, and not to
the Words spoken of in verse 27, viz. commands now incor-
porated in verses 14 to 26, — yet even in that case it seems hard to
deny that the verse was " worked over" or modified when it was
removed from its original place by a Deuteronomistic reviser.
Why should the earlier narrator only here have spoken of
the tables as containing the " Words of the Covenant, the ten
Words"?
There is the further question whether the Yahvistic narrative
J ever contained the Decalogue of E (viz. Exodus xx. 2 — 17).
On Wellhausen's theory, adopted by Stade, Duhm, Eobertson
Smith and many others, xxxiv. 28 is not separated from ver. 27,
and J's Decalogue, his "Words of the Covenant," also "ten
Words," and written (by Moses, not Yahveh) upon the tables,
are to be picked out of xxxiv. 14 — 26. (See the enumeration in
Die Composition des Hexatcuclis und dcr historischen Bilcher des
alten Testaments, 1889, p. 331.) It is now even customary to
contrast the earlier ritual Decalogue of J with the later moral
Decalogue of E. I am not persuaded that such a contrast is
justifiable. If we believe that the teaching of the priests
included " morality " from the first, ever since Moses " connected
the religious idea with the moral life," and that moral and
juridical laws were codified earlier than ritual enactments, we
shall be inclined to suppose that the Decalogue of E dates from
an earlier period than the supposed Decalogue of J. It may be
older than J, even though J did not know it. But if it were
Mosaic, then it would have occupied the same place in J as it
does in E ; and even waiving this argument, it would have occu-
pied the same place in E as it does in Deuteronomy.
Taking all these considerations together, I think we must
abandon the Mosaic authorship of the Decalogue. But I am by
no means prepared to admit that its very substance and contents
prove that it cannot be earlier than the eighth or seventh cen-
APPENDIX. 557
tiny. (So, e.g., Kuenen, Hcxateuch, p. 244, Stade, Cornill, Addis
and many others.) The short lapidary style of the sixth, seventh
and eighth Words betokens a comparatively high antiquity. To
this may be added the argument of Kittel, Geschichte, Vol. I.
p. 85, which I have quoted in my article in the Jewish Quarterly
Review, Vol. III. p. 285. And, finally, if it be true that the
religious teaching of Moses did contain an ethical element, — if
by the creation of the judicial and pedagogic Torah he practi-
cally declared that Yahveh was a God of justice as well as a
God of might — and if the priests, his successors, followed, very
gradually and with many lapses, but still followed, in his foot-
steps— then I see no convincing reason why the Decalogue need
be assumed to imply and to demand the prophetical movement
of the eighth century. It may equally well have been drawn
up by some priest of the north, who answered more fully to
Hosea's ideal of the priesthood, in the ninth or even in the tenth
century.
II.
LEGAL EVASIONS OF THE LAW.
The so-called "Evasion Laws" in Eabbinical Judaism, to
which reference is occasionally made in theological works, are
very few in number. The Rabbis were too closely attached to
the Law to shun what was inconvenient in it. Only in a few
cases where the enforcement of the law would, under new con-
ditions, have inevitably compelled people to rebel against its
authority, did they try to meet law by law, or even by a legal
lie' ion through which the law in question was indeed partly abro-
gated, but the authority of the Law as a whole was maintained
intact. The evasive laws are usually, though not always with full
justice, taken to include certain regulations of the Rabbis con-
cerning oaths and vows, and others relating to the Sabbath and
the Sabbatical year.
Most of the definitions by which the Rabbis seek to classify
558 APPENDIX.
and explain oaths and vows were formulated solely from the
juristic side. This must by no means be confounded with their
moral aspect, which is equally represented in the Talmud. The
general principles of the Eabbis will bear comparison with the
highest ideal standard ever attained by any moral teacher. But
the Eabbis were also Judges, and when they had to inflict on the
transgressor corporal punishment or exact a sacrificial fine, they
could — as judges — only be guided by the legal code as they
interpreted it. To give an instance. It is an accepted moral
principle with the Eabbis that the thought of sin is worse than
sin, that an unchaste thought is a " wicked thing " (Abodah
Zarah, 20 a), and that an impure word not only brings him who
utters it into the very lowest depth of hell, but calls forth the
judgment of God upon the whole world (Sabbath, 33 a). This
was the teaching of the Eabbis as preachers and moralists ; but
when they had to decide whether they should condemn a man
or woman for adultery, they did not allow themselves to be
carried away by their lofty moral sentiments, but, like any
modern judge, they were guided by the facts of the case and
gave their verdict on the basis of the legal code. The same thing
may be observed in their procedure with respect to oaths and
vows. The general principle is : Let thy yea be yea, and thy
nay be nay (Baba Mezia, 49 a) ; and even a silent determina-
tion in the heart is considered as the spoken word which must
not be withdrawn or changed (Maccoth, 24 a, and Eashi, ad loc),
for he who changes his word commits as heavy a sin as he
who worships idols (Sanhedrin, 92 a), and he who utters an
untruth is excluded from the divine presence (Sotah, 42 a). AVe
can thus conceive with what abhorrence the Eabbis must have
condemned every false or vain oath. Indeed, such offences beL rag
to the seven capital sins which provoke the severest judgment
of God on the world (Aboth, v. 11). A false oath, even if made
unconsciously, involves man in sin and is punished as such
(Gittin, 35 a).
Such were the views of the Eabbis as to the importance of
oaths and of truth-speaking generally. Still, when they acted
as judges, they carefully weighed whether the case before them
APPENDIX. 559
fell under any of the four classes of oaths of which the Law
speaks (utterance oath, vain oath, witness oath, and trust oath).
They would consider under which heading the special case
before them might be included, whether the case corresponded
in detail — according to their interpretation of the Law — with
those for which Scripture prescribes either flagellation or the
penalty of a sacrifice. It must be clearly understood that the
Rabbis considered the bringing of a sacrifice under a false pre-
tence or doubtful obligation — i.e. in cases where it was not
perfectly clear that Scripture required a sacrifice — as sinful and
sacrilegious. Hence their compunction against ordering a trans-
gressor to bring a guilt-offering or sin-offering in cases in which
there was the slightest doubt, lest the scriptural injunction was
inapplicable. The term patur (tiee, " free " from bringing an
offering) in Rabbinic literature therefore has merely a legal
implication: namely, the case in question was not considered
analogous to that cited in Scripture. But this term patur must
not be taken as an equivalent of muttar (imia " permitted "), i. e.
as permitting the man to do the act, or as acquitting him before
the tribunal of his conscience. As an illustration showing how
little the Rabbis confused the legal element with the moral, the
words of Maimonides may be quoted from the Mishneh Tor ah
(Rilchoth Shcbuoth, c. 12, §§ 1, 2), and these words are based upon
citations from the Talmud, as may be. seen from the commentators
to Maimonides' treatise : " Though he who takes a vain oath is
punished by flagellation, and he who takes a false oath has to
bring a sacrifice, not the whole of the sin is atoned (by these
penalties). For it is said that God will not hold him guiltless
(Exodus xx. 7). There is thus no escape for him from the
judgment of Heaven until he has been punished by God for the
profanation of the great name (which is involved in his sin), as
it is said, And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, so that
ye profane the name of your God (Levit. xix. 13) ; which
sin is one of the heaviest, though it is not punished either by
Kareth (being rooted out) or by execution at the hands of the
Beth Din." Thus the atonements prescribed by Scripture were
not in themselves an acquittal of the offender from the sin of
560 APPENDIX.
profaning the name of God, which is the moral aspect of the
oath. When the moral element was violated the man suffered
for it, whether the Beth Din had the right to fine him for tin-
breach of the purely legal element or not. When the Rabbis
assigned to every one the duty of immediately, and without
further consideration, putting under a ban (see Maimonides,
ibid. § 9) a man heard to utter a false or vain oath, they probably
regarded this as the right way to make the man conscious of the
moral offence which he had committed.
As to the admissibility of granting absolution for vows and
oaths, the conclusion is clear enough. The Rabbis felt a general
repugnance against oaths and vows even when they were kept
and fulfilled (Nedarim, 20 a, 22 a), and there was even a tendency
to declare the man who was in the habit of taking vows to be
unworthy of bearing the name chabcr (Demai, ii. 3). But people
were not always guided by this advice ; and under momentary
impulse or in times of danger, men often took vows which they
could not possibly fulfil. Some relaxation of the law was there-
fore necessary unless people were to become downright trans-
gressors. Sometimes their vows and oaths might clash with
their domestic duties, or interfere with their proper relations to
their neighbours (Nedarim, ix. 4, 5 and 9), and in such cases the
Rabbis would consider it their duty to afford people every
facility to annul their thoughtless or impossible vows. This was
done by the Beth Din or by the Chacham. Now the Rabbis
themselves profess their ignorance of the source from which
their predecessors derived the authority enabling them to deal
with vows in this manner. "The absolving of vows," we
read in Chagiga i. 8, " flies in the air, without any support" (from
Scripture). Most probably they followed the precedent of
Scripture, which allows the father to annul the vows of his
daughter and the husband of his wife, and the Beth Din or
Chacham, who were considered as in a sense guardians of the,
people, were invested with similar powers. But if this be the
precedent, the absolving of vows cannot rightly be regarded as
an evasion of the law, but as providential, and as designed, like
the law in the Bible with regard to father and husband, to avert
APPENDIX. 5G1
the evil resulting from an unlimited power of taking oaths and
vows which might be abused by imbecile and rash minds.
Besides, it was only in certain cases that the Beth Din could
exercise its power, and thus the Biblical law, generally con-
sidered, was obeyed. An oath or vow, for instance, which a man
was charged to make by a court of justice, could not be absolved
by any Beth Din or Chacham, or any other authority in the
world. And even private vows and oaths (those imposed on
oneself by oneself voluntarily) could only be annulled under-
certain conditions and restrictions.1 The subject is indeed a
most complicated one, and a full treatment is here impossible.
One instance only of these conditions will be given as an illus-
tration of the opening paragraph of the Mishnah Nedarim, c. ix.,
which has been the object of much misrepresentation. I refer
to the so-called " door case." For the absolving of certain vows,
it was necessary to prove that the vows would never have been
made if he who made them had realized their evil effect upon
him, upon his good name, upon his relatives, &c. I must pre-
mise two things : 1, that this had to be proved to the entire
satisfaction of the Beth Din, and if they could not rely upon the
man's telling the real truth — nay, if there were even a suspicion
that a feeling of shame might make him withhold the truth —
the court would not absolve his vow ; 2, that the habit of taking
vows was considered a sign of bad breeding, and affected the
honour of the vower's parents, just as swearing would nowadays
point to a man's low origin. In the Mishnah to which I have
referred, the question is whether the Beth Din may open (the
door) to one who has taken a vow of a private nature {not
directly affecting his relation to his parents) by saying to him :
"Would you have taken a vow at all had you considered how
injurious this very act is to the honour of your parents ? — people
inferring from this habit that you have been badly brought up.
On this, the Wise Men remark that such a cpuestion is not per-
missible, as no man is so bare of all shame that he would
1 The oaths here alluded to partake rather of the nature of vows
than oaths. See Z. Frankel's essay, Die Eidesleidung der Juden in
theologischer und historischer Beziehung (Dresden, 1847).
2 o
562 APPENDIX.
answer : Yes, he would have taken the vow even at the risk of
offence to his parents ; and thus the Beth Din could not rely
upon getting the whole truth from him. This is the real mean-
ing of the Mishnah, and it is clear enough that it has no rele-
vance whatever to Matt. xv. 5 and Mark vii. 10. Such vows as
are referred to in those passages belong to the category of vows
which, as I mentioned above, the Beth Din would afford every
opportunity of annulling (See Maimonides, ibid, c G, § 10).
The evasion laws relating to the Sabbath do not affect any
Biblical law. The restriction of the Sabbath way to 2000 yards
without the town is a Rabbinical restriction (see Jerusalem
Talmud Erubin, i. 10, and Maimonides, Hilchoth Sabbath, c.27, § 1),
and of a relatively late date (see Herzfeld, Geschichte des Volkcs
Israel, II. 142). Now the legal fiction often alluded to consisted
in putting a meal at a certain point (at the end of the 2000
yards' limit). The person so acting was regarded as having re-
moved his habitation from the town, and as having fixed it at
the new point. He could thus walk 2000 yards further on,
whilst he lost the right to walk 2000 yards in the opposite
direction. This was termed Erub Techumin. As the Erub as
well as the Sabbath way were both Eabbinical institutions, the
former was hardly an evasion, but a law on equal footing with
.the law of the Sabbath way itself. But even this concession
was only allowed for the furtherance of some religious object ;
for instance, to pay a visit of condolence, to attend a wedding
banquet, to meet a master or friend, or to perform similar acts
(Maimonides, Hilchoth Erubin, c. vi. § G).
A really evasive law — one which the Rabbis themselves re-
garded as such — was the Prosbul (Trpoa-(3oX',f), introduced by
Hillel. By this, the law in Deuteronomy xv. 1 — 3 was practi-
cally abrogated. The accepted interpretation of the law already
was that moneys or fines charged by a public court were not
released by the Sabbatical year. By the Prosbul, a kind of
registered declaration, the creditor made over all his charges to
the Beth Din, so that the court became the creditor and thus
secured the debt, despite the incidence of the year of release.
(See Mishnah, Shebiith, x. § 3.) The cause of this reform was,
APPENDIX. 5G3
as the Mishnah points out, that people ceased to lend each other
money, and thus transgressed the injunction : " Beware that
there be not a base thought in thy heart, saying, the seventh
year, the year of release, is at hand " (Deut. xv. 9). It was thus
the moral element (not the thought of establishing public credit
on a safe basis) that necessitated the reform, and the main-
tenance of the law was itself a moral principle, while no con-
tradiction, as it would seem, was originally felt in maintaining
it by a legal fiction. The later Eabbis (Amoraim), indeed, felt
great difficulty about this evasive law, and they tried to explain
it in various ways (Gittin, 36 a and &, and references) into which
it is impossible to enter here. But one thing is clear from this
sense of difficulty. As they never raised similar objections to
the absolution of vows or to the Eruh (with regard to the Sabbath
way), the Rabbinical authorities cannot have regarded them as
evasive laws. The effect of evasive laws can only be pernicious
in religion when people realize them as such.
S. SCHECHTER.
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.
P. 47. "Wellhausen, in his new edition of the Minor Prophets (Die
Jdeinen Propheten iibersetzt, rait Noten, 1892), has the following
suggestive note upon Hosea ii. 9, A.V. ii. 7 ("I will go and return
to my first husband, for then was it better with me than now"):
"Der Entschluss zu Jahve zuriickzukehren setzt beim Volk ein
freilich nur in der iiussersten Noth sich regendes Bewusstsein des
Unterschiedes zwischen dem alten Jahvedienst und dem seit der
Einwanderung ubernommenen dionysischen Cultus voraus. Das
Bewusstsein ist in der That vorhanden gewesen und hat die innere
Spannung erzeugt, aus der die ganze Bewegung der israelitischen
Religionsgeschichte sich erklaren liisst" (p. 99).
Pp. 59 — 62. Canaanite religion. Several points here stated seem, on
further investigation, to rest on insufficient evidence. The exact
relation of Baal to the sun is not ascertained; the meaning
of Chammanim is doubtful ; plain Baal was not the supreme
Canaanite god, because no divinity bearing the name Baal,
unqualified by a locality (mountain, town, heaven) or a quality
(as Baalzebub, Baal berit, &c), seems known. El should have
been included in the list of Canaanite divinities. He, and not
Baal, may have been the deity to be identified with the Cronos of
Carthage. The whole subject is very obscure and the sources are
fragmentary, and thus greater caution was necessary than I, who
do not speak of the subject first-hand, have shown. Cf. Ed. Meyer,
in his articles on Astarte, El and Baal, in Roscher's Lexikon der
griechischen und romischen Mythologie. The article on Baal is in
the Nacldrdrje to Vol. I. (1890).
P. 60. From Hosea ii. 19, it would seem as if the various Baalim had
often also their own particular names to boot. So Wellhausen :
" Die Baale fuhren also verschiedene Eigennamen, von denen uns
jedoch nur wenige bekannt sind, z. B. Astarte" (Die kleinen Pro-
pheten iibersetzt, mit Noten, 1892, p. 100).
566 ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.
P. 63, n. 1. Add also Wellhausen's note on Hosea ii. 7, in Kleine
Propheten ubersetzt, p. 98.
P. 69. On the oral and legal character of the early Torah of the priests,
cf. the admirable chapter of Wellhausen, "The Oral and the
"Written Torah," in Religion of Israel, pp. 392 — 400.
P. 79. On Nathan, cf. Schwally, Zur QueMenJcritik der historischen
Biicher, Z.A.W., 1892, pp. 155, 156.
P. 84. The historical truth of 1 Kings xi. 29 — 39, has been denied.
On the divergencies of the LXX., see Kobertson Smith, Tlie Old
Testament in the Jewish Church, 2nd ed., 1892, pp. 117 — 119.
On the other side, cf. Kittel, Geschichte der Heartier, Vol. II.
p. 162, n. 1.
Pp. 93, 94. On 1 Kings xxii., cf. Schwally, Zur Quellenkritik, &c,
pp. 159—161.
P. 99, seq. For an admirable and somewhat more conservative view of
the pre-prophetic period in its religion and culture, see Kittel,
Geschichte der Hebrder, § 38, "Kultur und Keligion in der
Eichterzeit" (pp. 82 — 90); § 50, " Kultur und Eeligion der ersten
Konigszeit" (pp. 169 — 176) ; and § 64, "Kultur und Religion der
Zeit nach Salomo" (pp. 252 — 264). The points on which he
lays most stress are, that in the sanctuary at Shiloh, where we
find the ark of Yahveh and Eli as priest, there is no evidence of
any image of Yahveh. Samuel is never brought into connection
with the ephod. Moreover, after the ark has been captured and
the estrangement between Saul and Samuel begun, ephod and
teraphim become more prominent. "With the return of the ark
they begin to wane. Baal is no longer used in proper names after
David (pp. 90, 175, and also pp. 260, 261).
P. 113, n. 1. See also Kittel's article, " Die pentateuchischen Urkunden
in den Buchern Richter und Samuel," Theol. Studien und Kritiken,
1892, pp. 44 — 71; and his Geschichte der Hebrder, Yol. II.
pp. 3 — 54. The two prophetical narratives in the Pentateuch
and Joshua have for the first time been disentangled from the
remaining portions, and printed separately, by Mr. Addis in his
Documents of the Hexateuch, Yol. I., " The Oldest Book of
Hebrew History " (1892).
P. 118. On Hosea viii. 12, cf. now Wellhausen (Die Ideinen Propheten
ubersetzt, p. 119), who emends rather differently.
P 128, n. 2. Wellhausen (p. 92) also agrees that if the text be sound,
the allusion must be to the golden bulls of Jeroboam. But he
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. 567
goes on to say : " Dem Amos ist der Ausdruck (die Schuld
Samariens) nicht zuzutrauen ; denn er gebraucht nie Samarien fur
Israel, und das goldene Kalb ist ihm keineswegs die Griindsiinde
des Volks (Hosea x. 10), er polernisirt nie dagegen, iiberhaupt
nicbt gcgen irgend eine Besonderbeit des Cultus. Er wird einen
unverfanglichen Xamen far den Jahve von Betbel gebraucht baben,
der dann spater korrigirt worden ist." It may also be noted that
"Wellbausen (p. 83) suspects the genuineness of Amos v. 26 :
" Denn Amos macht seinen Zeitgenossen sonst nur iibertriebenen
Jahvecultus zum Vorwurf, nie den Dienst fremder und gar baby-
lonisch-assyrischer Gutter."
P. 130, n. 2. In the Hebrew Dictionary by Brown, Driver and Briggs,
it is said that D^VbH "was possibly originally an independent
word = gods, but even if so, associated by the prophets with the
idea of worthlessness, and used by them in ironical contrast with
L^bs trnbs
P. 138, n. 1. Wellbausen (Klcine Proplieten, p. 94) also suspects the
authenticity of Amos ix. 8 — 15.
P. 149, n. 1. Duhm, in his new Commentary on Isaiah, also brings
forward fresh and, it must be admitted, powerful arguments
against the authenticity of Isaiah xix. 16 — 25. It should be
added, however, that he regards these verses as a very late addi-
tion (circa 150 B.C.) to a wholly un-Isianic chapter.
P. 163. Hezekiah's reform. It is possible I have followed Stade too
closely and been too negative. Cf. Kuenen, Hexateueh, § 12,
n. 5, p. 218: "Deuteronomy presupposes Hezekiah's partial
reformation, for the incomplete and partially defeated practice
usually precedes the theory, and not vice versa." See also Kittel,
GescMchte, Vol. II. pp. 301—303.
P. 190, last line. This is exaggerated. I am not sure now whether
one should use these catch-word oppositions, " people," " church,"
even for the priestly code. (It was a nation which rose in revolt
against Antiochus Epiphanes.) They are certainly out of place
for Deuteronomy. Cf. Wellbausen, Composition, p. 205 : " Israel
ist im Deuteronomium wie in JE zwar ein frommes Volk, aber
doch ein Volk, ein biirgerliches Gemeingewesen — in Q ist es eine
Kirche, eine Gemeinde, die rein aufgeht in den geistlichen Ange-
legenheiten."
P. 206. That Habakkuk was one of the "false prophets" would be
convincingly established if Wellhausen's views should prove to be
568 ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.
correct. Sec his notes on Habakkuk in the Kleine Propheten
iibersetzt, p. 161, seq.
P. 215, n. 3. It must be confessed that the two verses, Deut. iv. 39
and xxxii. 39, seem almost modelled upon Deutero-Isaiah's lan-
guage.
P. 234. One of the best arguments for the existence of written collec-
tions of priestly or ceremonial laws before the exile, seems to be
a chapter of Deuteronomy such as xiv. and certain passages in
xxii. — xxv. I have not sufficiently alluded to and acknowledged
the weight and probability of this argument. Cf. the very
temperate remarks of Kuenen, Hexateuch, p. 263 fin., § 14, n. 6,
pp. 266, 272, and § 15, n. 1, 2, 3, 4, pp. 273—275.
P. 256. Cf. the arguments in Gautier's pleasant book, Le prophete
Ezecluel (Lausanne, 1891), especially pp. 176 — 187 and pp. 261 —
274.
P. 329 and 349. Cf. note on p. 190. For the general effect of the
temple legislation, see Delitzsch's admirable essay, in Iris, Studies
in Colour and Talks aboitt Flowers, on "Dancing and the Criti-
cism of the Pentateuch."
P. 425. Cf. Cheyne, Origin of the Psalter, p. 314.
P. 500. The 'Am ha-Arets. It should perhaps have been said that
while originally and technically the 'Am ha-Arets (as Jew) seems
to have denoted the man who was lax in his observance of the
laws of clean and unclean and of the agrarian laws, there was
also a tendency to use the word (as we may see from the passages
quoted on p. 501, n. 1) to denote anybody who was generally
both unobservant and ignorant of the law. But nevertheless
Rabbinism was never a religion of the learned and for the learned
only.
P. 551. To the saying of Jesus, " Whosoever shall seek to save his life
shall lose it," &c, a very interesting parallel may be found in
Tamid 32 a (Wiinsche, Vol. II. 4, p. 165 fin.), in the reply which
the " wise men of the south " make to Alexander of Macedon.
He asks, " What should a man do that he may live 1 " and they
answer, "Let him kill himself,"and vice versa. The Hebrew is very
pointed and precise: j-pb VIES HYPl ^rs -D^ HE )l~h *")ES
: 1^3: ns rvrv nwi ra^s tos* he yass rvE\ Cf. also
Aboth de Rabbi Natha?i (ed. Schechter), 36 a, where R. Jehuda
the Prince gives similar advice. Cf. also Brull, Jahrbiicher fur
jiidische Geschichte und Literatur, II. Jahrgang (1876), p. 129.
INDEX.
Abiatbar, 43, 67, 79.
Abijara, 87.
Acbimelecb, 67.
Agrarian laws, 474; neglect of, 501.
Ahab, 90, '.'2, 93.
Ahaz, 108, 111.
Ahijah, 84.
Alexander tbe Great, 362.
Almsgiving, 4S5,526; delivers from deatb,
527, 528.
Altars, see Higb-places.
Amaziah, 97, 98.
'Am ha-Arets, 497; meaning of, 498, 499 ;
laws concerning, 500; sayings about,
501, n. 1 ; disappearance of, 502.
Ammonites, religion of, 29.
Anion, 167, 171.
Amos, 99, 119, 120, 128, 131, 138, 144,
146, 162.
Anaitis, worship of, ordered by Artaxerxes
II., 360.
Angels in post-exilic literature, 429 ; in
Daniel, 4^0 ; functions of, 431 ; bad
angels, 453 ; Satan, 453, 454.
Antigonus, 363.
AntiochusIIL, 365.
Antiochus Epiphanes, 367, 382.
Apocalypses, place of, in post-exilic reli-
gion, 467.
Ark, relation of, to Yahveh, 42 ; captured
by Philistines, 71 ; taken by David to
Jerusalem, 82.
Arpad, battle of, 107.
Artaxerxes I. Longimanus, 307, 359.
Artaxerxes II. Mnemon, 360.
Artaxerxes III. Ochus, 360 ; deportation
of Jews by, 361.
Asa, 87 ; his religious reform, 88.
Asherah, 87, 89, 164, 181.
Assyria, prophetic view of its relation to
Israel, 133, 134 ; judgment on, 144, 145.
Astarte, 61.
Asurbanipal, 167, 172.
Athaliah, 92. 96.
Atonement, day of, 333—336, 523.
Augustine, St., 449, n. 1.
Azariah or Uzziah (king of Judah), 98
108.
B.
Baal, 20, 59, 60 ; introduction of worship
of Tyrian Baal by Ahab into Israel, 92;
by Jehoram and Athaliah into Judab,
96 ; suppressed in Israel by Jehu, 95 ;
in Judah by Jehoiada, 96.
Baasha, 86.
Baethgen, on Semitic religion, 24 ; on
Edomito religion, 28 ; on Ammonite
religion, 29.
Bagoses, 361, 362, 392.
Baudissin, on the god Moloch, 61.
Boissier, on Paul Orosius, 448.
Bulls (images or symbols of Yahveh), 42,
43; Jeroboam's, 84, 85.
C.
Cambyses, 297.
Canaanites, influence of, 20, 31 ; not de-
stroyed by Israelites, 56, 58 ; their
religion, 59; chief divinities of, 60;
their worship, 62 ; influence of, on
Israelite religion, 62, 63.
Carchemish, battle of, 199.
Carpenter, on Isaiah liii., 280, n. 1 ; on
Proverbs, 396, n. 2; on Messianic king,
417, n. 1.
Cbaber, 498.
Charity in post-exilic period, 484, 4S5,
491, 526.
Chavannes, on editors of historical books,
234, n. 1 ; on lack of mysticism in
Judaism, 424.
Chemosh, 29, 35.
Cheyne, on Josiah, 173; on pre-Deute-
ronomic collection of laws, 178; on
hopefulness of Deuteronomy, 191; on
Jehoiakim's submission to Nebuchad-
rezzar, 203; on Lamentations, 210,
n. 2 ; on imperfect moral conceptions
of Isaiah, 217 ; on Deutero-Isaiah, 265 ;
on Isaiah liii., 279 ; on Jewish revolt
under Ochus, 361 ; on Isaiah lvi., 372
'A r
570
INDEX.
n. 2; on influence of Hellenism, 378;
on Zoroastrian origin of belief in future
life, 456 ; on future life in Psalter,
458; on Psalm xix., 481.
Chronicles, Book of, 348, 403, 447, 454,
483.
Circumcision, 229, 337.
Cleanness, ritual, meaning of, 475, 476 ;
neglect of, 501; see also Law.
Cornill, 410.
Covenant, book of, 117.
Ciiticism of the Old Testament, general
results of. 3.
Cyaxares, 195, 199.
Cyrus, 260, 261 ; Deutero-Isaiah's con-
ception of, 273 ; captures Babylon, 283.
D.
Daniel, Book of, 40S, 412, 430, 457.
Darius, 277, 301, 302.
Darius II. Ochus, 359.
David, 35, 39, 43, 81.
Davidson, on idolatry in the exile, 226,
n. 1; on Ezekiel, 248, n.l.
Deborah, 75 ; Song of, 15, 56.
Decalogue, 49, 117, and Appendix I.
Delitzsch, on faith of Old Testament, 455.
Demetrius (son of Antigonus), 363, 364.
Deutero- Isaiah, 264 — 267; his mono-
theism, 268 ; his appeal to previous
prophecies, 270, 271 ; on idolatry, 271,
272 ; conception of Israel's calling, 274,
275 ; of the Servant and his work,
277 — 280 ; the new Jerusalem, 280,
281.
Deuteronomy, origin of, 177, 17S ; finding
of the Book of the Law, 179; public
recital of, 180; account of, 183 seq.;
aim of, 184; hatred of idolatry, 185;
single sanctuary, 186, 187; sacrifices
in, 187 ; tecularization of slaughter,
187; humanity of, 188; priestliness
of, 1S8 ; introductory chapters of, 189 ;
love of God, 190; not hopeful, 192;
first four chapters, 193 ; school of Deu-
teronomists, 193; monotheistic verses
in iv. and xxxii., 215.
Dillmann, on patriarchs, 12, 13.
Driver, on Priestly Code, 354.
Droysen, 364.
Duhra, on Jeremiah, 213, 221 ; on Ezekiel,
239; on Deutero-Isaiah, 267; on the
Servant, 276, n. 3 ; on Isaiah lvi., 372,
n. 2; on Isaiah lvii. 15, 441, n. 1.
Eben-ha-Ezer, battle of, 71.
Ecclesiastes, Book of, 367, 379, 408, 4:
427.
Ecclesiasticus, see Sirach.
Edomites, religion of, 28.
Elah, 86.
Eli, 67
Eliashib, 351.
Elijah, 91, 92, 94.
Elisha, 94, 95.
Ephod, 43, 67, 69.
Esarhaddon, 167.
Esther, Book of, 412
Ethics, post-exilic, 484; " external goods, n
485 ; attitude towards enemies, 486,
487 ; enthusiasm, 48S ; modification of
penal law, 489, 490; women and mar-
riage, 491.
Evasions of Law, 557 seq. (Appendix II.).
Exile, Babylonian, 209, 222; causes of
special result of, 212 ; condition of
exiles in, 207, 223, 259 ; religious views
among,224 — 228 ; attitude towardsvic-
tories of Cyrus, 261 ; restoration of
exiles by Cyrus, 284, 285.
Ezekiel, 239 ; his early life, 240 ; his
prophetic call, 241 ; his book, 242 ; his
visions, 242, 243; his work among the
exiles, 244; his conception of Yahveb,
246,247 ; of Yahveh's relationto Israel,
250; his individualism, 251— 253 ; his
conception of the new Jerusalem ml
its sanctuary, 255 ; position of morality
in, 256 ; his legalism, 257.
Ezra, his journey to Jerusalem, 306 ;
objects of, 307; arrival at Jerusalem,
308 ; hears of mixed marriages, 309 ;
the special commission, 310; desires
to fortify Jerusalem, 311; works with
Nehemiah, 313; produces his new law-
book and reads it, 3 1 4, 3 46 ; his speech ,
347.
F.
Fasting in post-exilic religion, 509, 510.
Free-will emphasized by Sirach, 518.
Freudenthal, on moderate Hellenistic
party, 377.
Fripp, on composition of Genesis, 316, n. 1.
Future life, 455 ; rise of belief in, 456 ;
resurrection of body, 457 ; idea of im-
mortality in Psalter, 458, 459 ; reli-
gious effects of belief in, 460 — 462.
G.
Gad, 79, 80.
Galilee, Judaizing of, 371.
Gaza, battle of, 363.
Gedaliah, 208.
Gideon, 43, 57.
God, conception of, in post-exilic period,
420; Yahveb. now equals God, 421;
God still remains Yahveh, 422; God'6
INDEX.
571
nearness, how conditioned, 422 ; his
nature, 423 ; his transcendence, 423 ;
effects of, 424 ; God of heaven, 425 ;
his relation to nature, 426 ; near to
Israelite, 432, 434 — 436 ; religious
effects of his nearness, 439 ; conception
of character of, 442 ; goodness and
compassion of, 443 ; his rule of Israel
in the past, 447; his justice, 462; his
love and its limits, 463, 464 ; a Father
to Israel and the Israelite, 464, 539;
fear of, 540 ; love of, 541 ; see also
Yahveh.
Graetz, 363, 365, 366.
H.
Habakkuk, 206.
Haggai, 297, 299.
Hananiah, 206.
Hazael, 97.
Heart, source of good and evil, 483, 484,
519.
Heaven, God's dwelling-place, 425.
Hebrews, original meaning of word, 27.
Hekatsus of Abdera, 382.
Hellenism, influence of, 374 ; opposition to
and attraction of, 375, 376 ; mediatiz-
ing effects of, 377; religious speculation
promoted by, 378; gradual Hellenization
interrupted by Antiochus Epiphanes,
382, 383.
Hezekiah, 111, 112 ; his reform, 163—
165 ; effect of, 166 ; death, 166.
High-places, 87, 103 ; growing objection
to, by prophetical party, 176 ; idea of
their abolition, 177 ; destroyed by
Josiah, 182.
Hilkiah, 173, 179.
Historical books, view of their editors of
age between Moses and prophets. 17 ;
editing of, in exile, 231; religious views
of editors, 232 ; their conception of
Israel's past history, 233.
Holiness, conception of, in Deuteronomy,
188, 189 ; law of, 235, 236 ; conception
of, in Priestly Code, 325, 326.
Holtzmann, on Joseph, son of Tobias, 375;
on Judaea under Ptolemaean kings, 397;
on post-exilic conception of sin, 518.
Hosea, 70, 119, 120, 128, 129, 132, 139,
162.
Hoshea, 108, 109.
Humility a post-exilic virtue, 440, 441,
n. ], 481.
Hunter (Hay), 233.
Hyrkanus, 366.
I.
Idolatry, in pre-prophetic period, 18 ;
character of, 19; idolatrous influence
of Canaanites upon Israelites, 20; under
Solomon, 83 ; in 8th century, 115, 128,
130; Assyrian idolatry in Judah, 168;
sacrifice of children, 169; under Josiah,
176 ; Josiah eradicates its symbols, 181 ;
in exile, 226 ; Deutero-Isaiah's polemic
against, 271, 272.
Images (of Yahveh), 42 — 44; no allusion
to, in prophetical narratives of Hexa-
teuch. 116 ; Hosea's view of, 128, 129 ;
Isaiah's view of, 130 ; Hezekiah's
attack on, 164.
Immortality, see Future Life.
Individualism, growth of, in 7th century,
216, 217; in Jeremiah, 218, 219; in
Ezekiel, 251—253.
Isaiah, 119, 120, 130, 132, 136, 139—144,
147, 148, 162, 165, 166, 217. Second
Isaiah, see Deutero-Isaiah.
Israel, kingdom of, or northern kingdom,
founded by Jeroboam I., 84; religious
condition of, 85, 86 ; under Ahab, 90 ;
fall of, 109; deportations to Assyria;
110, 111 ; introduction of foreign colo-
nists, 110 ; relation of returned exiles
from Babylon to mixed inhabitants of
north, 293.
Israelites, their place among the Semitic
races, 27, 28.
J.
Jacob (Rabbi), 461.
Jannai (Rabbi), 451.
Jehoahaz (king of Israel), 97.
Jehoahaz (king of Judah), 196.
Jehoiachin, 204.
Jehoiada, 96, 117.
Jehoiakim, 196, 197, 200, 203, 204.
Jehonadab, 95.
Jehoram (king of Judah), 96.
Jehoshaphat, 88, 92, 93.
Jehu, 95, 97.
Jephthah, 40.
Jeremiah, 173 ; early prophecies of, 174,
175 ; relation to Deuteronomy, 194.
201 ; after Josiah's death, 198 ; under
Jehoiakim, 199, 200; on sacrifices, 201;
on inviolability of Jerusalem, 202 ;
lives concealed, 203 ; under Zedekiah,
207 ; after fall of Jerusalem, 209 ;
monotheistic implications in, 215 ; in-
dividualism in, 218, 219; new covenant
in, 220, 221.
Jeroboam I., 83, 84, 85.
Jeroboam II., 98, 107.
Jerusalem, made capital of kingdom by
David, 82 ; Solomon builds temple at,
82 ; escapes in Sennacherib's invasion,
112 ; importance of, to Isaiah, 165 ;
effects of Isaiah's teaching about. 166 ;
572
INDEX.
captured by Nebuchadrezzar, 204; again
and destroyed, 208 ; walls of, rebuilt
byNehemiah, 313; captured byPtolemy
I., 362, 364 ; by Scopas, 365 ; by
Antiochus III., 365.
Jesus, 428, 429, 506, 550, 551.
Jezebel, 90.
Joash or Jehoash (king of Judah), 96, 97.
Joash (king of Israel), 97.
Job, Book of, 367, 408, 453.
Jocbanan (son of Joiada the high-priest),
361.
Joel, Book of, 362, 406.
Johanan (son of Kareah), 208.
Jonah, Book of, 371, 408.
Joseph (son of Tobias), 366.
Josephus, on foundation of Samaritan
community, 352 ; on Bagoses, 361 ; on
Antiochus III., 365 ; on Joseph, son of
Tobias, 366, 376 ; on John Hyrkanus,
394; on punishments of Pharisees, 490.
Joshua, high-priest, 270, 299.
Joshua (sou of Joiada the high-priest), 361.
Josiah, 171 — 173; his reform, 177 seq.;
hears the new Law-book, 179, 180 ;
his measures t:> give it effect, 181 — 183,
his death, 196.
Jotham (king of Judah), 108.
Judasa, relation of restored exiles to old
population remaining in, 291, 292.
Judah (kingdom of), religious condition
after disruption, 85 — 87; Asa's reform,
88 ; vassal of Assyria, 163 ; Hezekiah's
reform, 163, 165 ; religious effects of,
166 ; effects of Josiah's death, 196 ;
religious reaction, 197, 198; firstdepor-
tation uuder Jehoiachin, 204 ; condi-
tion under Zedekiah, 205 ; second
deportation, 208 ; religious condition in
7th century, 210 ; religious advance ia
7th century, 213—217.
Judaism, its religious development un-
finished at age of Maccabees and of
Christ, 357.
Judges, nature of so-called, 57.
Judges, Book of, unhistorical conception
of history between Joshua and Samuel
given by editors of, 57 ; see also His-
torical Book?.
Judgment, conception of, by prophets,
137—143.
Judith, Book of, 408.
K.
Kamphausen, on Mosaic religion, 47.
Kenites, 51.
Kings, Book of, see Historical Books.
Kuenen, on pre-prophetic period, 19 ; on
Xoses, 46 ; on religious effect of Syrian
wars, 97, 99 ; on prophetic monotheism
135 ; on Isaiah xxxii., xxxiii., 218 ; on
Sheshbazzar, 289 ; on delay in rebuild-
ing temple, 294 ; on Priestly Code, 341,
343 ; on laws of clean and unclean,
477, n.l.
Lamentations, Book of, 209 — 211.
Law, beginnings of written law, 118.
collection of laws in exile, 234 ; holiness
law, 235, 236 ; teaching of, in post-
exilic period, 400, 402 ; additions to
Priestly Code after Ezra, 402 ; influence
of, on outward circumstance, 452 ; gives
new spiritual pleasure, 452 ; place of,
in post-exilic religion, 468 ; effect of
religion as law, 4,i9 — 471; cereiuonia;
law, 472 seq.; dietary laws, 4731
agrarian laws, 474 ; clean and unclean,
474 seq.; effect of law on conception*
of goodness and sin, 479 ; the " legal
good man," 480; "pride or despair,"
481, 482 ; law as spiritual joy, 485 ;
effects of ceremonial law, 492, 508 ;
was law a burden ? 493 ; " intellec-
tualism" of law, 494 — 496 ; not dis-
obeyed by mass of people, 500 ; not a
burden, 502, 503 ; sanctification of
ordinary life by ceremonial law, 511 ;
tendency towards doctrine of "good
works," 525 — 528 ; why law was ob-
served, motive for observance, 529 seq.;
effects not the same as motives, 530 ;
motive not merely mercenary, 531 ;
Prof. Schultz on motive, 532 ; mer-
cenary motive in Deuteronomy stronger
than with Rabbis, 533 ; law obeyed
for God's sake, 534; from real religious
motives, 537 — 539 ; God's fatherhood
realized by law, 539, 540 ; law moral-
ized life, 547 ; general effects of, 548 ;
law for its own sake, 549 ; see also
Deuteronomy, Priestly Code, Torah.
Legalism, mark of post-exilic j>eiiod, 466.
Levites, relation to priests, 66, 70 ; in
Deuteronomy, 193 ; in exile and at
restoration, 288, 289 ; in Babylon after
Zerubbabel's return, 305 ; few accom-
pany Ezra, 308 ; in Priestly Code, 323 ;
at reading of law, 346, 347 ; in post-
exilic period, 393 ; as teachers, 400.
Lot, sacred, 65, 66, 67, 68.
Love of God, in Deuteronomy, 190; in
later literature, 541.
M.
Mahaffy, 365.
Malachi, Book of, 349.
INDEX.
573
Manasseh (king of Judah), 167, 168, 169,
170.
Manasseh (grandson of Eliashib), 351,
352.
Marriages, mixed, 302, 303, 309, 310,
349.
Marti, on Satan, 454.
Medes, 195.
Megiddo, battle of, 196.
Menahera, 107, 108.
Mesa, 29.
Messiah, Messianic king in Isaiah, 142,
143; conception of, less important in
Judaism than in Christianity, 416;
Messianic age, priestly conception of,
319; later views of, 416, 438.
Micah (Ephraimite), 43, 66.
Micah (prophet), 119, 120.
Micah, Book of, chapter vi., 171.
Micaiah, 93, 94.
Mitsvah, meaning of, 536.
Moabite stone, 29.
Moabites, religion of, 29; not monolatrous,
30.
Moloch or Milk, 61 ; worship of, 169,
171.
Monolatry, meaning of, 11 ; origin of, in
Israel, 16, 18; Yahveh Israel's God,
21; origin of, why ascribed to Moses,
31, 32; character of pre-prophetic, 34,
35, 36.
Monotheism, advance towards, by 8th-
centuiy prophets, 134 — 136 ; in 7th
century,214 — 216 ; growth of, in exile,
228 ; absolute in Deutero- Isaiah, 268 ;
in post-exilic period, 367, 368.
Moses, 14, 15; origin of his monolatry,
33, 50 ; character of his monolatry,
46 ; his conception of Yahveh, 47 ; his
religious teaching, 48, 49; his relation
to Kenites, 51 ; opens historic period,
54; his work, 55; founder of priestly
Torah, 64, 65, 68.
Myus, battle of, 363.
N.
Nabonnedos, 260.
Nabopolassar, 199.
Nadab, 86.
Nathan, 79, 80.
Nazirites, 80.
Nebuchadrezzar, 199, 200, 203.
Ne^ho II., 155, 196.
Nehjmiah, 311; his expedition to Jeru-
salem, 312 ; his rebuilding of the walls,
313; at reading of law, 346; leaves
Jerusalem, 349; second visit of, 350,
351.
Nehushtan, 164.
Noldeke, on names compounded with
Yahveh or Yah, 21, n. 1; on Semitic
religion, 24, n. 1.
O.
Old Testament history, closes at Nehemiah,
353, 355.
Old Testament literature extends for 300
years after Nehemiah, 355, 412; classes
of, 415.
Omri, 86, 87,
Onias III. (high-priest), 366.
Origin of Israelite religion, why obscure,
4—7.
Orosius (Paul), 448.
P.
Panion, battle of, 365.
Particularism, growth of, in exile, 228 ;
in post-exilic period, 292, 369, 432,
437, 439.
Patriarchs, 11 ; unhistoric, 12, 13.
Paul, St., 156, 427, 429, 542, 545.
Pekah, 108.
Pekahiab, 108.
Pentateuch, "prophetical" narratives of,
113; final redaction of, 403, 404.
Philistines, 71.
Pietschmann, on early Canaanite religion,
26.
Post-exilic period, religious variety in,
409; explanations of this variety, 410,
411; religious fervour in, 413; points
of view from which to regard, 416.
Prayer, character of, in post-exilic religion,
505, 506.
Priest, priesthood, in old Israel, 65 ; origin
of, 66 ; relation to tribe of Levi, 66
priests as soothsayers, 67 ; as judges
and teachers, 68 ; their Torah oral, 69
advance between Samuel and Amos
69 ; Hosea's conception of priest's office
70; in 8th century, 116, 117; their
written codes, 117, 118; in 7th cen
tury, 175, 212; priests of high-places
182; in Deuteronomy, 188, 193; codify
laws in exile, 234 ; at the return, 287
" sons of Zadok," 288 ; high-priest,
creation of, 290 : in Babylon, 304 ; legal
work of, 305; "sons of Aaron," 323
quarrel with Levites, 350; corruption
among, 350—352; high-priest, 392
number of, in post-exilic period, 392
position of, 393.
Priestly Code, Ezra's law-book, 315
portions of Pentateuch which belong to
315,316, 354; character of, 31 6; central
portion of, 317; account and criticisni
of, 318 — 345; deals with community
574
INDEX.
318 ; conception of God, 320; his rela-
tion to Israel, 321 ; Priests and Levites
in, 323; morality in, 324; conception
of holiness in, 325, 326 ; of sin and
atonement, 327; of uncleanness, 328,
329; place of sacrifice in, 330—332;
Day of Atonement in, 333—336; Sab-
bath in, 33S, 339 ; relation of Israel to
outer world in, 339, 340 ; position of
foreigners in, 341; place of ritual in,
342; sin-offerings in, 343; effects of,
344, 345; reading of, 346; covenant
signed to observe, 348 ; additions to,
after Ezra, 402.
Prophets of 8th century, 8; their teach-
ing, 9, 10; on Moses and Mosaic age,
16 ; first appearance of, 72, 76; Canaan-
ite origin of, 77 ; coalescence with seers,
77, 78; in 8th century, 115, 116;
higher movement at that time, 120;
character of, 121; teaching of Amos,
Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, 121 — 160 ; moral
ideals of, 126; monotheism of, 134;
not statesmen, 150; political teaching
of, 151, 152; sympathy with poor,
152, 153 ; religious teachers, 154 ;
Wellhausen's view of, 154, 155, 158 ;
sudden excellence of, 155; their work
and its results, 156 — 160; in 7th cen-
tury, 174; alliance with priests, 175;
national party among, after Josiah's
death, 198, 205, 206; in exile, 237,
238 ; prophecy aroused by Cyrus' vic-
tories, 262 ; new character of, 262, 263 ;
character of early post-exilic prophecy,
298; editing of prophetical writings in
post-exilic period, 405; additions to,
405 ; their character and purpose, 406,
407 ; see also Judgment, Yahveh, Mes-
siah, Monotheism, Sacrifices, Universal-
ism, and names of Prophets, Amos,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, &c.
Proselytism, 369, 371, 372.
Prostitution, sacred, 87, 88.
Proverbs, Book of, 362, 367, 380; post-
exilic date of, 396 ; explanations of
that date, 397; teaching in, 401, 428,
459, 488, 491, 514.
Psalter, 302, 362, 385, 386, 428, 443,
458, 459, 515.
Psammetichus, 172.
Ptolemy I. Lagi, 362, 364.
Ptolemy II. Philadelphus, 365.
R.
Rabbinical literature, use of, in these
Lectures, 465, n. 2, 467.
Rechabites, 51.
Rehoboam, 87.
Religion, between Moses and Samuel, 58;
influence of Canaanites, 58, 63; charac-
ter of pre-prophetic religion generally,
100—105; simplicity of, 104; limita-
tions of, 105 ; religion in 7th century,
210—212 ; advance, 213 ; religious
literature of 7th century, monotheistic
progress in, 214 — 216 ; growth of indi-
vidualism in, 216, 217; religious views
in exile, 224 — 228; undogmatic cha-
racter of post-exilic religion, 418, 545;
religion only spiritual interest, 419;
unsystematized, 543, 544.
Renan, on Semitic religions, 23 ; on Asa's
reform, S8; on prophets, 152.
Repentance, needs God's help, 520; con-
dition of forgiveness, 521, 524; Rab-
binic eulogies of, 528, 529.
Resurrection, see Future Life.
Retribution, divine, theory of, in post-
exilic period, 444—446, 538.
Reuss, on Priestly Code, 323.
Rezin, 108.
Ruth, Book of, 362, 408.
S.
Sabbath, 56 ; increased importance at-
tached to, in exile, 229, 230 ; in
Priestly Code, 338 ; in post-exilic reli-
gion, 473 ; not a burden, 504, 505, 507.
Sacrifices, prophetic attitude towards, 131,
132; in Priestly Code, 330—332.
Samaria, capture of, 109.
Samaritans, foundation of their commu-
nity, 352.
Samson, 71.
Samuel, 72—76, 80.
Samuel, Books of, see Historical Books.
Sanballat, 350, 351.
Sargon II., 109, 111.
Satan, 453, 454, 518.
Saul, 73—76.
Schechter, on St. Francis of Assisi, 426,
n. 1 ; on Sabbath under law, 506, 507 ;
on Ruskin and the law, 534, n. 1 ; on
evasions of the law, 557 (Appendix II.).
Schrader, on delay in rebuilding temple,
295.
Schultz, on supposed higher conception
of Yahveh through Elijah and Syrian
wars, 98 ; on burden of law, 503 ; on
motive for law's observance, 532, 535 —
537.
Schurer, on influence of Hellenism, 383;
on numbers of Levites, 393 ; on origin
of Scribes, 396 ; on laws of clean and
unclean, 477 ; on prayer in post-exilic
religion, 505 ; on motive for observing
law, 532.
INDEX.
575
Schwally, on Job, 460, n. 1.
Scopas, 365.
Scribes, origin of, 394, 395 ; literary
products of earlier Scribes in the Old
Testament, 396 seq.
Scriptures, sacred, 212; in post-exilic
period, 3S9.
Scythians, 172.
Seers, 72 ; their office and methods, 73.
Seleucus I., 363, 364.
Seleucus IV. Philopator, 366.
Semitic religion, 22; names of Semitic
deities, 23, 24 ; no original monolatry,
25 ; chief divinities, 26.
Sennacherib, 111, 112, 162.
Servant, conception of, in Deutero-Isaiah,
276—280.
Shallum, 107.
Shalmanesar IV., 109.
Shaphan, 179.
Sheol, 102.
Sheshbazzar, 289, 294.
Sin, conception of, in post-exilic religion,
512 seq.; sense of sin, how aroused,
513; national righteousness, 514; guilt
and calamity, 515; sin as violation of
law, 516; sin and sinfulness, 516, 517;
no principle of sin, 518 ; God's part in
its overthrow, 519, 520; evil inclina-
tion, 521; theory of "good works,"
525, 526; sin and merit, 527, 528.
Siracb, 380 — 382, 388, 389, 428, 443,
488, 491, 518, 519, 524.
Smend, on Ezekiel, 254.
Smerdis (Pseudo), 297.
Smith (Robertson), on prophets of 8th
century, 150 ; on conception of holiness,
325 ; on uncleanness, 328, 329 ; on Day
of Atonement, 333, n. 3 ; 334, n. 1.
Society, condition of, in 8th century, 114 ;
religious decline and advance, 115, 116.
Solomon, 82, 83.
Spirit, divine, 431.
Stade, on pre-prophetic period, 19; on
Mosaic religion, 47; on origin of Yah veh,
50 ; on priesthood in Old Israel, 68,
70, 71 ; on book of Jeremiah, 214 ; on
monotheistic passages in Deuteronomy
and Jeremiah, 214; on Sheshbazzar,
289 ; on delay in rebuilding temple,
294, 295 ; on 2 Chronicles xv. 9 and
xxx. 5—25, 370.
Steinthal, on Isaiah ii. 2—4, 372, n. 1;
en humility, 441, n. 1 ; on scientific
monomania, 488, n. 1.
Suffering, disciplinary view of, 445 ; pro-
blems of, 450; explanations of, 451.
Synagogue, origin of, 390; services in,
390; effect of, 391.
Syrian wars, 97.
Temple, Solomon's built, 82; worship at,
in 7th century, 177; made the only
legitimate place of worship in Deute-
ronomy, 186; not rebuilt at once on
return, 294, 295 ; begun in 520 B.C.,
299 ; finished in 516 B.C., 302 ; in
post-exilic period, 383 ; religious influ-
ence of, 385 — 388 ; God's presence in,
433.
Teraphim, 44.
Theano, 328, n.l.
Tiele, on oriein of Yahveh, 50.
Tiglath-pilesar II., 107—109.
Tobiah, 350, 351.
Tobit, Book of, 408, 430.
Topheth, 181.
Torah, priestly Torah, 45 ; founded by
Moses, 49 ; character of his Torah, 55,
64, 65 ; of that of his successors, the
priests, 69, 70 ; meaning of word in
Judaism, 465, 469 ; see Law.
Toy, on relation of God to nature in post-
exilic period, 426; on relation of God
to Israel, 439 ; on post-exilic religion,
469 ; on post-exilic morality, 487 ; on
feeling of national innocence, 514; on
conception of sin in Psalms, 516.
Tradition, its view of Old Testament
books, 2.
U.
Universalism, origin of idea, 146 ; univer-
salist passages in Isaiah, 147, 148 ;
growth of idea in exile, 228 ; tendency
towards, in post-exilic period, 353 ;
universalist passages in post-exilic lite-
rature, 371, 372, 437; see also Prose-
lytism.
Uriah, 117.
Urijah, 202.
Uzziah or Azariah (king of Judah), 98,
108.
W.
Wellhausen, on Israelite apostasy to Baal,
20; on Moses and his Torah, 49; on
origin of Yahveh, 53; on influence of
Canaanite religion, 63; on Elijah, 91 ;
on prophets, 126, 154, 155, 158; on
the single sanctuary of Deuteronomy,
187; on Jeremiah, 218; on Priestly
Code, 345; on Pharisees, 541; on St.
Paul as the pathologist of Judaism, 542.
Wisdom, conception of, 380, 399; identi-
fied with law and its teaching, 400.
Wisdom literature ; see Ecclesiastes, Job,
Proverbs, Sirach.
576
INDEX.
T.
Yahveb, God of Israel, 21, 35; charac-
ter of, in pre-prophetic period, 37
connection with fire, 37 ; wrath of, 38
warlike, 39; human sacrifices to, 40
his form, 41 ; his relation to the ark
42 ; images of, 43 ; God of justice, 44
his sanctuary, 45 ; origin of name, 50.
51 ; meaning of name, 52 ; name pro-
bably pre -Mosaic, 53 ; Wellhausen's
hypothesis, 53 ; remains God of Israel
in spite of Canaanite influence, 56, 64 ;
conception of, raised by Elijah and
Syrian wars, 98, 99 ; at close of pre-
prophetic period, 100; gradual moral-
ization of character of, 101, 102 ;
Israelites proud of, 105 ; conception
of his character by prophets of 8th
century, 122; relation to Israel, 123 —
125 ; object of Israel's election by, 125 ;
true worship of, 127; prophetic attack
upon images of, 128 — 130; conception
of, in Deuteronomy, 190, 191 ; by
Jeremiah, 215, 216 ; increased import-
ance attached in exile to outward wor-
ship of, 231 ; Ezekiel's conception of,
246, 247 ; Yahveh's honour, 248, 249 ;
as universal Creator in Deutero-Isaiah,
269, 270 ; conception of, in Priestly
Code, 320; Yahveh and God are iden-
tical in post-exilic period, 421.
Yetser, good and evil, 513, n. 1 ; 521.
Z.
Zadok, 67, 69.
Zechariah (king of Israel), 107.
Zechariah (prophet), 297, 300, 301, 453.
Zechariah, Book of, ix. — xi., 149.
Zedekiah, 204, 21 4.
Zephaniah, 173.
Zerubbabel, 289, 294, 299.
Zimri, 86.
Zoroastrian religion, influence of 373.
C. Green & Son, Printers, 178, Strand.
I
^H
G
O
o
•H
jG
t»0
*t
•H
H
•H O
Q)
0 Jh
h
to W)
*
rC>
a) -rf
H -d
rC <D
O £
-P
O td
•d
>>C\i
-£3. CJ
,D
ffi«H
O bD
•d •
ca «H
<D CO
O U
-P £
•-3 O
c\j d)
1h fn
CD CD
-P r^
r3 -^
CO CD
2 -P
3 iu
3
H
H C
H i£
o o
•H PI
0)
•» CO
CO «H
<D 0)
id o
%b
£ cd
•H -P
o
<+H O
•H 0
CD CD
M ,3
-P i-3
•H P
a
H
o
a> <h
X
*H O
OA
nmo^
S l>vO to
m h
S H
University of Toronto
Library
DO NOT
REMOVE
THE
CARD
FROM
THIS
POCKET
Acme Library Card Pocket
LOWE-MARTIN CO. limited
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11